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.

Little Berlin’s founders Martha Savery and Kristen Neville-Taylor put out a call for members a while back to mix it up a bit and push their space forward. I talked with Savery by phone last week and she explained the move as a desire to bring in new energy, ideas and hands to help run the gallery. Yesterday LB announced the names of their new team, some of whom have LB affiliations (having shown there or curated there) and some of whom are new names.

Little Berlin the collective

Robert “Tim” Pannell
Tyler Kline
Masha Badinter
Alex Gartlemann
Beth Heinly*
Kristen Neville-Taylor
Sam Belkowitz
Martha Savery

Tyler Kline’s installation in April 2008

It’s a great list of names and a dynamic team to lead the space forward.

In the group exhibit Restless Discontent, at My House Gallery, I was intrigued by work by several of the artists.

Sarah O’Donnell

Sarah O’Donnell (who also has work up at Little Berlin right now–see previous post), from Tyler, brings to her drawings her interest in what we see and how it connects — or doesn’t connect — to what we don’t see. This is the one that I loved, with a creepy suggestion of the drain pulling down inexorably to a nasty netherworld.

Lillian Cotton

A piece by Lillian Cotton, a UArts grad,looks at first blush like a traditional gaze at female beauty. But Cotton’s self-portrait places the revealed portion of her head and bust at the far bottom of a work that then becomes a depiction of her hair as a tangly wild bramble that she supports with upraised arms like a Caryatid. There are a lot of African American women doing art about hair, but this one has a lovely, metaphoric quality that belies the conventional treatment of the figure, and becomes a dare to all who might venture into the thicket. The ambiguities in the piece kept me looking–and looking.

Jenny Bradley

Jenny Bradley‘s painting of a sublime landscape all tied up in ribbons that create a kind of keyhole affect reminds me of a Faberge egg. A third level of reality is the red area at the lower right–perhaps another landscape. The girliness of the ribbons, the redness of the bottom mountains (flowers?) also suggests sexuality and identity.

That three works by women all of suggest unfamiliar levels of reality beneath the surface of the everyday seems pretty interesting to me, especially since their approaches are quite different.

Michael Studebaker

Also in this show, religion meets guns and bling in a piece by Michael Studebaker, as well as work by Adam Bush, Nathaniel Butler, Anton Carlone, Megan Frisch, and Alexandra Torres. (Bush, by the way, scored two shows–Five Into One, and this one).

This show, for recent art school graduates, was Juried by My House Gallery directors Alex Gartelmann, Hannah Heffner, and Fernando Ramos. Usually shows in this space are pretty ephemeral, so for what it’s worth, here’s the location and the contact phone: 2534 S. Eighth St. 908.370.1656. Call before you go, and get there quick.

The annual Nexus Selects at Nexus Foundation for Today’s Art is another small group show drawn from this year’s Philly art school grads, selected by members of the gallery.

Amy Opsasnick, I ain’t so lonely; one of our readers, chad, pointed out in the comments below the post that this image is based on the Philip-Lorca diCorcia photo, Hartford, 1980

Amy Opsasnick, from UArts, prints images of people doing mysterious things in mysterious relationship to each other. The work has an illustration quality, but there’s no saying just what is being illustrated. The way highlights and shadows are drawn brings to mind photographs and Photoshop renderings and paint by numbers. It feels fresh.

Gerold Mooney, Banshee, mixed media on plexi

UArts grad Gerold Mooney‘s colors are knock-outs, and his cityscapes sizzle at the same time as they depict disintegration. The beauty lulls so well that the dark message and portent can slide right by, making this work you could actually live with quite happily. I like how Mooney’s work continues to have its own, distinct juiciness even though it’s so architectural.

Amanda Ritter, The Re-up Gang, archival ink jet

Although Amanda Ritter is treading familiar territory of kids at play and the power of masks, there’s a nice eye for the uncanny in the everyday and the camera’s ability to lie about scale. Ritter went to Tyler School of Art.

