City Paper welcomes guest Critical Mass columnist Jonathan Wallis, assistant professor of art history at Moore College of Art and Design. His column, “Perspective,” runs monthly in this space, bringing a critical eye to a visual art scene that continues to thrive in Philadelphia. Questions? E-mail Wallis at jswallis@gmail.com.

>>>KNOCK ON THE big wooden door at 244 S. Third St. and you can enter a museum filled with artistic, curatorial and historical wonder.

“Post-Revolutionary Selections from the Powel House Moving Image Archive, 1888- 2089″ (through May 8), a collaborative artistic project at the Powel House Museum, invites viewers to time-travel to actual and imagined pasts and futures, connecting with over 300 years of site-specific history inside one of Philadelphia’s most famous and treasured historical landmarks.

The experience is that of a “meta-museum,” where a potential future archive of moving images is “returned” to the present for contemplation and complication of the written and unwritten, and real and imagined history and future of the Powel House.

“Post-Revolutionary Selections” is the brainchild of Robert Wuilfe, founding curator of Landmarks Contemporary Projects at the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks. Created in 2006, Wuilfe’s experimental program involves the confluence of contemporary art/culture and historical sites in Philadelphia, and from the looks of the museum-wide video installation at the Powel House, Wuilfe has a knack for matching artistic temperaments with historic spaces.

“Post-Revolutionary Selections” is the product of two artists, Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib, who have been working collaboratively for several years now. Their current detour into an existing historical site has produced a museum experience that is provocative yet accessible, and conceptually and formally balanced with the existing site. This is one example of Philadelphia’s potential to produce its own unique brand of critical art within contemporary culture; one that turns to its own talented artists and curators, and rich cultural resources and history. Click For More »

City Paper welcomes guest Critical Mass columnist Jonathan Wallis, assistant professor of art history at Moore College of Art and Design. His column, “Perspective,” runs monthly in this space, bringing a critical eye to a visual art scene that continues to thrive in Philadelphia. Questions? E-mail Wallis at jswallis@gmail.com.

Photo | Bijoux Altamirano | voxpopuligallery.org

The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, performance documentation, Kembra Pfahler

“Got my own world to live through, and I ain’t gonna copy you.”
—Jimi Hendrix, “If 6 was 9”

“Dead Flowers,” the current show at Vox Populi, pays tribute to eccentric American actor/director Timothy Carey, whose pioneering independent film production and insistence on preserving artistic integrity at the expense of popular “success” is familiar to those steeped in alternative cinema.

Curated by Lisa Gangitano, founder of the nonprofit alternative art space on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Participant Inc., “Dead Flowers” exemplifies her commitment to interdisciplinary and intergenerational exhibitions (the show will move to Gangitano’s venue in NYC in early May), and explores the strategies, responses and resistances of artists to dominant culture and mainstream ideology over the last four decades. Starting from the concept of “the underground” as a site of alternative cinematic expression with Carey’s highly controversial film, The World’s Greatest Sinner (1962), the show meanders through various decades and media, suggesting a complex course of assimilations, mutations and contradictions that illuminate its fascinating, yet difficult, persistence.

voxpopuligallery.org

Timothy Carey

Ephemera and a video documentary segment introduce viewers to the protagonist in the lobby, where photographs, movie stills and articles, as well as comments by Carey’s brother, present the man with the triangle goatee as a radicalized, self-driven social and artistic rebel. Adjacent to these materials is the first of several “intergenerational” juxtapositions; the infamous penis and breast casts of Cynthia Plaster Caster (yes, Jimi Hendrix is there) next to display cases filled with collages by contemporary Swiss artist Georg Gatsas. In one, Gatsas displays photographs and descriptions of Dubstep music subculture along with several pages of text discussing Julian Henriques’ notion of “sonic dominance,” an experience of sensory “hierarchy” via audio stimulus matching the distinct bass power of Dubstep music. This collage/visual essay is one of the more easily intelligible works related to the show’s theme.  Click For More »

City Paper welcomes guest Critical Mass columnist Jonathan Wallis, assistant professor of art history at Moore College of Art and Design. His column, “Perspective,” runs monthly in this space, bringing a critical eye to a visual art scene that continues to thrive in Philadelphia. Questions? E-mail Wallis at jswallis@gmail.com.

