Dan Schein, Inconsequential Times in Snowersville, oil on canvas

The paintings here are lively, and the subject matter and paint applications vary so much that you’d be hard-pressed to pinpoint a “Tyler” style among them.

Dan Schein’s oil paintings are mock-heroic cartoons, and his large, drippy brush strokes give off a dreamlike ambiance. Schein’s narratives don’t add up to a coherent story—or even an incoherent story—but there’s plenty of room for the viewers to come up with their own.

Stuart Lorimer, The Suck, oil on linen

Stuart Lorimer’s oil paintings likewise allude to some kind of story but don’t quite get there. In fact, Lorimer, one of the five student organizers of the show, told me he once painted narrative works with so much content he began to question just what he was doing and why. Now, in an opposite extreme, he paints works like “The Suck” and “After the Dance,” which depict a carefully abstract shape in a color field—something that looks like a religious icon from Mars.

Ash Ferlito Tell Me What to Do, oil on canvas

Emily Davidson, Shipwreck, oil on linen

Ash Ferlito’s oil on canvas, “Tell Me What to Do,” a rotary telephone floating in a sea of black, is also iconic. Emily Davidson’s lovely and surreal “Shipwreck,” is especially striking: a tiny piece depicts improbably gorgeous rubble in an urban environment.  Davidson is another one of the show’s student-organizers.

right front-Giles Hefferan, The Gates of Horn and Ivory, foam core and acrylic; middle - Tim Rusterholz The Vision of Constantine, styrofoam and wood; rear left-Leslie Friedman, Sukkot Ramp, serigraph on linoleum tile, wood drywall; rear center-Matt Ziemke, Stepping Down and Constructing a Need for Redundancy, ceramic and mixed

Among the objects on display, Giles Hefferan’s “The Gates of Horn and Ivory” is the standout. Of course, it helps that the white foam core tower almost reaches the ceiling and that at its top is a tiny, well-lit city under glass (it’s a blue-tinged Emerald City). Tim Rusterholz’s virtuosic “The Vision of Constantine” weds a classically styled horse head of pink foam insulation with a rocking-horse bottom to suggest the emperor at play. Also playful is Leslie Friedman’s “Sukkot Ramp,” a hand-serigraphed path of linoleum tiles that runs up what looks to be a skateboard ramp on one wall and dead-ends after a hairpin turn in a wall without a ramp. Why she created a suicidal Jewish holiday skateboard ramp is something I couldn’t figure out. Matt Ziemke’s exaggerated ceramic drip is a great pop art moment somewhat confused by the wood constructions in the mixed-media installation that surrounds it.

Matt Kalasky, Addresses (our last symposium trailer) digital video, 4.58 min.

Of course, no show is complete without video and digital works. And of those entries, Matt Kalasky’s video “Addresses (our last symposium trailer)” is a nice wry package. The artist sits at a desk reading from a script as if he’s the president in a disaster film addressing the world via television, bidding a final farewell before a looming apocalypse. The piece ends with a musical clip from a Beatles song slowed down to a dirge.

Emily Rooney, Single for the Night, Brooklyn queers dance to Lil Wayne, 5 min and 38 sec

Nearby, Emily Rooney’s crotch-focused, black-and-white video “Single for the Night, Brooklyn queers dance to Lil Wayne” could have broken the monotony of seeing one crotch after another (they’re all clothed) if the video showed an occasional face.

David King, Plastic Palin/Plastic Marx animation

And David King’s animation “Plastic Palin/Plastic Marx” needs more Marx and less Palin to balance its message that all idealogues are one in the same. As it is, Palin dominates. Who wants to look at or think about that?

The Tyler students, who fundraised in order to produce this show from start to finish, have done a great job of filling the space with works big and small. Look for solo shows by each of the graduating MFAs beginning March 16 at Tyler’s Temple Gallery.  Schedule of those shows here.

Through March 13. Reception: Thurs., March 10, 6-9pm. Ice Box Project Space and Grey Area, 
Crane Arts, 1400 N. American St. cranearts.com

Read this at Philadelphia Weekly.  More photos at flickr.

Jessica Herzfeld, dirty limerick giveaway at Pafa's BFA and Certificate show.

PAFA BFA/Certificate — Jessica Herzfeld’s giveaway of a hand-colored zerox cartoon (click to read the limerick) was a high point in a show that could have used more energy and wildness.

Itsuki Ogihara, Islamic in White. Ogihara often uses the Minimalist strategy of multiples, but stretches the concept, here, to wallpaper, print, and decoration, just for starters.

