Art(s) Place by Regan Golden

Recent Reviews and Articles

2011-05-23T08:19:00.000-07:00

Very excited to be getting in a few more words these days (a cumulative 1850 words). . . recent reviews include:

"The Spectacular of Vernacular" at The Walker Art Center in Art Lies, Issue no. 68
This show will be coming to the The Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston in July, will take a slightly different form there, and it should be interesting to see how it changes in this context with the very different (but equally strong) vernacular style and tradition of Texas.

. . .and an article in Newcity on the panel discussion, "How Chicago are you?" which was at the Graham Foundation in mid-May. The panel consisted of eleven artists, musicians, architects and designers from Chicago including, Alex Lehrnerer, Pamela Fraser, Jimenez Lai, Geoff Goldberg and Damon Locks. Good stuff.
"What's to Like about this place?" in Newcity, May 19 edition.

Also had the wonderful opportunity to write about Huma Bhabha's work in Newcity, just a short review, but really got me interested in her work and process. There is a great interview of Bhabha by Julie Mehrehtu in the catalog for Bhabha's exhibition at Peter Blum Gallery. My review of Huma Bhabha's show at Rhona Hoffman appeared in the April 11 edition of Newcity.

Winter/Spring Reviews. . .

2011-03-02T07:31:00.001-08:00

After a brief reprieve from writing while making new work for the show "Pushing Paper" at Dominican University (Jan.26-Feb.26) and taking a week long trip to New York, I am back to writing. Here is a list of my new and upcoming articles:

"Philip Vanderhyden's Outside Group" at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Newcity, February 2011.

The bulk of my writing time in the past month has been dedicated to my first 1000 word review in print in Art Lies. This show at the Walker is raucous and far-reaching with 40 artworks by 25 different artists:

"The Spectacular of Vernacular" at The Walker Art Center, Spring/Winter Print Edition.

In March look for my first review in the new online journal, Art in Print.

List of Fall / Winter Reviews. . .

2010-12-08T18:07:00.000-08:00

I have been terrible about keeping up my blog lately, but am still doing lots of writing. I published several reviews this fall of shows in Chicago. I decided to write about each of these artists because their work either utilized everyday objects in a new way (see Stephanie Syjuco and Alberto Aguilar), or because I was amazed by their intensive process (see Anthony Pearson and Zach Mory), or because their two-dimensional work created a different type of experience for me in the gallery. I am interested in two-dimensional work that engages the gallery, not as installation, but using the relationship between the drawings/paintings and the gallery (both as a literal space and conceptual framework) to expand certain ideas in the work (see Deb Sokolow and Hilary Wilder). These themes just evolved over the course of a few months as I continued writing. Here is the list and links. Enjoy!

"Deb Sokolow at Western Exhibitions," Newcity, December 2010.

"Hilary Wilder's Ornament and Crime at The Suburban Gallery," Art Lies, Fall/Winter 2010. (In print only).

"Light and Air at The Coalition Gallery" (Robin Dluzen, Zach Mory and Connie Wolfe), Newcity, November 2010.

"Things to be next to . . . at Three Walls" (Alberto Aguilar, Peter Fagundo, Warren Rosser and James Woodfill), Newcity, November 2010.

"Anthony Pearson at Shane Campbell Gallery," Newcity, October 2010.

"Stephanie Syjuco's Particulate Matter at Gallery 400," Newcity, September 2010.

Summer Studios Temporary Installation

2010-08-24T18:52:00.000-07:00

In the end of July and early August, I assisted Adia Millet in the building of three installations for the Summer Studios project at Threewalls and the Sullivan Galleries at the Art Institute. For a week I was an interloper at the Sullivan Galleries after Adia invited me to fill one of the spaces she had been allocated with an installation that responded to her adjacent installation, "Blood, Sweat & Tears." For more information about this piece you can read Adia's entry about the Summer Studios on the Studio Chicago blog.

While working in the studio, our conversation kept returning to the issue of indeterminacy: what you can't see but know is there, and the limits of what you can ever really know, understand, or identify. There is a sense of uncertainty, ambiguity, potential that lingers in Adia's installation in which an old wooden chest sits beneath floating, irregularly shaped circular forms. A single light casts shadows against the gray walls multiplying these forms and making it nearly impossible to tell whether the rings are coming or going, filling the chest or emptying out. In an adjacent installation, I addressed similar ideas in different materials: a granite rock (not from Plymouth, but close) is tightly wrapped in paper ribbons opposite a pile of sand from Cape Cod that buries an unfurling cream-colored bow. These two objects have a reciprocal relationship in that the rock will eventually dissolve into sand and the sand will someday be compressed into stone. Casting shadows on the rock and the sand is a web of pearl-organ-blobs cut from plastic sheeting. Together they created a strange landscape of plastic, stone and paper that I plan to keep working with. Thanks to all who made this improvised project possible.

Residency at the Harvard Forest

2010-08-09T08:49:00.000-07:00

Just recently completed an artist residency at the Harvard Forest near the Quabbin Reservoir in Western Mass. The residency was a time to talk with biologists and ecologists at the Harvard Forest about their research, understanding and view (quite literally how they see the forest). It was also an opportunity to look at the photographs in their archive of the damage that the 1938 Hurricane caused in the forest. I was interested in how scientists photograph the forest versus artists, are they looking for or looking at different aspects of the woods? Are scientists as interested in making a whole, unified image of the forest as a landscape photographer would be? As conversations evolved, the questions shifted more to how does the perception of the forest as ordered or disordered, balanced or imbalanced impact the images that artists or scientists make of the woods?

I was joined on this residency by Jeremy Lundquist, we collaborated on an installation in Fisher Museum at the Harvard Forest. The museum describes the changes that have taken place in the forests of New England over time through dioramas, photographs, and graphs. We worked with the documents that were already on display in the museum and within the conventions of display that existed in this natural history museum. Images of the project will be compiled into a book and posted on our website: http://www.drawnlots.com/

Chicago Art Excursion no. 1: U of C

2010-05-17T06:59:00.000-07:00

On my first weekend in Chicago, I took a bus to a train to a bus down to Hyde Park and the University of Chicago. I made the trek for a symposium on the films of Marcel Broodthaers, but also to see "The Seductiveness of the Interval" at the Renaissance Society and to delve into the bowels of the Seminary Bookstore. The "Seductiveness of the Interval" is a series of low, small, interconnected rooms with different types of seating: from the seats on a bus, to the wooden seats in a school auditorium. The chairs all face a screen on which is projected a video. The exhibition includes work by three artists: Stefan Constantinescu, Andrea Faciu and Ciprian Muresan. While their strategy for inserting videos inside an installation in a very minimalistic way seems important in advancing the dialogue about medium-specificity v. installation art, I did not find the videos compelling enough to want to sit through, perhaps because I had been blown away by Broodthaers' films. The most interesting piece in the show was the garden on the roof of the structure, which you reached only after climbing steep steps that raised you up above the gallery lighting. Although reminiscent of Francis Alys' lofted space in 2008, what I like about seeing shows at the Renaissance Society is that the work always gets you experience the space in a new way.

It is hard for me, just days later, to gauge the impact of seeing so many of Broodthaers' films together, a rare occurrence. While I like Broodthaers' work, I primarily went to the conference to hear Benjamin Buchloh and Bruce Jenkins speak about his work. I was therefore unprepared to be totally charmed by Broodthaers' films. I had no idea how funny they were. Broodthaers, I learned, was influenced by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, borrowing strategies from silent film to poke fun at the bourgeoisie, as well as himself. I must admit that most of my knowledge of Broodthaers' work comes from Krauss' book, "A Voyage on the North Sea" and my research into Tacita Dean's work (see my post on the The Artist's Studio at the MCA). While I can't rehearse Buchloh's lecture here, in his talk he re-examined the connection between Broodthaers' work and Benjamin, by linking Broodthaers' more closely to Guy Debord, and describes his films as a critique of "The Spectacle". With films like Le Bataille de Waterloo (1975) this connection seemed quite clear to me, less so with his earlier works like La Pipe Satire (1970). While I know this is quite a leap, after spending time last week researching the Yes Men for another article, I couldn't help but think they share the same dead pan humor directed, perhaps, at the similar targets. Broodthaers' films also reminded me of early works by Frances Alys such as Paradox of Praxis, where Alys pushes a melting block of ice through the streets of Mexico City. In this work, like Broodthaers' film, Eau de Cologne in which he sits on a folding chair in front of a cathedral holding a potted plant as it blows wildly in the wind, there is a mixture of the poetic and the absurd, as each artist incorporates their own bodies into a kind of physical comedy.

