Mink

First String, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 50 x 50 inches

From today's Ithaca Times:

Barbara Mink is one of Ithaca's most exciting and unpredictable painters. Her latest solo show "Event Horizons" is up this month at The State of The Art Gallery and features canvases from mostly this year. These rich, sometimes quirky abstractions combine pouring and dripping in the tradition of Jackson Pollock with brushy atmospherics that owe something to Romantic landscape painting.

Understanding the history of Mink's development as an artist can heighten a viewer's sensitivity to the different aspects of her style. For her development has been accretive; you can often find traces of her older approaches within her constantly evolving style. Mink started painting about a decade ago. Her work has evolved from still-life and botanical illustration to a looser, more atmospheric form of landscape with affinities to such masters as J.M.W Turner and James Whistler.

Then, as she likes to say, the horizon-line disappeared. (This is akin to moving your head up or down.) Her work over the past half-decade or so has become more and more abstract, gradually, never completely, shedding its allusions to landscape.

As indicated by her paintings' titles, Mink's recent work incorporates yet another influence: popular science. As the founder and artistic director of Ithaca's yearly art and science festival Light in Winter (the next one is upcoming January 21-24) this might seem natural. Knowing her work, however, the move is a bit surprising.

Her work is quintessentially lush and immediate, seemingly the polar opposite of science's remote concepts. At a recent informal talk (given as part of the LiW-sponsored monthly Science Cabaret series) she expressed some ambivalence about her attempts to bridge these "two cultures". It's best to regard her "concepts" as starting points for personal and unscientific association-making.

An unexpected presence unifies most of these paintings. One or several spheres, often red, have been brushed into these amorphous paint-scapes. They invite narrative associations, either microcosmic or macrocosmic — atoms or planets, for example. Too, they could be balls, giving these works a game-like quality. Most importantly, they provide stable reference points for the viewer trying to find a way into these paintings.

They're the descendants of the detailed botanical specimens that populated some of her earlier landscapes. For all their geometrical primitiveness, they act as stand-ins for the human body, always moving but stable.

A series of three large paintings take their names from those given to the three laws of thermodynamics by the scientist and cultural critic C.P. Snow: You Can't Win (a triptych), You Can't Break Even and You Can't Quit The Game. (Snow's poetic paraphrases are more apposite here that the actual science.) Nearly monochromatic, each features a murky curtain of black, gray, and muted color suspended over a flatly painted white background.

A big problem with these pieces arises from the fact that in areas the white has been brushed over the splattered areas creating a duller, less dynamic contour line and an awkwardly mannered sense of space.

Butterfly Catastrophe, another triptych featuring "empty" white background avoids this mistake. Here the spilled paint curtain — mostly coils and puddles of black with areas of intense but white-softened pinks and oranges — sits more properly up front, its edges un-brushed-over. Catastrophe was painted in the last month or so. It suggests new directions.

First String and Second String are the strongest pieces. (Their titles allude to a theory addressing the composition of matter.) First suggests something like a traditional landscape: there is a thin strip of darker, solidly painted matter seemingly growing or accreting from the bottom edge: pink, red, gray. A black coil carries the eye into the air — all clouds of white, beige, pale pinks and oranges. The red balls, of which there are many, seem oddly neither here nor there.

Second, although similarly colored, is something else. Suspended over a flat black background, a Rorsharch-like cascade of paint bridges the upper left and lower right corners. Springs of white paint — smooth at times, staccato at others — traverse the other two corners.

You Can't Get There From Here might be part satellite-view landscape and part billiards game. Intricate rivers and clouds of paint — creamy pinks and purples, white and cool gray — have been laced once again with smooth black coils. A spread of red balls cast black shadows, making them feel particularly three-dimensional and making their backdrop feel flatter than it would otherwise. The effect is a mannered, impure and loopily engaging.

The title of Random Walk alludes to attempts to mathematically formalize certain random processes. (According to the artist it resembles, if by accident, a graph of such dynamics.) The painting is distinctive for its richly encrusted texture and its gold on black. It's the most compelling of several smaller paintings here. The twin-sized Hubbles and Bubbles are more suggestive of the confectionary than the astronomical. Square and using smooth black backgrounds, they feature particularly cartoonish cascades of pink, white and gray alongside a crowd of blue balls — an overuse of this somewhat precious icon.

The work within "Event Horizons" is uneven. (I always say this yes, but it's particularly true here.) But the best work in the gallery, though not flawless, is so compelling that it almost seems not to matter. Spend some time exploring these evocative environments and don't be afraid to follow your eyes where they lead you.

