View of Shock Waves installation from sidewalk

For Oliva, the most regrettable part of the tragedy is the havoc caused by nuclear power. With a death toll of over 15,000 people, the destruction and loss of life was not solely the result of an unavoidable, natural disaster. Instead, human activities were partially to blame.

Left window of installation

Paintings on acetate made of translucent latex and acrylic paint fill the gallery’s two front windows with their colors reaching their full brilliance when the sun sets. In the window on the left, a satellite image of Japan is shown. Markings plot the tsunami’s location and the nuclear evacuation zones. The names of the forty towns that were most affected by the tsunami are written in Japanese in the window to the right. Their English translations appear nearby and reinforce the disaster’s widespread impact. On the gallery’s brick façade, a red nuclear symbol in what looks like reflective tape notes the ever-present threat of nuclear meltdown. The surrounding circle indicates the area threatened by potential contamination in the event of nuclear fallout.

Right window of installation

As a time-specific installation, the exhibition is dynamic. In order to see its colors at their most vibrant, viewers must be active participants arriving at the right time and waiting for the colors to reach their peak. The exhibition becomes an experience requiring an investment of time and contemplation (around ten minutes at sunset will do). During this time, thoughts inevitably turn to the magnitude of the natural and man-made disasters and to Japan’s changed landscape.

Detail of left window of installation

By making the installation visible from the street, the gallery is able to reach new audiences. Passersby I saw were in awe of each painting’s glowing richness, and several were curious and interested enough to stop and read the press release hung on the front door. Besides each painting’s brilliant color, each is also highly textural. The thick impasto layers of paint help suggest Japan’s topography, and the golden characters of Japanese script seem to pulsate against their black background. The work’s striking beauty draws viewers, and the work’s fleeting nature compels them to stop and watch the change unfold.

Detail of right window of installation

Daniel Oliva has created several other site-specific installations that incorporate satellite images and translucent paint to achieve a brilliance of color and a similar message concerned with topography, mapping, and environmental issues. Although Pentimenti Gallery is closed through August 17, Shock Waves provides an opportunity for the gallery to help realize the artist’s project. As a memorial to the victims of the tsunami, it is fitting that the installation reaches beyond the confines of the gallery and becomes accessible to the general public.

Installation view with work from Tim Eads and Jacque Liu

With matter-of-fact titles like “The undeniable truth about the eastern United States” and “Europe has been through a lot,” Tim Eads dryly states the impact of the mounting, ecological crisis, or so it seems. His found maps of countries and continents drip with house paint and bring to mind natural disasters, oil spills, toxic waste, and other corrosive effects on the environment.

Tim Eads, one of his found maps with cut outs and house paint

Between dripped trails, certain portions of the maps, showing coastal or landlocked areas, have been cut out, leaving no area exempt from potential damage. Each splatter of paint with its artificial color reads as an unnatural presence, and Eads’ use of the synthetic product points to the difficulty of finding sustainable alternatives.

Jacque Liu, Abeam. 2010. Mylar, paper. 16 x 16 x 11.25 ". Photo by Mike Kopena, courtesy artist's website

Jacque Liu’s mylar works, which he refers to as drawings, are difficult to categorize in strict terms. Shielded by translucent mylar, the works appear from a frontal perspective as flat, minimalist compositions, while from other viewpoints their sculptural character is revealed. Each drawing references architectural details from the artist’s travels. By offering competing side and frontal views, each drawing suggests a subjective recollection of events. The artist also has graphite drawings on paper that resemble topographical mappings. Entitled “Nainai #2-#4,” each seems drawn from memory to present an imagined landscape.

Laura Ledbetter, "Lauren and Petee" Cut Paper/Pencil on Paper 27 1/2"x39 1/2" 2010. Photo courtesy Fleisher Challenge Flickr site

The precariously balanced structures in Laura Ledbetter’s “Charles and Albert” and “George and Paul” appear as if they are going to collapse at any moment. With miniature figures surrounded by miniature building debris and domestic items, each drawing suggests an unstable environment and economic uncertainty.

Laura Ledbetter’s "728.2 mi. 08/10" - 27.75 X 39.25 inches - Cut paper, pencil on rag paper - 2011 - Image Courtesy of Pentimenti Gallery

Laura Ledbetter, detail. Photo courtesy Fleisher Challenge Flickr site

In the artist’s other drawing with cut paper, entitled “728.2 MI. 08/10,” houses and other objects in the built environment (wind turbines) encircle what looks like a cut-away view of a landmass. However the earth appears microscopic and cellular and, as a result, more vulnerable and fragile. The houses and their occupants become parasitic.

Leah Frankel’s "Surface" - 11 X 6.5 feet - 1,454 eggs - 2006 - 2011

With its sprawling size and use of 1,454 eggs, Leah Frankel’s sculpture “Surface” is the show’s most visible metaphor for fragility. Natural forms inspire both it and Frankel’s other sculpture, “Book Contour,” and each sculpture is created using mathematical calculations. Resembling a wave formation, the swaying eggs in “Surface” plot each moving point. The artist’s use of hand-blown eggs as a material makes the work and nature seem ephemeral and fragile.

Leah Frankel, carved book sculpture

In “Book Contour,” the artist cuts through a series of lined-up paperbacks to suggest the topography of a landscape. The missing text makes the form appear eroded, and with the divisions created by different colored books, the work seems like an attempt to analyze the deteriorating landscape.

