Changes for Warhol Museum
The Andy Warhol Museum has announced Eric C. Shiner as its new director. A curator, professor, writer and translator, Shiner has had an academic emphasis on contemporary Asian art – specifically that of Japan. He aims to continue the museum’s plans of traveling its collections around the world and working with Pittsburgh’s business community on an international level.

Also released by the museum is its new Warhol D.I.Y. Pop app. In the past, visitors to The Andy Warhol Museum could create silk screen prints in the museum’s Weekend Factory. This app allows people anywhere to learn about the process and create Warhol-style digital prints from their own pictures. The app is available at a debut demo price of $0.99 in the iTunes store.

Arts jobs are growing in number!
Some great news for the creative community: The National Endowment for the Arts recently released an analysis which projects healthy growth in the arts sector through 2018. The highest projected growth rates? Museum technicians and conservators. But not to worry artists. Although they rank among the lowest, the category of jobs for painters and sculptors is still expected to grow by as much as 9%.

ITE open studio

International Turning Exchange, all about wood

On July 16, the Center for Art in Wood (Wood Turning Center) will host its International Turning Exchange open studio day from 10 am – 4 pm. The cost is $10 and lunch will be provided. Contact Lori at lori@woodturningcenter.org to register.

Prospect.2 announces artists and venues
There was some question about whether there’d be a second Prospect New Orleans, but they must have worked out the finances because the New Orleans Contemporary Art Biennial – Prospect.2 – has released its list of participants and locations. The biennial will last from October 22, 2011 – January 29, 2012. Visit their website for all of the details.

New gallery director at Moore
Kaytie Johnson has been selected as Moore College of Art and Design’s new gallery director and chief curator. Formerly the director of galleries, museums, and collections at DePauw University, she is expected to bring a fresh new programming perspective to the college when she begins in late August.

Opportunities

author-LESS-ity deadline July 25
Help join in a publicly curated exhibition inside City Hall! All you have to do is contribute an image of art that you find to be quality. The artwork will be displayed in the Little Berlin‘s Department of Alternative Affairs office in City Hall and then be compiled into a book. Send your image to berlin.little@gmail.com or upload pictures to the Flickr page.

Utrecht Local Arts Series
Utrecht Art Supply on Chestnut Street will be showcasing one artist or theme every month beginning on Second Friday. The first artist showcased is Steve Cleff through August 8. If you are interested in having your work considered, contact the store at store28@utrecht.com.

Dialogo 365 call for artists
In celebration of the 200th year of Venezuela’s independence, The TRUST Venue will host Dialogo 365. The themes of the exhibition are freedom/liberty/independence and the intent is to tap into the Northeast’s rich Latin, Latin American, and Caribbean artistic production. To apply visit the call for artists or e-mail at curator@dialogo365.com.

Call for documentary photos: hard economic times
A show of documentary photography concerning tough economic times will begin on September 8 as part of 5-part series called Class Warfare in Philadelphia. This show will be held at Robin’s Books and Moonstone Arts Center and is currently accepting work. Submit low-res images to Ted Adams (tedadams@verizon.net) and Eric Mencher (emencher@hotmail.com) by July 31 for consideration.

Pterodactyl BIG ART SHOW
Pterodactyl Creative Project Space is seeking submissions for their BIG ART SHOW – a one night art party where you can show off your stuff in an unpretentious environment. The catch? There is no catch! No judging, no applications. Contact them at BIGARTSHOW@pterodactylphiladelphia.org if you have any questions or just to let them know you’re coming!

Academy of Natural Sciences seeks artists
To celebrate their bicentennial, the Academy of Natural Sciences is requesting artists to submit ideas for installations or performance that celebrate the inter-relation of science and art. Artists of any medium are welcome, and are asked to submit a short paragraph explaining their idea. The deadline is August 12. Contact Karen Spiro at project200@ansp.org if you have any questions or ideas.

Artist News

Andrew Jeffrey Wright recently made some episodes of a children’s show on Comcast with buddies Rose Luardo, Ted Passon and Thom Lessner. To find the episodes go to: On Demand > Kids > Activity TV > Summer Joke School.

As we mentioned before, Henry Bermudez has an installation up at Philadelphia International Airport, but check out the picture (detail above) we just received!

Lee Stoetzel, wood motorcycle, from his show at Mixed Greens in 2007

You may know Lee Stoetzel as the director of the West Collection, but do you know his art? Watch this Ted x event video to hear more.

Artist Serena Perrone has a lot coming up around the bend including a group show, “Here and Now” at the PMA, as well as her solo show at Cade Tompkins Projects, Providence, RI.

artblog, the Philadelphia region’s oldest and most complete source of online reviews, discussion and opinion on the visual arts, has been awarded a grant by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

A recent photo of libby (left) and roberta (center) participating in a reading of Maira Kalman's childrens books at the ICA. Also pictured, event organizer and ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner (right).

“Philadelphia is now one of the hip visual arts towns in America. You have Los Angeles and New York and Miami, where I live, but Philly is one of those towns, too,” said Dennis Scholl, program director for the Knight Foundation, which is based in Miami.

