Carson 5" BigEye Magnifier

This work covers individuals/creations from ancient times to present, and provides timelines and interesting facts like brief artist bios, the current locations of the featured masterpieces, and the official names of each artistic "period." Each artist gets his/her own few pages, describing his/her style/history, and there are tons of images, including one of the artist him/herself. It's quite substantial, and the pages have a high-quality shine.

Price: $13.57

Click here to buy from Amazon

Here's Your Sign

This work covers individuals/creations from ancient times to present, and provides timelines and interesting facts like brief artist bios, the current locations of the featured masterpieces, and the official names of each artistic "period." Each artist gets his/her own few pages, describing his/her style/history, and there are tons of images, including one of the artist him/herself. It's quite substantial, and the pages have a high-quality shine.

Price: $13.57

Click here to buy from Amazon

Novelty Gourmet Chocolate Golf Balls: Three in One Box - Triple Bogey

This work covers individuals/creations from ancient times to present, and provides timelines and interesting facts like brief artist bios, the current locations of the featured masterpieces, and the official names of each artistic "period." Each artist gets his/her own few pages, describing his/her style/history, and there are tons of images, including one of the artist him/herself. It's quite substantial, and the pages have a high-quality shine.

Price: $13.57

Click here to buy from Amazon

Theater review – Tis the season

Shows for the holidays promise a lot of the usual Christmas fare. But surprise! There is also some adult humor, politics, and irreverence in the mix.

Rachel Brennan, Kim Carson, and Richard Ruiz in Kathryn Petersen’s The Three Musketeers (The Later Years): A Musical Panto, with music and lyrics by Michael Ogborn, at People’s Light & Theatre Company. Photo by Mark Garvin.

People’s Light & Theatre Company in Malvern mounts its seventh annual holiday panto–the British tradition of winter musical comedy based on familiar fairytales and children’s stories, injected with contemporary references and audience participation.  Pete Pryor, whose direction of Cinderella earned him a Barrymore in 2009, returns again this year for The Three Musketeers (The Later Years), both as the director, and the villain.  The raucous comedy, set in the swashbuckling world of the 17th-century court, runs November 17-January 9, and promises fun for all ages.

Back by popular demand, 1812 Productions makes its annual foray into political comedy with its fifth installment of This Is the Week that Is, which runs December 2-31, at Plays & Players. Written and performed by the popular Week ensemble, this perennial favorite has a script that changes nightly with the evening news.  Local, national, and international events are all fair game for parody, in a show designed to laugh at, instead of lamenting, the present state of the world.  What better holiday gift?

Anthony Lawton in The Great Divorce, from Lantern Theater Company’s Between Heaven and Hell: The Anthony Lawton Festival. Photo by Janet Embree.

Lantern Theater Company celebrates one of Philadelphia’s most compelling actor/playwrights in a three-play extravaganza, Between Heaven and Hell:  The Anthony Lawton Festival, comprising C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, Shel Silverstein’s The Devil and Billy Markham, and Lawton’s autobiographical Heresy.  If you haven’t seen these works before–or even if you have–be sure to catch this “spiritual theater for a secular audience,” performed in repertory December 3-19, at St. Stephen’s Theater.  Lawton is the master of intense one-man shows, intimate self-examination, and pondering the virtues and vices of organized religion.  He will make you think, make you laugh, and make you very uncomfortable, as a great performer should.

Derick Loafmann in Flashpoint Theatre Company’s The SantaLand Diaries. Photo by Arthur Malavasic.

Now in its seventh successful year, Flashpoint Theatre Company offers a new take on David Sedaris’s autobiographical The SantaLand Diaries, with Flashpoint’s own Noah Herman directing.  Chronicling the author’s true stint as a Macy’s elf during the Christmas shopping season in Manhattan, company founder Derick Loafmann reprises his hilarious role as Crumpet, Santa’s smart-mouthed helper, from December 1-19, at the Adrienne.

