Philadelphia Inquirer
April 18, 2008

By Edith Newhall


"Am the Rhythm" is about the connections, passages, and dissonances that visual artists can create when they play off each other's work in one gallery. The five-person show, organized by artist and freelance curator Shelley Spector for the Painted Bride Gallery, is full of unexpected juxtapositions.

First, watch Wendy L. Weinberg's video, "Am the Rhythm," to get a proper introduction (being counterintuitively played at the back of the second-floor space). This lively film has a syncopated beat of its own as it shows Spector on studio visits with her artists and parts of the show's installation, including work being painted and constructed on-site.

Isaac Tin Wei Lin's two architectonic sculptures composed of painted cardboard boxes - one a tower that reaches almost to the ceiling and confronts you as soon as you enter the ground-floor space, and the other the box equivalent of a stone wall on the second floor - set the structure of the exhibition.

The geometric linear paintings of Laura Watt across from the fluid fantasies of painter Jackie Tileston create a triangle with Jeanne Jaffe's bulbous resin sculptures. These three artists' works are so full and intense, you can practically see the sparks flying between them (come to think of it, Tileston's paintings suggest abstracted electrical storms and some of Jaffe's sculptures are connected by rubber cords).

By contrast, Andrew Jeffrey Wright's pattern paintings (imagine your grandmother's needlepoint Bargello-pattern cushions in early '70s album-cover colors) and an infinite-loop DVD have a contemplative place to themselves upstairs, separated from Weinberg's video "room" by Lin's all-black wall. A very smart move.


Artblog
April 7, 2008

by Libby Rosof


Am the Rhythm at the Painted Bride riffs in unexpected directions by grouping a somewhat unlikely quintet of artists--Jeanne Jaffe, Isaac Tin Wei Lin, Jackie Tileston, Laura Watt and Andrew Jeffrey Wright.

Curator Shelley Spector asked the artists to respond to the space and to one another's work, improvising, sort of the way a jazz combo improvises and riffs.

The end result goes beyond the metaphor of music, turning the combo into something bigger and better.

First of all, the artists in the show transcend the generational divide and the genre divide--

Jaffe has installed inflated, blobby breast-shapes that are cartoony and metastatic, as if Popeye's forearms and hands detached from his body, multiplied and began growing out of the walls and the floor. Jaffe may be the senior member of the group, but the work is young and irreverent. The plastic toy materials are colored in cartoon flesh tones, mixing a little of Murakami art-toy product with Linda Benglis' blobby, wild sexuality. The result is pure pleasure.

Wright's buzzy x-shapes bring houndstooth/sawtooth patterns to psychedelia. These trippy pieces get re-imagined in a tv version that sizzles and pops like a tv test pattern on the fritz. Wright made the paintings in situ (and we can see him and the others in the exhibit at work in Wendy Weinberg's wonderful video documenting all the artists before and during the installation).

Wright brings wit to work that reminds me of the form of outsider hobo art, turning a depressed genre into a mandala for the YouTube generation, who are used to visual over-stimulation.

Trippy in a whole other way are new paintings by Tileston, which she created after seeing the work the other artists were doing. They retain Tileston's signature inchoate space that explodes and rains down in orgasmic clouds--there must have been some influence from Pat Steir's faux nature paintings and from color-field glitz-meisters like Jules Olitski, but Tileston adds depth-and-space layers of cultures colliding and joining. This time, Tileston has added cartoony passages of fluid outlines and heated, zingy color that anchor this new work to American Pop. These paintings open a hole in the fabric of the cosmos to deliver a new, joyous world order.

Wright's x-boxes seem transfigured into figure eights in Watt's paintings--layered visual roller coasters and wormholes that knot around the canvas. Responding to the other artists and the space, Watt added a pink crystalline network outlined directly on the walls, connecting her paintings as a group and connecting them to Jaffe's pink breasts on the opposite side of the room.

The approach to the show is past a tall black tower of cardboard boxes, painted with calligraphic white marks, by Lin. The boxes create a skinny ziggurat reaching to the sky--or at least to the ceiling of the two-story-high gallery space. The language on them is mumbo jumbo, and the scale of the markings stands in strong contrast to so many of language-driven obsessive mark-makers like Jacob el-Hanani. Lin's approach here suggests billboards that fail to communicate, and transmission towers that put out so many words in so many languages that the result is a surplus of incomprehensible babble. Contrasting the non-communications tower, Lin also installed a black-box wall, sans the linguistic markings, to create a lowering, stolid black box for Weinberg's video.

I suppose we're all channeling the Age of Aquarius again at this moment in time to overcome our feelings of bleak prospects in a nation that has lost its upward momentum. It works, too. If you're feeling down about the trip you can no longer afford to take to Europe, you can go to the Painted Bride and catch the Marrakesh Express.


Philadelphia Weekly
April 29, 2008

Roberta Fallon


Undulating stripes and bursts of color, pulsing psychedelic patterns, delicious pink sculptural bubbles—all this and more make “Am the Rhythm” at the Painted Bride a jolly good show. The five-person exhibit of painting, sculpture and installation curated by Shelley Spector possesses a youthful ebullience. While the artists range from young to established, the high energy, sense of play and focus on beauty is uniform. All this art’s fresh as a daisy and supercharged.

The show’s edgiest work is by Jeanne Jaffe, head of the UArts fine arts department and coordinator of sculpture for the school. Jaffe’s installation Polygenesis-Progeny, a group of painted acrylic shapes that look like various breasts (or perhaps those rubber toys you squeeze and the eyes pop out) sits on the walls and floor, suggesting a kind of bubbly infestation from a cartoon petri dish.

Each bulbous form extrudes a thin line of licorice-like black rope connecting to another form, which gives the whole a family-like connection—as well as some weird comical sex-toy kink. This brainy artist, who probably could define string theory for you then quote Baudrillard, took a risk with this new direction in her work, touching on stuff that’s comic as well as cosmic. It’s just what artists should do but often don’t.

Andrew Jeffrey Wright’s pulsing animated video Xs and Diamonds (animation by Bonnie Brenda Scott) takes his psychedelic pattern paintings (a grid of them is also included in the show) to a new level of zaniness. These paintings have patterns like grandma’s crocheted afghans. Only here she must’ve been on LSD, because the colors clash so intensely. These works will open your doors of perception and let you fall right in.

Isaac Tin Wei Lin’s black-painted cardboard monolith Haunted stands sentinel at the show’s entrance. This skyscraper of a piece has a cascade of white calligraphic swirls, letters and zigzags that taper off at the bottom, suggesting an elegant snowfall caught in the air.

Lin has been using cardboard boxes and what’s now his signature calligraphy in lots of room-sized installations. Here, the marks, packed onto one massive vertical structure that suggests a human as well as a building, become the decoration on a ceremonial robe.

Lin’s work stands next to a swirling explosive abstract painting by Jackie Tileston, whose mark-making seems a perfect echo with Lin’s (and vice versa). Laura Watt’s paintings surrounded by painted spiderwebs round out the show.

Upstairs, behind a black-painted cardboard wall by Lin, is filmmaker Wendy Weinberg’s video documentary that shows each artist making their work and installing the show, and curator Spector discussing the works.

The video is smartly edited. My favorite part includes a scene in which Jaffe’s booby bubbles jiggle like Jell-O in a new animation by the artist. Also in Weinberg’s video is a great sequence on Wright. who’s focused with Zenlike intensity while making squiggly lined paintings using craft store colored paint pens.