Annette Monnier pointing to her to-do list

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This episode is edited by Peter Crimmins. The music is by Eric Biondo. The slide show is edited by artblog Intern Alison McMenamin. Thanks to the Knight Foundation for helping us get the ball rolling on this project. Thanks also to J-Lab‘s Enterprise Reporting Fund and William Penn Foundation for additional support and to our partner WHYY NewsWorks for their ongoing support and for sharing artblog radio episodes on the arts & culture page of their community news site NewsWorks.org. You can subscribe to artblog radio on iTunes.

Annette Monnier 47-second sample

In the interest of full disclosure, before Monnier worked for the Clay Mobile, she worked part-time as our advertising coordinator.

Posters at Vox Populi's Dead Flowers

The best work in Dead Flowers earns that appellation by letting the tasteful and the taboo get real cozy.

Alvin Baltrop’s Pier Photographs (1975-86) are sensitively observed.  A brief shock of blinding light or the fleeting poise of a half closed hand is honored by the technical comfort and intimate scale of the photographs. But the subjects of these graceful observations—meetings of queer runaways and cruisers in the abandoned post-industrial West Side piers of 1970s and 80s Manhattan—could only happen precisely where normative society failed to look. Baltrop’s photographs of overlooked spaces and covered-up activities fulfill the promise of the underground through their disarming beauty.

Alvin Baltrop's photos of the gay hook-up scene on the piers.

Putting Paul Thek’s Meat Cable (1968-9) nearby is a tidy curatorial move. Thek’s simple conceit—desiccated flesh as capacitor—turns a surprising and conventionally distasteful material into a stunning visual metaphor for stored energy.

Paul Thek's Meat Cable / Meat Cable, detail

Paul Thek's Meat Cable / Meat Cable, detail

Some of the contemporary work fares less well. Between the artworld’s pluralist mood and the Naughties’ internet-aided desensitization, it’s harder to shock than ever. Better find another way to get condemned.

Brandon Olson’s Untitled (2004), an expressionistic and colorful drawing of an ambiguously gendered heavily made-up face, is as not as transgressive as its casual construction and material choices (glitter and spray paint) together seem to hope for. Nor is its polite gender confusion or declarative glaze really stepping on anyone’s toes.  It’s been 7 years since Captain Jack Sparrow hit theaters, decades since Duchamp’s alt-gender alter-ego Rrose Sélavy entered the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and over a century since Olympia stared down some surprised salon-goers. That Olson’s piece features the word “Selavy” scrawled across a cheek does not legitimize it, but, rather, only confirms that its bite is borrowed.

Brandon Olson painting

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s overly sleek nude double portrait Red Chair Posed (2008) and materially sensuous but insubstantial Tongue Kiss (2003) share some of the troubles of Olson’s drawing. However, P-Orridge’s most recent piece, Boaz (2010), is a real knockout.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

At first, it appears to be three impersonal medical images of patients with decreasing numbers of false teeth. But the unusual quantity and color of the teeth, coupled with a persistent mole, reveal that the series of photographs depict the same mouth.

That is, the subjects of the triptych are not three people, but three states of one person; the visible change is the number of teeth replaced with gleaming metal. Boaz’s success lies precisely in achieving these kinds of transgressions—confusions of personal and impersonal, singular and plural—through the seemingly matter-of-fact genre of medical photography.

CG Haiti with stage production by Humalode LLC

Suspiciously billed as “CG Haiti live gesamptkunstwerk with stage production by Humalode LLC,” Copy Gallery’s first Friday shenanigans filled the small space. Loud music emanated from an irregular opaque packing-tape (cling wrap?) prism, just barely smaller than the room itself—think DIY Richard Serra with killer bass. The space between the prism’s planes and the walls of the gallery was just wide enough to act as an encircling hallway.

CG Haiti etal at Copy Gallery

Walking counter-clockwise around the prism, I was confronted by a series of assertive images. Affixed to the back wall of the gallery, two motorized body-sized prints of a “Predator-mouth” spun like pinwheels, lit by a bare white fluorescent tube on the floor. A projection onto the prism itself alternated between grainy overexposed photos of hard-partiers and incendiary text (“The public sector was outsourced” “WHAT ARE VIABLE MODES OF NON-IDENTIFIED COMMUNAL PRAYER?”).

