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 Left: Tarshito (Italy), Applauses (2007) Made at Tarshito studio with Isabella De Chiara, Roma e Agnieszka Blazy, Polonia, Angela Ferrara,Bari; Martinelli Corato, and Bari, metal structure and ceramic hands. Photo: Edward Rubin. artes fine arts magazine

Marc Quinn (England), The Chromatic Archaeology of Desire (2008) Painted Bronze. Photo: Sergio Martucci

 The show was founded fourteen years ago by Paolo De Grandis, and cleverly scheduled by that chief curator to run alongside the Venice Film Festival and overlap exhibition dates with the Venice Art and Architectural Biennales; the exhibition hosts thousands during its month-long run. This year, OPEN 14 was co-curated by Carlotta Scarpa, Ebadur Rahman, Nevia Capello, Christos Savvidis, and Gloria Vallese. Vallese also curated the highly-touted Cracked Culture? The Quest for Identity in Contemporary Chinese Art , with Wang Lin. The Venice Biennale Collateral Event featured twenty-eight artists from Albania, Bangladesh, China, England, Finland, Germany, Greece, Iran, Italy, Romania, and Switzerland.

Feng Feng (China), W Fountain 2010 installation. Photo: Courtesy Arte Communications

The first work was visible even before the boat docked—The Chromatic Archaeology of Desire (2008), London-based artist Marc Quinn’s super realistic painted orchid. Perched atop a tall pedestal, it was an elegant poem in bronze, speaking to the beauty and fragility of everyday life. Down the road, were 3000 of Romanian artist Martin-Emilian Balint’s laminated cardboard figures, housed in a small, multi-level vitrine on wheels. Titled Embrace (2011), the marching figures stood shoulder-to-shoulder, seeming to offer an expression of love as they welcomed visitors to the island. Across the street, echoing similar sentiment, was Applauses (2007), above, a tall metal vase covered with hundreds of ceramic-crafted open hands. Created by Italian artist Tarshito, the vase was significantly placed at the entrance to the Grande Albergo Ausonia & Hungaria Hotel, where it appeared to applaud the arrival of its guests.

Filippo Zuriato (Italy), “Hey?!!” (2011), painted terracotta. Photo: Sergio Martucci

Several show-stopping and intellectually-challenging works welcomed viewers to the Lungomare G. Marconi, the section of the exhibition most densely arrayed with art. In city terms, it runs some five-or-six blocks. First to catch our eye, and especially hypnotic when lit up at night, was Chinese artist Feng Feng’s stunning W Fountain (2010), an intensely-bright yellow McDonald’s sign, the iconic form turned upside down. Also prominently featured in Vallese’s Cracked Culture exhibition, W Fountain is the artist’s comment on the rampant spread of Western culture—in this case, fast food. Some ten feet away, separated by a tree and some foliage—as were most of the works along this botanical stretch—was, Hey?!!, Italian artist Filippo Zuriato’s terracotta sculpture of a young Chinese boy enclosed in a wire cage. Dressed in the ubiquitous outfit of the American West—a T-shirt and jeans—the boy points to his almond-shaped eyes. The work, in which the boy boldly calls attention to himself, was open to a myriad of interpretations: possible loss of identity one; loss of freedom, another.

Ronni Ahmmed (Bangladesh), The Tomb of Qara Köz (2011), eggs, acrylic sheets, wood. Photo: Sergio Martucci

Across the avenue, enticingly situated at the entrance to the beach, was Bangladesh artist Ronni Ahmmed’s intricately constructed sculpture, The Tomb of Qara Köz (2011). Rooted in Opera Aperta, or ‘open work of art,’ as set forth by Umberto Eco’s book of the same name, and traditional Bengali theatre (both of which use history to tell their stories), Tomb was composed of three layers of 1254 glasses, each holding a cartoon-painted egg in the manner of Bassano, Veronese, and Tintoretto. The pyramidal sculpture, top-heavy in meaning, was meant to recall, as the catalog informed us, the campaign of the Mughal princess Qara Köz, who exerted powerful influence amid the Medici’s Florence. The sculpture’s three planes paid homage to Venice’s Bengali immigrants, the adventures of Pinocchio, and Fairytale, Ai Weiwei’s 2007 Documenta installation. This trio of influences inspired Ahmmed, in emulation of Weiwei, to invite 101 Bengalis visitors to his tomb, to record their secret desires, pay alms, and make their wishes come true.

Alfred Milot Mirashi (Albania), Do, Try (2011) - iron, aluminium, glue, plaster, jute, foam, gold paint, fibre glass. Photo: Sergio Martucci

 Back to the residential side of Lungomare G. Marconi—lined with a steady stream of stately mansions—could be seen Albanian artist, Alfred Milot Mirashi’s Do, Try (2011), a large, severely- bent, partially-painted golden key, reminiscent of Oldenburg’s sculptures of everyday objects. Though minimally constructed, it maximized the ideas it conjured, as everybody the world over, not only deals with keys, but uses that word in many contexts. ‘Key to my heart’ quickly came to mind, as did ‘key to the city’, among others. Though these are popular uses, according to curator Rahman, Mirashi, the artist is thinking about the human body— the twisted, tormented people “who reach out, body and soul, in their yearning for peace.” Given the key’s contorted anatomical referencing, it seems the artist’s wish for universal peace would be a long-time coming.

Marina Gavazzi (Italy), His Holiness (2011) tubes, digital print on plastic support. Photo: Sergio Martucci

Italian artist Marina Gavazzi set her incendiary sights on the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, in her four-sided installation, His Holiness (2011), particularly the shameful attempt by the Vatican’s highest echelons to cover up sex crimes against minors by priests, especially in the United States. Digital prints of the pope were printed on plastic panels, the Holy See engulfed in flames. Presumably in hell, he faced punishment for centuries of violence inflicted by the Church, in the name of their creed, against the people. The artist cited the Inquisition in her catalog essay, but the legion countries—both past and present—complicit with the Vatican’s actions, remained unnamed. Perhaps there were just too many to list, especially in such proximity to the Vatican.

Puni (Italy), Openings (2011), wood, PMMA, brass, enamel. Photo: Sergio Martucci

 The conceptual works of Puni and Marilena Vita, two Italian artists, added a bit of levity to the exhibition. Openings (2011), Puni’s installation comprised a common door, set upright on a patch of green grass. Like Mirashi’s key, Do, Try, serves as an everyday object and a universal symbol; like the key and its many interpretations, the viewer was encouraged to make of it what they would. Our first thought, given the door’s bucolic setting, was one of freedom, entering a new world. On closer examination, the words ‘Emergency Exit’ appeared on the door, exposing the other side of the coin, alerting us to the ever-present possibility of imminent danger. Also playing with our minds, as well as our eyes, was Marilena Vita’s Legs (2011), a compelling, surreal photograph, printed on vinyl, of the artist’s long legs. One set of legs is real, the other, reflected in a mirror and appearing in reverse, seems to be growing out of the first set of legs. With our perspective disoriented, our eyes work overtime to make sense of what we were looking at.

Casagrande & Recalcati (Italy), Fiori (2011), oil on board. Photo: Courtesy Arte Communications

I ended my tour of OPEN 14—which began, upon my arrival in Venice, with an orchid, and finished in the lobby of the Excelsior– just in time for a cocktail at the hotel’s renowned Blue Bar, I might add—as I stood mesmerized in front of another floral work, Fiori (2011), an astonishingly beautiful painting of flowering peonies by Milan-based artists, Sandra Casagrande and Roberto Recalcati. Melding a color palette of luxurious creams and pinks, evoking the voluptuous imagery of French Rococo painters Jean Honoré Fragonard and Francois Boucher, together with the kind of lingering Hollywood close-ups that forever etched Greta Garbo’s face in our collective memory—the artists have rendered a cinematically-exquisite floral motif in paint, whose silky petals actually appear to be opening in slow-motion. It is here, imaginatively savoring the heady aroma of the perfumed bouquet, where we get to experience the magic of art in all its multi-sensory glory. . .

By Edward Rubin, Contributing Writer

OPEN, International Exhibition of Sculpture and Installations is held In Venice, Italy in the fall of each year.

Jonathan Prince, Torus 340 # 2, Oxidized and Stainless Steel (2011)

 The work of Massachusetts-based artist, Jonathan Prince, is currently on view until November 18th, at the Sculpture Garden in the atrium of the old IBM building, in New York City. Shown under the title Torn Steel, the work—like the artist, himself, who resembles Julian Schnabel—is big, bold and undeniably ambitious. But underneath the swagger of the man and his work—observations based on an in-depth studio visit, a couple of wide-ranging conversations of the inquiring kind and, of course, the four, eye- to-mind-grabbing sculptures on view—lives a sensitive soul, albeit on top of a simmering volcano. His innards seem to house an acute and restless intellect that appears to know no bounds.artes fine arts magazine

Sculptor, Jonathan Prince, with Torus 340 # 2 (2011)

Though relatively new, as a full-time practitioner to the art world, that is, Prince has only been sculpting 24/7 for the past eight years, a somewhat unbelievable fact given the sure-footedness of his work. As a young boy he was drafted into the world of art through a series of visits with his father to the studio of artist, Jacques Lipchitz. It was here that he was first exposed to contemporary art, to Lipchitz’s extensive collection of pre-Columbian sculpture, and where he experienced, first hand—with a few demonstrations by the master himself—what it meant to be an artist.

Jonathan Prince, Totem, Steel (2011)

As a teenager, still smitten with the lessons of Lipchitz, Prince turned both hands to sculpting in stone and clay, as well as plaster. As fate would have it—like a good son who would follow in his father’s footsteps—his career trajectory led him to the art of dentistry and maxillofacial surgery. After three years in this highly precise eye-to-hand occupation, Prince turned to directing and producing films and computer animated special-effects projects. After successfully pursuing the art and science of filmmaking for a number of decades, he returned (an argument could be made that he never left) to his first love, sculpting.

In Torn Steel, his newest series, Prince, known primarily for his work in black granite, stone, and marble, each harboring traces of Noguchi, Brancusi and Arp, uses steel, oxidized and stainless steel to implement his vision. “Steel is less tight than stone. It gives me the opportunity to cut something or to weld it back,” he told one interviewer. “What I’m hoping to create is the intersection between chaos theory and refined geometry.” True to his word, the artist’s four geometrically-shaped works in Torn Steel, set down among the Sculpture Center atrium’s elegant stand of bamboo trees—the cellular softness of nature embracing our industrial civilization—does just that.

Jonathan Prince, Vestigal Block, 6'x6'x6' Steel Cube (2011)

At first glance, Prince’s monumental sculptures appear to be nothing more than simple geometric forms: a square with a broken edge: a column with its top gouged; a couple of circular sculptural riffs, one resembling a large distressed pill set on edge, the other a partially eaten donut doing a clever balancing act. On closer examination, the lively quartette begins to take on an otherworldly, if not quasi-religious, cast. Refraining from the impulse to begin praying, we ask ourselves: are these objects relics of worship from a lost civilization; artifacts left behind by a race that has died off; a Hollywood studio prop leftover from a long-forgotten Roman epic; or are they really post-modern sculptures waiting to be transported to some city plaza?

Each sculpture, though massive in appearance is, in actuality, deceptively hollow. The naturally-oxidized appearance that weathered steel effortlessly acquires is, in the case of Prince’s work, a labor-intensive process that is anything but random. It all begins with Prince sketching out a concept. After refining it on computer, he creates a urethane foam model, along with a series of engineering drawings, enabling him to order the necessary materials for fabrication. Once the full geometrically shaped work is constructed, the artist marks the sections to be “torn” out of the sculpture with a powerful plasma torch. Then the stainless steel plates are shaped, welded into the form, the patterns are overlaid onto the plates with a MIG welder in stainless steel, and all areas smoothed and blended with a TIG welder. Finally, the stainless steel areas are smoothed and polished with various abrasives.

Johnathan Prince with Vestigial Block (2011)

The most satisfying and easily digestible of the four sculptures on view—also the most challenging in its simplicity—is Vestigial Block, Prince’s six-foot square cube. It is here at the steel cubiform, unfettered and uncomplicated by the edgy and visually jagged cuts and molten steel plating found at the top of Totem and at either end of Torus—making them a bit too fussy for my taste—that Prince’s technique of exposing the seemingly soft molten innards buried within the sculpture’s hard outer shell is at its most natural and pleasantly poignant. It is also at this stop, while basking gently in the light of this daringly modest sculpture, that our mind is gently seduced into conjuring up images of the earth’s fiery center, overflowing lava, and thoughts of the human body housing an active soul.