Broodthaers reading the newspaper through glasses dipped in whipped cream in Berlin oder ein Traum mit Sahne (1970).

And lastly, the amazing book I found in the catacombs of the Seminary Book Co-op, a history of Objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison published by Zone Books.

Eggleston in Texas and Chicago

2010-04-20T18:01:00.000-07:00

Since my arrival in Houston in September, one artist has more influenced my thinking than any other—William Eggleston. I have encountered his work several times this year, and each time its importance multiplies. Eggleston's photographs tell you something about Texas that you just can't understand until you have lived here awhile. I can only describe this something as the way that time seems to lingers here, ceasing almost to move forward until it lapses itself.

This passage of time is told through Eggleston's photographs individually and in series. Much of Eggleston's entire body of work is currently on display at the Art Institute of Chicago in the exhibition, The Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 (until May 23rd). Although Eggleston's printing techniques have changed from dye-transfer to digital and the scale of his photographs has shifted from 8 x 10 inches to 20 x 30 inches, his subject matter and his approach to it remain unchanged. Eggleston articulates this approach in an interview from 1988, as he describes driving through Mississippi, pulling over, getting out of his car with his camera and looking out at a dried up field. Even though, as he says, "it was one of those occasions when there was no picture there," he made one anyway. Eggleston describes this decision as a choice to photograph "democratically."

In this interview and in the series The Democratic Forest, Eggleston confronts one of the oddest experiences in photography—that moment when you look around and find nothing visually compelling enough to photograph, but you make an image anyway. This moment is uncomfortable, even depressing, as you stand bluntly looking out at a space where absolutely nothing lends itself to becoming an image. There is something strangely subversive about making a picture of "nothing," of "no place," or of that which is non-descript to the point of failing to cohere into an image. In photographing "democratically," Eggleston's images run counter to the idea that a photograph should narrate an event; nonetheless, Eggleston's images also avoid becoming sublime images of nothing. These are not spectacular images of voids, as many recent photographers like Trevor Paglen and Hiroshi Sugimoto have delved into. Eggleston's "democratic" approach to photography leads to images of "nothing" that are often boring and mundane, but for this reason they are remarkably, and also uncomfortably, familiar.

One could argue that Eggleston's consistent approach to the same subject matter appears staid over time, yet through this process Eggleston reveals what has remained the same in the Southern United States since the 1960s: beneath the ordinariness of daily life and cleanliness of domestic spaces lies a sense of uncertainty about the future. Singularly his sparse compositions appear easy to read, but upon viewing the images as a series you begin to realize that this simplicity belies confusion. This tension is heightened when Eggleston photographs the space around whatever should be at the center of the scene. The center could be the owner of the home in Greenville, Mississippi who never appears in the photograph that Eggleston took there on a sunny afternoon; all we see is an empty seat on the sofa beside a window. Without this center, Eggleston's image instead becomes a document of all of the forces that shape our identity as individuals and as a nation.

From this image of a quiet parlor in Mississippi are hurtled questions about how we define prosperity, happiness, safety and convenience. Above all, once we have settled upon these definitions we must then ask, what of this is sustainable? Despite the urgency of these questions, the viewer never feels as if they are looking at the crux of the problem, but somehow seeing it from the side, which makes it more approachable. Eggleston's approach, oddly enough, reminds me of Kara Walker's decision to use silhouettes as a way of allowing her and her audience to confront fantasies of race and gender that would otherwise be too "ugly" to depict (this is her word, from the Art:21 interview, "Insurrection!" from 2003). While Eggleston certainly is not as critical in his work of the fantasies of race and gender that Walker seeks to expose in her silhouettes, he does, to an extent, allow us to confront our own expectations about life in America by showing us the periphery rather than the center.

Houston Puddles

2010-04-19T11:14:00.000-07:00

When it rains in Houston the whole city fills with water that has nowhere to go. The water seems to just hang around, until it eventually trickles down to the bayou or evaporates into the moist air. After a morning of reading about landscape photography, I decided it was time to get outside and make some images. The way that every pothole, nook, and cranny fills with water makes you feel as if the city is somehow turning itself inside out; all the trees and building are reflected in millions of little pools of water. The massive infrastructure of the city slowly worn away one puddle at a time. (I was thinking of Olafur Eliasson's photographs from his Cartographic Ceries when I assembled these images: http://www.olafureliasson.net/works/cartographic_III.html).

Orderly Disorder: Art and Science on Decay.

2010-04-02T14:54:00.000-07:00

This week I have been thinking about the differences in how artists and scientists investigate and understand decay and disarray in nature. I started thinking about this topic after reading Mark Dion's interview on Art:21 and hearing a remarkable story about the formation of our solar system on NPR.

Dion's Neokom Herbarium is an enormous rotting Hemlock tree encased within a giant terrarium. In describing his work as an artist, Dion says that he is not interested in nature, but in ideas about nature (Art:21 Interview). By removing the tree from the forest and allowing it to decay within the museum, Dion works to "enhance the uncanniness of nature" in order to motivate viewers to consider their relationship to nature by exposing "the sense of the marvelous" in this fallen tree that continues to spawn new life everyday (Art:21 Interview). Dion's piece reminds me of Surrealism's fascination with the Praying Mantis that can even "play dead" a short time after it is actually dead. Is it fair to say then, that contemporary artists are undermining the idea of nature as orderly, while scientists seek to make visible the order within nature?

On Wednesday I heard this story by Robert Krulwich about the unusual structure of our galaxy. Krulwich begins by saying that twenty years ago "we thought there were rules about building solar systems," but that new research has completely upended these rules. (Talk about uncanny, check out the double gas explosion created by the explosion of the star, Eta Carinae taken at the European Southern Observatory).

Krulwich asks Mike Brown, an Astronomy professor at Cal Tech, when we look at how galaxies form what is normal or in other words, the predominant order of events? Brown replies that currently,"we have no idea[. . .]I have no idea what to expect." While certainly Astronomers have not stopped looking for patterns in the formation of solar systems, its just that Brown, for instance, no longer assumes that he will find them. Perhaps what artists and scientists share when they look out at the natural world is not a sense of certainty in knowing how the world works, but instead, actually a great deal of uncertainty. We just cannot know or anticipate all the ways that the Hemlock or Eta Carinae will change as they decay.

Romancing the Artist's Studio: A love affair diverted.

2010-03-08T11:51:00.000-08:00

The exhibition "Production Site: The Artist's Studio Inside-Out" on the first level of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago was easy for me to like, but that ease also made me a bit uneasy. I was initially exuberant about the show, but also slightly repulsed by the twinge of nostalgia that I detected in the show's premise, a nostalgia for the days when artists toiled away in their studio. This feeling was exacerbated by the layout of the exhibition in which each artist had their own partitioned area of the gallery, as if they had their own studio space within the museum. This twinge (only a twinge) stuck with me, but so did this sense of joy that I attribute to the earnestness with which the artists in this show addressed the meaning and importance of the studio.

As evident in this conflicted opening, this show nearly caused me to develop a split-personality: the artist side of me loved it, the critic side of me was suspicious of my love for it. As an artist, I enjoy being in the studio. I enjoy imagining and building things in a space apart that somehow also feels as if it is at the very center of everything. This show reminded me of how important my first studio was. I had just returned home after finishing college and my whole world seemed to be turned upside down, but things started to right themselves when I found a studio only blocks away from the neighborhood where I grew up. More than a place to make work, the studio produced a feeling of authority, in the sense that I felt the studio gave me permission to be an author. I rarely feel this way in the studio anymore, but when I was just starting off as an artist, this sense of authority that I felt when I entered the studio was incredibly important.

Some of the works in this exhibition, particularly the pieces by William Kentridge and Deb Sokolow, describe a similar sense of the studio as the locus of a certain "groundedness", not in a repressive way, but as a ground against which endless experimentation and inventiveness can take place. As a critic, however, beneath all of this romance, there was a staid quality to some of the works in the show that made them difficult to connect to this idea of the artist's studio as a production site when everything seemed so perfectly poised and placed. For instance, Andrea Zittel's work was displayed in much the same way as her show at Andrea Rosen Gallery. Neither the works themselves, nor their installation, gave much away about her studio practice. Ryan Gander's piece plays on this idea, and the installation itself seems to question what, if anything, the artist can reveal about their studio process in the gallery. In Gander's work, sheets of paper falling to the floor appear caught and held within glass bubbles, pointing to the impossibility of capturing the process of change and transformation that occurs at the studio inside the museum. Tacita Dean's film, Section Cinema(Homage to Marcel Broodthaers)from 2002 shows the remnants of Marcel Broodthaers' studio and also refuses to depict the "workings" of an artist's studio. Instead Dean projects the image of a studio out of work, the artist's process again held still, preserved, but lodged in the past. In contrast, Gander's piece titled A sheet of paper on which I was about to draw, as it slipped from my table and fell to the floor (2008) alludes to the floating sheets of paper as so many new ideas or potential artworks. Dean's piece reminds the viewer that there will be no new works made by the artist in this studio, except for her film, of course.

The most interesting aspect of this show, which at first glance appears as a celebration of the artist's studio, is that, in fact, it is pervaded by some skepticism, and perhaps even some confusion about the studio as a place for contemporary artists to work any longer. It is notable that Kentridge, who in part makes Charcoal drawings on paper, created the only space in which an unabashed enthusiasm for the studio is detectable. Kentridge's space was painted a deep blue-gray with multiple black and white projections filling the whole room. The projections include animated drawings that are changing and being reworked. Other projections showed Kentridge at work as he climbs up and down ladders while positioning and re-positioning pieces of paper. These transforming images imparted the feeling that, for Kentridge at least, the studio still holds some magic as a space of constant, epic invention.

Searching for Stella through Binoculars

2010-02-01T09:03:00.000-08:00

Last October at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), I stumbled upon a vivid landscape painting tucked in a secluded hallway by Frederick Church, titled Cotopaxi (1855). The painting was quite alluring—deep green trees along the edge of a volcano in Ecuador—but as an avid "birder" I was even more intrigued by a pair small gold binoculars or "opera glasses" dangling from a silver chain next to the image. Peering through the binoculars at the painting, I felt completely immersed in Church's lusciously painted green, leafy forest in front of a pinky sunset. Church frequently invited guests to his studio to view his landscape paintings through opera glasses because, as I experienced, it makes you feel as if you are inside the landscape, completely surrounded by the trees and hills of Ecuador.

Months later, I was once again standing in a museum peering at art through a pair of binoculars, but this time, I was looking at a painting by Frank Stella in the "Benches & Binoculars" exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The painting, Stretch Variation (1968), is from the "Damascus Gate" series and approximately 5 feet long. Viewing Church's painting through the "binos" produced the sense of immersion in the illusionary space of the painted landscape: in contrast, the abstract patterns in Stella's painting seemed to retreat from view through the binoculars. Stella's painting is a sequence of semi-circular forms painted in pastel colors with thin bands of bright yellow between each shape. In addition to Stella's work, there are over 75 paintings in the exhibition. The paintings are hung "salon-style" next to and over one another filling the entire gallery from floor to ceiling. Many of the paintings in the show, including Stella's, were created after the "salon-style" display was abandoned by art museums that preferred to hang paintings in a line.

Before I return to the experience of looking at Stella's painting through the "binos" at the Walker, there is one more twist in this story: when I returned to the MFAH this week, I walked into the main gallery and immediately saw an enormous painting by none other than, Frank Stella. Also from the "Damascus Gate" series, Stella's Stretch Variation III (1970) is 50 feet long. The vibrant colors in the painting—hot pink next deep teal—make pinwheel patterns across the canvas. The swooping curves of the shaped sides of the canvas mirror the architectural curves of the gallery. To make way for this large painting, the artworks that typically hang on the opposing walls of the gallery have been removed. Their absence makes Stella's painting appear even more massive and monumental, as if the painting itself had expelled all of the other artwork from the room. Its independence is striking. Seeing Stella's painting dominate the main gallery at the MFAH brought back the awkwardness of viewing the Stella at the Walker through binoculars.

My frustration viewing Stella's painting at the Walker stemmed from not being able to view the entire painting at one time through the binoculars. Although much smaller than his painting at the MFAH, Stella's painting at the Walker is still quite large—5 feet long and much bigger than many of the other works in the exhibition. With the scale and the large patterning in the painting, I could only view one or two colors at a time, which undermined what I find most compelling in Stella's "Damascus Gate" series—the unusual combinations of color that are sometimes harmonious, sometimes dissonant. Quite the opposite when viewing Church's painting in the binoculars: even though only small parts of Church's painting could be viewed at one time, I felt immersed in the landscape. Viewing Stella's painting through binoculars, I was "kept out" of the painting. My experience of the work was limited by what was visible through the binoculars, but also the conventions of spectatorship embedded in the binoculars.

Viewing Stella's painting through the "binos" also makes Cartesian perspective the dominant mode of viewing the work. The binoculars as a tool for enhancing and focusing the sense of sight reflect some aspects of Cartesian perspective (defined as the combination of the Cartesian rational subject and the tools of rendering linear perspective, for a complete and eloquent description see in Martin Jay's "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," Vision and Visuality, Hal Foster, ed.). For instance, the binoculars harness "natural vision" with both eyes into a monocular viewpoint. In Cartesian perspective, the frame of the artist's gaze has a similar effect of transforming natural vision through both eyes to a singular vantage point. This fixed "window onto the world" of the artist's gaze makes the tools for rendering perspective work. Without a fixed and singular position as a viewer, the objects in the image would appear at two slightly different vantage points, and the illusion of depth would not be conveyed. The tools of Cartesian perspective were introduced during the Renaissance to create the illusion of space on flat surfaces used in painting and drawing. Viewing Stella's painting through binoculars makes it difficult for the work to challenge the conventions of spectatorship rooted in Cartesian perspective.

It is this mode of spectatorship that Stella's paintings react to—the ability to project one's self into the image is limited by his exposure of the flatness of the painting's surface. In Stella's two paintings from the "Damascus Gate" series, there are no luscious landscapes to imagine moving through, or even thick brush strokes to create a physical space on the canvas. Although entirely flat, Stella's paintings are very much about space. The space he creates when a pale pink line leaps out in front of deep blue hue. The space he makes evident when the painting in its intense color and curving forms reaches out from the wall towards the viewer. As the architecture critic, Paul Goldberger writes:

And for all the extraordinary power Stella's art has had as an exploration of color, line, and form in two dimensions, it is hard not to look at this paintings and feel that what has most intrigued him, all along, has been space: the space between lines, the space left out of the canvas, the space you imagine as you look at his shapes, and the real space that exists between the painting and the viewer. (Paul Goldberger, Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2007).

In Goldberger's analysis, Stella's paintings are above all about the creation and control of space (Goldberger 31). Stella's painting certainly "controls" the gallery at the MFAH: yet, in the salon-style exhibition at the Walker, Stella's painting instead seemed struggle to control the viewer's experience of the space within the structure of the exhibition.

Stella's earlier paintings are described by art critic Phillip Leider as examples of Literalism because their abstract patterns reveal the inherent objectness of painting (Phillip Leider, "Literalism and Abstraction: Frank Stella's Retrospective at the Modern," Artforum, vol. 8, no.8, April 1970). Although the "Damascus Gate" series perhaps move away from Literalism, Stella's paintings in this series still make evident the blunt objectness of paintings. It is their physicality as objects that enable the individual in the gallery to be reminded of the "real" space of the gallery and their own physical presence in it. It is the objectness of the painting that the binoculars remove.

Viewing Stella's painting at the Walker through the binoculars is to transform an object into an image. As a result, my encounter with the work focused on sight as opposed to a "whole-body" experience. Without the binoculars, the scale and vivacity of Stella's paintings affect my body in the gallery. I find the intensity of the color dizzying: sometimes nauseating, sometimes jarring, and often difficult to look at. The scale of the painting is larger than my own body and the curves on both ends of the canvas produce the sense that the painting is expanding to envelop me. The introduction of the binoculars diminished the effect of Stella's painting on my body, because the binoculars changed my sense of the limits of my body in relationship to the limits of the painting. Certainly the binoculars improve my sense of sight, I can see greater detail farther away, but this amplified vision means that my attention is on what I am seeing and my other senses are dimmed. This is a wonderful feature of binoculars, when I am trying to spot a tiny Blue-grey Gnatcatcher bird in a dense forest. Looking at artwork in the gallery through binoculars, however, produced a similar effect, I was less aware of my body in the space and about my body's relationship to Stella's painting. The binos did not diminish my experience of Church's work because this painting already primarily engages the viewer's sense of sight above the other senses. It is through the sense of sight that I project myself into the scene—a landscape created by Church's use of Cartesian perspective to produce the illusion of space on the flat surface of the canvas. The ability of Stella's painting at the Walker to engage the body of the viewer in space was also challenged by the "salon-style" hanging of the show. The painting was hemmed in on all sides by other images, and so did not relate to the architecture of the gallery or impart the feeling of surrounding the viewer.

