2007 - One of my photographs (above) was included in The Art of Photography Show in San Diego, California. Here's an article about the show. 2006 - City of Brea Art Gallery, Brea, California Two of my existing sculptures and a new interactive piece were included in the recent exhibition entitled I Could Do That: Contemprary Art and the Audience, curated by Thomas Ciganko. An interactive piece by Kim Abeles was also included in the exhibition. review 2005 - Sam Francis Gallery, Crossroads School, Santa Monica, California My work was included in the One Hundred Years of Solitude exhibition curated by Pearlie Rose Baluyut. In the catalog accompanying the exhibition, Ms. Balyut wrote ”Thomas Sacco’s work resurrects the classic composition and irony found in Nicolas Poussin’s oil painting, Et in Arcadia Ego. A Latin phrase coined by Virgil, 'Even in Arcadia, I – Death – am to be found,' synthesizes Sacco’s relationship with South Bronx, which was considered a national symbol of urban blight while he was growing up. Sacco declares that although he ‘never participated in or personally experienced the street violence that, according to the Kerner Commission report, made the odds of dying a natural death in that neighborhood four to one against…it was impossible not to be aware of, and possibly a bit entranced by, the fact that just being in a particular place could present such a risk.’ Instead of recreating Poussin’s tomb to break the magisterial view of the idyllic landscape, Sacco uses found objects, which constitute the matrix of his oeuvre. Like memorial inscriptions, these scraps of wood and metal serve as a record – the remains – of violence, unplanned events, and accidents. Perhaps Sacco expects the viewer to regard his mixed-media assemblage akin to a modern memento mori, inspect it with an air of melancholic curiosity as Poussin’s shepherds do, and conclude that paradise is, inevitably, not always pastoral.” 2004 - Atelier 31 Gallery, Seattle, Washington I was included in the Rosso exhibition curated by Stefano Catalani. (Please see the installation shot on my home page.) Despite receiving mixed reviews such as the ones below, this was an interesting project to be be involved in. The show opened around Valentine's Day, and we were asked to revisit an existing piece, but with the color red in mind. Seattle Post Intelligencer Atelier 31 Gallery exhibit has 13 artists seeing red "Rosso," Italian for red, is a vigorous exhibit with a curious premise. Curator Stefano Catalani, the new director of Atelier 31 Gallery, invited 13 artists to "reinterpret" one of their existing works in red. Original and red versions hang side by side, except in the case of Ellen Ziegler. She "contaminated" (curator's word) a room-size series of blue prints with a watery red addition, adding clotted dark to her feathery cool. Does it work? Yes, which, in the end, is the point. Other forays into red are less successful. Rich Lehl's original painting of a slow-motion runner on a bridge has a queasy clarity its red companion lacks. Claire Johnson's original painting, titled "1978," has a wonderful, internal heat that red tones coarsen. But Pam Keeley's double painting of "Saturn's Daughter" is a pleasure twice, as are Demi Raven's tiny pair of painted louts (one having an atmospheric heart attack), and Margo Quan Knight's photographic prints "Thorn Hug," subtly different. By directing the color scheme of these artworks, Catalani participates in their creation. He's bringing excellent artists (mostly from Soil) into the gallery, but if he continues in this collaborative vein, he might want to take at least partial credit for the end product. At Atelier 31, 2500 First Ave. Through Feb. 29. Hours: Monday-Tuesday, 10:30 a.m.-6 p.m.; Wednesday-Saturday, 10:30 a.m.-7:30 p.m., and Sunday, noon-5 p.m. -- Regina Hackett and from the stranger: BLOODY HELL A Curator Goes Too Far by Emily Hall Rosso Atelier 31 Gallery 2500 First Ave, 448-5250 Through Feb 29. Red is the least ambiguous of colors. It is not subtle. Its associations--blood, siren lights, hellfire, passion, anger, heat--are obvious. Yet somehow when curator Stefano Catalani asked artists to remake one of their own works in red, he thought we would be surprised by the results. We are not surprised by the results. For Rosso, Catalani chose work by 13 artists and then asked those artists to remake the work in red. His intent was to test the ways that palette influences meaning, and, to quote from his press release, to create an "experiment inside the semiotics of art." He goes on: "How does the subtextual language of color change the language of the image or the object of art?... It will be interesting to experience how the red color overpowers the work of art by changing its language and how the artists' reinterpretations confront and revise the agenda at the root of the original work." But it really isn't very interesting, is it? Red is hardly subtextual--it intensifies emotion and shoves ideas to the edge of reason. But not every work of art needs to be ratcheted up to the point of insanity; many of the artists shown here pointedly sidestep the overlay of heat that Catalani has insisted on. Helen Curtis' delicate cages of string, filled with translucent objects, are about barely-thereness; the tint of red (dipped in blood, blushing, whatever) does nothing for them. Some work already carries plenty of intensity: A painting by Rich Lehl--a lovely little bit of paranoia, a lonely runner on some kind of spotlit nighttime overpass--is only given a kind of meaningless, lurid glare. Christian MacKetenz's ambiguous painting of a weird brawl becomes, in red, a patently obvious fight between good and evil, complete with leering skulls. At best, the assignment has only the unfortunate ring of the design showroom, where if you don't like an object in one color, it's certainly available in another. At worst--and on my first viewing it struck me as much worse--it overrides the artist's intent altogether, suggesting that the curator's needs are more important. I like Ana Lois-Borzi's thorough and demented autopsies of stuffed animal parts, like solemn taxonomies, but when each part is dyed deeply red, the strange variety, the odd palette, is drained away, and the sly suggestion of violence gives way to a heavy-handed and spurious version. At least part of the pleasure of Lois-Borzi's work is how little of the artist's rather surgical will needs to be exerted on these found objects to give them meaning; Catalani's proposition pushes them right over into cliché. This is bad curating, in love with itself, calling attention to itself instead of letting the work's own significance emerge. It's the kind of show that leads to theories, like one I heard recently, that art no longer has any intrinsic meaning; that, instead, we wait for curators to assemble meaning for us. A good curator strives to lead us toward new perceptions, toward new thinking; a bad one tries to manage our reactions. Two works in Rosso seem to know this, to tartly undermine the project's methodology: When Tom Sacco went to transform his bent metal sculpture, which looks to be a scrap left over from some industrial jigsaw, he chose the hood of a red car, and where else but a car dealership is your choice of color so easily accommodated? Similarly, the red-toned version of Doug Smithenry's scruffy little painting of a man split down the middle uses an exaggerated paint-by-numbers technique--with all those little strange pools of color and odd contrasts--that seems to laugh back at the assignment. The inflated language of Rosso's proposition and the dull results infuriated me--is this what passes for rigorous thinking around here?--although when I went back for a second viewing, it seemed more harmless, though no more interesting, than I had first thought. I suppose there's a measure of credit due to Catalani for trying to diverge from the usual commercial gallery practice of solo shows and tame group exhibitions, but like Strata, Davidson Galleries' show of all striped works a few months back, the effect is more so what? than groundbreaking. And with a show featuring so many artists who don't normally deal in so what?, it's certainly the fault of the curator rather than the work. emily@thestranger.com |