BY DAVID GIBSON

TIME SHARE The Photographs of Leah Oates

2011-11-23T08:40:00.001-05:00

The power of the photographic imagehas always been to stop time—to create instant artifacts. But these days, sincedigital media has overwhelmed the processes by which photographs are made, thisoriginal logic seems to have been turned upon its ear. How do we judge a staticreality when images are considered as mere samples of perception rather thandocuments of beauty commingled with truth? It is equally a matter of thephotographic image, the objective it depicts, and our approach to it. Thephotograph, if taken in consideration of static and transitory elements, can besaid to share time with reality, because as a document it represents both theactual and the symbolic.

The photographs of Leah Oates aremeant as documents not of an object frozen in time, but animated by it. Hers isa visual register similar to the literary trope called “stream ofconsciousness” in which the perspective of the writer--in this case the artistor viewer—creates a fluidic narrative that affects the way the text isrecognized as a metaphor for actuality. It is not filled with symbols but issymbolically actualized.

In her recent series of photographs,Leah Oates deals with physical areas in Newfoundland, Beijing, China, and inseveral public parks in of New York City including Pelham Bay, Jamaica Bay andProspect Park. What unifies all these areas is that they share once wild orcultivated natural areas with post-industrial, post-residential ones. Shecreates fantastic vistas that, despite not being attached to the same staticenvironments of her previous collections—that dealt with consumer detritus in anurban sphere of lost space—Oates is dealing with nature as a by-product ofBourgeois appetites for conspicuous consumption, an idea that was birthed inthe late 19th century with the advent of cities built around industrial habits.So called “civilized people” were attempting to maintain the rituals of courtsociety in a post-imperial world. These manicured and landscaped environmentscreated a doppelganger to the grounds of great castles like Versailles orVaux-Le-Vicompte, or city parks such as the Luxembourg Gardens. Over theinterval of progressing eras, these parks shifted in the use value and theirreference to the urban areas surrounding them.

In the 1970’s, in her famous bookabout urbanism and urban blight, The Death and Life of Great American Cities,Jane Jacobs talks about how neighborhoods that are organized around a publicpark invariably lose their focus as communities, and become centerless. This isbecause they do not resemble court society, but a more complex version of MainStreet America, in which services and residences take up different areas notalways en face with one another. The community that develops in an urbancommunity is interior and is unified by ethnicity and nationalism and theirshared commonality, not by imposed class-based values. Parks in cities changedas the 20th century progressed, because they suffered the same fate as thestreets ringing them. They became places that nobody went, for not only werethey in disrepair, they were a loss of ideals, a degradation of a gloriouspast, a ruined purity. Yet today many of the parks have been returned to aversion of their glory, in some case s completely re-landscaped so as to hew tothe original wishes of their historical builders and preservers. In Oates’simages they take on a wildness that is both diffuse and sublime, like enteringa glade in a place we’ve never visited before. Oates reaffirms the primalcharacter of nature by allowing the eye to meander and vibrate among opticalperspectives enlivened by the rigor of the transitory.

Alternatively, the images of hersoriginating in faraway places such as Newfoundland and Beijing tend toreference abandoned residences around which nature is slowly creeping andtaking over, turning them into mordant relics; or she focuses specifically uponobjects such as electric and telephone wire towers, silently connecting humancommunities while creating an industrial periphery in uninhabited areas thatare otherwise entirely natural. They are metal and energy totems representingthe value system of human will with only the sky, wind, and clouds to symbolizeand lay bare the alternately implied and emphasized manifest destiny thatutility structures and the system of organic interactions that is natureitself, mean to one another.

Leah Oates brings our impressions of both worlds into one frame. Whocould look upon any of her scenes and not agree that she had transformed ourtrained esthetic expectations into a manifestation of reality that createsbeauty in its path, not because it makes the image more precious, but becausethey make us feel more alive. Like people who share a single space but never atthe same time, always looking out the same window but perhaps seeing completelydifferent things, we are given the chance to share moments of transcendentfragility that approach the originality of the empirical.

THE NEW HORIZON: PAINTINGS BY THOMAS FRONTINI

2011-11-05T21:17:00.001-04:00

Pink Sky~North Shore c. 2050 (The Lessons of Rapa Nui), 45 x 56 in., Oil on Panel, 2007

If the need is pressing and the world is not forthcoming, then vision will dictate how the object of desire can be created (James Elkins, The Object Stares Back, pp 30-1).

A picture is not only a view onto the world, or onto someone’s imagination: it is a peculiar kind of object that sets us thinking about desire…. Looking immediately activates desire, possession, violence, displeasure, pain, force, ambition, power, obligation, gratitude, longing…there seems to be no end to what seeing is, to how it is tangled with living and acting (Ibid).

It’s long been said, and much to thedetriment of true understanding, that artists live outside of society; whatartist really desire is to understand society. Once they have expressed thisunderstanding in their work, they can begin to make their place in it. Therecent paintings of Thomas Frontini are proof of this. They present a versionof the world that is Edenic, devoid of societal complication, yet metaphoricallyredolent. Each one is an allegory of the elements that construct artisticvision and its role in delegating levels of pictorial and social meaning.

When we look at a picture, we want tobe convinced that it is saying something about the nature of human experience.How we define the scale of perspective, the scale of human drama, is by acomprehension of the degree of intimacy. In film we have the pull-back and theclose-up, we have a certain degree of staging, of mis-en-scene. Thistranslates easily into painting depending upon the size of the scene, itsnumber of objects or persons, the complexity of its background, and the scalethat it gives to the actions. In Frontini’s recent oeuvre, scale is everything.His stage is the world, but the world with everything slightly askew; or withvital parts missing; or his subject focused upon so intently that it excludeseveryday contexts.

The term mis-en-scene means,literally, putting things in place, preparing the scene. Frontini presents uswith scenes that might confuse us if we were to understand them fully. He givesus details in the order of reckoning: from the near to the far, and back again.And this is why the horizon functions so actively in his paintings. We look tothe horizon to give meaning to our lives, but for just as much as is present inthe distance, there are details within intimate space that cannot be ignored.Frontini seems to want us to enter a dialogue between the present and thefuture.

In many of Frontini’s paintings hepresents us with a scene that pretends to be a narrative but is in fact apastiche of complex allegories on themes such as existence, youthful vitality,nature, civilization, myth, and the passage of time. Spatial arrangements ofrecognizable objects, persons, places, as well as mysterious and obliqueones—symbolic embellishments if you will—present us with experiences that areonly to be had in paintings. WhatFrontini is in fact involved with is the act of cultural transference.

The agenda of the set-up that Frontiniborrows from film can never operate exactly the same way since the assumedreality of a filmic scene, replete with perspectival gestures on the part ofthe cinematographer and our own aptitude for details, do not succeed when thescene is depicted in a painterly fashion. This is where reality and artificediverge.

The scaling of experience possible inpainting succeeds because the talent of the painter allows us to vieweverything at once, from the merest speck in the distance, to emergent detailson the very edge of conscious understanding, and at every level of attention tonoticeable events, objects, and persons right up to our very noses.

Last of its Kind (Empire, Forgotten Monument), 39 x 45 inches, Oil on Panel, 2006

If Frontini’s paintings are puzzles,then his titles are clues. Since most of his titles have symbolic portent andare immediately reinforced by parenthetical asides, we can only assume that hemeans not one thing by them, but many. Take for instance Last of Its Kind (Empire, Forgotten Monument), whichincludes a young woman holding a small white dog in her lap, by the sea-shore,with an ominous and vaguely anthropomorphic mountainous island behind her,mounted with a flag upon its crest; and beside her, a bowl with a large bird’segg in it. Clearly our attention is at first drawn to the girl with the dog, sincewe are apt to assume that since she is the only person there that the paintingmust be about her. But she provides only a presence, a quality of humanness toan otherwise alien environment, and presence in Frontini‘s paintings is notalways the same as agency. She may activate the painting but she does nothingelse. Next we are drawn to the island behind her: it is unremarkable exceptthat it resembles a monolithic head of some forgotten god. Like a shrine, itsits in self-evidence, undisturbed only by a portal that has been carved in thelower end of the rock face and a flag that has been planted at its crest. Wecan only assume that if it is not currently inhabited, that it was at one time,or its inhabitants have preferred to remain anonymous. The face of the godstares impassively out into some unknown distance, over all our heads. Nearerto us is the bowl with the egg, and of this we can say at least something.Maybe this is what he means by the main part of his title, the Last of ItsKind? Not even hatched and already it is on our minds. It will consume ourcuriosity and distract us from all other issues at hand. For potential life andthe advent of birth, are much more joyous and filled with portent than facts wemay already know or may never know. Prehistory and human agency are a glasshalf-empty and new life is a glass half-full.

Frontini deals not only with mythsconnecting cultures, but more often than not he turns his pictorial imaginationto scenes in which the main character is an artist, a collector, or some otherrole within the contemporary art world that resonates at a pre-cultural level.Who knows when the first artist emerged from his social peers, but Frontinihints at how the structures of social organization that created the need forthem have always been around. Two of his current works, Documentation of Youth/Art Star and Painter At the Easel/Young Monster are good examples of thisagenda.

Documentation of Youth (Art Star), 16 x 20 inches, Oil on Panel, 2007

The first concerns a young girl who isready, as they say in Hollywood, for her close-up: the paparazzi shot thatbrings her face into the news. Except that Frontini’s parable is meant to fallflat. She stands in front of a large ornately gilded mirror and is aimed at byseveral old fashioned yet unmanned cameras. She is alone, even a birdcage thathangs above her is empty and desolate. In the distance behind her a parachutefalls to earth, evidence that there are other, perhaps more important events athand. But youth holds sway over our attention, and the fact that the girl is an‘art star’ seems similarly devoid of specialness. The mirror behind herreflects only the cameras that, without direction, take no pictures. How do weknow she is a star? Or an artist? We only know that she is young, and thatyouth is prize. Is the mirror behind her a stand-in for an easel, the picturethat can never be painted because time is always ticking away? We are temptedto ditch this scene and find out where the parachutist has landed.


Painter at the Easel (Young Monster), 16 x 26 inches, Oil on Panel, 2007

In the second painting we have hisYoung Monster who is at the beach making a painting. We know nothing of hischaracter or even his sex as he is covered from head to toe in fine brown fur.He stands far away from his easel, which is easily twice his height, the toolof an adult monster. His posture is one of intense focus and even agitation,and his presence there, as both an artist and a monster is in stark contrast tothe summary background details of a sailboat and a lighthouse. In this paintingFrontini pokes fun at the concept of the artist-maudit, or madman; perhaps thereis a pun in the word monster, referring to the ideal of artistic mastery. Onecan never be more masterly, only more monsterly. The better monster is a betterartist, always at odds with his surroundings, but also growing closer to hiscraft and its results.

Dream of the Great Collector, 39 x 45 inches, Oil on Panel, 2009

A third painting explores the essential role of art toinspire connoisseurs who are attracted to art but whose instinct for it alonecannot make them artists. Dream of theGreat Collector enacts a scene in which an older man sits to one side and observesas a work of art, in this case a sculpture that we would call a relic, releasesa spirit into the air, who was perhaps trapped inside of it. He is notsurprised and only seems to be blithely pleased, either because his hopes havebeen realized, or because he did not suspect but knew of this event before ithappened. What he is witnessing may be the emergence of a muse, or the essenceof artistic vision itself in disembodied form. This intimate event is powerfulbecause it is limited to his experience, and through Frontini’s imagination, toour attention as well. As an event in history it is not verifiable, but itremains true.

Frontini’s desire to bringphilosophical importance back to the role of the painter has led him indivergent directions which share a symbolic unity: animals or birds asfamiliars and spirits, and architectural structures of a symbolic character,real or imagined. Several recent paintings take birds as their central figure,but really the bird is meant to distract us from other elements of thecomposition that become clearer once we look past it. In both For Him Monuments Will Be Built/ GreatBalladeer and Red Parrot with Hermit/Silent Landscape there is the foregrounding of the bird, made epicallylarger by its proximity to the viewer, and narrative details that inhabit thescene which are made more miniscule by contrast. The great balladeer in thefirst work is in fact a tiny man who stands before a real white cockatoo over aPalladian garden, singing to him. We can hardly see him he is so small, andperhaps his what Frontini wants us to think, that his acts of artifice are lessimportant than the animal before him, who is muse, companion, and spirit allrolled into one, and connects us more immediately to the natural world wheremyths and stories begin. In the second painting the bird is again a moreimposing figure than the man who stands behind him, involved in a series ofprayers or exercises, while a rural background verging on being a desolatewasteland, imposes a moodiness on all but the bird himself, whose plumage andjaunty expression are enough to give the painting life.


For Him Monuments will be Made (Great Balladeer), 45 x 33 inches, Oil on Linen, 2008

Red Parrot with Hermit (Silent Landscape), 28 x 24 inches, Oil on Linen, 2008

Likewise, Frontini is attracted toforms of symbolic architecture, which imply a strong regard for historicalaccomplishments, and alternately the imposition of dead values. Eternal Temple (Before the New Empire)and Orange Temple both present uswith parables, one of glory and the other of waste. In the first work, twomermaids hold strings to support a temple structure, with ornate walls andsingle round window, floating amid a swirl of water vapors upon the very surfitself, while a vast and current empire spreads off in the distance shrouded bya veil of red dust. Of course, they cannot be holding up a building, this isonly a vision offered up to the initiated, a last glimpse of lost glory that iswaiting for us, like Atlantis or Avalon, in a separate dimension. The secondwork is a more direct image of a building that is minimal to the point ofspiritual impoverishment. Standing alone except for two bedraggled trees,fashioned from simple bricks, with none of the ritualized design characteristicof most temples, it is a sacred structure in name only: the name we give to it.Temples are the historical precursors to modern-day churches, and what theyrepresent, more than which deity they were built for, is the moment when manfirst moved his acts of worship inside a structure he made himself, separatinghimself simultaneously from nature and from the values of other men. It is atthis point that belief became scripture, when an interior reality made artnecessary.

