Alex Paik, Prelude and Fugue, 2011, gouache, marker, color pencil, paper, at Tiger Strikes Asteroid

Inside I saw another rainbow in Alex Paik’s bright-colored paper engineering at Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Paik says he’s not interested in making pop up books but to my eye these works would make fantastic innards to pop out at you from some kind of book — maybe coupled with some poetry or short short stories. They leap off the wall with lots of energy, and are highly playful.

Alex Paik, Prelude and Fugue, 2011, gouache, marker, color pencil, paper, at Tiger Strikes Asteroid

Down the hall, Marginal Utility was closed for Yom Kippur (via artist Hadassah Goldvicht’s wishes); Grizzly Grizzly has a severe little design installation by Patrick Gavin; Napoleon has a member’s show of abstract paintings by Dustin Campbell — all worth a quick look.

Becky Suss, Sumi ink on Paper, at Vox Populi

Meanwhile, Vox Populi has its usual mix of members’ shows and guests.  Member Becky Suss’s Sumi ink drawings of Philadelphia streets and other real world scenes (re-imagined by the artist) are so sincere and un-ironic they seem like visitors from another planet to the space that has almost cornered the market on irony in this town. Beautiful renderings, and so un-experimental that in this space they become experimental, they’re as much over the rainbow as the FLUX poster.

Piper Brett, from her installation at Vox Populi. The photo has been covered with white spray paint.

Member Piper Brett’s two pictures (blow ups of scanned porn magazine images I think) and a chain link sculpture are cyphers, as are Member Emily Rooney’s room of paintings and installations. Rooney’s room is particularly downbeat, a veiled history of something or other.  I like the paintings.

Emily Rooney, detail of her installation at Vox Populi

And the installation by guest artist Kikuko Tanaka, which had nice classical music playing but required you to crawl on hands and knees through the human mouse-hole to get to what is on the other side. I’m sorry but I don’t crawl on my hands and knees for art. I hope it was worth it, and there was a performance, presumably on the other side of the hole. If you saw that, maybe elucidate what I missed in a comment.

Kikuko Tanaka, mouse hole door to crawl through to see what's on the other side

The Rainbow Connection – Kermit sang it best.  This town is full of  lovers and dreamers who have banded together, created new places to be and share. Ten years ago, this kind of let’s make our own Emerald City thinking was just beginning.  Happily ever after is a dream, and yet with some sweat, some friends and some ideas, you can definitely create your own over the rainbow.

One more thing, Vox’s AUX performance space is almost completely done.  I got a quick peek at the black-walled space with a half-black painted floor (Vox is in the old Black Floor and Copy Gallery spaces).  Andrew Suggs says they will be painting the floor black.  There are no risers for audience seats, in case you were wondering.  Just folding chairs on a flat floor.  And the stage is a group of moveable platforms that can be arranged this way and that for performances.  Looking good!

Nicole De Brabandere's sexy clay objects. Background is Clint Baclawski's light boxes

Vox VI is organized, by rooms, into more or less related groups of work: There’s a chamber of figures and masks, a Jeff Koons/pop-culture room, a memento mori room and a noir road-movie room. Only the lobby space approaches the usual juried-show hodgepodge, but even here there’s a unifying out-of-control party feel.

Piper Brett, Phone Number, one of several light pieces in the show

The show’s humanist focus, fractured narratives and “damn the torpedoes” ambiance aren’t new. What is novel is the embrace of craftsmanship—well-painted paintings, beautifully made sculpture, great clay pieces and accomplished video and photography.

There’s a surprising amount of clay in the show, and the artists handle it like clay has always belonged in the big leagues—the content here is not the usual kitsch, but conceptual, unexpected and beautiful.

Katelyn Greth, Dog Boy

Nicole De Brabandere’s small objects in a glass vitrine are nonfunctional, but look like Baroque sex toys. Katelyn Greth’s soulful “Dog Boy” and “Sheep Boy” ride a sad “Animals R Us” edge. Janet Macpherson’s altered cast clay figurines play with our love of collectibles. Lauren Dombrowiak’s Brancusi-esque cityscape of stacked plates and cups is perfect domestic machismo—I wonder why I haven’t seen anything like it before.

Lauren Dombrowiak's towering dinner sets in Brancusi-like endless column cityscape. Constanze Pirch four paintings on the walls.

