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Brotman, Block and Sirvet at the Hamiltonian

April 26, 2009

Block, Brotman and Sirvet

Hamiltonian Gallery Director Jackie Ionita

I don’t often attend artist’s talks because I am not a big fan of artspeak; they generally set my teeth on edge and I really can’t spare any tooth enamel at this point. But since both Michael Sirvet and Tom Block are friends, and I AM a big fan of supporting one’s friends, I made it to their talk at the Hamiltonian and was rewarded with a pretty jargon-free yet interest-full evening.
As I’ve noted before, the Hamiltonian selects an annual crop of fellows from an applicant pool of “emerging” artists, defined as never having had commercial gallery representation. The program gives each artist a show during the course of the year, grouped with an established artist mentor.

Lisa Brotman's woman

In this month’s show, Lisa Brotman is the mentor and Sirvet and Block the fellows. The grouping, while serendipitous this time given some constraints that we need not specify, is illuminating. Brotman’s arresting images of youngish women suspended between the poles of innocence and knowing, victim and predator, refuse to make the choice. The surfaces are slick and alluring, the sentiment more dangerous.

Tom Block and his work

Block is an artist whose animating motivation is highly cerebral but his painting process is more intuitive and the outcome anything but slick. Here he has made a 62-foot long painting that wraps around the back of the gallery, based on a Sufi mystic legend which he has studied as part of an extended exploration of the mystic traditions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The painting looks like a wall thickly plastered with overlapping posters, graffiti and other marks of the passage of time. A closer look reveals the repetition of imagery taken from the Sufi story – birds, heads, hands. As a whole, the piece is fleshy and superabundant – perhaps not what one would immediately associate with “mystical.”

Michael Sirvet with Paul So in the back

I want this, Michael

Michael Sirvet, who just left a career in architectural engineering, (good timing there, buddy) works in metal. He expresses natural forms in metal that never tries to be anything other than metal and that often proudly displays its construction methods, like a garment worn inside-out. His newest work is his most overtly “beautiful” – biomorphic forms in mixed metals and a huge shimmery bowl pierced by thousands of holes that I covet immensely. I loved his description of making all of the holes by hand, proceeding from the large to the small, making progressively less and less obvious progress, until it felt that time was about to stop.

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