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Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Laziness and other evils at Nexus
Having had a little fun with evil and laziness at Nexus, I thought I'd tell
you about it (Deborah Hayner's "We Love to Hate").
hayner, deborah
The show about evil is about public evil and is appropriately in the more public
front room. "Axis of Evil: The Secret History of Sin" is a traveling
show of stamp art featuring artists from all around a world. The stamp-sized
images, some marked 37 cents and realistic enough to slip past napping postal
workers, are of course illegal to use.
hernandez de luna, michael
Their subject, as the show title suggests, is about governmental evil, but
corporations and terrorists also make the cut. So do sexual predators and religious
institutions--Woody Allen and molestor priests and the lying Catholic bureaucracy,
personified by Mother Theresa with a forked tongue. At this tiny, tiny, sometimes
1 or 2 inch size, the political harping loses its leaden quality, becomes light
as air and funny as heck (left, "The Baader-Meinhof Girls" by show
curator Michael Hernandez de Luna--I loved the Andy Warhol look of these).
baroni, vittore
The images on the sheets of stamps are so small that each one requires slowing
down and focusing. With work by more than 40 artists, some of whom contributed
more than one piece, the show requires a fair amount of time--but you can also
dip in and out and still enjoy yourself.
brownell, matthew
No miscreant escaped the wicked imagery, from artists in black to Harry S Truman as the Unabomber, by Steve Smith, a Florida artist (right, "Plague of the Art Zombies" by Italy's Vittore Baroni.)