Troy Night Out

OK, the weather has put a crimp in my ambitious plan for today to go see several shows in Troy and report on them in time for tonight's Troy Night Out. Instead, a short plug for two of the venues involved:

John Connors, one of my favorite local artists, has a solo of his lyrical Trojan watercolor drawings at Clement Art Gallery (example shown above). This is a show certain to bring joy to all who view it, and John is fun at a party, so go tonight if you can. Click if you want to see my 2009 review of his last solo show at Clement.

Also well worth checking out are two exhibitions at the Arts Center of the Capital Region, both of which opened last month; Vignette, curated by Nadine Wasserman, runs through March 20, and I expect to post a review of it here before then - but Andrea Hersh's Flora & Fauna (example shown below) ends Saturday, so see it now or forever wonder what you missed.

Enjoy the snow!

Carrie Will: I Am Redundant

The photographer Carrie Will has made her presence known in recent years with pictures in several regional juried shows - now a solo exhibition at Siena College’s Yates Gallery offers the first local opportunity to look at a full body of her work. Presented in a diaristic mode, I Am Redundant includes 13 medium-sized color prints, all of which are double self-portraits. That is, Will is an identical twin, and the portraits are of her sister and herself (you can see her portfolio by clicking here).

Tagged with the quote “I am redundant, half of a whole, a freak, identical and lucky,” the collection belies this statement by demonstrating (perhaps without intending to) that the two sisters are in fact not quite physically identical, and that each has a distinctly different personal presence.

This contrast is most apparent in the image titled Williamsburg, where the two sit in a gritty outdoor part of New York City, facing the camera. Rikki, the darker sister identifiable from the show’s first picture, which sorts them out by shirt color, slumps miserably, while the brighter Carrie holds herself up firmly and optimistically.

These pictures may be total fictions – it’s hard to tell. Do the young women come from a privileged home (like Tina barney, a photographer this work recalls), or are images such as the one taken in a sumptuous and multi-arched “Dining Room” made in other people’s spaces? It doesn’t really matter – these are the kinds of questions the genre prefers to ask rather than answer.

What appears to be real, however, is the intense relationship between the two sisters. In several of the pictures, they are locked in an intense embrace. One wonders whether Rikki is also an artist; or if Carrie, who is an artist, is actually the better adjusted twin. Is she supporting the emotional struggles of the seemingly troubled Rikki?

I’ve never been a big fan of the storytelling, girls-playing-dress-up style of photography that has been so popular since Cindy Sherman's heyday, but Will brings a deft touch to the category with her refined sense of color and form, and her understated ironies.

Please forgive the late notice, as there is only about a week left to see this show – it ends on March 4 - but it's worth a look if you can fit it in.

Rating: Recommended

Objects of Wonder & Delight at The Hyde Collection

Walt Kuhn Dancing Pears, 1924, oil on canvas, 12 x 15 in.

The Hyde Collection has broken with tradition by bringing a crowd-pleasing show to Glens Falls in the middle of a harsh winter. Objects of Wonder & Delight: Four Centuries of Still Life from the Norton Museum of Art may not be summer blockbuster material, but it comes darn close, with a galaxy’s worth of major-name artists’ work wrapped around an underwhelming premise in an intriguing way.

Organized by the Norton (which is in West Palm Beach, Fla., and where Hyde director David Setford once worked), this touring show both fulfills expectations and challenges them. Part of the strategy involves subthemes that allow for a free flow of groupings and interactions among the works. For example, in the section titled From the Garden: Fruits and Vegetables, tabletop still lifes mingle with figurative interiors and landscape-ish exteriors.

Here, the staff of the Hyde has excelled in clever arrangements and juxtapositions that make the whole enterprise much more lively than the topic natura morta ought to promise. But, then again, just look at what they had to work with. The selection of 51 pieces (including three-dimensional works and several functional or decorative objects) bristles with creative brilliance.

