Robert Miltner
Jean Paul Lemieux, Le Rapide, 1968. Oil on canvas, 101 x 204 cm. Collection of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, gift of the estate of Gabrielle Bertrand. Photo: MNBAQ, Idra Labrie.
Quebec Express
Terrifying space trapped in a limitless canvas. Dazzling snow etching the horizon & disappearing into the periphery, a nearly impervious border. The immense white scene is disrupted by stands of conifers forming obsidian humps along a liminal division. A smoke-colored sky clouds into a coal-dust stratosphere. The arrival of graphite & steel lines divides the vanishing point from its widening panorama, its curve slight as a migratory bird’s trajectory like beak or eye or pincer or maw. The tremor like a rapid mammal constructed of iron & rust. Like the past bearing down to erase the future.
After the painting Le Rapide by Jean-Paul LeMieux (above).
Andrea Myers, SlipSlump, 2013. Layered fabric, 24 x 55 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Stand of Snakes
a skein of sheep-shorn wool sleeps in a bowl a woven snake of sundry colors coiled a twilling of thread waiting in a flax ark a basket of unwound & whorled line a coat that envelops a round of rope of spooled python impatient to unsling
fissures split as yarn strands breach & pill like entrails what was once twined splinters into filament technicolor tendrils furrow & sleave a hybrid virus a helix of protoplasm germinates & cycles awakened from frozen ages of hibernation
a force from inside the wall pushes out seeks a pressure point where plaster shatters sheet rock slates, faults fractures like a mobile disassembling or a trajectory of hot metal leaving bright tracers like sewn-closed eyes what else is structure except plywood warped knotty pine wet pressed board drywall?
In response to the sculpture SlipSlump by Andrea Myers (above).
El Anatsui, Drifting Continents, 2009. Aluminum and copper wire, approximately 118 x 394 inches, variable. © El Anatsui. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.