Ed Ruscha at the Fabric Workshop last Friday night

Ed Ruscha was looking like a little leprachaun in front of a packed audience at the Fabric Workshop’s new space last Friday.  The 2nd floor gallery space — which makes a great lecture hall — was certified for only 200 people with a live feed downstairs for the big spillover crowd.  

Ruscha and his slide of the Barnyard Rembrandt

According to Ruscha, who was showing slides of his influences and a few of his own work, Barnyard Rembrandt Chuck Byers (sic–it’s really Clark Byers, see obit) said, “‘I never passed up a good roof.’”

Ruscha went on to say of Byers’ work, “It reminds me of those wraparound videos on buildings today”  (referring to moving billboards and the moving news ticker around Times Square).

We had a great time laughing at Ruscha’s wry humor.  He was full of notable quips including:

Jasper John‘s Flag was my atomic bomb.

Muhammed Ali. My hero, he was outrageous in almost every way.  He’s worth getting choked up about.

Harold Edgerton‘s photos are frozen still lives.

Renato Bertelli‘s endless [Head of] Mussolini.  That’s my Mona Lisa.  It says everything about our time.

I like the ambiguity of monosyllabic words.

Maybe I’ll live in a Standard [gas] station.  Park the car and just go in.

Accidental Ed Ruscha. Outside the FWM on Arch Street.

This light box on Arch St. caught our friend Susan‘s eye.  She immediately dubbed it an “Ed Ruscha.”

Jamie Dillon’s Monomelon at Copy

We heard it moaning like a beached whale before we saw it–Jamie Dillon‘s Monomelon at Copy Gallery.  It’s a sound installation following up his sound installation last month at Vox.   People loved this melon.  They were hanging out trying to hear what the oracle had to say next.

Trevor Reese, installation at Space 1026, has audio and video and plants!

Space 1026 has a terrific show by two artists, Trevor Reese of Brooklyn and Sighn (aka Matthew) of Chicago.  Words, wood, plants and video.  It’s one of the best shows we’ve seen there in a while — unexpected and provocative.  Fun, too.

Sighn at Space 1026. 

Sighn’s “ITSOK” wall.  Hand-cut bass wood.  1,000 pieces, cut with a jigsaw, which explains Sighn’s aching back.  Individual units of ITSOK in bamboo or bass wood available for $20!

Marisa Olson’s video at Vox Populi

We made a video of Marisa Olson’s video at Vox to try to give you a sense of the action in the subtle piece.  Well, YouTube rejected our video as “content inappropriate.”  So here’s a photo. The action is:  this woman is tied with pink strings.  She’s wiggling to get out of her predicament.  Over time you see she’s got a razor in her hands.

Xiang Yang’s installation at Vox Populi.

Xiang Yang was at the opening, showing a new body of work — deconstructed chairs.  He scavenged the chairs from the streets of New York where he lives and lovingly sanded them to new abstract beauty.  Zhang also has an installation opening Oct. 17 at the Liao Collection piece –a room filled with Chinese furniture.  It reminds us of Mari Shaw‘s encounter with some Chinese art in Germany.  

Gossip

William Pym, former gallery director at Fleisher-Ollman Gallery,  is now living at Jersey City with his girlfriend and writing for Village Voice and Artforum. We got this from John Ollman, who told us while juggling a glass of wine and a copy of the PMA’s hot-off-the-presses James Castle catalog. Fleisher-Ollman’s upcoming Castle show is running in conjunction with the upcoming PMA exhibit. Ollman, by the way, is featured in the Castle documentary movie that’s part of the PMA’s exhibit.

Anthony Campuzano is having a solo show at ICA’s project space, opening Jan. 16. We heard this from Ollman and then ran into Anthony at Vox and he confirmed. He seemed calmer than us. We’re very excited about this. He’s working with ICA’s new curatorial assistant Kate Kraczon. Anthony told us another Philly art star, video and clay animation virtuoso Josh Mosley, will be in the large upstairs gallery at the same time.

