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Friday, October 22, 2004

Traipsing down I-95

 
Well we're off again. This time to Baltimore for the SPE Conference where we'll be reviewing portfolios and listening to keynote speaker Nancy Burson discuss her ground-breaking photography which morphed several images into one composite. (image is not us. It's "First and Second Beauty Composites." First Composite: Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelley, Sophia Loren, and Marilyn Monroe. Second Composite: Jane Fonda, Jacqueline Bisset, Diane Keaton, Brooke Shields, and Meryl Streep. 1982)

We'll catch you up this weekend.
permanent link  libby and roberta 8:56 AM
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Bizareness alert!

 
Post by Jon Coplon


Matthew Barney’s video art"Cremaster 3: The Order" is now available on DVD. Not only that, you can rent Cremaster online at netflix. [Ed. note: Rent all the DVDs you want for $17.99 a month, says the website. Cremaster is in the Special Interest category.]

Synopsis: as "Cremaster 3: The Order" begins, chaos ensues. A pink, walrus-like protagonist clad in argyle (shown) takes you on an adventure through New York's Guggenheim Museum. Up and down the ramp he encounters a pink cheetah-woman; two rival punk bands (with mosh pits); the Rockettes and a lone artist (played by Richard Serra) playing with gobs of hot vaseline.

If you’re bored with your daily grind or just want a challenge, I recommend it. And for a warm-up, check out the trailers for the entire series on the artist’s all Cremaster all the time promotional website.
--Jon Coplon is a student in Colette Copeland's class on art writing at the University of Pennsylvania.



permanent link  libby and roberta 7:05 AM
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Moon crescent, mood Indigo

 
Post by Matthew Abess


Shining through each of Susan Rodriguez’s many works in the exhibit "Stealing Water from the Moon" at Indigo Arts gallery is a distinct interest the mysticism of sensual bonds and interactions. The multi-media works, mostly pastel collages and ink and stamp scrolls, display a deft fusion of varying artistic traditions – French, Tibetan, Indian and Japanese – and reveal the artist's keen interest in the intrinsic, sacred beauty of the human form.

In her pastels, Rodriguez employs bright colors (reminiscent of Matisse’s Fauvism), working into her compositions an aura of sensuality and mystery that is augmented by Eastern motifs and fabrics. Of particular notice is “Moontalk,” (shown above) in which a couple, lit by a cut paper moon, reclines languidly upon a field of yellow, green and rouge. Though relatively small (the work is not much larger than standard letter paper), it evokes the charged sacredness of human longing and companionship.

The motif of seasons and nature plays a central role in most of the works. The ink and scroll “Crescent Moon,” for example, draws on traditional Eastern styles depicting the waxing (or perhaps waning) embrace of two nude lovers under an offset … well, crescent moon. The artist toys with humanity’s relation to nature, focusing primarily on its many reflections in the natural world.

"Stealing Water From the Moon" is at once invitingly voyeuristic and alluringly confrontational as it investigates human beauty through a fusion of cross-cultural aesthetic traditions. Ultimately, it is a fulfilling exploration of both direct and underlying sacredness.

On a side note, it is a shame that the exhibition space doubles as a retail establishment (price tags are mounted beside each work); it can be difficult to enjoy art that champions apparently sacred motifs when it is all, in reality, so readily available for sale. Stealing Water From the Moon is on display through October 31, 2004.

--Matthew Abess is a student in Colette Copeland's class on art writing at the University of Pennsylvania.
permanent link  libby and roberta 6:52 AM
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Thursday, October 21, 2004

Code green

 
If you're on overload from the simplistic approach to the politics that are bombarding us daily on the tv screen, the telephone, the email, and wherever you walk, you might appreciate the delicacy of choices in "The Color Green Exhibition" at the Esther Klein Gallery.

The show mostly steers clear of save-the-environment didactics while still touching on green planet issues--and so much more.

The 11-artist show has wit, variety, beauty, and deep thoughts, and I'm not talking Jacques Cousteau and the dolphins here.

John Dilg's oil paintings are greenish monochromes that offer mystery along with their reductive meditations on biomorphic shapes. The small works, which are beautiful and compelling, bring to mind Joan Miro, the drawings in St. Exupery's "Le Petit Prince" and cave paintings. Dilg, a professor at the University of Iowa, is a former Fulbright Scholar as well as an NEA grant recipient (top, "Man Gove").

