What to do this First Friday
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Two galleries worth checking out.
When mixed-media artist J. Gordon moved from Philadelphia to Wilmington, Del., a few years ago, he immediately realized something was off.
“I was dismayed to find that there was not one art supply store in the state,” says Gordon. “But there was a Home Depot around the corner.”
Suddenly nails, wood stains, graphite and other construction materials made their way into Gordon’s geometric abstract art. (And they never left, though an art store did eventually open in poor Delaware.)
The hardware fits well in Gordon’s paintings of cubes and otherworldly shapes, which are depicted in a color palette of silvery grays and pale blues that he developed while living in the Pacific Northwest. It establishes a gritty, somber tone.
Gordon says he drew inspiration for his LGTripp exhibit from, of all things, the limitations of human perception.
“It is not hard to imagine that there exists an infinite range of phenomena beyond what we are aware of,” he says in an artist’s statement. “That so much of what we believe to know is like Plato’s shadows on the wall, vague shifting forms that are only projections of a deeper reality outside of our experience, hints at an infinite mystery that I find beautiful, humbling and deeply moving.”
Through April 26, reception Fri., April 4, 6 p.m., 47 N. Second St., 215-923-3110, lgtrippgallery.com.
Painter Norman Soong asks a tough question in the show “Chaos in Color”: “It is observed that nature in its vast randomness is orderly. … Is the cohesive nature of artistic color also ruled by a chaotic order?”
In all art? Maybe, maybe not. But in Soong’s meticulously detailed abstract paintings, balanced perfectly in both color and form, the answer is definitely yes.
Through April 27, reception Fri., April 4, 5 p.m., 52 N. Second St., 215-627-5310, musegalleryphiladelphia.com.
