Photographers add new dimensions to still life
New owners Dawn Southworth and Dana Salvo, who came to Clark Gallery in April, have added photography to the Lincoln gallery's portfolio. If "Staged," the current group show at Clark, is any indication, the new medium hasn't shaken up the gallery's longstanding aesthetic, conservative in content but beautifully crafted.
"Staged" is a still life show. John Chervinsky and Cynthia Greig, the two photographers on board, make images that cannily engage drawing, pitting the two-dimensionality of drawn lines against the illusion of space in photography.
Greig ingeniously sets up her still lifes to resemble drawings, even before she photographs them, by painting objects to give them an illusion of flatness, then outlining their edges. She photographs them against a seamless white background, eliminating spatial clues.
"Representation #55 (Cup Tower)," a stack of cups and saucers, looks drawn in succinct charcoal lines. If this were indeed a drawing, we'd assume she'd added little blots of coffee or lipstick with watercolor. She did, only she applied it to the cups themselves, not the page. The photographic quality remains in some of her images, such as "Representation #63 (Books)," in which she has made the book covers resemble drawings. The untouched waterlogged pages burst out of them, vividly real against Greig's spare backdrop.
Chervinsky sets his still lifes before a blackboard, cleverly filling out and accenting the objects in his photos with chalk drawings. "All Watched Over" features two mirrored orbs on a chessboard. One has a chalk-drawn ring, like Saturn, as well as a distant sun. A dotted line leads straight up from the other to a chalked asterisk, as if the sphere had a bright idea that has fizzled. Chervinsky marries symbolic object with diagram. Like Greig, he dances back and forth over a border between representation and the perceived reality of photography, riddling his viewers about what really is real.
Kathleen Volp paints on aluminum that stands out sculpturally from a wooden backing, adding volume to the mix of pattern and color in her still lifes. But "Wan-li Rumble" hardly feels still. It's a 21st-century nod to 17th-century Dutch still life painters' fascination with blue Chinese Wan-li porcelain.
With shards of china, seashells, and more whirling around a central sunflower, there's too much going on here; the gravitas of still life is lost. I prefer Volp's "Heavy Melon (no Wan-li)," in which a single melon balloons off the surface, sliced open to reveal pink flesh and seeds, with a small knife drawn in graphite near the bottom.
Nancy Hill's still life paintings are more classical, capturing fruit and vases on tables in an alluring, soft light. Her images of cakes, some half-eaten, are brilliantly executed, seductive as a lover beckoning from an unmade bed.
Salesmanship
Painter Chris Hauck, with a show at Gallery XIV, is a Warhol wannabe. His works, supported by an occasionally clever installation, critique and celebrate consumerism. He has one gimmick, which is to paint people in silhouettes and fill them with bar codes. This illustrates how we all have become commodities, either to corporations or the media.
Occasionally the idea comes off as sharp and layered, as in "Cereal Killer," in which the missing girl stamped on the side of a milk carton shows up as a bar code - a darkly comic commentary on how some missing children, such as Elizabeth Smart, can grip the nation's attention. More often, it's just a lame joke, as in one in which a bar-coded pope showers blessings on a big jar of Miracle Whip.
The installation includes a sale rack, with Hauck's studies on clothes hangers in plastic bags. The gallery staged a fashion show last week, with, among other things, a dress made from Target shopping bags and a corset emblazoned with golden arches. Almost everything in the gallery has a price tag. The installation adds meat to the show, which is otherwise pretty slim.
Deform and function
Crumple a painting by Mondrian, and what do you have? Other than a potential jail term, you've got nothing. James Paradis has an exhibit at the French Library in which he crumples and bundles canvases, many painted in the style of such artists as Mondrian and Pop artist Jean Dubuffet. "Homage to Mondrian" deflates like a balloon within a black, red, and yellow wooden frame.
The point, Paradis says in his artist's statement, is to go "beyond the use of the stretched canvas rectangular, to create an abstract form in flux, a sense of motion and fluidity."
It's possible this could work, if the more sculptural canvas effectively exaggerated the painting made on it. With Mondrian's grid, though, it's like a building imploding. Paradis gets a little closer with Dubuffet, who made bold, loopy gestures, but even here the painting gets lost on the destroyed canvas. One of painting's hallmarks is how an artist engages with a flat surface. Contemporary art has a way of shattering hallmarks, but that's got to be done with nuance and wit, not, as Paradis goes about it, with a sledgehammer.
