Category: reviews

by Emese Krunák-Hajagos

Browsing through Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival’s website Fire and Dust caught my eye at first glance. What strange pictures! Ryan Van Der Hout’s dark, monochromatic photographs create an inescapable mood of death and sadness, but having Amanda Arcuri’s colorful pieces displayed with them gives hope—at least for a short time, until we see what it’s all about. Fire and death – again. After looking at the whole exhibit it is hard to decide whose photographs are more disturbing.

Burke Paterson, Director of United Contemporary curated this show and pinpointed its connection to our current situation with COVID, as a period of great upheaval. He starts the gallery’s introduction to the exhibition with a question, “What happens to the artifacts of the civilized world when they no longer serve a purpose? Are they burned to the ground or left to collect dust?” This question goes back centuries and is not an easy one to answer. However, in their exhibition, Arcuri and Van Der Hout give a “unique yet complementary interpretation of destruction as a form of creation”.

The two Toronto based artists met through their education and as Van Der Hout said recently on United Contemporary’s Instagram, they were brought together by similar subject matter: the darkness, the lightness and destruction. Their processes are related and Van Der Hout was interested in how their work would show together.

Fire in the title of the show stands for Amanda Arcuri’s work as each piece depicts flowers on fire. All the images are beautiful in their vivid colors but looking at them still gives me mixed feelings. Fire is an ambiguous symbol. Humans have always been amazed by it. We give the flames the status of a god, and admire it more than fear it. But fire is a two-faced god, giving life on one hand, but also taking it. It also has a cleansing power; in some places people burn the undergrowth and unwanted vegetation each year so it will enrich the soil for next year’s crops. Fire is also a metaphor for death and rebirth. One of the best examples of it is the phoenix, a mythological bird that dies in flames and then is reborn from its own ashes.

A major part of Arcuri’s exhibited work is the series A Shot in the Dark, that won her the Best Photography and Digital Media Award at the Toronto Outdoor Show in 2019. This work began in 2018 when she was still able to collaborate with a lab. Arcuri said that this series she worked “through failed hopes and rituals of letting go or bringing new life”. When some of the flowers she received as birthday gifts withered, she wrote on Instagram that sometimes you just need to let some things die. The tulips (A Shot in the Dark 07) and irises (A Shot in the Dark 15) are still beautiful even as they decline. They seem to be dying with such grace. In another photograph (A Shot in the Dark 02), the leaves of a plant and the fire consuming it create a rather attractive, imaginary flower.

In A Shot in the Dark series dead floral bouquets or plants are ignited by flame in darkness and then lit through a stained-glass window to contemplate transcendence. Arcuri only makes two shots of each on large format film. She said about her subject matter that “there is something about the texture of dried or dying plants that gets me every-time.” Her place is filled with flowers waiting to be photographed and she finds herself attached to them—she just can’t let them go. When asked if she arranges the flowers for the shots, she said, that she never touches them but leaves them in the same position they were when they died. She admires the hand of nature in their wilting and thinks it “shows more emotion and heaviness” than she could impose on them.

Each flower is unique and they react to fire in different ways. For example, dried roses burn at the tips of their petals and leaves and water droplets hidden in them explode in little stars. She also finds it very interesting how flowers move slightly from the first burn to the second, creating a real vs. not real, sometimes even surrealistic look. A Shot in the Dark 11 is a wonderful example of this. The dried-out bouquet is a beautiful arrangement of roses, wild flowers and decorative plants—very life-like with their vibrant colors. However, the flames burn brighter than any of the colors, since it has a different, living quality. This particular photograph captures movements in the flames of the fire and the fall of some flowers, caused by the burning. 

The Remix series was created during the COVID lockdown, so Arcuri had to invent a different method. It is a continuation of the work in A Shot in the Dark series, but re-worked as the title suggests. “Remixing” two negatives of her older shots created colors that mimicked oil paintings, and, as she said, almost look infected. Comparing the images of A Shot in the Dark 11 and Remix 01, we can see the differences clearly. The colors of flowers in the earlier piece look real, even when touched by the fire, while in the second they are metallic, almost ice-like colors, even though the fire is consuming them. They are further from real, almost to the point of being abstract. In Arcuri’s work, as Burke Paterson commented in the Artist Talk (June 29, 2021), fire is disturbing the peace but the light brings it back.

