A group show is like a box of chocolates. There's always going to be some you don't like; & nothing can keep you from finishing the whole thing.

I had high hopes for Island of Lost Toys at Gray Matters (closed earlier this month). Toys are one of our last holds on the numinous, & after a long diet of numbingly appropriated religious kitsch, perhaps my contemporaries would be able to find fresh juju there.

Gray Matters itself, though by now far from the brash newcomer i remember it as, somehow has managed to preserve a house style (hip cuteness?); & this also seemed fitting. Alas, i did not even find the show as diverting as a stroll through a well stocked Sanrio quartier.

 

Only two works stood out. The Sad Day the Toys were Sent Away by Chuck & George (not their real names, i understand) shows a desolate drab landscape with a Dallas skyline on the horizon & in the foreground two slightly misshapen kids, clutching a fence that kept them away from presumably an enticing dump full of broken toys.

Its uneasy mix of sentimentality & irony (one can only imagine the two protagonists as time-warped self portraits) hinted at larger issues without bringing into focus an actual situation (are we living in the ruins, or are they lost to us?). But i liked the quasi-Lynchean mood it evoked.

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The other one wasn't particularly profound, but so well made i could almost believe it came off the shelf. Randy Reiger's American Mars is a game box with a colorful lid design, a spaceman doll & a small pile of reddish rocks. That's all. While a reductio ad absurdum of manned space travel, it also suggests a sinister possibility, since "breaking rocks" is the traditional occupation of chain-gang prisoners in old movies...

 

I've only been sporadically returning to 500X of late, & probably have missed a lot of good stuff, but it's funny how no matter how the personnel changes (& i imagine a hundred artists have passed through here since i've been following it) there's always going to be many of the same ideas in any given group show.

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Kyle Wadsworth - untitled mural
(Chuck Conners as John Egan in
Arrest and Trial, 1963
in New Mexican landscape
pink insulation tape

 

Brennen Bechtol - Not So Fast There, 2004
plastic, paint and ink

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It's like the space itself dictates that, as in the case of February's, there will be a portrait of Charlton Heston on the wall, executed in pink duct tape; & elsewhere, someone will have filled a tabletop with toy soldiers.

Baseera K Khan - The Second One, 2004
marker on wall

Upstairs, a vaguely handgrenadelike shape is drawn with tiny squiggles.

I find myself longing for some object with even as much physical presence as the heavy, rust caked, steel front door, which swings easily on delicately balanced hinges, yet closes with a dreadful, echoing clang — a sound that belongs to one of Poe's feverish insomniacs, not these etiolated & self-involved epigones.

the door at 500X

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Detail of MADI Museum façade
 

The MADI* Museum, on the other hand, surprised me with not only a new venue (it's less than a year old) but an "international art movement" i had never even heard of.

Started in South America half a century ago, its characteristics—bright colors, geometric shapes—do not strongly suggest any particular programmatic intent, or perhaps (& this seems to be the case, judging from a pamphlet in which its founder, Carmelo Arden Quin, is cited proposing "abstract forms that Peronists could not twist into government propaganda") the actual avoidance of one.

from the MADI website

Unlike Op Art of the Sixties, which many of these pieces resemble, MADI art & artists are very much a thing of the present day. For example, Lorenzo Piemanti's 'Madi' TR454 (above) is dated 1994.

I thought this piece, composed largely of horiontal wooden bars in two or three shades of middle green, quite the most subtle & suggestive of the show. After you stare at it a bit, shifting illusions arise in your peripheral vision. It creates a feeling like the first night spent in a strange house: mildly unsettling, unidentifiable sounds (or in this case, flickers) that are never distinct but impossible to entirely ignore.

Carlos Cruz-Diez, on the other hand, opts for an all-out visual assault. His principal weapon is narrow, subtly modulated stripes, each diagonally divided into two colors; the resultant eye-watering is worthy of Bridget Riley.

These paintings are hard to look at, but they command the room. Another op-artist, Jesus Rafael Soto, makes use of interference patterns in a strikingly elegant simplicity.

I rested my sight at Ines Silva's Eclipica, perhaps the most playful piece — & one that might have figured in the Toys show. Half spaceship, half enigmatic diagram, it did not rely so much on the insistent materiality that seeing a large number of geometric works at one time makes finally tedious. As i left, Volf Roitman's What is MADI? 2, activated by my passage, opened like a ponderous & sterile bloom.

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(*MADI either stands for Movimiento Artistico
De Invencion, MAterialismo DIalectismo, or
carMelo ArDen quIn)

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. . . . .   Glass As   . . . . .

by Michael Helsem

Glass as an art medium has only lately escaped the realm of the decorative-functional. Its aesthetic, invariably, is the Beautiful rather than the Sublime. Which is not to say, for example, that great music cannot be written for the harpsichord. You have to adjust your listening.

I went to the 11th Annual Scent Bottle Invitational at the Kittrell/Riffkind Art Glass gallery (in The Village On The Parkway shopping center) primarily because Melanie was hoping to see some vintage perfume bottles.

In that we were disappointed. But the show, & the gallery's permanent collection, (or merchandise), though not without its share of the merely exquisite, surprised with the range of techniques & sensibilities sampled. There were necklaces & earrings, but also glass sea-anemones & glass guitars; humorous works, & pieces that incorporated holograms.Three artists in particular brought me back for a second look.

Working in what might be called the "crystal ball" tradition, Jak Brewer fashions roundish objects lit from within, with fascinatingly intricate textures that invite deep scrutiny.

Susan Gott, almost alone in this group, adds a contemporary Folk Art feel to her curiously monumental, small statue-like abstract images, rough in texture & redolent of myth like translucent Clyde Connells.

And the scary-funny entities of Patrick Morrissey, halfway between giant bugs, exotic orchids & deep sea fish, exist in a class all their own. With these he out-Chihulys Chihuly & i think that glass, for once, starts to touch the Sublime. They look like they are about to jump up & gobble some of their nearer neighbors. I'm not sure there shouldn't be a cage around them.

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