PAFA BFA/Certificate — We paid Itsuki Ogihara a visit at her PAFA studio last January and the Japanese artist impressed with her street performance piece (she had used a stencil of cars and trucks in a line to create a pattern on the grimy walls under the Market St. bridge. What she did was wash the walls through the stencils creating a whitish pattern of cars and trucks on the very dark walls). A mural by subtraction, we thought–how clever! Mural Arts should hire her. Ogihara’s a materials girl and her piece in the PAFA show was a nice stencil of joint compound on two book-ended walls that was a stealth charmer. It reminded us of Islamic grid patterns and because it was white on white and book-like, it referenced books with exquisite content like the Koran, the Bible, or illuminated manuscripts.

Manya Scheps, holding her Poached Pack book at Penn's BFA show.

Penn BFA show — Manya Scheps met us at her show to step us through her imaginary creation, the Poached Pack. PP is a fictitious collective. The young artist, who belongs to PP is also a PIFAS collective member (a real collective) and she told us she’s not poking fun but studying the phenomenon of young artists hanging out, doing stuff like organizing shows, having openings, making zines. For her piece, Scheps aka PP organized a real group show of Philadelphia artists. She also produced a book/zine about the PP, a website for them and a video with a faux interview of one of the members. The art show within the art show was actually pretty good and the whole thing is a pretty perfect project for the times.

Nicholas Salvatore's installation at the Penn BFA show.

Penn BFA show — Nicholas Salvatore’s self portrait piece– an array of me-me-me videos around a dentist’s chair — plays with the pleasure, torture and mania of self-revelation in our digital age.

Cecelia Post, You Made Me, video, at Penn MFA show.

Cecelia Post, infrared video of mother possum with baby on its back foraging at night for food.

Penn MFA show — Cecelia Post’s videos are dreamy explorations about the self in the world. Above she is sewing what looks to be a life-sized doll that sits on her body and becomes one with her, in effect creating a new self. Her other video of a possum and baby possum rummaging for food at night captivated not only for its color and its nocturanal voyeurism but also for its evocation of mothers and offspring in general (we speak here as mothers with offspring).

Kurt Freyer's video at the Penn MFA show.

Penn MFA show — Kurt Freyer’s video mixes psychedelia, surrealism, and dream narrative about “Them” and “Us” for something spooky, riveting in parts, and peculiarly wonderful. The crude shed he built to watch the piece in was a claustrophobia chamber that went very well with the paranoia on the screen.

Nicolas McMahon does a star turn in front of his own camera, as a phone-sex provider

Penn MFA show–Posing as a variety of societal rejects and otherwise forlorn or beset characters, Nicolas McMahon stars in his own videos and photos. It’s not a pretty picture. He undercuts the stereotypes we see daily in the media–the poor emphysema victim, the sexy phone-sex purveyor. We gave McMahon a shout-out for outstanding work a year ago, (in the small student photography show accompanying the Through You exhibit at Penn), and we’re still shouting.

Elizabeth Hoy's construction suggests a makeshift survivalism.

Penn MFA show–Elizabeth Hoy’s decaying wall is the metaphor for the whole world and the people in it going to hell in a hand basket. Creaky, crumbly, rickety, leaky, slapdash and makeshift, it looks like urban survivalism to us. Move over. We need to get under that shed, too.

Angel O, Adam: 19 years in utero; the video is situated in an installation that's much like a doctor's waiting room, with gruesome pamphlets for deperate patients. The video loop is about 11 minutes.

Moore BFA show–The big news at Moore is video. Of the two that knocked our socks off, one comes out of the new photography and digital arts department, which is graduating its first group of students. The other, from Angel O, comes out of 2-D fine arts. In Angel O’s Adam: 19 years in utero, the artist plays all the roles, from the baby to the mom to the father, and each of them is horrifying at some level. The scenario of permanent pregnancy and permanent fetal dependency seems perfect for this day of the real-life OctaMom.

Moore BFA show–Megan Jensen’s video, I Live Here, from the photography and digi arts program, uses digi wizardry to cast a loving, yet skeptical, eye on home and on the suburbs, with pop-up hills and dales and houses and signs. The video hits its stride immediately after the first few interior scenes. We get a terrific sense of space and rhythm as we tour the real and the not-so-real Our Town — the ideal delivered with some gentle, questioning commentary. You can catch it here on YouTube.

Moore BFA show–Kelsey Costello (image in introductory post), using humble, low-tech clay and paint, imbues buildings with warm feelings for places from her past. The yearning for a remembered place is palpable.

All three of these Moore artists made us think of the rush of college students returning home instead of setting out on their own, thanks to a shaky economy and a really scary world out there.