Despite the prolific and generally overbearing images around the prism, the sound held its own. The strength of the vibration, the assertive but not deafening volume, and irregularity of the music revealed that it was not a recording, but a live performance masked by the prism walls.

The images in Copy managed to be both cacophonous and distant, while the live sound performance, despite the visual block, maintained a human touch. This unexpected harmony made Copy Gallery’s installation memorable and frankly pleasurable. I came back twice before the night was out.

Pat O'Neill's video at Screening

Pat O’Neill’s Horizontal Boundaries (2008), a 35mm film transferred to HD video for Screening, starts with a blank screen. In the darkened room, the sounds of city life hum, click, honk, and whir. They’re a suitable overture, as the screen lights up to an image as overlaid as the sounds. A scene of LA beachgoers reposing by, shuffling around, and crashing into the barely discernable ocean mixes with different views of the same scene and a still shot of debris on the sand. A lone figure on a bench sits, disappears, and reappears. California landscapes and crowds merge.

O’Neill masterfully uses optical printing, a technique where a film projector or projectors are synched to a movie camera recording the combined image the projectors produce. Nonetheless, the film’s (and the artist-statement’s) conceit—that the laborious overlays yield an image of representation itself, the subject represented, and the hazy “idea” of that subject—is less interesting than the resemblance O’Neill’s analog images have to digitally manipulated video. Particularly intriguing is that O’Neill’s highly crafted film resembles a genre of digital video—let’s call it youtubey—that is easily and quickly made, and critically celebrated for that democratic quality. Spending a half hour with the artisanal but strangely familiar Horizontal Boundaries, I’ll say the jury’s still out on the value of easy.

–David Muenzer fell down a few stairs in 1998. After passing a couple minutes by some tentative cursing, the soreness subsided, and he finished going to the backyard. He currently spends too much time trying to make a Tahdeeg, but, having failed to look up a recipe, generally just burns the pan.

Bill Smith combo of projections and sculpture and mechanical wizardry

Our first stop (Andrea and me), the Fabric Workshop and Museum was filled with crowd-pleasers from five artists from across the country.

Smith autographing a happy FWM member's exhibition brochure.

Bill Smith, from Illinois, merges an obsession with the natural world with delicate, lacy mechanisms that are next to impossible to photograph, but are easy to delve into in person. Each mechanism works differently, but each piece delights as its m.o. delivers a punch. The combo of hard mechanics with such delicate networks is a total crowd pleaser.

Tommy Joseph's prototype 3-piece suit, hand-painted w/ FWM artists, the imagery based on traditional Tlingit imagery, also on display along with masks that, with the suit, will be used in performance.

And Tlingit Alaskan Tommy Joseph has made a prototype of a performance costume–a three-piece suit hand painted with traditional Tlingit imagery. It’s a terrific merger of cultures. This is not your Mummer’s flash and dash. It has an elegance, a sense of serious intent and shamanistic power.

Robert Chambers, Ribbon Cutting, performance/ephemeral installation on Arch Street. The kids jumped right in.

On the street in front of the FWM annex, Florida artist Robert Chambers let loose 9 rolls of broad ribbons from windows overhead, creating a gorgeous streetscape in his “Ribbon Cutting” installation. I asked for a swatch of the ribbon and an FWM employee cut it for me–the future color of my bedroom, I hope.

Andrea snapped this picture of Joe Rishel and me. The ribbons made everyone feel happy! photo by Andrea Kirsh

Here I am with PMA Curator Joe Rishel and my swatch. Chambers’ other work inside the FWM is also concerned with how things work. There’s a curiosity about the way things are made in the modern manufacturing society and an interest in what these manufactured items represent in our culture.

The exhibit included a video of Ruben Ortiz-Torres’ low-rider inspired artist-modifed scissor fork lift, Hi ‘n’ Lo. Ortiz, like Chambers, is modifying what’s already out there, and talking to cultural values. I loved the pairing of these two. Also there, Seneca nation member Marie Watt’s womb-like, ultra-soft felt structure, called Engine (hope you get a chance to go inside–check out the shaman video, which is one of the features that makes this not just another yurt) .  It’s yummy in there.

A woman tries out a Dennis McNett print/papier mache wolf mask, in front of two fabulous wall-size collaged prints.