By Edward Rubin, Contributing Writer

Author’s Note: The Torn Steel exhibition at the Sculpture Garden at 590 Madison Avenue and 57th Street, New York City, runs through November 18, 2011. For those unable to make it to the exhibition, a beautiful video filmed during the exhibition’s installation, with Ghostland Observatory singing Sad Sad City from their 2006 Paparazzi Lightning album in the background, will put you front and center.

Harbor, Newport, RI, at peak of the season. Photo: Keith W. Stokes

Newport, Rhode Island, widely renowned for its Jazz Festival every August and its Gilded Age, turn-of -the-century mansions—many of the most awesome overlooking the Atlantic – is filled to the brim with hidden and not-so-hidden treasure. Saying that this small enclave of some 26,000 year-round folk (swelling three-fold, plus, in the summertime) is an embarrassment of riches, is a gross understatement, for around every corner await astonishing surprises, many of mesmerizing proportions. fine arts magazine

On a recent, 2 night, 3-day visit there, I dined and wined—well, actually, vodka is my preference— and toured some of the city’s finest wonders.

The Breakers, Cornelius Vanderbilt's 70-room Italianate Newport 'cottage'

Right off the bat, after checking into The Clarkeston – yes, I’d gladly stay there again – I took my father’s advice: “See everything in one fell swoop, get the lay of the land, then return to those places you want to see in depth.” I hopped on the Viking Tour’s Trolley for a guided tour and for ninety minutes was treated to an eye-popping, history-rich lesson in “Newport 101”.

The town’s many Gilded Age mansions cum museums are its biggest draw, as everybody dreams – gilt by association – of being rich. Around three hundred thousand of those dreamers visit the art-filled troves every year. Two of the most popular—Rough Point, the 49-room home of Doris Duke until her death in 1993, and The Breakers, the Vanderbilt’s 70-room summer Italianate “cottage” designed by Richard Morris Hunt (1827-1895) were at the top of my list. Hunt also designed the façade and the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. His last work, the Breakers, was built in 1893-95, and is over-the-top in royal grandeur. The main hall is fifty wide-by-fifty long-by-fifty feet tall, and a John La Farge (1835-1910) stained glass skylight hovers over the grand staircase. Rough Point, however, its rich interior filled with French furniture, Chinese porcelain, Turkish carpets, and paintings by Gainsborough, Van Dyck, and Renoir– all collected by the tobacco heiress, herself– has a homey, lived-in feel. So personal and present is Duke’s taste that one almost expects her to suddenly waltz into the room. For those interested in fashion, The Sporty Style of Doris Duke exhibition is on view through November 5, featuring a selection of Duke’s clothes and photographs documenting her surfing, swimming, playing golf and tennis, as well as scuba diving and bowling.

John N.A. Griswold House, home of Newport Art Museum & Art Association

Another architectural classic was Richard Morris Hunt’s first major Newport commission–The John N.A. Griswold House (1864). It is the main building of Newport Art Museum & Art Association’s three-building campus, and houses the museum’s permanent collection and exhibitions, both focusing on the work of Newport and southeastern New England artists– contemporary and 18th, 19th and 20th Century. Its walls are a lively walk through the history of American art, populated with paintings by Fitz Henry Lane, George Inness, William Trost Richards, John La Farge, and Gilbert Stuart. Also on view, following in the footsteps of their respective fathers, are works by John Allen Twachtman (1882-1975), son of John Henry Twachtman, and Gilbert Stuart’s daughter, Jane (1812-88).

China Blue, with an installation piece from Firefly Projects. Photo: David Hansen

On the contemporary scene, during my early June visit, I viewed still-current, solo exhibitions by artist China Blue and Trent Burleson, whose work occupies the museum’s largest gallery, with around 22 bird paintings, most dated 2010. This uber-prolific artist is obviously a factory unto himself! Many of his birds soar in full flight, diving for berries and insects amid beautifully-rendered foliage. Though reminiscent of Audubon, they are post modern in their soft colored tones and slightly blurred execution. Viewing Burleson’s paintings, as museum curator Nancy Whipple Grinnell suggests, is as though we are seeing them “through a gossamer veil.” His exhibition ends August 17th.

Firefly Projects is China Blue’s ‘fragility of life’ installation, occupying a chamber-like gallery on the first floor. A small, dark room, it is lit with twinkling blue lights, while sounds, robotics, and several electrifying photographs create an other-worldly feel, where the artist brings us back to our ‘collecting fireflies in a jar childhood.’ Commanding pride of place are two 7 ½-foot artist-constructed trees, on whose thin wooden branches perch flashing LED fireflies, all faithfully synchronized to mimic a mating dance. Known internationally for her interest in the intersection of science, art and technology, the iconoclastic Blue has recorded vibrations emanating from the Eiffel Tower, as well as sounds permeating Venetian canals, the latter with recording devices fixed to the underside of a gondola.

International Tennis Hall of Fame & Museum, Newport, RI

The two biggest surprises – who knew such museums even existed – are the International Tennis Hall of Fame & Museum and the National Museum of American Illustration at Vernon Court (1898), a Beaux Arts adaptation of a 17th century French Chateau. The mansion was designed by Carrére & Hastings, architects for the New York City Public Library, the U.S. Senate Office Building, and the Frick Collection in New York, and features the work of the most illustrious illustration icons: Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish, NS Wyeth, JC Leyendecker, Charles Dana Gibson, and Howard Chandler. Sharing the spotlight through the summer, along with Norman Rockwell’s America exhibition of 70 paintings, is another surprise–writer Tom Wolfe’s humorous pen and ink illustrations from his book, In Our Time, a compilation of essays originally printed in Harper’s Magazine, during the 70’s.

The International Tennis Hall of Fame and Museum—with its 13 manicured grass tennis courts—shares grounds with the recently renovated 1880 Stanford White Casino Theatre, where Orson Wells, Helene Hayes, Lillian Gish, Will Rogers and Oscar Wilde tread the boards. How’s that for theatrical history!? The museum itself, in the historic Newport Casino, was designed by McKim, Mead & White in Victorian shingle-style, and chronicles the history of tennis from the 12th century to the present, in its 18 galleries. It overflows with tennis memorabilia– photographs, videos, art, fashion, trophies, and attire–many donated by the game’s biggest stars: Gussy Moran’s once “scandalous” 1949 Wimbledon lace-trimmed tennis ensemble and a Chris Evert portrait by Warhol – he is everywhere – are among them. While I am still skeptical of interactive anything, I did find the museum’s touch screen research kiosks addictive!

John LaFarge, Snow: January, Southerly Wind, Cloudy Sky and Sunlight (1879), o/c. Courtesy Wm. Vareika Fine Arts

The most serious museum-quality gallery in Newport– some say in all of New England– is William Vareika Fine Arts. I happened upon this little bit of heaven – think of it as a mini Metropolitan Museum or even a room or two at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts – at the tail end of the stunning John La Forge: In Paradise: The Painter and His Muse exhibition, curated by William Vareika, gallery proprietor. Enough of the show remained, though, to set my head spinning! The gallery specializes in the purchase and sale, of 18th, 19th, and 20th century American paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints. One is apt to run across the work of John La Farge, whose estate they represent, as well as the work of William Morris Hunt, John F. Kensett, Winslow Homer, Worthington Whittredge, Alfred T. Bricher, William Trost Richards, William S. Haseltine, George Bellows, John H. Twachtman, Childe Hassam, John S. Sargent, and Martin Johnson Heade– all American artists inspired by Newport’s unique society and the sublime natural environment of Narragansett Bay.

Cloyery Georges, Carrefoure at Adjame (2010). Courtesy Cadeaux de Monde (Gifts of the World)

While my days were spent running with the big boys, on Newport Gallery Night which occurs the second Thursday each month from 5:30-8pm, I managed to get up close and personal to some of the local artists, thanks to my guide du nuit, Katie Dyer, the proprietress of Cadeaux de Monde (Gifts of the World). Her domain is an eclectic, green, fair trade, international folk art gallery, including several of Newport’s own contemporary artists.

My tour started at Cadeaux with Nina Hope Pfanstiehl, a local jewelry and ceramic artist, demonstrating various jewelry wire wrapping techniques. Also catching my attention – it practically jumped off the wall – was Carrefoure at Adjame, an exquisite city scene painting by Cote d’Ivoire painter Cloyery Georges. Interesting, also, was T.M. Dyer’s abstract pen and ink drawings lining the walls of Galerie Escalier, a section of Cadeaux dedicated to New England artists.

Edward Fey, The Sooloo of Salem, Mass (2010). Courtesy Harbor Fine Arts Gallery

Harbor Fine Art Gallery—in a 1704 wooden building in the historic downtown area for 3 years now—specializes in Rhode Island artists, primarily plein air painters, whose subject is Newport and its surroundings. Artist Betty Anne Morris owns and operates the gallery, also featuring original glass art and jewelry. It functions as a studio, as well, where visitors can experience artists immersed in creating new pieces. Laura B. Fernandez’s stained glass fishes, Edward Fey’s ship paintings, and Kathy Weber’s peopled beach scenes are veritable showstoppers. Following a plein air workshop, Morris– previously a leather and freeform basketry enthusiast and purveyor of antiques—very successfully dedicated herself to outdoor painting. She recently converted the top floor of the gallery into The Borden House B-no-B, meaning a soft queen size bed there and breakfast at one of many nearby eateries.

Didi Suydam, PaTh (2005), digital print, 40x40" Courtesy Didi Suydam Contemporary

Artist Didi Suydam and husband, sculptor Peter Diepenbrock, founded Didi Suydam Contemporary 12 years ago, and feature fine art and studio-designed jewelry. The gallery is architecturally light and airy, modern and minimal, and housed in an historic firehouse. It is also a showcase for their own work. While Suydam’s jewelry was displayed elegantly in the back of the gallery, it was her stunning black and white digital photography in front that held my eye. PaTh (2005), an other-worldly photograph of storm clouds–with a graphic ‘T’ symbol placed slightly left of center–is the artist’s attempt, as she explained to me, “to visually convey the metaphysical notion of alternate or coexistent, concurrent realities. The image and the presence of the symbol,” she adds, “may also be interpreted as a metaphor for the passage from the life experience to an afterlife experience.”

The Lady Who Paints Gallery houses both the studio and gallery of Rosemary Kavanagh O’Carroll and is one of the most unique art-viewing spaces in Newport. Part warehouse, gallery, and a little bit salon, it is dedicated solely to her own work, most based on her life experiences. The very Irish O’Carroll – reddish brown hair and freckles add to her charm – is a consummate story teller, verbally and in paint, following her passions wherever they lead.

Rosemary Kavanagh O'Carroll, Flamenco Dancer (2010). Courtesy The Lady Who Paints Gallery

In Grenada, Spain, she explored a cave below Alhambra, where, “There were flamenco gypsy dancers and I was totally fascinated. The woman dancing was intense and raw. There weren’t any windows in the cave, no air to breathe, but it was the real thing. I pulled out my sketch book and started going to work,” O’Carroll told us. “I took photos of her different movements and worked on the paintings in my studio back in America. To document migrant workers, I flew down to Florida, rented a car and drove to Homestead, where they toil in the fields.” Both trips yielded a series of paintings.

Since The Lady Who Paints was the last stop on our whirlwind treasure hunt, I was able to sit and chat for a while. It was a lovely way to end the evening. But this all was just the tip of the iceberg. Hopefully I would be able to return soon, to discover even more!

By Edward Rubin, Contributing Writer

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Newport Contact Information:

Below you will find the websites as well as the telephone numbers of the B & B that I stayed at, the room was large and airy, and the home cooked breakfasts scrumptious, the 3 restaurants I ate at – I had a different lobster dish at each one – and every museum and gallery venue that I visited.

While prices fluctuate season-to-season (summer is the high season), accommodations, eateries, and entertainment can be found to fit every pocket, from baked beans and beer to champagne, caviar, and a yacht in the harbor. Newport’s official website www.gonewport.com also has a wealth of information, from travel packages, special deals, and events, to where to stay, eat, shop, and things to do.