Videos

To continue the video blitz we've been covering lately, two artists offer terrific
short-short digital videos, so short they gobble up not much more time than the non-videos.


Hedwige Jacobs, a Philadelphian from the Netherlands, shows "Growing Grass," a cheery-looking animation of little figures dancing their way through life as grass gradually grows over them. The affect may be upbeat but the content touches on such downbeat subjects as entropy, the limits of life, and the ultimate power of nature to cover over what has been (left, "Growing Grass").


Juliana Forero, a Colombian who resides in Florida, quick cuts in her video "Nature" through a series of commercial stills. Then a solid green screen comes up and holds or else shifts through different shades of green. The greens range from computer kelly green to a bluey tropical shade. Next to the commercials, the greens can almost pass for nature and peacefulness--but of course that's a big lie (right, "Nature").

Under the bell jar

We've got not one but two artists showing bell jars.


Rebecca Chamberlain puts pretend nature under glass--bell jars within bell jars preserving the ersatz with a cheerful kitschiness that charms with its rueful layers of jokes (left, "Kawaii/Tete a Tete - Twin Series: Deers").







In contrast, Vaughn Bell's installation shows a series of Plexiglas domes filled with real plants. He also shows documentation of having placed the terrariums in places denuded of nature (right, "Introduction of a Green Horizon" detail).

Both these artists are about preservation and nature, but Chamberlain's take is richer. The cultural artifacts she uses--plastic animals, for example--have become what we treasure above the real thing. We are preserving a plastic, manufactured, self-deluded world.


Also of note were the four pieces by Keiko Myamori. The three "Shoe Tree" pieces are shrine-like, offering ritualistic traces of the tracks we leave behind--except tree rubbings, not feet, made the tracks, and our real tracks are embodied in the shoe trees, formerly parts of real trees. The serial numbers on her washi paper made me think of lives and trees felled, a statement about the value of life, be it animal or vegetable (from left to right, "Shoe Tree - woman," "Small Shoe Tree" and "Shoe Tree - man").


Colin Brant's landscape paintings are charmingly unnatural and stunningly green, green, green. Their storybook quality and exaggerated perfection tip Brant's hand. He's clearly got something other than mere landscape painting in mind. A man next to me burst out laughing while looking for the yellow orioles in his "Yellow Orioles Warble High in Shadowy Summer Woods" (image, right). The birds are not the only things missing in our real landscapes.

And if you try to find the models in an entymology book for Lisa Murch's multi-media dream insects pinned to the wall, you'd be in trouble. The insects are pretty small, mostly around finger length, but they're larger (and more exotic) than life (left, "Flora & Fauna").

Others in the show included Nancy Simonds' paintings of the color green, Karen Stone's ecology and death mixed-media pieces, and Paulette Bensignor's paintings on canvas and on sculpture.

The Color Green is part of The Color Project, a series of color-related shows and events organized by the Klein Gallery at other University City locations, including the University of Pennsylvania Museum (a self-guided tour of red's cultural significance), International House
(light and dark and color in film) and on Election Day evening, the Community Education Center (blue poetry slam with Spiral Q performance). There's more info at the Klein link at the top of the post.

The Color Project is part of the second big-thinking, multi-institutional art effort to come out of University City recently (the first was the ICA's citywide Big Nothing, which was a big something, including more than 35 other venues around town).
permanent link  libby 3:00 PM
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Communication by every means

 
The three artists in Fleisher Challenge 2 are communicators. They speak loudly, and while I found one of them difficult because of her obvious references to death, something I prefer as a subtext and not the perceived thrust of the work, and another difficult because of the found objects used, I commend them all for trying so hard to be clear about what they're saying.

Hiro Sakaguchi's voice is that of the exile in a foreign land. (top image is "Self Portrait" framed in a kind of cellphone)



His narrative paintings mix events, words and motifs from the artist's native Japan with his experience in America. As an Asian in America he understands about communicating and he even produced a little booklet with a "key" to unlocking his works.