Judy Gelles and Linda Brenner, installation in Pentimenti's Project Space. photo courtesy of the artists

Asking visitors to write a wish or fear they had on a sticky-note accompanied by their identifying thumb print, Linda Brenner and Judy Gelles extended their one-day project at Love Park, where they asked passersby to record the same. The results from both projects are displayed in the gallery’s Project Room. From concerns about new jobs, safe travels, and relationships, to the self-doubting “World Peace?,” the resulting fears and desires, like the other works in the gallery, range from personal issues to more global struggles. And with personal responses that are either humble requests or larger hopes that can be dismissed as platitudes, the participants seem to share in the artists’ reluctance to hope for more.

The Clay Studio’s flagship exhibit for the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts annual conference has a ponderous name: “Of this Century: Residents, Fellows, and Select Guest Artists of The Clay Studio, 2000-2010” (through May 2nd). Like the title, the show is large, organized by convention, and conveys less than its ought to for its length.

As a survey show, it might seem unfair of me to harp on curatorial choices (or lack thereof). But since there is, as a given, a degree of sameness to the pieces in a Clay Studio show—a shared penchant for demonstrated virtuosity and dishwasher-size—it is a special disservice to works in “Of this Century” to obscure their particularities through a homogenizing grouping.

Claire Curneen’s Lucretia

Claire Curneen’s porcelain and gold figural sculpture Lucretia is a prime example of the strengths and weakness of the works in the show. Curneen coaxes, with an unfussy additive sculpting process, convincing gesture from the clay figure. The facial features are likewise concise and poised—the eyes are reduced to dot-notations and the mouth an inset dash. The figure’s more modeled hand stabs the stomach, letting out a small flow of blood, rendered in gold leaf.

Lucretia, for all its deftness, fails to move me. It’s “sculptorly” simplifications, classical subject, and use of a literally precious material seem to reach for a weighty art-historical lineage: Rodin’s modern imbrication of form and material, the Kouros’s antique hope for perfect beauty, the Venus of Willendorf’s primal directness.

Claire Curneen’s Lucretia

But attempting to combine these distinct modes precludes the form that would actually constitute any one of them. The simple face, for instance, does have an arresting combination of specificity and vagueness—albeit somewhat closer to Julian Opie or Sandro Chia than a Kouros—but the baroque flourish of the gold and laborious, modeled hand bars reading the simplifications in the piece as a metaphysical posture.

I feel similarly ambivalent about many of the pieces from Old City’s first Friday; time and again, I saw artworks intimating powerful meanings that their forms could not carry.

Julie York’s Reflectionoitcelfer series—with a handful of pieces in the Clay Studio and a half-gallery of works at Pentimenti—are very different from Ms. Curneen’s sculpture, but subject to a similar critique.

A piece from Reflectionoitcelfer

York’s abstract ceramic tableaus place irregular and geometric shapes side by side on supports that look like miniature 1950s game show sets. The whole scene is mirrored and distorted by an arc of metal curving behind.

York’s pieces successfully confuse the organic and the inorganic—a strange ball of fiber sits above an “ideal” ceramic sphere in one piece—as well as the large and small—the set-like quality of the platforms coexists with a one-to-one scale flower. My favorite moment is a perfect half-sphere that seems to turn into a fried egg as it makes contact with its support. Because it is rendered in a single piece of ceramic, it demonstrates physical continuity between geometric ideals and the rude informality of the edible.

York’s “fried sphere” moment

Such challenges to conventions of rationality are central to the best works of art. Yet, presented too transparently, said challenges start to feel like rational exercises themselves: this round shape calls for a squiggle, these bundles call for a solid form, that natural needs an artificial. To everything, logically, its opposite!

York’s pieces please, but neatly lined up on the wall, the sculptures’ efforts to tangle experience are unwound. The repetition of techniques turns hard-to-parse moments like the fried sphere into a bit of a vocab list, easy enough to memorize, then utilize.

The repetitions in Viviane Rombaldi’s works at Pentimenti function in the opposite way. While excessive continuity trips up York’s project, Rombaldi interprets the same material to wildly differing degrees of success.

On its own, Rombaldi’s collage Boomerang is a striking revaluation of a newspaper. Where one might expect to see facing pages and horizontal type, Boomerang instead greets its audience with two delicate spirals of collaged-newspaper text.

Viviane Rombaldi’s Boomerang

I was struck by the extreme fragility of the configuration—it must have been painstaking to collage these thin strips of newsprint in a controlled manner—and the boldness of the mark—the spiral is visible even among information-saturated attention-grabbing newspaper clippings. By producing such tension in something as supposedly straightforward as a broadsheet, Romaldi shows us how unstable the seemingly basic act of “reading the morning paper” can be.

But flanking Boomerang on either side are Fougeres and Woodlands, in which newspapers are cut into plainly illustrative shapes. In these pieces, the final shape of Romaldi’s work makes no reference to the design of a newspaper, and the subtlety that Boomerang achieves is, accordingly, absent.

