The title Entropvisions is in homage to my mother, the poet and art critic, Harriet Zinnes. In 1990 New Directions published a collection of her poems titled Entropisms, a word she made-up combining entropy - the tendency toward disorder - and tropism - the growth towards or away from a stimulus. Similarly, my short reviews combine entropy and tropism by suggesting growth towards a vision of art from the chaos of the art world. Through the back door, my title also pays homage to my physicist father, Irving Zinnes, whose long discussions with my mom got her thinking about entropy and tropism in the first place.
Jeffrey Bishop at Mosaic
2023.1.4
Jeffrey Bishop
is a logically-instinctive artist. With a strong sense of form and
internal structure (i.e., the logic), Bishop intuitively creates
enigmatic, fluid images that configure and reconfigure into animalistic,
symbolic images, or perhaps purely abstract wanderings. In his most
recent work currently on view at Mosaic Artspace (49-28 31st Place,
LIC, up through January), Bishop begins with a digitally created
central, fairly symmetrical image he equates to a Rorschach
design, but which looks more like a complex totem, perhaps growing out
of the traditional northwest totems Bishop lived with during his many
years in Washington State. Printed vertically and in the center on
large sheets, each about 5x4 feet, the “totem” is then overlaid with
black and metallic ink, obscuring and clarifying parts of this central
core. Each artwork thus suggests unique readings, while still retaining
the repeating totem as an important structural and emotive motif. This
motif repetition becomes an anchor around which change happens, much as
our own bodies are anchors to our myriad of life’s experiences. Bishop
says he paints to music, and that he loves contemporary atonal jazz.
Though clearly not literal translations of any particular music, the
rigorous underlying structure and surprising tonal harmonies and rhythms
of atonal jazz do in fact find visual counterparts in Bishop’s work.
Also on view are samples of earlier prints and paintings, which both
inform and are informed by the new work and are valuable viewing in
their own right. Bishop will be at the gallery this Saturday from 11
-3pm, and next Tuesday, January 10, from 1-5pm.