"Buckskin Gulch, Escalante, National Monument, Utah," by Glenn Bizewski

Post by Erica Minutella, December 21, 2011

By now, hearing endless repetitions of holiday music and seeing the city mummified in strings of lights might leave you feeling more akin to Mr. Potter than George Bailey. But thanks to the stalwart efforts of a few arts spaces, like Cabaret Red Light’s recent mischievous rendition of The Nutcracker at the Painted Bride Art Center, the holidays face some much-needed reworking.

One such chance to recapture the holiday spirit before the weekend can be found at the Light Room Gallery. The photography on display for Holiday Show 2011 offers the rare opportunity to find holiday gifts without the atmospheric torture that comes standard with every department store visit.

Tucked away on Wallace Street, just a block from the imposing walls of Eastern State Penitentiary, the homey space of the Light Room Gallery beckons visitors into a room frosted over with white like a snowdrift brought in through the outer doors. If the sight of a fireplace isn’t enough to thaw the chill of commercialism from the wary newcomer, a glance at Tony Rocco‘s “Struggle in the ‘Italian’ Market,” just above the stairway, will finish the job. One of the few color photos on display, a forceful splash of vibrant flames in the foreground will continually recapture your eyes as you wander through the space.

Travel across vignettes of the city as you walk along a wall of works by Erin Yard. Refresh yourself with a brisk draft from Ranjoo Prasad’s “Chestnut Hill Winter Stream,” just before cutting into “Fruit Series,” by Joshua Marowitz.

Lose yourself in Mary Anne Broderick-Pakenham’s misty seascapes. Almost post-apocalyptic in their ghostlike desolation, Broderick’s Landscapes series could double as establishing shots from the mind of Rod Serling. On the wall opposite, three photos by Glenn Bizewski will strand you in the midst of towering rock formations, as you stare into dizzying pockets of devastating height.

Catch these photos and more at the 2024 Wallace Street space through January 7, and let your heart expand a few sizes as you return home, maybe even bearing gifts in support of local artists.

Stop by the gallery tonight at 8 pm for a demo by Tara Hornung on how to archivally mount / matte / and frame your photographs.

Tags: erin yard, glenn bizewski, holiday show, joshua marowitz, light room gallery, mary anne broderick-pakenham, philadelphia, ranjoo prasad, tony rocco
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"Acceptance" (left) and "Resistance" (right). Artist: Lawren Alice. Photographer: Noah Musher.

Post by Erica Minutella, December 14, 2011

If you’ve been watching American Horror Story on FX, it probably wasn’t long before you noticed the ability of a simple disguise to transform a character from a regular to regularly horrifying. But with Lawren Alicé‘s Body Painting at Gallery ML, a collective body art gallery located at 126 Market Street, disguises are multi-layered: at times beautiful, disturbing, morose, and empowering, disguises lose their classically secretive nature and themselves become forms of identity.

Photos of Lawren Alicé’s transitory works are taken by Noah Musher, Gallery ML owner. From extreme close-ups to elaborate stagings, the subjects of Alicé’s pieces populate their canvases like nouveau nymphs, embodying a spirit of progressive urbanity with the same lithe grace with which they once populated the forests of Greek myth.

These momentary monuments to human metamorphosis wind in labyrinthine lines and colors across their living canvases, challenging the line between stillness and motion, body and object. Finally vested with the colors and forms usually reserved for predators and plantlife, these individuals evolve into something beyond nature.

Alicé’s unique explorations of the human canvas are the last show of the season at Gallery ML’s current space, as they hope to move to a larger venue in early 2012.

Currently, Alicé is on her way to the RAWards show on January 12 at The Chinese Gauman Theater in Hollywood, to celebrate her recent win for the title of 2011 National Visual Artist of the Year.

Tags: body painting, chinese gauman theater, gallery ml, lawren alice, noah musher, old city, philadelphia, raw natural born artists, rawards
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Photo of work by Hugh Hales-Tooke at the "Micrographia" show, from the Meg Cohen Design Shop Facebook page.

