Gallery Report: June 27, 2007

Part One
This Gallery Report will be posted in several parts, appearing separately over the next couple of weeks.

The first installment, below, deals with four shows that, for one reason or another (or one artist or another), I liked. The forthcoming posts will discuss a group show at RARE, a tribal art exhibition at Betty Cuningham, and Michael Light's exceptional aerial photographs and bookworks on display at Hosfelt Gallery.

Note: In the interest of full disclosure, I went to graduate school with two of the artists highlighted here. I've been able to see the work of Amy Talluto and Doug Morris develop over the last five or six years, but I don't believe I allow these personal associations to bias my opinion of their work, dubious though the claim may seem.

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David Kennedy-Cutler
"Dying of Not Dying"
2005
Bubble gum, tree branch, wood
42 x 19 x 9 inches
Morgan Lehman Gallery: This being summertime, New York's galleries are predominantly occupied by half-baked group shows, and so "Promised Land," curated by Elizabeth M. Grady of the Whitney Museum, stood out on paper. The exhibition "[addresses] the recent upsurge in art dealing with 'American' imagery" and "the invention of a national identity." This should be exciting, complex stuff!


Kimi Weart
"untitled"
2006
Graphite and neon paint on paper
51 1/2 x 89 inches
The strongest pieces in the show are the most iconoclastic, even though their critique is also the most general. Perhaps they work because the artists' broad stroke approach allows the viewer some wiggle room? If artists offer too pointed an allegory or critique, the work becomes almost pedantic. Indeed, the more "clever" works in "Promised Land" suffer for this very reason. Instead, it is the artworks that take advantage of more obvious imagery -- those that, were I to have them described to me before having seen the show, would sound almost trite -- that are the most successful. In this group I would include pieces by Kimi Weart, Aaron Morse, and David Kennedy-Cutler.

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Marcia Kure
"012"
2006
Kolanut pigment, watercolor, pencil on paper
15 x 11 inches
BravinLee programs: Aptly called the "Vogue Series," Marcia Kure's works on paper are as chic as they are charming. Frankly, it's a bit surprising to see these whimsical, freely handled kolanut pigment, watercolor, and pencil drawings in Chelsea. They aren't a far cry from some steampunk costume design, the sort of thing you might find under the Extras menu on a DVD. Kure presents us with space cowboys, Victorian walrus men, and robed birds vaguely reminiscent of Henson's Skeksis. Personally, I love it, but a slew of my arty friends, the same bunch that uses "illustration" as a four-letter word, would shrug the show off. It's their loss.


Marcia Kure
"0.5 Tons II"
2006
Kolanut pigment, watercolor, pencil on paper
15 x 11 inches
My favorite drawings on display - there were at least forty works included - were Kure's most original creations, or at least those most unfamiliar to me. "0.5 Tons II" pictures a brainy she-male, and could be interpreted as an allegory of the tortured artist as Tiresias, and "012" seems to be the product of a menage a trois involving Marvin the Martian, a long-legged sparrow, and a hot dog. When I visit a show like Kure's, I pity those art viewers who are unable to appreciate whimsy; these small works are a joy to look at.

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Doug Morris
"untitled"
2002
Ribbon, foam, paper
approx. 24 x 30 x 18 inches
David Krut Projects: I very much like Renee Ricardo's curatorial impetus for HOMEGROWN. "18 emerging artists and art collectives from Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and Seattle" are included, all of whom "[take] cues from such homegrown practices as collage, quilting, crochet, embroidery, cross-stitch, and assemblage." Unfortunately much of the work on hand seems gestative yet, as though these artists might wow me five years out. But Margaret Lee, Jon Rosenbaum, Anne-Francoise Potterat, Doug Morris, and Erika Somogyi are exceptions and, of this group, Morris's work is the strongest.


