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 […]
Art
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Lou Ouzer
Next to his 1966 Igor Stravinsky portrait, Rochester photographer Lou Ouzer (1913-2002) is quoted: “I look for background before I take anyone’s picture.” It’s a simple rule, but one that allowed Ouzer to capture a life in every photograph. The portrait of Stravinsky, for example, doesn’t show much of the composer’s face. Taken in profile, […]
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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 […]
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It’s all how you frame it
A woman encounters a child. Encounter is an image photographically captured by Bob Gates, and one of 53 works of art included in the 60th Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition. Yet, what is a seemingly simple title for an equally simple action is actually a complex interplay between images and our way of seeing them. Who is […]
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Feeling blue (and white, and gray, and green) in Buffalo
Glass activism Private Visions, Utopian Ideals: The Art of Howard Ben Tré is an ambitious exhibition including sculptures, works on paper, and a selection of drawings, models, and photographs of Ben Tré’s public art projects. And although the exhibition space is relatively small, the work, for the most part, is not. Patrons of the Buffalo […]
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Screening cultural differences
The View From Here: Contemporary Russian and American Screenprints, an exhibition dedicated to printmaking, is definitely one you can sink your teeth into. The exhibition consists of screenprints by 22 artists — 12 Russian and 10 American — with a total of 70 works between them. The differing artists’ styles are brought together through the […]
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The new pilgrims
After the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act mandated an end to discriminatory immigration policies that favored white Western Europeans, the phrase “Give us your poor, your hungry, your huddled masses” began to take on new meaning. A local exhibit, Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America, presents a kaleidoscopic INA update (of […]
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Original prints by American greats
This Friday and Saturday, in conjunction with the exhibit The Art of the Print at Rochester Contemporary, master printer Bill Goldston of Universal Limited Art Editions will show and discuss original prints by contemporary artists like Jasper Johns, Elizabeth Murray, Robert Rauschenberg, Lisa Yuskavage, James Rosenquist, and others. The discussion and exhibition are presented by […]
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A tale of two landscape artists
Of two artists on display at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, one is very popular and well known; the other is hardly known at all. When you hear the name Georgia O’Keeffe, you tend to immediately think of the wrinkle-faced old painter who lived in the desert and painted flowers. But when you hear the […]
