These tessellated paintings are naturalistic by an abstractly-expressive-mimetic process, a reconciliation of the human creative impulse with the superior natural forces of creation that encompass it. In other words, Whitten’s work seems to be at an ethereal place, where art production rhymes with the ebb of creation at its highest state.
Read MoreBy controlling the atomizer, the thing that makes paint into microscopic droplets, the street artists were fighting the atomization of modern man. It was a rebellion against the psychic colony—f–k your copy! It’s what EKG touches on his “Technologies of Human Nature,”a wall-sized hierarchical chart created on black paper with orange oil sticks. He attempts to summarize street art’s ideological foundation, when he writes “bomb the semiotosphere!”
Read MoreWhat Kallat seeks to explore in “Covering Letter” is a near miss between two of the 20th century’s most influential minds. This juxtaposition of these two is a near-collision of worlds, east and west, right and wrong, peace and war. One had spoken and maybe one had listened. The viewer is left with this—what could have been, what could be.
Read MoreFrom the walls of color in his series that continue throughout the Breuer, to his earlier work, the oversized snapshots, the smaller pieces that take on death, black identity in America, and his deep, painfully humorous comics, Marshall is an artist who has worked and played his way into the all-important arts conversation.
Read MoreTo say the stairs are steep at the James Oliver Gallery is to say Mt. Everest is high. I have a mind to petition for a rest stop two flights up. The payoff, though, is a few calories lost and a big white cube. A strip of room as long as a bowling lane ends with a spacious bar and a plum view of downtown. Paintings, drawings, sculptures, and assemblage pieces fill most of the wall space. It’s the tenth anniversary show—JOG10, and there’s an installation of wooden birds—a flock in, um, flight.
Read MoreClean, neat, and unused are the words I think when I think of the new Mormon temple downtown. Pristine. It’s by the main library. I’m inside on a tour, and the walls are covered in photo-realistic, figurative depictions of piety, biblical scenes, scenes of a Sunday-school nature. It harkens back to simpler time when there was no doubt, in America at least, of who Jesus was ethnically speaking. Mormons, if nothing else, are unabashedly white, which gives me the odd feeling of relief.
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