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Saturday, January 03, 2004

First Friday, the tour

 

I'm always glad to find a new gallery, so I headed in to Union 237 (shown, inside the gallery) and introduced myself to Director of Art Brian B. Brown, who told me the place opened just two weeks earlier, and because of the Christmas break, had technically only been open a week and a half.

He practically begged me to see the work downstairs, so I entered the space-age canopy and took a look at the gallery's "urban art" room, with works by street artists with names like Pose2, Past, and Bird. I especially enjoyed the way these young artists were stretching beyond the basics of grafitti.


Past's "Red" and "Brown" (shown, Brown) seemed like internal examinations of the nature of letters and brush strokes.


I was reminded of ultra-insider painter David Reed (blue painting shown) and his meditations on brush strokes, but Past was taking the thought in a new direction, the shapes taking on a sinuous, alive quality beneath the skin of things.


Brandt Elling Peters' "Step on it, Fella, step on it!!!" (shown) reflected anime and other comic forms. What brought the fairly familiar imagery into another realm was the background, imagery of adults bleeding through the yellow. I guess someone's been telling Peters he has to grow up--soon.


Tom Smith's "Hungry for Style" (shown) takes the transition from wall art to the canvas literally and figuratively, as does Bird's Landscape3 (not shown), a transition that Brown says the gallery itself will undergo as large, wall-sized canvases take the place of the murals. Plus there was some work on paper from out-of-towners in a glass case that looked interesting, including cartoony work by Robert Nunez.

The gallery was also showing a video, but I didn't hang around long enough to see what it was, so I can't report. It remains to be seen if this is a place that will carry serious work, but I think it's worth keeping an eye on.


The other place I stopped at was FAN Gallery, which looked warm and cozy from the outside and was drawing a crowd, thanks in part to the Irish music from the band Ceol Mor.


It turns out that one of the musicians and the artist were one--R.M. Bender, a painter of pleasant landscapes plus a smattering of still lifes (shown left, October Light). The three musicians played guitar, bazooki and a hand-made Irish wooden flute. Some red dots decorated the walls.

The confluence of music and art seems to be quite the rage. On the way to the Clay Studio, I passed some people handing out information about Arts in Motion. Their motto: "Art is for everyone. That means you."

I told AIM artist and musician Eric Haeker that this was my motto, too. He probably thought I was nuts.

Anyway, Arts in Motion seems to have a number of projects cooking, including a gig at the Kimmel Center Jan. 18 and 19 with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, Arts in Motion providing computer generated visualizations to enhance the aural experience.

Considering this was January and immediately following New Year's Day, the crowd was pretty big wherever I went.
permanent link  libby 5:26 PM
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First Friday: Gilded cage

 
It was First Friday, again, and there I was back at my favorite haunt, the Clay Studio, where Rain Harris' "Gilding the Lily" pieces joined voluptuous baroque architectural decoration with venomous femininity (shown, Presuming Desire).

The surreal pieces, shaped tiles with pearly glazes arranged like moldings on the wall, were as spectacular to me as they were to Roberta when she reviewed them back in September at Temple's Tyler campus (see her Sept. 21, 2003 post), so I won't say much except, if you haven't seen these creations, which turn walls into decorated women and make me think of Elizabeth Taylor (if only she had a grip on how to turn her bad taste into something beyond taste), go look.

Of all the things I saw Friday, this took the cake, the prize and the laurel wreath (shown, Pretty in Pink detail). (Roberta and I went separate ways and saw different things, so she'll have a different take on better and best.)

The work eclipsed the rest of the work at the Clay Studio, and especially drained the life from the group of out-of-town potters showing in the back room, their work trapped in traditional shapes, with only glazes to rescue them from dinnerware.
permanent link  libby 4:29 PM
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Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Barbie art no lunch meat

 
If you missed the item in this morning's paper about artist Tom Forsythe's "Food Chain Barbie" beating out a copyright infringement suit from toy manufacturer Mattel, follow the link.
permanent link  libby 11:00 AM
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Tuesday, December 30, 2003

The Mystery of Case 13

 
I always have mixed feelings about the Art in City Hall shows. On the one hand, I'm completely sold on the idea of art in public spaces. On the other, City Hall's tall, narrow glass vitrines, placed on two floors of the building, are a challenge for the art and a challenge for the viewer.

Put on your hiking boots because to see the exhibit requires pacing hundreds of feet of hallways and ascending two flights of stairs. Apart from those logistics, what's in the exhibits is almost always worth the trip.

Right now you'll find the cases full of drawings and paintings by local childrens' book illustrators. The reason to go is to see how these folks handle narrative. Mostly the strategies are straightforward story-telling of classic tales. Interestingly, though, there's lots of room for individuality and humor. Two cases in particular talked to me. Lee Wilkinson's illustrations in Case 9 which seemed to combine vast, minimalist fields of color with figures and odd scale shifts to evoke something poetic. In fact, I found their affect quite like some of the work I've seen at Vox Populi over the last several years (I'm thinking Jen Macdonald and Kelley Roberts in particular).


But the mystery of the show came at the end of the line in Juliet Wayne's Case 13. Instead of book illustrations, Wayne installed the case like a little dollhouse theatre with an upstairs and a downstairs and a red and pink game board path pulling it all together. With its kindergarten materials (construction paper and flannel cut-out) and earnest affect, it trumped the show. The piece was outsider-y and both creepy (a little) and charming.

Wayne's artist's statement, affixed to the case, told this story. The artist played the game of "LIFE" as a six year old and lost. She lost because she didn't wind up with a career (doctor, lawyer etc), something she calls prophetic because she "still [doesn't] have an occupation."

I'm not sure what that all means. Maybe she considers book illustration less an occupation than a game? (image top is Case 13; image bottom is detail)

permanent link  roberta 11:20 AM
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Palumbo's in Northern Liberties

 

I want to recommend a show off the Old City path. Anthony Palumbo, painter and recent Pennsylvania Academy graduate, has a solo show notable for its portraits at Ashley Gallery on Third St. near Brown.


The work is nuanced and the paint handling is divine. This is a youngster to watch. (Image, top is "Concrete and Glass;" image, left is "Self Portrait.")

Although Palumbo's work is less edgy and more academy, I want to compare it to paintings by Rebecca Westcott.

Westcott, another youngster who's into portraits, paints in the Alice Neel tradition of chronicling her circle with portraits of psychological depth.

You may remember Westcott's two solo shows at the now defunct "One Pixel" Gallery across from Nexus -- or from the Space 1026 show at ICA in 2002 (she's a 1026er or was). She will have her first solo show with Spector gallery some time next year. (bottom image is painting by Westcott)

permanent link  roberta 9:17 AM
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Monday, December 29, 2003

The other side of the race equation

 
Two videos installations at the Gershman Y gnaw away at our intractable cultural problem of race. The show, "Reverse Negatives," which runs until Feb. 10, includes a pair of videos by Sanford Biggers and Jennifer Zackin and a pair of videos by Doron Solomon.

Biggers and Zackin, who are black and Jewish, respectively, went to art school together, where they discovered that their families' film archives were nearly identical, with piano lessons, birthday parties and trips to Disney World (or was it Disney Land?). So they created “a small world…” an installation incorporating those Super 8 movies screened in a '70s era rec room.

My favorite moment was the pair of birthday parties with matching sheet cakes and with tables filled with disoriented young children looking for their mothers as they spoon down the cake and ignore one another. It seemed like a metaphor for all of us, living side by side, self-absorbed, but not quite paying attention to one another.

I don't know that I think this was profound or unusually insightful, but it serves as a nice reminder that race is a social construct and that we Americans have confused "race" and class. The middle class, whether Jewish American or African American or Asian American or American American is overwhelmingly processed American cheese.

In Israeli video artist Doron Solomons' split screen video, “I Clean Richard’s Home and He Cleans Mine,” the artist cleans the home of his housekeeper named Richard, an illegal refugee from Ghana, while Richard simultaneously cleans the artist’s home. Turning the video into a negative seemed not so interesting to me, but it did highlight how weird negative water and suds look. They're black and seem to have magical properties.

The chores themselves went on and on, like they do in real life--worth doing but not interesting. I didn't find the exchange of tasks and spaces all that suprising or thought-provoking.

For all that, I still liked the way both video installations belied otherness and race, which blind us from seeing ourselves in others.
permanent link  libby 3:15 PM
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Sunday, December 28, 2003

David Guinn inside

 
I stopped by the Plastic Club yesterday to see mural artist David Guinn's small paintings (shown right, Mike) that he's showing alongside the work of Plastic Club member Alice Meyer-Wallace.

Guinn, who's in the process of painting an array of playing dogs on the side of the Morris Animal Refuge at 13 and Lombard, rented the Plastic Club with Meyer-Wallace, and sold nearly everything he put on the wall (shown left, "Connie," and below right, "Your Old Friend," which weren't for sale).

His father, Michael Guinn, a second-generation member of the Plastic Club himself and also a painter and graphic artist, told me that for a flat $500, an artist can rent the Plastic Club space for a one-month show and take home all the profits on the painting (i.e. no commission).

I did the math, and I'd say David took home between $4,000 and $5,000 (his prices were mostly in the $300 to $900 range and he split the rental cost with Meyer-Wallace).

Of course, the down side is the Plastic Club, being short-staffed, requires a phone call for a visit, unless you visit during their class hours--Wednesday, 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.; Thursday 9:45 a.m. to 1:45 p.m. and 6:30 to 9 p.m.; and Saturday, 1 to 4 p.m.

But Michael was a gracious respondent to my request, and he did point out that most work gets sold during the openings, so if it's about selling more than getting seen, this is certainly a nice option.

I enjoyed seeing the small acrylics, some of which related to the pieces that grace the city (shown, his Crystal Snowscape mural) and some of which did not. Unlike the murals, which are complete and complex, many of these felt more like ruminations, sketches and experiments. The work ranged from intense and dark, with hints of violence, to upbeat reflections of personal ties.

And the personal ties carried over to the show. Meyer-Wallace, a family friend, Michael said, showed mostly appealing watercolor landscapes of Greece (she lives there half the year on the island of Paros) or figure-study collages, which hung interspersed with Guinn's work in both the downstairs room and the huge upstairs room, which, by the way, is also for rent for events and meetings at $50 an hour.


permanent link  libby 10:07 AM
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