At Space 1026 and then at Vox, giant prints stole my heart. Dennis McNett takes over 1026 with Year of the Wolfbat, arguably a Halloween and Day of the Dead themed exhibit that includes two and 3-D work based on prints and collage. The 3 D is outstanding papier mache and sometimes wood–skull masks, birds and “wolfbats” covered with collaged prints. On the wall, enormous prints, smaller prints, and prints collaged to create wall-sized psychedelic explosions are all yummy and mesmerizizizng.

This Dennis McNett wolves-in-wolf print and paint collaged on panel includes carved-into mouth, nose and eyes.

Doing your Xmas shopping or decorating now? Check out the prints, some as low as $5 and $10! The quality of this work is top notch.

Rob Swainston's two-wall print installation suggesting a personal journey as well as a landscape.

A very different double-wall-sized print installation dominates Rob Swainston’s exhibit at Vox–mountain landscapes made of, well, there’s a shaggy dog back story here–that boils down to Swainston going to the Rockies for an artist residency and not having the space to print with the wood he brought along from Philadelphia. He threw the wood into the snow in disgust, where it swelled and warped. He screwed it together to flatten it and headed home, only to have his truck break down. After abandoning the truck and the wood, he was able to recover the wood and get it shipped home.

Rob Swainston is a great storyteller, and I wish I could have recorded his tale of his struggles to make this print and put it up as a podcast.

The prints are of the wood grain itself, raised up by the snow and the rain, creating an abstract landscape, mountainous with winding trails or streams–a symbolic map of the wood’s journeys and the artist’s. The work reminded me of Yan Kai’s digital photomontage landscapes at the InkNotInk exhibit of Chinese art at Drexel last spring.

still from Hiraki Sawa's 8 Minutes, video, 2005, courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, NYC, copied from http://www.screeningvideo.org/

There’s more about landscape at Screening Video, where Hiraki Sawa’s video shorts of animals and a landscape inserted into an ordinary bathroom are delightful meditations on fantasy and quotidian, real and not real, and the schism between modernity and nature. I want to once again give props to Screening for the most comfortable foam cube seating and egg-crate foam sound insulation on their walls.

Luren Jenison and a detail of her cactus installation at Copy.

Still another landscape fills Copy Gallery, where Luren Jenison’s “cactus” installation visits a lot of the same issues. Trash cans bristle with ratchet ties; pool noodles are topped with toothpicks and corn holders. A spot-lit giant white balloon is the moon or the sun, and the whole space manages to create a theatrical tongue-in-cheek faux nature.

The largest of Alexis Granwell's crumbling infrastructures at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Gallery

Landscapes were clearly the dominant theme of the evening. Alexis Granwell’s decomposing structures at Tiger Strikes Asteroid form dark, urban landscapes of our failure to overcome entropy. As in Sarah Sze‘s work, the walls have a precarious infrastructure that tumbles out and threatens immediate collapse.

Arden Bendler Browning's gouaches tumble across the paper, creating a world veering out of control.

At AHN/VHS, Arden Bendler Browning’s abstracts also have a sense of a landscape tumbling out of control, a sense of the precariousness of life, nature, and our own backyards.

I also want to give a shout-out to Caitlin Perkins’ collection of sea monster memorabilia in AHN/VHS’s The Cabinet–another meditation on human vulnerability fictionalized and projected onto a dangerous creature that doesn’t really exist.

At this point Andrea was wild with hunger, while I was worried that if I sat down to eat I’d never get up. Miraculously, we wandered into a real Chinese restaurant, a place with cow viscera, eel soup, and aromatic pig ears on the menu. We ordered the water spinach, and got an enormous plate of garlicky sauteed watercress. Fabulous. I’m not even gonna tell you the name of the place in hopes that it stays this way a while longer!

The amazing Beth, who curated Breaking News and was wise to resist her brother, who must have had groom-itis.

Our last stop? Little Berlin. We wandered in at 10:30 to the delightful show (not about landscape at all!) that Brandon already told you about. Our artblog gal friday Beth Heinly was the curator, too! Here she is at Little Berlin the night before her brother’s wedding, wondering if she was being a beast for refusing to have her hair and makeup done for the occasion. Just look at her! Are you kidding?

