 |
Email PageHashish
November 18, 2006- December 23, 2006
Dennis Balk
Michael Steinberg Fine Art
526 W 26th StDear friends and colleagues,
This November ‘06 show (my first since the closing of American Fine Arts) represents work made on the road in the Middle East. I was looking for something like an authentic experience, an unmediated immersion into the hot zone. An emotionalism overtook the work and I went with it. In my mind it further fleshes out my concept of “plausibility”— what a work of art can legitimately claim to say or be.
The “Exhausted and Ideographic” pictures (‘04 and ‘05) attempt to force relationships from torn pieces and rare associations of displaced ideographic fragments, trying to picture how meaning actually occurs. The five-panel piece “Scanner Darkly” was the culmination of this attempt, pushing this trajectory into a pop-contemporary frame.
The photographic portraits were taken in Amman and in Wehdat, the Palestinian UN camp in Jordan. The title of the large digital renderings and photographs, “Hashish” comes from my phrase, “my hashish dreams of Palestine free.” I wondered if it summarized the nightmare and the anguish, the bloodletting and abuse of the human spirit, and the bullshit rhetoric of freedom. Somewhere in the smoke and dust of a distant time a culture and people will find their way, to live the sublime humility of what is the truth that is Arab.
Dennis Balk
Art Reviews of Hashish
| New York Times December 15, 2006 | Roberta Smith | "Abstract Expressionism meets graffiti photography. Cy Twombly in cyberspace. Existential physics. The trajectories of car bombs. These phrases came to mind at the show of Dennis Balk’s new work, made during the last three years while he lived in Bahrain and traveled primarily in the Middle East...." |
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
|
 | |||||||||||||||||
Michael Steinberg Fine Art was last updated: 2008-10-11
Update general information with the Gallery Editor.
Update shows with the Exhibition Manager.
Update inventory with the Inventory Manager.
Update general information with the Gallery Editor.
Update shows with the Exhibition Manager.
Update inventory with the Inventory Manager.
|
© 2005-2008 chelseaartgalleries.com | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy
| Site Map |
