"Sustained Visions” at Pima Community College, Tucson
Might it be possible for the Louis Carlos Bernal Gallery at PCC West to become the Bernal Museum and permanently house its current show, “Sustained Visions”? The five-person exhibition presents the absolute epitome of both two and three-dimension work, and stands as a testament to the relevance --- particularly, but not only, of painting --- of Art, capital A, to the Now when so much of art --- particularly painting --- has degenerated into the contradiction of Modernism’s progressive 20th century lessons. And those lessons? Well, Art --- capital A --- parallels philosophy and science (whether the practitioner knows it or not) and what “you”/anyone likes/dislikes is irrelevant. Stuff can be important without being likable.
Then Postmodernism, bless it and its ad nauseam theories, important though they were, enabled young painters to do “whatever” --- returning to figuration, making (irrelevant?) “wall fodder” under the dictum “whatever goes.” And if you like it: fine. And does it matter, mean anything, add anything to the 200 year conversation? Who cares? It is Now.
But this show…
Excuse this personal interruption. Back in the 20th century I was designated, quite by accident --- few actual artists are able, it seems, to write complete sentences --- as the area’s critic. The area was The Borderland (El Paso/Juarez/Las Cruces) NOT a place one thinks of when one thinks of Art! But it was the 80s and 90s, the economy was booming and people were collecting and galleries were everywhere and non-profits, too, and we weren’t at war, and Art Art Art Art...
I’m glad I am as old as I am.
Writing a weekly column for the local AFTERNOON paper (yes: we had two newspapers, the morning one rather conservative and the other one --- mine --- not) as well as covering The Borderland for national magazines (again, yes: glossy stuff was produced on paper and physically delivered through the mail), required me to visit at least three exhibitions or art sites a week. And something odd happened over the months and years: I became able to guess correctly, more or less, the age and date of the work!
Which brings me back to Now and the mind-boggling, show-stopping exhibition at PCC, brilliantly curated and installed by Gallery Director David Andres. The artists, it seemed to me, have to have had their roots in Modernism; they have to have been pre-war or Baby Boomers, not any younger (the show’s title might’ve given me a clue if I’d been paying attention to words rather than forms and colors). But lucky them. If they studied art in college or MFA programs --- rare and exclusive as they were in that era ---, their professors would’ve been Abstract Expressionists. Pop Art was just on the horizon, then Minimalism would pretty much take us to the logical stopping point, style-wise. Painting opened out to other media and techniques: film, digital, you name it. I cannot. I am too old.
But this exhibition said to me, on some profound fundamental level, these folks --- the painters, you’ll forgive me for being stuck on the wall --- were shaped by Art, capital A, that meant something, that mattered. This exhibition means something, lots of things; it matters, in lots of ways. Can we keep it???
walls: Bailey Doogan; floor: Fred Borchardt
back wall: Barbara Rogers; glass: Tom Philabaum; right wall: Jim Waid
left to right: Jim Waid, Fred Borchardt, Tom Philabaum; Barbara Rogers
Allow me, as a two-dimensional type, to leave the wonderfully successful sculptural pieces --- formalist combos of materials by Fred Borcherdt and decorative symmetry in a mysterious (to me) medium and process, glass, by Tom Philabaum, so as to focus on the walls and the three very distinct “voices” that ring out from them. All, save one, are not known to me as a local newcomer, so this show’s insistence on recalling it --- I do this after one slow viewing and from the distance of miles and across borders --- seems all the more significant. It speaks, it spoke, to me.
Talent and technical skills are certainly things to be recognized and celebrated, but they alone/together do not Art, capital A, make. Bailey Doogan’s work, on first look, displays these two prerequisites to the max, but there is so much more. Without the manipulation of the subject matter --- self --- and the enlargement of the image of said subject… Well, you get what I’m saying. Both those things enabled this “seer” of immense and obvious talent and skill to rise above and beyond those two none-too-rare characteristics. She found a conceptual way to lose herself: distortion and distraction from the lines, spots, and droops that too often scare the aging seer from the mirror/photograph. “She” became a still life that invited her careful, impressive, skillful descriptions of that “self.”
