artblog

Friday, September 24, 2004

Artblog takes a rest

 
It's a Jewish holiday--lots of time to think about what to post next. Back on Sunday. (Roberta's still out of town.)
permanent link  libby 4:09 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Two art stars take a walk in space

 
Laura Owens and Yinka Shonibare--two big names in the art world--are at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, showing work made in residency there. Owens was one of the artists included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and Shonibare is one of four Turner Prize finalists for 2004 (the winner to be announced in December).

Space walk

Shonibare's installation, "Space Walk," shows a man and woman floating in an imaginary deep space (they're hanging from the ceiling, and their space ship is reduced to a photo projected on the wall). They are connected to eachother by a tube and they are not connected to the space ship.

But they are out there in style--covered in beautifully tailored space suits made of dazzlingly busy prints with words and images from African-American pop culture icons, mainly from the Philly Sound era. There are the Delfonics and the O'Jays for example. And then there are non-Philly sound representatives like James Brown and Billie Holliday. And in a nod to the art world there's David Hammons. The fabric and sewing were created in collaboration with the Fab.

If you look at the backbpacks and the connecting tube, you then notice that the astronauts are carrying their own stars on their backs into space (just in case you hadn't made that connection just looking at the suit fabric). Love it.

As I was looking I began to wonder if the famous Golden Record sent into space on Voyager included some of the Philly Sound. I didn't find a complete list of the music included, but here's a smattering: Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode"; "Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground," a 1922 song by Blind Willie Johnson; Mozart's "Magic Flute"; a Zairian Pygmy girls' initiation song; and a shakuhachi piece from Japan. Well, that's pretty diverse.

But that Golden Record was so spare. Not these two, ready to populate space with their own version of the culture we ought to be sharing. And why not? Or better yet, why share either the Golden Record or the Philly Sound? Is it just an attempt at communication or really cultural imperialism?

Are these two astronauts supposed to be dark skinned? I couldn't tell--maybe that's one of Shonibare's points--since they were covered with fabric and black bubblehead helmets. He's always been a clothes make the man kind of thinker.

Somehow, the implications in Shonibare's older work (image, not from this show)--detailed Victorian garb made in African-influenced fabric that really has European roots displayed on headless dark-skinned mannequins--finds its targets more easily than these space walkers do.

Part of that older body of work is included in the show. Two headless Victorian-era school boys sit at a desk, one with white chalk writing on a blackboard, the white inkwells spattered with black ink. The piece, again with the jazzy fabrics tailored to the nines, raises any number of race and cultural, as well as political, imperialism issues.

But my favorite piece of Shonibare's was a series of 12 photos in which Shonibare inserts himself as Dorian Gray in a number of tableaux from the story. His presence is a sharp reminder of just how Anglo the assumptions of our lives and our literature are.

Shonibare also showed a grid of squares of stretched, patterned fabric altered with paint--a kind of dialogue between western art traditions and the wild fabrics. It felt like filler and noodling, not finished work.

The artist was born and lives in London and was one of the artists included in the controversial "Sensation" show that then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani tried to shut down at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Lost in space

Owens, a Los Angeles painter (see post below), has stretched seven large pieces of highly textured raw silk that she had silkscreened and embroidered in collaboration with the Fab. The work lacks the juicy energy of her paintings. The luscious texture of the silk and the embroidery are all but lost to the silkscreened imagery and the scale of the pieces and the huge gallery space.

The seriality here reminds me of de Chirico's multiple versions of paintings, with a change in color here, a change in definition there, but more or less the same painting over and over (but then, it is a print, and that's how prints work).

I especially like the way the embroidery supplied hatch and cross-hatch details to lend dimensionality to flat areas.

Otherwise, the work, which is somewhat impersonal and highly decorative, because of Owens' formalist and aesthetic powers, still manages beauty and energy, with its references to Japanese screen prints and storybook illustrations.


The tree is a terrific gesture. I'm not sure I buy the expression of the passing of time and seasons, which seem tacked on as an afterthought.

Stretching this work like a canvas undermines its essential fabric-y luxuriousness, and places it in the paint world, where it just doesn't deliver. I'd like to see it off the stretchers.
permanent link  libby 9:32 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Thursday, September 23, 2004

Obscure (in the best sense) and clear

 
Post by Meredith Weber

"Back to the Front" at the Slought Foundation is a new show featuring the work of emerging artists from the Philadelphia area (see Colette's post for more on this show). Many of the pieces are imaginative, and well worth the trip to University City.

