Throwing Shade:Joshua Rose
by Jerome du Bois
The truth, who wants to hear it anyway?--J.R.
In Shade 1 (May 2002:$5.00[!]), Rose wrote:
While the exhibition, entitled “Rewritings” consists of four Native American artists, this is the only similarity that can be made between the disparate styles of the painters in the show. (30 words)
The only thing the four painters in “Rewritings” have in common is their Native American heritage, so disparate are their styles. (22 words)
The only thing the four unique painters in “Rewritings” have in common is their Native American heritage. (18 words)
drowning in no more than a small body of water...[snip]
Also, in the distance, one can make out a paved, modern day highway looming like a dark omen of things to come.
[snip]
In the painting The Calling, a lone figure, stands almost naked with an open, gaping mouth; one of the more harrowing images in modern art like Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
deals in her contemporary-stylized [?] works with the common stereotypes of Native Americans which have “always intrigued, angered, and horrified me . . .”
. . .depicts the traditional coyote “trickster” as a sort of modern vixen, complete with legs spread, low-cut top and knee high ankle [sic] boots.
And, in an art world that takes issues with things made for beauty, these Chihuly sculptural pieces use beauty in a way that provokes contemplation and thought. After all, even James Joyce, the most complex and intellectually demanding writer of the 20th century, could write, at the end of the short story, The Dead, something beautiful like “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling ...”
It was from Bertoia where Beals learned to fabricate the steel through a process that includes welding and grinding.
. . . Beals uses Corten steel which rusts over time to give the works an almost patina effect.
The rusted steel also lends to the work a more earthy, natural look that contradicts the tough informality that metal usually brings to art work. [emphasis added]
focuses on large, brushstrokes, [sic] abstract fields of color placed against one another and other various incidental painting marks and forms. With these forms, the viewers are led around the space, and discover them as a way of definition.
It’s what the critic Clement Greenberg would show as the history of forms being self-referential and developing independently from and of the history of events.
. . . a [Randy] Slack who has tossed away the juvenalia of the past and has, instead, focused on themes and style more in turned [sic] to those of a “professional” or “serious” artist -- whatever those terms mean, anyway.
The five, large-scale paintings in this new show combine everything there is to love about Slack’s works, from naked Japanese animation characters to large hunks of meat to kittens dressed as samurai.
These images are all shown against paint-splashed and dripped canvasses that carry the work into a form of abstraction.
“When I paint, I just put down what comes to me. . . They’re not really about anything, no deep meanings at all, just what I am feeling and seeing at the moment I paint them.”
We know artist Ted Troxel and he wants your trash. He wants your trash so that he can turn it into something useful or beautiful or even just something better to look at then [sic], well, trash, I guess. . . [emphasis added.]Yes, Troxel makes art out of trash. But, to say that Troxel’s art is just about taking something that has been deemed worthless and turning it into something of value is to merely simplify the process for the work is much more than that. . .
[Troxel’s art] is about scale in a way that even the smallest and most utilitarian object becomes a [sic] intricately crafted work of art when scaled down to a miniature version of its former self. . .
In an era when so much art can be confused for trash, we have to thank artists like Troxel for reminding us that the slippery slope can be reversed and the opposite is true as well.
Photographer Keith Krassner knows beauty. He knows beauty well enough to know that along with the sometimes deceptively alluring beauty aesthetic comes danger. Well, maybe we all know it.[snip]
His images, often juxtaposing the beauty and softness of the female form with the cold steel of saw blades, remind us of the truth to Johnny Cash’s words -- that love is a burning thing and the road to beauty is paved with the flames of desire.
[snip]
I’m sure there’s some place on the internet where you can find naked woman [sic] with power tools just as it is wrong to say that Krassner’s work doesn’t also use sexuality as one of its appeals.
For Krassner, it is these distinctions, these pairs of extremes that are far more interesting than the images themselves. [emphasis added.] It’s what separates the good from the bad; the art from the centerfold; the illusion from the truth.
The truth, who wants to hear it anyway?
I know I've only covered four issues, and there are nine Shades so far. It's work, but I'll be back soon to examine more lazy thinking and sloppy writing by the Editor-in-Chief of the slick, new -- though now-bimonthly, now-nonprofit -- Phoenix art magazine.
Posted by Jerome at June 1, 2003 08:47 PM