Spotlight shines

Yes, I know all the attention lately has been on that other movie. And, yes, I will go see Star Wars, episode whatever, the Force Awakens. It's not only wildly popular but getting good reviews. I'm looking forward to it. But I'm in no hurry.

I'm here to recommend another really good movie: Spotlight. This is no action adventure. There is no violence or sex, incredibly. It's just the best movie about journalistic integrity since, well, I think it's better than "All the President's Men." I can't think of a better one.

And it's not just a gripping story about investigative journalism, a sadly dying branch on the tree of contemporary media. It deals with one of the more compelling and tragic issues of our time, the abuse of children by priests and the cover up that enabled it to happen.

Click here to see the trailer.

If you don't catch it soon it will be gone from theaters. But add it to your Netflix queue!

Season's Greetings!

From the Lynden Sculpture Garden

2015 Artist in Residence

Sculpture: Salem 7, 1967, by Antoni Milkowski

May Peace settle like snow around you

and the Earth grow calm

I have had the privilege of serving as Artist in Residence at the Lynden Sculpture Garden this year. I am grateful to the staff there with whom I have worked. I've enjoyed meeting many other artists, some also in residence, some exhibiting, some leading workshops and others passing through. Most of all I have enjoyed the beauty and serenity of the place.

The mission of the Lynden Sculpture Garden is to promote the enjoyment, understanding, and appreciation of art and the environment. Public programming focuses on the intersection of art and nature. The setting integrates the Lynden’s collection of monumental outdoor sculpture with the natural ecology of the landscape.

The Residency Program is designed to enable artists to immerse themselves in Lynden’s sculpture collection, its landscape and the surrounding community. The residency program invites local artists to engage with the Lynden over a period of time, mostly commonly across four seasons.

To learn more about the 2015 residency and find links to many more images from the year go to the Lynden Sculpture Garden project page of my website.

Latino Arts: Gardens, Gods and Grids by Dara Larson

The full title is a mouthful: Gardens, Gods and Grids: Retracing Nature, Culture, & Infrastructure in the Americas. The multimedia exhibit by Milwaukee artist Dara Larson, which fills the huge Latino Arts Gallery at the United Community Center, is also a lot to take in.

As the title suggests, the work is from "the Americas." In this case it means throughout North, South and Central America. Larson clearly has done a lot of traveling. She did confess to me that she's been collecting materials and images over many years. However, the current work is recent.

Most of the prints in the exhibit are digital collages. Larson's images begin as photographs, but her complex layering and collaging techniques demolish normal perspective and any kind of typical photographic picture plane.

The center of the gallery is dominated by a day-of-the-dead style ofrenda, or shrine. Larson is a regular contributor to official Day of the Dead exhibits, so it comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with that work. But this ofenda is made up largely of old travel guidebooks and maps that show the varied destinations.

Gardens, Gods and Grids runs through February 26, so there is plenty of time to get in there to see this fine show.

The Latino Arts Gallery is open Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. - 8:00 p.m.

All images courtesy Dara Larson.

The split personality of the NGV

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia

From "Enclave," by Richard Mosse

The NGV, as it is commonly known, has a split personality and is literally divided into two campuses.

The Ian Potter Center: NGV Australia specializes in art of Australian origins, both indigenous and not, from colonial to contemporary. It is a major responsibility for a continent-sized country.

But then again, the NGV International, like so many “encyclopedic” museums in other cities around the globe, attempts to represent the entire rest of the world.

I spent more time in the Ian Potter Center but I managed to catch a few things at the International as well.

Here is a very small selection of things that caught my eye.

Ian Potter Center: NGV Australia

In this multi-media installation by Adam Goodrum, the immaterial aspects—cast light and shadows on the walls—seemed more substantial than the sculptural bit made of polymer resin at its center.

I very much enjoyed the indigenous works on display, some of which were historical and some contemporary.

This detail from a painted Eucalyptus pole was made in 2003 by Gawirrin Gumana of the Guyamirrilil people of the Northern Territory.

I especially enjoyed seeing traditional works displayed in proximity to more modern and non-indigenous works of art.

Having recently experienced Australian wildlife for the first time ever, I was drawn to indigenous representations such as this kangaroo by Robin Nganjmirra of the Northern Territory.

I’d seen kangaroos several times in the wild by this point in my trip. This one, however, was in a wildlife park, which enabled me to get close up and personal. In fact, they eat out of your hand like goats in a petting zoo.

However, I learned the hard way not to let the emus eat from my hand. Fierce creatures; they definitely bore a familial resemblance to velociraptors.

