Tor Seidler

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  print December 1979

  Hap Tivey

  In front of an Impressionist painting the eye differentiates between the individual brushstrokes and the composite picture. At a given distance the painting coalesces. So with Hap Tivey’s beautiful shadow boxes. A smokily translucent plastic mat (actually called “pola-coat,” used in rear screen projection) is stretched over a frame about three inches in front of the canvas. From a few feet away the eye, presented with the two surfaces, has trouble focusing. This gives the work an ethereal quality: the mat is like a slightly luminous mist clinging to the painting. It is also, in Tivey’s words,

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  print December 1979

  Toni Dove

  The first painting one comes to in Toni Dove’s recent exhibition is of two fish (trout, I think), placed one directly above the other in the center of a field of pastel blue. The top fish is realistically, even clinically, rendered; the bottom fish, identical in outline, is done in silver leaf. I use the word “field” to describe the background because it is not watery but a dry, brushy blue. The painting is called Equals. The top fish (not a fish, we are given to think, but Fish) is not superior to the mere silhouette. The title gave me pause, for the presentation of two such similar images

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  print December 1979

  Daniel Babior

  Daniel Babior’s color photographs at first appear to be superimpositions, tricks performed in the darkroom to blend urban interiors and urban exteriors. Still, there was something eerily familiar about them; I realized there were no tricks involved. The photographs are of windows on urban streets and of what these windows simultaneously reflect and reveal: the daily fare of any ambulatory city dweller. Glass is a true city medium, cold and hard; but these pictures avoid being either. They have no part of photography’s urban etiquette of chilling or awesome surfaces, of grotesque juxtapositions,