Schizzo: L’Isola di Fortuna / Fortune’s Island

by Paul D'Agostino

L’Isola di Fortuna / Fortuna’s Island, 1-4.
Serialized set of polytype monoprints with cross-diminishing palette.
Oil on card stock, 2012. Click on one for slideshow of all.

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According to a tradition going back to
the Romance of the Rose (Jean de Meung, 1280),
Fortune lives in a half-crumbling palace set on a rocky island,
which is now assaulted by waves, now left high and dry,
and it is constantly changing shape.

.                         .

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Extracted from The Mill and the Cross,
Michael Francis Gibson

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Artwork, P. D’Agostino

Extra curricular: science

by A.L. McMichael

Editors’ note: Sometimes presumably simple questions are the most elusive to address. A deeply storied and likely eternal example of such a question is the following:
What is art?

Writings on After Vasari bearing the new heading, “extra curricular” are attempts to explore this query in various ways, to probe the ever-nebulous boundaries of ‘art’ in hopes of grasping, however fleetingly, why it is that some endeavors and objects merit such a name.

**************

In The Brodmann Areas ballet from Norte Maar, dancers interact with video projection and sound by After Vasari’s own Paul D’Agostino.
PHOTO: Norte Maar.

Science and art are, at times, uneasy bedfellows—one explores the concrete and measurable while the other incorporates our entire realm of possibility and fantasy. This was not always the case, of course. In Renaissance Florence painters were incorporated into the guild of physicians and pharmacists, emphasizing their skills in mixing and measuring pigments. Leonardo da Vinci became the essence of a ‘Renaissance man’ with his plans for a helicopter and anatomical sketches created alongside his painted masterpieces. His anatomical drawings, on exhibition at Buckingham Palace, were produced with near-photographic accuracy, capturing the nuances of how a spine supports the body and how the heart pumps blood.

Dancers are often at the forefront of exploring the human body and its movements as a nexus of art and science. The Brodmann Areas, a recent collaborative ballet at Norte Maar, was named for a map exploring the cerebral cortex. Choreographer Julia Gleich introduced the final performance by sharing with the audience, “the dances are experiments.” And in that phrase, she summed up aspects of scientific experimentation that are driven by human creativity.

Each piece danced was a meditation on kinesis and memory. In a section called “Motivi esteriori e cosi via,” a film of collaged images was projected behind the dance floor. Each figure on the stage danced a response, emphasizing the temporal nature of fleeting images and the physical presence of the studio wall. As the images disappeared or changed, the movement continued, incorporating our memories of the images as an additional medium in the work.

In a segment titled “Folium: a wrinkles on the surface of the cerebellum,” Jace Coronado danced a solo with a small ladder strapped to his back. His jubilant leaps were a manifestation of pure human achievement. The accompanying clack of castanets in Antonio Martin y Coll’s music referenced the flapping ladder. Stepping away from clinical references to the brain, the piece offered instead metaphors for subtlety, subconscious connections, repeated thoughts. The ballet was an ever-changing incorporation of dance, visual stimulation, music, and vocals that speak to the myriad connections and collaborations in the activity of the human brain.

Harnessing neuroscience is also a way to decipher creative impulses. An Xiao of Hyperallergic has recently pondered the scientific impetus for art, exploring “what’s going on in artists’ brains” while they create. Jeremy Dean has pointed out that embodied metaphors such as “jog one’s memory,” can be put to literal use: movement, gesture, and even posture are connected to problem solving.

But what about the inherent element of science that is creativity? Experiments, even when tightly controlled are the result of intellectual curiosity, of innovative problem solving. My response is to contemplate and challenge my own notions of medium and materials in the construction of art. Leonardo’s painstaking draughtsmanship was a vehicle for both scientific observation and visual expression; perhaps it offers the most tangible example of the human body as a loca sancta of both science and of art.

