Arny Nadler "Beacons" and Works on Paper by Select Artists

All That Tends To Purify: 9 Abstract Painters


New Website Scheduled to Launch this Fall

TWENTY 08

The hip, the sick, and the beautiful! TWENTY 08 features 20 of our favorite artists: Jamie Adams, Phyllis Bramson, Art Chantry, Kelly Chorpening, Julia Clift, Don Colley, Elizabeth Ferry, Bill Fick, Cameron Fuller, Glenn Goldberg, Tom Huck, Jerald Ieans, Richard Knight, Larry Krone, Michael Krueger, Gary Panter, Tom Reed, Fred Stonehouse, Gary Tenenbaum, Cheryl Wassenaar.

Landscape Show

Phyllis Bramson and 40 Artists: Small Scale

Stan Strembicki and Ken Brown

Bill Kreplin and Cameron Fuller

Jeff Aeling and Belinda Lee

BLAB! Art

TO VIEW ART CHECKOUT BLAB! ART IN LINKS AT THE TOP OF PAGE

BLAB THIS!

BLAB! is an annual coffee-table publication and showcase of fine arts, illustration, and sequential art, and a gold-standard in the world of the professional visual arts. Many of BLAB!'s contributors through the years have gone onto huge success in the gallery world. The artists in this exhibition include:

Gary Baseman
Greg Clarke
Drew Friedman
Fred Stonehouse
Travis Louie
Tom Huck
Ryan Heshka
Esther Pearl Watson
Teresa James
Chris Pyle
Walter Minus
Laura Levine
Richard Beard
Travis Lampe
Kevin Scalzo

BLAB! is conceived, edited and designed by five-time New York Festival of Advertising award-winner Monte Beauchamp. His books include: The Life and Times of R. Crumb (St. Martin's Press), Striking Images: Vintage Matchcover Art (Chronicle Books), The Devil in Design (Fantagraphics), and New and Used BLAB! (Chronicle Books)


Metapsychology Online Review

"Perhaps it is a stretch, but I'm irresistibly drawn to compare the artwork in BLAB! with a great deal of outsider art. Outsider art, or art brut, is the category for creative work done by people outside the establishment, away from art schools and ambitions of fame and fortune. It is often only discovered after an artist's death, when relatives go through their belongings and come across years of work done in private."
- Christian Perring, Ph.D.

St. Louis Magazine -Culture: October, 2007

Monte Beauchamp's cult graphics annual, BLAB!, was called a "New Yorker for mutants" by the L.A. Reader. This month, Philip Slein Gallery, showcases the work of 15 international artists whose work has been showcased in its pages.

Michael Krueger, Lisa Bulawsky and Dan Colley

A Post-Modern Peep Show at the Philip Slein Gallery

The land inhibited by Michael Krueger’s characters is a kind of Westworld; Lisa Bulawsky calls the place her characters inhabit Shiftland; Don Colley identifies the place inhabited by his characters as Coulrotopia. All three provide metaphors for the post-modern.

The roots of the Post-Modern can be traced back to at least the First World War when the French linguist and father of Structuralism, Ferdinand de Saussure, precipitated an intellectual crisis by explaining how language undermines itself. Lacan said, “The slightest alteration in the relation between man and the signifier changes the whole course of history … by modifying the lines which anchor his being.” The land underneath our feet is undermined --it drifts, it shifts like a clown trying to walk after being hit on the head with a giant hammer. It is an ongoing comic apocalypse, characterized by ridiculous costuming and misguided optimism.

Krueger, Bulawsky, and Colley are the printmakers whose job it is to depict the characters inhabiting this unsettling new world.

PEEP THIS RIVERFRONT TIMES September 13-19

The new group show at the Philip Slein Gallery (1319 Washington Avenue) Post-Modern Peep Show, has a racy name, but the pleasures on display are of the metaphysical variety, not the carnal. The three printmakers whos works are included --Michael Krueger, Lisa Bulawsky and Don Colley --offer glimpes into other worlds rather than boudoir fantasies. Krueger creates images reminiscent fo the mythological Wild West, a stark landscape of lone figures standing against the barren world.

Bulawsky's prints are of a realm she calls "Shiftland"; i t's a mostly featureless world tinted in taupe and beige, with tiny human figures dwarfed by massive poppies and floating mouth-like shapes.
Colley refers to his world ad "Coulrotopia," a land of magnificent vistas and melancholy individuals. Post-Modern Peep Show opens with a free public reception from 6-9pm on Friday on September, 14th and the show remains up through Saturday, October 6th.

In Memoriam; Arthur Osver and Ernestine Betsberg

This show celebrates the lives and careers of Arthur Osver (1912-2006) and Ernestine Betsberg(1910-2007) two of the last and best modernist painters in the history of St. Louis.

Arthur and Ernestine were students of the painter Boris Anisfeld at the Art Institute of Chicago. The graduated in 1937 and 1938 respectively, lived in Europe, and settled in New York in1939. The work in this show spans the eight decades in which Arthur and Ernestine worked and lived. For the most part, they only got better.

As Arthur said: "It takes a lifetime. The visual artist matures slowly. Look at Matisse, Renoir, Titian.” Judge for yourself: In this exhibition the gallery presents some of their earliest works and some of their last.

Cheryl Wassenaar and Mel Watkin

A Statement from Cheryl Wassenaar:

I construct my work from fragments of discarded commercial signage. Scavenged from roadways and the wastelands of commercial sprawl, these wooden signs are the loud voices of city commerce, crowding our urban landscapes with the insistent messages of industry. The language that appears on signs is direct and economical. I disrupt its efficiency, breaking the text from context and rules of syntax, redirecting attention to the subtle nuances of visual and verbal form.

The work often has a nostalgic tone, as its surfaces carry the residue of accumulated experiences, traces of wear and weather. These signs mark specific places in our community. They are part of our local consumer culture, a link in the chain of communication between buyer and seller, venue and audience. Signs that are no longer in use document things that are past, changed, or failed. When a business closes, the sign is often the last to go.

Moving from an earlier interest in the associative properties of typography, in this recent work I reconsider the sign as a carrier of failed communication. I see our culture’s proliferation of homogenized text as a means to distribute information quickly and globally. Hurried clips of text scroll across televisions and flash incessently on computer screens. Stuttering bits of sound struggle on satelite-challenged cell phones. What gets lost in translation? Why is language inept? I’m interested in language barriers, voice-overs, short-hand text-messaging, bad grammar, acronyms, and scrambled text. Wa(lled) describes overlapping conversations in two languages. “Information” is literally fractured in glitch and spiraling uselessly in spin. Text hides underneath layers of implied surfaces; it accumulates and spills over edges in works like sprawl--composed from piles of real estate signs. In the free-standing communication tower, Tower of Babble 1 (after the Biblical story of Babel), overlapping rectangles read as an urban skyline, each filled with its own text-based system, indecipherable to others, resulting in a chaotic competition of language.

My self-imposed design perimeters in this body of work are growing narrow as I set limitations on my process and materials, using every square inch of my source material. My scavenging comes from a sense of frugality, a need to preserve and prolong, to “make good use of.” It is a response to our culture of excessive choices and naive belief in material surplus. I’m also interested in the role of craft, with its ethics of labor, its respect for the material it uses, and its reliance on the hand. As I continue to build, I continue to collect scrap pieces of smaller and smaller fragments. I have three generations of carpenters before me, and can hear their voices in my head as I turn to the trash bin with a sliver of wooden sign in my hand: no, that’s good wood—you could build something from it. And they’re right. So I turn away and stack it in a pile for later use.

Mel Watkin
Artist's Statement:
Map Based Works

My recent works-on-paper (2000-2007) include several ongoing series of drawings on roadmaps: Compass Rose (flowers and other plant life on road maps), Waterworks (roadmaps in which all the roads are replaced with waterways) and Sprawl (roadmaps overrun with fungi). Each of these works begins with a tattered, out-of-date road map, most from my car’s glove compartment. The original maps have been significantly altered; in some the roads are replaced with rivers or clogged with flowering vines, in others, coastlines are flooded and inland seas rehydrated. In all of the work, erosion, water, overgrown plant life and fungi have replaced humanity as the determining force on the land. I like the fact that in many cases, in the drawing Compass Rose: Wyoming for instance, these changes could represent the past as well as the future.

I have been drawing on surfaces other than plain paper for a number of years mainly because I prefer materials that come with a certain amount of baggage, imbedded history or automatic associations. (Recent examples include works on pillowcases, lace and tea towels.) Also, while my drawings of flowers and fungi are rendered realistically, they are not drawn from life and do not actually exist. They are compilations––inventions––based on the real flora and fungi I encounter daily around my home in rural Southern Illinois. I try to imbue all of this work with a sense of foreboding. As we know from recent events, despite nature’s beauty, complexity and delicacy, it can easily rear up and assert its claim on our lives.

Tom Reed and James Barsness

Boys & Girls, Birds & Squirrels, Pull Your Canoes Around the Fire to Hear Ranger Tom’s Tale of “The Land Beyond!” The vintage nostalgia created by Tom Reed, master printer for Washington University’s Island Press, is showing at the Philip Slein Gallery.

Tom Reed’s new show, “The Land Beyond” effectively fuses multi-panel grids with the scenery of every boy’s nostalgic childhood. The charm of thrift store junk, Boy Scout manuals, coloring books and beach toys transport the viewer to a carefree session of Saturday morning cartoons. Reed’s grids create a balance and regularity, which add to the comfort of his warm imagery.

In the smaller gallery, is new work by James Barsness in his first Saint Louis showing, “You Owe Me.” Barsness exhibition, like Reed’s, reveals a private world, only no Boy-Scouts here, but the fairly-tale land of outlandish rituals. Barsness’ images are loaded with a cryptic symbolism narrating birth, childhood, death and sex. These images, part hallucinatory, part seductive, trigger something in the base, primal nature of humanity. The friendly tendrils bordering each painting act as kind of looking glass –pulling you into a place where it is impossible to draw a line between the mortal and fairy-tale.

Glenn Goldberg and NYC Artists

The Search for Spring Begins March 2nd at the Philip Slein Gallery.
The Philip Slein Gallery, in conjunction with The Jeffrey Hartz Gallery, is proud to announce Glenn Goldberg’s first show in St. Louis since 1990. Goldberg lives and works in New York City where he pursues his painting career and teaches at Cooper Union. He is a painter of richly colored, luminous decorative designs and objects in an abstract style. Many of his works are geometric and resemble kaleidoscopes, stained glass, or "fantastic flowers." It has been suggested that his work "tickles" the eye.

Mr. Goldberg will be presenting his new flower paintings in a show titled In Search of Spring. In addition to his exhibition, Goldberg has used his extensive contacts to curate a show of small scale work by fellow New York artists that will run simultaneously. The artists showing include: Pedro Barbeito, Alex Blau, Karen Dow, Rico Gatson, Judy Glantzman,Vander McLain, Paul McLean, Jasmine Sian, Christopher Mir, Dana Frankfort, Tom Andersen, Regina Granne and Kristin Calabrese.

Please join Glenn Goldberg at the Philip Slein Gallery as we search for spring in the frozen city where Goldberg’s flowers are the first to push their delicate and brightly colored bulbs through the snowy frost of a frigid late winter.

Jamie Adams and Catherine Howe

Noir-Inspired Paintings Darken the Mood at the Philip Slein Gallery! Washington U. professor Jamie Adams, one of a generation of new figurative painters, is having his first solo show in the Lou, Jeannie and Other Dreamies.

In the great tradition of European painters who paint themselves into their pictures, Jamie goes one step beyond by injecting himself into filmic interiors, for example: his portrait of himself as a young artist sketching a semi-nude Jean Seberg –dreamy Jeannie-- dreamy in the sense of a young boy’s dream.

Whether it’s Jean Seberg in Breathless or Marilyn Monroe in Niagara, Adams’ subject matter is a boy’s lust for the femme fatale –a lust echoed by the painter’s lust for truth in the modern world. The image of the female, debased and degraded by the chaos of media and technology, is redeemed via painting by the acquisition of an aura.

In addition, the gallery will present the work of New York painter, Catherine Howe. Ms. Howe will present her new animal paintings in an exhibition titled, Live Animals.

Noted painter April Gornick has written a brief essay to accompany the exhibition.

Ronald Leax & Ken Steinbach

Ronald Leax and Ken Steinbach, November 17-December 23, Philip Slein Gallery. Leax, the city's most beloved sculptor, Washington University art professor, and mad scientist will dazzle and challenge gallery goers with his highly original and critically acclaimed sculptures that examine the confluence of the machine and the body. Leax has been cloistered in his laboratory/studio for the past two years working well into the night, where strange sounds and flashing lights have been seen, but for now only Igor knows the wonders that will be revealed in his show titled Anatomisms Steinbach, from St. Paul, Minnesota, will be showing his new brightly colored and shiny gestural paintings on plywood. Both shows open on November 17 with a public opening from 6-9pm. Runs through December 23. Gallery hours are Tuesday - Saturday 10-5pm. www.philipsleingallery.com. call 314-621-4634 for more information.

