An exhibit in the form of art criticism

What does Chicagoan Lori Waxman think about 39 artists' work? Find out at Arthouse.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

She came, she viewed and she reviewed.

Chicago-based critic Lori Waxman spent three days at Arthouse this past weekend reviewing art on an on-demand basis in 20-minute increments. Along with receptionist Elizabeth Spheeris, Waxman received artists and their one representative art work just like any other professional appointment or administrative service. And in a form of extreme critical writing, Waxman dutifully churned out a critical review of a few hundred words for 39 artists.

After all, why not turn the complicated politics of art criticism on its head and make it available to the artist by request?

Waxman's '60 WRD/MIN Art Critic' performance project at Arthouse is the first of 10 she'll stage at cities across the country as part of the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program.

- Jeanne Claire van Ryzin

E. (Jo) Johenning

7/10/09 1:22 p.m.

As if risen from the bed of a local creek, E. (Jo) Johennning's doll sculptures stand as princesses of sludge: regal, elegant and barnacled, the result not of years of aristocratic inbreeding but, seemingly, years of sediment buildup and litter accumulation. The result looks nothing like the dolls' genetic and material make-up would suggest-tuna and sardine cans become thrones, broken necklaces and copper scrubbers morph into fashionable gowns, a Crown Royal bottle cap turns, on the stroke of midnight, into a chic chapeau. And Barbie, the prototypical plastic doll who lurks at the core of these creatures, underneath their newfound layers of caked on paint and scrap accessories, proves herself finally to be a woman not of the repressive 1950s but something simultaneously ancient and contemporary.

Johenning's bottle cap figures, strung into stereotypical Texas figurines, lack the transformative magic and feminist surprise of her dolls. A cactus or cowboy made of steel beer tops may technically provide a transmutation from one medium to another, but isn't it one that suggests more the cliché of the hard-drinking Texan than anything unexpected-as unexpected, say, as a beautiful woman risen, like a Phoenix, from junk?

-Lori Waxman

David de Lara

7/10/09 2:13 p.m.

Hewing to conventions of beauty most often found in animé films, manga cartoons and china doll shops, David de Lara constructs portraits of young women with large eyes, perky small noses, plump limps, and narrow little chins. Since a portrait is traditionally meant to encapsulate the personality of the sitter, it seems reasonable to wonder what it is exactly that makes these ladies tick. Granted, they're as fictional as they come, but that's all the more reason to look to their pictures for answers (after all, there's no flesh-and-blood girl to ask). Where exactly to look? Accessories, expression, and color palette are all traditional markers of historical portraiture, and they're here too. In the first category are the ornaments of light bondage: chokers, a cardboard box as home, laces that string their way across shoulders, neck, and arm. In the second, faces alternately full of wide-eyed innocence, mild apprehension or even fear, and a sort of come-hither knowingness. In the third, the gothic tones of black, white and blood red, sometimes mixed to an earthy ochre, for what might be called "organic" gothic. What does it all add up to? Ignoring the urge to psychoanalyze the artist himself, one might instead apply the analysis to a culture that produces as its fantasy images women whose natural state seems to be one of loss, need and damaged fragility. One might then ask: How is this a picture of women today? And how might it be fixed?

-Lori Waxman

Dan Barry

7/10/09 2:37 p.m.

The conventions of two-dimensional artwork fall wondrously apart in Dan Barry's collages. Not so much because of the newness of his imagery-it consists mostly in figurative collage, plenty charming but in a way done brilliantly in the 1920s by Hannah Höch, though always worth doing more of-but rather his presentational technique. Barry presents his work in frames, nothing unconventional about that, but he uses both sides of the frame, offering a second collage on the backside, providing a sort of underbelly to the primary work, revealing what normally is hidden, left out, or covered over. If these rarely seem as thoughtful and meticulous as the deft collages that grace the "right" side of his frames-constructed pictures of monstrous yet empathetic creatures, birds of strange origin, and more-so be it. The "B" side usually is, but woe the day record companies did away with it. Makers, along with the rest us, rarely get it all perfectly into a single image, phrase, or gesture-how much more human and real to include the rest of the picture. But how to get people to look at the "wrong" side of the frame? We're all far too well trained to be lifting pictures off the wall and turning them around. Instead, then, Barry has ingeniously decided to offer his work not hung but rather wrapped, tucked inside of delicate, handmade cloth bags, their found and worn fabrics in keeping with the weathered quality of the collages themselves. The result is a holistic package that viewers must choose to unveil, handle and contemplate, slowly and intimately.

-Lori Waxman

Jack Robbins

7/10/09 3:06 p.m.

The themes and tactics of Jack Robbins' public and gallery projects link up across the body of his work. Concerns center on the connections between animals and people, people and man-made developments, and back to their effect on animals again. The strategy for making these connections clear is often the literal tactic of 1 + 1 = 2, where Robbins provides the elements of the first part of the equation and viewers come up with the answer at its end. (Which is not to suggest there's only one right answer. There never is in any good art.) Thus in his Carbon Emission series, standard automobile mufflers meet intricate butterfly and floral designs, for an uncomfortably pretty marriage of industrial polluter and its natural prey. Butterflies and flowers do not in exhaust bloom, and only a die-hard sports utility vehicle owner could think otherwise. The rest of us will get the message easily enough, so where the unexpected can happen with this work is in the sheer incongruity of a decorative muffler, a muffler made lovely and glittery, a muffler made girly. Ironically enough, however, Robbins' muffler might just make the perfect accessory for the lady who loves her S.U.V., content in her ignorant view that the butterflies will survive, somehow. No matter how many miles she drives in her gas-guzzler.

