INDEPENDENT WEEKLY
Visual Art 
13 MAY 2009

STRONG SHOWS AT FLANDERS 311 AND ADAM CAVE FINE ART
Story Time
By Dave Delcambre

Fables and Fantasy
Adam Cave Fine Art
Through May 26

The prints of John D. Gall on view at Adam Cave Fine Art through May 26 conversely are so visually cohesive as to seem inseparable. This is despite the fact that the artist has deployed a variety of media including intaglio, pen and ink, watercolor, and woodcut. In fact it is Gall’s aim to pursue a profound sense of storytelling in his work, and his overarching narrative qualities are inescapable.

Rendered in golden hues that evoke the feeling of aged prints and antique parchments, the works explore such left-brain concepts as mathematics, engineering and alphabetic letters. Gall’s prints are populated by a cast of characters (usually bald and mustachioed middle-aged men bearing more than a little family resemblance to one another) engaged in all sorts of construction and investigative busy-work activities. Simple machines like levers, pulleys and scales are put to use along with a variety of scaffolding and rigging devices. Notably, the words “seeker” and “knowledge” recur frequently, attached to all but a handful of works. Mythical places such as Babel are presented (although most of the settings are more ambiguous) along with anatomical and scientific diagrams that appear like pages seemingly torn out of Leonardo’s sketchbook.

The quirkiness of the bald characters and their metaphorical pursuits of information and understanding convey an animated feeling of challenging concepts. Much like the graphic symbols of mathematics and language he employs in his work, Gall’s prints tackle some heavy subjects while nimbly navigating a sense of timelessness within our humanity.

INDEPENDENT WEEKLY
Visual Art 
July 30, 2008

OLD AND NEW PHOTOGRAPHY TECHNIQUES AT ADAM CAVE FINE ART
The Image Endures 
By Dave Delcambre

The camera lens is often understood as a mechanism for capturing exacting, unforgiving and unemotional views of our surroundings. “The camera doesn’t lie,” the saying goes.

But the Four Photographers exhibit on view at Adam Cave Fine Art dispels this notion and demonstrates the tremendous varieties of emotive image-making that photography actually encompasses. Recent years have brought dramatic change to the medium: Digital cameras and printing techniques have fundamentally altered the way photography is done. With a foot in both the 19th and 21st centuries, this show succeeds by showing the contrast between digital techniques with more traditional methods and affording us a thumbnail glimpse of photography’s past and present. Examples of time-honored, laborious photographic processes such as platinum printing and cyanotypes co-exist alongside C-prints and the latest digital technologies

The four artists included in the show explore the time-honored subjects—landscape, still life and the human figure—but in often unconventional ways. DIANA BLOOMFIELD, for example, works with the lensless pinhole cameras, and she also utilizes antique methods of printing such as platinum prints and cyanotype. Her choice of subject matter echoes Romanticism, particularly the moody, emotive landscapes in works such as “Middle Island” and “Lake Ellis Simon at Dusk.”

ANDREW ROSS is also involved with landscape imagery, but he’s preoccupied by the individual’s place within it. His urban scenes typically depict one or very few figures moving about among streetscapes or along building facades. Isolation and solitude come to mind. Due to his shot selection, exquisite timing and the softly focused edges in his prints, his photographs have the distinct qualities of architectural models—they play tricks with scale and depth of field. One can’t help but feel empathy with his figures and implicated in their plight.

The work of STEPHEN AUBUCHON is ethereal in essence in the sense that he is studying the fleeting body in motion. His dancer photos, such as “Supplication” and “Etude,” have a whirling feel, while a pair of beach landscapes rounds out his works in the show: In their dusky twilight, there’s a chromatic unification of beach, sea and sky.

The 21st century comes most explicitly into view with the work of KIM ELLEN KAUFFMAN, who pushes the boundaries of photography by eliminating the camera itself. Rather, she uses a scanner as a type of camera and captures images of leaves, plant stems, seeds and other flora. A work like “Frabrication” exhibits how, once scanned, the image has then been imported into photo manipulation software such as Photoshop to create a richly textured and lush final digital printed image.

The exhibit at Adam Cave Gallery makes us consider where the fixing of images is heading. Will there always be room for the handcrafted work of art in the digital age? This show gives cause for optimism.

NEWS & OBSERVER
Arts
Sunday, May 25th, 2008

ARTIST EMBRACES NATURE 
By J. Peder Zane, Staff Writer

RALEIGH – Nathaniel Hester says he wants to create art full of “mystery and wonder.” On that score the Raleigh native’s new exhibit is a great success.
The 30 kaleidoscopic silkscreen prints that make up “Animal Farm” bear straightforward titles, including “Beaver,” “Buck,” “Snake” and “Zebra.” The mystery is locating those familiar figures amidst the colorful abstract shapes. You crane your head from side to side, step close then way back, wondering, huhn?