Jessica Mein's "Calvino-Senhor Palomar Series," (detail above right) is the piece that offers the most visual and intellectual satisfaction. Mein's piece consists of several small canvases arranged in a grid-like format. Text covers the canvases (which are presumably from writer Italo Calvino's "Senhor Palomar"). Mein has obscured most of the print with a coat of cream-colored paint and haphazardly applied lines of white-out. The artist expands on her theme of cloaking, by carving small cut-outs of windows and doors into the layers of paper. Some of the windows open slightly towards us, allowing us to peek into the piece, but for the most part, the blinds are drawn and the text further obscured.

We are left dealing with multiple levels of obstruction. What words Mein has not covered with paint are in a language unfamiliar to most of us, so even the untouched is hard to interpret. She speaks of a world where we do not truly see much of what is in front of us. Mein's piece blends into the white walls of the gallery, so that from afar, we do not even realize that there is an incomprehensible literal under-layer.


Another piece from the exhibit that is worth checking out is Jennifer Goettner's playful "Signs of Life" (left).The work, drastically different from Mein's (and most of the other pieces in the show), is a series of bright road-like signs showing line figures carrying out some of the mundane actions that form our daily activities. Goettner clearly enjoyed making the observations that she translated into her art. The work is not particularly insightful, but it displays a sense of fun that is lost in much of the art that we see nowadays.

--Meredith Weber is a student at the University of Pennsylvania in Colette Copeland's class on writing about art.
permanent link  libby and roberta 1:31 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Through the eyes of a child

 
Post from Sanja Benak



[Editor's note: artblog will be running a number of pieces from students in Colette Copeland's "Syntax of Art Writing" class at the University of Pennsylvania.]

At first, Pepon Osorio's "Trials and Turbulence" installation at the Institute of Contemporary Art doesn't give you the impression of art at all, up until you give it a second glance and see much more to it than expected.

Everything is placed to reflect the gradual process which a foster child has to go through when looking for a new home.

As you walk in, you see the cubicle (image above right) where the child probably spends some time just talking about his/her case with a social worker. Then the case goes to the offices, where the child's future is passed around on a bunch of papers for a very long period of time. During this time, all that a child can do is put his/her life on hold, and just ! wait with all the belongings packed and expect the good news - that may never come. Then in court, the child's life keeps being invaded by so many people who try to do the best they can, but who can never actually understand what is going on in this child's head and can never fullfill all the needs a child has.

Osorio carefully walks us through the different stages of a foster child's life and opens up our mind to something we hardly even think about. (For more posts on Osorio's installation, go here for Libby's post and here for Colette's post.)

--Sanja Benak is a student in Colette Copeland's "Syntax of Art Writing" class.
permanent link  libby and roberta 1:27 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Up close process

 
Los Angeles painter Laura Owens came to town for the Fabric Workshop and Museum's exhibition of her work produced as an artist-in-residence there, and about 100 people showed up to hear what she had to say (image left, installation shot of "Untitled," 5 and 6 of and edition of 7 variants, at the Fab; each one of the pieces is 69 1/2" x 50").

Mostly she talked about her process at the Fab, working with three embroiderers--Courtney Hager, Candace Lathrop and Lauren Durgin--and project coordinators Olivia Schreiner and Candy DePew.

She talked about picking the fabric--an Indian raw silk heavily textured enough to overcome the super-flat quality of silk screening.

She then did a combo drawing and painting and, with the help of the Fab team, transferred it to Mylars. The silkscreen process involved six colors and 12 enormous screens. Mostly, she felt that working so indirectly was a great mental challenge--for example, thinking about the six colors to get the final colors. It was an observation of a painter used to mixing colors and putting them right on the canvas.

Once they made one silkscreen image, they said, well, might as well make some more, said Schreiner, who also talked a little about the process.

Then Owens made a kind of map of the embroidery stitches she wanted to add to each print. She marked on the map the stitch type, the color and the number of threads. Shreiner quipped that it was sort of like embroidery by numbers.

Ownes said once she saw what the embroiderers could do, then she was off and running, figuring out how to make each of the prints different via embroidery (right, detail).

Most amazing was the info the embroiderers offered of making the clouds using a technique called couching that involves long, long stitches, more than one placed in each hole, that ultimately get tacked down every three or four inches. If the stitches were not perfectly in line with the threads of the silk, then they wouldn't lie properly.

