VOX POPULI
For Immediate Release
Contact: Amy Adams
amyadams3000@comcast.net or 215-426-4244                                                                                                     

Exhibition Dates:          Friday, January 6 – Sunday, January 29
Opening Reception:     First Friday, January 6, 6-10 PM
Gallery Talk:                 Sunday, January 29 at 4:30pm

Once a year, Vox Populi invites a guest curator to transform its gallery space.  This year, Vox welcomes Elizabeth Grady’s exhibition, Parts to the Whole, which explores the formal tension between the scale of small sculptures and the setting in which they are exhibited. Highlighting the tension between the viewing experience and temptation to touch encouraged by small-scale objects and the more distanced relationship between viewer and artwork encouraged by larger scale installations that include these same works, the exhibit aims to inspire in the audience a deeper appreciation of the impact of the artists' choices, and the space in which he or she works, on the material presence and potential meanings of an artwork. 

Parts to the Whole will include work by eleven emerging and/or under-represented artists based in Chicago, Delaware, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia, who have varied if not divergent visions and goals. They work in traditional materials such as porcelain, but also in decidedly non-traditional ones, such as Sculpey, monofilament and synthetic polymer.  Their concerns extend from the personal to the social, and from the realm of experience to the language of artistic form.  Jessica Bader molds common objects like nails in delicate white porcelain, creating a productive tension between the history of the material and the ordinary utility and coarseness of the objects made with it.  She thereby questions the gendered associations we make with the detritus of everyday life. Quotidian existence is also a central concern of David Baskin, whose rubber still life works refer to the domesticity by depicting tablecloths, fruits and vegetables. And he explores the implications of gender, but these works simultaneously reference a broad range of theories, styles, and genres, ranging from sixteenth-century Dutch still life to Minimalism, and from the idea of the object as erotic fetish to its role as consumer fetish. Bethany Bristow’s works are also fetishistic, but the appeal of their shiny glass elements and soft, colorful feathers is countered by an unmistakable shiver of disgust, as a clear, sticky liquid oozes from them and they emerge from the most unexpected corners of the gallery space. Their role as interventions in and alterations of the architectural environments she prefers as installation sites – whether indoor or outdoor – allows them to challenge the accustomed uses and functions of those spaces. Charley Friedman mounts eggs on the heads of pins and coats them in slick, shiny lacquer, he arranging them into flowers, and creating a garden within the gallery that initially appears lighthearted and decorative. However, the thick, clotted egg yolk that forms the centers of the blossoms suggests decay and failed regeneration as much as the flowers reference growth. As the viewer backs away in startled repugnance at the recognition of the material, a vanitas theme creeps in to question the work's cheery and life-affirming confidence. Jae Hi Ahn, too, plays on attraction and repulsion in her ambiguous insect-like, animal, and vegetal forms.

Prefab grass and colored plastic sheeting explode in a glowing riot of color that evokes an underwater paradise or an alien planet. She sees the re-purposing of materials as a way of honoring the life inherent in all things, illustrating the metaphysical notion of the trans-migration of souls. The bright plastics and craft materials act as a metaphor for the permanence of the spirit, regardless of what body or thing it inhabits, just as the shocking colors radiate a seemingly eternally renewable ethereal energy. The link between the tangible and the ethereal also lies at the heart of David Meyer's work, where we find seemingly solid, reliable forms that slowly reveal their structural vulnerability, evolving and sometimes decaying over time. Engaging the viewer's interest by means of formal elegance and unusual materials - like flour - Meyer seeks to communicate the significance of thought and perception on the production and reception of an artwork.

Questions about the nature and meaning of social behavior motivate the work of Pete Goldlust, Julie Hughes, and Mike Smith.  Goldlust and Hughes collaborate, making wall drawings and paintings on which they mount creatures made from Sculpey and common hardware-store items, such as knobs and pull-chains, implying by their placement fraught psychological interactions between the “actors” in their scenes.  Although the playful colors and forms are alluring, the figures are often menacing.  Mike Smith uses imagery that is at once familiar and alien, creating mysterious narratives through the placement of moons, dinosaur-inspired sculptures and action-figure characters. Using Spartan arrangements, he evokes unexplained relationships between the elements as he subtly references people from his own past. Viewers retreat to the artist's fantasy realm even as they are drawn into abstracted episodes of his personal experience. 

A tension between working in two and three dimensions provides a point of commonality between the work of the final two artists in the exhibition. Gelah Penn’s shimmering installations of knotted monofilament (fishing line) are the very essence of drawing, loosened from its dependence on the wall.  As the shadows change with shifting daylight and passing viewers, one recognizes that they are as integral to the work as its occupation of space.  In this way the work is always seen anew, depending on its site and the circumstances of its lighting.  Nami Yamamoto’s work, too, addresses the tension between flat pattern and three-dimensional space.  Natural structures like those of honeycombs or cells provide the starting point, as the discrete forms in vinyl and paper collect and fan out over wall and floor surfaces.  The microscopic world is thereby made manifest in a way that indicates the formal issues underlying the artistic process. 

Elizabeth Grady curated Structuring Perception at NURTUREart in Brooklyn, which runs through January 15, 2006. She has several forthcoming essays, on Stephen Nguyen in NY Arts, on Gary Simmons on the website of the Whitney Museum, and on the politicization of public art opinion in Berlin in the Weimar Republic, in a book on the political economy of art edited by Julie Codell. She has also published essays on Franz Ackermann, Matthew Ritchie, Alexander Ross, and Terry Winters in Elisabeth Sussman, Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Sculpture. New York: Whitney Museum, 2005. In addition, she is working as Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney Museum, Special Assistant to the Estate of Diane Arbus, and Adjunct Professor of Art History at F.I.T.-SUNY in New York.

For more information on these and other events, please see our website www.voxpopuligallery.org.

 Vox Populi is a non-profit artist's collective that was founded in 1988, that features regular exhibitions, gallery talks, performances and lectures, to support the work of emerging artists. Vox is located on the 4th floor of the Gilbert Building, at 1315 Cherry Street, in Philadelphia. Artist’s receptions are free and open to the public, and take place on the first Friday of each month, from 6 - 11pm.