artblog

Saturday, June 12, 2004

Blue water alert

 
I brake for street "events" on a regular basis. Yesterday, I saw this aqua velva enhancement in the fountain at Love Park. The city may not have money for art anymore (see my post about arts funding cuts) but they love to put color dye in the fountains around town -- ever since they found out the dye bath won't hurt anything or anybody.

I'm not complaining. It's a surreal touch for a city that far too often has no sense of humor about itself. I prefer when they do pink but this Bahama-cotton candy froth is pretty nice.

By the way, the Philadelphia city budget bill, now bandied about like a limp tennis ball, was vetoed by the Mayor this week. The City Council failed to override the veto, and a new proposal by Council is making the rounds. If I read the story in the paper correctly, the new proposal restores the arts funding. And the Mayor, who hasn't seen the bill, has no comment. Stay tuned.
permanent link  roberta 8:20 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Ellen Gallagher's hair pieces at PMA

 
I was on my way to the press preview of the Michael Hoffman tribute show "Golden Harvest" at the PMA. (more on that later) Stella, a photography buff with a good eye, was along. We pulled up short in front of an Ellen Gallagher drawing in the hallway between the coat check and the gift shop. Stella was not so impressed but I think the six-panel multi-media work riffing on race, class, culture and beauty is worth a trip to the museum all you drawing artists.

Libby told you about Gallagher's Two Palms print at Works on Paper gallery in her post. That show's up through June if you want to catch a cross-town mini Gallagher-athon.

Gallagher was included in the Studio Museum's great "Black Belt' exhibit last year. She had a couple of collaborative video works that also riffed on hair, in science fiction and underwater realms. Read Libby's post for more on that.

The PMA work, a 2004 piece called "Wish-Whish-Whisk," is baroque and wackily wonderful. (shown is detail at top and one panel)



Arrays of tiny faces painted in watercolor dot the six panels. They resemble heads of freshmen in high school yearbooks and are approximately the size of a thumbnail. All the faces seem to be African American women, but the gender is kind of ambiguous. What pushes them over the top is the sculptural flourishes Gallagher adds -- cut paper swirls and plastecine which she uses to partly obliterate the image (or adorn it I suppose is another way of looking at it). The hair takes over the face in fact becoming mask-like in a carnivalesque sort of way.

Gallagher's mining a vein having to do with water in this and other works in a series called "Watery Ecstatic." The wall card next to "Wish" quoted the artist as saying something about how ultimately everything turns white in the water...ie water is the great leveler.

For more background on Gallagher, a 1995 Whitney Biennial grad, read this blurb from show she had at the Drawing Center.
permanent link  roberta 6:42 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Friday, June 11, 2004

Hunt for free money...free!

 

Artblog contributor Shelley Spector wrote to tell me about a free service being offered this month only at the Foundation Center website. During June, they're waiving the normal $9.95 fee to access the grants database which means for the next couple weeks you can hunt for that golden grant money for free! Here's the notice from inliquid's website.

In celebration of Arts Month (June) the Foundation Center is offering free one-week memberships to individual artists for its Grants to Individuals Online, an extensive search engine for fellowships, scholarships, grants, and other financial support for artists. (Normally this service charges $9.95 to access.) To sign up, visit the web site.

permanent link  roberta 1:22 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

"What Remains," the bodies, plates and prints of Sally Mann

 
Post by Colette Copeland


On Tuesday, I took a mini road trip to Washington DC in order to make the morning press preview at the Corcoran Gallery of Art for the new Sally Mann exhibit, "What Remains." I relish the luxury of viewing work without hoards of people and the opportunity to meet an artist whose work I admire.

“What Remains” is a comprehensive overview of Mann's work from 2000-2002. The press release stated that "it was a five-part meditation on mortality, exploring the ineffable divide between body and soul, life and death, spirit and earth."



I wondered if the work would hold up to the provocative photographs of her children, which caused Mann such notoriety. Now that her children are grown, she has turned to landscape?

I admit I was skeptical. However the promise of death and decomposing bodies intrigued me.

“Matter Lent” is a series of prints made from the 19th century wet plate collodion process depicting the year old excavated remains of the family's beloved greyhound. (shown is "Untitled #17" 2000, a gelatin silver print with varnish from that series)

For the first time, the original plates were presented along with the prints. The plates had rich tones, a three-dimensional quality and depth, which the prints lacked.

The series “Untitled” depicts decomposing bodies from the University of Tennessee's Forensic Anthropology Facility. What made the photographs so unsettling, was not that they depicted dead bodies, but the context and the aesthetic of the images.



I had expected the bodies to be in a sterile lab, not in a thickly forested area. By removing them from the context of 'specimen,' the images suggested that these forms were victims of horrific crimes, dumped for disposal. (shown is "Untitled #9" 2001 from that series, a gelatin siver print with varnish)

Additionally Mann creates a new aesthetic from an anti-aesthetic. The hand-applied emulsion and unpredictability of the process produces results which would make photographic formalists shudder. The prints were flat, dark and covered with stains, streaks, dust and rips. The images were not matted and framed as traditional photographs, but varnished and mounted like paintings. The technique created a veiling, which abstracted and beautified the subject matter. The mark making was key to the success of the series.

Mann continues with the aesthetic/anti-aesthetic in the “Antietam” series, which blurs the lines between painting and photography. By revisiting and photographing the site where 23,000 men were killed in September 1862, Mann questions photography's relationship to history, place and time.



The exhibit ended with extreme close-up photographs of her children's faces. (shown is "Untitled #11" 2000, an ambrotype from the series "What Remains")

Again she showed both the original plates and some large prints. As with the dead greyhound images, the photographs did not hold up to the immediacy and sculptural quality of the plates. Mann chose to end with life, stating that "Death is approached as a springboard to appreciate life more fully."

--Colette Copeland is an artist, teacher and regular contributor to artblog. Her performance group--The Women's Art Rescue Squad will be part of the exhibit "Girl Art Now" at the Hera Gallery in Wakefield, RI. They'll be performing at the opening this Saturday.
permanent link  roberta 6:22 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Thursday, June 10, 2004

Handsome guy surrounded by gnomes with bad skin

 
Wonderful, catty Robert Hughes piece about the Modigliani show (up to Sept. 19) at New York's Jewish Museum in this morning's Guardian. Read.

Among other things, Hughes says the artist's work is overrated and overvalued due partly to a combination of his Hollywood-like life story (sex! drugs! handsome guy dies young!) and his pretty (inoffensive?) work which includes portraits that are all the same mask, and sprawling nudes with topiary pubic hair. Apparently, the show at the Jewish Museum doesn't have some of the artist's best work, and Hughes does give him credit for a couple of good portraits -- of Jean Cocteau and Max Jacob (shown)). Mostly, he seems to think the artist was sleepwalking through his paintings.

Hughes uses Modigliani's nickname (Modi) throughout the article ("Modi" for "painter maudit" (cursed painter)) which is amusing. And in a parting shot across the bow, here's what he says about some of Modigliani's big bucks collectors:

you can see why the Japanese are so nuts about Modi-san and, back in the days when they ruled the auction rooms, why Japanese collectors paid such extreme prices for his nudes; they are almost pure ukiyo-e, "paintings of the floating world": golden-skinned Paris geishas without their kimonos on.

permanent link  roberta 6:59 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Wednesday, June 09, 2004

Tales of New York City

 


Philadelphia artist Joe Naujokas, has a show, "Views of Views - Empire Manhattan," in New York at Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery, 41 E. 57th Street, up until July 9 (shown "Midtown Construction Paper," oil on birch, 15" x 45"). Joe, by the way, is an FoB (Friend of the Blog), i.e. a contributor.

Mario Naves in the New York Observer wrote about Joe's work in the show catalog: "This type of intricately contrived imagery has as its antecedent the trompe l'oeil paintings of 19th century American artists...except that Mr. Naujokas isn't out to fool the eye, he's out to keep it hustling."
permanent link  libby 9:55 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Northern exposure

 
I'm heading toward Alaska tomorrow and the near-24 hours of daylight each day. Roberta will hold down the fort.
permanent link  libby 12:31 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Mix it up with Comix

 


"The Comix: Cartoons as Art" is an Art in City Hall venture, and I squeezed it in right after my root canal. It cured me of all pain while I was looking. Try it. You'll see.

No, really, this show was so much fun--a perfect summer Art in City Hall event that transcends the awful cases and somehow doesn't look lost or weird in the space, quite an accomplishment if you ask me. And Cavin Jones, who curated the show, did a great job of setting it up as well, making the show readable and easy to follow.

I don't even know where to begin, because I liked something from everyone who showed.

But I must say Dennis Lo knocked my socks off with "Blink." It's the image on the 4th floor that sold me. I had already admired the two downstairs pages of weird life down on the farm, but the one upstairs was something else entirely, a cartoon as Persian miniature, with use of space like I've never quite seen in a comic before. The frames were overlapping in a sinuous arrangement and defined by densely patterned architectural forms. The draftsmanship was great. Wow!




So I won't put in a picture from Takitomo Tomita because you can see some of his work in past posts--here's one by Roberta. Like Tomo, Elizabeth Haidle, is influenced by Japanese cartoons, and she gets some cosmic thinking into a wistful little story with a wistful little girl who hugs too hard.



