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Saturday, September 11, 2004

Challenge of the spheres

 
By some harmonic convergence, the three artists at Fleisher's Challenge #1 exhibit talk to one another, partly thanks to the music of the spheres emanating from Sarah Zwerling's installation, the paintings of the spheres in Steve Cope's exhibit and the meltdown of the spheres in Veleta Vancza's enameled copper.

I'm not stating this to be jokey. But two of the artists are pinging on some kind of outer limits, and Zwerling's music implies that as well, although I'm not so sure that was her intent.

Veleta Vancza: Contradictions merge

The work I found most interesting were Veleta Vancza's tiny (diameter 1 inch-ish) colander meshes gone wild. When I talked to Roberta, a couple of days ago, she said she thought that when they were glommed together, they looked like Rice Krispie treats. I was thinking caramel-coated popcorn.

The scientific process of fusing the little globs seems to have been a big part of what generated this work. If you've been reading me lately, you know I'm on a tear about the failure of process pieces to achieve completion, to rise above the methods to become statements. But here we have work that does the job.

Side by side with the process is some formal and intellectual zing.

First, the bonding of the popcorn-shapes raises the seemingly contradictory issues of material strength versus delicacy. And then there are the references to enameled household products and to jewelry--the ordinary versus the precious.

Add a layer of Modernism and formalist references to Josef Albers' Homage to the Square series (right) and some Jasper Johns targets (below left) and go straight to Target to buy your Modernist refrigerator or droopy bowl.

This mixing of high art and low design strengthens this work as a final product, and that's what interests me the most here. The "Homage to Form" (left above) takes Albers' low-affect color-theory squares and gives them a 3-D junkiness and enthusiasm, the square protruding like a fridge turning itself inside out.

"Target De-Formed" (image at the top of post) is a witty collander that takes off on kitchy finishes in the housewares department as well as the formalism of Johns' targets. The green is a fashion color (at least this year it is) and I'm right back in the 50's and the avocado-green kitchen. There's the profusion of products and excessive foodstuffs written all over this work, a backhanded commentary on our consumerist culture.

The process by which Vancza arranged the small, jewel like, individual enameled pieces on a black board seemed rather overwrought to me, with hammer sounds translated by some computer process into a sound map that determined the placement of the pieces (image, "B.L.O.B. #8").

These small drops of color, unlike in the Rice Krispie treat pieces, talk more to the Faberge and jewelry end of the influences spectrum, but I thought the piece a little thin. That the end product was a starry night, however, connected Vancza's work to the other two artists'.

Steve Cope: Our place in space

Steve Cope's own version of the cosmos on canvas is beach balls or striped planets filled with helium, floating in the sky, drifting toward us with a mix of humor and menace. The skies are dramatic, painted in surprising colors (left, "Green Ball, Violet Sky," 55" x 55").

Cope segued into the ball series from a series of blimp paintings, inspired by seeing one floating over Boston harbor from a viewpoint high in a skyscraper. The blimps were, like himself, a "slow, stealthy observer with a great vantage point," he wrote in his statement.

The compositions are strong, the concept of balls or circles floating in the sky open to multiple interpretations, and I as always found the references to the heavens pretty heavenly, but I found the paint-handling just this side of pleasing, the colors just this side of beautiful (right, "Orange Ball").

Sarah Zwerling: Bleached by moonlight

The music emanating from the installation by Zwerling augmented the spacy drift of Cope's paintings.

Zwerling's music--samplings from love songs--had a movie-score sound that evoked Mars and the Moon, but not the honeymoon. Her installation, "Woo," also included a mood-lit forest of white plastic branches hanging from the ceiling, a white plastic stump topped by a blown-sugar sexy pink flower, and a video of the flower twirling and dancing. I liked the video on the floor of the hot pink sexy flower doing its tango. I liked the white branches, the white stump, the sexy flower, the faux moonlight (left, installation shot including video on floor and branches).

But I couldn't tie them all together.

