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Posted by libby

I'm off to New York for a belated birthday event for my son. Besides "Spamalot" (his choice of course; I wish I had chain mail to wear to this show, which I think has the potential of cult classicdom) I hope to get to the tail end of Max Ernst at the Met as well as the Tony Oursler pieces there (the question to be asked--can the Met handle contemporary?).

A couple of other posts still hanging in my to-do pile are the imaginary landscapes show at Vox Populi, a nice reminder of how many ways landscape continues to be an alive approach to artmaking, and the Space 1026 members show--sparkling moments amidst the ebullient chaos.

I'll be back Monday.

permanent link   libby 3:25 PM
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Posted by libby

Peter Rose on line and in New York:

I took this almost verbatim from the InLiquid Newsletter:
"Peter Rose has announced the opening of his new website, which contains downloadable movies, descriptions, scripts, schema, and stories (AOL browser not recommended). In addition, he is included in a multimedia exhibition at Maya Stendhal Gallery called Vital Signs: Summer 2005 Group Show, on view through July 31.

Winter down the shore:

And from MatCh-Art's Christine Vassallo:

MatCh-Art is coordinating an exhibit for the Shore Institute of Contemporary Art (SICA), in Long Branch, NJ. It is called the Circle Show and it will include a very strong Philadelphia contingency, with Rob Matthews, Mark Shetabi, Randall Sellers, Nami Yamamoto, and James Rosenthal contributing work. SICA is a non-profit org that hosts museum-quality exhibitions and maintains a well-developed schedule of workshops and studio programs. The show is due to open the last week of November 2005 and run through January 2006.

MatCh-Art is an on-line and real-world gallery, a partnership between Vassallo and artist Matt Fisher. The on-line stuff has been up for a while, but if you haven't seen it, pay a visit. There's lots of juicy stuff there, including work by people we've gone on and on about--Brian Alfred, Rob Matthews and Emily Bicht.

permanent link   libby 2:53 PM
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Posted by libby

(This is part III of a three-part report on Allan McCollum's talk in this summer's UArts Brown Bag Lunch Series,"Food for Thought" at the University of the Arts Wednesday. This part talks about the push and pull in McCollum's work between uniqueness and copies. Here is part 1 and part 2.)

Allan McCollum noticed that ginger jars were often used as props to suggest uniqueness, wealth, connoiseurship--a symbolic art object. "Ginger jars were everywhere!" including on television shows. And they were already a symbol. "I'll make a symbol of that symbol," he said, and he called it "Perfect Vehicles." Lo and behold, it was about religion, he said, about an object having an elevated value. So McCollum's assembly line produced the solid, unjarlike ginger jars that eventually spawned the decor that Sid Sachs had espied at Strawbridge's. McCollum's ginger jars contained nothing but themselves, were full of themselves. How appropriate. He wondered, What does it mean if you have 50 of a thing? Does it make it have more value or less value (left, "Perfect Vehicles")?
mccollum, allan
And then, inspired by the finials of ginger jars, he wondered "that an object should have a terminal point." So he collected a huge quantity of mass produced shapes, cast them and combined them in ways that no two were alike, yet they looked like a line of mass-produced products, all painted one color. He had a suite he painted green, to recall a commercial attempt to paint something grass color, and another a pinky red for commercial flesh color. The piece is called "Individual Works." The work, he complained, is often mistaken for being about consumerism, but that, he said is not what he's about (right, "Over Ten Thousand Individual Works").

Somewhere around this time, he changed his method of display, using folding tables covered with table cloths to fill the gallery floor as well as walls with his multiples. The inspiration was trade shows (left, "Drawings," each based on a unique combination of basic shapes, on display on folding tables).



He has had several more pieces since then that hark back to his kit technique, combining in as many ways as possible a limited number of basic shapes to mass produce unique objects. He has done it not only in the finials, but in the series of "Drawings" and in "The New City Markers," a series of unique combinations of basic shapes designed to hang on idividual homes in a housing development in Malmo, Sweden--to serve as an "address" without numbers (right, "The New City Markers," made of aluminum).


Other more recent work includes reproduced fossils on the theory that fossils are copies and then museums make copies of them, so why not mass produce more copies. (Left, "The Dog From Pompei," these are replicas of the original plaster cast of a dog that had been buried alive in volcanic ash 79 A.D. in Pompeii.)


These pieces involved collaborations around the country with small museums. And these projects took him on a path involving mass reproduction of a number of natural phenomena and a number of local-community collaborations. McCollum wrote or collected and reproduced information about the projects, the brochures becoming part of the art, and you can find the information in PDF files on his website. (right, "Lost Objects," cast dinosaur bones, produced in collaboration with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Here they are on display there, in a space that straddles the art museum and the natural history museum at the Carnegie, and therefore blurs the lines on where one discipline ends and the other begins. After this project, McCollum began seeking out small community museums to work with their collections).

