Allan Appel Photo
Artist Audrey Kantrowitz was always disappointed that the deformed protagonists she met in art and literature just didn’t get the girl.
She’s disappointed no longer, as the Quasimodo and Esmeralda she created in “The Pillory” just might have a happy ending together.
That’s her winking acrylic rendition of a poignant moment in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Her work is one of 23 by six artists in Comedy and Tragedy, the lively new show at the Arts Council’s Sumner McKnight Crosby Jr. Gallery (in its offices at 70 Audubon St.).
The show, which also includes small-format watercolors, photographs, and video, runs through Feb. 27.
Audrey Kantrowitz
“Heart and Soul,” acrylic.
The videos, along with an ink brush on paper portrait of a sewer rat and alley cat having a lustful encounter, are by the show’s curator Tony Juliano, who says on his website that he’s an artist who’s lost faith in nihilism.
Avoiding the nihilism trap, a common one for creative people, opens the way to exploring all the rest of life’s subjects: comedy, tragedy, and everything whimsical and disturbing in between.
From such a mixture springs the eponymous, wide-ranging, and colorful exhibition of works by Juliano, his friends, and colleagues.
For her contribution to the exhibition, Amie Ziner came up with “Chemical Love” (pictured, with artist).
The largest piece in the show, it features Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant wearing a caterpillar halo or turban on one of its four panels. Ziner’s piece is a satirical, funny, and ultimately scary send-up of the environmental havoc humans are causing to all nature’s creatures, from monarch butterflies to human babies, thanks to pharmaceutical companies’ pursuit of profit, she said.
Ziner said her decision to work in this manner came from Juliano’s own large, graphic, satirical, and sometimes cartoony creations.
“I was inspired by how he uses flat, graphic color,” she said, and also by his work’s touching frequently on social themes.
At the other end of the comedy-tragedy spectrum in mood and feeling is this brooding photograph by Jesse Richards.
DSLR
“Die Tote Stadt.”
Along with Juliano, Richards is a member of the short-lived Stuckism movement. “I lean to the tragic,” he said of his vampirish, noirish images.
The image of a street and canal in Bruges, Belgium suggests something is about to happen, and it’s likely to make the tabloid headlines. The shot is preparation for a movie that Richards says he hopes to make based on Bruge-La-Morte, a late 19th century novel by Georges Rodenbach.
Richards says he’s going to keep the mood even while he transfers the action and the setting to Holyoke, MA.
Other artists in the exhibition include Kim Mikenis, Edward Shaw, and Janet Croog. The latter’s watercolor and ink “We Can Do It!” will make you think twice about what percolates when you mix the high and the low, comedy and tragedy — or plunk Rosie the Riveter down at a low-wage job at Dunkin’ Donuts.