I'm still trying to figure out why the beautifully made white items are white. I suppose they evoke prom decorations in the high school gym and the loss of color in the moonlight. I didn't see romance, however. The blown sugar in hot pink--a swell technique--works well for the sexy flower on its white stump pedestal--a corsage on a prom dress or a flattened breast, by a great stretch of the imagination (right). But since the music doesn't evoke its source--pop love songs--the connection of the audio to the visuals is lost. Tell you the truth, I got a little lost in the woods.

permanent link  libby 1:15 PM
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Friday, September 10, 2004

Last words

 
When ICA founder and former Dean of the Graduate School of Fine Arts at Penn, G. Holmes Perkins died in August, I realized that I was probably the last person to interview him--for an article I wrote for Penn's alumni glossy magazine, the Pennsylvania Gazette.

I talked to Perkins in July about why he had started the ICA--the short answer was to bring contemporary art to the students at Penn. His speech was slow, his hearing dim, but his mind was clear.

The article is about the ICA's 40th anniversary. If you haven't attended any of the celebration lectures, there are more coming this academic year. I see one with installation artist Ann Hamilton and one with painter Lisa Yuscavage on the ICA event calendar.

permanent link  libby 3:38 PM
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How anti-corporate can you get?

 
Local artist and activist Albo Jeavons is known for his "Disney Hole" project of a few years back which lampooned the failed city/Disney corporation endeavor "DisneyQuest" which was going to be an indoor theme park on Market St. "Disney Quest" never got farther than the excavation hole in the ground. Disney pulled out (money presumably the issue) and time passed and the hole became a civic eyesore and weed- choked joke on a major thoroughfare in the tourist district.

Jeavons, a very good parodist suggested with his "Disney Hole" project that the city build a Museum of Corporate Welfare on the site. The artist then went public openly soliciting other proposals for the hole from anybody who had them.

The project was a great success and Jeavons got a bunch of serious and seriously funny proposals.

Nobody suggested a parking lot but that's what's there now.



Next month, Jeavons takes over the gallery at Space 1026 for a one-man show he's calling "Corporacist: an anti-racist investigation of the group mind of the corporation." (top image is a sticker advertising the show. I picked it up at Space 1026. It comes in blue or green.)


CORPORACIST, curated by Space 1026's Liz Rywelski, will include new paintings, collages, wallpaper and life-size anti-corporate figurative sculptures made of Brooks Brothers suits. (image right)

In addition to the exhibit, Jeavons is organizing events like films, a study group, puppet show and, my favorite, an anti-corporate haiku slapdown. See his website for more.

Jeavons has a swell line of anti-corporate t-shirts, kind of merch for the alt-culture set. I hope he has them out at the show because they're great. I bought one when I saw them in the travelling "Illegal Art" show at Nexus last year. (See my post for more.) The artist and web designer is good at twisting corporate logos like Banana Republic into political statements like "Ban Republican."
permanent link  roberta 9:00 AM
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Thursday, September 09, 2004

Peephole alert in Manhattan

 

Artblog pal and contributor Mark Shetabi wrote to say he was in a show at Jack the Pelican Presents in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The opening, which was supposed to be this weekend, has been postponed to Sept. 17, 7-9 p.m.

The show's called "Squint" and the wonderfully-named gallery is at 487 Driggs, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Dates are Sept. 17-Oct. 10.

Shetabi, who's known for his peephole environment pieces shown at Project Room, Locks Gallery and elsewhere in Philadelphia and at White Columns in New York last year, and for his lucious grisaille paintings of things like parking garages and his Voyager minivan, has paintings and a peephole in the show. (image is the particular peephole in the show. It's the piece that was in the "Greater Philadephia" show at Moore College in 2002.)

Shetabi says the peephole piece is modelled on Mary Boone's old Soho space which is now an Adidas store. Shetabi, by the way, is working on his next show at Locks which will be in March.
permanent link  roberta 8:07 PM
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Whazzup with that?

 
Driving up 11th St. the other day after seeing the show at Space 1026 (more on that later) I spotted an anomolous billboard just north of Vine.

