Contributed by Mary Sargent / John Berger declared that every image embodies a way of seeing, and the way that images gathered in “Amongst Other Things,” a recent group exhibition at A Space, embody is slow, sustained, and irreducibly human. The premise of the show was simple and deliberately unfashionable: to depict the landscape of New York through direct, on-site observation. Each of the twenty artists’ works channels a span of looking that may have taken hours, in the manner of artists such as Lois Dodd, Rackstraw Downes, and David Hockney, who spent decades exploring and refining it. As they record their surroundings in paint, the canvases accumulate memories and feelings.
