The Morning Call Art Review 5/3/07
The Morning Call
A generous genre is alive and fairly well in "The Living Still Life," an Ambre Studio exhibition of tabletop universes of fruits and doughnuts, flowers and Chinese food boxes.
Imael Checo is the show's sneaky radical, the one who turns containers of egg foo young and shrimp lo mein into vessels of elegant mystery. In "Take Out," an oil on linen, a Chinese food box is surrounded and enobled, by vaguely metallic, silky shopping bags available in designer stores. Shadow-play lighting and a frayed tablecloth convey a sence of gently disturbing drama.
Becky Reilly is the show's Dutch oil master, the one who elevates cantaloupes, pears, and a pewter tankard with pearly light, ripe tones and a background of shiny, rich chocolate. In a slightly soggy, stormy portrait of chocolate- and vanilla-frosted doughnuts she demonstrates the joshing humor of Claes Oldenburg, sculptor of giant, soft lipstick tube and typewriter eraser. And her ruddy, rough orange slices somehow resemble sculptural nuts or marooned boats.
The best traditionalists are just as impressive. Priscilla Taylor Rosenberger, a watercolorist of extraordinary delicacy contributes white rice........pastel of lemons in a bowl with egg-like holes is nothing less than a glowing lantern - or a domestic spaceship. Her 22-by-30 inch, frame filled view of a red apple and a green pepper is a sense-filling maze-marriage. The tart fruit, which has a lovely tan splash around the stem hole, seems to make the vegetable pucker up.
A number of bad old habits limit the exhibit to being fairly well rather than well. Pictures are marred by cloudy fruit, harsh reflections, vacous arrangements of objects posed rather than placed. Pleasing surprises - Sharon Jenne's quixotic union of tangerine and lady bug - can't cover for missing examples of still life as a meditation on mortality or a metaphysical adventure. Where's the spirtual decay, the illusory precousness, the threshold between the visible and the invisible?
"The Living Still Life," through June 15, Ambre Studio, 310 W. Broad Street, Bethlehem. Community draw-in with tables of floral and ceramic still lifes, 6-9 pm, May 18,discussion on the still life led by gallery director/designer Evelyn Beckman 6 pm May 18. Hours Wed-Fri 10 am to 5 pm and by appointment. 610-974-8480, www.ambrestudio.com.Art Review 5/3/07
By Geoff Gehman
