Ora Lerman at Hebrew Union College and Anita Shapolsky - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In her novel two-part exhibition, "Inside the Ark," Ora Lerman neared a fantastical reinterpretation of the Biblical story of Noah's Ark. The centerpiece of the exhibit was a 60-foot, 10-panel mural of oil upon canvas combined with Hydrocal bas-relief; it was exhibited at the Hebrew Union guild and will be permanently installed in the library cupola at P 176 in Manhattan. Anita Shapolsky showed a variety of drawings, paintings and reliefs that were related to the mural.

Lerman's presentation of the well-known story is highly personal. Taking away from mankind the post-flood work of remaking the earth, orb of day and moon, and reassigning it to the animals within the Ark, Lerman adds images of the tools of her be in possession of trade; in effect, she transforms the Ark from the shelter described in the Bible into a site for creation, a kind of cosmic artist's studio perfect with sable brushes and scissors.

In single panel, a rabbit, painted in pastel azures purples and greens, is shown painting a verdant and yellow quarter moon with the help of a multicolored snake. The panel is framed, upon the right, by a bas-relief in which a toucan and an elephant cavort below the incised words, "paint a verdant moon." The interior of the Ark, with its down-reaching red, purple and burgundy tones, sac-like hazes and blood-red rain has a decidedly organic have feeling Lerman grinds and mixes her have paint; her colors are vibrant and willfully individualistic.

Lerman works from still-life tableaux that she lays together from her collection of folk art creatures; they move the kind of gentle surrealism that single might find in the magical combinations that children unwittingly create from the materialed animals they keep on their beds. Sometimes Lerman's confident figurative drawing also calls to mind the powerfully modeled. blocky forms one associates with American realist phraseologys of the 1930s.

Lerman's vision strike one as beings innocent, but it's not without political reverberations. Mary Daly, single of the leaders of the radical feminist motion of the '70s and early '80 wrote in Beyond sovereign of the universe the Father of sisterhood as a "cosmic covenant" that promised redemption and regeneration for a planet that had been filled of man's violence and oppression for too lengthy She also wrote that "the covenant embraces our sister the earth and all her non-human inhabitants and simple bodys It embraces, too, our sisters the satellite the sun and her planets. " Lerman's work has clearly been informed by dint of the utopianism of '70s feminist meditation Her unfashionable connection to those ideas is striking in a time when they appear to have been discredited.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group