September 30-October 6, 2004

art

Hanging Around

Edward A. Raffel, Punctuation (2004), 19 inches by 16 inches by 7 inches, mixed media.

Sculptor Edward Raffel and Ashley Gallery stay the course to pleasing effect in Northern Liberties.

by Susan Hagen

Edward A. Raffel is a self-taught artist, based in Cleveland, who has been making and exhibiting art for close to 20 years. He started out as a painter but turned to sculpture when he found over 300 rectangular metal stampings in his Cleveland Flats warehouse studio. His pedal-to-the-metal work ethic has allowed him to make a large body of work now on display at Ashley Galley.

Diane Ashley, owner and director of Ashley Gallery, shows mostly offbeat figurative paintings by Philadelphia and national artists, including "new realism, the recreated surreal, and conceptually thematic constructions." She told me she got interested in Edward Raffel's work because she loved its "obsessiveness and intensity inventive construction techniques and visual beauty." Ashley opened the gallery three years ago, weathered some tough times after 9/11, and now is a fixture in Northern Liberties. This one-person exhibition is Raffel's second at Ashley Gallery and features an extremely diverse group of 13 sculptural works that use found objects and technological imagery to address formal, social and sexual themes.

In several pieces Raffel uses the cross form to explore his distaste for organized religion. One, titled Crosscut, is a 59-by-44-inch cross made out of approximately 2,500 picture hooks (a literal allusion to hang-ups) in a textured herringbone pattern, then painted white and splattered with red paint. I am reminded a little of H.C. Westermann's inventive do-it-yourself techniques. A second larger cross, Are You Hung Up? (95 by 68 by 8 inches), is obsessively patterned with over 7,200 hooks. It has a single glass eye in the crux of the cross and reads as a strangely fetishistic object, considering its anti-religious purpose. By contrast, Unisex Anthropomorphic Agitator Lamp, made of heavy aluminum industrial parts and a halo-shaped florescent light bulb, has a more nuanced expression of religious iconography.

Sexuality is a theme in many of Raffel's pieces. Punctuation (16 by 19 by 7 inches) is an enigmatic, kinetic piece. It's a wall-hung, pink rectangular box with a horizontal "corduroy" texture: very mod and attractive. On front is a rectangular grid of tiny holes and a rotating five-pronged unit covered with little red lights. A recording of "orgasm sounds" was meant to accompany the movement, but it wasn't working during my visit. Another piece, Uncle Sam Wants, addresses sexuality and power with a junk collector's aesthetic. It's constructed out of found objects: A red, white and blue phallic shape pivots on a stand, while a pair of astronauts in a super ball watch. There's also a firecracker, a plastic Indian, and a peepshow girl visible in a compartment inside the base.

In another group of work, Raffel uses industrial materials and lighting to create pictorial images. One piece, titled Logarithmic Light Strip Interruption, reads like a small color-field painting made of light. An 18-square-inch metal box is filled with nine horizontal florescent lights in amber Plexiglas tubes, covered with thin black O-rings in a pattern of greater density at the center. Another piece, Roof Rosette Modular Wall Unit, is about 54 square inches and made up of corrugated roof flashing arranged in a decorative pattern. There are alternating sections with internal inversions and external protrusions of shaped flashing—a novel and witty use of the material. In Floor Mat Wall Sconce Raffel cleverly silhouettes patterns in 1-inch thick rubber floor mats pierced with holes against white glowing Plexiglas, offering a down-to-earth lesson on perception and perspective.

Raffel is interested in mirrors for their optical and metaphorical uses, and two pieces in the show make extensive use of them. One, titled Vaudeville, is a 30-by-36-inch wall panel with a series of alternating mirrors set at 45 degrees to the viewer. Raffel creates an optical effect where, according to his artist statement, "the image reverses itself to the correct position, allowing the subject to see him/her self as others see him/her, possibly for the first time." The second, Escape is Impossible, was too big to fit up the stairs into the gallery so it's installed in the cafe downstairs. A black 40-inch wooden cube—filled with alternating mirrors—slowly rotates about 3 feet off the floor. If you stand inside it, you witness the strange presence of hundreds of moving reflections of yourself.

This diverse body of work is clearly still developing: Raffel has taken on (sometimes a bit perfunctorily) a wide range of forms and subjects. But in spite of that, many of the pieces are original and appealing. I like their connection to the American tradition of handicrafts made from ordinary objects like pop-top constructions, gum chains, and popsicle boxes—not to mention the American tradition of soapbox proselytizing. Even though Raffel's wide-ranging approach is a bit disjointed, it points in promising directions.

Edward A. Raffel: New Work Through Oct. 5, Ashley Gallery, 718 N. Third St., second floor, 215-888-4813