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Jennifer Levonian in Iceland
Gallery artist Jennifer Levonian will be featured at the 700IS Reindeerland Experimental Film Festival, Iceland. The festival runs from March 20 to 27, 2010. Levonian will be screening "You, Starbucks" - a stop-motion animation using collage and watercolor.
Luis Romero and Ray Yoshida reviewed in Philadelphia Inquirer
Galleries: Small, bold works dazzle in a big space
By Edith Newhall
Luis Romero's obsessively constructed and painted paper assemblages and quirky line drawings easily could lead you to believe he's a self-taught artist. That, and the fact that he's showing his works at the Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, which besides showing contemporary artists has a long history of introducing the efforts of the un-art-schooled, makes that possibility seem all the more likely.
In fact, Romero has spent more time in school than out of it. A Puerto Rican who lives in Chicago, he has a degree in philosophy, literature, and film from Boston University; a certificate from the National School of Plastic Arts (Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas) in Mexico City; and an M.F.A. in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Romero's paper assemblages take up most of his show and are the work you see first as you enter the main gallery. They're made up of multiple torn pieces of paper that he paints, then staples together to form rough grid patterns. As busy and childlike as this mode of construction sounds, it results in surprisingly elegant, bold geometry.
His abstract line drawings, on the other hand, bring to mind the contours of pre-Columbian Mexican pottery, as well as the stylized, repetitive shapes common to the paintings of Chicago imagists Roger Brown, Christina Ramberg, and Jim Nutt.
Having seen Romero's work in two group shows here, I would not have imagined it in a show of the scale he now has - his pieces are generally small and would seem ideally suited to an intimate box of a gallery - but his percolating grids take over Fleisher/Ollman's wide-open main space as if they were made to be there.
Represented by a selection of collages in Fleisher/Ollman's small gallery is Ray Yoshida, a Chicago imagist who counseled countless students during his decades as a painting professor at SAIC (Romero was one, as were Roger Brown, Elizabeth Murray, Robert Storr, and many others, myself included). He also was a master of the seemingly passing enigmatic observation that would leave a student desperately guessing at its real meaning. Yoshida's collages of images, cut from comic books and glued to paper in tidy grids, are as mysteriously witty as he was, an invitation to an inscrutable code that would never be cracked.
Top Ten From the Armory Show Modern
David Ebony of Art in America has named Fleisher/Ollman Gallery one of the ten best booths at this year's Armory Show Modern.
Ebony writes: "It would be difficult to find a better example of Ed Paschke's work than the 1970 painting of a figure playing an accordion on view here. Corresponding with canvases by Christina Ramberg, whose figurative abstraction closely relate to those of the Chicago Imagists, it was the centerpiece of a booth containing sculpture by William Edmondson and the Philadelphia Wireman. Recent works by young artists, such as the team of Steven and Billy Blaise Dufala, more than held their own here. Known for focusing on environmental issues in their works, the brothers showed large watercolors of the floating islands of plastic bottles and other refuse that litter the oceans, as well as a peculiar, jerry-built machine sculpture that resembles a yellow power saw."
Jennifer Levonian and Fleisher/Ollman at ARCO Madrid
Gallery artist, Jennifer Levonian will be featured in ARCO Madrid's Cinema Loop curated by Paul Young and Carolina Grau. ARCO Madrid 29 International Contemporary Art Fair runs from February 17 through February 21.
Take Your Picture With a Puma, Jennifer Levonian's newest low-tech animation, made from watercolor, drawing, and collage, follows an American tourist on her quest for authentic experiences in Mexico, aided only by a Lonely Planet guidebook. In her search for offbeat locations, she inevitably travels the well-trodden path of other like-minded tourists. Surrounded by cruise ships, open air markets, cat fights, and teenagers making out, the tourist-protagonist finds an unlikely friendship in a Mexican bakery.
Megawords Isuue 12 Release Party and Video Screening
The newest issue of Megawords is available now! Join Megawords at Fleisher/Ollman for a release party on Thursday, Janary 14 from 6:30 to 9pm.
Megawords will be showing a selection of short films by Adams and Itso from Denmark, and Mattias Wermke and Mischa Leinkauf from Berlin, whose work was previously seen in Philadelphia at the Megawords storefront. Their films document the construction of architectural surprises in public spaces.