In Talk to Me, Joao Enxuto and Erica Love read to each other text messages supplied by the audience.

The high point–using text messages–was an interactive performance by Brooklyn-based artists Joao Enxuto and Erica Love, who collaborate under the name the original copy. In their performance Talk to Me, they play a couple reading text messages to each other, the texts supplied by the audience.

It was a dark and rainy weeknight, however, and the audience in AUX was small, less than 20 when I counted. But the audience was greater than the people in the room, thanks to another layer of technology streaming in and out of the UK. Alas, the audience was a little reluctant to interact, raising the level of tension as well as the discussion about lack of meaningful communication between Enxuto’s and Love’s characters.

What made Talk to Me so successful were the theatrics, the fourth wall broken not just via technology but via the actors…and the irony that communications technology had created a fourth wall of sorts between the two lovers in much the way that we have our noses in our cell phones when we ought to be talking to the person right in front of us. This work was thoughtful and engaging, making successful use of the technology but putting it in a human context with a will-they-won’t-they-? plot driving the action forward in time.

Bonnie Jones, a Maryland-based artist who uses text and music in her improvised and composed performances, projected a poem on a screen in rhythmic bursts of typing and “copied/pasted” text. The words and their presentation were a cosmic meditation on the desire to communicate and how technology mediates. I found myself thinking of the percussive, aggressive word art of Heavy Industries, but the mellow jazziness of Jones’ poem was quite different–more like a haiku than a Howl.

Matt Kalasky performing his short story about love in the internet age. Two Diet Cokes were his main prop.

The ecstasy was palpable in Matt Kalasky‘s performance/reading of a tale of two early Match.com web developers who find each other via their own tech-savvy device in what amounts to an e-epistolatory short story. Why, I wondered, did Kalasky’s persona down two cans of Diet Coke? Why was one of the lovers his mom? With ironic nostalgia for early internet culture, the story builds to its predictable climax after actual bits of computer code (fictional I presume) become part of the mating dance. Highly entertaining and a nice addition to the discussion of the role of technology in communication. Kalasky is a Philadelphia artist and writer, chief editor of The Nicola Midnight St. Claire.

Also worthwhile and layered with ideas was a political film by New York-based Rainer Ganahl featuring a copy of Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England… being kicked down the streets of a deserted English mill town fallen victim to economic and technological changes. Ganahl represented Austria in the Venice Biennale in 1999.

Skyping with London-based KIOSK after 2am, Greenwich Mean Time

The framework of the evening, however, was pure agony–an intercontinental, interactive Twitter feed at #nightwatch2012–arty and infertile. An equally arty performance by the Bristol (Engand)-based group the Collect, with a trite visual metaphor of a man untangling wires, also fell flat.

KIOSK’s trio of sleepy curators in England (it was past 2am GMT) participated with the AUX crowd in a post-performance discussion on Skype. One of them suggested the word agony to describe much of the evening’s experience. That helped break the ice.

The Twitter feed for #nightwatch2012 ran in the background throughout the performances.

For all the agony, though, I found the evening fruitful. It brought to mind tedious early art videos, and how the process of learning to take advantage of a new technology takes experimentation and time until a vocabulary of useful strategies and precedents get built.

Since AUX opened over the summer, there’s been a steady stream of performances and screenings there–a space for taking risks. In that light, the agony was to be expected and was not for everyone. The ecstasy–I’d return for more (although there’s not much continuity in what gets shown at AUX; every performance is an adventure).

Perhaps the most engaging, because of its accessible narrative edge and cartoonish style, is Guy Ben-Ari‘s mostly grizaille paintings. With a clunky awkwardness that is endearing and a surreal sensibility enhanced by the use of mirrors, windows, long corridors and the suggestion of endless interior space, the works feature characters, in pairs, (some may be twins, or friends, or because this is dream-like, a single person represented twice) who look at each other bemusedly, lovingly, anxiously, judgeingly or lustfully.

Guy Ben-Ari, a series of small paintings

Other things are twinned too, like a table with lamp and small standing picture frame that appears, double, in one of the works. There’s no action to speak of except looking, which gives a slight sense of unease. If there is a punchline — and there isn’t — these would be pretty perfect on the cover of the New Yorker. As it is, they’re a good look and bespeak a quest to understand the nature of relationships and self.

Catharine Maloney, a photo-sculptural work that evokes a class or team picture

Wilmington artist Catharine Maloney‘s series of photo-collages and photo-constructions also seem to be looking — at gender. Not only does she focus on young men who mostly seem to be wearing Star Trek-like mock turtlenecks and posing in what amount to class or team pictures, but a number of the men are quite gender ambiguous. The seeming amateurish presentation of the works makes it seem like an obsessive scrap-booker or self-taught artist put this together. I found the work intriguing, both for the obsessive, closed-circuit point of view and for the eschewing of a sophisticated presentation.

Leah Beeferman's cosmic tabletop array

Leah Beeferman‘s two tables with colored plexiglas shapes of different sized geometric forms is situated in a gallery with black walls. The dramatic presentation and accessibility of the shapes made me immediately want to move things around on the table tops. But I was told no dice — it’s not an interactive piece. Too bad. The piece evokes two science fair tables awaiting the scientist to come and explain it all to you. There is apparently an audio component to the piece which I didn’t hear. When I went to Beeferman’s website to get some elucidation I found some delightful animations with sound, including the sound for this piece (a nice mix of what could be sounds of breathing magnified or sounds of car passing by on nearby highway and some bright percussive, almost tap-dance tapping). Clued in by the additional work on the website, it seems the artist is investigating the harmony of the spheres, and in that light, the table tops become mutable descriptions of what might be, what could be tomorrow and what might have been. Poignant, somehow.

