Thursday, November 12, 2009
Article in Frieze
Read an excellent article that provides an overview of "Nature v. nature" in recent film and literature, with a focus on Nature as ruthless and unfeeling, quite the opposite of the mother earth model, and perhaps more true? (ekk)..."Nature and Anti-Nature" by Mark Fisher.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Looking at Ends
As I was searching for images by Zoe Leonard this afternoon I was reminded of this exhibition from May 2008 "Eminent Domain" assembled by and from the collection of the New York Public Library. There is an excellent website long after the show, and I was really struck by the work of Bettina Johae that documents the edges of each borough. The site that the library made for this series is worth visiting, although the images are (as expected) mostly mundane. I couldn't help but think of this work in relationship to Willie Doherty's photographs of abandoned border markers in Northern Ireland that was recently on view at the Dallas Museum of Art. Both artists' works have me rethinking/returning to a series of photographs, "I looked at the Blocked Views" which I took at the Walker Art Center while under construction for the new Herzog&deMeuron addition in 2007.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Conversation Before a Landscape
by Regan Golden & Jeremy Lundquist, 2009, video from Ludlow, Mass. from Summer 2007.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
September shows in Chicago: To sum it up. . . photo and video have a firm grip on the Chicago art scene right now, and rightfully so, I saw several shows of paintings and works on paper and while they were aesthetically pleasing the work did not have much to say. One exception was the exhibition, "as we live and breathe" at Carrie Secrist Gallery with paintings by Megan Greene and David Lefkowitz; yet, the most intriguing works in this show were Kim Keever's large scale photographs of wilderness dioramas made from plastic models and painted backdrops inside of a giant fishtank filled with water to give the images this strange light.
Melanie Schiff's photographs at Kavi Gupta, are all images of tunnels--some organic and overgrown others the smooth and industrial. The title of the show is "The Mirror" one wonders how these holes act as a mirror for Schiff. The heavy duty metal frames on these works make the photographs look almost like light boxes and don't allow the viewer to fall into these tunnel spaces because the images are thrust so far out from the wall. Totally alluring nonetheless.
Selina Trepp's exhibition at Andrew Rafacz Gallery explores what happens after the mirror (of identity, of subjectivity?) is fragmented. Of all the work that I saw this weekend, the one work that I keep coming back to is Selina Trepp's "Appear to Disappear" (2009). At first this work seems altogether too blunt--a character in the video tosses broken shards of glass into a bucket while the actual bucket and broken glass dangle in the gallery space opposite the video. What is compelling about this piece is the gap that we experience as viewers between seeing a material and at the same time seeing it being used in the video. The display of the video piece was also very different from anything that I have seen before using mirrors and tape Trepp allows the figures to kind of float on the wall and they seem to become part of the same space of the viewer because they are unbound by a frame. It is more like a memory or a hallucination of a gesture, rather than a picture or a film of an action.
Michael Ruglio-Misurell's show "Project #12" at Gallery 400 is totally exuberant with colors, textures spiraling almost out of control--I love the ecstasy (jouissance?) of this in the work, but the more time I spent in the space there was this sadness that lingered in the work as well. One of the things I must enjoyed about this exhibition was the way that it dealt with issues of sexuality in a robust material form, such as the two urinals joined together. What troubles me about the discourse around this show is that it does not include this aspect of the work which is a missed opportunity to add another layer of meaning to a show that could easily be categorized as simply art about the spectacle of destruction. For a very complete review of entire show go to Bad at Sports.
Jason Lazarus' small installation Recordings ("Big Storm" January 30, 1967, Mom) at the Art Institute displays the backs of found photographs with lovely hand written phrases like "while we were visiting. . ." or blunt notations like "1959". The installation offers viewers the experience of imagining the image on the opposite side, but frustrates the viewer with the inability to turn the image around. This piece also nicely contrasts the experiences of reading and looking and how they are similar or different. I also thought the variation in the color of the photographs from dingy browns to creamy whites, they stood in stack contrast to the white of the gallery.
