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Saturday, June 05, 2004

Materials

 


Before I embark on our First Friday Odyssey (we went to about 2,000 shows, it seemed) I want to get in a couple of shows I saw at Schmidt/Dean.

Michael Kessler's acrylics on panel were a surprise, even though I had seen the card image. It just couldn't capture what was going on, on the panels--the worn away layers of paint suggesting erosion and landscape and shape, the pencil gestures, the subtleties that transform these seemingly (at first blush) straight-edged floor plans or architectural spaces into something beautiful and interesting.



Kessler uses the weather to erode his paintings which have and a sort of view-from-the-airplane quality that gets more sensuous the closer you get. A winner of the Prix de Rome, Kessler has a piece at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His work is worth a visit.




The other artist showing, Elisabeth Nickles, has switched from metal to glass following a residency at Seattle's Pilchuck Glass School (see Roberta's post).

She mounts her cast glass--mostly animal shapes, onto metal stands that have an architectural presence that make me think of Janus door posts. No surprise then that her influence is partly Roman glass, and some of the animals have a sacrificial references, such as libation cups.


Glass' translucence is always a pleasure, and the roughness in some of Nickles' pieces rescues them from preciousness. I suspect Nickles is aware of the need to roughen the affect because of her choices of unpainted plywood or a concrete slab for some of her supports (left, "Tree Dream," on a thick concrete slab with a wonderful, rough, scalloped edge).


Probably because of the process, the material, and the ancient references, I am reminded of work by Philadelphia glass artist Lucartha Kohler, whose work seems a little more elemental (right, "Blue Bowl").

I also caught the tail end of Larry Spaid's work over at Snyderman. This body of work, according to his artist's statement, was influenced by Asian fabric coloring techniques and symbolism.

I enjoyed the fabric-y feel of so many of the pieces, and I enjoyed the way the symbols floated in space in front of the "fabric" backdrops. But some of my favorite pieces seemed to be more about the paint and the joys of mark-making, with energized fields of marks in front of a deep space.

permanent link  libby 4:56 PM
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And the winners are...

 
Yesterday the Pew Fellowships announced what tout Philadelphia has been awaiting, the names of the 12 winners of the coveted $50,000 awards to artists for 2004. This year's categories are folk and traditional arts, painting and scriptworks.

Here's the names and congratulations to all. And keep on trying, all you artists. Next time the force may be with YOU.

Folk and Traditional
Robert Crowder
Mufulu Kingambo Gilonda
Hipolito "Tito" Rubio
Losang Samten
Wu Peter Tang

Painting
Francis G. Di Fronzo
Rebecca Rutstein
Jackie Tileston
Rebecca Westcott
Justin Witte

Scriptworks
Tanya E. Hamilton
Nicholas Wardigo
permanent link  roberta 8:56 AM
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Friday, June 04, 2004

Murals in Milwaukee

 
Philadelphia's got some 2,000 murals but it's not the only town with wall painters. My long-time friend, Kitty Thompson, is a mural painter in a town, Milwaukee, with few murals. Thompson, who teaches at Milwaukee Institute for Art and Design (MIAD), is also an illustrator and sidewalk chalk artist. Right now, she's working on walls at the new Urban Ecology Center, (kind of like the Schuylkill Valley Nature Center in Philadelphia). The Ecology Center operated for years out of two trailers in nearby Riverside park but now after a capital campaign, they're moving to a new -- still under construction -- state of the art teaching center.

Thompson's murals will adorn the walls and ceiling of a children's slide (sliding board) area. (image top is Thompson in front of her still in process mural in the slide area). She's also working on seven, six-foot panels for a classroom at the center. The panels will depict the habitat at different times of year and will include anatomically-correct depictions of birds and animals that can be used for teaching.



Thompson's work has always had a joyous quality that comes from her upbeat spirit and her embrace of people, animals, and what life throws at you. What I've seen of the murals tells me that they will carry on that spirit of exuberance and positivism. (image is one of the panels in Thompson's house)

While the mural for the sliding board is going up right on site, Thompson's been working on the large, six-foot teaching panels in her house. In fact, they've taken over the first floor which at the moment has little furniture in it.

She told me that for the teaching panels, she's using a combination of acrylic paint for the background and oil paint for the animals and birds in their anatomical exactitude.