Doug Morris
"untitled"
2006
Ribbon, foam, paper
approx. 18 x 16 x 8 inches
The gallery press release states that Morris "[pulls] imagery from many sources - ranging from Mexican folk art to a vacuum cover made by his grandmother." To my eye these brightly colored, impish creations are as closely related to molecular structure diagrams, Bosch's demons, and Hentai as they are pinatas. But whatever Morris's sources, the sculptures are playfully lewd and aesthetically seductive.

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Amy Talluto
"Burn 2"
2006
Pencil on paper
11 x 14 inches
Black & White: On the whole "En Plein Air RELOADED," a promising group show at Black & White Gallery's Chelsea location, falls flat, the result of concept trumping execution. Each of these artists is invested in their work, but as a viewer I struggle to establish the sort of connection I have come to expect from successful investigations of landscape.


Amy Talluto
"Blue"
2006
Oil on canvas
48 x 36 inches
The best landscape art, broad and ambiguous though the classification may be, shows more than it tells, granting the viewer an opportunity to experience land anew or in a heightened state - as in works by Caspar David Friedrich, Thomas Cole, or Robert Smithson - or offering us glimpses of worlds we may not know or haven't had a chance to contemplate - an Edward Burtynsky photograph, for example. Most of the work included in "En Plein Air" "subverts the traditional genre of landscape," as the press release puts it, by foregrounding the sub-text. The experiential aspect of these landscapes is largely erased in the process (or made artificially alien and off-putting in the case of Fiona Gardner's ultra-sharp photographs of Southern belles in a Florida theme park).


Amy Talluto
"Burn 3"
2007
Pencil on paper
10 x 13 inches
Amy Talluto's inclusions are an exception. Regular readers know that I very much like Talluto's paintings - even Art Fag City referenced my affection for her work - but I didn't realize just how accomplished Talluto's drawing has become. As far as I'm concerned, "Burn 2," "Burn 3," and "Blue" stole the show. I'm eager to see Amy's next solo outing, whenever it may come.

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Photo credits: David Kennedy-Cutler and Kimi Weart images ripped from Morgan Lehman webiste; Marcia Kure images courtesy BravinLee; Doug Morris images taken by Hungry Hyaena; Amy Talluto images courtesy artist

Sustaining Hope

Sebastiao Salgado
Reindeer graze on Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula

After spending decades photographing the machinations of capitalism (and the resulting dereliction of places and peoples), Sebastiao Salgado "lived for about seven years in real desperation." When individuals face formidable adversity or witness untenable horrors, they often turn to religious fellowship for solace. Indeed, the tribal communion of shared faith is a principal reason for religion's evolutionary success. Salgado found hope, however, not in prayer meetings or the Eucharist but in the natural world, in particular the outlying, inhospitable places - the poles, the deserts, the deep rain forests - and the indigenous societies, human and non-human alike, which occupy these regions. His current, on-going series, entitled "Genesis," is a testament to the remarkable restorative powers of Nature.

"I believe that these very political issues are all tied together. When I go to make these Genesis pictures — it’s not that I wanted to become photographer of exotic animals, not that I wanted to do landscape. I worked a lot when I was considering this project with Conservation International, and from them I get [the figure] that 46 percent of the planet is there like the day of Genesis. It is for this that I’m looking. It’s fabulous, to show to the people that live in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, anywhere, who imagine that all the planet is destroyed. There is good news, very hopeful news: 46 percent is there yet, not including the oceans. Of course, that is not the majority, the majority we exploit."

Today, Salgado is a glass half-full kinda guy and the Genesis photography project helped rescue him from despair.


