The video’s action is repetitive: one match lights another match, over and over again. The longer we watch the video, we begin to recognize that apart from the occasional unique response of the matchstick to the flameit is the movement of the hand that sometimes appears to light each match that assures us each segment is unique.

Once upon a time, in an era of drips, zips, and chapels, abstraction was the route to truth in painting.

Throughout time, we have struggled to gain insight into the human condition; to find meaning and purpose in our existence; to make sense of our relations to one another and to the world we inhabit. However tentative, these positions have revealed structures of knowing and becoming, casting light on the creative process itself and in turn on its formal, functional and dynamic possibilities. These preoccupations lie at the very heart of Michael A. Robinson’s work, presented here in The Origin of Ideas.

Maura Doyle’s smoke sealed clay pots are not re-creations exactly, but the artist confirms their point of reference comes directly from the pasteven for those works in the show modeled after things from the contemporary world, like a paper coffee cup.