Marcel Dzama at David Zwirner

Marcel Dzama's oeuvre is rife with disturbing childhood imaginations, executed in various mediums, each a successful means of connecting eerie psychosis with political imbalance. Scenes of the greedy and gruesome are displayed with the same dizziness and nonsensical story lines of twilight zone episodes, with decapitated heads, masked hunters, sexually questionable Pinocchios, burlesque theatrics, and the ubiquitous black bear. This cacophony of hauntingly nightmarish yet irresistibly cute figures come alive in this exhibition at David Zwirner.
In the first room, a series of drawings unite in color palette, where artist uses muted colors of red, beige, brown and gray, each drawing a constellation of figures mesmerizing the plane with repetitive patterns. In Poor Sacrifices of our enmity, a swarm of female figures utilizes the bow and arrow to point and shoot a goat atop a ladder, but none are placed on a sensical ground plane, filling the space from top to bottom swirling and rotating creating a layer of abstract patterns with the concentric circle of their bow. The blank background allows for this play on space and narrative, a violent scene marked by discombobulating placement of a singular figure. The minimal use of elements in these drawings send a strong message of the inhumane and inexplicable in each of us.
Pages from Dzama's sketchbooks reveal his interests in the magical fused with political manipulations and grievances of the individual. These dark themes are revealed thru quirky observations, each page of graph paper a collage of the artist's exploration of current events and random useless information. Page 5 of 13 in the sketchbook included in the exhibition includes a personal story in conjunction with a elementary science project study of the gopher, a naive childish caption beneath a violent scene with cartoon figures appropriated on top. And above the study for one of few puppet theater diamoras The Underground. The sketchbook is a precise portrayal of the artist's work in progress, his interests in the fantastical and the random, taking the mundane and newsworthy into a realm of imaginary characters and daydreams.
The second room is closed and dark, with a few dioramas in the likes of stages of stuffed animals seen in the museum of natural history, except these are scenes of greed, violence, and all that is deviously innocent. On the Banks of the Red River depicts men in gray suits from the olden days, scattered and numerous, pointing their rifles in the air as animals fall or in the midst of falling to their death. The scene is thrown into the fantastical with the inclusion of large decapitated heads and flowers billowing thru the empty space. The diorama creates contradictory reactions for the viewer, as we sympathize with the poor dead animals, feel animosity for the hunters, and are left with confusion as to why these zombie heads decorate the scene amidst beautiful blooming petals.
And the strongest and strangest work in the show is a 20 minute film shot in scratchy black and white, which is accompanied on select days by a pianist who plays in accord with the film, a beautiful trance of tunes accentuating each flighty scene. The protagonist of the film is an artist haunted by his own creations, costumed furry characters often masked who prance around the artist as both threat and revelry. There is a theme of keyholes thorughout the film, which is reiterated in an installation that reflects Duchamp"s Etant donnes, viewable through a peephole. Rather than the main image being a naked female, we are haunted by 2 figures, both male and female with a fox atop a hill, a successful predator preying on their fare skin and innocence.
A great show that merges the imagination with the all too real of our mundane and often ridiculously violent reality.

