by Onajídé Shabaka - 17 Dec., 2004

  Three Artists, December, 2004

   by Onajídé Shabaka

Although ones first impression of Brandon Opalka's paintings is that they are scenes of something, this is only partially true. Opalka's current solo exhibition at Rocket Projects fuses George Orwell's Animal Farm with Fauvism to create a strangely vague yet, familiar landscape. There is a search of the canvas for some clearcut and recognizable place or object yet, one it not likely to find either. That doesn't mean one cannot get a sense of what one may be looking at but, there is a continuing search that eventually leads to works that are based on assumptions of self-sufficiency. There is also a tension in the way the work is executed that harks back to Fauvist works where a bold sense of surface design was an important element. That tension also lends itself from Orwell's Animal Farm in that the story sets up a series of ongoing tensions that eventually lead to chaos.

Another form of abstraction at Rocket Projects are Emilio Perez’s paintings. He says they “are informed by the day to day workings of his subconscious…[b]y using an automatic approach to drawing he has developed.” They are not doodles even though the forms are swirled around the surface, and laced with nuanced color. The swirls actually look very deliberate even though there is some seeming randomness to them. Some of them look like unwound string or, even fingerpaints. However the painting’s surface is very smooth and inviting.

Photographer Deborah Jack's ongoing series of works focus on her autobiographical self-examination. She is from the St. Martin Dutch Antilles and lived some years on Holland before imigrating to the US. While living in both NYC and Dutch Antilles she began to examine her interaction between the two locales and how she had to adapt herself to them. It became an examination of space and place as well. She also recently completed an artists' residency at Light Work's Artist-in-Residence Program in Syracuse, New York, where she was able to use their facilities to print this body of work. Her photographs can be seen at Diaspora Vibe Gallery in Miami's Design District.