artblog

Saturday, July 17, 2004

We only look like we're smiling

 


Right now, Roberta is unable to use the new Blogger interface, and I'm still trying to figure out why things are the way they are in the html. So please bear with us while we try to get back up to speed.

Meanwhile, I now know why Mona is smiling. She doesn't have to wrestle with a cranky computer. Life was so much simpler in those days, although their dental care was inadequate--hence the closed-lip smile.
permanent link  libby 6:04 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

California dreaming

 

Here's where I get to play like Crocodile Hunter and tell you about the natural beauty of California. Indulge me. There are times when the art of the real world is incomparable.

That said, I'll get real in the next post and tell you about some great art I saw at San Francisco MOMA. (top image, sunset over Asilomar beach, five minutes walk from the cottage we stayed in)

Steve, Stella and I stayed in Pacific Grove, CA, just south of Monterey and north of Big Sur. PG is an old Methodist summer camp founded in the late 1800s. Tiny wood houses have plaques with the original owner's name and date of construction -- Mary Smith, 1888, etc. There are a lot of single women's names on the old places which made me wonder.

First off, how did all those women arrive in California and were they Civil War widows or Gold Rush widows or ministers' daughters or what? It's a mystery.

California for me is a great nature opportunity and the California Central Coast is, if not animal heaven, then animal-lovers heaven. Central Park does have its egret as we found out when we took Janet Cardiff's walk (see post here and here). Here's an egret Steve and I spotted at Point Lobos State Park. Notice the Monet-like background. (image above)



The entire Monterey Bay is a protected wildlife area. Needless to say word's gotten round to the seals of the world.

They hang out on the rocks and sunbathe on the beaches. (image left is seals on beach at the Stanford Research Center just next to the Monterey Aquarium -- there must have been 200 seals altogether)



Evening walks just before sunset are great for birdwatching. The cormorants that sit on the rocks all day take off and fly in great flocks skimming the water for fish. One flock after another, all going the same direction. It's thrilling.

This year, we also saw great flocks of brown pelicans doing the same. (image of pelicans-- they flew so low you could see the patterns in their feathers)



I met my dear friend Robbie in Cambria, a town near the Hearst castle San Simeon. We stayed at the Bluebird Inn and when I arrived the first thing I saw was a little fledgeling hawk doing some bird watching of his own, sitting atop the sign for the Bluebird Inn. There was a bird feeder next to the sign. I'm sorry you can't see the image better but the hawk looked a little like the bluebird pictured on the Inn's sign which amused. (hawk is in the upper right of the picture, left)



Harbor seals are demure tiny things compared to elephant seals which hang out near San Simeon.

The bull elephant seals, which were on the beach molting their old skins and growing new ones before heading back out to sea, weigh up to 8,000 pounds, that's each, not together. Image shows a couple bulls growling at each other. There were maybe 100 on the beach.



We saw -- and heard -- otters swimming on their backs cracking open their sea urchins for dinner. That was always great. Otters are solitary creatures so you have to look hard to spot them. Apparently they were endangered species once due to over-hunting but have been brought back through conservation efforts and their return has helped control the sea urchin population which restored the balance of the bay's ecosystem.

Final image shows some of the indoor spectaculars at the Monterey Aquarium. Thanks for indulging my need to spill. Hope you get out there some day. It's worth every penny. (image is Stella with jellyfish)
permanent link  roberta 8:10 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Thursday, July 15, 2004

Printshop with and without computers

 
This is the second time I'm writing this post.  I put it up Thursday night, and by early this morning, Blogger had eaten it whole.
 
I'm trying again only because the show, "Several Steps Removed" is so terrrific and I have to share it.  It's all prints and plates or other matrixes used to create them, and if you want to know a little more about printmaking, or you just want to see some terrific stuff, this show is for you (I figure that includes everyone in our reading audience).
 
The show, at Fleisher Art Memorial produced with the Philadelphia Print Collaborative, has a wide range of work, from the retro-hip lithograph(top) by Alyse C. Bernstein to the old-fashioned-looking woodcuts from James Mundie (top, Bernstein's "Greetings" and left,  a collection of Mundie's wood blocks and prints and original drawings).
 
