Here comes Rhody
curated by Dike Blair

Joe Bradley, Maia Cannon, Matthew Chase, Tori Duncan, Molly V. Smith

" Here comes Rhody..." drawls the track announcer at Rhode Island's Lincoln Greyhound Park as Rhody, the rabbit-shaped, lapin covered lure skitters along the inside rail and nears the starting boxes which hold eager thoroughbreds, yelping through their muzzles, anxious to streak down the opening stretch after their artificial prey. " Get prepared for an extended, `The art world is a dog race,' metaphor," says this essayist and curator of Here Comes Rhody.

The more commonly used metaphor is, " The art world is a horse race." That's because, among themselves and with a kind of conspiratorial humor, art collectors and curators like to compare their purchases and selections to pari-mutual betting. Some like to bet the blue-chip favorites and some like the long shot, making small wagers on a number of works by young and/or unknown artists. And some, the ones I'm most sympathetic to, ignore the tote board entirely and go down to the paddock to pick an animal that pleases their eye. But unlike dog racing, horse racing isn't legal in Rhode Island which is where I met these artists -- and I've chosen dogs and the dog races for a number of other reasons.

Artists -- at least the ones who chose to chase the lure of history -- are generally treated more like dogs. There's a popular fallacy that the greyhound's racing days are over if it ever succeeds in catching the lure. In fact the dog keeps chasing anything that's remotely rabbit-like because Greyhounds are " sighthounds," meaning they hunt visually rather than by scent (like bloodhounds). Artists are also sighthounds that never catch the lure; their art never captures the radiance of their initial conception and inspiration so they keep pursuing their visions, and the world can never give enough to satisfy the artistic ego.

So why are these artists, Joe Bradley, Maia Cannon, Matthew Chase, Tori Duncan, and Molly V. Smith, my pick of the litter from my 1999 senior painting class? They do all come from the same kennel (Rhode Island School of Design) and had many of the same trainers (R.I.S.D.'s teachers) -- trainers with an excellent track record. This trainer's influence may be negligible although my own " taste" is an inescapable criteria for choosing this card. Even though they don't all share a common pedigree (subject, style or theme) I think the sensitive viewer will see some common bloodlines. And I think they are among the fastest out of the starting boxes and are all in good shape as they approach the treacherous first turn...and that's enough of the metaphor.

All young artists adopt (consciously or not) a preexisting artistic vocabulary that they internalize and then splice with their own experience in order to produce plastic utterances that they hope will enter the language. Many times their early attempts at this argot are strained and feel phony -- I don't find this to be the case with these five. Each has a distinct approach, vision and identity; and each manages to craft works that communicate in an honest, deceptively simple, fashion. The directness of their work is hard won. What follows are thumbnail descriptions intended to share some of what I see in the work and to express my admiration.

Joe Bradley
Joe may be the most historical and the most iconoclastic painter of the group. His paintings walk the line between elegant virtuosity and clumsy crap, between arch wit and stupidity. A good hard look at Joe's palette and paint handling shows his affection for Ryder, Dove, Marin and Avery; but Joe likes to give only the slightest hint that he's capable of virtuostic and formally sophisticated canvasses. Sometimes he paints (badly) classic picaresque landscapes of Maine, his home state. In many of his paintings he dodges (barely) postcard kitsch, but he always retains a strange sentimentality both for his subjects and for the act of painting. (Joe is also a member of Barkley's Barnyard Critters.)

Maia Cannon
The subjects of Maia's paintings are things close at hand: some candles, some candies, a lipstick, her belly, a landscape depicted on a plate. She renders these objects and views in watercolor and ink, sometimes achieving a radiant tenderness that elevates the ordinary to mysterious beauty. Her collection of small works from this intimate world are slowly aggregating and forming larger scaled compositions (the works exist separately or as a grouping). When I cross-reference and navigate these compositions, I discover a modest sweetness, a sly humor, and a complicated personality behind these lovely pictures.

Matthew Chase
I watch in wonder as Matthew creates his own ecosystem. At R.I.S.D. his creatures flourished in the niches of that institutional world, in the hallways and toilets, creeping across ceilings and floorboards. Matthew reworks the detritus of consumption (discarded newspapers, cigarette butts, bits of plastic) into phyla and species that spring from his obsessive and fertile imagination. His approach reminds me of Charles Simmonds (the maker of miniature cities and implied Lilliputian cultures) but instead of fanciful archeologies, Matthew designs alternate ecologies. He plans to create the flora and fauna in this show from the waste of the millennial celebration in Boston.

Tori Duncan
Tori's art operates in an area somewhere between Warhol's Factory and Judy Chicago's Dinner Party. Her fascination with the Home and post-feminist theory led her, perhaps not unsurprisingly, into the realm of Martha Stewart. Tori's paintings combine the Martha Stewart palette (literally, Stewart's line of paints), faux Victorian interiors, and 70's feminist pattern-and-decoration strategies. Her product is smart, sweet and sinister. The membrane between artist and subject has all but disappeared, Tori now works as a prop stylist for Martha's television show.

Molly V. Smith
Molly is one of those artists with such an innate sense of design and taste that she transforms mundane materials into things of grace and elegance; and she does so without creating preciousness. She has a set designer's facility with arrangement, a calligrapher's elegance of line, an art director's sense of rightness for color and composition, a painter's facility with color and surface, and the artist's sense to use these talents and borrow from these domains to make them her own. If the viewer chooses to go through the lovely pane of Molly's surfaces, there' her mnemonic world with a melancholic atmosphere.

Barkley's Barnyard Critters (opening night performance)
The one performance I caught of Barkley's Barnyard Critters brought to mind Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi (and avant garage bands like Pere Ubu), too much Dramamine and Robitussin, Mr. Greenjeans lost in PeeWee's Playhouse, and musicians that should be on the receiving end of Farm Aid. The Critters are Barkley (dog), Brokton Picard III (vulture), Snakesworthy Price (cobra), Charolet (lamb), Sweetback (farmer) and The Mandrill.

Dike Blair 12/99