-Lori Waxman

Annie Arnold

7/10/09 3:39 p.m.

Annie Arnold pretends that her artistic practice is all about fabulousness, stardom, glamorous beauty, and the vanity and plastic (financial and surgical) necessary to attain these goals today. And it is-sort of. If it seems unfathomable to believe that any female artist with a brain today could find any of these to be worthwhile achievements, Arnold offers a convincing artist statement that affects just such an attitude-that is, if you take her words at face value and forget to actually look at the work, and look hard at it. For though Arnold's collages traffic in all the irresistibly glittery garbage of Vogue magazine, their promotion of plastic surgery, eco-chic and beautiful shallowness rings, well, shallow. As in, Arnold doesn't really believe it, but what she does believe is that plenty of other people believe it. Meaning, this is important cultural material to pay attention to and critique. Her critiques could be even harsher, frankly; the fashion and beauty industries can handle it. And sometimes she does go all the way, with a biting sense of humor, as in the mock online fund-raising project, Needed Fabulousness. Through this venture Arnold managed to raise some two hundred dollars, which she spent on a pair of stilettos-of-the-moment and a Lanvin dress-well, an ink jet print on vinyl of a Lanvin dress, which she wore, with all the fabulousness one could ever hope for.

-Lori Waxman

Henri Molle

7/10/09 4 p.m.

Hallucinogenic flowers, fun-house-mirror storefronts, acid-colored river views-the imagery painstakingly concocted by Henri Molle through hours and hours of digital manipulation is the stuff of the Surrealists, once upon a time. Today, though, the garish colors and trippy effects through which Molle filters his photographs of Austin and its surroundings reveal not the psychological experimentation that the Surrealists were after-in terms of finding the extraordinary in the ordinary-so much as a new way of making pleasurable and appealing imagery. Molle takes the subjects of the dedicated amateur photographer or painter-attractive city views, romantic country vistas, cool storefronts, still lifes, close-up scenes from nature-and makes them weird, yes, but weird in a way that would appeal to anyone who likes hot colors, jazzy shapes, nifty effects, and, in the end, recognizable and romantic subject matter. Though the digital effects are radical in how they transform their base images, what's curious is that the end results have nothing particularly radical about them. Nor need they: the most pleasant images rarely do.

-Lori Waxman

Daniel Birdsong

07/10/09 4:23 p.m.

Are dreams affected by the blankets and sheets we sleep under? It's a strange question to wonder in the face of a series of paintings, none of them depicting anything like a sleeping figure or a bed, but Daniel Birdsong's canvases, delicately layered with square upon square of pastel-colored retro patterns, painted over in washes of yellowed paint, recall nothing so much as beloved old quilts, their pretty vintage fabrics faded through years of use. Dreams enter the picture-the pictures-in the form of a sniffing dog, a leaping hare, a hovering hummingbird, and a proud rooster, all of them figures which Birdsong has traced overtop his evocative backgrounds. These creatures don't stand or sit or perch as animals would in a realist painting, but seem rather to materialize out of thin air, appearing and disappearing against their multi-patterned grounds. In Recitation and Insomnia, this effect is achieved in part because the animals are mere tracings, hollow creatures that exist only through their outlines; in The Undercover, the dog is herself made up of contrasting quilt squares. What these dreams might ultimately mean is perhaps best left up to the individual viewer to sort out-dreams, after all, fade in and out for a reason.

-Lori Waxman

Denise Prince

7/10/09 4:52 p.m.

Everything about Denise Prince's video Beck feels raw and unguarded, full of intimacy and confidence. Of course it is constructed to communicate just that. The artist appears in a sexy sheer bra and a pair of old panties, her hair disheveled and lips chapped. The setting is a bare, acid yellow bedroom whose floral mattress has had its sheets stripped back. What the artist does there is sit close up to the camera and tell a personal story, ostensibly about the musician Beck, whom she'd met years ago, before he was famous. What the story is really about, however, is not Beck but what it takes to feel and project confidence and to need intimacy and attain intimacy. Never mind how Beck provides the excuse for this discourse, what's far more compelling is the twist that Prince herself offers by suggesting that her character lacks confidence and intimacy, while exuding both of them in this video. Her unpampered and carefully mismatched semi-nakedness suggest both confidence and intimacy overtly, but anyone with a sense of styling could fake it. No, what really proves that the woman on the screen already has what she's asking for is what she does in the last part of the video, after the storytelling is over. She dances. She dances to no music we can hear, though it looks like it has a fabulous, hard, complex beat. She dances like a banshee. She dances on the bed. She dances like a nut. She dances with a big, black dog. She dances like she's happy and strong, even if just secretly so.

-Lori Waxman

Erick Michaud

7/10/09 5:25 p.m.

Erick Michaud does not suffer nostalgia lightly. Especially not the small-town New England nostalgia of baseball and front porches and hard work and fishing. Michaud's practice cuts quite literally through the soft-focus veneer of such dreamy imagery, taking the baseballs and bats, small cottages, mops and harpoons that are its material tools and revealing the reality that infuses them, if one dares to look longer and harder than any memory can take. He does this through the technique of wood burning, a folksy craft more typically used these days to burnish wood and leather with the kinds of pleasant pictures that sell to tourists. In Michaud's hands, however, the technique proves combustible, an unforgiving burning that insists one see the gravestones that lie at the other end of the mop handle; the brutal housing projects that rise along the business end of the baseball bat; the skulls that litter the handle of the harpoon. Nothing could be more correct-day labor exhausts the body and spirit, for little pay; baseball bats offer a cheap form of protection and violence in bleak urban neighborhoods; harpoons kill, not just whales but people too. Nothing could be more symbiotic than to use an old-fashioned technique to burn these stories into the very stuff of their making. And nothing could be harder to look at. No wonder we fall for nostalgia so easily.

