metamorphic

James Spitznagel, The City #28, inkjet print, 17" x 22"

Sorry, lateness:

James Spitznagel brings something distinctive and strange to the Upstairs Gallery — and to Ithaca's often over-familiar art scene — with his latest show of manipulated worldviews: "Metamorphoses: An Exhibition of Digital Fine Art Photography". Spitznagel is also an electronic musician and his sensibility here is similarly experimental. He compares the improvisational and unexpected nature of his image-making to Abstract Expressionism, an analogy based more on process than on overt style.

In addition to more straightforward means of digital manipulation, the pictures involve re-photographing imagery off of screens, typically at an off-angle. Perspective is oddly twisted as a result. We see the subtle overall grids of the screens, but rarely quite perpendicular with the edges of the paper.

Spitznagel is not forthcoming about the real-world sources for his otherworldly abstractions. Nevertheless, most of his prints allude to — while ultimately eluding — our sense of the familiar. Many of his photos (a sampling hangs in the gallery's back room) suggest still-life.

His front room pictures are more diffuse, lacking a center or an un-ambiguous perspective. Indeed, they suggest an abstract urban cartography — the modern city and modern art filtered through a science fiction aesthetic. Each of these printed sheets here is 17" x 22" and stands upright.

The City # 1, 2, and 4 are busy, patchwork-like grids of Cubist forms in overall gray tones. Square and rectangular shapes appear flat, like the roofs of a crowded futuristic metropolis seem from the sky. Occasional diagonals suggest a contradiction, breaking the flatness.

The City #28 vividly resembles the man-made canyons of some big city streets. The tall building flanking to the left and right evoke Manhattan — although they appear as a dense abstract tapestry of white, black, and gray rectangular patches. Below center are faint light-ish letters, reminiscent of Cubism and collage.

Perhaps the most compelling pieces here are a series incorporating more amorphous, less obviously rectilinear textures. (The ever-present grid is still here in the form of the overall screen texture.) These pieces are evocative of circuit boards and Gothic architecture alike. Their shimmer of light is sometimes reminiscent of Monet's paintings of Rouen Cathedral.

The City #19, with its sparsely printed dark green-brown seemingly making the white of the paper glow, is a standout in this vein.

The City #10 is distinctive for its suggestion of interior space, along with a (more or less) human scale. Toward the lower right there is what looks like a half-open door, half blocking a patch of bright white glare. The piece is vaguely, oddly reminiscent of Velázquez's seventeenth century masterpiece Las Meninas, a meditation of self-reference, looking, and picturing. While there is little of that here — certainly there are no figures — there is a strongly narrative, cinematic ambience: one thinks of the futuristic film noir of Blade Runner.

The City #15 is the most radical plunge into abstraction, a thoroughly perspective-less composition with only the most tenuous reference to its erstwhile subject. (Piet Mondrian's classic abstract painting Broadway Boogie Woogie, influenced by the NYC street grid and by jazz, is a conceptual and stylistic ancestor.) We see a lumpy island of square blocks, printed in black and gray against an expanse of white. The black blocks are solid in tone within; otherwise we see a fine mesh-grid texture.

Finally, there is a standout City in Red series, a triptych. Each of the three panels, hung in a row, is roughly continuous with the others — but with discontinuities as well. 1 and 2 suggest a city skyline seen from a considerable distance. There is an allover smear of red. Above the jagged horizon is a cloud of magenta and white; below are architecture-like arrays of black. There are spots of yellow too. These color layers continue into 3 but the perspective seems to shift to aerial — and we are no longer perpendicular to the city grid. We are thus twisted out of what otherwise might be a postcard view.

Not everything here works well. In particular, some prints are overly reminiscent of surveillance imagery - an interesting narrative association perhaps, but less than lovely to look at. Still, the best of these images maintains the Upstairs Gallery's usual high standards while tweaking familiar expectations of gallery art.

photo forum clipping

[The] State of the Art Gallery will host a forum on photography in conjunction with its 20th Annual Juried Photography Show on Wednesday, March 18 at 7pm. Three photographers from the Ithaca area who have shown their work both regionally and nationally will speak at this special event. This event will be held at the gallery located at 120 W. State Street and is free and open to the public.

The guest speakers are:

Wilka Roig, the Prize Judge for this year’s show and Visiting Assistant Professor of Photography at Cornell. Wilka holds an MFA from Cornell University.

Andy Gillis, owner of Cascadilla Photography, specializing in high quality commercial and industrial photography. Andy is a graduate of Cornell and teaches as an adjunct at Tompkins Cortland Community College.

Keith Millman, an Associate Professor of photography and digital imaging at TC3. Keith received his MFA in Photography from California College of Arts and Crafts.

clustering

In today's Times:

The State of the Art Gallery's "20th Annual Juried Photography Show" (which runs through March 29) is part of a familiar local tradition. This year's photographers are mostly from in and around Ithaca. Also included are artists from Rochester, Syracuse, Elmira, Binghamton, Utica and New York City.

This year, guest juror Wilka Roig, an assistant photography professor at Cornell, took an unusual tack in assigning the prizes. Drawing on twelve "cluster criteria" used by philosopher Denis Dutton to define art in his recent book The Art Instinct, Roig used a variety of categories, reflecting the diverse satisfactions art can offer. (None of the criteria is necessary; more than one can suggest the presence of art.)

Phil Koons' combination of formalism, pop vernacular subjects, sly humor and (often) strong color has been a highlight of past years' Annuals. Here he is showing two compelling giclée prints: 4 Blocks to the Mississippi and 27 Miles to the Rio Grande. Mississippi is typically exuberant. We see, through a row of telephone poles, the corner of vividly painted building. Rio is more austere, presenting us with an impenetrable warm white facade; the windows are filled in.

Donald Specker's aptly titled color print Ithaca Iconic takes its subject from near the SOAG — from the corner of the Chanticleer, with its painted neon roosters pressed up against each other, themselves against the dark. Smaller, a glowing electric hand — "Don't Walk" — balances them to the left.

George Cannon's giclée Dream Stairs (from the Spiral Series) is the recipient of Roig's "Direct Pleasure Award." The piece's central form is elegant, if stiffly — a curvaceous dark silhouette abstracted from a spiral staircase. The background is a warm greenish grayish tone with light emanating from the center.

Jennifer Gioffre's Untitled (from the series Diaphaneity) beats Stairs in its sensuous depth. The palladium/gold print (black on warm white) shows is sharp focus what appears to be a curl of water frozen in time. It blurs, melts around the edges. The borders are dark, thick and painterly.

In a materially conservative show, Lena Masur's black and white Gunblocks stands out for its effectively unusual technique: gelatin silver emulsion printed on a wide strip of unframed glass. The texture is smoky and diffuse. Printed forms merge with their shadows. Four variously sized blocks are lined up horizontally in middle distance. Direct light comes through the left edge. Around them is seashore: frothy waves with patches of darker water and a distant horizon.

Alissa Newton's color 6919 is the winner of the "Special Focus Award," exemplifying how artworks "tend to be bracketed off from ordinary life." Appropriately, its subject — a translucent plastic pillbox with its multiple compartments filled — itself fills the entire space of the sheet. We are in another world. An allover moderate blur further emphasizes this strangeness.

Sharon Barotz's color print Reclaimed by Nature and Ben Altman's platinum/palladium (black and white) False Dichotomy contrast natural and cultivated outdoor spaces. (They might have fit into the Johnson Museum's "Picturing Eden," up through March 22.) Reclaimed is flat, as if the forms — the rough base of a tree and several elaborate, weathered gravestones — had been pressed up against the plane of the image.

Elaborate divisions of space mark Dichotomy. As befits the winner of the "Intellectual Challenge Award," these divisions are metaphorically ripe. Dividing left from right is a leftward leaning tree planted in the foreground. Below it, against the center of the bottom edge, is a blurry lump — apparently a balding man, hunched over, wearing a backpack. Behind the tree, in middle distance, is a dense wall of shrubbery. Behind that, seen from an off-angle, is a row of three elaborately carved spirals of greenery. In their midst is a stone statue, a female. Statue, tree and man form a cryptic dance.

A pair of black and white inkjet prints by John Retallack come from a series portraying the RIT professor's colleagues. Portrait of Skip Battaglia and Portrait of Lisa Hermsen effectively combine formality and warmth. Together with Randi Millman-Brown's Milkweed, these are the deserving recipients of two awards for "Skill and Virtuosity."

Other prize winners: Susan Larkin's Wild Grape Vine ("Expressive Individuality"), Viola Kosseda's newsstand still-life No Title ("Art Traditions and Institutions") Gretel Pelto's street portrait Old and Active in Wageningan ("Style") and Brandy Boden's Echo ("Imaginative Experience"). Challenging artists, Roig refused to offer prizes in several Dutton-ian categories: "Criticism," "Novelty and Creativity" and "Emotional Saturation." No prize was given for "Representation," as this "is only a small element in a successful representational work."

As in past years, the "20th Annual" is dominated by skillful work. Rich art is here as well.

A special forum featuring Roig and two other local photographers will be held at the gallery on March 18 at 7pm.

drix

Four Brothers, 2009, charcoal, etching, graphite, gum transfer and monoprint on paper

Wolf Pelt, 2009, pastel on vellum

Four Directions, 2009, gum transfer and monoprint on paper

Dissection, 2009, gum transfer and monoprint on paper

Valois/Con-Daw-Haw and the Great Law of Peace, 2009, graphite on vellum

Ithaca Times:

"The Haudenosaunee Project: Prints, Drawings and Pastels by Pamela Rozelle Drix" represents an ongoing foray by the artist into the culture, religion, geography and history of the Native American peoples of Upstate New York — probably better known as the Iroquois. The show reveals Drix to be an image-maker of uncommon nuance and ambition.

"Haudenosaunee" continues a series of engaging shows put on by the Ink Shop in the Community School of Music and Arts' first floor lobby — a cooperative program inspired by the Shop moving into the second floor of the CSMA-owned building about a year ago. According to Drix, this is the first solo show at the CSMA in recent memory.

The bulk of "Haudenosaunee" is made up of a series of variations on a single motif: the pelt of a female Adirondack grey wolf. Drix has the real pelt on a wall in her studio and the pelt has a story. The creature was the gift of Joe Soto, "a Native American of Tia'no heritage and Cree training" who provided spiritual guidance during the recent death of her father, an amateur archaeologist and an enthusiast of Native culture. The gift has clearly captured her imagination during recent months; all but one of the pieces here (a landscape) dates to 2009.

Drix draws upon Iroquois traditions of animism and spirituality — she speaks of her identification with the she-wolf, her strength and power as well as her nurturing capability. Nevertheless, she also stresses the exploratory nature of her quest, her need (particularly as a non-Native-American) to find the meaning of this gift on her own terms.

Also reoccurring in many of these pieces is the image of a crow feather that accompanied her father during the final week of his life. The feather is meant to suggest "the beautiful frailty of life."

With two exceptions, each of the pieces here is print-based. Gum transfer (a means of printing Xeroxed images) and monoprint are both in wide use, as are hand-drawn additions in graphite, charcoal and/or pastel. Many of the pieces incorporate multiple sheets of paper under a single frame.

Typically the printed silhouette of the animal — sometimes whole; sometimes divided, fragmented or multiplied — is placed against an empty expanse of white paper. Black and brown are the most characteristic colors. The former is laid on in thick, brushy oft-fur-like marks while the latter, reddish or yellowish, is applied in dusty clouds.

Four Directions makes an interesting dissociation between the solid materiality of the black and the ghostliness of the brown. Over an upward oriented smudgy black pelt, four disconnected red-brown paws have been overlaid. They radiate out from the center like the four cardinal directions on a compass. Drix cites the piece as "a reminder to...extend our protective vigilance in all four directions." Indeed. And the way she suggests an inner psychic life for what elsewhere threatens to become a lifeless trophy is distinctive.

Four Brothers incorporates a grid of four tall sheets under one frame. The sheets are not neatly lined up and attached; the piece has a not-unwelcome roughness. Warhol-like (though not Pop), we see four iterations of an upward-turned wolf's head. The variety of media — etching, monoprint, gum transfer, charcoal and graphite — is noteworthy, as is the unusual range of color and textures.

In Dissection with Arrowheads I and Dissection with Arrowheads II Drix departs from her centralized, almost heraldic treatment of the wolf pelt. Limbs dangle mysteriously from the top edge, or from the left and right edges. Both images incorporate a row of small, delicately rendered arrowheads across the bottom. These call to mind the animal's associations with killing — both as hunter and hunted.

Drix combines fragmentation with the central creature-image in Dissection. This is a large piece comprised of four printed pages that are hung side-by-side directly on the wall, unframed. Surrounded by white, the printed areas are of different sizes and proportions, mismatched. We see the entire span of the animal — more or less life size — but broken up. It is unfortunate that this impressive would-be-centerpiece is hung above the staircase leading to the CSMA's basement. Although it holds the space well, one does want to get up close.

The sole pure drawing of the animal, a pastel on vellum Wolf Pelt, stands out for its physical intensity. At first glance, it appears to pop out of from its thin, translucent sheet. It follows the central silhouette format; the critter's head points straight up and her tail straight down. One gets a strong sense of the physical markmaking — strokes of black have been vigorously smudged and, in places, partially erased. There are occasional highlights of white pastel too.

The CSMA show also includes a pair of pieces combining landscape, imagery and text. In contrast to the focus on object and character offered by the wolf pictures, these works convey a disjunction between seemingly pastoral rural landscape and the varieties of man-made violence. These works are dense and multilayered, both visually and conceptually — also in contrast to the slow-moving theme and variation of that typifies the show. They are also closer to most of the work that Drix has shown in recent group exhibits.

Both Valois/Con-Daw-Haw and the Great Law of Peace and Sacred Conversations: What's Happening? include extracts from the Great Law, the founding document of the Iroquois' Five Nations (The Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, and the Seneca). Affinity with and thanksgiving for nature and the Creator are prominent themes.

The former image, drawn in graphite, resembles a book page turned on its side (actually it looks better this way). Across the top, we see numerous paragraphs. Below is a wide strip of aerial view landscape, sketchily rendered, showing Valois, NY — Drix's hometown — alongside the nearby site of Con-Daw-Haw, a native settlement razed to the ground by General Sullivan during the Revolutionary War. (Or so we're told by the introductory text, the distinction is visually absent.) The land is divided by several vertical bands, some of which also mark off breaks in what might seem at first to be a continuous landscape. Below is an expanse of white with a crow feather to the right.

The latter is even more eclectic in style and content — to the point of feeling more like scrapbook contents than an image. Sacred Conversations is divided into two square sections. On the left, in an overall smudgy purple tone, is a transfer photo showing a construction site, full of trucks, with a tall crane near the center. We see a label, "HALLIBURTON"; looking again at the intro, we see that this refers to companies "drill[ing]...for natural gas in the Marcellus shale." Attached to the square is a piece of vellum bearing more lines from the Law of Peace and a feather, both providing contradictory voices.

Further amplifying the piece's conversational contradictoriness — perhaps nearly to the point of absurdity — the square on the right shows a serene valley landscape, rather lyrically rendered in expressive black monoprinted strokes. Melding with the cursive-like lines are rows of handwriting, this time indecipherable. There is another attached vellum scrap. This one shows, in sketchy graphite, a rustic house fronted by a blackened sign. The same image appears elsewhere in the show, in a 2007 gum printed photo. There we learn the sign's function: an official historical marker commemorating Con-Daw-Haw.

Drix mentions the notion of the wolf as a protector of the environment as a link between her pelt series and these explorations of place. One would to like to see this narrative connection made a bit stronger. (Although the large-scale Dissection does begin to suggest a sort of landscape in itself.)

According to the artist, "The Haudenosaunee Project" is her first solo show since co-founding the Ink Shop about a decade ago. Thankfully, we won't have to wait another decade to see her work en masse. Announced during Drix's opening last Friday, Roger and Adrienne Bea Smith of Groton's Main Street Gallery have granted her another solo showcase in the near future.

More immediately, she has work included in the Main Street's "Spring Group Exhibition" and in the show "Artists Made Books" at the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center in Auburn, NY. (The latter show is recommended and also includes local print and bookmaking luminaries Kumi Korf, Maddy Rosenberg, Buzz Spector, and Christa Wolf.) Both open later this month.

"The Haudenosaunee Project" remains on display in the CSMA's lobby gallery though March 27.

dr. christy mag uidhir

Event: Talk Print Philosophy of Art

03-13-2009

Description: The goal of philosophy of art is to provide systematic and informative methods of thinking about art. This includes the definition of art (what makes something an artwork), the nature of art objects (physical objects like chairs or abstract objects like numbers), and the relationship between the artwork, the artist, and the audience. I will briefly discuss how philosophers have addressed the above, but mostly focus on specific philosophical issues surrounding printmaking, specifically the relationship between: (1) prints, plates, and the printing process (2) prints in an edition (3) artist and printmaker (4) authenticity and forgery in printmaking

Organization: The Ink Shop Printmaking Center/Olive Branch Press

Time: 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Location: Ink Shop and Olive Branch Press, 102-106 W. State Street , Ithaca, NY 14850

Location Details: The gallery is on the 2nd floor

Cost: free

Information: (607) 277-3884

Web Site: http://www.ink-shop.org

matters/haudenosaunee

Wylie Schwartz has an informative interview with Pam Drix of the Ink Shop in this week's Ithaca Times. Briefly and succinctly, it covers some of the history of the IS, the technicalities of their current operation, and their plans for the future.

Drix has a solo show, "The Haudenosaunee Project," opening this Friday in the CSMA's space (on the first floor below the Shop's own). From the Gallery Night listing:

The "Haudenosaunee Project: Pastels and Prints by Pamela Drix" opens at the Tompkins County Foundation Gallery at the Community School of Music and Arts. The Haudenosaunee Project encompasses a series of prints, drawings, and pastels that were created after the death of my father, who passionately loved Native American culture and who was an amateur archeologist throughout his life. After his death, a Cree elder, who sat with my father the last three days of his life, gave me an Adirondack grey wolf pelt. This amazing gift became the catalyst for me to begin the project in earnest. Through the metaphor of the wolf, I am exploring the importance of being stewards of the land, protecting our natural resources, and understanding the particular history of the Finger Lakes in relation to the plight of the Iroquois Nation. In no small way, though, these images are really a tribute to my father as well. With great concern, I am also dismayed by the development of natural gas drilling of the Marcellus shale in our backyards. We have important work to do — to become informed citizens and protectors of our community's resources. The Haudenosaunee people, and all future generations, demand no less.

I saw her working on one of her wolf pelt pictures recently (while writing up the Shop's last show one Monday). It was more or less life-size and looked pretty awesome. More to come next week.

added color

Of related interest: Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute's website has a podcast available in which M. Johnson talks about her painting process and influences.

melissa johnson

Melissa Johnson, New Lines, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 12" x 12"

Tompkins Weekly (PDF):

Small square canvases, of identical surface area, are covered in pools and clouds of richly colored, though thinly applied and often translucent paint. Floating or standing amongst these color fields are more crisply defined, relatively opaque shapes. Although abstract, these blobs, lumps, and tubes suggest the figure — or perhaps its limbs and organs.

The assemblages evoke oddball human dramas. Some shapes are also reminiscent of vegetables: peppers and eggplants in particular. Rock gardens and microbial landscapes also come to mind.

Such are the myriad forms that populate “New Lines: Paintings by Melissa Johnson,” which is currently up at Cornell’s Willard Straight Hall Gallery. Johnson’s show comprises some 20 acrylic works: 19 of them small (12" x 12") and one large (48" x 48"). The paintings are unframed and often quite thick; they pop out of the wall like boxes.

Though distinctive, Johnson’s paintings call to mind diverse precedents from the history of modern art. Her sensuously colored, densely translucent, and overlapping tone-tongues resemble the abstractions of Morris Louis, although on a much more intimate scale (and using brushes rather than pouring). In contrast to Louis, and the other protagonists of Post-Painterly Abstraction, with their high seriousness, her quirky, quasi-figurative drama and humor is reminiscent of artists such as Joan Miro and Louise Bourgeois. (The humor is slapstick, and therefore hard to convey in words.)

There is an ambiguity in the way Johnson plays shapes off of the edges of her squares: they either appear to rest on the edges like objects on a platform, or they seem to continue beyond our view.

Several canvases feature rows of tongue or finger-like forms protruding from the edges, often from the bottom. Among these is New Lines, one of the most strongly figurative works in the show. The background is unusually rough, with abrupt brushstrokes forming a rather landscape-like background of blue, purple, and green. Mid-ground, near the center of the square, floats a low hanging white cloud. Lined up along the bottom edge is row of six foreground finger people, resembling dancers, or individuals in a parade. Some, looking like inverted exclamation marks, even sport head-like spots. The foreground colors are warm: bold reds, murky dark purples, burnt orange.

Ten 26 is distinctive for its clarity and relative sparseness. The background is a busily brushy green — yellow over a blue under-layer. Emerging from the left of the bottom edge and seemingly leaning rightward is a pair of adjacent fat blob-tongues: lavender and orange-red. (Their brushwork fills neatly echo their contours, helping keep them separate.) Down from the top edge: a skinny, Indian yellow tongue and a pair of dark red-brown projections that suggest a pair of dangling, stocking-covered legs.

Slide On, in contrast, is a densely layered vortex of color-forms, spanning a wide range of sizes and opacities (generally, the smaller, the more opaque). These are more rock-like than organic and the colors suggest desert and rust. Slightly off-center is a tear in this space. Its colors are unexpected: warm blue and magenta.

The variety that Johnson has achieved within a fairly consistent format is impressive. Wild (like several) features rough, scrawl-like marks, My Deep a background of curved diagonal stripes. Pour Me Down is unusually opaque. The gracefully curving CM is filled with eggplants (purple and brown, hazy and sharp) while Those Spaces Between seems to feature some kind of elongated orange gourd.

Scaling up can be a difficulty for any artist. The task is a particular challenge with gestural, painterly work, wherein every mark may be called upon to make a self-conscious statement. Moving bigger requires renegotiating the manner in which bodily movements and perceptions are choreographed into the agglomeration of form.

It is therefore unsurprising that Best Days, the sole large piece here, is dominated by two stiff, flatly colored-in forms: one resembling a red pepper and the other (vaguely) an upside-down axe or hammer head. One misses the lively interplay of gesture and drawn shape found in most of the smaller works.

All too often in local art, work that has pretensions toward playfulness or whimsy gives the impression of desperate effort being made to mask a more fundamental creative lifelessness. Ithaca loves the idea of the artist as free spirit; sadly, the real thing seems to be fairly rare. Melissa Johnson’s paintings are the real thing and as such deserve a broad audience.

water preserves

Video art!:

"Water Preserves," the title of Jan Kather's current solo show, has a double meaning. On one hand, water sustains us — our bodies and our environment. On the other, water itself may require preservation. Although motivated by real world environmental destruction, the show treats both themes mostly in an indirect, metaphorical, and poetic manner.

The SOAG's back room, which has been darkened, contains four video installations. A large wall-projected video, Water Preserves, is the show's centerpiece. Incorporating footage from different locations (upstate New York and elsewhere), we are treated to a slow-moving, meditative essay on water's surfaces. The camera is mostly unobtrusive: it stays still or pans gently. Images dissolve into images. Looking down, we see waves, froth, stones, sand, shimmering light, bits of bright green foliage. Spots or streaks of mysterious pink or orange tint intrude occasionally. We hear the water, too.

According to Kather, the work may be entered and departed at any point in time. Still, for those willing to engage in a patient, protracted experience — and to abandon any expectation of linear narrative — it is worth taking in whole.

Three Mason jars (suggesting the theme of preservation) have been placed atop projectors and filled partially with water. The text and imagery is obscured, we see an enchanting abstraction of light and color.

A medium-sized video screen shows what is nearly a loop of still images. Time passes slowly before we dissolve to the next. We're outdoors, in winter's half-light. Only the steady falling of snow suggests time. We see an orange-tinted streetlight above. We move closer and then closer again. Then we see a criss-cross of snow-covered branches and then, finally, a brief shot of ground.

The least successful video features the most elaborate installation. A metal-mesh shelf has been fitted with six small screens — one in each cubby-hole. In front of each are one or two water-filled jars. The top three show image grids in shades of blue. The left and right of these show shots of clouds taken from an airplane. The middle screen shows water over grass. The bottom screens recycle the snow sequence at three different speeds — accompanied by ambient sounds including swinging doors and radio voices. Overall, the imagery is difficult to parse, the juxtaposition sketchily conceived, and the idea of water in multiple forms (solid, liquid, gas) tentatively presented.

In the front room, another screen presents a series of water-related works done by artists from around the world and assembled by Kather. (These can also be seen online: http://web.mac.com/jkather/iWeb/Site 11/Water Preserves.html.) Highlights are many. In Simone Stoll's Rain, we see from behind a bare-footed woman struggling for balance as she crosses a plank. Falling and flowing water surround her. Alicia Felberbaum's Not The Silent Sea is cacophonous: bright bands of unnatural color, visual distortion, swimming sea mammals and their cries, discordant music — all very appropriate, given her theme of noise pollution.

Also in front are several digital photo-collages. Based on grids (often staggered and irregular) they typically include identical or near-identical images reiterated. Again, images shot at disparate locales are mixed together. Many incorporate text, typically obscured: literary, Biblical or journalistic. One gets the sense of sketches, of ideas being worked out: only a few seem resolved as completed works.

Among these, Water Preserves: Homeland Security is particularly striking. The background image, in starkly beautiful black and white, shows a gentle cascade of water and ice. A row of translucent Mason jars cross the bottom edge. In the upper right corner of one of them, a tiny round warning sign in black, white and red: no drinking. The piece reflects post-9/11 concerns of bioterrorism and contamination — although these themes are (so to speak) submerged.

A series makes use of an image of a dead fish. A lenticular print (an image printed on a array of lenses which changes appearance as the viewer moves) juxtaposes the fish with a placid, postcard-like view of a lake. The medium is a bit contrived; a paper printed montage of the two images expresses the pastoral/morbid contrast with greater grace. Accompanying it is text taken from a 1964 obituary for ecologist Rachel Carson, one of the show's muses. Silent Spring: Fish and Pond (named after Carson's best-known book) shows a dead bird as well. The repetition and layering of the two images is subtle and varied. These images can be seen as elegies for environmental destruction.

A pair of silver prints date back to the eighties. Acadia and The Surf — both of them lovely and somewhat violent shore-scapes — show the continuity of Kather's aesthetics.

"Water Preserves" remains up at the State of the Art through March 1. From March 6 through April 3 it can be seen (likely in altered form) at Alfred State College in Alfred, NY.

in the dark

Treacy Ziegler, Leaving Stanley Point, 2008, monoprint, 35" x 60"

“Seeing In The Dark” — on display through March 26^th at the Tompkins County Public Library — aims to be a show about the night. Local artist Laurel Guy curated the exhibit; her plein air pastels are included. Also here are moody, cryptic monoprints by Treacy Ziegler; classicizing oils by Tim Merrick; desolate photographs by David Mount; and the painted cartoons of Alice Muhlback.

A good thematic show can deepen our understanding of the artists, highlighting differences as well as affinities. This is not such a show. The work is diverse to the point of being unrelated, a series of disconnected tracks.

Laurel Guy draws local scenes outdoors (here at night, of course). Her approach suggests a kind of folk impressionism.

Guy’s most affecting piece offers a view from Sunset Park. There is a palpable though elusive sense of height and distance; we are looking down at a mass of sky, land, and water. These are subtly rendered in horizontal streaks of blue, purple, and light grey. Bright lights — in the form of thickly pigmented spots of white, red, and yellow-orange — dot the bottom half of the page.

Treacy Ziegler’s four monoprints are by far the most advanced pieces here. One really gets the sense of being in the dark, of struggling to make out distinctions between forms. There is a rich diversity of texture: chalky lines and tone, thin brushing, and spongy oily droplets. The white of the paper is a rare sight. In addition to ample pure blacks, translucent blacks have been printed over blocks of color — often a pale yellow-tan.

Three of her prints feature pathways receding off into mysterious distance: Leaving Stanley Point shows a purple river — a small rowboat dangling off its edge — while Evening Cow and Boundary picture roads. Cow has the sole protagonist (which looks more like a black and white spotted dog), while Boundary suggests human presence with bulbous yellow-green trees and a pink-magenta house.

Before a Green Sky, a still life, stands out among Ziegler’s pieces here for its extreme spatial ambiguity. Light and dark, near and far, indoors and outdoors — all of these are twisted into disorienting puzzle. A flower rests in a cyan vase atop a red cloth covered table. We are facing the table straight on. And looking out a window at a blackened landscape — but the window frame is nowhere to be seen and we lose track of where we are.

Tim Merrick is showing a pair of large oil on canvas scenes, both of them emphatically flat and frontal. There is considerable roughness in the texture of the brushwork, much scumbling and messy translucent layering. The roughness, rather than being graceful, seems somewhat tentative and awkward.

Tiempieto at Night shows the front of a classical temple with a triangular pediment on top, circular windows, and a row of three arched doorways at the bottom. (The image is taken from a fresco by Renaissance master Piero della Francesca, whom Merrick sites as an influence.) The building is whitish earthy red and framed in strips of dirty ochre. A pair of large white birds in profile: one seemingly perched on the central archway, wings up and looking down-right; the other standing stiffly below the same door, facing left. Black and tan outlines give the shapes both structure and stiffness. The background is scumbled dark with blues and greens.

His Cachi Tree is red-brown with bare branches (and no outlines). Brushy balls of yellow-orange — passion fruit — hover around these limbs; others have fallen in a circle around the tree’s base. More white birds, this time squat and plump, perch above and below.

Also by Merrick are three watercolors, including a sketch for each of he canvases.

David Mount’s digital color photographs (inkjet prints) of unpopulated parks and roadsides emphasize bright, artificial lighting — often from uncertain sources. These “Night Trees” glow with sterile, alien light. The traditional romance of the night has been dispelled. The effect is most compelling in images such as Night Trees 25 in which the alien-ness has pushed to an extreme. (One expects the immanent arrival of a flying saucer.)

As for Alice Muhlback’s would be playful acrylic on wood paintings, my ability to appreciate them in the spirit in which they were intended is sadly lacking. Muhlback is more of a cartoonist than a painter. Her strokes of color — here a lot of blue, purple, and white, with spots of red (especially lips) — serve as functional backdrops to her black or white outlined figures. These figures are people or birds. Or fragments: heads, teardrop-shaped eyes, schematic wings.

One would like to see more carefully put together thematic shows in Ithaca. Here the fact that all of these images show nighttime scenes seems mostly accidental.

icons of the desert

Times:

The roots of contemporary Aboriginal art are commonly traced to the activities of white schoolteacher Geoffrey Bardon (1940-2003). The place of this breakthrough was the remote native settlement of Papunya, about 150 miles west of the town of Alice Springs, near the center of Australia. (Several native groups were made to resettle there during the previous decades.) In 1971, Bardon, a schoolteacher, encouraged the children and then several of the adult men of the impoverished community to create acrylic paintings using traditional and sacred imagery. Previously, this imagery has been seen only in ephemeral art forms such as sand and body painting.

"Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya" — which is on view at the Johnson Museum through April 5 — emphasizes work from the early years of this tradition, in particular from Bardon's 1971-1973 tenure. The art comes from the collection of John Wilkerson (a 1970 Cornell PhD) and his wife Barbara, who became fascinated with the movement in 1994. Put together by the Johnson and curated by University of Sydney scholar Roger Benjamin (a specialist in modern art), the show will move on to UCLA's Fowler Museum and then to NYU's Grey Art Gallery.

Contemporary Western viewers will note the works' formal similarity to Abstract Expressionism and other modern art movements. This is an inevitable part of their appeal. However, it is important to understand something of the artwork's narrative intent and not to view the work as purely abstract or decorative.

For their creators, they are thought not only to depict, but also to contain actual traces of, ancestral creation narratives known at the Dreamings (Tjukurpa). The cycle of stories involves the exploits of ancestral beings living in a mythic, extra-worldly time. Their actions are thought to have shaped the world as it is today — its social and moral order as well as its geography.

The paintings can be conceived as landscapes. Rather than the empirical, observational focus of traditional Western landscape, however, these acrylics are more akin to maps, or to the tenuous resemblances of pictographic writing.

Even a rudimentary understanding of the works' iconography helps deepen their appreciation. Arrangements of concentric circles — "roundrels" in the language of the show's accompanying text — represent campfires, watering holes, or other "sacred sites." These are typically connected together via networks of lines indicating pathways and journeys. Bulbous U-shapes indicate people (the shape is derived loosely from that of a seated person). Wavy lines indicate water and other shapes represent animal tracks.

Dots are the most prevalent and well-known motif in Papunya painting. ("Dot painting" is a popular name for the style.) Most characteristically, they are tightly packed and cover much (or nearly all) of the surfaces, sometimes filling in other forms and other times obscuring them. Their prevalence springs from their general lack of concrete religious significance. Much of the traditional sacred imagery created by male artists is to be kept from the eyes of women, children and outsiders. (This prohibition is occasionally — and carefully — violated in this show, with potentially controversial results.)

The paintings are complemented by floor installation, which — somewhat teasingly — alludes to the traditional ritual origins of the culture. Arranged within a sandbox-like enclosure is a roughly square network of roundrels and traveling lines. These are done in a red, fibrous plant material while the background is done in a similarly textured white. Installed last week by a team of visiting artists, this temporary work will come down with the end of the show.

Reflecting the art's traditional grounding, the colors tend overwhelmingly towards the earthy: black and white, as well as subdued tones of brown, yellow, red and ochre. A number of the paintings make use of a flagrantly artificial bright orange; the effect is invariably garish and off-putting. For example: Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi's otherwise interesting Mystery Sand Mosaic (November 1974).

During the first few years of the acrylic art movement, Masonite boards served as the primary support surface. The boards in "Icons" are often irregularly shaped and tend to be roughly cut.

Formally and technically, the accomplishment of these paintings is markedly uneven. As one might expect of artists experimenting with a new medium, the technique used is typically fairly basic — and occasionally downright crude. (I will focus, below, on some of the ample exceptions.) The basic method involves covering the entire surface of the support with a flat underlayer — often black or brown — and then covering most of the surface with an intricate pattern of lines and dots.

Water Dreaming at Kalpinypa (August 1972), by Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula is widely acknowledged as a masterpiece of modern Aboriginal art. Indeed, this "image of country being transformed...by Water Man" is a work of considerable visual sophistication and narrative resonance. Painted at a time of great rains and flooding, it reflects these concerns. Intricately detailed and strongly asymmetrical, it resembles a map in its lack of obvious structure. Against a milk-chocolate brown backdrop, there is a dense layering of forms rendered in brown-reddish cream, yellow, gray, beige, and black: multi-directional dots and striations, river-like curves, tiny roundrels, tjurangas (bandage-shaped ceremonial boards) — among others. Black dots indicate raisins (kampurarrpa), an important local foodstuff.

Classic Pintupi Water Dreaming (also August 1972) is another variation on the same theme. Done on an upright board (roughly a parallelogram), Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi's painting features a central roundrel in cool lemon-ochre lines, representing a waterhole. From it emerge spoke-like lines surrounded by further concentric circles, more widely spaced and becoming more rectangular towards the outer edges. These are said to represent "creeks" and "soakages" respectively. White dots on black fill in the background. Framing the scene to the top and bottom are a pair of lump-shaped hills — black over-dotted with brown as well as white.

Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri's almost square Yam Spirit Dreaming (March 1972) is both unusual and unusually compelling in its style and conception. A central X-shape emerging from the center dominates the composition. Painted in a slightly translucent white, various silhouetted forms branch off of the X: animal and human ("Yam Spirit") figures. Disconnected, scattered, pairs of U-shapes ("Yam Ceremonial Men") face each other. A leaf-like border, still in white, surrounds all the figures. The dotting, incessant, is red within and black without; the background is a pale yellow. The yam, notably, is central to the traditional (primarily vegetable) diet of the area.

A number of more recent works on stretched canvas or linen are included in the exhibition. Although stretching chronologically to our own decade, the late seventies and the following decade are the major focus here. In many cases, they show considerable advancement of style and technique.

Several canvases partake of a style incorporating densely overlapping roundrels and whitish, delicate colors. Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi's Tingarri Ceremony at Ilingawurngawurrnga (June 1974) is the earliest canvas in the show. Displaying somewhat hesitant brushwork, it fills its space with dizzying circles and waves of pale colors: white, pink, cream and ochre — all over a black surface. There are few dots. It shows "the men's ceremonial camp where sacred designs were painted on the novices' backs."

In a similar vein, but more fluent, is the un-annotated Pulpayella (December 1976) by Willy Tjungurrayi. The colors are similar. Imposed over a background of densely packed, overlapping roundrels is a central network of larger ones, spaced apart but connected with traveling lines. The foreground assemblage is vaguely figural, with a column of three roundrels running down the middle and two line-and-circle "arms" hanging down from the sides.

Tommy Lowry Tjapaltjarri's tightly painted Two Men's Dreaming at Kuluntjarranya (1984) is a distinctive and compelling large canvas. Its wide expanse contains two rows of over-scaled roundrel-lakes. The connecting lines have largely disappeared and the roundrels appear to radiate off the page. Dots (typically in neat rows) and lines over a brown ground: white, whitish clay red, ochre, black, cream. The Dreaming tells of the creation of salt lakes "200 miles south and west of Papunya": following the consumption of a "strong native tobacco," two healers (ngangkaris) died and their "bodies began to urinate copiously." Lowry's Ngulyukuntinya, from the following year, displays a similarly refined style. (Sadly, the artist died two years later.)

Despite the unevenness of the work, and the difficulties inherent in understanding their stories, there is much of great interest here. Although the full narrative significance of these paintings may be unavailable, the rich patterning of the most accomplished paintings and the iconographic density of their Dreamings will give viewers much to reach for.

eden

Adam Fuss, Love, 1993, silver dye bleach (Cibachrome) photogram

I am now writing pieces for Tompkins Weekly, another local publication (appearing on Mondays). Here's my first one:

Parallels between art and gardening. Like artworks, the garden is designed to provide an experience that transcends the everyday. Yet both partake deeply of the same currents — cultural and biological — that structure our more mundane lives. Pervasive in both is a tension between the idea of perfect order (found or created) and that of chance or serendipity.

These thoughts are just a few of many invoked by the Johnson Museum’s “Picturing Eden,” a photography show that combines sensual richness and literary/philosophical depth. The theme of paradise is to be taken in a broadly imaginative rather than narrowly theological sense.

Here, Adam Fuss works with the photogram, a camera-less technique in which objects are imprinted directly onto light-sensitive paper. His three color prints are upright, portrait style — his favored format.

Love has richly embodied paradoxes: figuration and abstraction, composure and chaos, life and death. Half way up, two dark purple rabbits face each other, dead. Their outlines are alternately furry and aqueous. Emerging from these figures like an overgrown umbilical cord is a wet, Pollock-like line tangle in lurid colors: purple, orange, ochre, and turquoise — the trace of flattened animal entrails. The background is stark white.

More quietly, Fuss’ Invocation and Untitled draw an analogy between humble locomotion and a more spiritual transport. Against watery, colored backdrops (Indian yellow and blue, respectively) dark silhouettes swim heavenward; a baby in the former piece and a snake in the latter. The snake is the more graceful; its curves meld with the ripples of the water.

Mark Kessell’s three oversized portraits also evoke life and death. Against a black background, A Trick of the Light shows the head and shoulders of a ghostly, blue-gray baby, vertically streaked. The Residue of Vision, splotchy and brown-tinted, shows a skull. The textures are the result of Kessell’s unusual method of re-photographing daguerreotypes (an early photo technique resulting in unique images on silver plates).

Doug and Mike Starn are as interested in material supports as they are in images. In two poignant large-scale inkjet prints, a collage of warm-white, translucent papers has been stretched over a frame. The grid is clearly visible and forms an integral counterpoint to the printed imagery. Behind these grids is a ghostly underlayer printed with similar forms.

Both pieces are from the Starns’ “Structure of Thought” series, in which the wildly branching forms of silhouetted trees are meant to echo the dendritic “trees” of neurons — and, by extension, to act as a metaphor for maze-like human cognition. To this end, the silhouette effect flattens the trees, creating an ambiguously suggested perspective. This is particularly evident in SOT #20, in which the tree begins branching closer to the bottom edge than in its relatively stable companion SOT #2.

Sally Gall’s gelatin silver prints, though conventional in size and technique, echo the Starns’ interest in dislocation. We are underground, in holes or caves, looking up to the light. In Heaven trees seems to grow inward from the edges of a bread-slice-shaped aperture.

Alec Soth’s Green Island, Iowa gives a lovely, lonely, oblique evocation of the garden. We see the corner of a dusty, abandoned building. On wooden floorboards sits a ball of off-white thread, slightly unraveled. Above, set against an expanse of weathered gray wall, is a torn patch of colorful floral wallpaper. Both Green and its companion, Patrick, Palm Sunday, Baton Rouge, Louisiana are from Soth’s documentary series “Sleeping by the Mississippi.”

A subtle and perhaps unexpected variation on the garden theme is offered by J. John Priola. There are four gelatin silver prints, each depicting a lighted window silhouetted against an expanse of unbroken darkness. In three, we look in from the outside: a detached, voyeuristic point of view uncharacteristic of “Eden”.

Not unlike the box assemblages of Joseph Cornell, the varied grids of the windows enframe micro-worlds. Nested geometries add to the pieces’ alien poignancy: the upright windows are echoed by the proportions of the prints themselves, and further so by their two-by-two installation grid.

15th Street, 3rd Floor (the titles reference San Francisco) is both abstract and garden-like with its divisions of flat-space. Its panes, opaque with rivers and fogs of condensation, mask blurry dark hanging plant pots in the upper corners. 15th Street, 2nd Floor, gives a relatively clear interior view. We see a desk with a lamp, various obscure boxes, and a framed picture with strange figures (more nesting). The window has been raised slightly. The arched window of Dolores Street, Ground Floor N. offers reverse voyeurism; we look out at trees through Venetian blinds.

While Priola’s windows contain brittle warmth, Matthias Hoch’s two large color prints are mercilessly deadpan in style and subject. Following in the school of contemporary German photography pioneered by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Paris #28 and Paris #31 show gray and anonymous modern architectures imprisoning fragments of greenery.

This is a sprawling show containing numerous works repaying sustained attention. “Eden,” which originated at the George Eastman House in Rochester, will be up at the Johnson through March 22.

UPDATE (02/18/09): A representative from the George Eastman House has contacted me with the request that I add the following information. "Eden" was guest curated by Deborah Klochko. After the Johnson, the show will be up at the the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota Florida from May 9th until August 2nd of this year.

Also note that the version of this review published above differs substantially from the one in print.

And that the opening sentence fragment is deliberate.

shop around

Mark Mullin, A Growing Time, 2007, etching, sugar lift, spit bite and aquatint, 19" x 26"

Ithaca Times:

"Publishing Printshops: VanDeb Editions/ Olive Branch Press" highlights the work of two print collectives. VanDeb, founded in 1999, is based in New York City and is owned by artists Marjorie Van Dyke and Deborah Freedman. The OBP is the publishing arm of Ithaca's own Ink Shop. The show — which fills both the Shop and the CSMA lobby downstairs — will be up through February 28.

The selection from Van Deb is broad rather than deep; artists are represented with one or two works. Abstraction is the focus — often with a pronounced retro-modernist feel, occasionally in a more idiosyncratic, quasi-figurative vein.

Effectively taking up the latter strand, Mark Mullin's square-shaped intaglio A Growing Time offers oddly schematic weather. Black clouds — clusters of horizontal ovals — crowd the left and (especially) right edges. A row of three similar ovals hover above-center; their centers glow blue-green. They trail upright stripes of translucent gray that fade in the distance below. These could be cloudlets — or flying saucers. Clouds and saucers alike drop short bursts of dash-rain. Filling the center and reaching to the bottom edge is a block of yellow-green, actually a dense web of looping lines dotted with the (fainter) ghosts of clouds.

Likewise is Lorraine Williams' They Are Indescribable Alike, which suggests an aquarium bearing alien life. The mixed-media intaglio print features a varied menagerie of forms, all immersed in a faintly brushy, dirty-orange sea. A spongy purple blob, clusters of darker orange whiplash grass, and dots and splotches of (orange and purple) color mostly keep their distance.

Chris Gianakos and John Schiff work more familiar terrains of geometric abstraction. Gianakos' aquatint Metropolis III shows an irregular six-sided polygon, red, and starkly silhouetted against thin, pale pink. In contrast, Schiff's monoprint Word Shimmering is dizzyingly complex, puzzle-like — this despite its simple palate: uninflected red, white, and black plus various grainy grays. Right-angled triangles and other angular shapes radiate out from a central point like a pinwheel. These shapes are often richly patterned inside, with forms both curvaceous and stiff.

Some of the VanDeb abstractions feel a bit dissolute. For example, Mark Saltz's September I, September II (aquatint and spit bite) is reminiscent of the organic, calligraphic webs of contemporary artists like Brice Marden and Terry Winters; the colors though seem anemic.

There is more figurative work from VanDeb as well. Mel Pekarsky's Dry suggests Cezanne in the desert, but has its own starkly beautiful character. A black and white etching, it gives a view of a sparsely planted landscape, composed variously of softly linear hatching, smudges, dots, and dark line-branchings — all against a light gray background. Slope is hinted at: from the upper left towards the lower right.

K.K. Kozik's surreal, storybook-like Force Majeure combines etching and aquatint. A pink-skinned, white haired man sits up in bed, white and baby blue sheets and shirt gathered up around him. Above and behind him is a window with blowing curtains (also pale blue). It covers purple night sky. He looks right-of-page where a pair of closed closet doors seem to frame views of a giant, pale yellow, grey pocked moon — and that same sky. The line-work is adept, mostly quick and informal; there are spots of hatching.

Among other things, the Olive Branch is showing artists' books.

Maddy Rosenberg's mesmerizing, toy-like Dystopia is stood up inside a vitrine. More like a stage tableau than a conventional page-turner, it is variously folded, tabbed and cut. Done in brown ink on cream paper, it shows the stiff lines and blocky forms (light and dark) characteristic of its medium, linocut. Not particularly dystopian in feel, it shows a playfully fragmented jumble of Gothic and other old-fashioned architectures: spires, towers, domes, pediments, arched windows, brick.

Zevi Blum presents five black and white etchings (unbound) from his book When I Did Not Die, each paired with a poem by Judith Levey-Kurlander. Crisply linear and ornate in style, the subjects are fanciful and folkloric — a fancy that does not mask their often eroticized morbitity.

Abstraction is the predominant framework in this show. Peter Jogo's mezzotint Song of Route 83 II stands out for its sharp, detailed realism. (Jogo showed related work in a one-person show here last summer.) Approximately the size of a playing card, it shows a panoramic highway-side vista: trees, slant-roofed buildings, tiny telephone poles and wires, a light outlined guardrail tilting up rightwards from the lower left. Above is a cloudy sky: pale yellow, faint orange, shades of gray. The sun is going up or down. Song effectively evokes the loneliness of road travel.

The Ink Shop's member roster is impressively diverse (and accomplished) to begin with. Pairing selected members with a similarly talented group of outsiders is an excellent way of mixing up the familiar and the unfamiliar.

cleaning up

A pair of Times pieces I neglected to put up here: a review of the Ink Shop's "Fine Edge" intaglio print show and a feature on Ithaca Fine Chocolates (which also shows art). Both no longer topical, unfortunately — but here you go.

well behaved women

Lilla Cabot Perry, Lady with a Violin (Portrait of Lady Bellingham), 1908, Pastel

Times:

"Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History: Innovative Women Artists on Paper" takes the first part of its title from contemporary feminist scholar Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. The show justifies its slant by pointing out how the female artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — the show's subject — were only then beginning to gain mass entry into the art-world.

The title is somewhat deceptive, however. For all the progressivism in the lives of many of these artists, their work here is relatively conservative in style and wholesome in subject matter - the latter in marked contrast to their Realist, Impressionist, and early-Modernist peers, many of whom explored the more sordid aspects of modern life. (This sort of thing was not considered acceptable for respectable, middle class ladies.) Domestic life is a recurring theme, while even those images highlighting the public life tend to have a private, contemplative quality.

A (1908) Lady With a Violin (Portrait of Lady Bellingham), by the American Impressionist Lilla Cabot Perry is the largest piece. The pastel drawing shows her seated in profile, facing rightward. She is indoors; the background is sketchily rendered, mainly dark browns and grays. She holds her instrument in her right hand; we see only a golden scroll cut off by the right edge of the sheet.

Lady successfully resolves a tension between the demands of formal portraiture and the improvisational markmaking of Impressionism. The solidity and modeling of her head and left arm contrast with the looser rendering of the rest of the scene — most notably the jazzy line-tangle of her dress, baby blue and turquoise.

An untitled black and white drawing (1938) by Blanche Lazzell (also an American) is the second largest piece and sticks out for its lack of decorum. The scene is a mass of overlapping, angular planes in soft charcoal, which has been selectively smudged and erased. As in many Cubist images, it can take a while for the subject — here a seated figure, mechanical and sexless — to emerge from the cacophony.

The predominant medium here, however, is printmaking — particularly intaglio and lithography. Some of the prints are extraordinary.

Particularly so is Mary Cassatt's color drypoint and aquatint print Peasant Mother and Child (1894). The theme is a signature one for the American Impressionist painter-printmaker. Emerging from an ambiguous hillock of olive green tone, a woman in a dark striped outfit turns away from us and towards her dull ochre cloaked child. The triangle shaped composition echoes Renaissance art, depictions of the Madonna and Child in particular.

Mother has been been paired, for contrast, with Au Louvre: Musée des Antiques (1879-80), a black and white etching by Cassatt's mentor and friend Edgar Degas. His piece shows two fashionable looking women, one of them Cassatt herself, inspecting a glass-encased ancient sculpture inside the French museum. The composition is unstable and asymmetrical, giving Louvre a dynamic quality unlike the classicized domesticity of the Cassatt.

Likewise, the curator has paired Berthe Morisot's tiny drypoint Nu De Dos (Back of a Nude) (1889) with Berthe Morisot (en silhouette), a lithograph by Edouard Manet. Although both black and white images emphasize outline, the delicate strokes of the Morisot have little in common with the boldly expressive lines of the Manet. Nu shows a woman's bare back, her head turned back as if in teasing acknowledgment of the viewer. Nudes are anomalous in Morisot work; this one mimics a series of sexualized female bathers by the French neoclassicist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.

The influence of Japanese art is all over. The opening of the formerly isolated country to Western trade during the 1850s lead to a cultural exchange, which was highly influential for Impressionist and early modernist artists in Europe and America. A move away from Renaissance verisimilitude and towards greater flatness, asymmetry and abstraction during the late 19th century has clear Japanese precedents.

Three American artists here go all out, imitating not just the style but the technique and subject matter of ukiyo-e (woodcut) prints. Helen Hyde's The Bamboo Fence (1904) is the most compelling. The wide piece in covered all-over by a grid of bamboo scaffolding on which five young children climb. The fluid, dance-like interaction of these boys and girls within a shallow space is witty.

Two other color woodcuts seem a bit forced in their appropriation of Japanese motifs. Lillian May Miller's Morning Snow on Bamboo (1920) aims for an austere, minimal approach but feels overly static and leaden. Bertha Lum's Tanabata (1915) errs in the opposite direction, overplaying the exoticism of the Orient.

The Johnson, with its impressive resources, consistently manages to put on fascinating historical shows of works on paper. "Well Behaved Women" is no exception — although the innovation in question is generally modest.