Eternal Temple, Before The New Empire, 48 x 39 inches, Oil on Panel, 2010

Orange Temple - Offering, 28 x 24 inches, Oil on Panel, 2010

Frontini fulfillsthe promise of the artist in his new work: to address the big issues, onesolder and long-unanswered, that are left to him. He takes us into scenes whereevery detail focuses on the character of meaning, in which the very landscapeis used to imply the variety of symbolism available to us. His horizon framesthe immediacy of experience, bringing us into contact with objects as well asideas, and making every destination, many of them within us, a line to becrossed for no other reason than we know it is there.

DEVOTION IN MOTION / The Paintings of Marcy Brafman

2010-10-02T02:24:00.002-04:00

The role of the symbol in art is not only as some semiotic tool, nor is it like a mythical creature, but it is instead, and rather conclusively, an object or scenario emerging out of daily life, something which magnifies (and clarifies) the meaning of everything upon which it touches, even in the most mundane circumstance. In the opening pages of his novel “Immortality,” Milan Kundera speaks of the nature of a gesture: “A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person's instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations.”

The paintings of Marcy Brafman can be considered empathic gestures. They deal with situations which are inherently symbolic, sometimes taking on the symbol as an icon, and sometimes mining it for its humanistic traits mired in narrative that exist outside of fine arts but not outside of the human condition. Another painter might spend time trying to re-insert the symbol into the category or scenario from which it first appeared. But this might possibly obscure the symbol, obfuscating the process of discerning its efficacy and its inevitability. Instead, Brafman re-instates the symbol itself as a central esthetic event, as evidence of a gesture and its philosophical importance.

Brafman’s new body of work employs a variety of tools and motifs that were only half realized in her previous work. Here they take on a form which is both extremely engaging but sticks to the repertoire she has popularized, of taking invisible icons and making them very overt, stylizing them with the medium and gestures of painterliness bordering on graffiti. Two of these paintings take a uniform appearance girded in tradition, both dogmatically and ideomatically, which Brafman brings it back into contemporary usage. The Sacred Heart and the Fleur-de-Lys are each a central image; they are symbols essentially and not narratives--though there certainly exist narratives aplenty which are connected to these symbols. To unearth the symbols is enough, not to have to tell all of the stories associated with them. On face value we can make certain assumptions that almost every time will ring true. The Sacred Heart is a symbol representing religious purity and devotion. A product of the dogma of the Catholic Church, entire orders have been named after it. Yet the notion of the ‘sacred heart’ has no place in a secular culture. Their most commonplace manifestations are as Valentine’s Day cards and little girls’ handwriting, every I dotted with a heart, espousing adoration and sweetness. They share an element of emotional purity and a quality of assignation that connects our “hearts” to our lives. They both have to do with love--devotion to a person, or to the emotion of affection, regard, and need associated with them and symbolized by the heart itself. Yet every time I say “heart” I feel that I fall into a trap of language, for there are so many associations with this one word; it is so central to our culture, and Brafman is actually mining its original source, not where it has ended up, and detritus for cultural use. The heart is a thing, a place, or an emotion. It is all of these things, and none of them in particular.

The Fleur-de-Lys is perhaps less recognizable as a symbol, though we have all seen in on medieval shields in Hollywood movies with knights in armor battling each other for king and country. But it also appears on wrapping paper, silk ties, and kerchiefs. It is anonymous and beautiful. What we may not know is that it has long been associated with the Emperors of France, and with empires in general. The mere showing of it on heraldry was originally meant to imply the urgency and importance of a given task. It was the most iconic of imprimaturs. In Brafman’s painting we are allowed to see it as both a symbol and as something human--warts and all, as the saying goes.

Halfway down the ideological spectrum is Brafman’s painting of an index finger tied with a string into a little bow, which may seem simultaneously a matter of superstition wed to sentiment; though it also has a practical connotation, to remember things, and relates to the symbol of the heart in that it is also a symbol of being true to one’s promises. One thinks of a child leaving home to do errands for their mother, tying a ribbon or a piece of string around their finger to remember what the duties were. Nowadays we can make vocal notations on our cellular phones and play them back to us, or take pictures with cameras and carry them around so that we know what to look for. The knot seems quaint. But the finger in the know seems to point upwards with some significance, as if to infer the distinctiveness of a statement, like someone using their hands while talking, in the street or on a stage.

The other two paintings within this group are CLEO and THE SUNBEAM which are both taken from popular media such as television programs and syndicated comic strips. They are more joyfully innocent, and more in turn with Brafman’s previous work, though each of them is also a departure from her in terms of source material and the transformation of it into painting. The dog figure in CLEO is an ideograph moonlighting from a live-action television drama of the late 70’s, in which an investigator bumbles through each plot aided by a real psychid dog who can never do more than bark emphatically and look pitiable but knowing as she aids him in solving mysteries. This is a picaresque of the old order, and has historical connections to Don Quixote and The Decameron. Yet it is in Brafman’s painting that the figure of the dog takes on a symbolic quality similar to hieroglyphics in Egyptian temples. This is not only a rendering from one pictorial format into another, it is in fact a devotional portrait. Here we have Cleo painted, not cartooned, the opposite of caricature. This is an endearing symbol in itself, Brafman takes a dime a dozen image on rotting celluloid and makes it into a personal saint. Our devotion follows hers without doubt.

In the second of her figurative paintings, TRIXIE & THE SUNBEAM, we are presented with a scenario of great symbolic potential, couched in a frame from a strip straight out of the funny papers. It is a moment of Blakean proportions. A child, a baby really, converses with an imaginary friend, which is itself a sunbeam. This is the height of anthropomorphism, aligning consciousness with the singular source of life-giving illumination, it could be a spirit, or even the hand of God. We are presented with the adorable Trixie who, in this moment is transfixed by the immediacy with which her desire for communication has been granted. She looks joyful at the edge of fear, and is poised to speak though we know that as a very young child, she lacks the eloquence to reflect upon the poetic urgency of the moment. It is left to the viewer to fill in the blanks.

The very questions Brafman asks in her paintings are the ones on the tip of our tongues upon concluding a proper evaluation of them, whether in the pages of a magazine or on the walls of a gallery. The symbolic order is consistent no matter how the actual paintings are presented. This is what proves the nobility of her endeavor to transmute abandoned symbols into devotional gestures. She recognizes that our world is a Pandora’s box of humanistic concerns, and that it is art’s role to provide a last dollop of hope. Her paintings assure us that we can trust the symbols that have always been around us.

D. DOMINICK LOMBARDI: HIDDEN WORLDS

2010-03-09T19:58:00.003-05:00

The small but resonant works which comprise D. Dominick Lombardi’s exhibition “Hidden Worlds,” in which both sculpture and drawing/collages depict his eponymous Urchins, define an essential relationship between culture, the power of metaphor, and the notion of innocence. Human behavior links nature to culture, and from this dichotomy emerges further conflicts, such as that between modern and postmodern values.

Culture is that tangle of influences which emerges from within us while seeming to approach us from without. Culture, in many ways, defines us, both as an individual pattern of behavior and as a structure of social order. Terry Eagleton, in his book The Idea of Culture (2000), describes the essential quandary which accompanies any attempt to compare one with the other. Though it is fashionable these days, he states, to see nature as a derivative of culture, culture, etymologically speaking, is a concept derived from nature. We can take this to mean natural nature or human nature, as both represent a seething cauldron of mixed instincts, none of which we yet understand fully.

Lombardi’s Urchins formally describe the cultural innards of human nature in his sculptures, while in his drawing/collages they enact a similar scenario as his cipherlike urchins are attacked by viral agents with heads of people taken straight from the daily news: actors, politicians, etc.

The Urchins as Sculptures are noble, poignant, and Apollonian, representing stoical monuments that reveal secret inner lives consisting of books and toys from an outmoded and obsolescent past. The objects themselves are the only color in the works, and they reveal as much about how we build our nature—accruing types of knowledge, and mythically playing out modes of experience.

The Urchins as Drawings/Collages are Dionysian, taking on a much more dramatic role in and of themselves, they are given white eyes with no pupils, and are given clothing and props, to suggest that they belong to a marginalized community of onlookers or victims within the larger sphere of culture. Their gestures and poses are marked by deeply psychological expressions of trepidation and terror. They are the only active figures in a landscape that is filled to obscurity with flowing, spectral trails that have as heads the appearance of various figures in media and daily life which, in any one particular decade, symbolized versions of human nature, either good, bad, or indifferent.

The urchins themselves are an everyman figure, lost in a world of populistic reference which is too vast and too aggressively filling up his attention span. The world of culture is supposedly a sphere of influence meant to be positive, but when placed in the wrong hands, it can operate like a gun—not protect, but damage us. Too much culture, especially when it is immediately overrunning the bounds of individuality and at the same time reaching a tipping point of contemporary relevance, ceases to be culture, and becomes nature.

Lombardi gives us a reference point for this feeling of being lost. We have gone through one door into a hidden world of symbols and come out another door into a real one, with the urchin remaining within us.

PRESENT TENSE

2009-11-03T10:40:00.006-05:00

Available Potential Enterprise / Northampton, MA

We don’t like to think that such differences exist, but artistic expression can be characterized by exceptions in gender. Both women and men have separate but equal agendas, temperaments, and as a consequence of this, their formal and esthetic results may widely differ. This is certainly the case in the exhibition “Present Tense” which brings together the work of Yvonne Estrada, Sean Greene, Clint Jukkala, Barbara Neulinger—four painters who each exemplify a divergent strain in contemporary currents of abstraction. Taken individually, the fusion of four unique talents would be enough reason to warrant attention—even fascination—with the attempts and achievements each makes into the formal ground of painterly abstraction. Yet as gender based pairs, and as practitioners of divergent inspiration, they each add to our understanding of what painting can mean for us.

The men in the show are involved with bright colors and hard edges, while the women are involved with gesture and depth of field. Sean Greene’s paintings are a compelling amalgam of gestural forms, but as they will appear in the future. Greene claims to be inspired by the signatures of graffiti and the fractured, though presumably articulate and soaring movement of skateboarding. They take on a gracefulness that they do not possess in life, unless the ardent practitioner strongly resembles the dedication of a talented musician or dancer. They are the shadows of past gestures choreographed for the use of future generations.

Clint Jukkula’s paintings intrinsically evoke the kind of resplendent environment dramatized within early versions of video games, epitomized by the film “Tron” (seeing a remake this year), with their given visual complexity, and the distance they possess from the landscapes of everyday life. Even when they break down, seeming to melt on the screen, it is not unlike the event of paint running too thinly on a canvas. Given the rugged materiality of Jukkula’s work, this shows the work’s relationship to its exterior environment, how paint may look like pixels but is still an organic medium relative to the human condition.

Barbara Neulinger’s forms are inspired from seaman’s knots, the type which any young boy completing for achievement badges in the Boy Scots would be required to prove proficiency. Such knots are a system of order, but also they inhabit a world of chance, of gesture, and of the intimations of design. They represent exactly the sort of real-world problem solving which is often at home in the hands of an artist. To solve the visual appearance of such knots, to place its squarely within the language of painting, is to understand how they exist in everyday life, in history, and in the life of the mind.

Yvonne Estrada deals with the expression of helixes, which are used in mathematics to explore the dynamic of quantum events, such as those in weather or the swirling forms of cosmic narrative beyond the comprehension of imagination despite appearing to resemble forms as the artist would naturally depict. Her work is primarily improvisational, having been generated from a simple calligraphic gesture, but this also connects it to a source of knowledge, as well as to stylistic determinations. Her works include both minute forms that preclude the use of large areas of negative space, and right at the tangent where automatism is wed to discipline, immediacy and detachment.

The words in the title of this exhibition are both succinct and deft. Each artist’s oeuvre is intensely displayed, suggesting the vicissitudes of temperament, talent, and cooperation with divergent trends in pictorial abstraction. Yet they also deliver a tension between their formal destinations which are not shared either across gender lines. The more time one spends in their company, the more they will all make their points clear.

THE BUSHWICK BIENNIAL

2009-09-01T19:03:00.004-04:00

The constant flowering of bohemia is not a construct of advertising, nor of the whims of a dozen infamous gallerists. It is the generational engine of youth culture, alive and well, striving at the border of the mainstream, throwing out its various statements while at the same time contributing to a community that has registered a similar creative echo for at least 25 years. Bushwick is the locus of new creative energies, the same ones that are active in many other parts of Brooklyn, especially its neighboring wards of Williamsburg and Greenpoint. This year saw the emergence of its first official celebration, The Bushwick Biennial, brainchild of NURTUREart gallery director Benjamin Evans, in collaboration with Austin Thomas of Pocket Utopia, Chris Harding of English Kills, and Jill McDermid of Grace Exhibition Space. I first heard Ben utter these two words over a year ago, and since then he has worked hard to make it a reality. As the director of NURTUREart, he has seen first-hand what sort of influence the art community as a whole can exert when given proper focus within the scheme of the larger art world. Certainly the word ‘Williamsburg’ echoes out into the international art world, and so should its generative offspring. Just as Soho created the possibilities for Tribeca and Noho, Williamsburg has spread into the outlying areas of Greenpoint and Bushwick, and further, all along the corridors of the L train and the B61 Bus, and into the minds of New Yorkers, Americans, and people around the world.

