Just like the WPA photographers taking pictures of Dust Bowl lives, Zoe Strauss takes pictures of the stuff from which we avert our eyes in Philadelphia and its environs--the crack pipers, the shabby commercial and personal signage, the detritus of lives badly lived, the people bearing the scratchmarks of life on their sleeves.

Strauss brought her images to a new venue and a new format yesterday (top image, at far left that's Strauss working the Power Point presentation). She sent out invitations to attend a couple of showings of six brief slide shows at a former settlement house on Front Street near Washington. In years past, she had set up her computer-print-out photos on the columns holding up I-95 around 15 blocks further south (see post on her previous show).

What they are adds up to a documentary of what we avert our eyes to, what we see but filter out.

Telling the forest from the trees

Which reminds of Oliver Sacks's point (he spoke at Arcadia this week; I didn't hear him but I've read much of his popular writing) about sight and how the brain sorts out what you see. People who gain sight after a lifetime of blindness find the new experience daunting--their brains were unprepared for all the sensory input from their eyes, and can't tell the forest from the trees. So there's a sense in which Strauss is photographing the individual trees and the individual leaves that our brains have learned to filter out so we can focus on making sense of the big picture and organize what we see.

At the picture show

At Strauss's picture show, there were Roberta and I and an assemblage of other people, some of whom we know--like photographer Ditta Baron Hoeber and her husband Frank, installation artist Kevin Reay, photographer Eileen Neff, artist Randall Sellers, curator Richard Torchia--and many (maybe 60 or so) whom we didn't know, sitting on little folding chairs, while mistress of ceremonies Strauss, with a humorous take on a school marm, told people to hush up or else. In between she danced to the music while operating Power Point like a dj. At the end she raised her hands in victory (miserable blurry image right) as we all madly applauded.

The music ranged from Tom Petty's "American Girl" to Goodie Mob's "Black Ice" to Billie Holiday's "You're My Thrill," and the images with the music were just right. The photos (color computer print-outs) sell for $5. each, and even if you missed the show, you can order from Strauss' Web site.

Strauss served up free refreshments, too, that are worth mentioning--including home-made baked goods with her logo "PAP" dusted on with powdered sugar and Canfield's diet chocolate-cherry soda. Now that's class. (No one's ever going to believe a word I say from here on out because of that endorsement, but as I tried to explain to a scornful Roberta, I often get chocolate and cherry water ice together in a cup at John's).

Roberta said she felt like we were at a drive-in movie. Good call.

The medium is the message

I couldn't help but think of the contrast between Strauss' democratic approach to art-making and display and the new Terry Adkins show up at the swank new gallery at 6th and Bainbridge. This comparison is not a judgment but praise for both, because I love both bodies of work, and the medium is the message in both cases (which is what modern art is all about anyway).

I'm playing catch up again. Here are a few things from the inbox that have me excited.

Morris Gallery update

PAFA Curator Alex Baker says he's signed up Eamon Ore-Giron for a Morris Gallery exhibit in March, 2005. Ore-Giron was featured in the Arizona exhibit, "Broken Western," at 222 Gallery last year. See my post. I loved the work I saw -- paintings of cars and tanks and trucks that looked like they were made from wood -- it turned them all into coffins of a sort. Virtuoso painting. (top image is an Ore-Giron)



And in 2006 (it's almost 2005, so can 2006 be far behind?) Baker has slotted one of our favorite local video artists, Nadia Hironaka. I love Hironaka's work in general and love her new three channel piece at Vox Populi -- for its sheer beauty and its ambitious, 3-channel narrative. Read Libby's post and my PW review for different takes on the work. (right is detail from "Prism")

He loves us in Belgium


The email subject line said "check it out!" and I almost threw it in the spam folder but since I work on a mac and don't have virus problems I opened the link. To my delight, I found a photo blog, happy famous artists by Antwerp, Belgium, artist Fred Michiels. Great images and links to shows, artist's sites and other interesting stuff. And he's included artblog in his array. We're most happy -- if not famous, yet.

From Michiel's list, I spent some happy time with

eboy (image is from the pop-ish, digi-art site)
kraftwerke
Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Just kidding on LW, but he sure enough is in the links. Fallon and Rosof's artblog is at the very bottom if you're looking.

Peter Rose seeks Ithaca in Conshohocken


The PMA is debuting a new video by excellent local film and video guy
Peter Rose. The piece, filmed in a parking garage in Conshohocken and titled "Odysseus in Ithaca," is up now to Jan 2. Read PMA info here. (image is video still from "Ithaca")

It's good and about 10-minutes long. I'll tell you more in another post.