Schizzo: See Idem, Ibidem, et alii

by Paul D'Agostino

Futuro anteriore VII: Colpevoli saranno stati tutti e nessuno affatto / Future Perfect VII: Guilty Will Have Been Everyone and No One At All. Mixed-media collage with ink and acrylic mediums on gessoed paper, 2012.

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See Idem, Ibidem, et alii

Herewith I observe
Paul Virilio observing
Franz Kafka’s version
of matters related
to what Jean Rostand called
‘foolishness’ made ‘noisier,’¹
and Ray Bradbury,
‘the bombardment of images.’²

Thus the thusly prefaced
observation:

“‘The masses are rushing, running,
charging through the age. They think
they are advancing, but they are simply
running on the spot and falling into the
void, that is all,’ observed Kafka.”³

Analogously circular, the pits of
citation.*

______________________

1. Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner, London, Verso, 2005. Cit. p. 38.
2. Ibidem.
3. Idem.
*  See notes 3, 2, 1.

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Artwork & text, P. D’Agostino

______________________

Nota bene: Feeling that the above verses were already lexico-textually indulgent enough for one post, I had opted not to include an additional note about the intriguing—at least in my mind—coincidence that led me to write them. But then a message I received from my cohort here, A.L. McMichael, led me to reconsider that decision.

Thusly did the coincidence play out:

The first lines of Chapter 5 of Virilio’s above-cited The Information Bomb are as follows: “‘The war years do not seem like real years…. They were a nightmare in which reality stopped,’ wrote Agatha Christie not so very long ago.”

Indeed, Virilio opens the chapter with a quote, an at least mildly chilling one at that. What’s more, he does so with a quote from an author whose works I do not often find cited, then proceeds in subsequent pages to cite authors whose works I know much better and find cited with at least relative frequency. That in itself is neither coincidental nor noteworthy, to be sure; that is, that Virilio’s citational opening and further paraphrasing and quoting might have been the impetus for me to compose a few inherently disposable verses—ouroborically self-consuming in their tautologized knot, those verses exist ever-stuck in the act of self-disposing—about, essentially, quotes, follows a logic that is linear enough.

The deeper layer in all this that made my encounter with Virilio’s citation of Agatha Christie so momentous—again, at least in my mind—was that it occurred almost precisely 24 hours after a previous, and quite similarly unexpected, encounter with the works of the same author. For two mornings ago (on the morning of 23 March 2012, that is), while reading the current issue of The Atlantic (April 2012) and arriving at a series of five rather brief book reviews (pp. 94-95), I found it notable that two of the brief reviews were of recently reissued editions of books first published decades ago, and both by the same writer, Agatha Christie. That doubled-up reminder of the author might have been enough to keep her name fresh in my mind, but what made me take more mental note was that I’d thought, after reading both reviews, how much I’d like to read both of the books mentioned therein. Admittedly, and perhaps inexcusably, I’ve never felt eager, or at least not irresistibly compelled, to delve into Christie’s oeuvre proper. These volumes, however, fall outside of it to some extent and seem promisingly full of different sorts of mysteries and surprises. For instance, one review notes that in Agatha Christie: An Autobiography, one finds a wealth of details related to how she derived plots and characters—yet absolutely no mention of what is considered her “famous 11-day disappearance in 1926″; the other review appraises very favorably Come, Tell Me How You Live: An Archaeological Memoir, in which Christie recounts experiences from her yearly trips to Syria in the 1930s with her husband, Sir Max Mallowan, who traveled there regularly for archaeological digs, all of which conjures a romantically placid, genteel aura of a nation that is currently in the tumult of self-destructive—though perhaps eventually self-renewing, unlikely though it still seems—violence.

I clearly dug into those reviews enough to plan to perhaps eventually dig into those books as well, so my brain was prepared to react synaptically when I encountered her name again 24 hours later in quite a different source—and sitting in precisely the same chair at the kitchen counter, no less, and with that issue of The Atlantic still right there as well. Also of note, of course, is the precise source of Virilio’s quote: the first edition of Agatha Christie: An Autobiography, which was initially published in 1977.

