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November 27-December 3, 2002

art

There's No Place Like Home

Big yellow taxi: Tin Man Alleyâs Jonathan LeVine has found paradise in Northern Liberties. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

After two years in New Hope, a Tin Man finds the heart of the gallery scene in Philly.

by Juliet Fletcher

From pint-sized pedal cars disguised as fire trucks -- perched high above the main gallery -- to the regimented armies of wind-up dolls on the high shelves of the basement, Tin Man Alley is stocked with toys. A New Hope staple for the past two years, Tin Man Alley and its founder, Jonathan LeVine, have upped sticks to the big city this month, landing in Northern Liberties. Designed to be a collector’s paradise in all respects, the store so embodies that ideal that LeVine nearly named the New Hope space The Lucky Fez, in honor of his favorite collector’s item.

But the toys are, in a way, bait to bring people to the store. LeVine, in fact, is an art dealer, relying not on luck but hard work; Tin Man Alley's main space is a gallery, devoted to pulling off a truly postmodernist trompe l'oeil. The populist elements -- toys, books, all manner of TV spin-off merchandise -- that anoint kids' characters and low-brow glyphs as icons are sold alongside work by various artists that delves into that iconography, generating a surrealist aesthetic fronted with a smiley-face. "I have a stable of artists that I feature," LeVine says; his longstanding interest in such painters and illustrators as Shepard Fairey and SHAG brought them to the roster at Tin Man Alley. Past shows have featured such work as Ron English's eerie portraits of Ronald McDonald, lit garishly, as if their light source was a TV set. What he hoped to set up using his experience as a curator in New York (including regular gigs at popular venues CBGB and Max Fish), he says, was a democratic atmosphere in which people could view what he regards as "accessible" art. "I do feel," he smiles, "that art should be really like rock 'n' roll."

But after two years, something was still missing: "It was quite simple: The New Hope community didn't support what I was trying to do," says LeVine. "It didn't surprise me. It just was a disappointment." While an increasingly national reputation for the gallery -- supported by an active web presence, coverage in Juxtapoz and recognition from influential outlets such as The Alternative Pick -- attracted people willing to travel for two days to see a show, LeVine guesses that only 5 percent of local visitors paid attention to what hung on the walls. The rest? Well, they came for the spinning tops and Roadrunner PEZ dispensers.

"New Hope is a tourist town; it's not so much of an art community in any cooperative sense," he observes. "What I have learned, over my time in New York, is that it's desperately hard to succeed in this market, a niche market, if you don't pay attention to what sells," he says. "Nowadays, I consider myself an art dealer. Passionately supporting an art form can mean giving artists a platform from which to sell their work."

Partly why this Trenton expat moved his base of operations to Philadelphia from New York, "where it costs four times what it does here to run a business month to month," was to give artists -- particularly those very New York or West Coast-oriented -- a wider spread of support. His move to New Hope was really an attempt to plug in to Philadelphia, recognizing that this is a place "where certain galleries treat artists very well. I respect what Shelley Spector does, what Space 1026 does," he says, recalling how he wound up curating a show of 1026 artists at CBGB's 313 Gallery in February 2001, titled "Smalltown Bullies." "People always ask, ŒWhy don't you show more local artists?' But what I think Philadelphia has is a great deal of space devoted to homegrown art. I just offer something different."

Broadly, he describes the artists that "dazzle" him as falling into two groups: the photorealistic -- such as Brandt Peters' Vintage Stand-off, which perches a wide-eyed child on a rocking horse between two heavily etched, gunmetal-gray pistols, appearing in this month's show, "Clean Monsters, Dirty Children" -- and graphic-influenced work, drawing on 30 years of brightly colored billboard advertising and commercial illustration. SHAG, the California-based artist whose April show at Tin Man was sold out in a day, works as an illustrator: For LeVine, the important distinction rests on how an illustrator develops his own voice in his work, rather than remaining professionally aloof. "Many of the artists I engage with use illustration as their technique, but rather than [embellishing] a product, they're illustrating their own far-ranging ideas."

For his client base -- born, he says, after 1962 -- those ideas of outer space and inner space, of vixens and monsters, have taken on a life and a vocabulary of their own. Stocking art books downstairs with the toys is a planned development that might lend the aesthetic a context, fueling the fire for discussions of pop culture in terms of artistic merit. Meanwhile, LeVine has planned a foray into publishing, first putting together a catalog, titled "The Accidental Taxidermist," for painter Scott Musgrove, and then compiling a set of postcards in conjunction with a show of mix-and-match paintings, created by two artists, Tim Biskup and Gary Baseman, that will go on display in February. Biskup has painted backdrops for kids' shows featured on Nickelodeon, while Baseman's cartoon, "Teacher's Pet," is produced by Disney; he and Baseman have worked on interchanging canvases featuring heads, torsos and legs that can be matched to conjure the quirkily colored figure that most grabs you.

LeVine, by now, has gotten used to searching out art that asks us to put two and two together, whether the elementary math of bright hues or the insoluble equation of surrealism. Installed in its new home, Tin Man for the first time feels like a resource for its adopted city --an outsider with a kitschy silver exterior, who arrived in search of its heart and found that we got its sense of humor.

Tin Man Alley opens "The Uncertainty Principle: Adventures in Ambiguity," Fri., Dec. 6 (exhibit runs through Jan. 27), 608 N. Second St., 215-923-1418.