Review

August 04, 2015, 1:13pm

Nancy Murphy Spicer’s Disrupted Drawings

In Carroll and Sons’ back gallery, we can see all but one piece of Nancy Murphy Spicer's exhibition, Disrupted Drawings, before specific works call for undivided attention. The frames hang in grids on two adjacent walls that face large windows overlooking Harrison Avenue. Visitors first walk through the exhibition by Damien Hoar de Galvan to reach Murphy Spicer's show, and the slouchy, distinctly untrendy colors contrast with the blues, reds, and neons that de Galvan incorporates in his wood sculptures. – Shana Dumont Garr, Boston Contributor 

Installation view, Nancy Murphy Spicer, Disrupted Drawings, Carroll and Sons, Boston, MA, July 3 - August 22, 2015

July 15, 2015, 8:39am

Space: Edie Fake at Western Exhibitions

The blood is voltaic, salt and copper and life and death, flowing fast and high around the fever dream haemalducts of Edie Fake's The Blood Bank, imbued with a passionate glow which seems to radiate in juxtaposition with the cold, flat surfaces—marble? tile? stone?—which constitute its flowing surface, a room of stately and imposingly beautiful columns and arches, its facade shot through with sharp geometry, like a thousand black shark's teeth on pallid sand, the columns topped with ornate weeping bull's eyes; a dazzling array of colors—rococo patterns formed from tiles the color of salmon and toothpaste, bands of claret and powder blue, jade and bubblegum, lace of electric orange-red—is lost to the eye by the great flowing blood's final destination, a pool fit for a Bathory, its deep center a rich bordeaux, fed by the blood flowing through the veins around the room's ceiling, flowing hot—like lava around the edge of a caldera—hot in color and consequence, biologically and ethically, burning in memory with fear, anger, paranoia, colored the red of passion and hazard both, blood from them, blood begetting panic, the blood of the AIDS crisis, the dread invisible specter preying on the edges, closing the bath houses and haunting the blood banks,  a nightmare, blood a commodity and curse, the mark of Cain and the gift of vigor, forever pouring into Fake's pool, which must be deep, deeper than the sea, to never jump its cold, slick sides, leaving not so much as a patina as its waves lap and stop with a clinical precision, and one stares into the sanguineous abyss, is presented—with disconcerting pulchritude—the horrors of a not-so-distant past, a spiritual kind of hemorrhagic shock. –  B. David Zarley, Chicago Contributor

Edie Fake | The Blood Bank, 2015, ink and gouache on paper, 22 x 30 inches. Photo courtesy of Western Exhibitions

June 19, 2015, 8:55am

Art Paul: Kill The Rabbit

Good God!, did it ever fucking multiply; springing forth from the singular mind of the cartilage-crushingly on-the-nose-named Art Paul, who needed a mascot-cum-logo for this eccentric's girly mag, a product, like Paul himself, of the Hog Butcher of the World—when that Lake Michigan wind blows, it blows, baby!—and ended up with an icon, an honest-to-goodness American deity, a long-eared, bow tied rabbit, a lapin a la mode who kept cocked ear bent towards what is comme il faut for the jet age gentleman, who is to sex and a certain cigar-smoke cured, bourbon-splashed, wood-paneled, velvet-touched kind of groomed wolf masculinity what the spider or coyote or raven is to chicanery, arguably the most famous bunny in the world—and here his hare straitens its bow tie, takes a pull off the tumbler, and exhales, in a cloud of fine, fine tobacco smoke, “Not much, doc; what's up with you?”—and an image that would have to be included in any kind of even semi-holistic and honest pastiche of American popular culture, the Playboy bunny!

It has been manifested in a million different inks and mediums, from gloss magazine stock to newsprint to flesh, rendered in rhinestones and sequins and neon tubes, in white and black and pink and a veritable zoo of animal print, looking dapper both soft-core and hard-core, on hats, shirts, sweaters, swizzle sticks, and thongs, across an entire sea foaming with licensing and corporate fornication, hopping—if one can excuse the turn—from one bedfellow to the next like, like … like a goddamn rabbit, one supposes, achieving that absolutely most rare and august of atmospheres wherein a piece of visual art can be both of the commercial sphere—bathing, in filthy lucre and public adoration, for immortality like Báthory—and above it; that bowtied cottontail created a cuniculus to very empyrean itself, and the bunny's enormous brood is both Paul's lasting impact—unfair or not—and lasting curse. – B. David Zarley, Chicago Contributor

Art Paul | Cheers, 1987, colored pencil on paper, 8 x 11.5 inches. Photo courtesy of UIMA

June 01, 2015, 8:28am

Toxic Skies and Heavenly Light: Alexandra Wiesenfeld at Klowden Mann

Alexandra Wiesenfeld (NAP #61) paints massive landscapes suggestive of the California painting tradition of the past, but she reinvigorates these on a grand scale and reimagines them with bold colors, frantic lines, and bursts of energy.

Her recent show “When I When If When Lie When Life (Xavier Villaurrutia)” at Klowden Mann offered viewers a delightful experience of envelopment. Her grandiose oil paintings run six feet tall or wide and powerfully connect the walls of the gallery, enclosing viewers in with a warm, painted, and natural embrace.

Alexandra Wiesenfeld | Installation view of Desire, Slippage, Nocturne, and Blue Slip at Klowden Mann. Photo courtesy of Klowden Mann.

Working at times from more well-known images like those of Ansel Adams, Wiesenfeld also works from unique composite images she has disassembled and pieced back together. She creates a fantastical photo collage from which to paint and then enlarges them to a monumental scale on canvas. - Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor