MAG Biennial

I visited Memorial Art Gallery today to take in the 3rd Rochester Invitational Biennial and here is my assessment: it’s a 50/50 success.

I love Juan Perdiguero’s “dog paintings.” These things are huge – approx. 4 ft. by 6 ft. or bigger – painted in shades of black and brown against mostly stark white backgrounds. The dogs are super-realistic, nearly photographically real. But Mr. Perdiguero places his dogs in poses that turn them into abstract silhouettes. You can’t help seeing the volumes of field as part of the whole, a lot like Rothko’s black and white abstract paintings.

Sue Huggins Leopard’s printed books are truly works of poetry as well as art. Leopard has worked quietly in Rochester for years and the level of her printmaking skills and integrity of her art has matured steadily. It is entirely appropriate that her work is finally getting serious recognition by serious art curators. I would snatch up an edition of her illustrated Emily Dickenson poems in a New York minute if I had adequate room to display them. They are charming.

I am a push over for “trash art” – those objects created from the throwaway junk that we all contribute to landfills – and Ronald Gonzalez uses these materials in clever and refreshingly original sculpture. Each sculpture sports a “junk” head perched on skinny wire legs. They form an army standing on a narrow shelf that circles a room in the exhibit, one more unlikely and funnier than the last. As someone who recently came from the latest Pixar cartoon featuring a charismatic little robot named Wall-E, I would believe that his band of characters were all movie extras.

Melissa Sarat’s paintings are complex and exuberantly colorful and that is probably the most understated sentence I have ever written about anyone’s art. Each canvas is so covered in imagery, so intensely packed with color that I just can’t concentrate on them for more than a few seconds. My brain goes into over-load. I guess her paintings are good but this time, dear friends, you’ll need to have someone else to analyze them. I found myself closing my eyes to rest.

The bad news: since the beginning of photography, picture takers have been fascinated by reflected images - mountains reflected in a lake or airplanes mirrored against glass covered buildings (and isn’t that a scarily prescient image?). And of course people reflected in everything from car windows, mirrors of every dimension and yes, even television sets. The narrative is just too easy. Susan Lakin’s photographs of people reflected on television screens are – let’s face it – old news.

Todd McGrain’s bird prints and sculpture have been done too but it took me a while to figure out why I was vaguely bothered by this artwork when by every measure I thought I should really like it. After all, I like nature art and stark images and who besides my friend Boo doesn’t like birds? Then it came to me: I own a small soapstone carving that is nearly exactly like Mr. McGrain’s birds except mine was carved by an Inuit carver nearly 50 years ago. And come to think of it, the birds prints look a lot like Eskimo art too – nearly always drawn in pairs – and I can’t help wondering if this is premeditated by the artist or an unconscious borrowing.
Now for the big question about these invitationals: it’s great seeing work by unknowns but what about the old timers in our community? Are they excluded from consideration because they have familiar names? Or because the museum selection committee sees their work as “less fresh?” Why don’t we ask those questions?