Jennifer Williams, inkjet ink on Photo-tex paper (that's Murray in the foreground)

New York artist Jennifer Williams’ installation photographs splayed on the gallery walls are spectacular. The one resting in a corner delights with the way it engages the viewer physically in its vertiginous urban spaces, delivering a sensation of instability, and at the same time trumpeting the architectural triumphs of the cityscape. The cityscape is a big theme in this show, from Arden Bendler Browning’s now familiar mural-size urban swirls, to Tim Portlock’s digital urban disaster zones, to Noah Addis’ Trump Plaza towering over urban decay (a straightforward photo).

Allison Kaufman, Trust Falls, Five Channel Looped Video Installation, Silent, 2011, Edition of 5. detail shows a woman shaving an elderly man

The vulnerability of buildings becomes a metaphor for the vulnerability of living things in this show. And that’s part of Allison Kaufman’s subject–the human need for companionship and loving care, in a series of five silent video loops by the New York artist. Her horizontal lineup of the video screens add up to a strong presence in the Gray Area foyer to the Ice Box. The tactility of a man braiding a woman’s hair or a young woman shaving an elderly man deliver the intimacy between people and show up-close people’s physical and emotional vulnerability. The intimate scale of the videos seems just right given the subject matter–at home with our good friend the telly.

Kimberly Witham, Still Life with Steak and Fox, Digital C Print, 20 x 26 inches, 2010, image © Kimberly Witham at www,kimberlywitham.com

Death and denial are what make Kimberly Witham’s beautiful still-lifes serious. Previously I had dismissed them as slight, based on Internet images. But with a look in the real world, I’m all aboard. These C-prints of road kill in decorative settings hark to the Vanitas tradition and William Harnett’s dead-critter still-lifes all gussied up with Ann Craven-like wallpaper paintings. The fiercest of Witham’s photos, Still Life with Steak and Fox, conflates beauty with bestiality, the red meat a perverse splash of delicious red caught on a hook!

Kimberly Witham, Still Life with Two Squirrels, Digital C Print

My other favorite of hers is a pair of squirrels floating in front of a blue sky filled with a pattern of white puffy clouds. The giddiness of the squirrels dancing in their blue heaven almost–but not quite–overcomes the questions of how dead the squirrels are–and how far we can delude ourselves as we enjoy their–and our–dance of death.

Bohyun Yoon's glass helmet is scheduled for a 2012 show at the Smithsonian

Installation and lighting conditions in the Gray Area take a toll on two video pieces. I had trouble seeing Bohyun Yoon’s marvelous Sound of Helmet Instrument, a video of a sort of tea ceremony with glass teapot-helmets, and Ana B. Hernandez’s Still Life With Figs, a projection of a performance with a lineup of sexy fruits.

Opening night, installation shot. Work by Jennifer Williams high on walls.

Others in the show are Lewis Colburn (I missed his performance), Don Edler, Laureen Griffin, Jordan Griska (his Oil Barrel), Mami Kato, Daniel Kornrumpf, Maggie Mills and Alison Stigora. The exhibit had a full house opening night.

The exhibition is open to June 29, 2011.

Pentimenti
For the last couple summers, Pentimenti has mounted a group show based on an open call.  Reaching outside her comfort zone and current stable of artists, gallerist Christine Pfister has again this year rounded up a lively show.

Leah Frankel's mathematically-inspired egg array at Pentimenti

Leah Frankel’s free-hanging field of hand-blown eggs billowed gently in the breeze created by the passing viewers.  Frankel told us her piece was inspired by math….In case you’re wondering about all the souffles she’s cooked to make the piece, she told us that in fact she received eggs from a food kitchen in exchange for making quiches to be served in those kitchens.  We like the project and we like the finished piece, which has some sideways affinity with Felix Gonzalez Torres’ giveaways only Ledbetter has given the product away not in the gallery but in the soup kitchen.

