Sunday, March 8, 2009

conspiracies

Freudians will make much of who I left out of my Beep Beep Gallery list, since it couldn't have been very many people...but except for Chris Carder, whose work I left out because I haven't seen his work become quite as ubiquitous as that of the other seven artists (and perhaps it is), the website list was one name short of a full exhibition program if there are nine shows rather than eight.

I've missed more than one show I very much wanted to see at Gallery Stokes, where Dayna Thacker's curatorship is beyond reproach...Amy Freeman's "Wide Awake" consists of paintings that prove that a personal symbology can produce oddly discomforting yet utterly captivating visual effects. But that just happens to be the most recent exhibition, and I have no idea what the rest of the year's schedule is like.

So random cross-sections on this blog should not be taken as the Word From On High. That is not the function of blogs, nor is it the accomplishment of art magazines, much less of newspapers.

if I had time to write more now, which I don't, I would have much to say about this, and even more about some quite lovely exhibitions currently up around town...I happen to like John Cox's paintings of trompe l'oeil figure drawings overlaid on Chinese calligraphy and his replications of the effects of time's erasures on the art of antiquity, currently on view at Sycamore Place Gallery and Studios, but then, I'm a sucker for work that references the borders that angels cannot transgress between the material and the spiritual (another fan of Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire) even if I prefer his trompe l'oeil tours de force. Almost everyone else was left stunned by his effects of texture, which are not inconsiderable. And so I honor them likewise; for what I like and what is likely to survive for the ages are not at all the same thing.