Lance Winn, War Ship as seen at the To Be Or Not To Be exhibit at Rutgers earlier this year.

Then he turned up in a panel at “To be or not to be,” the painting symposium I moderated one day at Rutgers.  I liked what he had to say. And his  work in the Rutgers show grabbed my attention–a stand-out for treading a very different path from the other work in the exhibit.

I also wanted to know more about UD’s jumping into the Philadelphia art scene at the Crane–a bold move that immediately signaled an interest in bringing the Delaware program into a now flourishing contemporary art world here in Philadelphia.  So we met a little over a month ago over coffee at the Green Line.

James Zeske, detail from his mega installation at the UD MFA show. This little trophy deer's head is about half-a-hand big.

Winn, BFA RISD and MFA Cranbrook, came to the University of Delaware at a time when a number of simultaneous retirements meant the UD art department was able to reinvent itself. Part of that reinvention was to find a way to take advantage of Philadelphia’s contemporary art scene and art-critical eyes.

Winn gives credit for bringing the MFA show to the Crane to a number of people with Fishtown, Crane, and UD ties–especially Justyna Badach, who was on the faculty for a while. Their first MFA show opened there three years ago, taking advantage of the timing of the Penn MFA and other shows’ foot traffic. The concept was to bring the work into a contemporary and critical setting.

Jennifer Dillner's medusa jellyfish, made of fabric, invites entry into the stage-like space beneath its canopy; also at the UD MFA exhibit 2009

To build on the concept of bringing top-notch criticism and savvy eyes and ideas to the students, Delaware invites big-name art speakers already headed to Philadelphia for talks and critiques. “The train is the stream,” Winn said. For example, all Julie Heffernan had to do was jump on the train to get to Delaware. Plus the UD students attend the guest artists lectures at Penn and the ICA.

Francine Fox painting at the UD MFA exhibit

Winn came here from teaching at Carnegie Mellon. He also coordinated the graduate program Cranbrook, as a replacement for a faculty member of sabbatical. “I was younger than everyone in the program.”

The Delaware program, now recreated as studio-based and interdisciplinary, has already seen the pay-off–more applications, and more apps from out-of-state and international students. With only 10 slots, the program has become more selective and in the swim of things.

Then I asked Winn about his own work.

Lance Winn, Car Bomb, positing the car as a box and an explosion as formlessness, a reaction to the war in Iraq; photo provided by artist

“I’ve been obsessed with the idea of the form and the formless (relating it to the war in Iraq). The car bomb is an almost perfect representation of the formless. The Ford assembly line is a model of the West. I was thinking of the car as a box. And then the explosive car struck me as a way to think about a lot of things in the world.”

Lance Winn, The Flood, photo courtesy the artist

He also has been thinking about paintings, even about Bob Ross‘ how-to-do-it, one-stroke flower painting technique, where you dip the brush into two colors and wiggle the brush to get a flower–doing “something paint does really well–how it creates a path and how it blends.

“I start with a stable text (a word or phrase) or image, and I use it to become something else. The paintings are degenerative, so that, by the end, the starting point becomes irrelevant. The painting is a performative object; if the way it’s constructed is not relevant to its meaning, there are so many other ways to make images.

Lance Winn, detail, Flood, photo courtesy artist

“I’ve been thinking about Jasper Johns a lot. I’m not proud of the fact (he laughs). I like …the way the American flag in John’s work loses its ability to mean.”

Then Winn went on to talk about 9/11, and the repeated tv images. “For most of us, we experienced it through an image. It had a very real emotional impact but also it was very distanced. So I wanted to cope with these things in art, but I was concerned about the danger of the experience becoming aestheticized.

Lance Winn, Chaos, photo courtesy the artist

“In the paintings, I’m contemplating something by tracing it, …tracing the plane as a caligraphic mark until it becomes something else. I’ve been looking at fluid dynamics and the way one thing impacts another. The paint and the image—the ripples in a stream hit a small rock, then hit something else and you’re in a state of chaos.

“It’s a small world, and one thing impacts another in a way it never has before. …During the Bush era I wrote the words American flag until it turned black and nothing was there. So that one needs a tag.

Lance Winn, Life on Mars, laser cut; photo provided by artist

“Life on Mars, by tracing the letters it turned into a piece about the virtual and the computer screen as escapism–it was never touched by my hand but created (from computer output) by a laser.”

Life on Mars, by Lance Winn, as installed at the To Be Or Not To Be exhibit.

Then Winn went on to talk about a couple of experiences that went into his thinking about high versus low art as a false dichotomy. One was Cranbrook, where there were no preconceptions about design versus art. He said something about the insidious nature of design and how we are not even aware that it’s acting on us. The other experience was a job he had working for an architecture firm. “I listened to them talk about the meaning of space. They have whole days when they talk about the threshold!”

