ABC Rosalind Tobias Solo Exhibit and TYPO Group Show
On view October 6 through November 3 at the Greene County Council on the Arts Gallery,398 Main Street, Catskill. An opening reception will be held Saturday, Oct. 6 from 5 to 7 p.m.
Artists’ books, broadsheets, postcards and paintings bridge the graphic, calligraphic, mathematical and metaphoric.
In the upstairs gallery, Rosalind Tobias’ solo exhibit ABC evokes an ethereal Rosetta stone with soft figures structured in a loose grid. Her invented alphabet emerges from the cloudlike painting ground.
These works inspired TYPO, the group show in the first floor gallery and special guest artists Sarah Wellington and Laurie Arbieter exhibiting their human rights message tee-shirts, postcards and photographs from their WE WILL NOT BE SILENT Language Project .
Fern Apfel’s work combines painted still lives in an intimately scaled, poetic montage of words carefully sliced from books. Leonard Seastone’s graphic broadsides and artist books comment on the process and construction of hand bound books. These black and white studies utilize Seastone’s collection of oversize wood letter sets, illustrating a lifetime of experiments with hand set type, a fascination with paper and an expertise in highly crafted bindings. Esther Smith and Dikko Faust’s Purgatory Pie Press also produces artist books in addition to limited edition postcards and paper toys with a playful sense of humor. In some cases the alphabet is the subject of the work, in others the typeface is a part of the palette.
Kate Boyer’s ink and watercolor calligraphy recalls the enlarged letter at the beginning of illustrated manuscripts. Bez Ocko’s camouflage variations of “wholelottalove” and “sunshineofyourlife” reveal her typography expertise, a lecture subject she has presented internationally. William Barnds’ self-portrait shows the artist’s confused expression floating in a sea of equations.
The invented alphabets of Juliet Rago McNamara and her grandson Miles Rago reveal secret messages in a calligraphic hand. Art Murphy’s Ptolemaic Variations layers two periods of understanding the cosmos. His colored pencil drawings illustrate this second century Roman scientist’s diagram of the earth and it’s neighbors beautifully rendered over pages from a 19th century book on the same subject. Kim McLean’s invents mysterious figures are created with a 3D modeling software, wrapped in pages from our local phone book.