Nick Paparone's installation at Vox Populi with the revolving eyeball/wrecking ball in the center

With Nick Paparone’s evil eyeball circling maniacally via a little motor in his frat boy sex, beer and hangover room installation, the revolutionary air was set at Vox. Brent Wahl’s quiet revolving zoetrope, a tinfoil mini landscape on a huge turntable that was captured by video and thrown up on the wall as a travelling landscape of the mind echoed the revolving nature of life.  The piece is lovely.

Brent Wahl's revolving tabletop landscape

Brent Wahl's revolving piece projected on the wall.

Onions, sliced in half and and dipped in rainbow-colored dyes were odiferous circles at Copy in Constance Mensh’s installation.  Mensh photographed herself in situ working with the aggressive vegetables.  Here she is crying her eyes out; there she is looking serene and like she’s done battle; here she is, frock covered in a mess of dye.

Constance Mensch, in a photograph, looking like Nigella Lawson having a bad day in the kitchen. Copy Gallery

Onions make us cry.  But so do breakups, sad movies, pretty rainbows.  Many things make us cry.  Good food can make people cry.  Some of Mensh’s photos — where she is standing behind a table laid with her onions in dye baths — have a wacky Food Network ambiance, like out-takes from a Nigella Lawson show where something went wrong.

Reading viaduct seen from the 6th floor of 319A N. 11th St. High line Philly anyone?

Much more to see in this building, from Alex Paik’s new tiny drawings at Tiger to Victorian-esque photographs by Margaux Kent at Jeffrey Stockbridge and, up on 6, a nice view of the Reading Viaduct that one day might just be the Philadelphia High Line (any funders may now please step forward).

I will put in links later (sorry) going to ICA now.

Successful artworks seem to fall under one of two humors – they can call attention to themselves overtly or be so plainly understated as to provoke curiosity. This has been true of modern art for quite a while. Consider the simultaneous success of the frenetic work of Jackson Pollock and the contemplative work of Mark Rothko. At present, when images, video, and sound are more readily available then ever before, art’s ability to demand attention or stand quietly waiting to be engaged seems all the more important.

This is especially true given the way in which much contemporary art is seen. Most people visit galleries during crowded openings or events. In Philadelphia, the Vox Populi and Copy galleries are perhaps most notable in this regard. First Fridays there are massive parties. (And they have only grown with the arrival of new upstairs neighbors Tiger Strikes Asteroid and Progressive Sharing.) As people work their way through the galleries, looking at and/or listening to what is on display, they are also searching for the people they know. Socializing blurs the art experience.

This is not a repudiation. Art’s social function is one of its most valuable features. It is, no doubt, commendable that any gallery or group of galleries can promote and sustain such events. But in accepting that, another question lingers. How does that social function influence the making and viewing of art? Two recent installations, one at Vox and the other at Copy, addressed this interaction. Though quite different, both seemed to acknowledge the opening night atmosphere, even using it to their benefit.

Linda Yun’s It Is What It Is was installed at Vox Populi during the month of February 2009. The piece included three elements: a false wall with a rectangular cutout, a strip of colorful metallic streamers strung in an arc across the cutout, and an oscillating fan mounted to a floor stand. The room was separated from the rest of Vox by a black curtain and was dark except for back-lighting behind the cutout. The fan spun, blowing air around the room. The streamers gently fluttered and flickered in the dim glow. Visitors could circulate through the room to gain different points of view or inspect the apparatus.

Despite her title’s claim and the simple materials she used, Yun’s installation did not make immediate sense. The cutout was lit to create an optical illusion (in the manner of James Turrell) whereby it appeared to be both a hollow recess and a painted surface. With the lights low and the fan on the room’s far side, the movement of the streamers seemed inexplicable. But these mysteries were eventually revealed. Walking through the gallery, the cutout became more legible as an empty space. A ring of holiday lights could be seen illuminating it from behind. Even the lazy, slightly delayed rhythm of the fluttering streamers seemed less irregular with time. Deception gave way to understanding. The installation was what it was, down to the fan’s exposed cord.

FUCK “THIS” PLACE, by Jamie Dillon, debuted at Copy Gallery on May 1. It too had three main components: a tennis ball machine, tennis balls, and a gong spray painted with the installation’s title. (For technical reasons, the tennis ball machine has since been removed.) The tennis ball machine was positioned in one corner, the gong suspended in another. Triggered by a remote control in the artist’s possession, the machine periodically shot tennis balls across the gallery. Each ball hit the gong, causing a crashing reverberation, and then bounced around until coming to a rest. Chicken wire barring entrance to the space kept balls from rolling out.

