Linda Dubin Garfield, 10 years of Art and Caring @ Philly Fringe Festival
John Thornton Films
“For the past 10 years on her birthday, Linda Dubin Garfield has a party and asks her guests to make collages on a theme. Months later, at the Book Trader, as a part of the Philly Fringe Festival,Linda exhibits these, as well as her own art, and invites the public to participate. All of the proceeds from sales go to charity. This year’s theme is “Family”, and the recipient is Family Support Services.” – John Thornton
Marilyn MacGregor, Philly artist and designer, has created a special limited edition print in honor of Pope Francis’s visit to Philadelphia, with sales to benefit the hungry and homeless. Her series Philadelphia: Famous Sites & Famous Places, a fresh new take on well-known landmarks and neighborhoods in Philadelphia, combines her original, on-site sketches with appealing colors and crisp design. The series is readily available as cards and prints in stores around the city as well as from her Friday merchant cart at Reading Terminal Market.
This signed limited print, in an edition of 50, honors Pope Francis’s work on behalf of the poor and needy and the environment, and will benefit Philadelphia’s hungry and homeless through the Francis Fund. This offer is made independently and was not commissioned by any agency.
“I don’t believe one needs to be a Catholic or a churchgoer to understand that this Pope is using his voice and his position in an important way in a time of great need. This is my artist’s way of supporting him and his work with my work.”
The print, in Marilyn’s loose contemporary style, shows Philadelphia’s Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul and has a commemorative message for the Pope’s historic visit. See details at http://www.macgregor-art.com/benefit-prints-for-good-causes.html
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Going to The Philadelphia Sketch Club’s PHOTOgraphy 2015 Juried exhibition reception, I went as a fellow photographer to support friends and members of photographic clubs in the city and local areas. I did not go to review this collection, so, my view of the work is not as extensive has it could have been. The best way to see any collection is to go during regular gallery hours which in this case, are Wed. Fri. Sat. Sun. 1:00 to 5:00 PM.
PHOTOgraphy 2015, The Philadelphia Sketch Club, Susan Knott, Incomplete, 4″ x 5″ negative scanned and digitally printed, 20″ x 20″
You will find works “utilizing any photography process, traditional and digital, black & white and color.” There are nature landscapes; there are street scenes, studio work, and creative blurs (abstracts). There are works from long time photographers who know their craft, there are brilliant photographs from photographs who recently begun making photos, getting the feel of genre. Creating for the jurors a task that I don’t envy, jurors Melvin Chappel, Stuart Shils, and Ron Tarver’s selections offer a vision for the senses.
PHOTOgraphy 2015, The Philadelphia Sketch Club, Molly Carpenter, The Burlap Bag, photograph, 11″ x 17″, Third Prize
I am not going to select particular photos or photographs to feature here as favorites, for that would not be fair, to all the other wonderful creative works involved. To me having one’s art juried into the show is an honor in itself. To be selected to exhibit at The Philadelphia Sketch Club’s annual PHOTOgraphy exhibition is a prize worthy to place in each photographer’s artist statement.
Give yourself an artistic treat and go visit The Philadelphia Sketch Club’s galleries, the show is on display until August 15th.
The Philadelphia Sketch Club235 South Camac Street, The Avenue of the Artists, Center City, Philadelphia, PA, 19107, 215-545-9398
(i)The steps to this particular abstraction… are, like the ascent to any of the abstractions that interest us importantly, an ascent through illusion which gathers round us more closely and thickly, as we might expect it to do, the more we penetrate it. – Wallace Stevens
Metaphor moves in a flare of intuition that is both the recognition of an abstract likeness and the event of a poetic transformation. Arrested, I see: this is that, although it is not. A metaphor is an impossible being, an alchemy of logic and magic, a dun-white horse who – pausing, turning, breathing – returns one’s regard from the verge of a deep dark wood. As in metaphor, similitude is estranged and remade in the tropical grove we enter with Eileen Neff – sometimes in a pitch-dark night, sometimes in the lambent green light of day.
