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Saturday, April 24, 2004

Eat your fiber and love it

 

I'm ashamed to say I didn't make it to Snyderman's "Fiber Biennial 2004" until Thursday, but boy am I glad I made it. And so will you be if you rush on over. It closes Friday, the 30th.

As ever, the state of what constitutes fiber in this show is so broad that I'm wondering why the curator, Bruce Hoffman, didn't include some canvases covered with paint. Just kidding. But only a little.

Take Warren Seelig's "Shadow Field in Granite" (shown). This piece was made of rods of metal and stone, but the suggestion of the grid and stitchery got it included in the show. It reminded me, by the way, of some Charles Fahlen work back when he was in love with rods and rocks and mountains and such.


Baskets and anti-baskets


Lindsay K. Rais' "Neckline Basket" was a basket only by virtue of having a handle; it was bottomless. As for the fiber, it consisted of pistachio nuts and screening. But it evoked clothing (that's fiber, ain't it) and jewelry, and Indian goddesses with lots of breasts.



Basket-making's tradition runs the gamut in this show. Take Hisako Sekijima's "Turns for Depth II," woven and tied twigs that hold--woven and tied twigs. It's a lacy solid that speaks of concentration and control over wild things that cannot quite be controlled--a little cage of itself.

And Kiyomi Iwata's "Stand" (shown at top) and "Peach Two" were also nonfunctional. Paper, stiffened and woven with delicate wire in a loose grid, became human vessels, vulnerable and airy.

For unlikely subject-matter in the world of basketry, Ferne Jacobs offered her three-D explosions of knot-making (shown at top, "Heart Dance"). Her "Open Globe" took a globe of the world (sort of) and turned it into a freeform vessel. Another artist whose sculptural shapes seemed like surprises were Karyl Sisson's constructions of ribbon or cloth tape and clothespins.

With what looked like knots and mixed media, Joyce Scott created talismans and fetishes. Here's a picture of her "Spirit Twins," the green mother a gal not to be messed with. I'm not so sure I want to mess with the twins either.








Humorous twists

In a world that usually doesn't have time for a sense of humor (how can you have a sense of humor when the labor required to make any of these pieces amounts to self-flagellation?), there was Pat Hickman's "Dust Bowl," a sort of joke--more like a dust sifter. And K. Pannepacker's "7000 Q-tips," a fairly conventional weaving except for the 7000 Q-tips interwoven and creating the strips, made me laugh. It was created at the Fringe Festival (can you believe this joke?), with audience participation in the cutting-off ceremony.

And speaking of humor, Tom Wegman's beaded found objects had a Pop Art, cartoony sensibility. I was thinking about Red Grooms when I looked at his toasters and irons. At the same time, this was full-bore, obsessive folk art.

I'd put Barbara-Rose Okun's little picture weavings (maybe macrame knottings) (alas, not shown) somewhere close. Her "Texas Longhorns Summering in New Mexico" and "Up to My Ears in Snow" tickled me with their quirkiness and intensity, fitting whole landscapes into about 24 square inches.

Anyway, even with more traditional means and materials--jacquard weavings (shown, Lia Cook's "Beach Head"), needlepoint, embroidery, applique, quilting, much of the work had a twist of some kind that made it feel modern, conceptual or otherwise more art than craft.

permanent link  libby 8:19 AM
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Friday, April 23, 2004

Friday viewing go-round

 
Ryan McGinley and David Hilliard at University of the Arts

Two hot young photographers have work in Sol Mednick Gallery and Gallery 1401, two venues a floor apart in the UArts Terra building on south Broad St. (Uarts' website is useless for gallery information. These galleries are open 10 am-4:30 pm Mon-Sat, 211 S. Broad St. See map.)

