I recently went to Wellesley to see the Kathe Kollwitz/ Krieg Cycle exhibit at the Davis Museum & Cultural Center. I’d write about that, but Altoon Sultan already did that here. While I was in the vicinity, I went to Altoon’s current exhibit at the David Hall Fine Arts Gallery downtown. I went with children, and so didn’t have quite as much time to really look as I would have liked. It’s a bit distracting when your middle daughter starts rolling around the gallery on a wheeled chair, even if the owner is exceedingly nice and even encouraging.
Still, I have admired her from afar for some time and it was wonderful to see these exquisite little works in person.
I was also given a large full color catalog with a full length essay about her work, which I will read as soon as I remember where I put it. It was been that kind of week. Two weeks, really. But today I’m back in the studio and it’s been so long since I updated my website/blog, that I’m feeling slightly ashamed.
Not for lack of working, however. Here is a new piece:
It’s similar to what I’m working on today, only now it’s a diptych, with more orange. An interesting confluence, to me at least, is that the way Altoon’s hooked wool rectangles hang from pins on the gallery wall causes them to be not perfectly straight. The gelatin plates I’m using are the same way, and as they age they become more and more irregular. All in the interest of subverting the tyranny of the rectangle.
The diptych idea popped into my head about a month ago, but it requires a bit of a set-up to line everything up, which I finally did today.
One more thing. I’ve become hooked on listening to the Modern Art Notes Podcasts while I work. They had a really interesting one on Picasso’s sculpture at the MoMA, and today I listened to an older one on Marylin Minter and David Ireland. If you like modern and contemporary art, they are a great way to learn while you work.
Deborah Santoro 