Making a list of standouts, I ran out of room on my notepad: Matisse, Picasso, Chagall, Courbet, O’Keeffe, Demuth, Lichtenstein, Avery, and Severini number among the 20th-century painters with significant pieces here. Photography is also well represented, most importantly by two Edwards (Steichen and Weston), along with important predecessors, contemporaries, and followers – including Baron Adolph De Meyer, Ralph Steiner, Dorothy Norman, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Lilo Raymond.

The sculptural surprises include an oversized felt suit by Joseph Beuys, a miniature townhouse by the British Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, and a marvelously wrought wooden skeleton of a grouper fish by Fumio Yoshimura. This is not your Dutch uncle’s still life – but, don’t worry, there are enough Flemish paintings here to satisfy him, too. In fact, these provide some of the show’s nicest moments, such as the Jesuit painter Daniel Seghers’ undated oil on canvas depicting a luminescent garland of flowers (explained on the label as representing painting as a form of religious contemplation), and the nicely conjured trio of William Harnett’s Bachelor’s Table (1880), Christiaen Striep’s classic still life (about 1665), and a Chinese Imperial carved wood panel from the Qing dynasty (1736-1795).

But, ultimately, Objects of Wonder & Delight really earns its stripes through individual masterpieces. Starting with a large Robert Delaunay from 1916, its objects radiating colorfully striped auras, the show grabs you by the eyes and never lets go. The O’Keeffe, a white cow’s pelvis floating in a brilliant blue sky above a low Southwestern landscape, is gorgeous; one of the Matisses is also arguably a landscape - a fabulous seaside one featuring two beached rays; and a 17th-century trompe l’oeil by Jacobus Biltius is a masterful and darkly humorous example of the genre.

Almost mirroring the Matisse is a Surrealist-tinged painting from 1945 that also features rotting fish, by the Japanese-American Yasuo Kuniyoshi – fortunately, though they’re not hung together, it’s possible to view them simultaneously from a certain vantage point. Another treasure, the Courbet, shows that great art can be made while languishing in prison – and by contrasting the temptations of accessible fruits with those of an inaccessible forest.

Among all this glory, my favorite picture in the show is a relatively small and unassuming one by the German Expressionist Max Beckmann – probably not an artist you think of as painting still life at all. But here is his signature black-outline style gracing a two-foot-square canvas with a spray of irises and a few unlit candlesticks. The painting was made just a couple of years before his death, and you feel that he senses it coming, but you also feel in the colors how fiercely he defies it. Still alive!

Rating: Must See

Channing Lefebvre at Clement Gallery

The artist Channing Lefebvre has assembled an exquisite collection of minimally altered ephemera appropriately presented under the title Appreciations: Fine Printed and Handmade Paper Collages, which I saw at Clement Art Gallery during last week's Troy Night Out.

Lefebvre's process is not unlike that of a curator, or perhaps even a photographer, whose intention is to direct our attention to the delights they have discovered, as opposed to the attention-getting tricks of an artist whose primary goal is self-expression. A printer by trade, he draws from a vast personal collection of printed material, ranging from antique lithographed catalog pages to contemporary hand-marbled Florentine paper, which he carefully arranges in very simple rectangular collages.

The show contains about two dozen of these, matted and clip-framed, all the same small size (maybe 5 by 8 inches each), and arranged around one much larger framed piece. Many more of the small ones are available to peruse by flipping through them in a display bin.

Lefebvre has always had a light touch in most of his work, which over the decades has included simplified landscapes, color-field paintings, more elaborate collages, fetishistic three-dimensional objects, calligraphic abstractions, and – most recently – systematically hatched abstract drawings. But this body of work shows the lightest touch of all, with many of the pieces combining as few as two elements in simple overlays. These “appreciations” could also be called observations – he has seen what happens when two or more shapes or patterns are combined, and is sharing that with us.

