More Summer Fun

James Ellwanger’s new exhibition “41 degrees N / 93 degrees W” presents a series a ten portraits of Des Moines. Each composition is printed on four layers of Plexiglas stacked on top of each other. The background prints are satellite photos of Des Moines while the top three layers consist of various images within the satellite photo. Each set of prints is made in an edition of five and many have already been sold.
Ellwanger will also be showing a series of sculptures he’s been making out of motorcycle parts. Each portrays an animal, complete with a taxidermy tick bird. “I like to think about what it might be like some day when our pets are all robots. Plus it’s a lot of fun to work with motorcycle parts,” he said. The show begins July 28 and runs two months in the former Fitch Gallery, at 304 15th St..

Girls in White Underwear

Highbrow or Lowbrow?

At a recent Des Moines Art Center (DMAC) lecture launching a Stephanie Brunia exhibition, an audience member asked the artist what prizes her art had won. DMAC curator Gilbert Vicario answered on behalf of the rather puzzled young artist.

“An exhibition in a major art museum is a significantly bigger prize than any blue ribbon at any state fair or street fest,” he said, as diplomatically as possible.

The incident illustrated how highbrow and lowbrow culture clash these days in Des Moines. Vicario has played a significant role in that, bringing Leslie Hall, the super diva of trailer jive and satirical rap, into the hallowed confines of the DMAC last year. Brunia, still a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, is his latest discovery. He first saw her dramatically lit C prints of young girls mimicking Biblical scenes in white under ware at painter Larassa Kabel’s home. Kabel bought them at the 2009 Des Moines Art Festival, the only street fest or fair in which Brunia ever participated. The prints at DMAC comprise a series Brunia made on her grandfather’s farm near Ames. They include takes on classics like Leonardo‘s “The Last Supper,” Michelangelo’s “Pieta,” and John Everette Millais’ “Ophelia.”

She built the compositions one model at a time and stitched her compositions together on her computer. Her “Last Supper” includes “all the earthly delights and most of the seven deadly sins.” Brunia described her role as being “as much a performer as a photographer.” For instance, she obtained dramatic lighting effects by hand holding $10 flashlights for 30 second exposures while keeping all props smothered in bug spray. While her use of light recalls both Leonardo and the Dutch masters, these works are more suggestive of the more controversial ads by Ralph Lauren and Benneton.

Brunia has become a source of pride for the Art Festival, elevating the aegis of their emerging artists section. Her DMAC show runs through August 7.

Photography also delights the eye at the Faulconer Gallery where Liz Steketee’s “Family Album” begins June 24. The Bay Area artist uses photos “to rewrite history from my vantage point.” One panoramic shot of an ice cream parlor in Michigan looks like it belongs in the Smithsonian. Steketee says she reconstructs narratives in old photos, then prints them and ages these new photos to “reconstruct memories, address old confrontations and face old demons.” If that isn’t therapeutic enough, yoga classes will be taught in the gallery each Thursday June 30 - August 18. Steketee will speak there September 1.

At Moberg Gallery, John Phillip Davis confronts his “Nightmares and Allegories” in large scale. The artist says this series of mostly 36 square foot canvasses is meant to discuss a single subject from a dualistic point of view.

“If you found someone in the rain crying, and you could not tell if the they were really laughing or crying, you would need to think in other contexts… Nightmares talk about slightly more specific focal points that energize us, or make us afraid or excited. Allegories talk more to subtlety, a self narrative that is personality bent,” he explained. That show runs through July 9.

Olson - Larsen Galleries comforts us with dreamy summer landscapes. This year’s show adds two new artists to the popular trio of Gary Bowling, David Gordinier and Betsy Margolius. Rod Massey uses the geometric distortions of old fashioned Regionalism to personify houses and landscapes. British artist Roger Towndrow draws exclusively with pencil, revealing “serial and sequential” landscapes in flux. That exhibition continues through July 16.

TJ and Jackie Moberg bought the Art Store and will move its framing operations to Ingersoll this summer. The Eighth Street store will close. The Mobergs also opened Moberg Editions, an online gallery selling inexpensive art, and Moberg Consultations, a full service firm that directs clients from design to installation of artworks.
　

Much Ado About Shakespeare

Iowa’s Many Mannered Love of the Bard
(Originally published 2010)

Last month Othello’s anxiety reverberated through Greenwood Park in Des Moines.

“I have lost the immortal part of myself.”