There's always been an anthropomorphic quality to Thompson's animals and here is no exception. The animals welcome you like they're your neighbors. Guess they are.



Milwaukee is a sprawling place and as we drove from the Ecology Center to Thompson's house then out for coffee I got my camera out to take one of my favorite types of pictures, person in car. There's something about the small, pod-like car and the giant person inside that interests me. Also the lighting is off somehow, which makes it more dramatic. I've got a collection. Anyway, I snapped a picture of my friend driving her truck.

Then she told me about a friend of hers, Mike Fredrickson, a painter with a similar obsession. Fredrickson makes paintings of people driving cars. (I'm sure he paints other things, too, but he does indeed paint people driving cars). We stopped at the Uptowner bar in Riverwest (the Old City of Milwaukee) to check out three of his diptych paintings installed high on the walls. (shown is one)

Here's my question, is the people in cars obsession a Milwaukee thing or what?
permanent link  roberta 1:39 PM
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Thursday, June 03, 2004

Spiritual journeys, part 2

 


Turns out a lot of folks are on spiritual journeys all the time, and if you happen upon their path at the right moment, you can catch a glimpse of what they're mulling over.

So I happened to be in my synagogue, where you might expect some spirituality. In what passes for Society Hill Synagogue's art gallery (it's a wide anteroom a little short on adequate lighting, but it has had several nice shows) I stopped in front of some swell mandalas with salutes to Judaism (Stars of David, Trees of Life, Hebrew letters) and peace (the Hamsa hand, shown below) by artist Burnell Yow!.

At only 10" x 10" framed (unframed maybe 7" x 7"), the computer-printed mandalas, from Yow!'s "Spirituality" series, had a gem-like quality, all facets and color and complex backgrounds to get lost in.


I asked Yow! about how he made them, and he said the backgrounds were patterns from leaves and other natural materials that he scanned in and then played with.

He also had other leaf-based prints in the little show. As far as I'm concerned, nature's infinite variety is one of the few things that elicit spiritual feelings in me, so I was delighted by the info.

(By the way, if you're wondering about the concept of Jewish mandalas and meditation, there apparently are such things.)


Yow! also had some "Altar Boxes," salutes to people who influenced him, each including a little mirror so the viewer becomes part of the piece. He also had a couple of swell, almost austere portraits including one of his wife Betsy (shown, "Betsy in Hat"), along with other digital prints. One of them, "DA-7," (below right) looked like a fabric collage, with great texture and color.

A Yow! is a Yow! is a Yow!


I couldn't resist asking Yow! about his name. Turns out, his real name is Yow--without the exclamation point--a venerable Anglo-Saxon name meaning something like bend in the river. But then he found that yow was in the dictionary as an exclamation of pain. So he employed his artist's prerogative and added the exclamation point to his name. Yow!


permanent link  libby 8:49 PM
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clouds, rain and moon over Philadelphia

 
Of course it doesn't have to be raining where YOU are to cause a flight delay. Milwaukee was clear and beautiful and my flight back to Philadelphia couldn't take off for almost two hours due to thunderstorms "enroute."

I had a good book, Phillip Roth's "The Human Stain," (I highly recommend...Libby read it, liked it and loaned it to me so that makes two thumbs up). So I read and read. Once in the air at last, I was so happy I snapped some photos. I'm like that. It doesn't take much.



Up top is Milwaukee and Lake Michigan looking pretty elegant in spite of the fact that unprecedented rains caused some sanitary sewer overloads. But you don't want to know about that.

We were above clouds the whole way between the midwest and Philadelphia. Sometimes the almost setting sun was so low it was under the clouds as here.



Then we got to Philadelphia and wouldn't you know, a nice big yellow moon hung in the sky, not a cloud to obscure it.

I got a cab to come home and it started raining. Such was the night.

I saw a little art in Milwaukee and I'll get to that shortly.
permanent link  roberta 8:21 PM
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Wednesday, June 02, 2004

Spiritual journeys

 


I wanted to get to the Schuylkill Valley Nature Center before the summer heat became unbearable, so I dashed there yesterday between a couple of errands. But as soon as I hit the place, the gravel road forced me to slow down to 15 miles per hour.

Indoors

Still rushing, I took a look at SVNC artist-in-residence Knox Cummin's three pieces inside the main building, called "The Dearly Departed Suite."

