First Friday: A Guide to "The People's Artwalk"

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

By Henry Sweets

Jackson hole, Wyo.-Whether it’s a free-booze fluke or a cultural revolution, the First Friday  has become the biggest monthly event on Jackson’s cultural calendar.
This Friday promises to be the biggest ever.

Six galleries will have receptions, most of them opening shows of new work produced by local, contemporary artists, a rising trend in Jackson. It draws those artists’ friends out, who bring their friends, who bring other friends, and all of a sudden it’s a huge party.

And although directors admit that free beer and wine are a huge draw, they also say that the unique brand of interaction is as much of a draw as any. Stimulated, happy, and living a taste of a cosmopolitan lifestyle, it makes people feel different than if they were just standing in a bar.

Lyndsay McCandless started the whole thing at her gallery, Lyndsay McCandless Contemporary in 2006, so the name “First Friday,” belongs to her, but she is happy to share it, she said. She likes that it has become a cultural phenomenon all its own. The first First Friday had about 30 attendees, and this Friday, the six galleries will feature about 30 artists.

One local deejay said he has been trying to figure out how to corral together the First Friday energy into a late-night dance party. He described it as an “educated,” and “open” crowd. And he didn’t mean those with college degrees and Ph.D.’s, but those interested in exposing themselves to something new.

In interviews for the story, directors spoke excitedly about new ideas: a punch-card system where gallery goers who attend each opening are eligible for a raffle drawing and a post-walk deejay party.

But in the midst of the excitement, a sad secret loomed over anyone’s fresh ideas. Lyndsay McCandless Contemporary, the gallery that started it all, will likely close.
McCandless hopes it will metamorphose into something else, but for now there are no immediate solutions.

The old small-motor repair shop turned chic art gallery is struggling in the rough economy. Though First Friday events there might make it through the summer, for now this is the last First Friday she can guarantee will happen.

 She said that the community building function of the First Fridays are more in tune with her goals than the dealing of high-end art. So the function those events serve could guide the mission statement of the galleries potential next iteration.

Another gallery, Full Circle Frameworks, will host Friday events all summer on a different week (giving art lovers more than one night a month). And Art Association director Karen Stuart said despite excitement for the evolving gallery-going scene, not every opening works for a First Friday.

So the expansive walk this Friday might be the last of its kind.

Enjoy.

“Passage”
Starting in LMC, “Jenny Dowd’s “passage” is an installation of paper, ceramics and steel. In one gallery, Dowd has hung 280 small steel boats – skeletal, and organic-looking – that float from the ceilings and walls, and amongst the rafters.

Next door, in the tiny “make-out room” gallery dozens of velum paper drawers - from three-eighths of an inch to 3.5 inches wide - emerge from the walls, containing in them mall ceramic objects.

The whole installation is a commentary on how objects, information, emotions – anything for that matter – are organized and stored by people.

“I was exploring the idea of storage and collection and objects being moved around ostensibly for safety, but also getting lost in the shuffle,” Dowd said.

The show’s title, “Passage,” could refer to a passage on a ship, a passage from a book, the passage of time, or the secret passages that children are so fascinated with, Dowd said.

“At first, I was refusing to see them as boats because boats have so many meanings and heavy metaphors and I don’t want to deal with,” Dowd said. “But this work is open ended.”

The boats’ organic, aged quality and the fact that they are unseaworthy skeletons, would lead viewers away from a strict interpretation of boat metaphors.
“Passage” is an installation with so many small details that an observer can become lost in them, and stumble into a niche they connect with, or have little discoveries that really speak to them.

The show will open from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., Friday, at Lyndsay McCandless Contemporary, 130 S. Jackson. Dancers’ Workshop will perform new work and Mr. Whipple will spin tunes.

 “Dance on Film”
Three films of dances will be playing in a loop in the Art Association’s Artspace Loft gallery on a television that’s part of a re-creation of Erin Roy’s living room, where one of the dances, “Blue’s the Word,” was filmed. Her furniture, and some leftover wallpaper have been installed in the gallery.