Yet, four hundred years after William Shakespeare wrote those words, it remains to be seen whether they were well founded. The Bard of Avon is bigger than ever in America. Elizabethan theaters and Shakespeare festivals have become primary tourist attractions in cities from Ashland, Oregon and Cedar City, Utah to Odessa, Texas and Hempstead, New York. For several years, outdoor Shakespeare festivals have been drawing large crowds, including many Iowans, to Kansas City, Omaha and beyond. In Rosalind’s words from As You Like It, “Farewell Monsieur Traveler.”

At least six different companies will produce Shakespeare events in Iowa this summer. In Des Moines, two of them will duel, like Mercutio and County Paris, over the same weekend for the second year in a row. That coincidence could turn mid July into a midsummer week’s dream for Bard lovers. Performance dates might be the most common denominator for Des Moines’ two biggest Shakespeare events. Certainly, their venues do alteration find.

Shakespeare on the Lawn


Venerable Salisbury House was built in the Roaring Twenties. Cosmetics magnate Carl Weeks and his wife Edith modeled it after the 16th century King’s House in Salisbury, England, a mansion which Shakespeare himself would have known. The Salisbury House Foundation’s stated purpose for the 42 room house and its collections is “to preserve, interpret, and share (its) international significance for the educational and cultural benefit and enjoyment of the public.” So their annual productions of “Shakespeare on the Lawn” tend toward faithful interpretations of the plays. That conservative approach suits Repertoire Theater of Iowa (RTI) director Richard Manning well.

“As Shakespeare wrote, ‘the play’s the thing.’ His plays have stood up for over 400 years. I heard (British actor) Jonathan Miller speak at symposium called ‘Reinventing the Classics.’ Miller was known for that from his work with Beyond the Fringe but he adamantly insisted that the classics should not be reinvented at all. Their main value is the window they provide for looking in on another time and place, to the way people lived in another era. That’s why we love Salisbury House, it comes as close as anything to setting Shakespeare in his own time,” Maynard explained.

RTI tries to bring Elizabethan manners to contemporary Iowans. Before last summer’s productions of Twelfth Night, Wes Drahuzel played a vendor transposed from the beginning of seventeenth century. He peddled fortunes, charms and souvenirs including “water from the well of St. Withburga” and polished glass “guaranteed to reveal the location of a lady’s true love.” He didn’t sell much because he couldn’t take American money.

“Be careful, the queen has spies everywhere,” he warned picnickers.
For RTI, all the mansion’s balconies, gardens, terraces and porches are a stage. Even its underground tunnels connect to backstage dressing rooms.

“We don’t see any need to put Shakespeare in a contemporary setting. We don’t even lighten his sentiment. That’s why we played the mean things that are done to Malvolio (in Twelfth Night) as maliciously as they were written. That’s the lens through which Shakespeare observed his world, with an overkill of malice in his humor. It seems to surprise people today but it shouldn’t. After all, Shakespeare wrote the prototypical slasher film - Titus Andronicus,” Manning explained.

“We chose The Merry Wives of Windsor this year because it’s the only play Shakespeare set in his own time. It’s a magnificent window into his world. And this year, when Master Ford hires Falstaff to seduce his wife, it won’t be done in the manner of buffoonery. It will be a nasty, jealous thing,” Manning predicted.

Shakesperience™ Fest

The Simon Estes Riverfront Amphitheater was built as part of Des Moines’ downtown revitalization in the 1990‘s. A civic park, it hosts multiple concert series each summer and its price scale discriminates to favor free events and weddings. As a “people’s park,” it suits Shakesperience™ Fest - the current name for a theatrical company founded by Lorenzo Sandoval and Robin Heinemann, who were also the original producers of the Salisbury House’s Shakespearean event.

"We don't do 'yer run of the mill’ Shakespeare'," the couple said, emphasizing that their company creates Shakespearean drama for a new, broader audience. This year‘s production of A Midsummer Night‘s Dream Extravaganza will move Shakespeare from the Golden Age of Athens to the mythological Illyria (site of Twelfth Night) in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Tina Haase’s original music will mix with show and movie tunes from the 1930‘s. Sandoval said to expect John Zickefoose’s Puck to be “more like Noel Coward” than the usual impish bad boy of forest. Argentine choreographer Karina Barone will translate the entire dialogue of the fairy royalty into silent dance. Heinemann predicted that these fairies will suit the elaborate fancies of the fairy people cult too. Sandoval will write new dialogue, in iambic pentameter, to help the audience keep up with the spirit or the fairies. He explained his approach.

“Modern dramaturgy tries to make Shakespeare as accessible as possible. We want to discover new ways of doing theater. That adds to the canon at the same time it expands the audience. I think that’s how we discover new insights into Shakespeare as well as humanity,” he said.
Venues aren’t the only difference between the companies. Salisbury House sells tickets. Shakesperience™ Fest is free. It’s also more ambitious, and better endowed, than its rival company with a budget ten times that of RTI’s entire annual budget. Heinemann pointed out that it’s only about a fourth that of Omaha’s Shakespeare fest.

“We want to compete with Omaha - to keep Iowan’s in Iowa spending tourist dollars and even attracting a few Nebraskans,” she said.

Heinemann mentioned eight different funding sources before adding “and many, many more. More than I can count.” She said that her multiple grantees also make peripheral activities possible. This year’s event will include Family Night, VIP parties, a mini art fair, wine tastings, after parties, cocktail soirees for young professionals, and library programs all over metro Des Moines. There will also be readings by a children’s book author Cynthia Mercati and scholarly pre-show talks on Shakespeare in the African American tradition and community by WOI radio’s Hollis Monroe.

The Picnic’s the Thing, Too

The two troupes do have some things in common. Both use elaborate period costumes, by Drake University’s Josefa Poppen (RTI) and by Mell Ziegenfuss (Shakesperience™ Fest). Both encourage audiences to come early and picnic in beautiful venues.

Last year’s Salisbury production brought together family reunions and multiple generations, including babes not yet out of swaddling clouts. Sarah Ekstrand and Kirk Martin said they both began attending Shakespeare plays at around age eight but they wanted Lola Plum Martin to have an earlier start. She was six months old when their family watched last year from a discrete distance on the lawn of the magnificent garden.

At Simon Estes, prizes are given for the most elaborate tailgating displays. In fact, SF even persuaded the city of Des Moines to grant a festival exemption to allow people to bring their own bottles of wine. Their free shows attracted a wide eyed, multicultural audience. Edwina Brandon, Ellen Yee, Tim Hickman, Margaret Rubican and Frank Vaia came to deconstruct Coriolanus’ “love of a cup of hot wine.” Their soup swapping club held a monthly meeting at the Shakespeare event last summer where they enjoying borscht, cherry soup, cucumber soup and crème de Crecy - with room temperature wines.
“Wine’s a good familiar thing when well used,” they quoted from Othello.
Central Iowa’s different theatrical companies are showing audiences that the plays of the man who created Othello are at least that too, if not yet immortal.

2011

Shakesperience™ Festival
July 23 - August 2
“The Regina Monologues”

Shakespeare on the Lawn
July 21-24, 2010
Repertory Theater of Iowa‘s “As You Like It”.

Travis Rice Has Serious Fun

July used to be the dead month for Des Moines fine arts. Not any more. This year the kind of big brilliant shows that galleries used to hold back until autumn are opening this month at four different venues.

Travis Rice’s exhibition “Contamination” is the largest one person show ever at Moberg Gallery, taking up the entire gallery plus an outdoor wall. It’s inspired by a 1980 Italian cult film of the same name. That sci fi classic was about alcoholism, green eggs and coffee with the green eggs plotting to take over the world. I don’t make this stuff up. You can leave all expectations at the door of the exhibition.

“I’ve always had issues with germs and bacteria. I became interested in the way they move and multiply. I observed some bacteria that expanded into aerial routes, detracting and retracting to new hosts. That’s the way they are. That’s what I tried to capture in my prints, then in the paintings. Those are my ideas about what a 3D diagram of a sneeze might look like,” Rice explained.

Rice’s meditations on bacterial growth also include neon sculptures, 3D paintings, video monitors, and several metal sheds filled with fluorescent lights and props one might use in decontamination zones. Some of those are covered with metastasizing green eggs. All are covered with textured fluorescent film and separated from each other with shredded colored paper, a Rice trademark. This show is serious summer fun. Through August 20.

Gleeful Cynicism at Surface Value

During the last five years Des Moines Art Center (DMAC) exhibitions have been drawing the largest crowds ever to the institution. By no coincidence, these shows have also consistently celebrated aspects of art that stimulate our zygomaticus major, the muscle most responsible for making us smile, while also opening our eyes to somber realties. The three young artists represented in the museum’s new exhibition, Surface Value, do those things on several levels while mimicking classical art with both respect and irony.

Alison Elizabeth Taylor is a child of Las Vegas - the peripheral Las Vegas rather than mirage of neon, fountains and faux cities that attracts tourists to the Nevada desert. She simulates painting in marquetry and intarsia, which involve the cutting and piecing of wood and wood veneer to form designs. Taylor’s wooden narratives meditate cynically upon the culture of the most treeless landscape in America. Two works in the DMAC show are set in Bombay Beach, an infamous “oceanfront property” in the Colorado Desert that is half sunk in salt or dried mud.

