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Posted by libby

Steven Baris' The Correct Distance #B5, 30 x 30 inches

Jellybeans is what I think of whenever I see a Steven Baris painting. It has to do with the translucent glow and the Pop colors. Baris' one-man show of 19 works at Pentimenti until May 27, looks great.

Baris' translucency is achieved by painting with acrylic on Plexiglas. He also finishes his painting with a kind of waxy material. The resulting surface has a matte glow. All of these add up to a sense of layers in space, of depth.


Baris' Spread #A9, 14 x 14 inches

Some pieces have poured dots punctuating a plaid background. This series of work is downright comical. Maybe it's because of the scale of the dots (or the suggestion of fizzy soda bubbles) which have a clown-costume scale vis a vis the plaids. The larger--or supposedly closer ones--also are the right size for bouncing balls. The shiny, industrial thickness of the pools of paint contrasts with the thin plaid, which sometimes is beneath, sometimes covering the dots.



Landscape with Random Clusters #35, 14 x 14 inches

These spatial issues prevail in all of Baris' paintings, where abstract blips and blurs and backgrounds suggest place and space and yet are all on the painting surface. They are visual space stations, defining what's near and far, and yet undermining what's near and far. They do this with such bouncy charm and such look-at-me exuberance that the monolog about depth seems easy to follow, more of a game than a philosophical disquisition.

In a way it reflects cyberspace, a non-place kind of landscape in which there is no space at all, with glowing colors that contradict the absence of material.


Baris's Compartmental #D7, 48 x 103 inches, oil on mylar

Baris also created three large paintings for Pentimenti's tiny Project Space. The works have a more casual application of paint and finish, but the floating cubes in pastel skies raise the same issues of space as they attempt to push the walls of the gallery space back. Because the work is on sheets of mylar, I missed that happy melding of subject and the thick solidity of the Plexiglas substrate. The colors aim to make up a piece of that difference by suggesting deep space at close range.

Also at Pentimenti


Janaki Lennie's Breathing Space #61

Also at Pentimenti in the annex gallery are three other artists. Janaki Lennie's Breathing Space series focuses on the glow of dirt-colored skies. The skies bracketed on both sides by bits of the landscape have a pulsing visual tension that falls apart without the pair of space markers--either bits of trees or industrial towers. The works are an unexpected mix of Zen sky meditations and eco disaster commentary all at once.


Justyna Badach's Untitled Seascape #2 (After Monet)

Local artist Justyna Badach is showing two enormous, digitally altered photographs of where the sea meets the shore. In these photos, Badach removes things to create romanticized views, taken from an unlikely, mid-sea perspective. To me they seem to be photos of emptiness. They are the antithesis of the picturesque painting tradition in which nature and bits of human occupation--a crumbling castle, or perhaps an ancient bridge--give the paintings of nature some kind of focus that nature alone lacks. To deliberately counter this by removing all traces of focus is an interesting thought. The fogginess and the digital inkjet print-out (which falls apart on this large scale of 44 x 54 1/2 inches) all appropriately magnify this, but I found myself yearning for more to look at--or more to think about.

Also showing at Pentimenti are a few of Mary Bennett's altered books (see previous post here for more on her work).

permanent link   libby 3:08 PM
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Posted by libby

detail from Kristin Reynolds' installation

So there was so much going on last month I didn't get some things up that I wanted to let people know about, especially the April show at Vox Populi.

Actually, the Kristin Reynolds is still up in the back room, and tonight Voxumenta opens, which looks like it should be worth a visit (I'm counting on the wonderful Voxennial vibe from last year to carry over into this year).

So I'll start with Reynolds since she's still up. She's got lumber and flat, patterned boards arranged in a gravity-defying cascade. This work would not have been made without Sarah Sze having gone before, but Reynolds pumps up the materials to a point where they no longer suggest delicacy or the whirl of the cosmos or ephemeral vulnerability.


detail of hand-creatures from Reynolds' installation

What I liked best about this work were the rubber puddles on the floor and the cast creatures, sort of Mickey Mouse hands taking off on their own. I also liked the overblown pins. And I liked walking through the barriers in the space, like the displaced, low-floating clouds as well as the pokey pieces of lumber.

