The October First Friday seemed to be shaping up as a disappointment as I scanned through the list of openings. Several venues were showing the same work they had in September, and it looked as if it might be difficult to find shows worth writing about. I couldn’t even review the show Arts Incubator, which normally has solid work, because they had a group show featuring several people I know. It seemed I would have to venture off the beaten path to find some shows to review, and almost every time I’ve ventured out of the way to check out a new space, it has not been worth the effort. (I’m looking at you, Mutant Chaos Gallery. I had high hopes for such a wacky name, but you didn’t live up to it.) I picked some galleries that were not too far out of the way, and luckily my first pick, the Frontspace Gallery, yielded a good result.
Lindsay Deifik at the Frontspace Gallery
Being a printmaker myself, I really enjoy Lindsay Deifik’s show at the Frontspace Gallery because she moves the medium beyond simply making prints. That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with creating straight printed artwork at all, but the printmaking techniques really lend themselves to becoming something more than just a two dimensional work, and she is working with some really fresh ideas in this area.
Her show features a series of printed images that resemble the grids of injection-molded plastic components that come with model plane kits. They appear to be printed in either relief or collograph, and are printed on a very thick paper which is cut out, leaving only the printed area of the paper remaining to create a somewhat three-dimensional object with the print. I detect a reference to mass production and modern consumer society in how all the objects are presented because they are all printed together at once and look ready to punch out for use, but that if you did punch them out they would be quickly disposed of.
There are many different objects in each cluster, and where I start to get a little lost is in trying to figure out why she decided to include the objects she did in the prints. The lime green print seems to have the most thematically unified selection of objects, consisting of many items related to arts and culture in some way, but the rest of the objects are weapons, toys, house wares, sporting goods, and a random assemblage of knick-knack items. If there is a connection between all of these things, I’m not able to discern it.
What takes her prints to another level is that these printed forms can be folded up into house structures. Again, the perceived randomness of the images doesn’t enhance the structures at all, but the modular living quarters they create seem to go along with the sense of mass production I get from seeing the full prints on the wall. And even though the forms are not that extraordinary, just the idea of taking a printed image and being able to fold it into a structural form is compelling in itself.
She also has a nicely crafted hand-made book on display that incorporates the same type of prints and imagery seen in the rest of the show. Two rifles can be seen through openings in the felt cover, and cut out printed images are layered through the pages to create interesting multi-layered compositions, but again the mysteriousness of these images leaves me wondering what it all means.
Overall it’s a good show and I was glad to see it. I think Deifik has some good ideas cooking and that they can eventually result in some great things. The book is excellently made and Lindsay’s precision in creating and cutting out her prints is superb. One thing that would help the work would be to figure out a better presentation method of the full prints than just sticking them to the wall. Fixing them to a mat or pressing them between glass would keep the small pieces from sticking out or sagging, and give the print a more solid appearance as an object. Another option could be to print on a more rigid material. This would help the house structures look a bit more convincing and solid because the fragile nature of the cut paper makes them look a little shaky.
The other thing that would really help this show is an artist statement. I’m not one to say that all shows should have statements posted, but in this case it could be the key that lets the viewer know where she is coming from and what all this imagery is supposed to make us think. The best way of doing this would probably be in the book. Some text incorporated into the pages of the book could have provided a deeper look into some of the ideas and meaning behind the images, and been the perfect way to help the viewer make sense of the work without having to post a statement on the wall.
Kelly Porter at the Blue Gallery
There are three terms that are essential in describing Kelly Porter’s show at the Blue Gallery: chunky, clustered, and hodge-podge.
The term chunky is in reference to how her work feels visually because of her mark-making. Occasionally using flat planes of color, most of her work is dominated by very large, bold marks that appear exactly as they were applied in the final piece. It is a very raw effect, and with so many large brushstrokes and marks applied with the same unvarying pressure, the work feels very bulky. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, in some cases it works very well, but in many pieces Porter runs dangerously close to bogging down the composition with marks that are too visually repetitive. The lack of variety in marks eliminates many of the smaller focal points that finer brushwork can create throughout the piece, resulting in limited eye-movement, and ultimately making the work uninteresting to look at.
However, most of her pieces manage to avoid completely falling victim to this problem through the use of what I call “clustering.” While it is more typical to create visual interest and eye movement through varied line quality and color use, Porter creates a visual flow by swirling and layering dense marks in certain areas and leaving other areas less worked. Essentially, it mimics what using a smaller brush would do, but through different means. Some finer line work or color contrast would still help in most cases, but her method of clustering marks is enough to create some eye movement and a bit of depth within the dominantly bulky marks she uses.