Bannister's Wharf, Newport, RI. Photo: Newport Breeze

The Clarkeston www.innsofNewport.com 28 Clarke Street (800) 524-1386

Viking Tours www.vikingtoursnewport.com (401) 847-6921

The Breakers 44 Ochre Point Avenue www.newportmansions.org (401) 847-1000

Rough Point 680 Bellevue Avenue www.newportrestoration.org (401) 847-8344

Newport Art Museum & Art Association 76 Bellevue Ave. www.newportartmuseum.com (401)488-8200

International Tennis Hall of Fame & Museum 194 Bellevue Ave. www.tennisfame.com (401) 849-3990

National Museum of American Illustration www.americanillustration.org (401) 851-8949

William Vareika Fine Arts Gallery 212 Bellevue Avenue www.vareikafinearts.com (401) 849-6149

Cadeaux du Monde 26 Mary Street www.cadeauxdumonde.com (401) 848-0550

One of many Norman Rockwell originals on view at Nat'l Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI

The Lady Who Paints Gallery & Studio 94 Bridge Street www.theladywhopaints.com (401) 450-4791

Harbor Fine Arts 134 Spring Street www.harborfineart.com (401) 338-4462

Borden House B no B 134 Spring Street www.bordenhousenewport.com (401) 338-4462

Located in an old fire house, 25 Mill St. www.didisuydamcontemporary.com (401) 848-9414

The Lady Who Paints Gallery and Studio www.theladywhopaints.com (401) 450-4791

Newport Jazz Festival www.newportjazzfest.net (800) 745-3000

Great shopping and yacht watching at www.bannisterswharf.com

Gas Lamp Grille, 206 Thames Street www.gaslampgrille.com (401) 845-9300 $$

The Cliff Walk Terrace at the Chanler Hotel 117 Memorial Blvd. www.thechanler.com (401) 847-1300

One Bellevue Fine Dining & Seafood Restaurant at the Viking Hotel One Bellevue Avenue www.hotelviking.com for Reservations (401) 848-4824 $$$

Flo’s Clam Shack, 4 Wave Avenue www.flosclamshack.net (401) 847-8141 $

Mary Hrbacek, Entwined (2007), 40x44"

“We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men… trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They make journeys, not very extensive ones, it is true: but our own little comes and goes are only little more than tree-wavings – many of them not so much.” -John Muir, Scribner’s Monthly, November, 1878. 

“I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.” -Henry David Thoreau  

For the past decade or so, perhaps triggered by the tripling of anxiety-producing catastrophes around the world, trees of all kinds, sometimes even small forests, both realistic and obviously faux, have been making their appearance in the work of sculptors, painters, and video and installation artists. It seems more and more artists, in what appears to be an increasing back-to-nature ‘trendette’, are using trees in their work as a metaphor for examining the nature of mankind, as well as the fate of the world. fine arts magazine 

Woman Astride (2008) 42x48"

 Working in this naturalist mode is artist Mary Hrbacek whose anthropomorphic tree portraits are currently on exhibit at the Creon Gallery in New York City through April 30. Curated by Richard Pasquarelli, Hrbacek’s trees, practicing their magic under the title Entwined, are not only transcendent but speak directly to the heart, reminding us, a bit surreptitiously at that, that we are all walking trees. Our spines are trunks, our legs and arms are branches, and sooner or later, with twisted limbs and weathered bones, we too shall be planted.  

The Creon Gallery, founded in 2009 by Norm Hinsey is the perfect venue, spatially speaking, in which to closely contemplate the philosophical approach of Hrbacek’s boldly rendered paintings. In two smallish, white-walled rooms, and a backyard garden to exhibit work outdoors, the tiny gallery, housed, one could almost say, quietly hidden, in the back of a residential apartment complex, visitors are all but guaranteed, a pleasuring, one-on-one intimacy with the art.  

Light Search (2010), 42x46"

Though Entwined covers a scant 4 years, Hrbacek, has been traveling the world taking photographs, and making charcoal drawings and painting of trees that have shed their leaves and exposed their so-called bones, in Asia and Europe, as well as Brooklyn, and New York’s Central Park, for over ten years. Her repertoire also includes assemblages which use natural materials such as sticks, stones, pinecones and leaves, as well as drawings from live models, traces of which can be divined in the artist’s sculptural brushwork — finely executed lines that give form to her tree portraits.  

Last Dance (2007), 40x44"

In Entwined (2007), above, the tree’s two main branches, each one circling the other like boxers looking for an in, are vividly framed by a blue sun-drenched sky. Thinking of human relations, Hrbacek, explaining her ideas behind each work on a listed works sheet given out at the gallery, writes “They (the branches) are interdependent; just as so many other living things are connected and dependent on each other.” In Woman Astride (2008), a feminine looking figure, with arms akimbo, seems to be in the throes of ecstasy. Here the painter, perhaps waxing autobiographical, sees a woman expressing “a feeling of freedom, combined with a sense of risk-taking. There is an evocation of euphoria to the female-like form as it achieves a level of freedom and independence, while remaining anchored to its natural habitation.”  

In Light Search (2010),  under a pale blue sky that could be morning or dusk – two branches resembling hands, reach for the sky. They could be praying, shouting Halleluiah, or chucking it all by throwing their hands up in surrender, or like the artist suggests “searching for answers” — anything to lessen the “anxiety and the tension that arises from life itself.” In Last Dance (2007) Hrbacek captures two trees in the backwoods of Vermont. With one tree’s swaying branches encircling the other, the trees seem to be enacting a ritual dance. 

In Hanging Suspended (2008), left, a five hundred year old Sycamore that the painter discovered in Viareggio, Italy, we see what appears to be the torso of a male with his thighs still attached dangling upside down like a tortured body from one of Jake and Dinos Chapman installations. Like all of Hrbacek’s trees, this so-called torso, separated from its leafy origin, marks it especially, as the artist writes, “as a symbol of isolation in a topsy-turvey world.” Clearly all of Hrbacek’s eleven trees on view face the same trials and tribulations – civilization gone amuck – as we all are. No doubt, this is one of the messages that the artist wants us to walk away with.  

By Edward Rubin, Contributing Writer  

 CREON Gallery 238 E 24 St, NY, NY 10010  646.265.5508 www.creongallery.com

Rondo, detail (2010). Wool, cotton and beads on Gatorboard. Photo: Jean Kallina

 While the title of Santa Fe-based artist Joyce Melander-Dayton’s current outing at the June Kelly Gallery in New York City reads Extravagant Constructions—an apt title, especially when you are standing up close, studying the artist’s intricately bejeweled craftsmanship and her use of materials and patterning (think Faberge Egg or the Gobelin Tapestries )—it could just as easily have been labeled, depending on where you stand in relation to her work, where your brain is at the moment, and how well you know the artist’s past history, Musical Meditations, Celestial Compositions, or How I Keep My Life Together. For the exhibition is all of this and more—the ‘more’ being, quietly beautiful in the extreme, and very much alive. fine arts magazine 

Con Brio (2010), Cherry beeswing veneer, silk, wool and beads on Gatorboard. Photo: Wendy McEahern

Slow and steady, followed by a small, but nonetheless, near cataclysmic change in the direction of her work, seems to be Melander-Dayton’s modus operandi. At her three 2007 exhibitions at Aaron Payne Fine Arts in Santa Fe, Gallery Shoal Creek, in Austin and the June Kelly Gallery, the artist, primarily known for her figurative work, fully embraced the abstract, presenting her collaged, fabric and fiber-based ornamental elements on linen. At last year’s mid-career retrospective at the Rymer Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee, it was the artist’s free- standing abstract sculptures that made an unexpected appearance. This past summer, in yet another ‘new works’ exhibition at Aaron Payne, her home town gallery, it was Melander-Dayton’s three- dimensional wall hangings, composed of exotic wood veneers, wool, silk fabrics, and glass beads, that took us by surprise. 

Extravagant Constructions, yet another of the artist’s leaps into uncharted territory, is Melander-Dayton’s most elegantly curated , spiritually-resonant showing to date. It is hard to imagine – nonetheless, this is what transpires – that each of the eight works on view tackles so many ideas with such otherworldly elegance. The only possible explanation, other than acknowledging the visionary aspects of New Mexico’s landscape that bleed into your very bones, and the artist’s innate passion for music, is that Melander-Dayton has mastered the art of channeling, heart, soul, and a whole lot of psychic energy, into each work that she gives birth to. What better place to store your valuables. 

Rondo (2010). Wool, cotton and beads on Gatorboard. Photo: Wendy McEahern

In Rondo (2010), composed of 40 modules varying in size and stretching nearly 9 feet across, Melander-Dayton recreates a mountain stream whose crystal -clear running water covers a bed of shimmering stones composed of intensely-colored glass beads and lengths of wool, woven into blue modules, arranged in a horizontal bubble-like flow, transforming Rondo into the musical equivalent of a babbling brook. The work, situated in a corner of the gallery where two walls meet—an out-of-the-ordinary placement deliberately designed by the artist to split our viewing experience in half—forces our eyes to jump from one wall to the other, effectively evoking the sense of swift, running water. 

Allegro Non Troppo, detail (2008), Silk, nylon, cotton, wool and beads on Gatorboard. Photo: Jean Kallina

A simpler work, in size and number of units, is Archipelago (2010). In eight triangular- shaped, sangria bubinga burl veneer gatorboard modules, decorated with swatches of silk fabric and strings of wool and beads, the artist revisits Okinawa, a chain of islands off the Japanese coast, where she lived for two years as a youth. In Ryukyu Rain (2010), one of exhibition’s smaller, statelier works—Ryukyu also part of an island chain in the Western Pacific—Melander-Dayton, decorates four green willow veneer modules, the very largest an oval, with her customary silk fabrics, beads, and strands of wool. The overriding color of this work is a dry-looking tan, and actually conjures up the feel of the island’s weather—the air that we feel is hot and humid. 

Music, (her daily piano playing in particular), in addition to informing her work—like surgeons known to have taken up knitting—keeps the artist’s fingers nimble for weaving, cutting, sewing, embroidering, and working a jigsaw to cut and shape various veneers incorporated into her work. Many of Melander-Dayton’s creations bear titles of musical movements and those movements, themselves—lively, spirited, repeat, and gliding—play a part in the artist’s selection and placement of materials, not only within each module, but in the ultimate layout of the finished work. In Glissando (2010), described in musical terms as ‘a rapid slide through a series of consecutive tones in a scale-like passage’, the artist emulates the slide, forcing our eyes to do the same, in an eight part, horizontally laid- out, walnut burl veneer, wool and glass- beaded work. In Con Brio, another musically- inspired work, Melander-Dayton places twelve circular modules in a vertical line. , The artist imbues each segment—playfully dancing up the wall—with the joyous spirit that ‘Con Brio’ implies. 

Allegro Non Troppo, (2008), Silk, nylon, cotton, wool and beads on Gatorboard. Photo: Wendy McEahern

Allegro Non Troppo (2008), by virtue of its size, startling mixture of color, diversity of patterning, and sparkling glitter, and Theme and Variations (2010), which seems to be signaling yet another new direction for the artist, are the exhibition’s showstoppers. At $25,000 each, they also command the most money. Allegro Non Troppo, ‘fast but not too fast’ in music, has all the excitement, exuberance and fizz of a champagne toast at a New Year’s Eve party. Nearly two feet high, and ten feet in length, the celebratory work sports 42 variously shaped eye-popping, red, black and white circles in over a dozen different designs. Some are circles within circles that cling to each other. Others stand alone, each decorated in a different manner, with wool, beads, cotton and Japanese silk fabrics that look like small paintings. The overall effect, as eye-catching as the aurora borealis, is that of fireworks lighting up the sky. 

Theme and Variations (2010) is a whole different kettle of fish. (Detail, right, silk, cotton, wool and beads on Gatorboard. Photo: Jean Kallina)  While the other works on view are thin enough to underscore the modules’ flatness, each of the nine, vertically- hung, oval- shaped wall sculptures in Theme and Variations, with depths ranging from 2 to 10 inches, jump right off the wall, leading to a totally different viewing experience. The almost, but not quite, 2-dimensional components of Melander-Dayton’s other works which allow one to view many components as a whole, are ditched in this multi-faceted ensemble. Here, due to a variance of depth, as well as unique design of each sculpture—at certain angles they resemble cakes, at others, sewing kits or small hat boxes—the eye has no one flat surface on which to rest or come to a conclusion. As our eyes are forced to scan each work, up, down, and sideways, our brain, also, must observe, one by one, what it is that we are looking at. It is an exciting situation to be in, as well as a puzzle to be solved. 

