Stoney Lamar makes beautiful sculptures out of wood and his work is traveling the country in a show called A Sense of Balance. His work can be seen at Philadelphia’s Center for Art in Wood and the Synderman – Works Galleries through April 18, 2015. He talks about his life and career and how Parkinson’s Disease is affecting his work. – John Thornton
“What is true is that no matter how striking, unique and evolutionary Stoney Lamar’s career has been, he arrived at its beginning some decades ago by an entirely different path. He learned his geometrical theory in a pool hall; he aggravated his minister-father; he grappled with a war; he set out in a career direction that he neither liked nor decided he was much good at; he almost by accident discovered what he was good at, at long last feeling the call in his hands and soul.” – excerpt artist statement Stoney Lamar
“William Stoney Lamar (b. 1951) has contributed exceptional skill and vision to the world of wood turning for over 25 years. Stoney Lamar’s sculpture is created primarily through a unique approach to multi-axial lathe work, giving his pieces a distinct sense of line and movement unlike other works of turned wood. He lets the shape, color and modeling of the wood determine a piece’s finished appearance and employs paint and metal in his forms. Stoney Lamar is a founder of the American Association of Woodturners, teaches and lectures, and has served on the boards of the American Craft Council, The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design, and of the Southern Highland Craft Guild. The Center for Art in Wood is proud to present this retrospective, the final venue on the national tour, in our Gerry Lenfest Gallery.” – Center for Art in Woodwebsite
“Stoney Lamar: Standing Forms. On view from March 6, 2015 to April 18, 2015. This exhibit is in conjunction with A Sense of Balance: The Sculpture of Stoney Lamar, a solo exhibit traveling throughout the US, which will open at the Center for Art in Wood in mid-February.
Saturday, March 7, 2015 | 2:00 – 4:00 | Tour of Stoney Lomar: Standing Forms at Synderman – Works Galleries, followed by a gallery talk, tour of A Sense of Balance: The Sculpture of Stoney Lamar, and reception at The Center for Art in Wood with Stoney Lamar, Curator Andrew Glasgow, and studio artist and writer Bruce Metcalf. The Center for Art in Wood is located across the street from Synderman – Works Galleries at 141 N. 3rd Street, Philadelphia, PA.” – Synderman – Works Galleries
(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.
“The artist Ken Tutjamnong has a unique painting style which meshes seemlessly with his subject matter. His cityscapes currently on display at The Rosenfeld Gallery brilliantly capture the feeling and texture of urban life.
Ken Tutjamnong, originally from Thailand, creates highly evocative images of urban neighborhoods of New York City and Philadelphia. He paints on aluminum and his rough technique joined with close observation make him a true painter’s painter. Ken is the owner of a wonderful Thai restaurant in Philadelphia, Smile Cafe, but he would rather be painting. And he is great at it!” – John Thornton
“I met Ken at an art exhibit at the Headhouse Square, Philadelphia. From the very beginning I noticed how great an artist he is, I loved his cityscapes. They were very different. Ken’s artistic style can best be described as neoimpressionist, with its moveable knife-work, and soft dispersed striking. His work has a mixture of Eastern and Western civilizations resulting in paintings that are at once delicate and direct, melting and friendly.
Ken and I became very close friends. We loved each other’s art. His art gallery Smile opened with my own solo art exhibit. Very soon after Ken and I had together a very perceptive exhibit, ‘City, Shapes and Colors‘ at Da Vinci Art Alliance, February 2008. I always enjoyed exhibiting my art together with Ken’s.
Also, I visit every place where Ken exhibits his amazing paintings. Every new exhibit makes me love Ken’s paintings more and more. If you ask me to describe him in only a couple of words, I would say, ‘Unique Person & Unique Artist. That is my friend Ken.'” – Lilliana S. Didovic, M.Psyc. ATA, Inc.LC/BSC/MT Independent Fine Art Profess./Painter GENEVA Worldwide, foreign language interpreter
Located at 113 Arch Street in Philadelphia, The Rosenfeld Gallery was the first to open in Old City and has served the area for 35 years. The gallery is proud of its inclusive aesthetic representing diverse approaches, styles and media.
Public Reception on Thursday January 22, 6:00 – 8:00pm
In his largest exhibition of this work to date, James B. Abbott presents a timely meditation on Cape Cod across time. Large scale, multi-image panoramas display the drama of shifting tides, dunes and seasons while more intimate prints examine the subtleties of the moors and marshes. Taken over 15 years, this collection of images moves audiences into a contemplative space where time, place and scale are in constant flux.
The Landscape Before Me, is on display at St. Joseph’s University Gallery through Friday, Feb. 6, 2015. A reception for the artist will be held on Thursday, Jan. 22, from 5-7 p.m.
“The space of the Outer Cape has an inherent ambiguity of scale with little reference to familiar things, which makes it very malleable from a photographic and optical perspective,” remarks Abbott of his work with this landscape. “The dunes, tides, light, and water are never the same and they combine in so many different ways that I continually find new and interesting approaches to recording them.”
The cross section of images presented in The Landscape Before Me is from an ongoing body of work started in 2000 in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts while the artist was vacationing with his family. The work took on full commitment after he was accepted the Outer Cape Artist-in-Residence Consortium, managed by the Peaked Hill Trust. Through volunteers, the organization facilitates artists spending two weeks in a primitive dune shack with no electricity or no running water. The shelter was 400 feet from the ocean, isolated in the Peaked Hill dunes of the Cape Cod National Seashore, and provided unparalleled concentration and immersion in the landscape. This opportunity placed Abbott in the epicenter of an extraordinary environment, gave him the solitude to think, and came with a mandate to create. With this increased knowledge and appreciation of the place, his work took a new direction with increased momentum in the years following the first residency. Abbott has returned independently over 20 times since the May 2003 residency and in the summer of 2007, was awarded a three week C-Scape Dune Shack Artist Residency. This second residency was situated in a shack in the dunes of Race Point, for an intense three week period, and provided another unique time and situation to produce work.
The images are taken mostly in the Outer Cape region of the Cape Cod National Seashore in all four seasons. Abbott works with polaroid positive/negative multi-image panoramic and single wide-angle images printed and toned in a darkroom on conventional silver gelatin paper. Working in black and white allows the artist to approach the landscape without obvious tourist references, focusing instead on structure and nuance as he attempts to record a changing landscape. The ever-shifting sand dunes act as a three dimensional model as they record the primary forces and rhythm of nature. The sandscape seems to capture everything from the most minute shift of wind and tide to events of catastrophic force. The vocabulary of this landscape reflects permanence and mutability: where sea meets sky and land, where human intervention imprints the environment, and where the sky, sea and land often blend and/or mirror each other. The effects of currents of air are as evident as those of the sea in this place. At the most basic level, Abbott makes two dimensional photographic interpretations of these highly transitory three-dimensional records of natural and inflicted change.
Abbott’s goal is that the work will deal not only with how one perceives a place or thing but how one thinks of that place after encountering a visual representation of it. With emphasis on simultaneous micro and macro views or layer of information, the artist exploits the inherent descriptive nature of the photographic medium. He works on long term projects in one location and usually towards complex and diverse interpretations of a subject. In many ways, his collected works form a comprehensive and sincere portrait of a place. The artist learns and builds from each trip, so that as it grows, each body of work takes on a life of its own.
The work in Cape Cod is one of four long term, photo-based investigations of specific locations; he has also worked extensively in Berlin, Germany, on and around the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and currently in Florence and Venice, Italy.
Peaked Hill Dunes in Winter, Cape Cod National Seashore, James B. Abbott
Abbott’s work is included in many public and private collections including the Federal Reserve Bank, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Abbott’s curatorial endeavors brought outstanding and stimulating work to Philadelphia through his gallery/exhibition space Exhibit 231. He put together exhibitions by Carl Toth, John Geard, Joel Katz, Geanna Merola and Sandy Sorlien.
