Art at the Cathedral
Galleries: Summer art show at the Philadelphia Cathedral By Edith Newhall For the Inquirer
“Shadow Triptych” by Elaine Crivelli plays with light, form, and shadow, with traces of the real world.
If the works that make up the summer show at the Philadelphia Cathedral seem to possess an inner spirit and hint at the infinite, it’s not just the setting. It’s more likely due to the fact that the show’s three artists were chosen by Anne Minich, who exhibited here last year and whose own paintings suggest spiritual journeys across vast distances.
You can almost hear a rustling sound emanating from Elaine Crivelli’s mysterious combinations of light, form, and shadow. Her “Shadow Triptychs,” digitally manipulated photographs presented as ink-jet prints on rag paper, look like the phenomena that ghost hunters capture on film. While these are not recognizable images of scenes, most viewers nevertheless will detect some traces of the real world in them. In one sequence of three, I imagined the brownstone buildings and trees on Spruce Street west of 18th Street as shot from the windows of a moving car; in another, I’m sure I saw shadows falling across a wood floor or wall.
Marie Elcin’s collages of fabrics, arranged to resemble land and seascapes and set inside glass-covered frames, briefly bring Joseph Cornell’s boxes to mind. But her pared-down scapes fashioned from bits of beaded crochet, braided satin ribbon, and found fabrics are more reminiscent of women’s handiwork from earlier centuries.
From a distance, the bits of torn and crushed paper that make up Stephen Robin’s wall installation “Untitled” look as though they’re blowing in a breeze that picks up speed, then dwindles. In fact they’re mounted on the wall, but their arrangement is so random, so seemingly determined by air currents, that the impression of airborne paper persists the closer you get to them. Robin’s colored-pencil doodles on the paper (also a sculptor of large commissioned public works, he purposefully eliminates decision-making from his drawings) enhance the lovely ephemeral nature of this work.
Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral, 38th Street between Chestnut and Market Streets, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sundays. 215-386-0234 or www.philadelphiacathedral.org. Through Sept. 6.
5 Aug, 2010 — Daniel Tomko