By Edward Rubin, Contributing Writer 

Joyce Melander Dayton: Extravagant Constructions 

June Kelly Gallery 

166 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012 Tel (212) 226-1600 

Through March 29, 2011

Jessica Lagunas. Para besarte mejor (The Better to Kiss You With), 2003. From video, stills by Roni Mocán

 It was only a few years ago—2007 to be exact—that ‘The Pinta People’, took a big gamble and surprised the art world, by mounting the world’s first international Latin American Modern & Contemporary Art Show at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City. With 35 international galleries and countless Hispanic artists from the United States, Spain, Mexico, Central and South America, showing their works, the fair was an immediate hit. So much so, as a matter of fact, that Pinta felt secure enough to not only turn it into a yearly event, but also to eventually establish yet another annual Latin American art fair, during the month of June, in the city of London. fine arts magazine   

Opening Night at Pinta Latin American Art Show. Photo: Pablo Coradis

This past November, ‘the little fair that could’ took another gamble and moved its 4-day, New York City celebration of Latin American art from its Chelsea habitat to Pier 92 on the Hudson River, the same location made famous by The Armory Show. With daylight streaming in from the pier’s surrounding windows, the new and improved Pinta with larger and brighter aisles, more galleries and art installations, a bar and café for the public, and a private, upper level VIP section – with roughly four times more space than the old Pinta – generously gifted its visitors and exhibitors alike with more breathing and thinking room, as well as strolling, eating (and oh, my tired feet!), resting options.   

Museum of Modern Art Director Glenn Lowry. Photo: Edward Rubin

Again, the golden glow of success reared its lovely head and nearly 12,000 art-loving people visited the fair’s 57 participating galleries, the majority being from New York City and Sao Paulo, Brazil. More importantly, though, sales to private and institutional collectors, according to Pinta’s favorable wrap-up report, were “significant.” Among those institutions buying art was the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York’s El Museo del Barrio, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Harvard museums. Also seen looking for bargains at Pinta’s new space were several museum bigwigs—chief among them and wearing a snazzy pink scarf—MoMA’s director, Glen Lowry.   

Although the art of legendary artists Fernando Botero, Wilfredo Lam, Lygia Clark, and Ana Mendieta, as they did in the first three editions of Pinta, took their customary bows, for the most part, it was the work of the young contemporary Latin American artists whose fresh, unique ways of looking at life that supplied the majority of the fair’s visual excitement. Though many paintings, sculptures, and a few videos, were on view, it was the quietly inventive work of the photographers—digital and otherwise—that depicted life, in its myriad postures, most interestingly.   

Lluis Barba, Project of the Adequacy of the Great Gallery of Louvre (2010), after Hubert Robert (1796) Travelers in Time series 44x50” C-print, diasec Courtesy: Dean Project

 The work of Brazilian artist Rochelle Costi at the Celma Albuquerque Galeria De Arte (Rio de Janeiro) is about the scale and perception of space. In one photograph, two stacks of hand-cut paper, lined up side by side, inhabit a one-window, dollhouse-sized room. Another, titled Disproportionally, reveals the floor of a room, covered with a few dozen small metal containers, the type that holds rolls of film. Both objects, deliberately placed in miniaturized settings by the artist, add a disorienting effect to the photos. Our eyes dart back and forth, from the window to the ceiling to the floor, to the object and back, trying to make visual sense of what we are looking at. Are the objects large or small, and what size is the room? As Costi wrote, “The series was made using a model of a house where odd objects were introduced to stress the difficulty that we have in realizing the amount of space we really need to live. Have we grown up with too much,” Costi asks. Has the environment swallowed us? Is growing up not fitting anymore?”   

In his digitally-composed photographic series Travelers in Time at Dean Project (New York), Barcelona-based artist Lluis Barba, startles the brain by adding unexpected contemporary images, somewhat humorously, into the scenario of classical paintings. In Brueghel’s Peasant Wedding (1568) modern day tourists pose and party among Brueghel’s 16th century wedding guests. In Project of the Adequacy of the Great Gallery of the Louvre, Barba re-envisions Hurbert Robert’s 1796 painting of the Louvre, by re-hanging the museum’s walls with the work of twentieth century masters, like Picasso, Magritte, Rothko, then adding present-day museum goers into the mix. Even more topical—both images are slipped into the scenario—is a portrait of Michael Jackson and what seems to be the figure of designer Karl Lagerfeld, wearing his trademark sunglasses. The artist seems to be saying that art and fashion continually change while human behavior remains the same.   

Stills from video performance, Jessica Lagunas. Para acariciarte mejor (The Better to Caress You With), 2003. Image courtesy the artist and ROLLO Contemporary Art. Stills:Roni Mocán

None of videos on view were as visually exciting, lushly colored, or intellectually stimulating as those of Nicaragua-born, New York City-based artist Jessica Lagunas, at the Rollo Contemporary Art (London, England). In this series, the artist herself—in three separate wall-mounted screens—is seen applying lipstick, mascara and painting her nails, all in an overly exaggerated manner. Frantically transforming her lips, eyelashes and fingernails, until they become almost clown-like, Lagunas’s videos use the titles, Little Red Riding Hood, The Better To Caress You, The Better To See You With, and The Better To Kiss You With, to parody the various ‘must do’ female beauty routines that Madison Avenue and Hollywood have hawked for decades. In doing so, she attempts to undermine the authority of contemporary visual culture’s representation of the female body, by re-presenting it in terms of insecurity and obsession. A few months later, much to my surprise, these same Lagunas videos, apparently making the rounds, were entertaining crowds at the opening of curator Sasha Okshteyn’s exhibition, Basic Instinct, at the Black and White Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I have a sneaking suspicion that Okshteyn, known for having a keen eye and finger on the pulse, must have been doing some pre-exhibition shopping at Pinta.   

Luna Paiva, Untitled (2009), photograph of woman plucking a chicken 24.4x33.1”. Courtesy Galeria Teresa Anchorena, Argentina

The narrative work of Paris born, Argentina based photographer Luna Paiva, at the Galeria Teresa Anchorena (Buenos Aires, Argentina), is all about drama. Whether it’s her edgy series of scantily clothed show-girls, known as vedettes, posing inside their homes, or her telling portraits of everyday people at home and work, behind every photograph lurks a fascinating story. One eye-popping, surreal Paiva photograph of a woman manically plucking a chicken pulled me right into the gallery. With one arm in the air, and feathers magically flying everywhere, the lady stands behind a long fruit, fowl, and vegetable-laden table that would do any still life painting proud. As the story goes, Paiva, at the bequest of singer Candelaria Saenz Valiente, composed this sumptuous scenario – reminiscent of Peter Greenaway’s 1989 movie, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, at a friend’s antique shop, to illustrate the Argentine chanteuse’s song, Electrodomestics.   

Felipe Morozini A Noiva do Vento (Bride of The Wind) (2007) 16 photos mounted on Diasec. Above: Untitled, 2007, photograph of woman sunning herself, 40x60” courtesy: Zipper Gallery, San Paulo, Brazil

Equally strong, but opposite in their ability to excite, are the photographs of Brazilian, Felipe Morozini, at the Zipper Galeria (São Paulo, Brazil). Using a zoom lens, Morozini – exercising his voyeuristic rights – secretly documents the lives of his neighbors from the window of his apartment. In one photograph, a woman soaking up the sun in a two-piece bathing suit lies precariously on the ledge, just outside her apartment window. In another, a naked woman stands on her balcony examining herself in a mirror. As luck would have it—and luck plays a large part in Morozini’s work—the very instant he took a snapshot, the mirror was reflecting his neighbor’s nipple. In Bride of the Wind (2007), the artist turns his gaze on the temporal qualities of nature and depicts—in 16 sequenced frames—various effects of the wind on a set of curtains hanging out of an apartment window. Following the twisting and turning movements of each curtain, frame-by-frame, I found the windmill of my mind making its own little movie.   

Rafael Gómez Barros, Casa Tomada: Quinta de San Pedro Alejandrino Altar de la Patria (2008) Courtesy of Galería Christopher Paschall S.XXI, Bogotá, Columbia

Galería Christopher Paschall S.XXI (Bogatå, Columbia), one of a handful of galleries that did so, dedicated their entire exhibition space to Casa Tomada (Seized Home), Columbian conceptual artist Rafael Gómez Barros’s traveling installation. Using nature’s small, but hard-working creatures, for political purposes—his intent to symbolize the people displaced by continuing armed conflict and its resulting forced migration in Columbia—Barros attaches hundreds, sometimes thousands of fiberglass ants, enlarged to the size of scary, to the facades of government buildings and revered historical monuments, such the National Congress of Columbia and Quinta de San Pedro San Pedro in Santa Marta, one the nation’s many shrines dedicated to Simón Bolívar. One gallery wall, covered with a trail of giant black ants, was literally stopping people in their tracks. Another wall featuring photographs of Barros’s ants invading various buildings, brought to mind the countless science fiction movies popular in the 50s and 60s, such as Them (1954), in which ants, greatly enlarged by atomic radiation, threaten to take over the world.   

Gerard Ellis, Birthday Pinata (2010) 78x118” Courtesy: Lyle O. Reitzel Gallery, Santo Domingo

Even before I entered the Lyle O. Reitzel Gallery (Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic), Brooklyn-based, Dominican-born, Gerald Ellis’s stunningly composed painting, Birthday Piñata (2010), with its knockout vibrant blue sky, took me prisoner. The artist’s beautifully drawn images of dinosaurs, and cartoon-like white clouds, under which a birthday boy with toy sword in his hand stands, capture all of the innocence of childhood. Autobiographical by nature, the painting channels negative feelings that Ellis experienced as a child when called upon to smash open the piñata. “I hated going to birthday parties and always tried to stay away from clowns and the piñatas,” Ellis wrote to me. “I think this funny looking object (the piñata) can detonate a very strong and violent behavior on the child, who is, after destroying the object, fighting his way through into getting as much as he can from what was inside it. I view this as an early example of what really moves us as humans, from a selfish point of view.”   

No fair is complete without a touch of eroticism and Brazilian artist Vincent Gill more than made up for it in his series Read the Book, Watch the Movie (2004) at Galeria Nara Roesler (São Paulo, Brazil). Each drawing, executed in India ink on pages taken from psychology books—like a modern day Kama Sutra—lustily depicts various sexual positions. Few of the book’s words—those not blotted out by the black ink which covers most of the page—serve to illuminate each image, while white, topsy-turvy line drawings illustrate the love-making figures. The words on one drawing of a penis penetrating a vagina read, Another was the one who introduced the concept for the first time. The text accompanying the image of a man and woman in head-to-toe position announces that, All kinds of things come together (right). A third and somewhat ambiguous drawing of a naked woman leaning over a bed—it is left up to the viewer’s imagination as to what is going to take place—reads anxiety by chastisement.   

At first glance, the simple paintings of Mexican artist Hugo Lugo, at the Ginocchio Gallery (Mexico City, Mexico), executed on pages torn from a spiral notebook, the type we took with us to college, appear to be a simple mix of drawing and collage. On closer inspection – talking about trompe l’oeil – each work, down to the page’s torn holes and solitary men occupying each page, is a fully realized oil and acrylic painting on board. Equally deceiving is the subject matter. For here, the artist waxes existential in his presentation of solitary-thinking characters in simple situations, forcing us to consider our own existence. In one painting, the artist turns the page’s straight lines into a wavering whirlpool, placing a barefoot man, shoes in hand, head bent down at its very center. The painting, aptly titled Cuadernode de Reflexiones (Book of Reflections), seems to say that we are at the center of everything going on around us. Another less felicitous reading could be that it is only a matter of time before we are sucked into this circle of nothingness.   

Hugo Lugo, Cuaderno de reflexiones (Book of Reflections), 2010, oil, acrylic on canvas – 41x 31”, Courtesy: Ginoccho Gallery, Mexico

The most unusual installation at Pinta belonged to Venezuelan-born, Miami-based, fashion designer, Nicolás Felizola, who dedicated exhibition space in memory of Mexican actress, María Félix (1914-2002), Latin America’s revered movie goddess. Known as La Doña to her loving fans (myself included), Felíx was a huge star throughout Central and South America and Europe in the 40s, 50s and 60s. Cast in films by Renior, Buñuel, Emilio Fernández and Juan Antonio Bardem, with such greats as Rossano Brazzi, Vittorio Gassman, Jean Gabin, and Yves Montand, Felíx refused to work in Hollywood unless she made her grand entrance from the “big door” and not the small roles offered by Cecil B. de Mille. “I was not born to carry a basket,” Félix is reputed to have said.   