Owens expressed admiration for all the people she worked with. She looked (to me) quite young, and was dressed in a poplin, khaki suit and matching sneakers. Her horned-rim glasses and her straight hair parted at the side and pulled back on the top with a barrett, giving her a sort of no-nonesense, modest image.

I was also interested in Owens' discussion of fabric as paintings, a comment that also speaks to the Yinka Shonibare exhibit upstairs at the Fab.

What Owens said she admired about her Fab pieces was the "amazing quality of being up close," and since she gets the opportunity to take one of the pieces home for herself, she said she was looking forward to seeing how it would look in a domestic space.

She didn't have much to say about why she chose the imagery she chose other than to say she made a decision when she was in school to just paint what she felt like painting. I accepted this information as sincere and not in the least evasive, and I add that comment simply because if I had read that an artist had said that, I would have assumed they were being disingenuous. (Perhaps that says more about me than about the artist.)
permanent link  libby 5:03 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Slought gets down

 
Post by Colette Copeland

Slought Gallery's "Back to the Front: Emerging Artists" exhibition, deviates from the gallery's mission, which is to engage philosophical and theoretical concerns with contemporary art practice. The result--the emerging/emerged artist show is one of the most visually accessible exhibitions to date.


Highlights include Tamara Kostianovsky's "Hair Map" (image right), previously exhibited in the Window on Broad Street. Human hair 'populates' an outline of the United States, mounted on Plexi-Glas to create a three-dimensional, visceral quality. The work lends itself to many interpretations, leaving the viewer to ponder implications of DNA testing, population census and national identity.

Ben Volta's video "Airplane Hymn" (image left), depicts a group of people pelting a woman with paper airplanes. The setting is a corporate lobby with high, vaulted ceilings and floor to ceiling windows. Standing stoically still, the woman is holding a clear plastic umbrella, apparently oblivious to the bombardment/attack. The paper airplanes sound like bombs or gunshots as they hit the floor. The tonal underscore evokes an apocalyptic feeling. The scene is both absurd and disturbing.




Other highlights include Joseph Hu's ephemeral images entitled, "Just Telling Me, He Tells Me" (image right), Jennifer Goettner's ironic "Signs of Life: Iconography of Urban Gestures" (image top of post), Jessica Mein's delicate deconstruction/ reconstructions of text entitled, "Calvino-Senhor Palomar Series," Mauro Zamora's painting, "Yellow is the Color of Death" (image below left) and T.C. Moore's reverberating sound piece, "That Which is Known & Unknown."


A final quibble: Emerging artist is one of those nebulous terms bantered about in the art world. Many artists (myself included) wonder when the magnanimous shift occurs from emerging to established. Is it possible for an artist to be emerging for the duration of her/his career? Reviewing the roster of artists in the show, many are well known in the Philly art scene, if not at the national or international level.

--Colette Copeland teaches at the University of the Arts and the University of Pennsylvania

permanent link  libby and roberta 4:10 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Outtahere

 
I'm off to the Midwest today -- business and family. Back next week. Libby has her firm hand on the artblog rudder. Sail on me hearties.
permanent link  roberta 7:46 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Bohr and order

 
Vox Populi member Doug Bohr's solo exhibit in two rooms at Vox Populi is a spare, elegant hot-air balloon ride over the earth delivered through maps, a found book, and a few nicely-placed sculptural objects.

To call the exhibit minimal doesn't really get to the heart of it although there is a restraint that borders on zen understatement.

Bohr's maps -- free-hand renderings in gold leaf and gouache on mylar -- interpret demographic information about the world's resources and populations. They feel like they're from a Victorian gentleman's museum, one fueled by a quest to know the world, to research, catalog, cull, interpret and exhibit the results of some obsessive study. And indeed the artist told me he's a long-time collector of atlases



Even without the labels -- "Major Wheat Harvest," "Lesser Gross National Product, Illiteracy and Mortality," etc. -- I knew I was in Mercator map territory, so familiar are the suggestions of continents and the scatter-plot like effect of the data.

There's social commentary here, of course, most pronounced in the sculpture -- a foot rest made of cast plaster and wax that holds a regal red velvet pillow and a group of cast plastic bullhorns. (top image) The pillow has the word "order" screenprinted on it and in the context of the bullhorns the word's meanings are plentiful -- world order, law and order, orderly protest -- it's all in there.



