Sylvia Fein Self-Portrait, 1949, Pencil on paper, Gift of Sylvia Fein and William Scheuber, Courtesy of PAFA

The exhibit of more than 100 works — drawings, paintings, sculpture, prints and artifacts (Thomas Eakins’ pallette) — focuses on 19th, 20th century and contemporary portraiture.  It mixes the familiar and the unfamiliar with works borrowed and works (some unfamiliar) from PAFA’s own collection. The show is hung thematically; it juxtaposes the contemporary with the past, the psychological with the fantastic with the literal. Robert Arneson’s double-self-portrait in clay of one head consuming the other (point of contact has blood-red glaze –not for the weak of stomach) is a show stopper.  The piece chronicles the artist’s battle with cancer.

Narcissus pairs ultra-hip Rebecca Westcott’s portrait of her husband, Jim, wearing a pink t-shirt, with conventional 19th century portraits by men, of men, all wearing dark suits. It pairs James Sherman Brantley seen through his own eyes with James Sherman Brantley seen through Barkley Hendrick’s eyes. Same but different.  (Hear Brantley and other artists in the show talk about self-portraiture in an artists’ Q&A session this Sunday in the Hamilton Auditorium, Furness Building.  Free with museum admission)

Gregory Gillespie William Beckman, 1993 Oil and alkyd on panel Private Collection

Other  highlights include Gregory Gillespie’s theft of artist William Beckman’s identity. The portrait of the two good friends and rivals shows Beckman’s head in Gillespie’s studio atop Gillespie’s body. This piece is grouped with several other paintings by and of the pair of artists–all food for thought.

Gladys Nilsson Big Birthday Gladys, 2010, Watercolor and gouache on paper, Courtesy of the artist © Gladys Nilsson

The ladies, young and old, are a strong presence in this show. Sylvia Fein’s pencil drawing of her self, from 1949, looks fresh and contemporary. Anne Kraus’s vessel glazed with narratives and patterns is a delightful surprise inclusion. Gladys Nilsson paints herself a 70th birthday party, and Florine Stettheimer paints herself into a positively Fauve moment sur l’herbe in Picnic at Bedford Hills. Margaret Foster Richardson captures herself in motion back in 1912 in a perfectly luminous self-portrait, an Gina Litherland portrays herself in a fashionable but witchy costume with her familiars.

Mia Rosenthal Postpartum Portrait, 2010 Ink and graphite on paper Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Joe, Philadelphia © Mia Rosenthal

Mia Rosenthal’s Postpartum Portrait, a drawing that catalogs the clothing in her closet five months after giving birth to her son, Kirby, echoes the underlying theme of self as flesh and bone, something that is vulnerable, changeable and on the road to inevitable medical meltdown. Sarah McEneaney’s “Recent History,” too, recollects the artist’s vulnerability in the aftermath of breast cancer. But this focus on mortality is tempered. These are not works that wallow in self-pity or despair. Rather, they simply remind us — with something like shrug-shouldered good nature — of what we all know already.

Sarah McEneaney Recent History, 2006 Egg tempera on wood Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NY © Sarah McEneaney

PAFA Curator of Modern Art, Robert Cozzolino, who organized the show, created a small room in the gallery that is a student art studio. During the weekdays, PAFA students take turn working on portraits and self-portraits in the space. Cozzolino says there’s a waiting list–every student wants to draw or paint in this mini-performance space. Nobody was there working when we visited but the studio, with its paint-spattered drop cloth on the floor and drawings taped to the walls, is a great outcropping and completely unexpected. The studio sits next to Joe Fig’s tiny sculptural model of his studio, exact down to the minutest detail. The magical mini-studio and the life-size studio together are a great ending to the show offering the thought that studios and portraits and the magic of what happens when artists work will be with us as long as there are artists.

Studio for PAFA students in the gallery

There’s a comprehensive catalog for the show with essays by Cozzolino and Jonathan Frederick Walz and contributions about working in the studio by artists Joe Fig and Sarah McEneaney.

Mia Rosenthal "General Mills 8 Pack" Ink and gouache on mylar

This is not the first-ever artists-choose-artists exhibit, however the quantity — the idea of 5 choosing 5 — is different. The selections by Distort, Conor Fields, Ashley Flynn, Brooke Holloway and Mia Rosenthal (all previous exhibitors at the gallery) create five distinct groups free of set themes or guidelines, and yet somehow the whole is balanced and harmonious.

Sculptures, paintings, photography, video, mixed media and even stained-glass are on display.  Yet, despite each work’s unique style, there is cohesion throughout due to bright colors that unify and bring energy to the show.

Anthony Vega, "Reproduction/Milk and Honey (Shoes)" Giclee print

Anthony Vega’s Reproduction/Milk and Honey (Shoes), for example, with it bright oranges, dark reds and pinks, broadcasts  a palette that is echoed elsewhere.

Sarah Kate Burgess "Cup as Ring" Melamine plastic and mixed media

Sarah Kate Burgess’ Cup as Ring works are delicate and beautiful forms that speak to the redefining of everyday objects as something new — an underlying theme in other works as well–for example, Distort’s War, which parodies the “Tide” detergent logo, or Dustin Metz’s painting Still Life (not shown) which appropriates Warhol’s Marilyn as a still life object (her image is on the cover of a book in Metz’s still life).

Distort "War" Mixed media on spray can

Some other notable works are T.F. Dutchman’s work, Cooter, a stained glass light box depicting a man with his bike and Ashley Flynn’s sobering mixed media work, Dad in His Casket, whose colorful highlights and misleading perspective veil a mournful reality.

Ashley Flynn "Dad in His Casket" Mixed media on paper

The gallery staff did not know what the show would look like until the works arrived. That is a bold position for a gallery to willingly walk into. But, it worked!

