Roxana Pérez-Méndez detail of 'Ana' (2010), from 'Este Es Mi Pais'

One enters the gallery through a gold-fringed, red velvet curtain pulled to the side. PAFA regulars and students of American art and museum history will recognize the reference to Charles Wilson Peale’s self-portrait, on view upstairs, in which he beckons the viewer into his museum.  Peale’s interest in natural as well as human history preceded that of a number of American artists in the nineteenth century, most notably Frederick Church and Martin Johnson Heade.  Following the much-publicized scientific explorations of Alexander von Humbolt, both artists made their own journeys in South America, bringing back images of flora and fauna which they incorporated into their work (the most striking example being Church’s monumental Heart of the Andes, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Roxana Pérez-Méndez detail of 'Ana, (2010), from 'Este Es Mi Pais'

Roxana Pérez-Méndez detail of Pepper's Ghost hologram in'Ana, (2010), from 'Este Es Mi Pais'

On passing beyond Pérez-Méndez’s drape one sees a caged, domestic parakeet on which a video camera is focused; it conveys a live feed which is projected onto a hologram on the wall beyond. The hologram is fixed at approximately 45 degrees to the wall in front of James Peale’s charming portrait of Anna Maria Hodkinson.  The portrait of 1800 shows a girl, aged about ten, holding a tropical parakeet (larger than those we’re familiar with).  We see our own reflection as well as that of the caged bird in the glass, where they merge with the portrait behind.  The South American bird has been transported, tamed, domesticated; it has become a child’s plaything and, no doubt, a sign of her family’s wealth.

Benjamin West 'Penn’s Treaty with the Indians' (1771-71), PAFA

The case beyond it shows a bolt of off-white cloth onto which silhouettes have been printed in a very similar color.  I was able to make out a group of figures and behind them a landscape, which curator Julien Robson helpfully identified as details from Benjamin West’s painting of Penn’s Treaty with the Indians. I don’t know whether the barely-discernible images indicate suppression of the historical memory of Penn’s shady dealing with the first Americans, or the fact that this initial treachery is the not quite blank background to all later history.

The first piece visible in the darkened room around the corner, Selva (Jungle) is a Wardian Case (or terrarium) filled with lush tropical plants, through which the image of a tiny wood nymph flits (looking rather like Tinkerbell in the animated film of Peter Pan), via the magic of the Pepper’s Ghost hologram.  Throughout this room and the next Pérez-Méndez has culled paintings from PAFA’s collection that contain imagery of the inhabitants and landscape of Latin America and juxtaposed them with herself , the contemporary indigene, either parodying the image that others have created of her, or retreating into her unspoiled, native landscape.

A number of museums have asked artists to respond to their collections, and in  Pérez-Méndez PAFA found an ideal match, an artist who shares the interest in the subjects of many of its works but approaches them from an entirely different direction. This exhibition is a particularly fruitful view, explicit about the artist’s investment in the subject, of a southwards extension to nineteenth-century American expansionism.   Pérez-Méndez rebukes those artists who found an image of Eden in the tropical landscape, reminding them that they are not the first humans to walk there.

Anyone wanting to read about the nineteenth-century artists and their travels would do well to see Katherine Manthorne’s Tropical Renaissance; North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839-1879 (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989).

The huge, 29-artist exhibit attracted 500 people to Saturday’s opening at the Ice Box at the Crane Arts Center. There is a second opening tonight, at The Crane’s Second Thursday, 6-9 p.m.  that will include some more performances. So it would be a good time to go if you missed the opening, since performance was a key part of so many of the pieces.

Much of the show was about the body, fashion and performance. Here's Gregory Labold hitting all three notes!

Juried by Sarina Basta, a curator at SculptureCenter in Long Island City, N.Y., the show is exuberant and full of unexpected takes on what it means to be human and what it means to be categorized as sculpture, with a sharp emphasis on art about the body and fashion. It’s an exhibit that would be comfortable anywhere in the contemporary art world.

Basta also chose the prize winners:

1. First prize $1,500 Josh Kerner, Chris Golas and Joseph DiGuiseppi for their piece “The Plebeians.”
2. 2nd Prize $1,000  Susanne Gieske for You Can’t Help Yourself
3. 3rd prize $500  Tim Belknap, The Future is now a Shade of Grey

The money comes from a grant from Temple University’s Alumni Association.