Tim Eads, house paint dripped on Rand McNally maps

We continue to admire Tim Eads’ multi-faceted ouevre.  Tim debuted his bike pedal-powered butter churn last year at FLUXspace, a great old-fashioned, new-fangled functional kinetic sculpture.  Then at Jolie Laide, he had some wall paintings made by a fan pushing air at paint drips leaking from a paint can.  Recently, his lightbox digital prints appeared in the lobby of the Meridien hotel, his lit-up plastic-bag wall sconces were at Rebekah Templeton, and his Rube-Goldbergian toy slot machine was at the grand opening of the School House Studios.  Whew! Busy guy! Here at Pentimenti, he’s got dripped house paint on some cut up Rand McNally maps.  We love the Jackson Pollock meets grafitti-and-spin-art vibe.

Judy Gelles and Linda Brenner, installation in Pentimenti's Project Space. photo courtesy of the artists

In the Project Space, Judy Gelles and Linda Brenner collaborated on “Hopes and Fears,” a grid of photos and post-it notes. “I fear the loss of love…I want my mom to live forever…I hope this new job works out…I wish there was less acrimony in the world…I worry about my children. It’s a mother’s job,” were some of the sentiments on the notes, each one adorned with an inked fingerprint by way of a signature. The artists had asked for people’s hopes and fears during a one-day residency in LOVE Park–the basis of the grid. We watched as gallery-goers earnestly chose their Post-It colors and wrote their feelings. The new hopes and fears formed a cheery contrast to the stark Hanne Darboven-ish grid.

Also good in this show are Laura Ledbetter’s part cartoon/part abstract drawings and Jacque Liu’s beautiful pastel wall constructions — bon-bons on the wall.

One Night Only (UArts seniors) at the Icebox

Stephen James and Nick Maimone's video at the Icebox in One Night Only

The Icebox was burbling with sounds of seniors from University of the Arts, whose works sprawled through the big space and also the Icebox’s anteroom, the Grey Area.  We have to say we’re partial to this group since we taught some of them in our senior practices class in 2010.  Sadly, Tyler Held’s piece with a flat screen tv and a basketball hoop — which we’d seen at his thesis show — was missing, since it was too heavy to be installed on the Icebox’s apparently not so strong walls.  Tyler said he was going to have the piece at FLUXspace some time in the future. Stephen James and Nick Maimone’s collaborative video, with Steven sitting blankly, sometimes with eyes closed, occasionally smiling, getting Cheerios dumped on his head reminded us of Bill Viola’s The Crossing, a water piece that starts with a drip of water on to a body and ends in a deluge.

Stephen James, wall label

Nick and Stephen’s work is humble and sassy at the same time, an unbeatable combination. And we loved the ad hoc “wall label,” if that’s what it was — a brown paper bag with a couple names on it stuck to the wall by the force of a nearby fan.

Brandon Miller, photo on wood.

We found Brandon Miller’s photos on wood moving and a new direction for a sculptor who loves photography.  Miller’s images of himself and his family (father pictured above) are barely visible, submerged under the beautiful wood grain that asserts its dominance in the age-old  Man v. Nature conflict.

Michael Olivo, animation, at the One Night Only show

Michael Olivo’s animation is positively mesmerizing.  A skeleton sits on a couch, and periodically its torso and head gyrate like some unseen twisted rubber band has been let go to get the bones to move. Or maybe the bones are taking a bow (the perfect song-and-dance act for a show called One Night Only).  We don’t know what the message is but the still and moving image kept us riveted.

Little Berlin
Leslie Rogers’ first curatorial outing at Little Berlin brought together a bunch of live and video performances by a group of artists from Philadelphia, Boston, New York and  San Diego. It was quite the scene. As our buddies Kelani and Beth–sitting in LB’s swell grill, beer and weenie roast zone outside the gallery–said to us when we arrived, “It’s like high school in there!” We weren’t sure what they meant exactly until we got inside.

Vincent Finazzo, "Art 1," performance installation

Rogers gave us the annotated tour of the show, which was great and helped a lot in deciphering what we were seeing. For example, Vincent Finazzo’s installation — which showed four people sitting at an arts and crafts table — was about Finazzo’s high school experience as an artist surrounded by jocks in the high school lunch room. The performance here, which included the hoodied artist making art and three guys eating fast food and acting like obnoxious jocks, included a moment where the artist “escaped” only to be chased by the jocks and brought back, fireman-carry-style, slung over one of their shoulders. This was a really great idea and executed wonderfully.

