Hannah Price

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

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Philadelphia Museum of Art highlights ten local artists
Starting September 10, the PMA will host Here and Now: Prints, Drawings, and Photographs by Ten Philadelphia Artists.

Left: Disco Mosul, from the Amman Portfolio, 2006 by Daniel Heyman. Right: Walking from CVS, West Philly by Hannah Price

The local artists include Astrid Bowlby, Steven and Billy Blaise Dufala (who operate in collaboration), Vincent Feldman, Daniel Heyman, Isaac Tin Wei Lin, Virgil Marti, Joshua Mosley, Serena Perrone, Hannah Price, and Mia Rosenthal. They range in age from 25 to 50 and exercise a broad array of pictorial strategies in their work.

Kansas governor eliminate arts funding
Over Memorial Day weekend, Republican governor Sam Brownback of Kansas eliminated state funding for the arts. The move to privatize the arts in Kansas effectively makes it the only state to return to pre-National Endowment for the Arts legislation. The state’s art commission had been established in 1966.

Museums provide free admission for active military personnel, families
From Memorial Day (May 30) until Labor Day (September 5) 2011, Blue Star Museums across the country will provide free admission to active service military personnel and their families. There is a map of all the participating locations. The PA list can be found here.

Faux taxidermy makes its way to Art Star!

Jordan with some of her not-quite-taxidermy

Instead of stuffing and mounting real animals, artist Jordan Elise Perme creates creatures of her own called Horrible Adorables. The one-of-a-kind foam and felt animals (with real glass taxidermy eyes) are often mounted like actual hunting trophies, but with colorful, patterned exteriors. Read more in Jordan’s interview with Art Star!

Enlivening abandoned buildings and Reading Viaduct
The long empty Goldtex on 12th St. just north of Vine is showing signs of new life. The south face of the building is now dominated by a giant, fluttering green arrow, and plans to include a nighttime video projection on the east face of the structure are right around the corner. An arrow is always intended to point something out, and in this case that something is the Reading Viaduct – the abandoned elevated train track nearby. The groups Reading Viaduct Project and VIADUCTgreene are working to draw attention to this disused urban gem with the goal of renovating it.

Art + Soul Food in Brewerytown
On June 11th in Brewerytown there will be a celebration entitled Art + Soul Food from 5 – 8 PM.

Opportunities

DesignPhiladelphia – the largest design celebration of its kind nationwide – has opened a call for submissions. The festivities will take place October 13 – 23 2011, and submissions are due by July 15.

To coincide with her April 2012 show at the PMA, artist Zoe Strauss is seeking 10 Philadelphia teachers who would be interested in having her speak to their students. Email Zoe at info@zoestrauss.com.

Portrait by Zoe Strauss

On Saturday July 30 from 12-6, Arts Garage will host its first Art in Your Junk flea market. Registration for this indoor/outdoor event is $20 and they are seeking trinkets and art items of all types and mediums.

The theme of Projects Gallery‘s September show Máscara (Mask) juried by Henry Bermudez is the use of masks in contemporary society. The deadline for applications is July 25 and the full prospectus can be found here.

Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh is seeking short films for its 2-Minute Film Festival whose theme is The Labor Party. The deadline is June 20. If you have any questions, contact 2minutefilms@carnegiemuseums.org

FLUXspace will host an Art Swap on Saturday, June 18 from 2-6 PM (setup starts at 1). Have extra stuff in your studio that you don’t use? Come join the swap meet for some beer and art haggling! To register (for free!), contact info@artmakingmachine.com

Artists

Caleb Weintraub‘s show entitled The Good Old Bad Old Days is up now at Eggman & Walrus in Santa Fe.

From Caleb's show in Santa Fe

Kip Deeds is part of a group print exhibition at IPCNY from June 9 – July 29.

Stephen Talasnick will be showing his works at the Katonah Museum of Art from June 5 – September 18.

Justyna Badach is part of a group photography show at the Center for Photography at Woodstock from June 11 – August 28.

Diedra Krieger will be displaying Plastic Fantastic at Figment NYC on Governor’s Island from June 10 – 12.

Alex da Corte is part of the Nicole Klagsbrun show Spirit of the Signal from June 9 – July 28 as well as Team Gallery exhibition Re: Empire from June 30 – August 5, both in NYC.

Ditta Baron Hoeber has nine poems that were selected to be part of the May/June issue of The American Poetry Review.

Drawing by Ditta Baron Hoeber

Henry Bermudez has a painting on display at the Dick Blick art supply store on Chestnut St. and a print in the Philagrafika 2011 invitational portfolio. He is also hanging a cut paper assemblage at the airport on June 10!

