Adam Parker Smith, Salami, collage

Adam Parker Smith, Salami, detail, collage

Smith, who moved from Philly to Brooklyn and shows at Priska Juschka, is making collages here, a major change from the stuffed dolls. I especially loved the sexy body parts that add up to the piece named Salami.

Sator Square, ink and graphite on handcut paper mounted on plexiglass, 12 x 12 inches, 2009

Stabler’s cut paper has gone 3-D fabulous and soon I expect him to be cutting paper in the fifth dimension and the size of the head of a pin!

Pranger and Ruff are exciting new finds.

Donna Ruff, Aureola Series 1-16, burn on paper, gold leaf, 2009

Ruff’s grid of  drawings not much bigger than Post-its  are burned into gold-backed paper. The gold sneaks up with a glow from behind, lending a magical elegance to an object that is at once lacy, vulnerable and hard core. The imagery, which has an Astrid Bowlby-like obsessiveness, merges a mysterious symbolic or scientific code with a topographical mapping of the cosmos, while the repetitive hole-burning seems like a sort of religious devotion, a scarification of the paper. The gallery notes state that Ruff is inspired by Islamic and Afghani art.

Ben Pranger, Spaceship Log, wooden log, dowels, plexiglas, (braille text from buckminster fuller's spaceship earth), 18 x 28 x 18 inches

Pranger, a Pollock-Krasner grant winner, offered work that looks like giant Tinkertoy constructions made of found chunks of wood. What interests me is the use of Braille in it, a language for people who can’t see, in an art gallery where the blind would probably not go. But the clunky, DIY charm of the forms and the incomprehensibility of the encoded language created something mysterious, a sort of puzzle, endearingly awkward and inarticulate. The one piece with the words in a standard alphabet–a Biblical quote–I found less intriguing.

Corey Antis, Cold Room, acrylic, flashe, casein on jute

Also in the show is Vox Populi member Corey Antis, whose paintings are more like drawings in their spareness. He is the only artist in the show not playing with language’s inability to communicate. And religion, another show theme, is a stretch, unless martyrdom counts: Antis paints empty spaces, empty rooms that are challenges to enter and challenges to stay in. I suspect that’s his point. In Cold Room the horizonal lines look like heating elements. Ouch!

Vox Populi’s December members’ show is a conceptual outing that—with the exception of Amy Adams’ sparse but evocative “Our Boat That Is Made of Flowers”—is totally puzzling.

The newly married Adams is the former executive director of Vox and now works as the director of Fleisher-Ollman Gallery. Her installation is about power, love, war and peace, triggered by her recent honeymoon to Europe where she saw many old paintings of battle scenes and power brokers. Adams’ installation has two parts: a video animation of ocean waves abstracted from a maritime battle painting, and two portraits comprised of words from emails between the artist and her then-fiance.

The animation extracts the ships, smoke, guns and combatants from the original scanned painting and leaves only the waves that she set in motion. Because her source material is a scanned book plate of a painted sea and lacks color, the waves feel unreal – more like a sea of oatmeal than water. But the undulations still invoke seasickness. The idea of a woman editing the Old Masters, grabbing power from the powerful, is irresistible.

Amy Adams, Our Boat That Is Made Of Flowers pair of portraits of the bride and groom. Photo by Libby.

Adams’ two word portraits, framed and leaning against the wall, are clearly the products of laborious attention to detail. The task of cutting and pasting the words from each email into a “his” and “hers” Word document then sorting the words alphabetically seems an almost crazy thing to do. You can’t boil down a conversation between two people in love to the sum of its parts and have it make sense, can you? Shockingly, the portraits do seem to work that way. The bubbly Adams’ portrait is twice as long as her husband’s and who’s to say that’s not capturing some kernel of truth.

While Adams’ pieces are very straightforward in their meaning, the rest of the show provides a challenge for casual viewers.

Corey Antis, Herman Street, 2008
Arylic, flashe on paper
18 x 24 inches

Corey Antis’ small works on paper circle the first room. The pieces look similar to sketches, plans or architectural drawings. Washy and with surprising colors—salmon and black in one piece—the series suggests ongoing research. Ultimately, the works are puzzles too personal to be compelling.

Anna Neighbor, Hold Me Like You Mean It, 2008
Archival inkjet print
33 x 50 inches

Anna Neighbor’s large photo-based works also allude to something more. One photo is almost entirely black. Former Voxers Justin Witte and Olivia Schreiner’s collaboration in the guest gallery is a disappointment compared to their past outings, and Rebekah Tolley’s slow-motion videos projected on objects are reminiscent of lava lamps. Meanwhile, Mark Lewis’ video North Circular in Screening has cinematic chops that create a sense of mystery, beauty, suspense and denouement. (View it at his website).

“Vox Populi December Members Show.”
Through Dec. 28.
Vox Populi, 319 N. 11th St., third fl.
215.238.1236.

Darkness is my pillow at Vox Populi this month. Almost everything is noir, and the American Dream has turned into something lost, exploded, longed for and gone. At least that’s what I got over almost everything I saw there.

The most ambitious work on the subject is James Johnson‘s photo installation, Some Rooms-Part I (Yours). Corey Antis‘ smallish formalist paintings also refer to spaces and memory and feelings; and the video by Deborah Stratman at Screening Gallery, just inside Vox, also refers to these ideas. (Sarah Zwerling‘s Window, in the video lounge, wasn’t working when I was there).

James Johnson, Some Rooms-Part I (Yours)–the black picture window, showing a reflection of the gallery and a landscape drawing of a kitchen inside

Johnson, whose emotionally suggestive peephole views have grown this time to a dark, picture-window view. The cardboard corrugated boxes that held the little views have given way to a room-sized box. And the illusion of architectural space within the box has been simultaneously undercut and created by adding a scrim of architectural drawing in front of the more realistic photographic view.

This is Americana–about the vernacular architecture of the suburban landscape and how we are blocked from really entering other people’s lives and homes at the same time that we imbue them with our imaginations. It’s Robert Bechtle‘s cars as houses, or Henry Wessel‘s deadpan photos that reference real estate portraits.

In Johnson’s installation, the viewer looks through a dark, reflective picture window and through a blue-print-like, unbelievably long kitchen wall of counters, cabinets and windows. Beyond these layers stands a white clapboard house–a suburban classic–shrouded in darkness. Its windows light up and dim, inviting us to pick out the murky outlines of the house.
I yearned to look inside those lit windows as I stood there.

James Johnson, Some Rooms-Part I (Yours), infrastructure behind the installation is on display

Johnson makes sure you know it’s all faux. He leaves open the real gallery room behind the window for you to look at. It’s filled with the architectural infrastructure of the installation–a smaller box behind a bigger box, and a colorful mare’s nest of wires and a computer.

Even with this transparency, he still succeeds with the illusion–the yearning for all that the two houses–the barely visible one behind and the sketched one in front–represent. The layers of the drawn kitchen and the life-sized but reflective picture window add a distancing that cuts some of the emotional connection. The intimacy of the peephole and the revealed interior with light pouring in from behind has been lost. But layers of ideas and realities have filled the void. All in all, pretty great.

Corey Antis, Untitled Still (Black Room), 23 x 29 inches, acrylic, flashe on panel

Corey Antis was holding down the front desk at Vox when I arrived. He, too has a show there, and he said that in his own paintings, he is trying to capture the meaning and feeling of architectural spaces with a minimum of means and a consciousness of the materials he is using. In looking at these paintings, I also see the nostalgic vocabulary of interference on a television screen and the out-of-synch scratchiness of an old movie.

Palindrome, 24 x 29 inches, acrylic, flashe on panel

I’m interested in his tie to the brush stroke, which is most effective when it becomes something the painting is about–as in, Palindrome, and Untitled (black room), which become movie stills in a noir narrative that I can imagine my way into.

