Photographs by Isaac Schell

Stockbridge Fine Art Print

319 N. 11th 4th floor

Friday April 3rd, 5-10pm

Let’s talk about art. Isaac Schell is a Drexel photo graduate, and also my housemate. He shoots with a 4×5″ portable rail camera. It’s an enormous thing with an enormous tripod, the kind of camera with a ground glass and a dark cloth that goes over your head. It’s not the most agile camera, but the negatives can be printed 60″ wide before you start to see grain. If it were digital, it would be five hundred megapixels or something.

Isaac’s most recent body of work has had some legs. He participated in a group show at Copy Gallery last August, showing twelve images. One of the photographs was shown in the Project Basho Onward show in January. Two of the photos were selected for the Perkins Center juried exhibition in February. Another photo got him into the 69th annual juried exhibition at the Woodmere Art Museum in March.

Tonight’s show is a revisitation of a previous body of work: Bars, Churches, and Beauty Salons. The prints are really really big. The photographs present a topographic vernacular of West Philadelphia storefronts. These commercial/social institutions have at various times served as community glue, doing their best to stave off decay. Many of them have seen better times.

They are sad photographs, but they are beautiful. The buildings don’t tell us their stories, but they invite us to wonder. You can see former glory, recent disintegration, but also a tenacity. West Philly seems to have some fight left.

We will be having an opening and discussion on Thursday March 19th. Hope you can come.

P’unk Avenue Active Intersection
A new Sound Installation by Ashley John Pigford
Opening / Discussion: March 19, 6pm-9pm.
Hosted by P’unk Ave
1168 E Passyunk Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19147

In Ashley’s own words:

A camera records activity of the intersection of E. Passyunk Avenue and Federal Street in South Philadelphia. The amount of activity is translated into a constantly updating audio composition that is broadcast through low power FM in the area of the installation. Additional audio of the intersection, recorded live, is mixed into the broadcast composition and the composite video image of the camera is projected into the window of P’unk Avenue. This piece is intended to be experienced as an active participant of the intersection, with your radio tuned to the FM frequency that is projected in the window, or as an observer.

A few reasons why I don’t interact with contemporary art criticism:

A lot of it sucks. To be more specific, a lot of it is self-serving. A lot of it has agenda of a White House Press Secretary, never badmouthing the regime. Some of it is hiding in the back pages of text-heavy egghead magazines. Some of it remains unread in the forewords of over-designed exhibition catalogs shrink wrapped on museum gift shop shelves. The rest of it exists in the audience-of-one land of blogville.

That refers to the formal branch.

The good kind is overheard waiting in line for the bathroom at openings. It’s spontaneous and unsolicited. It’s snarky, but good-natured. It’s conversational, between friends.

Art pushes a lot of envelops. Art that engaged the audience, turning them into a community of participants, came into vogue in the early nineties. Way before digital social networks. So if art makes a solid attempt at staying ahead of the curve, why are the apparatuses with which we digest and reflect on it so Victorian?

There are exceptions. Jerry Saltz (of NY Magazine) is funny, accessible, and relevant. His most recent column provides an apropos critique of exhibition space— the imposing, expansive, anachronistic kind in which most art is still viewed. A lot of contemporary art is critical of previous movements, or self-critical. And we are certainly not want for publishing/conversation platforms.

Here’s what I want:

For critics and gallery types to take off their black sweaters, roll up their Paul Smith sleeves, and give us some straight talk. Match the criticism to the audience, to the work. To stop taking the art speak lexicon for granted and using an appropriate frame for the conversation.

For museums to stop being so museumy, especially when exhibiting contemporary work. Some “art as reliquary” objects are appropriate in hush rooms protected by a rectangle of sandpaper tape on the floor, but others beg to be discussed, to be engaged. Audio tours are a joke. Who cares what the unoffensively British lady has to say? I want RFID museum plaques that let me passively engage a historical work, to learn about the collector, the artist, it’s exhibition history, all information they already store in a database somewhere. What’s the provenance? Where’s the marginalia?

OR… to fix the audio tour. Invite the curator to take a walk through an exhibition with a critic or interviewer and record the conversation. Let me listen to an audio tour of discourse about the show. Let me hear the interviewer call bullshit on the curator. Give me the inside scoop. Why is the white cube so blackbox?

I’m pushing for this to be the topic of our next Junto. If I can convince anyone else that contemporary art criticism is relevant, that is. I want to call some bluff and create some room for constructive shit talk.

Today I start my “one thing for sale” project.

The concept is simple. I will choose one thing to sell in our storefront window on E. Passyunk Avenue. I will type up a description of the object and post that in the window and on this blog. It remains for sale until someone buys it in person. I will post a picture of the person that buys it holding the object and I will ask them to update me on the objects future home (not required). Along with the thing, you get my typed description.

I see this as an opportunity to create connections between people through the sale of a good – a more human way of exchanging things.

It is a comment on how and why we buy things. It is a comment on patience. It is a way to encourage reuse. It is a defense of simplicity.

Equally important, it will help me find a good home for things that no longer serve my needs.

The first object for sale is my Rolodex from Rolling Stone (with some contacts still in there).

The post-it in the window reads:

For Sale: Rolodex $5.00
Gently used. Lifted from Rolling Stone office. Still contains some contact information.