He needn't have. His paintings are readable on many levels and they communicate about his life and about the lives of most of us living in urban megalopolises in 2004. Sakaguchi's got a poetic, eliptical way of expressing himself and his works are a mix of sushi and hamburgers. In one work, for example he riffs on the different meanings of hibachi, a Japanese word adopted all the way up and down the food chain in America. In Japan the word means a hand warmer. Here of course it's the tabletop grill. But in his painting the artist takes it to another, weirder level by inserting the thought of moths drawn to the flame -- or airplanes flying above the flames. (image is "Hibachi Night"). I'm not sure what the image "says" exactly but what it communicates is a kind of cross-cultural, global wounding that involves people, war, and a fire that's out of control.



The artist's one sentence statement -- printed in about 36 pt. type in my press packet is so great I have to quote it here. It's a quiet manifesto that could be (should be?) relevant for all artists working today:

"I am interested in making an object which contains a fictional realm that is relevant to my life experience as an artist and an individual in this global society." (image is "Wind, Flower and Farewell")

Sakaguchi is a natural born globalist and his Tokyo by South Philadelphia mix is one to watch.



Rachel Clark's sculptural installation "Returning" consists of an array of stylized clay heads on the floor, each piece an individual with open mouth and eyes closed. The rounded vessels are filled with water. There are also some clay feet growing down from the ceiling and I almost missed them so focussed was I on not walking in to some of the breakable and spillable heads. The overall effect of this installation is a ghostly pumpkin patch (I'm sorry, it's Halloween season my photographs of this piece all have an orange cast). I understand the art references to Brancusi and the metaphorical references to people as vessels but I can't get past the objects' open mouths and their reading of life's last gasp.

Had the mouths been closed or perhaps had the load been lightened a bit by the insertion of a little bird here or there or some other symbol of life I would have found the piece more reflective of the complete package of life and death. Perhaps there's another reading someone with a more Zen outlook can suggest?



Stephen Binasiewicz is a found object sculptor and his work here is a melange of motorized and non-motorized pieces that have a century's-past carnivalesque character. Squeaking mechanical arms lift red, yellow and blue lights in one work whose front side is a kind of spinning target (image is "Shoot"). There is a bit of the obsessive outsider/tinkerer in Binasiewicz's work and I kind of liked the rhythmic sounds of the mechanical arms trying so hard to lift their burdens again and again.

The artist says he's working autobiographically and that he loves found objects. I felt the love but didn't get the memoir of his life. What I did pick up is the sad affect that comes from using old things (dolls, clothes, etc) and not transforming them enough. Apart from the two large pieces that moved ("Shoot" and "Hive"), the rest of the works were kind of creepy in a sideshow way. Perhaps the artist could push the narrative a bit and then the viewer would find a way in and past the found objects to the meat of the message.

Binasiewicz is the founder of the Philadelphia sculpture and set design fabrication lab, Kitchen Sink. The lab has worked on sculpture for Stephen Robin, Yinka Shoniabare and Jeanne Jaffe.

permanent link  roberta 2:53 PM
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Up on 125th Street

 
I just noticed in the back of my Art in America that Kerry James Marshall has a show at the Studio Museum in Harlem up until Jan. 9 (image, "SOB, SOB") . I'm a fan, and the work sounds interesting, as usual. Marshall's work is loaded with racial/political content without being didactic and predictable.

(The show traveled to the Studio Museum via the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Baltimore Museum).
permanent link  libby 10:02 AM
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Giants and soldiers in dreamland

 
Randall Sellers has his amazing miniature worlds lined up in a row this month at SPECTOR. The show has eleven new works and the little guys are waiting for your gaze through the magnifying glass to wake them up. (image -- sorry no magnifying glass you'll have to imagine the smokestacks, tunnels, aqueducts, bridges, ribbons of highway set on the rocks with trees and grass the jewels of adornment.)

But the artist also has some larger narrative works with figures who might be giants inhabiting the wee lands.



People with worried brows or ambiguous smiles seem caught in moments of quiet interaction. They can't keep their hands off each other, but they have the most delicate, exquisite touch -- it's sexy and familial. The bathers (image) touch each other and form a kind of human chain -- for protection against the gaze of an oncoming stranger, perhaps? Or are they saying goodbye to somebody? Who knows. It's a great image.



Whatever this band of monkeys (image) is doing sitting on that car is anybody's guess. But the dreamy inscrutability is great.