Mink teaser

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Curvilinear

Just found out about this promising looking show, up this week — and this week only — at Cornell's Hartell Gallery:

Mark Gibian’s (B.F.A. ’80) sculpture is multimedia: abstract and evocative of natural forms. He constructs both large public commissions and private works, fabricating the work himself in order to control the entire creative process. Since leaving Ithaca and Cornell he has been living and working in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

The show features both monoprints and small (non site-specific) sculptures. It comes down after tomorrow.

Sarah Carpenter has an intelligent review in this past Tuesday's Cornell Daily Sun (the student-run daily paper). The article goes into some depth about the relationship between his work in two and three dimensions:

Gibian’s work is about the juxtaposition and symbiotic structural relationship between the delicate and the sound, the spindly and the solid. Its forms imply skeletons, archaeology, rollercoasters and architectural interiors. The monoprints describe three-dimensional space, as promised, as well as motion and speed. Furthermore, they establish an ongoing conversation with Gibian’s sculptures, some of which are included in the show.

I'll have to get up the hill today or tomorrow. It'll be good opportunity as well to see the latest crop of offerings at the Johnson. I would not be surprised, though, if Gibian's work is more compelling that any of the contemporary offerings that they have up there. (And it's a contemporary fixated season, except for "Carved on Copper: Renaissance Engravers and Collectors in the Low Countries.") Alas. And do go see this if you can.

Upstairs

Sad news for local art:

For Immediate Release

The Upstairs Gallery, a longtime Ithaca art gallery, is closing, another victim of the slow economy.

Board members of the nonprofit Upstairs Gallery in the DeWitt Mall said they will close on Sat. December 26, 2009. The gallery opened 46 years ago, the first commercial art gallery in the Ithaca area. After a year and a half, the original owners were unable to continue in business, so the gallery was kept open by a group of volunteers dedicated to the ideals of supporting local artists, showing high-quality art, and reaching as many people as possible.

“The board was ready to close their doors in Oct. 2008, when they invited me to join and see if new energy could keep the organization alive,” said Laurel Guy, president of the board. “We recruited new board members James Spitznagel, Rob Costello, Werner Sun, Laura Kirsner, Lori Moseman and Margaret Strother. We created a strong slate of shows for 2009, became a mainstay of Gallery Night and gained a wonderful year of remission for the gallery.”

Unfortunately, the current recession made it fiscally impossible for the gallery to continue. The Upstairs Gallery is supported by donations and sales of art. “Art is a very discretionary sort of purchase, and we are in the worst recession arguably in the postwar era,” said Guy.

The board wishes to give sincere thanks to the artists, donors, volunteers and community; and encourages all to attend the current and final shows.

Event horizons

Of possible interest:

Event Horizons: Science in Art

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20th, 7:00pm

Barbara Mink and Frank Moon will show examples of their work, talk about the way science comes into their art and art into science, and invite the audience to share their thoughts on exploring both sides of the brain.

Presenters:

Barbara Mink teaches Management Communication at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management and is the Artistic Director of the Light in Winter Festival; Frank Moon is a sculptor, science writer and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Cornell.

Host: Science Cabaret & Light in Winter

Cost: FREE

Where: WildFire Lounge – 106 S Cayuga St.

Mink will be showing work from her science-inspired "Event Horizons" series next month at the State of the Art. I got a glimpse of these the weekend before last at Ithaca's yearly Art Trail open studios. More to come about these, but I will say that the new work is eclectic, often weird, and occasionally perhaps over-mannered. Her landscape allusions are still mostly there, but they've been twisted into something less familiar, less predictable.

Her informal lecture tomorrow promises to be a candid discussion on some of the ideas behind her new work — particularly on the promises and perils of trying to derive artistic ideas from the natural sciences.

Books to print to books

More Mains, along with other Ink Shop associated artists:

The Tompkins County Public Library will host an opening reception for its newest exhibit, "Books to Print — Prints to Books," Thursday, October 15 from 5:00 to 7:00 PM in the Borg Warner Community Room and the Avenue of the Friends.

Full details here.

I saw the show over this past weekend and it looked pretty decent. The selection and display, not surprisingly, looked a bit haphazard compared to shows the Shop holds in its own space. The caliber of the work, for the most part, is an improvement over the library's usual fare — definitely an improvement over "A Senior Summer."

The opening looks as well worth attending as the show, as several of the artists will be on hand to manipulate their work.

Mishaps

Hedgerow on Fire, 2008, monotype

Cessna, Cloud, and Mountain Range (detail), 2005, monotype triptych

Filter, 2008, monotype

Storm Surge and Oil Rig, 2008, monotype

U-Assemble Burning Trailer, 2007, inkjet print and mixed media

In last week's Times:

A small airplane seems posed to make an emergency landing in the mountains. A hedgerow sports cartoon-like bouquets of fire as do a trailer and a submarine. Houses and oil rigs tumble into the water. Ships leak oil and a bridge twists itself.