Post by James Rosenthal, December 12, 2011

Observed in a cozy SoHo boutique, the paintings of Hugh Hales-Tooke may be mistaken for decorative works with a certain historical bent. Look more closely. Taken out of this comfortable context, or on the wall of his studio, the paintings immediately resonate with meaning, both personal to the artist and specifically relating to the Enlightenment. Primarily a photographer, Hales-Tooke has drawn college buildings of Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren as a relevant inquiry into science versus art and the possibly grey areas in between. The show is titled Micrographia, Three Buildings of The Age of Reason. This refers to Hooke’s amazing 1664 book about microscopic animals and magnification using lenses. Hooke apparently coined the topical term, “cell.” This fascinating project started in 1989 when the artist inadvertently made his first image of the Wren Library at Trinity College. It took a while before Hales-Tooke realized fully his personal connection to the buildings in Cambridge, England, where he was brought up.

How do these the studies of Enlightenment architects relate to an individual? Partly because the paintings are a link in a conceptual chain. At first, the interest is intuitive. Then, it become more technical. The paintings (aka buildings) plot points in an investigation tying together Hales-Tooke’s family history with the edifices he duplicates. He traces his lineage back through the Petyr family line to Elizabethan times. Lord Petyr was a Catholic after the unfortunate dissolution of the monasteries, a precarious position for a man of state. But how is this investigation of family trees relevant to architecture from the Age of Reason? There’s the rub. We have to work it out. It could be that family DNA is related to the proliferation of ideas through history. At the end of the process, Hales-Tooke has presented the buildings denuded of any fanciful perspective and context – no light, shade, or place – so the façade faces the viewer without blanching, much like architectural elevations. Full frontal nudity, you might say. The series conveys myriad questions and serves as proof of the initial process. By illustrating the famous buildings in such a way, Hales-Tooke implies a cultural lineage which is wound tightly, like cloth around a wire: the buildings are neo-classical, but with added elements of the period that embody the thought of the time.

The subject could become a doctoral thesis. The Age of Reason was not just about science, but an attempt to remove art from science. There was also some Medievil psuedo-science bordering on Black Magic. (I must be thinking of William Blake and the architect Hawksmoor, Wren’s eccentric student! He imagined that the Ancients filled the skies with human-shaped constellations for a good reason.) These stories are writ large in mythic form so we can apply the facts later, if we fancy. Perhaps the whole of the Enlightenment is about “cosmic” wisdom being strained through the eyes of burgeoning science? It’s amazing what you can discover in a tasteful, unassuming shop in SoHo.

Full disclosure: The author admits he knows the methods and preoccupations of Mr. Hales-Tooke. They both studied at Syracuse University during the fermented Eighties and played loudly in a local band.

The Micrographia exhibition closed November 5. Visit the Meg Cohen Design Shop’s Facebook page for up to date information on current and upcoming shows.

Tags: hugh hales-tooke, james rosenthal, meg cohen, meg cohen design shop, micrographia
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Photo by Lori Lipton, courtesy of the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center site

Post by Erica Minutella, November 23, 2011

On October 28, the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center invited everyone to take a picture of anything they wished within the city limits as part of the second annual Philly Photo Day. Now the nearly 900 photos, on display through November 26, overflow from the walls of PPAC into the Nexus space just down the hall.

If Woody Allen films are also love letters to New York, then the photos currently at the Crane Building serve as Philadelphia’s equivalent. Like a near-death montage of city moments, the almost overwhelming flashes of places and people take you on a rapid-fire scavenger hunt through familiar and unfamiliar territory alike.

As distant relatives fly in to the city for Thanksgiving, the soon-to-close exhibition becomes particularly poignant. Touring through the inevitable cheese steak storefronts, unexpected perspectives on cultural landmarks placed on the eerie line between known and unknown, and even the occasional whimsical shots of squirrels and plastic skulls, reasserts the city as more than just home to 1.5 million people. Through the eyes of its inhabitants, Philadelphia is a living story, rewritten fresh every day.

The show closes November 26, so be sure to take a break between family festivities to reclaim a bit of urban magic.

Tags: philadelphia photo arts center, philly photo day
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Njideka Akunyili, My Refuge, 2011, mixed media on paper. Collection of John Friedman.

Post by Kira Grennan, November 16, 2011

Collage Perspectives, a new exhibition on display at Swarthmore College’s List Gallery, curated by director Andrea Packard, brings together the work of five contemporary artists whose practices include the process of collage. Working at different scales and in diverse media, Njideka Akunyili, Chie Fueki, Ken Kewley, Arden Bendler Browning, and Elizabeth O’Reilly all construct images that use the inherently disruptive practice of collage to document, explore, and question aspects of the observable world. In their highly individual ways, the artists speak to the complexity of both sensory and cultural experience. In her introduction to a panel discussion organized at Swarthmore, Packard pointed to a unifying sense of personal vision or narrative among the five artists. Each work spoke to its maker’s specific way of looking at and being in the world around him or her.

