People enjoying a piece of the Piazza

The Piazza was busy enough, and the gallery’s back door and back glass wall on the Piazza joined the interior and the exterior spaces. The Piazza is a breathtaking stretch of open space for an urban setting–big enough to dwarf the Jumbotron! The only thing I disliked about the space was the stage beneath the Jumbotron–a stepped, flat-topped half-pyramid that domineered in an unpleasant way.

Bambi

Sarah Gamble, joy, oil on canvas

The biggest crowd I saw was at Sarah Gamble‘s opening of her show the Unemployment Paintings, at Bambi, now located at developer Bart Blatstein’s Italian fantasy, the Piazza. Gamble, a recent Pew fellowship recipient, lives in a world where things–houses, weeds and invisible waves are animate. The electromagnetic emanations and encrustations are seductive rainbows against the blue sky, Other things–perhaps computer trash and cell phone trash–have taken up residence amid baroque fields of weeds. Computers emanate a golden igloo of Blue Toothiness. One of her charred black houses–a baroque Victorian with multiple wings and turrets–is also animate, threatening and mournful. These paintings look great, even as their subjects become forces of nature, taking over. The exhibit will remain up to July 26.

Jennifer Hermann, Cameo necklaces Stacked vinyl andcd's w/ sterling silver Cast cement Cameo necklace crystals, fresh water pear, sterling silver

Also at Bambi, which is a boutique as well as a gallery, is some of the best arty merch ever. I adored some giant cameo necklaces made of CDs and vinyl records, by Jennifer Hermann. Hermann also made a bunch of white plastic rings made of orange juice seals that she then embroidered with a sewing machine–also terrific–and reasonably priced (see comments for a correction on this; they only look machine made).

Kim Alsbrooks, James Madison, Mary Bartholomew, David Rittenhouse, from the White Trash Family series, oil on trash

Proprietor Candace Karch also has a number of pieces from previous shows, like the miniature historic portraits Kim Alsbrooks paints on crushed soda cans–her White Trash Family, or like Tory Franklin’s cut-out paper portraits. Plus she borrowed a hilarious Warren Mueller chandelier made from push brooms, and hung it in the back/boutique section of the store. If I had the space for it, I’d find out how to purchase it.

Projects–Summer in the City and more
On my way back toward Center City, I stopped at Projects Gallery for their Summer in the City exhibit, now in its second month. This show is pretty good for an open call sort of thing, and life in the hot city is what its main theme is. And part of what I liked about this show was it didn’t seem to hav an age bias. So there was work by young and old, side by side, and most of it, even if you could tell the artist’s age, seemed pretty terrific.

Among the outstanding work there:

Aubrie Costello, detail, He Shouldn't Let You out the House (Philly Hollers), 36 x 12, acrylic on paper, dupioni silk, clothing, jewels

Moore College grad (’07) Aubrie Costello’s pieces from her Philly Hollers series apparently offend the men and delight the ladies according to Projects Associate Director Sequoiah Medley, who sits in the gallery taking in people’s responses (she’s also was a juror of the show). Costello’s installation, with its Lynda Benglis bravado, includes a brief girl’s top, ultra short shorts, and hottie sandals with two giant hot-pink prize ribbons across the cleavage and the crotch. The medusa-like torn and tangled ribbons surround painted messages. The larger ribbon says, “Ya man, He shouldn’t let you out of the house alone.” The smaller one says, “Juicy as Shit.” Costello said she has a notebook filled so far with three years worth of some of the offensive things that men have called out on the street to her and her friends.

Daniel Petraitis, Fire Hydrant, 40 x 16 x 16 inches, blown glass, steel

In contrast, Daniel Petraitis’ glass Fire Hydrant on a ring of steel is as cool and male and terse as Costello’s installation is hot and female and gabby.  Part of what’s wonderful about Fire Hydrant is the hot processes that created something that looks like a melting ice sculpture. The piece is at once a penis and the source of sidewalk gushers keeping kids cool. It’s a mix of deadpan and glamor, humbleness and grandeur, reminding me of how Olafur Eliasson’s The New York Waterfalls captured the those dichotomies using opposite means (DIY humbleness to suggest grandeur as opposed to vice versa).

Conor Fields, Neapolitan, 7 x 3 x 3 inches, ice cream cone, freeze dried astronaut ice cream, hot glue

And speaking of hot and cold, Conor Fields’ ice cream cone, Neapolitan, made with a real cone, dried astronaut ice cream and hot glue is wonderfully revolting as it too plays with the contrast between hot and cold.

