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.