That happens to be the same year a certain yours truly was also issued (to the variable detriment of others).

All the same, as stated above, I had considered including something about all this in the post, only to then decide not to bother. It’s not all that coincidental, I figured, and it would perhaps be of little interest to anyone else. Furthermore, I note these types of lexical coincidences far too often to describe them every time, though each instance compels me to somehow do so.

But then I sent A.L. a brief note last night telling her I’d prepared a new Schizzo for the blog, and asking her to have a look at it before I posted it today. I mentioned nothing regarding the Agatha Christie encounters detailed above.

She replied at some late hour last night, but I only saw it early this afternoon. Therein she said the following: “That’s the second Ray Bradbury reference I’ve seen in two days. Is this a sign that I should be reading Fahrenheit 451 or not writing on lined paper or something?”

‘Perhaps,’ I thought, but I replied differently. “Funny you should bring up multiple encounters with an unlikely author. That’s exactly how I ended up writing that piece, though Bradbury wasn’t the unlikely one. It was, instead, someone quite different. I thought about adding an indulgent note at the end describing it, but then I thought it wasn’t necessary. Now I know it’s in fact necessary, so I’ll add that before posting.”

Necessary, at any rate, to round things off. To be thorough. To bring things, in a manner quite different from that implied in the verses above—or maybe not so different at all, depending on how any of this is eventually read—full circle. Additionally, A.L’s reference to that particular work by Bradbury also conjures imagery related to my collage featured above.

If nothing else, and if only to conclude, this ancillary recounting of coincidences and the like dovetails nicely with something Christie writes in her Mesopotamian memoirs regarding why she made such an effort to compose them. She did so (as quoted, of course in The Atlantic) “to remember that there were such days and such places.”

And such delight to be had in reading and writing.

In recounting and recalling.

In citing, repeating.

Ibidem, ‘as above.’

Idem, ‘the same.’

Nota bene.

— P.D.

Schizzo: Aloft

by Paul D'Agostino

Futuro anteriore VI: Si sarà sempre trattato di partenze, scoperte, rovine / Future Perfect VI: It Will Have Always Been a Matter of Departures, Discoveries, Ruins. Mixed-media collage and drawing, with ink and acrylic mediums on layered gessoed paper, 2012.*

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“As language refers to its own taking place via shifters, the “this”
and the “now,” [it] produces the sensible expressed in it as a past and
at the same time defers this sensible to the future. In this fashion,
it is always already caught up in a history and a time.”
- Giorgio Agamben**

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Aloft

The plight of beauty
might indeed
for artistry
be:
to lose love almost
or even entirely,
any longer
able solely
to adore.

Whence verses and chapters
and pictures yield
whatever truths any things
may yield.

Grand fictions of
laughter, of magic, of wars,
tales told and retold ever curled into
folds in history’s pleats, distant and deep,
to unfold and refurl into scrolls,
the variant texts of recrafted
worlds, the compassed flights and
magnetic maps and sapient talons of
messenger birds
aloft,
somewhere
in a time.

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Artwork & text, P. D’Agostino

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* This collage is currently featured in my exhibition at Norte Maar Gallery, Appearance Adrift in the Garden, on view through March 4th. More information at nortemaar.org.

** From The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford University Press, 2005).

Studio Visit: Cynthia Hartling

by A.L. McMichael

Cynthia Hartling's studio with a number of canvases including Blear-eyed (oil and gold leaf powder on linen).

Inwood, Manhattan

Cynthia Hartling is immersed in her art. Whereas more than a few Manhattan apartments have studios within, Hartling’s instead offers the distinct impression of a studio that happens to contain living space. Congenial and hospitable, she offered me snacks and tea, which I sipped amidst souvenirs of her travels and adventures, mementos of education and vacations, and most of all, canvases. Filed neatly in corners and under tables and hanging on walls, examples of her work inhabit almost every room, bridging the gap between living and working spaces. Hartling told me that making art is an “essential component” of her life, that being separated from it can make a person anxious, but to make art is a way into understanding the world.

