Web Exclusive: A Conversation with Morgan Meis
By Interview Issue 80
Morgan Meis blogs about philosophy and art criticism at The Smart Set. His essay “Conversion” in Image Issue 80 takes an oblique approach to his coming into the Catholic Church–it’s at least as much a portrait of the elderly Sri Lankan nun who catechized him as it is a personal essay. Image: You are a…
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 MoreForward into the Dark
By Essay Issue 80
Forward into the Dark: Twenty-Five Years of Ambition IN “THE IRRATIONAL ELEMENT IN POETRY,” Wallace Stevens explains that the unknown “excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom…. [W]e may resent the consideration of [the unknown] by any except the most lucid minds; but when so considered,…
Read MoreCotton Mather Examines Four Children Afflicted by Witchcraft
By Poetry Issue 80
Boston, 1688 Four years before Salem would lose itself to hysteria, Mather knew already the subtle workings of the devil, how an oak might shrivel overnight, its leaves as brown and parched as hostler’s leather; or a widow’s fields surrender to drought, her sons unable to save them, while a neighbor’s thrived. Only by confession…
Read MoreLascaux
By Poetry Issue 80
The photographs are separated by the turn of the page, so that to look at one is to conceal the other. In the first, reindeer scatter westward, their antlers unblooming trees upon the cave’s wall, their hooves roots snaking through barren rock, seeking distant water. In the second, the scene is repeated, but darkly, stripped…
Read MoreConverted
By Essay Issue 80
MY WIFE AND I were living in Sri Lanka when I suddenly found myself baptized into the Roman Catholic Church. I don’t regret it one bit, mind you. But it was surprising at the time. In retrospect, there were signs. My father was sent to Jesuit boarding school as a youth, and though he later left…
Read MoreQuantum Theory
By Poetry Issue 80
Fifty years ago, in Catholic school, a nun gave my mother a ribbon said to have been touched by a saint. This was when her brother was still alive, and masses were still read in Latin, and people still wandered across the street to other people’s houses in the evening. Now the school is coming…
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