Art Review
The painting “Beck (he/him)” by Eli depicts a queer/trans subject sitting on a bench. The background of the painting is very impressionistic, with foliage and the park behind the subject defined more by color and shade than by edge or boundary. The blurring of borders, however, reflects the blurring of gender in the subject. The subject is somewhat impressionistically portrayed as well—but here there is more focus on edge, more defined boundaries: the limbs and legs and face and features can all be discerned. What is most interesting about “Beck” however is that he is wearing large sunglasses that cover his eyes and create a mysterious effect on the viewer. The eyes are supposed to be the gateways to the soul, and here the viewer is unable to gain access to that soul so must look for meaning in the features of the face, the posture of the body, the lines of the mouth. The mouth itself is dubious: is the subject smiling or grimacing at the viewer? There is a Mona Lisa type of smile going on in “Beck” and it suggests that the subject is seeing something in the viewer and not letting on as to...
The posture of the subject, moreover, is ambivalent: one leg is crossed man-style over the other and the foot is dangled downward—but the shoulders of the subject are small and feminine and the cheeks and neck have a feminine appearance to them. The dubious nature of the subject is what gives the art work its overall mystique.
River Rock, Cathedral by Jay Sousa is a photograph that looks like a painting. Usually it is the painting that confuses the viewer and makes him wonder whether it is a photograph because it is so realistic. Here, Sousa has captured the shimmering impressionistic nature of a reflection of the surrounding rock wall above the river as the surface of the water ripples and causes distortion in the image. Only the line of large, oblong rocks looming slightly out of the water has any stillness to it: the water is full of sky and rock reflections while the actual stones sit like abstract agents in an abstract painting. Yet this is a photograph of nature and one that immediately captures the viewer’s eyes and causes them to be glued to the image. As Sousa himself says, “In my photography I…
