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Tire Iron #50 7/15/02 The BIG Show
With no entry fee and jurying from actual works, Lawndale's annual Big Show has always been a bastion of free-for-all democracy in a clubby artworld. It's a chance to discover obscure talent; anybody can drag in anything and have it seen. The show is never good in the sense that it's full of good work, or coherent, or even well hung, but the Big Show is like panning for gold: it's not the plate of sludge you wash away, it's the sparkly stuff left over that's the point. It's easy to write about the Big Show, too. All you have to do is pick your faves. Here's what caught my eye this time around (in alphabetical order): Marty Arredondo's Without Reasoning is viscous psychedelic meltdown of faces, trapped under yellowed polyurethane varnish. No Big Show is complete without at least one representative from the vast unsung population of introverted, fetishized doodlers. Louis Feldman's Elliptical Shapes has the cryptic inscrutability of a tantric mandala painted by a schoolchild. Its clunky technique confounds its attempt at geometric precision, leaving a lopsided yet curiously intense riddle. It grotesque, but I like that. Laura Neaderhouser uses her mastery of a variety of crochet stitches to create two energetic wall compositions, without the apologetic patheticness of johnny-come-lately craft artists like myself or Justin Kidd. In Reach Out, interlaced potholder-like mats make an abstract drama of attraction and repulsion between forms reminiscent of a brown chromosome and a pudgy red teddy bear. Blue Core is similarly poignant: a yellow wave pulls apart unraveling layers of stitchery like a virus invading a cell wall. Two of the best pieces in the show. Nadezda Prvulovic's Green Kazan is really big, a towering green industrial-fantasy painting with the harsh light and sharp shadows of a steel foundry. Close up, areas of surreal squishiness strain to cover the vast surface of this 10 x 8 foot painting with limited success. But it's really big. Patrick Renner's Cicada is a collage of colorful weathered boards, bowed over a simple shield-like form. Pretty, but less emphatic than Renner's prizewinning piece in last year's Big Show, it's still head and shoulders above the rest of the dismal sculpture on display. Even with my limited Spanish, Greg Rubio's __—n, still has an offhand grocery list/doodle quality, a cloud of words float inside a schematic head lined with nuts and bolts, forming a sort of interior hairstyle. Mike Swenson's Coast is the gulf's unimpressive surf incarnate. A lax swash of dreary gray over an even drabber gray background, the piece captures perfectly the soft lapping of the last foamy wavelet, while remaining a deadpan pool of poured paint on canvas. Swenson's What's Left of Them has a similar low-intensity pathos. In my younger, angrier days, I would have included digs at the most awful pieces in the show, too. But bad art is all the same: it gets repetitive to criticize superficial formalism, heavy-handed literalism, sentimental pathos over and over again. This Big Show is full of classic cases of all these art pathologies. What interests me is what Patrick Renner, Laura Nederhouser, Mike Swenson, Louis Feldman and Greg Rubio are going to do next. - Bill Davenport
Bill
Davenport is an artist and writer from
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