Zack Rockhill, Solar Void, 2011, concrete, curtain

Zack Rockhill, whose work I’ve seen before and liked, serves up an incomprehensible video accompanied by a couple of actually very nice sculptures. The oeuvre is laid at the altar of, quoting, “Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of Beckett’s Endgame in his book of essays Must We Mean What We Say?” I didn’t read the book but what I say is yes, Cavell, sometimes we do need to mean what we say, or mean what we make, or make what we say, whatever.

Zack Rockhill, Solar Void, 2011, concrete, curtain

Rockhill’s video has a construction theme which goes with his cast concrete and found object sculptures to a certain degree. But construction materials are surely not the subject: and if the work is saying something about building/renewal/collapse/solidity/fragility/self/other, I just can’t catch its meaning. But as I say, thumbs up on the look of the conceptual sculptural objects, which are not only beautiful in a satisfying formalist way (who doesn’t like a cube of smooth concrete?) but which have some poetry to them as well. “Solar Void” in particular — which approximates in my mind a modern update of the old master paintings of godly rays of light from on high — is both a crunchy materials’ piece and, as a tombstone stand-in, evocative emotionally.

Julianna Foster, #6 from the Kirkwood series, inkjet print

In a completely different zone of expression, Julianna Foster’s color inkjet prints from her Kirkwood series are conceptually clear. They are about families, people sharing inside space, and memories of things and emotions that once happened. Like Rockhill’s, Foster’s images, too, play with suggestions of construction and deconstruction. And one of the numbered works even echoes Rockhill’s Solar Void piece, casting heavenly rays of light into the picture from a punched out hole in the roof.

Julianna Foster, #8, Kirkwood series. inkjet print

When I saw these works I immediately thought of Jeffrey Stockbridge’s scenes of empty Philly squat houses or abandoned buildings (the Divine Lorraine). But something about the claustrophobia of Foster’s spaces suggests that these are miniature — and not human-scale rooms. I will keep you guessing because that question is rather intriguing. If these are dollhouse rooms, then it is as if a naughty child lit the fires, punched the holes and caused this mess. If so, the whole thing becomes a kind of meta-revenge on the past. If instead these are human-scale rooms they are one more poetic documentation of forlorn human space.

Brent Wahl, untitled #3, shot with a 4x5, printed digitally

There’s nothing forlorn about Brent Wahl’s new body of work, “Group Show.”  The very digitally-savvy-looking photos — all archival digital prints — are super op-pop glamorous. Installed on a band of grey paint running around the gallery walls, the body of work divides into a group of grisaille grille-like pieces and other more colorful works. Shot mostly with a 4×5 view camera and scanned from negatives, the artist says, the grisaille “scenes,” if that’s what you can call them, present what appear to be a series of screens and scrims behind which things lie. Things like shadows and maybe some objects like tables or crumpled tin foil (2011′s super art material). I kept thinking Bridget Riley thoughts as I moved between these numbered works, and yet, the op that they are is a Raymond Chandler-esque op–stylized, mysterious and urban/urbane. These works are seductive for their evocation of space and perhaps story.

Brent Wahl, Untitled (X), 2011

Wahl’s more colorful images are less compelling, being either documentary-like images of groups of matter or close ups of something in the real world (crumpled tin foil) captured through layers of colored masks. Whereas the grouping of grisaille works has a tight cohesion in both subject and motif (style), the colorful works are more disparate and their content is less compelling.

Narrator, from Alee Peoples' film-to-video documentary about the (perhaps fictitious) affinity group for Providence legend, Roger Williams

Elsewhere in Vox, a real group show, “Pull Your Coat to This,” presents four artists’ works on the theme of “group belonging.” The show, which has a RISD/Providence connection, is organized by Alee Peoples, whose “The Root that ate Roger Williams,” 2011, is the star of the show. The 18-minute film transferred to DVD describes the affinity group dedicated to the legend of Providence, RI, historical personage, Roger Williams. Williams died and was buried in a grave that was later invaded by a tree root that blasted through the casket and took over his body. It’s a legend as I say and the entire “documentary” about the affinity group is tongue in cheek serious.

Alee Peoples, from the film "The Root that ate Roger Williams," speaking with the history museum expert

Lumpy camera work, an engaging albeit untrained narrator and hostile responses to dumb questions are some of the highlights of this hand-made and lovable hooey. I’ll take a narrative any day, no matter how wink-wink, nod-nod. And this one feels just about right. Others in the group show are Michael Bizon, Erin Zona and Anders Johnson.