Another work, “Roadside” studies two “hunters” shooting deer in the suburbs with automatic rifles from their woodie station wagon. “The Breeder” is a portrait of a character from the pages of the dark humorist T. Coraghessan Boyle. A sinewy man stands before used furniture he has converted into kennels for chinchilla, the breeding of which became an impractical effort at self employment during Las Vegas recent employment crisis.

In Boyle’s story, the breeder flees his rental when his inventory dies after the air conditioner stops working. A small air conditioning vent appears in Taylor’s work, looking quite inefficient as her human subject gulps Corona wearing a wife beater. Two other works in the DMAC show inhabit more darker haunts. In “Tap Left On” and “Multiple Shots with Knife Slashes” Taylor portrays houses vandalized by their owners, after Vegas‘ worst-in-the-nation mortgage crisis.

James Gobel is a child of the other Las Vegas. He credits his high school and college years amongst the kitsch icons and neon mirages for forming his aesthetic which found its true milieu in San Francisco’s bear culture. Bears are hyper masculine gay men, fond of dandified beards and long eye lashes, flannel shirts, boots, leather and alcohol. In “The Problem with Leisure; What to Do for Pleasure,” three stylish bears play musical chairs with earnest intentions. Gobel, a constituent of Nancy Pelosi, compares his sub culture to that of Weimar Republic Berlin, fostering a “golden age of open and radical dialogue before the rule of the Third Reich.” It’s hard to tell how serious he is. He “paints” his subjects in felt, “a cuddly material for a cuddly subject,” and exhibits nothing more radical than clashing argyle with camouflage.

Mickalene Thomas’ preferred medium is rhinestones. She clashes those with textiles and patterns in an unbearably gaudy manner that comments on the “power and convolution of fashion and aesthetics.” Her subjects, thrust into classical poses reminiscent of Matisse and Manet, are highly stylized African-American women, many family members. In “Sweet and Out Front” she mimics Andy Warhol’s Marilyn (Monroe) prints, by featuring the women from the film “Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song,” the original blaxplotation movie that celebrated militant black men but did little for black women.

Open House

James Ellwanger, sculptor of Shattered Silence on the state capitol grounds, is busy designing interactive sculptures for Des Moines and its sister cities. With technology from Fair-Play scoreboards, visitors to town centers here and in Kobe, Japan or St. Etienne, France will be able to converse with each other by passing by his sculptures. You have to see the drawings to understand the project though, so Ellwanger will begin opening his studio one Friday each month for that purpose, and also for mini-exhibitions of his other works, which include multi-dimensional paintings and, for the first time in his career, traditional abstract paintings. The first open house exhibition is scheduled for May 20, at 304 15th St., Studio 100, (the former Fitch Gallery).

A Marvelous Month for Alternative Spaces

Alpha art collector Kirk Blunck explained his presence at a coffeehouse art show recently.

“Everybody starts out as a local artist. I bought an entire box of photographs once, mostly as a favor to a friend, for $100 a piece. The photographer was Anna Gaskell,” he said, alluding to an artist whose prints start now at around 75 times the price he paid and go up to $35,000.

This month Blunck purchased three works on paper at a Mars Coffeehouse exhibition of Jeremiah Elbel which runs through April. Elbel is a monstrously talented young artist who had a painting in a Saatchi Gallery show in London last year that drew the largest crowds of the year in the UK. He works in black and white, metaphorically and literally, painting with tar and drawing with charcoal. His subjects in the new show are portraits of decapitated humans - some Mexican drug war victims, some victims of Islamic terrorists, others of Shari'a, or French law. They are rendered in charcoal, with curved vertical lines dominating and reminding one of Egon Schiele, an admitted influence. Danny Pearl is one subject that didn’t make Elbel’s cut.

“I tried but I couldn’t. I watched the video (Al-Qaeda’s “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl,” in which Khalid Sheik Mohammad saws off the head of the Wall Street Journal reporter) but it was too disturbing,” Elbel explained.

For now, Elbel remains a local artist. The father of two young children, he works a full time day job plus several nights a week bartending at Sbrocco. He still makes time to build a repertoire that continues to impress international collectors.

Other extraordinary artists are also showing in alternative spaces this month. Lindy Smith moved back to Iowa last summer after 35 years on the road. During the 1990’s, she documented the people and horses of the American west (“Straight West: Portraits and Scenes from American Ranch Life”) in photographs she took between the Mexico and Wyoming. In the last decade her work documented the flora of the American prairie.

For that, Smith revived Kallitype, a 19th century alternative photo process that involves iron salts and silver nitrates on paper exposed to ultraviolet light. Sometimes called “sun printing,” this process allows Smith to produce life sized images of native plants in a range of tones partially created by sunlight interacting with decomposing plants.