Also coming soon to the PMA, Bill Viola's "The Greeting," the slo-mo technicolor video projection based on a Piero della Francesca painting (if memory serves). I saw it at the FWM in 1995 and at Viola's retrospective at the Whitney and it's a stunner of ambiguity and fluidity. (image)


The work is on loan from the Whitney. I don't know where the PMA will be putting it but I suspect in the contemporary galleries, which have a room closed for installation at the moment.

"The Greeting" will be at the PMA in conjunction with the Pontormo, Bronzino and the Medicis exhibit opening Nov. 4. (Read more on that here) It seems to me a good pairing of old and new -- like the weaving together of old and new art in the African art exhibit. A museological trend? See Libby's post for more on the Africa show.


Get Optimistic

Matthew Sepielli of the online gallery the Vacuum has co-organized (with Jeff McMahon) a painting salon for the month of November at a little gallery in a house at 708 South Washington Square, The Optimistic. The show, "Possibilities in Painting" includes a bunch of Tyler-schooled painters and teachers and opens First Friday. Catch it at the opening or call McMahon to make an appointment. 215-888-4350. The Optimistic had a very nice exhibit of work by retired Tyler prof and color guru, Richard Cramer and his students last year. Here's my PW sketch. Maybe Cramer will have work in the show? I hope so.

For more on the Vacuum read my post.

That's it for now. There's so much more going on here it's overwhelming!

A swell-looking new gallery opened its doors last night just south of South Street.

And its first show is a knockout, thanks to the presence of the work of sculptor Terry Adkins, whose large music-related pieces plus other work fill the two spacious rooms. Adkins, a professor of sculpture at the University of Pennsylvania, had a show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1999, and last year at Eastern State Penitentiary. He shows at P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York.

The new gallery, Pageant, is at 607 Bainbridge Street, 215 925 1535.

Adkins, who is also a composer, is offering three pieces of music at the gallery, one of which, "Cathedral," was to be premiered some time this evening (I couldn't stay, alas). But two others will be performed during the course of the show. On the schedule are "Pinewood Air," Tuesday, Nov. 23, and "Firmament," Friday Dec. 17, both at 7:20 p.m.


The exhibit "Black Beethoven: Recital in Nine Dominions" will remain open until Dec. 31. I have to go back and really give the work a good look, but what I saw in just a brief time bowled me over. By the way, this enormous music-roll looking piece (left) does turn and does make noise.

One day, I'll get my facts straight. However, yesterday was not the day (image, Isaac Resnikoff's "Electoral College Mascot").

I got two notes, one from artist Isaac Resnikoff...

I did want to point out, though, that "Electoral College Mascot" (the state-shapes piece)is displayed 90 degrees off. It's based on the gadsden flag (don't tread on me) and should be turned 90 counterclockwise.

Not to question your judgment, but that Electoral College piece in the Born to Kill show is in the shape of the "Don't Tread on Me" snake, not a bug. If you rotate the photo on your website 90 degrees to the left back to the original orientation, you'll see the snake head at the top and the rattle poking out at the bottom.

Ed Ruscha will represent the US at the next Venice Biennale. Read Carol Vogel's piece in yesterday's NY Times. (user: lrrfartblog, password: artblog). Quoting,

This is the second time that Mr. Ruscha's work has been included in the American pavilion at a Venice Biennale. In 1970 he created "Chocolate Room,'' an installation consisting of 360 sheets of paper silk-screened with chocolate, as part of a larger exhibition that included other American artists.

Just a few days left to the election and even fewer for this month's group of exhibits at Vox Populi, up until the 31st.

An examination of what's real and what's ideal (that's the Platonic point) seems to be on the minds of everyone showing there.

Robert Arnold in the Video Lounge offered up several short films and videos, of which I saw three. One of them was the perfect, ideal romantic kiss. (I could really confuse things here and call it Platonic but that would confuse everyone, because the coupling here was anything but Platonic in that other sense). "The Morphology of Desire" (image, top), from 1998 was laugh-out-loud funny, with borrowed images of American-brand idealized men and women from romance magazines and bookcovers morphing to create a rhythmic sexual coupling, starting with longing looks and climaxing in pulsating motions, all to a heartbeat soundtrack. These particular "ideals" have been manipulated to undermine themselves.

In "Triptych" (image left) an urban scene is divided in three by two tall trees that perform as stage doors through which trains or cars sometimes appear and disappear. Even night falls unevenly across the triptych.