Adelaide Paul’s exhibition “The Peaceable Queendom” at Wexler gallery (through May 1st) presents similarly uneven work, with the potency of the central material, once again, only occasionally realized. In the best pieces, taxidermy manikins have been lightly modified to great effect. These simple changes generate uncomfortable hybrids: an evocative yawn from a three legged dog or an inquisitive stare exists in the same space as a still-recognizable taxidermy manikin, which we are uneasily aware could well have been used instead to display a real dog’s carcass.

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Two smaller, better, sculptures from “The Peaceable Queendom”

Unfortunately, Paul does not always show such discretion. In most of the show, she favors complex dramatic poses and baroque ornamentation, which discourages considering the strangeness of the manikins. Accordingly, the poetry of the animated taxidermy, present in the two smaller works, is lost.

One of Adelaide Paul’s more elaborate pieces.

My favorite piece of the night was Bruk Dunbar’s small ceramic bus from Dalet art gallery’s “The Travel Show” (through April 27th). Dunbar’s piece does, in under 4 square feet, everything Dalet’s other show—the large, largely mediocre, and pretentiously titled “Birth of Shape”—fails to do.

Bruk Dunbar’s little gem

Dunbar’s cartoony bus tapers as it goes back, seeming to speed forward through an anamorphosis effect. But unlike most times such trickery shows up in art, we can be disillusioned as we walk past the sculpture, and see the awkward distortions from the rear.

This failure to zoom, rendered in strong glazed color and brittle ceramic, is announced by the heavy title: The Silver Bullet Will Become A Ghetto Pod. Yet, as skeptical as Dunbar’s piece is about the unbridled optimism of the modern, it is not pessimistic. The reflections of light on its glassy surface, still-brilliant green hue, and obstinate charge frozen in time, give us a fleeting sense of the beauty and total futility of the modern dream.

–David Muenzer fell down a few stairs in 1998. After passing a couple minutes by some tentative cursing, the soreness subsided, and he finished going to the backyard. He currently spends too much time trying to make a Tahdeeg, but, having failed to look up a recipe, generally just burns the pan.

Daniel Firman, Grey Matters at Galerie Emanuel Perotin at the Armory.

Pulse

Johanna Unzueta, posing for us with her felt installation at Pulse where the artist won the Pulse Prize.

Johanna Unzueta‘s installation made entirely of felt at RJ Fine Arts was the highpoint of Pulse for us. Maybe it was the highpoint of all the fairs.

Unzueta was there when we visited and the Chilean-born, Brooklyn-based artist told us she uses felt from Germany in her installations, which play with the idea of poverty, infrastructure, connectedness and flow. Unzueta won the 2010 Pulse prize for artist of distinction–well deserved we say.

Jeremy Dean standing with his tricked out stagecoach Hummer

Dean had several models for his Hummer stagecoach on display in his frankly "auto show-ready" booth.

The globalism that Unzueta represented was countered by the pure Americana of Jeremy Dean’s Back to the Futurama installation, which was the shiny showboat of Pulse. A slick black Hummer vehicle sawed in half, its back half turned into a stagecoach to be pulled by horses, the eviscerated Hummer had quite a presence. Dean, a Brooklyn artist and filmmaker, told us he bought the car with money he and his wife put together. Then he took the car to a chop shop where the engine was cut out and the vehicle was transformed into a swank stagecoach. Dean said he was hoping to hitch the wagon to a team of two white horses and parade through Central park. We hope he did that. Dean has made work previously that’s social activist in nature and this piece, too, has an activist point of view (eco).

Daniel Gonzalez at Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts

We noticed a trend in sequins at the fairs.  Daniel Gonzalez’s cartoony works on canvas radiate decorative va-va-voom and some content too. We love it.  The artist has a show at Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts in Miami right now.

Mickalene Thomas' sequined canvas piece at Rhona Hoffman at the Armory

At the Armory, Mickalene Thomas continues producing eye-popping sequin-embellished paintings that confront the art historical conventions of a white, straight world.

Frances Goodman at Goodman Gallery, the Armory

Also at the Armory, Frances Goodman’s slippery, sequin-covered high-end luggage at Goodman Gallery (South Africa) made us wonder whether its intent was ironic commentary on commerce and art, or really complicit).

Miki Taira

Nick Cave's soundsuit above at Jack Shainman Gallery reminded us of Taira's folktale baby

Elsewhere, Miki Taira’s small calligraphy-covered cloth dolls that give body to Japanese folk tales caught our eye. This one, the Bottom Sounding Spatula (Buttocks Ringing Paddle), Linen, sumi ink, acrylic case, 2009 at Tokyo Gallery + BTAP took a shape we later saw at the Armory in Nick Cave’s new soundsuits at Jack Shainman Gallery. And speaking of dolls, Liliana Porter’s teeny-weeny knitter at Hosfelt Gallery–maybe an inch high–is producing an enormous blue afghan (piled on the right, out of range of the camera) with those little needles–the power of one.

Liliana Porter's tiny lady knitting is an unexpected delight.

Meanwhile, we saw Gallery Joe‘s Becky Kerlin in a booth so close to the entrance you’re in it before realizing where you are. Her booth looked snappy and elegant. Later we ran into Virgil de Voldere, who was a little down — it had been a difficult year financially for the young Chelsea gallerist. But he was excited about the show in his gallery by J Shih Chieh Huang, the master of led lights and water bottles who we’ve told you about before.