I'll have a review in next week's PW but want to give a shout out now because the show's only up to Nov. 6.



Fisher soldiers on


In Spector's back space, Brooklyn's Matthew Fisher is exhibiting more paintings and drawings of his trademark Prussian soldiers. They play out their lonely existences in twelve works of beautiful draftsmanship and wry affect. (image is "Brought Down")

Fisher's works have appeared before in group exhibits in the gallery and I love the half-sad/half-funny edge the artist straddles.



The individual militarists presented -- tall and stiff as toy soldiers -- are less manly men than embodiments of John Keats or Percy Shelley gone to war. Stoic and anti-heroic but also a little fey, they go fishing in their uniforms and pluck the petals off daisies in their solitary moments. Then they go out unclothed to meet the tide when the sky is red. (image is "Neap Tide")

Fisher, by the way, is also part of a curating team and he and his co-curator, writer Christina Vassallo (together they call themselves MatCh) are going to have a booth in Miami in December at the Scope Fair. They were one of four independent curating venues chosen for Scope. The duo's warm and toasty online exhibit, Sunday Afternoon is up now.

There's truth and beauty in Fishers' and in Sellers' works.

permanent link  roberta 8:18 AM
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Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Emendations and elucidations--white trees and billboards

 
Contributor Charlie Hankin offers a possible explanation for why the tree trunks in Judith Schermer's paintings(see Alex Tryon's post) may have looked white. (It has to do with whitewash and the sun.)

Another explanation comes from artist Samantha Simpson:

I happen to know about white painted trees; it's an insecticide:
something, I think, to stop caterpillars (gypsy moth larvae, I think) crawling up the trees. I remember this from growing up around orchards in New Hampshire. Not sure if they still do it there, but that's what it was when I was little.

While I'm on the subject of elucidations, we got an email from artist Lydia Hunn further explaining that the Artboard, atop a building at 11th and Pearl, was commissioned by building owner Michelle Liao (see post). Hunn also added that the artist, Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, shows at Schmidt/Dean.
permanent link  libby and roberta 9:05 AM
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Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Word art

 
Post from Meredith Weber

Michael Winkler's "Word Images 1982-2004," is an experiment in the visual nature of language. The show, which contains pieces of the artist's work from 1982-2004, is currently on display in the Rosenwald Gallery at the top of Penn's Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, 3429 Walnut St.

Winkler's work explores the connection between the way words are spelled and how
they look when charted on an alphabetically arranged circle (detail above). Winkler highlights how the organization of words such as "even" and "uneven"
visually represent their meanings.

In some pieces, such as "Time Study (in 8 languages)," he picks words and constructs images around them using a variety of media. In others, including the centerpiece "Artist's Proof­Study #1," he chooses certain words and lets the shapes speak for themselves without decoration. The contrast between these two styles is
highly noticeable.

The pieces are intellectually interesting and visually appealing, though some works are more satisfying than others. I found it amusing, if a little hokey, that Winkler wrote his artist's statement using the same language diagrams that are the trademark of his art. If you happen to be on the Penn campus, the exhibit is worth checking out, especially if you are interested in the connection between words and shapes.

--Meredith Weber is a student in Colette Copeland's class on art writing at the University of Pennsylvania.
permanent link  libby 7:15 PM
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Trees near and far

 
Post from Alex Tryon

In Judith Schermer’s world of shadows and subtleties in a room filled with 34 paintings of trees at 3rd Street Gallery, she contrasts an apple orchard located near Philadelphia to a grove of olive trees in Italy.

The apple trees were photographed in one viewing, allowing consistency in the light among these paintings, while the olive trees were viewed at two different times of day, allowing Schermer to experiment with the delicate differences in shadow and light.

The paintings vary in size, the largest 19" x 19", the smallest 10" x 10".

Speaking with the artist, I discovered that one of the most intriguing aspects of the apple tree paintings was unexplained. The trunks of these trees are painted white, which I assumed to be artistic license in their portrayal. Instead, this is how the trees were found when photographed, although neither I nor the artist is sure as to the intention in painting the entire orchard white. The effect, though, is magnificent, creating extremes of light and dark intermixed with shades of green and brown. Schermer’s “Two Orchards” will be on display now through October 31st.

