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Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Post, the eleventh -- "an unnamed need"

right now, the Wriston Gallery features an exhibit with work by Anila Quayyum Agha, Jennifer Angus, Michelle Grabner, Heather McGill and Tony Orrico.

although i couldn't make it to the opening, i just checked it out and it was pretty cool.

the description inside the gallery reads:

"We desire beautiful things, and yet we discount them.  
Beauty has been so exploited as a means of manipulation 
in contemporary society that we have learned to mistrust it.  
Consequently, we denigrate qualities that create the experience of beauty: 
pattern and ornament are scoffed at as mindless; carefully crafted 
objects are dismissed as elitist; lush and pristine surfaces are considered superficial.  
We have allowed the abuse of beauty to blind us to its richness of meaning.

The works assembled here bring that richness back before our eyes, 
and compel us to contemplate all that beauty can encompass: the fluid 
boundaries among natural and artificial; eye, mind, and body; 
self and other; form and nothingness."

the first room of the exhibit was a series of beautiful patterns on the walls but, unfortunately, i couldn't really look at them because they were made of giant bugs so it was pretty much my worst nightmare; Miriam Beerman was a walk in the park compared to this.

the room that i really enjoyed was the third and final room with Tony Orrico's work that i'm really disappointed i didn't get to see in action.

images of work by Tony Orrico in the Wriston Gallery

his work is extremely active but at the same time looks totally controlled because of the repetition.  

in a way i think that his work really relates, in a very literal way, to the idea of production in Simulations.

i wonder, though, how Tony's intentional production of one (master) piece at a time relates to Baudrillard's idea that "what society seeks through production, and overproduction, is the restoration of the real which escapes it." (pg 44)

are Orrico's works anything less than real if they can never truly be duplicated, not in the same way with the same people feeling and thinking the same things.

maybe Tony Orrico's works are some of the only real works i or we have ever seen.



love

2 comments:

  1. Ooh, interesting... I love the idea that something so completely focused on repetition and precision can be considered unrepeatable. He might be making something very similar to another piece but because of the situation of the performance itself, it becomes a wholly unique, self-contained piece of art.

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  2. I definitely agree that Tony's overall technique is full of activity, something I really liked and have rarely seen before. However, I kind of felt like that activity or energy put into the output of his work is sorely lacking compared to his input because of how controlled and repetitive they looked. The patterns he creates are certainly appealing to look at, but wouldn't it have been more compelling if he'd break out of that repetition and do something other than said patterns?

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