Being my first attempt to do a multi-show review, I didn’t have much of a plan as to how to go about doing it. My goal was to look at and review as much work as possible, which after writing this entry I realize is not feasible. In the future I will develop criteria that will limit the number of shows being reviewed. Rule #1 is going to be: no more reviewing group shows. But for now you’re going to have to deal with this marathon of a blog post. If you get bored, just skip to the end. It’s worth it.
Jonah Criswell at the Cocoon Gallery
The Cocoon Gallery at Arts Incubator near 18th and Baltimore in the Crossroads is a First Fridays stronghold that consistently attracts good shows. This month’s show of paintings by Jonah Criswell titled “Reside” is not a departure from this norm.
Three of the four paintings in a series titled “We Are Home” portray a living area, and the treatment of the wood floors is perhaps the most interesting part of the work. By using warm and cool mixtures to capture different tones of light reflections and texture, the viewer is given a heightened and interpreted sense of an otherwise everyday subject. Equal attention is paid to all surfaces in the work, but the floor offers the most play in light, and rightfully dominates the compositions.
The warping of the space is the magic ingredient that activates the paintings with a sense of life. The floor is shown from an overhead angle that doesn’t always match the walls, which have a tendency to twist as they go up, and the floorboards do not follow realistic parallel patterns. The furniture also shifts in perspective through the space. If the perspective were rendered completely realistically, the paintings would probably be rather boring. Instead, the small tweaks in angles cause your brain to start scrambling all over the painting trying to figure it out, and it’s effective because the changes are not major enough to make it unbelievable. Rather, it is a closer representation of how our brains recall a space than how it perceives it through our eyes, and creates a unique, exciting space to look at.
The fourth painting, showing a view over a shower curtain rail in a bathroom, is not as interesting. The composition is very symmetrical and dominantly a drab green. The darkness of the space does not offer itself to the same amount of detail as the other paintings, and the room dimensions looking unrealistically constrained around a window in the center. The only thing for the viewer to grasp onto is the soft glow of light reaching the ceiling from the window, which is not remarkable enough to carry the piece by itself.
Perhaps to prove that the warped perspectives in the paintings are purposeful, Criswell’s graphite drawings are rendered as perfectly realistic, at least in terms of perspective. These interior spaces are very meticulously drawn interiors with light vertical stripes and patchworks of darker areas throughout the drawing. I probably wouldn’t have guessed that they were drawings of low-res apartment ads if it wasn’t for the obvious pixilation happening in “Beautiful 1 Bedroom Loft Great Kitchen”. The pixilation in this drawing is overbearing, distracting from the skill it took to manually draw the image, and it ends up coming off gimmicky. Still, the other two drawings didn’t fall victim to this and have enough happening in the mixture of abstraction into the image to make it fun to look at.
Overall a good show, the concept is also enjoyable. Criswell’s work is also effective in getting the viewer to consider what makes a home, and what makes a space unique to us, but you don’t have to get into that realm of thinking to enjoy the work. It is enough of an idea to carry the work conceptually without being so overly-important that it distracts from the interesting spaces he creates.
The Blue Gallery
“Spectacle” at the Blue Gallery features a handful of their 43 represented artists in a 10th anniversary exhibition. Apparently the Blue Gallery is bipolar, predominantly embracing realistic figure work, but also hosting a fair number of abstract artists. It’s not a bad thing, just unexpected.
Jhina Alvaredo
Jhina Alvaredo uses gorgeous technique to create her series “Forgotten Memories”. A majority of the images is an empty off-white space, and she paints her figures in an antique gray that allows them to visually merge with the white, making it atmospheric. The whole painting is then covered in encaustic wax, which gives the perfect finish to her antique photo subjects.
Nicole Cawlfield
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Another artist working in the antique motif, Cawlfield pulls it off rather flawlessly. Her work is a great object by placing photo transfers onto old, beaten tin ceiling tiles for a frame. It fits the imagery perfectly, and recalls the tin daguerreotypes of the 1800’s. There was no statement available for her work, but I was curious to know if the photos were found or shot recently, because they actually look like genuine photos of freak shows in the 20’s. They are very fun and appealing pieces that make us think about what it means to think of someone as a freak or an oddity, and how that perception either has or hasn’t changed in our modern times.