“artblog makes sure that anybody anywhere anytime can find out what’s happening in Philadelphia. Blogs are easy to do, but the question is which ones are special, which are more than just one person’s meditation. artblog is special.”

artblog was begun in 2003 by two collaborating artists, Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof.

“This money will give us a chance to reach a broader audience for Philadelphia’s fabulous art scene,” said Fallon and Rosof. “We will be using new technologies on artblog to help art lovers navigate to galleries and art events around town. We also will create a new series of podcasts modeled on our favorite radio talk show,‘Fresh Air.’”

Fallon and Rosof also share English literature and writing backgrounds. They met in the mid-1980s and began working together as painters and sculptors. Despite grants, commissions and accolades, Fallon and Rosof were frustrated with how few people their art was reaching. So they took the art out onto the street where they gave it away. One of these giveaways is documented in Academy-award nominee Wendy Weinberg’s film “Art of Activism” (excerpt here):

That same activism spurred them to create artblog to fill a growing gap between the burgeoning art scene and the shrinking art coverage in the print media.

The Knight Foundation also recently gave grants in Philadelphia to the Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design, the Institute of Contemporary Art and Vox Populi Gallery.

The Philadelphia Foundation participated in the issuing of the Knight grant.

The Philagrafika artist and curators pose amidst Regina Silveira's bug invasion at Moore College.

Conversation with Marc Voge, the male half of the collective Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, at Temple Gallery, as recollected by me–
Voge: I hate everyone. And everyone hates me.
Libby: I just read an interview of you in which you state you love everybody and everybody loves you, and what you want most is to be loved, especially for your art.
Voge: I said that? Yes that’s true. I love everybody and everybody loves me, and my art. But I can’t figure out how to make money from it.
Libby: I should think they would be easy to sell, but then what do I know.
Voge: You can represent me then. You are now my representative.
Libby: Oh, sure. Now you’re in even worse trouble. I am good at making money JK. Are you sure you don’t want to rethink this?
Someone walks over, and he introduces Libby as his art rep.

Photo by Duke Riley of his King of Petty Island commemorative seal atop a Citgo tank there. The island is owned by Citgo which is owned by Venezuela.

Duke Riley at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, talking to Libby and Roberta about his visit to Petty Island and tracking down what really happened to Ralston Laird, known in the Philadelphia popular press of the 1800s as the King of Petty Island. This conversation, which took place at the Historical Society,  is from notes–
Duke: All of a sudden, complaints started appearing about pigs being raised there, but pigs have been going on there for 50 years. And then the house burnt down.
artblog: So did you find proof of a conspiracy to take the land?
Duke: No. that’s my theory. The king was the first out there.
artblog: So the king wasn’t really a king, although he was really a Laird. Is Duke your real name?
Duke: Yes.

While talking to Betsabee Romero (Mexico) and Regina Silveira (Brazil), both showing at Moore College, Libby learned they both have made prints using tires.

Silveira, whose giant insects are an invading plague that swarms the gallery, spoke her work as symbolic of political corruption, crime and violence. The insects also appear atop a table in the center of the gallery, embroidered onto a tablecloth and printed on porcelain. This use of interior decoration seems quite difference from the more architectural projects in Silveira’s catalog, which she leafed through with me.

Silveira’s tire prints of ordinary tire treads, like her current installation, were architectural, printed rolling up and around the walls of a building.

detail of Betsabee Romero's carved tire installation at Moore

Romero carves her own version of treads onto the bald tires that frequently cause accidents that kill. Her treads are folk-looking patterns of birds, plants and figures. Her work suggests resurrection and remembrance. Romero prints her tire treads on various surfaces, from fabric to sugar. In this case she used rolls of window screening.

part of Gunilla Klingberg's installation at Moore, covering windows and repeated in a reflection and in a pile of printed giveaways stacked on the floor

Also at Moore, Libby and Roberta talked briefly to Gunilla Klingberg. Here’s some of what I remember of our conversation more or less.
Libby: How to you pronounce your name?
Gunilla: Gunilla Klingberg.
Libby in a thought bubble: [Doh!]
Libby: How did you assemble these Philadelphia logos?
Gunilla: I worked with someone in Philadelphia who gave me a list of Philadelphia corporate logos, like Tastykake, Acme.
Libby: Is this then the Philadelphia version of a project you have done before?
Gunilla: Yes.

“]

Orit Hofshi- If The Tread Is An Echo; the material is both the carved blocks (tan color ground) and prints on paper (white ground mounted on wood)

At one of the Philagrafika celebrations, Libby spoke to Orit Hofshi. Libby wondered why the vegetation in the Israeli artist’s giant prints (at PAFA‘s Hamilton Building) looks so European. Hofshi, a PAFA alum, said lots of people asked her that. But that the imagery was based on plants in Israel. And besides, she looks at a lot of European art work–that’s the history that she sees herself continuing.

Carl Pope's poster was used for the cover of the Philagrafika guide book.