New Yorker Ryan McGinley, who had a solo show at the Whitney last year, is a my gang photographer -- shots of his friends doing... whatever (bike-riding, cavorting at night in the ocean, standing on a rooftop at dusk or dawn looking wasted). The camera is never off and McGinley catches his crew on the fly. The work is active, intense and almost agitated. (image above is "Tim and Dakota" image below is "Sam at Ground Zero")



McGinley's work is also sexy. Not only is there skin, skin and more skin, but there's an untamed quality to both the people he's looking at and they way he presents them.



These are children in a world with no grown-ups. And the photographer is completely merged with what he's shooting. He's so inside the milieu there is no feel of separation between the artist and his subjects. These are very excellent snapshots. (image is "Dan Dusted" and "Self Portrait Root Canal")

That used to be a cut. But nowadays, it's a compliment.



Hilliard's work, which is interwoven with McGinley's in both galleries by the way, is also documentary but in a more studied, I'm outside the picture kind of way.

The artist, who lives in Boston and teaches at Yale, makes triptychs that let the image unfold in a slow, cinematic pan (you read them left to right) that lets you catch the scene, then hone in on the details -- which are plentiful and telling. In "Home Made" two women/girls sit, legs splayed, panties showing, doing a summer time chore. They're taking the stones out of a batch of cherries. (image)

It's a messy job and they don't look particularly happy doing it. Red cherry juice stains their hands and runs down their bare legs. The subtext with womens' issues here struck me as funny. But maybe not. The point of view is cool and anthropological. And the vibe is Hitchcockian. The birds could be swarming right off camera. (See more Hilliard at artnet)

Both artists works are large and both look great, mounted on aluminum and unframed. Large scale photography shown this way is compelling the way a large painting can be. It doesn't give you surface and that will always make it a kind of lesser cousin. You'll never want to lick the surface of a photograph. But you may actually want to devote a large wall in your house to one.

Thom Lessner redux and Jennifer Blazina at SPECTOR

Libby told you about Thom Lessner's new work at SPECTOR. Let me echo her enthusiasm and say the guy's work has never looked so confident and accomplished. The colors! The ability to capture a cheekbone with just one small curving line! The hair details! His full-blown love of his subjects! It's great to see this talent blossom. Buy before the price goes up. Here's another image, "Isaac."



Meanwhile, in the gallery's back space there's work of a completely different stripe and color. Jennifer Blazina, an installation artist whose process-heavy output involves printing and casting -- miniature photographs in handmade frames -- has turned the back room into a kind of chapel. (image left and detail right below)

What looks like hundreds of miniature objects hung in grid-like fashion from ceiling to floor, give the space a pock-marked affect, but also a religious ambiance. Something in my Catholic upbringing cried out to me here of scapulars or perhaps holy cards tacked to the walls. Votive candles would have completed the picture and for that reason I'm glad there aren't any.



The artist, who lives and teaches in Philadelphia, is mining her family's photo archives for source material. I'll be curious to see where she goes with this project because while the techniques are a wow, the installation feels like a closed book. Any sequel needs to take it elsewhere.

Inez Storer at National Museum of American Jewish History

Inez Storer's a magical realist painter. The Bay area artist (represented locally by Snyderman Gallery where she's had solo shows-- the last in 2002) makes collage paintings, books and assemblages that are beautiful, edgy and outsider-y. (The work is installed beautifully in NMAJH, which is a great place if you've never been, by the way.)

The work is about identity and displacement and the artist, now 71, has reason to pick those as her subject.
(image is "Las Madres")

She was raised in a household where there was a big secret and she knew there was a secret but was forbidden to talk about it.

Basically, Storer's mother, a Jewish emigre who fled Nazi Germany, was so traumatized by the pain of the war and dislocation that she denied her Jewish roots. She (and her husband) raised Storer as a Catholic; and she (mom) only confirmed her Jewish roots on her death bed. Even then, she couched it in a lie, denying that there were any remaining family members. Storer later discovered she had 29 Jewish cousins, some living in California!