Others in the show are painter Anton Carlone from University of the Arts, photographer Kelsey Fain from Drexel University, photographer Colin Leaman from Tyler School of Art, and printmaker Jessie Wolfrom from University of the Arts.

We all have a love affair going with the movies–arguably the narrative art form of our times–and the exhibit in Little Berlin is all about that.

Post Production features multi-media installations by Sarah O’Donnell and Conor Fields that blow kisses to the movies.

Conor Fields, Day in Paris

Fields’ works hark back to early movie technology, with Neanderthal mechanics imbuing old-fashioned special effects with a sense wonder and eager ingenuity. In Day in Paris, a zoetrope/lampshade salutes both early movie technology and early aviation technology, recreating Alberto Santos-Dumont’s small blimp circling the Eiffel Tower in 1901. My favorite bit in this piece is the old vacuum that powers the spinning lampshade atop the cut glass lamp base. But the deliberate crudeness of the multiple chunky Eiffel Towers and blimps (you can see them through the holes of the lampshade as it spins) also charm.

Conor Fields, Goin’ to Mars

In another great piece, a terrific little airplane (another boyishly chunky bit of sculpture) circles inside a hollow old television case in Goin’ to Mars, a salute to Trip to Mars. I found myself eagerly anticipating the plane’s approach, timed just long enough to never quite satisfy, and therefore to keep me looking for a better and better view.

(Trend alert–This is the second deadpan spinning lamp piece in a month!! See post here).

As in Day in Paris, the works that keep this going are as wonderful as the show-piece side of the sculpture, and in fact that is the point, here. It’s about the wonders of technology and it’s a salute to the DIY ingenuity behind the early days of cinema. In a way, the work is the sculptural equivalent of the movie Ed Wood.

Conor Fields, Untitled

Two other pieces, both untitled, involve moving shadows projected through paper screens. The set-up for the triple screen in a bookcase is hilarious for its outrageous anti-slickness. The gallery never got dark enough, on the longest day of the year, for me to see the rocket take off in the other untitled piece. But the relatively elegant and framed, minimal screen embedded in the gallery wall seemed like it might be too highbrow. And the mechanics behind the wall looked less goofy than the others.

Fields is in his last semester at Tyler, and this is a propitious debut.

Sarah O’Donnell posing with her mega-model Timberline Lodge/Overlook Hotel

O’Donnell’s ambitious recreation of the hotel in The Shining, with film clips through the door and a couple of the windows, is impressive for size alone. The model draws from plans of the building O’Donnell found on the internet.

The piece explores how the movie lies to tell its story–how the movie-set spaces of the interiors of the lodge are an imaginary creation that don’t quite match up with the real place–a hotel in the Pacific Northwest. That probably added to the spookiness of the movie, but maybe not. After all, all movies take you into their personal space of the imagination. O’Donnell gave the piece both its real-life name and its movie name–Timberline Lodge/Overlook Hotel. After all, unreal space and real space are what she is mulling over.

Sarah O’Donnell, video viewed through the front door of Timberline Lodge/Overlook Hotel

The clips from the movie have been edited so all the actions that takes place in one space are spliced together and projected in their proper space. You can see how there’s something weird, some spatial disjuncture.

The piece is limited by its literalness, however. There’s no video around the back, and not enough of a reward for circling the piece, which, by the way, is the full monty display of the building.

Sculpturally, what seem most intriguing to me are the cement stairs, that capture something off base. I think if you’re a big fan of The Shining, you might love this piece, even though it falls a little short. Nonetheless, I am thrilled by the ambition of it and the ideas in it and look forward to seeing more work from O’Donnell. BTW, it took six months of hard labor to create it, O’Donnell said at the opening.

All in all, this is a great show, with our adoration of movies mixed with the magic of the lies they tell and the fantasies they weave.

There’s a gallery talk by movie fans/video artists/Screening Videos founders Matthew Suib and Nadia Hironaka tomorrow night, Thursday, June 26, at 7:30 p.m., followed by a screening of Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining.

The show runs through July 12. Gallery hours Saturdays, 12 to 5 p.m., and by appointment, Berlin.Little@gmail.com, 610.308.0579.