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Posted by libby and roberta

[ed note: Here's something new: Words by Libby and photos, formatting and captions by Roberta.]

The metaphor of a walk on the clouds won a committee of jurors over and inspired them to select Mei-Ling Hom's poetic proposal for the "Women's Walkway Project" at Fleisher Art Memorial, Fleisher Director Thora Jacobson announced this afternoon.
(image is Hom, left, and Jacobson, right, after the announcement which took place at Fleisher's Print Center on Christian St.)
hom, mei ling

"The extraordinarily simple, elegant proposal of Mei-Ling Hom would be our choice," Jacobson said of the decision by the selection committee of the Women's Work Committee (WWC). The walkway and a new fence along the east side of the parking lot is to connect the original Fleisher building on Catharine Street to the newer Fleisher addition at 700 Christian Street.


The term "Women's Walkway" acknowledges the creator and fundraising arm of this project, the WWC, which charged the artists to honor the women who have been part of Fleisher's history as artists, teachers and leaders, as well as to pay respect to the time-honored ways in which women work--as connectors, protectors and mentors.


Hom is a Philadelphia artist whose installations and public art often refer to her Chinese family background and her status as a woman. Perhaps her most visible piece is "China Wedge," (image) a conglomeration of Asian-style soup spoons and bowls nestling in a wedge-shape under one of the otherwise freestanding escalators in the Philadelphia Convention Center. An associate professor of art at the Community College of Philadelphia, Hom is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards and fellowships, including two each from Pew and from the Leeway Foundation. Most recently, she is the 2004 recipient of the Pritzker Foundation Endowed Fellowship at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. We saw her solo exhibit at Fleisher-Ollman Gallery in 2004 and guess what? It was about clouds! Here's a link to Libby's post on that show.


The selection committee's decision was unanimous, according to independent curator Marsha Moss, one of the committee members. The group particularly loved the "cloud as a symbol of good luck and a vehicle for the goddesses--all of us--and the few gods," she said, nodding to the women and then the few men in the room. (image shows Hom surrounded by the committee members explaining her project on site in the parking lot.)



Hom was chosen from an original field of 24 women artists. The final competition was between Hom's metaphoric green walkway and wall that could double as exhibition space, and the history-imbued proposal from the team of artist Jennie Shanker (pictured right) and landscape architect Anna Forrester. Hom created her "Cloud Path" with technical advice from architect Charles Evers.



Six feet wide and about 160 feet long, the path is to go where cars perpetually and illegally block a fire lane on busy nights and mornings at the institution that grew out Samuel Fleisher's attempt to bring culture to the poor. The path will be on-grade so it can also serve as the fire lane.
(image is a the wall next to the proposed path and the houses that sit close behind it. View looks south towards Christian St.)

Prior to the announcement of the winner, both teams gave presentations of their proposals. The proposals will remain on exhibit at the Christian Street Building through June 23.



Part of what inspired Hom's thinking were her walks from home to work. "There are streets I avoid and streets I seek out," she said. The streets on the steam loop beneath the city are the ice-free streets in winter. So Hom proposed that the walkway should include heat coils under the serpentine-green cement pavers--to nurture, support and connect, she said, referring to the roles of women and the charge from the WWC. (image is the artist pointing out details of her plan as illustrated by a drawing. )



The abstracted cloud pattern that will grace the path and the adjacent wall was inspired by Asian mythology, said Hom, dressed for business in a denim work shirt with Chinese-jacket styling. "The cloud is the vehicle of the goddesses, and for Xi Wang Mu, the Queen Mother of the West and the Goddess of Immortality. ...The ephemerally shaped form allows her to be transported and arrive." The repeating, stylized clouds outlined in white in the 6-foot wide walkway would transport walkers metaphorically from building to building. Clouds also mean luck, and repeated cloud imagery means never-ending fortune, said Hom. (image is the artist with a paper model of the design showing how the concrete pavers will interlock into the cloud pattern. Below right are the green and white concrete pavers that will make the cloud pattern.)



A relief of the same cloud outline will also be pressed into a green, 30-inch high "knee" wall, also made of the same green concrete to replace the old stucco wall and the various fences on the east side of the parking lot. The wall will also have plain panels for donor names and for the names of those whom donors want to acknowledge for their work in the arts. Above the concrete panels, perforated aluminum will complete the fence to reach 8.5 feet high. The design calls for the fence to be capped by a cold-cathode fixture to light the way. The aluminum could also serve as an outdoor exhibition space, Hom said.


Hom suggested that solar panels might fuel the heating coils and the light.

In the three years since the WWC was formed for this project, it has raised nearly $135,000, said committee Chair, Allison R. Moore in her introduction to the presentations.(the artist is showing a piece of the aluminum that will make the fencing for the plein air exhibits she envisions.)

Hom's proposal, which did not include the solar panels, had a proposed budget of $163,900. In accepting the honor, Hom thanked Jacobson for her flexibility when Hom, who had a lot on her plate at the time, emailed bemoaning that she had missed her deadline. Hom said Jacobson's generous response reflected the same women's values that the committee hoped to honor.

While we were waiting for the results of the selection committee, staff member Leigh Sweda gave a group of us the grand tour of the original Fleisher building, which is looking great since the last time I was there. There's a shiny new elevator, air conditioning, improved ventilation and a romantic little faculty gallery.

(image is some of the new infrastructure, a perky orange-painted stairwell with tall windows letting in natural light.)



The gallery, (pictured left) which is on the second floor, is graced by three arches--a beautiful arched wood storage cabinet, an arched window surrounded by bare brick with a bench in front, and an arch over one of the entrances. We're happy to report that it is a gallery that can hold 3-D work, thereby remedying the shortcoming of the old downstairs faculty gallery. We at artblog are delighted to see some attention to seating issues in galleries. We hope this is the beginning of a trend.

The school also now has a children's and an adult art library (with a card catalog--as in physical cards in file boxes). The children's library has a fanciful chair created with some help from children by artist and former faculty member Sebastienne Mundheim. It's a wow! (last image is the chair -- with lots of pillows -- in the children's library)


The WWC is also the group that brought us "Dear Fleisher," the exhibit/auction of postcards by local artists (we also contributed one). The selection committee for the walkway are: Jacobson, Moss, Moore, Fairmount Park Art Association Exceutive Director Penny Balkin Bach, architect David A. Schultz of DAS Architects, and several other WWC committee members including artist Diane Burko.
shanker, jennie

permanent link   libby and roberta 9:07 PM
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Posted by libby

What's surprising at Seraphin? If you were thinking that a gallery that mostly trades in New York big names, etc., can hold few surprises, you'd be surprised.
bograd, alana
There's a show there that's neither safe nor big-name, and it's mainly local.

I have to think that Seraphin gave this show a chance because June is the beginning of the summer art doldrums. Curated by gallery assistant Todd Keyser, the show, "Philadelphia Cheek," has a bit of humor, a bit of surrealism, and a plunge into darkness--much with a supercilious or cool tinge (hence the show title).

loebs, jason
The work comes mostly from young people who came of age when 9/11 changed the world. The imagery is mostly dark, with a smiley face painted on top. So Jason Loebs' juicy paintwork and stretched, distorted comic figures live in a pixillated world with unclear parameters and no solid earth underfoot (right, Untitled 1, 53 x 36 inches).
will, ben
And Ben Will's paintings have titles like "Mortar Defense Unit." This one to the left, "The Warmth of the Fold," at least offers a suggestion of sexiness along with its unnatural landscape. Will's beautiful colors in the other pieces belie his dark subject matter.

Alana Bograd's swell comic surreal paintings with manga influences offer a space that's only space, no ground. But there's plenty of worry in the imagery. In "Winged" (top, 28 x 22 inches), plants are trampled by an elephant-like foot that morphs into a mutant shape. Small creatures on chariots fly, and bubbles and blue sausages run riot against an orange sky.
nicholas, dee
There's plenty more worry here. Dee Nicholas' beeswax coated paper construction "The Secret Life of Bricks" suggest multiplication out of control and an effort to pin it down and hold it together with lots of corsage pins. There's something creepy and Victorian about this work. Maybe it's the pearly-headed pins and the doily. Maybe it's the waxiness that makes me think of amateur science. And then there's the subject. But I loved the jaunty, toppling brick buildings, the black sky with white holes (right, "The Secret Life of Bricks," beeswax, hand-made paper, corsage pins, sclupy, 36 x 24 inches).
smith, walter benjamin 2
It's mostly the men in the show who go the comic narrative route, like Loebs. The somewhat incoherent landscape in Walter Benjamin Smith II's ambitious "Greetings from Earth" (left, 40 x 60 inches), looks like a series of layered stage flats beneath toxic skies. There's some comic-book composition in the interplay of large and small scale and in Batman flying in from the right, plus there's a bunch of characters who look like they belong in a Monty Python skit. It feels Photoshopped, but it also has grandeur and something of Renaissance religious paintings in its composition--with two close-up saints flanking the central action in a more 3-D world. The message "Greetings from Earth" is not so much funny as desperate and sarcastic.
sweeney, christopher
Even darker is Christopher Sweeney's "7:30 Coal Pitch Drive" (right, 22 x 17 inches), which has a fun-house and the nightmare scariness of a decrepit honky-tonk carnival parading as a strip mall along a semi-deserted roadway. With agitated, deliberately unpleasant paint handling, the painting virtually shouts a dare--love me as I am with my dirty-looking surfaces and borrowed imagery.
keyser, todd
Keyser's "Big Day" (left, 14 x 70 inches) is a grisaille painted snapshot of himself posed with his martial-arts instructor, both dressed for combat, no background to speak of, and we get to make up the story. This is not a funny story (clearly Keyser thinks it is but we all know that artists are not to be trusted about their own work) but rather the story of passing a test or hurdle, with its anxieties and its sense of responsibility to mentors and parents. This piece is so much more personal and meaningful and unexpected compared to his glib grid of tongues in cheeks.
zamora, mauro
I didn't yet mention Mauro Zamora's monochromatic portraits of nature defeating architecture only because I have seen them before. Flattened, hard-edge silhouettes of trees and plants growing through roofs and into skeletal buildings suggest worry about man's control of the situation. Since it's one of my personal preoccupations, I keep looking at Zamora's work, which stands out in this show for its professionalism. What had seemed simplistic to me on my last look--too easy a message in too simple a package--seems more complex to me, this time out; I found more to look at (always a good sign) and I'm moving into his corner (right, "Sacked," 60 x 60 inches).
jacobs, hedwige
The other work I've seen before is by Hedwige Jacobs. Her no-depth landscape on canvas and her animation loop "Growing Grass" (left) tickled me last time I saw them, in "Green," over at the Esther Klein Gallery. The animation wasn't working when I stopped at Seraphin, but I remember loving it for its charming depiction of the not-so-charming truths of life, death, regeneration and maybe even overcrowding. Jacobs also has something up at the University of Maryland right now. I'm surprised at how little my previous posts on her say, because her work really left an impression on me, both at Klein and in an online show at The Vacuum (by the way, check out Roberta's recent post on the current show at The Vacuum).
brown, ellie
Photographer Ellie Brown's "Nice" (right) is the funniest piece in the show. Each box in a grid of nine photographs says someone is nice--for instance, "Andrew is nice" or "Kelly is nice." Below the message is a band of repeated, tiny photo portraits, presumably of the named person. Suddenly, thanks to Friendster and its endorsements of friends, junior high school fate books and multiple wallet-sized portrait exchanges at graduation have multiplied into a manufactured kaleidoscope of relationships. We're deep in cyberspace where friendship has become metastatic and wide publication forces us into insincerity. It's scary. But it's also funny. This piece puts that minimalist grid to good use, manufacturing friendship with tongue firmly and appropriately in cheek. This is by far my favorite piece from Brown. She also has work up at Afif (see post) and at Tower Gallery in Northern Liberties.

