Philly 1st Fridays Walkabout

Last Friday I went wandering through some of the galleries participating in Philadelphia's 1st Fridays gallery openings. The streets were packed with art loving people who obviously missed the Dawson memo that gallery crawls are dead.

My choices from the evening were actually located in the "back room" of the Rodger La Pelle Galleries. The gallery's main show was Matt Bollinger's "Auto Video," which was an interesting show on its own, but one of the wonders of being "new" to a city is discovering new artists, and in the back room of the gallery I discovered a series of breathtaking small paintings by Rachel Bess, who has a Gregory Gillespie thing going in her beautifully bizarre paintings.

I also liked Lauren Lyons photographs at Silicon Gallery, Christian Mendoza's maddeningly complex drawings at the huge Lineage Gallery and definately the three person show at Pentimenti but especially the film noir work of Matt Haffner.