Garden Rules

A new gallery in Northern Liberties brings public art to the neighborhood.

by Roberta Fallon

A Moore College faculty member, Hyder is known nationally and internationally for his spiritually themed work (carvings and paintings that evoke mysticism, magic and ritual). The artist is especially well known in Venezuela, where he's lived and taught.

At the gallery's debut in June, the artist told me he wanted to do something for his neighborhood, so he dedicated the first floor of his new living and working space to a gallery. He's also hoping to make the gallery's openings--which so far have included live music by the Northern Liberties Dance Band--a place for residents to get together and celebrate the neighborhood that may house more artists than any other in the city.

Now, in another neighborhood-friendly art action, Hyder has created a Mural Arts Program mural, Hanging Garden of I-95, in collaboration with artists Henry Bermudez and Paul Santoleri. Hanging Garden sits up high on a wall two doors down from his gallery and faces off with the traffic in the southbound lanes of the highway.

Hyder, Venezuela native Bermudez and the well-known Philadelphia mural painter Santoleri worked as one on the colorful mural that splashes across a 30-by-120-foot expanse of wall.

The mural, a checkerboard arrangement of lush, tropical forest images--fish swimming, flowers growing, eyes peeking through thick, ripe foliage--is unexpected in the urban environment. With its saturated colors and full, undulating rhythms, the mural is like a flower springing out of a crack in a concrete wall.

Best viewed from a car on the interstate--or from the roof deck of Hyder's compound--Hanging Garden is also an embrace of the collaborative impulse. So seamless is the cooperation among the three artists--the interweaving of painting styles, color choices and work habits--that the mural sings with one voice.

Hanging Garden of I-95 began in a drawing exercise similar to the surrealists' "exquisite corpse" drawings. But unlike the surrealists, Bermudez, Hyder and Santoleri didn't draw on each others' drawings. They sat side by side drawing their own imagery on the theme of the tropical forest, and stopped when they had 15 panels that pleased them--about five by each artist.

They assembled the panels in a manner they liked, and after that it was straight to paint--no Photoshop, no scaling up by gridding. They worked the wall like it was 15 enormous canvasses. Three and a half weeks after they began, the mural is 95 percent finished.

Inside, Hyder Gallery has an exhibit that represents the birth of the mural, from the original 15 small panels to documentary photos of the wall being painted to the artists' new woodcut prints on handmade paper that translate the mural motifs into black-and-white.

Also in the gallery, each artist is represented by drawings that reflect their studio practice and help flesh out who they are as individuals. It's a nice companion exhibit.

Helen Hyder, the artist's wife and the gallery's director, says the owner of the building on which the mural sits wants the three artists to paint the other side of his building (an even bigger wall). If and when funds become available for that project, the artists may well do that. After all, it's for the neighborhood.

"Hanging Garden"
Through Oct. 17. Hyder Gallery, 629 N. Second St. 267.303.9652. www.hyder gallery.com

sketches

Menage a Trois

"Trois Pipis Dans la Neige" (Three Pees in the Snow), a group show by three French Canadian artists at Space 1026, comes in three flavors--sweet, sour and spicy. Geneviève Castrée's delicate line drawings are tender accompaniments to her wan, autobiographical multipanel stories about Tina, the zoo elephant with bad feet, and la femelle panda (the female panda), who lives alone and is "just a little depressed." Castrée, 23, makes work that's lovely, fashionable (hair nicely tousled, clothes just right) and unimaginably lonely. Self-taught Dominique Pétrin's paintings and small doll sculptures concern themselves less with the inner and more with the outer world. Her work has an angry anti-art edge that shows in her strong brush work and rough-and-tumble surfaces. Her Hermaphro-pop and Moustache for Girls posters, painted on what looks like the back side of a plastic tablecloth, riff on Grecian urns and ambisexuality. Pétrin's small surreal photo collages about family, life, love and death let the anger go comic--with better results. Julie Doucet's works, full of hot colors and cool product packaging, are a universe of alt-culture merchandise. Doucet's got a beautifully made zine called Sophie Punt, along with miscellaneous boxes and cards all tacked on the wall and ready for purchase. The show's hotter than you'd expect from its title. (R.F.)

"Trois Pipis Dans la Neige: Julie Doucet, Dominique Pétrin, Geneviève Castrée," through Sept. 24. Space 1026, 1026 Arch St. 215.574.7630. www.space1026.com