March 29 - May 19, 2001
"In the center of Fedora, that gray stone metropolis, stands a metal building with a crystal globe in every room. Looking into each globe, you see a blue city, the model of a different Fedora. These are the forms the city could have taken if, for one reason or another, it had not become what we see today. In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city, but while he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as before, and what had been until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe."-- Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
With support from the Visual Arts Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, the Rotunda Gallery was able to re-configure its Artists' Slide Registry to create a database that is searchable using hundreds of key words. Our goal was to provide access to what artists wrote about their work through an intuitive search process - one that more closely reflects the way people think about art and, by extension, the curatorial process.
Using the evocative passage from Calvino's Invisible Cities cited above, we searched the 850-record database using the words which appear in bold face. Over 250 artists were selected in this computer-assisted part of our curatorial process; it was a process which encompassed slide reviews and studio visits, and ultimately led us to a broad range of work offering alternative and divergent ways to look at the spaces in which we live. We narrowed our list to the final twelve artists featured in the exhibition: Janice Caswell, Ann deVere, James Dustin, Emily Feinstein, Linda Ganjian, Limor Gasko, John Rae, Helen Evans Ramsaran, Lizzie Scott, Emily Stern, Micki Watanabe, and Moonching Wu. In this exhibition a woman's purse becomes a home, water plants echo architectonic forms, and tile patterns and floor plans map familiar spaces in lush, improbable materials. While some of the artists depict intimate interiors, others use models to distort perspective and the experience of place. Real or imagined, their urban landscapes reflect the vagaries of chance, shared histories, and buried memories.