Challenge fulfilled at Fleisher

Two photographers and a sculptor have urban architecture in common.

By Edith Newhall

FOR THE INQUIRER

The Fleisher Art Memorial's prestige-endowing "Challenge" exhibitions are always fun, even when the combination of three emerging artists in one isn't always superlative. Sometimes, the overall effect is like a dinner of clashing flavors. A "Challenge" show is not a raucous, sprawling biennial spread out over many vast galleries, where you can move on quickly. These three are in your face.

Just as often, though, the participants complement one another perfectly, as they do in "Challenge 2." Its three artists - photographers Jeffrey Stockbridge and Isaac Schell, and sculptor Amy Walsh, who were selected from a group of 291 applicants - share a fascination with urban architecture, especially with decayed and abandoned buildings, but explore and express their interest in entirely different and intriguing ways.

Stockbridge, who shoots the interiors of abandoned houses in Philadelphia with a 4-by-5-inch view camera using only available light, has created hauntingly beautiful images of ravaged rooms that still seem occupied by their owners. He has accomplished this by leaving parts of his pictures out of focus, giving a viewer the impression of seeing the elements of a particular room selectively, as we might in real life.

In his photograph of the entrance hall of a house at 48th and Sansom Streets, for example, one's eye goes directly to the pale yellow-or perhaps just sunlit-wall of an adjoining room (a dining room?), which has a door (to a kitchen?), which could, we imagine, lead to a person. The kitchen in a house at 51st and Warrington has an open window through which vines have spread their tendrils, but seemingly clean glasses sit on a table as if waiting to be filled with the next morning's juice or milk.

In Schell's case, Walker Evans seems to be the main influence on the straight-on, unframed but laminated photographs of the rowhouses, ministries, bars and hairdressing shops that line the streets of West Philadelphia. At first, glimpsing them from the room in which Stockbridge's large, handsomely framed prints are installed, I thought Schell's might be too unprepossessing in such company, and should have been saved for a different "Challenge."

I changed my mind immediately after seeing them up close and noticing the rapt attention Schell pays to the most ordinary details, whether a patch of grass springing up from a sidewalk missing a chunk of concrete or the artfully painted names of four beauticians in four different styles on one door. Like Stockbridge (and Walsh), Schell does not portray people in the urban environment, which lends his pictures an eerie feeling of dislocation.

The overhead lights in the room in which Walsh's sculpture is installed are dimmed, and if you didn't know her work, you might think she had not yet taken whatever she made out of that looming conglomeration of boxes in the center of the gallery. You'd be sort of right, except that the boxes are part of the work, and their mysterious contents will stay right where they are.

The lights are low so that when you peer into small peepholes cut into the boxes, Walsh's illuminated interior dioramas stand out. Her gloomy labyrinthine hallways; dark skeletons of apartments or hotel rooms that appear to be under construction; and other dollhouse-scaled vignettes are undoubtedly constructed with painstaking care, but look cleverly like tricks.

I'm sure the wide-eyed children I saw wandering around the galleries thought "Challenge 2" had something to do with Halloween. I think it was just frighteningly good.

Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, 719 Catharine St., 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays. Through Nov. 25. Information: 215-922-3456 or www.fleisher.org.