Gallery at The Boca Raton

What are we to make of Tigran Tsitoghdzyan's "Mirrors" — big, bold portraits, confrontationally large, and black and white, like the negative of a photograph, the colors of life enigmatically erased as though in a melancholy underworld? They are clearly masterpieces, but for all the beauty of the female model peculiarly bleak. However well-realized—empirically precise, insistently descriptive—her appearance, she seems peculiarly unreal. The hands that hide her face, yet let her piercing eyes magically see through them, suggest she is a delusion. Ambiguously transparent and opaque, her hands convey the ambivalence built into the artist's "handling" of her.

The stainless steel and aluminum sculptures created by Massachusetts artist, Rob Lorenson are a compositionally rich interplay of formalist elements.  They exist in suspended animation and are situated to freeze a moment in time; hovering effortlessly in space.  The work is constructed of sturdy, permanent materials but lives in contradiction to the impermanent sense of the composition.  He strives to emphasize the compositional qualities of the work, to create dynamic movement with static, solid objects.  

In 2002, Rob was commissioned by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to create two editioned works to be given as Awards to Innovator of the Year and Humanitarian of the Year.

James Austin Murray’s paintings are made using the most basic of means: ivory black oil paint, a canvas and wood-panel support, and wallpaper brushes—up to nine affixed to a long handle. But the surface effects are far from simple, and indeed offer an almost otherworldly experience, as the striations from the brush take the eye on a roller-coaster journey into pleats and folds, over light-struck hillocks and into shadowy crooks and bends. Depending on where you stand, the paintings look like a forbidding landscape you could walk right into. It’s a visual encounter that is both unsettling and profoundly seductive.

The artists' objective is to distill the stereotypical perceptions and associations within our culture into visually compelling objects, sculptures and installations. Whether they are creating an installation describing the impending doom of the dinosaurs or a valise filled with gold lucky charms, their iconography is drawn from the animals, objects and/or situations that operate as commonplace tropes within our culture. Berg & Myers take these generic stand-ins and invest them with multiple meanings through humorous allusions. The aesthetic decisions they make are informed by the consumer culture we inhabit and their desire to create ultra-smooth forms and high gloss finishes that seduce the viewer. Although each individual piece we create may be understood on it’s own terms, the pieces within each exhibition reinforce one another and manifest connections, which make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Michael Dweck is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist known for his narrative photographic and film projects. His work depicts the beauty and complexity of human life, while exploring on-going struggles between identity and adaptation within endangered societal enclaves. The artist says of his work, “I’m not a documentarian that explains a foreign world, not the insider bragging about his haunts, but rather a visual storyteller, who tries to transport and immerse you into a very particular cloistered cultural ecosystem and tells the stories of its characters in the process.” 

Dweck holds a degree in Fine Art from the Pratt Institute in New York. During his earlier career as a highly regarded creative director, Dweck received over forty international awards, including the coveted Gold Lion at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 

Metis Atash views her sculpture as a fusion of worldly pleasure and spiritual insight. Upon first glance, their shiny surfaces and bright colors are unmistakable, though much like the human beings they resemble, their complexity lies within. As a child growing up in the 1970’s and 1980’s, Metis was heavily influence by music. She felt drawn to Punk Rock with its rejection of the mainstream and perceived excesses. This feeling continued into adulthood, when Metis chose to relinquish a successful corporate life for an artistic one. She found the source of her artwork in Bali, after much time spent embracing the authenticity and love of its people.

The approach to sculpture requires a form, and Metis’ choice is reflected literally as the form of Buddha. This shape implies a relationship to Siddartha Gautama, and to Buddhism. Siddartha’s teachings were based on the idea that we exist in a constant state of craving, or want. This endless cycle creates an attachment to impermanent worldly things and pleasures. According to Siddartha, only by recognizing these desires may they be extinguished. The physical act of creating these sculptures is also linked to Buddhism’s ascetic fundamentals. Ascetics have historically withdrawn from the world for their religious practice, and adopted a lifestyle of extreme austerity and reflection. Two examples of this practice are seen in the creation of Buddhist sand mandalas, and even Christian illuminated manuscripts. The intensely detailed work offers solitary monks a profound state of concentration. This kind of ‘escapism’ is also found in the repetitive placing of tiny crystals that cover each Buddha sculpture. Although these works are not intended for religious purposes, the simple act of creating them is meditative.

The emergence of a digital world has affected almost every aspect of contemporary life.  New forms of inhabiting the algorithmic world and the physical world emerge through relationships between human and machine.  While many aspects of natural life have become inextricable from digital life, these new coded forms are consistently evolving–avatars look human; online communication between people is referred to as “chatting”; computers have “brains” etc.

Two objects that have punctuated key moments in the history of Western modernity have undergone a process of radical transformation since the advent of the digital: books and photographs. The emergence of print culture in the 15th Century and of mechanically produced images in the 19th Century set certain parameters around knowledge, communications, circulation and truth. It was these ways of constituting knowledge as a method of enlightenment that set the stage for many struggles and forms of freedom, but also a stage of power and control. 

"To make the sculptures I scavenge scrap yards and construction sites for evocatively shaped pieces of steel, looking for pre-existing lines and shapes with which to draw. Most of the metal is rebar, the reinforcement rod used in buildings, bridges, and highways. Rendered from the concrete for recycling, it comes in a great variety of curves, shapes, and thicknesses. To begin a sculpture I have an idea of the type of animal it’s going to be, and a rough mental image of the gesture. I sketch loosely, welding steel line to line in the air. Rather than bending every piece, I choose pre-existing curves and cut them free from the pile with an oxy-acetylene torch. If I need to adjust the shape I heat and bend with the torch. The arc welder is immediate: I can tack weld a steel line in place and if I don’t like it can twist it off easily. Only in the final stage is each section welded thoroughly. Since the sculpture is not a solid form all the connections have to be strong; I spend a lot of time on the final welding to make the piece ready for transportation and installation."  -Wendy Klemperer

Her work takes many forms: furniture, outdoor installations, floor- and pedestal-mounted works, and even wall-mounted pieces that allude to the history of reductivist painting and shaped canvases. “A lot of pieces are site-specific,” says Manus, “and I think of every piece in three-dimensional terms, even wall pieces. I always think about furniture from every different angle as well.” Works such as Double Jeopardy (2004), which is mounted on the wall, are reminiscent of the work of El Lissitzky, an early 20th-century Russian constructivist who blended mass production and graphic design with high art and confounded the division between two- and three-dimensional artworks. The sculpture is a highly formal experiment: a diptych composed of two aluminum forms painted blue. The two pieces mirror one another’s shape—a vertical band with a cube mounted on each, pointing outward. The cube on the left element is closed, absorbing light, and the right one open and reflective.

Ernest Trova was an artist whose signature creation, a gleaming humanoid known as “Falling Man,” appeared in a series of sculptures and paintings and became a symbol of an imperfect humanity hurtling into the future. Mr. Trova was largely known as a sculptor, but his “Falling Man,” a standard of Pop Art, began life as a painted figure, taking shape on his easel in the early 1960s. Faceless, armless, with a hint of a belly and, its name notwithstanding, of indeterminate sex, the figure struck a variety of poses, sometimes juxtaposed with other like figures, sometimes with mechanical appendages.