I also admired Gregory Erskine's boys in cars looking for girls. The subject matter made the consistently sized frames seem appropriate. Another frame, another night to cruise and be frustrated and angry. The high contrast inking was also a trait in the pages from Peter Stathis' "Evenfall," which you can apparently get in book form. The compositions are vertiginous and active. Stupidly, I failed to take a picture of this one. ouch.


Roberta posted about meeting Kip Deeds on First Friday at Spartaco, and here were a couple of his pieces, including "Building the Arkadelphia"! I'm not sure I consider this work comics, but that's just semantics. It's loopy and dense with ideas. The more I look at what Deeds is doing, the more curious I get. The obsessions seem pretty wide-ranging.


I also was pleased to see work by Delia King, who we met selling work off the 2nd Street fence in Old City one Friday (see post) although I again wonder if they are cartoons (shown "Floyd Family").

Jerry De Falco had a couple of almost cruel round paintings, one of a mama mia bountiful and one of a pinched little nun and giant girl. Claudia Chou and Tyrone Lawrence had a young girl heroine on the loose story, at least in the frames on display, and Lance C. Hansen's drawings came straight out of tv land, with a story-board look and camera angles. But in Philadelphia, I think everyone would read the John Karpinski Spaceboy story set in Philadelphia locales like the Swann fountain. I'm not sure why I didn't take pictures of any of these. They were swell, too.

Human nature is a big comics subject. Leroy Johnson presented quick ink sketches--sharp observations of how people present themselves. I liked the young hipsters with their pants stylishly hanging below the critical zone in "60th Street." But David Ferro's ceramic cartoons of people he probably knows went beyond the expected with the suspended in air thought bubbles, each representing something relevant and different (shown, "Irv").


And speaking of clay, 3-D political cartoons from Bill Hogan were a nice touch, with the Bush administration posing--Condy, Dubya, Colin Powel and Rummy. Also stretching the idea of what's a cartoon were Carlson Pott's glass goblets with cartoony animals hanging off the side.



Animals are anthropomorphic in cartoons. Cinzia Sevignana shows life and its mysteries through the eyes of bugs. These are religious in a way, pondering man's place in the universe and his limited point of view. Holly Smith's "Companion" is the cat from hell. And John Jonik's cartoons are about human nature and anti-heroes (the mooses are his).



While most of the cartoonists worked in black-on-white ink, like Dan O'Connor with his square-jawed heroes and use of insets, Susan Quick offered someswell hi-gloss photo ink in dazzling colors that seemed to take a cel from Disney's book.

Jacob Lambert's pieces (shown "Cartoon Violence I" at the top) are in the most untraditional acrylic and he uses it to comment with a cartoon about cartoons. Takashi Moriyama uses mixed media that looks like it's part acrylic as well, all sci-fi beams of light and steel.

Jeff Kilpatrick's portraits in "Friday, Saturday, Monday" of guys in a bar were beauties. The story fell flat but no matter. I couldn't take my eyes of the faces. They must be based on real people. And last but not least, Orlando Valentin offered a stylish goth epic with tangled bodies that made me think of Hieronymous Bosch.


permanent link  libby 9:44 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Hot photos, cool video

 
Of course it may not be in the 90s this weekend but if it is you may want to seek shelter inside the big cooler on the hill. The Philadelphia Museum of Art debuts a new exhibit of people-centric photographs in "Golden Harvest" in the Berman and Stiglitz Galleries opposite the gift shop. The 90-works show is in honor of the late PMA curator Michael Hoffman (1942-2001) who worked with the Aperture Foundation and was instrumental in shaping and boosting careers of many contemporary photographers. Much of the work in the show, including shots by Graciela Iturbide, Mary Ellen Mark and a host of others was donated to the museum as part of the Michael Hoffman Tribute Collection. "Golden Harvest" opens Saturday, June 12 and runs to Oct. 3.



And while you're up there visiting, stop by the Video Gallery in the Contemporary wing for a wonderful taste of Gary Hill's 1994 piece "Remarks on Color" in which the artist's young daughter, Anastasia, in a blue dress, reads from a red book by Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The book is "Remarks on Color" a foray into language and meaning and as Anastasia tries dutifully and stumbles over words too big for her, Hill's own treatise on words and meaning becomes clear. This piece about the language divide is not only about children and adults but also about haves and have nots, class, and, of course, signifiers.

On a more contemporary note, remember the word hash coming out of Washington these days in which labels like "Healthy Forests" initiative and "No Child Left Behind" are language manipulations used to obfuscate instead of clarify.

Hill's piece, only up through Sunday, is lovely, sweet and better than the Wittgenstein Cliff's Notes.
permanent link  roberta 9:26 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

The line on New York

 

Anne Seidman, artblog contributor, painter, web guru and pal, has a show of line drawings opening June 15 in New York at George Billis Gallery. (Artist's reception is Thursday, June 17, 6-8 pm.)

