You will find the staircase to Robin’s Bookstore and Moonstone Arts Center between two bustling restaurants on an equally busy street. Once upstairs, you still might be able to hear the rabble and cries from those encamped at City Hall. Their chants and shouts are not intelligible, and many wonder what the protestors are trying to say. However confusing their message, we know why they have chosen to occupy the city center. We all feel it, hear and talk about why rabble-rousers and Americans hang their heads together.  And the Class Warfare exhibit at Robin’s/Moonstone will show you.

Group shot of works in the exhibit "Class Warfare in Philadelphia"

"Vek," photograph by Justyna Badach

Class Warfare In Philadelphia is a five part educational series presented by the Moonstone Art Center. The photographs in the exhibit act as mirrors for gripping stories that exist but have been hidden by the media haze and politics of the recession. The truth behind the photographs is what is both gripping and frightening. The largest color print, by Justyna Badach, is titled “VEK”. The picture was taken the day the subject learned of his eviction. The image catches your attention when entering the bookstore. And you are stunned because the subject is so bewildered. He sits on a stool frozen with his belongings around him, disheveled and recently homeless. Your mind subconsciously might start to erase the belongings from the frame, considering how they will soon be gone, but you will never be able to rid yourself of the subject’s devastation.

"Mother Crying," photograph by Kevin Cook

Most of the pictures follow in the same vein as glimpses into lives we may or may not share but understand and empathize with. One of the best examples is a photograph by Kevin Cook of a mother holding her child. As the mother cries she tries to conceal her sobs from the child on her chest by turning her head away. The child seems content, with her or his only wish to be with the mother. This black and white work communicates the history of photography’s role in documenting economic hard times. It is akin to the well-known Dorothea Lange photograph of the Migrant Mother. The same shroud of namelessness and grief are in both photographs. However, the mother in Cook’s picture cannot hide her emotion from the photographer – and maybe she shouldn’t.

"I Need a Beer," photograph by Sherry Ruczynski

This recession is visibly different from the Great Depression of the 1930s, but the photographs of Class Warfare are eerily close. What adds to this feeling of historical continuity with the past — as you discover photographs in every nook and cranny of the bookstore — is the fact that the images of Class Warfare are mostly untitled. During the Depression, photographs by Lange and others appeared in magazines and newspapers showing us the pain the economic downturn. Now we get little magazine coverage, but photographers like those in Class Warfare continue to document. The idea of class warfare has been called unpatriotic, divisive, and false.  But it is living and breathing in these photographs, which are as diverse as Philadelphia and our nation.

"Hooded," photograph by Harris Fogel

The photographs of Class Warfare allow for a discussion we need to have. Photographs do not shout, have a political party, or run for reelection. They show what we can all tell through a war that is not only between the rich and poor, but between the idea of America and the reality of American citizens’ lives.

The photographs of Class Warfare in Philadelphia are on view until November 3, coinciding with a panel discussion.

Barkley L. Hendricks, Misc. Tyrone (Tyrone Smith), 1976. Oil and magna on linen canvas, 72 x 50 ¼ inches. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.Barkley L. Hendricks, Tequila, 1978. Oil and acrylic on linen canvas, 60 ¾ x 50 ¼ inches. Collection of the Butler Institute for American Art, Youngstown, OH.

I was struck by, how in a funny reversal of expectation, Hendricks’ paintings, with their blank backgrounds and fashion focus, come out of a recent photographic tradition, while so many of the photographs in Personal Views come more directly out of the painting tradition, in which sitters pose with symbols of their worth.

Hendricks’ portraits also reference religious icons, an association that elevates his subjects to sainthood. Some of the paintings glow with an ethereal light; and some of them have iconic gilt backgrounds. Surrounded by nothing but ether, with no details of the urban environment from where they come, these subjects are well-positioned to communicate their self-worth with sartorial splendor. They come without pedigree and create their own individuality. It’s costume as self-invention. And Hendricks loves and admires them for being exactly who they are.

