Anya Antonovych Metcalf
"There is a Crack in Everything"
And now there is a crack in everything which is about the worst news I’ve heard since hearing that my friend from childhood, Humpty Dumpty, had been pushed. Humpty Dumpty though might be a different case as he broke into many pieces, like a vase, made of ceramics.
Is the implication also that there is a flaw in everything?
This thought or report does open quite a variety of things and start them breaking apart or coming apart – like zips – like runs in stockings – like roots rising up and cracking sidewalks, walls, buildings.
To what cracks though are Anya and her exhibition of paintings referring? This artist’s gaze seems turned upon cracks in roads, cracks in streets. What come to mind in addition and immediately though are the metaphors – the crack before for birth and intercourse – the crack behind for defecation which is also otherwise made use of.
There is a crack in everything calls to mind the metaphor to do with the heart – with its being broken. No heart ever was though and no heart ever can be. Hearts are not made of stuff that breaks. This does bring to mind the man having problems with his mind who went to his Zen master to complain of it. “Bring out your mind before me!” he was told, “I’d pacify it.” His mind which was troubling him, though he searched for it, he had to confess, he could not find.
What therefore of Anya’s crack in everything? Is it like the broken heart which cannot break? Has this crack been attributed to what cannot crack of be cracked - the way lightening cracks the sky or the way the Red Sea was cracked for the children of Israel to cross? Is it the crack of a whip?
Is it about fracture though and is therefore about pain – like a cracked tooth or a cracked or fractured skull and about broken bones?
What Anya’s exhibition is about and is reference to as well is what had been fractured and in time mends and a scar remains – indicating where raw injury once was.
Art is about beauty. There is a crack in everything therefore is not meant to be bad news. It is about wholeness in spite of flaws and fissures and fractures. It is about the crack of dawn and the crack of birth – about the place of orgasm – the screams of lovers and of babies, drawn into the world and into light out of the dark.
Putting Humpty Dumpty together again is the business artists must be in. We must commit to doing what all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not accomplish.
What pleases me is the sense of golden rectangles – the wonderfully made frames – echoing the shapes upon which Anya has painted. And these exquisite shapes of frames and papers they frame, argue with the art and the idea of fracture and the dynamics of what breaks and what mends.
Ultimately though is the crack about being crack or cracked as in insane, wholly or partially, or is it about crack cocaine and altered perception?
This artist has two hands though and in Hungry, in 1989, in a museum, standing before a painting, a portrait of a girl, the thought occurred to me, “We use our hands to put things together, to take things apart.”
I like very much what Anya, in this exhibition has put together or assembled. Certainly when purchased, these will be pulled apart again. What each buyer takes away though will be something whole – something beautiful, with a crack in it, like the cracks in a broken heart which actually has no cracks at all and the pain as well is no more than illusion.
I asked Anya, the evening her exhibition opened, at The Hub, Friday, June 12, about the fact that all her paintings in this exhibition are squares. Drawn away by her son, running about until he was sound asleep in his grandmother’s arms, Anya’s answer begun, was never concluded. The answer comes to me now, after 2 in the morning, two days later. Squares are circles. It is the same 360 degrees and within a square a circle can be drawn from the very same centre and a circle, like the earth or like a wheel, can revolve. Is traffic why the roads are cracked after all, coupled with neglect?
Anya’s cracks are about time though, about aging. Anya’s paintings are just done or painted not long ago. Some are on paper, some are acrylics, and others are oil on canvas. What is indicated by the title of the exhibition is what happens after decades or after several hundred years.
It implies the paintings we see in museums, in the Louvre and elsewhere, painted by Rembrandt, The Dutch Masters, by Caravaggio or even Venus de Milo, without arms. Here is what is new, pointing to antiquity, to what happens after these masters are long dead and time, as it were, is continuing to work on their paintings, their works of art. It is what happens to the paint upon old building in the oldest cities in the world.
By Obediah Michael Smith.
June 15, 2009.