View the original article here

Prints return–John Caperton on artblog radio next Monday

Used to be prints were dowdy and derriere garde. No more. Silk screens, books, zines, yurts. Print Center Curator John Caperton knows where the wild things are, and talks to us next week about the print revival among young artists. He also talks about the The Print Center past and future and Philagrafika’s halo effect on a venerable but modest institution that usually works in the shadow of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Below is a 29-second sample clip from our talk. Tune in next Monday to hear the entire episode.

John Caperton–29-second sample

View the original article here

Books for Holiday Gifts

Here are some books which might solve some of your holiday gift problems:

Anton Radevsky and Emma Saunders Voyage to the Heart of Matter; the Atlas Experiment at CERN (Papadakis Publisher: Winterbourne, UK, 2009; 2nd ed. 2010; distributed by Antique Collectors Club, New York) ISBN-10: 190650606X, 13: 978-1906506063

Whether you think art and science are on parallel journeys, find beauty in industrial architecture or just love pop-up books, this is a treat. It’s hard to imagine who conceived the idea of doing a 3-d book on the Large Hadron Collider, the experimental equipment near Geneva constructed to explore the most basic building blocks of the universe; it was written by Emma Saunders of CERN (the European Center for Nuclear Research, which has a wonderful website) with paper engineer and illustrator Anton Radevsky. In order to complete the model of the accelerator, additional pieces enclosed in an envelope inserted into the center of the pop-up must be assembled; but who said physics was supposed to be simple? The pop-up of the Big Bang requires no further effort. It’s a bargain at less than $25 (if the price is much higher, it’s for the first edition).

Lisa Kirwin Lists, To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art (Princeton Architectural Press: New York, 2010) ISBN 978-1-56898-888-7

This is a good stocking-stuffer for your more obsessive friends and for those who like books that can be read in one-page modules.  The Archives of American Art has thousands of lists, explains Lisa Kirwin, curator of manuscripts, who conceived the book: to-do lists, membership lists, lists of paintings sold, appointment lists and so on.  Sixty-nine are reproduced in manuscript with a few sentences of context; an appendix gives selected transcriptions and translations. They run from the mundane to the didactic: Adolf Konrad’s entirely visual catalog of things to be packed for a trip, including two pair of undershorts and 23 tubes of paint (as well as 2 trays of watercolors, bottles of ink, and various drawing implements);  Robert Morris on alternative terms for earth works: dirt art, … geometric quagmires,… minimal muck,… Nature at her fatuous flat chested best; Gordon Newton’s $100 invoice for Sam Wagstaff, who was supporting him, which includes Bad Habits $5;  Hans Hoffman’s “About the Relations of Students and Teachers”: 1) What a teacher should know from the beginning: there is always an apostle who will deny his master.

Tadao Ando's Chichu Art Museum (2004)

Museums in the 21st Century; Concepts, Projects, Buildings Suzanne Greub and Thierry Grub, editors (Prestel: Munich, 2008, 2nd edition) ISBN  978-3-7913-3840-8

Museums are prestige projects, and their planning and construction continues around the globe.  Richard Rogers’ and Renzo Piano’s Centre Pompidou, built in Paris in 1977, presented a totally new conception of museum architecture and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (1991-97) made the building itself the star as well as the driver of civic prosperity. The editors think 21st century museums needn’t choose between designing buildings either to house collections or to make independent statements. While a number of books address recent museum architecture, none is so deeply informative and international as this volume, the catalog for an international exhibition that opened in 2006 and is booked through 2011, with further venues possible.  One article introduces the general theme and four further articles discuss recent museum projects in Japan, Australia, Europe and the U.S. The strength of the book is its illustrations: 27 museum projects (a few, such as Gehry’s for the Corcoran, may never be realized) include plans, various analytical drawings, sketches and site plans. Each has a short essay by various academics, curators and writers. The book itself is a beautifully designed object (except for the dust jacket), with a textured, silver binding that makes a suitably architectural reference.

