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newsletter - spring - 2005
| FOOLS - Members’ Exhibition - March 29-April 23, 2005 |
FOOLS
Members’ Exhibition
March 29-April 23, 2005
A pretty loaded term, Fools, but at least it’s open to interpretation, and several ways of approaching this large and diverse exhibition of 149 artworks come to mind.
The current state of the union —political, social, economic, religious, and cultural— offers a target-rich environment for satire, and many Works/San Jose artists have gleefully skewered our national follies. Efren Alvarez’s Popular Programming depicts a man confined in a bottle, his head screwed to a toilet. Debra Blessing’s Lab Monsters shows us four photos of humanoid heads no less disturbing for being out of focus and hard to read, enlisting our imaginations to creep us out. Lacy Kuhlmann’s Blinded by Patriotism juxtaposes Bush, an Abu Ghraib victim, and the iconic Vietnamese Army execution victim in a claustrophobic portrait of our collective nightmare. Cindy Lee’s Dirty Laundry ridicules sexism, with a woman —in bunny slippers, yet— cheerfully hanging out to dry nothing less than crude insults. Mary Medrano’s Remodel depicts the White House with proposed new ecclesiastical additions. Chris Moon’s Miss America offers a scathing comment on our cult of beauty, her “It Girl” a waving biomechanical headless Barbie. Mark Nobriga’s Building Democracy subverts old Boy Scout imagery to reveal how the politics of old-boy entitlement is fostered from boyhood. Michael Robinson’s Exit Strategy, parodying fire alarms with a glassed-in nitrous oxide tank, provides no remedy for the problem of Iraq beyond intoxication and anesthesia. Lornas Sulgit’s May Day USA updates Thomas Nast’s famous warring elephant and donkey handily with the current hot-button shibboleths —Choice, Individual Rights— to reflect our current state of political disunion.
More widely viewed, and perhaps more benevolently, Fools can be interpreted as indicting all of us who plead human, all too human, all too often; the viewer can adopt a censorious or tolerant tone according to his or her taste and self-image. The human condition’s mixture of tragedy and comedy finds many representations. Kyung Ahn’s Memories, a detail of an old family photo, provokes reveries even from strangers reflecting on their own histories. Jason Challas’s End of an Era depicts a closed movie theater with equal parts of nostalgia and realistic grit. Dottie Cichon’s Figure 3 presents a butterfly threatened by an almost abstract rough industrial background in browns and oranges. Peter Foley’s Untitled juxtaposes an old photo of a nude, Bellocq-style, with contemporary color squiggles and letters spelling out our old frenemy LUST. Saaba MBB Lutzeler’s Beach Ball presents a woman in a slip (or sunsuit) sitting enervated by heat, while a beach ball awaits. Mark Slade’s Lethean Fandango shows an entertainer in full gallop, like Lautrec’s celebs, ludicrous, splendid and endearing. Marci Tolomei’s Which Ego? depicts the contest between social masks that we engage in every day. Sylvia Waddell’s Sheep is a closely observed and affectionate portrait of a fellow being.
Finally, stepping back from the artwork, we can think of folly as the artist’s ironic badge of honor: a consumerist society bent on accumulation sees the creative life at best with incomprehension, and it judges creators (unless favored with sales) as idle dreamers cavorting in cap and bells. Like jesters, however, artists are able to speak the truth. Many artworks that elude the two previous categories can be appreciated in this light. Betsy Recktenwald’s Family Surprises and Bob Rose’s Snake Among the Rocks present humorous portraits of personalities within surprising contexts. Jason Gallagher’s Monastery of the Burning Bush and Margaret-Ann Clemente’s Mars Dreams II present otherworldly visions emerging from abstractions, while Susie Grant’s Scan and Gianfranco Paolozzi’s Journal 2/3/2005 achieve poetry from the repetition of visual elements suggesting pictorial writing. Francie Allen’s Draped Knee and Sarah Puckitt’s Untitled both employ furled, rumpled forms, the former creating a mysterious shape from mere folds of cloth, the latter revealing bizarre forms (Insect legs? Hairs? Roots?) warping the very surface through which they are seen. Morgan Riccili Slade’s Buck reflects a smiliar interplay between subject and means, with its deer’s head seemingly spattered by graphite buckshot. Gary Tolomei’s Chairman of the Bored pairs Mickey Mouse with a man strapped —possibly— in an electric chair, images that defy explanation yet exert a strange fascination. Pete Zivkiv’s Land’s End produces a nifty metaphor for culture’s long-term subjection to nature: a brick wall ground by wind and water down to a grouted red pebble.
DeWitt Cheng 2005
works/san josé
451 south 1st street • san josé,
california 95112• 408.286.6800
hours: t,w,f,sat 12pm - 4pm and th 12pm - 7pm
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