Van Der Hout works are philosophical questions of life and death, focusing on the afterlife. Does it exist at all? What happens after falling into the abyss? His images depict objects that are already dead and covered with black dust. Death is unmistakable and final here. As the gallery introduction states, they remind us of the relics of Pompeii. The artists explains that he was six years old when his parents went to Pompeii and brought back “photos of a society encapsulated in rock and dust”. Those dramatic depictions stayed with him and influenced his latest series Collecting dust where he tries to “imagine what art looks like after us, what is time after time” and what future generations will see in his work. This series was created during the COVID lockdown and that explains their dark vision.

Van Der Hout’s work indeed reminds us of Pompeii’s remains. These images are manifestations of how everything perishes and enters the afterlife (if there is one) or remains dusty and overlooked, considered as memento moris. They are nothing like a classical still-life, but more like, as the gallery states, ”natures morte”. They tell a story about the passage from past and present to the future, and we are looking at these images as though we are part of the future. Beyond their aesthetic appearance, we still keep wondering about their hidden narrative.

Van Der Hout’s compositions are reminiscent of Dutch vanitas paintings as they are very layered and heavy with symbolism. Feast (2021) is one of his most still-life-looking images, including many meaningful symbols. The skull represents death and mortality, as we all die, but without death life would be meaningless. Grapes are for fertility, so life will go on. Roses are more complex symbols as they combine death and renewal, while butterflies promise rebirth. All covered with black dust they are, without any doubt, dead, but some hide a hint of hope.

Three Graces (2021) is different from the other photographs since it is centralized around a sculpture of the three graces. Talking about his composing method in the Artist Talk, Van Der Hout said that handling an art object (even a copy) is very important for him, not just because of what it embodies but also the feelings it evokes in him. In this photograph the bust on the left side and the three graces represent beauty and show how art is timeless. There is a book for knowledge, as printed words survive the ages, grapes for fertility and a pitcher and glass bottle for drinks in good times.

As the artist mentioned, his works are all about transformation and, often, destruction. However, while the objects in his photographs are transformed from life to death, from light to dark, they are still not destroyed as they forever encapsulate their meanings and beauty.

In United Contemporary’s exhibition, Arcuri’s and Van Der Hout’s images hang side by side, mixed together instead of separated by artists. Arcuri’s brilliant colors pop out when paired with Van Der Hout’s monochromatic compositions. Together they generate a dynamic opposition, that both unites and highlights their themes.

 Our outlook on life has been rather dark throughout the last year and a few months. COVID has caused more harm to the mental health of people than in its death toll. Fear is difficult enough, but being locked down, kept away from our loved ones and not being able to live our lives to the fullest has been even more dreadful. The quality of our lives has been reduced. Our cultural entertainment became virtual like an online exhibition. Arcuri’s and Van Der Hout’s work resonate with our state of mind—depression, repression and confusion—wonderfully well. Their photographs engage our minds and shake us to the core – and will stay with us for a long time.

Images are courtesy of United Contemporary

by Dominique Nahas

Intercessions, a two-personexhibition at the Joyce Goldstein Gallery, curated by Jen Dragon, is a tidily concise, intensely combustible, portrait exhibition. Included in the exhibit are twenty oils by James Singelis, all wall works, ranging in size from 36” x 24” to 10” x 8”, and Bobbie Moline-Kramer’s twenty-one oil and mixed-media wall panels ranging in size from 10” x 10” to 6” x 6” (and three table-top constructions). Highlights within Singelis’s artworks would include “Later Self” a black-and-white self-portrait made of charcoal, graphite, and tape, “Glass Eye” a work incorporating collage elements and oil paint, and the oil-on-board work “Little Boy.” Standouts among Moline-Kramer’s contributions to the exhibition include “All that Remains” (2010) a metaphoric family- tree wall installation of 11 incised and painted 10” x 10” wood panels. These breathtakingly exquisite painted wood panels replete with avian-and-tree-branches imagery used throughout pertains to Moline-Kramer’s family members remembered and dis-remembered. Also visually arresting are “Words” (2019), “Untitled 1” (2021), and “Wowza” (2018).

