THE magazine february-March 2012

Santa Fe’s Monthly

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of and for the Arts • February/March 2012

Exclusive Interview: Joel-Peter Witkin

S A N TA F E ’ S FINEST SELECTION O F V I N TA G E N AT I V E AMERICAN J E W E L RY

53 Old Santa Fe Trail Upstairs on the Plaza Santa Fe, NM 505.982.8478 shiprocksantafe.com

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do e lga e m D rô o é d G an on rn é e L F ner ea J h y ap ab gr e t o la ot Ga ph d lie f an o ver n e O o i l rs eff ma dJ ve g i n y a n r :P elle K um U r na o 12 age An tF : r s mit t r i A A s ne Vi

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oR e t c 7 l a 1 ee d Pl a: R e an m m i e A: T Cin OM N

: 18 ght hou T r fo Baer ood shua o J y b 21 F Gin, enda i c a le: H ouse Bott e anch H n R e h O T and 23 omme, urant, t a t s e R e Palace ide: Th u G g inin 25 D enings 29 Art Op

30 Out & About 34 Previews: Agnes Martin at the Harwood Museum of Art (Taos); Interlopers at Evoke Contemporary; and New Mexico Showcase at 516 ARTS 37 National Spotlight: The Doggie Diaries at Gerald Peters Gallery,

New York City 39 Interview: Exclusive Interview with Joel-Peter Witkin 45 Critical

Reflections:

Arlene

Shechet

at

James

Kelly

Contemporary; David Simpson at Charlotte Jackson Fine Art; Deborah Klezmer at Rio Bravo Fine Art (Truth or Consequences); Doll at Tower Gallery; Donald Anderson at Isaac’s Gallery (Roswell); Michele Mikesell at Chiaroscuro; Natural Beauty at the Roswell Museum; Peter Burega at Hunter Kirkland Contemporary; Ray Belcher at Legends Santa Fe; and Susanna and Bruce Carlisle at the New Mexico Arts Centennial Project Space 55 Green Planet: Gloria Steinem, photograph by Jennifer Esperanza 57 Architectural Details: I-25 Overpass, photograph by Guy Cross 58

Writings: “Some Fountains Overflow,” by Thomas Fitzsimmons

CONTENTS

Before Alexander McQueen made edginess (almost) accessible, Michael Clark was experimenting with the flamboyantly avant-garde in ways that would make Lady Gaga blush. Once described by the London Evening Standard as “ballet’s bad boy,” Clark is a classically trained ballet dancer and choreographer whose artistry loaned intelligence to the eighties punk movement with his two earliest productions, Do You Me? I Did and New Puritans. Clark’s work is known for its memorable scenes, whimsical costuming, and fearless pairing of classical movement with modern music. While he has raised eyebrows by featuring massive dildos, exposed buttocks, and his own bare-breasted mother in his performances, dance critics never fail to swoon over his exhilarating choreography and “perfect lines.” Clark has collaborated with many important British artists, including Leigh Bowery and Sarah Lucas, and his dancers have moved to music by The Fall and the Sex Pistols. His most recent work, entitled th, premiered at the Tate Modern in June 2011. Michael Clark (Violette, $85), includes four hundred twenty arresting images of Clark’s work, and contains contributions by Steven Scott, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Richard Alston.

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READINGS & CONVERSATIONS

This series brings to Santa Fe nationally and internationally recognized writers from the literary world of fiction, nonfiction and poetry to read and discuss their work.

MICHAEL ONDAATJE with Carolyn Forché

In Pursuit of Cultural Freedom

WEDNESDAY 15 FEBRUARY AT 7:00 P M

A lecture series on political, economic, environmental and human rights issues featuring social justice activists, writers, journalists, and scholars discussing critical topics of our day.

“I write very freely, but then do a lot of rewriting to alter it, change it, dip it into other colors”… “I don’t really begin a novel, or any kind of book, with any sure sense of what’s happening or even what’s going to happen.”

BRIAN JONES IN HOWARD ZINN’S PLAY, MARX IN SOHO

— Michael Ondaatje

WEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY AT 7:00 P M

The Cat’s Table is “A treasure chest of escapades from a pitchperfect writer, an immaculate observer of the dance of humans, giving us an intoxicating mix of tenderly rendered boy’s eye perspective and the musings of the older narrator looking back on this intensely formative voyage… It is a classic, perfect premise for a novel packed with possibilities.”

“Brian Jones deserves the highest ‘marx’. Find out how Karl Marx lived, what he thought, and what he might think today. Hilarious and informative. A superb performance.”

—The Scotsman (UK)

— Amy Goodman

Both Events at the Lensic Performing Arts Center 211 West San Francisco Street Tickets: www.lensic.com or call 505.988.1234

www.lannan.org

Brian Jones is a teacher, actor and activist. His commentary and writings have appeared on MSNBC and GritTV, and in The Huffington Post and the International Socialist Review. Jones is featured in the documentary film The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman. He also has lent his voice to several audiobooks, including Wallace Shawn’s Essays and Noam Chomsky’s Hopes and Prospects. He lives in New York City, where he teaches in the public school system.

LETTERS

magazine

VOLUME XVIII, NUMBER VIII WINNER 1994 Best Consumer Tabloid SELECTED 1997 Top-5 Best Consumer Tabloids SELECTED 2005 & 2006 Top-5 Best Consumer Tabloids P u b L I S h E R / C R E AT I V E D I R E C T O R Guy Cross PubLIShER / fOOD EDITOR Judith Cross ART DIRECTOR Chris Myers COPy EDITOR edGar sCully PROOfREADERS JaMes rodewald KenJi Barrett S TA f f P h O T O G R A P h E R S dana waldon anne staveley lydia Gonzales PREVIEw / CALENDAR EDITOR elizaBeth harBall wEbmEISTER

Jason rodriGuez CONTRIbuTORS

derusha, diane arMitaG ita e, Joshua Baer, itaG davis BriMBerG er , Jon Carver, Kathryn M davis, erG Jennifer esperanza, thoMas fitzsiMMons, anthony hassett, Marina la palMa, tanya leon, iris MClister, riChard toBin, susan wider, and Katia zavistovsKi COVER

Joel-Peter Witkin’s studio photoGraph:

on front easel: other easel: leda

Guy Cross

Woman With small Breasts GivinG her lover a Condom

ARTsmart was founded to address the lack of funding for art programs and supplies in Santa Fe public schools. Each year ARTsmart organizes ARTfeast as its major fundraiser, with contributions made through ticket sales, event and program underwriters, donors, and from hundreds of businesses. Now in its 15th season, ARTfeast’s weekend of festivities—Friday to Sunday, February 24 to 26—showcases Santa Fe’s worldclass chefs and restaurants, an international array of vintners, original designer fashions, unique homes, a gourmet dinner, and an Artists’ Sunday Brunch and Art Auction. Pictured above at Giacobbe-Fritz Fine Art on Canyon Road are chefs from Rooftop Pizzeria. Do the right thing—support this worthwhile event. For tickets and complete details of all events: www.artfeast.com or call 505-603-4643.

TO THE EDITOR: Thank you David Prince for sharing your knowledge of music with me. Thank you David for your generosity. Thank you David for coming to hear our music, and taking photos, and writing articles about our music. Thank you for your curiosity. Thank you for your energy. Thank you David for sharing this time with us, on this Earth.

—Kurt heyl, via eMail TO THE EDITOR: I am writing to tell you how I am pleased that my black-andwhite print and the accompanying interpretations were featured on THE magazine’s December/January “Art Forum” page. All the comments were spot-on. Each person chosen to write about my image was sensitive to the work and articulated themselves clearly and effectively. It’s good to have my work and the essence of my being at that time (1977) seen and understood.

—elizaBeth Munro, wales, uK, via eMail

ADVERTISING SALES

the MaGazine: 505-424-7641 edie dillMan: 505-577-4207 vinCe foster: 505-690-1010 Chase ault: 505-690-3639 DISTRIbuTION

TO THE EDITOR: Just a note from all of us at Frances Lincoln to thank you for including The Universe in the Landscape in your Best Books of 2011 roundup. We really appreciated receiving the physical copy of your (gorgeous!) magazine as well.

— ennifer aBel Kovitz, franCes linColn, seattle, wa, via eMail —J

JiMMyy Montoya: 470-0258 (MoBile) THE magazine is published 10x a year by THE magazine Inc., 320 Aztec St., Santa Fe, NM 87501. Corporate address: 44 Bishop Lamy Road, Lamy, NM 87540. Phone: (505) 424-7641. Fax: (505) 424-7642, E-mail: themagazineSF@gmail.com. Website: www.TheMagazineOnLine.com. All materials are copyright 2012 by THE magazine. All rights are reserved by THE magazine. Reproduction of contents is prohibited without written permismagazine. sion from THE magazine. magazine. All submissions must be accompanied by a SASE envelope. THE magazine is not responsible for the loss of any unsolicited materials. As well, THE magazine is not responsible or liable for any misspellings, incorrect dates, or inc rect information in its captions, calendar, or other listings. The opinions expressed within the fair confines of THE magazine do not necessarily represent the views or policies of THE magazine, magazine, its owners, or any of its, employees, members, interns, volunteers, agents, or distribution venues. Bylined articles and editorials represent the views of their authors. Letters to the editor are welcome. Letters may be edited for style and libel, and are subject to condensation. THE magazine accepts advertisements from advertisers believed to be of good reputation, but cannot guarantee the authenticity or quality of objects and/or services advertised. As well, THE magazine is not responsible for any claims made by its advertisers; for copyright infringement by its advertisers .and is not responsible or liable for errors in any advertisement.

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TO THE EDITOR: I want to thank Marina La Palma for what I consider to be a very accurate and meaningful review of my work in the November issue. It is as though the reviewer and I had met and talked about the work in detail. Her review is right on! Her observations of my new work The Wings—I could not have said it better.

I have never responded to a review of my work before, so I will say no more except that it would be interesting to meet Marina La Palma.

— ohn GeldersMa, tesuque, via eMail —J

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ANSEL ADAMS DIANE ARBUS E U G È N E AT G E T A N N A AT K I N S THOMAS BARROW HILLA & BERND BECHER J AY N E H I N D S B I D A U T H A R RY C A L L A H A N H E N R I C A RT I E R - B R E S S O N L A R RY C L A R K

ANTOINE CLAUDET JOHN COPLANS

hirOshi sugimOtO

M I K E D I S FA R M E R WILLIAM EGGLESTON

L IG H T NIN G F IE L D S SEASCAPES DIORAMAS M E C H A NI C A L F O R M S T HE AT E R S

R O B E RT F R A N K LEE FRIEDLANDER

re cOn sidering the phOtOgraphic masterpie ce

LAURA GILPIN BETTY HAHN EIKOH HOSOE D A N N Y LY O N R A L P H E U G E N E M E AT YA R D

Ope ning re cept iOn: t wO ne w e xhibi t iOns Friday, F e bruary 10 F rOm 5 tO 7 pm

LISETTE MODEL L Á S Z L Ó M O H O LY - N A G Y M A RT I N PA R R AUGUST SANDER CHARLES SHEELER ALEC SOTH

F E B R U A R Y 10 – M AY 2 7

S O U T H W O RT H & H AW E S

T H R O U G H J U L Y 2 012

ALFRED STIEGLITZ W. H. F O X TA L B O T E D WA R D W E S T O N

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b.1948) Castro Theater,1992 Gelatin silver print, © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Pace Gallery, New York

JOEL - PE TER WITKIN

John Coplans (British,1920 – 2003), Hands Holding Feet, 1985 gelatin silver print © The John Coplans Trust, image courtesy of Carl Solway Gallery, purchased with funds from the Friends of Art, 2012.2.1

UNIVERSIT Y OF NE W MEXICO ART MUSEUM | AL BUQUERQUE www.unm.edu/~artmuse 505.277.4001

A L F O N S O F R AT T E G G I A N I B I A N C H I “TRIPTYCON”

FEBRUARY 24 - MARCH 24, 2012

C H A R LO T T E J A C K S O N F I N E A R T 505.989.8688 / 554 South Guadalupe, Santa Fe, NM 87501 / www.charlottejackson.com

through February 24th Reception: Saturday, February 4, 6-8 pm

Skirts

March 2 - April 5

David Poppie (Dis)order

Project Room: Charles Fresquez Richard Levy Gallery

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A buquerque

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www.levygallery.com

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505.766.9888

LANDSCAPES OF AN AMERICAN MODERNIST NOW THROUGH APRIL 29, 2O12 Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, The Court House Steps, 1987. Oil on canvas, 72 x 60 inches. Collection of Elise and Lee Sacks.

Sabine Dehnel & Heidi Lender

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith:

217 JOHNSON STREET, SANTA FE 505.946.1000 WWW.OKMUSEUM.ORG OPEN DAILY 10 AM – 5 PM OPEN LATE, UNTIL 7 PM, FRIDAY EVENINGS

FEBRUARY

OLI SIHVONEN:

ENERGY FIELDS, LIFE AS A PAINTER

SELECTIONS FROM HIS CAREER 1921– 1991 FEBRUARY 10 – MARCH 24 OPENING RECEPTION FRIDAY FEBRUARY 10, 5-7PM

UNTITLED, CIRCA 1980, OIL ON BOARD,16 X 17 INCHES

MARCH

BILL JACOBSON: PLACE (SERIES)

NEW PHOTOGRAPHS MARCH 30 – MAY 12 ARTIST RECEPTION FRIDAY MARCH 30, 5-7PM

JAMES KELLY CONTEMPORARY PLEASE VISIT US IN THE NEW SPACE WITHIN THE SAME BUILDING AT 550 SOUTH GUADALUPE IN THE RAILYARD 505.989.1601/ JAMESKELLY.COM

UNDER

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Dunham Aurelius Tamara Zibners Matthew Szosz Michael Petry Holly Roberts February 24 Karina Hean through March 23 OPENI N G R EC EPT ION

Friday, February 24 from 5 – 7 pm MATTHEW SZOSZ Untitled (inflatable) No.18, fused and inflated glass, 12 x 10 x 10 inches, 2007

FINE ART & CRAFTS

LOCAL ARTISTS WINTER SHOW

INSIDE SANBUSCO CENTER (old Border’s building) Saturdays January thru March 9:00 am to 5:00 pm

RAILYARD PARK

PASEO DE PERALTA AT GUADALUPE Saturdays March thru December 8:00 am to 2:00 pm 435 South Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501 505 982-8111 www.zanebennettgallery.com Tuesday-Saturday 10-5 or by appointment RAILYARD ARTS DISTRICT WALK LAST FRIDAY OF EVERY MONTH

CATHEDRAL PARK

ONE BLOCK EAST OF THE PLAZA Saturday and Sunday - 10 am to 5 pm May 5-6, July 7-8, Oct 6-7

www.SantaFeArtistsMarket.com

INTERLOPERS works on paper

02 march 5 – 7 pm | opening reception friday evening, through 31 march 2012

harriet yale russell, holey knobs, gesso, india ink on paper, 48 X 61.75

evan boggess • phillip dvorak • lisa grossman • william harrison • tomas lasansky • javier marín group

show

wade reynolds • harriet yale russell • jorge santos • kent williams • pamela wilson • yuri zatarain • and more

EvokeContemporary.com

Cuban-born Fernando Delgado

attended the Cooper Union School of Art and the Parsons School of Design, in New York City, where he studied with graphic designers Herb Lubalin, Henry Wolf, and Milton Glaser. Working in the advertising game on Madison Avenue, Delgado was the creative director on fashion accounts such as Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, and co-authored Exhibit A: Guy Bourdin—a book of innovative images by the French fashion photographer. In 2005, Delgado left New York and moved to New Mexico, to concentrate on making fine-art photographs. Delgado has a plethora of collectors, and his work has been exhibited throughout the United States. FernandoDelgadophotography.com

Mentors I credit my mother with laying my artistic foundation; she was the dreamer and the visionary in our family. The seventies and eighties in New York City were my brick-and-mortar years, where I was fortunate to study with Louise Nevelson, William Klein, Herb Lubalin, and Henry Wolf—a learning experience that was meaningful and lifechanging. From my first year at Cooper Union to my last year at Parsons School of Design, I was convinced I was going to be an illustrator. Then I met the renowned art director Henry Wolf. His assignment to me was to present a visual interpretation of the word shocking. Upon seeing my detailed illustration, he asked, “How did this image reveal itself to you?” “I saw a photographic image,” was my response. He asked, “Then why did you illustrate it? Always trust that first instinct.” After that lightning-bolt moment, it became clear to me that my creative instinct would be forever linked to the photographic medium. I’ve never turned back.

Composition, composition, composition After more than twenty-five years in the advertising industry—promoting, scrutinizing and working with thousands of images—approaching my own work was a daunting task. I knew a visual palate-cleansing was in order. Moving to New Mexico was a catalyst for change. The desert was the place to reflect, replenish, refocus—and I was ready. My eyes re-awakened to the singular quality of the light and how it defines form and space, so I knew I’d found my sanctuary. Through the teachings of Arthur Dow, via Georgia O’Keeffe, I learned the importance of always filling a space in a beautiful way. The process of paring things down to the essence of an idea is a discipline that I deliberately impose on whatever I do. As O’Keeffe once said, “Nothing is less real than realism … it is only by elimination, by emphasis that we get to the real meaning of things.”

light, texture, shape, and form I suppose anyone can photograph a flower as it is. However, my role is to photograph that flower as it is felt. I feel a need to connect with my subject, and at times that happens immediately or it can take time.

I prefer the studio, where I control the light as well as the subject. It is a calculated process where I strip away any reference to scale and context. Through my own process of elimination and emphasis, the spirit of these natural forms is revealed. A unique transformation takes place and other universal symbols begin to emerge. Nature for me is about personal interpretation rather than documentation.

attention to detail My process of working with the still-life is quiet and meditative. I get to choose my subjects; they don’t speak, eat, or need to go to the bathroom. They are willing and present—they are my clay. I concentrate on the light and how it defines form and space. It is a beautiful, serene, and transcendental dance.

The power of black-and-white imagery Black-and-white photography for me is about pure energy and communication; one of the reasons why they are intrinsically associated with photojournalism. When viewing a color image, I react to the color energy first, and to content second. A black-and-white image levels the field of vision—tonality, form, space, and content are in perfect balance.

My fascination with fashion Beyond fashion, what fascinates me is the psychology and seduction of fashion. Fashion is about ideas, the way we live, what is happening. It is one of the few public arenas where freedom, fantasy, and sensuality are still a possibility. My favorite fashion images are about an idea—they are at once visceral, elegant, and mysterious. The notion of impossible beauty as a direct result of absolute control fascinates me. Guy Bourdin, Helmut Newton, and Richard Avedon are my heroes and a perpetual source of inspiration.

Controlling color Everyone has an instinctive eye and reaction to color as it relates to life around us. It is hard, especially in photography, to fool this sixth sense. When color is real, it energizes and excites the senses—we don’t question it. In contrast, when color tips the saturation point for its own sake, our eyes know it.

Eloquent use of color, in my opinion, is a question of restraint—idea before execution.

photograph by

Dana Waldon

universe of

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ARTsmart presents the 15th Annual ™

Santa Fe Purchase your tickets at artfeast.com today!

