Guides
We hear a lot about what the holidays "used to mean" - family, friends, good will, etc. But some time ago (let's be real, practically from its onset) commercialism shoved all that warm fuzzy wholesomeness in the corner, and the season became a cash-spending and ulcer-growing contest. This year, consider
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When The Fool has something to say, it's prudent to perk up those ears. Whether represented as a sooth-saying oaf in Shakespeare or the daring and disaster-prone man in a deck of tarot, the seeming nonsensical madness can bring needed, if inexplicable, wisdom. Laugh at my tarot reference if you
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Oh, misfortunate humanity! To be aware of ourselves is to suffer and to know it - what a grab bag of boons and curses is our lot. And oh, the resultant, urgently probing existential angst. And the horrors we commit! World War II was certainly an end of innocence to
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Human Sexuality: the Final Frontier! Here is the truth: we have always stood in awkward, vulnerable terror of our sexual nature. In lusting after strict and neat definitions, we forsake the beauty and freedom that can be found in seeing that the reality of sexuality is elusive - a complicated
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"The world is perfect, and we're such fuckups," Emily Vey Duke laments in "The Birds Come Back," one episode within "Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure," a video by the Canadian artist-couple Duke and Battersby. This month at Rochester Contemporary, get lost in a multimedia world where god
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Robert Ernst Marx is disturbed. He does not render pretty, comfortable images. His despairing muses are distorted and bound, either overtly or metaphorically; they wear the heavy signals of every kind of subjugation. But they've largely done it to themselves. Marx's artworks are compelling acts of thoughts and reflection, rife
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You've heard that old adage, "It's not the destination, but the journey." How many times have you finally arrived at a location or at a goal, only to experience an anticlimactic, underwhelming result? So after a rest, we plot our next move. Life is transition. For the two painters currently
Guides
So, Gauguin pretty much summed up human experience when he titled that painting "Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?" It's all we've ever wondered, and we'll spend eternity looking for those elusive (or nonexistent) answers. And there's one more pillar of a question we
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Not everyone who is born with a creative impulse is graced with the familial support for that drive. Todd Stahl not only benefited from such support, but has also chosen to pay it forward and foster that spark in artists of the next generation. Born and raised in Fairport, he
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My stance on photography is not uncommon: it can be a complicated, artistic science, but the relative ease of the modern medium makes it all too easy for anyone to point and click and capture a charming image. I'm all for the democratization of art, but truly impressed when genuine