--Alex Tryon is a student in Collette Copeland's class on art writing at the University of Pennsylvania.
permanent link  libby 6:54 PM
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Government exercise and other New York moments

 
The work that engaged me most in New York this past visit was work that chewed on some aspect of politics.

So I found myself interested in Jane and Louise Wilson's five-screen video installation "Erewhon" at 303Gallery until Nov. 6, even though it is somewhat repetitive. ("Erewhon" is the title of Samuel Butler's satirical novel of a young Brit colonial who builds a new life in the isolation of New Zealand.)

The installation shows long, old-fashioned, oppressive institutional hallways; dormitory-like rooms with old bed springs; empty landscapes; and young women in a soaring modern space wearing First World War-era athletic gear and posing as if exercising.

The idea of shooting creepy, abandoned spaces is classic Wilsoniana, although the angles and perspectives here are less original than the previous work, "Gamma," that I'd seen from the twin sisters at the previous Carnegie International: "Gamma" (video still left) was filmed at Greenham Common, an American military base and cruise missile storage facility in England that was decommissioned in 1992.

But what makes this newer video interesting is the young women holding exercise poses in a chorus-line (based on archival photos of ladies exercise classes from 1910).

Turns out the source material for all this had to do with a eugenics ferver that swept through New Zealand (where the two British artists had been on a residency) after the death of so many of its young men in World War I. A fit young woman was deemed an appropriate vessel for the regeneration of the population. So exercise for women became a government program.

What interests me here, besides the held poses and the pleasing geometrics of chorus lines in Edwardian exercise gear, is the scary effectiveness of government in promoting its loopy, pre-Nazi concepts. The videos portray the women's fitness platoons with a touch of cheesecake, which cements traditional ideas about women and their roles as sex-objects and then child-bearers.

People's lives were disrupted, redirected, controlled by some government theory. The empty, dreary sanatoriums and hospitals brings to my mind author Pat Barker's trilogy ("The Eye in the Door," "Regeneration" and "The Ghost Road") of the shell-shocked veterans from the war and horrors perpetrated by the era's pschologists.

It also brings to mind our current delusion that if you exercise, you will be virtuous and healthy as well as fit. I see the armies of virtuous joggers in my neighborhood out ruining their knees as they slap their feet on the concrete. Anyway, I thought the work was worth a look. (Please don't email me about how wonderful running makes you feel. You'd only be proving my point.)

Video from India

Work from Indian artist Nalini Malani, at Bose Pacia gallery until Oct. 23, has quite a different take on video. Her "Game Pieces" (left) include shadow images from Indian myth projected over richly colored video backdrops. The simplicity of using a sort of magic lantern to cast shadows of hand-painted figures over juicy, richly colored video was seductive, indeed. The figures appropriately enough are done in the lower-tech medium, the lanterns, but their message is about the modern world, hence the video.

The repetition of the shadows as they circled around suggested the eternal truths of the myths and stories Malani evokes.

Another video installation, "Unity in Diversity" (image, video still, right), set in a red room with red velvet chairs, layers death and violence, based on the 2002 attacks against Muslims in Gujarat, India, with an 1893 painting that promoted pluralism in India. The piece is a plea for more rational times, and a sad commentary on how our thinking has gotten more primitive over time.



Malani also showed several paintings (left) that also blend old myths and storytelling with modern cultural values. Her paintings, like her video "Game Pieces," offered rich colors and a blend of past and present.








Big whimsy and boy toys

I want to mention some sculptures by Johannes Girardoni until Nov. 2 at Stephen Haller Gallery. The intensely colored what-is-its of beeswax, pigment and wood (image right, "Stacked.1-Nickel Green," 18.5" tall) remind me of giant version of David Goerk's quirky, 3- or 4-inch sculptures that show at Larry Becker(see Roberta's post). Girardoni's pieces, because of their scale, suggest furniture, too. The intense jelly bean colors suggest a voluptuousness and joy in the material world; the rough wood is aescetic, the cross to bear.

Also, Max Protetch is showing Oliver Herring until Nov. 6. Known previously for sculptures knit from Mylar, Herring's new work is boyish in the extreme. There's a video, "Trucks," of dump trucks and backhoes leveling dirt on an arena floor. From the perspective of the camera they are toy size, and the almost fast-forward pacing makes it all seem rather dancy. Charming but thin.