Lesley Mitchell and 31 artists in the Guild of Book Workers participate in a show at the Athenaeum from June 3 – 30. The show travels to Venice in the fall to the Scuola Internationale di Grafica, Oct 5-28.

Kyohei Abe, Imaginary Scape #2, 2008, Archival Inkjet Print, 20 x 20 inches (left). Kyohei Abe, Imaginary Scape #12, 2008, Archival Inkjet Print, 20 x 20 inches (right). Images courtesy Gallery 339.

Kyohei Abe’s austere photographs of small objects on white tables show how fruitful technical rigor can be. Such a rarefied take on still life might come off as precious in the wrong hands. However, Abe’s masterful toning and printing exaggerates: the table-edges/horizon lines feel heightened (perhaps retouched?) in such a way that these borders go beyond formal elegance to become a narrative element in the story of creating the image. The material intricacies of the subjects are not merely indexed in the language of photography, but translated into prints as controlled as the tabletops Abe prepares.

Dustin Ream’s tightly cropped centered photographs of barns operate a bit like Abe’s, but don’t bear the same level of scrutiny. The prints are fine—sharply focused and clean—but fail to elevate the unimaginatively orderly compositions and predictably pleasing textures of rural architecture.

Two Untitled photographs from Dustin Ream’s Barns Series

Ream’s consistently geometricized documentary photographs bear some resemblance to the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher. However, Ream’s photographs do not have the sustained deadpan the Bechers use to turn their formal repetitions into a conceptual inquiry.

A photo from Chang Kim’s Index Series

Chang Kim’s photographs, like Ream’s, are geometric and documentary, but Kim—by strictly limiting his subject to signage and the series-title “Index”—invites an analytic read. Kim’s in well-explored territory here, but holding his own.

Phillip Toledano, whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair, GQ, and the like, makes a strong showing with A new kind of beauty, studio-portraits of plastic surgery regulars.

Phillip Toledano’s A new kind of beauty

Toldedano’s professional chiaroscuro and monochromatic backgrounds, which would emphasize the desirability of a 17-year-old model, only underscore the inability of surgery to transform. In seeking to become a phantom image, surgery-regulars have become its opposite: while fashion essentializes gender roles, Toledano’s subjects seem almost in drag; while fashion values a narrow range of highly distinctive features, the features of the surgery-regulars are almost indistinguishable, differing primarily in scale.

Isa Leshko’s work is an interesting analog. She gives older animals the portrait-treatment, and while the results are less tidily critical and less consistent than Toledano’s photographs, the best are more enigmatic and more engaging.

Isa Leshko. Rooster, Age Unknown, 2008. Archival Inkjet Print, 8" x 8" (left). Isa Leshko. Pumpkin, Age 28, 2008. Archival Inkjet Print, 8" x 8" (right). Images courtesy Gallery 339.

In Leshko’s Rooster, Age Unknown, the animal’s worn-through feathers feel like bones or worn timbers and its grimace seems like it could belong to the bird’s dinosaur ancestors. The still-alert eye looks out at the viewer, not only from the photo, but out from the ancient-body-house the consciousness is trapped in. However, Leshko’s work can trip into the sentimental. Pumpkin, Age 28—a photograph of a glassy eyed horse emerging from darkness—is too much for my taste.

The photographs of Peter Ainsworth, John Chervinsky, and Joel Lederer seem more engaged with the history of painting than photography. Ainsworth’s images of smudges on concrete, cropped to create a shallow depth of field, borrow liberally from the devices of postwar abstraction. The regular arc of Chervinsky’s hanging balloon, target-on-paper, and picture-in-a-picture hand and string feel like riffs on neo-dada. Unfortunately, what is hard-won in one medium at one point in time seems almost too easy in another: both Ainsworth and Chervinsky’s efforts feel more decorative than substantial.

Peter Ainsworth. Untitled, From the Series "Concrete Island," 2010, Chromogenic Print, 38 x 28 inches (left). John Chervinsky. The Hand of Man, 2006. Archival Inkjet Print, 23 x 18 inches (middle). Joel Lederer. 200804211518, from the Series "The Metaverse is Beautiful,"Archival Pigment Print, 40 x 50 inches. Images courtesy Gallery 339.

Lederer’s slightly psychedelic landscapes feel more fresh, but benefit, perhaps unfairly, from proximity to mostly tight figurative work.

