The Thinking Eye

Art of the Steal

2011-04-16T17:09:00.020-04:00

Located in Lower Merion Township, a suburb of Philadelphia, the Barnes Foundation is one America’s great (if lesser known) collections of visual art. It was founded in 1922 by Dr. Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951), a progressive albeit eccentric collector who raised himself from working-class origins through medical training and through his development and marketing of the antiseptic drug Argyrol. Housed in a distinctive building by French-American Beaux-Arts architect Paul Cret, the eclectic collection of fine and decorative artworks is best known for its Post-Impressionist and early Modernist paintings. It has formidable holdings by the likes of Jean-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Matisse once called it “the only sane place to see art in America” while the philosopher John Dewey dedicated his classic 1934 book Art as Experience to Barnes – his student and close friend. Wary of the spectacle and commercialism that he saw as defining art museums, Barnes conceived of his building and collection primarily as a school. He stipulated in his indenture for the Collection that it be kept intact inside the original building.

It is this wish – as well as the great artistic and historical integrity of the collection and its housing – that has been violated by its current and recent trustees in their plans to move the Collection to a new home in downtown Philadelphia’s Museum District. Legally authorized in 2004, the move is currently well underway. Construction for the new building began in the fall of 2009 and should be completed this next winter. The original Barnes is to close down this July and is to reopen at the new location next year. The move has the support of many local players in politics and business, many of them seemingly more concerned with their own interests than with the integrity of the Barnes. The move have not gone uncontested: The Friends of The Barnes Foundation, a “citizens’ group,” continues to engage in legal challenges. Many in the art world have spoken out as well, among them the prominent local architect Robert Venturi – who renovated the building back in the 90’s.

This Sunday, at 2pm, Cornell’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art will be offering a public screening of “The Art of the Steal,” director Don Argott’s acclaimed 2009 documentary about the controversy. As indicated by the title, the film is an unashamedly biased polemic against the move. In the words of LA Times art critic Christopher Knight (one of its many interviewees) it “is a riveting — and tragic — documentary film chronicling the gratuitous ruin of a school outside Philadelphia that houses an incomparable art collection. It's a classic story of destroying the village in order to save it.”

Following the showing, there will be a panel discussion featuring Cornell English professor Jeremy Braddock, grad student and preservationist Nathaniel Guest and Barnes curator Martha Lucy. It promises to complicate the perspective offered by what some have claimed is an overly one-sided film. Lucy will also be giving a lecture the following Monday with the tantalizing title “Why We Love to Hate Renoir.” It will be held at 5pm at the Ruth Woolsey Findley History of Art Gallery at Goldwin Smith Hall and will be followed by a reception. Both events are free and open to the public.

Decadia

2011-01-12T18:17:00.003-05:00

A review of the Ink Shop's "Decadia" in this week's Tompkins Weekly. (I'd post it here in full but I had a lousy time with Blogger's text formatting last time around and am not eager to repeat the experience.) Or download the whole paper here (PDF). Go see the show before it closes after Saturday.

Trees and Other Ramifications

2010-12-21T20:34:00.017-05:00

Mike Starn and Doug Starn
Structure of Thought 15, 2001-05
Inkjet print and mixed media
Collection of the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas

In this week’s Tompkins Weekly (PDF):

Branching, both as natural phenomenon and as cultural metaphor, is the subject of a current Johnson Museum show. “Trees and Other Ramifications: Branches in Nature and Culture” comes from The Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas – where it was organized by curator Stephen Goddard – and has been supplemented with works from Cornell. Goddard specializes in works on paper and “Trees,” mostly in black and white, has the same bias.

Several images stand out for their raw beauty. Both Doug and Mike Starn’s large-scale inkjet photograph Structure of Thought 15 (2001-05) and Jacques Hnizdovsky’s modestly sized woodcut Copper Beech (1985) present flatly silhouetted monochromatic tree-forms. The elaborate material support of Structure is typical of the Starns’: a grid of waxed and varnished papers glued together and stretched over a frame. The warmly colored and translucent sheets make the tree(s) ghostly, free-floating. An intended analogy between branching and thinking is robustly embodied (other photographs in the series show neurons). In a related but distinct way, the detailed and impeccable line drawing in Beech conveys a sense of outward movement in tension with the static overall profile.

Arboreal metaphors for lineage have a long history. Among many examples here is a diagrammatic Tree of Life (1860, lithograph and letterpress) by none other than Charles Darwin. This elegant piece of information design, the only illustration from his groundbreaking Origin of Species, diversifies upward in splitting dashed lines. Similarly, Ad Reinhardt’s polemical cartoon How to Look at Modern Art in America (1946, offset lithography) parodies Alfred Barr’s schematic attempt to chart the roots and branches of visual modernism with a more literally drawn tree. (A print by Darwin’s evolutionist colleague Ernst Haeckel is similarly literalist – the stiff line drawing not among his more captivating images.)

Treescape as pastoral endures, despite being closely tied in Western art with the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Although as subject as any genre to cliché (think of images on posters and calendars), the best work in this vein is difficult to deny. Numerous pieces here attest to this. The dense accumulation of fine hatchings that make up Franz Von Stuck’s (1890) etching Forellenweiher (Trout Pond) make up a shadowy space pierced by light coming from between trunks. The receding perspective of these trees – reflected in the water – penetrates an otherwise flat image. A pair of recent drypoints by Donald Resnick – Shoreline (1997) and Woods/Morning (1998) is similarly atmospheric.

But some of the most exciting work here takes the viewer into less familiar territories. One of these “other ramifications” is a gelatin silver photograph by engineer-photographer Harold Edgerton, a close-up of the White of the Eye (taken 1979) showing a network of retinal arteries and veins. Camera blurring, particularly in the foreground, helps create a delightfully ambiguous space. (It also suggests a self-reflexive commentary on the nature of vision.) White has been provocatively paired with Tanaka Ryohei’s skillful and intricate etching Trees #3 (1974), an idiosyncratic orchard scene with exaggerated perspective. The dense overlapping of the knotted trunks and branches echoes Edgerton’s ocular vessels. (Augustus Knapp’s 19^th century wood engraving of a medicinal rhizome is also worth comparing.)

Another pairing of “others” is similarly fascinating, if more opposed in its approaches. Both images show plants as botanical specimens. Karl Blossfeldt’s (early twentieth century) gelatin silver Erygnium Bourgatii shows a starkly silhouetted leaf. The spiky form has the look and feel of Gothic architecture filtered through the artist’s characteristic detachment. William Sharp’s (1854) color lithograph illustration Lily Leaf, by contrast, is drawn with great detail. Featuring an overall dull reddish tone, it shows the underside of the leaf with an admirable eye for the plant’s intricate structure of ridges and branches.

Elliott Erwitt’s gelatin silver Bearded Man with Tree, Venice, CA (taken 1979) makes a comical analogy between its two foreground “figures.” A scruffy fellow and an also-bearded palm seem oblivious to one another. In the background: a gable with a row of windows, antennas, wires.

It would have been interesting to see more three-dimensional work such as Cornell professor Jack Elliott and students’ sculptural VanRose benches. Named after pioneering Cornell Home Economics professors Martha Van Rensselaer and Flora Rose and crafted from the stump of a sugar maple recently cleared in an expansion of that college (now Human Ecology), the symmetrically arranged pair both preserves and enriches the natural beauty of the roots and trunk.

Despite this eclecticism the overall sense conveyed by “Trees” is one of traditionalism. It would have been good to see more offbeat and aggressively contemporary work with the visual presence of the Starns’ or Edgerton. Still, this is an engaging show able to provoke hours of viewing and thought.

“Trees and Other Ramifications” remains on display at Cornell’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art through January 2^nd.

Flattery

2010-12-01T15:11:00.007-05:00

For those who may not have seen it, I have a fairly lengthy review of a solo show by local artist Barbara Page published recently in the Ithaca Post. "The Dot and the Line," comprised mainly of collage-paintings, was up last month at Center Ithaca's CAP ArtSpace and is now down, unfortunately. The piece is worth reading nevertheless (or do I flatter myself?), as I extensively relate the work to broader artistic and intellectual movements and to other works of culture – this in addition to my usual close reading. Among them: Katherine Harmon's recent anthology The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, popular science author Steven Johnsons "long zoom" as profiled in this NYT article and in many of his books, The Charles and Ray Eames film Powers of Ten, Norton Juster's picture book The Dot and the Line (a film/video version), and Georges Perec's essay "Species of Spaces." And to top it off, some of the modernist/abstractionist art that I was raised on. And if that sounds excessive, let me just say that Page's work is the sort of thing that interests me particularly and that I have a deep intuitive sense of what it is about – or so I'd like to think. (Long term readers of this blog, on the off chance that there are any, might have some clue as to the sensibility I am vaguely pointing at.)

In other art review related news, look for an upcoming Tompkins Weekly review of the show "Trees and Other Ramifications," at the Johnson Museum. I'll post it here. The show itself is worth seeing as well.

Post-critical

2010-07-30T16:19:00.012-04:00

I've been remiss in not mentioning here the art reviews that I've been writing for the Ithaca Post. The Post is a new online publication focusing on the local (Ithaca-area) scene. It publishes more or less daily articles on a variety of subjects; headings include Art, Culture, Film, Food, Literature, Music, and Stage.

The Post is the brainchild of the indefatigable Luke Fenchel, who might be responsible for a quarter (or more) of our local arts coverage. This is in addition to his many other contributions to local culture, popular music in particular.

I have also had the pleasure of working with the literary-minded Danielle Winterton as my editor. She has been very responsive and critical with my writing — something that has been a pleasure to have. Danielle is also co-edits the online literary journal Essays and Fictions, which is based both here and in New York City.

An archive of my work is posted on the right sidebar. Pieces I would like to emphasize here — though unfortunately no longer timely — are a review of a two-person photography show featuring Steve Poleskie and J. Robert Lennon and one of the Ink Shop's recent 10 year anniversary show. More to come.

Siena studio

2010-04-15T12:30:00.006-04:00

I am writing reviews for the Times again:

Intricate, sometimes brilliantly colored geometrical abstractions, carefully rendered on small metal panels or sheets of paper, are the main attractions in a current show at the Cornell's Johnson Museum.

These lovably convoluted flatlands are the work of James Siena, a Cornell graduate (BFA, 1979), and the winner of this year's Eissner Artist of the Year Award. The prize is given annually to "an alumna/us who has achieved national or international success in the arts" — something Siena has achieved over the course of three decades in New York City. "James Siena: From the Studio" will be on display at the Johnson through Sunday, April 18.

Siena's images belong to a genre of artworks (not just visual) incorporating preconceived formal constraints as a primary source of structure and shape. Sol LeWitt, to whom Siena is frequently compared, is a primary point of reference. LeWitt devised formulas for wall drawings to be executed by assistants — e.g., iterations of straight-ruled horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines.

LeWitt is of great historical importance and undoubtedly an influence on the younger artist. Siena's work, however, develops these ideas in a different and arguably richer direction — more aesthetically robust, more sensual and bodily. Plus his math is just more interesting. Though strictly non-figurative (with exceptions, see below), Siena's art might be closer to that of M.C. Escher, whose geometrical schemas are deployed in the service of more accessible image-making.

Siena is also frequently aligned with folk and decorative traditions. However, his art has a self-enclosed quality that seems to place it more directly in the modern art lineage.

The most elaborately formal work here is composed with sign-painter's enamel on aluminum panels, a signature medium. Enter the Faces and Base Three feature elaborate patterns of nested geometric forms. The former contains spiraling rectangular shapes while the latter's rounded forms feel dully static. The acridly colored Non-Slice is a strong example of Siena's more organic, freeform side. It can indeed be seen as a cross-section — perhaps of some biological or geological structure.

V-Module is a dizzying maze-vortex in two colors: green and off-white. Hook-like striations converge towards the center of the panel, but the visual core is strangely indeterminate. Module is notably irregular in its manual execution — you can see varying opacities of paint, as well as areas of unpainted metal.

Siena is a rather hit-or-miss colorist. Much of his best work is color restricted, often two-toned. For example, the branching, sponge-like growth of Ballou — black ink on white paper — is not too far removed from the simplicity of Matisse's cutout collages.

Recently, Siena has incorporated his intricate patterning into images of comics-influenced human grotesques. The profiled head of a Cursing Old Man (graphite on paper) is crisply outlined, while his interior forms — suggesting muscles and brain — are rendered in scratchily tonal lines. (The allover abstract graphite drawing Untitled (Fuzzy Line) has similar mark-making — look closely and it's easy to see a face.) In Flatland, Flat Battered Girls, and Four Figures Connected feature disturbingly flattened and distended figures.

Flat Mole and Flat Mouse (both from his student days) are both done on outstretched animal hides covered with metal leaf. The former features tiny drawn hands. Also outliers in Siena's corpus are three small sculptures. Lattices of toothpick fragments have been constructed around grape stems. These minor efforts fit the show's intimate and exploratory theme.

Beyond Siena's own work, a collection of art and artifacts "from the studio" also forms an integral part of the show's concept. The bona-fide artworks are from friends and influences (many bear dedications). Although mostly so-so as art, they do help define a sensibility.

Alan Saret, a mentor of Siena's, has created one of the most impressive images here: Shroni Gorge Air. One of his "gang drawings," it was done with several colored pencils in hand, manipulated with characteristic grace and variety. It contains a sense of sweeping movement akin to the weather. In a similar vein, but less subtle and expressive, is a tiny ink drawing by the abstract surrealist Charles Seliger.

The non-art fares better. Two antique typewriters, aside from being beautiful, are closely linked to Siena's sensibility in at least two ways: in their implicitly anthropomorphic form and in the transparency of their mechanisms. Like them, Siena's work displays its inner workings — actually more so because their resolute flatness leaves nothing occluded.

Three small photographs, anonymous aerial surveillance images from World War 1, show networks of trenches. Many of these form crenellation-like patterns, particularly Siena-esque.

This is flawed yet fascinating show, a glimpse into the work and sensibility of an intriguing and influential artist.

***

Siena will be giving a talk on his work at the museum 4:30 p.m. Friday, April 16. An award ceremony for the Eissner will be held in conjunction with the talk. Visit museum.cornell.edu for more information.

The show was also reviewed for the Cornell Daily Sun.

Mink

2009-11-18T14:33:00.011-05:00

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

2009-11-08T17:33:00.006-05:00

From the opening for "Event Horizons" at the State of the Art Gallery on the evening of Friday 11/06/09. Artist in black with necklace. Other important local artworld people out and about. Footage by Jan Kather, an artist in digital photgraphy and video installation. My review coming on Wednesday. UPDATE (11/12/09): Wednesday of next week, which is when it looks like the paper is printing it — apologies.

Curvilinear

2009-10-29T09:35:00.018-04:00

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

2009-10-26T19:29:00.003-04:00

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

2009-10-19T19:21:00.005-04:00

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

2009-10-15T09:15:00.004-04:00

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

2009-10-15T08:33:00.017-04:00

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

2009-09-26T11:09:00.006-04:00

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

2009-04-04T14:35:00.008-04:00

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

2009-03-18T12:16:00.004-04:00

[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

2009-03-18T12:00:00.006-04:00

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

2009-03-13T13:33:00.014-04:00

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

2009-03-13T12:06:00.005-04:00

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

2009-03-04T13:01:00.008-05:00

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

2009-03-03T13:39:00.004-05:00

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.

melissa johnson

2009-03-03T08:11:00.007-05:00

Melissa Johnson, New Lines, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 12" x 12"

Tompkins Weekly (PDF):

Small square canvases, of identical surface area, are covered in pools and clouds of richly colored, though thinly applied and often translucent paint. Floating or standing amongst these color fields are more crisply defined, relatively opaque shapes. Although abstract, these blobs, lumps, and tubes suggest the figure — or perhaps its limbs and organs.

The assemblages evoke oddball human dramas. Some shapes are also reminiscent of vegetables: peppers and eggplants in particular. Rock gardens and microbial landscapes also come to mind.

Such are the myriad forms that populate “New Lines: Paintings by Melissa Johnson,” which is currently up at Cornell’s Willard Straight Hall Gallery. Johnson’s show comprises some 20 acrylic works: 19 of them small (12" x 12") and one large (48" x 48"). The paintings are unframed and often quite thick; they pop out of the wall like boxes.

Though distinctive, Johnson’s paintings call to mind diverse precedents from the history of modern art. Her sensuously colored, densely translucent, and overlapping tone-tongues resemble the abstractions of Morris Louis, although on a much more intimate scale (and using brushes rather than pouring). In contrast to Louis, and the other protagonists of Post-Painterly Abstraction, with their high seriousness, her quirky, quasi-figurative drama and humor is reminiscent of artists such as Joan Miro and Louise Bourgeois. (The humor is slapstick, and therefore hard to convey in words.)

There is an ambiguity in the way Johnson plays shapes off of the edges of her squares: they either appear to rest on the edges like objects on a platform, or they seem to continue beyond our view.

Several canvases feature rows of tongue or finger-like forms protruding from the edges, often from the bottom. Among these is New Lines, one of the most strongly figurative works in the show. The background is unusually rough, with abrupt brushstrokes forming a rather landscape-like background of blue, purple, and green. Mid-ground, near the center of the square, floats a low hanging white cloud. Lined up along the bottom edge is row of six foreground finger people, resembling dancers, or individuals in a parade. Some, looking like inverted exclamation marks, even sport head-like spots. The foreground colors are warm: bold reds, murky dark purples, burnt orange.

Ten 26 is distinctive for its clarity and relative sparseness. The background is a busily brushy green — yellow over a blue under-layer. Emerging from the left of the bottom edge and seemingly leaning rightward is a pair of adjacent fat blob-tongues: lavender and orange-red. (Their brushwork fills neatly echo their contours, helping keep them separate.) Down from the top edge: a skinny, Indian yellow tongue and a pair of dark red-brown projections that suggest a pair of dangling, stocking-covered legs.

Slide On, in contrast, is a densely layered vortex of color-forms, spanning a wide range of sizes and opacities (generally, the smaller, the more opaque). These are more rock-like than organic and the colors suggest desert and rust. Slightly off-center is a tear in this space. Its colors are unexpected: warm blue and magenta.

The variety that Johnson has achieved within a fairly consistent format is impressive. Wild (like several) features rough, scrawl-like marks, My Deep a background of curved diagonal stripes. Pour Me Down is unusually opaque. The gracefully curving CM is filled with eggplants (purple and brown, hazy and sharp) while Those Spaces Between seems to feature some kind of elongated orange gourd.

Scaling up can be a difficulty for any artist. The task is a particular challenge with gestural, painterly work, wherein every mark may be called upon to make a self-conscious statement. Moving bigger requires renegotiating the manner in which bodily movements and perceptions are choreographed into the agglomeration of form.

It is therefore unsurprising that Best Days, the sole large piece here, is dominated by two stiff, flatly colored-in forms: one resembling a red pepper and the other (vaguely) an upside-down axe or hammer head. One misses the lively interplay of gesture and drawn shape found in most of the smaller works.

All too often in local art, work that has pretensions toward playfulness or whimsy gives the impression of desperate effort being made to mask a more fundamental creative lifelessness. Ithaca loves the idea of the artist as free spirit; sadly, the real thing seems to be fairly rare. Melissa Johnson’s paintings are the real thing and as such deserve a broad audience.

water preserves

2009-02-25T14:04:00.010-05:00

Video art!:

"Water Preserves," the title of Jan Kather's current solo show, has a double meaning. On one hand, water sustains us — our bodies and our environment. On the other, water itself may require preservation. Although motivated by real world environmental destruction, the show treats both themes mostly in an indirect, metaphorical, and poetic manner.

The SOAG's back room, which has been darkened, contains four video installations. A large wall-projected video, Water Preserves, is the show's centerpiece. Incorporating footage from different locations (upstate New York and elsewhere), we are treated to a slow-moving, meditative essay on water's surfaces. The camera is mostly unobtrusive: it stays still or pans gently. Images dissolve into images. Looking down, we see waves, froth, stones, sand, shimmering light, bits of bright green foliage. Spots or streaks of mysterious pink or orange tint intrude occasionally. We hear the water, too.

According to Kather, the work may be entered and departed at any point in time. Still, for those willing to engage in a patient, protracted experience — and to abandon any expectation of linear narrative — it is worth taking in whole.

Three Mason jars (suggesting the theme of preservation) have been placed atop projectors and filled partially with water. The text and imagery is obscured, we see an enchanting abstraction of light and color.

A medium-sized video screen shows what is nearly a loop of still images. Time passes slowly before we dissolve to the next. We're outdoors, in winter's half-light. Only the steady falling of snow suggests time. We see an orange-tinted streetlight above. We move closer and then closer again. Then we see a criss-cross of snow-covered branches and then, finally, a brief shot of ground.

The least successful video features the most elaborate installation. A metal-mesh shelf has been fitted with six small screens — one in each cubby-hole. In front of each are one or two water-filled jars. The top three show image grids in shades of blue. The left and right of these show shots of clouds taken from an airplane. The middle screen shows water over grass. The bottom screens recycle the snow sequence at three different speeds — accompanied by ambient sounds including swinging doors and radio voices. Overall, the imagery is difficult to parse, the juxtaposition sketchily conceived, and the idea of water in multiple forms (solid, liquid, gas) tentatively presented.

In the front room, another screen presents a series of water-related works done by artists from around the world and assembled by Kather. (These can also be seen online: http://web.mac.com/jkather/iWeb/Site 11/Water Preserves.html.) Highlights are many. In Simone Stoll's Rain, we see from behind a bare-footed woman struggling for balance as she crosses a plank. Falling and flowing water surround her. Alicia Felberbaum's Not The Silent Sea is cacophonous: bright bands of unnatural color, visual distortion, swimming sea mammals and their cries, discordant music — all very appropriate, given her theme of noise pollution.

