Richard Campbell, Horses are Pretty, 2008 6 minute short film based on illustrated story.

For all that, the show is full of some wonderful moments by non-country artists looking toward the west and south and piney woods as well as country artists gazing at the culture in which they find themselves immersed.

My favorite videos were Janine Harkleroad’s The Duel and Richard Campbell’s Horses are Pretty.

Janine Harkleroad, The Duel. stop motion video, Annie Oakley's feet and skirt are visible right.

Harkleroad’s The Duel is a shoot-out between two life-size cut-out props, one representing Annie Oakley and one The Cowboy. The competition has feminist Annie shoot off her mouth as well as her piece, amid a quirky stage set that includes quilted backdrops and a mix of drawings and fabrics. Fun to look at, fun to listen to. Plus the story goes contemporary and domestic in its war between the sexes.

A nice contrast is Campbell’s My Little Pony porno. Betty the Nurse wears a Pony-pink wig and an enormous swatch of Pony-pink pubic hair at the base of her belly and at times not much else, in a send-up that plays with pre-teen girls’ obsession with real studly steeds and grown boy sex fantasies of nurses in and out of uniform. Yet somehow the end product is not so much dirty as funny and pleasantly odd.

Mel Chin, Rough Rider, 2001 barbed wire, steel

Marshall Harris, Saddle Sketch #1, detail, 2011 graphite on mylar

Speaking of steeds, the show saddles up twice–with Mel Chin’s Rough Rider, a saddle beautifully crafted of barbed wire and steel (ouch; for cowpokes no doubt), and with Marshall Harris’ tour-de-force graphite on mylar drawing, Saddle Sketch, notable for turning the leather embossing into a romantic Wild West landscape. The contrast between the two is worth some thinking.

Suki Anderson Mr. Nibbles Likes to Wear Hats, 2011, 9 digital photographic metallic prints; these are maybe 8 inches each.

Joseph Girandola, Horse Sense (Father and Son), 2008 duct tape on canvas; 81.5 x 89.5 inches

In Philadelphia artist Joe Girandola’s duct-tape on canvas portrait of a horse watching a televised horse race, the monumental beast of a horse is a humanized and sad creature, tamed in the stable. And humanized animals sporting ridiculous hat fashions in Suki Anderson’s series Mr. Nibbles Likes to Wear Hats goes even further off the beaten path. The nine digital images are amusing, a la poodles in raincoats, but far less conventional and just a little creepy with suggestions of lives of enslavement and bondage for our four-footed friends.

C. Grant Cox, Tense Negotiations

For another fashion statement and then some, C. Grant Cox’s Tense Negotiations is a gizmo with stomping cowboy boots, disembodied but still dancing their way in (or out) of the Long Branch Saloon and their not drunk on sarsparilla. It delights at the same time that it iconifies something already iconic–all those heroic and villainous characters who live and die in their boots in a century of Hollywood oaters. This is a show with lots of boots and lots and lots of gunfights.

Jeffrey Stockbridge, Country, 2011

The only shot in a photo by Philadelphia photographer Jeffrey Stockbridge is from a syringe, suggesting a drug-infused slow death in contemporary rural life. The show does get beyond the conventions of cowboys, and spends a little time on the farm and in the woods, North and South. I loved the Matthew Weddington’s conceptual road sign, too.

Matthew Weddington, Landmark, 2003, Cibachrome print

The show has barns, a still, rope, and other country conventions to poke. I’m not so sure the show achieves a new definition of what “country” means, but it’s having an awfully good time playing with the old definitions, and moving the art conversation out of New York.

The show’s 22 artists come from around the country, and Delaware Center for Contemporary Art Curator Maiza Hixson said she hopes to travel the show some more. For now, it opened in Louisville, and came here. The next venue is still in the planning stage. This is DCCA’s first ever “satellite” show, a DCCA-curated show especially for off-site exhibition.

