Unwonted Eye, Christo Brock
In his latest work, Brock continues to explore unwonted (unusual, unexpected) imagery from everyday life. His eye ranges from the languid rolling ocean in “Ripples #3” to the macroscopic “Tortured Orange Line” and the enhanced fantastical forest-scape of “Christmas Trees”. In all his imagery, printed exclusively on metal, Brock shows the unique vision that has characterized his work.
It’s this metal surface that provides a medium to complete Brock’s abstraction of image. These photographs don’t merely sit on the metal as a photograph - they seem to live in the metal. His images shimmer and glisten, and the metal often adds a welcome element of abstraction to his work. At times, Brock plays with the metal, as if daring to evoke the molecules to speak. Dew Drops become glowing orbs, waves become undulating stripes of blue, trees become lines of color and depth.
In his triptich “Pearl Harbor, 23 December 2011” Brock pursues this approach in photos taken only minutes apart at the Hawaii National Park that memorializes the horrible attack that brought America into war. The oil floating on the surface above the sunken monument USS Arizona has an eerie visual shimmer to it. It’s like looking at a series of demon clouds conjured from a 70 year old monument eager to speak its secrets.
In the piece entitled Tiny Bubbles, tiny bubbles appear arranged with a hidden logic, and the piece looks to be a close-up view of piebald crocodile skin. Brock reveals that it was shot it was condensation on a fruit bowl’s saran wrap.
“I don’t like to reveal to people what the image was,” Brock says with a wry smile, “because when I took the image, it was one thing. Now it’s something else.” When pressured, Brock will reveal the provenance of the original image, but he much prefers to let the viewer decide. “People ask me all the time what the image “is”. … when what they really mean is, what did I aim my camera lens at. Now, it’s something else, and I want people to feel that new thing.”
Choreographed Color, Elizabeth Szymczak
'Contemporary figure painting has become, for the most part, too stabile. People sit, stand, or lie around the house or garden, stolid and inert, their poses without animation, often they seem as if they were stuffed. By not moving, they often fail to move us: the loss of animation has meant a loss to painting, in the range of both expression and subject matter,” wrote art historian Gerald Ackerman in his paper, “On Motion in Art”.
Elizabeth Szymczak captures the dynamism of motion, whilst maintaining an exemplary level of realism. She paints out of a love for dance and the expressing of emotion through movement. Szymczak’s paintings render what the figures are attempting to evoke.
As her latest body of work, Choreographed Color is a more positive collection. Szymczak concentration is centered on the blend of surrealism and realism. As in life, she is striving to find the right balance between expression and approach.
JUST PICTURES, Kamil Vojnar
Just Pictures is anything but… JUST PICTURES. Its a desperate cry, … it’s a hand sticking out from the water, trying to grab to whatever, to anything, that is still true and real, in today’s fast-paced world. Vojnar himself pronounces his work to be above everything else, … about collisions … “Of yellowish nostalgia, melancholy, of our sepia tinted past. colliding with the cold, ultra LED HDTV plasma, retina display, uninspiring, robotic present.”
Vojnar utilizes many paradoxical elements in his work. His pieces have a gritty, yet delicate and elegant feel. They are ethereal, yet remarkably tangible. The drips of paint, the layering of the image across numerous pieces of paper and the familiar elements and details in each piece (shoes, a sofa, a mirror, etc.) make the work part of our world. At the same time, central to the images are figures that are detached and untouchable. Like a muse or angels, they elude the viewer and perhaps the artist as well.