projectbasho.org

David Lambert, 1/27/08 4:39 pm

A TESTAMENT TO PROGRESS >> Austrian photographer Ernst Haas remarked that the “limitations of photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.” “Onward,” the annual juried exhibition currently on view at Project Basho, is evidence that the limitations suggested by Haas are expanding rapidly as more and more artists find themselves drawn to the camera. Dedicated to providing exposure to new and emerging photographers without current gallery affiliation, the third run of “Onward” is a testament to the progress made in widening the medium’s scope in recent decades and a continued affirmation of the importance of its more traditional aesthetic qualities for artistic production and expression.

projectbasho.org

Rafael Soldi, Bajo Tu Manto

In large part, the show is a small portal into emerging American  photography, and it displays much promise. For a town like Philadelphia, whose artistic identity of late is strongly tied to photography, the show is a great resource: The local art community can look critically at a small sampling of emerging photographic practice from around the country. Plus, “Onward” suggests who — and what — is inspiring new photographers today, and I like what I see: sophisticated, up-to-date photographic vocabulary, high standards of technical execution, and (with a few exceptions) professional presentation.

This year’s juror for “Onward” is Debbie Fleming Caffery, a documentary photographer whose evocative black-and-white images have captured the culture of her native Louisiana, as well as Portugal and Mexico, with a unique and carefully located artistic vision. Caffery is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, and her work resides in the collections of many well-known institutions, including MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Judging by the variety of work in the show, she was a very good choice — the judicious balancing act of her selections illustrates a respect for the diversity of photography as it is practiced today.  This year’s call produced 1,666 entries by 418 artists, and the selection process yielded 73 works by 40 artists, with all but one hailing from the United States (one entry was from Dubai).

If there is one noticeable consistency in the selections this year, it’s that they all appear very reserved; there is nothing in the show that might qualify as “transgressive” or “radical” in portrayal or conceptual message. Whether this is the result of the submissions themselves or the choices of the juror, an introspective and restrained presence pervades much of the work in the show. Click For More »

City Paper welcomes guest Critical Mass columnist Jonathan Wallis, assistant professor of art history at Moore College of Art and Design. His column, “Perspective,” runs monthly in this space, bringing a critical eye to a visual art scene that continues to thrive in Philadelphia. Questions? E-mail Wallis at jswallis@gmail.com.

tigerstrikesasteroid.com

Ben Pranger, Spaceship Log

REVELING IN THE MYSTERIES >> With so much video on display in Philadelphia at the moment, my sensory faculties are almost pre-programmed to expect sound, movement and action when entering an artist space or museum. But when I walked into the single-room exhibition at Tiger Strikes Asteroid to view their current show, “Unveil,” the effect was the opposite: silence and stillness. It rattled me. I had to slow myself down and consciously step out of my life-stream running on virtual communication and “connectivity” and put myself in neutral. The room contained two and three-dimensional work that shared something distanced from me of late: It felt distinctly human in a way difficult to describe.  I felt a form of empathy through art that had been dormant for some time.

tigerstrikesasteroid.com

Donna Ruff, Aurelia series

“Unveil,” curated primarily by two members of the TSA collective, Alex Paik and Alexis Granwell, is a matrix of mysteries addressed through artistic exploration and production. But what is unveiled in these works, according to Paik and Granwell, are not answers, but questions — and much of what is seen is itself coded in various ways. Ben Pranger’s sculptures transcribe texts from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Buckminster Fuller into Braille, and are made manifest through thin wooden pegs inserted into sections of raw, cut trees. Whirlwind Revelation, a large swirling staircase of wooden blocks with text from Revelation 21 (scroll down for image), was generated by submitting the sculptural process of “becoming” to angular shifts dictated by the recurrence of specific words within the biblical text. Donna Ruff’s paper pieces enact a mysterious personal ritual inspired by Afghani goldwork, Islamic calligraphy, and scarification to transform surfaces into abstract, organic codes. Click For More »