William Kentridge's tour de force stereoscopic prints at Brodsky Center

One of the Trenton Doyle Hancock prints at the Brodsky Center, part of a portfolio of his work

We saw Ron Rumford and enjoyed talking with the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions folks who had some fantastic prints by Duke Riley, Trenton Doyle Hancock, William Kentridge and others on view.

Volta

The front side of Dona Nelson's two-sided painting is positively nuclear. The camera couldn't do justice to the pthalo green.

At Volta, too, conversation was king. We had nice chats with Dona Nelson who was exhibiting at Thomas Erben. Her painting had a nuclear energy to it, its pthalo green ambiance radiated. Set on milk crates–a technique right out of grad school–the presentation made us smile.

Charif Benhelima transforms everyday objects into ideals in photographs that are based on Polaroids.

We had a marvelous chat with the gentleman from Crown Gallery (Brussels), which was showing photographs by Charif Benhelima–an ideal canary trash can floating in white ether, for instance–that made us think Luc Tuymans thoughts. Our informant said the photographs were based on Polaroids that were grown and modified until they expressed ideals, and that Benhelima is currently showing at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston.

The gallery owner at Videospace, who is standing in front of a video installation by Gigi Scaria.

The buildings spin in this festive video by Gigi Scaria, at Videospace.

Another gallery owner who delighted us was at Videospace Gallery (Budapest). As with Benhelima, we were wowed by the art, and then by the gallery owner. The artist, Gigi Scaria (he’s a man and he’s from India), captures public urban landscapes and transforms them into something magical.   The Hungarian gallerist met the Indian artist in Seoul Korea where the artist was in residence and the gallerist was visiting art studios!

Tamara Kostianovsky (seated right) and two of her meat works.

We saw Tamara Kostianovsky sitting next to her newest meat works. Kostianovsky, who used to be in Philadelphia, reminded us that she uses her own clothes in creating the sculptures, which were hanging from meat hooks at Y Gallery‘s booth at Volta. The work has grown (in scale and in concept) since last we saw it, looking seductive with its fashion and body references.

Artist Matthew Cox hanging his work at the Pentimenti booth at Volta

One of Matthew Cox's x-ray plus embroidery pieces hanging by carpet needles

Speaking about the body’s inner workings and Philadelphia connections, we stopped at Pentimenti to chat with gallerist Christine Pfister and artist Matthew Cox, who was hanging his embroidered X-rays on the wall using ultra-long carpet needles as fasteners. We wondered where the X-rays came from and he said his brother-in-law was a doctor who sometimes had “throw-offs” that he passed along. We heard he sold a number of them!

Artist Jan Hafstrom standing in front of his wooden panel cut-out paintings at Andreas Brandstrom Fine Art, Stockholm

Jan Hafstrom's painted cut panel signage pieces at Volta

Our last stop at Volta was to look at the cut-out paintings on panel by Jan Hafstrom at Andreas Brandstrom Fine Art (Stockholm). Hafstrom’s work reminded us of signage, bowsprits and Medieval magic-infused folk tales–wouldn’t Alex Katz look better if he had some of this content?  The gallerist told us this installation of Hafstrom’s was at the last Venice Biennale.  He also gave us a book the artist made when he was visiting Guatemala last year–a cut and pasted non-bound folio based on an old Funk and Wagnall’s dictionary.  It’s whimsical and child-like and quite wonderful.

On our way out we ran into Tadashi Moriyama, former Philadelphian and Penn MFA who is living in Brooklyn.  He said he had a gift for us and gave us a catalog of his work from a show at Bonelli Arte Contemporanea in Mantova, Italy.  The catalog has an essay by the Warhol Museum curator Eric Shiner and all we can say is — small world!  Moriyama says he’s making his living as an artist — way to go!  We love his work — magical maniacal musings about displacement and being alone together in the greater universe.

Also on our way out we had a lovely conversation with Julien Robson, Pafa Curator of Contemporary Art, who made our heads spin with how much he was seeing over  the few days he was in New York.  Robson is thinking thoughts about the regions vs the centers, an issue he’s dealing with for a big show he’s organizing for his museum.  His ideas about how art in the regions is rooted in place more than art in the centers is very interesting and we can’t wait to see his show.

Onward to the Armory in another post.  Here are flickr sets for more pictures:

Roberta’s  Pulse Volta

Libby’s   Pulse Volta

Joseph Hu, Design Guild, detail Acrylic on cardboard, 1 ¾ x 32 ½ x 20 inches, 2009

In a perfect art historical storm, Joseph Hu’s life-size sculptures, including pencils and an eraser, and Vija Celmin’s giant pencil sculpture at the Seductive Subversion exhibit at University of the Arts are on exhibit at this same moment of time.

Vija Celmins, Pencil, 1966, oil on canvas on wood with graphite,, as shown at Seductive Subversion exhibit, Collection National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Gift of Edward R. Broida

The similarities, the genealogy, and the differences, both physical and philosophical come rushing in.

Joseph Hu, Coffee Mug, After P.D., Gouache and acrylic on cardboard, 4 x 40 x 5 inches, 2010

Here both artists are looking hard at the ordinary objects of daily life, paying close attention to how they look. Celmins’ ordinary pencil, like her pink pearl eraser and her comb (not on exhibit here now), would be trompe l’oeil if they were of real-life scale. But they are not. They are supersized, in a salute to American exuberance as well as a Pop commercial value.  But more to the point, the large size imbues these objects with personal value and meaning. The scale turns them into stand-ins for the artist–expressions of her identity and her memories.

