artblog

 
Posted by roberta

tv on 2nd floor1web copy
Originally uploaded by Zoe Strauss.

Go look. they are truly amazing and heart-breaking. Buildings on life support; buildings decimated; people living in trailers.

strauss, zoe

permanent link   roberta 11:45 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by libby

I went back to catch the stuff I missed at the Operation RAW opening, and I'm glad I did. Roberta put up a post with some images of stuff she loved, and I want to add (a lot) to it. It seems like such a survey of the Philadelphia art scene and such a bold show to do that I wanted to get something up this last weekend to remind you it's worth the visit. Here's my list of things that caught my attention one way or another, mostly in no particular order.

The skull, swampy weeds, shadows on the wall and message about love, not war, from a witchy little critter from Paul Swenbeck and Joy Feasley hit the target of anti-war while offering a mental and a visual trip. Since it covered a lot of space between its main elements, it's hard to give a full photo. So here's one detail shot.





Mark Shetabi's grid of foreign names rescued from thrift-shop gas-station uniforms is a reminder of global immigration patterns and their effect on local economies. It's also a reminder, about the oil industry and religious migration patterns. So simple, but so complex.



Shetabi also offered a signature peephole piece, the safe bedroom complete with the oriental rug in a bunker under a ghostly gas station. The thoughts that this is where we seem to be heading are simply unbearable.





Some mordant prints from Sam Belkowitz caught my eye for their stylishness, beauty and content. "This Year Believe in Peace," (left) with its lineup of cheerleaders, was one of the two that really knocked me out. The other, "Our Korea," shows a couple of Asian-looking women sitting on a lawn in front of a suburban McMansion.

A series of five tiny, exquisite monochrome watercolors of the architects of the Vietnam War--Dean Rusk, Robert MacNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Walter Rostow and William Bundy--stunned for their technical accomplishment as well as a reminder that these, too, were once young idealists hoisted by their own petard. The artist is Mary Henderson.

I'm putting up Gabriel Martinez oily black "Novena to St. Barbara," even though Roberta also mentioned it, just because I got the shot (oh, I cheated) of the murky circle of warrior saints around a black pool lit with the suggestion of an oil lamp. Before I knew it was St. Barbara, I thought the figures were soldiers, saints, sheiks and other royalty. It works both ways.

And while I'm in Roberta's list, Mark Campbell's "What my Mother Knew" was such a moving favorite with a gorgeous photograph of his family home, I just had to mention it too. Also, Nicholas Kripal's "Specter (after UT)" metal leaf wall drawing of the most famous Vietnam photo of all, the young girl stripped bare by napalm, is pretty amazing, the sense of dissolving materials--the clothes, the metal leaf--and dissolving lives was a knockout. In a similar vein, I thought I'd mention Don Fox's "Silent Witness," a series of six frames of a woman in a conical hat looking disturbed and startled and horrified (or maybe I'm reading a lot in).


Also Houston Ripley's "Sacrificial 'Nam" took over an entire wall with its buzzsaw outsider-outlined, kaleidoscopic patterns that turned into explosive images of war and death.




It was nicely paired with Ira Upin's "Shared Sacrifice," on the opposite wall.







Another soldier from Matt Fisher, "March," offers a poetic look at a soldier noticing an owl and feeling the weather and just being a human being in his gussied up uniform from times past. Fisher has a sweet story-book innocence in his work plus a sense of beauty and time standing still for a moment. It felt like a break from the fury of the show.

A little looping DVD from Sarah Zwirling panning up into the clear blue sky and then slowly panning down to one helicopter, then a bevy of them, raises questions of what foolishness we are bringing into such a beautiful world. I think the helicopters are paper cutouts.




Continuing his series on war in the suburbs, Andrew Prayzner continues to catch my attention. Although this one isn't quite as much a surprise, having seen the others, I still went for it. The pristine mountains, the tank-like vehicle in the driveway of the suburban home are a reminder of what we are doing to others in their patch of paradise.

Jane Irish's series of paintings that started this whole show include landscapes along the route of the anti-Vietnam War march Operation RAW, the inspiration for this show. Besides her recent personal pilgrimage to sites along the route, she also painted some images from the war, putting scenes like this Vietnamese busy street next to scenes of horror and carnage. The other one of these that was a beauty amidst the carnage was a breathtakingly intimate shot of a soldier and a woman making love in an exotic setting. Like Prayzner, like Shetabi, these juxtapose the everyday peaceful world with mayhem.

Susan Hagen's drawings for the series of soldier carvings she is now showing at Schmidt/Dean are beauties, but it's the carvings that are the must-see.




Carolyn Healy and John Phillips' installation was especially notable for the video component of exploding word pairs--lie and deny, cradle and crucible, profit and loss, Mekong and Eurphrates, drill and kill, rich and poor, etc.
The installation included drill bits in sand and war camouflage sorts of things.