I took the work as a suggestion of disaster, of buildings falling, of the flat patterned boards as dislocated wallpaper patterns, although they looked like fabric patterns to me--but no matter, they seemed to be about the patterns life as we know it under some kind of threat. Which it is...


Joseph Hu's toothpick holder, a recreation of an gift he can't bear to part with

Also at Vox were works by Joseph Hu, who focused on paper sculptures this time in his Hard to Hold exhibit. I loved the Pop vibe of the cherry chapstick, which was the micro version of Claes Oldenburg's Lipstick. I also loved the craftsmanship made visible (almost) in the bowl. The works are recreations of objects of sentimental value to Hu, things he can't quite bear to dispose of. In the care with which the sculptures were made and the considered, simplifications of the originals, the emotion comes through.

I thought the toothpick holder won the prize as an unnecessary object that somehow survives all the cuts because someone we love gave it to us.



by Gabriel Boyce

I also liked stepping among Gabriel Boyce's stuffed birds in his Gone Borneo exhibit at Vox. The beautifully crafted creatures overpowered the small models of things like boats. But both had a funny toy-like quality. The realistic bird poses battle with the stuffed toy quality and the paper feathers for dominance, and make these objects open enough for some wide-ranging speculation.


by Sarah Daub

And Sarah Daub's paper cut-out drawings, in her Close Call exhibit, the best of them have a creepy fear factor that threatens with the most unstable of materials. I especially liked the ones where Daub creates a back layer of paint that fills in some of the cut-out spaces. Daub made it into the Arcadia Works on Paper show, this year.


Blowback still by Karina Aguilera Skvirsky

In the Video Lounge was work by Karina Aguilera Skvirsky. The one I enjoyed from beginning to end, Blowback, depicted people dressed in Arab garb emerging from behind trees and approaching until they form a phalanx in an idyllic park scene. The approaching group has a floaty quality, unrooted from the real ground. And the whole scene raises questions about our assumptions and fantasies about people and threats and safe places.

permanent link   libby 1:26 PM
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Posted by libby

Untitled, masonite, wood, Plexiglas and acrylic paint, 4 x 6 1/4 x 3 inches

Just one of Lynne Clibanoff's five little house shadow boxes at Gallery Joe reminded me of the humongo Holiday Home by Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos (UN Studio, Amsterdam) (see Roberta's Flickr site for Holiday Home images). But the idea that Clibanoff's version was the toy version and the Bos-Van Berkel was the real-world version struck me as so funny that I'm having trouble letting it go.

Not that it's all wrong. The Clibanoff piece that most calls up the comparison, Untitled, has unexpected angles and pods jutting out unexpectedly. And works create a special atmosphere using architecture.

But like all of Clibanoff's pieces, Untitled's atmosphere is calm and empty, a peep into a space missing its people. Holiday Home, on the other hand, because you walk in, is not empty, and has a fun-house atmosphere, with its pink walls and vertiginous, swooping planes. Holiday Home is full of jokes--the picture windows that don't know what a right angle is, the floor that rises up under your feet, the chimney that has no real fireplace, etc. The jokes in Untitled are not really lol funny, except perhaps for the little ball support in the back (to see an image of this and more of the show at Gallery Joe, see my Flickr set here).


cigar box, masonite, Plexiglas and acrylic paint, 7 1/2 x 4 3/8 x 4 1/4 inches

Clibanoff's little structures have gloomy recesses, in some cases the gloom emphasized by a subtle shading of graphite on the edges of the walls. There's something Surreal going on here. This dreamscape is not about wish fulfillment at the level of cotton candy. It's about desire in the context of isolation, emptiness and shadow, and it's about hope coming from the light in the windows. But mostly it's about not being able to get in.


Cabinet 57, cigar box, masonite, Plexiglas, gesso and graphite, 7 1/2 x 4 3/8 x 4 1/4 inches

Part of the charm, here, is 2-D perspective applied to a 3-D space. It reminds me of a stage, with it's upstage and downstage tilt of the floor surrounded by the proscenium. But for all the staginess, the little boxes, with their details and their attention to light and dark, are not about acting. They are more about the mise en scene of where other people's lives are really lived, with disappointments and a sense of limits. By changing the perspective, Clibanoff achieves a spatial and emotional compression in a world where the stability of rectilinear architecture is undermined.

I especially loved Cabinet #57, with the tilting black and white tiled floor. The perspective of the tiles clearly shouts how false the perspective of these pieces is.