Brie Ruais, video of St. Theresa sculpture on a raft, like Huck Finn going down river

Brie Ruais‘ “Unfolding/Performing Sculpture” includes a couple of large, fired, clay starbursts on the walls; a freestanding sculpture that is appears to have the face and hands of Bernini’s St.Theresa only here she is struggling to be free of the mound of clay she’s in. Elsewhere in the room, a river of what looks like unfired clay crosses the floor ala Lynda Benglis’ rivers of latex; and a video shows a slightly different St. Theresa piece on a raft in the middle of a river with some attendants.

Brie Ruais, floor piece showing a different St. Theresa, mired in a mound of clay

The suggestion is of some kind of Huck Finnish journey to come. The idea of transporting the clay piece downstream is highly appealing, while I don’t find the works in the room as appealing. Ruais’ work feels less like its questing for something (you don’t feel the struggle) than that it has arrived at an hypothesis and is experimenting with material and art history to perhaps knock some art history icons down a peg or two.

All in all, the art world reflected in these four rooms looks pretty much as you’d expect these days – hydra-headed and conceptual, albeit with lots of traditional materials being thrown around in a traditional manner.

Imagine waking up from a vivid black-and-white dream, in which you explored a recognizable yet distant city dense with foliage and structure, where the most intricate details were highlighted despite a sunless, cloudy sky, and you weren’t quite sure whether you were looking at a mural or real life. This is exactly how I felt when first viewing Becky Suss’ drawings, on display at Vox Populi. Her landscape drawings, void of any human activity, made me reminisce about being a child and exploring the depths of my grandma’s backyard, or weaving in and out of the strange apartment complex I once lived in. I felt alone, unsure, but happy to be on a strange adventure. There is something quite powerful about these drawings, although I might be biased since they brought up so many wonderful childhood memories. Suss’ ability to create something so simultaneously strange, empty, familiar, and beautiful is impressive, and that isn’t even taking into consideration her particular, obsessive details, where clusters of tiny marks make up a section of tree or ground.

Becky Suss, Hope Street, Sumi ink on paper. All images courtesy of the artist

Perhaps the most stimulating part of Suss’ exhibition is the level of complexity at which she draws her scenes. A mass of small, organized lines come together to create images of shrubbery, construction, and asphalt. Most important of all, what seems like a far away dreamland is actually a representation of various locations in Philadelphia, such as 4th and Girard, which in turn are titles of the works.

Becky Suss, 4th and Girard

The scale of these drawings give off an air of importance and grandiosity, something that isn’t often awarded to such random city blocks. Perhaps these locations hold a special memory for Becky Suss. Maybe she wants to bring special attention to these otherwise overlooked intersections. The scene in the woods is where Becky got her first kiss. The drawing of a backyard is where Becky spent her childhood. 4th and Girard is the location of her first studio. Perhaps they mean all of these things. Perhaps they mean nothing at all. But these assumptions don’t make the work any better or any worse. They stand alone as lovely drawings: elegant, quiet, and detailed.

Becky Suss, Frankford and Palmer

I must say that it is well worth it to trek up the creaky wooden staircase to Vox Populi, if only to see these enchanting works by Becky Suss. If I can find a childhood dreamland in each of her pieces, I can only imagine what other people might see for themselves. The show runs until October 30th. See it and relive your dreams.

Vox Populi Gallery.319 N 11th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107 215.238.1236  Gallery hours – Wed. through Sun. noon to 6 pm

Hayley Tomlinson is a senior 3D fine arts major at Moore College of Art & Design. This semester, in her Critical Discourse class taught by Terri Saulin, she participated in a project in which Libby Rosof and Roberta Fallon came to their classroom and discussed how to look at and write about art, and afterwards the students travelled to old city on First Friday to write their own reviews. The essays were then judged by Libby and Roberta, and Hayley was chosen as the winner. The experience was coordinated by Culture in the Classroom, a program at Moore that helps link classroom experience with cultural opportunities and professionals in the arts in Philadelphia.

Adrienne Skye Roberts at the Coral Street Arts House

The story was about Roberts’ search for truth, family and identity. She was tracking down information about her grandfather, who was one of nine members of the American Communist Party arrested and tried under the Smith Act here in Philadelphia for conspiracy to overthrow the United States Government. (Eventually the Smith Act and the convictions were tossed). The talk included a slideshow and a giveaway of a Daily Worker newspaper facsimile into which Roberts inserted her own content. I especially loved the red date stamp, lending the publication a feel of 1950s government bureaucracy, surveillance, and dusty files. The slide show, while it repeated some of the newspaper images, also had a few surprises, and it was those surprises that gave it life. Some additional images would make it even better.

Adrienne Skye Roberts' bogus facsimile of the Daily Worker, with a photo of her grandfather, Joseph Roberts, previously known as Sam Gobeloff. Date stamped in red on left.

Roberts, from San Francisco, came to Philadelphia on a Philadelphia Art Hotel residency, and in the course of her research, she got squired around to her grandfather’s old neighborhood by artist Diane Pieri, who was in the audience the night of the talk. Pieri, told me she herself had been a “red diaper” baby. Roberts met the last surviving of her grandfather’s co-defendants, Sherman Labovitz, and the wife of another–both were in the audience. Labovitz is the author of Being Red in Philadelphia, A Memoir of the McCarthy Act. He looked quite chipper and handsome. The human faces helped authenticate the story.

