Icebergs and Drawings

A couple of ongoing exhibitions with a Brontë twist:

1. In Gettysburg, Pennsylvania:

A sculpture, some drawings, and my relationship with Jane Eyre: New works by Mark Warwick

Gettysburg College's Schmucker Art Gallery
January 24 to February 24, 2008

This is a show about place," Warwick said. "Drawing is the medium that I tend to use when I encounter a new place."
The sculpture in this exhibition also speaks to the issue of place and is a study for a large-scale outdoor work. As a native of Liverpool, England, Warwick contemplates the idea of "home" regularly, especially in regard to Liverpool's celebrated status as European Capital of Culture in 2008. The larger-scale version of Warwick's sculpture, "Looking Across to Sea," will be placed at a port city on the East Coast of the United States with a view across the ocean to Liverpool.
Warwick's unique perceptions of many different places inform the aesthetic of his comprehensive body of work. He considers many of his drawings to be "travel vignettes."
"It is easy to take a person out of a place, but it is perhaps impossible to take the place out of the person," Warwick said.

2. In Las Vegas, Nevada

Withering Heights, new paintings by Elizabeth Blau
10 a.m.-9 p.m. Mondays, 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Saturdays (through Feb. 8)

Winchester Cultural Center
3130 S. McLeod Drive

AT FIRST GLANCE, THE MOUNTING CRISIS of global warming doesn't seem to influence the limitless, ice-blue imagination of Las Vegas artist Elizabeth Blau. She has created vast frozen tundra bordering on the epic, yet revealing a distinct sense of vulnerability. Titled Withering Heights -- a play on Victorian author Emily Brontë's novel, Wuthering Heights -- Blau's show, in its own distant way, mines the thematic terrain of thwarted love and doomed passion. Given the nature of her glacial images, the artist asks viewers to look carefully in an effort to discern subtle emotional tremors and seismic philosophical shifts. Indeed, gazing at something like "Separation Anxiety," a large, two-part acrylic painting, one comes away with the notion that even glaciers must somehow feel the pain of saying goodbye.
Ok, maybe Blau's message is global warming is a serious problem, after all. (Jaret Keene in Las Vegas CityLife)

More information in Las Vegas Review Journal. Picture: Elizabeth Blau, Refraction.

Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights