Prism Schizm

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of taking a visit to the Hamptons to escape the oppressive New York City heat. Brooklyn based painter Ryan Wallace was my host and showed me around the latest exhibition at Halsey Mckay Gallery, a new summer long gallery venture. Their second show, Patterns and Light is a solo exhibition of work by San Francisco artist Chris Duncan. It’s funny that I came to escape the heat; walking into a room full of Chris’s work is like staring into the sun.  The largest work in the show, Prism Schizm is the most obvious in this respect. The yarn construction is like a tapestry of homespun summer air erupting from a tiny quicksilver pyramid. Two floor level mirror constructs feel like pooled quicksilver set out to collect strings of color that ooze lazily from its grinning wall sized façade.

A New Way to Cope

In the gallery’s back room the only two paintings in the show shine like hypnotic rubix cube mandalas. Each is a self contained orbit of mad, beautiful color set against gauzy white constraints. We celebrate the artist’s ability to leap joyfully across the color wheel with the practiced legs of an athlete. A series of monochromatic paper and tape collages and an array of dizzying triangular photo constructions are hazy and simplistic, if no less intense. In many ways the exhibition space feels like a laboratory. The artist takes every opportunity to turn the mirror against us, examining the way we perceive and digest color and light. What is interesting to me is that beneath this conversation, lying at rest like dormant genetic code is a sure footed confidence and shamanic intensity. The result is a love letter of profound gravity tempered with the cool, practical language of a scientist.

When it comes to Art Galleries in New York, I have to admit, I have a crush on the Lower East Side. Perhaps that’s trite, but I don’t care.  I have been watching with cheerful expectations the last couple of years as one after another small, independently owned gallery moved into the neighborhood. The gritty, DIY aesthetic of the storefront gallery is something that appeals to me on a visceral level. There is something more personable here.  I no longer feel the need to rally against the white cube aesthetic of museums or larger Chelsea galleries when standing in the charmingly askew planes of a gallery that’s walls have begun to sag.  There are a number of incredibly well curated, exciting contemporary galleries in this neighborhood. Needless to say, I can’t resist excitement when a promising new one joins their ranks.

Toomer Labzda gallery- run by husband and wife team  Helen Toomer Labzda and Christopher Labzda- opened its doors on Forsyth st. on June 24^th. Their first exhibition is an impressive display by British artist Mia Taylor.  Taylor’s first US solo exhibition is indicative of the artist’s colorful, zany oeuvre. Her wall mounted sculptures feel like playful finger jabs, the relentless tickle of an artist reciting the vocabulary of modernism through a sing song warble. Her timber, paper and cloth construction are neon, cheerful and for all of their whimsy, have a rough and tumble edge that left me slightly uneasy. The artist’s drawings are equally as vibrant and seem to shoot neon mind waves throughout the room. I respect the sparse paring of objects in this exhibition, a strategy that tends to lend them the formal weight they deserve. I did leave the show wishing I could see more. The result was like the whispered first words of a promise, a hint of exciting possibility both from the artist and gallery.

Courtesy of the Artist

Ryan Wallace is a painter and mixed media artist who lives and works in Brooklyn.  His body of work spans a range of influences, re-purposing a variety of art historical and popular references into a fluid vocabulary of rough, playful abstraction. His paintings vary in size and medium but are united by their alternating notions of fragmentation and unity and by a moody, often diffuse tone. His compositions reflect the payload of modernism viewed through the dust covered lens of a gritty, sun bleached kaleidoscope. His interest in the way information is presented, transmitted and stored results in a sensibility that is equal parts science, mysticism and high fives. I had a chance to stop by the artists Greenpoint studio recently to talk with the artist.

HH: You went to school at RISD, your background is in illustration, have you always been a painter?