Video, computers and media are a big presence—no surprise. Lindsay Foster’s “Father Lover Friend” feels like a reality-TV road movie in which a young woman talks with a grizzled, old homeless man. The man is intransigent; the girl cries. It’s poignant and, as a metaphor for the run-down world and the youth who will inherit it, father’s self-destruction is terrifying.

Lindsay Foster's roadtrip movie with a homeless man and a young girl

Joshua Bienko’s colorful and insistent rap/rant videos “Lewitt, Sol” and “TehChing Hsieh” spit out references to contemporary art stars, culture and commerce, capturing the anger many artists feel toward the art-industrial complex. Kelli Miller’s “The True Believer” video, about self-help gurus, needs a larger dose of anger.

Diedra Krieger, from her short video, made in Costa Rica, promoting the Spastic Plantastic project

Diedra Krieger’s faux-commercials in her “Plastic Fantastic” video series are just about perfect, short and seductive in a quirky, passive-aggressive way.

Nora Salzman, Replica Reuben, oil paint on papier mache, eyelashes

Nora Salzman, Replica Reuben staring at a picture of Replica Reuben Masking as Nora

There are some outstanding 3-D pieces in the show. Nora Salzman’s painted papier-mache bust “Replica Reuben” for example, is a chilling lost soul. Sanford Mirling’s “Nothing Could Drag Me Away From…” a set of Marilyn-esque legs, skirt billowing, is another miracle of craft. The woodworked oak legs balance on tiptoe with great drama and engineering, and the content feels Lohan-perfect.

Sanford Mirling's Marilyn-like sculpture in front, Clint Baclawski's lightbox, rear

Piper Brett, Large Bow; Joshua Bienko's video and painted shoes, Diedra Krieger videos and Brett's Phone Number on walls

Piper Brett’s “Large Bow,” a nod to Koons’ many million-dollar bow sculptures, is clunky and scary, yet it, too, is perfect corporate lobby décor, a steal at $10,000. As for home décor, Aidan Rumack’s inset shadow boxes behind a row of fluorescent tubes suggest new home uses for the old tubes. Jordan Griska’s “Gas Pump” (a real gas pump shortened to kids’ playroom size) is a perfect degraded object.

Sally Dennison, Hannah

Finally, while the entire show is full of deadpan works, Sally Dennison’s portrait photos of gender-ambiguous youth, Dustin Metz’s oil paintings “Still Life” and “self(seeing) portrait” and Erin Murray’s oil paintings from the “Ugly and Ordinary” series take the prize for smoldering without smirking, giving nothing away.

Dustin Metz, Still Life and self(seeing)

Through Aug. 1 
Vox Populi 
319 N. 11th St. 
215.238.1236 voxpopuligallery.org

Read this article at Philadelphia Weekly.  More photos at flickr.

Aidan Rumack, Living isn't Worth Dying for (Diptych), 2010, detail, fluorescent tubes, taxidermy bird shown here

This show has often been a moment of clarity, and this year’s exhibit, juried by ultra-hot New York artists William Powhida and Jennifer Dalton, is among the best of them. In this one, a lot of the pieces relate to a yearning for what is unattainable, and that seems to be pretty close to what everyone is thinking about in these dark days of the gulf oil spill, financial meltdown and continuing war.

My personal favorite is a diptych of fluorescent lights arrayed like jail bars in front of a pair of egg-shaped cells embedded in the wall. Inside one cell stands a flustered white taxidermy bird wearing shades; inside the other, a sleek, gold-trimmed moon landing module that suggests Cinderella’s coach (it’s made of an ostrich egg!). Downstairs in Marginal Utility Gallery, the artist, Aidan Rumack, introduced himself to me and told me his intent was religious. But the RayBans on the holy bird don’t fly as gear for the Trinity. Maybe, just maybe, the spacecraft cries out sci-fi beatification. But fluorescents are so humdrum. And in art historical terms, I’m channeling Dan Flavin optics and Minimalist grids of a man-made version of perfection, not Barnett Newman zips or Mark Rothko orgasms of color-soaked enlightenment. Rumack is a PAFA MFA.