Such morbid occurrences characterize "Mishaps: Monotypes and U-Assemble Disasters," the current show at Cayuga Heights' Corners Gallery highlighting the work of printmaker Craig Mains. He gives us a compelling teleology for his story-world; in an accompanying statement he imagines "large man-made objects and proscribed spaces...as attractors of natural malaise." So it goes, and with a logic that is both otherworldly and convincing.

Mains' style and technique are as distinctive as his subject matter. Working primarily in monotype (one-of-a-kind prints) he manipulates hand-painted acetate cutouts in a collage-like manner on a hard plate. After printing these, Mains will often change their arrangement and run the plate through the press again, resulting in color-faded "ghost" images. This combination of toy-like hard-edged shapes, repetition with variation, and painterly rendering is rich and well suited to his narrative imagination.

Although "Mishaps" presents a range of experiments and novelties, it is the relatively traditional work that stands out.

His large-scale triptych Cessna, Cloud, and Mountain Range is the most impressive of these by far. It consists of three framed square-ish sheets and can be read as a narrative sequence, from left to right, in the manner of a comic strip.

The first frame is ghost-ly, the silhouette of the plane merging into that of a cloud, both faint blue-green. It suggests the just-occurred; the second offers up the here-and-now with a solid dark brown aircraft aimed rightward (echoing its shadowy predecessor) towards an imposing peak, darker blue-green. Looking ahead, the final frame shows nothing but landscape: blue-green, green, a patch of black and white — all swirled together in a manner suggesting both Chinese ink landscape and Abstract Expressionism. Where is that plane headed?

Filter is another fine example of Mains in his most familiar mode. Colored in a range of ochres, pinks, reddish and orangish browns and watery yellows, it gives a characteristically surreal take on the depredations of flooding.

In front, perched on dark cliff, stands a lone house with indications of a chimney, windows and doors, and a front staircase. Behind it is a large expanse of river, coming in from the left edge of the sheet and winding its way into the far background, towards the upper right corner. Spanning it diagonally is an arch bridge, its feet progressively twisted toward the viewer as it moves closer to her. To its left, many partially drowned dwellings, houses scattered like tumbled dice. Comically, the bridge appears to block the houses from flowing further downstream — hence the title.

Recently, the artist has been experimenting a group of ideas that are idiosyncratic, at least in a fine-art context. Although animation and paper sculpture are not unexpected directions, his simultaneous use of do-it-yourself hobbyist formats certainly is.

Mains' prints imply a world in violent motion. It's unsurprising, therefore, to see his recent turn to animation. He has built a zoetrope, a nineteenth-century animation device. A strip printed with a sequence of images — here an inkjet copy of hand-printed work — is attached to the inside of a wheel. Through holes we can see a moment in time. Turn the crank and we can see motion. This is a good idea with rich potential. Here the image he has chosen, Storm Surge and Oil Rig — the title tells the story — seems a bit random in its moment-to-moment transitions (compare it with Cessna).

Images from his Oil Rig series are also presented behind frames. They vary both in color and in precise arrangement. Again the action seems arbitrary, more explicitly so since we can see everything at once.

More interesting is a U-Assemble Burning Trailer, a diorama made up of folded paper — again inkjet replicas — framed behind wood and glass. The trailer is placed at a diagonal. It is monochrome save for its green striped awnings. It sports an ear-like pair of red-orange flames; another flame occupies the foreground like shrubbery. In the background is a red-orange-brown volcano. Mountain, smoke, and fire merge into a single blurry mass.

Burning Sub, a small screenprint, distills Mains' oddball logic into uncommonly compact form. A solid black submarine, in profile, is submerged in cool gray water; crowning it is a bright, spongy yellow-green flame.

Mains shows his prints around town only sporadically, so a visit to this slightly offbeat venue — The Corners is a suburban frame-shop — is highly worthwhile. This is the work of an ambitious and idiosyncratic sensibility. That said, not everything here works well, particularly amongst the outliers and experiments.

Romeyn de Hooghe

Times:

Shows of European printmaking are characteristically strong at Cornell's Johnson Museum. Recent years have featured superb exhibitions on such print-masters as Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn and Honoré Daumier.

A compatriot and later-day contemporary of Rembrandt's is the subject of a compact but dense show currently at the museum. "Romeyn de Hooghe: Virtuoso Etcher" features an eclectic array of black and white intaglio prints by this little-known Dutch Baroque artist.

