Thomas Buildmore, "Today was pretty awesome." Photo by Christopher P. McManus.

Post by Leah Abrams, January 30, 2012

Have you ever been loath to leave that perfect parking spot right in front of your apartment? Maybe you’ve even considered accidentally-on-purpose dragging that blue recycling bin into the street to deter future parkers. Or maybe you are that person who, in very deliberate disregard of the law, pulls two orange cones from your trunk and plops them in the middle of the spot. You’re not alone. The practice of ‘space saving’ is not unknown in Philadelphia, nor is it a banal one. It is in fact a hotly contested issue in many neighborhoods, and a group of space savers are using art to air their opinions with The Space Savers Project. The pieces neither condone nor condemn the practice, but seek to create a dialogue about new concepts of spatial use.

The Space Savers Project opened Friday at the Breadboard’s EKG Exhibition Space at the Science Center (3600 Market Street), where it will be on display until February 5. A group of ten artists created their own interpretations of space saving objects, which range from practical to political to playful. Piper Brett’s efficient space saver is comprised of laser cut neon Plexiglas, which folds neatly for easy assembly and storage. In contrast, Thomas Buildmore displays a 48” x 48” custom-designed orange road sign (think: “Road Work Ahead”), which boldly proclaims the message: “Today was pretty awesome!!” This sign moves away from practicality and uses the previously passive parking space to “cannibalize the symbols and language of road construction,” and perhaps bring a few smiles to otherwise frustrated parking spot searchers.

A couple of the artists reach toward childhood in creating their space savers. Christopher P. McManus likens the tension-filled quest for a parking space to the deadly conflict over another highly desirable item: Air Jordans. Inspired by the crimes Air Jordans provoked, McManus fashioned a large paper-mâché Air Jordan as a simultaneous “visual joke” and “grim threat”: as silly or absurd as space saving may appear, it’s a real practice that brings real tensions to neighborhoods. The father-son team of Brent and Oscar Wahl channel the same vein of thought with “MINE.” Constructed primarily from Tinkertoys and decorated with glitter, the piece points out that the possessive nature of space saving can be childish, but the urge to claim something as your own can be felt at any age.

One socially conscious artist, Linda Yun, used this opportunity to create something beneficial to the feline inhabitants of the neighborhood: a shelter for stray cats, complete with food, blankets, and litter. “Move Along/Please Stay” is, however, only “seemingly-generous.” Despite its elaborate construction and positive message, the artist admits it is still a selfish space saver.

Despite the differences in the artwork, viewers are continually asked to consider the compelling and pertinent question of private vs. public. Though the idea of saving a public parking space is a bit ridiculous, is it really that absurd to want a space of your own, a space of stability in the ever shifting landscape of urban streets?

Tags: breadboard, brent wahl, christopher p mcmanus, ekg exhibition space, linda yun, oscar wahl, philadelphia, piper brett, science center, space savers project, thomas buildmore
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Matthew Osborn's work at Projects Gallery

Post by Erica Minutella, January 23, 2012

In the late nineties, the television show Sliders envisioned a world where traveling through parallel universes would be as simple as flicking a remote control switch. While science may take a while to catch up with fiction, the imaginations of a few local artists have opened their own, much closer doorway into the unfamiliarly familiar.

At Lovely Things, the Bambi Gallery Pop Up Show on display at Projects Gallery through January 28, and curated by Candace Karch, the work of four artists – Jim Garvey, Matthew Osborn, Bonnie Brenda Scott, and Stacey Lee Webber – presents visitors with a meandering trip that strands them in uncharted territory.

Enter the doorway and you’ll be confronted with a room populated by creatures from a Jim Henson production gone wrong. Brought to life by Matthew Osborn, these cartoon monsters shift uncomfortably through their colorfully mundane confrontations with insomnia, boredom, and alcohol abuse. Stripped of the glamor of unreal circumstances, Osborn’s monsters are more likely to inspire pity than fear. At once amusing and quietly unsettling, his creations are also endearingly relatable.

A few steps into the next room will flip you back in time with thoughts of museum-dwelling pressed penny machines, as Philadelphia-based artist Stacey Lee Webber manipulates the traditional geometry of coins. Suspending them in shadow boxes or reworking them into tools, Webber draws attention back to the smallest denomination. While the childhood joy of turning a crank to flatten pennies was grounded in the act itself, Webber’s work draws audiences to the finished product, evoking unexpected shapes from an everyday object so often stripped of defining surfaces as it is passes from hand to hand.

