artblog

Saturday, November 13, 2004

In and out, backward and forward

 
Vox Populi continues to put on shows worth a visit. This time Amy Adams and Max Lawrence have each put up some work that made my eyes and mind jump.

Adams' paintings of circles on top of circles previously interested me for their profusion and suggestion of infinite mass production (see post). This time, in her show "All We Ever Wanted Was Everything," Adams has added areas of plain color or loopy strings of color amongst the circles.

Either way, the new work suggests a tension between the circles and the new stuff, their colors, their shapes, their degree of freedom in mark-making, the implication of victory and subjugation. There's a struggle between what's forward and what's back, mainly because these paintings have no forward no back no space no horizon. It reminds me of looking into the infinity of the computer screen with no there, there. And because the paintings are so immaterial, so smooth and slick in their paint-handling, this fight between marks of paint that don't exist in a material way really is quite weird and wonderful--and a little bit scary.

The circles also make me think of atoms and molecular space and the stringy oobleck in a second color makes me say we're somewhere in space, in the land of string theory and voids (I'm sure if I understood what string theory really was, I wouldn't be saying this, but I'm in love with the words).

Finally, what I like about this work is its decorative quality. It's quite the magic trick--to create something decorative and rather immaterial that talks about a kind of void at the same time as it suggests surfeit and all kinds of other things that have gravitas.

Safety inside, threats outside

While Adams is focused on a threat that's purely metaphorical and perhaps metaphysical, Lawrence has created an installation which implies a real-world threat that's also apparently immaterial, or at least hard to understand with its technical wizardry--i.e. just how do radio waves, cell phones, satellites, television, the Internet work?

Lawrence offers up a living room, with tatty furniture and a plethora of remote controls, with a spy camera and satellites orbiting around the room and telephone poles. The suggestion of governmental control of media, of spying via satellite, of invasion of our homes via inexplicable technology comes through, but I can't say I thought the installation was a complete success; it doesn't achieve a sense of physical immersion that gives installation art its kick. But the ideas there are rich and still worth exploring.

The paintings, however, are beautiful and pretty much on the same themes. Lawrence is using shiny resin to encase his paintings, and like Alyson Shotz (see Shotz post) he is painting on the layers of resin to build up pattern and image. He's blowing up Persian miniature motifs and original plaids and suggesting space with patterns.

He's making portraits of his friends, his girlfriend, his dog and himself (left above and right above). He's preserving them and the atmosphere of love and friendship in resin. The sun shines through his dog's ears.
He puts two tough-looking hookers in front of brown and yellow stripes, a claustrophobic choice that implies a lack of horizon in their lives. He arranges his friends in hoodies in a room, hanging out, white curls like smoke obscuring the space and pulling it together at the same time (left).

It's for these paintings that Lawrence's show is a must see, along with Adams'.

There's also a randomly tacked on but charming wall painting of marijuana palms surrounding a dollar-billish portrait oval on which a computer projects portraits of criminals that Lawrence drew, mixing and matching the facial features. You can generate these new faces with the computer in the room and print them out to take home (right, "The Silent Society Generation").

This high-tech wonder is in sharp contrast to the unapologetically low-tech approach to the rest of the installation, which includes a surveillance camera painted on the wall, satellites painted on the walls and on the television screen, and funniest but least comprehensible of all, a room divider of pinwheels of skin colors that struggle to rotate with the help of a bank of fans (left). I don't get it but it made me laugh out loud.

Also showing at Vox is a video, "Dallas," by Sheena Macrae (I really couldn't see it with the reflections on the screen. This is not usually a problem there, so I'm not sure why it was happening yesterday--low winter light?). Apparently it's layers of images from the TV show Dallas. I can't really give it a fair report, but Roberta said she'd have something to say about it, upcoming.

In the back room is an installation by Danica Maier. Maier, who travelled from London to do this installation, uses lace to create a multi-layered sexy drawing on the walls.

The material, lace is so full of implications. It's peek-a-boo and it's modest. It's rich and it's low-class. It's public in windows even while it serves a purpose of privacy, and it's private in underwear even though it serves a purpose of revealing. It's old-fashioned, and it's old, some of it from Maier's grandmother. The fasteners--straight pins--here give new meaning to the word pin-ups.