The larger world is, indeed, embedded in the vivid geometric forms of Hartling’s oil paintings. She speaks of the Celts, of the 1960s and 70s in New York, of Native Americans and Europeans, of cave paintings and artifacts, although a viewer might not immediately perceive her abstract, aniconic compositions as carrying the weight of art history. But Hartling’s two-dimensional works actually offer nothing less than an alternative to linear perspective.

The subject of Blear-eyed is, at a glance, dots. But when the artist referred to the shapes instead as “balls,” their connotation as objects in space became irrefutable. As such, they acknowledge a depth and an existence that goes beyond the surface of the canvas. It’s as though she has sculpted space out of a two-dimensional surface, bypassing the need for a vanishing point, figural narrative, or three-dimensionality. The surface is an active space. Oil paint is subtly sculpted on the canvas, raising the plane into the viewer’s space, bridging the gap between surface and viewer.

Hartling has such a visceral and tactile reaction to color that her hand gestures become more articulated and pronounced when she talks about it. She has a deep affinity for color, for the richness and complexity it develops in relation to the canvas and to the emotions or expressions of the artist. In Blear-eyed, layers of melancholy blue-greys beneath sharply contrasting warm tones reveal raised paint and visible brushstrokes in currents of energy that require a close viewing.

Details of Blear-eyed (left) and Now What (right) reveal the artist's textures and techniques.

Larger pieces such as Now What enable a different kind of viewing. Immersion in the space is more immediate because of their larger-than-life size; I was able to stake out a small area to focus on the minutiae: texture, adherence of paint to linen, stray dots of paint. Regardless of their size, these paintings all dispel any notion of non-figural compositions as impersonal. The shapes themselves convey humanity. As opposed to Renaissance geometry, Hartling’s rectangles and circles are drawn without a compass, offering evidence of the artist’s hand; they feel unmechanical. Each layer of cracked pigment or splattered paint represents a motion, a human decision.

Medicine Wheel (oil on linen) with smaller paintings and supplies.

In abstract compositions, responses to human experience are often embedded as well. Medicine Wheel is imbued with a cosmological essence in the geometry and organization, with objects and moments layered upon one another and at the center, white on white.  While I would not have guessed that it is the artist’s response to a white buckskin from a Native American ceremony, the painting does convey ritual organization and the electric excitement of experiencing something vivid and pure.

By channeling a lifetime of travels and experiences into seemingly abstract works, Hartling demonstrates the truism that we are all products of our experience, and that allowing ourselves to be immersed in that experience is a way of making the creative process richer, more personal, and simultaneously more universal.

This studio visit took place on Thursday, November 10, 2011. For a list of Cynthia Hartling’s current exhibitions and portfolio, visit www.cynthiahartling.com.

Gallery Visit: Rick Briggs and Adam Simon at Valentine

by Paul D'Agostino

Around where an Associated Supermarket on Seneca Avenue sits cater-corner from a public school playing pitch in the hilltop heart of Ridgewood – a rather borough-resistant, historically pseudo-sovereign neighborhood I have described elsewhere as “yonder-Bushwick, nether-Queens, soft-hilled and arboreally charmed” – one alights upon a truly stunning view of the Manhattan skyline soaring up over the far end of the field, providing what must be, for those who play there, a dramatic backdrop to something as relatively mundane as baseball practice, for example, or a soccer scrimmage, or flying a kite. At the same time, this panoramic spot might only seem so momentous for visitors passing by; for locals, its mundanity might be far greater compared to the setting’s various activities it rises behind. Nonetheless, if this is not your everyday sight, it is certainly well worth a visit – even on, or perhaps especially on a most frigid winter night, when the clarity of cold seems to encourage the city’s familiar lights to shine a little bit brighter than usual, as if they too must do something to keep warm.

Apropos of locals, nestled a few blocks down the street from this vista is Valentine Gallery, directed by artist and curator Fred Valentine, where the current exhibit, a two-artist show of works by Rick Briggs and Adam Simon, might be likened to a satisfying main course for which the above treat would make a fitting appetizer or dessert.

