Potato plus bandaid features in Brad Troemel, Pre-career Retrospective at Extra Extra Gallery. Untitled, 2009

Brad Troemel, Pre-career Retrospective at Extra Extra Gallery. Installation view

The selected works were printed out on plain copy paper with no worries about archival materials—the prints are not meant to last. The works themselves seem to be a tribute to ephemera—documentation of the meaningless, or accidental, or silly. A photo of a tree branch rolled up in a car window is listed as an installation as though any action in life could be a performance and every object, a sculpture. A potato held to a wall with band-aids, a sandwich on a bedpost, a piñata on fire; the images are all roughly the same size and are distributed around three walls of the gallery in a grid with none given precedence and in no particular order. All of life aggregated through technology into an endless series of unnoticed art blobs. The show is captivating and witty, getting funnier the longer you look.

George Shinn, New, Renew & Rerun at Highwire Gallery. Shard of Purple Shadows Fall on Horatio’s Face (detail)

The paintings in George Shinn’s New, Renew & Rerun show at Highwire Gallery took the reverse path. While Troemel starts in reality and moves to the digital; Shinn starts with a digital process in order to create something almost primitive. Shinn draws using Mac Paint and then transfers the designs to canvas and paints the images the old-fashioned way. The resulting pictures of faces and groups have a blocky style that echoes Northwest Coast Native American design. Heavy shadows and outlines on the faces stand out against empty backgrounds with decorative patterning—the faces become reminiscent of cartoons or primitive masks with the pixilation of digital design still visible in some of the figures.

Chad Curtis, Drawing Machine at InLiquid Art + Design

At InLiquid Art + Design Chad Curtis’ Drawing Machine continues the dialogue between technology and art. It is a computer-driven mechanical armature that draws pictures reminiscent of some ornithological paint-by-numbers series. The nature scenes and Audubon-style illustrations of birds appear with perfect regularity as the pen glides on its pre-planned flight path. But the products seem a little soulless, waiting for the weekend painter to come and fill it in with color.

Andree-Anne Dupuis-Bourret, Medium Resistance at The Ice Box. La Debacle, Installation view

The Ice Box’s large group show of print works: Medium Resistance promises a continuation of this inquiry into the possibilities inherent in developing media: “these works reassess the mediums’ expressive, communicative, and material possibilities … strategically exploring each format’s relative autonomy and usefulness, its potential for participation and collaboration, communication and dissemination, aesthetic, social, and technical labor.” But this broad and confusing introduction leads in to a show that is relatively conventional.

While the work is solid, the format is very traditional with many 2-D prints hugging the walls and rarely venturing out into the center of the room. The standout exception is Andree-Anne Dupuis-Bourret’s La Debacle a landscape that spreads across the floor like a mini-mountain range of perfectly regular hills. Standing above the tiny peaks—softly shaded from mostly white to nearly black—it is easy to have a sense of vertigo as if entering upon a science fiction landscape sprung up from the pages of a hand-printed volume.

Piper Shepard, Medium Resistance at The Ice Box. Pattern Pinning

Other enjoyable pieces include Piper Shepard’s Pattern Pinning an 8’ x 8’ installation of corsage pins and printed floral borders that blend visually into a virtual quilt.

Piper Shepard, Medium Resistance at The Ice Box. Pattern Pinning (detail)

Colette Fu’s oversize photography pop-up books are captivating with their odd blend of subject, content and juvenile format. Over all there are many strong pieces and interesting installations, but the show lacks coherence, possibly as a result of its somewhat overwrought mission. Despite the claim to question material possibilities and the new potential for communication the show is particularly lacking in work that addresses the effects of new technologies or crosses any as yet untraversed boundaries.

More about this post’s author, S. Tiernan Alexander

The Penn Museum’s  recent  invitation to Pablo Helguera (as part of Philagrafika ) was well-rewarded.  Helguera spent time in the museum’s archives and discovered that museum director Froelich Rainey had made use of the quite new medium of television to bring the collections to public attention in the1950s. He hosted What in the World? in which a group of scholars and occasional celebrities were shown a museum object which they tried to identify; it was the first ever educational tv program.  Helguera’s response took three forms: a recreation of the tv show’s format for a live event on Feb. 28th (above), a small gallery installation on view through April 11, 2010 and a book of stories about objects in the collection and the people behind them.

The What in the World? re-creation on Feb.  28th was hosted by current director, Richard Hodges with Helguera, artist Mark Dion and PMA curator, Joe Rischel as contestants.  The objects they were given to identify were hardly from the museum’s best-known collections and a number of them were obscure indeed: Ainu prayer sticks, fetishes from Eastern Siberia, an apron from British Guiana.  The participants were good sports and Dion’s habit of talking through his examination process (this is heavy, which means the wood isn’t completely dry so it’s probably 20th century) was particularly edifying for the audience.