I almost didn't see it at first, so small was it, so subtle, and so high up. The billboard sits on top of a rehabbed building at 11th and Pearl and I pulled over long enough to take this shot then drove on scratching my head. (image)

The crisp blue sky, hard edge of the building, unavoidable wires and wispy clouds of the real world were so very real. And the dreamy, black and white image of fog-covered sea with its little peaked rocks was so romantic and unreal I thought it was a perfect yin, yang urban moment.

The billboard might be the opening shot for an upcoming ad for a new beverage. Who knows. But the few moments I took to consider it on a busy work day were moments that made me happy.
permanent link  roberta 5:16 PM
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I'd rather be in Hoboken?

 


Going to Hoboken? Our contributor Colette Copeland has curated a show there for Inliquid and Fotofile called "Death Bizarre."

Some of the artists, who work in photography or video, are familiar names. Here's the list: Andrea Pickens, Lauren Simonutti, Bradley Blackway, Brian Moss, Talia Greene’s photographs, Anita Allyn and Colette herself (image, still from Allyn's "Body Electric").

The show, which explores the theme of death to demystify human experience is at the Almanac Gallery, Sept. 12 to Oct. 3, reception this Sunday, 1 to 4 p.m. Almanac Gallery is located at 1252 Garden Street in Hoboken. Hours are few so call for an appointment and info: phone (201)865-6997, e-mail ben@hobokenalmanac.com



permanent link  libby and roberta 8:49 AM
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Wednesday, September 08, 2004

Wood turn, turn, turns for every purpose under heaven

 


Like the Clay Studio, the Wood Turning Center consistently puts on good shows, brings in non-locals to facilitate the exchange of ideas, and creates a synergy that results in high-quality, original work. These centers also give artists the opportunity to use and experiment with equipment that would exceed what a single artist might afford.

There are a couple of glassblowing studios and photography groups that aim to replicate this kind of cooperation and synergy, but so far, they have not gotten there, but perhaps, given time, they will figure out how to make it happen.

All this is preamble to a report on my visit to the Wood Turning Center's current show, "allTURNatives: Form + Spirit. " The work was generated by wood turners from Australia and the United States who were invited for an eight-week residency entitled the International Turning Exchange, during which time they worked and talked and exchanged and synergized.

The work on display includes pieces created during the actual residency as well as some prior work.

Odes on Grecian urns

I was surprised by the number of artists who made wooden vessels inspired by traditional clay shapes. These fashioners of vases included a local woodworker Michael Podmaniczky, who described himself in his artist's statement as just a wood turner, not an artist. Podmaniczky's "Knot a Vessel" (right) looked like a volcanic cupcake. The horizontal lines of turning on the lathe were a visible statement, the vertical hairline fissures a counterpoint. The merger of the wood's weirdness with the artist's intervention is just right.

Australia's protean Marcus Tatton, made a number of vessel-shapes as well, inspired by amphora. Tatton's "Procreation" (left) was a Greek vase, its base a leafy acanthus-like curlicue inspired by the wood, its top a suggestion of wine "legs" clinging to the lip.

Tatton also was inspired by letters and binary digital symbols, the drawn figures on Greek vases, native art, as well as the wonders of wood and nature (right, "Wood Drops").


Also inspired by traditional vase forms was American Michael Mocho, whose tiny, tiny vessels displayed his ability to make something surprisingly precious out of a material that seems like it might not permit such control.





Body art

American Joel Urruty, on the other hand, was inspired by bodies. His "Waitress" (image top of post) made its point with humor, the whorl of the wood providing a natural nipple to the half-a-torso. Even his "Rocker," (right) evoked body parts.

And Andrew Potocnik, an Australian, who collaborated some with Urruty at ITE in addition to producing his own work, also was inspired by bodies. "Defense Shield 53 (My Hiding Place)" was a beautiful torso shell of wood, hollowed out behind (left). Potocnik's work ranged in a number of other directions as well, some highly polished and formal, some with a sense of humor.



