Friday, February 4, 2011

Joseph Bernard: BASEDONATRUESTORY!

The Brooklyn Rail has published my review of Joseph Bernard's two-part exhibition BASEDONATRUESTORY! The exhibition took place last fall at the Art Gallery of the Macomb Center for the Performing Arts and Center Galleries at College for Creative Studies. If you're not hip the to Rail, you are really missing something. It started coming out in October 2000, not long after I moved to Brooklyn to go the New School. The list of contributors associated with the publication is quite amazing, some of the top people in American arts and letters, all of whom work for the love of ideas. When I lived in Brooklyn I always wanted to contribute, as I knew one of the film editors, but could never seem to find the occasion. Yet now that I'm in the D, I've had a couple of opportunities to play. It's cool. Also, this spring the Rail's publishing arm, Black Square Editions, will be issuing fellow Kresge Fellow Lynn Crawford's new novel, an excerpt from which she read at the DIA during the literary event I curated there last October. But back to Joe....

Bernard's recent work is in my opinion the best he has ever done. He's really focused in on a format that provides coherence to the work but he's mixing up imagery, techniques, and mediums with a mastery that has opened up seemingly endless horizons of creative possibility. The Rail only published one image. So I put a few more below to give a better sense of what the recent work is about. (All works acrylic, ink, and objects on wood panel. Images courtesy of the artist.) For more on Joseph Bernard, go to his website.

Angola, 2009
Alterpiece, 2009
Nine Very Deep Drums, 2009
Chief, 2009
Still, Still Moving, 2010
Scattered Ashes, 2010
Death Chant, 2010

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