artblog

Friday, May 28, 2004

Worlds of wishes

 


Roberta and our buddy Anne Seidman and I rode up to look at "affect," a show a little far afield for us. It's at Ursinus College's Berman Gallery, in Pottstown, which is why we haven't gotten there sooner.

Every week since its opening, we've been talking about going, because of the artists included. Here's the list: Ellen Berkenblit, Joy Feasley, Nancy Lewis, Robin Miller, Ellen Phelan, our buddy Anne, and Amy Sillman.

(That's two Ellens, one man and six women.)

The work was pretty interesting--post-modern without the chilliness (that's the explanation for the name). I wouldn't say it heaved with emotion, just percolated with subdued anxieties, perhaps.

In a way, I can group Berkenblit, Feasley, Lewis, and Sillman for a childlike take on a world of wishes.

Berkenblit's drawings (shown top, "Giraffe With Red Lantern") almost feel like illustrations to some loopy child's storybook, with a woman listening to a mouse on her lap (left) or sprinkling dust on a butterfly. The drawings, clearly narrative, are thoroughly unclear in meaning, but their lyrical shapes, earnestness and what feels like concern come straight from a childlike imagination.

But this is no young kid making these cartoons and drawings (right, "Yellow Arrow"). Her work predates the craze for that kind of work on paper that has become the rage.

There's also a little girl fashion sense in the poses here, and sure enough, if you go to drboudoir.com you can see her fashion designs, a fact gleaned from show curator Andrea Cooper, who used to be at the ICA.

The affect carries me over to Joy Feasley's naked campfire girls who bravely challenge and endure the world as they find it, creating some good, clean living for themselves. The women's slightly awkward nakedness, juxtaposed with settings far from the bedroom, seems to come from a girl's dream of her magic powers.



In "Tree Levitation," a girl in pigtails, underpants and flipflops levitates next to a Christmas tree. The three women in "Future Farmers of America" (shown above) have an intimate conversation over a log, oblivious to their own incomplete nakedness, interrupted by wellies and sandals. ("Love Hippie" shown)

Amy Sillman's "Untitled," a piece of sheetrock leaning against the wall covered with 50 gouache-on-paper drawings (shown, full and detail below), comes straight out of the kids-will-paint-what-they-will-paint school, the freedom of self-expression feeling like its main point. It's not unlike Sillman's paintings (she was in the Whitney this year) in which she throws up multiple styles in the same painting without restraint.

It's a freedom that allows for inconsistency of subject and imagery. While not all the images are great, some of them are pretty interesting. I am reminded of the snake eating the elephant in the "Little Prince," here, the adults mistaking it for a hat. The imagery teeters on the verge of being something recognizable.

But it was the child's bulletin board in a world without art rules that gave this work traction.

Nancy Lewis's "too much," (shown) a wall drawing installation in (and over the edge of)one of the two niches in the gallery, is romantic without the violins, cooled by the abstracted imagery and the subdued pencil and paint colors.

A landscape that's a rollercoaster that suggests minarets with Crusader flags and mountains seems to bring us back into a girl's dream world of yearning tempered by speed. The Chinese landscape is pulled from a vertiginous vertical to a speeding and looping horizontal.

The second niche was filled by Anne Seidman's site-specific "Line Drawing" installation (right), that seemed to take its inspiration from the window inside the niche's side wall. Seidman defines a pink pool of architecturally defined light or shadow pretend-cast by the window.

And she refers to the perspective suggested by the shape of the niche in her drawing, a series of vertical colored-pencil lines that reminded me of the shadows cast by venetian blinds. There's a flicker of light play suggested in the markings, and the color juxtapositions bring to mind Seurat's pointilism, with lines instead of points--all of which brings to my mind a peaceful, naturally lit space.

Ellen Phelan's still lifes (left, "Brown Vase With Roses") and landscapes seemed to belong to a different show, maybe because they seemed so close to traditional still lifes and landscapes. This is an ideal world, but the pieces seemed more about perception than feeling, and lovely though they were to look at, I was unable to find what the others in the show offered, those touchstones where dreamy fantasy and tentative emotions meet.



The paintings and sculptures of Robin Miller, the one guy in the group, however, seemed to have his own take on the dream world of low anxiety--sort of from a man's point of view--architecture.



His four tiny "Babel Towers" (above right) each made from the letters and punctuation marks cut up and stacked, and each from a different English translations of the Tower of Babel story, bespoke the disintegration of language. I started thinking about Political Correctness, and how it has undermined language. Anyway, it's a boy's dream world that's less than pleasing.