Adam Lovitz, detail Candy Abdomen (series of 3), 5 inches x 3 inches each, mixed media on paper

In the 2-D department, I especially enjoyed several gouache and collage pieces by Adam Lovitz, which all have conceptual underpinnings and inexplicable magic in their choices. I especially loved his Candy Abdomen series of saccharine children’s portraits atop a tower candy-colored stripes, looking for all the world like Pez dispensers.

Fay Stanford, The Elders, 9 x7 inches, woodcut

In dramatic contrast to Lovitz, some black and white woodcuts by Fay Stanford look to elderly people–two women arguing in the pool lanes, and three grumps atop their skinny legs, looking like indignant storks. The wit and sharp observation in Stanford’s cartooning crosses generational barriers.

Henry Berkowitz, Transformer Trio, 8 x 10 inches, oil on canvas

I also liked the pairing of Henry Berkowitz’s traditional oil-on-canvas skyscape of transformers and wires, which is the most youthful of his pieces, in terms of subject matter, and the vignette of urban life in Jennifer Baker’s oil on mylar Wedding Party, which, youthful though it is in its handling of imagery, can also pass for quite old except for the mylar.

Tamsen Wojtanowski, cast, 17 x 17 inches color photograph bikes, 17 x 17 inches, color photograph

A couple of photos by Tamsen Wojtanowski caught my eye. I liked the raking angles of the compositions and the content–a lineup of beer bottles casting long shadows on the sidewalk, and a lineup of crippled bicycles. Both photos not only capture the sorts of things we normally avert our eyes from, but also capture things as representations of people, worn and hurt by a tough life in the city.

Others in the exhibit are Linda Dubin Garfield, Ashley Flynn, Bobby Rosenstock, Martha Savery, Allen Spencer and Deborah Imler, Jayne Surrena, Mat Tomezsko, and Andrew Wapinski.

Lisa Murch, detail of an installation in progress, going on in the lower level of Projects Gallery

While I was there, Medley took me downstairs to look at an installation in progress by Lisa Murch. The sewn egg crate bottoms are pretty amazing!Murch will be down there off and on during the summer growing the piece, and would welcome people to stop by and give her feedback as she works. As of now, there’s no set schedule, but you could probably call the gallery and see if you can pin down a sure time.

Tiger Strikes Asteroid–Andrew Prayzner and William Crump
Manifest Destination was the perfect July 4th experience, with its questions about the American dreams of success and a limitless frontier.

Andrew Prayzner, untitled, oil on linen, 28 x 22 inches

Prayzner, an ex-Philly guy who has moved to Brooklyn, is showing six oil paintings that appropriate police photos of Colombian drug mules. The images of half-stripped bodies taped with drugs or with drugs packed into underclothes are depressing and degrading–the baggage deforming the bodies in weird ways. The pixelated grid covering the faces strips the mules of their identity and places them in some sort of meta world of those who don’t deserve to be seen because they are bad.

Andrew Prayzner, untitled, oil on linen, 28 x 22 inches

Yet they look vulnerable, vulnerable enough to elicit a load of empathy–people who underestimated the risk of what they were doing and were pawns of a larger cultural and economic system, entrapped by the poverty of their lives and an oppressive legal system that seems a little crazed on this subject of drugs.

William Crump, The Mountain Man Dreams of His Bounty, While the Sweet Bird of Redemption Sings in His Ear, pencil on paper, 16 x20 inches

While we’re on the subject of the land of the brave and the free, New York artist William Crump‘s beautiful drawings of the American landscape populated by lonesome frontiersmen–cowboys, trappers, mountain men, and a voluptuous nude of a mountain man’s wife–are distanced from their references to historic magazine images of the great frontier by discordant elements like rainbow creeks and auras. These images at once capture the majesty of Ansel Adams’ Yosemite photos and reflect on the story the nation told itself about the push Westward.

William Crump, The Mountain of Yesterday's Burden, gouache and graphite on paper, 20 x16

Crump uses what I take to be a very hard graphite pencil, to which he ads gouache or colored pencil in some cases. The paleness of the drawings not only pull you in close, but they suggest a fading, a loss of power and a loss of memory. The colors are dreamy elements, the last drippy drop of romanticism still flowing, or even orbiting threats.

The work is beautiful and sad, the fireworks of an era undercut by a more cynical view.

