Screened In - Adam Lesh @ Woodpecker's Muse

Adam Lesh’s Screened In at the Woodpecker’s Muse feels claustrophobic. His paintings, imagery mediated by and through screens, disorient and close in on the viewer. Fascinated by the way that many of the most “real” experiences are often perceived through screens, Lesh appropriates subjects from both virtual and physical screens – webcams, cell phones, twitter, windows, windshields etc. Portraits clearly painted from a digital source, people filtered through the sickly green and white light only a poor quality digital camera or cell phone camera could achieve, speak to the significant connections one can build and keep through an artificial screen while at once keeping the viewer/participant closed off from outside physical reality, or the inability to truly experience while “screened off.” It is hard to deny the lingering questions: how real can it be or feel through a screen? What is it like to live a life screened in?

The most interesting piece in the show, “T-Mobile Metanarrative”, is comprised of nine panels hung together as a whole, a grid. Clearly part of a cell phone camera aesthetic, the images are unclear, hurried and glimpsed, as if the camera was unexpectedly shifted away before the viewer had the chance to recognize what it is they are seeing. This effect of being cut off and disoriented is heightened by Lesh’s palette, one of acid colors that speak to digital reproduction and modern technology. Some panels are overlaid with literal mesh screens, creating a subtle pixelation effect and further connecting the oil paintings to the digital world. Lesh states that he “intends to tease apart possible meanings, to reorient these dizzying phenomena from the quick time of bits to the slow time of paint.” “T-Mobile Metanarrative” achieves this in the most tangible way by suggesting the little parts of ourselves we involve within this world, filtered through these strange screens, and the various degrees and ways we reach to understand the whole. Lesh's paintings seem to beg answer to the question of "what is it like to live screened in?" I can't help but think the answer is a life dizzy and unsettled, solitary as a result of being held, by your own doing, inside. 

Screened In runs from now until end of March.

Woodpecker's Muse Gallery hours:

Closed Sunday and Monday.
Open: Tuesday thru Friday : 11:00 to 6:00
Saturday: 1:00 to 5:00

The Woodpecker's Muse is located at 372 W. Broadway, Eugene, Oregon 97401

Adam Lesh "Screened In"

At THE WOODPECKER'S MUSE

review coming soon

http://eugeneagogo.com/-screened-In-A-Solo-Exhibit-By-Adam-Lesh/e/EJSQVJW/

Eugene Collects @ Jacobs Gallery, Hult Center

Despite having a highly unattractive flier, Eugene Collects, now showing at the Jacobs Gallery in Hult Center, is very charming. A showcase complimenting art owned and loaned by local collectors, the artists featured range from 19th century French print makers and Japanese brush and ink painters, to contemporary artists working in a variety of media.

The painting that greets you upon entering the show, Sherrie Wolf's Red Tulip with David, is undeniably attractive and surprising in its date of origin. A religious tableau of David holding Goliath's severed head is partially obscured by a still life of shining blood red tulips, reflective of the violence of the dangling head. The content and the way it is painted, traditional, realistic oils with an enamel-like sheen, would lead you to believe this is a long lost painting of Caravaggio's apprentice. However, it was painted in 2007. Placed as a totem of attraction in the entrance, above all else it spoke to the wonder and appreciation of the beautiful object, the passion and motivation of an art collector. 

Another welcome, happy surprise was seeing work by a few "big names." There were two small drypoint etchings by Pierre Auguste Renoir (Renoir? In Eugene?), as well as another, really very perfect print by Albrecht Durer, Virgin and Child with Monkey (1498). Correct me if I am wrong but Renoir and Durer are not the usual suspects one sees around town. Seeing them in Eugene is a unique opportunity. 

The show also included a print by American Pop artist Ed Ruscha, Just an Average Guy (1979). A horizontal panorama of a lone miniature man standing and facing the brink of nothing, emptiness, was both humorous and melancholy in its acceptance of ordinariness. 

Another favorite was by artist Nicolas De Jesus, whose large print on amate bark paper, Pescadores, was a study in narrative. His figures communicate across the paper in a complex web of interaction, almost seeming to move across the dirt-earth landscape, presided over by a glowing red/orange orb of a sun. 

I had criticized the faculty show The Long Now at the Jordan Schnitzer for being overwhelmingly diverse and dense without offering any explanation. Eugene Collects is diverse in a way that works because it is a celebration of the myriad ways art can be attractive, bringing collectors, people who care about art, together with its creators. It serves as a welcome reminder that those people, the collectors, still exist. 

Eugene Collects is on show now until March 24, 2012.

Gallery Hours:
Tues-Friday: Noon-4pm
Saturday: 11am-3pm
One hour before all Hult Center performances



http://jacobsgallery.org/

http://www.sherriewolfstudio.com/index.html

http://www.edruscha.com/

http://www.californios.us/dejesus/

Benjamin Ficklin @ The Wave Gallery

I attended the Captured Distortion opening, a photography show by UO non-art student Benjamin Ficklin, the last cold Friday evening here in Eugene. Although it was chilly outside, inside of The Wave Gallery it was  crowded and steamy with heavily breathing twenty-somethings. The Wave is a really nice space, though, what some might call "intimate," although it was hard to get a real handle on the photographs since it was in fact so crowded (but what else to expect at an art opening). 