In another piece, "Self Reliance," Bohr has photographed a number of open pages from Emerson's book. The framed photographs run across the wall and make a beautiful horizontal strip of color that is a counterpoint to the more free-form-looking maps.

The book is a found book, and it's been heavily marked with highlighter by the previous owner, perhaps a student -- at any rate a serious reader trying to figure it out and learn. The piece is a great counterpoint to the maps and sculpture.

Where "Order's maps took me was into the world of connections -- globalism in all its good and bad meanings. That's a place where we sink or swim together.

"Self Reliance" on the other hand, goes to a particularly American philosophy, one that has been distilled and parodied into a jingoistic isolationism and a "let them pull themselves up by their own boot straps" attitude which, our, ahem, political leaders seem to be relying on in our foreign policy these days.

Anyway, go check out the show and think about the world. The artist gives a gallery talk tomorrow night at 6:30 p.m.
permanent link  roberta 7:41 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Bad girl videos from the fab Patty Chang

 

I went to the Fabric Workshop and Museum to see the Yinka Shonibare and Laura Owens work but what I wasn't expecting, not having noticed any promotional materials on it, were videos from performance artist Patty Chang. I'll get back to Shonibare and Owens later.

The 14 videos, dating from 1998 to 2001, show Chang fiercely defying any notion of dignity and decorum.

My first take was this was a woman who had zero patience with any stereotypical ideas of Asian womanhood. Chang is outrageous in a gigantic nursing-mother sized bra, one side open to reveal, instead of a breast, a halved melon which she scoops out with a spoon and inserts in her mouth mercilessly (image top, a still from "Melons (At a Loss)," 1998).

When I went to download a still from this video, I got popped into some damned sex site, a place where all Chang's fierceness and comic self-abuse and irony were clearly lost. But to people in the more usual range of sexual interest, my guess is that Chang would not come across here as sexy. What I got out of this was an absolute determination to make fun of that abusive version of sexy, to shock and even offend.

I've read some stuff comparing Chang to self-abuse artists a la Chris Burden and Marina Abramovic (image right), but I don't think that's what's going on here, even though Chang names Abromovic [sic.] in one of her titles. Chang's self-abuse does not veer (at least in the videos I saw) into harming herself.

Rather, she's play-acting at the self-abuse. This is an important difference, because she's more about showing her viewer her darkest side, thereby liberating herself from her viewer's expectations. I don't get that sense of seeking to reach a higher plane of psychological or religious ecstacy through self-abuse that Abramovic gives.

Because she's play-acting, the videos have a sense of humor at the same time that they are somewhat repelling. A melon in a nursing bra is just too funny. In "Contortion," (image left) she plays an Asian sphynx with a sexy self-absorption. The legs come from another performer whose upper half is hidden, creating the illusion of one contorted body moving with a mocking languor. I especially loved the orchid behind Chang's ear, her half-shut eyes, and the red circus costume, again playing on stereotypes of sexiness.

Another video showed her face and its reflection in a mirror. When her lips move to slurp the water pooled invisibly at first on the mirror, it becomes clear that the mirror must be face up even though it looks like it's upright. What starts as a gesture resembling kissing herself escalates into vigorous slurping of the water, until empty spots begin to form on the mirror, the mappy edges of the water distorting Chang's face--a disfigurement that's only mirror-deep, but what a perfect backdrop for questioning beauty and vanity (image right, "Fountain"). I somehow missed that this mirror was on the floor of a public bathroom, but I read that somewhere later. Eeeuw.

There were a couple of videos of Chang kissing unexpected partners--another woman and in the other an older man and an older woman who are her parents--and passing an onion from mouth to mouth as they weep, and there were a couple of videos with a false perspective where she ends up walking and falling on a waterbed disguised (barely) as grass in a field--it reminded me of Wyeth's "Christina's World," especially when she toppled on to the grass--or as carpeting in an office hallway. One of these each was enough for me, and maybe because I saw it first, or maybe because of Chang's suit and high heels, I liked the office hallway version better.

A movie of her making love or struggling with a blow-up doll in a pool reminded me of a Pipilotti Rist video which I had seen at the Fab as well. Chang's background music was "This is dedicated to the one I love;" Rist's background music was Chris Isaac's "Wicked Game." Although the music in Rist's video is a renunciation of love, there she is immersed in sensually lit water, floating around. Although Chang's music is a paeon to love, she's fiercely entangling with the doll in ways that suggest frustration and anger more than love. And Chang is dressed in white cotton good girl underwear for this.