I don't know that this is the show that will shake up Seraphin's business plan. But I was glad to take a look. It was worth my while.

permanent link   libby 5:05 PM
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Posted by roberta

While we're in deep cyber-linkage and cyber-viewing I want to encourage you to peek at a couple of short animateds and a video at the Vacuum, one of Philadelphia's fine young efforts, an online-only gallery for short video. I've seen a number of memorable works here since the Vacuum went up last year. That's a pretty good track record for a new venue. Here's a post from Sept. 2004 on the Vacuum's innaugural show.



Up til Aug. 30 is Aaron Osborn's "Count Down" and "Night Thought," two short animateds that are sweet and possessed of a flowing, reductivist animation style and a hypnotic, hip hoppity musical accompaniment that's just fine. The pieces are cool and hot at once, a nice trick and Osborn pulls it off. Click the third floor buttons for Osborn's works.
sweitzer, jody
(first three images are from "Count Down")

"Count Down," which starts with a cosmic night of swirling stars and planets, then zeroes in on earth for a story, caught me by surprise. In spite of the title I didn't get where it was going until it got there.



Partly that's because of the breezy audiotrack that stays with the cool beat throughout, regardless of the action (which gets into rockets and missles and some nuclear explosions). Consider the piece an anti Hollywood movie. It's subversive storytelling with a lesson. Very nicely done. I've watched the short piece several times and enjoyed it each time.

The artist says he was born in the desert in Texas, went to RISD for painting and printmaking but that his heart is in video animation. I think this work is right where he belongs.



His second piece, "Night Thought"is shorter and seems like it's either not finished or it's meant to have a kind of video wallpaper effect -- no story. It's good. The piece has a similar trippy rolling with the punches ambiance to "Count Down" with an equally sober and rhythmic soundtrack. It shows a thunderstorm from up in the clouds. Both pieces have a kind of world at a distance ambiance and a questioning that's kind of poignant and very young. I will be watching for more of Osborn in the future. (image is from "Night Thought")



Nexus Member Jody Sweitzer, whom we've written about before (see artists list), is an experimental video artist whose works generally deal with the body -- hers -- in relation to herself, her relationships and the culture at large. Sweitzer's got four pieces in this show including three black and white quicktime movies, two on the first floor, "I love you" and "19%" and "Ladies and Gentlemen, part 3" on the second floor. "I love" shows a closeup of lips mouthing words. The piece lasts six minutes. "19%," which lasts twelve minutes, depicts a closeup of fingers kneading skin to locate the 19% of fat measured in, I think, the artist's body. Both of these works could have benefitted from editing, and 19% in particular tried my patience by loading up slowly.

For "Ladies and Gentlemen, part 3" the artist placed surveillance cameras at foot level in bathrooms (maybe at the Fringe Festival?) and speeded up the soundtrack so it sounds like Huey, Louie and Dewey quacking away. The piece made me uncomfortable but the soundtrack is so cartoonish it undercut the piece's punch. Surveillance is a scary thing and I have to question undercutting the scare factor.

Sweitzer's "Inner mission" on the second floor is the piece to go for. (all three black and white images are from "Inner mission") It's a great piece about relationships, arguments, and how nothing in relationships is really black and white. The artist calls it an experiment between speech and negative space and wants the viewer to wear headphones while watching it to get the biggest bang from the very loud soundtrack with gun shots, car horns honking, etc., probably from an action adventure movie. While I didn't wear headphones, and in fact turned down the sound, I found the piece had much beauty and humor and was smart commentary on reading beneath the surface.

