Ribas’ choices for the Arcadia Works on Paper exhibit raise issues of sharing, reproducibility and loss of copyright control. They raise disturbing questions about the value of all art at a time when works on paper have never been more highly valued.

James Johnson, 14K Sentences on Conceptual Art, 2009, framed silkscreen print on letter-sized sheet of 14 K gold on acid-free board, 14.75 x 12.5 inches

Ribas first shots across the bow, the first pieces in front of you as you walk into the gallery, are Michael Davis Carter’s gator, a tissue paper piece that appropriates the LaCoste alligator logo, and James Johnson’s 14K Sentences on Conceptual Art, a 14K gold sheet of paper on which is silkscreened an appropriation of Sol Lewitt’s Sentences on Contemporary Art. The reflective quality of the material and the art historical appropriation serve as a conceptual treatise on material value and creative value–Lewitt’s creative capital, Johnson’s creative capital, the means of production that crosses lines between the handmade and machine (computer) made and printed.

Gabriel Boyce and Preston Link, Health Care Bill, 2009 printed paper 11 x 8.5 x 3 inches

In that same front room, Gabriel Boyce and Preston Link offer on a pedestal another conceptual work–Health Care Bill, three inches of Congressional bureaucratese downloaded from the internet and stacked on a pedestal, the work representing value beyond the ability of most of us to calculate. I found it especially amusing that the gallery needed a young woman to stand guard over this particular piece, to make sure no one commandeered a piece of paper from the bill, a piece of paper of questionable value without the context! And

Bruce Campbell, Directional drawing, 2008, graphite on cut paper on board, 43.25 x 65 inches. This is the largest piece in the show.

Bruce Campbell’s Directional Drawing, with words scrawled over a paper incised with a Frank Stella geometric shape–another art-historical appropriation–brings into question 1968 aesthetics and value at the same time that Campbell appropriates and incorporates into his own value system a piece of Stella’s creative capital!

Robert T. Pannell, Revision, 2006, photo etching, 11.25 x 24 inches

Robert T. Pannell and Pernot Hudson pull the rug out from the assumptions of our common culture–oy, those Indians got such a bad deal, speaking of value. Hudson’s print/drawing of a sheriff’s badge, Samburg’s Finest, drips with irony.

Mia Rosenthal, Breakfast cereals of this great nation, 2009, detail, ink and graphite on paper, 32 x 22.5 inches

The counterpoise to all these rather cynical meditations on value is a wall of five drawings that range from contemporary deadpan to doodly to an old-fashioned elegance of line–all of them raising questions of aesthetics. In this group, Mia Rosenthal’s cereal box grid drawing, an obsessive Roz Chast-like reuse and filtering of mass produced advertising, most pointedly continues the conversation about authorship and value (this and Leah Bailis’ Corner were the only works in the show I had seen before, but I was happy to revisit both of them).

Andrea Beizer, Three In bed, 2009, graphite on Arches, 22.5 x 31 inches

The others in that group on the wall with Cereal… suggest that cultural fashion and value are fickle, from Andrea Beizer’s Three in Bed, which passes for a contemporary cartoon, to John Costanza’s What did you do to the Booze Hickey? #2, which passes for a mid-20th-century one. In the mix of shifting tastes–Erika Mayer’s Knapsack Nation and Dino Vasquez Gargas Positivas.

Erika Mayer, Knapsack Nation, 2008-9, etching, 11 x 14.75 inches

Turns out there’s nothing in this show that doesn’t raise these questions about value and aesthetics. But the conversation about value is the more interesting and edgy of the two.

Mark Stockton, Composition 3, 2009, grphite of BFK Rives, 29 x 22.75 inches

As the show moves into the back room, a number of works copy popular culture images, using hand-reproduction methods that reinterpret the original values. I especially loved Fay Stanford’s Indigenous Princess, a highly unlikely image that turns the sentimentality of kitsch into a wild thing. Closer to my point about copying are Kristina Martin’s movie still and Mark Stockton’s Composition 3, the latter a drawn clipboard of media-celeb images. Matt Neff’s prints may valorize or criticize the Wu Tang Clan. He doesn’t give enough away for me to guess, but he’s playing in the same pond of appropriated pop culture.

That art work appropriating manufactured imagery is so widespread surely shows how far behind the courts are in handling the phenomenon of Shepard Fairey’s reuse of an AP photographer’s Obama portrait. The contentiousness about Fairey’s authorship, ironically, raises the value of the hand work, cheaply reproduced and sold over the internet, and the value of the photo, even more cheaply reproduced and sold over the wire services.