City Paper welcomes Jonathan Wallis, assistant professor of art history at Moore College of Art and Design, to our Critical Mass team. His column, “Perspective,” will run monthly in this space, bringing a critical eye to a visual art scene that continues to thrive in Philadelphia. Questions? E-mail Wallis at jswallis@gmail.com.

nexusphiladelphia.org/supergirl.html

Passive Aggressive, by Jody Wood

There was a knife fight last Thursday night at the Crane Building. The slashing and stabbing resulted in blood stains, yet there were no actual injuries. Jody Wood’s performance at Nexus Gallery at the opening of “SUPERGIRL!” pitted two identically dressed women, Wood and an artist-friend, against each other; the two battled with lipstick-tipped knives to the point of physical exhaustion. The performance, preserved for the show through sculptural evidence in the form of shoes and knives on a red mat in the gallery, still resonates with me — most notably their heavy breathing that was magnified by the silence of the crowd surrounding them — the usual jeers and taunts of a schoolyard fight were squelched by the gallery context (“shhh… it’s art”), so that their gasps and labored breathing became sonorous.

There are other conflicts involved with “SUPERGIRL!” of a critical nature: Provocative video work is  presented in a sophisticated, dramatic and accessible manner in the space of the gallery, but it fights a dangerously narrow representation of “super” women (back to that shortly), and a sensational and over-generalized theme that lacks a clear sense of curatorial motivations. “SUPERGIRL!” leaves me standing at a critical crossroads, with no way out of the mired discourse other than to follow both paths in order to cover the art and the show that houses it. Sorry, Robert Frost, but I’m going down both…  Click For More »

City Paper welcomes Jonathan Wallis, assistant professor of art history at Moore College of Art and Design, to our Critical Mass team. His column, “Perspective,” will run monthly in this space, bringing a critical eye to a visual art scene that continues to thrive in Philadelphia. Questions? E-mail Wallis at jswallis@gmail.com.

philamuseum.org

Water of the Flowery Mill, by Arshile Gorky, oil on canvas, 1944.

To Be or Not to Be …

A retrospective exhibition should be more than just the collection and display of work from the lifetime of an artist. It should also be necessary in some way, whether due to changes in critical approaches to art history, new scholarship on the artist’s life and work, hitherto unknown or unseen works that revise the existing inventory of the artist, or a new curatorial approach. “Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is an august example of a proper retrospective — almost 30 years has elapsed since the last large gathering of Gorky’s work, and it is clearly time for another look.

Michael R. Taylor, the curator of the exhibition, never chooses his exhibitions lightly — he is a curator and an art historian when he tackles his projects (this one was five years in the making). For Taylor, it’s not just about looking at art; it’s about asking questions that a retrospective can hopefully answer. With three new biographies about Gorky, as well as revisions to the study and understanding of the development of modern American abstraction and surrealism in recent decades, Taylor recognized that it was time to revisit the artist’s life and work, and the show delivers grandly. It is a visual spectacle — a feast for the eyes, and also a provocative reconsideration of one of the most talented and self-driven painters in American modern art.

It’s hard to go wrong with an artist like Gorky. His long periods of self-imposed apprenticeships with artists such as Cézanne and Picasso clearly paid off; his ability to absorb the modern languages of pictorial structure and the handling of paint and color stands out among his contemporaries. It’s not that he is better — he is different. I don’t know of any other modern artist who enacted apprenticeships with recent and current “masters” and stayed closely dedicated to them for such long and intensive periods of study. Gorky works like an academic within a modern vocabulary, and Taylor’s curatorial decisions expose his artistic process during the course of the exhibition. The drawings and paintings in the “Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia” series from 1931-34, for example, guide viewers from an inspirational source by Giorgio de Chirico to a final painted solution unleashed almost entirely from where the artist began (observing this creative track should push aside any accusations by his detractors of a lack of individuality or originality in Gorky’s “apprenticeships”). It’s obvious that Gorky’s craft is a labor of love at all times. His work invites viewers to relish in the details — the way he turns and molds colors together, builds edges, and gracefully drags a liner brush across the canvas with linear elegance. Gorky knows how to paint, and as a disciplined “student” his time was well spent. Click For More »

