artblog

Saturday, March 13, 2004

Disappointment with Neto

 

Post by Colette Copeland
I was sorry to miss Ernesto Neto's talk on Friday (it conflicted with my own opening at Nexus) [see roberta's post of Mar 7 for more on Neto]

I went to the Fabric Workshop on Saturday. I had high hopes based on the invitation card and the comments from people who had seen the NYC show. (image is Neto's 2003 "The House")

I have to say that as an installation, I was very disappointed. I too related it to Richard Serra's piece. However, the work was in no way assimmilated within the space. The space was not transformed by the sculptured foam. I was very much aware that the foam was simply placed inside the gallery space.

Where was the ambient lighting? Why wasn't something done to mask the gallery ceiling and floor? From the postcard, I envisioned an all-encompassing cave of foam which created simultaneous feelings of claustrophobia and comforting insulation. --see Colette Copeland's new installation in the Nexus Community Gallery
permanent link  libby and roberta 10:41 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Friday, March 12, 2004

Biennial hot flash: best of show

 

This is the biennial of lists, we decided after seeing it the other day at the press preview. Here is our first list for you. Libby and Roberta's picks for best of show.

1. Tam Van Tran (image shown below left) whose wedding of chlorophyl and office stationary dazzles with sensual va va va voom.

2. Olav Westphalen (shown above right) whose sculptures and wall pieces we're still trying to deconstruct. Westphalen puts the Gilbert and George into George Segal-like freestanding figures. It's the men in black and blue in chains. On the wall it's 1950's book illustration gone awry. Again, we're still deconstructing.

3. Liz Craft, who put life back into bronze (or should we say death) with her "Death Rider (Libra)" on a motorcycle. We want to order a couple. One for Pisces, one for Aquarius. Her dying old mermaid was so transgressively anti-bimbo it took our breath away.

4. Mark Handforth (shown bottom right) , for his blue collar, I-95 affect. (A beer drinker in a cocaine world he brought the everyday world in to a show that was overwhelmingly fey and faux in subject matter).

5. Ernesto Caivano whose Japanese-influenced story-telling ink drawings were technical tour de forces (and gave you a lot of birds for your money).

6. James Siena who if he hasn't been at Gallery Joe should be for his obsessive systematic drawings and paintings which were beauties.

7. Jim Hodges whose scissor-wizardry on a photograph of a sylvan scene felt new.

permanent link  libby and roberta 10:13 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Thursday, March 11, 2004

Tiffany grants to Philadelphia folks

 

The William Comfort Tiffany Foundation grants were announced recently and the artnet roundup tells us that three artists with Philadelphia connections --Josh Mosley, Clare Rojas and Phil Frost -- were among the thirty winners of the $20,000 awards. Philadelphia video artist Mosley's "Commute," (image is detail) a beautiful, labor-intensive clay animation, was screened in the PMA Video Gallery last summer. Rojas (can we claim her? she used to be a Space 1026er a while back) was seen at the ICA's 2001 East Meets West show guest-curated by Alex Baker. And Frost, a self-taught Brooklyn artist, is also connected to Philadelphia through friendship with Space 1026ers -- and through his 2002 show at PAFA's Morris Gallery (also curated by Alex Baker.) Philadelphian and 2004 Whitney Biennial participant Virgil Marti was a Tiffany award winner in 1997.
permanent link  roberta 9:42 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Wednesday, March 10, 2004

The other Roberta on McEneaney

 
Our friend John McInerney at ICA wrote to tell me that New York Times critic Roberta Smith's review of McEneaney's show will appear in this Sunday's Arts and Leisure section. McInerney said "I am 99% sure it is coming out [Sunday]...it was postponed three times." I'll put the link up when I see it.
permanent link  roberta 7:06 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Tuesday, March 09, 2004

McEneaney on life, art and bricks

 

I met with Sarah McEneaney on Feb. 17 to interview her for a Q&A for Philadelphia Weekly. McEneaney's glorious retrospective is upstairs at the ICA until April 4. The interview is up now at the Weekly's website. Here is the complete version. (top image "Callowhill Neighborhood")

Q. Your show as a whole seems cinematic. You have close-ups, wide angle landscapes, scenes of mystery, scenes pregnant with expectation or anxiety. The "No Title" picture (of the critic in the dark suit) is very Hitchcockian.

A. I definitely think about stories because I am chronicling my life. I never thought of it as cinematic...

Q. Architectural space is important in your work. You connect with it in a direct way. Does this come out of your work as a carpenter?


A. You know I used to support myself as a carpenter. Right out of art school, instead of waiting on tables I became a helper to Dick Caswell. He was an artist who supported himself by carpentry, so I helped him. I learned on the job. I did wait on tables a little bit when I was in school but I saw the advantage to learning a trade.
I also did art installation. When I got out of PAFA (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) I worked as a preparator at PAFA. It was my first museum job. They hire artists because artists are careful with art. Then you learn on the job. (image left "Flood")

Q. Are you still working as an art installer?

A. I haven't worked [as a preparator] at the ICA for a year. Since having a gallery in New York, I've been selling enough to support myself.

Q. How did you get the New York gallery?


A. I went to an opening at Gallery Joe. It was Jacob El Hanani's. Steve Schlessinger was there. He knows Jacob and had just been to the PMA (Philadelphia Museum of Art) and saw my picture there ("Winter Studio"). I met him and he said "[Your] name's familiar." I told him I was in a group show in New York the next week (at Dorsky Gallery). Steve and Jacob came to the opening. I showed him the brochure from my Swarthmore show and he looked at the swimming pool picture ("Revenge Fantasy") and said "I want that one." He bought it just looking at the brochure. I called Becky [Kerlin of Gallery Joe] and asked whether he was on the up and up. She said yes.

Q. Tell me about the group show at Dorsky Gallery. (image right "Winter 1996")

A. Michael Klein used to have a gallery. He put me in some group shows. Now he's the curator of the Microsoft Collection. He put two of mine in the collection. He's a real supporter.

Q. What paintings are in the Microsoft collection?

A. He took "Men at Work" a neighborhood scene with guys drinking coffee on the ground and one guy up in a cherry picker working. He also took the painting I did of my mural on Diamond St.


Q. I noticed that doors are big in your paintings. they're usually open except for the backyard painting. Also there are no animals in that work.

A.Usually the doors are open. The studio spills into the house and the house into the studio. The door to my yard used to be always open. That changed. The door closing is about protecting myself and my home. It's about that. There's a peephole in the door and I have my hammer and my telephone.

The reason there are no animals is that my dog had died six weeks before. I think it wouldn't have happened [the rape by the intruder] if I had a dog. Then somebody's dog slipped into my yard and chased my kitty into a corner and chased the kitty away. She never came back so I had no animals at the time. (image above left "Alpha Dog")

The next animal I got was Birdie. She was found on a street in Fishtown. I got her in Sept. I named her Birdie because she's got a shadow marking of a bird on her head. It's like the shadow of a bird flying over. I've had her five and a half years and she was one and a half or two when I got her.

Q. Let's talk about paint and color. You use a lot of white in your works. Is white a nicer pigment to work with...talk a little bit about your eggs and pigments.

A. Titanium white needs more eggs. I never use zinc white. I never use black. A teacher, Cynthia Carlson, who I love, said black paint makes a hole. Mix it instead.

Q. How many eggs do you go through per painting or per week or however you can parse it out?

A. I can't really break it down by painting because I work on more than one at a time. A two-egg day is a very full day of work. The eggs go far.

I mix it on a glass palette and sometimes if I'm mixing up more I can put it in the fridge and use it the next day. I have to separate the yolks from the whites. then I puncture the sacks and only use what's inside. The sacks and whites get fed to Birdie. I cook them in the microwave and put em in with her kibble. Kind of like scrambled eggs.

I like to work on a number of things [at the same time]. They start out very loose -- on gesso - it's very absorbent.

Q. Gesso? I read some people use 10 layers under egg tempera...

A. I use six coats of gesso. I'll spend an entire day prepping a 4 by 8 ft. sheet of plywood. It's birch plywood. It's furniture grade. One-half inch thick. Some of the bigger pieces have quarter inch thick and have more support on the back.