Gary Panter and Art Chantry

Gary Panter and Art Chantry (Oct. 13 – Nov. 11) Philip Slein Gallery. You won’t want to miss this exhibition of the work of two of the most influential graphic artists of their generation. Panter, the “King of Punk Art”, known for his underground comics and his legendary set designs for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, will be showing his newest paintings and drawings! Chantry, the “King of Grunge Art”, famed for his poster and album cover designs for Seattle’s grunge music scene, will show a selection of his most famous posters! Time: Tuesday-Saturday 10am to 5 pm. Free Admission. For more info call (314) 621-4634 or visit www.philipsleingallery.com (1319 Washington Ave. Downtown)

The King of Punk Art Meets the King of Grunge Art at the Philip Slein Gallery October 13. The Philip Slein Gallery proudly presents two of the top graphic artists in the world, Gary Panter and Art Chantry.

Illustrator, painter, designer and part-time musician, Gary Panter is a child of the ‘50s who blossomed in the full glare of the psychedelic ‘60s and, after surviving underground during the ‘70s, finally made his mark in the ‘80s as head set designer for the successful kid/adult TV show Pee Wee’s Playhouse, a job which brought his jagged art and surreal cartoon ideas into the homes of America and bagged him three Emmy Awards.

Possibly the most influential graphic artist of his generation, Panter was one of the first to stop worrying about graphic perfection, preferring instead to push the underground punk attitude he had nurtured since the ‘70s into his commercial art for established magazines such as, Time, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly and The New Yorker. By deliberately presenting his work with serrated edges instead of clean lines, Panter’s style came as a breath of fresh air to both publishers and audience alike. His enormous body of work has earned him the moniker of “King of Punk Art.”

Just as Grunge is like the bastard child of Punk, so Art Chantry is like a Panter-zombie re-animated. By year 2000, Chantry had worked in Seattle for nearly thirty years, carving out a style that took hold of the popular underground music scene in the early ‘90s. Through his work at an alternative newsweekly named The Rocket, at various record labels, and at classes taught at the School of Visual Concepts, Chantry influenced an entire generation of young graphic designers in the northwest, and eventually across the country.

Gary Panter will present his latest series of large-scale paintings called Swamp Weeds. Art Chantry will present a selection of his most famous posters we like to call Art Chantry’s Greatest Hits. The show is at the Des Lee Gallery, which is supported by Washington University partially through the advocacy of gallery director Philip Slein.

From the St. Louis Post Dispatch Thursday October 12th

David Bonetti
St. Louis Post Dispatch
Visual Art Critic

When Slein saw the catalog, he says, he was excited that it includes a poster by Art Chantry, a famed Seattle poster and album-cover maker then living in St. Louis. Chantry has since moved back to Seattle.

Slein had a highly successful show last year of Chantry's provocative work, the visual correlative of Seattle's grunge music, at his own gallery just a couple of blocks down the street. And when the university decided to show "The Graphic Imperative," he scheduled a new show of Chantry's work at his Philip Slein Gallery, along with paintings by graphic designer Gary Panter.

"It's my job to be a promoter and add layers to experience," Slein says. "Students and others interested in political posters can see the show at Des Lee and then walk down the street to see two of the most influential graphic artists of the past 30 years."

Chantry has been called "the father of grunge" and Panter, whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, is known as "the king of punk," Slein says.

"Chantry couldn't be doing what he's doing if Panter hadn't done what he did first," he says. "It was a natural."

Brandon Anschultz and Larry Krone

Brandon Anschultz and Larry Krone: New Work (Sept. 8—Oct. 7), Philip Slein Gallery. Two of the more interesting examples of local-boy-made-good. Anschultz, making some of the hippest and freshest paintings in the city, is having what will likely be the first of many successes to come. Krone, a graduate of U. City High and darling of the New York art scene, will debut his newest suite of collage/drawings in conjunction with his show at the Contemporary Art Museum.

Brandon Anschultz: Fission, Friction, Fiction

How many times in the contorted continuum of art history has painting been declared dead? Let's not count. Let's do consider, however, the genuine satisfaction gained from the work of young artists of vitality and vision who not only undersatnd that painting is not dead and never will be, but also appreciate painting's limitless potential for thrashing out ideas and making fascinating discoveries. In this vivid and unfailingly rewarding exhibition, Brandon Anschultz shows not only his remarkable facility with paint but also his pure delight in painting images. With a wide repertory of ideas and impules and a penchant for pushing color to extremes, Anschultz's work adds lustrous new piece to the incremental puzzle that is painting

Robert Duffy
Art Critic
Riverfront Times

Anschultz at Slein Gallery

At Philip Slein, area painter Brandon Anschultz is showing 43 new paintings - 18 of them small works arranged tightly in a grid.

The exhibition's title, "Fission, Friction, Fiction," suggests that the work has been the product of struggle. Friction means a rubbing of two objects together but also a difference or conflict, and fission means a splitting apart or division. But the paintings are so suave that there is little hint of the labor required to make them seem so. They are a triumph of fiction - the counterfeiting of something to make it seem like something else - which is art's ground rock.

Anschultz's new paintings mark a departure from his earlier work, but anyone who knows what he has done in recent years would immediately recognize them as his.

The paintings are still done on wood panel, which gives his designs a hard surface on which to lie. In the new works, he doesn't clear-varnish passages of bare wood, covering instead the entire surface with paint.

As before, the paintings are clean: Their facture is smooth, precise and hard-edged; in the few instances where there is a drip, it is intentional and controlled. The color is crisp and clean as well. The work, all non-objective, is cheerful. It suggests an all-American optimism: The present is hunky-dory and the future will be even brighter. But, remember, the paintings are a fiction, a nostalgic dream of a happier past - the '50s.

With his evocation of '50s modernist design and a happy science-fiction view of the future - the atom is our friend! - Anschultz participates in that nostalgia, but he also subtly suggests unease as well. Compositions are not always balanced, imagery dissolves into a blur, harlequin patterns seem not only to disguise something underneath but to threaten with their sharp diamond points.

Anschultz's paintings are pretty but not dumb. They have something in their head.

Slein is also showing collages by Larry Krone, the headliner of the trio of artists opening at the Contemporary Art Museum, so we'll withhold our comments until next week.

David Bonetti
Visual Arts Critic
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Larry Krone: Artist/Entertainer At his opening at the Contemporary, Larry Krone's sister Janet Kennedy was suspended six feet off the ground, singing her heart out about her life, Larry's life, family life and her best friend Eleanor. Her sweet soprano sounded so nice she sang it twice. Kennedy was positioned above the crowd in a Larry-made swing seat that's a variation on those chromy crazed-plastic dinette-set chairs so popular in the 1950s — everybody could see her, and she could survey not only the audience but also her brother's new exhibition. Which is, gentle reader, a knockout. Quirky, irreverent, Dada-all-over-again, bizarre, hyperimaginative: all that plus a triple-gainer into the murky pool of memory. Like the circus, it's a lot of fun. And like the circus, once you make the effort to get beyond the surface, you're transported into the magician's reality. In Krone's world, the most basic materials (including strands of hair and toenail clippings) communicate the most fundamental and complicated components of consciousness and parcel out secrets from the shadowy world of dreams. Stuff from his University City boyhood, from sink traps, from the remnants bin in a fabric store, Krone transforms into little fetish dolls and embroidered objects of ironic sentimentality. Nothing in his repertoire looks like it's worth more than a nickel. Nothing is discarded as irrelevant before being examined for its communicative potential. Such glosses of kitschiness mess with ideas about taste, about perception and about art. Krone's unpretentious charm is disarming, the authenticity of his art, mesmerizing.

Robert Duffy
Art Critic
Riverfront Times

Larry Krone: New Work In addition to his work at the Contemporary (see above), Larry Krone's art is on display at the Philip Slein Gallery downtown. It's a smaller dose of the same medicine, a sure cure for what ails you. At Slein as at the museum, Larry sings his song to you, the one he borrowed from Whitney Houston: "I will always love you," he croons cursively, and you love him right back.

Robert Duffy
Art Critic
Riverfront Times

Summer in the City!

For immediate release:

When You’re Alone and Life is Making You Lonely, You Can Always Go Downtown and See Summer in the City at the Philip Slein Gallery. The Philip Slein Gallery is proud to announce a summer show called Summer in the City featuring selected works by gallery artists. The show will include some of this town’s hottest artists, such as: John Watson, who recently won the Kranzberg Award at Laumeier Sculpture Park. Tom Huck, the wildest and most important printmaker. Art Chantry, the nation’s premiere rock & roll graphic artist and designer of the gallery’s new logo. Other artists featured include: Jeff Aeling, Brandon Anschultz, Ernestine Betsberg, Michael Byron, Bill Fick, Michael Noland, Arthur Osver, Tom Reed, Alison Slein, and Fred Stonehouse.

In addition, the gallery will continue it’s wildly popular wall of small-scale artwork. This installation features over 30 artists with small and reasonably priced works that are available on a cash and carry basis, and the selection is always evolving and changing!

So forget all your troubles, forget all your cares, and go downtown for a hot time: it’s summer in the city!

Calendar Summary:

Who: Philip Slein Gallery Phone:314-621-4634 Hours: Tues.-Sat 10am-5pm

What: Group Art Exhibition: Summer in the City

When: July 7th, artist reception 6-9pm, runs thought August 19th

Where: 1319 Washington Avenue, Downtown St. Louis

Cost: Free and open to the public

Fred Stonehouse and Michael Noland

Philip Slein Gallery Focuses on Nearby Artists

By David Bonetti
POST-DISPATCH VISUAL ARTS CRITIC
06/22/2006

During the three years I've lived in St. Louis, I've often wondered why local museums and galleries seldom showcase artists from other Midwest cities. Through Saturday, the Philip Slein Gallery is taking a rare look outside the Lou at artists from other flyover-states. The experience is worth a stop-over.

The major Midwest artist movement of the past half-century has been the Chicago Imagists, and both Slein artists, Michael Noland and Fred Stonehouse, share affinities with that funky, figurative movement.

Noland, who lives near Chicago, shows the greatest sympathy with the Chicago tradition, and painters such as Roger Brown and Carl Wirsum inform his work. Like them, Noland combines appreciation for "outsider" or untrained artists with understanding of contemporary art expectations. His paintings deal with a monstrous notion of both nature and Americana. Giant fish are silhouetted against infernal landscapes, and erect squid claim royal status. His most telling painting, "The Warrior King," depicts in his typically lurid style a weary, bleary-eyed buffalo on most likely his last stand.

Milwaukee-based Stonehouse displays more complex sources in his work. Eight small self-portraits, a couple of them as Mr. Potato Head, derive from Renaissance models - Flemish masters like Memling and Bouts, Italians such as Antonello da Messina and French miniaturists like Jean Clouet. Looming just as large are the lapidary portraits of Chicago's greatest contemporary painter, Jim Nutt.

Stonehouse's larger works are indebted to carnival banners and other vernacular sources. But wherever his ideas come from - and Stonehouse revels in art history - his major interest is commentary on contemporary life's follies and absurdities. Like St. Louis print-maker Tom Huck, Stonehouse is a moralist. A horned devil, looking not all that different from your friends and neighbors and maybe even you, is one of the featured characters in his work.

Stonehouse revels in the carnival-esque, the high-spirited sinning that goes on under heaven's eye that can be forgiven because it is, after all, just human behavior. In his most commanding painting, "Old Angry Frank," a black-masked devil with pointed horns, sheds tears as black as his mask. He wears a blood-stained apron imprinted with a cartoon pig, and thought-balloons carry images of hands, which he is conspicuously missing. Are his tears over the slaughter he has executed for our human love of barbecue or for his missing appendages? All we know is that he is angry.

In his small back gallery, Slein has smartly installed 30 small works in a grid by a passel of local artists. A clever idea, it should become an annual event. After a couple of seasons, everyone will look forward to it.

I especially liked a small wood construction by John Watson, a couple of acts of surrealism-in-aspic by Sandra Marchewa, two hard-edge color paintings on plywood by Brandon Anschultz and two abstractions by Laura Aeling.

Aeling, Leibman, and Watson: New Works

Philip Slein Gallery to Present Three Top Abstract Artists: Laura Beard Aeling, Barry Leibman, and John Watson.

The Philip Slein Gallery proudly presents three local abstract artists of similar sensibilities--two painters and a sculptor. The two painters are: Laura Beard Aeling, a veteran of the scene in only her first major show in a St. Louis commercial art gallery, and Barry Leibman, who has recently abandoned pure painting for what is essentially painted wood constructions. The two artists are similar in their obsession with the brushstroke. In the case of Laura, her paintings are of stick-like structures made of brushstroke lines arranged in random patterns. And in the case of Barry, the brushstrokes have literally been replaced by strips of painted wood that look like brushstrokes.

In addition to the exhibitions of Laura and Barry is an exhibition by another local abstract artist, John Watson, a sculptor who displays his drawings of sculptures which are usually no more than rows of planks that function like brushstrokes.

In all three artists there is another similar sensibility at work: a rigorous aesthetic resulting in beautiful work.

Edmondson: Simple

Biology in Art
By David Bonetti
POST-DISPATCH VISUAL ARTS CRITIC
03/29/2006

This is an age of biology run amok. Epidemics such as Legionnaire's disease, AIDS, Avian flu; laboratory-created mutants and clones; and bio-engineered foodstuffs originating right here in River City - "frankenfoods" - combine to create a sense of an unnatural and, hence, frightening nature.