beetroot ravioli with beetroot water ice, pistachio and yoghurt at elBulli

Food for Thought, Thought for Food Edited by Richard Hamilton and Vicente Todoli (Actar, Barcelona and New York, 2009) ISBN 978-84-96954-68-7

The British artist Richard Hamilton and Vicente Todoli, then Director of Tate Modern, have edited this most odd but intriguing book about one of the participants in Documenta 12 (in 2007): Ferran Adrià. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, Adrià is the proprietor and chef of elBulli, a restaurant in a small, Catalan town on the Costa Brava which has widely been hailed as one of the world’s greatest for a number of years. The book will likely be cataloged in the food section, which is a shame, since it more properly addresses definitions of art (why a chef was chosen to participate in a major international art exhibition) and curatorial issues: in what form could a chef participate?  It includes a visual catalog of all of Adrià’s creations (albeit postage stamp sized), a number of more proper illustrations of dishes, a menu for Documenta and photographs of Documenta’s diners.  There’s also an amusing survey of 20th century (and occasional earlier) artworks involving food, from the expected (Daniel Spoerri, Dieter Roth, Antoni Miralda, Rikrit Taravanija) to the surprising (Paul McCarthy, Martha Rosler, Bruce Nauman, Peiro Manzoni). From the silver binding with Matt Groening’s portrait of Adrià on the cover to the assorted fold-outs and inserts, the book is imaginatively designed, and will more likely be appreciated by readers of art books than cookbooks.

Woman's Ceremonial Skirt, Malaysian Borneo, Sarawak

Five Centuries of Indonesian Textiles Ruth Barnes and Mary Hunt Kahlenberg, eds. (Delmonico Books, Prestel: Munich and New York, 2010) ISBN 978-3-7913-5071-4

Indonesia has one of the world’s greatest textile traditions, based on extraordinary weaving and dying, but it interests textile scholars and anthropologists for another reason: the thousands of islands each have individual traditions, which can be studied in isolation and in interaction with each other. Furthermore, Indonesia’s location at the nexus of sea trade means that its textiles also interacted with those of China, India, and later with Europe. This absolutely beautiful volume will interest anyone who cares about textiles and patterned decoration, and the illustrations alone will yield endless information and pleasure. But it is also a serious scholarly enterprise, with seven European and American authors contributing studies on the scientific dating of the textiles, research on batik, technique and meaning in ritual textiles, textiles and identity, and several other subjects. Its full-color illustrations are splendid, including many details as well as numerous early 20th century and contemporary photographs of the textiles in use.  It includes a glossary and bibliography.  The book’s handsome, slip-covered design acknowledges the visual richness of its contents and it is a beautiful object to hold and to read.

View the original article here

Book review – Q&A’s done well, Mineral Spirits, Thomas Nozkowski, Paul Cava

Exhibition catalogs often include an interview with the artist along with an in-depth essay or two. Of course there’s also those glossy color plates like eye candy — all of which makes these documentary books fabulous to look at and read and useful in extending the life of the show. Two recent catalogs (and one show brochure ) that do the Q&A well are the ICA’s slim, notebook-like volume, “Mineral Spirits,” for the Anne Chu and Matthew Monahan exhibit (closing Sunday, Dec. 5); “Thomas Nozkowski,” the catalog for the artist’s exhibit at Pace (closing Saturday, Dec. 4); and “Paul Cava Thirty Years,” a four-fold brochure for Cava’s retrospective at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery (extended to Dec. 7).  All three of the exhibits are still up and definitely worth a visit.

Installation shot from the opening, ICA, Anne Chu and Matthew Monahan, Mineral Spirits

“Mineral Spirits” the two-person show at ICA featuring sculpture by Anne Chu and sculpture and drawings by Matthew Monathan has a little book that’s an extended Q&A between the artists and the show’s organizer, Curator Jenelle Porter.