John Sinclair, "All the love you can take," performance installation

In another corner of the gallery, John Sinclair had set up a replica of his childhood lair in the basement.  He was typing notes on an old typewriter and mainly trying to get people to sit down with him and make out.  While we were there LB member Masha Badinter was gamely sitting on the couch looking coy and in character as a teenage girl sitting uncomfortably on a couch with a boy who’d just put his arm around her.  Thumbs up for this installation and performance for revisiting the past and not getting bogged down in nostalgia.

We learned about All-Star Cheerleading, a world of competitive cheerleading we didn’t know existed, thanks to a still projection of the lightweight fly-girl atop the human pyramid and a photo of girls scrambling to form the pyramid, by Hannah Walsh! It looked positively bacchanalian, and again thanks to Leslie Rogers for the commentary.

Nick Paparone, Jamie Dillon and Dave Dunn, Personal Pain

The performance band Personal Pain, made up of Nick Paparone, Jamie Dillon and Dave Dunn, did a number that was notable for its noise and beat and for Paparone’s writhing, gyrating performance that riveted in spite of the song’s lyrics (repeated, mantra-like shouts of “Fuck You, Little Berlin!  Fuck You, Mom!  Fuck You, Dad!).  Paparone, by the way, is newly graduated from Columbia and worked with Rirkrit Tiravanija on Rirkrit’s recent show at Gavin Brown’s.  Nick told us that show will travel to Stockholm and he’ll be going over there to help with that as well.  Notably, Rirkrit’s show had a soup kitchen and a t-shirt  factory.  If you remember, Nick is co-founder, with Jamie Dillon, of the internet phenomenon Print Liberation, a t-shirt factory based in Philadelphia.

At the end of the evening, Zac Paladino would be handing out awards to the various artists for their works. Just like in those big high school art shows, we’re pretty sure everybody got an award of some kind. (We didn’t stay to see the award ceremony–if you know who won what, please put it in the comments!) Curator Rogers takes off soon for Virginia Commonwealth University to pursue her MFA.  Good luck, and come back soon!

Meanwhile, kudos to Little Berlin for fixing up their raw space at Viking Mills and turning it into a great white box with a fantastic courtyard for performing and hanging out.

Dan Schein, Inconsequential Times in Snowersville, oil on canvas

The paintings here are lively, and the subject matter and paint applications vary so much that you’d be hard-pressed to pinpoint a “Tyler” style among them.

Dan Schein’s oil paintings are mock-heroic cartoons, and his large, drippy brush strokes give off a dreamlike ambiance. Schein’s narratives don’t add up to a coherent story—or even an incoherent story—but there’s plenty of room for the viewers to come up with their own.

Stuart Lorimer, The Suck, oil on linen

Stuart Lorimer’s oil paintings likewise allude to some kind of story but don’t quite get there. In fact, Lorimer, one of the five student organizers of the show, told me he once painted narrative works with so much content he began to question just what he was doing and why. Now, in an opposite extreme, he paints works like “The Suck” and “After the Dance,” which depict a carefully abstract shape in a color field—something that looks like a religious icon from Mars.

Ash Ferlito Tell Me What to Do, oil on canvas

Emily Davidson, Shipwreck, oil on linen

Ash Ferlito’s oil on canvas, “Tell Me What to Do,” a rotary telephone floating in a sea of black, is also iconic. Emily Davidson’s lovely and surreal “Shipwreck,” is especially striking: a tiny piece depicts improbably gorgeous rubble in an urban environment.  Davidson is another one of the show’s student-organizers.

right front-Giles Hefferan, The Gates of Horn and Ivory, foam core and acrylic; middle - Tim Rusterholz The Vision of Constantine, styrofoam and wood; rear left-Leslie Friedman, Sukkot Ramp, serigraph on linoleum tile, wood drywall; rear center-Matt Ziemke, Stepping Down and Constructing a Need for Redundancy, ceramic and mixed

Among the objects on display, Giles Hefferan’s “The Gates of Horn and Ivory” is the standout. Of course, it helps that the white foam core tower almost reaches the ceiling and that at its top is a tiny, well-lit city under glass (it’s a blue-tinged Emerald City). Tim Rusterholz’s virtuosic “The Vision of Constantine” weds a classically styled horse head of pink foam insulation with a rocking-horse bottom to suggest the emperor at play. Also playful is Leslie Friedman’s “Sukkot Ramp,” a hand-serigraphed path of linoleum tiles that runs up what looks to be a skateboard ramp on one wall and dead-ends after a hairpin turn in a wall without a ramp. Why she created a suicidal Jewish holiday skateboard ramp is something I couldn’t figure out. Matt Ziemke’s exaggerated ceramic drip is a great pop art moment somewhat confused by the wood constructions in the mixed-media installation that surrounds it.

Matt Kalasky, Addresses (our last symposium trailer) digital video, 4.58 min.

Of course, no show is complete without video and digital works. And of those entries, Matt Kalasky’s video “Addresses (our last symposium trailer)” is a nice wry package. The artist sits at a desk reading from a script as if he’s the president in a disaster film addressing the world via television, bidding a final farewell before a looming apocalypse. The piece ends with a musical clip from a Beatles song slowed down to a dirge.

Emily Rooney, Single for the Night, Brooklyn queers dance to Lil Wayne, 5 min and 38 sec

Nearby, Emily Rooney’s crotch-focused, black-and-white video “Single for the Night, Brooklyn queers dance to Lil Wayne” could have broken the monotony of seeing one crotch after another (they’re all clothed) if the video showed an occasional face.

David King, Plastic Palin/Plastic Marx animation

And David King’s animation “Plastic Palin/Plastic Marx” needs more Marx and less Palin to balance its message that all idealogues are one in the same. As it is, Palin dominates. Who wants to look at or think about that?

The Tyler students, who fundraised in order to produce this show from start to finish, have done a great job of filling the space with works big and small. Look for solo shows by each of the graduating MFAs beginning March 16 at Tyler’s Temple Gallery.  Schedule of those shows here.

Through March 13. Reception: Thurs., March 10, 6-9pm. Ice Box Project Space and Grey Area, 
Crane Arts, 1400 N. American St. cranearts.com

Read this at Philadelphia Weekly.  More photos at flickr.

Robert Smythe as flea circus meister Oskar Vanderwold in Troupe de Fetishe at the Icebox

Insects in art represent death and decay, and while many artists work that subject area, few use actual insects. When they do, it’s usually to trigger revulsion—a visceral response most art can’t and doesn’t necessarily want to provide. Troupe de Fetishe, though, made by a team of MFA students and teachers in Temple’s film department, actually skips the insects to become a nice take on the classic idea of a man trapped by obsession.

Oskar Vanderwold, played by Mum Puppettheatre’s Robert Smythe, is a study in obsessive behavior, captured with extreme and almost claustrophobic closeups that don’t give much of an idea of the larger studio Vanderwold is in. The tweezers-wielding flea-circusmeister never looks up from his work and barely speaks, and the camera stays on his face and hands as he works on his tiny props—a cannon, trapeze, carts. There’s a quick-but-important cameo by a fly, if not a flea.

Being so uncomfortably close to Vanderwold feels like a burden, like the viewer is spying on him and passing judgment. In the foreground, Vanderwold’s black pet rat runs on a flywheel in its cage, and the ringmaster himself is caged, his obsession locking him into this fantasy playground.

Even though the video, co-directed by Lisa Marie Patzer, Ian Markiewicz and Doris (Chia-Ching) Lin with sound design by David Miranda Hardy, is blown up so large, searching for the tiny performers themselves in video seems futile; every time Vanderwold’s tweezers seem to drop a flea onto the trapeze, there’s nothing there but air, making you question your eyes, the character’s sanity and eventually your own.

And without giving away the punch line, let’s just say that it turns out that Vanderwold doesn’t like insects.

**Also in the annals of Philadelphia art with insects: Talia Greene’s Wooly Willy-style portraits, with scanned bunches of drysophila arranged around human faces in the shape of hairdos, beards and mustaches, and another flea circus, from Colombian artist Maria Fernandez Cordoza, which was at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in 1996 and again in 2008.

Troupe de Fetische
Through Oct. 31. 
Icebox Project Space at Crane Arts,
1400 N. American St.
215.232.3203. 
cranearts.com

Read this article at Philadelphia Weekly.