 


 
My first surprise was coming upon some pieces by Richard Hricko, a printmaker whose work I keep stored in my mental flat files for favorite artists. His three prints were created with four plates, one of which was a gorgeous, gnarled piece of flattened bark ( the leftmost of the four plates shown right). He printed on both sides of translucent silk, creating layers of pattern and light. My photos didn't even begin to do the prints justice, but the plates themselves are pretty swell.
 
Some of the plates competed with the final product for beauty.  I'm thinking here of Mundie's woodcuts and Judith K. Brodsky's photo etchings with a plate that's a noteworthy object in and of itself (left, the plates for "At 65," based on a poem by her father). 
  
  
  
  
  

Next to Hricko's delicate prints were Candy DePew's silkscreens on fabric. The oddly shaped chair cushions were a delight.  The hanging fabric seemed dispirited although it used the same motifs (right, "Blooming Tuffet"). 
  
  
  
  
  
  
Among the highlights of the show were the pieces that demonstrated innovative methods.  I'm thinking here of Shelley Thorstensen's child-scarred dining room table turned into a woodcut (left), as well as her plaster intaglio prints, printed from scratched-into plastic blocks. Also of interest were Ron Rumford's intaglios from polymer clay plates, using a process that included baking; Mary Phelan's letterpress prints using everyday materials like sand for her textures.
 
Also pushing the envelope of what an art print can be made from, Charles Burwell used a computer to layer and then print his imagery. Part of the fun of his display of the layers was figuring out how they fit together to make the final print (right, "Composition Wave" and display of layers).

Daniel A. Heyman's "Forgotten Salt," made with linocuts, also provided a kind of puzzle for examining the link between the matrix and the final print. The linocuts were stacked in a nearby rack, looking inviting enough to pick up. (No, I didn't, but I did try, unsuccessfully, to maneuver the racks so I could get a better look.)
 
Examining the how-did-they-do-it for almost every one of the artists was one of the great pleasures this show had to offer. Another nice demonstration came from Jesse Goldstein's poster "Field Day" and the three silk screens used to make it. Goldstein also included a silkscreen print, "Fight My War," (left) an example of the traditonal use of silk screens for political postermaking which more modern--but cheesier-- reproduction techniques are replacing. The image is a grid of Dubya urging one and all to "Follow the leader."
 
Every artist in this show had something special to offer: Joan Wadleigh Curran's "Chestnut" etching; Kevin Strickland's untitled monoprint, Patricia M. Smith's "Hours" book made with woodblocks and offset lithography, Rochelle Toner's snappy etchings, Janet Towbin's all-over patterns, and Charlotte Yudis' celestial etchings, made with a touch of alchemy.  But after seeing this show, I'm convinced that all print making has a touch of alchemy.
 
This show was part of the Big Nothing project organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, but the logic of making it fit was a bit tortured and not worth repeating.  What is worth repeating, however, is, Go see this show.
 
 
 
 








permanent link  libby 7:13 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Hit parade

 



Two of the best shows I saw in New York Tuesday had pop lyrics from the weed-choked Vietnam War era. "I am the Walrus" is the name of a terrific show with a clown theme from a wide range of heavy hitters in the art world, and "I Want to Take You Higher" is a surprisingly varied group show of mandalas that use and abuse the form's traditional spiritual enterprise.

The shows seem a perfect fit for our times, what with an unpopular war raging, an unpopular government governing, and the smell of marijuana wafting down city streets.

A thousand clowns

What struck me about "Walrus," at Cheim & Read, however, is not the nostalgia for some old kind of humor but rather the currency of most of these artists, whose in-your-face approach to humor is so popular today. Like Letterman and Larry David, the clowns here are not always first and foremost self-deprecating. More often than not, they are quite the opposite.

Bruce Nauman's clowns jump up and down screaming "No" in an excruciating pitch in his video piece "No No New Museum." Christopher Wool's painting "Fool" (top) addresses the viewer's foolishness as well as his own.



And Paul McCarthy, is in hot form in "Basement Bunker," a grid of 28 photographs with images of violence so disgusting and bloody--the little elves and dwarfs of the free world, including our fearless leader in the White House, gone wild with hatchets and such--that he dares you to look without flinching and to find the humor (detail left).