Roberts is not a typical PAH resident. She’s a writer for one thing, and a former dancer (she’s unusually tall for a dancer!), not to mention a curator, educator and activist interested in issues of queerness and race.

A performance has been cancelled that was scheduled for tomorrow night, but another one is scheduled for Friday, one of several talks organized by the Moles Not Molar Reading and Performance Series:

Friday, Sept. 23, 8 p.m.
Vox Populi Gallery
319 N. 11th St., 3rd Floor

Hilary Doyle, Pink Notebook, 2011, oil on wood panel

Paintings

Jordan Graw, Priority Number One, 2011, detail, oil on canvas

The paintings in the show deliver a convincing argument of its infinite variety. Jordan Graw manages to evoke early Alex Katz and Milton Avery even as Graw gives the lie to slick advertising that insults us daily with its seductive lies.  In two paintings–Priority Number One and From Broadway to Tanzania–a traveler is pictured enjoying the discomforts of flying. A young man stretches out (oxymoron or do they really think we are morons?) in a cramped, reclining airplane chair, while his gloppy-paint pants and little candy dish grow the fur of travel-grime. In the other the traveler is a middle-aged tourist grinning in front of a white table-cloth-covered tray. Ha ha. What airline is this? His shirt of colorful paint glops is also the only touch of color and individuality–a threat to the corporate-dictated environment of the airplane.

Dustin Metz, Room With a View, 2011, oil on canvas

Dustin Metz’ Room with a View, switches the surrealistic trope of a dislocated view through rose-colored glasses to the view through a pair of pink-ringed eyes, making it both more personal and more sincere. Only the row of paint blobs across the bottom suggest this is as much about painting as it is about dreaming. At a time when we are all eating Mexican food on Girard Avenue or at the Italian Market, this painting is recording a bit of life as we know it–the new Mexican revolution in El Norte.

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Lindsay Wraga, After the Fall, 2011, detail, acrylic and collage on canvas

In contrast to Metz’ vision of Eden in this crazy economy, Lindsay Wraga’s painting with collage elements, After the Fall, is an armageddon of greed.  More like a drawing than a painting–all outlines, largely grisaille, delivered with convincing obsession–the turmoil is palpable with quavering pillars of power about to topple onto piles of wealth–if only. Also taking on excess is Jaime Treadwell, who brings a sort of Candyland sense of colors and a kaleidoscopic sense of structure to life in the exhibitionist fast lane–all painted with traditional trompe-l’oeil oil technique. Hilary Doyle’s Pink Notebook captures a well-worn ordinary specimen of daily school life in all its well-worn perfection. The paint-handling hits the mark, capturing its distressed cover and wobbly spiral binding and at the same time capturing its iconic perfection as beloved–a companion, a friend, a confidante.

Sculpture

John Schlesinger, All That Remains, 2011, lab clamps, lab glass, low watt bulbs, rolled steel, video, ink jet prints, silicone rubber

John Schlesinger’s installation “All That Remains,” a network of lab clamps, lab glass, low watt bulbs, steel, video, inkjet prints and silicone rubber, greets you in the gallery’s lobby space. The piece weaves itself through the space like a man-made web whose purpose is a puzzle.

John Schlesinger, video of plumb bob with heavy chaotic looking top

It does seem to trap a video player in it and on that video is an image of a plumb bob with a bushy top, something the artist made and says refers to Altzheimers, a condition that will make you lose your moorings like the top-heavy plumb bob. It’s hard not to read body into the delicate network of rods and nodes here. Far from exuberant and singing the body electric, this is a reference to the body that’s a shadow of its former self, a body reduced to parts that can’t sustain themselves.

Bobby Gonzales, Sun Damage & Crepe Skin Under Eyes, 2011 photocopy, kitchen foil

At the other end of the show in the back room is a pair of vulnerable paper sculptures by Bobby Gonzales. Decay is on his mind, we guess. The body is under threat in Sun Damage & Crepe Skin Under the Eyes, a super-sized photocopy on foil-backed kitchen paper crumpled like the crepe-y skin and tossed on the floor. A net of caterpillar tent-like paper strips enmesh struggling artificial flowers in, Gypsy Moths. The vase is a found object, the paper strips are photocopied paper. The off-hand materials in both pieces, and the mega scale and lack of pedestal in Sun Damage save Gonzales from Victorian vapors over the loss of beauty.

Daniel Petraitis, Corner (with Paul), 2011 concrete, casters

Right nearby, Daniel Petraitis’ elegant concrete replica of a sidewalk corner — curb-cut and all — floating above the floor on casters, threatens to skateboard right over Gonzales’ floor piece and crash through the walls, once it builds up a head of steam. The wheels and disconnection carry that doggedly everyday thing into a Platonic sculptural heaven.