After several pages devoted to defense of figurative art (both artists are in the statuary tradition) these two tidbits are unearthed — Monahan loves Flemish primitives like Grunwald, Jan van Eyck, Durer, Bosch and Breughel.  And, he finds it hard to make hands and arms — very good information when looking at any sculpture, actually.

But then, talking about pedestals, Monahan, who is a sparky guy in this trialog, erupts with a small essay on sculpture’s place in the world — and art’s place in the world.  It’s worth the price of the book. Art is this special thing, Monahan says. It’s not going to change the world…and please, he continues, let’s have fewer installations.

(P. 17) Monahan …For a long time it seemed like the goal of sculpture was that it would dissolve into the expanded field, that it would take on architecture, it would take on the great outdoors, and then it would have to take on politics once it got outside. It had to go ahead and change the world. But there is something about the pedestal that’s about framing, that’s saying, “Look, I’m just taking care of my little corner of shit here, and don’t bother me.”  It’s a closing off, it’s definitely a shutting down; it’s a retraction.
Chu Well, that’s a presentation.
Monahan It’s a presentation, but it’s also saying, “Look, art is a special little zone here, and it’s not going to try to be anything else.” We’re not trying to envelop you in an installation experience. So in that way, it’s quite regressive. I’m speaking personally. I’m tired of this thing of art wrapping around me. I’m tired of the immersive experience. I’m tired of wondering if something is art or not. These were all things that were celebrated during my education. And I’m saying no, it’s art. The only place in the world this can survive is in art, and that’s a very special place in the world. We’re going to give some respect to art, which is very contradictory, very much against most of what I was taught. It’s precious, it’s fetishistic, it’s the return of the autonomous–all of that stuff. It’s the commodity. it’s all these bad things.
Chu It’s an object.
Monahan Well it’s not even an object; it’s art, which is a different, higher form than an object.

Later on Monahan again cuts through a wall of words and spits what he actually is after in his work.  He talks about his relationship to the art market and the canon.  Tres interesant.

(P. 21) Monahan Tragic poetry. That’s what I’m after. I want it to feel like some of my favorite songs. I want to look at it and have that feeling that some of my favorite songs can have: heartbreak, memory, mortality, life force…..I feel sometimes I should be harder, cooler. I could iron out some of the emotional qualities in my work, and the sentimentality. But then I think maybe I’d rather have a short-term buzz than try to hammer out my idiosyncrasies to fit into the canon.
Porter It would be paralyzing to try to make work that would fit the canon, whatever that might be.
Monahan Yes, but you walk this way and that. You know there are moves you can make in your work. There are things you could do, directions you could take. I think I’ll just stay in this ghetto for a bit, and that’s where I’ll find my truths.

Mineral Spirits
Anne Chu and Matthew Monahan in conversation with Curator Jenelle Porter
ICA Philadelphia

Thomas Nozkowski, installation shot from his current show at Pace. l, Untitled (N-25) 2010, walnut ink and pencil on paper; r, Untitled (8-133) 2010, oil on linen on panel

Thomas Nozkowski, maker of life-inspired abstractions, each one of which is like a delicious Rubik’s cube on the wall, exercises his Zen muscle in talking with Garth Lewis, whom he’s known for many years. One of the best passages in a very readable and relatively short Q&A has the artist talking about having made work for 35 years.

Nozkowski …The hardest thing I have ever had to do as an artist is to become an old one. I actually know how to make a Nozkowski now, and that can be a real trap.

Other chunks of information imparted include that the artist early on decided to work small, and on canvas board (a hated support in the art world); and that he was making work to hang on his friends’ apartment walls.  In the 1970s he dabbled in sculpture–artfully arranged scavenged stuff on the floor (one image suggests they looked like a Nozkowski painting but made with gravel, clay, cloth, glass and other material). People loved the sculpture and thought he had embraced the “Painting is Dead” movement, which was prevalent at the time (he hadn’t).   He was back to painting in short order.

