artblog

 
Posted by libby

Here's a belated list of some of the local art I saw at First Friday that either made mre fall in love or piqued my interest:

At Vox Populi, Samantha Simpson's storybook fantasy paintings, "The Problem of Prevost's Squirrel," continue Simpson's exploration of what is scary and familiar and beautiful all at once. The menace this time is in a swarm of evil-eyed, stylized squirrels that verge on the abstract. The work is heartfelt and suggests way more than meets the eye at first.


And William Lohre, who in his last Vox outing had made literal models in achingly obsessive detail, has figured out that literal is not the way to go. This work is break-through, and I can't wait to see more. He creates dream-space diaramas that include cowboy sunsets, Medieval fortifications and 1950s space stations. Big sky is a repeating theme, and so are movie-land inspirations.


Another place to visit is Nexus for its Benjamin Franklin: An American Idol exhibition, its contribution to the citywide Ben Franklin 300 Philadelphia celebration. Check out this realistic bust of Ben in silicone, based on the PMA's Houdon bust. Next to Ben stands the sculptor and willing model, Robert A. Erb, Ph.D., whose normal approach to sculpture is making prosthetics of silicone. So he brought along a couple of hands to show a little more about his method. Eek.


Ryan Kelley's giant medallions, Ben & Aretha, combine giant cameo reliefs with Cordons of the Order of National Treasures. The pairing is the timeline of American culture in relief.


And Jody Sweitzer's old phone booth with video of lips looked great from without. What secret were those lips imparting on the telephone, I wondered. Inside, I got to listen to the lips message--Franklin's list of 13 virtues, described in more detail than I was ready to absorb. The silent visual worked best for me. But then again, this was a show about Franklin.


Nick Paparone and Jamie Dillon's Everest (see post) experiences a second coming here, the mountain transformed into a roadside boulder with graffiti, an exuberant expression of freedom of speech. Memories of family trips past the graffitied boulders of the New Jersey Pallisades popped right up. The graffiti, back then, was mysterious to me, messages from some teenage tribe whose rituals and words defied interpretation. This thing captures that.

The show also includes lots of interactive stuff with lots of words, more than I personally was able to digest on a First Friday with crowds galore. But you can tag your photographs on Flickr with "democracy" and perhaps have them flashed on a slide show that included words in some Asian language that suggested to me how little we value our own freedom of speech.


On the other end of the aesthetic scale, David Goerk's what-is-its at Larry Becker. Goerk is again showing tiny constructions of wood coated with encaustic. These are less drippy and iced than previous ones, but the color is cranked up to new heights, with multiple shades in some cases. The work is wall anti-jewelry, the materials a cry against ultra-refinement. The pieces remind me of precocious but charming children, sure of their own worth and not shy in the least. They demand love at the same time that they refuse to prove themselves, positive that their material presence is all that is needed. They're right.


Over at Drizzle, which is still getting its sea legs, a suite of photographs by Jill Galloway with child-like houses scratched or drawn on reminded me in methodology of the ultra-hip slide show of Grady Gerbracht's trip in which he traces what's outside on the bus windows (see post).


Some loopy takes on still life by Andrea Mozen also caught my attention. The small photograph of grapes on the draped astroturf become dinosaur eggs or mutant golf balls, and the rotting fruit blends with fabric patterns or looks positively sexy amid folds of fabric. The work emphasizes the mort in nature mort. I'm sorry about the reflections in the bottom part of this image.


At Carbon 14, some of Annelise Ream's paintings in her exhibit Systems of Suffering and Redemption go unexpected places, with ritualistic sacrifice and ritualistic scientific exploration mixed with diagrammatic maps of sacred spaces.
simpson, samanthalohre, williamerb, franklingalloway, jillgoerk, davidkelley, ryanpaparone, nick and jamie dillondillon, jamie and nick paparoneream, annelise e.sweitzer, jodiegerbracht, gradymozen, andrea

permanent link   libby 11:34 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by libby

Just in case you didn't notice it at the bottom of today's Inky, on the B page,Robert Storr will be the Philadelphia Museum of Art's consulting curator of modern and contemporary art.