When the pieces work, the architectural vocabulary becomes a sort of Malevich block of paint, almost scrubbed away until it acquires a ghostliness and spiritual representation of memory, with only the textures and brush strokes pulling the work back to the concrete world.

Julianna Foster’s installation, In A Vale, her first one-person exhibit at Vox

Also at Vox, Julianna Foster’s installation, In a Vale. The grouping of light-box-illuminated color transparencies recall horror and disaster movies and the weirdness that can transform the vernacular American landscape into a danger zone. I liked the individual images a lot; they are pure photographic fiction from the Hollywood conventions–stuck on a deserted road, lost in the woods, beset by fog, etc., etc. The installation, which suggests a series of related movie stills, undercuts the narratives of the individual images and does them a disservice, overall, I think. But the use of the light boxes with cinema-inspired stills feels just right.

The moon is ghostly in this night-time shot from Deborah Stratman’s video In Order Not to be Here.

Which brings me to Screening Gallery, the video gallery within Vox. Deborah Stratman’s 33-minute video In Order Not to be Here is about surveillance in our daily worlds. In the video, shot totally at night, we see guards in front of a wall of tv monitors and a guard dog baring its teeth materializes in the night light. We see empty parking lots and unpopulated cul de sacs. This is all quite unsettling, with its suggestion of an embattled nation living in fear and putting up with an utter loss of privacy at the same time that the nation is pulling up the drawbridges of life to hide in mcmansions in the ‘burbs. This video makes its points by showing the familiar as the sinister–mixed with beauty. Although there’s no narrative, the emotional and political punch are pretty great (warning–it may totally depress you).

Leah Bailis, Corner, cardboard and paint, 2007, at Fleisher/Ollman

In the same vein, I want to mention Vox member Leah Bailis’ piece that’s now up in 2000 Years of Sculpture at Fleisher/Ollman. Her sculpture is a fragment of the sort of white clapboard American Dream house that’s in James Johnson’s piece. Bailis, too, shows us infrastructure–of the walls–the American Dream laid bare and dissected as a flimsy facade.

In the work of all these artists, I was particularly conscious of how they were feeling the national loss of innocence and the yearning for safer, more optimistic times.

Justin Schiedel, So Long (Philly), video

On a lighter note, also at Vox, So Long (Philly), by Canadian artist Jason Schiedel, depicts a manic flight of a barely visible figure moving through urban scenes–from all the cities where the video has shown, so it gets longer as its exhibition history grows. It’s hilarious and tornado-like–the only truly upbeat art in the lot. Even the tilt of the overturned tv doesn’t suggest threat, but rather wild exuberance.

In between the Tyler groundbreaking ceremony last Friday at 11 and a meeting at 2 pm with Pepon Osorio at the Lighthouse to see his Badge of Honor installation (highly recommended! — see my flickr set, and watch for a post soon) I ran into Old City and stopped in to Temple Gallery to see the MFA shows. I had gotten a heads’ up on one of them, from Corey Antis, a Vox Populi member who wrote us about his show. We’ve covered his Vox shows on artblog. The other MFA show artist — who was in the gallery when I stopped by — is Robert Geyer, a glass artist who also runs the gallery the Barbershop out of his house.

Geyer, standing with his work, around 6 hours before the show’s opening, when I stopped in.

Geyer was fixing a broken piece in his show and working hard to get it done before the opening reception at 6 pm. Geyer’s show involved found glass, specifically the faceted glass covers from fluorescent light fixtures, and he told me that someone had backed into a big circular wall piece (by accident) and the glass cracked. Geyer’s a glass major so he went and cut another big circle of glass and was getting ready to replace the broken piece. The glass is attached to some kind of motor that causes it to spin. Sounds great but I couldn’t wait to see the finished work so we will all have to imagine it.

Meanwhile, the freestanding glass sculpture that looks like a crystal mountain had great appeal. Geyer said that while normal glass reflects light, the faceted glass absorbs it and the object seems to contain light. He said the piece looked great at night. I thought it looked pretty great during the day.