Nathan T. Wilson and Dante Blackstone's two mixed media sculptural works, like king and pawn, queen and jester, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza

Nathan T. Wilson and Dante Blackstone’s collaborative pieces, one large (it scrapes the ceiling and towers over the back of one gallery) and one small like a sidekick, are found-object amalgamations that have the physical presence of a queen and her jester or maybe Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. The large piece has an hourglass shape covered with a white skirt at the bottom and with a bodice of clear glass through which you see topographical layers of stuff including pink foam insulation, what looks like dirt and hundreds of egg-like golf balls. Together with the smaller, jester-like figure, these two are a new tribe, both dramatic, ancient, and completely part of now. The pieces, by the way, have fanciful titles suggesting they are a royal sentinel (large object) and royal escort (shortie)

Jennifer Lingford, Wound 4 (Bruised Knee), 2010, wool, embroidery thread

Jennifer Lingford’s Wound 4(Bruised Knee), unlike the macho majesty of the previous works, packs a punch demurely in a pedestal-top work of wool and embroidery thread that suggests a knee only, cut off above and below, and floating disembodied like a jewel to be studied and envied for its beauty. It is quite beautiful in fact, and soft-looking and stuffed-animal-like, until you remember it’s just a bruised knee. Funny.

Kevin McCullough, Sign, 2011, street sign, breakaway glass

And Kevin McCullough’s “Sign” a glass-shard encrusted street sign doubled over on the floor is a nice object that brings up reveries of car crashes and glass shards on the street from car break-ins. It’s a large piece and needs more room for it to shine in than it has here.

Video

Chris Domenick, Untitled (screen saver) (unique unit) 2011, video

Chris Domenick’s videos loop on a monitor in the lobby — close-up shots that are like moving still-lifes.  One, Orion, shows marbles on a pinball-machine-like background with holes for the little balls to land on. As the tiny balls roll around and plop into the holes they do evoke the celestial bodies revolving in space and settling into their pre-ordained orbits, only to be disturbed by an energy wave or disruption in the cosmic pattern that will throw them out of their holes and into the void again until they can settle once more. The second work, “Untitled (screen saver)” shows a static, scribble-scrabble drawing on paper and a lively, snake-like tape measure that wiggles across the paper in an agitated manner to suggest a snake on speed. The piece has a quiet audio that hisses as the piece loops on and on in what suggests a kind of Zen koan about work and play, good and evil. These two pieces are pretty great.

Run Shayo, Becoming Be-going, 2011, video; Here is a cross between a car and a pair of giant horns. The horns share one mouthpiece (which is in front of the cloud).

A Chaplinesque everyman alone in a wintery landscape encounters goofy machine-monsters in Run Shayo’s Becoming Be-Going. Our anti-hero, wearing a glass bubble on his head and a rain suit, seems impervious to the pollution the machine-monsters belch at him. They are this forlorn nerd’s only companions in an otherwise vacant world–all lost survivors of some cataclysmic event that we get to make up as we watch the journey to nowhere and root for his survival, which is our survival. He is a kind of scarecrow, all awkwardness, in hot, airless clothes–clammy inside. Everything happens without much of a plot, like Pilgrim’s Progress, yet this video has the charm of its leading man and the surprising objects in his re-calibrated existence to help carry us along.

The short, computer-animated film Dauphin 007 by Jonathan Monaghan is a morality tale with animal characters. A lion and a crow are rivals and position themselves for the crown. Only one can have it, but the one that presumably is destined for it (the lion) only gets it in heaven after the wily crow engineers the lion’s beheading. The conflation of religion, animal lore and swanky 3D animation is interesting if somewhat off-putting. The animals move in a choppy, Second Life fashion and the entire short story, with its echoes of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe with the Christ-like Aslan, is weirdly preachy.

Tara Kelton’s Leonardo, 2008, is a parody of a teach yourself how to draw video lesson only here what’s being drawn is a kind of abstract black mass with nothing Leonardo-esque about it. Also funny. And Ben Pederson’s sad-sack video — of a drawing with animated text that may or may not be autobiographical — fits our contemporary taste for self-exposure without dignity.

Photographs

Milana Braslavsky, White Shirt Red Skirt, 2009, archival inkjet print. photo courtesy http://pichaus.com/

Milana Braslavsky’s White Shirt Red Skirt is odd enough to be a Diane Arbus update. Pictured is the artist (or at least her legs from the thighs down) wearing a red skirt that starts at her knees and goes to just above the ankles. She has a white blouse on top of the skirt, and that starts at the thighs. The legs are far apart in a bow-legged stance. It’s a funny take on fashion, and on little people, and perhaps, on wanting to be small when you’re not. Ben Goddard’s two photos — of sky writing in a blue sky and of a crowded room with a ping pong table — are nice, if nothing new.

Drawing

Scott Giblin, Untitled (Where Pizzas Crawl), 2011 Graphite on paper

Drawing was surely not a main focus in this show, although there’s plenty of stuff we could recategorize to fall here–Wraga, Gonzales, Kelton and Pederson for starters. But the drawing that’s a drawing and none of those other things that is surely worth a mention is Scott Giblin’s pizza smothering two children with cheesy drips. The drawing is small enough to be overlooked in a room full of large pieces, a modest scale of about eight inches square executed nicely in a modest medium, graphite. Equally modest in demeanor is Giblin, whom we met at the opening. We pried out of him that he was one of the artists in the show, and he readily confessed that the drawing is based on a photo of an aggressive pizza that is consuming a couple of kids. At this time when horror movies walk the earth and dominate movie box offices, this Casper the Friendly Pizza treads where only The Blob has gone before. It looked fresh and new!

The take-away from the show, which was curated by Melissa Ho (aka the artist M. Ho) and Hennessy Youngman (aka the artist Jayson Scott Musson), is that contemporary popular culture is alive and well and a major presence in art–nice and easy and still providing pizza for thought and candy for the eyes.

