VISUAL ARTS
By Robert L. Pincus ART CRITIC
2:00 a.m. April 16, 2009
There is something both poignant and pathetic about faded celebrity. Jason Sherry reminds us of this in an elaborate photographic collage, “Whether Celebrity Can, Or Should, Transcend Dimension,” which is part of his latest exhibition – his second at Seminal Projects.
Few will be able to identify the main figure in this image, though 30 years ago many more people would have. This fellow with the blond shag hair is Leif Garrett, then a sort of fresh-faced pop singer and actor. He's done a lot of acting since then, but has also had legal troubles stemming from drug arrests.
Sherry sets him among a crowd of small faces, taken from celebrity magazines, which form a kind of landscape behind him. In the adjoining image is a similar land mass, this one seemingly extraterrestrial and partially filled with letters.
Language, in Sherry's art, is often reduced to nonsense, in a way that Lewis Carroll probably would have enjoyed. And like Carroll's Wonderland, his universe is a place where rational thought has little use.
Sherry is also a connoisseur of pulp pictures. The piece that gives this exhibition its title is dense with pages and covers from old tabloid and porn magazines, sliced up to fit the shape of “The Packrat Dirge (Or the Theme from Human Interest Story).”
The packrat is a friend of the artist. He was getting divorced and wanted to jettison a pile of publications. So Sherry took them and made them into a new shell for an old pump organ mechanism. The imagery even covers the keys. And, wonder of wonders, the organ still plays. So the artist's reference to a dirge can be taken literally, though you're free to play happier tunes on it.
The use of music isn't isolated to “The Packrat Dirge,” either. Sherry, who once played bass in rock bands, clearly has interest in making objects with sound. He's turned a BMX bike into a turntable for “Time Space Trials.” Pedaling it plays vinyl records in a herky-jerky style. It doesn't look like much, but you have to praise his low-tech ingenuity. He seems to view his device as revenge on bad music, since it plays albums badly: He christened it himself by playing one by Iron Maiden.
More on music
Mark Mulroney had a really fine solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego five years ago. His mural scale project, among the current offerings at The New Children's Museum downtown, is an intriguing swirl of imagery alluding to fairy tales and puppets.
“Nude Drum Solo,” his show at Seminal Projects, consists of more slight work, paintings with a lot of open space interrupted by a figure or two and sometimes a telling prop.
“Paradise” doesn't look so paradisical. There's a lone palm tree and a guy on all fours. In “You Look at Me. I Look at You,” a male with bulging torso cut off at the chest gazes at a nude woman with no neck and head. It's a droll take on desire.
There are traces of the style and wit that give Mulroney's art its life among the seven exhibited paintings. But they fall short of expectations he's created for his work.
Perilous places
The fragility and insecurities of the artist's life are a recurring theme in a four-artist exhibition titled “Security For All” at Agitprop in North Park. Only one of them, Judith Pedroza, is local. The others are from Mexico City; Pedroza, who curated the show, is a recent transplant from there.
Architecture is a symbol of precariousness in Pedroza's installation, “There Is a House by the Sea,” which consists of a paper house hanging from balloons above a miniature mountain of charcoal.
The edifices aren't any more stabile in Orlando Diaz's several watercolors/drawings, “Structures of Protection,” depicting crude structures sandwiched in trees, themselves suspended above water or shifting earth. These are vigorously rendered pictorial visions, which mix dark fantasy and the grotesque.
Toy soldiers are Héctor IvÁn Delgado's medium, in a labyrinth on the floor. It suggests symbolism about a circuitous path, through childhood, to adult acceptance of military violence. The commentary seems predictable; the use of the labyrinth as a symbol is, too, even if it is handsomely arranged.
Rodrigo Sastre offers an animation piece in the form of a shape-shifting book, in which he comments favorably on his move from Argentina to Mexico City. He uses imagery from Velazquez's iconic “Las Meninas” to convey his tale and does so well.
Robert L. Pincus: (619) 293-1831; robert.pincus@uniontrib.com
In the Union-Tribune on Page W14
http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/apr/16/lz1w16pincus183725-thematic-adventures/?uniontrib
DETAILS
“Time Space Trials and the Packrat Dirge,” exhibition by Jason Sherry, and “Nude Drum Solo,” exhibition by Mark Mulroney
When: Through May 2
Where: Seminal Projects, 2040 India St., Little Italy
Tickets: Free
Phone: (619) 696-9699
Online: seminalprojects.com
DETAILS
“Security For All,” artists from Mexico City and San Diego
When: Through April 25
Where: Agitprop, 2837 University Ave. (entrance on Utah Street),
North Park
Tickets: Free
Phone: (619) 384-7989