Sebastiao Salgado
Sun over Namib Desert

Salgado fortified his hope by turning his attention to the land. A cultivated appreciation of the world that birthed us and sustains us (cultivated, in this case, by shedding many of contemporary culture's prejudices and fears) allows us to more fully adopt an integrated worldview. To do so, we must be honest; we must include strip mines, genocide and industry, all products of our special exuberance, in this cultivated consideration. This is the first step in developing a philosophy that might lead to a fundamental restructuring of our globalized economic system. More importantly, the sort of experience one has when you connect to the whole, or as I call it, the Everything, reminds us that the promises of immortal salvation are irrelevant. This life - indeed, this very moment - is worth innumerable afterlives. If we, as a culture, awaken to that truth, sustainability might yet be, well, sustainable.


Sebastiao Salgado
Himbas mother and child with dog, Namib Desert

Photo credits: all images, Sebastiao Salgado; dates vary

Singing for the rains

A child of the South, I miss the fluctuating drone of cicadas during the spring and summer months. Yet I take some solace when a startling crush of thunder sets off all the car alarms in Astoria.

Reed Flute Caves and Indonesian Fireflies

So after a lot of hemming and hawing I've decided to take a slightly different tack to this whole blogging thing. Or rather, I've decided to go with the more conventional approach.

As I've said (way too often), when the painting is going well, the writing suffers. Although the two languages compliment one another, when I'm operating in a predominantly visual mode, I find it difficult to write. Pecking at the keyboard becomes a frustrating chore when I’d rather be in the studio. The good news, however, is that I'm almost always in a painting mode this last year, and so the studio time is productive and my new works continue to get stronger and more exciting; the flip side, of course, is that I'm never much in the mood to write (unless I'm reacting to art or some particularly curious article or idea).

The longer posts and short essays that regular readers are accustomed to may go the way of the dodo or at least become exceedingly rare. The “more conventional approach” I have in mind? Content comprised of tidbits - arty links, random thoughts, poetry and the like - punctuated by the familiar “Gallery Reports.” I’ll reserve any essay efforts for publications and online journals.

And, so, to get things started…a picture of the Reed Flute Cave in China’s Guangxi Zhuangzu region. The photograph, by James P. Nelson, was published in the July 2007 issue of National Geographic. The ceiling of the cave is seen reflected in an underground pool.

Admiring the image, David Abram’s writing on sensual vertigo came to mind.

“Late one evening, I stepped out of my little hut in the rice paddies of eastern Bali and found myself falling through space. Over my head the black sky was rippling with stars, densely clustered in some regions, almost blocking out the darkness between them, and loosely scattered in other areas, pulsing and beckoning to each other. Behind them all streamed the great river of light, with its several tributaries. But the Milky Way churned beneath me as well, for my hut was set in the middle of a large patchwork of rice paddies, separated from each other by narrow, two-foot-high dikes, and these paddies were all filled with water. By day, the surface of these pools reflected perfectly the blue sky, a reflection broken only by the thin, bright-green tips of new rice. But by night, the stars themselves glimmered from the surface of the paddies, and the river of light whirled through the darkness underfoot as well as above; there seemed no ground in front of my feet, only the abyss of starstudded space falling away forever.

I was no longer simply beneath the night sky, but also above it; the immediate impression was of weightlessness. I might perhaps have been able to reorient myself, to regain some sense of ground and gravity, were it not for a fact that confounded my senses entirely: between the galaxies below and the constellations above drifted countless fireflies, their lights flickering like the stars, some drifting up to join the constellations overhead, others, like graceful meteors, slipping down from above to join the constellations underfoot, and all these paths of light upward and downward were mirrored, as well, in the still surface of the paddies. I felt myself at times falling through space, at other moments floating and drifting. I simply could not dispel the profound vertigo and giddiness; the paths of the fireflies, and their reflections in the water's surface, held me in a sustained trance. Even after I crawled back to my hut and shut the door on this whirling world, the little room in which I lay seemed itself to be floating free of the Earth.”

T.H. Whites’ Merlin said “There is only one thing for it then—to learn… That is the only thing that the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.” I agree, though I would add that learning to look, feel, taste, touch and hear anew, learning again how to just be, like the proverbial baby…that also roots the human animal.