Of Miller's tiny paintings, quite abstract, my favorite was "Angels over Berlin" (above left) painted on a map of Berlin, with "Utopia Parkway" (shown right) a second. Again, the dreams are dark. The angels are over Berlin, not Paris. And the glasses don't seem to help in seeing through the fog on Utopia Parkway.

I didn't find that childlike pleasure the women offered, only a world of menace and disintegration.

The show us up only until June 6, so you have a week left to get there.


permanent link  libby 6:04 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Blue skies

 
Hi guys, I'm off to Milwaukee to see family tonight. Back next week. And a great Memorial Day weekend to ye all!
permanent link  roberta 4:17 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Online magazine onslaught

 
I was contacted at PW by Tony Smyrski of the new, Philadelphia online magazine WORK. WORK, run by Smyrski and Melissa Farley, is a flash site but once the program loads (or download the issues to your desktop), you click through what's essentially a group art show on a theme. This month's theme is guns and there's urban, anti-war material aplenty. I hit all the pages and many were grafitti-esque and to my taste. (image top is WORK's cover page, right is art by German artist Thomas Schostok)

Smyrski told me the magazine is moving its offices to Space 1026 at the end of the summer, and in fact, they already have a Space connection, featuring works by Ben Woodward and Dan Murphy in previous issues.



May was WORK's third issue. Next issue debuts June 1 with a theme of travel and connections called "Where are you going, where have you been?" Artists featured in the June issue are Dan Murphy, Melissa Farley, Justin Pekera and artists from Sweden, Portugal and Germany.



WORK joins the hippity hopping online mag community in Philadelphia which also includes Candy Depew's Candy Coated devoted to beauty. Depew's site, which debuted on Valentine's day, in under construction so, for example, there are plans for an online shop but it's not up yet. Meanwhile, the gallery click through is a group art show with local artists, also by theme. (image is painting by Nancy Lewis in the group show "Red" at Candy Coated")

Hinge Online, now celebrating their fourth anniversary (congrats, guys!) is a literary, art and comics zine with ties to Well Fed Artists Gallery on Third St.

Drexel's online journal is of a more studious, academic nature. right now I see they have an interview with Bell Hooks and with artblog contributor and pal, poet and photographer, Ditta Baron Hoeber.



B INFORMED is a hip hop themed, two-issues old magazine with ties to Rennie Harris's Pure Movement dance troupe. At least it used to have those ties. An hour ago, their site had a big Rennie Harris presence and now, such is publishing on the web, I can't find it. Anyway, go to Harris's site for info on their Illadelph Legends festival.

B INFORMED's site, by the way, is decked out in weeny, grey hard to read type which tells me it's for the 20-somethings of the world. (image is Rennie Harris dancing)



Finally, for a fashion and young face magazine, Philth is the ticket. It's young and photo-based, what else can I say. (image is Philth cover from issue one)

That's all I know. Maybe somebody knows of other online zines in the Philly ether they'd like to pony up and tell us about.
permanent link  roberta 7:31 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Cindy Sherman, shape shifter

 
Very nice Roberta Smith article in the NY Times this morning about two new Cindy Sherman exhibits, one of which has the artist appearing in clown dress. Smith doesn't love the clowns but gives them some credit. (Sherman, even though not a painter, is a colorist, says Smith.)

By the way, I took a cue from Modern Art Notes blog guy Tyler Green and signed up to read the Times online as member: lrrfartblog, password: artblog. Feel free to use it.




permanent link  roberta 7:06 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Thursday, May 27, 2004

Summer of shovel love

 
Libby and I don't often coordinate our trips out to see art, nor do we divvy up the territory in any carefully orchestrated way, deciding who writes about what.

Sometimes that results in the two of us running around unknowingly following each other's footsteps in and out of galleries. We only find out about this when the gallerist mentions that the other was just in. This may seem inefficient or even silly but we just laugh and keep on working.

Last week I hit Highwire Gallery's Shovel Show in Libby's wake. (image is Highwire's sign, embellished by Abe Rothblatt's tape drawing)

Libby told you about the Shovel show in her great post and I'll not be redundant here, only mention I loved the show, too.



It was great to see Brian Wagner's collection of sticks in the light of day once more. Wagner, who collects used broom and mop and shovel handles then occasionally hauls them out and stacks them -- freely without armature or fasteners -- in big haystack-like arrangements that tower in the air and miraculously don't fall down, is one of Philadelphia's many undersung art heroes. See pictures of the Highwire install on Wagner's page on Highwire's website.



Wagner's stack of 950 sticks -- yellow as the summer sun -- is culled from a greater assortment of some 5,000 the artist owns. I saw the 5,000-stick stack in a West Philadelphia trolley barn a few years back (1999 I think) and it was a wonder.

