“Condon ‘hates’ the birds and flowers’ reference to stifled, feminized, upper class tastes. At the same time, their tasteful ornamentation is her ‘secret sin.’ As both conceptual and visual problems, the images are loaded with implications that sabotage the perfection of the pours. Like Philip Guston’s late-1960s break from pure abstraction, however (Guston: ‘I got sick and tired of all that Purity!'(1)), Condon’s attempt to integrate recognizable images with abstraction revels in difficulty, rather than retreating from it.”

“With their gorgeous colors, over-bloomed flowers, and zones of glitter, Condon’s paintings can be judged hastily as pretty, decorative, and not at all serious. Getting lost in their sumptuous painting passages can mask a disdain for references to a specific combination of gender, age, class, and taste. Though decoration symbolizes everything Condon railed against as a young woman, she felt it necessary ‘to go back in’ and reclaim her experience, and to give voice to women whose creative expression has been confined to women’s work.”

“Condon’s injection of feminine elements into the predominantly male ‘grand gesture’ of large-scale abstract painting manifests a feminist acknowledgment of individual experiences. Recalling Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s proclamation, ‘I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femininity,'(2) Condon’s paintings permit birds, flowers, and decoration to sit alongside expressions of angst and tensity, as well as beauty, as part of women’s, and human, experience.”

excerpts from
Elisabeth Condon’s Unnatural Life
by Erica Ando
1. Robert Storr, Guston (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986), 52.
2. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists (New York: Anchor Books, 2014), 39.

ABOUT ELISABETH CONDON
Elisabeth Condon is a painter, traveler, and Chinese scroll aficionado, whose work re-interprets Chinese principles of balance for an information-saturated world. Awards and fellowships include a Hanban Confucius Institute Understanding China Fellowship, the PULSE Prize, Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, Florida Individual Artist Grant and numerous University research grants. Upcoming and recent artist residencies include Wave Hill’s 2017 Winter Workspace residency in Riverdale, NY, Art & History Museums, Maitland, FL, a Hemera Foundation Tending Spaces Artist Fellowship, the Florida Everglades (AIRIE), Swatch Art Peace Hotel Shanghai, Grand Canyon National Park, Wupatki National Monument, Corporation of Yaddo, Fountainhead and Red Gate, among others. In 2017 she will complete a public art commission for Tampa’s International Airport.

Condon has exhibited in venues such as the Museum of Fine Art in St. Petersburg, FL, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, Shenghua Art Centre, Nanjing and 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery, New York. Condon’s work is held in public collections including the J.P. Chase Collection, the US Embassy Beijing, Swatch Art Peace Hotel Traces Collection Shanghai, and The Sweeney Print Collection at the Museum of Fine Art in St. Petersburg, FL. She has shown with and been represented by Emerson Dorsch of Miami since 2006.

ABOUT EMERSON DORSCH
Emerson Dorsch reflects the generative partnership of founder Brook Dorsch and curator Tyler Emerson-Dorsch. The contemporary art gallery represents select South Florida-based artists, and we also host leading visiting artists, curators and musicians to do projects at and around the gallery at least once per year. EDG began as Dorsch Gallery on Coral Way in 1991, moved to Wynwood in 2000, and re-opens in Little Haiti in 2017.

Emerson Dorsch represents a core group of select South Florida-based artists. We believe in the joys of an artful life, of experiencing art close to the source. The gallery also has an invitational program for national and international artists to explore and seed new partnerships. Through all the gallery’s activities, we foster art patronage and artistic community.

Image:
Elisabeth Condon
Unnatural Life, 2016
acrylic and ink on linen
57 x 72 inches
Courtesy Emerson Dorsch Gallery

General inquiries:
info@emersondorsch.com
305-576-1278

EMERSON DORSCH | 5900 NW 2ND AVE | MIAMI, FL 33127

She will also present a lecture/slide show at the Biblioteca on February 14th on Collage: Past & Present.
This lecture will also be presented at Westbeth this coming spring.

Part 1: Collage & Assemblage, Past & Present
Part 2 : The Art of Joan Hall

Collage has rapidly gained popularity as an art form in the United States. I believe that there are sociological reasons for this. Everyone is in a hurry and the medium of collage conveys a feeling of spontaneity. With the advent of the computer and the Internet, our world had become fragmented. This is reflected in the bits and pieces that make up a collage and assemblage. Based on this, I have compiled a lecture/slide show on collage and assemblage from 12th century Japan to contemporary digital photo illustration
Part 1 includes works by Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Cornell, Rauschenberg, and many other artists. You will see how artists recycled everyday materials into artwork, using spare tires, shredded money, and even ones own blood! The use of collage in illustration has become a familiar sight. You will learn how collage artists cope with some hilarious, yet frustrating experiences in the publishing workplace. This program is both entertaining and educational.
Part 2 consists of my own artwork.

Native New Yorker Joan Hall’s artwork has appeared on covers of Time Magazine, The New York Times and numerous other publications. Her collages and assemblages have been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including The Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. She was commissioned by the American Cultural Center of the US State Department to lecture, exhibit, and conduct workshops in France, India, Brazil, and Mexico.

photo Karen Almond

Since its debut in 2013, Michael Mayer’s Vegas-strip take on Rigoletto has been perhaps the most talked-about production in the Metropolitan Opera’s repertoire. With its topless pole-dance, flashing neon, and lines of cocaine, it is more than anything a send-up of Verdi and Piave’s classic tragedy. On some nights, the gentle parody is quite effective, offering a self-effacing interpretation that softly teases the piece’s flirtation with melodrama, winking at the audience but still retaining enough respect for the work to convey its emotional elements honestly.

And for the second night in a row, the Met got a fine pinch-hit appearance, as
Edyta Kulczak combined playful camaraderie and motherly warmth…

– Eric Simpson Jan 21, 2017

Read rest of review HERE

Conceptual artist, Lorraine O’Grady stars in the new music video by Anohni,from the album, HOPELESSNESS. The video features the song Marrow as lip-synched by Lorraine O’Grady.

My thanks to Anohni for her dangerous and desperately needed work. It’s been a privilege to be a small part of her project — which at first seems so simple, but then layer by layer reveals how the many mutually reinforcing “isms” are buffeting and driving us to perhaps an unavoidable end. Stay strong.

– Lorraine O’Grady

See more of Anohni‘s videos from the album Here

A wonderful review of the video by Jillain Steinhauer has just been published
in Hyperallergic

Indeed, what makes the video so powerful is that O’Grady does more than just lip-synch along; she seems to be absorbing the music in the moment — both the lyrics and the breaks — and then transmitting it to the viewer, acting as a kind of mediator between the contents of the song and us.

Read More Here.

Anohni is a transgender woman. In 2016, Anohni became the second openly transgender person nominated for an Academy Award; she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, along with J. Ralph, for the song “Manta Ray” in the film Racing Extinction. Her debut solo album, Hopelessness, was released in May 2016 to wide critical acclaim, including another nomination for the Mercury Music Prize. (Wikipedia)