It should not be surprising that artists, who often function like canaries in a mine, have responded to the situation with a renewed interest in biology. Three local artists showing new work in two galleries explore biology and the organic in their work.

Greg Edmondson's biology is the most twisted of the three. But his sculptures, made of light-weight urethane - a material akin to Styrofoam - and painted cartoon colors, aim at comedy, not end-of-the-world tragedy. You might be tempted to call his work whimsical if it weren't so erotically suggestive.

Look at one of his untitled sculptures, the pink one with bulbous red knobs sitting on a shelf. It initially looks playful, something you'd give to a kid. But then you notice that the creature is hermaphroditic. At one end is a pointed red protuberance; at the other, a red ovoid slit. You could imagine the creature forming a circle and penetrating one end of itself with the other, but then its cuteness becomes something more adult.

Edmondson's naughty biomorphism comes with a genealogy. The late work of Philip Guston leads to Carroll Dunham who leads to Alexander Ross, Edmondson and an entire school of artists for whom bad biology and eroticism combine to create horrific, if occasionally cuddly, imagery. In his work, Edmondson seems aware of the problem, but he doesn't let it bring him down. Whistling on the edge of the abyss, he mines the humor in the absurd.

Ron Laboray is more interested in ideas than biology, basing his paintings in maps and charts - here the plan of the recently demolished Busch Stadium, the state of Georgia, the great globe itself.

But what might put you in the mind-set of biology is the product of the next step in his process. Over his maps, he pours a liquid mix of plastic and acrylic that dries into viscous blobs that look like a late, denatured variation on abstract expressionism. Laboray's blobs share the look, if not the intention, of mid-20th century biomorphic surrealism.

In fact, the pours are based on analyses of colors used to represent pop-culture figures, such as Marge and Homer Simpson. Marge is reduced to concentric circles of orange, yellow-green and yellow surrounding a blue center, which merge with each other to form one amorphous mass.

Homer, of course, is simpler: a black center surrounded by yellow and beige.

What doesn't make itself apparent is why 10 Marges have been poured over a map of Georgia, and 17 Homers over a barely discernible map of the United States. Laboray might be more interested in culture than nature, but his work suggests that it is hard to separate the two. He is an artist to keep an eye on.

Review:Riverfront Times
By Ivy Cooper
March 15, 2006

Greg Edmondson: Simple and Ron Laboray: Keeping Score If you think you know Edmondson's works, think again. Here's a galleryful of whimsical bug sculptures and amoebalike forms that are unlike anything else the local artist has ever done. Also new are the drawings — large works on paper that could be DNA charts of aliens, and small gouache paintings on antique wallpaper that insist on their own seriousness in spite of their obvious sweetness. It's a completely disarming show, marvelous, funny and weird all at once. That description applies just as well to local painter Laboray's works in Philip Slein's back gallery. Laboray charts American pop-cultural hegemony with a paranoia-tinged humor that remains unparalleled among artists I've seen. He's a great cultural leveler, documenting moon missions and multiple-Marge Simpson invasions of Georgia with the same urgency and visual panache. This is tour-de-force work by two incredibly bright local artists.

Simple Mind
By Chris King
Saint Louis Magazine

Greg Edmondson, who teaches drawing and sculpture at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and is artist in residence at Thomas Jefferson School, has a show opening at Philip Slein Gallery this month-his first solo gallery show in St. Louis in 10 years. In November, Edmondson will be one of 11 artists, all with international reputations, showing in Bug: Out of the Box at the Berkshire Museum in Massachusetts. His work hangs on the walls of houses owned by Halle Berry and Elton John, and his credits include a Fullbright scholarship to study in Munich (1986-89) and an MFA from Washington University (1985). We spoke to him about his show, which opens March 3.

WHAT’S THE TITLE OF YOUR UPCOMING SHOW? Simple. It’s both true and ironic. All of the Pieces are based on simple processes, simple procedures, though a lot of them become intricately detailed.

YOU’RE FROM TENNESSEE. DOWN THERE DOESN’T “SIMPLE” ALSO MEAN A LITTLE SLOW, A LITTLE CRAZY? This is all old school, everything handmade, made by me, simply and laboriously. In a world that moves at this speed, anything made that slowly and laboriously seems crazy.

WHAT DID YOU DRAW FOR THE SHOW? There are my drawings on remnants of wallpaper from my Natural Selection show [gorgeous drawings of insects on floridly patterned wallpaper], very small and delicate. Then there are larger drawings, based on a simple, continuous system of marks. As long as you follow the rules, the system takes away one level of the dictatorship of the artist.

WHAT ARE SOME TITLES? This show is unusual in that nothing is titled. I only use a title if it’s meaningful to the work. All of these pieces grow out of simple ideas. Everything is about growth or decay through a simple process, a repetitive action. I didn’t want to give the pieces titles disconnected from the work.

WHY THE PHILIP SLEIN GALLERY? This is probably incriminating, but I haven’t done a solo show in a commercial gallery in St. Louis in 10 years, though I’ve shown elsewhere. Phil has opened this beautiful space, and he is genuinely committed to the artists he shows there.

TEN YEARS AGO-THAT’S WHEN YOU WENT THROUGH A LITTLE LIONIZATION. For a moment, I was showing in Los Angeles, Chicago and Germany, all at the same time, and a couple of stars were buying my work. That was when I was single and didn’t have a kid, when I could travel to where the action was and didn’t have to hope it would come back to me.

HOW HAS THE WORK ITSELF CHANGED? Back then, my work was mostly self-reflexive. It had a lot to do with me stumbling through the world. My currant work uses me much less as a jumping-off point.

ARE YOU LESS INTERESTED IN YOURSELF? I’m sure everyone else is. I still do my own self-searching, but I don’t feel the need to hang that.

YOU’D RATHER HAND IMAGES OF BUGS? I am fascinated by insects. They all go through four distinct phases: egg, larva, nymph and adult-some skip the nymph stage. We go through similar stages, but they are more cloudy. Natural Selection was insect-based; Simple is not, though there are some related forms.

ARE YOU AN EGG, LARVA, NYMPH OS ADULT? I’ll shoot for nymph. It’s a generally smaller version of the adult. If it’s winged, it’s generally not able to fly. It has wings, but they don’t work.

YOUR WINGS DON’T WORK? I’m testing them out. This show should be a good test flight.

Greg Edmondson, whose latest work will be on view at the Philip Slein Gallery starting March 3rd, had an early interest in biology, and it shows. Like Kafka, his interest is transformation—forms on the verge of transformation, already in transformation, or recently transformed.

Edmondson’s earliest work was in wood, a material that had once been alive and bore the scars and histories of that life. He incorporated that life into his aesthetic. Now he uses bright colors and “unnatural” materials such as plastics and resins. These allow him to simplify his studio process and the resulting works, while adding complexity to the range of their interpretation.

Also showing in the backroom is the latest work of Ron Laboray, a conceptual artist who, like Edmondson, is inspired by science. But unlike Edmondson, Laboray uses scientific procedures to create his art, thus removing the hand of the artist from an art-making process (painting) that has always involved the hand of the artist.

Art Inspired by Science Stops by Philip Slein Gallery

By Laura McCarthy
Wednesday, March 1, 2006

St. Louis-based artists Greg Edmondson and Ron Laboray are vastly different in their craft but both are inspired by science. Edmondson’s show, Simple, and Laboray’s, Keeping Score, are scheduled to open at the Philip Slein Gallery, 1319 Washington Ave., with a reception at 6 p.m. March 3. The shows will run through April 1.

Edmondson, with a long history of interest in biology and now an accomplished sculptor and painter, will be showcasing a recent collection of his work that marks a departure from his traditional way of working using natural materials and colors. For approximately the past 18 months, he has revisited a highly durable synthetic sculpting material and introduced bright metallic colors to “see what would happen.” The results are pieces that resemble ... no one thing in particular.

“People always see something different,” Edmondson said. “These things are simple, but I don’t want it to be like a joke that is only funny once.” He wants his audience to look, and then to keep looking and imagining.

Many of his sculptures and paintings in the past are representative of the natural world and human emotion — for example, a large centaur he sculpted early in his career out of wood that was meant to represent the animalistic nature of humans. He has recently “become less interested in narrative or personal mythology and more fascinated by forms on the verge of transformation,” he said. The results are more representative of the images and shapes one would see through a microscope — suggesting movement, growth or decay.

Edmondson said he especially enjoys working with something new and challenging and said he relished the playfulness the past 18 months have granted him. “I would have never painted something hot pink before. My work has always had the suggestion of color.”

Edmondson predicts his usual “postpartum depression” with a new show, as a year and a half of hard work leaves the studio and enters the public eye. “You get to play God in the studio, but then you relinquish that control once you put your work out there.” Edmondson is the artist in residence at Thomas Jefferson School in St. Louis and an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His art has been collected by celebrities such as Elton John and Halle Berry and by corporations, universities and museums.

Also showing at the gallery will be Keeping Score, a collection of work by Ron Laboray, who is intrigued by cultural influences or icons such as Superman, The Simpsons, Barbie or the St. Louis Cardinals and their impact on place.

After collecting a significant amount of data, he uses a formulaic system of pouring blobs of color over the appropriate regions on a map, creating layers. The information he collects largely dictates the piece, he said. In Laboray’s art, “the line between facilitator and creator is fuzzy,” he said, although “an artist’s fingers will always find their way” into the piece.

Laboray considers himself a mapmaker or archaeologist, someone with an objective point of view recording and sifting major cultural trends, represented by color, over the places they affect. Viewers are asked to view the work as he or she would look at a road map.

In his work, Laboray said he “hopes to see the spread of culture,” for example, his globe pieces that show the spread of Barbie, McDonald’s and Starbuck’s. “It’s humorous, taking seriously something that is not serious — it makes it compelling.” He also said that he is aware that this is “banal junk,” but seeks to find “real humanity at the core of these things … that moment of impetus, whether it be heroics, religion or other belief systems, or even comic books and TV.”

“People are used to looking at maps; they are comfortable with that abstraction — assimilating themselves with the blue line … we put our belief in it,” Laboray said.

While these pieces seem abstract, Laboray said, “The titles are the Rosetta Stone of the piece.” For example, in one of his most recent pieces, titled “The Final Season at Busch,” he has recorded an aerial view of the wins and losses by the colors of the Cardinals, the opposing teams and the fans. Laboray said he found the “connective sadness in a community for the loss of one thing” intriguing, as well as the move forward to the new stadium and the hope resting in future seasons.

Laboray received his master’s degree in fine art from Washington University in 2000 and currently teaches around town at Washington University, the University of Missouri-St. Louis and St. Louis Community College-Florissant Valley.

“Both artists are conceptually based and have a scientific link; they are different and similar enough to show them simultaneously,” said Philip Slein, owner of the gallery. “They are two of the best in St. Louis and are both working on a national level.” He said Edmondson’s show will serve as the main course and Laboray’s is the dessert.

 

Osver and Betsberg: Selected Works

ART IN AMERICA

November 2006

Ernestine Betsberg and Arthur Osver are painters' painters who both create work that lies solidly within the modernist tradition. In their mid-90s at the time of this show, the couple, who met in 1935, long drew the respect of knowledgeable St. Louis artists and collectors (Osver died on July 26).

In this show of 28 paintings, Betsberg's and Osver's large canvases, averaging 4 by 5 feet, faced each other across Slein's long narrow gallery. The couple's distinctly different styles complemented each other through contrast. The show looked back at their individual careers. Most of Osver's work on view dated from the past 15 years, but there was one piece from 1950 and a second from 1964. Betsberg's work came primarily from the 1990s, with a small selection of paintings from the 1940s through the '80s.

Betsberg's seductive paintings seem to glow from within, the result of an active brush and a palette geared toward optical resonance. French Market Bakery (1992) vibrates with luminous oranges. Betsberg places the viewer inside the bakery looking out through a yellow-orange, multi-paned window. Rendered in deep orange-reds, rounded loaves of bread sit before the window among the bakery's other symmetrically arranged offerings. These seem to hover over a white draped cloth rendered in Cézanne-like pastel purples, pinks an blues. A number of works in the exhibition, including Betsberg's magenta and green At Chatham Square (1967), demonstrated this rendering of everyday scenes made powerful through vibrant color.

Betsberg's colorful images stood in direct contrast to Osver's dynamic, somewhat muted abstractions. Osver subdues color behind flat, often white, blocks of paint. In his 1997 work Q, color has to push its way to the surface through both white and black blocks. It also competes for prominence with collaged text. In Q and other works, Osver's use of text is more formal than content driven. Words cut from magazines are often painted or collaged over to subvert their meaning. Even the huge letter Q in the center of this canvas is not clear unless you know the painting's title.

Obviously, Betsberg and Osver shared an unquenchable drive to make art. Less obviously, they shared a penchant for canvases with veiled optical depth. From a distance, Betsberg's work reads as pure color– pure orange or pure purple. Osver's reads as white. They both activate the canvas with brushstrokes– hers render a luminous, stylized reality, while his depict activity, motion and hidden meaning.

