City Newspaper, December 2008; "ReMixed."

ART REVIEW: "ReMixed"

By Rebecca Rafferty on December 17, 2008

I'm all about the blending of artistic media, and the people who run Potential Life Studios know that visual art and music are a great mix. This tiny, seriously hip gallery and music venue is co-owned by husband and wife team Jeremy and Colleen Dziedzic, who host both local experimental musical endeavors and local visual artists. Four mixed media artists are currently showing their stuff at the gallery.

The owners decorated the lofty space sparingly with dried flowers and mismatched furniture to lend a sweetly dark bohemian feel. Colleen informed me that every Sunday evening the gallery holds improvised musical collaborations. You can follow artist links on the gallery's site to check out music hosted in the past. Some of the clips are industrial flavored; others are slower and moody/eerie. Fans can subscribe to receive the monthly recordings of the shows, or buy them individually online or at the gallery.

My viewing of the visual art show left me with a bunch of questions, so I harassed a couple of the mixed-media artists, who kindly offered some insight into their inspiration and work.

Rheytchul Chicken Bone's salon-style positioning of her paintings resembles a wall of family portraits in a medley of frames. Her art is as enigmatically named as she is (her best friend coined the nickname, which stuck), and I had been oscillating between whether the titles were non-sequiturs or some private association. Turns out the latter is true. "A lot of my titles come from lines of songs, lines of poems, movie quotes, inside jokes," says the painter, picture-framer, and counter-girl at Ultimate Tattoo and Piercing.

Of her mixed-media surface for the paintings, she explains, "I like to use fabric and texture to help build a narrative of the subject, to almost give them a setting, without actually doing so. Just enough to evoke a feeling in the viewer, albeit one that is unsettling, comedic, bland, or assertive." The tones that I lifted from many of them were haunting (the figure in "It Tastes Better than the Truth" has a ghostly countenance and unsettling stare enhanced by pinpoint highlights in the eyes), or cheeky ("Coney Island Baby"), or forlorn ("Dreams of Truckasaurus," a large image of a sad young girl with big eyes).

But Chicken Bone says that she sees a comedic quality in her work, despite the darkness. "A few I intentionally painted a bit moodier, a bit prettier, a bit more tragic, hopeful, etc." Her subjects vary from "old photographs and magazines as a starting reference point" to "Bob Flanagan, Charles Bukowski, and my grandfather."

You can see more of her work in "Portraits: Our Town and Our People" at the Center at High Falls.

Metal artist R. Scott Oliver contributed three minimalist pieces to the group show: rusted, yet smooth, metal surfaces stained with paint to give them an urban, silenced-industrial feel. The center of "Green Square" is dominated by the simple dark green form. This sparseness is atypical of his other wall sculptures (see more at rscottoliver.com), which are characterized by little reliquary-like shelves, complete with objects, or script scrawled allover.

Owner Jeremy Dziedzic shows you what can be done with only recycled book pages, white paint, and black ink. His nightmares-for-sale "Sketchbook" series (001-005) are old, faded pages with tables and charts, superimposed by Dziedzic's highly detailed grotesque anatomy sketches of beasties and truncated body parts ("Sketchbook 001" is dominated by a long-necked human skeleton that seems about to turn to face the viewer), topped off with obsessive scribbling of words in a dark-thought rush.

Kurt Ketchum, of SMUV (single-minded-urban-vision) Brand, creates art of spray-painted stenciling, drawing, and painting on corrugated cardboard or plywood. The pieces are black and white with brightly colored accents, and mostly abstractions of mechanical things and animals. Part L337 ("g33k-speak"; numbers stand in for letters) and part graffiti, they are a bit cartoony and skater-esque. The self-described "garden variety visual junkie" pulls inspiration from found objects, old graphics, paintings, album covers, new graphics, old buildings, nature, color, numbers, and letters.

"AFRO-AM" resembles a saber-tooth whale, and evokes Pacific Native American art. "3TRN54MR5" looked at first like linked pod houses, but translate the name to ‘three transformers' and you can detect them. The subject of "1AM-W" is little more than a helmet and feet.

Ketchum's unique style has caught the attention of some rather big clients; his two favorite commercial projects were for EXPN X-Games and Gravis, of which he says, "the boardsport and the lifestyle industries that evolved from that culture have always provided a great canvas for artists to express themselves."

Despite success, the commercial work, "leaves more to be desired" for Ketchum. "I have always had a burning desire to make stuff on my own. I guess I like the process of experimenting with materials and bringing order to chaos in a sense." He names "constant evolution" as his artistic goal: "I have just recently been able to use the gallery as a way to study my own work and make decisions and adjustments to improve it to fit my inner vision."

All of the artists' work plays nice with one another, though Ketchum's playful work lacks the ominous tone that the others' conveyed so strongly. Which is why I wasn't surprised when he answered my questions like an enthusiastic wonderer: "I am using my work to document and further my limited personal understandings of the ways of the universe and the power of the human spirit. If nothing else I am guaranteed a good lesson in patience and humility." You can see more of Ketchum's work at smuvcentral.com and altpick.com/kurtketchum.

ReMixed

Through January 3

Potential Life Studios, 34 Elton St

770-0149, potentiallifestudios.com

Thu 3-5 p.m., Fri & Sun 6-9 p.m., by appointment

Cultural Imbibation, 06/25/08.