Mark Dion, Joe Rischel and Pablo Helguera attempt to identify a Siberian hat

The gallery and book reveal Helguera’s interest in the history of the museum’s artifacts in the course of excavation and once they left their originating culture (or burial site) and came to the museum; some of them passed through the market first.  While hardly a typical approach of archaeology and anthropology museums the Penn Museum looks at similar issues in its current exhibition about the excavations it sponsored at Ur (which I wrote about here).

The book, What in the World; A Museum’s Subjective Biography (which is available for purchase at the museum, ISBN -10:1-934978-28-0) is filled with stories about some of the obsessives, eccentrics and rogues responsible for five areas of the collection, and the gallery covers the same material with five objects on display, each with an associated video. The installation suffered somewhat from the fact that watching an 8-11 minute video projected on the wall above the objects case is awkward (all are available on Youtube, as are clips from the original television program ), but the videos themselves are great fun.  Helguera has faithfully re-created the style of the original What in the World? complete with dry ice mist and haunting background music; and he has unearthed wonderful stories that include deception, theft, fakes and madness, which make for entertaining viewing and reading. Richard Hodges said he checked with Penn’s lawyer before allowing Helguera to publish the material, and I’m not certain whether he was joking.

There’s been a proliferation of recent interest in the role of the curator, accompanied by criticism that Harald Szeemann set a harmful example in the late 1960s by using the curatorial function as an art form itself.  In that light it’s ironic that Helguera, working as an artist, took no more liberty with standard curatorial approaches than Fro Rainey had done sixty years earlier.

First Annual Print Invitational at Little Berlin

Stella Ebner, Car Lot on HWY 101, Screenprint

This first print invitational was organized by Tim Pannell, the only printmaker in the artists’ collective, Little Berlin,  and I had a chance to talk with him at the opening.  If many of the invited artists’ bios included R.I.S.D. it’s not a coincidence; that’s where Pannell studied. The twelve artists from across the country covered a broad range of what print-makers are doing these days from traditional uses of sreen printing and intaglio processes to mixed media and photographically-generated work.  Both the work and the event were somewhat more sedate than the always lively, sometimes noisy openings at the gallery.  I don’t mean anything negative by sedate; it’s just that most of the work was framed and sat quietly on the walls and none of it was edible.

I like prints, but I’m always asking why an artist did a work in multiples. Is the subject something that many people will want? Is there an audience that can’t afford the artist’s paintings (Durer sold engravings of commonly desirable subjects, such as madonnas, to finance his travels)?  Is the image an effect that can only be done in drypoint, silkscreen, or whatever; or is the subject somehow connected with the medium and/or the multiplicity (one might say that Warhol’s off-register silkscreen was integral both to the visual effect and the subject)?

Vicky Chen’s series on the Port of Oakland employed the unusual technique of silkscreen on translucent gampi paper glued to wood, so the underlying wood grain becomes part of the image. Ports these days are filled with standardized shipping containers, and printmaking seemed an apt way to depict their global uniformity. Chen’s means were not easy to understand at first glance, but the results are subtle and something about her delicacy of line and use of space reminds me of Ben Shahn’s work.

Stella Ebner filled an entire wall with a grid of screen prints of a car lot along a highway strip.  The only variation was the writing on the signage, an apt commentary on our culture of endless, interchangeable commercial appeals.  Amelia Hankin used woodcut to create multi-color prints (variations of grey) of extreme subtlety.  They gave the impression of landscapes, despite the fact that none of the forms was identifiable.  She studied in Japan, and the sensibility comes through.

Serena Perrone exhibited a large, two-sheet mixed-media work that contrasted the boldness of a woodcut ship at sea with the delicacy of gold ink she used to draw in two female figures. Pannell’s own work was an homage to nineteenth-century wood engraving (cut on the end-grain of very hard wood, which enabled very fine lines).  He gives historic tours of Philadelphia and, inspired by some of the mis-information he hears, produced the first in a planned series of fallacious histories: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln seated together, with the Statue of Liberty just visible through the window.

The print invitational, on view through March 27, also includes work by Kabuya P. Bowens, Kate Copeland, Juan Garcia, Morgan Hill, Fleming Jeffries, Alice Thompson and Tanya Ziniewic; it is also associated with Philagrafika.

Dead Flowers at Vox Populi

Work by Marti Domination

Dead Flowers, on view at Vox Populi through May 2 was curated by Lia Gangitano of PARTICIPANT INC, New York, where it will be exhibited May 9 – June 20, 2010.  Inspired by the work of actor/director Timothy Carey, Gangitano assembled a variety of work by contemporary artists and those of the 60s-70s to explore the idea of the artistic underground and the shifting boundaries between underground and mass culture.  The exhibition includes a recent documentary interview with Carey’s brother recounting how the actor made trouble for the nuns at grade school, among other stories.

