Not a mirage: the rapidly growing Phoenix metropolitan area, which includes the towns of Scottsdale and Tempe, has become a substantial venue for contemporary art - Report From Arizona

Art in America, Dec, 2002 by Raphael Rubinstein

Compared to Riva Yares and Bentley, Scottsdale's other galleries are more modest in scale and scope but worth investigating. One of the smaller galleries that I liked was Lisa Sette, which has been in existence for 16 years and has a penchant for somber, sepia-tinted art with a seductively gloomy sensibility--a striking departure from the bright modernist work favored by many other Scottsdale galleries. This "Sepia School," if I may coin a phrase, includes Peter Drake's paintings of Italianate scenes that resemble 19th-century photographs (paired in one exhibition with photos by Karl Blossfeld); David Levinthal's shadow-drenched photos of toy figures; Luis Gonzalez Palma's assemblaged moody photos, sometimes printed on antique paper and flanked by panels of gold and silver leaf; and David Kroll's symbolist still lifes. Carrying things over into three dimensions are Kim Cridler's openwork sculptures of wax, steel and glass, which, in one show, shared the gallery with mysterious assemblages by Italian artist Maurizio Pellegrin. Not at all sepia but still in keeping with the gallery's saturnine tendencies are the mixed-medium reliefs of Einar and Jamex de la Torre, brothers whose work is often inspired by vernacular Latino culture.

Back in the realm of colorful abstraction, during spring and summer Cervini Haas Gallery presented the work of two southern California painters, Lance Blackman and Allison Renshaw, both of whom possess a lively sense of color and an agility in combining various techniques. I only saw one show at G2 Gallery, of oil and acrylic paintings by Jack Balas in which flying machines such as dirigibles were juxtaposed with clock faces on which the numbers had been replaced by letters. The effect was a deadpan combination of the documentary and the enigmatic. The gallery is devoted to emerging and mid-career artists from the Southwest. Vanier Galleries, which recently opened a branch in Tucson, exhibits well-known artists such as Dale Chihuly, Janet Fish, Hunt Slonem, Beth Ames Swartz and Emmi Whitehorse, as well as a host of others. Last year the Santa Fe-based Chiaroscura Gallery joined Scottsdale's roster of interesting galleries.

In the midst of the fine-art galleries on Marshall Way is Gallery Materia, which specializes in applied art and craft. Everything in the large gallery, which is built around a patio that serves as a kind of sculpture court, is exquisitely crafted and many of the objects on view would be perfectly at home in an art gallery. (In fact, Materia is owned by Bentley Gallery, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were occasional crossovers between the two.) Among the works that struck me were Nancy Sansom Reynold's sinuous sculptures of laminated plywood, Philip Moulthrop's turned wooden bowls, Carol Shin's embroidered depictions of old cars, Jae Won Lee's glazed porcelain slabs and Marian Bijlenga's wall pieces made from cotton and dyed horsehair. In recent years, more and more artists have embraced materials and techniques that were once considered to belong exclusively to the craft domain. At the same time, it appears, craftspeople have adopted some of the conceptual sophistication from so-called fine art. Taking in Materia's incredible collection of vessels, pieces of furniture and objects of no clear function, I couldn't help noticing how the level of craft was often far above that of many current fine artists who have gained recognition using craft-related techniques, and that deep understanding of their materials also led to works of great subtlety and beauty. I found myself wondering if there was anything inherently more significant in malting, say, a geometric abstract painting than in turning out an object like one of Peter Masters's ceramic-and-glass bowls or Sansom Reynold's wavy, laminated-wood sculptures. These issues of craft versus art would come up again when I visited the new Ceramics Research Center at Arizona State University in near-by Tempe.