February 24-26, 2012

505.603.4643 • info@artfeast.com ARTsmart office,102 E. Water Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501 Edible Art Tour tickets are also available at participating galleries and through Tickets Santa Fe, Lensic Box Office, 505.988.1234, ticketssantafe.com

ART FORUM

THE magazine asked three New Mexico artists and a clinical

and a hammer in the bottom foreground space, the scene is a meta-narrative about art-making itself. An allegory about the classical relationship between the artist and his or her work; in this painting, art takes shape and comes alive.

psychologist to share with our

—Katia zavistovsKi, Curator and CritiC, houston, tX t

readers their take on this 1890 oil

Romantic, hazy, dreamlike, art studio, painting, buttocks, sculpture, angular, rhythmic, theater, bow, arrow, angel, cloud, precision, cupid, woman, man, ivory to flesh, wood stairs, statue, embrace, pedestal, mallet, fish at the foot, reaching, blue, heads, mouths, shield, perspective, symbolic, woman and child, hooded, hand to face, woman and mirror, ornate chair, reflection, painting, academic, red robe, white robe, kneeling, throne, stairway, death masks of the young and old, marble dust, white to pink, muscles, naked, hips, waist, hand on breast, fingers, fantasy, draping cloth, artist, model, muse, passion, resistance, embraced, society, family, responsibility, bravery, immortality, judgment, erotic, youth, compassion, lust, worship, height, reach, life, hard, soft, breath, mouths, shadow, light, movement, commitment, perfection, body, soft, hard, age, youth, ability, establishment, solitude, belief, ideal, reality, solitude, greatness, creator, subject, mystery,

painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme.

They were shown only the image—they were not told the title, medium, or name of the artist.

What a fantasy! In this image the artist is so overcome with joy that he interrupts working in order to passionately kiss his female model. The model’s body appears as living flesh and blood, but from the knees down merges into the marble or plaster base of a sculpture. She can only return his love halfway. The model is beautifully illuminated in an ethereal way. She has a womanly form, yet is beyond human existence.

The sculpture towers over the sculptor, suggesting that the art is more significant than the artist. He is on his tiptoes, trying to reach her beauty. Notably, we see a fish at the sculpture’s feet. One imagines she emerges from the sea like Botticelli’s Venus. In the background is a seated woman staring at her reflection in a handheld mirror. This highlights the idea of self-love. Perhaps the sculptor is enamored of his own creativity? While he fell for his model, perhaps what he truly loves is the spark she ignites in his artistic soul.

Cupid points his arrow at the couple. But is Cupid creating their love or is he merely reflecting the artist’s flight of imagination? Psychoanalytic theory postulates that love is a kind of projection. Such theorists state that when we are in love, with a real or imagined person, we project our mate as being virtually “ideal.” That is not such a romantic view of love. But muses can be powerful. They inspire artists to do the darnedest things!

escape, divine, wealth, poverty, skill, on his toes, anatomy, tradition, creation, excellence, effort, strength, feminine, masculine, adoration, fertility, suppleness, grace, desire, divinity, commission, faith, devotion, invention, clarity, contrast, depth, foundation, revelation, realization, Greek and Roman mythology, Venus, love, French, reward, kiss, dream come true.

—derusha, artist, santa fe While I don’t remember the painter of this piece, it is certainly a take on the story of Pygmalion, and beautifully rendered. The narrative has to do with a Greek sculptor swearing off women because of too many disappointments, yet falling in love with his own creation. A sympathetic goddess brought the sculpture to life for him, and maybe they lived happily every after.

The deeper point to me is that subjective reality often contains elements of unreality, and reality and imagination are fabulous dancing partners. The bottom line is that whatever you truly believe in you will see. Michelangelo said, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” Have faith.

—t tanya leon, artist, alBuquerque

—davis K. BriMBerG, ph.d., CliniCal psyC sy holoGist The subject of this painting calls to mind the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea as it is recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. According to the Greek legend, Pygmalion, mythic sculptor and King of Cyprus, made a statue of a woman, which he named Galatea. He fell in love with his creation, and prayed to Aphrodite for a wife as beautiful as his ivory nude. The goddess of love and beauty took pity on the lovesick Pygmalion and endowed his sculpted form with life. In this painting, Galatea’s smooth, alabaster skin is at once lifeless marble and living flesh. Her complexion slips seamlessly from the cold, milky white of her immobile legs set in their stone base to the warm pink blush of her curving, breathing torso. Pygmalion’s arms reach around Galatea’s arched back, pressing into her now pliant skin; she in turn yields to her creator’s touch, twisting to meet his lips. The painting depicts the moment when Galatea stirs to life. Taking place in the artist’s studio, with painted and sculptural studies in the background, the theatrical masks of comedy and tragedy on the right side of the composition,

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Pygmalion and Galatea, oil on canvas, 35” x 27”, 1890

STUDIO VISITS

“whAT ART OffERS IS SPACE— A CERTAIN bREAThING ROOm fOR ThE SPIRIT.” TwO ARTISTS COmmENT ON ThIS STATEmENT. As a painter, I certainly need a respite from our hectic world so that I can make my work.

Enjoying the art of others, or losing myself in my own studio beckons me into a different place—one of beauty, adventure, mystery, controversy, love. Art invites me to consider other perspectives and to see the magic in ordinary life. The best art takes my breath away, shows me my dreams, and then allows me to breathe again, renewed.

—anna Keller In November 2011, Keller was in the three-person exhibition Atmospherics 3 at La Tienda Exhibition Space. On March 31, she will have a solo show at The Gallery at Pioneer Bluffs—Pioneer Bluffs Foundation, Matfield Green, Kansas.

Without the context of the original statement I can’t respond to it, even if it’s referring to an artistic act using a paintbrush produced using underage or prison labor, which brings into the question the idea of right or wrong. For me, spontaneity is an act or impulse that overrides preconditioned responses to my everyday circumstances and behavioral conditioning, due to a moment of consciousness or awareness. Acting on these moments is a release of the constraints I place upon myself, and something I would benefit from by allowing more often.

—Jeff overlie Overlie had a solo exhibition of his aerospace aluminum sculptural work—Maximum Minimalism—at Riva Yares Galley last October. As well, he has participated in several group shows at the Yares Gallery during 2011. His sculptures were shown at Art Aspen 2011, and will be on view at Art Houston 2011.

Overlie is the featured artist for Yares Art Projects, at the Palm Springs Fine Art Fair in February 2012.

photoGraphs By

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anne staveley

the magazine | 17

Reel to Real A Love Story Starring Industrial Light by

and

Diane Armitage

At the Golden Globe awards ceremony in January, Martin Scorsese won the Best Director award for his film Hugo, a mythic and melancholy fable. The Artist, directed

by Michel Hazanavicius, is a dazzling and delicious paean to the golden age of silent movies, and it won the award for Best Comedy, for Best Score (Ludovic Bource), and for Best Actor (Jean Dujardin). But as I write this, the awards and nominations don’t stop there for this unusual pair of movies that have at their heart a backward motion toward the roots of early cinema.

Hugo is an unabashed love poem to the origins of moving pictures in general and to one of its pioneers in particular, Georges Méliès, best known for his 1902 film A Trip to the Moon—a work that winds up being at the center of Hugo’s mythology and its mysterious, recursive nature. The Artist is in ravishing black-and-white and presents a dashing and charismatic leading man of silent films, the fictional George Valentin, and the women who love him, then leave him in the dust. Sort of. The heroine of The Artist—Peppy Miller, played by the luminous Bérénice Bejo—never quite lets go of her original crush on Valentin, whose decline she follows for several years after he refuses the opportunity to segue into talking pictures. “I won’t talk! I won’t say a word!” he mouths into the camera even as the Hollywood mogul yells out, “Speak! Speak!” Silently of course, as the movie itself never says a word, except at the very end.

As both elegant pastiche and brilliant deconstruction, The Artist is riveting—a daring and spellbinding effort to elevate aspects of the history of cinema, giving this movie pride of place as opposed to a shabby makeover for the sake of nostalgia or parody. Hugo is a movie dipped in the aged metallic tints of old brass, rusted iron, weathered bronze, and a depression-era, Paris-in-winter, romantic drabness highlighted by the color of flowers out of season, a police officer’s vivid uniform, and the magical glow of a silver automaton—a machine in the form of a man that may or may not be the missing link in Hugo Cabret’s quest to connect with his dead father. This is a movie drenched in loss, abandonment, and wounds of the body and the soul, yet its primary function is, ironically, the reincarnation of enchantment.

The movie more than achieves this, particularly in its lead role, played by the limpideyed, knock-kneed Asa Butterfield as Hugo, who has more than a passing resemblance to a character from Dickens. But the movie is based on a contemporary young adult novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick, who, by the way, is also related to the famous Hollywood Selznicks—another example of the snake that bites its own tail in a kind of eternal return that both Hugo and The Artist celebrate.

A Trip to the Moon, Georges Méliès, director, 1902

Magic

Hugo appears to be the culmination of Scorsese’s passion for film history, and for anyone interested in this topic, there is Scorsese’s documentary Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies, a recent project by the director that also came out in 2011 but was not released in theaters. (It’s part of a series of videos on art-related topics produced by Arthouse Films.) Scorsese’s documentary pinpoints the precise moments from which moving pictures evolved—Eadweard Muybridge and his zoopraxiscope; Thomas Edison and his assistant W. K. L. Dickson and their kinetoscope films; and then the first commercial projections by Auguste and Louis Lumière who invented, in 1895, the Cinematographe, a device for shooting, printing, and projecting films, not in a box, but on a wall. Their technological revolution gave still images the final push into cinema as we know it. The first film by the Lumières, Workers Leaving the Factory, was followed by Arrival of a Train at Ciotat, a movie that made people jump and scream because they thought a train was actually coming out of the wall right at them. Méliès, a practicing magician at the end of the nineteenth century, became entranced by the work of the Lumière brothers, but they refused to sell him a camera because, they said, film had no future. Méliès proceeded to make his own cameras, however, and he went on to reinvent the world of movies. He presented the first films in color by hand tinting them, as well as introducing the first 3-D effects by employing multiple cameras, all while shooting scripts that he wrote, produced, and even acted in.

So begins another golden age of cultural exploration with all its sleights of hand, disguises and myths, conflicts and concurrences, and pulsing narratives grounded in comedy or tragedy, all of which reflect the nature of our conscious and unconscious selves with their collective archetypes churning in the landscapes of the mind. Certain themes were seized upon immediately in early films and they continued to be reborn as filmmaking blossomed in the twentieth century: adventure, love and eroticism, nature, fantasy, humor, horror, combat, exotica, death, and resurrection. And it’s the last two generative principles—death and resurrection—that feature prominently in both Hugo and The Artist. In both films there is a deliberate arc of meaning in the storylines that reflects not only the symbolic death and resurrection of principal characters—for example the roles of Méliès and George Valentin—but also the death and resurrection of the early days of cinema mirrored in each film. Motion begets motion until there is, in Hugo and The Artist, this backward reach toward the roots of film’s own unique essence, its own franchise on the nature of the dreaming mind.

The Artist, Michel Hazavanicius, director, 2011

CINEMA

Death and resurrection feature prominently in both Hugo and The Artist to the group Industrial Light and Magic, and I borrowed those words for the subtitle of this article. If ever there was a turn of phrase that defined the roots of cinema, this is it. Scorsese takes the idea of Industrial Light and Magic and uses it to embrace the story of the lost, then found Méliès and all the other pioneers of early film who gave the world not only A Trip to the Moon but all those collective initiation experiences we have come to take for granted in our high-tech era. The philosopher George Santayana once suggested that those who forget their own history are doomed to repeat it. In the case of cinema, maybe this isn’t such a bad thing. D

Hugo, Martin Scorsese, director, 2011

Film provides an amazingly refractive space in which to be metaphysically reborn that is unlike any other cultural arena.

Hugo would be nothing without its gigantic representations of clockworks— those enormous gears and springs and counterweights that run the clocks in the Montparnasse train station, in Paris, where the character of Hugo lives within its labyrinthine walls. But a more delicate and enigmatic complex of interlocking parts takes the form of the automaton, the implied deus ex machina on which the plot revolves. I’ll say no more about the mystery of the automaton except to add that the great ensemble cast of Hugo functions as a marvelous machine with its intricate and interdependent parts that turn, eventually lock together, and point back to its driving wheel: the desire to overcome loss and abandonment, to lose oneself in a cinematic world of the imagination where anything is possible, secrets are revealed, and mysterious codes undo the loneliness of the orphan child. In the world of fables, all children are really orphans and all adults are essentially children always trying to escape the ogre who will beat them and eat them and further separate them from the rest of the world order.

The theme of death and resurrection takes shape in The Artist as well, and there is a kind of reversal of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice that unfolds. It is Peppy Miller/Eurydice who must go into the underworld to find and bring George Valentin/ Orpheus back to the world of creative possibility. In this case it will be a return to movie making and the reinvention of a performative genre—the two characters become a prototype of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers song-and-dance artists who will captivate a whole other generation of film goers. And if anyone has to be convinced of the richness and sensuality of black-and-white film, they just need to see The Artist and study the quality of its lights and darks as they play against flesh and a thousand-and-one textures.

Watching the credits for Hugo, filmed in 3-D, I happened to catch the credit that referred to the opening tracking shot of the movie as it travels in a straight path through crowds of people on a long platform as they embark and disembark in the Gare Montparnasse. The credit for this swooping bird-flight camera work was given

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THE magazine | 19

Taste the New Southwest Chef Charles Dale’s modern rustic cuisine introduces a Contemporary American fare that is regionally inspired

by Northern New Mexico and infused with local and organically sourced ingredients.

TwenTy classic & signaTure salads builT upon organic greens & produce from our Ten-acre farm in nambÉ

Savory soups, griddled sandwiches, wines by the glass & housemade desserts supplement the bistro menu.

709 don cubero alley santa fe, nm 87505 505.820.9205 www.vinaigretteonline.com 877.262.4666

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food for thought

NOMA: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine René Redzepi has risen to superstar status in the culinary world after his restaurant Noma in Copenhagen, Denmark, was voted number one at the 2010 San Pellegrino World’s Best Restaurants awards. Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine (Phaidon, $49.95) is the chef’s introduction to his pioneering cuisine, extolling a technique almost compulsively devoted to indigenous Nordic ingredients. The name of the restaurant is short for nordatlantiskl mad, or North Atlantic food.

Redzepi—the father of modern-day foraging—keeps three professional foragers and two Danish food historians on staff at Noma, and favors surprising ingredients like sea buckthorn and smoked bone marrow. Redzepi forces his patrons into a sense of time and place, serving spruce shoots in spring and sea urchins in winter.

He also maintains close personal relationships with those who provide his “raw materials,” and has written a brief biography of his favorite farmers and foragers at the end of his book. Redzepi’s remarkably novel debut cookbook may have more to do with the philosophy of cooking than recipes, but its overall presentation is so exquisite that one hardly notices. The book’s triumph lies in its two hundred luscious images by photographer Ditte Isager, which are presented at the center of the book, unmarred by commentary or recipes—an artistic effort that won Isager the James Beard Foundation Award for Photography. The dishes themselves rise to Isager’s talent; the chef’s presentations are worthy of gallery representation. Redzepi’s passion for the land and bounty of the Nordic region is contagious, and a look at Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine will have you craving dishes that you never before knew existed. D

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THE magazine | 21

“Where Elegance Reigns.”

Celebrate LOVE in 19 Languages this

–Patricia Greathouse, Pasatiempo

Valentine’s Day

lunch – monday thru saturday sunday brunch dinner nightly

at The Compound Restaurant with Mark Kiffin, James Beard Award-Winner Best Chef of the Southwest

231 washington avenue - reservations 505 984 1788

gift certificates, menus & special events online www.santacafé.com

Reservations 982.4353

653 Canyon Road

compoundrestaurant.com

Available at Select Purveyors in Santa Fe and Taos:

TAOS LIGHTNING RYE

315 RE STAUR ANT & WINE BAR C L IFF ’S L IQUOR S COYOTE CAFÉ

VODK A VIR ACOCHA

E L C AMINO C ANTINA E L MESON RESTAURANT E NC AN TAD O GERONIMO

HAC IENDA GIN

INN AT L ORET TO K AUNES NE IGHBORHOOD MARK ET K ELLY L IQUOR BARN KOKOM AN

TAOS LIGHTNING BOURBON

L IQUID C OMPANY MIDTOW N MARK ET & L OUNG E PINK AD OBE SANTAC AFE

CONQUISTADOR ORANGE LIQUEUR

SUSAN’S F INE WINE & SPIRITS TAOS INN TESUQUE V ILL AGE MARKET T HE G ORGE T HE MATAD OR

BRIMSTONE ABSINTHE

Small Batch Heirloom Spirits Hand Crafted in New Mexico at Rancho de Los Luceros Destilaría

e Los L od u ch

ros ce

Drink different.

Ra n

T IN STAR SAL OON

one bottle

One Bottle:

Los Luceros Hacienda Gin

by Joshua Baer

The power of suggestion is a horse-drawn carriage with two horses, a driver who sits at the front of the carriage, and a passenger who sits inside the compartment. Black curtains cover the windows of the compartment. The horses, the driver, and the exterior of the compartment are visible to the naked eye but no one has seen the inside of the compartment and no one has seen the passenger. Four wheels connect the carriage to the road. A pair of harnesses connects the horses to the carriage. Two sets of reins connect the driver to the horses. The driver calls out commands to the horses. The driver receives directions from the passenger but the means of communication between the passenger and the driver is not apparent to the naked eye.

If all goes well, the horses, the carriage, and the driver transport the passenger to the passenger’s destination. Some people say that destination is paradise. Other people say it is enlightenment, wisdom, or the peace that surpasses understanding.

Unfortunately, things do not always go according to plan.

The horses can ignore the driver’s commands and run away with the carriage. The driver can forget to stop and let the horses drink, eat, and rest. If the carriage’s axles are neglected, the wheels will come loose and the carriage will collapse. If the reins become too cold, too hot, too wet, or too dry, they will snap. And if the driver misunderstands the passenger’s directions, he will follow his own impulses and drive the carriage straight to Hell.

What you just read was a suggestion. What you are reading now is a statement. The difference between a suggestion and a statement is like the difference between falling in love and listening to one of your friends describe how it felt to fall in love. The former changes your life.

The latter is a description of an experience that loses its immediacy through the process of being described.

If you take life literally—if you are a person who says, “Truth is the only thing that matters”—then you prefer statements to suggestions. If you approach life figuratively— if you are attracted to constellations, myths, pulses, and seasons—then you prefer suggestions to statements.

For most of human history, the power of suggestion ruled the world. Hunters, shamans, kings, and queens spoke in riddles. Truth lived behind a veil.

These days, the cards are on the table. The power of suggestion is still powerful, but the forces of dominion, finance, and privilege are engaged in a concerted effort to undermine the power of suggestion and claim sovereignty over the world. Journalists, politicians, tycoons, and war criminals use so-called “statements of fact” as propaganda.

While there is nothing factual about those statements, they have been repeated so often that they have come to be accepted as facts. “Torture prevents terrorism”; “God wrote the Bible”; “Cutting taxes creates jobs”—these are just a few examples of prejudicial fairy tales masquerading as absolute truths.

Fortunately, the power of suggestion is strong enough to absorb everything in its path. It takes a so-called statement of fact and turns that statement into a suggestion

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2012

before the statement can retaliate. Offense becomes defense. Innovation becomes obsolescence. Revolution becomes tradition. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Which brings us to Los Luceros Hacienda Gin. Los Luceros is a historic ranch in Alcade, New Mexico. The village of Alcade is forty-five minutes north of Santa Fe. Three years ago, Karen Lubliner, George Schurman, and John Bernasconi founded a company called KGB Spirits in Alcade. They started with a five-gallon still. They now have two stills, a sixteen-plate copper column still for vodka, and an alembic still with a gooseneck and a botanical chamber for whiskey, gin, and liqueurs.

KGB’s Taos Lightning rye whiskey is already famous. In my opinion, their Hacienda Gin is next.

In the glass, the Hacienda Gin has a quiet, deceptive clarity. You can see through it, but the world on the other side of the glass is not the same as the world on your side. When you drink the gin straight, it has a noble, almost royal bearing. You want to salute it as you taste it. In a Martini, that nobility becomes a frisky gesture.

When you taste it, you laugh out loud. In a gin and tonic, the Hacienda’s nobility becomes medicinal. With each sip, you thank God (or fate, or evolution) for giving you a mouth, a nose, and a tongue. By the time you reach the bottom of your glass, your body and mind are refreshed.

People who love wine will love Los Luceros Hacienda Gin. At $40 (at Susan’s Fine Wine and Spirits, and at Kaune’s Food Town, in Santa Fe), a bottle costs more than a bottle of Tanqueray, Bombay, or Hendrick’s, but the Hacienda offers you a regional specificity that the global brands lack. When you taste the Hacienda, you taste a New Mexican terroir.

In the late 1960s, I met a dealer in Oriental carpets who told me stories about the carriage, the horses, the driver, and the passenger. As much as I liked the carpet dealer, the combination of his heavily accented English and arcane stories brought me nothing but frustration.

One day, after listening to yet another story, I said, “Look, I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to tell me what these stories really mean. I can’t listen to another one without knowing the truth.”

The carpet dealer scratched his ear. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “but I’m warning you. After you know what they mean, the carriage, the horses, the driver, and the passenger will lose their magic. You won’t enjoy them as much as you do now.”

“Tell me anyway,” I said.

The carpet dealer explained that the carriage was the human body, the horses were our emotions, the driver was the human intellect, and the passenger was the soul.

For the last forty years, I have done my best—and have failed miserably—to forget his explanation. My consolation has been my glimpse of the human soul: A secret protected by the illusion of clarity. D One Bottle is dedicated to the appreciation of good wines, good times, and good spirits, one bottle at a time. The name “One Bottle” and the contents of this column are ©2012 by onebottle.com. For back issues, go to onebottle.com. You can write to Joshua Baer at jb@onebottle.com.

THE magazine | 23

dining guide

Mescal Chocolate Bar at

The Palace

Restaurant & Saloon 142 West Palace Avenue Reservations 428-0690

$ KEY

INEXPENSIVE

$

up to $14

MODERATE

$$

$15—$23

EXPENSIVE

$$$

$24—$33

Prices are for one dinner entrée. If a restaurant serves only lunch, then a lunch entrée price is reflected.

Alcoholic beverages appetizers and desserts are not included in these price keys. Call restaurants for hours.

VERY EXPENSIVE

$$$$

$34 plus

EAT OUT OFTEN

Photos: Guy Cross

...a guide to the very best restaurants in santa fe and surrounding areas...

315 Restaurant & Wine Bar 315 Old Santa Fe Trail. 986-9190.

Dinner Full bar. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: French. Atmosphere: Reminds one of an inn in the French counyside.

House specialties: Steak Frites, seared Pork Tenderloin, and the Black Mussels are all winners. Comments: A beautiful new bar with generous martinis, a teriffic wine list and a “can’t miss” bar menu. Winner of Wine Spectator’s Award of Excellence.

Andiamo!

322 Garfield St. 995-9595.

Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Italian. Atmosphere: Casual House specialties: Start with the Steamed Mussels or the Roasted Beet Salad. For your main, choose the delicious Chicken Marsala or the Pork Tenderloin.

Comments: Good wines, great pizzas, and a sharp waitstaff.

Anasazi Restaurant Inn of the Anasazi 113 Washington Ave. 988-3236 .

Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Valet parking.

Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: Contemporary American cuisine. Atmosphere: A casual yet elegant room evoking the feeling of an Anasazi cliff dwelling. House specialties: We suggest blue corn-crusted salmon with citrus jalapeno sauce, and the nine-spice beef tenderloin.

Comments: Attentive service.

Azur Mediterranean Bistro & Wine Bar 428 Agua Fria St. 992-2897 Dinner Wine/Beer Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Mediterranean. Atmosphere: Intimate restaurant housed in a small adobe building. House specialties: We enjoyed the Butternut Squash with Crimini Mushrooms, Shallots, Shaved Parmesan, and Brown Sage Butter and the Grilled Angus Ribeye. Comments: A variety of small plates are also offered.

Bobcat Bite Restaurant Old Las Vegas Hwy. 983-5319.

Lunch/Dinner No alcohol.

Cash. $$ Cuisine: American. Atmosphere: This is the real deal—a neon bobcat sign sits above a small, low-slung building. Inside are five tables and nine seats at a counter made out of logs. House specialties: The enormous inch-and-a-half thick green chile cheeseburger is sensational. The 13-ounce rib-eye steak is juicy and flavorful.

Body Café 333 Cordova Rd. 986-0362.

Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Organic. Atmosphere: Casual.

House specialties: In the morning, try the breakfast smoothie or the Green Chile Burrito. We love the Asian Curry

for lunch or the Avocado and Cheese Wrap. Comments: Soups and salads are marvelous, as is the Carrot Juice Alchemy.

Cafe Cafe Italian Grill 500 Sandoval St. 466-1391.

Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Italian. Atmosphere: Casual.

House specialties: For lunch, the classic Caesar salad, the tasty specialty pizzas, or the grilled eggplant sandwich. For dinner, we loved the perfectly grilled swordfish salmorglio and the herb-breaded veal cutlet. Comments: Very friendly waitstaff.

Café Pasqual’s 121 Don Gaspar Ave. 983-9340.

Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner/Sunday Brunch Beer/Wine.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Multi-ethnic. Atmosphere: The café is adorned with lots of Mexican streamers, Indian maiden posters, and rustic wooden furniture. House specialties: Hotcakes got a nod from Gourmet magazine. Huevos motuleños, a Yucatán breakfast, is one you’ll never forget. For lunch, try the grilled chicken breast sandwich with Manchego cheese.

The Compound 653 Canyon Rd. 982-4353.

Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: Contemporary American.

Atmosphere: 150-year-old adobe with polished plaster walls and white linen on the tables. House specialties: Jumbo Crab and Lobster Salad. The Chicken Schnitzel is flawless. Desserts are perfect.

Comments: Chef/owner Mark Kiffin, winner of James Beard Foundation’s “Best Chef of the Southwest” award has a new restaurant, Zacatecas, now open at 3423 Central Avenue NE, Albuquerque Reservations: 505-255-8226 Counter Culture 930 Baca St. 995-1105.

Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Patio. Cash. $$ Cuisine: All-American. Atmosphere: Informal. House specialties: Breakfast: burritos and frittata. Lunch: sandwiches and salads. Dinner: flash-fried calamari; grilled salmon with leek and Pernod cream sauce, and a delicious hanger steak.

Comments: Boutique wine list.

Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: Southwestern with French and Asian influences. Atmosphere Bustling.

House specialties: For your main course, go for the grilled Maine Lobster Tails, the Southwestern Rotisserie, or the grilled 24-ounce “Cowboy Cut” steak.

Comments: Good wine list.

Downtown Subscription 376 Garcia St. 983-3085.

Breakfast/Lunch No alcohol. Patio.

Cash/ Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: Standard coffee-house fare.

Atmosphere: A large room with small tables inside and a nice patio outside where you can sit, read periodicals, and schmooze. tons of magazine to peruse. House specialties: Espresso, cappuccino, and lattes.

El Faról 808 Canyon Rd. 983-9912.

Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Spanish. Atmosphere: Wood plank floors, thick adobe walls, and a postage-stamp-size dance floor for cheekto-cheek dancing. House specialties: Tapas.

Comments: Murals by Alfred Morang.

El Mesón 213 Washington Ave. 983-6756.

Dinner Beer/Wine. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Spanish. Atmosphere: Spain could be just around the corner. Music nightly. House specialties: Tapas reign supreme, with classics like Manchego cheese marinated in extra virgin olive oil; sautéed spinach with garlic. Go. Geronimo 724 Canyon Rd. 982-1500.

Dinner Full bar. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: We call it French/Asian fusion.

Atmosphere: Kiva fireplaces, a portal, and a lovely garden room. House specialties: Start with the superb foie gras. Entrées we love include the green miso sea bass, served with black truffle scallions, and the classic peppery Elk tenderloin. Comments: Tasting menus are available.

Cowgirl Hall of Fame 319 S. Guadalupe St. 982-2565.

Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: All-American. Atmosphere: Popular patio shaded by big cottonwoods.

Great bar. House specialties: The smoked brisket and ribs are fantastic.

Super buffalo burgers. Comments: Huge selection of beers.

Il Piatto 95 W. Marcy St. 984-1091.

Lunch/Dinner Full bar.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Italian. Atmosphere: Bustling.

House specialties: Our faves: the arugula and tomato salad, the lemon rosemary chicken, and the pork chop stuffed with mozzarella, pine nuts, and prosciutto.

Comments: New on the menu: a perfect New York Strip Strip Steak for just $32— way better price than the Bull Ring, and you don’t have to buy the potato.

Coyote Café 132 W. Water St. 983-1615.

Dinner Full bar.

Jambo Cafe 2010 Cerrillios Rd. 473-1269.

Lunch/Dinner Major credit cards. $$

Cuisine: African and Caribbean inspired.

Atmosphere: Basic cafe-style. House specialties: We love the Jerk Chicken Sandwich. Try the Curried Chicken Salad Wrap; or the marvelous Phillo Ttuffed with Spinach, Black olives, Feta cheese, Roasted red peppers, and Chickpeas served over Organic Greens. Comments: Obo was the executive chef at the Zia Diner.

Kohnami Restaurant 313 S. Guadalupe St. 984-2002.

Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine/Sake. Patio.

Visa & Mastercard. $$ Cuisine: Japanese. Atmosphere: Casual.

House specialties: Miso soup; Soft Shell Crab; Dragon Roll; Chicken Katsu; noodle dishes; and Bento Box specials.

Comments: The sushi is always perfect.

Try the Ruiaku Sake. It is clear, smooth, and very dry. Comments: We love the new noodle menu. A friendly and efficent waitstaff is a plus.

La Plancha de Eldorado 7 Caliente Road at La Tienda. 466-2060 Highway 285 / Vista Grande Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner/Sunday Brunch Beer/Wine.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Salvadoran Grill. Atmosphere: casual open space. House specialties: Loroco omelet and anything with the pan-fried plantains. Try the Salvadorian tamales and the poblano del ia. Everything is fresh. Recommendations: Try the Sunday brunch—it is terrific.

Lan’s Vietnamese Cuisine 2430 Cerrillos Rd. 986-1636.

Lunch/Dinner Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Vietnamese.

Atmosphere: Casual and friendly. House specialties: Start with the Pho Tai Hoi, a vegetarian soup loaded with veggies, fresh herbs, and spices. For your entrée, we suggest the Noung—it will rock your taste buds.

Comments: Generous portions.

La Plazuela on the Plaza 100 E. San Francisco St. 989-3300.

Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Full Bar. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: New Mexican and Continental.

Atmosphere: A gorgeous enclosed courtyard with skylights and hand-painted windows. House specialties: Start with the Classic Tortilla Soup or the Heirloom Tomato Salad with baked New Mexico goat cheese. For your entrée try the Braised Lamb Shank, served with a spring gremolata, roasted piñon couscous, and fresh vegetables. Comments: Seasonal menus M aria ’ s N ew M exican K itchen 555 W. Cordova Rd. 983-7929.

Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$

Cuisine: New Mexican. Atmosphere: Rough wooden floors and hand-carved chairs set the historical tone. House specialties: Freshly made tortillas,

green chile stew, and pork spareribs.

Comments: Perfect margaritas Mu Du Noodles 1494 Cerrillos Rd. 983-1411.

Dinner/Sunday Brunch Beer/Wine.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Pan-Asian. Atmosphere: Casual.

House specialties: Vietnamese Spring Rolls, Green Thai Curry, and the Singapore: Comments: Mu Du is committed to organic products whenever possible.

Mu rules.

Museum Hill Cafe Museum Hill, off Camino Lejo. 984-8900.

Lunch: Tuesday - Sunday Beer/Wine.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: American/Contemporary New Mexican. Atmosphere: Casual and friendly. House specialties: We love the Asian Shrimp Tacos, they’re right on the mark. Try the Smoked Duck Flautas— they won’t disappoint. Comments: Menu changes seasonally.

Nostrani Ristorante 304 Johnson St. 983-3800.

Dinner Beer/Wine. Fragrance-free Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Regional dishes from Northern Italy. Atmosphere: A renovated adobe with a great bar. House specialties: Fall menu includes Grilled Baby leeks with goat cheese and tomato vinaigrette and Marinated Trout served with cucumber and radish. Nostrani is rated by Frommers as one of the “Top 500 Restaurants in the World.” Comments: with Nellie in the kitchen, you cannot go wrong dining here. Make a note to yourself: fragrance-free.

Plaza Café Southside 3466 Zafarano Dr. 424-0755.

Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner 7 days Full bar.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: American and New Mexican.

Atmosphere: Bright and light, colorful, and friendly. House specialties: For your breakfast go for the Huevos Rancheros or the Blue Corn Piñon Pancakes.

Rasa Juice Bar/Ayurveda 815 Early St. 989-1288 Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Organic juice bar. Atmosphere: Calm. House specialties: Smoothies, juices, teas, chai, cocoa, coffee, and espresso, all made with organic ingredients. Juice: our favorite is the Shringara (love and passion), made with beet, apple, pear and ginger.

Real Food Nation Old Las Vegas Hwy/Hwy 285. 466-3886.

Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Farm to table with an on-site organic garden. Atmosphere: Cheery, light. House specialties: Grilled veggie burgers and organic, and grass-fed beef burger . Comments: Kid-friendly

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THE magazine | 25

TR ADIT IO NAL JAPAN E S E RA M E N H O U S E

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Lunch: 11:30 am – 2:30 pm Monday – Friday Dinner: 5:30 –10 pm Monday – Saturday Kaiseki / Izakaya Dinner: Last Thursday of the Month 26 Chapelle Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501 505.428.0077 ■ shibumiramen.com Fragrance Free

■

Parking Available

DINING GUIDE

“Smash” Burger (best ever). Fish and Chips, Soups, and the Duck Salad are standouts. Comments: Once again, Chef Joseph Wrede works his magic in the kitchen.

The Pink Adobe 406 Old Santa Fe Trail. 983-7712.

Lunch/ Dinner Full Bar Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: All American, Creole, and New Mexican. Atmosphere: Friendly and casual. House specialties: For lunch we love the Gypsy Stew or the Pink Adobe Club. For dinner, get the Steak Dunigan, with green chile and sauteed mushrooms, or the Fried Shrimp Louisianne. Comments: Great pour at the bar.

tomme restaurant

229 Galisteo Street • Reservations: 820-2253 Rio Chama Steakhouse 414 Old Santa Fe Trail. 955-0765.

Sunday Brunch/Lunch/Dinner/Bar Menu.

Full bar. Smoke-free dining rooms.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: All-American classic steakhouse.

Atmosphere: Gorgeous Pueblo-style adobe. House specialities: USDA prime steaks and prime rib. Juicy and flavorful burgers. Haystack fries and cornbread with honey butter is a big plus. Nice wine list and a well-stocked bar. Recommendations: For des, we choose the chocolate pot Ristra 548 Agua Fria St. 982-8608.

Dinner/Bar Menu Full bar. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Southwestern with a French flair.

Atmosphere: Elegant bar and comfortable dining rooms. House specialties: Mediterranean mussels in chipotle and mint broth is superb, as is the ahi tuna tartare.

Comments: Ristra won the Wine Specator Award of Excellence.

San Q 31 Burro Alley. 992-0304 Lunch/Dinner Sake/Wine Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Japanese Sushi and Tapas.

Atmosphere: Large open room with a Sushi bar and table dining.

House specialties: Sushi, Vegetable Gyoza, Softshell Crab, Sashimi and Sushi Platters, and a selection of Japanese Tapas Comments: A selection of boutique sake and a savvy sushi chef make San Q a top choice for those who love Japanese food.

San Francisco Street Bar & Grill 50 E. San Francisco St. 982-2044.

Lunch/Dinner Full bar.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: As American as apple pie.

Atmosphere: Casual with art on the walls. House specialties: At lunch, go for the San Francisco Street hamburger or the grilled yellowfin tuna nicoise salad with baby red potatoes. At dinner, choose the flavorful twelve-ounce New York Strip, or the Idaho Ruby Red Trout.

Comments: Try their sister restaurant located in the DeVargas Center.

Santacafé 231 Washington Ave. 984-1788.

Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Contemporary Southwestern.

Atmosphere: Minimal, subdued, and elegant. House specialties: The world famous calamari never disappoints. Favorite entrées include the perfectly cooked grilled rack of lamb and the pan-seared salmon with olive oil crushed new potatoes and creamed sorrel. Comments: Appetizers during cocktail hour rule.

Santa Fe Bar & Grill 187 Paseo de Peralta. 982.3033.

Lunch/Dinner

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2012

Full bar. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: American and New Mexican.

Atmosphere: Casual and friendly. House specialties: Try the cornmeal-crusted calamari, the Rotisserie chicken, or the Rosemary Baby Back Ribs. Comments: Easy on the wallet.

Saveur 204 Montezuma St. 989-4200.

Breakfast/Lunch Beer/Wine. Patio.

Visa/Mastercard. $$ Cuisine: French meets American.

Atmosphere: Casual. Buffet-style service for salad bar and soups. House specialties: Daily chef specials, gourmet and buildyour-own sandwiches, wonderful soups, and an excellent salad bar). Comments: Breakfasts, organic coffees, and super desserts. Family-run.

Second Street Brewery 1814 Second St. 982-3030.

Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Simple pub grub and brewery.

Atmosphere: Casual and friendly.

House specialties: The beers are outstanding when paired with beersteamed mussels, calamari, burgers, and fish and chips. Fun bar and kid friendly.

Comments: Try their sister restaurant at 1607 Paseo de Peralta in the Railyard District.

Shibumi 26 Chapelle St. 428-0077.

Lunch/Dinner Fragrance-free Cash only. $$. Parking available Beer/wine/sake Cuisine: Japanese noodle house.

Atmosphere: Tranquil and elegant.

Table and counter service. House specialties: Start with the Gyoza—a spicy pork pot sticker—or the Otsumami Zensai (small plates of delicious chilled appetizers), or select from four hearty soups. Shibumi offers sake by the glass or bottle, beer, and champagne.

Comments: Zen-like setting.

Shohko Café 321 Johnson St. 982-9708.

Lunch/Dinner Sake/Beer.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Authentic Japanese Cuisine.

Atmosphere: Sushi bar, table dining.

House specialties: Softshell crab tempura, sushi, and bento boxes.

Station 430 S. Guadalupe. 988-2470 Breakfast/Lunch Patio Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: Light fare and fine cofffee and teas. Atmosphere: Friendly and casual.

House specialties: For your breakfast choose the Ham and Cheese Croissant or any of the Fresh Fruit Cups. Our lunch favorite is the Prosciutto, Mozzarella, Tomato sandwich on a Cabatta roll.

Comments: Special espresso drinks.

El Gancho Old Las Vegas Hwy. 988-3333.

Lunch/Dinner Full bar.

Major credit cards $$$ Cuisine: American. Atmosphere: Family restaurant with full bar and lounge. House specialties: Aged steaks, lobster. Try the pepper steak with Dijon cream sauce. Comments: They know steak here.

Steaksmith

at

Table de Los Santos 210 Don Gaspar at the Hotel St. Francis. 992-5863 Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Sunday Brunch Full Bar. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: New Mexican–inspired fare.

Atmosphere: Wonderful archways leading to a patio for al fresco dining.

House specialties: The organic Chicken Paillard with fresh market potatoes and vegetables is delicious.

Recommendations: For dessert, the organic goat milk flan is the best. Comments: Organic produce when available. Chef Estevan Garcia has created a wonderful menu.

Teahouse

The Shed 113½ E. Palace Ave. 982-9030.

Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: New Mexican. Atmosphere: A local institution located just off the Plaza. House specialties: Order the red or green chile cheese enchiladas.

