It's kinda silly to cite just one art gallery as
my favorite. But certainly the closest to where I live is 500X,
where I'm rarely disappointed and often delighted with whatever's
showing when I stop along Exposition Avenue to park my car on the
big middle of where the tracks used to be.
Jennifer Pepper -
Blue Carbon Wall, 2004
carbon paper with drawings (human shown for scale)
If I'm feeling out of sorts on a weekend aft, I'm
likely to ramble around in that stately old building just to catch
my breath of art. My lights are often knocked out there. But I'm
just as likely to be utterly baffled.
As I am in the spooky blue world of the Project Room,
one side lit by its carbon paper wall. Up close one sees a drawing
per page. But backing off is the wonder of dark blue, red dots
in the intersections of the grid of copy sheets, else all dark.
(Their always amazing annual
open show is coming up, and I've noted it
in both the free and
the members-only Art
Opportunities pages.)
There's more than just the art on the walls that
I love about the venerable 500. The rich, dark brown wood staircases
are as marvelous as the little bits around the edges of the outside
of the building.
Ben Clark and Matthew
L Flint - Migration
white stoneware, glaze, mixed media drawings, T-pins
Not sure what it is I like about this, that compelled
me to photograph it. Love the space, and the lighting. The progression,
maybe, of shapes into the sky above the horizon, and thence?
And residents' doors are sometimes hung with personal
art that's better than what's in the shows. But not always and
not this time.
Jennifer Locke and
Johnathan Lee Stevens
Reconstructing Franz Kline Number
635-75
sheet aluminum, enamel, washers and hex bolts
I enjoyed both upstairs and downstairs shows, upstairs
because I have so often looked at the High Five construction as
worthy of photographing for the spatial relationships, dark and
light shapes, heavy and light, all floating menacing above us as
we drive down those concrete paths.
And here giant representations of those even more
giant shapes impending into our transporting lives.
Brennan Bechtol's
2004 mixed media Mirage was
as much a challenge to photograph — its vivid balancing act
slowly spinning on a white shelf in the member's room downstairs — as
to understand. But kinda wonderful as playful combination of objects.
Something downstairs I can at least begin to understand, although
much there is down there to enjoy. -JRC
