Brewery ArtWalk: April 5th-6th

The Brewery is reported to be the largest art colony in the world; it truly is a massive place! I believe there are more than 300 artist live-work spaces, and twice a year they have a big open studio "artwalk" where most everyone opens up their space and has artwork on display.

So, given the massive sampling of work... you're bound to wade through a lot of crap... but assuming a scatter-shot mentality... you're also bound to have a few artists who hit the mark.


Here's my list of highlights:


Jim Payne had to be the most interesting show of the day! Jim has been photographing his friends and family using stereo images (for a 3-D appearance) for over 30 years! His work was presented here in hundreds of small viewfinders suspended throughout his space. When you peer through the viewfinder, you see a very convincing full-color 3D image (!) of a person or family in their home or studio space. As individual images these are novelties, but exhibited together they present an exciting project recording his personal contacts in a really intriguing way for over 3 decades!

Please forgive this terrible photo (I stole it from someone elses blog entry about the artwalk), but at least you get to see Jim sitting on the stairs surrounded by many of his viewfinders, suspended all around.


Right nearby Jim's studio was a great couple named Billy and Winifred Johnson Brewer.

Billy Brewer is a very talented photographer with a keen eye for interesting distinctly American landscapes. His panoramic images are always beautiful (and technically very well executed), frequently romantic, sometimes tragic, and every once in a while ironic. They may not be deeply conceptual, but they are no less very strong images!

Winifred Johnson Brewer (apparently Billy's wife) was exhibiting a great collection of square panels, and she is clearly a strong painter in her own right. Together they made for a great mini-exhibition!

Guillermo Bert of LA Site Fine Art had an interesting series of panels all based around etchings or carvings of barcodes into a variety of media (with various words substituted for the SKU#). A very clean minimal aesthetic, and beautiful finishing, make these really interesting objects commenting on the seductive quality of our consumerist society. "The Price of Democracy, Triptych" (pcitured below) is particularly effective. Others falter when they get too political...

Aside from conceptual work, there was a great deal of good classic photography on display. Aside from Billy Brewer (mentioned above), two other standouts include John Smith's photos of Iceland, and Yoshi Hashimoto's project documenting the Lexington Hotel, Chicago, in the days before its demolition.

There was also a great project by Wendy Hall. I wasn't able to find any reference for you, but they were some very unique apocalyptic images, digitally composited urban landscapes, seemingly amidst some sort of supernatural event and watched over by an ominously ever-present swarm of black crows. Crazy. And these nearly monochromatic images were then printed on transparencies and mounted over brass plates giving them a look almost akin to old Daguerreotype images... so somehow this apocalypse feels as though it is already part of our history! Cool stuff!

There is much more, I'm sure... but those were the things that stuck in my head.