The Ranch House (Formerly Josh’s BBQ) 2571 Cristos Road. 424-8900 Lunch/Dinner Full bar Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: BBQ and Grill. Atmosphere: Casual—family and kid-friendly. House specialties: Josh’s famous Red Chile Honey-glazed Baby Back Ribs; Smoked Brisket, Pulled Pork, Chicken, and Ranch House Beans remain favorites. New items like the Grilled Heritage Ranch New Mexico Beef Strip Loin, Atlantic Salmon, Shrimp and Penne Pasta, and three New Mexican Enchilada Plates round out the menu. We love BBQ Salad, Taquitos, and the Green chile Queso Comments: Special cocktails and beer on tap available from the bar.

The Supper Club 628 Old Las Vegas Hwy. 466-2440 Dinner: Wednesday–Saturday Beer/Wine.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Fine dining. Atmosphere: Comfortable and intimate. House specialties: Organic salads and soups, sustainably-raised meat, poultry, and seafood. Recomendations: the perfect Berkshire Pork Chop. Comments: Fine wines and attentive service.

821 Canyon Rd. 992-0972.

Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner 7 days Beer/Wine. Fireplace.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Farm-to-fork. Atmosphere: Very casual. House specialties: We love the Salmon Benedict with poached eggs, the quiche, the gourmet cheese sandwich, and the Teahouse Mix salad.

Comments: A truely smazing selection of teas from around the world.

Tia Sophia’s 210 W. San Francisco St. 983-9880.

Breakfast/Lunch Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: New Mexican. Atmosphere: This restaurant is absolutely a Santa Fe tradition.

House specialties: Green Chile Stew, the traditional Breakfast Burrito, stuffed with bacon, potatoes, chile, and cheese. Comments: The real deal.

Terra at Encantado 198 State Rd. 592, Tesuque. 988-9955.

Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: Contemporary American.

Atmosphere: Elegant, with great views from the dining room and bar.

House specialties: For dinner, start with the Risotto with Shaved Truffles. For your main, order the Harris Ranch Beef Tenderloin served with foie gras butter, or the Fish of the Day. Comments: Chef Charles Dale knows what “attention to detail” means.

Tomme Restaurant 229 Galisteo St. 820-2253 Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Contemporary. Atmosphere:

The Palace Restaurant & Saloon 142 West Palace Avenue 428-0690 Lunch/Dinner Full bar.

Major credit cards $$$ Cuisine: Modern Italian Atmosphere: Old World flavor with red-flocked wallpaper in the bar, dark wood, and fancy chandeliers. House Specialties: Italian, Hawaiian, New Mexican, Chinese, and Moroccan influences all show up on the dinner menu: Chicken Breast Diablo Italiano, Tuscan Shrimp, Hawaiian Tuna Tartar, Pork Belly Red Chile Chinese Tacos, Rocky Mountain Trout, and an All-American Steak au Poivre.

Recommendations: Lunch is not to be missed—get the duck fat fries with five dipping sauces, the Green Chile-cheese

Casual and friendly. House specialties: Start with the Smoked Sturgeon Salad or the Slow Braised Short Rib Gougeres.

For your entrée, try the Coq au Vin Pot Pie, the Fettucini Primavera, the Fried Chicken, Cobb Salad, or the Steak Frites. For your dessert, it’s a toss-up between the Green Apple Galette or the wonderful Cheese board. Comments: Sous vide cooking from Chef Mark Connell, the chef with a deft touch.

Tree House Pastry Shop and Cafe 1600 Lena St. 474-5543.

Breakfast/Lunch Tuesday-Sunday Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Only organic ingredients used.

Atmosphere: Light, bright, and cozy.

House specialties: You cannot go wrong ordering the fresh Farmer’s Market salad, the juicy Birdhouse Burger, or the Lunch Burrito—black beans, brown rice, seasonal veggies, pepper jack, sprouts, and and salsa, smothered in red chile and served with a side salad.

Tune-Up Café 1115 Hickox St.. 983-7060.

Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: American, Cuban, Salvadorean, Mexican, and, yes, New Mexican. Atmosphere: Down home, baby. House specialties: Breakfast faves are the scrumptious Buttermilk Pancakes and the Tune-Up Breakfast.

Comments: Super Fish Tacos and the El Salvadoran Pupusas are excellant.

Vinaigrette 709 Don Cubero Alley. 820-9205.

Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: We call the food here: farmto-table-to-fork. Atmosphere: Light, bright and cheerful. House specialties: All of the salads are totally amazing—they are fresh as can be. We love the Nutty Pear-fessor salad—it’s the best.

Comments: Vinaigrette will open a “sister” restaurant in Albuquerque soon.

Whoo’s Donuts 851 Cerrillos Rd. 629-1678 6 am to 4 pm.

Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: Donuts, donuts and, yes, even more knockout donuts. Atmosphere: Very, very casual. House specialties: This bakery has every yummy flavor you can think of and more. Organic ingredients only and gourmet dark chocolate. Comments: Our fave donut is the maple bar, with or without the bacon. Organic coffee is a plus.

Zia Diner 326 S. Guadalupe St. 988-7008.

Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: All-American diner food.

Atmosphere: Down home, baby, down home. House specialties: Chile Rellenos and eggs is our breafast choice. Lunch: We love the Southwestern Chicken Salad, the Meat Loaf, Burgers, and the Fish and Chips.

Comments: Wonderful sweets available for take-out. The bar is a fun place to bend your elbow at cocktail hour.

The Ranch House (Formerly Josh’s BBQ) 2571 Christos Road • 424-8900

THE magazine | 27

TOM HOLLAND Paintings Past anD Present MARCH 2 - APRIL 21, 2012

OPenIng ReCePtIOn: FRIdAy, MARCH 2, 5:00 - 7:00 P.M.

red Hanging, 1966, Mixed media, 69 1/2” x 59”

DavidrichardContemporary.com 130 Lincoln Avenue, Suite d, Santa Fe, nM 87501 | p (505) 983-9555 | f (505) 983-1284 info@davidRichardContemporary.com

ART OPENINGS

FEBRUARY A R T M A R C H OPENINGS WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 1

Robert Highsmith. 5-8 pm.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 4

PhOtO-eye Gallery, 376 Garcia St., Santa Fe. 9885159. First Wednesday’s February Salon: photographers Toba Tucker and Michael Levin. 6:30-9 pm.

mariPOsa Gallery, 3500 Central Ave. SE, Alb. 505-268-6828. How to Love: photographs by Kyle Zimmerman. Truly, Madly, Deeply: group show. 5-8 pm.

516 arts, 516 Central Ave. SW, Alb. 505-2421445. New Mexico Station: juried show of works

by New Mexico artists. 6-8 pm.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 3

richarD leVy Gallery, 514 Central Ave. SW, Alb. 505-766-9888. Skirts: photographs by Sabine Dehnel and Heidi Lender. 6-8 pm.

BraniGan cultural center, 501 N. Main St., Las Cruces. 575-541-2154. For the Love of Art: group show. 5-7 pm.

mOnrOe Gallery Of PhOtOGraPhy, 112 Don Gaspar, Santa Fe. 992-0800. Vivian Maier: Discovered: Discovered street and travel photographs by Vivian Maier. 5-7 pm.

eGGman anD Walrus, 131 W. San Francisco St. and 130 W. Palace Ave., Santa Fe. 660-0048.

Sentimental Impropriety: group show. 5:30-9 pm.

Palette cOntemPOrary art anD craft, 7400 Montgomery Blvd. NE, Alb. 505-855-7777.

Tsuzureori: Tsuzureori glass art by Aki Takemoto. 5-8 pm.

1629 cluB, 733 Chavez Rd. NW, Los Ranchos.

505-550-7220. A State of Grace: photographs by Lenny Foster. Reception RSVP only. 5-8 pm.

inPOst artsPace at the Outpost Performance Space, 210 Yale Blvd. SE, Alb. 505-268-0044.

Free Sea-Monkey: A Pop Cultural Odyssey: paintings by Jenny Berry. 5-8 pm.

stranGer factOry, 109 Carlisle Blvd. NE, Alb. 505-508-3049. Circus–Folke: works by Mindy and Candace Metzger. 6-9 pm.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 9

manitOu Galleries, 123 W. Palace Ave., Santa Fe. 986-0440. Wine, Chocolate and Jewelry: diamonds and Native jewelry with La Chiripada winery and the Chocolate Smith. 5-7:30 pm. mariGOlD arts, 424 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 982-4142. Winter Watercolors: watercolors by

thirD street arts, 711 3rd St. SW, Alb. 505306-0535. Charnel Ground—Where Do These Bones Come From From: drawings and paintings by Juliana Coles. 6-9 pm.

Weyrich Gallery, 2935-D Louisiana Blvd.

NE, Alb. 505-883-7410. The Roy Rogers Series: paintings by Eason Eige. 5-8:30 pm.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 8

santa fe cOmmunity cOlleGe Visual arts Gallery, 6401 Richards Ave., Santa Fe. 4281501. Sculpture Showcase: works by SFCC faculty and students. 4:30-6:30 pm.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10 canyOn rOaD cOntemPOrary art, 403 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 983-0433. I Know What Love Is: group show. 5-7 pm.

eD larsOn Gallery, 229-C Johnson St., Santa Fe. 982-9988. Oh Careless Love!: paintings by Ed Larson. 5-7 pm.

James Kelly cOntemPOrary, 550 S. Guadalupe St., Santa Fe. 989-1601. Works by Oli Sihvonen.

5-7 pm. rOuGe cat, 101 W. Marcy St., Santa Fe. 9836603. Light Portal: photography by Michael Gutierrez. 6-9 pm. uniVersity Of neW mexicO art museum, 1 University of New Mexico, Alb. 505277-4001. Reconsidering the Photographic Masterpiece: works from the museum’s Masterpiece collection. Hiroshi Sugimoto: photographs.

5-7 pm.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 12 las Placitas PresByterian church, NM 165 Exit 242, Placitas. 505-867-8080. Placitas Artists Series: works by Marjie Bassler, Ilena Grayson, Series Katerine Irish Hennry, and Karl and Mary Hofmann. 2-5:30 pm. museum Of inDian arts anD culture, 710 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe. 476-1250. Breaking the Rules: works by Margarete Bagshaw. 1-4 pm.

Rules

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17 alexanDra steVens Gallery, 820 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 988-1311. Joyful Abundance: oil paintings by Katrina Howarth. 5-7 pm.

Palette cOntemPOrary art anD craft, 7400 Montgomery Blvd. NE, Alb. 505-855-7777.

Tsuzureori: Tsuzureori glass art by Aki Takemoto. 5-8 pm. site santa fe, 1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 989-1199. Time-Lapse: works by Mary Temple, Byron Kim, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation.

5-7 pm.

Weyrich Gallery, 2935-D Louisiana Blvd.

NE, Alb. 505-883-7410. The Roy Rogers Series: painting by Eason Eige. Talk. 5-8:30 pm

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 18 act i Gallery, 218 Paseo del Pueblo Norte, Taos. 575-758-7831. Colors of Winter: group show. 3:30-5:30 pm. la tienDa exhiBit sPace, 7 Caliente Rd., Santa Fe. 428-0024. 5 Submerging: works by Thayer Carter, Andrew Davis, Geraldine Fiskus, Dee Homans, and J. Barry Zeiger. 5-8 pm.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24 charlOtte JacKsOn fine art, 554 South Guadalupe, Santa Fe. 988-8688. Solo Show: new work by Alfonso Fratteggiani Bianchi. 5-7 pm.

Jane sauer Gallery, 652 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 995-8513. Cooking Without Calories: glass works

by Tim Tate. 5-8 pm.

Zane Bennett Contemporary Art—435 South Guadalupe Street—presents West Coast Artists, an exhibition celebrating the L.A. art scene through the sixties and seventies.

Artists include: John Baldessari, Judy Chicago, Richard Diebenkorn, Guy Dill, and Sam Francis.

F Show runs through February 17. Image: Country Cityscapes Portfolio by Ed Ruscha. fEbRuARy / mARCh

2012

continued on page 32

the magazine | 29

HERE’S THE DEAL for artists without gallery representation in New Mexico.

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WHO SAID THIS?

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The Natural World in the Nineteenth Century

Archival pigment prints 22 x 17 on Rives BFK 310 gsm paper $135.00 includes shipping. View other images www.gwahl.com

G.WAHL Gallery

1408 Wazee St. Denver, CO 80202 303 825-9928

santa fe clay, 545 Camino de la Familia, Santa Fe. 984-1122. Summer Workshop Preview: work by artists featured in Summer Workshop Program. 5-7 pm. zane Bennett cOntemPOrary art, 435 S. Guadalupe St., Santa Fe. 982-8111. Under Thirty-Five: group show of sculpture, prints, photography, and mixed media. 5-7 pm.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 25 harWOOD museum Of art, 238 Ledoux St., Taos. 575-758-9826. Agnes Martin: Before the Grid. 10 am.

PhOtO-eye

Gallery, 376 Garcia St., Santa Fe. 988-5159. Photographs by Steve Fitch. 3-6 pm.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26 hulse/Warman Gallery, 222 Paseo del Pueblo Norte, Taos. 575-751-7702. Solo Show: glass work by Michelle Cook. 2-5 pm. neW mexicO cOmmittee Of the natiOnal museum Of WOmen in the arts at the former studio of Agnes Martin, 13 Marcelina Ln., Galisteo. 505-603-5646. A Tribute to Agnes Martin: open house celebrating Agnes Martin.

2-4 pm.

FRIDAY, MARCH 2 eGGman anD Walrus, 131 W. San Francisco St., Santa Fe. 660-0048. Mixed media group show with SITE Santa Fe’s young curators program. 5:30-9 pm. eVOKe cOntemPOrary, 130 Lincoln Ave., Santa Fe. 995-9902. Interlopers: group show.

5-7 pm.

GeralD Peters Gallery, 1011 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 954-5700. Works by Theodore Waddell. 5-7 pm.

DaViD richarD cOntemPOrary, 130 Lincoln Ave., #D. Santa Fe. 983-9555. New Paintings: Jay Davis. Paintings Past and Present: Tom Holland. 5-7.

SATURDAY, MARCH 3 main liBrary, 501 Copper Ave NW, Alb. 505254-2787. Portals, Transitions, Transformations: group show. 1-3 pm.

FRIDAY, MARCH 16 eGGman anD Walrus, 130 W. Palace Ave., Santa Fe. 660-0048. Resinate: mixed-media artwork and installations by Estzer Sziksz and Ben Utigard. 5:30-9 pm.

Jane sauer Gallery, 652 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 995-8513. Carved churches by Roberto Cardinale. 5-7 pm. mariGOlD arts, 424 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 9824142. New Hand-Woven Rugs: works by Sandy Voss. 5-7 pm.

SATURDAY, MARCH 17 la tienDa exhiBit sPace, 7 Caliente Rd., Eldorado. 466-0065. Metamorphosis: group show. 4-6 pm.

FRIDAY, MARCH 23 James Kelly cOntemPOrary, 550 S. Guadalupe St., Santa Fe. 989-1601. Solo Show: works by Bill Jacobson. 5-7 pm.

ViVO cOntemPOrary, 725 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 982-1320. Bound By Art: book arts and works on paper—group show. 5-7 pm.

SPECIAL INTEREST artsmart at various locations in Santa Fe. 6034643. ARTfeast Santa Fe: weekend of art, food, wine, fashion and homes benefiting youth art programs. Fri., Feb. 24 through Sun., Feb. 26. artfeast.com BOnD hOuse museum, 706 Bond St., Española.

310-9700.

310-9700 Untitled XII—The Lost Years and Waterproofs: Waterproofs photography group show. Through Sun., Feb. 19. untitledxii.com center fOr cOntemPOrary arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe. 982-1338. Calaveras Resplandecientes: archival photo prints by Resplandecientes George O. Jackson. Through Sun., April 1.

Arrhythmic Visions Visions: sculpture and wall works by Jamie Hamilton and Alison Keogh. Fri., March 16 through Sun., June 10. ccasantafe.org chiarOscurO, 702 ½ and 708 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 992-0711. Revolving Winter Group Show.

Through Wed., Feb. 29. chiaroscurosantafe.com DaViD richarD cOntemPOrary, 130 Lincoln

The UNM Art Museum on the Main Campus, Albuquerque, presents Reconsidering the Photographic Masterpiece (100 works from the museum’s collection) and Hiroshi Sugimoto (photographic work about time, light, space, movement, and form). Reception: Friday, February 10, from 5 to 7 pm.

Photographs by Vivian Maier on view at Monroe Gallery of Photography—112 Don Gaspar Avenue.

Reception: Friday, February 3, from 5 to 7 pm. Exhibition runs through April 22.

+Ave., Suite D, Santa Fe. 983-9555. Music in Garden: paintings by Beatrice Mandelman. the Garden Through Sat., Feb. 25. A Survey of Five Decades: paintings, drawings and sketches by Ward Jackson. Through Sun., Feb. 19.

Destiny allisOn fine art, 7 Caliente Rd., Eldorado. 466-0065. Somewhere in Ireland: poetry and music with Linda Wittenberg and Danny Wilding. Sat, March 24, 1:30 pm. e e.l.

Blumenschein hOme, 222 Ledoux St., Taos. 575-758-0505. Out of the Background— The Women Artists of Early Taos Taos: part of the Harwood Museum’s Remarkable Women of Taos and Northern New Mexico series. Fri., Feb. 10 through Fri., May 18. taos.org/women el caminO real internatiOnal heritaGe center, 30 mi. S. of Socorro on I-25. 575-8543600. Historic Forts Day. elcaminoreal.org GeOrGia O’Keeffe museum, 217 Johnson St., Santa Fe. 946-1037. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith-—Landscapes of an American Modernist.

Through Sun., April 29. Saluting Two Remarkable Women Artists—Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Margarete Bagshaw Bagshaw: exhibition tour. Thurs., March 15, 11 am-2:30 pm. okeeffemuseum.org GOVernOr’s Gallery, 490 Old Santa Fe Trail, Santa Fe. 476-5058. Lines and Cultures— A Cartographic Excursion into New Mexico Statehood: New Mexico Centennial map Statehood exhibition. harWOOD museum, 238 Ledoux St., Taos.

575-758-9826. Oli Sihvonen—sThe Final Years.

Through Sun., Feb. 19. Black Mountain College and New Mexico Mexico. Through Sun., Feb. 5. Films, lectures, and concerts through Feb. and March. harwoodmuseum.org isaac’s Gallery, 309 N. Virginia St., Roswell.

626-8626. Curator’s Invitational: group show.

Through Fri., March 2.

James Kelly cOntemPOrary, 550 S. Guadalupe

St., Santa Fe. 989-1601. The Thick of It: sculptures by Arlene Shechet. Though Sat., Feb. 4. jameskelly.com Jane sauer Gallery, 652 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 995-8513. What is New: group show with gallery artists. Through Tues., Feb. 21. jsauergallery.com meOW WOlf at the NMSU Art Gallery, D.W. Williams Hall, University Ave., Las Cruces.

575-646-5423. Glitteropolis!: immersive art experience. Through Sat., Feb. 18. meowwolf. com millicent rOGers museum, 1504 Millicent Rogers Rd., Taos. 575-758-2462. Millicent Rogers—The Power to Create, Collect, and Inspire; Inspire Maria Martinez—Matriarch of San Ildefonso: Ildefonso a part of the Harwood Museum’s Remarkable Women of Taos and Northern New Mexico series. museum Of cOntemPOrary natiVe arts, 108 Cathedral Place, Santa Fe. 983-1666. Prophecy: pottery by Peter B. Jones. Through Sat., March 31. Under The Influenc—Iroquois Artists at IAIA (1962-2012). Through Tues., July 31. mocna.org (1962-2012) museum Of inDian arts anD culture, 710 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe. 476-1269. Woven Identities: basketry from the museum’s Identities collections. indianartsandculture.org museum Of inDian arts anD culture, 710 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe. 476-1269.

