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Imagination’s shores
At Provincetown 2002
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

" Richard Baker: New Work "
At Albert Merola Gallery, 424 Commercial Street, Provincetown, August 9 through 22.
" Anna Poor, Tabitha Vevers, Daniel Ranalli, and Danica Phelps "
At DNA Gallery, 288 Bradford Street, Provincetown, through August 21.


" Gumby Goes to Woods Hole " could be the name of Richard Baker’s tongue-in-cheek show of marine-life images at the Alberto Marola Gallery. Baker’s meditations in gouache and acrylic on a market’s worth of crustaceans, mollusks, and fish seem half toy and half aquarium, at once plastic and scaly, phony and true, ridiculous and poignant.

Baker isolates his creatures against simple geometric washes of color — you can’t tell whether you’re looking at a toy-store display case or a fishmonger’s glass-fronted counter. For one thing, the artist constantly plays with verisimilitude. When the shapes of his creatures appear realistic, the colors register as too bright; when the colors are subdued, the shapes seem exaggerated. At no time, however, are you invited to think the crabs or sardines or goldfish or squid are actually alive. Maybe they’re rubber erasers and maybe they’re posed before the frying pan, but they’re assuredly inanimate.

This out-of-formaldehyde aspect of Baker’s images turns out to be a psychological ploy, an optical manipulation with a subtle hall-of-mirrors effect. A William Escher drawing makes you do a double take for what your eyes behold; its precision masks a carefully orchestrated chaos. A Baker painting, on the other hand, makes you do a double take for what your eyes fail to take in; its naïveté masks a carefully orchestrated plan.

The eight fishlike objects that make up Fish School are too simple, too buffoonish, too weirdly colored to be mistaken for the real thing; they’re more like trinkets in a boardwalk gift shop. And yet their various shapes, from bulky to thin, from flat to bloated, suggest a taxonomist’s appreciation of the range of forms marine bodies can take. And therein live the contradictions Baker has mastered that invigorate his art — connoisseurship and childishness, exactitude and clumsiness, the catch of the day in a gumball machine. The artist dares us to take him seriously, to read meaning into faux cuttlefish and make-believe flounder. That in itself is refreshing. Neither kitschy nor pretentious, neither lowbrow nor high, Baker is content to let us enjoy the silliness of what washes up on the shores of his imagination.

If irony and detachment are the hallmarks of Baker’s art, the opposite can be said of the work of Daniel Ranalli and Tabitha Vevers at the DNA Gallery. But just what is the opposite of irony? In Ranalli’s case, the answer may be mirth. His Buddha Series photograms — sepia-toned, washed-out images that look as if they’d just been lifted from their emulsion fluid — all depict the same statuary figure. More like negatives than positives, these Buddhas come in various sizes and in various combinations. What they don’t come with are details. Like the intaglios on old coins, the images appear worn so smooth that only the larger contours can be identified — head and lower body, extended arms, sometimes hands.

Nothing generally looks more stationary or more withdrawn than the expressionless, lotus-positioned Buddha — but not in Ranalli’s treatments. By repeating the same image across frames and frequently within the same frame, he makes his Buddhas seem filmic, arrested in action rather than immobile. They even have emotional weight. Number 9 appears to be on fire; Number 2 could be participating in a relaxed conversation. Think of the Buddha as light and Ranalli’s Buddha Series becomes a prism, with each image signifying a different, refracted color. The result regards the Buddha not as the transcendence of the emotional and physical world but rather as the sum of it.

Tabitha Vevers’s previous show at DNA Gallery depicted the likes of naked women with solitary horns spiraling out of their foreheads crawling processionally on their hands and knees. They were painted on piano keys. Vevers’s newest works return to another ongoing project, her Flying Dreams series. Bigger in scale than the piano-key pieces, they’re merely small; more important, they’ve magnified in complexity and ambition. Painted in oil on steel, Flying Dreams reads like pages from an illustrated book; the text below each scene corresponds with the imagery above in the personal, unembellished language we associate with diaries. And in each painting, bodies fly.

Every element of these powerful new works transports you toward the somnolent state of levitation. The written words resonate like verbatim transcripts; their simple immediacy delivers you into the mind of the figure depicted sailing above. The muted, mediæval tones of Vevers’s paint combine with the contemporary artifacts — electric lights and baseball caps, telephone wires and a woman in red bra and matching panties — to strand you in time. And the book-like size of each piece (the largest, Mark II, measures in at two feet square) invites you to approach closely.

One of my favorites is David, in which a tousle-haired young man in a white T-shirt and jeans appears suspended horizontally above a blur of distant trees. When I tried to stand him up in my imagination, I perceived his feet would not balance him on the ground. What’s more, his arm doesn’t fall in the way it would were he walking. Part of the delight of Flying Dreams is that Vevers regards the magical and the hallucinatory with sufficient rigor to get such details right. Yet these aren’t illustrations but explorations, pointing to mystery, not answers.

Also on view at the DNA are bas reliefs by Anna Poor, only one of which was available at the time of my visit (the show opens this Friday), and work by Danica Phelps that I saw last year in New York. Phelps makes nervous little notes and drawings on postcard-sized pieces of lined paper. They’re actually pages from a diary she keeps, and they all relate to money. Get up close to her jottings — and you have to, they’re really small — and you’ll learn that those little grids of green and red stripes that brand her pages like Christmas bar codes are actually a record of her earnings (green) and expenses (red) for the date of that entry.

Phelps’s opened vein of financial worries — a year ago she was on a pilgrimage to all the cities where she sends her monthly bills — is both funny and disquieting in its obsessiveness. I remember thinking last year that her originality as a conceptual artist shouldn’t be confined to a gallery’s walls. The work itself isn’t much to look at, but it’s marvelous to hold in the mind’s eye.

PS.: if you’re interested in Provincetown’s rich artistic past, a visit to the Julie Heller Gallery (2 Gosnold Street) can provide some unexpected if hard-to-look-at treats. In a freestanding, unpainted, shingled shack down a short sandy path off Commercial Street, what looks like a place to buy clam rolls is actually a remarkable repository of works by such luminaries as Robert Motherwell, Hans Hofmann, Charles Hawthorne, and Milton Avery.

Or if you’re up for Provincetown’s latest outcropping of contemporary art, try the Mumford Gallery (379a Commercial Street), where the work of photographer Gail Bryan and painter Greg Mumford will appear through the summer. Mumford’s exuberant, complex, smart abstractions enjoy a vibrancy that never feels hyperactive. Gail Bryan’s photographs are at their best when she’s shooting the human figure and when she has the good sense not to let her flowery, oversized signature dominate her frames. Her black-and-white pictures of a man’s torso and a woman’s, at once geometric and sensual, attest to the depth of her talent.

Issue Date: August 8 - 15, 2002
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