artblog (10 unread)

• 

  Letter From Paris: Markus Hansen?s Palindrome

  Posted: 28-February-2012, 6:22pm CET by matthew rose

  ?My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.? ? Woody Allen

  Markus Hansen, the Paris-based German artist, is trying in more than a decade?s worth of projects to see what it might be like to be someone else, and then to confront that very notion of being someone else. Using a Felix the Cat bag o? tricks to flesh out the narrative or even the feeling he?s someone else (you), one senses the tugging or nudging ? imagine Peter Pan?s moment he lost his shadow ? out of one?s singular identity.  It?s a bit more than hearing your voice on an answering machine, and a bit less than an LSD trip.  His work gives shape and form to the vagueness of sentiments like It?s hard to be you, I?m sure. Just as it?s hard to be me. Walk a mile in my shoes?  Sorry, I don?t want the shirt off your back. You?re one in a million. You?re special. Unique. There will never be another you. I did it my way. I?ve got to be me….  Hansen’s inquiry, I sense, concerns the mechanics of the examined life.

  

  Markus Hansen, ?Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves? (Chambre Miroir) 2005/2012.

  Each Man Kills The Thing He loves. (Chambre Miroir) is the artist?s most recent and perhaps most precise expression of our dependency on seeing limited versions of ourselves reflected in someone else?s eyes ? and of course our own.  Located in the artist?s Paris studio, the ?chambre? (room) is housed in its own modest white labyrinth. Constructed of plywood, a single, doorless entrance leads you and then leaves you with the choice of turning left or right, although neither direction seems to portend any advantage or disadvantage.  It is, as Hansen suggests, an architectural palindrome with rippling internal palindromes: Eve damned Eden, mad Eve.  Playing softly but consistently is the vaguely annoying song sung by Ingrid Caven from The Ballad of Reading Gaol (after Oscar Wilde).

  One follows a short corridor cushioned throughout with a common, office-style grey carpet, and we are suddenly in a room with a view: A hi-fi with a pair of speakers, and a spinning turntable; several wires flare out of the back of the turn table and a mirror behind the unit reflects the back of the turntable and high-fi with its inputs and wires. Or does it? You stand in front and examine the machine and then, of course, your reflection (my reflection).  The mirror is the sort you see in dressing rooms: Long and inexpensive, edged with metal and often fastened to a wall with clear plastic clamps or hooks.  The reflection has a slightly grayish tint to it. One problem: When I stand in front it, I?m nowhere to be found.

  

  Portrait of the artist: Markus Hansen, specialist in palindromes, in his Chambre Miroir in Paris.

  What is so wonderful about this piece is the insistence of that the illusion we can see is really an illusion concerning ourselves, particularly how we grasp the past and manage the present.  And it takes place in an instant and, as magic will have it, we need to dip into again.  I imagine it like your first pot high when you find yourself in front of a mirror for what seems like the very first time.

  The satisfying illusion harks back to the intimations of photography ? the expectation of realism ? that began, according to a controversial theory and book by David Hockney and a University of Arizona physicist Charles Falco (Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of Old Masters, 2001).  The book proposes that many Renaissance painters didn?t come by their ?perspective? through imagination but the vanishing point was conceived by use of lenses and mirrors. (See more here)

  Mirrors and self-deception are the province of most artists, of course ? illusionism in the package of Renaissance perspective (now no longer mined, interestingly enough) ? and we perhaps delight most when we are fooled.  Notably artists from da Vinci to Van Eyck to famously Hans Holbein to Manet on through to Escher and Michaelangelo Pistoletto and even Jeff Koons (think stainless steel balloon dog sculptures) continue to pack in the crowds.  (And even impersonators play off the mirror image concept ? check out Lorna Bliss impersonating Britney Spears in the barn burning ?Idol? knock-off, Britain?s Got Talent).

  Holbein The Younger?s The Ambassadors (at the National Gallery in London) resonates here because to fully understand that painting, one must approach it from about a 5-degree angle to see the skull in perspective ? perhaps the key to the entire work ? the rendezvous with death, the great equalizer and all that stuff.  With Hansen?s Each Man Kills (Chambre Miroir), we are distracted by sound and shades of white (inside the labyrinth), and then encouraged to examine our presence and absence from multiple angles.  An animated video on the artist’s website plays a bit with this idea, drawing in and pulling back, but it lacks the ?realism? of the illusion.

  Few works of art, in the end, are not ?reflections? of some kind ? whether sketches of skyscrapers in a puddle, or our tormented inner worlds in globs of paint on canvas.  As sentient beings, we seek to situate not just others but ourselves, and the reason might be simple: It is virtually impossible to see our whole beings in a mirror.  What we get, even with multiple mirrors is a fragment.  Only the other can see us fully, and yet we often say, they can?t see us at all.

  

  You, like me; me, like you: Markus Hansen's Other People's Feelings (2004-2012).

  I should also note a project Hansen launched in 2004 (and still ongoing)? Other People?s Feelings.  Here, in side by side portraits, the artist positions himself in relatively similar dress and more specifically similar facial gestures, with the idea to capture, in a flash, the mirror image of someone?s feelings, someone?s look.  Subjectivity is truth, here, even as we objectively scour the image for ?likeness? and incongruity. The examined life is indeed still worth living.

  Markus Hansen Web Site.

• 

  Not so ungovernable, the triennial roundup at the New Museum

  Posted: 29-February-2012, 6:15pm CET by libby and roberta

  When the New Museum created its signature show, the triennial of emerging artists,  in 2009, it laid claim to territory that was once the exclusive realm of the Whitney Biennial. The inaugural exhibit, “Younger Than Jesus” sprawled through the museum and actually had the feel of a Whitney Biennial — there were a lot of artists making sprawling installations, and you were familiar with a lot of the names.

  

  A group shot of some of the artists in the Ungovernables, at the New Museum.

  This year’s triennial “The Ungovernables” feels radically different. Here the New Museum separates itself from the Whitney by being truly global — with seemingly 99 percent of the artists from outside the US. It’s a decidedly downtown show, seemingly beholden to nobody but the museum and its mission to show art — lots of it political — from outside the normal channels.

  

  Artist Abigail DeVille in bling and prints, at the New Museum, was one of only two Americans in this very international show.

  We were happy to be introduced to the new names — and we came away more convinced than ever that art made anywhere in the world looks pretty much like art made any other place in the world.  Thank you Internet, or no thank you Internet.

  Performance, social networking; video; animation; politics; autobiographical documentation along with object-making and painting — it’s all here. And ironically given the show’s title, most of the pieces are quite polite and mannerly. If they are ungovernable, you wouldn’t for the most part know it.

  

  Abigail DeVille's Dark Day installation embedded in the wall on the stairwell between two floors--the dark side of bunking down out of sight.

  There are exceptions: The untamed installation “Dark Day” by Abigail DeVille in the stairwell between the 2nd and 3rd floor; and The Propeller group’s multi-channel video project about rebranding communism, especially the single piece that spoofs communism’s happy face.  There’s a subversive piece by Pilvi Takala, and while they aren’t really explosive or raucous, the video by Hassan Khan and the behemoth sculpture by Adrian Villar Rojas are notable, as is Gabriel Sierra’s take on a modest life in hiding, with elegant wall niches hiding tools.

  

  Gabriel Sierra, Untitled (the devil in shape of a ladder), one of a series of wall niches to hide tools--a take on the repressiveness of bunking down out of sight.

  DeVille, whom we know from her installation last summer at Marginal Utility, punched a hole into the ceiling above the alcove space and tunneled upward 30 feet into the building’s interstices. Using found materials gathered from the streets, she’s created a hive/cave with references to yesterday’s squats and todays tent cities with displaced, homeless, discarded people. It’s a poignant work, and visually stunning. We ran into Abigail when we were leaving the museum. We love her bling!

  

  Propeller Group, TVC Communism, 2011. The Vietnamese group rebrands communism with a smiley logo (the yellow object is part of it).

  The Ho Chi Mihn City Propeller Group’s 5-hour+ video installation shows people taking a meeting at an advertising agency. That is what it is and we didn’t spend more than a minute surrounded by the screens on their poles before we “got” the irony of the capitalist/communist meeting vibe. But we watched, over and over, the animation that seemingly resulted from the meeting, a wry piece of work that suggests without saying it that communism is a sham.

  

  Adrian Villar Rojas, A Person Loved Me, 2012 Clay, wood, metal, cement, styrofoam, burlap, sand, paint

  While it didn’t break new ground, the concrete and clay behemoth by Adrian Villar Rojas, “A Person Loved Me” is totally lovable. Made on site (well, next door at 231 Bowery, a building now owned by the Museum and used for projects), Love rises above you majestically and is a gorgeous object, cold and steely, and yet lumpy and frisky enough to be, we think, the show’s mascot.

  

  Shannon Bowser, chief preparator, New Museum, and former Philly-ite

  Lo and behold, it was in Love’s shadow that we ran into Shannon Bowser! Shannon, who used to be in Philadelphia, and is an awesome artist (making cement sculptures that had things like wheels on them), is now chief preparator at the New Museum. Congratulations Shannon!

  We also loved the video, Jewel, 2010, by Hassan Khan. Presented in a pitch dark room, it shows two men, one older and rotund, one younger and slim (are they father, son; uncle, nephew?) dressed in street garb and dancing to the mesmerizing sound of music we don’t think is really dance music, but is clearly Middle Eastern. The notes say the men are re-enacting historical Egyptian events. But the ambiguity and grace of their actions seems barely related to anything so humdrum as reality. If this piece is about gender, which it may or may not be, it’s also about stasis — the men stand in place while moving.

  And we must mention the project by Pilvi Takala, in which the Dutch artist inserted herself into an office of the accounting firm DeLoitte, and sat there thinking for days on end. Her office mates didn’t know what to make of her, but they were jealous. And nobody kicked her out. The hubris of this is what we like as much as the videos showing Takala sitting at her desk thinking–and not working on a computer.

  

  Dominique Ansel Bakery on Spring St. Wayne Thibaud world come alive!

  We saw the show on Valentine’s Day and have to share these little treats of the day. Pastries at the Dominique Ansel Bakery on Spring St. in the West Village (near enough to the Bolt Bus downtown stop to make a great coffee pit stop). And the abject lineup of guys outside a flower shop waiting to get their flowers for their sweeties. Only in NY would you see such a line, we believe.