Last, I want to make sure I mention the Tony Velez photojournalism from Operation RAW, "Vietnam Memories: at War & Peace." The triplet photos at the bottom are documentary photos of the war itself from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. But the big ones, from Operation RAW, serve as reminders of what we lose, who we lose. This one "Assembling the Wounded," is my favorite (silver print).feasley, joyswenbeck, paulshetabi, markbelkowitz, samhenderson, marymartinez, gabrielcampbell, markkripal, nicholasfox, donripley, houstonupin, irafisher, mattzwirling, sarahprayzner, andrewirish, janehagen, susanhealy, carolyn and john phillipsphillips, john and carolyn healyvelez, tony

permanent link   libby 9:28 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by libby

We were our way to see the little Smithson-on-the-Hudson (see Cate's post), driving up with Chuck at the wheel and Iris in the back, when we got detoured from the N.J. Turnpike. It took us four hours, partly because we tried to get back on the turnpike too soon and had to cirle back to the original exit and repeat the first part of the detour. Here's a picture of traffic on Route 130. All the way, I felt bad for Chuck, who all too recently had been stuck in a similar, slow-moving line of traffic fleeing New Orleans and Katrina. The memories seemed too fresh. Iris, however, managed to nap through a lot of the hejira to go to the press preview of Robert Smithson's "Floating Island."

After a while, we discovered the cause of our detour was an accident involving a hazmat vehicle. We still do not know what the hazmat was.

Once we found a place to park, the whole of the waterfront began to look like one giant photo opportunity. Sometimes we all ran to photograph the same thing, like this sleeping man who looked like just another rock.






Sometimes we all thought different items were worthy of our attention. Here's Chuck photographing, um, I don't know what he was seeing. Here's Roberta photographing, um, I don't know what she was seeing. And the picture is proof of me photographing something else entirely--the two of them.


A number of people walking along Hudson River Park were unsure what was going on. One young man, on a break from work, asked us and we told him all about the Smithson. He seemed amused, pleased, and puzzled all at once. Then we passed this group of workers on a break. I don't know if they were staring at the "Floating Island" out in the Hudson, or just at the Hudson itself, which, like all bodies of water, is eye candy.

In this shot you can see "Floating Island" leaving the press preview event for it's night-time berth on Staten Island. The arrow is pointing to an OSHA-yellow bollard that we thought at first was a fire extinguisher. For some reason that I can't quite recall, we thought that was funny, so I added the info in case you want to laugh, too. The whole thing--the tug, the island, the bollard looked toy-like and optimistically boyish. This is how we prefer our icons of art history.

As the press preview broke up, we gathered together as a group to chat. (left to right, the man who was giving instructions to the tug boat, Cate, Iris, Chuck, Roberta's back, and artblog contributor Brent Burket (see his previous post here).

Then it was off to some nearby Belgian bistro after Village Voice inexpensive-food reviewer and Chowhound Robert Sietsema nixed Burket's lowly diner suggestion (names escaping me like crazy). Roberta and I had both read about Sietsema and Chowhound in a Calvin Trillin piece in the New Yorker in 2001, and where he led, we would certainly follow. Lunch was pleasant. Great fries. We all threw our money in the basket to pay. Here's Iris counting and in focus. The rest of us were blurry. The plus side of the trip--being outdoors, seeing people and seeing Smithson's piece. The downside--six hours of travel for 30 minutes of art. We had a 3:30 bus to catch. It had no shocks and our driver was enraged about its condition.smithson, robert

permanent link   libby 4:50 PM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by roberta

Post by Cate Fallon



[Ed. note: Last Friday, Libby and I and my New Orleans friends Chuck and Iris drove to New York for the press preview of the Robert Smithson "Floating Island," a realization of a Smithson proposal that never saw daylight during the artist's lifetime. Cate was to meet us there. Traffic on the NJ Turnpike was snarled by an accident that forced us off and into the back roads of the garden state with all the trucks and SUVs and we arrived in New York too late for the preview speeches and fanfare. All in all, we caught glimpses of the little floating barge of willow trees and shrubs and loved it and its wee tugboat. What follows is Cate's report on the press preview and her photos of the Floating Island.]



The whole event was very sweet -- and in an improbable way, all the people who spoke that morning said they were surprised that Smithson who is known for his massive work would have had this little gem waiting in the wings -- it had been a real surprise to them all. The scale and fragility of the piece seemed to connect them all to the piece in a way that they had not expected -- more like adoptive parents than authoritative curators of ART (or landscape architects).



They talked about the issue of a changing world -- how today, New York is embracing its harbor and shoreline. And 25 years ago it was a working neighborhood filled with trucks and some artists on the fringe - not today's boutiques and environmentally-enhanced bikepaths and runner/walker/stroller paths.



The current rehab of the harbor was one part of the reason that it now became feasible to propose and get the funding to do a project that Smithson could not fund 30+ years ago. It now references a city or time past. Would the tug look so "cute?" Would anyone other than a truck driver see or notice it? Would it just be an absurdity?



The island was constructed from his notes and the drawing. It has stone from Central Park (a constructed landscape that Smithson frequently visited and referenced). And the trees are indigenous -- all the trees and rocks will return to Central Park at the end -- return to the mother ship? Prodigal rock and tree?
No -- just something from this time about that time and for the future time.



There is a path on the island -- a path no one walks on -- a path of possibility -- a walk in the offing -- not yet taken.

They talked about the issue of time -- how the trees had been planted just a short time ago and were already losing some leaves. Yes, it was fall, but it was also nature and natural for them to grow and change.

There was much back-slapping and glad-handing over how well they had all worked together and how in an odd effortless way, the piece had just come together.

CONCERNS
Not rain -- rain is good for trees.
Wind -- anything over 25mph would cause stability problems.


