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Song and dance meets demons and chainsaws in a new Louisville production of the crowd-pleasing Evil Dead the Musical, put on by Jake Wheat and Joey Arena with The Alley Theater and Art Sanctuary. The show takes the cult movie Evil Dead, seasons it with juicy cuts from the film's campy progeny Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness, and gives it all the musical-theatre treatment, with delightful results and a not-insignificant volume of stage blood. You might even get wet on this ride.
The play opens on teenagers on their way to cabin deep in the woods. There's verbally-abusive jerk Scott, his latest brainless conquest Shelly, Scott's friend and soon-to-be unlikely hero Ash, Ash's girlfriend Linda, and his bookish little sister Cheryl. It doesn't take much for the group to splinter, and the strange thumps that echo up from the cellar aren't settling anyone's nerves. Soon they discover a shotgun, an axe, a chainsaw, a leather-bound book with a twisted face on the cover, and a tape recording of a researcher reading passages of the book aloud. By playing the recording, the kids accidentally awaken the ancient evil that the book was intended to summon, or imprison.
Even if you haven't seen the movies, you probably recognize where this is going. Characters become fountains of horror—spraying blood, losing hands and heads, and generally giving comedic backbiting a lively and gruesome new spin. Chain saws roar, and teenagers-cum-demons covered in gore chant unconvincing refrains of “Join us! Join us.” Peer pressure has never been so easy to reject or oh so hard to vanquish.
The individual performances are solid, with Scott Anthony taking on the role of Ash, originally played by legendary B-actor and amply-chinned Bruce Campbell. Anthony's voice is strong in the role, and his mugging and posing on stage help to extend his chin right before your eyes. He and the other actors succeed in pulling off the show's main trick: remaining true to the amateurish camp of the film's performances, but doing so with all the exaggerated flair and punchy delivery that musical theatre can muster.
The show benefits from good acting and good choreography, but it's the high-energy delivery of hilarious, frequently self-conscious lyrics in the songs that carries the night. Among the best musical numbers are “Do the Necronomicon” and “All the Men in My Life Keep Getting Killed By Candarian Demons,” but the show-stopper of the night is without doubt the buddy-duet “What the Fuck was That” where Ash and Scott express all the confusion and rage that comes with finding oneself trapped in an unfolding horror story.
The actors also succeed in equitably spraying, splashing, and gushing fake blood onto the first few rows of seats—a wet delight for those up close and very amusing for the rest of the crowd. Buying tickets, you get a choice of theater seating, cabaret tables, or the sellout Splatter Zone. The splatter tickets cost $5 more, but they come with safety goggles and an Evil Dead the Musical poncho. The theater also sells white "SplatterZone Survivor" shirts for thrill seekers who prefer to keep their bloodstains.
Evil Dead the Musical runs through Halloween night, with shows each Thursday, Friday and Saturday at the Pointe located at 1205 E. Washington Street in the Butchertown neighborhood. Tickets run $20-$25 and are available on the website http://www.louevildead.com/ and from select local stores. If you go thirsty, you can get $2 cans of PBR, $2.50 sodas, or $4 wine.
by J. Isaac Spradlin
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Reviews of the Ocober 2 Louisville Gallery Hop
by J. Isaac Spradlin
Nineveh:
To enter the first floor exhibition room at the Cressman Center and encounter Ezra Kellerman's installation Nineveh is to walk into a Magritte or a Dali. Grass grows just below eye level atop bulbous containers suspended above the concrete floor by thin wires. A sprinkler irrigation system weeps onto the floating islands of grass from elongated, eyeball-like appendages that droop from the ceiling. Narrow paths among the irregularly-shaped containers dictate a tight web of routes through the room along which you can stroll, smelling the soil and grass.
At root, the artist is playing with notions of sustainability—“life support” as it were—but Kellerman's Nineveh eschews either the plodding didacticism of a morality piece or the strident tones of a call to action. This piece is fun, a clever and surreal environment fabricated from dirt, water, grass, wire, and latex.
Walking along, there's an illusion of being very small again, that you're sensing the world from a childlike perspective. Or you can crouch down and look across the room below the pods and feel almost submerged, like opening your eyes underwater—it's even subtly more quiet. Legs and feet without faces drift in channels between brown- and red-colored forms molded to look like clouds of earth held aloft up as if by some science fiction antigravity.