Here's the press release short form (bold face names courtesy of artblog).

Philadelphia, PA (December 9, 2005)--Anne d’Harnoncourt, Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, announced today the appointment of Robert Storr as Consulting Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Storr is the Museum’s third appointment in the last year to the department, where he joins Carlos Basualdo, the new Curator of Contemporary Art and Michael Taylor, the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art.

A well-known critic, curator, and artist, Storr is the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University and is the organizer of the 2007 Venice Biennale. He served as Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1990 until 2000, where he was the coordinator of Projects, a series of exhibitions devoted to contemporary artists. His final exhibition for MoMA is the retrospective devoted to Elizabeth Murray that opened in October to wide acclaim.

permanent link   libby 9:35 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by roberta

Libby and I and our small swarm of two more are going to New York today. See you tomorrow and stay warm.

permanent link   roberta 8:53 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by libby

Some of the big names in town can take your breath away. We've got pieces by Sarah Sze and Julie Mehretu, Trenton Doyle Hancock and Shahzia Sikander, Felix Gonzalez-Torres (okay, so he's the late FG-T) and Matthew Ritchie, Michal Rovner and Fred Tomaselli and Yukinori Yanagi. They're all at the Fabric Workshop and Museum.



The show at the Fab is "Swarm," curated by Abbott Miller and Abington's Ellen Lupton. It's got lots of great work and ideas(image, a detail of Sze's construction at the Fab).

The concept is swarming, or the pattern of behavior that is based on contiguous and preceding actions --it's what bees do and crowds do, and these days it's often what artists do. It's a concept whose time has come thanks to the computer, which can figure out patterns and also generate patterns (see Roberta's post here on some internet swarm art).

It also can generate art, and there's plenty of it in this show. Some of it looks not that different from artist-generated systematic art (I'm thinking of the fibonacci craze or perhaps work by James Siena) or Xylor Jane.

The show includes examples of swarms from science -- including ant art -- and examples of artistic swarms -- mark-making based on some system of response to the previous marks. It also includes work that is not literally swarm behavior, but which suggests it.

The computer has been a great enabler of swarm analysis, and the show includes demonstrations of this too.

All in all it's a great show. Among my faves were not computer-generated patterns, although I liked a bunch of those. Here's my list: for starters a vertiginous construction from Sarah Sze (definitely not a literal swarm), made with such delectable fragile items as quarter moons cut from styrofoam plates, and rings cut from styrofoam cups; matches and rulers and tape measures, and all kinds of bits and pieces suggesting it's a rickety structure on which we have built our lives (top image, Sze's installation).




Then there's the faux petrie dish embedded in an end table. Inside is an overhead video of a crowd compressing and dispersing, a sort of mandala of what look to be men in suits behaving like the June Taylor Dancers; the piece, "Seeds," is by video artist Michal Rovner (image, Robner's "Seeds").

Shahzia Sikander's "SpiNN," which Roberta and I had seen previously in New York, a video animation of an Indian miniature, in which people and winged creatures multiply into crowds;



Trenton Doyle Hancock's painting/collage of a tangle of trees and disintegration and words. The composition is breathtaking, the layering mezmerizing. It's a fantastic world (image, Hancock's forrest, including a hole through the bottom right corner of the canvas).






There was so much else to admire in this energetic show, from Siebren Versteeg's "Long Division" light project on the floor to Yukinori Yanagi's live ants tunneling through a sand image of a dollar bill (see Roberta's post on other ant work from Yanagi as well as swarm work by Ed Ruscha) to Julie Mehretu's loci of intense action amidst a cityscape filled with energy lines. Lots more. Great show (image, Yanagi's "Philadelphia" dollar bill, with ants tunneling).sze, sarahyanagi, yukinorirovner, michalhancock, trenton doyle

permanent link   libby 11:08 PM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by roberta

This week's Weekly has my review of Temple Gallery's "Mix," and a sketch of Nick Muellner's "Moscow Plastic Arts" at Arcadia. Here's the link to the art page and below is the copy with some added pictures. And here's Libby's post on the Arcadia show.