Taking first and second prize were artists associated with FLUXspace–

Joseph DiGiuseppe, Josh Kerner, Chris Golas, "The Plebeians," What ever it takes, we must make it to the top. Performance, 18 x 15 x 15 feet, 2009; Photo with Sir Question Mark and the Trusty Steed pushing up Prince Charming, with Mr. Art Shark holding the fort (photo by Marianne Bernstein)

“The Plebeians,” which won prize numero uno, casts its creators  DiGiuseppe, Kerner and Golas as three of four actors in an art fairy tale–an attempt to climb an 18-foot mountain installation set in front of a sky blue corner of the room. A shark guards the top of the mountain, a Botticelli reproduction hanging in the sky behind him–the mythical ogre guarding the treasure. He cooks and heaves waffles down and blows “snow” confetti down at Prince Charming, his Trusty Steed, and Sir Question Mark who are trying to climb art’s heady heights to steal the treasure. The piece has a loveable storybook and DIY affect, and is of course in part about the artists’ personal ambitions, but it invites broader readings. The go-for-broke scale plus the energy and charm of the Perils of Pauline performance make this piece a big surprise as well as a good-natured challenge to the institutions of the past.

Susanna Gieske, You Can't Help Yourself. The family here is eating in the middle of the exhibition.

Numero dos went to FLUX’s program coordinator, Susanna Gieske, for her dining-in-the-gallery piece, You Can’t Help Yourself.  This performance piece–an enormous table and chairs set in the center of the enormous Ice Box space, decked out with settings and a full meal–also dominated the room. This amazing reimagining of the role  of the gallery space also challenges the family. The title is an ambiguous accusation or perhaps an ambiguous anti-invitation. The invitations were hand-written letters, a mix of passive-aggressive expressions of disappointment and love.

Susanne Gieske, detail of letter to one of her uncles, inviting him to dinner, part of her performance piece You Can't Help Yourself

The family was a little shocked that the gallery was where they would be eating, but once they got the picture, they gamely dug in!!! The individualized invitations hung on the back of each diner’s chair. This turning of the tables so that the audience becomes the performer, the personal becomes the public, is pretty amazing.

Tim Belknap, The Future is Now a Shade of Grey. Third prize at Victory.

Prize number 3 went to Belknap for his installation, The Future is Now a Shade of Grey. Belknap’s piece recycles his Fleisher Challenge exhibit last year bringing the narrative story of that installation forward.  Mr. Pineapple’s now-grafitti-scrawled truck has seen some battles.  It’s propped up on yoga balls and pulling (if it could pull) a small flatbed holding a severed hand.  When asked early in the evening about his options to win a prize, the artist (who also has ties to FLUXspace, having curated shows there) quipped that if we saw him later passed out from too much beer that meant he’d won, because the prizes were probably beer tickets!  

Laura Hricko, Interface(ing), performance using antique sewing patterns and hand-made garments, dimensions variable, 2007

The overwhelming focus of the show was bodies in motion, bodies in clothes, and bodies as symbols for survival. We saw Laura Hricko‘s models floating around the room in “antique” hand-made garments based on “antique”–ahem 1950s–sewing patterns posted on the wall. The body as shaped by clothes was a reminder of how fashion reflects the values of a culture.

Just for the record, we learned the juror didn’t know that Hricko was related to Ice Box co-founder Richard Hricko.

Gregory Labold, Mr. Green is Very Mean in This Scene, fabric, silscreen, Nikes, spray paint, plaster, 6 feet 6 inches, x 4 feet x 6 feet, 2008; next to Mr. Green stands Mr. Labold.

Gregory Labold arrived in costume– his own handmade suit and matching black-and-white stripes makeup–a blood borther to his sculpture “Mr. Green is Very Mean in This Scene.” Mr Green, or Moldman, is half Joker, half Ferengi. Labold stole the show from his own golem. And his little coloring zine, which we were happy to accept, invited readers to draw their own mold in the pictured petri dish. We laughed out loud.

Candy Depew, Ode, performance and mixed. Odalisque with swanky decor and blood on the floor.

Also wearing a home grown outfit was the young model in Candy Depew’s installation “Ode,” a very fashionable work, with a clothed odalisque nodding to Manet, Ingres and all other art historical ladies on couches surrounded by pillows and drapery.  The faux blood on the floor beside the couch is an oddly satisfying touch, reminding of how gansters have molls who often are fashionistas!

Ianthe Jackson, Purifyer, animation, life size projection 2007

Elsewhere, saving us from Labold’s Moldman and his killer mold is Ianthe Jackson’s terrific Purifyer, a stop action animation of people on an assembly-line conveyer belt undergoing some kind of irradiation or germ detection process. The conveyer belt looks like a bicycle chain kind of gizmo–all DIY herky-jerky–so when one of the people gets vaporized (not pure enough we suppose), it comes as a shock. Simple in concept and broad enough to apply in all kinds of ways, it’s political and it’s a throwback to early special effects in early sci-fi movies. The timing of the action as well as the style is serio-comic and retro.  (There’s a nice old-fashioned clanging bell that signals the entrance of another human taking a ride on the belt.)