Gabriel Martinez, Untitled (Peking Ducks),"Pink" 2009, archival pigment print, 31 x 59 inches

Gabriel Martinez Untitled (Peking Ducks), “Pink” photo raises so many issues of identity, ownership, advertising, beauty, cultural hegemony, gender, duplication, yadda yadda yadda that it leaves me breathless. Martinez took the photo with a Holga camera in a gay pick-up park in Peking. He asked the subject to pose for him with pink Peeps ducks serving as a mask, but the subject, afraid of being recognized, tore out a magazine ad and covered his face with the advertising image of a woman’s face, and covered her unseeing eyes with the Peeps. The clash of cultures  is played out here in numerous ways, especially with the Western photographer and his Western Peeps and the Western influenced Eastern advertising image. Not to mention, on the love front, that peeps will be peeps. Amazing!!!

Quentin Morris, Untitled (Dec. 2008), 2008, December 2008, black gesso and polymer acrylic, 28 inches in diameter, courtesy Larry Becker Contemporary Art

Quentin Morris, who is a perennial presence in the Works on Paper show, expressed disappointment during the opening because his black circle was hung high on the wall like on ominous moon threatening the art cosmos. In a way he’s right. His work’s meaning got highjacked by the curator for his own purposes! But even when hanging at the normal height, the piece serves as an elegant question mark. Is it reproducible? Depends on who you ask. It is a philosophical conundrum for its refusal to behave like an ordinary drawing or declare its value in quantifiable terms.

Hannah Heffner, Baby Bubble, 2009, cut paper and bubble wrap, 14 x 11 inches

Speaking of drawings, Hannah Heffner’s Baby Bubble is also slippery. The baby bump is bubble wrap and any sense of transcendent birth is completely undermined by the deliberate crappiness of the material inserted in the cut (old-fashioned) image, a page from a magazine. When I was in the gallery, I was sure the page was a hand-made reproduction. Now, as I look at the picture, I am not so sure. The action of the man’s hand becomes a giant question with the intervention of the bubblewrap. This was arguably the riskiest piece in the exhibit!

On the surface, the show had a tremendous respect for small work and for drawing and draftsmanship and craftsmanship and art history.  Although gray, black and white and conservative on the surface, underneath, the show is slippery.If it really is ushering the end of originality and the end of handmade in a world of infinite reproduction, all of this writing is about a bunch of wildly overvalued work–except for that sheet of gold. I don’t buy it–yet.

Here’s the complete list of who’s in the show:

Leah Bailis, Andrea Beizer, Gabriel Boyce & Preston Link, Bruce Campbell, John Costanza, Michael Davis Carter, Hannah Heffner, Pernot Hudson, James Johnson, Sebastien Leclercq, Erika Mayer, Gabriel Martinez, Kristina Martino, Quentin Morris, Matt Neff, Robert T. Pannell, Mia Rosenthal, Fay Stanford, Mark Stockton, Judith Taylor, and Dino Vasquez.

The Arcadia Works on Paper 2009 show runs to Dec. 21.

“You Open so Late, You Close so Early” is Amy Adams first outing with the Fleisher/Ollman winter invitational, and although she is only one part of the curatorial team (see comment at end of post), there clearly is a difference.

Previous shows were kind of like the show titles–daring you to figure out what the hell they meant, but invariably they showed you work you were really excited to see. In its place is a show that feels like it belongs in Fleisher/Ollman, for starters. For seconders, it feels like dead-on Philadelphia at its finest (most of the artists are Philly folks). In other words, there’s more of an interest in pleasing here–and please it does. (I’m not saying I didn’t love the exhibits that William Pym helped curate. But they were more uneven, with big surprises that sometimes were exciting and on target, sometimes were just unclear and uncooked).

I’m having a little war within myself as I try to pick out my favorites in this year’s emerging artists invitational. To put it another way, there was a lot in this exhibit that I loved. (If you think you already read this post, it’s because Roberta wrote about it for the Weekly. But I couldn’t deprive myself of writing about it, too).

So here, in no particular order, are my top picks.

Nicholas Lenker, Always Remember Your Place, 2008. clay, glaze, luster; enamel, wood. 12x14x14 inches

Nicholas Lenker, long a personal favorite, appears to have emerged from an identity crisis and is back mucking around in his natural medium–clay. But he’s using some of the stuff he was doing in other media and making sense of it now.