De Hooghe (1645-1708) isn't on the exalted artistic level of the above artists. His line-work is never less than immensely skillful and meticulous; still, the impression is often predominantly one of workaday laboriousness. His oft-repeated trick of juxtaposing dark, shadowy foregrounds against light middle-to-backgrounds is dramatic but sometimes over-mannered.

Like that of many printmakers, De Hooghe's oeuvre spans popular culture as well as more rarefied aesthetic territory. He made both stand-alone prints and illustrations for books (some of which he wrote himself) spanning everything from maps and mnemonic charts to political and military reportage.

De Hooghe's lifetime was marked by a series of wars, most prominently struggles between the Dutch and a coalition of foreign powers — particularly the English and the French — that took place between 1672 and 1678. Commemorations of some of these are concentrated in the show's first gallery. He was a Dutch patriot; consequently, an often vicious anti-French and anti-Catholic politics is marked.

Six framed plates taken from the artist's own text The Theatre of Changes in the Netherlands (1674) — a bound copy of the book is on display, too — show a visually intricate and heavily idealized narrative. Six progressive stages show a Dutch utopia threatened by barbarian Frenchmen only to be eventually recovered. Characteristically, they combine real current events with mythological and allegorical figures.

A rudimentarily hand-colored sea chart (attributed to the artist) incorporates a scene of the Dutch naval hero De Ruyter as Neptune being lead on a seaborne chariot by horses and merfolk.

Other prints emphasize more straightforward military scenery. In the best of these, the rhythmic dynamics of the struggling troops creates a palpable energy. A Dike Bursting Toward Coevorden shows the aftermath of a fortuitous (for the Dutch) event: leaking dikes washing away enemy troops, as well as flooding the farms surrounding the city.

The subjects and formats of the second room are more far-flung. Politics, propaganda and caricature serve as something of an anchor.

Scenes of events in the life of William of Orange are numerous. He was an important figure in both Dutch and English history (stadtholder in the Netherlands, later king of England).

Queen Mary's lying-in-state, a 1695 print commemorating the ceremony following the death of William's wife and English co-ruler, is dazzlingly baroque in its command of interior space. The overall symmetry of the architecture is masterfully countered by the directedness of the crowd towards the seated king at left. Mary herself lies in an elaborate bed in the middle, both a centerpiece and overlooked.

The same gallery gives us a sampling of the diverse subjects to which De Hooghe lent his talent. Particularly interesting are three illustrations included in Nicolaes Petter's 1674 treatise on the use of wrestling as self-defense. These illustrations feature two recurring combatants. The dynamism and unusual sparseness of the subject-matter affords the printmaker opportunity for some of his best work with the human body.

The intersection of landscape art and cartography is one of the show's most compelling themes. You can see it in the removed perspective and topographical focus of many of his battle scenes. An exciting 1672 image of The Siege of Groeningen combines a panoramic landscape (city in background, mayhem in front), a bird's-eye view and schematic regional map.

More naturalistic and more profound, however, is the second gallery's astonishing aerial view of The citadel and town of Mont Melian in Savoy. We see, from a foreground hill (moving forward) a sparsely wooded valley, a bridge-path traversing a river towards a partially fortified settlement, in its center is a steep hillside supporting an angular fortress. The rendering overall is perhaps the liveliest in show and the sense of deep space is vertiginous.

The foreground is weirder. Arrayed center to right is a crowd of figures (in typically shadowed style, here not too heavy-handed), among them several cartographers gathered around a picture-within-a-picture — an upturned document showing a schematic rendering of the distant fortress. The image breaks with the illusionism of the whole, as if collaged on.

"Virtuoso Etcher" is a rare opportunity to see work by this distinguished but lesser-known printmaker. Although his characteristically Baroque visual and narrative density can be off-putting to the modern eye, the work does reward the careful scrutiny it demands

metamorphic

James Spitznagel, The City #28, inkjet print, 17" x 22"

Sorry, lateness:

James Spitznagel brings something distinctive and strange to the Upstairs Gallery — and to Ithaca's often over-familiar art scene — with his latest show of manipulated worldviews: "Metamorphoses: An Exhibition of Digital Fine Art Photography". Spitznagel is also an electronic musician and his sensibility here is similarly experimental. He compares the improvisational and unexpected nature of his image-making to Abstract Expressionism, an analogy based more on process than on overt style.

In addition to more straightforward means of digital manipulation, the pictures involve re-photographing imagery off of screens, typically at an off-angle. Perspective is oddly twisted as a result. We see the subtle overall grids of the screens, but rarely quite perpendicular with the edges of the paper.