Center Hall, plywood, masonite, Plixglas and acrylic paint, 10 3/4 x 13 1/4 x 6 3/4 inches

That announcement of the falseness of perspective also applies in Center Hall, in which the hallway in a little house with a blind doorway, blocked by wood. That thought is even more pronounced in Cabinet 56, in which the hallway ends into a vanishing point. In the real world, the vanishing point is only a trick of the eye. Move closer and it moves back further. But in this little cabinet, the end is real.


Plan for Center Hall, graphite and colored pencil on mylar

Another highlight was the drawings for the cabinets, working plans that show the complexity of the process by which they are made. The drawings serve as templates for cutting the parts, and show how the fitting together will work. They are spectacular for their information about process, as well as their meticulousness and their difficulty.


Tower, by Cheryl Goldsleger, 6 x 5 x 5 inches

Also showing at Gallery Joe are two architecture-inspired sculptures and seven graphite on mylar drawings by Cheryl Goldsleger. The sculptures, two amber-colored blocks of epoxy acrylate that look like jello, contain elusive 3-D drawings of spaces--a stairwell and an arcade.


Migrate, by Goldsleger, has elements that represent the original plans for Detroit; 6 1/8 x 7 15/16 inches

The drawings, which have a nice, grainy texture and a slight messiness to relieve the control of the lines, suggest buildings and aerial perspectives of city plans. Indeed, they are inspired by some old, original plans. There's a suggestion of times past and the importance of imagined light in both of Goldsleger's bodies of work. Although I liked looking at them and even admired them, the pieces seemed to reach to retrieve and revivify ancient meanings lost in time.

permanent link   libby 2:38 PM
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Posted by roberta

May issue of Philadelphia magazine with a Jessica Pressler story about the art scene.

Jessica Pressler's great story on the Philly art scene is out now in the May issue of Philadelphia magazine. Featured artist, Rob Matthews, wrote about it on his blog, Matthews the Younger (click Matthews The Younger: Jessica Pressler Ryan Donnell = Awesome #2 to get there). He scanned the magazine page with his quote and the photo of him and his art -- the photo's a great noirish mix including a tv with the classic noir film Touch of Evil playing on it and Matthews' new drawing of Mark Shetabi soon to be featured in the National Academy of Design's contemporary drawing show in New York.

The magazine's not available online but they do have a great newsy online expansion feature that includes artblog (top of the (ahem, alphabetical) list), news about some current exhibits and about upcoming stuff like Shelley Spector's artjaw, an online art/literary mag on her website debuting soon.

permanent link   roberta 9:36 AM
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This week's Weekly includes my preview of Pen Pals, the new exquisite corpse drawing exhibit at Padlock Gallery opening this Friday. Also, there's a nice, juicy sketch with information on the new Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiatives (PEI) 2006 grant winners. Here's the link to the art page and below is the copy with some images. And to see the images bigger, go to my flickr set.

It's a Draw

Artists incarcerated and free join forces in an exquisite corpse show.


Andrew Jeffrey Wright/Ed Campbell collaboration. Words say Stay in School! unless it is art school, then drop out and buy a computer. Stay in School! unless it is law school, then drop out and buy a lawn mower.

Ted Passon wanted to curate an exquisite corpse drawing show at Padlock, his living room gallery in South Philadelphia. But the artist wanted the exhibit-in which two people make one drawing with neither one looking at the other's work-to have a particular focus: Half of the artists would be incarcerated adults or juveniles, and half would be on the outside. "I was inspired by the Inside/Out Program at Temple," he says, explaining that a class he attended in that program met 50 percent of the time at Graterford Prison, and half the students were inmates. Passon, 25, has some personal experience with prison from visiting family members there. "I knew a few people in prison-mostly my brother and my cousin," he says.

Books Through Bars provided Passon with names of inmates throughout the country who make art. Passon approached them to be in his show. Then, through a program for incarcerated juveniles run through the American Friends Service Committee, he made a youth exquisite corpse component to run alongside the adult show. The imprisoned juveniles are paired with students in the Youth Build Charter School for high school dropouts.


Heather Morton/Scott Servus collaboration.