I wrote a story about Wagner, a Drexel prof, and his sticks for PW but unfortunately the paper's online archives don't go back that far so I can't link it. Several videographers, including Highwire's John Van Zandt, have videotaped Wagner's sticks going up -- usually a group activity requiring ladders and scaffolding. Van Zandt's was playing on a video monitor in Highwire.

I have a copy of David Miller's short video "5,000 Sticks," which I played this morning for a stroll down memory lane. The image above is my photo of the last shot in Miller's piece -- it's the completed stack in the West Philly shed. You can't see it clearly but this thing had a tornado-like torque, it's top seeming to spiral up and out for liftoff.



Meanwhile, Abe Rothblatt's tape installation in long, bunker-like, fluorescent-lit hallway outside Highwire, which I guess is part of the Shovel show, is such a feel good piece it took me right back to my hippie summer of love days. (image left and right are details)



The free-form, multi-color tape drawing, grafitti-like but incredibly delicate of touch, is just enough anointment of the ugly space to make you forget the prison-like ambiance. I hope the gallery decides to keep the piece up for a while. It's truly a civic improvement.



Speaking of prisons and civic improvements, Rothblatt famously installed a wonderful tape piece many years ago in the jury waiting room at Philadelphia City Hall. Read more about the artist at his page on Highwire's website.

He was on a jury and had some down time, I guess.

I'm very happy that the artist is still in touch with his tape. (jury room image by joe mikuliak.)
permanent link  roberta 7:58 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Doing time

 



Eastern State Penitentiary is a monster of a place with damp, crumbling walls and depressing information about human folly and lives wasted. By time I finished looking at the six art installations there, I felt as uplifted as I felt depressed.

The art work is excellent and thoughtful; and the space is as tame as it has ever been, cleaner, less dangerous (the hardhats were eliminated a year ago), but still imposing, and still a monument to wrong-headedness.

The art work, on the other hand, needs to take a different tack, speak to the human condition. Most of the artists spoke to the edurance of the human spirit in the face of all odds.

Music for the souls

Timothy Nohe's "142 Ways to Mark Time" was outstanding, a musical piece made up of recordings of rhythmic noises performed on parts of the prison--its rusting metal gates, wooden benches, fallen plaster, broken glass, locks. The recorded cadences are located in different cells, and each one is randomly timed in relationship to the other cadences.

The randomness has the influence of John Cage, but the music was accessible, moody and evocative as its taps and scrapes and scratchings echoed through Cellblock 10 and its cathedral-like spaces.

Nohe, a professor of visual arts at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, imagined the experiences of the earliest prisoners at Eastern State, who were hooded when they were moved out of their cells. He said he imagined them counting on the regularity of sounds around them to make sense of what was going on and to keep a grip on time.

Nohe's piece also had a visual component, a kind of documentation via photographs of the performances and "each sonic environment." The photos were printed on orchestral score paper and bound in folios resting on old-fashioned wooden music stands positioned at each end of the cellblock.

The visuals seemed overwhelmed by the brute space, but I loved the idea of a music folio, translating the sound sources and into another dimension. But it was the soundthat held the cathedral-like space.

Of cats and men

Linda Brenner's "The Ghost Cats"--there are 39 of them dispersed through the prison--walk, sun and groom among the ruins. The graceful white statues commemorate the cat colony that inhabited the prison for 28 years and the man who cared for them. Dan McCloud came to the prison three times a week to feed them.

The cats were no so different from the imprisoned humans, who depended on their guards to keep them alive. The creatures made a cat life for themselves within the prison walls, becoming an extended cat family, just as the prisoners found ways to connect with one another and create some sort of way to endure.

As for McCloud, he's on the audiotour in an old interview, talking about his own need to endure and the role of the cats in keeping him alive: "I'm afraid to stop now [feeding the cats] because I figure the Guy Upstairs might not need me no more."

The cats, cast in hydrocal, were designed to last as long as the show show needs them, through November. The real cats are long gone, having died out eventually, not from lack of food but because of neutering and speying.

The kitties, whose thickish legs remind me of Bast, the Egyptian cat god, are nice surprises, popping up in unexpected places.

View from the bottom of the bowl

A poetic inverted sundial, "midway of another day," came from Michael Grothusen, who created a bowl that holds the shadow of its own rim as the sun moves across the sky, slowly, each day. Grothusen will mark the arcs cast at various times and dates throughout the summer. Some are already marked.

Grothusen's bowl didn't look like it was part of the detritus of the prison--it was too perfect and shiny and silvery. It reminded me of a park decoration, a fountain of some kind. But the interior focus and suggestion of a perimeter too high to look beyond seemed like the interior focus of the cells themselves.

