High Wire Gallery Shovel Show - P.A.W. Print

Four floors above street level, shovels cavort drunkenly and meld with orchids. Garden implements become chandeliers. Glass gleams garishly with genitalia. A tide flows from Rubbermaid into a ready-made beach. DuChamp puns abound. This is The Shovel Show at the High Wire Gallery.

Curator Jeff Thomas details the theory behind the exhibition, “We dig everything, stone and sand for buildings, iron out of the ground to produce steel, to build skyscrapers and airplanes, power lines and telephone lines from copper mines, uranium for big bombs to knock it all down. You name it and at some point in its existence it has been dug out of the ground with a shovel or buried with one.

“Steam shovels, snow shovels, long-handled shovels, coal shovels, short-handled shovels, a garden spade, a grave digger’s shovel--- the Panama Canal was dug with a shovel. The GI gets a gun and a shovel, digs a fox hole. The press is always digging up dirt, we have ditch diggers, clam diggers, potatodiggers, gold diggers, you name it we dig it.”

Thomas’ installation, Fantasy Shovels of Wood and Steel and Other Simple Tools, forms the centerpiece of the exhibition. An altar looms of garden implements, most notably the shovel, decorated with found objects from children’s toys to bones and unidentifiable apparati. Shovels descend from the ceiling in a striking sculpture melding the natural with artificial materials in a dance of fancy and fantasy.

Directly next to Thomas’ piece rises Brian Wagner’s Untitled (500-5000 sticks project). An assembly of found painted and unpainted wooden broom mop and assorted sticks composes this enormous, yellow structure, affixed together within the Highwire walls.


Brian Wagner’s Untitled (500-5000 sticks project). photo, Lisa Spera

The first conception of this structure occurred in 1989. Wagner explains that the work was “generated as an alternative response in materials, methods and process at the time.

“They are temporal, ephemeral and involve groups of people helping to ‘build’ the structure in a site-specific place as a response to that space and the conditions of installation.”

Seemingly a work strictly of textile, Angela Victor’s “aged” creates the effect of textile from paper, gesso, paint, clay, and other earth materials. Fibers descend lacily from the upper and lower layers in a seductive scene in this semblance of fabricated fabric.

Another large scale sculpture, Stephanie Lincoln’s “beach toy” fashioned from chicken wire and papier mache painted yellow and pink. Lincoln boasts that this piece is “not for sale: free to a good home,” and her snapshot photographs show that the piece has visited the actual beach itself.

Another beach rises from Rubbermade in a ready-made sculpture by Ron Markee. Untitled consists of sand, shell, water, piping in a blue wooden confined sandbox which seems to be a beach. Water actively runs through the pipes, moistening sand, creating an evolving landscape.

Pennsylvania State Council on the Arts recipient for sculpture Lydia Hunn provides the site-specific Shit/Snow/Sand: Many Things are Moved by Shovels. Hunn festoons four- and five-letter words onto the gallery. The text and sculptural installation consists of words falling in the center of each square box contained within a space, six squares tall by seven squares wide. A metal, sculpted shovel stands before them.

An Associate Professor at Drexel in the Department of Visual Studies, Hunn works in the realms of conceptual, environmental, site-specific sculptural installations and works on paper. Her work which ranges from book arts to sculpture can be viewed in public collections in Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Lisa Spera, the Highwire Gallery photographer and member creates a multimedia exposition of small pieces. She fuses an inkjet printing of a shovel onto a red painted canvas to create S (m. It’s a multi-media piece. It seems almost as if she had painted canvas and affixed it to canvas, in its textures. The Secret Lives of Teenage Shovels, depicts shovels in their randy, seedy element before liquor strewn landscapes.

Spera described the conceptualization of the shot, “I came home and saw that some kids in my neighborhood had been partying and saw the bottles and trash, so I put shovels in front of it and shot it. The shovels seemed young and innocent, but I photographed their secret life.”


Larry Livolsis' Missile Tip Rhumba. photo, Lisa Spera

Other bawdy shovels appear in Larry Livolsis' Missile Tip Rhumba, a collection of steel and glass sculptures. In the rhumba, phalli, nipples, and reproductive organs adorn blue, green, and clear blown glass, stemmed handles of spiked steel shovelheads in a tactile and strangely erotic fashion.

The Shovel Show also features work from Floss Barber, Katie Bidlingmaier, Mitru Costea III, Stanley Kaplan, Peter Kinney, John Massee, Bill Mayes, Gerald Nichols, Jean Plough, Jennifer Brinton Robkin, Abraham Rothblatt, KT, Midge Valdes, Highwire Gallery coordinatorJohn Van Zandt, Jeff Waring, Kathleen Wert, and Robert Younger.

Highwire Artists, Inc., is a non-profit community of artists with permanent meeting and gallery space. Its mission is twofold: to fulfill obligations to its members and the community. The gallery offers emerging and established artists of diverse backgrounds an opportunity to develop and present in various disciplines, by providing an environment that supports and encourages the creative process, free of restrictions often encountered in commercial art galleries. Highwire Gallery also rents space to other art groups for artistic and creative events.

The latest show at the gallery is Ashes & Earth: New works by Jeff Margraf. It is open until June 27.

High Wire Gallery is located at 1315 Cherry Street. For more information, please call (215) 829-1255, or visit the website www.highwired.tv.