The computer and the Internet were made for a person who loves mass replication. (He created his website himself, he told Sachs, before the talk.)


He has made generic gifts that sort of look like ingots imprinted with "thank you," which he said were "objects with no meaning until they were exchanged." These were reproduced by Philadelphia art reproductions manufacturer Cerealart (left, "The Visible Markers").


At the ICA's "Big Bang," McCollum's "Glossies" looked like black photographs, but were in fact facsimiles with black rectangles for images that allowed the viewer to feel they were looking at photographs when in fact they weren't (right, "Glossies).

Meanwhile, he said he is making a system large enough to produce 12 billion symbols, each one unique. Connected to this, he is wondering at how mass communication and the internet have made us more aware of the number of people in the world and how hard it is for us to take in that number and that each person is unique, so we make up stereotypes that reduce individuals to masses.

(Video recordings from the "Food for Thought" series are archived at the UArtsSummer MFA office and the UArts library. I wonder if the projected slide images look any better on video.)

permanent link   libby 10:40 AM
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Posted by libby

(This is part II of a three-part report on Allan McCollum's talk in this summer's UArts Brown Bag Lunch Series,"Food for Thought" at the University of the Arts Wednesday. Here's the previous post.)
mccollum, allan

McCollum also did a number of collaborations and likes to work that way--with other artists, with studio assistants, with community collaborators.
simmons, laurie
With Laurie Simmons, who was doing dolls and dollhouses, he purchased the smallest cast model-train figures he could find (some Simmons info is here). The artists photographed them and blew them up until the vagaries of the casting process and the hand painting became the subject, rather than the mass-produced perfection that we assume. On that enormous scale, the pieces look unique. There's an emotional desire to have that mass-produced sameness, but it's a fiction he said. Every object is unique, even when cast, he said (left above, one of the "Actual Photos," and right below, a photo showing the scale of the train figures, which are seated on a nickel).

For decent photos of all these projects, try McCollum's web page. It's full of really great images and words.
lawler, louise

(I'm not so sure this is totally true, although the desire for that kind of control is true. My brother Barry used to manufacture high-tech widgets that had to meet precise specifications. Lack of uniformity would create widget failure. Little, cast figures, however, have no need for that kind of perfection. We do, however, behave as if they achieve that perfection. I suppose at some molecular level, those widgets also might be inconsistent, but it's their perfection we aim for, wish for and focus on. Well, that is McCollum's point.)
fraser, andrea

With Louise Lawler he made a couple of pieces, including "Ideal Setting"--stacks of bases for sculptures. (Here's some Lawler information.) The bases were of plaster coated with black shoe polish with no sculpture on top. He put them on pedestals in a gallery tricked up like a showroom, with glowing colored spotlights and an inference that the pedestals themselves made art art and in fact were art (Brancusi would have loved this one). Above the stacks, projected on the wall was the price, $200. He said they actually sold one (left, "Ideal Setting").

One of the collaborations he mentioned was with Andrea Fraser (see post), an artblog favorite, who wrote a script about owning art that the gallery attendants had to memorize and use in talking to people in the gallery. The script highlighted how the sales pitch is also mass produced. Here's a link to a recent post on Fraser.

In some ways, mass production is the perfect opportunity for collaboration, and McCollum said he likes the social aspect of working with others. While talking about coming from a family with factory work in his and his parents backgrounds, he said it was a pretty good experience for him, and one of the reasons was the comraderie.

(In the last part of this series, McCollum takes his mass production methods and his interest in collaboration to new levels.)

permanent link   libby 7:45 AM
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Posted by libby

(This is part I of a three-part report.)


Artist Allan McCollum attracted quite the crowd at his lunch-time talk yesterday at the University of the Arts. He was the third artist to speak in this summer's UArts Brown Bag Lunch Series,"Food for Thought." Over the years, the program has brought in memorable artists like Jose Bedia, Dario Robleto and Siah Armajani. The series is organized by Carole Moore who heads up the Summer MFA program there and most important of all includes air conditioning. The rest of the schedule for these talks is here (right, McCollum from a very strange angle, sorree, but I love the hands).
mccollum, allan
I arrived in a serious sweat, having decided (oh, what possessed me?) to bicycle down there in the appalling humidity, and radiated heat for the first hour of the talk. People kept asking me about my tan. I was probably just beet red from exertion and the high humidity. I can't imagine why Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery Director Sid Sachs or anyone else for that matter would have sat next to me in that state.

But Sachs did share with me that McCollum's website is amazing, so here's the link, where you can see decent versions these same photos that I have posted here. (I personally am amused that the images here are copies of McCollum's art of making copies). Sachs also mentioned that McCollum was generous and sensitive, unlike so many self-absorbed artists, and certainly the talk bore that out.