Spitznagel is not forthcoming about the real-world sources for his otherworldly abstractions. Nevertheless, most of his prints allude to — while ultimately eluding — our sense of the familiar. Many of his photos (a sampling hangs in the gallery's back room) suggest still-life.

His front room pictures are more diffuse, lacking a center or an un-ambiguous perspective. Indeed, they suggest an abstract urban cartography — the modern city and modern art filtered through a science fiction aesthetic. Each of these printed sheets here is 17" x 22" and stands upright.

The City # 1, 2, and 4 are busy, patchwork-like grids of Cubist forms in overall gray tones. Square and rectangular shapes appear flat, like the roofs of a crowded futuristic metropolis seem from the sky. Occasional diagonals suggest a contradiction, breaking the flatness.

The City #28 vividly resembles the man-made canyons of some big city streets. The tall building flanking to the left and right evoke Manhattan — although they appear as a dense abstract tapestry of white, black, and gray rectangular patches. Below center are faint light-ish letters, reminiscent of Cubism and collage.

Perhaps the most compelling pieces here are a series incorporating more amorphous, less obviously rectilinear textures. (The ever-present grid is still here in the form of the overall screen texture.) These pieces are evocative of circuit boards and Gothic architecture alike. Their shimmer of light is sometimes reminiscent of Monet's paintings of Rouen Cathedral.

The City #19, with its sparsely printed dark green-brown seemingly making the white of the paper glow, is a standout in this vein.

The City #10 is distinctive for its suggestion of interior space, along with a (more or less) human scale. Toward the lower right there is what looks like a half-open door, half blocking a patch of bright white glare. The piece is vaguely, oddly reminiscent of Velázquez's seventeenth century masterpiece Las Meninas, a meditation of self-reference, looking, and picturing. While there is little of that here — certainly there are no figures — there is a strongly narrative, cinematic ambience: one thinks of the futuristic film noir of Blade Runner.

The City #15 is the most radical plunge into abstraction, a thoroughly perspective-less composition with only the most tenuous reference to its erstwhile subject. (Piet Mondrian's classic abstract painting Broadway Boogie Woogie, influenced by the NYC street grid and by jazz, is a conceptual and stylistic ancestor.) We see a lumpy island of square blocks, printed in black and gray against an expanse of white. The black blocks are solid in tone within; otherwise we see a fine mesh-grid texture.

Finally, there is a standout City in Red series, a triptych. Each of the three panels, hung in a row, is roughly continuous with the others — but with discontinuities as well. 1 and 2 suggest a city skyline seen from a considerable distance. There is an allover smear of red. Above the jagged horizon is a cloud of magenta and white; below are architecture-like arrays of black. There are spots of yellow too. These color layers continue into 3 but the perspective seems to shift to aerial — and we are no longer perpendicular to the city grid. We are thus twisted out of what otherwise might be a postcard view.

Not everything here works well. In particular, some prints are overly reminiscent of surveillance imagery - an interesting narrative association perhaps, but less than lovely to look at. Still, the best of these images maintains the Upstairs Gallery's usual high standards while tweaking familiar expectations of gallery art.

photo forum clipping

[The] State of the Art Gallery will host a forum on photography in conjunction with its 20th Annual Juried Photography Show on Wednesday, March 18 at 7pm. Three photographers from the Ithaca area who have shown their work both regionally and nationally will speak at this special event. This event will be held at the gallery located at 120 W. State Street and is free and open to the public.

The guest speakers are:

Wilka Roig, the Prize Judge for this year’s show and Visiting Assistant Professor of Photography at Cornell. Wilka holds an MFA from Cornell University.

Andy Gillis, owner of Cascadilla Photography, specializing in high quality commercial and industrial photography. Andy is a graduate of Cornell and teaches as an adjunct at Tompkins Cortland Community College.

Keith Millman, an Associate Professor of photography and digital imaging at TC3. Keith received his MFA in Photography from California College of Arts and Crafts.

clustering

In today's Times:

The State of the Art Gallery's "20th Annual Juried Photography Show" (which runs through March 29) is part of a familiar local tradition. This year's photographers are mostly from in and around Ithaca. Also included are artists from Rochester, Syracuse, Elmira, Binghamton, Utica and New York City.

This year, guest juror Wilka Roig, an assistant photography professor at Cornell, took an unusual tack in assigning the prizes. Drawing on twelve "cluster criteria" used by philosopher Denis Dutton to define art in his recent book The Art Instinct, Roig used a variety of categories, reflecting the diverse satisfactions art can offer. (None of the criteria is necessary; more than one can suggest the presence of art.)