Young Country
Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery
333 S. Broad Street
to July 29
Monday – Thursday: 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Friday: 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.

Matthew Higgs

“It was the greatest experience of my life,” he said of one of the JD performances he attended. “I knew it was historic.” At the time he was publishing a music fanzine, Photophobia. These days, he himself is the subject of an internet fanzine, The Matthew Higgs Society, based in Philadelphia.

Higgs was speaking to a crowded room at the University of the Arts Wednesday, July 6, the talk a part of a series of summer art talks for the MFA program. Roberta and I were both there to hear Higgs and also to attend the opening of the student show, which we had juried.

The 46-year-old curator, artist, write and publisher spoke so quickly in his English accent that the room was utterly silent with people straining to catch what he was saying. Part of what he said was that he learned was about the importance of community–from how Joy Division shared its royalties among all its members and how they plowed the income back into their club.

Two years later, Higgs became equally passionate about art. At 16, “My interest in art surpassed my interest in music.” His desire to know ever more about whatever he was curious about came through as a fierce intelligence during the talk.

At art school in Newcastle, he had political ideas that seeped into his art practice–when he realized that he could only go so far in art all by himself. “It was clear to me from day one that I wasn’t the most interesting artist in my class.” So he adopted collaboration and community as his way of coping.

Here he dropped a name. New York gallery owner Gavin Brown was in his class. Higgs continued to drop names from his generation in the course of the talk–Jeremy Deller, Elizabeth Peyton. At 22 in London, in an art scene he termed moribund, he saw new artists starting to make things happen for themselves. “For me it was just interesting to be putting art into the world.” So he published about 60 quirky, hand-assembled book/objects he created with artists, including Deller, Peyton and Martin Creed. One he singled out in the talk was Stewart Home’s Cunt Lickers Anonymous, in which Home outed as straight the fey duo artists Gilbert and George.

Jeremy Deller's Valentine's Day message, part of Higgs' project to put art in a public context.

He submitted messages by fellow artists into the Valentine’s Day personals in the newspapers. Deller’s personal (above) was lyrics from a song by the Smiths, offbeat out of the song’s context. Higgs called it an “attempt to make work in the public domain.” Both the books projects and the Valentines personals he paid for out of his own pocket, while working as an administrative assistant in a London ad agency. (He noted at this point in the talk that he has curated a Jeremy Deller show coming up at Hayward Gallery (London) next year.

Higgs made his mark curating shows that demonstrated the YBAs weren’t the only game in town–an almost political sort of thing breaking up the Saatchi cartel-approach to art. (Higgs has curated more than 100 shows all in all).

After the London ICA he moved to San Francisco as curator of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art at California College of Arts and Crafts where among other things he placed art in non-art places like bulletin boards in hallways, and showed work that played with language, both persistent themes in his career. And since moving on to White Columns, he said he has redefined what the space is doing–tons of shows, publishing a fanzine every couple of months (another example of consistent interests through the years), and releasing records on occasion. “The idea is to be idiosyncratic,” he said, now that so many other spaces are serving as incubators for new talent, which was White Columns’ original defining role.

The line dancers at Young Country show. The horse painting (right rear) is really made of tape--by Joe Girandola.

Hixson, who just stepped into the role of curator at DCCA, told us at the opening that she quite by accident got into a conversation with a bartender who said he was part of a line-dance group, and so a deal was struck. The line dancers, with their upbeat music, stomping and hand-clapping, turned the art party into a party party. The group was terrific.  We’d love to tell you more about the exhibit but with the crush of flesh, the dancing, and our desire to hob-nob we didn’t absorb the art.  We’ll have to go back.

Young Country curator Maiza Hixson getting her own country on at the opening

Meanwhile, in Hamilton Hall across Broad Street, people were celebrating Cosmic Bodies, an MFA show we juried.  We celebrated too–the show looks great!  Before both openings, we were part of a full auditorium of eager listeners for White Columns‘ Director Matthew Higgs, who speed-talked his way through a slide show about his career (pretty darned interesting).