Anecdotes

But best of all, Sachs offered a couple of funny art anecdotes.
moore, carole
Here's my favorite one: Sachs was wandering through Strawbridge's when he espied some giant ginger jars in solid colors--basically copies of McCollum's "Perfect Vehicles," giagiant ginger jars, in this case turned to use as store decor. Now McCollum, who is a man who makes copies of copies, questions uniqueness and uniformity, and thinks mass production is a good thing, would really have loved these copies. So Sid tried to take a photograph, but store security intercepted him before he could focus. What would have been the pinkerton scrooge's point, I wonder? He was protecting copies of copies from being copied. Then again, maybe that proves McCollum's point about the value of the mass produced item (left, one of McCollum's extra-large "Perfect Vehicles").
sachs, sid
McCollum himself told an anecdote about being asked to supply props for the movie "American Psycho." However the filmmakers didn't want the responsibility of keeping the artwork safe, so McCollum gave them permission to copy his work and then they sent him the copies when they were done. He now has them, six "Surrogate Paintings," or maybe he meant six surrogate paintings.

McCollum brought more slides than I've ever seen in a slide talk, many of them duplicating the same art work in different venues--a sort of mass-produced slide show--but he kept everyone's attention nonetheless.

Moore did the introduction, stating that McCollum, who was born in Los Angeles and lives and works in New York, explores in his art how objects change personal and public meaning in the world. McCollum has had more than 100 solo exhibitons in galleries and museums around the world and is in the collections of 70 major art museums around the world (I didn't know there were 70 major ones). He has also written about other artists, among them Matthew Mullican and Andrea Zittel. (Speaking of Mullican, see Roberta's post on a collaboration he and Mullican produced that we saw in New York).

McCollum started by saying he hadn't gone to art school (I heard an intake of breath all around the room, I do believe).

The early assembly line


Fairly early on in McCollum's career he moved to making a larger image from small strips of canvas and then from uniform squares of canvas--the beginnings of the relationship between McCollum's art and mass production, a theme that has persisted in his work ever since. He said the process of assembling all the squares into a piece was a Fluxus-like event, adopting mass production techniques. "I didn't know what it would look like until I did it," he said (right, detail from a work in the "Constructed Painting" series).


Then he showed "a kind of kit" he designed, created in multiples using the paper lithograph method of printing that had swept into print shops (like PIP) across the country. He said the method was an influence on the anti-war movement, enabling cheap reproductions of pamphlets before xerox came along. It also was a kind of mass production technique that appealed to him. He took the kit's shapes and glued them together to get grids on grids (left, a kit of shapes).

"There's some humor in this," he said. At the time at Art Forum, there was a lot of writing about the edges of the canvas being the first four lines of your composition. "So I'm making a painting with nothing but edges."

He also mentioned as an influence here Richard Tuttle and the idea of making something that you might throw away.

When he moved to New York in the mid 1970s he began questioning the critical assumptions in his work. He came from a poor family that valued mass produced objects, so he himself valued them.


He said he wanted to make a painting that stood for all paintings. "If I was an anthropoligist from Mars trying to describe a painting, what would I say to my people?" (right, a "Surrogate Painting").

He began to wonder about the expectation that people bring when walking into a gallery, the social space in which an art work flourishes. He wanted to figure out "that longing that precedes looking at an artwork...what precedes your walking in the door" of a gallery.


Then he began looking at paintings on television. They are ever present in the background of dramas and sitcoms where everything but the frame is blurry and indistinguishable--but the viewer accepts the thing in the frame as a work of art with all the values having such a thing represents. Why, they could be mass produced and still have the same effect (left, a tv still with unreadable paintings in background behind JFK).


He began by making monochrome paintings. "But I didn't think I was making monocrhome paintings." However, the work was chosen for shows of monochrome art, like the show "Dark Paintings, Dark Thoughts" [sic.] Sachs leaned over to tell me he too was in that show, which was really called "Black Paintings, Dark Thoughts." I refuse to do a search to double check on this. This way either one can be right in my mind (left, "Plaster Surrogates," cast plaster one-piece objects painted with enamel).



McCollum's monochrome art objects included the "painting" and the frame, but really the whole thing was the painting.

They sold (here's a group of them bought and installed by someone at Chase Bank).


This discovery that art isn't necessarily about the quality of the image inside the frame inspired him to begin making enormous blow-ups of photos he took off the television screen of the indecipherable television art--"You see four or five every night." He hung the "Perpetual Photos" in galleries, where they looked great, all framed and layed out across the white walls (left, a blown up piece of television art).


From there he mass produced plaster molds of paintings, including the frame and the mat. But, he said, each one was unique. "Anyone that's ever made cookies knows that." He made them in 20 sizes and used 32 colors. But he made no two combinations alike (left, a grouping of "Surrogate Paintings").