You may have seen Seidman's stealth color pencil wall drawings around town. The first one I remember seeing was at her Fleisher Challenge show in 2001.

Recently, she installed a drawing at Ursinus College in the nice show,now closed, "Affect." (see Libby's post) (image top is installation from "Affect" and right below is "Untitled" 2002)



What I love about Seidman's work in general and about her line drawings in particular is the suggestion of individuality within a larger group and the quiet sense of community. You can read the works variously, since they are abstract and mostly untitled. But I've always found a humanist strain in the side by side by side lines and shapes in the work.

Unlike in the real world, Seidman's world is a no conflict zone made up of companionable nudging. There's a suggestion of competition and -- especially in the paintings -- an evocation of wounds healing that may reference emotional or spiritual bruising.

I am reminded of Tim McFarlane's paintings in which urban landscapes suggest people and community. (read earlier post on McFarlane)

And in the line drawings, built slowly with colored pencil, hand drawn and responding to the space, the sense of motion brought on by the tightly packed lines evokes sheets of rain -- and the march of time.

Check out the artist's flash enhanced website. It's a trip.
permanent link  roberta 7:42 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Tuesday, June 08, 2004

Report from Haddonfield

 


I spent about an hour with my friend, artist Fran Gallun, and some students and teacher Tom Cook who worked together on an art project at Haddonfield Memorial High School.

The kids worked in teams of two or three to create five sculptures using coils of remesh from Home Depot as the armature, and in some cases, as an integral part of the finished product.

Well, not quite finished in most cases, but on their way. Theresa McGluaghlin was madly trying to catch up to the others, she and her partner Amanda Cossaboon having been waylaid by so many ideas that they put lost energy into work they eventually discarded. I loved their discards.

But while I was there, McGlaughlin was laboring in the hot sun, snipping the remesh (it's kind of like giant hardware cloth for concrete reinforcement) with large wire cutters to create holes in the columns to accept a variety of ducts. McGlaughlin (shown working) was a little irritated with my questions, or maybe with her piece. "It's just a thing," she said, not so willing to say what her goal was.

Kelly Polman was attaching photos and paintings on the piece she and Katherine Koniges made--a postmodern, self-referential wonder. The kids made photos (shown top) of the sculpture, then paintings--brushy and loose--then paintings of the photos and then meta-meta-meta photos of the paintings.

Not only were the paintings and photos both swell, but the concept of opening up the remesh (left) to tumble out of iteself was pretty smart. I can't say if the final product took off because it wasn't complete, but the thinking here was worth it all. The piece was chock-a-block conceptual.

It was one of six pieces (one was by Gallun) that enlivened an otherwise rather weedy strip of land between a parking lot and the school building.

The liveliest-looking when I was there came from Abigail Schwartz, Sara Mussoline and Crystal Cheung--a sort of Mummer bird (right), its head not quite complete, a rough assortment of branches piercing the column below. The girls were also filling the column with rocks.



A banana embraced by a giant monkey (left) was not quite complete, a simple concept boldly created by Robert Glenn (on the banana) and Emre Ozdemir (on the monkey). It looked pretty promising when we propped the monkey in place, which Ozdemir had signed and copyrighted--he said it was a joke.



And speaking of apes, King Kong, made of outdoor carpeting, was mounted on a metal flashing Empire State Building by Cale Krise and Katherine Chiumento.

I especially liked "The End," just in case you thought it wasn't about the movie. But also end of the school year? End of high school? This was one of two completed pieces when I got there.



The other was a kind of temple, painted gold with big metal flashing bamboo leaves hanging off, a red flashing obi around the base with some Asian words painted on, and best of all, a surprise inside, a temple bell (shown) hanging from the top, the clapper hung with Asian coins--those round ones with squares cut out of the center. Students Alison Aminto and Jennifer Manning made this one.



Gallun herself, "the self-declared column queen," who has a great way with color, went all out painting her own remesh column to death, not to mention her leafy branch arabesques plus critters from air and land. The branches were attached with those plastic ratchet ties and swayed in the wind, the colors and patterns holding their space among the grass and flowers and weeds.

There's all this talk about how important sports are for all the ways they teach young people to cooperate and work as a team. But this project beat sports any day.

The kids had to collaborate and communicate. They had to work toward finishing a project and make it stand up to the elements. They learned about materials and ways to fasten things and solve problems. My guess is they probably had to do a little math to figure out how much material they'd need to get their projects done. They all had moments of thinking outside the box and being creative. Plus, they made something that will last for a while.

