Ex-local-girl Jina Valentine opens Thursday (either tonight or tomorrow, depending on when you’re reading this) at Fleisher-Ollman (she used to work at F/O with William Pym). Here’s Pym’s gossipy email on the subject:

Tomorrow night, Thursday the 8th February, will mark the opening of DARK MATTERS at Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, a show of new and recent works by Jina Valentine. Currently based in San Francisco, this will be Jina’s first solo show for the gallery. In the past few years Valentine has appeared in Thelma Golden and Christine Kim’s landmark “Frequency” exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Drawing Center’s “Common Destination,” “Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day,” curated by Shinique Amy Smith at The Proposition in New York. We are looking forward to working with her and Steve Turner Gallery (Los Angeles), Lisa Dent Gallery (San Francisco), and Dwight Hackett Gallery (Santa Fe) in upcoming group exhibitions for 2007. She has been praised and dissected in detail in the New York Times, Frieze Magazine, Time Out New York, the Philadelphia Weekly and Philadelphia Inquirer. [Hey, maybe we didn’t dissect, but we mentioned our hearts out, William.]

In San Francisco a few weeks ago, curator Larry Rinder asked Jina why she didn’t want to be an Abstract Expressionist painter, like Amy Sillman. She relayed the finer points of this critique to me while we were getting drunk the day after she arrived back in Philadelphia. …Jina told me “there are new forms of obfuscation available,” and she’s right, of course. The 30+ works in this show explore myriad strategies of construction and destruction, of loving culture and tearing culture to pieces. It’s faintly forbidding in places, and largely monochromatic, but there is an enormous amount of raw information contained here now, taking on (a shortlist) the Chicago Seven, the Top 40 selling albums of all time, Johnny Mathis and Johnny Cash, trans-American migration, graffiti in National parks, blacklists, dark spaces and collective historical omissions.

The opening will be 6-8 at the gallery. …there’s no open bar bash (we’ll be back on that track next month,) but to make up for it we’ve flown in DJ Nis from Copenhagen’s Escho crew to play perfect music at the opening itself. It promises to be a wonderful time.

What Roberta did say, and more

Roberta mentioned in her Cornucopia week post that Andrew Jeffrey Wright and Skullphone had an opening Friday night at Art Syndicate at Maze Gallery, 1726 Chestnut St., 3rd floor 215 350 6225, reception, 5-10 pm.

We visited the gallery last month (had to call for an appointment, and so will you if you want to see the show not on Friday night), and hoped to have something up about that show in a little video, but the video didn’t quite get off the ground–hang on, though, because video reviews are a project whose time is coming soon, we hope.

Anyway, the show was terrific–new cut paper from Hunter Stabler, oooommmmm; three hyped up videos from Danny Perez, mesmerizing like lava lamps, dude, hmmmmmmm; and highly unlikely prints on fabric by a Brooklyn duo who call themselves Wowch!, yummmmm.

We loved the show but we never made it to print on it. So here we are on the record, along with a heads up to explain Roberta’s suggestion, not that Andrew Jeffrey Wright needs much explanation. Here’s skullphone’s myspace page. The other thing you should know is the last opening pulled in hundreds for a major party.

Art Syndicate at Maze Gallery is looking a kit like it’s a not-to-miss venue for art worth wearing down your rubber soles.