The back story here is that in 2007 Felizola, attending Maria Felíx’s posthumous auction at Christie’s, left the premises owning the most comprehensive collection of the movie star’s couture-designed wardrobe, some of which—Dior, Balenciaga, Hermes, Chanel, Halston, Cardin, and some of Felizola’s own Felíx-inspired creations—are displayed here on mannequins (see below) . Running alongside what is essentially a visual timeline of Felíx’s devotion to fashion and film, through her costumes, garments, hats, and accessories, is Carmen Castilla’s 2001 documentary film, Maria Felíx, The Making of a Myth. Structured around an exclusive interview, in which the still-radiant 87-year old, Maria Felix responds to an off-camera narrator, she recalls her films, men, clothes and jewels. Thus, little by little, the legend unfurls.   

Fully saturated, having spent a wonder-filled, half-day at Pinta, I make for the door.   

By Edward Rubin, Contributing Writer   

Edward Rubin is a critic who writes about art, culture and entertainment. Although based in New York City, he travels frequently to cover international events.

Takashi MURAKAMI, Oval Buddha Silver (2008) Salon De L’Abondance, Château de Versailles, 18.6 x 10.5 x 10.2’, photo:Cedric Delsaux, ©2007-2010 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Once again the battle between preserving classical French culture from the ugly claws of globalization has been making headlines in France. This time around it is provocateur-artist Takashi Murakami’s, Japan’s answer to Andy Warhol, recent exhibition of comic-based manga and anime-inspired paintings, sculptures, one rug and a film, at the Château Versailles and its gardens (September 14–December 12, 2010), that raised the hackles of Prince Sixte-Henri de Bourbon-Parme, a descendent of the Louis XIV, as well as the Coordination de la Défense de Versailles, an organization specifically formed to prevent artist, Jeff Koons from exhibiting at the palace in 2008. Aimed at giving Koons and his giant metal dog the boot, a lawsuit initiated by the prince’s nephew, was dismissed by the court.

Condemning Murakami’s “veritable ‘murder’ of our heritage, our artistic identity, and our most sacred culture”, de Bourbon-Parme claims that the artist’s work disrespects the glory of Versailles. “There are puppets in that exhibition that are frankly grotesque. These works undermine the unity-of-style of the museum.” According to the CDV it also, “violates the harmony of the palace itself which is a symbol of French history and culture.” fine arts magazine

Takashi Murakami at Versailles (2010), photo:Kleinefenn

Various Murakami’s quotes!…“When someone scores a goal, someone is going to be unhappy.” “I am the Cheshire Cat who greets Alice in Wonderland with his devilish grin, and chatters on as she wanders around the chateau.” “This is a face-off between the baroque and postwar Japan,”and, “I hope it will create in visitors a sort of shock, an aesthetic feeling.”

On Murakami’s side, as well as hordes of Euro-spending tourists visiting Versailles each year – as the third most popular tourist spot in France – are the so-called powers behind the throne. According to Jean-Jacques Aillagon—former culture minister and the current palace museum director— who stated it is his duty to open the palace to contemporary artistic creations of our times, “the coexistence of Murakami and Versailles makes perfect sense.” The Hall of Mirrors is a kind of manga, a comic strip for glory of the king’s reign, he told one interviewer.

As for Laurent Brunner, who chooses the artists to exhibit at Versailles – and who toured me through the exhibition – his “nine year old son is not interested in Veronese, but he does relate to Murakami’s work.” And, says Laurent Le Bon, director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz and curator of the exhibition, “All I really want to do is make a dialogue between Murakami and Versailles.”

T. Murakami, Miss KO² (1997) oil, acrylic, fiberglass and iron, 6.16’ x 2.08’ x 2.9’, Photo: Edward Rubin ©Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Though Murakami’s exhibition was not derailed, the ‘powers that be’ did capitulate ever so slightly. Not on view, as they were deemed too ‘explosive’ to show, were Murakami’s more titillating – some say pornographic – larger than life “body fluid” sculptures. Missing in action was My Lonesome Cowboy (1998), featuring a masturbating young man whose ejaculation, exploding from a large penis, floats lasso-style overhead. Also missing was Hiropon (1997), in which a young woman in bikini top and nothing below is squeezing her oversized breasts and nipples, while a frothy stream of milk swirls around her like a jump rope.

The nearest we get to the subject of sex at Versailles is six-foot tall Miss Ko² (1997), a young, short-skirted, stiletto-heeled, perky-breasted Barbie doll blond. Awkwardly situated in a corner of the Salon De La Guerre, Miss Ko² is dressed as a waitress, a la Hooters—like servers at Anna Miller’s, a popular restaurant chain in Tokyo.

T. Murakami, Flower Matango (2001-06), fiberglass, iron, oil paint and acrylic, 10.3 x 6.7 x 8.6’, Hall of Mirrors, Versailles. photo:Cedric Delsaux ©2001-2006 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Whether Murakami succeeded in creating a vibrant, meaningful dialogue is a matter of opinion and all of France seems to have has weighed in! For me, who is of the mind that Marie Antoinette got a bum deal, Murakami’s invasion of the king and queen’s royal chambers, is little more than sideshow entertainment – read, diversion – for youngsters, as well as culture-vulture tourists who know little more than its former occupants lost their heads. It does offer a respite, as well distraction, from mere historical consideration, or for that matter, from any serious thinking. Of course, those who stand to gain the most from the caché of Murakami’s Versailles outing, are the galleries representing him, museums showing him, those collecting his work, and of course the artist, whose larger works – his Cowboy’was auctioned in 2008, at Sotheby’s Contemporary Art auction, for $15,161,000 – have been known to bring in millions.

This said, Murakami, like Jeff Koons, another ‘fast food’ mega-millionaire, art manufacturing-entrepreneur who rarely applies his hand to his own work – a large staff in New York and Japan does his bidding – does have a gift for supplying the curious masses with kitschy, cartoon based, entertainment pieces. Two, or maybe three tops, of the 22 works on view at Versailles, manage to register high on my Richter scale of visual enjoyment, craft and placement; the latter, due to the already-spectacular Baroque nature of Versailles itself, being of utmost importance. The remaining works are occasionally ironic, mildly impertinent, and cutesy-poo in their insistence, coming across as more, “Toys ‘R’ Us” display, than an actual work of art. Here the peerless neutering powers of the Sun King’s palace all but remove Murakami’s vitals.

T. Murakami,The Emperor’s New Clothes (2005), fiberglass, resin, iron, wood, fabrics, oil paint, acrylic and lacquer, 6.2 x 3.1 x 1.5’, © Coronation Room, Versailles. photo:Cedric Delsaux

A good example of such neutering is Flower Mantango (2001-2006), the artist’s oversized, tendril-sprouting, double-globed sculpture covered with grinning flowers in a thousand eye-popping colors. Placed at the entrance of the spectacular Hall of Mirrors—all seventeen huge mirrored arches reflecting seventeen equally-impressive arcade windows overlooking the palace gardens— Mantango is reduced to an annoying accessory to the fact; the fact being that you are standing in the jewel of one of the world’s most awe-inspiring palaces and nothing else really matters. The artist’s display of Superflat Flowers (2010) in the Salon de la Paix fares no better.

The Emperor’s New Clothes (2005), a nod to Hans Christian Anderson’s story, adds the ultimate ironic touch—perhaps serving as a statement about the entire exhibition. Murakami places a diminutive, large-headed, wide-eyed, comedic-looking king in the Coronation Room, a room filled with paintings celebrating the glories of Napoleon Bonaparte. This juxtaposition raises myriad thoughts, from humorous, to insulting, to calculatingly subversive, no doubt reflecting the artist’s intention.

When Murakami’s efforts hit the bull’s eye, it’s as if Marie Antoinette and Louis XIV, the palace’s most notorious occupants, specifically commissioned the work of art, for not only does it fit perfectly within its respective space—be it in the palace or gardens—but, it appears inseparable from its surroundings.

T. Murakami, Tongari-Kun (2003-04) fiberglass, steel, and oil, acrylic, urethane paint, 22.96 x11.48’ ©. Salon D'Hercule, Versailles. Photo: Edward Rubin

Tongari-Kun (2003-2004), the crowning glory if the exhibition, is Murakami at his most inventive and luxurious best. The 23- foot Baroque-style sculpture is a colorful fusion of surrealism, Art Nouveau and a hint of Japanese manga, featuring a giant-headed, fiberglass and steel Buddha, with numerous arms gracing its sides. Buddha sits on a frog, which in turn, is resting on a lotus flower. Smack-dab in the center of the ornate Salon D’Hercule, beneath a ceiling painting, Apotheosis of Hercules, by François Le Moyne, and surrounded by a pair of Veroneses, this imposing Buddha is the exhibition’s indoor show-stopper. Equally impressive is Murakami’s large, stately, richly-detailed sterling silver Oval Buddha Silver (2008), situated in the Salon De L’Abondance, beneath the portrait of Louis XV, great-grandson of Louis XIV. As dramatic, is his bronze and gold-leafed Oval Buddha (2007-2010), overlooking the palace’s extensive gardens. It is here, among the ‘big three’ that Murakami, if only during the run of his exhibition, gets to rule.

By Edward Rubin, Contributing Writrer

Edward Rubin is a critic who writes about art, culture and entertainment. Although based in New York City, he travels frequently to cover international events.

Editor’s notes: Here is a link to Jerry Sals, from New York Magazine, discussing the Murakami exhibition when it showed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY.  In it, he discusses some of the pieces that were excluded from the Versailles event, but discussed by Ed Rubin in the article above.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxmMxi-lelg

The idea behind a work of art has always fascinated me—in the best sense of the word you could call it propaganda, though artists prefer to call it their vision. As an avid consumer of art, I want more than what’s just in front of me. I want the mechanics of art, the living innards, be it a painting, a book, a movie, or a play, to turn me every way but loose, to wake me from the dead, to hold me captive, to lift me to the next plateau, to enlarge me as a human being. Like Poe’s Annabel Lee, I want winged seraphs to whisk me away to heaven. A good work of art attempts to do that. A true masterpiece, to use an overworked and frequently misapplied word, does just that. Here—shades of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”—there is an infusive, god-like bonding between the art and the viewer, and in no small way the artist, where all become one. The lucky ones get to take this epiphany home with them, and like the very best of marriages, continue the conversation.

The special section, Complex, But Not Complicated, in NY Arts’ fall issue is about the ideas, and ultimately the structure behind the work of 12 artists, none two exactly alike. I have selected artists whose work, from first viewing, caught me off guard, and pierced my very armor. I asked each artist to supply the text—using their own words— to explain the ideas behind their work, be it about their specific work or works on the page, or their overall aesthetic. The reader should bear in mind, as is the case with many artists: the artists in this section are not tethered to the one medium on display. In fact, most of the painters can sculpt, and most of the sculptors and conceptual artists can draw as well as paint. It is particularly enlightening to reflect on how each artist’s ideas, some subtle, some not so, work their magic.

The age of the artists in this mix ranges from early 30s to late 60s. Added up, there are some 500-plus years of experience. A few of the artists are represented by a gal¬lery; most are not. One could say that their place in the art world, if one wants to count the number of years they’ve been on the scene, varies from the near-, and continually emerging, to that of a grand master, a painter’s painter, if you will. Nearly half—Judi Harvest, Lori Nelson, Carol Salmanson, Gae Savannah, and EJay Weiss—live and work, and in some cases teach, in and around New York City. The other six, many of whom exhibit internationally, live abroad. Derek Besant and Steve Rockwell are from Canada. Anne Ferrer is from France. Helga Griffiths is from Germany. And Resi Girardello and Barbara Taboni, Italy. Last but not least, adding a welcome bit of country flavor and Southern hospitality is Bristol, Tennessee’s own Val Lyle. I hope that readers enjoy this section as much as I enjoyed assembling it. For me it was an act of love.

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Steve Rockwell, The Steve Rockwell Sandwich, 1989. Photo credit: Skip Dean. Courtesy of the artist.

Making a Meal Out of a Cubist Still Life

Steve Rockwell

“There has been nothing new in art since 1915” was something that I blurted out to an art professor 21 years ago at a party. It turned out to be an awkward conversation stopper, and obviously untrue in terms of art history. I was only trying to get across that the seeds of most of the art that followed had already been sown by then. Personally, the notion has proven to be a nugget of nutrients when it came to panning ideas. Collage elements in a typical Cubist still life from the year 1912, not only banished illusionism, but made it possible to view the painting and its components as concrete objects. By serving an actual sandwich as art, as I first did in 1989, the object was consumed and ingested as well as viewed.

