Claire Schneider, curator of the Extreme Abstraction exhibition at the Albright-KnoxArtGallery in Buffalo, recently pointed out that the word “extreme” may be the word of our time. For example, reality TV shows like Fear Factor show “ordinary” people jumping from tall buildings, laying among snakes, and/or eating all sorts of strange things all in the […]
Heidi Nickisher
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The garden inside the house
It’s a striking image — large, glossy, vibrantly colored. A young girl stands in the lush greenery of a tropical forest; her black skin contrasted against the extreme whiteness of her dress. Punctuating the green is a purple-y pink phallic flower just to the right of the girl’s shoulder, and in her right hand she […]
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A ghost in the tower
From 1977 to 1980 Mark Klett led a team of photographers in a project that rephotographed landscapes originally captured by 19th-century photographers such as William Henry Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan. The work of the 19th-century photographers was a major representation of America’s push westward: the taking of lands and other notions of “progress.” Rephotographing the […]
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Curating curators
Every summer, when most New Yorkers are out and about, galleries in New York City either close or put up group shows culled from their collections. These shows are usually mildly interesting in that they show a variety of work reflecting the galleries’ specific interests and tastes. But the downside is that these shows generally […]
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The exquisite corpse drinks the new wine
In 1924 Andre Breton, the “father” of Surrealism, defined the new movement as something “[d]ictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason [and] exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” For the Surrealists, truth was not the thing that was in front of us but was hidden and buried from view. […]
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Let’s shed some light on the matter
The current exhibition at SUNY Brockport’s Tower Fine Arts Gallery, Illuminating Developments: Images, Objects, and the Use of Light, features the work of seven artists who rely on light as a physical part of the existence of their art. Light, of course — its presence or absence — has played a significant role in both […]
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The grid speaks
Patricia Wilder’s photographs could not have looked more at home in the Dyer Arts Center on the RIT campus. Her exhibition, Forms and Surfaces, is a striking presentation of nearly 90 photographs. But the title of the exhibit could have included the space itself. The elegant modernist space is all about forms and surfaces. Towering […]
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The way we see the world
In 1839, two new processes for capturing “reality” were announced, thereby changing forever the way we would see the world. William Henry Fox Talbot presented to the public in London photogenic drawing, or what he first called the paper image, while across the channel in Paris, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, through the French Academy of […]
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Decorating thoughts
Albers, de Kooning, Hoffman, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Pollock: Though many of these artists’ works are nearly 100 years old, they are still quite often misunderstood and even more often disliked. Still, older works as well as many contemporary examples of abstract art are the focus of a major exhibition at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Extreme Abstraction. […]
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Looking at tragic beauty
Vital Signs: Focus on Young Photographers, on view at the George Eastman House, is a thoughtful selection of photographs by 12 emerging artists from five different countries. Seen collectively, there is in these photographs beauty and terror — as well as a level of theatricality. Something seems just a little off. It’s a familiar notion […]
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There’s got to be more to it
The photographs currently on exhibit at A\V in the Public Market remind us of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still series or the documentary photographs in Nan Goldin’s book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. In their own ways, both of these photographers deal with the complexities of gender, identity politics, and sexuality. Goldin portrays the people […]
