Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

Ideas can be carved out of table tops and in fact there was an installation of such a table wood blocked phrases in a drawer, not to mention a speaker’s voice emanating from another. A few messages were literally draped on the natural pine surface as though to say the best thoughts come from milieus where the table is the center piece. But that might seem cliched Suffice it o say the artist was looking for an interactive medium to get the connoisseur aware of an artistic message.

I would walk through a maze of rooms where sometimes the demarcation line between one artist and the next was less pronounced. Jason showed off some serigraph prints combining the look of older publicity shots of air hostesses and tramway stations all mounted on or around fear inducing elements. Hence the octopus’s tentacles about to engulf an early tram station aptly referred to as the end of the world. His quarters adjoined that of a female colleague who did some realistic looking self portraits. The black framed glasses made me think of a resemblance to a young Nana Maskouris.

Another did micro-photography getting his inspiration from coined cameos that were very much enlarged and mounted on a black background. That was enough to see the scratches on their surface and wonder about the history of the wear on the face. There were cases where layering of images was done be it on a computer screen to mount an interactive music CD site with titles on a chain saw surface, while its circular part was the metaphoric compact disc.

An art teacher and  artist just mounted one photo on the next, being inspired by some Christmas lights and a perspective of a stream to get the final image of a river with strange balls of lights reflecting from its surface. The sky’s reflection into the water was touched up to give the feel of an ambiguous day or night scene. Someone else down the hall was concerned about plotting maps by putting  dots and spots on wall spaces on prints and mounted on jagged pieces of paper as if the were pieces of continents waiting to collide behind the glass covering of their mountings.

The artists are concerned about keeping their space where they learn from one another and get to share their medium with art appreciative people. They are getting together to voice their need to keep their space from speculators who would turn lofts into condos and such is the way of art spaces that go in and out of existence.Rental leases originally for five year periods are now down to two. One never knows how long these spaces will be available in a city where the cost of property is always going up.