After weeks of heat during the day and clear nights, there comes the evening of my opening reception at Wohlfarth Gallery Provincetown - and it rained like hell. Buckets, oodles, heaps, copious and extravagant amounts of wetness. And I was sure, of course, that no-one would come, a fear that I kept barely at bay by quaffing multiple glasses of yummy prosecco.

Well, readers,  I’m here to report that my Cape friends and even some art-seeking strangers, came through like champs, slogging through the downpour and earning my eternal love. Ends up, we had a great party.

Vinnie Wohlfarth hung the show magnificently, which was not an insignificant  challenge considering that I showed both tar pieces and encaustics. The Wohlfarth outpost here in P-Town, celebrating 20 years on the ragged end of the Cape, is a beautiful space in the heart of the East End gallery district. It is lit like a dream, so none of my usual bitching about lighting will be heard here. I also owe a big  thank-you shout out to Provincetown Magazine, which for some lucky reason decided to sponsor my reception and brought us some fabulous food well above the art opening norm.

So I’ll just show you some pictures, since I do draw the line at reviewing my own art.

perfect P-town:motorcycle, baby carriage, gallery goers

the meditative and moneyed P-Town

The couple of miles of Commercial Street that constitute the commercial spine of Provincetown can be divided into distinct districts. The compact central downtown is haute raffish: souvenir shops, bars, t-shirt shops, henna tattoos, ice cream – think Ocean City in old buildings. This is bracketed by the residential West End, which includes some of the 250 year-old houses that were floated over the harbor on barges from the original settlement at Long Point after one too many storms had swamped them.On the other side is the East End, home to many galleries, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and its share of historic buildings.

Unlike some other more buffed and shiny historic areas, like Society Hill in Philadelphia and Beacon Hill in Boston, restoration in P-Town has largely been confined to basic maintenance; the whole town is kind of crumbly around the edges and for the most part, P-Towners like it that way.

Bailey's sculptures

Every Friday night during the summer, all the galleries in P-Town participate in the gallery crawl and most have receptions for the artist(s) featured that week. The exhibitions change pretty much every week because there are only about 10 weeks to the season during which most of a year’s worth of income has to be earned.

Maryalice Johnson's work

my summer gallery home

This Friday I stopped first at Art Strand, the coop gallery  that includes many of the finest year-round resident artists and whose exhibitions are consistently among the most interesting in town. No sailboats or lighthouses here. The current show features the work of Maryalice Johnson and Bailey Bob Bailey. Johnson’s cut-out collages are peopled with a cast of female characters whose adventures she has been chronicling for some time. They are made on clear plastic and mounted about 6 inches off the wall, so that the play of shadows increases the population and the activity exponentially. While I frankly resist devoting the time that would be required to decipher the narrative, the visual impact of the work is strong enough on its own to make it fully successful.

Bailey’s sculptures promise nothing more than fun and they deliver. My favorites are the painted foam pieces, out-of-scale big, looking eroded by time and weather and simultaneously heavy and light.

Wohlfarth gallery goers

Vinnie Wohlfarth herself

Just a short walk brought us to Wohlfarth Gallery, my lovely gallery home for the summer. Vinnie has hung (and lit!) my 15-piece grid of encaustics really beautifully – somehow it found itself in the background of all the pictures I took. Imagine that. My opening reception there is July 23, where we’ll be showing a grid of yummy tar paintings.

the crowd

Anna U. Davis accepted the challenge to fill the cavernous spaces of Long View Gallery on 9th Street and has accomplished it with brio. An awful lot of people can fit in that space, making it possible to see the work even though the opening last night of her new show was the clear destination of choice for DC artfolk.

Anna's gorgeous husband, Peter

For several years, Davis has been creating a cast of characters she calls Frocasians - people who transcend race. Up till now they have appeared in collages, often quite large, assembled from thousands of tiny slices of colored magazine pages. It is the kind of work that requires a patience, attention to detail and sheer level of manual dexterity that few of us possess. I know I sure don’t.

For the first time in this show, Davis has made ink drawings on paper, all in black in white. She tells us that the new work has been inspired by the pasodoble, Spanish dance music played in ballrooms and at bullfights, hence the title: “The Dance Before the Kill. ”And by God, that’s exactly what they look like.

Anna story-telling

Arkin and Barlow etc.

The most intense of the drawings fill the entire sheet of paper with a grid of writhing, grimacing people, simultaneously pulling each other limb from limb while they grope and reach for each other, dancing and killing at the same time. It is an effect of violence and sexuality that calls to mind  medieval depictions of the sufferings in hell. The black and white format and the use of line drawing, allows the viewer to see the action more clearly and somehow enhances the immediacy of the experience, to my eye at least.

 

Alex B.

Nor are the collections of people randomly assembled for visual effect. There is a very specific story and an intention behind each. During the opening, a guy with a laptop followed Davis, recording some of the stories. I hope that Long View captures that for a kind of audio tour – or that they compile the stories in writing, because they add a great deal to the work.