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Thresholding invests us in that moment when an artist or writer develops radically in their work. What led to the change, how was it manifested, and how did it affect others?

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AT THIS MOMENT: OCTOBER 15, 2006

According to Elisabeth Condon Formalism created an armature for artistic progression in the 20th century. Its progression culminated in new visual discoveries exemplified by Cezanne’s petit sensation and Philip Guston’s fleshy psychology. Formal innovations at their best revealed, as Louis Finkelstein noted in his 1971 Arts magazine essay Painterly, both technical solutions and glimmerings of possible meaning. Now movies have sequels and artists have shows. Progress in both is measured by their ability to expand on, yet remain within range of a particular direction. Making things easier, technology replaces the armature of formal innovation with the conceptual tension between all-knowing and suspended disbelief. Manipulating a direction becomes conscious and deliberate. Though the model of artistic progression retains last century’s agenda to catalyze shifts in perception, disorientation and immersion become new metaphors for heightening awareness, offset by a broader knowledge ba

Emil Alzamora: Supernumerary by David Gibson

The artist’s attempt to define the ineffable qualities that quantify humanness often result in the construction of effigies closely resembling human appearance. How that artist in question achieves his specific effigy dictates the parameters of his intent. In the case of Emil Alzamora we are presented with two recent series: nearly life size ones with a metallic exterior broken up by striated fissures, like those appearing after an earthquake, titled ‘The Initiates’; and miniature ones that have a molten or melted appearance, under the rubric of ‘Supernumerary.’ Both series play off our reasonable expectation that human forms would naturally take an expressiveness of cerebral repose or narrative energy, yet their fabrication hints at forces far greater than organic life itself—the raging furnace inside planets and stars…the dynamo of creation at work. THE INITIATES reference an accrual of presences t

Josh Peters: Painting Space by David Gibson

Koe Chang ( 2012), Acrylic on canvas, 65 x 48 inches I met Josh Peters in 2010 when he was living and working in Northampton, MA, taking a break from his workaday life to devote himself to his painting. His studio was housed in the same building where I had organized a group exhibition. A mutual friend had recommended him. Never one to pass up a possibly interesting encounter, I agreed and dropped by the next day. I was not disappointed. He was at the time painting narrative scenes compiled and inspired by superhero comic books. I liked them and felt that they were in no way derivative because of how joyful they were. In recent years Peters moved to Los Angeles, where he had a solo exhibition at ACME Gallery in 2013, included in Artist's Pension Trust, and in the Pacific Coast Edition of New American Paintings, selected by Apsara DiQuinzio, the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Berkeley Art Museum. His work has changed considerably from then to now, but a

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