Monthly Archives: November 2011

This is the (other) place . . .

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In some ways, selling art is like a business. The proprietors are called ‘curators,’ but still must believe in the merchandise in order to convince customers to set aside some other, often more practical need and trade limited resources for an object of intangible value and sometimes fleeting desire. As with any business, a gallery director can’t consider only her own wishes and tastes. Selling art requires a sixth sense: a finger on the pulse of some community willing to metaphorically—and sometimes literally—skip a meal in exchange for nourishment of another kind. In other ways, though, gallery owners are more like their ideal customer than like ordinary merchants. Like their best patrons, truly canny art dealers sacrifice practical considerations, trusting in their personal enthusiasm and in unfashionable motives like idealism. Yet the rewards for standing by principles aren’t necessarily limited to good feelings. An isolated store or gallery may defy bad economic times and survive to become a mecca for the discerning. In rare cases, a handful of stubborn visionaries may transform a neighborhood. The strip of small stores along Broadway—the east side of Third Avenue South in downtown Salt Lake—that continue to survive in the face of urban renewal are a splendid example of what makes a neighborhood work.

The corner of 3rd South (Broadway) and 2nd East. At the right, Ken Sanders Rare Books. At left, Frosty Darling, Kayo Gallery, and Stolen and Escaped

Judging by the crowds, the heart of this community for some years now has been the corner of Broadway and Second East. On one side, Ken Sanders Rare Books keeps alive a style of bookstore that used to line 4th Avenue in New York and the neighborhood around City Hall in San Francisco, but which succumbed in most US cities to mindless urban renewal and even dumber tax laws. Around the corner, crowds of people too young to remember Ed Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and B. Traven mill around on the sidewalks in front of, or browse avidly within, Frosty Darling and Kayo Gallery. Here the literary feel runs closer to Dave Eggers, Viggo Mortensen, and McSweeney’s: in other words, the generation of culture distillers inspired by those Sanders specializes in, who like their Beat ancestors, are more likely to be found in literary quarterlies than mainstream weeklies.

Grant Fuhst’s ‘Robots and Gargoyles’ — ‘Robbie’ and ‘Ralph’ Click to follow them home.

There are currently three separate entities behind a single pair of entrance doors. At the east, closest to the intersection, is Kayo Gallery, which moved here in February of 2007. Kayo’s founder, Kenny Riches, was a painter in his own right and eventually sold the gallery in order to pursue his art full time. Since buying the business, Shilo Jackson has been responsible for finding the artists and mounting, publicizing, and shipping all the art for at least one, and often two contrasting-yet-related shows every month, all while handling the myriad business details. The current show not only typifies what makes the gallery a draw for young culturati (including the film crew that was shooting either a commercial or an imaginative video on the sidewalk the last time I called) but demonstrates how Jackson likes to use the long room by showing contrasting art on opposite walls. Grant Furst’s assemblages, ‘Robots and Gargoyles,’ are visions of tomorrow built of familiar, sometimes recognizable parts scavenged from yesterday’s technology, while David Laub, using a technique like Ed Bateman’s, builds photo-like pictures from drawing to fully painted images on a computer. Both artists invoke an imaginary future while infusing—or confusing—it with real elements from the past. Furst uses obsolete technology to assemble his visions, while Laub’s future bears an unsettling resemblance to the horror-drams of early sci-fi movies. Bemused laughter at these aestheticized versions of camp nightmares could lead in a couple of directions. On the one hand, they might gain power from subversive resonance with the nightmares such images generated in our more vulnerable young selves. On the other, if we ponder what parts of utopian visions have generally tended to come true, we realize it is rarely the ones we prefer: instead of connecting us, the computer gave us identity theft. While bringing the world to us for free, the Internet surreptitiously sells our attention to the highest bidder.

‘Poachers’ and ‘Amok’ exemplify David Laub’s B&W mock-photographic Days of Future Past