Each of the three galleries I visited that weekend had a different focus of interest. The show Fortress to Solitude (an event that was actually part of the yearly organized Bushwick Open Studios, overlapping this year with the Biennial), curated in an independent studio space by Guillermo Creus and hosted by Brooklyn Fireproof landlord Burr Dodd, featured the work of some 22 artists, many of them working out the formal strategies of abstraction, some figurative, and some with text and a combination of elements. Paintings by Amanda Church, Peter Fox, Lisha Bai, and Anna Pedersen presented drippy phantasms that were either visceral, limpid, or gossamer. Other abstract works were more structurally based, combining radically different mediums such as oil and spray paint (Guillermo Creus, Baptiste Ibar), making naturalistic allusions (Diane Carr), and stretching into hard edge materialism (Tom Meacham, Gary Petersen). Another work by Peter Fox is a pale light blue canvas with two words painted in bold red letters, spelling out the expression ‘Idiot proof’, which is to say, anyone can get my art, and anyone could have made it. One very iconic portrait of President Obama by Tom Sanford is overlaid with the words What You Believe Is Already True emblazoned over a half quizzical facial expression of our fearless leader; is this just sloganeering, is the artist poking fun at authority, or is this just a painting about painting? Perhaps we will never know. The title of this exhibition, a play on words originally describing the re-birthed spiritual home of the comic book legend Superman, is a telling narrative about the nature of creativity and how it is specifically vested in areas such as Bushwick. The overwhelming presence of abstraction in the exhibition can be characterized not only as the aesthetic bent of its curator (a painter him self), but also as a statement on the manic focus of Bushwick artists, whose concern is with forms of expression, and though they are a fairly idealistic bunch, such values do not always lead them down the primrose path of ideology. They remain committed to the formalism which inspires them. Hung randomly with a lot of white space between them, we get the effect that spatial concerns still matter in the Bushwick of 2009 as they did in the Soho of 1969, and that giving artists room to think, and showing their work as existing within a systematic but disinterested locality is the best thing for them. Finally Utopic is not just a pun, it’s the last show in the space that was once the studio of its director, the conceptual artist Austin Thomas, and features work by all the artists she has championed since her project began only two years ago. It has always existed as a sort of playground for artistic intentions, not taking itself too seriously, looking at art as if it were a form of conversation rather than a political slogan or commercial advertisement. Molly Larkey, who is usually a sculptor, here presents gestural rather slapdash gouaches that intimate the beginnings of an idea that may later take physical form; Valerie Hegarty cracks the plaster of the wall before pasting a poster over the hole, that will ultimately rip the image along its ragged edge; Rico Gatson installs Systemic Risk Funky Revolutionthat is one part tautology and one part puzzle. The air overall is one of tentativeness, as if no one statement should predominate and none will last beyond the end of the space itself.

A strong tenor of idealism was evident in works at NURTUREart, curated by Benjamin Evans, though this motif was not always comprehensible in the same way; the works here were by and large non-abstract, or at least not within the limits of a formalist bent. His own curatorial statement states that “These fourteen artists in- volve both optimism and melancholy, and reflect the tensions between doomed worlds, better places and personal mythologies. Themes of transformation and strategies of transformative experience run through the work and link it to the neighborhood that is transforming all around (and partly because of) them. Mike Estabrook’s video loop The Road to 'Nam is both entertaining and pensive, as it combines images of brutality in war and the dour countenances of Kissinger and Nixon with a Bob Hope and Bing Crosby song "If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Of Baked A Cake." We recognize the images from the front page of The New York Times, of a US Okie aiming his gun at a Viet Cong, with politicians thrown in for good visual sense; but the whole arrangement falls apart with the song resounding. It’s so cheery and chummy that war can almost be seen as a big party in which we laugh until we have to cry. Audrey Russel made a special installation on the adjoining rooftop that created a visual and physical spectacle which gallery guests had to step around as they talked, drank, and shared their experiences of the past evening’s activities. Made from pink foam insulation, a large wooden pylon and Xmas lights, Beam Tower with Pink Grass waved around the roof like the froth of an ever renewing tide. There is something very energizing about always living on the edge, engaging with what seems newly relevant. The Bushwick phenomenon has us looking for the next aesthetic event around every corner.

ANGIE ARLENE SMITH: SHADOWS OF THE HEART

2009-06-22T21:16:00.002-04:00

In the tradition of the artist there are many aspects which make up a picture, many procedures and specialties which combine to create that specific illusion of reality called artifice. Yet not every artist is called upon to master them all, not even to become fascinated with a few of them. Some take it upon themselves to discern the qualities which prove the importance of only one specialty. For Angie Arlene Smith that has been landscape, or rather the paradox of perspectival contingencies which we usually regard as the backdrop for dramatic action. Smith is fascinated with the pictorial qualities which construct a scene possessed of mystery, foreboding, and complexity even when there are no persons present.

But there are no simple pastoral scenes here, everything is angle and shadow. Sometimes one little element of the picture seems to be coming to life, as if a tree branch or an outcropping of rocks were so vividly drawn they were beginning to move of their own volition. At other times we are certain, given the angles of the scenes, that no one passive or uninteresting could possibly inhabit them. There must be a conflict unfolding in such a place as she draws for us.

In one image a flower or shell like structure sits at the edge of a cliff, looking as if it is about to give birth to a new creature. There is no movement, no narrator to set the scenario up for us. The “pod” seems to balance on the edge of a cliff or float down a stream that’s about to pour out over the edge into illicit depth. Will it open and reveal its secrets, will it be dashed on the rocks below, or will it somehow float onward, opening not for us but for others?

In another image a strange mawkish hut sits amidst cragged rocks, holes in its roof showing it to be empty, but who knows? We can’t see everything from where the artist has situated us. Everything in the image is hardness and sharpness and there is a breathless quality to the very air surrounding the physical elements presented here.

In Smith’s largest work, she depicts a scene that is so complex it is nearly a microcosm. We see what appears to be a pier, with columns standing in deep water and streetlights barely illuminating the walkway above. Curving steps lead up from the water’s edge to a jumble of paved paths, winding caves, and above them all, an aerie from which a stranger looks out—but not over us, rather into the pale distance, into further areas of mystery yet undiscovered. At the far left side of this scene, following the pier, is a sheer rock face broken only by a high door with what look like prison bars inside, and above a set of empty cages and still further up, two more openings with craggy orifices, the shadows of which resemble figures; and with steps that seemingly lead nowhere.

Smith is a spinner of tales which have a mastery of dramaturgy at their core. Her images direct us to a place where knowledge is not as important as adventure; her shadows are the corridors of our own hearts.

TANEY RONIGER AT SLATE GALLERY

2009-05-19T21:36:00.002-04:00

There is something very obstinate yet enduring in the work of Taney Roniger. Her recent exhibition “Stones and Ciphers” at Slate Gallery in Brooklyn brings together two bodies of work which share a similar aesthetic interest informed by scientific ideas. They manage a specific aspect of abstraction in which method is equal to madness. How else are we to perceive the finitude which characterizes this work, in which all color is limited to hues of black, white, gray, and sometimes sepia, as if the painting were no more than the printout of some military-industrial computer bank? Roniger doesn’t need words to transmit the values in her paintings. Perhaps because she wants to achieve the status of a document or an artifact--both products of excessive effort and detritus relevant to the passing of time.

We look into these images and we see both information and mystery. It makes perfect sense for an artist to be attracted to matters of abstract reality, yet the degree to which Roniger has extended this interest begs further analysis. Nature at this level offers an amazing clarity and symmetry that no other model can teach. The attraction of artists to elements of design is one aspect of this work. But Roniger is also fascinated by the appearance of scientific printouts, and on the algorithmic procedures which emerge from the systems used to measure random natural events. Despite their serial quality, their streamlined and machinelike structure, the fact that these images exist as the demonstrative subset for a sequence of otherwise unknowable events, they are especially admirable as a form of artistic expression.

Roniger gives her works oblique titles which resound with the respect she has for puzzles, whether logic or theory derived. One vertical work within The Cipher Series is titled Prisoner’s Dilemma and the reference is to a logic game in which two people, each of them accomplices in a crime, both tell exactly the same story, making both of them innocent and canceling out the notion that competition is the primary urge in normal social relations; that we have an instinctive need to protect ourselves. Perhaps Roniger is telling us that even at a molecular level, competition, i.e, the concept of kill or be killed, is not just the law of averages, but is the law in word and name. Matching system for system and obliqueness for obliqueness we cannot fail but we drawn into the web of aesthetic expectations that shrouds these works and keep us from being alienated by the streamlined and transparent quality they so easily evoke.

Of Roniger’s second body of work on view, The Stone Series, the best example was titled Embedded Form #1 which most resembles a hill, or even a mere stone, with its edge torn away to reveal a vein of some other ore, perhaps coal or gold, which reaches from one side to the other like the lines in a person’s hand, giving innate dimension to an otherwise consistent substrata of bubble forms that press together, creating a linkage of tangencies which seem to infer density and content. The less consistent vein interrupting them represents a void instead of an exception, a gesture of something flowing from one unknown origin into an uncertain future.

Each of these works combines structural with esthetic perspectives on a field of endeavor which is essentially abstract only because it exists below the level of an everyday visual commonplace. We cannot sense these images via sight, touch, or smell, and therefore we can only know them as textbook illustrations. What an artifact and a cipher both share is the quality of evidence, which adds to their beauty and also lends them a degree of authority that moves beyond cultural reference, manifesting equally as knowledge and inspiration.

For the gallery: www.slategallery.com

For the artist: www.concatenations.org

SPEAKING IN GESTURES: THE ART OF CUI XIANJI

2007-12-18T12:19:00.003-05:00

All meaning begins with a mark. Whether intentional or accidental, it begins the long path from innocence to wisdom. We make or leave a mark, and then we judge its merit. Soon we add another mark, which is perhaps complementary to the first. Soon we have either a picture, or a language, or both. Whatever it is, it complicates our view of reality. Is it necessary? Absolutely.

The artist is at heart a mark-maker, whether by choice or by instinct. Many artists begin their careers as painters, and then graduate to more direct forms made possible with everyday materials and with the accessibility of their implied meaning. This has been the case with Cui Xianji, whose intimate and nostalgic impressions of childhood, a life filled with innate sensation and strong personal emotions, have been transformed into a more rigorous arena for the espousal of formal and conceptual realizations.

Both the making of marks and the presentation of installations have their origin in a relationship to a sense of mystery approaching faith. The essential symbol which animates Xianji’s work is a gestural glyph, or scribble, which is easily misinterpreted as a type of language—but which means nothing at all. Rather, it represents the terra firma of inspiration, the ground upon which other ideas and experiences may be constructed, and which has a role in each of his many and varied expressions. Xianji’s glyphs are built using caulk instead of paint, a material originated for construction. It is shot from a gun, and in this way the artist not only trades painting for sculpture, but he is allowed to interject a painterly aspect into the new work by taking the essential gesture both in terms of its assigned meaning and its material indications. This form of expression is not merely random, but adheres to subconscious disciplines such as automatic writing by the Surrealists, or the “first thought, best thought” philosophy of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. 

There are several works due to be featured in the new exhibition which utilize his glyph in different and exciting ways. Some of them use similar motifs but are meant to express different formal ideas. One is a set of three ornate gold painted frames, out of which project lengths of cloth in red, black, and white, each covered in a color of caulk matching its own, and the central form, the white cloth, pours down the floor and instead of gathering in billows that resemble steam, it ends at a mirror curt so as to resemble the gentle bends in the shape of a secluded pond.

In another work, two ornate gold frames are hung ten feet off the ground in a back to back fashion, also with cloth pouring out of the eye of the frame, in black and white, each with a shade of caulk in corresponding colors. This work is unique because in order to properly view one side the work, the other must be completely hidden, and the same in reverse. Seen in intimate perspective, the layering of cloth and caulk creates a prismatic effect by being hung in the open air; and the parts that are not made translucent are those blocked from the reverse face which, while viewing that, is also blocked by the dynamic at work in its double. They are like opposite ends of the earth of two untenable truths in the context of a single argument; each needs to define its own territory and yet can never know the other.

In other works, Xianji uses his glyphs to aid him in confronting the symbols of European artistic mastery and the eternal conflict of nationalist politics. Both of these works are ten feet by four feet in size and each one is covered with a multitude of images reproduced in miniature and spread across the surface, the swathed in paint, black for the masterpieces and red for the flags, which is then marked with his signature glyphs, the thick and glistening caulk overwhelming and the recognizable images behind it; its vagueness taking on an air of malevolence, proof of an obvious conflict between the powers of the artist, whose marginalized role allows him to offer critique on any level of the encompassing society.

In one last work, we have a sequence of several portraits of important political thinkers, including Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Tse-tung, each of which is framed, then covered in the veil of a nylon sheet which is painted over with the artist’s sylphs, and alternately with many small spray-paint stenciled images of mathematical equations such as 9 x 6 = 69 and ! x ! = ?. These three images of important figures in the ideological reality of a Communist country such as China appear everywhere, especially on the national currency, and Xianji evens the score by adding his own image to their number, whether as a hero or a scoundrel, we are not sure. Like other figures of importance who have become shrouded in personal mystery and historical opacity, Xianji is likewise covered with the veil of a nylon sheet that has these numbers and glyphs covering them. The role of the equations is proof that there is no final meaning in existence, that all of his questions toward a definition or equivocation of reality in mean and rational terms was eventually minimized down to nothing. Since there are no answers, one is forced to return to the questions.