–Mel Watkin

On the Wall

Ernestine Betsberg and Arthur Osver: Selected Work
Riverfront Times
Ivy Cooper

The prospect of Slein's gallery showing paintings by this definitive old-school couple was initially surprising. As accomplished as they are, they belong to another era, when modernism reigned supreme; what was Slein doing, showing them off in a gallery that aspires to the cutting edge? The joke's on me, though: Modernism is evidently back "in"; and regardless, these paintings just couldn't look better. Betsberg's candy-color confections, which range from 1946 to 1994, still generate the shimmer and ease of Modigliani and Bonnard.

For his part, Osver continues work in a vein similar to the collaged, fragmented scenes that have served him well over the last 50-plus years (the earliest works here are studies for Fortune magazine covers from 1950; the latest is a gorgeous 2005 oil painting titled Blue Hour).

The show should serve as a reality check for fans of contemporary art: They don't make paintings like they used to, but thank goodness Betsberg and Osver still do. Through February 25 at the Philip Slein Gallery, 1319 Washington Avenue; 314-621-4634 (www.philipsleingallery.com). Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Sat.

Art Lovers By David Bonetti POST-DISPATCH VISUAL ARTS CRITIC

Valentine's Day may be a commercial creation of the greeting card, flower and chocolate businesses, but it still seems like the perfect time to tell the story of Arthur Osver and Ernestine Betsberg. The two painters, who have lived in the same house in Webster Groves since 1962, met while at school at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1935. She was 26, he was 23, and they have been together ever since. Today, in their 90s - she is "96 and a half," as she puts it proudly, he is 93 - they make a cute couple, interrupting each other in telling the story of their lives together, but then quickly conferring to make sure they've gotten a date, name or place right.

Their recall is fast and precise - you get the feeling they've told the stories before - and they exhibit a sprightliness you'd expect in someone decades younger. Although Betsberg needs a chairlift to get upstairs, Osver jumps up to answer the phone, to get a bottle of wine and to find a framed newspaper clipping about them. How do they do it? How have they stayed together for so long? Could it be their open-mindedness and insatiable curiosity about the world? Could it be the wine? The fact that they are vegetarians? Betsberg gives an unexpected answer to the question: "It's because of making paintings. That's why we've stuck together.

"You can always make up when you get mad at each other. If you always agree about everything, your life is hell. We have different ideas about things, but we come around - we listen to each other, we pay attention." Osver points out that after all these years of working in close proximity, their work is still different. He tends toward abstraction; she is a figurative artist, who favors still lives. What they share is a love of color, which they both pursue down different but equally hedonistic paths, more European in sensibility than American. "Yes, we paint differently," Betsberg agrees, "but we respect each other's work. With two artists living and working together, it would be dull to do the same kind of work." She says they always have had separate studies. A large studio added in the 1930s by another artist to their 1851 house has been Osver's since they moved in. Betsberg works in what was the downstairs living room, a 30-foot-long space that allowed her to work big for the first time. They recall the one time they tried to share the same studio - at the American Academy in Rome, where Osver had won the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1952. It didn't work out.

"The studios were huge - they were designed for mural painters - so we hung a sheet down the middle, but neither of us could work, knowing that the other was there on the other side of the curtain," Betsberg says. Even today, Osver says, they look at each other's works-in-progress only by invitation. Through the 1950s, Osver and Betsberg spent their lives in art centers such as New York City, Paris and Rome, often on fellowships. Betsberg recounts how Osver, who was a year ahead of her at school, won a fellowship to study in Paris in 1936. "I told him not to spend all his money, because I was going to win the prize the next year and intended to come over and join him," she says. "I did win, and I did go." They made friends - artists, writers, dancers - wherever they went. In Rome, they befriended American novelists Ralph Ellison and William Styron, composers Otto Luening and Lukas Foss, and Italian sculptor Afro. For years, they visited avant-garde choreographers Alvin Nikolais and Murray Louis at their Long Island summer house.

Betsberg is proud of the fact that she always kept her own name. "I insisted on being treated as a woman on equal terms with her husband," she says. And she always refused to be shown in all-female exhibitions. "No, I always wanted to be shown with the best, not in some show organized according to irrelevant criteria like sex," Betsberg says. The only time she had to endure being called "Mrs. Arthur Osver" was when the couple moved to St. Louis, because, she says, people here couldn't handle her independence.

The two moved to St. Louis in 1960. Osver was lured here to teach painting at Washington University by Ken Hudson, the dean who had earlier hired Philip Guston and Max Beckmann. They originally planned to stay one year, which Betsberg laughingly says turned out to be "a long year." But Osver was offered tenure almost right away - at the time, he didn't know what tenure meant - and they stayed. "You could say that Washington University made one of those godfather type offers you can't refuse," Osver says. After living for two years in University City, they found the old farmhouse in Webster Groves that has been their home ever since. "I always used to say I wished I lived in New York City," Betsberg says. "But we have had a good life here, we made good friends and I learned to be a gardener."

Tom Huck: The Bloody Bucket

Full 'Bucket'


Printmaker Tom Huck sees his hometown of Potosi, Mo., as a laboratory of the depraved.

By David Bonetti, Post Dispatch Visual Arts Critic


Set your watches, pack your bags, get ready for the trip of a lifetime: The Ship of Fools is setting sail from the Philip Slein Gallery every day for Potosi, Mo., the hometown of local printmaker Tom Huck. Potosi is probably taking a fatwa out against Huck at this very moment for all the nasty things he is imputing about it in "The Bloody Bucket," the scabrous series of prints he has set there.

What a place Potosi is, at least in Huck's perfervid imagination! A town where World War II veterans - "the greatest generation" - hold a Memorial Day parade with members of the Klan, giant balloons of Hitler, Tojo and Sambo floating overhead. Where a pregnant bride dances on a tabletop, a bouquet in one hand, a pistol in the other, while a stocking-capped fiddler plays an orgiastic tune and everyone else swills liquor. Where two well-fed natives dive into a cow skull with their forks during the weekly beef-brain buffet. Where a homegrown sadist tortures and kills a sailor while a couple make out in a convertible and another local boozer gets his head smashed in with a baseball bat. Where an armless lowlife with hooked prostheses and a floozy - both high on crack - fornicate in an outhouse while an excited dog looks on. Where demented fundamentalists talk in tongues and handle snakes, their leaders wearing crucifix-topped sculptures made of twisted balloons on their heads.

"The Bloody Bucket," a series of 10 large (52-by-38-inch) woodcuts made from 2000 to just a few months ago, is the result of oral history. Huck has explained that the Bloody Bucket was a bar that flourished for three years on the outskirts of Potosi until it burned down in 1951 - 20 years before he was born. It attracted veterans who had nothing better to do than carouse, and it became a local legend. His father, the town chiropractor, told him the stories, but Huck admits that when he was a kid he himself witnessed the pregnant bride dancing on the table of the local VFW hall.

Huck's work, which is superbly and laboriously made (see accompanying story), belongs to a rich and ancient tradition. Imagery that made fun of people by showing them doing undignified things, often involving the lower organs, or behaving badly dates back to pre-history. When such salacious imagery features ordinary people, the subject is morality. When it is about the rich and powerful, it is morality laced with politics.

Although the Memorial Day parade with the veterans indistinguishable from members of the KKK has political content, Huck for the most part tilts toward ordinary people gone wild. In the series, you can see people turning to alcohol, drugs, gluttony, sex, violence and the false promises of religion and right-wing politics to avoid facing life's hard truths.

Huck admits to being a moralist, and, as such, he belongs to another rich graphic tradition. Artists from Bosch and Breugel, to Hogarth and Goya, to Daumier and James Cruikshank, to James Ensor and Jose Guadalupe Posada, to Max Beckmann and Philip Guston, to R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman have turned to paper to make their most critical observations about humanity, alone and in groups.

As a satirist, Huck has a unique vision. His extraordinary woodblock printing technique has roots in Albrecht Durer, his main man, and you can find individual stylistic influences - a little Crumb, a lot of S. Clay Wilson, some Beckmann (mostly in his composition) - but Huck puts it together in a manner you can't confuse with anyone else.

His prints are huge and his compositions are dense, so dense that at first you don't know where to enter them, but once you get past that obstacle, you find that they open up to tell shocking - and hilarious - stories about human nature at its worst. The information piles up from bottom to top, zigzagging from edge to edge and from front to back, but you can jump in at any spot - and at virtually any spot there is something going on. You might be focusing on the pimpled and bruised butt of the crack addict in "Anatomy of a Crack Shack," but then the little dog gets your attention and won't let it go. Huck knows how to employ passages of solid black to prevent the compositions from becoming indecipherable. It can be the black coat of a snarling dog, the black chassis of a convertible, the black sheen of a pair of knee-high boots or the black spaces between the action.

Huck isn't forgiving of any human vice, but he acknowledges that he too is human and isn't immune from bad behavior. A humanist as well as a moralist, he shows people at their worst, but they're seldom unredeemable - well, the sadist killing the sailor might be beyond redemption. Despite his surface disdain, there is a love, sometimes barely discernible, as well. After all, if you truly hate humanity, why would you spend five years of hard work trying to save it?





Tom Huck's Woodcuts have a Sharp, Satirical Bite."
By David Bonetti, Post Dispatch Arts Critic


There is probably no young artist in St. Louis more widely collected by museums than Tom Huck. His woodcuts - boldly satirical images of members of the human race gone wild, behaving badly and just making fools of themselves - are in such prestigious collections as Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum, the New York Public Library, the Whitney Museum in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, as well as the St. Louis Art Museum.

Such success hasn't gone to Huck's head. His  "blue-collar ethic" makes him work hard, putting in time every day in his studio, seldom taking off weekends or holidays. He also teaches printmaking, which he clearly loves with a passion, at Washington University. Yet, when asked if he would mind being called  "Hoosier artist laureate," he beams  "Not only would I not mind, I'd be honored."

Huck has just completed  "The Bloody Bucket," a series of 10 large-scale woodcuts that he has worked on since 2000 and that is shown in its entirety for the first time in St. Louis at a show opening Friday at the Philip Slein Gallery. But Huck's next project is already mapped out in his mind - "Booger Stew," a series of 15 triptychs, each panel the size of a door, that will take him a decade to complete and promises to be even more scabrous in subject than his earlier work.

Huck, 34, is a great storyteller, and he shared a lot of history on a recent afternoon in his Washington Avenue studio, where the walls were crowded with his work and that of his peers. Some highlights:


On the Bloody Bucket:

"The Bloody Bucket was a bar that existed between 1948 and 1951 just outside my hometown of Potosi, Mo., a town of 2,200 with about 30,000 prisoners in a big prison. It was a violent, seedy, sawdust-floored, hillbilly, French hick bar. It burned down after about three years, but during its heyday, it was patronized by all those soldiers coming out of World War II - the so-called greatest generation - and they just raised hell. I heard about it from my dad, who was the town chiropractor, who got the stories from the people he treated. We were like the only liberals in Potosi."


On his artistic heroes:

"Durer, Crumb and Zappa. Durer (the great German Renaissance printmaker), because technically he was a revolutionary and because he made such damn good prints. Zappa and Crumb, because they are both satirists like me. I found a copy of a Crumb comic under my dad's mattress when I was a kid - my older brothers had liberated the porn. I wrote Crumb a fan letter like every year until I was 23. He never answered. I love Zappa for sticking to his guns and doing what he had to do, no matter what the public said, because when you're doing social commentary, you have to."


On his artistic education:


"I started making art when I was about 2. It's something I've always done. I originally wanted to be a painter, but at (Southern Illinois University) Carbondale I took a printmaking class. I made this stupid little etching - but when I pulled it off the plate, I went, 'My God, this is what I want to do with my life.' Later at Wash U., they were giving me a hard time. I had a meltdown and got put on probation. When they confronted me, I said, '(Screw) you, I'm going to make art about my hometown.' And that's what I've done."


On printmaking:

"I like it because you can make copies. You can trade them with other artists and have more than one show at the same time. There is always an engagement with social commentary with prints - a black humor. After Durer, my heroes among printmakers are Hogarth, Daumier, Goya and Posada. They are like family to me. I feel as if I know them. I want to be as good in my art as they were in theirs. You have to be (angry) to make work like mine, and I'm (angry) all the time - at politicians, academics, cops, bad musicians, landlords, the IRS, lawyers, you name it."


On being a moralist:

"Am I a moralist? Yeah, totally. I think I know what's right, and I think I know what's wrong, and I want to be a mirror that's held up onto our society that reflects it back like it really is. That's what all my heroes did."

Marked Men

"MARKED MEN"

Fine Art From 6 Influential Tattooists

One of the most important steps in turn of the century art making is how people are looking at a wide range of visual ideas and concepts. It is these ideals that brought attention to tattooing, catapulting it to a new level of respectability.

Beginning in the late 60's a small group of tattooists began to meld tattooing concepts from Japan, the Pacific Islands, and America into singular visions. These traditional designs where reworked to present modern ideals and experiences. In initiating this important step they lit the fuse that would ignite the tattoo renaissance not only in America but, worldwide.

The artists presented here were some of the first to bring a fine art sensibility to their work. They saw beyond the stigma of the culture and were able to visualize what it could be. As outsiders they presented their ideas using alternative mediums and placing them on non-traditional surfaces. They learned that the placement of an image could be more important then the image itself.