Njideka Akunyili’s large-scale collages address the tension between her love for Nigeria, her country of birth, and her feelings of appreciation for Western culture. During the panel Akunyili spoke about Homi Bhabha’s notions of hybridity and the ‘third space,’ in which cultures come together to create a new hybrid social space. Collage, Njideka pointed out, is a medium particularly well-suited to operate within this space of cultural hybridity.

Chie Fueki’s mixed media and acrylic collages also give the feeling of a complex cultural experience. Fueki, born in Japan and raised in Brazil, creates brilliantly colored scenes of people and spaces she knows. Her works integrate a sculptural, isometric understanding of space with a sense of personal, felt experience. During the panel Fueki talked about each different paper she uses in a piece as a vehicle for a different ‘language,’ coming together to make a kind of mixed-language painting.

Ken Kewley talks about collage as a way of working that can give new energy or free up his painting process. His small collages of figures and environments vibrate with the energy of surprising, decisive juxtapositions of color and shape. These images simplify, clarify, abstract, and break up the process of vision, drawing viewers’ attention to the process of seeing itself.

Arden Bendler Browning uses collage as a means of reorganizing, mixing up, or shifting around her paintings. She sometimes introduces one part of a painting into another or removes and reworks specific areas to capture the overlapping, dynamic layers of the urban environment. Her complex works communicate the feeling of moving through the city with its shifting extremes of sensory density and sprawling space.

Elizabeth O’Reilly collages small, intimate images of the canal, rooftops, and streets of Gowanus, the area of Brooklyn where her studio is located. O’Reilly cuts out pieces of colored paper that she has painted with watercolor and fits them together to make simplified, yet densely rich images of her immediate urban environment. Born in Ireland, O’Reilly talks about collage as a parallel practice to her primary work as a plein air painter, in which she can be free to play in the quiet, uninterrupted space of her studio.

Tags: arden bendler browning, chie fueki, collage perspectives, elizabeth o'reilly, ken kewley, list gallery, njideka akunyili, swarthmore college
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Philly Blossoms: Series, 2010. Find work by InLiquid member Brooke Hine at the Art Star Holiday Craft Bazaar.

Post by Erica Minutella, November 14, 2011

It’s only about midway into November, and already the holiday pressure’s starting to build (because, unfortunately, not every department store shares the Nordstrom philosophy). It may even start to seem like Ebeneezer Scrooge had the right idea after all: no holiday means no bothering to come up with the perfect gift for every one.

Luckily, Philadelphians are spoiled, which means every one you know can potentially be spoiled, too. Take a tour through craft fairs and auctions being held throughout the season, and you just might have it easy this year.

Want to make your out-of-town relatives a little jealous? Then stop by the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center through November 26 and show off the city’s highlights with a reprint of the images from this year’s Philly Photo Day. With reprints selling for $25 each, it requires a wallet size only a little bigger than the Grinch’s heart.

Stop by AxD Gallery on Thursday, November 18 for the Paint it RIGHT art gallery and silent auction event. It’s a chance to pick up some gifts that count double in the good karma arena, since all proceeds will be donated to THE RIGHT Foundation’s HIV/AIDS program.

Forget about Black Friday. Use the day after Thanksgiving to sleep off all those built-up years of tryptophan in your system and get your shopping done the weekend before – at the first Art Star Holiday Craft Bazaar, featuring work by InLiquid members Brooke Hine and John Murphy.

If you’re still behind once December rolls around, release all the pent-up energy of procrastination by battling to bid in a series of auctions that benefit local arts spaces.

For some liquid fortification from the shopping blues, purchase a ticket to the Champagne Preview and Raffle for The Print Center‘s Annual Auction on Saturday, December 3.

Planning on showing off your favorite punch recipe? Find the perfect bowl to compliment it at the “Battle of the Bowls” auction at the Philadelphia Art Alliance on Tuesday, December 6, which benefits the exhibitions and programs of the Alliance.

If you find the thought of all these auctions intimidating, then visit the Space 1026 auction on December 9. With $5 starting bids on all items, even an auction amateur can feel at ease.

Tags: art star, art star holiday craft bazaar, axd gallery, battle of the bowls, black friday, holiday gifts, paint it right, philadelphia art alliance, philadelphia photo arts center, philly photo day, right foundation, thanksgiving
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Installation shot: Blowing on a Hairy Shoulder/Grief Hunters. Photo courtesy of ICA.

