But the Old Market Artists gallery is trying hard to make the "First Fridays" thing work, and I'm trying to get with the program.
[What's First Fridays? The idea is that galleries collaborate to have receptions on the first Friday of each month, hoping to build a "destination" event that will draw bigger crowds. It's never gotten much traction in Omaha; if you want to see First Fridays that rock, check out Kansas City's version. Believe me, the slide show on this page doesn't do it justice.]
Okay, back to OMA. It isn't much bigger than the proverbial hole in the wall, so when it's crowded (and anything over a dozen is a crowd in this space) it can be hard to see the work. Because of that – and because let's face it, we all need a breather after last week's epic-length Jackson Artworks whackathon – I'm just going to pick on two artists who snagged my attention:
Zack Jones has a lot of works in the gallery, and frankly, most of them don't do a lot for me.
But I got a kick out of two paintings, apparently part of a series, of people looking at paintings. (Solitude, linked here from his own website, depicts the Chicago Art Institute; another is recognizably set at Joslyn.)
There's a fun, hall-of-mirrors vibe to the concept. Here's me, looking at a painting of other people looking at another painting; who knows, maybe Jones is behind me, painting me into another painting. Wooo, like, cosmic, man!
I've got to say that Jones' painting technique doesn't trip my trigger -- too generic for my taste. But his idea's got legs, and I'd enjoy seeing him take it farther and work some more angles on it.
Technique isn't the issue for photographer Andrew Baran -- his camera work and printing are knockout. Disclosure: Eons ago, Baran and I both were members of the Photographers' Gallery; it wasn't like we were buds or anything, but I admired his mad tech skills even then. It was his taste I sometimes questioned... and guess what? I still do.
You don't need to worry about clicking the link to Baran's elegantly-designed website -- it's reasonably "safe for work," unless you work for the Taliban. Be advised, though, that the images he's showing at OMA right now are considerably edgier: nude young women, erogenous zones, mildly kinky overtones of bondage and such.
Yeah, I know, there's nothing inherently wrong with that stuff and it's perfectly possible to make significant art about it. And I've got to say that while I sometimes think Baran is flirting a bit with the cliff-edge that separates figure photography from sleaze, he never actually goes over.
So that's not my kick. What gets me is that, fabulous technique or no, Baran's concepts sometimes strike me as, well, cheesy.
Take a look at Io, pictured here via a link to Baran's website (try to disregard the "watermark" type.) This is so, so close to being an image that would knock me loopy. I love the lighting, the tones, and the tautly athletic way Baran has fitted the figure into the frame (although it bugs me that he cropped off her fingers and toes to do it.)
But then, he screws it all up by decorating the model with automotive hose clamps. Hose clamps?!? What the...? They're not aesthetic, they're not organic to the situation, they don't resonate with any concept of either Io-the-mythological-hard-luck-girl or Io-the-moon-of-Jupiter... So why are they there? Okay, I can see Baran wanting to include something hard and shiny on his model to balance all that softly-glowing skin, but still... auto parts? There's a word for this kind of misdirected creativity, and that word is contrived.
Back in the '30s, possibly the most famous fine-art photographer in the world was William Mortensen. His reputation was huge, his writing was popular, his technical skills were legendary, and some of his ideas about the factual basis of photography (basically, he didn't give a kack about it) have only recently come back into the mainstream. But his work made some people nervous with its nubile nudes and hints of kinkiness, and when it came to taste he sometimes zigged when everybody else was zagging. The result was that sometime in the 1950s, he dropped almost completely off the art-world radar.
Baran's nudes remind me a bit of Mortensen's, but I'd hate to see his career go the same way. Which, really, is a polite way of saying: Lose the hose clamps, bunkie!
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