-Lori Waxman

Sara J. Frantz

07/10/09 5:52 p.m.

Drawings are the stuff of graphite on paper, and usually it is the graphite that tells the story. But sometimes, in the hands of an artist with a sense for the power of empty space, the paper that's left unmarked can tell as much, even more, than that which has been sketched. Such is the case with Sara J. Frantz's recent series of drawings, which depicts with admirable restraint the wide-open spaces of West Texas and Northern Iceland. Never mind the series' title, Quit the Neighborhood, which has a jokey edge that befits neither the spaces portrayed nor the works themselves. Pay attention instead to the strangeness of meticulously rendered man-made structures somewhat pathetically adrift in the endless, majestic landscapes of Iceland's snowfields and Texas's deserts. At least, that's what I see in the expanses of creamy white paper that Frantz has left blank around the warehouses and trailers that populate these places. Someone more familiar with these localities might fill in the details, the vegetation and topography that I still know nothing about. But what Frantz allows in leaving these details out is an acknowledgment of the humbling, grand nature of natural spaces-humbling because it reveals our human inability to express in words or in pictures the grandest of nature's territory.

-Lori Waxman

Tom Rouse

07/10/09 6:19 p.m.

The history of abstract painting is a strange one. How to get from the spatial radicalness of Picasso and Cubism to the revolutionary political aims of Rodchenko and Russian Constructivism to the expressionistic mode of Pollock and the Ab Ex? That the non-objective mode of painting manages to encompass so many divergent intentions, that it is open to such a variety of interpretations, explains, for one, its enduring appeal to painters, and, for two, how it has come to have a contemporary life as a wholly decorative medium. Witness the work of Tom Rouse, which plays with palette and texture, layering and transparency, ground and surface, bas-relief and shape, all to the end of constructing pleasurable and concentrated viewing experiences. Whether or not the experience will engage the viewer depends, of course, almost entirely on what tickles one's aesthetic fancy-and I'll admit that mine, at least, necessitates a less muted palette-but if the path from dusty rose to teal turns yours, then Rouse's experiments might be just the thing.

-Lori Waxman

Tatiana Dolfine Miller

07/10/09 6:45 p.m.

The army of girls led by Tatiana Dolfine Miller is not one you'd want to encounter in a dark alley-or anywhere, for that matter, unless your own personal fantasy life runs toward the sado-masochistic and barely legal. But fantasy here isn't about wanting these girls, who for all their kittenish appeal are more graveyard than schoolyard, more horror show than talent show. That might be the case if the artist's gender were male, but it isn't. Miller is a young woman, about the same age as the girls she depicts in these elaborate, crafty shadow boxes, oil paintings, and watercolors. The gender of the artist rarely has much relevance for a work's reception, but Miller's work proves an exception to the rule, because what's fascinating about the characters she's created is how, despite their willowy attractiveness, they stand not for fragility and neediness but power and control. Granted, this is achieved through bloodied steak knives and otherworldly fangs, but at least it's a start. Miller will eventually have to figure out how this translates into sustainable real-world strength, but for now, her girls rule.

-Lori Waxman

M. Foster

07/10/09 7:06 p.m.

Air drying, setting down roots, just hanging out-these are common enough phrases, but in the hands of Michelle Foster, they take on the wholly unexpected quality of being dry and witty observations on life. In Air Dry, a striped doll's shirt gets hung, literally, off a sky blue piece of paper, onto which a clothesline has been drawn and two clouds tacked. In Roots Tent, Roots Tipi, and Roots Trailer, these otherwise mobile dwelling units find themselves literally setting down roots, as earth-colored radicles burrow into the ground beneath them. And in the sweet feminist one-liner Just Hanging Out, Waiting for Ken - Functional Shelf, two Barbies do just that: attached by the tops of their heads to the bottom of a wall shelf, they defy gravity (as Barbie's body always has) and wait for their dates to arrive. These examples are all Foster at her best: literal yet twisted, political yet quick. Less successful are her assemblages on board, which despite winning titles and premises lack the composure and tightness of her other work. One of them, I Am Not All Washed Up, I Am Still Standing, a gowned woman juxtaposed with a rowboat, is so good in principle it deserves to be remade. Clearly Foster has the smarts to do that and more.

-Lori Waxman

Trick

07/11/09 11:20 a.m.

Trick-as the artist Patrick Yang tags himself-is a doodler. But to call him that is not in any way to suggest that his meticulous, exhaustive drawings are done haphazardly, thoughtlessly or in the margins of the page. On the contrary, they reveal all the deliberateness and care of a planned piece, and their all-overness leaves no area of paper unmarked. So what makes them doodles? It's both content and style. In terms of content, the strange creatures that fill every square inch of space in The Monster Pattern are the very stuff of doodling, the kind of smiling amoebas and bug-eyed fish and tentacled heads that come out one end of a pen when the mind is allowed to roam free and silly. In terms of style, the tight, hyper-detailed continuity of Communication Device I reveals exactly the kind of imagery that can be generated when some other task is at hand but being assiduously ignored. Both pieces prove surprisingly resilient, for doodles, but worth taking in differently: the monsters reward close looking, which reveals the comic specifics of their obsessive detail, whereas the devices work best taken in all together, their wacky, Seussian linkages clear, their lack of human presence undiscovered.