The press release of this exhibition claims that “Intercessions…is an exhibition of spiritual portraits that act as a conduit between inner and outer worlds.” The intimation that the artwork and the artists in this exhibition serve as mediators, or conduits, to and from an ineffable essence that is yet also grounded in the reality of the human visage strikes me as a fruitful way for me as a critic to begin making remarks describing the artworks in the exhibition itself and the experiential takeaway of the show. Intercessions, in using a term such as “spiritual portraits”in its press releaseoffers a gallery experience that suggests that the visitor will be struck with the power of the auratic presence of the artworks themselves as well with the impact of the artists’ incarnating of this aura through their pictorial activities. Towards that end, Bobbie Moline-Kramer and James Singelis approach the act of image-making as a mediatory device in different ways. Moline-Kramer’s artistic activity at its core serves to inculcate the activity of calling forth, an evocation, of ineffable and mysterious essences. These inmost substances conjured up through her activity of art-making points to the needs of human attachments and detachments to and from things as friendships, memories, and longstanding if painful personal family histories. James Singelis’s art, by contrast to Moline-Kramer’s, functions as a mediatory device or structure of the imagination through invocation whose purpose is to engage in a calling-in, a summoning of feelings that are triggered by each portrait as it emerges from his hand and soul. To this very point, Singelis writes in his artist’s notes “…I see each painting …not [as an] illustration or snapshot of an emotional moment, but rather a history of the interior cross-currents that occur while I paint.”

Singelis’s aesthetic practice has an uplifting, almost early-Matisse freshness to it as he works expressionistically and intuitively using unusual color combinations. A hazily vaporous glow clings to his work giving it a dreamlike, even tender, evanescent quality that is captivating in ways that are unique to him. Outside of the self-portraits he produces, Singelis makes up the portraits as he goes along. He’s challenged by creating an optical zone of recognizability that coalesces into what one would call a human “face” whose features slowly emerge from myriad marks and lines and colored brush marks that end up as participating in the codes of representation, one might say, by default. His free-falling or free-floating into and through the codes of representation are evidentiary indications that Singelis’s tendencies lead him to the habit of an eternal return, a perpetual attempt to break free from historic models of image-making again and again. He reverts to a state of mind that attempts to build a human visage from point zero, a starting point of the imaginary that entirely precludes a one-on-one relationship with a sitter. James Singelis’s picture-making has a lingering unfinished look, a de facto memento-mori aspect, a pathos intimating his mission as an artist of properly recording or memorializing the facial characteristics of the human entity emerging from the center of his mind’s eye could never be adequately completed.

Moline-Kramer’s precise naturalism, on the other hand, while engaging with the codes of mimetic fidelity and fealty towards exactitude that is pushed to the limits attends to spontaneity, somehow, in unexpected surgical-strike ways. As a result, her works resonate with haptic and sensorial impact as she flecks and spikes her otherwise meticulously planned pictorial surfaces to give rise to under-the-radar variegated visual intrusions that tickle the eye and keep it moving. Moline-Kramer’s art career began decades ago as a medical illustrator and her rigorous observational training in depicting the body (inside and out) with intense verisimilitude has stayed with her as a residual part of her aesthetic modus-operandi. Moline-Kramer makes a point of only engaging in portraying individuals she has observed intimately. Even if she does refer to photographic studies of her subjects in the completion of her artwork, she takes these photos herself. When she is in the presence of her subject for future use, in-studio purposes, she takes careful forensic notes using colored pencils to make sure that the skin tones on paper are precise matches with the living entity. The upshot of this process is that Moline-Kramer’s art involves a precise form of meticulously planned naturalism, a type of verisimilitude with affinities to trompe l’oeil. Yet there are additional abstract free-standing mark-making elements that are superimposed onto this pictorial precision that paradoxically alludes to a notion of identity that is fluid and not fixed; a shape-shifting sense of self that is at its core at variance with itself.

Intercessions showcases the inner worlds of Bobbie Moline-Kramer and James Singelis, artists whose works diverge in terms of painterly application and approach to the subject matter of the face. Yet these vitalistic differences joined in the same viewing circumstances at the Joyce Goldstein Gallery create a visual momentum, a psychical vivacity that left this viewer in a deeply satisfying state of exalted, enlightened mystification.

More about this exhibition: https://bit.ly/ccpbmkjs

by D. Dominick Lombardi

It is commonly thought that in Western Art, the interest in representing the landscape as part of a paintings composition cropped up during the time of the Renaissance. From the beginning, representations of the landscape have brought the viewer to virtually experience new places throughout time, offering a sense of discovery, a feeling of hope for a better more peaceful world. More recently, a truer understanding of the force and fragility of nature has come to the fore motivated by politics, profit and pleasure. For this exhibition, I have selected paintings, sculptures, archival pigment prints, ceramics, dioramas and collages that offer a variety of contemporary views regarding the state of the genre.

Beginning with the shear awesomeness of nature and all its endless contemplations, Todd Bartel offers Garden Study (Surrender to Vastness), 2002, where we find a lone figure standing in stereoscope, at the edge of a great canyon. One quote in the composition reads: “…to reach the limits of space would be to arrive at our own origins, at the place where life began.” – Jean Clair. Contrasting this great work are two more humorous objects that blatantly addresses a concern for the environment as Bartel channels Man Ray’s iconic sculpture, The Gift, 1921.

Cecilia Whittaker-Doe takes us through a wooded walk as horizons shift, planes tilt, rivers reappear and color intensifies. Despite the cubist calamity, there seems to be an odd sort of order to it all, as if each part both supports and contrasts the other. In the end, we are left with a far more sensory experience than we might expect, as our attention is rewarded with a beautifully composed, tactile trip.

Don Doe focuses on the strain of our rising rivers in two paintings: Johnstown Flood No. 91 (1995) and June with my GTO in the Rising Mississippi Delta Flood No. 10 (1993). Employing dark humor, Doe’s subjects seem to be unaffected by the imposing destruction of the rushing water long enough to record the scene on canvas. The overall impression is acceptance, especially when looked at through the lens of current day political ploys and punditry.

Into the Falls (2016) by Inness Hancock takes us to a place where representation and abstraction coalesce. Movement is key here, as thin veils of blue rain down upon the depths of a deep darkening pond. The contrast between the thin washes at the top and middle of the canvas, and the weight of the deep blue pool below anchors the composition and our thoughts as both time and thought wonder.

Patrick Jacobs has the unique ability to take the most complex and compelling fantasy and turn it into an intimate physical reality. His dioramas redefine the genre with otherworldly color, light, form and space resulting in stunningly spectacular worlds that only he could imagine. After seeing Jacobs work, one’s general state of mind may experience a shift, more likely the memory of the work will become fixed in your subconscious, and very possibly dreaming will become easier.

China Marks makes beautifully constructed, fantastical narratives that delight the eye and broaden the mind. Her way of capturing a complex moment with such dizzying directness is key, while her sense of color, composition and actual conversation makes the trip all the more worth while. I can’t imagine any point in one’s life where you could not gain insight or enjoy looking at Marks’ work. – it’s all just a matter of time and willingness to seek and find.

The archival pigment prints of Creighton Michael reside somewhere between consciousness and subconsciousness – an in-between state that is not unlike Surrealism. More importantly, Michael’s art reflects something of a waking-dream state where reality and memory prove to be deceiving. It is hard to pinpoint exactly what part of Michael’s art takes us to this place, but we know we are there and it is simultaneously, both otherworldly and familiar.    

Brant Moorefield’s paintings teeter between perception and reality. Perception, meaning the artist’s inner thoughts, what is internalized and later expressed, even if it does not directly relate to the reality. As a result, we find ourselves caught between dimensions, in a place where the psychological supersedes the actual. There are references to displacement, disorder, deconstruction, and yet there seems to be an overriding sense of resolve and perhaps a bit of redemption to it all.

Maggie Robertson’s ceramics blend the stature of fine china with a sort of organic, ‘wabi-sabi’ imperfection that is oddly comforting. The traditional blue and white glazed bucolic scenes atop the hand-formed utilitarian objects makes for the perfect blend of new and old. Seen in the context of an ‘exhibition’, the works of Robertson become something else, more contemplative and sculptural.

Pacific Crest Trail: Sierra Snow Bridge (2018) by Annie Varnot is a bold and brilliant work that essentially communicates two truths. First, that our planet is home to countless awe inspiring vistas – at times indescribable beauty that we can not live without. Second, what we hold dear, what many of us live to experience, to feel, to see and touch is quite fragile, and what we do, how we over-consume, has a lasting negative effect on our environment.

