photography

New York’s Ricco/Maresca Gallery Exhibits Bastienne Schmidt’s ‘Topography of Quiet’

www.artesmagazine.com — Bastienne Schmidt, ‘Measuring Light, Strehlen, Germany’ (2008)

Bastienne Schmidt has a roving eye, eagerly assimilating the world around her. Her most recent body of published work, Topography of Quiet, demonstrates her extraordinary ability as an artist to visualize the myriad details surrounding her, then filter them through the screen of her artistic sensibilities. Once in the studio, the images she visualizes become larger than the sum of their parts. The reasoning is straight-forward: She believes the quiet corners of the ordinary world have important things to teach us—about order and chaos, balance and form, identity and sense of place. Any transformation of non-trivial data into an image will leave out information, but what lies just beyond the frame of a Schmidt photograph, or just beyond the edge of the canvas, speaks as convincingly to her compositions as what she opts to include. xxxxxxMore

Steven Rockefeller at the Mattatuck Museum: the Permanence of Change

Video artist, Steven Rockefeller wants you to stop and take time to notice the world around you. Our lives are filled with the pressures of time, perpetual movement and the built environment we inhabit, and we learn to function on a structured schedule— as the simple elements of nature surrounding us often go unnoticed. Using his still-shot camera as a digital video recorder, Rockefeller pauses in front of scenes that might hold little interest for a casual passer-by or preoccupied vacationer, calling attention to the beauty and serenity in settings where ‘almost nothing’ appears to be happening. I emphasize the ‘almost,’ because through his lens he discovers—and invites us to share—the stunningly beautiful world of the ordinary, expressed through subtle, often imperceptible motion. Rockefeller’s multi-media installation at Waterbury, Connecticut’s Mattatuck Museum, A Park Bench View, fascinates with the world of the everyday, with mesmerizing results. xxxxxxMore

Philadelphia Museum of Art Showcases Paul Strand, Early Modern Photographer

Sometimes, small is beautiful. And by any standard, the photography of Paul Strand (1890-1976), whose vast body of work is now on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in the exhibition, Paul Strand, Master of Modern Photography, meets that standard. A maze of galleries are hung with row-upon-row of muted, sepia-toned, atmospheric prints. Turning each corner becomes a well-planned adventure, as work after work, covering the duration of his career, invites discovery and closer examination. The reward for the exhibition visitor can be seen in the painstaking effort that went into the production of each piece, and the discovery—just as Strand, himself, did—of the captivating the world of the particular. xxxxxxMore

Yale Center for British Art: Two Photographers Find Grace in the Living and Dead

Here is the surprise: a pure and unexpected delight in having an expectation shattered. It was with an unquestioned confidence that I walked into this exhibition knowing which of the two photographers would matter most to me. But I was wrong.

And I needed only one image to realize this. xxxxxxMore

Robin Rhode at Neuberger Museum of Art: Animating the Everyday

“I come from a culture that is very spontaneous, with a lot of humor and sarcasm. People can laugh at themselves quite easily. After the horrendous political situation they have gone through, they can still find humor in themselves. And I think a lot of my work stems from this South African mentality….It has to do with freedom, with the possibility of imagining or reinventing another world quite rapidly.”

The Neuberger Museum of Art, in Purchase, New York—less than an hour north of the City—is known especially for their beautifully curated exhibitions, as well as their intelligently timed choices. They always seem to have ten fingers on the pulse of the art world, with its hot-button subjects and important contemporary emerging and established artists. One of their most critically acclaimed and crowd-pleasing programs, named after the museum’s founder, is their Roy R. Neuberger Exhibition Prize. Given biannually, it celebrates early-career artists, giving them an exhibition, accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog. xxxxxxMore

