Three Big Touts for Art Stop

 Art Stop, Des Moines’ autumnal celebration of the arts, has been expanded this year to three full weekends. Three very different artists’ new shows demonstrate a range of creativity worth celebrating.   Since he opened a gallery ten years ago, with Jackie Moberg, TJ Moberg has been too busy to prepare a show of his own art. Plus his work has been too much in demand. Besides numerous commissions, anything else he made sold immediately. So in order to have a show, he had to hold a year of work off the market. The result is called “Skins” and runs through October 6 at Moberg Gallery.

“Skins” is also Moberg’s name for the dried paint assemblages that are the foundation of the works in this exhibit. After drying in the bottom of paint cans, they are torn, chipped and mixed with found objects before being assembled and then bathed in a solution of epoxy and chemical conditioner, blowtorched and cooled. The result is so smooth looking it belies ragged, even dangerous, textures.

Some of these works are quite personal. “Trans Am” is an homage to his native Eastside. “The firebird says mullets, fast living and cut off tank tops. It’s a giant bird logo on the hood of a 6.6 litter V8. Can it get any more over the top than that?” he asked.

Artist Chris Vance suggested that the process TJ has invented has parallels with Jackson Pollack invention of “action painting” seven decades ago. TJ is amused by that. “Ha. Jackson Pollack and TJ Moberg mentioned in the same sentence - and it’s not about drinking? I’m just excited to be creating works of art that are like nothing else I have created. I want to keep pushing my own comfort levels and not get complacent with successful work.”

Saley Nong’s “Not for Sale” at Thee Eye Gallery is a collection of installations that are as perishable as the foods from which most of them are constructed.  Their playful, carefree nature does not detract from their existential portent. “Waiting” is made of Sweet & Low packets with chicken wire but looks like a body seeking a sarcophagus. “Mended Heart” is made with a freshly harvested cow’s heart, jute, caramelized sugar and honey. “Desire” amounts to lard, sugar, barn wood and chicken wire all crucified with long nails. “Table for Turds” presents a lavishly set dinner table with roses, candelabra, linen and exquisite china under entrees of cow shit. “Blood Butter” bonded by mixing its (pig’s) blood with cream fat, before cooling and sculpting. “Cotton Candy Hair” is made with human hair wigs, all remarkably similar. “My Mother” was built with patties of steamed sticky rice. A digital print of the artist’s faces advised “See Evil, Hear Evil, Speak Evit.“

Most installations of ephemeral art sell books of photography.  Nong’s book of the event ($10) commemorates the thought process with a collection of preliminary drawings of her inspirations. East Fifth Street was closed off during her opening so that tables could be dressed up for a grand cocktail party. A very large gallery crowd turned out, many dressed for clubbing. The message of the night was to “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may die.”

Dan Mason’s new paintings, at Olson-Larsen Galleries through October 6, dazzle with contradictions. He chooses durable, even indomitable, subjects like old Brooklyn neighborhoods, stones, harbors and the sea. Then he portrays them, minimally, as mystical and ephemeral. The paintings look like single applications of oil on coarsely woven linen. Yet each one actually has at least 14 ultra thin layers. Mason never uses green paint though the greens he creates, by mixing layers of other colors on the linen, are the most brilliant in this self-described colorist’s spectrum.    

Art Stop continues each weekend through September.  

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.
　

Prepping for the Apocalypse

August 2010

Richard Kelley opened his biennial exhibition at Moberg Gallery (through Sept. 18) by revisiting his visionary world of deep blues and brilliant reds. He still observes an ominous world of housing developments, bumper to bumper freeways, and zoo animals on the loose often led by naked shepherdesses. This year, the Planet Kelley looks pre-Apocalyptic. Giant preying mantises and super rabbits stalk doomed cityscapes. Psychedelic sea hawks fish for eels. Insects seem to be preparing to mate with human women. Hares observe jungle cats as if their roles were reversed in the hunting cycle.

In his oil paintings, Kelley’s colors are more vivid than ever, something I didn’t think possible. He also added some affordable pastel paintings to his repertoire this year. Some lighter touches underlie the boldness. A traffic scene includes blondes in convertibles rather than the usual hectic road rage. The giant attacking insects in “Invasion of Gansevoort Street” pay homage to color schemes in early American works of Dutch painter Willem de Kooning.

The Des Moines Art Center (DMAC) celebrated the 25th anniversary of its Richard Meire wing with new installations. A new floor plan on the lowest level presents a de facto exhibition of modern German art. That floor’s masterpiece is a giant untitled piece by Anselm Kieffer.

(Des Moines artist Don Dunagan, who died last month, described that work as “German optimism - ballet slippers in a bomb site.”) It’s now surrounded by works of eight other 20th century German artists plus those of another eight English and American artists of Germanic descent. The contrast between those two groups says something about national psyches following WWII.

Among the Germans, Thomas Struth’s high definition photo of museum visitors focuses on cultural rape - an ancient temple which was plundered from Greece and reassembled in Berlin.

Thomas Demand’s camera recreates the scene of a famous terrorist bomb which failed to go off. Wolfgang Tillmans zeroes in on a man extracting splinters from his foot. Hilda and Bernd Becher focus on ominous blast furnaces with horrible historical suggestiveness. Andreas Gursky observes a crowded beach scene at Rimini where bathers appear to metastasize. For levity, Gerhard Richter presents an “abstract landscape” that evokes the great German Romantics. One of Joseph Beuys’ famous blackboards and a piece by Martin Kippenberger also make statements without ominous undertones. Works by artists of Germanic descent are much mellower. Jeff Koons, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Diebenkorn, George Segal and Alex Katz are at their whimsical best here. Even Julian Schnabel and Britain’s Lucien Freud seem light hearted in the company of the German Germans.