All three exhibits, using largely traditional media in four-square formats, still manage to find new ways to see. On this moment of our nation’s birthday, I saw a loss of optimism, and a sadder definition of what it means to be American. I suppose that’s not surprise, given the economy, the draining of American power and leadership, and the loss of moral high ground perpetrated by the last administration (I can’t even write that man’s name).

Sarah Gamble recently received one of the coveted Pew Fellowships. But before that, her year was a mess. Her house was struck by lightning and vandalized. She lost her job. And she got sick and wound up in the hospital.  In her show Unemployment Paintings at Bambi Gallery , Gamble displays the fruits of her turbulent year in a handful of new work. One standout piece is an untitled painting of a dark and quirky castlelike house bleeding from one side while a rainbow sits on its other shoulder. Gamble paints from imagination and her colorful, heavily worked paintings on panel and canvas evoke a storybook world of children subject to stormy nights and the whims of fate.

Sarah Gamble, Untitled painting, from her show of new works at Bambi.

Andrew Prayzner’s mule paintings and William Crump’s delicate, nostalgic drawings of early American mountain folk are nicely paired at Tiger Strikes 
Asteroid in a show channeling the opening of the West and the closing of the borders. Prayzner’s mules are young drug traffickers pictured postarrest in their underwear with drugs taped to their bodies and their faces pixillated to protect their identities. Despite the fact that the documentary-style paintings are based on 1980s-era photos, the issue of border-jumping is still a hot topic. The small gallery’s show features six works by each artist. Crump’s wispy drawings hold their own against the colorful aggressive paintings by virtue of an attention to detail that draws you in for a close look.

Andrew Prayzner, painting from his "mule" series, at Tiger Strikes Asteroid

Dave Dunn’s video installation at Copy Gallery promises icons of summer—the beach, the athlete’s victory lap and angry dogs—all running on continuous loops on three or more video monitors in the gallery’s tiny space. Along with this work-in-progress with all new videos, Dunn says there may be a live performance involving bowls of cereal. Dunn often takes small moments and repeats them in his work to create a mesmerizing stream of images, and he’s always up to something new. Expect great visuals in a thought-provoking exhibition. (THIS SHOW’S FIRST FRIDAY OPENING HAS BEEN CANCELED.)

Dave Dunn, film still from his new works at Copy Gallery

If you enjoyed the Institute for Contemporary Art’s all-clay Dirt on Delight , try the national juried student roundup of clay sculpture and functional objects at the Clay Studio .

Jacob Foran, Eddie, at the Clay Studio

Jacob Foran’s Eddie , a mastiff with a hangdog look balancing on his front legs caught in a trough of what looks like concrete, is a doggy descendant of West Coast master Robert Arneson’s mocking clay self-portraits.

Andrea Marquis, Ornament, at the Clay Studio

At the other end of the spectrum in this 30-artist show, Andrea Marquis’ Ornament is a bauble of beauty for your delectation.

Sarah Gamble–Unemployment Paintings, til July 26.  Bambi, 1001 N. 2nd St., Suite 7.  opening reception July 3, 6-10 pm

Manifest Destination:  Andrew Prayzner and William Crump, to July 31.  Tiger Strikes Asteroid.  319A N. 11th St., 4F.  opening reception July 3, 6-10 pm

Summertime Sunrise Fun Club –Dave Dunn, through July.  Copy Gallery, 319A N. 11th St., 3rd floor.  (THIS SHOW’S FIRST FRIDAY OPENING HAS BEEN CANCELED.)

Sixth Annual Marge Brown Kalodner Graduate Student 
Exhibition, Fri., July 3, 5-9pm. Through Aug. 2. Clay Studio, 139 N. Second St.

Friday, July 3

Sarah Gamble

Sarah Gamble–Unemployment Paintings
Bambi
1001 N. 2nd St., Suite 7 (the Piazza)
opening reception, 6-10 pm.
show runs til July 26

Andrew Prayzner, painting of a photo from his Mule series.

Manifest Destination:  Andrew Prayzner and William Crump
Tiger Strikes Asteroid
319A N. 11th St., 4F
opening reception, 6-10 pm
show runs to July 31

David Dunn film still

OPENING POSTPONED TO THE 10TH–

Summertime Sunrise Fun Club (working title)–Dave Dunn video installation
Copy Gallery
319A N. 11th St., 3rd floor
opening reception, 6-10 pm. OPENING CANCELLED!! POSTPONED TO THE 10TH
through July

Wednesday, July 8

Phil Jackson photo from Skatopia.