Take a tangential trip downstairs to wind your way through an industrial maze of street art by Jim Garvey. Graffiti-spattered ladders hoist themselves up into the air like tattooed circus performers, juggling the identities of object and art in between flashes of a video installation on the back wall.

Resist the temptation to hold your breath as the back room plunges you into the darkened cosmos of Bonnie Brenda Scott. Skeletal remains crawl their way across the floor’s wasteland, providing an eerie accompaniment to a neon pink monster elevated on plastic crates. Prisms and giant hands, lined like images out of a palmistry textbook, illuminate the walls. Like the grownup rendition of a child’s room covered in glow-in-the-dark decals of the solar system, Scott’s installation presents an extra-dimensional, alchemical universe that might leave you in need of terrestrial reorientation.

Take a spin around Lovely Things before the show closes this Saturday.

Tags: bambi gallery, bonnie brenda scott, jim garvey, matthew osborn, projects gallery, stacey lee webber
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Cono Norte (Los Olivos) 2011. Photo from gluciadelapuente.com.

Post by Laurens Dhaenens, January 18, 2012

Using diverse strategies and materials, spanning from the installation of light filters and translucent materials to the use of photography, Brazilian artist Lucia Koch critically dissects the issues of space. Introducing subtle alternations in private and public spaces, she questions what constitutes a space, how we create it, and how we live within it. Working in situ, the artist departs from the particularity of a location to reshape its experience and open up new perspectives on its structures and functions. However, in her site-specific interventions the original space always remains legible. Koch modifies a space without erasing its singularity. As such, her work simultaneously locates the viewer both inside and outside a space—in an ambiguous position, which generates a critical attitude toward architecture and its effects.

Lucia Koch’s exhibition at Lucía de la Puente, Un Tour, was centered around/on a wall. Characterized by its irregular curved form, its undulating surface, and its brown color, the wall articulated the antithesis to the rational architecture of the gallery. Diagonally installed, it distorted the spatial unity of the room and obliged the visitors to make ‘un tour’ in what is normally an open, surveyable space. By altering the gallery space and choreographing the visitors’ movement, Koch’s exhibition articulated a critical exploration of the significance of the gallery as a physical space and as a defining context.

Koch’s wall created two spaces, both marked by the conflict between the geometric architecture of the gallery and the organic design of the wall. In the first space the gallery context disappeared in favor of the physical space. The wall did not appear as an object but as an element emphasizing the spatial structure of the gallery. In the second space, however, the gallery context prevailed due to the presence of a photograph of the interior of a coffee package, enlarged to an architectural scale (Café extra-forte, 2011). The wall no longer appeared as a structural element; instead, it appeared as a sculpture, reflecting the qualities of borders, separations, and divisions—or what could be called the aesthetics of walls. Consequently, instead of simply contrasting ‘the white cube,’ the wall created two dialoguing rooms, which both, in turn, challenged the experience of the gallery with the presence and absence of objects.

If the wall altered the space structurally, the photograph Café extra-forte transformed it illusorily. Yet both evoked the expansion of space beyond the visual and physical borders surrounding us. The wall was perforated but not transparent; thus it incorporated the presence of the other side without making it visually accessible. Similarly, the photograph virtually expanded the room only to impose yet another border. Through this process of creating and denying spaces, Lucia Koch emphasizes the surface of walls as an element of communication between the inside and the outside, the internal and the external—a motive that also returns in her photographic series Cono Norte (2011).

Café extra-forte prefaced the four photographs exhibited in the last room of the gallery. Produced during the artist’s travels through el Cono Norte, the northern district of Lima, this series reflects her impressions of the regional architecture. Each photo exposes the interior of a box, marked by cuts, and in some cases, colors. Parallel to her series of Amostras de Arquitetura, they represent specific architectural spaces on a miniature scale. Whereas most of the photos only display basic interiors, such as Los Olivos, 2011, others have more elaborate designs, such as San Martin de Porres, 2011. Through their differences, the photographs demonstrate the heterogeneity of the architecture of the region. Heavily influenced by a massive rural urban migration and a decade of intense economic activity, el Cono Norte is marked by a persistent conflict between center and the periphery, wealth and poverty. As one of the most populated areas of Peru, its architectural landscape is in a state of flux. Koch expresses the transitoriness inherent to this situation with the use of cardboard boxes. In the photograph San Martin de Porres, 2011, this material yields a beautiful confrontation with the elegant design, making explicit the coexistence of divergent realities within this zone.