Gene Hracho, Ride 'em. A helicopter made from scavenged kitchen utelsils and household stuff.

Gene Hracho’s endearingly-low tech helicopter, sited around the corner from Jackson’s conveyer belt video, is a great oversized toy that came together in a garage over the last three years, said Hracho’s parents who hovered proudly near their son’s creation (he was expected but not there yet when we talked with them).  

Hracho's use of the four-slice toaster is so unexpected and funny we laughed.

Aluminum jello molds, tin cans, cranks from egg beaters and, the piece de resistance, two, four-slice toasters, try to bridge the gap between kitchen and aerospace-engineering.  The labor of love is not for sale but Hracho pere has been encouraging his son to get in touch with helicopter manufacturers who might just like to display his ur-machine in their lobbies.  

Francine Gintoff, Cassius (left), Ayn (center) and Gort (right), acrylic on hand, approx. 7 inches each. Hand??? What an odd material!

In another take on body and fashion, Francine Gintoff’s hands sport tattoo-like portraits of an unlikely trio–Cassius Clay, Ayn Rand, and Gort (the robot from the film When the Earth Stood Still). We wondered if Gintoff was a student of Susan Moore, whose paintings of tattooed people (real tattoos on real people) are showing at LaSalle College right now. Gintoff’s off-putting hands seem to be about skin and skin color and the future of humankind–we’ve got a dark brown hand for Cassius (aka Cassius Clay aka Muhammed Ali), a tan hand for Ayn, and a silver hand for Gort. All three subjects, not to mention tattoos, can be interpreted as threats by some, but the hands are not in threatening poses.

Sarah O'Donnell, Untitled video installation. The tvs are on their sides and "sitting" in seats.

Faces and extreme attitudinalality are Sarah O’Donnell’s m-o in her untitled video installation with televisions “seated” on theatre chairs, each one showing an arms-crossed young person staring blankly ahead.  A movie theatre audience is suggested but the blank stares and crossed arms also call to mind a room of high schoolers being lectured or individual teenagers receiving some bad news from mom.  Like Andy Warhol’s screen tests, these static vignettes focused on faces are slow-cooked and pretty great. 

Roxana Perez-Mendez, New Espacio, multi-media

And speaking of sci-fi and clothes making the woman, Roxana Perez-Mendez’s New Espacio, a video of herself as the first Puerto Rican space walker, seemed to reach a wonderful new level of visual immateriality and unmoored floatiness in its presentation. The floaty version reflected off a visible video screen–which explained how she created the more immaterial version and somehow doubled the pleasure.

Austin Lee, Impulse Artwork, lowest of the low, a modest charmer.

Finally, Austin Lee’s minimalist Impulse Artwork, red and blue “worms” snaking through holes in the Icebox and Grey Area walls, should win the wallflower prize.  If you didn’t look closely you’d miss this piece sited far below eyelevel and dangling, modestly suggestive.  The piece’s charms lie in its subtle evocation of nature (worms), candy (licorice twists), people (girl and boy) and technology (that mass of electrical cords and cables that are lifelines to grids of electricity, fiber optics and other miracles of contemporary plugged-in-ness.)

The show is up to April 26, 2009.

Black Hole, a video by Matthew Suib and Nadia Hironaka; I had to play with the image to show anything other than a pure black rectangle, so I’m afraid it’s a bit misleading.

The first ever collaboration between married video-makers Matthew Suib and Nadia Hironaka is a noteworthy event. (Their second collaboration is about to open Wednesday at the Ice Box at the Crane Building; this may be the only space in town big enough to house the installation’s 100-foot-long projection).

These two artists, both Vox members, are in love with the movies and each of them creates work that references the big screen. This collaboration, Black Hole, is a 7 1/2-minute noir surround-sound experience inspired by cinematic takes on imprisonment. The black box has never been blacker. The hole to the sky has never been less promising, the symbolic bird has never looked less free. The soundtrack of clanging gates and such is courtesy of Eugene Lew, Boris (Japan) and Birchville Cat Motel (New Zealand). The piece will remain up through April.

Visual deprivation was more than just the concept here. It was the actual experience. As I blinked my eyes in the penumbral room, I found myself yearning for more images, more action, just more.

I couldn’t wait to break out. This literal experience was quite successful, but being me, I’d rather skip the solitary and imagine myself in someone else’s shoes.

And that’s what the other new video installations at Vox gave me.

Roxana Perez-Mendez, in her two-channel video installation Larga Distancia, Memoria Corta

Vox member Roxana Perez-Mendez both curated the guest artist in the Video Lounge and projected her own work in one of the gallery spaces.