Lance Winn's plane sconce, photo courtesy the artist

That conflation of high and low is not only in his paintings. It’s in his sculptures–kitschy, horrific objects like an airplane crashing into a wall–a sort of lit-up wall sconce in an edition of 10, or a lit up Buddhist monk lawn ornament, about 3 or 4 feet high. “They are small public sculpture,” he declared. “It’s the domestic as a form of public expression.”

Lance Winn's burning man, photo courtesy the artist

Then he returned to his beginning topic–form becoming formless. Chicken wire, a grid, can get stretched to a sort of formlessness. And then if he coats it in foam, as he did in his exploding car lawn ornament, the underlying form disappears altogether. And from there he went on to talking about an emptiness in the middle–in the paintings, in the sculptures. Then he worried. “If the residue of an action can’t be contained in a discrete thing, then where can we go?”

James Zeske, detail Nomad installation at UD. The giant backpack Winn mentions is in the post we did on student thesis exhibits

Then he was back on the students and how the program nurtures whatever it is they do. “If you collect stuff, how can you collect stuff better? Jim Zeske–he’s one of the students–will bring up [for the MFA show] his entire installation in a giant canvas backpack. He’s a wanderer, and he’s in a band on the basement circuit on the East Coast, with no money.

“Philadelphia is more affordable. People can take risks. Like Providence. That’s why those groups (of artists) came out of Providence. There were all those empty indsutrial spaces and all those creative people. All they needed was to make $100 a month. Philly has always felt that way, with a diversity of ways to get by.”

Jessica Herzfeld, dirty limerick giveaway at Pafa's BFA and Certificate show.

PAFA BFA/Certificate — Jessica Herzfeld’s giveaway of a hand-colored zerox cartoon (click to read the limerick) was a high point in a show that could have used more energy and wildness.

Itsuki Ogihara, Islamic in White. Ogihara often uses the Minimalist strategy of multiples, but stretches the concept, here, to wallpaper, print, and decoration, just for starters.

PAFA BFA/Certificate — We paid Itsuki Ogihara a visit at her PAFA studio last January and the Japanese artist impressed with her street performance piece (she had used a stencil of cars and trucks in a line to create a pattern on the grimy walls under the Market St. bridge. What she did was wash the walls through the stencils creating a whitish pattern of cars and trucks on the very dark walls). A mural by subtraction, we thought–how clever! Mural Arts should hire her. Ogihara’s a materials girl and her piece in the PAFA show was a nice stencil of joint compound on two book-ended walls that was a stealth charmer. It reminded us of Islamic grid patterns and because it was white on white and book-like, it referenced books with exquisite content like the Koran, the Bible, or illuminated manuscripts.

Manya Scheps, holding her Poached Pack book at Penn's BFA show.

Penn BFA show — Manya Scheps met us at her show to step us through her imaginary creation, the Poached Pack. PP is a fictitious collective. The young artist, who belongs to PP is also a PIFAS collective member (a real collective) and she told us she’s not poking fun but studying the phenomenon of young artists hanging out, doing stuff like organizing shows, having openings, making zines. For her piece, Scheps aka PP organized a real group show of Philadelphia artists. She also produced a book/zine about the PP, a website for them and a video with a faux interview of one of the members. The art show within the art show was actually pretty good and the whole thing is a pretty perfect project for the times.

Nicholas Salvatore's installation at the Penn BFA show.

Penn BFA show — Nicholas Salvatore’s self portrait piece– an array of me-me-me videos around a dentist’s chair — plays with the pleasure, torture and mania of self-revelation in our digital age.

Cecelia Post, You Made Me, video, at Penn MFA show.

Cecelia Post, infrared video of mother possum with baby on its back foraging at night for food.

Penn MFA show — Cecelia Post’s videos are dreamy explorations about the self in the world. Above she is sewing what looks to be a life-sized doll that sits on her body and becomes one with her, in effect creating a new self. Her other video of a possum and baby possum rummaging for food at night captivated not only for its color and its nocturanal voyeurism but also for its evocation of mothers and offspring in general (we speak here as mothers with offspring).

Kurt Freyer's video at the Penn MFA show.

Penn MFA show — Kurt Freyer’s video mixes psychedelia, surrealism, and dream narrative about “Them” and “Us” for something spooky, riveting in parts, and peculiarly wonderful. The crude shed he built to watch the piece in was a claustrophobia chamber that went very well with the paranoia on the screen.