So congratulations to Gallun, Cook, but mostly to the kids for working so hard and thinking so hard. And this is just one art program. I'm still trying to understand why the arts are the first things to get axed whenever Philadelphia hits a budget shortfall.


permanent link  libby 10:26 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Food for thought

 


Dario Robleto uses some mighty weird materials in his sculptures--like all the bones in the human body. He will be in town for the University of the Arts' summer MFA lecture series, and so will a bunch of others whose work presents a wide range of practice and content.



The series runs Wednesdays from noon to 1 p.m. at the CBS Auditorium, Hamilton Hall, 320 S. Broad Street.


Here's the lineup:

June 23, Ingrid Schaffner, curator at the ICA
June 30, Dan Walsh (top, "True Blues") --spare geometric paintings about color, among other things
July 7, Katy Schimert--narrative sculpture and video with a female edge (left)
July 14, Annabeth Rosen--ceramic sculpture suggesting rough patterning; lots of food imagery
July 21, Dario Robleto--check out what Eleanor Heartney has to say about this guy in her Whitney Biennial article in this month's Art in America.
July 28, Abby Donovan (above right) --word-based sculpture, letters piled or draped, etc.

I've always found this series to be pretty interesting. Besides, you can bring your lunch and munch while you look at the slides and listen.
permanent link  libby 3:50 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

How much color can you get from a black hole?

 

"Mixmaster Universe" at Temple Gallery is a surprising burst of color and exuberance given that its subject is black holes.

That is to say, the show's not really about black holes but, as part of the Big Nothing festival, it's a sideways glimpse at science, scientists and scary imploding stars through the eyes and brains of five local artists, David Guinn, M. Ho, Sue Patterson, Roxana Perez-Mendez and Thom Lessner. Temple curator Nancy Lewis, who organized the show, charged the artists with dipping into the John Wheeler Archive on Black Holes at the American Philosophical Society then coming up for air to make a piece of art. It was a good idea and the show's got some winners.

Out of the cave
Perhaps the oddest tie-in in this colorful, loopy science and art experiment is David Guinn's paintings featuring a lumbering bear, areas of lush abstraction and a naked caveman who appears digitally blurred like they do on tv for modesty or privacy reasons. (top image is "Guinn's "Early Times")

Guinn's paintings set the scene way back the same way Kubrick, in "2001 Space Oddysey" showed homo erectus discovering fire and tools before blasting into the future.

The idea of ancient man on a quest is a nice touch and one that grounds the show in a kind of historical battle for knowledge and domination.

Guinn, who's also a Philadelphia muralist (see Libby's post for more), has other paintings and sculpture in the show but the caveman paintings speak louder about history, chaos and a world that's a cloudy soup most of the time.

To infinity and beyond


Roxana Perez-Mendez' "Terra incognita" fast forwards to a space voyage that may be a commentary on our increasingly small and isolated personal existence -- or may just be a fantasy about intergalactic travel. Either way, Perez-Mendez' three-channel video work set in a space capsule presents the artist-astronaut at home reading a magazine; stretching her legs as if warming up for a run; and doing some knee bends in her underwear (a la Sigourney Weaver in Aliens) only here, the Latino artist's got a crucifix on the wall of her space cabin.



I didn't see any zero gravity effects but apart from that, the commentary on mundane activities carried out alone in a pod are poignant. I don't know whether the artist saw Adal Maldonado's "Coconauts in Space" at Taller Puertorriqueno recently, (read my previous post for more) but I find it interesting that the two Latino artists suited up for space exploration in works about identity, the past and the future.

Black Hole Heroes


Thom Lessner's hero worshipful print (shown) depicts a smiling John Wheeler in a four color screenprint. It's aw shucks wonderful.

Lessner's "Black Hole Gang," a black on black screenprint (done in collaboration with Clare Rojas, Andrew Jeffrey Wright and Barry McGee) is laugh out loud funny.



For "Gang," Lessner and company lay out a mix of symbols, heroes, dudes and words like "My hole is so black I have to wear shades" in what looks like a rock poster. I especially like the artist's depiction of what looked to me like conjoined twin guitars and elsewhere, two nude men stepping out of a big black hole.

Bouncing balls and pretty packages

I didn't quite understand Sue Patterson's "t" shaped sticker installation on the first floor wall, but I liked the idea of a bouncing ball timeline that runs up a wall and out in both directions with no definable beginning and end (at least it seemed that way to me). Many of the flat cut outs on the wall were red and round and that made a nice symmetry and also started me thinking about whether black holes could be another color...like red.



As for speculation of a completely different kind, M. Ho's installation "All Good News," which packaged hundreds of daily newspapers in beautiful tissue paper tied with a rubber band, spoke of beautifying things that are ugly or ordinary and about human endeavors to create stability and happiness in a world that's prone to earthquakes and political upheavals.

