ART REVIEW
Examining local shows featuring Craig Smith, Paul Zone and William Koch
“Craig Smith: Training Manual for Relational Art”
Through June 28 in Big Orbit Gallery, 30D Essex St.; 560-1968 or www.bigorbitgallery.org
Monsters of Nature and Design III” performance at 8:30 p. m. next Friday outside the Burchfield Penney Art Center, 1300 Elmwood Ave.
The performance-based, documentary and interactive work of Craig Smith, a London-based artist who earned his master’s of fine arts degree in Buffalo more than a decade ago, isn’t the most easily accessible art in the world. Smith’s exhibition at Big Orbit, which includes large-scale photographs of a performance during which Smith and a collaborator were dragged by boats through Boston Harbor and an unsettling series of images featuring college engineering students posing with firearms, is somewhat perplexing on its face.
But these images only scratch the surface of Smith, whose ranging and often tongue-in-cheek performances feed on the social participation of viewers. With his performance partner, Colin Beatty, University at Buffalo professors Gary Nickard and Reinhard Reitzenstein and local band the Vores, Smith will present another performance on the lawn and terrace of the Burchfield Penney Art Center next Friday. Exact details are subject to change per the whims of the performers, but as it stands the event is slated to involve a pair of chalk-liners (of the sort used to mark boundaries on football fields), an industrial lift and a post-performance photo-shoot.
“Paul Zone: The New York Underground Scene, 1972-1977”
Through July 17 at Queen City Gallery, 617 Main St.; 856-2839 or queencitygallery. tripod.com
Few of the photographs in this show are very good. Most of them, aside from being largely black and white, look like the sort of pictures routinely snapped today on iPhones from the 20th row of a rock concert. But that doesn’t make this exhibition of images from New York City’s underground music scene of the mid-’70s any less fascinating or intriguing.
Paul Zone’s work is magnetic entirely because he was in the right place at the right time. He had access to shoot photographs in places few others might, including the men’s bathroom at the infamous (now-closed) club CBGB and backstage at shows where he documented legends.
I’d argue that the appealing amateurishness of Zone’s compositions and technique makes this cramped display relevant in an age when everyone and their nephew is snapping copious shots of anything that moves and feverishly uploading them to Flickr. Even with our 7-megapixel point-and-shoot cameras, we are creating documents that, 30 years hence, could be considered jaw-dropping to a backward-glancing culture.
“William Koch: 5W30: Wastelands”
Through Aug. 8 in Buffalo Arts Studio, 2495 Main St. Suite 500; 833-4450 or www.buffaloartsstudio.org
With “5W30: Wastelands,” Buffalo sculptor and painter William Koch has turned his eye toward environmental devastation. His pieces employ all manner of unorthodox material, from coffee and spray paint to casting wax and even motor oil itself, to create formally balanced and hypnotizing abstractions that tempt the eye as much as the mind.
Koch has created a striking series of streaked and blotted canvases that recall the interconnected strands of Joan Miro (sans the great painter’s symbolic vocabulary) and suggest a seriously broad range of emotions. In “Sacrificed,” the violent, Baconian overtones are clear enough, and plenty disturbing at that. But some pieces, such as “Contain and Disperse,” bleed vivacity and ebullience rather than blood and guts. “Hickory Woods,” a large, mixed-media canvas, animates its title with a lyrical and understated grace that threatens to envelop you. For those whose appetites for abstraction have been thoroughly whetted by the Albright-Knox’s “Action/Abstraction,” Koch’s work provides an engrossing modern extension of the abstract expressionist thread.
Between spells of gawking at Koch’s impressive body of work, be sure to check out Amy Robinson Gendrou’s installation, “Kleenex Shelter,” several columns of woven-together tissues imprinted with bad, typewritten poetry, in the next room. Also don’t miss the water-based works of local artists Rosemarie Bauer Sroka and Kathleen Sherin in the adjacent room.
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