From the start I must confess that occasionally I have tested my ability to either predict or influence future events through my thoughts and have always failed. In all cases seeing more of my own anxieties and wishes projecting into events than any real unfoldings past the frontiers of time. So for me the future is always either by and large a blank page, or a page written with fictions from the past Ñ a mirror of the past which gives an illusion of further depth but keeps the viewer from peering behind it into the true space ahead.

So maybe I was a poor choice for a participant in this project of selecting artists that have made a transition into the 21st century. (My last prediction of the future, just before the presidential elections, was that Al Gore would win by a narrow margin.)

I was only partially comforted by the notion of many historians that the 20th century ended somewhere around 1989 or 1991, with the collapse of the cold war and the final movement past the forces set up by the two world wars of that nasty and unkind century spoiled by the brutal effectiveness of people and ideas such as those of Hitler and Stalin (who partly spoiled my view of the half of the century that I live through.) And equally spoiled by a certain amount of ineffectiveness of those who hold hope for a progressive improvement in our human treatment of each other and our world at large. I can only hope that those who have solved the more simple problems in this regard now find the intelligence and courage to address the harder problems.

But to return from this digression, the idea that the 21st century may have started a bit ahead of the calendar, while helpful in giving me ten or so years of cultural achievements to try to work from, doesn't really help very much. No dramatic defining qualities have emerged, and without launching into another longer digression, I think that in regard to the visual arts, we may still be dealing with many inherited issues.

John Dewey, a decidedly peculiar figure in both American thought and art, states in Art and Experience that "Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reënforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what is now." Essentially what I looked for in artists for this exhibit were ones that somehow expressed to me a new or slightly askew view of relationships and ideas that seem to me promising for works that relate to the past, but make statements that extend ideas of the past into a different direction, a quickening of the present, one that may eventually call into question many of the ideas that the works of the past have taken for granted.

Brian McCutcheon and Kathryn Frund represent in their respective works two different approaches to moving visual art in fresh directions. McCutcheon works in a variety of mediums, and explores a range of topics related to technology, the world of animals and insects, and the world of manmade objects. Frund's works are all paintings with collaged elements and explore a conception of reality where images and physical objects coexist.

Brian McCutcheon, in photographs, installations, or sculpture, combines an element or two from the man-made world with an element from the natural world, usually a biological quotation. In Heard (1997), a stampede of small bureaus with Victrola horns run together on antelope or deer legs. In his photographs concerning flight, such as Angel (1999), man-made wings are formed by multiple exposures of arms holding a feather. Here the contrast is more in the process depicted by the photograph of imagined, man-made wing, and actual feather. In his more recent series of sculptures from the Ego Horn series, McCutcheon (who plays the bagpipes) contrasts biomorphic forms with the mouth piece and bell of a trumpet or other brass instrument. In his works McCutcheon makes straightforward presentations of two- or three-part concepts which run the risk of being trite by overemphasizing their point. In his best works, this emphasis pushes the viewer to reconsider them in light of less obvious relationships between a natural, more random, world and a rational, more purposefully determined world. While these issues have been dealt with before, McCutcheon points to a new way to broach them by combining a cartoonish intensity with a conceptual directness.

Kathryn Frund's paintings with assembled objects contrast, often with jarring incoherence, material fact with depicted reality: a bolt interrupts a sunset lit sky or red writing (from a diary? from an account ledger?) interrupts foliage or blue sky. And then these elements reverse themselves as you look at them, and a piece of hardware on a flat plane seems to be disturbed and activated by colored shapes that refer more distantly to an image. Yet her best works are ultimately successful because of their ability to resolve these contrasts coherently. They depict visually simple propositions and their experiences which cannot be put into or resolved in words. Frund subtly alters our consideration of physical and visual appearances through a freedom to consider them in direct juxtapositions.

The similarity of McCutcheon's works and Frund's, and it is somewhat tenuous, is that both state things straightforwardly through a couple of contrasting qualities. The most visible art of the '80s and early '90s was often frenetic and barbed, alternately contrasting elements from a variety of unrelated positions or coming directly from heartfelt arguments of political and social concerns. By contrast, the art of emerging artists of the last few years, as exemplified by these two, seems to be more concerned with direct statements which are tinged with metaphysical and whimsical concerns, but nonetheless forthright in their elocution.