Here’s the full podcast interview:
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Coming soon–a YouTube slide version of this podcast.

This episode is edited by Peter Crimmins. The music is by Eric Biondo. The slide show is edited by artblog Intern Alison McMenamin. Thanks to the Knight Foundation for helping us get the ball rolling on this project. Thanks also to J-Lab‘s Enterprise Reporting Fund and William Penn Foundation for additional support and to our partner WHYY NewsWorks for their ongoing support and for sharing artblog radio episodes on the arts & culture page of their community news site NewsWorks.org. You can subscribe to artblog radio on iTunes.

Gallery view at Space 1026

In this show, Hardman presents an array of smallish, singular structures, and also some other pieces that I would call construction-scapes. His single structures take the form of sharp, angular table-top pieces, which colorfully crown their simple white pedestals like magic crystals or other weird chunks of strata. These works, most often oddly angled and displaying a robust juxtaposition of disparate surface texture and color, have an excellent balance and tension, both creating long, foreboding shadows punctuated with broad areas of reflected light.

"Little Boat"

“Little Boat,” the strongest of these pieces, resembles a small, irregularly-shaped house – or should I say chunk of a house. Perhaps because there’s already cake in the room, (I’ll get to that in a minute), I felt like this sculpture represented a section of house served up like a piece of cake, like it had been cut down the sides to reveal the other textures under its facade. And the blue roof, which is probably some sort of spackle or sealant, reminded me of my blue Cookie Monster cake I had when I was in kindergarten. Still, the sculpture is chock full of texture and pattern modulations and has great weightiness and energy.

"Butterfly"

The sculpture, “Butterfly,” was another standout. Again using sharp, aggressive angles, Hardman creates an unexpected dialogue between some whimsical butterfly wallpaper and roofing tar. The shape is almost futuristic in its dynamics, the outer side plastered with the wall paper, while shadowy inner walls are slopped up with a thick impasto layer of shiny black tar. The sculpture conveys a sort of stark formal beauty, yet with an air of uneasiness – I felt a little like I was being purposely misdirected or lied to by a child.

"Michigan"

Hardman’s miniaturized construction-scapes are also on display. “Michigan” is a large sheet-cake that seems to be undergoing some sort of excavation/construction project. Brick walls, wooden railings, and metal barricades populate the site. The chocolate cake (dirt), with its patches or white icing (snow) gives the scene a cold, desolate feel that indeed reminds one of Detroit and its barren, crumbling infrastructure. Apart from being a pretty good material for grading and carving up into a mini landscape, the use of cake seems to comment on the way we (Americans?) consume our resources without much serious thought, comparing our wanton use of land and raw materials to a sort of unplanned, benign activity such as eating cake.

"Loading Dock"

Another contruction-scape, “Loading Dock,” depicts a myriad of tiny handmade objects that would be piled up and stored at a construction site. Tediously crafted miniature trash bags, concrete barriers, steel girders, cinderblocks, and many other objects are tightly packed together and stacked up in this multicolored world. The piece at once celebrates these artifacts of human ingenuity, while also highlighting the wasteful practices of 20th century construction techniques.

"Justin Loves Fire Trucks"

Lastly, the most playful piece in the show is called “Justin Loves Fire Trucks.” A small cake sits under a glass lid. At the center of the cake is a birthday candle thatʼs been extinguished. Surrounding the candle are some tiny fire trucks that appear to have just put the candle out like it was a burning building. The little toys donʼt want Justin getting older because heʼll probably grow out of his love for fire trucks, so they just extinguish his birthday candle!

Hardman’s show runs until January 28.

Miss Rockaway Armada installation at the Philadelphia Art Alliance - once a wave, now a cave. Photo by Tod Seelie.

My old favorite sculpture seems to have sunk into the plastic wrap waters. I crawl inside and look out once more. Instead of swinging lanterns, a stream of chandelier light diffused through a waterfall of multi-colored glass bottles drips into the cave through the slats.

The first stop in the new Miss Rockaway experience at the PAA delivers on the collective’s commitment to work “within the material reality of a specific urban landscape,” says Melissa Caldwell, Director of Exhibitions. Springing out of the plastic water like geysers or horns from a monster beneath the deep, a “tornado” forest of repurposed Philly electric pole signs surrounds the cave. Reading “We Buy HoCash For CarVerFresh” further roots the Philly audience’s personal experience of a transformed dream or fantasy of our specific material reality.