At the same event Carl Pope was charming. He is based in Indianapolis (he grew up there and returned there fairly recently, and he is part of the Temple Gallery show with North Philadelphia billboards for local businesses using art from local student. He is also in an exhibit at the Crane. Natch he was talking about the need for a more populist, public art approach. Libby, who loves good populist art with pop culture roots in public spaces, agreed.

Given what one UArts sculpture student is showing in Philadelphia right now, the Art Institute president’s attempt at censorship of art is downright laughable (see post)–using a gun to swat a mosquito.

On the other hand, Nicholas Poyner‘s horror show sculptures and faux snuff video in the 5 into 1 show are truly transgressive!! Not that I think it should be censored. Far from it.

Poyner makes sculptures that are excuses for making videos or maybe it’s vice versa. The resulting works are take-no-prisoners in-your-face I-dare-you-not-to-flinch affairs. Poyner is comfortable with gore, dismembered body parts and bodily fluids as he confronts limits on sexual and social behavior.

All of this he does with deadpan humor and abandon as he begs, borrows and steals great movie scenes, re-envisioning and warping them for his own purposes. The results would be unwatchable (to some they are unwatchable) if not for a sense that Poyner is playing with his audience, inviting his audience in on his extended jokes, just having a really good time at the same time that he challenges mores.

Nicholas Poyner, south paw 2007, platinum, silicone and hair

To clarify a bit about the 5 into 1 exhibit that includes Poyner’s work. The show is in two venues this year. One is at Moore College of Art and Design (20th and the Parkway), where the 5 into 1 exhibit of emerging artists has been held for a number of years. The other venue this year is FLUXspace, home base of the gang that did the curating this year. The exhibit is organized by Philadelphia Sculptors, and focuses on sculpture, that much under-exhibited field because it doesn’t sell as well as something people can mount on their walls. The sculptors in this show have in the past come from the five big art schools–Moore, Penn, UArts, PAFA and Tyler–hence the name of the exhibit. This year, Arcadia was included, so it’s really 6 into 1.

Poyner’s horror show props, south paw and Self-Portrait #666 are at the Moore College venue and bring to mind Ron Mueck, who came to sculpture from a movie prop career. In the case of southpaw, cherry-red blood provides relief from the horror and is sort of a wink that keeps down the hurl-factor (here are Roberta’s most recent Mueck post and Libby’s most recent Mueck post.

Nicholas Poyner, Scum Suckers III, video

The video, Scum Suckers III, is at FLUX. And if you find the sculptures too wild for your taste, skip the video, which is sure to offend you. The curtained entrance outside the video viewing space suggests that no one under 17 enter. Who’s to say 17 is less arbitrary than 18 or 21 or 71? Perhaps it should just say, if you’re in the least bit impressionable or sensitive, this video may disturb you. Or perhaps the age says it all, plus it gets in the peculiarity of official cut-off ages.

While I watched the movie some of the time out of the corner of my eye with my arms crossed protectively across my chest, the truth is I also laughed my way through it. Like the horror show props, there’s a wink of unreality and ridiculousness to take the edge off stuff that would otherwise be quite unbearable. But Poyner, who plays the bad guy in this movie, is also exploitive enough as a character to push buttons.

Nick Poyner, Scum Suckers III, video, in which the kidnap victim trains to execute the perfect blow job, using street debris for hurdles. The training sequence is thoroughly original at the same time that it salutes Rocky and the Karate Kid.

I couldn’t decide if this movie was homophobic or anti-homophobic, but ultimately that question became beside the point. It was a vision of exploitation and emotional manipulativenss having to do with blow jobs, street pick-up sex and desperation. At the same time, the video throws out comical salutes to movies past, from Rocky to Psycho to prison movies to any number of pornos. The allusions are broad and campy.

And then there is the so-called blood. Somewhere, we all have heard that what the movie industry uses for blood is chocolate syrup. So Poyner gives us plenty of chocolate syrup gore that clearly is not blood!!! I won’t tell you about the central sculptural prop around which this movie is built, in case you should decide to subject yourself to this. But I will say the prop is in your face and Poyner dares you to chew it over.

The mix of all these satirical elements with a down and dirty story manages to pull off something pretty amazing–a web of commentary that captivates as it repels and that makes an ethical point. This is the second Poyner movie I’ve seen. The other was of a homeless man invading bourgeois spaces–a Starbucks, the Kimmel Center–and showing people responding or really avoiding responding. It was pretty interesting, and in that case, the prop was the homeless man’s get-up and make-up.

Nick Poyner, Scum Suckers III, the two characters having an unfriendly discussion.

All this brings me to Kara Walker. I happened to be reading Eleanor Heartney on Walker in an old Art in America. Here’s her conculding paragraph:

In a perceptive essay written in the catalogue for Walker’s contribution to the 2002 Sao Paulo Bienal, Robert Hobbs points to the centrality of abjection to Walker’s vision. Abjection, as defined by Julia Kristeva, is essentially a form of border-crossing in which taboo materials like dirt, hair, excrement, dead animals, menstrual blood and rotting food and taboo subjects like castration and dismemberment serve as a means of breaking down the prescribed order of polite society. In Walker’s work, sex serves as an agent of mixing, disrupting order and creating impurities through a willful breaching of established boundaries. In the end, Walker seems to be saying, slavery, and the racism that is its ongoing legacy, deforms all that it touches, victim and victimizer alike. It creates a set of distorted identities that depend on each other for their continued existence. As a result, though the stereotypes which Walker parlays may not reflect “real” people, that fact does nothing to abridge their power.

