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.

Elisa Soliven study visit
2024.7.17
Back in the spring, I had a lovely visit to Elisa Soliven 's studio, but refrained from writing until her upcoming solo show would open, and so it is that, with her show at Marvin Gardens in Queens opening this Saturday from 3-7pm, I now send out my thoughts. Walking into her gallery, filled with amphora-derived sculptures stored on large shelving units, I immediately felt in the presence of marching female warriors, women of strength, determined to make their way through our men’s world. And in fact, Elisa, is interested in women’s roles, particularly how, even today, they do more housework than men, but she is interested in so much more. Elisa’s art seems to embody both the optimistic and the ominous, not only for women, but for our environment, history, and our lives in general. Her sculptures are totems, survivors from archeological digs, and creatures of an imagined mythological world. In some pieces, the armor seems to be made from embedded seed pods, and the figures, defiant with their arms crossed, seem to be holding seeds, as if offering hopeful renewal pellets to ward off our looming climate catastrophe. The ceramic sculptures are busts, vessels, and full figures of modular parts stacked vertically, much as early architecture was built by adding layers of brick. We feel the thickness of the vessel walls, as lower layers visibly show the weight from above, emphasizing the heaviness of clay and the import of the artwork’s content, but we also feel a lightness from the embedded jewel-like fragments, pieces taken from her past work. Based on stable patterned geometries of the grid, as well as right angles, and wrapped in winding, looping armor that doubles as roots of growth, sometimes glazed with the silver of power, and other times left the clay’s neutral gray of vulnerability, Elisa’s work seems to embody both the strong and weak forces of the human experience. Elisa is always experimenting, inventing the new as she evolves from structures in her past, and so her upcoming show, surely to include some of the work I saw, but more recent work as well, promises to be an engaging exhibition.