Erika Baca (l) and Lindsey Baker at the Cosmic Bodies party

With all these great confluences of talent it seems essential to point out that Joe Girandola is the cosmic force behind it all. He brokered the deal to have the show at Rosenwald-Wolf, which is otherwise closed during July.  And as the MFA program director, he organized the Food For Thought lecture series (with Matthew Higgs and others) and was the impetus behind the juried MFA exhibit.

Here’s our jurors’ statement about Cosmic Bodies, plus some pictures:

Erika Baca morphs himself with Gary Coleman, fandom with clowndom

Orbs and bodies are age-old artistic motifs. Their depictions have been used to trigger narratives about the human place in the cosmos, and to raise issues about time, connectivity, life cycles and our earthly realm’s place in the universe. Cosmic Bodies raises these human and cosmic issues, sometimes with humor and other times with dead seriousness.

Kristine Strawser's wood-carved clean-up woman with glow sticks

Figurative works by Sarah Nguyen, Kris Strawser and Erika Baca tease personal and universal meaning from imagery that’s both old and new. Nguyen’s nude child in a dark, threatening interior portends a coming trouble. The image is a haunting reminder of human vulnerability. Strawser’s mini 3D superhero stands ready to face the terror of the deep blue night with only a bunch of glowsticks at her command. Erika Baca’s Warhol-esque grid of Gary Coleman faces with sardine can mouths is funny at the same time that it’s full of sadness for this child actor and perhaps for humans everywhere. We all face death by playing the clown, and face the pitfalls of life, flaming out early and having no control over what our bodies and our circumstances do to us.

Lindsay Baker, still from her Sad Club series of videos, a mashup of lachrymose singing, real music videos and drawings

Speaking of sad, Lindsey Baker’s Sad Club videos grasp pop culture by the throat and wrestle with the annoying side of overheated emotions in music videos.

Janine Hughes' orbs overwhelmed the front gallery space with the scent of cotton candy

Gina Herrera's piece infused the back gallery with the scent of ground coffee and coffee dripped all the way down the wall

Harry Hukkinen's cast concrete pieces channel time passes and orbital phases

Orbs in the sculptural installations of Gina Herrera, Janine Hughes and Harry Hukkinen mark time’s passage and elicit thoughts of connectivity. Hughes and Herrera use sensual raw materials (cotton candy; coffee grounds) that trigger Proust-ian journeys into personal experience.

Virginia McKinney's biomorphic interconnectedness in clay

Virginia McKinney’s biomorphic forms, too, are connected — physically to each other and metaphorically to biology–macro and micro. All these connectivities are temporary and all mimic human life’s rhythms and bespeak the cycles of life, death and rebirth.

Colin O'Neill, whose art work is pictured at the end of the post.

The gallery is a few blocks north of the Chinatown gallery zone, at 12th and Spring Garden. You probably have noticed the building in passing.  It looks like a mausoleum and has the world “Finney & Son” carved into the marble facade; it used to be a show room for grave markers. PhilaMOCA opened in October.

Nicholas Maimone showed his controversial portrait of Carpenter's Union chief Ed Coryell Sr.

We could not have been happier with how our own students’ work looked on Friday, opening night. Pretty darned professional if you ask us! And we don’t think we’re exaggerating or being kind here.

Stephen F. James showed a conceptual sound sculpture

Besides, they are a good-looking crew, so we thought we’d share some pix of some of them as well as of some of their art work.

Tyler Held and Brittany Papale

Tyler Held's pimped out stove

Pavia Burroughs' pink piggy chair

Colin O'Neill, Trans Tools. The trompe l'oeil tools are made of plaster.

Today is the last day of the show.  Congratulations to all!  And more pictures at Roberta’s flickr and Libby’s flickr.

