Patrick Phipps' "It Took The Night to Believe" @ Domy Books, Houston: May 9-June 27

A long time ago, my niece got this thing for Christmas that was something like the Visible Man anatomy model. Except this was just a visible head, kinda. It was clearly not meant for educational purposes; if you pushed a button, viscous green goo would trickle from its nose. I think all of the orifices did something of the same nature, but I remember the runny nose the best. My niece was like, "Cool!" I hadn't seen anyone get so worked up over a toy like that since a Power Ranger.

It fascinated me and weirded me out simultaneously, but, like my niece, I was like, "Cool!"

I had the same feeling when I studied Patrick Phipps' new sculptures in It Took the Night to Believe over at the Domy Bookstore. The sculptures, fashioned from plaster bandages, newspaper, masking tape, airbrush colors, acrylic paint, gesso, and model railroad landscaping supplies, have this odd fragility and a distinctly human quality. That is, if you're human and you've just been knocked around enough to require medical attention, and then, having gotten it, you had a dozen more mishaps.

It's interesting how his work has evolved from his drawings and paintings. His 2D stuff always had a rough, visceral feel; the way he let his paint drip, and his use of graphic materials and subject matter, done with such painterly flair, was done with such immediacy, you always knew you weren't far away from the artist himself.



One gets the same feeling here, but one also gets the feeling that, perhaps because they each have such a presence, that these are a band of Phipps' monstrous, misshapen, but still treasured children.

Phipps admits to having been influenced by both Franz West and Rachel Harrison, but I think there's more West here. Harrison's work has that blobbed-out look to it, but she tends, especially lately, to coat her objects with layer upon layer of paint, and I like Phipps' work more in this respect. (Keep in mind, people, that I spent a month in RachelHarrisonville, and I'm pretty sick of her stuff.) Phipps' work feels, despite its blobby misshapen quality, extremely delicate and fragile.

I hadn't seen Patrick's work for a while, and was really looking forward to seeing what he's been up to. It Took the Night to Believe came as a real surprise--like, Ewww, Cool.

Some People

Kickasssss artist Harrell Fletcher, co-creator of the awesome online (and ongoing) project Learning to Love You More , brings us yet another way to relish in the richness of our communal existences. Some People, a new project that we're invited to join in on, is described thusly:

Some people get to be well known and other people live their lives in obscurity. For this project you get to choose and present someone that you think other people should know about by making a documentary about them. Your documentary can take any form that can be presented on the web — video, sound, images, text or any combination of those things. The hope is that this will eventually become an archive of interesting people that previously were not well known, from all over the world.

So this will be a good opportunity to prove that your Aunt Dottie is infinitely more interesting than Paris Hilton--because we all knew she always was--by participating in the project. Or you can just do it to show how cool your ex-wife is, as Peter Max Lawrence did with Virginie Falquerho. Who knows? The person you choose to immortalize may well become the subject of a series of strange videos by Japanese people. It worked for me.

And They Call Themselves Christian

It's just sad that, after waiting for hours in line to get into the Vatican, women who are missing a leg, or men who are missing a forearm or a stubby hand, will be turned away.

ho ho ho

I've sold my soul to Glasstire!! I wrote a review on Lifting, a new show at Texas Christian University's Contemporary Arts Center in Fort Worth, Texas. Shit, I figured if I had to go to Fort Worth, I had to get paid for it. It only stands to reason. Why else would you go there?

Anyway, I'm proud of my re-entry into the world of art whoredom, so if you go to Glasstire Articles you can read about it. It's really a great show. Maybe there is a reason to go to Fort Worth after all.

paradise

Nail salons are just weird.

Because It's Come to This...

I gotta be honest: I don't know how people find me, and I don't know why they take interest in me, but for some reason they do, and they do. For the last couple of years, I have been hearing from a 22 year old musician named Olaolu Winfunke from Locust Grove, Georgia.

I don't know what he thinks a moon-faced whitey like myself can do for him, but he runs a business called AfricanConnect, where he hawks his music and wares. I go to his website every time I hear from him, but when I saw the "Street Team" on his website, I decided that I liked him and his pals and their electronic Afro-pop, if only for "Street Team" member "Whitney".

Hell, I've never been so enterprising. So there you go, Olaolu. You've worn this milquetoast suburban-raised middle-aged woman who wouldn't know a rap from an ankle bracelet right down. Persistence is obviously the key to winning a plug on the internationally renowned and prize-winning WhinyBabyLand!

Now He Tells Me

I was recently alerted to a website called The Two Percent which kinda takes the tedium and dirty work out of gallery hopping in maze-like districts like Chelsea. The video's informative and funny, and although I don't completely think that the method accounts for all tastes, I think that it does a pretty good job at painting a wide and informative brush stroke. I just wish I'd known about it while I was up there this time; it seems that sheer fatigue prevented me from seeing some really good stuff.

I also liked the "about" section on the website's founder, David Behringer:


Originally from Seattle, David currently resides in Manhattan. All information presented in 'the two percent' is gathered and qualified only through his regular gallery viewing experiences. David is 30 and has no pets.

Now, there's a man you can trust.