Her Larga Distancia, Memoria Corta is a larger-than-life projection of the two videos Roxana had made for her installation at the Powel House, where they were shown on small screens encased in a pair of Federal pillars installed in the historic house-museum (my post here and Roberta’s post here.

Roxana Perez-Mendez, in her two-channel video installation Larga Distancia, Memoria Corta

What a difference scale can make. Although I enjoyed the videos in their original form, I was crazy about them blown up large. The physical presence of the character that the artist plays takes on a magical quality. In her white dress as she rushes up and down the stairs, she becomes a ghost. And in the ballroom where she dances, she becomes a woman dreaming. On the bed, she turns the historical character into a living, breathing, sexy woman–Elizabeth Powel re-imagined as Perez-Mendez herself, who is searching for her own place as a Puerto Rican in the tales we tell about American history.

The light in this pair of videos comes in through the Powel House windows, casting an aura that is indirect and atmospheric and real all at once. If you missed these videos at the Powel House, catch them here. Even if you saw them there, catch them here.

Perez-Mendez, who was also thinking about what happens to history as conquerors erase the losing side of the story, selected Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga for the Video Lounge. Born of immigrant parents from Nicaragua, he, like Peres-Mendez, mixes installation and video and his own history.

Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga, Transmitting Ideology, 20 carved wooden guns equipped with radios.

In his installation Transmitting Ideology, 20 carved wooden guns broadcast political speeches. I asked Miranda Zúñiga about the broadcasts, because most of them had run out of juice by time I got to the exhibit. He wrote:

The radio guns were broadcasting political speeches that I believe have been instrumental in constructing “Conservative” and “Liberal” ideology in the United States. The speeches included in the broadcast are by Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan (x2), Martin Luther King (against Vietnam speech, this was the only one I edited by dropping Vietnam and leaving war – the speech fits today’s situation to closely to not drop Vietnam), an excerpt from a debate between Buckley and Chomsky and Obama. Since people can pick up the guns and listen to them, they may be on a different frequency than the transmitter in the gallery, so you may have heard an interview on local radio.

While I heard none of the things Ricardo described, what I heard made perfect sense. I heard a commercial urging us to buy, buy, buy. In the context of Uzis and AK47s, the commercial took on an ominous tone, highlighting the politics of the culture and American consumerism and how they relate to violence. I would have liked to hear some of the political transmissions. Oops. Everything is political. The radio guns, which you can pick up and handle, turned out to be successful, even if they transmitted something the artist hadn’t scripted!

Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga, Arbol Torcido (Twisted Tree). Here the superhero on the right tells the other about his sense of dislocation on returning to visit his native land.

Miranda Zuniga’s animated video, Arbol Torcido (Twisted Tree), set in the future, is of conversation between two superheroes, one of whom left his homeland. He tells the other about visiting the family he left behind. As Thomas Wolfe wrote in Look Homeward Angel, you can’t go home again. The video is poignant and painful, the visuals delightful.

You can view it online at http://ambriente.com/carreta_nagua/. It was originally presented as part of a sculptural performance piece in Mexico City.

Part of what I like about both Miranda Zuniga and Perez-Mendez is not just the outsider voice, but the clarity of their concerns as they juxtapose their dual national identities. They are using videos to tell a narrative that’s their own story and at the same time, everyone’s story. We are all trying to figure out how we fit in and where we come from.

Brent Wahl, Interplanetary Death Star

The only non-video was presented by Brent Wahl, who has created a room-size architectural installation Interplanetary Death Star–the skeletal framework, wrapped in aluminum foil, of a sort of stadium/parking lot/spaceship.

I liked the scale and I loved the low-tech material.

Brent Wahl, Interplanetary Death Star, detail

Small, colored square images hung from all over the framework, populating it with laminated photos of people, messages and symbols. It felt like Wahl’s Death Star is channeling all the voices, all the ideas, and carrying them through space–or cyberspace. The aluminum foil reminds me of all the crackpots receiving messages from outer space through their fillings.

I also liked that Wahl gave credit to the crew who wrapped the aluminum foil. Vito Acconci was the first artist I remember who posted the names of his work-crew on his installations. Everyone should be doing this.

Held over from February are the videos by guest artist Jason Schiedel, reinstalled in a different gallery space, and by Deborah Stratman, in Screening, the video space developed within Vox by Hironaka and Suib. I have to add that Stratman’s video and the collaboration by Hironaka and Suib seem to be having a nice chat. I posted on those here.

PREAMBLE
It was a year of utopian thinking with ambitious new venues run by young artists just out of school. In addition, several community-spirited galleries found their voice. Welcome to all of you builders of a better world: Bobos, Basho, Rebecca Templeton, FluxSpace, Yo!, Little Berlin, !, Midwives Collective, The Other Woman, The Seed Collective, etc. etc. etc. These real collectives put Second Life to shame and show it to be a chimera of the internet.

