Art Out: Erik Hoffner: Ice Visions, Lucas Blalock: Florida, 1989, Begin Anew
Ice Visions 38, 2020, digital print, 17 x 22 inches © Erik Hoffner, Brattleboro Museum & Art Center
Complementing the ice shanties exhibit, “Erik Hoffner: Ice Visions” features photographs of ice patterns that form overnight atop the holes bored by ice fishermen. Hoffner has spent 20 years documenting these intricate designs on New England lakes and ponds.
“When fishing holes refreeze overnight, they create fertile ground for nature’s wild artistic side,” Hoffner said, “and these perfectly augered circles become worlds at once interstellar and cellular, dreamlike and tactile.” On Thursday, February 11, at 7 p.m., Hoffner presents “Seeing the Story,” a free online talk about approaches and strategies for visual storytelling through photography.
Ice Visions is an informal collaboration between myself, the ice fishing community, and elemental forces. When fishing holes refreeze overnight, they create fertile ground for nature’s wild artistic side, and these perfectly augered circles become worlds at once interstellar and cellular, dreamlike and tactile.
The images on display depict ice designs I’ve documented during 20 years of exploring New England lakes and ponds. In the morning light, with tiny bubbles from below fixed in place by several inches of new ice, these scenes come to life as eyes, galaxies, stars, cells, and more when rendered in black and white.
Due to milder than usual temperatures during the past winter, on many mornings I found barely a skin of new ice covering the prior day’s fishing holes. Bubbles pooled up at the surface before freezing, creating striking new kinds of formations I’d never seen before, ones that perhaps reveal the fingerprint of a warming climate.
— Erik Hoffner
Please click here for more infomation about this exhibition.
Lucas Blalock, Reverse Titanic / Hell is in the Air, 2019, Dye sublimation print on aluminum, 150 x 175.5 cm / 59 x 69 in, © Lucas Blalock, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich / New York
Lucas Blalock was ten in 1989, when his thumb was crushed beyond repair in a freak accident on Disney World’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride and surgically replaced with his big toe. The procedure was somewhat experimental—only a handful of similar operations had been attempted at the time—but it pretty much went off without a hitch, in a utilitarian sense. He exited the surgery one toe short of an even ten, but Blalock was able to maintain nearly normal use of his hand, thanks to his novel cut-and-paste digit.
As you might imagine, the psychic and physiological aftermath from the event has been ongoing. Some of this fallout was jarring, disruptive, paradigm-shifting: the trauma triggered an early transition into puberty, and all memories from his childhood before the accident vanished as if they had been sucked into a black hole, never to be recovered.
There is no aspect of Blalock’s work that was not shaped by this personal tragedy. You can see it in the wonky way he deploys Photoshop to cobble together strange and disturbing new objects and monstrously remixed portraits, in the work’s gnawing sense of disquiet, in the way that he transforms dime store tchotchkes designed to project sunny, childlike optimism into objects of menace. This exhibition marks the first time that Blalock has attempted to grapple with this event directly, or at least as directly as one might expect from an artist whose work is as elusive and allusive as his.
Lucas Blalock’s upcoming exhibition at Eva Presenhuber, New York. Florida, 1989 will open on February 26 and run through April 10, 2021. This will be Blalock’s first significant presentation in New York since he participated in the Whitney Biennial 2019. Full press release here.
Begin Anew
The Royal @ RSOAA is pleased to present, Begin Anew a group exhibition curated by Jason Clay Lewis featuring artists John Marc Peckham, Debbie Raisel, Alfred Schwartz, and Patrice Yourdon.
Begin Anew is about starting fresh and moving forward in this very scary period. These are dangerous times with obvious difficulties ahead, but there is beauty in the darkness. We find ourselves feeling nostalgic and yearning for the world around us to get back to some semblance of normality.
Please click here for more information about this exhibition.
