local ephemera: A Question of Drawing the Line

This post is about to rhyme itself into the visual equivalent of a ditty. Hold on to your hat.

Saw Adron at Starbar

listening to her is like going on a mini-tropical vacay inside a whiskey glass.

In April 6pm is apparently the witching hour.

Perfect lighting for Nancy to shoot a video in her studio. She installed new wallpaper from the Haverford College show, it looks awesome.

Table full of artists for Nancy's "Truth or Dare" dinner. I dared.

Ok, food, wall paper, repetitive color pattern, flowers, where does this take us next?

Amy Landesberg, "Rosewood Swag," 2011, Digital Print on clear and translucent film.

6pm was also the time Amy Landesberg chose to give a talk at Solomon Projects about her piece currently in the show "Something Along the Lines of Rock and Roll" and about the massive commission being completed for the new international wing (F) at Hartsfield.

Amy Landesberg, "Rosewood Swag,"detail.

The pieces derive from scanning endangered wood veneers, turning the patterns into vector based graphics, and printing them on glass and/or film.

Alex Brewer, "Untitled," 2010, silkscreen, graphite, house paint, on panel, 48'x48"

But what is most important is the way natural light projects the colors into space. It's ephemeral at heart. You can see better images of the cast light here.

Alex Brewer, "Untitled," detail

Veneer scans aside, what I also see in Landesberg's pieces are layers of graffitied and wheat pasted walls weathered into abstraction and liberated into space through light.

Alex Brewer, "Untitled," 2011, m/m on canvas, 60"x70"

And at Sandler Hudson graffiti artist and painter Alex Brewer is taking ephemeral methods and creating very solid paintings

Alex Brewer, "Untitled," detail

as part of the group show "Mark Making in Black and White."

Alex Brewer, "Untitled," detail

Brewer's gestural details build a network, however convulsing or on the edge of explosion, the marks convince the eye there is a harmony in the chaos

Alex Brewer, "Untitled," detail

like the intricate balance of a wood veneer patterning.

Brett Smith, "Spring Fireworks," 2007, Pastel on paper, 26"x40"

Also in the show, Brett Smith builds an intimacy of space in his small frenetic marks

Amy Pleasant, "How I See You, How You See Me," 2011, Latex paint on sheetrock.

and back at Solomon the fantastic Amy Pleasant takes adjacent walls and transforms them into an intimate meeting in muted color.

Amy Pleasant, "How I See You, How You See Me," detail

Pleasant removes every artifice in her study; managing to balance a massive wall-sized scale with a pair of small paper pieces, each seeming to speak at the same decibel.

Ink marks become a depth of floating figures in space.

Go see the Solomon show, it is ephemeral and beautiful.

All this talk about decibels and the corner space of a room. Last weekend was National Record Store Day and Criminal had a bunch of bands playing

including members of the recently disbanded band the Back Pockets, who are in the process of reforming into something new and equally fantastic.

Lead singer Emily Kempf's lyrics - delivered in a weaving of the guttural and the delicate -exploded somewhere beyond the cerebral cortex, somewhere much deeper,