Alice Thompson
Each year for the last several Philadelphia Sculptors has organized a graduating student show to coincide with its annual members’ meeting. The shows are juried by local faculty from the five participating art schools (the five in the show’s title “Five into One” are Moore College, University of the Arts, Tyler, University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Academy). And the results have been great, with works both surprising and charming. This year’s exhibit, which closed June 11, had some wonderful installation art (notable in a very strong show were PAFA’s Alice Thompson, Moore’s Kimi Kaplowitz, Tyler’s Andrew Pennington, PAFA’s Amy Walsh and Tyler’s Julie Greenberg).
Thompson’s window installation (seen in this shot– and take a virtual tour of the show at my flickr set) was a beautiful architectural hallucination with simple means (white and yellow tracing paper) using light and shadow as shading tools. Kaplowitz’s video animation played on a monitor with the props — nude doll, insects, pink goop and miscellaneous machine-like tools displayed nearby — was a great sci-fi Matthew Barney-esque narrative. Body was obviously a subject and machinery, all set in a post-apocalyptic cave. Very dreamy.
Anyway, I’m glad I got to see the show — it solidified my view that sculpture and installation are thriving activities among young artists. Others in the show — and look for them all to crop up if they stay in Philly because the quality overall here was outstanding — were: Sinae Lee, Elena Saxton, Edward Carey, Elizabeth Long, Josh Kerner and Phillip Adams.
