Setups Situations Solutions

The latest exhibition at the newly expanded popopstudios featured new works by the trio of John Cox, Heino Schmidt and Blue Curry. As always the work offered many interesting directions to guide the wandering mind through the collision of mixed media and traditional techniques like painting and pencil drawing. All three artists featured new work that seemed to be addressing or responding to different ideas with equal levels of wit and invention.

Heino Schmidt’s Six of One, half a Dozen of the Other was a very satisfying combination of shaky dashboard video driving through Nassau’s streets and some well executed line drawings of a rugged looking man in 360 degrees. Heino articulated just enough to give the drawing character but still allowing you to fill in the details. Check out the video to see what I mean. This has got to be the most moving piece of Heino’s that I have experienced. i will have to go back and watch the whole video loop.

Blue Curry’s video installation REPAIRWORK traces the history of a statue that was unveiled in the 1800’s in Nassau to great celebrations. Within a few years the holiday honoring the man in the statue was taken off the books and a few years later the statue landed in the Bahamas National Library storage. Blue discovered the statue’s sorry state in 2001 and began to reconstruct its lost history. The research reveals many details from a Tourist’s comment post on an internet forum to the story of colonial Nassau. It is as if new technologies are helping to reboot our discarded histories by re-infusing it’s artifacts with meaning - or irony, I am not sure which direction Blue might have been leaning. Reading the timeline that he had printed while watching the video make-over is essential as well as both amusing and thought provoking.

John Cox continues in his intriguing exploration within the I Against I series. Four of the six canvases this time do not feature words and simply offer shadowy sea greens and low res blue images which convey a much less confrontational stance than previous works in this series. The absence of textual symbolisms to guide (or distract) the viewer gives the pieces a soothing calm. The final two pieces are a study in opposites. I Against I‘s cold blues and shocking night-safety writing is a cluster of clashing energies while Champion is a soft mesh of tranquility. This piece speaks to me of resolution. As if the first piece when you enter is the first punch that starts the fight. Through the four large muted blue and green canvases, we get a few rounds of give and take that engage you and then suddenly the knock out punch: Champion. With the figure of Cox now buried beneath an cloudy mix of zen floral shapes, the overall image is beautifully abstract and decidedly more feminine in tone than anything I have seen in Cox’s previous work. It will be interesting to see where this series is headed given that the oppositional ideas that it seems to symbolize require both a winner and a loser.

Once again the work from all three artists was powerful, interesting and executed with a high degree of technical skill and the new exhibition space really allows you more room to take in the scale of the larger pieces while also inviting interesting juxtapositions between the different mediums and subject matter.

by: seeward

Posted on 01/17/08

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