Corey Antis, from his show, the Parallax View

In the back room, Antis’s show, the Parallax View was a series of large works on paper (paintings I believe) that were architectural and while some felt a little like architectural renderings some defied ideas of real space and seemed to be false spaces, things that would not be walked into under any circumstances.

Corey Antis

I note here that this is the second show I’ve seen with a title referring to a 1970s movie thriller. The Parallax View (1974) is a conspiracy movie with political overtones. It’s about a political assissination and the opening scene has been done up to resemble the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968. The other paranoid-conspiracy-movie exhibit was, of course, Logan’s Run, curated by Damian Weinkrantz, based on the movie Logan’s Run, 1976, which tells of a society where those older than age 30 are killed.

More photos at flickr.

Space — internal, external, fairy tale and architected — is on the table at Vox Populi this month. Looking at the work here, I kept feeling like Marty McFly in Back the the Future when Doc would explain the space/time continuum. Sure, Doc, whatever. Let’s just get this jalopy moving. It’s apt that space is an issue though since Vox the gallery is once again moving its tent, displaced by the powers that be who would expand the Convention Center over to Broad St. Now that’s an uncomfortable place to be in!

Nadia Hironaka‘s spacey piece, Crack, will have you look through her eyes at Philadelphia and the possibility of murder in the neighborhood — yikes! I watched her video piece, riveted, eating up each on-the-edge-of-abstract scene as it dissolved into the next with no apparent logical connective tissue. Each beautiful dissolve or tracking shot left me hungry for the next. I almost didn’t care about content my eyes were so satisfied. I had never thought the Jeremy Blake thought about Hironaka’s work before I saw this piece, but as I watched one abstracted image after another I wanted the artist to simply let fly and abandon all caution. Go abstract and make beauty. Let the imagery sing and dance and don’t worry about narrative. It’s just a thought.

Jen (l) and Dustin, two Tyler senior painting students peruse the model-esque styrofoam shelters created by Corey Antis, Vox member and Tyler grad.

In his small paintings and sculptures Corey Antis is working a theme having to do with shelter and the lack of comfort therein. There is something loveable about the styrofoam packing material shelters. I thought about James Casebere’s photos of forlorn cave-like spaces when I looked at the works. Antis’s paintings are harder to decipher. Their failure to leap into some fantasy zone holds them back from transporting you with the artist into an imagined space.

Xiang Yang’s Buddha says.

Xiang Yang continues to intrigue with his East-West embroidery thread hybrids. Buddha is the ostensible subject in this installation. But it’s Buddha seemingly whooshing forth from the wall, a cartoon-trail of colors following him. It’s not your grandfather’s Buddha. The crafting of the piece is, as usual, virtuosic. And that craftsmanship calls into question the entire enterprise of crafting embroidered objects in the Orient. Whatever else this installation is about I find that the artist is going confidently forth in ways that break him thankfully out of the plastic deli box to which he was wed for a couple of years. Xiang’s work is in part about the artist feeling out of time, out of place and out of his culture. That he is able to create a hybrid East-West space that also merges old and new (traditional imagery and cartoon “speed” lines) bodes well for the continued milking of his subject. I look forward to watching where he takes it.

Brooklyn artist Diana al-Hadid, in Vox’s fourth room, creates an anthropomorphized sculptural city and its little brother or sister. The two-part sculpture which is full of references to the ancients — Roman aqueducts, walled medieval cities, Louis XIV decorative gold leaves, Michaelangelo’s Sistene Chapel image of God touching Adam — has the presence of a diva or dancer in the spotlight. It’s hot! I kept thinking of a whirling dervish with skirts flying in its self-created wind. The piece is exciting, dramatic, and great to look at, whatever it’s about.

I didn’t get to watch the video in the video lounge and perhaps someone else can chirp up about that. The show’s up to Sept 30 so get on over there. Vox always delivers the goods and this show is no exception.