Walker of course is not the only person using abasement to break through taboos. Paul McCarthy and his manic, excrement/sex-laden movies also fit the bill. Poyner’s approach is closer to McCarthy’s in that there’s the simultaneous complicity and confrontation with his audience. Poyner is using classic abasement tactics–castration and dismemberment, hair, rot, dirt–to cross boundaries of class and sexual identity, not to mention to cross the boundaries of the proper, bourgeois, hoity-toity art world. To see such complicated, bold, edgy work from an emerging artist is pretty exciting.

As for the under 17 caveat, you who are over 17 will have to decide for yourselves if you’re tough enough. I’d put this show in the horror movie tradition, in which you know that what you are seeing is all makeup, smoke and mirrors.

I don’t want to give the impression that there isn’t other interesting work by other artists in this show. To squelch the validity of their work placing them in comparison with this particular young artist who already has so much to say is both unfair and inappropriate, since I did find the work I saw quite interesting and promising. Back to that in a separate post.

Perhaps I was in the perfect frame of mind for taking a good look at what two Philadelphia artists are showing at Moore College, in tandem with a group show that includes a large number of internationally known artists.

The two artists are in Encapsulated Time: Age, Image and Rock ‘n Roll in the Levy Gallery at Moore. The two couldn’t be more different from each other. One of the artists is Judy Gelles, who’s from my age group and is well established in photography and video. She is known for using her own life to tell stories about time, family, gender and other identity issues. The other is Andrew Suggs, just a few years out of Harvard (AB cum laude), who recently joined Vox Populi and was in Fleisher/Ollman’s emerging artists exhibition Morgellons last year.

detail from Andrew Suggs’ 6-channel video installation of music listeners

But both of these very different artists are using video to dig beneath the skin that so defines us, and reach into the mind–the part of us that knows no age.

What put me in the excellent frame of mind was my visit to the adjacent gallery at Moore. In Repose, an exhibit of photographs, videos and sculpture drawn by Curator Lorie Mertes from the collection of Dennis and Debra Scholl, includes work by women about women, and it’s not to be missed.

Pipilotti Rist, who came out of pop singing, subverts a music video to her own purposes with I’m not the Girl who Misses Much
collection Debra and Dennis Scholl

In Repose explores femininity, identity, and sexuality–and by extension, it explores how the images we’re so used to of women from the historical past and from the pop-culture present are not necessarily how women see themselves.

But that is too narrow a description of this show, full of terrific images that overturn stereotypes by satire, anger, and every other strategy possible.

Tanyth Berkeley, Grace in Window 2006, C-print, explores atypical-looking women in her photographs, moving them from real life into photoraphs, thereby broadening our view of who should serve as a subject
collection Debra and Dennis Scholl

In the context of women’s traditional role as subjects projecting some male image-maker’s fantasy of sexual perfection, and in the context of women’s culturally exaggerated fascination with the impression their appearance gives, each of the works in In Repose was frought with multiple messages.

The false standards for beauty and what women really look like are the subject in Tanyth Berkeley’s portraits.

Bettina von Zwehl, Untitled 1, from the series Untitled 1 (Sophy) 1998; (right) Untitled 2, from the series Untitled 1 (Charlie) 1998
C-print on aluminum
collection Debra and Dennis Scholl

Bettina von Zwehl’s large portraits of women just awakened from sleep also seem to be trying to scratch away the surface to reach some kind of understanding of the person beneath, before they put their day faces on.

Mariko Mori, Miko no Inori, 1996
video, color, sound
collection Debra and Dennis Scholl

Pipilotti Rist’s bare-breasted music video on speed and helium is a hysterical challenge to cultural expectations of how she ought to be behaving and dressing and relating to male love expectations. Mariko Mori‘s other-worldly perfection in her music-video-inspired Miko no Inori reflects fantasies of female identity and projects them into a fantasy future. It took my breath away, with its slick, commercial-like production and its bald-faced unreality that simultaneously creates and undercuts its own falseness in one fell swoop. (I also have to mention the elegant, futuristic installation in the mint green room, visible and audible from the street).

Anna Gaskell, Floater 1997, 16mm color film transfered to DVD
collection Debra and Dennis Scholl

Anna Gaskell‘s Alice tumbling down the stairs in her perfect good-girl outfit with immaculate white tights questions with gentle humor the whole sybolic paradigm of Alice falling down the rabbit hole, just as Gaskell’s Floater projection on the floor re-examines the romanticized death/madness-of-the-innocent paradigm of Ophelia. By entitling it Floater, she brings up the brutality of police jargon, and reestablishes Ophelia’s death as anything but lovely. (I don’t see victimization in either of these pieces; rather I saw a rejection of victimization. I did a survey while I was there and found only a few that I saw as victimization of women all over again).

