[ pronounced chee·dem ah·sah·tek·in. writer and painter in Brooklyn. telling stories about art and its makers. ]
She had fair and healthy skin, slightly red on the cheeks, and flawlessly taut around the eyes. Her aquiline nose was the most prominent feature of her face, protruding over shapely lips. Brown eyes, light like unripened almonds, were half-covered by sleepy eyelids, and framed subtly by modest brows.
In the group exhibition A Bridge Between You and Everything many artworks are slightly concealed. Sometimes the veil is a thin coat of blue paint, or a glaze of dirty water blurring the black ink, or fully opaque, jet-black brush strokes over pictures of famous landmarks.
A cardboard dollhouse cracks open in the middle, revealing a nude, pregnant woman also of cardboard. Her legs are spread and vulva dilated and, surrounded by flowers, bushes, and other flora, she clutches her rounded belly.
To artist Vija Celmins, everything in the world is of equal importance: a heater, a fan, an old letter addressed to Miss Vija Celmins, a burning plane from WWII, Saturn, the sea, the stars. Celmins fixes her objects of inspiration in time, as perfectly as can be.
“My interest is less in making a fake protagonist who might stand in for me,” says Lucy Ives over iced coffee one hot Sunday afternoon, “than in having independent characters who produce writing.”
In Feng Shui, a wind chime is a symbol of good fortune and peaceful spirits. One hangs inside the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea.
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. [...]
