ELLEN MCMAHON FINDS no contradiction in making high art from lowly diapers. "We Make Sacrifices IV," a multimedia piece now on view at the group show Mentors at Central Arts Collective, is a wall triptych fashioned out of three cloth diapers and a slew of safety pins, surely the humblest of art materials. Displayed on the diapers (which are clean, by the way) are one of those double-breasted snap undershirts new babies wear and two sonogram images of a fetus curled up in utero. It's an elegant, graphic work in creamy whites and shadowy blues, made more haunting by the gossamer cloth nearly concealing the pictures.
The piece is part of McMahon's continuing exploration of the conflicts between creative work and motherhood, or at least motherhood the way it's constructed in our culture. A teacher of graphics at the University of Arizona, McMahon has been working this particular vein for a couple years. Her hand-made book about new motherhood with an all-too-explanatory title ("No New Work") was one of the highlights of the UA faculty show a season or two back. Now she's experimenting a bit more with adding other materials to her letterpress printing and fine papers.
Beside the earthy new diaper work, a couple other of her pieces address the notion of sacrifice. McMahon's talking about the sacrifices mothers are asked to make, but her works can also serve as a kind of emblem for the whole Mentors show. Central Arts Collective president Ned Gray invited local artists who have tirelessly given of their own time to help other artists and who have helped improve the whole climate for art in Tucson. Sometimes, like the mothers McMahon alludes to in her art, these self-sacrificing artists have done it at the expense of their own work.
Yet many of them have made the time to produce that proverbial new work. Linda Rosenfield, for instance, who says she still calls herself a photographer, moves into some delicious little multi-media drawings here. A longtime teacher who began a children's program on the Tohono O'odham Nation at Sells, taught at the Tucson Museum of Art School and now teaches at Pima College and runs the college gallery, Rosenfield exhibits 12 pieces from her "Anti-Gravity" series. These provocative textured works in oil pastels and pencils feature a series of bowl shapes hovering and landing in some weird, undefined space. In "#19" a pink bowl sits firmly at rest on a gray rectangle. An upturned bowl floating above showers down some shiny silver rays.
Susan Kay Johnson, another longtime downtown artist, has served as artist-in-residence, opened her studio to the curious among the Downtown Saturday Night throngs and has long taught at the TMA school. The three-dimensional wall pieces she's exhibiting here are not at all like the classical sculpture I saw in her studio a few years back. These exciting new works are made out of material called hydrostone, which she's shaped into distorted, flattened-out human bodies and faces, and then colored with oil paints. "Transformation Pain" is a disturbing assemblage of hydrostone human bones, crisscrossed over an organic backdrop of deep red, topped by an eerie face. The "skin" on another face at the side is stretched away from its bones; it seems to be rotting before our eyes. Visually enticing and psychologically intense, Johnson's new work charts some breakthrough terrain for her.
Even Thomas A. Philabaum, so well known locally for the his glass gallery and studio, his taking on of apprentices, and his willingness to share techniques with the general public in his open studios, turns out something a bit different here. His three glass sculptures are less decorative than the work he typically sells in his gallery. They signal other preoccupations, such as a critique of the Spanish Conquest of America embodied in "Santa Gonorrea," a pale green glass revisioning of Columbus's Santa Maria.
Ceramic artist Susan Gamble and photographer Steven Meckler, both old-time Congress Street artists, have collaborated for this show on a series of interior photos of San Xavier. Meckler, who's taught at Pima and the TMA school and has organized many downtown events over the years, provides the miniature color portraits of San Xavier's saints. Gamble, probably best known for her public art in the Santa Cruz River Park, has served on just about every board from the Partnership to the Phantom Gallery committee, to the Art Expo studio tour. She contributes her characteristic folk-art inspired ceramics as frames.
But at least two of the dedicated art laborers apparently don't have much time for new work, if we're to judge what they came up with for this show. Clay artist David Aguirre is busy these days developing artist studio spaces in the warehouse district and running the Art Forms Gallery downtown. Before those projects he ran the Phantom Gallery program. His large installation piece in this show, "Inferno," full of devils and hearts, has, I think, been seen before.
And Judith D'Agostino now works full time running the TMA school that employs so many artists and teaches so many locals and she's still on the board of Tucson Arts Coalition, a group nowadays setting up low-rent housing for artists. For this show she offers up only three small paintings of life in the modern city. Once she had the time to turn out large, color-infused canvases that depicted the local landscape. But that was in the days when all she was doing was teaching, helping start Dinnerware and the Arts Coalition, campaigning to save the Temple of Music and Art, and working to get the Tucson Arts District and the Tucson Partnership started. That's the kind of sacrificing schedule that McMahon's archetypal mother would have no trouble understanding.
Mentors continues through January 28 at Central Arts Collective, 188 E. Broadway. Gallery hours are noon to 3 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, from 7 to 10 p.m. Downtown Saturday Night, January 21, and from 7 to p.m. for Art Walk, Thursday, January 26. Native American poet Jamison Mahto will read from his work Blues for Franklin Avenue at the gallery at 7:30 and at 9:30 p.m. this Saturday, January 21. For more information call 623-5883.
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