Rabus
Image courtesy of Hoffman-LaChance Fine Art
Two art openings of note tonight: Daniel McGrath's "What Pictures Want," at PSTL Gallery (3842 Washington, 314-531-4304, paceframing.com), and Jeremy Rabus' "The Pangea Project" at Hoffman-LaChance in Maplewood (2713 Sutton, 314-398-9636, hoffmanlachancefineart.com). They both commence at 6pm, but the Hoffman-LaChance opening closes at 10pm rather than 9, so PSTL may be your first logical stop-off, depending on what corner of the city you're in.
Daniel McGrath teaches art history at Webster University and is a Gallery Assistant Director at Duane Reed. He's also got an interesting educational background -- he earned a BFA at UCLA, then an MA in military history from King's College London. He's worked at the Hammer in L.A. as well as the Imperial War Museum in London, and all this to say that his show at PSTL has nothing to do with muskets or cannons. "What Pictures Want," which runs through April 24, "is an ongoing series of text-based paintings based on W.J.T. Mitchell’s hypothesis that pictures must be considered living things that communicate and have desires, as outlined in his essay 'What Do Pictures Want?' from 2005. These paintings' desires, in short, are to trade places with the beholder turning him or her into an image for the gaze of the picture." Over-conceptual or overly theory-based work can be a real drag in the wrong hands, but it looks like McGrath's wit and humor will make this a satisfying show for both casual observers as well as art wonks. I've learned the hard way not to make any promises about posting photos after the fact, but if possible, I'll post some here next week.
Jeremy Rabus' work I'm much more familiar with. If you buy art supplies, you may know his work too, because he was the guy behind the register at the late City Art Supply on Cherokee. While there, he also painted and stretched canvases between transactions (I also saw him making ceramic tiles one day) so seeing Jeremy at work also meant a peek at whatever canvas he was working on. When City Art Supply closed, Jeremy was forced to move back over the river to his parents' house in Southern Illinois, and as he explains in this conversation with Alicia LaChance on Creative Saint Louis, this exile has inspired him to focus even more intensely on his painting. If you never went to City Art Supply, note the image above was painted by Jeremy's hand. All his work tends to ride the border between not-quite-abstract and not-quite-figurative, and is remarkable in its use of color. As Jeremy notes in the Creative Saint Louis piece, this is also the first time he's shown work in cut paper, so I'm curious about what form that will take.
On Fridays, I'll do my best to post whatever's opening this week, but because there is only one of me, and we also cover music, books, architecture, theater, dance and all of St. Louis' odd little cultural festivals, I suspect this may not always happen. So if you like to keep on top of this stuff: bookmark Art-Patrol.com and the Regional Arts Commission's Artzipper calendar. Art Patrol is basically two guys and a camera; I don't know how they manage to track every art opening in the city without changing into superhero outfits. And Artszipper publishes an exhaustive database of all kinds of arts events. One look at either and you'll realize that a Friday nights when there are only two art openings is something of an anomaly. Not an entirely bad one, though -- as long as you have a full tank of gas, you don't have to make any tough choices about what to see and what to skip. --Stefene Russell