Matthew Harding, an Australian, created meticulous, formal pieces with elegant, smoothly crafted shapes, some of them so finely balanced that they startled with their ability to stand.

The show also included documentary photographs of the woodworkers in action, taken by Linette Messina. I always like to know what artists look like, so these images made me quite happy.

This show will be up until Oct. 23, and it's well worth your while to find your way to 5th and Vine.



permanent link  libby 3:30 PM
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Tuesday, September 07, 2004

Photo road trips

 
"Wish you were here," the postcard writer's cliche, lost its ability to communicate meaningful information a while ago. As a title for a photography show, "WYWH" is equally cloudy.

Not to worry. The photographs in the three-person inLiquid show in the Painted Bride cafe communicate plenty about the world and about the way three young photographers, Brian Connor, Mark Indig and Brian Moss, are seeing it. (top image is Moss's "Nissan 405.")



What I'm showing you here, three shots that focus on infrastructure (a highway, a billboard, a bridge construction) are imbued with a kind of documentary forlorn-ness. You might even think, from what's here, that the three pictures were made by the same person.

Cyberspace lies in many ways and in this case, you can't see that Moss's works (like the top one) are square-format shots.

...Or that Connor's work is large and mounted, unframed on an understructure of aluminum or plexi. (above is Connor's "I really believe in you")

...And that Indig's work is small, framed and under glass. (below is Indig's "Under Construction.")

It makes a difference.



When I saw the show Friday night, inLiquid's John Murphy, who curated it, mentioned that Indig is a location scout for the movies. And it shows. His work, more than the other two artists', felt pregnant with expectation. Cue the closeup and the actors.

There seems to be much forlorn roadside photography in the world these days. It responds to the times -- full of questioning about man's place in the greater scheme of things. It tells me that young artists are worried about the future. These are not happy pictures. But they show minds at work trying to study their way out of the present.

All three artists are inLiquid artists. You can see more images (and see these slightly larger) on their artists' pages on the site.
permanent link  roberta 8:13 AM
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Monday, September 06, 2004

Looking and seeing

 
I'm fascinated by the way people see things. I mean that both in the sense of ocular vision and of cognitive perception.

It's hard to tell from the photo here but a young woman in the 2nd floor gallery of the Clay Studio (see circle and arrow) stood at the window looking out for the longest time.

Actually looking out is the wrong terminology. She was looking inwardly but staring out the window. What was she thinking?

Here's a little story about what I was thinking and about how my sister, Cate, was seeing while on our way to meet Libby and Bay at Painted Bride.

We were going to see the Women Holler and the Inliquid photography exhibits at the Bride and as we walked up the little street behind the art center, Cate stopped me and pointed to the building. "Isn't that great," she said of the play of reflected light from Isaiah Zagar's mirror-crazy mosaic onto the back door of the building.

I asked her if that was a picture because I hadn't even noticed it and certainly hadn't seen its photographic possibilities.

Cate, the photographer, said "Sure."

Since she didn't have her camera with her, I took a picture with mine.(image above)

Then I asked Cate if she wanted to snap one with my camera. She did.

Here's what she took. (image below)


The difference is pronounced. What I took is a documentary type shot that includes the building and some sense of space. While it documents the play of light on the door, you understand what you are seeing. Neat-o, but end of story.

Cate's shot, on the other hand, cropped to what interested her, presents an almost inner vision -- something surreal and beautiful that invites a journey into the world of the mind. You don't need to know the real world framework to get the point of Cate's shot because the point is to create imaginative workspace. The world is irrelevant.



Cate's photographs have always taken the viewer on inner journeys. But not all fine art photographers go inside. Some, like Lisa Spera, whose works we saw Saturday at Highwire, focus on the exterior world.

I especially like this one, called "Love" which shows a dog looking out the window of a door. I wonder what he's thinking.


permanent link  roberta 9:22 AM
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Fantasies on 2nd St.

 
Building Democracy stick by stick at Temple
My sister Cate was in town this weekend and since she was up for some art-going we did the First Friday thing together. Our first stop was Temple Gallery, site of Buster Simpson's soon to be Windsor chair workshop. (See my previous post for a refresher.)