Genesis Bryer P-Orridge ‘Red Chair Posed’ 2008 C-print

Gangitano’s underground is largely associated with the more flamboyant aspects of gay culture, so the exhibition is filled with false eye-lashes, heavy eye-liner and very high heels.  While all of this was certainly underground in the 60s, who could have anticipated a broadcast television program called Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, much less same-sex marriage?  Alvin Baltrop’s black and white Pier Photographs (1975-86) portray an insider’s view of  gay coupling conducted out-of-doors in a then unfrequented area of New York.  It’s hard to know what Baltrop’s intentions were, but the series records changing real estate as well as sexual values, as the far West Side has entirely succumbed to gentrification.

Charles Atlas, still from video

I’m not sure how Cynthia ‘Plaster Caster’s work fits in either with art or with the underground.  Word circulated in the late 60s that a couple of rock groupies managed to get into the (mainstream) stars’ dressing-rooms with the intent of making plaster casts of their erect penises (and providing the necessary stimulation).  The story was too outlandish to be made up, and now at Vox you can see the results yourself; although who but Cynthia can vouchsafe whether that is, indeed, a cast of Jimi Hendrix?  As I told Andrew Suggs at the opening, penises without men attached hold little interest for me, but chacun à son goût.  As to changing bounderies of the underground, not so long ago I saw photos of a middle-aged Cynthia in her kitchen (with casts) in the pages of some forgettable mainstream magazine.

Pat O’Neill at Screening

Pat O’Neill’s Horizontal Boundaries (2008, film transferred to video) is showing through May 2 at Screening, in Vox’s Space, and I found all 23 minutes mezmerizing.  His collaged images move in changing rhythms that at times resemble a heartbeat, at others a racing train, with elleptical snippets of dialog that echo Beckett. O’neill has worked with the most mainstream of Hollywood filmmakers, but this is rigorous, exciting experimental film by a seventy-year-old who can still out-run his juniors.

Alexander Arrechea, front room of 'Orange Tree' installation at Crane

On the walls around it were three huge drawings and a digital print, all executed with tromp l’oeil virtuosity.  Almohada (Pillow) (2005) and T-Shirt (2005) are watercolors depicting vastly-enlarged versions of the named objects, bound with measuring tape.  I can’t say exactly why the form of the bound pillow evoked a trussed corpse, but the association was undeniable (I made me think of David Hammons ). Birds (2009) is a c-print referring to the camera-bearing tree in Garden of Mistrust, a video projection in the large space beyond.  It creates the illusion of a piece of marbleized paper cut into the silhouette of the tree and pinned to a black background.

Alexander Arrechea ' Almohada' (Pillow) (2005) watercolor 66x44 in.

The Icebox space contained Orange Tree (2010), a towering, multi-limbed “tree” sprouting nineteen basketball hoops, rather than branches, surrounded by balls which looked liked fallen fruit.  Facing it was a similar-sized video projection of Garden of Mistrust (2007), an earlier “tree” with constantly-moving video surveillance cameras substituting for branches.  Both are obviously urban species, and strange mutations.  If the increasing use of cameras is a way of keeping urban youth under control, basketball is one route they take to make their way within and out of the ghetto.  It is unclear whether basketball will empower these players or ensnare them in the corporate control of professional sports.

Alexander Arrechea, rear room of 'Orange Tree'

Arrechea’s world is one of illusion, often invoked in the name of power.  The mutant forms and shifting scale create an intentional unease.  He has previously dealt with the equipment and spaces of sports, those arenas and stadiums where boys and men play out their manhood, where symbolic wars are fought and national passions aroused.  Raised within the state control of Castro’s Cuba, Arrechea is sensitive to the control that corporate power and fear have imposed on more open states in Europe and America. The project, curated by Anabelle Rodriguez, was the first in the International Curatorial Exchange at Crane Building, and a roaring start it was.

Alexander Arrechea 'Orange Tree' (2010)

Miller Lagos’ Silence Doogood at the Arthur Ross Gallery, U.  of  Pennsylvania

Miller Lagos’ 'Silence Doogood' during fabrication

Miller Lagos’ Silence Doogood at the Arthur Ross Gallery (the title was one of Benjamin Franklin’s pen names) through March 21, 2010 is the product of the artist’s residency at the University of  Pennsylvania, and one of the independent projects of Philagrafika He worked with fine arts students to paste a ton of newspaper pages together and wind them into a huge roll which he sculpted to resemble a cross-section of a huge tree, although I needed to read the label copy to discover that.  The gallery also contains stacks of newspapers sitting in the form a cube; walking around the pile the visitor discovers that a group of paper has been removed, resulting in a shape that reads as a throne (a sort of ur throne that a child might make).  A video of Lagos working with the students and a short introduction by Lynn D. Marsden-Atlass, director of the gallery and Jose Roca, curator of Philagrafika, is shown beside the entrance.  It can be seen on Youtube . .