  

  Valentine's Day lineup for flowers, on the Lower East Side.

  Monday we saw the Whitney Biennial and will tell you about that show in another post coming soon.

• 

  Down to earth drawings by Isis Shiffer at Strange Brew Coffee

  Posted: 27-February-2012, 11:53am CET by guest writer

  By Maegan Arthurs
  I am your typical homebody?I prefer a cozy night in to a rowdy night out nine times out of ten. Were there more events like New Drawings by Isis Shiffer, which opened February 3rd at Strange Brew Coffee, I might be tempted to change my ways. Located far off the traditional First Friday beaten track, Strange Brew is a fledgling coffee house and event venue/art gallery in South Philadelphia. On the evening of the opening, the venue was packed with friends, artists, musicians, neighbors and loved ones?the room was warm with mirth and fellowship. In addition to Shiffer?s exhibit, local musicians Christie Lenee and Susi Brown performed primarily acoustic sets blending percussive elements with inventive finger-plucking techniques. This carefree, loose soundscape harmonized with the exhibit to create a passionate atmosphere alive with energy.

  

  Isis Shiffer, idealized self portrait

  The space is small but full of promise. Co-owner/ proprietor and dear friend, Bobby Dombroski, fuses modern design with rustic vintage wood furnishings to create a funky, homey environment. This comfortable nook is, to my mind, the ideal setting for Shiffer?s intimate and personal works. The show comprises 26 drawings, portraits, still life and landscape, done in charcoal on paper. Simply installed throughout the space, the pieces are unframed which lends an approachable, unstuffy feel?the viewer is beckoned to come closer and absorb each one contemplatively. Sensitively rendered, Shiffer utilizes subtle mark-making, soft gesture and a dash of quirk to imbue her works with emotion.

  

  Isis Shiffer, Nathan the Idealist, detail

  Shiffer?s portraits struck me for their candid and playful representations. The subjects are friends and family members whom Shiffer has captured in honest moments revealing their individual peculiarities. ?Nathan the Idealist? glances to the right, hand on chin, eyes bright and musing. ?Mary the Bold,? in contrast, locks gaze with the viewer. Her face emerges from the grey paper; rosy-cheeked, strong and quiet at once. ?Josh, Recently Returned? gazes to the right with an expression keen yet sobered. The mysterious title leaves me wondering where he has returned from. The rendering gives the impression of a transformation.

  

  Isis Shiffer, One carving I have not finished...

   

  A still life titled, ?One Carving I Have Not Finished, Two Books I Have Not Read,? speaks of the struggle of the creative process. Shiffer’s unfinished projects fill the foreground; in the background the artist looks upon her own reflection, determined. She seems to be challenging herself onward while also acknowledging her failures for what they are?a necessary step on the way to growth. As an aspiring ceramic sculptor, I truly relate to Shiffer in this piece.

  

  Though some might claim that Shiffer’s traditional style is outmoded in today’s world of irony-laden imagery, I disagree. She documents a seemingly ordinary moment in time and elevates it to the numinous. Her work is fresh, unpretentious and accessible. The crowd at Strange Brew on opening night was not full of stiff upper lips– rather, Shiffer (and Strange Brew) take art out of the formidable gallery and bring it to the neighborhood.

  Isis Shiffer, a PAFA graduate, lives and works in Philadelphia. “New Drawings by Isis Shiffer” will be on display until March 31st at Strange">[www.facebook.com] Brew Coffee on 2nd and Reed Streets in the Pennsport section of South Philadelphia.

  –Maegan Arthurs is a senior fine art’s and English major at St. Joseph’s University.  Her senior thesis show is this April.

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  The Bowery gets more art ? Jon Kessler at Salon 94 and Marble at Sperone Westwater

  Posted: 25-February-2012, 4:31pm CET by libby and roberta

  With the New Museum as anchor, galleries big and small are flocking to the Lower East Side giving it a brand new feel.  Not quite the Mall of the Bowery but getting there.   So on our visit to see The Ungovernables, the second roundup of emerging artists at the museum, we stopped at a couple of nearby galleries, steered by our friend, Hrag Varganian of Hyperallergic, who we ran into and who seems to have his pulse on the scene, for sure.

  

  Jon Kessler, The Blue Period installation detail at Salon 94, with Roberta and cut-out figure.

  The Blue Period, a wild, immersive installation by Brooklyn-based artist Jon Kessler fills the downstairs space at Salon 94. The installation –blue paint spatters everywhere, augmented with blaring sounds, dematerializing images of masked portraits in frames, in-your-face corporate-style surveillance cameras and life-size, trompe l’oeil cut-out mannequins – is low-art disco mall culture.  It’s got the super cool affect of an Apple store, all the frozen geniuses caught mid-thought, and the pulsing electronic urgency of a club, or maybe an Abercrombie and Fitch on a Saturday afternoon.  Surveillance? It’s a little like the overkill security of one-time mall magnet  The Sharper Image trying to protect the high-end merchandise from wandering off to Wendy’s.

  The crowded space is confrontational–it’s hard not to bump into things. And the cardboard cut-outs look like they are gazing at art in a gallery. Doh.  Or maybe you’ve just asked them a question about Walter Benjamin and they are working on a pithy reply.