Joseph Hu, Chocolate Bell Pepper, Gouache and acrylic on paper and cardboard, 24 x 20 ½ x 12 inches, 2010

Nearly 50 years later, Hu is creating similarly ordinary objects from daily life with similarly astonishing execution. But his materials are humbler than Celmins’ wood, just as his scale is humbler. Hu is mostly working with cardboard and paper. Even the shelves on which the objects rest may look like wood but they too are cardboard–wood transformed into a flimsier state. The shelves and the objects are indeed magically trompe l’oeil, not because they are more realistic than Celmins’ pieces but because they are in a realistic scale. But the material is DIY–modest and contemporary, not made for eternity perhaps.

Briefly Noted Acrylic on wood 10 ¾ x 7 7/8 x 1 ¾ inches 2010 Only the New Yorkers are of wood--inverting the joke of material transformation.

Putting the very ordinary in the trompe l’oeil tradition results in a remarkable elevation of value of objects and materials that seem disposable. Hu wins us over with the vulnerability of the pieces at the same time that he offers us a personal invitation into his private world, his home. Celmins calls up personal memories. Hu calls up today–which seems quite in line with the way the vulnerability of the materials and their revelation of the personal becomes an intimation of mortality. Today is ephemeral and so is the art and so are we. And the artist’s personal space also is in danger of collapse, as we the audience become voyeurs into Hu’s private life.

Hunter Stabler, Magick Kruller Alefbet Lamen of the Golden Dawn, Ink and graphite on hand-cut paper and color-aid mounted on plexiglas, 35 x 27 inches, 2009

Hunter Stabler’s cut paper is also astonishing for its technical craftsmanship. He is a master paper cutter who has long been a wizard of mandala-like lacy creations that mash up the religions of the world. For all the transcendental fervor and whirling dervish snickersnack, the work is remarkably cool in its uber control and seemingly mathematical precision.

Hunter Stabler, The Impractical Astrolabe Wavicle of Timey Whimey Stuff / Children’s Clock Preliminary Drawing, Ink and graphite on hand-cut paper and color-aid mounted on plexiglas, 14 x 14 inches, 2009

Stabler has added layers, now, that add the illusion of soft, smokiness to his sharp blade work. Yet the precision remains, as startling as ever. And the material remains as fragile as ever, just like ecstatic states. I am reminded of numerology and kabbalah, systems of (il)logic for reaching ecstatic understanding.

Hunter Stabler, detail of Schweinfurt Yantra of Black Thursday/ The Flying Fortress of Solitude Ink and graphite on hand-cut paper mounted on plexiglas 32 x 80 inches 2009

The addition of airplane imagery into the iconography of religion suggests that war too is a belief system folly.

Hunter Stabler, Thelemic Yggdrasil, Ink and graphite on hand-cut paper mounted on plexiglas 42.5 x 25.5 inches 2009

The real ecstasy of Stabler’s work is in the making–he works 8-hour days! While the work seems as if it could serve as a mandala or tankha, antithetically, the level of cool control and work suggests its antithesis–doubt and control. And the jokey titles serve as reminders that this work is post-modern ironic tongue-in-cheek. Either way, whether you want to see it as the stairway to heaven or the stairway to folly, it is a visual WOW!

Both shows at Pentimenti run to Feb. 27.

Working with six local artists new to her gallery, Pentimenti’s Christine Pfister organized Think Global, Go Local as a show about relationships.  It’s an exhibit of clean, sleek, beautiful work consistent with the gallery’s aesthetic and has two surprises — an architectural piece that bulges like a pregnant wall of a house and two sculptures that puncture a freestanding gallery wall, their “heads” on one side and “tails” on the other.

Christine Pfister with SURALtmWALL, various dimensions, plywood, vinyl siding, light, 2009. She was showing me how the piece swings on its hinge like a door.

The architecture team of Jason Austin and Aleksandr Mergold designed their bulging wall, called SURALtmWALL, to showcase vinyl siding, that utilitarian material used to weatherize suburban wood houses and cut costs of house painting.  It’s a funny choice for an art material but backlighting the piece turns the thin sheets of sometimes-translucent vinyl into not quite stained glass.  The piece is a weird and hulking beauty.    A massive plywood armature holds the sheets of vinyl and the structure is hinged on one side like a door.  It actually swings on its hinge, although in closed position the work charms the most, evoking not only human habitation but an insect’s hive.  I couldn’t stop thinking of children playing house by turning alternate materials (bedsheets, tablecloths) into “homes” and using flashlights to light them up.  And with today’s push to sustainable architecture the work evokes not only pre-fabs, but huts everywhere made of reused or recycled materials.

Piper Brett, Red Prepositions (49x12x27", red plexi, steel, wall. 2007 White Preposition 49x12x27", plexi, steel, wall. 2007

Piper Brett’s ribbon-like loops of plexiglas in bright red and white poke through the gallery’s one freestanding wall like they’ve been trapped mid-extrusion.  Sculptors– like architects– love to reference houses, walls and doors in relation to the human body.  Brett’s plexi ribbons are playful and turn the wall into a kind of party present with a bow on top.  Brett, by the way, is also in “Offerings” at Little Berlin and her project there was about the word “wow.”  Here at Pentimenti you can see a hanging steel sculpture of the word “wow” which is so completely deadpan it’s funny.