The centerpiece of the show, however, goes far beyond this approach, to produce what could arguably be called a full-fledged work of original expression, though it, too, is comprised entirely of cut-and-pasted swatches of other people’s designs. The chaotic collision of colors and patterns that occurs in that piece transcends anything the source prints’ creators likely would have envisioned. I found the effect totally gratifying (its hallucinatory quality is reflected in the far simpler piece reproduced at the top of this post).

Lefebvre had a large collection of drawings in a group show at Albany Center Gallery two years ago (you can read my very short review of it here), but he hasn't had a solo exhibition locally in quite a bit longer than that. This subtle presentation will not be for everybody, especially those who demand that their artists demonstrate specialized or arduous techniques, but it will grow on those who give it a proper chance (it's there through Feb. 24).

Rating: Recommended

Here comes Oscar

Jennifer Lawrence (with young co-star) in Winter's Bone

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a long time know that I very occasionally weigh in on movies - and the recent Oscar nominations provide a ready excuse to look back at the rather weak year that 2010 was for the filmic medium.

Year Two of having 10 Best Picture nominees (up from the traditional five) shows what a problem that number can cause under such circumstances - my own record of films seen in 2010 barely includes 10 films at all, and most of those were not Best-Picture-Oscar worthy in my opinion. Still, six of them have been nominated for Best Picture, so I can comment on those - and having not seen the other four won't stop me commenting on some of them as well.

I will start with those I've seen, in descending order of my rating, then go on to explain why I haven't seen the others (yet).

1. Winter's Bone - Nice that it got nominated, since it was by far the best film of the year. An intensely good story, incredibly well told (and beautifully photographed). I also think the unaffected and mesmerizing Jennifer Lawrence deserves the Best Actress statuette, but it's likely the Academy will consider her nomination to be the prize, and award the Oscar to someone more famous.
2. The King's Speech - Like Winter's Bone, I loved this film and gave it my highest rating (4 stars). But the fact that such a modestly styled and historical presentation grabbed 12 nominations really underscores what a weak field we're considering. Firth and Rush together made this movie an extraordinary experience - if the world were just, they would share the Best Actor award.
3. True Grit - OK, we're down to my 3.5-star rating here, which ain't bad, but it's only No. 3 on the list! Coen Brothers darkness tinges a rollicking Western with a couple of hoot-worthy characters played by Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld. Both are terrific, but the kid is totally awesome. An incredible discovery. I enjoyed the film heartily, and wished I had popcorn to munch throughout.
4. The Social Network - No surprise that this got a lot of noms, as it's got a super-relevant topic and very snappy dialogue by Aaron Sorkin. I gave it 3.5 stars, but ultimately found it less memorable than those listed above.
5. The Fighter - An unoriginal story presented in a slightly novel way, with very, very good acting that elevated this film to a 3-star rating. I always expect greatness from Christian Bale, and here he comes close to the mind-bending tour-de-force that he accomplished in The Machinist (look it up, and Jennifer Jason Leigh is just as good). Melissa Leo was better in Frozen River; Mark Wahlberg may have been overlooked here.
6. Inception - OK, the Academy gave like a hundred nominations to Titanic, so nothing surprises me anymore. This was a boring action film disguised as an intellectual thriller, starring CGI (and some actual people who did nothing to distinguish themselves, unless you count delivering laughably stupid dialogue with a straight face). I only gave it 2 stars, which means I wouldn't recommend you waste the time to see it.

