March 28, 2015

March marches on: cold, windy, glare, barren.

Clint Roenisch Gallery – Eli Langer and Jennifer Murphy

Caravansary Of Joy is the title of a joint exhibition by Eli Langer and Jennifer Murphy at the capacious Clint Roenisch Gallery on St. Helen’s Avenue. The two artists are a couple.  Other than that fact, the exhibition is composed of two separate and distinct shows.

The paintings by Eli Langer, occupying the front of the gallery, are a pleasure to look at mainly because they are so uncomplicated.  This artist is pushing paint around in a serious way but anything external to that activity is irrelevant.  There is no agenda, narrative, political pitch, intellectual or iconoclastic posture.  I like this feeling of having nothing between the paintings and me; nothing I have to sort out or disagree or agree with.  Its relaxing and calming to look at these paintings and there is a crystalline lightness to them that makes it hard to look away.

Winter Flowers by Eli Langer

The Three Sisters by Eli Langer

Eli Langer did provide a sheet of notes available for viewers of the paintings.  They reinforce the calm, open, meditative qualities the art works possess.  A few lines from the notes are excerpted below:

Painting is experimental.  I want to get lost.  Turn off the logocentric mind.  Trip up purposeful reflex that seeks     familiarity in recognizances.

I work without plans.  I want the painting to surprise me with its directness.

Painting is truly free of its history in 2015.

Her Cabinet by Eli Langer

Eli Langer is talking about getting into the zone where creativity is effortless and assured.  It’s exciting and mysterious to see how that Zen-like stillness comes through in the work.  Also in the notes Eli Langer writes about the idyllic, creative period he recently experienced, in a supportive relationship with his partner, Jennifer Murphy.

Jennifer Murphy’s work occupies the back of the gallery space.

Installation of art work by Jennifer Murphy

A polished granite platform holds sculptural works in the center of the room and around the walls the artist’s collage pieces are pinned, at varying heights.

Who among us has not, at one time or another, cut pictures out of a magazine and glued them down to make something new?  Jennifer Murphy has the uncanny ability to create art works using this technique.  Suspended on long pins, like insect specimens, a parade of beast portraits, interspersed with somewhat more conventional portraits of women, are displayed.

Art works by Jennifer Murphy

As varied as the animal kingdom itself the pieces share a fragile spindly-ness and jewel-like allure.  I recall certain aunts of mine wearing brooches like this: a leopard with an “emerald” eye for instance.  The frankencat, shown below, has such a coquettish pose, but maybe that’s just something about cats.

Art work by Jennifer Murphy

The sculptural pieces in the exhibition have the look of  a surrealist’s garden: weird, ungainly, texturally patchworked and  punctuated with fizzing colour.

Sculpture by Jennifer Murphy

One of the tiniest pieces has a wonderful “Twilight Zone” sensibility.  It’s as if the doe-eyed ingenue is trapped in another dimension.

Detail of sculpture by Jennifer Murphy

Details of sculpture by Jennifer Murphy

In fact all the objects by Jennifer Murphy – composed of humble materials, found objects, scraps of fabric and various castoff print media – evoke an alternate universe.  It’s similar to this universe, but adjusted a bit, for private aesthetic purposes.

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Daniel Faria Gallery – Valerie Blass

Just next door, at the Daniel Faria Gallery: A glittering arm holds aloft a crack pipe, miniature figures melt together in lurid sexual embrace, whacked together scrap wood has an anthropomorphic expressiveness, a life-size sculpture of cliched female desirability studies “herself” in a distorting mirror.  These are some of the pieces constituting an exhibition by Valerie Blass.  Exploring notions of identity, objectification and self-delusion, Valerie Blass adds an ambiguous overlay of autobiography by titling the exhibition My Life.

Art work by Valerie Blass

Art work by Valerie Blass

Detail of Sois gentille by Valerie Blass

The technical virtuosity and versatility of the artist is impressive.  She boldly takes on all media to trawl the psycho sexual depths.

Dr. Marbuse Psychoanalyst by Valerie Blass

Dr. Marbuse was a fictional hypnotist and criminal who featured in Fritz Lang movies.   Is the artist suggesting that hypnotic self absorption is implicated in the fracturing of identify?

Details of Dr. Marbuse Psychoanalyst by Valerie Blass

A grinning homunculus, looking like something out of a medieval relief, inhabits the “face” of the mirror gazer above.

Artwork by Valerie Blass

In another piece, the same curtain of silky blond hair is present.  This time the hair is out of context, set in a provocative display with a hand, a foot and pale pink panties.  Parts only, no woman required.  It’s the definition of fetish.

Something about the piece made me think of Andrea Dworkin and the feminist sexual wars of the eighties.  At that time feminists defined themselves as either sex-positive or sex-negative.  This was mainly because of the theories of Andrea Dworkin which condemned all objectification of women and all pornographic imagery.  She was truly a crusader and was famous for saying things like “Intercourse remains a means or the means of physiologically making a woman inferior [and is] the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women.”  That kind of talk turned a lot of her feminist, lefty allies against her.  Today, pornography has won.  It’s everywhere. Andrea Dworkin was the hardest of the hard-line feminists and the strange upshot of her ideas is that the Christian Right championed then and they still do today.