Q. Who's your lumber purveyor?

A. Riley Lumber. I was just there this morning. I got half in birch plywood. I used to have a pickup truck. Now I have a Subaru...I have them do preliminary cuts [at Riley - so she can get them home] John Struble a furniture maker in my neighborhood has a table saw. I'm going there this afternoon. (image right ICA installation shot)

Q. I'm always surprised at the scale of your works. How do you decide the size...small vs big?

A. I guess I like to do the big neighborhood paintings and want to do them big. I have favorite proportions - three ft. by four ft. I like squares. Two ft. by two ft. Sometimes it's arbitrary. I did a lot of eight-and a half inch by eleven inch head self portraits. ...It's the daily business. How we're always putting out our resumes.

Q. Your patterns are incredible and you must love bricks. They're all over the place.

A. I love bricks. I love them because they're red. And I love the pattern of them. I may use a ruler pencil line then do them by hand ...

Q. Do you do sketches first?

A. I do sketches for everything. My favorite sketchbook is the Strathmore six inch by eight inch. I do the drawing and project on the panel. Then of course there's always changes.

I used to spend hours translating from small to big. I like the dumb-math kind of thing. I like the variety of jobs involved.

Q. Tell me about your new neighborhood activism project

A. John Strubel and I formed a committee to save the Reading Viaduct. It's the elevated tracks of the Reading Railroad. We want to turn it into a walkway. We got Inga Saffron up there walking with us. It's the Reading Viaduct Project. Some Penn students did a charette about it recently. I've painted some of it in the neighborhood paintings. I think now it's going to become the focus.

Q. How do you get those birds-eye shots of the neighborhood?

A. Like in Callowhill neighborhood? I went on the roof of a building.

Q. Do you use photos as sources?

A. I use photos when I don't know how to do something. Like horses - I went on the Internet and found pictures. (above and below are installation shots of animal sculptures)

Q. Have you ever painted a scene with a big crowd? Most of the time it feels like it's just you and the world...or you and a friend or sister and the world. I guess it would have to come out of your being in crowds...like at meetings for stopping the stadium?


A. The summer of the stadium I didn't get much painting done. I was so obsessed with the meetings and such. But I'm thinking of a painting...it's in a travelling show next year, "Inside Out loud - Women's Health". (it's not in the ICA show). I used to be a clinic escort at Planned Parenthood. This painting shows four escorts, maybe four people getting escorted in and a group of protesters.

Janine Myleaf an art historian at Swarthmore curated the show. It'll be at Washington University in Jan. 2005. Janine wrote about self examinations in the ICA catalog

Q. It sounds like you were a baby boomer activist...like all this community work is in your blood (image below "No Stadium")

A. I'm on the end of it. The last year of high school I was going to antiwar demonstrations. I couldn't wait to be old enough to vote. My mom was a liberal. I just feel it's part of living. I can't imagine not doing it.

Q. Did you always know you wanted to paint?

A> I was painting in oils in 4th grade. 4th - 12th grade I was in a class. The teacher taught us oils.

Q. You were painting narrative paintings at a time when everybody else was painting abstract or minimalist things.

A. I think I made one abstract painting in high school and it wound up with a face in it. At PCA [Philadelphia College of Art, now University of the Arts], I took what you had to take. By the time I got to the Academy, I was painting from life. I already knew what I wanted to do....I painted that picture it's in the catalog [it shows Sarah in a painting class at PAFA]. It has some messy abstract gestural stuff. By the time I got out I was making big collage paintings..they're not that different from what I'm doing today.

Q. How do you feel being paired by ICA with Nara?

A. I like the big bowls with the cloth, and some of the drawings. I like the flying nun. Of course how could I not love his dogs.

Q. It seems there are lots of people painting from their lives now. Do you feel kinship with any of them?

A. I love Shazia Sikander and also Amy Sillman. It's totally different work but it's similar in that its describing their world. (image right "No Title")

Q. Your trip through the world is not like the trip of an Everywoman

A. Yes, but I'm a bunch of them. Astrid Bowlby sent me a real nice email and told me 'when I stand in front of your paintings I think of me in the kitchen or me in the studio."