Miller Lagos is clearly a charismatic teacher and the project appears to have been a pedagogic success. Jose Roca remarked that Lagos’ work reminds us that paper comes from trees; if the students  hadn’t learned that in grade school, it was probably a useful lesson.  They clearly saw the power of one artist to transform materials and gained experience with the shared vision and coordinated work required by such labor-intensive art, which they could never attempt within an educational system marked by semesters. The final  product, however, was a bit thin as a gallery presentation.  That’s a shame, because Lagos’ previous work sculpted from recycled newspaper is very impressive.  The notion that the work deals with the dissemination of knowledge via newspapers may have been impressed upon the student collaborators, but did not come through as a significant focus in the work on display.

Bookmark/postcard from nowhere to nowhere, that comes with the North Georgia Gazette. Like this bookmark, everything in this bookmark is thoughtful and artful.

Green Lantern Press is the artist-run organization that also publishes the Phonebook, a national directory of artist-run spaces. (The most recent edition, 2008-2009, Philly’s artist-run spaces are severely underrepresented, but then even we can’t keep up.) And of course this show is at an artist-run collective space. There’s a theme here.

The story behind the book goes back to when a British fleet of exploration ships got stuck in the Arctic ice while searching for the Northwest Passage. Trapped for eight months, waiting for the ice to melt, they published a ship’s journal, The North Georgia Gazette, on orders from the fleet’s Captain Parry to keep spirits lifted. No whining allowed.

Amanda Browder, Installation, 2010 and Nike Desis standing there for scale

The original publication included letters to the editor, recipes, poems and reviews of on-board performances. The Gazette’s contents are reprinted here in their entirety, and embellished with an essay by contemporary Arctic explorer John Huston, as well as contemporary art work.

Nick Butcher, Grain Advance, wood glue cast of vinyl record on paper, 7 inches, 2009.

The exhibit, curated by Green Lantern Gallery & Press founding director Caroline Picard, includes fewer than a dozen pieces, which are touring the country to publicize the release of the book. Most of the art included in the exhibit is included in the book, including a limited edition 7″ record–a wood glue on paper print of a vinyl record. It can actually be played, the music of the original distorted by the wobbly backing and the iffy process. The resulting pops and squeaks and musical swoops, if you’re feeling imaginative, are quite evocative. You can hear and see this work, by Nick Butcher, on a small record player in the exhibit. The book, a small edition of 250 with silk-screened covers, is available at Flux for $30, an amazing deal!

Carmen Price, Normal Floe, mixed media on paper, 22x11 3/4 inches.

Other works include a marvelous, delicate seascape by Carmen Price that captures the white-out isolation of 24-hour Arctic days. A hilarious map of the arctic north, part fiction part real, by Rebecca Grady, and a wonderful soft-sculpture iceberg made of patchwork fabric with a fuzzy toupee of fake fur on top. Grady’s other piece, three draped rolls of somewhat crinkled paper in front of the windows has a makeshift, thin feel, making it the only piece in the show that is less than satisfying.

Rebecca Grady, detail of Map of the Polar Regions, pen and ink on paper, 19 x 22 inches

Also in the exhibit are artists Jason Dunda, Devin King and Deb Sokolow. I have images of their work–all pretty interesting–up at my Flickr site.

The show, one of the Philagrafika independent projects, is a lovely evocation of the past and the sense of awe that the sailors must have felt isolated in that barren landscape with no promise of escape.

The bookcase at the Flux reading room--the very beginning of an archive of Philadelphia contemporary art.

I went to the exhibit with Andrea, and while we were there we visited Flux’s temporary reading room, erected in conjunction with Isolated Fictions. It is part of Flux’s new project–an archive of Philadelphia-related art-ifacts. At this point, the reading room has a small collection that includes zines from Machete to old New Art Examiners to various Philadelphia exhibition postcards and printed materials. But, as in everything they do, Flux is ambitious and wants more.

The reading room, a temporary adjunct to the archive.

So help yourself out by helping Flux out. If you have exhibition catalogs, postcards and zines from shows in the city, old copies of Eye Level, this would be a good place to send a couple of copies. This project to preserve and make accessible contemporary Philadelphia art history parallels the Vox book on collectives, by Richard Torchia, and if I were to guess, it may have been inspired by the talk Torchia gave about the necessity of documenting. This is a breakthrough, with Philadelphia taking itself and its art history seriously!

Nearly 125 years of the New York Times, on microfilm at Flux.

There’s one more great feature at the reading room–microfilm of the New York Times, from 1886 to 2008, and a microfilm reader and printer, that Montgomery County Community College gave up when it switched to digital versions. The advantage of microfilm is that the articles are on their pages, with the ads and everything. And they won’t become inaccessible and unusable when the digital programs go through their annual sweeping changes. So, artists, as material-oriented people who are contrarians, seem to me to be saving our culture.