“Kill Them Before They Multiply” (through Sept. 26) continues DMAC Print Gallery’s string of intriguing, themed shows. This historical review of artistic anxieties plays in visions of multiplication and subdivision - a theme that allows artists to unleash their imaginations. Media range from prints, photos, drawings and watercolor paintings to conventional sculptures and hair sprayed rubber bands. Subjects range from Biblical (Jehan Duvet’s “The Beast with Seven Heads and Ten Horns”) to the historical (Dennis Kardon” “Death of Marat” and Pablo Picasso’s “The Lie of Franco”) to modern things like suburban sprawl (Ross Racine’s “Subdivision: Heavenly Heights”) and cell phone obsessions (Iowan Timothy Wehrle’s “Inner Kingdom, Thieving Speedway’). Everything in the exhibition seems to make a common, modern observation - be it a dictator’s polyps or a land developer’s business plan, growth is cancerous. Curator Amy Worthen tried to sum up the exhibition’s theme in its catalogue.

“ Although individuals and societies are supposed to benefit from material and technological advances, we ultimately experience overload. The world reaps the consequences of immoderation, over extension, greed, disparity and injustice.”

Tout

“Crockett” and

“Tubb’s,” TJ Moberg’s latest mixed media paintings at Moberg Gallery, celebrate 1980’s American style.

Best & Worst of the Wild Times - A Decade in Review

Anna Mendietta self portrait, courtesy DM Art Center

People talk about starving artists but significant art scenes usually keep company with sustained periods of prosperity. The recently completed decade began with an all time high stock market. Ten years later those same markets had climbed back to within ten per cent of where they began. Iowa’s art scene experienced similar highs and lows.

The Story of the Decade - Des Moines’ artistic magnetism

Prior to the last decade, almost all young artists in Iowa had to choose between making a living as an artist and staying in Iowa. Most left. Artists who stayed usually needed day jobs to make ends meet. That changed during the last ten years. Sticks, the artistic furniture company created by Des Moines artist Sarah Grant, became a magnet for artists, reversing the “creativity drain” that obsessed focus groups from coast to coast. Alex Brown maintained his residence and studio in Des Moines even after making it in old New York.

A group of young artists with eastside backgrounds, signed with fledgling Moberg Gallery and soon discovered they could make a living as artists without leaving town, even for representation. Before the end of the decade, artists were moving to Des Moines and not just to work at Sticks. One of them, Zach Mannheimer, established the Des Moines Social Club, a serious theatrical company that also provided a place for all kinds of artists to hang their berets.

Other Top Stories: The Temple of the Performing Arts is saved from civic rubble lust; The Faulconer Gallery opens with generous endowment; The Pappajohn Sculpture Garden shows off a magnificent gift to the city.

Person of the Decade - TJ Moberg

Jackie Moberg says that one day in 2003 she came from work and her husband, sculptor TJ Moberg, told her to quit her job because he had purchased an art gallery. The Mobergs spent the next six years getting people to take local artists seriously. They began with all Iowans and mostly young artists. By decade’s end, they had expanded to Beverly Hills and their stable included known artists from coast to coast. Meanwhile, TJ’s career as a sculptor took a serious turn. His work moved from realistic representations of client’s visions, to unpredictable personal abstractions, as he became the most interesting public artist in the state.

Painter of the Decade - Michael Brangoccio

This painter of magical realism delineated a placeor grace and faith within a post-quantum universe of alternate realities. His investigations into the laws of physics arrested the eye and engaged the mind with a religious sense of awe.

Designers of the Decade - Kirk Blunck & Greg Wattier

I hate ties as much as anyone but these two guys shared the workload that turned East Village and Court Avenue into the most arty hoods in town. They did it with distinctively different visions too. Blunck’s minimalism suited the revival of East Village’s marvelous historic brick buildings. His café Lucca was designed to remind people that the food was the attraction.

Wattier restored other historic buildings with more flair. His Alba café is the most theatrical in town. Apples and oranges.

Gallery Exhibitions of the Decade - “Jules Kirschenbaum: A Matchless Clarity” at Anderson and Olson-Larsen, 2000

This Des Moines master anticipated the style of the YBA’s by decades. His posthumous retrospectives increased his international profile and led to museum exhibitions.

Museum Exhibition of the Decade - “Andy Goldsworthy” at the Des Moines Art Center, 2002

The great Scottish sculptor created three remarkable cairns for this show. They are now civic icons. Runner-up - Anna Mendieta at DMAC.

Architecture’s Best and Worst

Two sports arenas demonstrated a decade of great contrasts. Rob Whitehead’s (HLKB) McLeod Center retained traditional Iowa values, with a democratic aesthetics that included a single seating area, intimacy and great sight lines. Wells Fargo Arena (by ironically named Populous) shucked all that for the trappings of apartheid - valet stations, segregated seating areas, elitist entrances and tiers, etc.

Top Ten Breakthrough Artists

John Phillip Davis, Chris Vance, TJ Moberg, Frank Hansen,

Mathew J Clark, Jean Marie Salem, Larassa Kabel, Jessie Fisher, Ryan Clark and Lee Ann Conlan all came out of nowhere to mark the Iowa artscape.

Made Man of the Decade - Alex Brown

Des Moines' Alex Brown left the city behind professionally. He's represented by one of the world's top galleries - Feature, Inc. in New York City. But the painter still keeps a studio in Des Moines and even opens it up during open houses there.