Thomas Nozkowski
In conversation with Garth Lewis
Pace Gallery

Paul Cava from his show at Rosenwald Wolf Gallery, Nemaleon 2, 2005, archival pigment print, ed. 5

The 4-fold brochure accompanying Paul Cava’s retrospective at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery (extended to Dec. 7) is not a catalog per se but with 12 color images and a wonderful Q&A between Cava and Curator Sid Sachs, the piece is comprehensive as a book.  Loaded with history of the Philadelphia art scene, which Cava and Sachs have played major roles in for thirty or more years, the piece susses out the underpinnings of the artist’s sexy and poetic works.

Cava is trained as a photographer (he went to Rochester Institute of Technology) but his first art experience, was poetry, he says.  While in college in New York in the 70s he headed up the student literary magazine and went to Soho openings where he and his buddies handed out poems from their publication.

Cava arrived in Philadelphia — which Sachs calls “a hard art city” — in 1975.  After waiting tables at The Commissary restaurant he goes to Paris and studies up on early French photography, comes home to find a promised job at the PMA is a fiction, and finally, goes on to establish a gallery, which he funds through sales of a cache of antique French Barbizon photos found in an antique show on Strawberry St.

It’s a pithy interview, with Sachs’ questions including lots of details and Cava’s answers likewise.  We learn that Cava was photographer Jock Sturges‘ first dealer.  And we are reminded (those of us who remember Cava’s gallery spaces in Old City and Walnut St. the 80s and 90s) that he had a great gallery that showed Thomas Nozkowski, Ray Metzger, Neyssa Grassi, Francesco Clemente, Sharon Horvath, Susan Fenton, Steven Baris and a host of others.  Cava takes photographs as well as appropriating found imagery.  One of his favorite subjects is his wife, Devise Aveyou.  Sachs brings up Denise in one question then asks, obviously referring to a similar relationship between another husband and wife/muse, “How does it feel to be Philadelphia’s Stieglitz?”  It’s a great comparison.

Sachs hits a nerve when he asks whether Cava’s work, with its use of antique source material, is anomalous and out of its time.  It’s a great exchange and the artist gets the last word and what he says is very fine.

Sachs…Each part of your process evokes the past.  So here you are in the twenty-first century.  How do you fit into your time?  Do you feel somehow part of an anomalous parallel world?

Cava I understand the gist of your question but I feel you are stacking the deck a bit, for example, in the ink series I paint over other contemporary subjects besides old master paintings.  There are the images of the victims of the Khmer Rouge and the Model and Man/Woman series, hardly romantic or nostalgic.  In any case, I will cede your example for the sake of the larger point that you are making.  I may use elements of the old in my work but seek in relation to other pictorial elements, a timelessness and most importantly an intimacy through metaphor.  that is what I feel gives the work relevance and engages it in the here and now.  I go for an unnerving sensual experience not for a nostalgic comfort zone.  My concept of time is inclusive of the past but with a pulse.  I often ground my work in natural forms because they are outside of specific culture and universal.  Upon this ground I try to portray the humanist condition of being alive in a world where fear,love, anxiety, desire, and loss cross fertilize.  It’s a sexy, messy business but someone has to do it, right?

Paul Cava Thirty Years
Paul Cava in conversation with Sid Sachs
Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery

View the original article here

Book review – Q&A’s done well, Mineral Spirits, Thomas Nozkowski, Paul Cava

Exhibition catalogs often include an interview with the artist along with an in-depth essay or two. Of course there’s also those glossy color plates like eye candy — all of which makes these documentary books fabulous to look at and read and useful in extending the life of the show. Two recent catalogs (and one show brochure ) that do the Q&A well are the ICA’s slim, notebook-like volume, “Mineral Spirits,” for the Anne Chu and Matthew Monahan exhibit (closing Sunday, Dec. 5); “Thomas Nozkowski,” the catalog for the artist’s exhibit at Pace (closing Saturday, Dec. 4); and “Paul Cava Thirty Years,” a four-fold brochure for Cava’s retrospective at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery (extended to Dec. 7).  All three of the exhibits are still up and definitely worth a visit.