Let me tell you about a dream I had steals our hearts once more before skipping town to trade them for playing cards and whiskey somewhere down the Schuylkill that doesn’t quite exist.

As we move into the familiar “Amfibitheater” room, look up at the billowing silk parachute and around the corner for the familiar fish no worse for wear out of water.

Amfibitheater photo by Tod Seelie

Spilling down from above a grand staircase, multicolored nautical ropes pool at your feet like the still connected pieces of a broken chandelier. Music cranks out “songs for people slipping into the sea” as the lights and sounds and smells pull you in a million directions.

Various beautifully arranged piles of refuse seem to break through the walls and fireplaces of the old Wetherill mansion like the house in Jumanji, except nothing is trying to kill you. The building takes on a new life, breathing and belching Miss Rockaway’s sea shanties and allowing her pieces to sink and rise like in the water. The mounds and varying heights of installations create a sea-sunk quality, fitting into the Armada narrative.

“amplified interactive sound sculpture made from the guts of a piano and an organ” photo by Tod Seelie

The installation is seamless and avoids the “see what I made” tradition of artistic display, a tradition Caldwell said the group was concerned about. Their mission is to interact directly with viewers and they succeeded. Miss Rockaway’s romantic vision of trash as treasure and freedom through art asks viewers not to “see what I made” but instead be a part of what the group made. The participatory flotilla, parades, and shows in Kensington, Clark Park, and Rittenhouse are “communal events…unmediated by the art world or institutional influence…[that] reinforced Miss Rockaway’s continual interest in a non-hierarchical exchange of information,” the group stated.

Down on the Schuylkill last month, children’s shrieks from the bicycle Ferris wheel, among other exclamations—some less delightful when (Spoiler Alert!) dangling crabs surprise you with sight and smell inches from your face—attest to Miss Rockaway’s adherence to her playful, anti-intellectual mission.

So much celebrated interactive art currently involves digital components—the common modes many of us interact through. Miss Rockaway smashes your iphone and re-invokes the carnival. She reminds us how art also interacts with audiences through sensory modes of escape and transportation. Her artists express the freedom of escape from material possessions and modern society with their shrine in loving memory of real life Huck Finn counterpart Poppa Neutrino. On the second floor of the mansion, Miss Rockaway honors the lovable wanderer whose generous acts read like those of a vagabond Santa Claus. Close by, the dark mystery room filled with Kensington crabs stink up the place and are ready to pinch you in the face as you stumble in. Just as Poppa Neutrino’s life inspired these artists, Momma Rockaway’s recycled art palace shows us what art and the urban experience could be.

Debris and refuse at Miss Rockaway Armada

“Miss Rockaway Armada doesn’t actually exist,” Caldwell states. With recent attention in the media to movements, the art community in Philadelphia has paid attention not only to Occupy Philly but also, in lending their spaces and members to Miss Rockaway. Space 1026 and FLUX space, among others, have, according to Caldwell, thought more about what is involved when organizing around an idea and event than to a location. The anonymity of Miss Rockaway (the members are not named; all the credit goes to the group) also speaks to their politics and hints at some of the reasons they were hesitant to bring their work inside an institution. Miss Rockaway, after all, is no Rittenhouse dinner party kinda gal (did I mention the crabs?). However, through the interactive techniques employed and use of salvaged materials from RAIR and The Resource Exchange, she sticks to her guns.

The Art Alliance’s new direction as Philadelphia’s site for Art, Craft, and Design harkens back to the Arts and Craft movement’s push for craft economies and social reform and serves as the perfect site to display the “radical potential of the DIY movement.” Caldwell aims to expand upon “the idea of ‘craft’ as a verb,” as process and experience, unafraid to admit that it works toward a utopian ideal.

“reflective light sculpture made of discarded wood and clear glass bottles” photo by Tod Seelie

Though the exhibition operates as “partial remnant” to the Miss Rockaway event, the installation experience and accompanying programming serve as rich events in and of themselves. Thanks, Miss Rockaway, for allowing us to linger on your shores admiring your flotsam and jetsam, the touch of driftwood, and the smell of bonfire smoke and moonshine.

This month when you pull the homemade doorbell at Space 1026, you get buzzed up into Alternate Universes, a two person show featuring large installations that play off of each other, attempting to warp you far away from the hustle and bustle of Chinatown outside.

