ARTCORE Journal - William Cordova at the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts by Steve Locke

My essay on the amazing William Cordova exhibition that was at the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts, courtesy of artcore journal, founded and edited by Erin Dziedzic in collaboration with Gregory Eltringham.

William Cordova at the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts by Steve Locke.

artcore journal is an edited online contemporary art journal published biannually. The journal seeks to establish a broad range of responses to contemporary art and curatorial practice from varied spatial perspectives. artcore journal presents a broad range of informed written texts, art works and curatorial initiatives. Each issue welcomes creative and critical responses to a theme as a way of establishing an intertextual network postulating on ideas concerning space in contemporary art discourse.

"Imaging Lazarus" essay included in the SUPERNATURE issue of DRAIN

Imaging Lazarus: The Undead in Contemporary Painting

Steve Locke

I want to avoid the obvious discussion of painting being dead.  It’s not.  Rather, painting has been killed several times and has been brought back to life by a certain kind of belief, or faith in it.  This faith sustains painting as a practice, but recently there has been a kind of representation of the body, the “undead” body in painting that I think has a lot to do with the history of painting, but an attempt to re-inscribe the art in general and body specifically as a site of political agency.

It bears an investigation of the story of Lazarus to get a sense of what I am talking about here.  The tale is found in the Gospel of John.  Many people focus on Jesus’s act of raising Lazarus from the dead (he had been entombed for four days) as a pre-figuring of his own resurrection.  It is that, no question.  But there are other elements of the story that I think are often overlooked.

Please visit the DRAIN site to read the rest of the essay.  Click HERE.