Passon recruited outside artists through his connections. His gallery has been an underground favorite since it opened in 2004, and many artists he's featured participated, along with local rising stars Andrew Jeffrey Wright, Liz Rywelski, Randall Sellers and Tadashi Moriyama. The small show has 23 drawings: 13 by adults and 10 by kids. Short bios of the artists will be posted alongside the drawings, and Passon says he's considering creating a book of the project. Interest is high, and the show will also appear at a Puppet Uprising event in West Philadelphia. "If people want to see it elsewhere, I'd be happy to talk with them," Passon says.

Passon, who's a filmmaker, didn't participate as an artist in this project. In fact, when I spoke with him he was in Seattle getting ready to show a film and perform at the World Championship of Experimental Films at the Portland Documentary Experimental Film Festival.


Liz Rywelski/Danny Hawk Smith collaboration

While the show isn't full of political art, Passon's idea-to humanize the prisoners to an outside audience and to allow prisoners an empowering experience of showing their work outside the gulag of a "prison art" show-is heartfelt political activism. And by the way, the three drawings I've seen in reproduction are great.

If you miss the opening, the best way to see the show is to email Passon at tedecmfg@hotmail.com to make an appointment.

"Pen Pals"
Sat., May 6, 8pm-midnight. Free. Through May 28. Padlock Gallery, 1409 Ellsworth St.



sketches
Access Granted

With awards totaling $746,550, Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiatives (PEI) announced its 2006 grants this week. This year's awards to local arts institutions bring the 9-year-old program to an unprecedented total of more than $7.5 million given by the Pew affiliate for the staging of exhibits and exhibit planning in the Philadelphia region.

Three of this year's exhibitions grant winners are first-time PEI recipients: Philagrafika ($90,000), the Village of Arts and Humanities ($117,050) and a consortium of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia and Peregrine Arts Inc. ($200,000). The fourth is the Philadelphia Museum of Art ($200,000). The awards will help fund a solo show by Tom Chimes (PMA); an international symposium and exhibit on printmaking (Philagrafika); a 20th-anniversary celebration (Village of Arts and Humanities); and a two-month exhibition exploring Philadelphia's "hidden" city treasures (Preservation Alliance/Peregrine).

2006 planning grants were awarded to Asian Arts Initiative ($20,000 for Chinatown In/Flux 2008), InLiquid.com Inc. and Basekamp ($19,500 for Plausible Artworlds conference and exhibit), the Institute of Contemporary Art ($20,000 for "The Puppet Show"), and the Print Center ($20,000 for Australian printmakers). Congratulations to all. For more information go to PEI's website (see link above).

permanent link   roberta 7:37 AM
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Posted by roberta

This time each year the Weekly sponsors an insert in the paper that supports the GLBT Equality Forum, the week-long conference that deals with gay issues. (The 2006 conference started Monday). The Equality Forum always organizes an art exhibition and usually I write about it for the supplement. This year I wrote a feature dealing with the issue of "gay closeting" in the art museum world. Here's the link to the feature and below is the copy. Ant this link has the Equality Forum schedule

Museum Admission
A panel of experts makes the case for paying more institutional attention to GLBT artists.


Warhol Museum Director Tom Sokolowski

Exhibitions by gay artists-even those as "out" as Andy Warhol-sometimes get mounted without any mention in the informational materials that the artist is or was gay. Though this suppression of information is less prevalent today than it was 10 or even five years ago, insiders say, institutions are still climbing the learning curve on how to address issues of tolerance and multiculturalism in their programming.

This year's Museum Closet Equality Forum's panel tackled the issue of GLBT information in the art world with a panel of experts who discussed how institutions could do better-and why they should.

"Generally, Equality Forum programming deals with obvious issues like hate crimes, but here we decided to look at more systemic problems," says Equality Forum director Malcolm Lazin. "Think about it in terms of role models for gay and lesbian people," he says. Institutions that suppress or mask the sexual orientation of GLBT artists make those artists invisible to students and other GLBT people looking for figures of empowerment.

Tom Sokolowski, director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and a panel member, has direct experience with the issue. When he took over directorship of the Warhol from Thomas Armstrong, the museum's first director, the Warhol's walls were full of "oodles of information on Warhol's history, his ethnicity, his religion-but nothing on his homosexuality," Sokolowski says. One of the first things he did was put a text panel on the wall that dealt with Warhol's sexual orientation. "To my mind, we feel it's an important part of Warhol's makeup-but no more so than his history, his religion, his ethnicity."


