August 5-11, 2004

art

House of Games

TOY STORY: The living room of South Philly's Padlock Gallery will be transformed into a child's bedroom, complete with the doll-like creations of Juliet Wayne. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Juliet Wayne and Padlock Gallery make beautiful art together.

by Joel Tannenbaum

Pleased to Meet You: A Game of Introductions is an old, decrepit board game, from the early 1970s, by the looks of it. On the front of the weathered red box is a picture of four bonneted young women, identical except that one is made entirely of imaginary continents, another of Rube Goldberg-ish factory components, etc. Scrawled in crayon next to the four figures is a child's rendition of a fifth. This particular copy of Pleased to Meet You will certainly not pass for "near mint" in the eyes of collectors. Inside the box, things get stranger. The game consists of 90 wooden blocks. If placed in the proper order, in rows of 5 by 18, each side of the blocks displays one of the images on the box. The rules of the game are a mystery. The directions, we are told, have been lost.

But Pleased to Meet You is no game. It is one of the most striking pieces on display at South Philadelphia's Padlock Gallery for the first-ever solo show by local animator/puppeteer/sculptor/painter Juliet Wayne. For the duration of the show, Padlock's living room/gallery floor will be transformed into a child's bedroom, full of toy-store detritus: games that are not games, dolls that are not dolls, half-remembered images that, through Wayne's animated work (looped on a television in the gallery) serve as both standalone pieces and "commercials" for the other objects in the room. Wayne's animation is "object-oriented," as she puts it — subjecting painstakingly created objects and puppets, along with the occasional live subject, to stop-motion photography.

If Pleased to Meet You is all about uncertainty and incompletion, then Yellow Wallpaper Doll represents precisely the opposite. A doll in a bed, a bed in an elaborate frame, with a moving yellow backdrop, the piece practically asks not to be touched, despite its interactive format (the viewer turns the backdrop manually). The title is taken from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's late-Victorian short story, in which a recent mother, diagnosed with a nervous disorder and encouraged to abandon all social and intellectual activity, slowly loses herself in the yellow wallpaper of her nursery.

The Padlock Gallery is arguably the perfect venue for this sort of thing. The Ellsworth Avenue space is a rowhouse, with the front room serving as the gallery. Using the operational logic of a DIY punk-show space, the residents and curators have quickly racked up a reputation for off-the-hook first-time group and solo shows. The space oozes accessibility, for both the artists and the visitors.

Not surprisingly, all three Padlock residents have backgrounds in the DIY scene: Ted Passon, 23, used to set up punk and hardcore music shows near his childhood home in New Jersey. Molly MacIntyre, 24, has designed posters for local bands like the Walkie Talkies. Q, 26, organized soccer matches in Fairmount Park. "That kind of DIY show ethic is definitely something that's important to all of us," says Passon.

An excellent turnout at the opening for their first show, "Strangely Familiar" by Alina Josan, suggested that they were on to something. Subsequent shows, featuring things like mixtape art and sewing machine art to name a few, have consistently generated excitement. Their success spoke to an embarrassing gap in the Philadelphia gallery scene: a lack of spaces for young artists to display their work. "There's Space 1026," says MacIntyre, "but other than that, there's not a lot of places to show art if you're a young person, except for your senior show in school, and then once everybody graduates it's like, 'Well, we have all these friends who make art in their room. No one can see it.'"

Juliet Wayne's untitled show will be the Padlock Gallery's sixth. Some of the pieces on display have surfaced before in group shows at University of the Arts' Gallery One, and as part of the Art in City Hall program. Wayne, a 27-year-old Havertown native, has done time at both University of the Arts and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in addition to a brief stint at New York's School of Visual Arts, where she studied illustration. Her focus eventually became animation.

The decision to attend PAFA was rooted in an admirable but ultimately misguided attempt to perfect her painting and drawing through rigorous technical training. Wayne says the school's stifling orthodoxy eventually proved to be too much: "Their whole outlook, the whole structure of the school, the social scene, the way people talk to each other, what they were teaching, how they taught, the teachers, the other students, everything … and then they brought Laura Bush to the school to host a luncheon. She picked up her speaker's fee and didn't buy anything. Then they put her picture in some brochure and I was like, 'Check please.'"

The Padlock people are excited to work with Wayne. "I think it's inspiring to a lot of people who are our age to see someone that's our age have a large body of work that ranges that many different mediums," says Passon. MacIntyre agrees: "She does animation and drawing and prints and sculpture. She has tons and tons of work."

The work displayed in Wayne's show at the Padlock Gallery stands out for its eclecticism and its emotional depth. If there is a conceptual weight behind it that remains untapped as of yet, then that is all the more reason to stay tuned — to see if her future work will produce some grand theory of childhood, consumption and memory; one to which her current work consistently and fascinatingly alludes.

Juliet Wayne's solo show, opens Sat., Aug. 7, 8 p.m.,The Padlock Gallery, 1409 Ellsworth St. Runs through Aug. 28, by appointment only. E-mail thepadlockgallery@hotmail.com to set up an appointment.