Visual Commen-taries on the Physical World, an exhibition at The New York Public Library. Although unified in their relation to the physical world, the images range from explorations of the delicate beauty of a swan feather to very personal, sometimes jarring examinations of psyche, sexuality, gender, and disease. The exhibition features prints and illustrated books by more than forty artists, including Louise Bourgeois, Christine Dixie, Carroll Dunham, Paul Etienne Lincoln, and Frank Moore.
Admission is free.
The curator is Roberta Waddell, who is also curator of the Library's Print Collection. It is this implicit subjectivity and ambiguity that allow us through art to gain access to an enlightening variety of visions and insights. This relativity of perception is reflected, for example, in works by artist Phil Sims and writer Gregory Whitehead, in which ricocheting line patterns printed in drypoint are paired with humorous, satiric captions written as mock medical diagnoses. Richard Deacon evinces a duality in his anthropomorphic figures based on a series of vegetable photographs he remembered from his youth. In one, a lumpy potato figure is hunched over like an elderly man or woman with a walking stick.