Warning: Division by zero in /home/customer/www/centralbookingnyc.com/public_html/wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/src/DisplayTypes/Slideshow.php on line 76
DIG
February 12, 2015 – April 5, 2015
In archeology, we dig beneath the surface, an activity that is both literal and figurative. “The dig” also becomes the site of an excavation into the layers of history beneath us, our history. The deeper we dig, the more we uncover and learn about who we were and who we are and perhaps where we would like to go. The past is always with us, in more than memory, we walk over it as well as confront it.
Ann Reichlin illuminates in aluminum the path of the past, of housing commemorated with beds of flowers while Don Burmeister captures ancient mounds exposed to our modern conceits of preservation. Agnes Murray etches the ruins of a former age, in the echoes of ancestral edifices as Purgatory Pie Press builds upon the designs through the ages.
The collaged and overdrawn work of Despo Magoni dig into her own cultural heritage, the objects of glory and a sacrificial past while Evelyn Eller pieces together the cradle of a civilization taught in our history books. Marcia Scanlon culls history for her story while Jennie Hinchcliff follows the stars for the thread of narrative through time.
Leslie Fry “uncovers” a library that holds the key to our heritage, fallen leaves full of words of wisdom. The built up gravelly surfaces of the artist’s books of Ilse Schreiber-Noll tear away the buried past. The photographs of Janet Goldner skate the surface with objects that truly give us a passage into the past.
Peter Patchen organizes archeological specimens in cases emulating museum classifications. The “artifacts” of Barbara Siegel are not the handcrafted ones of former civilizations but the ordinary commercial products of industrial society. Sarah Stengle digs through the depths of the book and reconstructs it as an uncovered artifact as Kathy Aoki gathers contemporary cultural relics of an idolicizing populist. Joyce Ellen Weinstein “documents” a dig and drawers us into a book that is literally a container, not of text but object.
Our curiosity is provoked and poked as we search for answers, these artists delve into their own past, the past possibilities, haunted by the past, through fragments and fragmentation.