Barkley L. Hendricks, Icon for My Man Superman (Superman never saved any black people – Bobby Seale), 1969, Oil, acrylic, and aluminum leaf on linen canvas, 59 ½ x 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

This is not art as fashion design; this is art with a political subtext. The scale is confrontational, grand and powerful at the same time that the figures are non-threatening. The iconoclasm in Icon for My Man Superman, a portrait of Bobby Seale, takes both Superman and Seale off pedestals, humanizing the cartoon, humorizing the man. Barkley Hendricks loves his subjects and loves people. It comes through loud and clear. He is legitimizing, embodying, making visible. It’s a gentle approach to a social revolution.

Sarah Stolfa, Benton, MS, 2007, Archival Pigment Print, 24 x 30 inches, Edition of 10

Sarah Stolfa’s, Zoe Strauss’ and Justyna Badach’s portraits at Gallery 339 may provide environment in the tradition of Rembrandtian burghers, but their subjects are not exactly burghers. not the usual powerful or moneyed class who can afford to commission Annie Leibovitz.

Justyna Badach, Rourke, 2009, Archival Pigment Print, 23" x 30"; Edition of 3; 31" x 40"; Edition of 3

Badach’s photos of bachelors are sad, the men isolated in forlorn environments of their own choosing and creation. These photos have no lushness to them, but the question of who we are looking at and why is plenty of a draw, with or without the statements Badach displays with the photos.

Sarah Stolfa, Memphis, TN, 2007, Archival Pigment Print, 24 x 30 inches, Edition of 10

In Stolfa’s current series on view, which references Robert Frank and Alec Soth, there’s a question of intention. She lets the subjects project who they are. But she cannot cross the social divide in the same way that she did in her portraits across the bar at McGlinchey’s.  Stolfa means to disconcert her viewer. And I suspect she herself is disconcerted by the kitchen worker with the gun at her waist. In this sense, Stolfa’s portraits are less about the individuals, and more about a cultural divide between northern and southern values.

Zoe Strauss, Bunny, 2001, Archival Pigment Print, 20 x 30 inches

Not so in Strauss’s work, where the people’s faces become a roadmap away from Britney and Joan Rivers, a different vision from the media circus of what it means to be human. Strauss is the Walt Whitman of Philadelphia photographers, singing her love for an entire side of the culture otherwise ignored. But unlike the romanticizer Hendricks, Strauss keeps the hard-scrabble environment and the hard-nosed realism, be it no makeup or too much makeup.

Andrea Modica, Sicily 7, 1990, Platinum/Palladium Contact Print, 8 x 10 inches, Edition of 20

Also in the show at 339 are Andrea Modica’s sociological photographs of Italians who have been largely untouched by glamor shots and the notion of performing for the camera; Rita Bernstein’s painterly photographs that are less about portraiture than mood and light and material; Jessica Todd Harper’s portraits of middle-class comfort, which seem closest to the burgher portraits of the Dutch golden age of painting; and Nadine Rovner’s setups, which are less about the individual people and more about cinematic mise-en-scenes.

a portrait by Josh Rickards

PS: I saw Josh Rickards at BYOTY at Little Berlin while I was thinking about the photos and Hendricks, so then I gave some thought to what Rickards is doing. He, like Hendricks, takes the subject out of a real environment. Sometimes the background is a blank color, but sometimes he creates a flat, abstracted environment that represents a milieu, a time and a place. And his stylized faces, which draw from craft veneer drawing, emphasizes the deadpan ordinariness of his subject. These are not so much personal portraits; they are pictures of a lifestyle and subculture.

Personal Views: Contemporary Photographic Portraiture in Philadelphia is up through November 14, 2009 and Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool is up to January 3, 2010.

Two photographic portrait exhibits at the Philadelphia Art Alliance borrow from the old masters to very different effect.

Justyna Badach’s Bachelor Portraits exhibit is quite different from other work I have seen of hers. This time she is using straightforward C-prints with no digital whiz-bang alterations, and her subjects are human beings. The portraits are quite satisfying and material, presenting quite a different sensibility from her immaterial landscapes devoid of people.

By including in each large portrait details of that person’s home and interests, Badach is falling back on the portrait tradition that includes symbols of the subject’s status and interests. The choices of what to include and what space to use as a backdrop immediately raises numerous questions about these men and their lives.

I found Kirk the most mysterious of all, with a transitory, lonely life suggested by things like the large picture frame still holding the standard fill-in images from the manufacturer, or the single pinned-up black drape, or the subject sitting on a stool rather than a comfortable chair. Badach has chosen to show his eyes avoiding the camera.