Jackson is also an artist in her own right, currently profiled in Utah’s on-line arts magazine, but for now seems to be managing both vocations. There’s probably a new chorus for the old anthem, ‘I’m a Woman,’ in there, but part of the secret of her success may be her close working relationship with fellow artist Gentry Blackburn, who owns and operates Frosty Darling, the art boutique in the space that mirrors Kayo’s. One way to understand what Blackburn does is to think about the homes of artists you’ve visited, or perhaps seen in the pages of Architectural Digest (If you’re reading The Post, this could be your home). Few artists restrict their creativity to formal artworks—thoughtful images that make serious philosophical claims. They also pick up odd bits of stuff that triggers the same sensibility, usually in a more light-hearted way, and modify or combine those into engaging ornaments or ornamented utilitarian objects that they then display around their studio or home: epiphanies of chance, or surprise revelations. Gentry Blackburn makes those sorts of small-but-eloquent objects deliberately. She also buys such incidental works of art from about 30 other artists and arranges them for sale alongside conventionally-distributed merchandise that appeals to the same quirky aesthetic. The total effect is like walking into a Woolworth’s on another planet: all the goods are arrayed in familiar ways or displayed on conventional fixtures, yet on closer inspection, instead of finding goods that were made in China without imagination, hoping to pass for the genuine articles that filled our stores before giant discount stores landed here and replaced our products with zombies that fall just short of passing for real, at Frosty Darling the shelves are full of original things made with imagination that you will want to take home even if you don’t fully know what they are meant to replace. They aren’t meant to replace anything: they are entirely themselves.

Frosty Darling was already there when Kayo moved in next door, and Blackburn had plans to turn the buildings basement, accessible via a stairway taking up a portion of her valuable floor space, into a rehearsal space or a massage parlor. Seems a tattoo parlor would have been thematically preferable, but it may be no one wanted the legal hassles likely to follow. What Blackburn really needed, given the architecturally-enforced commercial intimacy of the three spaces, was a business that fit with theirs, and one eventually turned up when a third artist with entrepreneurial chops, Amanda Hurtado, took over the space and opened Stolen and Escaped, a somewhat informal gallery now well into its second year. With a dozen associated artists on tap, Stolen and Escaped has carved out a niche built around the great demotic aesthetic of our time: what we might call ‘the art of the age of communication.’

If you’re thinking computers, cell phone photos, and video, you’re right, but that’s only the high-tech end. It starts with something as simple as collage: with a basic response to the plethora of illustration and our common inundation under a universal sea of images. When Leonardo da Vinci painted Mona Lisa, optically credible images were rare and precious; today, not only are they commonplace, but in much of daily life have taken the place of the real: we see more things in pictures than we ever see for real. As art, then, collage can take a range of approaches limited only by the artist’s intention and imagination. Liberty Blake showed what might be called classical collages at Stolen and Escaped—that is, if ‘classical’ didn’t seem a bit of a stretch in describing an art form invented just a century ago. Her torn and assembled pieces of colored paper, like all pure abstractions, could be felt intuitively, without cognition, like moods, evocative events, times of day: the sorts of things that come to us more bodily that mentally. On another end of the spectrum, Myranda Blair’s ‘. . . and this is goodbye’ collaged images of contents with real, association-laden containers. Her watercolor paintings of flora and fauna, inserted into canning jars, evoked recurring experiences of curiosity and exploration, but also dealt with the gamut of emotion from fear of the natural world to exaltation at its wonders.

Another dimension was staked out between ‘Timbre,’ last month’s show by Cara Despain, and ‘Autogenus Automatus,’ hanging as I write this. The former revised the concept of mixed media in the light of such recent, breakthrough concepts as Action and Artifact. The artist was present in the gallery, operating equipment and interacting with the audience. Her nervous intensity energized the presentation, which was built around a short video that hinted at dreams, fugue states, nightmares, and visions. Lining the walls on either side of the projection space were dioramas built from the film’s props or extending its images, leaving viewers to intuit not only their own cinematic meaning, but walking around the theatrical space after the film disappeared, credible narrative connections between the various parts of the time-space collage.

Other Stolen and Escaped exhibits showcased Reclaimed Sentiment, photographer Tj Nelson, and Travis Bone’s ‘mano y mono’ prints. Each of these very different artists has found ways of bringing source material into art alongside its representation. Shilo Jackson properly chose not to show her paintings in her own gallery upstairs, but accepted the opportunity to bring her work into this larger, sympathetic context. Her trompe-l’oeil paintings clearly belong here. After all, she could show the originals of her topological accidents—snippets of printed paper, postcards, paper ephemera, notes to herself, all found pinned to cork boards or fabric-covered panels—as collages directly in the tradition founded by Picasso and Braque. By choosing to paint them instead, she answers their teasing assault on painting.

Pinned to fabric, birch plywood, and cork: ‘Off With His Head,’ ‘Drink Me,’ & ‘This Is No Pipe Dream’ each reveal something about how images connect in the mind of artist and gallery director Shilo Jackson.

