42 August 29 • 2019
jn

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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