Phil Koons' combination of formalism, pop vernacular subjects, sly humor and (often) strong color has been a highlight of past years' Annuals. Here he is showing two compelling giclée prints: 4 Blocks to the Mississippi and 27 Miles to the Rio Grande. Mississippi is typically exuberant. We see, through a row of telephone poles, the corner of vividly painted building. Rio is more austere, presenting us with an impenetrable warm white facade; the windows are filled in.

Donald Specker's aptly titled color print Ithaca Iconic takes its subject from near the SOAG — from the corner of the Chanticleer, with its painted neon roosters pressed up against each other, themselves against the dark. Smaller, a glowing electric hand — "Don't Walk" — balances them to the left.

George Cannon's giclée Dream Stairs (from the Spiral Series) is the recipient of Roig's "Direct Pleasure Award." The piece's central form is elegant, if stiffly — a curvaceous dark silhouette abstracted from a spiral staircase. The background is a warm greenish grayish tone with light emanating from the center.

Jennifer Gioffre's Untitled (from the series Diaphaneity) beats Stairs in its sensuous depth. The palladium/gold print (black on warm white) shows is sharp focus what appears to be a curl of water frozen in time. It blurs, melts around the edges. The borders are dark, thick and painterly.

In a materially conservative show, Lena Masur's black and white Gunblocks stands out for its effectively unusual technique: gelatin silver emulsion printed on a wide strip of unframed glass. The texture is smoky and diffuse. Printed forms merge with their shadows. Four variously sized blocks are lined up horizontally in middle distance. Direct light comes through the left edge. Around them is seashore: frothy waves with patches of darker water and a distant horizon.

Alissa Newton's color 6919 is the winner of the "Special Focus Award," exemplifying how artworks "tend to be bracketed off from ordinary life." Appropriately, its subject — a translucent plastic pillbox with its multiple compartments filled — itself fills the entire space of the sheet. We are in another world. An allover moderate blur further emphasizes this strangeness.

Sharon Barotz's color print Reclaimed by Nature and Ben Altman's platinum/palladium (black and white) False Dichotomy contrast natural and cultivated outdoor spaces. (They might have fit into the Johnson Museum's "Picturing Eden," up through March 22.) Reclaimed is flat, as if the forms — the rough base of a tree and several elaborate, weathered gravestones — had been pressed up against the plane of the image.

Elaborate divisions of space mark Dichotomy. As befits the winner of the "Intellectual Challenge Award," these divisions are metaphorically ripe. Dividing left from right is a leftward leaning tree planted in the foreground. Below it, against the center of the bottom edge, is a blurry lump — apparently a balding man, hunched over, wearing a backpack. Behind the tree, in middle distance, is a dense wall of shrubbery. Behind that, seen from an off-angle, is a row of three elaborately carved spirals of greenery. In their midst is a stone statue, a female. Statue, tree and man form a cryptic dance.

A pair of black and white inkjet prints by John Retallack come from a series portraying the RIT professor's colleagues. Portrait of Skip Battaglia and Portrait of Lisa Hermsen effectively combine formality and warmth. Together with Randi Millman-Brown's Milkweed, these are the deserving recipients of two awards for "Skill and Virtuosity."

Other prize winners: Susan Larkin's Wild Grape Vine ("Expressive Individuality"), Viola Kosseda's newsstand still-life No Title ("Art Traditions and Institutions") Gretel Pelto's street portrait Old and Active in Wageningan ("Style") and Brandy Boden's Echo ("Imaginative Experience"). Challenging artists, Roig refused to offer prizes in several Dutton-ian categories: "Criticism," "Novelty and Creativity" and "Emotional Saturation." No prize was given for "Representation," as this "is only a small element in a successful representational work."

As in past years, the "20th Annual" is dominated by skillful work. Rich art is here as well.

A special forum featuring Roig and two other local photographers will be held at the gallery on March 18 at 7pm.

drix

Four Brothers, 2009, charcoal, etching, graphite, gum transfer and monoprint on paper

Wolf Pelt, 2009, pastel on vellum

Four Directions, 2009, gum transfer and monoprint on paper

Dissection, 2009, gum transfer and monoprint on paper

Valois/Con-Daw-Haw and the Great Law of Peace, 2009, graphite on vellum

Ithaca Times:

"The Haudenosaunee Project: Prints, Drawings and Pastels by Pamela Rozelle Drix" represents an ongoing foray by the artist into the culture, religion, geography and history of the Native American peoples of Upstate New York — probably better known as the Iroquois. The show reveals Drix to be an image-maker of uncommon nuance and ambition.

