Also this issue:

Boxed In
In a story of a con man turned boxer, Darin Strauss loses sight of the core of truth.
-Justin Bauer

First Friday Focus
The Galleries at Moore | Temple Gallery | Ashley Gallery
-Lori Hill

Blind Date
Two artists are grouped together for an exhibit at Seraphin Gallery.
-Robin Rice

East Meets Midwest
Wisconsin artist T.L. Solien is featured in two gallery shows this month.
-Susan Hagen

Poe's Own Twilight Zone
-Toby Zinman

June 6-12, 2002

art

Learning to Fly

Spector gadgets: The artist poses with some of her creations.

Shelley Spector chats about her life, her art and her upcoming show.

by Robin Rice

This summer, it seems like Shelley Spector rules the Philly art world. Not content with her success as a sculptor at Sande Webster Gallery, where her solo show “Fly” opens this Friday, about three years ago Spector opened her own Spector Gallery at Fifth and Bainbridge. There, she shows the work of younger artists who are often influenced by cartooning and commerce. Five of them are part of the current “Space 1026: Scratch Off the Serial” show now at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Spector's next solo show, "Mamaloshen," ("mother tongue" in Yiddish) will open in September at the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art (Congregation Rodeph Shalom, 615 N. Broad St.) For that one, she is translating Yiddish words into painting and sculpture.

In addition to completing two bodies of work and running her gallery alone, Spector and her partner are expecting a second child this summer. Spector chose the exhibition title "Fly" to express a recent sense of freedom. "Flying for me is about ambition and going after what you want. I've always been cautious and slow-moving," she claims. "Now, I feel I don't have any reason to not do things. I'm leaping. I'm not tiptoeing. I'm taking every opportunity that comes my way and so far it's gone OK."

Although Spector has not abandoned her identity as a sculptor, her current show is dominated by flat figurative painting. Many works reprise earlier sculpture. Often painted on slightly asymmetrical pieces of appropriated wood, the figures are stylized: clunky and chunky or elongated. They inhabit an indistinct expanse, perhaps identified by a cloud or a single prop like a boat. What might be called "background" draws an ambiguous spatial character from the stains and scars on the unaltered found material. In her quest for broad, interestingly blemished and patinaed wooden surfaces, Spector removed most of the tabletops in her own studio, replacing them with temporary, sometimes less satisfactory supports.

In the past, Spector has painted elements of her sculpture. She continues to use the same palette of sky blue, raw sienna, green, white and deep red, all knocked down by thin surface coats of brown. This brings strong color into harmony with time and grime-burnished surfaces. She outlines shapes in pencil, going back into painted areas to retrace fine graphite details, incising them delicately through the paint. Many of the paintings deal with gender and identity, role playing and language.

In the autobiographical Spector's Specter, a female figure stands, feet planted firmly on nothing. Her head is turned to one side and her arms stretch wing-like behind her. Above a man flies, as if swimming in air. His features, with eyes closed behind squarish glasses, are an almost exact duplicate of hers. The corner of a cloud is barely visible at the left of the panel that suspends the figures in its amber translucence.

The man or "specter" in this painting represents her deceased father. The woman is Spector gathering herself ballerina-like to leap upon the stage. Spector's mother, a dancer and dance teacher, taught her dance from the age of 3. When she reached the age where she to begin to move into the world of professional dance, she was surprised to find that she had "lost my heart for it." Nevertheless, "it influences everything I do: That's why I work figuratively and why I think about gesture and position. I see the painting as a stage." The discipline of dancing is second nature. "When I think about my work I think of it as dancing, like practicing daily and getting better and better."

When she was about 4 or 5, she recalls, "My dad was building a bathroom in our house. He put up dry wall and before he papered it, he let us [kids] draw on it. I drew a cuckoo clock with an accordion projection on it [for the bird]. It was good!" Years would pass before Spector turned to art seriously. Assemblage proved to be her medium. "I've always been a person that gets the pieces of something and puts them together and makes something." She turned to wood largely because she serendipitously had access to a studio with a band saw. Eventually she began painting her sculpture and now she's produced a coherent group of paintings.

But there is sculpture in the Sande Webster show. Most notably The Inch Men, a wall installation. The 21 wooden figures, each with its own shelf, range in 1-inch increments from 1 inch to 21 inches. A metaphor of measurement and context emerges through Spector's characteristically playful juxtapositions. Disarmingly free of angst or rant, her practice as a whole seems to suggest that individuality and ingenuity can deal with almost any situation and that life is more than a little bit absurd. We all can fly if we take the leap.

Shelley Spector, “Fly: Sculpture and Painting,” June 7-29, Reception Fri., June 14, 6-8 p.m., Sande Webster Gallery, 2018 Locust St., 215-732-8850.