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Posted by libby

Ryan Wolfe
Originally uploaded by libbyrosof.

I went to SCOPE by myself, and was struck by the prevalence of machines and robots. This elegant one by Ryan Wolfe, "Fields of Grass," consists of small sand-filled plexiglas boxes from which a faux blade of grass emerges. The grass blows in response to electrical messages, and the delicate wires strunge from box to box were roots as well as reminders of how intertwined natures systems are.

The piece was at Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery (Brooklyn). There's a Philadelphia connection here--Leah Stuhltrager is from the Philadelphia area, and her family is still in the neighborhood.

I'll be back with more. Just wanted to get something quick up. To see more of my SCOPE pictures, go to Flickr here.

Roberta and I have also posted pictures for Pulse there but I haven't gotten around to labeling anything yet.
Roberta's are good to go, here.

permanent link   libby 6:04 PM
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Posted by libby

DSCN0918.JPG
Originally uploaded by sokref1.

Here's our picture of Ilya Lipkin installing Jim Shaw's Bite the Hand that Feeds You yesterday at the Metro Pictures booth at the Armory Art Fair, New York. Off to Pulse and Scope, we hope. Our ambitions are greater than our energy. See Libby's flickr set for more pictures and Roberta's flickr set too.

permanent link   libby 8:29 AM
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Posted by libby

The galleries in L.A. show blind eyes to the street, look forbidding and closed, look not much like galleries. This is part of a row of galleries in Culver City along La Cienega Blvd. I almost didn't find it, having mistakenly turned onto La Cienega Ave. But artist Carol Es pointed me in the right direction--told me where to see some art in L.A., and when I was lost, set me straight.

The stuff inside the galleries, like stuff at galleries everywhere, ranged from great to huh?

I started out at Es' gallery, George Billis, which also has a New York space (it's also Anne Seidman's gallery), and had a great time there.


Carol Es' book, 1-Self

For one thing, they showed me a copy of Es' artist's book, "1-Self," recently purchased by the Getty. It's packaged in a box that's lined with sewing-pattern tissue, and it's a mix of words and sewing-related images. Some of the originals of the images were in the gallery, too. Like all of Es' art, it's beautiful and delicate and vulnerable.

San Pedro



Two days later, the morning before my return to Philadelphia, I dashed over to Es' new studio, a beautiful, airy space with a zillion windows on top of a hill in a park in San Pedro. The studio is in one of the buildings that were old army barracks, and the whole gallery and art area is now owned by the L.A. parks department.

I misjudged the time it would take to get there, however, and didn't really have enough time to look and just talk. Damn. I felt guilty because Carol rushed over to show me around. And she felt guilty because the trip took longer than I expected and she blamed herself for that. But really, it was bad planning on my part.

Above is one of the pieces Es had on a table. It's all poked with pinholes and texture. She had lots of pieces of similar paper, many with small, painted images that looked stiched to the paper. One was a pattern piece of a shirt front, with a heart in just about the right spot.

Es is getting ready for a show at the Torrance Art Museum, an installation of a zillion of her cut-out pattern pieces pinned to a wall. That's all she could get out before I had to leave. As I left I fingered some lacy paper--the negative pieces that Es had cut out. They were beautiful.

What else I saw in Culver City


by Ellen Frances Tuchman

Two artists were showing at George Billis when I was there--Ellen Frances Tuchman and Julie Speed.

Tuchman's airy mylar sheets are covered with stitched on tiny beads and sequins and other trimmings as well as what looked like marker and paint. The work has an architectural quality, including dark doorways and mosque-like towers. In several of the pieces, Tuchman rolled up sliced paintings and attached the coils to the mylar in a chock-a-block arrangement that brought to mind clock springs, or rolled anchovies packed in a can. The central dichotomies in the work are between the pretty airiness and the looming architecture; and between the breezy, decorative look paired with intense process.


my favorite piece by Julie Speed includes images from a damaged bible

At the other end of the visual spectrum, Texas artist Julie Speed's show "Bible Studies," combines borrowed and collaged imagery with printmaking. The words and images are cut out of a distressed bible. There's a touch of humor here, but it's pretty dark and not particularly kind to her subjects--Old Masters grotesques, beautifully crafted and full of obsessive detail, in surreal spaces--much like a lot of Philadelphia art I see. Speed is in the collections of a bunch of Texas museums, including the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Austin Museum of Art. She sells things before they're finished, according to the gallerist, Manolo.


