February Gloom
Highlighting art, music, literature, and film for the month of February in the year 2024.
Art
Nicola Samorì gallery show, “Blend the Blind”
Nicodim Gallery, New York City — February 8 - March 16, 2024
“The application of oils on stone, copper plates, and canvas is made possible by his own human practice, experience, and experimentation with the personalities, nuance, and chemistry of the materials themselves. His materials dictate the rules and call images to themselves. The material exuberance of these works is the greatest challenge that can be posed to the literal absence of materiality in digital creations. He sees it as a way to slow down the frenzied pace with which digital images proliferate on the screen. One of the inexhaustible forces of painting is to bind the hand, mind, and eye to a manifestation that, even if fast, follows a biological rhythm of breath and heartbeat.”
Literature
“I Who Have Never Known Men” by Jacqueline Harpmen
First published in January, 1995
Recommended if you enjoy existential and philosophical principles, dystopian worlds, and contemplative literature. A tale of both friendship and aloneness, “I Who Have Never Known Men” delves into the meaning of life, death, and the unknown. Easily one of my favorite reads of all time, I absorbed its message quickly and excitedly.
Synopsis:
Thirty-nine women and a girl are being held prisoner in a cage underground. The guards are all male, and never speak to them. The girl is the only one of the prisoners who has no memory of the outside world; none of them know why they are being held prisoner, or why there is one child among thirty-nine adults. One day, an alarm sounds, and the guards flee; the prisoners are subsequently able to escape. They find themselves on an immense barren plain, with no other people anywhere, and no clue as to what has happened to the world. The book explores themes of loneliness, sensory deprivation, and survival.
“Reflections on the Guillotine” by Albert Camus
First published in 1957
“But it is my intention to talk about it crudely. Not because I like scandal, nor, I believe, because of an unhealthy streak in my nature. As a writer, I have always loathed avoiding the issue; as a man, I believe that the repulsive aspects of our condition, if they are inevitable, must merely be faced in silence. But when silence or tricks of language contribute to maintaining an abuse that must be reformed or a suffering that can be relieved, then there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.”
— an excerpt from the essay
Music
“Pensées” by Megan Perry Fisher
Released in November, 2023
Recommended if you enjoy classical adagio piano, meditation, study music. Megan Perry Fisher creates beautiful and mesmerizing melodies, weaving a beautiful set of songs together to create such a stunning and contemplative collection of contemporary classical music.
View album on Bandcamp
“All Life Long” Kali Malone
Released in February, 2024
“Malone’s new album All Life Long, created between 2020 - 2023, presents her first compositions for organ since 2019’s breakthrough album The Sacrificial Code alongside interrelated pieces for voice and brass performed by Macadam Ensemble and Anima Brass. Over the course of twelve pieces, harmonic themes and patterns recur, presented in altered forms and for varied instrumentation. They emerge and reemerge like echoes of their former selves, making the familiar uncanny. Propelled by lungs and breath rather than bellows and oscillators, Malone’s compositions for choir and brass take on expressive qualities that complicate the austerity that has defined her work, introducing lyricism and the beauty of human fallibility into music that has been driven by mechanical processes.”
Recommended if you enjoy classical, choral, organ, ambient music.
View album on Bandcamp
Poetry
“Collective Amnesia” by Koleka Putuma
First published in 2017
Recommended if you enjoy raw, visceral, and fearless poetry. Koleka Putuma explores blackness, womanhood, and history in her debut collection of poetry. Through themes of grief, pain, sex, and joy she emphasizes her region, family, how she was raised, and who she was raised by. It’s an astonishing revelation into the South African society, as well as herself.
Koleka Putuma website
Film
“Godland” directed by Hlynur Pálmason
Released in 2022
The struggle between the strictures of religion and humankind’s brute animal nature plays out amid the beautifully forbidding landscapes of remote Iceland in this stunning psychological epic from director Hlynur Pálmason. In the late nineteenth century, Danish priest Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) makes the perilous trek to Iceland’s southeastern coast with the intention of establishing a church. There, the arrogant man of God finds his resolve tested as he confronts the harsh terrain, temptations of the flesh, and the reality of being an intruder in an unforgiving land. What unfolds is a transfixing journey into the heart of colonial darkness—one that’s attuned to both the majesty and the terrifying power of the natural world.
“The Eight Mountains” directed by Felix Van Groeningen & Charlotte Vandermeersch
Released in 2022
An epic journey of friendship and self-discovery set in the Italian Alps, The Eight Mountains is a cinematic experience as intimate as it is monumental. Adapting an award-winning novel by Paolo Cognetti, Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch portray, through observant detail and stunning landscape photography, the profound relationship between Pietro (Luca Marinelli) and Bruno (Alessandro Borghi), who first meet as children in an Alpine village. Years later, the estranged friends reunite, after the passing of Pietro’s father (Filippo Timi), in order to realize his dream of rebuilding a ruined cabin on a mountain slope. This emotional project, and their subsequent explorations of the mountains, create a strong bond between the two—yet individual dreams, and the demands of society, ultimately drive them to pursue irrevocably divergent paths.
Are you familiar with any of the above? Let me know what you think…