The lace and the fasteners together communicate a fragility and temporariness that seem appropriate and inappropriate, depending on whether you're thinking about your last failed love affair or the love of your life who's still the love of your life--or even if you're thinking about how love is an eternal verity.



The subject matter, while old as Adam and Eve, has a modern shamelessness (what would her grandmother think?). The lace is pinned to the wall where it casts shadows, but visually it is a little subtle--but there's some fun in decoding what you're looking at.

There was also a small show of photographs by John Lorenzini.


permanent link  libby 5:26 PM
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Happy Famous Artists correction

 
Post by Intelligensius Anarchus & Jeff Blind
[note: I posted previously on the awesome photo blog, "Happy Famous Artists," but mis-attributed authorship of the site to Fred Michiels. The real owners, Inteligensius Anarchus and Jeff Blind wrote to correct this mis-information. Sorry guys.]

dear roberta & libby,

we take the liberty to contact you in order to clear up a small misunderstanding concerning our weblog <Happy Famous Artists - Bad Art for Bad People>.

although we are thrilled & honored that you mentioned our blog in your list, we also noticed that it has been by mistake attributed to another artist, namely fred michiels.

although we included fred in our list of featured artists/events, he has nothing to do with the weblog as such (creation, contribution etc) & we would very much appreciate to have the blog presented the name of its real authors: Happy Famous Artists (Intelligensius Anarchus & Jeff Blind), should you consider to mention it in the future.

We are currently creating a website as well, where we plan to present solely our own artistic work, so we'll let you know once finished! Thanks & May The Fame Be with You!

Happy Famous Artists

(Intelligensius Anarchus & Jeff Blind)
permanent link  roberta 11:46 AM
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Friday, November 12, 2004

Nozkowski on size

 
Thomas Nozkowski's little gems of paintings have always made me swoon for their humor, their materiality, their balance and intelligence. Here's something Nozkowski said, quoted in last month's Art in America, that I thought was worth sharing and thinking about:

I was really trying to think something through and politics was informing everything that we were doing in those days, with Vietnam, with the early days of feminism, and with the Civil Rights movement. ...I felt that I could no longer do big paintings that were for an audience of the very institutions that I then despised. The last thing I wanted to do was to paint for a museum, to paint for a bank lobby. I wanted to paint paintings that could fit in my friends' rooms.

permanent link  libby 9:03 AM
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More on new MOMA

 
Adding to Roberta's notes on MOMA's pr blitz, The New Yorker offers both John Updike and Paul Goldberger on the new building. The front page also links to Louis Mumford's 1939 piece on the original building. More than you ever wanted to know, perhaps, but soooo New Yorker.

permanent link  libby 8:51 AM
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Friday inbox

 


Janet Biggs: Norms and Forms opens today at Moore College with a reception at 6:30-8 p.m. and a slide lecture and a public chat with Exhibitions Director Brian Wallace at 5:30 p.m.

I previewed the four short video works on my ancient color tv (I'm talking pre-cable-ready version). The pieces, which focus on sport-like activities by humans and animals (wrestling, ice skating, synchronized swimming, horse racing, dressage) intercut seemingly gentle and quiet sports (ice skating, swimming) with stuff of a more muscular, grunt and bear it variety (wrestling, and, in an almost impossible to watch passage, a horse on a treadmill).



Biggs's startling combinations of lyrical and brute had impact on my small tv. So I imagine that projected large, as I believe at least two of them will be, the synch-swimmers moments will generate a kind of mesmeric, float-away ambiance, and the race horse on treadmill sequence will almost drive you from the room. Throughout, the work embodies a spirit of Victorian obsession with death and questions about mortality and the meaning of life. Biggs is a Moore graduate based in New York. This is her first major Philadelphia exhibition. (images are from "Bright Shiny Objects," 2004)
permanent link  roberta 8:02 AM
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More on MOMA

 
MOMA appears to have its pr machine well oiled. The articles are coming in fast and thick. Today, Carol Vogel's piece in the NY Times says the museum's added significantly to its holdings over the past three years. (member id: lrrfartblog; password: artblog) Quoting:

In the last three years, the museum has added well over $100 million worth of art and objects, officials there estimate. Some have been purchases, others gifts from trustees or museum lovers.

