It’s too easy to label Rachel Bess dark. After all, the 24-year-old artist harbors an obvious obsession with mortality. Her artwork is more still-dead than still-life, often incorporating fragments of animal skeletons or human skulls, and the bleak landscapes she paints, with titles like The Nightmare, have earned the moniker…
Mike Maas has more than a few skeletons in his closet. The budding artist who spent his childhood watching Creature Feature boasts a house full of monsters, goblins, freaks and bunnies. Yes, bunnies — both real and ceramic — the signature touch of sweetness that wife Jodi lends to Mike’s…
Michael 23 is an artist whose art has taken many forms. At the moment, he’s into robotics. “I try to understand how technology works in order to protect the survival of the species against it,” he says. Michael does that in a studio called Thought Crime located near Third Street…
Every afternoon, a whirlwind kicks up inside Pete Deise’s studio. It’s not just the metal sculptor at work. The artist has considered that he might have a roommate or two of the paranormal variety, someone who playfully blows dust around on a daily basis. “It’s kind of weird, and the…
Carrie Bloomston is an accomplished artist, a graduate of the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design. Her beautiful paintings have left random, empty frames of green-gray-purple-peach paint on the walls of her Tempe studio, where Bloomston stands, on a recent Friday morning, flipping carefully through a drawer of older work…
Chucky Spears has constructed a space to showcase his deconstructed denim. On the first Friday in June, he’s surrounded by beautiful women. Spears’ tiny studio, at Seventh Street and Fillmore in downtown Phoenix, is crammed full of people — friends, First Friday revelers and several models. Spears fields phone calls…
I got a bead on the overall quality of art shown this past First Friday in downtown Phoenix when I ended up rating a trip through the funky, skanky Hermanos Drive-In Food Market on Grand Avenue the real high point of the evening. So maybe I’m being just a bit…
As a native SoCal girl with roots still sunk deep into Southern California and its crazed cultural scene, I was really looking forward to seeing “southwestNET: PHX/LA” at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. Touted as a fresh look at urban life in Phoenix and Los Angeles, it was to feature…
Angel Cabrales lives and works in alternate realities. While driving through Cabrales’ neighborhood in east Mesa, you find that the cliché of suburban mass production — identical two-story floor plans inhabited by 2.something kids, canines and/or cats — ends at Cabrales’ property. Save for the unkempt lawn that hasn’t been…
Pantyhose with cotton crotches, old cut-up tablecloths, Hopalong Cassidy, Cesar Romero. Yup, Mesa Contemporary Arts certainly has selected a strange mixture of materials and subject matter for its “Two-Person National” exhibition, purportedly its very last before MCA bids adieu to its old location in Mesa Arts Center’s venerable Leave It…
“Landscapes in the Fireplace: The Paintings of Pedro Alvarez”: This exhibition is a bittersweet experience for those familiar with this well-loved young Cuban artist and his irony-laced work. A collection of Alvarez’s most recent paintings, ASU’s exhibition unwittingly stands as a final tribute to the irreverent spirit that infuses his…
At first glance, Ellen Wagener’s works look like photographs. Crisp lines of crops splay out in agricultural landscapes set below dreamy skies, looking like snapshots out the window of a car as you pass through the endless Midwestern prairies. But these are pastel drawings. Pastel — the grown-up version of…
Just a quick scan of the home-based studio of installation artist Heidi Hesse confirms that this native German has a serious thing for the Statue of Liberty, among other classic American icons. The 42-year-old artist, who grew up in the rural outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa, and a small…
Trust me when I say that “Landscape in the Fireplace: Paintings by Pedro Alvarez,” an exhibition of 40 large mixed media paintings by the Cuban artist currently on display at Arizona State University Art Museum, may be your very last opportunity to see so much of Alvarez’s work — particularly…
The downtown Phoenix gallery scene is often lauded as a place where you can discover fresh, young artists. But if you want them even younger and fresher, head to Tempe. In contrast to the established work shown at the university’s museum, Arizona State’s art department runs on-campus galleries that exhibit…
The ads running in Phoenix’s local media couldn’t be more straightforward, and seemingly guileless. Beneath a photo of one of the art world’s most popular icons, Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen, is the title of the exhibition now on display until May 30 at the Phoenix Art Museum, “Degas in Bronze.”…
Used to be Art Detour was a depressing event — a benchmark of just how far the downtown Phoenix arts scene hadn’t come. The three-day tour of Phoenix art venues was held at the end of March, always landing, it seemed, on the first uncomfortably warm day of the year…
The artistic offerings vary from metal giraffes to New York-sophisticated paintings. Before First Friday, there was First Thursday. For many years, snowbirds and equally gentle folk have flocked to Scottsdale on cool Thursday evenings, to sip wine and stroll through the galleries that line the city’s downtown streets. The artistic…
Better double-time it to Shemer Art Center on Camelback if you want to see “Land: Unconventional Approaches to Landscape” — billed as an exhibition that’s “pushing the boundaries” of the Phoenix municipal gallery — since it’s only going to be up for a mere two weeks. Considering the safe, watered-down…
Photographs of murdered men and women in grocery store parking lots. A picture of an enormous man made of cell phones and DVDs. And a guy in a karaoke bar. Not images you’d expect to see at the Heard Museum. But the Heard, like the Native cultures it showcases, is…
Putting a face to the name is the name of the game in “Bill Jay: Photographers Photographed.” The exhibition, now on display at Segura Art in downtown Mesa, pairs black-and-white images of internationally renowned artist-photographers taken by Jay over a 35-year period with a characteristic photographic image made by each…
Though white-bread Scottsdale may seem like an improbable venue for an exhibition about African-American hair and its vast implications, it’s actually the perfect place for “HairStories,” one of the current offerings at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. This hit me as I was following several SMoCA docents who were…
