stately

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

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!

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.

main spring

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.

nick maione at stella's

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.)

rural research

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

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.

think small

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.

d.c. diary

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.

feelies

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

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.

josh dorman on his paintings

links and announcements for a sunday afternoon in november

* Mr. Schjeldahl and Mrs. Smith on the Seurat drawing show at MoMA.

*"The Twelve Devices of Peanuts." (via)

*A hand-drawn map depicting most of the traversable terrain in the classic computer game Zork.

*MIT is suing Frank Gehry. They are alleging negligence in the design of their 300 million dollar Stata Center, which opened back in 2004. (via)

*Mark Steyn on Allan Bloom on rock'n' roll. (via)

*The Great Pumpkin.

*From this weekend's Ithaca Journal: Carol Kammen on blogs as popular history.

*Nancy Geyer on the big video art extravaganza currently taking up most of the Johnson Museum's temporary exhibition space. I need to get up there and see it myself.

*Local artist Jay Hart is showing examples of his "terrain art" at Cornell's Mann Library Gallery. The show will be up through January 10 with a reception taking place this coming Tuesday from 5 to 6 in the evening. I do fetishize aerial perspective in art and there seem to be at least a handful of local artists working (with various levels of abstraction) in this vein. More on this sometime, I think.

*Speaking of which, my hero, the Queens painter Josh Dorman has taken part in a television documentary, There is a Bridge. The show, narrated by Mr. Robert Pinsky, deals with some of the social and humanistic aspects of Alzheimer's disease. From their website:

Josh Dorman, a nationally recognized artist living in New York, came to Alden Town Manor Rehabilitation and Health Care Center in Cicero, Ill., in August 2005 to create five paintings based on the imaginative and emotional landscapes of five people with advanced dementia. Assisted by Michael Verde of Memory Bridge and two social workers from Northwestern University, Josh spent six hours a day with five residents of Alden Town Manor. The thoughts, feelings, memories, dreams, and whatever else residents chose to share with Josh provided him the imaginative material from which he created his paintings. Josh earned a B.A from Skidmore College and an M.F.A. from Queens College.

You can see the paintings here. They incorporate literal portraiture, something I don't thing I've seen before in Dorman's work. (There is an interesting parallel here with some of Barbara Mink's recent work.)

The show is airing on various public tv stations at different times; depending on where you live, you may have missed it. Locally, it can be seen on WCNY on the 18th of this month, at 11 in the morning. I hardly watch television, but I will be making an exception.

*I Am Sitting in a Room (more), a classic sound piece by experimental composer Alvin Lucier:

I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.

species of spaces

Ed Marion, Gimme Tburg, 2006, acrylic on masonite, 20"X20"

Ed Marion, Downtown Ithaca, 2006, acrylic on masonite, 12"x36"

Times:

The landscapes of Ed Marion and Carlton Manzano make a decent match. Marion, working from photographs, paints mostly urban scenes. Manzano works in plein air from his minivan, exploring the countryside. Both make modestly sized, loosely brushed work—Marion using mostly acrylic and Manzano using oils. Their two person show Ithaca: The City in the Country is up this month at the Upstairs Gallery. The work within attempts to reconcile painterly invention and invented color with the evocation of real spaces (the latter will likely be familiar to Ithacans). Marion's paintings, though uneven, are the more compelling.

Downtown Ithaca is a particularly strong example of Marion's style and observation. The painting, which is on masonite, is wide and panoramic. Its colors are whitish, "pastel," giving it a slightly dreamy quality. The view is from the middle of a wide road (slightly toward the right lane). The blue-gray street is in perspective and disappears about halfway up the panel where it is intersected by another, barely visible street running left-right. On either side of the road are parked cars in dull colors, and a pair of boxy, multistory buildings—pink and beige on the left and red on the right. Also visible on the right is a wide sidewalk, a mass of greenery, and a tall pole with two gray banners. In the back of the other intersecting street are more buildings. Most notable are a pink and white one with crennelations toward the left and a pair of pointed church towers closer to the middle. What makes the piece is a tilted white square toward the center of the panel—the back of a Fed-Ex truck at middle distance. It pulls the viewer into the scene.

Also notable are three of Marion's showing area coffee shops (the two Gimme! Coffees in downtown Ithaca plus the one in Trumansburg). In each, the view is from right outside the storefront, the street and sidewalk visible in the immediate foreground. Gimme! Tburg is the best of these. The warm colors—particularly a layer of orange underpainting that seeps through in places—suggest early twilight. The road is tilted upwards to the right. The architecture is richly detailed. A pair of wavelike benches flank the sides of the door. To the left (in the foreground) is a covered staircase leading who knows where. Near the middle of the panel hangs a red sign. The white lettering is carefully blurred, lest the piece become mere advertisement.

Gimme! Cayuga features similar colors, although the suggestion is of broad daylight. A pair of figures pose under the striped awning, perhaps facing each other. The flat, frontal view is broken towards the right, the building corner. Gimme! State is the least interesting of the three. Its dull color and dull character are perhaps reflections of the boring brick-box architecture.

Several of Marion's paintings feature figures—strolling around the city or playing music. An interesting example of the latter is Guitar Progression. Made up of four small square canvases, it shows a guitarist, wearing a cowboy hat, a loose white shirt, and a pair of shades. He is engaged in a kind of comic strip action sequence. Like Marion's best figures, it substitutes gestural energy for realistic rendering.

