I'm beginning to think that quaint little Lake Worth (affectionately known as LW) may be the future of culture. It seems like everything interesting and experimental in art takes place in, or has direct links to, LW-who would of thought it?
Besides having the only truly experimental contemporary art facility in Palm Beach County (the PBICA), Lake Worth has a long history of attracting creative types and mad geniuses. A few of them are up to their old tricks again:
Take for example Geeks, Freaks and Mysterious Visions: An exhibition of bizarro art, noise machine oddities and strange movements.
On Saturday April 19 at the Klein Arts Center (where nationally acclaimed choreographer and dancer Demetrius Klein keeps his home company) you can simultaneously experience the paintings of Pooch (Mike Puccierelli, tattoo artist) and Lea (both featured in past Closer issues); the "Haunted Pyramid" by MOG, a transplanted artist/musician/performance artist; and an original dance performance by Demetrius Klein.
"We wanted to see what happens when you get a Detroit performance artist, a Guggenheim award-winning dancer and two artists who own tattoo parlors together, MOG says. "What you end up with is a strange hodge-podge of art and performance. The whole sideshow motif seemed a perfect fit." The paintings of Pooch and Lea nod to the aesthetics of Surrealism and fantasy, as do the dances of Klein and the "noise machines" by MOG.
The sexually charged art of Lea and the mythical tones of Pooch's paintings complement each other in menacing and exciting ways, playing the masculine and feminine against each other. Demetrius Klein's elegant and sincere Modern Interpretive performances have been acclaimed worldwide (we overheard one spectator at a recent show at the Armory describe Klein as "that intense guy in the leotard,"), never sinking to those "I'm a sperm, I'm a sperm, I'm a flower" clichees.
MOG's soundscapes and noise machines have been evolving for years; the Haunted Pyramid is a variation of an earlier work, the Sound Tunnel, exhibited in Amsterdam and Tokyo.
"It's like getting beaten up by your best friend," MOG says wryly. As you crawl through the Pyramid, (yes, you have to crawl-just like the real pyramids), you're barraged and pummeled by sounds from all directions, and left disoriented and spent.
See Geeks, Freaks and Mysterious Visions
Saturday April 19th from 8pm to 12am
Klein Arts Center
811 Lake Ave. in downtown Lake Worth
Entry: $5
Ph: 561-596-5889
For more info go to: www.alteredstate.net/artshow.htm
Crash Test
He started out with a can of spray paint and the side of a subway car, and ended up at the Museum of Modern Art. But the paintings of John "Crash" Matos are more than your average graffiti. Drawing on larger-than-life Marvel characters like Spider Man, Cat Woman, Dick Tracy and The Shadow, reminiscent of Roy Lichtenstein's pop art comic strips, Crash's paintings are weird and vivid reminiscences of a technicolored childhood peopled with heroes and villains. The paintings don't exactly tell a story-they're more like random snippets, as if the artist had taken a pair of scissors to the big narratives in his head and then framed the primary-colored fragments. Batman or Dick Tracy might appear next to a woman's eye and part of her cheek-and perhaps a number, or a letter or two from a word we can only guess at ("Vu…"; "Kil…"). "It's done!" one character exclaims enigmatically. The result is beautiful and haunting-Pop Art with soul.
Crash himself will appear in Lake Worth for the opening of his one-man show at Art Link International this month. Father/daughter gallery owners Howard and Heather Brassner are apparently color fanatics: they also carry fabulously over-the-top paintings and prints by po-mo favorites Kenny Sharf and Keith Haring, COBRA artist Karel Appel, and bright geometric seriographs from Hungarian Victor Vasarely, along with many, many others. ArtLink International makes one of three first-class contemporary/modern galleries in downtown Lake Worth: visit also Margot Stein Gallery on the 500 block of Lucerne (she's got Warhols, Serras and Rauchenbergs), and American Contemporary Fine Art Gallery (bold abstractions by Ben Georgia, and others) on the 500 block of Lake Ave.
Crash
March 20-April 19th
Art Link International
810 Lake Avenue
Lake Worth
561-493-1162
Do your Homework!
Local artist/educator/amateur curating team Kara Walker-Tomé and her husband Gregg staged one of the most exhilarating and original art events of 2002 when they opened the one-night exhibit Showtel at Hotel Biba last spring. The Tomés brought together nearly 30 local artists to take over Hotel Biba for one night of paintings, performance, installation, and sculpture. The next day at noon it was if nothing had ever happened there--no discernible evidence whatsoever of what had gone down the night before.
In the early part of February of this year the Tomés set out to revisit the success of Showtel on a much smaller scale at their newly purchased home in Lake Worth, which they called, perhaps ironically, HouseWork. Eight local artists participated to transform every room in their new home with installation, paintings and sculpture-a fantasy capsule for local creative types.
In the kitchen Sarah Knutdson and Katie Kochanski collaboratively installed a mechanical pink poodle in the mid-20th Century oven, and white mechanical poodles on each of the period range burners. In the living room, Rick Newton set up his witty and inquisitive sculptures, and Mrs. Tomé herself filled a room with the abandoned residue (rugs, furniture, paintings, keys, knick-knacks) of the house's previous owners, along with framed quotes investigating the significance and correlation of objects to personal identity. In the garage, Philip Estlund brought in a mountain of wood, onto which he projected a recent video project of moving water at the Port in South Beach; the effect was riveting.
Here's a chance to catch the one you missed last year, and, if you hurry, even be get involved with it. In April of this year (no exact date has been set as of print time) the Tomés will revisit Showtel with Showtel 2. Local artists will once again commandeer Hotel Biba to install art and recapture the magic of last year, except this time around they want it to be even bigger. They're actively seeking people to participate. Contact Kara Walker-Tome at karawt@palmbeachica.org.