Linda Yun, "Recall," 2011 - films (Wizard of Oz & It’s a Wonderful Life)

Linda Yun’s Recall uses the shared, cultural memory of classic films to affect the viewer’s experience. Two televisions playing It’s A Wonderful Life and The Wizard of Oz sit on the floor shrouded in darkness and separated by a wall that has two cutout windows in it. Because of the proximity of both monitors, the sounds of each film become layered. This layering complicates the viewing experience and forces one to consider the complexity that is inevitably lost with memory.

The viewer’s position within the space also points to the insufficiency of memory. The cutout windows in the partition wall frame viewers in the space, illuminating each by the television’s reflected light and color. Because of this framing and illumination, these cut-out scenes compete for the viewer’s attention. Unlike the act of watching a screen in secluded darkness, the presence of other viewers disturbs the viewing experience. Together with Yun’s layering of sound, these competing scenes suggest a capacity for recollection that will never equate with lived experience.

Both films suggest a simpler time free from technology’s complications. Both stories offer a nostalgic view of American life that can never be reclaimed in technology’s wake.

Leticia Bajayo and Joshua Hamilton, Wow and Flutter installation. right, Bajayo's "Player Piano Diagram," framed piano roll and graphite

Artists Leticia Bajuyo and Joshua Hamilton also concern themselves with the deterioration of memory. In their installation “Wow and Flutter: Revolutions in Coded, De-coded, and Re-coded Memory” they bring together outmoded technologies and consider their peripheral status.  Curated by Joey Yates, the exhibition offers now defunct technologies — the player piano and the typewriter — as the basis for two new collaborative works, “Noiseless” and “Analog Twitter,”  in which player piano rolls are fed through typewriters. As the title of “Noiseless” obviously states, the exhibition is without sound. The player piano roll does not serve its intended function as a code to be read as automated music. Instead, only an indecipherable, visual transcription remains.

The burdens of technology are also reiterated in the physical characteristics of the works. Unlike a piece of paper that is usually inserted into a typewriter, the player piano roll is sprawling, commanding attention and overwhelming the viewer. This feeling of being overwhelmed by technology is most present in “Noiseless.” Numerous rolls of paper are tightly jammed into the typewriter and read as information overload. This glut of information speaks to our own increasingly filled-up electronic devices. Our dependency on these devices for information fuels our constant demand for progress and more sophisticated technology.

Detail of Noiseless, 2011

By combining player piano rolls and typewriters, Bajuyo and Hamilton re-purpose these old technologies and create visual poetry.

Wow and Flutter, information overload on the poor typewriter

In Joshua Hamilton’s individual works, “Nocturne,” “Cemeteries” and “Soledad,” the artist types passages from poet Juan Ramon Jimenez’s Diario de un poeta reciencasado (Diary of a Poet Recently Married) as well as his own journal entries on draped scrolls of player piano paper. Like Yun’s layering of sound, this combining of text from different sources complicates the viewing experience and adds to the feeling of being overwhelmed.

Leticia Bajayo’s individual works also contribute to this feeling of being overwhelmed. Her framed player piano rolls seem like historical documents to be analyzed and preserved. In “Player Piano Diagram” the artist illustrates the self-playing instrument. Despite the drawing’s seemingly straightforward objective to provide a diagram, the work points to the limited information that can be gleaned from a representation. The artist’s other works also adopt an analytical approach, providing more information and forcing us to recognize our own historical distance and lack of understanding.

The cut-out spaces in the artists’ individual and collaborative works that are ordinarily read as music look as if someone has cut words from the page. This indication of lost information points to the eventual replacement of technology. While new systems are favored, the remnants of these obsolete technologies remain. For Bajuyo and Hamilton, our memories of these systems allow us to reconsider their initial use. By re-purposing the obsolete, the artists offer new possibilities and question the seemingly finite solutions that coded systems propose to offer.

One of Craig Hein's small clay sculptures.

Craig Hein’s small clay objects are very modest. No room-sized installations here. He molds things which are mostly recognizable – carpets, dirt piles and hand trucks – yet rather elusive. For instance, why is the hand truck loaded with mounds of dirt and a flag? These tiny, perhaps easy to overlook creations allow for an astonishing amount of possibilities in their simplicity.

John Slaby and Tobias Waite, the exhibition’s other artists round out the show in two dimensions. Slaby’s suburban scenes are composed of skateboards, hair, trains, buildings, yards and well, more hair. Undoubtedly this takes many viewers back to days of youthful rebellion and infrequent haircuts. The flat green yards and train cars reinforce the familiarity of these Anywhere-USA landscapes.

Waite’s creations scintillate between pure pattern and subject. Horde, one of the show’s highlights, shows just the weapons of a perceived mob of people poking through waves of color. Both fun and potentially critical, I think this piece is somewhat revealing of our troubled economic and social climate.

Vox Populi’s September exhibiton is as diverse as it is overwhelming. One group exhibition, Paradise, explores the recession and its impact through large-scale, documentary style photos and a video calling for the return of the Works Progress Administration of the 30’s.

Jamie Dillon's installation at Vox Populi

Jamie Dillon offers the most visually interesting, if most obtuse, work in the show. The front fender of a Dodge Magnum sits idly near the center of a room. Having previously been twisted out of form, perhaps in some past accident, it mimics the pinkish streaks of paint smeared along the four walls. If this piece has any distinct meaning, it is unapparent, but standing between the crumple zone of this car and the marks on the walls, I found myself spending more time with this single piece than any other.

