I don’t know if Tanith Catteneo has exhibited any work previously at Brooklyn is Watching; I know that I haven’t talked about any. Throbbing Orb Garden shows a group of purple orbs; the orbs glow in the center and have an interesting texture, and are partially transparent. They are partially enclosed by sheaths with a sort of leopard-skin texture; the sheaths grow and shrink slightly, giving the work its name. The orbs and sheaths sit on dark green things that look vaguely like shrubberies, adding the garden to the name. All of this sits on a mostly black base with gray, blue, and purple speckles, and that in turn sits on a green base (a slightly lighter shade than the shrubberies) with a somewhat stone-like texture.

The purple orbs are pretty; their bright centers make them look a bit like cats-eyes. The throbbing sheaths are an interesting effect, but I don’t think the texture used for them was an ideal choice; to my eye it doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of the work. The shrubberies on a base that looks vaguely like a starfield is another odd juxtaposition. All in all, some fascinating elements that don’t quite seem to hang together, though it is possible that the seeming dissonance of the piece is part of the artist’s intent.

(Edited to add: if you looked at this post in Firefox, the picture might have looked ugly. I tried pasting in the HTML code that Flickr offers for embedding a picture on your web site. It includes the height and width of the picture; oddly, the effect of doing that in Firefox is that the picture displays in a distorted way. I’ve changed it back to what I usually do; it should look better now.)

Posted by Shirley Marquez on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 11:54 pm.