Melinda Steffy, artwork and art-writing

IDEA: Lygia Pape's "Livro do Tempo"

2011-12-15T18:29:00.002-05:00

Highly relevant to my current brainstorming. Highly inspiring.

100 words – Katie Murken: Continua

2011-09-05T12:54:00.000-04:00

When a system constantly replicates even a simple set of variables, the result quickly becomes organic, seemingly uncontained. By rolling dice to move around the color wheel using mathematical probabilities, Murken dissolves the familiar spectrum into variegated columns of haphazard hues. Towering chroma without regard to art-school theory nonetheless impose beauty on the gallery-white walls. There are the beginnings of excess, of sheer visceral reaction to brilliant abstraction. Phonebooks as the medium could add extra layers to themes of extreme systemization and the disruption of order, but instead are almost ignored, used as a meaningless ground to inexpensively house so much color.

("Continua" at Gallery 2J, 319 N. 11th Street, September 2-October 7, 2011)

RSVP 2011

2011-08-28T20:42:00.000-04:00

I'm pleased to have work included in the New Wilmington Art Association's upcoming exhibition RSVP. The show runs September 9 through October 20, with an opening reception on Friday, September 9th from 6:00-9:00pm. More details here.

Come see Three Thousand Daughters in person!

Now on Twitter!

2011-08-12T12:03:00.003-04:00

Taking the Twitter plunge. Follow @MelindaSteffy for regular updates and art-related tidbits.

Work in Progress, August 2011

2011-08-04T15:12:00.001-04:00

As I mentioned before, I'm in the beginning stages of a new series of work connecting handicraft with language, particularly using visual constructions as an actual language or code in themselves.

One piece in the works is a series of one-page, map-fold copper books. Each book is tarnished with a different quilt block pattern and will have a used sandpaper cover. Industrial material meets book arts meets textiles.

Taping the first few blocks to prepare them for tarnishing

Tarnishing the copper

So far I have 40-some tarnished. Since the fold pattern naturally divides each page into quarters, I'm only using 4x4 quilt patterns, and I would like the final result, if I were to display them in a grid, to also be divisible by 4. Which means I'm either making 64 of these suckers (8x8 grid) or 144 (12x12). 144 would fit nicely with my numerological inclinations, so that's what I'm leaning toward, but it will take a while to get there. Fortunately, "5500 Quilt Block Designs," which I am using as a reference, has ample patterns to choose from.

The pages. The surface will be antiqued and then each page will be folded into a small book form.

The language possibilities still seem wide open, but I'm leaning toward using the names of the blocks (since each one is different) to construct a story or poem that would accompany the artwork as an over-sized caption of sorts. Working title: "Impossible Narrative"

100 words - Sheila Hicks: May I Have this Dance?

2011-08-04T14:37:00.000-04:00

While containing all of the gentle tactility and delicate detail you might expect from a textile-work, Sheila Hicks’s two-story cascade blows the whole definition apart. Monumental, visceral – you feel the tangled coils twine through your own gut. It dwarfs you, shrinks you to the size of a pin head next to a spool of thread. You have no chance to passively observe, but must conquer the simultaneous desire to dive in and to run away screaming. Like standing at the base of a thousand-year-old tree, you feel the looming presence of time and the constant but unpredictable workings of nature itself.

("50 Years" at the Institute of Contemporary Art, March 24-August 7, 2011)

IDEA: khipus and three-dimensional writing

2011-07-14T17:45:00.004-04:00

A recent Slate.com article about khipus, the Incan method of recording information using knotted cords, has me thinking about the relationship between handicraft and language. My current work-in-process involves a series of one-page books of quilt-block patterns made from tarnished copper, so I've already been contemplating abstract methods of communicating via materials and patterns, but haven't really been sure about how to direct a larger body of work. This sort of material-based, non-alphabetic code might be just the connection. Interestingly, it also ties in to a new-found fascination with Chladni patterns and how they might be converted to musical scores (thanks to another Slate.com article). Several new pieces are now rolling around in my mind.

Gotta love sparks of inspiration.

100 words - Bohyun Yoon: Embody

2011-04-28T15:24:00.002-04:00

Bohyun Yoon: Embody
Yoon's "Structure of Shadow" suggests that our material bodies are so familiar, so universal, as to be intangible – a mob of mixed-up races and genders with indistinguishable limbs and torsos. The substance, then, is in the shadows, in the way a focused light condenses us each into a specific person with personality and proclivity, movement and meaning. We march together in haphazard rhythms as our passing bodies and tenuous identities shape into societies that shift and jumble as the light changes. What is our collective purpose, the focal light that directs our course? How do we structure the world when everything around us is shadow?

(At the Center for Emerging Visual Artists, April 4-May 6, 2011)

Installation shots at the Crane Arts Building

2011-02-16T14:38:00.031-05:00

Views of my artwork installed in The Hall at the Crane Arts Building during January & February 2011, presented by InLiquid. This time, I installed "Aubade" as one large sheet of the nine panels, so that the scale and color can dominate the space. "Ode" also got a modified installation, with the rows spaced according to the Fibonacci numbers. The "Introductions" are facing each other across the hall in their most formal posturing.

"Aubade: Mnemosyne Sings," with "Introductions I: Mars Enters" in the background

"Ode: Hestia Travels," with "Introductions II: Venus Receives" in the background

"Introductions II: Venus Receives"

IDEA: shadows and intangible imagery

2011-01-23T12:29:00.003-05:00

I'm in the preliminary stages of a new piece that is going to cast significant shadows if installed on a wall. I've been contemplating how best to make use of the shadows, and ran across some images of Kumi Yamashita's work. Now I'm fascinated by the idea of incorporating an intangible image, dependent entirely on the correct angle of light or viewer perspective.

This Yamashita piece particularly caught my attention because it looks similar in scale and installation to mine. Brainstorming...

"Myth/Memory" at the Crane Arts Building

2010-12-21T08:57:00.002-05:00

This winter, I'm pleased to be exhibiting four of my mixed media installations in The Hall at the Crane Arts Building, presented by InLiquid. "Aubade: Mnemosyne Sings" will be installed as a wall-to-wall, 15'x15' spread of vibrant yellow textile, accompanied by the burned paper piece "Ode: Hestia Travels" and the copper and iron "Introductions I and II: Mars Enters/Venus Receives."

"Myth/Memory"
January 5-February 27, 2011
The Hall at the Crane Arts Building, Philadelphia, PA

Receptions: January 13 and February 10 from 6-9pm

In Myth/Memory, memory, mythology & alchemy intertwine with the simplicity of a nine-patch sewing sampler and the belief that materials retain meaning from previous uses. Using symbolic materials such as the spice turmeric, tarnished copper and burnt paper, Melinda Steffy constructs rhythmic visual compositions that draw on additional themes of numerology, entropy, sustainability, domestic life and improvisation.
Painstaking processes of stitching, pinning, cutting and tearing result in loosely constructed grids, left rough and unfinished, with subtle variations and frequent repetitions. The pieces are deliberately fragmentary, brief, to give the feeling of a nearly forgotten story or a fleeting line of music.

See the details at InLiquid.com

New Wilmington Painting

2010-12-21T08:40:00.001-05:00

I have several textile-based pieces in this group show by the New Wilmington Art Association that focuses on experimental painting practices and new trends.

"New Wilmington Painting"
January 7-28, 2011
Pierre S. duPont Arts Center Gallery, Tower Hill School, Wilmington, DE

Opening reception: Friday, January 7 from 5-8pm

Installation shots at Fringe Wilmington

2010-11-09T11:25:00.000-05:00

A few images of my pieces in the Visual Fringe show as part of Fringe Wilmington, on display at the Shipley Lofts from September 29-October 21, 2010. Although the lighting wasn't great for photos, I really enjoyed how having both the "unfinished" concrete wall and the smooth drywall enhanced the craft/fine art dichotomy in my artwork.

Melinda Steffy in Fringe Wilmington's "Visual Fringe" show

2010-09-17T12:47:00.004-04:00

Three of my recent pieces will be in the "Visual Fringe" exhibition as part of Fringe Wilmington. The show will be up from September 29 through October 21 at the Shipley Lofts, 701 Shipley Street, Wilmington, DE.

There are several receptions to choose from:

Wednesday, September 29, 2010, 5:00-8:00 p.m.
"Visual Fringe" opening reception and Fringe Wilmington kick-off

Friday, October 1, 2010, 5:30-8:00 p.m.
Art on the Town reception

Thursday, October 21, 2010, 6:00-9:00 p.m.
"Visual Fringe" closing reception

ARTWORK:
"Aubade: Mnemosyne Sings"

"Ode: Hestia Travels"

"Untitled (Solitary)"

Installation shots at The Grantham Church Art Gallery

2010-08-29T12:30:00.001-04:00

A few images of my show "Collecting Stones: Minerals and Material Memory," on display at The Grantham Church Art Gallery from July 25-August 28, 2010.

Aubade: Mnemosyne Sings (alternate installation)

2010-08-29T12:20:00.006-04:00

approx. 180"x180"

turmeric-dyed canvas, torn apart and roughly sewn together

Residue II: Two Rivers

2010-08-29T12:18:00.005-04:00

82"x67"

turmeric, latex house paint and acrylic paint, India ink, tulle, vinyl, canvas dropcloth, buttons, popsicle stick

Press Release: Melinda Steffy at The Grantham Church Art Gallery

2010-06-25T10:05:00.002-04:00

ART EXHIBIT EXPLORES MEMORY LOSS THROUGH SYMBOLIC (AND UNUSUAL!) MIXED MEDIA

Grantham, PA — Philadelphia artist Melinda Steffy was devastated to watch her grandfather’s memory and personality deteriorate over nearly a decade of Alzheimer’s disease. At the same time, she was drawn to the idea that memory is the foundation of identity – both individual and community – and so began constructing what she calls a “memory room” of “painting/textile/objects,” with the intention of creating new systems for sustaining memory.

The artwork in the exhibit Collecting Stones: Minerals and Material Memory, on display at the Grantham Church Art Gallery beginning July 25, 2010, frequently uses methods familiar to sewing and quilt-making, while also including paintings and metal-work. Steffy, a Central PA native and graduate of Mechanicsburg Area Senior High, is returning to her hometown for her first solo exhibition in the area. A free public reception and artist talk will take place at the gallery on Sunday, July 25 from 11:45am-2:00pm.

