| Free Association of Artists by Alice Winn Pittsburgh City Paper October 18-25, 2000 Best of 2000 Issue |
| Within a trio of shows across town, artists
of various media use free association as a method to create works, articulating
their other, unconscious selves that can only emerge in the process of staging
the imagination. At the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh Gallery, Robert Qualters and Nick Bubash used H.H. Richardson's vacated Allegheny County Jail as a starting point for envisioning collaborative pieces. As in the Dadaists' Exquisite Corpse parlor game, where players conspired to find the body amid the detritus in the attics of their minds, Qualters and Bubash passed their paintings back and forth, layering dream upon dream in works that exude a gothic sense of fantasy. Within prison walls, captive souls project interior films of longing to keep themselves alive through the darkness. The tree a man looks at outside grows in him. A constant after-image of a lover drifts just out of reach, abiding in a place where only the heart which sprouts wings can follow. Some pieces release the pent-up eroticism of isolation. The displaced lady of the lake gazes seductively from a toilet bowl. A prisoner breaks out in fevered tattoos illustrating the rough charms of a world that's faded away. In others, hybrid creatures escape from the funhouse surrealism of nightmares into a lonely cell. Throughout the jail's architecture, there's a fluid vacillation between spiritual and physical realms. Birds appear at its impossible barred windows like getaway cars. Its Bridge of Sighs stretches across a concrete canal chalked up to the fresh colors of morning by children's hands. Solo works also allude to the state between asleep and awake. Qualters' painted streams of consciousness veer into visual Beat poetry, connecting personal memory to larger archetypal themes in literature and music. And the conglomerate character of Bubash's prints and 3-D compositions carries a further hallucinatory level of imagery. For James Church, the creative act consists of regarding, selecting, incorporating and contrasting found objects and images for his assemblage boxes at his Gallery on 43rd Street show. In one piece, a florid porcelain gentleman stands out against the shadow of a spectral figure as if braving a winter's chill. A tribute to sculptor Thad Mosley holds a ghost ship guarded by an angel sailing through quiet storm. Saved pieces of a life are unpacked for contemplation within the fragmented recreation of an old hotel room steeped in the golden light of October. These metaphors for the layered accumulation of memory and history are laden with tenderness and mystery. From the random textures and forms that Sharon Spell produced, she read and isolated images that led to a series of paintings with narratives guided by their own internal logic. In "Spell's World" at Zenith Gallery anything goes, and has a lot of fun going anywhere. In "The Pillow Talks Bad in a Tell-All," a pajama-clad love slave holds the tattler within earshot of its not-so-sweet nothings. There's the manifestation of a guy so perfect that his pick-up lines are engraved in gold. But no one beats "Barry White, Barry White," the mac daddy whose sonic boom kills every lady in the room. "The Brain's Senior Portrait" features the shameless gray matter striking a pose against polka-dot décor at the prom. A giantess cat goddess tangles up roads like balls of yarn, a city planner who delights in causing rush hours from hell for puny humans. In "Saint of the Fall Sea Winds," a holy man/meteorologist invokes beautiful tempests to animate the fireworks of autumn. Radiant colors infuse a portrait of mother and child like an inheritance of love. From the visionary play of these artists arise irrational, unconditioned landscapes of images in which they discover and communicate creative freedom. |
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