Jasper Johns at the Met and Matthew Marks

The Jasper Johns exhibition at Matthew Marks is an appropriate extension of his gray retrospective at the Met, both shows reveal with variety and precision his interests in literal execution and contemplative self-expression.
As a widely studied figure, Johns has been historicized for his use of representational icons such as targets, numbers, the alphabet, and the american flag. These motifs are easily recognized and the viewer is familiar with these representations creating singular interpretation through the view of universal symbols. He often gives new meaning, whether multiple meaning or non-meaning, to everyday objects incorporated directly onto canvas such as brooms, rules, strings, and household utensils, giving them triple functions as image, tool, and text. Johns reverberates the multiplicity of function and interpretation thru creating series after series of sketches and paintings, as if fighting each element for perfection.
Each flag, target, alphabet motif is generously represented in the Met, except with the absence of color. This thesis oriented exhibition breathes fresh air, albeit a foggy, thick and humid air, into all his signature works. The lack of primary and tertiary colors usually represented are silenced and choked by an overwhelming barrage of gray.
In Fool's House, 1962, a broom with wooden handle hangs vertically by a hinge at the top of the canvas, its body stained and used by the paint. It is also used as a mark maker evident by the scratch swooshy pattern made by sweeping the broom dipped in paint across the bottom of the canvas. A spontaneous and effortless gesture made by the artist, the broom seems to breathe life marking its presence, its significance in the back and forth act of sweeping. Johns uses text to label each item on canvas, a towel, stretcher line the bottom with a cup hanging off the tip by a hook. Each is labeled in a sloppy sketchy manner with an arrow relating the text to each item. A diagram, presentation, statement of the obvious, an inventory of belongings inside a fool's house, the fool most likely being the artist himself as he presents us with objects in his studio, the objects that he is most intimate with, the most widely used and functional. The oversimplification and literalism of the works are rife with dead pan humor mixed with somber meditation on the meaning of things.
A more recent work, Untitled, 1992-1995 keeps to the idea of using familiar icons, such as a floorpolan, stick figures, and eyes, and mixes with abstract figurative and non figurative motifs, the use of line as it billows around the canvas and makes for a surrealist take on object making. The background is split in three shades and patterned with dots, text and lines. A ladder sits diagonally on a cross, and somber stick figure prances around out of the cross as if just stepping off this ladder, a fallen man entering a surreality encased with abstraction. A geometric symbol consisting of two circles supported by diamond bodies and triangular wings float above this figure as if angels in duality representing his conscious. The colors are muted and thick, the motifs are plenty, overlapping and tumbling within each other's presence. The scattered positioning seem to be a reflection of the happenings within a mind, the thoughts and emotions presented in a conglomeration of literal and fantastical images.
These symbols of ladder, stick figure, and angelic form are also presented in a sketch shown at Matthew Marks, a repetitive positioning of scattered images, spontaneous in placement, a marking of the mind.
The drawings in the Matthew Marks show reveal the artist's interests in mark making in the last decade, many with references to Matisse and Picasso, an ode to modernist expression. There is also presented a few works on gray, the cross hatching and rectangular shaping create a field of abstracted infinitum. The exploratory referencing reveals the artist's recent interest in back tracking to history of mark making and representing.
Both exhibitions reveal an artist always at work, his never ending curiosities an impulse, a statement to the exploratory learning process of an artist who has himself made a mark in history.

Juan Usle at Cheim & Read

A recent series of paintings by Juan Usle on view at Cheim & Read reveals the artist's interest in transferring personal experience into visual constructions. The paintings conversate with one another expressing unique characteristics based on color, line and pattern. They vibrate with blissful shouting, as if color emerge on their own accord and organic form coordinates them into systems of vibrant environments.
Upon entering the gallery the viewer is struck by their immediacy and overwhelming presence. The uniformity between them is not created by the instruments used and the artist intention as much as their ability to create an environment of clarity, spontaneity, organic compartmentalizing, and sinuous grids. The contradicting formal elements of each work make Usle much more than a Greenbergian formalist, he is rather, an AbEx expressionist thats been cultured by the conventional wisdom that is Modernism.
Usle's use of instruments to execute the textile patterning of each stroke crates a static and uniform surface that is contradicted by the movement and fluidity of the curves and shapes they create. In La Escena Perdida, which translates to "The Lost Scene", flat black chords striped by a mark making tool intersect each other, uniting and dispersing in free movement without reference to coordination or choreography. Each strand is a member in this spontaneous dance, spiraling in and out to infinity. The minimal use of color in this painting seems to create a dissection that stalls or amputates each stroke. The ambivalence and allusion, the multi-defining within each painting is also contradicted by the precise and clarity of color, the smoothness of surface, the uniformity of the grid. In Aislados, or "Isolated", a consistent brick pattern spreads throughout the canvas, none is equal in siye to the other, they stand alone and independent forming a crowd of identical difference. Allusions of shadow and three dimensionality makes room for 2 white feather like strokes to reast on the 2nd tier of squares, members isolated from the rest of their group, standing, or laying, or being, in peace, or rather, in paranoiac loneliness. The freedom of interpretation makes the artist intent indeterminate, but the title of each gives a slight clue into the realm of these non-figures, a reflection of the artist's personal experiences and surroundings.
Standing at the center of the gallery, the viewer will easily notice the triptych of square grids on one side, and on the reflecting wall 3 painting of swirly shapes and lines. Its as if these opposing works are 2 identities of 1 form, the duality created within this setting makes for an almost schizophrenic impulse, grounded on non-conformity and ambiguity.
The irony in Usle's paintings is reflected again in Sin Desenlace, "Without Outcome", with its overwhelming layering of form, pattern, and color. Loops, lines, perpendiculars, stripes, patches, all these forms gather, as if at war with each other, fighting to conquer and overtake the surface of the canvas to no avail. The painting is chaotic, an overload of lines and colors that is too disorienting to absorb. But the clarity and smoothness of the surface bring the forms together and comforts the viewer with the safety of the line between us and "them".
The dichotomy that rests in the works of Usle is ingenious in their randomness, in its unplanned multiplicity, and the absolute ambivalence and conflict it creates in the viewer. It is spontaneously a refreshing and flabbergasting experience.

