Appropriate, Manipulate, Duplicate

Gil Kerlin, VISHU, digital print in Gallery Joe's "appriopriate, manipulate, duplicate

Gil Kerlin’s two new prints, made from scans of a drawing and of a piece of found crumpled tin foil, are perhaps the most surprising works here. Kerlin, who told me, with something akin to glee, that once he scanned the work it took him no more than fifteen minutes in Photoshop to mirror, tile, re-mirror and, voila, produce the file that is the basis of his finished work. It’s hard to believe since there’s a complication factor that suggests a mountain of manipulating.

Kaleidoscope from Wikipedia. Mirroring in Kerlin's works operate in a similar fashion

Gil Kerlin, digital print made from a scanned piece of found crumpled tin foil

The two works are almost mystical offerings that capture the eye and keep feeding it with new details of shape and texture. It’s pointless to resist the charms of the dark nooks, crannies and faces created as a million Gothic stories are suggested. That one of the works is called VISHU, the word for a vernal equinox festival in Southern India whose name in Sanskrit means “equal” refers you to a culture whose spiritual practices include mandalas. Of course with their Photoshop mirroring and duplicating the works are kaleidoscopic as well.

Eva Wylie standing in front of her silk screened wall at the opening at Gallery Joe

The most traditional work in the show hearkens back to the pre-computer age. Eva Wylie’s labor-intensive silk screen mural is totally real world stuff made using four screens and taking four days for the artists and her assistants to install, said gallerist Becky Kerlin.

What’s wild and unbridled about Wylie’s piece, Embedded Threads, is its chosen support, not paper but the wall. Wylie’s been printing on walls for several years now indicating her determination to create and destroy works of beauty (this wall, like all her previous works, will be painted over at the end of the exhibit). While I have to wonder about the economic feasibility of working so ephemerally I do love the idea of the works being like fairy dust sprinkled on and then disappearing into the ether. This is one of Wylie’s best. It is as ebullient as a hot air balloon rising and quite as captivating.

Others in the show are William Betts, Ati Maier and Andrew Millner.

Big Ditty

Shelley Spector, Money Quilt

Shelley Spector’s “Money Quilt,” part of her solo outing in the gallery’s Vault space does something so simple I marveled that I hadn’t seen it before. The patchwork of greenish squares is based on repeat design elements from the $1 bill, the bill so common its design elements are completely overlooked.

Shelley Spector, detail, Money Quilt

Spector told me she got the images printed on fabric at an online printer, getting squares of one design printed together that she later cut apart into the patchwork squares. It’s a smart move making use of the age-old truth about printing, economies of scale will accrue when you print multiples. Spector, who is known for her wood sculpture, sewed the quilt herself.

Shelley Spector, Oil Cans made of stacked and cut found paper

And she’s got three small sculptures in the show — cut paper stacks resembling oil cans of various dimensions. The paper oil cans (from found scraps of paper from friends and from print shops in town) immediately had me wanting one. At $325 and $425 the small cans are pretty affordable. The threesome, at $1950, should be snapped up by Sunoco for their corporate art collection. Seriously.

Vox Members Shows

Julianna Foster’s From Morning On

Julianna Foster‘s From Morning On continues the artist’s exploration of narrative through serial photography. This group of photographs shows gorgeous misty landscapes, decrepit mystery interiors that are also misty; claustrophobic backyard mists and more. It’s like the misty moors of Wuthering Heights come to the American Northeast farmland. The actor is a woman who performs ambiguous and rather static actions (listening through a wall; blowing dust off a box; staring out a window). And, maybe it’s because he just died, I’m thinking about Andrew Wyeth‘s dreamy, romantic and nostalgic Americana. Of course, Eileen Neff‘s tres post-modern photos of anthropomorphized clouds who dance with trees and have a lovely existence in the woods and inside houses also come to mind. Foster’s work intrigues by remaining ambiguous at its core, but its lyricism and beauty draw you in. This series is open enough to let all minds wander around and claim the territory for their own.  And let’s not forget we’re in Oscar season.  What kind of movie would this be?