Pepon Osorio told us he’s in a great-sounding group show opening October 19 at PS I in New York. NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith is co-organized by The Menil Collection Many of the artists in the show we’ve followed for years and love — including Philadelphia artist Terry Adkins. Here’s who else is in the exhibit:

Janine Antoni, Radcliffe Bailey, José Bedia, Rebecca Belmore, Sanford Biggers, Tania Bruguera, James Lee Byars, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, William Cordova, Jimmie Durham, Regina José Galindo, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Hammons, Michael Joo, Brian Jungen, Kcho, Marepe, Ana Mendieta, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Adrian Piper, Ernesto Pujol, Dario Robleto, Betye Saar, Gary Simmons, George Smith, Michael Tracy, Nari Ward

6th International Fiber Biennial
Snyderman/Works Galleries

About 100 artists from far and wide were selected for this exhibit, now in its 6th year, curated by Snyderman Gallery director/exhibition curator, Bruce Hoffman. This show is the seed from which the full extravaganza of fiber exhibits in Philadelphia grew. The range of materials and methods is as astounding as ever, from quilted film to plastic discs arranged in a grid to suggest the grid of woven fabric. The craftsmanship was uniformly outstanding. Here’s what I found most interesting:

Xiang Yang‘s Uncertain Identity takes his two-faced embroidery frames to new limits. This Chinese-born artist, who used to live in Philadelphia, seems to be in the midst of wondering just how Chinese he still is, if I can read a bit of autobiography into this new piece. Xiang is now represented by Snyderman.

Susie Brandt‘s Beech Sampler unites good-girl stitchery with bad-boy tree carving and creates a love note to both practices–using neither the stitchery nor the beech tree. It’s a print on fabric.

Patricia Waller‘s Baby Ghost is my kind of kitsch. That the ghost would have a pacifier stuffed in its mouth, a big pink bow, and giant, innocent/scary black holes for eyes just strikes me as hilarious. Waller has it both ways–sentimental and not. Plus, it’s beautifully made. I also liked her crocheted bare lightbulb.

Marcia Docter‘s An Eye for an Eye Soon the Whole World is Blind, which is in the sampler tradition, is also a piece of political protest–in pinks. The warning, written as a rebus–or a text message–it is only for those who are sighted.

This little patch of grass took a lot of looking by Lewis Knauss. I realize the small scale was probably chosen partly because of the intense process, but that it’s a square patch and is so literal moves this piece into contemporary deadpan.

Lia Cook‘s Maze Doll, a computer generated tapestry of sorts, has a creep factor in the way the embedded doll’s face emerges slowly as the image behind the yucky maze, suggesting decomposition and neglect.

Everything by Joyce Scott pleased me, from this 3-D portrait of glass beads, Later Baby, to her necklaces. She’s fearless in her image-making and object making.

She’s a master of her medium and I wish one of those necklaces was mine.

Passage, by Norma Minkowitz, is a giant stitched drawing. It’s really hard to tell from this picture what the physical presence of this large piece is, but that small gray passage hole, with the maze of paths around it, goes in many directions at once–to death, to the cosmos, to the daily paths we follow, etc. etc. It’s also a little baroque, a little sexy, a little frilly and has a lot of quirky decisions in it.

Joseph Shuldiner‘s delicate “utensils” seem like people-surrogates to me. They are vulnerable and too tender for the task that lays ahead of them. Very nice.

Usually when insects are on clothes, they become quite decorative and lose their creep factor. Not here in Ambush, by John Eric Riis. These make me recoil. Excellent.

Ed Bing Lee has gone into high gear, turning out one knotted morsel after another, like this key lime pie, and a cupcake with sprinkles. The food must be selling for him, but I miss the variety he has previously brought to his intense process. It felt a wee bit like product this time.