"Everyone's Skull is Different," by Jon-Paul Villegas

Next door at Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery Jon-Paul Villegas was showing work made of glue sticks and found objects, plus words that didn't quite work for me. Nonetheless, I liked the shapes he made, that brought to mind toys, gift-store kitsch, roadside shrines and automobile finishes--not to mention Banks Violette.


by Jon-Paul Villegas

Although the work resisted my inner monologue of stories and reasons, I felt like it was just a notch away from that open place where the plot thickens to suit the viewer.

The other two galleries I stopped at were Blum & Poe and Sandroni.Rey.


by Friedrich Kunath

Blum & Poe, from which I expected mucho, was the only gallery I went in that had the full New York-Chelsea chill in its spaces. But the work, by Friedrich Kunath of Cologne, Germany, seemed to barely make a dent in the forbidding spaces and felt somewhat undercooked. I liked the mappy rug on the floor, not so original a thought, but nicely done. A nearby photo of a man swathed in upscale bedding on a cot on a beach looked more like an ad for Ikea than a work of art. A stuffed bird wearing shoes that left paint footprints all across the gallery floor was jejune.


by Anthony Goicolea

At Sandroni.Rey, Anthony Goicolea's drawings of campfire boys were beautifully drawn, painted, composed, but they looked suspiciously familiar. One painting looked like a Joy Feaseley, another like an Amy Cutler, and all of them looked like the work of Hernan Bas.



Goicolea wasn't the only creator of some weird back-to-nature notion. After all, we were in L.A. where the rivers are lined with concrete. Here's one of them right near the row of galleries. It's hard to tell, but the dark area on the left is a "waterfall."



And speaking of the great outdoors, I also want to mention that this huge 1976 mural by our own Jane Golden graces Santa Monica. It's a little worse for wear, with grafitti and fading colors. But my favorite part was the painted-out name after Golden's. The cover-up paint was fresher than the rest of the mural. I wondered, did the artist paint it out himself, embarrassed by his past work? Oops, there I go again, making up stories.

permanent link   libby 7:10 PM
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Posted by libby

I had to post this picture, taken at LAX, just in case you believed California's PR about the weather.

But otherwise, my 2.5 days in LA were pretty close to perfection albeit a little chilly (Philadelphia promises to be warmer on Friday!). I got to visit with dear friends, see the ocean, soak up some sun, and see some art.

About airports



Someone on our flight home told us that Philadelphia had a great airport. I swelled with pride. She said it has good food and good shops. Here's the funniest shop of all--I can't escape the PMA, even on vacation.

After I was at LAX, I have to say Philadelphia's airport is looking good.


detail of "Double Vision," Amy Orr's twist-tie quilt, the twist-tie edges highlighted with oil pastels

Philadelphia International also has good art. Alas, I missed Astrid Bowlby's exhibit at Terminal B, which opened Monday. Airport art works best on the way out, when you're waiting, waiting, waiting.



I haven't seen work by Lanny Bergner in years, but there it was, in Terminal B! It was like finding an old friend.

Venice


Steve (left) and Murray crossing one of Venice's canals

Venice has changed a great deal since my days in Pasadena, 20 years prior. It used to be a dump and the canals smelled. These days, the canals are looking good.



We walked into an Open House for a $3.4 million fixer upper along one of the canals!
Every time I go to the beach with Susan and Steve, I start imagining I would like to live there, so I go house hunting. I also saw a really ugly house for $1.4 million. Both houses had lap pools, however, a saving grace in both cases.

Venice architecture



Speaking of houses, this one, Susan said, she thought was designed by Frank Gehry. It's his little fish, I guess. But I sure did like the lookout tower with the chandelier inside. To get in, you climb a ladder. I wondered if it was for the adults or for the kids.



And speaking of exotic buildings, this one is part of the public works recreation facilities at Muscle Beach. I decided it was above your average architecture--besides evoking barbells, it evoked movie reels and Mickey Mouse ears. Perfect. Nearby was an outdoor array of weight machines. It's $5/day to use the equipment.