Juliana Foster From Morning On

Several of the photos are framed but not under glass and those pieces become more palpably real — like objects — in a way the glass-framed pieces aren’t. It’s the same non-glass framing Zoe Strauss used for her recent show at Silvertstein and the strategy gives the photos immediacy and plays up their sensuality.

James Johnson, Break, view through the glass door.

James Johnson‘s Break is a breakout piece. The artist used to work in small boxes, putting dollhouse-sized photos in spaces accessible through a peephole or other voyeuristic device. Break is a life-size box (a whole room in the gallery) separated from the viewer by a locked, glass-panel door (the artist selected the door, he says, for its resemblance to Maurizio Catalan’s The Wrong Gallery door.)  Outfitted like it’s a small office this big box has a desk, easy chair, books and slippers. At the opening and at other times during the show’s run it will also have the artist, in residence, sitting, reading, writing and cogitating in the space. Johnson says it’s not a performance piece, but when the artist puts his body in the picture I read it that way. The theatrical aspect pushes into rich territory and I am excited to see where the artist goes next. Artist trapped in a box? I can see that going far.

Eva Wylie, A Continuous Shuffle of Earthturf

Eva Wylie‘s A Continuous Shuffle of Earthturf is a continuous shuffle of imagery in the artist’s virtuoso silkscreen-on-wall method.  From afar the piece looks like an asymmetrical array of candy-colored floating toys or balloons. Up close, the images come into focus as a profusion of women’s hair pieces:  long plaits — thick, double-braidings and solitary ropes — mostly upside down.  Something about the shape of the plaits and their relation to the crown of the head gives them a topsy-turvy jellyfish look, which I quite like. I have no idea what the work is about–whether it’s celebratory or wry — but the image, screened right onto the pristine wall, is dazzling.

Eva Wylie, A Continuous Shuffle of Earthturf (detail)

Vox Alumni show

It’s great that the alternative space continues to showcase its alumni members which allows you to catch up with the artists, or in some cases, meet them for the first time.

Merilee Challiss

Merrilee Challiss‘ delicate white on black works on paper with pinking sheer edges and what appear to be embroidery hoop frames are Edward Gorey-delightful. The work nods to arts and crafts and book illustration and is a nice mix of old, new, high and low.

John T. Lange

John T. Lange‘s mini landscape projection via two clattery old film projectors has a hobby shop charm.

Anne Schaefer.  Photo by Libby.

Anne Schaefer‘s little tower of patterned boxes is elegant and seems like it walked in from the AiA Bookstore — meta-architectural blocks for kids to play with.

Video Lounge

In the video lounge, David Tinapple‘s Scatter Square translates a seascape into a series of digital rows and columns of tiles which it then flips around reconfiguring the landscape like one of those old-fashioned tile games that you can now get for your keychain. There’s a solitary soul on the beach and it’s funny to think of the person being shuffled around willy nilly not even knowing what’s happening. But I guess that’s life for you.

The cheerful boyishness that permeates Nick Paparone‘s work is always a little slippery. He is one of the trio of Vox Populi artists up for the month of May, plus a couple of guest artists, and he almost steals the show with one of his pieces–The Wonder Wander.

The piece, a sort of portable den, consists of a globe spinning slowly on the axis of a lamp pole. The gizmo on the wall that turns the globe is a small motor that spins a small rubber cylinder. The cylinder, pressed against the globe, uses friction to push it around. Tin foil land oceans, gumby-green land masses, the gizmo, the diminutive rug beneath, all diminish the grandeur of the globe as a respresentative of our Planet Earth in the universe.

The Wonder Wander is a sort of metaphor, a slice of the Big Guy’s den domain, his American Dream, turned into a cartoon of powerlessness and yearning.