Tiago Carneiro da Cunha working on Mudman at University of the Arts

The artist’s residency for the internationally recognized artist was arranged with the help of his hosts, contemporary art collectors Mari and Peter Shaw. He is not the first international artist the couple has brought to Philadelphia and the University of the Arts, providing a chance for students, faculty and the visiting artist to have an exchange.

Tiago Carneiro da Cunha, alegoria, alegoria, 2009 faiança policromada / polichrome faience 12 (a) x 35 x 35 cms, in part inspired by the song Alegria, alegria. and a cartoon of an art critic as a barking leashed dog

Tiago is far from his family. His wife, he says, has “a baby bump”–the couple’s first is due in January (it’s a girl)! When I visit him he has just returned from a quick trip home, and seems a little sad that he’s missing this experience with his wife. He seems a little startled by the changes in her belly, even though they have been staying in touch via Skype (a nice lesson in the differences between immediate and mediated, 2-D and 3-D).

Tiago Carneiro da Cunha's skull ashtray includes a rest for the cigarette or cigar; smoke comes out the note and eye cavities when a cigarette is resting there.

At 34,  Tiago is full of charm, energy and enthusiasm. He apologizes for the small amount of work in the studio. Besides the figure, there are a couple of ultra-lumpy skull ashtrays with drippy glazes, part of a larger series with no two exactly alike. When I ask what they fetch at his gallery, he seems almost apologetic when he says $2,000. “They are either an expensive ashtray or a reasonably priced sculpture.”

Tiago Carnerio da Cunha, antropomorfismo nietzschiano coçando, 2009 faiança policromada / polichrome faience 30 x 31 x 40 cms; the philosopher is scratching his balls and not getting much done

His work, inspired by kitsch-y objects, cartoons, fables and movies from Brazil, fits snugly in what’s going on in U.S. and international art, and also Philadelphia art–Jeff Koons, Urs Fischer, Paul Swenbeck.

Tiago’s taste in easy listening as he works in the studio reflects his engagement in popular culture. ” I’ve been watching House Husbands of Hollywood, a horror movie, the newest episode of South Park. I’m really trashy in my tastes.”

generalidade / generality 2009 faiança policromada / polichrome faience 29 x 25 x 23 cms

That same relish for the tacky comes through in the work, but, Tiago’s work, like the artist himself, has a boyish sweetness and playfulness as he mucks about with materials and ideas and culture. It’s tacky as thoughtful commentary on the themes of death, corruption, greed, waste and the human comedy.

Tiago Carneiro da Cunha, latinoamericano pensante verde e amarelo / green yellow latinamerican thinking, 2004

Among the figurines that have inspired Tiago’s work are a sleepy Mexican drowsing under a giant sombrero, a masturbating monkey, surf boards and diamonds. “They are all sort of cliches, they are all sort of ready mades usually involving sex.” He tells me about another popular figurine in Brazil–a caped priest with a mechanical erection–one of the inspirations for his Generality caped military man.

Tiago Carneiro da Cunha, pedinte pequeno / small beggar 2009 faiança policromada / polichrome faience 21 x 21 x 24 cm

Saccharine beggars is another favorite theme. “…The beggar is a Brazilian traditional figure, portraying misery at the same time that it becomes an opportunistic cliche [i.e. a cheap figure for sale]. I wanted to make it even more pathetic and sarcastic. It’s a reaction to seeing the real beggars on the streets in Brazil.  There’s emotion there. I wanted to do something with that .”

caveira realista roxo perolado 2004 resina de poliester moldada, polida a mão / cast poliester resin, hand-polished 13 x 12 x 20 cms edição variada de 7 mais P.A. / edition variee of 7 plus A.P. coleção privada / private collection

His work has veered from slick, faceted objects cast in epoxy to chunky clay objects heavily imprinted with exaggerated thumb impressions and coated with drippy glazes. Tiago says the elegant facets on the epoxy pieces (which start as plaster) and the crude-looking fingerprints and the exaggerated lines in the clay work are all one–a preoccupation with gesture. “I think the subject matter is an excuse,” he said. “They are about preserving values more linked to drawing. …The facets and the thumb prints are the same thing, defining planes and spaces. I wanted to rescue drawing. I started drawing as a teenager. …With the resin I’m reducing the gesture to something shiny.” He switched to epoxy when he realized his folded paper sculptures were easily damaged.