Q. Tell me about self inflicted portrait. Did you paint it with your left hand?
A. No, I used my right hand. I was looking in the mirror. Sometimes I make the correction, sometimes I don't. There's one painting - it's not in the show-where I'm sitting in a chair with a utensil in each hand and there's one in my hair and behind my ears etc.

Q. Tell me about your art collection. I know you're a great buyer of local art.

A. I tend to buy small things. I buy here. I bought a Susan Hagen...I just had to have it. I have made a lot of trades. I'm on the board of Vox Populi. I stay really attuned to what they're doing.

Q. Were you ever in one of those co-op galleries?

aA. I was in 3rd St. gallery right out of school...when it was a women's coop.

Q How was it working with the ICA on your show?

A It was a pleasure. When it came time to choose, I worked with Ingrid [Schaffner] and Elyse [Gonzales] and we sat around and talked and looked and ideas of themes became apparent and then there were too many. I didn't' know which ones to choose. I was too close to it. There were some very logistical things. This painting? iI's in germany, so let's not.

Q. Any travel plans?

A. I applied to the Tyrone Guthrie Center in County Monaghan, Ireland. If I don't get in I'll apply elsewhere. I'm a big believer in perseverence. (laughs)

Q I know you're a person who likes details. I wonder if you have this one in mind? How many paintings have you made? It seems you're a hard worker and prolific. (image left is wall of drawings at ICA)

A. Let's see. It's 25 years since I'm out of school. Say maybe 20 a year, maybe 15. Some years I'm more prolific than others... (25 yrs X 20= 500; 25 x 15=375; 25 x 10=250)

Q. Do you miss the art installing work?

A. The carpentry I was happy to back off of. I have back trouble. But I miss the great people I worked with.

Q. Your works have a kind of poetic distancing I think of when I think of Emily Dickinson. Emily and her encounter with a bird on the walk; Emily and her cottage; Emily and her garden wall; Do you write poetry? Do you read Dickinson?

A. I don't write poetry. I've read Dickinson, some. It's interesting you say Emily Dickinson. Jeanne Nugent mentioned her in something she wrote about a show I had at More Gallery.

But I loved writing the obit for Trumpet that's in the catalog. I read obits every day. There's a style to it. They tell about people's accomplishments and their lives.

Q. Are there any paintings you woudn't sell?

A. Trumpet. ["Alpha Dog"] I wouldn't let it go. Also "Flood"...and Sozanski ["No Title"]. I'm keeping that one.

Q. So what do you leave out of your work? You put so much in...what's not in there? (bottom image is detail of bricks in "Winter 1996")

A. While they're very specific, they very edited and controlled. I put something in that I want to for a reason. They're not "tell all" paintings.

Q. I loved the sculpture on the small furniture borrowed from your friends.

A. They're funny little sculptures. I hadn't really showed them much. Nobody wanted to put them on pedestals. I live with them on funky little furniture. But I didn't have enough.

I'm a fanatical knitter. I made all the rugs. I make them big then "felt" them. You wash them and dry them in the drier and they shrink.

Q. Finally, those gouaches...they seem like cinema out-takes.

A. I do gouaches when I travel. I always start them on site. And usually finish them on the trip. I never touch them when I'm home.

permanent link  roberta 7:37 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Monday, March 08, 2004

Last thoughts on First Friday

 


I stopped at Rosenfeld Gallery to see the Susan Pasquarelli work and walked in on a conversation between the gallery's eponymous Richard Rosenfeld and Paul Stankard on gay marriage. I don't know who said what because I was looking at the art (one pro, one anti the word "marriage" but not the permanent union).


Pasquarelli paints beautiful gouache on paper work with glowing colors.


What appealed to me most were the newer pieces with stelae-like forms, which suggested something dark and thoughtful and the small, landscapy watercolors, with their obsessive dotty dashes (no stelae or dotty watercolors shown here, alas).

All the work (including a blue quilt-like piece, shown) seemed to have a meditative, repetitive mark-making quality that brought to mind the work of Diane Pieri (shown, her "Symbolic Landscape"), also an artist Rosenfeld carries.

