42 August 29 • 2019
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E
ver wonder what the idea of par-
adise ultimately could mean for
you or someone else?
Dick Goody, director of the Oakland
University Art Gallery, gives people a
chance to view the concept from the
imaginations represented visually by a
group of international artists.
Goody, also an associate professor of
art and curator of the art collection at
the university, has curated the exhibit
“Your Very Own Paradise” to be shown
Sept. 7- Nov. 24 and has included par-
ticipants with ties to Israel.
“The subjectivity surrounding par-
adise is explored via the depictions of
motifs as progressive, optimistic, exis-
tential indicators: home, food, identity,
métier, harmony, euphoria and so on,”
says Goody, who accessed pieces from
other showings.
“In an era of crisis and dissimulation,
this exhibition presents a conduit to
inspire the viewer to repose in a visual
culture that is less pessimistic and more
open to the abundance of a positive and
inclusive world view.”
Orit Raff, now working in Israel, is
represented by two computer-designed
images titled “Madame Bovary” and
“The Secret History.” They combine her
artistic talents with her love for reading.
“Both pieces were part of the series
‘
Priming’
and were shown at the Tel
Aviv Museum of Art in 2014,” says Raff,
who has studied and lived in New York.
“The images are based on novels with
cultural, sociological and political refer-
ences and were constructed virtually on
the computer with the help of three-di-
mensional computer programming to
mimic a photographic site linked with
the photographic act.
“The realism is important for me
as I want the viewers to believe these
spaces exist in the world, to believe they
are looking at a photograph and slowly
discover that they are looking at a 3-D
rendering.”
The “Madame Bovary” image is
based on a description in the Gustave
Flaubert novel; it imagines the hotel
room where Emma Bovary meets
her lover each Thursday. “The Secret
History” is based on the unheated farm-
house where one of the protagonists in
the Donna Tartt novel stays during his
winter break and nearly freezes to death
only to keep the secret that
he is not wealthy.
Both images required con-
siderable research to depict
the structures as they were
referenced in the novels.
Raff’
s work, which has
been exhibited internation-
ally, is in the collections of
the Tel Aviv Museum of
Art, Modern Art Museum
of Fort Worth and the
Davis Museum of Wellesley
College in Massachusetts.
Melanie Daniel, who lives and teach-
es in Grand Rapids after studying art in
Israel, is showing her oil painting, “Goat
Love in a Digital Age.” It was planned as
a humorous project featuring the refuge
of a band of islanders who coexist with
goats that balance on tree limbs. The
youths are going through digital detox
as they tend to the goats.
“The focus is on working for posi-
tive changes in our relationship to one
another and the communities in which
we live,” says Daniel, the Padnos distin-
guished visiting artist at Grand Valley
State University.
“My piece is kind of a wink and smile
in the midst of catastrophe. It portrays
a generation that defies contemporary
cultural convention and yearns for a
different path.”
This painting represents Daniel’
s
trend of making crowded narrative
paintings in psychedelic colors. Most
of her scenes are set in otherwise deso-
late, sun-drenched utopias in the near
future, when people try to reconnect
with nature and rebuild their post-cata-
clysm world.
Daniel pursued her artistic possibil-
ities in Israel, after meeting, in India,
the Israeli man she married. The artist
studied at the Bezalel Academy of
Arts and Design in Jerusalem, leaving
behind studies involv-
ing very different
careers with art then in
the background.
“I’
m presently
exhibiting (until Sept.
8) a solo show at the
Grand Rapids Art
Museum called ‘
Only
Four Degrees,’
” Daniel
says. “It deals with cli-
mate change and the
effects of a four-degree
increase on our planet.”
Other artists in the Oakland
University exhibit include Nick Archer
(painter), Enrique Chagoya (paint-
er and printmaker), Maira Kalman
(illustrator, artist and designer), Amer
Kobaslija (painter), Andrew Lenaghan
(painter), Tayna Marcuse (photogra-
pher), Rebecca Morgan (painter, drawer
and ceramist), Lamar Peterson (paint-
er), Simon Roberts (photographer),
Thomas Trosch (painter) and Marc
Yankus (photographer).
“This exhibition brings people and
art together in a place where they leave
all their anxieties behind,” Goody says.
“They are free and safe to imagine a
better world.” ■
SUZANNE CHESSLER CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Paradise Found?
OU Art Gallery show considers the concept of
paradise through international artists’
work.
Details
“Your Very Own
Paradise” will be shown
Sept. 7- Nov. 24 at the
Oakland University Art
Gallery, 209 Wilson Hall,
in Rochester.
(248) 370-3005.
ouartgallery.org.
Melanie Daniel, “Goat Love in a
Digital Age,” oil on canvas, 2018
Orit Raff, “Madame Bovary,” pigment print, 2013
Maira Kalman, “Everything she said was hilarious,” gouache on paper, 2017
JULIE SAUL GALLERY, NEW YORK
ASYA GEISBERG GALLERY, NEW YORK
JULIE SAUL GALLERY, NEW YORK
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