Also in front are several digital photo-collages. Based on grids (often staggered and irregular) they typically include identical or near-identical images reiterated. Again, images shot at disparate locales are mixed together. Many incorporate text, typically obscured: literary, Biblical or journalistic. One gets the sense of sketches, of ideas being worked out: only a few seem resolved as completed works.

Among these, Water Preserves: Homeland Security is particularly striking. The background image, in starkly beautiful black and white, shows a gentle cascade of water and ice. A row of translucent Mason jars cross the bottom edge. In the upper right corner of one of them, a tiny round warning sign in black, white and red: no drinking. The piece reflects post-9/11 concerns of bioterrorism and contamination — although these themes are (so to speak) submerged.

A series makes use of an image of a dead fish. A lenticular print (an image printed on a array of lenses which changes appearance as the viewer moves) juxtaposes the fish with a placid, postcard-like view of a lake. The medium is a bit contrived; a paper printed montage of the two images expresses the pastoral/morbid contrast with greater grace. Accompanying it is text taken from a 1964 obituary for ecologist Rachel Carson, one of the show's muses. Silent Spring: Fish and Pond (named after Carson's best-known book) shows a dead bird as well. The repetition and layering of the two images is subtle and varied. These images can be seen as elegies for environmental destruction.

A pair of silver prints date back to the eighties. Acadia and The Surf — both of them lovely and somewhat violent shore-scapes — show the continuity of Kather's aesthetics.

"Water Preserves" remains up at the State of the Art through March 1. From March 6 through April 3 it can be seen (likely in altered form) at Alfred State College in Alfred, NY.

in the dark

2009-02-23T12:28:00.015-05:00

Treacy Ziegler, Leaving Stanley Point, 2008, monoprint, 35" x 60"

“Seeing In The Dark” — on display through March 26^th at the Tompkins County Public Library — aims to be a show about the night. Local artist Laurel Guy curated the exhibit; her plein air pastels are included. Also here are moody, cryptic monoprints by Treacy Ziegler; classicizing oils by Tim Merrick; desolate photographs by David Mount; and the painted cartoons of Alice Muhlback.

A good thematic show can deepen our understanding of the artists, highlighting differences as well as affinities. This is not such a show. The work is diverse to the point of being unrelated, a series of disconnected tracks.

Laurel Guy draws local scenes outdoors (here at night, of course). Her approach suggests a kind of folk impressionism.

Guy’s most affecting piece offers a view from Sunset Park. There is a palpable though elusive sense of height and distance; we are looking down at a mass of sky, land, and water. These are subtly rendered in horizontal streaks of blue, purple, and light grey. Bright lights — in the form of thickly pigmented spots of white, red, and yellow-orange — dot the bottom half of the page.

Treacy Ziegler’s four monoprints are by far the most advanced pieces here. One really gets the sense of being in the dark, of struggling to make out distinctions between forms. There is a rich diversity of texture: chalky lines and tone, thin brushing, and spongy oily droplets. The white of the paper is a rare sight. In addition to ample pure blacks, translucent blacks have been printed over blocks of color — often a pale yellow-tan.

Three of her prints feature pathways receding off into mysterious distance: Leaving Stanley Point shows a purple river — a small rowboat dangling off its edge — while Evening Cow and Boundary picture roads. Cow has the sole protagonist (which looks more like a black and white spotted dog), while Boundary suggests human presence with bulbous yellow-green trees and a pink-magenta house.

Before a Green Sky, a still life, stands out among Ziegler’s pieces here for its extreme spatial ambiguity. Light and dark, near and far, indoors and outdoors — all of these are twisted into disorienting puzzle. A flower rests in a cyan vase atop a red cloth covered table. We are facing the table straight on. And looking out a window at a blackened landscape — but the window frame is nowhere to be seen and we lose track of where we are.

Tim Merrick is showing a pair of large oil on canvas scenes, both of them emphatically flat and frontal. There is considerable roughness in the texture of the brushwork, much scumbling and messy translucent layering. The roughness, rather than being graceful, seems somewhat tentative and awkward.

Tiempieto at Night shows the front of a classical temple with a triangular pediment on top, circular windows, and a row of three arched doorways at the bottom. (The image is taken from a fresco by Renaissance master Piero della Francesca, whom Merrick sites as an influence.) The building is whitish earthy red and framed in strips of dirty ochre. A pair of large white birds in profile: one seemingly perched on the central archway, wings up and looking down-right; the other standing stiffly below the same door, facing left. Black and tan outlines give the shapes both structure and stiffness. The background is scumbled dark with blues and greens.

His Cachi Tree is red-brown with bare branches (and no outlines). Brushy balls of yellow-orange — passion fruit — hover around these limbs; others have fallen in a circle around the tree’s base. More white birds, this time squat and plump, perch above and below.

Also by Merrick are three watercolors, including a sketch for each of he canvases.

David Mount’s digital color photographs (inkjet prints) of unpopulated parks and roadsides emphasize bright, artificial lighting — often from uncertain sources. These “Night Trees” glow with sterile, alien light. The traditional romance of the night has been dispelled. The effect is most compelling in images such as Night Trees 25 in which the alien-ness has pushed to an extreme. (One expects the immanent arrival of a flying saucer.)

As for Alice Muhlback’s would be playful acrylic on wood paintings, my ability to appreciate them in the spirit in which they were intended is sadly lacking. Muhlback is more of a cartoonist than a painter. Her strokes of color — here a lot of blue, purple, and white, with spots of red (especially lips) — serve as functional backdrops to her black or white outlined figures. These figures are people or birds. Or fragments: heads, teardrop-shaped eyes, schematic wings.

One would like to see more carefully put together thematic shows in Ithaca. Here the fact that all of these images show nighttime scenes seems mostly accidental.

icons of the desert

2009-02-18T10:45:00.007-05:00

Times:

The roots of contemporary Aboriginal art are commonly traced to the activities of white schoolteacher Geoffrey Bardon (1940-2003). The place of this breakthrough was the remote native settlement of Papunya, about 150 miles west of the town of Alice Springs, near the center of Australia. (Several native groups were made to resettle there during the previous decades.) In 1971, Bardon, a schoolteacher, encouraged the children and then several of the adult men of the impoverished community to create acrylic paintings using traditional and sacred imagery. Previously, this imagery has been seen only in ephemeral art forms such as sand and body painting.

"Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya" — which is on view at the Johnson Museum through April 5 — emphasizes work from the early years of this tradition, in particular from Bardon's 1971-1973 tenure. The art comes from the collection of John Wilkerson (a 1970 Cornell PhD) and his wife Barbara, who became fascinated with the movement in 1994. Put together by the Johnson and curated by University of Sydney scholar Roger Benjamin (a specialist in modern art), the show will move on to UCLA's Fowler Museum and then to NYU's Grey Art Gallery.

Contemporary Western viewers will note the works' formal similarity to Abstract Expressionism and other modern art movements. This is an inevitable part of their appeal. However, it is important to understand something of the artwork's narrative intent and not to view the work as purely abstract or decorative.

For their creators, they are thought not only to depict, but also to contain actual traces of, ancestral creation narratives known at the Dreamings (Tjukurpa). The cycle of stories involves the exploits of ancestral beings living in a mythic, extra-worldly time. Their actions are thought to have shaped the world as it is today — its social and moral order as well as its geography.

The paintings can be conceived as landscapes. Rather than the empirical, observational focus of traditional Western landscape, however, these acrylics are more akin to maps, or to the tenuous resemblances of pictographic writing.

Even a rudimentary understanding of the works' iconography helps deepen their appreciation. Arrangements of concentric circles — "roundrels" in the language of the show's accompanying text — represent campfires, watering holes, or other "sacred sites." These are typically connected together via networks of lines indicating pathways and journeys. Bulbous U-shapes indicate people (the shape is derived loosely from that of a seated person). Wavy lines indicate water and other shapes represent animal tracks.

Dots are the most prevalent and well-known motif in Papunya painting. ("Dot painting" is a popular name for the style.) Most characteristically, they are tightly packed and cover much (or nearly all) of the surfaces, sometimes filling in other forms and other times obscuring them. Their prevalence springs from their general lack of concrete religious significance. Much of the traditional sacred imagery created by male artists is to be kept from the eyes of women, children and outsiders. (This prohibition is occasionally — and carefully — violated in this show, with potentially controversial results.)

The paintings are complemented by floor installation, which — somewhat teasingly — alludes to the traditional ritual origins of the culture. Arranged within a sandbox-like enclosure is a roughly square network of roundrels and traveling lines. These are done in a red, fibrous plant material while the background is done in a similarly textured white. Installed last week by a team of visiting artists, this temporary work will come down with the end of the show.

Reflecting the art's traditional grounding, the colors tend overwhelmingly towards the earthy: black and white, as well as subdued tones of brown, yellow, red and ochre. A number of the paintings make use of a flagrantly artificial bright orange; the effect is invariably garish and off-putting. For example: Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi's otherwise interesting Mystery Sand Mosaic (November 1974).

During the first few years of the acrylic art movement, Masonite boards served as the primary support surface. The boards in "Icons" are often irregularly shaped and tend to be roughly cut.

Formally and technically, the accomplishment of these paintings is markedly uneven. As one might expect of artists experimenting with a new medium, the technique used is typically fairly basic — and occasionally downright crude. (I will focus, below, on some of the ample exceptions.) The basic method involves covering the entire surface of the support with a flat underlayer — often black or brown — and then covering most of the surface with an intricate pattern of lines and dots.

Water Dreaming at Kalpinypa (August 1972), by Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula is widely acknowledged as a masterpiece of modern Aboriginal art. Indeed, this "image of country being transformed...by Water Man" is a work of considerable visual sophistication and narrative resonance. Painted at a time of great rains and flooding, it reflects these concerns. Intricately detailed and strongly asymmetrical, it resembles a map in its lack of obvious structure. Against a milk-chocolate brown backdrop, there is a dense layering of forms rendered in brown-reddish cream, yellow, gray, beige, and black: multi-directional dots and striations, river-like curves, tiny roundrels, tjurangas (bandage-shaped ceremonial boards) — among others. Black dots indicate raisins (kampurarrpa), an important local foodstuff.

Classic Pintupi Water Dreaming (also August 1972) is another variation on the same theme. Done on an upright board (roughly a parallelogram), Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi's painting features a central roundrel in cool lemon-ochre lines, representing a waterhole. From it emerge spoke-like lines surrounded by further concentric circles, more widely spaced and becoming more rectangular towards the outer edges. These are said to represent "creeks" and "soakages" respectively. White dots on black fill in the background. Framing the scene to the top and bottom are a pair of lump-shaped hills — black over-dotted with brown as well as white.

Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri's almost square Yam Spirit Dreaming (March 1972) is both unusual and unusually compelling in its style and conception. A central X-shape emerging from the center dominates the composition. Painted in a slightly translucent white, various silhouetted forms branch off of the X: animal and human ("Yam Spirit") figures. Disconnected, scattered, pairs of U-shapes ("Yam Ceremonial Men") face each other. A leaf-like border, still in white, surrounds all the figures. The dotting, incessant, is red within and black without; the background is a pale yellow. The yam, notably, is central to the traditional (primarily vegetable) diet of the area.

A number of more recent works on stretched canvas or linen are included in the exhibition. Although stretching chronologically to our own decade, the late seventies and the following decade are the major focus here. In many cases, they show considerable advancement of style and technique.

Several canvases partake of a style incorporating densely overlapping roundrels and whitish, delicate colors. Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi's Tingarri Ceremony at Ilingawurngawurrnga (June 1974) is the earliest canvas in the show. Displaying somewhat hesitant brushwork, it fills its space with dizzying circles and waves of pale colors: white, pink, cream and ochre — all over a black surface. There are few dots. It shows "the men's ceremonial camp where sacred designs were painted on the novices' backs."

In a similar vein, but more fluent, is the un-annotated Pulpayella (December 1976) by Willy Tjungurrayi. The colors are similar. Imposed over a background of densely packed, overlapping roundrels is a central network of larger ones, spaced apart but connected with traveling lines. The foreground assemblage is vaguely figural, with a column of three roundrels running down the middle and two line-and-circle "arms" hanging down from the sides.

Tommy Lowry Tjapaltjarri's tightly painted Two Men's Dreaming at Kuluntjarranya (1984) is a distinctive and compelling large canvas. Its wide expanse contains two rows of over-scaled roundrel-lakes. The connecting lines have largely disappeared and the roundrels appear to radiate off the page. Dots (typically in neat rows) and lines over a brown ground: white, whitish clay red, ochre, black, cream. The Dreaming tells of the creation of salt lakes "200 miles south and west of Papunya": following the consumption of a "strong native tobacco," two healers (ngangkaris) died and their "bodies began to urinate copiously." Lowry's Ngulyukuntinya, from the following year, displays a similarly refined style. (Sadly, the artist died two years later.)

Despite the unevenness of the work, and the difficulties inherent in understanding their stories, there is much of great interest here. Although the full narrative significance of these paintings may be unavailable, the rich patterning of the most accomplished paintings and the iconographic density of their Dreamings will give viewers much to reach for.

eden

2009-02-17T17:23:00.026-05:00

Adam Fuss, Love, 1993, silver dye bleach (Cibachrome) photogram

I am now writing pieces for Tompkins Weekly, another local publication (appearing on Mondays). Here's my first one:

Parallels between art and gardening. Like artworks, the garden is designed to provide an experience that transcends the everyday. Yet both partake deeply of the same currents — cultural and biological — that structure our more mundane lives. Pervasive in both is a tension between the idea of perfect order (found or created) and that of chance or serendipity.

These thoughts are just a few of many invoked by the Johnson Museum’s “Picturing Eden,” a photography show that combines sensual richness and literary/philosophical depth. The theme of paradise is to be taken in a broadly imaginative rather than narrowly theological sense.

Here, Adam Fuss works with the photogram, a camera-less technique in which objects are imprinted directly onto light-sensitive paper. His three color prints are upright, portrait style — his favored format.

Love has richly embodied paradoxes: figuration and abstraction, composure and chaos, life and death. Half way up, two dark purple rabbits face each other, dead. Their outlines are alternately furry and aqueous. Emerging from these figures like an overgrown umbilical cord is a wet, Pollock-like line tangle in lurid colors: purple, orange, ochre, and turquoise — the trace of flattened animal entrails. The background is stark white.

More quietly, Fuss’ Invocation and Untitled draw an analogy between humble locomotion and a more spiritual transport. Against watery, colored backdrops (Indian yellow and blue, respectively) dark silhouettes swim heavenward; a baby in the former piece and a snake in the latter. The snake is the more graceful; its curves meld with the ripples of the water.

Mark Kessell’s three oversized portraits also evoke life and death. Against a black background, A Trick of the Light shows the head and shoulders of a ghostly, blue-gray baby, vertically streaked. The Residue of Vision, splotchy and brown-tinted, shows a skull. The textures are the result of Kessell’s unusual method of re-photographing daguerreotypes (an early photo technique resulting in unique images on silver plates).

Doug and Mike Starn are as interested in material supports as they are in images. In two poignant large-scale inkjet prints, a collage of warm-white, translucent papers has been stretched over a frame. The grid is clearly visible and forms an integral counterpoint to the printed imagery. Behind these grids is a ghostly underlayer printed with similar forms.

Both pieces are from the Starns’ “Structure of Thought” series, in which the wildly branching forms of silhouetted trees are meant to echo the dendritic “trees” of neurons — and, by extension, to act as a metaphor for maze-like human cognition. To this end, the silhouette effect flattens the trees, creating an ambiguously suggested perspective. This is particularly evident in SOT #20, in which the tree begins branching closer to the bottom edge than in its relatively stable companion SOT #2.

Sally Gall’s gelatin silver prints, though conventional in size and technique, echo the Starns’ interest in dislocation. We are underground, in holes or caves, looking up to the light. In Heaven trees seems to grow inward from the edges of a bread-slice-shaped aperture.

Alec Soth’s Green Island, Iowa gives a lovely, lonely, oblique evocation of the garden. We see the corner of a dusty, abandoned building. On wooden floorboards sits a ball of off-white thread, slightly unraveled. Above, set against an expanse of weathered gray wall, is a torn patch of colorful floral wallpaper. Both Green and its companion, Patrick, Palm Sunday, Baton Rouge, Louisian a are from Soth’s documentary series “Sleeping by the Mississippi.”

A subtle and perhaps unexpected variation on the garden theme is offered by J. John Priola. There are four gelatin silver prints, each depicting a lighted window silhouetted against an expanse of unbroken darkness. In three, we look in from the outside: a detached, voyeuristic point of view uncharacteristic of “Eden”.

Not unlike the box assemblages of Joseph Cornell, the varied grids of the windows enframe micro-worlds. Nested geometries add to the pieces’ alien poignancy: the upright windows are echoed by the proportions of the prints themselves, and further so by their two-by-two installation grid.

15th Street, 3rd Floor (the titles reference San Francisco) is both abstract and garden-like with its divisions of flat-space. Its panes, opaque with rivers and fogs of condensation, mask blurry dark hanging plant pots in the upper corners. 15th Street, 2nd Floor, gives a relatively clear interior view. We see a desk with a lamp, various obscure boxes, and a framed picture with strange figures (more nesting). The window has been raised slightly. The arched window of Dolores Street, Ground Floor N. offers reverse voyeurism; we look out at trees through Venetian blinds.

While Priola’s windows contain brittle warmth, Matthias Hoch’s two large color prints are mercilessly deadpan in style and subject. Following in the school of contemporary German photography pioneered by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Paris #28 and Paris #31 show gray and anonymous modern architectures imprisoning fragments of greenery.

This is a sprawling show containing numerous works repaying sustained attention. “Eden,” which originated at the George Eastman House in Rochester, will be up at the Johnson through March 22.

UPDATE (02/18/09): A representative from the George Eastman House has contacted me with the request that I add the following information. "Eden" was guest curated by Deborah Klochko. After the Johnson, the show will be up at the the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota Florida from May 9th until August 2nd of this year.
Also note that the version of this review published above differs substantially from the one in print.
And that the opening sentence fragment is deliberate.

shop around

2009-02-11T10:43:00.011-05:00

Mark Mullin, A Growing Time, 2007, etching, sugar lift, spit bite and aquatint, 19" x 26"

Ithaca Times:

"Publishing Printshops: VanDeb Editions/ Olive Branch Press" highlights the work of two print collectives. VanDeb, founded in 1999, is based in New York City and is owned by artists Marjorie Van Dyke and Deborah Freedman. The OBP is the publishing arm of Ithaca's own Ink Shop. The show — which fills both the Shop and the CSMA lobby downstairs — will be up through February 28.

The selection from Van Deb is broad rather than deep; artists are represented with one or two works. Abstraction is the focus — often with a pronounced retro-modernist feel, occasionally in a more idiosyncratic, quasi-figurative vein.

Effectively taking up the latter strand, Mark Mullin's square-shaped intaglio A Growing Time offers oddly schematic weather. Black clouds — clusters of horizontal ovals — crowd the left and (especially) right edges. A row of three similar ovals hover above-center; their centers glow blue-green. They trail upright stripes of translucent gray that fade in the distance below. These could be cloudlets — or flying saucers. Clouds and saucers alike drop short bursts of dash-rain. Filling the center and reaching to the bottom edge is a block of yellow-green, actually a dense web of looping lines dotted with the (fainter) ghosts of clouds.

Likewise is Lorraine Williams' They Are Indescribable Alike, which suggests an aquarium bearing alien life. The mixed-media intaglio print features a varied menagerie of forms, all immersed in a faintly brushy, dirty-orange sea. A spongy purple blob, clusters of darker orange whiplash grass, and dots and splotches of (orange and purple) color mostly keep their distance.

Chris Gianakos and John Schiff work more familiar terrains of geometric abstraction. Gianakos' aquatint Metropolis III shows an irregular six-sided polygon, red, and starkly silhouetted against thin, pale pink. In contrast, Schiff's monoprint Word Shimmering is dizzyingly complex, puzzle-like — this despite its simple palate: uninflected red, white, and black plus various grainy grays. Right-angled triangles and other angular shapes radiate out from a central point like a pinwheel. These shapes are often richly patterned inside, with forms both curvaceous and stiff.

Some of the VanDeb abstractions feel a bit dissolute. For example, Mark Saltz's September I, September II (aquatint and spit bite) is reminiscent of the organic, calligraphic webs of contemporary artists like Brice Marden and Terry Winters; the colors though seem anemic.

There is more figurative work from VanDeb as well. Mel Pekarsky's Dry suggests Cezanne in the desert, but has its own starkly beautiful character. A black and white etching, it gives a view of a sparsely planted landscape, composed variously of softly linear hatching, smudges, dots, and dark line-branchings — all against a light gray background. Slope is hinted at: from the upper left towards the lower right.

K.K. Kozik's surreal, storybook-like Force Majeure combines etching and aquatint. A pink-skinned, white haired man sits up in bed, white and baby blue sheets and shirt gathered up around him. Above and behind him is a window with blowing curtains (also pale blue). It covers purple night sky. He looks right-of-page where a pair of closed closet doors seem to frame views of a giant, pale yellow, grey pocked moon — and that same sky. The line-work is adept, mostly quick and informal; there are spots of hatching.

Among other things, the Olive Branch is showing artists' books.

Maddy Rosenberg's mesmerizing, toy-like Dystopia is stood up inside a vitrine. More like a stage tableau than a conventional page-turner, it is variously folded, tabbed and cut. Done in brown ink on cream paper, it shows the stiff lines and blocky forms (light and dark) characteristic of its medium, linocut. Not particularly dystopian in feel, it shows a playfully fragmented jumble of Gothic and other old-fashioned architectures: spires, towers, domes, pediments, arched windows, brick.

Zevi Blum presents five black and white etchings (unbound) from his book When I Did Not Die, each paired with a poem by Judith Levey-Kurlander. Crisply linear and ornate in style, the subjects are fanciful and folkloric — a fancy that does not mask their often eroticized morbitity.

Abstraction is the predominant framework in this show. Peter Jogo's mezzotint Song of Route 83 II stands out for its sharp, detailed realism. (Jogo showed related work in a one-person show here last summer.) Approximately the size of a playing card, it shows a panoramic highway-side vista: trees, slant-roofed buildings, tiny telephone poles and wires, a light outlined guardrail tilting up rightwards from the lower left. Above is a cloudy sky: pale yellow, faint orange, shades of gray. The sun is going up or down. Song effectively evokes the loneliness of road travel.

The Ink Shop's member roster is impressively diverse (and accomplished) to begin with. Pairing selected members with a similarly talented group of outsiders is an excellent way of mixing up the familiar and the unfamiliar.

cleaning up

2009-01-27T10:49:00.003-05:00

A pair of Times pieces I neglected to put up here: a review of the Ink Shop's "Fine Edge" intaglio print show and a feature on Ithaca Fine Chocolates (which also shows art). Both no longer topical, unfortunately — but here you go.

well behaved women

2009-01-23T14:19:00.006-05:00

Lilla Cabot Perry, Lady with a Violin (Portrait of Lady Bellingham), 1908, Pastel

Times:

"Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History: Innovative Women Artists on Paper" takes the first part of its title from contemporary feminist scholar Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. The show justifies its slant by pointing out how the female artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — the show's subject — were only then beginning to gain mass entry into the art-world.

The title is somewhat deceptive, however. For all the progressivism in the lives of many of these artists, their work here is relatively conservative in style and wholesome in subject matter - the latter in marked contrast to their Realist, Impressionist, and early-Modernist peers, many of whom explored the more sordid aspects of modern life. (This sort of thing was not considered acceptable for respectable, middle class ladies.) Domestic life is a recurring theme, while even those images highlighting the public life tend to have a private, contemplative quality.

A (1908) Lady With a Violin (Portrait of Lady Bellingham), by the American Impressionist Lilla Cabot Perry is the largest piece. The pastel drawing shows her seated in profile, facing rightward. She is indoors; the background is sketchily rendered, mainly dark browns and grays. She holds her instrument in her right hand; we see only a golden scroll cut off by the right edge of the sheet.

Lady successfully resolves a tension between the demands of formal portraiture and the improvisational markmaking of Impressionism. The solidity and modeling of her head and left arm contrast with the looser rendering of the rest of the scene — most notably the jazzy line-tangle of her dress, baby blue and turquoise.

An untitled black and white drawing (1938) by Blanche Lazzell (also an American) is the second largest piece and sticks out for its lack of decorum. The scene is a mass of overlapping, angular planes in soft charcoal, which has been selectively smudged and erased. As in many Cubist images, it can take a while for the subject — here a seated figure, mechanical and sexless — to emerge from the cacophony.

The predominant medium here, however, is printmaking — particularly intaglio and lithography. Some of the prints are extraordinary.

Particularly so is Mary Cassatt's color drypoint and aquatint print Peasant Mother and Child (1894). The theme is a signature one for the American Impressionist painter-printmaker. Emerging from an ambiguous hillock of olive green tone, a woman in a dark striped outfit turns away from us and towards her dull ochre cloaked child. The triangle shaped composition echoes Renaissance art, depictions of the Madonna and Child in particular.

Mother has been been paired, for contrast, with Au Louvre: Musée des Antiques (1879-80), a black and white etching by Cassatt's mentor and friend Edgar Degas. His piece shows two fashionable looking women, one of them Cassatt herself, inspecting a glass-encased ancient sculpture inside the French museum. The composition is unstable and asymmetrical, giving Louvre a dynamic quality unlike the classicized domesticity of the Cassatt.

Likewise, the curator has paired Berthe Morisot's tiny drypoint Nu De Dos (Back of a Nude) (1889) with Berthe Morisot (en silhouette), a lithograph by Edouard Manet. Although both black and white images emphasize outline, the delicate strokes of the Morisot have little in common with the boldly expressive lines of the Manet. Nu shows a woman's bare back, her head turned back as if in teasing acknowledgment of the viewer. Nudes are anomalous in Morisot work; this one mimics a series of sexualized female bathers by the French neoclassicist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.

The influence of Japanese art is all over. The opening of the formerly isolated country to Western trade during the 1850s lead to a cultural exchange, which was highly influential for Impressionist and early modernist artists in Europe and America. A move away from Renaissance verisimilitude and towards greater flatness, asymmetry and abstraction during the late 19th century has clear Japanese precedents.

Three American artists here go all out, imitating not just the style but the technique and subject matter of ukiyo-e (woodcut) prints. Helen Hyde's The Bamboo Fence (1904) is the most compelling. The wide piece in covered all-over by a grid of bamboo scaffolding on which five young children climb. The fluid, dance-like interaction of these boys and girls within a shallow space is witty.

Two other color woodcuts seem a bit forced in their appropriation of Japanese motifs. Lillian May Miller's Morning Snow on Bamboo (1920) aims for an austere, minimal approach but feels overly static and leaden. Bertha Lum's Tanabata (1915) errs in the opposite direction, overplaying the exoticism of the Orient.

The Johnson, with its impressive resources, consistently manages to put on fascinating historical shows of works on paper. "Well Behaved Women" is no exception — although the innovation in question is generally modest.

small works?

2008-12-17T18:13:00.007-05:00

Laura Glenn, Hidde(n) Letter, watercolor & ink on specialty paper, 19.5" x 15.5"

Kristen T. Woodward, Total Boar, acrylic & oil on wood, 12" x 9"

Brian Paulsen, Joyce Looking for James, watercolor on paper, 13.25" x 9"

Times:

Scaling Back

Arthur Whitman

Groton's Main Street Gallery traditionally ends its annual season with a "National Small Works Painting Show." This year's exhibit — which runs through Dec. 28 — was guest curated by Syracuse art critic Katherine Rushworth. Work was culled from submissions sent from around the country. It was put together with assistance from husband and wife gallery owners Roger Smith and Adrienne Bea Smith. Disappointingly, the show is not as strong as it has been in past years.

The repetitive, modular structure of David Higgins' oil on wood Moles appears indebted to the Minimalist art of the sixties, although the piece's hand-painted facture departs from the robotic lack of affect characteristic of that art movement. The piece is divided into a grid of painted images overlaid by a myrtle green grille and surrounded by a gold frame (all painted wood). The grid is four square-holes high and three wide. Each aperture frames a similar but slightly different image: a patch of tan or creamy pink skin with a dark blemish somewhere near the center and dark hairs sprouting (the hairs in graphite, I believe). The squares can be read in sequence, like a comic strip, as well as seen all together. The play of theme and variations is intriguing.

Joe Figlerski's trompe-l'œil ("fool the eye") oil on linen What Lies Beneath is worth comparing to Moles for its structure and concept. The style is very slick. On a quick glance, it has the appearance of an airbrushed work, although closer inspection reveals traces of brushwork — especially in the margins. Evoking historical precedents such as that of nineteenth century American still life master John Peto and the Surrealist Rene Magritte, Beneath attempts to be playfully self-referential. It purports to show us the back of a painting, perhaps itself. We see fabric stretched over bars: four covered ones around the edges and two more wood-grained ones crossing the middle. This painted grid is the most interesting part of the painting. Above this surface hovers, improbably, a slickly rendered rose with a purple-blue blossom.

All of this makes the painting sound much more interesting than it is. (This is a risk in interpreting and contextualizing.) Ultimately, the flashy technique fails to give the image the material presence needed to create an emotionally plausible illusion.

Kathleen Caprario shows a pair of square wood panels covered with fine gradations of tone rendered in a mixture of oil and wax. Although well crafted and texturally pleasing, the paintings have an unfortunate tinge of cheap mysticism. The Effects of the Weather shows a globe of glowing yellow light radiating outwards until blocked by shadowy black corners. Breath of Dawn features a crisp-edged black orb popping out from the bottom edge. Above: a cosmic fire, white and red with areas of ghostly greenish tint, trailing off upwards into more extraterrestrial blackness. The two paintings' texture is not totally smooth; fine, feathery strokes are visible.

Allen Cummings' Poptart is sly in its use of a rich, old school painterly technique to depict a vulgar, contemporary foodstuff. The pale ochre pastry (with red and white frosting) is split in two and casts loosely painted reflections down onto the brushy red-brown backdrop that surrounds it on all sides.

I am generally ambivalent about local poet-painter Laura Glenn's watercolor and ink bedecked paper collages. Although not unaccomplished, these abstractions suggest a yearning to be "poetic" which precedes and overruns any kind of specific content or experience to be conveyed.

Nevertheless, her Hidde(n) Letter, which is typical of her work, stands out as one the more compelling pieces here. Against an overall blue-gray-purple background, it overlays blocks and splotches of color, many on collaged scraps. The color strains for luxuriousness: green-gold, saturated cyan, tan-cream, blue, orange, yellow, salmon pink, raspberry ice cream, among others. The collage blocks become more regular towards the center, forming a loose grid. There are letters in black ink — Glenn's signature fake Chinese/Japanese calligraphy. (The effect inevitably seems a bit wrong if you're familiar with the real thing.) The characters are scribbly, thick or thin, and often bleed into their surrounds. English letters appear in one spot as well. The overall effect is mythical, exotic, and cryptic — something accomplished with more finesse by another local artist, Syau-Cheng Lai.

Kristen T. Woodward's Total Boar (terrible pun) features a rich build up of color, texture and imagery. It is done in oil and acrylic on a thick wood block. The support is unframed and the left and right hand sides at least can be considered integral parts of the work. It is covered overall in a carefully layered gestural field of reds, pinks, and creamy yellow-greens. There are two central images in front, both icons of masculine aggression and both silhouetted in profile and pointed leftward. Above: the boar, in whitish creamy tones and thickly outlined in red and blue. Around its head, the bordering is broken with highlights and haloing in white and slightly greenish yellow. Below, smaller and less visually prominent: an old military aircraft in a faded, ghostly green is collaged on. On it appear another white smudge highlight and a red star insignia. This image is echoed elsewhere, on the sides of the woodblock — look for it. Boar suggests a reliquary, albeit likely ironic in intent.

Three watercolors by Brian Paulsen are interesting, although more for their conception than for their technique. The conception is obscure, literary and puzzle-like. The technique is a dryly illustrational realism combining areas of careful modeling with background areas of flatly applied tone. In each a muscular woman, "Joyce," stands indoors, facing the viewer — although not looking at her. She is wearing a white (perhaps light gray) bikini and has carefully modeled dull coppery skin. She casts implausible shadows, weirdly blob-like and animated. Behind her, apparently hung on the wall, are pictures within pictures.

In both Joyce Looking For James and Specific Junction, the background scene — here spanning left to right — is the junction of two ordinary suburban streets (different ones). They are shown in a sharp perspective that belies the shallow stage-like space of the "real" images. In the former painting she stands, staring through a pair of binoculars while in the latter she sits in a metal chair, blindfolded, with her arms crossed in a manner that echoes the passageways. A coil of orange electrical cord surrounds that chair.

In Looking For James, Too, the background is a tall, dully colored image of James Joyce, bow-tied and standing in front of a shelf of books. It attached to wall with over-scaled cream "tape." The female Joyce, curiously, is a near-identical replica from JLFJ — as is the wooden chair to the right.

Amanda Vella's oil on canvas Sailboat Reflections is done in a post-impressionist manner loosely reminiscent of Van Gogh. It emphasizes thick, broken paint-strokes that cluster most densely towards the middle of the left edge, creating a focus. Vertical strokes — the boat masts, apparently — are scattered about like a thin forest. The piece is best seen from at least few feet away. Any closer and the scene dissolves into its somewhat murkily colored marks. Sailboat is about par for the course: more or less competently done but less than thrilling.

This is the Main Street's sixth annual small paintings show, and although it might be difficult to prove, I get a sense of over-familiarity, of well-worn ruts and diminishing returns. The gallery is, of course, a business, charged with the difficult task of making money in a small and isolated market. Still, it may be conceivable, practical, and valuable to change course slightly, to try something a bit different in years to come.

show-fall

2008-12-04T18:38:00.005-05:00

I'm not ordinarily in the business of using this space to announce shows or events. But there are an inordinately large number of things going on this month — many of them taking place in and around the Ithaca Commons (quite literally my front yard) — so it seems remiss not to say anything.

The official Gallery Night website has listings here. These shows are all downtown and have openings tomorrow night from 5 to 8pm. I anticipate the following highlights. The Ink Shop is showing "Fine Edge: 9 Intaglio Artists"; I previewed some of the work yesterday and it looked quite good. The artists: Steven Barbash, Zevi Blum, Ladislav Hanka, Kumi Korf, Nancy Lasar, Elisabeth Meyer, Tim Merrick, Gillian Pederson-Krag, and Masha Ryskin. Ithaca Fine Chocolates is having their yearly December art and candy sale. Artists of note include Erica Pollock and Sharon Horvat h — whose lovely, intricate work is a personal favorite. Both shows feature local and non-local artists.

The State of the Art Gallery and the Community School of Music and Arts are showing work from outside their customary bases. The SOAG show is invitational while the CSMA one comes from open submissions. These events are generally like playing the lottery: undpredictable but potentially renumerative.

Ithaca has a new group visual arts blog, The Switchboard. Their interest is in promoting the emergence of an edgy "young art" scene. To that end, they have a post up listing some more alternative activities. These include a night of video art being held at Sfumato following Gallery Night from 8 to 11pm and a four day weekend "Temp Space" show of art and performance, which begins today. Please see this post to learn more.

hecomi

2008-11-29T16:28:00.007-05:00

Intriguing looking/sounding work by a young Japanese sculptor reviewed in the December Artforum (sorry, no link as of now):

Delicately branching cracks and furrows that resemble river deltas are the forms that capture [Ken'ichiro] Taniguchi's interest. He uses transparent film to transfer their outlines to yellow plastic – or, sometimes, to other materials like stainless steel – creating an exact negative. He then transforms these raw materials into foldable sculptures by slicing through the casts, often at the thinnest possible points, and mounting hinges at each fold. And so every crack, every crevice, is transformed into a literally manifold sculpture that can be given many different configurations. Each sculpture is named for the location of the cracks that produced it, including addresses in Russia, the Netherlands, and Thailand.

The review (originally written in German by a Wolf Jahn and translated by an Oliver E. Dryfuss) covers a recent show at the Mikiko Sato Gallery in Hamburg. It contextualizes the work in terms of cartography as art, Leonardo's "chance landscapes," and traditional Japanese aesthetics. Most notable is Taniguchi's use of the concept-aesthetic hecomi: "crack, indentation, or, figuratively, exaustion."

Local reader-viewers should be reminded of the Johnson museum's recent show of mended Japanese ceramics, in which cracks were beautifully repaired with gold or lacquer (this traditional practice is also mentioned in the review). These highlighted fissures often set apart ceramic fragments of differing style and origin juxtaposed in a collage-like manner. For example, bits of more polished and/or ornate material would be grafted on to these characteristically rough, earthy vessels.

I am interested in the way Taniguchi seems intent upon preserving the natural complexity of his source material while imposing upon it a new, and specifically sculptural, kind of architecture. (Needless to say, I have not seen the work in person and it might not live up to these expectations.)

new states

2008-11-29T15:41:00.008-05:00

Times:

Fresh Air

by Arthur Whitman

This month's show at the State of the Art features the work of four new gallery members: shimmering, paint speckled tree-scapes by Leslie Brill; carefully constructed city-views by Erica Pollock; mock-religious magazine cutout collages by Andrea King (the only non-painter); and microcosmic abstractions by Ethel Vrana.

Brill, working with oil on various supports, is the most diverse. Most typically, her paintings feature rows of stiffly vertical tree trunks, surrounded by a curtain of free-floating branches and leaves, silhouetted against a hazy sky. Brushstrokes are short and distinct, emphasizing containing forms. Seeing the Forest is a fine example in this mode. Its smooth panel support helps the glowing white background hold its own against the dense foliage. In contrast, the near abstraction Where's There? (canvas) dissolves its forms in a whitish impressionistic haze of densely overlapping strokes.

Junction sticks out for its two pale, gently curving, anthropomorphic trunks, conjoined towards the middle of the bottom edge. The trunk on the left, in particular, evokes a headless human torso, with buttocks and outstretched arms. Its companion to the right is stiffer – more like an arm, slightly bent – and stretches towards the upper right corner. Canvas is visible through thinned brownish under-painting, which gives heft to the characteristic fleck-strokes. The background has the usual floating branches over a baby blue sky.

Pollock, also an oil painter, takes the street-sides of New York and San Francisco as her main subject. Intricate, puzzle-like arrangements of light and dark characterize her best work; here shadows aim to take on a life of there own, separate from the bodies and buildings that cast them. Although often fascinating, too many of her large canvases suffer from distracting brushwork – sometimes over-ostentatious (e.g. the cut-off lower bodies in Crossing Shadows), other times also without meaningful direction, as in the large, shadow-crossed "empty" spaces that fill much of her work here.

Two small oil on panel pieces are exceptional. Alley Shadows, in particular, is a gem of machine-like precision. Although impastoed – like all of Pollock's work here – the brushwork is uncommonly quiet, rhyming with its containing forms rather than sticking out. Like an archetypal Pollock, it shows a passageway in sharp perspective, flanked by buildings - here abstract, anonymous and overgrown with purple shadows. The squarish Side Street might match Alley's impersonal perfection if not for its two focal cars, which seem messy and human in comparison to the towering buildings.

King's glossy, lurid magazine cutout collages form a series. "Ignoring...Pluto's recent demotion" (according to a written statement), each personifies one of the nine planets in our solar system. Loosely echoing the traditional Greco-Roman religious symbolism of their namesakes (excepting glam nature goddess Earth), they re-imagine idol-worship though the lens of contemporary pop sensibility. In this, her work echoes that of distinguished figurative collagist Hannah Höch. The angular facets and abrupt shifts of perspective are in a broadly Cubist idiom. Androgyny and multi-racial hybrids prevail. The work is playful and loud.

Uranus stands out for it effective use of complexity. (Mars and Pluto, evidently more masculine types, are relatively stark.) The sky god's face combines the eyes and forehead of an Asian woman, a light-skinned nose, and a dark-skinned mouth and chin (black and white), with a grin revealing a metallic tooth. This composite is flanked on both sides by long black dreadlocks and crowned by a row of (b&w) female dancers, arms outstretched. His/her arms are tinted green and hold up a silver horn. The background is a dizzying but solid mélange: lurid red tomatoes and watermelons, lilacs bushes, birches, miscellaneous plant-life, more dancers - faded glare pink.

Vrana's acrylic abstractions are uneven, both in style and accomplishment. They can be divided into two main categories: wet versus chalky and dry. The former group is relatively strong while the latter – e.g. Pilobolus and Ephermeral Pool – seem unfinished, like tentative efforts to sketch out a terrain. Colors tend to veer between the blue, green, and the metallic.

The muddy, pleasing Pangea is coppery overall, with an under-layer of blue and green poking through. Separate thickened areas suggest landmasses, though not the Ur-continent promised by the title. Pearl-like drops of green, red, and silvery white dot the surface. (Dots are common in Vrana's work.)

The blue-green-silver Fertile Valley makes use of a somewhat clichéd marbling effect (used less effectively elsewhere). An amorphous, bubbly cloud – white and warm blue – seems to sink towards the lower left. An overall yellow-green grid gives the painting an unusually robust structure.

All in all, these four women make a welcome addition to the SOAG's roster. Pollock's work is particularly so, with its melding of abstraction and naturalism and its distinctive subject matter - big city life for a populace that clings to scenes of unsullied nature.

Also, see Wylie Schwarz's interview with Erica Pollock from a few weeks back:

Pollock: I paint in a contemporary realist style, and I am very influenced by the urban environment. I love watching people and deriving things from watching them. I've always been an introspective person and so I actually learn a lot from watching people. Most of my reference material comes from the cities. My first body of work was based on trying to take a very commonplace scene which you would ordinarily not pay much attention to and to present it to people. Once it's in the form of a painting, people stop to look the subject matter whereas in real life, the scene would have barely caught their eye.

artist/instructor

2008-11-19T12:07:00.002-05:00

Times:

Partner Up

by Arthur Whitman

Artist/Instructor" - up this month at the CSMA - conjoins two worlds. Since a fire forced the Ink Shop out of their old home this past January, the printmaking collective has made the second floor of the CSMA building its new one. This show highlights currently teaching artists from both institutions.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the Ink Shop is the more serious group. Craig Mains' color monotype technique involves the toy-like manipulation of cutouts. Typically, the faded "ghost" images that follow the initial impression are used to create uncanny echoes within his prints. His disjointed, free-associative style resembles Cubism and Surrealism but is distinctive. He has created a novel and fascinating iconography of natural disaster. Here he aims his vengeful-god destructions at golf courses - carts sporting cartoon-like flames and flagged holes are repeated motifs. Here, Golf Carts and Passing Storm is unusually rough and scribbly. It is divided into three upright, right-tilting sections. A cloud(s) trailing lightning heightens the piece's angular, violent quality. The larger Country Club has a sparser, more stable composition that belies its own destructions.

