Skepticism & Critique |
by Cynnie Gaasch |
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The Burchfield-Penney Art Center is currently showing four exhibitions that illustrate a variety of critiques created by artists in their work. Skepticism about elements of the world around them is the main subject for each of these artists’ exhibits currently on display. These exhibitions showcase the work of Charles Burchfield, Edward G. Bisone, Christy Rupp and Peter Sowiski.
“City Critique: Burchfield’s Commentary on the Early Twentieth Century” includes a handful of paintings and many sketches which relate to the development of cities and “progress” in general. The works are mostly skeptical of the progress of man, as shown in “Civic Improvement,” a painting that has men chopping down a tree in front of a neighborhood of houses. The location is Mohawk Street in Buffalo. Our fine City was the source for a good deal of work in this exhibit. “Grain Elevators” shows the dark waters and sky surrounding our familiar structures. Each window and clapboard of the buildings is carefully described; making the piece beautiful in its description of the reality of the elevators’ role in consumerism.
Burchfield also clearly admired some of the new creations at the hand of man. “Buildings and Street Scene” includes the Niagara Mohawk Building (formerly the Electrical Building.” Catching the light of a cool sky, the light colored building is shown for all its beauty on the crowded city street.
“A Life in the Arts: Ed Bisone” incorporates work from the artist’s (who is in his eighties) many decades of hard work. Bisone has a way of working the surface that lets you know he has considered every inch, which is in itself touching. This exhibit includes a good number of works that incorporate themes of death. In an untitled piece of 1988 you see a corpse of a human next to a cow with an ominous dark house or mountain in the distance.
Another piece is a statement about lynching. Horizontal marks in black clip the main figure’s head off. In “Confinement Series I” of 1990 he scrawls across the page, “We are all sentenced to solitary confinement for life.” The images are of brutality to humans. “Black Mountain Series” is more abstract and seems to be a quiet homage to the artist’s contemporaries, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
Peter Sowiski’s paper pulp portraits of military aircrafts make light (and then again heavy) of the reality of our contemporary war culture. The “F-117” is ominous and the image of the plane disappears into the surface of the piece. In “Wart Hog” the sky is dappled with black, red, and blue suggesting gunfire, explosion, and detritus surrounding the plane in flight (at battle). In the larger wall work, “F-15 Service” the Plexiglas which covers the paper panels is distracting with more than one panel scratched on its surface. The image, of a man doing maintenance or perhaps loading a bomb onto the war plane, is abstracted and lost in the large space of the work (about 8 feet tall by 16 feet wide), then it comes back to snap you out of your easy inspection to the reality of reality.
Christy Rupp under the name Lowgo exhibits textiles partially produced by South American women as a critique of the North America Free Trade Agreement and World Trade Organization. Guatemalan fabrics are hand embroidered with corporate identities like McDonalds, Pepsi, Gap, and Shell. Statements about the actuality of the role of American big business and their affect on foreign economies with statements like, “Business of Going out of Business,” “Race to the Bottom,” and “Global Life Science. We Make Messes.” Much like the original fabric, the embroidered works are delicate and beautiful in their patterned design. I’d love to see someone walking down the street in a poncho with some of these statements embroidered on it.
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