What come in the door?
--A 2003 Jasper Johns painting "Bushbaby," valued at $3 million (described as having a harlequin motif that echoes Picasso's harlequins.
--Donald Judd's "Untitled," 1989, an important late work that's also huge -- 5 ft. x 5 ft. x 24 ft.
--drawings, photographs, sculptures and architectural and design objects (many devoted to the theme of travel -- e.g., 1955 Vespa GS 150)

By the way, MOMA's public opening is Saturday, Nov. 20. Admission will be free all day on the 20th. After that, ticket price will be $20.

permanent link  roberta 7:23 AM
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Prints redux

 
Thanks to Renae Pavlosky at Philadelphia Print Collaborative, I now have jpeg images to show you of some of the 2004 portfolio prints on view at Silicon Gallery. (see my previous post for more)



Top is Kate Abercrombie's "Untitled," an etching, chine colle and digital, printed at C. Royce Ettinger Studio and Silicon Gallery Fine Art Prints.

Rick De Coyte at Silicon (one of the six local print studios participating in the PPC) clarified how all that print-making was accomplished on Abercrombie's piece: "...It’s a Chin Colle with a digital print made by Silicon printed on Japanese rice paper which Cindy Ettinger then worked her magic on." Clear?


Above is Charles Burwell's "Variations," Silkscreen, printed at Space 1026.


Last image is Shelley Spector's "The Light," digital print, printed at Silicon Gallery Fine Art Prints.

Also included in the 2004 portfolio are prints by Joy Feasley, Anne Seidman and Ben Woodward. The show's up at Silicon through November.

permanent link  roberta 6:53 AM
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Thursday, November 11, 2004

Tate Modern vs MOMA

 
Not that it's a battle mind you but today's Guardian has a nice piece by Jonathan Jones in which the Brit journalist talks to MOMA's Glen Lowry and John Elderfield and learns that the MOMA re-installation on 53rd St., opening next week, will not put the collection in a Cuisinart and place Picasso next to John Currin (which is kind of the way the Tate Modern does it).

MOMA's approach will continue to be historical with rooms devoted to themes at play during this era or that. But gone will be the overarching idea that modern art progressed in a line from Cezanne to abstract expressionism which had been the museum's story of modern art previously.

Surrounding all the great facts and quotes is the journalist's silly worry about which museum got it "right" and which museum, Tate Modern or MOMA, will win the hearts and minds of viewers. And fueling that worry, presumably, is worry about tourist dollars. Will MOMA, closed for so long, now be the "it" global art attraction siphoning tourists away from the London museum.
permanent link  roberta 7:42 AM
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Wednesday, November 10, 2004

The wonder of light

 
I brought my camera along when I went out tonight because I knew I'd be near City Hall and I knew that at 6 p.m. or so the city fathers and mothers were going to flip the switch on some floodlights and light up the 19th Century wedding cake for the first time ever in its history.

So here you have it, a City Hall groupie's picture of the building looking like a crystal palace in the inky night.

I read in today's paper that it cost $750,000 to implement the night time lighting, and that the city coughed up $140,000 and the rest came from the owners of the surrounding buildings who not only agreed to host the floodlights but willingly gave money for the effort. Huzzah for the noble corporations and their contribution towards nighttime beauty!

You might question the money going into this -- and indeed into the City Hall cleanup (we're talking millions) which has been going on for over a year. But I say it's money well spent. It's turned an eyesore into a pearl and something to be proud of in a city ever looking for such.

permanent link  roberta 8:12 PM
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More NY

 
Artblog pal and egg tempera painting phenom Sarah McEneaney wrote to tell us about a great-sounding panel discussion in New York on Friday, Dec. 3.

It's called Review Panel and these critics:
--Roberta Smith of the NY Times,
--David Cohen The New York Sun
--Joe Fyfe Gay City News
--Andrea Scott Time Out New York

will be talking about these four current New York shows
--Sarah McEneaney at Gallery Schlesinger
--Gilbert and George at Lehmann Maupin and at Sonnabend
--Jesper Just at Perry Rubenstein
--Richard Tuttle at the Drawing Center.

The panel, third in a series of public programs moderated by critic David Cohen, is sponsored by the National Academy and by Cohen's artcritical.com.

Open to all
Suggested Donation of $5.00
The National Academy Museum is located at Fifth Ave and 89th Street
Please enter at the School Entrance, 5 E 89th Street
For further information, call 212-369-4880 or see the artcritical website.
permanent link  roberta 3:29 PM
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Mystical marvels

 
Nothing like a big dose of the art of the self-taughts to get the juices flowing. Felipe Jesus Consalvos's cigar paper collage wonderland is up at Fleisher Ollman Gallery and it's a must see.

I had sampled the artist's two-D collages made from cigar bands and wrappers over the summer and thought they were a wow of organization, symmetry and playfulness.



But I had no idea that in addition to making 2-D designs, the Cuban American cigar factory worker whose ouervre dates from 1920-1950 covered what looks like every stick of furniture and every object in his possession with his cigar-band, tattoo-like designs.

And in fact, the gallery has around 100 works in the show and the majority are objects.



In addition to covering a host of musical instruments (guitars, flutes, banjos, tambourines), the artist, who sometimes worked with his son, Jose Felipe, adorned the following: lamps, dressers, plates, chairs, a typewriter, several telephones, a cane, binoculars, a 78 rpm record, ping pong paddles, a stool, trays, a model ship and other real world objects. The aesthetic is suffocatingly pretty and masculine.



The artist liked to mock the American presidents and George Washington and Abe Lincoln appear throughout, their heads collaged on improbable bodies or -- in the case of Lincoln -- his lips enhanced with what looks like red lipstick (top image).



Felipe Jose, known to his family as Uncle Lipe was born in 1981 outside Havana. He emigrated to Miami in the 1920s and lived in New York and Philadelphia and worked in cigar factories both in Cuba and in the U.S. His son, Jose was born around 1912.

The Consalvoses were self-described healers and practiced a Cubo-Catholicism that included shamanistic practices and medicine making.



Some time in the 1980s a trove of 650 works by Consalvos was discovered in Philadelphia. It's never been shown before this.

The gallery notes state that it's unclear which works should be attributed to Felipe and which to Jose and consequently the work is spoken of as a single entity made by Felipe. Felipe died in Philadelphia some time before 1968.



By all means stop in for a look. Not only is the Consalvos aesthetic -- handsome, symmetrical designs in Americana-like colors and motifs -- great but the gallery has put out a generous spread of work and while the individual pieces are amazing, the cumulative affect is what's got impact.

Mystical nature at More
Eugene Baguskas's sheer love of the wilder side of the woods -- its trees and waterfalls, its bears, flying birds and leaping fish -- is contagious. One look at the glorious color and adoring motifs of Baguskas's flora and fauna now on view at More and you'll be out buying a fly fishing rod and heading to Montana (or to the video store to rent that Robert Redford/Brad Pitt fishing movie, "A River Runs Through It").

Baguskas transcends the literal by virtue of his over the top imagery which can only be seen as the best of all possible outdoor kingdoms.

This picture, for example, of a seemingly endless world of red salmon leaping upstream, is so lush and so optimistic and so, well, pop-Andy Warhol in a way that it made me laugh and want to hug it.



And in More's front room, Michael Rossman, magician with a pencil, arranges his skittery lines into hallucinations that imply the real world of architecture, furniture, landscape but also the interior life of the mind working to make sense of the world. In what gallery owner Charles More said were the newest pieces, Rossman has drawn weird and wonderful emanations of flowers and vases. (image is "Bouquet"). I can't help but think of Christine Hiebert's skittery line works (now at Gallery Joe) when I think of Rossman's. Both artists translate the world through a nervous energy that denotes emotion. Rossman is more forthcoming about what's on his mind, which helps the viewer connect with it. Hiebert, whose work I like, has let go of imagery entirely and asks the viewer to jump off the cliff with her -- something few are willing or able to do.

permanent link  roberta 3:19 PM
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New York bound?

 
It's amazing what you can find if you root through your old piles of gallery notices. Here's what I found this morning--two to see in New York of local talent--Virgil Marti is at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, up through Saturday (Nov. 13), and another reminder that Sarah McEneaney has a show at Gallery Schlesinger until Dec. 11.
permanent link  libby 10:21 AM
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Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Black Beethoven

 
Lucky for me I bumped into artist Terry Adkins (see previous post) when I went back to see his show, "Black Beethoven," at Pageant, the new gallery on Bainbridge Street (image top, "Behearer").

Adkins show is ostensibly about Ludwig von Beethoven and his racial identity, which is somewhat murky (isn't all racial identity somewhat murky?), but it really was about fabulous object-making, heaven, hell and the human body--including race of course.

While it's nice to know the historical references--I needed them for only a couple of the pieces. The talismanic pieces like "Veil Isis" and "Appearance" come from a different aesthetic, with Isis the more successful of the two with its burlap bag and glued-on buttons. I appreciated the information about Beethoven's interest in mystical things Egyptian and Eastern as well as about his notoriously dissheveled appearance. Everything else in the show was elegant and heroic.

The DVD video, "Dissolve," a 45 second morph of Beethoven as a white guy to Beethoven as a black guy with dreads and back again is simple without being simplistic. The shifts in skin tone and features are hard to detect as they happen, and only at the extremes are the differences clear--very white European with drooping locks and very brown African with nappy dreadlocks (left). Watching the morph is irresistible and compelling (I watched it more than once).

The piece is a fine reminder of the truth about race and about all of our racial backgrounds. Beethoven is Adkins and Beethoven is us. (The piece was made with animator Joshua Mosley, who like Adkins, teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.)

The horn pieces are fabulous fantasies that bring to mind angels in heaven blowing horns to praise the Lord. "I'm trying to make sculpture that's as ethereal...as music and music as muscular and physical as sculpture," said Adkins, who also will be performing music at the gallery a couple of times more (on the schedule are "Pinewood Air," Tuesday, Nov. 23, and "Firmament," Friday Dec. 17, both at 7:20 p.m.). Some of the horns also imply body parts. "Behearer" (at top) implies ears (top image), as does "Mute," for example. In this context, even "Jubilee" (right), which suggests bagpipes, also implies human form and function.

Speaking of muscular, Adkins' music box, "Off Minor" (left), growls and scratches as it strikes tuning forks. But it's the look of it, an enormous tube bristling with door-stop springs, that holds interest, looking more like an instrument of torture than an instrument of sound. Or maybe the sound is the torture.

"Plinth," for holding up an imaginary Beethoven statue, is more about the grandeur he deserves and less about function, it being made of improbably of some kind of propeller material, as well as Napoleonic formal fabrics. Not only is the plinth not a plinth, there being no platform to rest on. It's a sort of musical instrument, bringing to my mind bag pipes and accordians, bellows and other air squeezers, although that isn't what Adkins talked about.


What he did talk about were the geode "ears" in the angels' hands in "Cathedral" (figures in left image), the ears and eyes of "Earsight," the unruly appearance of Beethoven in "Appearance" (below right, small piece next to door), and the deafness implied by "Mute," an array of horn mutes poking from the wall. Between the two angels in "Cathedral" was "Solemnis" (see image), a brass pipe grid that implied the circulatory, nervous and skeletal systems that make our bodies work. The pipes are also a reference to organs and Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis," an affirmation of faith.



Just fyi, Adkins hung a bunch of contemporaneous portraits of Beethoven that suggest his dark ancestry, and a series of giant lenses, called "Evidence," are etched at their base with words used to describe Beethoven during his life, including Moor, Espanol, and Swarthy (image right, "Evidence" in center, "Appearance" on floor next to door, and "Veil Isis" covered in buttons right).



Also fyi, Beethoven means beet harvester which doesn't really explain "Signature," the baler with beets on the end (left). The piece, which is white, and which drips beet juice from the impaled beets, shivers if you poke it, and my first response was better the beets than me. If the beets are humans, this is really scary. Anyway, it's another instrument of torture, like "Off Minor."

Gallery owner Daniel Dalseth was also there when I stopped by the second time, so I asked him what he had in mind for the future. Dalseth has avant-garde filmmaker Yevgeniy Yufit, from St. Petersburg, Russia, on the schedule so far.

Dalseth, who hails from Minnesota, and came here for his MFA at Penn, where Adkins teaches, is planning shows that remain up for an entire season. Adkins will be up through December. The work is scheduled to go to Dublin and Bonn. I'm not sure in which order or time frame.

If you're in a rut of visiting the same galleries as usual, this show is a must detour.(The location is a wonderful bonus for us art hogs who now can visit Spector Gallery on the same excursion.

I did just that, catching the end of Spector's Randall Sellers-Matt Fisher show (see Roberta's post); the walls were crazy covered with red dots). Pageant is at 607 Bainbridge, 215 925 1535.
permanent link  libby 8:04 PM
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Maps, flags, photorealism and Africa

 
It seemed so off the beaten First Friday path that we didn't think we'd make it to the opening, but, by George, the Atwater Kent Museum on 7th St. is directly up the block from The Optimistic so we tumbled in to see Kocot and Hatton's video, "Flag" and to check out the new floor map installation "Where in the world is Philadelphia."(shown)

Kocot and Hatton, the conceptual collborators whose work appears at Larry Becker Gallery and elsewhere had previously written to tell us of their inclusion in the AK show. Their video "Flag" captures an inky black night and a flag snapping in the wind. The 41-minute-long piece, on view in a small room off the lobby, displays mostly dark night. But when the flag whips into view -- spotlit by a stationary floodlight -- it becomes an eerie spectre, alive and seemingly reaching out. (shown)



Libby told you about a previous K&H's video of a dark and stormy night (read). This piece, like that one, captures real time action (or inaction) and by sheer weight of time passing creates an elegaic work that turns something prosaic into a monument. Warhol, with his 12-hour long films of the Empire State Building or a person sleeping, did it first, but K&H with their own poetic vision, have created a great, slow piece for fast times.

Speaking of fast times
As Libby told you, we met at The Optimistic on Washington Square for the painting salon. As we talked about blue state secession from the country with the Optimistic's proprietor, Jeff McMahon and with Samuel Yun and Matt Sepielli, the gallery space filled up with viewers and the atmosphere -- homey and warm -- was terrific for looking at art.



Amidst the abstract, process and narrative works, I found the photo-influenced works the most fun. It's possible I was only reacting to the photo source material -- a werewolf (by Eric Swartz, shown), praying altarboys (not shown), a tree limb over water (by Michael Sullivan, shown).

It's easy enough to conflate your reaction to source material with your reaction to the work itself. That's neither a bad nor a good thing and it depends on the final product how the art hangs together. Here, I admired Swartz's and Sullivan's admittedly very different painting styles and their ability to create extremes of hot and cool imagery and deal with death and symbolism and feel contemporary and old at the same time.

Twins Seven-Seven at Indigo

The Nigerian-born artist Twins Seven-Seven, whose work is included in the African Art, African Voices show at the PMA (see Libby's post), has four works on view at Indigo Arts in that gallery's "African Visions" exhibit.

Seven-Seven, (born Taiwo Olaniyi Salau) who now lives in the Philadelphia area, came to art via music, according to Indigo's Tony Fisher, who's been exhibiting the artist's work for around ten years.

The artist, who christened himself "Twins Seven-Seven" to refer to his lineage -- he's the sole survivor of a line of seven sets of twins -- was a travelling troubador when he came to an arts-heavy village, Oshogbo, in 1964 and found a home there -- and discovered his gift for visual art.



The artist's imagery, based in his Yoruba cultural practices (image above righ is "Baby Naming Ceremony"), presents a world where real and mystical combine in a fluid atmosphere that seems inherent in much aboriginal art. My picture hardly does his work justice. The details-heavy world created by the artist is one you can fall into and get lost in




And surrounding the artist's work is a treasure trove of cloth, carvings and signage from African countries.


The mud cloth by Nakunte Diarra (image above) is a stand-out as are the carved figures in general (image right).

That's it for now. I'm off to see Teresa Jaynes' installation at Abington Art Center.
permanent link  roberta 9:30 AM
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Monday, November 08, 2004

Stubborn stagnancy of Harrisburg

 
Post from Emilie Froh

The limited gallery scene in Harrisburg is largely sales and audience driven. The typical art-buyer from the Harrisburg area has reserved and rather traditional taste. Thus, the typical Harrisburg gallery displays artwork that fits this description. This buyer-seller relationship sadly prohibits the development of a cutting edge art movement in the heart of south-central Pennsylvania.

