R.L. Washington and Phil Stein Make You Reassess the World

Two artists share a show at Sande Webster Gallery.

By Roberta Fallon
Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Apr. 21, 2009

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Photo by RL Washington

Painter R. L. Washington and photographer Phil Stein have their eyes on Philadelphia, and their works at Sande Webster Gallery are quiet monuments to city streets and ordinary people.

In his third solo show with the gallery, Washington continues to chronicle urban life—and people, especially—in dreamy works that approximate the real without giving you specifics. The artist doesn’t work from photos but from memory and observation. His scenes have a poetic concreteness—you feel their truth and accept these people and places as archetypes. Trained at Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts and the University of Pennsylvania), Washington’s works have the vigor of the Ashcan School painters and the humbleness and grace of Horace Pippin.

East Wind Blowing, one of the strongest works in the show, serves up a fashionable woman struggling with an armload of groceries, her head down, hair and clothes swept up by the wind. It’s a lovely, dignified portrait. 

Make a Move is a haunting vision of an elderly woman weighed down by plastic bags and about to sit down on a street bench. She stares at you and her fatigue—whether from world-weariness, illness, age or sadness—is poignant. It’s a beautiful sunny day, yet whether this woman is waiting for a bus or for a friend, she’s in the evening of her life and all alone.

Washington’s work from the past two years is mournful. During that time, his mother, father and an older sibling passed away, he notes in his artist’s statement.

Phil Stein’s sculptural photo collages in the gallery’s front space fracture the city’s buildings, roads and vehicles into fly’s-eye views. Unlike Washington, Stein gives you street names and intersections with GPS-type specificity (13th and Market; 19th and Callowhill). Yet his stutter-step presentation calls into question whether you’ve ever really seen the places you think you know so well. Stein’s pictures are like 3-D puzzles. Each image fragment is individually mounted on board or foamcore then placed in its location, rebuilding the street, architecture, cars and people.

 Like a mirage on a hot day, Off Chestnut shimmers, its big tan building slightly off-kilter. Market St. Bridge is a mélange of architectural styles with 30th Street Station and the Cira Center behind the dirty, Gothic-style bridge. This would be a spooky picture without Stein’s jiggering of the edifices. With the surgery he’s done, the image becomes vertiginous.

The intent of these artists’ works may not be to get you to go outside and really look at the world in the flesh, bricks and mortar. But that’s what you will want to do after seeing this show.

R.L. Washington: “Extensions of Presence” and Phil Stein: “Streets.” Through May 2. Sande Webster Gallery, 2006 Walnut St. 215.636.9003. sandewebstergallery.com

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