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Also this issue: Phrenic Pace Bruce Campbell Rosalie Knecht Philadelphia Black Theatre Festival "A Sense of Place" |
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August 22-28, 2002
art
 (Top) William Speidel, To Die By Your Side (After Warhol’s Red Disaster) (2002), 5 feet by 6 feet, screen print on acrylic; (above) Nami Yamamoto, Elements (2001), detail, mixed media. |
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HI-FIVE: Nami Yamamoto, William A. Speidel, John Lorenzini, Mauro Zamora, Erin WeckerleThrough Sept. 1, Vox Populi, 1315 Cherry St., Fourth Floor, 215-568-5513
On the wall behind the counter at cooperative gallery Vox Populi where needed items such as folding chairs are posted on a short “Wish List,” requests for fans have been crossed out and replaced with “air conditioner.” August is a thankless month for art galleries.
Refill your bottle of Dasani and check out the debut of Vox's five newest members. The strongest piece is Primordial Soup, a wall-based installation by Nami Yamamoto. Quivering on the ends of long pins, layered flat elements wrap around two walls and drift cloudlike from about knee-height to seven or eight feet. The lacy, cut-out forms apparently depict zygotic cleavage and further cellular division into bubble clusters. Yamamoto cut the four-, eight- or many-lobed elements from flat contrasting materials: pink foam, plastic screen, glittering 3-D textured cardboard. A stretched orange rubber band may represent a single cell. An occasional frothy pattern is simply painted on the wall.
The drift of colors ranges from neutrals and pastels to brights but it all looks synthetic: a candy-wrapper vision of buoyant irrepressible life. A significant contingent of artists at Vox chooses to work within the constraints of everyday materials and tools. In this installation, Yamamoto makes an effective statement with a pared-down technical armory, partly because she does what she does with precision and commitment.
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A similar standard of perfection in construction raises William A. Speidel's elaborate installation The Chippendale to a visually satisfying level, though the concept is slightly thin. Speidel's weight-lifting bench conflates the notion of the Chippendale male strippers with historic Chippendale furniture. Buff Aryan flesh is handsomely suggested by smooth pine and ornate designs stenciled in sawdust on white vinyl. From lacy pierced Gothic brackets to a twisting curtain rod supporting the plastic weights, everything in the installation appears to have been assembled from prefab wood elements available at your friendly Home Depot.
Speidel's decision to rely on factory-made parts dovetails with the popular appeal of the Chippendale dancers; however, a direct reference to actual Chippendale furniture, with its bulging corbel legs and curving backs, might have deepened the resonance of The Chippendale.
Speidel's To Die By Your Side (after Andy Warhol's Silver Disaster) is an oddly endearing and funny silk-screen double image of Warhol's electric chair with a Windsor rocking chair beside it. The weird, cozy juxtaposition accurately duplicates the grainy, newspapery quality of Warhol's original. It draws on myriad mass-culture execution associations, including recent films like Dead Man Walking and Monster's Ball, which persuade us that we are familiar with the protocols of legally sanctioned murder. Execution, like Warhol's art, now in the Modernist canon, no longer has the power to shock.
John Lorenzini's light jet prints depict the absence of a figure or figures which have been removed from the original photograph and digitally replaced, leaving a human-shaped shadow. The scenes are neatly composed in grid formats of surfaces such as knotty pine paneling or -- perhaps the best -- a sofa with a black throw, three pillows and a red telephone against a red wall. Nevertheless, the purity of Lorenzini's compositions is consistently undermined by angled verticals which remind us that no matter how brilliant the altered color and no matter how artful the forms, his photographs do not pretend to be more than souped-up snapshots and are, therefore, perhaps more human.
Erin Weckerle collages fabric, sometimes using raised appliqué, glue or just paint. Her approach flaunts big black basting stitches and rough-edged areas of acrylic. Oversized dark blue paisleys on thick textured sienna velvet are appealing, as is Half-Hearted, a gestural scattering of leaves and stems on partially whited-out patterned fabric. Edges of the unpainted pattern frame the whole, which also contains a circle of metal studs. Most effective in manipulating pattern, Wind in the Ringing is a vortex of concentric circles sucking in pomegranate vines from the underlying fabric ground.
All of Mauro Zamora's paintings in this show are listed as "From a series titled: Absolute reactions on culture and nature." They contain silhouetted motifs suggesting walls, lakes, mountains, roads and trees. Some also include patterns of Brice Marten-esque lines superimposed on flat areas of paint, but just as "reactions on culture and nature" is not a kosher English phrase, these deconstructed elements are stacked up or otherwise disposed in a manner which insults pictorial conventions. Even though I did not truly admire these paintings, I found myself speculating about what they would become if they were really large.
There is plenty of color in this show, which also includes an installation of paintings: urban narratives by guest artists Martin McClure and Tricia Treacy. As in The Chippendale, color throughout the galleries communicates ideas in addition to a sense of visual richness. Not every piece at Vox is perfect, but the new members' work is energetic, vivid and aims high.
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