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.
Stepping into JJ Murphy Gallery is stepping into the magical world of Nora Sturges, where past meets present, abstraction blurs with representation, and the mysteries of human experience unfold with gentle color and open-ended form. Inspired by late medieval fresco paintings, her small – most are only about 6 inches – gouache paintings suggest abstract worlds which so strongly imply figures and compositional elements from specific medieval paintings that we feel we know the originals. Soon, however, the references drift away as pure abstraction takes hold, for Sturges, who is “inspired by medieval paintings as visionary tools and pathways to abstraction,” does not actually recreate the medieval religious narratives. Rather, she looks to the frescoes for their worldview that allows logical contradictions of multiple stories and time sequences, collapsed space, and ambiguity within a kind of visual clarity. She starts with a fresco’s general sense of composition and color, including its imperfections caused by centuries of damage, and then, with meticulous brushwork made with the tiniest of tiny brushes – the gallery provides a magnifying glass to see minute details and patterning – finds stream-of-consciousness imagery of illuminated color, light, movement and form. Sturges is trying to understand what it is to be human, what it is that at root has not changed since medieval days, how the holy still touches us despite our modern agnosticism, and ultimately, how our own existence is defined by the same intangibles of time, space, emotion, energy and eternal life forces our ancestors grabbled with. Give yourself the joy of walking off the hectic streets of NYC and into a contemporary world of infinite time condensed into tiny jewels of expansive art. Enter Nora’s intimate meditation of discovery, with its generosity of spirit that was born 6 centuries ago. On Saturday, Dec. 14 at 4 pm, the artist will discuss her work at the gallery, but the exhibition itself remains on view through Dec. 21.