The gallery is in warehouse mode at the moment awaiting the arrival of the Seattle artist this week. Judging from the number of high stacks of wood pallets in the room I'd say Simpson's got ambitions to make many, many fantasy chairs. The project, of course, is about building a seat for everyone at the democratic table -- appropriate this election season. Also appropriate at a time when fewer folks than ever participate in our democracy by voting.

We had a peculiar though typical Philadelphia moment in the gallery revealing the city once again to be the true crossroads of the art world. I was introducing my sister to Sheryl Conkelton the new Temple Gallery Exhibitions Director who arrived here from Seattle recently when Cate said "Hi Sheryl" and Sheryl said "Hi Cate" and it turns out they knew each other from years ago in New York when Conkelton, a photo curator at MOMA* and Cate, who teaches photography at NYU, travelled in some of the same circles.

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to seeing this workshop in action.

Building Fortress Philadelphia at 3rd Street


Across the street, 3rd Street Gallery was crowded and people slowed down and spent time with Architect and Tyler professor John James Pron's socially-themed architectural drawings and maquette. It's unusual to see folks so engaged with work that they stand there reading the handout, studying the drawings and seemingly rooted to the spot creating a traffic jam.

The project is called "Cita-Del of Brotherly Love." And Pron's multi-panel drawings collage news photos of soldiers, tanks and other war images onto drawn city scapes. Loaded with imagery and swirling, nervous pencil-mark build-ups, the drawings pack a kind of Breaking News wallop. (image right)



The thrust of the project, if you read the handout, is biting social satire. What Pron suggests is creation of a gated impenetrable fortress on the Delaware River (Cita-Del) to house everything precious to our democracy -- the Liberty Bell, a bank or two, even Vice President Dick Cheney.

Everyone else would hang out down-river in what Pron calls a "Salon de Refuses." (image left is the maquette)



With its questions about homeland security, freedom and gated communities in a democracy, this is a show you want to see -- to contemplate what sounds like it might be only a slight exaggeration of what the future might bring.



The project reminded me of the wonderful Lebbeus Woods fantasy architecture exhibit at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery some years back in which war and architecture merge into a didactic hybrid that has nothing to do with construction and everything to do with provocation.

Like Buster Simpson's fantasy workshop across the street, Pron's project is a metaphorical construct about what is right or wrong with our world.

Accompanying "Cita-Del" is a group of Pron's large portrait drawings in charcoal of individuals who may or may be included in the walled fortress city. (image above)



Pron's show is paired with oil and acrylic paintings by Carol Albrecht. Albrecht's Grand Canyon Series (image is one from the series), which portrays one of our national treasures, is in nice dialog with Pron's work. The paintings create a fantasy of a pristine wilderness that belongs to all but is unreachable for most.

[*ed note: earlier version of this post said Sheryl Conkelton was at the ICP. That was an error. She was at MOMA.]
permanent link  roberta 6:51 AM
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Sunday, September 05, 2004

First Friday traffic, politics and art

 
Maybe people were transfering their First Friday time to the Fringe Festival, but it seemed awfully quiet in Old City Friday evening.

Other factors affecting the turnout may be the National Hardware parking lot disaster on North Second Street.




The problem on Second Street

The first problem is the fencing in of the fence there (left), previously a popular spot for artists to mount their art en plein air. Now a second fence blocks the sidewalk, a parking lane and a lane of traffic. To put it another way, not only is the outdoor gallery gone, but the sidewalk is gone, parking on the west side of that block is practically eliminated--a disaster in a city where parking is an issue under the best of circumstances--and a busy two lane street now merges into a stop-and-go one-laner, emphasis on the stop.

For all that bad news--another assault on gallery-owners' livelihood by the morphing city--people put up their pro-Kerry voter-registration table (right) near Nexus and the Clay Studio, and tourists gathered around the door to the former "Real World" residence, trying to catch a glimpse of I'm not sure what.