Fellow Inker Neil Berger is one of Ithaca's best straight-ahead realists. His brushy, black and white monotype Magnolias is characteristically sensitive. It shows a glass vase with a spartan flower arrangement placed on a ledge in front of a window. The window is a dark grid; through it, you can see only smudgy glare. This, and the fact the perspective is as if you had twisted your body about 30 degrees to your left focuses your attention on the blossoms instead. The directions of the strokes work to create a sense of depth with impressive economy.

Other Shop members are well represented. Jenny Pope's playfully expressionistic color-reduction woodcuts of animals and Christa Wolf's mini-reprise of her recent "Satterly Hill" monotype exhibit are highlights. I am ambivalent about both Caleb Thomas' photo-based prints and Kumi Korf's renowned calligraphic abstractions - here represented by her accordion fold book Hunter-Gatherer: Family Business, Mario. Their craft and visual intelligence, however, is undeniable.

The work of the CSMA instructors is collectively less riveting. Carlton Manzano and Virginia Cobey both work with oil on canvas, creating loose, painterly nature-scapes. Manzano is the more talented, although his fast approach sometimes results in a borderline slapdash filling in of color. His autumnal View From Mt. Pleasant mostly avoids this: variations of brushwork and tone emphasize trees, clouds, and perspective layers. It is difficult not to read into it a vaguely Christian symbolism: a pair of tilting phone pole crosses crown the mid-ground while smudgy beams of light shine in from the upper-left corner.

While Cobey's Upstream in Coy Glen is amateurish, her Late Fall in the Rockies displays modest ambition. Generically reminiscent of early 20th Century modernism, it pictures a row of pale trees with bits of autumn foliage on the branches and piled on the ground. The leaves and dirt are daub-y (recalling Upstream), but the rest of the scene is broken into softly rendered crystalline facets.

Benn Nadelman's uses scratchboard, a technique in which black ink is scraped away selectively to reveal bits of a lighter - here white - undersurface. Using stippling, Ten Pound Sunset shows, at some distance, a dark island covered with trees; to the right is a lighthouse. Most interesting is the sky above and the sea below. The former is flat, a thick cloud of dots and dashes, while the latter is sparser, the dots forming lines that hint at direction and perspective. The Road to Santa Fe - It Always Led Back to Me makes use of softer, hair-like shading and filling, as well as lines and blocks of solid tone. In the foreground a family of silhouetted figures holds hands. In the background: a road in sharp perspective, a grassy field, a flagpole and suggestions of city. The sky is an abstract mélange of swirls, waves, and leaf-forms. Road exemplifies the sort of folk-surrealism beloved of high school art students.

Monica Franciscus' two untitled pieces feel unfinished, like under-drawings for a painting. Done on unstretched scraps of linen pinned to the wall, they combine roughly painted fields of white paint with raw fabric areas outlined and detailed in black graphite and marker. The drawn areas are things: clothespins hanging from twists of rope. Her approach has historical precedents. The sketchiness of some impressionist work, the austere forms of Giorgio Morandi and the pencil on raw canvas grids of Agnes Martin all come to mind. However, such comparisons ultimately do little to dispel the initial impression of incompleteness.

The Ink Shop is a tightly knit group: creating, teaching, organizing and showing together in a common space. The CSMA clan is more diffuse. A greater communal effort on their part might result in a better representation of their individual talents.

drawing conclusions

2008-11-14T00:43:00.010-05:00

Times:

Drawing Ideas

by Arthur Whitman

In the fashionable, cosmopolitan art-world, drawing has become something of a genre. "Contemporary Prints and Drawings," currently at the Johnson Museum, samples the state of the art. Given its small size, it feels surprisingly – and disappointingly – representative.

Two prints by James Siena (a 1979 Cornell BFA) offer up variations on signature motifs. His stock-in-trade is a minutely rendered geometric abstraction, both complex and methodical. Battery, a reduction linocut, is packed all over with striated (dark to light) red loops. Towards the outside they are ovals, parallel to the edges in staggered rows; in the middle they are smaller circles, packed in with increasing disorder. Often with Siena, the more difficult an image is to figure out, the better; Battery, while lively, feels a bit rudimentary.

His black and white engraving Upside Down Devil Variation has a weirder, more compelling tension. The dominant motif is a set of eleven "explosions," lines radiating out from empty points. The lines all have the same quality: careful, stiff, but visibly hand-drawn. They are staggered and spaced — close together or far apart — to create textural variety. This flying through outer space perspective effect is broken, flattened by a lightning-like lattice of empty space that divides the bursts. The fragmentary effect is reminiscent of collage.

Julie Mehretu is known for her large paintings, densely packed with geometric, architectural and elemental forms - often to the point of illegibility. They can be both utopian and apocalyptic at the same time. In contrast with Siena, she benefits (here anyway) from paring down. Her Untitled ink and watercolor is all about the classical elements: air, fire, earth, and water. Although abstract, it suggests an aerial view of a landscape in turmoil. The pen and brush strokes are varied and expressive while the palate is limited — mostly dark brown, gray, and blue-gray lines with small areas of thinner washes.

As expected, some of the work is superficially pretty, mock-decorative. Laura Owens' intaglio Untitled (LO271) shows the blue-purple silhouette of a horse in profile, three of its twisty legs up in the air. Its tail is a long vine-like curl sprouting multi-colored teardrop-leaves. The ink overall is watery, with soft edges; darker, more precise lines add emphasis. Larger and more complex, but not necessarily weightier, is Beatriz Milhazes' As Irmãs (The Sisters). The screenprint is a colorful pastiche of decorative and abstract art clichés: vertical stripes and overlapping colored rectangles, flowers and Baroque swirls, targets.

Fiona Rae's collaged digital print So Lovely!, a pinky neo-Pop piece, is a tight but careless montage of patterns and imagery: canned brushstrokes, flowers, cute little dogs, typography, cartoon eyeballs, and so forth.

A good deal of work focuses on the human figure. Much of it is keyed to the fashionable theme of identity politics — in particular that of blacks and women. This is a legitimate theme with an important tradition in modern art (everything from Manet's Olympia to the photo-montages of Hannah Höch). The western fine art tradition has undoubtedly excluded the concerns of minorities. Beyond any politics, the weirdness of the body is endlessly fascinating. Unfortunately, much contemporary work in this vein is lacking in wit or visual invention; the school's representation here is unsurprisingly perfunctory and weak. (This tends to happen when a species of iconography become academic cliché; a parallel could be drawn with the ubiquity of Greek mythology in 19th-century European art.)

Kara Walker's large, wide linocut African/American makes use of her signature black on white silhouette. A woman appears to be falling. Her head, face turned downward, points toward the left corner, while her legs are raised in the opposite direction. The figure — in the context of Walker's work, probably a slave — is dynamic in her angular profile but helpless in her pose. The hair sprouting from her genitals is grotesque. Scraps of ribbon around her waist suggest a release from bondage. The print, unlike most of the portraiture here, has some drama; it would be enhanced if she could do something more than plop her figure in an indifferent empty white space.

Ellen Gallagher's print Abu Simbel was originally commissioned by the Freud Museum and parodies a piece from Freud's library. In chalky black and white, it shows the side of an Egyptian temple with a row of oversized seated statues. Collaged elements combine racist caricature with kitschy science fiction — including a yellow plasticine UFO sprouting a halo of blue hair. The appropriation of morally sketchy imagery is doubtlessly intended as satire, but in combination with aesthetic sketchiness, the results are dubious.

Despite the presence of a handful of decent or better pieces, this is a disappointing show. The over-reliance on trendy subjects and stylistic conceits is discouraging. Shows like this would benefit from more work like Siena's or Mehretu's, work that cuts against the grain a bit, offering visions that are more personal and idiosyncratic.

shoptalk

2008-10-29T18:05:00.005-04:00

From the mail (with minor edits):

Dear Associates and Friends of The Ink Shop,

After carefully weighing all the pros and cons, The Ink Shop Board of Directors recently voted to stay at our new location on the 2nd floor of the Community School of Music and Art Building. We feel we have a great future here and want to continue to develop our exhibit and workshop programming. CSMA has agreed that we will be able to exhibit in the Hallway Gallery the whole year around and the Lobby Gallery for four months every year. We discussed helping to coordinate additional shows in the CSMA gallery space with artists doing interesting work, whether installations, video, or other media. We are excited about these possibilities and look forward to your involvement in all aspects.

Beginning in November, The Ink Shop and CSMA will showcase all artists/instructors that are currently teaching in both places. That is our first adventure in collaboration. We also will discuss with CSMA about collaborating on a series of parent/kids workshops in the summer months.

As for the Holidays, we will have a Grand Opening Party on December 5, during Gallery Night at the Opening of the last exhibition of this year, "Fine Edge", which will showcase nine artists. As in previous years , we will start the Holiday Print Sale at that opening and we will also offer an offset printed calendar with images from Ink Shop Artists.

Looking ahead, we have planned an exciting schedule of exhibitions for 2009:

*Van Deb Editions with cutting edge of intaglios from Marjorie Van Dyke's studio

*an installation of Lisa Mackie's prints and books, both from New York City.

*a one person show with Zevi Blum, Professor Emeritus from Cornell, now living in California.

*We invite our associates to exhibit with us in "Exquisite Corpse", a game of prints in March 2009

*a Monotype Printing Event in April

*a portfolio of prints "12x12" in preparation for our 10th Anniversary in 2010!

Watch for applications for open exhibits on The Ink Shop website: www.artist@ink-shop.org

Hopefully, you already have planned to take a workshop with us, and have marked your calendar for the upcoming Talk Print with Minna Resnick and Susan Weisend on their print adventure in China last year on Thursday October 30, 7 -8 pm.

Please also take a look at Caleb R. Thomas exhibition "Balancing on Rooftops" which goes though November 17. He will give a gallery tour on Thursday November 13, 7-8pm.

Last but not least, we would like you to come down and meet our new H. Peter Kahn Fellow Jamie Ellen Davies who started to work with us in September.

Our heartfelt thanks to all of you for all of your support to The Ink Shop as move beyond recent disruption and toward renewed artistic excellence and opportunity.

Join the creative spirit,

Christa Wolf
for the Board of Directors

missing the forest for the trees

2008-10-29T16:04:00.017-04:00

Barbara Page, Time's Magic Carpet, watercolor

From this week's Ithaca Times:

MOTE hosts Barbara Page exhibition

Arthur Whitman

Silhouettes resembling cut-away tree stumps contain strange two-dimensional micro-worlds, densely packed with forms that feel organic but are hard to place: microbial blobs and tubes, evocations of aerial views of land and water, concentric striations focusing the eye inward. The palate is autumnal: purples, browns, yellows, oranges, grays and silvers, broken occasionally by bits of green and other (often unexpected) colors.

Such forms and associations characterize the watercolors that make up Barbara Page's intriguing new show "Missing the Forest for the Trees." These paintings are currently on display at The Museum of the Earth. The natural history museum setting is appropriate, as her near-abstractions depict cross-sections of petrified wood: fossils in which gradual mineral accretions both replace and immortalize the original organic matter.

These artworks are clearly the products of close observation and careful rendering. (Visitors will want to compare them with the actual mineral specimens on display.) Nevertheless, the artist's stated goal is to invoke a state of romantic "reverie," and to evoke associations with vastly different types of environments, from the physiological to the geographical. Although the show is uneven, the best work on show achieves both with considerable grace.

There's a somewhat tedious repetitiveness to "Missing." With the exception of one monoprint (Tietea), these are all watercolors. The color is often too thinned and ineffectual. Nearly every single piece shows a roughly round or rectangular shape — the petrified cut-away — silhouetted against paper white. Typically, at one or more points, the shape is cut-off at the edges. This regularity and detachment preserves the fossil's specimen-like character while inhibiting closer engagement.

While the juxtaposition of (relatively) dark and clearly outlined forms against white backgrounds calls to mind the minimal abstractions of Ellsworth Kelly, the intricate inner patterning of these silhouettes allows for a very different sort of tension from Kelly's uninflected geometry. How well this tension is played out is a fairly good indicator of how effective each of these paintings is in general.

Fandango #15 is a standout piece in this and many other regards. The fossil image is unusually dark, dominated by pools of black and dark gray, which makes it pop out (or draw us in). It has a visual weight, which pushes towards the lower right corner. There is a lot going on. A brief anatomical list: lakes of color; stiff, branch-like rivers in contrasting tones; curving, racing streaks of white; a warm, lightly colored clearing in the middle, dotted. The specimen — and the painting — has an irrepressible dynamism that belies its literal deadness. (There is an analogy here, painting and fossil.)

Two pieces escape the central silhouette format, creating a greater sense of dislocation in the viewer, who is plunged further into their alien worlds. The patterned surfaces engulf nearly the entire paper. Although not fully effective, this approach demands further exploration. Far Fling is the more familiar of the two, with its roughly concentric ordering and cell-like forms. Split is something else entirely; its all-over marking suggests a chaotic tangle of rivers, lakes, and islands. There is a weird — and again not quite successful — tension between the piece's Abstract Expressionist-like wildness and it's typically tight rendering and wan, thinned-out color.

Visitors to the MotE will have two comparative benchmarks. One is Page's own epic natural history Rock of Ages Sands of Time, which is permanently installed right beyond the museum's lobby. The mixed-media piece represents 550 million years of evolution in a sequence of panels and skillfully combines painting and relief. The other is an impressive selection of real wood fossils, displayed in scattered vitrines. (Some of these are marked as sources for specific paintings.) Both display a richly engrossing feel, which unfortunately leaves all but the best of the watercolors looking weak in comparison.

Page is clearly engaged in a fascinating project. Deriving abstraction from the close observation of nature, "aerial" perspective, organism-as-landscape — all of these are ideas worth pursuing. I would like to see a greater experimentation with composition, format, and media. It is not clear, for example, that watercolor is serving this dense, complex work very well. There is a need in this work both for illustrational precision and painterly lushness — something difficult to pull of in any medium but particularly so in watercolor, which offers limited potential for revision.

It would also be useful to vary the size of the works more. The standard format here is 22' by 30', a safe, middle-of-the-road landscape format, which fails to do justice to the subjects' essential strangeness. Working big or small would alter the relation of our perceiving bodies to these micro-worlds in potentially exciting ways.

microworlds roundup

2008-10-24T17:39:00.007-04:00

I have a pair of reviews coming up. One, which will be appearing in next week's Ithaca Times, addresses Barbara Page's new show of watercolors "Missing the Forest for the Trees." The paintings show slices of petrified wood, fossils rich in microcosmic detail. They are both carefully observed and abstract. The show is markedly uneven. Nevetheless, this is a rich vein of work, well worth following. "Missing" is on show now and through January 18th at the Museum of the Earth (Ithaca's natural history museum).

My second piece, to be appearing here only, delves into Christa Wolf's "Satterly Hill" monotypes, which were in a recently closed exhibit at the Main Street Gallery. This was an amazing show, so sorry if you live in the area and missed it. Expect my review some time this weekend.

More items of personal or topical interest:

* Nancy Geyer wrote a fine review of the Wolf show for the Times. My own take is different but — I believe — complementary.

* During my junior year of high school (96-97), I attended this fine Connecticut private school, about an hour's drive from Boston. Subsequently, I got booted out as a poor student. But not before receiving eye-opening instruction from David Brewster, an excellent and energetic plein air oil landscapist. I believe that I acquired, then and there, a taste for gestural and painterly painting, one which persists to this day.

Anyway, David got a nice write-up in the June/July issue of Art New England. And check out the work on his site while you're there — it kicks.

* "Within Four Miles: The Work of Josh Dorman," the Brooklyn artist's first retrospective, is on display at LA's Craft and Folk Art Museum. He has some interesting things to say about his altered-map paintings in this LA Times article:

"I'm flattered to feel that my work can be viewed as 'folk art,' as some sort of natural product," he wrote in a recent e-mail. The contrivances, slickness and irony of much contemporary art puts him out of sync with the current moment, though he feels some kinship with James Siena and Daniel Zeller, whose meticulous line drawings, he surmises, have something to do with asserting control of a small, self-contained world when "we've lost control and we've lost having our say in the greater world."

I don't think I'm going to make it out to the West Coast this winter like I did the last. But I do see that he is also showing in New York City, in yet another cartographically themed group show. (I last encountered his work in the flesh a couple of years back in a show entitled "Personal Geographies" at Hunter College.)

* Also for to visit NYC: "Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964" at the Met. A review by Peter Schjeldahl and social commentary by Terry Teachout (the latter via Artblog.net). And on Flickr (why not?).

* More map-as-art and again by a former teacher of mine: Mara Metcalf's delicate, nearly-monochromatic ink on paper micro-scapes.

*Related: fiction writer Steven Milhauser in the NYT on miniatures and recursion (see also and for example).

stately

2008-05-29T12:04:00.003-04:00

Barbara Mink, Haphaestus, oil on canvas, 50" X 50"

Times:

This year, the State of Art Gallery's annual "Members' Show" features the work of four new members. Their lively contributions contrast with the somewhat predictable work being made by many of the older members.

The most impressive of these is oil-painter Erica Pollock, an Ithacan recently returned from art studies in San Francisco — the subject of many of her elaborate cityscapes. She has spoken of her interest in evoking locations by creating abstractions of light and dark forms.

Her two large canvases here, Midtown, Midday and Overpass, hint at the diversity of her approach. Midday is a commonplace city scene. Extending center-ward from the lower left is a trafficked road, with a bus in the foreground, and buildings of various heights behind. A shadow falls over much of this area, forming an arrow pointing leftward. This reinforces both the perspective and the symmetry of the picture. To the right, a line of shop-fronts and banners and a sidewalk stretching from the foreground to the vanishing point. People amble along — the strangest is an obliquely angled shadow-silhouette cut-off by the bottom edge.

Overpass is, in contrast, fragmented and asymmetrical. It shows a jumble of signs, shadows, buildings and elevated roadways above a wetted road carrying a line of cars towards the viewer's immediate right. The rendering of the street below is unusually fluid, a welcome contrast to Pollock's characteristic brushwork, which is more coolly descriptive.

Also new is Leslie K. Brill. Her three oil forest scenes stand out amongst the many indifferent landscapes here. Their flat, screen-like appearance is loosely reminiscent of similar paintings by Gustav Klimt. Seeing The Forest, painted on a wide panel, is the strongest of these. A near-white underlayer — visible through the warm-colored, stiffly upright trunks and a hovering cloud of leaves — gives the whole scene a shimmering glow. Leaf Mosaic, a diptych painted on tall linen panels, has a darker, off-white background and skinnier, more delicate trees. It feels overly clotted in comparison, as does the sketchy-looking Through the Portal, also on linen.

Carol Ast and Diane Newton are both fine pastel landscapists. Ast's picture of [Andy] Goldsworthy's Holocaust Memorial, Cornell University depicts one of the British artist's local outdoor installations. Visible is simply an arrangement of boulders. The variety of markmaking is a bit disconcerting: rough strokes for a line of background trees, elegant, face-like detail for the rocks, and fine, finicky scribbles for the foreground grass.

Newton, working in oil pastel, achieves a thicker, juicier effect. Delaware County, New York shows a rural road curving away downhill, then behind some trees. Around it are groves, grass, farmland, a fence, and, near the middle of the page, a house. In the background are flat hills; their whitish, hazy colors indicate distance.

Barbara Mink's sensuously colored, fluid abstract paintings have been a highlight of the State's group shows in recent years; the two in this exhibition are no exception.

While Io's color ties it to the Romantic landscape-like mode Mink has worked with in the past, those of the larger Haphaestus (named after the Greek fire god) calls to mind a less terrestrial environment. There is little green. Scattered holes punctuate the dense painterly mass, suggesting the depth of outer space. It's a remarkable piece.

Like Mink, Ethel Vrana is working in a vein of painterly abstraction that subsumes autographic gesture to texture and an exploration of material. While Mink appears to be moving in the direction of astronomy and geology, Vrana seems to be taking her cues from microbiology. Her recent imagery — here a series of loose, drippy grids — is layered, but relentlessly flat. The work, while compelling, seems to be in a developmental stage.

Mary Schuler's abstract acrylic canvases compel less. Sedona Succulents clutters the bottom three-fourths of the wide space with the whitish-green plant-forms, bulbous and darkly outlined. Without the outlines, the painting would fall apart. Above is a choppy, dryly painted, multi-colored sky. Worst of all, the succulents are enshrouded with clouds of pseudo (Jackson) Pollock drips in dark, iridescent grey. The more purely abstract paintings fare slightly better. Universal Expansion is a sugary atmospheric scene with colored strokes radiating out from a white center. The smaller Golden Reflection calls to mind Jasper Johns' sloppy hatching.

Margy Nelson's digital drawing Old Mother Spider is a witty combination of image and nursery-rhyme-like verse ("In the corner of my room, Lives an old mother spider..."). The latter is inscribed (apparently by hand in ink) in black down and off of a white-line web, itself draped down the left of the image. Towards the top right, by the ceiling corner, is an egg-hatching brown Spider. Her flatness and delicate, articulated anatomy, recall both Japanese prints and Nelson's background as a scientific illustrator.

With the State of the Art's group shows, if you know what you want, it's easy enough to ignore large swaths of the offerings. The gap between interesting and not-so-interesting seems particularly marked this time around.

ramayana

2008-05-07T12:38:00.011-04:00

Indian, Madhya Pradesh, Datia, Rama’s Army Attacks Ravana’s Demon Army, page from a Ramayana, 1595, opaque watercolors and gold on paper, 28 x 19 cm.

