Welcome Back Show Review

Lyda Craig Tales from Holoscene, 1997

This piece is composed of different views of cropped pigs. The pigs are depicted in ways that show the role of the boars over time. In the bottom right there is a picture of man fighting a boar, and the in the upper left corner there is a of a boar depicted similarly to cave drawings. Craig layers these images of pigs and divides the canvas with a horizontal line of pigs which are pushed to the foreground. She also introduces a vertical thrust by depicting a two headed man. She may be investigating the relationship of man of these animals. Man fights the wild boars in one image, and the other two pigs seem to be the type used for meat. Many of the images in her exhibition centered around mythological creatures and tales. I think by incorporating the different images of the pigs,  such as the skeleton of what may be a primitive boar, gives the boars a mythological place in the history of man.

Suzanne Joelson Easter West, 2010

This piece paired well with the piece it was presented next to because of the similar palette used to construct them. What aided in this similarity was the color of the frame of the pice to the left of this one. This piece is painted with a painterly style, the brush strokes are left in the piece and looks like they were painted with a broad brush. The forms layered on top of the broad vertical strokes creates a strong sense of figure/ground. While the forms are organic, the piece retains a certain geometric quality because the forms divide each canvas into four quadrants. This play of geometric and organic forms work well with Lindblom’s piece because of this relationship. Allison Lindblom’s work, Untitled, is a flat piece concerning grids and geometric forms. The white triangles which decrease in size seem to recede back into space. However, that space is skewed because of the figures juxtaposed. In this work it is difficult to establish what is the figured or the ground.

Allison Lindblom, Untitled, 2010. 

Bryan Whitney Neo Kabbalah, 2010

 These three works, were all in the entry gallery space. Many of these work incorporate geometric abstraction. Many of these works were presented in different medium and it was interesting to see how they worked together. Whitney’s piece fit into the show as it deals with geometry and grids as many of the other pieces did. The forms created in this piece are not perfectly geometric, as one might expect them to be based on the complex grid. None of the white intersections of the lines are quite the same. This dissimilarity in the forms plays off the strict grid lines.