Potato plus bandaid features in Brad Troemel, Pre-career Retrospective at Extra Extra Gallery. Untitled, 2009

Brad Troemel, Pre-career Retrospective at Extra Extra Gallery. Installation view

The selected works were printed out on plain copy paper with no worries about archival materials—the prints are not meant to last. The works themselves seem to be a tribute to ephemera—documentation of the meaningless, or accidental, or silly. A photo of a tree branch rolled up in a car window is listed as an installation as though any action in life could be a performance and every object, a sculpture. A potato held to a wall with band-aids, a sandwich on a bedpost, a piñata on fire; the images are all roughly the same size and are distributed around three walls of the gallery in a grid with none given precedence and in no particular order. All of life aggregated through technology into an endless series of unnoticed art blobs. The show is captivating and witty, getting funnier the longer you look.

George Shinn, New, Renew & Rerun at Highwire Gallery. Shard of Purple Shadows Fall on Horatio’s Face (detail)

The paintings in George Shinn’s New, Renew & Rerun show at Highwire Gallery took the reverse path. While Troemel starts in reality and moves to the digital; Shinn starts with a digital process in order to create something almost primitive. Shinn draws using Mac Paint and then transfers the designs to canvas and paints the images the old-fashioned way. The resulting pictures of faces and groups have a blocky style that echoes Northwest Coast Native American design. Heavy shadows and outlines on the faces stand out against empty backgrounds with decorative patterning—the faces become reminiscent of cartoons or primitive masks with the pixilation of digital design still visible in some of the figures.

Chad Curtis, Drawing Machine at InLiquid Art + Design

At InLiquid Art + Design Chad Curtis’ Drawing Machine continues the dialogue between technology and art. It is a computer-driven mechanical armature that draws pictures reminiscent of some ornithological paint-by-numbers series. The nature scenes and Audubon-style illustrations of birds appear with perfect regularity as the pen glides on its pre-planned flight path. But the products seem a little soulless, waiting for the weekend painter to come and fill it in with color.

Andree-Anne Dupuis-Bourret, Medium Resistance at The Ice Box. La Debacle, Installation view

The Ice Box’s large group show of print works: Medium Resistance promises a continuation of this inquiry into the possibilities inherent in developing media: “these works reassess the mediums’ expressive, communicative, and material possibilities … strategically exploring each format’s relative autonomy and usefulness, its potential for participation and collaboration, communication and dissemination, aesthetic, social, and technical labor.” But this broad and confusing introduction leads in to a show that is relatively conventional.

While the work is solid, the format is very traditional with many 2-D prints hugging the walls and rarely venturing out into the center of the room. The standout exception is Andree-Anne Dupuis-Bourret’s La Debacle a landscape that spreads across the floor like a mini-mountain range of perfectly regular hills. Standing above the tiny peaks—softly shaded from mostly white to nearly black—it is easy to have a sense of vertigo as if entering upon a science fiction landscape sprung up from the pages of a hand-printed volume.

Piper Shepard, Medium Resistance at The Ice Box. Pattern Pinning

Other enjoyable pieces include Piper Shepard’s Pattern Pinning an 8’ x 8’ installation of corsage pins and printed floral borders that blend visually into a virtual quilt.

Piper Shepard, Medium Resistance at The Ice Box. Pattern Pinning (detail)

Colette Fu’s oversize photography pop-up books are captivating with their odd blend of subject, content and juvenile format. Over all there are many strong pieces and interesting installations, but the show lacks coherence, possibly as a result of its somewhat overwrought mission. Despite the claim to question material possibilities and the new potential for communication the show is particularly lacking in work that addresses the effects of new technologies or crosses any as yet untraversed boundaries.

More about this post’s author, S. Tiernan Alexander

Su Tomesen, 40,000 feet, video installation at the Ice Box, courtesy the artist

The long-range plan is to have October be video month at the Crane, and to entertain proposals from artists and curators around the world to use the 125,000 cubic fee of space in the Ice Box and use the new video and sound system.

“We always thought of that space as a kind of place where people could expand their studio or curatorial practice because  they have the opportunity [to use such a large expanse],” said Kripal in a recent telephone conversation. He and Hricko named the projector project I.C.E., or the International Curatorial Exchange.

The inaugural run of the system for an art project, which people can program to run in numerous ways, is up right now, and has just been extended an extra week to run until Nov. 29.