The noir mixed media thread drawing by Kim Kamens speaks of chair as body, of nails as stars as well as structural devices and of the kinds of shimmering quality of penumbral spaces. I liked the moodiness of the piece and the disembodied arm. But it got subverted by the foot in a way that undercut the mystery.

Kamens’ methodology reminds me of Mark Khaisman’s packing tape drawings.

Joh Ricci’s lumpy stele is a Weeble and quite human.

In her Garden, Helen Frost Way‘s suggestion of roots and tubers, have some kind of battle going between the tender roots and the pokey horns. It’s this battle that pushes the work from preciousness to something worth thinking about.

This terrific little landscape in a moving truck, by B.J. Adams, is romantic and illustrative. It says New Yorker cover to me, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I liked the wittiness. This time, I’m just a wee bit puzzled why this complex image would find its expression in such a slow, exacting medium.

I’m ending on a local note here–Amy Orr‘s credit card shreds on velvet talk about more than just the possibility of identity theft. They talk about the American dream of spending and consumerism and our King George who is a true believer (hey, did he notice our economy is in the toilet under his reign?)

In this one, Credit Cards: Security Measures, she also pushes beyond identity theft and suggests there’s a whole underpinning of not just our economy but our entire culture in the digital world that is recording everything.

As always, Orr’s work is beautiful, smart, witty and finely crafted.

Anyway, there’s my list of fiber loves.

A year ago, the folks at Snyderman stopped in the Painted Bride and were as blown away as we are by Xiang Yang’s emboidery, which mixes contemporary political and cultural issues with the ancient art of embroidery and Chinese and Western visual traditions. Snyderman now represents Xiang, and placed him in an exhibit at the Museum of Design & Arts, opening Nov. 8. The exhibit, Pricked: Extreme Embroidery, is a sequel to the museum’s show, Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting. Snyderman also is showing Xiang’s work at SOFA Chicago as I write this.

Here are links to our posts on Xiang’s show at the Bride: My post and Roberta’s post.

Anyway, we’ve been excited about Xiang’s art for since 2004. We’re glad we’re not alone.

The execution by hanging of Saddam Hussein served as a nice reminder that I wanted to bring up Xiang Yang’s exhibit, Beyond the Duplicated Voice at the Painted Bride. Even though Roberta wrote a great post on it, I wanted to add my two cents because I’m such a fan.

George W. Bush’s portrait is paired with Saddam Hussein’s, and it seems like a dead-on coupling, the two of them undone by one another. They are each framed, several feet apart, with the embroidery threads that edge the portraits stretched across the space between them.

Relationship:Buddhism-Saddamism, by Xiang Yang. This pairing is of North Korean dictator Kim Jung-Il and Mao Tse-Tung.

Xiang also has coupled together state portraits of Mao-Tse Tung and Kim Jung Il. Ha.

Those stretches of embroidery thread, which create a solid-looking streak of color, form a surface around a hollow space, an inside sculpture/portrait of air that’s at once something and nothing. With the departure of Hussein, he seems to me to be something and nothing all at once. And with Bush’s hollowness between the ears and his loss of power (and the shift of power in Congress), he too seems like something and nothing all at once. And the stretch between the two of them, on opposite sides of the world and the sculpture, is hyped to warp-speed by the cartoonlike trail of color between the heads.

The delicacy of balance and oppostion, of sameness and difference, of somethingness and nothingness, gives these sculptures their resonance, a see-sawing that is matched by the materials–delicate thread, bold metal framework.

A Xiang Yang’s Floating Object, with Floating World content.

Xiang also has his sexy lunch box embroideries on exhibit, which raise the same issues in another arena. Both bodies of work borrow their imagery from popular sources– ubiquitous state portraits, ubiquitous pulp cartoons and porn–and make them into something else. The lunch boxes suggest consumption of product and diposability. The joke about the lasting powers Chinese food immediately comes to mind. And what looks like something solid, be it the image or its trailing threads, represents something hollow and not all that satisfying. Some of this imagery looks Asian, some of it American, but the message is there’s a sameness.

