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"Rooms and Voices' at Gross McCleaf
Inside story
ANDREW MANGRAVITE
There’s just one week left to catch “Rooms and Voices,” the exhibition at Gross McCleaf Gallery. The show features work by ten artists, some pure interiors, others interiors with figures. Among the pure interiors, the large, festive-looking interiors of Barbara Kassel, as immaculately designed as stage sets, and the small, intense works by Mark Karnes are especially noteworthy. Karnes offers haiku-like works— snapshots of a space— but he also offers one fully-worked up, and quite beautiful, interior of a richly furnished room.
The interiors with figures are a bit more complicated. The presence of people will do that.
Douglas Martenson’s heavy, brownish-looking interiors reminded me of both Vuillard and Sickert. Even his painting of a woman Reading a Book suggests some intense interior drama going on. Scott Noel’s larger, brighter works similarly suggest sub-texts all over the place. Why are the artist and his model referred to as Nyssia and Gyges? And why does the fellow standing in the doorway cause the painting to be titled Enter the Sandman?
Best of all are the 11 casein-on-paper works by Michael Ananian, which comprise a veritable mini-exhibition in themselves. Ananian’s subject is The Human Comedy, and his preferred technique is the “He Said/She Said” gambit, which he pulls off by the simple technique of dividing his canvas. In a series depicting phone conversations, Ananian cleverly uses a coiled phone cord as the divider. Talking is a small gem of gender relations with a guy undergoing contortions while the woman he’s conversing with stands erect and stares coolly out a window. You can almost guess where this particular conversation is heading.
Some moody interiors by Susan Lichtman, dark and clotted as any film noir, and four large, bright, freely-rendered pieces by Barbara Grossman round out the show.
ANDREW MANGRAVITE
There’s just one week left to catch “Rooms and Voices,” the exhibition at Gross McCleaf Gallery. The show features work by ten artists, some pure interiors, others interiors with figures. Among the pure interiors, the large, festive-looking interiors of Barbara Kassel, as immaculately designed as stage sets, and the small, intense works by Mark Karnes are especially noteworthy. Karnes offers haiku-like works— snapshots of a space— but he also offers one fully-worked up, and quite beautiful, interior of a richly furnished room.
The interiors with figures are a bit more complicated. The presence of people will do that.
Douglas Martenson’s heavy, brownish-looking interiors reminded me of both Vuillard and Sickert. Even his painting of a woman Reading a Book suggests some intense interior drama going on. Scott Noel’s larger, brighter works similarly suggest sub-texts all over the place. Why are the artist and his model referred to as Nyssia and Gyges? And why does the fellow standing in the doorway cause the painting to be titled Enter the Sandman?
Best of all are the 11 casein-on-paper works by Michael Ananian, which comprise a veritable mini-exhibition in themselves. Ananian’s subject is The Human Comedy, and his preferred technique is the “He Said/She Said” gambit, which he pulls off by the simple technique of dividing his canvas. In a series depicting phone conversations, Ananian cleverly uses a coiled phone cord as the divider. Talking is a small gem of gender relations with a guy undergoing contortions while the woman he’s conversing with stands erect and stares coolly out a window. You can almost guess where this particular conversation is heading.
Some moody interiors by Susan Lichtman, dark and clotted as any film noir, and four large, bright, freely-rendered pieces by Barbara Grossman round out the show.
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