I hope you all are well.

Colonies collapsing

"But I think we’re the ones suffering from Colony Collapse Disorder. Because although nobody really knows for sure what’s killing the bees, it’s not al-Qaeda, and it’s not God doing some of his Old Testament shtick, and it’s not Winnie the Pooh. It’s us. It could be from pesticides, or genetically modified food, or global warming, or the high-fructose corn syrup we started to feed them. Recently it was discovered that bees won’t fly near cell phones — the electromagnetic signals they emit might screw up the bees navigation system, knocking them out of the sky. So thanks guy in line at Starbucks, you just killed us. It’s nature’s way of saying, 'Can you hear me now?'"

-Bill Maher

Many readers will be at least a little familiar with news of the global collapse of European honeybee (Apis mellifera) populations. I've talked with friends and acquaintances who take this development very seriously, while others who dismiss it offhand. Whatever their attitude, however, most people possess only a superficial understanding of colony collapse disorder (CCD). As with most "natural" declines, the science of the situation is more complex than our major media outlets report.

Consider the following wrinkle. The European honeybee, the species in question, is not native to the United States. While many areas of agricultural production will be adversely affected by their collapse, some entomologists have pointed out that populations of native bee species may rebound as the niche they originally filled (as pollinators) opens up again. On the other hand, those native bee species are not domesticated, and therefore will not pollinate crops as efficiently as European honeybees do. No surprise there; what's good for biodiversity is rarely good for industrialized agriculture.

I'm very curious to learn what (or what confluence of causes) is responsible for the collapse. While I’m pleased to see celebrities like Bill Maher making a popular fuss about an environmental dilemma, the media only chose to issue a red alert regarding this particular environmental issue because it could lead to diminishing economic returns. Given this agrinomics bias, the science side of the news story is generally glossed over or grossly simplified.

Fortunately, there are folks offering more comprehensive summations. Link over to Bioephemera for an excellent roundup of the situation (and one of Cicada's lovely paintings, to boot).

Penises and art

Last night, I caught the last half of "Creature Comforts," the US spin-off of Aardman Animations' 1990 Best Animated Short Film winner (created by Nick Park, of "Wallace & Gromit" fame). The interview audio tracks are recorded with "real" Americans, then cast as the various animal characters. Not surprisingly, most of the comments are decidedly inexpert...and that much better for it.

The final segment of last night's episode was entitled "Art." It was delightful, and a welcome change from the often tedious musings of art bloggers. (Tedious is a strong word, but if you read through the long conversations generated by posts like Winkleman's "What's An Artist? Take 459" or Cognitive Daily's "Is Science Art?," you'll likely agree that sometimes even thoughtful dialogue can seem like so much noise.)

Gallery Report, June 5th, 2007

Mr. Misi on the studio floor

I've seen a great deal of art these last two months, but I haven't been inclined to write a gallery report since early April. The truth is, I probably wouldn't be writing one now but for the fact that my apartment and studio are hot and humid. Mr. Misi, my abundantly proportioned house cat, lolls about on the shady areas of the hardwood and at night I rest ice packs on the back of my neck to lower my core temperature. Even when outdoor conditions are tolerable, my apartment remains uncomfortable and, because sweat likes to sabotage watercolors, my painting time is limited to cooler days.

I could install the window unit air conditioner, but I have trouble reconciling such profligate power consumption, especially in my poorly insulated apartment building. Instead, stubborn and sticky, I suffer through the summer months, longing for autumn, winter or spring (and residential architecture that better considers natural air flow).

Fortunately, computer keyboards aren't much bothered much by the occasional bead of sweat and, after noticing a small pile of press releases and notes saved from recent shows I enjoyed, I've decided to write about four of them.