This is one of a grid of 56 Buddhas carved into the wall, the removed plaster hung in a plastic lunch bag below each carving.

The lack of corporeality and the disposability carries over into the Buddhas carved into the wall.

Newsreel, detail. These long streamers of faces in the news hung from the double-height ceiling to the floor, looking much like unrolled film strips. The two show W. and (I think) Katie Couric.

In Newsreel, the long strands of celluloid tape with images transferred from the news also raises the flimsiness issue–and brings the outsider’s eye to our culture. The film format promises motion but the images are static, the facial expressions unchanging.

At the same time that Xiang, who is Chinese born and still speaks halting English, is positing flimsiness in his use of nothingness, he is also positing its opposite–that nothing is something, is worthy of our attention, not a notion native to our culture.

And speaking of what’s not native to our culture, Xiang’s work also has a New York vibe; although he resides here, he has a New York studio. His work shows it. He pulled a Banksy at P.S. 1 and at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2001, sneaking his own work into the museums. And his use of embroidery thread calls not only to Asian manufacturing of embroidered goods that we use here, but also to other Asian artists, like Do-Ho Suh, and his Paratrooper.

White Storage with Lamp (West Elm, Spring 2006), by Leslie Mutchler, 30″ x 44″, collage using catalog images

Also at the Bride, Leslie Mutchler‘s portraits of the emptiness of furnishings make a nice pairing with Xiang’s work. I don’t have anything to add to Roberta’s comments. For more images, my Flickr set is here.

Holiday Diversity
Art with a global sauce.

As we celebrate Thanksgiving with ritual turkey and pumpkin pie feasting, there are a few exhibitions like the salsas, chutneys and rice dishes that also grace some American tables this time of year.

Henry Bermudez. Catalog cover. This is Projects Gallery’s second show this year with a catalog. It’s a great idea for the show, for the gallery and for the artist.

Henry Bermudez’s “Fragmented Dream” at Projects Gallery and Xiang Yang’s “Beyond the Duplicated Voice” at Painted Bride are exhibitions by nonnative-born Philadelphia artists. The duo — Bermudez is Venezuelan and Yang is Chinese — make works that are cultural hybrids. They don’t feel local; they don’t feel exotically nonlocal. They’re works reflecting a kind of 21st-century nomadism in which artists live where they will and make works with a quality that’s not denuded of its roots but reflects those roots in translation.

Xiang Yang, work from last summer’s Outside/Inside exhibit at Philadelphia Art Alliance. Yang has been working with thread and frames for several years now.

While Yang’s sculptures include references to Buddha and Chairman Mao, and Bermudez’s mixed-media paintings use hybrid animal shapes evoking indigenous cultures, you can’t really pigeonhole these artists as Chinese or Venezuelan. The beautiful works, made by accomplished, trained artists, have a universal contemporary aesthetic that’s aware of the artist’s past yet engaged with the contemporary art world. The works are personal, yet because they’re geographically and narratively suggestive without being specific, they’re also globally reverberant.

Xiang Yang’s temporal-spatial embroidery shape-shifters at Painted Bride.

Yang uses thread and embroidery, and his imagery involves politics, pornography and Buddhist thinking. In the home of one of America’s most famous inventors, Benjamin Franklin, Yang has invented something new—a double-sided embroidery frame that’s a storytelling device spelling out the connection over time and space of two persons or objects. Yang’s device elongates the embroidered stitch into lines that stretch improbably—2, 3, 4 feet­—between two frames. The colorful river of thread reverberates with both the Buddhist idea of samara (an ever transmigrating being) and the Western cartoon notion of speed lines (think Road Runner).

Xiang Yang, The other side of chairman Mao, Korea’s Kim Jong-Il. In the background is a viewer looking at the piece pairing Saddam Hussein and George Bush.