Some highlights of this show include twin portraits by John Waters of Clarabelle, the "Howdy Doody Show" clown, that look like video stills taken off the tv screen. It's the only piece in the show with a touch of nostalgia. After all these years, I was moved by seeing the human through the makeup.

And speaking of humans behind clown noses, a portrait of Andy Warhol, Christopher Makos' "Andy With Clown Nose," also shows the man in a reflective moment, putting the lie to the Andy clown-with-fright-wig image that is seared in our collective memories.

A couple more of my favorites in this show--Ugo Rondinone's ultra-close-up polaroid shots of a clown (detail left) and a monkey, strewn on the floor where we can step on their faces, and also Olaf Breuning's photo "Helen Frudin aus America" (right below), showing a bare-breasted Frudin slithering across the floor, her feet inside loaves of bread, her fingers inside rolls (so she looks like one of those tree frogs with the suction-cup fingers) and a Walkyrie-inspired cap adorned with crescent rolls for the horns.



The ridiculous meets the sublime of her noble effort to do whatever she may be doing. And ridiculous though the bread appendages are, her nakedness is arresting.

A thousand colonels

The other '60s throwback is the show of mandalas, "I Want to Take You Higher," at McKenzie Fine Art. The surprises of what a mandala can look like and how it can have content that relates more to our culture than to mandalas is what's great about this show.

Laura Sharp Wilson's mandalas (left, "Ani Pachen") are a riff on antique floral watercolor plates for botany books as well as wallpaper patterns. But these wallpaper patterns will not lie down on the wall and behave themselves. A mix of acrylic and graphite, their intense twining and vining of flower motifs in patterns suggest a freeform mandala format, where the art-historical culture of the East meets that of the West.

In this meeting-of-the-cultures mode, I enjoyed Aric Obrosey's "The Symbolic Lotus of a Thousand Colonels," the KFC symbol twirled into multiples that suggest the overload of advertising we enjoy. Of the layered mylar pieces of Ambreen Butt, all with a woman dead center drawn in a beautiful Persian miniature style, my favorite showed the central figure sucking on a hose or a rope.





In Marietta Ganapin's "Untitled (Paris through the Window by Marc Chagall)" (left) and other pieces with a similar approach, Ganapin slices and dices art museum picture postcards of paintings, the imagery repeated over and over again, then whirled by the Western cultural blender.


Barbara Takenaga's "Shaker (Big Blue)" made me think of Fred Tomaselli's pot paintings and Chris Ofili's dot paintings, not to mention Bruce Pollock's meditations. The surprise here is the rectangular canvas which is held together by the looping, Milky Way of tendrils pulling the width of the canvas into an intense center of godhood.

Bill Armstrong's two mandalas (left, #450) and Miriam Cabessa's "Blue Circle" use the iris-as-mandala motif. Armstrong adds day-glo colors and ultra-soft edges to make his point--a sort of hopped-up Rothko approach. Cabessa uses a painterly drippy dart shape that looks like it's penetrating the blue pupil of the big blue eye. Ow.

And Robert Kushner decorates a pair of Japanese doors with sexy blooms, glitter, gold leaf and mica to create "First Mandala." The opulence and decoration are typical Kushner, whose voluptuous fabric creations seem more complex and challenging. But the sense of too-too beauty is still in operation.
permanent link  libby 10:12 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

 

Post from Minna Dubin

The "Scarab" show at The Project Room on 8th and Girard opened last Saturday night. All I knew was it had to do with heavy metal music, of which I am completely ignorant. So I walked in, trying to forget all of the heavy metal stereotypes I've learned over time. Turns out I didn't need to try and forget them, because the artists were busy examining them in their work.

Of the 10 artists and 17 pieces featured at the show, my favorite was an installation by A. Ho called "Satan, sitting there, he's smiling." Well-placed in one corner of the room, under the irritating glow of a strategically-placed fluorescent light sat a wooden school desk with an attached chair that you're allowed to sit in.