Ho has worked with newspapers before. Her piece at the Arcadia works on paper show "prettified" newspaper war stories about Iraq by obliterating the text and leaving the pictures. She's also made Chinese-type landscape installations from yellow post-it notes. Here, with her mountainous landscape of newspapers, she merges the two streams. It's a great piece.

Back story

The show's in conjunction with the Library of the APS, the esteemed local institution that houses the John Archibald Wheeler archives as well as the journals from the Lewis and Clark expedition and lots of other interesting scientific stuff. John Archibald Wheeler, physicist and cosmologist who worked with Albert Einstein, coined the term "black hole" to describe the big, life sucking fields like those created by imploding stars. Wheeler, 93, is professor emeritus at Princeton.

And if you're wondering about that catchy title, "Mixmaster Universe" (which has a nice rap or hip hop sensibility, the term belongs to physics and was coined by Charles Misner, a student of Wheeler's. Misner, who didn't like the idea of the "big bang" theory of the origins of the universe, came up with his theory, the "Mixmaster Universe" which likens the universe's beginnings to the churnings of a vegetable processor.

By the way, I ran into Lewis at the opening and she said physicist Misner was there looking at the show.

Finally, Bruce Partridge, physicist at Haverford College will give a lecture at the APS titled "The Biggest Nothing" on June 16 at 6:30 pm. Wheeler will be attending the lecture according to Lewis. For more information on the lecture, contact Roy Goodman at the APS at 215-440-3408.
permanent link  roberta 6:49 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Monday, June 07, 2004

First Friday for new gallery

 


I'm happy to report that there's a new gallery in town. Roberta and I ended our FF by heading up to 2nd and Spring Garden for a show at Hyder Gallery, as in artist Frank Hyder. He built the place himself, bricks and all, and lives and paints there too. Hyder came home from his Fulbright in Venezuela and was so impressed with how the neighborhood had improved that he decided the time was ripe for opening a gallery.

His opening night featured himself and four other artists--Paul Santoleri, Ira Upin, James Dupree and (a new name to me) Henry Bermudez--plus a live band. Very nice space, very nice music, very nice art.

Hyder's work has a kind of art-work-as-magical-talisman quality that makes me think of Jose Bedia, and I find this magic forces behind the world as we know it in Dupree's and Upin's work. This quality might explain why Hyder was such a hit in Venezuela, where he had a six-month show in the largest museum there.



In his "Stolen Dreams and Forbidden Fruit Series" (shown, number 1 in the series) James Dupree suggests that the whirling fruits are possessed with power.

The paintings are antithesis of a still life, with normally inert objects traveling through time and space.



And Ira Upin's pieces also seemed to be about force fields of power. His materials by the way are oil, tar and paper on canvas, a contrast to Hyder's gold leaf, but the materials are part of the magic power for both artists (shown, Upin's "Opposing Forces").


Henry Bermudez's small 10" x 8" "Horse and the Gold Jungle" (shown) and his large 96" x 48" "Inner Landscape" seem to travel into magical kingdoms where pattern is powerful, and I'm reminded of the Unicorn tapestries not just by subject matter but by the crisp significance of the repeating tangles. The magic in Bermudez's work is more like the magic of mythology and fairytales, but not of shamans and rituals.


Paul Santoleri also doesn't exactly have religious power but he, like Bermudez does create a feel of magical forces trembling beneath the world as we know it. His work has some of the twisting and tangling energy that Bermudez's has. Santolero's sets a semi-mythological world into dizzying motion. His paintings and drawings (shown, "Bramble") (and of course his murals) are transformative and charming but are not magic charms.

Hyder also mentioned that he and Santoleri and Bermudez were collaborating on a mural for the lucky street where the gallery is. That's a bundle of neighborhood initiative being set into motion.

permanent link  libby 9:40 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Green Bay and Philadelphia

 
While we're on the subject of geography, here's another midwest and Philadelphia connection. (I'm sorry if this is too much for you but I'm kind of fascinated as you can see...)

Brian McCutcheon, local artist and teacher (Uarts, although he just announced he's leaving his post after 8 years) sends out periodic email missives about his artistic comings and goings. McCutcheon's a sculptor and photographer and he roams the planet exhibiting and installing lyrical works rooted in memory, autobiography, humor and the land of scientific what if-ism. If it sounds like I'm a fan, I am. Check out his website for lots of images.



Last month, the artist told us about a piece he made as part of a residency at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. The work's a frosty-looking sled based on the Flexible Flyer which, McCutcheon says, has a Philadelphia connection. (top image is finished "Sled" and right is sled in the sandblaster, a nice behind the scenes shot. Both photos provided by the artist.)