Befitting their on-site execution, Manzano's oils are rougher and seemingly more casual than Marion's work. While this is a legitimate way of working, the results here seem uneven. Too often, the hairlike, impressionistic brushstrokes seem undirected, more concerned with filling space (one way or another) than with describing form and topography. At least two exceptions stand out.

Departure After the Harvest is one of these. It is a classic autumn scene: animated clouds against a pale blue sky, a flock of birds flying south, brown and orange trees, an abandoned field (beige), cornstalks, mud and dirt (with blue water, echoing the sky). In a manner somewhat reminiscent of Van Gogh, the strokes of paint form a rhythmic zig-zag pattern, top to bottom. This compelling texture is enlivened by short, curly marks carved into the paint (perhaps with the handle of a brush). This technique is used elsewhere, where it seems more like an affectation.

Like Harvest, Wide Awake Farm and Summer Clouds feels unusually considered, with things going on in different layers of space. In the foreground, towards the left, is an off-kilter jumble of farm buildings, tinted purple. To their right is a pink tractor and a pair of tall, crooked telephone poles, their wires hanging loosely. In the background is a hilly green landscape bordered top and bottom by rows of trees. A distant road climbs up near the center. At the top is a strip of sky. This sort of picturesque rustic mess is typical of Manzano's work, the careful composition somewhat less so.

And from the same issue, check out Wylie Schwartz's feature on the Ink Shop's current show.

space opera

Times:

Alan Singer has had a long and distinguished career as an artist. His work has encompassed everything from botanical illustration and graphic design to fine art in a range of abstract and realistic styles. In addition, he has been active as a curator and art writer. He teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Singer has shown his work extensively in New York State, as well as around the country. Last year, he took place in Mostly Abstract, an impressive group print exhibit at Ithaca's Ink Shop.

Cosmology, his current solo show, is on view at Syracuse's Joan Lukas Rothenberg Gallery. The small space is part of the Redhouse, a lively multi-arts center also featuring music, theatre and cinema programs.

The aptly titled exhibit is dominated by modestly sized works on paper showing a Surrealist influence. Odd conglomerations of three-dimensional geometric forms, an anti-naturalistic use of illusionism and persepctive, the human body in fragments: all of these are familiar and well-worn tropes. The extent to which these pieces dodge cliché is a valuable measure of their success.

Surrealism was also notable for its use of novel and hybrid techniques. Such strategies as collage, frottage (rubbing paper over a textured surface), the mixing of mediums and styles, and the use of random procedures were used to provide suprise. Likewise, Singer's paper pieces combine digital printing (often applied through a transfer process rather than directly) with hand-painted watercolor. This approach makes for a lively variety of textures—everything from painterly clouds and smears to pixellated fuzz to flat, uniflected tone and smooth color gradiants. At their best, these painted prints offer an engaging fusion of the analog and the digital.

In addition to being a particularly striking and well-balanced composition, Parade Grounds contains many of Singer's signature motifs. The print is panoramic (28 inches tall and 35.5 wide), giving the sense of a landscape or stage set. The background is made up of hazy horizontal bands of violet, cyan, green, yellow, warm off-white, and pink. A vague horizon can be detected about two-thirds of the way down. Floating in the foreground are a pair of geometrically patterned heads (each with two faces, facing left and right), a tilted pink fence, various other grids and lattices, a pair of pink horn-like shapes, and a blue-gray polyhedron. These 3D forms seem largely untethered to the landscape behind. Tying the whole giddy assemblage together is thickly painted striped ribbon, colored in bold pinks and reds, as well as in colors matching the background. The flat, meandering strip leads the viewer around. (In the loosely similar Isle of Light, a matching ribbon is echoed by more literal roadway—a looping black band with dotted yellow lines running through the middle.)

The smaller, nearly square Hydroacoustic is particularly busy, yet lucid. Indeed, it does suggest sound in water. The thick yellow-greenish tint of the background does not much obscure a cluster of foreground forms gravitating toward the middle. Three curving, empty musical staves (in blue, red, and red-brown) attempt to nail the whole mess down, loosely forming an upside down T. Incongrously, a pair of orange flames burn in the middle. The background is multilayered. Dark, dull greenish stripes obscure a suble grid of rounded rectangles. The latter are either empty or filled in; the resulting pattern resembles an answer sheet for a multiple choice standardized test. (This design reappears elsewhere in the show, with variations, as do the staves.)

For better or for worse, both Beach Comber and 66th Horizon have the feeling of video games. They have deep, perspectival spaces that ask the viewer to enter and explore. The terrain in each is lumpy and similarly textured with a pattern of bent, broken dark stripes. Bizarre abstract objects invite interaction.

At least a couple pieces go overboard with their surrealist (or science fiction) imagery and/or style. Sculpture Court features a pair of realistically rendered tripod mounted satellite dishes (complete with shadows). They appear to be kissing each other. The piece also has an overly lo-fi, digital feel; the painted areas are not well integrated. Into the Crucible has—among too many other things—a globe studded with bulbous eyeballs. Even with the best pieces in the show, this aspect of his work is present and may not be to everyone's taste.

Also in the show are four oil on linen paintings, two of them large diptychs the size and scale of a human couple. The Ghost of Charles Burchfield has a unique vocabulary of flat, broken pale pink stripes over a warm blue background. Hazy white lights shine out from the middle. The other three cover more familiar territory. While transferring his cosmic motifs to a larger scale seems to make sense, Singer's paintings suffer from relatively uninteresting surfaces.