Andrew Suggs, installation shot, showing of five of the six channels of preoccupied karaoke singers

I carried those thoughts with me when I walked into Suggs’ video installation of young men and women singing to themselves, often tunelessly, as they listened with earphones to rock ‘n’ roll. The utter lack of self-consciousness of the subjects, all ears, lost in the rock music they are hearing, is a rare peek at young people, who generally spend a lot of time considering how to look, how to confront the world, how to seem cool, and how to attract a sexual partner. Here, the balanced tips toward their interior life and away from their exterior self-presentation.

Andrew Suggs, video detail

Mostly when we see people sing, they are performing at some level. These subjects are so engrossed with what’s in their minds that they sing along tunelessly in perfect anti-performances. How each of the subjects looks falls away here. To have each of them be the star of such an anti-music video is a conflation of 15 minutes of fame and a commentary on the superficiality of the fame, all at once. It’s innervisions without production values. It’s the way we look to us all–questioned on multiple levels.

And it brings to mind Kutlug Ataman‘s political 40-channel video installation of soliloquys by the rarely noticed residents of an Istanbul shanty town. It used ordinary televisions and a sense of being in a place where people really live and think thoughts not necessarily part of the cultural stream of images we absorb daily.

Suggs’ use of ordinary-looking televisions also challenges the societal image of the slick world of every home with a mega HDTV tuned to the slick imagery of the commercial television world. On this Superbowl day of extreme commercials, I feel like I’m writing about what’s happening on my own television right now.

Hooray for the installation of Judy Gelles’ video with a pair of silver stools–with backs!!!– and earphones, inside a curtained-off space.

The other two works in the exhibit are by Gelles. One is a video of close-cropped mouths speaking about how they feel about their age–and therefore their lives. The speakers are all artists of various ages and media from visual to music whom Gelles filmed while on an artist’s residency. By eliminating so much face, Gelles takes away most of the visual identity of her subjects. Gender comes through (but not sexuality); age comes through only partially. But tension around the mouth is part of the package, along with small details of skin, lips, teeth. So little information is there that the words become almost disembodied, and some of the younger artists have old heads and vice versa.

Judy Gelles’ video

The means of presentation brings us into people’s inner lives, and gets us past the physical lies of beauty, clothing, and self-presentation. Yet we definitely are not listening to radio. The visual still has a role, but it teases with less information than we are used to. But we get a lot of aural information–of what people consider a life worth living as well as the values placed on youth and age.

That Gelles wears a hearing aid makes the focus on the mouth less surprising. When I first spoke to her about this video, around a year ago, she said that she hadn’t had that thought while making the decision to crop close to the mouths, and it wasn’t until someone pointed it out to her that she realized the relationship to lip reading.

Judy Gelles, her parents and her husband and boys when they were young.

Gelles’ other piece is a series of photographs of her and her family (her mother, father, herself, her husband and her two sons), taken annually in the same arrangement, same spot (in Florida, her parents home). While the setting and the configuration of the people remains as much the same as possible through the years, we get to watch the boys grow up, the older generations age.

Judy Gelles, her husband and her mother, in recent times.

People disappear from the picture–death takes Judy’s father, the boys, now men with adult work obligations, aren’t there some years. The series is a moving document of all our lives, and raises the family-on-vacation, family-reunion snapshot and the family portrait to something profound and meaningful. In the context of all the single-person portraits in In Repose, Gelles’ work looks sane and social. It makes the art next door (in In Repose) look awfully hermetic, sterile and self-absorbed.

By the way, Gelles is one of the three artists in the Challenge #4 exhibit at Fleisher, opening Feb. 15.

Kudos to Mertes, who curated these two shows and brought together this unexpected pairing of age and youth.

By the way, my response to In Repose was quite different from Andrea Kirsh’s. If you missed what she had to say, here’s her post.

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.

Sarah McEneaney, looking regal, in a new work at Moore College’s Facts, Fantasies and Fictions.

Narrative art takes a well deserved bow in “Facts, Fantasies and Fictions” at the Galleries at Moore. The paintings by Sarah McEneaney and Christian Curiel, and video art by Matthew Suib, are three stops on a visual merry-go-round where human life is presented against lush landscapes or forlorn atmospheric wastelands.

As with all works focused on people, the big point is that life is precious and regardless of how far we’ve come technologically, we need our stories of people, pets, far-off lands and heroes to engage our minds in headier stuff than today’s grocery list or tomorrow’s bills.

McEneaney’s Independence Day, detail, showing the artist and her dog, Trixie, walking over to a dog that was tied up in the rain. This painting uses the Indian miniature method of story-telling with multiple scenes taking place over time in one work.

Sarah McEneaney’s bright-hued autobiographical paintings in egg tempera on wood, or gouache on paper, keep getting better. Seeing a large group of them together is a reminder of this artist’s special talents as a narrator of whimsy, delicacy and gravitas. McEneaney’s deadpan depictions are a humble, homespun approach. But her visual diary, with its great attention to detail, distills the small moments into Balzac-like vignettes where a pooch is never just a pooch.

Independence Day, detail.