At one moment in the distant past, the artist took on an important role as a communicator of eternal truths, he was a soothsayer of sorts, and his words were equally important to both peasant and kings. That time is now gone, and he is marginalized beyond belief by a multitude of media-laden experiences from news media to entertainment on television, the internet, and in video games—each of which replicates reality without adding much depth to its perception. The artist is still endowed with specific powers that allow him to tell the stories of what is true and what is essential to everyday life but is also hidden behind appearances and within the context of communicative structures such as language, which is nothing more than a different sort of vibration we make in response to the natural world. They allow us to perceive the layers of interpretation that exist between overpowering ideologies, simple yet symbolic events as fleeting as the passage of a stream or the mist at the bottom of a waterfall. The symbols which inhabit and qualify Xianji’s works are seen as code, but they are really a form of primitive movement, one that speaks and makes sense.

THE DISCURSIVE ARCHAEOLOGY OF SPACE: THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF LEAH OATES

2007-12-18T12:17:00.006-05:00

When we look at a photograph, chances are it will remind us of something in our own lives. We have a tendency to personalize whatever we see, to own it with our senses before judgment sweeps in and separates its essential function for us from its palpable uniqueness as an image or its utility as an expression of beauty. Photography created a world in which every thing has an internal referent to its conventional appearance, and via memory or media, to some role that we suspect has a source in intimate experience, whether as metaphor or use value.

Yet much of our common experience is branded not by our memory, but by the demands of time. Every object or place has had some role not only in activities related to industry, leisure, or distraction, but once it loses its utility, is once and for all marked by time. It becomes a relic. In our culture, the relic has an especially short half-life. But the photograph reanimates the essential significance of experience itself, creating a form of discursive archaeology, in which the artist pursues hidden truths in seemingly useless and random effects. As a photographer, Leah Oates is interested in using the documentary aspect of the photograph, not only to dramatize a prior event through reference to its effluvia, but to frame objects in the utility of the presented image, making every scrap of paper or dirty wall into an artifact of lost knowledge. Oates sees the role of the photograph not as a document, but as an artifact. The essential difference between these two perspectives is that one maintains the utilitarian aspect of the photographic image as something sensible and practical, and the other retains the aura of the object, place, or action, which it freezes in perception. The subject of the photograph immerses the viewer in an engagement with the difference between what is perceptible and what is imaginable.

Since 2003, Oates has been actively engaged in discovering the essential temporality of the photographic image. Isolated from narrative, these images convey an unspecified mise-en-scene which is specifically poignant though also universal. They seem to have been the result of mere chance, of letting the aperture fall in a certain direction and document what it may. Perhaps this is the efficacy of a narrative emerging from our dependence on the senses. We view a given scene and certain judgments inevitably arise, complicating sensate reality and adding a context of human presence even when none is in evidence. Oates seems to eschew various manifestations of fluidic and transparent natural reality for its own sake.

In 2004, Oates turned to an urban environment to uncover the temporality in the transient evidence at hand that was related to the flow of the elements and to the duties and whims of a constantly milling populace. Oates has traveled to to Taiwan, Newfoundland, Finland and Chicago to discover how the transitory elements of everyday life were manifested in different locations. In one city she found that the inhabitants, one day after a large of noisy annual holiday, would immediately discard of all decorative and symbol materials related to the ritual of that event, along with all other forms of household refuse, combining a ritual purging with spring cleaning, and leaving a huge mess in the back alleys of every major housing area, which when documented by the artists takes on a material deluge of Biblical proportions, except that here it is limited to commercial goods.

Another part of the same series depicts the hidden corners of the city, where everyday labor occurs, and sometimes where construction and refuse share the same space. In further images from the same section, Oates portrays the hidden corners of the city, lost and forgotten alleyways and plots of land that are not even considered ‘real estate,’ but are lost except in the few random moments when these thresholds or cul-de-sacs receive the workers of their adjacent structures.

More recent work from the same series is comprised of photographs of deserted factories, their chained front gates with gaping holes torn in the chain link fences, and dirt roads trodden heavily through the otherwise tall and unkempt grass. Inside its deserted offices and work stations, despite windows lacking panes of glass, there are signs of human presence: food and clothing strewn about, the new mixed with the old, small signs of a beleaguered domesticity. The language of urban anarchy and freedom is present in scrawls of graffiti that appear on many surfaces, even in the merest of corners, non-places that echo back their baldness except for these scant markings.

One series of images consists entirely of rediscovered print media—newspapers and magazines—which have been weighted down with stones and pieces of broken brick and left open to display important headlines of days past. It’s hard to know from these images how long ago the use of these spaces was made—it could have been years before, or earlier that same day. The space is definitely marked by its use.

A third part of the same series traces Oates’s journey through the natural beauty of her surroundings which either approaching or departing the deserted work places described above. As the conscience behind an aperture moving through the world, she records what she sees in a fashion which allows the inherent randomness of sensation to lead her to new and different imagery. One image shows a factory whose walls are intermingled with the ephemeral blue sky and a diffuse mixture of whispery white clouds that halfway resemble steam, so that we are confused as to which it really is. In another image we have the front gate of the property, but instead of being a fixed object, perceptibly solid, it reverberates, as if the mutability of its role as a portal were at war with its more recent one as a mere barrier to human interaction.

What all of these images share is an interest in the susceptibility of the senses to guide us through experience, in which sensation and intuition are more important than logic. When we see scenes in a photograph we have a tendency to own them—to allow or disallow the artist to gain access to our imagination, for even images of real things, sensible and useful as they may be, must have a role as referents to the power of the imagination. That is, we have to be able to extend the intuitive and reflective quality of idiosyncratic projection around any given image in order that it may succeed for us in any real sense. This is how knowledge is received, and imagination is a sort of knowledge. Learning to see through a photographer’s eyes is less a social contract than the chance for a collusion to occur in which free will and a sense of wonder irrevocably commingle.

In her own way, Oates is a visual purist. In an era when digital processes are overwhelming traditional ones not only initially but in earnest, she continues to apply herself to the methods of mechanical picture-making. Yet her work, as thematic process, is also gauged against the ideological context of the visual image in the age of reproduction. Most photographic images of this sort are tributes to the technological skill the artist has in sculpting a visually succinct moment out of the subtleties of perception. They create a form of sensate nuanced evidence that has ties to the artifice of the painter. Oates is instead interested in how the photographic image may accrue visual knowledge in the same degree of intensity as did the experience which first inspired it. We are allowed to capture the moment of recognition where Oates images leave off.

LIMBO KARMA: THE PAINTINGS OF THOMAS FRONTINI

2006-03-15T14:53:00.003-05:00

As a painter, Thomas Frontini is a very good spinner of tales. He sees magic in the mundane, and explores the themes of creativity, youthful experience, and the transformative power of the imagination. His characters contain a degree of emotional depth comparable to those in narratives. They arise out of myth and memory, and often enter from his intimate emotional life, and aid him in dramatizing various parables on creativity, family, and the search for identity. They project a quality of innocence that is part fancifulness and part fantasy, affirming Frontini’s earnest appreciation for the rigor of dreams. The structure of fantasy has its base in allegory--the construction of an ethos through divergent modes of expression. A fantasy is more than a single fabrication, but a complication of means in collusion towards the end of setting up an exception to the mundane upon the model of an ethical exception. By creating an atypical progression of the real, the enabler of fantasies is creating a morally ambiguous but fresh universe to which we can easily apply new experiences and values. The stories of Thomas Frontini are each paeans to the mysterious yet curious imagination of children. In some cases they are learning to see, in others they are caught as if by a photograph in moments of leisure and possession that underscore the degree to which common experiences such as a day at the beach may be transformed into a subjective realm of emotionally charged experience that will in later years represent the magical and immutable character of their early youth, untrammeled by adult contexts or justifications.

The Artist Sees Only What He Believes (Nature’s Apprentice) shows a seated boy engaged in painting an image of his subject, another boy who happens to be a centaur, the creature out of ancient Greek myth who represented a primordial mingling of human intelligence and animal instinct. The painting upon his easel shows not the full figure of the centaur but only the face and mane of an actual horse. The horse which he paints is iconic, almost as if it were merely a statue in stone or bronze, a symbol of inherent ‘horseness’ that it is perhaps easy to forget when faced with a stunning creature such a centaur, who speaks with reason, and yet moves around in the world with the speed and ease of a four-legged animal. The element of overt unreality in this picture serves to illustrate the boy’s understanding of nature, which is to say the separation of the character of his subject from his over manifestation in reality. Painting by young boys is not the same as that done by men; it is meant as a means of exploring the unknown in order to seek the origin of visual values that will translate into empirical ones. The boy in this picture uses his imagination to seek our essence instead of relying upon the details of an overly fantastic daily reality, forging a link between the imagination and moral character.

In Girl in the Forest (Feral Princess) we have another artist in training, who has stopped to turn her face to the viewer, and in this moment’s repose, we are able to see her in her own sense of emotional stasis--a cipher for the sake of her art, and otherwise mute. The painting is a self-portrait but it is in great contrast to the figure herself and the dynamic yet sensuous genre of her immediate surroundings, which are filled with loaded meaning. She is accompanied by the figure of an elf, of the ceramic kind made to sit in suburban front yards for Christmas celebrations; here, in the lushness of spring he looks out of place, but he remains jolly, laughing loudly while holding onto his belt, as if he might lose himself to the force of his emotion. The woods around her are lush and deep, and the area immediately around her is filled with birds that flit about and, one can imagine, sing freely and with much animation, while she sits frozen, holding a ball upon which perches a small blue bird. The self-portrait at her side seems to echo her own stilled form, lacking only the ball and the bird. There is a quality of guarded, nearly malevolent patience in the young girl, as if she has been interrupted in the middle of very intent play--a ritual she values but which also represents her privacy. She waits to resume it while not indicating any other emotional trait; though her familiars, animal and mythological alike, continue undisturbed in the mischievous tenor of their day.

In Everything She Needs (North Michigan Beach Scene) the artist depicts the charming yet innocuous image of a young girl and her dog, a standard poodle whose fur has been sculpted and painted bright pink in a manner common to the pets of the wealthy. Though she is as tall as the dog, and though its very appearance marks it as the subject of certain female flights of fancy--typically girlish coloring, dressing up, etc--it is a large dog and its sheer size and directness of countenance also mark it as a protector or the girl, whose expression belies only the satisfaction of a carefree summer day at the beach. Again, in “Puppy an Ponies” a small girl is seated on a red and white tasseled rug accompanied by her pet, a small white dog, and in the presence of two large domestic horses, and upon the hindquarters of one of them, a small pink owl. The horses have white flowing manes and dark glowering eyes, and stand quite still over her, one facing the viewer, the other turned aside and moving his head to correspond to a likewise perspective. The ground around them is covered with the deep marks of their hooves and the scene behind them shows a path between hills with a light blue and ever deepening dusk. In both of these paintings Frontini depicts the close relationship between animals and children, in which the child attaches herself to them not only as familiars of the natural world, which animates their emotional desires and hides them from adults with their rules and sensible teachings about “the way of the world,” but also they in some way become personas, friends and gods in one instant. The child has one main desire: to remain in the moment; to continue the level of instinctual learning that need seek only further sensation, and to revel in instinct as a disavowal of intelligent learning.

Finally, we have the oblique yet earnest image of The Birth of the Great Balladeer in which the artist portrays a very fantastical scene underscoring the desire for popularity, even heroism as presented by the innate ability for song. The image shows a large pool of water with coral, seashells, a starfish and lobster in it, and amidst all this, four beautiful mermaids wave to the viewer while holding large red conch shell upon which stands a gangly and pale naked young man holding a guitar, ready to play. The sky behind him is filled with the inverse plume of a nuclear explosion, as if the magic of his ability were instantly transmitted to heaven. This image is part revelation of myth and its place in poem and song, and part repressed fantasy. The balladeer and the painter have much in common; each expresses an immutable truth but suffers for it to be borne through the inequities of the role the artist has in everyday life. His is not viewed as a practical function in society, and the gains are less immediately recognizable than those conferred by wealth or power. He may be loved or admired, he may even alter the fabric of reality, but he belongs to myth. The mermaids in this painting are not mothers for they have no human wombs; they are like spiritual sisters who have produced, through sheer force of will, a spirit of creative expression to give value to the nature of experience on the human plane of existence. They are presenting a gift to man and will soon recede into the mists of time. Like Venus on the half shell, the poet stands for love even as he stands alone, an antihero who cannot partake of what he offers.

The paintings of Thomas Frontini all ask a very basic question: Where does imagination come from? Clearly, it is born in the mind of the child, a mental construction of reality which stops time and reverses the normal flow of logic to serve fantastic and sensate ends. The child possesses an imagination that has not yet been curtailed by adult logic, the burgeoning impulses of maturity, or by too much factual knowledge. What the child understands has been gained mainly by a degree naive empiricism, which includes the imaginary and mythical tales which he or she has been told. We tell such tales to children because we hope to instill in them a fascination for the unknown, and because such tales, beyond their overt veneer of symbolic reality, also contain idealistic values that should predate any harder truths to come along later in life. Imagination comes from being innately innocent, believing that all things are possible. The paintings of Thomas Frontini are one step in the right direction.