The work, which is beautifully crafted and richly colored, is not sweet. Words appear in child-like block letters and often they convey ironic meaning. In "Home Quilt," (image) the word "mom" accompanies a face that has been grafitti-ed with a mustache and pointy (devilish?) beard.

This is no passing reference to Duchamp's playful LHOOQ. It's an angry defacing.
permanent link  roberta 9:00 AM
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Thursday, April 22, 2004

Paper

 

I finally got around the Gallery Joe's brief show for this month--a three-weeker. Yikes, it's closing Saturday.

Four of the five artists showing are new to the gallery. Two of them were standouts, for me, but all of them had thought-provoking work.





Xylor Jane is fascinated with numbers; the works in the show are patterns based on the Fibonacci number sequence. I've been looking at her name and wondering if she made it up, using the X and Y axes for inspiration, or if, having this unusual name inspired her to x-y axis love. Fortunately the work stands up without the explanation, and I especially enjoyed "The Sixty x 18" (shown, right).

First of all, it was the only work in the show in living color. Second, it was based on a series of concentric squares. I began thinking of televisions, pixels and Joseph Albers (left, "Homage to the Square: Apparition"*)and his color theories. Thanks to the dark blue dots, I also thought of electric moving billboards like the one on top of the PGW building, with some of its lights missing, creating a kind of static-y void dancing across the surface.



Clarence Morgan's black and white drawings, a combo of stenciled-on shapes in black marker and hand-penciled marks were full of humor and the cosmos. I saw the Statue of Liberty as a balloon in "Fluid Tranquility" (shown here, right). And in "Stolen Moments," (shown at top), balloons, blown up rubber gloves, breasts, cacti and black holes. The wonder of these pieces, to me, is that black blots, that usually come across as black holes, here come across as bulbous and voluminous.



Annabel Daou's grids had tactile and sculptural qualities, even though they seemed to be referring to the picture plane and frame. On chunks of wood, Daou layers paper, sometimes with layers of tape, sometimes painted or covered with graphite ("Broken," left).




The work, with its deliberate imperfection and roughness also suggests skin, old book pages and layers of paint on buildings ("Quiet Move," right).


Both Nicole Phunagrasamee Fein and Leonie Guyer (she's the one who has shown at the gallery before) work as far away from deliberate imperfection and roughness as possible.



Fein's "Iteration 4012TI" (left) layered a greem watercolor grid over an ochre one, created a woven and plaid fabric reference. "Iteration 4013MI" was an ochre tattersall plaid. And then there were the shirting stripes, ochre and black or ochre with black and white.



And Guyer's tiny icons floating on either saturated-with-black-ink silk or delineated on white with just the faintest graphite line seemed modest, vulnerable and anthropomorphic, floating all alone in space.

* 2003 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
permanent link  libby 10:37 PM
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Wednesday, April 21, 2004

United Nations of Barnes

 
(Ed. note--In this post, artblog reader Charles Hankin is referring to the Philadelphia Inquirer story mentioned in Roberta's post of April 19. For other recent commentary on the issue, see Libby's post of April 20 and Tyler Green's posts like this one and this one at Modern Art Notes.)

Post by Charles Hankin
I am in wonder at the concept of opening up the Barnes back door.

The divide between the city of Philadelphia and the Main Line has been clear for generations. Barnes, the humanist, seems to have wanted to break down that barrier. He was after all a risk taker, collecting art by the cutting edge, or as Robert Hughes coined, the Art of the New. What would fit in with the new plan would be a gallery that would take risks.

A partnership with St. Joe's [University] could work toward this, along with a partnership with Lincoln University. Why not have a world art center which could include African and other cultures? It could be marketed as the United Nations of Art. (image is Horace Pippin's "Giving Thanks" from the Barnes Collection)

This would join the cultural divide that is City Line Ave.

The Philadelphia community is much larger than three stuffy foundations.

