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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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J.Isaac Spradlin
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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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