“I felt like I needed to catch memory before it disappeared,” says Steffy, “not necessarily specific memories, but the whole structure of memory.” As a result, the idea that materials have meanings from their previous uses becomes a central focus, and many pieces include found objects, secondhand fabrics, family keepsakes, hand-made pigments or house paints. Items like antique lace, the spice turmeric, tarnished copper, used teabags and dead ladybugs all have symbolic meanings that are transferred to the artwork.

Steffy elaborates, “Turmeric, for example, is a sacred Hindu spice. It’s a staple ingredient of many curries and was traditionally used on the skin as a beauty product. Now, recent scientific studies have shown that eating turmeric helps prevent memory loss and dementia. So, turmeric makes this amazing yellow dye that ends up being about much more than just the color. I use it as the incarnation of Memory.”

A large textile-work titled Aubade: Mnemosyne Sings contains nine five-foot-square panels of fabric patches that have been loosely sewn together and dyed yellow with turmeric. An “aubade” is a song for the morning and the title references the goddess of memory who gave birth to the nine muses. The panels can be arranged differently to accommodate different galleries, but the desired effect is to flood the installation space with the warm glow of the yellow fabric and suggest the essence of the creative spirit.

Many works include references to Greek mythology or alchemy, which according to Steffy, are both based on an effort to preserve memory. “Mythology is essentially collective memory. It’s what an entire community has to say about itself and its history and spirituality. Alchemy deals more with materials, with the idea that matter has an inherent essence. If you can combine the right essences just the right ways, you’ll transform the matter into the foundational material of life itself.”

Aspects of geology and rock collecting also appear in several pieces. Mineral (Orange), Mineral (Yellow) and Flow contain mixtures of oil and acrylic paints that depict close-ups of actual mineral formations. In Steffy’s view, the formation of minerals correlates to the creation of memory: “These beautiful minerals were formed when liquid rock settled together and eventually solidified. At some point it was all very fluid, and even though it seems solid now, it can still be worn down. It can still change depending on the environmental factors around it. Memory, I think, works the same way: there’s this formational period when everything’s in flux, then at some point the memories settle in to their ‘offical’ form, and then there’s the natural weathering over time.”

In Four Corners, Steffy wove together thin strips of copper into a textile-like surface and then tarnished it so that it will continue to change over time. The piece Remark also re-imagines textiles and suggests changeability as unraveled canvas threads have been laid into a delicate skin of deteriorating latex house paint.

Steffy received a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from The University of the Arts and a Bachelor of Arts degree in religious studies from Eastern Mennonite University. Her artwork has been on display at the Sam Quinn Gallery, Villanova University, Finlandia University, the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, the Lancaster Museum of Art, Micro Museum, Stamford Art Association, the F.U.E.L. Collection, Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Highwire Gallery and George School, among others, and she was recently a prize-winner in the 29th annual Faber Birren Color Award Show. She has taught art classes and workshops and previously worked as a freelance art reviewer, primarily covering contemporary art in the Philadelphia region. Additionally, Steffy’s artwork has taken her to other parts of the world, such as South Africa, where she gave bead-working classes for small-business ventures and constructed a mural with homeless adults, and Guatemala, where she studied Mayan back-strap loom weaving.

The exhibit is on display through August 28, 2010. Contact the Grantham Church for hours and other information: 717-766-0531 or www.granthamchurch.org. For more information about the artist, visit www.melindasteffy.com.

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Artist Statement in Chart Form

2010-04-22T15:04:00.004-04:00

Updated InLiquid page

2010-04-05T11:46:00.004-04:00

My InLiquid page was just updated:
http://www.inliquid.com/artist/steffy_melinda/steffy.php

Event Advisory: Melinda Steffy at The Grantham Church Art Gallery

2010-03-28T13:46:00.010-04:00

"Collecting Stones: Minerals & Material Memory"

July 24-August 28, 2010
Artist Reception Sunday, July 25 from 11:45am-2:00pm

The Grantham Church Art Gallery

Grantham, PA 17027
(Google map: 421 Grantham Road, Mechanicsburg, PA 17055)

Philadelphia artist Melinda Steffy’s current artwork explores aspects of memory and its loss, family history, alchemy and the symbolic meanings of materials. With the belief that materials retain meaning from their previous uses, items like antique lace, the spice turmeric, tarnished copper, burned paper and dead ladybugs make their way into rhythmic visual compositions that reference traditional quilt-making and dyeing techniques as well as mineral formations and mythological stories. Returning to her hometown for her first solo exhibit in the area, Steffy presents a selection of paintings, textiles and mixed-media works.

"...the poetry of Steffy’s work lies in her ability to translate philosophical concepts into visually complex and abstract compositions. The materials she chooses to use in her art-making are an integral part of the finished piece."

100 words - Anais Mitchell: Hadestown

2010-03-10T19:45:00.006-05:00

Anaïs Mitchell: Hadestown
Think film noir – dusky rendezvous in dark alleys, the sound of passing trains, a red-lipsticked lounge singer with sloshing drink, the fat man upstairs obscured by billowing cigar smoke. Then add a hobo with banjo in hand, a delicate maiden in a field of yellow flowers and a raucous Greek chorus dancing the jitterbug. Wrap them together in lush arrangements of instruments, with poetry poignant enough to make you hold your breath. Give them the names of gods and mortals; let them sing an ancient but timely tale of love and loss, of power and pain. What more could you want?

http://www.anaismitchell.com/

100 words - Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms

2010-02-07T23:22:00.003-05:00

Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms: Explosion Project
In the span of human history, an individual life blazes up and quickly extinguishes. A life of renown perhaps shines more brightly, leaving behind spots in the eyes, a billow of smoke, but is still transient, immaterial. By igniting a lotus blossom, symbol of spiritual awakening, pure beauty rising above murky waters, Guo-Qiang pays tribute to a fleeting life of artistic leadership and vision. Covering the museum’s facade for a single afternoon, the memorial both illuminates and violates the temple behind, highlighting its grandeur and invoking its vulnerability. Uncollectable, unrepeatable, the artwork sharply contrasts the assumption of institutional permanence embodied in the museum.

(At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, December 11, 2009.)

100 words - Bruce Nauman: Days

2010-02-07T23:15:00.006-05:00

Bruce Nauman: Days
Who hasn’t felt the distortions of time? The way a single afternoon drags on, one painful minute after the next, while a whole month flies by in a blinding flash. “Days” captures both monotony and unpredictability, repetition and endless flow. A diverse array of disembodied voices melds into moments of communal synchronicity, into a mindless, meditative chant. Time. Time. Time. Ticking by, measured and chaotic, specific and generalized. The doubling of each voice across the aisle builds layers, alternate dimensions, by which the world is randomly deconstructed and reordered and then finds clarity in a rare moment of near unison.

(At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, November 21, 2009, to April 4, 2010.)

Installation shots at Finlandia University

2010-02-07T15:45:00.011-05:00

A few images of my show "Remnants and Residual Memories," on display at the Finlandia University Gallery through February 11, 2010.

Four Corners

2010-01-24T15:22:00.009-05:00

each 14"x14"

woven strips of copper tarnished with liver of sulfur and vinegar, ink, canvas

Melinda Steffy artist talk at Finlandia University

2010-01-24T13:49:00.008-05:00

Artist talk from my January 21, 2010, opening at Finlandia University, posted by the IronwoodInfo blog. Additional photos and information online here.

Melinda Steffy in Keweenaw Now blog

2010-01-24T13:01:00.007-05:00

Keweenaw Now blog posted information about my opening at Finlandia University (Thursday, January 21, 2010). Online here.

Excerpt:
"...the poetry of Steffy’s work lies in her ability to translate philosophical concepts into visually complex and abstract compositions. The materials she chooses to use in her art-making are an integral part of the finished piece."

Event Advisory: Melinda Steffy at Finlandia University Art Gallery

2009-12-08T22:24:00.009-05:00

"Remnants & Residual Memories"
January 11 to February 11, 2010
Artist reception Thursday, January 21, 7:00-8:30 p.m.
Finlandia University Art Gallery, 601 Quincy Street, Hancock, MI

Philadelphia artist Melinda Steffy's current painting/textile/objects draw from her interests in memory, mythology, alchemy, geology, family history, and music. Based on the belief that materials retain meaning from their previous uses, items like antique lace, the spice turmeric, tarnished copper, dead ladybugs, and found barrettes make their way into rhythmic visual compositions that consider questions of memory, the loss of memory, and the construction of systems that sustain memory.

"Eyes on the Earth" exhibition at George School

2009-10-06T22:42:00.010-04:00

"The Seventh Day" and "Three Thousand Daughters" (2008) are part of George School's exhibition "Eyes on the Earth: Sustainability Through the Eyes of Artists." On display October 12 through November 26, 2009.

Third prize in annual Faber Birren Color Award Show

2009-10-06T22:21:00.012-04:00

"Song for the Morning" (2008) was awarded third prize in the 29th annual Faber Birren Color Award Show, hosted by the Stamford Art Association and juried by MoMA curator Paulina Pobocha. Show runs October 4 through November 5, 2009.

Article in Greenwich Time
Article in The Hour

Melinda Steffy in The Philadelphia Inqurier

2009-09-05T15:03:00.010-04:00

The Inquirer's Victoria Donohoe did a brief write-up of my show at Villanova University (Friday, September 4, 2009). Online here.

Excerpt:
"...there's a luxury of sensation and touch combined with intricate adjustments of single shapes or separate smaller objects ... in her seemingly casual reveries with dyed cloth, I sense what might be the rare giftedness of a phenomenal quilt maker."

Transmute IV - 4.5"x4.5" (10"x10" framed) copper, liver of sulfur

2009-09-05T14:38:00.002-04:00

Ode: Hestia Travels

2009-09-04T16:15:00.008-04:00

approx. 84"x60"

360 pieces of burned paper, sewn together

Installation shots at Villanova University Art Gallery

2009-09-04T15:58:00.007-04:00

A few images of my show "Remnants and Residual Memories," on display at Villanova University Art Gallery through October 4, 2009.

Melinda Steffy in Delaware Arts Info blog

2009-08-17T18:50:00.007-04:00

The Delaware Arts Info blog mentions both of my current shows in a post about Wilmington's August 14 openings: "More Artful Excitement in August" by Jessica Graae (Sunday, August 16, 2009).

Excerpt:
"...the marriage of music and art is a vibrant one. How wonderful to think a student or teacher might pause after a cello lesson to look at Sequence I-III..."