Independence Day, for example, is an urban tableau depicting several actions taking place over time in one compact epic picture. The 4-foot-long work shows fireworks over the artist’s Chinatown North neighborhood. A dog is tied between two prison-like condo buildings and a human figure with another dog approaches the tethered animal. Further on in the same painting, the figure—now with two dogs—is seen running up the street. McEneaney said at the opening that the painting is about her rescue of a dog that had been tied up outside in the rain.

McEneaney and Trixie, having rescued the dog, run back to her house. She
called the SPCA, she said.

Where McEneaney’s tableaux are Bruegel-esque with small figures in a huge land, Christian Curiel—a Puerto-Rican-born New York artist—makes symbolist paintings with jumbo children and adolescents in postapocalyptic landscapes filled with dead or dying animals. The heated atmosphere and ambiguity of Curiel’s works are nice counterpoints to McEneaney’s cool.

Christian Curiel’s large paintings have references to Diego Rivera’s murals and to Frida Kahlo’s use of animals as symbols of psychological states. Note the three-legged horse.

Matthew Suib’s video appropriations of Hollywood movies—some denuded of their players and others focused exclusively on the human face or body—might seem the outlier in this show. But Suib’s works are conceptual narrations and, like Curiel’s and McEneaney’s, fiercely humanist in theme.

Matthew Suib’s Cocked, a montage of close-up shots of faces from Hollywood westerns, takes suspenseful scenes and eviscerates them by extracting the action. These guys squint and scowl ….and next scene they’re smiling! What’s missing, the mayhem, is never missed since the lovingly portrayed faces are gripping in and of themselves.

Cocked and The Desert Loops both subvert martial material by turning it into an elegy about violence and loss of life. Suib’s new video Untitled (Flooded Room), commissioned by Moore and projected on its 20th Street facade, is a rumination on lives lost after Katrina.

Suib, Untitled (Flooded Room) is shown each night from 7-midnight, projected on the Moore Galleries back door.

Narrative art is slippery, and the best of it is subversive, mixing fact and fiction to suggest universal truths. This push for truth is what makes narrative art a rich playground for the mind.

“Facts, Fantasies and Fictions”
Through Dec. 9. Galleries at Moore, 20th St. and the Pkwy. 215.965.4045.

Steve Sherman, Figure with Breaking Wave, 2007, chalk on paper (the light reflections are not a part of the drawing)

My trip to The Galleries at Moore College this past week was a little frightening–mass competing exhibitions, four in all. My reaction to the deluge of art–dive into what interested me, forget the rest. In the faculty exhibition, which was pretty much expected, some drawings of waves by Steve Sherman knocked me out. Some were pastel, but the one above is chalk on paper.

I immediately thought of Richard Longo’s enormous charcoal wave, inspired by Hokusai.

Sherman’s waves are relatively small but they still succeed in creating a physical response. The level of control of the medium, the lack of horizon line, the visual envelopment in water, the tension between the realism and the overt mark making, all drew me into the power of the ocean.

I looked up Sherman’s exhibition record only to find he hasn’t show much in Philadelphia. I want to see more.

Anne Seidman, untitled 2007, colored pencil on arches, courtesy Schmidt Dean Gallery

I already mentioned James Johnson’s installation (see post); I regret not taking the time to pause for Kara Crombie’s two videos. The Michael Olszewski textiles, the Anne Seidman drawing and the Moe Brooker paintings also stood out.

The apocalypse

Joshua Levine, Trophy Room, detail

Also outstanding was a non-faculty exhibit, the installation in the window in the Goldie Paley Gallery–Joshua Levine’s Trophy Room.

The exhibit is of a futuristic den or hunting cabinet, with pristine–almost clinical–walls, modernist furniture, and mutant hunting trophies hanging on the walls–creatures that mostly look like deer, but with some differences. Some have more than one head. Some have four eyes, four ears, etc. Another trophy, a “stuffed” what-is-it kind of ant-eater dog-rat in a vitrine is posed on an elaborate pedestal topped with fake grass.

Joshua Levine, Trophy Room, installation shot

The installation takes on human meddling with genetics, hunting, and the environmental apocalypse now on our doorstep. Levine is a Los Angeles artist, and his installation lookes like a sci-fi movie set. The creatures, which are a notch smaller than reality (although who knows, since they are not real creatures), look like they are made from a resin.

This space, which I was able to walk into, is going to continue to be used for installations by emerging artists. It’s also viewable through the window on Cherry Street (the daytime reflections are a problem here, but inside, it’s great and light-filled). I see Eva Wylie is coming up in this space Oct. 25.

Both the faculty and the Levine shows end Oct. 14.

Photography is all over town–and there’s more on the way. From L’Autre, a group show at University of the Arts, to Tina Barney at Gallery 339, to James Johnson’s installation in the faculty show at Moore College, (not to mention Joel Katz’s 1964 photographs of Mississippians in the midst of the Civil Rights Era, also at Moore), to Eileen Neff’s eerie work at the ICA, I couldn’t help but think of how photography is increasingly slippery. Only Katz’s reportage from more than 50 years ago has the authority of what we like to think of as fact.