Show on display till June 26th

Gallery Hours:
Thursday and Friday 4-7 p.m.
Saturday noon to 7 p.m.

Mia Rosenthal's mail art project at Tiger Strikes Asteroid

Mail art @Tiger Strikes Asteroid: Mia Rosenthal’s handmade ink on paper travel postcards at Tiger Strikes Asteroid stole a lot of hearts and I heard at least one person ask what the price was ($300 — one sold, Rosenthal told me). Installed on three little card racks, the touchable, merchandise-like cards emulate travel postcards mailed to loved ones from places like Hawaii, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, Europe, Mexico. Based on real cards that were mailed and saved, each ink on paper piece has a message on the back written by Rosenthal or by a friend or family member. There’s the proverbial “wish you were here” and the “you won’t get this card till after I get home,” sentiments we’ve all penned.  A memorial to the past as well as to the (dying?) postcard industry, the installation is both sweet and comic. It seems nostalgic for a pre-Facebook era where sharing meant sitting on a couch with someone looking at pictures and mementos. And it’s a little mocking of the cash-in on your memoirs idea, although, here, ironically or not, these postcards are memoir-telling product and for sale.

Clint Jukkala's paintings at Tiger Strikes Asteroid

Eye candy alert 1: Also at Tiger this month, the Josef Albers-ian abstract paintings by Clint Jukkala. The large and small works, with nested squares and rectangles in candy colors suggest doors of perception for all sensibilities and palettes.

Theresa Pfarr's paintings at Grizzly Grizzly

Eye candy alert 2:  At Grizzly Grizzly, it’s Francis Bacon meets John Currin and Dana Schutz in Theresa Pfarr’s abstracted portraits. With their luscious pinks and reds for skin and with faces and bodies that seem half-eaten away, these works are as close to grizzly beauty as it comes.

Lights, camera, action. The end of Copy Gallery, a monumental monument in the middle of the room

The end of Copy: Copy Gallery, we’ll miss you but you had a great 3-year run.  Where do we go now for our fix of radical, odd, funny, serious, shy, aggressive, lame, well-meaning, badly-made, well-made stuff delivered in doses that make you smile? Your last piece — like many other installations we’ve seen here — is a pile of stuff (suggestive of Tatlin’s monument to the 3rd International), with mechanical elements, a note saying good-bye, and incomprehensible words on the wall.  Awesome, funny, nostalgic, silly, sad.

Eternity, spelled out in analog clock hands, at 8 pm Friday night at Progressive Sharing. Photo courtesy of Progressive Sharing.

Eternity @Progressive Sharing: I couldn’t wait for eternity to arrive at 8 pm at Progressive Sharing, but above is a photo by the artists of the 36 clock hands that spell out the word. Alicia Eggert and Mike Fleming’s installation was wall to wall people fifteen minutes before eternity. The atmosphere was festive in case you’re wondering. Nobody expected eternity to be anything other than fun.  One viewer I talked with was curious to see just how perfect eternity would be–he was hoping it would be perfect because it would bug him if it wasn’t.

Inflatable sculpture @Progressive Sharing puffed up and deflated at regular intervals like a cheerleader on the sidelines

The inflatable sculpture in the corner helped keep everybody’s spirits high.

Ray Studios door at Vox Populi

Advertising memorials @Vox: Ray Studios Presents, behind the glass studio door at Vox Populi, is an ad hoc, air conditioned space for viewers to take the stage, get in the spotlight and get some canned applause. There’s a video tutorial; and a set of Ray Studios products (which you can take).  The product line implies a world of things for sale (business card, envelope, song prayer, moist towlette). Coffee in the corner and a server offering chilled beverages enhanced the feel that you might be at some kind of funeral, if not at a product demo at a convention.

A viewer taking a bow on the Ray Studios stage

Go for the promotional materials and for your canned applause and 2 seconds in the spotlight.  I may be the only one thinking funeral thoughts in this piece, but go and see for yourself.

I am happy but I am not happy, in the first gallery at Vox

Also memorial-like and advertising-like is the icy installation in the front room, a group venture by Ludwig Fischer, James Johnson, Jacque Liu, Kirk Loubier, and Dustin Sparks. A large wood box-like structure that evokes a car and a casket on a bier made me flash on Richard Prince’s car hoods for a moment.  Like Prince’s work, there’s a deadpan quality merged with admirable craftsmanship.  The whole thing is festooned with balloons and calalilies, with a neon sign above eye level — it may spell out a word, who knows, it’s too high up to see. The piece sports framed photos of itself at the front and rear bottom, seeming to broadcast its availability for your next party, or maybe it’s like the photos of the deceased placed in front of the casket at a funeral.  Is this a memorial to the death of sculpture?  It’s a very nice object, if that’s the case.  Bronze next time.

Meredith Nickie's installation in the Fourth Room at Vox.

More memorializing in Meredith Nickie’s Fourth Room installation: An antique photo of a scarified aboriginal man dressed in Western garb sits above an altar. Leading up to the altar and taking up most of the room is a maze-like concrete construction on the floor that looks like a model of city infrastructure (subway map perhaps?). There’s a broken (beer) bottle on the concrete as well as a golden barrier like those that appear above open manholes to prevent people from falling in.  The golden stanchion stands out here as a weird reference to the underworld.

Post No Bills installation at Vox

Finally, the Post No Bills installation in the last room at Vox Populi.  I am sorry that my note-taking fell down here.  I don’t know who it’s by and the material on the gallery website does not elucidate.  If you know anything about this piece, add it in the comments, please!

That wraps up my stroll through a few of the shows at 319A N. 11th St.  We’ll have more First Friday posts next week.  More photos at flickr.

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.