-Lori Waxman

Rachelle King

07/11/09 11:46 a.m.

The term "abstract," applied to painting, does not always mean something quite as "abstract" as it is taken to be. Abstract originally meant "abstracted from," as in abstracted from life. So an abstraction of a bottle of wine and a newspaper begins with those very real objects and ends up somewhere else. Such is the case with much of Rachelle King's work, although the stylistic idioms she employs run the gamut from expressionistic renderings of architectural sites, as the German artist-architects of the 1920s, like Bruno Taut, were wont to do, to essentializing imagery of the kind popular among seventies feminists like Judy Chicago-and everything in between. King's Hollywood Bowl, impressionistically dabbed out in hot oranges, greens, purples and yellows, fits squarely in the first mode; her Feminine Mystique, all curves and earth tones, epitomizes the second. Leather I, a textured play of browns and ochres in a soft geometric grid, lands somewhere experimental in the middle. None of this adds up to a practice of stylistic consistency, but rather one that reveals a commitment to observation and painting, and a pleasure attained through both.

-Lori Waxman

Suza Kanon

07/11/09 12:06 p.m.

Erwin Schrödinger, an Austrian physicist who founded the study of wave mechanics and won the Nobel Prize in 1933, has more recently given his name to a series of studies by artist Suza Kanon. Schrödinger's Birdcages is inspired by the physicist's questioning of how objects change in relation to their observation. In translating this relativist notion into sculptural and painterly media, Kanon has taken a route that looks wonderfully like Joseph Cornell's-she has put paper birds into open cages, along with bits of mirror. Of course, Cornell's purpose was nothing like Kanon's, or Schrödinger's for that matter-he was after a more idiosyncratic revelation of the extraordinary, and his odd juxtapositions continue to attract marveling today. But Kanon's tactic, meant to reveal how reality changes depending on the position of the observer-the birds seem alive from certain angles, depending on how they are caught in the dangling mirrors-also reveals something unexpected: the birds' point of view. Because, although Kanon suggests that the birds stay in their cages so that we may better observe them, another way of looking at the situation is to imagine that the birds are so confused by the alternative realities reflected in the mirrors that they don't know what's free and what's locked up. They might also be fooled by the paintings Kanon has paired with each cage, which show the birds floating free, up above any wire mesh. Maybe the birds believe what they see, and think they're already free. We live in a world of images, after all.

-Lori Waxman

Pablo Gimenez Zapiola

07/11/09 12:30 p.m.

Glowing words populate our lives-they shout off of billboards, bus shelter, building facades, and every other surface that advertisers can get their hands on. But words on their own have much less stable meanings than their place in these campaigns ever suggest. Sometimes the cooptation is enough for a wordsmith (or an anti-consumer activist) to dream of tearing those letters off their neon frameworks and setting them free, to fly off into a universe of signifiers. Pablo Gimenez Zapiola has done something just like that. The artist projects words against passing trains, capturing the poetic effect in a series of photographs titled Meaning in Motion. Thus DREAM and FREEDOM hover luminously in space, the train on which they're projected moving so fast it virtually disappears under the camera's quick shutter speed, the words given all the space they deserve, the effect tempered by a telephone pole that seems to plunge right through DREAM. And HARMONY and FEAR appear together, offering relief in the solidity of the former and the dissipation of the latter. Gimenez Zapiola isn't pretending to don the cap of poet-none of his chosen words, alone or in pairs, would have much of an effect on their own-but rather that of collageist, a maker of meaning through juxtaposition, and the freezing of motion.

-Lori Waxman

Jamie Salvador Castillo

07/11/09 1:04 p.m.

Brake grease and tires don't the stuff of classical art make, but Jaime Castillo has used them to create an obelisk for today. Piling the tires up high into an orderly column that reaches from floor to ceiling, seeming almost to go right through, he takes their dark treads as a surface on which to tell not the story of a conquest, as the Romans did on their vertical canvases, but rather of an endless march or race. A simple running figure appears over and over again, painted in the vivid and symbiotic, if gloppy, medium of white brake grease, spiraling up the tire pile, striding tirelessly onward. Also in the classical vein is a series of white ink on acetate sketches, frustratingly but enticingly hard to make out. The bodies that appear and disappear in these pictures cast Michelangelo-esque figures-too broad and strong to be women, too delicately posed to be men. Bereft of even the most cursory of details, the reading is left up to the viewer, bringing the pictures postmodernistically up to date.

-Lori Waxman

Laura Caffrey

07/11/09 1:30 p.m.

Laura Caffrey makes orderly, precious and spare assemblages out of the kind of junk that most often ends up jammed into the back of the kitchen drawer or spilling out of flea market bins. One piece from 2008 could stand for them all, given its title: Regenerate. Though here the word refers directly to the kind of cellular renewal depicted in the series of small found drawings that act as an interior frame, it could equally relate to the overall effect that her work has on the bits and pieces of stuff that they incorporate. Old clock parts, out of date map fragments, silly musical refrains, embossed metal fish tags, various sewing notions, lost keys, feathers, old photographs, odd playing cards-all take on new life through Caffrey's sensitive juxtapositions of one with the other. The whole reveals a measured level of nostalgia, the kind that finds precious beauty in outmoded and useless old things, but fortunately it isn't the kind of nostalgia that just sits on its haunches and moans about the good old days. No, Caffrey's is an active nostalgia that insists on rummaging through piles of forgotten and rejected things, searching for those that, through her handiwork, will add up to something new.