Andy Warhol Camouflage self portrait and Victor Grippo's Analogia I (second version), 1977, now on view at the PMA in Carlos Basualdo's Energy Yes! installation.

Sokolowski has worked in several museums and art institutions. (Before Pittsburgh, he was director of the Grey Art Gallery at New York University.) He understands the complexity of the issues involved, and emphasizes it's important not to sum things up in black and white. "It's always about levels of gray," he says. "If you have the courage of your convictions and a powerful personality, as I do, you can get things done."

But Sokolowski admits things can be tricky with living GLBT artists-some of whom object so strenuously to mentioning their sexual orientation, they'll forbid access to their works. "Even though the sexual aspects of their lives are well known," he says, "if you want to show their work, you can't deal with their sexuality."

Jenni Sorkin, art history Ph.D. candidate at Yale and also a panel member, echoes that sentiment: "Some artists don't want to be perceived or contextualized [as gay]. It's a big issue." Sorkin says artists have the power to withhold any reproductions of their images from the public if they don't like the context in which the work will be shown.

Sorkin is also concerned about the lack of collecting of GLBT art by institutions, and how that lack of market value and institutionalization guarantees its exclusion from the history books. Feminist works from the 1970s, for example, like those by Carolee Schneemann and Judy Chicago, are rarely collected, Sorkin says.

"Carolee Schneemann is hardly collected. One piece from the 1990s was bought by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It's a newer piece, a photo of her French kissing her cat," she says. This piece is less incendiary and more collection-worthy, apparently, than Schneemann's earlier works, one of which, Interior Scroll, involved a performance in which the artist pulls a long string of text out of her vagina.


Strange Fruit (for David) (detail), 1992-97; by Zoe Leonard; fruit peel (orange), thread, needle, variable dimensions. Photo by Vivien Bittencourt from a 1995 installation at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Contemporary lesbian artists like Nicole Eisenman and Zoe Leonard are faring a little better. "They're hip lesbians," Sorkin says, adding that both are also object-makers, as opposed to performers like Schneemann and some of the other '70s feminists. The Philadelphia Museum of Art owns and has exhibited works by both Eisenman and Leonard.

Funding is a big issue in mounting shows by artists whose works are seen as difficult. "Boards are fairly conservative and don't want to rock the boat," Sorkin says, adding that with NEA money so scarce and private collectors not invested in the work, it's hard to get funding to put on shows. But "the beauty of an oppressive cultural environment is that a lot of great work gets produced," she says. "I do have hope for museums changing."


Nicole Eisenmann's "Untitled" 2004, a watercolor on paper, exhibited at Art in the Armory 2005. Thanks James Wagner for the image.

"Big museums," says Sokolowski, "the Museum of Modern Art, for example-have chosen to create a canon of what art is about. And not only homosexuals, but women, minorities and figurative art don't fit into that. It's the deracination or desexualization" of the story, he says.

Sokolowski says he hopes the GLBT community seeks alternatives to the hierarchical modes that predominate today. "We see gay people aping the roles of the straight world, but we want to create alternate systems. What we should be learning is to be more horizontal ... to include more people and don't just talk about who has the biggest stick at the moment."

And that's great advice-no matter what your sexual orientation.

permanent link   roberta 6:11 PM
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Posted by roberta

Robert Goodman
Originally uploaded by sokref1.


This is a detail from an untitled Robert Goodman painting. Click the image to see it bigger. And see more images from the show at my flickr set.

Poured or brushed, chaos-evoking or orderly, abstract painting, can always make the case for itself when it's well done. Seraphin Gallery 's exhibit Abstraction: 3 Views, does just that--delivers a juicy, non-representational painting show that's a crowd pleaser.

Of course no two minds think completely alike on any one subject so the three artists in the show, Robert Goodman, Jon Manteau and Ben Will, present three different approaches whose outcomes are unlike each other even if their intents might be in the same ballpark. Goodman's large gestural oil paintings on canvas are brushy and colorful and punctuated with paint passages that range from staccato to weepy-willowy. I want to see these works as narrative abstraction. There are worlds colliding here, or people having wide-ranging discussions. The works are theatrical -- brassy even. And they are full of space. I kept thinking of Frank Stella and his "Working Space" essay in which he says painting must create 3-D space (my paraphrase and please correct me, someone, if I got it wrong). Goodman is creating 3-D space in a 2-D plane. And his strategies draw you in -- instead of repelling you as do some, if not all, Frank Stella literal 3-D painting exercises.

