“As Clear As White and Black”, The Times-Picayune
Barsness’ works look like antique Hindu scrolls, with elephant gods, celestial turtles, intricate mandalas and endless decorative patterns. But straight pseudo-religious iconography they’re not.
Press & Media
“James Barsness: Beastly Beatitudes”, Gambit Weekly
Before TV and computers, we had animals. Domestic beasts aside, animals represented the world beyond the village gate; horses and camels plied the trade routes connecting Europe to Asia, while migrating birds dotted the skies like omens from elsewhere.
“Biennale Babylon”, Art in America
“Al Souza, Moody Gallery,” Artforum
Al Souza’s extravagant “paintings” are so visually disruptive they demand to be stared at long and hard—that is, if you can manage to fix your gaze on them at all. Stand before these works, composed of thousands of layered jigsaw-puzzle pieces, loose and in semi-completed chunks, and the whole immediate environment seems in flux; the paintings appear to slide back and forth, creating a vaguely feverish sensation.
“A World in One Room- Whitfield Lovell art exhibition”, Art in America
Recalling, in part, an African-American community razed by whites in the 1920s, a recent installation by Whitfield Lovell evokes in elegiac detail the rural South and the quiet, dignified lives of its inhabitants.
“Whitfield Lovell,” Frieze Magazine
The charcoal drawings on wooden planks in Whitfield Lovell’s show ‘Recent Tableaux’ evoke the ghost stories of African American history by playing with two types of found object. The drawings seem to coax out the figurative presence of anonymous turn-of-the-century subjects from the mundane household furnishings that once surrounded their lives.
“David Bates at Dunn and Brown Contemporary”, Art in America
David Bates at Dunn and Brown Contemporary by Charles Dee Mitchell, ART IN AMERICA Near the center of the painted wood relief Cannas (all works 2000), there is a break…
“John Alexander: Parallel Worlds” —Gerard Haggerty
For those who relish art the name John Alexander brings to mind buttery oil paint, signature whiplash brushstrokes, and canvases that represent nature as mysterious and never entirely benign. In this exhibition we see a less familiar side of the artist’s work: not the panoramic seascapes, overgrown gardens and teeming swamps he’s painted for more than 3 decades, but a drawn world of great refinement.
“A Day at the Opera: Opera-Themed Artworks Are Worth a Standing Ovation”, New Orleans Times-Picayune
I know you’re busy. You’ve got a ton of stuff to do at work, it’s your week to drive car pool, Sissy’s volleyball tournament begins tonight, you’ve got to pick up a king cake for the office party and you’re almost out of gas. But you can’t be any busier than Stephen Paul Day has been over the past two years.
“Ted Kincaid”, Art Forum
The permutations of color and image in Ted Kincaid’s photogravures raise, and politely refuse to answer, some heavy questions about modernist seriality and the identity of an individual artwork I’d be tempted to say that Kincaid’s works calculate a post-Warholian logic of pluralized identities and sameness beneath their surfaces, except that it’s nearly impossible to think that there is anything behind the ink on the paper: Like shadows, the gravures live only on the surface, which is appropriate given the light-based chemistry of the photo-intaglio process.