So as my friend asked after reading this essay, "why are you foaming at the mouth over a show that is just supposed to be fun?!" So a bit of a disclaimer here, I like this show, it is fun, but I also think it is important to talk about how the curating of an exhibition can profoundly shape our experience of a work of art. It is not that I don't understand the reasons for the "Benches & Binoculars" show (i.e.the history of the T.B. Walker collection, making the work more accessible to a broad audience), or that I am convinced the curators of the exhibition did not discuss the same issues I have just described relative to Stella's painting, or similar works in the show. It is just that it seems like such a dramatic change to the experience of Stella's painting that I found it startling and worth unraveling.

Found in LACMA's Reading Room

2010-01-28T11:27:00.000-08:00

LACMA just opened an online reading room of artist books and exhibition catalogs, looks like this is an excellent tool and resource. I came across this catalog for the exhibition, "The Museum as Site." Produced in the early 80s, the exhibition provides a strange snapshot of a moment when installation art, institutional interventions, and Minimalist sculpture could all be included in one exhibition! Artists included in the exhibition range from Chris Burden and Michael Asher to Robert Irwin. Very nice! Check it out:http://www.lacma.org/art/collections.aspx

Noriko Furunishi at Minneapolis Institute of Arts

2010-01-09T19:55:00.000-08:00

The MIA has just started a new exhibition space--new pictures--devoted to contemporary photography, this show is only the second that they have had in this odd little space. The work of Noriko Furunishi is large photographs mostly in California, made with a 4 x 5 camera and then photoshopped until, they become "seamless" landscapes. Furunishi layers twisting, turning pathways through the landscapes on top of one another until the perspective of the space becomes multifaceted. These works are important in this museum since the MIA has a truly excellent collection of ink scroll paintings of Japanese landscapes on silk, my favorite is Hidaka Tetsuo's Floating Mist on Distant Peaks (1858). While viewers seemed to stroll past the monumental scroll paintings (some as large at 50 inches long), in the gallery with Furunishi's photographs I noticed people standing for several minutes tracing the pathways that weave through the photographs, much as I imagine people would have done at one time through the scroll paintings. Rather than simply staring at the photographs, there was lots of discussion about which ways the paths went in the landscape depicted in the photograph. I had the strange sense that Furunishi's work perhaps revitalized a dialogue that I would have heard around the scrolls at one time. Furunishi'photographs, like Tetsuo's painting, engages the spectator in a different way of looking at a landscape.

Why Photography?

2010-01-05T09:45:00.000-08:00

I came across this quote last night reading and falling asleep, this morning when I woke-up I was still thinking it over, so here it is. From "Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity" written by Hollis Frampton, first published in Artforum in October, 1974:

"As I sit writing this text, on one of the days of the only life I shall live, a fine April afternoon is passing outside my window. Like a novelist, or a painter, I have walled myself into a room, away from the passage of time. Photography, uniquely among the visual arts, allows us to have our cake and eat it too: if I were making images today, I could be outside, within that day, converting its appearances to the requirements of ecstasy. Instead I am enmeshed in very these words. But I can't find the words to tell you what it is like to be writing them."

Article in Frieze

2009-11-12T18:47:00.000-08:00

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.

Looking at Ends

2009-10-13T12:59:00.000-07:00

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.

Conversation Before a Landscape

2009-10-12T09:51:00.000-07:00

by Regan Golden & Jeremy Lundquist, 2009, video from Ludlow, Mass. from Summer 2007.

2009-09-29T15:16:00.000-07:00

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:

Sweeping Up Installation at WPCA

2009-09-16T12:05:00.001-07:00

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.

Ely to Ely

2009-08-19T19:54:00.000-07:00

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.

The reason for a picture. . .

2009-08-06T07:55:00.000-07:00

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

May Art(s) Round-Up

2009-06-11T07:25:00.000-07:00

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".

Two Variations on a Shoe Shine

2009-03-08T21:06:00.000-07:00

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.

Before and After

2008-11-20T08:23:00.000-08:00

For the first time we were able to get some before and after shots of the land as it was being developed. We now wish that we had more carefully marked the spots that we were photographing from on previous trips to the woods because there is something really compelling about having a before and after image. One of the things we found most challenging was to photograph the parts of the mountain that had been dynamited and cleared without making spectacular images. There were many images in which the destroyed part of the hill looked phenomenal, almost more grandiose than the forest. This was in some ways, an unexpected part of the project, and somewhat troubling. Although it is a different subject matter, I couldn't help but think of Coco Fusco's piece "Better yet when dead" (1997). Even blown apart the mountain side looks monumental. It is really only once the houses and roads appear that the physical qualities of the landscape that make it identifiable as a "mountain" disappear.

From MPLS to CHIC

2008-09-27T09:22:00.001-07:00

From Chicago to Minneapolis-lots of art to see and think over. In Chicago at the Green Lantern Gallery is a sweet, impeccable, subtly disturbing show by Kari Percival and Greg Cook (ends Oct. 4). Of course, as an artist obsessed with Early American pattern, Greg Cook's work was lovely to see and is a good example of how to make something-- dare I say 'primitive'--and transforms it into contemporary art through color and installation. His use of simple line drawings depicting unfortunate events in American history can be seen on his website, in particular I would direct you to his, "Wonders of the Known World Flags". Cook lives and works in Gloucester, Mass and publishes a nice blog of his own, The New England Journal of Aesthetics which currently features some wild-flowery-sewn-silkscreened-wallprints by Karen Gelardi, also worth seeing.

Onto to Minneapolis. . .oh,oh, my beloved city. . . The Soap Factory--in a bold move--titled their most recent group show of local artists, Pay Attention: GREATER Minneapolis (ends Oct.26). . .inducing through this brave title a comparison to the P.S.1's Greater New York Show in 2005. As all of us who love Minneapolis know, we have all the things New Yorkers have--fantastic chef-owned restaurants, innovative museums, lovely parks designed by the same folks who brought you Central Park, and moreover, we have small-batch roasted coffee and the State Fair. However. . .the Greater New York show at P.S.1 in 2005 was an astounding slice of the artworld featuring emerging artists, tough to beat, but not impossible. While P.S. 1 as a rehabbed elementary school is an interesting and unusual space that many artists transformed in 2005, the Soap Factory as a structure is even more fascinating and exerts itself even more forcefully on the artworks that dare to go inside it. With many of the works in Pay Attention: Greater Minneapolis the space seemed to intrude on the artwork that was desperately trying to fend off the wonky wood floors and the rusted pulleys that dangle from the ceiling. In past shows, the art and the space just sing together in some kind of incredible duet that you feel privileged to see because you know these two elements will never come together this way ever again, such was the case with the show Gigantic that the Soap Factory also put on in 2005.

While this was not the case with most of the work in Pay Attention: Greater Minneapolis . . there were a few exceptions: two pieces by Chris Hill and the drawings, but particularly the cast object sculptures, by Megan Vossler. The works by Chris Hill are--a completely disassembled bicycle and arranged on the floor piece-by-piece from smallest to largest and a smashed china plate with the fragments all laid out in a pattern on the floor. These two works jumped out at me (literally they were shocking) because of their fragility and the efficacy of the execution of Hill's idea. I must admit I enjoy works where the artist's idea confronts you first and then your are rewarded with a beautiful object--the work presents itself as a solution to a problem you didn't know existed until you saw it solved just now. While this work references Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman on one extreme and Conceptual Artist Marcel Broodthaers on the other it is surprising to see these two divergent ideas brought together. The cast plater duffle bags scattered into the base of an old elevator by Megan Vossler and her drawings of Artic landscape were strangely unnerving in their use of white, that sharply contrasted the gritty, worn Soap Factory. Finally, this post on Minneapolis would not be complete without mentioning the work of Anthony Pearson (ends Oct. 25) at Midway Contemporary Art. This work is again very beautiful, and yet it puzzles me. I don't know how I feel about it but I think with this work that seems appropriate--aesthetically quite lovely and subdued.