Martin Weinstein’s paintings define the beauty in the rhythms of the seasons – the endless (hopefully) return of life in the spring, the brilliance of the summer, the temporary demise the fall brings to our vegetation, and the clear, crisp chill of winter – all that defines the Northeast is exquisitely expressed in Sun Dogs, 3X (2013) and Winter under Summer, Summer under Fall (2019). In each instance, Weinstein brings heaven back to earth.

The compelling, albethey strange interactions with nature some of us humans might have or imagine come to life in the paintings of Shari Weschler. In Bending #1 (2017) we see what appears to be a burgeoning suburban backyard in spring-thaw mode. Bear Stand (Needs date) shows a young woman creating a sort of ‘Mother Earth’ in-body experience representing the sky, animals and land. Bridging (Needs date) is an obvious play-on-words with a twist, which has a vastly different read in these days of Covid.

Red Fox Contemporary art is located at 55 Westchester Avenue, Pound Ridge, NY 10576. LandX runs from May 22 through July 4, 2021. There is an opening May 22 from 3 – 6 pm. (475) 205-8956

The Work of Bassmi Ibrahim, Dellamarie Parrilli, Victoria Lowe, John Lyon Paul, and Anne Marchand https://bit.ly/ccpunimakgrp

by Dominique Nahas

Bassmi Ibrahim, Dellamarie Parrilli, Victoria Lowe, John Lyon Paul, and Anne Marchand are our universe-makers. To place their highly differentiated abstract aesthetic visions together so that they seem to react and inspire each other reminds me that this exhibition of visual persuasions is perhaps like visual chamber music of individual voices, heard collectively. These individual voices, passionately unique, create indelible experiences for the beholder.  

Bassmi Ibrahim’s Isness series are meditatively induced visual exaltations (he would perhaps call his artworks “emanations” as they draw you into his soul-world). Using giant soft Chinese brushes Bassmi creates extraordinarily suggestive, sonorously layered liquid forms – entities possessing, seemingly, individual personalities. Each softly shaped abstract form, like a taxonomic laboratory specimen plucked out of an imaginary collection of gigantic organisms, floats in stillness, on an undifferentiated white expanse. Taken together Bassmi’s color fields are paradoxical in appearance – mesmerizingly so.  Vaporous, veil like yet robust, his open-ended forms easily elicit the suggestion of after-image contours of a flower or a sea creature, or of an air-bound and fleeting entity. 

Dellamarie Parrilli’s painterly abstractions are compositions that are all at once structured, experimental and playful. Works such as Blue Iris and Heart Connection (both 2016) bespeak of a vision that passionately attempts at grasping an essence, a central nature that is then extended outward from centrality to peripherality. In later works produced in 2017 as in Aperture, Seek, and In Search Of  Parrilli creates painterly emanations suggestive of energetic systems whose intensely colored paint strokes are thickly layered to create the illusion of relief, a dimensionalized world of gritty punk- lacework. 

Victoria Lowe’s exquisite works on canvas and on paper glow with saturated auras and colored coronas. Her Ener Space series of giclée prints have a rapturous other-worldly quality that seem to ask how do we experience, how do we dream, how do we conjure up the immateriality of time and space as well as of timelessness itself? Lowes’s abstract realms suggest purely eidetic manifestations of ambient becoming, of boundless expansion. Equally marvelous her artworks are so radically reduced and understated they seem to resonate with moments of quiet revelation. 

John Lyon Paul’s immersive abstractions painted on glass seem to be meditations on the tension between dispersed fragmentation and harmonious togetherness. His combination of illuminated micro-spaces and patterns recall filigreed intervals and retinal floaters that have the ethereal radiance of stained-glass windows. Paul’s artworks are hushed visual meditations as well as measured reflections of possibilities. 

Anne Marchand’s colorful aesthetic vision is an involvement in an overall sensibility that delights in an abandonment to sensuous immanence and no small sense of mystery. One senses an enormous physicality in this work. As in Overview Effect (2019) Marchand conveys a near-ecstatic concern animating universes of swirling, congregating, interacting forms.  The artist’s acrylic, enamel, and ink brushstrokes constitute veils and swathes of colors comprised of different viscosities. They converge in a play of presence and absence on what might be immense, restless fields of time and shifting space.