John Morris at D'Amelio Terras

A series of intimate paintings by John Morris on view at D'Amelio Terras, consisting of obsessive details in the shape of swirls, dashes, dots and lines. Mostly in white made translucent by a layer of wax, these small abstract works are ethereal, repetitive, organic and serial. Each painting on board focuses on a particular motif, repeated in differing shades and sizes, overlapping, underlapping, crossing, and chaffing each other as if in conversation. The narratives created are completely up to the imagination of the viewer and they are subtle in message.
Each pattern creates a world of its own, they are deceivingly simple, revealing an intertwined network of channels, of forms, of delicate energy.

Hans Haacke at Paula Cooper

A mini-retrospective of works by Hans Haacke at Paula Cooper, minimal and scarce in number but enough to create an environment that is diverse in medium, concept, and subject.
The strongest and most emotionally influential is Wide White Flow from 1967 which consists of large white fabric dreamily billowing by a few fans. Each corner is fitted to the floor preventing chaotic stormy movement. The fans create waves of movement, an energy in constant flux, but steady in tone, serene in attitude. Its all encompassing size is contradicted by its closeness to the floor, as if stunted, limited in its freedom to expand and billow into infinitum.
His controversial and signature photographic conceptual piece, Sol Goldman and Alex DiLorenzo Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, is on view in a separate room, a line of buildings stationed on the wall, an unforgiving simplicity attached to its concept of political and social significance. Not very easy to digest, or perhaps too easily digested without proper chewing, this series is often dismissed for its lack of formal aesthetic but this is precisely what the artist intends, making the viewer struggle in finding a meaning behind all the closed doors. The data gathered comments to a social system based on ownership, power and manipulation, as the rich get richer thus kicking out the less fortunate from their forced state of comfort.
A more recent work consists of a dilapidated couch, torn, stained and ugly on which is planted an embroidered pillow quoted with words by George H.W. Bush and a torn paper flag, its other half still in its frame above the couch. The message is clear, perfectly rendered with simple everyday household goods.
Each work in the show deals with a level of consummation, consuming culture, politics, property, beauty, art viewing, etc. They all reflect current concerns specific to America, of fear of change, obsession with real estate, and the growing promiscuity of the art market.

Mike Cockrill at KENT gallery

A series of works on paper by Mike Cockrill is on view at KENT gallery, a follow up on a recent show on paintings. Both shows cover the almost redundant theme of naiveté, adolescence, sexual curiosity and exploration. They are soft, dreamy and effeminate, with image of pretty girls, butterflies and airy colors. The girls engage the tainted and pedophilic impulses in the viewer with their taunting come hither glances, pleasure driven poses, scanty clothing. They act innocently, we react pornographically. The watercolors are thinnly painted but the result is rich, especially when using colored paper creating a monochrome background making way for a more fantasy driven narrative. The amount of violence imbedded into the narrative is disturbing and leaves the viewer at unease, jumbling pleasure with pain, admiration with repulsion. This ambivalence
Not as successfully affective or intriguing is a series titled from Stations of the Cross. A numbered series of watercolor on paper works picturing various protagonists as Jesus going through the process of life and death and resurrection. In one piece Jesus is a black man, in another Jesus is a series of youthful flirtatious women out of the 50s. Neither convincing nor relevant in its attempt to create a successful fantasy narrative concerning condemnation and regurgitated life lines.
Overall, the works of Mike Cockrill is straightforward in its content, disturbingly beautiful in its formal elements, and unfortunately, dismissive.

