Rebecca Jacoby, "Bubbles." Oil, Acrylic, Pastel Collage on Canvas. 32” x 38”. 2010

The natural and nonobjective forms in Jacoby’s works are reminiscent of plankton or aquatic creatures swimming in some primordial soup. Bubbles and globules ebb and flow on her canvases much in the same way that her process reveals itself to her.

Unintentional marks that occur whilst preparing her canvas serve as the starting point for other forms. Jacoby says that “these marks are catalysts from which I expand on imagery and move the work forward.” She then works and reworks the pieces to completion, mirroring real evolution not only in biological appearance, but also process.

Miriam Singer, the other featured artist, makes a good contrast to Jacoby with her intricate drawings. Whether traveling around town or sitting in airports, Singer often carries her art around with her, working on her drawings much in the same way one would approach a sketchbook. Using whatever writing implements she may have available, she builds small urban environments across her pages.

Miriam Singer, "Fords and Tires 4." Pencil, silkscreen, acrylic, marker, monotype on paper drawing. 39" x 50". 2010

Once at the studio, Singer applies various screen printing and woodblock techniques to the drawings. The printing surfaces’ limited size (as well as frequent folding of the paper for portability purposes) gives her larger works a grid-like composition and additional depth.

These little landscapes have distinct neighborhoods of their own that are reflective of the diverse and colorful nature of real cities. Often geometric and sometimes crowded, the subtlety of every pen stroke and idiosyncrasy makes these little communities dynamic enough to feel real.

Over at the Bridgette Mayer Gallery, most of the space is dominated by Charles Burwell’s large-scale studies of that tenuous place between the geometric and the organic. These paintings involve layering and dripping paint and shapes over one another to construct intricate patterns of great depth. These are op-art excursions that would put even Hunter S. Thompson’s wardrobe to shame.

Charles Burwell, "New White." Oil and Acrylic on Canvas. 59" x 59". 2010

Aside from their scale, they are impressive also for their sense of movement. The direction of that movement, however, is anyone’s guess. Flower-like forms seem to spin over curved lines, which dip beneath bulbous forms and slide under more lines, all of which lie beneath stripes of striking hues.

Burwell’s compositions seem wild and random, but upon closer inspection it is evident that they are extremely calculated and precise. The only thing more mind-blowing than these heavily-saturated explosions themselves is the realization of how much time they must take to produce.

More humble, and in this instance truly random, are Clint Takeda’s prints in the back vault of the gallery. He was happy to explain the background of each, and they all have curious individual narratives behind their creation, like dropping ink-covered rubber bands over wood prints or dripping iodine onto paper.

Clint Takeda, Oil & Water Experiment. 2010

What emerge are unique, yet strangely recognizable natural forms. Some are celestial and distant while others look curiously figurative. They are all created rather randomly, and at least one utilizes the old oil and water adage in practice to shape an image that is otherwise irreproducible.

While these shows run the gamut of styles, there is a reminder in their divergence: that process is the backbone of visual – and perhaps any – creative endeavor. Whether explicitly or not, the journey is just as important as the destination.

As works on paper go, Philly artist Miriam Singer‘s work–talismanic cityscape-maps that record time and place and daily life in layers–is not so much on paper as of paper. And that makes these combination prints/drawings a good fit with all the paper cutting and 3-D paper work that’s been filling the galleries lately (see post).

I paid her a studio visit a earlier this month, and learned she will be in The Rolling Canvas Art Collective, an exhibit and art auction at MBN August 1, of bike-related art presented by Fuji Bikes, Jinxed and R.E.Load. Also among the 20-plus participating artists are Adam Wallacavage, Ben Woodward, and Leanne Biank.

Singer’s studio is in the same building that houses Vox and Copy and the Khmer Art Gallery. It’s a section of a large factory loft space she shares with others, including Ryan Beck, who just had an exhibit at 222 Gallery.

I asked Singer about her education–she attended a post-bac at Brandeis (“It was awesome!”), Massachusetts College of Art (MFA), Yale, Brandeis (BA) and RISD. [Oops, not Yale and RISD--see comment at the end of the post from Miriam--Libby].

Singer added how her passion for cities and planning brought her to Harvard’s School of Urban Design, where they told her, “‘You should just stick to painting.’”

