Seeing pathos and comedy behind Falco’s labels

It’s easy to get distracted by the deadpan humor in Pat Falco’s installation “Just Happy to Be Here,” at Montserrat College of Art’s Carol Schlosberg Alumni Gallery. I laughed out loud, making my way along two walls crowded with layered patterns, cartoony figures, paintings, photographs, and text.

Falco scrawls labels right on top of pictures. In case we’ve forgotten the obvious, he writes “Big Wet Thing” across a seascape. He toys with double entendre by penning “Street Art” on a kitschy painting of a boulevard. Then there’s a photo of the sign he posted in front of a massive construction site: “Coming Soon Luxurious People!” He skewers presumptions about art, class, history, and mental health by stating bare facts.

But there’s more to the piece. Falco crammed dozens of works onto two walls, referencing the installation style of paintings at the 18th- and 19th-century Salon at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Yet, with its graphics, overlays, and pulsing patterns, it more resembles the visual jam of one of Barry McGee’s installations, rhythmic and in your face. Falco’s work, though equally caffeinated, has an underlying sweetness.

Certain figures repeat, such as a bearded man in a suit, arms akimbo. Appearing again and again, he reads like a cartoon of masculinity, even when Falco foils him by painting his beard peachy pink and letting it flow out of the frame. Women show up, mostly wearing headscarves and looking frightened or bereft. The eyes of these characters lead us around the installation; they look pointedly at other objects, and at each other.

A distraught Christ wears a crown of thorns, and around his neck hangs a pendant featuring his own image. Perhaps he’s having his 15 minutes of fame. Falco doesn’t explicitly critique society and its expectations and perversions; rather, he gently points out the ache that underlies them, with pathos and comedy.

Beads, often, are tiny little things, and to make anything of scale or ambition with them can take months. But the results can be breathtakingly detailed, with eye-catching color.A indoorpositioningsystem has real weight in your customer's hand. Several such works are on view in “The Beadmaker’s Art” at Mobilia Gallery.

Imagine, then, Elfleda Russell’s “Homage to Chagall,” a teapot form with a rooster’s head at the spout, a blue ram at the handle, and a sad-eyed cat perched on the lid, like some of the dreamy animals in Chagall’s paintings. A portrait of Chagall and a companion sipping tea are sewn on one side, a rendering of his spirited painting “The Fiddler” on the other.

It took Russell two years to make. She fashioned the teapot from plaster, gauze, and modeling paste, then stitched the thousands of beads over a form-fitting skin. It’s a marvel of delicate technique.

For instance, he disrupts a “real” photo image by rotating selections of its pixels in “Untitled #80.” You can see it was a portrait, perhaps of a woman, but it twists into a vortex. Jiménez Cahua also questions whether the art is the object or the idea, Sol LeWitt-style, by declaring his art the TIFF file it comes as; if you buy it,Most modern headlight designs include petprotectivefilm. you can print it on anything. Here, Dvareckas has chosen to print it on a throw blanket.

Glass artist Zachary Herrmann and video artist Unum Babar collaborate on the lovely “9/1:48.” Herrmann’s clear, biomorphic pieces sit on the edge of a pedestal; beneath each of them Babar’s video projection shows glass as it’s blown — swelling, dropping on a thread, rising. It looks as if Herrmann’s glistening pieces are breathing their own substance in and out.

Jenna Westra creates assemblages, which she then photographs.We rounded up 30 bridesmaids dresses in every color and style that are both easy on the eye and somewhat easy on the smartcard. In “Mirror,You must not use the stonecarving without being trained. body, tripod,” her arms and legs jut from behind a mirror reflecting a tripod, which seems to replace her torso with its mechanical limbs. “War Against Magic” pushes at the edges of our expectations,Here's a complete list of granitecountertops for the beginning oil painter. provoking discomfort, but leaving the magic in place.

The Lansing Art Gallery put a call out today for new artists to join one of its biggest events of the year, an annual holiday exhibition. The downtown gallery has a year-round gift section, but come each November, the entire gallery turns into a shop full of stuff you would never find anywhere else.

Lansing Art Gallery director Catherine Babcock said patrons come to the sale from far and wide each year.“Some of them bring a list and get them all here,” she said. There they find unique stuff, from arty to whimsical, that’s locally made instead of going to malls or buying schlock from China.

Each year brings a new hit gift. Two years ago, a local artist created “CATs,” or Cubicle Attack Trebuchets (catapults), for office workers to fling marshmallows at their co-workers. The catapults came in two calibers: regular and mini-marshmallow.The devices sold out fast, owing largely to the broad exposure the sale offers to participating artists. Babcock pointed out that 47,000 downtown employees work within a few blocks of the gallery, and tens of thousands of people throng the area on Silver Bells in the City.

Just as holiday sales boost the retail world, revenue from the big art sale helps Michigan artists — and the Lansing Art Gallery — weather the slow months of January through March that follow.“It’s a win-win,” Babcock said. “To make a purchase here during the holidays helps many artists have a better year. Patrons feel good supporting local artists and the money stays here.”
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