After visiting several exhibitions this winter, two artists’ works especially stayed with me, provocatively, after viewing them each in two different exhibits: Milo, and Anastasia Semash.
Milo’s work was shown as part of a recently concluded exhibition at the Belmont Art Gallery in Belmont, Massachusetts titled “Off the Clock,” a witty reference to a slew of invited artists who teach in the Belmont Public Schools, but who don’t drop their brushes or ignore their easels after hours when they are “Off the Clock.”
Showing himself simply by his first name, in“Enough?” Milo (Milowsky) painted a 48” x 36” scene that struck me both by its subject and its interiority when I saw it on display. Made of a combination of paint, automotive candy-like spray paint and metallic flake, its background is haunted by what had once been the skyscrapers of a city, but now could be burnt, blackened hands stretching splintered fingertips towards a sky where whizzing warplanes fly overhead.
Towering over this city is the fetchingly delicate, but staunch figure of a little girl in a decorative red dress. She hoists what looks like a butterfly net in the direction of three approaching jets. Perhaps it is a butterfly net, but one cunningly reconfigured with, possibly, metal netting — netting which will hold captive even such powers as the most modern technology could throw at a hapless, enemy city?
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