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Posted by libby

Every time I grasp an overriding theme that applies to all four artists in Arcadia's "A Closer Look," the theme slips away in the midst of my argument.
skoogfors, anne
The show, a regular event that draws four artists from the previous year's "Works on Paper" show at Arcadia, this year was curated by ICA Director Claudia Gould. This year's fab four are M. Ho, Bruce Pollock, Anne Skoogfors and Carl Fudge.
ho, m.
The show as a whole seems like a curious meditation on color (see Roberta's post on how it's a musical show). Skoogfors' "Botanica," 28 cyberprints of scanned-in flowers, offer the most intense of the color experiences on view.

What I got out of the floral grid was a questioning of reality. I'm not sure if every artist on earth is thinking deep thoughts about what is real or if it's just me at the moment. But these super-saturated floral prints, which allude to traditional plant studies and prints more than they allude to still lifes, get their visual kick from the ultra-black grounds that don't recede the way that blacks usually do. The intense flowers practically retain their juicy, living texture and seem, in fact, more juicy that any real flower has a right to be. They are transformed by the intensity of colors against the blackness into superflowers (installation shot above).
fudge, carl
These studies exchange the traditional white background of taxonomical prints for a black one. The velvety blackness and that they are pinned to the wall further enforces the taxonomical allusion, reminding me of delicate butterflies pinned to black velvet. The grid installation turns them into a periodic table of flowers (left, one of the studies).
pollock, bruce
But the work is an attempt to create its own reality, not to understand the world we know. It is what it is--a scanned image, unreal and odd, and a pleasure to contemplate.


The colors in M. Ho's nine untitled newspaper collages seem subdued by contrast. But in their own context, the daily gray of New York Times pages, they look lively indeed. These collages, which cover over the headlines--the captions, the text, all the words--with blocks of color and prints of flowers and plants, began with the war in Iraq. The newspaper photos that remain, comment on one another, their original context stolen and redefined by Ho's collage. Not only are the newspaper collages lovely, but they offer up the bleak sadness and ironies of the society we live in--life as death (right) or bodies in circles of power and powerlessness (below), for example. The colors offer a reminder of what's here that we are not paying enough attention to as we get our daily dose of demoralizing news.


The grid of these pieces is something quite different from Skoogfors' grid. Ho's grid is imposed by the newspaper itself and its flow of words in columns, its organization of stories into idea units. But she chooses not to obliterate that grid. What she obliterates is the words, thereby creating a new world order, a new sense of priority.

The last time I saw this work in quantity, it was laid out on a table, to be touched and turned over like a newspaper is read. On the wall, it's easier to see the patterns, but the tactile fragility of the newsprints contrasted to the tensile quality of the collaged papers is compromised.


Carl Fudge's two screenprinted paintings, "Overflow Orange" and "Overflow Green" are black and white interrupted by color. The process--the lines are copied into a computer from erotic Japanese woodcuts and then blown up and taken out of context and screenprinted onto the two canvases--seems to be more about decoration and line than content. The resulting images are not erotic; there's a decontextualized arrangement of lines and spaces, which then get filled with color in parts of the painting, as if an industrial accident has ocurred, and paint has invaded an otherwise sterile world.


In the green painting, the green is corralled by the lines. The orange painting goes somewhere else; dry brush strokes of mixed colors besmirch the environment without regard to the lines. The paintings have a strange mix of exuberant color (they hark to OSHA warning paints) and repression, a mix of safety and danger, and a complete airlessness and spacelessness. I'm not sure I like the world they depict.




But the world Bruce Pollock depicts in "Every Infinite Place in Space"--an installation pencilled and inked directly on the white wall--has no sense of repression and no color. Using the fractal repetitions that we know from his paintings, he creates a deep, deep space, a universe of optimism and distant horizons (installation shot, right, detail below left).


Aside: Pollock has some work of quite a different order at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, right now--beautiful, layered paintings of telephone poles, and also three little wooden ur-buildings, also covered with beautiful layers of paint.

At Arcadia, by the simplest of means, with process not the subject but rather the product as the subject, Pollock has created his own rhythmic universe, with room in its inner space and outer space for all of us to contemplate our place and our purpose.

permanent link   libby 12:07 PM
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Posted by libby

Passing through the foyer/gallery of my synagogue, I happened upon a display of quilts at a moment when art was not on my mind. What a treat! The quilts are by Linda Rosenstein, who it seems is not exactly a closet quilter but, like so many quilters of the past, is someone who fits quilting in with the rest of her life. The work is quirky, beautiful, and varied, reworking the traditions of quilting and of art some of the time, ignoring them at other times (right, "Tangle," 25" x 25").

The quilts include surprising fabrics and threads, some formal, some more gestural. In some sense, each one is a flight of fancy and a hard-headed thought process.

"Two Hearts" (left, 8.75" x 12") isn't pieced, just quilted, but the thread is metallic, and the stitchery is the subject, following no pattern but creating the image of the two hearts and radiating spokes of love.


rosenstein, linda

The largest quilt is a narrative told in traditional squares:

"Passover Hagadah" (right, 56" x 56"), uses the squares to describe the ancient Jew's exodus from ancient Egypt, the 10 plagues that befell the Egyptians and the symbols of the Passover seder. Materials include beads and whatever else Rosenstein needs to tell the story. Each motif contributes a piece of the tale. A figure-ground joke becomes the perfect metaphor for part of the tradition--a hidden piece of matzah, easier to detect in the photo than in the real thing, where texture and pattern overwhelm it.

Rosenstein, has exhibited her quilts at Quilters' Heritage Festivals in Lancaster, and was part of the traveling "A Gathering of Women" exhibit.

The quilts are up at Society Hill Synagogue, 418 Spruce St., through April. Enter by the side door (ring the bell, there) and call 215.922.6590 for hours before you go.

permanent link   libby 5:40 PM
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Posted by roberta

fudge, carl

I missed most of the 1970s pop music scene, being completely immersed instead in Bix Beiderbick, Jelly Roll Morton, Cole Porter -- and Beethoven, due to my then boyfriend now husband Steve a serious amateur trombone player and music fanatic. It was during that time that we discovered Bobby Short's music when we heard it playing in a record store in Madison. It was love, total and complete which even resulted in a pilgrimage to the Cafe Carlyle when the price of the cover and two drink minimum wiped out our student savings but who cared we were experiencing the real amber glow of the guy singing our songs our way in his dream room in the dream city. (image is sheet music for "Just a Closer Walk with Thee," here transcribed for concertina)
ho, m.



One of the songs I remember hearing repeatedly at Dixieland jazz fests is "A Closer Walk with Thee," a traditional hymn that is a standard along with "Muskrat Ramble" and translates well from gospel to the jazz medium. And I bring it up here in this shaggy dog tale not only for the pun value but because I find that often when I respond to art I respond to it in a musical kind of way. So entwined are the music and art impulses in my brain, so deep and parallel are those neural shortcuts I've built up that they sometimes fire off interchangeably.(More on Dixieland music here.) (image is installation shot of Anne Skoogfors' "Botanica")
pollock, bruce

So when I saw the "Closer Look 6" exhibit at Arcadia University Art Gallery, the show of local artists who have previously been included in the college's Works on Paper exhibit, I had the distinct audio-visual pleasure of hearing the work as well as seeing it. In other words, there's music in this work -- measured pace, repeat motifs and emotional underpinnings.

I'm going to let it go at that because I know that Libby's working on something about the show and I'll get to write more for the Weekly. Here are some musical accompaniments that I suggest. Or call up something else from your own personal jukebox of the mind.

M. Ho's fierce re-decorations of the news, "Nine untitled collages on newspaper (shown above is one of them)" -- Janacek's Fanfare from Sinfonietta (featuring a stately brass anthem that has tragedy, pomp and elegance. You can download a version here and if you've never heard it I highly recommend a listen.)
skoogfors, anne




Bruce Pollock's first ever wall drawing, and it's a beauty, "Every Infinite Place in Space " -- Handel's Water Music and anything by Philip Glass. Both have cosmic nets of sound with star-like events.

(image is detail of Pollock's wall drawing)



Carl Fudge's sexy sampling in "Overflow, Green and Orange" (installation shot) -- Beck's Odelay which samples and weaves together old and new and leaves a few rough edges.




Anne Skoogfors's sad, beautiful "Botanica"

-- Bobby Short's rendition of "Autumn in New York" which rolls out like honey and is an elegy to beauty and love (image is detail of one of Skoogfors' "Botanicals")

permanent link   roberta 8:50 AM
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Posted by libby

ore-giron, eamon

Just thought I'd add one more thought about Eamon Ore-Giron's excellent one-man show, "Mirage," at the Morris Gallery at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (for more, see Roberta's story at the Philadelphia Weekly here, and my post on the artist's talk).

The land is flat--a stripe of land. When he uses two or three stripes of land, they indicate depth and distance. There, the shift of receding colors is not gradual but expressed in flat stripes. On top is a stripe of sky above. For the most part, perspective is not an element.

The bodies are also flat. Most have no modeling to show roundness. They rely on line and shape for their depth. Because of this approach, which is straight out of graphic design and children's storybook illustrations, Ore is signalling that he's telling a story and that it's not necessarily a representation of visual reality. The paintings read almost as silkscreens or collages.


ore-giron, eamon
The only 3-D element in many of the paintings is shadows, which in that flattened context take on significance. The pink-clad tourist in "Brown Town" (image top of post) is nearly shadowless compared to the faux Wild West; the myth has become a solid reality to us. In "Praise for the Morning" (right) the body, chair and table do not cast shadows. Only the hat does. In "Cookin' 1" (left) the people cast no shadows at all.

What makes "...Morning" and "Cookin' 1" have power is their snapshot ordinariness transmogrified into significance. In "Cookin' 1," it's a ritual and a memory. In "Praise...," it's the magic of identity disguised by the objects and clothes.

Ore-Giron's predicament is much like our own, only more so. Is the girl with pink hair really a pink-haired girl? Is the boy with the eyebrow piercing really that person? A person's essence and background, measured through the filters of culture and costume, is never visible at a glance. Identity is too complex for the symbols we assign (right, "Exit Strategy," with the painter dressed in over-the-top cowboy pants styled after Native American garb, a shirt styled after Huichol (Mexican) peyote-vision patterns and mendhi arm decorations, enough identities for any one human to support).

What makes this work so resonant is partially this--the story of Ore-Giron's mixed identity is a metaphor for the identity of each of us. But it's also resonant because of the story the paintings tell. They take a hard look at the stories we tell as a culture--the myths we have invented and then come to believe about the past and the present.

permanent link   libby 1:30 PM
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Posted by libby

bramson, phyllis
After seeing so much work at Scope New York, I think it helps to have what I saw marinate a little, just to see what work has stuck in my mind as special for one reason or another. Focusing on artists whose work was new to me, here's my short list of additions to Roberta's list of faves (see post).

I'll start with Chicago artist Phyllis Bramson at Claire Oliver Fine Art. Her over-the-top paintings of kitschy chinoiserie with indian minature patterning, sexy pop imagery and obscure narrative suggestions practically leap off the walls (left). Bramson, who is in her 60s, also showed objets I'd have to describe as bric-a-brac, very much in the same kitsch spirit, and also a sumptuous embroidered bedspread--the best bed cover of them all at Scope.
dobson, kelly
One of the funniest videos was a woman trying to sound like a blender, and also turning on the blender by biting the handle, by Kelly Dobson at Ethan Cohen Fine Art. There's a whole weird relationship between the woman and the blender, the blender becoming a mysterious, unknowable, un-understandable object with magical powers. Pretty funny. A mordant bit of feminist art that tickles.
martinez, alfredo

Roberta mentioned Kyung Jeon's cartoons with stretch breasts at The Proposition Gallery and I want to put in a word for the that gallery in general. Alfredo Martinez's drawings with floating imagery put through a photo process that blackens the background and turns the drawings to a pewtery sheen. The result is a shamanistic and outsider-y depiction of an unsafe world (left).

patterson, don
Also at The Proposition, Don Patterson's pencil drawings have a technique that reminds me of Rob Matthews, but his subject matter, less cosmic but equally weird, is based on photos of private performances which cover up and distort parts of his body (right).


grun, eva
At Gallerie Schuster, Eva Grun's cartoons have a European real-world darkness in the subject matter that makes them look quite different to me from the kinds of darkness that inhabit American cartoon drawings. There was a whole wall of them, but this one was my favorite (left).


hames, levack
And finally, Roberta mentioned projects of curators Hames Levack in London, featured at Factor. Here's a nice picture of a project they curated, foam vacuum cleaners floating in the North Sea. I don't know the artist's name. Peter Hames told us about an upcoming project of putting refugee tents on the piers across the Thames that used to hold up Blackfriars Bridge, by Edinburgh artist Ettie Spencer.

gunstheimer, janaOf Roberta's list, the artist I'd never seen before who deserves an extra- special thumbs up is Jana Gunstheimer at Galerie Romerapotheke for her artistic version of "The Office," photo-based black-and-white watercolors of oppressive corporate life. The vision is pretty global, with images of corporate retreats and retraining to images of the boss in a sumptuous office, golf club in hand, practicing his putts.

permanent link   libby 12:19 PM
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Posted by roberta

My Spring round-up piece is in today's Weekly. Here. It's going to be a great season.

Here's what's on my list of must sees:

--Trouble in Paradise at Abington. (We've told you about it here and here, too.)

--A Closer Look 6 at Arcadia.
--Challenge 3 and Challenge 4 at Fleisher Art Memorial.
--Jim Houser's solo exhibit at Spector.
--Pandemonium, the audio installation by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller at eastern State Penitentiary.


Archie Rand

And today in the Editors' Choice section of the paper (i.e., the listings) there's my short take on Archie Rand's bible paintings at Borowsky Gallery. Here. (Those are two Rand painting in this post -- examples from the two-walls worth of amusing, cartoony bible paintings that turn god into your mother yelling at you and actually create a nice homey touch in the gallery.)
rand, archie
The word bubble at top reads: "Elijah, get up and go to Zarephath. I've told a widow there to take care of you!!" The word bubble in the second painting reads: "Get up and EAT!!!"

permanent link   roberta 7:10 AM
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Posted by libby

Time's winged chariot is drawing near for the March shows. So let me put up something quick about the work at Vox Populi that will leave before April.
berger, jonathan
In the front rooms were a show by the gloriously decorative Kate Abercrombie, "Four O'Clocks and Morning Glories," Kelley Roberts' faux-tographic "fauna," Roxana Perez-Mendez's video installation "Puerto Rico Airlines," and an installation, "Bridgehead," by Brian Dennis who is having his final show at Vox after 15 years (after all, Vox is an emerging artist coop).

Abercrombie's gouache's and hand-printed wallpaper installation are exuberant overgrowths of flowers invading and concealing our interior spaces. They're beautifully done, the compositions practically trembling with color and pattern. The wallpaper would be tough to live with, but its presence under the little gouaches creates an aura of domestic decoration (image above, an untitled gouache landscape and right, the wallpaper with a couple of the gouache paintings).
abercrombie, kate
abercromb


Roberts is also mulling over our borrowing from nature to create something fictional, I think. She has cut out creatures like bees (left, "Bees") or mice from a storybook vision of nature, only their missing shape remaining, in the surface photo. Underneath is another layer, the edges of the missing shapes creating shadows. There's some eco thinking here of wildlife gone missing from the world, but there's also some thought about the false perfection of nature as we have imagined it and rewritten it. The more saccharine the setting, the more successful these pieces are.
roberts, kelley
oberts, kelley



Perez-Mendez's two-channel video installation (right), creates a faux Puerto Rico Airlines, with endless flight delays, incompetency and the same stewardess (probably the airline's only employee, Perez-Mendez herself) announcing endless flight delays and other signs of PRA incompetence. Installed to resemble cheesy airport arrival-and-departure monitors, the videos are a little expected and lighter than air. Perez had a wonderful out-of-this-world video installation last year at Temple Gallery (see post), playing a bored, shallow astronaut painting her nails and reading cheesy magazines aboard a space station. The deadpan juxtaposition of space and its ordinary bored moments was hilarious.
perez-mendez, roxana
Dennis' retreating metal wedge, "Bridgehead," is a hanging, receding metal boardwalk of oxidized gold metal leaf concealing a chaos of back-lit, unpainted sticks that throw light shadows on the walls. The work suggests illusion and delusion, what's hidden and revealed, and truth and shadows. Roberta reminded me that Dennis had a swell piece at the Art Alliance last year (see post), a grand gesture that took over the grand staircase, obscuring the window with sticks and brown paper--a protest against repressive national security measures. The concerns in "Bridgehead" are pretty similar, but the lines from the ceiling supporting the receding highway or boardwalk undermines some of the elegance and strength.dennis, brian david

Roberta already told you about Jonathan Berger's "Goner" installation (post here), and I have to say it's a two thumbs up (four thumbs? two from her, two from me?). The good news is that it's up for another month. But I do want to add that the space deliberately squeezes and cramps. It's tough to take a giant step, coralled into small walkways. It's tough to stand up straight with lamps hovering low. I love installations that give a physical sensation of a particular space--in this one a coffin, a cemetery, a sense of losing a vision of the horizon . Even the rollercoasters made me think thoughts of the fragility of life, of exuberance easily snuffed.

Much to my surprise, two young women who were in the room at the same time I was seemed quite dissatisfied by the piece. That's why there's apples and oranges.

permanent link   libby 5:27 PM
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Posted by libby

da corte, alex
The Window on Broad is always a tough space to put art. The glare on the glass there is formidable.

Alex Da Corte's "The Death of All Things Beautiful," a droopy stuffed pink horse embelleshed with flowers, holds the space, where it will remain until April 22. The horse is a sort of memento for childhood and beloved stuffed toys ultimately abandoned, as well as a memento for that innocent devotion between child and animal.

The surprising size, floral appliques and color--normally, horses are male in the imagination, safe but sexy partners to preteen girls--pushes the horse into a personification of a pretty-in-pink girl grown up. Even though its lack of hooves makes the horse somewhat sadder and more powerless, the decoration has a power of its own. I am reminded, in the trailing fabric off the pointed feet, of ribbons from toe shoes (the image, provided by the artist, does not show the appliqued flowers and doesn't give a sense of scale; this is large and imposing at the same time that it's all gussied up.).

Here's some background I got from Da Corte in an email:

I am a 24-year-old artist residing in Philadelphia, a recent BFA graduate of the University of the Arts with a degree in printmaking/ fine arts.

I started making work for the public a few years ago in the form of wheat pasting, which is a type of grafitti using printed images and gluing them onto abandoned billboards around the city.

My work was mainly about ketchup and diners and the idea that ketchup was the "light of the world" in the diner world. I have always made installations about diners or my time spent in the hospital and more recently about people and the fascinating interactions that are shared amongst us everyday. My work is all across the board, consisting of paintings, sculptures, clothing, and installation work.

permanent link   libby 2:53 PM
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Posted by libby

A couple of shows far off the beaten track seem to me to be another sign of life in the contemporary art sign.
hironaka, nadia
Roberta and I went to a show in curator Sean Stoops' apartment (up until May 15, hours and location below). Stoops, who works at the Asian Arts Initiative, created a group show, INHABIT, inspired by post-modern domesticity and various aspects of 21st century apartment life, installed in an actual living space- the curator's apartment. The resulting display of painting, installation, prints, sculpture, and multimedia is hip and lively, with lots of solid hits.

Ultra faves

Video artist Nadia Hironaka has hung a video of a light switch at light-switch height and size on the wall (right). The plain white ceramic switch acquires tiny floral decorations of the sort commonly painted or decal-ed on over the course of the video, at which point a hand materializes and throws the switch. That's the 52-second loop--a nice metaphor for time passing, day and night. This takes pattern and decoration in a several new directions--the dreaminess, the cyber immateriality, the routines of domestic life. The piece is entitled "Lightswitch Daydream."

Just around the corner in the hallway closet, James Johnson's "closet," a peephole in a pile of computer cartons showed an ultrareal, daylit scene of an upper-middle-class suburban living room with french doors and the perfect garden beyond. The contrast of the darkness of the closet's and the computer boxes' secrets with the glorious miniature scene raised questions about unreality and falsity all over the place (image left; the optics of the inside image made it too hard for me to photograph).johnson, james

And in the bedroom, Courtney Hager's untitled quilt installation (image at top of post) can't cover up the Mt. Fuji-shaped polyps poking up. I loved the way this also went in more direction, the embroidered arabesques suggesting body and landscape all at once.hager, courtney

More bedroom pieces

Above the bed, Joseph Hu's "Friday Night, Up All Night" (right) suggests not such a good time, restless in front of the television. In this sepia-toned grisaille painting, Hu's blur technique suggests tv screen static as well as a state of mind.hu, joseph





Across the room, Joonhyun Kim's "Stage," also oil on canvas, also grisaille, also from photographic sources, offers nice angles and a feeling of compression that brings me right back to the intensity of taking care of (and adoring, being exhausted by) young children.kim, joonhyun





I also liked Hiro Sakaguchi's "Cellphone Miniatures," a birthday and Mt. Fuji, the latter conveniently near the polyps of the quilt. For those of us who wear bifocals, however, in the relatively dim light of a domestic setting, these are a little tough to see. However that's part of the point, life and nature compressed to something smaller than a snapshot (right, "Cellphone Miniature A Birthday," acrylic on wood and ivory).sakaguchi, hiro

Home decorators alert

Kate Stewart's untitled mural installation made me laugh--a mix of pattern and false perspectives making the hallway into a sort of destination (left). The colors seemed so hip--acidy green, mauve, gold, pink, etc. It was like those instructions in decorating magazines--How to turn your small space into a palace, or, Mirrors--windows into spatiousness.stewart, kate


The rueful, stylized cartoon/true romance drawing installation from Adam Parker Smith were fun for their serial sentiments, telling the story of romance, romance failure, new romance. This is as much a word piece as a drawing piece, and its placement in an apartment brings to mind images of earnest and not-so-earnest couplings and lonely nights (image right, below).smith, adam parker



Because I was there at the opening (oh, well, bad excuse), I didn't hear the Clint Takeda or Matthew Suib audios, so I can't say anything here, but I think the above are more than enough reasons to go out of your way to see this show. Other artists showing here are: Elysa Voshell, Kate Norton, James Rosenthal, Eric McDade, Hiro Sakaguchi, Anita Schillhorn Van Veen and Candy Depew in no particular order.

Here's the where and the hours:
806 South 48th St., #2R, (near Baltimore Ave.), Philadelphia, regular hours: Saturday and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.. Monday to Thursday evenings by appointment; closed on 3/27 and 5/8. Call for information: 215-724-5343

Seeing red--second apartment show

I got an email from Matt Pruden with info on another apartment show. Some friends of his have converted their studio/warehouse space into a gallery for the month.

Here's the info:
SEEING RED
Artists: Amber Dubois, Justin Grant, Steve Layne, Laura McKinley, Matt Pruden, Emily Royer, Gael Abary, Laura Graham, Darla Jackson, Amy Kahn, Elisabeth Nickles, Ron Ribant, Lilian Walsh

STUDIO C
2716 N. Salmon Street, 2nd Floor
Phila, PA 19134
215-901-1933
alfalfalovesme@aol.com

permanent link   libby 2:12 PM
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Posted by roberta

cianni, vincent
I first saw Vincent Cianni's black and white photographs at University of the Arts' Sol Mednick Gallery in 2003. The body of work the Brooklyn photographer and teacher was showing was called "Southside," and it represented Cianni's photos of a group of Latino in-line skaters from his Williamsburg neighborhood. I thought Cianni's photos did for Williamsburg what Mary Ellen Mark's did for Seattle -- capture the angst and thrill ride that is urban adolescence. (Read my PW sketch here.)

Last week I got a card from Cianni announcing that his series of Southside photos is now a book, "We Skate Hardcore: Photographs from Brooklyn's Southside." (NYU Press, 150 pages, $24.95)

On the book's cover is the picture I fell in love with. It's called "Jump, South 1st St. (shown) Back in the Weekly, I called the photo "an urban anthem -- a life-affirming shot of a kid with natural grace at one with the grafitti-covered streets." I guess I'll stick with that.

For more on Cianni and his new book, see his very nice and comprehensive website.

permanent link   roberta 9:53 AM
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Posted by roberta

barnes, richard
It's an old cliche that we are what we eat, what we wear and what we live in. So an exhibit that riffs on housing or buildings like "Building References" at Rosenwald Wolf Gallery is, of course, about human beings as much as it is about architecture.

So for example, Richard Barnes's two large black and white photographs of an almost windowless shed, one a side view; the other a front view, seem like anthropological specimens...or those police mug shots from the front and side. The ambiance is spooky -- the shed floats in an inky void and evokes something utilitarian like a smoke house or place where the sun's not supposed to shine. It also evokes a kind of perverse, window-less twist on a one-room schoolhouse. The captions show that the shed is indeed a forensic specimen: "Unabomber Cabin, Exhibits A and B." Instantly, the photos become a portrait of a mad man, the rough lumber is skin, the whole thing an apparition of, if not evil, then mania, isolation, sadness in the extreme. (image is installation shot of one of Barnes's Unabomber cabin photographs, next to Oliver Boberg's "Rohbau," a photograph of a faux (i.e., mini-constructed model) building. In the foreground are three Bruce Pollock "Blocks" based on real Philadelphia housing.)
campbell, mark

In addition to Barnes's chilling photos, "Building References" is chock full of works playing with big ideas about humanity, reality and symbolism. The show's a wonderful mix of Philadelphia artists (Mark Campbell, Ruth Thorne-Thomson, Bruce Pollock, Jesse Gillespie, Nick Kripal) -- and non-Philly folks like Oliver Boberg, Ira Joel Haber and Julian Opie. And everybody's on the same wavelength and once again, it's a global conversation right here in river city.

I'm not going to give you the full court press about the show which is great. But I do want to mention that Campbell, one of my favorite Philadelphia artists, will give a talk about his work tomorrow night, Mar. 23, 7 pm at Uarts -- [Ed. note. Room correction: the talk has been moved. It will be in CBS Auditorium, not the Hunt Room as previously stated here.] CBS Auditorium, Hamilton Hall, 320 S. Broad St., across the street from Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery. There's a pre-talk reception in the gallery starting at 6 pm if you want to come check out the show.

I've long admired Campbell's tabletop arrays of mini houses which are cast in resin and made from real mini-versions of housing stock. This piece in this show (shown above) is a gut-churning visual essay on overdevelopment and greed (think copulating insects). Wow.

Building References is up to April 3.

permanent link   roberta 9:14 AM
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Posted by roberta

leonard, jameshernandez de luna, michaelrose, matthewlamanova, nataliepaschke, ed

There's an axis of postal art running between Philadelphia, Paris and Brooklyn that I have to tell you about. First off, the great, rambunctious stamp art exhibit “Axis of Evil” is at Nexus right now. Organized by Chicago artist Michael Hernandez de Luna, a long-time stamp art practitioner, the exhibit (Libby told you about it here) is chock full of terrific micro-designs by a group of international artists. The works pack a political wallop and many have a wicked sense of humor both of which make it a satisfying and subversive show. (HdL was in the "Illegal Art" show at Nexus a few years back by the way, speaking of subversive.) The artist told me that he sends his stamps sailing through the mail and that it works, the USPS accepts them as stamps, a minor, but thrilling subversion. (image is Hernandez de Luna's Monica Lewinsky stamp. And here's a review of a show of stamp art by HdL and Michael Thompson at Chicago Printmakers Collaborative a while back.)



There's a full color catalog for the travelling exhibit and you can browse it online here.

And in some kind of aeropostale voodoo, Matthew Rose, an American artist, writer and editor for art-the magazine living in Paris who stumbled onto artblog a week ago and liked us well enough to get us linked on his publication's front page, is a sometime stamp artist, and his stamp, "Rien" (shown) is in the Axis of Evil show.



Rose, who is a big HdL fan, wrote about the artist's Anthrax stamp in Art & Antiques (October 2001). Apparently there are art stamp fanatics in France like Michel Hosszu who runs a site where you can order stamps based on your own images. Rose is chasing some stamp art he found on Paris Craig’s list at the moment. (Who even knew there was a Paris Craig's list?) Anyway, see more of Rose's nice, surreal, cartoon-influenced paintings and collages at his website.

(image above right is stamp art by Natalie Lamanova and below is by the late Ed Paschke, both pieces in the Axis of Evil exhibit.)




And in case you’re looking for some piece of mail to affix the stamps to, here’s the perfect object, a lenticular postcard called "Greetings from America" by Brooklyn artist and blogger James Leonard.

“Greetings from America” shows two views of the red state/blue state America we are sick to death of hearing about. Tilted one way, the card reveals a red state bias. From another angle, a blue-biased view appears. The back of the postcard has deadpan copy describing four natural and architectural wonders found within the United States. See the card at the interactive site, at which you can mouse over the card and it lenticulates for you! (card below, red state to the right, blue state to the left, ahem)



Leonard does distrubtional art (I guess that's a cousin of Libby's and my giveaway art projects).

He drops his postcards into card shops and other unsuspecting places and then wait and see what happens when people try to buy them. (Philadelphians with long memories may recall the Heretical Society distributing its non-standard bookmarks in a similar fashion here.)



The card's wholesale price is $1.50 apiece or $1.25 for orders of more than 100. Email Leonard jamesleonard@jamesleonard.org to order some.

We've known about Leonard for a while. He discovered artblog and wrote us and we discovered his great art at his website which is chock full of video art and other projects. I highly recommend the videos which I browsed like a kid in a candy shop. There's one, "Strawberry Lemondade," with a slow motion ball and jacks game that is a Zen doozie. Highly recommended.

permanent link   roberta 8:02 AM
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Posted by libby

biddle, megansvec, ericanichols, jennyhong, jung il
While Greater New York is taking its licks for not enough women artists included in the show (see Roberta's post), here in Philadelphia, Space 1026 is finishing up its second exhibit in a row with not a male artist in sight.

This one, Full Fathom 5, in its final week--five artists from Providence--like the one before (see post), was not a conscious decision to show women only, said the show's curator, artist Max Lawrence. The preponderance of females has more to do with the increasing number of women involved in 1026, now, and their heavily female network.

You know, boys know lots of boys, girls know lots of girls. It's the way of the world. At least at 1026 they didn't claim that they are showing women because they couldn't find a fair share of qualifying men.

Two printmakers stole the show--Jung il Hong, who installed a shooting gallery lined with her overwhelmingly pretty silkscreens. There's a real bb gun, tons of detail, targets and a pink-pink-pink trippy patterning and decoration effect in what's normally a boy space (top photo, detail inside the shooting gallery).

Roberta and I stopped by Saturday afternoon, and Lawrence showed us some prints of hers that weren't hanging--images that joined detailed Asian pattern and gesture and natural world with suburban housing and graphic details from the world around us. This work is fantastic, and Lawrence said the Philadelphia Museum of Art was interested (left, one of Hong's prints).





The other printmaker, Jenny Nichols, offers a mordant slice of political point-of-view, a rip on the military-industrial complex, with zoned-out people attached to some futuristic life support (right), with pit bulls fighting on land and under water, and other images that telegraph threat. No way could you define the creator, just by looking, as female. Some of the prints also have amazing patterning; some have wonderful watery imagery.


The show also included surrealist distortion mixed with painty expressionism from Erica Svec, with enough recognizable imagery, like these sliding bathroom tiles (left), providing a ticket for entry. One of Svec's paintings a landscape, the other an interior, both held my attention and made me admire.



The other big, brushy painter, Annette Wehrhahn, showed images decidedly more abstract, but space and texture and other bits of imagery kept them in this world (right). Lawrence mentioned that Wehrhahn's paintings were all hinged to fold up--Wehrhahn's apartment is small indeed and so is she, and that's how she was able to move the work out. The show also included a plaster landscape by Megan Biddle that reminded me of the stratified paper holes of Noriko Ambe (see post on paper show at Tyler).

permanent link   libby 11:54 PM
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