Steve and Susan warned me that people along the Venice walkway try to charge you if you take their picture. So I took the picture of the building, instead.

Venice voodoo



Like most boardwalks, Venice's walk includes cheesy beachy stores. This G.I. toy was
crawling out of one of the stores on its belly, its colors flying. It's distorted body came straight out of "Species."



And speaking of spookiness, here's a picture of the kids gathering for the drum circle on Venice Beach. They come to drum the sun setting into the ocean, to dance, and to get high.

Nature in Venice



According to Susan and Steve's landlord, this palm tree, which is in their front yard, is the oldest palm tree in Venice. Maybe it's so.



The birds of paradise grow everywhere, even in front of this hurricane fence and the construction behind it. Not quite paradise...but still, pretty nice. Next post from me--LA art.

permanent link   libby 1:09 PM
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Posted by roberta

This week's Weekly includes my review of the ICA's Gone Formalism. Here's the link to the art page and below is the copy with some more pictures. For a more complete view of the ICA's current crop of shows see my flickr set. And here's Libby's posts on the ramp project and on the Ben Franklin installation.

Cold Hands, Warm Heart
Six artists tackle chilly formalism, but with heated anxiety.

The Institute of Contemporary Art's "Gone Formalism" is an exhibit of antisublime works by six out-of-town artists (two of whom, Liz Larner and Mark Grotjahn, are in the Whitney Biennial). Like the Biennial (more on that next week), the exhibit is forlorn. With art made of scavenged or low-art materials like papier-mache, the show's sensibility is if not nihilistic then at least highly negative about the world we live in.


Gitte Schafer's totems and other found object works were put together in part from local thrift shop trips she took with ICA's Associate Curator Jenelle Porter, according to Jenelle.

This forlorn inward-looking work is being made in Philadelphia as well as in Los Angeles, New York and Berlin. M. Ho and Shannon Bowser are two local artists whose works share commonalities with what's here. This stream of art doesn't produce pretty pictures-like Goya, these artists voice their worries about the state of the world.

Gitte Schäfer's corner of the show epitomizes how many of these artists seek dialogue with art of the past as well as with contemporary culture. Schäfer's columns of recycled poles, lamp bases, hat stands and other cast-offs evoke Brancusi. Yet the aesthetic is less high art and more like grandma's house before the estate sale: Art is a quaint discard.


Liz Larner's Untitled (wall)

Liz Larner's metal cubes wrapped in painted papier-mache raise notions of nothingness and false promise. Larner's delicate shapes-mere outlines of cubes that evoke Sol Lewitt, or pipe cleaner sculptures from kindergarten-are more air than substance. Even when stacked 63 inches high by 19 inches long and 87 inches wide, as in Untitled (Wall), the cubes contradict themselves-they're building blocks, but they're delicate and ephemeral.


Several Mark Grotjahn butterfly drawings with Liz Larner's ephemeral cubes on a pedestal in front.

Mark Grotjahn's untitled drawings all have the same motif: a zip down the middle with radiating lines or stripes from a central point at either side. The obsessive and urgent works are like drugged-up Barnet Newmans. There's no peace here, no glimpse of the infinite in works that are noisy, surfacey and as insistent as a 2-year-old. Grotjahn calls his works "butterflies," but to me these butterflies sting.


Eerie shadows cast by Charles Long's sculpture made the piece doubly resonant.

Charles Long's totemic sculptures are like drawings in space. Made with objects pulled from the Los Angeles River and held together with steel bars, the work seems Joseph Beuysian except for its cool impersonality. Jessica Jackson Hutchins and Evan Holloway round out the show with works in papier-mache that debunk the romanticism of nature beauty (Hutchins) and propose that life is an infernal merry-go-round (Holloway).

Formalism of yore was chilly and impersonal, and so are these works. But their subtext of anxiety about the world is white hot.


Holiday Home by Caroline Bos and Ben van Berkel, upstairs at ICA.