These indoor pieces are only up until the 7th, but the outside pieces will remain at least through the summer.

My favorite in the group was "Resting With Guardians" (left), but all three seemed about spirits departing this life, the roughness of the wood retaining more of life's juices--and more grief stricken--than if it had been more polished. The pods on long arched sticks seemed to be cracked open and human.



They made me think of Fritz Dietel's pods (see post on Dietel).

The pieces slowed me down, bringing me to thoughts of my past week with a number of mourning rituals.



Into the woods




Then I ventured into the woods, heading for his bird blind, "Slithering" (could this be a Harry Potter influence?). Because I am directionally challenged, I attended to my instructions and my map and my bearings with infinite care, and for a change I didn't get lost.

The bird blind (at top, above left and below right), which is set into the side of a ravine, undulated and fit back against the land, with benches inside and scales of bark on the outside.

The view of the sky and the land through the grid of wood was spectacular. I saw a wonderful hawk, but I was so excited, I pressed the off button instead of the shutter button on my camera and missed the photo op. The other birds I could only hear.

Nearby in the ravine were some pieces by students who worked with Cummin and their teacher at the Green Woods Charter School at SVNC.

Cummin had several other pieces outside, including a group of three vessels--two boats and a bowl (from left to right, "Two-Bowed Boat," "Longboat" and "Bowl"). Like "Resting With the Guardians," the two boats are made from hurricane cherry. "Bowl" is from hurricane poplar.

Again, the pieces have a life's or soul's journey feel about them, partly because of their size, and partly because they are metaphoric vessels, with no real function. The roughness of the work implied an eagerness in their manufacture, a desire to express the feelings immediately and get on with the soul's journey.

I missed one piece, appropriately called "It Got Away," but three more boats, "Three Departing Boats," these with masts, right in front of the main building seemed sad to be leaving, just like me. I do confess that, because one of them had three masts, and because there were three, I did think of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.

Returning to civilization (well, the woods seemed more civilized than my life), I once again crossed the gravel at 15 mph, but on the way out, it seemed fast enough for any human.
permanent link  libby 10:34 PM
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Tuesday, June 01, 2004

Becoming nothing in China

 


Walking down the street this morning, it suddenly struck me how appropriate the pairing is between "Yun-Fei Ji: The East Wind" show and the "Big Nothing" exhibit at the ICA.

Ji, now a resident of Brooklyn, still keeps a foot in China in both technique and subject matter. His paintings use traditional Chinese methods and materials as well as Chinese history (top, "Dinner at the Forbidden City").

Even without this knowledge, though, a Westerner lacking Chinese historical background and familiarity with the techniques can find ways into this work, which suggests a world dripping in decadence and distorted values, a topsy-turvy land of confusion and injustices.

But what makes the two worlds at the ICA a nice fit are Ji's blotted out areas, reminders of how people who fell out of favor in China got erased from propaganda paintings--or how people who were something became big nothings, and how historical fact just disappeared (shown, "The Forbidden City Ghosts").

I agree with Roberta's post about Ji's work, where she suggests a relationship between this work and German Expressionism (below right, Otto Dix's "Seven Deadly Sins"), the distorted cartoons of people and people-as-monsters cavorting while the culture went to hell in a handbasket. I see this as a commentary on our own culture as well.

The work is agitated and frought with anger, frustration and astonishment.

The good news is that if you are historically impaired vis a vis the relevant Chinese history, the ICA has provided a couple of DVDs in which Dr. Yangwen Zheng, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about the Boxer Rebellion, and about the Opium War, which she says marks the beginning of modern China. (I was also grateful for the bench, a place to rest while listening.) Her Cliff notes to the panoramic "Uprising of the Boxers" were quite helpful.

Unlike the usual acoustiguide experiences, with their lowest-common-denominator explanations, Zheng's talks were scholarly and informative. The DVDs also contain a couple of excellent talks by Ji, himself--all of which helped pull me into the work, which for all its accessible iconography (the decadence, the cartooniness, the storytelling) is still quite obscure if you don't know who's who or are unfamiliar with the traditional symbols of Chinese painting (left, "The Forbidden City Ghosts" detail).




permanent link  libby 10:38 AM
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Monday, May 31, 2004

Changing the rules of the game

 


The impending sale of the land underneath Philadelphia's tile-and-mirrors whiz Isaiah Zagar's installation garnered some press that included raves about the work from a variety of passersby and out-of-town visitors.

