2008/10/21/Portfolio Weekly PFAC

TRANSCENDING TRADITION: John Roth's delightfully bizarre '05 Nomad

Biennial 2008

Though Nov. 2

Peninsula Fine Arts Center

596-8175, www.pfac-va.org

Ad Reinhardt once said that a sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.  

Not so in the exhibition currently on view at the Peninsula Fine Arts Center.

Juror Mark Richard Leach, Executive Director of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C., selected a beautiful show, with very few anomalies, in which curator Michael Preble reminds us that "traditional subject matter still matters."

It is the sculpture, though, that feels the most exciting, fresh and new.

This exhibition of 113 works by 84 artists from 16 states—culled from 177 works by 501 artists from 19 states—is full of many fine drawn, painted, sculpted, photographed and digitally rendered portraits, landscapes, interiors, exteriors and more. But, beauty aside, the 2-D work, especially, falls along a continuum from barely, mildly or moderately engaging to visually arresting. 

Bob Carlson's large scale, photorealistic Paratrooper

Among the latter is Bob Carlson’s Paratrooper. Its large scale, impeccable technique and photographic realism coupled with infrequently seen subject matter—a zoomed in view of parents and children on a carnival ride—is liable to stop visitors dead in their tracks. The smiling mom in the front car, arms around both young sons, seems purposefully juxtaposed with the lone dad in the car behind, face obscured and arm around a cowering younger child. The piece seems metaphorical: a visual essay on family dynamics. But, the artist may have intended something less psychologically-loaded.

Peter Geiger's nuanced Transportation

Peter Geiger’s Transportation is similarly bombastic, though with nuanced layers of intrigue. Juxtaposed over vertical blocks of greens, gray, orange and blues is an 18-wheeler traveling along a stretch of local interstate, as the signage indicates. The roadway and bridge appear to stretch to and from nowhere, floating in an ambiguous space which lends a hit of magic realism to the painting.

A lenticular print on the side of the truck, bearing the names "Hapag-Lloyd," "China Shipping," and "Maersk Sealand" depending on the angle of viewing, conveys a feeling of movement. It also purposefully reflects, according to the artist, the notion of a global economy and trade imbalances. The overall affect of the color blocking, the realistically painted imagery, the media, and the defamiliarized familiar context is hip, commercial and industrial, yet with strangely traditional undertones.

Sounding a gentler note is Rob Tarbell’s evocative and sensual Feral Ribbon 2 which appears to be a sfumato charcoal drawing of a languidly coiling ribbon. However, his medium is smoke, or rather the residue of smoke, on paper.

Similarly quiet yet striking is David Dodge Lewis’ Barnacle #4. In it, he elevates the ubiquitous beach painting to a new and ethereal level. This large tonal drawing of a barnacle is rendered exquisitely in ink, wax, charcoal and conte on paper with many beautiful and delicate markings.

Turning away from the concrete world to the more abstract content of math and science is Sara Clark. Her small painting, Torc, is composed of three symbol forms with the look of 3-D computer-generated models. In a palette of blue, olive green, aqua, gold and pinkish-red, her partial cylinder, tubular ring and architectural segment overlaid with a web-like crack pattern is bold and oddly sexy with the look of real-but-not virtual reality.

The sculpture in the show, especially the large pieces in the front gallery, function as the show’s epicenter.

Elizabeth Mead’s Station 1 Lake Waramanng is a handsome and commanding presence. A hybrid installation of drawing and sculpture, its minimalist forms resonate in the space between the natural and the industrial worlds. Mounted on the wall is a large graphite drawing consisting of a massive dark organic shape in the bottom right of the horizontally-oriented paper. Offset to the right of the drawing on the floor is a sheet of steel with a stunningly subtle patina of grays, aquas and clandestine warm tones—not unlike the surface of a lake—cut into a shape that echoes the one in the drawing. Assertively present, yet ephemeral in the way that shadows and reflections are, the piece is calm and meditative, yet powerful.

Jason Lanka’s sculptures, one free-standing and one wall-mounted, are as thoughtful, finely crafted and forcefully present as the pieces in his recent show at the TCC Visual Arts Center (see the review in the Oct. 7 edition of Port Folio Weekly).

John Roth’s ’05 Nomad, one of two of his pieces juried into the show, is delightfully bizarre. In it, a large inverse cone of stone rendered in plaster is crowned by what appears to be mossy-looking artificial turf. Mounted on top is a small red and white checkered cube from which an industrial looking chimney belches a solid plume of smoke. On one side of the box, a circular opening reveals a small blank "Hello, My Name Is" nametag. The whole curious form rests on styroform wheels. What does it mean? That’s not clear, thought the title is certainly a clue. But, no matter, for the poetically ambiguous in art is far more intriguing than the simply illustrative.

James Parker’s Seagulls in the Living Room is about the only beach-themed art that should be in any room, except perhaps for one of Lewis’ barnacles. Three cast concrete cone forms sit in a cluster on top of a steel table with attenuated legs. Each form, resting on a base of two, three or four identical rings, is meticulously and elaborately wrapped with twine and capped with a small steel cone from which the ends of the twine protrude. With both organic and industrial references, the piece defies simple decoding.

But, again, that quality is, in part, responsible for the impact of the sculptures noted here. Significantly, though, each one provides points of entry lest they become bizarre for the sake of being bizarre.

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