In January 2014, Eileen Neff held a three-week artist’s residency at Monte Azul, a unique amalgamation of contemporary art center, eco-resort, and nature preserve set in the rainforest of southern Costa Rica. While not documentary in any usual sense of the word, the works that comprise Traveling Into View are drawn from her experiences of the residency – experiences of transit and arrival, of the forest’s fecundity and her own limitations in face of such fecundity, of close looking amid profuse stimulus, and of repeated passages (as by foot between her casita and Monte Azul’s café, or by car over the mountain road linking the compound to parts beyond). The photographs Neff made in Costa Rica became the raw material for the digitally-crafted pictures that take on physical forms and spatial relationships in the gallery – all of which has as much to do with painting, sculpture, and literature as it does with the insular traditions of photography. Neff’s constellations of image-objects displace linear coherence with the sensibilities of collage, a mode of expression that draws close to experience while declining to represent causes and effects in a prosaic manner.
As Neff’s work often has, the current project posits a kind of dream-like photographic narrative and then fractures that narrative over the razor edges of temporality and perception. In its introductory passage the installation suggests the unfolding arrival of a beholder who is both rapt by technologically augmented vision and savvy to it. The god’s-eye vista of Window Seat receives a reflexive jab in Pre-Viewing, in which the shadow of a superimposed postcard rack reveals a picturesque view of Costa Rican landscape as a constructed surface. (ii) A knowing gesture, the postcard rack is also a reference to Neff’s oeuvre, as well as a synecdoche for the larger ecosystem of photographic imagery that preconditions the traveler’s perception and representation of the world. Fast on the heels of this canny dialogue comes Mountain Road, a (roughly) three-and-a-half by five-foot gulp of experience in which earthbound sensory overload seems to overflow cerebral maneuver. As the beholder is sped through unfamiliar, sublime terrain, roadside foliage blurs against landscape, and the relation between figure and ground scintillates.
If there is a suggestion in these works that some type of distance may be necessary for sense-
making, there are complex ripostes throughout the project. Two pendants to Mountain Road embody immediate examples. Evoking, respectively, the parted curtain of enlightenment painting and the beady gaze of the taxonomist, The Golden Leaf and Moon-Tropic broach historical modes of looking and picturing that have served to bring the phenomenal into a visual order. These two pictures seem to promise both a grand spectacle and still, close, concentrated seeing. Scrutiny, however, works both ways. In Moon-Tropic, what appears to be the fronds of a tropical plant in the compass of a botanist’s magnifying glass is in fact a reflection, caught in a mirrored disc Neff brought with her as potential working material, along with the roll of Mylar film she used to create Reflected and Reflected 2 (two chromogenic prints that appear later in the installation). At some point in the artist’s process, the photographed mirror-double of botanical fact was twined with the celestial bodies of the Costa Rican night.
Circuits of resemblance are also much at issue in The Golden Leaf, a photograph (and a title) that describes the form of a curtain tie-back, the appearance of a pictured curtain, and the effect of gold pigment on the surface of a print (as in, gold leaf) – not to mention a parallel realm of reference to tropical flora and the grasping fantasies of explorers-cum-treasure hunters. Here the curtain is drawn back on glinting indices of disappeared phenomena, artifacts of the lens made inscrutable in a conjured night. In Neff’s characteristically precise visual language, these first pictures seem simultaneously to reinforce the allure of vision and qualify its capacity to discern. In a related vein, consider the lightbox transparency, Green Honeycreeper, installed alone in an alcove between the front and rear spaces of the gallery. The work stems from a recurrent experience during Neff’s residency: she passed this tangle of trees and the eponymous bird on the walk between the café and her living quarters – (iii) “a regular, brilliant moment had several times each day.”
