My review of what’s at Locks Gallery is in today’s paper. Here. To wit, the gallery has video installations — two of them! That’s the big news.
And there’s a great show of Ray Metzger‘s black and white photographs from the 1960s and ’70. Noirish shots of Philadelphia and beach scenes that don’t have today’s de rigeour groomed sand and happy people.
The folks in Metzger’s beach scenes (like the one above) are sleeping on blankets and looking like they’re part of the animal kingdom just wearing clothes. And the way Metzger paints with neon at night (like in the image left showing what must be cars in a parking garage) is lovely and makes the city mysterious and delightful.
The video installations by Peter Campus and Jennifer Steinkamp are pretty great. Mostly, they’re notable for being there in the town’s blue chip gallery where video has not been shown before that I know of.
(image is still from Campus’s 8-channel video projection at Locks.)
Locks’s Jeremiah Misfeldt told me that two of our town’s premier video artists, Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib, took a seminar from Campus at one time (the artist teaches at NYU). So there’s another Philly-New York video connection.
Steinkamp, a Los Angeles media artist, is a digital wizard and the projection here of a hanging curtain of flowers is great for its sly allusions to strands of DNA and other cyber-science wizardry. The piece, called “Cleopatra” (shown left) goes way beyond flowers. Here’s how Misfeldt described the piece in an email
“3D modeled computer generated imagery – plant forms modeled and rendered using software customized by the artist – movement much like an undulating “curtain” of vines with flowers – no soundtrack – lovely.”
I just checked and Misfeldt told me that the second Steinkamp video, “Dance Hall Girl” is being installed today and will be ready for viewing tomorrow.
Metzger and Steinkamp are up through June 30. The Campus is up through June 23.
Gallery Joe
In the Editors Picks in the listings is my review of Linn Meyers and Sabeen Raja‘s two-person show at the Gallery. Here.
The two bodies of work are inspiring for their virtuoso craftsmanship. And Raja’s subject matter, the subversion of Indian miniature painting with social commentary about gender and racial politics, is amazing. Meyers’ drawings on mylar of curtains and cubes speak of magic and shifting layers of reality and seem very appropriate for our slippery electronically-mediated world. (image is one of Raja’s pieces from the current show)
Libby also wrote about this work in her post.
Please note: If you read this piece in the printed paper version you will see that I refer to Raja as a “he.” This is a mistake made by the editors who assumed the artist was a man and changed my words and didn’t tell me or check with the gallery. Online, happily, this has been corrected but in the real world it’s an embarrassing mistake. My humble apologies to Ms. Raja, whose work in fact deals with gender issues. Ironic.
