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Saturday, November 20, 2004

Dreamlands for conquests

The dreamy, snow-covered peaks in Matt Pruden's drawings and painting-installation at the University City Arts League are true dreamlands--fictions of Pruden's imagination (top, "Codex of Lost Lands: Figure 1").

The work in his show, "lost in clouds," is beautiful, and the snowy images on icy blue paper might convince you that this is nature. The painting on the wall, a golden latex oval with a liquified graphite mountain scene, romanticizes the imagery with a kind of seal of Nationalistic bombast sporting a Victorian fringe of drips(right, "Codex of Lost Lands: Vista").

But what Pruden is really drawing are men's dreams about mountains and landscapes

His drawing titles all start with "codex," an early book form, and that's a strong hint of what's on his mind--culture and fiction and exploration history as a fiction. He's a guy who's mystified by the urge to conquer Everest or reach the South Pole (see my previous posts on Pruden here and here) and he's interested in what it is in a culture or a person's mind that transforms land into something more than a spot on the globe.

Here's something funny about these pieces: Pruden tore off pieces of Plastilena (modeling clay) and then arranged the craggy chunks until they looked kind of mountain-like. That's the basis for what he drew--but it's not the sum. The rest is his imagination. When I saw him at his opening, he mentioned that the geography of the drawings violated natural law (left, Codex of Lost Lands: Figure 3).

The show also includes a several of his Rorschach single-word images, two of them new, two that had shown at Nexus, that call up with white-on-white words--hypothermia, asphyxiation, starvation, insomnia--the physical horrors of exploration in a literary-looking, Victorian script. Some romance.

This show is up until Dec. 3.
permanent link libby 4:57 PM
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Friday, November 19, 2004

I Heart MOMA

Not to blog on and on about it but Libby and I both loved the interesting way the art has been gathered together sometimes highlighting motifs and other times pushing themes. With its expanded floor space, the galleries are now larger and the groupings can be made broader. And it's a great exercise to consider the works in the new contexts they've been given. (top image is Duchamp's bicycle wheel and Picabia's "M'Amenez-y (Take me there)"

For example, Malevich's suprematist paintings sit in a room with work by Duchamp and Picabia; Kandinsky paintings are paired with the decorative Gustav Klimt; one of Jacob Lawrence's "Migration Series" groupings hangs with German expressionists Otto Dix and Max Beckmann and with the Mexican muralists. And itall makes sense historically and thematically.

In the Drawings Department, work by self-taught artist Bill Traylor is right out there near drawings by Picasso, Andre Masson and Paul Klee. (image above is Klee's "Little Ghost"and right is Traylor's "Figures on Blue Construction.")

Donald Judd, whose works look super and are seemingly everywhere, is paired in one room with Sol Lewitt (left) in a kind of Halloween twosome -- that's Judd's black "Relief" on the wall, a death-imbued piece that makes me want to reconsider his stacks as coffins; and a perky, peek-a-boo orange Lewitt "Floor Acquisition," 1963, that's a new acquisition.

The contemporary galleries have been stripped of some walls which gives them an almost scary emptiness. This also allows massive things like Rachel Whiteread's "Untitled (Room)" 1993, a plaster casting of an entire room, (right) to float free and light as a bubble. Paired here with Doris Salcedo's untitled concrete-filled dresser (far right) and an infinite floor stack of posters, "Death by Gun" by Felix Gonzales-Torres (floor in the middle) the room is almost empty of color and imbued with a downer of an ambiance. It's the '90s room and it's hard. Not only are Whiteread's and Salcedo's coffin-like works a reminder of the big D but a black and white medical-torture object from Matthew Barney's Cremaster sits nearby. (not pictured). And although I loved it, the Jeff Wall "After the Invisible Man" (not shown) a work that envisions the narrator in his lightbulb-filled basement room, is -- for all its lightbulby -- stunningly dark.

In fact, the contemporary galleries, which hold only a smidgen of the collection according to the press material, will be changed every nine months. I can't wait. Because except for the Jeff Koons "New Shelton Wet/Dry Doubledecker (1981)" (left) which, after seeing all the Judd stacks and boxes makes me consider it a kind of funny Judd-critique, there aren't a lot of high points. The whole contemporary painting and sculpture area was big and low energy.

But the pairing of Koons with the nearby Elizabeth Murray relief painting "Dis Pair," (behind the Koons) is fun and smart and I have to assume the next round of works shown will weigh in with themes other than deathly death.

permanent link roberta 6:33 AM
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Thursday, November 18, 2004

Mythology at play

Post from Meredith Weber

Barbara Spadaro's new paintings at Muse Gallery are studies in
myth and imagination.

Her canvases are blanketed in calming blues, greens, and off-whites. Small human figures reminiscent of those from early Sienese paintings occupy small portions of the canvas, and in some cases are surrounded by delicate birds or animals which are suspended above the flat fields of color. Each work appears weightless and inviting.

The wide expanses of open space that characterize these paintings leave the works open to interpretation. In some pieces, such as "The Shape of Light" (image, top), figures are outlined but not filled in with colors. There is no literal story here, just an understanding that mythology is at play.

Supplementing the paintings are several tiny prints which, like the paintings, reference the early Renaissance style. These prints are more compact and cluttered than the paintings, but they share the same fragile and intricate quality. Yet even in these miniature pieces, a playful understanding of myth and imagination is apparent. In an age where giant installations and an obsession with innovation dominate the art world, Spadaro's small scale work is a welcome reference to the simple wonders of the past.

The show runs until Nov. 28.
permanent link libby 3:57 PM
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Memory, the game

Post by Alex Tryon

At Laura Hutton's show at Nexus, “Memory: The Palest Ink”, I participated in a game of Memory, a favorite childhood pastime with a new depth to it.

The show consists of 25 works on paper. The first piece in the series presents 16 solid white cards on a white background, an intriguing start. As cards are flipped and pairs discovered, the artist reveals a subtle, beautiful design on each card. By placing quotes about memory by individuals such as Abraham Lincoln, Shakespeare, and Freud under each card, Hutton brings the viewer to consider both the task of remembering which cards match and contemplating the role memory plays in our lives.

This mixture of aesthetic pleasure and compelling quotes kept me interested until the last quote was revealed--“The palest ink is better than the best memory." The quote is a Chinese proverb that sums up the quiet color and philosophical message of the work completely.

I left realizing how large a role memory played in my life, considering my need to live in the present.

--Alex Tryon is a student in Colette Copeland's art criticism writing class at the University of Pennsylvania
permanent link libby 2:58 PM
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Natural reflections

Nic Coviello's prints and layered multimedia pieces are based on botanical forms.

The work showing at Nexus, , 38 pieces in all, had several different approaches--including blank-ink prints, installations with photos and prints, and small reliquaries of nature.

It was the black-ink prints that interested me most, with their dark, inky zones that suggested light and shadow, pools and leaves, and their less-than-literal approach to traces of nature (top, "Nest," carborundum relief on BFK).

Tiny reliquaries --framed rectangles of aluminum covered with photo emulsion and paint, and then topped with natural artifacts -- were delicate--and too close to one another. But the markings on the aluminum, sometimes brushy, sometimes puddly, sometimes scratchy, sometimes reflective, held my interest. They implied the critical value of the parts of the plant for its survival(one of 12 in "Relica" series, acrylic, photopolymer and potanical objects on aluminum).

Coviello, who used to show at Gross-McCleaf, took a break from the gallery scene for a while, but is now at Nexus. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

Here's another response to Coviello's work from Sanja Benjak, one of Colette Copeland's students at Penn:

Coviello uses a variety of media to capture nature. He uses some of his photographs as a basis for his drawings. One of the photographs that really caught my attention was the one where Coviello made me wonder if the leaves are floating in water or if they're up in the sky.

Some of the drawings (left) use light to create shadows the way sunlight creates shadows in the woods.

Many of his drawings have real leaves or twigs included that seem to suffer by being surrounded by the different media.

permanent link libby 1:42 PM
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Wednesday, November 17, 2004

MOMA sees the light; we see a little art

The good news about MoMA's new building is that it no longer is like a casino or a big-box mall, blocking out all of the outside world to dupe you into believing that what you see is everything and that you've gotta have it (image, steam rising up the side of a building outside a MoMA window).

The truth is, great art, unlike consumer goods, doesn't need to be replaced in a few years, and therefore doesn't need any architectural illusion to elevate it.

I suppose what justifies all this splendor (and this new building is indeed splendid) is the value of the art and its need for basic display space. By value, I don't mean only financial value but cultural value. These paintings and sculptures, especially in the way they are now displayed, are ideas in conversation with eachother. That's the big, big plus.

With all that new space and all those windows for swell views of Manhattan, as well as all those interior perspectives for views of the museum itself, MOMA is no longer oppressive. The spaces are elegant and airy, giving the art lots of room to breathe.

Even mega-size art has a comfortable home here (right, Monet's "Water Lilies" with Barnett Newman's "Broken Obelisk" in the atrium).

No longer do you have to crane your neck as your visit nose-to-nose with a James Rosenquist uber painting (Here's Rosenquist's "F-111" serving as a backdrop for a press conference; room for art, room for mobs of people).

Even the ridiculously huge Ellsworth Kelly "Sculpture for a Large Wall" (approximately 11 x 65 feet) has enough space (right). The piece was originally created for the lobby of the Transportation Building in Philadelphia's Penn Plaza, and was rescued and donated to MoMA by Carole and Ronald Lauder.

Although Roberta and I tried to see everything, and left under the illusion we had seen everything, it was merely an illusion. As it was, my feet barely held out, and I would have sold the nice little plastic bag that my press materials came in just for a bench every gallery or two.

Just reading through my press packet once I got home, I realized that we had missed any number of galleries--all the more reason to return. So what follows are a few highlights and musings on what we did see.

Photographs

Photographs have been elevated from the nether regions to a nice space of their own (no images; they didn't allow picture taking in the photo section; I grabbed these off the Web, for better or worse). Photo has lots of new acquisitions, incuding a swell Andreas Gursky, "Tote Hosen," taken at a rock concert in Germany and pieced together by computer wizardry and weirdness; some Philip-Lorca di Corcia photos that looked staged and candid at the same time; a Jeff Wall giant lightbox of a picture, "Milk," (left) in which (I think) he continues his salutes to Hokusai by freezing in mid-air a wave of spilt milk emitted by a little milkbox held by a scruffy young man in a scruffy urban milieu; a Boris Mikhailov from his "Case History" series in which a fast-living young man is caught in a Pieta pose (right); three pieces by German photographer Marco Breuer of color photo paper scored with different degrees of pressure to show different colors and create landscapey textures; and Gillian Wearing's "Self-Portrait at 17 Years Old," showing the artist wearing a wax mask of her own, youthful face.

According to curator Susan Kismaric of the photo department, who shared with us some of the above information on how the images were made, 218 photos are up now, and the plan is to change the exhibit every six months.

All of the pieces I mentioned touch on the issue of how reliable and truthful photography is.

The new order

We started at the top, where the collection is strongest, and found wonderful curatorial mixes and matches, now that the old chronology is officially lost (except it's really there, just rethought). Among my faves were the Dada/constructivist room, in which Marcel Duchamp's bicycle wheel is a jumping off point for wonderful images suggesting wheels, circles, and motion from Francis Picabia, Kasimir Malevich and this wonderful "Maquette for Radio-Announcer" from Gustav Klucis (left).

The Post-WWI Germans never looked better, from Otto Dix and Oskar Schlemmer (image, "Dr. Mayer-Harmann" and "Bauhaus Stairway" respectively) to George Grosz and Max Beckmann. Their take on social upheaval is matched with Jacob Lawrence and his takes on American social turbulence. Good thought. Then Mexican political painters like David Afaro Siquieros and Diego Rivera complete the thought.

Another nice group: Lucio Fontana (left), Lee Bontecou, and Piero Manzoni (right below); suddenly Bontecou's black hole becomes anatomized--but not brought down--in this company. On the contrary, she brings up the other two, giving them a seriousness that mere anatomy wouldn't merit.

And Yves Klein's blue obsession suddenly makes sense in the presence of Yayoi Kusama's obsessive work. Kusama's "Accumulation of Stamps, 63" rises above its material presence with its wit and surprise.

Donald Judd for all seasons

By the way, there seems to be a lot of Donald Judd. I take this as a curatorial statement of his importance. He's got a newly acquired piece with Playskool colors--a box about the size of an industrial dumpster--that won't let you play with it, but will let you feel small by its side (left, detail of top of the piece).

Then he's got a stack in the Minimalism section near a Carl Andre lead rug (both in view, right); and a dumpster-green segmented floor piece that looks like a sliced dumpster. Also in the Minimalist zone was a plug ugly "Relief," that was black and dreary, embedded with a banana-bread pan (Roberta's description) that was a blind alley.

But also in the Minimalism zone and looking fabulous in cheery orange with a real peep hole at eye-height was a Sol LeWitt, "Floor Structure" (left). Two ladders of shadows fell down the orange sides from the industrial black ears.

Miscellaneous observations

The Pop art looked great, and included Romare Bearden's "Patchwork Quilt" (right). What a surprise! Does this make a patchwork quilt made by hand the equivalent of a Campbell's Soup can?

No surprise but a joy to behold--Ed Ruscha's "Oof," Roy Lichtenstein's cartoon of a drowning woman,

Tom Wesselman's relief kitchen, and Claes Oldenburg's droopy "Fan" (left above) which made me think of Louise Bourgeois's "Quarantania" upstairs, with its hanging bags suggesting body parts (right, "Quarantania" installed next to Wilfredo Lam's "The Jungle", both talking to eachother with their groupings of ectomorphs).

A newly acquired Richard Tuttle actually appealed to me--"Letters (The Twenty-Six Series)," 1966, glyphs of galvanized iron arrayed on a wall like randomly placed petroglyphs (left).

In the contemporary section (right), the proximity of Matthew Barney's "The Cabinet of Baby Fay La Foe" (front) Lorna Simpson's "Wig's Portfolio" (back left) and Sigmar Polke's "Watchtower, 1984" suggested a theme of inhumane treatment of people.

Well, there was way more of course, but shortly after viewing that, we left. For what Roberta had to see, read her MoMA posts here and here.

The high cost of seeing art

Outside a young man and woman from FrEEMoMA.org were picketing against the high cost of museum admission, now $20.

Well, it does seem high; and membership is also high, at $75 for a single person for a year, $120 dual, and $150 for a family. Clearly, if you don't have a family, get a friend to go in on a dual (it doesn't explain what they mean by dual, so I figure that should work; who's to say you and your buddy are not dual?). So I figure, if you get a dual membership and each of you uses it only 10 times during the year, you are paying only $6 per visit--less than a movie. However 10 is a lot of visits. Three is more like it. No bargains here, unless you've got a really large family and they all go to the museum on a regular basis. Is this what they mean by family values?

My favorite line in the freemoma.org screed, which they handed out to anyone who would grab one, was "New Yorkers of middle-class means, families, artists, even students will no longer be able to afford to spend a Saturday afternoon with Van Gogh's "Starry Night" or Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon."

The good news is they can go on free Friday nights instead, courtesy of Target, Target, Target, Target. (The corporate sponsorship plugs rained down upon all the journalists listening to MoMA jefe Lowry and anyone who opened their 1" thick press packet.)

Perhaps MoMA needs a hardship admission rate. On the other hand, I wonder if the protesters balk at spending $10 on a movie. In light of that, $20 for a day of swell art seems like quite the bargain.

Here are two discussions of the $20 rate worth reading:

Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes
Greg Allen at greg.org
Additional links are at both those sites.

permanent link libby 10:50 AM
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Thursday Demand

No sooner had I finished that bulletin when I remembered this: Photographer Thomas Demand speaks at University of Pennsylvania tomorrow, Thursday at 4:30 p.m. in Meyerson Hall (B-3). The lecture is sponsored by Penn Design.

We've told you about his constructed world photographs. See Libby's post. He's hot, he's great, see you there. Free and open to the public. Read more on Demand at the Penn Design website. (image is a Demand photograph)

permanent link roberta 9:38 AM
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Three-day bulletin

By some twist of fate, the town's hopping with evening activities tonight, tomorrow and Friday. Here's a few that sound good. (Libby told you about the Yuskavage/Mednick conundrum in her previous post. Sorry to be redundant):

Tonight
For starters, Lisa Yuskavage talks with Claudia Gould at the ICA tonight at 6 p.m. (free with $2 or $3 admission). Read my last week's PW review of the new, $50 Yuskavage monograph, "Lisa Yuskavage: Small Paintings, 1993-2004" for an update on my opinion (to wit, still don't like it).

Also tonight, Arthur Mednick does a gallery talk at University of the Arts' Rosenwald Wolf Gallery, 6-8 p.m. Libby told you about the beautiful, sexy work in her post. (image is a Mednick star from the show)

Then again, there's the Print Center auction from 6-9 p.m. with an astonishing list of participating artists. Tickets $25. The Print Center is a great Philadelphia institution and most worthy of support. Highly recommended.

Tomorrow, Nov. 18

CAN (now called Center for Emerging Visual Artists) opens an alumni small works show featuring artblog pal, Judy Gelles, and Lesley Mitchell. Reception is 5:30-7:30 p.m. in the Center's Barclay Hotel digs, 18th St. across from the Art Alliance.

Friday
Masters re-mastered at Spector. Don't miss it. Great artists, from Philadelphia, Brooklyn and the world, pay respects to some of the art world's war horses. The reception is 6-9 p.m. These sound so great I have to list them all:

Sarah McEneaney
(after Vincent Van Gogh, Rain)
Egg tempera on wood

Mitch Gillette
(after Michelangelo, David) (shown right)
Ink on paper

Max Lawrence
(after Eduard Charlemont, The Moorish Chief)
Oil on Canvas

Randall Sellers
(after Manet, Luncheon On The Grass)
Gouache on paper

Ben Woodward
(after Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending A Staircase)
Gouache on board

Paul Santoleri (shown left)
(after Rubens, Prometheus Bound)
Acrylic on panel

CW Wells
(after Francisco Goya, Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga)
Mixed media

Andrew Jeffrey Wright
(after Leonardo Da Vinci , Portrait of Mona Lisa)
Graphite on paper

Jim Houser
(after Cy Twombly, 50 Days At Ilium)
Acrylic on canvas

Fay Stanford
(after John James Audubon, Snowy Owl)
Encaustic

Rob Matthews
(after Edward Hopper, Office at Night)
Graphite on paper

Eric McDade
(after Rubens, Perseus Liberating Andromeda)
Screen print

David Guinn
(after Christian Muller, Suit of armor)
Cardboard, acrylic

Xiang Yang (shown right)
(after Leonardo Da Vinci , Lady With Ermine)
Mylar, Map, Pencil and Embroidery Thread

Thom Lessner
(after Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom)
Acrylic on wood

Whitney Lee
(after Titian, Venus of Urbino)
Found latch-hook rug and yarn

Matt Fisher
(after Peter Doig, Figure in a Mountain Landscape III)
Acrylic on linen

Jacques Wilmore
(after Artist Unknown, Jina Rishabhanatha)
Oil on Canvas

Sarah Roche
(after Gustave Courbet, The Wave)
Oil on canvas

permanent link roberta 8:36 AM
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Tuesday, November 16, 2004

MOMA people

There were around 300 people at the media preview and when we were all dispersed to the many nooks and crannies of the 6-floor space, it seemed a thin crowd. But when everybody got rounded up for the opening remarks by MOMA Director, Glenn Lowry, and others, you felt the numbers. And especially, you felt the cameras. I counted around 30 video cameras on tripods. There were a half dozen others bouncing around on shoulders.

Before beginning the session, the speakers -- Lowry, (left above), architect Yoshio Taniguchi (two down from Lowry) and others -- lined up in the front row and the cameras devoured them for what seemed like ten minutes.

I'd never seen anything as parasitic up close except for when I had a sugar ant attack in my kitchen a couple summers ago. The lineup of cameras reminded me especially of the Goya painting the Third of May with its line up of guns for the execution.

Libby and I had a wonderful encounter with MOMA's Curator of Photography, Susan Kismaric (shown left, below). The curator, sandwiched between Gillian Wearing's self-portrait at age 17 and the green and pink slice of Helen Chadwick's round, "No. 11 from Bad Blooms, 1992-92," was roaming her new gallery space and, unprompted and with great charm, told us all about the Wearing self-portrait. It's a stunner and very dark and we were fixated on it.

Apparently, the artist mined her family's scrapbooks and found a photo of herself at age 17, then took it to Madame Toussaud's wax works and had them make a mask. The artist is wearing the mask and it's so subtle you can't tell. What you sense is that something is very wrong and artificial with the portrait.

By the way, Kismaric says there are 25,000 photographs in the MOMA collection and that around 215 are on view now. (Many are new acquisitions, like a big Andreas Gursky rock concert photo-painting; eight color prints by Philip-Lorca diCorcia; a Jeff Wall, three Marco Breuer scratch works (Kismaric explained those also -- the artist develops color photo paper (no image) and scores it with varying degrees of force for each line to produce multi-colored striped works. Sometimes he places sand or objects under the paper and scores over them to get a bubbled effect. The three works are pretty captivating We stood long and admired them even before we knew the method of their making.

And in a wonderful merger of print and photograph, the photo galleries house another new acquisition -- Andy Warhol's photo silkscreen "Double Elvises" from 1963.

Finally, we kept running into our blogging pal, Tyler Green, as he traversed the galleries, happy to see this...unhappy to see that.

The opinion-meister, who looks like the jolly green blogging giant he is in this shot, turns out to have many complaints about the MOMA physical plant. Go read.

I've never met a new building that didn't debut with a few nicks and unfinished corridors. No biggie.

permanent link roberta 7:40 PM
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The Bloomies of Art

Libby and I had one of our far-reaching conversations about art and museums and New York and Philadelphia while we tooled along the NJ Turnpike yesterday going to MOMA. We talked about Frank Gehry and his sculptural boxes. Was the art inside irrelevant when the building was such a showboat? We were clearly in a stew about art versus buildings. I guess we thought we were going to do battle with the new MOMA. (image is one of the contemporary galleries. Elizabeth Murray piece on the wall, right)

We have these big conversations constantly and because the issues are complex and there are no rights and wrongs just speculations, hypotheses and lots of blue sky we never come to closure but just move on to the next big issue.

Anyway, we hadn't expected to find a building of grace and charms in the new MOMA. And that is what we found -- a kind of architectural wallflower of understated beauty that is a glorious space for the art.

The building is double the size of the former space with some 40,000 new sq. ft. for exhibits (up from 85,000 to 125,000 sq. ft). Designed by Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, in what is his first building outside his home country, the new MOMA treats the art with dignity and gives it room to breathe. (My memory of the old MOMA is that it was claustrophobic and difficult.) (image is 6th floor public space with Francis Bacon on the wall and skylights in ceiling.)

And, in its people-friendly design, the new MOMA has lots of public spaces outside the galleries -- an atrium, walkways overlooking it and interior windows looking through one gallery to the next. In fact it feels a little like a swanky mall.

The public infrastructure includes a couple of escalator corridors and that gave the place a kind of department store ambiance. And, just like in those department stores there is no place to sit down except in the cafe. Few of the galleries have benches. And ironically, the benches there were were in front of work that almost repelled you from the room. (One unfortunate space in the Contemporary galleries had a bench but it was surrounded by some difficult and unfriendly conceptual work by On Kawara and Lawrence Weiner and by a screechy video piece by Joan Jonas. It was uncomfortable sitting on the comfortable bench. (image is view out south-facing window)

Throughout the museum, the windows -- and the urban scene outside -- were themselves art objects. People gravitated to them, stared out them at the city, and generally paid as much attention to them (or in my case, occasionally, more) as they did to the art. (look at that gorgeous blue urban light coming through the window.)

The sculpture garden looks much as I remember it looking -- only bigger. (It has indeed been expanded.) By the way, there are now two entrances to the building -- on 53rd St. and on 54th St. (image is the sculpture garden seen from the lobby space.)

I'll let my space views end here. I'm sorry I don't have a decent shot of the atrium, a big space with some huge works in it (like Monet's Waterlilies and Barnet Newman's Broken Obelisk). But Libby has a shot and she'll share it with us and weigh in with her ideas. (image is the department store escalator corridor.)

We'll both dice and slice away at the collection and serve up more chunks as time allows in the next day or so.

permanent link roberta 2:21 AM
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Monday, November 15, 2004

Coming home to MOMA

Libby and I are off to the press opening of the brand new MOMA today. We're all excited, and we'll you about it tomorrow.
permanent link roberta 6:31 AM
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Sunday, November 14, 2004

Compression and refinement

Music of the canvas

From contributor Joe Naujokas

[Joe is elucidating my comparison of Amy Adams' paintings to string theory, about which I know nothing, in a previous post.--Libby]

Well Libby, the theory is even more beautiful than the words. Atoms are made up of stuff which is made up of stuff which is made up of what mathematicians describe as mostly closed (or maybe not closed) loops of vibrating 1 dimensional strings. The world is made up of music, not matter.

--Painter Joe Naujokas is represented by Katherina Rich-Perlow Gallery in New York
permanent link libby 9:02 AM
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Celebration of life, celebration of work

[note: Here are responses by two students in Colette Copeland's critical writing class at the University of Pennsylvania to work by Marcie Feldman at Third Street Gallery.]

Post by Ainsley Adams

Marcie Feldman's colorful collages, on display at Third Street Gallery until
November 28, are playful and fun. Inspired by a recent trip to New Mexico, Feldman infused each piece with the energy of the southwest through the bold colors and rudimentary forms. The collages are intricate arrangements of handmade paper involving layering and a variety of tearing techniques. This attention to detail creates different visual effects that give the pieces a unique depth and complexity. The colleges convey a sense of liveliness and appear bursting with movement.

Iparticularly enjoyed the more representational pieces in which the subjects are frequently depicted smiling and dancing, whether they are animals, cars, or the sun. The casual juxtaposition of the objects at various angles contributes to this impression of animation. Certain decorative items are stamped onto the collage and resemble artwork by the Native Americans of the southwest. They include abstract designs like swirls as well as realistically modeled ladders, chairs, and hands. This celebration of life and culture characterizes the entire exhibit.

Post by Lea Marin

Marcie Feldman’s prints are a celebration of life, painting, and the studio. Her work is about losing all inhibitions and self-consciousness in order to allow the magic of painting and the studio to take hold and manifest itself in art. Through bright colors and busy compositions, Feldman imbues her work with an unrestrained passion and dreamlike quality. Plant and animal symbols dance rhythmically across Feldman’s works and burst with fiery energy and excitement.

Artist Reception (open to public) Sun., Nov. 14 1-5 p.m., exhibition through Nov. 28, 3rd Street Gallery on 2nd Street, 58 North Second Street, (215)625-0993.

permanent link roberta 7:56 AM
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roberta fallon and libby rosof'sartblog

artblog

Saturday, November 20, 2004

Dreamlands for conquests

Friday, November 19, 2004

I Heart MOMA

Thursday, November 18, 2004

Mythology at play

Memory, the game

Natural reflections

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

MOMA sees the light; we see a little art

Thursday Demand

Three-day bulletin

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

MOMA people

The Bloomies of Art

Monday, November 15, 2004

Coming home to MOMA

Sunday, November 14, 2004

Compression and refinement

Music of the canvas

Celebration of life, celebration of work

roberta fallon and
libby rosof's
artblog