Screen Play


We plug into electronic media (radio, TV, iPod, computer) on autopilot, like brushing our teeth. "Mix," a video art show at Temple Gallery with work by six rising young contemporary artists--Cory Arcangel and Frankie Martin, Phyllis Baldino, Tony Cokes, Seth Price, Anri Sala and Althea Thauberger--shows that our electronic immersion is a comforting and pretty trap. (image is Anri Sala's piece showing a rooftop scene with a dj spinning darkly under a clear plastic tarp while overhead it looks like the siege of Bagdad is going on. The music of war? War as entertainment? It's a chilling piece.)


Music and words drive the art. Rhythms swing from techno to blues, ballad, spoken word and, in one case, silent screen crawl read at your own rhythm. Each piece is an earnest communicator, although the message is complex and multilayered. And that's precisely the point of all the works here: The media embed the message and you must peel the onion to get at it. (image is Phyllis Baldino's trippy projection of a guitar player falling apart while his music stays together in the background.)


Seth Price's Folk Music and Documentary captures the importance of subtext maybe better than the others. In it an alt-culture type (flannel shirt, beads, long hair) stands in front of a blue screen spouting off about globalism and culture. "Fuck hippies," he says at one point, followed after a pregnant pause by, "I also hate punk. It's just about fashion." It's a rant, delivered deadpan. I won't give away the hidden secret, but the piece, about smoke and mirrors and the embrace of cant, is just great. (image is from Price's piece. Hint--you must listen very closely to what's in the background to get the point here)

Cory Arcangel and Frankie Martin's 414-3-RAVE-95 combines old Nintendo graphics and techno music with the "made in the basement" affect of amateur pornos. Two actors who look like Super Mario Bros. incarnate do the pelvic thrust on electronic dance-party footpads. The dudes swagger and sneer, but they flub their one line of dialogue, which comes with a phone number on the screen: "Seriously, ladies, if any of you saw something you like, you can give us a call at 414-372-8395." Nintendo as porn? Porn as game? What have we done to the children? (image is from the Arcangel/Martin piece)


"Shoot the Singer" at the Institute of Contemporary Art in 2002 also rounded up video artists whose work comments on music and media. That retrospective looked back at 20 years of video art. "Mix" shows young artists' continued obsession with the media and its layered meanings. The show is important viewing no matter how much or how little you've tuned in, turned on or dropped out. (last image is from Althea Thauberger's "Songstress," in which amateur singers perform clunkily and quite imperfectly while in the all too perfect woods)

"Mix" Through Feb. 18. Temple Gallery, 45 N. Second St. 215.782.2776.

sketches

House of blues: Muellner's photos of Moscow suggest failure on a global scale.


Sepia-toned photographs denote a world of Conestoga wagons and prerevolutionary Russian tsars. But bathe a photograph in another hue-like the purplish blue of Nick Muellner's "Moscow Plastic Arts" series at Arcadia-and the transformation is sideways and not historical. Muellner's photographs of a forlorn, rubble-strewn and depopulated Moscow wash the scene in twilight's indeterminate shade of mystery. What's evoked is neither past nor future but the today of a badly tuned TV or a Photoshop mistake. Muellner's 20 photographs, printed on nonarchival manila tag stock, and also available free in book form, were shot on location in 2003 and 2005. Their content is generic and microcosmic (a pile of bricks, a bucket), but what's suggested-whether intended or not-is failure on a global scale: failure of all infrastructures everywhere, failure of all urban planning, failure to create humane and beautiful spaces. Muellner's photos are on paper that will crumble in time. But his brutal vision is universal and for the ages. (image is one of Muellner's works. It stood out for its aqua tint. Mostly they were lavendar-tinted images.)