Choosing cheap film over digital, Ficklin's work registered as dream-like, filmy/filmic, and surreal. The photographs had the pleasing appearance of being "vintage" but in the modern sense where it was clear the grain and distortion was overtly intentional. I was reminded of my favorite mid-century British postcard photographer John Hinde, especially in the shots of the cathedral and daffodils. Although Ficklin's were visually engaging photographs, I find actual old photographs, such as Hinde's, to be significantly more interesting. 

A John Hinde postcard circa 1960's
(see below image for comparison)

What I like about Ficklin's work is its spontaneous nature, what Ficklin himself calls "impromptu" in an article  in the Register Guard. I think there is something to be said about the accident in photography, and Ficklin's photos do have a charming happy-accident appeal.

Ficklin and his work. I felt weird about posting a stranger's face.
This photo was not taken by me.

Ficklin also states that his photographs look "more like a painting than a photograph," and that he "wants to use the film as a canvas...to paint with light without anything digital getting in the way." I thought this statement was most interesting in the context of recent declarations of "Painting is dead," meaning its relevance is dying. I, at least, thought that this kind of movement towards distortion and painterly effects in photography, embodied by Ficklin's statement, only underscores the attraction of painting, and the permanence of its aesthetics. But this is a painter talking!

The show runs until February 17th at the Wave Gallery on Blair. 

Here is a link to the Register Guard article:

http://www.registerguard.com/web/entertainmentarts/27486999-41/ficklin-film-art-shot-benjamin.html.csp

Shaping Visions @ MKAC

The show currently up in the gallery at Maude Kerns Art Center, Shaping Visions, features work by Portland-based graphic designer/artist Craig S. Holmes in conjunction with work by MKAC's namesake, artist and educator Maude Kerns. There is a definite line of similarity between the two artists' work, but first lets look at Craig S. Holmes.

Holmes' seems to be interested in constructing images that exist between a push and pull of real and fictitious space. In almost every piece on view, there are elements that can be read as accurate as well as mind-bending, labyrinthine and futuristic. Interspersing his drawings with elements of transportation, landscape, media, business and industry, his work "seeks to express the simple beauty and balance in the complexity of what he calls the 'structured chaos of modernism'." The work is clearly inspired and drawn from the architectural rendering style and is pleasantly illustrative, cool and crisp. 

Many of the pieces are on elongated panels which appear to have been distressed or scratched. In "Lost" and "The Farm," two of these stretched images on panel, complimentary blue and orange are lain down in washy, watery acrylic layers, with hidden elements like an American flag and televisions. Truly the combination of imaginary structure with a style that signals as concrete achieves Holmes intent to "picture a possibility others have not considered, to impact the mental landscape." 

Maude Kerns was an Oregonian and successful female artist who showed her work nationally and internationally in the mid-20th century, and was the first head of the University of Oregon Art Education department from 1921-1947. Kerns was devoted to "the search for the universal and spiritual in relation to art," which is evident in her paintings. Non-objective, both geometric and oftentimes biomorphic, her paintings reflect an intense study of color, structure, space and form. More abstract and less rigid than that of Holmes' work, she paints a variety of geometric shapes and forms, from glowing spheres and undulating lines to rigid or swooping rectangles. 

My favorite painting of Kerns' in the show, Autumn Moon (not dated), is harmony in fall hues. The crimson, magenta, yellow, and ochre vertical rectangles are luminous. The paint is applied in dapples, almost an aggressive form of Pointillism, having the shimmering effect of the afternoon sun setting through a prismatic window. 

Autumn Moon

Although I normally don't respond well to rather chunky, dried oil paintings such as Kerns', her dedication to finding the spirituality and beauty in non-objective painting is inspiring for an artist of her time. Showing her work in conjunction with that of Craig S. Holmes seemed to be a natural collaboration, as work by both of the artists is suggestive of geometry, invented spacial environments, exteriors and interiors, and harmonious color. Holmes and Kerns invite the viewer into their imagined pictorial space to travel through and interact with their angles, shapes, planes, and windows. 

Show is open from January 13th to February 10th 2012

Gallery hours:

Monday to Friday: 10.00 AM - 5.30 PM, Saturday: 12.00 PM - 4.00 PM

Artist Links

Here are some links to the websites of the artists I mentioned in the review:

Jack Ryan: http://volcanophile.com/
Tannz Farsi: http://tannazfarsi.com
Ying Tan: http://tanying.99k.org/
Sylvan Lionni: http://kansasgallery.com/sylvan-lionni-main

UO Faculty: http://art-uo.uoregon.edu/faculty

The Long Now : JSMA

Child's rendition of the JORDAN SCHNITZER ART MUSSEME
from website

The Long Now, now on view at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art on the University of Oregon campus and showcasing broad collection of work by current art faculty members, is a complicated show to digest. Organized by independent New York curator Stamatina Gregory, the title itself refers to the only perceptible common thread: these are artists working in “a now of shared place and time…a protracted present.” Time, or an extension of such, is what the exhibition pamphlet claims these works by dissimilar artists have in common, because “to produce and to engage with objects is to –if unconsciously - collapse and expand one’s sense of time.”

