Lyric Fest‘s composer in residence Kile Smith talks about his process in writing “Waxing Poetic, In This Blue Room“, a 45 minute song cycle. The music is based on 17 poems that are in turn based on the batik paintings of Laura Pritchard.
“The overall mission of Lyric Fest is to bring people together through the shared experience of song by offering to diverse audiences lively, theme-oriented voice recitals designed to edify, educate, stimulate dialogue, and foster community.” – About Lyric Fest
“Kile Smith is Composer in Residence for Lyric Fest, the Helena Symphony, and the Church of the Holy Trinity on Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. His music is praised by critics and audiences for its emotional power, direct appeal, and strong voice. Gramophone hailed the “sparkling beauty” of his music, calling Vespers “spectacular.” The Philadelphia Inquirer called it “ecstatically beautiful,” American Record Guide, “a major new work,” Audiophile Audition, “easily one of the best releases of the year of any type… a crime to pass up,” and Fanfare, “a magnificent achievement.” – About Kile Smith
“Lyric Fest unveils an exciting new commission from LF’s first ever composer in residence, Kile Smith. This cross-fertilization of visual, poetic and musical arts features works of four Philadelphia poets inspired by Laura Pritchard’s imaginative paintings of fine-art batik. Join us for a unique and lively art happening ~ art viewing, poetry reading and musical premiere all wrapped in one. With baritone, David Teadt and mezzo soprano, Suzanne DuPlantis and Laura Ward, piano.” – Lyric Fest
Opening Reception Thursday, April 9th, from 7 PM to 10 PM. Hope to see you there! bahdeebahdu, 1522 N. American Street, Philadelphia
“A fusion of styles, aesthetics and artistic mediums, JAMBALAYA promises a visual cuisine that’ll satiate the voracious creative appetite!” – bahdeebahdu
Featuring the visual work of Jombi Supastar, Juan Dimida and James Tafel Shuster, and the CD release of “The Missing Shade of Blue” by Bryan Cohen & James Shuster.
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(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.
Exhibition examines materiality, experience, and authorship in technology-based art.
Glassboro, NJ – Rowan University Art Gallery presents Simulate – Permeate from January 20 to March 7, 2015 with a reception and artist’s talk on Wednesday, February 11 from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.
Curated by Mat Tomezsko, Curator and Program Manager at InLiquid Art & Design, the exhibition features the work of eight Philadelphia-based artists and artist groups making innovative use of new media that collectively examine concepts of materiality, experience, and authorship in technology-based contemporary art.
Lyn Godley makes use of naturally occurring responses to particular light wavelengths and imagery in her photographs of water, which are altered digitally and threaded (by hand) with optic fiber and lit with LEDs to achieve an undulating effect.
Juggling Wolf, a multidisciplinary collective dedicated to creating video and animation that is technically challenging and visually rewarding, offers two versions of a new video: one full length playing in the gallery and a shorter version broadcast across campus using the technological infrastructure of the university.
Christopher McManus’ work is a sculpture and a 20 second video that plays in reaction to the audience’s interaction with the sculpture, which is a piece meant to be a physical representation of the internet: friendly, cute, and enticing while simultaneously being completely repulsive, mean-spirited, and horrifying.
A collective of artists, engineers, and designers dedicated to bringing engaging and empowering art to the public, and to encouraging a sense of ownership to community spaces, New American Public Art has created an encounter with a monitor of a live video feed with a temporal delay. The delay is just long enough to create a disconnect, yet remain familiar as viewers are faced with images of themselves from the near past, but just beyond immediate memory.
Maria Schneider’s work begins with a pencil on paper drawing, which is then scanned and laser printed onto layers of polycarbonate and illuminated with LED light. The drawings evoke a common experience and a familiar medium, but are transformed by the technological process to become something new.
Jody Sweitzer’s outdoor sound and video installation is triggered by the movement of pedestrians on the patio after dark. The seemingly sinister messenger subverts the familiar recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance and emphasizes the tendency to insert religion into what is supposed to be a secular context.
Chris Vecchio’s work is about interaction and meant to be touched, and contains more than 500 samples of audio that can be triggered by the angle of movement, ensuring that every interaction between the viewer and the sculpture is unique and questions the traditional role of the art object.
TangenT is an artist collective dedicated to mixed-media, project-based immersive art environments exploring socially relevant and politically current themes. At Rowan, their immersive installation of disparate physical, visual, and sound elements seeks to examine the simultaneous connection and disconnection of experience, perception, and knowledge using government reporting on individuals and institutions as a meditation on information control, privacy, and truth.
InLiquid Art & Design is a nonprofit organization committed to creating opportunities and exposure for visual artists while serving as a free, online public hub for arts information in the Philadelphia area. By providing the public with immediate access to view the portfolios and credentials of over 280 artists and designers via the internet; through meaningful partnerships with other cultural organizations; through community-based activities and exhibitions; and through an extensive online body of timely art information, InLiquid brings to light the richness of our region’s art activity, broadens audiences, and heightens appreciation for all forms of visual culture.
Admission to Rowan University Art Gallery, talks and reception is free and open to the public. Regular gallery hours are Monday – Friday, 10 am to 5 pm (with extended hours on Wednesdays to 7 pm); and Saturday, 12 to 5 pm.
Rowan University Art Gallery is located on the lower level of Westby Hall on the university campus, Route 322 in Glassboro, NJ. Directions can be found on the gallery or university websites. For more information, call 856-256-4521 or visit www.rowan.edu/artgallery.