With a thundering bang echoing from the gallery every few minutes, Dillon’s installation could not be missed. Visitors were aware of it being there well before seeing it. If this built anticipation, a look in the space was instantly demystifying. The system was plainly straightforward. This shot those into that – CLANG! Watching from behind the fence as the tennis ball machine rumbled in its pre-launch routine, the viewer felt oddly sympathetic. All that preparation and expended energy for such a brief climax. The gong was right. Fuck this place.

Apart from their use of utterly banal materials, the installations by Yun and Dillon could not have looked less alike. Had they been shown side by side, their differences would have been all the more apparent. The first was hidden from plain sight by a curtain while the second used sound to announce its presence from far away. Darkness or false walls obscured the workings of one, but not of the other. Viewers could walk around the space of Yun’s installation. Dillon’s was fenced off, allowing only one distanced point of view. In terms of time (and sound), the fan blew the streamers with a consistent, predetermined rhythm. The tennis balls were shot at the gong irregularly at the artist’s whim. Even the two titles – one a deadpan disclaimer, the other a vulgar exclamation – were opposites.

Where the two installations did coincide was in their apparent self-consciousness. They were both aware of their own contrived presence and the audiences they addressed. For them, the gallery environment was an opportunity for self-enhancement. It Is What It Is did so with curious optical devices that arrested perception and stimulated inquiry. The viewer had to slow down, ensuring a more engaging interaction with the piece. FUCK “THIS” PLACE exploited the viewer’s imagination and expectations to critique the potential of art. Existing desires and practices were intensified, reinforcing the work’s premise.

The respective interactions between these two pieces and their audiences are significant because they occur via confrontation with the social nature of art. Yun defied the notion that viewers can glance their way through a gallery. Challenging people to explore the tricks of her installation, she also offered an opportunity for relevant discussion. Dillon, on the other hand, mocked the tendency for art to be ignored in favor of socializing. His installation was a center of attention that promised to disappoint over and over again, allowing viewers to keep moving on. Clever, critical, and captivating, both works stood out against the crowds.

Secret Passage by Charles Hobbs, on display at Vox, is a somewhat awkwardly choreographed interactive piece.  As one approaches the opening to the exhibit a large, almost surreal twisted gate structure is immediately viewable, inhabiting the center of the room. As one draws nearer to this large structure, the inner-workings of the exhibit begin to expose themselves.  The entryway into the exhibit can only be traversed by navigating through a slowly moving mesh-like curtain which is rigged around the room on a motorized pulley system.  The result of this contraption is at once both restrictive and engaging – as the curtain moves into a closed position across the doorway, the choice to enter the space (or leave for that matter) is no longer available.

Unfortunately aside from the striking central gate-object which severs to initially draw the viewer in, there is not much else engaging once you’ve successfully entered the space, resulting in a backup trying to both enter and leave through the blocked opening.

The back-up creates a forced experience between viewers, as people wait to be released or permitted entry by the delicately moving curtain. It also creates a rather timid dance as people flow in and out of the exhibit at regular intervals as the curtains open and close.   The result is a displacement of the viewer, as she realizes the restrictions this exhibit places on her viewership.  This displacement is nicely complemented by the eerie dream-like quality of both the central gate-object and the mechanical curtain, as well as the background of theramin-generated lulls and the squeaking along of the pulley system.

This eerie displacement continued up on the sixth floor with the opening of Music and Sound in Progressive Sharing, a gallery space started by Maggie Manzer.  This space seemed curated to transport the viewer into a dream-like state (or perhaps it was more a result of the great beer selection at the Vox opening and all the Twin Peaks I’ve been watching).  As in the Secret Passage, music plays a central role in the exhibit, and it was also the subject of the piece displayed on the walls.  This display was less interesting, however, than the richly-real experience unfolding in the space.

As you enter, there is music being played from an antique Victrola accompanied by its owner and operator. To his left sits a parrot atop a wooden perch.  When I inquired with the man if that were his parrot, he responded, ‘No, this is my Victrola that’s his parrot.” indicating the man across from him (pictured above) who was apparently part of the orchestration of this experience.