Upon walking through the exhibition, I was not struck by any particularly strong sense of time in relation to the show as a whole nor to any specific work. Really what struck me was that, as a collection and upon first impression, it felt vaguely menacing. As operatic female vocals projected from one piece and co-mingled with the chirping insects and buzzing flies of another that combined with girlish weeping projected from a separate piece, it became difficult to ignore the disquieting symphony building and echoing throughout the space.

This strange background music almost reinforced the disjointed nature of the show. Although time/place is an appropriately wide “theme” in which to situate the works, the density and variety of ideas only made it more difficult to absorb any conception of what the artists were trying to achieve. There is no doubt that each work in the show is fully conceived in the mind of the artist, but much of it had its own degree of unexpected impenetrability. Perhaps this is the role of the gallery talk to be the true dispenser of enlightenment, but for a show with such a wide berth of content set in a venue devoted to the “appreciation and enjoyment of the visual arts for the general public” (as per the JSMA Mission Statement), a bit of explanatory wall text might have been appropriate. It would, at least, help the work achieve a more readily approachable quality.

The Meteor/Biodesic

Although some of the works in the show are effective as fanciful visual stimuli, whatever content or meaning that is intended to be suggested here escapes me.  The material list for Jack Ryan’s Weeping Meteor, Weeping Biodesic, (culprit of aforementioned tearful laments) includes one “metaphysical quartz crystal.” Said crystal is arranged on the floor, adjacent to the weeping wooden sphere/meteor/biodesic, placed in a line with other miniature objects ranging from tiny ears and lightswitches to sugar cubes and a white whale. These seemingly arbitrary items are aligned in a way that suggests forethought and intention but read more as a game of “Which of these things does not belong?” This kind of complexity can sometimes be exciting and fascinating, but within the context of the show (already complex in the scope of ideas expressed by so many different artists) it reads as heady and bewildering. Although the pleasantly geometric and attractively lit “meteor” is exciting to look at, it is this kind of conceptual nirvana that exists at a level unattainable by the casual viewer.

Password, another eye catching installation by faculty member Tannaz Farsi, acts in a similar way. A large glitter block-letter rendering of the word THEM hangs high on the wall, framed by fluorescent tube lights. Underneath rests “unused greeting cards” in a stack and what appears to be unsightly yet artfully placed black dead roses. Using heavily symbolic media like greeting cards and flowers, Password reeks of content that lies just out of reach. This work somehow achieves the impossible: a certain pungent sentimentality coexisting with the difficulty to relate.  

Tide Hunting screen capture

However, there were pieces that were refreshingly the opposite. Ying Tan’s video works Breathing Tide/Perpetual Motion and Tide Hunting had both a humor and self-awareness that many of the other works lacked. In Tide Hunting, ocean birds are shown skittering across the sand while frantically pecking at food and avoiding the swell of the upcoming tide, all set to a dramatic Bartok accompaniment. In their feverish and chaotic quest for sustenance exists an easy metaphor for the chaotic, absurd, and falsely urgent nature of human life.

Breathing Tide/Perpetual Motion felt like the antithesis to Tide Hunting’s commotion, showing only a persistent close-up of the slow incoming tide or the natural churning and bubbling of waves. It was easy to become hypnotized, relishing in the simplicity of the act of staring at moving water and the complexity of the constant percolating motion itself. Tan’s video work operates on a much more approachable level (compared to other work in the show) that feels effortless in its nuances.

From Ying Tan's Perpetual Motion

Sylvan Lionni’s Bloodstream II and III was similarly effective in its invitation for quiet reflection. Capturing the image of his blood flow by positioning his thumb over an Iphone camera, Lioni’s pulse subtly drummed through the large scarlet rectangular projections. Not only did it recall “the pairing of body and devices” but the pairing of then and now. It is the same immersive effect a Rothko color field painting might have but with an exaggerated sense of the artists body and connection to a more real human element. Bloodstream II and III proves that appreciation of pure color can mean even more when it’s a literal expression of a human body, a literal beating heart.

Although the show as a whole read partly as chaotic, dense and dimly impersonal, there were parts I really did appreciate and that felt important, engaging and very “NOW”.  I must add the disclaimer that these are all personal opinions that I could happily revisit and play my own devil’s advocate to. I am not a trained art historian past an undergraduate minor and am far from being versed in the language of sculpture/installation (which seemed to earn the brunt of my criticism). I also left out a whole lot of work in the show because, let’s face it, this blog post is long enough! The Long Now is definitely a show worth seeing, and although it is a wide loosely-related collection, that may just mean there is something for everyone.

OPEN NOW THROUGH APRIL 8, 2012

Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art Hours:

Tuesday: 11:00 am - 5:00 pm
Wednesday: 11:00 am - 8:00 pm
Thurs- Sat: 11:00 am - 5:00 pm