The show is called “Dance on Film” by Carrie Noel.

In the first film, “Winter Migration,” five women dance in fresh powder at the base of Teton Pass – wearing snow goggles and ski pants.

“We wanted to do a dance film that sort of embraced the extreme athleticism that’s in snow sports in this town, but with an artistic angle,” Noel said.

The film also reflects the migration of winter wildlife. “It loosely parallels the animals in Wyoming migrating, and moving from one place to the next,” Noel said. “Sometimes it is really beautiful and human, and sometimes it’s harsh.”

The next film, “Blue’s not the Word,” is about a woman who lives vicariously through her television. Dramatically lit and full of colorful wallpaper and empty picture frames, it is a bit more “whimsical, surreal and bizarre” than Winter Migration, Noel said.

The film is a companion piece, of sorts, to “This Bird Has Flown,” a flick Noel made in San Francisco, about the night John Lennon wrote Norwegian Wood. When “This Bird Has Flown” screened at the Jackson Hole Film Festival last summer, Erin Roy told Noel that the set looked a lot like Roy’s living room.

Noel saw it, and sure enough Roy was right; her decorating style was similar to the style of art direction that Noel had used in the film. That’s how “Blue’s not the Word” came to be, and why a reconstruction of Roy’s living room has been installed in the gallery.

Kate Kosharek choreographed the dancing in “Blue’s not the Word,” and “Winter Migration.” She was the dancer in “Blues not the Word,” while Margaret Breffeilh, Heather Best, Erin Roy, Jen Walker & Kate Kosharek were the dancers in “Winter Migration.”

Kosharek and Noel started a production company called “Hole Dance Films,” to produce the two new films, and will be entering them in festivals starting next month, Noel said.

A reception for “Dance on Film” takes place in the Center for the Arts from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday, but the films will be looping later into the night, and throughout the next week, until June 15.

Something Added
Upstairs from “Dance on Film,” in the Artspace Loft gallery, “Something Added” -16 photos by Brian McGeogh create a travelogue of McGeogh’s recent trip to the West Coast, and a chronicle of the growth of an “eye.”

Many of the photos are lent a mystical quality by the coastal haze, but in others the curios tint is provided by interesting subject matter: a vintage car whose paint job matches the dying leaves of a shrub it is parked behind or a beach of molting seals.
“Driving along the coast … there was a serious fog and mist going on, so that a lot of these people trying to take pictures were disappointed about how they couldn’t see certain things because they were foggy,” McGeogh said. “But I thought they had an atmospherical quality that gave the photo a clean, simple feel.”

Many of the landscapes contain a small human element, often dwarfed by the landscape but still altering it.

 “There are other photos in this show that have what might be a nice landscape shot on their own but then I would notice something in the photo that had been placed there by a human or by somebody, or even somebody standing in the photo, that added to what that place is like now,” McGeogh said.

McGeogh has only been photographing for about three years, he said. His natural skill to locate interesting photographic content was noticed by Artlab’s director Travis Walker, who decided to get him a week-long show in the Artspace Loft gallery.

Though he sounds as if he is still learning voraciously, his style might fool you into thinking he has more experience.

McGeogh’s show, “Something Added” opens in the Art Association’s Artspace Loft gallery, from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday, and will hang until June 15.

OK Cowboy
On the third floor of the Center, in Teton Artlab, the prints, stencils and paintings keep on rolling out and the newest batch will be displayed as “OK, Cowboy,”  along with a tournament of Mike Tyson’s punch-out, played on a first generation Nintendo Entertainment System.

The show is an effort to bring more new artists into the mix, like Peter McCullough, Ruckus and Scott Sears, director Travis Walker said.

