THE LEIGH SIDE
Memory is a tricky thing. At a certain point it can become difficult to be certain of what has actually happened versus what you are told has happened versus what you've seen happen to someone else. Even the experiences of characters in books, movies and television
can begin to leak into our own sense of self. This disjointed borscht of mental leftovers courses through David Leigh's paintings at Klaudia Marr Gallery (668 Canyon Road, 988-2100) in the form of pop culture images, historic icons and landscape and portrait fragments. Leigh toys with conflicting and cacophonous imagery with a casual aplomb that belies the seriousness of his work; the recognizable and nostalgic components are really touchstones in an exploration of painting in which Leigh leeringly spelunks perspective, pentimento and plane. From Leigh's smallest drawings to his most thorough paintings, provocative, if sometimes collegiate and pithy, titles like "Decreasing economic advancement through poor decision making" hint at the collision of influences, the painter's mash-up of styles and social agendas that collide in these basement science experiments where all elements are poured into a single kamikaze beaker. When successful, as he often is, Leigh emulates a big bang where each element shares a deep relationship with the next in a microverse that implies an expanding and evolving potential-from everything, life. At least, that's how I remember it. Through April 23.
ONE GOOD TURN...
Most gallerists offering their exhibition space in exchange for cold hard cash-even for the sake of benefiting the arts-would be more than a little nervous about the outcome. But even if Linda Durham wasn't bothered by auctioning off a show at her well-respected gallery space during the Center for Contemporary Arts' Metamorphosis Ball last October (knowing that she was helping CCA put her mind at ease, she told me), I was nervous on her behalf; the only possible result, it seemed, was that some middle-aged, art-frenzied transplant or wannabe worldly retiree with more money than (artistic) sense would wind up with the honors and the result would be a difficult and embarrassing affair for everyone.
Thinking about that kind of gossipy, unimportant crap falls away in the presence of Adam Randolph's paintings. Randolph's brother, a Santa Fe sculptor, won the auction on his behalf and Linda Durham Contemporary Art (1101 Paseo de Peralta, 466-6600) wound up with much more of a show than it might have hoped.
Bathtub Paintings
, Randolph's interpretation of life as seen from the seat of a social worker in a high welfare area, or, as he puts it himself "weak, frightened, partitioned third world America," would be a visual bludgeoning based on content alone, if not for the artist's weary but expert sense of light and balance, his sheer miserable love of the "broken, sick, sickening" figures that he paints. Both emaciated and gigantic forms haunt and engage various "bathtub" objects in most of the works, the tub being a place of vulnerability and openness and curiously quixotic possibility. A similar tone is set in my favorite of the works, "Self-Portrait with Shovel," in which a man stands, hairless and naked in the foreground, his skin rendered in angled, mani-toned strokes, with a single horizon line separating a lower quarter of darkness from a subtle tangle of light consuming the top of the painting. A leaning shovel describes the horizon break as the difference between floor and wall, but the eye remains unconvinced. As open-ended as Randolph's spatial relationships are, his content and emotion are equally vexing-and engrossing. Is the shovel death? Life? Work? All possibilities are also inevitabilities and the fixed gaze of self-portrait does nothing to share which meditation is holding the moment. Randolph, more aware of what he's doing and why he's doing it than many artists, sums up his work, more outsider sociology than outsider art, better than I can when he suggests that his paintings require, "equal parts of intense control and loose defiance." Through April 29.
PLANNED PLANET
Even with my newfound and intense distaste for public input on master plans, I was unable to resist the siren call of the Warehouse 21 Downtown Vision Plan meeting. Created to draw droves of youngish folks, the attendance was thin for my taste, especially after the small throng of punkish youths hanging about proved to be just waiting until we were done and they could plug in the amps and do something that, you know, matters. But those who were there had intelligence and focus-however matching that with City Councilors Karen Heldmeyer and Rebecca Wurzberger and a snarl (or is it a snafu?) of city planners, resulted in a bit more debating than visioning. Still, one interesting consensus is that the new county courthouse complex, which is meant to displace the former Paramount and the Blue Monkey Salon and School, is a bigger issue than small business and club space-it goes to the very heart of how limited real estate should be used at the heart of downtown. The question we were left with was how to convince the city that they should horse trade with the county to keep that prime Montezuma block from being used for a bureaucratic behemoth. Don't tell her I told you, but Councilor Heldmeyer said to call her with any bright ideas (955-6818).
Maybe downtown needs to take a cue from Second Street, where local businesses, denizens and activists have (with the aid of the McCune Charitable Trust) launched The Triangle Messenger, a very cool neighborhood-wide DIY media effort packed with articles about life in the so-called Triangle District. To learn how one bright neighborhood is taking responsibility for its own development and future, grab your copy at Azulito Boutique, Back Road Pizza, Second Street Brewery, Cloud Cliff or, you know, lots of other places.