In the gallery’s main room are new works by Briggs, paintings whose generally subdued palette and variably painterly self-reflexivity read like demurred witticisms writ, with great ease of depiction, large. Take, for example – if not perhaps with all too great ease of exemplarity – Brown Roller, in which the self-awareness of creative agency is portrayed not through portraiture or canvas-bound act of creativity, but rather, and far more tellingly, through the portrayal of a lone man in an essentially empty room, his back turned to the viewer with slack and indifference as he toils away with a long-armed roller to light-brown-wash a very plain wall.

Workaday enough is the wit therein, one might say, but Briggs’ one-liner-like commentary can also be more curiously curvilinear. For here he deepens by at least a layer the portrayal of painter-cum-house-painter in the bored throes of going through motions by inverting the understood utility of the roller, its flat-tending intentionality amusingly upended in columns of oblong-stamped – indeed, and in deed, almost terrifyingly spreadsheet-like – traces of itself, exposing for a moment the formal quality of brushstroke as counter-functionality of form.

Brown Roller, by Rick Briggs. Photo courtesy the artist.

Or something like that. One can ponder this one forever – from living room to studio, from cubicle to cave with so much Plato, et al, in between. Of course, one might elect to seek out similarly winking wit elsewhere in the gallery instead, for there is plenty to take in and enjoy. Briggs’ humor elicits cracked smiles with crossed arms, not knee-slaps and guffaws, and his paintings are thereby engaging and engagingly placating.

Paintings by Rick Briggs. Photo by Tom Micchelli.

Pause, by Rick Briggs. Photo courtesy the artist.

At the same time, don’t be surprised if you’re occasionally blinded by bright flashes of yellow or red, or if a small painting of spectacles on a table draws you in, with particular intimacy, until you note the softly undulating brushstrokes follicularly incised into a swath of backdropped taupe.

Once you’re that close, once you’re that inveigled within, you might as well be wearing those glasses yourself.

Now back up. Touch chin.

Wink.

Or, if you will, exit stage left, for there you will find an exquisite series of works by Adam Simon, one large painting and a suite of somewhat spare yet deeply shadowy, fundamentally transfiguring – not to mention technically transfigural, for they portray figures transferred several times over – drawings.

Simon's drawings. Photo by Tom Micchelli.

Much more ramification of than departure from his oeuvre proper, which consists mostly of paintings (the process and content of which my cohort here at After Vasari, A.L. McMichael, has already described with abundant meticulousness and grace), these new works, executed in variable strata of graphite dust, exude a lingering aura that lures and lurks. In their now crisp, now blurred lines and errant streaks, these transfers of composite images, though largely devoid of details, bring to mind early photographic images à la Daguerre. In fact, given that Simon culls his characters’ delineations from stock photography, one might even see these renderings as a collection of post-photographic fossils impressed, beneath the amber of fixatif, into paper.

Photo courtesy Adam Simon.

Or something, once more, like that. These works also beg further pondering. Yet given their number and gathered display, one needn’t move around too much to linger in the midst of their enigmatic looming, one need only stir ever so barely their still air of mystery and spectral allure. Upon close enough engagement, moreover, one might well be led to wonder, having dined on the entire exhibit, what sort of fare a phantasm like Waiter might lean forth to offer.

Waiter, by Adam Simon. Photo courtesy the artist.

Let us assume – for metaphorical convenience, if not also for presumable gastronomic propriety – that his proposed provisions relate to dessert.

And now let me step into his shoes as I offer you two further exhibitional curiosities to ponder, followed by a sweet visit-ending treat to savor.

Curiosity #1: Where Briggs’ Brown Roller might be likened to a brush-rendered apotheosis of the form of a paint roller, Simon’s works suggest temporary paint-roller apostasy. Rollers are among the primary tools Simon deploys for his paintings, that is, yet here, for his drawings, he abandons them.