Nick Paparone’s defaced Cindy Crawford poster, 400 Horsepower #2, airbrushed, laminated Cindy Crawford poster, poster hangers

Behind Nick’s entire installation, Cliffs, Bluffs and Steamy Lowlands…, is this persona. He’s the same dopey guy who at a younger age, drools over a well-oiled Cindy Crawford in a swimsuit with just two inches more fabric than a monokini, who at a still earlier time in his life lets one rip after drinking his coke or his beer, and who dreams of superhero exploits as a kid. Paparone’s installation is a sort of growth chart for the American frat-boy turned president.

Nick Paparone, King Kiosk, comic books, tree branches, chaser lights, fabric, wood, homocote board

Although I admired the kiosk, which is beautifully put together, I sort of didn’t get it. The comics are inaccessible and overwhelming, with their superhero role model beyond reach yet overwhelmingly promoted–covered with plastic and draped in chains. The tree branches are like antlers and why twinkling lights? I don’t know. I did get a laugh out of the Cindy Crawford, however, the proverbial graffiti moustache as Micky Mouse ear orange slices and banana bunches.

Nick paparone, Asshole, coffee can, aluminum foil, change, tape, paper, rope, wood

The fat, ballooned out coke can with a slot for coins gave me a laugh for its deadpan silliness–a rec room prank. This is Paparone’s first solo outing as a Vox member.

Stefan Abrams has three actors read posts from an online bulletin board. Some of the posts are also framed on the walls.

Stefan Abrams‘ Laugh out Loud is a response to online bulletin board discussions of the Superbowl commercials. I thought it was a great idea that was too restrained in its execution. The idea of obsession over nonsense gets lost in the limited selection of posts on the walls and in the videos, in which actors recite some of the posts. The real online discussion is excessive, and excess is what’s called for. (Abrams’ recent photographs at Stratasphere Gallery of people at the car show are far more layered and interesting).

Eva Wylie, Roaring Tulips

Eva Wylie‘s Roaring Tulips, a room-sized installation of a parachute of cut-out floral images backed with velvet cast wonderful shadows. The inverted parachute took over the space, but the content of the flowers and the parachute seemed arbitrary. All I get out of this is, Make decoration, not war.

by Carl Baratta

The show is rounded out with paintings by guest artist Carl Baratta, which I enjoyed for their mysterious mix of narrative and symbolism and abstract mark-making. Jack Sloss is in the Video Lounge.

Gardens become figments of the imagination on the shortest days of the year. So naturally, a show about gardens that begins as the days shorten and ends before they lengthen turns my thoughts to the divide between art and the real thing–any real thing, any art.

Jackie Tileston, detail, Opera Brain Incantation, mixed on linen

The exhibit is Garden in Winter, a small group show featuring work by six artists–Jackie Tileston, Margery Amdur, Bill Scott, Robert Straight, Carole Sivin and Diane Pieri–at Hopkins House in New Jersey.

Each artist takes a different approach to creating something that passes for or is inspired by nature. But this is not a show of garden landscapes–of pictorial perspectives and trompe l’oeil or photographic realism. It isn’t even a show of impressionism.

Margery Amdur, detail, Wisp #1 acrylic, mylar

It turns out to be a show about what all art shows are about if they are any good. It’s a show about the artist’s mind, the material in front of us, and the relation between the two. It’s about taking something and making it make us think of something it is not. It’s about creating a new object that never existed before, and the best of the work is also about creating a new object that could never have been made prior to present times.

Eva Wylie’s installation, looking in, at Moore College

I don’t know that my mind would have gone in this direction if I hadn’t seen Eva Wylie’s outstanding installation at Moore College of Art (it came down Dec. 9). Wylie created a patio in the front-window installation space on Race Street, but there were no bushes in this bower. Turning installation on its head, Wylie’s posies and topiaries were 2-D images on the walls and windows. The only 3-D elements were the room itself, a garden bench, and two awnings made from scraps of paper covered with images.

Eva Wylie’s installation, looking out through pretend nature to some real nature (not to mention cars and paving)

Wylie’s silkscreened imagery comes from the information ephemera of our society–magazines, the internet, photographs. But the closer you get to them, the less they seem to be there. There’s a deliberate insubstantiality that stands in contrast to the architectural surfaces she decorates. Her work raises questions about art as an entity of its own and as an object of permanence. At the same time, she incorporates the ideas and tastes of the world around her–which are also transient.

