Rockslide Sky
Curated by Carleen Sheehan
The Center Gallery and the Lipani Gallery
Fordham University at Lincoln Center
October 1 – November 5, 2012
Opening October 4, 6–8
Press: New York Times, Thursday September 20, 2012
Writer Roberto Bolaño’s story, Gomez Palacio, describes a young poet sent to teach for the Mexican Arts Council in a desert town in the northern state of Durango. Viewed on a map, the town is literally in the middle of nowhere, and the narrator, an exiled young writer from Pinochet’s Chile, is, at 23 years old, adrift and world-weary. This is a story where very little happens, yet everything does. Bolano describes a world where the mundane spawns the beautiful, where color is palpable, where an enigmatic emptiness pervades yet manages to provide strange respite.
Key colors in Gomez Palacio are a long, sky blue car, yellow hills described as pure light-- and possibly eternity--, a night sky that descends like a gray wall, and a green, spectral light that appears when passing car headlights rake the desert floor at night. There is also mention of a sky that looks like a rockslide settling over the town.
Bolaño writes as an aggregator, gathering, collating and finally distilling factual information into lucid bits of confounding beauty. Things that shouldn’t add up, do, and much falls by the wayside, or, as the narrator says, is “unlikely, like most things in this story”. Critic Pauline Font writes in her NY Times review that “the aura of mystery and melancholy Bolaño create(s) in Gomez Palacio)…is a sort of microclimate reminiscent of Kafka,…a weather that obliterate(s) everything outside the story”.
The artists in this exhibition all touch on aspects of the narrative in compelling ways, bringing visual impact and tangential experience to the space evoked by the written word. In a sense this exhibition is a visual collaboration with Roberto Bolaño, conjuring and collaging visual accomplices to his words.
ROCKSLIDE SKY / ARTISTS LIST
Justin Berry
Mary Carlson
Marsha Cottrell
Steve Di Bennedetto
Franklin Evans
Janet Gillespie
Jared Handelsman
Michelle Kloehn
Katerina Lanfranco
Joel Longenecker
Tom McGrath
Laura Newman
Morgan O’Hara
Ann Pibal
Marcy Rosenblat
Jackie Saccoccio