Post by Erica Minutella, October 19, 2011

In 1993, author Lois Lowry disturbed a generation of children with the monochrome, dystopian setting of her science fiction novel, The Giver. For the main character Jonas, his ability to see the color “red” in a black-and-white world propels him into a simultaneously shattering and uplifting personal transformation.

Through February 19, if you walk into the Institute of Contemporary Art and make a sharp right, you just might find yourself in the midst of such sudden soul-slapping awareness. Being confronted with the paintings of Charline Von Heyl is rather like seeing color for the first time in a previously colorless existence.

Once your discovery of the color spectrum is complete, shapes will begin to take hold. It’s more than just a result of being the victim of pareidolia (the psychological phenomenon that causes you to see faces in clouds and the occasional Martian mountain). It’s an active investigation into perception almost as fun as childhood memories of searching for hidden pictures in a Highlights magazine.

If you venture upstairs, you’ll be confronted with the much darker world of Blowing on a Hairy Shoulder/Grief Hunters, on view through December 4, which presents work by twenty artists from Israel, Greece, Germany, Belgium, Britain, and America. Dealing with the themes of originality and origin, these works offer yet another investigative challenge. Navigating through the maze of video clips, sculptures, photography, and drawings will lead you on a journey simultaneously unsettling and humorous.

Be sure to take a few minutes to watch The 588 Project, a video by Gilad Ratman. While mud monsters may be the typical fare of campy horror films, the repetitive sounds and images of mud pool-submerged people and their musical instruments that double as breathing apparatus will leave you mesmerized. As it cycles slowly through clear tubes in the treetops, only to eventually emerge through a series of wooden pipes, mud takes on the transformative beauty of flowing water and musical notation.

Just two of the exhibitions currently on view at ICA, the works of Von Heyl and Grief Hunters will leave you happily balanced in a world between color and mud, formlessness and renewal.

Tags: charline von heyl, gilad ratman, highlights, ica, institute of contemporary art, lois lowry, philadelphia, the 588 project, the giver
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"Nosferatu" (1922), Photo courtesy of plong - Flickr

Post by Erica Minutella, October 12, 2011

There are few things as satisfying as visiting Linvilla Orchards the week before Halloween, digging through hundreds upon hundreds of leftover pumpkins that look somewhat like orange miniatures of Frankenstein’s monster, and yet somehow finding the one so perfect even Charlie Brown couldn’t complain (often to the envy of other last-minute families tag-teaming hurried pumpkin searches all around you). Sometimes, last-minute plans work out best.

But with only about 20 days left till Halloween, anyone still stuck without party invites might be feeling desperate for a less-reclusive way to celebrate than watching Ghost Hunters Live on the Syfy channel. Luckily, there are several nearby arts-related events to choose from:

Today through October 31, visit the Dracula Festival at the Rosenbach Museum.  With its collection of Bram Stoker’s notes on the supernatural, the Rosenbach might leave you better prepared to fight a vampire than Peter Cushing.

If the Rosenbach fails to quench your thirst for the undead, then once the sun goes down on Saturday, October 15, head over to International House for a screening of Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens (A Symphony of Horror) (1922), the first film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel. The silent film will be accompanied by a live, new original score by Brendan Cooney.

Edgar Allen Poe will be returning to Philadelphia once more to read selections of his work at Laurel Hill Cemetery. While he may not be one of the legions of the undead, he will be brought back to life through the portrayal by Rob Vellela as part of Poe’s 2011 Cemetery Tour.

Friday, October 28 finally offers a chance to break out your costumes at the Art After 5: Halloween Dance Party at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Anyone who hears the name Casper and thinks of the original cartoon (rather than Christina Ricci) will appreciate the performance of Ghost Train Orchestra, whose haunting strains of jazz and 1920-40 cartoon medleys will provide the background for tarot-card readings and tours of the museum’s more macabre works.

If you spent your childhood preparing for bed by reading the works of Edward Gorey, then you might enjoy Monster Mash, a nighttime horror-themed poetry and story reading at Musehouse.

Saturday, October 29 offers two more chances to party in-costume. Indie music website The Deli Philadelphia presents Halloween Partay at PhilaMOCA, with performances by several local bands as well as a vinal release party for pop/swing group Circadian Rhythms.  Monsters Ball 2011 at Artworks Trenton will thrill guests with a costume contest, fire performances, silent horror film screenings, and more.

