The Best And Worst Of The Local Arts Scene In 1997.
By Margaret Regan
ONE OF THE best moments in the whole art year took place
in its earliest weeks. Liz Lerman s Dance Exchange had come
to town in January, and worked intensively with local groups to
incorporate them into a professional performance at Centennial
Hall. After weeks of rehearsals, old Mexican-American women from
El Rio Neighborhood Center, Jewish mothers and children from the
Hebrew Academy, gay activists and even Ken Foster, head of
UApresents,
joined Lerman s troupe onstage for Still Crossing,
a dance about immigration and nationhood. It was a performance at once solemn and joyful. Its best moment,
Three Artists Display Their Latest Works At Etherton Gallery
By Margaret Regan
HYPED-UP COLOR saturates every work in Etherton Gallery s sumptuous
opening show of the season. Gail Marcus-Orlen, a popular local artist, paints surrealistic
interiors in her familiar turquoises, yellows and purples, ratcheting
up the hues of her drifting walls and unloosed easy chairs to
the intensity of neon. On the opposite wall, photographer Christopher Burkett plumbs
the brilliant unnatural colors of the natural world. His astonishingly
detailed large-format Cibachrome prints vibrate with the screeching
reds of the autumn maple, the strident purples of blueberry fields
at sunrise. Tucked away in the tiny front gallery, local painter Owen Williams