And the shadow marking time was a reminder of the small glimpse of the sky in each cell, and how that might have kept the prisoners connected to time, weather, the universe.

Prison of the young mind

Nick Cassway (see my post on his piece at Nexus) made his own death row, a kind of shooting gallery of portraits of approximately half those on death row today who were sentenced as juveniles. The portraits were created by rustproofing some areas on 24" x 36" steel plates. Time and the weather did the rest.

Cassway is a painter of souls, and this piece is no exception, the young faces surviving for now, yet taking a beating, in their decaying surroundings. The long time prognosis for the prisoners is even worse than for the rusting metal. This piece was more didactic and less complex than some of Cassway's meditations on materiality and lack thereof.

The face behind the number

"Cellblock Nine," by Ianthe Jackson, was inspired by the ex-cons she taught. She showed nine ghostly, animated portraits of different psychological states projected onto the floor. Her goal, she said was to recognize the complexity of them as individuals. The prisoner portraits seem to disappear into the floor on which they are projected. The jerky animation seemed inconsistent with the drawing and undercut the serious point being made.

Prison chapel

The only piece that seemed less about the people imprisoned and more about decay of the once mighty fortress-like space was offered by brothers Matthew & Jonathan Stemler. "Juxtaposition" creates a sort of cloud layer suspended like a dropped ceiling in one of the cells. The low layer, which spoke of prison life's limits and blocked views, was created from lily-pad shaped pieces of suspended fallen plaster. The observation seat gave a nice escape from the dropped ceiling, and added to the sense of a small chapel created by the light streaming in.

I also loved the two hills of detritus on the floor, although I was puzzled by seeing the plywood undersupport, which offered too sharp an angle for the rocks to rest without slipping. On the other hand, I thought, well, they look like coffins under the rocks. How appropriate.

I want to add that the audiotour, with the artists speaking about their own pieces, gave you control over where you wandered in which order and what you listened to. It was a plus.
permanent link  libby 1:49 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Sand castles and the oops factor

 
Friday night Stella and I went to Spector for the opening of Oliver Vernon and C.W.Wells's shows. Vernon, who had been up all night building a sand castle in a sandbox (left) Spector had built for the occasion, didn't look sleep deprived or even hot in the warm gallery.

Not even when a gallery-goer accidently knocked into the castle and gave it a boo boo did the artist bat an eye.

It's not as bad as it could have been, he said to the mortified guest who had bashed it.



Then, parlaying lemons into lemonade, Vernon suggested to the guest, a bookstore owner, that he had his eye on a certain book at the bookstore, and the bookstore owner, relieved of his guilt, said he'd be happy to oblige. (image is Vernon shoring up the castle)

Vernon's a yoga-Zen guy, which may account for some of that unflappability. His works on the walls, in addition to the sand castle, included mandala-like hybrids that draw their inspiration from real mandalas as well as from the street. The artist told me he used to be a grafitti tagger -- at age 12. But that he'd long since traded in his spray can for the paintbrush and the studio.

Nowadays he is still putting paint directly on walls in murals for interiors of clubs, restaurants and private residences.



He told me he loves to work huge scale. And one work in the show, on unstretched canvas, gives a glimpse of how well his stuff works large. With its big motifs and tiny, interlocking layers of detail, the works have a lot to offer.

One work with a top layer of creamy white in a baroque shape (image above) reminded me of white-out king,Phil Frost's work.



Spector's back gallery was full of local ceramic artist C.W. Wells' new figures and paintings.

Wells' small glazed stoneware figurines are like a tribe of naughty kids. Some of them have large almond-shaped eye sockets with no discernible eyeballs in them, giving them an alienish charm.

Stella liked her group of oil paintings on wood which had a kind of evil twin of Little Lulu thing going on. (image above right is of Wells' paintings)



In the people department, the opening was not as crowded as some at Spector, but the gallerist told me many people said they would come by after the Manna auction across town.

While we were there, Tin Man Alley's Jonathan Levine was looking. (shown is Levine and gallerist Shelley Spector) I asked him how the Art Philadelphia expo at the Convention Center was and he pulled two thumbs down.

Apparently, there was not enough pre-show advertising and publicity and it was seriously under-attended. Exhibitors who came in from out of town at great expense were fomenting revolution, he said.



For Levine, it was a good opportunity to meet some Philadelphia gallery owners, and he was sanguine about the whole thing.