Mike Trefehn's installation in his Tyler MFA show. Detail.

Mike Trefehn in front of his word wall in his history museum-ish installation.

Tyler MFA show — Mike Trefehn’s installation looked like something out of a small historical society museum. The artist is mining his family, studying the town his German grandparents settled in and in one case literally walking the perimeter of the town to feel it in his bones. Part performance, part narrative about immigration, work, social class, and all rumination about his own place in the world, Trefehn’s piece actually transforms the currently rampant phenomenon of navel-gazing into something serious and forward-moving.

Nick Barbee, detail from his Tyler MFA show. Pocahantas in the foreground and General Robert E. Lee and his horse in the back.

Tyler MFA — Nick Barbee charmed us with his painted clay figurines that were cruder than kitsch gift shop souvenirs but treading on the same nostalgia for history territory. Barbee’s questioning what heroism is really all about and like Trefehn, Barbee is mining his own past. He’s a Virginia native and all the material in his show was about Virginia. The artist inserted himself into the tabletop arrays of Pochahantas, Gen. Robert E. Lee, John Smith, Mr. Bojangles, Arthur Ashe and the rest by placing painted rainbows, lumpy white clouds and images of himself throughout. He explained that he’s always loved rainbows and clouds and that as a Virginian, he belonged on the table too. Like we say, charming.

An Erin Riley weaving; she also dyes her own yarns.

Erin Riley, from her series of car weavings

Tyler MFA — Erin Riley, whose BFA is from Mass Art, emailed us in early winter to tell us about her work–hand-woven tapestries of cars and car crashes. We looked, we liked and we scheduled a studio visit. We loved the costumed little girl in front of her family car–a childhood that Riley’s own childhood didn’t quite measure up to: “A lot of people died in drunk driving accidents in my life. …I always joke if I don’t make it, I could always sleep in my work, or use it to stay warm. I’ll be fine.”

James Zeske, view of his installation Nomad

University of Delaware MFA — James Zeske, in his Nomad installation, crocheted strips and strung them vertically to frame the walls of his temporary campsite, and he recycled molded styrofoam packing material to deliver a touch of home– niches hung on the wall. The shifts in scale and materials are surprising–a trophy deer head sculpture (I’m not sure if it was plaster or styrofoam) is miniature and unabashedly crude. A sentimental figurine looks store-bought, but the music come out of the fiddle is a small abstract sculpture of lightening-bolt-like pieces. (It’s not easy for an MFA program in Delaware to catch someone’s eye. But here it is, at the Crane, shouldering its way in. This alone is worthy of notice). If Elizabeth Hoy and Penn are urban survivalism, Zesko and Delaware are her deep-woods counterpart.

There was low energy everywhere, almost.

University of Pennsylvania MFA show at the Icebox. Channeling the underbelly.

Students seemed obsessed with hearth and home–looking for safety from the disaster around them. Eco disaster and urban deterioration were all over the place, channeling the apocalypse and implosion of life as we know it. The relief came in dark humor, and anti-consumerist themes.

Body imagery was all over the place–it was about not feeling well, not looking good, feeling wounded, feeling threatened, feeling absurd. Architecture is crumbling–we saw a lot of beautiful decay. None of these are new themes or strategies, but they do seem to be obsessions permeating the work we saw.

Humor appears! Tyler MFA show, piece by Dustin Campbell. The artist as Sisyphus.

We saw tracks of Web 3.0 all-about-me art all over the place, with the artists featured as the stars of their own videos and photographs. But it’s depressed–the youthful outpourings of Facebook and webcams and blogorrhea. Some of it, although self-focused, still managed to say something big. Some of it, not.

Craftsmanship was off the charts both ways–fabulously crafted and fabulously anti-craft. There were good things in both extremes.

Kelsey Costello's clay buildings are a mix of imagination and memory--at Moore College.

Moore College went high on craft. Penn MFA videos were awesome–when they were functioning. The Penn BFA videos were fine the day we came. Tyler MFAs looked fantastico in their new space, which lent an aura of professionalism and razzle-dazzle that some of the other shows didn’t have. PAFA’s show was more conservative than last year’s show and was actually more conservative than the other college shows we saw, reflecting its more conservative tradition with the focus on still life, figures and landscapes–although we did notice a giveaway–a xeroxed cartoon drawing with a dirty limerick–that broke the mold.

We noticed only one image of Obama–as a superhero–we expected more. We also saw a video and a facsimile of a doctor’s waiting room, touching on issues about our health-care system that we’re all thinking about right now. Boy, was this dark. And all in all, there was not a lot of joy passing around these shows. The kids may not be talking about the economy, but they do seem to be affected by it.