We at artblog are realists and activists. We know the Philadelphia art world has blossomed into an international art destination and we’re here beating the bongos! And we know we’re right about this because Art Review approached Roberta to write a story about Philadelphia which she did…and the New York Times ran two stories about what was happening in Philadelphia. It’s really hot!

THE 2007 LIBERTA AWARDS

Brave new space award
AMMS/FLUXspace
The creators of this multi-use space don’t know the meaning of the word no. The team, Nike Desis, Joseph DiGiuseppe, Chris Golas and Josh Kerner, made a brilliant move reaching out to internationally acclaimed artist, art activist and utopian thinker, Oliver Herring. They’ve made friends with their neighbors in a rough neighborhood. They’re becoming a real community art center without sacrificing quality and experimentation in their gallery, FLUXspace. They’re explosive.

A toxic Rice Krispie treat at the grand opening of ! Gallery. We love the coming together of classy fruit and childish marshmallow goo cereal tart.

Wild enthusiam award
! Gallery and Yo! Darkroom
For enshrining the exclamation mark in their gallery’s title. We heart them back!!!

Artist residency from left field award (tie)
PIFAS
They bring people in who are brilliant and unexpected.
James Dupree
For his personal artist in residency program, an extension of his self-marketing get up and go. (story to follow)

Roxana Perez-Mendez, who is a performer in her self-created videos, here imagines herself as a Spanish-speaking colonial dame at the Powel House.

Martha Stewart award
Roxana Perez-Mendez
For her ingenious decoration of Powel House in her Puerto Rico-power installation. She put Karen Kilimnik‘s installation at Powel House — some sound, objects and pictures — to shame.

Martha Stewart award runner up
Eva Wylie
For her ephemeral bower installation at Moore College, the best work we’ve seen by her to date.

The Missed Opportunity award
Whitney Biennial 2008 curators
With all the action and wonderment going on in Philadelphia they choose a 70′s era Philly phenom — Karen Kilimnik — as their token Philly artist in the big show. Wake up to what’s happening here now, guys!!

Golden Rickshaw award
Philly Car Share and POST
For superb shuttle service in Philly’s third world country north of Girard during the open studios event. This overcame unmanageable distances and parking hell for art lovers.

B Boys award
The Belknap Brothers
In a one-night performance at FLUXspace, the brothers spun to a slow White Stripes drumbeat atop a spinning giant disc. They looked like sexy supersized Little Bo Peeps. Can you please get out there with more art, gentlemen?

Sid Sachs at Rosalyn Drexler’s opening in March at Pace-Wildenstein. Drexler is one of the Pop artists Sid will talk about.

Look! It’s Sid Sachs award
Sid Sachs
For his internet video series on Women of Pop, UArts.

Gimme more award
Pew
Ups fellowship money by $10,000. Big whoop.

Golden balls award
Print Center
For hiring John Caperton who curated the poop, blood, and vomit bodily excretion show at Project Room. Earthquake on Latimer Street! Yippee!

Smack Down award
Judge Stanley Ott
Orphans Court judge rebuffs Friends of the Barnes for grandstanding. Thumbs up!

The Supremes, our favorite girl group.

The Supremes award
Sue Spaid, Lori Mertes, and Jenny Jaskey
Three empowered women curators to watch. How about a Philadelphia Biennial, ladies? Now is the time.

Mired in Turpenoid award
Broad Street Review
For continuing to review academic realism and eschewing what’s really happening here.

Mired in Turpenoid award, runner up
Ed Sozanski
In the Philadelphia Inquirer, the newspaper that refuses to acknowledge what’s happening on its doorstep.

Hokusai’s perfect wave.

Perfect wave award
Alex Baker
Surfing curator catches the big one to Melbourne, Australia’s National Gallery of Victoria. PAFA‘s loss and ours.

Anti-Starbucks award
Douglas Witmer
Expanding his West Philly Green Line Cafe empire — this time adding a gallery.

Best public art you’ll never see in Philadelphia
Jaume Plensa and Anish Kapoor
In Millenium Park in Chicago. What do we get? A hand-me-down di Suvero. We just want to slap the powers that be for the low-energy decision passing for exciting public art.

Urban Renewal award
319 N. 11th Street
A building that houses Vox, Copy and Screening singlehandedly changed the center of gravity of First Fridays. The new FF orbit now includes Space 1026 and soon the FWM, all nearby. Liberta would be very happy if more galleries moved into this burgeoning art neighborhood.

Aryon Hostleton and Alison Macrina’s “Thank You” shopping bag—a knit knockoff of the real plastic item– in Space 1026′s Handjob exhibit.

