Familiar Territory

An Extended View: Landscapes by Philadelphia Artists, Levy Gallery

Off The Wall, Atrium Moore College of Art, 20th & The Parkway, 568-4515, ext. 1142.

Fire at Yellowstone, Walter Edmonds.

Lisa Panzera has been curator of Moore College's Levy Gallery for over a year, but the current exhibition is the first she's curated especially for the gallery. Because Levy Gallery is probably the most significant institution to devote itself exclusively to Philadelphia art, its shows are important events, and its future direction is of great interest in the art community.

Panzera's choice of landscape for her debut presents a contrast with the playful but conceptual themes favored by Richard Torchia, her predecessor. Torchia challenged the traditional image of Philadelphia as the city of representation, just as he challenged traditional definitions of art.

Panzera takes a thoughtful accessible tack. Her survey includes a number of familiar artists with work which seems surprisingly fresh. She expands only slightly on the idea of landscape as it has been understood for the last couple of centuries. The sense of nature is paramount. Panzera even shys away from urban scenes for the most part and from works which comment on the place of the figure in the landscape. She does gently push the envelope with some near-abstractions, the installation work of Jane Irish and the surreal eco-commentary of Jimmy Mance's large shield-like drawing The Other Side of Equilibrium.

Panzera's curatorial essay economically sketches the broad history of landscape painting. In locating Philadelphia landscape within this context, she notes few direct links between the past and the present, a curious conundrum given the Quaker interest in nature and our strong tradition of mostly figurative representation.

The majority of the 22 artists in the show paint what they see. From Emily Brown's plein-air studies to Louis Sloan's ragged tree silhouettes against the sky, most do it the old fashioned way: representationally.

Randall Exon's darkish Corot-like scenes do not include the master's signature spots of red. William Smith seems to have aged his pictures with antique-y umber glazes. A long untitled painting of trees against the setting sun transcends the pretension of its exaggerated proportions to emphasize the horizon within the horizontal, and a golden nostalgia for the setting sun.

Not usually a landscapist, James Brantley brings a characteristic touch of fantasy and scale manipulation to his View from Belmont Plateau. Here the foreground floats forward out of a smooth spatial recession and a patch of water reflects the bright blue sky.

Sarah McEneaney's work in this show is also atypically free of narrative. The Burren, County Clare has a chunky solid bank of white clouds above an outcrop of white rocks. Rain has a delightful lacy speckled surface.

Marita Fitzpatrick's patterned diptych of formal gardens allows angled paths to cut from one panel into another with a kind of Last Year at Marienbad surrealism.

No-holds-barred Walter Edmonds apparently never heard the word irony (or if he did, he ignored it). He is perhaps the most obvious heir to the sublime school of 19th-century landscape painting in this group. In the blazing Fire at Yellowstone, he brazenly sculpts wild curlicues of crimson flame and silhouettes cross-like tree trunks against a field of yellow.

A cool contrast, Mary Ann Krutsick is showing silhouette images linking the destructive character of oil refineries with forces of nature. In the diptych Grey Event, for example, the light-on-light silhouetted shape of a fire-orphaned stone chimney is echoed and inverted as a dark-on-dark smoke plume.

Tom Judd's bold but somber painterly abstractions are sometimes applied to found objects. Compositionally, he joins image fragments somewhat in the manner of James Rosenquist. Similarly, Vivian Wolovitz uses bits of collage to evoke a swampy dark field — atmospheric, scratched and speckled with light.

Without reference to seen specifics, John McDaniel suggests bursts of power with flaring sprays of delicate lines contrasted with almost pictographic renderings of humans and machines.

But realism predominates. The thin linearity of Morgan Gilpatrick's small egg temperas is almost Flemish in its obsessive accumulation of detail and rich oil-based glazes. The perfection of tree subjects like Green Ash is elaborated in Gilpatrick's carefully chosen wood frames which transform these paintings into icon-like objects.

The painting as object has a strong presence in this exhibition and is one of the directions in which Panzera may be seen to enlarge strictly traditional forms. While Gilpatrick's landscapes look definitively traditional, Landscape with Blind Spots by Steven Baris resembles camouflage. And what could be more demonstrably evocative of landscape than camouflage? Baris' grid-related blobs of blues and browns remind one of translucent leaves rustling in the sun. Landscape with Blind Spots #2 and Untitled #87 carry the illusion further because they are executed on thick panels of light refracting Plexiglas.

A complementary jewel-like surface is achieved by Clare K. Robinson's grouping of 14 small panels which have been scraped and smoothed into appealing pieces of physicality.

We would expect to find Diane Burko in this show. And we do, but with paintings transposed into object, a handsome three-panel screen containing views of the Wissahickon (probably made in conjunction with large murals on the same subject for the Marriott Hotel). All six paintings (both sides of each panel are painted) devote most of their area to water reflections, so that the river margin in the upper portion of each unites the scenes within the joined panels through continuity of edge.

The historic importance of painting as object is underscored by Jane Irish. Her lush Decor; Overdoor x 2 installation includes a burnt-orange upper register containing two elaborate over-door cartouches: garden views of hollyhocks and roses. A rectangular white relief panel set in a gleaming tawny brocade wall depicts buildings and a road against a lavender sky.

This show pleased a lot of people. It remains to be seen what Panzera will do next. A show dealing with houses and architecture has been mentioned as a future possibility — an appropriate follow-up on the landscape idea.

Off The Wall in the atrium adjacent to Levy Gallery is a small exhibition featuring three mural painters. It interestingly complements the Landscape show. Tish Ingersoll, Ras Malik and Parris Stancell have all participated in Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program (directed by Jane Golden) and their ways of representing landscape are specifically suited to large-scale works.

A stark-orange rocky outcrop is the subject chosen by Malik. In the simplified, deeply shadowed foreground of this dramatic scene are startling spiky green cacti.

Ingersoll is showing three panels demonstrating her skills with different techniques and subjects. The three views (a bridge on the Schuykill, an almost Impressionist flower garden and a rock-strewn mountain) are united by similar spring-like palettes.

Stancell is showing three works, too; but his are designs rather than representations and they are painted on both sides of panels hung from the ceiling. Each set of three comprises a single composition. On one side are simple dark tree trunks against a pink sky, all patterned with brick-shaped brush strokes. On the reverse is a loose linear representation of a flowery foreground against a background of trees.