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Mirrormind: Lia Chavez and the Artistic Process

By Katie Kresser Essay

Neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated…. They begin as an unknown adventure in an unknown space.          —Mark Rothko, 1947 OUR ENCOUNTER with reality is endlessly generative. Both Subject and Object, the contemplative and the contemplated, are replete with a beautiful, orderly complexity. The authentic artwork—glittering, effulgent with metaphysical…

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Objects Worth Keeping

By Mary McCleary Essay

The Road Behind Us Image’s Founding Generation When Image was founded in 1989, the cultural landscape looked different than it does today. Religious writers and artists felt cold-shouldered in the public square and often ill at ease within the church. The need for a journal that demonstrated the continuing vitality of contemporary art informed by…

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From Culture War to Culture Care

By Makoto Fujimura Essay

The Road Behind Us Image’s Founding Generation When Image was founded in 1989, the cultural landscape looked different than it does today. Religious writers and artists felt cold-shouldered in the public square and often ill at ease within the church. The need for a journal that demonstrated the continuing vitality of contemporary art informed by…

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Far as the Curse is Found: The Art of Scott Kolbo

By Cameron J. Anderson Essay

The prophet is a realist of distances, and it is this kind of realism that you find in the best modern instances of the grotesque.                             —Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners SOME MONTHS AGO, while traveling, I walked full-force into the sloping ceiling of the unfamiliar guest room where I was staying. The blow to…

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Hanging Gardens: The Drawings of Gala Bent

By Hannah Faith Notess Essay

GALA BENT WAS ONCE a landscape painter who lived in Indiana, born and raised in the Midwest. Her paintings, acrylic on paper, featured dark, heavy, and flat horizontal spaces. But she used to dream about mountains. That is, until she found herself surrounded by them. When she and her husband, fellow artist Zack Bent, moved…

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Web Exclusive: A Conversation with Natalie Settles

By Mary Kenagy Mitchell Interview

Artist Natalie Settles, featured in Image issue 85, has long been fascinated by the biological sciences. She makes drawings and installation art that mix highly detailed botanical and zoological imagery with highly stylized forms, like Victorian decorative motifs. Her installation works are interactive; they use a gallery space to create an ecosystem in which the viewer…

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Ecologies of Knowing

By Mark Sprinkle Essay

Ecologies of Knowing: What Natalie Settles Learned in the Lab   IN 2011, NATALIE SETTLES sat down for coffee and a conversation with Stephen Tonsor, head of an evolutionary plant genetics lab at the University of Pittsburgh. Settles had recently moved to Pittsburgh after a decade in Madison, Wisconsin, where she had been fascinated with and…

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Learning to Live on the Spiral Jetty

By Jeffrey L. Kosky Essay

IN JULY OF 2014 I went to find Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in the Utah desert, about two hours by car from Salt Lake City. Massive, remote, and seemingly useless, Spiral Jetty has the feel of a lost work—one so far out of sight as to be out of mind:  most of us don’t even…

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Into the Artworld

By Theodore L. Prescott Essay

Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton (Norton, 2009) Artworld Prestige by Timothy Van Laar and Leonard Diepeveen (Oxford, 2013)   HOW MANY CONTEMPORARY American artists have you never heard of? Apparently a lot, if surveys are to be believed. A 2005 study by the NEA found that the number of artists in…

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