"Echolalia" (2003) offers television-screen captures of politicians and pundits saying the words weapons of mass destruction (with some variant versions like biological weapons), thereby revealing the power of the repetition to create fear. Although W, who talks to God when he makes his decisions, was the star of this one, he was not alone. Even the liberal Sen. Joseph Biden made an appearance (since he's a regular on the TV news talk shows). The name of the film is of course a term straight out of the fundamentalist, Bible-thumping culture of speaking in tongues. We're witnesses here to a national, media-generated self-delusion.

Arnold, an associate professor of film at Boston University and a visiting professor at Poznan Academy of Fine Arts in Poland, has won a number of awards for his videos. Check them out.

And while I'm on the subject of politics, Isaac Resnikoff's "Born to Kill" examines politics, art and American values. Resnikoff, who is a sweet fellow who definitely was not Born to Kill, has a killer sense of humor that had me chuckling my way through his roughly crafted show of anti-objets from the American dream (image right, "Seating Solutions for the Conflicted," the miniature Adirondack chair emblazoned with Idle Hands, the butterfly chair with Born to Kill).

His "Electoral College Mascot" (left) is a bug-shaped map of red and blue puzzle pieces that passes for a heart (not quite Bo Bartlett's Heartland, is it?) and is based on the Don't Tread on Me snake. "Idle Hands (Endless Night)" is a cheesy, wall-paneling version of Brancusi's endless column with an ashtray on top, filled with faux cigarettes (right). It's the all-too-material version of Brancusi's sculptural ideal.

The materials in this show--a lot of plywood, Sculpey, roughly applied gouache, words embroidered off center on pillows, wooden sculptures of tools that were carved with a kitchen knife--all bring into question sculpture and the material world in general, and most of all, Americana and the questionable, unspoken Platonic values implied beneath the material (and verbal) culture. Although a little uneven, this is a show worth a visit.

As an aside, Resnikoff, who was gallery sitting when I arrived, mentioned to me that his grandmother had agreed to crochet pillow covers for him, but then she couldn't bring herself to put the words Born to Kill on them. The project ground to a halt. So Resnikoff improvised with a pair of Early American style pillows embroidered, one with Born to Kill, the other with Idle Hands (the words are everywhere). (Am I right to assume that "Idle hands are the devil's tools" is an expression everyone is familiar with? I never know how far into the next generation expressions like that travel. Clearly, the words reached Resnikoff.)

By the way, Resnikoff has work that opened Oct. 23 in New York at Rivington Arms, 102 Rivington St. on the Lower East Side.

Nami Yamamoto's "tidal," an undulating, wall-to-wall floor cloth, covers the front room gallery floor (installation shot left). The gray cloth is printed with stylized white wave and water motifs from 17th century Japanese paintings--perfect waves printed on perfect waves. Platonic and elegant.

Though it's a floor cloth, it's too delicate and carefully arranged to give us a chance to walk on the water. Without more visual va-va-voom, I'm looking for some more meaning, but I'm coming up dry (detail, right).

The other exhibit is video artist Nadia Hironaka's three-screen video installation, "A Girl Named Prism." I've always been a fan, but this one was such a challenge for me that after sitting and sitting and sitting, I bolted (installation shot left).

Starring performance artist Martha McDonald, the videos tell the story of one woman struggling to create perfect sync between her past, present and future selves--a kind of struggle to reach some Platonic ideal that the material world in real life never can get to. I'm not even sure in what sense past, present and future can ever be in sync or what in sync means in this context.

Of what I saw, the film was great to look at, the colors practically radioactive. Motifs like gemstones, colored blouses, screens drenched in color, private life, work life, sex life, motherhood, cuts of raw meat, cycled through the videos offering a rhythmic eye candy. As always, Hironaka offered a sense of spaces and what they mean--rooms, offices, streets, doors. The sounds were of ambient noises like car horns, and the conversations were too low to be understood. But my mind couldn't wrap around the time warps and ultimately my impatience won the day.

Phil Blank's paintings at Ashley Gallery are the kind of works that make you hum and smile.

The Abington native, now living in Carrboro, North Carolina, is heavily influenced by bluegrass and country music and his show, "Frozen Songs," his second solo with the gallery, is his visual counterpoint to the sad song-poems of Ben Hartlage a poet and musician friend. Blank and Hartlage are clearly in sync.