Well, back to Chicago tomorrow for the opening of Francis Alys at the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, 4pm.

Under Surveillance at the Kohler Art Center

2008-08-26T16:00:00.000-07:00

You can read my review of the exhibition, Under Surveillance at the Kohler Arts Center on the Susceptible to Images Online Art Journal. The show includes a really interesting group of artists whose work is not often shown together because they each work in different media and are scattered across the country such as Yasmine Chatila, Golan Levin, Trevor Paglen and Daniel Goodwin among others. This photograph is a detail taken by Yevgeniya Kaganovich of the piece "WE" which is a collaboration between Kaganovich, Dale Kaminski and Mat Rappaport.

Phenomenal Muir Woods

2008-08-07T17:37:00.000-07:00

The spectacular beauty of Muir Woods and the surrounding hills can hardly be believed. I rarely allow myself to gush about a landscape, running the risk of romanticizing the place, but Muir Woods is beyond the rational discourse. Being in the woods was like walking through a diorama because of the absurd scale of the Redwoods and the Park Services strategic placement of rocks and ferns--part "natural" part "constructed"--tourists stroll casually down an asphalt path amongst the truly monumental trees.

Notes from Ohio Tree Farm

2008-07-28T10:54:00.000-07:00

Finally I have the chance to post images from Ohio where I worked on a collaborative project at the Harold Arts Center which is on a tree farm in rural Appalachia. It was good to be back in this strange corner of Southeast Ohio where I once lived for one year selling furniture and making art. While working on the project which was installed in this old church, I had the opportunity to take some pictures on a warm, sticky afternoon before the installation got underway. The only sound was the drone of wasps floating through the gaps between the rafters and roof. I doubt this building will be standing much longer, but it marks an interesting intersection between nature and religion in American thought since the preacher was also one of the nation's first sustainable tree farmers. Next week I will post images of another sustainable farm in the area, only this farm was also a mental institution. This is a wonderful part of the country to make art from because it has such a very rich sense of place, partly because of the isolation of the whole region. To read more about the Harold Arts Center, click on this link to a recent article in the Chicago Reader:
http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/ourtown/080228/

More Images from Ox-Bow

2008-06-25T19:04:00.000-07:00

What is fascinating and a bit unnerving about the woods around Ox-Bow is that these enormous trees are rooted in the soft sandy soil of the dunes that line this side of Lake Michigan. The landscape (especially the dune grass which looks like little green hairs) is incredibly fragile, and I think some of that sense of fragility showed up in the pictures I took while wondering the paths.

On not knowing.

2008-06-10T21:21:00.000-07:00

Ox-Bow: Day two. Thoughts clearing, weather clear.

On not knowing.

There are currently three noises sounding off in the woods that I do not recognize, but those sounds overlay the chatter of two women walking down the path, the clank of beer bottles being thrown in the trash and far away-the whine of a motor boat. When I was talking to the Ox-Bow director today she explained that one of the things she likes most about growing-up and living still in the woods are the unidentifiable noises that animals and birds make at night. Holding off the urge to identify and categorize the information that comes through the senses is a difficult task, since I think as students we are trained, disciplined (some might say) into making quick quantitative or qualitative judgments. "What color is the apple?" "The apple is red!" What, if any, are the real benefits of delaying that response? That would only prevent you from making the next step towards analysis: what type of bird it is, what are its behaviors, how rare or common is the bird in these woods? I don't know that there are any benefits aside from living with a sense of uneasiness about the world and your environment. Instead of assuaging those uncertainties with knowledge, just accepting them as unresolved.

It really puts a tremendous burden on the senses to perhaps do some analysis that they otherwise might not do--to listen more closely, to make associations between sounds and smells, or sounds and certain types of light or weather. Delaying that response to identify and categorize could possibly result in a more cohesive sensory experience. One of the things I realized today as I was photographing the woods was that the camera has the strange effect of making me both more and less physically involved in the space/place. For instance, I crawled part way under a tree today, kneeling down in wet leaves, I thought I would never do this if I wasn't here to take a picture because I would be too caught up in the potential discomfort of wet knees, or bugs, or stepping in a hole. So then can the type of knowledge acquired through one sense (like the camera privileging the sense of sight, ever be truly isolated from the rest of the body and the senses?

Dinner today: Shrimp Creole with rice, cornbread and crazy fresh Okra.
Song of the day: Reckoner by Radiohead.

The Unusual and the Exemplary

2008-06-09T17:20:00.000-07:00

Today begins my first full day at Ox-Bow, I thought I would connect with the outside world via my blog so you can see what I am up to. Feel free to leave comments at the end that would be much appreciated.

Ox-Bow Day One: Thinking Cloudy, Weather Cloudy.

The Unusual and Exemplary:
In the introduction to the Center for Land Use Interpretation's Scenic Overlook, Matt Coolidge describes their two fold process for selecting sites to be included in their database: sites must be either unusual, such as the nation's only Y-shaped bridge, or the site must exemplify a certain type of land use, such as the Mount Rumpke "megafill" which is the largest landfill in the country. The "exemplary structures" must approach the ideal version of this type of site in order to be considered "exemplary", even if it is a toxic waste storage facility. Implicit in the Center's categorization of "exemplary structures" is the idea that we do have a shared understanding of what an ideal nuclear waste dump looks like, in the Platonic sense. A Platonic form of an abandoned weapons test-site. Implicit in the Center's categorization of "unusual structures" is the idea that there is a deviation from "normal structures" that produces a unique type of site.

While this approach may be effective in categorizing built structures, how could these same categories be applied to natural spaces? To start with a practical application of these ideas: when photographing the woods around Ox-Bow here today, I found my images could be divided into two categories: "unusual natural objects" such as an orange mushroom popping through an otherwise drab patch of dried leaves, or "idealized" images of the woods in which the trees, lush and green appear evenly spaced as the requisite amount of light filters through the leaves. How can you take a picture of a natural space that does not fall into one of these two categories? Is it possible not to find something unique in a photograph of nature? Is it possible for us to imagine a woods more Ideal, more perfect than the one before us?

My approach to documenting the natural world consistently falls into either of these two categories. The woods can be understood in terms of either infinitely small, endlessly fragmented unique parts, or a limitless, vast uniform whole. The small and fragmented parts of the woods collect on my windowsill--little souvenirs of morning walks that fit in my pocket. I feel especially close to these fragments. The limitless Ideal of the woods lives somewhere in my mind, a great distance from my hands, only the lens of the camera begins to bring this Ideal into view, or to at least provide a glimmer of its totality. Is there another way to understand "the woods," a third way? Barthes talks about the "third meaning" of a photograph its punctum, this kind of ecstatic feeling/knowledge that arises from something uncanny? Can this "punctum" ever be present in photographing the natural world? What there is ever out of place, incomplete, jarring, causing the subject to be turned inside out? In an effort to resolve these questions, I am attaching some of the images I took this morning that suggest these two categories of "unusual" and "exemplary" as well as another image that seems not to fit as easily into these categories.

walker on the green

2008-05-29T15:59:00.000-07:00

growholes is part sculpture, part mini-golf made from waste-wood particle board, recycled rubber tires, and cast resin. In this project Maura Rockcastle and I dealt with two primary issues: challenging the dialectical design inherent in mini-golf and addressing the topography of the hillside into which the Walker Art Center is embedded. We dealt with the issue of place by mimicking the hilly terrain behind the Walker in the topographic contours of the wood form. We played with the idea of empty hole/full hole by repeating the basic 4 inch golf hole as a solid form, but placing it inside a depression that we dug out of the actual site. It was an incredible project, built in only two weeks. Thank you to Jeremy Lundquist, Matt Murphy, Garth Rockcastle, Brian Nerney, and the Walker for all of your help.

snow day

2008-02-11T05:13:00.001-08:00

Few things alter a landscape like two feet of wet snow.

Collaborative Project: Site Lines

2008-01-30T14:56:00.000-08:00

This weekend Peck School of Art and INOVA hosted a collaborative project with local artists called Siteline. The focus of the project was on mapping--its definitions and the expansion of drawing into "two and a half dimensions". The project was designed by Leslie Vansen in response to Deb Sokolow's The trouble with people you don't know exhibition at INOVA in the Kenilworth Building. Here are some images from the project. Thanks to my collaborators Nan and Donna!