The desk had graphite pencil drawings of demons and words scribbled all over it. One drawing was of a hand making the metal "monster/metallica" sign with the words "Metal up your ass" written underneath. My favorite saying on the desk was, "I'll be the first to watch your funeral, I'll be the last to leave." Hardcore metal music played in the background.

I liked Ho's installation because I could access it without being a "metal-head." Even though I can't name a song the band Slayer sings, the feeling of that school scene transcended. I knew kids in high school who had desks and notebooks that looked like that. With the installation's offensive fluorescent glow, it seemed obvious why an angsty high-schooler would connect with the pissed-aura that surrounds metal.

Thom Lessner's cartoon-like paintings of white metal dudes (Twisted Sister, James Dio, and Cliff Burton) were hysterical. I thought they invoked the humorous spirit of the TV show "King of the Hill," about a white trash Texan family.

I also liked, and like more and more as time goes on and I think back to it, Paul Swenbeck's "My Only Son, A Demon." This was a black, shiny, lagoon-like creature coming out of a puddle of, well, the "lagoon," or wherever it comes from. Made from polychromed resin, and looking like plastic, leather, and oil, this wormy, creepy being perfectly captured one interpretation of what I could imagine to be the birth of heavy metal.

The rest of the pieces may have meant more to those with a background or interest in heavy metal. But on a whole, the show surprised me with clever commentary and the general feeling of poking fun at oneself.

--Minna Dubin is a free-lance writer and teacher as well as an astute observer of art

(Editor's note from Libby: Oh, I almost forgot to mention she's my daughter.)
permanent link  libby 2:23 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Philadelphia bites in Big Apple

 


While I was in Chelsea yesterday, I stopped to see artblog contributor Anne Seidman's second solo show at George Billis. Seeing so many of her stacked-line drawings in one place led me to thinking about boundaries.

The work is made with a series of rules--horizontal lines only, stacked to create verticals. The horizontal lines seem quite straight, but the vertical borders shamelessly waver.

The boundaries where the stacks of lines meet one another have a tension to them, as do the boundaries where the horizontals edge closer and further from eachother within the stacks. When they get really close, they emit an explosive smudge and become dense with feeling.

Even though these pieces are made with rules, the colors have an improvisational quality--a way to keep things fresh and free within the rules that keep things in line. There's fierceness here, a concentrated search for lyricism and gesture amidst rigor and straight lines.

By chance, I came upon a Steve Baris piece in Jeffrey Coploff gallery, where my friend Lenore stopped in to visit an ex-student, the assistant curator there (right, "Landscape With Clumps and Trickles 7). Baris has a couple of pieces in Philadelphia Selects 5 show at Moore College. Roberta also gave a nice write-up to his most recent Schmidt-Dean show.

The other Philadelphia work I passed by was Judy Gelles' beach boxes at lyonswier, which made a terrific grid of colors on the gallery wall.


permanent link  libby 1:06 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Son of Andy

 


New York was dreary, yesterday, with a steady drizzle that kept the temperatures down, so I didn't mind. I went up to visit my son, who markets movies on the Internet, and also spent some time with an old friend.

It felt like I was going to see an old friend when I stopped in to see the Burt Barr videos at Brent Sikkema. I had seen Barr's work (see post from me and post from Roberta) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and was definitely up for more of the same.

Barr comes from the Andy Warhol school of anti-video (did you know Warhol's "Sleep" is showing at the ICA next week?). And the three pieces showing at Sikkema fit the bill. Watch for the twitches and contemplate why.

My favorite was "Roz," a video of the face of a beautiful young woman standing in the shower in front of tiles, water coursing over her and her sexy curls. First she emits some sultry curls of smoke from between her lips, setting the scene for sexiness plus weirdness. Then she opens her mouth to sing, and out comes the voice of Otis Clay singing "The Banks of the Ohio," a maudlin rootsy song of love and murder.

At first she looks amused that she's standing there lip-synching. Then she gets into it, then she gets bored, then she really goes for it as the woman in the song begs, "...don't murder me, I'm not prepared for eternity." Then she alternates between some more emoting and self-consciousness. The one large action in the video is when she raises her arms to lift her wet hair. It's all kind of sexy--but not in the shameless way that our society usually delivers sexiness--the plea for life and the raised hair serving as climaxes.

