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From: Cynthia Lee Henthorn, Author of From Submarines to Suburbs: Selling a Better America, 1939--1959 (Ohio University Press) Category: Art Date: 20 October 2006 Time: 07:20 PM Review: Tracking the Ephemeral Artists have ubiquitously turned to the body as a vehicle for exploring transformations of motion and process. In figurative art, a classic example of such exploration is Auguste Rodin’s rough and fragmented bodies cast in bronze. In an abstract sense, Jackson Pollock’s action paintings display the results of the body in motion, engaged in the process of painting. While in Chris Burden’s conceptual works, the artist’s own body is appropriated as a medium. The stress Burden inflicts upon his body as a living, moving “sculpture” pushes the envelope of process and performance. A new direction for the body, motion, and process can be found in the work of Terry Rosenberg, whose paintings and drawings are on exhibition at the Nowhere Gallery (Milan, Italy) from September 22 to November 11, 2006. At first glance, Rosenberg’s dancing swirls of line and vibrant color appear as glorious interpretations of action and process. But upon closer inspection, the slight curve of a head, the arc of a thigh, the cup of a hand, subtly emerge through cirrus clouds of color. And then, the subject of the work becomes clear: Rosenberg has depicted that dimension of physical energy the Chinese refer to as chi, the life-force that swims through our veins and propels us as we move through space and time against the pull of gravity. Rosenberg has made a study of the flux and fluidity of the body’s chi, tracking the ephemeral changes and processes within the moving body that are often overlooked by the naked eye. A wide variety of body types populate his work spanning the last ten years, ranging from dancers and athletes to lovers and yogis. His work is not a symbolic representation of these model types, but a direct observation of their bodies’ inner rhythms: the dancer’s pulse as it accelerates; the yogi’s breath as it crests and falls; the lovers’ flesh as it sparks in the heat of sexual attraction. No matter if they are engaged in the process of love-making or baseball, his models emit a magnetic current that pulls the viewer’s body into the work, enveloping the viewer in the warm footprint left behind by the models’ presence.