December 4, 2007
You Catch More Flies with Honey…@ Carroll Square
While the name might promise simple sweetness and pleasantries, the exhibit You Catch More Flies with Honey…, now on display at Carroll Square Gallery, is not simple or superficial. Curated by Hemphill Fine Arts, the exhibit features five artists in the first annual OPTIMA exhibition, which showcases artists whose works have natural connections and form dynamic relationships when viewed together.
Bright color infuses the gallery as each artist uses a cheerful color palette to hide complex meaning and subject matter. This is most prevalent in the mixed media canvases by Isabel Manalo. At first her compositions seem to form uncoordinated landscapes. Upon closer inspection, familiar natural forms start to emerge. You can tell that each blob of color or bright blown ink spot is very deliberate and makes her compositions tight, drawing your eye easily around the canvas. The joyful colors and pretty patterns clash with the dark subject matter of works named Death March (pictured) and After Chernobyl.
The exhibit also plays with scale, as Denise Tassin's miniatures snake through the floor space of the gallery providing an interesting contrast to the large pieces displayed on the walls. Her work is intimate and invites you close to consider its minute details. In Shakers, three small light bulb type globes are centered in the middle of green felt or Astroturf. Each globe contains miniature figures reminiscent of worry dolls but better defined. The people are dressed in suits and ties and business attire. Each globe is filled with different amounts of people. It is easiest to view the one with the least amount of mini-people, while the one filled half way with the miniature people, feels very claustrophobic.
Todd Johnson's photographs of mundane, but quirky objects grouped in a pattern which alternates duck decoys, fishing lures and handkerchiefs, also play with scale. He enlarges the fishing lures to similar sizes of the handkerchiefs and decoys, so small details of rust or chipped paint are not missed.
Utilizing scale to further enlarge a small medium for dramatic effect, Valerie Molnar uses acrylic yarn to knit large, vivid, abstract pieces. Her work carries an interesting context in that they are made with inexpensive material but the work to create such unwieldy objects is unimaginable. In Count Tyrone Rugen's Run, intense colors are striped at various intervals, making triangles of abstract shapes throughout the piece. The shape is tacked onto the wall and stretched at various points. At the top, black and white stripes are spitting out of the color stripes, demanding attention. The knitting provides an interesting texture and hands itch to indulge the urge to touch.
Laurel Farrin uses trompe l'oeil and "fools the eye" to create a different texture creating painted fabric on canvas. The majority of her compositions are minimal and her canvases are mostly covered by an army green fabric background with some form of a mosaic skeleton and a photograph of a girl in period dress. In Rest in Piece, the skeleton is in pieces with the head at one end of the painting and a leg bone at the other. The head is anchored to the right center of the frame by the only real texture in this series, a mess of thickly painted layers. Along with texture, Farrin’s work carries the themes of the exhibit with bright colors, scale and a more than meets the eye context.