A Conversation with Margarete Bagshaw and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Smith lecture. Sun., March 11, 2 pm. okmuseum.org museum Of neW mexicO, 107 W. Palace Ave., Santa Fe. 476-5072. Past, Present, Future— Three New Mexico Photographers: Photographers work by Michael Berman, David Taylor, and Connie Samaras. Through April. nmartmuseum.org neW mexicO arts centennial PrOJect sPace, 54 1/2 E. San Francisco St., Santa Fe. 827-

ART OPENINGS

sanDOVal cOunty histOrical sOciety museum, Edmund Rd. and Hwy. 550, Bernalillo.

792-4851. Manuel Lopez Presents Spanish Buffalo Hunters Hunters: lecture. Sun., Feb. 19, 2 pm.

Dennis Herrick Presents Winter of the Metal People: lecture on the Tiguex War. Sun., March People 18, 2 pm. home.comcast.net/~friendsofcsm santa fe clay, 545 Camino de la Familia, Santa Fe. 984-1122. Tea for Two Cups: group show from the Diane and Sandy Besser collection.

Through Sat., Feb. 18. santafeclay.com santa fe cOmmunity fOunDatiOn at the Academy for the Love of Learning, 501 Halona Street, Santa Fe. 988-9715. The Heart of Philanthropy Retreat. Fri., Feb. 17, 9 am-5 pm. santafecf.org

Tamarind’s New Editions on view through March 23 at the Tamarind Institute Gallery, 2500 Central Ave., SE, Albuquerque. Work by Dan Brice, Amy Cutler, Hung Liu, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and others.

Image: Jim Dine.

6490. House of Cards: installation by Michael Darmody. Through Fri., Feb. 17. nmarts.org neW mexicO cOmmittee Of the natiOnal museum Of WOmen in the arts at University of New Mexico West, 2600 College Blvd. NE, Rio Rancho. 505-603-5646. Weavers Susan Klebanoff and Shira Greenberg. Thurs., Feb. 16, 10 am. RSVP: pmondoy@gmail.com. newmexicowomeninthearts.org neW mexicO cOmmittee Of the natiOnal museum Of WOmen in the arts, location TBA. 505-603-5646. Recognizing Women Artists of the Galisteo Basin: Celebrate Agnes Martin in Galisteo. Sun., Feb. 26, 2 pm. newmexicowomeninthearts.org neW mexicO cOmmittee Of the natiOnal museum Of WOmen in the arts, at the Museum Hill Cafe, 710 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe. 505-6035646. Luncheon for Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Margarete Bagshaw. Thurs., March 15, 11:30 am-2 pm. newmexicowomeninthearts. org neW mexicO cOmmittee Of the natiOnal museum Of WOmen in the arts at various locations in Taos. 505-603-5646. Taos Weekend Art of the Dress Exhibition and Sale. Fri., March 16Sun., March 18. newmexicowomeninthearts. org neW mexicO museum Of sPace histOry at various locations in Las Cruces and Alamogordo. 575-437-2840. Apollo 16 40th Anniversary Commemoration: films, talks, and other events. Thurs., March 8 through Sat., March 10. nmspacemuseum.org PrestOn cOntemPOrary art center, 1755 Avenida de Mercado, Mesilla. 575-5238713. The Last Picture Show—Regional Juried Exhibition: group show. Through Fri., Feb. 17. prestoncontemporaryart.com reD DOt Gallery, 826 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 820-7338. Lumen: works by Institute of American Indian Arts’s students, faculty, and alumni. Through Mon., Feb. 20. red-dotgallery.com

fEbRuARy / mARCh

2012

santa fe cOuncil On internatiOnal relatiOns at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, 1600 St. Michael’s Dr., Santa Fe. 982-4931. Pakistan—Four Futures for a Troubled Relationship Relationship: Professor Timothy Hoyt of the U.S. Naval War College. Sat., Feb. 25, 3 pm.

Saudi Arabia—A Problematic Ally Ally: Toby Jones.

Sat., March 24, 3 pm. sfcir.org st. JOhn’s cOlleGe, 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca, Santa Fe. 984-6000. Spring 2012 community seminars available for registration. Lectures and performances throughout Feb. and March. stjohnscollege.edu tai Gallery, 1601-B Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 984-1387. Geigoto: photography by Taka Kobayashi. Through Sat., Feb. 18. taigallery. com tamarinD institute at the University of New Mexico, 2500 Central Ave. SE, Alb. Welcome Back—Tamarind’s New Editions Editions: group show.

Through Fri., March 23. tamarind.unm.edu the taOs art museum at fechin hOuse, 227 Paseo del Pueblo Norte, Taos. 575-7582690. Taos Living Legends—Magnificent Masters: works by Cliff Harmon, Barbara Harmon, Ray Vinella, and others. Treasures from the Vault: works by the Taos Society of Artists Vault and the Taos Moderns. Through Fri., June 15. taosartmuseum.org teatrO ParaGuas stuDiO, 3221 Richards Lane, Suite B, Santa Fe. 988-1655. International Women’s Day Poetry Reading Reading: with Debbi Brody, Kathamann, Moriah Williams, and Ann Hunkins.

Sun., March 11, 4-6 pm. teatroparaguas.org u u.s.

Green BuilDinG cOuncil, neW mexicO chaPter, P.O. Box 25771, Alb. 505-227-0474.

2012 GreenBuilt Tour Tour: seeking builders and home owners to submit their homes for June 9 to June 10 tour. usgbcnm.org unitarian uniVersalist cOnGreGatiOn Of santa fe, 107 W. Barcelona Rd., Santa Fe. 982-9674. Precarious Poise: paintings by Jim Modiano. Fri., Feb. 3-Wed., Feb. 29. uusantafe. org

Sam Francis, and Edward Ruscha. Through Fri., Feb. 17. zanebennettgallery.com

The Magic of Musicals Musicals. Sat., Feb. 4, 1:30 pm. abqtheatre.org/tlc

PERFORMING ARTS

CALL FOR ARTISTS

alBuquerque theatre GuilD, P.O. Box 26395, Alb. Performances throughout Feb. and March.

Info: abqtheatre.org

aBiquiu WOrKshOPs, P.O. Box 1212, Bldg. 21196, Hwy 84, Abiquiu. 685-0921.

Registration available for 2012 workshops. abiquiuworkshops.com

BraniGan cultural center, 501 N. Main St., Las Cruces. 575-541-2154. Presentations by area musicians, dancers, and poets throughout Feb. lascruces.org/museums la tienDa PerfOrmance sPace, 7 Caliente Rd., Eldorado. 466-0065. The Quilters: a play. Saturday March 17 and 31, 1:30 pm. New Mexico’s Historic Centennial Textiles Textiles: powerpoint presentation and display. Sat., March 17, 2.30 pm. muñOz Waxman Gallery at the Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe. 474-8400. STORM: world premiere with Theater Grottesco and the Out of Context Orchestra. Fri., Feb. 17 through Sun., Feb. 26. theatergrottesco.org natiOnal hisPanic cultural center, 1701 4th St. SW, Alb. 505-724-4771. Carnaval: music and dance featuring Odara Dance Ensemble and PANdemonium. Fri., Feb. 17, and Sat., Feb. 18, 8 pm. nhccnm.org OutPOst PerfOrmance sPace, 210 Yale Blvd., Alb. 505-268-0044. Special Evening with Jane Monheit Monheit: jazz vocalist Jane Monheit. Thurs., March 8, 7:30 pm. Benefit concert on Friday, March 9, 7:30 pm. Reception: 6:30 pm. outpostspace.org santa fe PlayhOuse with Ironweed Productions, 142 East DeVargas St., Santa Fe. 988-4262. Our Town: play by Thornton Wilder.

Thurs., March 29 through Sun., April 15. ironweedsantafe.com scOttish rite masOnic center, 463 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 946-1039. Native American Inspirations/New Composers: Composers concert with pianist Emanuele Arciuli and composer Jerod Impíchchaachaaha’ Tate. Thurs., March 22, 7 pm. okmuseum.org st. JOhn’s cOlleGe, 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca, Santa Fe. 984-6000. Solo Piano Concert: music of Stravinsky and Schubert with Peter Pesic.

Fri., Feb. 3, 7:30 pm. Man of La Mancha: performance by St. John’s College community.

Sat., March 3, 8 pm; Sun. March 4, 3 pm and 7 pm. stjohnscollege.edu theatre lOVers cOmmunity at the Adobe Theater, 9813 4th St. NW, Alb. 505-898-9222.

city Of santa fe arts cOmmissiOn at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center, 201 West Marcy St., Santa Fe. 955-6707. Nonprofit arts organizations in Santa Fe County eligible to apply for funding. Pre-application workshop on Thurs., Feb. 7, 11 am and 12:30 pm. Deadline: Thurs., March 8. santafeartscommission.org cOrrales art stuDiO tOur at various locations in Corrales. 505-771-8370. 14th Annual Corrales Art Studio Tour. Deadline: Thurs., March 1. corralesartstudiotour.com GreG mOOn art, 109-A Kit Carson Rd. Taos.

575-770-4463. After Dark: show celebrating all things nocturnal. Deadline: Sun., April 1. gregmoonart.com/links Placitas artists series, P. O. Box 944, Placitas. 867-8080. Placitas Artists Series: calling for artists to exhibit works accompanying Las Placitas Presbyterian Church 2012-13 concert season. Deadline: Sun., April 1. placitasarts.org sca cOntemPOrary art, 524 Haines Ave. NW, Alb. 505-228-3749. The Finite Passing of an Infinite Passion Passion: curated by Danielle Rae Miller and Laura Ratcliffe. Seeking work in all media on the theme of religion. Deadline: Tues., May 22. scacontemporary.com

OUT THERE BiBliOthèque natiOnale, 8 Rue de Richelieu, P Paris, France. Solo Show: new works by JoelPeter Witkin. Opens Monday, March 26.

Galerie BauDOin leBOn, 8 Rue CharlesFrançois Dupuis, Paris, France. Solo Show: works

by Joel-Peter Witkin. Opens Tuesday, March 27. rOBischOn Gallery, 1740 Wazee Street, Denver, CO. 303-298-7788. AB EX—Positions and Dispositions Dispositions: works by Robert Motherwell, Manuel Neri, Frank Lobdell, Gary Komarin and Dale Chisman. Through Sat., March 10. robischongallery.com WaDe WilsOn art, 4411 Montrose Blvd., Houston, T Tx. 713-521-2977. Zachariah Rieke: Raw Beauty Beauty. Through Sat., Feb. 25. Libbie Masterson: Nuit Nuit. Fri., March 2 through Sat., April 14. wadewilsonart.com

5 Submerging, group show at La Tienda Exhibit Space—7 Caliente Road in Eldorado.

Reception: Saturday, February 18, from 5 to 8 pm. Image: J. Barry Zeiger.

ViVO cOntemPOrary, 725 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 982-1320. Dream State: group show.

Through Tues., Feb. 21. vivocontemporary.com zane Bennett cOntemPOrary art, 435 S. Guadalupe St., Santa Fe. 982-8111. Showcasing West Coast Artists Artists: works by John Baldessari, Judy Chicago, Richard Diebenkorn, Guy Dill,

the magazine | 33

PREVIEWS

New Mexico Showcase: Group Show February 4 through April 28 516 ARTS, 516 Central Avenue SW, Albuquerque. 505-242-1445.

Reception: Saturday, February 4, 6 to 8 pm.

When 516 ARTS opened, in 2007, the gallery held an invitational exhibition for local artists. In celebration of its fifth anniversary, the gallery will return to its roots, once again showcasing the plethora of local artistic talent. Works by seventy artists from more than thirty New Mexico communities are on view. Some give a nod to the state’s history—The Gadget (Trinity Test Site, July 15, 1945), by Nina Elder, alludes to the Manhattan Project, depicting a massive, cylindrical machine laced with wires and dotted with ominous controls. Elder used graphite and charcoal harvested from Los Alamos to create this subtly provocative work. Others draw on New Mexico’s cultural heritage, like Luanne Redeye’s Ageswë’gaiyo’, a dramatic self-portrait by the Seneca artist. Many of the works on view, like Scott Krichau’s whimsical Uncle Buttshark, cannot be so easily connected to their creators’ home state, but still act as a testament to New Mexico’s rich artistic community.

The show is juried by Los Angeles art critic and curator Peter Frank, associate editor of Fabrik magazine and art writer for the Huffington Post. “Given New Mexico’s reputation as a locus for artistic talent,” says Frank, “it was no surprise to be deluged with serious and even surprising work from all corners of the state. It was a delight, not a chore, to sift through the submissions, never knowing what was coming next, but reasonably sure it wouldn’t be the same old same old.”

Interlopers: Group Show Through Saturday, March 31 EVOKE Contemporary, 130 Lincoln Avenue, Santa Fe. 995-9902.

Reception: Friday, March 2, 5 to 7 pm.

Pamela Wilson’s Antechamber of Regret is like a missing page from a children’s storybook. In this moody graphite-on-paper work, a young girl gazes pensively at a pocket watch hanging from a chain around her neck.

Standing in the middle of a field, she wears a cotton shift, a fox fur, and an aviator’s cap. Her enigmatic character is an interloper on our consciousness; long after we stop looking at the portrait, nagging questions remain: Who is she? What is she contemplating? Where will her adventure lead her? Antechamber of Regret and other works by Pamela Wilson will be shown in Interlopers— a group show of works on paper by twenty-two artists, themed on the irregular, the startling, and the unwelcome.

Bill Harrison’s photorealist portrait of a man, Trash, falls under all three of these categories. Other featured artists include Tomas Lasansky, Javier Marín, Jorge Santos, Kent Williams, Harriet Yale Russell, and Yuri Zatarain. With this show, EVOKE Contemporary wholly embraces the appeal of that which does not belong, exhibiting a number of works on paper in a space usually reserved for paintings and sculptures, proving there is something strangely seductive about the interloper.

34 | THE magazine

Agnes Martin: Before the Grid February 25 through June 17 Harwood Museum, 238 Ledoux Street, Taos.

575-758-9826.

Agnes Martin, whose hundredth birthday would have been this February, was stubborn about certain things. She would not allow others to label her a Minimalist, though much of her art can undoubtedly be seen through this lens—rather, she called herself an Abstract Expressionist. For many years, she refused to hire an assistant to help her carry her six-by-six-foot paintings around the studio—instead she started to work on smaller canvasses. And when her art matured, in the 1960s, she destroyed many of her earlier works. Thankfully, some of these early paintings were saved. Martin’s biomorphic paintings, created in Taos from 1954 to 1957, are displayed in the Harwood’s Agnes Martin Gallery alongside several works tracing her evolution from organic shapes to her pale, linear geometries. Despite Martin’s best efforts to eliminate this chapter from her history, these early works provide fascinating insight into the artist she became.

Clockwise from top left: Luanne Redeye, Ageswë’gaiyo’, oil on panel, 30” x 24”, 2011; Pamela Wilson, Antechamber of Regret, graphite on paper, 30” x 19”, 2011; Agnes Martin, Beach, watercolor and ink on paper, 5½” x 8½”, nd.

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THE WORLD IS CHANGING

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national spotlight

Poshie, the Boston Terrier by

Michael Scott

When people call New York City “the most diverse city in the world,” they shouldn’t limit this statement to humans. From Irish Wolfhounds to Chihuahuas, all shapes and sizes of dogs trot happily beside their masters up Broadway, down Park Avenue, and through Central Park. As evidenced by lavish downtown “dog spas,” high-end pet boutiques, and gourmet dog-treat bakeries, New Yorkers adore their canine companions. So why shouldn’t Big Apple pups have their own art exhibition? This winter Michael Scott—a.k.a. “Dog Man”—is presenting his new series, The Doggie Diaries, at Gerald Peters’ New York City gallery. Scott’s paintings explore a number of colorful pooch personalities within an art-historical, “tongue and tail” context, including Poshie, the Boston Terrier—a high-society pooch who caused a scandal when she virtually flew out of her bedroom window to chase, yes, wild boars. And—perk up your ears for this announcement—on February 12, preceding the 136th Annual Westminster Dog Show, the Gerald Peters Gallery will host a costume contest. The dog wearing the costume deemed “most artistic” will become the subject of Scott’s next painting.

This event—benefiting the Angels on a Leash therapy-dog program—has New York’s fashionista pups howling with anticipation. The Doggie Diaries will be on view through February 17 at Gerald Peters Gallery, 24 East 78th Street, New York City. D

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THE magazine | 37

danielquatphotography

MONROE GALLERY of photography

September 28, 1959, East 108th Street, New York

If the name Vivian Maier is unfamiliar to you, that's because the prolific street photographer was essentially unknown throughout her lifetime. Now, Maier’s pictures have resounded through the photography world and her story has been sweeping the international press. Please join us to view this remarkable discovery.

Open Daily

portraits

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Opening Reception Friday, February 3 • 5 - 7 PM

Jackie Hall © 2011 Daniel Quat

creative photography for creative people

VIVIAN MAIER: DISCOVERED

505-982-7474

The Andrew Smith Gallery, INC.

M a s t e r p i e c e s

o f

P h o t o g r a p h y

The Andrew Smith Gallery is the leading gallery for classic 19th and 20th Century photographs.

Artists include Ansel Adams, Edward S. Curtis, William H. Jackson, Laura Gilpin, A. C. Vroman, F. J. Haynes, Alfred Stieglitz, Timothy O’Sullivan, Edward Weston, Annie Leibovitz, Joel-Peter Witkin, Carleton Watkins, John K. Hillers, Paul Caponigro, Lee Friedlander, Henri Cartier-Bresson and many more. The Andrew Smith Gallery is also home to many regional photographers including, Joan Myers, Barbara Van Cleve, Alan Ross, Jody Forster, Baron Wolman, Victor Masayesva, Lisa Law, David Michael Kennedy, Elliott McDowell and Duane Monczewski.

Joel-Peter Witkin, Night In A Small Town, NM, 2007

122 Grant Ave., Santa Fe, NM 87501 Next to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

• 505.984.1234 • www.AndrewSmithGallery.com

In a phone call to THE magazine from Santa Fe’s Andrew Smith Gallery in the fall of 2011, owner Andrew Smith left a message saying, “ You must come to the

interview

gallery to see Joel-Peter Witkin’s new work.

It is quite a departure from his earlier work.”

Witkin is considered to be one of the most controversial photographic artists of our time. His early work portrays a world peopled with transsexuals, corpses, and severed heads on plates—with references to classical paintings and religious tableaux. Witkin has been labeled a genius, has been compared to Goya, and some have even called him the Hieronymus Bosch of photography. However, Witkin’s new work is different.

Witkin says, “It is romantic, it’s genteel, it’s tender, and it’s more compassionate.” Artists rarely move away from a style that’s been commercially successful, so of course we were intrigued. Our curiosity was rewarded with this exclusive interview, which took place in Witkin’s studio in Albuquerque’s South Valley. photograph by

Lydia Gonzales

THE magazine: You have several shows and books about to happen. Talk about these shows—when and where they’re taking place and what’s going on with the books. Joel-Peter Witkin: Okay. The shows are both in Paris. The first is a retrospective, at the Bibliothèque Nationale—the national library of France and one of the great museums of the world.

It’s going to open on March 26, and consists of ninety-five of my works, augmented by about forty of what they call a estampes.

TM: Estampe? J-PW: An estampe is an engraving, or etching, from the Renaissance clear through to Picasso.

GC: It’s meant to show influences? J-PW: Well, you could say influences, but I would call it historical parallels.

TM: Are you involved with the installation of the work? J-PW: Never; that’s the job of the curator, who should know the work, who knows the space, and who knows good design and lighting.

TM: Who is the curator of this show? J-PW: Her name is Anne Biroleau, and she’s the chief curator of photography at the Bibliothèque. The last big show there was with Richard Prince. The Bibliothèque does wonderful shows, and there will be a book published—as a book/catalogue. The other show in Paris is the next night, March 27, at the Galerie Baudoin Lebon, which has represented my work for over twenty-five years.

It’s all new work, and that’s what I’m killing myself over now.

TM: Will people see the new work at the Bibliothèque show?

J-PW: Some of the new work, but mostly it is a retrospective.

TM: And you’ll be in Paris for a couple of weeks in March?

J-PW: Yes, I’ll go there for interviews first, and then the hang.

And I plan to photograph an amazing thing I saw at the Paris flea market last year. It was a fetus, but it was a weeping fetus.

continued on page 40

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But both the new work and the old work are part of my life, because I think that—not life as such— but that the world is irrational. And since I’m living in that world, through this life that I’m living I have to basically confront the irrationality, the strangeness, and the conflicting aspects of being in that world.

TM: Do you find that when you finish an image you can say, ‘Okay this is perfect, it’s great?’ A lot of artists—whether they make fine art or commercial art—are always dissatisfied with what they ’ve done.

What about you? J-PW: Of course I am dissatisfied.

That’s a natural inclination. That’s why I think people who are in the arts have ups and downs. That’s a natural aspect of their personality because they get encouraged, and then they become attached, and then they have to become encouraged again. That’s not to say that it’s abnormal; I think it’s very normal as far as what discovery is about. But in my case, it’s not a question of moving on. I think if a person has dedicated his life to something, as I have, then he’s deadly serious about what he’s doing and what it means, and then it’s a natural evolution to move on to different subject matter, because there are different interests involved.

Someone in the nineteenth century had taken a fetus and positioned it so that it’s crying into a small towel.

I’m making a still life of that, with musical instruments.

It will be very beautiful.

TM: Do you often find your props at flea markets?

J-PW: I always go to flea markets because I always get lucky. And yes, I find some props. In Budapest, I actually found a painting that was made in a concentration camp, and I was going to buy it, but it was just too big. But I did buy a painting on glass, which is in my studio. It’s painted on the reverse from the inside, and it shows a German occupier putting flowers in front of a crucifix in the small town. It’s a horrible, horrible thing because it’s from that era. It’s the only thing that I have that I ever want from that era, because it shows the horrible power of one country occupying another country— infiltrating and taking over the culture. I have the painting as an historical example. So yes, I always find things—flea markets are indicative of the past and the present. Even when I was in Bogotá, I’d go to the flea market and pick up crazy things there for my photographs, like chains and strange stuff like old vases.

TM: Considering the work you’ve done for the last forty years or so, the new work seems to be a major departure. Talk about the new work and how different it is from the other work, and what elements are in it that would surprise people. J-PW: I think the new work is romantic, I think it’s genteel, I think it’s tender, and it’s more compassionate, because I’ve grown.

I’m seventy-two now and I’m facing the big “D,” amd I don’t mean Dallas. But I can say that the older work is more visually combative, where I basically photographed very, very strong subject matter.

From left to right: The Kiss, New Mexico, 1982; A Day in the Country, Poland, 1998; The Reader, Paris, 2010

interview

TM: Right. What three pieces you have done over the last forty years would define you? J-PW: The first

TM: That makes me think of the Fellini film 8½. You know, the crane,the statue of Christ in the air. J-PW: Yes, the model is Polish, and she took us to a small town. Anyway, she’s holding a penis that I made that’s attached to the horse. She’s holding it, and she’s looking at the camera, and basically it’s about a very dire situation, about what love is—confused love. It also reflects on our lives at all times as far as what constitutes purpose and life and love. And the third one that comes to mind is The Reader—a beautiful woman who tells her dreams and her thoughts into a computer so that they can be used to animate machines.

And so this beautiful woman (I took this shot in Paris last year)

one would be The Kiss, which I did in 1982.

TM: Many people do the work and they show it to somebody—an editor, their wife, partner, whoever. Usually there’s somebody they look to for some approval or recognition of what they are trying to do. Is there a person in your life—you don’t have to tell me who it is—but is there a person who might say to you, ‘Yeah, you got it,’ or ‘Hey, Joel-Peter, give me a break.’ J-PW: Yeah, myself.

It’s a head cut in half, and both sides of that half are kissing each other—a very powerful

TM: No one else outside of you? And are you your best critic? J-PW: Well, I don’t know if I’m my best critic. It comes out of me, so me should look at it. [Laughs]

metaphor for life and maybe aspects of what personality is—or selflove. Second would be a

photograph

called

A Day in the Country that I made in Poland in 1998.

It’s of a horse that came from a slaughterhouse, basically held up by a crane, and there’s a masked nude woman below the horse.

TM: Talk about the image that is on the cover of this issue. J-PW: It’s called Woman with Small Breasts. The model is an Israeli woman who works in the gallery that represents me. She herself is a photographer, now teaching in Tel Aviv in a university, but I photographed her in Paris. Her profile is so beautiful, and she has these beautiful little breasts, and I wanted to do kind of a close-up, which I normally don’t do too often, but I wanted to raise the stakes. I designed the hat she’s wearing with a horn, fish, and flowers, and all kinds of stuff to create a kind of distraction from her beauty.

The title is very important, but in this case it’s not about her breasts, it’s about her beauty.

has a snake that’s crawling around her body, but she’s in an elegant chair. She’s wearing a hat of books, there’s a dog, too, and a pheasant in this environment. It’s a beautiful photograph because it’s very engaging and mysterious, and it doesn’t have the darker aspect of my earlier work. But in art I think that any subject matter is totally plausible; it just depends on the depth and consciousness of the artist who created the work.

The subject matter is basically the vehicle, as the art form is. But it’s the consciousness of the artist that makes any medium alive and makes it an event rather than a depiction.

TM: Do you have the ability to look at the work you’ve done and see it new, as if you have never seen it before?

J-PW: Well, that’s my objective. I mean, it comes through me as a discovery, as self-discovery, and when it happens that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen all the time, but I think I bat about eight hundred. And, usually, it’s as I’m making the print, because in the process of making my photographs the decisive moment is not what’s in the camera, it’s what’s on the paper. For me, it’s not just a question of photographing something and it’s done; I have to print them—I’m a printmaker. The first phase is getting the negative—the vehicle for the print—and then the final stage is to make the print.

I make the print myself, and that’s a lost art in photography. If you talk about painting, people would say you can’t have another person paint your painting for you because you’re a painter. I think that’s true for photography too, although there are a lot of photographers that are very good image-makers but not good printers. But in my case, I am a good printer—and I must be the printmaker of my work, because in the process of making the print I’m actually changing the concept around. I’m changing the formality of the piece, I’m changing its meaning, and I have to be there to do it. continued on page 42

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Joel-Peter Witkin’ studio. New Mexico, 2011

Tm: Prints can be too hard, too soft, too flat, and can have too much contrast, etc. Do you make more than one print?

Do you still work on the negative as you did with the earlier work, or do you now work directly on the print?

J-Pw: Both. There are times that are just the reverse of that; there are some times when it’s just a straight print; I don’t do anything. That doesn’t happen often. I study the contact prints, which takes about half a day. I don’t shoot that much so there’s not that much to look at. But when I’m photographing people, it’s very important that I look very precisely because of the gesture. And then I decide how I’m going to—in a very primordial way—change the look of the negative to basically mystify it and to make it my own. It’s kind of like drawing inside of the photographic information.

I’ve been printing for almost sixty years now, and I must say I’m probably one of the best printers around.

Tm: What enlargers do you print with? A Bessler, Omega, or what? J-Pw: I print with deVeres; it’s a English company that went out of business. Every time before I start printing a particular negative, I sit in the darkroom and I thank all the equipment as my colleagues and my partners, because for me everything is alive—the paper is alive, the developer is alive. It’s something that’s not mechanical, per se.

Tm: And you’re mixing your own chemicals? J-Pw: Right.

My wife and I even make our own toners.

GC: I’m curious because I used to be a printer myself.

Do you ever work with things like warm developer and ferrocyanide, things like this? J-Pw: Oh yes, the whole gamut. Absolutely.

Tm:

You

once

said,

“Sometimes I say to myself that the work is smarter than I am.” Could you talk about that for a moment? J-Pw: Yeah, I think that’s true for

interview

TM: The use of words in the new work. I haven’t seen every picture you’ve ever done, but I’ve never seen words in the older work. How come words now? J-PW: Well, it started with my photographing a retablo. I love retablos, which are basically visualized prayers. In the history of art there has been an explanation below the image of what it was. But very often in photography, even though there’s a name for the image or a title, we’re left to second guess what’s going on. What I want to do with the use of words in the photographs is not to clarify, but to augment the visual information with the literature. I generally write my own inscriptions, but that doesn’t apply to every work.

Some works get it and some works don’t. It all depends.

TM: You do editions of your photographs, right? J-PW: Yes, I do editions.

GC: My question about editions is, take Sunrise over Hernandez, the famous picture by Ansel Adams. It was not a straight shot and he did a lot of work on that print in the darkroom—using ferrocyanide and such. And a copy negative was made of the print. How do you create your editions? Is each print in the edition made by you, or are they made making a copy negative?

J-PW: Every print I make is from the original negative.

TM: Buyers and collectors want to know that. J-PW: Right.

And it’s very, very important. I would never print from a copy negative because that’s a cop-out.

TM: Cheating? J-PW: It could be.

TM: Well, using a copy negative to make prints takes away the hand of the artist, for sure. J-PW: Right. And the thing is that when I sign my name on the print, it’s me, and no one’s making it quite that way. And no one can. The whole premise of being a creator is to make something never seen quite like that before.

TM: Your thoughts on pornography? J-PW: Pornography is the lowest level of emotion that anyone can fall down into. If cancer could shit, it would be pornography.

TM: [Laughs] Okay, shit and blood. Well, let me ask you this: How do you know this? Have you ever looked at

everybody.

TM: Say hi from me. J-PW: Yes, I shall, I shall.

TM: Elaborate please.

TM: You better! [Laughs] J-PW: The second person would probably be Henri Cartier-Bresson. And the third would be Max Beckmann. I’ve always loved his work. I would get clarity from different viewpoints. The first being from an infinite viewpoint, and then the other two from viewpoints of aesthetic consciousness that I think are far beyond my own.

That would be a very wonderful experience.

TM: Okay, just a few more questions. In the song Idiot Wind, which Dylan wrote, there are a couple lines: “I’ve been double crossed too much, in times I think I’ve lost my mind, lady killers blow dice on me, behind my back while imitators steal me blind.”

Are there a lot of Joel-Peter Witkin copycats out there, and what do you think of them? J-PW: Well, I think there are. I’ve seen a bunch, and I’m constantly having things sent to me in the mail.

TM: Do you find it to be pathetic? J-PW: No, it’s not pathetic.

But what’s pathetic is that sometimes I’ll give lectures at different universities, and see that the instructors actually have their students do work of different photographers. I couldn’t disagree with this approach more. It’s so horrible. The fact is that you want to nourish growth; you just don’t want to supplant it. And by the way, that is a form of pornography too.

TM: Okay, last thing. The opera Tosca by Puccini has an aria, “Vissi d’Arte.” It translates to, “I have lived for art.” Would you say this applies to you? J-PW: Oh yes. Actually, there are two things in my life that I’m perfectly aware of and that I strive to clarify. The two things that drive me are my religious faith—I’m a Christian—and the second thing is that I make

J-PW: It is very much like the movie Melancholia—a film about love, family, and the apocalypse—which is in two parts. The first part of the film is about why life doesn’t work. And the second part is about the end of time. And that’s what I want to bring to the work itself, because I really believe that all of us are living in a world where our history is horrible. And it’s getting more and more horrible—we don’t know how to live and we never will. So the few aspects of better living and the purpose of love in living is what I want to bring to people’s attention through the themes I work with. I know that sounds strange. I know that some people see me as a monster, and other people see me as a kind of a person who believes in what he does. And I do believe in what I do. However, we’re living in a time where everyone has their own baggage, and there’s a kind of relativity that is scary in the sense that if people believe in, say, relativism, then they can believe that the scribbling of a monkey is equal to the writing of Shakespeare. That’s not the case, because morality dictates that we have criteria, and what I try to do in my work is to present criteria of conscience and morality. And that’s what I want to leave behind—that’s my message. D

Interview by Guy Cross: co-publisher and creative director of THE magazine.

Photograph of Joel-Peter Witkin’s studio by Guy Cross.

we make a leap. That said,

—let’s say, through an image—

be, [laughs] because trying to

sometimes what happens in the

then it’s time to consider

make a discovery represents

process of turning ourselves

other things. But basically

a

direction.

inside out to manifest a personal

when a person is growing as a

Sometimes we trip, sometimes

vision, we grow. And then when

visual artist, he’s growing in all

we walk faster, and sometimes

we reach that particular place

sensibilities, including the spirit.

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2012

it

TM: It’s definitely exploitation. Okay, what image-makers are you impressed by? What two or three people are you able to say, ‘Gee, they are impressed by what I do, they like what I do?’ J-PW: I think that’s a very good question. One of three people would have to be Jesus Christ, because I’m going to see him when I die anyway.

the work for the good of man and for the glory of God— that’s where I’m coming from. The last thing Oscar Wilde said is, “Either me or this wallpaper has to go.” In my case, I’ll be satisfied when I die, or when I make that transition into eternity while I’m printing, or while I’m making my work in the darkroom—because what I do in my work is to bring light to the darkness. And that’s why some of the subject matter that I’ve always used is about that kind of clarity. I think that in a very strange way—in a very ultra-personal way—the base of my work is to make life better; for people to view what I’ve encountered and present it as an encounter in life.

should

growth

Or

any pornography? J-PW: Well, of course I’ve looked at pornography. I think it’s a horrible abuse of the person’s spirit, the body, and the purpose of life. It’s terrible.

THE magazine | 43

Sculpture faculty and student

February 9 through March 8, 2012 Opening Reception: February 9, 4:30 to 6:30 p.m.

Thomas Osgood

Terri Elkins

Santa Fe Community College School of Arts and Design | Visual Arts Gallery Mondays through Fridays, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Dee Anne Wagner

6401 Richards Ave. • (505) 428-1501 www.sfcc.edu

Jack Slentz

CRITICAL REFLECTIONS

Arlene Shechet: The Thick

of I t James Kelly Contemporary 550 South Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe

It was the dead of winter

in 1915 and Russian painter Kazimir

Malevich’s

Black

Square, along with a dozen or so of his other highly conceptual paintings, was premiering in St. Petersburg.

Malevich was at the forefront of the Russian avant-garde, but gallery-goers found his geometric paintings perplexing and art critics were skeptical. With what I like to imagine as a twinkle in his eye, Malevich defended his starkly abstract paintings by saying, “art does not need us, and it never did.” Enigmatically independent and self-assured, the strange and lovely sculptures of Arlene Shechet share in this sentiment.

Classically trained as a sculptor, Shechet has worked with glazed and fired clay for many years, and with her most recent exhibition, The Thick of It, she advances the medium with intelligence and humor. Shechet revels in the inherent earthiness and humility of clay—qualities which shine in all of their imperfect, silly beauty. Variously rendered in shades of metallic silver or matte, chalky grey, they are eccentrically abstract even by contemporary standards. They are curiously formless—often slumping or drooping as if they’ve had a little too much to drink. When one of them does resemble any kind of recognizable form, it invariably is more akin to an intergalactic or deep-sea creature than it is to an earthbound one.

Their amorphous shapes give them an air of precarious haphazardness without ever making them appear unfinished or carelessly crafted. They are nebulous little fortresses, resting on pedestals which are sculpturally significant on their own. Created with the same blend of self-possessed composure and raucous wit as the clay forms they buttress, they pay homage to the decorative and ornamental potential of classic ceramic art while stating in no uncertain terms that contemporary clay sculpture is indisputably and unapologetically innovative. This could mean a dense wooden column randomly splattered with black and dark blue paint. Or, it could look like an Eames barstool, with thin metal legs somehow supporting a spare plank at the top. Of course it could also mean a dense stack of pastel cement bricks, intricately wedged together to form a short podium.

One of the more striking examples of this collaboration between support structure and supported sculpture is Rascal. A slab of distressed wood is gingerly held aloft by spindly wrought-iron legs. Atop this is the actual sculpture, which sports a bulging, curvy build. The thing is primarily forest green, with lighter viridian patches spread across it like moss. Jutting out from the form are stumpy, limb-like appendages.

Its chunky green “body” is capped with a bulbous, mushroomy sort of crown; altogether these elements make for a humorous contrast to the gauntness of the stool upon which it rests. There is something

Arlene Shechet, Rascal, ceramic, solid wood and steel base, 59½” x 17” x 17”, 2011 Arlene Shechet, Beyond Itself (Red, White and Blue), ceramic and brick base, 12” x 8¾ ” x 5”, 2011

perversely comic about a pile of painted clay, resembling bile or Nickelodeon slime, coolly perched on a skinny stool.

This fascinating juxtaposition of elements is continued in Beyond Itself (Red, White, and Blue).

If some of Shechet’s sculptures look like body parts (or functions), the fleshy, jumbled coils in this one are unmistakably suggestive of intestines. Fittingly, if nauseatingly, it is glazed all over in a Pepto-Bismol pink and its twisted segments are marked with vein-like dashes of crimson. Unlike other works in the exhibition, Beyond Itself rests on a wooden shelf that’s covered with a streaky wash of white paint and attached to the wall. The placement of the sculpture on the wall adds playful intrigue to this somewhat macabre piece.

Borrowed from Ghosts is similarly titillating. Once again, Shechet’s pairing of pedestal with art piece is quirkily perfect. This time a snow-white form all but hovers atop a narrow, bleached wood column. In its alabaster wispiness one can clearly see where its tenebrous title comes from; its appearance is positively otherworldly. Voluminously puffed upward at its base is a flattened spout, like a pursed cartoon mouth. Is it whispering or breathing? It’s too silly to be scary, but in its diaphanous pallor it suggests a certain nuisance.

In their unusual mixture of austerity and wackiness, the marvelously weird sculptures of Arlene Shechet are keenly self-aware: they quietly but summarily overthrow the functional and decorative qualities we tend to associate with classic ceramic art. Despite their often goofy appearances, Shechet’s sculptures nevertheless manage to communicate a sense of legitimacy and respect. They are stripped down and naked; they are humble and shapeless and ancient, or else impossibly young. What they are not is conventionally pretty—who cares? Prettiness is rather hilariously beside the point. Malevich would have been proud.

—Iris McLister

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THE magazine | 45

Deborah Klezmer: Fictions Rio Bravo Fine Art 110 North Broadway, Truth or Consequences

Incorporating glass,

found objects and text, artist Deborah Klezmer’s

sculptural assemblages evoke modern illuminated manuscripts, documenting the history of women who have loved other women. The exhibition’s title Fictions directs the viewer to look at specific moments in history and the incomparable spirit of dignity with which women have moved forward through the decades despite continual opposition. “My earliest training was in the theatre and I love that feeling of being transported to another world, a sort of parallel reality. It is the goal of these works to present a visual window into someplace else, someone else. We are nothing if not our fictions.”

The long history of glass includes definitions, descriptions, creators, and methods that are seemingly endless and often utilitarian. Glass has become a dominant participant in the contemporary art world, moving like molten lava into shapes, colors and glistening lighttransforming forms. In Klezmer’s hands, glass becomes a means of personal expression as she incorporates narrative and image, baroque items of memory and representations of history into her work. She builds the finished work using a range of techniques and materials rather than the more familiar method we recognize as hot furnace work resulting in blown shapes and objects.

Klezmer’s early history began at New York University where she received a BFA in dramatic writing in 1988. She went on to serve as an editor of women’s historical biography, most notably of the seventeen-volume Women in World History, which received the prestigious Dartmouth Award for Outstanding Reference Work in 2001. All the while, however, there were glass shards all over her kitchen counter.

