Tuesday, April 10, 2012

One Thing Led To Another-itis

Does this ever happen to you? You make a list; you have the best of intentions but get derailed by the smallest of things, a phone call, a sunny day, something shiny?


I so meant to write you over the winter but I am guilty of One Thing Led To Another-itis. A thoroughly relaxing vacation set the tone that I could not escape from and took the last few months to catch up with friends, museum hop, stroll the NYBotanical Gardens Orchid Exhibit, be with family and revamp my catering menus. Not having much of a winter here in NY had me gardening in February and March and I can use the garden as a daily diversion, but I already see that the lack of rain and snow is going to lead to a tough year in the vegetable patch.

I am not complaining, this time off has been rejuvenating and I frankly needed it. Looks like 2012 is going to be a terrific year for business, and I have restaffed and revamped and now we are chomping at the bit. The first event of the spring season had us back at where my past post put us, my favorite treasure, The Katonah Museum of Art.

Rising Dragon: Contemporary Chinese Photography is the exhibit. We were busy doing our do but I was listening to the docent tell the gathering that the introduction of the internet into China in 1997 unlocked the world to a waiting populace who were eager for expression. The artists embraced technology and quickly came up to speed with techniques and advances, meeting, and in some instances surpassing, what is happening in this art form globally.

This exhibit ironically related to Walter Wick exhibit we did back at the end of January at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Walter Wick: Games, Gizmos and Toys in the Attic, an artist who works in this modern form of photography that creates scenes, manipulates images with the resulting work that is more real than reality while becoming dream like in its intensity.

The Walter Wick exhibit was the first time I actually realized what I was looking at in this new digital form of expression and was fortunate to speak with the artists involved in the model and scene making and Walter Wick himself. Learning about the explosion of art coming from China and realizing how a suppressed society does not have an outlet to create, the toll that takes on the individual as well as the society was a new thought for me. With Walter Wick, like the title suggests, I felt like someone had opened my childhood mind’s attic, my memories of stories, toys, of play. With Rising Dragon I could not escape the fantasy; you could literally see the mind unleashed. Contemporary art is always exciting. Love it or hate it, it reflects the world and its current state. To the nay sayers I want to remind them that many of the artist’s works considered classic now were hated, even despised, at the time they were made. Contemporary art is, in many ways, seeing the future.

Speaking of future, it's sunny out, the lake is sparkling and the phone is ringing...I smell diversion....

The Katonah Museum- Katonah, NY
http://www.katonahmuseum.org/
Rising Dragon: Contemporary Chinese Photography
March 25 - September 2, 2012

The Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT
http://brucemuseum.org/
Walter Wick: Games, Gizmos and Toys in the Attic
January 28, 2012 - April 21, 2012

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