And of course, the extreme black and white imagery is a reminder of that old optical trick asking whether you see a vase or two faces -- which is of course about perception and reality and how hard it is to see the forest for the trees. Anyway, the piece is solid and reverberant. Something about the visual reductiveness of this piece went well with the spare graphics of Osborn's pieces.
osborn, aaron
Score another good show for the Vacuum.

permanent link   roberta 9:19 AM
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Posted by roberta

Lo and behold, our girl, the highly loved by artblog Zoe Strauss is a flickr!
Here's her flickr page, rich with her street ambiance and love of all things human and Philly.
strauss, zoe
And by the way, Chuck P has new -- color -- images up this morning. Wonderful New Orleans shots.
chuck p

permanent link   roberta 7:54 AM
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Posted by libby

Email from Charles Hankin
hankin, charles
(This email is a response to the previous post on "The Lost Meeting," an installation created by a collaborating group of artists spearheaded by J. Morgan Puett and including the collective spurse and the composer David Lang).
puett, j. morgan
Hi,
spurse
I hope to see the meetinghouse at Abington. My family were members of the Hicksite Meeting which is still in use across from the Art Center. The Orthodox Meeting is the one that was closed when the Quakers reunited in 1951, after the separation. It was abandoned by the Township after they were given it by the Rosenwalds.

Jim Turrell's art seems to reflect Quaker values better: "My grandmother used to tell me that as you sat in Quaker silence you were to go inside to greet the light. That expression stuck with me" (see images of Turrell's art here) (image top right, Turrell's "Kielder Skyspace").

From artblog:
"The idea of carrying your message outside your house and into the world...is what Quakers (and all religions) try to do." Artblog.
lang, david

From "Faith and Practice of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting," E. Ministry of Outreach--

Outreach
What are we doing as a Meeting to communicate our presence and our principles to the community around us? Does our Meeting’s ministry of outreach lead Friends to share their spiritual experiences with others? ...Do I seize opportunities to tell others about the Religious Society of Friends and invite them to worship with us? Is my manner with visitors and attenders to our Meeting one of welcome?

Collaboration
...What opportunities have I taken to know people from different religious and cultural backgrounds, to worship with them,and to work with them on common concerns? What opportunities have I taken to know, to work, and to worship with Friends outside of my own Meeting?

I find it funny that people take liberties with a religion that they would not with others.

I wonder if the artists took the time to attend Meeting across the road on Sunday morning?

One more thing (in a second email)...

It is not the place (house) that matters. Some of my favorite Meetings were held outdoors while attending summer camp at Quaker camps. Sitting in the woods on a quiet sunday morning with just the birds speaking is a great way to commune with nature.

In my mind the abandonment of the Little Meeting is not the important part because those families rejoined the Abington Friends Meeting across the road. The Religious Society of Friends is a living community as represented by the active Meetings.

...Like many religions that have had their communities change, i.e.. the Jewish removal from the Strawberry Mansion section of North Philadelphia, churches get recycled or torn down. Religion is a living thing while buildings are simply vessels that shelter those communities.


--Sculptor Charles Hankin is an artblog contributor

permanent link   libby 11:41 AM
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Posted by roberta

I was introduced to flickr, the beta site for sharing and storing photographs by my good friend Chuck P who I've known since college days in Madison and who has always been, in my book, a photographer extraordinaire, even though he's not shown his work outside his circle of friends. (image is "Circus Parade 80" taken in Madison)
chuck p

Chuck and his family were up from New Orleans the other weekend for the high school graduation of their son, Alex from the George School and when he mentioned flickr and how great it was, we fired up the computer so he could give me the tour.

Chuck has several groups of photographs on his page at flickr. I must have seen some of the work, which dates from the late 1970s and 1980s, but to see it in what amounts to an online exhibit laid out in the wonderful professional fashion the site offers was thrilling. You can see photographs at thumbnail, mid-size, and high resolution. It's the best possible interface to see art. And it's free, fellow travelers! And the software at flickr sizes your images for you. You just upload it at your highest resolution and they do the rest.

As I looked at Chuck's wonderful black and white street shots and people shots, all with the artist's wide-eyed point of view asking "do you believe this -- ain't it great?" I was thrilled. Here, at last, is a public venue where Chuck's work will be seen -- and has been. Chuck is huge in the flickr community (a kind of friendster without the hookup vibe). People love his work and leave him mash notes and testimonials like crazy. It's no wonder. Chuck's work is humanist with touches of humor and social commentary. He's in the Garry Winogrand tradition of street photography with heart. (image is "Spidey 79, also from Madison, which shows a kid who's larger than Spiderman hugging the petite masked one.)

I'm waiting for him to put up the series of satellite dish photographs he told me he started taking when they first moved to New Orleans. This was before the advent of the modest-sized dishes that sit demurely near your second-floor window and back when your dish might be almost as big as your house. But the guy's got a backlog of undeveloped film sitting in drawers and closets and so I'll be patient. But I do wish he'd get a grant from someone to help him free up time to print those pix and get them up and out and in the world for I feel a palpable need for more. And in fact I'm not alone. The comments Chuck's been getting on his work (you can read them at the site) show that people think they've tapped into a treasure chest here and they're hungry for more. (image below is "Wall Street 77" showing an ambiguous transaction of some sort. I love the dramatic light which casts the whole thing in the realm of theatre.)