Then there is Barbara Rogers, whose work requires much more study and thought because it, on early/first look, seems impossible to have been made with hand and brush. The small examples of her “vocabulary” deserve more attention, too; perhaps they reveal meaningful input. Beside the point from this skimming assessment: the large painting --- yes, it falls under the PoMo label “pastiche” --- requires visual work from the viewer, and its optical and spatial contradictions and games are no accident. This is smart art, really smart. Did she work from a smaller sketch? There are no accidents here, and that is, perhaps, part of her point.
So we are led to an opposite process: the wondrous work of Jim Waid, who occasionally works in other media and smaller scale, but whose true Home is the large-scale oil “landscape” of the type that suggests, to me, at least, an inner dream rather than an outer vision by an historic Monet-type. The ultimate painter’s painter, Waid gets more color out of color than is possible; how is it possible?
If I had immense wealth and local importance --- sorry; I’ve neither --- I would purchase this entire exhibition and display it permanently in a public space. It is a testament to the lessons learned and absorbed by the fortunate, attentive artists of Modernism’s legacy. Art, capital A --- I repeat myself --- can still mean something, can still matter. In “Sustained Visions,” it does.
Becky Hendrick
Puerto Peñasco, Mexico
November 19, 2018
Allow me, as a two-dimensional type, to leave the wonderfully successful sculptural pieces --- formalist combos of materials by Fred Borcherdt and decorative symmetry in a mysterious (to me) medium and process, glass, by Tom Philabaum, so as to focus on the walls and the three very distinct “voices” that ring out from them. All, save one, are not known to me as a local newcomer, so this show’s insistence on recalling it --- I do this after one slow viewing and from the distance of miles and across borders --- seems all the more significant. It speaks, it spoke, to me.
Talent and technical skills are certainly things to be recognized and celebrated, but they alone/together do not Art, capital A, make. Bailey Doogan’s work, on first look, displays these two prerequisites to the max, but there is so much more. Without the manipulation of the subject matter --- self --- and the enlargement of the image of said subject… Well, you get what I’m saying. Both those things enabled this “seer” of immense and obvious talent and skill to rise above and beyond those two none-too-rare characteristics. She found a conceptual way to lose herself: distortion and distraction from the lines, spots, and droops that too often scare the aging seer from the mirror/photograph. “She” became a still life that invited her careful, impressive, skillful descriptions of that “self.”
Then there is Barbara Rogers, whose work requires much more study and thought because it, on early/first look, seems impossible to have been made with hand and brush. The small examples of her “vocabulary” deserve more attention, too; perhaps they reveal meaningful input. Beside the point from this skimming assessment: the large painting --- yes, it falls under the PoMo label “pastiche” --- requires visual work from the viewer, and its optical and spatial contradictions and games are no accident. This is smart art, really smart. Did she work from a smaller sketch? There are no accidents here, and that is, perhaps, part of her point.
So we are led to an opposite process: the wondrous work of Jim Waid, who occasionally works in other media and smaller scale, but whose true Home is the large-scale oil “landscape” of the type that suggests, to me, at least, an inner dream rather than an outer vision by an historic Monet-type. The ultimate painter’s painter, Waid gets more color out of color than is possible; how is it possible?
If I had immense wealth and local importance --- sorry; I’ve neither --- I would purchase this entire exhibition and display it permanently in a public space. It is a testament to the lessons learned and absorbed by the fortunate, attentive artists of Modernism’s legacy. Art, capital A --- I repeat myself --- can still mean something, can still matter. In “Sustained Visions,” it does.
Becky Hendrick
Puerto Peñasco, Mexico
November 19, 2018
