Philadelphia City Paper.net
July 5–12, 2001
Kicks
Personal iconography and high-energy kitsch at the ICA.
By Susan Hagen

This zippy show gathers together recent work by six young artists that one way or another will probably knock your socks off. Their work embodies their generation’s energy along with an interest in alternative and folk culture. Guest Curator Alex Baker (formerly ICA’s Associate Curator and now the Associate Curator at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art) says these artists have "personalized styles and a handmade aesthetic" and their sources range from contemporary Indian and 19th-century American sign painting to surrealism, children’s art and thrift-store paintings. Interestingly, the artistically taboo subjects (the saccharine, mundane or self-indulgent) give an unexpected kick to the show.

Joy Feasley, from Philadelphia, has 15 marvelous paintings in the show that combine flat decorative patterns and surfaces with fragments of autobiographical stories. They’re meticulously rendered with a flat graphic style, while the materials (flocking, resin and vinyl paints on panel) and colors (Day-Glo, vivid, dark, murky and bright) are in your face. Backwoods Campground shows a peculiar night scene. A small hair-covered man crouches in the foreground while bears scatter his hard-earned blueberries. In between, we can see his peace offering to the bears, a case of beer and a bottle containing glowing green foliage. Flirting with tackiness, other paintings illustrate a snowmobiling adventure and a kitten wedged in a glass.

Clare Rojas contributed a number of small intricate gouache paintings and a corner installation — a padded gingham stage with a painted wood personage holding a guitar. Rojas’ intriguing paintings merge personal symbols and fantasy with a pantheistic mythology. Squirrel Bridge, for instance, shows a large squirrel stretched into a bridge over a waterfall. A strange girl carries a log over it, while two other logs tumble into the layers of spray and foam below. Another painting, The Owl and the Baby, shows a lumpy female giving birth while an enormous owl hovers above. Rojas has created timeless parables about nature, though several have contemporary touches like a microphone and amp. Rojas, who recently moved from Philadelphia to Chicago, is active as a musician.

Philadelphian Jim Houser’s charming installation, titled And It Built, has a plethora of painted objects (boxes, panels, stretched canvas, frames) arranged on painted pale-blue, avocado and orange backgrounds and painted over with more images and text. The text functions as captions, but he says it also documents his thoughts and "weird things I hear people say." Monsters, musclemen, small tenacious creatures, germs, mountains, waves, herbs, hats and potions cover the walls. The largest creature is a sort of emcee, an olive-green, five-limbed octopus with big eyes and a big toothy grin that points dramatically to other parts of the installation.

Entered through a door in a long faux-brick wall, San Franciscan Chris Johanson’s untitled sculptural installation is roughly constructed out of painted boxes, wood and cardboard. Once inside, the viewer is confronted with a makeshift model of a world gone awry — a crowded and bustling city with buildings, streets, cars, pedestrians and canoers — that is funneled into a big pile of (makeshift) shit. Here, four unhappy individuals are propped up on rickety pedestals as if to survey their bleak surroundings. Although this piece conveys despair and disillusionment, Johanson tempers it with his idealism and refreshing naiveté.

Scott Hewicker, also from San Francisco, makes highly original abstract paintings that are embellished with psychedelic kitsch. Painted in acrylic on canvas, they all have flowing, blobby surfaces that have been turned into clichéd landscapes covered with cats, mushrooms, castles or clouds. Sunsets abound. One painting, titled The Other Side of the 12th Planet Meadows, has it all: cats, butterflies, sailing ships (and much more) are arranged over oily spills of brown, gray and green paint. It’s clear that Hewicker is in full control of his tacky iconography and, although intentionally irritating, his work is also witty and entertaining.

San Francisco artist Margaret Kilgallen (see below) created a complex and lovely installation, with a 30-foot-tall mural in latex paint on two walls of the gallery, called Main Drag. It’s made up of fragmented images and text painted in muted earth colors that build a three-dimensional space at the same time that they destroy it. Two main scenes of bare urban landscapes, showing people interacting in public, are surrounded by dozens of smaller images. These act as digressions and show scenes of women surfing, couples arguing and musicians playing. Signs and pieces of signs are everywhere. There’s also a three-story ramshackle hut with boarded-up windows made of text-covered panels. Kilgallen’s wonderful installation, with its references to folk art and contemporary culture, conveys a paradoxical timelessness.

These six artists have been able to express intensely personal and original ideas by reworking the common and the clichéd. It seems to me that they’re proving, as did their precursors in Art Brut and the Hairy Who, the wisdom of infusing fine art with fresh ideas and imagery from pop and folk culture. It grates here and there, but this is truly a groovy show!