Gabriel Shuldiner at Parsons MFA Fine Arts Thesis show

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two pieces by Gabriel J. Shuldiner from the Parsons MFA show

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[large detail of the triptych, from the side]


I wandered over to the Kitchen Thursday evening for the opening reception of the Parsons MFA Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition, here I saw these two works by Gabriel J. Shuldiner displayed. The triptych represents an interesting and significant departure from Shuldiner's work I'd seen recently. Much of it was closer to the first image shown above.

There's a lot of noise in the image of the triptych; it was very difficult to get a good picture of it. Even though it was hung just left of the other piece, its lighting was very different from the other, pretty weird, it turns out. So you'll have to take my word for it: the surfaces of both works are very, very black, except for the irregular appearance of an underlay of emergency-orange paint on the first, paint which also covers the glass bottle neck projecting from its wonderful muck and which is responsible for the light cast on the walls wherever it appears on the deep side panels of both. Also, when you're standing in front of it the pitch-black surfaces of the triptych look more like a stretched, pleated bolt of rich mourning silk than dried paint.

The room was really hot and very crowded, and there was a tiny black kitten in the immediate vicinity, so I forgot to get a picture of the label with the details of either piece. They are both approximately three feet high and, if I remember correctly, the lengthy list of elements describing the medium of each begins with "modified acrylic polymer emulsion".

There is a lot of good work, in every medium, being shown by the twenty-one artists in this exhibition. It continues continues through May 16. The full list includes Emil Bakalli, Angela Basile, Michael Caines, Wai-Yam Cheng, Rebecca Curry, Matthew de Leon, Benjamin Finer, Jana Flynn, James Harley, Kyoung Eun Kang, Antoine Lefebvre, Seyhan Musaoglu, Mary Nangah, Jess Ramsay, Caitlin Rueter, Gabriel J. Shuldiner, Suzanne Stroebe, Lars van Dooren, Nikita Vishnevskiy, Genevieve White, and Stephen Wilson.