On the occasion of her first exhibiting them, I referred to these ensembles as ‘archives.’ In a sense, building this collection is like putting together the file, or ‘morgue,’ that an artist sometimes assembles in boxes or on bookshelves, sometimes entirely in her mind. By displaying them, essentially making them visible in various iterations, she presents a kind of X-ray of what (and who) inspires her. Connections made on these small canvases parallel more subtle links in a world of ideas. Thus she builds a palace of art which is only visible in these few places, like the projections into our space of higher dimensional worlds that physicists talk about. Something similar happens in her extreme illusionism, which has been a legitimate goal of the painter’s craft at least since the Renaissance. Instead of their goals, however, she invokes the distinctly American take on trompe l’oeil: the twist that turns ‘trompe’ (to trick, to fool) into ‘trump’—to outrank. We are used to thinking that our eyes see through natural appearances to reality. Images like the ones shown here remind us that encoding visual information is more difficult and a rarer skill than decoding it. Our nervous systems learn to see in the world what we want, which is often also what the objects of our gaze want us to see. What’s really there is another matter.
(More about Stolen and Escaped can be found at http://stolenandescaped.wordpress.com/

‘Transported’ at the Rio: Utah ’11

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Dave Borba's 'Flight of the Wounded Bird' lifts the spirits

A state can do a lot to promote itself: it can advertise its scenic grandeur, its pleasant climate, its vigorous industry. Legislatures can designate all manner of natural and manufactured items as virtues: a state bird, a state flower, a significant crop. One thing a state cannot do, however, is restrict use of its name. There is a tiny art center in central Utah that often sees the artists who show there, plus their friends and families, outnumber the audience that attends its exhibits, yet which annually throws an ‘All-Utah’ art exhibition, to which a dozen or so artists, from the thousands who make their livings and their art here, send examples of their work. No matter that they are few and self-selected; the gallery is still entitled to call theirs a Utah-wide exhibition. In fact many—if not most—galleries hold such extravaganzas, and so long as anyone from anywhere in Utah is allowed to submit work for consideration, that gallery has the right to invoke the entire state’s art enterprise in their promotions.

Folk wisdom dictates that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. In spite of their geographical pretensions, some ‘state-wide’ art exhibitions manage to spotlight local talent, or to showcase idiosyncratic artists worth seeing in spite of their distance from ‘the mainstream.’ And then there is the occasional profusion in which one estimable work after another offers surprises new to even a dedicated enthusiast. The chance of finding an overlooked aesthetic pleasure may be the one reason why even those who carry their own internal catalogs should still at least stroll through invitationals. One of these actually carries the state’s official imprimatur: the Utah Division of Arts and Museums Statewide Annual Exhibition. This year’s model, Utah ’11, has gathered exemplary painting and sculpture for display at the Rio Gallery until November 23rd. Rather than overwhelm with an encyclopedic catalog of competence, it distills some indispensable art from artists who have emerged in recent years.

Two kinds of immersion: Evan Terry's 'Cloudland' brings the usually static landscape to life, while Nathan Florence's canvas is literally 'Embracing Sarah'

It’s absurd to claim that one work of art among 65 works by 45 artists stands out as the best. Neither can I point to one that is my favorite. When confronted, different works strike very different emotional chords. Some of the artists were subjects of reviews or profiles that I wrote for a small, online publication. Others I have known personally. One was once my boss, another my student. The saving grace may be that more often than not, when I stand before a work for the first time, none of that matters. Either I connect with the object or I don’t. It doesn’t matter who made it, any more than it ultimately matters if the child who either annoys or impresses me is the offspring of a friend. When choosing a book I make this recommendation: open it to page one and start reading. If at the end of the page, you want to turn to the next one, go on. If not, put it down. Something similar works here. When approaching a work, ignore the card next to it for a moment. If after contemplating the object you feel a desire to get to know it better, read the card. If not, move on. Sure, you might miss something that your friends consider important, but fear not: they’ll eventually let you know.

David Estes 'Lilly'

If not my favorite, at least the piece in Utah ’11 that evoked my deepest emotional response was Erin D. Coleman-Cruz’s ‘Seepage,’ a well-worn wooden cabinet containing an array of preserve jars, each with a hand-embroidered calico cover. Most are nearly empty, containing only what appears to be a residue of salt crystals. Eventually, the viewer may notice one that is still full . . . of salty water just beginning to evaporate (seep?) through the cloth. The evidence suggests that this is a private space here thrown open, and notes of privation, suppression, poverty of opportunity, and unuttered suffering seep from it. Arthur Bacon’s ‘State Gun’ also uses a found piece of furniture, an occasional table with an open drawer that arguably reveals less about the owner than the gun safe resting atop it. That this is one of the more enigmatic, perhaps reticent works in the show makes it paradoxically more profound.