Kirk, C-print, 44 x 54 inches

Also hiding from the camera is Vek, with a black eye averted and an empty shelf behind him. The filled shelves have a sad grouping of boyish game objects. Jim looks positively menacing with a knife, but his surroundings suggest an ordinary orderly life of post-its and calendar and computer. In a way, all of these men have some sort of boyish games and fantasies in their surroundings. Even Kirk sports a skull and crossbones pendant atop his youthful attire.

I found these portraits interesting and peculiar and a pleasure to explore.

Michael (Playing The Italian Job), by Shauna Frischkorn

In the next room, Shauna Frischkorn’s Game Boys exhibit of ecstatic young video-game players rely solely on focused facial expression and the name of the game they are playing. While the images are pretty to look at, with illuminated faces that reference Rembrandtian lighting and ecstatic faces of saints, that’s it. The boys are decked in typical teen-age uniforms of allegiance to some image or another, but they are still young and unformed and just don’t give enough back.

These exhibits run until May 6.

Jellybeans is what I think of whenever I see a Steven Baris painting. It has to do with the translucent glow and the Pop colors. Baris’ one-man show of 19 works at Pentimenti until May 27, looks great.

Baris’ translucency is achieved by painting with acrylic on Plexiglas. He also finishes his painting with a kind of waxy material. The resulting surface has a matte glow. All of these add up to a sense of layers in space, of depth.

Baris’ Spread #A9, 14 x 14 inches

Some pieces have poured dots punctuating a plaid background. This series of work is downright comical. Maybe it’s because of the scale of the dots (or the suggestion of fizzy soda bubbles) which have a clown-costume scale vis a vis the plaids. The larger–or supposedly closer ones–also are the right size for bouncing balls. The shiny, industrial thickness of the pools of paint contrasts with the thin plaid, which sometimes is beneath, sometimes covering the dots.

Landscape with Random Clusters #35, 14 x 14 inches

These spatial issues prevail in all of Baris’ paintings, where abstract blips and blurs and backgrounds suggest place and space and yet are all on the painting surface. They are visual space stations, defining what’s near and far, and yet undermining what’s near and far. They do this with such bouncy charm and such look-at-me exuberance that the monolog about depth seems easy to follow, more of a game than a philosophical disquisition.

In a way it reflects cyberspace, a non-place kind of landscape in which there is no space at all, with glowing colors that contradict the absence of material.

Baris’s Compartmental #D7, 48 x 103 inches, oil on mylar

Baris also created three large paintings for Pentimenti’s tiny Project Space. The works have a more casual application of paint and finish, but the floating cubes in pastel skies raise the same issues of space as they attempt to push the walls of the gallery space back. Because the work is on sheets of mylar, I missed that happy melding of subject and the thick solidity of the Plexiglas substrate. The colors aim to make up a piece of that difference by suggesting deep space at close range.

Also at Pentimenti

Janaki Lennie’s Breathing Space #61

Also at Pentimenti in the annex gallery are three other artists. Janaki Lennie’s Breathing Space series focuses on the glow of dirt-colored skies. The skies bracketed on both sides by bits of the landscape have a pulsing visual tension that falls apart without the pair of space markers–either bits of trees or industrial towers. The works are an unexpected mix of Zen sky meditations and eco disaster commentary all at once.

Justyna Badach’s Untitled Seascape #2 (After Monet)

Local artist Justyna Badach is showing two enormous, digitally altered photographs of where the sea meets the shore. In these photos, Badach removes things to create romanticized views, taken from an unlikely, mid-sea perspective. To me they seem to be photos of emptiness. They are the antithesis of the picturesque painting tradition in which nature and bits of human occupation–a crumbling castle, or perhaps an ancient bridge–give the paintings of nature some kind of focus that nature alone lacks. To deliberately counter this by removing all traces of focus is an interesting thought. The fogginess and the digital inkjet print-out (which falls apart on this large scale of 44 x 54 1/2 inches) all appropriately magnify this, but I found myself yearning for more to look at–or more to think about.

Also showing at Pentimenti are a few of Mary Bennett’s altered books (see previous post here for more on her work).