Some of the power of this video lies in the shock of such a voice and such a song coming from the mouth of such a beauty. But finally, it's the woman herself, her multi-racial Rosario Dawson look and her ambivalence played out in small facial adjustments that captivate. I stuck it for all 5 minutes, 42 seconds, no sweat.

No sweat may be one of the problems with "The Mile," which is my idea of torture, both for the participants and the viewers. A woman runs a mile in 7:25, which is the length of the video. She keeps a steady pace and never breaks a sweat. The video is taken from the back of a vehicle ahead of her, and the landscape is barely a presence on a road amidst low sandy dunes.

As she runs we hear her breathing and the thump of her feet on the pavement (I liked that running -with-sound-effects better in "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner," perhaps because it had other action as well). In the upper-left corner of the screen the remaining time for the video and the run is burned in. The "running time" count is the most action this video has to offer, which is pretty funny, given that the woman is in constant motion and she's going somewhere. Not so the movie, which goes nowhere. It is a picture of asceticism. Not my taste.

The third piece was an installation of an oscillating fan on a pedestal in front of a DVD-player projecting a video of an oscillating fan. The real fan casts a shadow on the projected fan image on the wall. And the video projects not just onto the wall but onto the real fan, which reflects onto the walls all around a wheel of light that moves as the fan oscillates.

This, I understand, goes on for 55 minutes. I liked the concept, liked when the breeze hit me, liked the reflections of light and the reflections in my mind--but not enough to stay for more than 3 or 4 minutes.
permanent link  libby 11:20 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Sticky wickets at Ice Box

 


Friday evening I took my daughter Minna and her friend Becca to a veritable art outpost, a place we'd never explored before--The Crane Arts Center's Ice Box Project Space, a huge old warehouse two blocks north of Girard on American Street).

The show, "Valsalva Maneuver," was a display of artists' takes on croquet course that brought back the miniature golf show at Artists Space in New York. But unlike that show, the artists here are not big, big names, but rather a bunch of young people bristling with energy. (I still remember with especial fondness that show's Cheeto-coated hole created by artist Sandy Skoglund. Oy, what a color!)

The space was enormous and has great potential for future ventures, especially installations and gigantic sculptures.

Like all such prescriptive ventures for artists (I give you a format, you make a piece of art that fits in), it was uneven, but it did have its moments.

Course 7, a gothic black and brown paper forest was enticing and weird, with brightly colored papier mache mallets and balls to hit down a curved path. The gallery map credits Diane Carr, Nichola Kinch and Kelly McRaven with this one (top).




The deer in Course 6, by Wendy DesChene and Jennifer McTague had a fantasy affect that the painted floor cloth forest and the droopy wickets couldn't live up to. I did like the distorted painted croquet balls on the floor cloth--or were they eyes? Hard to say (right, Course 6).




The camouflage floor cloth and giant swinging mallet that hung was a big hit with the kids. The artists were listed as Adam Parker Smith and Kevin Hayes. I'm not sure anyone playing there noticed the drawings on the walls that dwarfed the players, turning them into gnomes or elves.




Others participating were Roxana Perez-Mendez, Ivy Green, Michelle Posadas, Sean McMullen, Katie McDory, Leslie A. Mutchler, Samantha Coles and Michael Dur. Plus a funny indoor tent with lawn chairs and lots of coolers holding drinks came from Kameron Gad, Joel Stoehr, Komal Kehar and Elizabeth Manclark. This last one was labeled Course 3 and seemed fun but a cop-out on the art front. Certainly the people sitting in the tent looked happy.

The curators were Wendy DesChene, Adam Parker Smith and Eva Wylie.

Of course I had to look up valsalva maneuver, wondering what it had to do with croquet. Turns out, it's what happens sometimes when your blowing up a balloon and the air pressure moves back into your ears--but you can do it on purpose. I still don't know what it has to do with croquet.

Ice Box is at 1400 N. American Street, phone 267-972-8523. I'm unclear on when they're open.
permanent link  libby 10:25 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Why money goes where it goes, nobody knows

 


It occurs to me that I ought to share some information that stunned me.