Two works I was so blown out by that I can't yet formulate a comment: Cy Twombly's painting "The Roses" (2007) lush sparkling blacks against the a lime green backdrop, dripping with magenta--sometimes a painting can be so right. Finally, Zarina Bhimji's "Out of Blue" made in 16mm film and transferred to digital the images are so beautiful and terrifying that I could barely watch and I could barely leave the gallery. Still from the video below:
Melanie Schiff's photographs at Kavi Gupta, are all images of tunnels--some organic and overgrown others the smooth and industrial. The title of the show is "The Mirror" one wonders how these holes act as a mirror for Schiff. The heavy duty metal frames on these works make the photographs look almost like light boxes and don't allow the viewer to fall into these tunnel spaces because the images are thrust so far out from the wall. Totally alluring nonetheless.
Selina Trepp's exhibition at Andrew Rafacz Gallery explores what happens after the mirror (of identity, of subjectivity?) is fragmented. Of all the work that I saw this weekend, the one work that I keep coming back to is Selina Trepp's "Appear to Disappear" (2009). At first this work seems altogether too blunt--a character in the video tosses broken shards of glass into a bucket while the actual bucket and broken glass dangle in the gallery space opposite the video. What is compelling about this piece is the gap that we experience as viewers between seeing a material and at the same time seeing it being used in the video. The display of the video piece was also very different from anything that I have seen before using mirrors and tape Trepp allows the figures to kind of float on the wall and they seem to become part of the same space of the viewer because they are unbound by a frame. It is more like a memory or a hallucination of a gesture, rather than a picture or a film of an action.
Michael Ruglio-Misurell's show "Project #12" at Gallery 400 is totally exuberant with colors, textures spiraling almost out of control--I love the ecstasy (jouissance?) of this in the work, but the more time I spent in the space there was this sadness that lingered in the work as well. One of the things I must enjoyed about this exhibition was the way that it dealt with issues of sexuality in a robust material form, such as the two urinals joined together. What troubles me about the discourse around this show is that it does not include this aspect of the work which is a missed opportunity to add another layer of meaning to a show that could easily be categorized as simply art about the spectacle of destruction. For a very complete review of entire show go to Bad at Sports.
Jason Lazarus' small installation Recordings ("Big Storm" January 30, 1967, Mom) at the Art Institute displays the backs of found photographs with lovely hand written phrases like "while we were visiting. . ." or blunt notations like "1959". The installation offers viewers the experience of imagining the image on the opposite side, but frustrates the viewer with the inability to turn the image around. This piece also nicely contrasts the experiences of reading and looking and how they are similar or different. I also thought the variation in the color of the photographs from dingy browns to creamy whites, they stood in stack contrast to the white of the gallery.
Two works I was so blown out by that I can't yet formulate a comment: Cy Twombly's painting "The Roses" (2007) lush sparkling blacks against the a lime green backdrop, dripping with magenta--sometimes a painting can be so right. Finally, Zarina Bhimji's "Out of Blue" made in 16mm film and transferred to digital the images are so beautiful and terrifying that I could barely watch and I could barely leave the gallery. Still from the video below:
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Sweeping Up Installation at WPCA
In the 1700's American women living on the shores of Massachusetts drew patterns on their wood floors in sand. As the family walked over the sand the patterns shifted, but the wood floors were cleaned.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Ely to Ely
View from hotel window in Ely, Iowa. August 8th, 5:40 am, 85 degrees.
View from middle of Snowbank Lake in Ely, Minnesota. August 8th, 11:05 pm, 65 degrees.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
The reason for a picture. . .
After returning from two weeks in a cabin at the Blacklock Nature sanctuary where I struggled to take the pictures of the forest that I was supposed to be taking (or had proposed to be there taking, I got suckered into taking this photograph after resisting for several days by the outright beauty of the whole scene. This was at the end of week one and freed me up to spend the other week glutinously taking pictures after picture of the woods sparkling in the sunlight. I left both happy and defeated. More images from this new series--"the reason for a picture" are posted on mnartists.org
Thursday, June 11, 2009
May Art(s) Round-Up
When spring finally arrived in the end of May, I was so stunned by the quality of the work I was seeing everywhere that I just had to write about it.