The barge is docked overnight in Staten Island and the tugboat captain is the watchman and guardian of the night. They will sail around Manhattan, an island itself, about 1.5 times a day. They can only get up the East River (east side of Manhattan) to about 23rd Street due to the United Nations being in session, although most of the world luminaries, if they saw it, would rather appreciate it for its care of resources and homage to nature.

Minetta Brook is the name of a stream that flows under lower Manhattan so the group took its name Minetta Brook because of its interest in the river/harbor etc. of the city. The woman (Diane Shamash) was instrumental in getting the people and funding together.

The Whitney Museum sponsored the project as part of its Smithson Retrospective.

also:
ROBERT SMITHSON SYMPOSIUM
Saturday, September 24
11am-6pm
Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College

East 68th Street between Park & Lexington Avenues Entrance is closer to Lexington, on the North side of 68th St.
Admission is free, but registration is required. Please call (212) 570-7715, or e-mail public_programs@whitney.org to specify a session or sessions. Seats will be available on a first-come, first-served basis. See here for more information about the seminar options.


smithson, robert
Someone in my class (Cate teaches photography at NYU) said it was sort of like The Gates -- hard to really see, hard to really get, a little underwhelming, but such an event. One person who hadn't known about it saw it and thought -- how odd.

The picture of the woman -- Nancy Holt (Smithson's widow) is pointing at the old house they lived in on the west side around when he did the drawing.

--Cate Fallon is a photographer living in New York.
fallon, cate

permanent link   roberta 7:41 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by libby

Post from our man in New York, Brent Burket


Saturday I went gallery hopping, and it was good. It was very good. There were a few ughs, a couple of shrugs, and a host of jaw-dropping silences. The day started with Projectile on 57th and ending with Bellwether in Chelsea. Two fine book ends with many excellent volumes between them. The art season is in a full and serious swing in NYC.
dicorcia, philip-lorca
Uptown reliables


First I went uptown to hit a few favorites. Projectile offered up some multimedia brilliance by Nic Hess. I've said it before and I'll say it again: This gallery, along with Maccarone and Zach Feuer, just doesn't miss. The colored tape logo subversions were wicked fun, but the works that had me asking for prices were the color swatch plotting of MTV videos in the back room. The artist took the median color of each frame of iconic MTV hits such as Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit", and plotted the video out in strips of those colors. (image) His method and the outcome, although not as absolutely perfect, reminded me of Sherrie Levine's brilliant iris print appropriations of Rembrandt.

Mary Boone's uptown gallery had a collection of interesting papercut collages by Brian Alfred. At first I was unmoved, but then I found myself walking around the room a number of times. I became absorbed in the slight asymmetry of the pieces. Corners and angles never quite connect the way they should. The best piece was the video animation installation in the smaller gallery.

I also stopped at Pace Prints while I was uptown. A collection of new Sol LeWitt prints graced the walls of the gallery. I can't think of the last time he disappointed me, and this show was no exception. This gallery is always worth the trip uptown, even if you're not interested in what's on at the moment. A walk through of the back galleries revealed a beautiful pair of monoprints by Pat Steir, an array of etchings by the ever-thrilling Tara Donovan, and some starkly expressive prints by Agnes Martin. The list goes on, but the list always goes on at Pace Prints. I love this place. Not only is the amount of great art overwhelming, but the staff is open and helpful. In fact, I find that to be the case for all the galleries under the Pace umbrella.



Speaking of which, just a spiral staircase away from Pace Prints is the Pace Wildenstein Gallery, with a show of light projections and holograms by James Turrell that is nothing short of miraculous. There have been books written about what Turrell does in regards to our perception. That's fine and true, but above and beyond
his theoretical and perceptual bendings is something that is just downright beautiful. (Turrell, left)

The move from "How does he do that?" to "Oh, God. Who cares. I'm just glad he does. Feed me." always happens quickly for me. Later, I can think about how he accomplishes something, but when I'm in front of his art I just want to let it own me. And, as usual, it does.

Hello Chelsea


My first stop in Chelsea was PPOW to see the Ann Agee. I felt like I was watching a cake after everybody had gone to the next room to open gifts. The color and composition echoes the feeling of uninhibited behavior on display. A blast. A big miniature pink blast. (Agee image right)
belott, brian
Next door was the Monique Prieto at Cheim & Reid . It was boring. I just couldn't find my way in to these clunky things. The visit was saved by an absolutely transcendent Pat Steir painting I was able to peak at in the sealed-off side room.


I wasn't expecting much from the Philip-Lorca diCorcia at the Pace
Wildensteinacross the street. At first I was distracted by an excellent Sol LeWitt wall drawing in a roped off back room. One of the associates let me go up to get a better look at the undulating graphite wallscape. OK. Calm down, Brent. Once I got that out of my system I went back downstairs and began to settle into the diCorcia's photographs (if one can "settle" into something so unsettling). Hard work. These stretched and tortured landscapes of feminity seem worn from reaching back across the decades to an old Vegas that is still grinding away. The dancers' sacrificial contortions tell the story. And Jesus wept.

(diCorcia image above left)


Speaking of contortions, I walked right past Orlan's work in the front of Stux to get to Brian Belott's work in the back. I first saw his work this summer at Joymore in Williamsburg. His exuberant books and the sentimental abstraction of his found photographs were just the remedy to the heavy heart of the diCorcia. Plus, giving the finger to Damien Hirst is always fun.