"Haudenosaunee" continues a series of engaging shows put on by the Ink Shop in the Community School of Music and Arts' first floor lobby — a cooperative program inspired by the Shop moving into the second floor of the CSMA-owned building about a year ago. According to Drix, this is the first solo show at the CSMA in recent memory.

The bulk of "Haudenosaunee" is made up of a series of variations on a single motif: the pelt of a female Adirondack grey wolf. Drix has the real pelt on a wall in her studio and the pelt has a story. The creature was the gift of Joe Soto, "a Native American of Tia'no heritage and Cree training" who provided spiritual guidance during the recent death of her father, an amateur archaeologist and an enthusiast of Native culture. The gift has clearly captured her imagination during recent months; all but one of the pieces here (a landscape) dates to 2009.

Drix draws upon Iroquois traditions of animism and spirituality — she speaks of her identification with the she-wolf, her strength and power as well as her nurturing capability. Nevertheless, she also stresses the exploratory nature of her quest, her need (particularly as a non-Native-American) to find the meaning of this gift on her own terms.

Also reoccurring in many of these pieces is the image of a crow feather that accompanied her father during the final week of his life. The feather is meant to suggest "the beautiful frailty of life."

With two exceptions, each of the pieces here is print-based. Gum transfer (a means of printing Xeroxed images) and monoprint are both in wide use, as are hand-drawn additions in graphite, charcoal and/or pastel. Many of the pieces incorporate multiple sheets of paper under a single frame.

Typically the printed silhouette of the animal — sometimes whole; sometimes divided, fragmented or multiplied — is placed against an empty expanse of white paper. Black and brown are the most characteristic colors. The former is laid on in thick, brushy oft-fur-like marks while the latter, reddish or yellowish, is applied in dusty clouds.

Four Directions makes an interesting dissociation between the solid materiality of the black and the ghostliness of the brown. Over an upward oriented smudgy black pelt, four disconnected red-brown paws have been overlaid. They radiate out from the center like the four cardinal directions on a compass. Drix cites the piece as "a reminder to...extend our protective vigilance in all four directions." Indeed. And the way she suggests an inner psychic life for what elsewhere threatens to become a lifeless trophy is distinctive.

Four Brothers incorporates a grid of four tall sheets under one frame. The sheets are not neatly lined up and attached; the piece has a not-unwelcome roughness. Warhol-like (though not Pop), we see four iterations of an upward-turned wolf's head. The variety of media — etching, monoprint, gum transfer, charcoal and graphite — is noteworthy, as is the unusual range of color and textures.

In Dissection with Arrowheads I and Dissection with Arrowheads II Drix departs from her centralized, almost heraldic treatment of the wolf pelt. Limbs dangle mysteriously from the top edge, or from the left and right edges. Both images incorporate a row of small, delicately rendered arrowheads across the bottom. These call to mind the animal's associations with killing — both as hunter and hunted.

Drix combines fragmentation with the central creature-image in Dissection. This is a large piece comprised of four printed pages that are hung side-by-side directly on the wall, unframed. Surrounded by white, the printed areas are of different sizes and proportions, mismatched. We see the entire span of the animal — more or less life size — but broken up. It is unfortunate that this impressive would-be-centerpiece is hung above the staircase leading to the CSMA's basement. Although it holds the space well, one does want to get up close.

The sole pure drawing of the animal, a pastel on vellum Wolf Pelt, stands out for its physical intensity. At first glance, it appears to pop out of from its thin, translucent sheet. It follows the central silhouette format; the critter's head points straight up and her tail straight down. One gets a strong sense of the physical markmaking — strokes of black have been vigorously smudged and, in places, partially erased. There are occasional highlights of white pastel too.

The CSMA show also includes a pair of pieces combining landscape, imagery and text. In contrast to the focus on object and character offered by the wolf pictures, these works convey a disjunction between seemingly pastoral rural landscape and the varieties of man-made violence. These works are dense and multilayered, both visually and conceptually — also in contrast to the slow-moving theme and variation of that typifies the show. They are also closer to most of the work that Drix has shown in recent group exhibits.

Both Valois/Con-Daw-Haw and the Great Law of Peace and Sacred Conversations: What's Happening? include extracts from the Great Law, the founding document of the Iroquois' Five Nations (The Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, and the Seneca). Affinity with and thanksgiving for nature and the Creator are prominent themes.

The former image, drawn in graphite, resembles a book page turned on its side (actually it looks better this way). Across the top, we see numerous paragraphs. Below is a wide strip of aerial view landscape, sketchily rendered, showing Valois, NY — Drix's hometown — alongside the nearby site of Con-Daw-Haw, a native settlement razed to the ground by General Sullivan during the Revolutionary War. (Or so we're told by the introductory text, the distinction is visually absent.) The land is divided by several vertical bands, some of which also mark off breaks in what might seem at first to be a continuous landscape. Below is an expanse of white with a crow feather to the right.