As time passed other found objects appeared and her work developed into what she terms “mixed-media glasswork.” After a stint in a dark basement studio, a trip to Santa Fe in 2004 brought the realization that “Santa Fe had apparently sucked the light out of the rest of the world.” Her subsequent move the next year was the obvious conclusion.

Although built with the same technical rigor, Klezmer’s new work at Rio Bravo Fine Art represents a marked departure from her earlier body of work. Given the unique opportunity to design and oversee the entire installation in Rio Bravo’s spacious galleries, she made a commitment to feminist and gay rights issues. I have observed no other artist using the medium of glass with this degree of architectural integrity that also conveys such personal messages.

On Nassau Street, a large, double-paneled sculpture in a steel surround, is irregularly shaped and suspended in space to be visible 360º. Separate orange and blue swirled glass areas are set within the framework, which also includes three image transparencies, a story, antique hardware, and antique glass vaults along with Klezmer’s signature ornate keyhole escutcheon. Transparencies are reproduced from glass plate negatives and show a boy and a girl. These images—reminders of early photographic techniques—illustrate the narrative of a young girl who dresses as a boy to free herself of the limitations imposed on girls of her day. Although the piece feels unpredictable, the elements come together to create their own discourse, pushing the limits of symmetry and balance.

Memory in Blue, also suspended in the gallery space, is particularly sumptuous with soldered well-balanced areas in rich shades of blue. The panel is inset with L.C. Tiffany glass jewels, antique hardware, an image on transparency, and a window of text. The narrative remembers a moment of intimacy, and is illustrative of the convergence of past and present in Klezmer’s work.

In Klezmer’s own words, “There is no escaping the fact that the personal is political.

What I wish people understood more is that the political is also personal.” With the piece An Abomination, Really?, Klezmer has taken the certificate of her marriage (to Ann Reuland)—issued in Massachusetts—and created a collage with a photograph of them both, as well as some personal mementos.

If there is one other observation to be made, there are no pieces in the show to reflect the mid-20th century. One wonders how Klezmer would shape these years. Then again, perhaps it is not so bad to be left wanting more.

—Susan Christie Deborah Klezmer, Memory in Blue, glass, L.C. Tiffany glass jewels, antique hardware, 41” x 16”, nd.

CRITICAL REFLECTIONS

SuSAnnA cArliSle

And

bruce hAmilton: runAwA w yS wA y

Indigeneity versus invasion:

new mexico ArtS rt c entenniAl p roJ ro ect S pA p ce 54 ½ eAStt SAn frA r nciSco S treet , S AntA nt f e ntA

space, specimens of the trio of green culprits are displayed, quasi-scientifically, in long glass tubes with their propagating organs in super-sized petri dishes.

it’s an environmentalist’s nightmare. Anyone who lives within a block or two of those ubiquitous

This highly effective exhibition brings up questions of who and what survive the clash of

(at least on the Westside of Santa Fe) Siberian Elms and their horrible little pod-monster offspring,

invasion, and what kinds of hybrids might result. In the case of Runaways, the invasive species

which sprout in the unlikeliest crannies of your yard every damned summer, knows about invasive

have taken so well to their environments that they seem to exist, at least in our collective

fauna that grow like crazy, taking over indigenous soil and turning it into a fecund breeding ground for

subconscious, as aboriginal inhabitants. The salt cedar has proven a terrible invader in New

alien life. In fact, that’s why Governor Tingley had the trees planted in New Mexico during the New

Mexico since its introduction here in the nineteenth century as a decorative plant. Still, in

Deal era; they grow like mad and provide shade during the hot summer months. The rest of the

2009, ecohydrologist Edward Glenn Long wrote in the Newsletter of the Native Plant Society

time, you wish you could kill them. Turns out, though, the execrable things are worse than a mess—

of New Mexico that “tamarisk has become an important riparian plant that now contributes

getting rid of a decades-old Siberian Elm is as easy as dynamiting your entire neighborhood. Axe

to the ecosystem. Since we have too few naturally flowing rivers that periodically flood, we

one and ten new trees will explode on the site like blood-sucking leeches from a B-grade sci-fi flick.

have created a saline soil condition in riparian areas in which few plants thrive. Tamarisk,

Susanna Carlisle and Bruce Hamilton, a married couple known for locating moving pictures

which prospers in saline conditions, has now replaced species that thrived in different riparian

within relevant, hand-crafted installations, have created an exquisite exhibition out of videos of

conditions. Without it, many plants and animals could not now survive.” No longer can a black-

invasive species in New Mexico—our own salt cedars, or tamarisks—as well as Florida Everglades

and-white position be taken; these plants are part of their new environment just as certainly as

intruders the Burma reed and Australian pine. Their exhibition is the result of a partnership

Europeans call the Americas home. Talk about a deadly invasive species! (In case you find that

between the Art in Public Places division of New Mexico Arts and Urban Paradise Guild (based

last to be hyperbolic, ask a Native person.) But here we European-Americans are, and I don’t

out of Miami) to build awareness of the effects of non-indigenous plants on their adopted habitats.

think there are plans to deport us en masse.

For Runaways, images—beautiful images—of the aliens are projected onto recycled glass blocks

The project space, a three-hundred-square-foot room with old hardwood floors and a

(built in collaboration with Stacey Neff), with ambient sound adding another level of elegance to

skylight, is the perfect gallery for this show. The dim light—natural, projected, and artificial—lends

the installation. The audio tracks evoke nature’s tranquility: crickets chirp, the sea rolls in and out,

a haunting beauty to what could have been a didactic display of “bad” plants. As noted, the Burma

the wind blows. Showing the videos on smallish glass-cube devices gives the installation an obvious

reed video is the loveliest of the group; I only wish technical logistics had allowed it to be positioned

transparency at the same time that it shows us this stuff doesn’t go away. You’re not going to fall,

more prominently toward the room’s center so that it could easily be viewed from all sides. Like the

Alice-like, through the glass into a world where this isn’t a fact of our environment. The artists don’t

Everglades themselves, though, clear visual range is uncommon in the tangle of tropical swampland;

take the obvious route of vilifying the three non-indigenous trespassers; rather than deny their

instead, one must insinuate oneself, snakelike, around the piece, just as it has crept through the land

beauty, they present it as the fait accompli it is, most successfully with the Burma reed video. Shot

of southern Florida and the Keys.

on what must have been a stormy day, its moodiness is mesmerizing. On each wall of the project

—Kathryn m DaV aVis

Susanna Carlisle and Bruce Hamilton, Runaways, mixed-media video installation, 2011

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the magazine | 47

doll: Group Show 78 citieS

Keri Ataumbi’s Elephant Girl

of

tower GAllery Gold roA o d , p oJ o oA o que

presents a small, pathetic figure formed primarily of nylon pantyhose material.

The figure is twisted and broken, evoking the kind of creepy intimacy that characterizes

(and the story she tells) is a gem among many strong pieces in this group show. The doll

the work of Louise Bourgeois or Kiki Smith, giving the piece power well beyond its size.

is inspired by a day in the artist’s early childhood when an adult friend of her parents

The idea of bringing a figure to death rather than to life is an interesting twist on concepts

makes it clear that she isn’t really going to grow up to become an elephant. Crushed

of sculptural presence, with ramifications for everything from abortion issues to how

by this intrusion upon the boundless world of her childhood imagination, she examines

the mainstream handles death and dying. The poignancy of this broken figure and the

herself in the mirror, lamenting that her nose will never grow into a trunk and that

empathy it evokes is palpable.

her ears won’t ever become the big, flapping ears she’d looked forward to. The sweet

Similarly, Rose Simpson, who is also the show’s excellent curator, presents an

sadness of this loss of childhood innocence is magically imbued in the white elephant-

oversized dead wasp in a fetal position. She created it in response to finding a dead wasp

girl doll created by Ataumbi. We are approaching a day when an adult may well feel

curled up on an earlier sculpture she had made of a human being in the same position.

compelled to tell a child, not only can you not grow up to be an elephant, but you may

The rhyming of the forms intrigued her and in Empathy she elevates the utterly mundane

never grow up to see one alive.

into the realm of art, amplifying her intimate experience, stressing the importance of small

Many of the best pieces in the show share similar elements of autobiography and attention to detail. Overall, the show creates a point of return to childhood imagination

things. This is what Doll does best.

—JOn carV ar er

as a source. All the work in the show is figurative. All are near the same size, and all are literally dolls or images of dolls.

A return to the intimate figure of the doll as a way of confronting the real world negotiations of adulthood is a common subtheme.

The Negotiation of Youth, by Marty Two Bulls Jr., is perfectly realized. The small deer sculpture is concise in execution and materials, but as long (if not longer) on implications than any Bruce Nauman sculpture. Encapsulating a moment of initiation into adulthood, the deer is anatomically accurate and formed around what could be bullets that have been removed, leaving out-of-scale cylindrical absences in the running animal, whose back legs appear ready to crumple like the tinfoil from which the sculpture is made.

The humbleness of the material in contrast to the strength of the piece puts a fine edge to certain questions concerning what art actually is and where it actually resides. In Two Bulls’ childhood, tin foil was used by the adults to make toys for the children. The associations of this simple medium and how it is being used here are multiple and meaningful. They include the decisive moment between the hunter and the hunted, the decision to take life, and that decision made for food vs. the accidents of war and warriors.

Do humans grow up and return to harmony with nature, or will we smother ourselves in our childish delusions?

In Adaptation, by Ginger Dunnil and Cannupa HanskaLuger, we see a couple who have converted to a more natural form of costuming and lifestyle. These amazingly crafted figures sport a neo-native look predicated upon the post-apocalypse and the moment beyond the collapse of everything that’s collapsing right now. They’re stepping out and re-starting the world with serious style. Snow Erika, by Erika Wanenmacher, has a similar vibe. She stands dressed all in white wool, but her teeth are chattering and her lips are raw with cold. These are visitor dolls from other times and places.

America Meredith’s beautifully painted image of a traveler holding hands with a stuffed Wild Things doll is the only painting in the show. This piece subtly up-ends stereotypes of indigenous peoples as so-called “savages,” by reframing the title of Sendak’s book Where the Wild Things Are as a question. Given the horrendous genocide enacted upon the native populations of both Americas, or the current policy of endless war pursued by Bush and Obama, we might do well to figure out just who exactly the “wild things” are, and just where the barbarous behavior really resides.

Eliza Naranjo-Morse presents a doll that is also a standout (while lying down). Made Passed Away. It’s OK.

Keri Ataumbi, Elephant Girl, Barin-tanned buckskin, porcelain, fabric, 2k Keum-boo on fine silver, 2011

CRITICAL REFLECTIONS

donAld AnderSon: An ArtiSt’S Gift

iSAAc’S GAllery 309 north virGiniA, roSwell

Stand on the peak of a mountain, contemplate the long ranges

This is a geologist’s view of landscape—this understanding of deep time and its natural

of hills … and all the other glories offered to your view, and

artifacts of matter on a vast scale—and it holds the key to Anderson’s imagination and

what feeling seizes you? You lose yourself in boundless space,

gives him his vision. That said, the artist’s vision is not without its sensuality, as evidenced

your self disappears….

in works such as Lakeland Doorway. This painting has an almost cozy feel as the viewer

—Carl Gustav Carus from his Letters on Landscape Painting; Carus was

peers outside from within some habitation with its brightly colored door and window

a follower of the nineteenth-century artist Caspar David Friedrich.

framing a gorgeous glacial lake and soft, almost voluptuous gray foothills. Stairs lead from

Donald Anderson is

the door down to the lake,` and this half-in, half-out landscape, while not characteristic of a man who straddles a kind of geologic divide

between two distinct worlds—the world of business and the world of art. Trained as

Anderson’s work as a whole, is like a gentle but vivid hint of the artist’s desire to balance the inner with the outer man.

—Diane armitaG rmita e

both an engineer and a painter, Anderson became the highly successful founder of the Anderson Oil Company, and yet he has also devoted many years developing himself as an artist whose main focus has been painting remote and rugged landscapes that have an otherworldly quality. Anderson has brought his deep understanding of landforms—with their dramatic synclines and anticlines—and combined that knowledge, necessary to his business career, with his metaphysical longing to merge with the geology that he records in his paintings. In this back and forth manner, swinging between business and art, Anderson is both in the world and resolutely outside of it as his imagination searches the high peaks, the gorges, and the rolling hills for his alter ego, his other identity as a man of solitude very much at home in solitary places.

I first saw Anderson’s work at the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, in Roswell, almost twenty years ago. He opened the museum as a way to showcase the work he collected from individuals who had received grants from the Roswell Artist in Residence Program, a series of year-long residencies that Anderson has been funding for forty-five years. In the course of creating a space for the work of over two hundred artists, Anderson also set aside a wall for his own paintings.

His cool and moody palette of de-saturated colors and the distinct sense of geographic isolation in his landscapes act as a stealth counter-valence to the variety of pieces by so many different artists. When I was introduced to Anderson’s paintings, they immediately reminded me of work by the German painter Caspar David Friedrich such as Wanderer Above a Sea of Mist, from 1818.

If you took out the figure of the man with his back to the viewer, standing on a promontory in the foreground of Friedrich’s work, you might have a work by Anderson. In Anderson’s painting Canyon Wall, Rain, from 1989, if you added a rocky shelf in the foreground and

Donald Anderson, Barbondale, acrylic on panel, 16” x 21”, 1973

placed a figure looking away from us, you might have a work by Friedrich.

The painting Canyon Wall, Rain is one of the strongest works in An Artist’s Gift, an overview of forty-three years of painting.

Here, Anderson makes no attempt to hide his fascination with the inhospitable and the existentially lonely. Yet, for all the remoteness of the scene, there is a visually elegant handling of nature’s most rugged artifacts. You wouldn’t want to be caught in a torrential downpour trying to scale the walls of these lethal, knife-edge ridges, but looking at this work you somehow feel cradled in the beauty of Anderson’s line and the soft pastel shades of brown, tan, creamy white, and gray seen through a veil of rain. This ironic comfort in the remote and the awe inspiring that we find in Canyon Wall, Rain is totally absent in On the Way to Khyber Pass, from 1969. This dark and brooding painting is enough to induce nightmares, so alien is this landscape, so distant is a sense of any civilizing force. The Khyber Pass image presents a decidedly brutal mood in its black, mountainous up-thrusts about to crunch in on themselves and grind everything to dust. However, this extremely bleak vision, weighted toward nature at its most impenetrable, isn’t really typical of Anderson’s landscapes.

For all the desolate vistas in the artist’s paintings, a blue sky, a raking beam of light on a hill, or a grassy riverbank generally softens the fact that Anderson’s visual metaphysics don’t admit the presence of other people. Anderson is an artist who sees the world as a series of tectonic plates always shifting and creating new configurations of geographic realities that are then subject to the forces of erosion.

Donald Anderson, Lakeland Doorway, acrylic on canvas, 60” x 80”, 2000

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the magazine | 49

Natural Beauty: 2011 Invitational Exhibition

Walk through the

Roswell Museum and Art Center 100 West 11th Street, Roswell

front entrance of the Roswell

Davis Mountains. Davidoff collected ash from the burn area for the drawings. The blend of

Museum and Art Center (RMAC)

charcoal, ash, burnt plant material, and wax creates a smoky effect on the golden-brown

and there is an arresting teaser on your left, a flower garden with twenty-five buds and

background that is at once beautiful, pensive, and sinister.

blooms that reach up to greet you. Titled Synthetic Stems, and created by Tempe, Arizona

Ana Maria Hernando’s seven works—eight if you count her poem Dame Flores (Give

artist Susan Beiner, each bud, stalk, and flower springs from a specially manufactured yellow-

Me Flowers) which was wisely included by curator Brooks—move us into a festive and

green inverted demi-globe base, and rises with green porcelain leaves and foam flowers

brightly colored world. Hernando, who is both artist and poet, incorporates textiles, resin,

in shades of pink, brown, and peach. It isn’t until you reach the museum’s two-thousand-

and collaged patterns and papers into her work. The overall impression is one of being

square-foot Russell Vernon Hunter Gallery that you realize the Beiner flower installation is

wrapped in reds, oranges, and pinks. Her use of polymer resin discs of varying sizes in the

part of the Museum’s 2011 Invitational Exhibition, Natural Beauty.

wall installation Pongco, III (Circle of Power, III) and in the floor installation La Montaña Trae

Along with three other installations by Beiner, the exhibition includes the work of Julia

Barcas de Azucenas, IV (The Mountain Brings us Boats Full of Lilies, IV) serves to magnify the

Barello (Las Cruces, New Mexico), Suzi Davidoff (El Paso, Texas), and Ana Maria Hernando

flower cutouts in Pongco, and to create gigantic water droplets in La Montaña. The flowers in

(Boulder, Colorado). Each artist expresses her individual relationship to nature. Beiner creates

the former are from cloth embroidered by the Carmelite Cloistered Nuns of the Monastery

luscious ceramic structures encrusted with leaves and blooms and then shocks us by hiding

of Saint Teresa of Jesus, in Buenos Aires. Hernando embeds the red, orange, and peach-

a ceramic bolt, screw, or acrylic rod behind a calla lily. In her pieces titled Artificial Selection,

hued flowers in twenty-eight resin discs that individually look like giant paperweights with

Synthetic Reality, and Germinating, it is as though the plants in that entryway garden have been

a pressed flower inside, but collectively become petals in the fifty-eight by fifty-eight inch

gathered, layered, and rearranged. The more you study the individual glossy teal, blue, and

far-from-shy wallflower installation.

green botanical ceramic shapes, the more you look for species you can recognize. Just as you

Julia Barello’s creativity astonishes in a different way in her two large-scale installations.

spot one, you also notice a burgundy bolt piercing the organic cluster. On closer inspection,

She uses exposed, discarded X-ray and M.R.I. film and cuts it into exquisite botanical shapes.

the Synthetic Reality wall installation is a jigsaw of sixteen ceramic chunks. Artificial Selection,

Wisteria begins with the tree’s trunk on one wall of the gallery, turns a corner, and stretches

on the next wall, alternates sand-colored bands with rings packed with ceramic barnacle-like

along a second wall, much as the actual plant might twist, climb, and spread. The translucent

shapes sprouting acrylic red-tipped rods that quiver. Germinating is a line of five twenty-two-

tendrils, leaves, and flowers move and shimmer with the slightest motion of air as visitors

inch-tall by twenty-six-inch-diameter ceramic domed pods on the floor, some sporting those

approach and move away. Up close, the viewer can just pick out bits of the actual anatomical

same probing rods in twenty-four-inch to sixty-inch lengths. Like something from Doctor

and numerical information on the original films. Outside In, Again includes some one hundred

Who, these creatures give you the sense that they are ready to follow you around the gallery

forty individually cut leaf and other botanical forms. Barello pins them to the wall at lengths

if they feel like it.

of three to ten inches with pins she makes herself. The result is one hundred forty additional

Suzi Davidoff’s twelve drawings in the exhibition blend natural materials with traditional

shapes created by the smoky shadows that the M.R.I. film casts on the gallery walls.

drawing media. In Autumn Clematis with Mercury and Venus’s Dance, Davidoff uses charcoal,

It was Assistant Director Caroline Brooks’ inspired idea to “plant” the Beiner garden

watercolor, moss, earth, graphite, mica, gesso, and wax to create what curator Caroline

by the front entrance. In a similar creative enticement for the viewer, Barello’s Outside

Brooks describes as “trajectories one could imagine while peering up through the tangle of

In, Again begins on a wall outside the gallery and swirls its way inside. With this beautiful

plants in the foreground at the sky beyond serving to bring together both visible and invisible

exhibition, Brooks and the artists have created an effect that is at once fanciful and organic.

patterns.” Davidoff’s series Elegy: April, Madera Canyon is her response to last year’s Rock

—Susan Wider

House Fire, in Texas, where a fire in an abandoned house spread to Fort Davis and the

Top: Ana Maria Hernando, Pongco, III (Circle of Power, III), embroidered cloth in polymer resin, 2011.

