DAVID GIBSON WRITING

  I first met Janice Caswell around 1994 through a mutual friend who has since left New York. I was still generally unaffiliated at that time, a non-artist in the art world with critical aspirations. Having grown up around art dealers in Soho, I was just then beginning to visit studios, and hers was among the very first art that I was seeing where it was being made, and not just where it was commercially exhibited. What I saw reflected a personal reality in which parts and details really mattered. To me, it was about intimacy. Caswell was making artworks that resembled maps. She was clearly interested in describing the mutable character of periodic experience as viewed on a grand scale, and found its most successful manner of expression in a format that begged to be reproduced and reinterpreted. These were placed directly upon a wall, later to be contained in boxes covered in glass. What most attracted me to Caswell's work back then was how it combined order with ambiguity. Unl

October Waves 2013, No. 17 It is easy to misconstrue the photographic work of Sandra Gottlieb, which is entirely non-traditional when it comes to its overall theme, yet at the same time it connects with esthetic pleasures usually reserved for painters. The type of movement found in Gottlieb's photographs, the manner by which she captures it, and the appeal it presents, are unique to her process. There is something very removed from time in her work. She is what most would call a nature photographer but her works are not created in order to adorn the pages of National Geographic. They depict the ocean as a canvas, not as a setting or backdrop for people or sea life to enact the usual dramas. A poet might call her a stenographer of the sublime, annotating the randomness of tidal force while allowing it to impose itself upon the moral consciousness of viewers, who will not be able to peer away from the images no matter how overwhelming they may seem. Primal force is her

  The dog days of summer are a great time to interact with art in studios. There is a certain benumbed calm about the interim period between one art season and the next. I was in the studio of Dean Monogenis on Thursday, August 6, and it was refreshing. Dean has a smallish studio in the downstairs of his East Williamsburg apartment. Works in progress and recently finished ones, left hanging just before a recent trip to attend openings in Los Angeles and Madrid, were in evidence. There were five paintings on view, enough to generate a lively discussion lasting nearly two hours. Monogenis' primary subject over time has been architecture manifested as metaphysical and phenomenological space. Over the years it has gestated and morphed into an engagement with how to recreate that space in a means that people can understand without relying on painterly abstraction. It has become a sort of standard to replace gestural tropes with  detailed, organizational ones, and t