Allegorical Strays: The Art and Craft of James Mellick
By Essay Issue 79
AS YOU ARE A SAVVY and a dedicated reader, here for your delectation is a quick quiz in the pestering style of the SAT analogy, but more akin in spirit to Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. If critics from the pre-modern period considered craft to be the opposite of art (craft vs.…
Read MoreThings Come Alive: The Art of Olga Lah
By Essay Issue 80
OLGA LAH DID NOT start out wanting to wrap buildings in electrician’s tape, fill huge spaces with billows of crumpled paper, or line galleries with great swathes of plastic bottle caps. She did not set out to be an artist at all—let alone one catching the attention of the art world in Los Angeles and even…
Read MoreFrom Specimen to Spectacle: The Unruly Art of Dayton Castleman
By Essay Issue 80
The spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation; through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubstantiation takes place…. —Marcel Duchamp BACK WHEN MY KIDS were very young and I rarely had a moment to myself, I once managed…
Read MoreCarnal Beauties: The Art of Allison Luce
By Essay Issue 80
CERAMICIST ALLISON LUCE makes biomorphic portraits that seem almost excessively beautiful. Each piece revels in its physicality, its undeniable materiality, in its earthy substance—clay—and organic forms. Her four-part Serpent Tree series serves as an apt introduction to her work. In Primoris Ortus, for example, assemblages of swelling, vegetative curves stand alongside works suggestive of eroded rock…
Read MoreMirrormind: Lia Chavez and the Artistic Process
By Essay Issue 80
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…
Read MoreObjects Worth Keeping
By Essay Issue 80
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…
Read MoreFrom Culture War to Culture Care
By Essay Issue 80
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…
Read MoreFar as the Curse is Found: The Art of Scott Kolbo
By Essay Issue 80
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…
Read MoreHanging Gardens: The Drawings of Gala Bent
By Essay Issue 82
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…
Read MoreWeb Exclusive: A Conversation with Natalie Settles
By Interview Issue 85
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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