ARTISTS TALK ON ART 

02/08/2021

ATOA presents Jaqueline Cedar's Good Naked Gallery artists from The Burrow

Moderated by Barry Kostrinsky

ATOA's 43rd Monday Presentation of Jaqueline Cedar's "Good Naked Gallery" exhibition "The Burrow" featuring 5 video artists - Zebadiah Keneally, Irgin Sena, Camilo Godoy, Paula Stuttman, and Larry Cedar - offers insight into these artists' recent and past works. Jaqueline's gallery in her living space offers an 'opportunity  to play and explore' where 'anxiety, pleasure and a range of emotions' reek a serene havoc.  This unique new model for a gallery was previously featured  on 10/26/2020 with the show "Earthly Delights"; both dialogues offered insight into the varied and creative artists Ms. Cedar draws together with her keen eye.  The integration of theatre and the contemporary art world is most evident in the videos in the exhibit and the artists' other works.  The crossover or divide between art and theater meanders a thin line at best.

Zebadah Keaneally, a theatre major bagged by a common object, the plastic bag, left ubiquitously in our land muffles an obstructed sight and limits hearing when Keneally obscures himself with his eco responsibility baggage.  This could almost induce and influence a psychedelic transformation not unlike a stay down low in the basement of a pyramid or in a dark room with chanting and a Peruvian cocktail. Very much an origin story "Touched for the First Time" is about bagman.  Zebadah "judges and reevaluates...it has served its purpose."

Irgin Sena, a painter from Albania of moving pictures, likes the extended duration of the process and engages a slow down of time in a way painting could not do. He wants to experience 1 second in moments over time. Mr. Sena replaces a 'minimal core of family archives' and re-actives the images in different works.  There is a struggle to keep pace, to bring things of interest to the top and to keep something less.  The work brings together personal experience from everyday and Irgin asks how to bring that into a new context, into a new geopolitical Social framework and to disrupt the old accepted norms.  Achieving this with blurriness of image downloads, drawing the work - a primary tool for Mr. Sena, use of memory, and engaging the moment of potentiality Mr. Sena has created a world that defines its parameters.

Camilo Godoy's hair has gone through a lot. It has been cut, almost sold, and started falling out in patches during difficult emotional times such as the passing of his mother and later on his father. Moving deeply into humankind's family history with hair, Camilo is amazed by 4000 year old hair extensions, hair's role in the afterlife, DNA, Mummification, Grieving, Victorian hair wreaths, hair notebooks and its more modern predecessors in Revolutionary images of Che Guevara from the 50's, and 60's - men with all this hair that looked very sexy to a young gay man growing up. As hair length changes gender choice is often revealed.  "Hair" was a broadway hit, shoulder length or longer speaks to revolution, both personal and cultural.

Paula Stuttman's figure drawings have a DADA B/W tone and set the mantra "Upright naked male missing...." You won't quite hit nirvana on that note but the 513 images make and unmake this decapitated shrinking man.  The work is more about what is removed, what is missing and engages absence/presence to ponder more than positive space.  Figure drawing is her critical tool and Ms. Stuttman uses voices as materials.

Ms. Cedar's "Good Naked Gallery" dove deeply into the nepotistic pool of pleasures for artists........and struck gold. Jaqueline's father, Larry Cedar is quite the video artist and actor and his film "The Burrow" as well as recent work was discussed.  Larry Cedar adopts literature from the past, his wife Pamela Cedar directs and does art direction and it becomes clear artists are influenced by their surroundings, their friends, their artwork and yes at times by nurturing parents in an environment where the arts thrive and in which Jaqueline has come full circle growing a world of art within her 2 bedroom apartment gallery.

— Barry Kostrinsky