By Innocence Bound: The Paintings of Mike Cockrill

2005-09-13T17:26:00.001-04:00

31 GRAND, Brooklyn, October 15 - November 14, 2004

When we were young, the world seemed completely open to us. It was filled with promise, and we were excited - if uncertain - about what would happen. In many ways, the process of becoming a human being is similar to that of developing an artistic sensibility. We begin as clean slates and slowly, through trial and error, aided by an interiority of uninformed impulses, develop a sensibility which begins to resemble a set of convictions, allowing us to proceed within our purview and ultimately beyond. For these processes to develop, a degree of projection is needed, and art provides just such an outlet. The paintings in Mike Cockrill’s solo exhibition, Then Again, narrate a period of youth during which a variety of anonymous characters – in this case, mainly young girls - experience life in all its wonderful complexity. The entire duration of life is neither available to us through these images, nor does Cockrill consider it useful nor revealing to narrate a life's full span. He focuses on the interval between two greatly dramatized yet nominally understood states: childhood and maturity. The word "innocence" describes a state of absence, a blissful ignorance waiting to be filled with ideas and experiences from which a suitable set of convictions can be formed. It denotes a lack of culpability in matters of adult moral agency, and yet it also presents us with a value which is constantly under review. It is hard to know what innocence means, except as a symbolic embodiment of everything we know unlearned from the start. Its opposites are well known to us: lust, evil, or knowledge. Yet the innocent present us with a paradox of unfathomable limits. Their openness is like a weapon, a standard with no clear message. They are closer to beasts than men. The innocents that Mike Cockrill portrays are for the most part children. In some cases they are quasi-adult children, or young women, or adult women transforming from knowing adults into pawns in dramas where adult agendas are instantly suspect. This is a complex exhibition, instantly adding to the variety of forms in Cockrill’s previous body of work, and, aided by a will toward multivalence and idiosyncrasy, successfully presenting characters emerging from stereotypes into full-blown personae. The most easily perceived works are four large canvases, 5 x 4 feet in size, depicting dramas in which a female persona, whether a mother, daughter, or beloved childhood companion, symbolizes an alteration in childlike consciousness - a dream of simple idealism, attraction turning into awe, or bittersweet love from afar. Readily informed pictorially by religious, mythological, and propagandistic sources, these transformations prove no less effective for Cockrill's use of a large range of visual agendas. The evidence of such influences proves how important they are from a societal level down to a personal one.

In the first of these large canvasses, Men with Arrows Plan Our Future (all works 2004), we are presented with a scene out of the mists of childhood, a happy accident that leads one from ignorance into lust: a young boy hangs around with his mother as she completes household chores such as laundry. When she kneels down to lift the basket, he is inadvertently given a full view of her womanhood, including her legs above the knees and her full breasts. Her eyes averted while at her task, she is both unconscious of his sudden and instinctually informed attentiveness while simultaneously becoming the vessel for his desire. The momentous quality of such a simple event is underscored by the depiction of a space rocket’s final section landing in the ocean, accompanied by a billowing parachute and identified with a large black arrow like the type appearing on NASA flight charts. Besides this image, there are also background images which include a living room couch and a large, ranch-style suburban home - stereotypically American - combining the aura of a traditional family with the generic style of mass-produced domesticity.

In another large canvas titled The Iliad, Cockrill depicts a young girl caught in the whirlwind of her own deeply repressed emotions. This painting does not contain a single dramatic event, but rather attempts to capture the emotional tenor of her world-view. The girl is spindly and fragile-looking, dressed in sensible shoes, knee high striped socks, a zipped white windbreaker, and thick black frame glasses. She stands in the center of the painting with an assortment of images surrounding her in the manner of a high-school scrapbook: two cute puppies; her younger brother drawing in a book; a little Dutch or Amish boy cranking a town water pump; military jets booming through the sky; an aircraft carrier moored in port somewhere far away. While her mother paints the blank background around the edge of her face with a whitewash, a mysterious male hand covers the bottom half of the picture with the same substance. The little girl stands on a large image of an aircraft carrier that is made to seem less realistic than the ones depicted in separate frames. It seems to be almost a chariot for her, to carry her through anxiety and fear into safety, or which functions as the presence of a father - a long lost warrior out to sea - who will return to complete her life as she can never do on her own.

A third large canvas, Ascension, presents a woman in the throes of an excessive emotional state, though one which expresses an opposite state of mind from the previous one described here. The woman in this picture is older, and has the Rubenesque body of someone who has born a few children. She is clad in a gossamer teddy, and surrounded on all sides by gaily singing boys and girls, a large, cheerful country home with a spacious front yard, as well as by a jet plane and the small background image of a woman packing a suitcase. Although all is depicted in straight lines and bright colors, we can only come to certain conclusions here. The painting represents an actual and symbolic celebration of the artist’s own mother: surrounded by her beautiful and adoring progeny, she is portrayed not only as the successful proprietress of her household, but also as a woman both sensual and idealistic who dreams of both further richesse and future travel - an independent departure from her current circumstance into one of as yet unreckoned possibility. Again, there is no father or husband figure present.

The Madonna of the Roses depicts a scene of mundane gaiety which is quickly transformed - by the excising of a single object - from one of camaraderie and youthful joy on the edge of desire, into one of spiritual awe. A young girl is skipping rope, holding in one hand a flower which perhaps the young boy at her side has just given her. In the midst of a single leap her ropes disappear and she is made to levitate: the frills on her two-piece jumpsuit fly up in the breeze while her gaze lowers down to the viewer, giving her a serenity and earnestness beyond her years. The young boy, dressed fancily for church with a white shirt and large bow at his neck, is caught in mid-sentence, either in the throes of religious ecstasy or love for his suddenly blessed companion.

A series of single portraits fills out the show, some on canvas in oil and others on paper in watercolor. Each provides an allegory or narrative which expands our ability to see in women and children what Cockrill sees. In The Good Child, a young girl prays before bedtime, her hands folded before her in the customary gesture. But instead of a solemn face dedicated to moral purpose, we see a girl whose love of God and trust in the truth of ritual brings her immediate joy - which Cockrill has dramatized by painting clown lips over the girl’s own. White and large with a slight outline of black, such lips make the girl into a primal force for unabashed glee, as well as a devout worshipper. Not My Rainbow, Dog Day Afternoon, Virgin in Spring, and The Rainy Day - each portrays a young girl or woman who is given to the contemplation of solitude. Some of these maidens seem to be taken from the images of melancholy characters that illustrate front covers of ten-cent paperbacks. Others seem lifted directly from literature as varied as Little Red Riding Hood, Heidi of the Hills, Nabokov’s Lolita or from the paintings of Balthus. Despite their overly generalized imagery, and sampling from multiple sources, these portraits lose nothing in the way of emotional message or urgency, and serve to reinforce our attentiveness to the culturally-informed contexts of Cockrill's idiosyncratic perceptions on storytelling, emotional narrative, and idealization of women. I

In viewing these paintings, we look back upon a dim memory of a time when we were just beginning to actively form our sense of self. Moments of contemplation and accidental scenarios of loaded significance - even generalized periods spent under the sign of a particular impression or event - all contributed significantly to how we developed in our later years. It’s clear to see that Mike Cockrill has a special love for women, and whether this originates from his own role as a father or the golden memories of his distant youth, it is the degree of parable in these images that charms and seduces us. Woman is the divine Other - a force for emotional and spiritual change. In our earliest years we are naturally dependent upon a mother figure. As we mature, it is to a mother or sister that we are drawn to make the first observations of newfound sexuality – as either a mirror or vessel for desirous projection. The resulting start of a new set of moral values also represents the loss of a previous, if unfulfilled, set of childlike values, in which the character of a family member may easily take on a degree of mythical significance. Each of these personae, individually or as a complementary set, represents an equal and opposite force to our own nature, which is then defined only by the choices we make and our evaluation of qualifying the general state of affairs surrounding and coloring such judgments. As Oscar Wilde once said, "the story of your life is not your life…it’s your story". Mike Cockrill reminds us of the importance of knowing the difference.

www.wburg.com, September 2005

Sampling Identity: The Work of Carla Gannis

2005-08-27T17:29:00.000-04:00

Identity is the cornerstone of our being and the means by which we impose some small degree of order upon the world, which is always in a state of growth and flux. What we may or may not comprehend is that identity itself is likewise in flux, and though we may often hold to the belief that it represents a fixed quantity, we are hard-pressed to decide which elements define our individual ideas of our selves. In history, when mankind has been in a state of doubt, it has searched for symbols to represent the qualities it most admires or despises. Those first took the form of mythology, then later of religious devotion, and much later—and in some ways finally—the precepts of science. The journey through belief is itself a journey to self-knowledge, and it is through art that man has often found himself seated before not only a fount of valuable learning, but also before a mystery whose purpose has yet to be told.

Individual artists throughout history have created oeuvres that present pictorial views of reality which impress upon the viewer a regard for beauty and order, for depravity and chaos, and for the mystery and opacity of abstraction. A common thread between each of these aesthetic agendas has been that the works reveal a degree of symbolism that relates directly to our manner of approach, and not to the overt subject matter on view. We must be able to take from the work of various artists what is given, in the combinations of complex and hybrid meaning that are intended. Symbolism works best when it is connected to a depiction of reality that is loaded with varied degrees of context yet allows us to detach ourselves and consider a work’s themes without any expectation that it will fall in line, aesthetically or morally, with the mundane aspects of our daily lives. What art reveals is the connection between conscious and unconscious recognition, whether that relates to fantasy versus reality or to accepted versus taboo ideas and beliefs.

Carla Gannis utilizes the appearance of reality to create a context of transparent pastiche which ironically juxtaposes received knowledge with aesthetic phenomenon. Her characters are sampled from various cultural contexts, including her own life, art history, mythology, and the mainstream media; yet a working knowledge of the inner recesses and psyche of the artist's life may be necessary in order to gainsay the character of each image. Whether through individual choice or the agency of unseen forces, every character expresses a loaded and subjective vulnerability, either by appearance or mood, or by a transformation depicted in the physical situation. Likewise, the situations themselves, as paired with the actions of her characters, are made to represent a perverted perspective of the logic behind narrative and causality. This is achieved by her use of the "sample," a technique that is relatively new in cultural terms, though it is similar in effect to gene-splicing, when scientists combine, for example, the genes of different flowers to experiment with the physical consequences of crossbreeding. As a cultural process, sampling became popular in the early 1980s with rap music, in which musicians would take a passage of music from another artist's recordings and layer their own tunes or words over it. This began to occur in other musical forms over time. The synth-pop band Depeche Mode became especially well known for its practice of sampling such disparate sounds as spinning helicopter blades, shattering glass, or skidding car brakes, and adding them to a rhythmic or syncopated beat to form the backbone for their songs. In the age of digital culture, sampling has become a very accessible practice that allows artists to combine images from various origins and seamlessly meld them into an overt new reality.

Such is the case in Gannis's "Travelogue Series". The concept of narrative is a strong element in these works. Each of the images tells a story, and though very little is provided for the viewer to draw a conclusion, it is clear that there is more going on than what is depicted. The narrative that Gannis wants to show us is essentially a psychological one, in which factual details are not as important as emotional ones. Each story has to do with a strong psychic impression that she has held at one time or another. The degree of portent they hold and the manner of symbolism used to express that portent are the more telling qualities of her intention than anything more formal and explicit could suggest. For every period of emotional education in our lives there have been 'psychic turns,' moments of instantaneous clarity that have allowed us insight into the depth of our inner growth. Through these moments we are able to classify the movement from one state of being to another. From the inherent narrative quality of Gannis's imagery it can readily be surmised that she wishes to express the complexity of her issues in transit.

Because the sense of reality Gannis seeks to impart is necessarily complex, it obligates the viewer, when looking for meaning to take on the whole image, replete with all of its visual and contextual associations. We must start with the myths that are built into them, and work back toward a description of the commonplace. In WAITRESS, for instance, we have a figure that is clearly a woman, but the kind of woman we see depends upon the order in which we accept the various symbolic aspects of her appearance and the dramatic situation she inhabits. Her assigned role is given her by the work's title, but she is plainly more than that. She wears the costume of a comic-book super hero, her body naked from the waist up. In the area that would comprise her stomach and her womb, there is only a spine, with her stomach and womb neatly excised from the ideal representation of female form that she otherwise fulfills. The setting is a traditional diner with leather booths, a long red carpet down the middle, and red-and-white "Coca-Cola" signs overhead. The situation in which the waitress is posed provides another puzzling context. She is paused in midair, as if she were about to leap into action. It is clear that WAITRESS presents us with a complex symbol simultaneously representing different models of female identity. The character is swathed in identities that together show us how narrative can be created from the depiction of an emotional state, and conversely, how an emotional state can be projected upon the viewer which generates an empathic reaction that is both symbolic and personal. The character in this scene is clearly a symbol of strength, one that exists to heighten our regard for pedestrian reality, and yet she is no mean caricature, governed equally by idiosyncrasy as by heroism. She does not need to be involved in some cosmic clash or daring rescue to possess the rank we give her; her position as a mere wage slave presses this upon us. Her further state, in which she is deprived of the attributes that biologically define her and make her human, such as the need for sustenance and procreation. Gannis sets the stage for our reactions just as she manipulates the view. She wants us to understand that truth is not a one-sided coin, and that just as all persons can be symbols, such symbols can mean, and achieve, as much as individuals do in their private lives.

In LAST DAYS IN MEXICO we are presented with the scene of a crime in which there are three players, the villain, his victim, and a mysterious witness. The crime is a murder. A man in a dapper suit stands above a prone Pan-like figure with the furry body and cloven hoofs of a goat and the face of a woman. The setting is a large warehouse with one bright light high above on the ceiling, and the otherwise drab appearance of dirty white and industrial green paint. The Pan figure is joined in his fate by a naked woman with two moaning heads and wings that resemble those of a demonic butterfly. She is Hecate, queen of the underworld, a spirit who is present in the endgame of the hunt, and who presides over every event deemed a moral crossroads in life. She is a pagan figure, just as is Pan, and though he is a symbol of the decadence of late Greek society, she is a primordial figure who was once the Empress of Hell, predating even Hades himself. Her presence lends a sense of pathos to the death of Pan, and a vulnerability to the one human pawn here, who though he has been the harbinger of a certain decree of fate, is at this moment considering the efficacy of his role, lost in his houghts, thinking of the future.

A third and final example is THE BLUE CAR, another image that depicts a figure in the garb of a comic-book superhero, this one suggesting Superman, though in this case the character does not resemble our memory of him in the least. Our hero here is a small figure, curled into a fetal position as if sleeping, hanging upside down like a bat, with his cape wafting down to just above the surface of the earth. There is a lone witness to this event—a blue car that passes him in the middle distance—which makes us wonder about the identity of his spectators and of their intentions while he is both literally and figuratively 'wrapped up in himself.' We are made to feel a paternal or proprietary empathy for the sleeping hero, and a sense of dread for any unknown entity, even one provided by as innocuous a source as a simple automobile.

As Francis Bacon said, "knowledge is power." Yet knowledge comes to us from various sources, and identity is the sieve through which such gleanings are processed. If we can say, this is who I am, then we are inviting chaos and mystery into our lives. Yet the progress of history has shown us that there are many directions from which knowledge can be approached. There is the scientific method, which is primarily deductive, and which looks at physical details and makes assumptions that usually fall in line with preconceived notions. Alternately, there is the symbolic method, found in Gannis’s images, in which a vast and unforeseen psychic province is tapped through the use of complex narratives that introduce us to characters who are as opaque as their symbols. The narrative and the symbolic intersect in these images, obscuring any one path to understanding, and moreover, subverting the misconception that there can be only one story in each image. As a means of emotional education, they are thrilling and mysterious models for the shape of our common unconscious, and the transitional quality they impart proves a doubly rich context for the evolution of aesthetic perception.

Catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition "Carla Gannis: Travelogue" at Pablo's Birthday, 84 Franklin Street, New York, November 11 to December 7, 2004

8/27/05

Leemour Pelli: Paintings and Drawings

2003-08-26T21:10:00.000-04:00

The aesthetic and formal accomplishments of Leemour Pelli, which are maintained alternately through the activities of painting and drawing, accrue in their degree of portent as they develop her subject matter—an extended treatise on the irreconcilable workings of the heart. Pelli is dedicated to using the human figure as a scale for gauging human drama, and her work springs from an interest in the aesthetic interstices of linguistic and pictorial inspiration. It is at once an investigation of the issues of her own life—which deal mainly with pain, loneliness, and memory; longing, solitude, and desire, and with matters of formal craft. Despite its strong emotional tenor, it should be viewed as an alternating cycle of interpretations. Just as a writer may revise characters from one book to the next, so Pelli reinterprets her characters, the world they live in, and the terms of their thematic reception. Pelli’s work possesses a dynamic emotional charge which, along with her use of the figure as both character and totem, forges an unseen emotional narrative beyond the appearance of any particular person, place, or event. Through its very evident sense of mystery it challenges our acceptance of what constitutes reality.

Leemour Pelli began as a poet, and it was her love of literature that sprang into a desire to create art works which transcend the boundaries of literary inspiration. Early on, she was attracted to all manner of amorous and romantic literature, reading such writers as Rimbaud, Chateaubriand, Artaud, Constant, etc. which infused her imagination with the dynamic of human relations. Her purview soon attached itself to the writings of the Surrealists, such as Breton, Aragon, and Lautreamont, and later, particularly to the Absurdist plays and novels of Samuel Beckett. As an individual thoroughly convinced of her uniqueness in idiosyncrasy, both out of place and out of time, Pelli found an immediate affinity for a literature which placed a higher value in interior reality and the transformation of the mundane into the sublime. Her reading of such authors whose insistence (whether by the demands of narrative or character) that life is absurd—aided her in her progression of a specific set of pictorially symbolic values that have only grown more dynamic and informed in their accrual. However, it is from Beckett himself that she draws the widest expanse of emotional inquiry. Several of her titles are drawn from his novel Murphy which relates, in his typically idiosyncratic prose, the story of two men whose hearts work differently, but who both bear a love for the same woman. Murphy is prone to emotional extremes, with "such an irrational heart that no physician could get to the root of it," and he is for good reason the center of the novel. Neary, on the other hand, is described as a man who "could stop his heart more or less whenever he liked and keep it stopped, within reasonable limits, for as long as he liked." Pelli does not attempt to overtly narrate distinct scenes from Murphy, but instead takes an intrinsic view of the pure psychological and idiosyncratic elements of the story involving Murphy and Neary. She samples the mood and depth of the novel’s characterization without borrowing from the thread of expository narrative, preferring instead to rely upon its degree of personification and myriad eventfulness.

To Murphy II - 2002

From this idea of the differing hearts and emotional extremes, Pelli has created, among others, a dual set of images which operate as either complementary views of the same condition, as depictive foils, or both. In To Murphy I and To Murphy II (both 2002) we are presented with a single persona in alternating afflictions relating to the human ability to aptly communicate emotions and their relationship to innate identity. Each large drawing is dominated by a wash of color, and a body and face outlined by pictorial dimness, yet they are both stirred by emotional redolence. The main dramatic qualities are their manner of facial expression, and the specifically painted imagery of their individually dramatized afflictions. In To Murphy I, there are scars, and wide gashes in the skin over the area of the heart, symbolic of some psychic or emotional violence that has not yet fully healed, with the body itself seeming ulcerated and isolated from any trace of a lower body, and which underscores the sense of this persona as functionally immobile. The face of the persona in this image is frozen in a deep stare, as if comprehending a deep truth inexpressible in mere words or mundane action. The figure in To Murphy II is rendered in much deeper tones of red and pink, and the pictorial area behind and around it both matches and overwhelms the figure with a likewise redolence of the bodily color that Pelli has chosen as a tonal trigger in her work. The body representing this version of Murphy differs in almost every formal characteristic from its predecessor. There is still the lack of a lower torso, still a personified comparison between the problems of the head and the heart, between unseen cerebral conflicts and the overt progression of bodily conflicts as a form of pictorial agenda. Both the face and the inner organs of this figure are more specifically rendered, with the face expressing a sort of dread, the expression otherwise muted and the gaze drawn out and beyond the veil of the image. This figure’s body is depicted as a view of its interior organs, which seem to have radically expanded, as if they were handling too heavy a load of symbolic emotion, and were about to burst. The descriptive appearance of the organs, their distinct utility yet ambiguous symbolism, are perversely analogous to the condition of the affliction the person is unable to communicate, yet by a means of psychic emotional projection, makes us perceive what afflicts them.

Surface Perception - 2003

In a recent set of images, Surface Perception I & II (both 2003), we are presented with a pair of figures drawn in red paint on a white background, viewed from a distance of middle perspective. The figures in Surface Perception I are without arms and their faces stare off to the side, dramatically unaware of the angle by which we may perceive them. Caught in the middle of a pensive moment or act, their faces are also obscured by a haze of pink and red paint which draws our eyes toward them. The main action in Surface Perception I involves the sequence of two figures with, alternately, a sequence of multiple hearts and one of scars emanating from their forms. The difference between these two types of imagery acts as both a foil for the narrative quality of the image overall and as a metaphor for the differences between the characters these personae represent; each will be transformed by the event, yet the outcome is left unresolved. In Surface Perception II we view them first as integrated entities, each with a set of merged visible interior organs. Then later, the figures which seemed to have acquired a unified quality as if they had progressed in evolutionary terms, may have been yet again transformed – the result being the single figure to the far left with somewhat mangled, partial, inner organs. The universe which Pelli depicts is characterized by her use of color to impose mood, to overpower the senses and therefore extend the degree of inquiry into a more hermetic and intellectual realm, though one still tinged by the emotions projected by her personae. This is a dramatic strategy which centers upon how the painterly and depictive qualities of a given scene may impose formal and conceptual values upon the narrative event at hand. Pelli’s color of choice is pink, which she refers to as "my black," a color she often uses and which was once the predominant color of her palette. Pelli has chosen to use this color as the overall qualifier not only of narrative depiction but as the backdrop in which her personae enact their innately interior dramas. As a color, pink has many connotations which extend past the aesthetic control of the artist at hand. It is redolent of human skin, and therefore equally erotic and visceral. It is also a color associated with girlish femininity, and for an adult it represents something of a taboo. More formally it presents certain painterly difficulties, as it overwhelms the visual locus of a given scene when used to excess. However, in recent years Pelli has added a variety of other colors to the mix, and has also alternated the use of pink as field, line, and overshadowing. As the color utilized in representation, it takes on a quality that is not as pictorially aggressive, yet still continues to reinforce her use of line. It is not so much that pink has been replaced in her new work as reinterpreted. In the past it dominated the work, and though it is still strongly evident, the constancy of its application has been curtailed in favor of sketching out dramatic scenarios which rely upon a different narrative element.

Lingering Dissolution - 2002

Lingering Dissolution (2002) presents a central figure in a state of active emotion, with attached exterior hearts emanating from its form, and two faces in profile, slightly behind it. Instead of an ordinary, interior, single heart, the figure seems to manifest this out of control, over sensitive state, as if its body were solid, but the organ in question were undergoing some sort of transference or phase between one dimension and another. The event taking place seems to be the product of an emotional state in which the two characters or faces attached and behind the central figure, are viewable here only because of the emotional effect their memory imposes upon the character. The hearts that are phasing in and out of the body are a symbolic measure of how this character is unsure to whom its heart belongs–itself, (and therefore hidden and functional to him/her), or to the object of its consideration, and therefore outside of him/her, projected into the ether of an insubstantial, unrequited love. What dramatizes this image in a manner radically differentiated from past works is its use of color. The scene overall is a deep cerulean blue, as if the character inhabited a subterranean or undersea world. This environment is painted more heavily above the figure, and is separated on the "ground" by a long red linesuggesting a wall or corner being formed behind the figure, placing him not only in emotional but also physical isolation. The body of the center figure itself is on the whole, vague, suggested only by a white silhouette, with slightly more heavily painted sections where feet and middle torso would be located. The pose it infers is one of resignation, turned toward the viewer – exposing not only its internal condition, but inner thoughts as well. The amount of details that are provided here are of course merely suggestive, and overall they are obscured by the opaque, incandescent presence of a pink nimbus which surrounds the faces, and which finds its tonal match in the blurred motion suggested by the moving hearts.

The image in Handicapped (2000) is contextually central to Pelli’s development of a symbolic representation of innate desire which often takes the form of a physically recognized scene. The interior situation dramatically depicted enacts its own sort of narrative through a wide range of views or visions. In this work, Pelli renders the parable of the overt against the inert and innate, with a figure whose functional immobility is merely a stasis enforced by its physical limitations reflected as fatal circumstance. The personae inhabiting this figure are one and the same, but are also two characters, one residing inside the other. The painting is a study in the quality of psychological projection as dominated visually by the fleshly color Pelli often uses to characterize the agendas of her work. Overwhelmingly pink, this canvas contains only a single figure, which is delineated in the most minimal fashion possible, with one slightly darker outline of color for the shape of its upper torso and shoulders. The lines which describe the chair (in which the central figure sits in) is rendered only by the merest outlines of straight vertical and horizontal lines, defining it as a cage of sorts, with a footrest below and a large wheel beneath it. Though by her depiction, the chair seems to sit upon the wheel rather than be just connected to it for the purpose of utility. The personae inhabiting this emotionally distant and oppressive field of visual endeavor are two in number, one set inside the interior of the other figure, like the image of hearts or intestines is similarly made visible in other of Pelli’s works—for the purpose of revealing states of emotion that would otherwise be mislaid pictorially. The face of the central figure is caught in the middle of an intense reaction to some external and removed event which can not be perceived, the outcome of which is the mark or presence of another visage in its interior. These two faces can be perceived as either a dual habitation or they can be seen as a species of chronologically defined versions of the selfsame entity, projected or rememberedfrom a previous time.

Stilted - 1999

In a much earlier work, Stilted (1999), we view an ephemeral scene in which two personas, a male and a female one, share the same prosthetic body, an elongated slab of meat which stands on two dark poles and is also suspended from above by tenuous strings. In the distance, off to the right, erased traces of another set of similar figures, are suspended by strings though not by stilts. Pelli describes this image as embodying themes of physical vacancy and attachment over time. The two personas inhabit a figure which, despite their presence, is incapable of separate movement, and which inhabits a locality which is predominantly characterized by a lack of physical detail and the visceral and tabooed color with which she decidedly characterizes the homogenous environment in which her emotional parables come aptly to life.

Another formal characteristic that innately defines her work is the utilization of dramatic perspective. In dealing with the figure, and especially a type of figurative depiction which on its face suspends most of the natural laws of proportion, scale, and dimension, it is important that certain formal aspects which relate to sensory perception still hold sway, perspective being foremost among these. What Pelli achieves through the use of perspective is perhaps unique, for it functions not only to place her personae in the visual field of the viewer, but girds them within their immediate surroundings, and creates a greater context for us to explore their idiosyncratic situations as characters and totemic figures. Since there are few visual clues in her works to tie her personae into the physical world from which we draw our own sense of bodily knowledge, it is important to consider how the perspectival remove of the viewer affects our comprehension of her personae and their depictive agenda.

