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Friday, July 04, 2003

Fair's fair and Purveegiin's fine

 

You’ve heard of concept-driven art. Well, just in case you wondered, “Art Philadelphia,” the indoor art fair at the Convention Center last weekend, was frame-driven.

Putting the gilt before the art is not my idea of serious. But, to paraphrase, “It’s the sales, stupid,” and, like it or not, there seemed to be lots of happy shoppers in the hall the day I went.

Two Philadelphia galleries I consider serious -- Seraphin and Sande Webster -- participated. I never made it to Webster, but when I spotted Tony Seraphin at his booth, he was almost too busy to talk. Works were flying off the chain links. Of course, Seraphin was showing Ab-Ex painter Grace Hartigan and Leon Golub in addition to locals Paul Cava, Sandra Flood and Phoebe Adams, all heavy hitters apparently mowing down the competition.

The always-quotable Seraphin said it was a shot in the dark to throw in his lot with the fair. “When I first walked in (and saw the rest of the exhibitors) I thought ‘I’m out of here,’” said Seraphin. But he stayed and told me he had sold a lot (a Victor Vazquez portfolio, a Sandra Flood painting (see image) , a couple of Hartleys). “I just hope they do a little editing of who’s in here next year,” was his parting shot.

My real reason for being there was to meet Mongolian artist Batsaihan Purveegiin. Purveegiin, 37, emailed me about some great story he had to tell me. (I’d written about the artist in 2000 for the Weekly but I had not met him.)

The artist’s got a gallery now, Gallery 911 at Revsin Custom Picture Framing on 9th and Arch. When I arrived, he was sitting in the gallery's booth, dressed in his grandfather’s Mongolian costume and working on a new, cut-paper piece (see horse image).

You have to know the artist’s back story to understand how amazing it is that he’s got a gallery, something that seems so normal but for him is revolutionary.

Purveegiin came to New York in 1991-- on scholarship -- to study at the Art Students League. He had trouble with English and got into some financial and maybe political trouble, too. (Details are a little unclear, something about protesting his country’s actions at the NY consulate. His country is known for human rights violations. See State Department report.) What followed was a bout of depression, loss of scholarship, then homelessness, and, the corker, imprisonment for 19 months in various INS detention centers. He was released by a sympathetic judge who found that if he was deported he would be in danger in his homeland. The case is pending.

The artist arrived in Philadelphia in 1999, lived in St. John’s Hospice for men and was helped by a number of homeless advocacy groups. For the last two years, he's lived in an apartment and made a living for himself by selling his art. His Philadelphia gallery debut was in a Coalition Ingenue exhibit in 2000 at Project Home.

Purveegiin’s new story is that he’s become an activist on behalf of Mongolian orphans. He is raising money through sales of a children’s book, "The Baby Horse, a Smart Rabbit and an Angry Gray Wolf," based on a Mongolian folk tale. The book, which is spiral-bound and sells for $12, was published with the help of Journey Home, a homeless advocacy group. Purveegiin says there are 6,000 homeless street children in Ulaan Bator, Mongolia's capitol city. It’s a hard number to verify, but child homelessness is a fact in Mongolia (see that state department report).

The book, available at Gallery 911, is a kind of Mongolian “Brer Rabbit.” The artist’s watercolor illustrations are sweet and based on traditional Mongolian folk art -- mountains in the background, lots of stylized animals.

Because Purveegiin has found friends and people he can trust in Philadelphia, he now incorporates things like the Love statue and the Philadelphia skyline in his cut-paper drawings (see image). It makes you smile to see Liberty Place given the same treatment as a Mongolian snow lion.

permanent link  roberta 12:42 PM
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Thursday, July 03, 2003

1026 meets ICA, music meets art

 
The art-world's fireworks for July 4 are at Space 1026, which is putting on a show of artwork by the crew that builds walls and hangs things at the ICA. The crew is made up of artists like Sarah McEneaney, Clint Takeda and Joy Feasley, who work at the ICA to support their art habits. The opening-night reception, which starts at 7, includes music--Bardo Pond, Oxbo, Stone 50 and more--The show, "Off the Wagon," runs until July 26.

permanent link  libby 3:19 PM
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Painters steal Wednesday First Friday

 
The red, white and blue balloons bobbed outside Old City’s gallery doors, but the brouhaha celebrating the opening of the Constitution Center didn’t seem to touch Old City, which was unusually quiet.