The flickr community, for that's what it is, is very group-friendly. Check out and see if it's for you. You upload your pictures, title them, group them into thematic sets and send them into the cyber world. You can make them private so nobody but an anointed few can view them, or, and this is so much better, make them public and they go up with everybody else's in a photo-array reminiscent of the great democratic free for all exhibit "Snapshot" that perched at Arcadia University's art gallery in 2001. Here's my review of Snapshot in the Weekly.

There's also groups you can join if you have time or interest for such. My favorite is the Macintosh group -- which has pictures of computers -- because really, do you know any group of people more obsessed than Mac users?



flickr is for the obsessed. People put loads of junk up but you know it's their world and they love it. Just like in "Snapshot, flickr's photostream has images of cats and dogs, babies and families, birds, sunsets, trees, and other stuff. It's a new kind of family of man with stuff. Upbeat and ebullient, it's democratic and offers people a chance to connect over the beloved imagery. (image is "DC Mall 82")

You know I'm obsessed, right. So I, too, have a flickr page. I've been spending too much time with it and, unlike Chuck's page, mine feels like a random image generator -- which it is. But I'll whip it in shape in time, getting some photo sets that make sense and discarding the dross.

Flickr is my new best friend and right now we're having a great chat about photography.
flickr

permanent link   roberta 8:30 AM
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Posted by libby

The ramp at the ICA, an installation space that has daunted any number of out-of-town big-name wunderkinds from Arturo Herrera (he was the first) to Amy Sillman (she was the most recent), will get the treatment from local photographer Zoe Strauss (here's a link to one of our many doting posts on Zoe that links to an interview by Roberta in the Weekly (image, Strauss in her studio).
strauss, zoe
Strauss, whose photos of the seamy side of the street have recently won her a well-deserved Pew Fellowship in the Arts 2005, will have at the ramp April 22 to July 30, 2006. Here's how the ICA described her work:

[She] captures images of the sites and people she encounters in her neighborhood and travels. Prostitutes, urban youth, the elderly, street signs and building facades are all subjects for her camerawork. Like Robert Frank or Diane Arbus, Strauss captures the mundane and freakish and exposes beauty in the gritty city. Twice a year, Strauss takes her work back to the streets by staging exhibitions beneath freeway overpasses. Everyone is invited to participate in the viewing and acquisition of her works, which are produced inexpensively as unlimited editions using the computer. This will be Strauss's first museum exhibition.

The only other local artist who has handled the ramp is Virgil Marti (he took the space right over).

Two other ramp projects are also on the agenda--one by Ingrid Calame, just before Strauss, from Jan. 21 to March 26, and coming up in September, Fortuyn/O'Brien, one of several architecture/design-related exhibitions in the 2005/2006 ICA schedule.

As for the next main gallery show Sept. 10, it will be "Rodney Graham: A Little Thought," the only East Coast venue for a survey of Graham's work organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario (Graham's a Canadian), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. I am soooo looking forward to some work that uses humor.

permanent link   libby 8:17 PM
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Posted by roberta

My review of "Voxennial" the 33-artist show of emerging talent at Vox Populi Gallery is in today's Weekly. Here. Basically I think it's a great show with lots of energy and some surprises (like Marina Borker, post-MFA, painting an outstanding surreal image on wood instead of making reductivist tape on wall landscapes, which actually, come to think of it, were pretty surreal and at the end in her Fleisher Challenge exhibit in 2000, rather painterly.) Here's Libby's post on Voxennial. She ran an image of Borker's painting.
lewis, nancy

I'd run images of the entire show if I thought it would get people in. Will it? Or will you feel like you've seen it now and don't need to go. I can't decide.

I'm just running two of the many things that tickled me -- Nick Papparone and James Dillon's "Dungeon Rug" (top image) very black and very on the floor and very much by two of the founders of Black Floor gallery and collective; and Nancy Lewis's pink bar napkin imprinted with the words "this is very serious" and the image of the drawing of her dog (sorry the image is fuzzy.) (below) Maybe check out the show at Vox's wine tasting fundraiser on Saturday, June 25 from 4-7 pm, followed by live music at the semi-regular event, Musica Populi at 8 pm. Playing are Comets On Fire, Growing, Gang Gang Dance and Bloodlines. See Gallery's website for more.

And in sketches today the announcement of the naming of Tyler School of Art's new dean, Keith Morrison, from the College of Creative Arts at San Francisco State University. More info about him in sketches.
papparone, nick and james dillon
And news of Fleisher Art Memorial's finalists for the walkway competition to create a coherent campus between Fleisher's two-buildings and a parking lot campus. The finalists: two of artblog's favorite artists, Mei-Ling Hom and Jennie Shanker (in collaboration with Anna Forrester). The artist's reception and viewing of the two finalists' designs is Thursday, June 16, 5:30-7:30 pm at Fleisher's Center for Works on Paper, 705 Christian St. The winner will be announced Friday.
dillon, james and nick papparone

permanent link   roberta 11:24 AM
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Posted by roberta

The promotional brochure for "The Lost Meeting" had so many words and was arranged in such a confusing way up and down the page, this way and that that I couldn't read it. I took in the old-fashioned script which communicated "old" and the indecipherablility which conveyed chaos and accepted it all as part of the art project. Then I worried that the chaos of the brochure boded ill for the project. (image is the abandoned Quaker meetinghouse at Abington Art Center that is the site for "The Lost Meeting.")
spurse

An art teacher I had once said that it's not good enough to have great ideas. You have to do something with them -- bring them to life and share them with the world. That's the test of art.


