Tag Archive "daniel-petraitis"

Vox VII – nice and easy

Not as wild as some of its predecessors, Vox VII, the annual emerging artist show at Vox Populi, is a whale of a good show. With 35 artists and all media except performance represented, paintings make a strong showing. No matter how many times people say painting is dead, it just is not, and here the variety of paintings demonstrates the media’s still got some tricks up its sleeve. Sculpture is literally all over the map, from a highly crafted fiber object to a sprawling found-object installation with a video embedded in it to a low-tech gizmo made of wood ... More » »

A Seed on Diamond Gallery grows

Daniel Petraitis is omnipresent this month, it seems. Besides his iconic t-shirt at Rebekah Templeton, he is in another group show, To-Day is another Day, Make Art at Pterodactyl Gallery. And he also had a too brief, two-week solo show at A Seed on Diamond, a beautiful gallery in a rowhouse on Norris Square.  

Templeton Spotlights 9 emerging artists

In the small open-call show Spotlights at Rebekah Templeton, the nine artists in the exhibit do a great job of making fresh work from the old tactic of making silk purses out of sows ears.

Another kind of festival–Art in the Open in June

In this extraordinary year of multiple art festivals in Philadelphia, Art in the Open Philadelphia, scheduled for June 9 to 12 along the Schuylkill River, is cut from a different cloth. This grand plan of four days of activities started out as a simple celebration of conventional plein air landscape painting, with artists painting in plain view of the public along the banks of the river.

First Friday–an introspective Fourth of July

The streets may have been deserted, But the few galleries that were opening for First Friday on the July 4th holiday weekend still had a surprising number of attendees, if not exactly major crowds. And since I began at Bambi at the Piazza, everything seemed quite celebratory.

The great society at Little Berlin and Basekamp

Little Berlin and Basekamp, part of my First Friday route, were both you-had-to-be-there moments, something quite different from a quiet gallery visit in the middle of the week. Little Berlin‘s exhibit, Offerings, is made of works created by small groups of four people collaborating together. The total number of participants at play–71 participants in 20 groups–was pretty amazing. Little Berliners Alex Gartelmann and Martha Savery mixed and matched group members for the most part, so participants barely knew or didn’t at all know their collaborators. Little Berlin, once again, is reaching out beyond their core group and finding lots of ... More » »

Dumpsters ‘r’ us–Daniel Petraitis at 201

Daniel Petraitis, Dumpsters (there are three sizes in all) Everyone kept saying “the dumpsters” in reverent tones whenever I brought up the fact that I was headed to 201 Gallery at Kelly and Weber to check out Daniel Petraitis’ exhibit there. I’ve seen some great dumpster art before–Tim Belknap‘s thumper dumpster (Red Dumpster With Strap-On) at Slought, Billy Blaise Dufala‘s Dumpster Coffin at the Main Line Art Center. But I wasn’t sure the world was ready for another dumpster piece. To see Daniel Petraitis’ five dumpsters is to love them!!! The dumpsters (there are three versions, five dumpsters in all) ... More » »

nuts and berries: objects and not

Little Berlin 1801 N. Howard St., Philadelphia.Friday, December 14th- ? A wall of found and manipulated objects, priced from low to “priceless” nuts and berries: objects and not bills itself as a “visual agreement between daniel petraitis and martha savery” and each would-be capital letter was printed lower case as it is reproduced here. I can only assume the use of lower case implies that the artists (or the space) are extremely modest about their craft and its place in society. I think an adept parallel would be when a band chooses to play on the floor, becoming a part ... More » »