The latter is even more eclectic in style and content — to the point of feeling more like scrapbook contents than an image. Sacred Conversations is divided into two square sections. On the left, in an overall smudgy purple tone, is a transfer photo showing a construction site, full of trucks, with a tall crane near the center. We see a label, "HALLIBURTON"; looking again at the intro, we see that this refers to companies "drill[ing]...for natural gas in the Marcellus shale." Attached to the square is a piece of vellum bearing more lines from the Law of Peace and a feather, both providing contradictory voices.

Further amplifying the piece's conversational contradictoriness — perhaps nearly to the point of absurdity — the square on the right shows a serene valley landscape, rather lyrically rendered in expressive black monoprinted strokes. Melding with the cursive-like lines are rows of handwriting, this time indecipherable. There is another attached vellum scrap. This one shows, in sketchy graphite, a rustic house fronted by a blackened sign. The same image appears elsewhere in the show, in a 2007 gum printed photo. There we learn the sign's function: an official historical marker commemorating Con-Daw-Haw.

Drix mentions the notion of the wolf as a protector of the environment as a link between her pelt series and these explorations of place. One would to like to see this narrative connection made a bit stronger. (Although the large-scale Dissection does begin to suggest a sort of landscape in itself.)

According to the artist, "The Haudenosaunee Project" is her first solo show since co-founding the Ink Shop about a decade ago. Thankfully, we won't have to wait another decade to see her work en masse. Announced during Drix's opening last Friday, Roger and Adrienne Bea Smith of Groton's Main Street Gallery have granted her another solo showcase in the near future.

More immediately, she has work included in the Main Street's "Spring Group Exhibition" and in the show "Artists Made Books" at the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center in Auburn, NY. (The latter show is recommended and also includes local print and bookmaking luminaries Kumi Korf, Maddy Rosenberg, Buzz Spector, and Christa Wolf.) Both open later this month.

"The Haudenosaunee Project" remains on display in the CSMA's lobby gallery though March 27.

dr. christy mag uidhir

Event: Talk Print Philosophy of Art

03-13-2009

Description: The goal of philosophy of art is to provide systematic and informative methods of thinking about art. This includes the definition of art (what makes something an artwork), the nature of art objects (physical objects like chairs or abstract objects like numbers), and the relationship between the artwork, the artist, and the audience. I will briefly discuss how philosophers have addressed the above, but mostly focus on specific philosophical issues surrounding printmaking, specifically the relationship between: (1) prints, plates, and the printing process (2) prints in an edition (3) artist and printmaker (4) authenticity and forgery in printmaking

Organization: The Ink Shop Printmaking Center/Olive Branch Press

Time: 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Location: Ink Shop and Olive Branch Press, 102-106 W. State Street , Ithaca, NY 14850

Location Details: The gallery is on the 2nd floor

Cost: free

Information: (607) 277-3884

Web Site: http://www.ink-shop.org

matters/haudenosaunee

Wylie Schwartz has an informative interview with Pam Drix of the Ink Shop in this week's Ithaca Times. Briefly and succinctly, it covers some of the history of the IS, the technicalities of their current operation, and their plans for the future.

Drix has a solo show, "The Haudenosaunee Project," opening this Friday in the CSMA's space (on the first floor below the Shop's own). From the Gallery Night listing:

The "Haudenosaunee Project: Pastels and Prints by Pamela Drix" opens at the Tompkins County Foundation Gallery at the Community School of Music and Arts. The Haudenosaunee Project encompasses a series of prints, drawings, and pastels that were created after the death of my father, who passionately loved Native American culture and who was an amateur archeologist throughout his life. After his death, a Cree elder, who sat with my father the last three days of his life, gave me an Adirondack grey wolf pelt. This amazing gift became the catalyst for me to begin the project in earnest. Through the metaphor of the wolf, I am exploring the importance of being stewards of the land, protecting our natural resources, and understanding the particular history of the Finger Lakes in relation to the plight of the Iroquois Nation. In no small way, though, these images are really a tribute to my father as well. With great concern, I am also dismayed by the development of natural gas drilling of the Marcellus shale in our backyards. We have important work to do — to become informed citizens and protectors of our community's resources. The Haudenosaunee people, and all future generations, demand no less.

I saw her working on one of her wolf pelt pictures recently (while writing up the Shop's last show one Monday). It was more or less life-size and looked pretty awesome. More to come next week.

added color

Of related interest: Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute's website has a podcast available in which M. Johnson talks about her painting process and influences.