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Art Review: Fantasy elements permeate works shown by three artists |
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A strong element of fantasy — bordering on the bizarre — is found in three shows at JRB Art at the Elms gallery. A wonderful mix of the fantastic, the funky and found objects, Kim Camp’s three-dimensional mixed-media sculptural characters manage to be humorous and nearly nightmarish.
A green, monkey-like figure that warns us not to bad-mouth its "new fez” is one of six memorable mixed-media creations by Camp. Among these are a grotesque "little piggy” on the way to market, an offbeat "Birdman” wearing an orange clown costume, and a weird, green-faced, purple-beaked "Wingman” with tiny objects hung on its thin wings.
Other oddities by Camp include a vacuum cleaner encrusted with objects, and a tin can fish with beaded eyes, a fishing plug nose, a black rubber tail and "Rolly Polly Fish Ears.” There is something disarming and actually armless about "Belly Achin’ Bob,” a man with a radio for a body, pink rabbit ears and pink rabbit slippers.
Paul Medina, the second artist at JRB, "branches out” in a small exhibit of "botanical assemblages” from his "New Growth” series, made from wood, painted with acrylic and gold leaf. Exotic, multi-colored flower buds, blossoms and almost rapacious-looking leaves sprout from the branches of Medina’s golden but truncated parts of trees, most of which are displayed slightly off the wall, so they cast shadows.
An unexplained golden hand, holding onto a branch, supplies an extra, surreal touch to Medina’s only freestanding tree-branch-sculpture at JRB.
More fanciful and whimsically humorous, if a bit gimmicky and almost "too much of a good thing,” are the imaginary animal acrylic paintings of Arizona-based artist Timothy Chapman.
A giraffe-like creature with decorative markings nibbles leaves from a fruit tree, blending in with an ornate structure behind it, in Chapman’s "Camouflage in the Decorative Age,” while two more of its kind float through the air during the "Migration Season” in a smaller work.
A sea of bears migrates past a quixotic house on skinny stilts, and a carefree zebra leaps over a distant green mesa, demonstrating "The Carefree Avoidance of Misfortune,” in works by Chapman. Still more outrageously tongue-in-cheek is Chapman’s "The Heretofore Unobserved Interaction of Albinism and Gravity,” a large acrylic of a pink-eyed white buffalo floating, with only its tail touching down, over a crow on the ground.
— John Brandenburg
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© Joy Reed Belt 2010
All prices subject to change without notice - not responsible for errors. Availability, price and shipping charges can be confirmed by e-mail or phone prior to purchase. |
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