-Lori Waxman

Rebekah Frank

07/11/09 1:53 p.m.

Blacksmithing is a practice rife with mythical associations, of man turning the raw, hard stuff of the earth into flexible material for his own use, against all the forces of stone and steel, and whomever it was who brought them into being in the first place. Rebekah Frank, a young smith of admirable skill, takes this practice even further, insisting that steel and copper, bronze and brass, can be used to create forms suggestive of lush, organic ones, like sea surreys and raphides.

Making something out of the most unexpected of materials is clearly one of Frank's modus operandi, and it has even led her beyond her talents for manipulating metals through heat and hammer. A pair of corsets does this in the most unexpected of ways: one pairs woven upholstery fabric with pieces of venetian blind, to create a kind of domestic armor both witty and bizarre, while another mixes bicycle tire rubber with steel and delicate interfacing for a mix of hard and soft flexibility.

-Lori Waxman

Vincent Martinez

07/11/09 2:20 p.m.

I have no idea who Meagan Evans and Roberta Calindrez are, but in a pair of heavily painted panels that Vincent Martinez has titled with their names, they seem to stand for the before and after of feminism. The more overt of the pictures illustrates the spines of a towering stack of new and old feminist books, from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own through Gloria Steinem's Outrageous Acts & Everyday Rebellions through Luce Irigaray's A New Mythos. The depiction is messy and human, the paint sticky and thick, implying all the flesh and blood of real-life women that the books themselves address. The second panel, painted in much the same hands-on manner, shows the heads of two women, presumable the Meagan and Roberta of the diptych's title. They could not be more different: one emerges as if from the shadows, a mysterious and sober figure in black, with a few facial details highlighted in grey; the other appears full-on, headstrong in a rainbow of hues, her smile toothy and bright, her hair a mess of rainbow streamers. One, it seems, was born too early for the lessons of these books to become part of women's everyday lives; the other, lucky her, doesn't even need to read them. And she most likely hasn't: unlike the first woman, whose single visible eye is clearly open, the second has had hers completely obliterated, washed out with white paint. Blind luck, indeed.

-Lori Waxman

Liz Penniman

07/11/09 2:42 p.m.

The strange, luscious, candy-colored watercolors that Liz Penniman produces seem the stuff of cowboy surrealists and hallucinating hikers, with their acid greens and magenta purples, dusty blues and mustard yellows. Phallic shapes float overtop loopy fires, while bleeding figures lie underneath stringy sunsets. Despite their dreamlike qualities, these pictures come complete with titles that link them to specific landscapes-Alum Rock Park, for one, Boreal Ridge, for another. And while it is completely believable that these places inspired the images that take their names, how much the better that they clearly inspired so much more than mere picturesque reproduction. Instead, Penniman pays tribute to the otherworldly strangeness and inexplicable beauty of wild places, not by trying to imitate them with pigment and brush, but rather by doing something much more challenging, rewarding and, in the end, true. Because no matter how talented the realist painter, he or she will never, ever succeed in capturing anything of the spirit of a natural site; the smart and brave artist will instead choose the opposite tack, as Penniman has done, and leave realism to the winds.

-Lori Waxman

Jory Drew and Angel Hernandez

07/11/09 3:02 p.m.

Both Jory Drew and Angel Hernandez make art out of the stuff of everyday life, presumably their everyday lives. Though they work in radically different materials and styles, this critical attention to their surroundings warrants attention. Hernandez takes a pictorial tack, rendering the zombies and jokers of contemporary Hollywood as if they were the icons of today-icons of violence and trickery, but icons nonetheless. Once upon a time, icons were great politicians, religious figures, even great artists. But icons need to serve a purpose, and if the ones of yesterday mean little today, then new ones, however problematic, will step in to take their place-like the ones Hernandez depicts here.

Drew, meanwhile, uses the literal materials of the quotidian, turning cigarette packs and butts, cheap rhinestones, jean tags and manga cut-outs to create intimate tableaux with allegorical leanings, not least in the sense that junk can be turned into meaningful matter, even it might genuinely be junk in its original form. No one, not even a young adult, thinks cigarettes are good for you, however much fun they may be to smoke. Better to take a used up pack and turn it into something meaningful, like an artwork decorated with candy-colored skulls, which deftly references at once the continued appeal of smoking and its stupid harmfulness.

-Lori Waxman

Ashley Love and Jessica Tinoco

07/11/09 3:16 p.m.

Ashley Love has created an animé character for today, one who can knock out every lame little Powder Puff girl or Sailor Moon character of yesterday, with their pastel get-ups, pathetic politeness, and unabashed white-girlness (never mind that Sailor Moon was Japanese, she never looked it). Love's Apprentice is all urban force, with all the hard-to-place ethnicity and toughness that that implies, not to mention a penchant for abstract graffiti-style backgrounds. You wouldn't want to meet her in a dark alley, unless you needed help and she was offering.

Jessica Tinoco's work offers an update of another kind entirely, harkening back to the idiom of fragmented space invented by the Cubists in the early twentieth century, but making it resolutely of today by filtering it through digital technology. Cubism, rendered by hand, as Tinoco has done in one untitled work, functions by taking a subject (here, a woman's head and face) and fragmenting it into its various parts and planes, rearranging them not according to reality as it is usually perceived but as it might be otherwise be. Where Tinoco's practice gets new is when she does the cubistic through a computer, using pixels instead of handwork to break up the image into new levels of representation. This, in a way, is how we see today, just as planar fragmentation was true, in a way, of how science was rethinking vision circa 1910.

