Artblog
March 07, 2008

by Roberta Fallon


Accumulations -- of words, pencils, birds, people and memories sit at the table in the Fleisher Challenge 4 exhibit. The 3-person exhibit by Judy Gelles, Erica Zoe Loustau and Shelley Spector is by turns energetic, nostalgic and dreamy.

Spector's mechanized sculptural objects made from scrap wood and found objects (or in several cases digital prints laminated onto objects) focus on music, people and place with one eye forward and one eye back. Spector (a longtime friend of artblog) is having her first solo show in more than two years. Working more serendipitously than in previously well-orchestrated installations (like her Jewish- and community-themed show at Painted Bride, see post and post) here she's got discrete objects that read as entities on their own yet talk nicely with their partners. Spector's a great meticulous object maker and her pencil log cabin with the black smoke coming out is probably my favorite piece both for its whimsy and its great use of a found material.

Her work has always been about people as icons. Here she's made icons of music with her little record player and song lyric-word pieces on the walls. The record player, which resembles a child's record player from the 50s does not really work but it's tricked out with electronics that play music. The songs are not contemporary and suggest songs from the 40s. The music washes the gallery in pop cultures past--a reminder that our songs today will sound equally out of place some years down the road. Time has also been a big subject for Spector and she's measuring it out here in all her pieces which refer backwards and forwards but somehow not to today. Her large prints of a ruler, a belt and other things (a scrabble game) make icons of everyday objects and transform what are often discards into something to ponder.


The Philadelphia Inquirer
March 07, 2008

by Edith J. Newhall


Like its three predecessors, the fourth and final of this season's Wind Challenge Exhibitions at the Fleisher Art Memorial is less of a piece than the Challenge shows of 18 months or two years ago. A shared aesthetic among each group of three artists seems not to have been a top priority for the 2007/2008 jurors.

There is some commonality between the three artists in Challenge #4, though. Shelley Spector, Judy Gelles, and Erica Zoe Loustau all employ the human figure and writing to one degree or another. They also work on a similar medium-size scale, and their art shares a touch of the past, a somewhat melancholy quality. Except for several of Spector's pieces that produce sound, this is an especially quiet, reflective show by Challenge standards

Spector's found-object sculptures and photographs, which occupy the first room of Fleisher's Louchheim Galleries, make a strong immediate impression. Her colorful pieces look like Depression-era toys rejiggered by a hobo, and are installed to perfection. (I'll assume Spector, a former gallery owner, was responsible.)

The carved-wood word pieces, with their intentional misspellings and lack of punctuation, and her gigantic American Ruler, a seven-foot strip of wood printed with a color photograph of a real vintage ruler, are more interesting than her audio or kinetic pieces. The latter include a wooden phonograph that plays old-fashioned songs but whose turntable doesn't revolve, or the Blockhead-type figure that continuously lifts and lowers a ball.

Spector is also showing a group of new, deeply vertical photographic prints of vertical objects, among them a zipper, a belt, a chain, the spines of a few National Geographics - all of which she has altered (she often replaces a brand name with her own surname, among other things) with humor and charm.