He was working cleaning buildings around that time, allowing him to look across the street into windows of other buildings. Again he saw artwork he couldn't decipher, and so photographed, blew up and duplicated those as well. He also used newspapers as a source for indecipherable art. He said art was "about the desire to see a picture."

(This is part 1 of a three-part report; part 2 is here and part 3 is here. These talks, by the way, are recorded and archived in the UArts Summer MFA office and in the UArts library.)

permanent link   libby 5:42 PM
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Posted by libby

Email from Robert Cozzolino

This advice addressed to Roberta, who's now in Milwaukee, could apply to anyone within spitting distance of Madison. I know if she could possibly get there, she'd be there in a minute--Libby:
wilde, john

I noticed that Roberta is in the Midwest -- in the great state of Wisconsin. I encourage you to borrow a car, a friend with a car, a family member with a car, or take the Badger bus to Madison and the Chazen Museum of Art (formerly the Elvehjem -- they recently received a $20 Million gift to support their expansion and voila, a name change) to see the other big 'ol show I have on display there. That one is accompanied by a catalogue... (image off the cover of the catalog is by John Wilde, American, b. 1919, "Karl Priebe, Gertrude Abercrombie, Dudley Huppler, Marshall Glasier, Sylvia Fein, A Friend, Arnold Dadian, and Myself, 1966," Oil on panel, 8 x 12 inches).
cozzolino, robert
Unfortunately, it will not be traveling so you can only see it there. Here's a link to the exhibition [With Friends: Six Magic Realists 1940-1965, which runs to Sept. 18] and then a link to said catalogue.

I know from my own travels to see family and friends in the Midwest that it is very hard to try and squeeze in everything and everyone you'd like to see -- but I thought I'd just alert you to the show in case you have a chance to drop in on Madison. You can go get Babcock Hall ice cream at the Union and look out at the lake afterward!

--Robert Cozzolino curated the show "Light, Line and Color" at PAFA

permanent link   libby 2:23 PM
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Posted by libby

Two new places to see art is always a good thing.

First there's Darius Rug and Art Gallery--honest, that's literally what it is, rugs first, art second, but art nonetheless.
minervini, robert

Right now, Rob Minervini has a small one-man show there mostly of flat men in suits in front of bright walls. Some of the men are flayed In one painting, a man is revealing girl's underpants below a suit jacket. The men in suits are about people in uniforms, their unique natures suppressed and the uniformity steamrollering them into cut-out dolls (left, "It Takes Tough Skin to Stand Out," left).

The flatness in these paintings suggests they are about making art, about the process of turning what is real into something that is unreal. The wonderful acid colors also suggest that and help to give this work its visual surprise.

In "Domesticate Everything" (right) a dog is on a chain and the wallpaper pattern appears to be an extreme closeup--a detail. The scale pushes the pattern repeat beyond the scope of the painting and makes it impossible to know what it looks like. The dog is also huge and compressed forward, the outline suggesting a cutout or drawing. This is not a free, frolicking dog.

I was curious about paintings in a rug store, although I did have the thought that paintings in cafes and restaurants were not much different. Darius owner and interior designer Davoud Rad has been showing art alongside his rugs for a couple of months. Rad said that he was interested in helping young artists get their work out, and that he was also interested in supporting art education.

Rad said in all modesty, that rugs were what he knew and sold, not art, so he relied on Sharon at QBix Gallery to select the work at Darius. Making money from the art, he said, was less important than giving artists a chance to show their work (see other images from Minervini in posts here and here).

Also new

The gallery space formerly known as Pringle is now San Vicente Gallery at 323 Arch St., with art from eight Latin artists, some of the work from folk traditions, some from academic traditions. Stepping into this gallery was a little like going to a gallery in a foreign country, the formality and decorousness of the people there a nice surprise.

permanent link   libby 4:20 PM
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Posted by roberta

Hello summer campers! I'm off tonight to Milwaukee to see family. While ashore I leave co-captain Libby steering the boat.

And I promise to report back on a film and video art exhibit I'm anxious to see: CUT/Film as Found Object organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum and MoCA, North Miami.

The exhibit has 14 works, all of which sample from film sources and twist it into...well, whatever they twist it into. The artists include Christian Marclay, Paul Pfeiffer, Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huyghe, some of my faves.

(image is Douglas Gordon, "24 Hour Psycho," 1993. Video projection. 24 hours)
gordon, douglas

permanent link   roberta 1:34 PM
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Posted by roberta

[Ed. note: Steinberg's post follows up my earlier post on bioart.]

