Galleries
Signal 66: Painted Into A Corner
Thursday, October 21, 2004; Page C05
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• "The Dream of the Earth: 21st Century Tendencies in Mexican Sculpture" doesn't deliver exactly what its title promises. These artists share just one tendency, and it is millenniums old: modeling in clay. The six artists on view, most in their fifties, work the ancient medium with a reverent touch; so much so that their work, though recent, hardly seems it. On occasion, a quirky ingredient trots in -- Miriam Medrez favors pipe cleaners -- to bring these sculptures into our world. But mostly the artists seem bent on self-conscious reworkings of ancient forms and figures. Intentionally crude renderings, such as the oversize feet in Maribel Portela's figure "Blooming," border on the contrived.
Mexican artist Miriam Medrez's clay figure is dressed in pipe cleaners.
(Cultural Institute Of Mexico)
• All those years it's been amassing spacecraft, the Air and Space Museum has been collecting artworks, too. A brand-new exhibition installed in a second-floor gallery offers a peek at 72 donated works depicting all manner of flight, from early experiments in ballooning to space shuttle launches. You'll recognize a few names, such as Goya and Calder, though most works are by lesser-knowns. Milestones of flight, such as 1969's Apollo 11 lunar landing, offer opportunities for compare-and-contrast: Artists as creatively polarized as Norman Rockwell and Robert Rauschenberg responded to the event, making it a touchstone for kitsch and avant-garde alike.
"Escape Tower" by Robert T. McCall.
(National Air And Space Museum)
• You're seeing stripes, all right. This is a Gene Davis show. At Mateyka, a selection from the late artist's estate includes moody canvases featuring generous fields of black alongside chipper silk-screens inflected with preppy greens and pinks. And then there are some pleasant surprises: Watercolors from 1956 show Davis in latter-day abstract expressionist mode, playing with unstructured clouds of color. In the gallery's main room, high above our heads, hang five "micro paintings," most not much bigger than a matchbook. The gallery's whimsical, just-out-of-reach installation is based on historic precedent: When Davis first exhibited his small-scale works, a great many of them exited via five-finger discount. Only a giant could get at these.
From Gene Davis's "Series 1" (1969), a suite of six prints.
(Marsha Mateyka Gallery)
• No idle hands here. The young girls who labored to create the samplers and quilts in this fascinating exhibition of historical needlework were busy, busy, busy -- or so their parents must have hoped. Endlessly embroidering alphabets, wisteria vines, cornucopias and eagles, girls as young as 8 or 9 turned out many of the more than 50 works on view here. Some were gifted seamstresses, sewing quilts with an expert hand. Others, less blessed with spatial and artistic relations, were made to learn proverbs stitch by stitch. Witness little Nancy Tucker, age 8, who in 1791 was made to sew this morbid verse: "This Work In Hand my Friend may hav [sic] When I am Dead And in My Grave."
Detail from an 1846 "album quilt" at the DAR Museum.
(Mark Gulezian -- Dar Museum)
• A solid sampler of artists playing in three dimensions: Adam Ross paints alternative landscapes filled with drowsy floating capsules; James Casebere makes models of rooms and photographs them with eerie floodwaters seeping in; Robert Lazzarini fashions distorted versions of everyday objects, here a school desk so warped it looks like a saddle. The show's most intriguing piece, an installation by Isidro Blasco, takes images shown on a video monitor -- a couple discussing banalities over a meal -- and explodes their world into three dimensions. Photographs depicting the onscreen room are pasted onto a plywood structure in the gallery, so the video's fleeting images are given sprawling, sculptural form.
Adam Ross's "Too far for the eye to see, always at the back of my mind #4."
(Numark Gallery)