The Cubans

In Gallery Siano, the work of two Cuban-born artists covered the walls. Fuentes Ferrin's surreal paintings and drawings seemed like what "Alice in Wonderland" illustrator John Tennial might have produced had he been raised on Cuban rum. They mixed sweetness and fantasy with soupcons of the grotesque (images, top of post, "Muse in Love," and left, "My Backyard is Private").

The colors in the thinly applied oils tend to hot-house primaries, giving the imagery an innocence that fits the imagery to a tee. The black-and-white drawings are mostly ink on paper, with a couple in pencil (right below, "Filomeno").

The subject matter seems to be love and family and daily life and who knows what else transformed by the magic of imagination and memory. I'd call it magical realism if it were a little more realistic, but what's realistic about that work is not how it looks but the emotions it conveys--the pleasures of relationships and the sense of life as well as people are something to be embraced.

Ferrin is Cuba-educated and has been in the United States only about four years, but has been involved in a number of group shows in Miami since his arrival.

Alex Queral's education was in this country, and Roberta and I had seen his phone-book portraits at the Painted Bride earlier this year in "Used: New Work from Old Things," curated by Shelley Spector (Roberta's post here). Imagine my surprise in finding this newer work was completely abstract--large paintings of straight, hard-edge lines creating space and the illusion of light, expressing a kind of yearning for something beyond. Several of the paintings were either grisaille or monochromatic, and Queral writes, were "influenced by the basic graphic look of comic books."

Queral, who has an MFA from Penn, has taught locally at Moore College and Penn.

Politics and dogs

At LaPelle, W.T. Williams' show, "Eye on America," in the second room of the gallery, crowds the walls with 95 paintings of several ilks.

His collage-like portraits of political figures from the past can barely contain themselves within the canvases on which they are painted. He's got George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Ullysses S. Grant, etc., etc., all dressed up in modern garb and surrounded by images of the money that memorializes them as well as their signatures and portraits from the past.

In this political season, I happily tested myself to see which ones I could recognize. The names of the paintings, eg. "George: 1-1-25" decoded, represent the portrait subject named in the modern way, first name only, with which number president he was (1), which paper currency denomination he ornaments (1), and which coin he ornaments (25) (shown, "Andrew: 7-20-0").
What I liked about these paintings besides their energy, was their way of poking a little fun of the way we have deified these figures from our past and then bringing them into the modern world. In a way, they're puzzle paintings, letting you search through them to find what you can.

But politics weren't Williams' only body of work, which ranges from traditional to pop.

Best in show

Best in show were the iconic doggie portraits, one more wacky and more beautiful than the next. The dogs stare you down, their wrinkly skin becoming formal folds like the fabric drapes on saints in altar tryptichs. Williams surrounds the animals with painted borders and dresses them in outfits befitting their personas.

And speaking of saints, Williams confided that one woman, who had asked him to paint her Rotweiller, said the dog was a saint. "So I painted him like a saint," he said.

I asked him if the dogs sat still for their portraits, but Williams said he worked from photos. "Of course they're not dressed," he said of the dogs in the photos.

Anyway, I'd commission a painting of my dog if I had a dog and were a dog person. These capture the doting dog lover's idolization of their pooches with some humor that undercuts a kitschiness so extreme it gathers gravitas.

In the front room at Lapelle were encaustic sepia-toned nudes by Leah MacDonald that come straight out of Victorian nudie photographs. The technique was great, the subject matter questionable. But I suspect there are folks out there who might eat this up (urp, excuse me) (left, "Cloud").



Portraits of metal

I also want to mention some paintings of machinery and abandoned-looking metal junk by Ed Marston at Muse Gallery. Marston got in a touch of politics in "Exit Strategy," a painting of an old, found rusty exit sign. He said he was referring to the lack of exit strategy in Iraq.


Other outstanding pieces included "Norman's Garage" (left) and "Blast Furnace." The quality of his junk piles and abandoned or non-standard spaces were filled with unexpected color and compassion.


permanent link  libby 11:24 AM
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