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Also this issue: Designer Threads Bryan Willette Forbidden Broadway Beauty and the Beast The Consul Paul Taylor Dance Co. John Simpson and Jesse Sheidlower of the OED Artsbeat |
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December 5-11, 2002
first friday focus
 Keith Sharp, Waves (2002), 20 inches by 24 inches, toned silver gelatin prints. |
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CHAD students share gallery space this month with work from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. As part of its “Start Your First Friday at CHAD” initiative, each of the 365 students enrolled in the progressive charter school will exhibit their work. CHAD, with the encouragement of Old City Arts, has offered to be the much-needed “educational arm” of First Friday reveling, says Barbara Chandler Allen, the school’s director of development. “Come see what dynamic inner-city kids are doing with design.” This month, student work juried by local design professionals will be hard to miss: It will be installed on the walls, ceilings, everywhere. The C-H, a Smithsonian-affiliated New York institution, has developed a symbiotic relationship with the school. CHAD faculty participated in the museum’s summer design institute this year and the C-H is loaning work from its recent “Skin” show. And through a program called CHADesign, respected designers have been invited to donate work so the school can form “a study collection to live with, handle, study and, in some cases, take apart,” says Allen.
Reception Fri., Dec. 6, 5:30-8 p.m. Exhibit runs through Jan. 15, 675 Sansom St., 215-351-2900.
Sometimes a baby toy is just a baby toy. But sometimes, it's different. It looks like rubber tires stacked around a pole. These are the moments that Keith Sharp savors. He's been working on his "Same While Different" series for a while now, and the comparisons just keep coming to him: A fish's scales resemble the siding on a house; a series of overlapping freeways mimic thick, winding leaves; a round waffle could pass for a manhole cover. Some are more straightforward than others (hair cornrows compared to real cornrows), but all provoke a moment of recognition that Sharp was surely after. The "Anthropomorphic" series is an excuse for Sharp to get silly. He has made a Winking Car and a Sick Planet by manipulating scanned photographs with PhotoShop. Many look like greeting cards that might have obvious jokes inside about feeling under the weather or not keeping in touch; nevertheless, the images are smile-getters.
Reception Fri., Dec. 6, 5-8:30 p.m. Exhibition runs through Dec. 29, 60 N. Second St., 215-627-5310.
Mary Murphy's liquidy canvases glow with shiny jewel-like colors and swirly forms. These "self-portraits" have an Audrey Flack quality, with a cosmetic-like palette and glossy exterior, but below the surface are pools of oily, changeable color. Robert Straight must have loved his Spirograph when he was a kid. His petal forms and perfect circles have the same sense of planned whimsy as that geometrical toy -- all laid over plaids and checks. In oil paint on thick boards, Scott Marvel Cassidy carefully recreates what we can only assume are his favorite CDs: Black Sabbath, Wire, The Stooges. The cover art is his main interest, meticulously, but not too perfectly, copied with his own touch, but Cassidy has also paid close attention to the jewel case of the CD -- the chunky plastic trimmed in black gives the object dimension on its ground of steely gray.
Reception Fri., Dec. 6, 5:30-7:30 p.m. Exhibit runs through Jan. 18, 1710 Sansom St., 215-569-9433.
The Optimistic is a refreshingly different kind of gallery for Philadelphians used to stark white walls and a vacant atmosphere. That's because it's also a home. Jeff McMahon and Lizanne Haimes rehabbed a house over the last year and have turned it into what they hope will be a salon in the old tradition of good talk, good socializing and the sharing of good works of art. They ran a gallery of the same name in Chicago, but decided to bring it all back to their hometown. This month's show is "Revisionist History" and features the works of painters Charles Schmidt, Christina Renfer and Carrie Cook and paper-sculptor Sarah Steinwachs. Reception Fri., Dec. 6, 6-9 p.m. Exhibit runs through Jan. 10., 708 S. Washington Sq., 215-888-4350.... Continuing at The Leonard Pearlstein Gallery is a show by Israeli artist Ofra Uzan of her "Luminous Sculptures," mixed-media pieces lit from above, below and all over, and usually drawn from Judaic stories and mythology. Exhibit runs through Dec. 13, Drexel University, 33rd and Market sts., 215-895-2548.... Also continuing is "Youth and the United Nations: A Look at Internationalism Through Children's Art" at MYX Gallery. Exhibit runs through Dec. 20, 110 Church St., 215-923-1415.
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