Now, for the Best Picture-nominated films I haven't seen, in the order I may see them in:

1. Black Swan - I have shied away from this film, despite having loved Darren Aronofsky's previous work, because I'm worried that the crazy ballerina character (seen in photo above at right) will give me unpleasant flashbacks to a couple of past girlfriends. Also, the mixed reviews. But I may buck up my courage and catch it while it's still in the theater. One more thing - am I the only person who's sick and tired of Natalie Portman already?
2. The Kids Are All Right - Gets points for correct spelling of alright. Lots of people have urged me to see this film, and I like the actors just fine. But, a long time ago, lots of people urged me to see a Lisa Cholodenko film called High Art, and it also had some pretty good actors in it, but it was so horrbly written that I shut it off after 45 minutes. Finding this available from the library will probably take several months, but maybe some day I'll see it and find out that this time they were right.
3. Toy Story 3 - Predecessors were wonderful, and this probably is, too. Didn't see it because I'm old and don't have kids. Also, it sort of bothers me that it has grossed $415 million to just $6.3 million for Winter's Bone. Could it possibly be 65 times more worthwhile?
4. 127 Hours - Didn't go because I don't crave such a harrowing experience. Probably won't ever crave such a harrowing experience. Also, I get the impression that the guy James Franco plays is so arrogant that half the audience is glad he has to cut off his arm. Yeeeesh!

Overlooked: Babies. I can't understand why this French-made documentary isn't nominated in its category. Of the five feature-length documentary nominees, I've only seen one - Restrepo - and it was amateurish in comparison to the lyrical, beautiful, nearly wordless human nature film Babies. See it and be charmed by who we are.

Colin Firth, Helena Bonham Carter and Geoffrey Rush in The King's Speech

The World According to Willie

Willie Marlowe: A Survey 1977-2010 has opened at Sage College of Albany's Opalka Gallery; there will be an artist's reception there on 1st Friday, Feb. 4, from 5-9 p.m.

I've seen the exhibition, and it is exquisite. But, because I was commissioned to write an essay for the show's catalog (which also contains an essay by E. Tornai Thyssen), I won't be writing a review. Instead, below are a few key images from the show, along with the text of my essay. Naturally, I highly recommend you go see this wonderful work.

Hot Coals and Feather Moon 2009 mixed media on paper 13.5" x 21"

The World According to Willie

It’s been almost 30 years since I first met Willie Marlowe, but she never ceases to amaze me. Demurely Southern, with a deliciously acerbic undertone, Marlowe is quiet but frank, extremely reliable, and remarkably committed to her work. For the many years she taught at Sage, she was also strongly committed to the students – but there was never any doubt that painting came first, clearly manifested in a relentlessly constant studio practice, which in turn set a fine example for her devoted students to follow.

I see Marlowe as having had two sides all these years: The single-minded painter isolated in her studio, continuously bringing mountains of rich artwork to life; and the joyful, attentive friend, teacher, and collaborator who issued a steady stream of letters (and, after a certain date, e-mails) as well as mail-art pieces and curatorial projects, all bearing unparalleled enthusiasm for other artists’ activities. She is that increasingly rare person who always picks up the phone if you dial her number. Yes, she’s home in the studio painting feverishly and, of course, she has time to talk.

Painters do work in isolation – it’s a necessity – and, as with all good painters, Marlowe’s work is truly a world unto itself. With the majority of her pieces being small and jewel-like, suggestive but usually abstract, and created with non-traditional techniques, it would be easy to think that they represent a primarily inward-looking process. However, that would be a grave misapprehension. In fact, Marlowe’s work is deeply informed by the world around her, and particularly by her travels.

A brilliant colorist, Marlowe added black to her palette after stints as a visiting artist in Barbados in 1986 and the Yucatan Peninsula in 1993, where she experienced the sudden drops to nightfall typical of places near the equator. The vivifying effect of black on the other colors she employs recalls for me another favorite painter, Henri Matisse. Caribbean influence also appears in the lushly lit and exotically populated underwater gardens of many of her paintings made in that period and since. And a longtime theme of houses took on new flavor with the hurricane-threatened shacks of another series that came out of those island visits.