Exhibit Titles We Wish We’d Thought of Ourselves awards
Handjob (DIY show at Space 1026)
Voxxoxo and its predecessors Voxennial and Voxumenta (Vox Populi).

Nobody Knows What These Titles Mean awards
Morgellons and Street Button (Fleisher Ollman)
What’s with this, Fleisher Ollman?

Anne d’Harnoncourt award
Anne d’Harnoncourt
For continuing excellence in the role.

Bob’s Your Uncle award (tie)
Mari Shaw
For bringing German photo-superstar Candida Hofer to Philadelphia on a photo shoot and instigating the foreign artist residency at UArts.
Dina and Jerry Wind
For bankrolling the Fleisher Challenge exhibitions and the new PMA lecture series, starting with William Kentridge.

Naughty Liberta award
PMA
Live Cinema videos from Asia include sex on horseback! lots of licking! of egg white meringue on body parts! Heavy breathing, too!

Liberta’s Stalking Victims 2007
Zoe Strauss (repeat winner)
Rob Matthews
David Kessler who stalks us back.

PSYCHIC LIBERTA’S CRYSTAL BALL AWARDS
Liberta writes a book about Philadelphia, and Oprah includes it in her book club!
Liberta becomes a millionaire and establishes the Liberta Foundation for Today’s Philadelphia Art.
Liberta Foundation gets a design award for its no bullshit grant applications. They take 12 minutes to complete.
Andrew Jeffrey Wright scores an artist’s residency at Rosenbach Museum and Library.

THE LIBERTA SUGGESTION BOX
PEW Wish List
Painting: Josh Rickards, Quentin Morris, Jim Houser, Jane Irish, Austin Lee, Bryan Jeitner, Joy Feasley, Isaac Lin
Works on Paper: Christopher Davison, Ben Peterson, Rob Matthews (repeat), Hunter Stabler, Joe Boruchow
Sculpture and installation: Austin Heitzman, Norm Paris, Terry Adkins (repeat), Nick Paparone and Jamie Dillon
Video: Kara Crombie, Sarah Christman, David Kessler, Ted Passon, Matthew Suib
Transcending Categories: Amy Adams (repeat), Annette Monnier, Roxana Perez-Mendez (repeat), K-Fai Steele

Grant that somebody needs to establish
Any Wednesday art grant.
Can’t somebody fund gallery sitters at places like Vox and Copy et al. so they can open for Liberta on a Wednesday?

This table wasn’t arranged for conversation but ours will be!

Great conversationalists we’d like to invite to the first annual Charlie Finch gang-bang dinner (see his evil artnet column).
Maira Kalman, Brent Burket because we love him every year, Zoe Strauss for the same reason, Sid Sachs,Terry Adkins, Jenny Jaskey, Pepon Osorio, Mark Shetabi and of course Charlie Finch (we promise we won’t poison his meatballs).

TRENDS WE’D LIKE TO KILL
Enough cute deer already.
Put a spike in goth.
Death to assemblage. Get back to making objects!
No more bad art.

TRENDS WE’D LIKE TO KISS
DIY. Do it!
video. More. Short. Videos.
installation. Build it.
interactive. Liberta likes to play.
cheap bus fare to NY.

I’m not much of a history buff. But I just completed John Adams by David McCullough. Plus I’m reading another book a friend gave me about the portrait of Elizabeth Powel in the Powel House on 3rd Street.

All this set my imagination back to a time when people got caught up in the extraordinary events that made us a new, independent country, by the skin of our teeth. With those books in mind, the Powel House and all the rest of historic Philadelphia comes alive.

Alas Karen Kilimnik’s installation at the Powel House for Landmarks Contemporary Projects does not.

The thing I found most interesting in this group of television screen grabs from The Avengers was the uneven spacing between the photos. So, a little modern haphazardness inserted in the perfect recreation of the past? Not all that interesting.

Kilimnik has inserted a number of her paintings and photographs, some sound pieces and some objects into the house. The photos are images grabbed off the television screen of episodes from The Avengers, and they do add some sense of modern people living in this space and some commentary on family photos. My favorite piece in the exhibit is the one that has the word PAUSE included in the grab.

Karen Kilimnik, the sports car rally + the treasure hunt, england, Steed, Emma Peel, assorted villains + the butler – Emma Peel, 2007, c print, 4 x 5 1/2 inches; I liked the PAUSE clarifying the source of the photograph.

But a bowl of gruel with the soundtrack of Food Glorious Food playing? Puhleez. It neither brings life to the past nor expresses much of interest about life in the present. If I compare the barrenness of this installation to an installation in the same space by Roxana Perez-Mendez using some of the same strategies–sly insertions of cultural household artifacts and sounds that do not belong to the house, Kilimnik’s piece looks haphazard and silly. Even granting her obsession with celebrity and the deficiencies in celebrity culture, the lives of others in this context never take off. Here’s my post and Roberta’s on Perez-Mendez.

