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Few arts groups around here are older than the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh. Founded in 1910, the AAP is the oldest continuously exhibiting visual-artists’ group in the U.S. In Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Museums have been around longer, and the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Mendelssohn Choir, but that might be about it.
But older arts groups can learn new tricks, too. And so it is with the AAP’s 109th Annual Exhibition — even if the innovation here paradoxically means including artists who aren’t AAP members, or even based in the region.
“Transcendental Arrangements” occupies two floors at the Miller ICA (on the Carnegie Mellon campus) through Sun., Sept. 3. For the first time, the Annual includes artists from outside the Pittsburgh region — by my count, seven of the 14 participating artists, from as far afield as Germany. The juror, Miller executive director Elizabeth Chodos, chose artists whose practices “engage with ritual, magical, and supernatural qualities within everyday encounters.”
Including so many non-Pittsburgh artists is a bold move, and I imagine it might be controversial in some quarters. But, in the gallery, it works.
On the second floor, for instance, three semi-abstract prints by Chicago-based Jessica Labatte prove a fine complement to a series of pieces in various media by Pittsburgh’s A.W. Allison. Allison’s “unload natural artificer, the life of every person (empathy nerve)” is a mural-sized acrylic painting on fabric, hung like a banner, depicting dozens of fantastical, typically fateful encounters between dragons, demons and other mythical creatures, and some human figures as well. There are lots of swords, and I couldn’t always tell what was going on, but it’s compulsively viewable. Hung nearby, Labatte’s prints of iconic, meditatively gleaming stone-like objects are as austere as Allison’s vision is sprawling.
Likewise, the works on the third floor seem bound together by pieces from New Mexico-based artist Paula Wilson, in particular her 5-minute video “Life Spiral.” Part performance art, part nature photography, part visual poem, the video blends beautiful cinematography, surprising mise en scène and inventive editing to make a universal statement about life, love and death.
“Life Spiral” especially sets the scene for works hung nearby, like Pittsburgh-based Angie Jenning’s mixed-media-on-cloth pieces, the towering, dark-hued “Butterfly” and the somber “Water Weeps In a Vail.” And it pairs readily with Pittsburgh photographer Sue Abramson’s series of gelatin silver prints of cicadas (“Magicicada”) and her powerful series of 13 black-and-white photographic prints of large downed trees found in local parks.
Other notable works on the third floor include Pittsburgh-based Deanna Mance’s “What’s Contained in a Breath,” a colored-pencil wall mural that’s almost as densely populated as Wilson’s “natural artificer” but — instead of mayhem — teems with cowrie shells, eyeballs rolled heavenward, calming geometric patterns, and playfully colored figures proffering vases full of flowers.
And on the second floor, there’s a chance to get acquainted with (or catch up on) the work of fast-rising Pittsburgh artist Mikael Owunna, who pays homage to Igbo cosmology by photographing body-painted Black people with customized cameras under special light so they glimmer like galaxies. The show features four of his gleaming dye-sublimation prints on aluminum as well as a monitor (with headphones for the soundtrack) screening the 30-minute dance film “Obi Mbu,” co-directed with Marques Redd.
