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| Nancy
Hoffman Gallery's 2005 summer Project Space exhibition entitled "Eve,"
opens July 1 through September 10, 2005. Including works by Nicolas Africano,
David Bierk, Colette Calascione, Timothy Cummings and Hung Liu, the exhibition
explores the beguiling female gaze first encountered in the Garden of Eden.
Eve, "crafted," as legend goes, from Adam's rib, simultaneously
evokes the subject of gender and identity. |
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Two of the
artists in the exhibition fuse female and male into idealized visages,
the others focus on women from history and legend. In Hung Liu's "Visage"
paintings, based on turn- of-the century photos of prostitutes, a young
courtesan face is magnified in scale to fill the canvas. She is empowered
as she gazes out to the world. Accompanying Liu's large face are flowers
and other motifs from traditional Chinese paintings in addition to her
signature circles, a symbol of the universe in Chinese art.
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Hung
Liu, Lacquer Box
with Procession, 2004, mixed
media, 12 x 12 inches |
Hung
Liu, Lacquer Box
with Hawk, 2004, mixed
media, 12 x 12 inches
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Hung
Liu, Visage I, 2004,
oil on canvas, 51 x 48 inches |
| Hung
Liu's recent "Relic" series incorporates a central red resin-glazed
panel upon which the artist has painted a Chinese character in black. In
each painting, the central panel is composed of the calligraphic radical
for ³female² as well as a second, more descriptive ideogram that renders
each character unique. In "Relic 9," the translation of the character
is "Eve," the Chinese legend, Nu Wa. In this painting, a beautiful
courtesan reclines in a flowered pink dress, seeming to float in washes
of paint accompanied by a bird, flowers, circles, as she stretches from
one end of the canvas to the other. The legend tells that the sky was falling
and this goddess had to fix it or the end of the world would soon come.
In order to do so, she had to melt rocks and fix the sky and thus became
a heroine and legend, the legend of Nu Wa. |
David Bierk,
Metropolitan Study Nude,
1999, oil on photography on board,
rusted iron on board, 28 x 26 inches |
David
Bierk's painting after the 19th century French artist, Janmot, is a close-in
view of an idealized young woman's face flush with youth, dressed in Primavera
garb with a garland of flowers on her head-a perfect face infused with all
the possibilities of life and its blossoming. |
David Bierk,
Portrait in Stone,
after Janmot, 2001, oil on canvas,
concrete, 31 x 27 inches |
| David
Bierk made the subject of art history his own, plumbing its depths from
classical times to 2002, the year he died. He never literally copied the
masters; he re-interpreted their works, celebrating the act of creation
through his passionate, multi-layered paintings. For the artist it was not
the image alone that was important, but the presentation of the image as
well. He framed his painting after Janmot in a concrete surround. Bierk
worked the surface of the surround, stressing, distressing, weathering and
ageing it, not unlike the surface of the paintings, which he instantly and
intentionally aged, creating his signature craquelure, a conceptual necessity.
Dr. Michael Mezzatesta, in a Bierk exhibition catalogue essay writes: "Bierk's
study is different for it was not based on drawing, but on photographing.
He carefully surveyed his targets, shooting a head frontally or in profile,
from below or straight on, or by meticulously framing a portion of the figure.
Painterly manipulations thus remove the photo source from the status of
museum souvenir to a different realm, to another place and time suggesting
both the present, and the 19th century when sepia-tinted photos of ancient
sculpture decorated drawing rooms and classrooms throughout Europe and America."
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Nicolas Africano's
woman of cast and sculpted black glass sits on a world with her hands resting
gently on its surface. Unclothed this delicate being slightly tilts her
head to intensify her gaze forward. She is not confronting, but beguiling.
Her slender body perfectly sculpted as "woman" has a tensile force
locked within like a lithe animal perched and at the ready.
Africano's cast glass figure sculptures, while contemporary, reflect an
air of classicism in their stance, posture, dress and mien. The subject
of his sculptures for the past several years has been his wife and muse,
Rebecca. He paints her and sculpts her in different states of dress and
undress. She is often in a moment of private reflection, closed within her
being, yet looking out to the world as if seeing eternity. Sometimes she
gazes straight forward, at others her eyes are closed in thought. While
Rebecca is the subject and object of the figures, Africano's inner concerns
are the hidden or silent subject of each of his sculptures, paintings and
drawings. The sculptures are as much about identity and gender roles as
they are about beauty in its most sincere form. |
He has said
of his work: "I resist the notion that my work is narrative; my interest
resides in what cannot be told, in what seems unspeakable." Africano
continues: "the function of meaning in my art is as a verb; it seeks
to express the desire for meaning by way of providing the occasion for it."
In talking with Lisa Lyons, a long-time friend and aficionado of his work,
the artist used the following words to describe his work and the issues
he deals with therein: "humility, indulgence, costume, gender/role,
identity (will), nude, naked, bloodless, carnal, place (scene, context),
passionate, stoic (ecstatic, static), erotic-unintentional-chaste, absence
of irony, egoism, egoless (fourth person), disillusionment, charm, meaning,
observation." |
Nicolas Africano, Woman Seated
on Globe, 2005, cast glass,
16 x 8 x 14 inches
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Timothy Cummings,
Eve, 2005,
acrylic on wood, 24 x 18 inches |
Timothy Cummings's
"The Lute Player" strums her instrument in a lush misty garden,
a contemporary Eden. Dressed in a pink frock of classic inspiration, wearing
red toe shoes, she is on pointe ready to dance and play music on her lute,
a straw hat is jauntily placed atop her head. Is she female, is she male?
It is hard to tell as one looks at her. Cummings paints a face that holds
the promise of life, of childhood, of fantasy, as the viewer muses on her
identity. In his "Eve" painting, an innocent youngster sits with
a serpent and an apple at her side. |
Timothy Cummings,
The Lute Player, 2005, acrylic on wood, 20 x 16 inches |
| Timothy
Cummings was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1968 where he grew up in
the midst of Spanish Catholic and Native American culture, fertile with
religious imagery and iconography in the churches in New Mexico. Murals
and retablos he saw depicting death, martyrdom, and Day of the Dead imagery
influenced him. Cummings is completely self-taught. He eschewed the politics
of art school for an education from books with images of Rembrandt and El
Greco, among other masters. He began to paint as early as grade school and
added sewing to his creative endeavors, making dolls and puppets with elaborate
costumes as a teenager. The detailed clothing he sewed for his puppets and
dolls became a source of inspiration for the costumes he paints for his
people, such as "The Lute Player" and "Eve." Much of
Cummings's work addresses the issues of inner youthful turmoil, that awkward
moment between childhood and adult-hood, a time ripe for childhood fantasies.
Cummings's interest in painting and amplifying childhood fantasies is accompanied
by his fascination in transformation. Figures metamorphose into birds, hair
turns into feathers, figures ride on the backs of birds in mythic flight,
a bird perches on a young man's shoulder. |
Colette Calascione,
Illumination,
2004, oil on panel, 30 x 20 inches |
In Colette
Calascione's "Illumination," a woman is covered from neck to toe
in a tattoo the artist invented, a garden of earthly delights appearing
to be stenciled on her body, of flowers, butterflies, leaves, bees. A cornucopia
of nature of flowers, butterflies and bees bedeck her ears as she gazes
at the viewer, an idealized face, full of promise. |
Colette Calascione,
Sleeper,
2004, oil on panel, 8 x 10 inches |
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