Month: August 2004

  • Josh Blanc’s Cosmic Clouds

    Think of Josh Blanc’s terra cotta tiles as a grownup version of finger painting. With that classic kindergarten exercise, the child’s still-developing coordination and sense of color create a surprising synergy; the painter moves one direction, the paint pulls another, and the piece springs to life. Blanc makes tiles—on display at Clay Squared To Infinity’s…

  • Poster Offensive

    Election years are prime media-inundation time, and we’ve found that some forms—like witty Internet cartoons—are categorically cooler than others—say, party-sponsored ads. The Poster Offensive takes the cool kind—visually appealing public discourse set to the tune of clever wordplay and cheeky graphics—and presents it in a series of posters that are both an offensive against the…

  • Seasons of Life and Land

    When amateur photographer Subhankar Banerjee set out in 2001 to document the Arctic Natural Wildlife Refuge across four seasons, he could not have known how many hot buttons his project would push. Last year, with Seasons slated for wide exposure through a prominent Smithsonian gallery exhibit and a nationally distributed book, liberal senators wielded Banerjee’s…

  • Open House

    In the realm of home improvement porn, HGTV is the softcore king. Designer dominatrices who flagrantly ignore client safe-words (“Please, no purple walls!”) have no place on this channel. Nor do professional organizers who march around like Dr. Phil with obsessive compulsive disorder, tough-sorting messy homeowners into a state of tidy bliss. In an effort…

  • CLINT MCCOWN, The Weatherman

    Wisconsin author McCown follows up his previous War Memorials with this marvelously sardonic satire of seat-of-the-pants, renegade journalism. As a boy in Alabama, Taylor Wakefield watches his no-count cousin commit a murder—and then later suffers a humiliating defeat in the National Spelling Bee by screwing up the word “responsibility.” When, years later, his cousin accuses…

  • MURIEL SPARK, The Finishing School

    “Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.” So once said the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Spark has enjoyed quite a prime herself, having just published her twenty-second novel. The Finishing School is a story of literary competition and love affairs set…