His Greek-oid trophy-like vases are top-notch wifty, weird, and beautiful, with humanimals, beasts, and exhortatory cryptic writings that have a medieval torture and mythic kind of tone. The Masons ain’t got nothing on Nick when it comes to secret codes and rituals. The work is hell-fire and back again. Brrr. It gives me the chills.

Unlike some of the work about to appear at the ICA in their upcoming show on clay, this doesn’t have the exuberant juiciness of Betty Woodman, Robert Arneson or Kathy Butterly. Nor does it have the financial politics of Jane Irish’s work, about to open at Locks. This is dark stuff that brings to mind funerary urns and museum displays and extreme Olympian athletes of ancient Greece. I thought it was great.

Semiotics of the Alchemical Forest, 2004-2008, oil on panel, 11 x 11 inches (The four year stretch reflects Thornton’s practice of going back in to each painting, over and over again.)

Shawn Thornton, another long-held personal fave of mine, brings visionary obsession to his paintings on panel. It’s Paul Laffoley on acid (oops, Laffoley also looks like he’s on acid, but Shawn takes it way further) in a video game world in which all the layers are visible at once. Try to find your way and you’re lost in Shawn’s mental mandalas, which in part are a product of a tumor on his pineal gland and the therapy that ensued. Honest, you can’t write stuff like this and get away with it! Some of the pieces have portraits in them (one’s a self portrait) that remind me of Russian icons.

Josh Rickards, My Dad if he Lived up North, 2008, acrylic, flashe & oil on paper, 36 x 36 inches

And speaking of icons, Josh Rickards’ ultra-flat portraits with tumescent noses convey a lot without a lot of information. The deadpan plaid shirt of My Dad if he Lived up North, and the deadpan striped robe of Drug Rug are each just flat pattern on a generic shape. But the choices of information nail what Rickards is getting at. I want to relate these lumpy humans to the elegant Pop figures of Barkley Hendricks with those minimal backgrounds and fashion (or in Rickard’s case, anti-fashion) sensibility.

Mark Stockton, Pete 1974, 2008, graphite on BFK Rives paper, 26 x 22 inches

Also in the portraits realm, Mark Stockton’s confrontational portraits of Patty Hearst (her mug shots), Pete Rose (holding his crotch) and a young, pumped-up, 8-foot tall drawing of Arnold Schwarzenegger in a body-building pose–they all combine beautiful drawing with a sort of Pop culture horror! Really, seeing the three in such ludicrous detail is simply chilling. The highlighting of the very thing they are each most unappealing for is a smart move–and a commentary on the celebrity circus.

In the realm of sculpture, there’s a surprising amount of wood. Steven and Billy Blaise Dufala’s bunyanesque Sledge Hammer is similar to a piece they showed at their Fleisher Challenge, but this one takes the idea even further, and adds a touch of anti-macho commentary (at least that’s how I read it). That same sly undercutting of macho extremes is personified in Long Chuck, an altered digital image of an endless sneaker. Both pieces out-Oldenburg Claes Oldenburg with a lot less bombast and a lot more material pleasure. The work carries a self-deprecating, boyish charm that might fool you into thinking that’s all there is. Not so.

David Clayton, When I Grow Up, 2007, plywood, grass paper, ABS plastic, silk flowers, 30 x 16 x 12 inches

While we’re in the zone of boyish charm, David Clayton’s models of Americana and space are first cousins to Nick Paparone’s blow-up pickle in a box and his orbiting fried eggs in front of a digital print of space. At the other extreme, Charles Hobbs, who used to make models, surprised with ultra-crafted wood snakes and tree forms, all calling for a caress of the hand.

David Clayton, Neil Armstrong Dreams of Ohio, 2006, found object, pink foam, ceramic dry material, 8 x 14 x 20 inches

The one woman in the show, C. Pazia Mannella, offered a sort of counterpoint to the Dufalas’ Long Chuck fashion statement–a boa of multiple sewn-together zippers, displayed as a giant ruffle across the floor.

Also in the exhibit, Jeremy Drummond’s USA map, a bird’s eye view of an “ex-urban development” for each state, and Alex Lukas’ drawn-on prints of flooded cityscapes and other infrastructure disasters. Yikes! The end is near.

All in all, a great show. It’s up until Jan. 17!

