artblog

 
Posted by libby

I had to write something quick about the Salvador Dali show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, before someone else used this corny headline (image, Dali's "Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach, 1938).

Here's my very, very short response. Little did I know that Dali was brilliant, a genius, an iconoclast, a man before his time.

You know how when you see a museum show, it has a thesis that the curators are pushing. Usually, it is over-argued, supported just barely by the art. But not so with Dali. The art doesn't need a thesis. It's complex, smart, gorgeous, inventive, original, sexy, obstreperous, challenging--and Dali was a rock star celebrity artist before his time.

I don't have time to write about it now. I'm madly packing up my kitchen for the contractors who are coming next week, and Roberta and I are driving up to New York tomorrow for the Christo and Jeanne-Claude "Gates" and the Whitney. But I just had to let you know that this is an amazing show and if you're not in Philadelphia, you ought to come here just for this. It merits the hype.

permanent link   libby 9:01 PM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by roberta

I went to hear author Sherman Alexie Wednesday night at the Academy of Natural Sciences. This was one of the evening lectures that went with the "Cocktails with Lewis and Clark" programming to coincide with their bicentennial exhibit about the explorers' 1804-1806 trip across America. (image is Bucks County coffee served nicely in front of a scene with a big buck. Serendipity or no? You be the judge.)



Before the lecture, folks milled around outside the auditorium where food tables and a bar were set up. Whoever placed the Colonially-garbed Mark Carroll three-piece band in front of the rams knew what they were doing. The lovely animals in the mountain top scene appear to be pausing for a bit of musical interlude before they look for more grass to eat. Loved the band's costumes and their music, which felt colonial to me but the pr said was 19th century. (I suppose that could be colonial, couldn't it?)



I saw the L&C exhibit in a flash in the few minutes I had before the talk. It's comprehensive and nicely laid out in a geographical pathway (starting in Philadelphia where Lewis came to study botany and learn about scientific instruments and measurements at the American Philosophical Society, and ending on the west coast.) (image is a buffalo robe from 1835. It's like the one L&C gave to Jefferson. That one was lost. The robe, which is read from right to left tells of the war exploits of a tribe --sorry my hasty notes don't say which tribe.)

Alexie, (below right) known for his novels, poetry and the film "Smoke Signals" (highly recommended), is a fantastic aerobic speaker. He gave a 90-minute talk that included all kinds of pacing back and forth across the stage and probably logged a mile and lost some weight with all the hot lights and marching. My estimate of the audience was 400. Carolyn Belardo of the Academy told me that it was the biggest audience yet for their evening lecture series. (The night was co-produced by the Galleries at Moore, which hosted the post-lecture reception and book signing.)



Alexie's talk was a cross between a Spaulding Grey monolog only much angrier and full of lefty politics and a stand-up routine. Much personal information in funny anecdotes about being a fish out of water coupled with some barbed comments about being raised on the res.

He grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation (Alexie has no problem with the word Indian, by the way). And said that in the 20th century, 20 Spokane residents graduated from college. Two got masters degrees and one got a Ph.D. Born hydrocephalic, he had seizures until age 7 and had a series of brain operations. As a kid he couldn't do the normal stuff and took up reading. He still has petit mal seizures. "Those are easy," he said, lifting his head up and letting it fall limp on his left shoulder. "It looks like you're writing."

People always ask him about the alcoholism among Indians. He said "In my family there are only two that don't drink -- my sister and me....I'm a drunk. I've just been sober for 13 years."

He talked about Indian men and their machismo issues which play out especially at war time. There were 5,000 Indians fighting in World War One "and we weren't even citizens then," he said. In Vietnam, 87,000 Indians fought and 97 percent of those were volunteers.

...I'm going to post this now and come back and give more about Alexie's talk this weekend. Meanwhile here's the link to his website and a nice Q&A with him about Smoke Signals.

permanent link   roberta 8:12 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by libby

Here's what I like about Matt Bollinger's figurative paintings, now hanging at Rodger La Pelle Galleries:

I like the surprising angles and distorted spaces. I like the sometimes unexpected subject matter. I like the narratives, not spelled out but suggested. I like the glimpses into life in his neighborhood and life amongst the young folks in seedy spaces. I like the prehensile foliage. I like the paint. I also like the views framed by walls and windows (left, "After the Party").

Bollinger is young, and so the large show (all painted in the past year and a half) includes some mere studies and paintings that look not quite finished (he's going to have to learn to edit these out when he shows). Some of the paintings seem to have been in styles he tried on for size and then let go. But he's on the verge of nailing what his subject matter is, what fascinates him (right, "The Fall").

Clearly I wasn't the only one who liked his work. He sold 20 of his paintings. And one of them had three customers who wanted it.

Bollinger, who hails from Kansas City, Mo., and attended the Kansas City Art Institute, according to gallery owner La Pelle, will also have a few pieces in next month's show at La Pelle, a group show of artists who hail from the Midwest (left, "Marriage Portrait" with curved floor boards).

I recently wrote about Bollinger's ink drawings at my neighborhood cafe (see post). Some of those images reappeared in oil at LaPelle's.bollinger, matt

permanent link   libby 6:20 PM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by libby

We're trying to upgrade our artists index so the posts are more accessible. So if you see weirdness on the left-hand side of the page, please be patient with us. Eventually, we hope to get it right.

permanent link   libby 12:49 PM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by libby

Roberta didn't lie. She posted that I would write something about "Pulp:Paper Sculpture," at Tyler's Produce Gallery. The show, which has five artists from hot ticket Vik Muniz to local young artist Leslie Mutchler, explores how something basically flat and 2-dimensional can be sculptural. The show was curated by grad student/Produce Gallery advisor Omar Rodriguez-Graham, who was struck by the solidity of the material when he saw Japanese artist Noriko Ambe's stratified paper landscapes three years ago in a show in Brooklyn.

Ambe is also in the show and her three pieces are the jaw dropper. Her "Lands of Emptiness: Linear Actions Cutting Project" (right top) are stratified landscapes carved into paper. The cutouts create eroded-looking canyons and sink-holes, pristine and empty and voluptuous at the same time. These canyons or hollows, deliberately cut and removed, have a surprising grandeur and believability that is of course false. They are obsessive and controlled products of the imagination--somewhere and nowhere at once. By stacking the paper, the usually ignored third dimension of paper suddenly becomes a formal, striking presence. Ambe right now is working in New York (image top, "Lands of Emptiness: Linear Actions Cutting Project," from front to back, 2Z, 2A and 2M.

In contrast, Vik Muniz' faux newspaper articles raise issues of what's real and what's not, but he's not raising issues about the third dimension of paper. The articles are on yellowed newsprint with torn edges and look like they might be the real thing. But each of the articles parodies some cultural phenomenon--in Las Vegas, a Gerhy-designed art museum is nixed because Gerhy doesn't get the neon aesthetic of the town; in Romania, tourists flee after sighting the ghost of former dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu; in outer space, an artist with an almost-real name (Ross Bleckman instead of Bleckner) rides the space shuttle courtesy of NASA to bridge art and science and and study creativity and visual cognition in space (left, Ceaucescu item in "Personal Articles" series).

Muniz, by the way, will have a show this spring at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (see post).

Leslie Mutchler's "The Affected Model of a Flawed Paradigm in the H-O Scale" (detail right) turns newsprint into a landscape atop a plywood sheet--hence the model-trains reference in the title. This landscape, as the name suggests, is flawed. Instead of the looping train tracks and faux rolling hills, we've got a city grid, the streets between stacks of newsprint that are just about the same size as Post-it pads, each with a little pinky-red-orange street sign, some of them instructing us to "sign here." The affect is computer-chip like, and repetitive, the piled papers like buildings, the world of office life reduced to reams, cubicles, tyrannical square piles for round humans.

I would compare how John Powers uses paper, applying rectangles and squares of paper to create a rather architectural relief, to how Astrid Bowlby accretes modular paper shapes. But Powers is working small and contained in a rectangle with no marks. Bowlby pushes the the layers beyond the picture frame, her lyrically outlined and cut shapes becoming enormous installations that place you physically in a surging paper landscape--see post (image, Powers' "Full Carpet").



Ryan Johnson, also a New York artist, offers a paper sculpture that focuses on the flat, 2-D side formed to make non-flat planes and taking advantage of the lightness of paper, it's ability to not sink. "Redhead," with airborne hair (right), is a head on a stick, and it made me think about how red hair holds your attention before the body beneath registers on your consciousness. In a way, this is the most traditional of the pieces, the least conceptual. It's a traditional portrait sculpture, just made of paper.

I might not have visited the show if I weren't already attracted to the Northeast suburbs by a show first curated for a New York gallery and then brought in by Abington Art Center's new curator, Amy Lipton. You know, drive out to Abington,you might as well drive over to Cheltenham. Also both were open on a Tuesday, a big plus in an art world that has decided Monday and Tuesday are the weekend. The thing that sealed it was running into Rodriguez at the screening of "Atanarjuat" Saturday--see post.

I also got lost (help, I need my urban grid; I'm more at home in Mutchler's H-O scale organization than the idealized suburban and country landscapes of model-train enthusiasts). I finally followed the setting sun, and much to my surprise, came upon Cheltenham Avenue, which I'm still trying to figure that out.

Anyway, seeing the show at Abington and this one in the same trip was a good way to go.

permanent link   libby 11:34 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by roberta

While charging in to Tyler's Produce Gallery to check out the "PULP: Paper Sculptures" show (very good --Libby and I both saw it and I'm sure we'll both have some or much to say) I ran into Nicholas Kripal, one of the Crane Art Center founders. Crane, you may remember, houses the Icebox, a glorious, high-ceilinged, unobstructed project space that has the most potential for giganto-excitement in visual arts of anything in this town. Kripal, a sculptor and Tyler faculty, says things are coming along at Crane, a mixed use space which will have artists' studios, exhibit space and performing arts spaces. They're installing the heating/air conditioning units in the studios at the moment. And, Kripal says look out for non-stop programming in the Icebox which is booked through November. We'll let you know what's coming up when we get the press material. See previous posts here and here for more on Crane and the Icebox.

(image is detail of Leslie Mutchler's "The Affected Model of a Flawed Paradigm in the H-O Scale" 2005, a kind of faux archive cum landscape, which, in spite of its title is a fun piece. It's in the "Pulp" show up at Tyler.)

permanent link   roberta 8:15 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by roberta

Here's the scoop: A total of $365,000 was awarded to 66 individual artists in 19 counties throughout Pennsylvania. In our five-county region (Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery and Philadelphia), 38 artists, writers and musicians were picked in categories that included visual arts, media arts, folk and traditional, arts commentary, crafts, music and literature. Awards are in the amounts of $10,000 or $5,000.

Here's the visual arts eight:

Mark Campbell, Virgil Marti, Peter Miraglia, Brian McCutcheon, Eileen Neff, Amanda Tinker, Thomas S. Vance and Nami Yamamoto.

And the craft arts six:

Debora Muhl, Paula Winokur, Lorraine Glessner, Karen E. Misher, Adelaide Paul and Lorraine Glessner

Read the full list here.

The bad news is that the Council has suspended its SOS grant program as of this cycle of grantees. SOS grants were for the grant winners and for the runners' up who needed small amounts to realize a project. Thanks to Brian McCutcheon for the heads up and the link. And congratulations, Brian, and all the winners. Everybody else, keep on working, now. Next time is yours. (image is McCutcheon's "Ultralounger" 2000)

permanent link   roberta 7:14 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by roberta

Just in case you're wondering how the arts would fare under Bush's slash and burn budget proposal, here's news: NEA is targetted for a 15% increase...and NEH for a 19% increase. But apparently we can't have science with our art (is science the new bugaboo? ...Do stem cells trump piss Christ photographs in the homeland now?)

Read this news item from the Cornell website. We are in scary anti-intellectual times.

Here's a few paragraphs that stand out about science:

Bush requested small increases to the two largest sources of federal funds for academic scientists, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NIH would get a 2.7 percent increase, to $28.8 billion; the NSF would get a 3 percent increase, to $5.7 billion.

This proposal comes after several years of healthy increases for NIH and NSF and includes increases below inflation for most science programs. Total science and technology spending would decline by 0.4 percent, to $60.4 billion, excluding Pentagon expenditures. Spending for science and technology programs at agencies other than the NIH would drop by 3 percent.

Here's the news about the arts:

Funding for the arts and humanities fared substantially better than the sciences under the president's proposal. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) would receive a 15.2 percent increase, to $139.4 million, while the National Endowment for the Humanities would get a 19.7 percent increase, or $18.4 million, to $162 million. Most of the increase for the humanities would go to the agency's American history program, aimed at increasing the understanding of American history and culture.

I'm so bummed.

(image is moon over my street on a dark and cloudy night. I thought it was kind of ominous.)

permanent link   roberta 11:47 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by roberta

I can't believe it was a year ago that Stella and I were chasing around New Orleans with our friends Chuck, Iris and Lianna gathering up pounds of beads, cups and stuffed animals from the many parades we saw. Here's the post with lots of pix. Never thought I'd want to go again but today I find myself longing for a little NOLA color, warmth and noise.

(image is a little Jerry Garcia look-alike we saw posing in the French Quarter)

permanent link   roberta 11:15 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by roberta

After Ann and I stepped out of the Rosenwald Wolf gallery last week on a bright sunny day we spotted an unexplainable hovering object (uho) above what appeared to be the University of the Arts' campus. The balloon was tethered to the ground and seemed to have a skirt on it. It looked a little like a jellyfish. Any info anybody?



Only this morning after a photo library clean out did I realize the uho's unmistakable echoing of a work of art inside Rosenwald Wolf: Aaron Williams' painting of a hot body part in flat blue sky background. There's something shocking about Williams' paintings. Their overheated body references seem pop and high culture savvy (John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage and MTV) and yet I couldn't get to the there in these works. Is it flesh/body/human that is all important in a flat, blank world? Is the Big Nothing infringing on the Big Humanoid? Body deformation sits heavy on this work, which could be a kind of human monolith a la "2001: A Space Oddysey." Oh well, whatever it is, I guess it's part of the anxiety-driven, post-millenial fascination with the grotesque, something we'll be treated to for some time to come while we work our way to the future.

permanent link   roberta 8:29 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by libby

Before the First Friday shows really opened, I stopped at Artists House after looking in the window and seeing some nice portraits.

They were done by David Palumbo, Anthony Palumbo's brother (see posts on Anthony here and here).

But David's got different fish to fry. His portraits, which have an old masters sheen, take place in the quotidien world of unremarkable spaces--the office file room, the vacant suburbs, the streets filled with stores and signs.

And the people seem uneasy and waiting. What they're waiting for I can only speculate--the shutter to snap; the shoe to drop; life to begin.

These are not the entitled and confident posers of traditional portraiture.

Not as edgy as Anthony, but surely worth a look at how Rembrandtian lights and darks and rich painting illuminate everyday life and everyday people and their worries.

Some woodblock prints by Daniel Miller of struggling trees had a Japanese and eco feel to them. Only their scraggly and scrubby look kept them from falling into preciousness (sorry about the reflection). He also had huge, fierce woodblock portraits of literary and other cultural heroes (I remember Eudora Welty, for one). I did not see the other work in the gallery because I jumped the gun.

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

 
Posted by libby

If you (or a buddy) have travelled to see the Reichstag wrapped--and the Pont Neuf, the fences, the umbrellas, the islands or any other Christo and Jeanne-Claude feats of wrapping and marking, a reporter for a New York paper wants to talk to you (right, plans for the gates for New York's Central Park, scheduled to open Saturday, weather permitting).

The reporter Jennifer Steinhauer, jestei@nytimes.com wrote us looking for globetrotting Christo fans who travel the world to see the work. Email her directly with names or leads.

permanent link   libby 7:34 PM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by roberta

Just a heads up on coming attractions. I'm meeting Abington Art Center's new curator, Amy Lipton, tomorrow and will see what's on her mind for the sculpture garden and the indoor program.

Lipton is an eco-oriented curator who had a New York gallery in the 1980s and was the first to show works by Polly Apfelbaum, Sue Williams, and Mel Chin. She's been an independent curator since 1995 and her debut exhibit at Abington, "Trouble in Paradise" is an eco-themed show she originated with Van Brunt Gallery in New York. (Van Brunt seems to have decamped to Beacon if I understand their website's information.)

Fifteen artists in the show including Brandon Ballengeé, Edward Burtynsky, David Chow, Dan Ford, Adam Fuss, Joy Garnett, Fariba Hajamadi, Julie Heffernan, Joanne Howard, Thomas Huber, Alison Moritsugu, Kirsten Mosher, Steve Mumford, Alexis Rockman and Chrysanne Stathacos. (image is Rockman's "Untitled (Neozoic era)" 2000.)

We've seen a grizzly, Rockman post-Apocalyptic work here at Temple Gallery in a group exhibit a few years back. Mumford is the artist whose drawings from Iraq are a regular feature on artnet.

permanent link   roberta 8:21 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by roberta

I'm going to do a little looking back before I charge forward. Here are some thoughts about three shows Libby told you about and which I saw last week: Tina Newberry at Schmidt-Dean; Field Questions at Rosenwald-Wolf and the Lewis and Clark-based exhibit at Moore College. Libby's posts are here, here and here.

I'll be brief and re-iterate they're all worthy shows and up for a while so I encourage you to get out and see them.

Gaze into my eyes


All English majors are specialists in symbol and subtext and my years of digging and delving beneath the surface of texts has transferred over to art which I love to pick apart and analyze for hidden meaning. So when my friend Ann and I saw Tina Newberry's autobiographical paintings, which seemed to be all about dress-up and a kind of old-fashioned militarism, I immediately thought of a certain contemporary world leader prone to militarism, dress up and premature declarations of "Mission accomplished." But no, Chris Schmidt told me, Newberry's work is not fueled by contemporary politics. The current body of work, all made in 2004, comes out of the artist's immersion in the world of antique gun-fanciers. Not exactly re-enactors, Schmidt said, the group is comprised of folks who own real muskets and actually go out there and shoot them (like, at targets). (image is detail of Newberry's "Self-Appointment")



That cleared up, I found Newberry's world one of fierce gazes and raw self-speculation. There are a number of woman in interior paintings that read as through the looking glass views of the artist in a symbol-laden world. Most reverberant for me were her portrait busts which offer unblinking confrontations between viewer and artist. I loved these works for their ability to raise the mirror and offer that human interaction of looking into someone else's eyes and thinking about what it means to be you, and how you differ -- or don't -- from someone else. Portraits that offer hard gazes are assertive. I've always thought they are important in helping to chronicle the age. Newberry's portraits offer, in addition to direct confrontation, a world of questions about male and female roles, and the role of clothes and costume. And while they're really not at all about fashion, there is some element of fashion in the artist's dress up that mirrors our own time's fascination with the glossy surface of things. Excellent show. (image is detail of "L'il Deacon.")

The question



Sid Sachs' exhibit at Rosenwald-Wolf is a high concept affair. The curator asked a group of abstract painters to field some questions about why their type of art was relevant today. It's a fair question. The artists emailed their responses to the curator and sent some paintings to display, and voila, the show. There's a catalog coming soon which will lay the questions out. Until then, the exhibit is enigmatic, with some strong work (Chris Martin) and some less so. Martin's big and little paintings are a particular type of abstraction -- call it Thomas Nozkowskian. They seem based on something real (game boards, computer circuitry, maps, bar charts, "dots" candy strips). And they offer a point of view about the world -- about power, life and death. While not really spelling it out, these paintings speak of a need for control and order and what could be more relevant than that thought in a world so clearly without both. Martins' paintings have a messy, full-speed ahead craftsmanship that makes them seem tossed off and even a little feverish. Sachs told me that on the contrary the works take a long time to make and often are painted on top of other paintings (his own or other painters' canvasses). In any event, the human hand is a big presence in the works -- as is a ruminant mind. Without a written explanation, these works make the case for their relevance today. As for the other works, which seemed bound up in formalist concerns, I'll wait and read the explanation in the catalog. (image is installation shot of two Martin paintings)

The critique


I loved the big Lewis and Clark exhibit at Moore College. (See my review in PW on Wednesday for more.) In particular, I loved Bently Spang's videos in the gallery window. The artist (a member of the Northern Cheyenne nation) plays with the stereotypes of Native Americans in works that both mock the stereotypes and hold them in esteem. Thomas Haukaas's beaded memorial shirt and his wishful drawing of a tribe moving to a more prosperous future were assertions of Native culture and poignant for their earnest looking back to look forward. (image is Haukaas' drawing "More Time Expected")



The show, which is an almost-expected critique of western expansion by the white man into pristine and already inhabited territory is nonetheless a great viewing eperience. So Western in its affect, the show is unlike others you're liable to see in Philadelphia. The only thing even vaguely comparable is "Broken Western" at 222 Gallery back in April, 2004, which brought a group of Western artists together with work commenting on similar issues (ecological, cultural and social). (See post about that show.) (image is from Spang's video "Bigfoot," sorry about glare from the window)

Next up, something new.

permanent link   roberta 3:41 PM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by libby

I had to talk Murray into coming with me to see "Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)," a film about good and survival vs. evil and death among traditional Inuit, at International House last night.

"Atanarjuat" is one of the film series that is part of the Fabric Workshop and Museum's "Experiments with Truth" international survey of contemporary film making, which focuses on documentary in modern art film-making.

I can quibble my way into high dudgeon, since "Atanarjuat" is neither a documentary nor an art-gallery kind of film.

But whatever category it might belong in, it is certainly wonderful, and if you ever get a chance to see it, go. Even Murray, who's a dedicated follower of pop culture (I had to promise him we'd leave if the film turned out to be bad-arty), was won over and dazzled by this film, which has in it extraordinary arctic locale, an exotic way of life, mythic story telling, love, sex, jealousy, murder, mayhem, and threats to the entire social order.

In short, it's the north country's own Greek drama, with evil deeds throwing a community out of balance across generations and corrective deeds righting the wrong and healing the community. Without healing and restoration of communal values of cooperation, it is clear that these people could not survive in such a harsh climate.

The film, which retells an oral tale handed down through Inuit generations, is a sort of Rain King myth--with a spiritual resurrection and ensuing rescue. At the beginning, keeping track of who is who and who did what to whom was a little puzzling. But after that, we were gripped by the tale as well as by the scenery, the clothing required for survival, the relationships, the method of building igloos, the food customs and rituals, etc., etc.

In contrast to Hollywood and cable TV licentiousness, the movie served as a great reminder that sexual attraction doesn't require T&A to start the juices flowing, although spring does help. Just moving with all those layers of furs must be exhausting, but burrowing through to find the body beneath is its own sort of turn-on.

Another astonishing moment was a ritual punch-down before the community, gathered in an igloo, between the two antagonists. Nothing like fighting as we know it, with rules for how each blow is cast, it's a lesson in cultural differences.

The outtakes at the end of the movie showed some of the creative film-making techniques used to track the actors as they moved across the ice and snow.

This movie, which is nearly 3 hours long (172 minutes) held my interest--and still holds my interest as I ruminate over the dramatic images and the story--in ways that 2-minute gallery videos and traditional documentary never could. I give it five stars out of five, and a Better-Than-Hollywood vote for being nothing like the navel-gazing and shallowness that permeates our American movie culture.

See the FWM website for other films and discussions. By the way, following Isaac Julien's "Frantz Fanon: Black Skin/White Mask" on Wednesday, the artist will take part in the post-screening discussion, this according to the FWM Director of Public Programs and Exhibitions Doug Bohr in his intro to "Atanarjuat."

permanent link   libby 12:50 PM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by libby

Roberta and I are still looking for our way through the First Friday morass, trying to figure out how to cover it, how to give shows a fair viewing. By time Friday evening rolls around, we're pretty tired, and viewing art amidst the excitement and the crowds and the desire to schmooze is always a problem.

Last month, we skipped First Friday altogether. It seemed to work well; we kept bumping into eachother as we each trolled the galleries separately on Saturday afternoon, but we got a better look at the work.

Yesterday, however, we couldn't quite stay away.

For one thing, our friend Stephen Robin had an opening at Gallery Joe (images above and right of two of his voluptuous new cast aluminum reliefs--suggesting any number of ultra-closeups of natural forms like the sea, straw, leaves that go on without end beyond the edges of the image). By the way, Robin's been working on some really sexy orange blossoms, 9 feet tall, for the Miami airport. He's got some pictures in a binder of the models. Check 'em out. Also at Gallery Joe, artist Mary Judge, but I didn't really take the time to look at these.

We also couldn't stay away because Roberta's been in touch with those involved with the missionCREEP.com show at Nexus, and it looked like it might be a lot of fun (it was--I'm counting on Roberta to tell you about this one).

And then we thought we'd stop by missioncreeper Bill Amundson's solo show at PII Gallery (we saw satirical cartoons in colored pencil and met the artist himself--both had us laughing out loud)(left, "Modigliano [sic.] Nude with iPod and Tattoo"). In addition to the art-referential drawings, there are suburban landscapes filled with Starbucks and Wal-Marts. Worth a visit.

Then we stopped at Carbon 14 to check out an installation by Steve Rossi that also involved a model looking at the art plus photographers taking photos of the model looking at the art while we looked at the photographers and the model and the art. It didn't quite click, but we were glad to re-aquaint ourselves with Katarina, whom we had met many years back when Carbon 14 was in its first life and Roberta and I had a plan for an installation that we didn't know how to get made.

Then Roberta headed for home, I headed for 10 minutes worth of Gallery 222 and the Painted Bride, and my dinner date with Murray.

The work at 222, "Memory Document," was sort of grafitti appropriation art by Jose Parla. I thought it was pretty funny to reproduce for gallery display crumbling wall surfaces, tiles, ragged plaster, peeling posters and all--sad documents of the urban scene. But it wasn't so great to look at, not enough of a transformation from reality to art.

As for the grafitti, it was abstract, and not as word- or image-oriented as real grafitti. Maybe I didn't give it much of a chance, or maybe it really wasn't any deeper than the surface it was scribbled on.

Nothing new I want to report about at the Bride, yet.

For all the ups and downs, I still was glad to be out among the crowds, talking and walking and looking around. I'll get back to Old City because there's more that I want to see. And on the way home I tried to take a picture of the Inquirer building decked out in green Eagles light. But the car was moving too fast (left).

permanent link   libby 11:15 AM
Comments? Let us know.