In Angle of Immunity (2000), a figure sits upon a wide chair which is slightly upturned yet rests within an intangible area. A round unframed mirror rests on the figure’s lap, and it is within the reflected area of the mirror that another face (not that of the sitter’s) is reflected and seen. The title of this work refers to a Becketesque idea about how one may safely regard an object of vision (i.e., desire) without being seen or visually caught. The mirror is a symbol for the realization of truth. If it reflects reality, then it gives us only a refracted image, reversed and pale by comparison to the image which our own eyes would present to us. A truth glimpsed offers up reality as artifice, framed and valued by the physical area of the mirror which, just like a painting, can only present the perspective which its formal qualities allows us to view. Our position facing the image reveals little more than is dramatically intended; we may see in the person’s face a measure of the anxiety and expectation they have of the event they expect to view, however acutely, via the mirror, and our specific angle of regard is likewise limited to the mirror this person represents as one of us.

Castle-Land - 2003

Castle-Land (2003) presents a scene in which two characters are in the middle of some sort of confrontation or conversation, one of whom has a full body with exposed hearts and intestines, and the other who is identified by its face alone. Several new pictorial elements enliven this painting, such as the fact that the main figure is involved in more than one divestment of emotional control; that dangling above the two characters is a human heart suspended from a rope; and that in the distance, a series of castle towers and spires loom, though they are drawn in blurry, indecisive strokes, and may in fact not be a natural backdrop but an imaginary one instead. Pelli qualifies the form of the hanging heart as one which may be pulled away and removed from sight (or utility) at any time, yet the mere presence of an external heart ready for use bespeaks its availability, and not its threat of imminent removal. This work clearly adds to the expression of iconic language which has previously resided in her paintings and drawings. The occlusion of narrative concerns in no way lessens the iconic, and therefore totemic, status of her new work, only serving to qualify them as a form of communication as well as a system of spiritual symbols. Whether we view Pelli’s characters as persons or totems in a particular order is of less consequence than that we see them as complex entities, both personifying and feeling while at the same time symbolizing and projecting. Pelli’s works are developed with particular regard to emotional themes as well as to ideas of representation, so they tend to take on a dual identity: first as characters with atypical and idiosyncratic emotional depth, a degree of opacity, and a sensitivity to how they are either connected to, intimate with, or disaffected from their environments or each other. Secondly, they also fulfill important roles as totemic figures, a series or system of iconic entities reflecting upon the human condition which Pelli means to continuously expose. In both conceptions, it remains important to consider that no matter how they are ambiguously conceived or interpreted through the subtext of emotions or ideas, that their singularity as a progressive rendering of human experience in its totality—and therefore of a movement from ignorance to enlightenment—is at the heart of their cumulative depiction and a model for our own evolution as human beings.

In Mirror Mirror on the Wall (2002), there is a person who sits regarding her reflection in a large ornately carved mirror. The person has a forlorn, sad look upon her face, and dark looming shapes evident inside her chest, of a sickened or broken heart. The image of her reflection stares back at her as a strong and impassive figure with no visible organs. Instead, it reveals two faces, one stacked atop the other, in a totemic fashion, as if to say that this is how the person on this side of the mirror would prefer to be seen. This could be a memory of her past self or a self-fulfilling prophecy. The character in this case does little, although the scene pictured here provides more dramatic detail than Pelli often utilizes. Because of it, we see the innate humanity of the character, and her vulnerability. At the same time, Pelli exposes her innate affliction, whether real or symbolically projected in a visual extreme. We are made to feel that a veil of reality is being minutely lifted, and that two worlds simultaneously perceive the other. One persona carries their affliction in humors (the idea that organs carrying different liquids through the body could characterize and determine the excessive quality of one’s affliction), or in the mind, as modern Psychology assumes that we are psychically split and naturally ambivalent in a view of our innate self.

The formal and conceptual accomplishments of Leemour Pelli comprise a body of work which is both aesthetically and tautologically impressive. The depiction of vague landscapes and simple yet loaded details represent a retelling of the psychic event of inspiration. Hidden beneath the evidence at hand is the language of idiosyncratic identity, which possesses a mythos of its own. Its measure of reality is bound up in emotional agendas which are realized through the pastiche of formalist aims. This allows us to make our own aesthetic leaps while we are simultaneously acted upon by its latent emotional charge. A measure of the human condition is everywhere in Pelli’s work, stretching from dream into parable and back again.

Catalog essay for the exhibition "Leemour Pelli: Paintings and Drawings," University of Central Florida in Orlando, August 26-October 5, 2003

Roe Ethridge at Andrew Kreps

2002-10-01T19:30:00.000-04:00

Pigeon (2001), C-print, 38 x 30 inches

The relationship between a photograph's overt appearance and the technical ability of the artist is what inspires Roe Ethridge. His second solo exhibition, "The Bow," stresses an interest in nature both as a physical subject and as a process of realistic depiction.

Ethridge could be considered a traditional artist, since his images are often either figures or landscapes. Each image is beautiful, yet each image of beauty obscures, or exacts through ironic counterpoint, an unseen context. The most blatantly romantic images, such as those in his "New York Water" series, Osgood Pond and Catskills, present what seem like nature pictorials straight out of Hallmark cards: the haze of late summer covering a large pond seen through a rise of fir trees, and a stream bubbling merrily through a bucolic landscape. Yet hidden in the obvious details are reasons why beauty lies to us, and why we let it. Nature is a backdrop of beautiful detail to Ethridge, but it is also merely a fact, which can be defined and compartmentalized, as it is in the title of the series, which sounds like the name of a state regulatory agency, and not a thematic depiction of beautiful scenery.

More perversely intentional are Untitled (Self Portrait) and Car Carrier. In the first, the artist sustained a nasty black eye while climbing a rock embankment. He found the image so guilelessly convincing that he was driven to document it in order to show people what a real black eye looks like. The image is painfully convincing, even as it mars his clean faced, boy next door looks. Car Carrier presents the image of a commercial freighter transporting automobiles from Europe. Ethridge was struck by the enormity of such an operation, as well as by the plain economic reality it represents. He utilized a prismatic lens to transform one ship into an army of doppelgangers whose similarity and number echo the multitude of cars each one ostensibly carries.

Combining honesty with trickery are three photographs titled simply Pigeon in which the artist "hired” a set of trained birds from Universal Studios to fly about in predetermined routines. Portrayed with a high speed lens, they take on a dramatic saintliness, like the religious familiars they really are.

Finally there is The Pink Bow, the image after which this exhibition was named. As a commercially fabricated item with humble origins, it is speciously portrayed as if it were not merely a metaphor for the sexual object it resembles, but also a commodity critique. As a gesture, it is an homage to the inspiration Ethridge derives from specific subject matter, and the specificity of the photographic image itself.

Flash Art, Vol. XXXIV, October 2002

David Henry Brown at Daniel Silverstein

2002-09-01T17:01:00.000-04:00

The idea of celebrity is completely fused with our perspective of everyday reality. Celebrity is a component of fame, a more momentary and satisfying instance in which the illumination of flash bulbs, the “royal treatment” of celebrity peers, and the adoration of unnamed masses all act to separate us from those from whom we bear away a large part of our common nature. As a subject for art, celebrity presents a slippery slope full of hidden agendas, mixed messages, and a breadth of cultural context which is rarely plumbed, for fear it may reveal the collusion between greatness and its opposite. Yet one artist today has made celebrity his main focus. David Henry Brown Jr, over the last few years, has developed an expansive body of work which explores these ideas.

The first part of this exploration took the form of a series of actions, subtly interwoven into the social fabric of given public events. Brown invented a company in ‘98 called Carpet Rollers, which for $99 offered to roll out a red carpet for private parties. “We were able to get into private people’s affairs,” says Brown. “The kind of people that liked to enjoy life. We’d come up to a party with our red carpet and people would gather around us. Hundreds of people would come and watch and we would say that we didn’t know who was coming. The red carpet was a symbol. It created a discussion and people would say stuff about who they thought was coming. It was like “Waiting for Godot.” They were all waiting for this grand thing to happen that never happened, and the real thing was the waiting.” (1)

This experiment revealed a basic truth about the nature of fame: it requires an event. The event is rarely pure happenstance, though it can be intentionally caused by a celebrity-wannabe. For instance there is the story about how Jean-Claude Van Damme met a Hollywood producer and said words to the effect that if he could kick above the man’s head, would he put him in a movie? He did, of course, and that was the beginning of his story. Fame may be elusive but celebrity endures for as long as there are people who wish it to endure. There are also the casualties of celebrity, such as Princess Diana. Then there are people who became known for an act of cruelty, like OJ Simpson, or for self abuse, like Robert Downey Jr. We need only to say their names for everyone to know who they are, without any reference to the careers which made them stars—perhaps even heroes—in the eyes of many Americans, and around the world. Success is a form of heroism in a culture where there is a such a vast divide between the rich and the poor, between the ones who merely get by, and those who thrive within their own milieu.

Brown’s next project, “Alex”, was more closely related to the sense of social recognition which creates the phenomenon of celebrity. He masqueraded as a celebrity, but not any particular celebrity, someone with actual accomplishments, but a person whose fame rested specifically upon his family name: Von Furstenberg. Brown cultivated the casual earnestness and lack of pretense which qualifies those who are born to positions of social celebrity. In effect, just by becoming Alex Von Furstenberg, he carried the event of fame around with him, even if, in his ostensible realness as Alex, he were to meet someone who was fooled into believing that he was who he said he was. The images which resulted have him shaking hands or standing shoulder to shoulder with the well to do, the curvaceous, the politically aspiring, and the culturally revered.

In “Host,” Brown explores the cult of the pose. For this project, Brown masqueraded as a guide at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square. Brown attended visitors as they toured the museum, providing historical narration on figures as diverse as Mayor Giuliani, the actors Nicholas Cage and Whoopi Goldberg, and political entities Fidel Castro and Jesse Jackson. The images which resulted from these encounters (expertly captured by Susanna Wimmer), reveal an interesting dynamic in which Brown, once critiquing the notion of celebrity by having his picture taken with known celebrities under the social agenda of masquerading as a socialite, now poses with wax figures of known famous entities. Yet the presence of these tourists, who may visit the museum to pose also enlivens the intentional quality of this work. With whom is Brown posing? Brown’s photographs may include an image of him, but are rarely about him, but about the context he creates. Brown’s images taken of celebrities and the images taken of tourists with wax models which, in collusion include him, are all images.

Our association with a given wax model such as Pope Jean Paul II, Morgan Freeman, or Woody Allen, is proof of how we relate to the world, who our heroes are, and the images in “Host” are really of the tourists, who represent the most chaotic and unpredictable aspects of social interaction inspired by this situation. Brown operates as a cipher, directing our attention to the expressions of those around him, and paying homage to the figures themselves, as if they were really people like Woody Allen or Barbara Streisand, and not just charismatic replicas. The figures with whom people posed said a lot about what they thought was important. morgan pictures the actor Morgan Freeman dressed as the chauffeur in “Driving Miss Daisy”, his eyes looking off into the distance in a pose reminiscent of George Washington crossing the Delaware was visited by two African American women, a mother and daughter pair, who are framed by Brown in a warm embrace, one woman beside him, the other holding Freeman’s chest as if he were her sweetheart. In chris, Brown joins a father and his paraplegic son with the wheelchair bound image of Christopher Reeve; the boy wears a T-shirt with the classic logo of Superman on it. The actor’s identity post-accident emboldens him as a figure of extraordinary dimension whose desire to surpass his limitations as a cripple have surpassed his identity as a portrayer of the comic book hero, Superman. For fidel Brown joins a Cuban family in a group salute at the statue of Fidel Castro, vogues out with elle, sits in impassioned introspection with woody, beams with glee alongside elton, is cool or tough with lenny or nick.

A few other elements rounded out the exhibition. The first was a series of photographs in which Brown posed in a frozen state and then unfroze to scare various groups of tourists, who were always shocked when he did so. I’m sure that he was quite interested in what it was like to be one of the statues; after all, they are the objects of appreciation, the source for the degree of social intervention that occurs ad nauseum at Madame Tussaud’s, a type of interaction which is rarely if never viewed in art museums, or any formal museum environment, for that matter. The second were the artifacts of his experience, a letter stating the position of Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in regard to Brown’s artful interloping, and a video Brown had made in which he is filmed in his role as guide, mocking out as a frozen statue, and interviewing one particular wax museum habitué who candidly states his preference for a world in which everyone was made into a wax replica, as it would simplify the necessary amount of social exchange and dissolve the expectations of proprietary interest. If we could all have a date with Elle McPherson, what would be the use of envy or insecurity?

The final image of the videotape shows Brown frozen in a relatively isolated corner of the museum, with the noise of the crowd and the lights aimed at known celebrities felt from far off. This image reveals the degree of fragility inherent in the need to pose, to take on a timelessness which separates us from others. The desire for celebrity leads us into labyrinths of self-reflection. The images which Brown’s reflection presents will pursue us into the future.

Notes: (1) Berlind, Robert. “David Brown Isn't Von Furstenberg, But He Loves to Pretend He Is!,” The New York Observer, 1999

Zingmagazine # 17, Autumn 2002

Mona Hatoum at The New Museum

1998-01-01T21:18:00.000-05:00

The oeuvre of Mona Hatoum evokes a landscape peopled by absence. On many levels, the ideas of intimacy and vulnerability inhabit her work. She often uses images representing intimacy, such as a bed, to illustrate this. But the messages of her work are not bound to a single object. They take,the form of whatever material her interests follow. In one installation, Hatoum employs a video of the inner orifices of her body. Her works are visual, tactile, and in the words of one critic, corporeal. For what Hatoum's work lacks in an actual human presence is instead represented through metaphoric objects projecting a gestalt of vulnerability and loss, of intimacy and defensiveness or distance, a foreshortening of the desire to either remain intimate, or to iinitiate the process of trust and risk, by which intimacy develops.

