Charles Hobbs

In his second solo show at Philadelphia’s venerable Vox Populi, Charles Hobbs takes on the Oscar-winning themes of lush, hyper-articulated fantasy worlds. There is more than a little Tolkien in his paintings—Tomaselli, too—as he floats islands of adventure in the middle of black, heavily resinated canvases. Waterfalls beget ice pools and ice pools beget stalactites and it all adds up in a reassuringly nerdy fashion. The artist evidently takes great pleasure in creating fully realized, if preposterous, ecosystems. He extends his logic in kinetic sculptures that hang from the ceiling in which tree limbs are brown pipe cleaners carefully gnarled and waterfalls are seafoam satin ribbons stretched around little bobbins. Should you turn their wee crank and put the mechanism in motion, you will see nature, or at least a diminutively adorable facsimile of it, in action. The material, stylistic, and thematic elements here evidently belong to those raw teenage boys who wish themselves wizards and ghosts, a once-rarefied American subculture that has been greatly magnified in the last five years thanks to the sensational Forcefield family and its followers in Providence and beyond. Hobbs is cutely approximate with his expansive visions—too simple and too innocent to fly with his addled and dirty contemporaries—so the work is fresh enough, though not completely transporting. Ultimately, his alternate worlds serve as a reminder that a grand mal freakout is not necessarily a definitive and satisfying destination for the young artist, and that we remain solidly on earth.