In a recent show, I embedded Dutch Panter cigar tins, clear Cuban cigar tubes, food lids, and a wine cork into mahogany supports. My focus had been various forms of human consumption, in this case eating, drinking, and smoking. Frequent subjects of early Cubist works were pipes, wine bottles, playing cards, and fragments of daily newspapers. A popular inclusion was the word “journal,” which could be variously sliced into “jour” and “jou,” day and play respectively in English. “Journal” and “jou” happens to be other Cubist elements that I have “actualized” in my work. The journal is dArt International magazine, which I released in Los Angeles in 1998, and continues to be served. “Jou” refers to Color Match Game, which was created in 1987 and continues to be played in tournaments across North America. One could say that the bulk of my work may be apprehended through reading, eating, and playing. 

www.steverockwellart.com

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Anne Ferrer, Tunnel of Love, 2006, Ripstop fabric, fans, 12'x20'x18'. Install. Musee d'art Moderne Centre Pompidou, Paris. Court. the artist

A Billowing of Beauty

“I restrict the form with the stitches and seams, so that they will become intricate organisms as the pieces balloon.” -Anne Ferrer

I have the desire to achieve in my sculpture an accessible, spontaneous experience for the viewer that is bold, exuberant, swollen, but also exquisitely delicate and smart. I combine two mediums that seem to naturally accomplish this best: air and lightweight colorful fabric. I restrict the form with the stitches and seams, so that they will become intricate organisms as the pieces balloon. I use this unexpected alchemy to achieve beauty, through a sensual lightness and a bold presence, all the while, smiling at what Parisians breathe. It is an “Air de Paris” filled with fashion, seduction, appearance, futility, irreverence, and humor. This “souffle,” impulsion of freedom is inspired by the energy and boldness I discovered and loved in American art while I was an art student at Yale in the 80s. I earned my MFA there in 1988. American art critic, Julie Johnson, writes that this work is “light, air-filled, and sewn of hot colorful fabric. The sculptures are luscious, ripe, and over-the-top. With time, they have expanded to take over the entire space, crowding up to the walls. Some have been edible collaborations with pastry chefs, and lately some are created with perfumists as well as composers. They are a feast for the senses, a visual ravishment. Like the original Gargantua, who was born from a feast of tripe in a delicious garden, the work was born from associations with delicious consumption, beauty, and sexuality, but also from the world’s aggressive or violent associations. This is the line where pleasure and the disgust of over-consumption meet.” I want my work to be totally vain and essential.

www.anneferrer.com

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Carol Salmanson, Diaphany, 2008. Installation, Mixed Greens Gallery, NY. LEDs, fluorescents, gel filters, aluminum frame, 3 windows, 111”x 80”, 80”x 31” & 80”x 53”. Courtesy, the artist.

A Lighted Conversion

Carol Salmanson

I started working with light so that I could take the spatial and color concerns of my painting into a different realm. By developing a vocabulary of various lighting technologies, reflective materials, and structures, I’ve created works that fully activate their surrounding areas. I focus on both object and space, exploiting walls and other surfaces, as well as the work’s surroundings.

My window installation, Diaphany, at Mixed Greens Gallery in New York in the winter of 2008-2009, used the building’s architecture as its starting point. It incorporated the windows’ mullions, sills, and fire escape into its geometry. A total of 2,642 LEDs joined with the hard edges and soft blends of gel filters to change the experience of the urban street.

The wall piece, Luminous Layers, uses different colors of LEDs beamed through prism rods for a jewel-like effect. They are nestled into angled stainless steel to create multiple reflections. These three pieces work together to amplify each other’s effects and create a warm, inviting sensation from what should be a cold, sterile material.

My most recent work, All That’s Left, was shown last winter at the East/West Project in Berlin. It consisted of ten boxes with LEDs embedded into reflective sheeting and backlit with white light, to depict brick fragments. They transformed the heavy feeling of salvaged masonry into an evocative, ethereal experience.

All of my work is about the unspoken intricacies of human interaction, which I learned to observe to compensate for a hereditary hearing problem. Like the best theater, which captures hidden dynamics to go beyond words, the work explores the energy in subconscious perceptions and calculations, the things you see and know without realizing it. Information intersects with emotions to create a specific kind of knowledge that is nonverbal, precise, and intense.

www.carolsalmanson.com

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Helga Griffiths, Wavespace, 2009. Wire net support, 4000 blue light-emitting diodes, control units, computer with dedicated software, thermo sensors, wave sensor, mobile data transmission 8 active loudspeakers, sound (percussion), thermo sensors, 22.5 x 1 x 5 meters. Courtesy of the artist.

Waves of Influence

Helga Griffiths

I work with scientific data to test and reshape perceptions of everyday phenomena by presenting them in unfamiliar ways and contexts. Perceptual forms are interchanged and complex codes created, often beginning with the deconstruction of the familiar to open up new avenues of reception. Our confidence in familiar sensory perception is shaken, and an experiential space is created in which emotions, memories, and associations can grow and move freely. This can develop into a play between proximity and distance, for example, by having information that we normally receive only through touching an object suddenly perceived remotely through our senses of sight or hearing. The information is received through a completely different channel from what we are used to. My recent installation Wavespace is an example of this technique. This multisensory installation combines light and sound elements in novel ways to recreate the experience of weather and the sea in the exhibition space.

Weather and climate are complex, chaotic phenomena. We humans are exposed to the weather and respond to it on an individual level. We might feel the rain or snow on our skin, but we do not fully comprehend the complex mechanisms that cause the drop or the snowflake to fall just then and there. Our ability to predict future atmospheric events is also quite general and limited to short intervals of time and space. We influence the climate with our behavior and actions, but we are not in total control of the complex climate.

For this specific project, I gathered data on extreme weather events measured over a period of 100 years, a period longer than my own lifespan, and transformed it into an abstract and imaginative interpretation that could be experienced through light and sound elements. The historical data were augmented by real-time data from a wave sensor located in the nearby sea and thermal detectors that sense the presence of visitors in the exhibition space. Information about events remote in time and space can thus be experienced with different senses in this walk-through installation, where they are perceived as constantly changing waves of blue LED light and sound moving through the exhibition space. For the acoustic element of the installation, of which the importance is at least equal to that of the visual aspect, I avoided naturalistic sounds for the most part, in favor of sounds created with a wide range of percussive instruments.

The thermo sensors in the exhibition space itself detect heat radiated by visitors, providing information that is used to modify the sounds and light patterns, so that visitors experience direct interaction with the installation, a microclimatic analogy to man’s influence on world climate. In this constantly changing atmosphere of sound and light, participants can experience the fragility of their environment in relation to their own presence in space. The juxtaposition of historical weather data with real-time information provokes a reassessment of one’s own position on the climate timeline, and provides an effective counterpoint to conventional perceptions of weather and the sea.

www.helgagriffiths.de

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Barbara Taboni, Portland, 2009. Iron, concrete, video with sound, endless loop, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist

Concrete Meanderings

Barbara Taboni

In this age we are often surrounded by concrete, and in most cities you will find concrete areas in the process of construction. The name of the cement widely used in the world is Portland, hence the title of my work. The elements of iron scaffolding, used on construction sites and rusted by time, give me the chance to build a strong geometry, made up of the relations of forces calculated to the millimeter. This architecture allows the viewer to enter and walk in the workspace and engage with it. Parts of the human body in white concrete are placed under scaffolding; its disaggregation is symbolic: spiritual, cultural, social, and political.

These act as a base to the whole structure. As in Gothic cathedrals, there are figures that support the building, which become its points of strength. The human body always accompanies my imagination. In Portland, it functions as a mirror; it forces you to ask questions. Mankind is called to support a tottering age, balancing its relationship with the universe. The video is visually a uterus, a concrete mixer that mixes the raw materials. The cement turns inside the machine, which acts as a sound box, accompanying the exhibition with a soundtrack similar to a mantra that covers any other noise, canceling any distractions. Now you’re inside of Portland, which requires thought to be present. I chose to do a loop; the repetition is a character I have been experimenting. It is a circular rhythm, like all rituals. The small screen on the ground, with light and sound, is the beating heart of the installation. The goal of my work is to open questions, at times ironic, at times dramatic. This is what the artist can do; the answers come from the viewers.

www.barbarataboni.carbonmade.com

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Lori Nelson, First Day on the Job, 2009. Oil on panel, 12” x 12”. Courtesy of the artist.

Drawing Near by Drawing Far

“I paint people in their distant mode, complex, ready for some undefined or internal episode, but still far enough away to be generalized.” -Lori Nelson

The thing to do when looking at a city is try to not look closely or sharply at the city. Look blurrily and let the shapes mass. Sometimes you’ll get the opportunity to be above the city while at the same time remaining within the city. You will be on the rooftop of a building (a friend has a key) looking around and down, laughing and joking about falling accidentally, dropping your phone, or spitting. Not from an airplane, but from this high building, you may possibly understand for a maddeningly slippery moment that the city is only one entity, a mass, a single body, breathing and solid, complex, but not complicated from this vantage where the details recede enough to unify the pieces. If you can stop talking for about a minute, you’ll understand that the city is really only just one massive thing and the many busy pieces that make it up will seem hard to grasp, though you know they do exist.

www.lorinelson.com

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Gae Savannah, Rhydal (detail), 2010. Sequins, vinyl, garland, steel, 70"x19"x13". Courtesy of Rupert Ravens Contemporary, Newark, NJ.

Blinding Glitz

“Glamour Trance freezes time and stunts emotional development, yet supremely entertains, quixotic escapism. All the same, behind the puerile myopia, irony lurks.” -Gae Savannah

Rhydal, seen here in detail, speaks to Glamour Trance. 21st-century Americans court oblivion in shopping, fundamentalism, hegemony, pedigree, capitalism, sugar, and fashion. The list is long. Calling to mind the protagonists of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels or Rita Hayworth in the film Gilda, the sculpture’s hypnotic sizzle is intoxicat¬ing. Glamour Trance freezes time and stunts emotional development, yet supremely entertains, quixotic escapism. All the same, behind the puerile myopia, irony lurks. We turn a blind eye to our culture’s scourges: droning slaughter and daily torture of gentle farm animals. While ultimately Fitzgerald left the city of illusion, New York, many of us continue to eat at the trough of la-la, celebrity glitz.

www.gaesavannah.com

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Val Lyle, Fetus, 2008. Cockleburs (burdock), 19”x 30”x 16”. Courtesy of the artist.

Scraps of Appalachia

“ … I use common burdock and cockleburs to create sculptures that point out the various elephants in the living rooms of our country without taking sides.” -Val Lyle

Appalachia has been the smoky base flavor of my work even as I’ve lived in New York City, Florida, Hawaii, and Arizona. Living now in my family hometown in Bristol, Tennessee, I look to my roots directly. I am troubled by the artistic gentrification that would rob me of a heritage. Because I’ve come to think that a voice with a clear sense of heritage and place is the freshest voice in contemporary art, I address global issues through an Appalachian lens, and interpret rural Appalachia with a contemporary eye.

My current immersion installation focuses on the vanishing wooden barn, with large-scale paintings of interior and exterior views rendered in a contemporary, cropped, and abstracted style alongside drying tobacco, hay bales, and farm tools. Eight-foot-tall figurative rope sculptures stand next to their humble inspiration, a strand of bailing twine. Giant projections of barn imagery loop to live, old-time music. The strong play between positive and negative space carries through the individual artworks and the exhibition itself. Viewers spontaneously crawl through hay tunnels and gush their own “barn” stories brought to life by familiar scents. The interiors become a vehicle for embracing the vulnerable child that we all once were. The barn exteriors acknowledge the inevitable loss of innocence and time that occurs so naturally. Light shining through board slats becomes saturated with meanings.

Arte Povera could be applied to much of my current work, for I use rope, burdock, and other discarded materials. But making art out of common stuff comes naturally to me, perhaps from a tradition steeped in “making do,” a way of life in Appalachia, where both materials and means are scarce. I continue to use all appropriate media to execute a visual and physical artistic concept. With a nod to Merritt Oppenheim’s fur-covered teacup, and a humorous wink in the title The Sticky Subjects series, I use common burdock and cockleburs to create sculptures that point out the various elephants in the living rooms of our country without taking sides. A tea service titled Tea Time for Darfur references Great Britain’s role and the world’s non-action in the staggering number of deaths in Sudan. In this day of Octomoms, loving couples without children, and unplanned marriages due to pregnancy, the Cocklebur Fetus is hope and fear made visible. A life-size ‘M16′ needs little explanation in burdock. The series continues to grow. So does the burdock.

www.VGLyle.com

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Derek Michael Besant, I Am the River project, 2010. Temporary public art installations; digital vinyl banner on city construction site, 40’x50’. Courtesy, the artist.