Gallery shot of "Alternate Universes"

The stated aim of Alternate Universes is to create a “tangible interactive setting” by which the mind can “explore ideas of the intangible such as the origins of life or the elements fundamental for creation.”

The work of Chelsea Coon

Entering the gallery, you are confronted with the imposing installation of Chelsea Coon, a Boston based artist. Known for her drip paintings that resemble the rich star-fields from Hubble space images, here she uses those pieces as starting points, which she then rolls around wire skeletons, making long, hollow tubes out of them. These paper tunnels then criss-cross and snake from the floor to the huge, black trash bag-covered wall. The piece is ugly, dark, and foreboding. The handling of the materials is loose, creating a cragged, interior world that seems grindingly claustrophobic. Dissonance reigns as the shiny crinkled trash bags shine behind the greyish matte tunnels. The placement of her protruding tunnels is random and feels as if they have metastasized by accident or surprise.

The work of Emily Bowser

As alternate counterpoint, the other installation is by artist Emily Bowser. Unlike Coon’s more literal reference to the universe and space, Bowser prefers to provoke the exploration of such subjects with object multiplication and redundant accumulations of pattern and form. Bowser is an accomplished fabric artist, whose prior work with seas of plaid patterning created intense, mathematical grid-like matrices.

Coon's work as seen through Bowser's.

If Coon’s world is raw, cragged, lugubrious, and dark, as you emerge onto Bowser’s side of the gallery you end up in a bright, airy world of colorful beams of soft fabric that seem to glow like radiating plumes of rainbow-colored light. Multicolored bands of pastel fabric are stapled to the walls of the gallery along soft, imaginary arching lines. The tautly stretched fabric bands travel in a parallel trajectory at random angles across the room, thereby creating a large web of sharp, interlaced forms. You can walk into her installation and become immersed in her playfully positive world. In fact, when Coon’s dark, ominous world is viewed from inside Bowser’s pastel beams, it feels as though you are protected and safe, inside an almost heaven-like womb.

The two pieces meet.

Poetically, the two opposing artworks kiss at the center point of the installation. When Coon’s trash bag wall tapers into a tongue-like arc, and as you follow the line, you slip from her world onto a curved section of Bowser’s alternate world of light. That spot where alternate universes may meet remains a mysterious, elusive, and beautiful place to contemplate.

This show will be on view at Space 1026 until July 29.

Becky Suss embraces remembrance and her artistic seasonal affective disorder through a series of multi-textured oil landscapes at her first solo exhibition in Philadelphia, Cold Cold Ground, on display at Space 1026. Her wintry mix of iced-over hidden streams and snowed-in backyard gardens calls to mind the past season and the missing places of spring. Those places exist once again in these recreated memories. During her First Friday opening, “Green River” and “wish you were here” twinged my nostalgia for pockets of rural New England I’ve happened upon in previous years.

“Green River” - Oil on canvas - 16” x 16”

Suss trespasses on my emotions and lays claim to these scenes through the richness of her palette, accuracy of overlapping natural textures, and submission to the sentiments these landscapes stir in us all. The steel-cold, grey shadows covering the softness of the snow mimic the bite of frost on your lips and the chill of winter in your bones. The chipped ice popping through Suss’s blue-black “Green River” captures the idea of the river’s memory melting away with time.

“wish you were here” - Oil on canvas - 36” x 36”

The artist is compelled to paint these remembered landscapes.  She says it’s as natural as wanting to see a photo of them or simply recalling the image in the mind. The viewer’s emotional response to the landscapes attests to the honesty of its memory activation, which for the modern viewer relies not only on personal and collective narratives but also competing images—historical, photographic, remembered, and imagined.

“Emerald Street” - Oil on canvas - 16” x 16”

The beast of a beaver’s den in the foreground of this piece emerges life-like yet impossible from the winding composition of celestial waterfalls. A few of Suss’s most spirited previous pieces, like “Snake Hill,” often feature twiggy and rocky mammoths whose texture, scale, and perspective disorient and challenge the viewer. Suss references Cezanne’s initial ventures into Modernism’s multiple perspective still-lifes, as she admits to taking on a “snow perspective,” with the first snowfall of the season transforming her perspective on landscape. Having worked on her MFA in Berkeley, CA, she confessed to withdrawals from seasonal landscapes and an inability to escape being seasonally affected. With “Emerald Street,” she admits to “predictably wanting spring” and transitioning from winter to spring as the snow thawed in her mind and on her canvas. A visit to 1026 before the show closes on May 27 allows you to revisit experiences of winter richly symptomatic of Suss’s seasonality and modern explorations of memory.