(image right is a Belott)


It's always a pleasure when Gagosian Gallery
has an excellent exhibit, as opposed to, well, a Hirst or a Schnabel show. The Roy Lichtenstein sculpture show is not only excellent, but there are some nice surprises.

(image left is a Lichtenstein)

As fine a thing as the sculptures are there's a smattering of unusual paintings throughout the gallery. The more I see of
Lichtenstein's work the more I realize that, as familiar as his style might have become, he was an artist that never stopped moving.


Awhile ago I asked about some paintings that were in Mary Boone's back gallery that had stopped me in my tracks. The artist, it turns out, was Eric Freeman and he was scheduled to have a show in the main room. Well, here it is, and it's nothing short of luminous. And I am a sucker for the luminous. The way these paintings move remind me of Mondrian and Martin, although they bear more resemblance to Rothko. I think that Boone's guardians might have found the duration of my stay worrisome. Too bad. Once I entered those paintings I didn't want to leave. (image right is by Freeman)

Across the street at Perry Rubenstein's tiny second gallery, a not-so-quiet conversation is going down amongst four heavy hitters, all delivering: John Baldessari, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, and Christopher Wool. 'Nuf said. Serious weight.

At the always trustworthy Zach Feuer Gallery Danica Phelps was quietly rocking the house with her intimate drawings of showering and sex. She records her days and colors, and we get to watch. After so much overload from earlier in the day (Not a complaint, just a recognition of an ebbing energy flow.) her clean lines and the uncertain certainty of this show were reinvigorating (for two other artblog items on Danica Phelps, go here and here).
lichtenstein, roy

When the occasional light dance and soft singing broke out at Sonnabend
Saturday afternoon Candice Breitz was to blame. Her lined and stacked video portraits of Michael Jackson and Madonna über fans singing entire albums of their stars' songs was both fun and poignant. I dare anybody who's ever performed for the thousands of fans in their mirror to see this show and not smile with recognition and to not be touched by the open intimacy of it all. It's more than entertainment though. It addresses the spectrum of what we can do with and to pop culture, and don't ask me which is better: red or violet. I saw some excellent shows on Saturday, but this is the one that I cannot get out of my head. A bit like the most artfully crafted pop song ever. Immaculate. (right above is the Breitz piece)
freeman, eric

With much anticipation I headed over to see the new Adam Cvijanovic's paintings that filled the ceilings and walls of Bellwether. He had one of my favorite shows at the gallery before they moved from Williamsburg to
Chelsea. This time around? Stunning . . . Stunning. Stunning. Stunning. Have I said . . . Stunning? Loosing all earthly things from their gravity requirements lets them fly, and I found myself swept up in the motion of this work. A yearning for what is being lost and a hunger for that which will replace it envelops the viewer. This is a Bellwether show that more than lives up to the hype. I couldn't get enough. Hello Chelsea? Yeah, finally. Hello back! (image here and top are Cvijanovic's installation)
cvijanovic, adam
Lastly, I went next door to an old standby, Alexander & Bonin. This was one of the jaw-dropping silences, but not in a good way. Are they serious? Robert Bordo's paintings lacked, well, just about everything: color, depth, technique, interesting ideas. Supposedly it's an exploration of the "line between subject and abstraction.", but it just seemed lost rather than exploratory. Sometimes, deceptively simple is just downright
simple.
alfred, brian
I didn't want to end such a good day on a sour note, so I ducked back
into the Cvijanovic for another long look. That did the trick.
Everything wrong was right again. At Bellwether it still looked like
disaster, but it felt like love.
turrell, james
--Brent Burket also writes for his own blog, Heart as Arena and for the Creative Time blog.

hess, nic
agee, ann

permanent link   libby 6:15 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by libby

Photographer Zoe Strauss put up a little post about the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Atget exhibit. She doesn't have a direct link to each post, but here's the link to her blog. You'll have to search (image, Atget's "Versailles--Bassin du Sud").

permanent link   libby 9:14 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by libby

I had coffee yesterday morning with Lisa Kereszi at the Green Line Cafe. We sat outside in the sun with our coffees and somehow I managed to take some notes in spite of the drink (usually can't drink something and take notes at the same time).

Kereszi (pronouced kerezzi) is the photographer who has a show of her work on exhibit at Moore College right now, in the gallery space next to the one now occupied byFaith Ringgold's work. Both shows are worth a visit and I'll get back to the shows, and some more about the fabulous Ringgold, too, in another post.

Kereszi won the prestigious 2005 Baum Award in Photography and she worked for photographer Nan Goldin (there's a nice piece at artnet.com by Mia Fineman on Goldin here); Kereszi is a Yale M.F.A. alum, undergrad degree from Bard, and she's now a lecturer in photography at Yale. You can see a lot of her work here. Among her collectors is the West Collection (I put that up for its local connection).

As for the Green Line, I like the place and wanted to give it a plug. In an email after our chat, Kereszi said the neighborhood reminded her of Park Slope.

Which is not to say she's exactly an out-of-towner, although she now lives in East Williamsburg. Kereszi was born in Chester and grew up nearby in Delaware County, the daughter of a biker ("He looked rough, still does") who ran the family junk yard.


