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MARTIN WEINSTEIN
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There are a few
specific concepts that are made comprehensible through art. These are endemic
to the basic process of creative vision, and they tend to construct a bias, or
force the flow of a specific passion, so that one can become devoted to one
choice over another. In the world of traditional painting, the divergence
begins in school, where classes are taught in either body or landscape painting.
Or to put it in other terms, a choice between depicting the intimacy of bodies
in all their brick and mortar realness or the intimacy of the living
environment which envelops us. No painting can put another’s flesh in our
hands, or present us with the experience of standing upon a mountaintop or
running barefoot through the grass. But art can both depict and enact a quality
of perception that allows us to live beyond the banality of the moment. The image of a
landscape is what we think about when we hear the word itself. Yet what is
attempted, and in many ways achieved by “Resonance and Memory: The Essence of
Landscape” is a more comprehensive idea that directs the viewer to recognize
how Landscape functions as a cultural influence.
The translation of
nature as both a language of beauty and one of appearances is the active
dynamic in Martin Weinstein’s oeuvre. What is not apparent from any printed
image is the method by which Weinstein makes something accepted as traditional
and straightforward into something ambiguous and diverse. He paints disparate
elements of the same composition on separate sheets of acrylic and layers them
to create a scene. Full knowledge of his process lends the work a fullness and
ambiguity which it could not have if the effect were merely achieved with the
use of paint itself. Clearly Weinstein is after an engagement with the allure
of perception and not only the magisterial and ecstatic beauty of his
settings.
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GERRY TUTEN
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Gerry Tuten’s
paintings resemble random photographs of naturalistic aesthetic moments taken
from the raw material of the senses: a section of a frozen stream covered in
random twigs, cold water rushing under colder ice, the dark water of gulley and
water banks where loamy earth waits to grow; a misted meadow in early morning,
the air diffuse with dew and the first glimmers of sunlight, colors of random
flowers and birds sifting through a haze of perception; and so forth. There is
an allover quality to her paintings that engenders a natural ambivalence: they
could be either natural scenes natural or memories or dreams of the same.
Rebeca Calderon
Pittman makes drawings she calls “recombinant” because they are comprised of
different sheets lain one over the other. Yet even despite this, they are
amorphous and elliptical, with lines leave off abruptly, creating blank areas
that perhaps reference the idiosyncrasy of memory. Her titles are vaguely
metaphysical, like Empty Freedom, Eternity in an Hour, and Anatomy of Sharing,
but with no persons actively depicted to manifest the narrative aspect of their
disparate meanings, it’s clear that her scenes are evidence of intimate human
history as a landscape of what remains.
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REBECCA CALDERON PITTMAN
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JJ L’Heureux and
Sandra Gottlieb each use a singular subject to broaden our immediate attention
span and avoid overtures of pleasantness on the part of the viewer. L’Heureux
does this by achieving a degree of emotional aplomb in her subjects, which are overall the myriad
types of Penguins to be found on every landscape in or near the South Pole. As
an artist focusing exclusively upon a certain species, geographically limited
and contextualized by needs of survival but also those of what in any other situation
one would call ‘character-building,’ L’Heureux elevates his subjects into a
population with its own quirks and graces. L’Heureux presents them as almost
fledgling humans, reaching for an interiority that manifests as symbolic if not
as biographical. Though no one can speak for the animals themselves, the images
can tell a story that is loaded with poignant interpretation. In one image, two
Emperor penguins stand in the middle of a snowy expanse that is extremely flat,
limited only by a cloudless horizon that holds no sun or clouds. They both
stand facing left though photographed in reverse perspective, and one penguin
arches its neck backward over its left shoulder, as if to tell the other
penguin something important before leaving. They are like two actors on a
stage, waiting for something to happen, animated by a slow and urgent gesture.
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JJ L'HEUREUX |
Sandra Gottlieb’s
photographs of waves in the ocean, specifically documented during the month of
October, present us with a stage upon which all motion is emotion incarnate,
like a canvas upon which the forms are constantly emerging. The lack of a human
presence in her images only serves to allow the viewer to place themselves into
a relationship with the watery action, which like the painterly dynamic for
which it is an obvious stand-in, pulls and pushes us in every direction
possible. The strongest impression it gives us is a feeling of overwhelming
presence, of what can only be described as sublime; the strength and heaviness
of water out in such alien expanses, coupled with its minute and effervescent
spray, its rolling waves, crashing only on some shore hundreds of miles
distant. There is no way not to feel the very pull of nature’s will and the
artist’s service to its overt authority.