That thought has stayed with me and I always look for art to communicate some great idea. If it does, it's usually a great piece of art.

The Lost Meeting has a great idea but it's not a great piece of art. The reason for that is it doesn't communicate clearly enough to be comprehensible to a viewer. The group of artists who made the project clearly click with what it's about. I spoke to several of them at the opening and they were all in tune with what they were doing. But for those of us on the outside looking in "The Lost Meeting" is, as someone said to me, a little opaque.
(image is table with two computers cranking out patterns courtesy of an algorithm being run through a database. Computers are huge in this installation. In fact, they're in the driver's seat.)


"Lost Meeting" has to do with creating new from old. That much I understand. The collaborating group of artists spearheaded by J. Morgan Puett and including the collective spurse and the composer David Lang did a lot of research into the old. They researched the archives surrounding Quakers in the region including those who would have been members of this little meeting on the Abington grounds. They documented old Quaker artifacts like clothing, dolls and other historical material. They restored the benches from the original now-crumbling building. They did some restoration to the meeting house which was a wreck apparently. They got the names of the original 47 Quaker families of the meeting. (image is books sitting on one of the original benches. The bench, which is still a bench, has been placed high on the wall. Other benches are used as work tables and in some cases they are installed diagonally in free space making kind of expressionistic lines or space dividers. I guess that's part of the old-new idea, transforming the benches into something else -- a shelf, a table, etc..)

lang, david

When they were done with research, the group members went to work on the new. That's where they lost me. Somehow the old material got translated into numbers and then the numbers got run through algorithms and the algorithms created new patterns. And the patterns keep being created because the project is ongoing. (this image shows a printout that describes the process (from right to left) of the devolution of an artifact into a new pattern. On the right is a photograph of a Quaker hat box and lid. Next is the first iteration of change, followed by several other iterations. There may be six or seven iterations in all.)

The little meeting house is a pattern workshop, with computers all over the place and a printer cranking out printouts of the new patterns as they are generated by the computers. What the space looks like is a kids clubhouse with things -- patterns, tools, other stuff and clutter -- hanging everywhere and little spaces and cubbyholes cut out here and there. It's chaotic and claustrophobic and feels a little like a human beehive. What the new patterns represent is not clear to me, except that they are fuel for new projects by the artists which is what one of them told me. Spurse, by the way, is a play on the words disperse and spur. (image of more computers)

Anyway, I keep wondering how the new patterns have anything to do with Quakers, faith, people, and loss, either today or in the yesteryear when this meeting had a life. The closest things I could link it to in today's world and I hesitate to say this are the cabin of the unabomber -- or a beehive. Except that in both my examples there was and is a real world outcome -- bombs and honey. Here, the outcome is not in the real world, it's in generation of new patterns which have no application in the real world that I could see. (image below is a laptop generating one version of one pattern.)


I kept thinking as I was being stepped through the process of algorithmic change by one artist or another "What's necessary in all this?" What's in it for me? In other words, why do we need these new patterns? Usually, necessity is the mother of invention. Here necessity seemed irrelevent, and invention was the end in itself. (image right is the same laptop as above, about a minute before the previous object appeared. It's the same original object only at an earlier stage of development.)


Like a dog catching a frisbee thrown by its owner, the pattern-making activity seems game-like and necessary to the participants but only mildly remarkable to a passerby.

Lang's instrumental music seems much more in tune with the idea of the old abandoned house in the woods which once was alive with voices and activity but for so many years signalled -- with its abandonment -- failure and loss. The music, which is outside and seems to emanate from the woods, is not heard inside the meeting house. Lovely, melodic and somewhat sad, the music connects with hymns, Quakers, and the idea of carrying your message outside your house and into the world, which is what Quakers (and all religions) try to do. In any event, it's delightful. Lang is the founder and artistic director of New York's "Bang on a Can."


The spurse collective, the international group of architects, psychologists, scientists, statisticians, artists and skateboarders who worked on the project has done projects at Mass MoCA and elsewhere. There are some 40 spurse members (including Puett) and a fair number of them were in attendance at the opening. The group started in 1996 and began as a group of graduate students, member Rochelle (sorry I failed to write down her last name), a statistician from Toronto told me. (image is a printer which has been printing out the computer-generated patterns.)


"Lost Meeting" is a communicative piece. It speaks to the artists who made it and who will be able to use some of the patterns generated here in future projects. To an outside viewer what it communicates is industry and confusion. And if that's the intent that's ok. I think industry is intended. I'm not sure about confusion.