Melinda Steffy featured in Art on the Town brochure

2009-08-16T11:08:00.006-04:00

I am the featured artist in this month's "Art on the Town" brochure, produced by the city of Wilmington, DE. See page 2 for my bio and page 7 for show information.

Press Release: Melinda Steffy at Villanova University Art Gallery

2009-07-21T21:11:00.010-04:00

"Remnants and Residual Memories"
August 21 - October 4, 2009
Artist reception Friday, September 11 from 5-7 pm
Villanova University Art Gallery, 800 Lancaster Avenue, Connelly Center, 2nd Floor, Villanova, PA 19085
http://artgallery.villanova.edu

For Immediate Release
For more information, contact Maryanne Erwin at 610-519-4612

Villanova, PA – Contemporary artist Melinda Steffy draws inspiration for her art from many sources, a recent one being the curious behavior of some penguins depicted in a documentary about Antarctica. In it, a flock of penguins is seen heading for the open water. On the way, part of the group turns back toward their nesting ground. Joining neither group, one lone bird chooses a third direction, waddling off toward distant mountains.

“I’m intrigued that these few birds set out on a solitary journey that goes against all penguin food, flock and mating survival instincts,” says the Philadelphia artist, whose thematic installation, ‘Remnants and Residual Memories’, opens August 17 at the Villanova University Art Gallery. “This anomaly fits with my ongoing interest in order versus chaos, structure against formlessness, while adding, at least seemingly, an element of free will.

For her upcoming Villanova exhibit, the artist is creating what she calls “a ‘memory room’ of painting/textile/objects” through which she seeks “to metaphorically reclaim memories before they disappear.” The work includes found objects, remnants, secondhand fabrics, family keepsakes, hand-made pigments, and house paints.

"I like the word ‘remnants’, says Steffy. “They’re fragments that you’re rescuing from a former life. What they were used for in that previous life is somehow being carried through. It’s not the end of the story.”

A free public reception to meet the artist will take place Friday, September 11, from 5 to 7 pm, in the art gallery on the Villanova campus. The exhibit, which is supported in part by the Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts, the regional arts funding partnership of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, continues to October 3.

The exhibit is, in part, a look into the nature of her grandfather’s memory loss from Alzheimer’s disease. “While there was distortion and fading of material memory, abstractions of life seemed to still be there for him. He might not have specific memories, but he could recall the qualities of a person,” she notes. More broadly, Steffy sees her Villanova installation as comprising “rhythmic visual compositions that address abstract questions about memory and its loss, particles and the void around them, structure and formlessness, purpose and accident.”

Normally a backdrop in traditional installations, the gallery walls play an integral role in Steffy’s exhibits. “The most compelling installations cluster the artwork in groups and pay careful attention to the wall space between so that there is a feeling of breath and emptiness as well as connection and interrelation. The pieces themselves are deliberately fragmentary, brief, to give the feeling of a nearly forgotten story or a fleeting line of music,” says the artist, for whom music plays a central role in her art and life.

The materials of which the objects are made are as integral to the art as the objects themselves. “For me,” says Steffy, “untraditional or re-used materials carry with them meaning from their previous lives or original purposes, and so add conceptual complexity to artwork.” She cites as an example the house paint in her work ‘Remark’. Peeled from its surface, rather than attached to a wall, with a painstaking grid of unraveled canvas threads, the paint was cut into rough shapes and then loosely sewn together. “All of the house paint I use is left over from other people’s renovation projects, so it carries a connotation of home life and transformation, rather than the blankness of commercial artist paints.”

Other compositions include ‘Fable (Loss and Its Recovery)’, with more than 300 found barrettes on individual paper pieces stitched together by the artist; ‘Fugue (Grandmother’s Favorite)’, featuring ink drawings on paper hand made from 80-year-old sheet music, and ‘Aubade (Mnemosyne Sings)’, comprising nine five-foot-square canvas panels dyed vibrant yellow with turmeric.

To enhance the material meaning, Steffy makes her own dyes and pigments from plants, nuts and spices, which often have medicinal properties or applications beyond their common uses. The tediousness of the paint-making process, as with the stitching, sewing, papermaking, and other repetitive tasks, invests her even more deeply in her art. “The repetition and the monotony, even though I may cringe at them, become ritual and rhythm. They make me part of the meaning of my work and add elements of time and spirituality”

Steffy received her Master of Fine Arts degree in painting in 2006 from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and earned a bachelor’s degree in religious studies at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. She has given bead-working classes for small business ventures in South Africa and studied Mayan back-strap loom weaving in Guatemala. Her work has been exhibited at the Sam Quinn, Rosenwald-Wolf, F.U.E.L. Collection, and Highwire Galleries in Philadelphia, William Paterson University, MicroMuseum, The Music School of Delaware, the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, and the Lancaster Museum of Art. Her mural, ‘In Remembrance’, hangs in the Tshwane Leadership Foundation in Pretoria, South Africa.

The Villanova University Art Gallery is open weekdays from 9 am to 5 pm. For weekend and extended hours, and other information, telephone the Art Gallery at (610) 519-4612. Selected works for Melinda Steffy’s exhibit may be previewed on the gallery’s website at http://artgallery.villanova.edu.

Event Advisory: Melinda Steffy at The Music School of Delaware

2009-07-21T20:58:00.010-04:00

"Vegetable/Mineral"
July 13 - September 14, 2009
Artist reception Friday, August 14 from 5-8 pm
The Music School of Delaware, 4101 Washington Street, Wilmington, DE 19802.

Featuring, mixed media paintings and 2-D metal works, Melinda Steffy’s artwork pulls in themes of geology, alchemy, entropy, molecular structure and improvisation, addressing broad questions of structure and formlessness, purpose and accident. Her experimental uses of materials create fluid, abstract forms with subtle patterns and unusual textures.

(10% of sales will be donated to the Music School.)

Fugue: Grandmother's Favorite

2009-07-01T16:38:00.004-04:00

12"x12"

handmade paper from 80-year-old sheet music, ink, canvas

Aubade: Mnemosyne Sings

2009-07-01T16:37:00.005-04:00

9 panels each 60"x60"

turmeric-dyed canvas, torn apart and roughly sewn together; 144 squares per panel

Introductions II: Venus Receives

2009-07-01T16:36:00.008-04:00

9 panels each 4"x4"

copper tarnished with liver of sulfur

Untitled (Solitary)

2009-07-01T16:34:00.010-04:00

52"x52"

walnut stain, recycled paintings, latex house paint, canvas

Translation

2009-07-01T16:33:00.005-04:00

14"x14"

antique lace dipped in latex house paint

Remark

2009-07-01T16:32:00.005-04:00

35"x35"

latex house paint embedded with unraveled canvas threads

Residue I: Horizon

2009-07-01T16:30:00.005-04:00

23"x35"

burnt sheet metal, ash; the residue from "Ode: Hestia Travels"

Introductions I: Mars Enters

2009-07-01T16:29:00.008-04:00

9 panels each 4"x4"

rusted iron filings on canvas

Fable: Loss and Its Recovery

2009-07-01T16:24:00.007-04:00

dimensions variable

over 300 found barrettes, paper, thread

NURTUREart - artist registry

2009-05-08T13:38:00.008-04:00

See my artwork in NURTUREart's artist registry.

Eileen Neff at Locks Gallery

2009-03-09T19:50:00.004-04:00

Published by The Bulletin on March 5, 2009. Online here.

Levels of Reality, Unreality
By Melinda Steffy

Eileen Neff’s current show at Locks Gallery, “Things counter, original, spare,” creates a still, silent space in which perceptions of reality and originality are subtly twisted and distorted. The large-scale photographs, along with a smaller diptych and a narrow vertical line of abstracted color, occupy a spectrum that considers various states of existence and gently blurs boundaries between what is real and what is unreal.

On one end of the spectrum are photographs of scenes that presumably actually exist somewhere in the world. “Under the Summer Sky” shows a dilapidated zoo enclosure in which the surrounding forest has reclaimed the wooden beams and wire mesh. Instead of housing animals, the pen now holds tree branches and shrubs with a distorted sense of what is outside/inside, of which is the container and which is being contained. “Two Deer” juxtaposes a photograph of a real deer standing attentive in a clearing next to a photograph of a fake deer (and its black bear companion) lazily propped against the side of a cabin. And although it’s likely that “A Goat in the Field,” depicting an inquisitive-looking white goat standing in Ms. Neff’s signature forest-enclosed green field, is a digital composite, the resulting image is plausible — faintly bizarre, but an image one might actually see.

Moving along the spectrum are montages of images of real scenes, combined for abstraction and visual complement. In “Before and Behind” a different zoo pen image has been inserted over the same field image, rectangle on top of rectangle, so that various forces of openness, containment and space exist simultaneously. It brings out different degrees of human control (mown field, wire cage) versus natural growth (forest around field, trees filling cage). Another piece, “Horizon,” takes a photograph of dense, barren tree trunks and places it next to a thin vertical stripe with a sky-blue top and grass green bottom. The stripe grounds an otherwise horizon-less view of a winter forest and adds a heightened perception of distance, without any of the horizontality usually associated with landscapes.

Another segment of the show splices together images of images of real scenes so as to appear believable, but to actually distort reality. By using a photograph of the bare gallery wall as a backdrop for inserting photographs of her other pieces, Ms. Neff twists the viewer’s sense of originality, creating an artwork of her own artwork. The gallery itself and then Ms. Neff’s representation of the gallery emerge as active, intertwined elements, while the original scenes, being twice removed from their concrete existence in the world, become abstracted. In “After the Winter Before,” it looks like “Under the Summer Sky” has been propped against a wall next to the wall-mounted vertical stripe of “Flipping Glimpse” (the same stripe from “Horizon,” this time isolated against the white gallery wall) and an already hung “A Goat in the Field.” The faux installation-view pulls together the visual relationships of the three pieces and opens a window to an alternate-universe viewing possibility.

In a similar piece, “The Winter Before,” Ms. Neff includes an image of a piece not present elsewhere in the show, taking the distortion of reality a step further. Sandwiched between the edges of “Two Deer” and “Horizon” sits an image of a picture of blurred branches rushing past. Given the stillness and location-specificity of all of the other images in the show, this one moment of decontextualized movement stands out — it is both present in its activity and absent in its lack of place. It exists as an image of a photograph, but doesn’t actually exist in photographic form in the show. It is as if the viewer can only see it secondhand, through someone else’s lens, which raises the question of whether it physically exists at all. In the age of digital creativity and virtual community, Ms. Neff engages her nature-themed artwork in a conversation about what is really real and suggests that perhaps reality isn’t what we expect.

