One Pick and One Pan

Efflorescence, at the Clara Hatton Gallery is my top recommendation for new shows this month.  I attended the opening Thursday… but you never really see the art at an opening, so I went back today to really take some time with it.  This show of three graduate students from different concentrations reflects the CSU Art Dept’s newfound comfort with interdisciplinary projects (hurray!).  It’s a really fresh, conceptually well-integrated show.  It hardly matters which artist is the printmaking grad, or the drawing, or the graphic design grad, because all three move confidently outside the traditional parameters of their chosen media.  Nick Croghan, Laura Grossett, and Eli Marco Hall intersect artistically in their foregrounding of biological forms.  I’m told that they met together extensively in planning this show- and I can tell you it payed off.  Each artist is recognizable as a distinct voice, but they harmonize beautifully.

Grossett and Croghan share a similar approach in presenting their multi-media objects as specimens or artifacts.  The effect is a framing of the art practice as scientific inquiry, albeit an arcane form of inquiry.  These artists describe the minutia of biological systems and propose unlikely contexts for them.  Hall’s reference to biology is sometimes more subtle:  his stately wood-and-metal sculptures appear as abstract crystalizations of visceral trauma.

Grossett’s drawings depict bird, insect and plant biology in a way reminiscent of naturalist illustration. The endeavor of the naturalist is further echoed in the presentation of some drawings as “slides”, whether scribed on plexiglass disks, or tucked snuggly into a file box.  Some of these objects point to a certain antiquatedness, the outmoded implements of collection and classification.  Snow Moths, a particularly lovely work, could pass for an eccentric piece of Victoriana:  careful drawings of moths are sandwiched between clouded plexi disks, and these disks are held on stems branching from an ornate copper stand, itself an abstraction from botanical forms.

If Grosset’s work suggests the science of a past era, Croghan’s might depict an alien technology. Here too drawing is incorporated within ambiguous objects.  Biological forms (plant? animal?) are sampled and repurposed as parts in uncanny mechanisms.  Conceal/Reveal is striking: three illustrated disks are arrayed on a sort of turntable, one disk positioned under a lens. what this instrument is meant to discern is anyone’s guess.  Croghan’s other object/drawings are no less mysterious.  Lenses appear again in Inquiry into Curiosity, suggesting a hidden space behind the seductive watercolor drawing.

Hall’s references to biology are sometimes as direct as the corroded metal heart that appears in Asd.  The reference in Fulcrum is more oblique.  The red-enameled, shredded metal-  hung from the ceiling and tethered to a mean looking hook- evokes the abattoir.  At the same time, the form is reassuringly sanitized, at a remove from the implied violence.  The same feeling of distance is at play in Champ:  An ambiguous form (of hacked and charred wood) releases a spillage of red metal flecks from it’s hollowed core, but the stream is neatly pixelated- tidy squares of metal confetti instead of spatters.

Efflorescence runs through March 24.  M-F, 10-4.  Free Admission.

On Saturday, Ron and I took in the new photo exhibit at FCMOCA.  So, here comes the pan…sorry, MOCA- maybe if you hire a curator, we can start to be friends again.  Lynn Goldsmith’s The Looking Glass is a series of  pointlessly theatrical, heavily photoshopped costume glamor shots. (Yes, I really hate them that much.)  Goldsmith is a celebrity photographer; and to be honest I like her commercial work better…because it looks less commercial. This foray into self-portraiture is so slick; and this might be forgivable if her vignettes constituted more than the shallowest premise of narrative.  What a strange choice, for someone who photographs celebs with straightforward sensitivity, to shoot herself as the star of some numbly ironic ad campaign.

Maybe if I’d seen this show a week earlier, I’d be a little less harsh.  However, distant rumors of the Whitney Biennial piqued my curiosity in a photographer named Nina Berman.  And so, over the past week I’ve been pouring over Berman’s Marine Wedding series- images of devastating sincerity and humanity.  There’s nothing arty about them.  The coincidental juxtaposition puts Goldsmith’s shiny frivolities in a pretty bad light for me.  Unfair?  Perhaps.  But, isn’t the slicky photoshop thing looking a little dated anyway?  Berman’s inclusion in the Biennial certainly isn’t the first hint that photography today is moving away from special effects in favor of directness, showing up variously as a deadpan kind of documentation, or simply as intimacy, or hand-constructed sensibility.

The Looking Glass runs through May 15.  T-F, 10-4/ Sat, 12- 5.