| Shahryar (2007)
oil on canvas, 40x58 The opening scene of the Arabian Nights… As Shahryar witnessed his brother’s Queen’s orgy, what went through his head? I think he must have felt relieved that his brother, just like him, has also been fooled by his Queen; that he was not the only fool in the family. Did he use this opportunity to fully examine the riches of his brother’s inner court and tried to gage who has a more well appointed court and who has better looking queens and concubines? I know he ended up killing everyone anyways but I can’t help but wonder…and how do you really feel as you witness the turmoil in the Middle East and our economical collapse? |
| “Bear Market”, ink and acrylic on
paper, 18x24 inches, 2008 Ecological crisis… economic crisis… overpopulation and more, are issues that affect us globally. These small pieces attempt to comment on these current issues as a modest reminder that we are all on the same boat. |
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Our twenty-four hour news cycle is dominated by infotainment and
celebrity culture. Red carpet images as well as those of celebrities
shopping or and covering their bruised faces while exiting their
cosmetic surgeons' are conflated in importance with the domestic spying
abuse scandal, evidence of the Bush administration's torture program,
and the shredding of our Constitution. Our newspapers are filled with
drunken starlets and a parade of celebrity couples clutching their
designer babies. These works are the kind of shiny, glam-obsessed
images consumed by the rabid minions on a daily basis. Even
thoughtful persons who are not necessarily obsessed with the comings
and goings of Britney and Paris escape from the endless flow of bad
news of wars and the tanking economy by consuming a daily stream of
pictures like these, the demand for which has soared in dark
times. The anti-current events are presented alongside and
often
eclipse the real news. We do not show photos of war dead, but
are
deluged with information should an actor or a large breasted blonde
overdose. This tabloid frenzy may not be entirely new, but it
has
reached a point of saturation and influence that is worth
comment. How does the glut of glitz affect the way we view
the
quality of our own lives? Does daily Olsen twins related
"news"
degrade our collective ability to comprehend and respond to weightier
matters? These ideas are worthy of consideration while we
abandon
ourselves to the pleasure of the pictures. Defining art as a way to describe the beauty and terror of existence, figure paintings can bare an aspiration toward the eternal, paired with the fragile and ephemeral. “Every moment is of endless worth, for it represents the whole of eternity.” Heather Morgan’s figurative oil paintings, primarily of women, dwell in themes of performance of identity and gender as a reflective way to express life’s perverse tension between frail and fleeting, and the infinite. “An artist…neglects no aspect of his dual nature. This dualism is the power of being oneself and someone else at the same time.” Morgan’s women are consumed by the viewer, the voyeur’s gaze. They often display a self-possession that suggests the knowledge that they are being examined, either from the mirror, seeing themselves as though from the outside, or by the viewer. The possibilities for self-creation are illustrated in a succession of vivid characters loosely based on the artist, her acquaintance, and recognizable cultural constructions; cigar-chomping chicks, androgynes, harlots, fighters, dancing queens, the starved, the tragically hip, the desperate (but not serious). Whether lurid or delicate, these figures are rendered with intelligence and awareness. The originality of these images comes from a sensibility that echoes the step of our time through fashion, expression, and a keen visual wit. These works invite the viewer to look and to covet, presenting an alluring world that is also potent and seething. Beauty quivers with pain and flaw in the distorted, luminous, candy-like figures that populate Morgan’s paintings. Every detail suggests a struggle, every gesture conveys a meaning, loaded with self-questioning. The figures stretch out louche before the viewer and bravely offer themselves with a conflicting, penetrating gaze. These unflinching yet vulnerable pastel heroines become all the more unknowable, as they reveal themselves in their fractured splendor. |
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I am a descendant of the prehistoric bones in Giacometti’s Palace at 4AM, recruited into an illusion of space and time where everything is real and
metaphor simultaneously. It was that early surrealist concept of mixing separate and distinct states of reality that placed the viewer “elsewhere”
that fascinated me at the beginning. But now defining the philosophical attributes of art over time is challenging to define because art today is
so embedded in our culture and it’s commerce that it has lost it’s meaning in terms of being cutting edge or avant-garde. In spite of this I draw
from all media, nature, events and life experiences to make the unreal believable where nothing is questioned in the work, where everything is
true because there is no reality. In a sense I make an absurd copy of an unseen world (therefore my interest in hell). I strive for a space that
is panoptic where we can see everything that is visible all at once,followed by subtle depth cueing in order to keep the viewer in a story
that never ends. The “seeing” part for me is always under a kind pressure because I try to express myself through the ambiguity of the juxtaposition
of spaces or the uncertainty of time. I am not a political/social artist but am drawn to intriguing stories or visual elements that disturb and are
outside established art or its history but at the same time I am very much aware that how the world is framed is just as important as what is in the
frame even if it’s source can be traumatic or rebellious. I think of myself as an aesthetic outlaw concerned with the look of things while
moving through life.