Here's an excerpt from his note:

The initial image I had of Green Bay, after having grown up almost directly across Lake Michigan, is that of snow/cold and youth. I decided to try to render this childhood impression with the image of a Flexible Flyer sled - coincidentally invented and manufactured in Philadelphia for over 100 years. I constructed the sled, light fixture and base from clear acrylic sheet and then sandblasted them. There are working fluorescent fixtures in both the base and the body above the sled. The sculpture is now in the collection of the school.

Right now you can see a McCutcheon's outdoor installation at Evergreen House in Baltimore, part of a ten-person exhibit on the grounds of Johns Hopkins University.
permanent link  roberta 1:48 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Remembrance of Fridays past

 

Libby and I met painter Matt Green nine months ago on a balmy First Friday in September. Green had some large urban landscape paintings for sale on the sidewalk on 2nd St., and we were taken with the seriousness of the work, its vision and painterliness, and the artist's enterprise in sidewalk selling. (see posts here and here and my feature at PW)

After a number of indoor cafe exhibits, the young artist now has a large body of work at PII Gallery on Race, including some of the paintings we saw on the sidewalk and two new oil paintings, "Noble Street" and "Tacony Waterfront," shown top and below.



In the new pieces, Green continues his themes of urban decay and the resiliance of nature. His focus on abandoned warehouses, depicted down to the last brick, in sites of lush, weedy overgrowth, are quiet elegies whose stillness invites contemplation. Less didactic than documentary, the artist's mining a vein of personal response to the environment and combining it with a felt need to archive the old sites before they're torn down.

Many local artists paint the Philadelphia streets but nobody's doing it with the same emotional charge.

2 Street shuffle


After spending some time with Green's paintings at PII, we headed around the corner to 2nd St. and, as Libby told you in her post, ran into a crowd of walkers and lookers -- and artists selling their paintings, prints, jewelry and crafts right there near Church St. The ambiance was New Orleans French Quarter -- hip and hippie.

Thumbs up to Mark Price, new Space 1026er and Hussian School of Art grad, whose blanket on the sidewalk held gems (four-color screenprints and drawings) all priced by a self-invented uniform pricing scheme (everything $5 dollars). Price, whose work has something of the 1026 signature (forlorn, comic book influenced and advertising aware) said he learned the printing technique by observing and by helping out on other artists' projects at the collective. Price has work for sale at the 1026 online shop, Market East. I notice the uniform pricing ($5) applies there as well.

Inside at Artjaz



Artjaz was hopping as usual, the crowd an enthusiastic group of munchers (good cheese and crudites) who also were excited about what was on the walls -- Will Downing's backstage and studio photographs of musicians like Al Jarreau. Downing, himself a Grammy-nominated vocalist, was expected later and many folks were waiting to see him. Read more about Downing at artjaz' website.

Interspersed with the photographs were paintings by Bernard which seem large-scale blow-ups of the photos.



Outside Artjaz, Wendy Nicholas tapped me on the shoulder and said we should come see her mom's work at Big Jar Books next door. I'm a sucker for kids shilling for their mothers so in we went. Dee Nicholas's collage paintings (shown) some of them framed, others unframed and in a big group on the wall, felt earnest and the wall space at Big Jar is pretty generous, so I recommend checking it out.


Midwest voodoo at Spartaco

Libby told you about Jason Urban's print-influenced paintings at Spartaco. I loved them too and will weigh in at PW next week.

Meanwhile, I found out that Urban has a midwest connection (something I'm always looking for, being a cheerleader for that undersung and often derided part of the country).

Urban went to University of Iowa for grad school and he was very enthusiastic. Not only that but a friend of his who was at the opening, Kip Deeds, said he too had midwest connections. Deeds, who teaches printmaking at Tyler and Princeton, went to University of Illinois and said he spends his summers teaching at Interlocken in the Michigan upper peninsula.

While I was digesting all the rust-belt love, another person -- a young woman -- chimed in saying she was from somewhere outside Chicago.

Then, Deeds reminded me of another displaced midwesterner -- recently-retired Tyler painting teacher Richard Cramer -- a Wisconsin boy. All those corn-fed connections in one place made me giddy.

Anyway, Deeds said he's making a book right now, using himself as a character in the narrative. (image above is sample from Deeds'website) I'm not sure whether the book's fiction or memoir or a little of both but I love artist's books and can't wait to see it.

I'll get to Nancy Lewis's Big Nothing show, "Mixmaster Universe" at Temple Gallery later today. Stay tuned.
permanent link  roberta 6:29 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Sunday, June 06, 2004

First Friday perfection

 



On the street

Not too hot. Not too cold. Just right. And so the streets of Old City were packed with prints and paintings (here's a $5 computer print I bought from a very young man named Mark Price, who prints at Space 1026), crafty jewelry, African masks--all for sale. And the buyers were out in force. At some point, Roberta and I moved off the sidewalk, which was chock-a-block, elbowing-room only, and walked with the cars.