Miriam Singer in her studio

L. What about cities that interests you?

M. The density, warehouses, the gritty quality. I got really frustrated with Boston looking so cleaned up. I like a dense landscape. I live in the Intalian Market area. I like the mish mash of things. I think it’s also multiple histories in the raw.

I went from painting landscapes, and I started thinking about impressionism and light. I’d been thinking about my family. My mother died of cancer. I was 23, and felt I’d made enough work about it.

There’s so much subject matter in there–the mix of cities and my imagination, just interpreting what I’m seeing and still being intuitive.

I think a lot about Matisse. I’m definitely into his cutouts. I was doing a construction site about Buffalo, with different cutouts and photocopies.

detail of a piece by Miriam Singer

L. How does that relate to the drawings?

M. The drawings I usually think of them as collages. Ideally, I like to build and build and build to make it seem like a collage. It’s a bunch of memories being together on one piece of paper.

L. When I look at your work, I think about how the pieces are records of time.

M. That’s hard to talk about. I do think about them growing over time. I pretty much work slowly on all my stuff. I pick it up later and I work in layers. You see the mark making, the erasures. There’s an anxiety in the stuff. …There’s an element of overworking.

Miriam Singer, several works, some in progress, piled up

L. How do you know when you’re done?

M. I take it home to my apapertment and spend some time with them, photograph them. When I photograph them, then they are done.

Paper really stops me. Paintings are neverending (quests for perfection). But with paper, I let things go, more. When they are finished, I react with it in a different way.

My drawings come from sketchbook-making. I constantly carried around a sketchbook. But then I started carrying around pieces of paper. They are diary like and came out of not having a studio any more. (Now I have one, but then I didn’t). It was tough making the transition (from school to working). That’s why I started to make these. I also wanted to focus on one drawing at a time. So I carry just one drawing in my bag. And I just need to draw a lot in general.

Miriam Singer, one of her works pinned to her studio wall

L. How do you describe the drawings?

M. It’s a chaotic landscape that I’m always trying to reproduce. It’s the feeling of stress, running around; it’s not peaceful. I’m always trying to pursue peace.

I have been making the same paintings over and over again for the past 10 years, recycling the same images. They’re never finished–[they] can be broken up. If they are broken up, I then concentrate on the small segment and finish it. I do need a huge amount of time to process it.

L. I notice how casual you are in how you handle the paper. [Singer tosses the work around, puts framed images on top of them just treats them like a notebook.]

M. I think they would make great rugs. Just kidding. Only just recently I stopped making them into postcards. Maybe I undervalue them. Each one is very specifiic. I can’t make them again. So why am I not taking care of them more?

Miriam Singer, work with collaged elements added

L. OK, so why?

M. I like to abuse them. In that way it’s also a kind of a mark. If I spilled something on it, I work that spilled moment into them. Sometimes I dunk them in water so the color bleeds together. I’m not interested in aging it, but I am kind of interested in making it look like a Pirate’s map.

L. How do you make I living?

M. I helped paint murals with Shira Walinsky. I like the process of collaborating and making it on the wall. I like how physical they are. I also teach for Mural Arts for the Corps program, working with high school students. I’m not teaching this summer.
I’m a printing technician at Moore College. They won’t let me teach there because I’m staff.

L. What kinds of prints do you use in your drawings?

M. Wood blocks, etchings, silk screen, lithographs, monoprints.

L. Other materials?

M. pencil–Prismacolor, markers, crayons, graphite, acrylic–I add that at the end occasionally.

One show at the Philadelphia Fringe is not enough. It’s so hard to know what will be good, what will not, that you sort of have to sample a bunch and hope for the best. This year, we finally figured that out and purchased tickets to four shows. Two down, two to go–plus a bonus.

by Miriam Singer

The bonus was added on to show number one. Murray and I got to the Painted Bride early to pick up our tickets, and there were works by Miriam Singer hanging on the wall in the cafe area, where InLiquid curates member shows. It’s such a gloomy space that if anything looks good in there, it’s probably good. On top of that, I’m a Singer fan, having first come across her work in a show at Siano Gallery (now the late lamented Siano Gallery, it turns out–we heard from gallerist Luella Tripp that it’s going to be a furniture store, instead. But look for Tripp to run another Old City gallery in six months or so).

by Miriam Singer

Singer’s work in her show de’rive dreams merges drawings with prints on paper that has been folded and unfolded and otherwise distressed in the course of her travels. She adds to them on the run as she moves through her life, and they have the jazzy rhythms and compression of city life–showing hints of stores, apartments, reflections, compression, circles, parks, bicycles, cars. None of it is spelled out, but all of it is in there, chock-a-block and rubbing elbows, inch by inch across the page.

