With the onslaught of holiday madness, it is perhaps most appropriate to look at Nina Levy’s funny, disturbing and oh-so-true portraits of social identity. Levy’s sculptures are consistently playful and grotesque, the horror of everyday masks we wear to placate or nourish others laid bare. What I like is the absence of celebration or judgment in […]
Daphne Arthur’s Smoke Drawings takes us into an other-worldly landscape that is both recognizable and yet beautifully foreign. Many of the objects in her artwork border on appearing animated, thus creating a narrative of the fantastic. Take for instance Grasses of Green Lemon Drops, where the scene resides in between apocalyptic desolation and serene beauty. The tree in […]
If you are in New York City this summer, then make some time to see Head (July 10-Aug 11), an exhibit curated by Robert Curcio and D. Dominick Lombardi for Bosi Contemporary. Featuring the works of Christophe Avella-Bagur, Benedetta Bonichi, Richard Butler, Lori Field, Rieko Fujinami, Chambliss Giobbi, Ronald L. Hall, Nina Levy, D. Dominick Lombardi, Esther […]
The aesthetics of the grotesque can be quite broad and far-ranging. The grotesque can be so subtle you miss it on the first interaction with a story, artwork, or film; other times, it’s so shocking that you’ll never forget the image having seen it once (and just once, you have decided, is enough). Then there’s […]
The grotesque is often used as a synonym for all that is dark, obscene, bizarre, and even gruesome. That is a rather lazy definition for an aesthetic that robs us momentarily of our ability to rationalize and categorize things. The truly grotesque moves us more into a sense of mystery — into the world of things that are now given […]
You know the story. Little girl goes through the woods to her grandmother’s house. Little girl is stalked by ravenous wolf. Big bad wolf gets to the house first, eats grandma. Wolf gets in bed with girl, then eats her. This would be the Little Red Riding Hood of Charles Perrault (who published it as […]
There seems to be an ever-growing trend to both humanize animals (particularly pets), to the point of giving them organic food and worrying about their health care perhaps more than our own, while simultaneously continuing our eradication of species that we don’t see as necessary (go research the blob fish). Jessica Joslin ruptures that binary […]
Ever since Icarus fell from the sky, we have been in love with the idea of flight. America watched in anticipation and fearful delight as Australian Felix Baumgartner broke the sound barrier and survived freefalling 29 miles back to earth; we cheered when the Curiosity Rover landed on Mars. Paradoxically, we so easily forget the absolute […]
There is, within the aesthetics of the grotesque, an unsettling interconnectivity between the organic and mechanical, between the hybrid and the cohesive whole. We don’t mind when we can give such hybrids a name (such as the Borg) and relegate them to the realm of science fiction or fantasy. But then there is the art that […]
There has been much ado about this term called The New Aesthetic: what it means, where it’s from, what it aims to do, how it might wander aimlessly through the rhetoric of revolutionary art movements with nary a ripple in that ocean. Bruce Sterling has described it as the “eruption of the digital into the physical,” throwing […]