The Barnes is not the answer for the Parkway, which could benefit from street life like street vendors and performers or even a carnival. Now it is just a street for rowers to get to Center City or commuters to get to Chestnut Hill without going through North Philadelphia.
-- Charles Hankin is a regular artblog reader from Philadelphia
permanent link  libby and roberta 4:11 PM
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The dot and the line

 
Two artists whose work I've admired for some time are together at Schmidt-Dean Gallery.

Wei Jia mixes Eastern calligraphy in abstract grids and floaty fields of color and Steven Baris uses dots and deep space shadows, also in floaty fields.

Jia's works are large, monumental, and slow. Because you understand the lines as language, you want to read these works -- left to right, up and down.



But, the artist, who was born in China and has been in the Philadelphia region for twenty years, frustrates your attempt to read, letting the ancient lines fall apart before your eyes. Sometimes they seem to swim around like displaced beings. Other times, they snap back together like they're trying to say something. (image top and left are paintings by Jia. Left is a detail)

The work never loses its Eastern feel, for all its abstractions. Jia's colors are rich -- mostly, though not always, earth tones (ochres and golds). The surfaces, which the artist builds up with torn paper, then paints over, have the feel of bandaged skin. Something is trying to heal here.


Baris paints on plexiglas (although a few works are on paper), building up eye-popping fields of color on which he places lucite- and bakelite-inspired color dots (avocado, turquoise -- think 50's refrigerators). Underneath, although not situated in clear relationships with the dots, bruise-like shadows swim, shark-like. The works are mostly small and intimate.

Because the surface colors are so unreal and "man-made" and the shadowy areas so believable (even though there is no suggestion of light) the whole thing speaks about human-kind and the process of location, dislocation, false and real memory.


Whether the pop-ish dots are real and the bruises false -- or the opposite -- is for the viewer to decide. I think it goes either way. Baris, calls his works landscapes, and they are indeed evocative of out of focus maps that want to be regular and resolved but aren't. I think they're landscapes of the mind.

Schmidt Dean always seems to pair artists smartly. Here, the dot and the line make great companions in works that have a little bit of "Le Petit Prince" in them -- they're sitting atop the world all alone and trying to figure things out.

Black and white photographs by Linda Adlestein are in the gallery's third space.
permanent link  roberta 7:56 AM
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Tuesday, April 20, 2004

Not quite the facts

 
I couldn't help but gag at the take-out in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Sunday from the Peter Schjeldahl article in the New Yorker about the Barnes, because it misrepresented the piece. The Inky ran a chunk from the center of the piece, in favor of the Barnes' display system, and left out the all important context of the piece--the beginning and the end--which expressed the case for moving the Barnes and the author's ambivalence.

Furthermore, to represent the art world as a united front in favor of keeping the Barnes where it is, is also misleading. Yet that's what the Inky did.

Just like Schjeldahl, the art world is conflicted.
permanent link  libby 12:17 PM
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Monday, April 19, 2004

Barnes go-round

 
You may have read the article by Patricia Horn and Matthew P. Blanchard in yesterday's Inquirer about how the Barnes Foundation's neighbors now want to keep the institution in the neighborhood and how a $10 million parking lot with access from the City Ave thoroughfare (bypassing the battleground of Latches Lane where school buses are forbidden) might cut the Gordian knot.

It seems a reasonable, pragmatic idea, and that's why it'll never ever work. However, it doesn't really change the fact that few of the "just folks" Barnes saw as his audience would be empowered to visit a place that is still, when all is said and done, pretty darn inaccessible.

The Barnes would serve its population better in Philadelphia at a location where people could walk to it or take the bus easily.

Watching the Barnes saga play out is torture.

