March
11, 2009 "Good times, bad times, art goes on in Raleigh"
- review by David Fellerath, Independent Weekly
"...Over in the Warehouse district, the combination studio/ exhibition space Flanders 311 has four small shows up in its gallery. Before I even entered the building, however, my attention was snagged by a sculpture visible through the window. By Washington, D.C.-based Carol Gellner Levin and titled "Fertility," it depicts eight naked babies, bleached white, in what appears to be a group free-fall through the air. However, it's only an assumption that they're in the air: It could also be a representation of them suspended in amniotic fluid, for example, or even inside a swimming pool (think of the famous cover of Nirvana's Nevermind album). Identically plump, the expressions on their faces could be that of joy.
Rebecca Alvarado's "Red Cradle, Bare Feet"
Photo courtesy of Flanders 311
Near some mildly surreal paintings by Diane Feissel is a series of uniformly small canvases by Rebecca Alvarado. At first, I was struck by a figurative style that seems reminiscent of Victorian kitsch—a not altogether pleasant sensation. But closer examination reveals a rather macabre, if diffuse, narrative of the passage from girlhood to womanhood, complete with tastefully bloody imagery. I especially liked "Blanket," which depicts an adult woman, with a nude torso, gazing pensively to the rear of the composition, where the legs of her girlhood, adorned with a tutu, hang on a coat rack. Tellingly, the legs of the adult aren't visible; they're covered by the titular blanket. I'm not sure it's necessary, but Alvarado also likes to make the preparations for her paintings visible. We see marginal notes scrawled on the edges of the pictures, and here and there some masking tape has been left (or applied ex post facto?) on the canvas. Alvarado's obsessively feminine content and intentionally overheated symbolism—such as a towering crown of thorns on a girl's head in one painting—calls Frida Kahlo to mind.
Ron Ward's "Here's Looking at You Kid (Here's to You Kid)"
Photo courtesy of Flanders 311
The quartet of exhibits in Flanders is capped by Ron Ward's series of portraits of abandoned mannequins. He found his models, as it were, in a warehouse and took pictures of these forgotten women with a soon-to-be-obsolete Polaroid—without any formal lighting, he says. He then transferred the images to 16 inch-by-24 inch paper, which hangs on the walls. The result is transfixing. Ward doesn't manage to thaw these frozen figures, but he does give them a more dignified context: These plastic women seem to be extras in a barely remembered movie from the mid-20th century, a status typified by the print titled "Here's Looking at You Kid (Here's to You Kid)": Only when I peered at the fuzzy background behind the mannequins did I see the outline of a poster for the movie Casablanca, with the recognizable profiles of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. A bygone world, indeed. "