Tiago Carneiro da Cunha, meu 2001 rosa bebê / baby pink my 2001, 2004 resina de poliester moldada, polida a mão / cast poliester resin, hand-polished 50 x 22 x 35 cms edição variada de 7 mais P.A. / edition variee of 7 plus A.P. coleção privada / private collection

Here’s a little more of our conversation:

L. Tell me about your name?
T. My name is from my father’s side of the family, which comes from the Northeast side of the country. Historically, they are famous slave ones and abolitionists in equal number. My mother is a Hungarian Jew. She was born in Portugal but migrated to Brazil. I’m mixed. I’m Jewish but I was baptized. My mother is a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. She has lived here for the past 20 or so years. So I’ve been in this country before. (His English is great).

Tiago Carneiro da Cunha, zumbi faiança policromada 23 x 30 x 27 cms

L. Has the U.S. changed since the last time you were here?
T. The general perception of the states by Americans themselves has matured. Americans no longer think that the U.S. is the center of the universe. That’s better.

L. Are you excited about the Olympics?
T. At first I was cynical. Brazil has a tradition of public officials stealing money. Huge pubic works in Brazil are started and then never finished. But when I went back, my friends were excited, and now I’m excited too.  International pressure for accountability is too great for the Olympics projects not to get done.

Tiago Carneiro da Cunha, esfinge amarela / yellow sphynx resina de poliester moldada, polida a mão / cast poliester resin, hand-polished 28 x 27 x 60 cm edição variada de 7 mais P.A. / edition variee of 7 plus A.P. coleção privada / private collection

L.Where do you live?
T. in Rio. We used to live in a bohemian area that was in the middle of slums. At night we heard grenades, anti-aircraft, machine guns. Now we live in Leme; it’s a community of 18,000 people who all work hard, but it’s dominated by a small gang of 18 to 15 youths. …An effort is being made now to institute community policing. People realized power could be taken back.

Tiago told me that his method of sculpting in clay horrifies the ceramics artists. “I start with a solid piece of clay and carve it. It’s not safe. It’s not the kosher way to do it. I create tunnels and other ways to hollow it out. I don’t think of myself as a sculptor, anyway. I always used domestic sized kilns, That’s how ceramics survived in Brazil. There’s not a ceramics market there to allow ceramics to be risky.”

Tiago Carneiro da Cunha, gargantua rex 2009 faiança / faience 42 x 43 x 38 cms

I asked him if he’s ever had a piece explode. Yes, he said. Will this one be okay? “I hope so. I think so.”

The photos in this post are all by permission of Tiago, taken from his website, which is a preformatted photo website hosted by SmugMug for $50 a year.

Postsscripts

Did the mudman sculpture survive the firing? I got the following notes from Tiago about it, now renamed the Philadelphia Experiment (tres Frankenstein).

1) 11/2/2009
i’ll be firing the mudman this week, which is my final week here in philly! it atually broke in half but the ceramics head technician here at uarts saved my life and helped me restore it. hopefully it will survive the kiln.

2) 11/5/2009
i’m coloring the big ‘mudman’ sculpture this afternoon… should be ready by tomorrow… i will definitely send u images as soon as it’s ready! by the way it’s called ‘the philadelphia experiment’: i thought that sounded like it had the right mix of b-horror references, hendrix, and what i was actually doing here…

Tiago Carneiro da Cunha, The Philadelphia Experiment, 2009

Layla Ali gave a talk a couple of weeks ago, part of the University of the Arts Food for Thought lecture series organized by the Summer MFA program. I’ve been thinking it over for this long because she’s a bit elusive.

