Michael reviews a film exploring the last years of a Japanese American grandfather’s life, filmed by his own granddaughter, which he only agreed to allow her to publish at the end of his life.
Read MoreMichael takes in Christopher Wood’s drawing-a-day project, Frequent Exceptions, on view at HOUSE Gallery. These subtle, resonant graphite drawings pull you into a meditative state of reflection on space, tone, and the passage of time, he says.
Read MoreA More Perfect Union? at the Woodmere Art Museum brings together the personal and the political, exploring the most intimate images of love and tenderness between individuals. In the current political climate, Michael says, these images, which include both gay and straight relationships, as well as interracial relationships, take on an important new urgency. This is an ambitious show, not to be missed!
Read MoreCurrently on view at Penn’s Arthur Ross Gallery, Willie Cole’s travelling show On Site contains the artist’s signature found-object sculpture, which transforms common domestic objects like irons, shoes, and bottles into powerful ensembles evoking ancient gods and contemporary consumer culture.
Read MoreSometimes it looks like a science fair and sometimes it looks like an art exhibit. Either way, Michael Lieberman says the exhibition, How Food Moves: Edible Logistics, is a good one to sink your teeth into.
Read MoreDescendants of trash pickers and connoisseurs of the found object, wearing overalls and hard hats, and “interrupting the waste stream,” the RAIR artists turn trash into artwork of one sort or another, and challenge our perceptions of the discarded.
Read MoreArt that wants to be small – how intriguing. But isn’t it a strange notion, one that you would probably not consider unless you were thinking about extremes of size?
I want to say that art works (or not) based upon a myriad of factors, size being only one of many. But here we have eighty-five works of art — a multiplicity of viewpoints, media and materials – that actually work well together and, for reasons that I think are idiosyncratic, want to be small.
Read MoreThe film captures the mood of sorrow and pain, and the quest for freedom, that has always marked the plight of the refugee, and which surely marks the tragic plight of the 65 million people who recently have been forced to leave their homes around the world. It is well worth five minutes of your emotional time.
Read Morethe written image. presents a thought provoking array of works which, in a variety of ways, visually examine the symbolic and conceptual complexity of words and language. The exhibition has been skillfully curated by Susanna Gold, and the presentation in her bright Bryn Mawr home, which spans a series of rooms, is refreshingly pleasant.
Read MoreSomething about the design of the geodesic dome captures the imagination, and the evolution of the design demonstrates how certain abstractions transmogrify when released into the consciousness of a society. Johnson’s work shows us the jump from abstraction to a series of structures which seek to embody both utopian and utilitarian ideals. Geodesic domes may be an imperfect example, but Johnson’s project does capture something of the mystery surrounding the idea-to-object process, and suggests that the results are intriguingly impossible to predict.
Read More“Night Room” is an immersive experience in which you keep discovering new things, not because of its complexity, but as a result of the purity and simplicity of its components. Its changing perspectives on light and color, together with subtle, unexpected details–some of string, some of light–that you might overlook, are intriguing and satisfying.
Read MoreIt’s not often that the whole of an exhibition overpowers its component parts. But with the sharp, brilliant shapes, vigorous diagonals, and eye-popping colors that come at you from practically every direction, Hues Muse at Mt. Airy Contemporary is a show that does just that. With eleven strong paintings by four local artists, Hues Muse feels almost like a grand celebration of color and shape arranged by those avowed colorists, Josef Albers or Ellsworth Kelly. Everywhere you turn, some bright, otherworldly being or design faces you, or provides a window through which to peer, or presents you with something you cannot resist mind-playing with. Bravo to curator Andrea Wohl Keefe.
Read MoreMartin’s striped paintings, such as “Gratitude” and “Untitled #2,” pictured here–soft acrylic washes thinly applied over layers of gesso in pinks, blues, and yellows–are beautiful, tranquil, serene, meditative, pristine, innocent, and exquisitely spare. They fulfill the artist’s intention to evoke abstract positive emotions, emotions “above the line”–happiness, love, and experiences of innocence, freedom, beauty, and perfection. “I would like [my pictures] to represent beauty, innocence and happiness,” Martin said. “I would like them all to represent that. Exaltation.”
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