Adding to the Mayan-inspired ziggurats and labyrinths that have always fascinated Marlowe (and which show up in tantalizing concrete poetry pieces as well as recent digital paintings), trips to Ireland in 1997, 2001, and 2005 brought ancient stone monoliths into her daily vocabulary. They found good company there with Marlowe’s various references to cave paintings, calligraphy, architecture, and historic maps. And then there’s Venice, which she visited in 1984 and 1989 and then returned to in 2006, 2008, and 2010 for artist’s residencies.

As a source for Marlowe’s dazzlingly layered and transparent colors, Venice is almost too obvious. The sun glinting off the water, the fresh and weathered colors of the houses and palazzos, and the mesmerizing glass, born in fire, all fit Marlowe’s vision like a glove (one 2010 example, titled Glass Games, is shown above at right). Recent years have found her spending longer and longer stints in that magical island city, where incidental facts of life such as the absence of cars and the presence of cats resonate with the Willie Marlowe I have always known, and where she clearly comes alive in new ways.

The work inspired by her stays in Venice is perhaps most meaningfully captured in Marlowe’s use of portals. The city has countless covered passageways, doors, and windows that suggest these arched entries into and out of the paintings. While her work has always been given to structure, the more recent Venice paintings take on new aspects of architectural rigor, sometimes flattened into pre-Renaissance perspective, other times opened into multiple dimensions. Stage-like spaces are often suggested as well, wherein Marlowe’s biomorphic figures dance and swirl, a connecting element through most of her work, whether painted, constructed or collaged, whether brightly colored or in black and white, whether shiny, flat or textured. These gestural forms represent life, ideas, dreams, poetry, fabric and glass – everything that embodies the precious elements of Willie’s world.

Stepping into that world through any of the many entries she offers gives the viewer of a Marlowe painting or series a new experience, belying the deeply historic sources that inform it. Ultimately, it is this freshness, inexplicably available to the painter in her studio over decades of constant effort, that makes the work irresistible. Equally, the artist’s rigorous attention to detail, masterful technique, and commitment to a personal vision make it lasting – and important.

David Brickman, October 2010

Wingspan 2010 modular installation, acrylic on paper mounted on wood panels, 80" x 110"

The Jewel Thief at the Tang Teaching Museum

Think what it would be like if you had a friend with a really wild modern art collection, and you were invited to hang out for a while in their home gallery. Now imagine that the living room/gallery is more of a playground, built on a giant scale, with a soaring ceiling, broad swaths of bright colors and shapes on the walls and floors, a series of huge blocks marching through the middle of it, and viewing stands of varying heights from which to take it all in.

This Alice-in-Wonderland scenario is what it’s like to experience The Jewel Thief, organized by Skidmore College’s Tang Teaching Museum curator Ian Berry in collaboration with Yale University administrator and sculptor Jessica Stockholder. Publicity for the show aptly describes it as “immersive” and it’s true that one can feel a bit like they’re drowning in a sea of so much art; also describing it as experimental, the show’s organizers clearly want to lead viewers into a place where they can experience abstract art in a new way.

The more than 100 works in the exhibition by 60 or so artists include a significant number from the Tang’s permanent collection, while the rest were borrowed from artists, collectors and commercial galleries; some of those were designed and installed specifically for this show. Almost every common medium is abundantly present: painting, drawing, sculpture, and textiles, as well as decorative media such as wallpaper, furniture, and light fixtures. Printmaking is represented by just a handful of items, and photography is entirely absent (unless you count the one color photograph by Anne Delaporte, which is entirely covered in gold leaf and therefore invisible).

The historical sweep of the show is also broad, with at least one piece from every decade going back to the 1950s – but it is by no means a survey (nor intends to be), and the great majority of the works date from 2000 or later. The show is perhaps best summed up as an amusement park designed by two connoisseurs of abstract art who had access to tons of great material and could think of nothing more fun to do than to present it all to the rest of us in a fresh way.

