more radius250

Had a good time walking around the Manchester Arts District Friday night on the Sculpture Invitational's walking tour. I'll talk about that in a later post but for now I want to spotlight some more artists from radius250. The walking tour started at artspace and I had a lot of time to re-examine that large show and notice some good things I didn't fully catch the first time.

Two artists recommended in the comments of the previous radius250 post are Amy Lincoln and Joshua Rickards. Both artists are painters showing thinly painted works. Rickards has two very small paintings straddling that line between the scrappy and the crappy - one is a cloud dripping a rainbow of pale colors and was like a more hazy empty Ben Woodward piece, the other is a weird one with a middle-aged shirtless guy holding a sword. He's painted off to the bottom left side, like a sketch you'd find in a high-school notebook. The hazy beigeness and materiality of these pieces is very nice. Amy Lincoln's washy direct portraits have a strength, honesty and emotional assertiveness missing in so much of the scrappy. They are slight without being glib, like Elizabeth Peyton but with more emotion. A little less style and a lot more soul.

Todd Scalise - has a graphic latch-hook rug piece called The Prophet. Nothing to say about it but that I liked it.

Michael Seal - I hadn't noticed these at all on my first visit to the show. He has three open "books" on a low pedestal which are actually frames for small black and white photographs - I say photographs but they are in fact something called an ambrotype. These small photos are of a very tiny figure wandering through a forest of pillars and monuments, the tops of which all feature huge lumpy portrait busts of probably the same person. These have a funny scale thing because the pillar-scapes feel like miniatures but to the tiny figure wandering among them they are monumental. Also you have to bend over and peer into the book to get a good look at them.

Monica Palma Narvaez - this artist's work remains my favorite of the show. Here's the short statement that accompanies her photographs - "after arriving in Richmond from Mexico, I noticed some posters in the street that talked about citizen vigilance in the neighborhood. I decided to assume my neighborly responsibilities and monitor the activities in the street seen from my front window."