Kudos to Vox — which programs like a mini-museum these days — for this nice mix of member shows and a completely unrelated but nonetheless fitting outside group show.  The May exhibits are up through next Sunday, May 29.

Vox Members Shows

Julianna Foster’s From Morning On

Julianna Foster‘s From Morning On continues the artist’s exploration of narrative through serial photography. This group of photographs shows gorgeous misty landscapes, decrepit mystery interiors that are also misty; claustrophobic backyard mists and more. It’s like the misty moors of Wuthering Heights come to the American Northeast farmland. The actor is a woman who performs ambiguous and rather static actions (listening through a wall; blowing dust off a box; staring out a window). And, maybe it’s because he just died, I’m thinking about Andrew Wyeth‘s dreamy, romantic and nostalgic Americana. Of course, Eileen Neff‘s tres post-modern photos of anthropomorphized clouds who dance with trees and have a lovely existence in the woods and inside houses also come to mind. Foster’s work intrigues by remaining ambiguous at its core, but its lyricism and beauty draw you in. This series is open enough to let all minds wander around and claim the territory for their own.  And let’s not forget we’re in Oscar season.  What kind of movie would this be?

Juliana Foster From Morning On

Several of the photos are framed but not under glass and those pieces become more palpably real — like objects — in a way the glass-framed pieces aren’t. It’s the same non-glass framing Zoe Strauss used for her recent show at Silvertstein and the strategy gives the photos immediacy and plays up their sensuality.

James Johnson, Break, view through the glass door.

James Johnson‘s Break is a breakout piece. The artist used to work in small boxes, putting dollhouse-sized photos in spaces accessible through a peephole or other voyeuristic device. Break is a life-size box (a whole room in the gallery) separated from the viewer by a locked, glass-panel door (the artist selected the door, he says, for its resemblance to Maurizio Catalan’s The Wrong Gallery door.)  Outfitted like it’s a small office this big box has a desk, easy chair, books and slippers. At the opening and at other times during the show’s run it will also have the artist, in residence, sitting, reading, writing and cogitating in the space. Johnson says it’s not a performance piece, but when the artist puts his body in the picture I read it that way. The theatrical aspect pushes into rich territory and I am excited to see where the artist goes next. Artist trapped in a box? I can see that going far.

Eva Wylie, A Continuous Shuffle of Earthturf

Eva Wylie‘s A Continuous Shuffle of Earthturf is a continuous shuffle of imagery in the artist’s virtuoso silkscreen-on-wall method.  From afar the piece looks like an asymmetrical array of candy-colored floating toys or balloons. Up close, the images come into focus as a profusion of women’s hair pieces:  long plaits — thick, double-braidings and solitary ropes — mostly upside down.  Something about the shape of the plaits and their relation to the crown of the head gives them a topsy-turvy jellyfish look, which I quite like. I have no idea what the work is about–whether it’s celebratory or wry — but the image, screened right onto the pristine wall, is dazzling.

Eva Wylie, A Continuous Shuffle of Earthturf (detail)

Vox Alumni show

It’s great that the alternative space continues to showcase its alumni members which allows you to catch up with the artists, or in some cases, meet them for the first time.

Merilee Challiss

Merrilee Challiss‘ delicate white on black works on paper with pinking sheer edges and what appear to be embroidery hoop frames are Edward Gorey-delightful. The work nods to arts and crafts and book illustration and is a nice mix of old, new, high and low.

John T. Lange

John T. Lange‘s mini landscape projection via two clattery old film projectors has a hobby shop charm.

Anne Schaefer.  Photo by Libby.

Anne Schaefer‘s little tower of patterned boxes is elegant and seems like it walked in from the AiA Bookstore — meta-architectural blocks for kids to play with.

Video Lounge

In the video lounge, David Tinapple‘s Scatter Square translates a seascape into a series of digital rows and columns of tiles which it then flips around reconfiguring the landscape like one of those old-fashioned tile games that you can now get for your keychain. There’s a solitary soul on the beach and it’s funny to think of the person being shuffled around willy nilly not even knowing what’s happening. But I guess that’s life for you.