(By the way, you may have to sign up for Philly.com to read this article. It doesn't cost anything but you will be giving them your email address and some demographic info. That seems to be the way it is with most online newspapers. Sorry to make you go through this step to read the article.)
--photo by Bob Krist for Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation
permanent link  roberta 8:15 AM
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Northern Liberties and points south

 
The scene in Northern Liberties yesterday reminded me of the '60s, with people making music on the streets and paintings in random places outside whatever the official celebration was. I also remember when the Northern Liberties official celebration was more like the unofficial, random stuff. I am not yearning for the good old days. I thought NL never looked so good.

I left Roberta and Stella (see Roberta's previous post) after our stop at 314 Brown.

The art in the other venues was a random mix of people with big reps and people you never heard of and people you hadn't heard from for a pretty long time. I'm going to skip the big reps, like Mark Shetabi and Sarah McEneaney because they'll get space no matter what sooner or later.

I enjoyed pieces by people whose work I didn't know, like Lee Wilkinson, whose ominous blue and pink landscape suggested human pollution or some other emanation from human real estate.

Christopher Curchin's large painting of wizened bodies and skulls floating like putti among the puffy clouds around a patterned, Buddha-like head, made me think of Chris Ofili and of the decorative art I see in Indian restaurants.



The red lollipop tree, duplicated in the pond of Marita Fitzpatrick's desolate landscape, creeped me out with its balloony shape glowing red not once but twice. The hot-air balloon quality lightened the threat a bit and added to its mystery.



And it was nice to see something recent and bold by Ira Upin, with tribal textures and suggestions of a family and their door.



There were names on the list whose work I couldn't find, too. As for studios, I never even got there.




But I did get to South Philly to see Thom Lessner's show at Spector Gallery. Lessner is the ultimate fan, making cartoony paintings of his favorite rock groups and of his friends.

The series of rock-group portraits on pennies (shown, "Guns & Roses" and detail), with Lessner's heroes shrunk down to nearly microscopic size, yet still visibly exuding their rock attitudes on top of presidents. Putting them on pennies instead of thousand dollar bills is ironic and sincere all at once.

Another standout was "The Bee Gees," looking angelic over (I have no idea what you call those things, but they look like mini trays) patterns that bring back everybody's mother. The no-nonsense flatness of the figures make them work against the wallpaper pattern behind, and the pattern changes the milieu and aura of rock stardom. This one also brings up the feeling of Byzantine icons.

I also want to mention the David Lee Roth series, each incarnation a little weirder than the one before, just like Roth in real life. The guy is odd. And the "Ramones on Lamborghini" shows the rock group added on to an advertisement for a white Lamborghini, another instance of divine justice according to Thom Lessner.

Getting away from his groupie imagination, Lessner also turned out a bunch of portraits of his friends and himself. With incredible economy, he catches an expression or a look that seems just right and personal, or a gesture that lets you know what's happening. (Shown, clockwise from left "Andrew," "Dustin, Michelle, & Roy" and "Driz Girls.")

The show includes a display of posters he's made for a variety of things this past year, all for sale at prices from $6 to $25. The paintings range from $40 to $700, most on the lower end, and the sold dots are all over the place.
permanent link  libby 12:17 AM
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Sunday, April 18, 2004

I brake for fleas and other things

 
Stella and I drove to Chinatown yesterday and while circling for a parking space we almost caused an accident gawking at the big, 70-vender flea market on the sidewalk across from Reading Terminal (image). Call me out of it but I had no idea the flea scene was so organized here. Apparently, according to a young man at the organizer's table, something called Philadelphia Flea Markets has been around for seventeen years! Anyway, this was a small one, he said. But a good one, I'd add. Check out the two campaign pins -- going for $3 -- true antiques, in addition to wearable art!



There are seven more markets scheduled around town between now and Nov. 6. The big Kahuna is On May 1 on the grounds outside Eastern State Penitentiary, 22nd and Fairmount, where there will be 170 vendors -- and a positively frightening amount of stuff for sale.