From the Times, a long one:

Together with the Mahabarata, the Ramayana is one of the great folk epics of Hindu culture. By legend, it is commonly ascribed to the Indian writer-sage Valmiki. Although its precise date of origin is unknown, it is thought by scholars to be over 2,000 years old. The original Sanskrit text is spread throughout the country and throughout Southeast Asia, often in altered versions. There it profoundly influenced the arts and the common culture. It combines moral and spiritual guidance with a story of high adventure that is both engrossing and, ultimately, tragic.

In seven books, Valmiki's Ramayana covers the life of Rama, who is said to be an incarnation of the god Vishnu. Upon losing his kingship amidst familial conflict, he leaves his city of Ayodhya and takes to voluntary exile in the woods. There he is joined by his ever-faithful wife, Sita. Sita however is soon abducted by the demon-king Ravana, who imprisons her in the city of Lanka. After enlisting the help of the monkey-man general Hanuman, and his simian troops, and after much violent struggle, he is able to take the city and liberate his wife. Although this should be a happy ending, further complications ensue, with unfortunate results.

Up now at the Johnson Museum, "Ramayana in the Arts of India and Southeast Asia" contains some stunning work. As befits it modest (by museum standards) scale, the show focuses on a relatively narrow geographic and historical range. Middle-Eastern influenced miniature paintings from India are one emphasis. A stylistically distinct body of work — paintings and shadow puppets — coming from the south of the subcontinent is another. A group of 20th century folk textiles from Bali make up a third focus. Other locales get only token representation. And although artists have been illustrating the Ramayana for much longer, the majority of work here comes from the last 300 years or so.

The first of these contains the best art here. As their size and proportions might indicate, these miniatures originate as book or album pages. They are colored in opaque watercolor, often with the addition of gold. Bookended by the rise of the Islamic Mughal Empire (16th though 19th century) and the 19th century institution of Western-style oil painting by the British colonialists, they represent a period of great accomplishment in Indian painting. Characteristic is a stylistic syncretism and the proliferation of distinctive regional and court-based approaches. For shear refinement and sophistication, the work is hard to beat.

Hanuman Sets Fire to the Golden City of Lanka (early 19th century) is a particularly striking example. To give the back-story, the monkey-general has travelled to the mythic island city (in present-day Sri-Lanka) to contact Sita. He does so successfully, but is then found out. Ravana wishes to kill Hanuman, but his moral code prohibits doing this to a mere messenger. Instead, he sets his tail on fire. In revenge, Hanuman goes around the city, setting flames, before finally escaping to rejoin Rama on the mainland.

The painting is ingeniously composed and ambiguous in its perspective. It is horizontally oriented and contains three sharply divided sections. To the right is the polygonal city, mainly colored pale and indian yellow. Its thick outer walls are as if squashed flat across the ground. Inside: a maze of buildings and doors, archways, demons, scattered purple flames rendered translucently. In the middle is an curvaceous expanse of pea-soup-green. It narrows towards the left; near the tip of the mini-penisula a light-skinned Hanuman stands in profile. He steps forward but faces back, his flaming tail echoing its handiwork. To the left is the dark blue sea covered in white swirls — abstracted waves. The combination of broad areas of flat color, with fine details rendered less opaquely is effective.

Lanka and it surrounds are also the setting for Rama's Army Attacks Ravana's Demon Army (1595). The vertical miniature uses a more naturalistic perspective than Hanuman. The city — here covered all-over in real gold, with black lines — stands against the top edge of the page, indicating its distance. In front rages a wild battle, the two sides facing each other wielding bows, swords, shields, and spears. In the lower left corner are Rama (blue skin) and his younger brother Lakshmana (light-skinned). Their postures and orange bows echo each other. Fighting with them is Hanuman's monkey army, each also blue or light. Facing them from the right of the page is a heterogeneously hued crew of horned demons. Together, the figures form a dense, rhythmic tangle. A cloud of white, in places quite translucent, surround the fighters.

The painting contains a variety of stylistic tendencies, ranging from the somewhat stiff line drawing of the city to the fluid outlines and painterliness of the rocks and foliage setting the city off from the combatants.

Three paintings from the south of India (all 19th century) show a more direct approach. Their style, which is quite uniform, is characterized by an all-over flatness and the prominent use of black outlining. Characters (excepting a multi-headed Ravana in one scene) are seen in profile. There is an ample use of bands, stripes, and various architectural motifs to structure the compositions. Forms occluding others give the only hint of depth.

A similarly blunt, dark-outlined style can be found in the numerous South Indian shadow puppets. Made of animal hide, and mounted through the center on wooden rods, they are substantially larger than the paintings. Each is punctured by cutout holes.

The most striking of these are arranged a long display. Each one is a major Ramayana character. Elevated a few feet from the ground, they match human height. With two exceptions, the colors are bold (but not garish). Rama, for one, has dark turquoise skin. The bad guys, Ravana and Kumbhakarna (his brother), are more subtle: mostly red with black, and white details. The former has eight heads rather than his characteristic 10 and again breaks from the usual profile. The latter's giant stature is indicated by his over-scaled head. In most of these puppets, the patterning is rich, with exuberant stripes, swirls, and bursts. Dense filigrees of holes help the puppets stand out, along with the (somewhat harsh) fluorescent under-lighting.

Another Indian puppet (20th century), shows Sita crouched amidst leaves, snakes, and birds. Notably, it depicts a specific scene rather than just a character. It is also unique for its lack of joints. Although its inside cutouts are delightfully intricate, the overall shape is rather formless.

For comparison, she is hung next to a Javanese Shadow Puppet of Hanuman. The stylistic contrast is sharp. Hanuman is covered head to toe in gold, with sinuous details in red, white, and black. His limbs are skinny and project in an angular manner. The decorative detailing - painted and cut - is particularly intricate. The face is wildly mannered. In further contrast to the flatness of the South Indian styles, shading appears in the form of feathery black marks around the edges of the limbs.

The Balinese embroidered cloths here may be familiar to Johnson visitors from "The Story Cloths of Bali," a show from early 2006. They represent the scholarly and collection efforts of Joseph Fischer, who has written a useful and accessible book with the same title as that exhibit (copyright 2004). According to him, the works originate from the Balinese regions of Jembrana and Buleleng, and in particular from the city of Negara, in the former district. Often they involve collaboration between a man, who selects traditional subjects and renders them in pencil outline, and a woman, who chooses the colors and does the actual embroidery. The finished pieces are used in a variety of Hindu rituals, often alongside other art-forms such as dance, architecture, and painting. Sadly, Fischer reports that the tradition is now moribund, having faded during his researches of the nineties.

Although one piece features a red background, most feature plain, off-white cotton backings, to which colored cotton thread has been applied. The threads sometimes veer towards the garish and the synthetic-looking — even iridescent colors. This is a difficult tightrope to walk when surrounded by so much classical restraint and some areas don't quite pull it off. (The 2006 show featured even more over-the-top work.) A variety of embroidery techniques are used, resulting in a richly expressive array of textures. Faces are typically rendered in outlines, while bodies and other forms are made up of solid or sketchy color-areas. Personages are labeled with Roman letters.

A scattering of sculptures from otherwise unrepresented regions round out the show. Their inclusion feels a bit teasing; still, some pieces are impressive. A pair of tall, carved wooden doors is a standout amongst these. Thai or Cambodian, each door shows a combatant: Hanuman on the left and Ravana on the right, facing each other. Their detailed armor makes them look flat and a bit stiff. This is in contrast to the more dimensional, life-like character of the animals occupying smaller sections below each. The doors were originally gilded gold and a dusting towards the door-tops remains.

Given its relatively modest ambitions, "Ramayana in the Arts of India and Southeast Asia" is a success. It features some highly impressive work — some of the miniature-paintings in particular — and it offers a compelling and accessible entryway into a rich subject.

ed marion at gimme!

2008-04-30T12:32:00.009-04:00

Ed Marion, Chad Crumm, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 12" x 12"

Times:

Ed Marion has made a name for himself locally as a painter of portraits and landscapes. Although numerous artists have focused on the area's rural and natural environments, Marion is one of the few to focus on cityscapes. His style is gestural, but his pieces are faithful and detailed enough to strongly evoke their subjects.

Through April 30, Marion showed a recent series of portraits at Gimme! Coffee's recently renovated space on Cayuga St.. Dating from 2008, the acrylic canvases are all square. Walking into the coffee shop from the street, the viewer will notice three large pieces (30" x 30") in a row to their right and six smaller (12" x 12") lined up to their left. The subjects are all local artistic luminiares — painters and players of stringed instruments. With one exception, each focuses on an individual.

A large-format Evil City String Band features four men standing in the foreground of a chalky-green, grassy field, otherwise deserted. Their clothes are casual but calculatedly stylish. They face more or less forward, wielding their various instruments somewhat stiffly. They seem oddly detached from each other and from us. And they are detached from their (surprisingly) pastoral setting, as if Marion is unsure how to place figures convincingly within a space lacking sharp angles. Illogic of posture compounds illogic of narrative — what are these guys doing out there? The landscape and figures are both fine in themselves, but don't fit together. Canvas size seems to compound this problem, since Marion tends to use small painterly gestures to create structure and rhythm.

Trevor MacDonald also appears to be another casualty of oversize. Its the worst piece in the show by a comfortable margin. Trevor, scruffy-looking, stands in front of a a tilted American flag. His right arm holds up an electric guitar, itself sporting a starburst pattern of red and white stripes. His left hand rests on his chest in a patriotic gesture. Everything is more or less red, white and blue. There is a mismatch of styles. Marion's subtle palate and gesturalism do not easily combine with hard-edge patterning.

Evil and Trevor both sport lurid, bright orange under-painting. This technique is used more prominently and more effectively in several of the smaller canvases, where it gives life to Marion's whitish colors. (This is particularly so for the over-painted skin-tones, which tend towards the disturbingly undead-looking.)

It also appears in the strongest of the large pieces, Paul McMillan. While too many of those have struggling-to-fill-all-this-space-type backgrounds, McMillan mostly avoids that trap. It shows a profile view of the artist in his cramped-looking studio, behind brushes and bric-a-brac, wielding a fine brush with concentration. He wears glasses and what appears to be a blue t-shirt. He has a mustache and dark, shoulder-length hair.

Painter Brody Parker Burroughs is shown, from the upper chest up, standing in front of one of his own pictures. The painting within a painting makes up the whole background, which gives Brody a flattened, compressed quality. Burroughs' downturned head is imperfectly mirrored by a more sketchily rendered one behind him. Otherwise, the "backdrop" has a jazzily rendered life of its own which threatens to steal attention from the ostensible subject. Again, the orange under-painting emphasizes this; there seems to be a light emanating from Burroughs' image.

Two more portraits feature local painters. Jim DeGraff is the only one here to face us, rather than his painting or an unspecified point. He does so grinning. He wears a baseball cap and a thick, hooded shirt, both green. His painting is in the background, to the left, tilted, and cut-off. It shows the torso of a woman, wearing a loose-fitting white shirt and blue pants.

Erica Pollock — we see her head and shoulders — wears a blue shirt and looks off to her right. Although she covers perhaps half of the (real) canvas, she again seems unsubstantial compared to her background. In this case it is a busy street scene. It may initially be unclear whether she is standing in front of a painting or the (depicted) real thing. But an edge near the lower left corner indicates that she is indoors.

More musicians are the subjects of the remaining small pieces. A portrait of guitarist Sim Redmond again makes effective use of an orange under-layer. Fiddler Chad Crumm is also well-served, while guitarist Kevin Kinsella comes out somewhat too sketchy.

Spaces rather than people seem to be Ed Marion's strongest point. Some of the backgrounds here are more engaging and life-like than the protagonists that occupy them, sometimes awkwardly. Still, with the exception of the two large paintings mentioned above, each piece here has much to recommend it.

passim

2008-04-26T21:36:00.009-04:00

I've been taking a class at Cornell, on the subject of Hellenistic Philosophy. The teacher is Tad Brennan, who is great. Less so are my fellow students (mostly undergrads), who seem bored and apathetic. Anyways, if I never mention this again, at least know that it has been sucking up most of my writerly and intellectual energies. I have some other projects in mind or or coming out, however.

I have written a mostly positive review of Ed Marion's current show of portrait paintings at Gimme! Coffee. It was supposed to appear in this week's paper but it will appear next week instead.

About the show: each portrait depicts a local musician or painter. One features my pal Brody Parker Burroughs', a fine painter in his own right. You can see the whole show on Marion's blog-like website. The work looks much better in person, however.

The exhibit is up at Gimme! recently renovated space on Cayuga St., downtown. (For non-local readers: G! is a locally-based chain with branches also in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Their coffee tastes good.) The new space has a higher ceiling, and crystalline hanging Art Deco light fixtures, which remind me of Frantisek Kupka. Although you wouldn't know it from this show, Marion is Ithaca's coffee-shop pornographer laureate, painting storefronts and interiors like those discussed here. His best work is is his cityscapes, which depict both Ithaca and his native NYC.

For the following week, I am working on a piece about "Ramayana in the Arts of India and Southeast Asia," up at the Johnson Museum. The work in the show is great; unfortunately, the installation seems a bit awkward. The combination of miniature paintings and larger pieces — particularly a group of exuberantly-colored animal hide puppets — in weird in the small-scale underground space. A big display of puppets is lit from below with fluorescent lighting. This makes sense in terms of conservation (there is also indirect halogen lighting from above), but it makes the pieces look cold and unnatural. A scattering of sculptural pieces feel like afterthoughts. I'll have to revisit the show in order to figure out exactly how I feel about all this.

I also have to do some more background reading, which I like to do when I review historical shows. My background in art history is not as strong as I like, so this makes a valuable education for me.

I'm going to be motoring out to Boston next weekend and I'm hoping to see some good things there.

Some more bits and pieces:

* I had the pleasure of attending, last September 28, a concert lead by keyboardist David Borden. Borden is the founder of the pioneering local synthesizer-minimalist ensemble Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Company (circa 1969!) and it was under that rubric that he played. The actual group of players, however, was new. So was their gear: laptops and digital keyboards rather than cool, cumbersome Moogs.

You can read about Borden, Robert Moog, and the role of the Ithaca area (Trumansburg, specifically) in the early development of the synthesizer in Trevor Pinch's book Analog Days. The book is an engagingly written popular history, poorly disguised as an academic science-studies text.

The accompanying projected video — a groovy black and white montage of dancers — is the work of Noni Korf Vidal and her husband Franck Vidal. Noni is the daughter of Kumi Korf. The video was remixed live during the performance.

Via Ithaca Experimental, some YouTube excerpts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

* "Daumier, Caricaturist" by the artist's American friend, Henry James.

* My Times collegue BP interviews graphic novelist Alison Bechdel and reviews her autobiographical book, Fun Home.

* The program for Ithaca's upcoming Gallery Night on May 2nd. Looks like some interesting shows will be opening up. I will be out of town, but I 'll see the shows when I get back, of course. "Strange Worlds," is new at the Main Street and looks promising as well.

* Next Wednesday, the New York Foundation for the Arts will hold a series of brief talks by the following local artists: Sara Ahearn, Marna Bell, Karen Brummund, Charity Ray Burger, Lynn E. Dates, Jane Dennis, Andrew Gillis, Ed Marion, Daniel McPheeters, Barbara Page, Erica Pollock, and Allen C. Smith. The event takes place at the Tompkins County Public Library from six to eight in the evening. I look forward to actually meeting some of these people for the first time, including Ed.

* Raymond Tallis criticizes neuroaesthetics. I'm not really familiar with this branch of art-theorizing, so I probably should keep quiet. But the story he tells — that of a gap between the generalized explanations of science and the rich concreteness of our interactions with artworks — is a plausible one. (via Artblog.net, although I believe I saw it linked to elsewhere earlier)

* More art and science: "Synchrotron proves Europeans were not the first painters to use oils." (via 3 Quarks Daily)

* Matt Nash of Big Red & Shiny on the recent rash of gallery-closings and movings in Boston. More recently, via BRS' blog: news that Malden Mass' Artspace@16 is soon to close as well. Artspace has been the work of artist (and fellow Museum School alumnus) Sand T. The gallery is notable for being run out of her suburban garage. There will be a closing reception on Saturday, May 3, from two to five in the afternoon. I hope to be there.

* Pitchfork reviews a reissue of OMD's eighties classic Dazzle Ships, a favorite album of mine. See the video for "Genetic Engineering".

ink shop: 03/21/08, afternoon

2008-03-30T20:24:00.020-04:00

main spring

2008-03-30T19:02:00.013-04:00

Buzz Spector, Creeley's Creeleys, Internal Dye Diffusion Print (Polaroid), 36.75" x 24"

Kumi Korf, Birds in Conversation, Gold, Intaglio Print on Japanese Paper, 36" x 20"

Victoria Romanoff, The Oysters of Le Havre, Paper Mosaic

Jeremiah Donovan, Walnut Bowl Inside/Out, Earthenware Clay layered with Terrasigilatta and Raku Glazes (Multi-Fired), 12" x 14"

A version of my review appearing in the Times, 3/19/08 (which I can't find online):

The Main Street Gallery's annual spring show covers an eclectic range of styles and mediums with an emphasis on local artists. The show has been markedly strong in recent years (particularly relative to similar efforts by other area galleries) and this year's feels particularly so.

Cornell professor Buzz Spector's Creeley's Creeleys exemplifies his recent large format Polaroid work as well as his use of books as brick-like sculptural units. The bricks here come from the collection of the late poet Robert Creeley and collectively form an oblique, associative portrait. The volumes vary richly in color, design, and typography; some include author photos. They are arranged in a roughly circular cluster of small stacks (some clearly showing different editions of the same book). The stacks zig-zag — facing in different directions — and grow taller towards the back. They sit on rough, unpainted floorboards which emphasize the picture's deep perspective. (As does the contrasting flatness of scattered volumes placed upright, more or less parallel to the picture-plane, as if in a bookstore display) The image itself is sensuous with subtle contrasting tones and artful blurring along the top and bottom edges.

Birds in Conversation, Gold, by Ithacan Kumi Korf, is another standout. The tall intaglio print belongs to a recent series in which she attempts to provide an abstract analogue for the experience of flight. Like others, this one features a flock of flatly painted, hard-edged shapes arranged against a brushy, gestural background. In Gold there are three. Moving from top to bottom, left to right and then back left: a warm grayish-blue one most resembling a bird in profile (wings closed), a burnt orange amoeba, and a red one suggesting a kite or an arrow. These are tied together by curving green line suggesting a flight line or a thread. These stick sharply out of a ground of indian yellow, printed over silver onto a thin tan-colored Japanese paper sheet.

Korf's long-standing print collaborator is Ink Shop master-printer Christa Wolf. Wolf herself is well-represented here by the monotype landscape Alegretto. The piece loosely depicts a view of the landscape surrounding her upstate NY farmhouse. The piece is arranged in vertical tiers of wave-like, gestural marks barely hinting at perspective. The bottom half is dominated by a pair of dark purple-brown tree trunks, gnarly and with bare branches leaping out sideways. The brushing reveals the white of the paper. The colors -- mostly greens with small patches of reddish brown --are faintly iridescent.

Victoria Romanoff (another well-known Ithacan), offers an engaging collage-painting, The Oysters of Le Havre. The bits that make up this "paper mosaic" fit each other snugly without overlapping. Although the scene is fragmented and filled with abstract mark-making, it is recognizable as a landscape with a shoreline. A relatively empty horizontal bar towards the top is warm gray (apparently sprayed) and indicates sky. Marks elsewhere are predominantly whitish — pink and blue — and applied via thick and thin paint and with chalk or crayon. The whole vista is surrounded by a pink painted border, relatively dark, but tied to the rest through similar marks.

The inclusion of functional pottery is a distinguishing characteristic of the Main Street's group shows; included here are the decoratively glazed vessels of Anna Velkoff Freeman — two tall cups and a wide, shallow bowl. The white on dark blue designs are stylized depictions of dangerous microbes. The inclusion of the foodborne e coli (on the bowl and one of the cups) is a cheap joke but their sinuous tendrils do form interesting patterns.

Much more interesting sculpturally are three asymmetric goblet-like bowls by the Groton native Jeremiah Donovan. They are inspired by the forms — interior and exterior — of walnuts, and their jagged inner ridges and staggered, uneven rims limit their functionality. Colors are copper brown and greenish. The outside edges (along with parts of the inside) are rough, covered in scored lines and accreted dirt clumps.

The least satisfying mode of art on display here is a figural, narrative surrealist sculpture based on an assemblage aesthetic. By far the strongest work in this vain is Gail Hoffman's Messenger, a bird-headed figurine welded together from cast bronze fragments. Included are casts from real objects, e.g. a leaf wing and a doily covering its chest. In comparison, Claire Harootunian's Angel Mine and Lead On look rather slight. Both feature tiny, minimally altered dolls sitting atop benches: clay and painted wood, respectively.

"Spring Group Exhibition" will be of greatest interest to those already familiar with the works of the artists shown. The particular style of combining well-known area artists with select (and perennial) "outsiders" is idiosyncratic to the Main Street. Visitors from past years should feel an engaging tension between the expected and the new, as different aspects of artists' work are (often slowly!) revealed.

ink spot

2008-03-27T22:53:00.006-04:00

From the Times, with further edits:

Late in the evening of this past January 8th, an accidental fire started in the three-storey Handwork Building at 102 W. State Street. The second floor was home to Ithaca’s community printshop. And while the Ink Shop did not face the catastrophic flame damage of their upstairs neighbor, the Ithaca Academy of Dance, it was blanketed in soot and water. On show, but thankfully only minimally damaged, was their most expensive endeavour to date, a show of work from Lafayette College’s Experimental Printmaking Institute. However, the structural damage done to the building means that they will have to wait, probably until at least next year, before they can consider moving back in.

