Installation shots of Other People's Paintings, Winter 2014

Bather (center) by Nikki Maloof, glove sculpture by Amanda Friedman, MacGregor Harp paintings on right and left. 

Left to right: Shara Hughes, Nora Griffin, Shara Hughes.

MacGregor Harp paintings. 

Nora Griffin shaped painting (left) and Austin Eddy (two right). 

Amanda Friedman glove sculpture, Anthony Iacono zine and MacGregor Harp cigarette painting. 

Amanda Friedman glove sculpture, MacGregor Harp cigarette painting. 

Left to right: MacGregor Harp, Austin Eddy and Erin Dunn. 

Left to right: Nora Griffin, Shara Hughes and Laura Westby (diptych).

Other People's Paintings, 2014 at Torrance Shipman, Sunset Park, Brooklyn

In Phillip K. Dick’s 1969 novel The Galactic Pot-Healer, an alien blob-shaped god called Glimmung selects a large group of disenchanted pan-galactic technical experts and transports them to his planet in order to challenge his fate. He requires the experts’ help to raise a sunken cathedral from the bottom of the local ocean. He cannot do it alone. In order to help him, they must enter his blob-shaped body and join his mind. Upon entering Glimmung they experience anxiety, fear and panic. But after the task is finished, they realize the allure of the telepathic communion that the group-mind offered. To their surprise, they find that inside Glimmung they feel no loneliness. At this point Glimmung gives the experts free will to leave the blob/body/mind. Everyone decides to stay, except an alien gastropod historian and the only Earthling in the group, the pot-healer Joe Fernwright.

Empathy might be close to telepathy. Art makes me feel its communiqué, throwing itself into the blob between us. Socially telepathic overlays emerge from the waters over time. The artists in this show include my old friends, new friends and near strangers. Together their energy and clarity of vision make me feel like I am part of something, whatever that means.

-Matthew Fischer


Torrance Shipman Gallery
4th Floor
219 36th Street,
Brooklyn, NY 11232

Directions: D, N, or R trains to 36th St. in Brooklyn

Hours: by appointment only
torranceshipmangallery@gmail.com

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