“The Falling Man” We live in a time when everything is falling apart, but ultimately it’s our fall. We are in an ambiguous decent, out of control into a dark abyss. The new fallen angel falls into a dark, perpetually skewed space. Is this character falling in terror or a joyful suicide? Is it even a man or our reinvention of a dream gone wrong? For me it’s a tragic arrival by falling through ritual and death. Its not negative but a destructive affirmation of life thorough metaphor. The problem today is that we are devoid of the metaphysical journey and to live in the midst of the incomprehensible. |
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having worked as a digital graphic designer / illustrator for years, i
felt it was time to get back to basics. graphite and coloured pencil
are, for me, as basic as one can get. i started a series of drawings in
2007 whose subject matter and inspiration were derived from the idea
that modern man and technology can not only have an adverse effect on
the environment, but were, it seemed, responsible for the obliteration
of the honeybee, through the omnipotent usage of cellular phones.
thankfully, this theory was proven false, but it did open the way to
many hypothetical questions. if the honeybee were to die out, then
what? what would happen to plants, flowers and animals, without the
honeybee's ability to pollinate? what would happen to our food source?
how would this devastation effect not only our food, but a multitude of
things related, for example, our water supplies, or the weather? these drawings are not drawn directly from nature, but more so from a fertile imagination of what plant life might be like as it takes on a new twist in it's effort to survive the curve ball thrown it by modern man and technology. my interpretation of 'zeitgeist' can be seen as figurative, metaphorical and, even literal, in that the word itself is subtly present in the drawings, and, in that, each day since the first day of spring '09, these drawings have evolved, thus, my interpretation of 'the spirit of the times'. |
| A New York City native, Giles was born on July 19,1963, and as a
youngster was enthralled by the drawings of Charles Schulz, David
Levine, and Bruce Stark. Caricature and cartooning is still his primary
focus. "Most of the artists whose work I admire seem to me to have more
than a touch of the cartoonist to them. Alice Neel's portraits, Picasso
and Braque's cubes, Francis bacon, Kitaj, Rosenquist, Rauschenberg,
many of their works which seemed impenetrable to me as a youngster, and
even as a student, became clearer to me when glimpsed throught the
simple lens of the illustrator. Nowadays I find myself most interested
in producing "comic abstractions" on foolscap panels, using crude
paints and glues, pen and ink, sometimes ballpoint pen, pasted paper
and such like. The picture aims to tell a story without words, like a
cave-drawing or a Rebus, or a math equation. |
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My work deals with the meaning of exile, an in looking outsider and an
out looking insider. All facets of a life in exile are subject to being
scrutinized and included in the imagery: images from the everyday
experience, Soviet history, the skewed memory of an immigrant, cultural
and historical Judaism, the ethnic body, current events in the Middle
East, dissident art. My painting comments on the way historical
narratives are constructed and is itself constructing a historical
narrative. The paintings are extensions of my cultural background and
they explore how the past effects the understanding of today. Anything
I encounter can elicit a work but I encounter selectively. I excavate
culture, I appropriate, recycle, and self-reference. Through the use of
paint, I examine the fictions of collective consciousness, cultural
conditioning, clichés, and hypocrisies of my cultures, all of which is
sometimes uncomfortably personal. I am thinking of identity of the
exiled not in terms of dividedness but rather in terms of redoubleness
⎯ building, accumulating, multiplying into something extremely knotty. Some of my conceptual premises include: reinterpreting ancient Jewish symbols found in decorative objects; processing roles of Jewish communities in Diaspora, specifically Ashkenazi Jews; making portraits of Russian women, specifically based on the images of Russian women found online, as a comment on the related class and gender role issues; making paintings that can be used as symbols of national apology by otherwise reluctant to apologize governments. I am also interested in the act of making use of the repressed energy of the artistic Jewish intelligentsia in Russia, doing what I am allowed and what they were not. I think of myself as their incarnation here. I am interested in creating an experience for the viewer that is mysterious, anomalous, and disquieting. The work hopes to both acknowledge and protest aspects of culture and ways of confronting those aspects. Titles accentuate the subject matter, often through humor-we often laugh in moments of discomfort. Text used in images is a comment on the provocation of the subject matter. There is visual push and a verbal push. Each piece functions on its own but I think of them in groups, coliving. Painted together, images create a rhythm, some aspects purposefully repeated, installation playing a critical role in punctuating intersections of the various styles of narration. Painting is the medium chosen to evoke meaning even when dealing with the immediacy of current events or digging through layers of the past because painting is capable of memorializing, sorting, and re-presenting as well as distancing to make objective. The surfaces ranges from distasteful, destroyed and decrepit to challenging and difficult beauty. Though there is a constant awareness that the viewer is coming into contact with surface, color, and composition, the aesthetic choices of the paintings are extensions of the concerns of the conceptual content. |
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My paintings explore the human emotions of denial, acceptance, fear,
pain and bliss. This recent group of works seeks to explore the
mindset, of what I consider to be, the "average" American citizen in
present times. The imagery is a combination of complex shapes and stylized figures twisting together in an exaggerated landscape. I create movement and texture in all my pieces and always use an array of mediums. I let the imagery unfold as I create it. I enjoy creating emotionally and have been working this way for a number of years. |
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Born in NYC, in 1962, Christopher attended Rhode Island School of
Design pursuing a BFA. Since then he has exhibited in NYC, Eastern Long
Island and Washington DC. Most recently he mounted a one-man show
titled : “Happy X-Mas / War is Over”, at Windows Gallery on Jackson
Avenue in Long Island City. The show was about our experience of war as
a nation seen thru the commercial media. Christopher’s work deals with topical issues of significance to the socio-political community. “Zeitgeist 2009” is a show he organized , presenting his fellow artists with the task of making pieces that interpret some aspect of current events- or the “spirit of the times.” |