Current Shows at ICA

2009-03-09T19:41:00.006-04:00

Published by The Bulletin on March 4, 2009. Online here.

Ten Tactile (But Not Touchable) Things To See At ICA
By Melinda Steffy

In case super-slick technology and mass-produced products make you crave a little human touch, swing by the Institute of Contemporary Art and take your fill of finger marks, hand-lettered signs and claymation-esque film.

Three concurrent shows — “Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay,” “Touch Sensitive: Anthony Campuzano” and “Joshua Mosley: dread” — maintain a magnetic sense of tactility, making visible the work of the artists’ hands. The delightful variability and irregularity that comes with hand-creating objects emerges in the diverse assortment of works that range from functional teapots to abstract sculptural vessels to illegible bulletin board posts. (Unfortunately, the fourth ICA show, the ramp project “Third Space” by Odili Donald Odita, while vibrant and soaring, seems far too impersonal and stylized in relation to the other shows and, therefore, curatorially out-of-place.) Below are descriptions of 10 particularly eye-catching and tactile pieces, in no particular order.

No. 1: “Shinnecock Pots” by Beverly Semmes. The surface of the meter-high vessels shows every evidence of human hands — grooves where fingers pushed and pulled the wet clay, smudges and smears. Ms. Semmes often adds extra handles, their superfluity suggesting the spaces where many hands could grasp. Then, as if to offset the overstated human presence, she paints the vessels the brightest fluorescent red, a thoroughly artificial color, smacking of neon lights and food coloring.

No 2: “Red River” by Peter Voulkos. Clay has never seemed heavier, denser, more clay-like. The tower of roughly formed blocks contains none of a vessel’s lightness, no openness. The solid mass bears down upon itself with unglazed surfaces, the plain clay bearing scratch marks and indentations with rough smears of glaze aggressively marking the facets. This is raw material, primal energy.

No. 3: “Zyko” by Ken Price. In contrast to Mr. Voulkos’s mass, Mr. Price’s minute detail occupies another extreme. His melded tubular forms — faintly figurative, but mostly cellular — have intricate surfaces that pull the viewer in to examine the whirl of colors. By applying dozens of layers of paint and then sanding the surface smooth, Mr. Price reveals delicate organic patterns so tiny they seem impossible.

No. 4: “Cenote” by Kathy Butterly. Ms. Butterly revels in dichotomies and paradoxes: a geode growing out of a pedestal, a vessel collapsing into ruin, opposite textures, complementary colors, a mysterious diving-board-like rectangle jutting into the abyss, a string of pearls. The textured moss interior perfectly challenges the slick, muscle-colored exterior while the small sculpture manages to balance vulnerability with a commanding presence.

No. 5: “Trophy Busts” including “Chemo I” and “Chemo II” by Robert Arneson. The self-portrait maquettes come across as anti-trophies in their painfully expressive distortions of Ms. Arneson’s head, commemorating loss rather than success. In “Chemo I” and “Chemo II,” the destructiveness of disease is evident in the squashed and gouged torsos, while the other figures recall emotional distress with scratched and worn surfaces.

No. 6: “Vase (Blue & Gold)” by Jane Irish. Another lover of paradox, Ms. Irish constructs pseudo-Rococo vases and urns with modern-day imagery. Instead of precise detailing, the decorative stripes and curls are obviously hand-painted with irregular edges and crooked lines. The sketchy narrative scenes within the cartouches are borrowed from Vietnam-era antiwar posters, showing scenes of battles and fighting soldiers, rather than traditional Rococo images of cherubs or relaxing peasants.

No. 7: “Agee Manufacturing Co. (Winter Catalogue)” by Ann Agee. The overflowing table of the artists’ “wares” takes the style of Meissen porcelain figurines but modernizes the characters and the morals. As at a store, there are multiples of many of the sculptures, but instead of having mass-produced uniformity, each repetition is unique, as though the story changes slightly each time it is told.

No. 8: “Greatest Show in the World” by Anthony Campuzano. Text-artist Mr. Campuzano avoids the regularity of a printing press in his hand-lettered drawings and paintings. The faux-stencil type in “Greatest Show” references the performance motivations of Lenny Bruce and Tiny Tim with Barnett Newman-like vertical strips of text and color. Between the strips, graphite hatchmarks further reveal the artist’s hand at work creating irregularly shaded backgrounds.

No. 9: “Gimme Shelter” by Anthony Campuzano. In another piece in Mr. Campuzano’s show, Rolling Stones lyrics are carved into the fibers of a worn red, orange and pink beach towel, the letters intersecting with the woven flowers and stripes. Handiwork meets commercial production; a message of apocalypse meets an emblem of frivolity.

No. 10: “dread” by Joshua Mosley. Before they were bronzes, the five sculptures on display were clay models, digitally scanned by the artist to create the animated figures in the six-minute film, complete with narrative soundtrack and philosophical allusions. Although technically not claymation, the film retains the feeling of hand-built characters and stop-motion movement as the figures move awkwardly, more slowly than the surrounding rustling leaves. The artist’s direct control over minute details shines through the technological process.

InLiquid page

2009-02-20T10:06:00.006-05:00

Be sure to take a look at my InLiquid page which went up this winter: http://inliquid.com/artist/steffy_melinda/steffy.php.

Gee's Bend Quilts at the PMA

2008-09-18T12:57:00.013-04:00

Published by The Bulletin September 17, 2008.

The Architecture of a Community
By: Melinda Steffy, for The Bulletin

Art rarely feels so personal. Few artists walk through galleries singing softly to their creations. Few collectors share gentle hugs and familial affection with their protégées. But when the artwork currently hanging on museum walls previously kept bodies warm on cold nights, when the vibrant colors and textures used to be someone’s everyday clothing, the personal element becomes unavoidable. Although most viewers won’t have the opportunity to meet the quilters themselves or hear their heartfelt spirituals echo through the gallery rooms, the Gee’s Bend quilts currently on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art “speak for themselves,” as quilter Louisiana Bendolph put it.

Gee’s Bend, a small rural town (population 750) in Alabama, remained relatively isolated through the 20th century, thanks in part to geography and partly to politics. Many of the residents trace their ancestry to slaves who worked the cotton fields and became sharecroppers after the Civil War, eventually acquiring land through Roosevelt’s New Deal programs in the 1930s. In the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr., arrived in Gee’s Bend, inspiring voting rights activism which led to the arrests of a number of protestors, losses of jobs and bank loans, and the cancellation of the town’s most direct access to the outside world – a ferry that crossed the Alabama River. Confined to a river-bound peninsula with only three cars to traverse the long, unpaved road, Gee’s Bend’s isolation increased the community’s need to share the burden and make do with what was available. In the midst of political turmoil and subsistence living, quilt-making traditions thrived.

Mary Lee Bendolph says, “We didn’t know we was [sic] doing artwork; only thing we was doing was making quilts to stay warm and keep our families warm.” Although women made “pretty quilts” to sell, using popular quilt patterns, and entered into business deals with major department stores to provide fashionable patchwork quilts and corduroy pillows, they continued expressing their creativity in the unique quilts they made for their own families. When art collectors began seeking out the “everyday” quilts, many quilters couldn’t believe that their private visions would attract such universal acclaim. Mary Lee didn’t accept that her quilts were artwork until she first saw them on display in the landmark 2002 exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. In Gee’s Bend, neighbors would visit each other when they had quilts hanging outside to air – quilters enjoyed seeing what others were creating – but it took seeing her own quilts hanging on gallery walls rather than fencerows to convince her that they were indeed impressive visual expressions. Since the 2002 show, younger quilters have joined in the art-making, crafting a new wave of quilts that continue to push and expand the Gee’s Bend tradition.

The PMA’s show Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt covers a range of Gee’s Bend quilt-making, combining antique quilts with contemporary ones, looking at visual relationships across generations and highlighting the oeuvres of several important quilters. Although individual working styles emerge, the communal vision of the quilts stands out as the close-knit, often related, quilters share ideas and materials. As a whole, the quilts demonstrate a love of organic geometry, with many “Blocks and Strips,” “Housetops,” and “Bricklayers” expressed through irregular edges and un-square corners. The quilters favor asymmetry and unusual juxtapositions of shapes, so that an otherwise rectangular layout of blocks often contains a striking lone triangle out or an irregular pattern variation. They use color with the vivacity of an abstract expressionist painter, with accent colors that slice through monochromatic fields and layers of unrelated tones that blend into complex harmonies. Drawing inspiration from the world around them, many of the quilters abstract landscapes and architectural structures, resulting in quilts that share affinities with paintings by Mondrian, Klee and Diebenkorn.

In an art culture that routinely revisits the discussion about the relationship (or lack thereof) between crafts and fine arts, the quilts erase those theoretical boundaries, managing to marry craftsmanship with concept, community with individuality, materiality with essence, functionality with transcendence. The quilts are stunning, exuberant, the strong voices of a vibrant community.

(Image: Irene Williams (American, born 1920), Blocks and Strips, 2003. Polyester double-knit, 100x72 inches. Collection of the Tinwood Alliance. Photo: Steven Pitkin, Pitkin Studio, Rockford, IL.)

Installation shots at the Sam Quinn Gallery

2008-05-09T11:27:00.018-04:00

A few images of my show "Particular Memories (Amid the Vast Emptiness of Forgetting)," on display at the Sam Quinn Gallery through June 13, 2008.

20th Century Kimono at the PMA

2008-05-03T18:33:00.007-04:00

Published by The Bulletin on April 29, 2008.

Beauty From a Bygone Era
By: Melinda Steffy, for The Bulletin

Vibrant colors, intricate handiwork and stunning patterns all characterize the collection of early-20th-century Japanese kimono on display the PMA’s Perelman Building, as do historical references, shifting culture and the global exchange of ideas. The 80-some kimono reflect the final era of kimono-wearing, when the kimono still existed as a functional, everyday garment, just before the proliferation of Western wear. Although the exhibition contains a variety of kimono, from formal dress pieces to traditional men’s wear to children’s ensembles, the majority are casual women’s kimono that reveal the dramatic changes in culture and technology that made kimono both affordable and very modern.

