art - others

More

From the Robert Wodzinski/pngmess flickr page.
Another screen capture example, with the brevity and clarity of a Paul Feeley '60s color field painting and the texture of tie-dyed fabric but you know it's a fragment of something: the red/green seam suggests a photoshoppy blurring.

This image needs a white space around it to work.

Update: Written in the style of Roger Fry, who described God, in a Renaissance painting he was lecturing about, as the "dominant central mass."

Update 2: The capture improves google's "arty" new favicon, which tries to be Miro but looks more like Sister Mary Corita, by giving it the Uta Barth treatment. That said, captures generally fare better as art when the references aren't topical or something to be "gotten" (or not gotten, in my case, before Paddy Johnson pointed out what it was).

Diana Kingsley has a show of new work opening Friday night at Leo Castelli gallery [ArtCal listing]:

Leo Castelli Gallery is pleased to present In Pari Delicto, an exhibition of new photographs by Diana Kingsley, her third solo show at the gallery. Kingsley, continuing to mine the terrain of the slight incident and the small indignity, has ratcheted up a sense of the absurd while maintaining the cool formalism and deadpan humor of her previous work.

The exhibition’s title, In Pari Delicto, a somewhat archaic legal term meaning “in equal fault,” connotes an elegance and charged sensuality belying the prosaic resignation of the phrase's meaning. Dress gloves, cigarettes, sterling silver sets, antiques, and thoroughbreds anachronistically symbolize sophistication, while barely disguising a standoff between ordinary, commensurable forces: incumbent and invading, animated and inert, covetous and restrained. In the slow unfolding of non-events each side acts in balletic concert; no side is privileged.

In “Delicate Beast” a tangle of unruly dried branch arrangements impossibly grows into a silver chalice as a live praying mantis materializes under the tangle, creepily mocking its own cartoon depiction on the background wallpaper. In “Bad Seed” the busywork of an unseen miscreant defaces the back of an antique chair with a spray of equestrian stickers. In “Night Ramble” a hand in an ill-fitting glove confronts a succulent gardenia in a mysterious stalemate as a cigarette in the gloved fingers languishes, ready to drop ash on the mitt's clean whiteness.

Though the images are strikingly lush, there is something discomfiting about their deliberate, almost defiant prettiness. Kingsley’s precise compositional rigor even hints at an inherent inanity in such photographic strategies. It is the unexpected contradictions and tensions in both form and subject matter that give the work its mischievous wit and power.

previous posts about Kingsley: "Get Those Breasts Out of the Lobby, Theyre Offending Women" and several from my digital media tree blog. I've been a fan of the artist's work since first seeing it in Soho around 1997, and look forward to this show.

1. I "made" this:

"Bounded creativity, beauty, banality, despair" might be the tag cloud for Object Array by Arend deGruyter-Helfer (works on principles similar to the build-a-bike utility the Loshadkaites found)

2. The late Sol LeWitt was a great art thinker but not such a hot artist when you actually see his work in person. His stacked cinderblock-type sculptures do have a perverse stark appeal and hope to put up a collection of images of them soon.
As for his ubiquitous (and oft-painted over--by design or otherwise) museum wall murals, Jon Rafman's online versions (1 / 2 / 3) are much preferable. They actually dazzle as opposed to making you stand there saying "Wish these were as dazzling as they obviously want you to think they are."

Update: Apologies if you saw a black rectangle instead of artwork in this post. I used an older version of Photoshop to make a .png and belatedly realized my "alternate browser" wasn't reading it.