For some years now, I’ve been arguing that representational painting is making a comeback beyond Utah, where of course it never lost its appeal. That a juror from Los Angeles chose so many paintings of identifiable subjects might prove my point. Joan C. Crowther’s ‘Morning Mist’ and Heather Fuller’s ‘Utah Lake’ both make the point that the experience of a particular place in a timeless moment is infinitely repeatable. Crowther’s is the more optically correct copy, while Fuller’s brush vies with her careful observation to produce a visual balance between seeing and painting. From there a progression of levels of realism could be constructed, with Tamara Lindsay’s ‘Old Schoolhouse’ and ‘Study in Folds’ arguing the case for academic re-presentation. Nathan S. Florence is another painter who calls attention to the artificiality of image making, doing so playfully by painting on printed fabrics in a way that forces us to see the print pattern as simultaneously the background and the foreground of his figures. The eye-candy figures in ‘Embracing Sarah’ and ‘Perfect Circle’ pop out in flawlessly rendered perspective, only to become ‘captured’ within the medium that supports them. Zachary Proctor’s ‘The Artist in His Studio’ and Qi Peng’s ‘Dannielle Tegeder Near a Window’ both confront viewers with subjects whose challenging gazes cover deliberately disorienting pictorial features. Proctor’s use of scale requires resolution, while Qi Peng (two separate artists who collaborate in violation of one of art’s most sacred shibboleths) breaks a fundamental rule of portraiture. Yet we recognize their mistakes as deliberate choices.

Brian Jensen's 'Misinformation' could replace Delicate Arch. Behind it, part of Ron Richmond's 'Robe (No.4) is visible

Current events and social commentary make a stronger showing here than is often the case in a state with something of an isolationist bent. George Mark England’s engaging fantasy landscapes, ‘Asia’ and ‘Pioneer Trail,’ harness the illustrator’s convention of a bird’s-eye view with no vanishing point perspective and cartoonishly rendered subjects to the task of conveying large amounts of hearsay and innuendo with humor and insight. Or they may be the perfect expression of ‘Post-Modernism’—the ‘next big thing’ that turned out to be dead on arrival—in the way they seem to show everything even while proving that no conclusions of value can be drawn. They started out enchanting works, and as he continues to produce them they get better and more fun to engage with. Nathan E. Perry also has talent to burn, and it will be interesting to see what, after he gets through sending an entire encyclopedia of visual data through the shredder, he finally decides to reveal with his combination of uncanny optics and insistence on truth.

Meanwhile, those who like their art to make a point, if not always an unambiguous one, will find some subtle and some not-so subtle choices. Lenka Konopasek’s oil-drilling rigs on fire proved her prescience with the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, a turn of events that saw governments trip over themselves to hide the damage and promote a rapid return to business as usual in what may be the most irresponsible industry in human history. Nancy Steele Makasci’s ‘The Final Days on Earth Book’ looks at first glance like a found art assemblage, but reveals itself on closer examination to be more evocative than literal. Adam Ned Larsen’s ‘Sparky Meter,’ one of a trio of coffins he built to memorialize three uncles that fell victim to modern technology, presents his unique idea of a book without pages, made from found materials that he meticulously crafts into objects of cinematic realism. David Estes ‘Secular Saint’ display either the miracle or the horror of modern medicine—or maybe he means to connect the two by showing the reality often hidden behind the headlines. And speaking of reality, students of art history may recognize the model for Eric Benroth’s searing indictment of poverty, modern American style: ‘Frugal Meal,’ if nothing else, proves how little has really changed in the hundred and twenty-six years since van Gogh painted ‘The Potato Eaters.’

Michelle Condrat's two images engage in a way some would resist calling dialog: 'No, no . . . It's Fine, Everything is Fine' on the left, 'Obviously' on the right

The sculpture here tends towards the formally bold and expressive. Heidi Moller Somsen likes to combine ceramic and vegetal materials in her figures, like the one she showed last year in Bountiful that seemed to be vomiting dried vines. In ‘The Salve and the Scion,’ a lost arm is replaced by a tree’s branch, while in ‘Pleaching’—the title refers to a method of weaving several plants into a fence—the branch that connects two figures gives additional dimension to the joining of arms as a gesture of solidarity. Brian L. Jensen displays both the plastic power and the surface versatility of clay in his sensuous ‘Bottle Form,’ while ‘Misinformation’ presents a vast demonstration of the social derailment of truth in a single, sweeping arc. Dave Borba’s ‘Flight of the Wounded Bird’ is likewise a parable, albeit with a more positive moral. Don’t overlook the crank at its base.

