YVETTE DRURY DUBINSKY, Dividing Time: NewWork on Paper
Opening Reception: Thursday,May 14, from 6 to 9 pm
MAY 14 – JUNE 27, 2009
Wed – Sat 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Project Room -- Frank Roth: Narrative Patterns
Media Room-- Van McElwee: Alternity
On view from May 14 to June 27, 2009, the show will be of two separate but related bodies of the artist’s last two years work: Large chromogenic prints of organic forms and one of a kind, layered, collaged, monoprints and drawings. The most recent and very large chromogenic prints show a continued fascination with the lines, textures and colors found in natural forms. By enlarging, isolating and enhancing what there is to see in common and less common vegetables and fruits, Yvette Drury Dubinsky shows in a simple way why artists and designers throughout time have used the natural world as inspiration for making art whether it is abstract or representational, sculptural or two-dimensional. These vegetables and fruits are pulled from their natural setting, cut, opened, rearranged and enlarged to reveal more than is usually observed about their amazing nature. Though the artist does some placing, cutting and cropping, the forms have a life of their own. They spill open and their insides fall out, uncontrolled by anyone. The multi-layer monoprints and drawings also begin as very organic and are meditations on lines, textures and forms. The first layers, seemingly random shapes, bring to mind beautiful, colorful and moving cells, or galaxies. They appear uncomplicated, wild and abstract until upon further examination one observes machines and words mixed in with the more non-objective, simply sensual marks. The prints have a political and social concern within their layers, as well as a general feel that mimics both a chaotic internal state and the current tumult in our economic and political world. As Henri Matisse stated it, producing art involves “a restructuring of time and space, a penetration into Reality itself”. Dubinsky’s work is an illustration of that rearranging of time, an insight into an internal reality that resonates with our current socio-economic situation.
In the Project Room, photographer Frank Roth presents a new series of photographs titled “Narrative Patterns.” The series began several years ago when Roth decided to lay claim to a personal art form and returned to photography. Influenced greatly by Edward Hopper, Roth explores the creation of photographic images that look at ordinary scenes and presents them as a
narrative image that reduces the illusion of three-dimensional perspective and respects the flat surface of the picture plane. Using a variety of small cameras, Roth achieves this flatness by taking pictures from a great distance whenever possible. Roth shoots images as he sees them in existing light, regardless of the time of day, in order to fully capture the mood. The images are then carefully cropped to arrive at the final statement, which suggests an abstract, random pattern and forces the viewer to question whether there is more to see beyond the long, narrow glimpses of quotidian life that Roth gracefully presents.
In the Media Room, video artist Van McElwee presents a single channel video titled “Alternity: A Figure in Manifold Space.” This 6:48 minute video created in 2008 expands the vanishing point of linear perspective into a plane, allowing all potential events at that point to mingle freely on the surface of the screen. Figures and sounds merge, blend, shift, and flow
through one another in time and space, creating what McElwee calls a “sponge-space of possibilities.” McElwee creates non-narrative videos that combine images extracted from the real world with textured music, and culminate in the viewer’s experience and interpretation of the piece. McElwee explains: “I find inspiration in noise, in nature, in fake things, in ruins and construction sites, in overlapping sounds, and in concepts that I barely understand. I've always been preoccupied with form, not as opposed to content, but in relation to formlessness, an idea I owe to the East.”
OPENING NIGHT Friday, May 8, 2009