The artist told that the man that he was free to go as the hour was getting late, but the man seemed insistent to stay and accompany his Victrola until the end.  Moving around the room one encountered various contraptions and exposed wires, related to the experiment with sound that was the subject of the opening.

I think the success of this work was perhaps less in what it intended – the experiment with music and sound – as it was in the realness of experience it created, especially when approximated by the work that is on display a few floors down in Vox.

Before I had more time to investigate the specifics of the music theory displayed on the walls in Music and Sound, an event began unfolding downstairs. It was another eerie choreographed experience; descend the stairs, migrate across the street towards the light emanating from yellow bulbs suspended at the tunnel’s ceiling under the tracks.

The yellow bulbs are an installation piece titled 'The Little Red String' which is part of 'Chinatown In/Flux'. The installation really helped to set the stage for a beautiful performance.

There everyone gathered around a table set with a number of crystal wine glasses full of water.

Each person individually wet their finger, and began to circle the rim of the glass.  The moaning of the reverberation from the glasses started out softy, then grew and morphed as more people joined in, and filled the space.  Coupled with the faint echo of the tunnel, and the dramatic soft light cast by the bulbs overhead, the sound created an engulfing other-worldly experience.

The seamless orchestration of this symphony was rather impressive, the doings of Mike Fleming and Ryan Hinkel in conjunction with the piece on display upstairs at Progressive Sharing.  The performance recalls the ‘Happenings’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the discordant and unfamiliar sounds emanating from the glassware seem to reference the work of John Cage, one of the originators of those performances.  The new idea in this piece lies in the artfully-intentioned way it was initiated and performed.  Earlier in the night, walking through the galleries, randomly scattered informational diagrams of how to make sound emanate from the top of a wine glass were posted throughout the space. Despite all the times I walked past and noticed the poster out of the corner of my eye, I never stopped to actually read it.  But its clean ‘visual-diagram’ style and repetition of placement in the exhibition space were enough for me to connect the two immediately, unconsciously as the performance began with the migration downstairs.

Poster image by Jon Barthmus

I am thrilled with Progressive Sharing’s experiments with-in and outside-of the traditional gallery space and am looking forward to seeing more from them.  Their thoroughly effective method of urging a happening suggests to me that looking at art in Philly is no longer so straightforward as it might seem.  Everything in the Collective space becomes on display, including the artists working spaces, which lurk at right angles all throughout the building.  Hints at what might unfold populate the space, and are as much part of the opening as the exhibits on display.  This communal approach to exhibition space, studio space, and what becomes performance space has a lasting impact.  The net result is that the work further removes itself from the white walls to go up the wooden stairs, around the corner, into a studio space (wrong turn), back down the stairs across the street and under the train tracks.

The town is full of great exhibits this month but don’t miss two ambitious narrative drawings with tales for the times.  They  will make you ponder, chuckle and shudder.  Annette Monnier’s wall-spanning ink drawing of City Hall at Copy Gallery and Phillip Adams’ charcoal mural of President Obama caught in a tidal wave at Tiger Strikes Asteroid are marvels that reward your trip up the dark creaky stairs at 319 N. 11^th.

Annette Monnier's massive ink on paper drawing of City Hall and the rest of her world at Copy Gallery. Low-lighting in the gallery made for dark pictures. Click it big to see detail.

Monnier’s delicate and whimsical piece shows our city’s seat of power as if taken over by bicyclists, birds, The Claymobile, some hippie vans, cats and young people (including a lineup of ten Kiera Knightly figures). Black balloons float up to the sky and a spaceship seems to be landing near a rainbow that’s not far from a tornado. City Hall is the biggest single character in this elegant, Where’s Waldo-like drawing, but the building is mute, stately and flat as a pancake, a mere backdrop for the swirl of activities around it.  

Annette Monnier, detail of drawing. Note the ten Kiera Knightley fashionistas lined up on the bottom.

Monnier, an artist/curator and co-founder of Copy Gallery (and its predecessor Black Floor) is an avid bike rider who also works at the Clay Studio.  She’s put those aspects of her life in the drawing along with her cat-, bird- and movie star-fashion-fantasies, claiming the city for herself and friends and asking you to re-imagine the place with the energy and foibles of youth.  Monnier’s detailed and fantastical drawing calls to mind the works of Florine Stettheimer, the early American modernist, scenester and friend of Marcel Duchamp.

