URBANISM at PAFA

Arlen Bendler Browning

                                        
 

Urbanism: Reimagining the Lived Environment

July 2- September 4, 2011, Fisher Brooks Gallery

Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building,

Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts

118-128 N. Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA

“Urbanism” speaks to social priorities and cultural tendencies in the postmodern age. The genius of the exhibition is in the cumulative dynamism of the four iconic artists/ teams. Brilliantly curated by Julien Robson, the themes are timely, relevant and intellectually engaging.

The work is stylistically diverse, with aesthetic range.

Arden Bendler Browning’s paintings are semi abstract, expressionist landscapes. Sweepingly gestural, they encompass a distinctly  contemporary urban experience. Immersed in the composition and color and energy of these highly emotive, visually compelling environments, the viewer is transported by the energy of the city.

Amy Walsh’s minutely detailed architectural installation incorporates deception and discovery. A pathway through coarsely veneered walls of cardboard and detritus leads to peepholes through which four minute, personalized, layered, private spaces are revealed. Each is its own painstakingly constructed, miniature model urban environment, simultaneously literal, referential and surreal.

The Dufala Brothers play with the aesthetics of urban “bling” to create compelling, repurposed metaphor. “Twenty Yard Dumpster Coffin”  is an upholstered cavity of a giant green dumpster. This luxury-limo, padded lounge is “contained” in an impenetrable, steel industrial shell.

 Ben Peterson’s elaborately imagined cartoons carefully illustrate managed chaos. Disintegrating environments are cheerfully propped with scaffold. Elements of whimsy and leisure are interjected amongst cantilevered decay. Buckled turf, reinforced to support multiple layers of tilted structure, shelters intricate subterranean cities. Peterson addresses human reaction to external forces, incorporating themes of evolution, decay, denial, and persistence.

This exhibition invites the viewer to consider scale, intimacy, and materialism in  the context of the constructed environment, addressing social context, dynamic reinvention, and the sustainability of a material obsessed culture.

Find out more: http://www.pafa.org/Museum/Exhibitions/Currently-On-View/Urbanism-Reimagining-the-Lived-Environment/989/

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