And that explains the title of the exhibit, "Lisa Kereszi: A Previous Life." Somewhere along the line she explained that what she wanted to do was escape her past. But the photos go back to it. There's an amazing photo of her father's rug, a U.S.A. eagle with bits of dirt and dropped coins of a life out of control. There are the tawdry drapes dressing up the walls of rooms (top), the seedy wall below peeking out from underneath the even seedier drape--a flash of stocking peeking out from under the skirt (image, "Bicentennial rug, Dad's Room, Media, PA).

"I grew up living an outsider lifestyle and I didn't want to be that. I wanted to do well in school, be successful and ambitious," she said. "I didn't necessarily want to be rich or have a nice car or that kind of stuff."


Kereszi took pictures at the junk yard, which her grandparents owned when she was a teenager at Penncrest High School. Her mother ran an antiques shop. So it's no surprise that the junk-yard aesthetic, with its concept of collecting and recycling, still impels her work. "I love the idea of rescuing something from oblivion, from not existing anymore. ...but not just any old thing." What she's collecting are things that are metaphors for something else (the Cadillac, with its triple dose of longing for living on the town--the car, the skyline, the detailing--is in the "Joe's Junkyard" series).

The surprise is in the opposing impulses in the work--to escape and yet recapture her past.

Not that she analyzes her choices while she's working. The choices are intuitive, she said. "I'm looking for the one little detail that means something to me. I'm interested in the very recent past."

Some of the places she photographs are not abandoned, but she said, "Its important to me that there are no people in it." But what interests her are the traces of people in the places she explores.


I pointed out she had so photographs of burlesque dancers that didn't fit those perameters. "My friend is a friend of a burlesque dancer," she said. It's not the only contradiction. There's also the Florida mermaid (image). Then she talked a little about the conflict between doing commercial work and doing her art--she was worried that the commercial work would make her "too soft" and she wanted to stay "hard" for the art work.

Her commercial track record is pretty impressive, including The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, Details and Penthouse. The list goes on. "It pays the rent."


Kereszi wants to make sure that she's not doing what other photographers of what's seedy are doing (but she doesn't want to name them, not wanting to appear to be saying something negative about their work). I name Zoe Strauss, whose work has no sense of avoidance or escape of anything, but a rapacious curiosity, and a passion for content and concept. Kereszi doesn't know Strauss' work. Kereszi is as much about the creation of something beautiful out of what's seedy. I don't think that's Strauss' agenda. Yet there are times when these two seem to cross over into one another's agendas (image, Kereszi's grandfather's basement; his inscription on the wall reads, "All humanity is scum").

Later, Kereszi emailed me with these thoughts:

I try to be careful when photographing things and people who are 'over-the-top.' Something that I do consciously think about is how to photograph such things in a way unlike how anyone else would - in a way that says something other than just - hey, look at this weird thing.

Also, being at the Phila. Museum of Art reminded me of my affection/affinity for Surrealism and also Duchamp's idea of the Readymade. Both of these art historical things are things I consciously realized after I had been making the pictures, not before."

Back at the Green Line, she said, "I realized you can apply the character of a person to a place."

Goldin's name comes up, and she says Goldin isn't doing the seedy thing anymore--because her lifestyle is not so seedy anymore.

Her time working for Goldin, when she was a junior in college, was an important experience for Kereszi. She interned there in exchange for one of Goldin's prints. She got a lot more out of it, including for a while a relationship she characterized as co-dependent and difficult to end. "Nan led into Yale," she said, by brokering a connection there for her. "I owe her a lot."

Kereszi's photographs are analog C-prints, for the most part, taken either with a medium- or a large-format camera. Her father's rug and the Governor's Island shovel in the bucket, for example, are large format. When she's working large format, she said she has to previsualize the image, whereas for the medium formats, she shoots more and then selects.

I asked why she was working with film. "I like the way film looks. Digital things look super-real. Film has more depth. It's light reacting with silver and dyes. It's something tangible. Whereas digital doesn't really exist. It's pixels, just information."

Not that she's opposed to digital. She mentioned the $10,000 cost of a really great digital camera as one factor. And she does make work prints using inkjets--there are small ones in the show (like the curtains and grandfather's basement shot).

Large C-prints, she said, are getting harder to get as labs stop making them. Joel Sternfeld's lab is an exception. Other labs, she said, are doing digital enlargements, "layed down in lines." She herself does digital enlargements sometimes if she gets a hair or a big piece of dust on an image that therefore requires some repair.


The conversation wound around to Kereszi talking about going to Bike Week in Florida, and looking at the goings on both as an insider and an outsider there. I mentioned the Bike Week photos of Burk Uzzle, and said I'd be curious to see how different her were, both for its woman's eye and its insider-sympathy. "I remember going to Bike Week as a kid," she said (she herself has no tattoos because "my dad's covered with them.") then she began to think about here insider-outsider relationship with the junkyards (image, Uzzle's "Industrial Accident Victim, Dayton Beach, Fla.").

Maybe she's not saying, "Hey look at this weird thing." Maybe what she's saying is look at this weird thing that's a part of me--and not.