Courtesy: Robischon Gallery, Denver.

Left: Suzi Davidoff, Autumn Clematis with Mercury and Venus’s Dance, mixed media, 2009.

Courtesy: Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, Santa Fe.

CRITICAL REFLECTIONS

michele mikeSell: breAd & circuS

The flower that

chiAroScuro 702 ½ & 708 cAnyon roA o d , S AntA nt f e ntA Michele

who live in an endless present of bread and circuses, oblivious to the consequences. In this

Mikesell’s newest body of work can

regard, Mikesell’s varied iconographies and purposes of circus imagery from the American

be found in Juvenal’s Satire 10, where the poet suggests that “panem et circenses” are

twentieth century can be explored as modern figures moving along well-plotted courses

the only remaining cares of a Roman populace that has given up its birthright of political

(the circle of the circus ring) in a state of sheer stupidity, and in the case of The Ringmaster,

freedom. Mikesell herself explains, “In these ten paintings I have returned to my favorite

prevarication and malice.

festoons

the

bier

of

subject—the circus. The title for the body of work, Bread & Circus, is taken from a quote

In Mikesell’s portraiture, the surface detail is dead-on: the figures, the flesh, their faces,

by the Roman writer Juvenal ‘in reference to the government staging elaborate spectacles

their costumes; everything that is literal. However, her figures signify an existence without

and passing out food to pacify the public.’” Indeed, her earnest and dutiful exploration of

signification—or, rather, signification (as far as Juvenal’s quote is concerned) is not part of the

circus life delivers a rather inchoate connection to Juvenal’s maxim by focusing instead on

consciousness of its participants. We have the Ringmaster, as dark and pitiless as a rotting

a period of circus performance much removed from the context and meaning of Juvenal’s

pier. We have the Trapeze Artist, droll chanteuse swathed in a whirligig of mysterious lace

famous line. In this regard, it is difficult for the title of the exhibition to be accessed in the

and raven’s wings—untouchable, vaguely satanic, and bored. We have the Cannon Girl,

work. The claim that Harlequins and weepy Saltimbanques somehow function “under the

a steampunk doll full of thrust and torque. Credit has to be given to Mikesell’s technical ability,

banner of government dissent” might lead one to the conclusion that the real subject on

her genius for the near impossible joining of expressionist archaism, sensual portraiture, and

display here is neither Circus Maximus, nor Barnum & Bailey, but the ineffectiveness of

Surrealist kitsch. One almost expects something substantial to emerge from the immediacy

political discourse in art.

and lushness of these candied and atmospheric pieces. But the oratorical storm that emerged

To be sure, the circus is a subject that for many artists has been filled with

from Juvenal’s Satires in the second century, when carnivorous Furies were capable of grand

metaphoric possibility, formal experimentation, and exotic allure. Much more than popular

lamentation, has convulsed into a decrepit weather report in our age. Instead of Furies

entertainment, the circus is a dazzling alternative to everyday life—a spectacle of man’s

we have The Chandelier, a symbolist in rabbit ears, glaring banefully out at the vast terrain

tragic failings, as seen in the buffoonish performances of the clowns, and a vision of his rich

of appropriated motifs. At its best, Mikesell’s lyrical but hermetic work creates surface

potential, symbolized by the daring and skill of the aerialists. But it is also hell. In order

expectations that are never realized. One wishes that the gorgeous mastery of affectless

to paint it one would need to get beyond the postmodernist turn of mind—recycling the

chic and cosmetic anxiety encountered in Fresh Start, a tremulous and damp Saltimbanque in

already recycled—to something more like magical invocation; a raising of the worst public

smeared makeup, would prompt a sense of complexity, or depth, or psychic intensity, rather

horrors of Arcadia, a palimpsest on which gangsters and politicians, clowns and whores,

than the image of a lost and lovely puppet. But it doesn’t.

the doomed, the uprooted, the crushed, and the demented, have all left their traces.

— nthOny hassett —a

The burning phantasmagorias of Breughel are closer in texture and weight to Juvenal’s cruel syntax. But this is America, home of Burning Man, where the bourgeois folklore of the circus turns primitive intensity into Warholwellian atavism, where Aeschylean Furies are funneled through vivacious herbivores, grazing on the sugar and carbohydrate of escape—escape from the world and history.

In

trying

to

understand how people face one

historical must

events,

admit

that

not everyone historicizes reality, that an awareness of a distance between oneself in the past and oneself in the present is not a given. In fact, reflection on the past, on time, and on the relation of our individual and collective selves to evolving history is rare. Most of mankind lives in a manufactured present.

Indeed, the rejection or neglect of history is the only way in which the majority of mankind can cope with the cascade of horrors that assail us every day of our lives. It is here that the meaning of

Juvenal’s

accusation

becomes clear, because it is clear that Juvenal is denouncing the people,

Michele Mikesell, The Ringmaster, 48” x 36”, 2011

Michele Mikesell, Fresh Start, 40” x 30”,’ 2011

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the magazine | 51

dAvid SimpSon: Gold vAriAtionS: interference pAintinGS

peter bureGA: new work

chA h rlotte J AckSon f ine A rt 554 South GuA u dAlupe S treet , S AntA nt f e ntA

David Simpson

offers a challenge: the radical reduction of our expectations of what a painting has to offer.

Critic David Bonetti, in discussing Simpson’s work, wrote that “painting that aims to achieve its

hunter kirklAnd contemporA ontempor ry 200-b cAnyon roA o d , S AntA nt f e ntA

From the moment I

happened to glimpse two of them leaning against the wall of a photography

credentials on the plane of formal integrity resists photography’s attempt at reproduction.” Indeed,

studio, with no identifying label, Peter Burega’s paintings called out to me

these paintings totally resist photographic reproduction. Printed on paper, they look like paint swatches.

in a way that very little recent art has done, even triggering that deliciously

The experience is available in person only. This may be a good thing for viewers of paintings to be

naughty acquisitive urge impossible to fulfill at my income level.

reminded of.

On display at Hunter Kirkland Contemporary are several of Burega’s

Simpson’s canvases are multilayered, first with acrylic paint, then with a material called

abstract works on laminated birch panels. Rather than letting their

“interference paint” containing microparticles coated with titanium oxide (or mica) like fish scales,

abstraction sternly remind us of the picture plane, they seem to contain vast

and available in only six colors. The surfaces change depth and hue with changing ambient light, but

inchoate worlds that we encounter in the very process of transformation.

reveal their instability most particularly as one moves across the space in front of them. Hues and tones

Vivid, dynamic colors explode, then slide aside to reveal things behind or

shimmer, subtly changing; surfaces take light and wear finishes that transcend pigment. The viewer

underneath them. In some places they seem to glow with their own inner light.

must keep moving, like a fish in water, to animate the work.

Perhaps it will give some idea of their effect to invoke Turner’s landscapes, but

Trying to engage with these works, I thought of the materiality of concrete poetry; of Stanley

with a more contemporary color palette and mood. Instead of an evocation of

Cavell’s notion that modernity calls for a skepticism in which our relation to the world is not one

the misty Thames, we get a sense of cities dissolving (Windward Going Through,

of knowing but of responsiveness and acceptance; of Louis Zukofsky’s Objectivist criterion that

2011), of firestorm and smoke (Water Music No. 28, 2010), of deserts blasted

“a ... [work of art] is not a metaphor for something else”; of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s aesthetics of

by wind and debris (Horsetable Bay No. 2, 2011).

participation, which posits an artwork as an event as well as an object, so that we must ask not “what is it” or “what does it mean” but “how does it occur”?

Burega, who was a pianist, an attorney, and a television director prior to starting to paint full-time, seems to aim at bringing dynamic states of

Evolving since the 1950s through several phases of masterful abstraction, Simpson has arrived at

tension into an aesthetic balance. The images are produced by applying

this attempted subtraction of all expressive overtones. The painting, sanding, scraping, and trowelling

layer upon layer of paint with a scraper and then strategically subtracting

process by which he produces these objects enacts a quest (like that of Duchamp, Cage, and others in

it. This may imply something chaotically expressionistic, but these works

that lineage) for something beyond personal choice (at least on the micro-level), something beyond the

couldn’t be farther from the blunt gesturality of Action painting. Rather,

artist’s control. The result is indeterminacy and minimalist ambiguity pointing to the object’s material

they radiate a confidence and sense of completeness that we usually

properties: a kinetic interaction played out on a surface just a few molecules thick. In the 1970s, Robert

only see in nature or works by a few Old Masters. Though much may

Irwin sublimely engaged light in destabilizing viewers’ sense of space, color, and depth, calling into

be an accident of process, nothing feels arbitrary. Implied grids structure

question the act of perception. Carl Andre placed arrangements of ordinary bricks, or squares of lead

each composition, subtly dividing the canvases into explicit and satisfying

and copper, on a gallery floor, calling into question the assigned meaning.

proportions one is tempted to call “classical.” Sometimes Burega places

Only a tiny percentage of the already small audience for poetry in this culture appreciates non-

small squares of solid color on the edges of the paintings—at corners, or

referential/concrete/objectivist/text-sound poetry. I believe Simpson’s new paintings address a similar

at the termini of strategic subdivisions. The images feel like records of real

tiny minority in the visual art realm. They are for the few. Yet they do hold a fleeting fascination, akin to

events, carved from the magma of sedimented colors, upon a strict matrix

the experience of hearing the names of colors in unknown langua languages.

of the artist’s intention. There is a lot going on, but harmony is the final

—marina la Palma

note. Take a look and see if you agree with me.

—marina la Palma

David Simpson, Burnished Gold, acrylic and interference pigment on canvas, 48” x 48”, 2011 Peter Burega, Water Music No. 28, oil on wood panel, 48” x 48”, 2011

CRITICAL REFLECTIONS

rAy belcher: cAStleS

And the

Sky

Solvitur in modo—

leGendS SAntA nt f e ntA 125 lincoln Avenue, SAntA nt f e ntA

Put (too) simply, the gelatin

device and aesthetic principle. White Church paints some hard-scrabble town out of the

silver print (GSP) is to

Old West, seen through a worm’s-eye view down the center of Main Street ending at a

the digital print in photography what oil is to acrylic in painting. The GSP process involves

steepled white church flanked by Spartan wooden buildings. The whiteness of the tiny

monochrome imaging on a film (negative) coated with light-sensitive silver halides whose

church almost glows in the ionized light of ominous storm clouds. The very sparseness

exposure to light in contact with light-sensitive paper produces a latent image that is chemically

of the composition gives to the print’s single contrived formal device—its very low

treated (developed) to yield the final, metallic silver, black-and-white print. Arguably, the GSP

perspective—a dramatic force it would not otherwise have: Suddenly we are transported

process produces an image with broader tonal range and greater depth, detail, patina, and

to the legendary past of High Noon, where our ground-level vantage becomes that of

texture than a high-quality digital print. But the critical difference, perhaps, is the degree

the fallen outlaw, outgunned by town marshal Gary Cooper and mourned only by the

and extent of engagement with the subject that the GSP requires of the photographer. The

film’s immortal lyrics: “Although you’re grievin’, I can’t be leavin’ / Until I shoot Frank

recent exhibition of photographs by Ray Belcher at Legends Santa Fe could make that case,

Miller dead.”

but viewers will be far more inclined to simply experience the work.

One subject that pervades Belcher’s work and perhaps best illustrates its power of

Belcher mines this superior tonal quality of the gelatin silver print process to yield

understatement is the sky—more precisely, cloud formations. In her written tribute to his

the dramatic import of an image. Sky Serpent depicts the corner of a Baroque architectural

work, critic Lucy Lippard links Belcher’s skies to the cloud-terrace forms common in Pueblo

cornice comprising a horizontal band or parapet of paired sculptural plaques with facing

rock art of the Galisteo Basin. The local link has a longer pedigree if we consider the early-

reliefs of a feathered serpent recalling the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl.

nineteenth-century cloud studies of the British landscape painter Constable, who gave to

Belcher frames the serpents from below, their features defined in high relief by bright light and deep shadow against a luminous sky enveloped in dark storm clouds. The effect

the subject a stand-alone status that Belcher appears to share in a print like Cloud of White, and again in June.

conjures the mythic drama of the dread Mesoamerican serpent deity—god of vegetation,

The authenticity of Belcher’s response to what he sees conditions the result of what he

creator of human life, thunder god, lord of the evening star. In Path, Lightning, a disturbed

shoots. Solvitur in modo, firmitur in re: the image is realized through the GSP process, yet is

tombstone in the foreground leans against its marble base in a long-untended cemetery,

grounded in the subject. Taking up these features of a timeless landscape inflected by human

its once sacred soil now reclaimed by the high desert. Yet the white surface of the stone

history, Belcher weaves a seamless tapestry of documentary and drama.

slab slouching toward the small path receding into the night is wonderfully quickened by

—richarD tOBin

parallel lightning strikes on the distant horizon—twin heralds recalling poet Thomas Gray’s graveyard elegy beckoning both the merits and the frailties of the long-forgotten dead “from their dread abode,” where “ … they alike in trembling hope repose.”

Belcher’s lens reflects upon itself in Wall, Window, Pond. The composition frames a stucco wall pierced by a rectangular opening that in turn frames the desert landscape and sky beyond—a selfconscious visual conceit à la Magritte’s “ceci n’est pas une pipe” that both mimics and belies the camera’s claim to capture reality.

Belcher evokes the conceit again in Ruins, Two Windows, in which a frontal view of distant desert panorama glimpsed through windows of opposing walls of an abandoned adobe structure is at the same time pulled to the surface of the picture plane by the

frame-within-a-frame

composition.

And again in Cypress, Deer, whose subject and treatment invoke the uncompromising realism of Courbet’s deer-in-the-woods paintings: Yet here, the overall tonality and texture of the print render photography’s claim to verism magically foiled by the disjunctive scale between the massive sprawl of the ancient cypress and the diminutive deer in the distance, almost invisible to the viewer. This optical disparity somehow underscores the organic unity of the natural world far more eloquently than any idyllic or picturesque approach to nature.

The strength of Belcher’s prints comes from the photographer’s keen sense of understatement, both as formal

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Ray Belcher, Sky Serpent, silver print, 13” x 13”, 1993

the magazine | 53

O

Santa Fe Art Institute Theatre Without Borders

Acting Together on the World Stage A documentary film to be followed by a panel discussion. Feb13, 6pm Tipton Hall Acting Together highlights courageous and creative artists and peacebuilders working in conflict zones.

Ida Kleiterp

Acequias: the art of bringing water

Talk: Apr 9, 6pm Tipton Hall Workshop: Apr 21, time TBD Exhibition: Apr 9-30 A sculptor from Amsterdam, Kleiterp creates installations from her experiences visiting acequia systems around the world. Workshop hosted by SFAI, Railyard Stewards, and the Santa Fe Watershed Association.

March Open Studios - March 22, 5:50pm SFAI See what our March artists and writers have been working on in their Santa Fe studios!

WWW.SFAI.ORG, 505- 424 5050, INFO@SFAI.ORG, SANTA FE ART INSTITUTE, 1600 ST.MICHAELS DRIVE, SANTA FE NM 87505 | THE SANTA FE ART INSTITUTE EXPLORES THE INTERCONNECTIONS OF COMTEMPORARY ART AND SOCIETY THROUGH ARTIST AND WRITER RESIDENCIES, PUBLIC LECTURES AND WORKSHOPS, EXHIBITIONS, & EDUCATIONAL OUTREACH THIS PROGRAM PART ALLY FUNDED BY THE CITY OF SANTA FE ARTS COMMIS ON AND THE 1% ODGER’S TAX AND BY NEW MEXICO ARTS, A DIVIS ON OF THE DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFA RS

GREEN PLANET

Gloria Steinem:

Activist, Journalist, Feminist, and Media Spokesperson for The WomEn’s Liberation Movement

Gloria Steinem, co-founder of New York Magazine and Ms. Magazine, for which she continues to serve as consulting editor, has helped to found many important groups.

They include the Women’s Action Alliance, the National Women’s Political Caucus, Voters for Choice, Choice USA, the Ms. Foundation for Women, Take Our Daughters to Work Day, the Beyond Racism Initiative, and the Women’s Media Center.

Steinem was the keynote speaker at the Bioneers Conference in Marin, California, in October 2011. Below is an excerpt from her talk, “When Women Are People... and Corporations Are Not: Why the First Inequality Will Also Be The Last.”

“The truth will set you free.

”

But first, it will piss you off.

“Gender roles are still confused with nature, just as racial differences were once falsified by science. We all come, after all, from a common embryo. How come that doesn’t get more publicity? Why don’t people emphasize that men have nipples? Why don’t we know that clitorises have the same nerve endings as penises? Hello? We can donate blood types to each other; we can donate organs to each other. Of course, we have become crazed on the subject of hormones, but behavior changes hormones as hormones change behavior. As you may have read recently, the so-called male hormone of testosterone, which females also have some of, is at a lower level in men when they are nurturing children. I so wish Dorothy Dinnerstein, who wrote The Mermaid and the Minotaur— a book I commend to you—were here to see her work confirmed, as she always said that men raising children as much as women is the key to world peace.

Do read The Mermaid and the Minotaur.

And I bet any minute that we’re gonna find out that testosterone is also raised in women when we have to fight in selfdefense or in defense of those we love.”

Steinem’s books include: Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Moving Beyond Words, and Marilyn: Norma Jeane. photograph by Jennifer Esperanza

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THE magazine | 55

I take long walks each day with my best friend.

Today we are off to my groomer for a wash, cut, and style.

I love my pals at the groomer and I love my best friend.

Make your appointment now.

And tell them that “Zelda” sent you.

466-6708

A Great Grooming Shop at the Agora Shopping Center in Eldorado

MARK Z. MIGDALSKI, D.D.S. GENERAL AND COSMETIC DENTISTRY “DEDICATED TO PREVENTION, SERVICE & EXCELLENCE”

architectural details

I-25 Overpass photograph by | f e b r u ar y

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Guy Cross THE magazine | 57

WRITINGS

Some Fountains Overflow

by Thomas Fitzsimmons On water once walked in silver the daughter of a Bent Man who is not — Lady Jane Queen of Spades with a gun in every hand.

Ghosts of electricity howl in her face; gypsy hymns mercury mouth.

Jewels and binoculars hang from the neck of a mule; infinity goes up on trial; so many things you don’t understand in the badly baffled rain.

Thomas Fitzsimmons is a poet, essayist, translator, and editor/publisher of the series Asian Poetry in Translation: Japan for the University of Hawaii Press. His latest books are Build Me Ruins, In The Cemetery There Are Lovers, The Wondrous Wee, and The Finger of God. A veteran of World War II, Fitzsimmons lives and works with his wife, sumi-e painter, Karen Hargreaves-Fitzsimmons, in Eldorado, south of Santa Fe.

58 | the magazine

There must be some way out of here.

Shakespeare with his painted shoes his bells. | fEbRuARy

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Palace Restaurant and Saloon Tel 505 428 0690 palacesantafe.com 142 West Palace Ave Santa Fe, NM 87501

2012 Select Solo Exhibitions

Rebecca Bluestone, June

Gretchen Wachs, September

Contemporary Aboriginal, July/August

Renate Aller, June Rose B. Simpson, August

John Garrett, May

all dates subject to change - further solo shows to be announce

Irene Kung, May

c h i a r o s c u r o 702

1/2

& 708 Canyon Road, at Gypsy Alley Santa Fe, New Mexico 505.992.0711

www.ChiaroscuroSantaFe.com