Accidental Modernism at Leslie Tonkonow

A group show consisting of works created in the last century, titled Accidental Modernism on view at Leslie Tonkonow gallery. A very well curated show based on the theme of artist appropriating their voice onto found, or happen chance materials, manipulating found products to incorporate and incise with their individual expressions. A vast range of artists from Jean Tinguely and Rudolf Stingel to Keith Tyson and a collaboration with Reena Spaulings, Bernadette Corporation and others.
Each work coincide in their interest with ambivalence and abstraction, transcending the interpretable, creating witty nonsense, yet separating with each other as very separate singular entities. They communicate the same concepts in different dimensions.
Bill Morrison's video "Light is Coming" is ethereal and dreamy, with a couple scenes superimposed, a stop animation of paintings, similar to the works of Jacco Olivier. A horse, a man and a woman make appearances throughout the video, blissfully drowning in a sea of earthy orange and yellows. The painterly-ness of the video creates an existential environment, tempting the viewer to jump in and escape from reality.
Keith Tyson's "Table Top Tales: The Little Silver Screen" from 2000 is a comical take on the existence of the artist in an artwork. He takes a used table with scratches and holes and gives them definitions, specifically indicating them to a tv guide schedule. This specificity grounds the work with our space, and the table mounted on the wall by its legs converts it into a screen for our viewing. We see chance and text combined with artificial surrealistic meaning, witty and comical in its rendering of the artists hand.
Rudolf Stingel's signature foil work is mounted here with a single panel engraved with bathroom graffiti phrases. There was no mention of the viewer to take the freedom creating their own remarks, but here the artist takes away the author and creates a work that stands alone defiant of being manipulated by a single creator.
Each work in the show, no matter their medium, either come together or go against each other, almost simultaneously, creating an ambivalent, confusing and surreal conglomeration.

El Anatsui at Jack Shainman

A series of works by El Anatsui on view at Jack Shainman gallery comprises of obsessive and repetitive patterns made by bottle caps and foils creating a landscape of muted glitter and billowing waves. The artist's African background is essential in interpreting these works, as they reminisce kente cloth patterns and symbols, delving into the nitty gritties of common culture and twisting it to a disorienting effect.
Each work is carefully crafted by hundreds of disposed liquor caps and the foil neck wrap. Each are punctured and connected by thin copper wires, each foil wrap either straightened our or folded into squares or twisted. The colors are exquisitely coordinated by palcing the wraps on the outside or flipped to reveal the muted silver underside. The works from afar glitter but also resemble jewelry that could use shining and cleaning. The overall effect is disorienting, as the rigid weaved pieces unite to create undulating waves of false fabric, a smoothness and regal authenticity marked by the refused and mundane.
As abstract and non-representational as they may seem, each work is titled mindful of the realities of nature, its gifts of order and beauty, its curse of death and violence. In Bleeding Takari II, straight and narrow bottle wraps reveal their backside, an army of rigid and dignified soliders lined up in discordance that result in the waves of overwhelming patterns. Random spots of red caps seem to grow out of these figures creating the blood of the work, dripping down in single file, trickling like a leaking dam into the viewer's space, transforming the silver plane into a multidimensional abstraction. The title references the political polarizing occurring in our all too real world, but a rarely heard of term/identity that face their own significant turmoil.
Overall the works in the show are beautiful in their scale, their obsessive repetition, with respect and awe for the patience of the artist, and his gift of giving meaning to objects so mundane and easily disposed of.

Jesuvian Process at Elizabeth Dee Gallery

A group show consisting of artists working in the last 50 years, portrays a concern with the contemporary obsession with recognition, blinded by the market and undervalued by lack of constructive criticism.
The title of the show "Jesuvian Process" takes on 2 significant meanings for the show, one pertaining to a term coined by art historian Rosalind Krauss, which describes the castration anxiety felt by men and the overall desire to overcome, secede and superiorize, over their rahter or larger counterpart. The second meaning pertains to the dialogue these works engage in, unconcerned about representation, regal conceptions, focusng rather on delapidated found material and jumbling them all together to create a successful un-pompous object.
The curated concept puts these artists on a self-created pedestal, guilty of "I'm larger than you because I made a good work of art that is formless yet meaningful, superior without even trying using garbage." I am certain this is far from the case but the concept behind the show, and the press release tells otherwise.
The most appealing in a non-appealing way is Hillary Harnischfeger's paper collage works. A dense layer of paper is carved deeply and concisely, most likely by an electronic cutter, creating a bulbous landscape, abstract forms that are underlined and outlined with thin colors of marker. The overall color scheme is an off dirty white, tainted and marked by blotches of subdued grays, maroons, and forest greens.
They are reminiscent of the large scale expressive abstract paintings of Janaina Tschape, especially the work titled Patternist II from 2007, made of paper, ink and plaster. There is a feminine crafty aspect to the work that is appealing to the eye, but not as clean and pretty. The sharply incised cuts and ridges create a subtle violent tone that is missed at first glance. The incongruent pattern making process seems spontaneous, uneven, disheveled, but unified by an imperfect beauty which is more real and tangible than the over-archiving perfection-ing act of the too careful and mighty.
The wooden sculpture works of Louise Nevelson perfectly exemplifies the theme of the show, with its kitschy and haphazard assembling of scrap pieces. The piece seems to be stifled and stuck on the wall, as if it were a breathing figure trapped and wishing to be free standing. The layers of elements are geometric and abstract, but again as in the works of Harnischfeger, very tangible, humble and dignified in its solidarity, its all encompassing dominance of color. It has a tinge of Raucherberg's Combines to its agenda but fiercer, more subdued, demanding.
These two artists seem to conversate to each other and perfectly understand each other, although they speak in 2 different languages.
Majority of the works in "Jesuvian Process" successfully transcend today's anxieties of making it big in the art world, and because of this irresponsibility to contributing ot the neuroticism, they succeed in getting their message through, which is formless, layered, and free.