City Paper welcomes Jonathan Wallis, assistant professor of art history at Moore College of Art and Design, to our Critical Mass team. His column, “Perspective,” will run monthly in this space, bringing a critical eye to a visual art scene that continues to thrive in Philadelphia. Questions? E-mail Wallis at jswallis@gmail.com.

gallery339.com

Nicholas with Mom and Milo, by Jessica Todd Harper

One hundred and twelve years ago, pioneering photographer Gertrude Käsebier lectured to an audience gathered to view her exhibition at the Photographic Society of Philadelphia. Known for her evocative portraits, Käsebier put forth this statement: “I earnestly advise women of artistic tastes to train for the unworked field of modern photography. It seems to be especially adapted to them, and the few who have entered it are meeting a gratifying and profitable success.”

The current exhibition at Gallery 339, “Personal Views: Contemporary Photographic Portraiture in Philadelphia,” brings together the work of six photographers who, by unintended chance through the selection process for the exhibition, are all women. It’s a result worth noting, however, and the range of creative and well-crafted portraiture in the show is a testament to the vanguard presence of women photographers in the Philadelphia art community.

In an ironic twist, the first works encountered when entering the gallery are Justyna Badach’s portraits of single men in their domestic dwellings. These large-scale vertical works evoke what the artist refers to as the “refuge and prison” of bachelorhood, and the images communicate the range and openness of its definition. Personality and identity are revealed equally in these images between the individuals’ poses and expressions and the decorative and iconographic aspects of their respective abodes.  But the deadpan aesthetic is cracked by Badach’s inclusion below the images of framed textual descriptions of the subjects’ histories, desires and interests gleaned from her personal encounters with each of the men.  These words “move” the picture (to borrow a term from David Carrier) and present an embellished narrative, providing viewers with a “before” leading up to the photograph as a visual pause. The fact that the tale of what is next for these men is left untold offers an open-ended approach to narrative portraiture that is provocative and compelling. Only one work hints at foreshadowing. Badach includes a terse comment about one man’s habit of collecting potentially controversial images, declaring “I was afraid for him.”

Jessica Todd Harper’s portraits in suburban backyards and interiors are quietly present, with long exposures and a sensitivity to backlighting that permits the eye to comprehend the subjects through an ethereal filter.  There is no missing the fact that Harper’s background is steeped with interests in Western art history, most notably Dutch Baroque and Renaissance painting, and these traces are present but reworked to a new, original purpose in the works in the show. In Sarah and Zephyr, the photographic distortion of the sitter’s arm and hand recalls the mannerist irregularities of Parmigianino and Rosso Fiorentino. Becky and the Mountain combines the tradition of odalisques with a formal echo between body and nature not unlike like Franz Marc’s Blue Horses. The act of looking at Harper’s work is a slow process that induces contemplation rather than an immediate transaction between viewer and image — it takes what painting offers and transcribes it to the contemporary through photography with innovative results. Click For More »

City Paper welcomes Jonathan Wallis, assistant professor of art history at Moore College of Art and Design, to our Critical Mass team. His column, “Perspective,” will run monthly in this space, bringing a critical eye to a visual art scene that continues to thrive in Philadelphia. Questions? E-mail Wallis at jswallis@gmail.com.

voxpopuligallery.org

Nick Paparone, “30 Days in the Hole”

Nick Paparone’s solo show at Vox Populi is a rambunctious affair, composed of sculptures and wall hangings that turn the gallery into an anxious landscape littered with past fits of excessive inebriation, sexual adventures and scatological accidents. The gallery is decorated with large beer labels and sheets with spray-painted images of billiard balls that create the effect of bouncing off objects and walls like a cue ball. It’s a bit too frenetic at times, but maybe that’s the point. The title of the show seems to leave little doubt — this experience, like the tale told in the 1974 song by the rock outfit Humble Pie, is a jaunt into a world of overindulgence with all the usual risks, dangers,and consequences.

