Orange County Museum of Art,
Oct 12, 2004 - Jan 30, 2005
Newport Beach, Ca, USA
California Biennial, 2004
by Eve Wood
Other works in this exhibition are more whimsical and spiritually based. Mindy Shapero’s use of everyday materials to create drawings and sculptures that are intangible and intuitively based, are so refreshing, playful and indeed wondrous. Shapero’s art practice, while visually engaging also operates on a textual level, as many of the titles of these works would suggest. Long and often lyrical, titles like "I Am Disappearing, And Becoming The Sea, The Sun And The Sky. I Am Everywhere At Once," connote the artist’s relationship to the natural world, and seem to propose the possibility that a true harmony can indeed be achieved through imagination and a lively interest in trees, fog, the sky, air, smoke and sunshine. Shapero’s great gift is her ability to represent not only the beauty and simplicity found in nature, but to transform into her own visual language the complexity of being human and alive on the planet.
Other work in the show seemed much more predictable and trite. Brian Calvin, whose great gift to the world is his hyper-fixation with guitars and the supremely empty gesture, delivers yet another group of vacuous paintings that suggest no real humanity, but an arid panacea in the "long-faced, androgenous figure," whose quest it is to find the perfect scenario in which to play his air guitar. The work does not derive from an essential humanness. After all, isn’t art a mean by which a person translates, for himself, as well as for others, all the desires and complexities of the world? Isn’t art an admittance of some real sacrifice?
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