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.
Petey Brown at Zurcher and Alexander Heath
2023.5.14
What a pleasure to be given a sneak preview of paintings by Petey Brown, soon be hung on public walls. From May 15-21, her work participates in Zurcher’s upcoming “11 Women of Sprit” exhibition, and from June2-30 it hangs along with Arthur Levine in their two-person exhibition at Alexander Heath Contemporary in Roanoke, VA. To my eye, Petey is a hardcore colorist, a lover of finding the colors of light and the dialogues between them, a peach-pink speaking to a light red, or the twist of a yellow into a light green. She is also a lover of the unusual spaces we all see every day but rarely notice, of the diagonals through subway scaffolding, or the angles through doorways reflected in mirrors, and then reflected again through more doorways. Petey emphasizes these spatial shifts with abrupt croppings of figures cut off at awkward locations, or slightly angled viewpoints of an entire scene. And of course, Petey is attracted to the quirkiness of life, expressed during Covid lockdown through her Olive Oyl series where Olive Oyl, perhaps a metaphor for us all, awkwardly engages with her world, or the more recent subway paintings where the sometimes eerie lighting, the cut-off bodies, the unusual viewing angles express Petey’s sheer joy of the unusual in the usual hidden directly in front of us.