When I was visiting Washington D.C. this past weekend, my hostess (Do we still use this feminized form now that we've dropped waitress and actress?) took me to a gallery in Bethesda, Md., where she had bought a swell, huge painting. The gallery, she said she'd been told, moves millions of dollars of art every month.

In we went. I was stunned--by the preponderance of crappy "art" with big prices.

Clearly, the art market is a separate entity from the art world. This gallery is sitting in the center of a big-bucks community with mega-houses in need of decoration on the walls.

The better art showing these days in Old City and Center City is a way better deal that what this guy had, for the most part. I suppose this isn't much of an insight, but: What sells is different from what's good and from what's interesting.


permanent link  libby 10:15 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Video fact meets fiction

 


Post from Colette Copeland

Performance artist, writer and activist Coco Fusco's new video debuted at The Project, a 57th St. gallery in New York. After spending three years curating the "Only Skin Deep Exhibit" at ICP, I wondered when she found time to create a major new work.

As in Fusco's previous work, the video "a/k/a/ Mrs. George Gilbert" critically examines racialized politics and imagery, exposing the inequities of justice for people of color. Specifically, it is the story of a FBI agent who confesses his involvement in the nation-wide search for Angela Davis, the black philosopher who was fired from UCLA in 1969 at the order of then governor Ronald Reagan. In 1970, she was placed on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted List," after which she fled underground.

During the two months that Davis was a fugitive, hundreds if not thousands, of other women were incorrectly identified by law enforcement officials and many were arrested as Davis. Her case culminated in one of the most famous trials in recent history and she was acquitted of all charges in 1972. (Top, the real Angela).

Fusco collaborated with Rick Moody, the author of the movie "The Ice Storm," on the writing of the script.

By combining both fictional and documentary source materials, the video successfully creates doubt as to the veracity of history as recorded by the government and presented to the public by the media. Fusco employs the visual strategy of filtering and altering the 'fictional' footage, so that it resembles the original source material, which includes newspaper articles, photographs and film clips. The voiceover of the FBI agent performed by Hacktavist (digital zapatista) Ricardo Dominguez personalizes the faux-documentary. His persistent clearing of the throat throughout the 40-minute video adds a bit of humor to the character. (Right, images from Fusco's "Dolores from 10 to 10").

I was struck by the seeming absurdity of the case. I had to watch the video twice before I could fathom what crime the government was charging Angela Davis with. Ultimately what lingered, is the timeliness of this piece and the fact that it so closely mirrors what is going on today in our country in the name of security and patriotism. It testifies to the extremes that the government will pursue, in order to protect 'the ideals' rather than the individuals.

The work is on display through July 24 at The Project.

As a side note, both Coco Fusco and Ricardo Dominguez were keynote speakers at last fall's Society of Photographic Education's conference in New Jersey, which I co-chaired. Both of them are dynamic speakers and performers, definitely not to be missed if you have the opportunity to see them.

--Frequent artblog contributor Colette Copeland is a multi-media artist who teaches at University of Pennyslvania and University of the Arts in Philadelphia


permanent link  libby 9:37 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Curiously strong survey

 


For a tasty little survey of what's happening in the art world right about now (although the show is short on digital media), go visit the Sixth Annual Altoids Collection showing at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts' Morris Gallery.

It's also nice to see locals Clare Rojas (top, "2x2") and Paul Swenbeck as part of this show, because here they are in the famously retrograde Philadelphia, in the famously retrograde Academy, showing work that's as hip as possible.

I enjoyed almost everything on display, but there were some standouts in my eye. In sculpture, Elizabeth Demaray's "Good Baseball Rocks" invited holding and shuffling. The weight of the rocks, the hand of the leather, the meticulous baseball stitching, the suggestion of violence and hopscotch all in the same breath were winners.

Rob DeMar's "Street Lamp II," a flocked highway-through-the-pines on-a-stick had moderne auto and aviation styling. It was a wow of detail and design for the road to nowhere.









And asianpunkboy's rhinestone-handled switchblade, "Untitled 8 (Grease Switchblade)," put me in mind of Sanford Biggers' bling-bling "Nanchakus" from the "Black Belt" show at the Studio Museum in Harlem (see my post on that show). The white-painted blade defanged the lethal weapon, moving it into an inconic pure nostalgia.