Phillip Adams charcoal drawing installation at Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Photo courtesy of the gallery.

Adams’ drawing installation, made directly on the gallery’s four walls (it will be erased for next month’s show), immerses the viewer in a dark sea with ten-foot-high waves curling above the head and just about to crash.  It’s a suffocating place to be – both literally and metaphorically.  The one human element in this ominous drawing is our Hawaii-raised president, who is swimming in the trough before the wave, his head above water like a pea in the giant sea.  Surely, he will be going under in a cataclysm of unstoppable proportions.  

Phillip Adams, detail showing President Obama.

This muscular drawing reminds me of Robert Longo’s wall-spanning charcoal drawings of a surfer’s ideal waves.  But Adams’ waves are threatening and the work is not exalting, and with his tiny Obama, the drawing calls to mind Breughel the Elder and his wee humans in landscapes of sublime beauty.

The visions Adams and Monnier express the anxiety and hopes of many young artists—and many viewers as well.  Each in its own way is a perfect drawing for the times.

 >>Phillip Adams: Spring Break 2009, to April 24.  Tiger Strikes Asteroid, 319A N. 11^th St., 4^th floor.  Free.

>>Annette Monnier:  Think Happy Thoughts and Good Things Will Happen, through April 30.  Copy Gallery.  319A N. 11^th St., 3^rd floor.  Free.  By appointment: annettemonnier@gmail.com

David Dunn, Craig’s List, 30 seconds of the installation at Copy Gallery

The tv portraits show a little of each seller’s house and also the program the owner has tuned into. After all, a sad tv with no tv show on it doesn’t appeal the way a sad puppy in the window appeals. (Besides, it may mean the tv doesn’t work). It’s hard to say whether the owner calculated which tv show would appeal most to the target buyer.

But no surprise here–the most popular image is sports. What better way to show off the assets of your big HD tv than to show off the football as it disappears into the pile-up? While I was in Copy, Dunn showed up and mentioned that in one of the Asian Craigs Lists there were a bunch of suspiciously brand new TVs–all the same model–but that otherwise, people’s images on the screens and off were pretty uniform around the world.

When I stopped in the gallery (I knocked loudly on the locked door), there was no installation in sight. But Nick Paparone and Jamie Dillon, who let me in, swore that putting the installation up was not a problem. And they asked me to tell you they can do the same for anyone who wants to drop by. They were right. It took just a few minutes to set up the tv on the pedestal and clear out the gallery.

The tv in the gallery is a rather humble one, perched somewhat precariously on a pedestal, looking not much like so many of the swank tvs in the video. So a crummy tv shows an image taken from a computer screen of a tv photographed in someone’s house. The houses were mostly pretty anonymous, except for a mirror here, a credenza there. Lots of white walls.

The similarities of the walls, the houses, the glimpses of furniture, the seedy intrusion into someone else’s life and someone else’s tv-viewing itinerary is kind of shocking and depressing. It’s one global culture all right, and oy, what a dreary culture it is. I can assure you Hamlet, Swan Lake or the Bolshoi are least likely choices for the array. Cartoons, One Life to Live and the Biggest Loser beat ‘em out easy.

The tv-on-pedestal isolated in the room was appropriately altar-like for the medium we love to and hate to worship. The look reminded me of some early installation I saw in New York of video pioneer Mary Lucier’s work, monitors atop pedestals. I realize that tvs on pedestals is not an uncommon approach; but in both these cases there was a sense of elevating the ordinary above it’s normal status.

But mostly what struck me was the sweet earnestness of the sellers, trying to charm with their taste and to get you to part with your dough.

Installation shot from Collections Show at Copy. Image features Neon Pink Things collected by Callie Konane Rickards (center), Andrew Jeffrey Wright‘s Family Circus books collection (left) and Erica Prince’s Best Friends photos collection (right)

This month, at Copy Gallery, Luren Jenison curated a Collections Show, with entries gathered from the private caches of various New York and Philadelphia obsessives. Slews of ski masks, records, stationery, squeaky toys, succulents, weirdo children’s videos, Family Circus Books— pinned up and spread out like cases of dried butterflies.