Darkness is my pillow at Vox Populi this month. Almost everything is noir, and the American Dream has turned into something lost, exploded, longed for and gone. At least that’s what I got over almost everything I saw there.

The most ambitious work on the subject is James Johnson‘s photo installation, Some Rooms-Part I (Yours). Corey Antis‘ smallish formalist paintings also refer to spaces and memory and feelings; and the video by Deborah Stratman at Screening Gallery, just inside Vox, also refers to these ideas. (Sarah Zwerling‘s Window, in the video lounge, wasn’t working when I was there).

James Johnson, Some Rooms-Part I (Yours)–the black picture window, showing a reflection of the gallery and a landscape drawing of a kitchen inside

Johnson, whose emotionally suggestive peephole views have grown this time to a dark, picture-window view. The cardboard corrugated boxes that held the little views have given way to a room-sized box. And the illusion of architectural space within the box has been simultaneously undercut and created by adding a scrim of architectural drawing in front of the more realistic photographic view.

This is Americana–about the vernacular architecture of the suburban landscape and how we are blocked from really entering other people’s lives and homes at the same time that we imbue them with our imaginations. It’s Robert Bechtle‘s cars as houses, or Henry Wessel‘s deadpan photos that reference real estate portraits.

In Johnson’s installation, the viewer looks through a dark, reflective picture window and through a blue-print-like, unbelievably long kitchen wall of counters, cabinets and windows. Beyond these layers stands a white clapboard house–a suburban classic–shrouded in darkness. Its windows light up and dim, inviting us to pick out the murky outlines of the house.
I yearned to look inside those lit windows as I stood there.

James Johnson, Some Rooms-Part I (Yours), infrastructure behind the installation is on display

Johnson makes sure you know it’s all faux. He leaves open the real gallery room behind the window for you to look at. It’s filled with the architectural infrastructure of the installation–a smaller box behind a bigger box, and a colorful mare’s nest of wires and a computer.

Even with this transparency, he still succeeds with the illusion–the yearning for all that the two houses–the barely visible one behind and the sketched one in front–represent. The layers of the drawn kitchen and the life-sized but reflective picture window add a distancing that cuts some of the emotional connection. The intimacy of the peephole and the revealed interior with light pouring in from behind has been lost. But layers of ideas and realities have filled the void. All in all, pretty great.

Corey Antis, Untitled Still (Black Room), 23 x 29 inches, acrylic, flashe on panel

Corey Antis was holding down the front desk at Vox when I arrived. He, too has a show there, and he said that in his own paintings, he is trying to capture the meaning and feeling of architectural spaces with a minimum of means and a consciousness of the materials he is using. In looking at these paintings, I also see the nostalgic vocabulary of interference on a television screen and the out-of-synch scratchiness of an old movie.

Palindrome, 24 x 29 inches, acrylic, flashe on panel

I’m interested in his tie to the brush stroke, which is most effective when it becomes something the painting is about–as in, Palindrome, and Untitled (black room), which become movie stills in a noir narrative that I can imagine my way into.

When the pieces work, the architectural vocabulary becomes a sort of Malevich block of paint, almost scrubbed away until it acquires a ghostliness and spiritual representation of memory, with only the textures and brush strokes pulling the work back to the concrete world.

Julianna Foster’s installation, In A Vale, her first one-person exhibit at Vox

Also at Vox, Julianna Foster’s installation, In a Vale. The grouping of light-box-illuminated color transparencies recall horror and disaster movies and the weirdness that can transform the vernacular American landscape into a danger zone. I liked the individual images a lot; they are pure photographic fiction from the Hollywood conventions–stuck on a deserted road, lost in the woods, beset by fog, etc., etc. The installation, which suggests a series of related movie stills, undercuts the narratives of the individual images and does them a disservice, overall, I think. But the use of the light boxes with cinema-inspired stills feels just right.

The moon is ghostly in this night-time shot from Deborah Stratman’s video In Order Not to be Here.

Which brings me to Screening Gallery, the video gallery within Vox. Deborah Stratman’s 33-minute video In Order Not to be Here is about surveillance in our daily worlds. In the video, shot totally at night, we see guards in front of a wall of tv monitors and a guard dog baring its teeth materializes in the night light. We see empty parking lots and unpopulated cul de sacs. This is all quite unsettling, with its suggestion of an embattled nation living in fear and putting up with an utter loss of privacy at the same time that the nation is pulling up the drawbridges of life to hide in mcmansions in the ‘burbs. This video makes its points by showing the familiar as the sinister–mixed with beauty. Although there’s no narrative, the emotional and political punch are pretty great (warning–it may totally depress you).

