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Also this issue: Etching for Glory Kick Out the Jams National Showcase of New Plays Dueling Media Thoroughly Modern Camillie |
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June 20-26, 2002
art
 Robert Chaney, Untitled (Orange/tan) (2001), 36 inches by 36 inches, acrylic on canvas. |
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M. Ho, Geoff DiMasi and Robert ChaneyThrough June 30, Vox Populi, 1315 Cherry St., fourth floor, 215-568-5513
There’s nothing in any of the three galleries at Vox Populi that Martha Stewart -- or you on your most fumble-fingered day -- couldn’t make at home. Accessible materials and processes characterize the work of the three artists in the show. On the other hand, there’s little here that would strike the television tastemaker as worth seeing. This is provocative. Could the artists of Vox have discovered a new, uncharted taste matrix? I think it’s possible, especially in the work of M. Ho.
Perhaps Robert Chaney's paintings exhibited under the series title "Antediluvian" might be a hit on Living, if Martha ripped the canvases off the stretchers and turned them into place mats. Chaney's sumptuous modulated colors lean toward greens and yellows, Martha's favorites.
Aside from color, which is the visual essence of Chaney's work, the untitled paintings are similar -- always 36 inches square -- with color areas organized by narrow lines resembling miniature Barnett Newman "zips." In contrast to Newman's flat, carefully planned paint, Chaney layers translucent pigments and reaps fields of complex relationships.
For Chaney, the act of painting is determined, but not the outcome. His process involves applying paint in successive layers with a rubber-tipped drywall blade. It scrapes across the canvas leaving drag marks and drips along the sides. This results in a pleasing balance of formal order and complexity, restraint and accident. These paintings will wear well in changing situations and lighting.
Geoff DiMasi is showing drawings and a pair of wooden structures in an installation composed on a single gray stripe running around his gallery at about eye level. The drawings, all placed within the stripe, are horizontal, about 8 inches high and 20 inches long. Some elements are loosely linked to technical drawing. Gallery notes suggest that this work grew out of carpentry and construction that DiMasi has done lately in his home and studio. The drawings progress clockwise from tight to loose. Several reiterate a delineation of a rectangular parallelepiped. One contains a picture of an I-beam. Many include strips and squares of painted collage and fragments of computer-printed text ("If you can convince enough neighbors you can have a frame for the sky"). Three drawings are composed of broad, isolated, sensuous black brushstrokes. Throughout there is an assured balance of patterned colored pieces and white paper.
Two wooden structures in the center of the gallery are open, framelike rectangles ("frames for the sky"?) echoing the proportions of the drawings. The apparently weathered wood has been demarcated in some places into square units. The whole installation is well-ordered and presented, but on a social or personal level it feels as if the artist is not substantially invested in it.
What would Martha say to M. Ho's temporary works exhibited under the title "Sweet Sweet Intuition"? Made with the most commonplace materials and tools and requiring minimal manual dexterity, they verge on three-dimensional doodles, like those swags of paper clips beloved of cube-farm desk jockeys. Nevertheless, Ho appropriates the tropes of contemporary vernacular art in persuasive visual statements. Layered waves of Post-Its bend around a corner. The bristling yellow rectangles suggest tree bark or some other natural phenomenon. They are fragile -- events of the moment. Yet they acquire value as a record of the maker's attention and sensitivity.
Ho's choice of yellow Post-Its -- the original and most common kind -- quietly establishes the work in the mainstream of ordinariness. Imagine you are an interplanetary ethnographer trying to decipher this work. Just as aboriginal peoples honor common indigenous plants through special uses, Ho celebrates materials typical of our environment.
Ocean Pacific similarly incorporates office or academic arte povera elements, but where Corner Piece might express the persona of an administrative assistant, swaths of simple flowers cut from white blue-lined (notebook?) paper suggest a more schoolgirl-ish origin. Each flower is pinned to the white wall with a white-headed pin: Teletubby-level craft in a virginal expanse of femininity. It really is sweet.
Spots Before Your Eyes is a more traditional high-art wall installation, striking in color and texture. It's composed of three sizes of red circles (cut a bit clumsily from something like contact paper) and shiny brass coat hooks. The circles are manipulated to delineate layered negative squares, and the bright metal provides a regal contrast.
Grid of Dipped Drawings, sheets of white paper dipped in thick black paint, is nicely suspended from binder clips, but it lacks that spooky evocation of an imaginary creator that characterizes Ho's strongest (contradictorily most fragile) work. A few drawings of negative shapes seem unresolved and unworthy of the rest of Ho's work in this show.
Taken as a whole, though, the entire show is thoughtful and certainly worth a visit. To quote a certain Kmart maven, "It's a good thing."