I especially loved "Death of Game," in which Chang, looking quite boyish and punchy, looks and acts like Jackie Chan (her name in movie, Mulan Rouge) with Roy, a weak, long skinny guy with a 'fro and wispy beard and kissy lips--more gender bending. It's a take-off on not a Jackie Chan but a Bruce Lee movie, "Game of Death," starring Kareem Abdul Jabar, and apparently was included in the Studio Museum in Harlem's "Black Belt" show (see our posts here and here) but I somehow missed it then.

"Calendar Girl" didn't have a live human, but rather a cheesecake calendar, a fan blowing the pages up so Miss October's torso is above December's sexy legs, and the action of the blowing pages call up Marilyn Monroe and the blowing skirt over the sidewalk grate. Miss December's legs are backed by another pair of legs--perhaps a woman's. I was dying to see what that bottom image really was. But all I got was a titillating peek as the fan made the calendar pages flutter.

But my favorite of all was Chang, propped up in a prissy, upright position against a wall (she's on the floor, but that's not clear at first), wearing a short, tailored skirt and a blouse buttoned high. It turns out that inside her shirt are eels, although you can't see that they are eels. She has to poke the eels to rally them from torpor. Their sinuous wriggling and her hands suggest auto-eroticism as well as discomfort, and she pants and moans as the eels wriggle inside her shirt. Her legs she squeezes together much of the time, holding the slit in her skirt down and shut, except she's got a fan that counters the action. Again, the tension between revulsion and eroticism is terrific, and the story you can make up as you watch the video can go either way, depending on your inclination (image, "Untitled (Eels)").

I missed pieces of two of the videos, and I totally missed one in which she shaves her pubic hair while blindfolded. I'll have to go back.

Overall, Chang's willingness to transgress norms of behavior and appearance give the videos a zing, and her preoccupation with the sexual tension of non-sex creates a sort of story that carries the viewer along. The climax never comes, but it's worth waiting for.
This show will be up until Nov. 6.

By the way, Laura Owens will be giving a gallery talk tonight at the Fab at 6 p.m.


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

Alice in giant land

 
Like many things in Philadelphia, Girard College is a first. It's the first private boarding school for underpriviledged children. Established in 1848 by Stephen Girard, revolutionary war era philanthropist, the school's gated campus, like many things built 150 years ago, is dotted with grand buildings with overscale architecture and wondrous, decorative details.

Founders Hall, (pictured right), with an entry door that is scaled for giants and a pillared porch suitable for presidential oratory, dwarfs the humans who scale its marble steps.



What better place for art by Tristin Lowe -- Girard College's first artist in residence -- that deals with the scale of objects and with issues relating to children and the child within us all. (pictured left and right below are Lowe's inflatible "Alice" and the installation in Founder's Hall)

Lowe is a Pew fellow known for his dark vision of a world of playful objects that tower over humans and in one memorable show at Project Room, objects that mimic life's and the body's less-than exalted tendencies. (there's a link to my Philadelphia Weekly review of the show on the PR page).



In his new exhibit in the Founders' Hall, Lowe presents a few big old things and some big -- and little -- new work. There's nothing really human scale about any of it, yet its rootedness in the world of people and objects made by and for people allows a great interplay about construction, play, and the growth of children.

"fe fi fo fum," is a journey into the odd, the off-putting, the comical, the sweet and the deliciously yucky.



Two inflatibles, Alice and the Pink elephant create the context for the work, standing guard, mascots to the unruly small chunks of architectural toys on the floor. There are several wall pieces made from what looks like leftovers from the object-making.

The new big kahuna is a colossal chair (shown below). It's a canvas and wood slingback recreation of a classic beach chair that's so understated it almost disappears into the ether.



In the face of the pink elephant, the cyclopsian Alice and the floor littered with little combination Lego-house/doggy chew-toys, the canvas chair is a moment of quiet, a wallflower to engage the eye and mind after it's done digesting the raucous rest of the show.

Like the best playrooms for children who are both good and bad, this space evokes wonders and secrets -- candy and stomach aches; prayers and curses; the wonders and the horrors of having a body.

There's a clear plastic storage box that seems to contain the remains of the "puking man." One can only imagine the smell. The impulse to save this particular work, in an archive-friendly box, is so anti-art I laughed out loud.