Paparone’s visual referents function like flotsam and jetsam from the unconscious, gathered together as surreal expressions of the tensions between repressed desires and powerful acts of personal catharsis.  The objects are the strongest aspect of the show, more so than the installation effect evoked by the wall elements, and the sculptures evidence solid craftsmanship and an adroit use of vernacular materials. Paparone seems at his best when working with free association between words and things, and engaging in semiotic associations with his chosen combinations and juxtapositions is provocative to say the least.

A saddle horse structure with a bucket of scatological slop and a lurid orange turd, mounted with a riding saddle, elicits aesthetic sophistication in a cocktail with something beastly. But at times the visual noise from the surrounding walls has a tendency to compete slightly with the full potential of Paparone’s objects.  With all the sexual and scatological imagery in the show, and the large kinetic sculpture of a bloodshot eye at the center of the room, I’m reminded of polemical surrealist Salvador Dalí, whose sequence in Hitchcock’s Spellbound seems recast through the hovering, lonely eye. But Paparone’s eye is not an outside observer. Instead, it seems to function as the ocular nexus of this visceral world, a way of presenting a haunting visual metaphor of the persistence of self-reflection. If Paparone’s intent in “30 Days in the Hole” is to take me on a trip down a perverse memory lane, recalling psychic and physical ups and downs along the road of life, then he succeeds with ease.

City Paper welcomes Jonathan Wallis, assistant professor of art history at Moore College of Art and Design, to our Critical Mass team. His column, “Perspective,” will run monthly in this space, bringing a critical eye to a visual art scene that continues to thrive in Philadelphia. Questions? E-mail Wallis at jswallis@gmail.com.

voxpopuligallery.org

Brent Wahl, “Arrivals and Departures”

The Earth completes one revolution on its axis every 24 hours. Brent Wahl’s self-created world accomplishes this feat a lot faster — about every 15 seconds.  It’s a small, simple world physically, made up of everyday stuff — aluminum foil, branches coated in glitter, some black foam cut into the shape of military bunkers and a scale model of a Le Corbusier building, all placed inside a circular floor with a backdrop of black construction paper.

But technically and conceptually it’s much more complex.  By modeling the structure off a zoetrope, with a number of creative alterations to the traditional format of the device, Wahl places us both inside and outside his world simultaneously; we are both mundane inhabitant and omniscient Olympian God. But there is more. As a mechanical device rotates the entire 360 degree environment at a constant, steady pace, a video camera placed at a fixed point inside the structure projects the changing (yet repeating) view of the inside of this desolate world onto a neighboring wall in the gallery. It’s a fascinating contraption, and Wahl’s creative ability to conjure up the extraordinary with ordinary materials (which the artist will recycle after the exhibition ends — kudos) places his construction methods alongside other mad scientist-like artists such as Tim Hawkinson. Click For More »

City Paper welcomes Jonathan Wallis, assistant professor of art history at Moore College of Art and Design, to our Critical Mass team. His column, “Perspective,” will run monthly in this space, bringing a critical eye to a visual art scene that continues to thrive in Philadelphia. Questions? E-mail Wallis at jswallis@gmail.com.

PART 1: Chad Stayrook, “Shooting for the Stars”

Mallary Johnson

On the night of the opening for “September at Vox Populi,” visitors were privy to a performance by Chad Stayrook, who spent the evening busily preparing for and attempting the launch of a self-crafted rocket as part of his solo exhibition, “Shooting for the Stars.” From the initial pre-launch sequence where he checked off squares on a piece of paper in earnest, to the final countdown sequence, Stayrook’s performance contained a Goldilocks-like balance of action, suspense, humor and drama. With his pre-flight ritual complete, Stayrook went from technician to cosmonaut, removing his blue workman’s outfit and changing into a space suit (consisting of a pair of moon boots and a very tight and uncomfortable-looking rubbery white get-up), whereupon he entered his homemade rocket. With the aid of a smoke machine that emitted the necessary fumes from the bottom of his four-panel cardboard contraption, the wannabe rocketeer went through a countdown and, with a rattle and some shaking, his rocket teetered and then hit the floor of the gallery … hard. After recovering from the impact Stayrook exited the broken rocket, removed his Science 101 rubber goggles, grabbed a megaphone and announced to the crowd, “We have a failure to launch.” Click For More »