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Saturday, May 15, 2004

Rush to more nothing

 




I was rushing around last week trying to catch up with the big backlog of Big Nothing shows and dashed into the Borowsky gallery to see "Subtle Nothings," a display of multimedia piecesmany with a sense of humor. (I'm not sure why I was in such a rush. Afterall, we did preview it, and the show will be up until Aug. 15.)

What made this show delight was its surprises. Most of the pieces in some way gave a little charge of delight when you discovered what it did, and the discovery often involved some action on your part.

I had to lift the lid of Meredith Monk's "Singing Suitcase," a blank white old-fashioned thing that looked less than promising sitting on its blank white pedestal. But when I got over my art world don't-touch-it phobia and lifted the lid (okay, that's a lie, I sneak illicit feels of art works all the time), it suddenly released a full-throated lullaby that made me pause and listen.


And Chris Vecchio's "Sparkly Cube" was a way better (way more surprising and way more high tech) than my Slinky and 8-Ball Fortune Teller combined. I picked it up and it was practically alive. You'll see.

I was also stunned by Antenna's (Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger's) bubble machine. I blew through the wand, as instructed, and a flurry of images appeared in front of my own reflection. This image doesn't quite cut it, either for the magical spray or for my face.

The show also included David McQueen's mechanized bird chorus line (shown), Ray Rapp's video sculptures (one of them, "acro S" shown at top, in which the acrobats leap across the video voids, from screen to screen), and Liz Phillips' interactive noise machine.

I think my favorite was Andy Holtin's dumb simple "Circle Time Machine," in which a marker writes in circles, followed by a wipe cloth which erases the marking as it goes, and so we all vaporize, with our words, our art work and drawings, whatever mark we leave upon the world during our daily circlings.


permanent link  libby 2:30 PM
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Fresh Coconauts til mid-July

 

Anabelle Rodriguez, Taller Puertorriqueno’s Visual Arts Curator, wrote me to say they have extended Adal Maldonado’s show "Coconauts in Space" until the middle of July. Yeah! [see posts here and here for more on that show, which I highly recommend]

Rodriguez is tambien muy excited about their next show, featuring Chicano art. It’s a show she curated, called Visiones from Post Modern Aztlán and it opens July 30. There will be a round-table discussion on July 31 and the show runs through October.

The exhibit of paintings, prints and installations by local and non-local artists includes forty prints from Self-Help Graphics (East LA) and Coronado Studio (Austin, TX) and work by locals Brujo de la Mancha, Cesar Viveros, Rocio Levito and “Chicana Cascarones Easter Queen Marta Sánchez,” says Rodriguez. (image is print from Coronado Studios, "Se Cree Cheerleader" by Juan A. Farias)

PS, they have a great show of Taíno art and archaeology to follow, says Rodriguez. (Taino means the indiginous people of Puerto Rico.)
permanent link  roberta 9:11 AM
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Martin and the four horsemen of Minimalism

 
Wonderful Roberta Smith review in the NY Times yesterday of a show of early work by Agnes Martin at Dia Beacon. (Speaking of Martin, shown in a 1992 photograph by Mary Ellen Mark)

Smith trashes the DIA Beacon site for a few paragraphs before weighing in on the subject at hand. When she does, her typical, punchy style and phrase coinage makes for a great read. I loved in particular when she talks about artists Martin met between 1957 and 1967 when she moved to New York, including "the four horsemen of Minimalism, Frank Stella, Robert Morris, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin."

Smith says Martin was between camps (not an ab ex painter, not a geometrician, not Minimalist). Here's a passage.

[work like Martin's] accrued from many, many small units, repeated over relatively large expanses of canvas, until they achieved a transforming force. In Ms. Martin's case, this was a kind of abstract beatitude: floating disembodied fields and hazes of color and light, which upon closer examination are triggered by surprisingly mundane causes.

Highly recommended reading. Made me want to go to Beacon.
permanent link  roberta 7:22 AM
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Friday, May 14, 2004

Getting back to business

 
I took some days off and left you in the company of Libby while I hosted a dear friend I hadn't seen in years. Now, back to work.

I promised to tell you about Gallery Joe's figure drawing show "Figure Out" and here goes.