(I tried to use images that Roberta didn’t use, so if you want to see more, check out her post, and also you can look at my Flickr set, as usual).

Shawn Thornton, one of five paintings in the show, oil on panel, 11×11″

Sly and serpentine works turn Fleisher-Ollman’s sixth annual emerging artist show into an Eden with bite. F-O is known for exhibiting the works of visionary outsider artists like James Castle.  But in this annual winter emerging artist exhibit it’s unusual to see a visionary.  So painter Shawn Thornton is the surprise. 

Thornton at the opening reception, posing with two of his works.

His colorful, heavily-worked oil paintings of complex diagrammatic interweavoven lines, nodes, dots and symbols are like 2-D Rube Golderg machines without the punchline at the end.  Several of the five paintings look like super tricked-out gameboards — Candyland or Parchesi for four-dimensional thinkers. The artist – (BFA 2000, VCU) who in 2006 had brain surgery and radiation therapy for a tumor on his pineal gland – is puzzling out life’s flow, energy and meaning right in front of your eyes.  Deeply personal yet somehow universal, the works are fascinating and gorgeous.
 

Steven and Billy Dufala, Long Chuck, 2008. archival digital print, ed. 5. 41×82″ That’s Ann Northrup caught studying the Photoshop whizbang image.

Steven and Billy Dufala‘s digitally-rendered photo of an improbably-long sneaker is another puzzle.  The iconic trick shoe curls into a snaky S curve that evokes snakes, skateboarding and roller coasters,  This virtuoso Photoshopping of a dirty sneaker into a pristine icon is funny and unexpected from the two makers of rough-hewn installations like their Fleisher Challenge show last year.  

Steven and Billy Dufala, Sledge Hammer. 2008. steel and oak. 33 1/4 x 12 1/2 x 6 1/2″

Also unlikely is the Dufala sculpture, Sledge Hammer.  With a a beautifully-finished wood shaft that looks like it’s an entire small tree trunk, the double-headed hammer is a fairy tale of a piece – it may be a lesson about double-dealing but the sculpture is pure seduction. 

Nick Lenker, Sacrifices Will Be Made, 2008. clay, glaze, enamel, wood, metal. 16x8x8″
Always Remember Your Place, 2008. clay, glaze, luster; enamel, wood. 12x14x14″

Next to the hammer — and all the more fragile for being there – are Nick Lenker‘s two ceramic pots in a glass vitrine.  The pieces mimic ancient Grecian urns with beautiful repeat patterns and central images of nudes or draped figures in some ambiguous narrative.  But the wowza pots are 21st Century constructs – the images are made with digital ceramic decals. 
 

Nick Paparone with his IHop special universe, The Long Now, 2008. laminated poster, aluminum foil, carpet, motor and light bulb. 78x24x25″

Nick Paparone‘s mischievous installation of a spinning breakfast special (2 eggs, pancakes, sausage and bacon on a white plate) in front of a laminated poster of the universe explores reality today.  The plastic breakfast is as real as the impossible picture of the universe, and the whole thing is comical.  Truly we are Lost in Space. 

Josh Rickards, Drug Rug, 2008. acrylic and oil on panel. 21×22″

Josh Rickards paintings of people with mutant noses (think Ed Paschke) and 70s hair are wonderfully deadpan; and Charles Hobbs‘ hand-carved snakes and wood installations are beautiful.

Mark Stockton, Mr. Olympia 1974. 2008. charcoal on paper, 104×60″
 
Also good are Mark Stockton‘s figure drawings, especially the 8 ½ ft. tall charcoal drawing of a young, monstrously pumped up Arnold Schwartzennegger; David Clayton‘s mini landscapes; C. Pazia Mannella‘s snake-like zipper constructions; and Jeremy Drummond‘s aerial photos of snaking suburban housing developments.

Charles Hobbs, Untitled. wood, 44x40x4″

Jeremy Drummond, 65-Point Plan for Sustainable Living, 2008. 65 lambda prints face and back-mounted plexi

C. Pazia Mannella, Your Grace, 2008. zippers, thread.

Alex Lukas’ untitled book pages like this one feature a post-deluge metropolis right out of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.  2008. ink, acrylic, gouache and silkscreen on book page. 10×14″

With beauty, virtuoso craftsmanship and dark humor throughout, the exhibition’s an unexpected holiday present.

“You Open So Late, You Close So Early.”
Through Jan. 17.
Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, 1616 Walnut St., suite 100.
215.545.7562.