Deidra Krieger, Spastic Plantastic, video

Deidra Krieger sets up a transgressive relationship with the camera and the viewer, while mocking the worlds of advertising and consumerist waste in both of her videos. She’s in your face and beyond your reach all at once. A constant crowd of gallery goers Friday stopped for a while in front of Krieger’s videos and Texas artist Joshua Bienko’s rap videos about art. Lindsay Foster (the one international artist, with a Norway address) transgresses class and propriety in her video, Father Lover Friend, of a California road trip stripped of glamour as she searches with a boy friend for her father, the guide of her quest an old bum. At least that’s what I think is going on. The ambiguity pushes this all into a dangerous zone.

Piper Brett, Large Bow, 2009, sheet steel, fluorescent red powder coating

Piper Brett‘s neon phone number is a poignant advertisement of  the promise of a relationship or a phone connection. Her giant, Koonsian metal bow also feels personal in a way that Koons doesn’t. The bow promises something that probably can’t measure up to the packaging; it’s installed next to Bienko’s trompe l’oeil paintings of Koons sculptures painted on the soles of a pair of kick-ass shoes. Crushes and desire also get a workout in Constanze Pirch‘s typography-inspired and hunk-inspired Yes, Yes…26 Times Yes! At first I thought the names–from Orlando to Viggo–might all belong to movie stars, but now I realize they are random objects of desire.

Sanford Mirling, Nothing Could Drag Me Away from the Soft Glow of Electric Sex in the Window, 2010, oak, vinyl, fabric, mirrored turntable, purse, iPod

And speaking of desire, Venus de Milo lost her arms, but Sanford Mirling’s sculpture takes it a step farther and loses the top half of his carved female. He crowns her at the waist with a white tutu that looks like a quilted lounge banquette emitting suggestive plumes at its center. Poised atop a mirror, this fantasy requires Dr. Freud. But mama mia, what an object!

Jordan Griska, Gas Pump, 1960s gas pump

A sad sack gas pump by Jordan Griska is from the good old days, when oil wasn’t all over the gulf and a man was still a man, a car was still a sex symbol. Griska has been busy this year, with a great show at EKG. He’s also in Montana’s post yesterday on a pop-up art show in the Rittenhouse Square area.

Joshua Weibley, Untitled (Personal Desktop Environment), ink on Denril, rock

Vox VI also has a couple of pieces about computers (coincidentally perhaps both by Brooklyn-based artists), which are surely desirable. Joshua Weibley‘s conceptual Untitled (Personal Desktop Environment), is a computer for Barney Rubble–the mouse is a rock, and the screen is an ink on paper rendering of a color-separated computer screen image would make George Seurat proud.

Kelli Miller, Gifts, 2009, animated gifs

In contrast, Kelli Miller filled a computer screen with animated a series of gif assemblages that make a mockery of us as we stare at the gifs in motion. My personal favorite image is the more than 50 download progress bars that worm across the screen all at once.

Clint Baclawski, The Titanic, powder coated steel, archival inkjet backlit prints

Massachusetts artist Clint Baclawski‘s giant backlit inkjet prints mounted on sleek lightboxes captures real events of improbably scaled razzle-dazzle and excess. Jeff Wall’s staged photos look almost real. Baclawski’s real photos look almost staged. But what is also notable here is the sleek presentation; the lightboxes are high-tech-looking things of beauty in and of themselves.

Dustin Metz, Que Chula Es Puebla, oil on canvas

And last but not least, I have to mention Dustin Metz‘s idyllic painting Que Chula Es Puebla. At least someone has found the good life! But there’s no one there, except a disembodied hand.

We’re still living in a time of diminishing prospects where fulfillment remains a wish, and that’s what this show communicates, by in large.

By the way three of the artists in this show are also in the show we juried into the Bambi Biennial–video artist Matt Kalasky, landscape artist Susan Marie Brundage, and Sarah Knouse. Others in the exhibit are Derya Altan, Sally Dennison, Lauren Dombrowiak, Amber DuBois, Katelyn Greth, Megan Hays, Jim Jeffers, Janet Macpherson, Erin Murray, Nightmare City, Manuel Pena, E. Elizabeth Peters, Nora Salzman, Libby Saylor, Samantha Simmons, and Sheila Whitsett. Most of the people who I didn’t mention were equally deserving of some notice.

The exhibit will remain up through Aug. 1, 2010

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.