One of Wylie’s awnings

To be fair, the work in Garden in Winter (up until Jan. 12) is not about the transience of the art object. But that relationship between what is real and what is representational and what is something else entirely is a key element in the show.

Margery Amdur, detail, #1 From the series Surrogattes, acrylic, mylar, wax and resin

The work from Margery Amdur and from Jackie Tileston may have some garden in their imagery, but they are thoroughly about materials and art and acts of synthesis and creation. Amdur is more Western-art historical in her bordering-on-baroque imagery, her references to paint-by-numbers, and her fabulous layering–either using resin or cutting layers of mylar (or embedding mylar in the resin). The work is lush and irresistable as it slips away from direct representation into its own identity as a thing, containing real shadows and indefinable spaces.

Jackie Tileston, detail from Trade Routes, mixed on linen

Tileston pulls her imagery from beyond the Western canon, exploring the Asian and South Asian imagery that also influences her own work. She unites rich saffrons and flocking mandalas and dripping jewels. She embeds cartoons and images from Asian popular culture as well as classic images. The rest is a feverish imagination creating floating worlds of non-perspectival landscape and Turner-esque eddies of paint. She has to have the widest variety of paint handling ever in her work.

Pieri, who also takes a page out of the Asian art handbook, on assembled sheets of bark-like Amate paper paints a narrow strip of landscape that floats up into an enormous sky, with a bar of Asian logo-like symbols along one side. But here the elements don’t quite merge. Another painting uses floral and decorative motifs that suggest murals.

Robert Straight, P-309, acrylic

Bill Scott’s linear etchings have the scratchiness of hay and twigs in their making. Robert Straight’s precise, spirograph-inspired works on panel suggest a magical connection to his materials in his mandala-like imagery. And Carole Sivin’s paper sculptures mix natural and manufactured forms that reference life–from spiders to people–in the garden.

I have seen many of the pieces in the show before, but the combination was a treat.

Silver-plated take-out box by Susan Myers at Fleisher Challenge 3.

All three artists in this year’s Fleisher Challenge (3) deserve the label of virtuoso, since all are formidable makers of works requiring fastidious adherence to technique. But Eva Wylie’s and Colette Fu’s works have me questioning the staying power of technique-heavy production that’s content-lite.

Artist Colette Fu demonstrating how to open and close her complex pop-up books which look like they are too delicate to do so. They actually close and open easily.

Fu’s pop-up books of Philadelphia locales such as the Rodin Museum are true marvels of paper engineering whose content is gift-shop standard, while Wylie’s four-color miniature fantasy scene screenprinted directly on the walls is dangerously close to greeting-card precious.

Eva Wylie, detail of her room-spanning screenprinted fantasy on the wall.

I’d love to see the scale of Wylie’s works grow, and her content clarify around a larger point. Fortunately Susan Myers’ fine metal pieces push the show to a meatier level, dealing with issues of ecology, recycling and the false promise of glitter. Her silver-plated takeout boxes made from thrift shop discards (those 25th wedding anniversary platters, replated and retooled into marvelous new objects) and her Tiffany-evoking gift bows and fringed-aluminum wallpaper speak of the pretty, the festive and the celebratory. However, the subliminal message—about tarnished hopes, false dreams and our perverse throwaway culture—adds a note of poignancy and Duchampian irony.

Wind Fleisher Challenge 3: Susan Myers, Eva Wylie, Colette Fu
Through Feb. 10. Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, 719 Catharine St. 215.922.3456.

Paul Chan and the Fabric Workshop

Paul Chan’s 1st Light (I don’t know how to make the word Light look crossed out; sorry) silenced the usually chatty gallery goers.

The excitement at the Fabric Workshop and Museum is Paul Chan. He’s showing 1st Light, a projected piece he had at the Whitney Biennial.

