Newark Star Ledger, NJ
June 3 2005

Putting social consciousness to canvas
Pierro Gallery show has four artists whose palettes feature protest
Friday, June 03, 2005
BY DAN BISCHOFF
Star-Ledger Staff

“Realities of Our Times: A Closer Look” brings four socially conscious
artists, three from Jersey and one from New York, together in a show
at the Pierro Gallery in South Orange that can only be described as a
social protest. It even divides neatly: Two artists protest domestic
inequalities and the other two decry war.

Beyond those correspondences, all four artists are representational, as
virtually every socially committed work of art is. Taken together, the
works in “Realities” seem to consciously invoke earlier art, from Works
Progress Administration prints to East European cartoons, in order
to make their political points. By and large, they are successful.

Photographer Helen M. Stummer, known for her pictures of Newark
subcultures, is perhaps the most explicit. She says in her artist’s
statement that “in the social documentary tradition of Jacob Riis,
Dorothea Lange, and Lewis Hine, I strive to portray stark realities of
people living on the edge.” Riis, Lange and Hine are among the most
famous of the early muckraking and labor photographers, who made a
study of appalling conditions for late 19th- and early 20th-century
people caught in the backwash of American capitalism.

Stummer does something very similar, even noting, in text printed on
the Pierro’s pleasant suburban walls, that the scenes she captures were
taken “just 10 minutes from here,” something she believes visitors may
well find shocking. Images like “Clara’s Kitchen–14th Ave. Newark” are
indeed very Riis in their squalor; but it is the way Stummer suggests
defiance and humanity in her subjects that is different. “Imitating
Mommy” and “Imitating Daddy” might suggest cliches of ghetto life —
early pregnancy in the one, thug life in the other — but the kids
won’t stop being individuals, and the pix actually undercut such
simple-minded caricatures. What they are really about is family
affection, which knows no stereotype.

Tim Gaydos, of Paterson, is known primarily as a romantic
abstractionist, turning Rust Belt tableaux into the sort of personal
aesthetic Abstract Expressionists of the ’50s were all about. But he
is also a Romantic Realist, and here he is showing nearly a score
of oils, pastels and even bronzes on the subject of homelessness.
Occasionally the bright colors make a counterpoint to the jackknifed
and prone bodies, as in one pastel of a man sleeping in his shopping
cart, one foot resting on a parking meter. The sculptures are new to
this reviewer, the bodies made of scavenged rusty plates and crumpled
rebar, but the faces and hands cast with almost Rodin-like liquidity.

Marcia Annenberg, who lives and works in New York, is here showing four
acrylic paintings that deal with war and the fear of war in the United
States. “Cruise to Kuwait” is based on photos of the vapor trail of a
sea-launched cruise missile, which arcs across the red canvas behind
a gun turret crowned with spikes that mimics the Statue of Liberty’s
crown. “B-2/Kukailimoku Blues” juxtaposes a stealth bomber with an
ape and a Polynesian statuette; “Safe at Last” shows a school girl
hiding under her desk, with a fallout shelter label on the wall.

Annenberg’s style is cool and emblematic — all her paintings have
a counterintuitive calm — that reminds you of the contemporary
narrative painting of Ida Applebroog or early R.B. Kitaj.

Shakeh Sassoon was born in Armenia, grew up in Iran and has lived
in Paterson for the past 10 years. Her eloquently stylized canvases
remind you of the pen-and-ink drawings of attenuated human figures by
Paul Klee; long, angular bodies with baseball knees and empty eyes.
They are very much the work of someone who knows war and death,
especially the harrowing triptych, “Splendid Insanity.”

As long as there is war, art will not be pretty.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress