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Friday, October 7, 2005
ZOUNDS! Dirty pictures at the DAI!
Oooooooh…. naughty bits!
Considering that we’re surrounded by sex, from bare-bellied teen fashions to the skirt-hiked plots of movies, books and TV shows, yadda yadda yadda, we really don’t seem to think about it all that much. Sure, we THINK about doing it — but we really don’t, as a culture, devote much consideration or conversation to what sex means: How it can affect and alter our relationships; how it can define who we are; how not having it can be as important as having it. In other words, the grown-up, difficult part of dealing with it. The stuff they mean when they say that the most important sex organ is the brain.
Kevin T. Kelly doesn’t have any problems with these questions or concerns, btw. The Cincinnati artist boldly takes sex and its various issues as his subject matter in a series of new and recent paintings on display through Dec. 11 at the Dayton Art Institute’s Regional Artists Gallery. There’s no wandering in by mistake … the gallery is located in a lower-level corrider that currently is marked with signs warning visitors that Kelly’s art contains graphic sexual material — and they’re right about that (the DAI reports no complaints about the show thus far, which opened on Sept. 17).
But Kelly’s work is also hilariously funny. Typical is 2005’s “Club Lust,” in which hubbie lovingly caresses his golf club while his negligeed wife sits in bed with a disgusted, chopped-liver look. Nearby is “Grandma’s Cookin’, in which an older couple sit together with beatific smiles. He’s thinking of her pancakes. She’s thinking of a vividly painted act between adults that is, well, very adult.
The notion of women’s desires being frustrated by men dully not getting it runs through a lot of Kelly’s work, often aggressively so. In “The Minotaur’s Comeuppance,” a man who’s been unable to perform in bed retreats to a corner, while a football ref calls a penalty on — who else? — his partner, who doesn’t know what she did wrong.
As with nearly all of Kelly’s paintings, there’s a lot going on in the frame to react to, none of it subtle — the nudity, the comic addition of the ref (who reminds one of those Miller Lite beer ads currently all over the tube), the lively background (a space Kelly usually fills with some sort of related imagery that propels the storyline) and the style. Ah, yes, the style.
Kelly employs a vivid, almost fluorescent palette of screaming colors, which he combines with a comic-book style strongly reminscent of Roy Leichtenstein’s famous Pop Art. He blends 1950s fashions, commercial art, old television shows, World War II bombers and old-fashioned visual slapstick — usually all in the same painting — to make his many points.
Other paintings poke fun at gender roles, suburban life, cultural perceptions of what’s right, wrong and appropriate — in some cases, mixing all those topics together in bizarre and amusing ways. A business-suited husband runs out the door to work, Dagwood-like, as his sexy, nearly nude wife looks on in boredom; across the hedge, a plane crashes and explodes. A man proudly presents his wife with a keen new present: A new handgun of your very own, honey! A couple thrash and grapple on a desktop surrounded by paintings on the office walls. The title? Art Lovers. Bad pun? Sure, but so what?
Kelly may be out to provoke, but he does so with a wry grin and a wink-nudge elbow in the ribs. Check your inhibitions at the gallery door and let yourself be nudged. We’re all adults here, right?
To have a look at Kelly’s stuff, visit www.daytonartinstitute.org.
If you stop by, lemme know what you think!
Sleeping through the new Neil Young album, alas
I always look forward to a new disc from Neil Young, and when I heard that his new one, “Prairie Wind,” was an acoustic return to the same form he followed with “Harvest” and “Harvest Moon,” I was pleased by the news. Those are great records … quiet, thoughtful and insightful, perfectly suited to his brittle voice and easy manner with a guitar. I return to them both from time to time, and they never stray far from the listening pile.
But the new disc is so far a bit of a disappointment — or at least, it’s a slow starter. Some of the songs, such as “This Old Guitar” and the lead-off “The Painter” are good, solid Young tunes in the tradition he’s set on his better acoustic work. Others, though, simple wander and amble about rather pointlessly, lyrical shuffling in search of a hook. This is especially true of “No Wonder,” which tries to be a post-9/11 song about confusion and modern angst, but which sorta just wanders in circles and goes no place… Which may be the point, to be fair, but if so that doesn’t come through. The construction is simply too loose.
Now of course, loose has always been a strong Young hallmark, and one of the things we love about the guy. And we do love him. But “Prairie Wind” feels more like a C+ than I wanted it to, and it’s definitely the weak link in its triptych.
All too often, I simplly found myself bored with this album … which was never the case with Young. Seems it’s been that way on his last few discs, and that’s unfortunate.
Note to Neil: Next time, can you return to big noise and feedback? We miss that stuff, and nobody does it like you. Nobody.
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