This sculpted representation was made from actual emu feathers and other fibres by Treahna Hamm of Wodonga, Victoria.

This modern piece was made circa 1962 by Godfrey Miller and titled Trees in Quarry. Like many Australians, Miller was educated in Europe before moving back to Sydney and an art career.

My favorite works in the Ian Potter Center were a roomful of altered photographs by Tony Garifalakis. This set of three demonstrates the tone, technique and style of the rest. Collectively called Bloodlines, The suite of 12 portraits of royal families have been ruthlessly defaced with black enamel paint.

I also liked the architecture of the building, which clearly eschews the straight and plumb of traditional structural forms. The exterior of the building, which I neglected to photograph (mentally kicking myself), looked like a child’s play structure that had been knocked down and rebuilt several times before the child went on to other things. The aerial shot (above) I borrowed from a website called Culture Victoria.

This is a shot of the interior showing a little of the complexity of the spatial relationships and off-kilter lines of the architecture.

Outside, there were several very intriguing, if hard to decipher, relief sculptures set into the very irregular paving bricks of the huge plaza.

NGV International

I can’t do this museum justice. I blitzed past most of the collection in order to see contemporary work on the top floor. Just three examples:

This sculptural mural made of painted wire by Mira Gojak is entitled “Unending herd of blue.” The artist intended it to represent the progression of Western art from the earliest cave paintings through Renaissance development of perspective and chiaroscuro to Modern art’s concern for the picture plane. Not to mention the tension between the drawing-like linearity and three-dimensional space. (Then again, maybe it wasn’t the artist who had all those grandiose intentions, but the curator who wrote up the wall label.) Sarcasm and hyperbole aside, I enjoyed its scale and playfulness.

This painting, slashed as you see it, is by an “American” named Titus Kaphar. When visiting a foreign museum, even the U.S. artists represented are unfamiliar ones. The work is entitled “Stripes.”

The real reason I went to the NGV International was to see “Enclave,” the video installation by Richard Mosse, which I saw listed in the promotional brochure at the Ian Potter Center. I’d heard of Mosse and seen stills of his powerful infrared images, taken in war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo. But stills cannot convey the power of the video. Even a single video screen online cannot really represent the power of the installation, which employs at least 6 enormous video monitors at various angles throughout a large, darkened gallery. The monitors cannot all be taken in at once and if you move around to see them all it is as if you are amongst the people in the videos themselves. Very immersive and the more moving for it.

To see an interview with Richard Mosse and get a sense of the content of the video, go to Vimeo.

“Enclave” was my favorite work of art of all that I saw in Australia--and I saw a lot of great work! Click here to read my review of the Adelaide Gallery of Art.

Richard Mosse image credits: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art website.

Chicago: City Creatures and the Day of the Dead

A day trip to Chicago took me to three distinct art exhibitions in two very different venues.

At the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Lincoln Park, the main attractions are live butterflies and family friendly interactions with natural history and contemporary ecological issues. But they host rotating exhibits of art related to nature as well.

The current show, called City Creatures: Animal Encounters in Chicago's Urban Wilderness, is based on a blog and a recently released book by the same name. It was curated and organized by the Center for Humans & Nature. The theme of the artworks, as the name suggests, deals with animals that the artists have encountered in Chicago. Among the many artists represented, who worked in a variety of mediums, were distinguished photographers, Terry Evans and Colleen Plumb.

A trip to Chicago in November is rarely complete without a stop at the National Museum of Mexican Art in the Pilsen neighborhood. Their annual Day of the Dead exhibit is always spectacular and--unlike most--seldom predictable. True to form, this year's exhibit, entitled La Muerte Niña: Day of the Dead, was more like a traditional art exhibit.

There were a dozen or so ofrendas (altars honoring the dead), a few of which were even more traditional in form than this one devoted to the singer Selena. 

Most were far less traditional, such as this one, complete with a marquee in blazing lights and titled Santo in the World of the Dead: Altar to the Silver Masked Wrestler / Santo en el mundo de los muertos: ofrenda al enmascarado de plata.

However, the ofrendas were widely spaced and the intervening wall spaces were hung with more traditional works of art, mostly paintings. My favorite was this very atypical, enormous installation of mixed media variations on the typical Day of the Dead skull motif (above and below, details). Each of the 40 or so "faces" is about 3 feet tall and the grid of them wraps around two sides of a huge gallery.

Here is a closer look at a few of the individual skull designs, many of which dealt with topical issues like immigration and climate change, among many other themes. Unfortunately, I didn't make a note of the name of the artist or artists who created them.