Figure sculptures realistically shaped and than collaged with bits from thousands of photographs of the model are amazingly realistic and life-sized (image, "Gloria" above left, 72"). Ten for the successful trick, four for the content.

Herring also created a kind of topographic map of a photo of a drapey guy that turned him into an amphitheater (not quite successful, but interesting). Both of these works raise questions about the difference between 2-D and 3-D, machine (camera) generation of imagery and human generation (image right, "Birdseye View of the Theatre Below").

In addition, Herring has a newspaper-like folio of photos of no news at all. It's documentation of two (adult) brothers playing in mud. This and two series of unframed photos telling a story of two people in his home reminded me of "Trucks," with its boys-at-play affect. Not so interesting.

And while we're on photos, Sonnabend has another of the Becher's progeny--Candida Hofer--taking big, empty public spaces like libraries and palaces full of swell detail--antecedents to Thomas Struth, but not quite as loaded. Nonetheless, there's still plenty to look at. It's open until Oct. 30 (image left, "Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek Wien VIII").



Stitchery

I've seen a lot of stitchery lately--Laura Owens at the Fabric Workshop, , Xiang Yang at Spector Gallery--so I tuned in at Christine Blair's stitched prints at George Billis. In contrast to Owens' oversized pieces, Blair's stitched monoprints were the right scale, 9 5/8" x 9". The work was rich with detail, color and texture, and it pulled me right in. Also at Billis, Daniel Schottenfeld's gouache iconic consumer goods were charming, even if a little expected. And Nicholas Evans-Cato's pleasant landscapes made me feel like I'd never left Philadelphia. Up until Oct. 30 (image right, Blair's "Configuration No. 3," 2004, print monotype on fabric with hand embroidery).

Already gone from the Cue Art Foundation were two wonderful bodies of work, one by cartoonist Jerry Moriarty and one by artist Stephan Andrews.

Andrews' works, curated by filmmaker Atom Egoyan, were crayon rubbings on parchment of deadly incidents in the Iraq war, based on photos and video clips. The rubbings came across as pixillated, the colors separated, the imagery dissolving into the medium. The work is beautiful at the same time that the incidents depicted are horrifying (image left, "Friendly Fire (a BBC cameraman also received minor injuries but continued to film with his blood dripping on the lens)," 14" x 16").

Unlike Seurat, Andrews' goal is not to make the colors come together but rather to fall apart. There's a conversation going on here between photographs and the drawings, between direct video and recreated video, between the impersonal images of war and Andrews' personal images. The shift from camera and reportage to hand work and time expended only adds to the sadness, the feeling of lives disappearing.

The show included a video and a wall of serial images for the video, based on a real video clip from the war. The action of the video gets caught and dissolves at the same time. This was great work, and a reminder of what's being lost on both sides on a daily basis in that faraway place.

Jerry Moriarty's large oil and acrylic paintings use comic book serial frames to tell brief, mordant stories, some of them clearly about his life. This one is "Sally's Surprise--Tree Pee" (60" x 46"), but others include the artist (loved his gray pony tail) in incidents (real or dreamed?) with his father (who looks younger).

After a day of pounding the pavement, I went with Judy Gelles to a book publication party for her friend, Martha Cooper, who just published "Hip Hop Files," a photographic history of hip hop's early years. The crowd included a DJ behind multiple turntables and lots of hip-hoppy looking men and women, many not so young, chronicled in the photographs. Here's Martha autographing a book for one of her subjects.

We drove home to the drone of the final debate on the radio. We had to imagine Bush's jaw clenching.

permanent link  libby 6:07 PM
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Tuesday this and that

 
I've been on system overload. Took on some new writing tasks (for Philly Style mag, I wrote a few pieces about design -- they'll be out in the Nov. issue, and then again in January). And I never do any travel but suddenly I had 3 trips in a month and another coming up this week. Sheesh.

I'm in catch up mode now and will hit you here with some inbox information about shows of note. For starters, it's mural month in Philadelphia and Nexus has a nice photo-documentary exhibit curated by independent curator Mary Salvante celebrating the Mural Arts Program's 2000+ wall paintings. We usually sing the murals' praises here, too. Muralist David McShane painted a real mural in the Nexus back room that's a kind of working document about how he "does it." (image) The Show's up to Oct. 31.

