July 28-August 3, 2005

artpicks

Spring-Loaded

by Susan Hagen

art

You think you have the whole summer ahead of you, then suddenly it's the end of July and all of the summer shows are starting to close. There are only a few more days to see "Springtide" at the ICA, billed as "a rush of new and recent work by five artists." Springtide — a name for a high tide right after the full and new moon and a copious flow of something — suggests the regenerative energies of the earth, elemental power, things beyond human control. The show is based on discussions among the curatorial staff at the ICA without any preselected themes or artists. According to ICA director Claudia Gould, they decided to "look with an open mind, and act with a sense of immediacy, to developments in the contemporary art world." The work shares a meticulousness of technique and materials, as well as, writes senior curator Ingrid Schaffner, a common "undercurrent of rising hysteria."

Work by some artists, like Dallas-based Erick Swenson, dramatically launches us into the sublime. Swenson contributed a dreamlike sculptural tableau depicting a contorted ice-covered faun lying on frosty cobblestones (pictured). Also disorienting (but wildly hilarious at the same time) is New York performance and video artist Patty Chang's 6-minute video loop, Losing Ground, which shows a woman (played by the artist) stumbling and falling as the grass-covered ground pitches up and down to a soundtrack of sloshing water. Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere's sculpture Les Deux, two remarkably lifelike horses suspended in a scaffold, is powerfully visceral. This trompe-l'oeil sculpture is made of stitched-together horse hide, but up close furry hooves and featureless faces give another shock.

Other works in the show are more subtle and intimate. Troy Brauntuch, from Austin, Texas, contributed four velvety and tactile black conté drawings-on-cotton of film-noir interiors and barely discernable objects, like a coat, some boxes of art supplies and a cat sleeping in a basket. Displayed sequentially, the 36 pages of Louise Bourgeois's limited-edition book, Ode à l'Oubli (Ode to Forgetfulness), are based on a prototype made from clothing and linens she had saved throughout her life dating back as early as the 1920s. The cloth pages are printed, quilted and basket-woven with appliquéd rings, squiggles and arrows and are refreshingly sensitive and guileless.

While you're at the ICA, be sure to venture upstairs. In the project gallery, "Framing Exposure: Process and Politics," a show collaboratively organized by a group of Penn students, includes provocative, compelling artwork by M. Ho, Ronald Jones and others — burdened, unfortunately, with an apologia in the form of overwrought didactic text. The Richard Pettibone retrospective exhibition is full of luscious miniature paintings on tiny stretched canvases, based on pop art and modernist icons. Pettibone (originally from California, now based in upstate New York) had the ingenious idea to paint portrait homages to these influential works at the same scale as the typical art history book reproduction — the scale that most of us first encounter great works of art.

"Springtide," through Sun., July 31, $3-$6, Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 S. 36th St., 215-898-5911, www.icaphila.org.