The Harrisburg Art Association Gallery is currently holding its Five Artist Invitational exhibition from Oct. 23 to Nov. 24. While the artists are both regional and national, the artwork largely reflects the regional art attitudes.

J. Leo Mendonca presents rather mundane photographic portraits of New York City’s streets and inhabitants. Danuta Muszynska’s pieces are all strikingly similar etchings of intricate and repeating symbols of infinity on a copper or black surface (alternating appropriately in a relentless fashion).

While Carolyn L. Shertzer offers stained glass creations, Janet E. Smedley submits pretty portraits of young children in whimsical poses (image, Smedley and two of her models).

Joan B. Sonnenberg’s work is the most interesting of the group, providing mixed media abstractions with vivid colors and surrealist design.

This is not meant to say that these artists’ works are not inherently beautiful and valuable in their respective manners. It must be the sharp contrast between the inventive Philadelphia art scene and the stubborn stagnancy of Harrisburg as presented in this gallery that disappoints me so.

--Emilie Froh is a student in Colette Copeland's writing art criticism class at the University of Pennsylvania
permanent link  libby and roberta 10:39 AM
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Prints on Parade

 
Come up and see my etchings
I had a lovely time at the opening of the print show celebrating local master printer, Cindi Ettinger. The artist/printer who established her business, Cindi Ettinger Studio, in 1982, has worked with a whopping number of local and New York artists -- 75 -- producing what are some of the best etchings and other prints in the region. (top image is Daniel Heyman's "Mark's Ghost" and "Mark" two prints that flank the entrance to the UArts auditorium)
towbin, janet
The exhibit, in the lobby of the UArts Hamilton Building samples the works of 14 local artists and it's rich with wonderful imagery by painters, sculptors and drawing artists, a veritable who's who in Philadelphia -- Kate Abercrombie, Phoebe Adams, Astrid Bowlby, Emily Brown, Donald O. Colley, Daniel Heyman, Harold Ivey, Sarah McEneaney, Bruce Pollock, Bill Scott, Anne Seidman, Kevin Strickland, Rochelle Toner and Janet Towbin.

The prints vary from large to small, from abstract to representational and from black and white to gorgeous color. The range of artistic voices in the exhibit is telling. It bespoke a printer with an open embrace of art and artists, no matter what their subject. (image is "Diptych,"2002, an etching by Bill Scott whose three pieces are outstanding in a great show.)



Much of the talk at the opening was of course about the recent presidential election. Everyone ate their cookies and crackers and worried aloud about their moral values. (image is "Scrawl" 2003 by Janet Towbin, a shockingly gestural work for an artist whose work is usually build-ups of tightly repetitive circles.)


Amidst talk about how to deal with life in post 11-2 America, I picked up a little of this and that: The map of United States of Canada/Jesusland had reached everyone -- usually more than once; UArts teacher and Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery curator Sid Sachs's son Asher, age almost 3, is reading -- phonetically; stained glass artist (and the toast of the 2002 Whitney Biennial) Judith Schaechter, is working some new material which will debut at Claire Oliver in May; artist of dark drawings and manic ink on paper installations, Astrid Bowlby, is happily drawing in her studio. See the White Columns artists registry to catch up on some amazing recent installations. (image is Bowlby, center, in front of four of her prints)

Each year since its inception, Ettinger Studios has participated in the Philadelphia Print Collaborative's (PPC) portfolio project which matches a local artist with one of six local print shops to produce a limited edition portfolio. This year, Ettinger worked with Vox Populi member and young up and comer, Katie Abercrombie, and the resulting print is a thing of Victorian beauty and swoon -- roses, lacey lines and delicate color. (sorry no image at the moment.)

Silicon's big PPC exhibit

My scanner's on the bust so I don't have images for you of the new PPC portfolio. But go look because the prints are great: In addition to Abercrombie, Shelley Spector made a digital collage that merges an image of her sculpture with a digi-fantasy dreamscape; Joy Feasley's print is a riff on fire, forests and crystal complications; Anne Seidman's brut and delicate lines create layers of landscape; Ben Woodward's cartoon about unravelling and connections is sweet and wry; Charles Burwell's stripe-heavy,layered world mesmerizes. (image is an earlier Burwell print, "Broken Labyrinth, No. 7 (1997), silkscreen, pastel and watercolor)

Prints from the 2001, 2002 and 2003 PPC portfolios are also on view at the gallery.