The work that’s totally outside the camera-as-reporter box is James Johnson’s installation at the galleries at Moore. Johnson’s prints would pass for reportage of the world around us, except he shrinks his digital prints into 1-inch images without frames, and sticks them all around two areas of the gallery. The amazing thing about the prints, at that scale, is they are surprisingly readable and invite you to enter their miniature world, kind of the way little television screens pulled you into the lives of the Cosbys or Edith and Archie.

James Johnson, When I was a Kid I thought Mr. Rogers Could See Me Too
2006, detail, inkjet prints

Maybe, with big flat screens, people no longer feel that way about the television screen. (Digression: or maybe it’s that Desperate Housewives and The Office are so darned arch that style eclipses emotions; we never quite believe in these characters in the same way that the nation believed in the Beav and in Ozzie and Harriet.)

But if you think about your iPod Nano, with its 3″ screen that displays a video, that shrinking of reality is more than ever a part of our world.

The name of Johnson’s piece is When I was a Kid I thought Mr. Rogers Could See Me Too. The feeling of being sucked into another zone of reality becomes a kind of poetry. The compression speaks to the body in Johnson’s piece–at once shrinking down and forcing you to peer into a minuscule space. But the little photos are dispersed widely enough to force a viewer to physically navigate them. The comparison of the micro and macro is surprisingly physical and mental. That duality allows the installation to accomplish something quite different from all the other self-contained photographs.

But the slippery slope of reality in photography is everywhere.

Thomas Ruff, Portrait (S.Kewer), c-print
courtesy Sender Collection –this print is enormous, and you the viewer, are staring directly at the subject’s chest.

L’Autre, at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at the University of the Arts, includes a surprising mix of power photographers and relative unknowns–Tanyth Berkeley, Alex Da Corte, Rineke Dijkstra, Suzanne Opton, Jessica Roberts, Thomas Ruff, and Sarah Stolfa. Roberts, Stolfa and Da Corte are local photographers. Curator Sid Sachs saw photos by Roberts at Nexus Gallery and invited her to be in the exhibit. And Alex Da Corte, on seeing what Sachs was up to, suggested his own work be included. Note this strategy, all you shy artists out there.

Tanyth Berkeley, Sarah, 2004, C print
courtesy bellwether gallery

The works I found most exciting were by Tanyth Berkeley (she just opened Sept. 30 in an exhibit at MoMA) and by Roberts. Berkeley opens up the discussion of what is beauty with her probing photographs of young women. She reveals the downy hair on their skin, the imperfections of acne, their non-movie-star plainness, and makes a convincing argument that this is what it really means to be human and to be beautiful. Her work stands in sharp contrast to Ruff’s enormous portrait of a woman, Portrait (S. Kewer), and Da Corte’s mid-sized portrait, Nick (that’s artist Nicholas Lenker). Both of these portraits, against fashion-blank white grounds, acknowledge the power of the cultural ideals of beauty and allow the subjects to communicate some sexiness and the power of that beauty. Nick, however, still looks a little uncomfortable. But that striving to control the message and to create the ideal gives the images an element of fiction and posturing. On the other hand, Berkeley’s subjects are completely vulnerable to the eye of the camera, the photographer and the power of natural light.

Jessica Roberts, Before the Coming: Ryan Andrew, 2006 digital print

Robert’s Before the Coming series of photographs of adolescent boys broke my heart with the boys’ vulnerability. Unless you know Before the Coming means before sexual maturity, it’s easy to interpret these as boys entangled in some religious cult. Either way, they are completely vulnerable and beautiful–at a time of their lives that society dismisses as transitional and homely, neither belonging to the realm of handsome real men, nor to the realm of beautiful little boys. And for me, they are best of show. I still get a lump in my throat just remembering them in my mind’s eye. I don’t know why, since the photographer has her own agenda, I find the truth of these photographs so impressive–perhaps because these kids are not pretending to be cool.

Suzanne Opton, Still Standing: Peter Kenny, 2001, archival pigment print

I don’t mean to dismiss the other images in the show. Of Opton’s Still Standing series of photos of New Yorkers after 9/11, I especially loved Peter Kenny, who is wearing not one ID but three. This photo got at something the others in the Still Standing series didn’t, that feeling and fear of being lost in the rubble. The others required more explanation.

Ryan Smith, 2005, archival pigment print, courtesy gallery 339, philadelphia

Stolfa channels her subjects sitting at a bar, allowing them total control of their persona! And Dijkstra’s biannual series of pictures of Almerisa, revealing the child’s growth from a young immigrant to the Netherlands, to a young woman who is totally Dutch, is really not about the subject so much as about acculturation, differences, and acceptance.

All of these photographs are terrific. But taken together, they ask the question of what an image of a person can mean. Ultimately, I came away thinking that whatever each image means, it is not necessarily about the subject or the fact of a person before a camera. The photographs are slippery signifiers of what’s on the photographer’s mind.