In the meantime, the Shop's newly rented — and possibly permanent — location is in the second floor of the Community School of Music and Arts building at 330 E. State St. The association of the two non-profits has potential, especially as both organizations show visual art and teach it to the public. This is their third home since the Ink Shop's founding in 1999.

The new gallery can be entered either from a side entrance or through a back door exiting the CSMA's first floor space. After twisting up a rough, concrete staircase, you find yourself in a long hallway, facing towards the front of the building. A door on the left leads to an architect's office. The door on the right leads to the new shop: two cramped rooms lined up straight, front and back, with a marble-lined washroom in the very back, off to the right. Each main room has three tall windows dominating their right-hand walls. The view looks out the CSMA parking lot, with The Commons in the background. Despite the pristine white walls and elegant cornices, the space has a grittier feel than the old one.

The front room contains, on the right, an impromptu office with tables and desks arranged in a square, chairs lining the inside. Flat-file cases are scattered about. An open closet space has been added up against the back left corner of the room; its low homasote walls don't reach the ceiling. The awkward combination of uses — work, office, and exhibition — is a marked change. The presses are in the back, along with scattered tables and chairs and a drying rack for prints. The back and left walls make a relatively spacious exhibition area.

A dedicated crew of member-volunteers has done most of the hard work of moving equipment and planning the logistics of the new space. Although the space now looks fairly settled-in, things are still being worked out. As of press time, they still lack telephone service. Programs are being worked out. Starting next month, the Shop will be resuming their schedule of printing classes that are open to the public.

Their latest show, "Fired Up," features mostly recent prints by Shop members. Many survived the fire. It was put together in the months following the disaster and its ad hoc-feel is unsurprising. (It opened on the last Gallery Night on March 7.) And the installation is understandably awkward as well. Things are cramped and the work is sometimes hard to see. It will be interesting to see how they meet this challenge in the future. The show does feature some impressive art, as usual. Some of it is familiar from past exhibitions.

There are two strong etchings by Tim Merrick. Both of them are rounded squares, and feature dark, purplish-brown lines against a light, mottled backdrop. The lines are fine and energetic, jazzy, forming sometimes dense accumulations of hatchings. And both scenes place the viewer beside — and in front of — a rapidly flowing creek, perched on some rocks. In The River, the water flows towards the foreground on the left. Behind it is dark and densely wooded hillside. In The Red Mill, the water flows away in a roughly straight path. The lines of the rocks in front exaggerate the sense of perspective. On the right shore sits a dilapidated split-level house; in the background, the water is blocked by an elongated building.

Also compelling is an untitled monotype by Neil Berger, a painterly, black-on-white rural scene. The central road (which in the foreground spans the bottom edge) arcs it way up a gentle slope, towards the upper left corner of the page. Piercing it is another road, going from the lower left corner towards the right edge (mid-ground), narrowing. Both roads are covered in fluid streaks, indicating mud rather than pavement. On an arcing hill-horizon in the background, from left to right: a grove of trees, a tiny house beneath a phone pole canopy, a pair of frame-structures, more trees.

"Fired Up" makes a useful accompaniment to the Main Street Gallery's current spring show. Both Kumi Korf and Christa Wolf are showing closely related work there. Pamela Rozelle Drix is showing in both galleries as well.

A recent series of intaglio prints by Korf draws a connection between aerial view landscape (or maps) and a classicist approach to modern art. They're reminiscent, in particular, of Joan Miró's paintings. The two tall pieces here are compelling but not quite as successful as the Main Street's Birds in Conversation.

Like that piece, Migratory Flight and Flight of the Red Window feature three hard-edged, flatly toned shapes — here: red, green, and yellow — hovering over a looser, but also flat background. In these two, the backgrounds are spanned top to bottom by finger lake-like columns of watery color: blue and purple respectively. The flying forms do not cross over into the lightly colored areas making up the left and right margins. As a result, the compositions feel unduly cramped. Unlike the bird-kite shapes of Birds and Migratory, Red Window features a more varied, and more straightforwardly abstract menagerie: a square (in yellow), a bent rod (green), and the empty frame-shape suggested by the title. Silver threads tie the foreground figures together in both prints.

Drix's monotype Where The Grass Meets the Water is another impressively abstract distillation of nature. The piece is made up of two square window-like panels, adjacent and side-by-side. On the left is a wave-like pattern of light and dark blue stripes. On the right, over the warm white of the paper, is an angular pattern of thick, dark-green lines. In the middle of these panels are two smaller squares, nested and touching so as to echo the larger ones. The same image of reeds is repeated in each of these: on the right in blue on blue again (but even darker) and on the left in white and black.

Moving to the back room: Christa Wolf's Allegro comes from a series of monotypes picturing her farmhouse garden, dominated by tangled vines. The pieces are each named after one of the five movements in Beethoven's sixth symphony (the "pastoral symphony"). The one downtown is black and white, with the white paper forming the vines and other foreground shapes. The lines are tangled, greasy, and often thick.

Craig Mains is represented with a pair of hard-edged digital images showing, appropriately enough, a flooded print shop. They're basically interior design schematics. Although they share in his characteristic (and endearing) subject matter of disaster and ruin, they lack the visual wit conveyed by his usual flat, stencil-derived forms.

Jenny Pope's color woodcut Underworld Owls is another standout. It shows, in cross-section, an underground network of burrow-holes, each housing an owl, some asleep. The earth is dotted with rocks and if you look closely, you can see snails and segmented worms. Above ground, toward the top edge, is a lumpy landscape, with snow falling and accumulated. Toward the left corner, in the distance, is a rail bridge with a small steam locomotive, both in profile. The colors are subdued: raw umber, ochre, medium gray, light celery green, baby blue, black - and the white of the paper. The rendering is flat overall, but the owls manage to contort themselves in a comically animated fashion.

Irina Kassabova's Scanning is an etching with smudgy layers of color: red, black, purple, blue. A loosely defined purple figure is seen in profile. Below, in white scratchy outlines, are what look to be bones. The print's painterliness and lack of coherence contrasts greatly with the work she showed in a two-person show at the Shop last fall (with her father Motko Bumov). There her black and white etchings of prehistoric animal skeletons were impressive in their detail and linear clarity.

In the basement of the CSMA is a reprise of "The Birth Portfolio," which was shown in the Clinton House's Mural Lounge earlier this year. It was originally planned for the old Ink Shop and features work from the International Birth Exchange Project. It's uneven but well worth a look. The space was generously lent for free by the School.

annual photography

2008-03-12T14:29:00.006-04:00

Times:

This year's "Annual Juried Photography Show" is the State of the Art Gallery's 19th. Like last year's, it provides a fine opportunity to survey the range of regional work (with some from beyond, too).

Joleen Mahoney Roe's architectural montage Sorroe is impressive but perhaps too slick. The thin, panoramic piece incorporates several separate views, which are variously repeated and staggered. On both sides is the same interior wall covered in graffiti script. In the middle are outdoor scenes; beams are all-over as are color painted totem-pillars and garishly colored Mother Marys. Otherwise, the middle is largely sepia-toned. Much of Sorroe's surface is soaked in a layer of digital effects - sometimes thin but thick and colorful around borders.

Carrie Chalmers' Red Rug. Niagara Falls, Canada is, in contrast, quietly poetic. Seen in three-quarters view from a concrete driveway is the back of a nondescript white house. The sky is cloudy and there is a thin layer of snow. Behind a tree is a porch; over one of the railings is the rug, the only patch of strong color. Two diagonal phone lines above the house act like picture corners (e.g. the little plastic ones) as do more subtle snow lines below. Jessica Evett-Miller also rings poetry out of similar color-contrasts. In Strata I and II, a knit red blanket draped softens barren, rocky landscapes.

Both Phil Koons' Cayuga Lake: Red Wall 27 and Myron Walker's Entrada (both digital) evoke early 20th-century modern painting. Cayuga appears to be a homage to the Synthetic Cubism of Picasso and Georges Braque, which is characterized by shallow perspective, angular fragmentation, and the juxtaposition of textures and signs enabled by collage. Picasso's 1912 Still Life with Chair Caning introduced collage into mainstream Western art. The cane (fake, printed on oilcloth), is alluded to in the Koons by three rectangular sections of wooden lattice. Also reminiscent of Still Life - and its brothers - is Cayuga's use of fragmented text. A "no parking any time" sign is in the foreground, tilting off the left edge. Only a "G," an "E," and a suggestive arrow are readable. (Compare with the similarly positioned French fragment " J O U" of the Picasso.)

Other similarities between the two works exist, but they are not quite versions. Cayuga is a rectangle rather than an oval and is dominated by red, green and blue along with the grays and browns of the older piece. In the background is a red building, perhaps a barn, and above a strip of bright sky. Cluttering the space in between is junk, mostly: pipes, a telephone pole, the lattices, a cinder-block, another arrowed sign.

Entrada is divided into two rectangular sections resembling the pages of an open book. The left shows a flat, solid wall, painted pink and covered in blobby white writing: the title ("entrance" in Spanish) and a schedule. Piercing this script is a yellow arrow gesturing right. The right is more dimensional; it shows the bottom of a pink stairway curving up leftwards. Above is a dirty mustard yellow wall painted with another arrow, dark red. The two pointers seem to echo each other but the right one is shorter and isn't flat, curving with the stairs. Paul Klee (a contemporary of Picasso) often used arrows in a similar way: both as strong graphic elements and as narrative cues, enticing the viewer to enter the work. Like Cayuga, the piece combines abstraction with a playful evocation of vernacular - albeit a more exotic one.

The over-scaled full-body portraits of Jessica Brown and Michael McCarthy show contrasting aesthetics. Brown's Polaroid self-portrait All the Lingerie I Own comes as a column of three framed pieces. These are subtitled separately (A, B, C) but are not experienced separately. As the title suggests, there is a wealth of fetishistic detail. McCarthy's void-like cyanotype Silhouette is white on dark warm blue, with ghostly blurring around the edges. Limbs are variously blurred and attenuated. The piece is a photogram, made without a camera by impressing objects directly on light sensitive paper. The paper is roughly textured and the piece has a painterly quality.

There are numerous botanical close-ups in National. Too often, these lean towards either the predictably competent (Linda's Lilly by Joshua Harden) or the unconvincingly experimental (the repetitive, mandala-like geometry of Daniel McPheeters' Succulents). Corrine Stern's Ornamental Cabbage, which is paired with, and echoes, her close-up Elephant's Eye is an exception. Both ink-jet prints are framed in glass, without any other backing. Cabbage is a reddish-purple ball surrounded by ghostly whitish leaves while the Eye is encircled by heavy folds of skin in cool grey and pale pink. Both have rich textures; the former's scattering of leaf-holes and dewdrops is particularly compelling.

daumier

2008-02-20T11:59:00.009-05:00

Times:

The great French artist Honoré Daumier (1808-1879) was an accomplished painter and sculptor. He was best known during his lifetime however, for his satirical black and white lithographs. Sold individually or in subscription periodicals, they took on the foibles of his age. A selection of these, "A Wit Still Sharp: Daumier Turns 200," is on view at the Johnson Museum. The show is small, especially relative to his prolific output. Nevertheless, it is packed with ideas — both visual and verbal.

The latter are primarily the contribution of Charles Philipon, publisher of La Caricature and La Charivari, liberal journals Daumier contributed to regularly. Philipon's captions supply an extra measure of wit — along with most of the works' titles. Many prints bare traces of their journalistic origins: horizontal fold-lines and text printed on the backs.

Much of the artist's early work satirized the government of constitutional monarch Louis-Phillipe, who reigned from 1830 to 1848. His rule was ostensibly a moderate, reformist one. He promised freedom of the press but this was not carried out consistently. Daumier and his publisher found themselves facing fines and even prison time for their efforts.

The highlight of the show is the 1834 classic La Ventre Législatif (The Legislative Belly), a vicious indictment of the new regime. It assembles government officials Daumier earlier caricatured individually. (Three of these portraits from the previous year are also on view.) In contrast to the detail of the earlier prints, the often grotesque visages of Belly are constructed out of suggestive blocks of tone. The statesmen sit in four rows which surround the semi-circular bit of floor which makes up the foreground. Alternately, they plot together, read papers, doze-off, or stare vacantly into space. In front, right, stands a dark-coated, mop-haired man recognizable from one of the earlier portraits as a Dr. Prunelle. An analogy is made between the corpulence of the leaders, the shape of the chamber, and the greed of the government. (Money-grubbing is also the subject of a sardonic April Fools' print wherein L-P and associate Adolphe Thiers throw coins from a balcony to a stupefied-looking crowd.)

Baissez le rideau, la farce est jouée (Lower the curtain, the farce is over) is from the same year. It shows the same belly-chamber through a sort of window in the center of a beautifully weird, angular composition. We see the rows from the side, above, at greater distance. Obscuring it from above is a curtain; to the right it is fronted by a plump, monstrous clown — Louis-Phillipe. He points a baton leftward, where it disrupts the scales of justice held by an allegorical female statue. Baissez recalls the artist's early background in theatre. His father, a glazier, had aspirations as a dramatist and poet.

Legislation passed in 1835 (following attempted regicide) banned political caricature. Daumier turned his satire towards the everyday social life of Paris. Although less joyfully mean-spirited, the resulting pieces show a keen awareness of modern city-life and an increasingly loose and expressive line.

In Cré nom!...(1841), a tattered man slumps against an outdoor wall, complaining that his rain-soaked boots have it better than he does, for at least they are able to drink. The print is hung alongside the only non-lithograph in the show, an intaglio Absinthe Drinker by Manet whose heavily worked shadows and other dark tones are only hinted at in the Daumier.

Daumier mocked the official French art-world, which in his day was dominated by the conservative exhibitions of the Salon. Three pieces here illustrate these shows. Lofty, idealized artworks are juxtaposed against the vulgarity of their viewing audience. Walls loaded with portraits — women, probably from classical mythology — form the backdrops of two. These are rendered lightly in the sketchiest of lines. The audience below can only understand them in coarse, sexualized terms.

In Triste contenance de la Sculpture...(1857), a nude female statue bears an agitated pose while around her a circle of gentlemen face away obliviously. In contrast to her, they appear formless, lumpy. The caption makes the target clear: a tendency to favor painting over sculpture.

A tout coup l'on perd! (Every throw's a loser!), from 1868, exemplifies Daumier's late return to politics. It alludes to the clouds of war then gathering over Europe in humorously allegorical terms. A crowned woman personifying Europe holds a bag of money in each hand. Squatting down, she aims in the direction of carnival game bearing the coarsely rendered likeness of the Greek god of war, his mouth a black hole. Framing him is the upright section of the contraption; it resembles a gravestone. The loose line-work is impressive, but the lack of tonal variation keeps it from being one of the more visually impressive pieces.

nick maione at stella's

2008-02-06T15:49:00.000-05:00

Times:

Stella's Cafe in Collegetown is currently showing a series of abstract drawings by Cornell student Nick Maione, up through February. Their clusters of marks, although expressive, are typically spare, with most of the action going on in the middle and the white of the paper playing a major role. Colors and mediums are restricted as well: black ink along with red, black, and bluish-grey marks in pastel, conte crayon, and oil paint. The sheets are all approximately the dimensions of a magazine or notebook page and usually panoramic rather than upright. All of this helps to give both the works and the show unity, although not at the expense of variation and surprise.

The art here recalls that of several well-known twentieth century modernist painters. You can see traces of Arshile Gorky's fine, fluid black lines — here rendered in pen. Although less graceful, Maione's cover space in a similar way, sometimes loosely outlining chalky, cloudy forms and at other times going their own way. The use and frequent repetition of abstractly calligraphic and scrawl-like marks calls to mind Cy Twombly. Philip Guston's late work - with its limited palate, coarse, cartoon-like images, and darkly humorous narrative - is another likely influence. Contained in Maione's more or less abstract spaces is an unexpectedly personal figurative vocabulary: maps, landscape, weather, fluids, bottles, body-parts.

The pieces lack individual titles, which makes it difficult to refer to them specifically. It is tempting for this reason and because of their (above-mentioned) consistency to treat them as parts of a single work, perhaps even sequential like a book. Nevertheless, several pieces stand out.

One piece does so with a horizon-line, a sign of landscape and deep perspective in a show otherwise dominated by a shallow, screen-like space. (Along one stretch, it is an actual line, while elsewhere it is merely implied.) It gives the surrounding lines and shapes strongly figurative associations that they might not have otherwise. Patches of horizontal gray strokes resemble choppy water. A rocklike island-bump in black and gray pokes up towards the left while a hollow red circle balancing it on the right could be a sea-monster. It trails tendril-lines downward diagonally to the right; these end in smaller circles. Surrounding the beast is a halo of black ink and gray chalk marks.

A pair of Maione's pieces bares ironic resemblance to certain ones by the Abstract Expressionist painter Adolph Gottlieb, in particular for their compositions dominated by central circles floating in mostly empty space. In many of Gottlieb's canvases, these are counterbalanced by gestural paint-tangles evocative of stormy weather. In Maione's case, weather comes in the form of cartoon raindrops (for some reason these are mostly upside-down, as if gravity were reversed). In one piece, there are two loosely-rendered balls — red dripping downwards on the left, gray on the right — supported by a tripod-like bit of scaffolding drawn in black crayon. The other piece has a red ball in the same position but it is thinly colored and smudgy rather than boldly drawn. A cluster of drops balances it to the right.

Needless to say, a coffeehouse is not the most auspicious place for concerted art-viewing. Still, Maione's work is definitely worth checking out for anyone interested in gestural abstract drawing that is playful as well as rigorous. There seems to be little else like it in Ithaca and it may be telling that it is the work of a student rather than a member of the gallery establishment. (Incidentally, the drawings were made during time spent away in Barcelona.)

afire, a fire

2008-01-21T19:57:00.001-05:00

Flickr photos from the fire and after (use the forward scroll arrow).

rural research

2008-01-21T17:34:00.000-05:00

I went down to Elmira last Saturday to visit the Rural Research Laboratories for the first time. RRL has recently taken over a red-brick carriage house located behind the Arnot Art Museum (which I have yet to visit). The grassroots organization houses artists' studios and communal workspaces as well as three ground-floor exhibition spaces. They also seem to have an busy program of poetry readings and folk concerts. Tom Oberg is the founder.

The place was clean and well-lit, not the kind of bohemian filth-hole I half-expected of an "alternative" arts venue. A nice touch: they had an exit-style sign reading "KURT" in homage to a recently deceased comic-absurdist novelist who attended Cornell.

Saturday afternoon was a closing reception for three shows. These included a series of not-really-monochrome paintings by Ed Malina and one of Steve Salsburg's documentary photographs. (There was also a hallway video-projection by Chris Keck and Steven Kistler, of melting icebergs, which I got an insufficient look at -- sorry.) Both were impressive.

Malina's paintings are single-colored in front, with textures that are variously lumpy or smooth. The surfaces are fetishistic but the effect of looking at several dulls this appeal. (Although there was at least one I really liked: a dark purple-brown one with a grid of round lumps reminiscent of Eva Hesse's Schema.) The real action takes place along the edges, where you can see solidified dripping cascades of paint in different colors. These reveal the layering and the labor behind the perfect surfaces and call attention to the often frame-like supports. My feelings were mixed.

Salsburg's startling gelatin-silver prints come from a single roll of film shot in 1970, when he was a flight-surgeon in Vietnam. They show the inmates of a leper colony, along with medical and military personnel there to help them. They betray a sharp eye and an urge to depict his often deformed subjects (many of them children) with both dignity and honesty. You can read more about them and him here (.pdf).

I got to meet RRL associate Jan Kather, who has a series of fine lenticular photographs up at the State of the Art (see my previous post for a review). She teaches photography and video art at Elmira College, and sometimes at Cornell as well. She was very kind and I look forward to seeing more of her work.

Also, I rode down with Buzz Spector and had an interesting conversation with him, although I won't recount it here.

states of the art

2008-01-16T17:11:00.000-05:00

Times:

"States of Identity: Real or Imagined" is the State of the Art Gallery's contribution to the upcoming Light in Winter Festival. As usual, it features gallery members weighing in on a loosely-defined theme. This year's theme is "identity." Although this may have served as a jumping-off point for the artists, it doesn't work as much of a guidepost for the viewer.

"States" does have a mood distinct from most SOAG group shows. While carefully observed realism often acts as an anchor, the work here is more experimental. There are a few traditionally figurative paintings scattered about; however, they are not among the strongest works here. In keeping with the hybrid and high-tech character of LiW, mixed-media, collage, and digital imaging rule. The human figure — portrayed literally or by analogy — is common, as is the natural and built environment presented in unfamiliar and awe-inspiring ways.

Not surprisingly, LiW founder-director Barbara Mink is well-represented. Her three large mixed-media acrylic canvases are standout works, full of her rich geologically-inspired painterly textures. These pieces are new terrain for Mink, as they incorporate collage and portraiture into her signature style. The monochrome faces are printed via photo-transfer. There is some awkwardness in the way they are juxtaposed with the paint. The familiar, intimate forms don't always sit well with the awesome expanses of color.

Black Angels is the most resolved painting in this regard and the best overall. The center is dominated by a black-printed face shown in three-quarter view — a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Another artist-head, frontal and less visible, hides in the lower right corner. The piece works so well because the blackness framing the angels is echoed throughout as contour-lines and shadowy patches. Portraiture dissolves into abstract landscape. The background is composed of patches of rich and varied color, particularly turquoise. Angels is named after a string quartet by avant-garde composer George Crumb and incorporates appropriate sheet music.