"There is a Crack in Everything"
And now there is a crack in everything which is about the worst news I’ve heard since hearing that my friend from childhood, Humpty Dumpty, had been pushed. Humpty Dumpty though might be a different case as he broke into many pieces, like a vase, made of ceramics.
Is the implication also that there is a flaw in everything?
This thought or report does open quite a variety of things and start them breaking apart or coming apart – like zips – like runs in stockings – like roots rising up and cracking sidewalks, walls, buildings.
To what cracks though are Anya and her exhibition of paintings referring? This artist’s gaze seems turned upon cracks in roads, cracks in streets. What come to mind in addition and immediately though are the metaphors – the crack before for birth and intercourse – the crack behind for defecation which is also otherwise made use of.
There is a crack in everything calls to mind the metaphor to do with the heart – with its being broken. No heart ever was though and no heart ever can be. Hearts are not made of stuff that breaks. This does bring to mind the man having problems with his mind who went to his Zen master to complain of it. “Bring out your mind before me!” he was told, “I’d pacify it.” His mind which was troubling him, though he searched for it, he had to confess, he could not find.
What therefore of Anya’s crack in everything? Is it like the broken heart which cannot break? Has this crack been attributed to what cannot crack of be cracked - the way lightening cracks the sky or the way the Red Sea was cracked for the children of Israel to cross? Is it the crack of a whip?
Is it about fracture though and is therefore about pain – like a cracked tooth or a cracked or fractured skull and about broken bones?
What Anya’s exhibition is about and is reference to as well is what had been fractured and in time mends and a scar remains – indicating where raw injury once was.
Art is about beauty. There is a crack in everything therefore is not meant to be bad news. It is about wholeness in spite of flaws and fissures and fractures. It is about the crack of dawn and the crack of birth – about the place of orgasm – the screams of lovers and of babies, drawn into the world and into light out of the dark.
Putting Humpty Dumpty together again is the business artists must be in. We must commit to doing what all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not accomplish.
What pleases me is the sense of golden rectangles – the wonderfully made frames – echoing the shapes upon which Anya has painted. And these exquisite shapes of frames and papers they frame, argue with the art and the idea of fracture and the dynamics of what breaks and what mends.
Ultimately though is the crack about being crack or cracked as in insane, wholly or partially, or is it about crack cocaine and altered perception?
This artist has two hands though and in Hungry, in 1989, in a museum, standing before a painting, a portrait of a girl, the thought occurred to me, “We use our hands to put things together, to take things apart.”
I like very much what Anya, in this exhibition has put together or assembled. Certainly when purchased, these will be pulled apart again. What each buyer takes away though will be something whole – something beautiful, with a crack in it, like the cracks in a broken heart which actually has no cracks at all and the pain as well is no more than illusion.
I asked Anya, the evening her exhibition opened, at The Hub, Friday, June 12, about the fact that all her paintings in this exhibition are squares. Drawn away by her son, running about until he was sound asleep in his grandmother’s arms, Anya’s answer begun, was never concluded. The answer comes to me now, after 2 in the morning, two days later. Squares are circles. It is the same 360 degrees and within a square a circle can be drawn from the very same centre and a circle, like the earth or like a wheel, can revolve. Is traffic why the roads are cracked after all, coupled with neglect?
Anya’s cracks are about time though, about aging. Anya’s paintings are just done or painted not long ago. Some are on paper, some are acrylics, and others are oil on canvas. What is indicated by the title of the exhibition is what happens after decades or after several hundred years.
It implies the paintings we see in museums, in the Louvre and elsewhere, painted by Rembrandt, The Dutch Masters, by Caravaggio or even Venus de Milo, without arms. Here is what is new, pointing to antiquity, to what happens after these masters are long dead and time, as it were, is continuing to work on their paintings, their works of art. It is what happens to the paint upon old building in the oldest cities in the world.
By Obediah Michael Smith.
June 15, 2009.
posted by Obie Quiet at 2:10 PM
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