Gallery Joe, known for finely-crafted work in sculpture and on paper, has shown figures before but in sculptural form (Diana Moore, Gil Kerlin) or in the photographs of Kate Moran, said Director Becky Kerlin when I asked if this was their first figure drawing show. (top two images from "Figure Out". Top is detail from Sabeen Raja's tiny watercolor on handmade wasli paper, "At the Tavern." Right is Sarah McEneaney's gouache on paper,"Ormewood Park, Atlanta, GA")



Kerlin pointed out that she exhibits representational work regularly. Shows of Emily Brown's drawings and Stephen Robin's sculpture are two examples.

But figures are on people's minds these days, Kerlin said, and these drawings, by seven artists making their debut with the gallery, are some great examples of new figure drawing -- something so far from an academic study of a figure it should be called something different like symbolist figuration or some such.

Figures pop up elsewhere



There are lots more figure drawings in town at the moment and coming up, too, if I can digress for a moment.

The (now-closed) CAN group show had a nice big graphite drawing by Elaine M. Erne, "Mr Bunny Gets Iced," (image) and if you missed that show, you can catch more Erne in CAN's upcoming small works exhibit May 27 to June 3. CAN if you're not familiar is Philadelphia's "Mixed Greens," an organization dedicated to helping the careers of young emerging artists. The small works show other years has been great and a great opportunity to buy affordable art. (image is Elaine Erne's "Mr Bunny Gets Iced" from the CAN show)



Also good and full of figures, the PAFA student show. This is a huge affair but I'll pick out one artist who seemed attuned to the current state of drawing, Hedwige Jacobs. The MFA grad's installation of drawing and animation had child-like drawings animated with sophistication and wit. (Her website's pretty great too.) (image is detail of Jacobs' "Class") Both the animation and the drawings were available (The 4.22 minute animation was $125 -- I always wonder how you price a video piece. This seemed ok.)


Back to Gallery Joe

"Figure Out" as Libby mentioned in her post is a dark show. Darkness is inescapable these days, a byproduct of living. Some of the work in this show is less existential, like Sarah McEneaney's documentary drawings of her travels, which are lyrical and calm, with something of the Zen acceptance about them. (second to top image)



But the rest walk with the vampires alluding to the vulnerability of humans in a vast, cold world.

Pakistani artist Sabeen Raja (top image) who studied Persian miniature painting in her homeland and also got Western training at Maryland Institute, made a perfect melange of East/West in her "Tavern" piece, in which a young woman weeps as monkeys offer her Rolling Rock, a cigarette and an erect penis.

Marilyn Holsing, who teaches at Tyler School of Art, has four works that remind you of old fashioned children's book illustrations but are packed with dark meaning. In a way they kind of reminded me of themes of ambiguity Randy Bolton brings up in his digitally-altered and appropriated images from kid's books. (image left is one of Holsing's gesso, casein, pencil on paper drawings)



Robyn O'Neil, of Whitney Biennial fame (hers is the huge drawing of men wandering in the snowscape) is a big presence here with three small works that seem like out-takes from the Whitney piece. The affect is old-fashioned and reminded me in a way of the darkly-ambiguous works of Marcel Dzama. Call her Dzama's older sister. (image is O'Neil's graphite drawing, "A Caribou and an Embrace")



Josephine Taylor and Rob Matthews win the award for eerie/edgy. Taylor's pupa girl, "Mummy" (image is detail of the 118 in. long work) a wrapped child whose head is huge and whose mannerist hands and feet seem knotted like twigs, is pretty and pretty shocking. Close study reveals the girl has a patterned cloth in her mouth and while she doesn't look like she's dying, she's not alive either. Maybe she's a bug. Her green eyes have no discernible pupils. I don't know. It's virtuoso drawing and left me with a shiver.




Matthews, whose sixteen "Sleepwalk: Philadelphia" drawings paired a positive image with its x-ray negative, are also virtuoso work. (image right is detail) I would have liked some x-ray vision to interpret what was afoot. These works were Rorshach tests for me. They spoke of life's fleeting moments and the Rashomon of interpretation. What's day to you is night to me. Matthews has other work at the Philadelphia Art Alliance through Aug. 8. Public reception for the artists May 18. (also showing at PAA are Voxers Matt Suib and Ahmed Salvador by the way.)