Unlike last time I saw it in the rush of the Whitney, this time I took it in. It’s the WTC apocalypse played out against the sky, with silhouettes of flying people diving to earth as objects like bicycles and pieces of the building float up and as birds fly across the transcendent sky. The pace is elegaic. The crowd of gallery goers stood silently watching. Me too.

A second piece, 4th Light, views the same event through the crossed mullions of a large window that wraps around the corner of the room. The idea is similar to the other piece, but not the same. And the sense of being a spectator behind the window reflects the reality so many office workers and residents faced on 9/11.

The use of silhouettes and light and floating turns the specific event into any disaster in any place, the interruption to daily life familiar and unfamiliar all at once.

The exhibit also includes drawings for the pieces as well as a couple of drawings of trash remaining after the Republican Convention of 2004.

Jean Shin’s TEXTile, created at the Fabric Workshop, allowed people to type letters onto a screen at the far end of the unrolling “paper”.

Jean Shin’s piece upstairs, TEXTile, is an interactive meditation on computers. Sit and type. Enough sitting and typing already. I watch people sitting and typing on TV detective shows. I watch them in the movies. Stop. The installation also included a couple of videos of keyboards in action, the rapid depression of letters too quick for a viewer to keep up. The words stayed inaccessible and indecipherable, just beyond reach, and reminded me a little of Ann Hamilton’s disappearing letters. This was my favorite part of Shin’s installation. I also liked the clicking noise of the computer keys on the soundtrack.

At Vox, Adams, Suib, and Wylie with Vicars

Amy Adams’ undead was a walk-into mountain range, black against a glowing sky.

Downstairs at Vox Populi Gallery, Amy Adams’installation, an imaginary landscape is built up of silver marks on black paper. Called “undead,” it’s the mural in the Chinese Restaurant, not to mention the silhouetted witch against the moon, reimagined. The large paper sheets, layered with a touch of 3-D, create a mountainous silhouette against a glowing white-wall sky. Adams creates a dramatic example of repetitive mark making that leads to a sense of land folding and heaving as well as a sense of time spent making the marks. She has created something from nothing, thereby suggesting both at once.

Matthew Suib’s fire mandala made me think of Tony Oursler’s couch potato at the Met.

Music continues to be a concern of visual artists these days. Adams played some music–a tape she spliced from discarded audio tapes she picks up from the streets of Philadelphia. And in the next room Matthew Suib has included some exotic stoner music to go with his installation Purified by Fire, which includes a churning mandala of fire projected onto the wall. It’s mesmerizing, and the highlight of his installation. I missed his special screening, also fire related. Maybe that was the highlight, but I can’t really say. Sorreee. Anyone see it who wants to report in the comments below?

Wylie and Vicars collaborated on the larger installation. this table-top landscape uses label imagery.

The physical presence of Eva Wylie with Rebecca Vicars’ installation Flourescapes and Mirth was removed from the oven before the cake had risen. I did love the idea of using and redrawing the imagery from water bottles (Deer Park and Poland Springs), and I loved including the price code in the landscape on the table top. But all in all, the installation lacked coherence.

Music carried over into the video lounge, where David Dyment’s video posts a series of questions drawn from the artist’s pop-music CD-and-record collection. It didn’t rise above the banality of its sources. The motion medium of video doesn’t match the message–static words.

The Black Boy George at 1026

Everyone stopped and read and read and read Musson’s latest installation of Too Black for BET.

Words however at Space 1026 were over the top wonderful in Jayson Scott Musson’s exhibit, Too Black for BET “Episode 2: The Black Boy George” of posters and downloads of text messages on his cell phone(it’s episode 2 because there was an Too Black for BET episode 1 and he’s hoping to finish episode 3 by 2010).

The posters are take-no-prisoners rants that lance the soft underbellies of everyone and everything, posturers all, from vegetarians to bias in post-Katrina restoration efforts to loft-living yuppies to feminists and rappers. (Musson himself is known as PackofRats with the musical rap group Plastic Little, so there’s a big music connection here too). Alex Da Corte, who filled me in since I couldn’t find the artist, assured me that Musson is the sweetest, gentlest of people. Well, here’s one of his bad-boy outlets. The text messages, interspersed with the posters, hint at the ordinary person and his daily life, hidden behind the performing persona. And the persona sure makes all of our posturing, his own included, look damned stupid. I loved this. It’s a book.

Yurt, sweet yurt at Black Floor

One Wall is an Edge, by Luren Jenison at Black Floor Gallery

Finally, Luren Jenison’s yurt and mural installation, One Wall is an Edge, at Black Floor offers a lot to look at during the first glance–a visual treat, the mural influenced by Mongolian and other Asian landscape traditions. I loved lots of the details, like the holes in the walls and the chance to enter the space. Ultimately, however, considering the themes of home and crossing borders, the imagery didn’t travel quite far enough.

All in all, as First Friday’s go, I have to sing this one’s praises.

For lots more images of all of these artists’ work, go to my First Friday Flickr set.

Art about decoration is a better proposition than decorative art. It’s about something. And that’s what the show “A Delicate Constitution” at the Art Alliance is about, featuring work by four artists who explore undercurrents in decorative motifs, especially as pertains to the ladies’ heavily decorated purviews of hearth, home and herself.

untitled silk screen on wall, by Wylie

Eva Wylie, a member of Vox Populi Gallery, has silk-screened friezes on the wall of imagery borrowed from popular-culture sources like the internet and magazines. The result looks pretty at first blush, but the subject matter reimagined in its new context, taking on threatening or otherwise subversive overtones. The work includes imagery that is new as well as imagery Wylie has used previously at Vox Populi. The newest edition in the frieze category is a lyrical line of map tidbits. The imagery suggests surveillance amidst the domesticity of a wall decoration. A delicate pink blanket with windows or squares cut out also suggests surveillance in the safety of home and the insecurity of a security blanket (see top image).

Portrait, by Linda Cordell

Lit up porcelain portraits of dogs are part of what Linda Cordell is showing in this exhibit. Cordell uses animals as a way to skewer people and societal roles, and here she includes porcelain portraits of dogs that preen with self-importance, the sort of portrait that belongs in an upper-crust English home of a bygone era. But the dogs are not so sweet and friendly, and the whiteness of the porcelain made me wonder if this was a joke on “bone china.” The pretension of the portraits are further exaggerated by the insanely decorative porcelain frame and matting.

Cordell’s pink blush

“pink blush,” a pink porcelain weasel (I think that’s what it was) posed on a highly decorated plinth/platter, wears a coyly short skirt that would leave nothing to the imagination even if the animal’s legs weren’t posed up in the air. It’s a creature who enjoys being a girl a little too much. She’s a ’50s housewife and a sex kitten serving herself up as a tasty treat.

Black Gothic, by Carson Fox

Carson Fox offers funereal arrays of blanketed silk flowers, birds and butterflies. The funereal qualities of the giant versions of Victorian memorial woven-hair mementos were mercifully undercut by the mordant use of words like Liar and Fraud. The kissing balls seemed like no more than what they were. I most enjoyed the judgmental, graphic display based on flocked wallpaper (above).

Grabtensil, II, by Colleen Toledano

And from Colleen Toledano, clinical-looking instruments of torture and pain parade in lace and pink as pumped-up versions of every girl’s purse accessory. Toledano’s use of pressurized (insulation?)foam as a decorative material stood out.

On My Way Back to You #3

Three photography shows were also at the Art Alliance. On the third floor, a show by Julianna Foster included some magical pieces–a panoramic picture of a distant person in a wide expanse of forest, and also her “Condensation Series,” images of nature transformed by frost- and mist-coated glass.

You and Me, by Kelley Roberts

Showing on the first floor were digital prints by Libby Saylor created by the trick of reversing a camera lens and also photographs by Kelley Roberts, in which cut-out top layers of photographic digital prints reveal layers beneath. I liked the metaphors in Roberts’ pieces that achieved clarity and poignancy, as in her You and Me.