The site-specific video installation, 40,000 feet, by Netherlands artist Su Tomesen, projects floating clouds and ocean filmed from airplanes around the world. The installation also includes smoke (ah-choo) and light and sound. It’s a sort of landscape that is at once familiar and unfamiliar. Philadelphia artist Candy DePew, recently on a residency in the Netherlands, saw Tomesen’s work there–a similar piece designed for a very different space, a restaurant–and suggested the piece for ICE.

VideoZoom info

This is not the only upgrade at the Crane worth noting. Until tomorrow, another video exhibit is screening at the Crane–in its brand new video projection area–a vast improvement from the curtained black box in the Gray Area.

Video Zoom, showing in this country for the first time ever, is an annual project started by Mary Angela Schroth of Gallery Sala 1 in Rome in 2003. Schroth invites a curator from a different country each year to assemble a survey of that country’s video scene.  Videos from seven countries, about 40 minutes to an hour for each country, are being screened. Schroth will speak tomorrow (Sunday, the 22nd at 5 p.m.)

Kripal said he’s doesn’t know if the video month concept will be in place for October 2010, but he’s looking further into the future. “It is our intent to do an annual project,” he said.

Su Tomesen’s 40,000 feet is up to Nov. 29, by appointment only.

Video Zoom is up until tomorrow. Mary Angela Schroth lecture tomorrow, Sunday, Nov. 22, 5 p.m.

Yesterday, a bright and sunny Sunday, was the opening of Global Warming, the Philadelphia Sculptor’s show at the Icebox. Miguel Luciano is in the show and one of his pieces, “Pimp my Piragua,” a shaved ice cart, was perfect for the day, the event, and the slowly melting world. Luciano’s vehicle — which he made himself– is outfitted with stereo, DVD player and the traditional ice and syrups. He sells the ices for $1-$2 dollars he told me. Here he’s making an ice (grape flavored) and talking with Pepon Osorio, (mostly in the wings).

Read more about Luciano’s project at the NY Times where you’ll find another video.

There’s some terrific work included in the exhibit From Taboo to Icon: Africanist Turnabout, an exhibit currently at the Ice Box, a group show of about 70 works that grew out of a series of symposia at Temple University last year.

The symposia, African Impressions/Contemporary Art, explored African influences in modern and contemporary art. They pondered the meanings behind the experiences of artists of color, especially when they used Africanist imagery. And they waded into the thicket of who owns the voices that get heard in the art world.

Earl Fyffe, Shanty, 2004, 4’3″ x 5’3 1/2″ x 3’6 3/8″, transforms specific, impoverished housing into a veritable god of safe housing, an animist form warding off the dangers of sliding down the slippery slope.

The exhibit at the Ice Box, interestingly enough, is full of work that has gotten seen and heard because of its excellence, changing times, and changing exhibitions spaces. Included in the show are artists who have crossed into the mainstream, like Hank Willis Thomas, Pepon Osorio and Deborah Willis.

As far as changing times go, I recently had a conversation with a friend about how the younger generation of successful African American artists, including his son, seem to be thinking about their work and their position in the art world without much consideration of race.

Sonya Clark, Beaded Prayers, 1999-present, 120 inches wide, 24- x 24-inch panels. An ebullient display of tiny, mixed media talismans of fiber, beads, toys, etc. I’m thinking mini-Adeagbo here.

And exhibition spaces are indeed showing more African-aesthetic art than ever before, thanks in part to the Studio Museum in Harlem and a younger generation running museum spaces. Martin Puryear’s African-influenced work closed last week at MoMA; the Whitney has increasingly been stepping up to the plate, as has the Met; and locally so has the Fabric Workshop and Museum. Inroads are happening.

But the curators statements show they want to push the inroads further. Others whose work stood out in the exhibit who indeed should be shown more widely include Sonya Clark and Earl Fyffe, for example.

Hank Willis Thomas, Scarred Chest, 2002, 30 x 40 inches, photograph, places the commercial world of basketball and black athletes in the context of tribal scarification, bringing brand loyalty to a shocking level. We first saw work from this series in the Frequency show at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Here’s my short list of faves:

Pepon Osorio–Mangual
Earl Fyffe–Shanty
Sonya Clark–Beaded Prayers, a wall display of beaded pouches; and “Long Hair”, a 96-inch-long scrolled photograph of an equally long dreadlock
Betty Leacraft–Camouflage: A Means of Survival, an fiber-based altar
Ghariokwu Lemi–three gloriously colored Pop/graffiti anti-war drawings, including Lagos Sitty, by album cover graphic designer Lemi
Hank Willis Thomas–a couple of photos and a sculpture playing on basketball culture (I’ve seen all this work before, and I’m happy to see it again)

Betty Leacraft, Camouflage: A Means of Survival, 1992, 72 x 52 inches, mixed media fiber, a powerful piece about culture and identity that masquerades as anti-war. Leacraft incorporates materials as diverse as clothing, holy card reproductions, beads, photos, sticks, candles and written symbols and words.

All of these pieces are rich conceptually as well as quirky reflections of the times in which they are made. I can find something African about all of them, but mostly, what I see in them is contemporary art practice, which is gobbling up cultures from around the globe. I’m thinking here of the way that Georges Adeagbo’s Abraham—L’ami de Dieu installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art embodied the swirl of cultural objects and communications and ideas and threw it up on the wall and strewed it across the floor, representing a maelstrom of cultural migration and transformation.

Ghariokwu Lemi, Lagos Sitty, 2001, 22 x 15.75 inches, poster color, ink/pen. Things blow apart as people smile, love, live and die in close proximity in this small, compressed work–Basquiat on an acid trip

In addition to my favorites, other work also interested me for my usual reasons (i.e. making me think or just giving me something I want to look at). Among that group, I want to mention one of the videos (I saw only two of the four, but this one I loved) by Nadine Patterson–an amazing image of a dark-skinned dancer in a tropical red-and-white patterned shirt, moving in a penumbral space. The dark face and arms keep disappearing into the background, but the shirt floats and moves in a hypnotic, graceful way to a rhythmic, musical soundtrack. Very interesting and provocative.

The show, exhibiting work by more than 35 artists, includes a number by artists with local connections in addition to Osorio and Leacraft–Lonnie Graham (photo portraits), Deborah Willis (body builder portraits), Kimberly Camp (painting), Syd Carpenter (sculpture) and John Dowell (photographs). There may be more.

Andrea contributed a post on her encounter with one of the curators and one of the artists. Its got some great background information.

I headed to the Crane Building Saturday primarily to see an exhibition with an intriguing title: From Taboo to Icon; Africanist Turnabout – the premise being that work either derived from or in response to African aesthetics is central to artists of the African diaspora and has been relatively excluded by mainstream (e.g. white) institutions. Organized under the auspices of Temple University by Sophie Sanders, a PhD student in art history, and artist Shervon Neckles, it filled two very large galleries with all the ambition of a museum exhibition and made me wonder why, among Philadelphia museums, only the Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) has a strong record of exhibiting art that addresses some of these concerns.

Polemical exhibitions are always a challenge – is the theme truly central to all the work, or is the art being used to explicate an idea? Libby will be reviewing the exhibition, and she and I concurred to a remarkable degree about the strongest work, but my Saturday visit gave me an unexpected chance to meet one of the curators and one of the artists.

Franky Laude Going Back Home 2007, various papers, photo Andrea Kirsh

The galleries were empty when I arrived, but after about fifteen minutes they filled with what appeared to be a group of serious high-school students who immediately began taking notes and photos. As I was inspecting the poetic floor-piece, a pile of irregular yellow and white globular forms titled Going Back Home, and wondering how its seeming abstraction related to the exhibition’s theme, a man approached and asked if I were with the group. No, I said, who was the group? It turned out they were students from New York in a program sponsored by the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

Franky Laude and Shervone Neckles in the exhibition From Taboo to Icon , photo Andrea Kirsh

And who was I talking to? Franky Laude, he said, the artist of the very work I was studying – so I told him I wanted to talk. Franky told me he’d moved to Philadelphia last year, following graduate school at Maryland Institute College of Art, and is working at the FWM. The piece was a reference to the calabashes of his native Haiti, which he remembered from his grandmother’s house. Calabashes are gourds grown for use as containers, eating utensils and musical instruments in the Carribean, West Africa and elsewhere. I know what calabashes are, I said, I’m from the tropics, too. Franky told me he constructed the work out of papier mache (formed over balloons) because he couldn’t obtain the actual gourds in Philadelphia.

Earl Fyffe Shanty 2004 photo Andrea Kirsh

We discussed the exhibition further and Franky told me about the work of another Carribean sculptor, Earl Fyffe of Jamica who, much to Laude’s amazement, arrived with only a bunch of wood and constructed Shanty entirely on site; much as the shacks of its subject are quickly assembled, I guess. Franky then introduced me to Shervone Neckles, one of the curators who had accompanied the students from New York. Shervone is a multi-media artist who received support from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and was teaching under its auspices (by the way, the Foundation has supported many artists with Philadelphia connections, including Mei-Ling Hom, Karen Kilimnick, Sarah McEaneany, Gabriel Martinez, Odili Donald Odita, Pepon Ossorio, Jody Pinto and Nami Yamamoto). Shervone and Sophie Sanders had been discussing the exhibition’s theme for a while. The exhibition also grew out of a series of three symposia at Temple that explored contemporary art from the perspective of African influences. It’s not a new subject, Shervone acknowledged (hardly; it was significant to artists since the 1920s and has been written about by scholars including Paul Gilroy, Robert Farris Thompson and Richard J. Powell). But that doesn’t make it any less current, as the varied and often provocative work in this exhibition attests.

From Taboo to Icon: Africanist Turnabout is on view Wed. – Sun., noon to 6, through Feb. 12. On Friday evening, Feb. 1 there will be a public reception with many of the artists in attendance and a group discussion at 7 pm. I plan to be there!

Thanks be to the National Lottery for helping Belfast artist Brian Kennedy to bring his installation, Passage, to the Ice Box.

Kennedy and the lovely catalog for Passage was also supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (which gets part of its funding from the lottery) and Kennedy’s gallery, the Golden Thread Gallery, I’m not quite sure how Kennedy came to the Ice Box, but he approached them, and they said sure, and no one here believed it would ever happen, said Chris Davison, who works at the Crane Art Center, home of the Ice Box.

This is news that highlights the amazing international art world and Philadelphia’s growing presence there. That someone in Belfast would find the perfect space all the way in Philadelphia for his installation seems rather amazing to me. And truly, it is the perfect space!!!

Brian Kennedy, Passage, detail

Kennedy’s installation looks great, transforming the Ice Box from a chilly white box into a romantic landscape of shadows cast by the floating skeletons of boats, hanging from the ceiling. The shadows suggest spirits and impart a sense of how insubstantial is the corporeal world.

The boats, currachs, are a kind that Irish fishermen use and that Kennedy himself had used during a stint as a lobster fisherman in the west of Ireland after finishing college, according to the Passage catalog essay by Declan Long. Long also wrote that the boat has some relevant cultural background as well–St. Brendan in the sixth century reputedly crossed the Atlantic in a currach. In a sense, so has Kennedy.

Brian Kennedy, Passage, detail

Kennedy covered the floor of the space with salt, thereby softening and variegating the battleship gray concrete surface and providing some sand-like crunch underfoot.

Boats are such a loaded choice for an object, metaphors for human beings, their passage through life and their passage from life to the underworld in Egyptian and Greek mythology. What makes this exhibit rise above cliche is not the boats themselves but the use of the space, the shadowy lighting, the sense of sacredness and expansiveness.

I somehow don’t think Kennedy was intending to discuss the death of the environment with this piece, but the skeletal boats, the shadows, the salt as dried up sea water, all made me think those thoughts. On the other hand, salt is also a necessity for life and survival.

Kennedy manages to create a limitlessness that brings us down to size, and turns us into intrepid explorers on the sea of life.

Brian Kennedy, Passage, detail

While Robert Stackhouse’s boat-like structures came to mind the moment that I saw this piece, Kennedy’s boat structures are more literal. In fact, the boats themselves are not really the art. The art is the installation, the transformation of the space. It’s a 3-D sister to Winslow Homer’s boat as it travels across an endless, inhospitable sea.

The boats, by the way, were crafted by Irish boat-builders. And there’s a video of the boat-building process, which will probably interest boat builders and wood craftsmen.