EJ Herczyk, Avalanche, 90x158" (15 pieces). Casein, resin, digital print on board. 2009

EJ Herczyk’s large and small shiny abstract mixed media panels reference the digital world. “Avalanche,” a 15-panel collage of digital prints under thick resin, is a cacophony of jagged-edge shapes that push forward like all the information in the world trying to get into your email inbox.

Gloria Houng, Persuasion 1, 35x3.5x5.5", 11 pieces. wax. 2009

Gloria Houng’s mixed media drawings and cast wax sculptures of rabbits concern the relationship between the man-made environment and nature.  And Alexis Granwell’s visionary etchings of vortex-like shapes – built up with dots and lines evoking Morse code or Braille — call to mind cycles of nature or perhaps man-made cycles in music or dance.

Alexis Granwell, Diagram for Tunnel I, 41x29", etching on waxed mulberry paper, 2008

I enjoyed many of the pieces in this physically-diverse show and I love that the gallerist took a risk on artists she didn’t know.

“Think Global, Go Local”: Through July 18. Pentimenti Gallery, 145 N. Second St. 215.625.9990.

Most of us live in urban and suburban streetscapes. Yet so much art focuses on more romantic notions of nature, neglecting what the familiar paved zones offer in subject matter and imagery.

Work now on exhibit at Pentimenti is grappling with its own take on what these human interventions in space and structure mean.

Kim Beck, Buoys installation at Pentimenti

One that nails it is a piece by Kim Beck, a Pittsburgh artist, who has created a terrific wall installation of a suburban, parking-lot-ish landscape. We don’t see the parking lot, just the specimen plantings, a la a James Audubon bird-on-branch specimen in front of the plain, white-paper, unarticulated sky. What we do see in Beck’s landscape is an expanse of unarticulated wall dotted with trees and shrubs planted in concrete-curbed bits of earth. The greenery is expressively drawn with graphite on mylar, the shapes cut out and arranged on the wall. The arrangements seem provisional, and we get to envision in our minds’ eye the space where the islands may have been planted.

Kim Beck, detail from Buoys installation

Beck helps us out by using different scale items, to suggest distance. But each of the little shrubs and trees, each given the name Buoy plus an identifying number, can be purchased alone or with others and a new arrangement is as close as your living room wall!

The shrubs, especially, remind me of little domesticated critters, so their mobility from wall to wall, position to position, seems just right. They are also just right in suggesting the arbitrary placement of city green spaces, dictated by the architecture in which they are placed, and not by the laws of nature.

Kim Beck, detail, Buoys installation

You think you’ve got a garden, and before you know it, some planner comes along and says it’s time for a change, for a new design. He cuts and digs up mature plantings. If we’re lucky, he plants in some new location puny new, baby greenery. Often, the old stuff gets chopped and nothing takes its place.

But without these small salutes to nature, the landscapes we humans have created are grim and lifeless.

City trees and shrubs are like people. Sometimes they flourish in the unhospitable environment, sometimes not.

The drawing, basic and unfussy and spontaneous-seeming, also seems like a good fit.

Kim Beck, Tree Lot 2, 22 x 30 inches, graphite with cut paper, 2008

This work eclipses Beck’s other pieces, which feel more labored. Three cut paper landscapes teem with too much information. A series of laser etchings burnt onto paper of urban tree islands seem too spare and short on information. A video based on the laser etchings does take the spare work a step further–and closer to the idea of the provisionality of nature–now you see it, now you don’t.

Steven Baris, Ruse of Transparency 1, 66 x 48 inches, oil, acrylic on plexiglas, 2008

New work from Steven Baris, a perennially interesting artist, is also up at Pentimenti. In his pair of exhibits, Baris has gotten experimental and looser. In the small Project Room, Baris’ Ruse of Transparency series explores the force fields exerted by massive urban buildings, which he expresses via building shapes on thick plexiglas slabs that rest their top edge against the wall. The plexiglas is reclaimed from building and demolition sites. Behind each building image is the shadow it casts, painted directly on the wall, and glowing from behind. Some of the buildings are expressed as solid polygons. Some are loose webs of undulating, griddy lines that suggest girders and other architectural features, as well as the watery reflections mirrored in skyscraper walls of glass.

Steven Baris, from the Ruse of Transparency series, oil and acrylic on plexiglas, 2008

These pieces have an aura about them, a juicy beauty that captivates at the same time that it explores the intrusive presence of the glassy urban behemoths.

Steven Baris installation shot detail of his exhibit, Urban Compression.

Baris’ exhibit also has other work in the front large gallery space–several works from the Urban Compression series of large oil and acrylic on canvas paintings and several from the Whole New Distance series of small, circular oil and acrylic paintings on plexiglas.

Steven Baris, Urban Compression E1, 48 x 56 inches, oil, acrylic on canvas, 2008

The large canvases are covered overall with buildings abstracted into flat polygons shaped to suggest how we view buildings from different angles. Behind the layers of polygons is a layer of linear markings suggesting eclipsed building structures and again, the force fields that the buildings exert on the city around them. The loose ghostly shadows and lines are a departure for Baris, whose previous body of work at Pentimenti was almost wholly based on floating lozenges of color suggesting spatial relationships. The layers of buildings, and the layer of background marks and shadows, suggest that you, the viewer, are the third dimension, with a fifth dimension of unpredictability. (The fourth is the material of the painting itself–the canvas and the paint). While I did not love these quite as much as the plexiglas pieces in the Project Room, they held my interest .