Ali placed her work in the context of self-portraiture, part of her undergraduate practice at Williams College (BFA 1991). Of her early self portraits, she said she was trying to do them with Nat Turner’s vision, and that family memories of slavery are part of the baggage she brings to the table.

But even if you saw what Ali looks like–a slender, bespectacled, person who manages to mix diffidence with no nonesense–you still wouldn’t know who she is. And that’s her point about portraiture and self-portraiture. Self-portraits are filled with “lies and mistruths.” She added, “People’s expectation of a self-portrait is overwhelming to me.”

Tellingly enough, no one was allowed to take photographs at Ali’s talk. So I don’t have a shot of her. (But she kindly sent along the images afterwards that I am posting with these words.) The good news is, if you want to see what she looks like and get a better sense of her, you can go to Art:21.

Ali said she hit a turning point when she declared, No more self-portraits, a critical move made at Skowhegan. (Some other educational bona fides–she also has an MFA from Washington University, St. Louis, and was in the Whitney’s Independent Study Program after graduating Williams).

Laylah Ali, untitled, Greenheads Series, 2000

It’s not that Ali has really changed her subject matter. “I am interested in myself, my own body, my history,” she said. Those interests carry over into all her work, including the work for which she is best known, the Greenheads Series, in which teams of figures–caligraphic, flat, layed out like semaphores on her drawing paper–are all to be interpreted as her, to some degree. “I hated dodgeball; I still do,” she said as a way to explain where the series came from.

She offered a long list of what her work was about. Here are a few that I jotted down.

figures as an ever-changing alphabet
the body as a (bad) joke
rage meted out, controlled
scars
checking each other out
flatness as a barrier, a demarcation between worlds
utopia/dystopia

The list was longer.

I am sorry she didn’t send along one of the pre-Greenheads Series works, circular heads in a grid with tongues sticking out. The one she showed at the talk were different shades of brown in colored pencil, but she did them in other colors as well, like pink and green. She also did a 6 x 6-foot grid of portraits of the presidents which included quite the range of hair adornment.

Laylah Ali, untitled, 2005, gouache on paper paintings

The grid of round heads immediately reminded me of Ellen Gallagher and her grid of brown-skinned heads with gloppy hair; the presidents and their hair styles cemented that connection for me. But she’s not on Ali’s short list of influences. She mentioned comic books, Ida Applebroog, for how she broke up the canvas; Cindy Sherman, for her self-portraits with wigs; Sophie Calle (I missed what she selected as how Calle’s work influenced her, but the self-portraiture as autobiography and the idea of proving her own existence seem pretty relevant to me); and David Hammonds for his playfulness in handling big subject matter (she mentioned his piece that involved selling snowballs on the street).

In 1996, Ali added anemic bodies in superhero costumes to the round heads and thus the Greenheads Series began. She said they were “me and not me, ” and she’s interested in “that middle place” between individuals and types. She thinks of the clothes on her figures as costumes. (She mentioned this later in answer to my question about fashion.)

Laylah Ali, untitled, Greenheads Series, 2000

Over time, the Greenheads have become more covered up so less brown skin is showing, because people’s identification of the figures “had so much to do with racial identity.” It’s not that people were wrong so much as they couldn’t see beyond it to the larger truths in the work.

But of course, because Ali’s work is so much about how people identify others by looking at them, race is still the elephant in the room, at least in this culture. The thing about Ali’s work, though, is that she is all about how we look and how our appearance never gives a full portrait; nonetheless, it does serve as a form of communication between humans, with signals that lie.

Overwhelmingly, Ali implies stories behind what she puts on the paper. The stories are there to be puzzled over and searched out and imagined, but they are never spelled out. She’ll add a scar or a band-aid. You get to think about what the violence or injury might have been. And the relationships between the figures communicates tension and wariness, not just in the Greenheads Series, but in the drawings that she showed at the Morris Gallery earlier this year (see posts here and here). Her figures–their costumes, their injuries, their public face–expose identity at the same time that they hide identity.

