ARTISTS TALK ON ART 

10/26/2020

ATOA presents Jaqueline Cedar's Good Naked Gallery artists from Earthly Delights

Moderated by Barry Kostrinsky

Jaqueline Cedar's "Good Naked Gallery" is titled from a Seinfeld episode. Though comedy plays a role in her gallery, don't let the implications of sex or a reference to a sitcom fool you. This gallery presents cutting edge creative artists in an exciting mixed arts environment building community and crossing the lines between art, science, play, humor and computers. The exhibition "Earthly Delights" and the seven artists in the show were the focus of the ATOA's 28th virtual Open Studios.

Explorations of materiality, tactility and work in relation to nature are key unifying points of alignment for this thought provoking and mind expanding exhibition.

Jaqueline began by expressing some of these points and then Heidi Norton began the individual artists presentations. 

Heidi works with light and uses organic materials including wax. Permanence is not the issue here.  The moment is what counts and at times the art works evolve through decay, sweating and burning. Her background in photography comes into play as reference and a reuse tool reiterating her thoughts on the passage of time. Transformation, ephemera, impermanence, mortality, detritus are key elements of Ms. Norton's work. She both draws inspiration from Edward Steichen's obsession with delphinium  plants in an homage piece and goes beyond anything Steichen could ever have imagined. Interior vs Exterior plays abound in her work and light, earth and fire are elements she incorporates, bringing to mind Artistotle's elements, his basic building blocks, bypassing the traditional table of elements and getting us back to a more fundamental simpler, yet complex understand of reality.

The married artistic duo of Dominic Terlizzi and Christine Stiver go together like bread and butter- literally as both use amongst other materials these unique and yet common place materials respectively  in their art making practices. Christine draws reference and support from a relatively unknown incredible ground breaking female artists from the late 19th century. Linda Nochlin's famous article "Where are all the female artists" comes to mind; Many were not given the time of day nor their due in history courses old and new. Stiver melts and burns her butter speaking of transience and many thoughts similar to Ms. Nortons. Christine finds it liberating to throw the melted work away and bring to mind the many burdens of ownership, storage and the expense art often saddles the artist with. Indeed she does capture the work in photographs and videos.

Dominic, a MICA grad works with bread and to grab a more solid, stable, and archival image casts the works in paint or the more traditional material of sculpture - Bronze. What results is a complex pattern both broken and connected that calls to mind Giacometti with vertical and horizontal line plays and a complex weave of form that could only come from the original irregular materials he has cast. he plays off the ideas of what can last and what can not and again emphasis ephemera and a duality of options. He hopes to bring the viewer into the works with both pleasure and disruption.

Christopher Lin combines simplicity with complexity in micro tiny worlds with macro complexity in closed universes toying with order and disorder. Subverted uses of fish tanks, drifting, messages in a bottle or better yet plants in a bottle would make Smithson proud. Organic vs synthetic, moss, haiku and years in a Yale lab are just some of the pieces in this complex artist's tool box. Inverted plants flip gravity and play with our notion of what is up and what is down inverting our eyes and ideas much as a surrealist would hope to do to make us see anew.

Jared Hoffman explores lenticular works involving lights, perceptions, space, movement and is an affirmed image hoarder; however this hoarding is assembled on his computer and the work is beyond intellectually challenging and visually appealing, eye candy in the best of ways being both sumptuous and satisfying. Computers are more than an aid here and the work involves layering and complexities played within an exploratory fashion. He respects the California light and space movement of the past.

The duo of Blake Carrington and Tei Blow finished our presentation this evening. They have been training AI and work with machine learning and collect images and words from the internet recombining them in unique ways. At times you get Richter-like schmeres and at other times the work is biomorphic and Bonsai-like as the algorithm approaches nature. The line between nature and computers is approached and crossed in their art and the art of many of the artists in this show. The work was mounted on a tree with low bluetooth hanging fruit in Prospect Park. This show happened outdoors as it was too risky to bring artists and the community through Ms. Cedar's residential apartment. Indeed the black belted video speaks a bit to both intellectualism and S&M.

— Barry Kostrinsky