Think of the piece as an anti-archive where generation of matter is important and organization is subsidiary. That may be the idea underneath it all -- that archiving is false at base because it puts an artificial constraint on matter which, as we all know is chaotic and entropic. I don't know. All I know is that with all that industry in that little cabin, I wish they were making honey instead of patterns. (image is the artists. I didn't meet them all so don't have everybody's names. In the front row starting left is spurse member Rochelle, composer David Lang, J. Morgan Puett and curator Julie Courtney.)
puett, j morgan

permanent link   roberta 8:51 AM
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Posted by libby

Here are three to see as a group: Clark Gibson's grids and patterns at Bridgette Mayer until July 17; Eric Mack's city meets infinity at Sande Webster until July 5; and Robert Straight's grids and spirals defining deep space at Schmidt Dean, show extended until July 8 (top image, Gibson's "Tropics," 17" x 27").
gibson, clark
Gibson's grids and patterns and layers in his solo show, "Kaleidoscope," exude a sane exuberance and a love of wonderful, summery colors. Of the three, his work is the most grounded in the world in which we live. Gibson, who has been in Philadelphia for the past four years and earned a BA from NYU and a BFA from Parsons, juxtaposes opposites like plaids inspired by architecture's blocky patterns, flat fields of color, and organic patterns that rise and fall and flow like fabric and the ground upon which we stand (right, Gibson's "Threaded Towers," 23" x 35").

What makes these heavily glazed, heavily layered oil-on-panel paintings so wonderful, besides the colors, are those organic patterns, quirky and engaging, bringing up images of fabric, animal spots, spidery flowers, stone walls, maps, and confetti. The depth in those patterns stays fairly close to the surface, unless they are embedded in the grids, which seem to go backwards into space forever. Sometimes, irregular fields of flat color--a layer from underneath--push the plaids and patterns apart or vice versa. They also lend a depth to the paintings. The beauty of the work took me by surprise and made me want to see more (left, from top to bottom, Gibson's "Tropics II," "Winged Form - Blue," and "Threaded Form with White Borders," each 8" x 10").

Gibson, who is in his mid '30s, took two years to create this show. His process is slow and painstaking, but the result is ebullient.

Also riffing on the cityscape is Eric Mack, an Atlanta-based artist at Sande Webster Gallery. Mack, who is not yet 30 and is all about how everything links up and is connected, has an outsider intensity that belies his art training in Atlanta. His no-holds-barred work in "Terraterrestrial" contrasts dramatically with the smooth, glossy and controlled work Gibson does. Mack's mappy mixed-media collage-and-paint canvases pile on bits of paper with words and jazzy rhythms of a sign-filled city and African-influenced patterns(right, Mack's "TRT-1976," 70" x 46", mixed media on canvas).
mack, eric
But city sizzle is not all that Mack seems to have on his mind in these paintings. There's a suggestion of the city's place in deep space and a view of all that's going on from the vantage point of way on high. The calmer spaces and the green spaces set up their own brand of contrast, and give the pulsating city grids room to carry on. Mack names his shows by numbers and letters--and then they also have a number and letter inventory code, a kind of piling on of obsessive codes (Mack's "SSS-33," 10" x 10", mixed media on paper).

The letter/number approach is also how Robert Straight at Schmidt Dean names his paintings. This approach makes me think of a kind of cataloguing obsessiveness, a desire to keep everything in its place (image, Straight's "P.390").
straight, robert
What inspires Straight's works has less to do with the real world around us and more to do with systems and their magic, their ability to keep control over the chaotic world. Some of the non-grid spaces are filled with marks that remind me of pickup sticks--a relatively chaotic bundle of marks. But the chaos is never allowed to take over; the lines are unbending. All grids and plaids and swooping pinwheels, the work suggests buildings and cities and their inherent magical powers. It also suggests skies and great depth. But it's a universe that follows strict rules. (Here's a previous post I wrote on some more fabric-y, less controlled work of Straight's that I saw previously at Schmidt Dean).

I'm forever intrigued by how similar tactics can evoke such variety of thought and express such different intents. While Gibson seems thoroughly to express earthly concerns and an interest in the here and now, Mack and Straight are seeking to place our world in the universe--or universal forces within our everyday world.

permanent link   libby 4:47 PM
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Posted by libby

Artist Eliseo Silva (see post on mural at the Spruance School) is one of three artists who will be teaching mural arts as part of the youth art program at the Asian Arts Initiative, and I hear he's a gifted teacher. The program is for youths 14 to 21 years of age and also has a poetry component, photography and comics. Others running the workshop from July 5th to Aug. 12 are muralist and poet Rodney Camarce, photographer Rana Sindhikara and performance artist Marian Thambynayagam.

For more info, get in touch with Rana at the Asian Arts Initiative, 215-557-0455, rana@asianartsinitiative.org, or write to Asian Arts Initiative, c/o Rana Sindhikara, 1315 Cherry St, 2nd Floor, Philadelphia, PA, 19107.

permanent link   libby 11:31 AM
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Posted by libby and roberta

We're happy to report that we didn't die of the heat at InLiquid's Art for the Cash Poor event in Old City on Saturday. We're also happy to report that we made some money! and finally we're happy to report that the young lady exhibitor who was suffering from the weather at the table next to us revived.
bromirski, martin
And finally, finally, we're very happy to report that we met Martin Bromirski, father of one of the blogs we like to visit, anaba. Here's Bromirski's weekend odyssey. The former Philadelphia artist and current inliquid member now based in Richmond VA piled himself into a Greyhound bus, tumbled into the art fair and set up his table, ran around looking for us because we were on his list of people to see, met us, wanted a painting, ran to the cash machine, came back and bought a painting (for which we are incredibly grateful, so much so that we gave him all our beer tickets), he drank four beers, asked us to be in his thumbs up project* and planned to head on home on the bus that night so he could report for his job the next morning as a whitewater river raft captain on the James River.