Stankard said "Beautiful work," to open the conversation with me and then he made sure I admired his pieces, which were also on display.

Stankard is a master of over-the-top glass paperweights (shown, a typical piece, "Tea Rose Cluster With Figures") with floral arrangements inside. Originally a glassmaker who created lab equipment for scientists, upon seeing the French paperweights with single flowers inside, Stankard was inspired. He modified the same flamework technique he was using for scientific glass to make the flowers and then he cast them in the glass. The rest is history.

On one hand, I admired the technique. On the other, the work's got a kitschy quality that made me laugh, with bees as well as buds. The prices, however, are anything but kitsch. $8,000. Oh la la. Nice corporate farewell gift, dontcha think?

I did like a couple of pieces of mosaic animal sculptures (deer shown) by Jonathan Mandell (he did some mosaic work for the new baseball stadium) embedded with an array of glass, shells, jewels and rocks. The critters seemed kind of outsidery--and perfect for outside spaces, besides.

All in all, I was glad I stopped in.

The other work I especially enjoyed was Matt Pruden's installation at Nexus, a glimpse of which he had offered a couple of months ago in the Window on Broad Street. The highlights, here, were the tee shirts, the hand-painted postcards, and the whited-out maps, which brought into modern terms a kind of obscure concept about the culture that inspired British gentleman-explorers to risk their lives and others' for fame and for the Crown.

The tee shirts, with photos from arctic exploration, reminded me of rock-concert memorabilia and other promotional material, and the postcards also brought me to advertising. Welcome to sunny Antarctica! As for the maps without place names, they were reminders of the imperialism implied in the naming of places as well as the loss of naming rights in death.



permanent link  libby 7:51 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Whitney Biennial on line

 
I want to thank Tyler Green's Modern Art Notes for this link to the Whitney Biennial's amazing site. It's got images and thumbnail info about each artist and ways to organize your tour through the information. Way cool. Thanks, Tyler.


permanent link  libby 6:35 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Pastel bricks and flowers galore in Pentimenti's new space

 

Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia’s premier spot for sensuous art with conceptual underpinnings, recently moved its operation around the corner to a glorious, 1,600 sq. ft. space on Second St. (same block as Nexus).


I stopped in on Saturday afternoon and the sun was streaming in the front windows casting a warm glow on the pine floors and providing a welcoming atmosphere. Not that you needed it, because Spring was in the air and on the walls.



Sara Eichner’s small pastel paintings broadcast the colors of Spring and Nancy Blum’s ceramic flowers hit you with thoughts of nature unchained after a winter sleep.

Eichner’s glossy, almost-sculpted oil on panel paintings present architectural motifs (bricks, wood floors) and other patterns that suggest other kinds of building blocks (hexagons).


Shown with a bees-eye view, Eichner's candy-colored patterns are in control, their patterns adhering rigidly to their grids. But the way Eichner has presented them--juicy to the point of ickiness, and with weird, abruptly truncated slices -- it's all a little bit off. This is not really architecture we're talking about here but building of a different kind. Staring at the works you could imagine their patterns (especially the wood grain) transporting you into a psychedelic reverie.

I thought perhaps Eichner was referring to photography with her skewed diagonal motifs. I've taken enough bad photographs to recognize those weird, off-square croppings.


Eichner, a New York artist, showed last year at PPOW. This is her second solo exhibit at Pentimenti.

Blum’s flowers -- ceramic, drawn and painted -- are also on this side of manic -- decorative but imbued with a kind of darkness, like Victorian exotica. Blum's work reminded me of Rain Harris's extravagent ceramic outpourings, seen recently at the Clay Studio.


Blum, by the way, is a New York artist who shows at Thatcher Projects. Gallerist Christine Pfister gave me a card with images of Blum's new 2004 percent for art commission at the Seattle/Tacoma International Airport. One more reason to go in case you need one.

If pattern, repetition and excess are the big three here, a sense of play is fourth, with art that invites you to take it seriously but also to keep a light touch about you.

Lest you think Pentimenti has gone New York on us, let me assure you that this show was in the works long before Pentimenti scheduled its move. Next show is Philadelphia artists, says Pfister.


permanent link  roberta 8:52 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Sunday, March 07, 2004

Digi redo

 

In the world of digital photography and collage, some people are maximalists and some people minimalists.