  

  Jon Kessler, The Blue Period, installation detail at Salon94. The HDTVs and surveillance tvs mixed up faces inside the room and others from elsewhere--reality and unreality tv.

  High-definition television screens as well as a bank of surveillance monitors project the swiveling cameras’ views. If you’re in the room, you’re on the screens, where it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. Surveillance has been turned into entertainment. (Should we take that as commentary on the internet?) YouTube and Facebook self-absorption has found a new outlet, without the joy (is there joy–we’re not sure; there’s glee, but that’s different).

  

  Jon Kessler, The Blue Period, installation detail with cardboard figure wearing facepaint

  Many of the cardboard figures sport blue stripes or masks on their cheeks–perhaps a way to foil face recognition software (see artblog’s post on anti-face-recognition tactics by Corey Armpriester). The paranoia and discomfort of the milieu seem all the more appropriate amid this week’s revelation that Google has been violating privacy agreements it had with Firefox — to say nothing of Google’s infiltration of Safari.

  Upstairs, the gallery showed a few discrete kinetic pieces also by Kessler. But the real energy of Kessler’s art is in the installation.

  

  Tom Sachs, Brute, 2009-10, marble, 32 x 25 inches

  Like we said, Hrag Vartanian steered us to the new Chelsea-implant to the Lower East Side, Sperone Westwater.  The gallery moved itself lock, stock, and barrel to a beautifully appointed five-story gallery space on The Bowery, with elevator or stair options.

  We saw two nice high-end shows–”Marble Sculpture from 350 B.C. to Last Week” and “Portraits/Self-Portraits from the 16th to the 21st Century” — and the high points were the marble works on the ground floor and balcony. As the title suggests, the work spanned the centuries, from a Roman bust and one from the Baroque era with amazing curled hair and drapery to a Rubbermaid garbage can by Tom Sachs.

  

  Fabio Viale, Infinite, 2011, marble, 25 x 57 inches diameter

  

  Marble show, notable for the range of objects packed side by side into Sperone Westwater's gallery

  

  Ai Weiwei's doors of perception, spookier than many of the other things in the show.

  Also noteworthy were a series of doors by Ai Weiwei, a gorilla head on a platter, with tour-de-force carvings of surgical gloves, by Bertozzi & Casoni, and a pair of marble interlocked car tires by Fabio Viale.

  The two exhibits come down today, Feb. 25.

• 

  News ? Cecelia Fitzgibbon to Moore, Tim Miller performance canceled by Villanova, and more!

  Posted: 24-February-2012, 12:06pm CET by chip schwartz

  News

  Cecelia Fitzgibbon named Moore President

  

  Cecelia Fitzgibbon

  Moore College of Art & Design has selected Cecelia Fitzgibbon as the school’s new president. Fitzgibbon, Director of Drexel’s Graduate Arts Administration Program, will succeed Dr. Happy Fernandez who has been president at Moore since 1999.  Fitzgibbon steps in at Moore in July.

  artblog news
  Check out our new features on artblog’s front page. First, in the bottom of the right column are feeds from Libby and Roberta’s Pinterest boards.  Don’t expect wedding planning or cute design things, but interesting articles and other stuff from around the web. Second, our RSS feeds in the left column now include Texas powerhouse blog, Glasstire, and Drexel literary and culture magazine Smart Set.  And, in case you’re missing the news post, we have that crucial Friday update in the top left of the blog, where it sits all week long!

  Tim Miller performance canceled at Villanova
  You probably heard about gay performance artist Tim Miller, who had his upcoming event at Villanova University abruptly canceled by President Rev. Peter M. Donahue without cause. Rumors on blogs of Miller’s anti-Catholic sentiments, which he says are lies, are the likely cause. Andrew Suggs of Vox Populi told us he will be extending an invitation to Miller to perform at their AUX performance space.

  ICA People’s Conference
  In conjunction with the People’s Biennial, Haverford College and the Institute of Contemporary Art are hosting the People’s Conference this weekend.  Friday’s session (that’s today) is at Haverford College’s Sharpless Auditorium at 4:30 PM and Saturday’s session is at ICA from 11 AM – 5 PM. Curators Jens Hoffman and Harrell Fletcher will be there along with participants from ICI, PEW and Creative Time curator Nato Thompson — who told us, maybe in jest (we’re not sure) that he’ll be talking about Republican political operative Carl Rove as an artist!

  Kehinde Wiley at the Jewish Museum

  

  Kehinde Wiley, "Leviathan Zodiac (The World Stage: Israel)", 2011.

  Renowned new school portrait painter Kehinde Wiley has 14 large-scale paintings on display at the Jewish Museum from March 9 – July 29. Wiley’s usual focus is on young, black males, but he was commissioned by the Jewish Museum to extend his scope for this exhibit to depict Israeli youth. Roughly two-thirds of the portraits in the Israel series are of Ethiopian Jews, others are of native-born Jews and Arab Israelis.