Desert Island, the exhibition at Space 1026, is full of artists who have played a role in Desert Island, the Brooklyn comics store owned by Gabe Fowler. The exhibition, curated by Fowler and up through the end of the month, gives us a little glimpse into the lives of these prolific artists. Art seems to permeate their lives and manifests itself in multiple expressions. Pieces on the wall serve as finished ideas, while zines act as receptacles for the numerous thoughts and ideas of the individual artists.

Cats, made of streamer paper, by Lisa Hanawalt

There is an absurdist lean to a lot of the work. Lisa Hanawalt’s sculpture “Cats” depicts two anthropomorphic cats sitting, holding hands and smiling while their heads are ripped off and their entrails pulled out by two birds. While the subject is gruesome, the execution is quite playful. The piece is made of streamer paper and looks like a massive piñata. By exaggerating the violence to an outrageous level, Hanawalt speaks about the violent nature of a child’s game.

Installation by Ali Aschman

Similarly, Ali Aschman’s work deals with themes of violence and absurdity. The mixed media mural “Installation” depicts people impaling each other with rod-like arms and tree branches while holding skulls in their other hands. Their sad expressions look as though the death in the work is inevitable and all players are victims of their fate. The illustrative nature of it feels playful despite its subject matter. It is at once beautiful and heavy-handed, which is one of the things that makes comic books so appealing.

James Moore's mask-like sculpture, grotesque and funny

James Moor’s “Sculpture” balances Aschman’s work with a completely different aesthetic. Moore’s work feels rough and impromptu, while Aschman’s is precise and planned out. Moore’s massive, floating metal head with glowing blue eyes, glass mucus and a mass of light bulbs — the severed spinal cord — dangling from the neck is hilarious and grotesque.

John Mejias, mask, detail

“Masks,” by John Mejias, strikes an equally dark tone. The masks are disembodied and suspended at odd heights in a cluster. We find out that they are relics of performances by the artist and his band. This notion of their former life as objects of performance makes them feel all the more ghostlike as they hover in the space. They are quite beautifully constructed of cut paper with printed patterns.

John Mejias, Masks, made out of cut paper, installation shot

In addition to being in a band, Mejias is a teacher.  He uses his experiences as a teacher as material for his zines, of which there are many. I cannot help but think of British education guru Ken Robinson who says that schools are gradually teaching students from the neck up and then slightly to one side. After experiencing the numerous facets through which these artists create and express, it makes me happy that Mejias is a teacher. Hopefully his students will be as prolific as he and his fellow artists in this show are.

Our series sponsor is Fleisher Art Memorial.

Artist Amze Emmons’ forlorn cityscapes of shaky, provisional dwellings seem ever more pertinent as we view on the news the tent cities in the center of Cairo. We talked to Emmons about his name, his art, and about his Refugee Reading Room exhibit at Space 1026. For the show, now in its last week, he invited about 50 artists to contribute prints and zines, all is free for the taking. Emmons is prolific and networked. He showed in 13 shows last year, from Philadelphia to Seattle to Osaka, Japan. And Emmons, who teaches at Muhlenberg College, is heavily involved in Printeresting, an amazing national blog/art project all about printing (look for a Printeresting-curated show at this year’s Southern Graphics Conference event in St. Louis).

Amze Emmons in his studio at 12th and Carpenter

First, a short sample from the interview; and below that the full 13-minute episode.

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Right click to download Amze Emmons 33-second sample

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Right click to download full 13-minute interview with Amze Emmons

This episode is edited by Peter Crimmins. The music is by Eric Biondo. Thanks to the Knight Foundation and our series sponsor, Fleisher Art Memorial, for their support of this project. You can subscribe to artblog radio on iTunes. And thanks to our partner WHYY, which shares artblog radio episodes on their community news site NewsWorks.org.

Cityscape background from Amze Emmons' Refugee Reading Room.

