The art that matters to you lives in your head. It emerges into consciousness whenever the world presents its echo. On a fine day, for instance, you note Fragonard clouds. In the rain by a pond, you see John Constable muck. Smashed glass on the street, Gretchen Bennett. White-out paint passages to cover graffiti, Matt McCormick. Open any old refrigerator, and you remember a video of a wolf chasing down dinner. (Vanessa Renwick, Hunting Requires Optimism.) See a pit bull cock its head to note the approach of a stranger, and Michael Spafford‘s Minotaur and the Maiden series from the 1980s comes to mind. (The long jaw, the barrel chest, the spring in the legs, poised to strike.)
Wrong Distance made the same point quite nicely: a random photo of a room instantly evokes German painter Matthias Weischer.”It’s far busier than something he would ever do, the colors are not quite, it has a person in it, it’s a photo. and yet…”
Or the chase of a guide in the form of R. Allen Jensen, with a whiplash of what you perceived as genius in Ford Crull, countered in the religious genius of Michael Tracy in Terminal Privileges, popped in the new moment of Jeffry Mitchell, mixed with the student of Dan Webb…and on it goes…