I'm thinking of Eileen Neff as a minimalist, who gets magic out of conflation of a couple of images. The world she creates is muted and without the physical presence of people, but through the windows or behind the scrims glow suggested isolated souls (shown, "Dickinson").

The works in her current show at Locks were created during a stay at the MacDowell Artists Colony in 2002, and were inspired by poetry and Wallace Stevens, whose house Neff had visited on her way to her retreat. (She named the show after Wallace Stevens' poem, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," and included the subtitle of the poem on the wall of the show: It must be abstract; it must change; it must give pleasure.) (shown right, "Thoreau")

Fortunately, the photos transcended the inspiration. I almost always find it disappointing when seeing work inspired by previous art/music/poetry/theater, etc., and not by life itself. These photos were about more than the poets and writers whose names they bear.

The photos have a poetry all their own, and I find it a relief to see such considered work in a world where digitization has allowed images to metasticize and pound at your brain.

Two others showing digital works are Lisa Spera at Highwire and Robert Brown at Muse Gallery.

Spera also keeps it simple, but the kinds of pictures she takes are about places and things in time (shown, "Driving Too Slow," taken on Rte. 252 in Swathmore). Each of Spera's labels identify the date and place of the photograph. Some of the photos rose above the naming of places, and some did not.

Brown is a maximalist. He's got words pouring out of him. He names his show "The Court of the Animal Gods" and his pieces (shown, "Animal Gods #6: The Vanquished Prostration of Id") with a spate of words. Look closely at these pictures and you'll see tiny images multiplied ad infinitum and multiple kinds of images under and over eachother, all taken from pop culture.

In terms of quantity of collaged imagery, he's kind of like Josh O.S., another maximalist, but O.S. is going for the big conspiracy theory in the sky. In Brown, there's an obsessiveness that assaults without providing a network of ideas in the macro or micro world. The work revels in the excess and wears me out before I can penetrate to some kind of meaning.


Of all Brown's pieces, the two with children as the central image seemed to reach out and draw me in, suggesting some concern over how the overflow of imagery from our culture interacts with young people, transforming them and making them just another snapshot in the circus of images society generates.


permanent link  libby 10:47 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Casting a wide Neto

 

I walked into the Fab Friday night, not having read the press material on Ernesto Neto’s new piece debuting that night. I was expecting one of Neto’s pantyhose environments like “Nude Plasmic,” which Libby and I walked through in Pittsburgh at the Carnegie International 2000. (third image right)


Instead, Neto has made a grand canyon environment of buttery yellow soft and cozy foam rubber. (That the piece is not fabric caused the Fab’s Curator Ellen Napier, who introduced Neto before he spoke, to do a little dance about how it was appropriate for them to participate. But it didn’t worry me much since I've long accepted foam as a kind of cousin to felt in the extruded fabric category.)


Where Neto's previous, womb-like piece took you back to infancy and caused you -- walking through it shoeless and looking at all those hanging tonsils -- to feel unempowered and off balance, the new work or works, called “The Gate" and “The Garden” empower you to be a Shackleton.

Walk into the snaking, nautilus like installation like an intrepid explorer. Experience the auditory deprivation that occurs when you’re surrounded by carved pieces of foam that tower five feet above you.

(Both Garden and Gate were shown in 2003 at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, and the two top images are Bonakdar installation shots)


Padded cells came to mind immediately once I was inside the piece, but so did the memory of Richard Serra’s rusty canyons of steel which we had walked among not so long ago at Gagosian (see post of Oct. 12). (image is of Serra's Gagosian installation last fall)

But in spite of the geological references, Neto’s foam world also evokes something of the romance of Fred and Ginger dancing. The stripe-like cuts and skirted bottoms and tops of these soft canyons list forward and aft andneed only a little Cole Porter to take off.


Neto spoke and showed slides at the opening. The Brazilian born artist, 40, is an engaging, aerobic speaker who used his body this way and that, crouching or pointing, to illustrate things about his working methods. Interestingly, one of the first references the artist made to using fabric was to a dance performance he saw where the dancers used a piece of elastic fabric which triggered a kind of eureka moment for him about soft armatures and undulating forms.

