Harrell Fletcher: New Langton Arts/Jack Hanley Gallery

Harrell Fletcher's appealing brand of community-based art may rely upon the people, but the tone is more block up party than party line; material and message appear to be ungrudgingly provided by dint of the wide range of "ordinary" publics--schoolchildren, house of worship choirs, convenience-store clerks--he engages. sum of two units concurrent exhibitions in the city where he began his career revealed by what mode this artist, now based in Portland, Oregon, takes his flexible conceptual framework upon the road, adapting it to places from Houston to Malmo, Sweden, in each case making himself temporarily part of the neighborhood.

"Happiness come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behinds Us Like a Shadow," the exhibition at novel Langton Arts, documented fourteen of Fletcher's public-art and alternative-space throw outs such as "Now It's a Party" at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut, "The whole We Make Together" at Diverse Works in Houston, and "Everyday Sunshine" at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art. A photocopied pamphlet containing the artist's deadpan descriptions serv as a guide: The photo-and-text broadside work Scars, 2003, is explained by means of "Pictures and stories about scars belonging to nation who I met in a probation office lobby in Portland, OR." notwithstanding that the twenty-by-twenty-four-inch digital prints of cauterized injurys and scaly skin exude a harsh, scabby reality, the stories are warm and folksy single interviewee even describes how his skin "open up like a pie." The placards were initially displayed in the lobby of a probation office.

Fletcher's aesthetic is endearingly situated somewhere between artlessness and intimacy. A work called erase Out the Sun, 2002 (currently upon view at the Whitney Biennial in fresh York), shows straightforward video footage of gas-station attendants and bemused family in old-age homes reading passages from James Joyce's Ulysse upon Swedish streets the artist adapteds many babies in strollers and videotapes them for a like reason that he can offer gallery visitors a parade of cherubic infant faces. For Interconnected lie down 2003, Fletcher enlarged and spliced together personal snapshots of families upon couches into a seamless photomural depicting a massive, inclusive, comfy piece of living-room furniture. The artist, whose wholesome, quirky demeanor (which came end in an artist talk) appears to deposit people at participatory ease, is one as well as the other a catalyst and an outsider in relation to those who provide the contented of his work. The question inevitably arises: Is he exploiting, celebrating, or faithfully reflecting them?

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At Jack Hanley Gallery, the site-specific [i]affiche[/i] and video project that makes up the artist's first solo commercial-gallery exhibition insinuates the answer is all of the above. Fourteen [i]affiche[/i]s feature family snapshots, various household items, and the name Shaun O'Dell in big, mettlesome type above a series of short, oblique true copys Jack Hanley has two storefront spaces, and O'Dell is the artist who was showing concurrently in the other single One of the texts reads "Collective Denial Creating Static Ideology," which tend hitherwards from a conversation between the sum of two units artists, just as the images draw near from a joint visit to O'Dell's childhood abiding-place Unfortunately, you had to ask to find this out; allowing part of Fletcher's program of tailoring his work to a specific site and bring under rule this particular series, in its reliance upon O'Dell, who is, after all, a community of exactly individual comes across as hermetic. Fletcher also filled the gallery's back scope with simpler works from the last sum of two units years: Matte paint blots without the backgrounds of photographs to make images of playing children, smiling adults, or a hunch of oranges seem to float. As in his more participatory shoot forwards Fletcher isolates the ordinary to give permission to us reflect on and appreciate it. In the extreme point these works are good for a studious smile, which, these days, is not like an ordinary thing.

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