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Andre Ethier
"Untitled"
2007
Oil on masonite
20 x 16 inches

Derek Eller Gallery: Andre Ethier's painting first came to my attention in late 2005, during his second solo show at Derek Eller Gallery. I was intrigued by the artist-musician's easy handling of oil paint, made fluid and in some areas translucent with the addition of various oil mediums. The works in that exhibition were luminous and colorful, but because Ethier mostly painted crude, ugly portraits, I was only able to admire the surface and color of his paintings. Ethier may have intended his slapdash treatment to read as nonchalance, but it instead seemed that the artist was unwilling to commit, perhaps frightened of accusations of earnestness.

Based on his follow-up at Eller, it appears that Ethier's reluctance to embrace his subjects has been overcome. Ethier also turns more to fantasy and myth in the recent work; his cast of characters now includes owl-headed figures, trolls, minotaurs, winged lions, and other, more fanciful creations. It is only when Ethier depicts one of these fantastic creatures with a cigarette or a peace sign medallion that I find myself again wondering if he isn't confusing defensive or cynical hipster posturing for intelligent mischief.


Andre Ethier
"Untitled"
2007
Oil on masonite
20 x 16 inches

But I do not wish to focus on the show's few weaknesses, for Ethier includes some remarkable visual treats. The strongest paintings in the exhibition are also the most complex. Startling and captivating, Ethier's psychedelic pseudo-landscapes are every bit as beautiful as they are exhilarating. Three or four of the works in this show are strong enough, in fact, that a discerning viewer could return to them time and again, on each occasion discovering something new.

The gallery's press release suggests Ethier intends his portrayal of nature, both physical and metaphysical, to be "not just horrific, but...oppressively overwhelming and of epic proportion, filled with wonder and beauty as well." That sounds like a fair description of the philosophical sublime. A great many artists attempt to celebrate that idea, often making works that are grand in scale. With his small paintings, however, Ethier fares better than most and in doing so reminds us that one needn't be dwarfed to be awed. I left the gallery thinking the artist, at his best, something of a latter-day, irreligious Blake.


Andre Ethier
"Untitled"
2007
Oil on masonite
24 x 18 inches

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Amy Ross
"Cow Birch with Barred Owls"
2007
Graphite, watercolor and walnut ink on paper
30 x 22 inches

Jen Bekman Gallery: I've written about Amy Ross's paintings on HH before. Several "delicate watercolors of hybrid bird-mushrooms" were included in "Flight Plan," a group exhibition at Morgan Lehman Gallery last year. I was at first skeptical of those works; they flirted with preciousness, but Ross's accomplished technique and "sincere integrity" won we over.

"anima mundi," Ross's current solo show at Jen Bekman Gallery, includes a few of the smaller birdshroom works, but the majority of Ross's recent paintings picture birch tree groves. As with the birdshrooms, however, the trees are mutants, part birch, part animal. In some of the larger works, she-wolves, creatures with human bodies and wolf heads, gather among the mutant trees. Although the artist states that her work depicts the natural world "through the lens of genetic engineering and mutation gone awry," her hybrids seem less the product of mad science than an active, engaged imagination. Many of our species' primary stories - now considered quaint by all but a few remaining indigenous societies - are populated by hybrid creatures and shape shifters, and the owls, pheasants, she-wolves and hoofed trees of Ross's pictures seem borne of a desire on the part of the artist for natural communion, a longing to reconnect with our animal antecedence, rather than an interest in engineering mutants.


Amy Ross
"She-wolf Series #6"
2007
Graphite, watercolor and walnut ink on paper
30 x 22 inches

But perhaps it doesn't matter whether Ross's morphs look inward, from whence we came, or forward, into that bright dream haze we call the future. Consider Dr. Joe Rosen, the maverick plastic surgeon who argues that it is only a matter of time - he claimed five years, um, five years ago - before humans have working wings. He believes our brains will build neural maps to control the new, surgically attached limbs. This claim would be more easily dismissed were Rosen not a respected physician at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire and a professor at Dartmouth College. (I highly recommend the terrific article, "Dr. Daedalus," by Lauren Slater, in the October 2001 issue of Harper's Magazine.) Who is to say that Dr. Rosen's surgical ambitions aren't also attached to some sort of longing for reconnection with the essential self, or animal?