The kimono are clustered around the gallery in thematic groupings, highlighting visual trends and design motifs rather than chronology or production technique, a wise curatorial decision that allows the kimono to be in conversation with one another throughout the room. It keeps the exhibit from feeling like a historical display and allows the kimono to exist in all their artistic glory. Beginning with the most traditional imagery of realistically depicted cranes and flora, temples and landscapes, the exhibit explores the diversity of popular motifs that range from organic arrangements of swallows, bamboo and chrysanthemums to abstractions of water; geometric stripes, pinwheels and blocks; polka dots and expressionistic color fields; and newly prevalent modes of transportation. Although many of the pieces in the exhibition might functionally have been the “blue jeans” of kimono, the potential for individual aesthetic expression in the most casual of garments is astounding. One can imagine the stunning visual effect of a room full of kimono-wearers as the distinctive colors and patterns would interweave in the midst of a social gathering, making everyday life perpetually beautiful.

Japanese textile production in the early 20th century benefited from new technologies, as new types of silk, simpler weaving processes and commercial dyes made kimono easier to mass produce and thus more affordable. Designers transformed traditional motifs into large, striking patterns that appealed to modern women, who could now shop for kimono at department stores. Kimono design from this time period reflects a cyclical relationship with Western design, particularly Art Deco and Art Nouveau movements – As North American and European artists and designers drew inspiration from historic Japanese sensibilities, Japanese artisans borrowed back the decorative rhythmic geometry of Art Deco and stylized naturalism of Art Nouveau. Kimono throughout the exhibition point to this international transfer of information, including one piece covered with abstracted Empire State Buildings.

Additionally, several of the kimono seem reminiscent of traditional textiles from other parts of the world, with patterns similar to the brightly dyed boubous of western Africa or geometric Navajo weavings. Clearly globalization and the growing spread of information allowed kimono-makers to pull from a wide range of design possibilities and adapt non-Japanese imagery to their own context.

The striking stylistic differences among the different kinds of kimono (particularly women’s, men’s and boys’ – girls’ kimono look very similar to the women’s kimono, pattern-wise) suggest the gender stratification of society. While the women’s kimono consist of bright colors and decorative patterns, clearly social wear, the men’s kimono are very plain and austere, usually entirely black on the outside, the equivalent of a Western business suit. However, the lining of men’s kimono frequently contains hand-painted mythological scenes or depictions of famous monks, and so in the exhibition the men’s kimono are displayed inside-out to allow the viewer to appreciate the hidden beauty of these functional garments. The boys’ kimono on display suggest a global male fascination with transportation, with several pieces portraying airplanes, automobiles, battleships and tanks in astounding detail (apparently, one kimono is detailed enough to identify the specific models of the depicted airplanes). They also reveal the growing military-industrial might of Japan in the advent of World War II and point to the Japanese patriotism of the time.

Although representing a particular country’s fashion from a specific time-period, the exhibition remains accessible to contemporary North American viewers, who will appreciate the exquisite craft of these textiles (be sure to look as closely as you can at the fabric itself) and who might experience a pervasive nostalgia for bygone eras and vanishing traditions. The method of display removes the human figure from the kimono and flattens them into abstracted fields of color and form, a vibrant tableau of gorgeous design that invites inspection, appreciation and awe.

(Image: Woman's Kimono, 1920s-30s (late Taisho-early Showa periods). Machine-spun silk plain weave with stencil-printed warp and weft threads (meisen). 61.26x43.25 inches (155.5x110cm). The Montgomery Collection, Lugano, Switzerland. [Cat. no. 90])

Press Release: Melinda Steffy at Sam Quinn

2008-03-29T10:28:00.008-04:00

Melinda Steffy at Sam Quinn Gallery
“Particular Memories (Amid the Vast Emptiness of Forgetting)”

April 18 to June 13, 2008
Opening reception: Friday, April 18—6:00-8:00 p.m.

4501 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19139

The Sam Quinn Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of “Particular Memories (Amid the Vast Emptiness of Forgetting)” by Philadelphia artist Melinda Steffy. The show metaphorically reclaims fleeting memories before they disappear, creating a “memory room” of small mixed-media pieces separated and enhanced by the empty space of the gallery setting. Homemade pigments, secondhand fabrics, found objects, family keepsakes, and re-purposed paintings combine into abstract painting/textile/objects. The rhythmic visual compositions integrate Ms. Steffy’s interests in geology, mythology, alchemy, family history, and music, and they address broad questions about memory and its loss, particles and the void around them, structure and formlessness, purpose and accident.

Ms. Steffy received a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from the University of the Arts and a Bachelor of Arts degree in religious studies from Eastern Mennonite University. Her work has recently been on display at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, the Lancaster Museum of Art, Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Highwire Gallery, and the Court Gallery at William Paterson University. Additionally, Ms. Steffy’s artwork has taken her to other parts of the world such as South Africa, where she gave bead-working classes for small-business ventures and constructed a mural with homeless adults, and Guatemala, where she studied Mayan back-strap loom weaving. Ms. Steffy works part-time as the concert manager for The Wilmington Music School/Delaware Music School and also does freelance art reviewing, primarily covering contemporary art in the Philadelphia region.

Three Thousand Daughters

2008-03-13T16:07:00.005-04:00

45"x45"

walnut stain, thread, conte, charcoal, fabric

Song for the Morning

2008-03-09T22:06:00.008-04:00

25"x27"

turmeric, canvas, thread

The Seventh Day

2008-03-09T22:02:00.008-04:00

25"x33"

walnut stain, turmeric, fabric

Marking the Passage of Time

2008-03-09T21:46:00.005-04:00

dimensions variable

92 used teabags embroidered with dates and dipped in latex house paint, antique and new quilting pins

In Search of Stone (solid form)

2008-03-09T21:41:00.004-04:00

6"x6"x4"

acrylic on canvas

Dreamer

2008-03-09T21:38:00.009-04:00

6"x2"x1"

driftwood, thread

Things Fall Apart

2008-03-09T21:29:00.006-04:00

18"x18"

latex paint, recycled paintings on canvas

Apothecary

2008-03-09T21:22:00.008-04:00

2"x10.5"x10.5"

glass jars, medicinal spices

Solar Flare

2008-03-09T20:53:00.004-04:00

30" x 30"

oil and acrylic on canvas

Flow

2008-03-09T20:45:00.006-04:00

30" x 30"

acrylic and oil on canvas

Sandstone

2008-03-09T20:41:00.005-04:00

12" x 20"

oil and acrylic on canvas

The Puppet Show at ICA

2008-03-06T10:18:00.007-05:00

Published by The Bulletin on March 5, 2008.

Puppets, In All Their Glory
By: Melinda Steffy, for The Bulletin

“What can puppets do that humans can’t?” queries the stuffed-cat-with-movable-arms moderator of “Puppet Conference,” a film by Christian Jankowski, on display at the Institute of Contemporary Art. “The Puppet Show,” ICA’s current first-floor group exhibition, explores the range of puppet imagery and ability through puppet-inspired artwork, films of various forms of puppetry, and of course, actual puppets. It’s a quirky mesh of limbs and armature, sculpted heads and exaggerated expressions, which together take on a life of their own.

“Puppet Storage” opens the show, a backstage closet of historical and contemporary puppets, props and images. From traditional Indonesian shadow puppets used to enact epic Hindu stories to Andy Warhol’s hand-puppet models of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, the selection of items points to a diverse world of puppetry, full of sarcasm and social commentary as well as careful handicraft and attention to detail. The collection of puppet paraphernalia sits on innocuous wooden shelves, inanimate objects so full of latent personalities that a viewer can’t help feeling watched. Many of the objects relate to the artwork in the main gallery, with artists providing preliminary sketches or actual props used to create their artwork. This self-reflective background information reveals the ubiquitous human behind every puppet and enhances the theatricality of the performances.

The main gallery space hosts a mix of video works and sculptural installations with occasional photographs and drawings. The various pieces embody both the movement and narrative of theater and the still abstraction of an art gallery, so that puppetry emerges as a mixed-up blend of visual and dramatic arts, a combination of the abstract and the representational. By using constructed, artificial characters, the stories remove themselves slightly from the realm of reality and yet, from that distance, comment so pointedly on human experience. Although Lambchop and the Muppets make occasional appearances, the exhibition has a decidedly adult spin, removing puppetry from mere childhood entertainment and using the medium to explore complex concepts.

In Cindy Loehr’s video installation “The Colloquy,” the most basic of hand-puppets – bare fists with rhinestone eyes and a thumb jaw-line – carry on a subdued lovers’ quarrel, with one hand doing all of the talking while the other emotionally withdraws. Shown on such a large scale, these simple characters take on surprisingly human characteristics in their enactment of a plausible conversation.

Guy Ben-Ner’s film “Elia: The Story of an Ostrich Chick” bizarrely merges puppet and actor, as humans dressed in ostrich costumes act out a coming-of-age story about an adolescent ostrich and her ostrich family. The costumes only cover the lower halves of the actors’ bodies, with the ostrich heads moved by sticks held in the actors’ hands, so human torsos and heads overlap with ostrich bodies and legs. Since the costumes face backwards – the actors walk in reverse to make the ostriches appear to go forward – the distinction between bird and person becomes even more distorted. Often, the human facial expressions, especially on the younger children, mimic the actions of the ostrich characters, further blurring the boundary lines between real and artificial.

Kiki Smith turns human into puppet in “Nuit” by dissembling the human figure and suspending arms and legs from the ceiling, stopping inches from the floor. The white plaster casts are empty of pulse or energy, unable to move unless someone would tug on the ropes. Even then, in the absence of body or face, the limbs resist anthropomorphizing, remaining devoid of the personalities typical to puppets. The effect is both elegant and faintly disturbing.
From Dennis Oppenheim’s mechanical puppet clones in “Theme for a Major Hit” (the suited men periodically jitter around the floor) to Kara Walker’s paper silhouette film confronting the history of racism and its lingering violence, the range of puppet-imagery is engaging and challenging, drifting from whimsical to disconcerting, simple to astoundingly complex.

Tibetan Buddhist Mandala at Philadelphia Cathedral

2008-01-30T13:17:00.004-05:00

Published by The Bulletin on January 29, 2008.

