by donald dusinberre imartsyfartsy@gmail.com
Every few months, MOCA unleashes a barrage of new exhibitions and if you’re reckless about seeing them, you can check them all out in one visit. Although it’s tempting, try to restrain yourself from doing that. Your eyes will get overloaded but your brain will starve.
Think of it as a buffet. You can see everything right in front of you, but you can only fit so much onto your plate. If you try to put some of everything onto that tiny plate, you won’t really enjoy anything. In fact, you’ll only come to realize that cantaloupe and Salisbury steak don’t mix too well in the stomach.
At MOCA, You have to make a choice to see one or two exhibits and save the rest for later. Trust me, it’s the best way. Installation art and photography don’t mix well in the brain.
There are five new exhibitions opening on September 14th and running through January 6, 2008. To help you decide which exhibitions you’ll want to see first, I’ve raided artists’ websites and MOCA’s press releases to give you a straight-up idea of what you may encounter.
(From MOCA Jacksonville’s press release) Carol Prusa’s paintings are inspired by her ongoing fascination with science, alchemy, organizational systems, and botany. Highly finished elliptical and round wooded panels serve as supports for an ethereal arena where Prusa’s depictions of ambiguous microscopic cellular structures, flora and cosmological symbols take on monumental presence. The works are meditative in the repetitive and meticulously drawn organic forms that hover weightless amidst the fluidity of the artist’s layered washes of suspended pigment. Prusa’s obsessively rendered drawings are created in silverpoint, a medium that was utilized by Renaissance masters Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, and Albrecht Durer. The artist’s skillful blending of materials ranging from powdered sulfur, titanium white, graphite and acrylic media, produce works that are subtle and complex in the same instance. The silverpoint drawing that is later heightened with titanium is somewhat faint and partially obscured by the transparent graphite veils. This exhibition features more than twenty works including a new installation that consists of more than a dozen various sized circular disks that are arranged on the gallery walls in a constellation-like configuration.
(From MOCA Jacksonville’s press release) Minoru Ohira’s simplistic and elegant sculptures are inspired by forms observed in nature. The artist transforms raw materials, primarily wood salvaged from construction sites and roadside discards, into a dynamic assortment of meticulously crafted seductive forms. The rounded and curvilinear sculptural forms, some over eight feet in length, exhibit a range of highly polished to jagged, scale-like textured surfaces. Central to the understanding of these works is the artist’s steadfast commitment to traditional woodworking techniques and a deep respect for the inherent nature of materials. Many of Minoru’s sculptures are created not by the use of power tools, but by his painstaking use of handsaws and hatchets. This exhibition features over a dozen large-scale sculptures that survey the varied artistic approaches of this important Japanese born sculptor.
(From marciawoodgallery.com) Jerry Cullum states in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, March 2001, “The uneven, stairstep effect of many of the pieces is a little reminiscent of parallel contour lines on topographical maps, but even that is a misleading comparison. These are, quite simply, abstract forms with their own internal logic, and they give pleasure for that very reason.”
Catherine Fox writes in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, 1997, “This ambiguity of scale infuses the work with a cosmic quality. It’s hard to decide which to admire first - that almost spiritual aura or the physical beauty of the surface patterns created by these little wood pieces and their tree rings and grains.”
(From creativeloafing.com) Martha Whittington’s “Raddle Cross” is like a persistent toddler lugging on your shirtsleeves to get your attention. The piece puts out a sound like ping-pong paddles sending a ball across a table that resonates through the gallery space. Wooden circles of varying sizes are suspended from the gallery ceiling on long strands of yarn and hooked to metal gears that send the discs pinging off the concrete floors at metronomic intervals. This quirky piece, both addled and soothing, comments on the repetitive labors of weaving, though here the gestures are the opposite of productive, the necessary intersections between the threads never occurring.
(From ewing-gallery.org) This printed installation is both a display of James Greene’s valuistics as well as a printed history of the word itself. With “The Making Of,” Greene - a former grocery store clerk and retail employee - reveals his own consumer politics (contradictions and all) by symbolizing and accounting for each of his consumer decisions. The installation is a scale re-creation of Greene’s home, family, and friends printed on pink insulation board.
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