Whatever Rosen's impetus may be, I don't see X-Men in Ross's hybrids; her creatures are more akin to Herne the Hunter, at least as Herne is portrayed in the BBC Robin Hood series of the early 1980s. In that incarnation, Herne is a shaman who dons a stag head, appears in misty visions and speaks with booming authority to guide Robin of Loxley, but, and this is the critical point, when Herne removes the stag head he is merely an old cripple who lives in a cave and fusses about with his kettle. He is still human despite - or perhaps more human, more vulnerable, because of - his ability to commune with and fathom Nature's supernatural elements. Herne didn't graft antlers to his skull or replace his tired feet with hoofs; it is enough to be human and to pay attention. This is what it seems Ross is up to among the birch trees, and why I respond positively to her pictures.


Amy Ross
"Goat Birch with Goldfinches"
2007
Graphite, watercolor and walnut ink on paper
30 x 22 inches

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Rachel Beach
"In The Round"
2007
Wood, wood veneer and oil paint
31 x 31 x 6 inches

HQ Gallery: I caught Rachel Beach's exhibition, "Chicken & Egg," at HQ Gallery the day before it closed. I'd seen the work - handsomely crafted wood sculptures that seduce and deceive the eye - beforehand, but only in online reproductions. Although the images on Beach's website are very good, her pieces need to be experienced in person. The intelligence and wit of this recent work is principally sensed; intellectual consideration is secondary, at least initially.


Rachel Beach
"London Bridge"
2006
Wood, wood veneer and oil paint
15 x 65 x 5 1/2 inches

When I did begin thinking about her hanging sculptures - and this only after I had left HQ - M.C. Escher came to mind. Both artists share an interest in pattern and so-called "optical illusion" but, more importantly, whether looking at a reproduced Escher drawing or one of Beach's wall works, conscious reflection is forced aside as my eyes and brain struggle to make sense of the given information. There is no set way to see such works; viewers are provided with "ands" and "ors." The optical trickery at work here might be considered the biological equivalent of a Zen koan, a question designed to root the practitioner in the moment. (Perhaps the title Beach chose for the show is an allusion to this sort of clear-headed uncertainty.)

Like many young artists today, Beach's designs and titles draw on a well of diverse sources - the arabesques of "Turkey's Nest" and the crenelations of "Wonderland," for example. Today we recognize most everything as familiar - the whole wide world is available on TV and YouTube in bite-sized clips - and yet we don't really know any more about "the other" than our parents or grandparents did in their day. Entering "Chicken & Egg," I experienced something akin to a tourist's alienation, an unsettled feeling furthered by the optical push-pull play of the work: shiny wood veneer, used in many of the sculptures, contrasts with the natural grain of unpainted wood; colorful, bright oil paint abuts earthy ochres and wood flesh; a two dimensional reading slips easily, and quite suddenly, into three dimensions. The sculptures, hung close together in salon fashion, grant viewers a world of contour and symbol in proxy, but one that most of us are only capable of absorbing in the abstract. The sculptures remain an amalgam of half truths, misunderstandings, and alternative narratives - an epistemological riff on Escher's optical games - all of which are recognized in glimpses, before you're on to the next reading.

But - and this is no small thing - Beach's works look fantastic, not so much beautiful as they are sexy, alluring. Considered individually, these sculptures are a meeting of careful craft and chic styling. Taken as a whole, the exhibition is a Necker portrait of our pastiche, pomo worldview.


