Take This Waltz, Sarah Polley (2012)

A tale of imperfect romance, Take This Waltz features characters who bare their insecurities, both bravely and embarrassingly. Michelle Williams plays the lead role as Margot, a woman with vague aspirations of being a writer, who has been married to Lou (Seth Rogen) for five years. While Lou devotes his energy to experimenting with chicken recipes for his cookbook Tastes Like Chicken, Margot has free time to pursue distractions and stumble through her complicated network of emotions.

Each scene can be assessed by a whirlwind of expressions on Margot's face. There's a chance she'll maintain fragile composure, crumble behind quivering lips, or surrender to a fit of carefree grins. In any case, Williams can be credited for a flawless display of Margot's nervousness and vulnerability.

Some situational elements seem unreal, like the premise for Margot meeting her enticing neighbor Daniel (Luke Kirby). They each take a trip to the same historic site in Nova Scotia alone, they sit next to each other on the plane ride back to Toronto, and when they take a taxi together they learn they live across the street from one another. Of course it could happen, and that's a very romantic way to set up a love story, but a simultaneous trip to Nova Scotia seems over the top. Anyway, that is the catalyst for Margot's craving new romance, which defies her marriage with the trustworthy Lou.

The script dabbles with playful humor between husband and wife, explicit sex talk between strangers who fantasize about being lovers, confessions of fears, and comments about getting old, overcoming addiction, or giving into indulgence. At moments, the acting is so loaded with expressive body language that no dialogue is necessary. While Take This Waltz touches on serious issues through dialogue, it more beautifully displays how these issues mark people's lives with a plot that's driven by emotions, which lead to actions that have consequences.

The movie is shot in a way that emphasizes actors' movements and expressions, enhancing the story with a depth that too much dialogue would bog down. The camera shifts from Margot's face to her feet while she makes blueberry muffins, the camera rests just far enough from Margot's face to catch every goodbye hug and kiss she gives her in-laws in a flurry as they shuffle out the door, and the camera spies on Margot and Daniel during an intoxicating carnival ride of momentary euphoria before abrupt silence, stillness, and florescent lighting coldly force them back to reality.

Take This Waltz is a love story without a definite protagonist. The story's substance comes from the uncertainty people face when they're emotionally conflicted. Despite a few overly romanticized moments, the movie resonates with anyone who has been surprised by his or her own emotions and felt it took courage to act on them.

Man and Nature, a Timeless Matter of Toil

The multifaceted relationship between man and his natural environment sparks discussions among everyone from artists and farmers to fishermen and scientists. Partaking in the sensory delight of fruit, or intensely debating over the use of natural resources, man's interactions with nature range from personal to political.

An act as ordinary as peering into the horizon inspires awe, so it's no wonder that the relationship between man and nature has been a timeless source of contemplation, evident in our agricultural practices, art, literature, philosophies, religions, and more.

In the Carnegie Museum of Art's exhibit Natural History, on display in the Forum Gallery until October 14, a small collection of works by international artists invites visitors to explore ideas concerning man as an inhabitant and appreciator of Earth.

The text on the gallery's exterior wall describes the artworks as "reveling in contradiction and complexity while nonetheless aiming for different kinds of truths, representations, and wonder." This offers a nice introduction to one room that approaches a subject so large it seems unapproachable. American Rachel Harrison's limestone green sculpture Utopia (2002) emulates this feeling with precision. A porcelain figurine confronts a giant cavernous entity, appearing to represent Mother Nature, which not only holds the figurine as to be of support, but also boldly marks its power over the figurine through its inherent advantage of size. What shelters man can also endanger man.

Gelatin silver prints by American photographer John Divola are both honest and surreal, displaying grainy, black and white images of majestic west coast landscapes evidently impacted by humans. In an artist statement, Divola writes, "While the literal subject of [The Four Landscapes (1992)] is California, its figurative subject is the psychological location of the natural from the vantage point of the cultural."

Next to Divola's photography rests German Florian Maier-Aichen's Untitled (2005), a chromogenic print. Maier-Aichen cleverly uses the medium to challenge what it represents. Does photography communicate truth? An ominously dark body of water rests aside the unreal red of Los Angeles' coastline, and a deep turquoise shroud of sky hovers over the whitewashed horizon. Through digital manipulation, Maier-Aichen dramatizes the naturally angular coastline into a luminous composition, like an inhabited red Mars (if it had beaches).

Other displays, such as 45 wooden boxes stretched across a wall, two videos of a cat and dog, and white pails containing castings of grass, are less astonishing but still thought-provoking. Don't miss two works that border the exterior wall and could be carelessly overlooked: Brazilian Beatriz Milhazes' Nazareth das Farinhas (2002), an acrylic burst of floral patterns on canvas, and American Mel Bochner's Measurement: Plant (Palm) (1969), an ode to man's desire to understand and document the physical development of a naturally occurring life form.

All artworks in Natural History are part of the museum's permanent collection. Centered around an inexhaustible, classic theme, the exhibit enables viewers to interpret some modes through which artists represent their surroundings, encouraging them to think about their own surroundings a little more.

Bloomfield's Box Heart features Keith Garubba

The Living Rose Window:

Printmaking on Paper and Glass by Keith Garubba

July 24 - August 18

In his printmaking, Keith Garubba explores relationships between architecture and biology, which he describes more simply as the things we make and the things we're made of. "I always feel like maybe we're trying to recreate ourselves in our artwork," he says, "and asking what it is to be human."

He titles his pieces after biological processes, which offer crucial insight to the artworks. The piece below, for example, is titled Angiogenesis, a term for the development of new blood vessels; in some cases, these new vessels provide nutrients for cancerous tissue. Even if you're unfamiliar with the terminology, compositional elements like line and color portray a sense of movement, as though some type of process is occurring.

Angiogenesis, Silkscreen and Collagraph

Whether it's the background of acrylic wash, the transition from crisp to faint colors, or the curling passages of inked string, Garubba's artworks evoke movement and spontaneity. Nearly symmetrical images of rose windows and biohazard symbols boldly mark Garubba's works as well. Spontaneity and symmetry then combine to create aesthetic balance within each composition.

Garubba's printmaking is a process of layers. He can typically complete pieces on paper in four layers, and his glassworks require more. A majority of the artworks displayed in The Living Rose Window are silkscreen and collagraph printing on paper. Some, however, are glassworks, which involve a more complicated process of silkscreening high fire enamels on glass and then kiln-firing to fuse the glass.

 Wake 2, Silkscreened Enamels Fused on Glass

In the quaint setting of Box Heart Gallery's furnished space, Garubba's works feel at home, where they provide a dynamic juxtaposition of our given bodies and the spaces we build to house them.