Peter McCullough is Artlab’s newest resident artist, bringing a design influenced, painterly style and some Swine Flu-based works. Ruckus (Benji Pierson), who also makes futuristic commercial art for snowboard companies, has gone big, with two massive paintings of his signature robotic totem creatures.

Scott Sears, a recent Jackson transplant whose roots are in the London Punk scene, is finally showing a large spray-enamel stencil portrait of Barak Obama, dressed as Jesus, with open hands raining golden coins down from Heaven.

It was an idea developed separately from Tristan Grezko’s well-known stencil print of Obama, holding an ice cream cone, reading “Americans Deserve More Ice Cream,” an image that will be the focus of an upcoming installation at an ice cream shop in Lander.

Walker said the men have different backgrounds, but happen to be employing similar mediums and dealing with similar themes, which are for the most part contemporary and political, but sometimes refer to the natural beauty, or Western heritage, that frames Jackson Holes contemporary culture.

“These guys are sinking their teeth into pop culture,” Walker said. “Contemporary artists try to look at the world as it is right now, instead of copying another style.”
Walker includes “Road to Niko,” a painting of Redmond Ave. that leads to St. Johns hospital where Niko, his son, was born a week ago Friday.

CIAO Grand Opening
Just down the street from the Center for the Arts, CIAO Gallery director Michelle Walters and artist-members of the co-op gallery were rolling out white paint in their new space on S. Glenwood, a block and a half from Town Square, this Monday.
Thirteen elated artists now have a space to show their art downtown, and their Grand Opening celebration will be this Friday evening.

The collective of local and regional artists, which began in Victor about three years ago and later moved to the Village road, recently scored a space right in town. Walters said the new exposure has inspired some old members to return, and has breathed new life into the gallery.

The styles of art are eclectic – ranging from realistic landscape to abstract and most things in between. And the new, slightly smaller, space has high ceilings so art viewers will encounter a salon-style display of 2-D art, as well as sculpture and craft.

There will be 13 artists’ work on display, and many of the artists will be there to greet the public.

Glass Summer
At the Northern outpost of the walk, on North Glenwood, Full Circle Frameworks hosts Stephen Glass’ “Glass Summer” - 15 works of layered glass on wood.
Glass is a graphic designer, artist and former poetry teacher from Maryland who lives in Victor and works as a designer at High Range Designs, a T-Shirt factory there.

Glass draws images on panes of glass, and frames them a few inches above an abstract background he has painted on a sheet of wood - like a shadow box, but cool.

The images he draws are simply, smoothly drawn in bright colors. The subject matter is usually derived from something that caught Glass’ eye in some sort of pop culture media.

“I used to be really into going into the thrift store and finding old books, but now it’s more about just finding ideas from magazines,” Glass said. “I like the idea of being open to a lot of ideas and seeing what speaks to you … filtering them and finding what you like.”

He breaks the image down to a few fields of bright color and bold silhouette lines, a style he picked up during his early years as a graffiti artist. Faces and body parts are often a blank space or field of saturated color, but the lines allude to its meaning or expression. It is catchy and mysterious. The bright colors evoke taste.

Some are paintings of pretty people, and some paintings are of odd-looking or extremely playful people. The addition of an abstract background creates a deeper snapshot of the image, and seems to be a commentary on it. But besides saying that his work deals with the disposability of images, Glass defers on deep discussions of the meaning of his paintings, and instead speaks matter-of-factly about how he creates his art.

“Basically, what I do is I paint the wood first, which will have an abstract field or theme, then it’s like finding an image that kind of wants to be in that environment,” Glass said. “Then it’s putting those two together and seeing where that image on the glass will go.”

Glass will also have a couple of T-Shirt designs available, a perk of having a new job at a T-Shirt factory and a way for people who can’t afford a painting to own a piece of his art, he said.

“Summer Glass” opens, 5 to 9 p.m. Friday, at Full Circle Frameworks and Gallery, 345 N Glenwood St.

“Passage,” by Jenny Dowd.


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