Helllooo. If you move First Friday to a Wednesday, not too many people are going to come.

But the art showed up, and some of it looked wild and juicy. Like the creepy, overheated suburbs (“Street Corner” shown) in Roland Becerra’s oils at Roger LaPelle, 122 N. Third Street. The figures look like action figures, the scenarios like horror movie or action movie stills, and the Virgin Mary shrine looks even less natural--but way more alive--than the real thing. Guys carry submachine guns. Insects light the path of approaching figures. And lit-up Victorian doll houses provide the stage for “Psycho” or “Godzilla.” These suburbs are way far from heaven.

While Becerra has used his high-art academy technique for pop culture topics, former Fleisher Challenge exhibitor Qimin Liu at Artists House uses his high-art academy technique to create portraits of society’s dispossessed. These are not the usual portraits of white-skinned burghers, their possessions telegraphing who they are and what they value. They are faces stripped bare of props, the rich background interiors of traditional portraiture reduced to nothing but sky, a mark of the subjects’ homeless days and nights spent under the sun and stars (“Under the Sky #4” shown). Liu makes visible the faces middle-class whites avoid studying, and that’s his personal revolution.

Wendell Castle’s sexy “Crux,” (shown--pull on the right stem and a drawer pulls out) made of polychromed julutong, bronze and brass, was one of a number of excellent pieces at Snyderman
tied in with last month’s furniture extravaganza. Other items of note include Jon Brooks’ chairs and John Eric Byers’ milk-painted furniture, including a dizzying geometric pattern covering a piano and two stools.

In sharp contrast, Larry Becker’s summer group show of minimalist work offers a visual break accompanied by intellectual challenge. Kocot and Hatton’s infrared “Rain” (shown) is a videotape of rain falling (in Ocean City). The piece is a companion to the work the couple have down at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art. And David Goerk’s small chunks of wood [“Oblique Block (B & W)” shown, is 4” by 4” by 2”] provide what-is-its for the wall and mind. I also enjoyed Marcia Hafif’s work, the latter a pulsing yellow-orange colorfield called “Glaze Painting: Naples Yellow/Indian Yellow.” As hot, hot, hot as spareness can go.

On departing Becker, we spotted non-minimalist artist Sydney Goodman entering, thereby making the gallery a meeting ground for minimalism and representation.

Pringle’s summer group show, which included mostly international artists, had a nice piece by English watercolorist Simon Palmer (“Clutching at Straws” shown), whose sinewed trees overwhelm the field of tiny gleaners in the background. Iceland native Karolina Larusdottir, who is an illustrator of children’s books with a strong commercial track record, offered etchings with ambiguous narrative scenes. My two favorites--”The Crossing” and “Free Ride”--were set by the ocean, the people in black and white, the background in color. I wondered if there was some political content here.

At Highwire’s group show, the notables were two guys with lots of drips. Theodore Mosher offered ink-blot covered drawings and small drippy paintings, some with art-historical references, and Bob Gorchov had an existential, smudgy touch (shown, “Animal Skeleton/4) with people and skeletons.

The standout print at the Cheltenham Printmaker’s Guild show at Muse Gallery was Herbert Appelson’s City Skyline,” stitched and embossed and surprising.“

permanent link  libby 2:37 PM
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Tuesday, July 01, 2003

Drawing at Spector

 
Because you never heard of Jombi Supastar and you think Isaiah Zagar has created far too many mirror murals, you might be under the impression that you can skip “Drawing for it,” a group show at Spector. That would be a mistake.

The show covers a trippy gamut from bravura representational drawing to hip cartoons and weird fantasy to outsider-looking work (that’s Supastar).

Supastar’s work includes childlike images on sweet pink paper, the subject matter sometimes as dark--a man gets knifed, for example--as the handling seems innocent and earnest. A riot of floating paper-white silhouettes emerge from a black pencil ground in “Jombi World” (shown here)and “I Have Nightmares”--reverse silhouettes recalling Picasso’s “Guernica,” but with a floaty, anti-polished quality. The handmade frames, spray-painted gold, and sometimes quite crooked, are the final touch.

Zagar’s work, fanciful autobiographical images of himself and his family--here’s “Julia and Dog Poop (Park)”--looks like crewel embroidery but is hand-dyed straw laid over Zagar’s drawings by Mexical folk-artist Luz M. Salinas. There’s a Chagalian joy of life here, plus an erotic punch and a folk-art beauty that bears little resemblance to Zagar's more public work. To my taste, this is tops.

In contrast, Randall Sellers, one of Spector’s regulars, offers diminutive, bravura pencil drawings of people and microscopic romantic images of imagined cities on a hill that look modern and medieval at the same time. The images, drawn bare-eyed with a constantly sharpened pencil, can be viewed through the magnifying glass hanging there. The largest in the show (shown here) is 3.25 inches wide. But I also liked the familiarity of "Chris, Sean and Quentin Playing Risk During the Blizzard of 2001," a rougher drawing that smelled of men being boys and boys playing at being men.


Fantasy permeates the show: Merrilee Challis’ body organs that grow on plants and under bell jars (see “Tabernacle” here) and snowglobes deserved to sell like hotcakes, and they did; Andrew Jeffrey Wright and Isaac Lin, alone and together, offer weird characters. I especially liked their collaboration “Time Peeper,” in which one cool urban creature slides its eyes to sneak a peek at another critter's watch. Marc Manning's fantasies of spirits in nature suggest a dark-sided pantheism.

And the noir drawings of Rob Matthews, catching himself in a beam of light as he sleeps or awakens, suggest Sam Spade as a boy, dreaming of monsters under the bed (check out the beautifully drawn relaxed shoulder and neck in “Light Dream 1," not shown).

The whole show’s kind of like that--personal, familiar and fantastic, all at once.
permanent link  libby 5:43 PM
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Yuskavage post-a-thon continues

 

A post by Judith Schaechter

Regarding Lisa Yuskavage: I vehemently disagree with Donna Sink’s opinion that “There's no soul-searching going on in these images, they're only about "working through that common artist's problem of having a lean bank account” and that “they're using common commercial sex-sells imagery under the guise of criticizing that imagery to do it. In other words, they're no different than Budweiser ads” (Editor--See Donna's post on Yuskavage on 6/19/03. Other posts on the subject on 6/19/03, 6/6/03 and 6/3/03).

I would never presume to know what’s going on in an artist’s mind based on looking at their work--it’s fairly obvious that art tells you way more about yourself [than about] the artist. Maybe Lisa Yuskavage is rigorously “soul searching” or maybe she was thinking about what’s for dinner. I’m sure many of the great icons of art had less than profound thoughts on their mind when they were creating.

Regardless, it’s been my experience (as a teacher and artist) that most artists are painfully sincere and anyone who goes into the arts to make a buck is a stone cold idiot. The charge that they [Yuskavage's figure paintings] are the same as Budweiser ads is ludicrous. If anything, Yuskavage’s figures are repulsive parodies of titillation. Has Donna Sink ever really looked at Playboy?

Anyone turned on by Yuskavage’s work will be forced to confront what appears to be a taste for alien, bulbous, duck-faced women in acid color schemes. Their “come hither” poses seems less “Venus” than “Venus Fly Trap” (see image above). Her work doesn’t appeal to me because it seems sarcastic to me at worst and aloof at best.

Reading it as a comment on "women's issues" seems fair enough but somewhat of a dead end--it seems very personal to me--like what it's really about is how much she hates her own body and by extension, everyone else’s.

I know I just said claiming to know what an artist intended is presumptuous but here goes anyway: maybe as a person Lisa Yuskavage can laugh at her own foibles, but her work (and John Currin’s too) seems to reflect a really harsh, judgmental side (see Currin image left)-- unlike Jenny Saville (image below), who, I would argue, loves those fat people who are her subjects.

--Judith Schaechter is a Philadelphia artist and writer. You can see her work at Claire Oliver Fine Art (Internet Explorer required for this site!) in New York and at the local online magazine, Missioncreep.

permanent link  roberta 8:52 AM
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Monday, June 30, 2003

Friday is Wednesday

 
Just a reminder that First Friday has been pushed up to Wednesday because of the July 4th festivities.

--posted by Roberta and Libby

permanent link  roberta 1:12 PM
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