Category Archives: Philadelphia Artists

Philadelphia’s art scene is vibrant, ever-changing, combining technique and technology for new visions of reality, creating a transformative influence on life-style in the urban community and beyond.

Listening In & Eye Charts on Broad @ UArts

1 Reply

Justin Rubick @ UArts

Listening In, Brittany Papale @ UArts, Broad & Pine Streets.

Nostalgia simply oozes from the dual pay phones installed outside UArts, harking back to the late days of public access to affordable communications.  DoN recalls the uproar when a 3 minute local call jumped from a dime to 25 cents – now, public phones are rare, cell phones so pervasive that young people can’t imagine a wired world with huge, magnificent switches manned by teams of technicians opening and closing connections.  Listening In allows you to eves-drop on private conversations in a very public setting.  “Stop phonin’, stop phonin’, I don’t wanna think anymore – I got my head & my heart on the dancefloor.”  Lady Gaga.

Justin Rubick @ UArts

“My piece consists of two eye charts arranged in a V, with one facing north and the other south.  Since the eye chart always corresponds to a certain distance from which to view it, I have not only blown up the eye chart 10X but scaled up the optimal viewing distance proportionally.“

Justin Rubich, artist.

Sculpture @ UArts

The continuing series of sculptures presented in the niches of the temple @ Pine & Broad Streets is always a nice surprise with thoughtful, contemporary installations casually placed right out on the street which really forces the artist to think about the environment of the sculpture.  The quest to be creative yet use materials that the artist won’t be totally devastated if something is damaged has resulted in works made from plastic milk crates, wire & broken glass, cellophane…so far the only damage DoN has noticed has been weather related.  Philly LoVeS ArT!!!

Scott Kip @ Fleisher Art Memorial Wind Challenge #3

Leave a reply

Fleisher Art Memorial

Scott Kip‘s installation of sculptures represents the past, present & future; the center sculpture with s a step stool has the shadow of clockworks rotating and when you look through the hole someone at a sculpture at the other end of the room can see your eye.  Each piece is a meticulously constructed models create wonderful optical illusions of abstract art reminiscent to Albers, Indiana and Grooms.  The left side of the gallery is the future and the right is the past – from the future the view is confusing, the past you may find another eye looking back at you.Scott Kip @ Fleisher Art Memorial Wind Challenge #3

Scott Kip‘s center sculpture projects the shadow of time in the center of a frail super-structure.  Scott told DoN it took more than a year to complete the project of hard woods and that he was inspired by the writing of T.S. Eliot. The result is ineffable.

Scott Kip @ Fleisher Art Memorial Wind Challenge #3

Scott Kipp @ Wind Challenge #3, Fleisher Art Memorial.

Scott Kip @ Fleisher Art Memorial Wind Challenge #3

Scott Kip

“I make model scale structures out of wood, each lit directly from above.  The structures are designed around the path light takes through them, both the light from above and the possible sight lines of the viewer.  The work is a meditation on how perspective affects our understanding of the relationships between things and the idea that life (the space between birth and death) is a place.”

“…Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell he passed the stages of his age and youth entering the whirlpool.”

Death By Water, T.S.Eliot

 

Photos by DoNBrewerPhotography

 

The Plastic Club’s 2010 Members’ Medals Show

Leave a reply

Karl Olsen The Plastic Club Members’ Medals Show

Karl Richard Olsen took home the Gold Medal in the Plastic Club’s Members’ Medals Show for “Norge“, graphite & pastel.  Check out the perfect hoop earring, a simple shape created with confidant strokes, anchoring the image in a time, place, personality, style… it’s amazing how charcoal & pastel can look so liquidy & fluid. Olsen has a major installation for MCGOPA @ The Inquirer Building in Conshohocken.

Robert Bohne won the Dorothy Invernizzi Guinn Memorial Prize for his masterpiece, “Crustacean Feast“.  The award honors realist paintings because Dorothy didn’t get abstract art and this oil painting is a timeless example of atmospheric naturalism of the highest achievement.  As an artist, when viewing a painting which speaks of years of observation, practice, study, patience & wisdom, it leaves a sensation of living forever, feasting in the moment and leaving a mark on the world.

The Plastic Club Members’ Medals Show

DoN Brewer, Denmark, photograph, Marie Samohod, Night Still Life, acrylic, Morris Klein, Washington Square, photograph and Eileen Eckstein, Finger Painting, photograph.

The Plastic Club Members’ Medals Show

Tom McCobb, Adirondack Tea Party, oil.

The Plastic Club Members’ Medals Show

Burton Greenspan, Albert, oil.  Honorable Mention Award for The Plastic Club’s Members’ Medals Show.