There is a sensual universe even within minute proximal encounter, a telescoping intensity for which the gesture of isolation here provides a kind of felt analog. A thatch of vines and branches knits the world together, while sprays of color and the very luminescence of the object seem to pull towards a wilder revelation. The experience of keen looking is both irreducible and rich. So rich, in fact, that its expression tends to undercut and overflow representation’s urge towards structure and distance. In the front space of the gallery, across from Mountain Road, gathers a coterie of pictures (though more than pictures) of leaves and birds. This portion of Neff’s project has been aptly described as “a kind of portrait gallery where each leaf is celebrated for the remarkable individual that it is.”(iv) Personified in stature and represented with a penetrating attention usually reserved for revelations of psychological depth, each leaf seems to harbor an interior life, hinted at by the play of shapes and shadows above or below its surface. Individuality, however, is a funny concept in a body of work in which similitude is a magnetic force. To individuate is to break an extensive field into a collection of singularities, but these particular individuals are pulled back to a more fluid state of identity in so many ways. In their analogousness to persons, certainly, they seem to oscillate between this and that. But they are also fluctuant as objects. Permuting the relationship between frame, print, and space of display, these pictures do not settle onto the wall in a way that allows one to forget their presentness as things. (Neff often pushes her work into this territory, as is evident from the very first here – Window Seat, for example, seems not so much hung as suspended in the act of gliding past the wall.) In the leaf gathering, frames float or land in a manner that suggests both a portrait gallery in mid-hang and the pell-mell visual incident of the rainforest. One frame gives up the ghost and allows its occupant to lap waxily onto the floor. Elsewhere in the installation, a few leaves break completely free of frames and present themselves as leaf-green, leaf-shaped leaves (of paper, yes, but isn’t paper just a plant in another form anyway?). Brazenly, these leaf-leaves also have no problem using the furniture to adopt an eye-level posture, or casually taking a seat.
There is a one-to-one ratio migrating through this body of work that tests the boundaries of representation and facsimile. Like a metaphor (or, arguably, a photograph) Neff’s leaves are abstractions that conjoin with the basic structure of the real by magical identification, by the being of resemblance, by metamorphosis. She teases out this kind of slippage with lucent, minimalist humor: amid a grove of uncannily personified plants, perch two birds and a tropical flower that is uncannily like a bird. If the point of taxonomy is to order by articulating difference, then taxonomy is both invoked and exploded here. Names refract and multiply meaning while they identify, and even the material form of an object is fluid – specific and significant, but mutable rather than fixed. In the rear space of the gallery, Neff’s testing and teasing out of analogy becomes both distilled and prismatic. Forms of resemblance cascade through this portion of the installation – doubling, reflection, replacement, and all of their unruly kin are present. One way to approach the variety and complexity at play among these works is through an idea that describes photography as well as metaphor: to reprise is to place into relation, which is to transform.
In addition to a structural relationship between a photograph and that which it pictures, one could argue that all photographs stem from a relation between subject and author. Portrait photographs force the point, however: a portrait is generated in an exchange between two beings, real or imagined. Many of the works in the installation can be understood as portraits of leaves or animals, but while there is more portraiture here than in all of Neff’s prior work, there are only two pictures in which the artist levels the camera at a human subject. First Scene and Second Nature feature a young Costa Rican man who helped Neff with the roll of Mylar film she brought to Monte Azul. At some point during their collaboration, she asked the man to hold a mirror disc in front of his face, and photographed him. While playful, these portraits are also disconcerting – because they hollow out the subject, but perhaps even more so because by de-facing the subject they picture the absence of the beholder. In place of relation between subject and author is a mirror that shifts the gaze to a third space, a move which is itself redoubled when the natural reflection in First Scene is digitally replaced with another landscape in Second Nature. It is poignant that although the beholder’s gaze is deferred in depictions of a human subject, that look is met by the like-but-unlike subject of Oh Brother. The animal (and, perhaps, the forest) is to the human that which is alike but in excess. So, an ascent to metaphor spirals back to the haunting regard of a lone white horse. In this regard is the beholder met – arrested, disclosed, metamorphosed, and returned. Perhaps, although never pictured, it is this being – the beholder – who is traveling into view, estranged and remade in the pitch-dark of an animal eye, on the verge of a deep dark wood.
i Wallace Stevens, “Three Academic Pieces,” The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), 81.
ii The postcard rack has been important for the artist both as motif and as an element of installation, for example in Here and There (2012), Postcloud (2012), and International Forest (1990). There are other returning elements here as well: actual pieces of furniture appear for the first time since The Mountain a Bed and a Chair (1992).
iii Eileen Neff, email communication to the author, February 18, 2015.
iv Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Bridgette Mayer Gallery Announces A Solo Exhibition By Gallery Artist Eileen Neff.