  Inscrutable mix of artists and show title
  An upcoming show at Sugar – 12 W. Willow Grove Avenue in Chestnut Hill – features Philadelphia abstract painter Douglas Witmer and West Coast cartoon and word artist Timothy Buckwalter with local conceptual phenom Michael Macfeat. This show of an intriguing group of artists has an equally intriguing title: “Crystal Days”. The reception is March 3 from 5 – 7 PM. For additional information call (267) 312-2686.

  GPTMC meetings With Art
  With Art Philadelphia, the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation’s campaign to get the word out on the wonders of the local art scene, has some public meetings coming up in which you can get your two cents worth in about how to market Philly as the next art destination.  If you heard about the meetings before, make note that today’s meeting at the Crane at 8:30am is cancelled. Here’s the list of the rest of the With Art Philadelphia community meetings as follows, and you can RSVP here.

  • Wednesday, February 29: 10:00 ? 11:30am, Institute of Contemporary Art ? 118 S. 36th St.
  • Monday, March 12: 2:00 ? 3:30pm, Brandywine Workshop ? 728 S. Broad St.
  • Friday, March 16: 10:00 ? 11:30am, The Clay Studio ? 139 N. 2nd St.
  • Monday, March 19: 2:00 ? 3:30pm, The Leeway Foundation ? 1315 Walnut St. #832
  • Friday, March 23: 10:00 ? 11:30am, Fleisher Art Memorial ? 719 Catharine St.

  Possible Projects video storefront
  You’ve heard of drive-in movies, well what about drive by movies? Possible Projects at 873 East Thompson Street is having a storefront video display nightly from 6 – 9 PM until March 17. The first week’s video There is This House by Nanna Debois Buhl ends on February 25. Other films to be shown are by Anne Eastman, Derek Frech, and Oliver Laric.

  Art Loft PA
  Art Loft PA is holding a salon Saturday, Feb. 25 from 6 – 9 PM. RSVP here (it’s mandatory!) There will be a variety of figurative art by Jeff Wallin, Rogelio Manzo, and Sienna Freeman as well as music by Brendan Burke and a performance by Laura Ann Samuelson.

  Opportunities

  Kutztown University thought its residency program was over, but voila, but they pulled it out for one more year and pumped up the stipend! This is very new news and additional information will be forthcoming. The residency includes a $10,000 stipend, plus housing and travel expenses.

  Independent Curators International is offering an intensive course called Contemporary Curatorial Practice from July 8 – 17 2012 in New York. It costs $1,900 but there are generous scholarships available to four participants.  They are looking for outside the box thinking, all you DIY curators.

  Artist News

  Rob Matthews‘ solo show,”The Vanishing Middle Ground,” opens March 1 in Chelsea at Daniel Cooney Fine Art.

  

  Dona Nelson, "Spacey Characters"

  Dona Nelson is featured in the 3rd edition of Salon Zürcher‘s mini art fair starting March 5 in New York.  Nelson is the featured artist of Thomas Erben gallery.

  Kevin Finklea has an upcoming solo show at Fred Giampietro Gallery in New Haven, CT opening on April 20 and Everything Nothing Projects in Canberra, Australia  (dates TBA) with Louise Blyton.

  

  Andrew Jeffrey Wright Fashion Week 2012 - "Gnarfield"

  Andrew Jeffrey Wright introduces Fashion Week 2012! For the next 4 days Store 1026 will release 6 new t-shirts silk screened by AJW himself. We want to see catwalk videos!

  Peter Rose has lots going on out of town. There is a juror screening March 28 at 12:30 at Ann Arbor Film Festival; ”Conflation”, a video installation made with Mark Campbell and Anthony Angelicola at the Rowan University Art Gallery opening on March 26; and a two-part retrospective at Anthology Film Archives in NYC.

  The Painting Center has an upcoming 3-person show with Arden Bendler Browning, Rebecca Rutstein, and Charles Burwell, all represented by Bridgette Mayer gallery.  That show opens February 28.

  Tim Eads just launched the website for The Taxonomy of Trash, a project to turn trash into cash.  We like the enterprising spirit! Tim is also in the group show Contraptions, a show at Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts that has a lot of good people in it.

  Alison Stigora created a ceiling-hung installation as part of the set for an upcoming performance at Painted Bride Art Center.  As the dance moves out into the audience, so does Stigora’s piece, to create a total environment.

  

  Marta Sanchez, "Retablo for the Women of Juarez"

  Marta Sanchez is showing in NYC as part of the We Are You Project which has an opening on March 18  from 3:00 ? 6:00 PM.

  Dan Papa is currently organizing and shooting his upcoming independent film MAYA which is being filmed in West Philly and elsewhere around the city.

  Got news?  Deadline to submit news items is Wednesday 12 PM.  We will consider them for our Friday news post.
  email libbyrosof@gmail.com and robertafallon@gmail.com 

  Got a show you want us to consider for our picks?  Deadline is 9 AM Monday prior to First Friday, every month.
  email libbyrosof@gmail.com and robertafallon@gmail.com

• 

  And the band came marching in ? at Hauser and Wirth! A Friday picture post

  Posted: 24-February-2012, 12:12pm CET by stefan zebrowski-rubin

  [Ed. note-This is a new Friday feature, a picture post on a day we publish the news post in the left column.  Short and visually spiffy.  A good way to begin the weekend!]  Just as I was leaving the preview for the dual shows of Michael Raedecker and Mary Heilmann at Hauser and Wirth, a band came marching in. Literally. The Royal British Legion Band, complete with drums and brass instruments and drum major, processed right into the middle of the room of Raedecker’s work. Perhaps just a festive acknowledgement of Mardi Gras, it definitely was a fun and unexpected interruption to the gallery routine. The varied crowd, already buzzing at the opening, had just that much more to buzz about, smiling. It certainly ended the night with a bang.