Lovely device, but less useful to me due to advent of address books on computers. Playing with it reminded me of some of its advantages. Rich tactile experience. Easy to add business cards. Physical size forces you to edit regularly. Will still work in an energy crisis (when you need it most.)

Inquire within or window.punkave.com

(That is the first time I used a typewriter to type a domain name.)

If you need a rolodex, please come by.

This week Sam Tremble of the Philadelphia City Paper wrote about our role in the emerging Second Friday Art thing in our neighborhood.

Sam attended many of the openings last month and really enjoyed it.

Hope you can make it if you are in town.

Rosi Dispensa: The Pittsburgh Series
An abstract look at the steel mills along route 837 in Pittsburgh, PA.
P’unk Avenue
1168 E. Passyunk Avenue, Philadelphia 19147
Closing: Friday, June 8 2007, 6 – 9 PM

P’UNK AVE designer Richard S. Banister Jr and Catherine A. Kane are currently working on an art show about making art. Hopefully they’ll be done by the opening on Saturday, June 2nd, but making art is sort of hard and pointless and expensive and sometimes boring to look at. Which is what the show is about anyway. So, if they can bring themselves to finish making some art about making some art, they’ll be really happy to see you and your friends between 7pm and 11pm on the aforementioned date.

Here is the flyer that they made even before they made the art.

The Proposal Show
14 Drawings by Catherine A. Kane and Richard S. Baniter Jr
The Padlock Gallery
1409 Ellsworth St (5 blocks from the studio)
Opening: Saturday, June 2 2007 7 – 11PM

Rosi Dispensa, Tower, C- Print, 2006

It is one of those moments in time when various cool things have started to coalesce in one place.

That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but I am excited about all of these cultural things that are happening in the neighborhood that P’unk Avenue calls home.

Case in point: there are 4 art openings this friday night in our hood. Of equal interest, there could have been 11! In fact, I have started to create a map of places that show and/or create culture near us. I know of a few more, and I am sure there is stuff I am missing.

Because I have a lot of free time (!), I am in the process of trying to coordinate this so that everyone considers doing something on the 2nd Friday of the month. Nancy at Benna’s Cafe has openings on this schedule, so it only makes sense to build upon this.

Today’s Daily News mentions this emergence of this art scene in South Philadelphia.

Some other cool things to note: Kun-Yang Lin Dance Company bought a building in the area and has intentions of opening their studio here.

2nd Friday Art Crawl in our Neighborhood!

May 11th starting at 6pm

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Rosi Dispensa: The Pittsburgh Series
An abstract look at the steel mills along route 837 in Pittsburgh, PA.
P’unk Avenue
1168 E. Passyunk Avenue, Philadelphia 19147
Opening: May 11, 6 – 10 pm

Katie Henry
Benna’s Cafe
8th & Wharton
Philadelphia 19147
Opening: May 11, 7 – 9 pm

Jared Udel: New Work
Annin Street Studio
1222 Annin Street
Philadelphia 19147
Opening: May 11, 6 – 8 pm

The Bards of Bruley Presents: “More Than Adequate”
w/ musical performance by Mr. Unloved
The Padlock Gallery
Opening Reception: Friday, May 11, 2007, 7-10

The Debtor’s Inheritance project that I wrote about in March is going live this sunday, May 6th!

I hope you can all make it.

We have really enjoyed the collaboration with Katie Murken on this project.

This foray into ubiquitous computing has allowed us to play with text-messages (SMS) as a medium. Delivering narrative through a text message is something that we will continue to develop.

One of the cool things that emerged from this process is the idea of pacing. The narrative is delivered in multiple messages. However, if you always receive them in rapid fire – one right after the next – it can get overwhelming. We gave Katie a tool to control the pace at which the different narratives were delivered so that she could play with the timing for each one.

It is probably fitting that Katie and I both graduated from the Book Arts/Printmaking MFA program at The University of the Arts where we studied this kind of stuff in relation to printed books. I have always been the black sheep of the program, though, with my interest in the digital!

Here are the details of how to experience this project:

Debtor’s Inheritance

(part of Green Machine curated by John Murphy of InLiquid)

May 6 – October 30, 2007

Opening Reception:

Sunday, May 6 2007

5:30 Reception

6:00 Gallery Talk

6:30 Trail Walk

At the The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education

Get Directions

One could make the argument that the Window began with a fabric purchase.

This material came from one of those stores on 4th Street in Philadelphia’s longstanding fabric row. It is a simple white “gauzy” weave that when hung over a window filters the light but does not block it completely.

My wife, Shannon, and I bought it to replace a very heavy and very dirty curtain that covered the window on E. Passyunk Ave in our new corner studio. We wanted more light. It instantly brightened the space, and an interesting side-effect was the ability to see what was happening outside very clearly in the day. The weave cut the glare, and in fact, the view of the outside was clearer than looking through a window.

It might have been a few days later before we realized… this effect was reversed in the evening and people could see inside very clearly and observe our bumbling-abouts.

This fabric got me thinking that I could project on it from the rear and see the image clearly from the street.

Our first show in the Window titled, “Unwatering” took place on Halloween night 2005. View some documentation here or read the press release.