In his large works Yang embroiders the opposing political figures of George Bush and Saddam Hussein, taking the Buddhist idea of oneness to a level of left-wing discourse. Yang’s small-scale embroideries in clear plastic deli containers use images from pornography to suggest no matter how far point A is from point B, transgressive imagery is universal and served up as a cheap, daily commodity.

Henry Bermudez’s ornamental riots of animals

Henry Bermudez, detail, entwined snakes.

Bermudez’s mixed-media works evoke ornate gilded ornamentation in ancient religious devotional works. While no particular country is referenced, the baroque imagery—with repeated curlicue patterns of snakes, lizards, frogs, celestial dots and tentacle-like plant fronds—to convey an aboriginal aesthetic crossed with a sophisticated sense of decor. According to the show’s catalog, Bermudez, who once represented his country at the prestigious Venice Biennale, is on a journey to experience the world and get to the authentic core of art-making. This new work, which feels connected to the spiritual practices of the Western and non-Western worlds, may have hit the mark.

Henry Bermudez, detail. Looks like the frog king.

In its playful and slightly threatening animal imagery and its gorgeous decorative patterns, Bermudez’s art embodies an aesthetic that transcends national borders, feels authentically spiritual and can be admired for its pure beauty. Here’s Libby’s post on Bermudez.

Word at the PMA

St. Jerome, polychromed wood statue in the Tesoros exhibit at the PMA.

The Art Museum’s “Tesoros/Treasures/Tesouros” shows the beauty of art made in Latin American countries during the Spanish colonial period. The countries in Latin America and elsewhere eventually drove out the conquerers, and yet these nations’ stories and the story of their art has largely been relegated to the footnotes of art history. PMA curator of contemporary art Carlos Basualdo conceived his “Notations” series as a retelling of the story of modern and contemporary art in a way that includes works from these Second and Third World countries.

Victor Grippo’s potato piece in front of Thomas Hirschhorn’s globes in “Energy Yes!” in the first Notations installation.

Basualdo’s first “Notations” installation “Energy, Yes!” featured a work by Argentine artist Victor Grippo that included a banquet table piled with raw Idaho potatoes attached to wires that were connected to a machine reading the spuds’ energy emissions. The piece was unlike anything inside the museum’s contemporary galleries, and it enhanced the understanding of how much we Western art viewers had been missing while we focused on our Paris/London/Berlin/Rome/New York-centric art.

Georges Adeagbo in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“Notations: Out of Words” opens Nov. 22, and will showcase a new PMA acquisition Abraham—Friend of God, by Benin artist Georges Adéagbo. The accumulation piece is made from hundreds of papers, carvings, books, records and handwritten letters from Benin and Philadelphia that tell the story of the struggle for freedom here and in the artist’s African country.

The global diversity on display in the 21st century was largely missing from our city’s galleries and museums in the 20th century. It’s great to see it now.

Where to See It

Henry Bermudez: “Fragmented Dream”
Through Dec. 22. Free. Projects Gallery, 629 N. Second St. 267.303.9652.

“Notations: Out of Words”
Nov. 22-May. $8-$12. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th St. and the Pkwy. 215.763.8100.

Xiang Yang: “Beyond the Duplicated Voice”
Through Jan. 13. Free. Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine St. 215.925.9914.

Space — internal, external, fairy tale and architected — is on the table at Vox Populi this month. Looking at the work here, I kept feeling like Marty McFly in Back the the Future when Doc would explain the space/time continuum. Sure, Doc, whatever. Let’s just get this jalopy moving. It’s apt that space is an issue though since Vox the gallery is once again moving its tent, displaced by the powers that be who would expand the Convention Center over to Broad St. Now that’s an uncomfortable place to be in!