James Siena at Pace Prints

images from Pace Prints website

Above the Josef Albers and Donald Judd show is a selection of prints by James Siena whose intricate abstract pattern making is mind-boggling. I love being able to immerse myself into these abstract geometric patterns, failing to let my eyes focus on one point and just getting lost within the lines and colors and shapes. And there is always the urge to go home and copy a repetitive square within square within square pattern and see if it comes out in the same effect as Siena creates. There's a simplicity and exactitude with which he executes the works that really is respectable and thoughtful IMO. It's fine-art-doodling at its best, comparable to Sol Lewitt and Sophie Taeuber.

Kristian Burford & Marcel Duchamp

2 male artists of differnt art historical eras conversate in their interest in narrative, spectacle, and fantasy:




Kristin Burford's "Rebecca" is shown at I-20 gallery, a theatrical setting enclosed behind doors that is peekable through a small crack. I tried to open it further but it was glued to be a non-functional stationary door. As the viewer/peeker I was presented with an amorous scene that had nothing really to do with a sexual encounter as it seemed but a display of a paralyzed woman role-playing with 2 girls not present in the scene who dressed up Rebecca as a ballerina. The indifference of her body, her imminent complacence is as idle and sexual as Duchamp's victim wax figure in "Etant Donnes" but lacks the violence and mystery that Duchamp instills into his similar installation.

Hey,Hot Shot! at Jen Bekman

jen bekman's "Hey, Hot Shot!" winter annual show opened wednesday night and what a delicious treat it was indeed. I've discovered a delightful and gratifying amount of information about what jen bekman does and how this show came about. If I am correct, she has a website heyhotshot.com where photographers can submit their work and participate in a competition which leads to seasonal exhibitions which then leads to those photographers being represented by the gallery.
There is an abundance of great work from past hey,hot shot! shows such as Dylan Chatain's exploratory photographs of people and their surroundings, pictures he must have taken while traveling around the country. They seem to comment on spontaneous and curious encounters with hidden natural beauties embedded in obscure locations where garbage, McDonalds, and people abound. It's a complacent mixture of poverty, idleness, sunlight, greenery (images of country), and claustrophobia (images of people in elevators). I found an aesthetic voice in each picture that was reflective and innocent, that each picture was as pure and literal, what you see is what you see. Here are some images:



In the current show there didn't seem to be a unifying theme, a little about massive consumption of objects and information found in the works by kate bingaman-burt, whose statement explains it all:

statement :: obsessive consumption
I documented my purchases for 28 months. Every purchased item was photographed at the point of sale or soon after. Every receipt was archived and tagged. All of the documentation was uploaded to my website obsessiveconsumption.com. I created a brand out of the process to package and promote - an infinite loop of consumerism was born.
In September 2004, I started collecting all of my credit card statements each month (six total) and am copying all of them in pen and ink every month until they are paid off. I have drawn 144 statements as of October 2006. I do this as penance for my sins.
In February 2006, I started drawing one item that I purchased everyday. I have no plans to stop.
I created Obsessive Consumption, the brand, the company and the website, to showcase my love/hate relationship with money, shopping, branding, credit cards, celebrity, advertising and marketing. Personal consumer spending and monthly credit card statements ferociously fuel my work.
Obsessive Consumption is about making the mundane special. I am taking a mass produced product and personalizing it. The consumer is no longer faceless.
Obsessive Consumption conforms to the cliché that shopping is a favorite past time of society. Obsessive Consumption is repulsed and grossly fascinated by the branding of consumer culture. It wants to eat the entire bag of candy and enjoy the sickness that it feels and hour later. It doesn't want to be an outside critical observer. It wants to be an active participant. Obsessive Consumption wants to be serious. Obsessive Consumption wants to have fun. Obsessive Consumption wants to document and create from experiences through this over stimulating, nauseating world of consumer culture.
CONSUME/DOCUMENT/MAKE
Obsessive Consumption was created to showcase my love/hate relationship with money, shopping, branding, credit cards, celebrity, advertising and marketing. The work is inspired by the ever ubiquitous, generic, delicate, sometimes stomachache inducing credit card statement, craft as activism, and general consumerism.

I find myself suffering all the time with this need to consume as much information as I can and to take that information and turn it into something productive such as posting on this blog. So in this sense, I obsessively connect with kate and I adore her over-productively in multiple channels of expression. Here's an example of her credit card bill drawing. how exquisite:

Material for the Making at Elizabeth Dee

Group show at Elizabeth Dee curated by new director Jenny Moore include works compiled together based on the theme of memory and subjective reality, re-presentation and re-making of things and memories that have already occurred and existed before.
Strongest work is Shaving Cream Series, a strip of small Polaroid photographs mounted horizontally by Gail Thacker, which includes images of performance artist Rafael Sanchez covered in shaving cream frolicking around with a swimming ducky float around his waist and a hat adorned with what seems to be a wired sculpture resembling baby toys that hang over a baby crib and rotate as it plays music and lulls the baby to sleep. It seems to recall psychoanalytical references of oedipal desires, fear of circumcision (the body lathered in shaving cream preparing to be razored), objects of infantile dependence such as the float and the crib toy. Gail Thacker manipulated the surface of the photographic material, rematerializing and texturing it through a "curing" process which makes it hazy and out of focus, much like our memories that are never truly rendered to the detail of its actuality.
In the back room is Kerry Tribe's video Near Miss, a recreation of an actual incident where her car spins on the highway in the middle of a snowstorm. I did not realize it was a set up recording until I came back into the main room and there was a photograph of the production process, the car mounted on top of a platform with a snow making machine and bright lighting. The video stirs the urgency and anticipation of an accident with the steady rhythm of the windshield wipers, as if to negate and comfort the anxiety of the viewer. In the end the car makes a slow, barely noticeable spin.
Kori Newkirk is well known for his use of pomade (a waxy hair gel) in paintings and other mediums. With themes of race and the transience of a short lived life he creates cut out snowflakes pasted around the gallery, scattered in different sizes but all in the same color black, against the white wall, seeming to hint at race differences between white and black. It reminded me of the appropriation of meaning Masaru Emoto gives to his snowflakes be exposing them to human conditions and emotional verbage.
Weakest work IMO was Mai Braun’s sculptures made of materials that have been deconstructed and reproduced to become an artistic object molded by the hands of the artist. A formless pastel yellow blob sits on a pedestal, an oversized textured snot meant to be abstract and unique in its “creating a symbiotic relationship between the image that inspired it and the form that follows after”. It is interesting that she has used found objects and gave them a new life as non-functional commodities but the lack of substance in the resulting form was tasteless and mute.

Maureen Gallace

A short review about Maureen Gallace's solo exhibition at 303 Gallery. Walking into the gallery and working reception desk gives me the opportunity to study my everyday reaction to the paintings as well as catching the interaction between the works and the scraggling confused visitors/collectors. The exhibit consists of miniature barren landscape paintings of solitary rural houses enraptured by the power of nature's silence. Expressionistic strokes are short and composed, personal in touch and in depiction. The titles of each work seems to refer to a past memory, nostalogic and personal for the artist: "My Brother's House", "Last Summer". Even so, there is a hint of unwelcoming distance as the houses are painted in mute neutral colors and is void of human warmth. "Road to the beach" shows a single house without doors or windows with a sanded path narrowing to the background. Her wide thick brushstrokes does not interfere with the coolness and neutrality of the scene, as if the expressionistic-ness is stifled by the content. This ambivalence of home v. isolation, cold v. warm, human v. nature, freedom v. containment is resonant in all of her works leaving the viewer baffled at the impact received from a seemingly harmless objective painting.