Installation shot from the opening, ICA, Anne Chu and Matthew Monahan, Mineral Spirits

“Mineral Spirits” the two-person show at ICA featuring sculpture by Anne Chu and sculpture and drawings by Matthew Monathan has a little book that’s an extended Q&A between the artists and the show’s organizer, Curator Jenelle Porter.

After several pages devoted to defense of figurative art (both artists are in the statuary tradition) these two tidbits are unearthed — Monahan loves Flemish primitives like Grunwald, Jan van Eyck, Durer, Bosch and Breughel.  And, he finds it hard to make hands and arms — very good information when looking at any sculpture, actually.

But then, talking about pedestals, Monahan, who is a sparky guy in this trialog, erupts with a small essay on sculpture’s place in the world — and art’s place in the world.  It’s worth the price of the book. Art is this special thing, Monahan says. It’s not going to change the world…and please, he continues, let’s have fewer installations.

(P. 17) Monahan …For a long time it seemed like the goal of sculpture was that it would dissolve into the expanded field, that it would take on architecture, it would take on the great outdoors, and then it would have to take on politics once it got outside. It had to go ahead and change the world. But there is something about the pedestal that’s about framing, that’s saying, “Look, I’m just taking care of my little corner of shit here, and don’t bother me.”  It’s a closing off, it’s definitely a shutting down; it’s a retraction.
Chu Well, that’s a presentation.
Monahan It’s a presentation, but it’s also saying, “Look, art is a special little zone here, and it’s not going to try to be anything else.” We’re not trying to envelop you in an installation experience. So in that way, it’s quite regressive. I’m speaking personally. I’m tired of this thing of art wrapping around me. I’m tired of the immersive experience. I’m tired of wondering if something is art or not. These were all things that were celebrated during my education. And I’m saying no, it’s art. The only place in the world this can survive is in art, and that’s a very special place in the world. We’re going to give some respect to art, which is very contradictory, very much against most of what I was taught. It’s precious, it’s fetishistic, it’s the return of the autonomous–all of that stuff. It’s the commodity. it’s all these bad things.
Chu It’s an object.
Monahan Well it’s not even an object; it’s art, which is a different, higher form than an object.

Later on Monahan again cuts through a wall of words and spits what he actually is after in his work.  He talks about his relationship to the art market and the canon.  Tres interesant.

(P. 21) Monahan Tragic poetry. That’s what I’m after. I want it to feel like some of my favorite songs. I want to look at it and have that feeling that some of my favorite songs can have: heartbreak, memory, mortality, life force…..I feel sometimes I should be harder, cooler. I could iron out some of the emotional qualities in my work, and the sentimentality. But then I think maybe I’d rather have a short-term buzz than try to hammer out my idiosyncrasies to fit into the canon.
Porter It would be paralyzing to try to make work that would fit the canon, whatever that might be.
Monahan Yes, but you walk this way and that. You know there are moves you can make in your work. There are things you could do, directions you could take. I think I’ll just stay in this ghetto for a bit, and that’s where I’ll find my truths.

Mineral Spirits
Anne Chu and Matthew Monahan in conversation with Curator Jenelle Porter
ICA Philadelphia

Thomas Nozkowski, installation shot from his current show at Pace. l, Untitled (N-25) 2010, walnut ink and pencil on paper; r, Untitled (8-133) 2010, oil on linen on panel

Thomas Nozkowski, maker of life-inspired abstractions, each one of which is like a delicious Rubik’s cube on the wall, exercises his Zen muscle in talking with Garth Lewis, whom he’s known for many years. One of the best passages in a very readable and relatively short Q&A has the artist talking about having made work for 35 years.

