- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Offering promise, teeming with conflict, the city lures adventurers and visionaries. Urban landscapes reflect conscious artistic design as well as the vagaries of chance, and our shared histories and buried memories. With Cities & Desire, Riker and McNeal used keywords from an evocative passage in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities that touches on the concept of the city, models and desire, to lead them to a range of work in the Rotunda Gallery Slide Registry . In this exhibition a woman's purse becomes a home, water plants echo urban architectural forms, and bathroom tile patterns are transformed using lush, improbable materials. While some of the artists depict intimate interiors, others use models to distort perspective and the experience of place. An exhibition with literary undertones, Cities & Desire offers alternative and divergent ways to look at the spaces in which we live.

Artists in the exhibition include:

Janice Caswell whose abstract paintings map her memories of specific places, with color, shape and line as personal references.

Amy Cutler who peoples her surreal paintings with recurring idiosyncratic images and characters. These dream landscapes explore a private, interior terrain.

Ann Devere whose jewel-like etchings reference man made sculptures and the visual language of architectural draftsmanship.

James Dustin whose suite of six works on paper are based on photographs of sun-drenched architectural models, which will also be on view.

Emily Feinstein whose light boxes project familiar domestic interiors. The play of shadows and light on her tiny furniture models creates a mysterious and evocative atmosphere.

Linda Ganjian who has created an intricate, elaborate golden city. Hundreds of miniature forms are amassed into a vast urban layout complete with separate districts and neighborhoods.

Limor Gasko who carefully structures models of scenes in nature and paints them in bold pop colors. Included are her fanciful recreations of Audubon prints.

John Rae who uses found metal scraps for his paintings of familiar urban icons such as water towers and bridges. His haunting images capture the beauty that can be found in the grimier, more neglected aspects of the urban landscape.

Helen Evans Ramsaran whose elegant bronze sculpture "Village Path" evokes indigenous architecture and tribal cultures.

Lizzie Scott who recreates the familiar patterns of bathroom floors complete with tile rubbings in a range of luscious fabrics such as ribbons, silk, fur and feathers.

Emily Stern whose glistening beaded sculptures generate intricate three-dimensional architectonic forms evocative of neon lights and skyscrapers.

Micki Watanabe who creates architectural structures out of original handbags and purses to subvert notions of public and private space.

Moonching Wu whose eerie photographs of water plants reveal microscopic structures similar to buildings and urban design.

Cross-indexed and continually updated, the Rotunda Gallery Slide Registry contains slides and resumés of over 850 Brooklyn-affiliated artists. Last year with funding from the New York State Council on the Arts, the registry was re-programmed to allow users to search its database of artists using hundreds of keywords. This more intuitive search process formed the basis for the computer-assisted curatorial process used in Cities & Desire. The Rotunda Gallery Slide Registry is open to any artist who was born, lives or works in Brooklyn; it is available as a resource for outside curators, scholars and collectors. Please call the Gallery for additional information.

In conjunction with Cities & Desire, a reading will be held at the Gallery from 6-8 PM onTuesday, May 15th to celebrate the publication of Venice (the invisible city) a collection of art and poetry inspired by Calvino's postmodern novel. Edited by Marcella Durand, Richard O'Russa and Karoline Schleh the anthology features twenty poets and eight artists. It will be published by Erato Press, which is based jointly in two unique cities, New York and New Orleans.

The ROTUNDA GALLERY, housed in an award-winning space designed by Smith-Miller + Hawkinson, showcases the work of Brooklyn artists. The ROTUNDA GALLERY's educational programs reach 6,000 students each year with gallery visits and in-school art making projects. Janet Riker is the Gallery Director; Meridith McNeal is Associate Director. The ROTUNDA GALLERY is a project of the not-for-profit BRIC/Brooklyn Information & Culture, Inc. (Nanette Rainone, President).

Located in Brooklyn Heights, just over the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, the Gallery is also easily accessible by public transportation. It is a short walk from the 2,3; 4,5; M; N or R trains at the Court Street/Borough Hall station; or the A, C trains at High Street.