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3/9/2003

Brenda Goodman and Maria Porges

Littlejohn Contemporary, New York

Main Gallery: BRENDA GOODMAN
Project Room: MARIA PORGES


IN THE PROJECT ROOM:
MARIA PORGES
"UNDER THE DESK: BOMBAST REVISTED"

In "Under the Desk: Bombast Revisited", Maria Porges invokes childhood memories of duck-and-cover safety drills. The work comes out of two things---first, her sense that the present is more like the fifties and early sixties than she would like to believe, in our return to weird cold-war paranoia (not to mention the loss of personal freedoms and rights gained at great cost over the past thirty years), and second, the dream she had several years ago of the college bomber. That dream is more about the consequence of actions than it is about terrorism, but you could say the same about current events (and what they're leading towards). The seemingly playful nature of "Bomboozle" , an installation of knitted, felted yarn "bombs", relates more to her childhood and that of her daughters to whom she will have to explain all this someday. What could be more strange (and seemingly impossible) than cute toy bombs? They fit right into the present atmosphere, though---the strange mix of sentimentality and fear that the powers that be try to invoke at all times.

"Each fuzzy bomb begs to be touched. This separation of signifier from signified confuses if not defuses the negative association of bombs, while the strangely mixed metaphors of violence and innocence brings to mind other stories featured in the past year's news: gun- toting African boy soldiers and young extremists nurtured from infancy on the fanatic's dream of dying a hero's death in a suicide bombing."
Excerpt from Jamie Brunson, Porges review, Stretcher Magazine, 2003

"Molotov Museum 2" , an encased display of cast-wax bottle bombs imprinted with text, has more of a direct relationship to the screenplay dream. Porges has long been interested in time and history, actions and consequences, and the text on the bottles refers to those interests. The twelve texts include: House to House, Coast to Coast, Cheek to Cheek, Back to Back, Mouth to Mouth, Eye to Eye, Man to Man.

As has been the case for the past twenty years, cast and fabricated elements made out of a variety of materials (wool, wax, glass, to name a few), are often combined with text to suggest what we have (or have not) learned from history, both personal and political. These questions are addressed through metaphors of memory, language, and time. This kind of engaging linguistic play and suggestion of narrative possibilities has always been characteristic of Porges' work.

Maria Porges' sculpture has been shown extensively in solo and group exhibitions in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Seattle and New Orleans. She is the recipient of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's SECA award, and often writes art criticism for a number of international art magazines. For further information or press photographs please call Jacquie Littlejohn or Kim Toscano at 212-980-2323.


In the Main Gallery:
BRENDA GOODMAN
RECENT PAINTINGS

Brenda Goodman's newest work was first inspired by quilts made by the women of Gee's Bend, a small rural community in Alabama, and shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art this past year. Dating from the early 20th century to the present, they were made from scraps of worn-out material and used for warmth. Yet, they are as strikingly beautiful as any painting, speaking with unusual authority of the human need to create beauty, even in the face of poverty and suffering. Goodman was very moved by the way the poignancy of these women's lives emanated so strongly in the quilts they created. Like the women of Gee's Bend, Goodman creates paintings through a process that is fundamentally intuitive. The challenge and excitement begin as forms and colors play off each other until, upon completion, there is a sense of balance, clarity, and purpose---a sense of the piece's "rightness".

In some of the paintings inspired by the Gee's Bend quilts, she incorporates magazine images from the 1930's, 1940's, and 1950's. Often, the women of Gee's Bend covered the walls of their homes with magazine and newspaper pages for insulation. Again, meaning emanates from the combination of necessity and the desire to create beauty. These magazines bring a host of images from Goodman's own past that are emotionally evocative. She finds pictures that tap into memories of her childhood. She is also attracted to pictures simply for their form and architecture.

The process that she uses in making these paintings is to knit the different elements together. Some images become prominent, some become shadow images, and others disappear entirely. The images she has to give up completely for the sake of the final painting are still embedded under layers of paint, essentially existing only in her own memory. In these paintings, Goodman continues to explore the ways that personal and emotional content can be expressed so that the result is both emotionally and artistically satisfying.

This is Brenda Goodman's eighth solo exhibition in New York and her first at Littlejohn Contemporary.
She has been a recipient of awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the
New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. Her work has been shown extensively nationally since 1966. For further information or press photographs please call Jacquie Littlejohn or Kim Toscano at 212-980-2323.


LITTLEJOHN CONTEMPORARY
41 EAST 57 STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10022
t-212.980.2323 f-212.980.2346

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