Post by Robert Steinberg

If the idea is to explore the links between art and science, there are are more productive possibilities than bioart. For example, Soft Condensed Matter Physics can provide artists with ways to create nature's patterns that are new in the annals of art! (See Soft Matter, Slow Dynamics and Art; Nature Materials vol 2, July 2003)




[Ed. note: when I was Googling around I found a local connection, the University of Pennsylvania Soft Condensed Matter Physics Group. Check out the images on that site!!! And I also found a sample of art by Steinberg at an online gallery The Nanotechnology Art Gallery. (True title, no kidding!) Steinberg's piece at the gallery's website is a virtual vase. I emailed him about the piece and the following is what he wrote back.]

"The key point is that the vase is the result of evaporation-induced self assembly. The patterns in the middle of the vase are extraordinary! Nature at her best."

(images are Steinberg's vase and a detail of the patterning. This page from the gallery site explains the process used in creating the vase.)

--Robert Steinberg is a scientist and nanotechnology artist
steinberg, robert

permanent link   roberta 1:06 PM
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Posted by roberta

[Ed. note: I'm trying something new today. I'll put the entire copy from my PW review in artblog. That way it's me all over the place : - } ...and for all ye who don't like to hit the links, there's no need, just read it here. And here, for more continuity and point of comparison, is Libby's post on Philadelphia Cheek.]

Cheeky

"Philadelphia Cheek," a group show at Seraphin Gallery, is breezy, colorful and energetic. In a season full of strong emerging artist shows, "Cheek" fits right in.
will, ben
Unlike the ambitious "VoxEnnial," which presented a larger number of artists and a broader snapshot of what's out there, "Cheek" is a more focused show with 10 artists. But it offers a view of the Philadelphia painting scene that's especially exciting.
(image is "Cheek" in Seraphin. Note the bench, weary art lovers! and the excited group of young artists in the background who are talking about the exhibit and stayed for a good fifteen minutes while I was there.)
bograd, alana
Curated by two young artists--Seraphin staffer Todd Keyser and his friend Ben Will, both of whom have work in the show--"Cheek" is ambitious. The curators' theme is to show young Philadelphia at its sassiest.
zamora, mauro
I'm not sure how you measure sassy in art (is Matthew Barney cheeky? Is Paul McCarthy?), so I can't really weigh in on the cheek factor. But in an outing heavy with painting, (19 paintings in a show of 23 works) I loved the candy-colored graphic sensibility and playfulness influenced by toys, cell animation and cyber-aesthetics. Call it cyber-surrealism.

It's a fantasy realm with oceans of deep space, the suggestion of movement and characters, and the hint of a continually changing landscape. These paintings-whether on the edge of abstract or with readable imagery-have the feel of a frozen screensaver.

smith, walter benjamin 2
Jason Loeb's "Untitled 1" evokes the impossible and the kitchen sink-from a stretched and howling Sylvester the Cat to abstract patterning and swooping cartoon speed lines. The work evokes a fun-house mirror: There's nothing "real," but it's all familiar.

Ben Will's paintings, more abstract than Loeb's, show acid-colored shapes in front of dark apocalyptic backgrounds. The shapes in two paintings are explosions, and they evoke the big bang of infinity reduced to a flat, stylish blob. They're less scary than pretty.

Curator Keyser, whom I met in the gallery, told me Will's explosions are based on packaging from G.I. Joe toys. They're eye candy with an antiwar edge. (image is one of Will's two G.I. Joe-related paintings, which I just loved.)


Keyser said the search for artists included advertising on Craigslist. That stroke of cyber-connecting -- bypassing more traditional channels of appeal -- is the cheekiest aspect of the show. Craigslist turned up one of the strongest painters in the show, Alana Bograd, whose delicious colors, iconic imagery (old men on bicycles) and dark hallucinatory sensibility is right out of The Triplets of Belleville. (image is one of Bograd's untitled paintings)

There are no disappointments in the show. Works by Christopher Sweeney and Keyser, more representational but imbued with the same cyber-ghostliness as the rest, are great in the mix.



Vox Populi member Mauro Zamora fits perfectly with his dreamy, creamy, flat landscapes that conflate interior and exterior space. Zamora's worlds, with their stick trees and spare suggestion of space, are quiet and deadpan. The longer you look, the more quirkiness you see. They'd be great animated. (image is one of Zamora's two paintings in the show)

Hedwige Jacobs, represented with a painting and a 40-second animation loop "Growing Grass" (seen at Klein Art Gallery earlier this year), could be the leader of this movement. The PAFA grad has a delicate painting touch and a childlike humanist focus that would warm Oscar the Grouch's heart.

Walter Benjamin Smith II, whose works I loved in "Junto" at Fleisher/Ollman, marries an outsider sensibility (words, religious imagery) to a Monty Pythonesque collage in his unique and compelling works. (image below is one of Smith's two works in the show)

Outliers in this wonderland of a show are the photo documentary piece "Nice" by Ellie Brown and two mixed-media works on paper by Dee Nicholas, both seemingly rooted in the real world and suggestive of the quotidian. They're good pieces but feel out of place.

