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Astounding! Mysterious! The Uncanny Comes Alive in
Rotunda Gallery's exhibition, Explaining Magic

The Rotunda Gallery, at 33 Clinton Street in Brooklyn Heights, presents Explaining Magic, a group exhibition of artists who transform the mundane into the incredible. Explaining Magic opens on Thursday, November 13th, 2003 with an opening reception from 6 to 9 PM, and remains on view until December 27. The exhibition is curated by Rotunda Director Janet Riker and Associate Director Meridith McNeal.

Conjurers, illusionists, enchanters — like these evocative entertainers, the artists in Explaining Magic change the known into the unknown. They ground their work in the everyday world in the same way that fairy tales and dreams often have their roots in the familiar. Stepping into the gallery space, each viewer is reminded of his or her own creative capacity to wonder. Explaining Magic includes three large-scale installations created specifically for the Rotunda Gallery by Kanik Chung, Ik-Joong Kang and Mary Temple.

Kanik Chung's works include his construction Martha Stewart Celebrating the Birth of Christ, a witty, visual surprise that turns the pop-culture icon and her Christmas decorations into a rose window for a consumer cathedral. His installation turns viewer expectations upside-down with a full-sized crystal chandelier springing from the floor of the gallery. Dawn Clements's black and white drawing meticulously recreates a bookshelf in the artist's home in a surreal combination of realistic detail and skewed, cartoonish perspective. Michael Houston creates mixed media images that might be called graffiti still-lifes; they evoke the thick black lines and overlapping, colorful images of street taggers. Houston's work is also represented in a video piece by the Barnstormers art collective; the group paints graffiti-inspired images on a floor, layer after layer, until they become a breath-taking time-lapse ballet of swirling movement and color. Ik-Joong Kang's awe-inspiring installation Buddha Learning English is a curving wall of small painted wood tiles, each adorned with small objects of personal significance, literally humming with movement. Peter Krashes's oil paintings evoke the distorted, liquid view of reality found in fun-house mirrors and rippling water, or landscapes glimpsed in the corner of one's eye. Zoë Sheehan Saldaña makes tiny works in cross-stitch that defy the typical approach to this craft, with mysterious images of crowds and flights of birds lifting off from a field. Also included are ink drawings from her series about the most dangerous areas of American life-most dangerous herb, career or city-each of them shown to be shockingly banal. Rachel Selekman breathes new life into antique materials, building sculptures from vintage brass, steel and metallic thread that recreate the shimmering flow and spray of water. Mary Temple creates illusory wall paintings, startling in their convincing rendering of shadows cast by window light. Shapes in bright relief fall across the angles of a wall, confounding the viewer since there is no window light to create them.

The exhibition will include an evening of interpretive readings from new and classic literature, on Friday, December 12 at 7pm. Latest of an ongoing series organized by author and curator Nelly Reifler, the evening will include performances by authors Shelley Jackson (The Melancholy of Anatomy) and Arthur Bradford (Dogwalker), and actor and producer Michael J. Ewing (most recently seen in the Fringe Festival hit The Writer's Mind). The event is free but requires reservations; call 718-875-4047 x11.