"Moscow Plastic Arts: Photographs by Nick Muellner," through Dec. 18. Arcadia University Art Gallery, Spruance Fine Arts Center, 450 S. Easton Rd., Glenside. 215.572.2131.
muellner, nicholas
price, seth
sala, anri
thauberger, althea
arcangel, cory and frankie martin
baldino, phyllis

permanent link   roberta 8:23 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by roberta

Last minute invitations are hard. Here's one I'll pass on. It was in my email inbox this morning. It's for a three-evening show, tonight, tomorrow night and Thursday night, December 6, 7 & 8th, 5-9 PM at Basekamp. The event is called "Participate?" and that is truly the question. I can't but maybe some of you will.

Here's the info from the email:

An interactive project by Per Hüttner (Paris) in collaboration with Ciceron group (Norrköping, Sweden) and basekamp (Philadelphia).
With artworks by:

Active Space
Renaud Bezy
Heidi Cody
Hasan Elahi
Ivan Fayard
Ghazel
Emmanuelle Mafille
Valérie Mréjen
Stéphanie Nava
Louise Nilsson
Tomas Nordmark
Leigh Stevens
Frida Thorell
Ben Volta
Brigitte Zieger

The project is supported by Moderna Museets International Program, Stockholm, The Consulate General of Sweden in Canton, Linköping University, Sweden, and The West Collection, US.

Questions, call Basekamp: (215) 592 7288 or email

permanent link   roberta 4:10 PM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by roberta

It seems like only yesterday that Spector Gallery's exciting show "Drawing for It 2" opened. And here it is closing Friday and we haven't told you about it. Bad on us.



From Huston Ripley's tantric magico-religio-satanico drawings on layers of tissue paper to JT Waldman's graphic novelization of the Book of Esther, "Megillat Esther," the works in this exhibit are eye-openers and these two at least demonstrate just how far you can go beyond religion -- and still take it with you. (image is Huston Ripley, Untitled, Ink on tissue, 13" x 9 1/2")

As a Catholic who seeks to run fast in the opposite direction every time words like bible, holy day or mass, comes up I find Ripley's translations of East into West (the Kama Sutra of Jesus?) exhilarating. Dignified, obsessively focused on sex and bodies, the drawings are transgressive without being transgressive. I don't know if it's exorcism (begone sex tabus!) or what, but these randy, beautiful and haunting works are divinely inspired and divine. Ripley shows work at Fleisher-Ollman Gallery and as we've told you before, PAFA recently bought a couple drawings for its collection. See Libby's post for more on that.



Waldman's high-contrast graphic novel using Esther as its source is likewise a genre-twisting, East-West sparkler.

(image above and below are from Megillat Esther. I found the one above online. Below is "7 Ministers" pen and ink on bristol, 11" x 17" from the show.)


I searched a little on line for more on the book and found this great website using Waldman's drawings from his book to discuss the biblical and textual underpinnings of Esther. It's a great site. It's published by Jewish Publication Society and you can read it in the gallery as well as see the original drawings on the wall.



Randall Sellers' hot-off-the drawing board "The Map-Readers" is a great Sellers piece, notable, as gallerist Spector told me when I saw the show, for reaching the edges of the paper. (Think about it, other Sellers works float like gems in the middle of a sea of white space. This one -- and it was Sellers' goal, apparently -- has sprawl! It goes east and west and south and almost hits the northern edge.) As with other works in the artist's ouervre, touch is a mainstay of the story. Human touch is so important and so overlooked in much art -- to say nothing of in life -- and Sellers' focus on people lightly caressing or nudging or touching each other is a reminder of how important the skin to skin connection is. (image is Sellers' "The Map-Readers," graphite on paper, 7 1/2" by 10 1/2")