Curiosity #2: Where Briggs portrays and probes quotidianity with an eye for and vein of humor, Simon explores the mundane and disrobes it to reveal an underlying stillness of whispery horror.

Adam Simon. Photo courtesy the artist.

And now that we’ve come full circle from the arguable mundanity of a skyline view to the variably captivating quotidianities on display at Valentine, I recommend you make yet another stage-left exit while still at the gallery. Into the gift shop, that is, where you will find, among a great many other artworks, a few very nice, and here very neatly relevant, skyscapes by Kerry Law. You will recognize that spire, no doubt. And once you’re familiar with that nearby panorama, you might well guess in which neighborhood the artist lives.

One of several 12"x12" skyline glimpses by Kerry Law in the gift shop at Valentine. Photo courtesy Valentine.

Take that in as dessert. And if you then head over to the spot on Seneca to behold a shimmery, perhaps dramatic sight, you might consider that vast view the digestivo rounding off your repast.

A bit of Fernet Branca as vista, for instance. Rather bracing like the chill of night. Or if you want to try one of my favorites, have some Cynar, Ramazzotti or Averna in a lowball tumbler filled to the brim with crushed ice.

But now full circle has forayed into fully changed topic.

Which is for me, to wit, absolutely mundane.

Or something like that.

Wink.

The exhibit of artworks by Rick Briggs & Adam Simon will remain on view at Valentine through 5 February 2012. For more information and visiting hours, see the gallery’s website.

Schizzo: Abbild / Likeness

by Paul D'Agostino

Apparenza vagando nel giardino / Appearance Adrift in the Garden, 3/4. From a set of serialized monoprints with diminishing palette, oil on paper, 2011.*

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“Passing away is the figure, the way of being of this world.”
-  Paul the Apostle, 1 Corinthians 7:31

“Man is enclosed in his image and he does not know it.”
-  Pierre Legendre, Dieu au miroir**

Abbild

Eine Sache
die sich immer
noch weiter verwandelt,
obwohl sie immer
im Grunde
die gleiche bleibt:

wie wir bezeichnen
was wir sehen
als Abbild,
unsere Sehnsucht
nach als ob,
nach als ob nicht.

.

Likeness

One thing
that is always
yet further transformed,
though it remains ever
essentially
the same:

how we designate
what we see as
a likeness,
our longing
for as if,
for as if not.

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Artwork & texts, P. D’Agostino.

______________________

* This set of serialized monoprints will soon be among the new works featured in D’Agostino’s solo exhibit, Appearance Adrift in the Garden, at Norte Maar Gallery. Curated by Jason Andrew, the exhibit will run from 3 February 2012 to 4 March 2012. Opening reception on Friday, 3 February. More information available soon at nortemaar.org.

** The citation from Pierre Legendre’s Dieu au miroir (Fayard, 1994) appears as referenced by Michael Francis Gibson in his book The Mill and The Cross (Acatos Editions, 2000). The citation from the writings of Paul the Apostle appears as referenced by Giorgio Agamben in The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford University Press, 2005).

Nota bene: Communication

by A.L. McMichael

A binder containing the Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology rests on a shelf in the People's Library in Zuccotti Park on November 5, 2011.

Alice Rawsthorn recently touted Occupy Wall Street’s design-savviness as demonstrated by its adaptable title and its use of the raised fist, the hash tag, and the oft-cited catch phrase, “We are the 99 percent.” Certainly one reason the movement has proliferated and engaged activists in many cities is its balance of versatile message and coherent identity. But under the larger umbrella of that overt message lie a thousand handmade signs, many with very individual and personal messages ranging from poignancy to conspiracy theory.

These raise a set of questions: Where are the boundaries between art and design, between literature and text? At what point do communal messages become personal, or vice-versa?

At what point does personal communication become art?

Stencils were a common tool for making signs to hang in and around the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park.

Studio Visit: Austin Thomas

by A.L. McMichael

After an open studio in October, Austin Thomas left a number of collages pinned to the wall.