We arrived before the serious crowds took over, but even at 5, the hustle had begun. Not too much later, on the steps of the Temple Gallery, a flautist peformed, wearing a red-and-white shirt--a perfect match to the Temple Gallery banner.

And by time we left Old City, we had heard on the street two blue-grass fiddlers fiddling, one of them accompanied by a guitarist and a third person whose contribution was unclear at the moment we passed by. We also heard a percussion duo, one on a wooden xylophone, the other on an upside down bucket, a piece of metal and who knows what else.

Pocket murals

The gallery shows were hopping, people spilling out on the sidewalk. Roberta will take our first and third stop, which I guess puts me in the second gallery, Artists House, with mural painter David McShane in the back room with pocket murals, playful little 6" square panels that were selling well.


McShane, if you don't remember, is the muralist with the penchant for blurry edges who brought us Jackie Robinson and the boxers, both on North Broad Street. He brings to some of his little panels those same out-of-focus edges, be they umbras and penumbras or back-lighting or sometimes just challenges for the eye.


His subjects ranged from heroes like Albert Einstein and Frank Zappa to self-portraits and family (my favorites) to toys to flower patterns--all sweet homages to the joys of life and love. (shown, self-portrait of the artist as a young boy "Baluch-a-ma-luch")


Artists House gallerist Lorraine showed us that the pictures could be mixed and matched, the combos somewhat arbitrary, and pointed out how nice to buy several and make your own combo. Here's one combo as hung at the gallery--"King Violet," "Yellow Plaid" and "Mom."

More heroes

We also found some heroes on the wall at Spartaco Gallery at 52 N. 2nd St. (I mention the address because they don't have a Web site and they're relatively new). Like McShane, Jason Urban also paints pop culture heroes--ballplayers, tv and movie cowboys and superheroes(shown, "The Goerge Reeves Memorial Painting")--but he also paints villains and politicians. And there's a post-modern questioning of our society's values here.

Urban's black-and-white, dot-patterned wooden panels (about 24" high) are nearly 4 inches thick, the sides sporting words that don't quite coalesce into sentences, deliberately frustrating the viewer's ability to come up with a formulaic meaning. The dots also deliberately frustate.

Urban also offered some of the work that led into the dot work--for example a large print portrait of the Lone Ranger portrait, with a quote from Clayton Moore's autobiography in which he says that a hero's language is precise and grammatical. Urban, an affable young man who just moved here from Baltimore, said the piece was a commentary on "our president not being able to get out a decent sentence." Because Bush fashions himself as a cowboy/hero, he invites the comparison (shown, "Surrender!").

Urban, whose heroes and villains paintings use a printmaker's layering approach, has also started a new series (shown, "Breakfast of Champions"). The Pop look is undercut by the stripes and the words circling the sides (NB: the stripes are not a moire pattern, despite the appearance on the computer, unlike in the above left "Surrender," which is an artist-created pattern).

We also stopped in Union 237, which attracts a young, multi-racial crowd, but this time the show was less than interesting. Downstairs, a couple of photos of some amazing grafitti murals caught my eye. Here's a shot of one of them. The wall is by the Wallnuts, a sort of grafitti collaborative. The photo, "Angel," is by Been 3.


permanent link  libby 12:15 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Hot air Sunday

 
I'm a little late with this one but when I read John Rockwell's NY Times story from May 28 on the online animated shorts featuring dour playwright August Strindberg and fantasy sidekick Helium I had to check it out. (I'm sorry the article is no longer free to read at the NYT site.)

I can't say I'm a fan of Strindberg, but I'm a big fan of animation online -- and this is just a great little package. Written and "performed" by members of a San Francisco comedy troupe "Killing My Lobster" and animated by Eun-Ha Park of Milky Elephant, a computer graphics collective once in San Francisco but now in Brooklyn, the four shorts (each takes no more than a minute) are like reading the Sunday funnies in a smart alternative paper. View them here. And check out Milky's flash-y site, too. (I want to say the collective had some work at Space 1026 a couple years ago.)

Helium, who Rockwell likens to Hello Kitty, hovers near the ponderous playwright. While I couldn't tell if Helium is male or female, its role seems to be that of animated thought bubble gone kerflooey. Helium, in a falsetto voice, echoes Strindberg's sledge-hammer heavy words, like "decay," "rotting" and "hell," letting them soar and hover over the scene like mournful bird chirps.

The script is taken from a Strindberg novel, "Inferno," and while I wouldn't necessarily want to read it based on this introduction, I could take a whole lot more of Helium.
permanent link  roberta 10:15 AM
Comments? Let us know.