-Lori Waxman

Dana Brown

07/11/09 3:36 p.m.

An obsessive hand and mind can elevate even the most mundane materials and artistic strategies into something transcendent. The work of Dana Brown illustrates this well, whether made from franked first-class postage stamps, plastic milk jug caps, cut-up cereal boxes, meticulously clipped dots from atop printed lower-case "i"s, or any of the other detritus that Brown sees potential in and the rest of us simply throw out. Material mundaneness, check. But add to that artistic strategies that range from repetitive mark-making to meticulous gluing to endless stacking, and the equation becomes increasingly strange, and all the more unusual for its ultimate effect, which is one of almost modernist purity, as if the sheer infiniteness of Brown's insistent regularity, his rejection of variation for constancy, were enough to take the sum of boring material and dull strategy over the edge into something wild and wonderful. Reality transcended, check.

-Lori Waxman

Chris Holloway

07/11/09

Holbein's The Ambassadors is generally considered to be the most famous anamorphic painting in art history. Painted in 1533, it depicts two regal, proud, and richly dressed royal figures, but the image is interrupted by a strange black-and-white shape that floats near the bottom of the picture plane. See the picture from a sideways glance, and the floating blob turns into a skull. That a symbol of vanitas is present in the picture is of some interest, but what's truly fascinating about this painting is how it breaks the viewer's vision, refusing to allow a single image, from a single point of view, to stand for reality. Something of this historical strategy finds a remarkably contemporary foothold in Chris Holloway's series Distorted People, where the artist depicts celebrity figures at play in their natural settings, their heads morphed as if in a funhouse mirror. Witness Jessica Simpson shopping at a Prada store (okay, it looks like the Prada store that some artists built in the Marfa desert as a hoax, but still), her svelte body slick in a little black dress and heels, her pretty head stretched as if it were made of Silly Putty. (As well it might be.) Just as Holbein, some five hundred years ago, questioned whether a painted picture could tell an entire story, so Holloway today questions whether the images that make up our celebrity culture ever tell any kind of truth at all.

-Lori Waxman

Andrea Nelson

07/11/09 4:23 p.m.

What kind of urge is it to want to read someone else's diary entries? What kind of urge is it to want someone to read yours? Both of these uncomfortable yet not unfamiliar desires lurk amid the passionate, insistent mark-making of Andrea Nelson's paintings, where figures and words, mute dashes and letters combine to form the grid and flow of the personal and private made unabashedly public. Distraction and Big Deal, No Big Deal, two paintings as tall and narrow as a person, layer tender and washy full-body portraits of a woman-self-portraits, one imagines-with sexually rich poetry of varying legibility. The first presents the woman nude, in shades of red and orange, as hot and open as the words that cover the canvas; the second depicts her clothed, in tones of blue, cool and thinking, trying for composure. Nelson's other paintings are far less explicit, more conceptual in their rendering of non-pictorial elements. Thus the words in the diptych Cause No. D-1-GN-07-001471: Temporary Restraining Order and Defendant's Response to Interrogatories are borrowed from a pair of painful and deeply personal legal documents and render them, almost meditatively, in grids of letter overtop letter, eventually silencing their complaints in illegibility. Which strategy works best? Tell all or hide all in the telling? Perhaps it depends entirely on the goal, be it meditation or exorcism, advertisement or revelation.

-Lori Waxman

Hank Waddell

07/11/09 5:52 p.m.

What happens when you cross a cumulonimbus cloud with a pile of shit? Nothing good, you might think, but think again. Or think like Hank Waddell, who makes fabulous, blobby sculptures that do just that and more. Working with a substance called Hilti foam, which he sometimes casts in shiny stainless steel or covers in pearly auto paint, Waddell forms odd, bulbous shapes that have none of the transcendent qualities that abstract forms often maintain. If his creations have something atmospheric about them, they have far more earthly aspects, from the aforementioned scatological ones to the kind found in horror movies like The Blob. One work in particular brings this latter association to mind: Rats Tale, where the raw foam, shiny and gold, has engulfed a hapless rubber lizard in its bubbling wake. The poor creature is stuck, hilariously, in a way that most sculptors would shy away from, since it shatters the impression of solidity and power that infuses so much metal work. But not Hank Waddell, who seems to understand, at least in this body of work, that humor and softness turn base substances into gold-or at least, surprising art.

-Lori Waxman

Ismael Cavazos

07/12/09 12:54 p.m.

Is a drip painting ever really just drips? Are abstract squiggles ever really just abstract squiggles? Clement Greenberg would say yes, you heathen, but even Jackson Pollock underwent Jungian analysis in an attempt to better understand the meaning of his own gestures. The work of Ismael Cavazos tackles this very conundrum as its raison d'être, making a comparative study of the abstract picture and the figurative images that arise from within it. One piece, Asleep at the Wheel, even directly references Pollock, the king of drip painting, by pairing a monochromatic drip canvas of Cavazos's with a drawing that mirrors the drips but also reveals the picture of a person napping in the driver's seat of a car. Leaving aside the possible connection to Pollock's own vehicular death, what's particular compelling about this pairing is the implication that dreaming is somehow involved in seeing through to the images that live in and among the otherwise non-objective lines of abstract compositions. The Surrealists would certainly have agreed.

-Lori Waxman

W. Tucker

07/12/09 1:17 p.m.