In Quarters (1996), a set of four five high metal bunk beds face each other in the shape of a cross. I think that this design is only incidental to the space of the installation, and to the formal elements which determine its effect, one of a complex structure of bars, yet minimal, producing an amibiguous signification of the work's title. Stripped of their local character, of all trappings of the physical connection to place, they attain a ghostly immanence. Their spareness and grand scale create a sense of ambiguity and physical paradox for the viewer. The spatial structures affect us, says Guy Brett, both optically and corporeally...to make us waver constantly between a sense of beauty and anxiety. Quarters evokes a historical sensibility in terms of the objects themselves, and one which expresses the sense of an figurative opacity. I say figurative because this opacity inhabits her sculptures and installations as if it were the physical remains or the disembodied spirit of a real person, a virtual presence which both adds and subtracts levels of trust according to its own dictates.

Similarly, yet on another grade of experience altogether, we have Corps Etranger (1994), a video collage made from interior views of the artist's own bodily orifices, into which have been plunged a tiny camera on the end of an infinitesimally small cord. The video is played alongside an intense soundtrack and is housed inside a towering room with beveled portals. Projected upon a wide sloping round screen, like the cornea of an eye, it presents to us as we cluster around the view, with a chasm of unknown depth. The artist's willingness to expose herself for the sake of an experience mirrors the nocturnal fear of failing off a high precipice, or into a dark pit, and to continue falling without reference of horizon or solid ground. The "strange body" or "foreign body" of the title is the interior landscape of our bodies removed from any sense of its perceptual exterior. Of course, it could also refer to ourselves as spectators, as being made virtual visitors in the realm of the artists' body. We are the foreign agents deposited into the blood or airstream of a realm which, in its structural and functional unity, dissociates all other elements that are introduced into it. The inside of the body is a strange landscape, and we are stranger for our immersion within it.

Another theme that has been said to run through Hatoum's work is the creation of installations or objects which contain an element of danger. Hatoum realizes that of all the modes of perception available to us as human beings, that which is connected to our highest dictate, self preservation, ensures the highest levels of self awareness. The range of expressivity in her work related to this intent is varied and determined by the physical aspects of each independent piece. Pin Carpet (1995) seems like any other carpet, another object of bourgeois domesticity raised to the level of an art object—until we look closely, and see that the mass of threads comprising its surface, which we had imagined to be warm and comfortable, are instead aan extremely fine grade of tiny, sharp nails which would pierce our skin at the slightest touch. But whatever the danger, the skein of imposed meaning in these pieces seems worth the risk.

December 4, 1997 - February 22, 1998

NY ARTS MAGAZINE #17, January-February 1998

Roxy Paine at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts

1997-06-01T12:14:00.000-04:00

March 15-April 26, 1997

In April, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts had its second exhibition of sculptures by Roxy Paine, a young artist whose work is some of the most exciting around. It speaks to the artist's role as maker, and to the sort of making, in variety and difference, that is his provenance. Paine's work connects artmaking to the theoretical and logistical methods employed passively by the artist in creating an active art object. Paine insists that his work is about nature and its potential. This recalls Harold Rosenberg's essay "The Anxious Object," which describes how any artwork which is opaque can work off of the viewer's anxiety to suggest ideas. In Paine's case, that idea is a sense of the mode of communication being formed. This language is invented in three ways: by an attempt at the organic simulacra; an organizing of abstract aggregates; and by a mechanically repetitive action.

Psilocybe cubensis Field, 1997 (detail)
2200 unique hallucinogenic mushrooms
polymer with lacquer and oil paint
4 1/4 x 328 x 5 1/3 inches

Poison Ivy Field (Toxicodendron radicans), 1977
poison ivy, skunk cabbage, dandelions, grasses
(cast in PETG and vinyl with lacquer and oil paint)
sticks, stones and earth in maple Plexiglas case
41 x 48 x 66 inches

The first thread of Paine's work is represented by Mushroom Field (1997) and Poison Ivy (1997). These works study the superficial and structural edifice of natural organisms. In both Mushroom Field and Poison Ivy, he assimilates the multiplicity and organic density of living matter. Both are just what they describe, images composed to as to immediately mirror the surface design of nature's own idea. Mushroom Field is set upon the floor, two thousand individual models for real life psylocybin mushrooms, each drawn out and designed with variations of color and growth patterns, as well as the wavelike pattern of the field as a whole, covering an area some ten or twenty feet in diameter. The effect is quite unsettling, of encountering these realistic lifeforms sprouting from the dead wood floor of the gallery space. It is almost hopeful in such a stance. It suggests that the gallery takes part in the in the growth of the artist, or the art in general. In Poison Ivy, the attention for detail is the same, but the approach is different. Instead of building a natural manifestation into the gallery area, he has collected living poison ivy plants and planted them inside a glassenclosed patch of ground, along with versions of the self same plants which he has fabricated.The effect is one of puzzlement, even of wonder, but a certain degree of encounter has been eliminated in placing these specimens under glass. They can no longer exert an effect upon us via their touch or proximity to us, or through our anxiety related to this particular plant.

Model Painting, 1996
polymer, mahogany case, 61 x 85 x 5 1/4 inches

Model for an Abstract Sculpture, 1997
objects cast from blister packaging and custom molds
Durham Rock Hard Water Putty, polymer, steel and auto paint
4 x 96 x 138 inches

Model Painting (1996) and Model For An Abstract Sculpture (1997) both represent a system of communication developed solely by Paine, edited and constructed like hieroglyphs. In the first, he has been able to isolate solidified flesh colored polymer brush strokes; in the second, he has accumulated various blister packs. Blister packs are part of the refuse of daily life, something which Paine has been able to utilize with regard to ideas of both positive and negative space inherent in their forms. In other words, it's initially difficult to view them as forms created to wrap around other forms. But within their model skeleton they approach a sense of anatomy, of social and political connections between shapes. Each pack then becomes a house in a town, a cell in a body, or a symbol in a system of scientific order. However, the objects accumulated with these works are neither mere simulacra nor Dadaesque mind games made flesh.The shapes of the objects, if they can be called that, whether blister pack or polymer brush stroke, suggest only the vaguest of forms, creating an inventive and playful acrostic of formal origin. Their organization is the creation of the new language being formed in us.

Paint Dipper, 1997
Steel frame, dipping vat, acrylic paint, chair and
computer controlled machinery with custom interface
and relays
124 x 99x 23 inches

Painting 17352011997, 1997
acrylic on canvas
45 x 57 x 3 1/4 inches

The third and final thread of Paine's work is represented by Paint Dipper (1997), a machine constructed to create paintings by a slow and methodical process.The canvasses hang above a vat of thick white house paint, which is timed to open and dip them down to a certain measured point every few hours over the duration of twenty four hours. It moves so slowly that rarely does the spectator actually see a painting being dipped, but as it hangs there, dripping paint off onto the machine and the floor around it completing the process for which it was built it is fusing ideas of natural formation with inorganic production, and this points out the limitation of the machine. By the manner of its manic and regular action, a process of ambiguous signification surfaces, one which can also be seen in any of the other works here, a negation of individual creation that when taken to an extreme creates a force ofjuggernaut proportions. This is the activity into which each of us falls when we try to compensate for the stultifying complexity of creative demands. Thus, Paint Dipper shows itself as eerie proof of our inability to contain or answer the complex demands of everyday life. All that the artist retains is his individual and idiosyncratic vitality. Paine's work is never dependent upon the forms invented in nature, but in forces directly supervised, and to some degree invented, by the artist. His control of them is both his freedom and ours.

Annette Messager at Gagosian

1997-05-01T17:06:00.000-04:00

The most recent exhibition by Annette Messager finds her deconstructing her collective oeuvre through an accruance of the motifs that have previously represented her. Dependance lndependance (1995-97) fills the room of Gagosian Gallery, employing both the scale and cavernous feel of the gallery space.

Dependancelndependance seems a complete departure from the sophisticated games between language and assemblage evident in many of her previous ereations. Whereas in earlier assemblages such as Penetration (1993 94) or Parade (1994 95) there was a tangible separation between the experience of the viewer and the drama enacted by the installation, here Messager seems to intend the complete confusion of the two. Entering the gallery, the first thing one sees is a mass of coils and nets which hold plastic bags filled with colourful masses resembling human organs or lost objects from the distant past. It is difficult to discern relative wholes within the mixture of images and objects. However there are regions dominated by a particular motif, such as headless dolls dressed in black with cotoured pencils puncturing them at every juncture, or photographs of Messager herself making childish faces. These self portraits mock nightmare images: the artist's cheeks are pushed in with tongue protruding; and her hands are pressed to her nose with eyes peering up and away, creating a medusae of harmless but alarming visual expressions. In other areas of the gallery, groups of arms and legs made from plush doll material hang communally, as if to suggest the collective uselessness or exterior appendages in a world created not by action, but its reverse. In other areas still, strings of puffy letters dangle among the nets and webs: ATTENDE...PROMESSE...SOUPÇON...CRAINTE," shouting to the viewer in angst ridden ambiguity. These vertical word hangings are the least representative of Messager's methods and the least effective.

The installation as a whole seems an unfettered miasma of et notions and reasons within the context of its title. Dependence could relate to that of a child upon its parents, or, in Messager's lexicon, to that of a lover upon the object of devotion. My first impression was that I was entering the pathways of the artist's mind, as if Messager was attempting a complete remove (hinted at in previous creations) from the physical world. Instead of composing scenes from a world of darkness, Messager has ejected herself wholeheartedly into that world, willing to accept the loss of identity it promises, along with the transcendence of consciousness. Though the form of her expression is sometimes problematic, lacking the sophistication, humour and sense of ritual evinced by previous small scale assemblages, she still creates an oppressive density of objects that, in falling, remain in collusion yet do not touch one another. Like the characters of a scroll, they unwind together as the tale is told.

C Magazine #53, May-August 1997

All My Writing So Far

1997-04-29T01:40:00.001-04:00

1993
Joseph Beuys essay, Junior year, Bradford College

1996
The Cowboy Wally Show by Kyle Baker, review for Cover Arts
Jim Toia at Kim Foster, review for Cover Arts
After Andy: Soho in the Eighties by Paul Taylor, review for Cover Arts
Dionisio Blanco at Barnard Biederman Fine Art, review for Cover Arts
Petah Coyne at Laurence Miller, review for NY SoHo Arts

1997
Art Is Where The Home Was at Foramen Magnum Gallery, exhibition catalog
Annette Messager at Gagosian, C Magazine, Toronto, Ontario, review
Jose Antonio Hernandez-Diez, review for NY SoHo Arts, review
Nancy Spero at Jack Tilton, PPOW & NY Kunsthalle, NY SoHo Arts, review
Roxy Paine at Ronald Feldman Fine Art, Zingmagazine, review

1998
Abstraction in Process II at Artists Space, NY SoHo Arts, review
Original Scale at Apex Art, NY SoHo Arts, review
Mona Hatoum at The New Museum, NY SoHo Arts, review
Peggy Bates at Tobey Fine Arts, exhibition catalogue

1999
Aaron Rose at Paul Kasmin, www.articlemagazine.com, review

2000
Lisa Stefanelli at Pierogi 2000, Zingmagazine, review
Moyra Davie at American Fine Arts Co, Zingmagazine, review

2001
On Kawara at David Zwirner, C Magazine, Toronto, Ontario, review

2002
Erotika at Riva Gallery, exhibition catalogue
Liz-N-Val, self-published catalogue
David Henry Brown Jr at Daniel Silverstein, Zingmagazine, review
Tracy Nakayama at Modern Culture, Flash Art, Milan, review
Roe Ethridge at Andrew Kreps, Flash Art, Milan, review
Ge-Karel van der Sterren at Henry Urbach Architecture, Flash Art, Milan, review
Sandra Bermudez, NY ARTS, article

2003
Erwin Redl at Riva Gallery, exhibition statement
Leemour Pelli at University of Central Florida, Orlando, exhibition catalogue
Terry Haggerty at Riva Gallery, exhibition statement

2004
Sampling Identity: The Work of Carla Gannis. Pablo's Birthday, gallery catalogue
Second-Generation Ego: Diana Shpungin and Nicole Engelmann, The University of Massachusetts in Amherst, exhibition statement
PERFORMING ARTS JOURNAL Mining the Urban Divide: The Work of Matthew McCaslin

2005
Beautiful Dreamer at Spaces Inc, Cleveland, Ohio, essay for gallery catalogue
WBURG.COM Innocence Bound: The Paintings of Mike Cockrill, 31 Grand

2006
Peter Barrett at Ingalls & Associates, Miami, Florida, essay for gallery catalogue
Limbo Karma: The Paintings of Thomas Frontini. Lawrence Asher Gallery, essay for gallery catalogue

2007
ART NOTES, Review: Amanda Church at Michael Steinberg Fine Art
ART NOTES, Review: Allan McCollum at Friedrich Petzel
ART NOTES, Review: Carroll Dunham at Gladstone
Discursive Archaeology: The Photographs of Leah Oates, essay for self-published catalogue
Chi Xuan Ji, essay for museum catalogue
Piao Guangxie, essay for catalogue
Mary Ann Strandell, essay for catalogue
Point Suite: Introduction for Artists Visual Anthology