Artsramble Archive

Meredith Brickell, Ray Duffey and Sarah Powers have a very clean contemporary exhibit running through the end of August at Crocker's Mark gallery in Raleigh.

The Gallery has been open since October, but jumping into art from the family business has been a quantum leap for Stan Crocker. Those who have been around Raleigh a while might remember Crocker's lawnmower repair shop at 613. W. Morgan St. It opened in the 1940s, and moved to Morgan St. in 1956, Crocker explains. "We still get phone calls looking for mower repair," Stan says, and within minutes sure enough, he has to refer a telephone customer to another shop.

The metamorphosis from lawnmower repair to fine art gallery may seem far fetched, but the Crocker family history provides clues. "My family was in the welding business through the depression. My father built pretty much everything you could possibly weld down in Wilmington. He was mostly into woodworking at home. He filled our house with furniture that would stand up against any craftsman in the state," Crocker says. Stan himself is handy with metal work, woodworking, photography and sculpture. "I wanted to honor my family's past, and keep a shop at this location," he says.

The current exhibit is a beautifully matched group of artists. Brickell and Powers work plays off each other in ways so symbiotic that collectors will be tempted to display one of each at home too.

Brickell's "Three Hollow Vessels" brought on memories of the better Chelsea galleries, with fine lines exuding reds and greens that spread like watercolors into the soft curves. A thoroughly established artist, with recent exhibits in Chicago, Philadelphia and Santa Fe, Brickell stretches clay into fine art with superb shapes and glazes that pull the eye in, and get you to flip the work over to see what she's done with the bottoms. "I use the clay as a canvas to try to represent all the facets of landscapes I've known," Brickell says. "You get to know the big things and then the little things in a place, and decorating the whole piece gives the viewer something to discover, like you would discover something new about a place the longer you are there."

Brickell and husband Ray Duffey moved back to the triangle from Nebraska partly because setting up a studio and getting a foothold in a new place is hard, and they were both comfortable with the art scene here, Brickell says in a phone interview. Duffey is also a cabinet maker for Eidicon designs, and the drummer for Countdown Quartet, and a variety of singer-songwriters.

Sarah Powers recently moved here after taking a BFA in ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design. The scene just got a touch better thanks to these three. Powers is probably typical of the painters trying to stay ahead of the curve these days: her landscapes include collage work, but are mostly abstract, and, once in a while achieve some upward separation from others who recently received their BFAs.

In "landscape. 2006. small square. number seven" there is enough contrast and color to help us forget her near-monochromatic show at Artspace.
Powers, whose day job is as the new director of the Visual Art Exchange, succeeds as an artist when she pushes past her urge to be minimalist, and gives us something to sink our teeth into. So far this happens about 50 percent of the time visually, and even more often with discernable subject matter than In an age of upheaval she manages to lay out soothing landscapes, full of water towers and stilted beach homes. This may help viewers relax, which is not easy if one keeps up with the news.

Powers' best moments will come when she strides past her comfort zone and expresses deeper feelings, or deeper concerns for the world around her. She displays an adept painterly touch on the landscapes, and an ability to paint over the original collages to make good abstractions. Giving the viewers something to think about or feel is the key to keeping an audience for abstract work.

Abstractions are not easy to pull off, Gallery C's Adam Cave once told me, because they come out and state "I am art." He meant that abstractions have a high hurdle to clear because they are STILL not accepted as fine art in some circles. It's good to see Powers sticking to her guns, as North Carolina is overweighted with conservative art collectors. Her landscapes are more than thick, linear, contemporary, non-expressionist, textured paintings. Sometimes they devolve into minimalist abstraction, and when the non-objective work is spiced up with the contrast of red on white the paintings show promise

Powers informs that the Talking Heads still ring through the halls of RISD, (pronounced RIZ-DEE) but perhaps it was Dire Straits singing about "an artist takes an empty canvas and hangs it on the wall," rather than any Talking Heads song that influenced "roadside," which is surely as minimal as Ms. Powers wants to go. She's squeezed the subject matter in a way that defies perspective and challenges casual viewers.. .that's why I like it.

Upon first view, Ray Duffey's prints are clearly accomplished. The sepia-toned "Bloom" shows seven stages of a flower opening, with the stem getting smaller and smaller as the flower opens. Is there hidden meaning in this? Probably not, as Duffey is clearly able to jump right into the fray, as in "Tonks," where the writing on the wall says: "What was once an ancient tropical garden of immense color and variety is in danger of being replaced by a comfortable but sterile and sleep inducing system of cultural super highways — with just one type of diet, and one available type of music. - A. Lomax
Little doubt his singer is singing the blues. Also little doubt that Blues would NOT be the type of available music in this scenario.

This print immediately jolts you back to "Fahrenheit 451," "Brave New World" and "Soylent Green," while continuing the trip down the memory lane of the 1930s cityscapes made famous by Adolph Gottlieb and Joseph Solman. You remember, the ones with water towers on top of buildings in New York City. Solman and Gottlieb were part of "The Ten" AKA Ben-Zion, Bolotowsky, Gatch, Gottlieb, Graham, Harris, Kerkam, Knaths, Rosenborg, Rothko, Shanker and Solman. (OK that's twelve, but the group evolved and remained ten-at-a-time, and Gatch was only involved for one year.) This group constantly complained about the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museums conservative natures, and it worked. By launching "The Ten Whitney Dissenters" at Mercury Gallery, they also began the long journey toward launching their own careers. Are there ten such talented artists around here? If there were, would enough people know? Would they ever form a group? Since there is very little to dissent against at Raleigh's Contemporary Art Museum, perhaps this young wave of talent (see Lee Hansley's current show for more) can make enough of a splash without having to complain so much here in the "cultured south." Still, an art movement form this area would be nice, since the short-lived "Chapel Hill School" seems like the distant past at this point. For more reading about Crocker's Mark Gallery try: http://www.crockersmarkgallery.blogspot.com
The Gallery is at 613 Morgan St. Raleigh NC, and open from 11-2 and 3-5 Monday through Friday, and Saturday 1-4. Phone 919.612.7277 for more information (but not for lawn mower repairs, although Stan can refer you.)

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