W. Tucker has created the story of stories in this series of drawings on found materials-not in the sense of this being the greatest of all stories, but literally of it's being a story of many stories, and none of them complete. As his ground, Tucker has taken tattered old book covers and sun-bleached pages come unglued from the novels to which they once belonged, and he has drawn childlike figures atop them, putting in play characters like Man-Dog, Girly Bird, Mr. Highpants, Yellow Face, and Avanelle Tye. Each drawing acts as a moment in a narrative-beginning, middle or end-and together they compel both in material and figurative ways, tapping into the pleasure of scribbling on books, making up nonsense people, and imagining the stories behind the pictures. The whole, in its narrative interruption, wondrously recalls Italo Calvino's great novel of novels, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler?, in which the brilliant Italian writer strung together the first chapters of a dozen imaginary novels, leaving the reader always wanting more and more and more, but without ever engendering any kind of dissatisfaction. In creating a visual counterpart to this strategy, W. Tucker has pulled off a similar kind of magic, feeding the viewer's desire but without ever truly satiating it-which is, of course, the only way to really keep desire in play.

-Lori Waxman

Robbie Ortiz

07/12/09 1:46 p.m.

The graceful bullfighter and his fierce four-legged companion have forever been the subject of Spanish myth, with literary tellings by writers as great as Hemingway and their visual counterparts by Picasso, among others. Robbie Ortiz, too, has tackled this grand Spanish theme, and at a moment that could not be more timely, as the first man in fourteen years to be gored to the death during the running of the bulls recently met his fate in Pamplona. In approaching this storied topic, Ortiz has stuck to the style set by one of the great depicters of bulls, Picasso, choosing a mix of Cubist and Surrealist pictorial techniques to capture the many sides of this performance. Tellingly, the fighter himself rarely succumbs to the indignity of Cubist fragmentation, and his heroism is therefore allowed to remain intact, even to the point of being put, in one image, quite literally on a pedestal. The poor bull, meanwhile, is revealed in all his monstrousness via every kind of distortion, appearing here as a multi-planed monster with eyes and teeth pointing in every direction, and there as an industrial behemoth with empty sockets and copper horns. The macho legend of the bullfighter thus remains intact, and man, yet again, is heralded as the tamer of the beast.

-Lori Waxman

Brad Stovall

07/12/09 2:12 p.m.

Portraits are meant to reveal something essential about the person portrayed-not something obvious but something that cuts to the core of the being. In Piano Player, a portrait by the painter Brad Stovall, a balding man in tie, vest and white shirt sits at a black box, eyes closed, fingers fluttering above a black box. Really, just that-a small black box. And yet, the picture is painted such that the viewer can vividly see the bliss and concentration with which the man plays. How Stovall achieves this is entirely a question of painterly choices, none of them obvious, all of them effective. Color is the dominant one: the majority of the picture is composed in black and white, a color palette that synecdochically conjures the missing piano. It also allows the few touches of applied color to have an immense force, with hot pinks and cool blues tinting the man's hands and head, where the passion of his playing resides. Thus does a simple subject, painted in an unpredictable and restrained manner, come to have surprising power, in none of the ways that might have been expected.

-Lori Waxman

Chris Dial

07/12/09 2:37 p.m.

Sometimes scale does curious and exciting things. An abstract rendering of wood, laminate, stone, and metal, arranged at the scale of a ladies' brooch, does little for me, reminding me only of the 1980s movie Ruthless People, and the then-fabulous furnishings by the vanguard Italian design firm Memphis that filled the home of the main characters, played by Danny DeVito and Bette Midler. But blown up to another scale entirely, both the design and its materials become something else entirely, something surprising and even uncanny. Such is the case with Geo-Jewel, a medium-size wall relief by Chris Dial, one of five works in her Jewel Box Series, all of them "translated," to borrow the artist's words, from jewelry pins. Measuring 18 ½ x 17 x 6 inches, the sculpture turns glossy white laminate, bane of kitchen cabinets everywhere, into a gleaming surface against which a series of other equally familiar materials can play at charming transformation. Sheets of copper-colored metal, hammered in a flagstone pattern, become sunburst and trippy geometric surface at once. And a pile of pearly, pastel stones, the kind found at the base of certain fancy floral arrangements, shed their easy decorativeness for something evocative at once of candy and jewels. The only thing left, it seems, is to find the right wall on which to hang this peculiar piece-one blank and staid enough, hopefully, to let it be as strange as it wants to be.

-Lori Waxman

Sarah Thomas

07/12/09 3 p.m.

Ever wonder what might have happened if Jackson Pollock hadn't met his fatal end in a car crash back in 1956? He'd be 97 if he'd lived the long, healthy life his alcoholism so dramatically cut short. Such longevity seems unlikely, but less so the idea that he might have lived at least through the 1980s, when jazzy neon colors took over as part of a "contemporary" design aesthetic, and might, in our hypothetical scenario, have led to a whole new scheme of drip paintings (pretending, for a moment, that Pollock failed to evolve beyond the style he invented in the late 1940s). Anyway, Pollock died, the decades turned, 2009 arrived, and Sarah Thomas stepped in to respond to our hypothetical question. And here it is, in the form of her judiciously titled canvas Confetti, Confection, Contrived, a square painting whose exuberant splatters range in tone from bubble-gum pink to acid green to ocean turquoise and fire-engine red, with some silver glitter thrown in for good measure. Action painting, as the form Pollock devised was sometimes called, supposedly traces the direct movements of the artist; here the plops and splashes, riotously colored as they are, seem to indicate quite a party. One contrived for the canvas, natch, but then again, it all always was, wasn't it?

-Lori Waxman

Suzanne Edmiston Worrell

07/12/09 3:26 p.m.