Perez-Mendez took the liberty of inserting artifacts related to herself and her own Puerto Rican background into the space, thereby commenting on American as well as Puerto Rican values and taste as well as on past lives lived. Her piece also spoke to the issue of immigration that’s hot on the political burners these days. It also spoke to identity and empathy and the need for imagination. I’ll raise the stars and stripes for Roxana who raised the Puerto Rican flag in front of the house. Raise them both. Sometimes a little flag waving can be a good thing.

Roxana Perez-Mendez’s Puerto Rican flag outside Powel House. The artist said that the flag drew in some Puerto Rican natives the night of the opening. They didn’t know what was in the house but the flag told them to go in and check it out.

Outside the Colonial mansion on Third Street hangs a Puerto Rican flag, part of Roxana Perez-Mendez’s Landmarks Contemporary Project at the Powel House. It’s just one of the subtle Caribbean subversions inserted into the Georgian-era house where George Washington and Ben Franklin dined.

The Powel House music room with the Radio Shack transmitter on the music stand. Sounds like harpsichord music but it’s really steel string guitar.

Perez-Mendez’s touch is light, and the piece works best in the upstairs music room where harpsichord-like music broadcasts via a small Radio Shack transmitter placed on a music stand. The music sounds like Bach but is actually “La Borinqueña,” Puerto Rico’s national anthem. Its mournful, fugue-like strains are believably Baroque and fit in well with the ambience. It makes you imagine a colonial-era Puerto Rico, something most Americans visiting Powel House won’t have considered.

The artist, who is a performer in her self-created videos, here imagines herself as a Spanish-speaking colonial.

Perez-Mendez creates—on video monitors set up in the parlor—a fantasy of a Spanish-speaking colonial-era woman trapped in a time warp, isolated but longing for connection. A metaphor for America’s stepchild island nation, Perez-Mendez’s piece suggests we should tell the story of Puerto Rico alongside the story of America. It’s a great idea.

Roxana Perez-Mendez: “La Declaracion”
Through April 1. $5. Powel House, 244 S. Third St. 215.627.0364.

The Powel House is one of a number of wonderful historical houses in Philadelphia that often go ignored by the crowds seeking out the Liberty Bell or the whiz bang of the new Constitution Center. As for the locals, it’s tough to get their attention too.

The Powel House was once the home of the mayor of the city, overseeing Philadelphia during its transition from a colonial city to the new nation’s capital. He was the last mayor to serve while Pennsylvania was a colony. What remains is enough to give some clues about life in that times–and yet, of course, not quite enough.

To lure people inside, the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks has been bringing the arts and performances into this historic house and others–an effort that according to curator Robert Wuilfe has met with some success. He cited a recent experimental music concert that packed the place.

Roxana Perez-Mendez’s installation, “Declaracion,” on display until April 2, inserts Perez’s Puerto Rican identity into the Colonial milieu, starting with the Puerto Rican flag hanging in front of the building, tropical island kitsch resting on the mantle and a banana wrapped in shiny beads on the sideboard.

These are small touches, but on the second floor the electronics take over and turn this installation into a feat of imagination that has been growing on me steadily since I stopped in. There’s the picture-framed video on a nightstand of fireworks over San Juan. I wondered if it was modern Philadelphia at first. Then I wondered if it was Iraq–or the American Revolution, right here in Philadelphia.

A pair of videos embedded in colonial looking columns show Perez dressed in colonial garb and white wig, powdering and rouging her face and behaving in intimate ways on the bed. They also show her playing the harpsichord–the same instrument that is in the ballroom.

In the ballroom resting on the harpsichord is a little recording device playing harpsichord music. It’s easy to imagine the men and women dancing in this room to that music when the Powels lived in the house. But it turns out the music is La Borinqueña, the national anthem of Puerto Rico.

Perez’ presence in the house becomes more and more real in my memory. I didn’t think the slides projected of herself into a doll house really worked. But all the video and music on the second floor is magical, creating a pampered new lady of the house leading a life of leisure and self-absorption.

The dime-store decorations downstairs, with their cheesy kitschiness, take on class issues. But the upstairs items–the video performances, the nightstand “photo,” La Borinqueña–have a ghostliness that inhabits the space.

Catch the spectacle at Penn’s Meyerson Hall before it blows out the lights Nov. 24. It’s a great show and you don’t want to miss it. The exhibit, organized by Gabe Martinez and Jeremiah Misfeldt for last weekend’s SPEMA conference, is an expression of Philadelphia’s high energy art making. The show touches all the bases of pop culture in just about all the materials you can imagine and has great works never before shown by big name artists like Pepon Osorio and Stuart Netsky. Hours to see the exhibit are 9 am-5 pm, Monday through Friday.

installation shot with Roxana Perez-Mendez’s Puerto Rican astronaut, one of the extraordinary number of pink pieces in the show.

