A two person show of photography, collage and mixed media work by a mother and daughter, each exploring in her own way the transformation of something old into something new through art – Rosalind Bloom andSarah R. Bloom. April 1 – 30, 2015. Artist Reception Saturday, April 11, 4:00 – 7:00pm at Da Vinci Art Alliance, 704 Catharine St, Philadelphia, PA 19147
Gallery hours Saturday & Sunday. 12:00 – 6:00pm, Wednesday 6:00 – 8:00, and by appointment. Gallery will be closed Easter Sunday, April 5th. Phone contact 610-715-1348 or 610-420-1733
“The past is reclaimed for the present. Ephemera of times gone by are retrieved and then transformed by our thoughts, experiences, current perspective, and the creative process into something new and different. Bits and pieces carved out of earlier work spark something new. Art is about transformation; something that existed one way is reclaimed and becomes something else.” – Rosalind Bloom, April, 2015
“I am seeking to adapt to my changing body, mindset and circumstance as I age. I see myself as an extension of these abandoned spaces, using them as an echo of the push/pull of our identity as we age. There is light and dark, sadness and beauty, fear and acceptance, a folding into and a pushing out all at once. I am working towards reclaiming my place in the world and redefining my mid-life as one of transformation rather than crisis.” – Sarah R. Bloom, April, 2015
“The Da Vinci Art Alliance was founded in 1931 and enjoys a distinguished history in Philadelphia. It was formed to serve the needs of artists and artisans and to promote the edification and appreciation of the arts. Our well-located building across from Fleisher Art Memorail was purchased in 1959 to provide studio, and gallery spaces for its members and outreach for the community. Da Vinci Art Alliance maintains a small collection of works by noted founders. The Da Vinci Art Alliance supports community based arts programs, and cultural and educational exchanges through monthly exhibitions, lectures and events.” – Da Vinci Art Alliance
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.
Art of the Flower 2015, The Philadelphia Sketch Club, Donald C. Meyer Medal
Art of the Flower 2015 at The Philadelphia Sketch Club is a juried group art exhibition dedicated to florals in honor of Donald C. Meyer. Dianne Meyer presented the First Prize winner, Kimberle Nentwig for her watercolor painting titled Dahlia Darling, a golden medal in remembrance of her late husband.
The exhibition is an exuberant display of floral artwork, the jurors were Al Gury, chair of the painting department at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Lauren Sweeney, fine artist and Marylyn Waltzer, member of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators. The entry process is completed on-line at The Philadelphia Sketch Club website and hundreds of artists submitted images for consideration by the jury who then select artworks for the awards. The jurors selected an eclectic mix of media for the awards but being in the show is a goal itself for many regional artists.
Spring is all everyone is thinking about, The Art of the Flower show excites the desire to preserve some of that delightful satisfaction of better days. Alice Chung captures a moment of quiet and warmth in her composition, the balance of color, tone and brushwork feels satisfying and serene. Flowers have always been used for decoration, welcoming guests, gifts of love and adornment for sacred ceremonies. Alice Chung‘s Spring is naturally atmospheric, defining a magical moment in time with loose, liquid strokes, empathetic marks and gestural cues to an energetic concept of a space and time of renewal.
“I am a direct painter, painting from life to capture the moment.The excitement of the moment and the immediacy are what drive me.It is that total impression that creates the completed painting.I focus on color, harmony, light, mood, texture, composition and the calligraphy of my brush strokes. I love to experiment with a variety of palettes and surfaces. It is the visual stimulation that drives and moves me forward.” – Doris Peltzman artist statement, Artists’ House Gallery
A Cup Full of Peonies by Doris Peltzmanpossesses a subdued yet elegant presence, the painting has an ethereal quality. Even though the palette is restrained, the alla prima mark-making expresses the subject though tone, light and action in powerful impressionism. Peonies are my favorite flower but they really only last a day, Doris narrates that brevity with experience and skill.
Suzanne Comer was so sweet to me at the reception for Art of the Flower 2015 at The Philadelphia Sketch Club, offering to take a photo of me with my accepted entry. She said people rarely take pictures of me with my work and we each took photos of each other with our artwork. It was a nice surprise to see that both of us had used digital photo montage to make floral artwork. While my composition has an informal composition, Suzanne Comer‘s Panoply is a formal composition with a coherent balance of shape, color and negative space with the charm of individual flowers emphasized.
“Suzanne Comer regards photography as an art form, often expanding the boundaries by using portions of her photographs to digitally create a new and different whole or montage. With the perspective of a painter, Suzanne’s style stimulates the viewer’s own interpretation and feelings. Therefore, in full circle, creating new personal meanings” – Media Arts Council
Art of the Flower 2015,The Philadelphia Sketch Club, Kimberle Nentwig, Dahia Darling, watercolor, First Prize and Maria Kurtzman, White Roses and Kumquats, oil on board, Second Place
“Laura Ducceschi’s photography captures the magical way natural light accentuates beauty in nature and in people. Laura’s award-winning fine art photography portrays an intimate view of our beautiful world. Her images reveal how natural light emphasizes color and texture._ excerpt Laura Ducceschiartist statement
As a photographer and painter I was particularly satisfied to see a top award go to a deserving photograph. Photography isn’t about just shooting hundreds of photos to find a good image, the photographer has to make it happen. The tools of a photographer are not unlike painters, the goals are similar, the time and effort equivalent. To have a jury of peers, experts in their field, select a photograph signals the change in acceptance towards the art form. There are a lot of photographs in the show, Philly is as much a photography town as it is a painters town. The history of photography in Philadelphia parallels PAFA and the influence of photography on modern painting is undeniable.
Art of the Flower 2015,The Philadelphia Sketch Club, J D Mitchell, Chestnut Hill Iris, digital print on 100 lb paper, 12″ x 12″ framed
The excitement of an opening, meeting the artists and their families, taking pictures, drinking and eating, is a social practice that is a reward in itself. It is so much fun to watch folks checking out the competition, eves dropping on critiques and comparing and contrasting the artworks with friends. One wonders why artists subject themselves to the process of acceptance and I think it’s the feeling of accomplishment, aside from the exclusivity, of being recognized for your hard work.
Please join us at historic The Philadelphia Sketch Club for an ongoing exhibition of works by one of our professional member. Free and open to the public. STEWART ROOM GALLERY New works by Lauren Sweeney. March 7-30, 2015See her Online Gallery under “Sweeney” in our PSC Member Gallery HERE . Reception: Saturday March 21, 2015, 2:00 – 4:00pm at The Philadelphia Sketch Club. Open to all.
A lifetime of scientific observation is the underpinning of the artist’s interest in capturing the essence of her subjects in watercolor. In her still life compositions, she focuses on close observation of the organic forms of flowering plants, vegetables, seashells and gourds for their exuberant variations in shape, color, texture and pattern.” – Lauren Sweeney
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, 
