2 - Arin Contemporary Art - Bradley Corman and Cara Cole at ACA

Bradley Corman: New Works

Corman's New Work flaunts more of his intellectual savvy as it relates to formal design with his "Untitled Installation." In this piece, undisclosed pills of various shape and color are enlarged to exactly two thousand times life-size and are placed in a 6 x 6 grid on the gallery wall. Like his other works, the interest for Corman lies in the pills formal design and the fact that each was created with a clear Aesthetic intent that subverts the reality of the conditions under which the pill is required or taken recreationally.

The pills, in the pseudo-pop context they are presented, do not reveal their intents or purposes beyond that design. The images serve the viewer individually, inciting them towards fantasy or horror depending on the viewer's personal experience dealing or not dealing with pharmaceuticals. The larger-than life format brings to attention the omnipresence of pills for everything, the identities we create for them, and how they influence our own.

Corman He Said, She Said

(Above: Untitled Installation, 2010, archival digital print, 20" x 20" each)

(Below: He Said, She Said, 2010, enamel on panel, 40" x 40" each)

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Cara Cole: An Immortality of Bliss

Cole writes of her work, "I love the fact that sexual and religious transportment echo each other. How ecstasy, that elevated sensation of bliss, is simultaneously carnal and spiritual. Bernini's The Ecstasy of St. Teresa (her head is thrown back, face upturned towards the heavens, lips parted, eyes softly closed--so similar to my own carnal angels) is based on the swooning nuns own writing: 'I saw in his hand a long spear of gold...He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of GOd. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.'"

While An Immortality of Bliss is a slight departure from Cole's previous series which largely confront issues of death and mortality, the artist throughout consciously confronts certain inescapable characteristics of photography. Literary theorist Susan Sontag describes that, "to take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt." An Immortality of Bliss engages that element implicit in the medium directly rather than allowing it to serve as subordinate to the image.

(Above: Cupids Lips and Humid Glow, 2010, archival digital prints, 34" x 36" each)

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