PUTNEY — A new show featuring works from nine regionally and nationally acclaimed artists is now open to the public at Landmark College's Fine Arts Gallery.
The show includes works in video, collage, photography, painting and sculpture by artists Cynthia Atwood, Lucinda Bliss, Sabrina Fadial, Toby Gonzalez, Linda Adele Goodine, Amy Jenkins, Michael Oatman, Evie Lovett, Susan Newbold, and Leonard Ragouzeos.
Curated by Landmark's art department chair Humberto Ramirez, a fundamental premise of the show is that “the most basic precondition for an object to become an artwork is that it communicates. A painting is no more an artwork than a brick, unless that painting or brick is able to engage in a critical discourse with history and the cultural conditions that determine its production.”
Similarly, in keeping with Roland Barthes' seminal text, “Mythologies,” Ramirez views myths as a type of speech or language construction dependent on a “particular cultural moment to articulate their relevance.”
In this show, he has assembled a stunning array of artworks that allow the viewer to make connections between the art and the myths from which they arise and to which they may lead. At its heart, Ramirez suggests that we read the works in the show as texts, with each piece viewed as a cultural construct, and a point of intersection for multiple modes of speech.
The videos of Amy Jenkins, the collages of Michael Oatman and the drawings of Leonard Ragouzeos, conjure up directly the mythic hero's journey; either under the pretext of a science fiction apotheosis, through spectacular subjects and scale, or through the mysterious negotiations through which we claim or are assigned sexual and gender roles.
Similarly, in the photographic works of Evie Lovett, Toby Gonzalez and Susan Newbold, the body is the site where resistance is enacted, and normativity is exposed, deconstructed and challenged. In these works, the body is understood as text and as such subject to the shifting and arbitrary conventions of language.
The paintings of Lucinda Bliss and the photographs of Linda Adele Goodine represent nature and landscape as highly mediated experiences. In these works artifice and carefully orchestrated codes reproduce an idea of nature as theater or as simulacra, pointing to nature's absence or non-existence.
In their sculptural works, Sabrina Fadial and Cynthia Atwood use the agency of materiality to extrude from the discourse of desire a “body without organs.”
In these works, membranes, limbs, petals, blood or genitals constitute an unstable syntax, a shifting grammar where the body is no longer anchored on the apparent certainty of the biological, but rather is set adrift onto a cosmology of signs.