Two of David Kontra's paintings at Vox

The showstopper at Vox, though, is undoubtedly David Kontra. This almost completely blind painter dives headlong into biting social criticisms and doesn’t look back. Questioning America’s overindulgence, greed and apathy, Kontra takes shots at a number of sources from the Bush Administration to the Westboro Baptists to the average American that sits idly by drinking beer and watching TV. Painting a quarter inch at a time, as if “looking through a straw” as he puts it, these gnarled images do well to reinforce his messages.

Cardboard sign from Adam Blumberg

The most amusing September exhibition I encountered was almost certainly Adam Blumberg’s Punctum(s) at Tiger Strikes Asteroid. A show of seeming refuse and witty banter, Blumberg creates some signs in the style of those held by homeless people asking for change, except encouraging the readers to “Jump! You Fuckers” or asserting that “I Wish I Had Your $Millions of Problems.” Both irreverent and relevant, some pieces are simply word bubbles on loose-leaf paper.

One piece is a plaster and wooden contraption, a beer bong, painted golden-bronze, and looking more like a broken bugle than a drinking device. The do-it-yourself, low cost, drinking-away-of-sorrows approach to Blumberg’s show make it worth a few hearty chuckles and perhaps the hankering for a beer… although I prefer a glass, myself.

PuppeTyranny at Vox Populi, Leslie Rogers and Zack Paladino performing the sexy-weird Mouth Theatre piece

Vox was the first big surprise. We skimmed the top of the press release for the one-night event Sound/Stages and assumed it was going to be an evening of djs, music and bands. Guess we needed to read down to the bottom.  Turns out, it was performance and puppet shows too! Performances by Beth Heinly and Bobby Gonzales and puppetry by PuppeTyranny.  The Mouth Theatre puppeteering by Leslie Rogers and Zachary Palladino was part flea circus part gender discussion. Very unexpected content for a tiny puppet show–all performed in Leslie’s mouth, with Zachary inserting a variety of instruments of torture and food. It was part yucky and part laugh out loud funny, and very suggestive of bondage and control–without being either of those. Some videos by Jeffrey Bussman here.

Beth Heinly, reading from Fear & Art

Meanwhile, our own beloved Beth Heinly, artblog’s ad coordinator and gal friday, saturday and sunday, gave a deadpan reading of Art & Fear, dressed in all white and exuding Greta Garbo I vant to be alone-ness in a white box space–Olympia on a white chaise in white bicycle shorts and white socks. The artist as art object! The self-help text was a little bit ridiculous and the subtext was ironic and the comedy was subtle. No fear here and lots of art!

We ran into Diedra Krieger whose reading-Baudrillard video was on tap for the open-call video room. We couldn’t stay, but we had curated it into the ID show at Projects Gallery a couple of years ago. It was a perfect pairing with Beth’s performance! Theory and practice.

We also ran into Austin Lee and Katrina Mortorff, who gave us a postcard for the upcoming Thanks. Frank show they organized to honor recently retired Tyler painting guru Frank Bramblett.http://www.thanksfrank.info/ The show will be Aug. 27 to Sept. 21. Reception on the 27th. See you there. We co-taught with Frank one semester so we know we’re a little partial, but really, the guy is amazing. And he’s left a huge mark on many many artists, including, besides the organizers, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Anthony Campuzano  and Rebecca Saylor Sack.

Thomas Vance -- Plan, at Tiger Strikes Asteroid. In addition to the 3D wonderworld the walls are filled with drawings collaged together showing similar potato shapes set amongst passages of wood grain

Thomas Vance, one of the contributors to Thanks.Frank is at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, with his charming cartoon Zen topiary, trees as the planets. It’s nature without the natural, and the large planet/potatoes are a break-out new direction in his work. Vance told us he and his wife artist Nami Yamamoto were leaving for real nature in Maine soon at the Acadia Summer Arts Program, aka Kamp Kippy, as in Kippy Stroud, Fabric Workshop founder and patron of the arts.

Abigail DeVille, installation Gold Mountain, at Marginal Utility. Charred sticks from fire at Trestle Inn.

At Marginal Utility, Yale grad student Abigail DeVille has installed Gold Mountain, a black-lit black hole with references to discrimination against Chinese gold miners and all other discrimination-affected classes. The piece was made from scavenged material found in Chinatown and vicinity, including burnt timbers from the newly incinerated Trestle Inn.

Abigail De Ville, floor bricks, painted and lit with black light

The floor “bricks” gave the piece a Yellow Brick Road jauntiness that was jarring. The stars and stripes allusions, plus a real flag, situated the piece in a land of dripping irony. DeVille said she hadn’t used black light paint before, but the effect was pretty great. The installation took her a week with help from David Dempewolf, and lots of hard labor.

Abigail De Ville, looking swanky

Abigail had never been to Philadelphia before. We had a conversation about Chinese American history and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and America’s long history of serial racial intolerance. DeVille looked glamorous, even in the heat.

MU has been one amazing installation after another, each one transforming it so its real shape has become increasingly mysterious. We think there’s some competition between MU and GG (Grizzly Grizzly) next door, which also has been running fabulous installations in its shoebox space.