A Fluid Display for the Masses

“I learned long ago, that work inside a gallery or museum was quite something else when you attempted to integrate it into the reality of urban settings.” -Derek Michael Besant

At one point I asked myself, if the human body is 90-percent water, then what makes up the other ten percent? This question started me photographing people I knew in stages of submerging in and out of water. I’ve often used my friends as models in my experiments, so they are cautious when I make any request for them to participate in one of my art projects. I even have an exhibition of this work, reconstructed as photo-based images, printed larger-than-life scale by thermal transfer into veil scrims. The veil material I work with has a sheen to it that acts like water tension or refraction on its surface, and the veil moving slightly on a wall when a person passes near it, gives another presence that a viewer might take more time to look at out of the corner of an eye.

Water. Something we can drink, bathe in, or swim through. The element that freezes solid, falls through our fin¬gers like sand, or is sometimes used to baptize the faithful. I have always been drawn to the fact that it can obliterate one’s vision or clarify the suspension of a body, like floating in air in slow motion. It is akin to a lens of sorts. Something to look through…

I read somewhere that British filmmaker Peter Greenaway always mentioned that the minute one discusses water, there is the possibility of drowning. And that has surfaced as a discussion every time I exhibit a full exhibition of this work in a museum. But the other relationships arise as far as the Pre-Raphaelite painters’ obsessions with classical themes, such as Ophelia. I think there will always be lines drawn between similar subjects, themes crossed among the trodden route, and attempts to define water in some rituals that deal with cleansing, healing, or washing away of something to oblivion. In my case, I tend to follow an idea that takes me to new ways of looking at things I thought I knew about.

I learned long ago, that work inside a gallery or museum was quite something else when you attempted to integrate it into the reality of urban settings. So, I started observing how signage functioned outdoors. This led me to the billboard industry, where I still do much of my research. New technologies have yielded incredible materials and ways to build work for settings where they operate differently. For instance, I can plan a series of images of people underwater that arrive on construction site scaffolds for a week or less. Images 30 feet by 30 feet across a building façade not only create an opportunity to consider scale, materials, and methods, but also how imagery reads as art rather than advertising.

One of my upcoming projects with water as subject matter will involve installing 100 images of submerged people that wrap onto buses and subway trains, like an outdoor museum exhibition in motion around a city. The technology for this is changing as rapidly as computer programs do, so I wait to output imagery until the last moment, to capitalize on the latest applications. The audience captured by this act is much larger than the audience who would normally see my work in a museum space. There is also the surprise encounter in the traffic. Watch the bus next time. It might be one of my works going by.

www.derekbesant.com

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Resi Girardello, Rococò Conversations, 2010. Copper wire, metal nets. Installation on Costa Deliziosa Cruise Ship, curated by Casa¬grande & Recalcati. Photo: Cristian Zambelli. Courtesy of the artist.

Everything Is Vanity

Resi Girardello

Water, for me, is a place to research. Primordial water is the birthplace of works of art. Everything originated from small organisms that float in the waters, which were once transformed, not only in our imagination, into fantastic beings, like seductive sirens. Tenuous forms come to life through light, and suggest shapes through their absence. In my works—works built with ancient constructive techniques, but talking of the modern condition—the theme is the shell, the being in its appearance, sometimes without a real presence, in a society in which empty appearances scare us. The frame is real; the content evolves and escapes. To construct shells of magical moments, sirens remain floating shells, tiny primordial beings magnified and revealed in their structures that guard the secrets of futuristic architecture. These shells with the worthy attributes of mythical goddesses of the past—small figures of small worlds, past or here—are meaningful and full of personality. Sometimes my intricately woven “costumed” shells appear on dishes, as if they could be consumed in an ironic dinner. Another theme finds them swinging on swings, as in the mythical Rococo era, when elegance and delicacy were the main themes of art. The swing series focuses on elusive and non-existent women, as if to find that steady archetype of femininity that only our grandmothers could have, and that, despite the emancipation of the contemporary, sometimes is looked at with longing by those who seek their true identity. The reality is revealed in its reflection: elusive as love, which is the engine of the world … yet fleeting and ephemeral as the pleasure of swinging on a swing. Today in Berlin it’s raining outside, but my characters have escaped. I know they want to walk over the rainbow.

www.resigirardello.com

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The Bee’s Omen

“Soon after I was building beehives in my studio, one cell at a time, just as the honeybee does.” -Judi Harvest

When I saw that Einstein had said, “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination … no more men,” I began researching Colony Collapse Disorder, a recent worldwide phenomenon in which worker bees from a beehive or honey bee colony abruptly disappear, leading to the death of the hive. Soon after I was building beehives in my studio, one cell at a time, just as the honeybee does.

Illustration, left:

Judi Harvest, Monumental Bee Hive, 2008-09. Porcelain, beeswax, gold leaf, resin, wire, collage materials, light, and sound, 80 x 50 x 32 inches. Photo credit: James Dee. Courtesy of the artist.

www.judiharvest.com

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EJay Weiss, Seascape with Venus Comb Murex, 2010. Acrylic/canvas, 64”x62”. Courtesy, the artist.

Escaping Measures

EJay Weiss

I am compelled to explore the bounded, yet infinite depth of the picture plane. I find the territory within the second dimension to be paradoxical, especially since paint is just a physical substance without form. The same set of physical forces that holds paint to the canvas also binds us to the planet, and gives movement to the tectonic plates that formed the continents. In a painting, there is an added dimension of timelessness. By definition, the second dimension is timeless, having height and width, but no real physical depth. Painting tends to be illusory, relatively free of time and distance. Without distance, there can be no time, only the now. Einstein pointed out space/time bends and is a continuum. Time requires fixing a point in space, in order to measure it. Where we “enter” or “exit” a painting is relative, as we tend to see a painting at once, as a singularity, or as a unified field.

Painting represents a multilayered process of viewing inward, outward, or otherwise. The metaphysics of this process substantiates the visual poetry that results in all great painting, no matter what period or style of painting we are referring to. Some 35,000 years ago the Paleolithic cave painters of Lascaux, France, produced masterpieces that rival Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling in imagination, breadth of imagery, form, and color.

What unfolds within the field of the painting provides a mirror to nature, which we didn’t create. But we do create art to reflect both nature and ourselves. My paintings express what is a seemingly natural and organic order. The canvas provides me with a grounded space in which an evolutionary process in paint occurs. What evolves is the geological structure of the painting itself, as an event, which tends to bend and transcend the visual limits of time and space back into its original matrix. Each painting evolves in its own spatial dimension, a bounded and infinite reflection of the way our own world is paradoxical: com¬plete, beautiful, harmonious, yet continuously unfolding before us. These recent seascapes exemplify the process I have outlined here.

weissejay@netzero.net

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This article appears courtesy of NY Arts Magazine and will be appearing in their October 2010 issue. Visit them at www.nyartsmagazine.com

J. Schnabel, Untitled (Self-Portrait), 2005

 It is somewhat ironic that Julian Schnabel’s current Canadian exhibition, Julian Schnabel: Art and Film, Art Gallery of Ontario’s version of New York City’s MoMA, is following in the footsteps of the museum’s King Tut exhibition. Both men are known for doing things in a very big way: King Tut with his pyramid; Schnabel, highly evidenced in this show, with his titanic canvases that all but dwarf the common man. For the fifty-nine year old Schnabel, all the rage for his smashed plate paintings during the late 70s and early 80s, before eventually falling off the art world pedestal, this exhibition—the largest since his 1987 Whitney Museum Retrospective—is tantamount to a Second Coming. Fine Arts Magazine  

He gratefully acknowledged that, “the ball has come back into my court” in his press preview. Not that he ever stopped playing or, for that matter, stopped painting. But, as people’s tastes and life transitioned, Julian, himself, turned to film direction, even further eclipsing his reputation as a painter.   

Art and Film, deftly curated by David Moos, is an ingenious means of refurbishing Schnabel’s all-but-forgotten art world reputation, while reintroducing him to the general public, now more familiar with his films than his art. The exhibition incorporates some sixty of Schnabel’s works. Beginning with his Painting Norma (Pool Painting for Norma Desmond), 1975 (a tribute to the film, Sunset Boulevard), to the present, the show traces the artist’s interest in cinema through his paintings, sculptures, and photographs, many of which directly reference specific actors, filmmakers and their films, such as Pasolini’s, Accattone and Vittorio de Sica’s, Shoeshine.  

J. Schnabel, Patients and the Doctors (1978)

 Film is an interest, according to Schnabel, dating back to his childhood, growing up in Brooklyn during the 50s. “Just like painting, going to the movies was an escape for me from the ordinariness of everyday life at home,” Schnabel told me during a pre-opening interview. “Movies were more real to me than my life at home. As a child, I found The Ten Commandments, when Moses parts the Red Sea, totally awesome, and Moby Dick, when you get to see the great white whale’s eye, as terrifying. When I first saw Repulsion, I realized a movie can really get inside of you. It could haunt you, and you could identify with it.”  

Ironically, the exhibition is an intimate experience, despite the immense size of the canvases, and the fact that the artist’s work takes up the entire 5th floor of the museum. This is due, in large part, to the intensely personal and arcane nature of many of the works. Crowds aside, the viewer is frequently reminded—by the size, power, and experimental brashness of the artist’s executions—that there are really only three elements at play here—the viewer, the looming works of art, and the hand of Schnabel, whose resonant signature-style announces itself at every turn.  

The first painting, Last Dairy Entry (for Roman Polanski), 2010, meets you head-on as you walk into the exhibition. Though I do not presume to know what it is about, nor what it represents, the lush, crazily-colored figure in the painting is a mix of a tamped-down Frances Bacon, an Alice in Wonderland character, and a dizzy dame…highly exciting and very much alive. It is one of the few works in the exhibition that jumps out at you, actively grabbing your attention, rather than engulfing or overwhelming you, as many of his larger works tend to do.  

Schnabel at Art Gallery of Ontario, with Painting for Malik Joyeux and Bernardo Bertolucci V & VI (2006)

 A couple of Schnabel’s historical smashed plate paintings—resurrected from the dust bin of history—are on view, most prominently his groundbreaking, Patients and the Doctors (1978). (above) They bear none the initial excitement engendered when they first turned the art world on its head, some thirty-plus years ago. At least for now, and until they are gathered en masse for maximum effect (hopefully soon!), they remain an anachronistic oddity. Equally unengaging, though shedding some light on the artist’s respect for Marlin Brando, who he considers “the greatest actor that we’ve seen”, is the Brando Room. Here, six large, relatively mundane, poster-like photographs, bought by Schnabel from the actor’s estate, depict Brando in a long-haired wig, kidding around during the filming of his 1968 comedy, Candy. By adding spray paint, resin, and ink to the surface of these photographs, Schnabel, claiming this work for his own, transformed the images into paintings. These same works first appeared in a fantasy scene in Schnabel’s 2007 film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  

J. Schnabel, The Portrait of Andy Warhol (1982)

 Another small gallery is filled with portraits that Schnabel has painted, including one of himself that reads “from the collection of Johnny Depp.” Even with their tacky framing, bespeaking young and very early 80s, the slickly-painted, slightly garish portraits, are compelling in a nervous sort of way, and not half-bad. Gary Oldman, who as Albert Milo, played Schnabel in the film, Basquiat, is presented wearing a traje de luces (suit of lights), belonging to Curro Romero, the famous Spanish bullfighter. Rula Jabreal, Schnabel’s current love interest, and the author of the book on which Schnabel’s soon-to-be-released movie, Miral, is based (opening worldwide this December), is seen wearing the same dress that actress Emma de Caunes wore in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, during one of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s reveries.  

The most compelling portrait on view is, The Portrait of Andy Warhol (1982), painted on black velvet, in two sittings and 5 hours. Here, a shirtless, ghostly Warhol, looking even more vulnerable than usual, is an apparition rather than a live human being, appearing to be dematerializing before our very eyes.  