Charles Ritchie, Night II, 1997-1010, printed by Jim Stroud, Center Street Studio, Milton, MA, published by Center Street Studio, One of 10 artist's proofs, ed. of 50, 2007.2.1, soapground aquatint and mezzotint with handworking including scraped highlights and painted gouache and watercolor additions on Somerset paper, image 11 7/8 x 15 3/4 inches on sheet 17 7/8 x 22 7/8 inches

Imagine my shock walking into Gallery Joe and seeing all the works hung salon style in the front gallery–a small explosion of art–and then seeing a color-rich cosmic explosion of a sound-and-video installation with lots of plexiglas, in the vault.

The exhibits Prints by Gallery Artists and big bang are certainly atypical of this gallery, which generally does not show prints or video and which usually limits the size of the shows to allow for eye-level hangings around the spaces, the better to show off the meticulous drawings that are the gallery’s bread and butter.

Installation shot at Gallery Joe, with prints by Astrid Bowlby (two on top right), by Jeanne Jaffe (below) and two by Mary Judge (to the left).

Owner Becky Kerlin asked her gallery artists to contribute prints, if they had any, and they did. The resulting exhibit, while surprisingly populous, is consistent and excellent.

The big surprise for me seeing a Charles Ritchie print with lots of red in it. The Ritchies I have seen at Gallery Joe have been wonderful black and white suburban noir drawings filled with portents. The red suggests infrared night-scope goggles and surveillance. Now that is triple-portentious!

Among other work I was especially taken with was an early Lynne Clibanoff print. Although it precedes in date her constructions, it looks a lot like them. The off-square perspectives have a hint of Constructivism.

Martin Wilner, Journal of Evidence Weekly Vol. 138, 2008, printed by Amber McMillan, Post Editions, Brooklyn, NY, edition of 100, book closed 6 x 3 3/4 x 3/4 inches, opened: 112 inches

I also want to give shout outs to a print version of a Martin Wilner fold-out journal (OK, so it looks exactly like the hand-done versions and I do like the hand ones better) and an early Stephen Robin series of autobiographical cartoons of himself as Every Shlub facing the ladies (OK, so I think I saw this before somewhere, but I still liked it, maybe because it’s so Stephen).  Marilyn Holsing’s feminist versions of a young Marie Antoinette, with their tongue-in-cheek reference to kitsch illustrations, are also pretty terrific!

Marilyn Holsing, Young Marie Casts a Shadow, 2007, edition of 10, commissioned by Philagrafika, printed at Silicon, Philadelphia, digital print on archival 100% rag paper, image 16 x 13 inches, sheet 18 x 15 inches

The show is filled–literally–with works that look a lot like the drawings and other non-print work the same artists show at the gallery. The hanging has an ebullience plus some savvy pairings that make everything look great. Hey, I even admired a Christine Hiebert, whose work is a taste I haven’t quite acquired yet. Others in the exhibit are Emily Brown, Sharon Louden, Winifred Lutz, Rob Matthews, Linn Meyers, Kate Moran, Samantha Simpson and Mark Sheinkman.

Adam Carlton Carrigan, bang, in the big bang installation, .5 x 7 feet, wood w/ etched hexagonal plexi

The cheek-by-jowl display almost prepared me for the ambitious big bang installation by Adam Carlton Carrigan in the vault. The video, with an original–terrific–musical score by Thomas Roland,  is movie-theatrical. Carrigan projects it through a plexiglas-paned geodesic dome that reminds me of the panoramic windows of an air-traffic control tower, and the view to outer space from the captain’s chair on the Starship Enterprise.

The windows and their ’50s vision of man looking out into the beginnings of the cosmos elevate the video, which seems pretty standard-issue big bang, or maybe the video is just overwhelmed by the marvelousness of the dome. Carrigan, who studied multimedia at UArts, has made music videos for a number of bands including Man Man, and that experience of music and performance is embedded in this installation. He also has shot and written for films in collaboration with Philly’s Liberian community, for screening in Africa.

Adam Carlton Carrigan, big bang installation, detail of the seven phases telling the story of the rise and fall of planet earth and man, .5 x 7 feet, wood w/ etched hexagonal plexi

Around the other walls of the room, seven small (13 x 13 inch) etched drawings on plexiglas that suggest philosophical, scientific, mathematical and cabalistic systems. Maybe they are charts for mapping humankind’s great escape. But the narrative seems to be about the failure of humankind, the failure of communication, and the failure of science. For all the beauty in the etched panels, they seem subdued in the light-show environment, which is unfortunate, because their content–a cosmology of sorts–suggests there’s something more going on here than just another light show.

I liked the daring here and the sound-and-light immersion experience. Although the elements here don’t quite gel, I’m looking forward to seeing more work from Carrigan, seeing where he takes this. This big bang was guest-curated by Marianne Bernstein, who brought the Welcome House to LOVE Park.

The print show is one of the independent projects of Philagrafika, and both exhibits run through this Saturday, Feb. 27.

