Sara Toby Moore's "The Mechanix," a self-described "science fiction-magical realism-human cartoon" show, takes place on "a normal day at a seaside amusement pier." The show includes interdimensional travel, anthropomorphic animals, the nature of free will, and an extended riff on "The Wizard of OZ." Through it all, one would be forgiven for occasionally asking what one thing has to do with the other. It's a question that never gets answered.
The show features painting, sculpture, photography, film and assemblage, tracing how artists working in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and New York grappled with identity, sexuality, race and power in ways often overlooked in canonical art histories. Though the women's liberation movement didn't enter wider public consciousness until the early 1970s, Sixties Surreal showcases how women artists were creating an early feminist aesthetic and imagining new fields of possibility for themselves and their work.
Have you ever seen the onearmed man running a bye to the keeper while 20,000 people leap and writhe and hold their heads and the one-armed man shouts in agony? This scene captures the surreal essence of a cricket match, where intense emotion exists even amidst a seemingly uneventful game.
Minami Kobayashi's figurative oil paintings and sculptures intertwine elements of intimacy and mystery, showcasing ordinary subjects with a surreal twist. Her work evokes a sense of the uncanny, engaging viewers with familiar yet disorienting imagery.
Suzanne Cesaire co-founded a journal called Tropiques and published influential essays on politics, literature, and art, inspired by her encounter with surrealist Andre Breton.
People are not very good at remembering things the way they really happened. If an experience is an article of clothing, then memory is the garment after it's been washed, not according to the instructions, over and over again: the colours fade, the size shrinks, the original, nostalgic scent has long since become the artificial orchid smell of fabric softener.
What Arshile Gorky and the other great immigrant observers of America had in common is that each pursued a passion in the modern sense, making art against the grain of commerce, while each underwent a passion in the mythical Greek sense-had some moment of struggle or pain that resolved in art, and, often, in the closest thing artists get to immortality: a place in the collective memory.