Phil Jackson, Ellie Brown and others at First Person Arts Arts Bank Salon
7:30-9:30 pm
Philadelphia Arts Bank
601 S. Broad Street
Admission: $8.
(Buy tickets here.   Seating is limited, and they typically sell out.)

Italy to Cyprus by way of L.A.

Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib, The Soft Epic, video still. click to see it bigger.

Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib go global this summer. (See a clip of their video Soft Epic on their Soft Epic website, a piece so epic it gets a site of its own!) See their works  here:

Pesaro, Italy, June 13th-28th
Moscow, June 22nd and 23rd

Los Angeles, July 11th-mid August

New York, NY, July 28th,

and Nicosia, Cyprus, Sept. 3

Boston

Alex Da Corte, Serge and Bacchus

Look for Philly alum Alex Da Corte’s Casual Luxury ultra-exhibit in New England! Now there’s a culture confrontation!
LaMontagne Gallery
June 18th to July 31st

Greensboro, NC.

Eileen Neff, photo from her show at Weatherspoon Museum

Eileen Neff is showing selected work from the last 10 years in her museum exhibit Eileen Neff: Photographs!  Are they real or are they art? Greensboro, check it out!
Weatherspoon Museum of Art
May 24,  2009  – August 16,  2009

Harrisburg

Sarah Gamble, painting that's in the Art of the State exhibit in Harrisburg

Mind-boggling: 157 works of art by 798 Pennsylvania artists, selected for more than 2,000 entries.

A shout-out to Matt Pruden for this breaking news about the Art of the State.
Here’s a selection of artists we’ve written about from some of the 66 artists from the Philadelphia area.
Arden Bendler Browning
Nanette Acker Clark
Dominic Episcopo
Sarah Gamble
Ed Bing Lee
Lisa Murch
Matthew Pruden
Kate Stewart
Ben Volta
Kip Deeds
Csilla Sadloch

Art of the State, June 27 – September 20
The State Museum of Pennsylvania

New York, NY

Adam Parker Smith, untitled plane crash

Adam Parker Smith  in A Greek Play with a Main Character Named Oblivious (Parker Smith is a Philly alum).

Priska C. Juschka Fine Art

June 23 – July 31, 2009
Opening Reception: Tuesday, June 23, 2009 6 – 9 PM

Jesse A. Greenberg, Invitation Station Arch 1, 2008, Plastic, foam, rubber, silicon, plexi-glass, acrylic, vinyl, mylar, fabric, glitter, urethane, wood, electric lighting 96” x 80” x 28” (243,8 x 203,2 x 71,1 cm)

Jesse A Greenberg will be going to Columbia for grad school this fall, but we still claim him as a Philly guy. He will be in
Wild Feature, a group show with Melissa Brown, Brendan Cass, James B. Franklin, John Hodany, Misaki Kawai and Taylor McKimens.
Zurcher Studio
June 25 – July 26, 2009
Opening Thursday June 25, from 6 to 8 pm

Austin, TX

Amir Lyles

Amir M. Lyles, Africa Create Us:  Art Exhibit and Gallery Talk
DiverseArts’ New East Arts Gallery and Pro Arts Collective
June 13-July 9

The rainbow was sudden. We were racing up to Little Berlin Friday along I-95 when Murray and I spotted it. We were so excited we missed our exit and almost drove off the road.

The first thing that struck me was how yellow it was at the base, shimmering and golden. I’d never seen that effect before, but I bet the legend about the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow comes from that.

The second thing the struck me was I wasn’t going to be able to get my camera out fast enough. The more I worried, the more I fumbled.

Inspiration and rainbow

I’m not sure just how long it took me to notice it was a double rainbow, although the big money was clearly on number one, which was vivid and spectacular, with the sky a different color on either side of it. The second was a mousy reflection.

One of those Temple University red billboards loomed in the distance. “Inspiration” with the Temple “T”. I could barely contain myself. I barely caught it with the rainbow in the same picture–being in a speeding-along car, being me, and being slow on the camera trigger.

Kate Abercrombie’s riot of flowers goes under the sea in this image, suggesting plenitude and the invisible world beneath the surface.

Appropriately enough, the exhibit at Little Berlin, turned out to have its own sort of rainbows and landscapes. BECKY + SARA + KATE + BEATJAMS is a three-girl art show, plus music from an all-girl garage band (Murray and I beat the band and ran out to dinner before they showed up).

The artists are Becky Suss, Sarah Gamble and Kate Abercrombie. My main point about all this work is that these are all landscapes–of a sort–i.e. not landscapes at all. They are landscapes of the mind.