There's an old fashioned impulse at work here. The paintings are a little like stage sets presenting a performer who's going to tell you a story. It doesn't take much to imagine a singer wailing the sad tale backed up by banjo or guitar. (image is "The Ladder," dedicated to the artist's father who died this year.)

With titles like "Stocksville jail; Cold, Cold Night," and "Never Miss You till Yer Gone; Water in the Well," (shown below right) etc., the paintings inhabit that dreamy twilight in which country and blues ballads croon on in stories both mythic and fresh as today. Lost love, hard living and regrets are right beneath the surface.



Blank paints his works as if they're verse and chorus.

Each picture showcases one theme -- the curse of alcohol; longing for lost love; fear of imprisonment -- then surrounds it with a painted frame that encircles it and picks up on the central idea and takes it slightly elsewhere. (image below left is "This Old Pine Box")




"Man with Accordion," (top image) is the largest work (48" tall) in a show of modest sized pieces (most in the neighborhood of 20" by 16"). In its lifelike portrait of a young man crossing a brook in a forlorn kind of woods, his jaunty Tyrolean hat a little too small for his big head, the picture is a surreal embodiment of the lonely troubador playing for himself because he must. It's what he does.



I'm always curious about an artist's background. What fuels Blank's fire, according to his statement, is a good high school art teacher and a love of drawing. He taught himself to paint using old technical manuals he found in a public library. (He also has a BFA from Washington University, 1994.) His inspirations range from poet Allen Ginsberg to: German Expressionist Otto Dix, Indonesian Puppetmakers, Mississippi John Hurt, the Flaming Lips, Robert Crumb and Brueghel. (image right is "Alcohol Blues: the Burden")

The exhibit is up through Oct. 31. After that, a selection of the works will move to the gallery's front space and make way for a show by recent PAFA grad Anthony Palumbo, opening Nov. 5. I've written about Palumbo before, and a peek at some digital images of the new work shows the young artist advancing into weird and wonderful new territory (nudes like Cezanne's monumental bathers standing like giants in a parking lot..).

I ran in to Gallery Joe today to see Winifred Lutz's new work before it comes down this weekend. I've long admired the artist and Tyler professor's nature with a twist sculpture. The new body of work is a nice continuation of themes I've seen before, themes about nature's more quiet side and its sometimes wacky and appealing shapes.

The 27 new pieces in "findings" show Lutz as a kind of scientist cum wizard of the woods, or in today's world I suppose she's a nature make-over artist --giving the sticks and rocks a new look.

As with the last show, there's humor and whimsy and in a few pieces, a kind of Grimms' fairy tale affect. (image is detail of "untitled (land shoe and Leviathan)" a piece that looks like a giant's foot dangling in the vault. On the floor nearby is another shoe-like form. The materials are bark and paper.)



Lutz takes sticks and rocks very seriously but she's having fun, too, crafting them into hybrid arrangements with her beautiful handmade or other papers. As with other shows, she has attached some of her stick and paper objects to the wall so they jut out perpendicularly like improbable wall barnacles.

Lutz has a great eye for the marvelous piece of bark. And some of her choices here are so gnarly and evocative they're monstrous. And attaching them to the wall gives them a kind of shamanistic power. (image is "untitled (reverse elephant trunk with flare)" and "untitled (lump on a perch)")




Lutz is always working with relationships --this stick to that rock, this paper to that bark. A few pieces are tied to each other via cable using a kind of cantilever system. Of course the most obvious, but never stated, relationship running through the body of works is that of the artist with nature (and by our identification with the artist, the viewer and nature).



The artist has an intense and intensely personal relationship with the natural world. Would that we all were as respectful of the humble rocks and trees. We'd all be better off.

As with her great outdoor Reclamation Garden at Abington Art Center, the artist is organizing and tidying and playing, but here it's on a more intimate scale.



Some of the pieces are less marked by the woods than others. Mostly these works involved handmade paper hung in layers and stretched over an armature that is not a found stick. Of this work, "untitled (green box viewfinder)" (shown) is the most playful.

The viewfinder changes depending on how you view it. From directly in front, it appears a beautiful green box with a dark oval inside it. In a way it reminded me of a kiwi fruit. But as you walk away from dead center what becomes visible is a kind of small rectangle that's a seemingly transparent hole revealing a little of what's in the box. The piece is mysterious -- and amusing. Like many things in nature, it's a changeling, but an artist-made one, and its spirit of mystical wonder is the same that imbues all the artist's works.

The large exhibit occupies the entire front gallery and the vault. I recommend a visit (show's up through Oct. 30). And if you haven't been to her Reclamation Garden at Abington, that's a must, too.

