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.
Brian Dickerson at Lightforms
2023.9.1
Another powerful exhibition from the Upstate NY Art Weekend was the Brian Dickerson show at Lightforms Art Center
in Hudson. Appearing as sculptural wall-hanging constructions, these
works, according to Dickerson, actually are paintings, or rather
“constructed paintings.” Disparate pieces of wood attached to large
base boards are painted in subtly nuanced layers that evoke light moving
across a room or through a landscape. This work has a presence, a
beingness, while also suggesting a
floating aura of nothingness, or of thoughts and memories suspended in
the unconsciousness of time. Gravity pulls down while air pulls up, and
so the large, clearly heavy wood structures have a weightlessness that
asks for us to step into their other worlds. Recently, Brian received a
residency fellowship to Ballinglen Arts, located in the seacoast
village of Ballycastle in North County, Mayo, in the Republic of
Ireland. Here he walked the rugged beach for miles each day, looking,
feeling, existing, and then translated some of his inner responses to
graphite drawings on paper. As in his meditative wood constructions,
these drawings suggest elusive forms that hover, their small, dark,
intuitive configurations engulfed by the white air of the paper,
creating shapes that breathe into dreams. Unfortunately, this show has
already closed.