Fresh Paint & More @ Arlington Arts Center

Earlier this week I was able to see the Fresh Paint show at the Arlington Arts Center. I was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the show. In my opinion, this is probably the best jurored/curated show I've seen at the AAC since they re-opened. Given that there is an opening reception tonight for the show, I won't say too much. Instead, I'll post a lot of the photos I took of the work and encourage you to see the show tonight or some other time.

A blurb about the show:

Process and Possibility, an invitational exhibition at Arlington Arts Center, fourteen Mid-Atlantic painters focus on process and materials as a means of questioning present-day reality. While they clearly take pleasure in the physicality of paint itself, the artists utilize a variety of alternative materials such as resin, glue, milk, henna, latex, clay and even robotics. At times they utilize unusual techniques which forego the use of a brush or canvas: paint skins are manipulated into sculptural forms, house paint is worked with power tools, needles and syringes are used to inject paint into resin.

A video/sound/interactive installation by Roberto Bocci. I don't believe this is part of the Fresh Paint exhibition. This is one of the few installation pieces like this that I've enjoyed. For some reason it just works.

Solar robots drawing on paper by Stefan Prosky. I personally like my photo of them in action more than any of the resulting drawings. In my opinion, process means nothing unless the end result is successful. Here's a sample of the end result:

Not so successful in my opinion.

Pat Goslee checks in with her always beautiful and lush encaustics*. She shows another suite of paintings not seen here.

* Update: Oops, got this one wrong. Per Pat, "they are mixed media mostly acrylic and spray paint. After [she] finished them to a state [she] applied Butcher's wax--there's probably 15+ coats of it" Thanks for correcting me Pat.

I really liked the two encaustic paintings on each end here by Linda Ray. They like more alive, more free versions of Sean Scully's work. They were just slightly more expensive than I was willing to pay ($450... they measure about 10" x 10").

New paintings by Isabel Manalo. She really seems to always be tinkering with her painting and I think these are quite good. There's a cheerfulness and playfulness here that was missing (for good or bad) from her older works.

Two more Manalo's on the left and a painting by Susan Palmisano on the right. These paintings are hanging in the Tiffany Gallery and actually seem to hold their own in the yellow light cast by the windows.

Big painting in center is by Byron Clercx. I really like it.

Two paintings by Eric Finzi. He recently had a solo show at Heineman Myers Gallery that was quite beautiful. They are resin paintings and the process used to achieve these results is remarkable. See if you can figure it out when you look at them.

Two more paintings by Finzi on the left and another diptych by Byron Clercx on the right.

Kevin Kepple's glue medium pieces. Not sure if it's a new direction, but a couple of his paintings were matte instead of glossy. It was shocking to see that but they grew on me.

An assortment of works by Cara Ober.

Anthony Brock's acrylic/latex paint skins. I think I've seen enough of these types of paintings but they did add a certain something to the installation.

Upstairs studio artist Evan Reed shows his galvanized tin sculptures. I haven't decided what I think of these works but the scale is certainly impressive.

As with any large group show, there are hits and misses. However, I feel that all components contribute something to the theme and the success of the show. This is one not to be missed.

Comments

[Marc Snyder]

HI hi, great posts as ever!

I was curious, in light of the idea that
process means nothing unless the end result is successful
I was wondering what you thought about the exhibition of performance artifacts as art - the leftover bits from a Joseph Beuys performance, for instance. Performance art has this problem (actually, I guess it's that museums and galleries have this problem ) when they want to display the documentation or, with Beuys, the remains, as the artwork.

Just throwing it out there.

Carry on.

Marc

[J.T. Kirkland]

Good question Marc. When taken as visual art, I think the vast majority of performance artifacts, well, suck. I've seen some that don't (photographs of the performance that work visually on their own, for example) but the majority does. And that makes sense. The artist isn't typically focused on the visual success of the artifacts resulting from a performance. They are focused on the performance itself and the resulting artifacts represent a record of the event.

As for Prosky, I probably wouldn't exhibit the final drawings on their own. Visually they are dull. The contraption used to make them, however, holds much more visual interest. Like I said, I love my photograph of the robots at work. It does look pretty cool, watching them twitch as they mark the paper. If I were the artist, I would destroy the drawings after they were "complete" and really put the focus on the "performance." If looked at as visual art, it's the most successful thing he's showing, in my opinion.

This discussion highlights one of the biggest challenges of performance art. It only truly exists when it's being performed. Anything exhibited with respect to the performance at a later time is only a fraction of the "art." I guess that's the nature of the beast.

A side note here is thinking about video art. There's a performance component to it but the artist's end goal is the video... not the performative aspects of the process. The two aren't that different really.