Arden Bendler Browning, gouache and flashe on tyvek

They are active and big enough to immerse a person in the vertiginous rhythms of the city. The paint handling is expressive and varied, an outdoor patchwork of fabrics and glancing shards of light–Diebenkorn on East Coast speed. These are very like the small ones she showed at AHN-VHS about a year ago, but the ambitious scaling up turns them into another thing altogether.

Amy Stevens photograph of a set-up.

Alongside Browning’s confidence and daring, the other two artists seem timid. Amy Stevens is showing her now familiar cake photos–images of excess–and Matthew Thomas Cianfrani is showing photos and a video depicting the environmental cost of the new China.

Cianfrani's photos of contemporary Chinese expansion and pollution on Asian-inspired hanging screens.

Cianfrani’s hanging Chinese screen supports for his images are precious and no surprise, but the message comes through loud and clear. The video, so similar to the still photos, is a missed opportunity to expand this work in a new direction.

l. to r. Arden Bendler Browning, Amy Stevens, Sue Spaid, and Matthew Thomas Cianfrani

Sue Spaid, an independent curator and arts writer, began the evening’s discussion on the colorful splashes and sweeping brushstrokes that comprise the paintings of Arden Bendler Browning. The artist elaborated the process that inspired the clashing forms and disorienting images that populate her pieces. Beginning with snapshots and memories of her travels throughout Philadelphia, as well as the handy supplementation of Google Maps images, Browning constructs a fragmented image of varied urban landscapes. Fascinated as she is by the city’s juxtaposition of beauty with decay, the new with the rundown, her works display these pieces of the city “bumping up against each other.” Browning continues this theme in the arrangement of the works themselves on the glaring white gallery walls: they crowd together in corners or hang slightly off-center in a deliberate attempt to disorient the viewer.

Within these paintings, Spaid saw a world of “roads buckling and bridges collapsing.” Amidst the chaos of form, she detected a warning of a future earth that mankind can no longer inhabit. But for Browning, this chaos represents a time-lapse version of the cityscape that is undefined and obstructed, just as in the experience of everyday urban life. Nevertheless, it seems that the visions of both artist and curator can meet in a happy medium: perhaps the ‘future’ that Spaid saw can be explained by Browning’s subtle acknowledgment of a Googlized reality, where information overload can sometimes leave us spinning.

Arden Bendler Browning: l. to r. "Beyond," 2010, Gouache and Flashe on Tyvek, 76" x 60"; "Between the Lots," 2010, Gouache and Flashe on Tyvek, 120" x 162"

Accompanied by the squeaking sound of rain boots against the wooden floor, our group was next ushered into the room containing the photographs of Amy Stevens. Stevens’s pictures feature cakes that she has baked herself, centered over backgrounds populated with bright fabrics, scarves, napkins, and cushions. Influenced by vintage shopping and the atmosphere of the 1950s, Stevens bakes, decorates, and photographs dozens of cakes with the intention of critiquing the seasonal world of the women’s magazine. For Spaid, these pictures encompass “identity, celebration, and nostalgia.” Within each cake, she finds a different character cast in its own unique role.

“I can bake cakes that taste good but don’t appear good, and cakes that look good but don’t taste good. Never both,” Stevens remarked, when asked for edible samples of her work. It was a revelation that seemed oddly appropriate. This inability for the worlds of artistry and baking to merge within her pieces seemed like a subconscious reflection of her wish to comment on the hollowness of the life of the proper hostess. While the cakes may seem perfect in the fictional reality created within the photographs, the illusion quickly loses substance when challenged by the curious intrusion of a cake knife.

Amy Stevens' elaborately constructed setup for her photographic exhibition of cakes at Fleisher.

Fleisher’s dimly lit back room housed the last of the three Challenge exhibitions: Matthew Thomas Cianfrani’s collection, consisting of thin silk photographs framed on steel. Images of skyscrapers taken during his travels graced the gray worlds of his pieces, which according to the artist emerge from the desire to reject the traditional notion of photography as an art form. Existing simultaneously as a denial of the camera’s ability to represent truth and a socioeconomic commentary, Cianfrani’s works project a personal, more spiritual reality.

Spaid was quick to bring up the question of how viewers can be expected to relate to the “faux memories” that exist within the prints. But perhaps the answer lies in the existence of the works themselves. Cianfrani has taken the first step toward making his reality universally relatable: by creating silken replicas of his inner perceptions and displaying them to the public. If eyes are the windows to the soul, then perhaps photographs, in the hands of a discerning artist, can become the windows to reality.

Matthew Thomas Cianfrani, "Contemplating charred hotel on cloudless day in Chaoyang District," Archival Pigment on Silk and Steel Finished Pine, 30" x 60", 2010

Wind made one final whimsical appearance that evening: in the form of the whirlwind force of Sue Spaid, whose effervescent energy served to provide a link among the three rather disparate artists. Arriving several minutes late and then leaving early for a flight to Las Vegas, Spaid’s breathless enthusiasm and piercing questions led both artists and guests on a tour of social decadance and historical identity that made travelling beneath rain-soaked skies well worth the effort.