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KATHLEEN ELIOT |
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Kathleen Eliot is
a sculptor who works in the difficult but rewarding material of glass. Yet
unlike many who work in that material, she does not allow it to end up looking
like something decorative or useful. Her glass sculptures resemble monster
forms like those in early Sixties Godzilla films, mutant plants, or fractals.
There is much background work that goes into these theoretical and formulaic
construction of her sculptures, including linguistics, biology, and spirituality.
Fragments of her sculptures give hints at symbolism or narrative, like the
unopened brackish petals of one, with crimson extruding tongues or beaks; or
the ballet shoes upon which another sculpture stands. For the most part they
are weblike or chromosomal, presenting forms that hint at the inherent
undercurrents or building blocks of reality, bringing the unseen into the
visual realm with vibrant color, muscular limbs, and a regard for the visceral
strength of form that is never truly abstract as long as we recognize the links
between real objects and how they make us feel.
Gail Watkins makes
paintings that are friezelike upon structures that remind one of cenotaphs,
scrolls, and cemeteries. Yet they are very much alive. Watkins is fulfilling a
desire to marry the ancient with the contemporary. Her pigments come from a
market in Egypt where, one may imagine, the same colors have been applied to
ritual make-up and to the surfaces of sarcophagi for millennia. They are best
described as dense, interwoven layers of paper, pigment, and dyes or inks as
applied to media including comic books and featuring imagery such as forgotten
languages and scientific markings, and featuring a build up and erosion of
materials that seem like stone rather than paint. Watkins seems less interested
in facilitating an illusion than of uncovering and re-manifesting an object
with loaded meaning to which only she has the key.
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GAIL WATKINS
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John Lyon Paul’s
paintings likewise traffic in a type of mystery that emerges from an engagement
with the appearance of motifs usually reserved for an ancient art form
preceding the act of applying a brush to a canvas. In his case it is the
structured and translucent look of stained glass, which he achieves with
acrylic and collage on mylar. The combination of a easily acquired and
chromatically dynamic pigment aided by sections of mixed media that accentuate
the painted forms without ever interfering with their use atop of surface that
is both hard and slick like glass but which also more porous and less heavy or
fragile, produces imagery that grows out of the abstract but distracts with its
air toward evoking a spiritual fervor. Mosaics that sometimes include an animal
loaded with symbol meaning, like a flamingo, X’s which were always used on maps
or contracts in place of a real fact or name, and a style of leaving a glossy
undercolor that is bronzed or burnt toward the middle and burnished on the
edges of tangent shapes gives an incandescence to his works. Other works
actually painted on plate glass achieve an effect so similar so as to create
instances of aesthetic doubt on the part of the viewer. Everywhere in these
paintings is a feeling of suffused rejoicing, as if hymns were sung over every
mark as it was being made. The landscapes in these paintings are emotional
ones, but no less poignant for not possessing a tree, a room, a bird, or a
wave. They possess us in the act of gazing into their endless light.
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JOHN PAUL LYON
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Landscape is a
strange word because it suggests a different ideal for everyone who hears it;
and every landscape is different, just as every inner reasoning is limited not
only by the forms that reflect it, but by the logic that reigns in an understanding
of its cultural importance. The idea of landscape in art was, until the era of
Impressionism, largely symbolic or historical, and it was not until the social
and industrial use of landscape changed that art forms followed in stead. At
the same time as painters were leaving mythology behind and relying upon the
senses and the imminent authority of natural surroundings, various other forces
were creating the locomotive and the photograph, which altered the role of
there where and the what. Artists today have moved well past the technological
accomplishments of their particular era and actively seek inspiration not only
from the nature, or what is not human; from the ancient past, or what is not
present; and from physics, religion, and chromosomes, or what is not evident to
reason or obvious to the senses. They create a resonance for found and
excavated forms that lead to new memorable facts, and we are left to unravel
and abound in the consequences.
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