And, sticking its nose in where it is not really wanted, a reminder of the body's revolting aspects, is a sculpture of a big hairy proboscis, a mountain of a thing. (shown left)

It sits enthroned on a pedestal looking for all the world like a cave with twin entrances waiting for some unsuspecting creatures to wander in and be gobbled up.

For another hit of Tristan, check Libby's post which has a picture of another of the artist's chairs. This smaller chair -- human scale -- is also in the Girard show and is also a wallflower. The artist pointed it out to me before I even noticed it amongst all the giants and minis.

Founder's Hall is at 2101 S. College Ave. The show is open Thursdaya, Fridays, Saturdays, noon-5 p.m. For more information, 215-787-2680. Here are some directions from the college's website.
permanent link  roberta 8:05 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Monday, September 20, 2004

More on comic book crewel

 
I was wondering about a thing or two after I wrote the previous post on Xiang Yang, so I talked to gallerist Shelley Spector.

The show included 72 pieces, and the images come out of popular magazines and other pop culture sources. If the tension on the threads is uneven, they will sag or pull, so Xiang stays focused on each piece until it is completed. Some of the pieces take four of five days (and he does eat and sleep; he just doesn't switch to another project or put the project aside).

I had been thinking about how this was such labor-intensive work, and that the lunch bowls and embroidery made me of all the factory workers in China manufacturing clothes.

Xiang, a native of China (he earned his bachelor's degree in painting and mural painting and his master's in art criticismm, there), now hails from South Philadelphia. He still doesn't speak English. "He brings a translator with him, usually his wife," Spector said.
permanent link  libby 6:30 PM
Comments? Let us know. 

Sunday, September 19, 2004

Earnest youth and comic book crewel at Spector

 

If you're not familiar with the portraits of Rebecca Westcott, you can see them this month at Spector Gallery.

Westcott's portraits of young adults--her crowd--against fairly blank backgrounds capture their earnestness, their tentativeness, and their everyday clothes. Unlike Elizabeth Peyton, who's working the same age group and paints only the cool, flattened stares of languid youth posing for Ralph Lauren, Westcott gets personal.


I also like the contrast between traditional portraiture--of people who can pay for their likenesses--and these pictures of the young, not-yet-successful who are still a little unformed (like the backgrounds) and finding their way in the world. Most portraits of young people come out of art school, practice ventures for the artist-in-training. But these are accomplished paintings with a point of view.


In the back room are the unusual three-dimensional embroideries by Xiang Yang. Xiang sews using a crewel technique through bowl-shaped plastic takeout containers so the same cartoony image is on the front and back. Inside the container, between the two images is the linking part of the thread, which creates a kind of stretch image that brings up comicbook and cartoon representations of speed.

The work raises the issues of how a 2-D representation distorts 3-D and just what dimensionality is. The elongated images remind me of wooden jigsaw pieces, the flat front image taking on a thickness that makes not a lot of sense to the eye.

I couldn't help but wonder about the labor involved in these pieces. What if two stitches are too close to one another, and create a too-big hole? How about the effort of keeping the two images totally parallel on a surface that curves? But I love the materials--the weird plastic bowls, the embroidery thread that usually implies a fussy, decorative motif, not the comics.

Both shows are worth a visit.


permanent link  libby 9:05 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Sillman ramps it up at ICA

 
ICA's fall shows all deserve a lot of ink -- they're great.

See my review of Pepon Osorio's "Trials and Turbulence in this Wednesday's Weekly (PW). Libby and Colette weighed in on Osorio in their posts here and here.


I have a few reactions to Amy Sillman's ramp piece, the seventh art installation in that narrow, difficult, high-ceilinged walkway between the first and second floor galleries.



Sillman, a painter with a rising profile, was featured in the Whitney Biennial and locally in the group show, "affect," at Ursinus College (see Libby's post for more on that show). Sillman paints a kind of abstracted figuration that reminds me of kid's paintings (I've got a basement full of em). I can't say I've seen much of it in person but what I have seen seems inner fueled to a degree that excludes me the viewer.

The colors run to pastels and the brush work ranges from scribble-scrabble brushy to restrained calligraphy -- and that can be all in one piece, as it is, actually, here on the ramp.



