PAST EVENTS

M55 ART 44-02 23rd Street Long Island City NY 11101
is pleased to presents:

“Duo Vision”

Recent work by Alfred Martinez and Glenn Reed

November 30- December 17 2011

Opening Reception: Saturday December 3 6-8pm

The art pieces for the “Duo Visions” exhibition uses the same process to achieve the art content as was used for the preceding “Digital Pilgrim” exhibition. Ideas formulated for those works involved telling visual stories through the media of painting and collage. The initial idea involved hiking the ancient 500-mile pilgrims’ route through northern Spain. I did just that, and worked daily photographing my encounters of people, locations, and the most intriguing Romanesque churches.

One challenge for me through the type of visual language I create is to make my work interesting. Aiming to be effective visually is the work of an artist, and it contributes I think towards conveying whatever one needs to say in art, clearly, precisely and even dramatically. I have been working multimedia for years by employing objects, photographs and audio in my paintings. Selecting to create in the collage format process has been revealing and exciting at the same time. Collage by its nature of process, allows materials and objects to come together and create new and unusual stories. A final challenge in this work was to create visual stories of the present about Romanesque art and places from the past.

In this exhibit I use collage with embedded digital frames to display multiple pictures in combination with laminated photographs. Max Ernst of the surrealist movement enjoyed selecting different types of printed images from magazines in order to use in his picture making process. I like to combine photographs with drawing, painting, impasto and even audio. The painted surfaces for these works are actually minimal. For this exhibit I work on a flat vinyl surface, adhering fragmented photographs and a digital frame into a composition of varying symbols. The pieces in this exhibit are individual 24” inch wide vertical units over 6’ feet in height draping to the floor from stainless steel towel racks. An important element for the pieces in this show is the grafting of consumer slide digital frames into my compositions. The digital frame is the contemporary reading magazine of today. Because one can look at different pictures singularly, grouped, and even stimulate movement as if turning pages; actually one is editing mixed information. The digital frame for the works in this exhibit add a three dimensional effect to the surface images. The flower shaped images I use give intense color to the compositions. The flowers also appear in detail on the digital frame screen adding information to the art’s content. Most of flower images I use are the result of photographs taken from the garden of Lorraine Messier, my wife. The digital frames provide music to help create the space presence of individual art piece.

This exhibit has been an opportunity to present work from specifically studying Romanesque relief sculpture. I walked for 15 days the pélerines’ le chemin route from Vézelay to Moissac France. It was a highly intense excursion that has led to the creation for the works in the Duo Visions exhibit. This work I hope invites the viewer to look at visual stories the way Romanesque Art was once looked at.

Alfred Martinez

Inspired by the beauty and symmetry in the shapes and ideas from cosmology, particle and astronomical physics, Glenn Reed’s hope is that his art is to some extent able to mimic that beauty and symmetry. The works are elegant, light, and balanced.
In general Glenn Reed’s work juxtaposes heaviness and lightness in the materials that are used. Pieces may be made from heavy raw materials such as concrete, cast iron, pipe, braided cable and chain, but also in the same works they may contain light, delicate and translucent materials such as thin wire, paper and Plexiglas. The heavy materials relate to the physical here and now, and the light materials imply cognitive energy. Some of the works are also physically heavy, yet are presented as very delicate and balanced. He uses spirals, springs and coils not only because of their metaphysical relation to infinity, but also because of the stored energy they possess.
Ideas and drawings for a work derive from contradictory interpretations of experiential knowledge of physical reality, including contemporary scientific models. For example, a favorite is a Zeno-like paradox: How can two perfect circles actually touch each other if they are continually turning in toward each other? No matter how close you zoom in on the two arced lines, they will continue to approach, but never converge. This prompts a further question: How could any two things touch?
Another important sculptural element in Glenn Reed’s work is tension or reserved force. The stored energy becomes a pictorial element that can be read or sensed by the viewer. It is another physical element along with physical form, gravity, light and empty space
Some of the wall pieces hang away from the wall and are sometimes perpendicular rather than flat against the wall, implying a sort of 21⁄2 dimensionality.

Glenn Reed