Although Lucia Koch’s work incessantly suggests the endless expansion of space, it stops short of actually showing what lies beyond the sphere of the interior. Only vague impressions of the outside penetrate the cut out windows in the Cono Norte series. Nonetheless, far from recovering the interior at the expense of the exterior, Koch focuses on the borders and transitions between the inside and the outside through her ongoing interest in windows, walls, and other visual filters. Empty and thus reduced to their structure, the interiors render a direct confrontation with spatial limitations that continuously surround us all. Going further still, each one being unique, they also represent intimate personal spaces which, uncovered, expose barriers between you and the other.

Tags: cono norte, galeria lucia de la puente, lucia koch, un tour
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Email culprit number two: Martin Dillon from the UK. Like any good thief, he uses multiple aliases: dillon_m2mm@yahoo.co.uk, bijmoi@yahoo.com.uk, and bijmoi@yahoo.com.ca, among others.

Find a list of other names to look out for here.

Do you know of a scam you’d like to report? Send it to erica@inliquid.org and we’ll be happy to post it to the blog under the new Art Scams section, which you can find by clicking on “Categories” at the left-hand side of the screen.

Find more helpful tips for avoiding scams:
artscams.com

If you’ve already been the victim of a scam, find a roundup of steps you can take here.

 The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3):
www.ic3.gov

Tags: art scams, martin dillon, scam email
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If you happen to receive an email from a Mike Walter, using the email address sgtmikewalter@gmail.com, be warned, it is a scam.

The body of the email may look something like this:

Two of the biggest red flags in this email? The abundance of typos and the fact that it comes from a free email client.

Thanks to Marc Salz and Favi Dubo for the tip-off.

Do you know of a scam you’d like to report? Send it to erica@inliquid.org and we’ll be happy to post it to the blog under the new Art Scams section, which you can find by clicking on “Categories” at the left-hand side of the screen.

Find more helpful tips for avoiding scams:
artscams.com

If you’ve already been the victim of a scam, find a roundup of steps you can take here.

 The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3):
www.ic3.gov

Tags: art scam, mike walter, sgtmikewalter@gmail.com
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Photo from Jay Hardman's "Unsustainable," courtesy of Space 1026.

Post by Leah Abrams, January 11, 2012

Friday night, I walked off Arch Street into Space 1026 and felt almost as if I were entering a birthday party – a crowd of exuberant people, bright and happy voices, and the omnipresent smell of birthday cake. The event was in fact the opening of Jay Hardman’s Unsustainable.

The exhibition features ten pieces from the artist, including photography, the most intriguing perhaps being “Michigan” - a scaled model of a construction site, several feet long, and fashioned predominantly from cake and frosting. The cake is carved into a striking simulation of the messy, ripped-up topography of a construction site with miniature details, such as fencing, added for context. A contractor in the construction industry, Hardman draws from this experience, but says his exploration really began with the concept of a piece of paper being a plane for creation, which led to an interest in how cake tops were used as surfaces for creating artwork. The earliest cake piece in the show, “Justin Loves Fire Trucks,” from 2005, is a small, round cake topped with tiny red fire trucks. This early sculpture is endearing and gently amusing, a contrast to the more serious “Michigan,” which presents a snapshot of seeming destruction.

However, Hardman does not see “Michigan” as being a negative statement, but a neutral one. He views construction as a natural cycle of replacing old with new.

“When things get old, they need to be fixed or it’s time to start over,” Hardman says. “It’s an organic process.”

Rather than viewing buildings as sterile or disconnected from human experience, he hopes in his work to “personify buildings and dwellings as significant extensions of the body.” What happens tangibly in a neighborhood also happens socially; there is a parallel cycle of decay and renewal.

In addition to his cake sculptures, Hardman creates sculptures in the miniature using craft supplies and real construction site materials. He believes that the different mediums he uses create “different points of entry for different people.” Some people respond more strongly to the use of cake, others connect to the miniature scaled objects.

Tags: first friday, jay hardman, space 1026, unsustainable
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"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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