Window Installations at the Fabric Workshop

Published by The Bulletin on November 20, 2007.

Eye-Catching Exhibits Draw Viewers Inside
By: Melinda Steffy, For The Bulletin

It’s a good day when a stroll down an ordinary city street, en route to a run-of-the-mill meeting or appointment, brings you in contact with something that catches the corner of your eye and engages your vision. The Fabric Workshop and Museum currently offers two street-side installations that promise to make a walk past the windows worthwhile.

“Storefront,” a collaborative installation by Mark Bradford and Juan Carlos Avendaño, applies static cling photographs of a construction site to the existing storefront windows. Instead of looking into a display case, the viewer looks through a barren building with only wooden beams in place. An unfinished roof reveals a vibrant blue sky. Although the photography itself is lovely, the interaction of the construction images with the physical structure of the building provides the most compelling aspect. The real building appears old, worn, with crackling paint on the elegantly carved woodwork and a scratched up door, clearly a remnant from the glory days of Philadelphia’s downtown. Yet the photography starkly implies newness, regeneration, urban development in the guise of an indistinct framework of ordinary beams. The building within a building seems to expand out of its window casings and create a new horizon, at the same time that the upper stories cap the blue sky and confine the images within a narrow field of view. Interior and exterior, image and object flip back and forth, blurring the boundaries between what is constructed and what is portrayed.

Mark Fox’s “Dust” explores a similar twist on the relationship between object and image. Object becomes image becomes object again as he meticulously draws household items on paper with black ink, then cuts out the drawings and displays them en masse several inches in front of the gallery wall. The assortment of items looks like a child’s toy box dumped onto the floor of an already cluttered room, with everything from furniture to tools to art supplies to musical instruments to figurines and a host of random things in between. There’s no particular order to the chaotic mass, and the juxtaposition of unusual objects (a Mr. Peanut figurine floats next to an antique camera which in turn shares space with a cactus and a kitchen knife) makes for an amusing image. The backside of each object is bright green or yellow, casting colored shadows onto the wall behind. This, combined with the flat homogeneity of color, weightlessness of the paper and disproportionate scale of the drawings, produces a dreamlike world, where everyday objects that should lie complacently on a table mysteriously float toward the ceiling as jumbled silhouettes of their actual selves. Unlike many art exhibits, the bulk of the work hovers above the viewer’s head, further monumentalizing and abstracting these otherwise insignificant objects. Although you can see a good portion of the installation from the street, it continues inside the gallery and a quick step through the door allows you to experience the entire piece.

Also on display at the Fabric Workshop and Museum are selections from the permanent collection, including textile-works by prominent artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Claus Oldenburg and Kiki Smith.

Rebecca Rothfus at Pentimenti

Published by The Bulletin on November 8, 2007.

Pencil-And-Gouach Exhibit At Pentimenti Contrasts The Natural With The Constructed
By: Melinda Steffy, For The Bulletin

If you only have time for a brief art ramble this week, be sure to stop by Pentimenti Gallery and take a look at Rebecca Rothfus’ drawings in the Project Room. The seven pencil-and-gouache landscapes in “Towers” pull together contrasting elements of human construction and natural landforms, balancing delicate details with flat colors and a blank-paper wash of sky. They exist comfortably as individual pieces, but in the close proximity in the small Project Room, they meld into a distorted urban landscape of radio towers and indistinguishable vistas.

Each drawing features at least one exquisitely rendered tower of the radio/electrical/telephone variety. Ms. Rothfus pencils in meticulous beams, bars, cables, lights and satellite dishes. Jutting up into an empty sky, the towers stand as monuments to the whole of modern communications, venerable signal-carriers that make possible the pervasive technology on which North American life thrives. In these landscapes, they stand alone, dominating an otherwise detail-less scene.

Using the matte colors of gouache, Ms. Rothfus outlines the faintest hint of background, positioning the towers as the only “real” elements amongst flattened trees and windowless buildings. Although the shapes suggest forested hillsides or protruding branches, the bland puce color immediately abstracts the form, removing it from human experience. Brick red cubes squat on the horizon, buildings without character or context. Flat slate blue bands traverse the edges of the drawings as roads or rivers. In this aggressively geometrized nature, the familiar geometry of the human-constructed towers appears graceful, gentle, and yet somehow out-of-place.

These drawings are both landscapes and not-landscapes. They present horizon and distance, but do so wholly in support of the individual towers, making the drawings feel more like portraits of important dignitaries. Ms. Rothfus constructs a strange world where usually overlooked infrastructure holds a central position, while oft-admired natural or architectural landscapes vanish. Optimism and romanticism give way to a blatant realism as the structures that support fast-paced human lifestyles appear to hold more meaning, more importance than the environment in which humans actually live. Perhaps in Rebecca Rothfus’ work, the familiar pillars of urban dwelling and suburban sprawl receive the recognition that they really deserve.

If you have a little more time for browsing, look around at Pentimenti’s other current show, “From a Thousand Pages.” This assortment of works by three artists is similarly cognizant of contemporary life and innovative in its treatment of paper (hence the show’s title). Glenn Fischer collages oval cutouts from books and magazines into stream-of-consciousness images with layers of surreal relationships. From a distance, the pieces look like abstract explorations of color and space, but closer examination reveals a dream-like, non-sequential narrative of obscured images. Matt Haffner continues Lichtenstein’s tradition of dramatic comic book figures with his own film noir narrative and richly textured imagery. Recurring characters and a monochromatic color palette give the feeling of looking at a splice of black-and-white film. Nate Moore organizes colorful origami jets into rigid formations with underlying grids, simultaneously suggesting military squadrons, handicrafts, and the formal explorations of modern art. Both “From a Thousand Pages” and “Towers” are worth a good long look, if you can squeeze it in.

©The Evening Bulletin 2007