Tiernan Alexander's side of the Grizzly Grizzly installation is all goth Victorian homebody. Tim Eads' side (sorry no photo) is sci-guy hard-edged, with a wood armature zig-zaging through the space and Gatorade bottles connected to surgical tubing, everything suspended, mid-air.

This month, we saw new work by Tim Eads and our gal (contributing writer) Tiernan Alexander, whose installation is a husband-wife death match, in which they will invade one another’s portion of the installation and revise each other. We hope they are still talking in the end. As Tiernan said to us, “At the closing there will be blood or snacks!”  Eads and Alexander really are husband and wife, btw.

And speaking of GG and couples, artists Paul Outlaw and Jennifer Catron, known to us as the Honeymooners from their installation at GG, will soon be trolling around Brooklyn and Chelsea serving up Midwest fishfry, which we can’t define–batter-dipped mystery fish? We got this news from Art Fag City.

We also ran into Gerard Brown and his two little boys. He was glad the summer semester was over.

Minty/Matt Savitsky playing puppy in the window at Bodega

Then we skedaddled over to North 3rd Street to Bodega. The highlight was in the window–Minty, the puppy in the window, was sticking up his butt and wagging it at us, making googly eyes at anyone who passed and paused. Two thumbs up for one weird performance. By the way, Minty was Matt Savitsky, we think, and he’d been in that window all day long, except for a change of costume to dress swanky for the evening. That’s the version we saw. This was pretty edgy–a mix of endearing and kitsch and strange. It captured our mixed feelings about real puppies in the window. Then of course there’s that whole level about sex trafficking and Amsterdam hookers in windows.

The final touch–we walked through old city and there was a harpist in a white gown on the sidewalk playing celestial music. Old City sure shines up pretty these days. A lot of the galleries were shut, but the street scene was glamorous and chock-a-block.

The art scene in Philadelphia is marked by an expanding community of artists, artists’ collectives and artist-run organizations, galleries, publications and events. Word gets out, but proper documentation is important for an accurate picture and for the future. In a publication recording its 21-year history, Vox Populi Gallery has provided a record of its own history as well as that of the other artists’ organizations established in Philadelphia since the founding of Painted Bride in 1969.

Visitor at Vox Populi Gallery, photo courtesy Jonathan Monaghan

Vox Populi; We’re working on it is fully-illustrated in color, with two pages devoted to each of the current members, double-page spreads of exhibitions of Vox alumni and others in curated and juried selections, a review of video lounge presentations and a variety of historical photographs.  Andrew Suggs, Vox director, has done an enormous job in gathering a wealth of information, essays, and illustrations from a large number of contributors.

Amy Adams (former Vox director) has written a very clear history of the organization which makes an excellent case study in artist-run organizations. She describes Vox’s growing pains and successes as members adjusted to a changing mission (moving from open membership to peer-review), financial needs, group decision-making, urban gentrification, incorporation and changes in the art world in Philadelphia and beyond.

Opening at Vox Populi, photo courtesy Jonathan Monaghan

Art historian and critic, Paul Galvez, discusses a history of 20th century artists’ collectives, from OBMOKhU in the early Soviet Union to Warhol’s Factory with its model of art as business. He also discusses Philadelphia’s self image and its uneasy relationship with New York and New York publications of record, with their national audience (hence the real concern with what is written in the New York Times, despite the stature of the stringer who likely wrote any particular article).

An essay by Richard Torchia, artist and gallery director, covers a history of artist-run spaces in Philadelphia followed by a time-line with a paragraph-long description of each organization, extant and defunct. Torchia includes a series of serious and provocative questions including Do artist-run spaces, by definition, need to be non-profit?, Given the pre-condition that selling art is not a viable goal in a city without a sufficient collecting population, what are the criteria for measuring success in a community with so few platforms for criticism and discourse? and Are we approaching a point at which there are more individuals on stage than in the audience? Torchia’s contribution is generous to his readers and to anyone who wants to catch up on an otherwise unavailable history of the past 50 years of grass-roots art activities in Philadelphia.

By choosing to present its own history as thoroughly embedded in a longer and broader story, Vox Populi represents the artist-run organization at its best: inclusive, community-oriented, mentoring the next generation and a crucial resource for the larger community that wants to follow the area’s art from its points of origin.  Thanks to all involved!

Anri Sala ‘Dammi i Colori’ (2003). View of Tirana as pictured on the cover of “Communities of Sense”

Communities of Sense; Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, Beth Hinderlitter et al, eds. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009). ISBN 978-0822345138

This volume of a dozen essays and one interview grew out of a conference of the same name held in 2003 at Columbia University. It takes up the ideas of political philosopher Jacques Rancière as a means of theorizing the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the global world. For those writing about art who have followed a largely-Francophone sequence of theorists (Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Kristeva, Baudrillard, Irigaray, Bourriaud…), Rancière appears to be the current favorite.

Several contributors, including Rancière himself, discuss the relationship of aesthetics and politics from the Enlightenment to the present. Rancière suggests that art offers a space for disagreement and the expression of minority opinion within a non-hierarchical and collectivist politics.  Alexander Potts, whose writing has a clarity that is exceptional in this compilation, looks at the Romantic artists’ rejection of the reigning aesthetic as a background for recent anti-aesthetic impulses. He uses the work of Hegel to examine Delacroix and Turner’s rejection of the totalizing aesthetics of Classicism; Potts uses specific works as examples of paintings that are de-centered, violate unity of time, depend upon the accompaniment of texts and involve ironic humor.

