DAVID GIBSON WRITING

The role of the symbol in art is not only as some semiotic tool, nor is it like a mythical creature, but it is instead, and rather conclusively, an object or scenario emerging out of daily life, something which magnifies (and clarifies) the meaning of everything upon which it touches, even in the most mundane circumstance. In the opening pages of his novel “Immortality,” Milan Kundera speaks of the nature of a gesture: “A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person's instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations.” The paintings of Marcy Brafman can be considered empathic gestures. They deal with situations which are inherently symbolic, sometimes taking on the symbol as an icon, and sometimes mining it for its humanistic traits mired in

The small but resonant works which comprise D. Dominick Lombardi’s exhibition “Hidden Worlds,” in which both sculpture and drawing/collages depict his eponymous Urchins, define an essential relationship between culture, the power of metaphor, and the notion of innocence. Human behavior links nature to culture, and from this dichotomy emerges further conflicts, such as that between modern and postmodern values. Culture is that tangle of influences which emerges from within us while seeming to approach us from without. Culture, in many ways, defines us, both as an individual pattern of behavior and as a structure of social order. Terry Eagleton, in his book The Idea of Culture (2000) , describes the essential quandary which accompanies any attempt to compare one with the other. Though it is fashionable these days, he states, to see nature as a derivative of culture, culture, etymologically speaking, is a concept derived from nature. We can take this to mean natural nature or human na