Joseph Hu, Design Guild, detail Acrylic on cardboard, 1 ¾ x 32 ½ x 20 inches, 2009

In a perfect art historical storm, Joseph Hu’s life-size sculptures, including pencils and an eraser, and Vija Celmin’s giant pencil sculpture at the Seductive Subversion exhibit at University of the Arts are on exhibit at this same moment of time.

Vija Celmins, Pencil, 1966, oil on canvas on wood with graphite,, as shown at Seductive Subversion exhibit, Collection National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Gift of Edward R. Broida

The similarities, the genealogy, and the differences, both physical and philosophical come rushing in.

Joseph Hu, Coffee Mug, After P.D., Gouache and acrylic on cardboard, 4 x 40 x 5 inches, 2010

Here both artists are looking hard at the ordinary objects of daily life, paying close attention to how they look. Celmins’ ordinary pencil, like her pink pearl eraser and her comb (not on exhibit here now), would be trompe l’oeil if they were of real-life scale. But they are not. They are supersized, in a salute to American exuberance as well as a Pop commercial value.  But more to the point, the large size imbues these objects with personal value and meaning. The scale turns them into stand-ins for the artist–expressions of her identity and her memories.

Joseph Hu, Chocolate Bell Pepper, Gouache and acrylic on paper and cardboard, 24 x 20 ½ x 12 inches, 2010

Nearly 50 years later, Hu is creating similarly ordinary objects from daily life with similarly astonishing execution. But his materials are humbler than Celmins’ wood, just as his scale is humbler. Hu is mostly working with cardboard and paper. Even the shelves on which the objects rest may look like wood but they too are cardboard–wood transformed into a flimsier state. The shelves and the objects are indeed magically trompe l’oeil, not because they are more realistic than Celmins’ pieces but because they are in a realistic scale. But the material is DIY–modest and contemporary, not made for eternity perhaps.

Briefly Noted Acrylic on wood 10 ¾ x 7 7/8 x 1 ¾ inches 2010 Only the New Yorkers are of wood--inverting the joke of material transformation.

Putting the very ordinary in the trompe l’oeil tradition results in a remarkable elevation of value of objects and materials that seem disposable. Hu wins us over with the vulnerability of the pieces at the same time that he offers us a personal invitation into his private world, his home. Celmins calls up personal memories. Hu calls up today–which seems quite in line with the way the vulnerability of the materials and their revelation of the personal becomes an intimation of mortality. Today is ephemeral and so is the art and so are we. And the artist’s personal space also is in danger of collapse, as we the audience become voyeurs into Hu’s private life.

Hunter Stabler, Magick Kruller Alefbet Lamen of the Golden Dawn, Ink and graphite on hand-cut paper and color-aid mounted on plexiglas, 35 x 27 inches, 2009

Hunter Stabler’s cut paper is also astonishing for its technical craftsmanship. He is a master paper cutter who has long been a wizard of mandala-like lacy creations that mash up the religions of the world. For all the transcendental fervor and whirling dervish snickersnack, the work is remarkably cool in its uber control and seemingly mathematical precision.

Hunter Stabler, The Impractical Astrolabe Wavicle of Timey Whimey Stuff / Children’s Clock Preliminary Drawing, Ink and graphite on hand-cut paper and color-aid mounted on plexiglas, 14 x 14 inches, 2009

Stabler has added layers, now, that add the illusion of soft, smokiness to his sharp blade work. Yet the precision remains, as startling as ever. And the material remains as fragile as ever, just like ecstatic states. I am reminded of numerology and kabbalah, systems of (il)logic for reaching ecstatic understanding.

Hunter Stabler, detail of Schweinfurt Yantra of Black Thursday/ The Flying Fortress of Solitude Ink and graphite on hand-cut paper mounted on plexiglas 32 x 80 inches 2009

The addition of airplane imagery into the iconography of religion suggests that war too is a belief system folly.