It’s worth noting that In Review is a show that drew from international portfolio reviews and that diversity is reflected in the breadth of work. It does help makes up for the lack of thematic focus. In Review also features work by Gabriel Benaim and Hannah Price, and is on view until September 4th.

From Woodmere Art Museum to the Print Center and places in between, Philadelphia celebrates the 170th year of photography this fall with exhibits that showcase the medium’s origins and point to the region’s strength in producing leaders in the field. Here’s a peek at two of the shows.

A Woman's Arm, 1978 Carol Taback (American, 1941 – 1980) Gelatin silver prints, 6 photo booth strips Overall: 7 7/8 x 9 1/2 inches Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of anonymous donor, 1980

Eight local artists who experimented with processes, techniques and subject matter are featured in Common Ground, a show of work from the 1960s and 70s.  Photography back then was just beginning to get credibility in galleries and museums and in art schools that began offering photography as a major.

Large scale prints are a hallmark of today’s photography but most of the works in Common Ground are small — and most are black and white since color photography was looked down on as less artistic. Regardless of format, Common Ground’s photos are uniformly human-focused; their ambiance upbeat, inquisitive and energetic.

Catherine Jensen’s experimental works from 1979 stand out for their colors and large format and for their radical mix of photography and sculpture.  Jensen transferred photographic images onto cloth via color xerography. She then stitched and stuffed her cloth images as 3D trompe l’oeil objects (a tea set; a table; a camera; some family pictures in frames).  In their domestic content, their “crafted-ness” and their playful use of trompe l’oeil, these works have an uncanny alliance with work by today’s young artists.

Schoolyard Graffiti, c. 1967-74 Will Brown (American, born 1937) Gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 inches. Collection of the artist, courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Other back to the future echoes include Carol Taback’s photo booth collages from the late 70s and Emmett Gowin’s psychologically-charged portraits of his wife’s family from 1969-70.  Taback — who had a photo booth in her studio — turned the human figure into abstract repeat patterns that prefigure Photoshop’s “mosaic” feature; Gowin’s intense portraits seem precursors of Zoe Strauss and Sarah Stolfa, both of whom strive for truth and confrontation in their portraits.

Street photography must include some grafitti and Will Brown’s shot of school yard grafitti from 1967 — names spelled out properly and nicknames like “Crazy” and “Smokey” — marks itself as from a kinder, gentler era rather than our own.  Ray Metzger, a magician of light and dark, turned 60s Philadelphia into eerie abstractions in his tiny photos.  Local photo leaders — and teachers — Will Larson, Sol Mednick and David Lebe round out the show.

Phil Jackson, Davis with deer.

Twenty-one young emerging photographers also focus on the human in Next: Emerging Philadelphia Photographers at Philadelphia Photo Arts Center.  What’s immediately different in “Next” is the color, the large size prints and in many cases the deadpan affect that evokes a been there done that world-weariness.  If earlier generations of photographers mirrored the exuberance of their times, today’s photographers record human uneasiness and depression.

Hannah Price, Twin Day

Jaime Alvarez’s “168_001 (Spain Rest Stop, outside of Leon)” for example, is a mystery.  A shot of a grassy hilltop on a sunny day features an electric pole in the foreground.  Is the pole the subject?  Is this an ironic comment on beauty?  Both snapshot-like and documentary, the photo guards its point of view.  Phil Jackson’s “Davis with deer, Upstate NY 2007” likewise cloaks its meaning.  A young man by the side of a country road stoops down to hold up the head of a dead deer.  The shot is operatic in content (loss of life; solidarity between young man and young deer).  Yet the photo is inscrutable.  Portraits by Hannah Price, Joshua Lanzara and Kyle Ferino deserve mention for their great empathy.

Next: Emerging Philadelphia Photographers, to November 29, Philadelphia Photo Art Center, 1400 N. American St., Suite 103, 215 232 5678.

Common Ground: Eight Philadelphia Photographers in the 1960s and 1970s, through Jan. 31, 2010. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th and Ben Franklin Parkway, 215

Kyle Ferino, Death of a Salesman, 2008, chromogenic print, 21 x 21 inches

Most of these photos depict ambiguous, uncomfortable scenarios of a damaged world. Kyle Ferino’s Death of a Salesman depicts a dishevelled, shoeless man in a suit under an overpass, draped like a river god. The scenario is a kind of netherworld glade, hidden from respectable eyes. That hidden world, a disreputable Eden, made me think of Jeff Wall. There’s a mix of magic, threat and myth–the powerful scariness of someone who has become an outsider. Or maybe the subject is nothing more than a homeless guy in a safe corner.

