I’ll close this week on art tidbits with two items that might interest you.

One is an exhibit in NYC (friends there: you have exactly 2 days to catch this show at Bookstein Projects….) that focusses on how a deviation from a traditional art subject can make things more interesting. Reversing the trend, in some ways.

Artists Who Unlocked the Modernist Grid

As someone who uses lines and circles as geometric anchors a lot in my own work, the art in this exhibit was mind-opening. Grids have been a staple in modern art ever since the Russian painter Kazemir Malevich and of course Piet Mondrian established them ass anchors in their work. The link below gives a short and fascinating art-history overview of the grid’s evolution in contemporary painting.

https://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/art_market/how_the_grid_conquered_contemporary_art-51540

To see several blue chip artists finding creative ways to break the grid while still using its visual power just spoke to me. Here are some samples from the show.

The second item of some kind of reversal has to do with photography.

In the normal progression of things, you come to a moment that catches your attention and you try to preserve it with your photograph. In the – fun! – link below, the photographer in some ways reversed that sequence. He stood in place, waiting for the moment to come to him.

(If you open the link  you need to push the cursor a bit to the right to get to the photographs – at least that was the case on my computer)

http://www.jonathanhigbee.com/coincidences  

When I first saw these pictures I was was assuming that they were staged. No one would have so much luck chancing upon so many meaningfully matching constellations. But when I read that Higbee visits certain promising locations (advertisement posters etc.) several times a week, waiting for hours, sometimes across two months, it all made sense. Of course he has one of the most photogenic and variable populations at his disposal: the citizens of NYC.

But perhaps hanging out on the street corners of PDX might yield just as delightful results…..

Photographs are my own grids, caught here or there.