Eventually you realize you’re playing a fool’s game. Sure, “Flamingo” has plenty of pink, and “Goose” does look like a bird. But Hester’s prints are not a jigsaw-puzzle test, challenging viewers to find the familiar in a whir of playful abstraction. They invite us to look beyond feathers, beaks and snouts and consider how we think and feel about these members of his menagerie.

“I made a list of about 35 favorites, animals that I have a particular relationship with,” he said in a recent interview.

“Crab” was inspired by a visit to Manteo 25 years ago when he dipped chicken necks into a marsh to lure crabs. “Cow” includes a big black rectangle because when Hester looks at a field of cows they appear rectangular.

His connection to nature runs deep. In 2005 he began living on the remote, 500-acre farm in Person County his family has owned for nine generations. Before the buyout, they grew tobacco; now they lease much of the land for cattle and wheat.

Hester, 31, and his wife, Saralynn, 25, keep bees and grow fruits and vegetables on the land he visited often while growing up in the Cameron Park section of Raleigh. After graduating from Broughton High School, Hester went to Rice University in hopes of becoming an agronomist.

His life took a different path thanks to an unlikely source. The Rotary Club sent him on a trip to Raleigh’s sister city in France, Compiègne, where he fell in love with the Louvre Museum during visits to Paris.

He switched his major to art history and French studies. After graduation, he earned a fellowship from Rice that landed him back in Paris.

Through the next six years he studied various art forms — animation, bookmaking, oil painting, printmaking, woodblocking — in France; New York; San Francisco; Kyoto, Japan; and Boston University.

While embracing the notion of avant-garde, he concluded that it had been sidetracked. “The safest thing you can do today is to try to shock somebody,” Hester said. “I didn’t want to live in that ironic disposition, what the critic Hilton Kramer calls the ‘free-floating hostility to life itself.’ I wanted to make felt, earnest work about what I saw and experienced but that wasn’t autobiographical.”

His art has been showcased at 11 shows across the country and is part of the permanent collection at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum.

In 2006 he completed a series of 100 paintings titled “Ship of Fools,” which was inspired by Shelby Foote’s novels about the Civil War. They encompassed identifiable events, such as the Siege of Vicksburg and the sinking of the Merrimac and “more abstract motifs like what maritime battle might have felt like.”

Last year he executed another 100-painting project, “Garden Delights,” inspired by the history of NASA. “Space travel is part of our blood-thirst to know and control everything, to map the known world,” he said.

After those challenging projects, Hester said he wanted to do something “joyous and fun.” The result was the lobster, loons and bunny rabbits of “Animal Farm.”

“Some of them are mysterious, some of them are silly,” he said. “But all them are honest.”

INDEPENDENT WEEKLY
Visual Art
May 21, 2008

NEW WORK IN RALEIGH’S LUMP GALLERY AND ADAM CAVE FINE ART
Beauty and the bestiary
By Dave Delcambre

…Nathaniel Hester channels Henri Matisse from the studio on his farm in Person County. From the available evidence, the artist’s relocation to the countryside—complete with a few farm animals—has had a direct, beneficial impact on his art.

His latest show is an exploration of abstract composition, in the context of a colorful animal portrait series. An accomplished printmaker and painter, Hester uses the serigraph (a type of screen print) as his chosen medium for this series, and he has employed a collage-like technique of layering blocks and swaths of color—much as Matisse did in his late collage cutouts. Because serigraphs demand that each color be laid on with individual screen passes, there are strong similarities to collage in the printing process. Just as the French artist’s use of scissors and colored paper freed up his method of creating form, Hester lets his serigraphs liberate compositional elements so that they interact with their background and—most effectively—each other in lively and compelling ways.

With these prints, Hester experiments with expectations of what any given animal’s portrait might look like (or not) while at the same time exploring its distinctive natural qualities. His abstractions are sometimes extreme enough that the viewer is challenged to find a visual connection between animal and picture. Some images in the series, such as “Flamingo,” reference the namesake in color with only the slightest anatomical hints. Works like “Chicken” and “Moth” are even more minimal and utilize hovering Rothko-esque planes of color. To Hester’s credit, he avoids taking on clichés of animal caricature and instead makes intelligent use of various oddities in his subjects, such as unexpected greens in his “Giraffe” and a very human-like visage in “Owl.” When looking at these pictures, it’s useful to keep in mind some aspect of the animal’s fundamental nature: perhaps writhing and curving for “Snake” and brilliant coloration and segmentation for “Caterpillar.” This is an effective starting point in engaging the work on its own terms. These images are not about unerring representation; ultimately, it is Hester’s keen sense of composition and knowing when to say when that keep the work accessible and under control.

