Some photos from a recent guided walking tour of the Bushwick Collective in Brooklyn, New York. Located around Troutman Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, it is a must-see collection of legal street art and murals contributed by local, regional, and international artists with the knowledge their art is temporary, seldom lasting more than a year.
There’s something surprising around every corner and, at points, it’s hard to know just were to look—everything grabs at your attention and there’s new work going up year round.
For our twenty-second wedding anniversary, we went day tripping in Jamestown and Newport, Rhode Island. Our first stop was the Jamestown Arts Center where my beloved was sure I would enjoy “Spacing Out: Expanding the Field of Vision” exhibition and he was so very right.
Spacing Out: Expanding the Field of Vision unites art that blurs the boundary between two- and three- dimensions. Spacing Out contextualizes the work of contemporary artists who challenge the limitations of space among historical works that also play with dimensionality. It asks the viewer to reconsider their visual and spatial perception, questioning the art’s depth and attachment to a surface. This surface, as well as edge, texture, scale, volume, place, and movement become the dialect with which the artists expand our concepts of sculpture and art in general.
Tom Deininger, Hanging Summer Tanager, mixed media, 2021
I was immediately smitten with Deininger pieces and wish I had thought to film them rather than take photographs. Then the distortion of form and the play of objects would be more obvious to you. Like many of the pieces Deininger contributed to the exhibition, “Hanging Summer Tanager” can be viewed as a whole, recognizable bird from only one angle. But move to either side and the bird is revealed to be a glorious explosion of plastic tat. That it all comes together to form a charming yellow bird seems unlikely, but there it is.
Thomas Deininger, We Killed Cock Robin, found objects, 2021
The same is true for “We Killed Cock Robin,” a cloud of plastic toys surrounding an arrow that pierces the heart of the robin. The arrow, as with the rest of the found objects, is not visible when looking at the bird in its entirety. Looked at sideways, the robin appears to be exploding out from the arrow. Contained chaos.
Inspired by telescopic images of asteroid belts and microscopic views of environmental particulates, Renadette’s pieces are assembled from such disparate ingredients as styrofoam packaging, window screen, disassembled artificial flowers, and cocktail swords. As with “Tanager” and “Robin,” “Hurtling” is an artwork that needs to be seen in person to be best appreciated.