Nadia Hironaka‘s spacey piece, Crack, will have you look through her eyes at Philadelphia and the possibility of murder in the neighborhood — yikes! I watched her video piece, riveted, eating up each on-the-edge-of-abstract scene as it dissolved into the next with no apparent logical connective tissue. Each beautiful dissolve or tracking shot left me hungry for the next. I almost didn’t care about content my eyes were so satisfied. I had never thought the Jeremy Blake thought about Hironaka’s work before I saw this piece, but as I watched one abstracted image after another I wanted the artist to simply let fly and abandon all caution. Go abstract and make beauty. Let the imagery sing and dance and don’t worry about narrative. It’s just a thought.

Jen (l) and Dustin, two Tyler senior painting students peruse the model-esque styrofoam shelters created by Corey Antis, Vox member and Tyler grad.

In his small paintings and sculptures Corey Antis is working a theme having to do with shelter and the lack of comfort therein. There is something loveable about the styrofoam packing material shelters. I thought about James Casebere’s photos of forlorn cave-like spaces when I looked at the works. Antis’s paintings are harder to decipher. Their failure to leap into some fantasy zone holds them back from transporting you with the artist into an imagined space.

Xiang Yang’s Buddha says.

Xiang Yang continues to intrigue with his East-West embroidery thread hybrids. Buddha is the ostensible subject in this installation. But it’s Buddha seemingly whooshing forth from the wall, a cartoon-trail of colors following him. It’s not your grandfather’s Buddha. The crafting of the piece is, as usual, virtuosic. And that craftsmanship calls into question the entire enterprise of crafting embroidered objects in the Orient. Whatever else this installation is about I find that the artist is going confidently forth in ways that break him thankfully out of the plastic deli box to which he was wed for a couple of years. Xiang’s work is in part about the artist feeling out of time, out of place and out of his culture. That he is able to create a hybrid East-West space that also merges old and new (traditional imagery and cartoon “speed” lines) bodes well for the continued milking of his subject. I look forward to watching where he takes it.

Brooklyn artist Diana al-Hadid, in Vox’s fourth room, creates an anthropomorphized sculptural city and its little brother or sister. The two-part sculpture which is full of references to the ancients — Roman aqueducts, walled medieval cities, Louis XIV decorative gold leaves, Michaelangelo’s Sistene Chapel image of God touching Adam — has the presence of a diva or dancer in the spotlight. It’s hot! I kept thinking of a whirling dervish with skirts flying in its self-created wind. The piece is exciting, dramatic, and great to look at, whatever it’s about.

I didn’t get to watch the video in the video lounge and perhaps someone else can chirp up about that. The show’s up to Sept 30 so get on over there. Vox always delivers the goods and this show is no exception.

Sonic Pretzel Mastadon, virtuoso cut paper, (detail) by Hunter Stabler. Click to see it bigger.

Cut paper to die for and thread used in un-thread-like ways — that’s the big news from Pageant Gallery this month in Everything is Lightpour, a two person show pairing Penn MFA candidate Hunter Stabler and Vox Populi member Xiang Yang.

Xiang Yang, piece with embroidery at two ends with thread spanning the void in the middle. Very nice piece.

Yang, whose embroidered images (from sources like magazines and the newspaper) and set in plastic take-out boxes have appeared at Spector Gallery and last year in a solo exhibit at Vox, has grown his m.o. from small to huge in one lovely work in which the embroidery thread spans what looks like an empty terrarium set on legs so that it’s at about eye-level. The piece is a marvel of technique and the work has a nice wavy, optical, cyber affect, especially as you stroll by the taut threads held in place by the stitches in each end of the terrarium.

Detail of Yang’s embroidery pieces in small plastic boxes.

It’s a delight to see a show that’s “whiz kid times two” with virtuoso technique all over the place. Even better, there’s content as well.

Stabler and Yang installation

Yang is about the displacement of identity in a foreign culture. His East by West labor intensive pieces are poignant and brittle, and speak of the emptiness that comes of feeling trapped in a culture that’s not your own.

Hunter Stabler “The most original subtle unique and illusive metaphor for mortality,” cut paper

Stabler also mines the East/West differences but he’s also grabbing on to time, going back and forth in imagery that is cyber-savvy as well as ancient evoking Buddha and other symbols from Eastern religions.