Jared Lindsay Clark calls it a 'Kitsch Painting' This one is 'Mice, and looking behind the colorfully patterned front (right) will show why (around the side at left)

There are also signs of what might be progress—if art ever really advances instead of just going around like a perpetual motion machine. Last year Al Denyers showed a series of black-on-black drawings that used the reflective quality of graphite to strip away context and present the inexorable flow of fluids as an aesthetic event in itself. Were they rivers in the jungle, or capillaries in the brain? Here black graphite is replaced by gold oil paint, and the titles’ reference to ‘Barents’ makes the connection between gold, oil, and the color black explicit. As Russia, Norway, the US, and any number of other countries turn their eyes to the north sea’s mineral wealth, ironically free of ice due to global warming, expect her images to come to seem as prescient as Konopasek’s.

Heidi Somsen: 'Pleaching'

Having made it this far, there are still delights to behold, like Heather Teran’s ruined architectural memento, ‘Strawberry Days,’ Erin Westenskow Berrett’s ‘Chemistry’—three monumentally presented spark plugs that stand in testimony to the American Century—and Jason Jones ‘Alpine Vision,’ which delivers exactly what it promises. Several paintings display what appears to be a cartoon sensibility, while others explore the use of abstraction to defy the specifics of the given world and the words used to describe it. Something needs to be left for you, the reader, to discover on your own.

Erin Westenskow Barrett: 'Chemistry'

‘Good Fortune’ — Art Access in the Year of the Rabbit

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There are no universal rules for making art. Just when it looks like one method always works, and another inevitably leads to failure, some contrarian comes along who gets results no one else thought possible. One of the characteristics of visionaries is they succeed with approaches no one else thought to try. Once upon a time the Pope told Michelangelo to paint twelve apostles on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, only to have the artist decide to paint God Creating The Universe instead. Whether that proves it’s pointless to tell artists what to do, or whether it proves it’s a good idea, depends on where you stand on the inner workings of cause and effect. Those who believe in unscientific principles like luck, or practice esoteric sciences like Chinese Astrology, may feel that it doesn’t so much matter what rules apply as when to apply them. You open the cookie and you find your fortune.

During the eighteen years Ruth Lubbers ran Art Access, the organization developed a reputation for being inclusive. It wasn’t just their assumption that anyone could make worthwhile art if given the wherewithal. There was a genuine resistance to saying ‘no’ up front: to second-guessing the creative process and assuming a new idea couldn’t produce valid art. This was a matter of knowing the difference between taking a chance and giving someone else a chance, and it made Art Access one of the few authentically progressive places to see art. I assumed the staff reorganization that followed Ruth Lubbers’ retirement last month wouldn’t change that, and judging from the first exhibition under the supervision of the new Executive Director, Sheryl Gillilan, there will be no retreat from the commitment to providing a supportive environment for the creativity it exists to nourish. This isn’t to say that the first special project—in house they were calling it ‘Sheryl’s Cotillion’—wasn’t challenging to those invited to participate, or for that matter to the public that was invited to come view the results. Nor do the results necessarily display uniform success. But there is nothing here that doesn’t deserve, or won’t find, an enthusiastic audience.

For those who haven’t been to the gallery lately, ‘Good Fortune’ is what might be called a high-concept show. The artists were invited to participate, but unlike the usual call for recent work, such as the one that produced the ‘Utah ’11‘ exhibit across the street at the Rio Gallery, this invitation stipulated that the work to be shown would have to be specially made for this show. The process began with another invitation, to a dinner party last spring, at which each guest was allowed to choose a fortune cookie containing a phrase that would provide a suggested theme and become the title of his or her project. As it that weren’t specific enough, an overall concept would locate the entire event in time, by permanently associating it with the fourth year of the ancient, twelve-year Chinese Zodiac: the Year of the Hare. While a scrupulous critic might ask just how those who can’t tell a hare from a rabbit can hope to profit from the influence of either, the gallery’s point had more to do with the promise, borrowed from an agricultural society, of a bountiful return from seeds planted with care.