Consider sneaking a quick flip of perspective by climbing the bench at the far end of the room and examining the installation from above. It's a must-do for those seeking a half-empty spin on all this: fragmentation, continental drift, a de-localized and generally featureless repetition of forms, isolated and scripted experiences for people conforming their routes to the tight channels between plots. Nobody ever suggested that surrealism was easy on the psyche, and with Magritte and Dali roaming the scene, the installation was bound to disclose a second face at some point.
Khalily:
The new run of work by woodblock printmaker Shawna Khalily at the Gallery Ex Voto balances a dose of gravity and ritual mysticism against an odd kind of punk aesthetic. On the one hand, there are expressive interpretations of biblical content, and the artist shapes dramatic contests between angelic and demonic forces in which it's difficult to determine a victor. In other prints, Khalily plays spiritedly with images of bones and hearts and wings and lovers—and combinations thereof—that could translate readily into a tattoo artist's portfolio or biker club's crest.
It's important to note that though the artist says on her website that her main interest lay in drawing the human figure, most of the works at Ex Voto are woodcut prints. There's even an example of a carved woodblock on display next to a colorful print called Adam and Eve.
Khalily's woodcuts demonstrate a thorough understanding of the mannered and allegorical visual language employed by 15th century European masters like Albrecht Dürer, but she's also confident enough to break from the style freely with a more broad and expressive cutting technique and by incorporating elements from lyrical pop-music lyrics and mythologies.
Remember R.E.M.'s video for "Losing My Religion"? I didn't either, particularly, but after re-watching it I get a sense that Khalily's works function in a similar allegorical vein and shares an adjacent visual territory: the kind of place where classical mythology mingles with southern gothic storytelling to create shifting tableaux of hope and fear and desire.
The term Ex Voto signifies an offering at a shrine made either in gratitude or devotion. In all, Khalily's work exemplifies the theme of the gallery and does so with candor, respect, and a not negligible hint of impending doom.
Other highlights from the gallery hop include Valerie Fuchs at the Green Building Gallery, Todd Smith at Zephyr, and the Mix Tape Art Show at Kin Ship. Read on to learn more.
Green Building Gallery: Valerie Fuchs sculpts film stills in this colorful exhibit. How do you sculpt a frozen moment of time? In one case she prints the still onto three panes of glass and sandwiches them to extend the two dimensional frame into a three-dimensional space through simple repetition. Paralax—and perhaps a slight offset from one print-bearing pane to the next—does the rest. In another piece, she takes a sequence of several green-tinted stills of water slowly moving and tiles them horizontally along a wall. The effect is like a Muybridge, though composed in abstract. The music accompanying the video projection is a welcome background to the exhibit.
Zephyr Gallery: Todd Smith's art practice lurks in that tricky eddy at the confluence of performance and documentary art. In the performance, the artists donned a custom made coverall adorned with dozens of tiny red, blue, white, ornage and green lights—and a name tag reading Yancey—and climbed trees. His documentary partner-in-crime (who is represented in the show as an assistant more than as a collaborator) snapped long-exposure photos at hours between dusk and dawn so that as Smith clambered, the lights would trace his arboreal return on the photo medium. Pieces are colorful and well-executed, but discussion about document vs. performance could be the most fun.
The Kin Ship: The artists represented at Mix Tape revisited the lost art of, well… yeah. But there's a twist. Each participant, after mixing a tape, designed an artwork that would go with the music in some way, whether by capturing the mood or simply manufacturing an aesthetic splash of some kind meant only to help move units. You see, the mixtapes are on sale for a dollar a pop and the only way to decide which one(s) to buy is by evaluating the cover art that accompanies each mix. It's a very clever merger of art, music, copyright law, and go-fish. That is, so long as you get a mix you can live with (and assuming your tape player doesn't burn out within 5 minutes. Grrr!).
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rob
thu nov 19 2009
at 10:14 pm
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by J. Isaac Spradlin
An in-depth look at the work Dune 4.0 in downtown Louisville.
Artist Daan Roosegaarde gave a joybuzzer of a presentation at Ideafestival in Louisville on Sept. 25 that got the crowd tingling about art and architecture and technology.