The Blue Grotto, Randy Dalton‘s installation is at the Community Education Center (CEC), 3500 Lancaster Avenue in West Philadelphia, is open on Tuesday and Thursday Evenings from 4:30 to 8:30 pm and Saturdays from 12 to 5pm. Dalton can reached at 215-844-6253 or email randydalton@earthlink.net
March is Women’s History Month, this week’s DoN Art News is dedicated to all my strong women friends who have supported my efforts, inspired me and encouraged me to continue my artistic growth. Since DoN is an honorary girl, the rest of this article is about women’s art happening around town.
The current exhibit at The Center for Emerging Visual Artists in the Barclay Building on Rittenhouse Square is currated by friend of DoN, Brooke Hine. Adaptation: Celebrating Growth and Change is an exhibition dedicated to the transformation of environments, organisms, bodies and forgotten places. Brooke has gathered a cohesive collection of new art composed of unusual, unique materials from dryer sheets as an ethereal wall installation to drawings made with human hair to mobile sculpture activated by magnets. Brooke is a well known ceramics artist and has obviously taken great care to gather a collection of exciting new media mixed with traditional composition and craft techniques.
Brooke Hine’s ceramics.
The venerable Newman Gallery on Walnut Street has a superb group of art by women on the mezzanine level of this three story historic building. The Newman family has been running the gallery (the first in America) since 1865 and has been open at their present location since 1935! Terry Newman has gathered a group of strong paintings by 20th Century women artist’s demonstrating the influence of Impressionism and modern painting styles. Newman Galleries’ collection of works by American women of the early twentieth century includes numerous nationally recognized artists working in a variety of media and styles. Two of the most prominent women of that era were Elizabeth Washington, renowned for her soft impressions of the unspoiled Pennsylvania landscape, and Fern Coppedge, whose dazzling use of color and composition made her painted scenes come alive. The Cubist still life paintings of Dorcas Doolittle and the dramatic bronzes of Amelie Zell and Beatrice Fenton further illustrate the diversity of talent demonstrated by these women.
Newman Gallery mezzanine with art by women painters.
The main floor of Newman’s Gallery is a trove of art, don’t be intimidated to visit and browse through the racks of drawings, prints and paintings; Newman’s staff is super-friendly and the third floor gallery is literally a museum of 18th, 19th and 20th century art.
Second Thursday at the Crane Arts Center was totally cool; Jocelyn Firth’s “You Might Find Yourself” show in the Icebox demonstrated that photography is not just “loft art” but inspiring, disturbing and influential. Thomas Prior’s, “Hotel Fire“, brought back the fear of distaster that CNN inflicts on us daily, Ian Baguskas‘, “Search for the American Landscape” elevates the mundane to the sublime with a simple shot of beach sand rendered as a passage of time and John Francis Peter‘s, “Red Tourism“, educates us to how photography and the pursuit of fame is universal if ephemeral. Firth’s curatorial debut in Philly is the beginning of a LoVe affair.
The crowd at Icebox in the Crane Art Center.
NEXUS gallery’s 8 artists, 8 viewpoints featuring women artists from Philadelphia art schools, includes a lot of fiber art and unusual fabric constructions coinciding with the FiberPhiladelphia shows going on around town. DoN‘s favorite is Rebecca Landes‘, “I Embroider the Pain Away“; a collection of embroideries of phrases reflecting the angst of modern life and the irony of the old fashioned art of cross stitch intersecting computer age social life – “I’ll Never Look at Your MySpace Page”.
InLiquid’s show in the hallway is outstanding: Ruth Borgenicht and Leslie Pontz’s Collaboration: linking metal and clay is fabulous with constructions combining metal mesh and clay globs is fresh and soon to be influential since a group of hanging mesh bags filled with clay will soon be included in a famous, world-class collection. DoN appreciated how the duo utilized the old urinals in the space – so DuChampian.
Leslie Pontz & Ruth Borgenicht.
Fiber art construction in the InLiquid show (sorry I don’t know who the artist is but the construction is poignant and evocative of working life in American society.)
Smile Gallery‘s, “F Word” show is superb featuring work by prominent women artists is this intimate space on the second floor. Friend of DoN, Betsy Alexander is showing her signature crosses made from old CDs and her new digital photos. Speaking of Betsy and my rant from my last post about how women in Philly don’t dress up…
Betsy Alexander shows how to wear art.
The “F Word” is all about feminism and other “F’s” from fecundity to fetishism by prominent female artist’s curated by Debra Miller with brave, charasmatic images, constructions and paintings.
Francine Strauss, Lilliana Didovic and curator Debra Miller at Smile’s “F Word”.Betsy Alexander reports that the Thai food on the first floor is the best in town. Smile is at 105 S. 22nd St., 215-564-2502.
The William Way Gay Community Centerr has a one woman show of fiber constructions by Kathryn Pannepacker in the main lobby. At once political and poetic, Pannepacker’s work combines mundane materials like Q-tips with traditional fibers like jute to produce a collection of flags, sculptures and hangings with messages of hope, tolerance and peace.
Speaking of the Gay Community Center – the current issue of Equality, HRC’s magazine features photos from Rachelle Lee Smith‘s wonderful portraits of gay youths who wrote short bio’s on the their pictures from the last art show at the center. Way to go HRC even if you abandoned the T’s in LGBT. Thankfully The William Way Center includes everybody even if it’s a boy who wants to wear dresses or a girl with a moustache and sideburns. The idea that HRC could turn their backs on a sub-group of an already persecuted group in order to push through an agenda is unacceptable; the leadership of HRC should be replaced if they’re not able to understand the evil of discrimination against transgendered people.
Waxing Poetic, Laura Pritchard, batik