Steven Baris, Whole New Distance A7, 10 inches dia., oil, acrylic on plexiglas

On the other hand, I deeply loved Baris’ Whole New Distance paintings–small round bubbles of plaid-painted plexiglas. These are comic, with shiny, raised blobs of pop-colored paint sometime falling off the edge, sometimes creating the only focus. The blob shapes raise these pieces above the plaid decorativeness, and make me think of older work by Thomas Nozkowski, whose abstract forms recall the iconography of the comics and whose colors recall bygone eras of home decoration. Baris pares the abstracted shapes down to icons.

Steven Baris

Some of them are just round, suggesting clown noses or googly eyes. But some of them suggest cloud forms and bubbles colliding and blue skies–the wild distances of nature domesticated by the plaid fields behind them.

In all cases, Baris reminds you he is challenging the way we perceive space–and color–nearly always in the context of the man-made.

In a final hiccup before the onslought of September shows, Pentimenti has reopened its sweet summer group show, Summer Journeys, Summer Dreams for a couple of weeks. There’s some terrific and surprising work here.

The artists in the show are a mix of the familiar and unfamiliar–Darlene Charneco, Heather Hutchison, Aurora Robson, Ben Roosevelt, Paul Villinski and Mauro Zamora.

I was pretty taken with hanging sculptures from Aurora Robson–biomorphic interplanetary shapes from recycled, repetitive materials. They were a sort of non-robotic, decorous cousin of Shi Chieh Huang‘s creatures and of Jae Hi Ahn‘s plastic fantastic hanging kelp gardens.

Aurora Robson

Robson also collages vortexes of junk-mail imagery, adding biomorphic shapes and juicy curves–taking a maximal approach that contrasts nicely with the elegant single gesture of Rachel Perry Welty‘s cut fruit labels, seen recently at Gallery Joe.

by Ben Roosevelt, from the The Reconnaissance Devices series

Ben Roosevelt is another artist whose work–beautiful drawings of figures floating in the paper’s white space–is new to me. There’s a sense of something happening here that’s not exactly clear, maybe even threatening.

Ben Roosevelt, from the The Reconnaissance Devices series

The work looks completely contemporary and fresh, as if the figures have been plucked from off the street.

Heather Hutchison

Another pleasant surprise was luminous work from Heather Hutchison, translucent paintings using beeswax on plexiglas. Their colors glow and almost vibrate!

Mauro Zamora

Darlene Charneco’s juicy map-like forms embedded in epoxy continue to raise questions about just where in the world or the internet or suburbia we have landed, and Mauro Zamora’s meditations on the relationship of where we are inside with what’s growing outside continue to deliver their graphic punch.

Paul Villinski

The exhibit also includes Paul Villinski’s installation of butterflies cut from aluminum cans, dipped in paint and pinned to the wall. Some of the pieces in this exhibit have been rotated out and replaced since the day I saw the exhibit, but work in the same vein should be in its place.

Sun, sand, warm weather and art. It’s a marriage made in magic-land, aka Miami, coming up later this week. And Philadelphia galleries will be there, as well as some Philly-connected artists showing work at other galleries. Here’s what we know about:

Two Philly artists to look for at GenArt’s Vanguard Exhibition and Official Party during Art Basel are Adam Wallacavage and AJ Fosik. Here’s a picture of one of Wallacavage’s fabulous octopus chandeliers that will there. FYI, Fosik shows at Jonathan LeVine Gallery.

artblog fave Judith Schaechter will show work at Claire Oliver’s booth at SCOPE, which has not a Philadelphia gallery on its list.

Two great Philadelphia galleries are going to be at Aqua.
Gallery Joe will be bringing Rob Matthews and Marilyn Holsing to Aqua Wynnwood. See Look! It’s Libby and Roberta and post here on them. Need I say more?

by Signe Vad; picture from Pentimenti Gallery website

Pentimenti, at Aqua Hotel, one of two Aqua Art venues, is featuring a great group, with lots of exciting breaks from their past, including local and international surprises. I’m super excited about Danish artist Signe Vad, whose digitally manipulated photographs we saw last year in the New York Red Dot fair. It’s also exciting to see Philadelphia photographer Judy Gelles on the list, plus Philadelphians Jackie Tileston, Matthew Kucynski (new!), Kevin Finklea and Julie York (new!). Also look to Pentimenti’s booth for work from New Zealander Sara Hughes (new!), Rebecca Rothfus (from PA and new!), Kay Hwang and Margaret Murphy.

Also, Philadelphia dealer Diane Ashley is on the Aqua list.

And Space 1026-er Isaac Lin will have some drawings at Triple Base Gallery from San Francisco at Aqua. Also at Red Dot, Pulliam Deffenbaugh from Portland, OR will be showing his work. One artist, two fairs!

Amze Emmons, Pidgin Satellite, 2007, graphite and gouache on paper, 24″ x 26″; picture from OHT Gallery website

Former Philadelphian Mark Lawrence Stafford and local artist Amze Emmons will have work at Boston’s OHT Gallery, booth 28, at Aqua Wynnewood.