Virgil Marti at Elizabeth Dee Gallery



The 2004 Whitney Biennial alum has a new (for him) venue in Chelsea. I ran into Marti recently and he told me -- if memory serves -- that he's going to show his black light on flocked velvet wallpaper from his 2001 PAFA's Morris Gallery show (image. Photo by Gregory Benson) -- but without the sculptural candle-tables that appeared in that installation. (Read my 2001 Philadelphia Story at artnet for more) Marti wrote to say the show's up and the opening reception is Thursday October 21, 6-8pm. Elizabeth Dee Gallery, 545 W. 20th St. , New York. The show's up to Nov 13, 2004.

Oliver Sacks at Arcadia



Among the side dishes available with Olafur Eliasson's glorious color shock therapy machine, "Your Colour Memory," up at Arcadia (see posts here and here) is a lecture by world-renowned physician Oliver Sacks, Oct. 26 at 7:30 p.m. The doctor is perhaps best known for his 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which tells of patients whose perceptions have been altered by neurological diseases.

"One of the great medical writers of this generation, he has transformed our understanding of the human mind and restored narrative to a central place in the practice of medicine," says the press material.

The lecture is free and open to the public. Eliasson's work is up through Jan. 9 and the gallery will be open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. the day of the lecture.


Graffiti Gods and Goddesses at Union 237


Libby told you about the work of Pose 2 in her October First Friday post. Pose2's work is at Freeform Gallery at MBN Studios in October. Here's an opportunity to see more -- lots more -- in November. Pose 2 will take over the entire 4000 square ft. Union 237 gallery, according to my press information.

The grafitti artist's gallery work at Freeform reminded me the kind of swanky caricatures Lisa Yuskavage does -- only without the male gaze/female sex empowerment mixed message.Pose 2 puts clothes on his folks, and he's not about sex but he is about empowerment. (image is "Ancient Warrior," copyright Pose 2)

Show opens November 5th and runs through November 30th. Union237 Gallery, 237 Market Street.

Yuskavage alert



Everybody's favorite bad girl painter will be in town Nov. 17 at 6 p.m. in a public conversation with ICA's Claudia Gould. I believe the talk's at the ICA -- early press information said the locale was tba. If it's not ICA I'll let you know. (image is "Kathy")

I'm reading the new, full color monograph on the painter "Lisa Yuskavage: Small Paintings 1993-2004" (Harry N. Abrams, New York) with an essay and diagrams (?!) by Tamara Jenkins , author and director of the 1998 movie "Slums of Beverly Hills." I'm digesting the 191 pages of mostly pictures and will review the book some time soon.

New 40th Street Artist in Residence Program in West Philadelphia

Edward Epstein wrote to tell me of a new Artist-in-Residence program he developed and is coordinating in West Philadelphia. The 40th Street Artist-in-Residence Program will award four area artists six months of free studio time in a previously unused space near the corner of 40th and Chestnut Streets. The residents for the first rotation are: Jerushia Graham, fiber artist, printmaker and book artist; Jacqueline Holloway, painter; Grace Jung, muralist and painter; and Jeremy Vaughn, sculptor, painter, and mixed-media artist.

In exchange for the free studio space, the program asks each artist to share his or her talents with the West Philadelphia community. This may include offering workshops or classes, or exhibiting work in the area.

Resident artists are nominated by an advisory board that consists of partner-members in the venture: West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, the University City Arts League, InLiquid.com, and the University of Pennsylvania. Contact Epstein at epstein.edward@earthlink.net for more.

Jessica Doyle in Williamsburg



We've told you about Penn grad Doyle's wall drawings and videos about her life as artist and new mom. (See my post of her Project Room show) Doyle's got a series of new drawings in an eleven-artist group show called The Wedding Project in a Brooklyn gallery. (image is detail of "Reception," copyright Jessica Doyle.)