Grotto is of the same size and proportion and also features a pair of Mink's, this time blending in more. The dark, earthy colors are covered with patches of dark turquoise and thick golden powder. The square shaped Old Country places the face of a white bearded ancestor in a sunken, shrine-like enclosure.

Ethel Vrana is also working with an abstraction inspired by the natural world. The acrylic Event-Particles indeed evokes a microcosm. A loose, branching grid of yellow lines covers a green ground and is itself covered by a cloud of copper. The overall texture is dense and lively with layering, scratches, and air bubbles. A cluster of shiny black droplets hovers near the center. It resembles a living system.

Photographer Jan Kather shows a series of lenticular photographs (the surface is a grid of tiny lenses). Depending on where you stand, you can see either one of two images — one astronomical and one earthly — or some combination of both. The images are iridescent and mesmerizing. Ausable Eddy Galaxy is particularly compelling. A marble-like maelstrom in black and white is juxtaposed with a pink cloudburst in the darkness of outer space. Central Park Galaxy combines similar astronomy with a blurry nighttime skyline, the park a strip in the foreground.

Carol Ast, long respected for her carefully rendered pastel landscapes, has been trying out new directions recently. Here, she has collages featuring diverse and unexpected combinations of media. Inunnguaq: In the Likeness of a Human: Inuit is on paper. It shows a dark stone monolith rendered in what looks like thick paint, set against a desolate pink pastel expanse. Remarkably enough, the pile is actually made of clay. Ast used regular clay as a top layer with paper clay in the middle acting as a kind of glue (containing as it does both materials). I assume this is a viable technique but the result appears somewhat unwieldy. Still, it is a striking image. Autobiography combines torn paper scraps — including fragments of her landscape pastels and bits in silver — with dried plant material and energetic pastel strokes.

This Ole House, a digital photograph by David Watkins Jr., shows a decrepit wooden house. The building is at a moderate distance, near the top of the page. Sloping upwards towards it is a swampy landscape filled with barren trees and branches. The dull, wintery colors are punctuated by the green of grass and the red of a brick chimney. The piece hangs in the middle of a row of five prints; each of the others shows an exterior detail of the ruin. Many show corners. It is up to the viewer to construct a whole from the evocative fragments. The borders of the images are uneven which gives them a weathered feel similar to their subject.

A correction: the central image in Black Angels is not Barbara Mink but her daughter (the corner image is Barbara). In Grotto, the top image is the artist.

calamity

2008-01-10T23:52:00.001-05:00

I am saddened to learn (via the internet) that the Ink Shop was one of several victims in a fire that took place downtown at the 102-104 West State Street building during the final hours of Tuesday night. The cause is apparently unclear. According to Thursday's Ithaca Journal, the blaze began in the the third (top) floor studio belonging to the Ithaca Academy of Dance. The Shop is right below but luckily did not face flames. Reportedly, "the second floor suffered moderate water damage, and the third floor and roof suffered major damage". I shudder to think about what "moderate" means, given the high-profile EPI show that was hanging, as well as whatever was in storage. We'll see.

According to this second Journal article:

The Ithaca community was quick to offer help to the businesses affected by the fire. The Ink Shop Printmaking Center, on the second floor of the damaged building, has experienced an outpouring of community support. The shop's current exhibition, which displayed a group of prints from Lafayette College, was the most expensive one ever to be in the space.
“We think it's amazing how the downtown area has immediately offered support,” said Christa Wolf, president of the Ink Shop board of directors.
The Ink Shop was granted several spaces that will allow it to continue operating. The State Theatre provided an apartment above its box office to put the damaged prints, the Community Arts Partnership offered the shop a space in the Clinton House to display the coming “Light in Winter” show as scheduled Jan. 18, and Dryden High School promised the use of its ink shop as a place to hold workshops.
“We thought we would be renting a truck and renting a spot to put everything, but (the response) has just been great,” Wolf said.

The rest of it goes into the impact of the disaster on the dance studio and on the street-level Handwork, a cooperative crafts store.

Needless to say, this is a major loss for the local arts community, and in particular to the numerous talented artists who have made the Shop their home. I would like to offer my condolences. I'll take a look there myself in the morning.

The Journal also has a picture gallery of the firefighters in action.

retrospective

2008-01-10T20:44:00.000-05:00

From the Times, looking back on 2007:

Following tradition, I've put together a year-end list of notable shows, artists, and venues from 2007. The list is not comprehensive and is in no particular order. My focus is mostly on shows that I've reviewed for these pages and, consequently, mostly on shows in the Ithaca area. In addition, this was my first full year as a regularly published newspaper critic.

1) Syau-Cheng Lai: Lai, a local artist, had a pair of excellent Ithaca shows. "Visualizing for Bunita Marcus" accompanied her performance of Morton Feldman's solo piano "For Bunita Marcus". Held in Cornell's Tjaden Gallery, the exhibit featured four long sheets of paper pinned directly to the walls. Using a wide range of wet and dry media, Lai created a sequence, beginning sparsely before developing dense strata of varied marks in rich colors (including gold and electric pink), finally petering back out into paper white. The piece is notable for its repetition and layering of different motifs. Letter-like forms and scribbles are prevalent, as are horizontal strokes and bands of color. On display for just five days in early February (2/5-9) and located in a obscure space, "Visualizing" was easy to miss. [See also my pictures: 1, 2, 3, 4.]

"Transformations," her two-woman show at the Upstairs Gallery (5/1-6/2) was just slightly less exhilarating. The show was a valuable complement to "Visualizing," as well as being powerful in its own right. Consisting as it did of work reaching back to the early part of the decade, it was more eclectic. The images are even denser, most with little or none of the white space that carries through "Visualizing." Although predominantly abstract, some of the pieces have more or less explicit references to landscape, often to the nautical.

2) Kumi Korf at The Main Street Gallery: Korf (also local) is best known as a printmaker and book artist. In 2007, she had substantial shows of her print-work in San Francisco and in her native Japan. "Paintings by Kumi Korf" (9/7-10/21) gave the local community a rare chance to see another side of her practice. Characteristically, the show combined abstraction with a sensibility rooted in nature.

The show was dominated by a pair of enormous acrylic paintings done on unprimed canvas. Each is of roughly human height and two to three times that in length. Together, they filled the gallery's oddly-angled front gallery. Korf treats the paint in a way analogous to watercolor, staining the fabric rather than covering it. While An Amphora and a Fish features graceful, rounded calligraphic shapes, A Clear Day has coarse, drippy blocks of (less diluted) color.

They were complemented by a generous selection of small pieces on paper hanging in the small back room. Included were a series of pieces in pastel and another in thick, greasy oil-stick.

3) The Ink Shop: The downtown printmaking cooperative's shows have been both diverse and almost uniformly strong. In addition, they have put on an impressive array of public talks and classes. With that said, no one show sticks out as the winner.

The current show (through 1/14) features work by nationally known artists such as Sam Gilliam and David Driskell. All prints are the work of Lafayette College's Experimental Printmaking Institute; EPI director Curlee Raven Holton (who has art in the show) gave an enthusiastic and well-received talk about his work there. Jenny Pope's "Kiwi Egg Soup" showed-off her playful, high-contrast color woodcuts of animals, both familiar and exotic. Stretching back into 2006, IC professor Susan Weisend's "Garden: Delights and Detritus" mixed mediums, styles, and formats in an almost reckless manner. Her best work enlivens or disrupts her pastoral flora and fauna through formal experimentation.

4) Out of Town Shows: Lane Twitchell and Alan Singer: I travelled for two Times reviews - to Auburn's Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center for Twitchell's "Revelation" (9/1-10/27) and to Syracuse's Redhouse Arts Center for Singer's "Cosmology" (9/20-11/08). Twitchell's jewel-like cut paper on panel collage-paintings were more impressive. His ornate compositions are packed with imagery relating to the Brooklyn artist's Utah Mormon upbringing as well as to American urbanism and to art history. They are typically large and are notable for their often off-kilter symmetry.

Singer is from Rochester. "Cosmology" was made up primarily of digital prints with hand-painting. This mixture of technique and texture gives the work a latter-day Surrealist feel as does Singer's taste for abstract, three-dimensional geometric forms and spaces placed alongside suggestions of human or otherwise organic form. Although some of the pieces feel over the top, his best work has a vibrant and meticulously crafted theatricality.

5) "Stop. Look. Listen: An Exhibition of Video Works" at the Johnson Museum: This ostentatious and highly uneven show (10/13-12/23) filled nearly all of the museum's temporary exhibition space and incorporated a night-time projection (of Janine Antoni's Touch) on the building's facade. It represents a culmination of several years of focused video collecting. Nancy Geyer reviewed it ably for this paper.

Works were divided into "feedback" and "immersion" modes, the former treating the camera as simply as a "electronic mirror" and the latter taking a more high-production, cinema-like approach. Works in the latter category were generally stronger. Among these were such standouts as Mircea Cantor's Deeparture - in which the camera gracefully tracks a wolf and a deer around a silent, white-walled space - and Amy Jenkins' macabre but subtle Ebb - in which the image of a bathing woman is projected on to a miniature ceramic tub. Gradually she purifies the at first bloody water.

6) "Looking Homeward: A Century of American Art" at the Johnson Museum: (7/7-9/23) This historical survey ran from turn-of-the-century Impressionism to the present. It was a more consistent effort than Stop., although its historical focus wavered for the postwar years. The show was particularly strong in its representation of the early 20th-century Ashcan school, a group known for their gritty portrayals of contemporary urban life. Group leader Robert Henri's Patience (1915) - a brushy portrait of a dark haired young boy reminiscent of Manet - was a standout. The show was also strong in early to mid-century modernist figuration, with pieces like Milton Avery's 1941 The Brown Hat (a young girl painted in flattened forms, mostly black, white, brown and tan) and a characteristic small female portrait by Willem de Kooning (1947). Other highlights included Reginald Marsh's satirical watercolor of wealthy folks atop the Grand Tier at the Met (1939) and a shadowy, enigmatic gelatin-silver photo by Imogen Cunningham, Eiko's Hands (1971).

While Ithaca has more than its share of good artists, many are unable (or unwilling) to show locally on a regular basis, or at least not in venues where their work will be fully recognized. While it is legitimate to show work in a café or restaurant, it can be difficult for aficionados, collectors, and critics to trace such efforts. A great deal of work is shown at Cornell, much of it by students or faculty. Aside from exhibits at the high-profile Johnson Museum, these are often invisible to the community at-large. The State of the Art Gallery is members-only, excepting its annual juried and invitational shows. Finally, several of the more established artists living in the area choose to show their work elsewhere.

I have tried to highlight some of these lesser-known artists and art spaces. For example, I reviewed Jay Hart's satellite graphics at Cornell's Mann Library (up through Jan. 10). While Lai is relatively well-known, the Tjaden and its programming is not.

As strong as it is, Ithaca's art world suffers in comparison to the talent and eclecticism of the music scene. I believe that some of the reasons for this are systematic - not that that's any reason for complacency. Music is more socially fluid in our culture; the prevalence of recording as a medium of creativity and exchange contrasts with art's focus on unique objects and limited multiples. While this is a good thing in many ways, it also constrains the dissemination of artworks and artistic ideas, and musicians travel extensively while artists tend to stay put. The result of all this is that it is impossible to see all the art you need to in a small town. Although cultural isolation can have its advantages, I believe that on balance, it is not a good thing for Ithaca.

think small

2007-12-19T16:30:00.002-05:00

Yongjeong Kim, My Map III, Mixed Media, 14.5" x 14.5"

Times:

Ending an impressive year at the Main Street Gallery is the latest of its annual small-paintings exhibitions. Programming has ranged from strong solo shows by distinguished local artists Victoria Romanoff and Kumi Korf to less-even group efforts focused by theme or medium. Come 2008, the gallery will be on hiatus for about two and half months. "2007 Small Works Painting" is a fitting conclusion, eclectic but well-balanced. Pieces were chosen from submissions by painter Joy Adams (an emeritus professor at Ithaca College) and gallery director Roger Smith.

My Map II and My Map III find common ground between abstract art and cartography. Both are by local artist Yongjeong Kim. Her two acrylics are relatively large - fourteen and a half inches square - and incorporate bits of fabric and other collaged materials. Apparently influenced by modernist artists like Paul Klee, Kurt Schwitters, and Chuck Close, they show loop-filled aerial views of rivers, roadways, and buildings. The painted areas are often murky, lacking in color contrast. The fabric additions help both pieces in this regard, particularly III.

According to the artist, II loosely depicts the outside and inside of her local Warrenwood apartment building, including her L-shaped sofa and imagined views of neighboring apartments. III zooms out a bit to show nearby Triphammer Mall and its surrounds. The correspondence is loose.

Aerial perspective is a compelling artistic device. Abstraction in art can be an effort at transcending the visible world, whereas realism tends to focus on the concrete and the everyday. Birds-eye landscapes can have the best of both worlds. They present familiar places in a de-familiarizing way. At least a handful of local artists are working in this rich vein. Barbara Page's scale-jumping paintings and her natural-historical mixed-media relief Rock of Ages, Sands of Time (at the Museum of the Earth) come to mind. Kumi Korf has a print show up this month at Chandler Fine Art in San Francisco. Included are large intaglio pieces in which cutout-like abstract bird-shapes trail curves over brushy backgrounds. Craig Mains has done a number of witty prints showing burning crop circles. (Unlike the other artists above, his perspectives are from oblique angles and sometimes show the horizon.)

Two pieces offer more straight-up forms of abstraction. John McLaughlin's jaunty oil Fair Fun features a cascade of fluid brushstrokes, both translucent and opaque. Pale, whitish blue dominates the background; these are overlaid in white, mustard yellow, ochre, and purplish grays. Thinner, rope-like curls of paint sit on top. Metamorphosis by Laura Glenn is perhaps a bit too sweet. The piece is done in watercolor and ink on paper, with little torn-paper bits collaged. Pinks, blues, and purples dominate. Calligraphic forms in black resemble Chinese characters, and the composition has something of the all-over evenness of the written page.

Four artists are showing work in encaustic (melted wax mixed with color pigments). The medium is seductive as well as novel; a temptation seems to be to use it to build up luscious surfaces while neglecting the underlying image. Paul Kline's Stairways buries an angular photo-collage of shadowed stairs in translucent white, a seemingly incongruous atmospheric effect. Martha Ferris' NOT is more texturally interesting; unlike the other wax pieces, the surface is scratchy and weathered-looking rather than smooth. A standing silhouetted woman bends down; layered over her is an uneven translucent grid and three blocky letters: N O T. The yellow-red-blue color scheme is effective, if obvious. Neither these nor Paul Kline's Toxic Plaza nor Martha Ferris' Sherry's Closeup (a fragmented femme fatale in blue, green, pink-red and peach) quite lives up to their textures.

A pair of tiny portraits by Vanessa Irzyk provides one of the show's few compelling investigations of the human figure. Induced is done with watercolor and polyurethane on board, while Swaddled adds oil paint to the mix. Each features a mischievous, child-like face, surrounded by white. The heads are built in an almost sculptural way, composed of layers of translucent brushstrokes which are loose but short and finicky. Unexpected colors include pale pinks and oranges as well as a dark, purplish red (the latter mostly in Induced). Induced is a diptych; the right side is mostly empty.

Landscapes and cityscapes are more common themes. Margaret Olney-McBride presents a pair of bookmark-sized panoramic oils on paper. The wintery fields and trees of Landscape Slice and the sea-like cloudscape of Sky Fragment 2 (its low low horizon capping silhouetted hills) are rendered in brushstrokes which pack a suprising amount of energy into such a small space. Jerry Schutte's Kansas is comparable, although its impasto is thicker and more stolid. The urban scenes show a greater stylistic range: from the flat and (overly) dry illustrational quality of Sue Wall's Brownstones and City Roof Tops to the whitish colors of Erica Pollock's impressionistic Overpass.

look.

2007-12-13T12:13:00.000-05:00

I've posted some clarifications regarding my review of Stop. Look. Listen. below.

happening

2007-12-08T15:50:00.000-05:00

I attended the downtown Gallery Night openings yesterday. Things seemed particularly festive and well-attended, no doubt due in part to the shopping season. Special events may have also played a part. NYC painter-printmaker Maddy Rosenberg was having a launch party for her new sculptural book, Dystopia at the Ink Shop. It is being published by the Shop's own Olive Branch Press and features black and white linocut images of architectural fantasia. You can see it on her website although I can't link directly to it. It looks good.

The Art Bar Gallery is open every year for about a month during the holiday season. Their gimmick is to sell fine Swiss chocolate bars, each with a collectible card featuring the work of one of the gallery artists. (Buzz Spector, featured a few years back, suggests the inclusion of stats.) As in past years, the artists are from both Ithaca and all around. The concept is fun and the art—while generally a mixed-bag—is at least something different. And they had champagne and chocolate cake at the opening.

A common characteristic was for the December shows to be markets rather than carefully assembled productions. Which is essentially what many of them are anyway, so perhaps its better to drop the more elevated pretenses.

Next Tuesday evening, I'll be driving down to Elmira (NY) with my Times colleague Wylie Schwartz to check out the Rural Research Labs, an artist's collective and exhibitions space. They're holding a press reception, though who knows who else will show up.

In other news, I will be spending about two weeks with my brother and motley housemates in San Francisco. I'll be flying out from Syracuse on the 14th. I'm looking forward to exploring the city, to which I've never been. The fifty five degree weather should also be nice.

Art-wise, it appears that SFMOMA is showing Joseph Cornell: Navigating The Imagination, which I got to see last winter in D.C.. The show was lovely but also too much to see in one visit, especially given the small-scale intricacy of Cornell's boxes. And they have a little Klee drawings show! At least two people I know personally are showing in the galleries. Kumi Korf's quiet calligraphic abstract prints are up at Chandler Fine Art and Framing. Jamie Vasta (a SF local I know from art school) is showing carefully crafted glitter paintings at Patricia Sweetow.

With any luck, I'll be able to blog from the West Coast. Otherwise, expect a flurry of posts around the beginning of next year.

experimental

2007-12-05T17:19:00.000-05:00

From today's Times:

The Ink Shop is unique among Ithaca galleries. Comprised primarily of skilled printmakers working with a variety of styles and media, it is mainly a working studio. Complementing this activity is a busy schedule of classes, visiting artist speakers, and of course, print exhibitions (all public).

Also remarkable is their dedication to networking with out of town print organizations and to introducing Ithacans to art from around the county and beyond. No other non-university affiliated gallery in the Ithaca area has been doing so in such an organized manner. While other galleries call for open submissions, the Ink Shop has taken a more systematic approach, seeking out artists that fit a particular vision or goal. The result is better and more coherent exhibitions. Their latest catch is "Selections From the Collection: Lafayette College's Experimental Printmaking Institute".

EPI founder and director Curlee Raven Holton lectured at the gallery last Thursday to a mostly insider crowd. A confident and articulate speaker, he spoke for about 50 minutes before taking questions. The lecture felt like a pep-talk, with exhortations to self-confidence mixed with anecdotes and recollected practical experience. While acknowledging some of the problems faced by foundling studios, his philosophy is one of calm determination.

The Institute was born in 1996 as a semi-autonomous collective affiliated with Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where Holton teaches. Although he describes the school as being not particularly artsy (and lacking a BFA program, for example), he says that the EPI has become a respected and integral part of the curriculum. It has also been successful in drawing well-known printmakers and other artists to the modest community. Students work for and learn from them.

According to Holton, an early inspiration was the pioneering NYC Printmaking Workshop and its founder Bob Blackburn (1920-2003), a friend and artistic collaborator. He cites Bob's commitment to printmaking and its communal ethos. But he mentioned his differences as well, in particular his dissatisfaction with the studio's poverty and with Bob's inclination to treat it as "his spouse" rather than something he was willing to let go of. "I made a commitment that I would try to create an environment similar to this, but it wouldn't be impoverished," Holton said. "I wouldn't be at risk, and it wouldn't be my spouse... I couldn't covet it." The EPI, he said, is intended to be a place where artists can experiment without financial worries. He plans to retire as director.

Holton presented work from the Institute's Master Artist Printmaker Portfolio, the core of the Ink Shop show. As he explained, the project paired a well-known artist (typically a painter) with an expert printmaker. His goal was to elevate the reputation of both partners by association. He is also interested in raising the profile of printmaking, which has been sometimes marginalized.

The show is eclectic. With one exception—a painterly abstract monotype by Al Loving showing a hollowed cube frame—all of the work is from the current decade. The work was created principally at Lafayette, with the assistance of students.

Sam is a gorgeous mixed media abstraction. The print is the work of Sam Gilliam, a well-known Washington D.C. artist. Although part of an edition, it is a one-of-a-kind production. Like much of his work dating back to the sixties, it combines three-dimensional and painterly elements. The relief construction is supported by an upright oval of orange felt covered with calligraphic swirls of blood red. Although the piece is not overtly figurative, the shape evokes mirrors and portraiture. Angular and curving bits of cloth and rice paper have been applied on top, with the visible stitched lined (arcs) forming an important compositional element. Colors and textures include white translucent and wavy striations of green, red, and yellow green. Holes have been cut to let the orange through.

According to Holton, each print in the edition was created using cloth scraps cut from one of Gilliam's large paintings. A woodblock for printing was created using a scanned drawing along with CAD software and a laser cutter owned by Lafayette's engineering department. The master printmaker was Wayne Crothers (who is represented by the loopy, maze-like woodcut, Humanitarian Camouflage). The rice paper sections were printed in Japan by an Australian artist and the stitching done by the students. Not suprisingly, Holton describes it as "one of our most popular prints."

