S u b l i m e S t r u c t u r e : a review by Cara Ober
This five-person exhibition presented a lively variety of contemporary work - painting. sculpture, and photography - grappling with the evocation of the sublime, a persistent theme in American art from the Hudson River School through Rothko and beyond.
Bold, lyrical paintings by three artists dominated the conversation. Effie Halivopoulou's Liquid Network 001 (2007) blends and reworks a collage of vague biomorphic shapes, data from genetic scans, and text fragments in the ancient Greek language Linear B into a palimpsest saturated with color. The work's indecipherable, interlocking structures hint at a grand, cyclical story beyond our comprehension. A bold counterpoint here. Kim Man-fredi's minimal, organic paintings offered monochromatic surfaces covered with dense wrinkles of paint and constellations of drilled holes. The paintings' tension lies in the pairing of broad open expanses with intimate surface details, effectively coupling the personal with the universal. Lu Zhang makes quiet microcosms of interlocking amoebic forms, created not with brushes but by dribbling black tar gel onto flat surfaces. In Tile Collection 4: A Platform for Catching Fallen Drawings (2006), Zhang leaves wide swaths of white space to animate unpredictable lines, giving them a chance to breathe and interact
Rachel Schmidt's sculptures and Christopher Myers's photographs approach the sublime through translation and transformation. Schmidt's larger-than-life-wire-and-thread sculptures are based on human vertebrae. Sinewy and rusted, menacing and benign, these structures are huge and complex. Myers translates black-and-white images Into digital code and pairs the two forms of Information into diptychs. Seen together as one piece, the sentimental snapshot and the computer script eloquently complement and contradict each other
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Cara Ober
Artnews, National Reviews, December 2009 Issue
Cara Ober is an artist and an art critic based in Baltimore, MD.
This five-person exhibition presented a lively variety of contemporary work - painting. sculpture, and photography - grappling with the evocation of the sublime, a persistent theme in American art from the Hudson River School through Rothko and beyond.
Bold, lyrical paintings by three artists dominated the conversation. Effie Halivopoulou's Liquid Network 001 (2007) blends and reworks a collage of vague biomorphic shapes, data from genetic scans, and text fragments in the ancient Greek language Linear B into a palimpsest saturated with color. The work's indecipherable, interlocking structures hint at a grand, cyclical story beyond our comprehension. A bold counterpoint here. Kim Man-fredi's minimal, organic paintings offered monochromatic surfaces covered with dense wrinkles of paint and constellations of drilled holes. The paintings' tension lies in the pairing of broad open expanses with intimate surface details, effectively coupling the personal with the universal. Lu Zhang makes quiet microcosms of interlocking amoebic forms, created not with brushes but by dribbling black tar gel onto flat surfaces. In Tile Collection 4: A Platform for Catching Fallen Drawings (2006), Zhang leaves wide swaths of white space to animate unpredictable lines, giving them a chance to breathe and interact
Rachel Schmidt's sculptures and Christopher Myers's photographs approach the sublime through translation and transformation. Schmidt's larger-than-life-wire-and-thread sculptures are based on human vertebrae. Sinewy and rusted, menacing and benign, these structures are huge and complex. Myers translates black-and-white images Into digital code and pairs the two forms of Information into diptychs. Seen together as one piece, the sentimental snapshot and the computer script eloquently complement and contradict each other
____________________________________
Cara Ober
Artnews, National Reviews, December 2009 Issue
Cara Ober is an artist and an art critic based in Baltimore, MD.