Pepon Osorio at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has printed a blow-up of an X-ray image of his mother’s skull atop a thick, black bed of confetti, laid on the floor like a fresh grave. The installation is to honor the memory of his mother, who died recently. And the memorial suggests all the medical interventions that fail and the way an individual, irreplaceable and unique and loved, is quantified in an X-ray (which of course is a form of print). The juxtaposition of confetti and death and dying stopped me in my tracks.

Pepon Osorio's print of an X-ray of his mother's skull on a bed of confetti

I had thought prior to seeing this that if I never saw another skull in an art work, that would be all right with me. Of course that was based on all the cliche skulls that abound in contemporary kitsch, plus a dose of too many Day of the Dead and Halloween illustrations.

Osorio, an internationally renowned artist who lives and works in Philadelphia, was born in Puerto Rico, and Latin ideas about death and mourning come through in this work, along with his personal pain.

Another Latino, Colombian artist Oscar Munoz, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. has created prints, some of them self-portraits, others portraits of others, printed on water.

The self-portraits, Narciso en proceso (Narcissi in process), are charcoal (ash) images that gets fuzzy and sometimes disintegrate altogether as the evaporating water deposits the charcoal onto paper. Munoz has been making these self-portraits, since 1994, and the implication is he himself, as he ages, is dying, vulnerable and ephemeral. The materials–paper, water and charcoal image–are boxed in plexiglas so we can watch the disintegration, each box a little coffin.

His other series, Biografias (Biographies), are portraits of people who have died or disappeared. The portraits are videos projected onto the floor. Each ink portrait is deposited on water in a rectangular basin with a center drain. The portraits morph and dissolve as they go down the drain. And the only print that remains is the video of the process.

The videos are cool and horrifying–the implication of descent down the drain or into the ground is rough. There’s an implication here that society is the machine that created these losses. But it’s the gentler process of the ashy charcoal deposited on paper, that packs the bigger wallop. The material itself implies death and cremation, and the slowness of the process, with its successes and glitches, offer more of a sense of the vulnerability of the artist, as well as a sense of the vulnerability of the printed image. The ills and inequities of society seem like something fixable compared to the human condition, for which there is no cure.

I hardly know how to cover the mass of marvelous stuff that is out there in Philagrafika-related shows. So I’m saying what I have to say piecemeal, and am leaving the big picture to everyone else.

Duke Riley, last week, installing his show at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania

In the HSP installation on the mantle beneath the photo of the oil tank are commemorative plates featuring images of the Laird descendants, a motley looking crew if ever there was one.

Riley’s trips to the island happened in secret since the island is private property and visitors are not welcome. The artist sneaked out there to do his research and at times had a film crew with him (how they got out there we don’t know). But we do know from Caitlin Perkins of Philagrafika that the artist — who was commissioned by the international print fair to do this new work — turned in a bunch of seriously soggy receipts for his materials and expenses, a byproduct of his kayaking out to the island.

Duke Riley, Princess Jill commemorative plate

Duke Riley, Laird kingdom commemorative plates

Upon arriving at the HSP and before talking with Duke, we met Lauri Cielo who tells us there are 21 million things in the HSP collection…graphics, newspapers, artifacts….and they have 34 Benjamin West drawings! But “This is the first time an artist is coming in to use our collection as a work of art,” she said.

Here’s our chat with Duke Riley:

artblog: How did you choose Petty’s Island? Did you know about it? We know you like islands–some of your work involves islands in the East River.
Duke: I didn’t know about Petty’s Island before.  [Apparently there are many islands in the Delaware River and people kept asking him about the islands they knew about but none of them was Pettys or Petty Island.]

artblog: How did you get to the island?
Duke: I kayaked out.

artblog: How did you find where the Laird house had been? [As someone researching the lost kingdom of Ralston Laird Riley really wanted to find the house/castle of the king and any artifacts connected with him.]
Duke: I found I could estimate where the house was based on (old newspaper) articles and from the viewpoints on the mainland where people reported seeing the fire [The house burned down in 1964]. The articles mentioned how when the house caught on fire you could see it from the shipyard.  I could see the foundation and went out with metal detector to find things. I started digging.

Duke Riley, Laird family tree with photos and artifacts from Petty's Island

artblog: What did you find?
Duke: (Points to a piece of rotting metal in glass case behind him.)  It’s not so old.  It looks old but it’s a piece of an overhead lamp from the 1930s.  We found serious digging (lots of big deep holes).  There were rumors of treasure on the island and it looks like people dug.

artblog: The history of Laird’s attachment to the island and his being chased off etc. has as much legend as fact. So what’s the real story here–did you figure it out?
Duke: I interpret history the way it favors you best…  Laird had to leave the island-against his will..He was forced off the island. If he was a squatter he could claim it (because he had been there so long– 60 years; but it’s not known whether he was a squatter or whether he worked as a caretaker for the island’s owner).  But someone complained of pigs, And then it was 18 people down to one person.