Abbott has also received a number of grants and awards for his work: he is the recipient of three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Individual Artist Awards, a SOS grant, and an Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts.
A solo exhibition of select images from this body of work will be on view at The Saint Joseph’s University Gallery featuring work from nearly two decades of working on Cape Cod. The Landscape Before Me will be on view from Monday December 22, 2014 through Friday February 6, 2015. There is a public artist reception on Thursday, January 22 from 6-8 pm. Saint Joseph’s University Gallery is located in Merion Hall on the James J. Maguire ’58 Campus at 355 N. Latches Lane in Merion Station, PA. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. – 7 p.m., and Saturday, 10 a.m. – 1 p.m. More at www.sju.edu/gallery or by calling 610-660-1845.
On First Fridaythis month, I was excited to finally visit Gravy Studio, located in Fishtown, which serves as a space that promotes local photographers and their work. As a photographer with a particular fondness for the darkroom, I was especially interested in attending the opening reception for Northeast Kingdom by Andrew Frost. Not only does this body of work contain black and white images captured on film, but I felt compelled to learn more about the mystery surrounding his project.
“These photographs were made in the Northeast area of the state of Vermont, an area known as the Northeast Kingdom. It’s where my family has lived for more than 200 years. My father joined the Navy when he was a teenager as a way to get out of the rural area, and growing up we never went back, though I always imagined what it was like. Over the past several years, I’ve been traveling there, exploring my past, and making photographs.”
Andrew Frost has been making large format photographs within and surrounding the small town of Groton, Vermont, where his relatives have lived for more that two hundred years. In the late 1970’s, his father left and joined the Navy as a teenager. As Andrew was growing up, his family moved constantly, and he had never personally experienced his heritage in Vermont. He always imagined “a magical place, with mountains, rivers, and lakes, and a land of tree houses and caves — the kind of place where kids were free to ride their bikes to the village store.”
Finally in 2010, he visited his roots for the first time and began photographing the world he had often envisioned. Because of his nomadic upbringing, the Northeast Kingdom held a mythical sense of history for Frost as he had been enamored by the stories of his father’s youth. On his initial visit to Vermont, he had instantly felt a deep connection and a sense of belonging. For the next 3 years, Frost had made frequent trips to the area, and brought his 8 x 10 view camera to record and discover his origins on a journey of self-exploration.
Documenting with a view camera was a slow and gradual process, which complimented the way of life in rural Vermont. Some of his subjects are relatives, others are strangers. Frost’s images are beautiful and expressively rich in their black and white tonality. Several of the captures could easily be mistaken as having been made in the distant past – including an image containing elements of a wall photo of a vintage car combined with an antiquated radio, to a photograph of a soldier leaving for boot camp. Before I knew any of the backstory regarding this project, I asked Andrew about the timeline and for details as for when these particular images were captured (as I initially thought that these could have been enlargements made from old negatives).
“I don’t know for certain what type of car is in the photo, and as far as I know it’s a clock radio – it’s at my grandmother’s house, and she’s had it for a very long time. The photograph of the soldier, Jeremy, was made the day he left for boot camp. It was the 4th of July in 2011. He’s my aunt’s husband’s sister’s son, and in that area there aren’t a lot of career options. Your choices are mostly limited to farming, ministry, or the military, and he chose to enlist when he finished high school.”
This poignant collection of work initially evokes feelings of melancholy, isolation, sterility, and stagnation in a pastoral land where time appears to be standing still. Yet these observations will eventually transition the viewer towards feelings of hope, beauty, tenderness, and human connection. The exhalation and inner peace that has resulted in this journey of self-realization and reflection are undoubtedly witnessed when viewing Northeast Kingdom.
Gravy Studio & Gallery is a collaborative photography workspace and gallery located near the Frankford Arts Corridor. Serving as a multifunctional space that promotes the work of local photographers, opening receptions are held on the First Friday of every month.
Ken Tutjamnong at 
