ArtSeen
JO NIGOGHOSSIAN: Exotica
On View
Team GalleryJune 8 – August 11, 2017
New York
Poise. Fiercely built by
A cohesive assembly of points, lines, and planes,
The precise demarcations separate
The provinces from the state,
On this side of geography.
Bent, twisted, high,
Base with ferocious dexterity,
Unpredictable balletic gestures tighten tough tissues,
Strengthen the muscular skeleton into a unified anatomy.
Dissimilar, welded forms punctuate
The image like semicolons trapping a sentence
Or two in mid air, writing lines of sight.
Asymmetrical arrays, with stitched greaves, gauntlets,
Pauldrons, faulds, vambraces,
Among other armored parts,
Exude a fragrance of motion,
Quivering shakes treading with confidence in their tempo.
A few swimmerets and antennules are visibly directed
By cardiac regions;
What appears as extremely durable becomes fragile.
This unknown pandemonium with piercing marks
And perforating cuts, rends fractures as transgressions.
No one assumes they were mere creations of Tsovina.
Robust prosoma—its anterior—is bolted with
Explicit exactitude, and an attitude for the dance.
How formidable yet tenuous, this moment.
Marching forward with an elliptical craze while
Transfixed by the pivotal shifts, from
Well-tempered comportments to intricate outlines, from
A remarkable aptitude for exceptional vulnerability.
This Cartesian dualism is what has indeed prompted
Each of these two Being(s)
Colossal vitality.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel
By Yvonne C. GarrettAPRIL 2020 | Books
There is a complex grace to The Glass Hotel that’s often lacking from contemporary fiction, particularly contemporary thriller fiction. It’s not simply Mandel’s deft prose, her ability to write Dickensian networks of coincidence, but her keen observation of human behavior: our fears, our dreams, what drives us, and what might ultimately destroy or save each of us.
Conversations About Sculpture
By Phillip GriffithNOV 2019 | Art Books
In May 2008, as the Parisian daylight stretched into summer hours, Richard Serra’s set of five 56-foot-tall steel plates, Promenade, had taken over the city’s cavernous, glass-roofed Grand Palais. In the Tuileries Garden, Serra’s 1983 work Clara-Clara, with its paired, inverted semicircles (or more precisely, conical sections), had been reinstalled in its original location at the garden’s gate to accompany the new work.
Christopher Wilmarth: Sculpture and Drawings from the 1970s
By Jan AvgikosAPRIL 2020 | ArtSeen
A new exhibition at Craig F. Starr Gallery presents a rare opportunity to revisit Christopher Wilmarth's serene glass and steel sculptures of the 1970s. No drama, no mess, no rough edges, nothing but the Apollonian perfection of flawless, hydrofluoric acid-etched translucent glass surfaces that attract and hold the light, reflecting in their layered depths tonal ranges from frosty white to pure aqua.
James Hyde: Public Sculpture
By Hovey BrockDEC 20-JAN 21 | ArtSeen
This exhibition extends James Hyde’s current practice of combining photographic imagery with paint and other materials on a variety of flat surfaces, including linen, board, and steel. Playing with the conventions of painting, these works have aesthetic appeal, but Hyde is after bigger game.