We’re sorry to report that you won’t be able to see the undergraduate snapshots on parade, in a show that was curated by Zoe Strauss also for the SPEMA conference. It’s already down. It was a gem.

By the way, John Waters, who was the keynote speaker, came to town early, Gabe Martinez told us. He wanted to see the Robert Ryman show at PAFA and we hear that Curator Alex Baker gave Waters a private tour of the show.

Here are links to more pictures of Vernacular Spectacular Extravaganza at Libby’s flickr set and Roberta’s flickr set.

Suite Dreams
A super-hotel serves as a metaphor for brainwashed consumerism.

Someone please teach me how to shoot a picture through a peephole. My several attempts failed to capture the three luminous and quite lovely peephole scenes in Roxana Perez-Mendez’s installation.

After I saw Roxana Pérez-Méndez’s installation at the Painted Bride Art Center, I ran home and looked up “encantada” in my Spanish-English dictionary. “Delighted, charmed, pleased,” said the dictionary, but I already knew that: It’s the word of choice when you meet someone for the first time in, say, Puerto Rico. But I wondered about the word’s roots, and indeed, “encanto” is defined as, “charm, spell, enchantment.”

One piece of the installation is a video collage of a beach scene with the improbably monolith on the beach brooding over the scene like a skinny Darth Vader.

It’s in that realm of conjuring and magic I’d put Pérez-Méndez’s “Encantada”—so much more than just “pleased to meet you.” The spare installation—which stretches over two floors and includes models, sculpture, soap samples and peephole environments—is a tall tale about the construction of El Encanto, the fictional tallest hotel in Puerto Rico. A symbol of all things new and shiny, El Encanto is everything advertising tries to sell you when it taps into your dreams. It’s the best car, the best vacation, the best house, the most opulent future, the impossible dream.

The doilies encircling the top of El Encanto. Also birds circling. And are those bar codes on the plastic sheeting? The whole installation, with its distancing of the artist from the material reminded me of Gabe Martinez‘s wonderful Art Alliance piece in 2003, in which he was everywhere — and nowhere.

So what does this Emerald City accommodation look like? El Encanto, in its sculptural form, is an aqua-blue monolith sheathed in clear plastic and topped by what looks like a mantilla of doilies. Fanciful doesn’t begin to cover it.

The model of the hotel’s grounds, with the digital swimming pools and synch swimmers.

In a tabletop model of the hotel’s grounds are two swimming pools in which synchronized swimmers spell out the hotel’s name. (The pools are video monitors, and the swimmers are the creator’s alter ego, the Incredible Shrinking Woman, digitally cloned into a whole team of performers.) The hotel’s rooms, seem through peepholes, reveal bright tableaux involving a woman (the artist) in a French maid’s uniform. There’s muzak wafting through the space, and a complementary bar of El Encanto soap to take home as a memento.

But all in all, this installation about the packaging of ideas could’ve used a little more packaging itself. The discrete objects would be more captivating with additional bows, bells and visual whistles to feed the eye as well as the brain.

artblog intern, Caitlin, helping herself to the complementary bar of El encanto soap.

Pérez-Méndez is an artist with formidable technical skills, and her work, which focuses on ideas about identity, dreams and lies, is always smart. It’s great to think about, and many of the parts are great to look at. Previously, the artist was the glamorous leading lady of her own video installations. But recently, as in this piece, she’s stepped behind the scene to become instead the Oz-like impresario who orchestrates the tableau. The glam performance work was hot, being both simpler and closer to autobiography, and the installation is cool. I look forward to a day when the artist finds a way to combine the hot and cool.

Talia Greene’s drysophila-fueled digital prints are a mix of yuck and awe, bugs and hair. But there’s something about the idea of masses of things adding up to something bigger is great. I immediately want to compare this with photographer of collected objects that make up bigger pictures, Vik Muniz. More on him here.

And don’t miss Talia Greene’s digital bug wonderland in the Bride’s Café Gallery.

Here’s the rune-like array of imagery the artist has made with the humble laboratory insects which she gets in bags and dumps on the scanner and manipulates. The artist told a group of us that unlike what you might think, she still has spider-phobia when she sees one in her house, although, spider-phobia tinged with scientific inquiry.

The InLiquid artist’s canny scan-bed imagery—she pours the dead bugs on the scanner and moves them around to make her images—reverberates with ideas of the good and the bad of science and technology.

“Encantada”; “Talia Greene: Solo Exhibition”
Through Oct. 14. Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine St. 215.925.9914.