The performance we saw at the Bride–Flamingo/Winnebago–was almost really good. It’s about a road trip across America with actors and creators Thaddeus Phillips and Muni Kulasinghe. Their two private journeys seek a piece of the past in the seediness of Las Vegas and the environmental disaster of the Salton Sea. Along the way, their searches for the American Dream cross paths. The performances were great. The set was witty and iconic. But call in an editor to trim the talky rants about the environment and politics. The show also sagged in spots, the timing not quite on target. Otherwise, pretty interesting. And, Murray, who always bumps into someone he knows, ran into someone he had written about in the Inquirer, years ago.

Waiting in a kind of staging area before the play begins. It’s really the back of the stage set for Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven

We had given up the possibility of bumping into someone we knew when we were waiting for the beginning of another Fringe show, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, at the Arden. But sure enough, one of our neighbors stumbled in, his unlimited admission pass to all Fringe shows hanging around his neck. Dragons, by Young Jean Lee, is about her conflicting identity as a Korean and an American. The show included enough spectacle and emotion to keep us riveted. But honestly, I was a little confused now and then and couldn’t quite buy into the extremity of Korean self-disgust. And when the show was over, I had much too much to ponder. Still, I enjoyed it. As for our neighbor, he was taking his unlimited admissions badge and moving on to another show. Not us. We went straight home to hug our TV and watch U.S. Open tennis. I’m at it again today, and I’m writing this during the commercials (c’mon, James Blake; I can’t believe you’re going down!)

As far as art “of the people, by the people, for the people” in City Hall, the “for the people” element has taken a turn for the worse. To get into City Hall these days, you have to go through a checkpoint (being paid for by Homeland Security). The first time I went, the line was long and slow. So this week was my second attempt to see the current Art in City Hall exhibit.

I imagine this new situation might be a barrier to anyone but friends and family of the artists involved, which is too bad, because the summer show Art of the City goes down like a mint julep on a hot summer day.

Sarah Steinwachs, Detritus and Light, drawings

Curated by local artist and current Art in City Hall Exhibitions Committee
Chair Cavin Jones, the exhibit has some offbeat choices that turn what could have been a snore into something worth a detour.

Anne Minich’s dark Cloud, with its little airplane and unlikely rocky mound put our lives here on earth into some sort of perspective–and broaden the theme of the show beyond the cityscape.

Miriam Singer, Imaginary Map 6, pencil, marker and monotype on paper

The layered life of the cityscape, though, is a theme that anchors the show. The urban grid and its jazzy stops and starts is the subject of Miriam Singer’s two mappy pieces. Singer’s work is an accretion of time and space. She carries the paper around with her to work on as she moves around the city, until layers of print and mark-making and scars like folds and small tears from the paper’s travels reach critical mass.

Other abstractions in the show didn’t stray far from the grid, focusing on windows and bricks.

Keiko Miyamori, City Root Maquette #2, root, bricks, metals in plastic block (the drawing, a detail of which is reflected on the block, is from Sean O’Rourke’s sweet cartoony pen and ink of San Francisco)

Keiko Miyamori’s two root sculptures go beneath the surface, pushing the show in still another unexpected direction. The roots encased in plastic are of the Only God can make a root variety, even amid the detritus of concrete and other urban materials. The theme also shows up beautifully in three lovely drawings by Sarah Steinwachs, two of them of detritus and light and one of light on windows (Only God can make light).

Walter Edmonds, Past/Future, oil on canvas

For Louis Allen Charles, Walter Edmonds, and Leroy Johnson, the changes of the city over time are things to ponder. Charles’ Summer–Old Philadelphia, circa 1914, offers an outsider perspective on an old, busy city street with tall modern buildings in the distance looming like ghosts above. Edmonds seemingly cheerful illustration on canvas of a neighborhood, on close inspection shows a weedy sidewalk with boarded up buildings and the march of gentrification–and change. And Johnson’s construction from found objects, with rooms, views and layers of lives, suggests a social structure as well as a building structure on the verge of collapse.