"Escape. That's the word."kereszi, lisauzzle, burkgoldin, nanstrauss, zoe

permanent link   libby 6:14 PM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by roberta

This week's Weekly has my review of the Vox Populi members' show with Max Lawrence, Amy Adams and Anne Schaefer. Also, in sketches, I tried something different this week, a 3-question Q&A with artist Josh Moseley. The Q&A will be an occasional regular sketch feature. Do you like it? Here's the link to the art page with the review and sketches. And here's Libby's post on the Vox show.

Go for Baroque


Bombarded by complex information in a world that increasingly demands multitasking, many young artists respond with art that's ornate, complex and layered. This 21st-century baroque sensibility-one that seems to study as well as celebrate excess-is much in evidence at Vox Populi this month in solo shows by members Amy Adams, Maximillian Lawrence and Anne Schaefer.

(top image is Lawrence and Samantha Simpson multitasking at Vox's front desk -- information central in the Vox realm. Lawrence was making a cd of images for me. Some of the images in this post are at my flickr site where you can see them bigger.)


It's a second solo for Adams and Lawrence, and both have moved away somewhat from what they were doing previously. For Adams, who works abstractly, the move is more dramatic. Formerly, her colorful paintings made with stencils and airbrush typically showed two fields of interest, one bubbly and energetic, the other static. There was tension between the two elements and the implication of conflict on a microcosmic level. (image is detail of work by Adams)

Adams' new works lose the conflict and embrace instead a woven reality that implies merger and coexistence. By losing the tension, Adams has pushed her work into pretty. But it was conflict that made it unique, and I hope she can work her way forward into that edgier space.


Last time, Lawrence showed resin paintings of his friends that were colorful, layered and full of love. He also included a computer installation with drawings of faces randomly created from a database of hand-drawn eyes, ears, noses, etc. The energy and vision were youthful, unedited and human-focused, as you'd expect from an artist who's also a member of Space 1026. (more images at his other website)

(image right and below are one of two characters that appear in Lawrence's new animation. This is "musculator.")



Here the artist continues his human-focused imagery and computer randomization programs. But the vision is one of social commentary, with ideas about self-image and what Lawrence calls "postapocalyptic archaeology."

(image right shows a skull-like sun rising over a flooded area with armed soldiers on patrol. The echoes of Katrina are so fresh they're shocking although the piece was made before the storm and has no connection with it.)


There's always been a restless intelligence behind Lawrence's art. He seems in perpetual personal upgrade just like the computer programs he's so expert in. This version, call it Lawrence v. 2.5, is one I'd like to see him stay with for a while. A combination of computer animation, projected imagery, interactivity and music, it's Koyaanisqatsi anime.


The imagery is a stew of Arcimboldo-like faces, Indonesian shadow puppets and flexing body builders. It's beautiful and weird, and the music has a mesmerizing prettiness that's perfect for being too perfect. The disjuncture between dreamy musical riffs (which you can add to by playing the keys yourself) and the parade of cartoon imagery reminded me of TV news streams with that crawl of words on the bottom that have nothing to do with the images.



Schaefer's first solo exhibit with Vox presents an artist with a sophisticated vision and mature aesthetic. Schaefer is now off to Cranbrook Academy to get her M.F.A., and let's hope the schooling enhances what she's already got going. These carefully arranged strips and scraps of what looks like wallpaper, in places covered by paint, evoke suffocating Victorian interiors and family secrets. I've never seen the color brown used so effectively, and I look forward to what comes next. (image is detail of work by Schaefer)

Anne Schaefer, Maximillian Lawrence, Amy Adams
Through Oct. 2. Vox Populi, 1315 Cherry St., fourth fl. 215.568.5513.


sketches

Three Questions for Joshua Mosley, 2005 Pew Fellow and Penn School of Design Faculty


Can you tell me about your new computer animation having to do with intelligent design?

"I'm modeling clay characters that are descendants of monsters that have nearly evolved to what appear to be normal animals. I've also been looking very closely at a large Indian beetle, and reading about how others have explained miraculous designs in nature. The clay models are then 3-D scanned into the computer and animated digitally with all of the clay tool marks remaining. I'm composing the music for this project, and this is a first for me." (image is film still from Moseley's "A Vue" which has to do with a statue of George Washington Carver)

Did you go anywhere fun this summer and see any art?


"I went to the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, Germany, and saw four full days of short films. Most memorable was an exquisitely choreographed film Goodbye to Love by a Malaysian filmmaker, James Lee. I also went to Pixar, Disney, Imageworks and Warner Bros. to visit friends and students, to see the working conditions and to learn more about each company's production pipeline. Pixar was the most interesting because I've always thought their stories reflected their development as a company as I'd expect an artist's work to be somewhat autobiographical."
lawrence, max
(image is 4 stills from Moseley's "Beyreuth.")
moseley, joshua
Was Rodney Graham, whose show is now at the ICA, an influence on you?

"His work has been very inspiring. The tree photos and camera obscura models first struck me in 1995 at the 'About Place' show at the Art Institute of Chicago. These pieces didn't start to really unfold in my mind for a couple of years. Since then I've been watching how he's carried these ideas about loops in perception and time into his lyrics and films. I like the slower photographic works, although his film and video works are very well produced, are just as complex and will continue to set a higher cinematic standard for the work we see in galleries."
schaefer, anne
adams, amy

permanent link   roberta 10:42 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by roberta

I knew the MacArthur genius awards were going to be announced today because yesterday Anne Seidman, artblog pal, activist and addicted NY Times op-ed page reader told me that as of today the Times was making their op-ed essays available only to those who paid to read them. So I rushed over to the NY Times op-eds and saw a story by a previous "genius" Jim Collins, class of 2003, a bioengineer from Boston University, confessing he still didn't feel like a genius. What else is new? Somewhere in that story it mentioned that today was the big announcement day and my radar kicked in. (user: sokref1@comcast.net, password: lrrfartblog)

Seidman, by the way, has a show of fantastic new paintings at Schmidt-Dean right now. My review will be in next Wednesday's Weekly.

