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.

Beverly Peterson & Farrell Brickhouse: Studio Visits
2023.12.27
Artist couples are always interesting, and so it was with great pleasure that I recently visited the studios of Farrell Brickhouse and Beverly Peterson. On the surface their work is entirely different, with Farrell’s thick, painterly oils of vaguely human figures within obscure environments and equally enigmatic sculptures made of collaged debris and paint scraps, and Beverly’s installation videos that play with, among other things, virtual reality and AI. But below the surface are the important overlaps. Both artists display expert craftsmanship, work instinctively, express a humanity of deep emotional resonance, and perhaps most interestingly, incorporate images from their personal lives, which not surprisingly often include each other. In fact, Beverly’s sprawling installation, now grown to occupy most of her large studio, is a 3 and 4-dimensional (with the 4th dimension being time) loving testimonial to Farrell’s and her shared lives in Montauk, Tribeca, Staten Island and upstate NY. Packing boxes, once used to carry the couple’s possessions as they moved from place to place, are displayed sculpturally, and now hold memories in their empty spaces of air, while photo and video images of those memories glide across their cardboard surfaces, much as the hidden histories of our lives inform our current experiences of the world. Room lighting, spatial dislocations and somewhat otherworldly digital manipulations of the images create a meditative and dreamy sense of universal nostalgia and warmth. Similarly, but through layers of pure paint, discarded remnants of personal stories found in and around his property, and even prints digitally edited from paintings, Farrell’s elusive oils and metaphoric sculptures repurpose memories and – in the case of his sculptures, trash as well – into mysteries from within his life, and journey into the sometimes whimsical but always vulnerable freedom of imagination that is his art. Fundamentally, both artists create work that begins within their entwined familial worlds and transcends into expressions of universal human experience, transforming one material into another, speaking their individual languages, while also nodding to and subtly mirroring one another’s histories.

Farrell Brickhouse

Beverly Peterson

Farrell Brickhouse

Beverly Peterson

Farrell Brickhouse

Farrell Brickhouse

Farrell Brickhouse

Farrell Brickhouse

Farrell Brickhouse

Farrell Brickhouse

Farrell Brickhouse

Farrell Brickhouse

Farrell Brickhouse

Farrell Brickhouse

Farrell Brickhouse

Farrell Brickhouse

Farrell Brickhouse

Beverly Peterson

Beverly Peterson

Beverly Peterson

Beverly Peterson

Beverly Peterson

Beverly Peterson

Beverly Peterson

Beverly Peterson

Beverly Peterson