artblog: Where did the Lairds go?
Duke: I managed to track down some descendants…I hired a private investigator to look for some. I found some graves. Some of the descendants just disappered off the face of the earth. I couldn’t find them.

artblog: Makes you feel how slippery putting together a history is.
Duke: One article said Laird had ten kids; another said 6 kids.  Sometimes there’s reference to Katie or Katherine or Catharine…Is it the same person?

artblog: So how did you want to represent the Lairds in your exhibit?
Duke: At one point I was thinking about royal families and how to present that.  I was looking up heraldry.  I Googled up heraldry and came up with commemorative plates…like Princess Di plates, the kind the Franklin Mint makes.  That’s in Pennsylvania. I have some plates from my uncle — they’re labrador dog plates.

Duke Riley, detail, Laird family tree

So Riley made commemorative plates of the Laird royals. And he made a family tree. He’s got the history of Venezuela drawn out too (since Citgo — owned by Venezuela — owns Petty’s Island). And he — or somebody —  did the big mural painting of Ralston Laird on the flat top of the Citgo tank on the island. The mural looks just like one of the Laird commemorative plates he made — only much bigger. For that big mural, he told us, somebody who looked just like him went out at night along with the Laird Liberation Army and painted in the dark. He hoped they got it right but he didn’t know for sure until he flew over the island in a helicopter and saw that it was good.

Duke Riley, Ralston Laird commemorative mural on Petty's Island

artblog: What’s next for you?
Duke: I’m going to the Caribbean to Bequia Island (pronounced Beckway) near St. Vincent.  Whaling is still legal there.  They do it the traditional way.  The island has Caribe indians, descendants of escaped slaves and Scottish whalers from Nantucket who came there long ago and decided to stay.  He’s going to make a whaling boat slightly different than what they use, which is a cross between whalers and a Caribe indian boat.

If Ralston Laird was a king, Riley is at least a Duke. And his duchy is whatever island he happens to be researching at the moment. Vive la Duke!

Every Man a King, by Huey Long and Castro Carrazo, 1935

Why weep or slumber America
Land of brave and true
With castles and clothing and food
for all
All belongs to you

Ev’ry man a King, ev’ry man a King
For you can be a millionaire
But there’s something belonging to others
There’s enough for all people to share
When it’s sunny June and December too
Or in the Winter time or Spring
There’ll be peace without end
Ev’ry neighbor a friend
With ev’ry man a King

The Philagrafika artist and curators pose amidst Regina Silveira's bug invasion at Moore College.

Conversation with Marc Voge, the male half of the collective Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, at Temple Gallery, as recollected by me–
Voge: I hate everyone. And everyone hates me.
Libby: I just read an interview of you in which you state you love everybody and everybody loves you, and what you want most is to be loved, especially for your art.
Voge: I said that? Yes that’s true. I love everybody and everybody loves me, and my art. But I can’t figure out how to make money from it.
Libby: I should think they would be easy to sell, but then what do I know.
Voge: You can represent me then. You are now my representative.
Libby: Oh, sure. Now you’re in even worse trouble. I am good at making money JK. Are you sure you don’t want to rethink this?
Someone walks over, and he introduces Libby as his art rep.

Photo by Duke Riley of his King of Petty Island commemorative seal atop a Citgo tank there. The island is owned by Citgo which is owned by Venezuela.

Duke Riley at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, talking to Libby and Roberta about his visit to Petty Island and tracking down what really happened to Ralston Laird, known in the Philadelphia popular press of the 1800s as the King of Petty Island. This conversation, which took place at the Historical Society,  is from notes–
Duke: All of a sudden, complaints started appearing about pigs being raised there, but pigs have been going on there for 50 years. And then the house burnt down.
artblog: So did you find proof of a conspiracy to take the land?
Duke: No. that’s my theory. The king was the first out there.
artblog: So the king wasn’t really a king, although he was really a Laird. Is Duke your real name?
Duke: Yes.

While talking to Betsabee Romero (Mexico) and Regina Silveira (Brazil), both showing at Moore College, Libby learned they both have made prints using tires.

Silveira, whose giant insects are an invading plague that swarms the gallery, spoke her work as symbolic of political corruption, crime and violence. The insects also appear atop a table in the center of the gallery, embroidered onto a tablecloth and printed on porcelain. This use of interior decoration seems quite difference from the more architectural projects in Silveira’s catalog, which she leafed through with me.

