VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

Rudolph Blume Fine Art/ ArtScan Gallery presents Lillian Warren: Urban Landscapes.  On view April 30 – June 4, 2011.

Lillian Warren investigates the relationship between the contemporary urban environment and cultural values – the uncomfortable transitory spaces of today's cities. These sites are anonymous and featureless, but familiar. They are the endless acres of concrete, the relentless snake of traffic and the absurd commercial street corners.

These "landscapes" are decidedly not beautiful, but mirror our culture's obsession with mobility and convenience, comfort and security. They do not impart any sense of place or belonging. The observer is lost in a sea of sameness and banality and wherever they travel are greeted by the same derivative icons of mass culture.

While the artist experiences the same uniformly banal environment as we do, she is transforming these disjointed impressions of a "drive-by" landscape into a study of presence and absence, of dislocation and intense focus, of perception and memory. At times she seems to take a perverse pleasure in depicting these cheerfully dissonant images full of an absurdist reality.

Lillian Warren's traffic-scapes, and mixed-media drawings are quite new in concept and reflect a heightened sense of social awareness and engagement with her urban landscape.

A catalog, The Memory of Feelings Made Visible with an essay by Renata Karlin was published for the exhibition Lillian Warren – Urban Landscapes.

Pictured above:  Fire Hydrant.