(Pictured top is Bromirski with his own painting, and next is Bromirski with our painting.)

fallon, roberta and libby rosof
*See this anaba post for a sample of Bromirski's thumbs up project in which he snags world renowned artists and writers (like us and Inka Essenhigh, Daniel Buren, Jonathan Franzen) to pose with his paintings in thumbs up position.

We liked the project so much that we asked him to do his own thumbs up of his paintings, something he hadn't done before. Then he suggested he'd pose with thumbs up for our "So True: Artforum, Sept. 2020, Art in America, 2020" which he had just purchased. Click here to see a close up detail of our work.

rosof, libby and roberta fallon

permanent link   libby and roberta 10:15 AM
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Posted by roberta

lutz, winifred

I visited the Abington Art Center outdoor sculpture show the day of the opening, June 5. It was one of Philadelphia's finest hot, humid days -- redeemed only by the fact that June 5 is too early for mosquitoes.

mccutcheon, brian

I can recommend the outdoor walk for several reasons, some old and some new. It's a great opportunity to re-visit Winifred Lutz's "Reclamation Garden," the ongoing project begun in 1992 (!!) to "tidy" the woods and recall the wonderful serendipitous way nature grows, dies and renews itself. (Top image is a tower built by Lutz that has primeval authority, second image is a group of logs holding up two greater trunks of trees. The whole assemblage suggests pallbearers carrying two caskets -- very beautiful and elegaic.)


siegel, steven

Brian McCutcheon's "Totus Mundus Agot Histrionem," (above) is a picture frame that frames the entrance to the trail leading to the Reclamation Garden. The piece amuses and is squarely in the Claes Oldenberg tradition of great big subversions.

angle, warren
There are lots of other old favorites on the grounds by well-loved Philadelphia artists we here at artblog are partial to: Ava Blitz, Alan Greenberg, Nicholas Kripal, Ron Klein, Jack Larimore, and Jeanne Jaffe, for example. And while he's not local Red Hook, NY artist Steven Siegel's "Scale," which I don't remember seeing before, made my day. The assemblage of old rotting newspapers is one of those perfect pieces. (above is a detail and below is the monolith)
klein, ron


Resembling an ancient Celtic cairn "Scale" calls to mind human rituals and also the power of rocks. 20,000 lbs. of old Philadelphia Inquirers speaks of old and new, nature and artifice, city and country. But what got to me is the way it calls into question the value of life. All those stories of all those people in those newspapers are memorialized in the piece. And yet at the same time the piece relegates all human endeavors to the scrap heap. It's a very dark thought indeed. The piece has been there since 2002 but I don't remember seeing it before. It alone is worth the trek out there.

murch, lisa

Here's a shot of another perfect piece, Ron Klein's "2.B.U-1.8.U.2," painted trash baskets that seem to rise like a cobra responding to some unheard melody. Subversive of its material and subversive in its questioning of waste, the piece makes me smile.
bankemper, joan
As for new kids in the woods or on the lawn, of the five new pieces in Curator Amy Lipton's "Inside/Outside PASSAGES" I connected most with three of them and unfortunately can't comment on one of them because I totally missed seeing it on my excursion in the woods where -- and be forwarned art lovers -- I got LOST on the way to the LOST MEETING and thus ran out of time to chase down that last outdoor piece. (Roy Staab's "Katsura Passage" is the one I missed. Maybe some artblog reader will write in and tell us about it because I won't be going back soon.)

Anyway, here's what's exciting:

Warren Angle's "La Brea." The faux tar pit in the shape of the US with the ducks lined up like the stars and stripes has the "goo" factor down perfectly. I almost gagged looking at it even though there was no smell. I love the map-shaped pond and the flag idea. It's so patriotic! I imagine if Angle tried he could license the idea of USA-shaped backyard water elements to Home Depot and sell a million patriotically-shaped ponds to gardeners in the South. Nice, sassy piece with an eco-message.



Joan Bankemper's "A Dovetail Garden." Bankemper created a number of bird houses that dot the periphery of the lawn. Made of pottery shards from kitsch figurines and cement sitting high on poles footed at the base by plantings, the little housing development is indoor-outdoor-indoor savvy. All those Hummel figurines, skulls (one Vargas girl) look great outside adorning the rooftops and walls of the mini-houses. Putting kitsch to work in the service of baby birds is great. In fact I spotted a tiny house wren bringing a twig into her nest in one house (not the forbidding skull castle (above) but this one (below) that had some angels on it.)



Seeing that little wren was one of my action-adventure animal encounters that day. The other was seeing a deer leave some droppings in the woods out near Siegel's piece. I know, eeeewwwww. But really, have you ever seen that? It was exciting!



Lisa Murch's "Typha Latifolia (Cattails"). They're big, they're faux, they're funny. That's about it. I loved them.

I'll tell you about "Lost Meeting," J. Morgan Puett's piece with spurse and David Lang in another post. I want to get this post up before my fingers get hot and sweaty and start sliding around the keyboard like it's a Slip 'n Slide.

Anyway, Abington, please put more signs in your woods. A couple would do saying "This way to the Lost Meeting" or "No, turn back! You're going the wrong way if you want to go to the Lost Meeting." I could have saved myself about 20 minutes if I hadn't gone astray.

permanent link   roberta 8:50 AM
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