Inside or Around Tino Sehgal's Exhibition at the Walker Art Center

2008-01-08T08:55:00.000-08:00

On a snowy afternoon in late December, a security guard in a pale blue uniform stood along the wall in an open space between Minimalist artworks by Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Ellsworth Kelly.

I walked towards Untitled (1967) by Donald Judd. My sense of space shifted and for a moment the work extended over me. The silvery mass rolled out into the room--an immense piece of steel hovering above the ground.

The guard began to sing as I walked toward the painting, RED YELLOW BLUE III (1966) by Ellsworth Kelly. She sang: "this is propaganda, you know, you know" in a lovely, lilting voice. She concluded, "by Tino Sehgal 2002."

I felt the presence of Ellsworth Kelly's painting evaporate. The color disappeared--suddenly appropriated into another work of art. I stood close to the painting to feel the heat of Kelly's red square burning up the space around it, but nothing.

My stomach turned and my knees wobbled. I was suddenly thrust on stage--the art was no longer performing, I was. Every step now a strange dance with the gallery guard in a space suddenly made vacuous.

I tried to re-inscribe the Minimalist works in the gallery by moving slowly along the perimeter of Andre's Aisle (1981) hoping to elicit a "TOO CLOSE" response from the guard, but nothing.

By now the sun had gone down and the city just outside the museum had turned a deep, iridescent blue. I climbed the white stairway to the gallery where Sehgal's main work was to be displayed. The space was empty except for the wall tag announcing the title of the work: instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things (2000). I puzzled with one of my friends, was this Sehgal's piece--the gallery represented?

We looked at each other for an instant, laughed and began dancing around the room, watching our reflections in glass windows opening out onto Hennepin Avenue. It was one of those childhood fantasies come true, a space at the Walker where we could finally run free.

The next afternoon I returned to Sehgal's "empty" room, but at the end of the gallery a woman crouched against the wall. My experience of the space was completely different. I cautiously crept into the gallery. I just stood quietly across from the figure that peered back at me, but I wanted to call out to her, "we are not here to hurt you!"

I read that Sehgal would not allow his works to be photographed, but in order to find out what was encompassed by his piece I began to photograph the gallery walls. I became interested in every mark on the walls, every scuff of a shoe. Was this part of the piece? I photographed the sludge melting on the floor left by someone's boot. No one confronted me about photographing the walls, and the figure at the end of the gallery remained still.

I walked back through the museum trying to find other pieces by Sehgal, but now everyone in the museum was part of the performance and every body an object contained within the museum.

We made our way to the gift shop and I opened up this book, Santiago Sierra: House in Mud. Inside were pictures of a gallery filled with dirt. The thick dark substance pushed against the white walls of the gallery, which struggled to contain the mess.

If "antagonism" is defined as the holding in conflict of two opposing views, how do we know its parameters? If "antagonism" is a condition of being in-between, how do we know when art neutralizes or provokes opposition? If "antagonism" describes one opposing element interfering with the action of the other, triggering an unpredicted event, how do we know what qualifies as unpredictable in a carefully orchestrated space?

As I recalled my experience of Tino Sehgal's piece later that evening, what stood out in my memory was the experience I had while standing in the threshold of the gallery: an older man and his wife stood beside me briefly and asked in a slightly annoyed tone, "Where is the art that Sandra Oh liked better than Frida Kahlo?"
"This is it," I said, and walked back down the white stairway.

I did not stay to see if they entered the room or turned around to walk out.

To see my accompanying images, go to mnartists.org

Familiar Trees

2007-11-13T18:37:00.000-08:00

This posting is actually a response to the interview with photographer Robert Adams that aired on Art:21 last Sunday evening. I was struck by the juxtaposition of Mark Dion's work with Adam's since both artists address the conflict between nature and culture through their work, but represent this conflict through very different means. Dion's installations emphasize the incredible human effort that it takes to mimic the simplest process of nature-decay. Dion's work, based on the aesthetic and conventions of modern science, is cool and removed. Adam's takes a more traditional approach to photography, working hard to place the subject matter in the proper context, with the appropriate distance, and waiting for those surprising moments, the punctum, to appear. What was fascinating was that this reserved, cautious practice was coupled with Adams intensely felt words about the environment, art and beauty. He argues without cynicism or naivete (in words and images) that "beauty is the confirmation of meaning in life" (to read more, go to: http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/adams/clip2.html). My response in images to Adam's works/words were taken this afternoon in the Seminary Woods.

Tracing the Woods

2007-11-09T12:26:00.000-08:00

After several months away from this project, I had the wonderful (and sometimes frustrating) experience of revisiting all of the digital photographs of the woods that I made this summer. On the last day, we took one of the paper backdrops that I typically cut apart (see portfolio link) up into the woods with some strange results. I particularly liked the way the backdrop collects light in this image, but is also dwarfed by the enormity of the space.

Place as 'Strata'

2007-09-11T08:52:00.000-07:00

I came across this quote and thought it relevant to this debate about place, art and history:

"The kind of difference that defines every place is not on the order of a juxta-position but rather takes the form of imbricated strata."

-Quote from Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.

New York: Day Five

2007-06-25T07:06:00.000-07:00

My End is your beginning is my end.(2006) at the Cue Art Foundation Gallery in Chelsea, open until July 28th. For more info:

Ludlow, MA: Day Three

2007-06-25T06:59:00.000-07:00

On our last day in Ludlow, Jeremy and I take some of the backdrop paper up the mountain and put it to use. The plan was to use the backdrop to isolate out natural objects, but there was a strange tonal and material syncrony between the trees, the low light, and the pale green paper (made in part, of course, from trees). So eventually, we dragged the paper down the hill as it gathered dirt and imrpints of rocks.

Ludlow, MA: Day Two

2007-06-25T06:43:00.000-07:00

On a rainy Saturday morning, we can't get up the mountain because of the mud sliding down the hill from the new developments. Instead, I photograph the natural patterns inside the house while my grandma bakes shortcake and works on a crossword. It is one of those wonderful mornings that seems to last all day. Eventually, we get restless and drive to the next exit on the Pike (Chicopee) to check email at Starbucks.

Ludlow, MA: Day One

2007-06-25T06:38:00.000-07:00

After a short drive from NH, we arrive in Ludlow and head straight up the mountain, and begin photographing the many property markers on the hill. We spend the next day struggling to figure out where the family property begins and ends.

Hopkinton, NH

2007-06-25T06:21:00.000-07:00

After driving three days in constant rain and making a quick detour to Maine, we arrived in Hopkinton just in time to see the tree behind my Aunt's barn get struck by lightening. I spent the following day photographing her house, the barn and the graveyard across the street. I use the photographs to collect and document patterns. The barn is 215 years old. The images posted are the outside and inside of the barn.

Pine Flat by Sharon Lockhart

2007-05-27T06:45:00.000-07:00

In late April, I had the opportunity to see Sharon Lockhart's film "Pine Flat" (2005) at UWM and never had the opportunity to write about it at that time. The film continues to stick with me, because of the questions is raises about how to depict the relationship between people and the natural world in contemporary art. The landscape in "Pine Flat" has all of the enormity and romanticism of Asher Durand's "Kindred Spirits" (1849) and the figures are positioned similarly. The young teens, often alone, in the woods are engulfed by their surroundings. However, unlike WIlliam Cullen Bryant and Thomas Cole depicted in "Kindred Spirits," the youths in Lockhart's film appear distracted--picking at the grass, reading a book, pushing each other off a swing. The landscape is not the focus of their attention. As a result, it becomes a backdrop for the individuals whose smallest gestures seem to send ripples through the space around them. This effect is magnified by the duration of each shot (10 Minutes) and the patience, focus and commitment of the viewer to the individual in the image. Watching "Pine Flat" was like watching a painting.

Drawing a Blank

2007-05-06T20:31:00.000-07:00

This weekend I went to a conference at the Center for 21st Century Studies, where two critics/historians discussed the idea of the blank page and the blank screen as a reoccurring symbol of femininity in the work Man Ray and Andy Warhol. The feminine as a surface to be inscribed. The feminine as a blank space onto which we can project meaning. Both authors described their theories on these works as a purposeful step away from the dialectics of language and psycholanalytic theory that position female as absent and male as present. It was difficult position for both to defend, but it was exciting for the audience to even think of the possibility of moving on from this dualism. However, can this be done without a serious memory lapse? Do we risk forgeting that these dualities are the building blocks of langauge? What if this form of language is still in practice? Or perhaps we should froget Lacan immediately, he has done enough damage and it is time for another direction(s).