Schnabel in the distance between Large Girl with No Eyes (2001) and Jane Birkin #2 (1990), oil on gesso on sailcloth

 Schnabel returns to the theme of bullfighting in the exhibit’s three largest paintings—each 22 feet square, just short of the gallery’s 23-foot ceilings—were painted in 1990, specifically to be exhibited in the city of Nîmes at the Maison Carée, an ancient Roman temple. Here, the three canvases, removed from their original site, present like epics movies relegated to a small television screen; the sense of wonder they were intended to purvey being severely muted. We are left with three very large, mildly interesting abstract paintings that might mean more to the artist than the viewing public. What is interesting about these works, though, is the unique, totally unexpected way – a well-known signature feature of the artist – that they came to be. “I took a table cloth, dipped it in oil paint thinned with a lot of turpentine and used it to create the painting. So all of this drawing that looks like printing, like gravure, is, in fact, made by taking a big linen sheet and throwing it in the canvas. Sometimes I even rolled it up and used it like a bat.”  

Schnabel on the film set of 'Miral' with title actress, Fridia Pinto, of Slumdog Millionaire fame

One near-mesmerizing, disarmingly-simple painting that still resonates with me—one of fourteen that Schnabel’s painted for his Big Girl Paintings series in 2001—is, Large Girl With No Eyes (above).  Going large again – roughly 14-by-12 feet – we see a young blonde girl, from the shoulders up, wearing a blue dress. If she could, she would appear to be looking straight out at us. The artist, however, strips her of vision, barring us further from entering into the picture by painting a long black bar that masks her eyes. Schnabel’s stated intent, for this painting as well as the entire exhibition – here perfectly, if not hypnotically achieved –“is to force the viewer to look at the painting and not the eyes.”  

The most cinematically stunning works on view are Painting for Malik Joyeux and Bernardo Bertolucci V and VI (2006) (above), two enormous black and white photographs, from Schnabel’s Surfing series. Again, by adding gesso and ink to the polyester canvas, the artist turns a simple photograph of a surfer negotiating a giant rolling wave – somewhat akin to turning a script into a movie – into a breathtakingly dizzying ride, all but magically pulling us into a canvas that is more alive than inanimate.  

Not a bad ending for a Schnabel comeback.  

by Edward Rubin, Contributing Writer  

Edward Rubin writes about art, culture and entertainment. Although based in New York City, he travels frequently to cover international events.  

Visit the Art Gallery of Ontario at www.ago.net

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The YouTube videos below refer to Julian Schnabel’s lastest film, Miral. One video is a movie trailer; the other features Rula Jabreal, author of the book Miral, on which the film is based, and Julian Schnabel’s current companion, talking about the experiences that compelled her to write the book.  She stresses the importance of the film’s message: that peace between Palestine and Israel, is not only desired, but necessary.   

 Miral, based on Jabreal’s own real life experience, is the story of four Palestinian women, whose lives intertwine in the starkly-human search for justice, hope and reconciliation, amid a world overshadowed by conflict, rage and war. The story begins in war-torn Jerusalem in 1948, when Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass) opens an orphanage for refugee children, that quickly becomes home to 2000 orphans!

 One of the children is seventeen year old Miral—the real-life Rula Jabreal—who arrived at the orphanage 10 years earlier, following her mother’s tragic death.  Miral is played by Frida Pinto, of Slumdog Millionaire fame. On the cusp of the Intifada resistance, Miral is assigned to teach at a refugee camp, where she falls for a fervent political activist, Hani (Omar Metwally), and finds herself in a personal battle that mirrors the greater dilemma around her: to fight like those before her or follow Mama Hind’s defiant belief that education will pave a road to peace.

 Miral was shown at the Toronto and Venice Film Festivals where it won the UNICEF Humanitarian Award. Though not yet released worldwide the film, controversial to say the least, is already being attacked on several fronts. Critics are seeing it as being a too one-sided, even propagandistic, meaning that it is far too Pro-Palestinian.  Some would believe this perspective on the conflict is portrayed unfairly. at the expense of Israel. This might help to explain why Vanessa Redgrave, the notoriously pro-Palestine actress, was given a cameo role. Another controversy is Fridia Pinto’s acting talents, which a number of critics are claiming is non-existent.      

 Below, is a snippet from an interview that I conducted with Julian Schnabel on August 26, 2010.  Having read Miral, I just had to ask him about this controversial political message. Schnabel weighs in on the possibility that the film is pro-Palestine…       

 Edward Rubin: I think Miral is going to be a pretty controversial film. Do you think that the press will sweep the seemingly pro-Palestinian politics under the rug or have you not, with your film, stoked the controversy?

 Julian Schnabel; Actually, it is not a pro-Palestinian movie. It is a pro-peace movie. And I think what is good for the Palestinians is good for the Israeli’s and vice versa.

 ER: Well, you also say that people forget that painting is an act of peace.

 JS: Absolutely so.

Levi van Veluw, Landscape I, from Landscape Series (2008). Courtesy, Gallery Ronmandos, Amsterdam/Rotterdam

 In less sure hands, New York City’s Museum of Arts and Design’s Dead or Alive, an exhibit of thirty-seven international artists’ work composed of feathers, bones, egg shells, insects, fur, antlers, dried and rotting plants– with a few stuffed birds and animals thrown in– would be a creepy, crawly experience, conceivably sending people packing for the exits. Not so with this exhibition, though. Dead or Alive, conceived by chief curator David Revere McFadden and senior curator Lowery Stokes Sims, assisted by curator Elizabeth Edwards Kirrane, examines beauty in the extreme: living proof, so to speak, that a sow’s ear can, indeed, be made into a silk purse. It is also, despite outward appearances, an intellectual adventure encouraging serious thought on ecology, beauty, violence to humans and animals, and most notably, one’s own mortality. Fine Arts Magazine  

Marc Swanson, Untitled (Antler Pile) (2007). Copyright Marc Swanson, courtesy Richard Gray Gallery

  Through use of idiosyncratic materials, the attention paid to the oddities of natural history, Dead or Alive, reminds one of a sixteenth century Cabinet of Wonders, for each highly distinctive work of art becomes a microcosm of the world. From videos, to sculptures, to highly crafted installations, it is a virtual sideshow of organic matter made art, some functional, some not. An obsession with numbers seems sometimes to be the artist’s métier. In Eight Thousand Miles of Home (2010) Thailand artist Angus Hutcheson weaves roughly 12,000 silk worm cocoons into a beautiful, overhead cloud-like light fixture and Moon (2006), Tracey Heneberger’s sculptural wall hanging, comprises over a thousand shellacked sardines arranged intricately in a circle. Marc Swanson contributes a glittering pyramid of deer antlers, Untitled (Antler Pile) (2007), covered in thousands of hand-glued crystals, while Flock (2010), Susie MacMurray’s ominous site-specific wall, hidden in a corner of the museum, features tens of thousands of dyed black rooster feathers.  

Tess Farmer, Little Savages, detail (2007). Courtesy, the artist & Spencer Brownstone Gallery, NY

Claire Morgan, On Top of the World (2009). Courtesy, the artist & Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris

 London-based artist Tessa Farmer’s theatrical diorama, Little Savages (2007) is a taxidermied fox – signifying humans – and appears under seige by flying and crawling insects. Dried slugs, silk moth cocoons, and plant roots are attached to its fur, a wasp’s nest hangs from its tail, and a bird eating an insect is perched on its back. We are here faced, “fast forwarding,” as curator Sims notes in the exhibition’s catalog, with “the cycle of nature in terms of death, disposal, and decay.” In On Top of the World (2009) Claire Morgan, also London-based, threads transparent nylon through hundreds of dead Bluebottle flies, to fashion an eerie army of flying creatures in a suspended, geometrically- layered cube. Atop the cube, invisible to all but the uppermost flies, the artist has added a red spider, suggesting the moment when disaster is poised, threatening her orderly state of perfection.  

Jorge Mayet, Obatala (2010). Courtesy Galeria Horrach Moya, Palma de Mallorca, SP

 Dutch artist Levi van Veluw is a performance artist as well as sculptor and photographer. At age twenty-five, this youngest artist of the exhibition uses his own head and shoulders as a canvas on which to build natural landscapes (see above). Seaweed and other organic materials become van Veluw’s flora and fauna, as well as stones, tiny plastic animals, trucks, lampposts, and telephone poles – all affixed to his painted face. He creates an entire world, simultaneously becoming part of it. Before “removing his latest face,” the artist, represented here by 3 photographs and a remarkable video featuring a toy train circling his landscaped head, documents each new creation. Cuban-born, Mallorca-based artist Jorge Mayet also uses synthetic materials to recreate nature. In Cayendo Suave (Falling Softly) (2009), the artist chooses simple electrical wires, papier mậché, and feathers, to form a super-realistic tree. An angel suspended in midair, with a clutch of feathers attached at its roots. It is astonishingly beautiful.  

Keith W. Bentley, Cauda Equina (Horse Tail) (1995-2007). Courtesy, the artist

Keith W. Bentley’s Cauda Equina (Horse Tail) (1995-2007) took twelve years to complete and is a labor of love and a eulogy to the thousands of horses slaughtered annually in this country for their meat. Bentley stitched and knotted nearly a million and a half individual hairs from 250 horses into a fabric that was attached to the full-sized taxidermy form of a horse, conjuring up a mourning veil, not unlike those worn by widows during the Victorian era. On the lighter side – but just slightly – is Billie Grace Lynn’s, Mad Cow Motorcycle (2008), in which she has mounted the skeleton of an entire cow over a working motorcycle. At the foot of this “kinetic sculpture” a video shows the artist careening through the streets of Miami while passersby—if not aghast– look on in amusement. Speaking of cows slaughtered to meet human needs, curator McFadden wryly notes in his catalog essay, that “even in death this cow is not allowed to rest in peace.” 

Billie Grace Lynn, Mad Cow Motorcycle (2008). Photo credit, the artist

 Definitely falling on the lighter side, despite the gravity of its subject, is Apothecarium Moderne, a collaborative work of artists Tim Tate, co- founder and director of the Washington Glass School and Studio outside of Washington, DC, and Connecticut- based artist Marc Petrovic. Nine hand-blown glass apothecary jars line a wall, each filled to the brim with talismans offering cures for various maladies, including loss of faith, over-population, ennui, identity theft, and intelligent design. Etched on each jar is a cure- related story. Apothecary #1 Cure for Erectile Dysfunction, one of the more humorous works, features a photo of Betty Page, the iconic 50’s pinup model surrounded by oyster shells, and Enzyte, a natural male enhancement pill. The tale engraved on this jar is the story of little David, who arrives in Manhattan by bus and meets a freakishly tall woman with an Adam’s apple, who takes him to her flat in Spanish Harlem, gets him addicted to Absinthe, and makes him into a man.  

Tim Tate, Marc Petrovic, Cure for Erictile Dysfunction (2010), from Apothecarium Moderne Series. Courtesy, the artists

 One of the most unusual works on view is Alastair Mackie’s Untitled (+/-)  (2009).  Here we are faced with a two-part installation, each piece placed dramatically, for effect, on its own concrete plinth. Resting on the first is a pile of thousands of mouse skeletons – all eaten, digested, and regurgitated by barn owls – collected by the artist over the course of a year. Occupying plinth two is a loom with a piece of fabric woven from mouse fur which the artist separated from these bones. Like much of the work in this exhibition, Mackie’s mouse-centric installation speaks to the relationship of things and events in the endless cycle of life and death. A strong point of this exhibition is the simply- written labels about the artists as well as each work on view. Once we digest the ideas behind each piece, and the process each artist has used to create it—often taken to the nth degree–everything falls into place, naturally, or so it seems.  

*As curator Lowery Sims notes in museum’s beautifully appointed catalog, “the work in Dead or Alive might challenge usual and habitual notions of beauty, but artists can extrude beauty from the most base and defiled materials…This maneuvering of a transcendent experience from trash was given a specifically psychological and emotional role in art making by the Surrealists, who linked it with concepts such as “the marvelous” or “convulsive beauty”— both of which were based on the experience of the “uncanny.”1 Of particular interest is what Hal Foster called understanding the “marvelous” as “signal(ing) a rupture in the natural order…challeng(ing)…rational causality…(and) its fascination with magic and alchemy. 2  

by Edward Rubin, Contributing Writer  

Dead or Alive: Nature becomes Art. At the Museum of Art and Design, through October 24, 2010

1. See Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA), and London, UK: MIY Press, 1993), 19-56  

2. Ibid., 19.  

Edward Rubin is a writer-photographer whose writings on theater and art appear regularly in various magazines such as Sculpture, ArtUS, Canadian Art, d’art International, Hispanic Outlook, and NY Arts Magazines, as well as for NY Theatre Wire, and Hi! Drama, a Time Warner cable TV show, based in New York City.