  

   

   

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  A Love Letter to Rocks and Wood - Totems and Topographies by Samantha Dylan Mitchell 

  Posted: 23-February-2012, 6:36pm CET by guest writer

  By Ben Meyer

  The latest works by my friend and former classmate at Oberlin College, Samantha Dylan Mitchell are currently exhibited at the Grizzly Grizzly gallery in the 319 N. 11th St. warehouse, which also houses the Vox Populi gallery. Her show, entitled “Totems and Topgraphies,” seems like a breath of bracing formality in comparison with most of the neighboring free-form and mixed-media shows currently inhabiting the building (see the awesome untitled geodesic dome in V.P., for example).

  

  Samantha Dylan Mitchell, Old House Trashscape

  A dozen neatly framed ink drawings circle the walls of the Grizzly gallery, including portraits of petrified wood, mountain landscapes and a picture of a collapsed house on top a pile of garbage at a landfill.

  Their presentation may be formal, but Samantha Mitchell’s approach to what she called ‘abstract landscapes and natural portraiture’ feels compelling and new. Her meticulously detailed drawings can expose the symmetry in the face of a piece of wind-swept water-battered rock that?s often obscured by nature’s chaos. She makes radical shifts in scale from piece to piece that highlight correspondences between the pieces of wood, rock and earth she examines. A massive mountain landscape is dissected crag by crag and drawn line by line, exactly like the infinite variety of crevices and cracks in the fist-sized rock hanging beside it.

  

  Samantha Dylan Mitchell, Pink Landscape

  A degree of perfectionism is evident in all of these detailed and intricate drawings. But while the magnified studies of petrified wood are realistic, they’re also alive with that indefinable whimsical strangeness of nature. You can tell Samantha Mitchell that a piece of wood looks like a duck or a flying skull or a mountain looks like a donkey and she’ll laugh. It’s obvious that the attempt at verisimilitude in capturing the literally infinite detail in just a tiny rock or pieces of wood has forced Mitchell to confront the unconquerable in artistic representation, but she’s come away with works that successfully captures the chaotic patterns of natural forces. In addition to her drawing, she also works with wood – at her opening at Grizzly Grizzly, she told this writer that she made all of her pieces’ frames herself, using pine, poplar and sassafrass wood.

  

  Samantha Dylan Mitchell, Old Wood Butte

  Mitchell’s technique’s ongoing evolution is evinced by her most recent work, where wood has literally become the medium in a series of multi-toned woodblock prints. One of these, Static Shift 2, went up Feb. 16 at the Woodmere Museum in Chestnut Hill, as part of an Elaine Kurtz retrospective open through April 22, which includes the works of local artists operating in a similar vein to Kurtz.

  Mitchell is a 2nd-year MFA student at PAFA who graduated from Oberlin College in 2008. The Grizzlies are hosting her work after she won their annual juried exhibition, ?Other Possible Titles,? in November 2011. A large detailed face portrait by Mitchell was previously shown in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in 2009, but this is her first solo show since moving to Philadelphia.

  The last day to see Totems and Topographies at Grizzly Grizzly is Saturday Feb. 25 from 2 to 6 pm. For more information, visit  [samanthadylanmitchell.net] .

  Ben Meyer is a writer living in Philadelphia who graduated from Oberlin College in 2008.

• 

  Constructing stories from Degrees of Abstraction at UD Crane

  Posted: 23-February-2012, 1:49pm CET by chip schwartz

  Degrees of Abstraction at The University of Delaware at the Crane features work by a number of UDel MFA alumni who explore materials and the use of resources to raise issues about the earth’s natural bounties, and our capacity for scientific inquiry.  Lest you think this is all dry goods, there are personal and communal stories, structural compositions, and functional recycled goods on view. Curated by Dr. Vicky A. Clark of Clarion University, the show includes work by Mark Franchino, Matthew Gehring, Jim Lee, Jennifer O?Neill, Greg Rubio, Shawn Williams, Deborah Winram and Jim Zeske.

  

  Deborah Winram, "Keepsake"

  Deborah Winram?s installation ?Keepsake? is reminiscent of something one would discover in a 19th Century laboratory or a natural history museum. The scientific overtones place this work within the sometimes overlapping fields of science and art, specifically biology. The seven-tiered shelf filled with identical glass jars contains a collection of small trinkets, many of which are shells, eggs, or other specimens. Thinking of Fibonacci spirals or smooth, elliptical egg shapes, the question of where art ends and nature begins comes to the forefront. In some of the jars there are also objects like vintage photographs, specimens of more personal, human histories. Winram demonstrates how collections of keepsakes or informative displays of nature both achieve a certain aesthetic sensibility when curated in their own right.