You could see music in these works but you could see urban life as well, the hum of highways; the big-boned structures and quieter spaces; the people running red lights or just plain running.




Jon Manteau, detail, Basketball Orange, 2005.

Jon Manteau is a drip-meister par excellence. His large, medium and small works -- all house paint on cabinet-grade plywood--feel elemental. With their lava-like surfaces Manteau's pours coagulate into topography that's as natural as the canyons and volcanoes they evoke and as unnatural as yesterday's Home Depot sale of satin finish latex, tinted basketball orange (and really who would order such a color?) These are seductive works and while they are not story-tellers exactly, they exercise a hypnotic charm, their various textures and passages allowing you to fall down into them in reverie.




Ben Will, Plotting, 2006, acrylic and oil on canvas

Ben Will's works have a system of coding that makes them mysterious. Will's organic shapes -- are they islands? mouths? vaginas? other??? -- are sometimes repeated and sometimes stand-alone, but always floating and surrounded by acid-colored backgrounds. Their ambiance is sci-fi and aboriginal and they seem to be charged with a kind of voodoo mantra electricity that is a little forbidding.

The show is just enough work (although I would have liked to see another Will just to study him a little more) and hung in nice groupings to foster comparisons. When I was in the gallery, Todd Keyser, who organized the show, told me the gallery was doing the Affordable Art Fair June 16-18 in New York. They're very excited about it. Other Philly galleries in the mix are Dolan/Maxwell, Pentimenti and the Print Center.

permanent link   roberta 8:59 AM
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Posted by libby

The Illustrated Page Series #1, 2005-6, Work on paper (gouache hand painting, gold leaf, and silkscreen pigment), 80x66 inches (framed), made in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum.

I thought I'd add a few images of Shahzia Sikander's work at the Fabric Workshop and Museum (see Roberta's post), a) because the pair of book pages is flat-out beautiful and b) because I think her work is important and I've been in love with it for a number of years.

If you went to Swarm at the Fab, you'll probably remember that Sikander contributed a video in which swarming motifs from classical Indian miniature painting take on a menacing quality as a crowd of priests (I think they were priests) grows and dematerializes in an endless loop. The same swarm motif in the current video on view, Dissonance to Detour, becomes a spinning mandala, but this piece is not quite as interesting, the abstraction of the imagery killing much hope of narrative.

The Illustrated Page Series #1 (top image), which was completed in cooperation with the Fabric Workshop, holds the greatest interest. It may only be one piece, but it's complex and it's worth going out of your way to visit. As I understand it, two more pieces in the series are being made in cooperation with the Fabric Workshop.



detail, Illustrated Page Series #1

Within a series of borders a landscape inspired by Indian miniatures, subcontinent mythologies, and Western art all meet in layers of silk-screened and hand-painted imagery. How all this stuff--East, West, past, present, art, non-art-- meets (I had to laugh at the soccer balls in one of the borders) and coheres is the thing that makes Sikander worth your time. The layers of borders that frame the two landscapes suggest a storybook at the same time that they suggest picture frames and formalized approaches to art. The landscapes within are idealized, candy-colored Gardens of Eden menaced by flying things. As readers, we get to define that menace.


left to right, Pathology of Suspension #5, 2005, gouache on paper, 77 ½ H x 51 ½ inches, Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins and Co., NYC;
Pathology of Suspension #7, 2005, gouache on prepared paper, 85 H x 58 ½ inches, courtesy Eileen and Richard Ekstract, and Illustrated Page Series #1

Each night, when I bother to watch the evening news, I am appalled by how not only our president, but also the media, contribute to our sense of menace. It's not just the color-coded Department of Homeland Security that has people anxious and it's not just Moussaoui's rantings. We have reached a point where a simple rainfall gets treated as a threat.

Sikander is writing the book about the mythology of our times, and it's embattled.

By the way, Sikander will speak at the FWM Friday at 6 p.m., preceded by a members-only exhibition tour with the artist at 5 p.m.

permanent link   libby 11:38 AM
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Posted by libby

Snow Melt, Snow Farm

The wide sweep Mary Tobias Putman's rural landscape paintings, mixed with the exactitude of detailed brush strokes, invoke an America where all is right with the world and where the human enterprise is suitably dwarfed by the land.