Louise Lawler ‘ Pollock and Tureen, Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, Connecticut’ (1984)

A number of contributions look at specific examples of art as political dissent on the one hand, and artists as participants in community-formation directed at social change on the other.  T. J. Demos writes about Dada events as political antagonism via transgressive acts which inherently re-configure the relationship between art and politics. Toni Ross attempts to understand the aspect of Louise Lawler’s photographs that exceeds their function as institutional critique. Carlos Basualdo and Reinaldo Laddaga examine Marjetica Potrc’s work with a community group in an outlying area of Caracas as an example of an artist’s involvement in what they term an experimental community; her participation addressed problems in the world at large and at the same time generated work that circulates within the traditional spaces of the art world.

These essays will be useful for readers who want to follow current theoretical approaches to art, but I must admit to a fair degree of skepticism about the whole project. The authors are largely senior faculty at universities, surely as hierarchical as any current institutions; they write about a politics of the left, which is inherently populist and anti-hierarchical, in a dense and exclusionary language. I am also prejudiced in being an adjunct faculty member, the proletariat of higher education; yet I don’t see such senior faculty at the barricades on behalf of just compensation or communally-shared  resources and decision-making within higher education, a sphere where they enjoy real power.

Nicole De Brabandere's sexy clay objects. Background is Clint Baclawski's light boxes

Vox VI is organized, by rooms, into more or less related groups of work: There’s a chamber of figures and masks, a Jeff Koons/pop-culture room, a memento mori room and a noir road-movie room. Only the lobby space approaches the usual juried-show hodgepodge, but even here there’s a unifying out-of-control party feel.

Piper Brett, Phone Number, one of several light pieces in the show

The show’s humanist focus, fractured narratives and “damn the torpedoes” ambiance aren’t new. What is novel is the embrace of craftsmanship—well-painted paintings, beautifully made sculpture, great clay pieces and accomplished video and photography.

There’s a surprising amount of clay in the show, and the artists handle it like clay has always belonged in the big leagues—the content here is not the usual kitsch, but conceptual, unexpected and beautiful.

Katelyn Greth, Dog Boy

Nicole De Brabandere’s small objects in a glass vitrine are nonfunctional, but look like Baroque sex toys. Katelyn Greth’s soulful “Dog Boy” and “Sheep Boy” ride a sad “Animals R Us” edge. Janet Macpherson’s altered cast clay figurines play with our love of collectibles. Lauren Dombrowiak’s Brancusi-esque cityscape of stacked plates and cups is perfect domestic machismo—I wonder why I haven’t seen anything like it before.

Lauren Dombrowiak's towering dinner sets in Brancusi-like endless column cityscape. Constanze Pirch four paintings on the walls.

Video, computers and media are a big presence—no surprise. Lindsay Foster’s “Father Lover Friend” feels like a reality-TV road movie in which a young woman talks with a grizzled, old homeless man. The man is intransigent; the girl cries. It’s poignant and, as a metaphor for the run-down world and the youth who will inherit it, father’s self-destruction is terrifying.

Lindsay Foster's roadtrip movie with a homeless man and a young girl

Joshua Bienko’s colorful and insistent rap/rant videos “Lewitt, Sol” and “TehChing Hsieh” spit out references to contemporary art stars, culture and commerce, capturing the anger many artists feel toward the art-industrial complex. Kelli Miller’s “The True Believer” video, about self-help gurus, needs a larger dose of anger.

Diedra Krieger, from her short video, made in Costa Rica, promoting the Spastic Plantastic project

Diedra Krieger’s faux-commercials in her “Plastic Fantastic” video series are just about perfect, short and seductive in a quirky, passive-aggressive way.

Nora Salzman, Replica Reuben, oil paint on papier mache, eyelashes

Nora Salzman, Replica Reuben staring at a picture of Replica Reuben Masking as Nora

There are some outstanding 3-D pieces in the show. Nora Salzman’s painted papier-mache bust “Replica Reuben” for example, is a chilling lost soul. Sanford Mirling’s “Nothing Could Drag Me Away From…” a set of Marilyn-esque legs, skirt billowing, is another miracle of craft. The woodworked oak legs balance on tiptoe with great drama and engineering, and the content feels Lohan-perfect.

Sanford Mirling's Marilyn-like sculpture in front, Clint Baclawski's lightbox, rear

Piper Brett, Large Bow; Joshua Bienko's video and painted shoes, Diedra Krieger videos and Brett's Phone Number on walls

Piper Brett’s “Large Bow,” a nod to Koons’ many million-dollar bow sculptures, is clunky and scary, yet it, too, is perfect corporate lobby décor, a steal at $10,000. As for home décor, Aidan Rumack’s inset shadow boxes behind a row of fluorescent tubes suggest new home uses for the old tubes. Jordan Griska’s “Gas Pump” (a real gas pump shortened to kids’ playroom size) is a perfect degraded object.

Sally Dennison, Hannah

Finally, while the entire show is full of deadpan works, Sally Dennison’s portrait photos of gender-ambiguous youth, Dustin Metz’s oil paintings “Still Life” and “self(seeing) portrait” and Erin Murray’s oil paintings from the “Ugly and Ordinary” series take the prize for smoldering without smirking, giving nothing away.

Dustin Metz, Still Life and self(seeing)

Through Aug. 1 
Vox Populi 
319 N. 11th St. 
215.238.1236 voxpopuligallery.org

Read this article at Philadelphia Weekly.  More photos at flickr.