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My sister and her new husband arrived on Friday for a visit. We stopped by my exhibit on the way home. I’m biased, of course, but I like it. I have noticed though that sometimes I find a piece doesn’t continue to work for me, thankfully, these continue to work for me.
Poissant Gallery had two exhibitions. Walk right past the first room with mediocre pictures of chess boards the best and framed words making those look good. In the back are treasures – prints on clear media fixed to plexi-glass. Nice – light, not preachy wonders of color, tone and light. Focus on simple things – plants and leaves.
I was pleasantly surprised by Johnny Bernhard’s exhibition. There was an image of dancers that was wonderful. Johnny works the commercial side of the street, so it was refreshing to see him do and quite successfully, some experimental work. I find these pieces much more innovative and exciting than say his dyptichs (you can see them in one of his books). Go see the exhibit, its number 75 on the list at 218 Westcott. Yes, it is just up the street from my exhibit at 230 Westcott. The two are an easy walk from each other.
The Summer Street Studios was worth the trip, but if you are physically challenged you’ll have to be content with looking at the large busts of the Presidents. They are wonderful and alone well worth the trip.
There may be elevators that I don’t know of, but we went up an outside stair/fire escape – fairly steep. The building is a working very large scale sculpture foundry/factory with at best incomplete kiss and a prayer renovations for gallery studio space above. Walking and even in the main Deborah Colton gallery I noted that there were several places in the floor that were trip and fall hazards – big dings in the concrete, old pipe holes, plates on top of the concrete with holes in the plates. If you go don’t wear spike heels – tennis shoes would be better.
The environment is supposed to suggest “finding” a brilliant struggling artist. The prices in the main Deborah Colton gallery indicate that these aren’t finds – nothing under 4 figures some at 5. Really inconsistent. Some of the work in both her main gallery and the annex was interesting. All well crafted. Most not for my walls and only some for my bookshelf. Will admit to smiling at the picture of Mao coming down, but I also remember pictures of Lenin and Saddam coming down too. I sat for a long while in the back room trying to decide if the techniques married the images. I finally decided that if I had to think about it that hard, the answer was no. The photo collages in the Colton annex were interesting, sort of. The individual components overlaid were very hard to discern as a meaningful component of message. The overall images distorted by the collage, were rendered less effective by the collage/compositing process.
If you go to the Summer Street studios do see the ASMP exhibit, a nice group show, everyone had a different favorite all worth seeing better than most journeyman work, but I don’t think these images are breakthrough images for the medium or the artist. Nice prints, most livable certainly worth the trip to see – although I will say the ASMP venue last FotoFest was easier to get to and enjoy.
Wandering around Summer Street, there was a painting studio open, and they were nice enough to let us wander through, Very nice abstracts, unfortunately I didn’t catch the name.
