PERSPECTIVE: 30 Days Hath September at Vox Populi, Part 3

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PERSPECTIVE: 30 Days Hath September at Vox Populi, Part 3

POSTED: Monday, September 21, 2009, 8:30 PM

Filed Under: Arts

City Paper welcomes Jonathan Wallis, assistant professor of art history at Moore College of Art and Design, to our Critical Mass team. His column, 'Perspective,' will run monthly in this space, bringing a critical eye to a visual art scene that continues to thrive in Philadelphia. Questions? E-mail Wallis at jswallis@gmail.com.

voxpopuligallery.org

Nick Paparone, "30 Days in the Hole" Nick Paparone's solo show at Vox Populi is a rambunctious affair, composed of sculptures and wall hangings that turn the gallery into an anxious landscape littered with past fits of excessive inebriation, sexual adventures and scatological accidents. The gallery is decorated with large beer labels and sheets with spray-painted images of billiard balls that create the effect of bouncing off objects and walls like a cue ball. It's a bit too frenetic at times, but maybe that's the point. The title of the show seems to leave little doubt ' this experience, like the tale told in the 1974 song by the rock outfit Humble Pie, is a jaunt into a world of overindulgence with all the usual risks, dangers,and consequences. Paparone's visual referents function like flotsam and jetsam from the unconscious, gathered together as surreal expressions of the tensions between repressed desires and powerful acts of personal catharsis.' The objects are the strongest aspect of the show, more so than the installation effect evoked by the wall elements, and the sculptures evidence solid craftsmanship and an adroit use of vernacular materials. Paparone seems at his best when working with free association between words and things, and engaging in semiotic associations with his chosen combinations and juxtapositions is provocative to say the least. A saddle horse structure with a bucket of scatological slop and a lurid orange turd, mounted with a riding saddle, elicits aesthetic sophistication in a cocktail with something beastly. But at times the visual noise from the surrounding walls has a tendency to compete slightly with the full potential of Paparone's objects.' With all the sexual and scatological imagery in the show, and the large kinetic sculpture of a bloodshot eye at the center of the room, I'm reminded of polemical surrealist Salvador Dal', whose sequence in Hitchcock's Spellbound seems recast through the hovering, lonely eye. But Paparone's eye is not an outside observer. Instead, it seems to function as the ocular nexus of this visceral world, a way of presenting a haunting visual metaphor of the persistence of self-reflection. If Paparone's intent in '30 Days in the Hole' is to take me on a trip down a perverse memory lane, recalling psychic and physical ups and downs along the road of life, then he succeeds with ease.

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Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

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