The Philadelphia Inquirer

September 27, 2009
By Edith Newhall


The human being is hot again. Hence, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Barkley Hendrick's strutting figures come on the heels of Sidney Goodman's writhing ones and the Institute of Contemporary Art's dancing ones ("Dance with Camera"). Curious portraiture abounds, too, as in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Étantes Donnés, which offers a fairly thorough examination of the mysterious female at the center of Marcel Duchamp's notorious PMA assemblage of the same name; Tina Newberry's eccentric visions of herself in male military costume; and Susan Hagen's carved-wood tweens at Schmidt Dean Gallery, or Zoe Strauss' Arbus-like snapshots of South Philly denizens at Gallery 339

"Beautiful Human" at Haverford College's Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery focuses on a gentler, slightly more ephemeral branch of the figure revival. Its curator, Shelley Spector, has brought together six artists who use the human image as a cypher for goodness, integrity, and spirituality, and whose mostly simple means and materials match the modesty of their images.

The show's theme is most perfectly limned by the photographs of Donald E. Camp, a former photojournalist who has been making large-scale photographic portraits of African Americans for more than 15 years. Camp's images of these solitary faces bring the newspaper head shot or police mug shot to mind, while the prints' distressed, brown-tinged surfaces give them the appearance of daguerreotypes. Knowing Camp's organic printing process - his unique photographs are made using earth for pigment and milk for casein - reinforces the sense of integrity his works already project.

The work of the show's only other photographer, Laura Graham, who pairs masked human subjects with animals, or unmasked humans with taxidermic animals, is accomplished but seems somewhat out of place here.

Rob Matthews' graphite-on-paper portraits of his friends and family holding objects of importance to them are beautiful drawings, which always helps, but his subjects also have a beatific inner glow, a quality that is emphasized by the lighting in which he portrays them and the shadows they cast. Look past the T-shirts, etc., and they could be saints and martyrs posing in everyday contemporary gear.

Who hasn't been in in a public place where everyone is on a cell phone, wandering around like a zombie? That familiar, isolating experience inspired Joshua Mosely's mixed-media film animation, Commute, in which a lone "hero" on a cell phone navigates the moon. He's the Everyman in search of companionship, but hasn't a clue where he's going (I'm remembering Mark Kostabi).

Freaks populate James G. Mundie's careful pen-and-ink drawings of circus sideshow performers posed as art historical figures, and you feel a surge of sympathy and admiration for the underdog, portrayed so elegantly and empathetically here.
Matthew Fisher, who like Graham doesn't easily fall into place here, is (like Graham) fascinated by the disguised person. Nonetheless, his renderings of hapless military figures of an earlier day on scrap paper are utterly charming.


Artblog
October 1, 2009

Libby Rosof


Beautiful Human at Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery is a small show with big thoughts that burble and pop as the works by five artists hold a conversation with each other about identity and imagination. The show’s points of view zoom from imaginative self-identificaton to masks and costumes as tribal and cultural signifiers to the tyranny of the genetic code. And those are just the starting points.
I don’t want to say much more about the ideas in there (so many more I can hardly believe it) because if you go, the show will reveal itself to you in ways you won’t expect. And you should go.

Here are some more reasons why:

Photographer Donald Camp’s elemental, giant portraits of African American men dominate the show. If you have never seen these one-offs printed with earth and casein, you owe it to yourself to see them now. These portraits tell a tale of self-invention and gravitas that overwhelms the popular culture’s focus on African American men as gangsters and gangstas. Camp is a former photographer for the Philadelphia Bulletin who manages to indict even the crappy newsprint and its quick and dirty printing methods in these masterpieces of material and social depth.

James G. Mundie’s small ink drawings of circus freaks–another group of outsiders reimagined, dignified, and preserved by portraits that borrow art historical compositions–stand up well, even next to Camp’s gorgeous ultra closeups. Mundie and Camp are both on a mission to reestablish into the mainstream the rejected, without tampering with the subjects’ self-images and their control of their own destiny.

Two other drawing wizards–Matt Fisher and Rob Matthews–are still more reasons to see this exhibit. Fisher’s 18th Century soldiers are vulnerable and awkward, even when they cavort or daydream. The delicate drawings are everyman in costume, playing a role and yet not quite inhabiting the clothes,  adult boys who are confused about how they could possibly be who they are and where they are–models of self-doubt as modern as they are antique. The deadpan drawings are delightful and quite like the soldiers–dreamy storybook figures that leap off the page into your heart.

In contrast to Fisher’s figures who exist as universal soldiers of any time, Rob Matthews’ portraits are documents of this time–ordinary family and friends depicted with art historical allusions that preserve the subjects in the continuum of history, that place them in that collective memory that erases most mortals in a couple of generations. Matthews said he thinks of these as memorials, and therefore has written on the back the subjects names and particulars. The context of this show highlights all the thinking and complexity that has gone into this seemingly deadpan take on social circumstances that nearly consume individual identity.

Out on his own moon, Joshua Mosley’s claymation cyber-video Commuter uses the cell phone as the opening metaphor for journeying beyond concrete physical circumstances to some place in the imagination or the mind. The mind’s world here is futuristic, an adventure down the wormhole of technology where physical and genetic facts seem almost beside the point! The journey is playful, defying nature, gravity, and other limits–and highlighting how technology is a magical mystery tour where we can escape who we really are where we really are.

In the context of these complex works, Laura Graham’s large, introspective photos of women seem too large, their hints of psychological depth and mythic underpinnings not fully realized.