Laura Jean Zito, Biker by the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, b/w gelatin silver point

The layers of space come through loud and clear in Laura Jean Zito’s photograph of bikers with a background of the city’s visual clutter and space confusion. The photograph has sharp lights and darks and a wonderful feel of spinning out of control.

Chelsea Combs, The Sound of Pants Drying, silver gelatin print

A photo by Chelsea Combs takes a thoughtful tack. “The Sounds of Pants Drying,” was a nice conceptual stab at the urban scene; the pants, like the homeless person they seem to represent, use the upwell of cool air from the subway tunnel to dry off. On a more literal note but with a related theme, Deborah Gross-Zuchman’s collage of obscenely large vegetables with a starving child below is a political poster about hunger in the land of plenty.

The exhibit has 39 artists, and the City Hall political meter — or maybe it was the PC-meter — was on high alert, so the list of artists arrived with a zip code next to each name. As usual, the exhibit was in those awful glass cases on the second and fourth floor, but this show seemed to rest pretty comfortably within and somewhat overcome those limitations.

Anyway, I think it’s a shame that this program, which mixes its democratic agenda with some serious work, is such an uneasy fit in City Hall.

The four artists showing this month at Gallery Siano have such different takes on what a place can mean that the exhibit gathers meaning beyond the contributors.

Rebecca Saylor Sack’s extraordinary paintings of water and woods sparkles with light and energy and danger. In the flick of a brush, Sack expresses a branch or a tumble of leaves. The leaf mold underfoot, the glint of sky in water, the crash of broken limbs and trunks are all there as reminders of the peace and danger and the cycle of life and death in the woods–without ever using trompe l’oeil literal representations.

Sack, who teaches at Tyler and has a Tyler MFA, is one smart cookie of a painter. Her slashes of color bring to mind de Kooning, but without the hatefulness. Rather, the quick, bold marks express exuberance and joy–a love of nature and of place and of light–and a love of paint. There’s a baroque quality to this vision of nature, a suggestion of the outside as something to be viewed from the inside as well as something to be walked through.

The paint itself is a subject here, with its juiciness and harshness, its small agitated areas contrasting with its glassy, smooth surfaces. These paintings of arcadian landscapes and of space all by themselves make the exhibit worth a visit.

by Miriam Singer; these pieces range from 15 to 29″ as their largest dimension

In quite a different vein, Miriam Singer’s combination drawings and prints of cityscapes, have a maplike quality that reminds me of the outsider cityscapes of Friedensreich Huntertwasser. They are layered with colors and lines until they turn into places of Singer’s imagination. The drawings are distressed by her process. She carries them around with her, working on them every chance she gets. In the course of that, the work acquires folds and chewed away edges.

The layers of buildings become a maze for the mind as well as a journey through time.

Chestnut, by Catherine Gontarek, acrylic on canvas, 32 x 32″

Catherine Gontarek, from whose layered paintings bits of Philadelphia merge and emerge, seems to view the city around her through a veil. There’s a shiftiness here, in which the world is not quite to be trusted–a sort of magic that makes me think of traditional artistic nocturnes like Whistler’s Westminster Bridge nocturne. Here, bits of architecture almost define space and then fade back into night. Trees become quite stylized and Japanese, in this work, far more corporeal than the buildings behind. And the light sources glow in the fog.

The work has a romantic edge, a touch of the gothic, without succumbing to it.

Ms. Pac Man (Dots and Ghosts), by Alex Paik, 72 x 60″, acrylic on canvas

Alex Paik’s reductive maps express the empty spaces in video games at the same time that he seems to love them. Paik, who has an MFA from Penn and was one of the artists in Fleisher/Ollman’s Meat Ball exhibit, makes paintings with a cartoony quality, with pastels and disembodied symbols that pretty much mean nothing to someone who doesn’t know the visual vocabulary of the games he is quoting. At the same time that he is painting a big zero, he is painting a made-up land that he (sort of) loves. There’s a boyishness here, and a sweetness that reminds me of Japanese super-cute art (honestly, I didn’t say this because Paik is Asian).

Ultimately a pixel is only a pixel. It’s not exactly substantial. I get a sense from my conversation with Paik, that he’s on the cusp of mapping his way out of video game land, even though he said nothing of the sort. He just seemed a little doubtful. I’d like to see where he heads.