“Strangefolks,” Allston Skirt Gallery, Boston, MA. Through Feb. 16. ASG presents a three-person show of big paintings by John Copeland, Logan Grider and Elizabeth Huey. Each bring a peculiar, multi-faceted vision of a complex world to life in their art � a world that has perhaps gone over the deep-end, physically, psychologically, and technologically. They all depict recognizable objects from our everyday inner and outer lives, but set into dynamic, often dysfunctional, fragmented and chaotic new relationships to each other. �The paintings have separate subjects but nearly all hinge on an organized mess, which is about to collapse,” writes Logan about his work. “Much in line with my beliefs about the potential trappings and downfalls due to the rapid growth of technology on the communications front,the paintings usually present this collapse of machinery as inevitable.�
In The Phoenix, Greg Cook writes that “Strangefolks” reverberates with the abject anxiety of our current political climate. “We�ve had a pretty crappy millennium so far: September 11, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (the latter hits its fifth anniversary in March), torture carried out in our name, a steady thumping of terrorist attacks abroad, Hurricane Katrina, global warming, and lately the mortgage crisis and threats of a looming economic recession. All this gloom and doom has burrowed down deep into our common dreams, mutated, and burbled back up in art as disconcerting symbols and off-kilter apocalyptic allegories.” Read more.