The Members’ Medals Show presents 130 artworks throughout three gallery spaces, Alan Klawans explained that volunteers organize and hang the show; the organic mix of paintings, drawings, photos & mixed media often is brilliant with quirky juxtapositions, DoN is confused by the placement of Syd Torchio‘s Art Porn, Take 3, a fantastical painting with a grown up fun-house vibe that gets a bit lost in the dim hall, the best view is from the stairs.

 

 

Brenna K. Murphy @ Fleisher Art Memorial Wind Challenge #3

Leave a reply

Brenna K. Murphy @ Fleisher Art Memorial

Brenna K. Murphy @ Wind Challenge Exhibitions #3, Fleisher Art Memorial.

Brenna’s installation @ The Fleisher Art Memorial is part drawing, part conceptual art, part performance art, part photography & part crafting like a recipe for 21st Century modern art.  Murphy uses human hair to draw on the walls, sews hair into her photographs and over time will wash the hairs off the wall to put in the bowls on the floor, an idea she came up with when she was de-installing her last show.

Brenna K. Murphy @ Fleisher Art Memorial

Brenna K. Murphy draws onto the photograph by sewing hair into the paper, creating an illusion of a documentary photo, DoN thought she had installed huge drawings of furniture like the ones in the gallery.

Brenna K. Murphy @ Fleisher Art Memorial

Detail of hair drawing on the wall @ Fleisher Art Memorial by Brenna K. Murphy – DoN had to do some Photoshop magic to get the delicate lines to appear for the web, in real life the stray strands are poetic and serene.

Brenna K. Murphy @ Fleisher Art Memorial

Human hair wall drawing of a dresser with a small bowl on the floor, each Wednesday Brenna plans to wash off some of the hair and put it in the bowls.  Brenna Murphy’s drawings are loaded like meme bombs filled with memory, loss, dreams, beauty, ritual, divinity all playing out on long stands on hair.  Filaments of the imagination.

Charles Rodman Pancoast “Magic Lantern” Glass Slides @ The Franklin Institute

1 Reply

Charles R Pancoast “Magic Lantern” Glass Slides

The image above is a digital photo of a projected “Magic Lantern” glass slide that was digitally scanned which DoN compressed for viewing on the web, a long way for a photo to travel.  April 14th, 2010 The Geographic Society Of Philadelphia invited members of The Photographic Society of Philadelphia to view glass slides of a travelogue through Japan by Charles R. Pancoast, an early member of PSoP, from the beginning of the 20th Century in Franklin Hall @ The Franklin Institute.

The invitation only viewing of the slides, not seen since the 1960s, was hosted by Senior Curator of Collections, John V. Alvin, who explained the origins of glass slide projections with the “Magic Lantern” and guided our tour of absolutely exquisite, engrossing, detailed, immediate, gloriously colorful photographs of life, architecture, landscape and fashion in early 1900s Japan.

Charles R Pancoast “Magic Lantern” Glass Slides

Example of a “Magic Lantern” projector which allowed glass slides with hand-colored positive photographs to be projected on a wall in the dark with light from a candle.  Magic Lantern shows became a popular form of public entertainment before the advent of electricity and entrepreneurs could purchase a lantern with a set of slides and booklets which allowed them to present guided travelogues, traveling town to town putting on shows like the tour GSoP & PSoP members viewed at The Franklin Institute.

Charles R Pancoast “Magic Lantern” Glass Slides

This beautiful image is of a dancer performing in a pagoda displays the beauty, grace, architecture, aesthetics, and quality of life in pre-war Japan as well as exhibiting the high quality of Pancoast’s photography loaded with immediacy, gorgeous composition and technical virtuosity.  Charles Pancoast operated a successful glass slide development business, producing his own slides as well as other photographers, he became a member of the Photographic Society of Philadelphia in 1877, serving as secretary and participating in the  photography section of the Franklin Institute.

Charles R Pancoast “Magic Lantern” Glass Slides

This slide is of “The Polar Stars”, Captain Roald Amundsen, Sir Ernest H. Shackleton and Rear Admiral Robert E. Peary in a historic meeting of the famous polar explorers at The Franklin Institute.  The Photographic Society has a long relationship with The Franklin Institute, DoN picked up an invitation to a PSoP meeting at 1305 Arch St, June 20th, 1888 – the conversation was about “the reproduction of negatives” and ” a new developer – Hydroxylamine and Pyro” – PSoP, the 2nd oldest photography club in the world, still holds monthly meetings at The Plastic Club on Camac Street, continuing the long conversation about photography which has been going on in Philly since the beginning of the development of this “magical” technology.