Tibetan Buddhist Mandala in Process at Cathedral
By: Melinda Steffy, For The Bulletin

It’s not a typical artwork. It doesn’t fit into contemporary models of abstraction, representation or self-expression, drawing instead on 2,500-year-old traditions and symbolism. It contains no paint, no paper, no clay, just careful layers of brightly colored sand. The highly trained artist did not attend a top-tier art school, but studied at a monastery in India. And no conservationist will ever worry about the artwork’s longevity; in another week it won’t exist.

The “Wheel of Life” Tibetan Buddhist mandala in process and on display at the Philadelphia Cathedral defies most modern Western notions of art-making, particularly ideas of permanence and personal attachment to one’s creation.

For two weeks, Losang Samten, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, has been rasping fine lines of sand out of a metal tube to create careful images that portray the frailty of the human condition and the consequences of giving in to the “poisons” of ignorance, greed and anger. Every image carries symbolism, from the trio of animals at the center (pig, pigeon and snake, corresponding to the three poisons) to the six surrounding landscapes to the evolving love story around the perimeter. The images cycle from infancy through death, tying together pain and joy, yin and yang, and showing the consequences of giving in to the three poisons. According to Buddhist beliefs, in order to cure suffering, one must train the mind to notice and eliminate the poisons, and so the “Wheel of Life” provides a tool for meditation and contemplation on this life-long journey.

The detailed workmanship is astounding. Using varying finenesses of sand, Samten outlines bricks, miniscule arrows and the decorative trim of a woman’s dress and sculpts buildings, mountains and rivers. He blends colors, so a band of yellow fades to green to meet the dominant blue of the largest circle. Although the overall effect is two-dimensional, Samten periodically turns off the overhead lights and uses a side-light to highlight the sand’s relief, and suddenly ocean waves and fruit trees come to life with depth and shadows.

The overall concept and symbolism of the “Wheel of Life” remain the same each time it is created, but individual artists add their own variations and interpretations. In this case, Samten whimsically includes a tiny dog that runs from scene to scene, appearing in the midst of a tale of human relationships. In other panels, Jesus and Buddha appear next to each other, a nod to the ecumenical relationship that brought this Buddhist mandala to an Episcopal cathedral, and a church building takes its place alongside a pagoda as diverse cultures intersect in Samten’s vision.

The profound awareness that an untimely gust of wind or a careless visitor could damage the mandala heightens its meaning and sense of value. The mandala embodies the very frailty it portrays, and so the active processes of creation and destruction become, in some ways, more important than the ancient symbols themselves. Since this particular mandala will soon be gone and no future incarnation will be exactly the same, viewing takes on a sense of pricelessness. After just two weeks of creation and one week on display, another monk will arrive to ritually sweep away the mandala, obscuring the image and returning the sand to the cosmos (via the Schuylkill River) in recognition of ultimate impermanence and natural cycles.

One visitor, clearly moved by the transient construction, asked, “Don’t you worry about it?” Samten paused for several seconds, observing his delicate creation, and smilingly shrugged his shoulders, “Not really.”

Each One Individually (Nine-Patch)

2008-01-26T16:23:00.003-05:00

approx. 15"x15"

latex paint, recycled paintings on canvas

Consolation/Remembrance

2008-01-26T16:21:00.003-05:00

4"x4"x2" / 2"x2"x.5"

80-year-old sheet music, pins

pencil on vellum, thread

Funeral March

2008-01-26T16:19:00.002-05:00

each jar 4" high

glass jars, corks, buckeye nut, pill casings, sheet music, ladybugs

Legacy

2008-01-26T16:18:00.002-05:00

8"x3"x3"

African violet cutting from my grandmother's plant, seashell from my grandmother's collection, dirt

Monument

2008-01-26T16:14:00.003-05:00

4"x4"x2"

river stones collected the day my grandfather with Alzheimer's disease didn't recognize one of his own children

The Beauty of Memory

2008-01-26T16:06:00.003-05:00

3” x 28.5”

turmeric, latex paint, canvas

Canción Tonta

2008-01-26T16:05:00.002-05:00

approx 94” x 60”

acrylic, latex, spices, fabric, canvas

Pieces Too Short

2008-01-26T16:01:00.003-05:00

1” high

leftover pieces of thread knotted together, wooden spools

Nine-Patch, Blue

2008-01-26T16:00:00.002-05:00

19” x 17.5”

acrylic, latex, alum, red cabbage, fabric, canvas

Oneness

2008-01-26T15:59:00.002-05:00

8” x 32”

acrylic, latex, alum, red cabbage, fabric, canvas

Untitled (Over the Piano)

2008-01-26T15:58:00.004-05:00

128” x 16.5”

acrylic, latex, ink, spices, pins, fabric, canvas

Patch

2008-01-26T15:57:00.002-05:00

60.5” x 44”

latex, paprika, pins, fabric, canvas

Twelve Tone

2008-01-26T15:54:00.003-05:00

approx 53” x 67”

acrylic, latex, fabric, spices, plants, thread, needles

In Search of Stone (Liquid Form)

2008-01-26T15:47:00.002-05:00

approx 72” x 48”

acrylic on canvas

Sequence I-IV

2008-01-26T15:45:00.001-05:00

5” x 5” each

iron filings on paper

Materia Prima

2008-01-26T15:43:00.003-05:00

30” x 30”

oil and acrylic on canvas

Mineral (Orange)

2008-01-26T15:42:00.003-05:00

30” x 30”

oil and acrylic on canvas

Mineral (Yellow)

2008-01-26T15:41:00.003-05:00

30” x 30”

oil and acrylic on canvas

Untitled (Orange Trail)

2008-01-26T15:39:00.002-05:00

42” x 30”

acrylic on canvas

Flood

2008-01-26T15:37:00.003-05:00

21” x 21”

acrylic on canvas

Spaces Between

2008-01-26T15:36:00.002-05:00

11” x 11”

acrylic on canvas

Temple

2008-01-26T15:34:00.002-05:00

20” x 20”

acrylic on canvas

Absence

2008-01-26T15:19:00.001-05:00

20” x 20”

oil and acrylic on canvas

MFA Thesis

2008-01-26T15:01:00.006-05:00

Click here for the full text PDF.

Introduction/Conclusion
Visual art emerges from a chain of discontinuous ideas – areas of interest that cannot always be cognitively linked but that function together to create cohesive representations of scattered thoughts. In my work, considerations of chemistry, alchemy, geology, music, family history, spirituality, environmentalism, materiality, and domesticity merge into painting/textile/object combinations. Like a collection of discarded remnants, the various themes exist incompletely, perhaps out of context, but are recombined with other ideas to make a patchwork of visual expression. Old and familiar topics take on different meanings in their new iterations.

Textile work, particularly hand-stitching crafts like needlepoint or counted cross-stitch, results in the emergence of a distinct frontside and backside. The front is the presentation; it hangs on walls and is admired by visiting friends. The backside, however, is what wins awards, as the level of meticulous attention to detail determines the overall quality of the handicraft. In writing about my artwork, I found this distinction to be a useful framework for organizing my thoughts. The “frontside” describes the actual work I have completed and often references other artists who have been influential. In the “backside” section, I provide the background themes and information that I think about in relation to my work. Occasionally, the background thoughts are a jumbled mass of knotted threads that I struggle to untangle; other times I am able to produce a beautiful arrangement of ideas to complement the visual work that emerges.

Just as my work demonstrates an inherent rearrangeability and fluidity of structure, so the format of my writing allows for an interchange of ideas as the sections can be read in any order. Four overarching themes emerge as central elements of my artwork, although each theme is itself a combination of several concepts that can be reshuffled into new configurations. In the section “Liquids, Molecular Structure, and the Manifestation of the Formless,” I consider the importance of the particle-void relationship and the implications of absences in visual work. “Snappy Musical Rhythms and Subtlety Geological Time” looks at underlying rhythmic structures and elements of time. In “Remnants, Alchemy, and DJ Sampling,” I explore the ethical re-purposing of discarded or familiar materials and the importance of material memory. “Disturbed Domesticity and the Informe” examines the bending of rules and unexpected uses of materials and techniques.

Book Review: Armed and Ready

2008-01-26T13:55:00.006-05:00

Published by The Bulletin on August 10, 2007.

Armed And Ready - And Wondering Why

By: Melinda Steffy, For The Bulletin

Before I launch into the substance of this book, I must admit two things. One,I get a little squeamish about the idea of owning a gun, for reasons I won't delve into here. And two, Philadelphia-based photographer/author KyleCassidy is a friend of a friend, and so I had heard tales of the book-to-be long before it officially emerged. However, my choice to write about Armed America has nothing to do with cronyism or any ideological stance; instead it is based on my complete absorption in the book each time I pick it up. I find myself peering into every corner of the richly detailed portraits, laughing at absurd scenes and out-of-control pets, marveling at the diversity of human self-expression and questioning my own perceptions of guns and gun ownership.

Evening gowns, easy chairs, combat boots, kilts, crosses, parrots, banjos, and yes, guns - the diverse portrayal of human experience is refreshingly unexpected with a pervasive sense of humor. Cassidy knows how to make the ride fun, expertly balancing a fun-loving, go-with-the-flow perspective with a clear appreciation for the people he photographs. In one image, a platinum-blond woman in a polka-dot dress leaps into the air, arms outstretched, adding a surreal slant to an otherwise straightforward family portrait. Several pages later, a shaggy-haired youth sits in a stark white room, 10 guns spread on the table and as many pizza boxes stacked in the corner. A camera-loving dog hogs the spotlight in another photo, center stage and drooling, while the owner chuckles in the background. A few images even have the theatrical vibe of a detective movie, mysteriously dark with fedoras and leather sofas, neon signs and smoky cigarettes.

Of course, not every image is otherworldly. There are plenty of the expected taxidermied animals and American flags. Entire families of gun-lovers pose in their living rooms, fathers with hunting rifles, children with air rifles, cats lounging on the carpet. People are surrounded by everyday objects in ordinary rooms, doing the sorts of things people usually do when pictures are taken. By avoiding studio contrivances, Cassidy allows the subjects to remain real people - they haven't cleaned off tables or put on their best outfits. The cluttered (or in some cases, desolately bare) ordinariness of the scenes makes them fascinatingly compelling, because the ubiquitous guns seem ordinary as well, blending in as just another utensil or picture on the wall.