Cultural Imbibation
by Rebecca Rafferty
June 25, 2008

Lux Lounge is known as much for its eclectic and outlandish decor as it is for its mixed and open community. Oh, those lady leg tables, the disco ball, the skulls bearing flowers in their teeth, the themed nights, that address! Like many other "alternative art spaces" (read: the main biz is not an art gallery), Lux also hosts art shows and provides a bit of cultural backdrop for your boozin'. Hey, if there's alcohol at art venues, why not the other way around? The current show, up through the end of July, exhibits three painters with very different styles, who are all more or less concerned with the human form, whether legendary, ordinary, or grotesque.

The bar actually works well as a gallery despite uneven lighting (gallery spotlights are installed in dim areas) because each painting gets lots of breathing room, even in the seating nooks. High ceilings accommodate large-scale paintings, and the largely open set up of Lux allows viewers to step back a take it all in. Picking up a title and price list up at the door, I began making my way around the room, sort of bopping to the mix of mostly hip-hop and trip-hop, occasionally peppered with The Beatles' "I am the Walrus" and The Cardigans' "Lovefool." I definitely earned some strange and curious stares from regulars...I guess it's uncommon to find a young woman at a bar not drinking, but taking notes.

Most captivating were Sarah Rutherford's enormous depictions of a familiar face with a twist: Wonder Woman as an aging hero, rendered in a realist style that also hints at comic book covers. All four paintings are titled "Wonder Woman Series," and have a genuine presence to them. In No. 1, we are met with her calm, confident gaze - she is at once grandmotherly, delicate, and strong, with fierce, proud eyes. With a nod to sequential art, she is rendered three times in a seeming suburban scene in which a plane hovers close above a house with a well manicured lawn. Rutherford's palette is heavily red, white, blue, and gold: heroic and all-American.

Wonder Woman seems to take pride in the peace of the scene, but other paintings speak of more emotional complexity. In No. 4, a younger Wonder Woman kneels on the seashore at night, backed up to a dollhouse. Teasing the audience with a partially exposed, toned thigh, she embraces a headless and limbless mannequin torso swathed in Superman's uniform, her cheek pressed to his chest emblem. Though lost in longing, the woman is a wall - while we can guess at the meaning of the scene, Rutherford refrains from the use of highly dramatic gesture, and our hero is as mysterious as the miniature house next to her.

In No. 3, again elderly, WW still sports her costume. Do superheroes retire? Staring off and up into an open sky, her expression reminds me of a poised, dignified first lady, or a queen. Dramatic light and shadow on her face and in her eyes lend the look of a determined woman who will not relinquish the burden of duty.

The "hey, I'm officially disturbed" award goes to Robert Frank Abplanalp, whose works get its freak on disturbing your inebriated mind. Some are grotesque, others are silly, and he seems to have had fun making all of them. Near the pool table, "Prehistoric Cloud People" is alien and dreamlike, with a softly flowing sherbet landscape of creamy neons, Seuss-y trees, and highly detailed weirdo creatures. In "Mentally Incompetent," a leering, toothy guy points to his bald head and looks at us like we're sharing a secret. "The Pet" offers a splatter-y, disturbed looking man peeping up from bottom of the canvas, with a rat or small dog scrabbling precariously about on his matted hair.

From here on out, Abplanalp's works become increasingly sinister. "Mommy Loves Her Baby" is a mammoth, messy square with two figures and an infant, all barely discernible from the rest of the complex scene. Distorted, twisted, and dancing features appear and disappear in apparently rotting space. On the wall shielding the restroom doors (identified by a peach and a banana) from the bar is "Birds in the Forest," which resembles a darker version of Alice's encounters in the woods of Wonderland. But there's no absurdity here, only menacing creepies.

Rheytchul Chicken Bone's medium-sized canvases speak of madness and isolation. All are depressive heads in vague and dingy environments. With subtly varied tones of paint over canvas and scraps of material, facial forms begin to take shape, and the rest of the information is given to us in a few quick swipes of black sharpie.

"Bob Flanagan II" presents the infamous masochist (perhaps known best for his role in the oft-banned Nine Inch Nails video "Happiness in Slavery"), his image floating above a patched-texture surface, complete with drips where his neck should be. My brain insisted that I was looking at a severed head. In "Her Roots Were Sweet But They Were So Shallow," a woman meets your gaze with a sleepy and disillusioned, half-lidded expression. One breast is barely visible at the bottom of the canvas. The "Designer of the Neutron Bomb" has a gaping mouth and rolling eyes, a vision of complete drooling madness. Tell us how you really feel...

A small murder of ravens atop a wall seem to approve of the misery found below in three paintings entitled "Interpersonal Relationships," which house two aging couples. The two outer paintings form a diptych; the right hand is an eye-rolling, disgusted man, the left is his estranged partner who is equally unenthused. In the center, the canvas holds another cheerless duo: a man stubbornly avoiding eye contact with the woman who suspiciously stares at him. We seem to have caught them in the midst of their confrontation and evasion game. Their muddy mugs are close in proximity but the two couldn't be less connected. Congrats, Chicken Bone, you have manifested exactly the thing that terrifies me about growing old with someone. Between this and reading Miranda July all day, I'm ready for a drink.