Thom DeVita the elder statesman of this group experiments with collages and assemblages. DeVita creates his work using objects he finds; grape crates, scraps of paper, postage stamps, money, and rubbings from traditional tattoo stencils. Taking rubbings of these stencils and combining them with Xerox transfers, creating ghost images on recovered grape crates and paper. A prolific artist who has a drive to create has amassed a body of work that 10 artists couldn't produce in a lifetime. This massive body of work is best shown as instillation. Like an arm full of tattoos it needs the others to make its voice heard.

Don Ed Hardy, A Southern California native born in 1945, Hardy revived a childhood determination to become a tattoo artist and underwent a tattoo apprenticeship while simultaneously receiving a B.F.A. degree in printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1967. Tattooing professionally since then, he developed the fine art potential of the medium with emphasis on its Asian heritage. In 1973 he lived in Japan, studying with a traditional tattoo master - the first non-Asian to gain access to that world. He resumed these studies in Japan throughout the 1980s. In this exhibition Hardy presents largescale paintings on Tyvek plastic. These images are created with the artist's knowledge of Chinese and Japanese, as well as pre-Columbian, mythological forms. The resulting amalgamation of tattoo's popular stylizations with classical Asian forms and conceptual modes of painting produce a hybrid that is often, in the nature of alloys, stronger and even more beautiful than its individual parts.

Nick Bubash a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts has been working as a tattooist since 1972. World religions and the deities that their followers worship influence Bubash's work. His highly detailed drawings are combinations of animal, humans, and machines. The images he creates possess heavy lines and explosions of color, which are expressed in his richly detailed assemblages and sculptures. Each piece is a kind of fast, slick, and dark beauty, salted with references to Hindu, Serbo-Croatia, or maybe Hasidic Judaica! In this exhibition he presents assemblages and found object sculptures.

Mike Malone creates solid, powerful work in the classic American mode and an uncompromising determination to innovate, refine and improve the medium. He's done this by influencing countless tattooers worldwide wit his custom-built machines and series of original flash designs - the best in the field for overall artistry and public appeal- as well as the example of his tattooing. He was responsible for encouraging late Paul Rogers to begin building custom machines in earnest. Through his travels Malone was the first to inspire a new breed of European tattooers to bring the art out of the dark ages in that part of the world. Malone has created a lot of custom work that had an impact on the tattoo sensibility of America. During his career he has spread his distinctive design style to thousand of people via his mail order "Mr. Lucky" line of T-shirts. His distinct tattoo flash that can be found in tattoo shops the world over under his nom de plume "Rollo Banks".

John Wyatt has been visiting tattoo shops since the late 1950's when he got his first tattoo. He became fascinated with art, the shops, and the artists. He later thought of becoming a tattoo artist and began visiting tattoo shops in New York City and Coney Island regularly as a teenager. He began photographing in the 1970's. He decided to combine his interest in tattooed people and photography by doing a series of photographs of tattooed people. He later decided to draw from his interest in sociology and years of job experience and interview each person that he photographed. In 2003 Schiffer Publishing published his book "Under My Skin" an exceptional example of images celebrating tattoos and the people who have them and give them. All of the photographs presented in this exhibition are from his book.

Scott Harrison the youngest member of this group is infamous for his bizarre and appalling tattoo design sheets. This well traveled tattooist has plied his trade on two continents. He presents his beautifully render watercolors of traditional images in a bizarre sexually charged world.

The concept of the exhibition came from the idea of celebrating Thom DeVita and the role he played influencing others in the field of tattooing. His ideas and visions have inspired the artists involved as well as hundreds of other tattooists plying their craft today.

This exhibition will be traveling to galleries across the United States through fall of 2006. Its second showing will take place at the Philip Slein Gallery in St Louis Missouri with and opening date of Saturday, December 2nd 2005. In October of 2006 the closing exhibition will take place at Old Dominion University in Norfolk Virginia. Old Dominion University will publish a catalog of the exhibition including text and images.

Phyllis Galembo: Dressed for Thrills

Phyllis Galembo, Dressed for Thrills Riverfront Times Review


Don't write this off as a Halloween gimmick; Galembo's Cibachrome photographs of historical Halloween costumes and masks are brilliant objects unto themselves. As a collector, Galembo clearly has an eye for the visual and the historical novelty of these costumes; but as a photographer she possesses uncanny skill and intuition for lighting, composition and color, and her images transport these things into another dimension. The "Deluxe Disguise Kit" (2001), a relic of the 1950s, looks straight out of a horror movie; the homemade "Depression Era Ghost Mask" (2000) can't help but evoke a KKK hood; even the cheesy, plastic 1965 "Hairy Skeleton" mask is unimaginable in the context of 21st century costumes. Granted, Halloween costumes are designed to be strange; but in Galembo's hands they appear to have come from another world, or at least the most surreal depths of this one. Through November 19 at Philip Slein Gallery, 1319 Washington Avenue; 314-621-4634. Gallery hours Tue.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Frank Stack: Master Prints

FRANK STACK (1938-), a.k.a. FOOLBERT STURGEON, is something of a schizophrenic artist. Part of him is an accomplished fine arts academic, while the other half is a disreputable underground cartoonist. We'll start with the respectable part. Stack was born in Houston TX and educated at the University of Texas at Austin, earning a bachelor of Fine Arts degree. He also studied at the Art Institute in Chicago and obtained his Master of Art at the University of Wyoming. He did further study at the Academie Grande Chaumiere in Paris. A longtime Professor at the University of Missouri in Columbia, he has taught courses as diverse as painting, watercolor, drawing, anatomical drawing, etching, lithography, comic strip and art appreciation.

He has achieved several academic awardsand recognition, including Artist in Residencies at the Appalachian State University in North Carolina, Shepherd College in West Virginia and Virginia Polytechnic University. Selected to be among Who's Who in American Art and in the current Who's Who in America, Stack has received several research fellowships and has studied in New Mexico and Paris. His work has been exhibited in the United States, France, Italy, Poland, South Korea, Switzerland and Turkey.

One of the earliest of the "underground" cartoonists, he didn't want to jeopardize his chance at tenure and financial security, particularly since he taught in the Bible Belt and his cartoons were often sacrilegious, among other political offenses. So for many years he drew his cartoons under the unlikely nom de plume of Foolbert Sturgeon. His early comix work included The Adventures of Jesus (1962), Amazon Comics (1972), Dorman's Doggie (1979), Feelgood Funnies (1972), The New Adventures of Jesus (1969), Jesus Meets the Armed Services [#2](1972) and Jesus Comics #3. Stack also contributed to such anthologies as Blab!, Hydrogen Bomb Funnies, Radical America Komiks, Rip Off Comix, Rip Off Review of Western Culture and Snarf. Some, including his old Texas friend Gilbert Shelton, regard Stack's Adventures of Jesus in 1962 to be the very first underground comic, though it was a 14-page Xerox zine circulated only among a small group of friends and never offered for sale. Nonetheless, Stack's status as one of the pioneer underground cartoonists is unquestioned.

Stack also edited and contributed introductory material to several volumes of V.T. Alley Oop collections (Kitchen Sink Press) and has contributed to National Lampoon magazine.

These days Stack spends much of his time in France, painting and hanging out with other expatriate American underground cartoonists Shelton, R. Crumb and Peter Poplaski

Pearls Are a Nuisance: A Retrospective of Art Chantry

"Art Chantry's Pearls are a Nuissance" By: Rudy Zapf art critic (Playback Magazine)
Art shows in St. Louis are like the notoriously short raspberry season at Soulard Market: You’d better grab those succulent, juicy jewels of astonishing flavor quickly, because while their taste is memorable, they disappear all too quickly. Thus, I tend to schedule reviews so that both exhibition and new PLAYBACK:stl issue are concurrently available. A recent show at the Philip Slein Gallery has forced me off my usual agenda.
Anyone who has listened to music or even looked at record packaging within the last 20 years has seen, and probably identified with, the graphic work of Art Chantry. His aesthetics have influenced an entire generation of imitators, posers, slackers, jaded idolators. Oh, and musicians and artists, too. Mining subgenres from the past 50 years of fiction and advertising, he developed the look that put Seattle on the map; he championed marginalized tribes and gave them a voice. By combining and collaging elements from such sources as comic books, vintage ads, burlesque magazines, skateboard ’zines, and carnival and drag racing posters, he constructed an advertising style built on post-use waste and deadpan humor.
Concisely put, his axiom for design might be “Handmade good, computers bad,” growled much like the Frankenstein monster on Saturday Night Live. For Chantry, fractured is better than refined; accidental is preferable to controlled. Working for 15 years in an industrial section of Seattle, his style is as rough as the pulp fiction that he avowedly devours. A barely contained chaos, his imagery bursts from the paper that tries to confine it. The cut-and-paste method of layout is his signature. Eschewing the possible perfection of computer-generated typesetting, he uses old press typography samples from his personal collection. If the obsolete forms are brittle and worse for the wear, so much the better. The propensity to make mistakes and other evidence of human input is a message that Chantry does not want viewers to miss. The texture of decay, like tattoos on aging skin, is inevitable. There is an irony in the painstaking processes he uses to produce this desired anti-perfection. As an example, when he was creating a promotion for clothing store Urban Outfitters, he and his print crew tossed the paper onto the inky floor of the silkscreen shop, then threw it onto the street and let cars run over it—and then they were ready to print on the paper.
As art director for The Rocket news weekly, and as a major force within the School of Visual Concepts, Chantry has developed a legendary influence in the world of graphic design. Not least because of his drive and fecundity. Given that the exhibit at Slein Gallery merely scratched the surface of Chantry’s output (and the walls were literally papered with examples, edge to edge and floor to ceiling—some 250 works, give or take), his drive to create numbs the senses.
Doug Parry’s 1996 movie Hype, and the earlier-released book Loser by Clark Humphrey, map the stories of disaffected souls and tragically wasted talents, the icons of Seattle’s mystique. Chantry is conspicuously present in both book and documentary. In addition to designing both cover and pages, he also suggested the title for Loser. His years of toil working for bands and theaters with no discretionary funds have yielded a visible representation of Seattle’s proudly dragged inferiority flag.
When carefully scuffed boots and unkempt, flanneled models covered the pages of Vogue, Seattle’s cultural purism slowly spiraled down the drain. Now that the underground has given rise to Starbucks and high-tech bucks, it’s come that the visionaries are following the buffalo. Long a holdout whilst friends and colleagues sought out greener pastures either south or east, Chantry finally decided it was time to move to an unlikely town.
Quietly residing in St. Louis since 2000, Chantry continues to dig through and reuse the past.

Pearls Are a Nuisance

Because he virtually invented a visual language that has become so much of a given in the contemporary landscape, one might presume to have a handle on Art Chantry’s overarching aesthetic strategy when experiencing the brash iconography of a single poster. Such a notion is quickly disabused by this exhibition’s dizzying range of work from his fertile design career: album covers, newspaper layouts, “original” mechanicals, and a diverse group of the widely acclaimed posters chronicling the punk-into-grunge and related artistic and cultural life of Seattle.

As in his favored hard-boiled fiction, Chantry’s art functions simultaneously on multiple levels. The precise servicing of specific commercial imperatives and formal requirements, smartly achieved through ever-surprising structural invention, is only the jumping-off point: the art lies in the haunting slow-burn poetry of subtly lurking background imagery and seemingly minor passages; deft collisions of time and voice; and innovative decisions regarding printing techniques, technologies, color, typography styles tied to vanished time and place, unconventional materials, and unpredictable scale and format. Chantry’s superficial subject matter may be an event (as the springboard of a grisly murder is in Chandler) that pins the imagery down to specific cultural climate, but this is merely the first chapter. A gradually totalizing environment is manifested by the accruing formal and conceptual details, while the composition (Chantry’s plot) is manipulated and unhinged from the ostensible point of reference. “Function” is always the crucial impetus—as Chantry has cogently stated, “graphic design as practiced today by academics really has no contact with the popular culture it emerged from: it doesn’t ‘work’”—so space is radically maximized or minimized for jarring, attention-grabbing effect and an evocative context is perfectly realized, but in myriad surprising ways and with numerous disparate voices vying for position; the “subject” is exploded rather than mirrored.

“There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot—things are not as they seem.” —Jim Thompson

Working in a commercial medium, Chantry has always demonstrated an inherent mastery of rhapsodic Situationist-derived détournement, via Jamie Reid’s punk cut-and-paste. Chantry’s hand-rendered conceptualism reflects punk’s historical subcultural mining for political and aesthetic ends, contrary to the professed disdain for anything older than fifteen minutes past. And his blusterous poetry is of the disjointed, shufflingly residual nature; after one is immediately bludgeoned by the deft collision of image and text, there’s a great deal to slowly ponder, whether it’s the multitude of crashing images bouncing off one another, unhinged benday dots as sweeping signifiers, or those seemingly empty fields barely cloaking an entire world of type and nearly obliterated print residue (hinted at by an occasional, perfectly placed remnant). By means of an aggression born of rudely discarded image-making systems, idiosyncratic practitioners of lost styles, cultures, and worlds, Chantry has pioneered a new visual-reading lingua franca, which, as all good art, speaks of the contemporary and historical at the same time. This lexicon of image-text interplay, featuring culled “types” both specific and symbolic, is of course a structuring of information flow, a willful derailing of the manner in which it’s processed. Chantry has remarked that rather than taking design’s task as creating order out of the chaos in which we live, “my position was that the chaos is the order of our culture, and to reflect that is a more accurate statement instead of trying to wrestle it to the ground and straighten it out.”

