Category: reviews

by D. Dominick Lombardi

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. – Henry David Thoreau

Controlling nature, or one’s personal environment, has been an age’s old endeavor. I am reminded of the ancient city of Petra in Southwest Jordan, which was carved directly into the reddish sandstone, as one example of something of a massive and monumental compromise in that struggle between ‘progress’ and the destruction of the environment.

Continue reading “Nothing Left of Time: An Installation of Works by Matthew Garrison”

by Jen Dragon

Christy Rupp’s latest solo exhibition Leaf Litter at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center Campus is an installation that comments on the environment while creating its own environment. Large printed digital versions of Rupp’s collages cover both end walls serving to expand the width of the gallery while sculptures of indicator species distort space as the perspective shifts dizzyingly from micro to macro organisms. 

Continue reading “Christy Rupp’s Leaf Litter”

by Carol Bruns

Our culture is permeated with violence. By media or in person we regularly experience violent economics, massacres of children in schools with automatic weapons, relentless assaults on the natural environment, widespread domestic violence, and even violent car driving, movies, games and songs. In an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon the character Tarantino remarks, “It’s even in breakfast cereals” and we guiltily laugh along with children at their absurd and extreme ferocious capers. It seems we’re wired onto its electric horror and excitement, while its production of suffering in real life is staggering and immeasurable, leaving no one unharmed, usually the direct result of policy choices.

Continue reading “Jacqueline de Jong and Violence at the Border-Line”

by D. Dominick Lombardi

The pandemic has had an incalculable effect on so many lives that it’s hard to think life will ever be normal again. Culturally, creatives have had the trajectory of their careers, their way of thinking and processing drastically altered in ways that we may never be able to fully process or understand until years from now, when we can look back and analyze the related output. One such artist, Sandi Daniel, whose usual approach to her craft has been completely altered by a lack of movement or travel, leading her to investigate the only option left to explore – her own immediate natural environment – to look for that elusive magic that so often accompanies the act of far-flung exploration.

Continue reading “A Photographer In Her Garden: Featuring Sandi Daniel”