The Passion for Tone
I love this photo by architect Steven Keith from the opening night of Between History And The Body at The 8th Floor Gallery of the Shelly and Donald Rubin Foundation. His image is reminiscent in tone and scale to an Edward Hopper painting, without ever being literal to any particular painting. The careful composition of the studious guest reading the label indications regarding my artwork. She is solitary and focused wearing what one might characterize as a the sign of a 20th Century femininity a timeless feminine dress of leisure and grace. Her figure is silhouetted within a gap of space, as if that space were her own personal canvas and frame. A picture within a picture highlighted by a splendid pouf of auburn hair and anchored by sturdy legs and sensible shoes. My work itself being merely a part of a larger more complex composition, fragmented, offering a teasing glimpse of an imagined landscape of veiled bodies but more importantly "people" in the Hoppernian sense. The fortuitous contrast between the two subjects could hardly be better, each carefully measured as a signifier of many peoples, she of a well cultured class who value nuance, they a museum public performing the carnivalesque for the camera in the safety of an anonymity of hooliganism.
Mr.Keith's other photo indicates a fuller presentation of my artwork The Passion with numerous guests looking closely while in conversation. I would risk guessing that the wonderful splash of red hair is probably one of New York's important figures of the Performance Art history Martha Wilson.
Many thanks to the artistic director Sara Reisman and her perceptive curatorial team George Bolster and Anjuli Nanda in bringing this larger show together. I believe we all share this sensitivity towards capturing tone.
More about this exhibition may be found on their website Between History and the Body July 9th - October 16th, 2015
Between History and the Body is an exhibition that looks closely at the ways in which cultural identity is defined, how it is used as a force of exclusion, and how it works as a unifying and transformative energy among artists of diverse cultural backgrounds.
Between History and the Body features artists Elia Alba, Firelei Baez, Nick Cave, Jean-Ulrick Désert, Nicolás Dumit Estévez, Brendan Fernandes, Jeffrey Gibson, Shaun Leonardo, Ana Mendieta (†), Paul Anthony Smith, Chungpo Tsering and Saya Woolfalk, who work across a variety of media including sculpture, painting, photography, performance and video. Together, these artists generate dialogue on cultural identity and history through representation of the body as an active force in ritual, both historic and imagined, and as an agent in the production of relics that communicate narratives of the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa.
NOTE: More images from The Passion may be found on this website's main pages and more back-stories on the JUD Diary/Blog