Pentimenti Gallery’s Latest Features Local Artists New to the Space

ARTS AND CULTURE > ART

In "Think Global, Go Local," six artists make work based on relationships.

By Roberta Fallon

Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Jun. 23, 2009

"Avalance" by EJ Herczyk

Photo by EJ Herczyk

Pentimenti Gallery owner Christine Pfister organized “Think Global, Go Local” with six local artists who’d never shown in her gallery. The show is about relationships and features clean, beautiful work consistent with the gallery’s aesthetic. “Think Global, Go Local” has two surprises: an architectural piece that bulges like a pregnant wall of a house, and two sculptures that puncture a freestanding gallery wall, their “heads” on one side and “tails” on the other.

“Think Global, Go Local”: Through July 18. Pentimenti Gallery, 145 N. Second St. 215.625.9990. pentimenti.com

The architecture team of Jason Austin and Aleksandr Mergold designed their bulging wall, called SURALtmWALL, to showcase vinyl siding, that utilitarian material used to weatherize suburban wood houses and cut costs of house painting. It’s an odd choice for an art material, but backlighting the piece turns the thin sheets of sometimes-translucent vinyl into not quite stained glass.

The piece is a weird and hulking beauty. A massive plywood armature holds the sheets of vinyl, and the structure is hinged on one side like a door. It swings on its hinge, but the work is most charming when in its closed position, evoking not only human habitation but an insect’s hive. I couldn’t stop thinking of children playing house by turning alternate materials (bedsheets, tablecloths) into “homes” and using flashlights to light them.

Piper Brett’s ribbonlike loops of Plexiglas in bright red and white poke through the gallery’s one freestanding wall as if they’ve been trapped mid-extrusion. Sculptors, like architects, love to reference houses, walls and doors in relation to the human body and Brett’s Plexi ribbons are playful.

Brett’s work also appears this month in “Offerings” at Little Berlin, where she created work based on the word “wow.” Her work at Pentimenti also incorporates the word in a hanging steel piece that’s so completely deadpan it’s funny.

EJ Herczyk’s shiny mixed-media panels abstractly reference the digital world. Avalanche, a 15-panel collage of digital prints under thick resin, is a cacophony of jagged-edge shapes that push forward as if all the information in the world trying to get into your in-box. Gloria Houng’s mixed media drawings and cast wax sculptures of rabbits concern the relationship between the man-made environment and nature. And Alexis Granwell’s visionary etchings of vortex-like shapes—built up with dots and lines evoking Morse code or Braille—call to mind cycles of nature or perhaps man-made cycles in music or dance.

For more on the Philadelphia art scene go to theartblog.org