Neto’s work seems process-driven and, as fits a man who connects viscerally with materials, his art practice is fueled by happy-accidents. You could feel the artist’s excitement about his process of discovering how socks and then women’s stockings could be filled with ball bearings and powders and spices then dropped from on high to create works of art about things referring to stars and biology.

Neto said he was into the cosmos and you could certainly read his dropped from on high powder dispersion pieces or “poofs” as having cosmic concerns.

But he is also concerned with human things like fragility and the body and works like “Nude Plasmic” reflect that in spades. About the fragility, he noted that there was always a limit to the work’s strength. Push the foam and it will topple; poke a hole in the stocking piece and it will develop a leak.

--
Since this new work raises the “how did he do that” factor I was happy to see the Fab has a video of the piece’s making. Called “The Making of the Silent Cliff, the Gate and the Garden,” the short video shows -- silently -- the simple but painstaking work of carving the foam. In a nutshell, here’s the m.o.
--huge blocks of foam were hoisted by crane up to the Fab’s 5th floor
--Neto laid an undulating line of string on the floor then chalked the line (representing the cuts)
--using an old-fashioned, two-person band-saw, the foam was carved -- in a process that looked arduous with a lot of full-body pushing and pulling
--the carved pieces were pulled apart and positioned in their careful arrangements. (no armatures, no glue, just the foam) (bottom image, the artist in 2001 with his piece at the Venice Biennale)



permanent link  roberta 5:15 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Vox pops on First Friday

 

Vox Populi, as usual, left me feeling full of energy and delight. They've got some of their staple members up and showing--Clint Takeda (shown, Takeda's "Spitting Lines"), Matthew Suib and Katie Abercrombie. Plus they've got some funky video that had some little kids enthralled and laughing out loud. And held over for a second month, the "Ultra-L" installation by ON Megumi Akiyoshi and Huang Shih Chieh (see Feb. 9 post for review).

Katie Abercrombie's beautiful gouache on paper imagined underwater worlds (right) draws from Persian miniatures, with intense overall patterning. The work includes some collage, harder to detect at first glance than the patterning, and even the wall painting she did, which didn't measure up to the works on paper, offered unexpected pleasures up close.

Matthew Suib's appropriately noisy installation in honor of the never-say-die Voyager spacecrafts (number 2 now reaching the edge of our solar system) has the feel of a boy's den or bedroom discotheque, with flashing images of formulas, heiroglyphic people and the iconic earth maps, reflected from a projector by a spinning half of a mirror ball while radio soundtracks and transmissions rumble and screech.

Much of Suib's source material is either taken directly from or inspired by real scientists' efforts to communicate with whatever's out there, but the alcove-in-the-wall diorama -- a collaboration between Suib and Takeda -- offers a video animation that only looks like it's from outer space, projected and reflected in a kid-like milieu.

Suib's sweet, boyish takes on space communicate loud and clear with Takeda's array of creatures from his inner space, at once fierce and vulnerable, and in the case of "Black Flame," making Takeda's original weird noises.

(At this point I feel the need to remind you there's a link in Roberta's previous post to an article by Roberta Smith about sound art in The New York Times.)

Takeda's show, called "Demiurge Noeyes" is highlighted by "Bluey" (shown), a fragile, eyeless critter with an enormous head. I could almost hear his little heart beating.

Also showing were some nice paintings on panel of nowhere or nothing I could name (one shown at top).

I stood still long enough to view most of two of the video lounge movies and bits of the third, all by Guy Ben-Ner, and this guy's sensibility of telling fantasy stories with the lowest tech means possible spoke directly to Suib's installation. "Moby Dick" was pretty funny, with shark fins sailing across the livingroom rug/ocean. The apartment was the barely modified set, cabinets and all, and Ahab's pegleg had a door in it.

"House Hold" didn't hold my interest, but "Elia--A Story of an Ostrich Chick" (shown) was worth the costumes and method of walking. Check it out.
permanent link  libby 11:37 AM
Comments? Let us know.