"Pay to Play"
BLACK FLOOR 319 A North 11th Street, 3rd FloorAugust 04–August 27
The guiding conceit of "Pay to Play," that artists might curry curatorial favor through bribery, is as acute as it is persistently amusing. Kenneth Lay's dramatic passing came only days before the opening, and the gallery handouts are thick with evidence of the syrup of corruption in American politics. Powerful national matters aside, the idea that an artist could secure an exhibition spot through greasing a palm seems ridiculous and surreal for a show at one of Philadelphia's newest, and most punky, communal venues. The fifteen young international artists work with the dominant tone of witty stridency to varying degrees of success. Adam Parker Smith shows an echoey, spare suite of devastating, formal, one-session drawings, all executed by his students and other at-risk teenagers in a tough Philly suburb, but the piece loses all its delicate integrity when viewed with his bribe, a tattoo parlor gift certificate for a teardrop falling from one's eye, hood symbolism for a fallen brother. Scott Andresen's semiabstract, folk-art-like quilts, two intricately assembled before-and-after topographies of a proposed housing development in central Florida, have a visual vibration, half elegy and half protest, that holds and grows in the viewer's mind. Despite smatterings of the sensational, undercooked, and derivative, curator Amy Adams deserves praise for an unadorned concept that showcases a few emerging artists with the ability to pack a world-class political punch.
—William Pym
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