Mark Robison: 'No One Can Walk Backwards Into the Future'


So where usually we might be looking at works by fifteen artists working in isolation, brought together by some curatorial whim or insight, these particular artists and their works cannot reasonably be viewed without regard to something exceptional they all have in common. How their possible shortcomings might indict the process they underwent, or how much their successes owe to sticking with or to overcoming the limits of the task, are part of a larger question: one we don’t have enough evidence to answer. Take, for instance, two artists whose success really isn’t open to argument: Mark Robison and Blue Critchfield. In ‘No One Can Walk Backwards Into the Future,’ Robison displays the advantages of his experience as an illustrator. It’s not just that he knows how to evaluate and stay focused on a text. He also realized that he could use the temporal element in his fortune to advantage. Since 2011 opens the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, his reference to that four-year period collapses past, present, and future time into an instant just waiting to open up in the mind. It’s like a pop-up book waiting for the page to be turned. His anachronistic painting of Abraham Lincoln as a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat includes a hint of the irony that accompanied his eventual victory: the rabbit is John Wilkes Booth, who in turn pulls Lincoln’s watch out of the President’s pocket to reveal the hour of the coming assassination. Presenting all this in a bright, borderline surrealistic style of painting, replete with a hint of surprise on one facial expression and of malice on the other, gives a fresh, potentially illuminating spin to what has come down to us today as a lugubrious moment that punctuated a national ordeal.

Blue Critchfield: 'You Will Meet Yourself Coming and See Yourself Going'


Blue Critchfield’s ‘You Will Meet Yourself Coming and See Yourself Going,‘ also showcases the artist’s pictorial skills, but harnesses them to very different ends. Where Robison turns a trauma into an accessible lesson, Critchfield turns an uncomfortable predicament into an exploration of individual awareness. The entire surface of his large painting appears to have been built up of fragile layers of chalk. This surface has been abraded, deeply scratched in places, the wear doing double duty by convincingly suggesting age and use, but also revealing underlying, currently-concealed layers of color. In the center, the presumed ‘you’ of the title stands, rooted in the ground midway up his thighs, wearing only white briefs, with his eyes closed and his face relaxed as if in sleep. Given that he stands rooted in what appears to be a front lawn in a suburban neighborhood, while cars and kids on bicycles pass a few feet away, we may choose to assume he is dreaming. Yet there is nothing either apprehensive or embarrassed about how he looks. Furthermore, the abrading and even gouging of the surface is most noticeable on his torso, making his skin seem transparent and revealing an inner, unknown,vital structure, as though in dreams we encounter another way of seeing ourselves. Critchfield knows better than to use art to make pronouncements; his paintings clearly mean something, but are often enigmatic, like codes with misplaced keys. This one is a bravura performance by an artist who asks questions about the isolation of consciousness and the possibility of connecting.

Critchfield ignored the rabbit option, as did Ed Bateman in ‘You Will Be Attracted To Your Opposite.’ Bateman builds his images in a computer to look like photographs, and often to work like rebus puzzles. The solution to this one has something to say about the counter-intuitive workings of human attraction, partly concealed and partly revealed in the word play implicit in his visual game. Here, light and dark interact, while elsewhere it’s light versus heavy. What one potential suitor considers irresistibly attractive may totally escape another.

In fact, most of the artists evidently felt that one task was enough of a burden and they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, carry two. About half left the rabbit out, while of those who included the rabbit motif, it could be argued that Jean Kotuda Irwin’s ‘Do Not Judge A Book By Its Cover,’ by placing the rabbit on its cover, casts doubt on its relevance to the history the artist’s book recollects. Another perennial favorite, the ever-sharp Marcee Blackerby, pretty much ignores her assigned text: ‘In Your Next Life You Will Come Back As A Work Of Art’—perhaps thinking it’s already come true—and instead delivers an epitaph for a once-pervasive cultural posture and the values it incorporated. The logo appearing on the ‘Remains of a Playboy’ may belong more to Lewis Carroll than to Hugh Hefner, but the wit transcends place and time.

Any conclusions we might draw at this point about the future of Art Access would be premature. Or arrogant. On the other hand, drawing conclusion about the future value of art is truly a fool’s errand. Suffice it to say that any show that offers one work each by over a dozen artists is likely to offer something for everyone. Those who can are certainly encouraged to visit Art Access before November 11th and form a personal impression to take the place of the ones presented here, or find some gem among the works I’ve left out.

Make that a monthly visit. And you may want to bring your checkbook.