For a complete change of pace, check out the ICA's upstairs shows: the Pepto Bismol-pink "Holiday Home" installation by Caroline Bos and Ben van Berkel,


Inside Holiday Home everyone's in the pink. Here, Caroline Bos is speaking (right) and ICA's Claudia Gould is listening (left)

the graffiti-influenced ramp painting by Ingrid Calame, (below) and a Ben Franklin portrait by Brian Tolle. (not shown)


Ramp project by Ingrid Calame seen from the outside. Calame lined up the rectangular paintings to echo the ICA's windows. From this vantage point outside the paintings seem perfectly framed by the ICA building.

"Holiday Home" is a standout. More like a James Turrell color projection made concrete than like a real home, the walk-through space is a sublime color immersion. The various shows work well together, making the experience of hiking the museum like climbing a mountain: Work at the bottom is rewarded with great views at the top.
"Gone Formalism"
Through March 26. Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 S. 36th St. 215.898.7108.

permanent link   roberta 7:13 AM
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Posted by libby and roberta

Here's one reason why we love artnet.com--gossip. And this week's Out With Mary Barone has celebrity photos from the Whitney Biennial gala. Our faves:

--Dash Snow, one of the two "Eat Shit and Die" artists (see post)

--we also like the jaundiced Rob Storr photo; Storr was recently appointed art dean at Yale

Our only disappointment (oh we're shameless fans) is that Barone didn't shoot Zoe Strauss.

permanent link   libby and roberta 2:31 PM
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Posted by roberta

From the isn't the internet amazing department: Fletcher Moore, a web developer from Roslindale, MA, wrote us about an inaccuracy in a previous post . He found the mistake when he was looking for lyrics to a song by the Minutemen. Huh?

How did he wind up at artblog? All he knew was the lyric, "Is your life worth a painting?" and our post includes that lyric because it was the name of an exhibit in Dublin. Our post says the show's title came from a song by the Butthole Surfers.

The song in question is called "Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing" and it's by the Minutemen. Here are two links Moore sent, one is the complete lyric the other is a link to a documentary film on the Minutemen that will be touring the country.

I know many of you are music lovers, so I thought you might find the interweaving of art and music, albeit in a mistaken attribution, kind of interesting. Moore said the song includes his all time favorite lyric: "If we heard mortar shells, we'd cuss more in our songs, and cut down on guitar solos." ...which is followed by a guitar solo, he said.

But the issue of the monetary value of life and art is especially pertinent in a climate where the market seems to be driving things. How do you answer the question? Are you worth it, as they say on the L'Oreal commercials.

permanent link   roberta 5:04 PM
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Posted by roberta

Los Angeles artist and blogger Carol Es and London artist, zine mistress and blogger Karen D'Amico have interviewed each other on their respective blogs about their almost simultaneous recent studio moves. I've been meaning to tell you about D'Amico's zine, Tangent, a real-world paper publication as well as an online site. And promise I will real soon because I have some and they're special.

Here's Carol's interview with Karen and here's Karen's interview with Carol. Lots of nuts, bolts, partition wall and window talk. Check it out. And by the way, I believe Libby did a studio visit with Carol while out in LA last weekend. Stay tuned for that.

permanent link   roberta 4:56 PM
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Posted by roberta

DSCN0851.jpg
Originally uploaded by sokref1.

Image is one of Doina Adam's glass pieces, this one, I believe wrapped in thread, at Vox.

Before going for ice cream at Space 1026 Friday night (see post), my friend, curator Andrea Kirsch and I stopped at Vox Populi to see the new members' show. Stefan Abrams, Doina Adam and Mauro Zamora (and Zamora's collaborators Carolyn Hesse, Gabriel Boyce and Brooklyn-based artist Paul Loughney) all had new work of a satisfying nature.




Doina Adam's crocheted monofilament "blanket" on the wall casts great shadows.

Adam's glass and mixed pieces conjure metaphorical landscapes of the mind. Her works most reminded me of Barry Le Va's (also internalized landscapes and surreal mindscapes) from his show at the ICA in 2005.

Andrea pointed out the great shadows cast by one Adam piece, a loose "blanket" of crocheted monofilament hung on the wall. Because of its materials and construction the piece is almost invisible. In a way it's more ephemeral than the grey shadows which become like a drawing on the wall. (I want to point out that this particular space at Vox is the gallery of barely visible art. Justin Witte and others have also put near impossible to see white on white works in this space.)