I wonder if this doesn't also apply to the landscape? Can we think of space/place as something aside from a blank space to be inscribed/developed? These signs have been up outside my house for months now. The city covered over the "No parking" signs on our street because neighbors compained after being ticketed for parking more than two hours in front of their own houses. I often thought about what I could draw, pin, tape or paint over these surfaces. As the months dragged on I realized that these "blank signs" meant to cover over existing information were anything but blank.

Inside the Scenic Backdrop

2007-04-06T06:17:00.000-07:00

My research on the New England landscape as told by artists and writers focused on two sources, the Hudson River School paintings of Thomas Cole and the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Of these two artists' works, I am particularly interested in Cole's painting The Oxbow: View from Mt. Holyoke, Northampton, after a Thunderstorm (1836) and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850). Initial comparisons between these works revealed two very different conceptions of the New England Landscape. In the Scarlet Letter, the forest is a chimerical character whose appearance reflects the motives of the human beings who enter into it. For Hester Prynne, the woods represent a space outside the realm of societal control. It is here that she dares to remove her "scarlet letter" by casting the embroidered letter onto the forest floor. For Robert Chillingworth, the woods are the source and symbol of his devious nature. The shadowy forest provides the ingredients that Chillingworth uses to slowly poison Hester's lover, the Reverend Dimmesdale. These portrayals of the woods are important to the telling of the story of the Scarlet Letter; yet, they are familiar depictions of the woods as either good or evil, corresponding to human nature. Between these two poles, the character Pearl's "indistinguishable" nature allows for Hawthorne to reimagine the woods as a liminal space. For instance, through her play in the woods, Pearl transforms the twigs and stones into representations of the puritan elders with whom she retells her version of the Scarlet Letter. The woods become a tool for reimagining her own role within society. Of the three images of the woods which Hawthorne offers in the Scarlet Letter, Pearl's character and her experience of the woods suggest a critical framework based not on dualities, but on the playful transformation of existing materials. Pearl's interaction with the forest offers a new model for an art theory and practice that is both informed by and transformed by a natural landscape.

In comparison to the indeterminacy of the woods in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Thomas Coles' The Oxbow depicts the New England landscape with empirical certainty. Coles' richly painted landscape of the Oxbow river valley outside North Hampton captures every detail from the leaves on the trees to the texturing of the stones along the river. Coles' work combines his knowledge of botany with his study of European history painting to create a lush wilderness of mythical proportions. His goal as a painter was to depict the American landscape as having a rich history, as well as a profitable future. The viewer in Coles' paintings is in a position of control, situated high above the landscape, looking down into the valley; the viewer remains at a safe distance from the wilderness without delving into its shadowy realms. The point of view from which the entire panorama is visible suggests human beings are in a position of control over nature through the observational tools of science.

Although this conception of Coles' paintings is accurate and remains an important part of the discussion of his work, art historians, such as Barbara Novak in Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting:1825-1875, have recently emphasized that Coles' paintings were also a response to the spread of industrialization beyond the confines of major cities into small New England towns. Novak argues that Coles' work could be reinterpreted as a plea for preserving the landscape, rather than exploiting it. The positioning of the viewer in Coles' painting The Oxbow high above the landscape remains a position of control, but perhaps with that control also comes responsibility. I am not interested in choosing between these two conceptualizations of Coles' work, but rather in that they present two conflicting views on how to design a utopian industrial center or pastoral retreat.

These conflicting views on Coles' The Oxbow resonate with current discussions about how to develop the woods of Western Massachusetts. For instance, in the town of Ludlow, Massachusetts, several generations of my family have worked in the same local factories that Cole feared would overrun the natural landscape. What remains of the surrounding forests is quickly disappearing as new housing developments are built. This moment in American history, similar to the time period just prior to industrialization, allows a brief window of opportunity to reconsider earlier attitudes towards the wilderness and to allow this information to change current attitudes about development.

In several previous works, I have adopted a similar approach to Coles' work by “repainting” sections of his landscapes in a new format. Coles' paintings are monumental in scale and vivid in color. When I repaint portions of these works, I transform them into small paintings that are portrait size and use only neutral tones. I typically use unbleached titanium paint which is normally used only used for underpaintings. The translation of these large works into intimate studies allows me and the viewer time to rethink how the landscape is portrayed in these works. This process also enables me to carefully reimagine and reconstruct the perspective of the artist at that time.

Un/building

2007-03-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about the structures up on the Mountain and how different they are from the giant new homes constructed only a few feet away. The first difference is that one is brand new, made of synthetic materials, and vacant. The other is old--a ruin--made of natural materials from the woods, and is not vacant or full because it has no inside or outside. I am aware of the long history of artists and art historians fetishizing ruins or transforming them into triggers for a wave of nostalgia, but that is not my purpose here. I am interested instead in how these ruins in our own backyard suggest an interaction with the landscape that is not an obstacle. You can move freely around, in and out of these non-structure structures Their intended function is no longer known or remains unfinished, enough to let the person who happens across them in the woods the opportunity to imagine multiple uses for such places--was it a still? Was it a cabin? Was it a well? Or a home? They are so much more present that the new homes. Even in their decay they are thriving, vivid documents of the bodies of the people who made them.

Land Markers Marked

2006-11-22T08:36:00.000-08:00

I have decided to change my approach to the project in Ludlow, Mass from "art project" to "history project"--for the moment. It occurred to me that while I was making paintings and drawings about my experience of the place, the history of the location had simply become background. This was unacceptable to me, so I picked up the book, Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick and also I went to see a series of shortfilms by Thomas Comerford at Woodland Patterns Bookstore/gallery/experimental film venue in Milwaukee. I thought that Comerford's most recent film "Land Marked/Marquette" was particularly insightful in how to layer historical information encapsulated in the city of Chicago's monuments to Pere Marquette alongside contemporary environmental issues. Here is a link to his website: http://www.thomascomerford.net/film.html

The Princess Pines

2006-10-22T12:14:00.000-07:00

Lately, I have been talking with my mother about her impressions of the New England landscape as a part of my artistic research, I was really surprised by her initial response that for her the source of the woods "magic" could be traced to a single plant: The Princess Pine. This minature tree grows low along the forest floor in shallow soil over rocks. The plants are actually "fern-allies" and although they are categorized as "ground pines." To find out more go to the University of MN extension site:
Last year, 170,000 ounds of Princess Pine was harvested from Midwestern forests last year for floral decorations.

http://www.extension.umn.edu/specializations/environment/components/lycopodium1.html

Times article on Internet monitoring of new construction

2006-10-02T08:34:00.000-07:00

An article in the Sunday New York Times points to the use of the internet as an important new tool is tracking new development and construction in older communities. Often communities close to major cities that are rapidly becoming suburbs may feel that they have little control over the types of developments springing up around them. I thought this community blog did an excellent job of at least documenting the changes in their town, and providing people with a space to comment on the teardown and redevelopment of existing homes (mostly ranch houses built in the mid-1940s). The article focuses on the town of Montclair, NJ but I know I have witnessed similar types of development projects in the older suburbs of Chicago, IL in distant emerging suburbs like Ludlow, MA and even in the rural college town of Athens, OH.
Here is a link to the blog: http://www.baristanet.com
You will find a link to the New York Times article under her October 1, 2006 entry.

the unflower flower

2006-09-15T17:47:00.000-07:00

There is evidence of the woods perpetual decay and rebirth in many of the fungi and mushrooms that I compulsively photographed for their various forms and textures, but none were as strange as the "ghost flower." Otherwise called, Indian Pipe, I was reminded when I saw this plant (and heard its unfortunate name) that the woods of western massachusetts have already been through many transformations. The "ghost flower" or "ice flower" (scientific name is montropa uniflora meaning once-turned single flower ) is a small whiteish plant with translucent leaves and flowers. It appears and disappears randomly thoughout the woods in mid-summer. It never comes back in the same spot and actually lives off the fungi that live off dead trees. The "ice plant's" odd colorless color is due to its inability to produce chlorophyll. It is also very difficult to photograph because it grows only in the shadows and washes out with a flash which I discoverd (and others have noted)-so I have included both the drawing and the photograph. Since my earlier works used pearls and icebergs as physical reminders of the welcome presence of indeterminacy in everyday life, these "ice plants" may work their way into the project. At the moment, however, they seem to raise the question, why not think of the development of the land into housing as simply another transformation in an ongoing reworking of the landscape?