Tina Barney, The Standing Man

Having just seen this exhibit, I went straight over to Gallery 339′s Tina Barney exhibit. Whatever I expected, I was wrong. Barney is pretty interesting. And talk about fact! Well, it’s pretty hard to know the facts that Barney offers up, but she gives lots of room for narrative speculation. People criticize her for pandering to the cushy lives, and in some of the photos she seems more focused on the cushiness than the humans. In the ones where the humans are key, however, the question becomes, are these really live action or is there complicity between Barney and her subjects. The gallery notes suggest there’s a degree of staging here, and a degree of spontaneity.

I simply don’t know the answer, just looking. But some of the images are fabulous. I was especially taken with The Standing Man, with its non-American decor, the relationship of the man to his standing sculpture on one side, a mysterious-looking modern sculpture under glass on the other, and his seated daughter balancing the collection spatially. This is Euro-chic par excellence, but it’s not the only thing Barney has to offer.

Tina Barney, Tim, Phil and I

Another photograph, on Barney with her two sons standing around a barbecue grill, Tim, Phil and I, is incredibly strange for all its casual familiarity. There’s a sneakiness suggested in Barnes’ triggering the shutter without looking, and the focus on the bodies of the young men, the dwelling on their manliness, is unsettling. As for the shrimp on the barbee, it’s undercover, wrapped in foil, unlike the two young men. I don’t know that I’d trust her as my mother.

And yet, I doubt this tells a true story about reality in the Barney home.

Joel Katz, from Mississippi 1964 series, Woman waiting to see the Special Assistant to the Governor, Mississippi State Capitol

Which brings me back to Joel Katz’s reportage photos at Moore, Mississippi 1964. These are earnest photographs that we are meant to take as reportage, but once again all reportage is as seen through the eyes of the beholder. A person with a different political agenda might have made different choices. None the less, I find myself appreciative of how straightforward Katz’s role is here–making choices of what to photograph with some intention of revealing the truth–his view of the truth.

And somehow, I think that’s every decent photographer’s intention–maybe. It’s just that these days, it’s a lot easier to create a whopper to tell that truth.

I haven’t seen the Eileen Neff show at the ICA yet, but Neff, with very different approaches, creates a reality that shimmers with a fifth dimension–i.e. not a reality at all. Also on my list to see–Women to Watch: Photography in Philadelphia will showcase new or recent work by Alida Fish, Neff, Clarissa Sligh, Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, Deborah Willis, Genevieve Coutroubis, Sarah Stolfa and Zoe Strauss, at Moore college, opening 10/25.

The author began by saying that while he’d gotten 500 offers to talk about Lewis and Clark in this bicentennial year, “nobody wants to pay the Indian.” But his Philly hosts compensated him well — as he mentioned more than once.

The talk was laced with comments about the various worlds he lives in. For example, the literary world:

“I have this huge literary career. Know how many books I sell? 50,000. There’s about 150,000 serious readers in this country and I’ve got about a third of them. In the literary world I’m Brad Pitt. And in the rest of the world I’m Ernest Borgnine.”

He’s part of the Indian world. At one time they thought his wife was related to Sacajawea and they were very proud. “Then we found out she was descended from the tribe that kidnapped Sacajewea,” and that was even cooler, he said. (image is video by Bentley Spang at Moore Galleries.)
spang, bently
He’s a Catholic.

And his looks are ambiguously ethnic (he’s been mistaken for Latino, Italian, Spanish, and lately, especially by airport TSA screeners, Mid-Eastern.

“I’m big, I’m 6’2″ and 220 lbs. I understand why I’m stopped,” he said.
haukaas, thomas
Finally, just in case you’re wondering, he wove Lewis and Clark into the talk, saying that he’s glad they came to the West. “They braved the wilderness…that was our house,” he said. (image is beaded shirt by Thomas Haukaas at Moore Galleries.)

“I’m glad they came because they brought Shakespeare. Without Lewis and Clark there’s no Miles Davis; there’s no Cesar Chavez.”

“You should be happy with us Indians. We have 10,000 times more reasons to terrorize your asses but we don’t. There’s a Lewis and Clark exhibit because Indians didn’t shoot them in the ass. There’s never going to be Native American suicide bombers because we can’t be on time.”

Alexie said he’s against traditional. Indians are traditional and Lewis and Clark is new. New is good.

Somebody asked him what was the best thing they could do for the Indian. He looked exasperated and told a metaphorical story about always thinking seven steps ahead and remembering who would be affected by the seventh step. Then he said “The best thing an Indian can do is get off the res. I’ve been trying since I was two.” (image is drawing by Thomas Haukaas at Moore Galleries.)

And he finished up on this downbeat note:

“Indians are slutty. That’s about colonialism. We Indians love you white people. You went from covered wagons to the Space Shuttle in one century! Indians are the nerdy girl in the corner…Indians are in a really bad marriage to white people. We’re battered spouses who say they won’t do it again.”

All in all, the talk with sweet and sour, funny and sad, angry, political and more than a little whimsical. What I most wanted to do after the talk was run out and buy one of Alexie’s books and up his literary Brad Pitt-ness quotient.

(image at top is Alexie, from his official website. What it doesn’t show is that the guy wears horn-rimmed glasses.)