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.
Claire Seidl thinks in layers – layers of time, memory, light, paint, lines, shapes and movement. In her paintings – and one photograph – now on view at Helm Contemporary through March 28, we see the almost infinite variety of layers that she finds. In some paintings large positive and negative shapes interweave and exchange places, acting like figures caught mid-motion or totems standing strong, while in other paintings fine incised lines meander amongst atmospheric darks and lights of delicate air. Always there is motion, motion of marks caught in the act of forming, motion of the process of making and the history of time unfolding. We feel that each mark is a mark of a particular light from a particular moment, and we flow through the accumulations of these singular incidents, growing with them, as simultaneously we get emersed in the painterly worlds before us. Even her photograph captures this allusive quality of prolonged time and memory condensed into a single frame. Made with long exposures, static items remain in focus and those in motion are blurred, while simultaneously the visual record of sunlight crossing across the motif becomes as tangible and as amorphous as the solid and blurred objects themselves. Apparently, while painting, Claire concentrates mainly on the process of making, beginning with sketches of intertwined figures and manipulating the image until it feels complete, or with her photographs on setting the stage for a surprise final result from the camera, but it is the more evocative and illusive qualities of her art that pull us in, and hold us in our own inner worlds of suspended belief. An added treat is that this Saturday, from 3-4pm at Helm, Claire will be in conversation with Laurie Gwen Shapiro, award-winning filmmaker, journalist, and author, and Peter Malone, artist, curator, and art critic. To see all photos, as well as past reviews, go to Instagram link in bio at @entropvisions or www.alicezinnes.com/entropvisions--blog-
@claire_seidl @helmcontemporary @lauriestories @writingpainter