Saving the Landscape with Pictures?

2006-09-08T09:04:00.000-07:00

My blog has come back to life!
One of the first ideas to write about following my trip to Massachusetts is, what role do the 400+ photographs play in the process of making my work and in the process of preserving the land? It is pretty clear at this point that the land will be sold and developed into housing. What remains of the woods will be the digital photographs and video that I took this summer. I find myself confronted with a strange question, do the photographs contribute to the destruction of the landscape by providing a certain degree of "preservation" in that they are a document of the place? So if the forest is uprooted, should I destroy the photographs along with it?

Somewhere else here

2006-06-12T15:11:00.000-07:00

On Thursday of last week in the middle of June, as we approach the pinnacle of summer, it grew cool and damp with the wind coming straight out of the north. I walked to the Lake in a daze, wondering if I was actually in the same place that I had been on the warm, humid evening before. Looking out over Lake Michigan, I was surprised to see that it had the same "character" (color, texture, raging waves) as many of the lakes that I had paddled across in the Boundary Waters. Even after living alongside the Lake for three years, until this particular morning I assumed that Lake Michigan was tame"and industrialized, so I was surprised to see these Northerly, steely grey waves repetitively pounding against the pile of rocks that make up the break water. Based on this experience, I would argue that place is something that we take with us, layering one place over another and then another, that it is impossible to separate one place from another in the memory of an individual, and yet, the preservation of a place requires environmentalists to prove that it is like no other place in teh world. Is there a way for artists and writers to rectify the multi-layered experience of a place with its definition as a complete, unique entity?

Place and Nostalgia

2006-06-06T17:57:00.000-07:00

Working on a project about the New England woods--a place I have visited, remember, read about in books, has generated many questions about the relationship between a sense of place and nostalgia. Embarking on a project about a place that is far away geographically, and soon to be rendered inaccessible with its destruction, makes the risk of slipping into a wallowing, romanticized sense of this place even more dangerous. But first--how do I define nostalgia? The phrase "nostos" meaning to return home and the phrase "algia" meaning longing--certainly nostalgia means an unattainable home that remains at a distance. Embedded in this definition is also its opposite--if nostalgia for a lost home implies spacial and temporal distance, this sense is always juxtaposed with the here and now, the place that is not the "home" of which I am dreaming--the lived place. This issue was brought to my attention by the opening chapter of Svetlana Boym's book, "The Future of Nostalgia"(2001). She begins the book, with an excerpt from a Russian newspaper which tells the story of a man from Germany who returns to the Kaliningrad where his parents were born. He recognizes nothing from their stories until he reaches the Pregolya River. Overjoyed he splashes the river's water on his face feeling at home at last, but the terribly polluted water scars him. A gruesome way to start an art theory text and a cautionary tale about the risk of being misguided by nostalgia into "false" identification with a place you know nothing about. But can nostalgia be productive? Perhaps being nostalgic is not so much a state of being on one side of the equation or the other--near or far, at home or away, living in the past or the present, but a condition of ping-ponging back and forth between two poles. A condition of living in both the past and the present, being both at home and away. Perhaps this is why the topic of nostalgia makes many art critics, writers and artists so squeamy, like a slugish, dirty river we can't resist dipping into.

via Iowa

2006-05-28T10:12:00.000-07:00

After four years living in various rural towns and mid-sized cities across the Midwest I have come to realize how places act like filters for daily experiences--subtly shapping and forming my thoughts, identity (the midwest may be deemed to be a homogenous blob in the center of the country, but I have found each of these places remarkably different). Do all Americans experience "place" this way? Who even has the time to reflect on their experience of a "place"? This image is taken half-way between two cities--one that I lived in for four years in Iowa and one where I live currently in Wisoncsin.

Artists and "Place"

2006-05-26T09:30:00.000-07:00

As I begin the research portion of this project, I am curious about the many types of relationships that have been formed between contemporary artists and places. Here are a few selected models:
1) Artists that convey a "sense of place" through their work combining a description of the physical landscape with the artists memories/experience of that place.
2) Artists whose work is to rebuild or reclaim a place. Their art work is also an act of conservation.
3) Artists who connect a place to a certain historical event or moment, that may reiterate or challenge pre-existing "grand narratives."
4) Artists who reveal how a "sense of place" can become commodified.
5) Artists who find or create borderline places. Places not easily recognized, mapped or preserved.
6) Artists whose works is informed by the place in which they live, but more specifically how this shapes their identity.
7)Artists who explore place as a psychoanalytic construct, fixating on the separation from the maternal body.
With many of the artists whose work comes to mind within the realm of these loosely defined categories what is shared is a sense that the function of the resulting artwork is to enable the artist to establish a connection to a place, while also leaving space for the viewer to enter into their own relationship with the work of art(possibly as a site in itself) and a place. This relationship may be affable, alienating, or abject.

Project Proposal

2006-05-18T07:12:00.001-07:00

After many thoughtful requests--here is the project that I have proposed to work on during the coming year:
With the Joan Mitchell Grant I will create a series of works based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter.” Since my work is a critique of the dualities inherent in Western thought and language, I am fascinated by Hawthorne’s ability to muddy the definitions of “good” and “evil” in this early American novel. The recent series of works, What Is Yours Is Mine Is Yours, examines the exchange of words, emotions, guilt and pleasure between mothers and daughters in a puritanical society as represented by Hester and Pearl. While Hester’s richly embroidered “A” is a decoration that accentuates and disguises her identity, her daughter Pearl is an “indistinguishable color” as she defies the parameters of shame placed on her by society. Due to the impact of this text on my work, I would like to take my research a step further. I would like to work in the landscape in which the novel is set--a New England woods. My project would involve using drawing materials and digital imaging to document the woods behind my grandmother’s home in Western Massachusetts, while weaving in Hawthorne’s lucid descriptions. This process would result in a series of painted, drawn and cut works on and with paper that would be installed in a local space with a history that could further expand the work. This project would extend and build upon my current artistic practice, as well as my connectivity to New England as a place of origin both for my family, for Hawthorne, and for an American consciousness. What I imagine I will find there is a barrage of fixed, linear narratives that after further exmination reveal the transitory and liminal space of the forest described by Hawthorne in “The Scarlet Letter.”

Part D. Protection of Natural Features

2006-05-15T14:11:00.000-07:00

Doing some research online today of the town planning board that regulates the development of subdivisions in the areas surrounding and inluding my grandmother's land in Massachusetts, I found this detailed advisory for developers on the subject of "protecting natural features" under the heading of "Section III: Subdivision Design Standards," which sounds good in theory:

D. PROTECTION OF NATURAL FEATURES
All natural features, such as large trees (greater than 8 inches in diameter DBH), water courses, wetlands, scenic points, historic locations, stone walls, and similar community assets which will contribute to the attractiveness and value of the property shall be shown on the plan and preserved. Appropriate reseeding and replanting of the non-paved areas of the public way is a component part of the construction of the subdivision, and is to be completed by the developer prior to acceptance. Existing vegetation shall be disturbed at a minimum. Except where necessary to conform to road design, driveways, safety, and drainage, major earth grading shall be avoided. The Board, at its discretion, shall require portions of the public way to be planted with groups of shrubs or trees for aesthetic value and effect as to enhance the property. At least two trees per lot shall be preserved or planted within the right-of-way or within 10 feet of the right-of-way.

Art(s) Project DAY Zero

2006-05-08T21:00:00.000-07:00

This purpose of this blog is to document my first year post-MFA. During this year I will be working on a project about my grandmother's land in western Mass. which will be sold to developers in the fall, but the idea for this project came two years ago from Nathaniel Hawthorne's description of the New England woods in his novel "The Scarlet Letter." This landscape has absolutely confounded me since I up and moved to western Mass. for one summer when I was fifteen after reading Hawthorne's book. The first issue to confront in this project is the question of "place"? Can a site exist in reality in an American culture in which site-specificity is readily fabricated? (Example: I went to a restaurant last night in suburban Chicago that was like a theme park--complete with faux tarnished mirrors and "worn" tables). So I started this project by rereading Miwon Kwon's "One Place After Another" (published in October Magazine in 1997). One of the main questions to face in this project is outlined by Kwon in the last paragraph of her essay, "What would it mean now to sustain the cultural and historical specificity of a place (and self) that is neither a simulacral pacifier nor a willful invention?"