Mother-Daughter Duo at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art

Judy Onofrio, Flux

Judy Onofrio and her daughter Jennifer Onofrio Fornes  have an exhibition whose spooky undertones are sometimes successful, and sometimes not.  Here's my review in The Kansas City Star.

If you think “Danse Macabre” is just a delightfully overplayed Camille Saint-Saens tone poem, you should hasten to see this odd mother-daughter exhibition at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art. Haunting bone sculptures and ghostly photographs create a new dance macabre.

Artists who use bones in their work surely realize the slender edge of disturbing upon which they dance.

Wisconsin self-taught artist Eugene Von Bruenchenhein suggested visionary worlds with his delicate chicken and turkey bone thrones and towers.

Bones eerily suggest death since they are only available once a being is finished with them, or more precisely, dead. 

And yet, Judy Onofrio turned to them after confronting a serious illness, as if to deny bones their death relation and confirm them as life affirming and spiritual, even.

Perhaps more interestingly, Onofrio untethers herself from the female figure, visual cacophony, and the carnival colors that dominated her work for so long.

In the “Earth Bound” sculptures, Onofrio gathers bones in decorative clusters, which she paints in delicate pale greens and creams.

Most of the sculptures deploy cattle and other large mammal bones. These bones feel uncomfortably human in scale, and generally fall into two categories, freeform and attached to wall-mounted bases. The freeform works feel active, engaging, as if they might jettison from the wall, and Onofrio presents them in surprisingly varied ways.

“Twist” is one of the largest free-form sculptures into which Onofrio incorporates curvaceous horns with the bones. Smooth and ribbed, the horns weave through the bones, gracefully tying the work together.

There are a few sculptures with tiny bones. In “Dig 1,” “2,” and “3,” Onofrio crams diminutive mouse bones into a decorative trough-like mount. These fragments, all jumbled together and painted a creamy hue, feel old, as if they have been unearthed from an antique cabinet of curiosities.

The 2009 works, which are displayed on oval wall-mounted bases, are more closely related to her former works — they incorporate mirrors, pearls, fruit, teeth, branches, glass orbs and other non-bone detritus. And yet by painting them with monochromatic pale colors, Onofrio encourages serenity rather than chaos. 

Onofrio’s daughter Jennifer Onofrio Fornes cuts close to the spooky bone with her ghostly photographs. While she uses her own body in the images, they are not self-portraits; in fact the body is scarcely discernible. Instead, the grainy, velvety, wispy images suggest otherworldly beings.

Borrowing from 19th century spiritualism and ghost photography, Fornes capitalizes on the romantic notion of communicating with beings from the spirit world. Her large silver gelatin prints are beautiful, lush, full of dramatic movement and have evocative titles such as “Deep Sleep,” “The Space Between,” and “Falling Away,” which emphasize her narrative.

Fornes uses her body, ethereal textiles, and the studio to create images that suggest an absence and a presence. As she moves through the studio, her camera captures ghostlike movement, suggesting something or someone.

The small, white-framed oval images of her “Trace” series are even more ephemeral. Blown out to almost indiscernible imagery, the photographs have only the slightest grey-to-white contrast. An image is just barely apparent. 

Fornes’ work suggests the disembodied spirit of things or beings that are present, but not quite there, while her mother’s work unearths the presence of beings that have been, and what remains behind.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/03/21/3503289/sherry-leedy-displays-a-mother.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

New York's Exit Art Has Its Final Exhibitions

Exit Art

I'm sorry to say that after 30 years, Exit Art is closing doors.  On March 24, Exit Art's final exhibitions open.  Every Exit is an Entrance:  30 Years of Exit Art, runs through the space's closing, May 19, 2012.  The exhibition documents Exit Art's history from its founding in a loft apartment on Canal Street to its current location in Hell’s Kitchen.  A second exhibition, Collective/Performative is an exhibition and event series focusing on performance practices that require the participation of an audience. The exhibition will include new works by eight commissioned artists and organizations that will utilize Exit Art's space during gallery hours for a public project, as well as an "artist's history" of performance art told by seminal performance artists who have exhibited at Exit Art.

It seems sad, but things end.

Los Angeles's True Rock Star!

The boulder in its quarry (from LACMA's blog).

Oh how I wish I were in LA to see Michael Heizer's gargantuan boulder finally appear at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  LACMA has always been one of my favorite museums.  I love its vibe and I've seen some really outstanding exhibitions there.

And I love the idea of this fantastically ambitious work titled Levitated Mass.

Here's some press on the boulder's journey, and LACMA's blog about the work.  While the cost is staggering ($10 million!), I love this devotion to an artist that enables him to carry out this monumental Earthwork.

Lawrence Artists Michael Krueger and Mark Cowardin at Rockhurst University

Here is my latest review in the Kansas City Star of Michael Krueger and Mark Cowardin's exhibition at Rockhurst University's Greenlease Gallery.  The artists' work made a dynamic combination.

Lawrence artists offer a naturally unnatural exhibit

Michael Krueger

The unpredictable combination of Lawrence artists Mark Cowardin and Michael Krueger unearths smart yet idiosyncratic gestures.

While their work is visually dissimilar, both artists articulate reverence for nature and as often, a lament for its diminution.

Cowardin’s smoothly graceful sculptures juxtapose materials and conflicting ideas. In “The Great Escape,” a taxidermied pheasant attempts to break from a sculptural, ebonized walnut branch with roots clawing at absent earth. Like all of Cowardin’s sculptures here, the wood is deliberately too beautiful and highly crafted, perhaps a suggestion of our dissociation from the natural world.

As a native Midwesterner, Cowardin questions and accepts his Midwesternness and the complexities that it embodies.

In “Get a Grip,” a circular sculptured branch morphs into a hand, grasping its own roots. A single green leaf juts out of the top. Cowardin explains that it is “a piece that illustrates contrasting desires to hang on to and let go of one’s roots with a dash of optimism. This piece works as both a personal narrative and an illustration of the dangers of interrupting the natural cycle.”

Other sculptures are ambiguous. In “Milk & Honey,” a blindfolded pink flamingo hovers over a trinity of three-rooted branches.

Michael Krueger’s pencil-on-paper drawings are studies in hot neon hues and paradoxical relationships. The drawings are unpeopled, except for “Night Falls,” a riff on the romanticism of Hudson River School paintings. 

Here, groovy hippies are at home with the land, yet the scene is odd and slightly disturbing, despite the idealized overtones. A blood-red, pink, yellow and brown sky compresses the composition, suggesting discord.

Curiously, two of Krueger’s drawings combine furniture and pottery with the land. For Krueger, the exquisite craftsmanship of highboys and Arts and Crafts pottery emphasizes a particular utopian quest for perfection. In “Highboy,” Krueger faces two dressers on a cliff’s edge, as if they are chatting about the precarious place in which they, oddly, find themselves.

“Arts & Crafts Stack” is a totemic mystery. A stack of pottery vessels balances on another cryptic rock edge, juxtaposed against an egg yolk-yellow background.

For Krueger both drawings suggest a specific American arts and crafts idealism. He notes, “the movement was all about creating a utopian balance in life through art and design and living with these objects that resonated with hope and optimism. I have (the highboys and pottery) in the landscape in tenuous situations but they still (in my mind) ring of hopefulness and optimism. It’s about finding a way that the images can be both hopeful and doomed at the same time … tragic and glorious.”

Only Krueger, Mel Ziegler and the late Kate Ericson could suggest that furniture is tragic and glorious and make me believe it.

Other drawings depict dying trees and landscapes with colors that are beautiful, perhaps toxically so. Bitter yellows, greens and pinks envelope branches scattered about on a parched ground. Jagged lines and great slashes of unnatural color bubble to the surface of Krueger’s drawings where the landscape has become unknowable and even alien.

The land is both precious and yet not quite right. Something is amiss where perfection and imperfection coexist. 

Cowardin and Krueger lay claim to and reject our typical relationship to the natural world. While beautifully articulated — the wood is perfect, the colors are crystalline — the work also suggests we are often unrooted, and those colors may be toxic. The world is familiar, yet not utopian, and still cruelly at odds with itself.

Sharon Louden Reviewed in Art In America

Merge, Weisman Art Museum

My dear friend, artist Sharon Louden, created a fantastical, enormous site-specific installation to celebrate the reopening of the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis.  Responding to Frank Gehry's iconic architecture, Louden's installation, Merge, is a dazzling tour de force, made of 250,000 aluminum strips.  The work is at the Weisman until May 20, 2012.  Janet Koplos has reviewed the work in Art in America.  Read her review here.

I worked with Sharon on The Attenders, her 2003 solo exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, when I was curator there.  That was also a beautiful exhibition.  Congratulations, Sharon!