Why have flowers been the favorite subject of still life painters for so long? An entire category of Dutch genre artists specialized in tulips, using them to symbolize the excesses of the economic craze of their time. Another category of Dutchmen used them as part of vanitas ensembles to allude to the fragility of life. Vincent Van Gogh had his insistently bright sunflowers, Odilon Redon his transcendent pastel bouquets, O'Keefe her sexually charged orchids. Today, Suzanne Edmiston Worrell has her own garden of blooms as inspiration, painting everything from red roses to white lilies to pink daisies. Her own reasoning for choosing flowers as subject-and subject they are, filling dozens and dozens of her canvases and drawings, in every medium and expressive style-seems to borrow nothing from the Dutch but much from the modernists mentioned above: Van Gogh's work was driven in part by a need to tame his mental illness; Redon's to manage his dark depressions; O'Keefe's to express an independent sexuality muffled by the restrictive sexism of her era. Edmiston Worrell, for her part, discusses how painting flowers, which she considers "positive, good, and beautiful," plays a role in helping her cope with her own mental disabilities. Apart from the tragic example of Van Gogh, she couldn't be in better company.

-Lori Waxman

Sarah Stevens

07/12/09 3:39 p.m.

Normally color and form don't get me excited, but something about Sarah Stevens's Oh there you are, my dear, a large-scale work on paper, has me wanting to wax poetic and silly, drippy and desirous, about fluorescent orange, sunshine yellow, moss green and hot pink, not to mention concentric circles and spherical clusters. Why? What is it about this particular mess of endlessly confectionary tones and organic shapes? Perhaps that, for a dense, all-over work that relies more or less on just two forms, Stevens's drawing feels not obsessive but passionate, driven not by a compulsion to repeat and repeat and repeat, ad infinitum, but rather to indulge in the pleasures inherent (apparently-who knew?) in the shapes and colors she's chosen. Perhaps also because she's remarkably adept at creating depth through layering and washes, theme and variation. Maybe, too, it's the tension she's created between cheerfully artificial colors and ancient, organic designs. I'll admit, I even peaked underneath the skirt, so to speak, of her drawing, catching a glimpse of its hidden backside, where only a few colors and patterns show through the thickness of good paper, cloud-like and faded, the fossilized remains of something magical that happened on its other side, long ago.

-Lori Waxman

Alison Kuo

07/12/09 4:11 p.m.

If Dr. Seuss were alive and well and making work that, instead of being illustrated children's narratives, consisted of hand-sewn fleece plushies that acknowledged the realities of industrial farming, the human perversion known as scatology, the trend toward interactivity, and the postmodern theories of Gilles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari (in particular, their notion of the body without organs), he might produce something that looked remarkably like the creations of Alison Kuo. But no need for all that-Alison Kuo is alive and well, and inventively sewing and stuffing away at enough simultaneously cuddly cute and monstrously bizarre creatures to fulfill the psychological needs that most of us refuse to admit we have. Well, perhaps not quite enough (there's a lot of need out there), but with the runaway commercial success of Uglydolls, which went from being hand-stitched by their creator to being mass-produced in China, Kuo is sure to find a taker, and soon, who can help to produce these uncomfortably appealing beasties for the masses.

-Lori Waxman

Leah Maxwell

07/12/09 4:31 p.m.

Bringing together the subject of moody, romantic landscapes with formal, experimental and strictly material concerns, Leah Maxwell does the unthinkable in her heavily worked canvases. Thus a dark, stormy seascape lit by an impossibly bright sunset meets hard-edged rectangles of scraped, acid-color paint, while a shady nighttime forest girded by a shimmering lake is cut through with swaths of scratchy green and blue. It's the strangest of mixings, and while each style of painting might individually seem a bit clichéd, it turns out that one plus one cliché does not equal two. On the contrary, it's hard to say what it does equal, as it's often hard to know quite how to look at that which you've never really seen before. And that, above all else, is the strength of these painting: their insistence, or rather Maxwell's, on painting as if precedents were not to be respected as untouchable, but rather as fodder for unexpected and even nonsensical stylistic juxtaposition.

-Lori Waxman

Andrew Anderson

07/12/09 4:58 p.m.

White is the most peculiar of colors, changing radically from one substance to another. White light, for instance, is made up of the entire spectrum of colors combined together, whereas white paint is made up of nothing except zinc oxide; adding any other color to the mix will spoil its purity, adding the rainbow will result in a brown mush. A starkly restrained painting by Andrew Anderson takes up this mysterious hue and makes an experiment of it in both light and paint, white and color. By carefully applying bands of acrylic paint to white acrylic glass, he achieves a study of admirable subtlety that would have made the young Robert Irwin proud. (Though perhaps less so the older Irwin, who's moved way past the minimal concerns of gallery studies to meticulously sensitive arrangements of the environment at large.) What Anderson had made looks at first to be a simple series of white horizontal bands on a white background. But look a little harder and a colorful glow begins to emanate from behind each of these rectangles, evidence of there being something more here than just white-as is true of white light itself. Look even further, especially at the sides of the painting, and Anderson's tactic slowly reveals itself: the white panels rest on top of hidden panels of red, yellow, and blue-an echo, perhaps, of Irwin's 2006 installation, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue3, itself an update of Aleksandr Rodchecko's 1921 Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, Pure Blue Color, a triptych meant to herald the (first) death of painting. And death, it's sometimes said, is heralded by a white light at the end of the tunnel. Perhaps the death of painting has come again, here, in all its ethereal beauty.

-Lori Waxman