“Fools For Lust,” Mary Katherine Murphy

Article Projects Realform Space
2008-05-01

It's the little window that could. For any one walking the central stretch of Bedford Avenue these days there's a jewel box of a display that you'll want to take a moment and enjoy right in the heart of the 'Burg. Using gold leaf and mad magenta shag carpet, Mary Katherine Murphy has painstakingly transformed this scruffy little show window into a fem-fantasy, complete with strappy high heels, bronze angel wings, and a grouping of pictures that depict various examples of today's “Glamour Girls”. These subjects seem tailor-made for Murphy's loose yet confident style. Her ample curving brush strokes accentuating features like overly plump lips and huge gazing eyes. “Orchid” (2008) a smallish piece features a head in three quarter profile that seems to inflate against the margins of the canvas. The “Orchid”, behind her ear, and the gaudy earring contrast against a face that, notwithstanding its bobbed nose, has a form that appears as ample as a Mycenaean fertility goddess. Despite a superficial “beauty”, these ladies, with their blank stares, seem about as deep as the paint they're fabricated with.

—James Kalm


“Geomorphical Fluxitosis,” Daniel Zeller

Pierogi
2008-05-01

At first sight, you might think that Dan Zeller's stunningly constructed line-a-paloozas belong to a long ancestry of similarly obsessive products output by such careful plotters as Martin Ramirez, Hiroyuki Doi, and James Siena, but I think you'd be barking up the wrong family tree. Zeller's relatives: Leonardo Da Vinci, Henri Rousseau, and, more recently, Alex Ross, are preoccupied not only with the power of meticulous image-making - the rhythms born of repetition, the formal possibilities of aggregation - but how getting this stuff down on paper can reveal eye-opening connections between all the things they're (almost) drawing. Zeller's works look almost like satellite images, almost like microscopic biology, almost like astronomical phenomenon. They are none of these things in particular, they are abstract, but thanks to their careful, fluid, and somehow not at all fussy semblance, they convey a plausible reality that transcends all of their influences. They take you to all of the places they reference and remind you that they're all connected. Leonardo made famous comparisons between eddies in streams and the swirls of fingerprints; between drapery folds and canyon walls. Dan Zeller, whether he meant to or not, has created descendants of those revelatory works - drawings built not simply to be busy but to be enlightening.

—Rodger Stevens