The steady cultivation of variety on Roosevelt Row

Featured photo: “Artist Reception” by Fred Tieken, on view at Treeo.

Isn’t it wonderful how you needn’t stroll into every single gallery in downtown Phoenix’s Roosevelt Row and can still take in a pleasing assortment of works by emerging and established artists? I did a bit of picking and choosing for Third Friday, October 16, and still felt that my love of viewing art was rewarded.

Another pleasure of Third Fridays is the more laid-back atmosphere versus First Friday, which gives visitors more elbow room in the galleries and which makes it easier to chat with the artists. I enjoyed meeting Patricia Sannit and Fred Tieken for the first time, having followed their work — Sannit’s ceramics and Tieken’s paintings — for a few years now. I also chatted with Larry Kornegay, showing mixed media works with Bill Timmerman’s photographs at Modified Arts. This year’s two-person show is even stronger than last year’s.

As for variety, I think it applies not just to the forms of art and the use of unusual materials that you can see on a single evening, but also to the galleries themselves — all shapes and sizes, from monOrchid’s airy space to the funky but effective spaces of the “hotboxes,” the three shipping containers-turned-mini galleries on the north side of Roosevelt. Congrats to Ted Decker of phICA and Nic Wiesinger of Rhetorical Galleries for keeping the temporary gallery idea alive.

I would have liked to have stopped by Artlink Phoenix’s exhibition at Oasis on Grand, which was juried by John Tuomisto-Bell, Bentley Calverley and Dana Mossman Tepper. If you checked it out, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Photographer Johnny Kerr has an excellent eye for the clean lines of modern architecture. Behind him is an abstract view of Manzanita Hall on the ASU campus. Kerr’s solo show is at the Bokeh Gallery at monOrchid.

This is Averian Chee’s “Dimensional Storm/Portrait,” a nice find at DeSoto Central Market.

Is it just me, or is “Shadow Play” more alluring at night? This is Third Street and Roosevelt.

For her solo exhibition at Eye Lounge, Constance McBride explored aging, grieving and the passage of time, as in this work, “Layered Torsos 3.”

Ideas about nonconformity come through in the work of Takashi Hara, here seen next to his swirly-paper dummy (for lack of a better description) at the phICA Hotbox.

As Fred Tieken would tell you, the comical surface of his paintings always require a closer look for their social commentary. This is “Three Heads are Better Than …” at Treeo Gallery.

Patricia Sannit finds and exploits the permeability between clay and wood in this untitled piece, at the Hotbox galleries.

Remarkably, Larry Kornegay spent 35 years playing with the tall carving in “Gary, Booger and the Kids” (foreground) before he felt he had it right. See his work at Modified Arts.