Author Archives

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.
Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts

Trent Alvey and the Perishing, Mortal Eye

For a couple of magic years during her adolescence, I drove my step-daughter to and from school five days a week. During those shared moments, one of her favorite things was to tell me her dreams. Eventually I realized her narratives went on far too long for her to be remembering them: that she had, in fact, returned to the dream state and was telling me the dream as she witnesses it continuing. The literary novelist, Robert Olin Butler, describes the process of artistic creation just so, as dreaming while awake, and I realized that I’d had the rare privilege of witnessing that process in play. 
That description comes close to accounting for the art of Trent Alvey, in that her works are rooted in abstractions and resist ascribing them to subject matter.

Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts

Some Things We Noticed at the Spring Salon: Jason Lanegan, Emily Hawkins, Pamela Beach, Shari Darley Griffiths, Santiago Michalek

Jason Lanegan’s “Relic and Icon of a Rural Life” unites a found toolbox with an icon: a model barn made on the scale of the small churches often held by saints in their portraits, here fabricated from building materials and covered with plans and patterns. Inside the box lies a baling hook, a handheld extension of the worker’s arms and fingers, restored to the environment in which it spent its working life. Lanegan’s reliquaries express his faith that his life and its milestones are as valid, and more entertaining, than those of long gone figures whose names few recall. 

Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts

The Visible and the Implicit in Modern West Landscape Show

Out There includes 17 artists, most of whom will be familiar to Modern West’s regulars. They all appear frequently, and most have some work in the collection, giving their audience a chance to witness their gradual, and occasionally sudden evolution. Two themes that made for new work were the ongoing environmental crisis, which has only grown worse while almost nothing is done by those who could and ought to help, and the pandemic, with its associated social isolation and continuing controversy, in spite of mortality remaining high. 

Translate »