It was the most exciting and entertainingly-delivered mashup of ideas and artful execution I've seen in some time (except for the documentary Copyright Criminals shown earlier in the week about, yes, mashups and sampling). I really looked forward to experiencing the Dune 4.0 installation on a stretch of scaffold-covered sidewalk across from the Bristol on Main Street until October 20.
First, we should applaud artwithoutwalls and director Alice Gray Stites for bringing the remarkable Roosegaarde to Louisville in partnership with IF09. Seriously, his art practice generates exactly the kind of immediately-accessible work (compared to so much of the readily-available contemporary inscrutable museum art) that can open conversations and create quality family time to boot. Plus, a forum like IdeaFestival provides a perfect platform for introducing tech-linked art to a huge audience of thoughtful, young-at-heart innovators. Kudos.
Now for Dune 4.0:
I'm hip to the notion that sometimes it's an artwork's idea rather than beauty that leaves you gobsmacked, and I'm no stranger to the wacked-out artsy sleights-of-hand available in major (and minor) musuems around the country that leave many people more mystified than they already were about art's purpose. I even came out of the "Generational: Younger Than Jesus" show at the New Museum in Manhattan thinking that it could have only been better had there been a bit more polish on the works (overall there was a feeling of "cheapness" to the stuff).
But here in downtown Louisville was an installation that was almost breathtaking for it's out-of-placeness. That's both good and bad.
The overall execution of the Dune work here in Louisville didn't quite measure up to the crisp fit and finish that Roosegaarde's other iterations in Europe have managed. It's no fault of the artist, I suspect. Had this piece been installed in the hallway between Proof and the reception desk at 21C, the art could have looked naturally suited to the museum's visual ecosystem. But in an ad-hoc, plywood-floored tarped-over sidewalk cave on Main Street it was just hard to make any sense of it.
My big concern is that though I'd seen the artist and heard him present his ideas and was (am) genuinely impressed, I was at-sea inside Dune 4.0. There's a dissonance between the slickness of Roosegaarde's high-tech take on sustainability and the imposed, throwaway artificiality of the construction-inflected setting.
Taken another way, I suppose that this dissonance can be instructive and offer a valuable takeaway for the audience. Maybe there's something about urban renewal, some cry for help from Ohio River wildlife needing preservation. But neither the artist nor Stites talked about anything like this during the hour and the result, I'm afraid, is that I'm not sure they they got what they expected.
Check it out for yourself through October 20 on Main Street in downtown Louisville, near the Science Center.
[And just so you know, the worm joke in the title of this post refers to the movie and book, both titled Dune. The artwork contains neither killing words nor giant worms, but the book does. And remember, "The worm IS the spice."]
Photo used with permission from Christopher Hall at LouisvilleMojo.com.
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by J. Isaac Spradlin
Two spires, six major parks, 15 boxing rounds, 20 disco balls, and counting.
Those were the highlights of the kickoff reception for the Gill Holland book Louisville Counts! A Children's Counting and Art Book at the Green Building. The event was part of the September First Friday Gallery Hop.
The combination exhibition/silent auction showcases the 22 works that local artists contributed for the book to illustrate fun facts about River City for young readers. Among the works shown, the most visually arresting was Skylar Smith's clever seek-and-find composition of disco balls with colorful surfaces on a rich indigo/violet background. The text accompanying this image reads, “Most Disco balls in the USA are made on Baxter Avenue” and then invites readers to find all 20 disco balls in the picture.
Who knew that the world turns to Louisville for disco balls? (Okay, maybe you knew. But I didn't.)
Smith's work was in good company with the playfully flattened perspective of Jacob Heustis' interpretation of the Churchill Downs grandstand and dirt track, as well as with Ashley Cecil's painting of Louisville's waterfront with gently curving roads and richly pigmented features. Hanging in sharp contrast to the colorful paintings, Letitia Quesenberry's graphite image of Muhammad Ali lightly models the Champ's features with gray daubs against a white background. The artist executes these punches of pencil against paper in a compelling pointillist style that recalls grainy, bleached-out film stills of Ali.