The Gallery is 65 Hope Street Gallery 65 Hope Street 2nd Floor, Williamsburg, Brooklyn and the show's up to November 7, 2004.
"This exhibition intends to deconstruct the shortcomings of the wedding ceremony and reception in terms of representations, exploitation, and expectations," says Jessica.
permanent link  roberta 10:33 AM
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Monday, October 18, 2004

Cranbrook dream

 
Before the snow flies I want to tell you a little about my trip last month to Cranbrook Academy of Art, an artist's learning and work environment that opened 77 years ago, the brainchild of George and Ellen Booth (the newspaper Booths) after they'd seen the Academy in Rome and were smitten. Cranbrook, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, is a graduate program in art in which a faculty member acts as mentor/role model/critic/teacher for a select group of students (around 15 in each discipline). There are no classes and everybody's main charge is to work, work, work in the studio.

The all work all the time paradigm is as divorced from the rest of the real world of MFA programming as is Cranbrook's fairyland-like campus. With its monumental, Saarinan-designed buildings and sculpture- and fountain-dotted grounds, the cloistered campus is fit for a king. For an art student it's Neverland. I visited when the fall colors were beginning and the weather was crisp and sunny and the sound of migrating geese passing overhead was a constant. (top image is the morning view out the window of Thornlea, the Cranbrook guesthouse where I stayed.)



I travelled to Cranbrook to be a visiting artist and critic for Randy Bolton's Print Media department. Bolton is a former Philadelphia artist whose dark and playful digital prints based on childrens' book imagery appeared regularly in all the Philadelphia area best venues (Schmidt Dean Gallery, the Arcadia Works on Paper exhibit, the Print Center, the Delaware Biennial, etc.). (image is the door to Bolton's Cranbrook studio. Someone could market a calendar, "The Doors of Cranbrook" -- they're each unique and beautiful.)




The artist is working on new prints for his upcoming exhibition at the Cranbrook Museum.

For the first time, he is working billboard-sized and the prints are on cloth. Bolton told me he learned to sew for the project so he could hem the pieces. He also invented and stitched on the tabs that will allow the prints to be fastened to the walls. (images left and right are two of the new works)



Bolton's a sassy commentator on the little truths and big lies we tell ourselves to get through life. But without being pat, his works ask questions. While they're not overtly political, these pieces can be read with the current election year situation in mind. The wall-spanning banners evoke the best of P. T. Barnum's circus of wonders while poking fun at the big, blustery language of big, blustery people. (image right below is Bolton and his wife, the artist Kathleen McShane, who shows her works on paper at Gallery Joe. The two are sitting on wood stumps that will be part of Bolton's new show. He's carving images into the tops of the logs.)



While touring the campus and meeting the students I noticed that, in the same way we've seen in Philadelphia and elsewhere, the artistic disciplines (sculpture, painting, printmaking, etc) aren't behaving like good girls and boys these days. All the genres are being mixed together and soon (if they haven't already) more and more artists will shun the restrictive labels (painter) for the more open "artist." And why not? If an artist's ideas dictate the use of potato chips and gummie bears we don't call her a junk food artist, she's an artist.



In Bolton's Print Media department I saw students working on sculpture, painting, drawing, assemblage and -- hold on, was there any printmaking? There were digital prints and photographs. But, Bolton said he was defining printmaking as anything that involved repetitive processes, so I guess all is fair in that scenario. (image is a studio in the Ceramics department -- note the sewing machine.)



The grounds and buildings as I said are a treat. The library and adjoining museum complex (right) is as elegant as an art nouveau Versailles reinterpreted for a Michigan mogul.



The Cranbrook Museum had three great exhibits when I was there:

1. an "best of" the collection show that included a wonderful Duane Hanson bodybuilder sitting on a bench. Hanson was an alum by the way. (sorry no image);

2. An African diaspora exhibit that included as its centerpiece a work by the seemingly ubiquitous Yinka Shonibare. "Scramble for Africa" (image left) depicted the artist's trademark headless men sitting at a dining table and eagerly carving up a map of Africa;



3. A snapshot exhibit from the Duane Hanson estate showing photographs Hanson worked from to make his sculptures. What was interesting is that the shots were ambiguous as photographs of sculpture. And in fact some seemed to include a human interacting with a sculpture which was pretty trippy. (image is an example of one of the snapshots)

I imagine Cranbrook, with all its wonderful resources would be a pretty great place to be stashed away in for a couple years to get really confused about what art is and about what you want to make. One thing is sure -- you'd pick up some discipline about staying in the studio and getting work done. And that's a good part of the struggle as most artists will tell you.
permanent link  roberta 8:58 PM
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