Mauro Zamora and Carolyn Hesse's collaborative sculpture/painting also casts some wonderful shadows and colored light.

In back, Zamora's collaboration with Carolyn Hesse produced another work whose cast shadows draw on the wall. Hesse, whose sculptural works Libby and I had seen at Sharktown in January, made the bent wood ski trails on the wall. And Zamora painted the insides of the bent wood swoops so that what's cast on the walls is a glowing orange light line as well as the grey shadows. A very nice piece indeed.




Zamora and Paul Loughney's painting/collage on the wall.

Zamora's mural on the wall continues his paintings' inside/outside motif. Here, one wall is worked up with a collaborative collage by Paul Loughney.




Mauro Zamora and Gabriel Boyce's collaborative drawings with spray graphite and spray paint. Little gems.

And in some delicate, smoky drawings, Zamora and Vox member Gabriel Boyce have poetry on the walls. The tiny collaborative works, made with stencils, spray graphite and white spray paint evoke Sherlock Holmesian London with pea soup fog and suspicious goings on. Very lovely.




Stefan Abrams' auto show photo at Vox. Cinematic without narrative. They pack a weird visceral punch. You want to piece together the story.

Stefan Abrams' auto show photos are amazing. Before I knew they were shot at the auto show I assumed they were staged photos that together made a kind of cinematic whole communicating angst about isolation and unhappiness in our times.

They still communicate that -- in spades -- regardless of where they were taken.


Another Abrams auto show photo. There must have been a dozen (sorry, my note-taking slipped.

And those magical white dots that appear reflected in the windshields of all the cars? They are some points of magical light, perhaps rays of hope, or perhaps false expectations of good. Who knows. This is a great body of work by Abrams.

The show has a lot of icy, glassy, slippery, reflective surfaces and great shadows as well. All in all the works talk back and forth beautifully in another great members' show.

permanent link   roberta 10:45 AM
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Posted by roberta

DSCN0843.jpg
Originally uploaded by sokref1.

Nadia Hironaka's installation The Late Show at PAFA. Click image to see it bigger.

Cold and windy outside but warm and summery inside. That was Friday night at PAFA where Nadia Hironaka's "The Late Show" debuted in the Morris Gallery.

Hironaka's non-narrative multi-channel video installation includes a two screen projection and a third visual element, a monitor on the wall. With its ramped up audio, it makes for an immersion in what might be out-takes from the cult flick of a few years back, The Blair Witch Project.

Filmed at a drive-in surrounded by the woods, the piece is quiet and ruminative, like scenes that landed on the cutting room floor because they were too slow to keep an audience involved in a scary movie. The piece was filmed mostly on-site at the Garden Drive-In near Wilkes Barre, and the artist told me at the opening that she chose the spot for its grove of trees behind the bright outdoor screen. The projectionist was apparently very accomodating, and happy to shine a light on Hironaka's project.

The artist is a Vox Populimember, 2000 Fleisher Challenge winner and linchpin of the local film/video community.

The projection on the big wall shows the outdoor movie screen, the background of trees and in the distance a highway with cars. The second projection shows a car driving at night down a gravel road towards the screen. The car's driver, a young woman, gets out and stands in front of the car facing the screen and smokes a cigarette. She walks out of the picture and at some point what looks like an animated moth flies into the bright screen and fades away.

The piece is more notable actually for its audio than for the video which has a maddening lack of narrative to it. The nicely-atomospheric audio has cricket sounds, car crunching on gravel road sounds, feet trampling leaves sounds and other less specified things. The intent according to the brochure essay is to implicate the viewer by surrounding you with sounds and images that make you feel like you're there in the woods. (Above the projection on the darkened skylights are what look like twinkling constellations which enhance the you are there affect.)

The Late Show is a dreamy piece. All Hironaka works have that in common -- they let you dream your way into the scene. Here, it's the audio that does the magic with speakers here and there to give an approximation of a real woods experience.

The linear non-narrative work -- which actually has a beginning, a middle and an end -- left me aching for more. We're conditioned to want stories. We read them into everything. Humans are subtext-driven. But here the subtext is less than enough to get the story going.

The Late Show is a technical tour de force by an artist I admire for pushing her videos in amazing ways technically. Had the ten-minute piece a little more narrative push, it would have been perfect. As it is, it's a nice atmospheric night at the drive-in with no movie.

permanent link   roberta 7:25 AM
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Posted by libby

touch the sky
Originally uploaded by libbyrosof.

Here's a link to my set of california pictures, so far.

permanent link   libby 6:48 PM
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Posted by roberta

DSCN0878.jpg
Originally uploaded by sokref1.

Billy Blaise Dufala handing out ice cream at Space 1026 Friday night. Click picture to see it bigger.

Leave it to the Dufala brothers, Steven and
Billy Blaise, to bring a big truck inside -- and not only inside but up a steep flight of stairs to the 2nd floor gallery. In their new installation at Space 1026 the forlorn yet majestic used vehicle -- brought in piece by piece according to what Billy Blaise told me -- has been modified with some tank-like guns on the front of it.

The Dufala's use anti-militarist imagery in their work routinely. They also use found objects -- like the truck here, and like a great metal dumpster that appeared on the porch at Main Line Art Center a while ago in some group show of emerging artists. The dumpster was lined with white velvet and had some filagree Victorian-esque etching on the sides.

Anyway, this truck is now an ice cream tank and many lined up for treats. Billy Blaise worked as fast as he could dishing the sloppy stuff (no refrigerator in the truck -- what do you want, they got it up there).

Meanwhile, at the front desk, Max Lawrence was selling the new Space 1026 book, a small, hard-bound, photo-rich tome called Pulling Teeth that comes wrapped in a hand-made screen print (and packaged in a ziplock bag). Sells for $20 -- a steal.

I've got a bunch more pictures from First Friday, including some from Vox Populi and PAFA's Morris Gallery in a flickr set. I'll have another post on Vox and PAFA soon I hope. So little time so much work...Yeesh.

permanent link   roberta 10:17 AM
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Posted by roberta

DSCN0725.jpg
Originally uploaded by sokref1.


Rudolf Stingel, Untitled (After Sam) oil on canvas, 2005-6. Click image to see it bigger.

So if the idiosyncratic poster project in the Whitney Biennial 2006 catalog is called Draw me a Sheep (see post) I'd call the idiosyncratic paintings in the show Paint me a sheep. The paintings are a funny lot that mostly don't stand out in a show with incredible visual noise.

So it's not a big painting biennial. But then neither was the last one if memory serves. I don't have much to say other than that Rudolf Stingel's huge photo-realist self-portrait (image at top) was sited beautifully in the Urs Fischer space with the broken walls.

Not only is the huge grisaille oil on canvas appropriately downbeat but it's the only rectangle in a room most notable for its references to rotundity -- wax circles on the floor, circular holes in the walls.

Stingel's portrait is an icon of despair accessorized with a touch of Ralph Lauren. Somehow that's a perfect snapshot of the times: We're going to hell but we'll be well dressed, dammit.




Michael Snow's poster in the catalog. It appears to be a still from the video SHEEPLOOP.

Apart from that and speaking of sheep, I'll mention Michael Snow's "SHEEPLOOP, 2000" a 15-minute video loop which I saw high up on a wall between paintings by Spencer Sweeney and Ed Paschke. Because the video is so static -- I mean how much do sheep move when they're grazing? -- it's an almost perfect virtual painting for the time. A beautiful landscape that's about nothing but sheep grazing. Well, of course it's about people too. And that's a pretty nihilistic thought.




Michael Snow SHEEPLOOP, 2000, video with three monitors, silent. 15 minute continuous loop, installed in monitor here high on the wall. To the right of the guard is one of Spencer Sweeney's paintings.

And newsflash from Alex Baker, PAFA curator extraordinaire whom I saw at the opening of Nadia Hironaka's Morris Gallery installation at PAFA Friday night: Spencer Sweeney is a Philly boy! He went to PAFA, in fact. And even though he lives in New York now we'll count him a homey, too. Score two Philadelphia entries in the show.

permanent link   roberta 8:59 AM
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