He has had solo exhibitions in Beijing, Miami, and Singapore and has participated in group shows at the Hong Kong Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Due to its popularity - the show was visited by over 100,000 people lured by word of mouth and the power of Instagram - further iterations of this ambitious and groundbreaking new format for art are planned to take place in major international cities and will be announced soon.īorn in Brighton, England in 1974, Birch has lived and worked in Hong Kong for over twenty years. Spanning a cross-section of his multivalent oeuvre, it encompassed sculpture, painting, photography, performance, video, and installations, leading one through a narrative sequence of a hero’s journey inspired by mythologist Joseph Campbell. In 2017, Birch created the socially engaged, experiential art installation The 14th Factory which opened in Los Angeles. The raw, unprimed canvases frame his shattered compositions of isolated figures within voids of negative space. His idiosyncratic palette is often punctuated with pulsating complementary reds and greens. Drawing upon a vast repertoire of painterly techniques such as scraping, troweling, scumbling, and brushing, the dynamic figures emerge in rigorous investigations of materiality in the plastic medium.
Employing the Futurist’s “lines of force,” and the “fourth dimension” to express a veiled space, he illustrates a reality perhaps more honest than that of visual perception.īasing his paintings on photographs he shoots, Birch then labors with study upon study of countless preparatory drawings, which he then resolves through the act of painting, translating them onto canvas. Mutable flesh becomes a terrain of primordial corporeality.
Investigating line, shape, and color, his canvases oscillate between figuration and abstraction, dissolving features into the dematerialized ether. All the things that should have been the film's focus-guilt, self-loathing, and redemption-remain elusive.Building upon and scraping away layers of paint he fragments into Cubist planes, the pluralistic impulses of creation and destruction conflate to generate what art critic Clive Bell theorized as “significant form,” provoking aesthetic emotion. By the end, the film is reduced to drivel, cliché, and melodrama to tug our heartstrings into submission. Simon Birch ultimately descends into crudeness, though it asks the audience to continue to engage with its crass lead character. In a plot point that resembles The Scarlet Letter, the tide of fate turns on the "immoral" mom just as she's on the verge of finding true love with a decent fellow (played by Oliver Platt). The deck is stacked from the beginning, especially when the camera dwells on Joe's luscious mom, Rebecca (Ashley Judd), who refuses to reveal the identity of Joe's father, which in turn urges Simon and Joe to embark on a quest to discover Joe's paternity. He's mourning at the grave of his best childhood friend, Simon Birch, with whom he had bonded instantly because both were misfits-one a dwarf, the other illegitimate. The film opens weepily, with Jim Carrey as the adult version of the film's main character and narrator, Joe Wenteworth (played as a youth by the serious young actor Joseph Mazzello).
Simon Birch is one of those nostalgic movies-determined to view the past in rose-colored hues-despite the fact that its protagonist, a dwarf named Simon Birch, is wholeheartedly unsympathetic.
Irving's books have fared only moderately well on film, and while The World According to Garp garnered critical praise, The Hotel New Hampshire was waiting in the wings to counteract the fanfare. This screen adaptation of John Irving's novel A Prayer for Owen Meany was appreciated much more by audiences than by the majority of disapproving critics.
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