Tricks and More - Ron Isaacs

A black dress speeds by, trailing sleeves and dry branches. A fine old christening dress disintegrates into chalk lines on a blackboard. A man's white dress shirt, circa 1875, sprouts a small forest of branches. You're in the world of Ron Isaacs, master craftsman and trompe l'oeil magician. There is mystery everywhere, writ in solid evidence on the walls of the Snyderman-Works Gallery in Old City, Philadelphia. Isaacs works in wood, birch plywood, to be specific. Delicate dry leaves, smooth gabardine, fine crocheted lace, wispy muslin with embroidered borders - all wood. You read the label, note the fact, and then return to the work without believing it; your eyes and mind tussle against each other in a rich and interesting game. There is knowledge of past masters here - William Michael Harnett especially, with his delight in tactile deception and fine detail - as well as a sense of the past, and of time passing. An autumnal theme runs throughout, recalling the twist of the heart that comes with the turn of that season. There is a hint of death in the air, evoked not only by dry leaves and bare branches but by the nostalgia implicit in the styles of the clothes. Someone once lived here, these works say. One, titled Improve Each Shining Hour, is a dress of a particular green with cream polka dots - a 40's icon complete with neatly buttoned sleeves and collar, here presented with cutout boxes filled with scissors (also wood - don't forget!) It recalls the neat tidy tasks of women - sewing, handwork - the slight wrinkling of the fabric visible at close range reminds one of a time before permanent press, when the iron and ironing board were a daily presence. One box, squarely over the pubic area, has a large pair of scissors pointing straight down - a hint of sex, perhaps, but perhaps not really the point (the scissors have a blunted tip.) A spring note appears in the work titled Overtaken, which sprouts colorful yellow and purple iris buds, rising out of the hem of a deep blue/green dress with demure lace collar. They bring a fresh damp smell into the air, but again there is a slight ominous note; the nostalgic style of the dress seems to have it sinking gracefully into a fecund swamp. The christening dresses (there are two) are sweet and delicate but perhaps most of all they carry the sense of lives lost. The Queen of January is a masterful work. The rich finely-detailed fabric, a tea-dyed ivory color, is thick and expensive looking; this christening took place in winter in a northern climate - or was it used to guard a tiny lost life against an eternal cold? The dusty spray of dry leaves shooting out of the skirt speak of both possibilities. There is so much to Isaacs's work - this exhibit is a pleasure for the senses and the intellect.
At the Snyderman-Works Gallery through May 14th
http://www.snyderman-works.com/exhibitions/nature-morte-transfigured-sculptural-still-life

Serious Eye Candy - Roberto Capucci

'Spectacular, stunning, dazzling, amazing - where do you begin with the work of Roberto Capucci, the Italian designer whose work is currently on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art? The exhibit, Art into Fashion, showcases a magician of fabric and color with a long career that includes some film work (Theorem by Piero Pasolini 1968) and many extravagant showings in various European locales. He is not a work-a-day kind of fashion designer - his statements about distancing himself from the commercial and institutional demands of the fashion trade make that clear, but even if he hadn't said a word, the work on displays testifies clearly that this is not Art INTO Fashion, but ART on its own terms. Many of the designs - most are more or less formal 'party dresses' - are given the name 'Sculpture Dress' - emphasizing that the point is not how the dress would look on a woman's body, but how it looks by itself. In fact, in an accompanying video, the clothes in action looked somewhat awkward; folded and pleated appendages that were spectacular as details on the stationary work, bumped and jerked against the model as she walked.  But who cares? No one can afford these anyway, so they are fun to appreciate as sculpture in the round. Color bowls you over the minute you walk in - Capucci has a rich drenched palette of glorious jewel tones - green, pink, magenta, clear red, blue, turquoise that he mate with gleaming taffetas and sensuous satins - against black backgrounds and under dramatic lighting, the exhibit makes for a delicious experience. He also the skills of an engineer/sculptor and a whimsical imagination - you never know what he's going to do next - ruffles, patches, pleats, folds - the possibilities keep opening up as you watch. There is an underlying debt to nature throughout, paid out in the use of materials - a dress covered with polished pebbles, another belted with bamboo - as well as themes and ideas. A dress titled 'Bougainvillea' is a paean to the namesake vine - the multicolored ruffles twine up the core garment, as if growing before your eyes.
Sculpture is not always this chic - this exhibit is fun and interesting on several levels.
Art Into Fashion is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art until June 5, 2011.

The News from China

Art is still very powerful. If you ever doubted it, you just have to read today's news. The focus is on China, and 'power' is defined by extremes. One the one hand, the art market is buzzing at the $10.1 million dollar price of a painting by a living Chinese artist, Zhang Xiaogang. One the other is a very different show of power - the disturbing news of the disappearance of Ai Weiwei, arguably China's most important artist - in fact, arguably one of the world's most important artists at this moment. Ai Weiwei designed the 'Birds Nest' Olympics stadium (a project he has since disowned) but that is hardly the cause of the actions taken against him. Chinese authorities have harassed him for years because of his often elegant, sometimes subtle, but always outspoken protests again human indignities and injustices, and this week the stakes went way up when he was detained and his Beijing studio raided. It is interesting to try to understand why Zhang Xiaogang appears to have escaped disfavor, despite what seem to be critical elements in his work, while Ai Weiwei is marked for harsh treatment. Both have shown widely in the West and have a great deal of international stature. Zhang Xiaogang's series 'Bloodlines,' based on old family photos, presents a view of China trapped in a motionless reality of obedience - mother, father, child, all neat, somber, and nearly interchangeable. The expensive triptych, 'Forever Lasting Love,' is a surreal, Bosch-like landscape of global cultural, sexual, religious(ish) symbols - a fat American-looking turkey, Hindu-seeming ascetics in a sort of Nativity scene, a vagina-like flowering tree sprouting heads, etc. It may be hard to understand exactly, but it has a human and artistic logic, with recognizable bodies, faces, trees. Ai Weiwei, by contrast, may be more of a threat because his work is more slippery - at first glance it means little beyond the obvious, but as you think about it.... Art that cause one to think makes certain regimes very uncomfortable. For example, Ai Weiwei had a recent installation at the Tate Modern - I saw it when I was in London in December. A room of sunflower seeds, each one made of porcelain and hand-painted by an anonymous Chinese worker, formed a gray sea of tiny elements, each one exactly alike, none of them standing out in any way. A more overtly critical work was his response to the loss of so many children in the 2009 earthquake as a result of poorly constructed schools, when he used childrens backpacks to spell out the pained cry of a grieving parent. Other strikes against him seem to be that he is openly critical of Chinese policies on Twitter - he has 75,000 followers, and he is comfortable in the West (he lived for an extended period in New York.) A large public art project by Ai Weiwei, based on the animals of the Chinese Zodiac, will be installed in New York soon and will be on display at 59th and 5th Avenue from May 2 - July 15. Let's all hope he is there for it.