Saturday, 29 October 2011: Garment District, Manhattan

As I drank hot tea in Austin Thomas’ studio in the midst of a blustery freak October snowstorm, dozens of colorful paper collages transformed the artificially-lit, windowless Manhattan space into a cozy nook with the warmth and optimism of a clever gingerbread house. I knew before meeting her that Thomas once ran the gallery Pocket Utopia and its summer camp, and that she also works on sculptural, site-specific pieces. I wondered whether this small space had lead her creative output toward smaller-scale projects.

Alongside the collages hung an inspiration board, a real-life Pinterest of photos, sketches, objects and architectural renderings under plexiglass. All of these were the driving force behind her in-process Plaza Perch, a gazebo of stainless steel. After receiving the commission from the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs, Thomas commissioned renderings, built a prototype in wood, and hired a team near Gowanus to form the steel. It will be installed on Humbolt Street in Brooklyn, a gathering space–one that acts as a touchstone for interactions and departures–a community spot.

Although paper is a unifying material, many of her collages include a variety of media: Thomas’ own drawings, some found objects and figurative collages, old books, graph paper. Thomas finds materials, such as sketches or photos, and makes art, including drawings and geometric designs. Many of these also come from her own “travel diaries,” little Moleskine notebooks that she carries around. These works might be made on a trip or in a café, on the fly as “anywhere, anytime art” that can be cut or ripped up and repurposed. Then she meticulously incorporates those pieces of art into collages, essentially incorporating the ‘great wide world’ into each object. In doing that, she embraces the studio as a place for assembly while the actual creation takes place in myriad locations.

Mandala, a collage on paper (left), and an assortment of paper sketches and materials awaiting a second life as a collage (right).

Thomas spoke of sending these objects back out into the world—by selling them, a topic that is often uncomfortable for artists to discuss but a necessary dialogue she undertakes—and of letting other ideas come back in their place. One of the pieces with a price tag was Mandala, a collage anchored by a piece of green-lined graph paper. Like a firework or a burst of confetti, bold organic paper shapes culminate in a mandala that swells into a paper rosette. Spinning into a vortex of red, blue, and black, the paper cut-outs rest on the stark green lines with delirious tension, breaking the grid and reaching off the page, lifelike, radiating energy.

Thomas approaches these pieces ontologically, thinking about the life of the objects, about the kind of world she wants her art to go out into and about making it that kind of world. In taking this approach, a sense of community drives the work. Reflecting on the roles artists play in communities, we touched on the “DIY aspect” of the current era, which often incorporates the artist as “writer, curator, maker.” Thomas embraces these roles with a determined lack of boundaries between projects—the scale, medium, field, and audience are all wildly divergent—and she insists that all aspects of the works inform one another.

I felt no compulsion to ask if there was a unifying message in all the works. In fact, I forgot to. The intimate nature of her collages reveals an artist who is comfortable with ideas of writing, making, and connecting, and the public works reveal a sense of fellowship and camaraderie with all those who encounter them. The underlying theme is personal yet public, gracious and inviting. Even the inspiration wall has an eclectic gracefulness, an assured nature of also being part of the work. From collages, perches, and sculptures to blog entries and Tweets, the facets of Thomas’ work operate like beams of the mandala—radiating in many directions, yet anchored and integrated as necessary elements of a lovingly curated career.

A table in the center of the space allows Thomas to work surrounded by finished projects (left wall) and inspiration for Plaza Perch (back wall under plexiglass).

Schizzo: Cielo stanco, Tired Sky

by Paul D'Agostino

Angeli in attesa del visitatore / Angels Awaiting the Visitor, 2/6. From a set of serialized monoprints with diminishing palette, oil on paper, 2011.

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Cielo stanco

Nel sempre buio
del mattino grigio verso
mezzogiorno: ancor’ cadendo
verso volendo quegli
uccelli della
sera.

.

Tired Sky

In the yet dark
of this ante-meridian
unto noon: ever falling
toward wanting
those evening
birds.

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Artwork & texts, P. D’Agostino.