The Next Fair -- Chicago, Sunny, 52 degrees:
Two works stood out to me in the way that they engaged the space and refused to hang blithely on the wall (as my own work did!)--Jeff Carter's "Catalog Floor" and the collaborative installation of particle board, folded bathtowels, and drawings at Scott Projects . Also beautiful and strange prints by Dutes & Stan printed at Spudnik press, imagining two men spawning from of their lengthy, intertwining beards.
Museum of Contemporary Art -- Chicago, Rain, 60 degrees:
A floor to ceiling wall of moss by Olafur Eliasson at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago--what got to me--the scent, the itchy (teary!) eyes, the pale green color of the reindeer moss, the enormous scale, its half living, half dying piquedness.
(Above: Karel Funk, 2006, Untitled #21, Acrylic on panel)
Rochester Art Center--MN, Rain, Flood Warnings, 45 degrees:
Karel Funk's paintings (yes-paintings!) are based on digital photographs that he painstakingly reproduces. These hooded, bundled figures appear aloof, but are made more intimate through Funk's careful painting--every stitch in the hem of a coat can be seen. I have to admit it is rare and refreshing to see a show of paintings that is equally about representation and technique and the gallery--about the viewers moving through the space situating themselves among and between the paintings. The layout of the show built upon a unique type of interactivity that is hidden and unexpected in this very quiet work.
(Above: Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing Detail)
Mass. Museum of Contemporary Art--North Adams, Sunny, 65 degrees:
NO SHOW ON EARTH could have prepared me for the retrospective of Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawings at Mass MOCA. This show is entirely phenomenal, totaling three floors--each floor half the size of a football field. The physical experience of color is incredibly intense--the gut churning orange with green stripes, the eye boggling grey on grey on grey. I went with a group of art professors and we all wished that our students could see this show, not only for the use of color, but because if anyone dares to say they have "done enough" after seeing this show they will understand immediately that they have not. Also at Mass MOCA was "These Days: Elegies for Modern Times," an intense little show about life after the apocalypse that included one of my favorite works of contemporary art--"A little bit of Death" by Sam Taylor Wood.
One of things that struck me about Mass MOCA is that this is museum gives itself up to the artists. There is such a sharp contrast between this museum and spaces like the Guggenheim or Calatrava's addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum where the work conforms (or interacts-depending upon the artwork) to this space.
Walker Art Center--Sunny, blissful 70 degrees.
The Quick and the Dead lives up to the word on the street that this is one of the best shows of 2009. I had a very strong response to the show as an artist--wanting to resist the dematerialization of art, but also relishing the cleverness of many of the works like a drawing by Joseph Beuys--a simple line on a page with the caption--the future starts here. It certainly invoked the stillness of something reaching the end of its time, but the connections between the works are so rich that it would take much more than a blog entry to unravel.
(Below: Beuys at Mass MOCA)
Heaven Gallery--partial sun, 55 degrees.
A lovely little show, I just saw in passing, also addresses this post-apocalypse, life after death theme that is circulating--really captured in the title of the show, "In that gold land." It was all about looking to the future and rebuilding.
Let's begin again!
Next month: "Frontier Preachers" at the Soap Factory and "THE Modern Wing".
The Next Fair -- Chicago, Sunny, 52 degrees:
Two works stood out to me in the way that they engaged the space and refused to hang blithely on the wall (as my own work did!)--Jeff Carter's "Catalog Floor" and the collaborative installation of particle board, folded bathtowels, and drawings at Scott Projects . Also beautiful and strange prints by Dutes & Stan printed at Spudnik press, imagining two men spawning from of their lengthy, intertwining beards.
