As sunset fingers through the trees and scrub of the Sangre de Cristo foothills and caroms from the low ribbons of adobe parapets, a meander down Santa Fe's storied Canyon Road is just the kind of delightful, and tame, experience that earns the road tourist accolades and designations as a national darling. To make something too beautiful in the middle of a tourist economy, however, is to risk its loss to the local community, by virtue of its "must-see" status for visitors. All too often, Canyon Road, like the Plaza, feels like it's not really a place for idlers, daydreamers and cash-poor citizens with no intention of buying a latte, let alone a landscape painting. Obviously, there's a subculture community of merchants and other locals who feel at home on their street, but idea of a Canyon Road where the antics of the
Cinco Pintores
are embraced or the action spills out of Claude's Bar and onto the street, feels like an urban myth more than a collective memory.***image2***
But the Nov. 2 opening reception for Tuscany Wenger's exhibition,
Piñata
, at Cruz Gallery, felt like a lost recollection of what the thriving Canyon Road art community is like. Wenger assembled a series of fantastical piñata creatures-oversized, oversexed, overinflated glories based on work she had previously done in miniature fits of felt and what can only be called doodads-that float with an anti-gravitational, aquatic glee through the gallery's small, but consistently versatile, front room. One of the sculpture/toy/mutant craft projects may be a fire-breathing chicken; another is quite possibly a flask made from a sentient space worm with the capacity to mist ambrosia or some kind of funky art Kool-Aid out into the room.
At the height of the reception's festivities, one of the beasts was sacrificed as a crowd swelled onto the street, tangled with traffic in the fading light and cheered as children took wild swings. It's a common enough sight in backyards everywhere, and sometimes at public parks, but it's all too rare in the civic spaces or the streets of the city to see-to feel, even-people cutting loose, dropping facades and biting their own lips as a kid chokes up on his stick and readies for an all-or-nothing swing. It sure as hell doesn't happen at too many art openings.
One notable exception is anything that involves the similarly enchanting, and spiritually related work of Rick Phelps. When Phelps showed at Albuquerque's Donkey Gallery, well, my memory has dimmed, but I'm pretty sure the sacrificial piñata involved fire, lots and lots of fire. Phelps, whose adornments and folk fabrications swell and undulate throughout the legendary chocolatier and candy shop, Todos Santos, opens an exhibition of his own,
It's Only a Paper Moon
, on Nov. 9 at the Café Pasqual's Gallery. Both Wenger and Phelps are successful at making their work transcend the realm of object and enter the territory of physical events. We are talking about voodoo, spells and intimate, essential, creative witchcraft here.
Not that there's a coven in these parts and not that the non-coven has a high priest or priestess, but the act of transforming what might normally be artistic practice into a potent and frequently subversive, meaningful presence, is most conspicuously the domain of Erika Wanenmacher. In her current exhibition,
I Stole Stealth (Coyote Taught Me)
at Linda Durham Contemporary Art, Wanenmacher achieves a kind of a quantum leap forward. It's not that her work-which ranges from meticulous drawings and paintings to painstakingly carved constructions and sculptures that throb as though they are recovered treasure from a wrecked schooner at the bottom of an ocean that, itself, is at the bottom of the rabbit hole-hasn't always been jumping forward on an evolutionary thread. But this time it's as though all 100 monkeys working overtime in the artist's brain suddenly "got it" and nothing will ever be the same.
At one end of the spectrum, you've got Wanenmacher, honestly, talking to birds. At the other end, there's a customized stealth fighter, done up in a hot, floral paint job, with its cockpit open to reveal a fabric nesting ground for an iPod and speakers. At still the other end of the spectrum (hey, it's her spectrum and she can bend it how she pleases), there's a self-portrait woman skin complete with tattoos (yeah, made from skin). Not to mention the carved snake that's covered, expertly, in actual snake skin so that it both is and isn't a real snake. If there is one word for the exhibition, it is "fierce." Seriously, it's a pagan, barbarian onslaught on what you thought was art, what you had previously assumed was personal expression-only Wanenmacher uses less force and more strategy, cunning, craft and all the connivances combined between the past and the future, between myth and science, to blow the doors off the gallery. It's not as much about pulling surprises up from the rabbit hole (or, in this case, the labyrinthine coyote den) as it is about adding elements to it. Her studio has become as big and as flexible as an imagined otherworld and, without a care for the consequences, Wanenmacher has started to reassemble reality from within it. It's a switch of the witch that happily makes the art world twitch.
Of course, we can't talk much about otherworldly, transcendent artists without mentioning Florence Pierce. By dying in October, she finally finished her greatest and most luminous painting. What kind of a woman moves from Washington, DC, to Taos, NM, to study painting when she's only 18 years old? In 1936? An adventurer, an explorer, a spell-caster whose work and voyages go way beyond the tender definitions of art. Thanks, Florence.
Piñata
Cruz Gallery
616 Canyon Road, 986-0644
Through Nov. 26.
It's Only a Paper Moon
Café Pasqual's Gallery
103 E. Water St., 983-9340
Reception 5:30-7:30 pm Friday, Nov. 9
Through Jan. 3.
I Stole Stealth (Coyote Taught Me)
Linda Durham Contemporary Art
1101 Paseo de Peralta, 466-6600
Through Nov. 24.