There are four concurrent exhibits on display at the museum. This one (above and below, details), by Rodrigo Lara Zendejas, was especially compelling. Entitled Deportable Aliens, it appears at first glance to be a set of shelves bearing busts. Each porcelain bust, however is sculpted in the form of a thumb and many of the highly expressive faces are composed of only partial facial features.

The thumb forms suggest the fingerprinting process required of anyone who is apprehended (such as immigrants), with all the identity issues that connotes. Their placement on the shelves symbolizes the commodification of individuals, subject to being bought and sold or deported at the whim of our government and society. The larger-than-life scale of each "bust" or thumb makes the installation especially powerful.

Tarnanthi: Art in Adelaide, Australia

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Tarnanthi is an aboriginal word from the Kaurna people of South Australia. It means to come forth or appear – like the sunrise, or a seed sprouting. For many cultures, first light represents a new beginning. I was fortunate, not only because I was able to travel to Australia and visit the Art Gallery of South Australia but also because this exhibit called Tarnanthi had just been unveiled. Billed by the museum as the “most ambitious exhibition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art in its 134 year history,” Tarnanthi was more ambitious even than that. It really is a series of 21 distinct exhibitions and those exhibitions were just part of a citywide festival of indigenous arts. 

Here is but a very small sample of what I saw at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Traditional indigenous paintings on eucalyptus bark by various indigenous people.

Detail of “Dead man” from the Gunbalanya people of western Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory.

This is a detail of just one of several rooms devoted to the weavings of contemporary indigenous artist Yvonne Koolmatrie, of the Ngarrindjeri nation. The weavings reference traditional eel, fish and animal traps, along with scoops, baskets and other utilitarian woven objects. Koolmatrie, whose art practice was inspired by her experiences as a seasonal worker and a “lifelong relationship with the river,” became a “pivotal figure” in contemporary aboriginal art. She represented Australia in the 1997 Venice Biennale.

One of the things I liked best about the installation of the permanent galleries in the museum was the placement of contemporary works amongst traditional ones. The piece in the center of this gallery features the headless, skinned bodies of two horses. Called “We are all flesh,” by Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere, it has been one of the more controversial ones, according to the museum staff person I spoke with.

This series of portraits was created between 1944 and 1947 by Australian artist Sidney Nolan.

One of the things I did not care for was a penchant for hanging paintings and framed works on paper on mirrored walls positioned in the middle of galleries. I found it distracting to see the reflections of other works of art on opposing walls, not to mention people moving through the gallery. Here is one of Hokusai’s famous woodcut prints of “Fuji in Fair Weather.”

An untitled photograph by a contemporary Swiss artist named Claudio Moser seems to float in the doorway between two galleries.

  

This is the second of a series of stories about art experiences during my recent foray to Australia and New Zealand. To read the first, click on Toi o Tāmaki.

To read stories from my excursion to the Antipodes, go to Urban Wilderness. To see a series of photos from Australia and New Zealand, go to my flickr album.

Toi o Tāmaki: Auckland Art Gallery

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image courtesy eventfinda

The Maori words Toi o Tāmaki are a literal translation of the English: Auckland Art Gallery. In backlit steel they run together across the polished stone exterior of the museum. I love that the two languages are given equal footing. From the permanent signage affixed to the building, to museum publications, website and even to the T-shirts worn by gallery staff, the institution is consistently identified in both languages.

As striking as that is to someone like me who is visiting New Zealand from the U.S. for the first time, it is hardly the most distinctive thing about the museum. The main entrance is a soaring atrium space with tall timber columns that flare outwards overhead like the canopy of the forested park into which the building is nestled. I found it exceptionally beautiful when I was there but I’ve since learned that it’s also internationally renowned.

The World Architecture Festival (“the world’s largest architectural event,” according to its website) named the Auckland Art Gallery as the Building of the Year for 2013. If I hadn’t had the good fortune to visit New Zealand I would never have known.

The collection was as interesting as the architecture and includes what seemed to me a healthy mix of Maori and European-oriented artists. I’ve always enjoyed visiting places like this where you get to see outstanding work that falls outside the canons of Western art historical convention. I didn’t take any photos inside the galleries but I enjoyed seeing the site-specific work of New Zealand artist John Ward Knox that was installed around the outside of the building.

Hardly Held Lightly, John Ward Knox

Clearly referencing natural, delicate and ephemeral spider webs, these not only are enormous and made of industrial-strength steel chain link. They also, literally as well as metaphorically, connect the architectural structure with the surrounding trees, thus reinforcing the architect’s vision of the gallery as a haven within the protective environment of the forest.

To see a slide show of the award-winning gallery, click here. 

To see a series of photos from Australia and New Zealand, go to my flickr album.