Hunter Stabler, Thelemic Yggdrasil, Ink and graphite on hand-cut paper mounted on plexiglas 42.5 x 25.5 inches 2009

The real ecstasy of Stabler’s work is in the making–he works 8-hour days! While the work seems as if it could serve as a mandala or tankha, antithetically, the level of cool control and work suggests its antithesis–doubt and control. And the jokey titles serve as reminders that this work is post-modern ironic tongue-in-cheek. Either way, whether you want to see it as the stairway to heaven or the stairway to folly, it is a visual WOW!

Both shows at Pentimenti run to Feb. 27.

Things We’ve Made Since September at Sweatshop

Joseph Hu, Briefly Noted, 2009. acrylic on wood. At Sweatshop in Things We've Made Since September. Joseph has magazines in his show at Pentimenti until Feb. 27

It’s a simple idea for a show–ask a bunch of people in your network to make something new or show something they’ve made very recently.  Voila–a 17-person show with lots of new work, much of it understated with a couple of gems in the mix.

Sweatshop is a new space at the Amber Street Studios in Frankford, run by six artists whose studios adjoin a small common area they’ve dedicated as a gallery.   Gabrielle Lavin, the Galleries at Moore gallery manager, curated this inaugural show.  Notable are Joseph Hu’s two faux New Yorker magazine mock-ups–made of paint on wood.  Hu has a show right now at Pentimenti where you can see more faux real objects — Hu’s got a special touch with the world of false.

Preston Link, Pedestal, 2009. acrylic on wood. Looks like money -- funny money.

Preston Link’s chunky “Pedestal” also made of painted wood, looks like money as envisioned by a child–bigger than life, kind of pretty, and somewhat useless all in all.

Joshua Rickards, Brother and sister, 2009, Flashe on magazine page

Josh Rickards has a wonderful collage painting that seems a new direction…

Linda Yun, After RM, detail from row of 13 polaroids

and Linda Yun’s row of manipulated Polaroid film are tiny Mark Rothko lookalikes — which perfectly complements her recent James Turrell look-alike at Vox Populi.

Sweatshop shows will last for two months.  This one’s gone, ended Jan. 31.  The gallery, 3237 Amber St. 4th floor south, is open Saturdays 1 – 4 pm and by appointment  email afalsefront@gmail.com for more information.  Roberta’s flickr set.  Libby’s flickr set.

Isaac Lin: A Place Near Here and Don Colley: Cascade at Fleisher-Ollman

Isaac Lin collaboration piece. Lin did the drawn embellishment on someone else's photo of what looks like big Sur.

Isaac Lin installed a huge black-painted hut that’s glued together with oogy gray putty that takes over the main space at F-O.  Inside the hut Lin’s colorful cartoon and calligraphy images sprawl on the walls.  Outside the hut a series of large cartoon cutouts ring the room.  We asked John Ollman whether he had sold the black hut and he smiled saying he is trying to tell people it would look great in their living rooms but….Elsewhere in the gallery, Lin is showing more commercially-viable works — photo/drawings. Photo/drawings are works that involve photos by people who agreed to collaborate with the artist and drawings by Lin on the photos.

Isaac Lin's calligraphy is a swarm of gnats!

Lin draws swarms of his signature short calligraphic strokes in many bright colors onto the photos.  It’s like anointing the works with a kind of voodoo magic that’s close to grafitti only more playful.  Some of the photo/drawings are pretty funny –like when Lin’s rain of calligraphy bears down on a figure lying on a field of grass and what’s suggested is the weight of the world about to sit on the man’s chest.  Or when the storm of calligraphy comes barreling in on the Big Sur coast looking like something crazier than a Nino or Nina storm about to hit.  Meanwhile, Don Colley’s print of a scary clown adorns the gallery’s main window overlooking Walnut St.  And on a wall opposite sit a small group of Colley’s ceramic tiles picturing evil clowns.  The tiles were painted at a paint your own pottery joint and all we can say is we wish we had been there when Colley’s evil clowns emerged from the firing alongside the birdies, flowers and hearts on everybody else’s tiles.   Roberta’s flickr for F-O.  Libby’s flickr for F-O.