Finally, we'll not skip over Nils Karsten whose work is also at Vox Populi right now. A cross-town dip into Karsten will show you an artist who's not afraid to tread where Henry Darger went -- into fantasies with little girls. Karsten's narrative drawings, which use multi-dimensional mark-making (some gentle and delicate; others brut and scratchy, angry, ugly) and are built in layers as the narrative unfolds over time in the artist's mind, are phenomena to be experienced and digested slowly. You may not like them but, like John Currin's paintings, they're on to something. (image is Karsten's "Untitled" graphite on paper)
permanent link  roberta 6:15 AM
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Thursday, May 13, 2004

Not so fast: Minimalism's true turf

 
Post from Doug Witmer


Hello artblog:

I know you're paraphrasing Schjeldal here:
"without the spiritual component in works by artists like Rothko and Martin, minimalism ain't great." (Right, Rothko's "No. 36 [Black Stripe]")

I get batty when work that is distilled or reductive automatically gets lumped in with Minimalism...whether or not it's intended to be flattering or critical. (...protecting my own turf, I guess...)

I don't think Rothko or Martin (left, Agnes Martin's "Praise") ever associated or associate themselves with Minimalism at all. In fact, Agnes Martin has said in an interview that she has always thought of her impulses as more expressionist. I'll try to find the quote.

--Douglas Witmer shows at Peng Gallery
permanent link  libby 5:04 PM
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Infinitely transcendental big nothing

 


The show "Infinitely Visible" on the first floor at the Print Center seems to hit the material extremes, from Robert Asman's lush photos of clouds (shown) transformed by some chemical hoodoo and Mike Stifel's prints of chemical tracks. It's another one of the Big Nothing shows scattered around town.

At this point I should probably mention that Asman has contributed to artblog, although I don't think I've ever met him.

Now that I've gotten that off my chest, I can say how much I liked the clouds and especially the chemically altered spaces between, which had metallic rainbows that went flat or substantial, creating black holes and tinted wholes, depending on your literal point of view.

The work, which packed some spiritual oomph and opera, brought to mind Frederic Church (left Church's "Icebergs") and other Transcendental artists, whose paintings of the universe's splendor reflected the spiritual optimism of their times. Asman's work is darker, the frontier of space and chemical play not quite as welcoming as the ends of the earth in oils, but that sense of amazement is still at play.

Asman's chemical play made the reductive white prints of Stifel have more resonance than they might have had on their own. Stifel's pure white surfaces embossed with single arcs or lines are supposed to track the movement of subatomic particles. The work is so very austere and controlled and reductive that, like its subject matter, its materiality has lost its meaning. The pieces do not stand without their explanation.
permanent link  libby 12:15 PM
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Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Prints and paper

 

A show of prints from Two Palms Press by the likes of Elizabeth Peyton, Carroll Dunham and Chuck Close (shown "Self-Portrait #1 and #2) is up at Works on Paper gallery. It's worth a visit.


Highlights include Terry Winters' "Shadowgraphs" (shown, in a miserable copy which doesn't begin to do them justice) with their weird shadows. It's a reality not quite understandable but full of nice textures, patterns in dark and light, and a mix of sharp and soft edges in a not quite readable space.


Ellen Gallagher's in-your-face takes on race issues often include wry stuff about hair and shifts in self-image. This one, "Duke," named after a brand of hair pomade, (shown) is pretty hysterical. It's a grid of tiny cartoon portraits (about 1 inch each), the passe hair styles--facial hair included--topped with globs of hair pomade (I thought it looked like silicone gel). Gallagher's mix of anger with self-deprecating humor makes for edginess that takes the work beyond pat for-it-against-it polemics.

"Marc" (shown right) bears the self-absorption in his own beauty that typifies Elizabeth Peyton's work--and Ralph Lauren models. The deliberately vapid coolness affected by the immature is as annoying as any teenager could hope. But it's all around us, a part of the culture to be examined. There's the secret to its success (alongside sheer beauty).

Peyton's not the only hottie on the bill.

There's Carroll Dunham, with "Closing In," a series of prints of a Gustonian-pink human, shown bit by bit, first on his side, from testicular ear to grid of teeth, and ultimately (presumably) standing upright, from lapel to winged collar.