Abercrombie’s cascades of ecstatic flowers in her paintings and drawings are effusive, and the geometrical straight lines and circles at once reinforce and undermine the notion of landscape–adding a little fillip of magic powers and signs. These works are almost decorative and design-y in their intent. They also seem to have moved away some from Indian miniatures and toward Chinese influences.

Sarah Gamble’s glowing igloo, home sweet home, is equipped with computers!!!

At the other extreme, Sarah Gamble–the ultimate rainbow painter of all time–continues her visions of romantic survivalism. There’s a sweetness to this work that pictures a dark world with details to admire–a sort of grown-up version of the little girl drawing of the house with the three tulips, the tree and the bird. But Gamble’s world includes the invisible powers of electricity and wi-fi keeping us warm in the barrens of nature.

Suss in this small exhibit, with a series of modest-scale paintings on paper, depicts a very personal take on imaginary headlands that suggest ascent. I especially liked the shapes and the way the land meets and becomes one with the sky. The painting is uneven and pastel, but the ideas and shapes are there, providing some tooth).

by Becky Suss’ paintings climb to join earth and sky.

For this young generation of artists, this is what has happened to landscape painting. I guess we humans have become unwilling to face that which is about to be lost. Besides, landscape painting, at its best, has always been political and full of cultural information. Truth be said, painting a pretty landscape has never done the job, and the notion of young Victorian ladies learning to paint realistic landscapes has never really been about art. These young women, however, are not painting in that Victorian tradition. Suss and Gamble are closer to April Gornick and Peter Doig, while Abercrombie is working closer to Asian traditions.

I met Roman Blazic for the first time, at Little Berlin

On another note, I was happy to meet Roman Blazic for the first time at this exhibit. Blazic has contributed some words and photos to artblog on the Fishtown/Kensington scene.

The exhibit goes until June 13.

little berlin
1801 N. Howard St., Philadelphia
Saturdays 12-5pm
or by appointment
610.308.0579

Sarah Gamble paints a particular type of girl-goth. I’ve been intrigued with Gamble’s work for some time partly because I don’t really “get” it but I want to. (You can see her work now in a solo show at Pageant Gallery through April 8). The work is goth in the sense of Gothic (cathedrals, dark mountains, the woods — things that are overwhelmingly big, beautiful and scary). But also goth in the sense of dark night of the soul where weird devils and fanciful emanations prowl. This is territory Joy Feasley disports herself in with her paintings of crystalline webs of entwinement that are ambiguously beautiful — and dangerous. The sky is usually dark in Gamble’s or Feasley’s works, and if you’re quiet you can “hear” the whoosh of movement as some small breath of wind pushes through the thick atmosphere bringing with it an owl or spirit or wood sprite.

Lots of guys make goth-inspired art. But it’s usually dripping with blood and daggers and machismo. See Juxtapoz magazine for more. But when women sashay into this realm it’s less about creating a threatening atmosphere than about creating the moment that anticipates the threat. The calm before the storm.

I met Gamble, 32, at Pageant last weekend so that we could chat about her work in her show titled All Alone in the Electro Magnetic Sphere.

The artist has two large drawing installations, one comprised of 50 drawings, all the same size, the other with 32 drawings. The drawings are tempera on paper and some of them have graphite or pastel or marker or other materials on them as well. There’s a group of medium-sized oil paintings in the show as well but I was focused on the drawings, groupled together chock-a-block as if flocking for protection from some unseen force. The drawings remind me of children’s drawings. The ambiance is naive and yet, when I mentioned that, Gamble was disappointed to hear it, something she’s apparently heard it before. “I’m not naive,” she said. “I want to be direct.”

Indeed, this is a Penn MFA and she’s not naive. The artist says she works on maybe 40 drawings at the same time, laying them on the floor, on the table, on the walls of her studio. She uses the drawings to work out ideas for the paintings. Many motifs that appear in the paintings are there in the drawings as well.

Oil painting with motif worked out in one of her drawings. I thought of Mardi Gras beads caught in the trees along St. Charles Ave. in New Orleans when I saw this.

Why are the drawings grouped so tightly together? “They are one big idea…one big thing,” she said. She grouped them together with themes of color (she didn’t want too much black too close together so spaced out the black-dominated works). So the group of drawings is a kind of stream of consciousness, a cloud or thought-bubble almost. I buy that. Although as with any group of individuals massed together some individuals stand out. I found myself stepping up close to focus on one or another drawing that intrigued me and found their quirks and personalities charming. The acid yellow flying saucer, the pale yellow ghost creature with a mint green trail, the many works that include rainbow-like dots that seem like sprays of words, thoughts, spit, energy–whatever. These small playful drawings had lots of charms.

