Art Preview: Biennial Gleanings
PCA has hosted the Biennial since 1994; this year’s exhibit took place despite budgetary woes that briefly forced the center’s closure last year. The show, open to artists within a 150-mile radius of the city, was co-curated by PCA Exhibitions Coordinator Laura Domencic and Hilary Shames, adjunct professor at Carlow College and the University of Pittsburgh.
“Agronics!” (2005), by Wendy Osher, seeks to literally find a healthy medium between on-the-job physical labor and exercise. A ceiling-mounted video projects images of various people working out onto a pile of dirt below. While Osher’s artist statement/manifesto might be taken seriously, one can’t help chortling at the abandoned tools positioned in the soil, emblazoned with phrases such as “Feel the Burn,” “Show Me Whatcha Got!” and “Squeeze Those Buns!”
Subconsciously inspired, Jennifer Bechak’s installation “When You Smile” (2005) initially incorporates a detached, sterile environment. In a side room blanketed with Astroturf, two layers of ordinary window screens serve as a transparent barrier near its entry. On the floor within the black framework that supports the dual screens, banks of fluorescent lights beam upward. Inside the installation, at the far wall, there’s a sense of enclosure, imprisonment. Here is a black leather bench, too small to lie on and too uncomfortable to sit on for any duration. Opposite, upon the wall, several fabric pouches hang on pegs. In the corner, a black-framework “desk” holds useless screen “vases.” Yet it’s here -- behind transparent walls and topsy-turvy lighting -- that the “surreality” ends: Directly beneath a low-hanging light bulb rests a gift in blue paper, with a silver bow. Though its contents are unknown, one hopes it allays the harshness of the bizarro environment.
Inspired by “technological and cultural breakdowns that cause us to question the promise of our future,” Adam Davies’ oil paintings offer a sense of bleakness in their imagery. In “Shimmer” (2005) a gray mist hangs over a silent, mostly hidden purple-shadowed village. Beyond it, a mountain range and a butter-colored sky. Does daybreak explain the emptiness of the village? Or is the ashen miasma that hovers above the hamlet its own curse? “Pink Sky” (2005) portrays a great expanse of low-lying heavens, a gloomy, gray modern neighborhood devoid of citizens and a wide, pockmarked road with nary an automobile in sight. An ambiguous landscape, it offers few clues. Is it a desolate Baghdad lit up day and night during the throes of the U.S. invasion? A post-apocalyptic ghost town? Or merely a sleepy a.m. cityscape? (Pittsburgh?)
Chris Craychee’s “The Spins” (undated) is a three-way collaboration between artist, audience and Lady Luck. Using wheels of fortune, visitors place penny tokens on a counter to wager upon such matters as whether the wheel’s pointer will stop on red, blue or green. Craychee uses permanent markers upon sheets of white graph paper to produce the resulting offbeat illustrations. While some resemble business diagrams (visualize stock market crests and valleys) most of the 70-some designs have intricate, three-dimensional qualities that it’s hard to accept were literally derived from the luck of the draw.
Another collaboration, “Rondo”(2005), by Hilary Harp and Suzie Silver, is a bi-screen computer-generated endeavor. A mesmerizing, wall-projected video contains flashing lights, rotating flowers and gears. The second video features a man and woman who shuffle, prance and wear a smiley-face barrel against a kaleidoscopic background of spinning shapes. Dictionary-defined as “an instrumental composition,” “Rondo” is misnamed; more occurs visually than in its industrial soundtrack. Though visually entertaining, “Rondo” is ultimately laconic in its aesthetic intention.
The Biennial continues through August 21. Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Fifth and Shady Avenues, Shadyside. 412-361-0873
posted by PG at 8:00 PM
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