Leslie Rogers’ paper bag collection

Three or four entries, in particular, really rang with earnest obsession. Leslie Rogers has been, for some time now, in love with the brown paper bag. She hoards them, saves names and bag-bottoms, follows news in the industry, tabs them with spreadsheets and manila folders, and even makes her own, Leslie Rogers-brand paper bags wholly from scratch. The names on the bottoms, she tells me, refer not to companies or facilities, but to living individuals. They are signatures; team leaders of quality control, perhaps. This is what initially intrigued her about the brown paper bags. The facture as much as manufacture.

PaintCo’s beer can collection

And to the right, stands a collection of 20th century beer cans, in varying stages of decomposition, by PaintCo, on a rack lovingly built to purpose. A white can generically labeled Beer sits a few shelves above its cousin, Lite Beer. A few cans have imploded into little aluminum supernovae or mangled rust-bunnies. Others are just pleasing as reminders of by-gone design sensibilities.

I stared over the collections and thought: there should be a gallery— or a micromuseum— dedicated to a weekly rotation of these kinds of collections. Curio-cabinets of human fixations. The public would never tire of it.

K-Fai Steele‘s collection of office stationary gathered from her temp jobs in New York from 2004-2007.

What is so transfixing about these fixations? Partially, there’s the raw archaeology of it all. The strict taxonomies. The old questions answered. A recent girlfriend of mine, for instance, would always stumble across brown paper bags imprinted with her surname, Salazar. And now, thanks to Rogers’ dogged investigations, I can trace the origins back to Elizabeth, New Jersey, straight back to the Duro Bag Corporation. Or, through beer cans bent and perforated into drug paraphernalia, I get a better picture of tribal practices in Providence, Rhode Island, during the year 1986. I understand the whole of culture better through some of its smaller parts — tiny pockets of my environment, newly illuminated.

Colt Hausman’s club flyers from 1994-95 found on the streets of New York, collected while he was walking to school in 5th grade.

But the Mind of the Collector is what really gets me; the genesis of these desires. Every collection has its story, usually with a pretty casual beginning. An initial find, followed by a close match, and then another, then another… until the collector develops an eye for the item; a connoisseurship that wants nothing more than to showcase them in all their pleasing, candy-aisle variety. Adam Wallacavage‘s Squeaky Toy collection comes to mind, or Jenison’s own accumulation of colorful, plastic-wrapped wine bottles. The desire is contingent, weird, and so specific that it seems to land the collector somewhere on the Aspberger’s spectrum.

Installation shot featuring the author of this post under Ben Peterson‘s ski mask collection and an example of Alexandra Segreti’s hand-painted movie poster collection. Left is Erica Prince’s best friends collection.

Nevertheless, it is no less real or wonderfully compulsive for the collector. Everyday vision switches into new, adoring detail. The collector gets this white-hot desire for something previously so undesirable, for the seemingly stupid and undeserving. PaintCo recalls “I started to be able to predict where I could find really good can deposits. Down in the woods. Places that seemed right. I learned all about the different brewing companies, and could tell the year by the size of the openings. I had this idea that the more you searched for something, the more it revealed itself.”

Installation shot, Jeremiah Hensen’s card collection, NY pickups from 2006, Adam Wallacavage‘s squeaky toys, Brendan Kellogg‘s kinetic sculptures with planar and hinge elements.

The nice thing about the Collections Show is that it allows us to see the social utility of our imbalanced fascinations. It welcomes obsession; rather than the proportional, reasonable, and loveless way in which we usually hoard our everyday artifacts.

Luren Jenison’s collection of plastic cord wrapped wine bottle collection. The show’s curator, one of Copy Gallery’s founders, did a wonderful annotated list for the show. She wrote about her own collection as well: I started finding these neon plastic wrapped wine bottles in thrift stores in North Philly while shopping for stuff for work. The first time I found one I couldn’t believe it was real — so neon and intricate. Then I kept finding more and more. I have tried to figure out where they are from and who is making them. At first I thought it was some crazy lady in her row house who substituted macrame or needlepoint for this wine bottle wrapping. But as I found more in different places, I have clues to lead me to believe that they are from a specific table wine vintner in Spain.

–Brandon Joyce is a founding father of PIFAS. We look forward to bringing you more of Joyce’s philosophical musings in the future.