The Tremont Art Walk was bumpin’ last night, despite the rainy weather.  Asterisk Gallery put on a show by the Ohio University graduate art program, which was killer.  Because I’m a Rothko devotee, the artist who caught my eye most was Tiffany Carbonneau, who describes her work sculpting light with shapes thus.

Visual Information has become ubiquitous in our daily lives and as we negotiate its significance, we become numb to its presence and complacent with its existence in our culture.  My work explores the tangible and intangible structures and systems that convey information within our cultural landscape and examines the influence this information has on our thoughts and actions.  Mass media and public architecture can carry with them an underlying intent of consumer manipulation and social engineering by conveying information through an interplay of overt imagery and subtle coerciveness.  Billboards and commercial window displays are blatant and obvious, yet they work in tandem with the more covert ways in which public architecture guides our movements through a given space and the way digital images are presented within a fleeting context.  I am particularly interested in accentuating the human experience of moving through delineated spaces and the interaction of that tangible space with the impermanence of the digital image.  By exposing these structures and systems and stripping them of their original imagery and context, I am striving to provide an alternate mediation of the conscious and subconscious information they are presenting and; subsequently, present a re-negotiation of the way in which we ingest the information that influences our thoughts and actions.

Here’s Tiffany’s blog, and see more of her stuff here.  Pretty cool.  I can imagine her pieces gracing hotel lobbies, restaurants, or other public places.  They pulse with a slow and mesmerizing glow of light, video, and barely recognizable images.  Perfect for a hip hang out in Manhattan….very like the paintings that Rothko created specifically for the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building.  That commission now hangs in the Rothko room at the Tate Modern in London, which I visit every time I’m in London.

Tiffany very graciously gave a talk on her work - always cool to hear from the artist in front of their work.  An opportunity that Asterisk, and the Tremont Art Walk, always provides.