And speaking of "Black Belt," artist Iona Rozeal Brown from that show was also here, with one of her elegant takes on FuBu-sporting Asian-style blacks. Another piece that brought that show to mind was Wangechi Mutu's "A Feathered Side Thought," an ink and collage on mylar that looked like an African-American transvestite on peyote.

"Shadows," a huge acrylic on paper painting by Mala Iqbal is a terrific take on the neighborhood, its row of little houses looking charming as they blur in the distance, but up close the stylized woodgrain picket fence is in bad shape, crudely repaired with a conglomeration of boards. The pattern of the sycamore tree's bark, the looming shingle pattern all have a touch of looming threat.

This painting, like DeMar's trippy traffic stick and Swenbeck's strange hatchet piece make me think we've got a lot of young artists influenced by the dark menace of the woodblock prints that go with Grimm's Fairytales. There's a teutonic gothic thread here that makes me shudder--with delight.

Ann Craven's highly decorative "Pecker on Pink" seemed not so interesting next to the Rojas' "2x2" which had its mysterious subtext to carry the image along further, and next to that, Daniel Davidson's existential cartoon of a little man victimized by his own jury-rigging. (In case you're wondering about the bars in the upper left of this image and the next one, they are reflections of the lights overhead in the gallery.)(For more on Craven, see Roberta's post on a show of hers that we saw in New York.)

Still in the realm of drawing, I was also taken by Daniel Zeller's "Isolated Output," a topographical-looking mapscape, the rivers like rends in the fabric of the earth's skin. Stitches tie the splits together and talk to the tiny hatch marks of the landscape. I felt that piece talking to the "Good Baseball Rocks" across the room, perhaps because of the stitches and the earth-in-need-of-repair subtexts.

Plenty of other interesting work was in the show, and if you want to preview more of it, here's a gallery Web site with complete images.

The show came here via PAFA's Curator of Confemporary Art Alex Baker--he who curates what the Morris Gallery shows. Baker was on the committee that selected this year's art for the Curiously Strong Collection. Altoids has been collecting this way since 1998.
permanent link  libby 7:45 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Monday, July 12, 2004

A Sally Mann fan responds

 


I got an email from J.T. Kirkland, who posted a more enthusiastic view of Sally Mann's work at the Corcoran on his blog, Thinking About Art.

Here's still another link if you want to read more.

If it came across that I didn't care for the whole show, then I misrepresented my view. Some pieces were quite beautiful. Others were just not that interesting to look at. And some were rather repelling.
permanent link  libby 8:15 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Two soon at Fab

 


The date for the Laura Owens show at the Fabric Workshop and Museum has been set for Sept. 8 to Nov. 13. Owens is the Los Angeles painter whose work created a stir at the Whitney Biennial with her combo of storybook kitsch and luscious painterly qualities. She'll be showing a suite of seven hand-embroidered prints on silk that she made during her Fab residency.

Yinka Shonibare, who was recently short-listed for Britain's prestigious Turner Prize, is slated for the same dates. He's known for making 19th century clothing fashions in African-style prints to confront cultural identity. The work on view will include Space Walk, in which a man on woman dressed in space suits of richly colored fabrics float in the gallery. The work was made in collaboration with the Fab.


permanent link  libby 2:11 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Mann o Mann

 

While in Washington this weekend, I stopped in at the Sally Mann show (see Colette Copeland's post) at the Corcoran. I just want to add that the photos that I found most beautiful and interesting in that series were the ones of people long dead. The ones in which the skin is still a skin around something inside were hard to look at and seemed like immodest transgressions--a defiling of people who had no say in the matter.

The children's faces, on the other hand, seemed pointless, even in the context of life vs. death. There's some kind of self-justification going on in the thinking here, and I'm not sure it's a pretty picture.

But in terms of what's light, dark, clear, fuzzy, random, etc., some of the prints in this show were quite engaging, and the plates were wonderful in their three-dimensionality and metalic sheen.

But all in all, I wanted to see less of what I was looking at, not more.
permanent link  libby 10:35 AM
Comments? Let us know.