Sillman's ICA offering, "Procession," combines black or white painted silhouettes of figures, birds and a tree showcased on bright yellow backgrounds. The figures, influenced, the artist said at the opening, by her trip to the Egypt wing of the Penn archaeology museum, do evoke the processionals one thinks of as Egyptian funerary art.

The piece also includes a large field of abstraction into which one particularly large, black, female figure seems to disappear. The whole has a nice locomotive ambiance which works well with the fact of the ramp which is a people-moving-corridor.



Sillman, a salt-and-pepper-haired 40-something artist who frequently works small and intimate in scale confided she was terrified with her charge to paint on a large, 92' long space, something she called "a mind blowing challenge."

"I faced it [the task, the wall] with extreme terror," she said, continuing, "With Pepon's thing going on downstairs and that was so really incredible, I said..."what am I doing here?"

But, inspired by the Egyptian art, she made some small drawings, scaled them up and started working, going "off the grid" frequently, she said, and into more exploratory explosions.

The artist, now seduced by working big, wondered out loud, half-jokingly, whether she'd ever work small again!

As for me, I have to say this is my favorite Amy Sillman to date. It has a clarity of purpose and plays with the space in a way that's cheery and inviting to me, the viewer, to partake of its painterly search for meaning. Also, I'm a sucker for yellow.
permanent link  roberta 8:44 AM
Comments? Let us know. 

Osorio's videos and the job of the artist

 
Post by Colette Copeland

"Trials & Turbulence"--Pepon Osorio's new installation at the ICA--explores the fractured intersection between the private sector and government agencies.

Osorio participated in a three-year residency with the Department of Human Services, working with social workers and administrators focusing on the foster care programs. Creating large-scale environmental tableaux, Osorio transforms the ICA galleries to resemble DHS office cubicles (image above), and a family courtroom. As in the artist's previous work, Osorio fuses community and art, questioning the role of both art and artist (see Libby's take on Osorio's installation here).

The tableaux overwhelm the viewer with found objects, photographs and artifacts, depicting the personalities/identities of the employees. The architecture repeatedly suggests containment/imprisonment.

The room's center contains a large meshed wire receptacle, stacked with furniture and personal effects taken from DHS's storage facilities. The accumulated remains trigger a feeling of claustrophobia in the space.

The second room features a courtroom complete with faux stone, red curtains, witness stand and judge's bench. Enclosed in the courtroom's center is a glass vessel containing another tableau of a bathroom strewn with Barbie dolls, and toiletry items (image left).

Osorio utilizes video strategically throughout the space. The videos activate the architecture with a sense of life. Without the human presence, the installation remains static and dead--a Memento Mori, with the objects representing the people.

Each of the cubicles displays a video of a female child shaking her head in a repetitive gesture. The blurred image evokes beauty, while the gesture reveals a disturbing/manic tension. The disembodied, yet ethereal head floating on the computer screen, is the ghost of children past, present and future. In a conference room/holding cell, a video portraying a man performing the same repetitive gesture as the small girl, references the breakdown/failure of the government system.

Projected onto a window shade above one of the cubicles, is a video of a worker asleep at her desk. The poignant image speaks to the frustration and emotional exhaustion of the job.

Buried inside the wire receptacle amongst the abandoned belongings, an old TV displays interviews with social workers and employees speaking about their experiences.

Dividing the cubicle from the courtroom is a wall of wooden boards blocking entrance into a darkened room (image right). Viewers are able to peek through the slats, glimpsing a wall-size projection of a boy running away. Like the looped videos of the young girl and man, this video is abstracted with the identity blurred, alluding to the many people whose lives are affected by the system.

The courtroom features two additional videos. In the glass vessel, projected onto a shower curtain, a young woman speaks about her experiences in many different foster homes. Visible from the front and behind (reflected into the medicine cabinet mirror), this video is particularly powerful. Osorio effectively addresses issues of public vs. private space. We become the woman's confidantes, simultaneously in the privacy of her bathroom and the public space of the courtroom. The other video resides on the judge's podium and shows hands slowly turning pages in a dictionary. The place where the gavel hits the desk, contains an image of a child's hand.

Pepon Osorio's complex installation asks us to question how art functions in our society and the role of the artist as a member of the community. By revealing the humanity within the public sector, Osorio's work critiques the effectiveness of our social service agencies and asks us to look at those whose lives slip between the cracks.

--Colette Copeland makes videos and installations

permanent link  libby 8:01 AM
Comments? Let us know.