Projects Gallery will have a big presence by showing at two fairs. Among the artists to watch for are Caleb Weintraub, Susan Howard, and Henry Bermudez, as well as Jim Brossy, Frank Hyder, Florence Putterman and Alex Queral. All but Weintraub are from the Philadelphia area. Look for them at the Bridge and at Red Dot.

Schmidt/Dean will be at “Flow” Art Fair, in Miami at the Dorset. I’m a little short on info here and will add it if I get more.

Of course there’s Cerealart selling at NADA (the New Art Dealer’s Alliance Art Fair) and The Rubell Family Collection. Those clever cerealarters, i.e. Larry Mangel and company, are sending around an image of a Kehinde Wiley tapestry hung in the Powel House, courtesy of the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks, and it looks really great there!

by Lizabeth Rossof, picture courtesy of the artist

On a personal note related to the World Wide Web, a young West Coast artist named Lizabeth Rossof (actually her dad) got in touch with me, because Liz’s grandmother was named Libby Rossof. Liz (not a relation to me, we concluded) will be showing at GEISAI Miami, which is hosted by PULSE art fair.

Alas, our Protestant (catholic and jewish?) work ethic and chronic shoestring budget won’t send us down for the sun and the fun, especially a loss to us this year because of the blogger get-together set up by Joanne Mattera and Sharon Butler at the Dorset (we love a party), but our roving correspondent Andrea Kirsh will represent us once again in glorious fashion.

Breezy Does It
Pentimenti’s group show offers loveliness and edge.

“In Summer the Song Sings Itself”
Through Sept. 15 (gallery closed July 24-Aug. 28). Pentimenti Gallery, 145 N. Second St. 215.625.9990.

Thomas Doyle’s miniature environments at Pentimenti escape the trap of precious and instead intrigue with their mystery narrative content.

Pentimenti’s summer group show is like one of those eight-countries-in-eight-days European tours. The whirlwind of color, texture, mountains, cities, beaches and woods leaves you panting. And when you’re home, you’ll have delicious memories—even if you don’t remember half of the specifics.

Eight emerging artists work in a variety of media, and whether abstract or representational, the works exude a smiling, breezy confidence that while life’s not always a beach, it’s not a total black hole either.

Matthew Fisher, oil on canvas, at Pentimenti. Fisher had a solo show at Spector Gallery a few years back. The paintings here are complex, beautifully painted and full of romantic landscapes and forlorn militarists.

There are edgy dark sentiments (Matthew Fisher) and madcap moments (Thomas Doyle, Deborah Hamon, Scot Wittman), all tempered by spots of sheer elegance and beauty (Cara Enteles, Kirk McCarthy, Sarah Daub, Gabe Brown).

Matthew Fisher, painting showing soldiers and a little bird. Birds are often minor albeit important characters in Fisher’s works.

What tickles me most in this solid group show is to see Brooklyn’s Matthew Fisher join Pentimenti’s ranks. Fisher’s paintings of forlorn Prussian soldiers (seen at Spector Gallery in 2005) are embodiments of both state and masculinity gone awry. They’re also the epitome of deadpan cool. The toy soldiers (they’d make great bobblehead dolls) are emblems of war and empire that provoke feelings of introspection and emotional fragility.

Deborah Hammon’s digital prints merge photo background and a painted figure. Their ambiance is whimsical and playful.

Beset by repeat encounters with ogre-like song birds, and overpowered by romantic landscapes, Fisher’s soldiers all but fall apart and weep. Whether they’re AWOL or just on R&R (there are no battlefields), these soldiers need a little tenderness. You can’t help but read today’s military men (and women) into these guys, which makes them all the more dear.

Scot Wittman’s cut paper maps translate into heraldic and iconic images. Here a map of Paris becomes a lady with a blue skirt.

New to me is New Jersey’s Scot Wittman, whose cut-paper silhouettes made from city maps are a tour de force. In Wittman’s 50 works the streets of Paris, London and Berlin translate with an uncanny charm into animals, knights, ladies and loving couples.

Sarah Daub’s cut paper pieces involve delicate outlines of objects layered together in non-narrative arrangements. The meaning eludes but the delicate shapes please.

Philadelphian Sarah Daub’s delicate lacy cut-paper pieces achieve lift-off as never before. New Yorker Thomas Doyle’s miniature sculptures under glass are excellent make-your-own-adventure stories. California’s Deborah Hamon creates a new paradigm for revisionist history with great faux snapshots that merge painted figures and photographic landscapes.

Cara Enteles, uses pink glass as a foil for her silhouette-tree-scape. Look at it big to see the little bird. This is a detail of a larger work.

Elsewhere Cara Enteles, Gabe Brown and Kirk McCarthy use citrus colors and undulating shapes in beautiful works that reference summer trees, sky, waves, magical twilights and the cosmos. It’s great to be reminded of these transcendental wonders, and they add to the show’s easy, breezy summer feel.

Over time Pentimenti has tweaked its stable of artists to present a show that’s edgy, playful and ridiculously pretty. It’s clear Christine Pfister has hit her stride as a gallerist. The program is sure-footed, and the gallery’s participation in national art fairs has broadened its reach in both selling and scouting new talent—something that certainly benefits Philadelphia’s art scene.