Silveira’s tire prints of ordinary tire treads, like her current installation, were architectural, printed rolling up and around the walls of a building.

detail of Betsabee Romero's carved tire installation at Moore

Romero carves her own version of treads onto the bald tires that frequently cause accidents that kill. Her treads are folk-looking patterns of birds, plants and figures. Her work suggests resurrection and remembrance. Romero prints her tire treads on various surfaces, from fabric to sugar. In this case she used rolls of window screening.

part of Gunilla Klingberg's installation at Moore, covering windows and repeated in a reflection and in a pile of printed giveaways stacked on the floor

Also at Moore, Libby and Roberta talked briefly to Gunilla Klingberg. Here’s some of what I remember of our conversation more or less.
Libby: How to you pronounce your name?
Gunilla: Gunilla Klingberg.
Libby in a thought bubble: [Doh!]
Libby: How did you assemble these Philadelphia logos?
Gunilla: I worked with someone in Philadelphia who gave me a list of Philadelphia corporate logos, like Tastykake, Acme.
Libby: Is this then the Philadelphia version of a project you have done before?
Gunilla: Yes.

“]

Orit Hofshi- If The Tread Is An Echo; the material is both the carved blocks (tan color ground) and prints on paper (white ground mounted on wood)

At one of the Philagrafika celebrations, Libby spoke to Orit Hofshi. Libby wondered why the vegetation in the Israeli artist’s giant prints (at PAFA‘s Hamilton Building) looks so European. Hofshi, a PAFA alum, said lots of people asked her that. But that the imagery was based on plants in Israel. And besides, she looks at a lot of European art work–that’s the history that she sees herself continuing.

Carl Pope's poster was used for the cover of the Philagrafika guide book.

At the same event Carl Pope was charming. He is based in Indianapolis (he grew up there and returned there fairly recently, and he is part of the Temple Gallery show with North Philadelphia billboards for local businesses using art from local student. He is also in an exhibit at the Crane. Natch he was talking about the need for a more populist, public art approach. Libby, who loves good populist art with pop culture roots in public spaces, agreed.

Tuesday, Feb.  2, 6 pm YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, a Seoul based web-art group, will be speaking at Temple where their work is part of Philagrafika.

126 AUDITORIUM, Temple University Architecture building,  1947 North 12th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122
Free and open to the public

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES

Who wouldn’t want to hear from artists who did a web piece called CUNNILINGUS IN N0RTH K0REA?  You can see it, and more of their work at their site.

Douglas Crimp. Photo Mathias Danbolt

Thursday, Feb.  4, 6:30 Courtesy of the ICA , Douglas Crimp, visual studies theorist and Aids activist will talk on Andy Warhol’s Paul Swan which will be screened following the talk.

International House,  3701 Chestnut Street

Free

"John Wayne" by Marisol, 1963, mixed media Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, Art © Marisol Escobar

Friday, Feb.  5-Sat., Feb.  6  Women and Pop Art Symposium is organized in conjunction with the “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-1968″ exhibition at U Arts .

Terra Hall, Connelly Auditorium (8th floor), 211 South Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102

Free and open to the public

Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. R.S.V.P.  to Kate Johnson, 215-717-6145 or kjohnson@uarts.edu

Then Next week I’m off to the College Art Association Annual Meeting in Chicago. Feb.  10-13.  For details, or to register, see CAA’s  site.

Some Philadelphia area participants are: Elisabeth Agro, Kathleen A. Foster, and Timothy Rub, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philip Glahn and Alicia Imperiale, Tyler School of Art,  Arthur J. Di Furia and Maureen Pelta, Moore College of Art and Design, Rachele Riley, University of the Arts, Christiane Hertel, Bryn Mawr College, Rachel Oberter, Haverford College, Jennifer Borland, Lisa Bourla, David Brownlee, Alison Chang, Andre Dombrowski, Ellery Foutch, Jane Irish, George Marcus, Larry Silver, Miya Tokumitsu, University of Pennsylvania, Anne Verplanck, independent scholar and Janine Mileaf, Swarthmore College
I expect to report on the meeting. 

Carl Pope comes from Indianapolis.

I met Pope, Ruiz (ultra briefly) and Heavy Industries, (Young-Hae Chang and Marc Voge) at the Philagrafika opening festivities last night. I can’t wait until Pope’s billboards go up in North Philly. Voge refused to have a conversation about his work, but I took a look on line and realized I’d seen one of Heavy Industry’s pieces before–in the Big Nothing at the ICA. It was an amazing piece, and here’s what I wrote:

For good readers only

First my fave, which is upstairs separated from the video corral by its own little, black-curtained room.

“Dakota” (shown), is a film noir digital animation by YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES. It’s a CD-ROM of words flashing in a variety of sizes and shapes at a variety of rhythms, set to a fabulous Art Blakey drum solo. In true film noir fashion, it’s all in black and white, and tells three noir stories, one of kids on the road, one an homage to Blakey, and one set in the seedy, fast-food-noodle-stand world of late-night Seoul, Korea. You can actually view it on line at the link above. Be sure to pump up the volume.

Unlike a lot of art video, this was compelling, its pace a wild pony ride from beginning to end, its stories rich with atmosphere and hip-hop poetry.

Meanwhile, I’m off to see what everyone else’s work is like and to hear what they have to say. And it’s a lot, since there’s mucho text in this exhibit.