City Lane Gallery, Dublin, Shows Contemporary Sculptor, Eva Rothschild

The Eva Rothschild exhibition, curated by Michael Dempsey, at Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery, is an uplifting presentation, delivering a welcome alternative from widespread social community artwork-in-context, such as that in the recent Whitney Biennial—amounting to a banquet of confused nothingness! Rothchild’s astutely constructed sculpture is commanding, though, demonstrating her continual restless experimentation and expansively wide-ranging approach to making and defining sculpture. The eminent sculptor was born in Dublin in 1971, and currently lives in London. In the past decade Rothschild’s constructions have been exhibited internationally, including a monumental, site-specific 2009 installation, Cold Corners, at Tate Britain for which she created a continuous steel structure filling the entire Duveens Gallery. This enormous sculptural piece stretched across the space, gracefully drawing notice to the immense structure’s architectural details, including its roof and floor. Her work is also included in the 2014 Sydney Biennale. xxxxxxMore

Interview with Toronto’s Stephen Bulger, Photography Gallery

EK: I remember when critics were arguing in the 1980’s about whether photography was an art form or not. What made you decide to open a Photography Gallery in March, 1995?

SB: I started as a photographer expecting to have my work seen in galleries. When I went to Ryerson I started curating student exhibitions, and then in my third year we opened the Ryerson gallery, at 80 Spadina, where I was its first manager for about two or three years. During that time there were lots of things I liked about the gallery, but also things I thought were shortcomings. So I started to fantasize: if I had my own gallery, what would I do? I went as far as putting together a business plan. Luckily I have older siblings that were trained in business practices, so I could learn from them. Their guidance was crucial to me being able to open a gallery that was able to sustain itself. I think there are a lot of great ideas out there, but if you don’t have a business plan behind it, it’s difficult to sustain that dream. There [was] a lack of appreciation for photography in Toronto. I thought I might be in a position where I could do something about that. xxxxxxMore

In-Between Worlds: Interview with Performance Artist Meryl McMaster

All I could see were the claws of a big brown and white animal hugging a tree trunk — that was the first image I saw by Meryl McMaster, in a CONTACT group show a few years ago. The creature was behind a tree, hidden from view excexpt for a pair of ominous, feathery claws. Was it hiding from some predator? Or was it, itself, a predator ready to leap out and attack us in the next moment? What kind of species was it? Hard to decide. I was fearsome and playful at the same time. It touched something in the unconscious mind, somehow deeply connected to the animal world, maybe an ancient totem. Perhaps it was an animal hiding in a human body or maybe a human in an animal skin – a very strange photograph. I soon forgot the artist’s name, but not the image. artes fine arts magazineMore

New York Historical Society Showcases Social Realism of Regionalist, Reginald Marsh

“Well-bred people are no fun to paint. I’d rather paint an old suit of clothes than a new one”……

New York of the 1930s was in the process of becoming everything it wanted to be—a raucous, tawdry, elegant, sophisticated, zealous, over-crowded, over whelming, yet tastefully understated composite of a world class city. After the next War—the one just over the horizon; the one everyone refused to believe would ever be visited upon us—New York would finally assume its place at the cultural epicenter of the world, sadly elevated by the mountains of rubble that the leading cities of Europe had once been. Add to this mix, Reginald Marsh, an urban realist painter known for his powerful, satirical images of the unseemly side of New York life during the 1930s and ‘40s. While his illustrations demonstrate an exaggeration of human form and sexuality, they become a visually compelling and honest historical testament to the many facets of the New York scene and, more broadly, to the human spirit of his time.

Above, left:Reginald Marsh (1898–1954), In Fourteenth Street (1934), egg tempera on composition board. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. artes fine arts magazineMore

Housatonic Museum of Art Exhibits ‘Eye on the Storm’

“The barrage of endless data from the most intense hard news to the silliest of social media is something we all must muddle through on some level each day. Depending on one’s needs or interests only a small percentage of said information is of any use, and an even smaller amount actually leaves us with palpable, lasting effects. What is most amazing is that somehow, every bit of the images and information has some potential use to someone out there, and it’s up to the individual to pick and choose what benefits, bothers or beguiles them…” D. Dominick Lombardi, Curator of Eye on the Storm

Ironically offering a perspective on calm, Eye on the Storm opens fittingly on a night destined for a summer downpour, lightning, thunder, winds, and the warning of a possible tornado. I decide to not risk life and limb on I-95 and postpone my visit. The next day, sunny skies urge me to go. I enter the gallery alone. artes fine arts magazineMore