Posts Tagged ‘collage’

The Temple of Blooom at Cinders Gallery

Sunday, August 8th, 2010

The Cinders Gallery on Havemeyer Street in Williamsburg is just closing out one of the more amazing shows of the summer today—The Temple of Blooom is an installation of drawings, paintings, collage and sculpture.  There are too many good things in this show to give an exhaustive description of what’s going on in the space; that such an engaging, inspiring installation could be assembled in the relatively small confines of a storefront gallery is testament to the vibrant energy that runs through the Brooklyn art scene, even during the Dog Days of summer.

Hisham Bharoocha has put together a group of collages that resonate at once with 1960’s San Francisco psychedelic poster art and the dreamlike imagery of Joseph Cornell, or the poignant poetics of the late Joe Brainard’s collage work.  Kelie Bowman’s delicately rendered drawing of flowers arranged in the shape of human forms might easily have been included in this year’s Biennial, across from Aurel Schmidt’s Arcimboldo-esque Minotaur drawing as a counterpoint to some of the Biennial’s brooding pessimism.  The entire gallery has a magical, ritual-like atmosphere, as if one had walked into the after-effects of a Vodun rite.  The black and gold painted papier mache shrine to “the gods of plants” by an artist who calls himself Sto, and John Orth’s mask-like drawings of disembodied, abstract spirit-faces further enhances the mysteriously evocative atmosphere of this show.

Photos and video from Friday’s musical performance by Inferior Amps, Noveller and Brian Chase are on the Cinders Gallery blog,  along with pictures from the closing party tonight.

Click on an image in the gallery to view a larger photo:

Please visit more of Harold’s Sketchbook @ www.haroldgraves.com

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Early Enigromatics: Collage Drawing

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Here’s something I did for an article that Bill Wyman wrote about David Bowie for Entertainment Weekly, some time ago.

I was experimenting a lot with collage ideas then (I still do, mostly in sketchbook format).  Bowie’s image, his whole “chameleon” persona seems connected with Enigromatics somehow.  Like Bob Dylan, Bowie’s musical persona is always changing; there’s an ambiguity in how the artist relates to the persona, the music & voice— projections are always shifting around, continually in flux; it’s often unclear just who a particular lyric might be addressed to, or which “persona” is doing the talking.

Again there’s that Mercurial spirit-genie thing that I find very interesting:  Bowie’s second Tin Machine album had just come out, and people were trying to get a handle on what he was up to.  Bill Wyman’s article, and I guess by extension, my drawing, were probably in some small way a part of the dialogue that was going on about the latest Bowie-manifestation at that time.

David Bowie Tin Machine

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