  

  Shawn Williams, "Push pull"

  Works by Shawn Williams and Mark Franchino are in some ways closely related. Both artists deal with issues of waste and resource usage through ideas surrounding construction and housing and America?s tendency toward a disposable, throwaway society. And both utilize wood in a structural fashion, which brings up the idea of raw materials. Williams makes frame-like forms out of boards and places pixilated images of actual construction scenes within them. One, called ?Push pull,? is tilted and held up by rope, mimicking the angle of the building materials in the image. Franchino uses higher quality hardwood to produce small representations of dumpsters. Not only would utilizing such fine quality materials for a trash receptacle be a true waste, but the containers themselves would be better as magazine racks than waste receptacles.

  

  One of Mark Franchino's wooden dumpsters

  A small house made from white paperboard stands suspended on top of two long strands of yellow yarn in Jim Zeske?s piece ?Plane of Immanence.” It is one of the more visually intriguing components of the show, and also lends itself to the structural themes found in Williams? and Franchino?s work. One of the first impressions the piece conveys is danger. Instead of a steady foundation, the only supports for this house are two thin lines of fabric. The structure balances precariously, and if it were a real residence, walking out the door would almost surely result in a fatal fall. It seems to be a sort of challenge to a culture in which we grow more isolated from our neighbors and communities in favor of nuclear families and the false security of giant, cookie-cutter homes. The strings themselves bring to mind power lines or the connectivity of modern technology. Information sharing and the internet, while no substitute for actual human contact, are certainly revolutionizing the way we live and communicate.

  

  Jim Zeske, "Plane of Immanence"

  Jim Lee has an entire portion of one large wall devoted to his abstract cutouts on the lower level of the two-floor show. Jennifer O?Neill and Matthew Gehring?s works polarize one another: While Gehring?s three-dimensional black forms protrude from the walls, O?Neill?s photographic prints are flat, and the x-ray style images appear as a white-on-black negative of Gehring?s sculptures. Greg Rubio presents functional archery targets made out of recycled clothing and fabric.

  It’s a multi-faceted, yet coherent show.

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  Marvels and Monsters at the Asian Arts Initiative

  Posted: 22-February-2012, 12:15pm CET by alyssa greenberg

  ?This is more about the history of America than anything else,? says Jeff Yang, curator of Marvels and Monsters, gesturing to the roomful of garish, pulpy comic book imagery. After spending time in the exhibition at Asian Arts Initiative this much is clear — fear and anxiety often prevail as a cultural force. We constantly project our insecurities into mass culture, scapegoating one group or another as the mysterious other.

  Marvels and Monsters: Unmasking Asian Images in U.S. Comics showcases what is possibly the world?s largest and only collection of Asian portrayals in comic books. Gathered by science fiction author and cultural studies scholar William F. Wu and curated by journalist Jeff Yang (who also co-curated this exhibition with D. Daniel Kim), the collection is housed in the NYU Fales Library & Special Collections and was donated with the help of the A/P/A Institute. Spanning the years 1942 to 1986, the Wu collection highlights the trajectory of xenophobic stereotypes of Asians into the mainstream American culture via comic books, once one of the most widespread forms of entertainment and cultural influence on young minds.  Marvels and Monsters was shown at the Fales Library in 2011.

  

  Detail, "The Temptress."

  With the end of America?s Asian wars and the rise of Asian immigration into the country, the ugly typecasting of Asians in comics waned. But many of the images calcified into ideas that continue to surface from time to time. Some, like ?The Kamikaze,? were more intrinsically tied to World War II, but others, like ?The Temptress,? are all too familiar to anyone who?s watched a Tarantino film.

  

  Detail, "The Manipulator."

  This is an exhibition that thrives on both reaction and nuance.  As starkly derogatory as most of the images are, the curators took care to include positive portrayals such as Wing (the DC Comics sidekick and valet to the Crimson Avenger notable for a characterization of bravery and social conscience).

  Both a large section of the exhibition and the talk I attended by curator Yang focused heavily on positive changes in the comics industry and the ability of artists to not only dismantle negative stereotypes, but play with them for their own purposes. The talk included a review of the history of Asians working in the comics industry in which Yang tied the rise of a fresh young cadre of Asian-American artists to the emergence of comics as a positive cultural force.

  

  Talk by curators D. Daniel Kim and Jeff Yang.

  The exhibition is heavily interactive; in addition to life-size cutouts and a ?Shades of Yellow? display that shows the garish Pantone colors used for Asian skin tones in comics, there is a ?talk-back? wall and a book cart stocked with the work of recent Asian-American creators. People?s feedback ranged from disgust at the bigotry that was once par for the course in comics to beaming acknowledgment of how far we have come vis-à-vis tolerance. Looking at the crowd around me at the talk, I saw that the mood seemed balanced between bemusement and shock. I was unfamiliar with several of the archetypes, and with comics in general, but recognized that many of the depicted stereotypes have inundated mainstream movies, books and TV shows. It is impossible to leave the show without some sort of new awareness.

  

  Life-size cutouts.

  Combining visual arts practice with storytelling, the exhibit allows people to literally step back and take in what is admittedly only a sample of Wu?s collection, but is still considerable in scope. Larry Hama, a veteran comics artist and one of the many sources cited in the text accompanying the displays, describes the comics industry as a remarkably accepting community — the creators are known for their trailblazing in breaking ethnic and racial stereotypes, and there is ample room for creators such as Jim Cheung (best known for his work on the Marvel series New Avengers and the Crossgen series Scion) to flourish and influence up-and coming artists. The challenge is to reconcile his account of the comics industry with the images of ignorance and fear that were once ubiquitous.

