NYAB Event - Joyce Korotkin and Tom Holmes "Natural Manipulation"

Joyce Korotkin and Tom Holmes "Natural Manipulation"

Skylight Gallery NYC

This event has ended.

Joyce Korotkin & Tom Holmes’ work shares a strong common thread. Natural elements inspire both artists, allowing for the media used to imitate, dance with and speak to the beauty ever present in the natural world. In both cases this beauty is enhanced by the artists’ hand in its manipulation.

Joyce’s pieces connect with the mist of our memory and the nostalgic places in our hearts while jumping off the canvas and enveloping us in a world all too familiar but ever elusive. Few wield natural elements with the grace and power that Tom Holmes does, creating a plethora of work in a great variety of natural media. Nature’s incredible intention cannot be more clearly presented than while viewing one of his pieces.

Joyce Korotkin’s Tabula Rasa Series is borne entirely of the imagination. In it she evokes real landscapes that play on the poetic moments of life infused with an incandescent light that distills the essence of memory. Steeped in the sensation of suspended time, they invite intimate reverie in much the same way that music, taste, or scent can transport one with nostalgic longing to a deeply private interior space of the past. These spaces are inevitably more deeply and truly felt than accurately reconstructed or understood in the present moment. Her paintings have the unique quality of allowing both the intensity of the foggy past and the bright reality of the present to exist at once and seamlessly. Interestingly enough, they will do so long into the future, adding the last of our described dimensions of ‘time’ to her work.

Tom Holmes’ work in wood, stone, bone, metal, and other natural elements gives him the ability to create intuitively.

All possibilities can exist briefly before he imposes parameters upon his emotional and intellectual contexts. The undercurrents of natural decay, unity, duality, symmetry, space, time and dimension are at the heart of his creative energy. These undercurrents are brought to form with a rare concreteness that expresses deep playfulness and understanding of spirit. Tom works seasonally-different seasons suggest different types and elements in his work. He loves the crisp colds of zero or below for icing in the winter. The summer brings outdoor work in steel sculpture, waterfalls and stone. Spring and fall are transition times that tie the year together with welding, sand blasting and finishing.

For Tom, there exists only the transcendence of the everyday-cooking, friends, and love become the sublime witness of doing. The process of creation is the essence of his work, but the end products are nothing to shake a stick at either.