July 2004 Archive

The groups of summer #2

Foraging is how I would describe my efforts on these steamy days to find something to look at. Success hit me at Schmidt/Dean yesterday, where there’s a mix of artists new and old, work I was delighted to revisit (some more so than others) and work I was delighted to discover for the first time. Among the pleasures were three photos by Ida Weygandt of the fox hunt milieu of Chester County, PA (top, “Virginia Brown,” Epson Archival Ink-Jet Print, 32″ x 41″). Even in the heat of the day, I caught a chill looking at that claustrophobic photo, which ... More » »

I dreamed I was a curator in my…

Here’s some info for those of who curate or are thinking of curating an exhibit. The proceedings from “Curating Now: Imaginative Practice/Public Responsibility” are now available online for download in PDF format on the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative’s website: www.philexin.org

tracer art II

The groups of summer #1

The gallery scene is at its slowest during the summer months, with low-energy group shows everywhere. It’s a time when galleries generally mine their storage and pick up a couple of experimental new prospects, throw them together and call it a show. Imagine my surprise, visiting Gross McCleaf‘s “Philadelphia” exhibit, to see the Larry Francis paintings of our lives, quotidien, familiar Philadelphia locales practically flying off the walls. I thought no one even walked into galleries in the summer, let alone bought stuff (top, Francis’ “Late Shadows”). Francis is one of nine painters of Philadelphia city scapes of various stripe at ... More » »

Inside and outside the museum

I returned today after yesterday’s political rally for John Kerry in front of the Art Museum (oy, it was so hot there). The water bottles were cleaned up, the political banners removed (left, the rally crowd and Kerry with arrow pointing to his white head of hair). Inside, I stopped briefly at the Jacques Lipschitz show out of a sense of duty. The work felt dusty–a dead end. When was the last time you saw someone create a sculpture that made you think, wow, that was influenced by Lipschitz? The politics, so heartfelt, the imagery borrowed from the ancient Greeks, ... More » »

On top of Old Faithful

If you caught the last Vox Populi show with John Stoney’s cow-poop under glass sculptures (see post here), I thought you’d like to know that he has a piece in Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, N.Y. (Right, “The Problem With Airplanes”). I read in the New York Times last Friday that it’s a scale model of Old Faithful that shoots up its own little geyser of water, timed to the real thing over in Yellowstone National Park. “Such a cannily simulated anomaly in Long Island City is delightfully surreal,” wrote Ken Johnson in one of the mini-reviews.

Vive la difference

Paul Georges, the late artist whose floral paintings and jumbo allegory are on display at The More Gallery, puts Ann Craven’s bird in the Altoids exhibit at the Morris Gallery of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to shame (left, “Cat and Pigeon and Arbor,” by Georges).     Craven, whose birds come out of the pattern and decoration movement, are cloying and content free (see Roberta’s post here). The birds have an impassive fashion-victim pose in front of floaty Pepto Bismol pink backgrounds (right).     Georges, on the other hand, seems to have a message beneath the gestural sprays of roses.  The trellises ... More » »

Voynich — hoax or art?

We subscribe to Scientific American and while I can’t say I read the mag, I’m a big fan of browsing the images — always visually rich. July’s issue, which has some wonderful Hubble photographs of nebulae (dying stars), also had a back of the mag story about a mysterious medieval tome, the Voynich Manuscript. The 200 page book of bound vellum is written in undecipherable code and illustrated with all manner of charts and diagrams, strange flora and fauna, and bevies of nude women bathing. (top image is page from the Voynich manuscript) Now it may be that the Voynich, ... More » »

Forlorn, oh forlorn

Traces of art

That Roberta just wrote about megaprints made me think about the tiny size of most of the pieces at “Traces,” an exhibit at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery and the University of the Arts. Seems to me I’ve been seeing a lot lot lot of tiny tiny tiny work. Can it be the gradiose gestures of macho art have fallen out of style?  Or is it just a function of the market.  Small pieces come at affordable prices. And then there’s the function of the sort of work this is for the most part–the obsessive process pieces that are so dense in effort ... More » »