  And check out the programs scheduled around the exhibition on the AAI website, including these two:
  Round Table Panel Discussion: Thursday Mar 1, 6-8pm (FREE)
  Family Style Open Mic featuring Larry Hama, Friday Feb. 17, 7:30-9:30pm Admission: $5-10 Sliding Scale

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  Van Gogh Up Close at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

  Posted: 21-February-2012, 2:25pm CET by andrea kirsh

  Most visitors to Van Gogh Up Close at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA, through May 6, 2012, then at the co-organizing museum, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa,   May 25 – Sept. 3, 2012) will be excited simply to see a large number of paintings by Van Gogh; he?s the artist most guaranteed to draw crowds and to send them home happy.  This doesn?t pretend to be a survey of his work. It is, rather, a carefully-curated theme exhibition about an aspect of Van Gogh’s work that has, until now, been unexplored: the artist?s novel exploration of the closely-focused view. For the serious visitor, it offers both challenges and rewards, as the true subject is Van Gogh’s exploration of both vision and representation.

  

  Vincent Van Gogh ?Vineyards with a View of Auvers? 64 x 80 cm, St. Louis Art Museum

  The paintings were produced during a time of changing visual culture, itself the product of increased trade and new technologies. Van Gogh responded, in particular, to three issues that engaged many artists of his day: an increased understanding of the science of vision, and color in particular; the opening of Japan, and the resulting circulation of Japanese prints; and the development of photography. The exhibition situates Van Gogh very clearly within this matrix by including a selection of Japanese prints he was know to have owned, and a group of photographs of trees and flowers, by mid 19th century photographers who are not well-known beyond specialists.

  

  Vincent Van Gogh ?Undergrowth? 49 x 64 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

  Van Gogh Up Close demonstrates three aspects of the artist?s practice that will interest serious students of painting. The first is that, despite creating the appearance of spontaneity, by the time he started painting Van Gogh had an extremely clear image of each composition, down to all the details; this is indicated by the very, very few instances of compositional changes that are found in his work. I found only one obvious pentimento (a change made during painting), revealed by heavily textured brush-strokes in one direction which are covered by brush-strokes in another.  It appears in Iris (Ottawa, below) in the area at the top, between the stalks, and it is not absolutely clear what the original idea was (as it is an another painting of irises owned by the Getty, where Van Gogh painted a stalk and afterwards painted an open bloom on top of it).

  

  Vincent Van Gogh ?Iris? 62.2 x 48.3 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

  The second aspect of Van Gogh?s technique which is clearly revealed throughout the exhibition is that almost all the paintings were created over multiple campaigns of work, again, despite their spontaneous, pleine-air look. While Van Gogh worked with wet-in-wet paint in many instances, he almost always returned to the paintings after the initial layer of thick and textured paint had dried (which may have taken weeks). Frequently he added outlines of very dark blue (or occasionally a brick red) to tighten up the forms, as well as making other additions over paint that had dried.

  

  Vincent Van Gogh ?Ears of Wheat? 64.5 x 48.5 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

  The third intriguing aspect of Van Gogh?s work is evident in only a few paintings which, rather startlingly, have no discernible focal point. They are the sort of all-over painting we associate with Abstract Expressionism; Pollock avant la lettre. Examples are Ears of Wheat, several paintings of undergrowth (both above; the exhibition contains a variant of Undergrowth, also from the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam), Acacias in Flower (Stockholm) and Dandelions (Winterthur). While the exhibition is organized around paintings which emphasize a close view, either zooming in on details or distant views in which there is equal focus on fore, middle, and backgrounds, that is not equivalent to these more radical, all-over compositions.  Most of the close up compositions delineate forms by color, if not by increased clarity of focus, so that, while rejecting conventional devices to indicate recession, they still retain fore and back-grounds. The subjects of the all-over paintings exist in an undifferentiated space.

  

  Vincent Van Gogh ?Rain? 73.3 x 92,4 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

  Two of my all-time very favorite paintings are included in the curators? list of close-ups: Rain (PMA), and the larger version of Undergrowth (above, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam).  I have tried to understand why they have such a hold on my imagination, when I wouldn?t usually describe Van Gogh as one of my favorite painters. I think it’s because both are attempts to represent atmosphere, rather than objects. In one case it is the sense of rain that activates ambient space, in the other it’s the play of light in a mostly dark and visually indistinct area beneath the woods.  In these works Van Gogh paints the un-seeable, and in doing so evokes the other senses through which we perceive such phenomena: touch and sound. These paintings of no-things make us aware of the complexity of our perceptions.

  One response to the exhibition surprises me, since the PMA usually installs work so beautifully that their efforts don?t show. I never thought I would complain of too much light on artworks (as a viewer, that is; as a curator I know better), yet a number of the paintings are so brightly lit that at first glance, the light bounces off the impasto, which becomes more prominent than the composition; I found it distracting. But this is a small quibble concerning a revelatory exhibition.