Levine was accompanied by Jeff Soto whose two-person show of new work opened at Tin Man on Saturday. (The other artist is Mitch O'Connell) Read my PW sketch last week for more on Soto's show. (image is Soto and Levine)

Rebecca Westcott, (shown below) whose solo show of portrait paintings and other work opens at Spector next fall, also looked cool in the warm night air.



Like all painters these days, Westcott's getting itchy for the Pew fellowships announcement, sometime in early June. Both Westcott and husband Jim Houser, who was a finalist last time, applied this year for the $50,000 grant.

Westcott told me she and Houser will be in Los Angeles in early June which should take their minds off their anxiety.

Houser, along with Andrew Jeffrey Wright and Ben Woodward, all Spector artists (and Space 1026ers), will be installing a show at Shephard Fairey's gallery. The three used to work for Fairey (of Obey the Giant fame) when they lived in Providence and have kept up the connection.


permanent link  roberta 7:49 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Spacers invade the midwest

 

Space 237 in Toledo wrote to alert us that Space 1026ers Max Lawrence, Jim Houser, Becky Westcott, Adam Wallacavage, Ben Woodward, Thom Lessner and others are making a big splash in their gallery.

According to Morgan Lawrence (not sure if he's related to Max):

700 people showed up to see the work. It was gratifying to see the midwest get cool with the urbanites. Nice reviews from the local papers. (you can read the reviews at 237's website.) The artists came up from their group shows (at Mockbee and Publico) in Cincinnati that were in conjunction with the Cincinnatti Art Center's "Beautiful Losers." (more about the Cincinnati shows here)

permanent link  roberta 7:11 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Monday, May 24, 2004

Digging it

 

The exuberant Shovel Show at Highwire Gallery is a welcome jumble of art related to shovels, curated by Highwire guy Jeff Thomas.

Sculpture rules

Sculpture dominated, not so surprising for a show about a ubiquitous tool. Four large sculptures of shovels dominated the big space, starting with Jeff Thomas' man-of-the-earth "Fantasy Shovels" (top). Their wiggly tree-branch handles (and sometimes work ends), sometimes hung with chains and other bulky hardware, went in all kinds of untamed directions.



Brian Wagner's yellow version of his sticks-meet-gravity sculpture, stretches the shovel idea to tools with long handles. Suddenly, pushing the dirt with a mop or a broom seems not that different from shoveling.





The merger of glass and steel in Larry Livolsi's "Missile Tip Rumba" series looked tempting to touch, the glass shafts as individual and relaxed as the metal shovel tips were prickly and industrial.



The anti-plastic




The antithesis of industrial was Stephanie Lincoln's cheerful, simple beach toy, a giant sand shovel made in paper mache, the anti-plastic. While not profound, it had a joyousness that gave it ur-sand-shovel status. (And it was parked outside Highwire's new video screening room, showing "Shovel Joy" by Jennifer Brinton Robkin. I watched one of the three videos, a child playing in the sand for what seemed like forever, until I lost patience and didn't see the others. The child's patience was endless.)

Smaller sculptures
Those were the big four, but the room was also punctuated with lots of little shovels as well. Allen Ritzman's charming "Fairy Shovels" (shown) and John Massey's "Aberrant Evolution" were tableware scale. Massey's work, the rougher of the two, showed a progression through spoons to a small pitchfork to a regular fork, etc.--all the perfect way to shovel down food. Although I've been known to call spatula's shovels, and people seem to talk about shoveling down food, this little progression in implements brought the concept to another level and amused at the same time.

Sculpture meets 2-D
The flat, iconic shovel in the middle of Lydia Hunn's "Shit/Snow/Sand" was a nice fit with the word-punctuated grid of grueling shoveling chores. I appreciated how the chores were neatly boxed off, like my shoveling jobs never manage to be.

Also walking the 2-D/3-D line was Floss Barber's "Karma," a mix of painting and glass shovels from small to large, but my favorite bit of the installation was the Buddhas rowing with shovel oars in the striped-glass shovel boats, wifty enough to delight and mystify (detail shown).

Paint and photos
Talking of wifty, and moving into full-blown 2-D, Katie Bidlingmaier's "St. George and the Dragon" was pre-Raphaelite, buff, and just plain funny. I can just picture Wonder Woman in a similar pose. To paint like this at this point in time and take yourself seriously doesn't work. But add a touch of arch and a soupcon of the ridiculous and it flies. I'm not sure why St. George is sporting a shovel, but I'm glad, because otherwise he wouldn't have made it into this show.

The other 2-D work that worked its way into my heart were a series of sepia-tone photographs by Mitru Costea mostly of shovels abandoned and forlorn, like stand-ins for people. Their sepia coloring, with a suspicious touch of yellow (to look contemporary?), seemed to go with the theme of things once used, now forgotten, now reconstituted.