Don Colley, ceramic tile painted at a paint-your-own pottery place

Sean Stoops: Interstellar Medium at Rebekah Templeton

Sean Stoops, installation at Rebekah Templeton

We hadn’t remembered seeing art by curator Sean Stoops before but maybe that’s just our overloaded and aging memories.  Stoops made a wizardly installation with a projected interstellar video on a beachball.  It is a fabulous high tech/low tech mashup.

Sean Stoops, Interstellar Medium j2010 digital vidio installation, 4:56 mins, with, behind, the aureola around the eclipse.

The projection even creates an elipse-like stream of light on the wall behind it–all of which is very much fun to watch.  It’s a kind of lava lamp experience to see this work and we were longing for a bench to sit on — or mattresses or pillows on the floor.  The piece was generated using some algorithms and all we can say is awesome–get on up there.  The show is up til Feb. 20.  Roberta’s flickr. Libby’s flickr.

At Grizzly Grizzly

Brother and sister artists Joshua Abelow and Tisch Abelow were showing a bunch of remarkably similar, geometric abstractions when we stopped by.  Joshua, whose retro abstractions capture ’50s kitsch-en colors Harvest Gold and Avocado, also did a number of cartoony drawings. Here’s one by brother that broke the sister-brother mold:

Joshua Abelow, Untitled (Self-Portrait with di Chirico), 2007, oil on canvas

We met two of the Grizzly-ites who were opening up the gallery when we got there–Dennis Matthews, who’s a blogger, and Michael Ellyson. Here they are amid next to a large abstraction on the left, by sister Tisch. The gallery guys told us Tisch got the large, thick sheet of paper from Richard Serra, who, on decideding he wasn’t going to use the paper, sold it off cheap.

Dennis Matthews and Michael Ellyson, two of the Grizzly Grizzly team. Also Bruce Wilhelm is part of this endeavor.

Upcoming First Friday at Grizzly Grizzly, which is in the Vox building, 319 N. 11th, 2nd floor, is work by Yevgeniya S. Baras and Robert Scobey.

Ted Larsen at Schmidt Dean

Ted Larsen at Schmidt Dean

Ted Larsen, this piece had fake wood trim from a car and some encaustic blobs. The piece was interactive--you could spin it round with your finger.

Ted Larsen’s sculptural paintings are made from junkyard car body pieces.  The colors you see represent the Mustangs, Chevies, Pontiacs and Cadillacs found on the scrap heaps out west in Santa Fe where Larsen lives.  John Chamberlain took car bodies and mashed them up like crumpled paper — art accidents — in the galleries they inhabited.  Larsen is more of a car parts zen master–part Mark Grotjean and part Mark Rothko.     Roberta’s flickr for Ted Larsen. This show ended Jan. 24, alas.

Drexel’s Leonard Pearlstein Gallery shows IPCNY show!

Bitch Delux by Any Malfunction, Buttonwood&Holmes, Inthang; silkscreen on cotton in supermarket meat tray, unique

There were a number of standouts at the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery’s current exhibit, New Prints 2009/Autumn, a show of small prints juried by the International Print Center New York.

The highlight is a one-off print, Bitch Delux by Any Malfunction, Buttonwood&Holmes, Inthang. If it’s unique it’s the very opposite of mass production! You can make purchases online for $37, packed in its own styrofoam meat tray (if you can get the website to work).

Marc Blumthal, Mass, 2009, serigraph on inkjet print, ed. 10, 21 x 27 inches, printed and published by the artist

Two Philadelphia artists–Marc Blumthal are included in the exhibit of 60 works. Blumthal’s Mass obliterates a war photograph with a big blob–surreal and funny; Talia Green is showing her retro prints of people with masses of insects for hair. This exhibit is one of the many independent shows affiliated with Philagrafika. Thumbnails and checklist of the work in the show are here.

Amid the upcropping of new galleries like Grizzly Grizzly and The Sweatshop, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. AHN/VHS and its subsidiary gallery, The Cabinet, has closed. It was a good one, so Libby and Roberta have the blues.

Joseph Hu and Mauro Zamora at Vox Populi, installation view

  Hundreds of Hu’s hand-cut, hand-painted leaves are piled on the gallery floor as though a gust of wind brought them here. On the wall above are the naked, cardboard branches of trees from which these leaves have fallen. As with all of Hu’s recent sculptural works, there is the sense of wonder about the careful and time-consuming creation of these items. While it must be crazy-making at times to cut all these leaves, the abundant and beautiful, great pile of them suggests a committed kind of love and quiet meditation. They do propose a reverie, as the title to this exhibition suggests, and I can imagine the forest walk that would result in this scene. They also suggest animation because leaves can so easily be carried by the wind, and so they could also end up stuck in the corners and edges of the chain link fence that make up Zamora’s painting/installation on the adjacent wall.

Joseph Hu, Forest Reverie, 2009, hand-cut, hand-painted leaves, detail

Titled “Restricted,” this work by Zamora is a continuation of both his wall paintings and his use of a fence as subject matter. It’s more unclear in this example if the fence is meant to keep us out or in. The fence is doubled here because it’s painted on the wall but it is also projected as part of a projected landscape setting that seems to be behind the fence, but could also be in front. Standing close to the work, backlit by the projected light, the viewer’s silhouette is part of the scene; silhouettes, of course, being a touchstone in Zamora’s work. We’re making a Mauro Zamora painting while we look at this.

Mauro Zamora, Restricted, 2009, video and latex

  This is a quiet, small installation. It requires some time spent with it, and the willingness to dream about it, to engage in the reverie. The title of the show is taken from Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “Forest Reverie,” which is so ambiguous that it’s hard to tell if it is about the destruction of nature, the delights of nature, or both. This is a good metaphor for these works because they could be read both ways, too. Hu’s leaves are glowing with gorgeous fall colors, but leaves decay. Zamora’s fence suggests limits and exclusion but could also offer protection.

Mauro Zamora, Like the Glaciers..., 2009, acrylic, latex, ink on canvas

The two paintings by Zamora included here are less ambiguous. As is typical of his work, we see a natural setting – trees and hills – interrupted forcefully by human-made architectural elements, in this case pipes, some of which leak brown fluid onto the ground. There is no getting around it, these are political works that show us how thoughtless and dangerous our intrusions in nature can be. The thin line that we walk is made obvious: we can’t deny our Romantic desire for landscape and nature, but this desire seems too often to hit up against the ubiquitous fences that we’ve erected. This is a great month to visit Vox. Stefan Abrams, Charles Hobbs, the great Roxana Perez-Mendez, and Dana Levy are also showing work. All this will be on view through May 31.

Mauro Zamora, Reformer, 2009, acrylic and latex on canvas

Licensed to Nil
In a world run by oil-crazed warmongers, pictures of kittens don’t cut it.

Aggressive Nippers from TODT’s installation at Fleisher-Ollman

Art mirrors the times. When the times get black and ugly, so does art. But not all art, of course. Some artists turn inward and produce things more spiritual, personal and beautiful. But since the dawn of the 20th century, art has mirrored war, genocide, economic depression, terrorism, anarchy and chaos in difficult abstract and conceptual paintings, sculpture, video and installations that scorn mere storytelling (one of art’s big jobs) and serve a meal of ashes and broken glass—art so negative and existential it’s more punishment than pleasure.

Foragers, from TODT.

Dada introduced the idea of nothingness into art with its games and art made by chance. Francis Bacon, one of the 20th century’s premier practitioners of existential art and a big influence on today’s young artists, perverted art history’s straight and narrow path by laughing at art’s narrative power. Bacon gave the world unforgettable images like the screaming Pope Innocent. His art is a declaration that art doesn’t need to be a thing of beauty and comfort—it can be nonsensical and scary.

Bombs away, and animals for industry in TODT’s show.

Much art about this void is hot. There’s implied violence and twisted and tortured people. The colors are acid and otherworldly. These works are hard to look at. TODT, the ’80s-era collective now having a survey of works at Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, make finely crafted works from machine parts and discards. The results are terrifying assemblages of weed wackers and tree pruners transformed into maiming machines. There’s also a cereal bowl full of teeth in this museum-quality show.

Paper Ralph Lauren shirt, Joseph Hu, at Pentimenti Gallery

But not all this radically forlorn art is hot. Flowing from Marcel Duchamp’s stream of cool intellectualism, artists like Gerhard Richter, Jasper Johns, Luc Tuymans and Karen Kilimnik practice a subdued, icy approach. Locally, artist Joseph Hu’s show at Pentimenti Gallery takes life’s ordinary materials (a shirt, a bottle, ChapStick) and reconfigures them to scale as antimonuments of paper and resin. The works are precise, pristine and scream of existential isolation.

Karen Kilimnik’s scatter art at ICA.

Cartoonists and graphic novelists have been mining nothingness for years—and making you chuckle at the same time. Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Gary Panter’s Jimbo, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth and Charles Burns’ Black Hole offer wry takes on life and a softer way to digest your doom and gloom.

Why is this art important? At a time when we quickly take information in, when we don’t sit long to mull over the implications of, say, 26 new deaths in Iraq, or the epidemic of killings in our own city, this art demands you come to a screeching halt and face life. It’s not only a good thing, it’s an essential thing. Art doesn’t need to tell a story anymore. But it does need to grab your attention and tell you something.

I used to think the current taste for forlorn art would fade as surely as I thought the war in Iraq would end. I was wrong. Radical forlorn art is a pitbull, and life feeds it raw meat daily. Until such time when that life lightens up, we’re in for a steady diet of downbeat. Nowadays art has left the kitchen. No more milk and cookies, kids. Seek comfort elsewhere.

Karen Kilimnik
Through Aug. 5. $3-$6. Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 S. 36th St. 215.898.7108.

“TODT After Next”
Through May 26. Free. Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, 1616 Walnut St., suite 100. 215.545.7562.

Joseph Hu: “By Itself”
Through June 16. Free. Pentimenti Gallery, 145 N. Second St. 215.625.9990.

Joseph Hu used his own hair for the bristles in his replica of his grandfather’s brush for clearing off eraser debris. It was one of a number of wonderful personal items he created for his first solo show at Pentimenti Gallery. Another outstanding piece was a replica of a shirt. But I loved each and every piece. Hu has the rare skill of doing personal without doing hermetic–and his control of his materials continues to be a wonder.

Also at Pentimenti were Margaret Murphy’s pristine doll paintings. The issues Murphy is exploring are related to the issues Karen Kilimnik explores, about girls and beauty, but Kilimnik takes it in about 12 other directions as well (see posts here and here).

Clark Gibson’s forever plaid horizonless landscapes of tubes and skewed urban grids take on depth from the way the paint is applied to catch the light, at Bridgette Mayer Gallery. These were pretty excellent, and the colors surprising.

The no-holds-barred small exquisite corpse pieces by Mark Brosseau, Deirdre Murphy, Kate Norton, Kate Stewart and Scott White in the little closet–oh Bridgette forgive me–in the way back of the gallery were full of surprises. This one, “1970′s Reinvention of the Wheel ,” was my favorite. The padded steering wheel was irresistable.

At Space 1026, which has a show of young Pittsburgh artists, we saw swell paintings with collage by Joshua Tonies that put me in mind of any number of dreamy, weightless landscapes that I’ve been seeing all over the place (Jackie Tileston, Tom Judd, etc. etc.) but these also put me in mind of Andrew Prayzner’s weird techno-suburban scenes.

We asked Josh about Pittsburgh and he said, “It’s a really wonderful place to gestate.” To be specific, his house rents for $250! The down side: “It’s remote.”

That about sums it up.

Tonies wasn’t the onlyone in the clouds. Matt Barton’s deer in choir robes (there were two of them kneeling) have gone straight to heaven. Jim Longo, who was still working on his own installation when we got there, told us Barton did his own taxidermy! Others in this exhibit include Ladyboy, Jesse McLean and some other video makers, Pittsburghers all.

On our way out of the 11th Street building that houses Vox Populi, Screenings and Copy, we learned from John McInerney that there’s more room in that building, and the landlord likes having artists in there. Hey Philly, this is an opportunity to expand the art scene there–good for all of us. Hope someone can jump on this! It’s a plea from me.

Walking into Vox, the first thing we saw was the entry was to Screening, the new gallery created by Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib. I loved the little box for the gallery notes; I loved the serious notes that include an interview with the artist; I loved the basic blue curtain (not that the PMA does much fancier with its droopy black curtain outside its video screening room).

And here’s Nadia and Matthew looking proud excited about their gallery, which is screening Johan Grimonprez’s Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. Grimonprez knows Matt so he waived the big-time $1,000 screening fee that the movie, never before shown in Philadelphia, usually commands [05/07/07: got a note from Nadia and Matt in which they stepped back from that figure and stated they were unclear about what the real figure might be].

The folks at Copy looked pretty proud of their gallery, too. It’s a cubby hole of a place, but somehow Annette Monnier fit in 80-plus unjuried works of art without looking ridiculous or even cheesy. It even looked pretty darned hip. It made me of Shelley Spector’s ex-gallery that could swallow enormous amounts of art without looking crowded. Included in this shot above are Dan Hughes’ Hood and Averell, the paired paintings of two iconic guys in uniform, as well as Gingerbread Skyscraper, the sculpture to their right, by anonymous. Among the highlights of the skyscraper were the starlight mints decorating the lowest tier.

I had to take this picture of Jim Dessicino (he’s a UArts BFA about to leave for Rome where he hopes to study art restoration) with his sculpture of Eoin Burke. As we were talking to him, in walked Burke.

Here he is, and here’s Roberta’s little post about Burke getting in touch with her. Burke also had a piece in the exhibit at Copy.

At Vox, Robert Chaney’s graphite silhouettes of cityscapes against bleached skies looked great–this one is Untitled (May 1, 1994; Park City KS). Also showing were Linda Yun’s Left show, a meditation on the traces things leave, and Micah Danges’ Spring House, with funny, low-tech “holograms” that threaten to cross your eyes.

For more pictures, visit my Flickr set here.

The cold snap arrived just in time to justify the trip to the Miami art fairs, starting Dec. 6. So all of you who are going, send warm thoughts our way. And enjoy all the great Philadelphia artists and galleries strutting their finest stuff–from artists Judith Schaechter to Rob Matthews, from Gallery Joe to Pentimenti and SchmidtDean.

Here’s where to find who:

Joseph Hu’s toothpick sculpture

Philadelphia’s largest contingent will be at the Bridge Art Fair, including Pentimenti, Projects and Ashley galleries [12/6/06: see correction in comment below]. A number of Philadelphia artists are included in the Pentimenti group, including Joseph Hu, Sarah Daub, and Kevin Finklea. Look for Frank Hyder and Florence Putterman at Projects Gallery’s space. And don’t forget to check out Diane Ashley’s booth. [addition 11:14 p.m.: Ashley's group of nine artists includes two from Philly--Matt Kucynski and Lea Provenzano].

Judith Schaechter will be featured at Claire Oliver‘s booth at Flow, a new invitational fair, and Schmidt/Dean Gallery will be there featuring work by William Smith, among others.

Darren, 2006, silver gelatin print, 50 x 40″; sexy thing that it is, it got some buzz the minute I put this up on Flickr

At NADA, the New Art Dealers Alliance fair, Gabriel Martinez is one of the featured artists at Samson Projects. Also at NADA look for CEREALART, which will be introducing a number of new editions, including work by Kehinde Wiley and by Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz.