Koehrsen’s paintings are a mix of fantasy art, pop art, geometric abstraction, and freeform abstraction. My first impression is that his work is an example of art as process, and sure enough his statement says that the series represent his long journey of surrendering himself to God so that he might take the identity of God. I won’t try to type the name of the deity for fear of getting it wrong, but it appears to be a part of Hindu or another Indian religion.
However, this effect doesn’t always work well. When the looser, expressive marks are more subdued and contribute to the background and overall atmosphere, it gives a logical order to the piece and works well. When the frontal forms are hand-painted in contrast to perfect geometric forms in the background, it looks a awkward, as if the hand-painted forms were an afterthought and he didn’t want to take the time to give them the same treatment. I’m also not sold on the excessive use of bright neon paint, but that’s really a personal hang-up, so take that with a grain of salt.
The paintings Jarrett had on display are shameless rip-offs of Franz Kline, and not even worth looking at. Abstract expressionism has been done to death, and lifting an idea from another artist is just a bad idea in general.
Joe Gregory
Gregory’s paintings are hard for me to form an opinion about because they are so… weird. He paints very confrontational images of figures, and paints them billboard size just to make sure they don’t escape your attention.
The first shows a newborn craning its pained-looking wrinkled face towards the viewer, and the other shows a nude masked man hunkered down on the floor, with a mirror showing a reflection of a vagina instead of the penis seen on the figure. I wouldn’t say the work is bad in any capacity, I kind of like it, but I’m just not sure what I’m supposed to think. It’s similar to the reaction I get sometimes from reading William S. Burroughs, where you are confronted with something so strangely outlandish, and sometimes grotesque, that it warps your mind. And if you continue to be exposed to similar material eventually your mind warps to the point that it makes sense, and you can enjoy it as easily as you do anything else.
Jennifer Rivers at The Beggar’s Table
Over the past few months I’ve come to find The Beggar’s Table an unexpectedly good gallery. I’ve typically seen emerging artists of varying levels there, and always been impressed by work that was above my expectations. This show came off a little underwhelming, perhaps because I’ve developed some expectations about the gallery.
All of Rivers’ acrylic paintings are abstract in the strictest sense. There is almost no intent of creating structure in any of the paintings, and it’s difficult to find a plane of color swaths engaging – especially when canvas after canvas is painted using the same structure-less formula. A handful of the pieces stood out as better, and even enjoyable, by beginning to suggest some abstract forms. Once the brain has a shape to play with, it can imagine a lot of things. It can see the sun setting over a rock ridge in the west as clouds roll in, or a hill side overlooking a frozen pond with snow drifts on the bank. The pieces that allowed this ability to imagine show some promise.
The Leedy-Voulkos Art Center
Kristin Goering
There is no shortage of landscape painting in the Midwest, but Goering found a way to capture the open fields and skies in a fresh way. Her paintings are representational, but not overly rendered so the paint has a chance to remain expressive. Her color choices complement the expressive nature of the brush strokes by being heightened intensity, but not so intense as to look absurd. She is also able to paint trees without them looking overly rigid, plastic, formless, unfinished, or any of the other pitfalls that can often happen when painting them. Close-up, her trees reveal a lattice of many different colors that help in creating form and texture, and far-away trees are simply rendered with a few bold strokes.
I wouldn’t say that her paintings are impressionistic, but the large brush strokes and rendering are very similar to some post-impressionistic works. She is able to create the illusion of finer detail in the wet paint mixing on the canvas and on the brush. In “Close to Cottonwood Falls” the trees are composed of paint daubs with distinct flecks of whites, reds, and yellows mixed into each stroke, which quickly differentiates the foliage and creates dancing traces of color through the green. It’s hard to tell on paintings like this because there could be many layers of paint underneath, but the finished product looks like it was done very quickly while perfectly describing the land. The perceived spontaneity makes it that much more appealing.