Small drawing

I mentioned that I thought there was a lot of anxiety in the works (the overwhelming greyness of the atmosphere, the sense of foreboding, the idea of unseen waves in the air. The artist agreed. I asked the artist if she is worried about the health effects of those electromagnetic waves referred to in the title of her show. Some people fear that rays emitted by cell towers, electric power stations, microwaves, satellite dishes, radio and tv transmitters and the like are bad for you.

But no, the North Carolina native, Corcoran Art program BFA and Penn MFA (2004) is more fascinated than worried. She said she likes the idea that you can speak via cell phone and your voice (or the bits and bytes of your voice) goes up to a satellite and gets beamed down elsewhere and her show is an attempt to get at that amazing mechanical-outer-spacey-inner spacey convergence. “I think it’s kind of beautiful the way things travel through space and dissipate in the air,” she said. “While my work is dark I want it to be beautiful,” she said, agreeing with my comment about the gothic sensibility.

Does she make comics? There is a definite cartoon edge to what she paints and how she paints it. She told me she used to do comics as a child. And, “Even now if something horrible happens (or something funny) I’ll do a comic strip” as a way to digest it.

Does she listen to music when she works? Yes, all the time — classical and other things. “I like Bach, and the Romanatic stuff they play on the Princeton radio station in the morning. I like adult R&B and adult soft rock”. Her boyfriend Jamey Robinson of the Need New Body band (now disbanded) who has a solo project “Buffalo Stance” is a big music influence.

The painting I particularly like is a small work showing a grass-roofed hut in a landscape that looks like a coastal island. The work is dark and smoky and the hut’s roof has an almost preposterous jauntiness and anthropomorphism. What I picked up from it was a sense of the person alone in the world, the world encroaching. The apocalypse might be upon this little house for all I know. The tall grass is lovely, the house’s grass roof is lovely and I felt protective and a little worried for what was looming in the dark sky. That said, there’s enough cartoon ambiance in the painting for me to not sweat the downside too much.

Gamble said she finished that painting the day of the show and ran in with it still wet. She was covered with green paint by the time she got the work hung on the wall.

Gamble has a day job as a secretary for a real estate firm. At night she paints away in her studio above Rocket Cat in Fishtown. She paints with artificial light and said she’s fine with that and sometimes she’s pleasantly surprised at how the works change when they’re shown in natural light as they are in Pageant’s beautiful and well lit space.

The artist modeling her t-shirt embroidery project for boyfriend Jamey Robinson’s Buffalo Stance music project.

Does she live with her works on her walls? NO! It would drive her crazy because she’d be criticizing them all the time and wanting to make changes. She has other artist’s works in her house and feels happy with them. “I don’t want to change them.”

I asked what she’s working on now and she said she’s taking a break from painting. Then she showed me her embroidered t-shirt. Her new non-painting project is making t-shirts for her boyfriend’s music project. “It doesn’t hurt my brain to do this,” she said of the embroidery. I asked if painting hurt her brain and she said painting is exhausting.

Gamble may stay in Philadelphia for a while. She likes it here. But I picked up a sense of wanderlust, and a desire to try to waters elsewhere. When you’re out of school a few years, and you’re in your early 30s and you’re a woman, the clock is ticking. So many decisions and so little time.

For more photos see my flickr set.

I don’t have time to write a real post, but I wanted to squeeze in a word about Minty at Vox.

It’s the new members group show, that includes a returning member, M.Ho, as well as truly new members Anita Allyn, Leah Bailis, Micah Danges, Sarah Gamble, M. Ho, Roxana Perez-Mendez and Joseph Protheroe.

All the work looked pretty snappy, but Anita Allyn’s video installation and mural were what I brought home with me in mind, a wall supergraphic of a sunset and road with a video inset where the sun would be. The video is a pimp on the classic American road movie–in hyped up uber-technicolor.

by M. Ho

M. Ho did a new version of her Post-it landscapes, behind the desk, and this one is extremely complex, and the texture and view made me think of flocked wallpaper.

by Sarah Gamble

And suddenly I got a grip on Sarah Gamble, or maybe she got a grip on her own work, and it looked great, with ur-igloos, mysterious houseboats/shacks and melting northern lights.

Thumbs up on the rest. Here’s my Flickr set for more images. Gotta go.