An untitled triptych of silkscreen prints is by frequent collaborators Ian Short and Robert Beckman. Three identically sized paper pages are framed together behind glass. On first glance, the piece is a disorienting visual buzz of bold colors and hard-to-decipher textures. Further inspection reveals layers of discrete color: black over green, red, cyan, cool green-gold. Letters and other typographic symbols can be seen along with the intricate maze-like texture of circuit boards. Similar details are repeated from page to page but with jarring shifts of color and arrangement that engage the eye. Read a sequence, the effect is dynamic like an animation.

Another screenprint, Mark's Tale, by William T. Williams, achieves its dynamic effect via more economical means. A flat black is printed over greenish off-white tinted paper. Its the off-white that forms the foreground image: a trapezoidal jumble of calligraphic swirls evoking plant-life and musical symbols.

Richard Anuskiewicz's silkscreened Twin Portals, is another sequential triptych. Like his mentor, the pioneering German modernist painter Josef Albers, Anuskiewicz is interested in optical effects created by juxtaposing hard-edge blocks of color. The individual panels in Portals, with their upright rectangular blocks enclosed in frames, echo Albers' famous Homage to a Square series. The pieces are intended as a 9/11 memorial, alluding the absent towers as they might appear in morning, mid-day, and night. In this regard the sequence also echoes Monet's well-known Rouen Cathedral paintings, which also tried to capture the effect of changing natural light on a constant architectural form. The colors and their contrasts in Portals are however much sharper and less naturalistic.

A number of pieces sport themes associated with the artists' African American heritage. Curlee Raven Holton's own Blind Spots I (etching and silkscreen with embossing) incorporates photos depicting rather fetishistic details from both black and Asian woman. These appear against a dull yellow-green background in baby blue portrait-ovals. The blind spots—apparently allusions to racial ignorance or confusion—appear as large black circles dotting the picture. Painter David C. Driskell's sensitive, earth-toned etching Brown Derby features a crowd of overlapping, angular faces pressed up against the plane of the picture (the one in front wears the titular hat). Like that of Romare Bearden, much of Driskell's work updates early 20th-century cubism—and Picasso's appropriation of the African mask—with specifically modern African American resonances. Wynton's Tune, a folk-art-like silkscreen by Faith Ringgold, shows the jazz trumpeter in a red suit, backed by band members in cool, contrasting blues.

Two untitled relief prints are by German artist Bodo Korsig. The rough black lines form strange images: on the left hand piece, what looks like a handful of chicken drumsticks hanging on horizontal wire, on the right a pair of sponge-like blobs tethered to the right and left edges respectively. The rich texture enlivens these reductive, cartoon-like pictures but not quite enough to make them come together.

Antidote, a stylish abstract digital print by Berrisford Boothe, has a grainy, video-like texture. A column running down the middle recalls a film-strip with the horizontal frame-borders removed so as to suggest the seamlessness of projected film. Its contents are bluish, aqueous and drippy. Outside is warmer with tan, reddish ochre and whitish green. The middle strip is flanked by four symmetrical, semi-circular curves running up and down. The right and left edges are blackened with flame-like streaks.

Grace Hartigan is veteran Abstract Expressionist painter, currently in her eighties. Her lithographic diptych is entitled Cleopatra and Marie Antoinette and features thick brushy black lines against colored fields—blue and yellow respectively. They form organic, loosely figural clumps. The work has a remarkable material presence.

As exciting as it is to see some of these artists in an Ithaca gallery, the actual work is unexpectedly uneven. The result is that Selections stands as merely another compelling but imperfect Ink Shop show. Viewed positively, this attests to the strength of the collective's own homegrown talent.

stop. look. listen.

2007-12-03T12:07:00.000-05:00

I have a review of the Johnson's big video-art show Stop. Look. Listen. up in the latest Big Red & Shiny. Mentioned favorably therein is the lovely Mircea Cantor video you see above, Deeparture (2005). Also in the show, recommended, and viewable online, are Ebb and Shelter for Daydreaming, both by Amy Jenkins. (Truth be told, the latter was not running properly during my visit.) The show runs through the 23rd of December.

UPDATE (12/13/07): In response to a since-deleted comment, let me clarify my description of Slater Bradley's Doppelganger Trilogy, which I agree was unclear and incomplete. The part of the three pop musicians (Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain, and Michael Jackson) was played not by Bradley but by his look-alike "doppelganger" Ben Brock. The music included with the Curtis and Cobain pieces was taken from recordings by the original artists (Joy Division and Nirvana respectively). Apologies for any confusion.

d.c. diary

2007-11-28T21:43:00.001-05:00

I spent the recent holiday with relatives in some desolate D.C. suburb, which honestly was not so much fun. But I did get the chance to consume a couple stray bits of culture. Some brief notes then.

First, and most significantly, I saw Morris Louis Now, a small retrospective, at the Hirschhorn. I have nothing original or intellectual to say about the man or his work right now. (I have too many other writing projects at the moment. Also, I'm just at a loss for words.) But I will say that these stained acrylic on canvas abstractions are among the most gorgeous things that I've seen this year. Their combination of cool analytic order and deeply sensuous color is intoxicating. I wish I could go back. I particularly like the wide empty spaces of his late late work (bare canvas!).

My favorites might be the so-called "unfurled" series, in which the artist dripped diagonal rivers of thinned (but saturated) color from the side edges. Here is an example. It's an intriguing compositional device; I'm not sure where else in the history of art it can be found. In Chinese painting, perhaps?

From the museum site linked to above:

The exhibition presents major paintings dating from the early 1950s until his death in late 1962, the years Louis developed an innovative method of painting by staining his unprimed canvases with thinned washes of acrylic pigments. The artist, who was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1912, studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts. As a young man he painted in a realist manner; only in his forties did he find his signature style. Even in cramped quarters in Washington D.C., Louis was able to make large paintings, achieving an exuberant, lyrical celebration of colors hovering in white space. Louis became an inspirational figure for other artists in the Color Field movement in the 1960s, notably Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler.

According to the same source, Louis has not had a retro since 1986 (when I was a kid), which is shocking. Needless to say, I am unable to compare this one with others. But the size and selection felt perfect to me, given that a little of his work goes such a long way.

And I read a short novel: Mark Dunn's fun, wordplay-laden Ella Minnow Pea. The book is written as series of letters, most of them between two teenage girl cousins: Ella and Tassie. The events described therein take place on Nollop, a fictional island off the South Carolina coast. The island is named after Nevin Nollop, the author (also fictional) of the sentence "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," which is a pangram, containing all the letters of the alphabet. As evinced by the exchanged epistles, with their alliteration and ornate, precious usage, the islanders have an unusual fondness for language. (This is entertaining some times and annoying at others.)

Nevin is worshiped as a godlike figure, and when letters start falling off of his memorial statue—off of the pangram—they are successively banned by the superstitious, tyrannical Council. First time offenders get off with a mere scolding, but a second violation brings a choice of flogging or the stockade. A third time brings expulsion from the would-be linguistic utopia. The novel tells of the progressive devolution of the society as a result of communicative breakdown and the departure of people (voluntarily or otherwise). The letters—with some exceptions—follow the law lipogrammatically, with humorous results. Later sections are clouded with increasingly evasive, absurd substitutions and mispellings.

Ella must demythologize Mr. Nollop in order to discredit the theocracy. To this end, she endevours to find another pangrammatic sentence with 32 or fewer letters. She is assisted in this task by others, including the renegade councilman Rederick Lyttle (hah) and Stateside scholar Nate Warren (with the predictable love story between Tassie and the latter). I'm sure you can guess how things turn out.

Ella is lighthearted and light-weight as a satire of theocracy and censorship. The wordplay, and the writing more generally, was however, a joy to read.

evidence

2007-11-28T19:46:00.000-05:00

Lewis Hine, Sunday Morning, March 7, 1909, Morris Herowitz, Ten Years Old, 1909, gelatin silver print

Alfred Steiglitz, The Steerage, 1915, photogravure

Arthur Rothstein, Girl at Gee's Bend Alabama, 1937, gelatin silver print

Times:

Alongside its big video-art extravaganza, the Johnson is showing a modest gallery-full of still camera images. Evidence: 150 Years of Documentary Photography is quiet and mostly conservative. Only a single work is in full color; two are in sepia and the rest are black and white. Their scale is intimate, book-sized. Most of the work is by established 20th-century photographers, American and European.

The Steerage (1907), by Alfred Steiglitz, is among the best-known pictures in the show. Although Steiglitz is not usually thought of as a documentarian, his photo does provide a strong (even overstated) formal analogy for class stratification. It shows the side of a boat packed with American immigrants; the wealthy are on the deck above and the poor below. The angular, cubist division of the scene suggests instability.

Sunday Morning, March 7, 1909, Morris Herowitz, Ten Years Old is by Lewis Hine. Among other subjects, Hine famously covered the sordid condition of early 20th-century child laborers. Newsboy Morris looks more dignified than most. Standing on a step, slightly to the right, he wears dark trousers and a buttoned blazer over a striped shirt. Under his left arm, he carries a stack of papers. Along with his stoic-looking face, these contain the lightest tones. Behind him is a corner entrance to a stone building. Reflected in the glass of the double doors are dark, silhouetted trees and buildings. Hazy off-white frames the left and bottom edges. The condition of the paper detracts from the strength of the image—the sheet is wrinkled and the bottom edge torn.

Several images illustrate the lives of the Great Depression poor. Although some of these are quite striking, their abundance suggests the clichedness of the subject (not the fault of the artists).
Arthur Rothenstein’s Girl at Gee’s Bend, Alabama (1937) is a standout. Standing in front of a rough log-cabin window is a young girl with her arms on the ledge. She faces left toward the back of the window covered in newspaper. Although the paper serves the practical purpose of insulation, its purpose in the photograph is symbolic. The cheerful advertising contrasts ironically with the evident poverty of the child. (Bruce Davidson’s 1965 Women In Cabin, Alabama makes use of the same device). The paper is also interesting as texture, torn and layered like artistic collage.
Girl bears comparison with Marion Post Walcott’s Unemployed Miner’s Wife (1939), who leans over the railing of a balcony on a rickety wooden building. Her head too is framed by a window (covered this time). Unlike the girl, with her earnest, pained expression, the woman smiles as she looks down at the camera.

A macabre scene by Margaret Bourke-White (shot in 1945, printed in 1965) is titled Hitler’s 1000 years stopped short for the Leipzig city treasurer. He gave his family poison when he saw American tanks under the window of his office. The viewpoint is from slightly above and at an oblique angle. Along with the sharp contrast of a dark interior and a bright exterior, this gives the piece a cinematic feel. Three people are dead. By the bottom left corner sits a man slumped over a paper-strewn desk, his body oriented rightward. In the middle, a dark-dressed woman is arched over a leather chair, her feet under the desk. A couch (also leather) up against the right wall holds a Red Cross nurse in a dark coat and white cap. Above her is a romantic landscape painting. Three tall windows flanked by skinny drapes line the back wall. The furnishings—an oriental rug and a chandelier among them—are lavish but the overall effect is austere.

Landscape in photography often tends towards the romantic and the pastoral. The gritty realism associated with the documentary appears less commonly, at least in self-consciously artistic work. Perhaps this helps explain why the handful of landscapes—with one exception—seem like curatorial afterthoughts.

Richard Misrach’s Dead Animals # 1 (1987) is an anomaly. It is the only piece in color and one of the few by a living artist. It is also the largest picture, although modest by the artist’s standards. The subject matter is exceptional as well. Dramatizing a destructive human presence, it shows a pile of animal corpses on a slope in the Nevada desert. Joined by metal barrels and other man-made detritus, the cows and horses form a large arrow pointing left (the base covers most of the right edge). Above and behind them, near the upper-left corner, is a pile of raw, bloody entrails. The ground is mostly sand, although patches of grass punctuate the far background near the top edge. It is a powerful scene but it feels stranded, both as a picture and as social commentary.

feelies

2007-11-20T19:35:00.000-05:00

I found these animations on YouTube while looking for dB's related material (see my brief mention of the band below, tenth paragraph). The video for their song "Big Brown Eyes" features animation by Emily Hubley. I like the song quite a bit but the visuals not so much. Further browsing of the nets revealed her to be the daughter of pioneering husband and wife animators Faith and John Hubley. (Her sister is is Yo La Tengo drummer Georgia.) I'm posting some of their stuff because it looks intriguing.

The couple married in 1955 and founded the collaborative Storyboard Studios the same year. As the top video suggests, they too worked with some of the most exiting musicians of their time. See also this entertaining outing with Dizzy Gillespie and cohorts. Faith continued making films after her husband's death in 1977 and the video below is one of these "solo" efforts. I like its synesthetic free-association and the drawing style, which reminds me of the underappreciated Romainian surrealist Victor Brauner (and Miro, more obviously). And yes, I have a taste for whimsy. Faith unfortunately passed away in 2001.

eye in the sky

2007-11-20T12:59:00.000-05:00

Early publication in the Times this week, due to the holiday:

Jay Hart comes to the world of art from that of science. The Trumansburg artist comes out of a career of several decades in map-making and in the study of geomorphology (the processes by which land-forms acquire their shapes). He has long been fascinated by the beauty of the land, and that of the pictures we use to represent it.

Recently, he has turned his skills and knowledge toward the making of more purely aesthetic images. The world seen from space is his subject. He is currently showing samples of his "terrain art" at Cornell University's Mann Library. These are large-format digital prints, many human-size or larger. They have been mounted to foam boards and are directly exposed rather than being protected by the expected glass. Each print is part of a limited edition.

Along with the differently colored Plains of Tidikelt, both Transitions and Greater Somalia were made using only color-coded elevation data. Although perhaps scientifically interesting, these two are less aesthetically rich than the others. White and violet mark the highest spots, green and tan the middle range, and reddish orange the lowlands. Hart has chosen to make bodies of water an uninflected black. This helps these images quite a bit by offsetting the sharp, punchy 3D effect of all those tiny ridges and valleys (especially in the former piece). Still the overall affect of these gradations feels cold and mechanical, ill-suited to the grandeur and intricacy of the subject matter.

Transitions depicts the Finger Lakes area. Appropriately enough, Ithaca is in the center, although visible only as an orange tail on the south end of Cayuga Lake. The southeast part of Lake Ontario silhouettes the top left corner. Pennsylvania is to the south, highlighted by what look something like loose strokes of transparent paint—the Appalachian Mountains.

Most of the pictures in the show combine the elevations with one or more satellite images, added as a translucent layer. This gives them a greater range of color and texture which is much more aesthetically compelling. The color seems more naturalistic. We can also see human traces more directly. These images feel more concrete.

An analogy can be made with painting, and with abstract painting in particular. Traditionally, the earth has been a primary source for the pigments that give paints their colors. Synthetic pigments imitate their properties. The interaction of minerals with more fluid substances generates most of the forms seen in Hart's pictures. Although intentionally manipulated by the painter's hand, painting can involve similar natural processes. A number of abstractionists have made such processes central to their work. For example, Larry Poons' poured paintings and the "abstract landscapes" of local painter Barbara Mink come to mind. Similarities of shape and texture with Hart's work are in some cases quite remarkable.

The panoramic Al Kidan, with its painterly layering of copper, turquoise and cloud-like white, is a stunning image. Its also one of the most impressive pieces of trompe-l'œil that I've seen in a while. From a few feet away, it looks as if a striated pattern of copper pigment blobs has been applied, or has accreted, on to the smooth photographic surface. But no, the blobs are actually sand dunes in the Saudi Arabian desert. They cover most of the surface, save for a bit around the right edge.Their rich variety of density and direction reflects the changing of the winds. The effect is reminiscent of some of Gerard Richter's abstract paintings. If you look closely, you can see a network of roads and other signs of human habitation beneath. The piece is roughly human-size; if it were laid on the floor, you could sleep on it. Like several other pieces in the show, the piece is unconventionally oriented. To the left is north.

In Cape Farvel, left is south. The piece shows the southern tip of Greenland, with the bottom of the eastern shoreline running across near the bottom edge. The water is blue and turquoise. The land is mostly white, except of course around the shore, where it is pale gray and brown. Punctuating the coast are many lengthy fjords, with a wild cluster toward the middle. The scene looks something like a row of burnt out trees—an interesting shift of scale and perspective.

The installation of the show could have been better thought out. Several relatively small pictures are hung well above eye-level, overlooking an area where the gallery area transitions to stacks of books. This makes it impossible to get a suitably close look at the intricate details.

From the same issue: Wylie Schwartz's profile of local artist-writer Stephen Poleskie touches on aerial art of a rather different sort. Also check out these two paintings from his early-sixties realist period.

rise and fall

2007-11-17T12:46:00.001-05:00

This past Thursday evening, I attended the Cornell screening of a rough cut of a documentary film by Long Islander Jake Gorst. It is entitled The Rise and Fall of Books and is being planned for PBS. (See Wylie Schwartz's piece in this week's Times.) Its title is somewhat misleading, since the main subject is really Cornell professor Buzz Spector—the man and artist—along with his recent book installation project, the "Big Red C."

I prefer to think of the "C" as an abstract, monumental arc. (C for Cornell? Or for "community," as someone suggested at the screening? This seems like a contrived jingoism and besides, the piece didn't even feel that much letter-like on-site). The piece was made up of over 800 books, all of them supposedly the work of Cornell humanists—professors, students, or alumni. Shapes and subjects ranged from children's books and coffee-table science books to classics (with new introductions) and ponderous-looking theoretical texts (reference). The shape was like a curved staircase: almost touching the floor on one end, the height of a child on the other.

Spector and a group of students constructed the form in a Cornell-owned building in Chelsea during the second week of January this year. The piece was rebuilt on-campus (using the same books) for an April exhibition. I saw it then at the Kroch Library and I liked it, despite my unease with some its symbolic aspects. (Disclosure: Buzz has been very friendly to me, which is impressive given our relative statures.)

The film was indeed rough, full of awkwardness that could be resolved by better pacing and arrangement. It centers around footage Gorst had shot with the intention of merely documenting the piece and its initial construction in NYC. But Gorst soon realized that he had the makings of a feature length film and so he went for it. The movie also features Buzz interviewed in his office (at Cornell, I believe) talking about some of his past work and how it related to his biography. These segments could be fleshed out and better integrated. Indeed, Gorst told the seated audience that he plans to do another interview.

Buzz as long worked with books, "both as subject and as object." As well as piling books and photographing them, he has worked extensively in altered books. One piece shown in the film was a book from which pages had been carefully torn—nearly the whole first page was missing, with more and more of the page present as one goes through the book. It seems clear to me at least that this is a man as in love with his medium as any painter.

He spoke movingly of his works relation to his biography (perhaps working against his stereotype has a cold, cerebral artist). He spoke of his mother's disapproval of him making art out of damaged books and how she eventually came around after recalling a childhood incident in which he sat by the waterside arranging stones to trace the lines made by the receding waves. He and she both saw an intimate connection between this and his mature artistic expression.

Although not quite justifying the title, he argues for the continuing value of the printed word in an increasingly digital world. He explains that some forms of printed literature will disappear, for example the phone book. But others, such as novels and books of poetry will prevail. The case is made largely based on a emotional appeal to appreciation for the material and tactile aspects of reading. There were, however, some suggestions that younger generations might not be as appreciative. A longtime friend of Buzz's (whose name I forget, and who is identified vaguely as a "writer") emphasizes the old-fogginess of this perspective. A child at the opening for the C carries what looks like a hand-held video game.

Buzz is also enchanted by analog photography. He owns an impressive large-format Polaroid camera, which he uses to photograph his installations. In Rise, he compares the materiality of the resulting prints to painting. These he considers art (you would to, if you saw them in the flesh) as opposed to the numerous digital shots, which are mere documentation.

The main focus of Rise however, was Spector and his students in downtown Manhattan. They drive around in a van, unpack boxes, sort and arrange books. There is a time lapse sequence in which the sculpture is put together in a minute or two. There are brief interviews with a handful of students, some of them awkward or annoying, others endearing. Some bits seemed to drag on too long or felt out of place, but again, this is a matter of arrangement. The basic material is strong.

The film features a rocking soundtrack by dB's, which effectively conveys the feeling of being young (or young at heart, to use the cliche) in the big city. Some of the songs were newly written for the project. As Buzz explained after the screening, he had designed early album art for their predecessor group, the Sneakers back in the 70's. Their involvement in the documentary was a lovely coincidence. Unfortunately, the music was less suited for some of the more reflective moments.

As I mentioned in the discussion following the screening, my main difficulty was the exclusion of Cornell University as subject. The sense given by the film was Buzz playing hooky with his students in the big city, which is all well and good as far as it goes. It might come off as square or boring to mention the institutional connection. But it does seem awfully willful to ignore the facts: the project was planned by a Cornell prof (formally the director of the art department, now on leave), executed by Cornell students for credit, built out of Cornell books, and presumably funded by university funds. We see an alumni studded reception at the end of the film. Ostensibly, the piece represents the unity of humanities scholarship at Cornell (I'm not sure that I buy this either though). I can understand how personal artistic goals and connection with students are more interesting and important than all of this. Certainly, non-Cornellians like me and Gorst are most likely to latch on to such aspects. But still, it does seem willful. I spoke with Buzz a bit after the event and he did seem receptive to my comments.

UPDATE (11/19/07): Buzz tells me that he in fact rents the camera (of which only around 15 exist) from the Polaroid 20X24 Studio in New York. Apologies. Also, the "writer" mentioned above is Reagan Upshaw, a New York poet and art dealer.