Challengers of the Known

Robin Rice on Visual Art: Challenge 2 at Fleisher Art Memorial

by Robin Rice

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For Philadelphia-area artists, the Fleisher Challenge is a once-in-a-career rite of passage. It's a juried competition for nine annual exhibition places that function as connected solo shows. The three-person shows are usually a worthwhile experience for art lovers, and the current felicitously assembled Challenge 2 group is no exception.

Mark Khaisman, a man who seems to have done a lot of different art-related things without becoming dilettantish, is showing sizable pictures based on Samuel Fuller's 1953 film noir Pickup on South Street. Each represents a frame of film, achieving the effect of celluloid through layering ordinary translucent brown plastic packaging tape onto a plastic sheet mounted over a light box. The images have a digitized quality that looks vaguely Cubist, but Khaisman's execution lifts the improvised technology to an impressive level of conviction. Very slightly reminiscent of Roy Lichtenstein's representations of cartoons, the intimacy of vastly enlarged close-ups meshes interestingly with the distancing engendered by quirky art materials and rigorous illusionistic simplification.

A short video titled There's a Frame Missing (a line from the Fuller movie) accompanies the pictures. Its vision already filtered through the processes and agendas of distant entities, Khaisman's homage to film noir (executed in tones of sepia rather than noir) functions at a third or fourth remove from lived human experience. Similarly, Hope Rovelto's porcelain chairs are the product of plaster molds of manufactured furniture. The ghostly white, fired clay (sometimes combined with other materials and steel chairs in the installation) and the chairs' wobbly, knock-kneed quality, emphasized by unsanded mold-lines, goes beyond frailty (it would be folly to sit in one of these chairs), implying that all stability is merely a provisional illusion.

Long acknowledged as stand-ins (sit-ins?) for the human form, Rovelto's spectrum of chairs implies the arc of life from infancy to infirmity. Presented in a scattered group with screen prints of photographs on the walls (inaccessible because the gallery is roped off), the installation seems more a slice of life than a linear narrative. The specific forms Rovelto chooses tend to the spartan and skeletal: There are no overstuffed comfy chairs here, though there is a lawn chaise.

Rovelto is giving away something very nice in return for a voluntary donation. It's an original, signed, frameable print on good-quality paper. What a treat! Five represented chairs begin with a high chair and end with a wheelchair. But I'm confused by the artist's anti-chair motto in the print, "Get up ... don't sit your life away." It seems to question her intentions in constructing this work so laboriously. Or is that the point, that chairs are the enemy and you have to stand on your own two feet?

Khaisman's film-based work, displayed in the first gallery, also bridges to Kara Crombie's video portraits. They are worth the trouble of asking Fleisher personnel to turn on and adjust the monitors. Apparently simple, the portraits (as in Woods of Saxony, 2005, pictured, detail, p. 22) consist of a looped image of the living, breathing subject posed for a still picture. Backgrounds were filmed separately. The precise outlines of the subjects and strong definite colors could suggest quattrocento Florentine portraiture.

Each portrait tells us about Crombie's subjects but without delving into deep psychology or much in the way of symbolic accessories. Crombie is moving toward a functional genre of portraiture. One of these portraits could be very satisfying as a permanent installed work.

Roveltos's life-story chairs could evolve into Khaisman's analysis of representation. His film noir fascination with society could be seen as a background to Crombie's more personal but still distanced use of video. Her individual subjects might be symbolized by chairs. The cumulative effect of this Challenge show is a sense of very individual artists who are grounded — not wandering in some arid conceptual maze but in touch with people, with society and with art that is relevant.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

Challenge 2 | Through March 7, Fleisher Art Memorial, 719 Catharine St., 215-922-3456, fleisher.org