ARTS JOURNAL (WWW.ARTSJOURNAL.COM)

FLYOVER
Art in the American Outback
May 13, 2008

FLUTTERINGS, FLITTERS, AND FANCIES
Matt Lively – Recent Works at Adam Cave Fine Art
By Dave Delcambre

Matt Lively creates paintings that live up to his surname. His works are never dull but instead are about the fanciful flights of everyday objects that foray off in unexpected directions. The Richmond based artist has developed a style imbued with a tremendous dose of whimsy and often a good bit of surrealism thrown into the mix for good measure. His paintings recently on view at Adam Cave Fine Art in Raleigh depicted stage set-like tableaux of domesticity: sitting parlors with groupings of striped and patterned chairs, living or bedroom like spaces with large windows and wind blown curtains, ironing boards fraternizing with high chairs, and staircases that curl around small tables like your grandma’s that held the family telephone. Ordinary household items, often of the old-timey, made-in-USA era variety, are a common thread that reappear in the canvases and visually tie this series of works together. These items are central in the paintings and are typically actual objects the artist owns- an antique film projector for instance, an old circulating fan, a rotary dial telephone- and they simultaneously lend an air of nostalgic familiarity coupled with an unsettled air of mysterious tranquility.

The paintings share much with the fundamentals of still life painting in that the main subject matter consists of carefully composed objects, attentively painted, within a supporting background. Yet in Lively’s paintings these objects are always strongly metaphorical and seem to be stand-ins for the missing occupants of these spaces. This in turn gives rise to all sorts of associations that your mind begins to draw. Has the occupant of the room just left for a second and we’re catching the precise moment when they are absent? Or are they ever really coming back? Why are their belongings blowing all around in the drafty breeze like that? Who really owns that many chairs and how can their house have so many little rooms?

Indeed for all the tendency of your mind to have a traditional Westerner’s point of view (i.e. focusing on the objects rather than the space around them) it is a more intangible element that recurs throughout that gives these works their chutzpah: namely the continual breeze that appears to be blowing across the scene. It is a constant presence whether blowing the papers out of an antique typewriter in the painting titled “Turgid Type”or loosing the dots right off the pattern of a hanging dress in “Fall in Place” leaving them tumbling down onto the floor. It is a tough task this; the painting of the wind, yet this abstruse breeze seems to me to be the true inhabitant of these spaces. It flutters and flows about, making its way around and between the objects in the rooms as handily as we viewers survey the painted subjects themselves.

A few live elements do occur to bring a sense of the living into the fray: a bird just flown out of a birdcage, a comical swarm of bees in flight mounted on curious little miniature unicycles. But one particular inanimate item that caught my attention is the recurring old fashioned plug-in electrical cord that is generally present with each painted appliance. This cord curls out and away from the fans, clothes irons, and movie projectors towards a wall socket as if to seek out some broader harmony for the objects within their surroundings. It is a tangible element of connection -a literal power source- that suffuses Lively’s work with a sense of tactile linkage. In our accelerated present, a time of wireless and unplugged everything, sometimes it takes an honest time-worn item like this to connect us back to fundamental notions of inhabitance and spaces we might call our own.

a postscript…

The painter, I learned from his recent interview on WUNC radio’s “The State of Things,” also has an intriguing alter ego- Matthew Lively- who is more the brooding type, preferring to work with darker, more menacing themes. Matthew is more prone to show his work in bars and pubs – his own art underworld if you will- whereas Matt’s work is more content in hanging (no pun intended) with the traditional gallery crowd. The work done under each guise rarely crosses over into the realm of the other and Lively (who I have to imagine must have to constantly refer to himself as the Artist formerly known as the other M) is perfectly ok with that. Indeed it is a modus operandi that serves him well as it has many other creative types through history from Duchamp / Rose Selavy to the multi-heteronymical Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. The overall benefit is that Lively is able to cleverly pursue multiple, simultaneous streams of thought in his work in a fruitful way. He in fact becomes his own multi-tasking editor as this working method allows him to let varying ideas and concepts be utilized (or not) in a pluralistic variety of working styles. In doing so he is able to tinge his works with various subtle shades of meaning that have the benefit of broad resonance with viewers…whatever sort of art venue they tend to frequent. The artist noted in this same interview that practically none of Matthew’s fans are likely to cross over to see the paintings done by Matt and vice versa due to the differences in venue and the type of crowd each attracts. But do yourself a favor if you get a chance; break this trend and check out what’s going on in both places. It’s well worth the trip to see what’s coming out of the flip side of this artist’s palette.