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VISUAL ARTS

The gang of 13: imagination (and luck) distinguish this year's Consortium winners

 
The moving hand in Lou Anne Colodny's video, <em>442</em>, is sometimes peaceful, sometimes menacing.
The moving hand in Lou Anne Colodny's video, 442, is sometimes peaceful, sometimes menacing.
THE MUSEUM OF ART | FORT LAUDERDALE

IF YOU GO

What: Thirteen_08

Where: Museum of Art | Fort Lauderdale, 1 E. Las Olas Blvd.

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, except Tuesdays; Thursdays until 8 p.m.; through Oct. 6.

Cost: Half-price admission until Sept. 30; regular rates are $10 adults; $7 ages 6-17, seniors and military; free 4 to 7 p.m. Thursdays and to college students with I.D. and children under 5.

Info: 954-525-5500 or www.moafl.org

fsantiago@MiamiHerald.com

Her photographic and video work, showcased in a large space in the exhibit, explores issues of societal and environmental metamorphosis in manipulated and re-choreographed images that are simultaneously sensual and haunting.

''They deal with the body and with the concept of societal pressures and aloneness,'' Colodny says.

The video 442 shows a white hand against an ocher background changing shape at high speed through a mirroring effect. Sometimes the movement is peaceful, like the flutter of doves, sometimes it's menacing, like the twirl of tentacled sea creatures. The movement is hypnotic, and, watching it, one experiences feelings of rage, fear.

''It almost feels like a metaphor for life,'' Colodny says. ``You see this object fighting with itself, caressing itself, moving, existing. Maybe what I see in it is that mankind will morph into this an apocalyptic thing.''

Behind the hand is a similar foot video, 2042. ''There's more violence in that piece. The foot kind of has stronger movement,'' says Colodny, who also dabbled in dance and theater, arts that add the choreographic and theatrical quality to her work.

MARIE MENNES

Born and raised in Miami, 49-year-old Marie Mennes remembers spending hours reading idyllic nursery rhymes and stories. ''I could define my childhood by these sweet images of little girls and boys, and the Leave It to Beaver-type family,'' says Mennes, who lives in Miami Shores.

But when she revisited Robert Louis Stevenson's vintage collection A Child's Garden of Verses, ``some words faded into the background, and some others stood out for me. I realized there were provocative messages kind of hidden in nursery rhymes. I don't think it was intended, but it was there nevertheless. I started thinking, what kinds of messages were sent to me and my generation?''

The discovery led her to work on the colorful series in this exhibition, Back to the Garden, in which Mennes explores childhood and its complexity through characters posed either in isolation or in conflicted, provocative or evocative postures within a garden setting. (Mennes ''appropriated'' these familiar images of children from Something Different, a 1942 primer.)

There's Slipping Away, the portrait of a daydreaming boy, and Falling Awake, a Dorothy or Alice-like girl. But she is not swept up by a tornado or dropped into a rabbit-hole; she dives into a field of flowers. The acrylic paintings are enhanced by embroidery floss and beads.

''It's bright, saturated with an almost coloring-book feeling,'' says Mennes, a first-time winner of the Consortium's juried exhibition but a long-time applicant.

``I've applied on and off for many years. It's a wonderful opportunity for artists not represented by galleries who are quietly working in their studios to be able to have some recognition and have the work shown as well.''

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