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Andrea Baldeck, From Medicine to Photography, Philadelphia Inquirer, January 26, 2007
Troy Sayers,First Friday Focus, City Paper, November 1, 2006
Peter Miraglia, Mirror Images, Art Matters, November, 2006
Max Maddox, Emerging Talent, Philadelphia Inquirer, May, 2005
Friday, January 26, 2007
From medicine to photography
Andrea Baldeck presents her second career in a retrospective at Moore.
By Edith Newhall
Like many professionals who long to try on another career, Andrea Baldeck, a physician and anesthesiologist who took pictures with a box camera as an 8-year-old and envisioned herself as a future Life magazine lenswoman, never forgot her dream.
Unlike most of those other wishful thinkers, Baldeck actually dropped medicine in the early 1990s to become a full-time photographer. It's no surprise that the bodies of black-and-white work that make up her first large-scale exhibition, "Andrea Baldeck: The Heart of the Matter, a Retrospective," at the Moore College of Art and Design, occasionally bring to mind vintage Life and National Geographic photo essays.
Although Baldeck has made lovely studies of plants, seedpods and shells, and still lifes of objects that speak of the past - Venetian glass, an old coffee percolator - her passion is for travel and foreign places, as demonstrated by her photographs of Haiti, Venice, Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam.
Her greatest strength, possibly a result of her years of doctoring, is portraiture. She has a gift for inspiring trust in her subjects that is reflected in their eyes, especially in her photographs of Haitians, who project an uncanny spiritual quality.
Her Venetian series is the least compelling here precisely because it focuses not on faces but on architecture and cityscape, neither of which she is able to infuse with much mystery or drama. Her close-ups of door knockers, and of two figurative sculptures, which portray them as almost eerily lifelike, are the most arresting of this group.
Baldeck clearly has a talent for photography, and an especially good eye for the close-up, but her mature style seems yet to be determined. She's both a photojournalist and a fine-art photographer in this sprawling exhibition, and her best efforts in each genre are often undercut by their proximity to minor, incidental prints.
Still, there is much to recommend this show, not least the tremendous enthusiasm and energy she has brought to her second career. Everyone should get this much enjoyment from work.
November 1, 2006
First Friday Focus
By Lori Hill
JMS Gallery
Whether creating sculpture with old railroad tracks or picking up a piece of furniture on the side of the road, Troy Sayers lives to recycle. "I love making something beautiful from an item that was certainly going to be in a landfill, so this art is completely 'green,'" says Sayers, who shows new bricolage work at Chestnut Hill's JMS Gallery this month. Bricolage refers to a trial-and-error process using found materials, and Sayers finds amazing materials. He's crafted beautiful tables and desks from Cutty Sark and Dewars whisky crates, and an old dresser and chair on which he painted Mondrian-inspired details. "I have a clock which I created from the barn doors from our garage carriage house," says Sayers. "I feel this connection of knowing where the materials came from adds a layer to the piece. I mean these doors have been hanging there for over one hundred years. There is a lot of history in that material that comes out in the piece."
November 2006
Mirror Images
By BURTON WASSERMAN,
Everyday in print and on TV, you and I see hundreds of photographs. Sometimes, it even seems as though we may drown in a sea of pictures. But fortunately, almost all of them are soon forgotten - with good reason- because frankly, they're not really worth remembering.
By contrast, consider the forms created by Peter Miraglia. On journeys near and far, he has framed phenomenal scenes photographically. By and large, they focus on the human figure, situated within carefully composed settings. To see them is to have your vision enriched with sights destined to stay attached to your memory forever after.
Miraglia's latest work, photographed on a recent trip to the Indian states of Bengal and Rajasthan, are currently on view in a magnificent solo exhibition. They are installed at the Art Gallery in Connelly Center, on the campus of Villanova University, off Lancaster
Ave. in Delaware County. The show is set to remain there until the end of December, 2006.
The prints on view are much more than pictures of people seen while wandering on a foreign strand halfway round the world. Instead, they are revelations of ambiguity, hesitancy and uncertainty combined with an underlying desire to please, brought to the surface in confrontations with a stranger from afar holding a camera. Identifying deeply with his subjects, Miraglia was able to inspire sufficient confidence in his models to help them evidence feelings of trust, perhaps in a belief that their tomorrow would be better than yesterday.
The image titled Shanti is a captivating sight. Studying the transparent veil-like covering on a woman's face, you enter an exotic wonderland. It's a place where human life and brilliant patches of color combine to present a deeply serene vision in which strange events and inexplicable moods become more real than all the words in a dictionary can ever hope to describe.