And I feel the term hodge-podge accurately describes everything about Porter’s style and the show. All the pieces in the show are an eclectic mix of results achieved through a similar style of frenetically mashing paint and other materials onto the canvas or paper. Some compositions come out complex, others come out static. Some pieces are pure paintings, and some are mixed media. The style is even similar to a number of artists all jumbled together. Off the top of my head I can see similarities to painters such as Klimt, Matisse, Dufy, Dubuffet, Hofmann, and de Kooning, all jumbled together in varying mixtures.
The most interesting results tend to be in the mixed media pieces because Porter’s style of working lets the marks stand out as they are, and in a piece with multiple materials this creates another aspect of variation and depth that gives the viewer more to digest.
On the whole I find Porter’s style of working very hit or miss, and the pieces that hit are the ones that have more variation in the marks, more complex compositions, and a more diverse use of color. Without these elements you end up with some colored blobs and no dynamic focal points to engage you in the work.
BEST IN SHOW- Christopher Leitch at the Leedy-Voulkos
I’m selecting Christopher Leitch’s show at the Leedy-Voulkos as the best of the October First Friday not because of technical skill, but because his show truly made me feel something. It’s rare that a show makes me surprised by how strongly I react to it, and Leitch was able to evoke this from me simply by scribbling on the walls in crayon. But my liking of the show may have been amplified by the fact that the first two pieces of it I saw were terrible.
On entering the space, there are two small framed watercolor and crayon pieces about 8” by 10”, and they literally look like a grade-schooler did them. Even if that is what Leitch was attempting to achieve, it has no redeeming qualities, and I was horrified to be seeing this in a space with the reputation that the Leedy-Voulkos has. But luckily there were only four of these abominations in the show and I completely forgot about them when I saw the rest of the installation.
Leitch’s show is titled “Blessings: Answers to Prayers,” and I must say he made some brilliant choices in how to portray images related to this idea. The downfall of the framed pieces is that they are too solid, too concrete, and too small to represent an idea such as a blessing or a prayer. It works infinitely better in the pieces he scribbles some swirling lines on the wall like a gesture of smoke rising into the sky.
Drawing directly on the wall makes the lines feel much more fleeting and impermanent, as if the shape of an actual blessing was burned in your retina just long enough to know what it looked like, and you recorded it by tracing its outline on the wall before it disappeared. What’s funny is that the forms he scribbled on the wall look almost exactly like something from my childhood. Every week in church we sang a song that contained the line “from whom all blessings flow,” and every week while singing that line I got a mental image of something that looked almost exactly like what Leitch drew on the wall. It is an idea of non-verbal communication with nobody, and he nailed it perfectly.
The other part of the show was also excellently done in terms of material choice. Along the wall pieces of white silky-looking fabric are suspended from the wall with different markings on them. In a way they resemble Tibetan prayer flags in a way. Some of the markings are similar to the crayon scribbling on the walls, and others were more similar to rudimentary Asian characters. The markings are not so compelling in themselves, but the way in which they are presented makes them seem weightless and impermanent enough that I feel as if I can form a meaning to them. It’s as if they are floating in my own consciousness, and I’m not supposed to know exactly what they mean because they are produced by a force that is beyond my comprehension. I have seen a lot of art that deals with ideas rooted in spirituality, but this show is perhaps the most effective one I have ever seen in terms of capturing the sensation of spiritual experiences.
I should also say that Leitch’s show is not the type of work I typically enjoy. It is more common for artists to lean on devices such as abstraction and simplicity as an easy way out, claiming that it represents their idea when really they just don’t want to work very hard. But in this case these devices were used very effectively, and because of this rare occurrence I’m going to grant Christopher Leitch with the best in show title for October, 2010. His website can be viewed here.
Hung Liu at the Byron C. Cohen Gallery
I don’t have much to say about Hung Liu’s show at the Byron C. Cohen Gallery, because there’s absolutely nothing to dispute about it. She is a modern master and has been making amazing paintings about twice as long as I’ve been alive. You just can’t mess with that.
I happen to know a bit about Asian art, which is helpful in appreciating her work because she creates an interesting blend of modern art and traditional Asian painting. In the lower level of the gallery are several paintings that juxtapose the plight of avian bird flu and SARS in modern China alongside traditional style paintings of birds and nature scenes. From my perspective I see these paintings as a statement that modern society is stepping too far outside its natural bounds, and paying for this transgression in human suffering and misery.
These paintings are done in a very different style than the rest of the show. The figurative portions are created with layers of thick brushstrokes that clearly show the features of each stroke while still creating a very realistic image, similar to how Rembrandt worked his paintings. The rest of the paintings in the show are considerably larger, and have a more polished look to them with many thin layers of oils creating a menagerie of traditional Asian imagery. I’m not well-versed enough in Asian art to fully explain the full meaning behind the landscapes, birds, and flowers that she includes in her paintings, but even without understanding anything about the meaning behind them, her paintings are a visual feast and should not be missed if you’re in the downtown Kansas City area.