Museum of Contemporary Art -- Chicago, Rain, 60 degrees:
A floor to ceiling wall of moss by Olafur Eliasson at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago--what got to me--the scent, the itchy (teary!) eyes, the pale green color of the reindeer moss, the enormous scale, its half living, half dying piquedness.
(Above: Karel Funk, 2006, Untitled #21, Acrylic on panel)
Rochester Art Center--MN, Rain, Flood Warnings, 45 degrees:
Karel Funk's paintings (yes-paintings!) are based on digital photographs that he painstakingly reproduces. These hooded, bundled figures appear aloof, but are made more intimate through Funk's careful painting--every stitch in the hem of a coat can be seen. I have to admit it is rare and refreshing to see a show of paintings that is equally about representation and technique and the gallery--about the viewers moving through the space situating themselves among and between the paintings. The layout of the show built upon a unique type of interactivity that is hidden and unexpected in this very quiet work.
(Above: Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing Detail)
Mass. Museum of Contemporary Art--North Adams, Sunny, 65 degrees:
NO SHOW ON EARTH could have prepared me for the retrospective of Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawings at Mass MOCA. This show is entirely phenomenal, totaling three floors--each floor half the size of a football field. The physical experience of color is incredibly intense--the gut churning orange with green stripes, the eye boggling grey on grey on grey. I went with a group of art professors and we all wished that our students could see this show, not only for the use of color, but because if anyone dares to say they have "done enough" after seeing this show they will understand immediately that they have not. Also at Mass MOCA was "These Days: Elegies for Modern Times," an intense little show about life after the apocalypse that included one of my favorite works of contemporary art--"A little bit of Death" by Sam Taylor Wood.
One of things that struck me about Mass MOCA is that this is museum gives itself up to the artists. There is such a sharp contrast between this museum and spaces like the Guggenheim or Calatrava's addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum where the work conforms (or interacts-depending upon the artwork) to this space.
Walker Art Center--Sunny, blissful 70 degrees.
The Quick and the Dead lives up to the word on the street that this is one of the best shows of 2009. I had a very strong response to the show as an artist--wanting to resist the dematerialization of art, but also relishing the cleverness of many of the works like a drawing by Joseph Beuys--a simple line on a page with the caption--the future starts here. It certainly invoked the stillness of something reaching the end of its time, but the connections between the works are so rich that it would take much more than a blog entry to unravel.
(Below: Beuys at Mass MOCA)
Heaven Gallery--partial sun, 55 degrees.
A lovely little show, I just saw in passing, also addresses this post-apocalypse, life after death theme that is circulating--really captured in the title of the show, "In that gold land." It was all about looking to the future and rebuilding.
Let's begin again!
Next month: "Frontier Preachers" at the Soap Factory and "THE Modern Wing".
Sunday, March 08, 2009
Two Variations on a Shoe Shine
This year I have witnessed two very revealing works about a seemingly ordinary, uneventful act- shining shoes. Francis Alys' "Bolero" (1996) at the Renaissance Society is a lovely and meticulous animation that includes 511 drawings on translucent paper. Simple, but visually breathtaking, Alys' piece describes how labor and repetitive gestures are integral to our lives. As alluring as this installation/animation was I forced to radically rethink this piece this week after I stopped into the INOVA Gallery at the UW-Milwaukee to see Jefferson Pinder's video installation, "Show Shine Variations" (2007). In Pinder's "shoe shine" a young black man shines a young, aloof white man's shoe so hard that the whole shoe rips apart. Pinder's piece immediately brought back to mind what was missing in Alys' work, the inequity of the relationship between the two individuals--that the types of labor we perform in society are never far from issues of race, class and gender. I had a similar nagging feeling when watching the making of Alys' "When Faith Moves Mountains" (2002). The gesture in both of Alys' works are so compelling, I want to believe in their innocence, but Pinder's work has me rethinking the dynamics of a shoe shine. Jefferson Pinder's show "Anthology" is up through May 10 at INOVA.
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