But yesterday I heard another point of view. It was a neighbor on Isaiah-overload--so many Zagars on so many walls. (Maybe there was a touch of NIMBYism here, too.) Besides, she said, he was playing unfair, changing the terms under which he had gotten permission to install his work.

So it goes. You fix up an empty lot with a garden or art, but when the owner wants to sell, your hard work is cooked. That's reality and that's private property. (Here's Zagar's side of the story.)

(I can just imagine a certain person saying, predictably, so how's that different from the Barnes, with the private owner disposing of his property as he sees fit? And I suppose the counterargument can be based on how this compares to Maxfield Parrish's Tiffany glass "Dream Garden," a piece I find somewhat depressing, which also was private property rescued from removal by public outcry and the concept of it being a public trust. In these two, big-time cases, I come down on the public trust side.)

However, I take the other side in the case of Zagar. Zagar's garden was originally allowed as temporary, site-specific work. Removal is part of the original bargain. I remember paying lots of money to have several tons of cement removed after a show ended. The cost of destruction exceeded the cost of manufacture, as I recall. I could take the Marie Antoinette approach, like the neighbor did, and say, let him buy the land instead, but I don't think that's a likely option. Destruction would be cheaper.

I personally wouldn't hop on the bandwagon to preserve it. On the other hand, I, unlike the neighbor, like Zagar's garden for its fanciful ideosyncrasy. I look forward to it popping up as I ride the 40 bus down South Street. I'll be sorry to see it go.
permanent link  libby 10:48 AM
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Big Nothing something more

 


The Big Nothing at the ICA is one of those shows that has such a range of work in it, it almost doesn't make sense to talk about the individual pieces but it does make sense to talk about the concept.

But I have to admit I saw the concept as more of an excuse for a show than something to take all that seriously. It's not that I don't think that nothingness isn't a concept in contemporary art. I do. And I think that nothingness is a concept in much of this work.

But there's nothingness and nothingness. Some nothingness is about futility -- I'd put Bas Jan Ader's film "I'm Too Sad to Tell You" in this category. It shows the artist so overcome with sadness that he is unable to stop weeping long enough to communicate something. His efforts and futile. The nothingness is not so much about no speech as about his inability to stop the tears.

Some nothingness is about absence of content. Maybe Robert Barry's video, "Nothing," which is nothing more than the word projected on the wall for 15 minutes, fits this one. One quick look and then you get it, except there's nothing to get.

Some nothingness is about somethingness. Another Ader piece, "Thoughts Unsaid, Then Forgotten," implies a whole back-story that is unexpressed. (Roberta and I saw this and "I'm Too Sad to Tell You" at a Carnegie Biennial in Pittsburgh, and it was nice to see them both again, although this piece, which is an installation, looked quite different--less wistful--than it did at the Carnegie, where it took up a larger space.) Another communications failure is implied by Matt Mullican's melted phones, "Untitled (Into the Fifth World)" (shown at top).

Another video (which you can view on the web at this link), "Swamp," from Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, shows close up, in the grasses, a weedy plot along a highway, plants regarded as nothing because they are not cultivated, in a garden not a garden for the same reason. The whining cars are invisible and so are the filmmakers (but aren't filmmakers almost always invisible, except via their message)? This is a different take on nothingness--it's about things not valued and therefore usually invisible, made visible in the video.

There were a number of pieces that seemed to be about death as well, which I suppose you could argue is something or nothing, depending on your point of view, but if you remember someone absent, it's hardly nothing. It's like a thought. It's real. But it's incorporeal. Gabriel Orozco's "Empty Shoe Box" and "Yogurt Caps" fit the bill, as does James Welling's "I" (from the "Drapes" series), in which a funereal black drape, it's form barely visible, is the photo's focus.

I suppose I'd also put Richard Artschwager's vinyl black blips, shaped like submarine doors, which puntuate the walls of the show in unexpected places. I got a similar buzz out of James Lee Byars' "Scroll," a black blip shape that looks rather like a fingernail on top of a thumb. Both Artschwager and Byar give us an opening into nowhere or no opening at all.

Whether all this adds up to incoherence or not, this is a show worth seeing.
permanent link  libby 8:58 AM
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