Jesse Small at the Belger Arts Center
I’ll admit that I’m somewhat biased against installation work, but it is because of artists like Jesse Small that I have a bias against it. More often than not, it seems that installation artists bank on the fact that their work takes up so much physical space that it will compensate for the fact that it doesn’t make a lot of sense, or at the very least a few saps will assume that because it’s an “untraditional” form of artwork that it must be good simply based off that fact.
Small’s installation, entitled “UNDADOG” just doesn’t make any sense as to what it’s trying to tell you. There is an unmistakable reference to war with a bunker area fenced in by soldiers’ field graves and exploding metal jumbles of AK-47’s arranged in portions of the installation, but there is no message or stance to it. It’s like having a stranger on the street walk up to you shout “WAR! WAR man! War is real! WAR!” Yeah, I get that it’s about war, but what is your view on it? War is a common theme in art, and to use it effectively requires injecting an opinion on the subject, and Small’s installation doesn’t do this.
The craft involved in making the installation is excellent, with a fine attention to detail present in each object. The aforementioned bunker is surrounded by cast metal guns with helmets perched on top of them, and different graffiti adorns each helmet. Metal barbed wire/plant forms are woven through parts of the fence created by the guns, and inside the enclosed space are many war-related artifacts, as well as a few small burning candles, a nice touch. There is ample evidence that the work is very well thought out as far as achieving a complete visual effect, and I suspect that it might be the attention to detail that distracted from the larger mission of purveying a message to the viewer.
It reminds me of the musician John Zorn who said he lost his big-picture perspective in the minute details with his album Locus Solus. He made the noise-jazz album thinking that it was going to hit the charts, but after the album was released he realized how skewed his focus had become in the process and said “what charts did I think this album was this album going to hit? On Mars? This is some weird shit!”
Where I really get lost in the installation is the other half where a large plastic panel resembling either a spider web or an explosion hangs suspended from the ceiling, and in front of this is a wood platform that looks like a bowling lane with many small, metal lumps, a few unrecognizable forms of twisted metal, what appears to be an “altar” with an illuminated plastic toy on top, and a jumble of metal with the aforementioned AK-47’s poking out of it. Replicas of this metal jumble are also suspended from the ceiling along with several colored lights, some of which are shaped like toy robots from the 80’s. Am I really supposed to make any sense of this?
Honestly, the whole thing would be better if it was just the bunker portion of the installation. This part of the work feels unified in the imagery and with the small candles lit inside exudes a sense of desperation which would fit well with the darkened room the show is placed in. It would feel complete if this small hovel made out of fallen comrades was stranded alone in this darkened room with the candles becoming the main point of interest, but this jumbled mess he created next to it completely dominates the viewer’s focus and completely confuses the meaning of the imagery in the other half of the work.
Patrick Adams at Plenum Space
The sign in front of the Plenum Space Gallery billed the work as “photographs,” but if I had to guess all of Patrick Adams’ pieces were digital and also run through photoshop. Not that it’s a big deal using photoshop, but I think it’s important that digital photos be billed as such, because anyone who’s ever developed real photographs knows that there is a definite art to producing a silver gelatin print. That aspect alone can be enough to appreciate a photograph as a true art object, and it’s difficult to grant a digital photograph the same respect when all you have to do is press a button, select a computer file, and click print to make it.
I assume that Adam’s used photoshop because he either did that or he is a master at printing color photography, and don’t believe that anyone would take the time to print multiple color exposures the old-fashioned way anymore. Most of the images are irrelevant to the typical viewer: a toy giraffe standing in a plant pot, text partially obscured by plants in the foreground, Chinese characters layered over a picture of some trees, etc. The ghostly merging of layers into one another has been so easily obtained for over a decade that most people are not going to be interested in looking at most of Adams’s show.
But there are two prints in the show that really catch my attention and show some possible promise in his work. Whatever manipulation that was used in these prints was done very well. The first is titled “Building Cities from Shadows.” It has an interesting composition, looks unified and compelling, plus I’m a sucker for work containing architectural elements. The other one that caught my eye is “reBirth” which shows a tree juxtaposed against an old wall with the paint peeling off of it.
These two stand out as different from the rest of his work because there seems to be some real thought put into how they were done. Many of the others feel like he was doing what is normally expected, (I’ve got an open country field scene here, so I’ll shop in a photo I took of some birds flying around…), but in these two he goes beyond the obvious and takes a more thoughtful approach to the images, and ends up with much better results.