Miraglia uses light to modulate periods of suspended time. They stop cold in pictures that make the sweep of the second hand in your watch seem to stand still. You tell yourself it's not possible, but the forms - one after another- speak otherwise.
In Ajaj, a male figure bathed in an intensity of brilliant red, deep violet and medium brown is counter-pointed visually by a crispness of skin, beard hairs and fabric textures. Together, they coalesce and become a unified, balanced composite, touched with a sense of ordered wholeness and an understated rhythmic presence.
Chandrakala presents subtle layers of transparent red perfectly aligned with areas of cobalt blue and pale gold. The head of a possibly vulnerable figure, hidden by a gauze-thin fold of fabric, appears mysteriously inside of a triangular, pyramid-like shape, which once seen, cannot by easily forgotten. It's a photograph with a distinctive mystique all its own. No simplistic explanation can do it justice.
Soma affords the visitor an eerie tableau where, once again, the interval of a split second has been transformed into an insight from a dimension of time no clock or calendar can properly explain or record. To see that instant in depth, with your own eyes- inner and outer- is to undergo a non-denominational epiphany filled with a knowing awareness that only a brilliantly talented visionary could make both mystically credible and optically evident.
The photograph functions as a channel in which different people from different places all come together, magically in contact with each other. Distant India is transported to Pennsylvania and becomes part of the Villanova campus. Of course, it's impossible! But, the picture makes it happen.
Kayviya comes across as a hauntingly fascinating photograph of a mature woman
standing in a space defined by gray stones piled upon each other. The contrast of the still, surrounding environment with the living figure adds up to an entirely unexpected discovery in which a moment from the past, when the person in front of him and the eye of the photographer, fused together perfectly. A digitally-processed image, it is an awesome documentation of his exceptional ability to capture a sublime event in which every square inch of the overall composition functions with supreme excellence. It isn't often one finds a picture in a contemporary solo show working at such a level of superb advantage. More frequently, it's what you find when you come upon a masterpiece in a first-rate institutional venue. Like seeing Picasso's Three Masked Musicians or van Der Weyden's diptych, Crucifixion and the Holy Mother Mourning with St. John the Evangelist in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Miraglia's superbly crafted configurations are able to give meaning to realities present inside the nature of his audience as well as the external appearance of his subjects. I know I'll never be able to explain how he accomplishes this, but it's enough to say, "He does so," and then let it go. Maybe it all hinges on the fact that when you study his pictures in depth, they confirm your eligibility for membership in the human family. How come? Because the pictures hold a mirror up to your need to be a sensitive living creature, able to think and feel in ways that are reserved on Planet Earth only for two-legged beings who are highly articulate, intellectually complex, philosophically reflective and very, very emotionally responsive.
At the same time, they are pictures pulsing with energy- given shape with a seemingly infinite visual awareness and a passionately motivated capacity to control shades of form that come into focus with incredible aesthetic acumen. The net outcome of all his labors is a body of images alive with a seemingly incredible wealth of expressive finesse.
I frequently maintain that the late photographer, Arthur Fellig or Weegee as he is better known, was an exceptionally gifted artist who gave definition to the dark side of life in his night scenes of New York City. By comparison, Miraglia is a great poet of daylight. In his hands, the camera is made to reveal the essence of the human state in a wide variety of physiological types, including male and female as well as young and old. While his work focuses on the overt appearance of specific individuals, as a group, they spell out interior psychological facts that are extraordinarily universal.
As the audience for Miraglia's work grows, it is reasonable to believe his name and his oeuvre will attract ever more widespread recognition. The installation currently on display at Villanova honors him on a truly well deserved level of eminent distinction. In my opinion, it is one of the finest art exhibitions to have been presented this year in the vicinity of Philadelphia and all of its surrounding counties.
June 17, 2005
Emerging talent
By Edward J. Sozanski I
In the two years since it opened, the JMS Gallery in Chestnut Hill has exhibited a number of promising younger artists. Max Maddox, included this month in a group show with Joe Mooney, Lynn Denton and Marilyn Fox, is the latest.
Maddox's large pastel drawings, some with charcoal, recall the way Alberto Giacometti fixed an object in space: by embedding it in a dense network of agitated contours. For Maddox as for the Swiss artist, nothing exists statically, as a single outline. His drawings offer a welter of simultaneous potential positions for his subjects.
Maddox realizes this idea most forcefully in the drawing called Rm810(3). The nominal subject is a group of chairs, sketchily described, but one is inclined to read the drawing as suggesting numerous varied arrangements viewed all at once.
Denton's abstract paintings on handmade paper shift the agitated tone of Maddox's drawings into a calmer, more contemplative mood. Her measured arrangements of enigmatic pictographs and their soft, delicate coloring feel primitive on one level, but visually tantalizing on another.
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