The ecumenical and unpredictable nature of these exhibitions has always had a near oracular quality akin to reading tea leaves as a broad array of concepts, concerns and subtexts rise to the surface in often unexpected new ways. This year it is the role of the individual that is highlighted in relation to an increasingly dense and interconnected world in which people must situate themselves within an ever shifting array of networks, human and electronic, reflecting a time of transition in how people define themselves in relation to their human and natural environment. Consequently our longstanding national myth of the rugged individualist hero is increasingly difficult to perpetuate in an ever more complex, hard wired world dominated by global corporations that are often larger than entire nations. It can now be argued that today's rugged individualists are more often found on the margins of society, or such is the implicit message of Ira Upin's dramatic magic realist paintings such as Fat Cat, in which an aging mobster in shades and puffing on a cheroot reclines in his easy chair as a torched building goes up in flames in the background. But in Jeff Pastorek's paintings the individual subjects appear as tiny portraits arranged in grids that focus on facial features that convey how people express their
emotions and desires in relation to each other in a group context, transforming the traditional miniature portrait genre into a kind of painterly social network. In Edward Ramsay-Morin's collages, some photographic portraits of the young adults and couples of the 1950s have been modified so their otherwise conventional Eisenhower-era faces reveal their innermost, cold war decade nightmares in the form of strategic military maps, ICBM missiles and mushroom clouds. Continued: Click Here>>