While it’s thankfully true that no smug conclusions are dogmatically posited within his buzzing maelstrom, perhaps paradoxically Chantry’s never-failing analytic precision and meticulous craft indeed compose (if not completely frame) the aggressively inky, blown-out source material; actually, the sure touch of a sophisticated aesthete revels in the chaos, a chaos that is masterfully layed out with a nod to highs (and “lows”) of 20th-century art and design history. Ultimately then, Chantry is an archaeological cubist, though instead of revealing a few sides of an object or two, he splinters visual, textual, and emotional planes of cultures—and received wisdom regarding their collective histories. Context goes far in determining meaning, but Chantry’s penetrating juxtapositions are their own context; the job requirement being that his decidedly hand-made aesthetic takes control: one can halfway fake the look, but never the vision. Springing from a suspicion that “for art’s sake” quickly devolves into empty wallowing in self-expression, a much more lucrative project is to anchor subverted and mangled commercial expectations as signposts—billboards to hold down the swirling tornado of a secret history of subcultures, brotherhoods of craftsmen, and other amateur artistic traditions. Such collisions are surprisingly revealing: as if Duchamp were the editor of a mortician’s trade publication featuring copy penned by a disgruntled art historian and center spreads commissioned from a cut-rate, Pollock-inspired painter of science-fiction paperback book covers.

Chantry isn’t an appropriator of visual culture detritus; he’s a tombstone cutter with the sensibility of a poet: his isn’t the self-serving artist’s narcissistic desire to “discover” and “elevate,” rather he etches in stone the ephemeral and, yes, poetic beauty of the unsung, decidedly idiosyncratic, and homegrown. Weird historical blind spots lyrically blossom and all of his work cracklingly resonates with the desire to re-imagine the ways images speak—no matter the context or professed function, there’s no greater art than that.

—Todd Hignite

Taste of Chantry

Across the street at Philip Slein Gallery, Art Chantry knows all about the muck of experience. And whe will tell Ms. Yoshida as well as anyone who comes to him for advice that pearls are indeed a nuisance. (And you know where you can cast them...)

Chantry was the graphic artist who gave the Seattle music scene its image in hundreds of posters and record covers. Widely acknowledged as one of the masters of his medium, he moved to St. Louis a couple of years ago, bored and angered by a Seattle that did not live up to his standards.

And Chantry's standards are pretty rigorous for a guy who is trying to get a couple of hundred people to go out to a concert.

He does not accept any bunk. He is irreverent, skeptical if not cynical, sex-obsessed and a great lover of bad taste. Ad if you have ever wondered whether taste is ethical or not, look at Chantry. It takes a lot of work to find an image or two that might reproduce in a "family" newspaper. But that is only because ethics and prudery have nothing to do with each other.

Chantry is a connoisseur of popular culture and he shows no shame in appropiating images and entire stylebooks from it. Hot rod magazines, wig ads, tool ads, San Francisco hippie-era psychedelia, science fiction book covers, rhythm-and-blues record covers, Russian constructivism, dada, wanted posters and an occasional film star-Edward G. Robinson, Sophia Loren-are sources for his deadlines.

One of my favorites is a poster for a show of Chantry's own work. It's a wanted poster, and it reproduces mug shots of people like Jim Morrison, James Brown, Frank Sinatra, Jane Fonda, Peewee herman and Lenny Bruce alongside Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer and O.J. Simpson (who was, remember, found innocent by a jury of his peers) and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Slein has nearly 250 works by Chantry hung edge to edge three and four high on the gallery wall. It offers an education in the history of a highly specific culture told primarily in pictures.

Of course, that cultue is best known for its music, but the images are necessary accompaniments if you want to understand its gestalt.

David Bonetti
Art Critic
Saint Louis Post Dispatch

Pearls Are a Nuisance: A Retrospective of Art Chantry
Chantry is the undisputed reigning master of contemporary American poster design, but his ragged, edgy style of graphic samplng and razor wit have been mimicked so often you may not even realize he's the source. Chantry came to prominence in his native Seattle during the post-punk 1980s engineering ads for groups like Gang of four, but he hit his brutal stride in the 1990s, channeling Raymond Chandler to shape a nasty noir aesthetic that was the visual equivalent of grunge music. This retrospective, smartly curated by Todd Hignite, delivers up a smorgasbord culled from Chantry's vast oeuvre, including poster work (ads for concerts, theater, art galleries and political posters), album covers and a group of "original" mechanicals that reveal Chantry's painstaking design and print processes. This may be the most fun any of us will have at an art gallery this year. And if you have any doubts about whether this is art, put them to bed: The guy's in the Louvre, for Pete's sake. Through October 15 at the Philip Slein Gallery, 1319 Washington Avenue; 314-621-4634. Gallery hours 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Sat.

Ivy Cooper
Art Critic
Riverfront Times

An Open Letter

Dear Art Chantry,
I don't hold you responsible for "grunge," whatever the hell that was. I mean, I bought some of the albums, sure. Nirvana was great, and I scrounged a copy of Tad's God's Balls solely on your recommendation, and hell, I still listen to it when the leaves turn red and the cold rain falls for days on end. Good stuff. But the last worthwhile album Sub Pop put out was that Wolf Eyes LP, and even that wasn't quite as scorching a ride as the Screamers' stuff. Which, again, thanks for the tip on that band. Jesus Christ, those guys were so far ahead of their time it's just unbelievable that they never put anything out officially. But that's part of the thrill, innit? You gotta dig for the good stuff.

But "grunge." Every time someone says your name, "grunge" isn't far behind it. It's like your personal cross. But I don't believe you set out to create a style of music, fashion, slang, haircut, guitar-distortion tone or commercially marketable "brand" when you made posters and designed album covers for all those Seattle bands. You were just making a living doing something you love, and somehow your personal style became linked with this tsunami of product that was washing over the "youth culture."

Maybe it had something to do with your remarkable productivity. You can really crank out the work, and even though nobody bats a thousand, you're probably flirting with a grand, lifetime-average-wise. You're a Midwesterner when it comes to work ethic, but you're a Renaissance Master when it comes to aesthetic. And that's what all those record labels and bands wanted: beauty on a budget, and with a quick turnaround.

The funny part is, "grunge" devoured itself right out of the market. Every corporate designer and label artist ripped you off left and right for a while there, and by the time Kurt was dead none of those hacks could determine who was who anymore. But man, throw a Chantry-designed poster up on a wall covered with cheap knockoffs and watch the people slow down when they come even with yours. That poster you did for Kristeen Young's recent show in town, the woman's face with the text doing double-duty as the shading for her features? Yeah, that caused people to stop on Delmar--and it was gone in two days. The people can (and will) steal your posters, and the suits could try to co-opt your look, but none of 'em can match the real thing.

I can tote up the combination of influences (hot-rod culture, Golden Age sci-fi, cheap offset press echnology), the ethic (dirty hands equal busy hands), the aesthetic (handmade good, computer useless) and the intention (make something visually striking, then make the next one better), but none of that adds up to the crappy, flash-in-the-pan trend that was grunge. Shit, I've seen the work--I own your book, Some People Can't Surf. That's not grunge, that's classic: gorgeous sign mated with your gruff/sweetheart personality. Your work is unique. People should start calling the look "Chantry," and leave "grunge" just for the music.

Call me. I hear you're involved somehow in the construction of a secret miniature golf course. I'll play you nine holes for a cup of coffee. As ever, I remain your pal.

Paul Friswold
Riverfront Times

FRESH! & Dan Barton: Post-Modern Primitive

Fresh and Tasty

The Philip Slein Gallery, now relocated to its new street-level location at 1319 Washington Ave., is featuring two concurrent exhibitions the month of July.Fresh! is a survey exhibit of young, emerging talent. The five artists included are Bryan Reckamp, K.L. Robinson, Shane Simmons, Cassie Simon and John Watson. Daniel Barton: Post-Modern Primitive showcases Barton's paintings, with their rich surfaces, saturated colors and haunting imagery.

The aptly titled Fresh! is bursting with an abundance of intelligence and technical ability evidenced in the work of all five artists.

K.L. Robinson's compositions display taut graphics with a nice counterpoint of subtley that softens the potentially hard-edges elements and lends variety to the work. Shane Simmons' paintings almost evoke a Lord of the Rings feel of fantasy, balanced with intricate lines that underpin and anchor the smoky, wispy billows of cloud-like forms. There is a lot of controlled movment in Simmons' work that is held in place by tight design.

Bryan Reckamp's "It's All Good" (2004; oil on canvas, 102"x 51x 3") is a clever depiction of a large arm and realistic hand poised in the OK gesture against a dark background. The unframed canvas leans against the wall and has three-dimensional blocks underneath it, as a pedistal might, with the words of the title and horizontal painted flames. "It's All Good" relies on spatial perception, as well as social commentary. In a similarly playful spirit, Reckamp's "Born to Ride, Forced to Work" (2004; oil on canvas, 63"x 66"x 3") will bring a knowing smile to any viewer's face.

Cassie Simon's lush and brightly colored, unashamedly flora and fauna pieces-- the sin of formal studio art education-- are wickedly clever. "Papi and the Cisco Kid" (2005; mixed media on paper, 48"x 41") is a tongue-in-cheek piece with sequins and tassle fringe hanging from the bottom How deliciously blasphemous!

However, the standout pieces in Fresh! have to belong to John Watson. He shows five sculptures here of found wood and mixed media that, at first glimpse, appear to be birdhouses-gone-wrong. After that initial impression, the complexities of each work reveal themselves. There is an attention to balance that is at once precarious and formidable. Both "Decker" (2005; found wood, mixed media, 80"x 70"x 55") and "Cammack" (2005; found wood, mixed media, 20"x 65"x 14") feature three-legged constructions of wood, screws, staples, and paint. "Decker" is a complicated and elaborate, larger-scale sculpture emphasizing linear verticals. "Cammack" is a horizontal design, perched elegantly on three stems. Both pieces are amazing-- they appear humble and slapdash on first glance but reveal themselves to be sophisticated pieces of engineering.

Daniel Barton: Post-Modern Primitive is a curious collection of oil paintings that haunt and mesmerize. Barton's vernacular style is somewhere between folk art, children's art and masterworks. Typically working with a singular subject, Barton's works attempt to define new genres. "Richard" (2005; oil and varnish on wood, 24"x 30") and "Portrait of Rita Peets" (2005; oil, wax, and varnish on canvas) are darkly spooky and sad, heavily-glazed paintings of felines.

"Lemons" (1990; oil, wax, and varnish on canvas) is a gorgeous still life of five lemons against a rich, yellow-orange color field set off by a distinctive black frame. In the hands of a lesser artist, this painting could have been disastrous. With Barton's mastery, "Lemons" is a skillful and distinctive painting of considerable and suprising depth.

-Theresa Callahan
West End Word
July 13-19, 2005


Fresh! and Daniel Barton: Post-Modern Primitive

Round out your summer tour of work by underexposed and overachieving artists with a visit to Philip Slein, where you'll see tantalizing new work by K.L. Robinson, Shane Simmons, John Watson, Bryan Reckamp, and Cassie Simon. Robinson and Reckamp make richly engaging paintings that play around with opposite ends of the semiotic spectrum: Reckamp employs overdetermined, commercial text and imagery, while Robinson relies on fragmented forms and typographic heiroglyphs. Simon's mixed-media works on paper smuggle in some fairly loaded content beneath their decorative surfaces, and Simmons' acrylic works are strangely joyful, ebullient messes. Watson, the sculptor among the group, contributes clumsy constructions made of too many plywood strips, screwed together obsessively and verging on overkill. Yet they're endearing-- like incompetently built soapbox derby cars. In the back gallery, Barton shows off his ability to paint as if he'd never gone to art school--sort of the reverse of the toddler who can turn out a Pollock. Good postmodern fun.

-Ivy Cooper
Riverfront Times
July 13-19, 2005

Summer Shows Off Less-Well-Known Talent

Slein's exhibition doesn't misrepresent: Although they have had their share of cafe and nonprofit-space showings, all five of the young artists are relatively new to the exhibition game, i.e., fresh. However, none of them is exactly breaking new ground in the work on view. All show their derivations, which is entirely normal and healthy in artists at this stage of their career. What's interesting is what they do-- or don't do -- with their influences.

Shane Simmons, a 2001 B.F.A. graduate of Webster University, shows the wierdest, or at least most unlikely, influence: the surrealist-tinged magic realm of Pavel Tchelitchew, the painter of "Hide and Seek," once one of the most popular paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Across abstract fields suggesting indefinite space, simmons drips gossamer skeins of pigment that define forms emerging from nothingness only to collapse back into the void. Titles like "strange Stories and Beautiful Creatures" and "New Meditations From a Star-Crossed Child of the Clear Light" hint at his cosmic interests.

Kevin Robinson, a 2000 B.F.A. Webster graduate, has looked into an encyclopedia of graphic design to create a visual language of signs and patterns. In "NW," the silhouette of a languorous woman painted against a liver-colored ground surrounded by variously colored panels decorated with wallpaper stencil patterns.

