Galleries: Eye-centric exhibition provoking looks and laughs

By Edith Newhall

For The Inquirer

The jurors of "The Vitreous: Eye & Optics" - works by 22 American artists on the themes of eyesight, visual perception, and optical phenomena - must have made humor (and I don't mean the gel between the lens and the retina) a priority. Moreover, unlike a few of the past efforts of the Esther M. Klein Art Gallery, impossible to miss in the lobby of the Science Center but rarely populated by center employees curious about art, this show is generating attention from the people who work there.

I noticed because the piece that's attracting the most attention from the science crowd initially scared the living daylights out of me. I was studying David Bowen's Infrared Drawing Device; I didn't know its title at the time, and that it contained motion sensors, or I might have been prepared for what came next.

Wondering what had prompted the device's metal "arm" to make the charcoal drawings on paper mounted on the wall behind it (it was absolutely still and showed no signs of impending motion), I leaned in for a closer look, and the "arm" suddenly swung out at me like a crazed windshield wiper.

Once I realized (by watching someone else play with it) that you could actually control its movement and subsequent drawings by moving your hands in front of it like an orchestra conductor, I understood its popularity.

By contrast, the spinning motion of Don Lambert's Flatland Array, a hexagonal wood structure containing motorized half-black, half-white (think of those deli cookies) discs, had a hypnotic effect. As the discs spin at high speed, they appear to be colored if you don't focus on them and instead stare like a zombie. It takes a few minutes to get the knack of this, but the scientists are patient.

Kathy Goodell's mysterious Watching and Waiting, a multipiece sculpture of large glass lenses filled with colored water and suspended from the ceiling, was another hit. Several people who had clearly not expected a show of contemporary art in the Science Center were mesmerized by this work, standing on their toes to peer down into the lenses or leaning sideways to look up underneath them.

A few pieces in this entertaining show that deserve similar scrutiny include Candace Karch's digital photographs, which resemble real X-rays of skulls but have been collaged with found paper; Desi Minchillo's obsessively constructed assemblage of hundreds of pieces of cut paper arranged in several layers; Lee Arnold's single-channel video of six flash animations; Cynthia Greig's Type-C prints of a television and a fan, which give the appearance of being partly drawn and not the actual objects they seem to portray; and Wade von Kramm's magical Self Portrait, a lumpen-looking plaster sculpture that casts an uncannily accurate shadow of a man.

Esther M. Klein Art Gallery at the Science Center, 3600 Market St., 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays. 215-966-6188 or www.kleinartgallery.org. Through Sept. 5.

Gimlets + gimlet eye

Now that Philadelphia-based photographer Sarah Stolfa's first book, The Regulars, has been published (by Artisan Books, with an introduction by author Jonathan Franzen, who famously spent some time here, too), Gallery 339 is celebrating with a look back at some of Stolfa's subjects.

"Sarah Stolfa: The Regulars Revisited" features 10 photographs from her award-winning series of portraits of patrons of McGlinchey's, the Philadelphia tavern where the photographer tended bar as a Drexel student. Several of these have not been previously exhibited, and all display her remarkable gimlet eye.

More to celebrate: Philadelphia Photo Arts, of which Stolfa is the founder and executive director, has moved into its new headquarters in the Crane Building (1400 N. American St., Suite 103) and will open its doors to the public on Aug. 11 at 10 a.m. The grand opening and reception for its first exhibition, "Next: Emerging Philadelphia Photographers," which goes on view Aug. 18, is Sept. 10, from 6 to 9 p.m.

Gallery 339, 339 S. 21st St., 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. 215-731-1530 or www.gallery339.com. Through Sept. 5.