Tuesday, September 4, 2007

3 Generations

Beep Beep Gallery is located on the corner of Ponce De Leon and Charles Allen Drive in a small shop space with a rich history of showing art in Midtown. The gallery's new show "Three Generations" is a salon style show bringing together the artwork of the gallery's current owners with the artwork of the two previous occupants of the space. There is not necessarily a cohesiveness running through the show other than an interesting history, but the show is a nice homage to the space itself.

The first was Grant Henry, working under the name Sister Louisa and originally owner of the Sister Louisa Gallery, reworks found paint-by-number paintings adding his own humorous and sarcastic one-liners on politics and religion.
The use of church Offering envelopes to label the work seemed appropriate on so many levels.

The second commander of the space was Joy Phrasavath, with his boutique L'Avenue. His three drawings on paper from the "Bed Wedders" series were some of the best in the show and at $200 each they are an incredible deal. While at the gallery I met one of the models for these drawings. Her legs were represented quite accurately but it turns out she isn't a double headed bunny which makes me think there isn't a guy with a goat head lurking out there either.

And to the present, James McConnell, one of the owners of Beep Beep had a dreamy series of cloud images that were arranged in patterns evoking ink blots or what the sky looked like as a kid after I had done one too many flips on the trampoline.

The images remind me of the Fox Talbot quote "Make picture of kaleidoscope" - which in this context gives it a completely different meaning.

There was also the drawing "Happy Valentine's Day, Satan" by another current owner, Steven Rauber, that was great because like the rest of his drawings it was done on paper that had been spit out of the printer as an error report. I have spent enough time toiling away in offices to appreciate the new use for wasted paper. I can image the artist's mood changing from frustration to triumph as he realizes the newest technical error just delivered a new canvas. Or maybe it was that particular frustration, which can only be instigated by computer problems, that inspired the drawing of a devil and this becomes more of a chicken or egg sort of question.

Show ends Sept 7, 2007. More information here.

2 comments:

sister louisa said...

Thanks for the coverage!
I love your perspective.
(who are you anyway)

Jonathan said...

Funny - I've been asking myself the same question - but you can see my work on the whitespace gallery website under Jonathan Bouknight