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Bambi Biennial February 1 - March 18, 2008 |
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Aptly tongue-in-cheek, the title Bambi Biennial is a joke on wider art world hubris. However it is meant, this modest show delivers a small scale whimsy that makes the title even more appropriate. It’s even more obvious when you see where they are located: way north of Girard on Frankford, which might be called an up and coming neighborhood to some. Luckily, Bambi is near the Rocket Cat Cafe and the Highwire Gallery, so it is not exactly a wasteland; I also stumbled into a new antique shop which was full of fantastic ephemera nicely placed on the original century-old shelf units. Although it is inescapable not to compare the Bambi space with Cereal Art (which is part office, part gallery) and Art Star (which is a small boutique with a nice exhibition wall for guest appearances), Bambi is more of a gallery with a restrained consumer part. This appears flexible, like many new model boutique-scale galleries of this type. In this case, the effect is remarkably like a booth at an art fair where the gallerist is hoping to garner a piece of the contemporary art pie. So Bambi has accomplished quite a bit. For Bambi Biennial, owner Candace Karch asked Artblog team Libby Rosof and Roberta Fallon to jury the show, and out of 100 applicants, 18 were selected. The caliber of the work is uneven, as one might expect in a juried show, but there was something of a unified and uplifting stance among the artists. Tory Franklin’s wall piece was striking and wouldn’t look out of place in any art fair. Her collage print piece, Nous Faisons, had a screened wall paper background and a large drawn portrait. Franklin’s tiny animated video was also delightful and just amusing enough to not be slight. In the same back room, Ben Will’s extremely contemporary cardboard box (avec duct tape) sneaks up on you, but might have benefited from better placement and perhaps a companion piece for contextual company. Is duct tape is the new black? K-Fai Stele supplied a rather difficult video piece paraphrasing Othello and portrayed by actors dressed as cats. It has fair production values without irony or shaky camera, so I’m not sure what lofty sentiment replaced the natural ironic humor it might have conjured up. It was certainly well acted by the artist and friends; perhaps the cat thing was a private joke. Joe di Guiseppe provided a framed video piece that the viewer could manually spin around with a crank. (Audience participation is so contemporary!) Josh Kerner’s foam guns in a plywood rack seemed familiar. Although the piece makes a valid point, it utilized an obvious and well-used political polemic one might see on any MFA course, contemporary as that agenda might be. It stood comfortably by Won Keong Lee’s bubble wrap sushi chair (it works) and near Daniel McCartney’s quaint found object collage hanging from the ceiling, guitar with alarm, which may or may not work. Other artists included Alan Prazniak, Michael Hurst, Daniel Payavis, Rika Hawes, and Alana Bograd among many others. It seems these artists are paying attention to events outside Philadelphia and are compelled to produce art for Fishtown and the big wide world both! Back to InLiquid's Commentary section index © 2008James Rosenthal and InLiquid.com; image copyright © 2008 Won Kyoung Lee |