As a cult practitioner and follower monochromatic image makers, let’s just say I was a little more than excited (okay, I was ecstatic!) to see the exhibit, A Deeper Look Into the Art ofRebecca Nurickand Marco Hill at the Jed Williams Gallery on February 28th. In addition to the opening reception held 2 weeks prior, this reception offered a variety of additional smaller prints not shown in the exhibit at easily affordable prices for cash and carry.
According to gallery owner and fine artist Jed Williams, “These unique photographs expand on the themes currently displayed by both photographers at the gallery. The images provide a deeper look into the artistic vision of Hill and Nurick.”
After I was welcomed into the cozy and inviting space by Rebecca Nurick, Marco Hill, and Jed Williams, immediately I could witness the similarities shared between both exhibits as my eye scanned across the gallery space. Besides making some interpretations of their respective visions in black and white, I learned that both Nurick and Hill are heavily influenced from their training in film capture and processing. One fitting example is Hill’s Into the Darkness, a black and white 35-mm film capture of an ascending stairwell that appears to rise toward the cavernous and shadowy unknown.
Other similar pieces between both artists follow street themes, such as Hill’s 9th and Mifflin Sunset and Nurick’s Train. Not only do they offer a gritty urban vibe but they are portrayed in the fashion of Kodachrome color. Common themes exist – both artists offer feelings of emotional connection and timelessness, yet both also convey ephemerality and human transience in their story telling. A dynamic interplay can be seen as dotted lines are invisibly connected back and forth amongst their works.
Many of Marco Hill‘s street photographs were captured in South Philadelphia where he resides, with this series punctuated by Still Standing, an emotionally moving image of an abandoned log cabin that harkens back to Hill’s native Virginia roots. His sense of humor, quick wit, and sense of curiosity is evident in unusual and quirky captures such as Yawn Jawn, Brick Work, and Abandoned Door.
“I roam the streets of the city looking for things that are unusual or things that I think would ordinarily go unnoticed…I actually got started in art as a musician, but after I found a love for photography the camera replaced the guitar as my instrument of choice. I call my approach to photography playing the blues with a camera.”
One of Rebecca Nurick‘s special prints are quite powerful: a striking image of a fearless mythological sunflower standing heroically in the face of foreboding dark cumulus clouds – with the hint of a silver lining. Her portraitures range from the human form to animal skeletons, expressed monochromatically, printed digitally, but expressed with the look of silver gelatin. I was instantly struck at how Torso, with it’s coppery tinge and grainy cloak has the look and feel of a super sized tintype. Also striking is Viaduct, another moody and cataclysmic image that instantly transported me back in time to David Lynch‘s Eraserhood.
“I find myself gravitating to photography, as it allows me to capture an image that is interesting to me and alter it in a way that can give it a hyper-real quality while still maintaining its true nature. The elevation of the ordinary is thrilling to me. The creative post-production of a photo is as enjoyable to me as the act of capturing the original subject.”
This exhibit consists of very well-crafted images that will appeal to fans of digital, film, and alternative processing techniques alike. Kudos to Jed Williams for this excellent pairing of photographers in one show, as both artists’ works play off each other and form a dialogue. Mystification is on display through March 15, 2015.
Jed Williams Gallery is a unique art space owned and operated since 2010 by artist Jed Williams. Jed showcases up-and-coming and inspiring artists from the local area, including his own work, along with providing a look into the workings of an actual artist studio. The gallery shows a variety of thoughtful, cutting edge works ranging from 2D, mixed media and painting, to video, installation and sculpture.
Mystification, 