Xiomara Benavides, Don Hilario, 2009, archival inkjet print, 16.5 x 21.75 inches

Xiomara Benavides’ Don Hilario is filled with questions. Was this a photoshoot portrait with backdrop in which the edges of the backdrop show to exhibit the artifice? And what about the chalked words on the ground? Is this crazy? Is he crazy? Are these his words? Yet Don Hilario looks so dignified, even in his jeans, sitting on a flimsy garden chair in a garden with a phony backdrop. Is the garden his? If not, whose? Whose backdrop is it, anyway? The image brings up all the early 20th Century immigrant photo portraits,  with serious, dignified subjects posed in front of a pictorial backdrop. The color, the jeans, and the buildings peeking out from behind the backdrop are incontrovertible clues that this photo is not from a time past.

Felicia Perretti, Car Seat Fight, 2009, archival inkjet print, 20 x 20 inches

Snapshots may be the style of Felicia Perretti’s photos, but her on-the-fly photos are not exactly family vacations. Car Seat Fight, framed by a car window, shows a wailing child being roughly transported by a woman clearly irritated. It’s unclear who started the fight, and it’s unclear if the child is merely being moved or is about to catch hell on the side of the road. The view from inside the car suggests there’s a player in the scenario who is inside. The side of the road is a snatch of besmirched nature, a transitory world beyond the rules of orderly gardens and the home front. The photo becomes an emotionally fraught moral tale in which fairness and justice come under scrutiny.

Phil Jackson, Davis with Deer, Upstate NY 2007, 2007, Chromogenic print, 30 x 40

And speaking of roadside moral tales, Phil “Filthy” Jackson’s road kill photo with what I take to be a distraught Davis, may in fact be a hunter and his prey. Either way, Bambi is under threat from the human race. As in all these photos above, Eden is lost.

Daniel Traub, Tree, North West Philadelphia 2008, 2008, archival inkjet print, 20 x 24 inches

The Eden theme comes up in a couple of photos by Daniel Traub, but in Traub’s cause, Eden isn’t so much lost as aspired to. His Tree, North West Philadelphia 2008, is a scrappy survivor on a trash strewn rowhouse front lawn, nature’s toehold in an unwelcoming environment. Traub’s Two boys, North Philadelphia 2008, shows two slightly uncomfortable, vulnerable youths, one hiding behind his hoodie with his legs in a posturing wide stance, one with his hands clasped shyly in front and his legs close together, in front of a weedy array of growth. Their young good looks also suggest survival, as does the tree, and the weedy Eden behind them tells pretty much the same story. (Traub also has an exhibit up at the Art Institute of Philadelphia until Oct. 16).

Sarah Moore, Anterior Future, 2008, archival inkjet print, 32 x 26 inches

Formal issues also caught my eye–Sarah Moore’s surprising framing of shots–she splits a woman’s head in two in the diptych, Fall, which also is about textures of a scarf and the landscape–and a sort of Eden. Again using a surprising split to very different effect, Moore shoots the back window of a car in Anterior Future, putting the humans only partially in the picture, with their matching herringbone coats (are they friends or mother and daughter?).  The suggestion of time past/road travelled, out the back window, colors the story of the two women and their related coats.

Matthew Thomas Cianfrani, Contemplating charred hotel on cloudless day in Chaoyang District, 2009, archival inkjet print on rice paper, 20 x 60 inches

The rice paper surface of Matthew Thomas Cianfrani’s Contemplating charred hotel on cloudless day in Chaoyang District suggests China as much as the title does. The atmospheric photo, with its sense of disintegration and insubstantiality rings true to its message. The domineering form of the destroyed building is far from the gritty urban environments of the other cityscapes in this exhibit. The photo communicates its own sort of horror and regret.

Hannah Price, Twin Day, Fall 2008, archival inkjet print, 24 x 20 inches

Some of the smaller photos in the show are given short shrift, hung too close together.   But all in all, this is a terrific show and a great beginning. Others in the exhibit are Martin Buday, Christopher Gianunzio, Jaime Alvarez, Samantha Sheehan, Chad States, Tom Goodman, Danielle Bogenhagen, Gene Smirnov, Bob Myaing, Elyse Derosia, Hannah Price, DM Witman, Kelsey Johnson, and Joshua Lanzara. The exhibit was juried by Ariel Shanberg, executive director of the Center for Photography at Woodstock. Woodstock! …speaking of metaphors for Eden lost!

The exhibit is up to Nov. 29.