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Oblique & Acute Angles of Vision
Five New Shows in Brattleboro
by Edgar Allen Beem
The Brattleboro Museum & Art Center is welcoming spring to southern Vermont with five new exhibitions (all through July 11) featuring the works of 18 contemporary artists. They present a lively mix of artists from the region and from away that continues the Brattleboro MAC's commitment to seasonal shows with wide visual appeal.
Occupying the museum's main gallery is a group show entitled Oblique/Acute that uses extreme point of view as the organizing principle to bring together the works of six artists.
The best known of the six is probably Yvonne Jacquette, who has painted aerial views of urban and rural landscapes all over the world, often at night such the human world glows from on high. "Above Times Square," for instance, is a night view of a skyscraper under construction, the angle of view locked in to the vertical geometry of New York City. The exhibition also features black and white photographs of New York by Jacquette's late husband Rudy Burckhardt.
Debra Bermingham, Jacquette's stablemate at D.C. Moore Gallery in New York, shows still, misty, ethereal paintings that have an almost otherworldly point of view - distant, detached, godlike. Israeli artist Maya Gold contributes paintings in which discrete objects are seen from directly overhead. David Kapp creates painterly evocations of urban street life from a bird's eye perspective. And Nicola López takes an opposing point of view, looking up from the ground through mazes of what appear to be skyscrapers under construction.
The museum's Center Gallery is devoted to an exhibition of art by eight artists - Doug Safranek, Robert Paul Saphier, Koo Schadler, Suzanne Scherer and Pavel Ouporov, Altoon Sultan, George Tooker, Robert Vickrey, and Fred Wessel - who work in egg tempera.
The South Gallery is filled with the colorful, jazz-inspired abstractions of painter Cecily Kahn, daughter of artists Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason, and wife of painter David Kapp. Kahn's vibrant, action-oriented application of color is like a spontaneous dance across the line surfaces of her paintings.
In the East Gallery, the collaborative duo of Nicholas Kahn (no relation as far as I know) and Richard Selesnick have installed their "City of Salt," a conceptual project consisting of models, photographs, and documentary text that purport to tell the story of a fictional desert land animated by greed, oil, and spiritual enlightenment. Timely, both as artistic conceit and political commentary.
Finally, in the Activity Room, Vermont artist Ellen Dorn Levitt shows "Symmetries," an exhibition of acrylic ink drawings of symmetrical patterns based on quilt squares and board games. The mandala-like works on paper have a decorative presence that evokes a meditative state of mind.
[Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, 10 Vernon St., Brattleboro VT, 802-257-0124]
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