Tags: after after 5, artworks trenton, bram stoker, deli philadelphia, dracula festival, edgar allen poe, ghost train orchestra, halloween, international house, laurel hill cemetery, monster mash, monsters ball 2011, nosferatu, philadelphia museum of art, philamoca, rosenbach museum
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Post by Kira Grennan, September 28, 2011

Continua, a new installation by Katie Murken at Gallery 2J, displays the artist’s enormous sensitivity to and love for color. Twenty-four columns made of colorful stacks of phone books form a life-size color wheel. Through Continua, Katie Murken reaffirms color as a vital, autonomous field, ripe with possibility.

The octagonal wall structure that Katie Murken has built as the backbone for her installation gently envelops viewers in a self-contained space. Here we not only can see color in its raw, distilled columnar form, but also seem to be able to feel and hear it. The intervals of twenty-four columns around the white gallery wall seem musical, like a horizontally moving scale lining the room. The variation of color within each spectrum, determined partly by chance and partly by probability, moves up and down the columns like chord progressions.

Talking through it, Katie explained that each column is based on a ‘chord’ made up of two complementary colors and one additional color. She rolls a pair of dice to determine the other twenty-four colors per column, each number rolled determining the degree shift of the next color from the previous one. Turning around the full perimeter of the columns, we witness yellow turn into green into teals, blues, and plums. On the opposite wall, burgundy turns into browns, brick reds, salmons, oranges. As our eyes drink in this rich, chromatic variety, we become aware of nuances within individual columns. Certain layers are striated, some seem more densely packed with die, others more warped and wrinkled. This variation deepens the sensual impact of the piece, making it feel emphatically handmade. It renews a sense of the organic nature of color in the midst of a world that deals more and more with neat digital swatches of color viewed on a computer screen.

The use of phonebooks as the raw material for Continua is also worth noting. Often overlooked or seen as irrelevant or inconsequential, these books are vestiges of an analog society in which every house and business could be referenced in a single, widely distributed text. The books are closed, the names and words and numbers sealed away within the columns of color. This highlights the place of color as an elemental, all encompassing part of the visible material world.

The back of the project space houses a series of prints that documents the process of choosing the colors for each column of Continua. Murken’s process is impeccably systematic and methodical, like the prints themselves, which map out probability charts, color diagrams, and excel spreadsheets of die quantity and location. It was a striking transition to go from the explosion of visceral, sensual color in the front of the gallery to the back area with its methodical probability, calculation, and charts. For me, the net result was that the concept of ‘spectrum’ became more physical than ever before when I stood in the middle of the columns. From this vantage point of pure, sensual experience, I understood more about color and its raw potential than from reading texts about color theory or the physics of electromagnetic spectra. In a way, Continua is a wonderful show about the act of making art; it strips away all of the specific ways in which we use color as painters, sculptors, video artists etc., allowing us to reflect on its inherent potential.

Tags: continua, gallery 2j, katie murken
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Piece by Warren Angle

Post by Erica J. Minutella, September 21, 2011

On Friday, September 9, Warren Angle, artist, educator, and exhibitions curator at Fleisher Art Memorial for 17 years, passed away after a courageous fight with cancer. Inspired by a background growing up in a rural area in the Midwest, Angle’s art dealt with the interplay between humans and nature. But just by browsing through the Facebook page set up in remembrance, it seems clear that, for anyone who knew him, Angle will be remembered most for the kind of man he was. The shared stories and photographs give a brief but poignant glimpse into the life of a man whose brush with the arts community of Philadelphia over the years has left behind a kaleidoscope of vibrant moments. Patching together this mosaic of memories leaves one with the idea of a man filled with subtle empathy, a keen (and somewhat irreverent) wit, and the very rare (but always appreciated) ability to connect with even casual acquaintances on a personal level.

On Saturday, September 10, Nessa Forman, 68, succumbed to her long struggle with pancreatic cancer. Forman inspired friends and colleagues during her time as Arts and Leisure Editor at the Philadelphia Bulletin, and later Vice President of Corporate Communications and Public Affairs at WHYY until 2007. In 2002, Forman was voted into the hall of fame of the Philadelphia Public Relations Association. Dan Cirucci, a lecturer in Corporate Communication at Penn State, has written a lovely tribute to a woman who leaves behind a great number of people influenced by her strength and counsel.

Tags: fleisher art memorial, nessa forman, philadelphia bulletin, warren angle, whyy
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