Leah Bailis, Corner, cardboard and paint, 2007, at Fleisher/Ollman

In the same vein, I want to mention Vox member Leah Bailis’ piece that’s now up in 2000 Years of Sculpture at Fleisher/Ollman. Her sculpture is a fragment of the sort of white clapboard American Dream house that’s in James Johnson’s piece. Bailis, too, shows us infrastructure–of the walls–the American Dream laid bare and dissected as a flimsy facade.

In the work of all these artists, I was particularly conscious of how they were feeling the national loss of innocence and the yearning for safer, more optimistic times.

Justin Schiedel, So Long (Philly), video

On a lighter note, also at Vox, So Long (Philly), by Canadian artist Jason Schiedel, depicts a manic flight of a barely visible figure moving through urban scenes–from all the cities where the video has shown, so it gets longer as its exhibition history grows. It’s hilarious and tornado-like–the only truly upbeat art in the lot. Even the tilt of the overturned tv doesn’t suggest threat, but rather wild exuberance.

Art about decoration is a better proposition than decorative art. It’s about something. And that’s what the show “A Delicate Constitution” at the Art Alliance is about, featuring work by four artists who explore undercurrents in decorative motifs, especially as pertains to the ladies’ heavily decorated purviews of hearth, home and herself.

untitled silk screen on wall, by Wylie

Eva Wylie, a member of Vox Populi Gallery, has silk-screened friezes on the wall of imagery borrowed from popular-culture sources like the internet and magazines. The result looks pretty at first blush, but the subject matter reimagined in its new context, taking on threatening or otherwise subversive overtones. The work includes imagery that is new as well as imagery Wylie has used previously at Vox Populi. The newest edition in the frieze category is a lyrical line of map tidbits. The imagery suggests surveillance amidst the domesticity of a wall decoration. A delicate pink blanket with windows or squares cut out also suggests surveillance in the safety of home and the insecurity of a security blanket (see top image).

Portrait, by Linda Cordell

Lit up porcelain portraits of dogs are part of what Linda Cordell is showing in this exhibit. Cordell uses animals as a way to skewer people and societal roles, and here she includes porcelain portraits of dogs that preen with self-importance, the sort of portrait that belongs in an upper-crust English home of a bygone era. But the dogs are not so sweet and friendly, and the whiteness of the porcelain made me wonder if this was a joke on “bone china.” The pretension of the portraits are further exaggerated by the insanely decorative porcelain frame and matting.

Cordell’s pink blush

“pink blush,” a pink porcelain weasel (I think that’s what it was) posed on a highly decorated plinth/platter, wears a coyly short skirt that would leave nothing to the imagination even if the animal’s legs weren’t posed up in the air. It’s a creature who enjoys being a girl a little too much. She’s a ’50s housewife and a sex kitten serving herself up as a tasty treat.

Black Gothic, by Carson Fox

Carson Fox offers funereal arrays of blanketed silk flowers, birds and butterflies. The funereal qualities of the giant versions of Victorian memorial woven-hair mementos were mercifully undercut by the mordant use of words like Liar and Fraud. The kissing balls seemed like no more than what they were. I most enjoyed the judgmental, graphic display based on flocked wallpaper (above).

Grabtensil, II, by Colleen Toledano

And from Colleen Toledano, clinical-looking instruments of torture and pain parade in lace and pink as pumped-up versions of every girl’s purse accessory. Toledano’s use of pressurized (insulation?)foam as a decorative material stood out.

On My Way Back to You #3

Three photography shows were also at the Art Alliance. On the third floor, a show by Julianna Foster included some magical pieces–a panoramic picture of a distant person in a wide expanse of forest, and also her “Condensation Series,” images of nature transformed by frost- and mist-coated glass.

You and Me, by Kelley Roberts

Showing on the first floor were digital prints by Libby Saylor created by the trick of reversing a camera lens and also photographs by Kelley Roberts, in which cut-out top layers of photographic digital prints reveal layers beneath. I liked the metaphors in Roberts’ pieces that achieved clarity and poignancy, as in her You and Me.