[ writer and painter in Brooklyn. telling stories about art and its makers. ]
Objects have stories to tell. Like humans they live and age, serve and suffer. They mean things to others. And during their lifetimes, they become storytellers. An object’s story is an autobiography; it is engraved in its core like a tree’s rings.
Camille Pissarro looked out of his window on a rainy day in 1896. The painter was staying in yet another hotel in Rouen. He chose a different one every time he visited, but always on the shore overlooking the bridges Boieldieu and Grand Pont, and the flowing, fast-paced waterside of the Seine.
Merve Denizci’s paintings are disturbingly eerie. Her scenes of simple domestic interiors, almost empty in a serene monotony, share the frame with lonely figures and displays of peculiarity and violence. The peacefulness of pallid pastel hues is warped by representations of discomfort, which often appear as raw meat, a dead animal or blood; frozen in time. [...]
On a foggy, grim October evening in 1913, the famous Barnum’s Circus was transporting its animals and equipment through the cobblestone streets of Leipzig, Germany, when a streetcar collided with one of its carriages. Inside this particular carriage were eight Barbary lions from North Africa, all of whom escaped and disappeared into the mist. For four long hours, wild beasts haunted the city’s dark alleyways, before the lions were hunted down and killed by local police. [...]
This is a story about monsters. I met one on a hot summer day on the subway to Coney Island. While listening to an audiobook, 'The Ocean at the End of the Lane' (HarperCollins, 2013), read by its author Neil Gaiman, he gave a name to someone I already knew well: "The thing that called itself Ursula Monkton hung in the air, about twenty feet above me, and lightnings crawled and flickered in the air behind her." [...]
One of the most prominent figures in Turkish contemporary art, Taner Ceylan is renowned internationally for his hyperrealist paintings. What he strives for, though, is something beyond simple reproduction of reality—he’s after the sentiment. [...]
Our physical presence as human beings and the decisions and designs made by robotics give the work a certain anthropomorphic quality, and our perception of machines can be obscured with their seemingly organic behavior. [...]
