Galleries
Wrapped Up In Symbolism
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• Ever since customs agents judged Constantin Brancusi's "Bird in Space" a "manufactured object" rather than a sculpture, the line between art and engineering has been hard to draw. The Octagon's installation of the Art Institute of Chicago's "Aerospace Design" exhibition plays up the overlap between the technical and artistic professions. But the main impression is of the formal allure of the scores of wind tunnel models on display. The accompanying test photos and the transparent shields designed by Chicago architect Jeanne Gang to protect the artifacts emphasize that, for these objects, space is not static but a fluid substance carved by wind and speed.
Shaped by the wind: One of the aerospace designs on view at the Octagon.
(NASA Ames Research Center)
• Ellipse Arts Center's "Permission Granted: An Exhibition by Selected Arlington Grant Awardees" is as much about Arlington as it is about art. Maremi Hooff's vegetable still lifes, which wouldn't look out of place in a vegan coffee shop, catalogue the seasonal wares at local farmers' markets. Mark Charette offers spiky, blurred and sometimes blue photos of the globe thistles in Bon Air Park. Most involving is Cynthia Connolly's photo and audio documentation of the bluegrass and old-time musicians who gather every other Sunday in Lyon Park. Like many former punks, Connolly has warmed to the idea of community-minded music that doesn't threaten nerve deafness. She's learning to play the banjo.
Roy "Speedy" Tolliver and his Montgomery Ward fiddle, captured by Cynthia Connolly.
(Ellipse Arts Center)
• Like any summertime grab bag, Conner Contemporary's survey of work by local art grads is hit-or-miss. The scruffy portraiture of J. Jordan Bruns and the fluorescent-lit interiors of Matt Klos will gratify only mossbacks who feared the academy had stopped teaching academic painting. But video artist Annie Schap steals the show. In "Say It With Feeling," she stabs a can of Miller and effortfully sucks the beer out of the side of the can, capping her performance with a burped "I love you" that blurs the line between emotional and physical stress. "Love Hurts Hands," in which Nazareth's deathless power ballad is spelled out line by line across the artist's knuckles, biker-tattoo-style, is the best music video I've seen in five years. It analyzes the cynical, seductive language of pop in a way that only reinforces its hold on the imagination.
Annie Schap's "Love Hurts Hands" spells out the language of pop music as seen through Nazareth's power ballad "Love Hurts."
(Annie Schap And Conner Contemporary Art)
• At the College Park Aviation Museum, it's the historical achievement of flight rather than the artifacts of aviation design that is aestheticized. The Wright Experience is a Warrenton-based group of devoted aviation enthusiasts who have endeavored to replicate the work of Orville and Wilbur Wright. Much as Civil War reenactors strive for historical authenticity, the Wright Experience sets the clock back a hundred years. Paul Glenshaw's photos of the team's efforts are rather workmanlike, but there are real pride and sorrow in them. When one plane founders in the trees, you can almost hear the cries from the ground.
Greg Cone prepares a reproduction of the Wright Model B for takeoff in May 2003.
(Paul Glenshaw -- Wright Experience)
• Timed to play off the themes of the current SITE Santa Fe biennial, Irvine Contemporary Art's "Full Frontal Figuration" presents three painters who cartoonishly explore the grotesque. Philip Knoll owes a debt to the sad-sack generation of comix artists who came of age in the '90s. You get the self-pity of Chris Ware, but not the unique style or narrative depth. Bede Murphy goes for outsiderish surrealism, adopting as a primary motif a hand-headed torso that daisy-chains with similar beings via muscular handshakes. Most convincing is Sean Foley's fluid agglomeration of the caricature of Gerald Scarfe, the vegetable portraits of Giuseppe Arcimboldo and the avian imagery of the tribal art of the Pacific Northwest.
Sean Foley's "Maven," on view at Irvine Contemporary Art's "Full Frontal Figuration" group show.
(Irvine Contemporary Art)