Matthew Fisher's forlorn soldiers, whom we at artblog are particularly partial to, (sorry no image of what's in the show -- didn't have my camera with me) here, interact with the animal and vegetable kindgom in a great suite of works, one of which has a hold on it for a museum). There's other delightful biological and zoological specimens and other inner musings on paper -- all worth checking out -- by Elizabeth Haidle, Amanda Miller, Caitlin Perkins, Willie Condry and Hiro Sakaguchi. I don't have time to tell you about them all. Just don't miss the show. Gallery hours are Thursday and Friday 2-6 pm. And watch out because Red Dot, the town's premier cash and carry holiday sale is around the corner, Dec. 16, 17, 18.

[Ed. note: This post was written before the Spector Red Dot banner ad went up. Honestly. We have reputations to uphold here. We love who we love and there are no quid pro quotas.]

sellers, randall
waldman, jt
ripley, huston

permanent link   roberta 7:45 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by libby

The almost final page of our online art project, Some Fun, is up and running. I wonder if we'll complete the cycle for the new year.(image, detail from "Some Fun: Art in America, 2020," acrylic on wood, 4" x 4").fallon, roberta and libby rosofrosof, libby and roberta fallon

permanent link   libby 5:54 PM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by roberta

Morning, all. Or afternoon, depending on where you are. We're here. And so are our new banner ads! Click on one and learn all. We're very proud of this. And we want to thank uber-programmer Kevin Matthews for his help in getting this up (along with the artists index database and the rotating ad column).


Also, in this season of mass purchases, don't forget if you're shopping Amazon.com to go in through the Amazon link in the left-hand column. It helps us, honestly.

(image is the logo we would have chosen for Amazon if they would have asked us. It's from the Nuremberg Chronicles, a medieval history of the world. We found it online here).

permanent link   roberta 11:02 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by roberta

Lee Tusman, quilt and t-shirt artist and community activist whom I told you about here emailed to say he was moving to Riverside CA to become community coordinator in the Riverside Cultural Consortium.


The self-proclaimed voodooartist, a high-energy type, updated his website to include some new comix (very nice -- see right, called the "super-awesomeness comix" which appears to be a random collage of nintendo-oid icons) and a really great video animation (not his but I'm not sure whose it is). He also had one of his quilts on view at Art Basel Miami Beach.

(image below is a screen grab from the great animation "Everybody at the Beach," whose audio keeps repeating a ska-like refrain of "Everybody at the Beach" while a variety of bodies scrolls past. Very much fun.)



Tusman, who actually went to the same high school with my kids (he was a year older than my son, Max) was in the 40th St. Artist in Residence program and his email reminded me that 40th St. is having its first-ever sale/benefit show at their gallery, AIRSPACE, this Friday, Dec. 9, 6-10 pm. He won't be there but he'll have shirts for sale alongside everybody else's works.

The bouncy artist who is always full of great stories signed off his note this way:

p.s. i brought my childhood piggy bank to the real bank yesterday and smashed it open and had my change counted and it was $150.01! So save those pennies kiddies! P.P.S. I had thanksgiving dinner at a Paparazzi's house.

Adios and good luck, Lee!
tusman, lee

permanent link   roberta 8:56 AM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by libby

Roberta gave you a little hint of how we began First Friday, and I'll give you a somehwat bigger hint of how we ended. In between, there was also lots of great stuff.

The end was the living end--Alex da Corte's all holds barred installation, "Welcome your Sorrows," at Black Floor Gallery.

You may have seen bits of it before--the horse with butterflies at the Window on Broad (see post as well as image to the left), the oil iconic portraits of his contemporaries at La Colombe (see post and the icon in the background above), but this time there's way more stuff, and he's integrated all of it, combining it with everything else under the sun in a cosmic vision of what is becoming of us.

The focal point of the installation is a pair of table-top armies, "The Darkness Before the Dawn," with cast wax heads, each figure dressed in a clerical-looking red robe over white vestments. The heads are the beasts of earth, beautifully made, looking oh so individual, made with lots of labor from Nicholas Lenker (see posts here and here) who confided in me that he's going to be showing more of his own stuffed wild things at Nexus in February. You go, Nick.

Above the armies are enormous stuffed snakes undulating in a tangle, a reminder of Da Corte's obsession with his lost intestines (really, truly), but a real world reminder of the mess we are in, the snakes above, the clouds below, the scalloped white table cloth a nice cloudy reference. It's also an altar, a birthday party and a kid's land of counterpane.

Adding to the party aura are fringed plastic streamers; and glued to the wall, floral prints, which bring to mind Virgil Marti's decorative obsessions with home decor (Da Corte has worked as an assistant to him) (check out the second picture from the top for some of the streamers and some of the floral wall treatment).

One army is armed with swords, the other with flowers, although the gallery notes state the flower-power army is really an army that fights with words. And he's so right.

And then there are the suffering human creatures, the saints or young folks hanging on the wall (see top image, with "Owl" in the background). In fact, the Catholic iconography is all over the place, pimps on its Medieval pomp and circumstance. Here we all are with our beliefs, unable to transcend our differences and going straight to hell in a handbasket.

The work is rich visually and conceptually and is worth whatever effort it takes to see it. December Gallery Hours: Sundays, noon - 3 p.m.; the show runs until Dec. 30. Da Corte, a recent UArts grad, has another show coming up in June at Space 1026. da corte, alex

permanent link   libby 2:50 PM
Comments? Let us know.   

 
Posted by roberta

szeoverall.jpg
Originally uploaded by sokref1.

Swarming is in the ether, cyber and ink today. It's also in the real world. Friday's opening of "Swarm," at the Fabric Workshop and Museum brings together some great swarms of lines, objects and ideas about convergence, divergence, chaos and group-think. It's a fab show and a beautiful one as well. I can't really pick one favorite but among my many is Sarah Sze's "Unravel," 2003, a monument to the mundane with materials like matchsticks, gift boxes, a baggie filled with water, a pool of salt on the floor, a tape measure, ruler and so much more. (There are a bunch more photos on the FWM "Swarm" show on my flickr site.)

Then in this morning's NY Times, a story by Sarah Boxer tells of the 3-month-old web project "Swarm Sketch" by Australian student at Canberra University, Peter Edmunds.

The online global-village sketch program allows all participants to input up to a 100 px continuous line. Then it allows you to edit other lines in the sketch by erasing them or darkening them. (image is a swarm sketch from nov. 27 called the biggest loser)

There are 50 sketches so far and according to Boxer's article the first couple were made by a small number of individuals and the results look like children's drawings. But in October word of mouth (word of email?) had gotten out and swarms came to draw and edit each others' marks. The drawings stop at the 1,000th line that's been contributed. After that a new sketch is begun based on a popular search term in the big cyber search engines (today's drawing is "cell phone bandit." Earlier ones were "hurricane," "jessica simpson wedding," "halloween,"etc.)

What the complete swarm drawings remind me of more than anything is Jean Dubuffet's crusty primitive images of people.

There's nudity galore and some bad language ("FUCK" was erased from the phone bandit piece but you can see it appear and get edited out when you watch the time lapse animation of the drawing which goes from first to last mark made.) (image is "world's ugliest dog" from nov. 29)

SwarmSketch is less fun to play with than you might think. In fact it's tedious looking at tiny line fragments and deciding up or down, darker or lighter. As for putting down your individual line, I never saw mine in the hectic atmosphere of lines. But the whole swarm drawing idea is a great one -- exquisite corpse drawing for the nintendo age. Oh, and there's a stats page on the site. More than 55% of the participants are from the US and Canada. A mere 2.85% are from Australia. How's that for being overlooked in your own backyard.

permanent link   roberta 10:25 AM
Comments? Let us know.