And there's Matthew Ritchie with "Sea State Five," a series of five color etchings with aquatint. As with all Ritchie, it's got an inscrutable back story, suggestions of land masses and atmospheric force fields, and in this case an anime-inspired young thing. I confess to not being a fan, but the marketplace clearly disagrees with me.







Others showing include Cecily Brown, Jessica Stockholder and Mel Bochner (shown, "Aggravate," a green-background version, but the one in the show has a blue background). I must say Bochner's print did more for me than his paintings, most recently seen at the Whitney. The print enlivens what in his painting is a flat, deadpan surface.
permanent link  libby 10:19 AM
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Addendum to work at Charles More's gallery

 

Being my monomanical self, I forgot to add at the end of my previous post that also showing at The More Gallery are colorfield paintings by Christopher Deeton and paintings on collaged pieces of panel by Philadelphia artist Marc Salz.

Deeton's strips of boffo color (shown, "Dive") of industrial enamel on aluminum about 48" wide bring to mind industrial design strategies, which is kind of chilly. Their shape made me think, Oh, little color Band-aids for the wall. The colors are swell, the variations minimal, and I'm going to restrain myself from ranting about the limits of minimalism here, except to refer people to a Peter Scheldahl piece that ran in The New Yorker three issues ago (I can't get back to its link I'm afraid), in which he suggests that without the spiritual component in works by artists like Rothko and Martin, minimalism ain't great.

Salz's collaged paintings (shown, "Better Days") had nice passages of markings that suggested script, pictographs and squiggles, but mostly I was thinking about aboriginal bark paintings without the sizzle. The connections amongst the collaged bits were weak.
permanent link  libby 9:34 AM
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Tuesday, May 11, 2004

Back to the north woods

 



Eugene Baguskas'fantasy-world paintings at Charles More is a reminder of why it was always such a great gallery, and it's great to see it back in operation.




Baguskas looks as fresh as ever, with romantic, northwoods imagery so transformed by the imagination that it takes on a storybook or fairytale aura. The imagined, heroic, somewhat narrative worlds of the next generation--Joy Feasely and Clare Rojas--come to mind.




It's a world where salmon race upstream for salvation in patterned rows, where moose contemplate the world around them much they way an artist does, where birch trees seem to become symbols for strength and flexibility. Even water takes on a materiality and weight that's fraught with meaning.




The brush work is loose, bold mark-making that implies a rhythmic physicality more than a rhythmic trance. I want to walk in these woods and swim in these streams with the creatures who make their home there.




permanent link  libby 3:52 PM
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Monday, May 10, 2004

More First Friday:Past and present

 


The MFA shows from Penn and Temple offered more for me to think about than some of the pros.

Yi Zhou's thesis exhibit (already gone!)at the Temple Gallery, set me thinking about how this work could never have shown 10 years ago. It seemed fresh, if not 100 percent cooked, with a nice mix of flat Asian aesthetic mixed with a slightly cartoony, outsider touch.

The horizontal planes push out of the side edges, blocking the possibility of perspective, making the space claustrophobic, and suggesting the world before our eyes is the world everywhere. In "Tree Fallen," the ground tilts up to further exaggerate the airlessness and threat.

Nature's colors have been processed by photos, photoshop, early color movies. I'm also reminded of "South Park," with it's flat spaces and simplification.

More MFAs
The Penn MFA exhibit included samplings from a number of in-vogue art styles, which is way better than samplings from a number of out-of-vogue art styles which I found around the corner and down the street. Canvas has basically taken a dive, replaced by wood panels for the most part. And paper is still hot.

Helen Chuang, who was babysitting the gallery space when I arrived, had a couple of deserted landscapes (one on panel, one on canvas) that felt weirdly unfamiliar, with wide swaths of flat spaces, these punctuated by dots of growth that suggested life and colonization in the harsh environment. The more successful, "Foreign Land" (shown), as well as ""Spinifex" are takes on Australia. I'm happy to report these did not remind me of any particular in- or out-of-vogue art style.

Susana Reiriz's ebullient, 8-foot tall canvas, "Chiquitica," made me think about the decorative and lush quality of Ann Craven's birdies that we saw in New York last month, not to mention Chiquita Banana, the commercial goddess of the fruits. Anyway, its spirit and energy was better than orange juice.

