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Thursday, October 23, 2003 Art: From Louisville to Las Vegas
By Gregory Crosby
It's old Kentucky home week at the Arts Factory, with 65 works of art by 11 artists from Louisville spread across three venues: the Brunz Rosowsky Gallery, the Michael Wardle Gallery and the Contemporary Arts Collective, which presents the bulk of the show. Curated by Marty Walsh, Here & There purports to explore the idea of regionalism in art, but beyond providing a good excuse to have a big group show of Walsh's friends from Louisville, I'm not sure I discern the exhibit's success with that theme. Regionalism is the prettier sister word to the homely epithet "provincialism," a word that usually bespeaks of art that's narrowly conceived and outside the stream of international ideas. But regionalism is really a portmanteau word that identifies some trend or content in art that's specific to--even deeply rooted in--the place it comes from. Taken this way, there's nothing obviously apparent or distinctively Kentuckian about the artists in the show, except perhaps a shared pleasure in the detritus of mass-produced objects, real and cultural. Walsh's own entries, a softly lighted series of oils that depict obsolescent kitchen appliances, from the "Ice-O-Mat" to the "Presto Hotdogger" and the mysterious "Swing-A-Way" (just what is that device for, anyway?), has the virtue of making the strange and half-remembered familiar again. Even more successful are Tom Pfannerstill's lovingly re-created consumer roadkill: meticulously realized re-creations of crushed objects found in the street, from a Cracker Jack box to a can of 3-in-1 Oil to a pack of Camel Lights. We instantly recognize these disposable victims of tire treads as the bright spots in the asphalt landscape; advertising packaging recast as wildflowers. Pfannerstill's roadkill are preferable to his other entries in the show, a series of sculpted heads that strike me as failed jokes, and they are a good counterpoint to Wendi Smith's marvelous, six-foot-tall painted cylinders that evoke the seasons, each a sort of silo holding a concept of spring, summer and fall. Suzanne Mitchell's constructions, stiff canvas vests and skirts and blouses wrapped in found images of Venetian scenes or other architectural landscapes, are accomplished as well. But the works of both of these artists puts me in mind of the Midwest and the West, not the bluegrass of the Upper South. Perhaps the implicit message of Here & There is that regionalism really is a sort of useless word, something thrown in when a consistent visual school or movement isn't present. Through Nov. 9 Contemporary Arts Collective 101 E. Charleston Blvd. 382-3886 |
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