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The Houston Literary Review is proud to present the February 2008 - Featured Artist Ira Joel HaberIra Joel Haber treats art as an act of refiguration. For him, doodling serves not simply as a way of re/marking a surface, but also as a critical act of intrusion, a kind of ritual cannibalism. The pen digs the terrain up and carves it out. But this re/marking of territory also gives Haber another method as well: collage. With the collage, Haber develops a method of offering up the guts of an embodied terrain and serving it up, smorgasbord style, but even the smorgasbord can be a sit-down meal. The work presented here moves from a sketch that varies its theme, to a couple of doodles, to a a couple of collages, to a collage that unsums its pieces and thereby stands as a complete image. Below, note how the replication of houses and the patterning of the trees in the sketch corresponds to the figuration of lips in the adjacent doodle.
Notebook Page 008923 Clifton Webb Doodle
But commentary itself can move from buttocks to face, from internal organs to acorns. The rhizomatic is polymorphous. It can also tend to the arboreal where leaves and branches form the tree, internal organs complete the human body, and the body politic forms the state.
Degas Doodle from the Aids Portfolio Early Fall Collage
The replication of space with its diversity of organs can then suddenly comprise only one space, the space of the monumental and total. New Collage & New Collage Fall
There is much humor and much intelligence in Haber's work. We hope you enjoy his work as much as we did bringing it to you. Help support the arts in southeast Texas and beyond with a secure PayPal donation
On Ira Joel Haber Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn New York. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer and teacher. His work was seen in numerous group shows in the USA and Europe and he has had nine, one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum & The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. His paintings, drawings and collages have been published in many on line and print magazines including Rock Heals, Otoliths, Winamop, Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks, Barfing Frog, The Raving Dove, Foliate Oak, Siren, Prose Toad, Triplopia, Thieves Jargon, Opium, Dirt, The Centrifugal Eye, the DMQ Review, Broadsided, Hotmetalpress, Double Dare Press, Events Quarterly,Unlikely Stories, Coupremine,Cerebration,Chick Flicks, Softblow Eclectica Magazine Backwards City Review,Right Hand Pointing, Ascent Aspirations Magazine, Brew City Magazine, Fiction Attic, Blue Print Review, Ellipsis,The Indelible Kitchen, Cricket, Entelechy, So To Speak, Taj Mahal Review, The Fifteen Project, The Externalist, Why Vandalism, Mungbeing Magazine, Lamination Colony, Paradigm, Lily, Literary Fever, and Glassfire Magazine. Over the years he has received three National Endowments For The Arts Fellowships, two Pollock-Krasner grants and most recently in 2004 received The Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant. Currently he teaches art at the United Federation of Teachers Retiree Program in Brooklyn.
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