Hunter Stabler, “A shaving of the sun, or a crude sketch of the mandala tapestry of the Ding Goat Slain at the foot of the throne, amidst the grainbow vortex of the returning savior” cut paper

Stabler’s got some paintings in addition to the several jaw-dropping cut paper pieces. The paintings are all about war and war games and kid games and vid games. They, too have a virtuosity to them that comes from being hand-made and not screen printed or stencilled. Watch out for Stabler who’s definitely on the arblog radar now.

Hunter Stabler and Nathan Thomas Wilson “Swastikas the Axis,” oil on canvas

Pageant has had a great year with its two-person exhibits. Daniel Dalseth, the gallery’s brain trust, is having fun with it bringing in a trippy mix of work that’s visually full of wonders and intellectually challenging. Dalseth, himself an artist and art teacher (he’s teaching at SUNY Binghamton right now), will be having another solo show of Terry Adkins’ works sometime in the near future. (Dalseth was a student of Adkins’ at Penn.)

Pageant opened its doors with a spectacular Adkins show and I can’t wait for the next one.

By the way, I have a bunch of pictures from the show in a flickr set.

Here, he’s doing a take-off on Leonardo Da Vinci‘s “Lady With Ermine” (left). The original was oil on wood, but Xiang’s quirky, yet elegant version is mylar layered over a map with some pencil and with some embroidery holding it together.

I came back at this today partly because Roberta’s piece in today’s Philadelphia Weekly served as a reminder to me.

Guilt II: I also feel I was unclear in my previous post about my reaction to Slought‘s “Didacticon: The Museum of Reproductions,” which was organized by Osvaldo Romberg. I think this show is not so much curated as created–it’s a conceptual art project in and of itself. That distinction, however, doesn’t alleviate the onerous reading requirements.

The show included 72 pieces, and the images come out of popular magazines and other pop culture sources. If the tension on the threads is uneven, they will sag or pull, so Xiang stays focused on each piece until it is completed. Some of the pieces take four of five days (and he does eat and sleep; he just doesn’t switch to another project or put the project aside).

I had been thinking about how this was such labor-intensive work, and that the lunch bowls and embroidery made me of all the factory workers in China manufacturing clothes.

Xiang, a native of China (he earned his bachelor’s degree in painting and mural painting and his master’s in art criticismm, there), now hails from South Philadelphia. He still doesn’t speak English. “He brings a translator with him, usually his wife,” Spector said.

Westcott’s portraits of young adults–her crowd–against fairly blank backgrounds capture their earnestness, their tentativeness, and their everyday clothes. Unlike Elizabeth Peyton, who’s working the same age group and paints only the cool, flattened stares of languid youth posing for Ralph Lauren, Westcott gets personal.

I also like the contrast between traditional portraiture–of people who can pay for their likenesses–and these pictures of the young, not-yet-successful who are still a little unformed (like the backgrounds) and finding their way in the world. Most portraits of young people come out of art school, practice ventures for the artist-in-training. But these are accomplished paintings with a point of view.

In the back room are the unusual three-dimensional embroideries by Xiang Yang. Xiang sews using a crewel technique through bowl-shaped plastic takeout containers so the same cartoony image is on the front and back. Inside the container, between the two images is the linking part of the thread, which creates a kind of stretch image that brings up comicbook and cartoon representations of speed.

The work raises the issues of how a 2-D representation distorts 3-D and just what dimensionality is. The elongated images remind me of wooden jigsaw pieces, the flat front image taking on a thickness that makes not a lot of sense to the eye.

I couldn’t help but wonder about the labor involved in these pieces. What if two stitches are too close to one another, and create a too-big hole? How about the effort of keeping the two images totally parallel on a surface that curves? But I love the materials–the weird plastic bowls, the embroidery thread that usually implies a fussy, decorative motif, not the comics.

Both shows are worth a visit.