Goering has a great sense of when to let large brushstrokes stand and when to work over them with smaller brushes, but the component that really pulls it together is her attention to repetition in the landscape. There is an element of order in all the work, whether it is the spacing of the trees in a line along a creek or the furrows of a field, there is an ordered element tying the composition together that makes the work very strong.
Goering also includes some paintings of flowers in the show, which is strange because they are not nearly as impressive. They lack the same energy seen in the landscapes, the compositions are in tight on a single blossom or two, and they feel stagnant. The background and negative spaces are full of bland “grass” strokes (despite having a few good paintings of grass in the show), and the subject isn’t interesting enough to leave the viewer thinking anything more than “that is a painting of a flower.” There are a couple examples of successfully integrating flowers into a larger landscape such as “Black Eyes Susans” and “Sunflower Fields Forever”, but the paintings that focus on flowers keep it from being a flawless show.
One last thing I would like to comment on is that Goering’s work is priced at a very attainable level. There are a number of pieces I would like to own within my price range, but they are all sold!
Jenny Meyer-McCall
A second show was in the front space of the gallery. It couldn’t compete with Goering’s work, but it wasn’t without its charm. If I had to guess, I would say that Meyer-McCall did not go to school for art. School tends to push artists into specific ways of working as far as mark making goes, and the strength of her work is that she doesn’t use the same method of painting twice in any of the pieces. It is interesting to see how she decides to approach each piece and make it unique. There is also a lot of collaged material in her paintings which makes it much more compelling than a straight abstract painting. Her pieces are on the small side, but her best one is made of about seven panels hung together on the wall. I would like to see some of this work made in a larger scale, her experimental methods could produce something really exciting.
S. Shaffer
When I was a younger artist I would sometimes get ideas like “what if I put on a show where I paint three-dimensional pictures of blank canvases on the wall? It’ll be a statement about what art is. It’s not about taking it home and owning it, it’s about blowing your mind and making you think!” But then I’d quickly decide it would be way too much work and I could better spend my time actually making art.
Well, an artist by the name of S. Shaffer followed through on one of these “what if I put on a show where…” ideas with “Yosemite”. I wouldn’t say I dislike the show, but I wouldn’t call it art so much as a social experiment. The room is entirely illuminated in an electric blue light, and inside are a dozen or so paintings all identical in size. Each canvas is completely white, and in the middle is painted a “.jpg” icon with a photo file name underneath. The only difference on each painting is the name of the file, and one painting in the corner features a full-canvas painting of the boy in the .jpg icon, who I had never noticed before. Clever, right?
The best part about the show is watching people react to it. Many people just scoff and hustle through. Some people laugh. “This is great comedy. I would love to own any of these” I overheard one person say. Some people pause and analyze them like they’ve been trained to do with art. It really is funny watching someone contemplate paintings that are more or less identical, as if to say “well, its art. I’m supposed to stand and look at it right?”
So does that mean that painters that paint pictures make inevitable work because it doesn’t let the viewer choose what the picture should be, and if it’s inevitable then that makes it idealistic, and that’s a bad thing like spicy cucumber salad???? Maybe the guy really is nuts. But at the very least he does need to be credited for the extraordinary talent of hand-painting the same thing over and over again with perfect precision, which I suppose doesn’t help in making him look any less nuts.
BEST IN SHOW- Anne Garney at studio b
I’m giving the best-in-show award for this First Friday to Anne Garney. Her style of painting and subject matter is very simple, but her technique and color choices really make the work something special. The bright orange outlines energize everything in the picture plane without being overpowering because the rest of the color selection is so bright. The hyper-realistic colors work together in a way that makes sense, and the images feel like vivid fantasies. I feel like a little kid again when I look at these, back when the world was a mystical place that, for all you know, there could be a place that looks exactly like that painting does, and you want to go there and see it.
I get really excited looking at Garney’s paintings, and that’s what art is all about. It’s not necessary to have a super-complex concept to make great art, all you need is a clear vision of what excites you about the world and that energy will be perceived and appreciated by at least one person. For Anne’s prize as best-in-show for First Friday, September, 2010, I will do some promo work for her. I encourage you to visit her site here and see more for yourself.