Art up North

After fleeing the flea, we met Libby in Northern Liberties for the "North of the Border, Art of Northern Liberties" celebration, a one-day open studio and exhibition in multiple venues. Northern Liberties, a scrappy neighborhood north of Spring Garden centered around 2nd and 3rd Streets is home to an amazing number of artists and artists' studios. There are a couple of galleries there and while I don't get up there often it's a good scene.


Drawing and painting were prominent and looked great in the ADM front office space and in the back gallery, which, if I understood, was a group show curated by ICA's Assistant Curator Elyse Gonzalez.

Here's a few of the things that caught my eye up front at ADM. Libby will tell you her thoughts too. Our friend, painter, Phyllis Laver had three large Phillip Pearlstein-esque portrait heads and two Leonardo-esque drawings on view that were just plain great. Laver's accomplished with portraits and these large, bold, nuanced works were humanist beauties. (image right and left above are Laver's three paintings. Detail is "Josie")


And Jerry Smith's cool, small gouache paintings of crunched cars and entwined bodies evoked Philadelphia without having to say so -- they had urban decay, gray skies, and vulnerable humans. (image is "Pile on.")


Portraits of people, portraits of lives
In the curated show in the gallery, Jessica Doyle, whose installation I had liked much at Project Room (see post of Nov. 30.) had a collaborative piece with Sarah Gamble that was similar to her previous PR wall drawings. Drawn and painted on thin sheets of unprimed plywood (that seemed to be curling away from the wall at the bottom), the piece is a kind of narrative of a life or lives. The ambiance is teen notebook doodle and the quality of the photo-based drawings is raw and straight-forward.



There's lots of loopy, girl energy in the work and Stella connected with it big time. (images left above and right are details)


Leslie Kaufman's large wood construction in the middle of the room held the space like a weird, Tiki surfboard throne. The dark, gnarly wood, the poles holding up the structure, the surfboard shaped floor, the suggestion of a chair, all came together to spell Hawaiian god or goddess on the move in calm seas.


I loved the piece. Kaufman, whom we ran into, told us something about the work -- there were two entwined figures under a huppa -- but she encouraged us to take our interpretations elsewhere -- which I did and do anyway. It's a strong piece and shows a great direction for the sculptor and head of Philadelphia Sculptors. (image left is Kaufman's piece)

Portraits that aren't

Upstairs above ADM are artists studios. Stella and I had time for two studio visits before she conked out. When we stopped in at Judith Jacobson's there happened to be a little traffic jam. The artist's family and friends all arrived together at the same time the three of us tumbled in. It made a nice crowd in the studio.

Jacobson's work, which I had seen a while back (also at Project Room) impressed me here like it didn't there.

Now I know why. What showed at PR were small drawings and not her strongest work. Seeing what she has in the studio made me reconsider.

Jacobson, who is a kind of psychic map-maker, uses faces to create what look like lacy fragments of cloth, but drawn. These are not portraits, although the artist uses faces as a take off point. But her process -- which involves xeroxing and degrading the image to the point of disintegration -- takes the work to another zone. Then she works back into the face, coming up with beautiful drawings that suggest many things -- from maps, to lace, to ghosts or x-rays or some computer-pixillated approximations. Shroud of Turn, maybe?

In any event, the work I saw in the studio, whether large drawings on mylar or small drawings cut out and attached to canvas as if they were butterflies or other found artifacts, were bold and pushed almost but not quite to the point of abstraction -- which is a good place to be.

I asked Jacobson what she was working on now and she showed me a bunch of drawing fragments in ziplock bags and shrugged her shoulders and said she wasn't quite sure where they'd wind up but there they were.

The fragments, some light, some dark, were like face topographies waiting to be assembled. I loved them in the ziplock bags. They spoke to me of archiving and saving and the interweaving of daily life and the sacred . I got a chill looking at them. I don't know what they'll be like outside the bags. The artist needs to figure that out. But what I saw made me want to see more.
--photos by Stella
permanent link  roberta 10:28 AM
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