This is accomplished by various stratagems. Take those blocks, for instance. As you approach the Tang’s main gallery from the museum’s entrance, you confront the first of them: a 13-foot cube painted on most of two sides in camouflage (following instructions by Jim Hodges), it shares dominion over the space with a large, permanent staircase, a temporary structure of metal bleachers (one of the show’s viewing platforms), and a seating group by the artist James Hyde. One has room to move around the cube, and is free to climb either staircase for a view from above, but the siting of it sends an immediate message that this is a show that may mess with your perceptions – or your preconceptions.

If, like me, you should choose to squeeze past one corner of the big cube toward the gallery entry (not birth-canal tight, but suggestive enough), you would find that entrance somewhat blocked by a second cube 10 feet high, which, like the other, is festooned with art (a surprisingly great many pieces in this case). Several other blocks follow in an angled line through the big room, ending in one just two-feet cubed, with a single small sculpture perched upon it (and too low for my middle-aged back’s comfort).

Once inside the room, you begin to discover other curiosities about the installation. A large wooden platform fills one corner, with a series of colorful and sharp-angled other platforms of varied heights stepping up to it. This, you soon learn from the helpful staff, is a sculpture by Stockholder – and, yes, you are expected to walk on it if you wish. A couple of other sculptures sit upon it already, which surprised me at first, but it is not the only instance in the show of one person’s art being mounted atop another person’s.

The rest of the room features different kinds of floor and wall treatments, from a Batcave-like space created by Liz Larner to cradle some of her porcelain works (and, no, you are not expected to enter it) to the aforementioned swatches of bright geometry on walls and floor. Pictures are hung salon-style throughout the room, in lines and groups and crowds that sometimes go up quite high. This is true outside the main gallery as well, and that’s where the scaffolds and steps come in so handy. (Mental note: I must try to remember to bring a step ladder to the next big museum show I visit.)

A printed guide with color thumbnails and identifying information for each artwork accompanies the show (which, wisely, has no labels), resulting in a treasure-hunt atmosphere for those who pick it up. This became a big part of the fun, because, believe me, not every work of art was immediately easy to spot. Also, as it turned out on my visit, the last page of the guide had become (temporarily?) obsolete, as several works had been removed from an upper “bridge” in the museum to make way for a new show’s installation. My guess is that they will be replaced after the upstairs exhibition’s packing crates are safely out of transit.

You may have noticed that I am not saying much about the specific artworks in The Jewel Thief. This is not because they are unworthy of comment – indeed, there are many wonderful works on view, by people most of us already know about (examples include Andy Warhol and Joan Mitchell) to folks I’ve seen in other Tang exhibits (such as John Torreano and Allan McCollum) to relative unknowns, and even a couple of locally shown artists (Victoria Palermo and Christopher Harvey). Some of these artists are represented by just one piece, while a few have as many as five or more on view – but in any case, this is a show that seems meant to be perceived as greater than the sum of its parts, and it makes the parts themselves seem relatively undeserving of specific comment.

Now, smarter people than me have addressed the issue of curator vs. artist for a good long time, and I don’t expect to add much to that discussion here. In fact, I think there was a panel discussion about that subject presented last fall as part of the programming around The Jewel Thief (the show opened in late September). So, suffice it to say that this show brings the issue up – big time.

I have to wonder: Do any of the artists in the exhibition feel used? Or do they feel exalted by inclusion in such an important and interesting event? I suppose some artists have smaller egos and are genuinely happy to be part of the greater whole (after all, whether they like it or not, they are merely a part of the contemporary scene, and an even smaller part of the whole history of art and culture). But I also suspect that a lot of artists, known to have big (and sometimes quite fragile) egos, may be feeling vaguely bad about it. Not as bad, perhaps, as those left out, but still …

All that arguing aside, make no mistake - The Jewel Thief is a heck of a fine exhibition, with a ton of really beautiful drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations, etc. in it. You have until Feb. 27 to take it in – be prepared, once might not be enough.

Rating: Must See

Photographs by Arthur Evans, provided by the Tang