Safety zone


More subdued were Si Young Rhie's pattern painting look-alikes, which amused me no end since I couldn't really detect a literal pattern repeat (shown, "Floating Plankton").




In a way, the control of this work (I admired its blues, it's white details) was not that different from Sean Riley's nicely realized obsessive mandala of bubbles, "Full Bloom."




And I suppose, while I'm drawing comparisons within the show, there were Natalie Eve Garrett's noir hot love scenes, barely visible, but also somehow a little tamped down.

I wanted something riskier from those three.

Dirty pretty things or not
But risk there was in a couple of transgressive sculptures and a series of transgressive drawings.

Jacqui Lantigua's dirty pictures with body parts that morph into one another and repeat in unexpected ways, the feet in fuck-me shoes straight out of Karen Kilimnick's jerky-lined drawings (below, Kilimnick's "Planning the Attack of Malta"), stopped me cold after my initial urge to run away.

It was the merger of fashion/girly aesthetics with cartoon-action-multiples sex-and-violence fantasies that caught my attention. I didn't love it, but I can't dismiss it, either.

And then there were these really scary sculptures of microcrystalline wax by Laura Frazure.

"Ambisexual," (the pink one in the rear) with an inch of red penis (Hedwig?) and the small, perky breasts of a 13-year-old girl is more than 8 feet tall and plain old upsetting to look at, its pinkness picking up the kind of realism and loss of idealism that have made modern sculpture tough to look at some of the time.

I'm thinking here of Ron Mueck (below, "Mask II")and Robert Gober details like hair and flesh tones. And that's putting aside the larger picture of the sexual ambiguity, presented in a theatrical look-at-me way.

The other creature, a dark-skinned female equivalent of a classical faun, with horns, and oh horrors a red curling tongue and vagina is equally theatrical, at six feet.

I would rather not look at these, but they were pretty amazing frontal attacks on your bourgeois takes on sexuality. I'm going to have to let them marinate in my mind. I think there's a kind of paean here to the seven deadly sins, one sin more wonderful than the next, perhaps, but I'm not so sure. I need to see more to know what I'm looking at. And I need to know a little about the artist.

Also showing were Demetrius Oliver's inkjet photos, Sanghee Park's austere figure sculptures and Jeremy Vaugh's drawings.

Back with the grownups

Over at Artist's House, Noah Buchanan's still lifes, thanks to some really sexy fruits, rose above their genre (shown, "Still Life with Papayas"). I was intrigued by the burst of color and suggestion of juicy flesh before an unusually austere, dark, rectilinear background.

And in the way back, where Artist's House tends to hang paintings that look like they were made in the 16th century, a self-portrait by Christina Kelly stood out from her lying-in hospital meets valley of the saints paintings.

Others showing there were Stefanie Lieberman with picture postcard Hawaiian landscapes and Elena Petreva's painted panels, painted, scraped, repainted, with wineglasses and some other object (heart, brain?) standing in for people.
permanent link  libby 12:09 PM
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Into the void on a steamy Friday night

 


Vox Populi was under-populated when Bay and I ran in to see Charles Hobbs, Bill Lohre, Jennifer Macdonald and guest artist Nils Karsten's works. (top image is detail of piece by Hobbs)

In fact, the gallery was locked since folks were at the save the arts rally. Luckily we shared the elevator up with Vox's Olivia Schreiner who had the keys. Schreiner who had her pooch in tow, a small, tail-waggish beagle whose name escapes me at the moment, let us in. We were followed by Justin Witte who was bringing in the kegs for the night's opening party.



Anyway, Vox is full of voids this month. Voids of space in prints and paintings, holes in sculptures, and while I'm not sure this is a Big Nothing event, the works are all existential in nature.

In the front space, Charles Hobbs had a room of painted fiberglass objects (top and next two images)that were some of the nicest 3-D works in a Philadelphia gallery I've seen of late. (Sculpture has always been a Vox strong suit, I'll add here.)

A few knee-high painted faux tree trunks sat on the floor. And hanging -- and swaying -- in the space around them were what looked like floating tree knots. That is they looked like tree knots from one side. From the other they had open maws with rock-like teeth and Spanish moss-like stringy things hanging down. "Vagina dentata," said Bay.

