no place like home

Antonio Petracca

...a few highlights from

Urban/Suburban

curated by Karen Shaw

Islip Art Museum

The dreamy logic of Darlene Charneco's depictions of complex organisms elicit visions of the utopic -- a sort of parallel universe where candy colored housing units thrive in an eternally healthy eco-system.

For William Carroll, long walks throughout the five boroughs of New York provide both subject matter and muse in a series of works that elucidate the urban geometries that characterize the city streets. 

Antonio Petracca samples elements of urban life that include its blight and decay as well as its function, industry and unlikely symmetries. 

Similarly, Corydon Cowandage examines the anonymity of urban/suburban sprawl in large format paintings of torqued perspectives, diminishing planes and the detail and beauty of roof tiles, vinyl siding and fencing. Cowandage's panoramas are expansive and dizzying.

Steven Millar builds networks that seem to multiply exponentially as if fueled by crystal technology. Like the 1960s song by Malvina Reynolds, Little Boxes, Millar's cubes examine "how we inhabit a space and how a space inhabits us." (excerpted from the artist's personal statement)

The show, which also includes E. E. Smith, Cheryl Molnar, Kim Beck, Noah Klersfeld, Travis Shaffer, Susan Wides and Grant Haffner, is on view through May 27th.

numbers game

Karen Shaw: Quantum Gravy

Islip Art Museum

 Opening reception: Sunday, September 25, 2-5pm  

The artist in Karen Shaw began to emerge in the 1970s as she mulled over a stack of grocery receipts that lay across her Long Island kitchen table. Applying a simple rubric to these random numbers, she began to make cryptographic poems in which arbitrary sums were composed into pithy word aggregates. The poetry found its way on to bingo cards, supermarket flyers, football jerseys and lottery tickets. Selected works are on view through November 13th in Karen Shaw: Quantum Gravy at Islip Art Museum.

Her Summantic Vocabulary codified numbers and words with a simple equation:  A = 1, B = 2, C = 3, and so on. Like Gematria, an ancient Cabbalistic form of numerology in which Hebrew letters are translated into number equivalents and then used to decode sacred texts and ancient manuscripts, Shaw's word amalgamates seemed to expose the hidden truths and deeper meanings that lay outside the margins of popular culture.

Rejigging the ironies of life and history has become second nature for Shaw, whose visual tropes are cheeky and smart. Definitely worth a trip to Islip Art Museum.