August 26-September 1, 2004

art

Shiny Happy People

Artists at Moore and Wexler this month examine the human condition.

by Robin Rice

STAR MAPS: Joy Feasley and Aaron Igler/LURE's installation in the window of Moore's Levy Gallery features electric lights and a xylophone.

Hey, here comes Charlton Heston. He's agitated: "You've got to warn everyone and tell them! Art is made of people! You've got to tell them! Art is people!"

Unfortunately, people can't eat art — unlike Soylent Green; but some art in Philly this August reminds us that, although art is always about people, sometimes its content is provocatively, generically human.

At Wexler Gallery, the husband-and-wife team of Rick Schneider and Nikki Vahle uses glass as a vehicle for addressing the lives of Midwestern workers. Like a Greek vase painter, Vahle decorates the surfaces of objects blown and solid-worked by Schneider, recycling illustrational cliches that, like Soylent Green, are drawn from human life.

They call their dazzling product "cameo glass," perhaps a misnomer. In true cameo glass, color modulation results from variations in the thickness of layered glass. The petals of a white blossom in relief on a red ground are pink-tinted where thin and translucent. They become white and opaque as they thicken and curl forward.

Schneider and Vahle's flat color resembles a comic strip or a Japanese woodcut. The process is subtractive. Schneider layers several colors of glass over the surface. Vahle exposes sequential zones through sandblasting. Reheating produces a glossy finish. I particularly liked black-and-white birds on a purple water ice sphere in Summer Sweets. The white edge accents the black outlines.

From variations on vessels, the pair has moved into sculpture and bolder opaque colors. Several pieces at Wexler are installations with assemblage aspects. In Eye on the Prize (2003), six oversized, orange glass carrots dangle from ropes tied to sticks mounted in metal wall brackets. These take the forms of silhouettes related to the international sign system. A family group is symbolically enticed by a carrot decorated with an archetypal happy family. However, the silhouette of an automobile supports a carrot depicting a multivehicle accident. An accident is hardly a "prize." Is the car a false promise of pleasure? Although mounted as an installation, each element of Eye on the Prize can be purchased individually and could stand (or hang) alone.

In the oversized six-pack For Whatever Ails You (2004), a vertical "VS" logo (the artists' initials) appears above labels decorated with working-class vignettes: men playing cards, a baker, a waitress in a diner. The proles reappear bowling on the elegantly constructed Strike ZoneVS brand bowling pins (2003) arranged on a blond wood triangle.

While Schneider and Vahle dazzle us with their technical skill and ambition, they present a subtle social critique. Who are these people who medicate themselves with all kinds of drugs, bowl, drink beer and go hunting? Their cartoonish happiness and lightning-struck pain seem as shallow as Vahle's precise cuts through layers of colored glass, but aren't they really reflections of ourselves?

At Levy Gallery's "Philadelphia Selections Five," we can admire our reflections in three large mirrors, but if we aren't too vain, we see so much more. As we approach the door outside the gallery, we're treated to a seemingly chaotic array of wires, lights and a computer on the floor. It's the backside of James Johnson's work inside the gallery — inside the mirrors. When you find the right spot on a mirror, you visually enter an expansive domestic interior. It's magical and Johnson seems to be transparent in the way he presents his magic, but he's tricky. He may be able to see us and to manipulate scenes as we are looking at them. Like God, he probably won't and the permutations we notice are preprogrammed.

Johnson is one of a group of 10 artists selected by the director of exhibitions, Brian Wallace, from the Levy Gallery Artists Registry of slides. The gallery periodically invites a curator to shape a show from its registry, which is open to all artists from nine counties in and around Philadelphia. It's the largest such collection in the area. Wallace has been in Philadelphia for a year and a half now and organized this fifth "Philadelphia Selections" as a way of learning more about local artists.

Nadia Hironaka's engaging video Home is a random sampling of domesticity anchored by close-ups of a wine glass and foliage. It divides itself vertically and horizontally to a Cage-like soundtrack. To visit Home, we must pass by Bekhyon Yim's cluster of nine red execution stools and nooses. The subject is public squares in Philadelphia where executions were staged. One, Logan Square, fronted the Levy Gallery location. On the stools, drawings of some of the FBI's most wanted remind us that executions are still public entertainment.

Also in the middle of the gallery, Ephraim Russell's perfectly crafted futuristic objects, such as the Dimensionator, a suitcaselike item on a revolving Display Environment, raise questions about function. Like the word "ergonomic," a pseudo-scientific way to say "curved," Russell's work (definitely anti-ergonomic) possesses a spooky empty authority.

Maybe ergonomic is the contemporary form of Rococo, which Rain Harris has clearly mastered in Gilding the Lily. The large, pearly pink wall-mounted ceramic, flower, wallpaper and braid cartouches are, Harris says, partly inspired by poison and medicine bottles. Though that is not obvious, all approach/avoidance and good taste/bad taste buttons are pushed. It's fun.

Elizabeth Rywelski deferred taste issues in her many portraits taken at Kmart's Olan Mills Portrait Studios to the store's shoppers and salespeople. On their suggestions, Rywelski purchased clothing and accessories, put them on and had her photo taken in this disguise. (She also bought the installation's wallpaper and paint in imitation of customers at Home Depot.) She told fellow shoppers, as well as salespeople and photographers, different stories to contextualize each portrait: a gift for a distant soldier boyfriend or for her child's birthday.

There's really no getting away from making decisions in making art. The question is, when are the decisions made? Rywelski's process seems to me to be arrogant and verging on unethical. She offers up others' taste for our amusement. Maybe that's acceptable; they'll never know. But she imposed on people who did their best for her, and she responded by returning things she'd purchased from them. Salespeople aren't overweening, soulless Kmart; they are individuals. Rywelski even plans to return the picture frames she bought for the show at Moore. It is funny, but isn't it a kind of Soylent Green?

If you really want to see unethical (as a subject), check out Daniel Heyman's quartet of paintings from his "War Series," which incorporates images from Abu Ghraib prison. Although he's made many idyllic images, Heyman has always been interested in political, sometimes violent subjects. This is his best work that I've seen. It is beautiful with many rhythmic repetitions of the same image, sometimes something hopeful like cranes, but the beauty obscures the horror and pain. It is almost musical in the reiteration of themes like obsessive memories.

The coolest abstractionist in the group is Steven Baris. His thoughtful manipulation of space, translucence and soft-edged geometries is deceptively unassuming. In contrast, the artist's statement from Arden Bendler Browning says she craves "imagined orderly structure." She goes chaotic cold turkey on unstretched, cut-out canvas. In the window of the gallery a large installation by Joy Feasley and Aaron Igler/LURE depicts the big dipper a la dollar store. In addition to plenty of electric lights, there's a xylophone, which is always a good thing.

The constants in this show are a sensitivity to color, a kind of bravado and the various human issues that engage these artists. Perhaps meaningful art is always made from people.

Rick Schneider and Nikki Vahle: Observations and Recollections Through Aug. 31, Wexler Gallery, 201 N. Third St., 215-923-7030 Philadelphia Selections Five Through Sept. 3, The Galleries at Moore, Moore College of Art and Design, 20th and the Parkway, 215-965-4027