Rachel Beach
"Midnight"
2005
Wood, wood veneer and acrylic
23 x 35 x 6 1/2 - 2 inches (variable)

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Boyce Cummings
"Black Trumpet"
2007
Oil on canvas
48 x 48 inches

Jonathan Shorr Gallery: Boyce Cummings is a close friend of mine. We met seven years ago in graduate school and it was immediately clear that we shared a deep affinity for wildlife and ethology. We both recognize the more raw elements of our species' evolutionary indebtedness to the rest of it. Curiously, our work at the time drew on many of the same stylistic influences. Given these commonalities, we were bound to either despise one another or get along famously. Happily, it turned out to be the latter.



Boyce Cummings
"Owl Monkey"
2007
Graphite and ink on paper
8 x 11 inches

So, sure, I'm a bit biased, but I think highly of Boyce's latest exhibition, "Camouflage," at the Jonathan Shorr Gallery in SoHo. The show is predominantly comprised of small pencil and ink drawings, but also includes several sculptures and paintings. Boyce's facile line work - immediate, graphic and bold, but also graceful and emotive - is central to the success of most of the drawings, but it isn't only the artist's technical skill and confidence that animates the work. Cummings' art is nurtured by the artist's comfortable relationship with dark humor, violence and contradiction. Much of Cummings' imagery is freighted with meaning - bluebirds, trumpets, and nooses, for example - but even those works featuring more cryptic or unconscious signs/characters aggressively assert themselves, as though we should know exactly what variety of mischief is intended. Mischief, though, is probably too timid a word for much of this work; thoughtful viewers will connect the violence done to (or by) Cummings' animal hybrids with recurrent themes of social injustice. If this is a portrait of the human animal, it's a decidedly melancholy one.


Boyce Cummings
"Cat Mangler versus Rock Parrot" (detail)
2007
Epoxy resin and paint
Dimensions variable

One of my favorite works in "Camouflage" is a sculpture, "Cat Mangler versus Rock Parrot." In this piece, a thin, yellow feline stands atop a pile of earth and leaves, staring intently ahead at a fluttering blue bird. The blue bird, Yellow Cat presumes, could be dinner. But the bird is not, in fact, a bird at all, but a lure on the tail of a much larger, barrel-chested predator, also cat-like in nature, but possessing humanoid hands and a Confucian abundance of whiskers. With its frighteningly intent eyes focused on Yellow Cat, this larger beast, the Cat Mangler, twitches his tail lure to-and-fro, further entrancing his own potential meal. Just when I thought I had accounted for all the goings-on, I realized that the "pile of earth and leaves" on which Yellow Cat stands is a third hungry hunter. As I rounded the pedestal the face of an eagle-like mud beast came into view, Rock Parrot, with great, gnarled feet and distant, reptilian eyes. This third player in the drama, mimicking some unremarkable terrain, was ready to make a meal of the Mangler. It's a Rock Parrot-eat-Cat Mangler-eat-Yellow Cat world, I guess.

Many young artists - indeed, young adults generally - talk about inequality and inequity, and of replacing the flawed systems now in place with something better. The French writer and philosopher Voltaire believed the Christian church an unnecessary evil in his day and called for a total rejection of faith. His contemporaries responded by asking what the philosopher would put in place of the church. His exasperated response: "What! A ferocious beast has sucked the blood of my family; I tell you to get rid of that beast, and you ask me, what shall we put in its place!" Cummings' "Cat Mangler versus Rock Parrot" isn't just a window onto the wonders of natural selection and adaptation, or merely a reminder of the bloody violence inherent in any food chain; in the context of the exhibition (and today's fraught global theatre), it stands as a critique of our accepted social systems.


Boyce Cummings
"Cheers to the Field Workers"
2006
Collaged paper and acrylic paint on paper
10 x 15 inches

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Photo credits: Picture of Mr. Misi taken by Hungry Hyaena, 2007; Ethier images ripped from Derek Eller Gallery website; Ross images ripped from Jen Bekman Gallery website; Beach images courtesy the artist; Cummings images courtesy the artist