Here, as at UArts, talk was of politics, and hand wringing was the order of the night. I did get a few minutes with Burwell to ask him how he liked working with Space 1026 to make his print. The tall and wry-humored artist was thrown off by the physical space at the Space (think college dorm with no cleaning people). But applauded the printer who produced his gorgeous print.

So that's it for the moment. Later today I'll have a bit more about the show at the Optimistic, which Libby told you about; about the Africa Visions exhibit at Indigo Arts and about the Atwater Kent Museum's new First Friday initiative that includes a video by Kocot and Hatton and a super new Rand-MacNally map of Philadelphia on the Museum's floor. (Libby took a walk on the Schuylkill expressway and got to her home in West Philadelphia in jig time.)
permanent link  roberta 8:20 AM
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Sunday, November 07, 2004

Youth, death and installation

 
Here's where I went First Friday--The Optimistic with Roberta, then Union 237, Siano, Carbon 14, and Silicon (this last one with Roberta too).

The Opitmistic was a small group show with 16 pieces from young artists with Tyler connections--the result of gallerist Jeff McMahon having taught there.

The show included work from Matthew Sepielli and Samuel Yun, who run The Vacuum, an online gallery. Yun's "Mustang," with its car logo and shifting, irridescent finish shifted from signage to idealization of an auto with an aura and back again (top image).

I liked how Michael Perrone's "The White Room" (left), with its rec room ping pong table bathed in circles of light, was not white at all but Philip Guston pink, its scraped surface reminding me of skin.

There's a graphic and sad cartoon quality to Perrone's piece. I also liked the anti-perspective of the piece and the unruly squiggle of paint from the tube (or at least that's what it looked like), asserting the paint over the image.

Lauren Rinaldi's canvas, which looked like it was covered in melted chocolate chips, sat in the midst of bowls of chocolates on a dining table (right, below).

I was intrigued by how Michael Sullivan's "Ice" painting of a gelid river looked almost photographic, a sort of struggle between Neil Welliver and the computer.

Overall, the show was a mix, but I always find it energizing to see what younger artists are doing. Theresa Marchetta is making objects--in this case flowers--from sheets of dried and peeled paint. Nicole Andreoni's little praying boys verged on the creepy but I wasn't clear about their intent, and Robert Lewis' "Graphsoma Italcium" really was creepy--a small insect, made 3-D with lots of paint, on a relatively large canvas.

Others in the show included Corrie Tice, Jason McHugh, Nicole Hellerman, Peter Smith, Andy Koslowski, Joseph Antonelli, Eric Swartz and Jessica Van Steenburgh.

I stopped to see what grafitti artist Pose II had up at Union 237 gallery. I was there along with a crowd of young folks checking the work out, but I couldn't wrap my mind around the stereotyped beauties that seemed like African versions of Vargas-cartoon girls in Playboy Magazine.

On the other hand, I thought his paint-handling was terrific, and his use of extreme verticality took the works out of the Western painting tradition--even though one of the pieces was a triptych (right, "Plasma 1, 2 and 3"). I'm hooked enough to want to see where he goes next with his painting, but this show wasn't quite what I had hoped it would be.

I also stopped at Siano, which held over the George H. Richmond retrospective another month. Richmond, who died earlier this year, made paintings of imagined life forms and landscapes as well as, more recently of people, some of these with a George Grosz German Expressionist darkness. Although I didn't love everything equally, I thought the body of work was definitely worth a look (left, "Smoke").

Then, on my way to meet Roberta at Silicon Gallery for the show of the Philadelphia Print Collaborative's newest portfolio, I passed by Carbon 14 Gallery, on 3rd Street, and miracle of miracles, it was open, with an installation of nylon line by Louise Barteau Chodoff (installation right). People were weaving in and out of the hanging thingamajigs and the spider-webby maze having a good old time. This gallery, which has been closed for a good 10 years, was up and running and taking risks again.
permanent link  libby 7:50 PM
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