A long list of favorite Philadelphia art stars will be at Gallery Joe’s booth at Aqua Art Miami, including Matthews, Astrid Bowlby, and many more. You can download this PDF catalog for more info. Gallery Joe is on page 16.

Truckhouse installation/performance and video, by Ianthe Jackson

On the wilder side, at GRENDELmiami, the ultra-hip Brooklyn gallery Jack the Pelican will be showing an artblog fave, Ianthe Jackson, whose career we’ve been watching from afar since even before she had her 2005 Tyler MFA show. She will be showing Truckhouse, 2006, a performance/installation with video. Grendel calls itself an exhibition of ambitious works of art that would be impossible to display in the confines of an art fair!

So we’re sizzling with jealousy, wondering why we’re not down to Miami on this cold, cold December day. But good news. Our deputy Andrea Kirsh is going down and will report to us all on what’s cooking there. Fellow blogger, artist Joanne Mattera should also be posting some reports.

So there was so much going on last month I didn’t get some things up that I wanted to let people know about, especially the April show at Vox Populi.

Actually, the Kristin Reynolds is still up in the back room, and tonight Voxumenta opens, which looks like it should be worth a visit (I’m counting on the wonderful Voxennial vibe from last year to carry over into this year).

So I’ll start with Reynolds since she’s still up. She’s got lumber and flat, patterned boards arranged in a gravity-defying cascade. This work would not have been made without Sarah Sze having gone before, but Reynolds pumps up the materials to a point where they no longer suggest delicacy or the whirl of the cosmos or ephemeral vulnerability.

detail of hand-creatures from Reynolds’ installation

What I liked best about this work were the rubber puddles on the floor and the cast creatures, sort of Mickey Mouse hands taking off on their own. I also liked the overblown pins. And I liked walking through the barriers in the space, like the displaced, low-floating clouds as well as the pokey pieces of lumber.

I took the work as a suggestion of disaster, of buildings falling, of the flat patterned boards as dislocated wallpaper patterns, although they looked like fabric patterns to me–but no matter, they seemed to be about the patterns life as we know it under some kind of threat. Which it is…

Joseph Hu’s toothpick holder, a recreation of an gift he can’t bear to part with

Also at Vox were works by Joseph Hu, who focused on paper sculptures this time in his Hard to Hold exhibit. I loved the Pop vibe of the cherry chapstick, which was the micro version of Claes Oldenburg’s Lipstick. I also loved the craftsmanship made visible (almost) in the bowl. The works are recreations of objects of sentimental value to Hu, things he can’t quite bear to dispose of. In the care with which the sculptures were made and the considered, simplifications of the originals, the emotion comes through.

I thought the toothpick holder won the prize as an unnecessary object that somehow survives all the cuts because someone we love gave it to us.

by Gabriel Boyce

I also liked stepping among Gabriel Boyce’s stuffed birds in his Gone Borneo exhibit at Vox. The beautifully crafted creatures overpowered the small models of things like boats. But both had a funny toy-like quality. The realistic bird poses battle with the stuffed toy quality and the paper feathers for dominance, and make these objects open enough for some wide-ranging speculation.

by Sarah Daub

And Sarah Daub’s paper cut-out drawings, in her Close Call exhibit, the best of them have a creepy fear factor that threatens with the most unstable of materials. I especially liked the ones where Daub creates a back layer of paint that fills in some of the cut-out spaces. Daub made it into the Arcadia Works on Paper show, this year.

Blowback still by Karina Aguilera Skvirsky

In the Video Lounge was work by Karina Aguilera Skvirsky. The one I enjoyed from beginning to end, Blowback, depicted people dressed in Arab garb emerging from behind trees and approaching until they form a phalanx in an idyllic park scene. The approaching group has a floaty quality, unrooted from the real ground. And the whole scene raises questions about our assumptions and fantasies about people and threats and safe places.