What do we really see when hues are subdued, diminished, or deleted outright? Tough question. If you’re like me—colorblind—that’s kind of how you go through life. Art’s power when deprived of its full spectrum of possibility is difficult to gauge, since most of us who live the difference are simply born this way and have […]
Though Antony and Cleopatra isn’t always considered a problem play, after seeing it at the American Shakespeare Center I can report that it really should be. Categorizing it as a problem play might be a lazy definition for a work defying easy literary taxonomies, but it does the trick. In ASC’s case (here comes a […]
Brooklyn multimedia artist Tamara Santibañez, one of the seven featured in Second Street Gallery’s group show “Subculture Shock: Death, Punk, & the Occult in Contemporary Art,” was recently quoted in The New York Times about Latinx artists’ use of family history and heritage. She explained that though her art represents her interests in aggressive underground […]
A confession: I’m not adequately prepared to discuss Peter Allen’s “Un-becoming” show at McGuffey Art Center with the level of insight both the artist and his art deserve. I certainly spent plenty of preparatory time and afforded the exhibition my contemplative attention. No, this is just a shortcoming of my own faculties—the same dearth that […]
Our voices bounce back at us as we speak. I’m one street over from the Downtown Mall in Megan Read’s studio, and it, like her paintings, has an uncluttered spaciousness about it. Older finished works line part of a wall, and paintings in progress are set up at various heights on another. But the rest […]
“Comfort thyself, sweet friend; it is not strange / That women will be false and wavering.”—Franklin, Arden of Faversham (Act 1, scene 1) Maybe the scheduling was merely coincidental, but witnessing the debut performance of the early modern true-crime drama Arden of Faversham on International Women’s Day felt particularly wrong—and perhaps more comical because of […]
To a lay audience member who hasn’t been involved in a theater production since fifth grade, directors seem as essential to any play’s success as a script. They’re the boss of the show. If the director goes into a coma at the start of the first rehearsal or has a crisis and runs off with […]
By CM Gorey Photography rules our lives now. And unless you’re a staunch Luddite with something to prove, you’re a contributor and a consumer from first coffee cup through alarm-setting before bed. We have transitioned from the point-and-shoot, badly lit grease fests of 1980s homespun glossies to teeming libraries of filters swizzling images into preposterous […]
Do we continue to have time to admire the still life? In a world where disposable and looping ultra-high resolution video pops from the phones in our pockets, the composed scenes of the genre require more from our attention. The art form that originated with painting centuries ago has been criticized for nearly as long […]
In a world where digital theaters project billions of colors in subtle gradations that mimic all the hues of real life, choosing to watch—or produce—a black and white film may be taken as a small act of defiance. For movies shot after the advent of color film, the choice of black and white is often […]