And speaking of photos, Midge Valdez' ink jet photo ("untitled" shown)was also a sad affair, although with a bit of humor, the hay sticking out through the crack in the tin can. The image was full of little byways and passages for plenty of looking.

Space for rent
I'd like to mention a couple of the paintings in the smaller room, which is, by the way, a 640-square-foot space for rent, said Highwire's Van Zandt, who also wanted to make sure I and you got the point that the gallery has a nice video screening space--so if you're a video artist, consider it.

"Working Class Heroes" (shown) and "A Ditch Digger's Work Gets Him Down" both by Bill Mayes, sort of walk the line between advertising (have we all seen too many iPod silhouettes?) and something to say, but they are fun to look at. I also liked the titles.

And Kathleen Wert's "Dirt Series" (shown, "Dirt Series: Sandstone") in a familiar, hard-edge style got a little sexiness added in that lifted it above.

And then, on the way out (or the way in), Abe Rothblatt's shovel on the hallway wall, painted like an adult pretending he's a kid, and labeled "A Cross Between a Barnet Newman Painting and a Shovel" gave the show it's farewell kick.

Roberta said she like the whole Rothblatt installation in the hallway, and she might weigh in later on it.
permanent link  libby 4:12 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

War and art, warriors and artists

 
Franklin Einspruch's got a great, moving dialog (and interior Hamlet-esque monolog) on his site this morning. It's about an encounter with an army nurse who wandered into his studio for a visit.

And it's a must read. (image is Einspruch's digital art logo at his site, artblog.net)
permanent link  roberta 10:12 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Mutter Nothings

 
The second half of our Tuesday double-bill of openings took place at the Mutter Museum, the historical collection of the American College of Physicians with medical specimens related to diseases and aberrations of the body.

The show is "9 Mutter XX04," part of the Big Nothing festival and it's got a world-class lineup of art stars including Karen Kilimnik, Jesse Olanday, Olaf Westphalen and Thomas Zummer.




The Mutter, if you haven't been, is a destination in and of itself, its skeletons (conjoined twins, a giant), collection of skulls, wax mock-ups of gangrenous body parts, disease samples in jars and more are memorable to say the least. (image is Zummer's "Drawing of a Photograph of a Misregistered 16 mm Frame of an Edison paper Print, circa 1906," and notice the collection of skulls reflected in the piece's glass)



Anyway, so you've got these tremendously gripping human disease samples in ceiling to floor glass cases on two floors. Where are you going to put the art and how will it stand up in this environment?

Those were two scientific questions Libby and I were interested in as we looked around. (image above is Kilimnik's "Spring Zephyr" and "Summer Zephyr," dreamy and candy-like sky paintings. Sorry about the yellowness, my bad.)



The answer to where was to place the art quietly here and there -- on the few bare walls and sprinkled around inside the glass cases. It turned the exhibit into a kind of treasure hunt. Luckily there's a map. (image is Francois Bucher's installation in the case with the plaster casts of Cheng and Eng, the original Siamese twins)

Interestingly, the whole thing puts the Mutter collection in an art context, which, if you think of the Chapmans aberrant body sculptures and Damien Hirst's formaldahyde shark tanks, is not a bad call. Needless to say, the art was washed in the Mutter's atmospherics.



And for the most part, the art stood up to the collection, commenting on it or commenting on other unusual phenomena with existential overtones. Westphalen's large untitled cartoon, placed in a spot so it looked like a bus shelter advert, is a great example of dark humor in a disease context. You can't read the image but it's of a doctor and patient in an examining room. (image above)

Doctor says: Instead of a prescription, I'll write you a check for 5 million dollars.

Patient says: Great! I feel better already. Maybe poverty is a disease after all.

I did think Jesse Olanday's silkscreen poster placed in the case near the skeleton of the fetal conjoined twins felt transgressive. (shown, Olanday's "Allison's Ode to Nothing")

There's a sacred feel to this place -- all the bones and real body parts turn it into a graveyard exposed. And Olanday's piece had a rock poster sexiness and seeming irrelevence to its surroundings that was jarring.

Because the work's interwoven with the collection, it's easy to get confused about which is which. And with all the reflective glass surfaces, the art and collection were married anyway with reflections of one on the other all over the installation.



One piece that stood out and stood alone was Ulrike Mueller's audio installation (shown) "One of Us (Freakish Moments)" in which you hear a woman, in German-inflected English, tell graphic stories of bodies and minds in extremis. Heavy with detail and, if memory serves, told in "you are there" first person accounts, the piece is a stomach churner. It's impossible to miss because of its red velvet drape.