From the outside, Space 1026 looks like the setting for a backroom deal in a heist movie – a graffiti-covered door with caged frame over its window opens out to a steep, wooden staircase littered with newspapers and broom closet supplies. The gallery space, complete with chandelier and faded, green settee, has an air of worn elegance, like a Victorian salon caught at the winding-down point in a time-lapse photography sequence. Emmons’ show, with its pastel colors and modern urban appeal, creates a pleasant contrast that still manages to suit the room, like a brightly-colored cartoon landscape suddenly popping up in the midst of drab reality a la Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

The silhouette of a city landscape, painted in asymmetrical lines worthy of the hand of Dr. Seuss, provides a backdrop to the exhibition. Propped up in corners and flowing over the floor like waste from an abandoned construction site are several wooden-beams, A-Frames and crates painted carnation pink. The sea of pastel debris, an homage to Emmons’ interest in refugee architecture, almost washes over a table that provides the focal point of the show: the “Reading Room Library.” Scattered over this table, constructed of a wooden flatbed propped up on plastic crates, an avalanche of paper products awaited the crush of people arriving for the First Friday opening. Seated on plastic children’s stools or crowded around the table, guests were encouraged to peruse the array of literature, photography and experiments-in-design.

Samples included in the "Refugee Reading Room Library."

“I think this particular project was heavily influenced by my collaboration on Printeresting, which is a kind of art project/art journalism project that I work on with R.L. Tillman and Jason Urban, and through that I’ve been put in touch with a lot of small press publications,” remarked artist Amze Emmons the night of the opening.

To the right of the library stands a mock-up of a newspaper stand, with white signs reading “FREE” in large, black font hanging along a series of shelves in the back. Included among the free gifts are samples of works from the library, as well as issues of the zine Machete, and various farcical tags, computer printouts, pins and matchbooks.

Free souveniers from the newspaper stand.

“I guess the big idea of the exhibit is that it’s a kind of gift economy,” Emmons explained. “And rather than just working with people who made zines – there’s poets, there’s cartoonists, there’s illustrators, there’s a lot of different types of creative people who contributed to this. And I’m sort of curious to see what happens if all that stuff is put into conversation.”

From the reaction of the First Friday crowds, whose excited chatter kept a steady background beat echoing across the small space, it seems that Emmons achieved the purpose behind the Refugee Reading Room. As individuals walked away with piles of souvenirs cradled in their arms, it became clear that the conversation would continue beyond the walls of Space 1026, breaking the fourth wall between a gallery and the outside world.

In a sense, Refugee Reading Room is the story of what would happen to a library without walls, plopped casually in the middle of a city street. It offers yet another context in which to view a “library” – as a forum-like space where ideas and individuals can freely come together.

Sandy Kim, Muddy Smoke

My favorite piece of the night was San Franciscan Sandy Kim’s photograph “Muddy Smoke,” a sort of nostalgic, dirty image of friendship and youth. The photo is of two friends, both with matted down hair and covered in mud, a young woman breathing smoke into a young man’s mouth. Much like “Muddy Smoke,” the majority of Kim’s photographs in this exhibit focus around her own life, capturing images of the people and places that inhabit it. Many of the images are of young adults, smoking, hanging out, and grinning, and the images are light-hearted. Compared to Nan Goldin’s photographs of people hanging out, Kim’s photographs seem more tasteful, youthful, and fun. There is still that same grunge, but not the danger that Goldin’s work evokes. Kim’s photographs capture friends and portray them as such; these are people you want to hang out with.

Logan White, Untitled 8

Macon, Ga., photographer Logan White, on the contrary, gives us photographs that are deliberately erotic. The collection “Bad Manor” is filled with masochistic images that often resemble porn shots, as in the example of a woman being hit just so by the light shining through a large window. as she crawls on her hands and knees in an old Victorian mansion. White’s image “Untitled 8” captures this same woman through leaves and plant-life, standing tall, barely dressed. Some of the photographs look like American Apparel ads, displaying images of scantily clad women in overly sexual positions. The images are filled with smoke, lace, and lingerie but still have a commercial look to them. They are played out and fail to amuse, and even more fail to shock.

While I was not a huge fan of all the photographs on display at Space 1026, a visit to each of the photographers’ websites allowed me to see a wider range of the work these two ladies have available. Their photographs are at times raw, other times innocent, and occasionally they meet somewhere in between. The show runs until October 29th and is worth a quick peek if in the area.