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