I actually mistook one of the Mutter's own objects (a crocheted doily made by a blind woman, not shown) for a contemporary artwork at one point, which was funny and not a little freaky to me.



Peter Lasch's "Naturalizations: The Mechanism of Facial Expression," perhaps the weakest entry, was a science museum piece about facial characteristics. The three-part piece included a slide show (shown) projected near the floor for some reason; a group of photocopies of faces you could handle and plexiglas boards with holes for eyes and mouth and with mirrored surfaces to obscure part of the face. (shown, Libby posing with one of the glass/mirror boards) The exercise seemed silly and obvious.



Basically, the show's pretty good and its sense of exploration and dark humor is appropriate to the institution. I am trying to imagine this show in a different location and can't quite. Somehow, a white box with all this work might be a bust.

Now for some gossip. Libby and I saw many familiar faces, some of whom trickled over from the Art Alliance opening. Artist Karen Kilimnick was there, along with her mother. We caught up with PAFA curator Alex Baker who told us about his new curatorial effort at DUMBO and about his recent surfing vacation at Cape May. Mark Shetabi was there, excited to be in the Mutter again (apparently he made a bunch of drawings there when he was a student.) Sarah Roche was there, sitting outside waiting for Mark, confessing she wasn't in a Mutter mood.



Rob Matthews and Tracy popped in after his Art Alliance opening. Slought's Aaron Levy and the Cultural Alliance's John McInerney were caucusing about something or maybe it was nothing.

We also saw Paul Swenbeck and heard that PEI honcho Paula Marincola was there although we didn't spot her. We chatted briefly with Eileen Neff who was having fun reading the 100-word sentence on a wall card for one of Thomas Zummer's works. And Richard Torchia was outside the place when we were leaving, maybe with his bike, who remembers.

Finally, we introduced ourselves to Mutter Director, Gretchen Worden, who was happy to have her institution included in the Nothingness. She was decked out in basic art black and around her neck was a necklace that turned her into a walking specimen case. The necklace, a framed array of mouse bones set in a spiral configuration, was delicate, beautiful, and just the right amount of weird.



permanent link  roberta 6:27 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Sunday, May 23, 2004

Dumbest Man at the Art Alliance

 
Libby and I went to two openings in the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood last Tuesday and ran into a bunch of folks also double art dipping on the muggy night. Here's a peek at the Art Alliance show, a four exhibit lollapalooza onsite with a fifth in its satellite space.

We didn't make it to the satellite for Julie Cardillo's paintings and we skirted the big show of historical photographs by Alfred Stiglitz and others, "Camera Work," curated by Photo Review's Stephen Perloff. We'll get to those later. What we devoured with gusto were new drawings by Rob Matthews, a video installation by Matthew Suib and dioramas by Ahmed Salvador.

Rob Matthews dreams of flyovers

Artblog fave Rob Matthews (who's also got work at Gallery Joe til June 26)is debuting a new body of work, called "The Dumbest Man." (more about the Gallery Joe show in my previous post and at the Weekly.)

Made in little over a year (Dec. 2003-April 2004), the finely-detailed and dreamy pencil drawings are rooted in the artist's memory of place. (top image is "Dumbest Man over Philadelphia") Matthews says the work, a break from his other, darker themed works (sleepwalkers and dead bodies in Hitchcockian interiors) was triggered by thoughts about Don Quixote, Steve Fossett and "decorated sheds." Hmmm. Translating, that would be dreaming impossible dreams (Don Q), flying around the world in a hot air balloon (Fossett) and ...bad taste (a la "Learning from Las Vegas")?



What's depicted are cityscapes from around the country, many belonging to places the artist has ties to, like Wilson, NC, where he was born and Cooksville, TN where his wife Tracy is from. These are not your typical picture-postcard images. They zero in on oddball constructions like the squat, unlovely Sun Sphere in Knoxville, TN, a World's Fair relic, or the fiberglass mascots attached to buildings (Big Boy...the cow-pig atop a building at Snyder and Delaware in Philadelphia.) (image above is "Dumbest Man over Knoxville")

Each work includes one tiny, drip-like aberration in it. You might think it's an erasure mark except that each time it's exactly the same -- a petite emanation floating in the sky. The ghost of Steve Fossett in his hot air balloon? The artist? The viewer? The critic? God?



The drawings, like the sombnambulist fantasies (image left is "Sleepwalk Philadelphia" and below is one from the series he did on spontaneous human combustion) are filled with a dense, velvety atmosphere that's completely unnatural but totally believable.

