Claire Corey and Robin Michal
16 March – April 28, 2001

Venetia Kapernekas Fine Arts proudly presents a two artist show, Claire Corey and Robin Michals. Claire Corey’s paintings on watercolor paper, created digitally, are virtually indistinguishable from traditional liquid media paintings, and remain innovative, exciting, soft and mysterious. Swirling flat pools of rich, hi-key colored liquid interspersed with weave patterns, sine waves, vertiginous spaces and odd floating blobs. Corey’s paintings position themselves between reality and the imaginary. This dual medium formulates an artistic composition, which encompasses both critical and aesthetic explorations, experimentation in specialization, and notions of abstraction. These images seduce the viewer while evoking questions about preconceived ideas of the art of painting. The result is a fusion of the dialogue between art and technology and the establishment of an authentic medium.
Claire Corey has been the recipient of The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Space Program (1999 – 2000), The Pollock- Krasner grant (2000) and has recently exhibited at The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (2000 – 2001) and The American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture (2001). A graduate of UCLA. She lives in NYC.

In three series of digitally manipulated photographs, F-16, Blackhawk, and M-1, Robin Michals examines the dissolving boundary between the human and the technological at its generative site, the U.S. Military. Michals photographs her subjects at the National Guard bases around the country. There has captured pilots and “tankers” demonstrating an advanced interface of man and machine- a cyborg choreography which is representative of a larger cultural trend. As the artist states, “ As new abilities to enhance and rearrange our species have emerged, a vision of the post- human shimmers before us.”  Each final image is a dynamic interplay between rich photographic elements and bold computer generated imagery. In each series, these images energetically build o each other, creating an evolving narrative that is as arresting is it is unsettling.

Robin Michals is also the creator of www.e-arcades.com, a journey of association and quotations concerning computers and the Internet, an inquiry into the effect of technological change on how we think as well as live. A graduate from both Barnard College and Columbia University, her work has been included in exhibits at Eyewash and the Alternative Museum among other venues. She lives and works in NYC.