The exhibition does have its shortcomings. For one, it's a showcase of art aimed—ostensibly—at children. Many parents brought kids along to have a look, so it seems an odd choice to hang the art so high on the walls. Sure, the auction is for grownups, but younger viewers have to climb their parents in order to have a look. The show's other hiccup is that some of the smaller digital images aren't as impressive when seen against the white gallery walls. Though this dosn't diminish the quality of the show, it does give the exhibit a hint of unevenness.
Sales of the book ($20 from Holland Brown Books or local retailers), and proceeds from auctioned artworks will support Arts Sparks children's gallery at the Speed Museum. You can visit the exhibition and bid on items in the silent auction through Sept. 25 at The Green Building Gallery, 732 E. Market St.
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Top picks from the Gallery Hop include a pair of painters for whom birds figure prominently, and a digital artist whose dense pop-culture collages glow with light from within. Read the particulars below:
Zephyr Gallery hosts Kenneth Hayden's selection of 26 bird paintings through Sept. 26. Near the gallery entrance are two sets (left and right) that show silhouettes of birds in flight against cool washes of overlapping greens, blues, and purples. These birds bank and lunge toward the edges of the canvases and deliver a certain melancholy that comes from the birds' frozen moments of lonely acrobatic grace. Each set has been edited to tease out lovely harmonies of color and line that work beautifully together on the wall—and fortunately Hayden offers a quantity discount.
Looking around the gallery-turned-aviary, which includes vivid cardinals and stark blackbirds, Hayden says he gets the Hitchcock connection that some people are making but he forestalls the inevitable psychology angle. “For me, personally, these are about painting,” says Hayden, even if he's showing crows eating road-kill. In all, his bird canvases show a knack for design that seizes on the gestures of these fleeting subjects with a colorful mix of delicate and bold brushstrokes.
Swanson Reed Gallery opens an exhibit of paintings and constructions by Rodney Hatfield, aka Art Snake's (wordplay on “Art for art's sake”). To a lesser extent than Hayden, birds figure in these densely layered and richly textured surfaces but here they share the spotlight with Thai elephants, slim trees and branches, and ghostly humanlike apparitions.
Even in peaceful-seeming compositions like Pajaro Blanco, which centers on a large white crested bird, there's a hint of unrest. The title of the painting is prominently stenciled in vaguely revolutionary capitals, and there is what looks to be an incendiary cherry (bomb?) to the right. Behind the main surface forms and images, there are suggestions of a large, sinister face glowering out from the jaundiced background hues and it casts a pall over the otherwise cheerful pinwheels of flowers and plants.
Much of Art Snake's work plays in moody colors and mist-shrouded features, and his palette invites comparisons to Chagall while his use of shape summons Klimt. But there are antidotes to the seriousness here, too, as in the painted panel A Self-Portrait of Someone Else which could be a graffiti-style take on the legendary Pope Lick Monster (Man/goat/sheep hybrid).
Art Ecology on Clay Street glows with the digital panes of J.B. Wilson's “I'm an American” series (through October 28). Here, the artist cribs images from the visual shorthand of pulp and popular culture—westerns, comic books, pinups, celebrity mags, and other stuff—and digitally re-masters them into transparent light box collages that mimic the way television images hit the eye.
The complexity of the images and the overall depth of Wilson's layering require some patience to decipher, but they also reward the attentive viewer with humorous surprises and playful suggestions and clichés. The most significant feature of these works, though, is the power of distraction that Wilson wields in this set. There's so much content to look at and so many small edits to scrutinize that the eye can't resist sliding from element to element, all in a very slick package.
Learn more about J. Isaac Spradlin at his interweb site
ispradlin.com or follow Isaac's microblog stream on twitter @ispradlin.
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Silent auction table at Louisville Counts!
Ashley Cecil's painting of Louisville Waterfront at Louisville Counts!
Jacob Heustis Churchill Downs painting at Louisville Counts!
Gibbs Rounsavall Olmsted Parks at Louisville Counts!
Kenneth Hayden's "Flocking" "The Ancients" and "Flying" at Zephyr Gallery
Rodney Hatfield aka Art Snake's "Tulum"
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This blog features original commentary, reporting, criticism, reviews, and other writing about Louisville art, lit, culture, and what-have-you by local, recently returned writer J. Isaac Spradlin.
Feel free to contact the writer with any news, events, advance notices, rumors, or bad jokes via twitter @ispradlin or email ispradlin@gmail.com. Thanks.
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