Steve Tobin, Hagop Hagopian

STEVE TOBIN, HAGOP HAGOPIAN
By Peter Frank

LA Weekly, CA –
June 28 2006

Steve Tobin, a many-faceted sculptor, began his career as a ceramist,
and has returned to the earth to – well, to blow it up. Tobin fashions
vessels of various sizes, details their skins, and then, instead of
firing them, sets off depth charges in their bowels, practically
turning them inside out and leaving a residue of glass at their
cores. Of course, how the vessels exfoliate is beyond Tobin’s control,
but that’s part of the beauty of the outcome. He’s certainly exhibiting
no duds here; the objects thus created, whether small enough for the
shelf or large enough for the floor, roil, flare, split and blister
like unearthly plants during mating season, or like the abandoned
pupae of dinosaur-size butterflies.

Hagop Hagopian, Sahghmosavank (1995)

Born in Egypt, Hagop Hagopian returned to Armenia, his ancestral
home, while it was still a Soviet republic. His decision to eschew
Social Realist bombast for brittle, tender renditions of the local
countryside cost him prominence, but endeared him to his countrymen.

Hagopian’s style recasts the muted expressionism of postwar School
of Paris painters as a poetically elliptical approach to what was
at once entirely ordinary and politically charged imagery – a way
of declaring a love for a patch of land without turning it into so
many post-card views. Even Hagopian’s renditions of Mount Ararat,
the touchstone of Armenian nationalism, are aloof and contemplative.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Emil Lazarian

“I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia . See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia.” - WS