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.
Kevin Cobb, whose show remains at 81 Leonard through March 23, is a young, talented, smart artist, who’s well-worth watching. His incredible technical proficiency, blended with complex ideas about perception, phenomenology and metaphysics, bring us to an art which depicts physical space merged with a neurological recreation of that space, suggesting a simultaneity between the seen, experienced and thought. Divided into four sections – Studio, Ekstasis (meaning “beyond or outside the self”), The Teleport and The Portal -- the exhibition becomes a journey through the act of comprehending our visual world. Recreated in the “Studio” space is a corner of his actual studio, with a desk, books by and about the philosophers and artists, such as M.C. Escher, who have inspired him, and, perhaps most interestingly, the mirror-globes he uses to create the curved images of his paintings. Hanging on the wall above is his round palette – roundness being our field of vision – made into a work of art, metaphorically conflating reality with art, and the process of making with looking. In Ekstasis are round paintings where we seem to be inside his eye, looking out from within the retina, through the pupil’s veins and into the room beyond, simultaneously seeing the outside room and its reflection on the eye’s lens. Or we view the scene of the Mt. Rushmore mountains, not as tourists, but from the carved presidential heads’ point of view, thus being asked to question direction and what is memorable about our observed experiences. By the time we have reached The Teleport and The Portal sections, we are off to elusive thought and metaphysis, and here the digital image and video are brought in to add even more layers of phenomenological complexity, as the physicality of paint, the intangibility of the digital image, and imagination are made one. Kevin’s is a conceptual art, but a conceptual art expressed purely visually, that makes us think as we experience, and see as we look. It is an intriguing show.