Philadelphia collectors need to support young local talent. With works ranging from $50 (Jacobs' animation) to $5,000 (Zamora's 5-feet-by-5-feet painting Sacked), with most under $1,000, there's every reason to buy from this extraordinary pool of talent.

Sketches

Fabric designer Jessica Smith, who taught in the UArts craft program but now lives in Seattle, emailed to say she has a website. Smith has a great product line of fabric, tote bags, pillows and more. Her pop culture imagery is half critique and half love. "Cars Go Beep," a repeat pattern of hand-drawn SUVs, suggests your worst nightmare on the Schuylkill -- or a childlike mash note to the behemoth. Your choice. [Ed. note: I interviewed Smith for a story I did for Philadelphia Style Magazine last year but the mag doesn't have a website I can link to. I recommend a visit to the designer's website.]

>> This month the Galleries at Moore become project space for Elena Fajt and Jen Blazina, who'll be in residence Tuesdays and Thursdays until Aug. 5 making art on site. Fajt's project "Hairsense" begins with a four-day public event (now through Friday, July 8) called "Donate Your Hair" in which the public is invited to participate by bringing in hair -- or having it snipped on site.

Blazina's "Re-Collect" involves photo silkscreening of her family pictures and framing them in hand-altered frames. Blazina did a previous project at Spector in 2004.

permanent link   roberta 11:05 AM
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Posted by libby

Twas the night before Live8, a First Friday in Old City, and the streets were pretty much deserted, everywhere except at Nexus, where you might think they were giving away ice cream cones or cold beer. Well, the beer really was a draw, but the main draw was "Nexus Selects," a juried exhibition of recently graduated art school seniors and MFAs (left, crowd in front of Nexus).
da corte, alex
What's exciting about this from the point of view of the city growing its young artists is it's Nexus' first attempt to build something coherent from the flurry of MFA and BFA shows that overwhelm May and June. Part of the paring down process, according to Nexus director Nick Cassway, is the professionalism of the artists selected. All of them in the show already have some kind of track record that shows they get the business/promotion side of making art as well as the quality.
lenker, nicholas
More good news--Nexus plans for this event to repeat annually.

Be forewarned, however, that this show is only up with regular hours until July 10, after which you must call for an appointment.

My personal highlights (in other words, my picks from among Nexus' picks)were work by Nick Lenker and Alex da Corte, which is not to sniffle at the other artists' works (image top, da Corte's ketchup and fries).


You can see previous posts on work by da Corte here--see image of stuffed pink horse that he draped in butterflies in the Window on Broad--and by Lenker here --see image of the Easter bunny's evil twin.

Lenker has switched from out-of-control, threatening holiday spirits to not-so-secure security blankets--two enormous stuffed critters, one a six-breasted mom/beast with three-mile arms, one a toy bear/beast that suggests impish alter-ego at the same time as it suggests crazy teddy bear. Both creatures cross the line from comforters to invidious pranksters. I asked Lenker what he had in mind and he said, "I was making something to replace my parents." The search for protection is only half the story (right above, "Childhood Conglomerate #1/My Stuffed Mother" and "Childhood Conglomerate #2/Bad Luck Bear").


As for da Corte, while his installation as a whole is a little fragmented, the individual items have loads of presence and content--a drooping ketchup squirter drapes over a life-sized drawing of himself squirting, intestinal red blood from his belly on a huge white canvas; mustard-color french fries with some intestinal droop lounge in a corner; a pink frame defines the edges of a wall painting of a white-on-white flower and a pink rosary frames a white, bloodless, radiant heart, sort of sweet pink girls turning Our Lady of the Little Flower and Sacred Heart into wall decorations (left, da Corte's squiggly ketchup and fries).


For these pieces, it might be helpful to know that da Corte had health problems and that he has a dicy relationship with food, which he needs for nutrition but which has been the cause of so many of his severe health problems. Other relevant facts: he was brought up Catholic; and he has some interest in the subculture of diners and Catholic waitresses (right, da Corte's heart and flower painted directly on the wall).


The installation has other parts--a grid of golden butterfly sculptures, some waxy, some glitter-coated, challenge Minimalism and Agnes Martin (who claims not to be a Minimalist). The symbolic fragility of life and ascending souls in multiples are such a different take on spirituality and mass production. The Catholic soul of da Corte wallows in decoration (left, da Corte in front of his butterfly grid).
stockbridge, jeffrey
Another piece--sod-lined book shelves pillowing flowers that are imprinted on stuffed, pillowy sticks, a portrait of a frog hung above-- again plays with decoration and nature and symbols of life and fragility arranged for admiration and domestication.
casey, maggie

A photographic installation by Jeffrey Stockbridge (from Drexel University), see previous post (here) , has been expanded for this show. Since I had just seen the previous version (I did admire it), I just breezed by, I confess, but if you missed the Drexel photography show at Nexus, here you have another chance to check out this promising work (right, "Occupied" installation at previous show).
perrin-mcgraw, marie

A series of clay pots named "Road Kill" by Marie Perrin-McGraw (from University of the Arts) plays on funeral urns and the tradition of plants and birds and other animals on pottery. Another grouping, "Farm," is a series of cups each representing the farm animal painted on them. I thought the ideas were smart and hilarious, but the objects as things didn't quite achieve the same level as the ideas (left, Perrin-McGraw's "Road Kill" urns).
holland, joy

Others in the show were Joy Holland (Tyler School of Art), with layered, glued paper that made me think of a less expansive version of the paper layers of Tam Van Tran and Tessa Kennedy (University of the Arts) with brooches and pendants on dark themes , and Maggie Casey with an elaborate contraption of shivering feathers and weights on strings (right, by Holland).
kennedy, tessa

permanent link   libby 2:14 PM
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Posted by roberta

Artist and artblog favorite Jennie Shanker emailed to remind us of our favorite summertime lecture series: the UArts Brown Bag Lunch Series, called "Food for Thought." Over the years, the program has brought in memorable artists like Jose Bedia and Dario Robleto and others for wonderful slide talks in the cool confines of the college's CBS auditorium.
mccollum, alan
This week Wednesday, July 6, at noon, Alan McCollum will be talking and showing slides, like I said, in CBS Auditorium, Broad and Pine Sts. I'm a big admirer of McCollum's playful conceptual work. Here's a post I wrote about a craps table piece he made in collaboration with Matt Mullican. And here's a post on his piece in the ICA's Big Nothing show. See his website for more. (image is a shot of McCollum's piece in the ICA exhibit.)

The brown bag lectures are all free and open to the public -- and actually just in case you were wondering, I've never seen anybody with a brown bag -- or actually eating -- at the lectures.

Here's the rest of the series:

July 13 Elaine Reichek Conceptual Artist
July 20 Lizbeth Stewart Ceramics
July 27 Dona Nelson Painter
Aug 3 Bonnie Collura Sculptor/Installations

And for more summertime fun on the Avenue of the Arts, June 18 at 5pm is the opening of the UArts MFA summer program alumni show, juried by Elaine Reichek and Robert Storr, the show will be installed both at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery and at Hamilton Gallery. Don't know who's in the show but when we find out we'll let you know.

And by the way we hear one of our favorite writers, Gerard Brown, is back in town from his new home in Los Angeles and is participating as faculty in the summer MFA program. Hi, Gerard!

permanent link   roberta 1:46 PM
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Posted by libby

It's July 4!

We got this announcement from Brian Wallace at the Galleries at Moore and thought, poifect--or prefcet--for the occasion (he probably was having the same thought, but we don't mind being used if it's good, and this is):

Temporary Allegiance public art project on Philadelphia’s Logan Square July through September:


SUBMIT YOUR FLAG
WE’LL FLY IT FOR ONE WEEK

Flags submitted by members of the public will be flown, one week at a time, from a second story flagpole on the front of Moore College of Art & Design overlooking Logan Square in Philadelphia (image, from flag video by Kocot and Hatton).

This space is open to anyone in the greater Philadelphia area to use for one week. Visible contact information for the author of every weekly flag at street level encourages dialogue between the flagmaker and viewers.

Go here for details on this project and another that requests hair donations. Check it out, too. Individuals are invited to sign up for a week of flagpole time.

"Temporary Allegiance" is a public project presented by the Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design in collaboration with Philip von Zweck and Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Happy independence day.
kocot and hatton

permanent link   libby 12:40 PM
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Posted by roberta

Post from Janet Towbin

[Ed. note: Towbin's post is about art on the streets of Philadelphia. Towbin's other street find is chronicled in this earlier post. And here's another post about street art, a genre we at artblog happen to get all excited about.]

Dear Roberta and libby,
I am sending two more examples of stencil graffiti I have found in Center City. My newest screensaver is “Pcitrue Prefcet” (sic) and it needs no additional commentary other than to tell you I found it on the west side of 21st St. between Spruce and Pine. (I am sorry, but I cannot remember the exact location of it).
towbin, janet

I found “Listen to your Dreams and Nightmares” May 5. Yes, it was a very good day—I found quite a treasure! It is stenciled multiple times on Chancellor St. (a small service alley) between 16th and 18th Sts. In fact, one of them is stenciled in Rittenhouse Square Park on the cobblestones in front of a bench, but it is not a full, clear image.

--Janet Towbin is a Philadelphia artist who teaches at Moore College of Art and Design. See a sample of her work here.

permanent link   roberta 10:36 AM
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Posted by roberta

Post by Charles Hankin

[Ed. note: Hankin is responding to a series of posts about the exhibition, "The Lost Meeting" at Abington Art Center. For more, see these posts in the thread: Roberta's original post, Hankin's post on Quakerism, Roberta's email back and forth with spurse member Paolo Bartolli and photographer Zoe Strauss's comment.)

Boy am I now confused! Conflict can be mediated which is a small part of the history of Quakers.
Much like the image of the old Quaker Oats man it seems that "Lost Meeting" is dealing with the superficial. What are Quaker objects? There are no Quaker religious icons and plainness is only a distant remnant of what Quakerism was. (top image is Quaker Oats man, a trademarked image owned by Pepsico)

To mediate is an action between parties in dispute. The differences between the Hicksite and Orthodox Friends were spiritual and lead to removal not mediation. The reunification was and is about acceptance.

What concerns me is the use of the term "abandoned Meeting" or "Lost Meeting". This faux anthropological study leaves the false impression that Quakers walked away from the building with no reason or purpose.

If the Art Center really respected the Quaker idea of Meetinghouse they would fix it up and use it for classes or meetings. If they want to respect the Quaker historical aspects of the Meetinghouse they could maintain it as a historical restoration. (time capsule) It feels like a misuse to try to interpret it through "art".

The exhibit, which I still haven't had time to experience, sounds like a misleading conception of what Quakerism is. It might be Shaker, Amish, Mennonite or Brethren all historically plain sects. Quakers were merchants and business owners who had fine china, cut glass, fine furniture, pianos, paintings, and many goods sold in Wanamakers, Strawbridges and Bailey Banks and Biddle. The image of the Quaker on the oats package represented the primary value of the sect- honesty. The spiritual values can be found in the teaching of Jesus not in a presumed church dogma. Common objects are not sacred and have not in my experience had any spiritual relevance to my faith. Living simply with respect for others has everything to with stewardship. (image is of George Fox, founder of Quakerism)

The question remains, what relationship do the activities occurring within the building have to the spiritual revelation of God within all? Or is it just a pastiche of the past?

Peace. Charlie

--Artist Charles Hankin is a regular contributor to artblog.

permanent link   roberta 8:28 AM
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Posted by roberta

artblog contributor Colette Copeland emailed to tell us about an article by Randy Kennedy in today's NY Times. The story's about art on the edge of science. Here's the link.

In the story, "The Artists in the Hazmat Suits," Kennedy mentions the case of Steven Kurtz, the Critical Art Ensemble member being pursued by the federal government for possible illegalities regarding some non-hazardous biological matter he procured for his art. Kurtz, whom we've told you about here, may get his day in court by the end of the year.
hirst, damien
But the story doesn't dwell at length on Kurtz. Instead it gives a larger context and questions the ethical nature of some of the work, which alters, for example, a cactus to have it sprout what looks like human hair.

(top image is "The Cactus Project" by Laura Cinti)

Kennedy also mentions Damien Hirst's highly marketable piece, "One Thousand Years," a work that includes a vitrine with a rotting cow head, maggots and a bug zapper. Apparently the piece was purchased by Charles Saatchi. He also highlights art by bioart activists like Steven Zaretsky, whose work sounds like Fringe Festival material -- wild.

Quoting from the article:

As biotechnology advances and bioart grows - several American universities are establishing centers for the art - it will undoubtedly become more difficult to tell where one leaves off and the other begins. And as artists are given ever more advanced tools for making their work, questions about how far the art can be pushed will only become harder to answer. Already, there are artists like Adam Zaretsky, an eccentric even in the eccentric world of bioart, who profess not to understand why everyone gets so worked up by its practical and ethical implications.

Mr. Zaretsky, who has worked at M.I.T. and San Francisco State University and describes himself as "between academic gigs," has had numerous run-ins with university ethics and animal-use committees, which he describes as "rent-a-priests." In one case, he was not allowed to stage a project at San Francisco State called the "Workhorse Zoo," in which he sealed himself in glass room for a week with albino frogs, mice, flies, microscopic worms and an actively growing yeast culture - in other words, a group of typical scientific test subjects - and ended up eating some of the frogs, fish and mice as any predator desperate for a meal would. (The project ended up being staged at the Salina Art Center in Kansas in 2002.)

My feeling is that bioart is an important underground component of art's larger whole and that it reflects and gives visual form to universal fears about the unstable nature of our world today. This art won't harm people, but shackling it, censoring it and forbidding it will harm discussion about the issues it raises. And that's bad for everyone.
kurtz, steven
cinti, laura

permanent link   roberta 6:56 PM
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