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.

John Yau, David Shapiro, Mary Flinn & Peter Acheson at Steven Harvey
2025.1.17

The interplay between artists in the current exhibition at Steven Harvey, up through Jan. 25, sheds new light on how collage, stream-of-consciousness, and formal construction are fundamental to the four main artists in the show, poets John Yau and David Shapiro, and artists Mary Flinn and Peter Acheson. Each artist uses a kind of collage – collage of separate physical elements, collage of ideas, or collage of marks and images -- to free the mind, heart and hand to wander at will, and express the inexpressible by transforming the uncensored imagination into something more potent than reality itself. Like his poetry, Yau’s collages have a delicate precision, where rhythm, sound, image and contrasting metaphors seamlessly merge into felt sensations of meaning, sometimes political, personal, or purely abstract, but always a bit ambiguous yet somehow still absolutely clear. Though Shapiro’s collages also bring poetry into a visual world of metaphor and enigmatic juxtaposition, these collages, with stickers stuck on to postcards of the main motif, are conceptual and literary, more about the complexity of thought than the elegance of design. Seeing both poets’ collages next to paintings by Mary Flinn, makes her own use of collage more evident: Suddenly the photo of Lee Miller’s head stands out from its environment of swirling paint, or the wooden frames and lace embedded into the layers of color, become essential elements of the painting. The selection of Peter Acheson’s work includes pure painting, actual collage, and asemic writing, demonstrating the diverse strategies underlying Peter’s process. Interestingly, seen with the poets’ collages, Peter’s oeuvre seems less a collection of individual pieces, and more one huge collage artwork, made of many pieces over many years, that intermix his fascination with intuition, philosophy, science, literature, history, and artmaking itself. Also in the exhibition are one piece each by Mary Heilmann, Christopher Wool, and a collaboration between Bob Thompson and Bill Burrell.

@stevenharveyfineartprojects @maryflinnart @acheson.peter @jyauwriter 

John Yau

David Shapiro

Mary Flinn

Peter Acheson

John Yau

John Yau

John Yau

John Yau

John Yau

John Yau

David Shapiro

David Shapiro

David Shapiro

David Shapiro

David Shapiro

David Shapiro

David Shapiro

Mary Flinn

Mary Flinn

Mary Flinn

Mary Flinn

Mary Flinn

Mary Flinn

Peter Acheson

Peter Acheson

Peter Acheson

Peter Acheson

Peter Acheson

Peter Acheson

Peter Acheson

Peter Acheson

Peter Acheson

Peter Acheson

Peter Acheson

Peter Acheson

Peter Acheson

Peter Acheson

Peter Acheson