Randal Thurston, well known for his black cutout silhouettes exploring visual vocabularies from Victorian jewelry to the Golem, and from butterflies to viruses, now finds inspiration and frisson in the relationships between literary, natural and cultural realms. “This Mortal Coil” includes stylized contemporary portraits inspired by the image of Jacob Marley’s image on Scrooge’s doorknocker in Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”, fields of perennials and a grouping of bonsai constructions – work representing the three areas of Thurston’s most recent exploration, an exploration driven by his continued interest in themes including mortality, identity, loss, memory, and life.

“This Mortal Coil” is Thurston’s second one-person exhibition at Allston Skirt Gallery. His work was included in “Terrors and Wonders: Monsters in Contemporary Art” in the fall of 2001 at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, where he also displayed “Kingdom”, a 32-foot high work in cut paper on the DeCordova’s famous tall wall. His work has also been seen recently in “The 18th Drawing Show” at the BCA’s Mills Gallery, jurored by Rose Art Museum curator Raphaela Platow, and will be shown in the Mills Gallery’s upcoming exhibition “Cut”, which opens on November 12, 2004. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Michelle Grabner, is perhaps best known for spare, patterned paintings that at first glance appear to speak in a classic Minimalist vocabulary, albeit in strange pastel colors; upon closer look, the lines and grids turn out to have wavy, erratic qualities. In fact, the “geometric abstractions” have been created by gently applying velvet flocking onto the painted impression left by everyday household items such as baby blankets, kitchen washrags, bits of wallpaper, or lace curtains pressed onto canvas, bringing a homely domestic element into the art-realm carved out by artists including Agnes Martin and Frank Stella.
In this new series of works on paper, Grabner uses Flashe paint on paper to create hypnotic dot patterns that continue to push the boundaries of contemporary abstraction. Reviewing Grabner’s newest work, as seen in the group show “Inner Positive” at Klein Art Works in Chicago last February in artnet, Terence J. Hannum writes: “Obsession and tedium fill the work of Michelle Grabner…. In [her