Without the money to bring in out-of-town talent and cover their and her own costs, and without the money to pay herself for her time and energy spent mounting a show, Kait Midgett says she's about to give up the Project Room, her off-beat gallery at 8th and Girard that has given artists room to experiment and stretch their limits for the past five years (image top, installation shot of Susan Moore's photos).

Midgett dropped this news when I stopped to see "Fictopicto" there, a show by established artists Susan Moore, whose monumental figurative paintings have earned her a monumental reputation, and cartoonist/illustrated book meister Charles Burns, who may be established but is anything but establishment (here's a swell fan webpage of Burns' work).

The art power-couple's show of photographs are about their process and their world--the things that go into their artwork, but the large accumulation of examples turns the two bodies of work into personal statements. Moore's got more than 500 photos on the wall in a tight, horizontal grid; Burns has nearly 100 sheets I'd guess, 6 photos collaged via computer on each sheet (a Burns collage, right).

The couple approached Midgett after she had stopped scheduling new exhibits, so the gallery was available. And Moore and Burns agreed to shoulder the burden of mounting the show in just about every way.

Their work is a departure for the Project Room, which has always specialized in more youthful work that stretches what art means. Midgett said Moore's and Burns' work fit the Project Room's long-time mission to provide a creative space for shows that aren't happening somewhere else. Certainly, these two groups of photographs are outside Burns' and Moore's usual art practice and have never been shown.

But after this show, Midgett said she was calling it quits, because it costs $500 to mount a show. "I can't put out more money for the gallery," she said. She's also thinking about closing down the fabrication operation and studio next door, which, like all small businesses, is feast or famine. But it sounds like much of this is just thought. She's dreaming of finding a job with regular pay and benefits; but so far, she said, she hasn't really gotten down to brass tacks and begun the job hunt. She's mulling over all the possibilities--full time, part time, teaching, consulting, etc., etc.

Meanwhile, she said she would be sad to lose the life she had set up, with the gallery and the art-making and fabrication and community-building integrated with one another.

This is not the first time Midgett has said she was going out of business. In Sept. 2002, she told Roberta she was leaving town, moving back to Virginia. Well, she's still in town and still on North 8th Street. So I'm not sure how seriously to take this.

But it would be a loss for the city and its art community. Among the shows the Project Room brought us were installations from Mark Shetabi, a surround mural by David Guinn, video from Chicago artists, an installation by Kevin Reay, an installation by Astrid Bowlby, etc. etc.

Back to Moore and Burns

Moore's photos (detail of installation, right) are snapshots of people of a variety of ages, sizes and genders, some dressed, some half-dressed, some undressed. The clothes range from swim suits to daily grunge to formal wear.

What I enjoyed about the collection of bodies (the faces are generally not the subject here, and black tape over the eyes blocks identification of those facing forward) is how they stand in contrast to the bodies we are accustomed to seeing in images. Moore's bodies are unprettied, unsexualized, just bodies. Everyone has flesh over bones, dimples in thighs; some people have sagging butts, some not. No one looks really beautiful (except for a couple of pregnant women). The images are less flattering than bodies in bathing suits on the beach. But like the beach bodies, these show humanity in its variety (not all its variety, but enough to get a sense of how little we look like fashion plates).

Even people who seemed to be thinking of themselves as sexy, projecting themselves as sexy, didn't look sexy in these pictures, which have an unblinking documentary quality. Even the children look unbeautiful.

The photos are artifacts of Moore's artwork, points of reference for when she's painting. And that history reveals itself in the occasional paint splatters and brush marks on some of the photos. But what made the images interesting to me was their unsparing factualness.

Burns' photos are not byproducts (a detail from installation, left above). They are deliberate documentation of the world in which he lives. He's been photographing his studio and what's inside it, as well as his neighborhood, since June. The arrangement of the images on the page reminds me of the story-telling style of comic books--Burns' metier. But for the most part, the combos are experimental and unresolved, with an equal emphasis on visual, formal relationships and on content/storytelling relationships.

Some of the combos hit the mark, like the wrinkled sheets with x's and an o-shaped rock, shadows and light tying the top bed photos to the bottom ones. I also liked one with a cartoon woman looking shocked as she reads in bed, a cartoon man with a scary face, a flower's reproductive organs, a lamp turned sidewise to suggest a piston, and small organic shapes like eggs and sperm. Another combination that worked were green plants and legs, with a felicitous color combo and a slightly surreal sense of place (installation detail right).