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Posted by libby

mokomoko
hunter, sarah
knight, jas
deluca, michaelgrigonis, marjoriesullivan, michaeldispensa, rosihoeber, ditta baron
There's still lots of stuff I meant to see last week but didn't. Typical.
But I saw a couple of group shows that were worthy of mention. On First Friday, Roberta and I both went to MBN Studios/freeform gallery, because our friend Ditta Baron Hoeber was part of a 9-person show curated by freeform's Tadashi Moriyama.

The show focuses on the diaristic and time-oriented role of serial images in art, with implicit comparisons between photos and video and paintings.

Although Hoeber is of a different generation--i.e. mine--than the rest of the artists (young, mostly recent graduates), her work seems in tune with theirs--a horizontal line of small serial photographs focusing on the empty spaces between people who are sitting around rehearsing a play. She also offered drawings of some of the actors and some contact-sheet-size prints as well. The line-up promises action, yet the people are pretty static, only their heads swivelling a little on their necks. The heads appear at the edges of the photos, falling off the bottom, barely in sight. I think it's better not to know this is a rehearsal. Then the images have a mystery that goes beyond the surprising compositions (left, from Hoeber's "Ensemble").

Rosi Dispensa's five images of Northern Liberties (really, just five in eight months?) are the size of picture postcards, but the content is not picture-postcard material, except for the intense blue skies. The gritty street and infrastructure details appear to float in front of the skies. And the pictures float in front of the wall, pristine presentations edged in aluminum and hung on wooden-block spacers with nice hardware and then leveled with delicate cork washers--hardware chic meets the real city, the part of the city that's never advertised. The work captures the mundane neighborhood in mundane images that glow (right, Dispensa's series, the closest one, "Wires").


Michael Sullivan's set of six paintings are of a woman saying, Thank you. They are painted from stills of a video of her speaking, but Sullivan adds oomph and detail, punching up the flat and blurred image from the video still. These are swell and intense, the shifting expression almost creepy. Sullivan was included in "The New Acropolis" at Fleisher-Ollman and "Salon: Possibilities in Painting" at the Optimistic (see our posts on "Salon" here and here). (left, "Thank you")


Mokomoko's installation of a fan's worshipful shrine-- in which Mokomoko is the fan, the star in the posters, and the artist of the posters--seems like a sign of the times. She bases it on her diaristic webpage, which creates a Mokomoko for public consumption that dwells somewhere between fact and fiction and fantasy. I'm put in mind of Paul Simon's lyrics, "the camera follows us in slo mo, the way it looks to us all." There's something about the Web and blogs and Web pages in which everyone is their own star."THE MOKOSPACE-Movie Posters of my life," with its grafitti-covered walls, is a frenetic translation of cyber into real space (right, a detail of "THE MOKOSPACE," with "movie posters").

Others in the show are Kristofer Harzinski, with gridded photos of minutiae, showing entropy's effects on an abandoned airport; William Medearis, with a grid of 27 similar paintings; Ryoichi Asada, with gelatin silver prints; and Osamu Kushida, with photos of moving bodies as blots with auras.

(This is a tough gallery to get into when it's not First Friday, so call before you go).

The group show of emerging artists at Artists House was at the other end of the spectrum, representational painting with a lot of trompe l'oeil technique. But three of the artists there caught my eye, each for different reasons.

Sarah Hunter, a Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts alum, paints some mighty odd paintings of mighty odd still life groupings--rough little assemblages that include crudely cut-out and painted fish or clouds, shelves supported by embroidery silk threaded through sewing-card holes, tschotchkes like toy ponies and religious figures, marked up masking tape and so on. The magic is capturing these anti-traditional images with trompe l'oeil technique (left, "Apocalyptic Vision").

University of the Arts alum Jas Knight's trompe l'oeil technique is brilliant. The drops of water on bathroom tiles with soiled grout practically bead on the surface of the canvas. A portrait of a young girl in a pink dress, with its luminous greens in the background and on the girl's face, is luscious and beautiful. The subject is a sweet young African American girl in her Mary Janes, not the Infanta or the blue boy. Another painting includes a backpack gaping open. The merger of daily life with a technique usually reserved for still life is a surprise in this day and age ("Girl in a Pink Dress," right).


And Michael de Luca, a CAN artist, I mean CFEVA artist, who teaches at Arcadia, paints light transforming the ordinary into an object of desire. His "Love Painting III" (left) turns multiple heart-shaped boxes into glowing, consumable, juicy objects that call up desire of many kinds. His chair draped in a flowered cloth or sheet that forms a train on the floor becomes a glowing throne. Even a pile of cinder blocks--not as original a subject--take on some desirability. de Luca's brush strokes are as material and sexy as his subject matter.

Others in the show are Hellen Cha-Kim, Holly DeCovny, Frank Kallop, Denise Lewandowski, Carol Maguire, Laura Renner, Alanna Rose, Sterling Shaw, Daria Zolotareva and Gregory Watson.

Marjorie Grigonis, who is a friend of ours, has a show across the street at 3rd Street Gallery. She's got some new wrinkles in her work--densely colored backgrounds instead of the usual white, and a couple of collaged paper pieces (right, "Berber"). Grigonis said she thought the colors were inspired by a trip to North Africa.

permanent link   libby 11:11 PM
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Posted by libby

The weather report just changed and we will now be out there today, 17th and Market, 11 to 2. The only thing thing that will change this will be stuff coming directly out of the sky making our art work wet. So if you see stuff coming down, we won't be there. Otherwise, we will.

permanent link   libby 8:26 AM
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Posted by roberta

berger, jonathanThe alternative gallery we love, Vox Populi, has another round of winners. Libby will tell you about most of it but here I will give you some pictures and talk a bit about Jonathan Berger's Fourth Room.

I met the Brooklyn artist when I was in the gallery. He was caucusing with photographer and LURE impresario Aaron Igler about a picture shoot Aaron was doing of Berger's installation at Vox.


"Goner," Berger's installation, translates the narrow, windowless room into a mini-musuem with big ideas about life, war, and mania. The piece has the feel of a Civil War-era travelling carnival display complete with tiny stanchions that cordon off exhibits and make a pathway for gigantic viewers to walk. Berger has wallpapered the room from top to bottom with a thin layer of plywood sheeting, some of it found wood, some purchased. The artist told me that he uses found wood a lot -- like for the walls, as well as for the ubiquitous stacked boxes, which evoke coffins and ancient packing crates for the toy-like roller coasters, swords and stanchions that make up the exhibit. The plywood walls are painted with a milk paint to give them the old, barn-like quality. By putting the dark wood on top and the lighter on the bottom it focusses the eye down and keep it riveted on the mini environments on the floor.



The artist, who made everything here, told me that for the roller coaster and for the two inch mini-swords, he uses poplar which he shaves down to toothpick size and carves. The starburst pattern of swords on the floor is sweetly decorative. But it also reminds me of pictures I've seen of piles of confiscated weapons turned in by a losing army after some cataclysmic battle.



Berger has a bunch of drawings framed in dark (scrap) wood. They're hung at about knee level and on close inspection are all roughly the same image -- line drawings, very child-like, of what look like tree trunks with their limbs cut off to stumpy protrusions (they look like tree dreadlocks or antlers). The drawings which are framed in scrap wood are on aged newsprint which the artist collects. Because of their lovely yellow color, which coordinates beautifully with the dark wood and the other colors in the room, the drawings are like windows letting in a kind of faux golden light.

The artist has a giveaway in conjunction with the exhibit. (My kind of guy!) He made a double-sided poster -- on newsprint -- that shows some of those stumpy trees, a starburst of swords, the stacks of boxes and the information about the show hand-written in old fashioned block print. And here's some news to follow up on, all you people looking for the cheap printing option, Berger said he used the printing services of the Communist/Jewish press in Camden. He said they have cheap rates and only work for artists, nothing commercial.



I asked Berger about his Vox connection and the artist, a native New Yorker, told me he was at the Macdowell Colony a while back and met and became friends with Philadelphia performance artist Martha Macdonald who also was in residence at Macdowell. Berger, who said he is a performer as well as an artist (he performs with the Brooklyn troupe Circus Amok) came to Philadelphia to help Macdonald with one of her shows and heard about Vox at that time and applied to the gallery for his installation idea.

The enterprise, which had an obsessive, inventor-like, outsidery aspect to it -- as well as some anti-war themes -- reminded me of Thomas Hirschhorn's also manic, anti-war "Cavemanman" which Libby and I had seen at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in 2002.

(all images are of Berger's "Goner")

permanent link   roberta 8:23 AM
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Posted by roberta

close, chuckHi there, sorry to be awol this week. Deadlines got me but I'm out from under and will try to get something up about Vox and the Stamp show (Axis of Evil) soon. Meanwhile, earlier today I picked up mail (snail variety) at the Weekly office and found a big fat envelope from Penn Design. I assumed it was the MFA students gearing up for their Spring exhibit but no the package contained information announcing the next Locks Distinguished Artist lecture: Chuck Close on April 7 at 6 pm at the Zellerbach Theater, Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. This one will be a solo gig, unlike the last session which was a Q&A between Alex Katz and Robert Storr. Close will talk about his work and about art in general. Sounds good. Tickets are free but you do need a ticket to get in. Call the Annenberg Center Box Office 215.898.3900 to reserve yours. (NOTE: There's a $2.50 booking charge for the telephone service, and unlike what I told you previously -- sorry about that -- there's no online sign up. But you can hoof it over to the Annenberg box office, 3680 Walnut St. and get tickets in person -- for free. Box office hours are 10 am-6 pm weekdays.)

Speaking of the Weekly, my piece on Eamon Ore-Giron came out Wednesday. Read it here. I also did an a-list quickie on Vox. Here.

permanent link   roberta 5:56 PM
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Posted by libby

I took Murray to his first Philadelphia Flower Show yesterday (can you believe this? a native Philadelphian?), and he was shocked by the number of cheesy displays alongside the drop-dead wonders of nature brought indoors.

Cheesiest of the cheese (well, maybe not the cheesiest, but certainly a contender) was a group of floral displays, oops, I'm sorry, floral interpretations, from members of the American Institute of Floral Designers. And so I present my personal bad-taste awards for these arrangements, inspired by visual and performing artists:

The Andy Warhol floral interpretation:












The Jackson Pollack floral interpretation:












The Dale Chihuly floral interpretation:
















The Alexander Calder floral interpretation (enough to make you regret the invention of the mobile):
















The Georgia O'Keefe floral interpretation:
















The Frank Lloyd Wright floral interpretation:
















The N.C. Wyeth floral interpretation:
















The Louis Comfort Tiffany floral interpretation:

















Others so honored were the late great rocker and avatar of all that's dark Jim Morrison, choreographer Paul Taylor, architects Greene and Greene (they were rolling over in their graves over this one), and singer Grover Washington!

I've got more First Friday reviews coming, but probably not until tomorrow. Roberta, too.

permanent link   libby 4:06 PM
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Posted by libby

Work that the canvas can barely contain, emotions that roil in improbably hot colors, drawings of stupendous detail and turbulence, lacy paper cutouts that bound up and around the walls in an installation, a sense of an explosive need to create has taken over at Rosenfeld Gallery, with the work of Emanuela Harris-Sintamarian (left, "Family," acrylic, pencil on wood).

harris-sintamarian, emanuela



Harris- Sintamarian, who's about 28 years old, was born and educated in Bucharest in a world where, until 1989, art was a subversive activity. She is working on her second MFA, this one with a fellowship in painting from San Jose State University; the first MFA was in printmaking, on scholarship at the University of Delaware (right, "Savage Garden," 2004, acrylic, silk-screen on canvas, 62" x 73").

The shock of a new culture and a land of excess and utter freedom is in the paintings. So is sadness about the past.
bottwin, richard

Some of the paintings are so turbulent and layered with imagery that they are hard to read, but many of them are beautiful, with luminous, pop colors that ought not to be able to survive next to eachother. Instead they flourish together, offering a parade of backdrops for drawing and silkscreened images (left, detail from lower right corner of "Savage Garden").

Some of the canvases are quite large ("Shutter to Talk" is 10 feet long) and look like no one else's work (although the exuberance and expressionistic paint handling feel wild, like Jackson Pollack). The sense of excess and overcrowdedness is extraordinary.
rohlf, jason

Some of the work is more subdued, like "Desene #3" (right, 12" x 12", marker on wood with magnifying glass), with the clinical magnifying glass suggesting the larger, austere words are pulling attention from something smaller and wilder and growing-- the drawing details that need the magnification.

Harris-Sintamarian's work stands in sharp contrast to the work now showing at Pentimenti. The work here--architectural wooden objects by Richard Bottwin in his exhibit, "Counterpoise," and heavily painted and incised canvases by Jason Rohlf in his exhibit, "Palmipsests"--keep their subject matter close to visual and artistic issues, and exhibit an extreme self-control.

Bottwin was at the gallery when I stopped by, and he explained that his depth perception is off, so his art work is a process of flattening things out and then popping them up. The resulting angles are surprising, the woodgrain veneers comically askew. I particularly liked his three little chairs, "Large Stripe Cube #1, 2 and 3." They have a child/playroom look because they're low and boxy and two of them have a primary color panel, one red, one blue. But the shades are not quite primary--so they feel simple and complex all at once. Bottwin's other eight pieces hang on the wall, all what-is-its that combine Bauhaus austerity with an anti-Bauhaus illogic (left, "Large Stripe Cube #1" in front, and cubes #2 and #3 in background).

Jason Rohlf's paintings are intense layers of acrylic, or of acrylic and collage on panel. Here too, there are moments of humor, like the thought bubble in "Spate" (right). The wallpapery stripes that emerge are not quite cheerful or jaunty, the usual affect of stripes, thanks to their colors; the incised circles and arcs in the background paint add to its materiality and to a sense of claustrophobia. Although the paintings suggest layers, everything is right at the surface. Even the stripes, which appear to break through, do not offer a sense of space. The paintings are a dark take on children's scratch drawings, which involve scraping through a black top-coat of crayon to reveal a riot of colors underneath.

I confess that I prefer Rohlf's older, more representational paintings of birds on branches, especially "Invited" (left) with the background offering more color and a sense of space and tree canopy as well as peeling, ancient walls. There's a lightness of spirit and concept in these. The storybook branches remind me of Laura Owens' trees, and the birds almost look collaged, their shapes simplified and striped to create a funny flatness on the writhing branch.

permanent link   libby 8:55 PM
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Posted by libby

Having had a little fun with evil and laziness at Nexus, I thought I'd tell you about it (right, Deborah Hayner's "We Love to Hate").
hayner, deborah

The show about evil is about public evil and is appropriately in the more public front room. "Axis of Evil: The Secret History of Sin" is a traveling show of stamp art featuring artists from all around a world. The stamp-sized images, some marked 37 cents and realistic enough to slip past napping postal workers, are of course illegal to use.
hernandez de luna, michael

Their subject, as the show title suggests, is about governmental evil, but corporations and terrorists also make the cut. So do sexual predators and religious institutions--Woody Allen and molestor priests and the lying Catholic bureaucracy, personified by Mother Theresa with a forked tongue. At this tiny, tiny, sometimes 1 or 2 inch size, the political harping loses its leaden quality, becomes light as air and funny as heck (left, "The Baader-Meinhof Girls" by show curator Michael Hernandez de Luna--I loved the Andy Warhol look of these).
baroni, vittore

The images on the sheets of stamps are so small that each one requires slowing down and focusing. With work by more than 40 artists, some of whom contributed more than one piece, the show requires a fair amount of time--but you can also dip in and out and still enjoy yourself.
brownell, matthew

No miscreant escaped the wicked imagery, from artists in black to Harry S Truman as the Unabomber, by Steve Smith, a Florida artist (right, "Plague of the Art Zombies" by Italy's Vittore Baroni.)

Roberta's going to have a lot more to say on this one, so I'll switch here to the back room, which is one enormous conceptual joke, based on Matthew Brownell's private life as a tv slacker. "Wish I Wasn't So Lazy" is as charming as conceptual, word-art can get, and it had me laughing out loud (left, Brownell with a detail of "It's the Little Things in Life," 50 framed scripts of television advertisements).

Brownell, who studied photography at Penn, lost the photo facilities and his whole m.o. for making art upon graduation. "I was addicted to the clarity of the 4-inch by 5-inch negative," he said. "I hated 35 millimeters." But all he had was a 35-millimeter camera.

Plus he was working all day at a couple of part-time jobs, doing data entry as a research assistant for obesity research and helping at Bridgette Mayer Gallery. So he was darned tired and spinning his wheels and apparently watching a lot of tv. "It was a lot of nothing," he said of his life post graduation.

Then came this idea.

The installation includes "Scenes of the Crime," 20 photos of the places he sat while watching so much television. It also includes "How it all Went Down"--three televisions, one playing a "Simpsons" episode, one a "Seinfeld" episode, and one "That '70s Show." And finally it includes three enormous framed sheets of paper covered with the handwritten transcripts of the three shows (right, the three transcripts, "Wish I Wasn't So Lazy" ).

Ah, the futility of all that writing of someone else's writing. Good metaphor.

I pictured Brownell sitting in front of the tv, trying to transcribe all that, but he confessed to me that he got the scripts off the Internet (I love the Internet). As for the commercials, he said he really did record them off the tv and then transcribe them.

Using a genre that has mostly lost its light touch--I'm thinking conceptual word art from John Baldessari, which had some bits of humor, to the humorless and ponderous Lawrence Weiner, to Jenny Holzer with her increasingly ponderous mottoes losing their earlier sizzle--Brownell has created a hip, humorous and sharp observation of his own generation and their tv habits. The ad scripts also decode how commercials and their underpinning ideas keep us all in thrall.

The whole installation reveals our so-called lifelessness in front of the tube, but with a kindness and tenderness that makes it go down easy. I'm guilty. You're guilty. And maybe it's kind of funny, this particular sin.

permanent link   libby 5:03 PM
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Posted by libby and roberta

If you were like Phyllis or Jacqueline and came late on Friday to get your "Dorothy Speaks" cards you may not have found us -- or found us but no cards. We sold out early and left around one o'clock after spending two hours instead of the promised three. (image is Jacqueline Van Rhyn, Curator at the Print Center, happy, even though we didn't have any more cards to give her.)
van rhyn, jacqueline
But the big news is...there is such a thing as a free lunch!



A group loitering in matching t-shirts on our corner turned out to be part of a leadership training class on a stealth assignment -- to perform a random act of kindness. We said that's what we were doing, too, but not on assignment.

At first, though they were puzzled and bemused, they took our cards. Then, they couldn't figure out how to be kind to us or whether we fit the profile of who they wanted to be kind to. After learning that we were on our way to lunch, the group silently reached consensus to bankroll our lunch. One of the Coca Cola guys took charge and pulled out some bucks and said "Here, lunch is on us." We were stunned. Here we were perpetrating our acts of kindness and somebody one ups us! Fortunately we got a grip and took the dough and went to eat burritos in Liberty Place. (image is leadership training class members, Mark Quinn, Michael Kimball and others -- we're not sure who's who-- with Libby, in the kindness convention)



In other street action, bike messenger Ben, who is also an artist, arrived the second week in a row for two sets of Dorothy cards, one for himself and the other for his dispatcher, Sean. Based on this scientific sample of the bike messenger business, we now believe we can confirm that all bike messengers and their dispatchers are artists. (image is Ben and Roberta)

For the first time ever, we noticed cell phones had changed the dynamics of what happened on the street. For starters, it made for more rejections of our art. And then, it stopped us cold when a man in need of a cellphone interrupted our giveaway. He borrowed Libby's cellphone to call his wife when she didn't show up at their meeting place (OUR corner). Turned out they just didn't see each other. They were both madder than hornets and obviously late for something. We were riveted by the family drama.

Movie stars



Last week, comic book artist, Manning Krull, who said he was leaving for Paris, did a double take when he recognized us as stars of Wendy Weinberg's "Art of Activism" documentary, which he had seen at Prince Music Theater. This week in the double take department, a student turned around and paused when she, too, recognized us from Weinberg's documentary, which she had seen in her art history class. The ICA still rejects us (see story here) but we're in art history! Click here for more information on Weinberg's video.

One man paused for conversation and wound up accusing us of zealotry. He said how are you different than the people who hand out religious tracts. We conceded his point; art is our religion. (image is not our accuser but another passerby willing to pause for a moment's conversation with the ever yacky Roberta and a piece of art)



We also got a visit from Jennifer Zarro, former curatorial assistant at Esther Klein Gallery, who came out specifically to get her free art. Zarro is an art history Ph.D. student at Rutgers and she enjoyed our contemporary art. We consider Zarro's enthusiasm another thumbs up from art history. (image is Zarro in yellow hat.)



We're supposed to go out again on Friday. We hear it might snow, so look on our website for notice of cancellation.

permanent link   libby and roberta 11:37 AM
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