Sweeping Up Installation at WPCA

In the 1700's American women living on the shores of Massachusetts drew patterns on their wood floors in sand. As the family walked over the sand the patterns shifted, but the wood floors were cleaned.

Ely to Ely

View from hotel window in Ely, Iowa. August 8th, 5:40 am, 85 degrees.



View from middle of Snowbank Lake in Ely, Minnesota. August 8th, 11:05 pm, 65 degrees.

The reason for a picture. . .

After returning from two weeks in a cabin at the Blacklock Nature sanctuary where I struggled to take the pictures of the forest that I was supposed to be taking (or had proposed to be there taking, I got suckered into taking this photograph after resisting for several days by the outright beauty of the whole scene. This was at the end of week one and freed me up to spend the other week glutinously taking pictures after picture of the woods sparkling in the sunlight. I left both happy and defeated. More images from this new series--"the reason for a picture" are posted on mnartists.org

May Art(s) Round-Up

When spring finally arrived in the end of May, I was so stunned by the quality of the work I was seeing everywhere that I just had to write about it.

The Next Fair -- Chicago, Sunny, 52 degrees:
Two works stood out to me in the way that they engaged the space and refused to hang blithely on the wall (as my own work did!)--Jeff Carter's "Catalog Floor" and the collaborative installation of particle board, folded bathtowels, and drawings at Scott Projects . Also beautiful and strange prints by Dutes & Stan printed at Spudnik press, imagining two men spawning from of their lengthy, intertwining beards.

Museum of Contemporary Art -- Chicago, Rain, 60 degrees:
A floor to ceiling wall of moss by Olafur Eliasson at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago--what got to me--the scent, the itchy (teary!) eyes, the pale green color of the reindeer moss, the enormous scale, its half living, half dying piquedness.


(Above: Karel Funk, 2006, Untitled #21, Acrylic on panel)

Rochester Art Center--MN, Rain, Flood Warnings, 45 degrees:
Karel Funk's paintings (yes-paintings!) are based on digital photographs that he painstakingly reproduces. These hooded, bundled figures appear aloof, but are made more intimate through Funk's careful painting--every stitch in the hem of a coat can be seen. I have to admit it is rare and refreshing to see a show of paintings that is equally about representation and technique and the gallery--about the viewers moving through the space situating themselves among and between the paintings. The layout of the show built upon a unique type of interactivity that is hidden and unexpected in this very quiet work.


(Above: Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing Detail)

Mass. Museum of Contemporary Art--North Adams, Sunny, 65 degrees:
NO SHOW ON EARTH could have prepared me for the retrospective of Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawings at Mass MOCA. This show is entirely phenomenal, totaling three floors--each floor half the size of a football field. The physical experience of color is incredibly intense--the gut churning orange with green stripes, the eye boggling grey on grey on grey. I went with a group of art professors and we all wished that our students could see this show, not only for the use of color, but because if anyone dares to say they have "done enough" after seeing this show they will understand immediately that they have not. Also at Mass MOCA was "These Days: Elegies for Modern Times," an intense little show about life after the apocalypse that included one of my favorite works of contemporary art--"A little bit of Death" by Sam Taylor Wood.

One of things that struck me about Mass MOCA is that this is museum gives itself up to the artists. There is such a sharp contrast between this museum and spaces like the Guggenheim or Calatrava's addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum where the work conforms (or interacts-depending upon the artwork) to this space.

Walker Art Center--Sunny, blissful 70 degrees.
The Quick and the Dead lives up to the word on the street that this is one of the best shows of 2009. I had a very strong response to the show as an artist--wanting to resist the dematerialization of art, but also relishing the cleverness of many of the works like a drawing by Joseph Beuys--a simple line on a page with the caption--the future starts here. It certainly invoked the stillness of something reaching the end of its time, but the connections between the works are so rich that it would take much more than a blog entry to unravel.

(Below: Beuys at Mass MOCA)



Heaven Gallery--partial sun, 55 degrees.
A lovely little show, I just saw in passing, also addresses this post-apocalypse, life after death theme that is circulating--really captured in the title of the show, "In that gold land." It was all about looking to the future and rebuilding.

Let's begin again!

Next month: "Frontier Preachers" at the Soap Factory and "THE Modern Wing".

Two Variations on a Shoe Shine

This year I have witnessed two very revealing works about a seemingly ordinary, uneventful act- shining shoes. Francis Alys' "Bolero" (1996) at the Renaissance Society is a lovely and meticulous animation that includes 511 drawings on translucent paper. Simple, but visually breathtaking, Alys' piece describes how labor and repetitive gestures are integral to our lives. As alluring as this installation/animation was I forced to radically rethink this piece this week after I stopped into the INOVA Gallery at the UW-Milwaukee to see Jefferson Pinder's video installation, "Show Shine Variations" (2007). In Pinder's "shoe shine" a young black man shines a young, aloof white man's shoe so hard that the whole shoe rips apart. Pinder's piece immediately brought back to mind what was missing in Alys' work, the inequity of the relationship between the two individuals--that the types of labor we perform in society are never far from issues of race, class and gender. I had a similar nagging feeling when watching the making of Alys' "When Faith Moves Mountains" (2002). The gesture in both of Alys' works are so compelling, I want to believe in their innocence, but Pinder's work has me rethinking the dynamics of a shoe shine. Jefferson Pinder's show "Anthology" is up through May 10 at INOVA.

Before and After

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Collaborative Project: Site Lines

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

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

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

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'

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.