Arts
Slip Into Platform
by Diane Daly
o way! Is that a ringer?”
It’s Saturday night and Phoebe McDermott is tossing horseshoes across the cacti and caliche of a local painter’s back yard. All of the players in this round are young artists. Most are in dusty boots or paint-spattered sneakers, guzzling beer, McDermott teetering among them in impossibly-thin high heels like a flamingo in a herd of ostrich.
I request an interview with McDermott for the next day and assume she will appear plumed to fit her new role as curator of Platform Gallery, which opens its doors September 1st. But as I approach the gallery at 6th and 6th on Sunday, through the gorgeous floor-to-ceiling windows I see something different: clean white walls, shiny beige floor, and McDermott rolling across it all like a fire engine in her red Converse high tops.
It’s not only about the shoes with Platform, or with its curator. Then again, the shoes could be the gallery’s hidden masterpiece, the sugar in the tomato sauce, and Phoebe McDermott’s choice of shoes is nothing if not surprising. Shoes show who you are, and Phoebe McDermott is representing Platform Gallery as something different.
“Tucson has a lot of decorative arts and a lot of the cowboy traditional western art,” she tells me, and while Tucson’s fine art galleries show different fare than your typical craft fair, she asserts that there is one audience they usually overlook. “There are a lot of younger people today who do appreciate art and artists whose work is very different and profound,” she says. She works to attract this new, fresh clientele in addition to “the snowbirds” who more typically frequent Tucson galleries.
Platform’s first show, which opens September 4th, features artists including Dougie Weber and Mirle Freel, Jr., both of whom paint strong figures in bright hues. Rounding the show out is the more muted work of Morgan Herguth, an abstract painter whose pale pinks and delicate lines bring to mind the poetry and fashion of Japan. “I am definitely a lover of bold colors and heavy line rendering,” McDermott notes about the work she is drawn to for Platform. An artist herself, she is comfortable with the fact that the artists she chooses are not necessarily sought after in the gallery scene. “Tucson doesn’t have a lot of venues for these artists to show,” she says proudly.
Dougie Weber is one painter who is thrilled with the opportunities presented by the opening of Platform. “I had been working on a body of work and I’m going to be able to show the paintings in a line as a narrative. I haven’t had that opportunity yet in a Tucson gallery.” Raina Benoit, another artist whose work will show at Platform in the future, describes the artists McDermott has chosen as “very diverse but equally serious.” A University of Arizona MFA student, Benoit is most enthusiastic about McDermott’s openness to different media in Platform. “She told me I could draw on the walls. I could do projections. A lot of galleries want it to be packaged in a golden frame.”
Both artists praise the unpretentious atmosphere McDermott gives Platform; as Dougie Weber phrases it, “Hey, It’s Phoebe!” Red Converse high tops set a comfortable precedent: Weber probably speaks for many young local artists when he speaks with relief of the new space as “a classy gallery that’s not pretentious. You’ll feel comfortable going in there even if you’re not wealthy.” He sees Platform’s mood as a refreshing reminder that “galleries are for going to look at art.”
But if the gallery plans to survive, it’s also going to have to be about buying art. To put it another way: Some clients will only talk to the woman who breezes across the room beneath in the icy shade of her own chin, to the chiseled tapping soundtrack of her own high-heeled shoes.
Fortunately, McDermott seems prepared to walk the gallery walk. She is quick to mention that the fine furniture Platform will feature in addition to contemporary art should help in the overall sales of the gallery, but she also stands by the marketability of contemporary art. She compares to the artwork she will be showing to “Diego Rivera and Mexican Mural-type artwork,” and is confident it “will fit well in a Southwest home.” You can almost hear the new approach, the tap tap tap...And wouldn’t these vivid colors be remarkable in curtains?
Platform Gallery, at the southwest corner of 6th St. and 6th Ave., is opening its doors September 1st to the exhibition “Carnal Pleasures and Heavenly Creatures”, presenting new works by Doug Weber, Morgan Herguth, Mirle Freel, Jr., and Brian Horton (furniture design). An Artists’ Reception happens on September 4th from 6 to 9pm, and features Matt Mitchell on guitar. Regular gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday 11am to 5pm.