Once you've adjusted to the haze, the focus comes into snap and you see the buildings and the scenes for what they are -- forlorn places whose odd, ugly contemporary architecture (often decorated with fiberglass animals) and plug ugly streetscapes exist everywhere.



Somebody probably thought the idea sounded good (sure, let's put those animals on top of the butcher shop's entryway; and sure, let's make a big tower to commemorate the World's Fair.) But for whatever reason, these projects fell short of the dreamers' visions.

Instead, there's something wrong about each and every one. The pig/cow (pog?) over the shop at Delaware and Snyder in "Dumbest Man over Philadelphia" is meant to be cute. It's just weird. The mirrored golf ball on a fat stick in "Dumbest Man over Knoxville #3" (the World's Fair "Sun Sphere") is squat and looks like a big glitzy microphone. And, as Matthews told us at the opening, the Sphere was supposed to tower over the landscape but it was built in a kind of gulley where just about everything towers over it.

The drawings are a treat and a nice complement to the Gallery Joe work. The guy's got stretch as they say.


Matthew Suib's dumb Hollywood

Another artblog fave Matthew Suib's been appropriating imagery in his video work for quite some time. Here in a three-piece, multi channel installation he's brought together some of Hollywood's finest source material (biblical epics, westerns and Hitchcock) and edited them all to put his own spin on things.



"Cocked," (image left) a western that's a high noon stare-down with a punchline, has every big, whiskery actor who's ever spat tobacco or tread the old west for Hollywood -- Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, Henry Fonda, to name a couple -- caught in those edgy closeups that directors put in right before all hell breaks loose on Main St.

Paced like a movie, "Cocked's" denoument at the end of ten minutes is a great, pacifist, non-Hollywood ending.

One of two features projected large and double-sided on translucent material hung in the middle of the gallery,(The other is "Heston"), the viewing's fine from either side and so are the plush benches.



"Birds" circle the center projection in three small monitors placed high on the walls. Excerpted from Hitchcock's "The Birds," the flyers flock and part for solitary winged adventures and in one nicely-timed move, they fly up together just as a bird flies up in one of the "Cocked" sequences.

"Heston" (image above) which seems to borrow from "The Ten Commandments" slows down the action, deletes the words, and distills a number of images down to heavy breathing, stolen glances and some wonderful sound effects. While it reminded me of Bill Viola's slo-mo "The Greeting" (shown at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in 1995) which turned an old master painting by into an action sequence, "Heston" is doing something quite other -- poking fun while paying homage and also turning Hollywood pictures into paintings with sound.



Suib's work keeps getting better and better, which is not to knock the earlier stuff like
his "Make No Mistake" (shown above) which deletes the words from Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech and leaves the smirks. It's a riveting work that states its politics squarely. I also love the 1998 "The Shadow People," an altered home movie, shown at the PMA's Video Gallery summer, 2002. That piece, which takes a crisp film-to-video clip to the point of disintegration, is the best metaphorical nuclear family meltdown I've ever seen.

I convened a video discussion group in 2002 and Suib was among the brainy and articulate film and video makers who attended. Here's my two-part PW article, if you want to dip in to some of the nuts and bolts of the trade.

Ahmed Salvador's Romantic hallucinations



Ahmed Salvador's brand new work is sculptural instead of photographs, which was a surprise. (shown is detail from the new work, "Sidelong Glances") What's consistent between the artist's work in the two media is the subject matter -- the falseness of the material world and a kind of Romantic longing for beauty. Here, the new work, called "Sidelong Glance," is a group of miniature landscape dioramas in long, thin boxes placed high on the wall (some so high you must view their contents from across the gallery). They have a kind of Antarctic appeal -- white expanses that look like snow masses at the ends of the earth, some of them accompanied by lights that suggest the aurora borealis. The fact that these scenes come to you through slit-like openings makes them feel as if the viewer is looking through a peephole or perhaps a periscope at some uncharted territory.

There's a poignance here and a longing for some better world that is found in a lot of work by young artists. I believe it's massaging something very deep and expressing fears about the future we all have.

You may remember Salvador's photographs from his Fleisher Challenge exhibit in 2002. (Here's my blurb about it in PW.) The photos, too, were fantasies. What looked like planets or stars in voids of space were really doctored closeups of doorknobs or drawer knobs. They were funny in a way and yet had the same kind of woe is me the world's full of falseness to them that I found sad and sweet.


On a final note, the opening was well attended, and even the babies turned out. Salvador and Kelley Roberts had their baby girl in tow as did John Murphy and his wife Justine. At one point, the four-some made a kind of ad hoc play group on the floor under the dioramas. It made it kind of homey.
permanent link  roberta 10:23 AM
Comments? Let us know.