Reviews of work by Walton Mendelson

REVIEWS

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Walton Mendelson makes an entirely different, but equally delicious, use of gelatin silver printing, masterfully manipulating the silky black-and-white medium into a crucial fine-tuning of . . . collages made from 19th century wood and steel engravings. . . . [This work] extends a by-now time-honored modernist trope, the photoengraving-montage, invented by Max Ernst and exploited by many artists since . . . . [these] differ from most of these montagists not only in . . . technical innovation, but in . . . emphasis on the pictorial. . . . These vertiginous excesses are exhilarating, hilarious and all the more sensuous for their photo-filmic gloss.

—LAWeekly, Picks of the Week, January 4-10, 2002

In the early 1970’s, the photographer cum-philosopher Frederick Sommer published a little book on aesthetics, in which he wrote, “Life is the most durable fiction that matter has yet come up with, and art is the structure of matter as life’s most durable fiction.”

Sommer’s conception of reality as a set of convincing fictional overlays serves as a useful touchpoint in considering the work . . . of Walton Mendelson. . . . [works] that play along the seams, stitching . . . one reality to another . . . visually entrancing . . . . manipulating light and tone to enhance the continuity of the new hybrid image.

. . . . scenes of lush poetry and exquisite fantasy, dense with mystery and humor . . . . a temporal retreat, fit to be savored with the quiet deliberation of an earlier age.

—Los Angeles Times, December 14, 2001

Of The Music of Frederick Sommer

[Mendelson and Aldrich] used an electronic keyboard and wind instrument to render the impressionistic staffs and smudged notes sprinkling the pages of Sommer's art. . . . The resultant music is a slow, dizzy ascent of piano (sometimes harpsichord) notes notes peaking discordantly, then descending to the dialogic broad anchor notes of the wind instrument. Dramatic and romantic, it is also unobtrusive and mesmerizing. . . My comment is: bravo! The music stands up to the best of 20th century avant-garde composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich. . . His [Sommer's] belief that the best music had the most visually attrative scores can be proven with this unique book [with CD], in which sight and sound interweave symbiotically and seductively.

—Kelly Everling, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Fall 2000