In Judy Gregory‘s artist statement at Richard Margolis’s Gallery she says, “Throughout history, regimes and individuals who have felt threatened by words have done their best to eliminate the sources from which those words have come.” Gregory was in the audience at Chautauqua Institution on August 12, 2022 when Salmon Rushdie was nearly killed by a knife-wielding attacker. In response to that experience she created the piece “8/12/22”, a panel made from transparent used tea bags in which “WORDS turn into SWORDS. “
On the wall, in the fourth floor hallway between Margolis’s space and Colleen Buzzard’s space, I found this sheet of paper taped to the wall. That is indeed where the magic happens – between the spaces.
I liked Jon Gary’s photographs at Colleen Buzzard’s, particularly these two. The show was called “High Contrast” and I was thinking about that property when I said to Jon, “So, these are high contrast.” Jon said they were but also he was thinking of the contrast between the photos he had separated into pairs when he hung this show. Even though I was drawn to the pair above I had missed that aspect.
In the back room of Colleen’s, where Hucky holds court, art books are typically laid out on the big table. An open invitation to browse and ideally, prompt art talk. Hucky said they were in NYC last week and I’m guessing they stopped by Printed Matter. I found a Laura Fields book in which each spread had the top half of the front page of an issue of the New York Times with one color photograph on the left and a reproduction of a flat, abstract painting on the right. I flipped through the book a few times and was drawn to the paintings but I could not figure out the connection with the newspapers. Peggi pointed out that Fields had picked up a detail in the NYT photos, a linear pattern, whether it be from a piece of cloth or made of metal pipes, and created a painting with that motif.
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