Similarly, Cassie Simon, a 2005 Washington University M.F.A. grad, is facinated by the language of decoration, in her case Mexico's florid tradition. "Papi and the Cisco Kid" is an intentional kitschy composition featuring butterflies and flowers, silver foil and glitter that genuflects toward Frida Kahlo.

Bryan Reckamp, who went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, addresses his German heritage through the filter of Pop art. His most amusing picture features two stereotypical Germans in traditional drag hoisting steins of beer. In Gothic script, the title of the painting, "Where Do I Come From," is written across its lower surface. The central image is surrounded by small blocks of seperate images, one of which is based on a quintessentially American couple dressed in shorts posing for a snapshot against their car, suggesting that despite the costumes and props not much has changed.

John Watson, who is currently teaching at Webster University, is showing the most mature work here. His rickety sculptures, made f found wood haphazardly nailed together, suggests tree or bird houses built by a hermit surviving deep in the forest. The works, which are remarkably sturdy despite their appearance, relate to both art povera, the 1970s Italian movement that made art out of an industrial society's castoffs, and the more current trend of sculpture referencing architecture. Both movements derive from a sense of vulnerability, of a fear that society might at any moment collapse and that shelter and making do with what's at hand might be crucial to survival. Watson's delicate constructions are a smart addition to both tendencies.

Folk artist, outsider artist, self-taught artist, primitive-- all these terms are fluid in definition and rich for appropriation. Daniel Barton, who had a B.F.A. from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, seems to have adopted the persona of a 19th-century folk artist. Although he has long lived in St. Louis, he doesn't seem to have shown his work in the past 10 years. The seven paintings here are quirky and weird and look as if they had just been found in someone's attic and cleaned off for exhibit. Indeed, the surface of "Fire" is so cracked it looks as if it were painted in 1883 instead of 1993. (Barton creates the effect by applying a coat of wax to wet paint, which cracks as the paint dries.)

Barton likes cats that seem to possess powers at which humans can only guess. (Goya would understand.) And his works tend toward the monochrome-- look at his canvas of six lemons against a yellow ground and his image of a blind black cat emerging from a black ground.

Barton's work looks unschooled, but it is knowing. It might remind you of Albert York or the father of all wierdness in paint, Albert Pinkham Ryder. And that is a good thing

-David Bonetti
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
July 24, 2005

The Conceptual View

Philip Slein offers an homage to the Conceptual art movement, the school of think-tank, idea-driven artist who took control of the stage as well as the art work. These artist started with the space in front of the cone of vision and pursued imagined situations, not nature. They would clarify things before laying on rectangles for the convenience of whoever wants to see. The conceptualists wanted a closed loop: idea context-tuned stage-interpretation-telling object. Make a meta-thing that explained more than it represented

The conceptual artist resorts to collage, theather, illusion, construction, text, appropriation, narrative. The artist emulates teacher and magician to drive the bus to Iunderstand rather than Isee.

Photography is the most cerebral of media. It shows ferocious detail at the molecular level, is authentic in representation, and we grant it noble credibility. It is a superb forum for things organized to pique, confound or clarify. These three photographers came late to school and have been rowdy.

Strembicki sonatas his way through aneurysm, cancer, decay of space and flesh, language, radiation, symbols and fear towards paranoia. Is that your own mortality doing the gallery tango in step and behind you? Slein displays a dank landscape with elder figures on the horizon supported by circus prosthetics. Is it wise to draw closer - do they not carry long blades? Assner pictures food, ostensibly a pleaseing, safer venture. Or is this too close head bleeding - or covered and unable to breathe or, in the shadow, missing?

Three artists here who puzzle your pause before the work, provoke attention. Art is not alienable. See it, get it, though you might rather not. No harmless art here, it may leave you marked in mind. Think about it.

Bart Parker
2005

Jeff Aeling: New Landscapes

Jeff Aeling: New Landscapes

Aeling's landscapes are classical, the kind you learn about in art-history class. Superbly detailed, they pitch together dramatic forces of nature and freeze them into moments of sublime stillness, recalling American Luminists such as Martin Johnson Heade or John Kensett. But these are leaner, and almost completely emptied of references to humans or buildings; only one, Thunderstorm and Power Plant, announces its postindustrial time frame. This Kansas City-based artist's work doesn't mimic but sits quite comfortably among its historical forebears.

Ivy Cooper
Art Critic
May 2005

Tom Reed and Cheryl Wassenaar

"..... In Slein's back galleries are several collages and prints by Tom Reed, an accomplished visual prankster and maker of cartoon-like cautionary tales about our mistreatment of the wilderness. Six works by our own Cheryl Wassenaar round out the show nicely, continuing her brilliant study of the arbitrary meanings suggested by sign fragments."

Ivy Cooper
Art Critic
Riverfront Times
April 2005

Eight the Hard Way: A Survey of Hard Edge Painting in St.Louis

Eight the Hard Way

A brilliant inauguration for Philip Slein’s delicious new street-level gallery just down Wash. Ave. from his previous digs. Here he takes a liberal approach to defining “hard-edge,” including some great figurative works by Robert McCann (the dazzling Big Fish Eat the Small Fish) and Bill Kreplin, whose line-drawn images are both edgy and funny. The abstract works are savvy contemporary takes on the hard-edge sensibility, with strong, distressed-looking pieces by Jerald Ieans; superflat squigglies by Erik Spehn; and Brandon Anschultz’s shapes that parade across highly varnished plywood surfaces. Kelly Chorpening’s linear webs and chunky, cartoonish cityscapes play deftly with spatial illusion and pure flatness, while Cheonae Kim’s Untitled is nothing but surface, articulated by strong color. In a sensational digression into the textual/conceptual, Kim Humphries’ eight “Emoticon” paintings monumentalize the absurd text-messaging lingo that employs letters and punctuation marks to express remarkably banal ideas. I was LMAO when I saw these, and chances are you’ll LOL too.

Ivy Cooper
Art Critic
Riverfront Times
February 9, 2005

The Scene and Scenery Keep Changing Among Local Galleries

“The gallery scene in St. Louis, never robust to begin with, seems to change its form on a monthly basis. We recently received the sad news that the Elliot Smith Gallery was closing in March after serving the community for 20 years. The Philip Slein Gallery, open only a year, was forced to move when it was evicted from its Washington Avenue loft, which is being renovated for living spaces. The good news in the latter case is that the gallery has relocated just down the street at pavement level, adding to the life of a slowly reviving Washington Avenue.

Gallerist Philip Slein is not one for small gestures, and he’s reopened his gallery with a blast of energy. His opening party, part of a benefit last weekend for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, was packed, and reunions, cordial and otherwise, marked the evening. Those who indulged only in air kissing should make the effort to go back and see the art, however. The exhibition, ambiguously titled “Eight the Hard Way,” featured eight St. Louis- associated painters who practice what the gallery calls “hard-edge painting.” Those of us who date back to a certain era remember that term to mean a specific approach to abstract painting in which contours, often formed by masking tape, were sharp as a knife. Slein uses a far looser definition. Any painting in which edges are not soft or modulated seems to qualify in his view. But no problem, that was then, this is now.

The show features some of the usual suspects and a few new, at least to me, names. Indeed, one highlight of a generally good show is the work- two small paintings- by Kelly Chorpening, an artist living in London who studied here, whose work I’ve not seen before. Her two oils on panel show a complex pattern of traceries that remind you variously of electric cables silhouetted against the sky or cat’s cradles that got out of control. One of the pieces features white lines delicately drawn on a black ground; the other a grey line on white.

Another strong work is a single painting show by Bill Kreplin. His “Communion with the Sacred Feminine” is in the Pop mode. Thick, sharply laid down lines of black acrylic create a fascinating image. A vintage stewardess holds a white circle between the index finger and thumb of both hands, showing it as if a precious gift toward a suited man facing her. Outside the windows behind, an equally vintage propeller plane occupies a runway. Blocks of dull color- beige, light blue, orange- are applied without regard to image or shape.

Of the works by St. Louis gallery regulars, three works by Brian Anschultz show the greatest growth. In the past, Anschultz has shown paintings on panel with constellations of oval or lozenge shapes distributed across their surface. Although always beautifully crafted, they seem a little too safe, a little too timid. In these new works, he seems to have thrown caution to the wind and to have come out a winner. His acrylic forms are freer in shape now, like the color-forms children play with. They contrast regularly shaped blocks, bars and ovals with forms that seem to be morphing before your eyes. What they share is a constant hard-edge. Anschultz’s use of color also seems to have become liberated, but his craftsmanship, especially his beautifully treated birch plywood grounds, is excellent as before.

Erik Spehn is also showing relatively new work. His four large square acrylics on canvas each feature a cartoonish squiggle that looks like a mestasticized intestine flattened out and spread across the canvas filling every inch of it.

Three other artists in the show, Jerald Ieans, Choenae Kim and Kim Humphries, are showing work that has been shown before or is similar to work we’ve seen. One weird inclusion in the exhibition is “The Big Fish Eat the Small Fish,” a figure painting by Bob McCann. A throwback to the ‘30s, it seems not to have digested fully the influence of moralist Paul Cadmus. This crowded beach scene features tales from the human comedy. A woman breast-feeds her infant while her husband massages her shoulders; a studly blonde lifeguard is ogled by two older gay men; an anguished female figure assumes the pose of Eve in Masaccio’s “Expulsion from Paradise”; a punkish couple looks on the entire scene with surly condescension. No one pays the least attention to a giant dinosaur skeleton that occupies the corner of the beach.”

-David Bonetti
Art Critic
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
February 6, 2005

The Outlaw Printmakers and Michael Byron

VISUAL RAZZBERRIES
Outlaw Printmakers demonstrates that the age-old tradition of socially engaged and morally responsible print-making remains vital. The 15 artists in this traveling show have proven themselves adept at grafting today's issues and preoccupations onto a satirical and parodistic tradition that goes back to the origins of image-making. In the 40-plus prints on view, the influence of Picasso, Max Beckmann and the Germans, the Mexicans of the 1930s, Philip Guston, and prints and broadsides from the Gothic and Renaissance eras is strong. The ribald and the carnivalesque are constant. (Shaking one's bottom at the powerful is an age-old expression of contempt by the powerless.) And a razor-sharp sense of morality cuts through the self-serving platitudes of current potentates of church and state. This show of "outlaws" is a perfect match for the exhibition of "underground" comics simultaneously on view across the street at the Des Lee Gallery.

When it comes to morality, the printmakers here suggest that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Which explains why older genres and models of representation are still powerful vehicles for expression of disgust at the status quo. Chicago-based tattoo artist Nick Bubash explores one of the oldest genres in Christendom in his series "The Seven Deadly Sins." In his hands, age-old and ageless vices take on a contemporary cast. In "Greed," America's favorite vice, the top of the head of a fat-faced gentleman opens to allow two fat pink pigs to come out for a breath of fresh air.

The show was organized by local artist Tom Huck, whose masterful woodcuts, detailing the human carnival as it passes through the streets of his hometown of Potosi, are a central part of the exhibition. Each of Huck's massive prints offers a world complete in itself, where boozin', wenchin' and retchin' are the morning, noon and night of existence.

Although this is a political year, most of the work here is more socially than politically concerned. An exception is work by Washington University professor Lisa Bulawsky. In her large mixed-media prints and collages, she uses organized one-on-one violence - boxing - as a metaphor for political and social violence, i.e., war. George W. Bush, John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld are among her cast of characters.

David Bonetti
Art Critic
St.Louis Post-Dipatch
October 2004

Michael Byron at Philip Slein Gallery

In "Psychological Chart," the first of some 39 works on paper at the Slein Gallery that were finished by Michael Byron since he moved to St. Louis, the track of what one might surmise to be the artist's own psychological state starts at a low point labeled "impetus" and ends, after a journey of radical ups and downs, at a higher point labeled "acceptance." However hard won that acceptance might be, after the artist has passed through wonder (a high), chemical depression (a mid-low), temporary euphoria (another high), financial anxiety (another mid-low) and isolation (a low), you wonder how long it might last. Will the jagged line charting his inner experience collapse into utter chaos or rise to stratospheric heights of self-regard? Made in 1993-95, the piece suggests a future history we might map for ourselves in our imaginations. And who's to say the chart is the artist's? Maybe it's our own to begin with.

Byron seems to relish such uncertainties. To remove intentionality from his practice, he embraces chance and, in the work of the "Amitin Notebook Series," what he calls "unknown collaborators" - the markings of persons unnamed left in a notebook found at the Amitin bookshop that he felt compelled to complete. (There are six pages, "Outtakes," from the "Amitin Notebook Series" in the show.)

"Psychological Chart" is a randomly generated work from start to, most likely, finish. The gray ground is a field of bubbles made by sprinkling water over a still-wet painted sheet of paper that is fixed by a quick application of clear spray-paint. The lighter gray dribble on the surface mimics '50s painting techniques - an art-fair version of Pollock. The nervous line jags up and down but seldom deviates from a regular orthogonality. (Rather than points, its peaks are all narrow plateaus.) The only question is whether the psychological states applied to its plateaus and valleys, reused found texts, are random as well. Are we gullible in accepting the chart as true to the subject's psychological state? Isn't it most likely an elaborate ruse?

Byron moved here in 1994 to teach at Washington University, and he has been busy since then. Anyone who cares about art made in St. Louis owes it to themselves to check it out - Byron's work is often difficult to grasp when seen in isolation. His concerns become clearer when work from several series made over a decade is shown together.