Each portrait is accompanied by a caption that gives people's responses to the question, "Why do you own a gun?" From the very basic,"I like them," to drawn-out descriptions of personal biographies, historical significance and political treatises, prevalent themes of second amendment rights and self-defense give way to the subtle differences of personal preference and social context. A history teacher likes having tangible artifacts to inspire his lectures. A chef wants to be able to hunt his own Thanksgiving turkey. Police officers and military personnel own weapons as a natural extension of their careers. People living in cities and suburbs alike feel safer having guns intheir homes and knowing how to use them for defense. There are collectors, target-shooters, hunters, people whose families have always owned guns, people with intense patriotism and a sense of entitlement as American citizens, people who like having a powerful "last resort." As with the images, some of the responses are surprisingly comical or unexpected. A non-violent Buddhist sitting lotus-style with his AK-47 explains that he owns a gun so that he can confront his own nature and choose not to be violent. One young man only became interested in guns after seeing "Bowling for Columbine," wanting to break the stigma attached to this inanimate object. A few frightening responses reflect the militant extremism of people exhorting their absolute right to armed rebellion in the face of socialists or fascists or their own government. And one woman, after her husband's reply, says baldly, "I hate guns. Don't get me started."

The prevailing mood of the book, even with its range of visual and verbal expression, is one of moderation, of tolerance, of patriotic commitment to upholding founding principles. The juxtaposition of intricate portraits and thought-provoking statements creates a coffee table book that is both beautiful and highly relevant to current discussions, regardless of one's opinions about violence or gunregulations. By placing weapons in a holistic context of home life and family and broadly considering the "Why?" of gun ownership, Armed America presents the possibility of dynamic engagement with a complex issue, rather than continuing a polarizing and stagnatingd ebate. The people become REAL, while the guns, in spite of their omnipresence, fade into a comfortable background.

Illustration Exhibition at the Brandywine River Museum

2008-01-26T13:51:00.004-05:00

Published by The Bulletin on September 11, 2007.

'Flights Into Fantasy' Captures Imagination Through Illustration

By: Melinda Steffy, For The Bulletin

A young child, nestled in bed under a graceful pink quilt, all golden ringlets and rosy cheeks, reads “The Bed-Time Book,” whose cover shows the same image in miniature, shrinking to an implied infinity of golden-haired children, beds, and nightly stories. Fantasy is eternal.

The Brandywine River Museum’s current exhibition, “Flights into Fantasy,” captures the innocent effervescence of childhood imagination with over 100 images of fantasy by American and European illustrators from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including The Bed-time Book by Jessie Wilcox Smith. Characters as familiar as the pied piper and Babar the Elephant combine with fantastical fairies and mischievous elves, scenes of wonder and of exploration. They reveal mysterious lands, drenched in nostalgia and patterned with snippets of stories we still tell our children as they fall asleep.

Collector Kendra Daniel explains that rather than gathering a historical survey of illustrations, she selected works that are “artistically sensitive and conceptually imaginative.” The result is vibrant, entrancing. Each exquisite illustration deserves careful viewing, with an eye for delicious detail, abundant creativity, and technical mastery.

Kay Nielsen’s striking illustration And Flitted Away as Far as They Could from the Castle that Lay East of the Sun and West of the Moon (1914) turns imagination into mythology, as a young couple rides down a rainbow/bridge away from a fire-breathing sun/dragon across a stormy sea. Nielsen expertly balances a wash of rich blue sky with illustrated-manuscript-like patterns and an Asian sensibility of emptiness and line, visually infusing the tale with magnificent drama and poetry. Prince Charming becomes Apollo; folklore becomes liturgy.

In contrast, Ida Rentoul Outhwaite creates delicate scenes where fantasy gently brushes the familiar world. Fairies, Elves and Sprites Meet a Boy in the Woods (c.1910) depicts the intangible moment when reality melds into imagination, as a young boy and a line of winged wonders peer at each other through the trees. Outhwaite meticulously forms every figure, tree leaf, and blade of grass from untouched white paper surrounded by a black ink background, so the drawing itself feels as elusive (and astounding) as the scene it depicts.

A playful sense of humor pervades many of the pieces. Charles Broughton’s He Refused to be Entangled in the Concerns of Fairyland (c.1900) shows a young boy staring sulkily into the distance, a book in his lap, while Little Bo Peep, Red Riding Hood, the Big Bad Wolf, a wicked witch, and a few Arabian Nights characters frolic around him. Even the boy’s most concentrated denial cannot eliminate the fantasy world he has created.

Although the artists’ names may not all be familiar, many of their stylized characters have become iconic. Grace Drayton’s Kindness to Animals (1923) features “Dotty Dumpling,” a wholesome paper doll with all of the round-cheeked, wide-eyed goodness of Drayton’s Campbell’s Soup kids. Panels from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, brought to life by artist Peter Newell, and Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline show storybook scenes familiar to children today. And although the circle of malicious tin-men-gone-awry might be more frightening than the Wizard himself, John Neill’s “You!” They Yelled (1909) clearly references his more well-known Oz characters.

“Flights into Fantasy” offers a not-to-be-missed visual story-telling experience. In the Brandywine’s galleries, the world becomes friendly, strikingly free of fear or discomfort as charming children confront the unfamiliar with wonder and amusement. Latent stories beckon from each image, a beautiful library of folktales and whimsy that will capture your attention and spark your own imagination.

Daring, Deafening, Different: ICA's New Exhibit...

2008-01-26T13:48:00.003-05:00

Published by The Bulletin on September 13, 2007.

Daring, Deafening And Different: ICA's New Exhibit An Interactive Romp Through Artistic Imagination

By: Melinda Steffy, For The Bulletin

Are you tired of hands-off, eyes-only art? Do you enjoy architecture, unexpected juxtapositions, or pirate jokes? It might be time to check out the current set of exhibitions at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), featuring solo shows by Eileen Neff and Jay Heikes, an installation by architecture studio Taalman Koch, and a group show of sound artists called “Ensemble.” A stroll through the galleries takes you on a multi-sensory experience—as captivating for the ears as for the eyes—and highlights excitingly diverse moments in contemporary art.

Consider it a symphony in four movements, if you will.

Movement I: “Ensemble”

Strike up the band! Just don’t be startled by the air raid siren. It will temporarily drown out all other noises and might cause your fingers to move towards your ears (pity the poor security guards), but you can hardly expect to have a show of kinetic sound sculptures without exploring the full range of audible sound. You will find, if you stop to pay attention, that the intervening silences aren’t really silent at all, but filled with the clink of glass, the thump of a mop, and an occasional rattle of garbage bags. Hopefully you’ll go at a time when other visitors participate in the interactive cacophony by pulling creaking levers, ringing glass bells, and wandering through the enormous bamboo wind chime.

It all looks as fantastic as it sounds. Mineko Grimmer’s Bamboo Forest (1995/2007) provides the perfect prelude to the gallery experience, with a series of thick bamboo poles hanging over the doorway that require gallery-goers to push the poles aside and walk through the rustling “forest”. The viewer participation, physicality and creation of sound introduce themes present throughout the gallery. Doug Aitkin’s K-N-O-C-K-O-U-T (2005) combines the smoothly varnished wood of an elegant table with the percussive melody of a marimba. A grand piano gone awry, an interactive dinner table. AND you get to strike it with mallets. The whimsical glass bells of Jim Hodges’ the bells/black (2007) hang from the ceiling, strings dangling just above your head, like a wild instrument from Alice in Wonderland or a troupe of flying bats. The bold color supersedes the material fragility and invites viewers to give it a try. Nearby, the wobbly wooden floor tiles of Staccato (americano) (2004/2007) by Katja Kölle rattle and thump with every step.

Not every piece is interactive. Keep your eyes open for the do-not-touch signs that mark many of the self-propelling kinetic sculptures. Céleste Boursier-Mougenot sets up a plastic swimming pool with a small motor that circulates floating ceramic bowls in Untitled (series #3): 7 (1999). The bowls gently collide with tinkling clinks as the water swishes and swirls. Terry Adkins’ oversized player piano roller Off Minor (2004) produces a non-musical scraping sound as flexible tubes perpetually rub against the playing mechanism. And David Ellis’ Trash Talk (2007) uses hidden devices to rustle and bang his convincingly nonchalant pile of garbage.

Movement II: “Fly Through” by Taalman Koch

Enter the silent portion. The current installment of ICA’s ever-inventive ramp projects (making use of the sloped walkway between the first and second floors), features the life-size architectural renderings of studio Taalman Koch. Inside becomes outside becomes inside again in the lattice of perspectival line drawings and vibrantly colored floral motifs. Based on a two-dimensional representation of a glass house, the drawings situate the existing architecture of the ramp within a new contextual possibility. Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings meet Escher’s skewed perspective and Matisse’s love of pattern.

Movement III: Jay Heikes

Watch out for the punch line. With all of the hyperbole and comic tension of a good joke, Jay Heikes presents the latest in a series of installations based on a joke about a parrot and pirate. You won’t see specific representations of the joke itself, but you will sense the exaggerated absurdity and developing suspense characteristic of such humor. In rules of attraction, a large Looney-Toons-like weight hangs inches above a hunk of cheese, daring a mischievous rat/mouse/human hand to reach for it. It brings up futility, danger, and the disturbing suspicion that a falling anvil might be good for a laugh. 6:30 today, tomorrow, and the day after that, an enormous non-functional cuckoo clock complete with pinecone weights, rests with flaccid hands at a dismal hour, gravity forcing time to perpetually stand still.

Movement IV: “Between Us” by Eileen Neff

A cloud doesn’t belong in an empty room or nestled next to a shrub in a manicured garden. Forests don’t grow out of antique chairs. One tree doesn’t cuddle up to another… Or do they?

The cleverly subtle juxtapositions of natural images and interior scenes in Eileen Neff’s photography/collages create a gently surreal world where assumed boundaries dissolve in the face of unusual relationships. Often digitally manipulated, sometimes found and photographed as they naturally occur, the images radiantly encompass all of the grandeur and minutia of the natural world with sprinklings of ironic humor.

At first, you might assume that Summer: The Couple (2007) is a simple photograph of a tree in a field. But look closely and you’ll see one tiny cedar leaning against the trunk of an enormous walnut tree—tenderness oozing from the image. In the spirit of Marcel Duchamp’s “ready-made” sculptures, Neff captures exquisite moments, revealing her own amusement and appreciation for small surprises.

Other works showcase the clever fusion of disparate situations. In The Visit, a lone evergreen makes a yearning bedside visit in a seemingly empty room. The eerie anthropomorphization recalls both grainy horror movies (What would you do if you awoke to find a tree staring at you?) and poignant sickbed scenes. One of a series of works paying homage to Neff’s favorite writers, Thoreau (2004) encloses a faded dirt road within a large canvas propped on an old wooden table in a white room. It appears both stark and minutely detailed, as the dominant whiteness gives way to faint impressions of forest and distant sky.

Finale

Together, the four shows, with all of their differences of media and technique, of interaction and observation, create an exhibition that distills the essence of contemporary art. Interactive, multi-sensory, and site specific with subtle twists and a sense of humor, ICA puts on a good show.

A Viewer's Guide to Contemporary Art

2007-12-07T16:23:00.003-05:00

Published in The Bulletin's Winter Culture Guide at the end of November 2007. The Culture Guide was not published online, so I can't link to the article and I'm providing the full text here. The text below is my unedited version -- The publisher had removed descriptions of several of the artworks because he didn't like the artwork, which, as you will see, underscores the need for just this sort of article...

A Viewer's Guide to Contemporary Art
By: Melinda Steffy, For The Bulletin

Conversations about contemporary art, even with other art-writers, frequently return to some expression of, “I don’t get it,” “I don’t know what to say about it,” or worse, “I don’t like it.” In honor of so many confused and disgruntled contemporary art viewers, I hereby embark on a mission to help it all make a little more sense. Here is a brief “Viewers’ Guide to Contemporary Art,” or something of the sort. Using real-life examples from current Philadelphia exhibitions, I pulled out a few prominent themes and concepts that often play a role in contemporary art. Naturally, not all artwork deals with the same themes, and these themes certainly do not represent all art. However, many artists enter the artistic dialogue through one of these points, and so understanding contemporary art requires paying attention to the following diverse elements.

Materiality and Found Objects
In much contemporary art, the materials used are at least as important as whatever image or product ends up being displayed. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp declared that a graffitied urinal was art and so launched the idea of “ready-mades,” a precursor to today’s found-object art. Subsequent art movements continued explorations of everyday objects and common materials, bringing in everything from historic handicrafts to mass-produced household items to massive industrial materials. For many artists, untraditional or re-used materials carry with them meaning from their previous lives or original purposes, and so add conceptual complexity to visual arts. In the current show at Larry Becker Contemporary Art, artist Merrill Wagner re-purposes scraps of steel discarded by a plumbing company to construct pseudo-minimalist, color field paintings with rust-preventive glazes and paints. By using the steel as she finds it, Wagner creates pieces with irregular edges and gentle oxidation, so the natural properties of the steel become central to appreciating the artwork. The heaviness inherent in the steel balances the delicate irregularities of the surface, and looming entropy contradicts the steel’s seeming permanence. Conceptually, using an industrial material provides an important contrast to her fascination with farm topography and sky-scapes. The material raises questions of the relationship between nature and machines, between that which is under human control (e.g., a tractor) and that which refuses human control (e.g., rust). In other pieces, Wagner explores another type of materiality by painting bands of solid colors using different brands’ versions of the same pigment. The paint itself, with its commercially produced variations, IS the artwork, while the image of the three or four stripes of color becomes secondary. In this way, paint, although purchased at a store, becomes a kind of found object as the artist avoids manipulating the paint and instead enhances its inherent properties.

Narrative and Voyeurism
Although some artists focus on materiality to the exclusion of representation or narrative, other contemporary artists continue to revamp story-telling genres, often with a voyeuristic slant in which the viewer is allowed access to a private or personal story. Modern culture’s enthusiasm for sharing someone else’s first-person experience, whether it be in the form of reality TV, blogging, or graphic news reporting, worms its way into artwork. Rob Matthews’ current show “Knoxville Girl” at Gallery Joe presents the details of a true crime – the murder of a young Tennessee woman – through the medium of exquisite pencil drawings. The scenes unfold chronologically around the room as the four characters (introduced through individual mug-shot-like portraits) carry out their violent scheme. Although the basics of the story could be gleaned from any newspaper article, the drawings provide a level of personal interaction and involvement as the viewer becomes a witness – perhaps even an accomplice – to the crime. Simultaneously, the gracefully rendered drawings seem to soften the violence through a comedy of exaggerated gestures and expressions, ending with a subtle moral and a final curtain call. Each drawing contributes a vital aspect of the whole story, so the individually framed works actually become one large artwork and the meta-narrative overrides the particular scenarios.

Repetition and Mass Production
The advent of mass produced consumer goods led to a corresponding artistic interest in reproduction and excessive repetition. Andy Warhol, for example, pictorialized the grocery store line-up of Campbell’s soup cans and repetitively reproduced images of pop culture icons. Many contemporary artists continue this study of reruns and visual homogeneity by creating serial artworks or repeating nearly identical forms. At Lineage Gallery, several of the artists in “Independent Residents” rely heavily on repetition and consumer imagery. Aiko Nakagawa combines religious and contemporary iconography in her “Kitty” series, imposing a Hello Kitty head over a Sacred Heart of Jesus torso and replacing the face with poker suits and her name, “Aiko.” Nakagawa repeats the quasi-self-portrait four times on separate canvases, invoking the obsessive reproduction common to animated figures, religious icons, and playing cards. Like two mirrors reflecting each other into infinity, this implied mass production of a mass production paves the way for continued distortion and dilution of popular imagery.

Viewer Participation and Site Specificity
Deconstructionist criticism of the 1960s examined literature and artwork in light of underlying frameworks and assumptions that were often overlooked or unspoken. In contemporary art, artists stopped thinking about artwork in the vacuum of white gallery walls and began overtly considering the implicit role of the viewer and of the surrounding space. The very structure of an exhibition became grounds for art-making. Now, artists love to involve the viewer, whether through passive voyeurism or direct participation, and many contemporary artists factor an active audience into the nature of their artwork. For example, in order to fully experience the sound art on display at the Institute of Contemporary Art’s (ICA) “Ensemble” exhibition, viewers must lift lids and turn cranks and strike objects with mallets. Although some pieces produce sound on their own through various kinetic and electrical impulses, viewers become part of the artwork itself by giving life and movement and noise to otherwise inanimate sound-makers. Similarly, many contemporary artists consider the surrounding space to be an essential element of an artwork, creating work that transforms an entire space and that cannot exist in the same way in any other location. The current ramp project at ICA provides an example, as architectural drawings applied directly to the walls and windows perfectly fit the contours of the ramp between the first and second floors. The perspectival lines and floral accents cause ordinary white walls take on depth and character. Although elements of the artwork could be recreated elsewhere, new environmental factors would necessarily change the structure and feeling of the piece.

Your Turn
The next time you walk into a gallery of unfamiliar or incomprehensible artwork, try applying some of these themes to see if the pieces start falling into place. Understanding contemporary art isn’t impossible, after all, but is rooted in a context of art history and cultural considerations that requires a deeper look.

Window Installations at the Fabric Workshop

2007-11-25T09:58:00.003-05:00

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

2007-11-09T12:18:00.002-05:00

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.

Book Art at Fleisher Art Memorial

2007-10-22T12:36:00.003-04:00

Published by The Bulletin on October 16, 2007.

Textbook Perfect: 'Anatomy Of The Book' At Fleisher Art Memorial
By: Melinda Steffy, For The Bulletin

Words and images saturate our society. From newspapers, novels, and blogs to advertisements, artwork, and films, we organize our communications into verbal and visual mediums. What happens, then, when the two forms intersect? When text becomes image; when image occupies the structure of a book?

“Anatomy of the Book,” a book arts show currently on display at the Fleisher Art Memorial’s Suzanne Fleisher and Ralph Joel Roberts Gallery, considers this melding of text and image. Four local book artists, Carol Barton, Hedi Kyle, Tom Leonard, and Mary Phelan, present an assortment of works – both art books and illustrations – that covers traditional bookmaking, printmaking, and drawing techniques while also exploring uniquely creative interpretations of the book form.

Carol Barton’s “Alphabetica Synthetica” begins with a standard definition of “synthetic” and then continues with an alphabetical listing of absurd vocabulary related to artificiality. A is for “Alterations, Animations, Acetate Assimilations,” with the culturally cunning list continuing all the way through to “Y2K” and “Zooplastic Zombies.” Each spread contains a pop-up square of the letters represented, giving the impression of wooden building blocks emerging out of the crevices. Printed on pastel-colored accordion-fold pages, this bizarre primer combines the crisp appearance of a child’s learn-to-read book with an obscure text that clearly requires adult recognition and humor.

Another playful book, Mary Phelan’s “Exquisite Horse, a Printer’s Corpse” creates fantastical animals by pairing a page showing a hypothetical back-half of an animal with another page showing an equally unexpected front-half. The example on display matches the back-side of a horse – skeleton showing through transparent skin, tail created out of text – with a front-side diagram of a man inside a huge clown puppet. Although subsequent pages are not visible, the format suggests transition, changeability, as pages could potentially be rearranged to construct myriad organisms.

Many of the pieces distort traditional assumptions about books by cutting out parts of pages or adding protruding elements, requiring a three-dimensional “reading.” Hedi Kyle’s “CFBL Fold” provides physical examples of various paper-folding techniques, inserting the samples among the printed pages. She uses very little text, relying instead on the real-life demonstrations of the actual folded paper in this pseudo-instruction manual. Carol Barton’s “Tunnel Map” takes a series of round maps, positions them parallel to each other, cuts holes through the centers, and inserts drawings of familiar landforms – ocean waves, grassy hills, rocky mountains. For the full effect, the viewer must peer through the holes to view the overlapping layers of landscapes. The round, unmoving pages and three-dimensionality expand typical definitions of “book” while maintaining the distinct pagination and sense of information-sharing common to ordinary reading.

Not just books, the exhibition also showcases vibrant flora and fauna illustrations by Tom Leonard and exploratory photographs and drawings by Mary Phelan. These two-dimensional works isolate critical elements of bookmaking, while also helping position the books in their broader context of the visual arts.

Unfortunately (and somewhat understandably), nothing can be touched, so the tactile pleasure of flipping through a book remains elusive. Entire pages stay hidden, and any sense of narrative or continuity or discovery disappears in the immobility of the pages. If only book arts shows could find a display option that functions somewhere between a library and a gallery, allowing for increased viewer interaction with this necessarily tangible art form. Although your eyes will enjoy the text-image feast, your fingers might twitch in anticipation of turning to the next page.