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
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Somewhere along the line, someone insinuated that graffiti was simply vandalism, the sign of a declining, violent neighborhood, and many people mistook it for the truth. We too often succumb to the urge to simplify the world along distinctly black and white lines. But that's idiotic. It's neither fair nor
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Whenever I walk into a group show I always try to discern a theme, no matter how diverse the art. But I don't think it's too far-fetched to assume that a group of people living in the same city at the same time might share some similar concerns. Though not
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No one would mistake Phyllis Kloda's introspective examinations of human experience for the inaccessible navel-gazing of other artists' reflections on human life and culture. She knows that some questions demand the answers of many sources, and the woman does her research. Kloda is the perfect example of an artist connecting
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Nobody gets to live forever. But perhaps your beauty is so profound, an artist felt compelled to document it. Or perhaps you purchased your shot at immortality and commissioned a portrait. Regardless of why your image has been recorded, the harder step toward immortality is entirely the artist's responsibility -
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You may or may not know that many tattoo artists don't limit their creative expression to skin. And if you think about it, they really should be talented artists, since they permanently alter people's bodies. Currently up at 1975 Gallery is the work of eight artists from LoveHate Tattoo. The
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I'm personally encouraging each one of you to call, e-mail, or otherwise harass Bleu Cease, the director of Rochester Contemporary. But be nice - he's a good dude. Cease has decided to discontinue the beloved and successful "6x6" fundraiser, making last Saturday's event the second and final iteration. "Visitors asked
Stage
When two people love each other very much, they get together and create something special. Sometimes they share that creation with the world: PUSH Physical Theatre is the love child of spouses and collaborators Darren and Heather Stevenson, who met while training at The Center in St. Louis,
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With more than 60,000 square feet of art, the sprawling, disorderly phenomenon that is Artisan Works could easily be compared to a labyrinth. And like a labyrinth, it keeps changing all the time, a warehouse-contained growing and shifting chaos, which creator and owner Louis Perticone calls "antiquarian." He delights that
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We all make mistakes. Even those of us who work heavily with the English language every day, even those of us who have an ongoing love affair with our mother tongue. These days, our errors are detected by the high-tech devices that come standard in our word-processing gadgetry. But back
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"We easily make distinctions between cruelties perpetuated by our species and those caused by other agents of ‘nature,'" begins the heavy artist statement of Alice Leora Briggs, whose equally intense work is currently on display at MCC's Mercer Gallery. Her art is as bewildering as it is beautiful, and is