“My goal is to make everyone think about things they wouldn’t normally think about,” Spaid remarked over the course of the talk. These words proved true in unexpected ways, when I learned that sometimes friendly, animated discourse can supply the best distraction from a gloomy winter storm.

Kyle Ferino, Death of a Salesman, 2008, chromogenic print, 21 x 21 inches

Most of these photos depict ambiguous, uncomfortable scenarios of a damaged world. Kyle Ferino’s Death of a Salesman depicts a dishevelled, shoeless man in a suit under an overpass, draped like a river god. The scenario is a kind of netherworld glade, hidden from respectable eyes. That hidden world, a disreputable Eden, made me think of Jeff Wall. There’s a mix of magic, threat and myth–the powerful scariness of someone who has become an outsider. Or maybe the subject is nothing more than a homeless guy in a safe corner.

Xiomara Benavides, Don Hilario, 2009, archival inkjet print, 16.5 x 21.75 inches

Xiomara Benavides’ Don Hilario is filled with questions. Was this a photoshoot portrait with backdrop in which the edges of the backdrop show to exhibit the artifice? And what about the chalked words on the ground? Is this crazy? Is he crazy? Are these his words? Yet Don Hilario looks so dignified, even in his jeans, sitting on a flimsy garden chair in a garden with a phony backdrop. Is the garden his? If not, whose? Whose backdrop is it, anyway? The image brings up all the early 20th Century immigrant photo portraits,  with serious, dignified subjects posed in front of a pictorial backdrop. The color, the jeans, and the buildings peeking out from behind the backdrop are incontrovertible clues that this photo is not from a time past.

Felicia Perretti, Car Seat Fight, 2009, archival inkjet print, 20 x 20 inches

Snapshots may be the style of Felicia Perretti’s photos, but her on-the-fly photos are not exactly family vacations. Car Seat Fight, framed by a car window, shows a wailing child being roughly transported by a woman clearly irritated. It’s unclear who started the fight, and it’s unclear if the child is merely being moved or is about to catch hell on the side of the road. The view from inside the car suggests there’s a player in the scenario who is inside. The side of the road is a snatch of besmirched nature, a transitory world beyond the rules of orderly gardens and the home front. The photo becomes an emotionally fraught moral tale in which fairness and justice come under scrutiny.

Phil Jackson, Davis with Deer, Upstate NY 2007, 2007, Chromogenic print, 30 x 40

And speaking of roadside moral tales, Phil “Filthy” Jackson’s road kill photo with what I take to be a distraught Davis, may in fact be a hunter and his prey. Either way, Bambi is under threat from the human race. As in all these photos above, Eden is lost.

Daniel Traub, Tree, North West Philadelphia 2008, 2008, archival inkjet print, 20 x 24 inches

The Eden theme comes up in a couple of photos by Daniel Traub, but in Traub’s cause, Eden isn’t so much lost as aspired to. His Tree, North West Philadelphia 2008, is a scrappy survivor on a trash strewn rowhouse front lawn, nature’s toehold in an unwelcoming environment. Traub’s Two boys, North Philadelphia 2008, shows two slightly uncomfortable, vulnerable youths, one hiding behind his hoodie with his legs in a posturing wide stance, one with his hands clasped shyly in front and his legs close together, in front of a weedy array of growth. Their young good looks also suggest survival, as does the tree, and the weedy Eden behind them tells pretty much the same story. (Traub also has an exhibit up at the Art Institute of Philadelphia until Oct. 16).

Sarah Moore, Anterior Future, 2008, archival inkjet print, 32 x 26 inches

Formal issues also caught my eye–Sarah Moore’s surprising framing of shots–she splits a woman’s head in two in the diptych, Fall, which also is about textures of a scarf and the landscape–and a sort of Eden. Again using a surprising split to very different effect, Moore shoots the back window of a car in Anterior Future, putting the humans only partially in the picture, with their matching herringbone coats (are they friends or mother and daughter?).  The suggestion of time past/road travelled, out the back window, colors the story of the two women and their related coats.

Matthew Thomas Cianfrani, Contemplating charred hotel on cloudless day in Chaoyang District, 2009, archival inkjet print on rice paper, 20 x 60 inches

The rice paper surface of Matthew Thomas Cianfrani’s Contemplating charred hotel on cloudless day in Chaoyang District suggests China as much as the title does. The atmospheric photo, with its sense of disintegration and insubstantiality rings true to its message. The domineering form of the destroyed building is far from the gritty urban environments of the other cityscapes in this exhibit. The photo communicates its own sort of horror and regret.

Hannah Price, Twin Day, Fall 2008, archival inkjet print, 24 x 20 inches

Some of the smaller photos in the show are given short shrift, hung too close together.   But all in all, this is a terrific show and a great beginning. Others in the exhibit are Martin Buday, Christopher Gianunzio, Jaime Alvarez, Samantha Sheehan, Chad States, Tom Goodman, Danielle Bogenhagen, Gene Smirnov, Bob Myaing, Elyse Derosia, Hannah Price, DM Witman, Kelsey Johnson, and Joshua Lanzara. The exhibit was juried by Ariel Shanberg, executive director of the Center for Photography at Woodstock. Woodstock! …speaking of metaphors for Eden lost!

The exhibit is up to Nov. 29.