Nozkowski …The hardest thing I have ever had to do as an artist is to become an old one. I actually know how to make a Nozkowski now, and that can be a real trap.

Other chunks of information imparted include that the artist early on decided to work small, and on canvas board (a hated support in the art world); and that he was making work to hang on his friends’ apartment walls.  In the 1970s he dabbled in sculpture–artfully arranged scavenged stuff on the floor (one image suggests they looked like a Nozkowski painting but made with gravel, clay, cloth, glass and other material). People loved the sculpture and thought he had embraced the “Painting is Dead” movement, which was prevalent at the time (he hadn’t).   He was back to painting in short order.

Thomas Nozkowski
In conversation with Garth Lewis
Pace Gallery

Paul Cava from his show at Rosenwald Wolf Gallery, Nemaleon 2, 2005, archival pigment print, ed. 5

The 4-fold brochure accompanying Paul Cava’s retrospective at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery (extended to Dec. 7) is not a catalog per se but with 12 color images and a wonderful Q&A between Cava and Curator Sid Sachs, the piece is comprehensive as a book.  Loaded with history of the Philadelphia art scene, which Cava and Sachs have played major roles in for thirty or more years, the piece susses out the underpinnings of the artist’s sexy and poetic works.

Cava is trained as a photographer (he went to Rochester Institute of Technology) but his first art experience, was poetry, he says.  While in college in New York in the 70s he headed up the student literary magazine and went to Soho openings where he and his buddies handed out poems from their publication.

Cava arrived in Philadelphia — which Sachs calls “a hard art city” — in 1975.  After waiting tables at The Commissary restaurant he goes to Paris and studies up on early French photography, comes home to find a promised job at the PMA is a fiction, and finally, goes on to establish a gallery, which he funds through sales of a cache of antique French Barbizon photos found in an antique show on Strawberry St.

It’s a pithy interview, with Sachs’ questions including lots of details and Cava’s answers likewise.  We learn that Cava was photographer Jock Sturges‘ first dealer.  And we are reminded (those of us who remember Cava’s gallery spaces in Old City and Walnut St. the 80s and 90s) that he had a great gallery that showed Thomas Nozkowski, Ray Metzger, Neyssa Grassi, Francesco Clemente, Sharon Horvath, Susan Fenton, Steven Baris and a host of others.  Cava takes photographs as well as appropriating found imagery.  One of his favorite subjects is his wife, Devise Aveyou.  Sachs brings up Denise in one question then asks, obviously referring to a similar relationship between another husband and wife/muse, “How does it feel to be Philadelphia’s Stieglitz?”  It’s a great comparison.

Sachs hits a nerve when he asks whether Cava’s work, with its use of antique source material, is anomalous and out of its time.  It’s a great exchange and the artist gets the last word and what he says is very fine.

Sachs…Each part of your process evokes the past.  So here you are in the twenty-first century.  How do you fit into your time?  Do you feel somehow part of an anomalous parallel world?

Cava I understand the gist of your question but I feel you are stacking the deck a bit, for example, in the ink series I paint over other contemporary subjects besides old master paintings.  There are the images of the victims of the Khmer Rouge and the Model and Man/Woman series, hardly romantic or nostalgic.  In any case, I will cede your example for the sake of the larger point that you are making.  I may use elements of the old in my work but seek in relation to other pictorial elements, a timelessness and most importantly an intimacy through metaphor.  that is what I feel gives the work relevance and engages it in the here and now.  I go for an unnerving sensual experience not for a nostalgic comfort zone.  My concept of time is inclusive of the past but with a pulse.  I often ground my work in natural forms because they are outside of specific culture and universal.  Upon this ground I try to portray the humanist condition of being alive in a world where fear,love, anxiety, desire, and loss cross fertilize.  It’s a sexy, messy business but someone has to do it, right?

Paul Cava Thirty Years
Paul Cava in conversation with Sid Sachs
Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery

View the original article here