So this morning I checked the MacArthur Foundation website and found the list of 2005 geniuses included two artists with artblog or Philadelphia connections: Teresita Fernandez, who was in residency at the Fabric Workshop and Museum a while back. In fact the artist has a show about to open there on Oct. 7.

And the other artist winner is Julie Mehretu whose work Libby and I have seen and admired in both the last Whitney Biennial and even more so in the last Carnegie International.

Here's what Libby and I wrote about Mehretu in our round-up of best of the Carnegie post:

Julie Mehretu--More ambitious than what she showed at the Whitney, Mehretu’s stadia series, the swirl of the vacuum of our empty culture and its militaristic jingoism in the huge series of paintings of stadia convinced us that this was powerful work. Born in Egypt, Mehretu works in New York.

(image above is installation shot of Mehretu's work at the Carnegie)


And here's the information about Fernandez's FWM show:
Teresita Fernández
Opening Reception and Lecture by the Artist
Friday, October 7, 2005 -- show runs to Nov. 12
6:00 p.m.
Recent work on view by FWM Artist-in-Residence Teresita Fernández will include Fire, created by the artist in collaboration with FWM staff from 2004 -2005 through an experimental process of hand-spraying dye onto woven silk fibers. A members-only preview with the artist will start at 5:00 p.m.
fernandez, teresita
By serendipitous occurence we ran into FWM honchos, Doug Bohr, Director of Public Programs and Exhibitions and Lila Kanner, FWM's new Associate Director, at a Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance members' meeting last night. (Yes, we at artblog are members.) And Bohr reminded us that Fernandez' piece "Fire" had its debut at Lehman-Maupin Gallery in Chelsea.
(image is Fernandez' "Fire" taken from Lehman-Maupin's website)

(Just in case you were wondering, Ellen Napier, former FWM-AD, is now over at Temple Gallery working with Sheryl Conkleton).
mehretu, julie

permanent link   roberta 8:35 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by roberta

I went to the family workshop Vik Muniz did at PAFA on Saturday. I'll tell you more in a few posts. But I want to get up a few images and a shout out for the artist's Morris Gallery exhibit which is great and which includes a work installed upstairs in the PAFA collection (the Charles Wilson Peale room)that Muniz is giving to the museum.



I asked PAFA curator Robert Cozzolino, who organized the show of West Collection-loaned works, if Muniz typically did family workshops. This struck me as somewhat odd for an artist of his stature and success. Imagine Jackson Pollock at a similar stage in his career doing a family workshop!



Cozzolino told me that yes, the Brazilian-born artist was into it. And that in fact he was starting an art school down in Rio that would be for poor kids. (More on that in another post)


The artist is a bundle of energy and enthusiasm. It's easy to be enthusiastic about your own art of course but the guy kept giving pep talks that resonated beyond his work and into the greater world.

"It's important to be an artist, not when you're young. Everyone's an artist then. Right? You all draw (looking at the kids). It's when everyone else STOPS being an artist that it's important to be an artist. Grown ups don't have time to draw. Teachers don't have time to teach drawing.

You have to draw yourself. Drawing is very good exercise for the brain. You should do it all your life. Everybody should do drawing. And it's very fun to do."

I tell you I dragged myself in to that workshop and left with a spring in my step. The guy's amazing. The art's amazing. The energy's enviable.

(bottom image is the Muniz work, which the artist is giving to PAFA. It's from a series of works of famous Americans he did, I believe, for the Corcoran Museum, several years back. It's a black ink piece he photographed wet to get a droplet-type effect. And it looks fantastic sitting in that blue-walled room opposite the original inspiration, which Muniz had never seen before except in reproduction, said Cozzolino.)
muniz, vik

permanent link   roberta 9:05 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by libby

Email from Anne Minich

(I emailed Anne Minich (see post) a few questions--how did her show at The Cathedral come to be? and what are the titles of some of the paintings? Here are her answers.)

I am a member of the Cathedral Community for the past 3 years. ...I started coming to services at the Cathedral with the intention of becoming a member there. I was struck by the design which is intended to promote the sense of being on a journey. For years, I have been designing and executing my HEAD pieces and fanaticizing that they would someday hang is such a space. I proposed such a show to the Dean and he agreed to the project. The rest is history!

It was a gamble as I would't know until the work was hung if it was going to be a good balance between the work and the architecture; I believe the gamble paid off.
My motives for showing at the Cathedral space are twofold; As a member of the Community, I have a need to "give back" and as an artist , I want to show my work in the best light possible.

The piece with the shell and thorny objects is "Our Lady of the Ancient Secrets" The objects are seed pods of some kind that I found along the Hudson River. They remind me of ancient gargoyle flowers (top, "Our Lady of the Ancient Secrets")!

