TOUCHING NEW HORIZONS
Joanne Tarlin: Finding Home
Through January 31
Nedret Andre: Bruegel’s Dream
February 1 through 28
Touch Gallery
281 Concord Avenue
Cambridge, Massachusetts
It seems to happen every time I feel my new neighbor Pezhman Tahavori’s gentle handshake and liquid glance that I’m sent off on a new mission. I wonder if that happens not only to writers, but also to every artist and craftsperson that Tahavori, founder of the newly opened Touch Gallery, touches personally?
It certainly doesn’t feel like a command, but yet, there I am, seemingly only moments later, exploring the gallery of the Howard Thurman Center at Boston University’s Sherman Student Union. I know Howard Thurman from only the barest acquaintance with his writings as an ardent and eloquent spiritual seeker. There’s more exploration to do here, but for now, I’m interested in “Transit,” an exhibition of work by painter Nedret Andre, whom Tahavori has chosen for February’s solo show at Touch.
Growing up in a Turkish household in London, Andre experienced a multiplicity of cultural influences that her painter’s sensibility is still artfully ordering — while not dishonoring their volatility. In “Breugel’s Dream,” floating just over the heads of two gossiping students, a large sailing ship from Breughel’s era navigates calm pastel seas. It could be a traditionally “pretty” view, except that over and under this calm ship passages of darker hues lean against each other like contradictory points of view, or geological strata during a seismic upheaval. Look closer at the ship lying flat as an iron on the sea and you notice a fore-sail billowing out as if churned by the same muscular forces that lie above and below.
A veil of exquisitely balanced and colored geometric forms, looking to this viewer like fragments of a traditionally designed tribal rug, edge along the subtly conflicting vectors of the central scene. Are they edging in or being edged out? Am I looking down or being shaken up?
Read the entire article in our magazine pages…
Art Scope: Touching New Horizons
January/February 2013
Page:16
By: James Foritano
http://www.artscopemagazine.com/asdyn/index.wr?is=41&a=5
Link on Archive.org