“I rarely know what the end result will be and that in itself holds my interest,” she explained.

Smith has done quite well in galleries of Santa Fe and New York City. She has also completed commissions for Neal Smith Wildlife Refuge in Iowa and similar places in Illinois and California. This Friday, she opens an exhibition at The Mansion with Madai Taylor, an original Iowa artist who paints with dirt, mixing different soils with gesso and scratching layers as they dry. Both artists work large. Each will show around twenty big works requiring a massive amount of wall space. With over 3000 square feet in several rooms, The Mansion has more than many galleries do.

In more traditional galleries this month, Chris Vance’s annual exhibition continues in, and outside, at Moberg Gallery. This year’s Senior Thesis Exhibition at Drake’s Anderson and Weeks galleries is the strongest in many years: Lucca Wang and Rachel Crown translate big personalities into paintings and Hannah Bloom demonstrates stunning mastery of several different media.

At Heritage Gallery “Lovers, Mothers & Their Dreams” features two sculptors, Annick Ibsen and Linda Lewis, who channel whimsy into profound, ironic statements about the human condition. That show opens April 25 with a reception on April 28. At Olson-Larsen Galleries, public art specialist Mike Baur shows small scale works along with clay vases and clay paintings by John Beckelman, and abstract landscapes and still lifes by Stephen Dinsmore.

Painting Grace

Michael Brangoccio and Madai Taylor find motivation in grace - not the kind that evolved from Greek mythology to represent elegance and beauty, but the theological-philosophical grace of The Enlightenment that allowed kindness to soften moral and legal codes. Though their symbolism and media are utterly different, these two Iowa painters are kindred in this common enthusiasm.

Over two decades, Brangoccio has created a post-quantum universe of alternate realities and small miracles where fish, bears and elephants fly while birds are grounded. He has however separated himself from surrealists and tromp d-oeil artists who play with similar symbolism by consistently affirming that grace is transcendent even in secular terms. No matter how precarious the situations his subjects confront, hope always trumps despair. In his new exhibition at Olson-Larsen Galleries, Brangoccio’s stressed acrylics suggest forms of grace that are more obvious than anything in his previous shows. “High Rise” employs Biblical atmospherics where seas roil under both stormy and sunny skies. “Two Thoughts” similarly confronts flying elephants with both blue and dark skies. “Shining” suggests something extraterrestrial while “Passing Thought” welcomes blimps somewhere over the rainbow. “Drift” presents an engaging puzzle in which saucers and dishes fly off into a consuming enlightenment. Call it Brangoccio’s light period but do not read anything more into the heavenly luminescence. These paintings are still about conundrums and possibilities.

Fort Dodge painter Madai Taylor also believes that his art is a measure of grace. For this pastor though, grace is more religiously charged right down to his choice of media. Taylor paints with the earth. He gathers red dirt in the South and black loam in Iowa fields, sifts it to fine grains and mixes it with gesso. He applies that paint in layers which he scratches while they are drying, much like the plows of agriculture scratch at the same dirt in its natural environment. He considers his process is a unique form of shorthand - a primitive scripture. For both media and inspiration, Taylor goes to a childhood comfort zone.

“As a child, without shoes on my feet I would jump off the front porch of the dilapidated old house where I lived to play in mud puddles… I can still feel the thick soft earth gushing through my toes,” he recalled.

Taylor says he uses dirt to create a vocabulary that symbolizes his ideals and values. “Dirt intrigues me as a medium because it has unique characteristics, rare tones, gradations and textures that lend themselves to an immense, versatile range of possibilities. It allows me to express infinite space and spiritual universes that exist beyond the visible world in a medium that is timeless, and of the soul,” he explains.

Taylor says his manipulations of paint are intentionally vertical. “The natural material from which I made these images reminds us surely and absolutely that we are part of nature. Their verticality symbolizes the link between God and man. Horizontal compositions represent what comes to humanity out of the earth realm, or that which can be ascertained by the mind. Square composition represents neutrality that believes nothing. I believe my work is about the vertical relationship I have with God.”

Art Touts

Tim Frerichs exhibits a three year study of industrial agriculture transposed with native grasses at Olson-Larsen through April 9. Collages, digital prints, ink and graphite gesso are assembled to study the relative merits of differing uses of land in the prairie... James Ellwanger is working on a spectacular sculpture for downtown that will also provide video connections to people in town centers of Des Moines’ sister cities. Also, Ellwanger’s new eight dimensional Plexiglas exhibition at the Iowa Historical Building considers six landmark civil rights decisions in Iowa history.