Byron's work might be formally and technically various, but he comes back repeatedly to certain themes. Like the surrealists, he bases his practice in chance operations and random events, finding meaning in the juxtaposition of unlike or unexpected imagery. (The proverbial umbrella and sewing machine found on a dissecting table is also Byron's standard of beauty.) He enjoys the somewhat cheap pleasures of illusionism, fooling the eye into believing it is seeing something it is not. He is interested in culture and civilization, the man-made and man-conceived, both art and science. Space travel, cosmic aspirations, charts, maps, tables of information, reproductions of famous and not-so-famous artworks, 1950s design and decorative patterns are regularly revisited tropes he exploits for his own purposes.

I particularly enjoyed his mid-'90s series, "100 Postcards." One, "Postcard #18: Camera Club Visits the Moon," features an etched image of men with cameras on a rocky outcropping, recalling the novels made by Max Ernst from cut-up and rearranged etchings, collage's 20th-century mother lode. And a certain autobiographical content gets slipped in as well: In "Postcard #93: Confessions of a Non-Smoker," there is a photographic image of the artist bending over to light a cigarette from a candle the shape and size of a woman's head. Now that's surreal.

David Bonetti
Art Critic
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
October 2004

Notes on Michael Byron’s A Decade of Work on Paper

By Tom Bussmann


Michael Byron’s work is frequently categorized as either neo-Surrealist or neo-Dadaist. It’s easy to see why when one considers the body of his work. The Surrealists were fascinated with dream life. Dreams reorganize the images of waking life in strange and unfamiliar patterns, sometimes transposing, by analogy, one person or object for another. The Surrealists used dreams and analogies as ways of attacking the perceived order of the universe. Likewise, a certain amount of Byron’s work revolves around groups of images or objects in search of an order. Some of his work incorporates visual ordering systems—maps, graphs, charts, diagrams—but in Byron’s systems, order always remains cryptic. He believes in the cabalistic nature of the diagram and its power to impart arcane knowledge. In creating completely eccentric systems for unknown or unknowable information, Byron leaves it up to the viewer to puzzle whether somewhere, perhaps, a sequence of ideas or things corresponds to the pieces.


The Dadaists aimed to restore art’s primal power. A review of a 1919 Dadaist exhibition could have been written today, in a post-9/11 world: “It has been said that this art reflects despair over the state of the modern world; admittedly, the human situation on this planet is hopeless; but hope, yearning, faith are and will remain the roots of all art.” The work of art, they said, is created by man out of his “will to magic” in response to his disenchanted nature. And never was the nature of man more disenchanted than in the period following World War I. Arp wrote: “Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages, and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell.”


In a nod to the Surrealists and the Dadaists, Byron incorporates collage and photography into the body of his work. Some work addresses the relationship between painting and photography. In addition, some paintings, notably the Grisaille Series, the Constellations and the Psychological Charts, employ a technique in which water is dripped on wet oil paint and then spray-painted over: what occurs to me is that in all cases a photographic process could be much more easily employed to render the look of water bubbles—just look at the bubbles printed on Coke cans. But that is the point. Byron creates the bubbles by hand—one could even say by sleight of hand --thus imparting to the mind of the viewer the aura of originality. Byron calls painting the Indian Rope Trick of the visual arts precisely because of this, because what is painted is always perceived as authentic and as existing, magically, in the present tense.

In the Constellations, Byron employs a kind of automatism by dripping water to create stars; in the Psychological Charts he drips paint to create charts. There are charts of the sky, charts of the sea, and charts of the psyche; cartography is a constant presence in his work. In 1996 he completed a series called 100 Postcards. Postcards by their nature assume a mapping identity—they function as reports, of the new and the miraculous, sent home to the clan. Byron’s postcards, however, speak of imagined vistas, or psychological vistas.

Byron’s latest series of works, the Cosmic Tears, is based on a text in which God, upon seeing the destructive potential of humanity, shed a cosmic tear on the birth of each one of us. That tear is the womb of our psyche. Our job, the text says, is to shape it into meaning. For Byron, art is essentially an optimistic venture--an Indian Rope Trick-- offering us an escape from the hopelessness.



Michael Byron: A Decade of Work on Paper at Philip Slein Gallery.
Art on Paper, Jan/Feb 05

The fifty-plus works is this may not have offered an exhaustive view of the work made by Michael Byron during the ten years he has lived in Saint Louis, but they adequately suggest the variety he has been able to achieve within a relatively narrow, though flexible, set of procedures. Byron's interests range broadly through art and science. The works feature fictional psychological charts, postcards from imaginary places, maps of the cosmos, reproductions of modernist artworks, and vintage illustrations from self-help manuals, all of which he manipulates with the same Surrealist-derived process of dissociation and radical juxtaposition, destabilizing both artwork and art viewer. Explotiation of chance and coincidence are at the heart of his practice

In Postcard B from his "100 Postcard Series" (1995-96), a reproduction of a German Expressionist deposition with a yellow Christ appears alongside a black-and-white '50s-style illustration of a suited man in an unlighted office peering at something closely through a handheld magnifying glass. Beside him, the drawer of a file cabinet is prominently open. The texts pasted on the surface read "Misfit" and "The 1st Conspiracy Theory." The narrative is fractured, the tone paranoid.

Byron's best-known work from the past decade is probably his "Amitin Notebook Series" (2000-01), in which he added his own imagery to the pages of a partially filled notebook that he found in the Amitin Bookstore in downtown Saint Louis. The six outtakes from this play with an "unknown collaborator" were so fascinatingly diverse that you wanted to experience the entire series to see just how far he would go. Three relatively large abstractions from Byron's current series, "Cosmic Tears," concluded the show. Grounded in the pessimistic view that each of us is born with a cosmic tear to accompany our mostly painful journey through life, the series nonetheless suggests that making art is a way to combat the existential vacuum of life by creating meaning out of nothing.

-David Bonetti
Art Critic

Michael Byron at Philip Slein
ART IN AMERICA
Mel Watkin

Like Duchamp's 1941 Boite-en-Valise, the various small works in Michael Byron's recent exhibition could have been unpacked from a suitcase. Hung in Slein's intimate side gallery, the show included 57 works on paper, most of them from five series Byron created after his move to St. Louis in 1994. Viewers could easily absorb a full decade of the artist's thoughtful and wryly humorous work, at a reduced scale.

Byron created each series with strict parameters and different procedures, but within those parameters he also played with expectations. He was especially crafty when rewroking such visual tropes as charts and graphs. In the "Psychological Chart Series" (1993-95), he used a dribble of paint to track the ups and downs of artistic life as if it were a stock market index. From a distance the composition reads as decorative abtraction, but close inspection reveals that labels like "temporary euphoria," "wonder," "discipline" or "clarity" are affixed to high points on the index. The low points include "chemical depression," "financial anxiety" and "isolation."

The "Amitin Notebook Series" (2000-1)--represented by six works--is based on a yellowing, partially filled notebook the artist found at the Amitin Bookshop, a now-defunct used-bookstore in newly rehabbed downtown St. Louis. Inspired by notes and scribbles already on the pages, Byron commenced a program of drawing, painting and collage. After all 239 pages were filled and photographed he grouped each finished page into an exhibition cateory, among them "Master Suite" (works that must always be shown together), "Outtakes" (works that could be shown individually) and "Destroyed." Byron burned pages in the "Destroyed" category and displayed their ashes in a glass vase mounted near the successful works.

For the series "Cosmic Tears" (represented by three examples from 2004), instructions dictate that a text written by the artist always accompany the works. In Cosmic Tears #19 a greengold iridescent fog billows over the center of a field of concentric circles. Indistinct lines connect dots of metallic paint that shimmer likle stars exploding in deep space. This combination of imagery brought to mind ancient decorative carvings and Englightenment-era astronomical charts, as the artist's accompanying text revealed his fascination with philosophy, alchemy and mysticism.

Mel Watkin
Contributing Critic
Art in America

Lisa Bulawsky: Merry Folly (all fall down)

"Lisa Bulawsky has an incomparable eye for the tragicomic. "Dementia Pugilistica" are handworked advertisements on newspaper featuring fantastic boxing matches (John Ashcroft, a.k.a. "Lawzilla," is pitted against a vacuum cleaner dubbed "Hurt Devil"). Also included is a hilarious interactive installation involving paddle balls and cheap trophies, along with a series of prints titled "Problem Plays" dedicated to tragic heroes, including Harvey Milk, Jack Kevorkian, Karen Carpenter and Amy Fisher (well, they're not all heroic). The caricatures are spot-on, and Bulawsky's humor is playful and cutting."

-Ivy Cooper
Art Critic
Riverfront Times
May 19,2004

Ronald Leax: Laboratories or Last Suppers

"Ronald Leax is nothing if not ambitious in his exhibition "Laboratories or Last Suppers," which fills the large Slein Gallery with odd contraptions that hover somewhere between science and religion but remain in the end firmly rooted in the category of art. Leax writes, in a rare example of an articulate artist's statement, that "the exhibition is not about science, art or religion. The exhibition is about the inadequacies of science,art and religion......I urge you to see this show,especially if you are skeptical about the potential for nontraditional art materials to satisfy traditional desires for beauty. No PC thinking here.

David Bonetti
Art Critic
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Feburary 15, 2004


“Embracing Modernism’s preoccupation with the confluence of art and science, Ron Leax has for several years acknowledged this important aspect of art history with large installations. Unlike much contemporary art, these projects comment on neither the abuses of technology nor the interaction and employment of new technologies, itself a strategy that might describe a primary impetus for much of western art history. Rather, Leax demonstrates a less stable approach in his installations, which employ obvious, even clichéd, scientific apparatus to attack preconceptions of the mutual exclusivity between art and science.

“Laboratories and Last Suppers” (Philip Slein Gallery, January 30-March 6, 2004) comprises thirteen sculptures and related drawings that juxtapose clear Christian iconographic references with scientific allusions. The number of sculptures included hints at the reception of symbols inherent in the exhibition; however, at this proposition’s heart is Leax’s masterful understanding of materials as aesthetic objects and as bearers of meaning. Several of the works entitles Last Supper refer directly to number symbolism: twelve Erlenmeyer or Florence flasks, each holding a thermometer and filled with various colored liquids, rest on thirteen glass panels while a flask filled with marble chips becomes subtly isolated. Leax’s careful attention to details of material continues with the inclusion of dried blood and stark white communion wafers. One is reminded of the many references to body as media in the time of AIDS, the infamous and NEA challenging performances of Ron Athey, Mark Quinn’s Self (1991) composed of the artist’s frozen blood or Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s elegance of materiality as an activated ready-made. Each of the many objects here suggest myriad potential narratives.

The monumental Laboratories (2004) confronts the viewer with seemingly hundreds of feet of glass rods, plastic tubing, Mohr pipets, multi-colored cable ties and assorted glass flasks held into a cruciform shape by stainless steel stands, all arranged on a heaping circular bed of dried animal blood. A container filled with a garish orange-tinged specimen sits separately below, perhaps a reminder of St. John at the base of the cross; it is balanced with a configuration of numerous upright lengths of tubing as though contrariwise evoking the Virgin as spotless laboratory glass. Beyond the multiple references to the iconography of the Christian Passion, the work also recalls the abundant, unsettling equipment around a dying patient’s hospital bed. More than merely mimicking an experimental setting, Leax’s laboratory underscores individual human passion- in essence a secular crucifixion.

This work acknowledges that competing ontologies can be multiply altered to fit our ideals. Much like the Viennese philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend’s claims about the disunity of science, Leax’s installations suggest that, in the absence of a unifying empirical theory, we can imagine alternate possibilities of reality. The theme of the Last Supper is a fitting metaphor to explore this plurality. Our preconception of the laboratory as a pristine intellectualized space could be understood as directly opposed to the visceral and mysterious setting of the Last Supper. The Eucharist, as harbinger of the horrific passion cycle, replete—according to Mel Gibson’s recent film version—with copious quantities of blood and pain, coalesces into the doctrine of transubstantiation. However, that mystery categorically links the scientific realm to the supernormal, whether constructed as medieval alchemical hermeticism or the contemporary esotericism of quantum mechanics and string theory."

-Jeffery Hughes
Art Critic
Art Papers
March/April 2004

Schmidt's Picks

"Downtown on Washington Avenue,Philip Slein's new gallery is making an argument for the importance of artists working closer to home. "Schmidt's pick's" a selection of works chosen by venerable gallerist Jim Schmidt, features a veritable who's who of St. Louis area artist. It's a knockout show, the perfect vehicle to make converts out of those who doubt - or don't know - the level of artistic talent in the city......"

Ivy Cooper
Art Critic
Riverfront Times
December 17, 2003

Grand Opening Show

"Many people feel that St. Louis could use more good galleries featuring good local artists. Philip Slein, who is the director of Washington University-sponsored Des Lee Gallery on Washington Avenue, has moved across the street into the Eli Walker building to do just that.

His opening show, which features 44 works by 16 artists, with another 40 artists hung salon-style in the back room he is calling "The Library," could serve as a snapshot of current local art activity. Slein will be the first to tell you that not everyone deserving on the local scene is included, but those who are make a lively group show."

-David Bonetti, art critic
St. Louis Post Dispatch
November 2, 2003