Nicolas McMahon does a star turn in front of his own camera, as a phone-sex provider

Penn MFA show–Posing as a variety of societal rejects and otherwise forlorn or beset characters, Nicolas McMahon stars in his own videos and photos. It’s not a pretty picture. He undercuts the stereotypes we see daily in the media–the poor emphysema victim, the sexy phone-sex purveyor. We gave McMahon a shout-out for outstanding work a year ago, (in the small student photography show accompanying the Through You exhibit at Penn), and we’re still shouting.

Elizabeth Hoy's construction suggests a makeshift survivalism.

Penn MFA show–Elizabeth Hoy’s decaying wall is the metaphor for the whole world and the people in it going to hell in a hand basket. Creaky, crumbly, rickety, leaky, slapdash and makeshift, it looks like urban survivalism to us. Move over. We need to get under that shed, too.

Angel O, Adam: 19 years in utero; the video is situated in an installation that's much like a doctor's waiting room, with gruesome pamphlets for deperate patients. The video loop is about 11 minutes.

Moore BFA show–The big news at Moore is video. Of the two that knocked our socks off, one comes out of the new photography and digital arts department, which is graduating its first group of students. The other, from Angel O, comes out of 2-D fine arts. In Angel O’s Adam: 19 years in utero, the artist plays all the roles, from the baby to the mom to the father, and each of them is horrifying at some level. The scenario of permanent pregnancy and permanent fetal dependency seems perfect for this day of the real-life OctaMom.

Moore BFA show–Megan Jensen’s video, I Live Here, from the photography and digi arts program, uses digi wizardry to cast a loving, yet skeptical, eye on home and on the suburbs, with pop-up hills and dales and houses and signs. The video hits its stride immediately after the first few interior scenes. We get a terrific sense of space and rhythm as we tour the real and the not-so-real Our Town — the ideal delivered with some gentle, questioning commentary. You can catch it here on YouTube.

Moore BFA show–Kelsey Costello (image in introductory post), using humble, low-tech clay and paint, imbues buildings with warm feelings for places from her past. The yearning for a remembered place is palpable.

All three of these Moore artists made us think of the rush of college students returning home instead of setting out on their own, thanks to a shaky economy and a really scary world out there.

Mike Trefehn's installation in his Tyler MFA show. Detail.

Mike Trefehn in front of his word wall in his history museum-ish installation.

Tyler MFA show — Mike Trefehn’s installation looked like something out of a small historical society museum. The artist is mining his family, studying the town his German grandparents settled in and in one case literally walking the perimeter of the town to feel it in his bones. Part performance, part narrative about immigration, work, social class, and all rumination about his own place in the world, Trefehn’s piece actually transforms the currently rampant phenomenon of navel-gazing into something serious and forward-moving.

Nick Barbee, detail from his Tyler MFA show. Pocahantas in the foreground and General Robert E. Lee and his horse in the back.

Tyler MFA — Nick Barbee charmed us with his painted clay figurines that were cruder than kitsch gift shop souvenirs but treading on the same nostalgia for history territory. Barbee’s questioning what heroism is really all about and like Trefehn, Barbee is mining his own past. He’s a Virginia native and all the material in his show was about Virginia. The artist inserted himself into the tabletop arrays of Pochahantas, Gen. Robert E. Lee, John Smith, Mr. Bojangles, Arthur Ashe and the rest by placing painted rainbows, lumpy white clouds and images of himself throughout. He explained that he’s always loved rainbows and clouds and that as a Virginian, he belonged on the table too. Like we say, charming.

An Erin Riley weaving; she also dyes her own yarns.

Erin Riley, from her series of car weavings

Tyler MFA — Erin Riley, whose BFA is from Mass Art, emailed us in early winter to tell us about her work–hand-woven tapestries of cars and car crashes. We looked, we liked and we scheduled a studio visit. We loved the costumed little girl in front of her family car–a childhood that Riley’s own childhood didn’t quite measure up to: “A lot of people died in drunk driving accidents in my life. …I always joke if I don’t make it, I could always sleep in my work, or use it to stay warm. I’ll be fine.”

James Zeske, view of his installation Nomad

University of Delaware MFA — James Zeske, in his Nomad installation, crocheted strips and strung them vertically to frame the walls of his temporary campsite, and he recycled molded styrofoam packing material to deliver a touch of home– niches hung on the wall. The shifts in scale and materials are surprising–a trophy deer head sculpture (I’m not sure if it was plaster or styrofoam) is miniature and unabashedly crude. A sentimental figurine looks store-bought, but the music come out of the fiddle is a small abstract sculpture of lightening-bolt-like pieces. (It’s not easy for an MFA program in Delaware to catch someone’s eye. But here it is, at the Crane, shouldering its way in. This alone is worthy of notice). If Elizabeth Hoy and Penn are urban survivalism, Zesko and Delaware are her deep-woods counterpart.