As with everything there’s an exception — PAFA‘s student show. That’s been a very public affair for 107 years. PAFA, which is expert at this by now and has always marketed the event as a way for collectors to get in on the ground floor with up and comers, just announced that they had record sales for the 2008 student show — 413 works of student art sold for a total of $355,557! Happily, students get 80% of the sales price and PAFA takes 20% (which it plows back into next year’s show).

Libby told you about the Penn MFA show at the Icebox and the PAFA MFA show and Slought and more in her post. I’m going to touch on the Tyler MFA show (also at the Icebox) and the PAFA certificate show and talk about the Penn show’s catalog.

OVERALL

Previous years the zeitgeist was easier to read. One year, hovel-making with cardboard construction seemed to be all over the place. This year, cardboard’s gone, wallpaper is in, painters are still painting abstract or figuratively and sculptors are making finely-crafted figurative things or installations made from assembled multiples (or sometimes assemblages from newspaper, sticks and clay.)  The human body with all its diseases, psychological distresses and vulnerabilities is a big worry. This has been the case for years now.  And no surprise at our time of war and recession where horizons seem closed and the future uncertain.

Two of the shows I saw (Penn MFA and Tyler MFA) were at the Icebox — a terrific space for a show. There’s something about the big pristine windowless space that elevates just about everything. And the Grey Area (next to the Icebox in the Crane) has wonderful light coming in the big warehouse windows so sculpture looks especially good there.

Tyler’s Curated MFA show “semi”
April 30-May 11
Icebox

Here’s a curated MFA show that puzzled me. There’s a curator, Elizabeth Grady, a well-respected gallerist and curator from New York and she wrote an essay. (Grady, by the way, curated the wonderful show Parts to the Whole at Vox Populi a few years back. — see posts here and here. )

I thought the show, “semi,” was the MFA thesis show but then saw that not all the graduates were included. Since when are we excluding some of the graduates from the MFA thesis show, I wondered. So after hunting around a bit on the tyler grads blog and piecing it together (it is nowhere clearly stated) I figured out that this show was indeed not the thesis show but was just a curated show at this time of year for Tyler MFA students.  Now it happens that of the 15 students in the show, 12 are 2008 MFA graduates.  So it’s almost a thesis show and I’m just going to not say another word about it except that 41 students applied to be in it and the 26 young artists who were rejected got an early taste of the real world. 

In between the Tyler groundbreaking ceremony last Friday at 11 and a meeting at 2 pm with Pepon Osorio at the Lighthouse to see his Badge of Honor installation (highly recommended! — see my flickr set, and watch for a post soon) I ran into Old City and stopped in to Temple Gallery to see the MFA shows. I had gotten a heads’ up on one of them, from Corey Antis, a Vox Populi member who wrote us about his show. We’ve covered his Vox shows on artblog. The other MFA show artist — who was in the gallery when I stopped by — is Robert Geyer, a glass artist who also runs the gallery the Barbershop out of his house.

Geyer, standing with his work, around 6 hours before the show’s opening, when I stopped in.

Geyer was fixing a broken piece in his show and working hard to get it done before the opening reception at 6 pm. Geyer’s show involved found glass, specifically the faceted glass covers from fluorescent light fixtures, and he told me that someone had backed into a big circular wall piece (by accident) and the glass cracked. Geyer’s a glass major so he went and cut another big circle of glass and was getting ready to replace the broken piece. The glass is attached to some kind of motor that causes it to spin. Sounds great but I couldn’t wait to see the finished work so we will all have to imagine it.

Meanwhile, the freestanding glass sculpture that looks like a crystal mountain had great appeal. Geyer said that while normal glass reflects light, the faceted glass absorbs it and the object seems to contain light. He said the piece looked great at night. I thought it looked pretty great during the day.

Corey Antis, from his show, the Parallax View

In the back room, Antis’s show, the Parallax View was a series of large works on paper (paintings I believe) that were architectural and while some felt a little like architectural renderings some defied ideas of real space and seemed to be false spaces, things that would not be walked into under any circumstances.

Corey Antis

I note here that this is the second show I’ve seen with a title referring to a 1970s movie thriller. The Parallax View (1974) is a conspiracy movie with political overtones. It’s about a political assissination and the opening scene has been done up to resemble the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968. The other paranoid-conspiracy-movie exhibit was, of course, Logan’s Run, curated by Damian Weinkrantz, based on the movie Logan’s Run, 1976, which tells of a society where those older than age 30 are killed.

More photos at flickr.