I am reminded of seascapes, those views from the crows nest, where the great beyond is nothing but waves all the way to the high horizon line. The boat is a fragile but buoyant voyager on the seas of life.

But Putman's horizon line is straight as an arrow--a mixture of her flattening of the earth plus a suggestion that what we see is only a small part of a very large picture.

The dimensions of these paintings are so wide, they do not reproduce well at the scale of artblog, so under each painting is a link to a larger version on the gallery's website.


Self-Portrait at 65 shows a rather anonymous-looking Putman, as Everyman, atop a lift, providing a hint of how she develops the views she paints

In the exhibit at Gross McCleaf Gallery, Putman takes the long view by looking at her landscape from high up on a lift. She even provides a self-portrait of herself doing this, imagining herself as she would like herself to be at the age of 65. She began the painting titled "Self Portrait at 65" when she was 60. Now she's 63.

The humorous modesty or recognition that humans are blips is reflected in the tiny generic figures, some of whom look like roly-poly Weebles, some so tiny that even in the full-size painting, they are barely readable.


Woodland Beach

But the affection behind these paintings is self-evident, affection for the people and their plight, and the affection for the land, sometimes scarred by the wheels across the fields, sometimes interrupted by a deliberately planted screen of trees, a barn, a development that serves as a precursor of coming suburbia.

The land is manipulated with the human touch of agriculture and bits of development. It's owned land, not wild land, and it's the land that sustains us and makes our lives have meaning.

The color in these paintings is glorious and suffused with warm ochre stripes of agricultural activity, plus bits of green and red for the vehicles and the buildings and trees.

Though there's some Grandma Moses here in the flat style and the love of land, Putman's work is further from the hurly burly of community.


Rough Riders 1985-2005

Even in Putman's flat portraits of commercial enterprise, which are modest in size, she uses the perspective of time to raise questions about our ideals and aging, as in the diptych Rough Riders, 1985-2005. Here the Marlboro Man has morphed into a guy with a gut, peddling tattoos. These pieces are not as beautiful or passionate, however, as the landscapes, which are considered, wise, and for all their size, unpretentious and intimate.

permanent link   libby 11:14 AM
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Doug Aitken
Originally uploaded by sokref1.


Doug Aitken's Broken Screen, a book of 26 conversations between the artist and big-name filmmakers, architects and artists. Click picture to see it bigger.

I kept wondering why I was having trouble reading Doug Aitken's book of conversations, Broken Screen. The 26 Q&A's are between the video artist and an awe-inspiring list of filmmakers, architects and artists who deal with space, time and human issues. It should be a page turner but it's not.

There's something about the snazzy graphics that makes it almost unreadable in parts. The text switches point size and from white on black to black on white in a relatively random way. There are many word-based illustrations that are pullouts from the interviews -- exploded blow-ups of quotes that are placed sometimes vertically, sometimes horizontally. I was putting the book down more than picking it up.




Doug Aitken's Broken Screen. Example of an exploded quote. This is the right side of a two-page spread. (left side of pagae is below)

Then I read the conversation with Matthew Barney where the two artists discover they can't read books:

Barney:...Now I realize that I can't read.

Doug: Yeah, me too! Maybe that's why this is a book of conversations--it's for people like us.

and then I understood. This book is not a book. It's a resource tool like an encyclopedia, something to be useful in small chunks and not read like a linear piece of work. Ha, silly me! I started at the beginning and tried to read it straight through. Luckily the "ah hah" moment came early in the alphabetically-structured book.

Another give-away, although I read right over it, is that Aitken asks each interviewee about non-linear narratives (something he himself makes and is a huge fan of in other peoples' works). So of course, the book IS NON-LINEAR.




Doug Aitken's Broken Screen. Example of an exploded quote. This is the left side of a two-page spread.(right side is above)

Once I got that, I am now high on Broken Screen as deep background for researching the all-star cast of artists included (Robert Altman, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Olafur Eliasson, Werner Herzog, Pierre Huyghe, Rem Koolhaas, Richard Prince, Ugo Rondinone...the list goes on.)




