Jeff Fleming’s unbearable lightness of being

1/1/2025

Jeff Fleming will kick off the 2025 cultural year in Des Moines Jan. 10 with an exhibition of all new works based on old family photos. Fleming paints ghosts and retrieved memories in gesso, India ink, white charcoal and pencil. He calls these canvasses “chalkboards,” meaning they have been used over and over again, because the stories they suggest are changing with the artist’s point of view over many decades. 

Fleming described his process as “storytelling of memories; it’s drawings and the recording of drawing.” This show began when he discovered boxes of old family photographs. He recreates them in both negative and positive reflections, his erasing and wiping as important as his drawing. Milan Kundera’s “unbearable lightness of being” comes to mind.

 

Winter sampler

Olson-Larsen Gallery’s “Winter Sampler” extends into early February with gallery all-stars Michael Brangoccio, Christopher Chiavetta, Mary Merkel-Hess, Anna Lambrini Moisiadis, Jonathan and Allison Metzger, Tim Schiffer, Jim Sincock, Debra Smith and Molly Wood. As the exhibition title suggests, variety trumps similarities.

Brangoccio’s 2013 exhibition at the gallery was our choice as exhibition of that year. As then, his super realist creatures still conjure a sense of magic but deal with conundrums; can freedom ever be tethered, or weighted down? He used to paint flightless birds and floating bears and elephants. Now his birds are released from grounding by sheer will. 

In 2013, the artist told CITYVIEW he had given up abstraction when he moved to small town Iowa “to lose any arrogance that didn’t fit in.” Now it seems he has given up surreal subjects and inconsistencies of size or placement, and the laws of physics. Yet, there is more than a hint of mystery, of something more-to-be-known.  

Tim Schiffer’s bio reads like that of a prodigious hero from the scripts of Jim Harrison, Taylor Sheridan or Norman MacLean. He was raised on a ranch in the wild west and then attended Phillips Exeter Academy and studied in France. Taught watercolor love by his mother, he still uses that medium with stunning clarity, juxtaposing still-life fruits real enough to eat with images ripped off classic artists: Cezanne’s peaches and a nursing mother by Dieric Bouts with a plate of store-bought tangelos, lemons and an avocado; Matisse’s fruit bowl on tablecloth with lemons and apples on Talavera tiles; bowls of pears with Leonardo’s ladies and Vermeer’s self-portrait; and Pink Lady apples with pink ladies portraits from two Victorian painters. 

Molly Wood uses cameras to make the bitter beauty of ephemeral flowerings look too lovely to touch. She styles using only natural window light with traditional Dutch still-life paintings in mind. She creates floral portraits in formal, sacred spaces, often in intensely intimate close-ups.  

Bird and bug watchers Jonathan and Allison Metzger chronicle their observations in hand-drawn and hand-printed mystery. Jim Sincock brings mixed media montages.   

Christopher Chiavetta, “always preoccupied with end-of-the-world scenarios,” paints windows as symbols of hope in the face of dystopia. Greek American Anna Lambrini Moisiadis transposes the history of ancient Greece and contemporary times in mixed media images of butterflies, leaves and other dead things that humans collect. Mary Merkel-Hess contributes paper sculpture and Debra Smith textile art. 

 

January touts

“Figments and Phantoms” opens at the Des Moines Art Center print gallery on Jan. 10. It promises a beguiling look at the human body with Hans Breder mirrors, Victo Obsatz’s double exposures, Kiki Smith panoramas, Laura Aguilar self-portraits, Cindy Sherman costumes, Rachel Cox’s funeral home flower arrangement, Alec Soth’s Americana at Niagara Falls, Andy Warhol’s empty electric chairs, and Mitchell Squire’s firing range dummies. 

Soth also has a major show coming in February to Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha. ♦