The piece with the interlocking crosses backdrop is "Jaune Brillant" named for the color. Occasionally I'll be so taken with the color that it becomes the name of the piece. Linda Alter of the Leeway Foundation owns a wonderful Head piece; "Vermillion" (she doesn't loan) (image, "Jaune Brillant").



I'm not sure which grill piece you are refering to; I think it is "Blood Bride" It has a grille with a shawdow head behind it and fleur-de-lis on the framing area? The color red I use in the piece is Scheveningen Purple Brown, an expensive color that I love and use a lot . It looks like blood to me. It is a transparent color and best suited to glazing to build up the intensity of the color. In all my work , there are many layers of meaning as there is in "Blood Bride" It is one of my favorite pieces that I have ever done (image, "Blood Bride").

These pieces on view are a selection from a larger series. The image come from a photograph that was taken of me after I shaved my head in the mid 70's. Each head is in part , self referential. The imagery employs Christian iconography and thought because that is what I know and understand; they are not to be considered as "religious art" but rather painting/constructs that make use of Xian thought and iconography.

--Anne Minich is an artist from Philadelphiaminich, anne

permanent link   libby 5:59 PM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by roberta

Queen of the ceramic baroque, Rain Harris, sent me a few images of her new installation at Nexus, "Cherry Crush." This is the artist's second solo with the coop gallery and she's gone wild with pink and orange and with dots.

Harris whom Libby and I have both written about seems to have dispensed with her trademark poison bottles and Louis XVI opulence for something more teeny bopper in the 70s. (See here and here for images and info about her previous aesthetic) Knee-length white plastic boots, long straight hair and mini skirts would be right at home here. And I want to say she should have served those "dots" candies that come in long paper strips at the opening.


The show's up through Sept. 25 and Nexus by the way is open on Sundays from 12-6 pm. There will be a gallery talk Sunday, September 25th at 4p.m



From the press release: "I didn’t want to restrain myself," says Rain, "I wanted to give myself the license to be as extravagant as I could possibly be."

I haven't seen the installation but these images point to the artist's success in achieving extravagance. They also show her pushing more and more into the land of installation immersion, something our town's Virgil Marti does so well. This may be a turning point for Harris. The affect is new. It's always exciting to see an artist push it.
harris, rain

permanent link   roberta 12:42 PM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by roberta

I stopped in to see Rodger Lapelle at his Old City gallery last week. Rodger's a pal and a great supporter of artblog. Libby told you about her recent chat with him here. The gallerist is always full of news, good bad or otherwise. He is a networker and a talker and has a nose for art world gossip and business news. Well, Lapelle's news the day I was in affected his own business: Roland Becerra had written to say he needed to postpone his October show due to his film project, a full length animation called "A New Haven," which was gobbling up all his time and energy. Much disappointment ensued at this news. We here at artblog love Becerra's art and any postponed show means a postponement of our enjoyment. Here's a review I wrote for the Weekly that later was reprinted at artnet with lots of pictures. It'll give you to a sense of Becerra's suburban, candy-coated my family as horror story sensibility.



But of course as it is with bad news, there's some good news packaged in. The young artist is making a movie. How cool is that? There were two movie trailer dvds in the Becerra letter and Rodger gave me one of them to view. It was labelled "Teaser Scene." (Is that a movie term of art?) I watched the DVD on my computer and because I'm not literate on how to get screen dumps of DVD images, instead, I took some photos and will share them here.

(image is from the dvd. It shows kids in costume for some small town parade or pageant)



The funniest thing about the trailer, and I don't know if this is my computer, Becerra's DVD or if this is what's meant by a "teaser scene" but the whole short cut is washed in a pastel haze. It's like seeing something through a veil. For another painter I would have accepted the veil but for Becerra, whose palette tends to the florid zone of the crayon box, I found it odd.

(image is candy dropping from a pinata. Becerra, by the way, went to PAFA and then got an MFA from Yale. "A New Haven" presumably is a reference to that Connecticut town that houses Yale.)



So just to see what would happen with a little Photoshop magic, I hit the "image-auto levels" command and found that they have a highly refined and exquisite color sensibility underneath the haze. Now what is intended by Becerra I can't say but I am showing you a few of the veiled and unveiled shots just for purposes of comparison.



(image above is an elfin-like child eating candy, post pinata bursting. left is the Photoshop-enhancement)



The story, as much as I could piece together from a narrative-less, wordless trailer set to nice dreamy travelling music in a minor key is that there's a Cherry Blossom festival, with kids in costume; a pinata that looks like a flower; candy that falls out when the pinata is bashed; and a woman who looks very very sad who stands in isolation from the rest of the partying.


(image above shows the pinata that holds the candy that floats down slowly and gently like pretty rain in the dreamy animation. left is the image enhanced by Photoshop)



The clip I saw was straight Becerra m.o. -- pageantry, costumes and a deep back story that includes secrets and sadness -- everything packaged with a kind of shell-shocked sensibility. I'm intrigued and want to see the rest.

There is supposedly a website for the project (the teaser scene gave the url as www.anewhaven.com) but it's not live yet or at least I couldn't access it.

Meanwhile, Lapelle says Becerra's show in his gallery will take place a year from now. What's a gallery owner to do but roll with it?



(last two images are of the sad woman, veiled and enhanced by Photoshop)
becerra, roland

permanent link   roberta 8:40 AM
Comments? Let us know.