John Baldessari images from Broken Screen. Here's a great Baldessari quote: "The best way to make art is to intrigue and to be a bit seductive. You just say, here's this and this...you figure it out."

Aitken is a good interviewer and I believe the conversations took place either face to face or by telephone (maybe video hookup?). He's able to lob big theoretical questions at John Baldassari and then get all mushy-headed with Barney. And it works, they actually feel conversational. In fact I kept thinking, I'd love to hear these on a cd. Thay'd also be a good radio show -- Fresh Air for the art crowd.

There are some lovely anecdotes. I love this one from Robert Altman -- clearly a genius from what he says in this meaty interview, well, clearly a genius from his movies too--




Collage from the Robert Altman film Nashville.

Robert:...Let me tell you this story. I was a pilot in World War II and after the war we made a film about how pilots were trained. One of the things we showed was how a pilot had to go through dozens of steps in a very linear way to start the plane. Each pilot had a checklist so they could remember them all. But then we showed how some pilots had been trained to remember how to start the plane by visualizing sixteen images simultaneously, and on up to as many as 64. They actually learned faster and better that way than when the information was presented to them as a linear checklist. This made a big impression on me. I have come to think that this is true in everything from love to sports--in anything where you're doing lots of things simultaneously. It is like our sense of taste that I was talking about before. Fragments that give an overall impression are much more important to me in my work than the plot.

There's more quotable quotes on every page and overall I have to say thank you, Doug, for this valuable non-linear resource. It covers a lot of interesting territory and, when digested in small chunks, it's a totally satisfying read.



There's a Creative Time event in New York this weekend coinciding with the book launch. Artists Vito Acconci, Jeff Koons and Miranda July will speak with Doug in public conversations. Live music and film screenings included. NOTE: THIS JUST IN FROM CREATIVE TIME...The event is full and no more RSVP's are being entertained. We'll read all about it after the fact, since Brent Burket of Heart as Arena fame wrote us to say he is attending the Aitkins event. Brent runs the CT blog and I'll post a link to his coverage when it's up there.

Here's information on the book.

Broken Screen; Expanding the Image, Breaking the Narrative
By Doug Aitken
Published and Distributed by: Distributed Art Publishers, D.A.P.
288 Pages, 7 x 9.5 inches; 310 color images, 65 black and white
Price: $40.00
ISBN: 1933045264
(212) 627-1999

permanent link   roberta 8:46 AM
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Posted by libby

Geoffrey Hendricks
Originally uploaded by libbyrosof.

Out of the blue, I have picked myself up and somewhat belatedly posted pictures on my Flickr site from the weather-related exhibit Out of the Blue up at Abington, now in its final week.

It's a terrific show of a wide range of work, some new, some not-so-new, all related to weather and planet-related phenomena here on earth. It's also about creativity as a metaphor for weather (a stretch of curatorial creativity from Joy Episalla, Joy Garnett and Amy Lipton).

Anyway, I wanted to give the show another plug (here's Roberta's post). The exhibit is chock full of interesting work and ephemera from a phenomenal group including big names like Felix Gonzales Torres and Andrea Zittel to local names like Eileen Neff, Emily Brown and Diane Burko.

permanent link   libby 2:15 PM
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Posted by libby

DSCN7964
Originally uploaded by libbyrosof.

Stopping in with Roberta to see the installation at Black Floor Gallery by Swoon, Alison Corrie and Solovei, I couldn't help but mull over how this was part of an art trend.

The three women who created the phenomenal La Boca Del Lobo installation are part of a phalanx of artists now snipping, following the success of Kara Walker and her silhouettes. Other recent snippers I've seen include Hunter Stabler recently at Pageant (see posts here and here), and Sarah Daub at Vox and at Arcadia's Works on Paper Biennial.

Since paper cuttery has international traditions as well as Western ones, its time feels just right amid art-world and commercial globalism.

These wonderful white patterns cut out at Black Floor, by the way, took the three women a week to a week and a half (night and day), according to Nick Paparone of Black Floor.

The three artists call up witch-y mythology along with Greek as they beg borrow and steal from art history, in an intense ritualistic brew. Alas the show is over, but that it was here in Philadelphia at all is noteworthy.

Here's my flickr set of photos on this installation, and here's Roberta's post (which also leads to her flickr set).

permanent link   libby 10:40 AM
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