You bet, but also microcosmic caves and maybe mouths, too. The objects themselves looked like they were wood or maybe clay but they were almost paper thin so you knew they were neither. The painted patterns, which included stars and stripes, were quite beautiful. The overriding motif of holes, voids and knots wed to stars and other patterns evoked mysticism and the magic of the forest. This is Hobbs' first solo exhibit with Vox.

Bay noticed that Hobbs' faux tree stumps were 3-D cousins of Justin Witte's white on white tree stumps in a screen print in the front room. (The nice-sized print, with small tree stumps and other imagery in voids of space is part of the Vox Box portfolios (a fund-raising endeavor, the boxes, of which there are a number available, cost $250--a bargain. Check out Vox's website for more.)

Schreiner told us that the paint on Witte's print, which had a slight 3-D quality to it, was fabric paint that puffs up when you iron it. Low tech puff paint is especially endearing in a work that had a lot of high art ambiance. I'm sorry I don't have an image. I didn't even try to photograph it. You'll have to go look.



Bill Lohre's installation "Forbidden Icing" (image above left and right are details), which included some bales of hay, was a little creepy but interesting, to say nothing of fragrant. Walking into the space, I initially mistook a very realistic manikin for a child. The manikin faces the wall, birds coming out of its mouth. The installation -- which seemed to be about excess -- unfolded in a spiral, the eye travelling from the child-manikin to wall to which it was connected to the bales of hay to the wall behind and back to the child.

The pieces were discrete but interlocking in some dark, mysterious cyclical way. The idea of telling a story in an almost linear fashion is exciting -- the whole thing had the ambiance of a child's pop up book. But the fragrance of the hay was offputting in the windowless room.

And while the wall collage made of beer cans (I believe) and metal medallions from the tops of wine bottle corks was a knockout and reverberent on many levels, the manikin was so over the top goth that it kind of took away from the rest. Press material says Lohre's work is responding to the abundance of violence present in today's world.



Jennifer Macdonald's suite of paintings, titled "Too _____ to tell you" depicts animal-headed humans standing, walking and not quite interacting in voids of space. The ink, enamel and latex paintings on Mylar are pinned to a strip of wall painted brown so the background color of the works is a kind of vaguely brown-beige. (My camera says the background's orange in one of these works but don't believe it. The color is beige.) (image above and below)



The press release says Macdonald's characters are a reference to film stills and show un-pornographic 1960's-esque menage a trois situations. The series title pays homage to Bas Jan Ader's "I'm too sad to tell you." (Ader's work is in the ICA Big Nothing show.)

I did an immediate double take with these fuzzy, hard to read images. They reminded me a lot of Rosalyn Drexler's noirish works only without the hot, pop colors.

I particularly like the frog-headed men. Somehow that clear reference to the fairy tale land of princes and princesses took the work somewhere I cared to go.

As for the un-porno menage a trois stuff, I can't say I picked up on it. What I got was an overall edginess and a story with spooks and -- like in Andy Warhol's 12-hour long reality videos -- no ending, no story arc, just a hell of repetition.



In the fourth room, guest artist Nils Karsten's large drawings of monumental children's heads (image) had the porn angle going. Here in these breathlessly-urgent portraits, mouths become vaginas and hair is fetishisized to death. These are disturbing almost demonic looking images.



Smaller works, which look like sketchbook pages, are more lyrical but they, too, have a weird and violent undertone. The German-born artist now lives and works in New York.

The ambiance of Karsten's drawings reminded me of much of the work in "Creative Consumption" at Rosenwald Wolf Gallery. Karsten has a whole room full of work at Vox.

At Gallery Joe he's represented by work that seemed somewhat tamer -- there was no scribble-scrabble on the page and the work was far more delicate both in presentation and in touch. (images left, right, left above are Karsten's drawings. Left is at Gallery Joe)

The work at Vox -- and I don't think it's just the scale of the big heads -- is scary, feeling just this side of wild.

Sated by the void, Bay and I headed out to Gallery Joe for more -- art not void we hoped.



Walking up Arch St. we passed the Bookmobile (image), also known as Mobilivre, parked in front of Space 1026 which reminded me that the airstream hits the road any day now bringing artists' books to the underserved. See their website for schedule of stops.
permanent link  roberta 6:28 AM
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Sunday, May 09, 2004

My First Friday delayed

 


I completely took a powder on First Friday, missed the demo (never met one I didn't like), slept through the shows. Sorree. But the good news is I rallied on Saturday and hit a mix of shows I wanted to see and shows I felt I ought to see.

The number one show I wanted to see was at Gallery Joe, which I will leave for Roberta, because I know she went there Friday and therefore has dibs. But I do want to say that it didn't disappoint.

There's a monster, under my bed
I must add, though, that if I hadn't had a hint of who was showing, I might have been shocked. "Becky," I said to gallerist Becky Kirlin, having looked at all the work out front, "You've gone over to the dark side." She laughed and suggested I take a look at the work in the vault--Josephine Taylor's "Mummy" (top). It kind of made me think of Judith Schaechter's figures (shown right above, Schaechter's "Child Bride") without the baroque backgrounds.

Anyway, this show of fine works on paper takes the medium to the monsters under the bed. I was counting my pennies, dreaming of buying, as I stood there. My choices were a Rob Matthews and a Sabeen Rogers. But I could have considered any of them.

Wall shadows
I also stopped at Nexus for Nick Cassway's "Who Died: Retinal Afterimage Portraits." Cassway is continuing his exploration of portraits of some sort of spiritual essence beneath the skin. The first ones I remember were etched glass, the shadow of the etched-in portraits more material than the etching. This latest permutation brings immateriality to a new level. Each paddle (see installation shot) is a negative (white-on-black portrait) of a dearly departed we all experienced at some level, from Bob Hope to Jane Barbe.

Who, you ask, might Jane Barbe be (her portrait bottom paddle). She might be "The Telephone Lady" (each portrait subject is identified in some detail on the back of each paddle), the voice actress who told us telephone customers that "The number you have reached is not in service; please check the number and try your call again," and a number of other disembodied messages, like the date and time and weather. What a great choice for this project! Anyway, she's dead and gone, but if you focus on her portrait on the paddle for about 30 seconds and then look at the white wall, a positive image of her, just like all the others, appears in front of your eyes. Spectral.

Anyway, since I've been in the morbid thoughts zone for the past couple of years, this hit the spot.

Nexus and the angry inch

In the front of Nexus was one of those gimmicky group shows in which the contributors all had to create an object no larger than one cubic inch. I suppose it's to be expected, given Philly Sculptors lilliputian matchbox-sized sculptures back in the fall, but I wasn't feeling kind, my eyes hurt (they are bright red, too boot) and the magnifying glasses had scratches all over the center where they hit the shelf or the wall. Maybe I'm just cranky and getting old and I can't see so well any more, but these tiny works (oh, well, some of them were pretty swell), weren't even identified. I don't know who did what, except for a one-inch ruler matted and framed and signed by Burnell Yow! Thanks, Burnell.

This is not the first time, recently, that Nexus has failed to identify what's up on its walls. What a disservice to itself and its artists. I know it's a coop, and we should be grateful that the art gets shown, but what's the point if we don't know who did it (yes, art is about the artist's ego). So I put up one image that had enough graphic punch to survive my photo skills. I have not a clue who did it. These three were part of a series of seven, one inch for each day of the week.

Upstairs at the Clay Studio, Amy Smith's show, "My Stone Boat," had a stand-out piece, "....a pounding summer rain," the pattern of rain in the sand enlarged and exaggerated to a nearly insect-like web, with a suggestion of bubbles and dirty gray, sticky foam.

Since it's Mother's Day I'm taking the rest of the day off (oh, I'm always taking days off, I admit), but I saw more stuff so I'll be back tomorrow with some views on MFA shows in Old City and more.


permanent link  libby 6:04 PM
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Thanks, mom

 


Courtesy of the front page of today's Washington Post a photo gallery of mom and baby animals in snuggle mode.

This one is my favorite. Note mom's angelic face and closed eyes.

Baby hippos weigh 80 to 100 lbs, by the way, according to the photo details.

Happy day moms and happy day all children everywhere.
permanent link  roberta 10:18 AM
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