Those later drawings, from the Typology Series, are looser than the gouaches. The tension of the figures projecting their identities is still there, but the tension of the actual way they were made was not. Ali spoke about how, using gouache, she was controlling color and the edges, to “move away from what my hand wanted to do.” The need to add a “filter or control something” was part of not just her message and thinking but part of her process. “Just because it feels good, doesn’t mean it’s worth anything.” Other people may not want to look at what you’re doing, even if you’re enjoying doing it. She later said, “I love to draw. Drawing to me is where it’s at.”

Keeping in mind she was talking to students, she talked a lot about her process. Regarding her book project for MoMA–a comic book, which she creating working with a computer technician using Adobe Illustrator, who based the images on Ali’s pencil drawings, Ali said the computer made it easier to make multiple figures. However, it was harder to make them quirky and varied on the computer. She said she worked on 20 paintings at once. And she did left-handed drawings for a while because she had tendonitis. To keep the precision, she used an eraser and a razor blade. She works at the kitchen table and listens to NPR, the BBC, and cuts things out of the New York Times. She said the smartest thing she had done was to always have a studio space. She also said she made the right decision in avoiding taking an administrative job.

Laylah Ali, untitled, 2005, gouache on paper paintings

A lot of what I do is searching and doubting,” she said. “Doubt and questioning is an important part of the practice.”

Taking on the go-go art market, she questioned the race to spectacle and scale that bowls over and shrinks the viewer. “I did do a billboard project for the Walker, but you’re driving by so fast it doesn’t matter,” she added with typical diffidence. She cited Australia (she met her husband there and he’s an Aussie) for more government support for younger artists, giving them the freedom to be more experimental in their careers. “Here you can switch to film if you’re a megastar,” she added.

At the end, she summed up about her work: “It’s kind of like meeting people. You guess what the story is just from the way he looks. It’s an impossible endeavor to read someone else just from what they present to you.”

A show of paintings and drawings of modest size at UArts Gallery 817 (upstairs from Rosenwald-Wolf) is definitely worth attention. The show called “Posture and Expression” was curated by artist Rob Matthews.

The title lets you know right off the bat that the show has some lessons to teach; it also lets you know that this show reflects some of Matthews’ own art-making concerns. It’s old-fashioned didacticism made me think of all the injunctions from my mother to sit up straight and stop frowning. I still slouch and I still frown. Can’t help it. But the artists in the show, all of whose names have appeared here numerous times, have learned their lesson well, and then reshaped the lesson to their own lights. In Matthews’ press notice, he wrote:

The exhibition was assembled to highlight Philadelphia artists that work with the figure but not necessarily in a traditional Philadelphia/Academy approach.

House Arrest, by Mark Shetabi

I liked almost every piece in the show, so picking a couple of pictures is hard; I put the whole suite of my photos of the show on Flickr.

Even though it’s not a human figure, I sure did like the fine figure cut by an ass in Matt Fisher’s Birch Bark Ass–a somewhat lost creature out of his own element in an endless expanse. I took the beast as a symbol for a human being.

House Arrest, by Mark Shetabi, brings the big world of international affairs and politics into the little gallery in a poignant image of a man whose life is on hold–but not his mind.

Healer #1, by Rob Matthews

Also in the exhibit are interesting works by Jane Irish (from the Operation RAW suite), Rebecca Westcott (also something you may have seen before), Susan Moore (she’s painting on acrylic gel medium in which beads are suspended, giving her a smaller, slicker version of the chunky oil stick marks she used in her enormous portraits), Norm Paris (continuing his Michael Jordan obsession with great drawing style), Sarah Roche (with a couple of oddly lit, eerie pieces), and Matthews himself (with a noir self-portrait with his wife in the midst of some questionable goings on that the title and her upturned hand put in the realm of religion).

The show has only 13 works, most pretty small, but they serve as a strong argument for how traditional technique can serve contemporary visions.