RW: I don’t have a deft touch. I have to work things into submission to gather my bearings. I tend to make a mess and then clean it up. There is room for this approach in painting. Painting has always felt most natural to me. I’ve been making sculptures and other three dimensional experiments lately but those even feel rooted in my approach to two-dimensional picture making. I stumble into these efforts as a result of not being able to articulate a tone or idea on a flat surface.

HH: You frequently work in the space between painting, collage and printmaking. Perhaps you can speak to this. How do different mediums fit into your practice?

RW: They all inform one and other. I’m always interested in finding new ways to use materials that are endemic to their specific properties. Certain types of work I can only resolve on paper, others on canvas or panel. The limitations of each lead to breakthroughs in others. In this sense the formal quality of materials is a very important part of my practice. I think I have a consistent sensibility and the outcomes are guided by the materials themselves. It keeps making things interesting. I couldn’t sit down and make ten paintings one at a time one after the other. While an oil painting is drying I may work on a mold for a sculpture or a piece on paper. It keeps the experience of being in the studio feeling fresh. I am free to work on what feels appropriate at the time. I think it also keeps a thread between the variety of media within a body of work.

Courtesy of the Artist

HH: You are constantly working on several bodies of work, each embodies a separate formal element of your practice. Your make collages, what you termed “proper oil paintings,” spare minimal “tablet” paintings, as well as evocative unique prints, how do you imagine each as part of the whole?

RW: I see it all as one body of work composed in parts revealed at various times.  I have mentioned before Brian Eno’s idea of a song as a selection lifted from a larger soundscape. I see my work functioning like this as well. That each piece is a selection of a larger atmosphere or timeline. Sometimes these parts are ripped from this environment and sometimes taken as an elegant slice or section. Certain paintings seem to be disintegrating or building themselves in front of you. Lately I have been looking at the Timeline pieces functioning like an Atlas and the other works as specificities within this larger collection. Atlas is also the name of particle detector at CERN that I have done research on. I like when monikers fall into place like that and this is often how I come to title works. In regards to my last show. I started the (((Ω.))) paintings in the summer of 2009. I developed them to a certain point then I photographed them and put them away for a year or so. Then, I bitmapped and tweaked the pictures in Photoshop and made lithography plates from those images. These plates became the basis for the works in the large square grid in the show. As I began those works on paper, I switched from newsprint to a finer, whiter drawing paper and Mylar to catch the run off from the plates in the printmaking process. Those pieces of paper and Mylar make up the cut pieces in Mist (Timeline) 3 and other works with the collage elements. Then I looked at everything and went back to finish the paintings that I had first started. From there I felt that the gestures in the work could be played with in a different way and maintain a similar tone and the Tablet paintings are the result of that exploration. So there is a physical and material relationship between the work as well as a conceptual link.

Courtesy of the Artist

HH: Your collage pieces especially are defined by their use of form, there are clearly references to painterly tradition and modernism, but you draw equally from science. Where do you gather these influences?

RW: I read a lot of books and magazines, I attend seminars from time to time. Youtube and the web are valuable resources for research.

Right now I’m watching this:

http://www.wimp.com/bighistory/

I focus less on specificity and more on the gesture of these types of ideas. I am especially interested in the human condition, how we operate, perceive and interpret the world around us.   I see a parallel between our own personal fears and desires and the way that the public views developments and trends in the sciences. The fuzziness of reality and imagination.

I recently read an article in Discover about how teams at the University of Rochester and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  were having success with a series of quantum experiments showing that measurements performed in the future can influence the present. They call this Reverse Causality. Destiny is another more familiar word. They were studying this by observing particles under a laser run through several mirrored reflections, over a prolonged period of time, much longer than is typical in these types of experiments. I saw this as a very similar approach to making a painting. You sit and observe and wait for things to happen in front of your stare and you go back, revisit marks and areas and make necessary adjustments. My work isn’t about the science of Reverse Causality. I will tap into an idea like this in terms of its approach to observation and time and philosophical nature and use that as a starting point for my work. Science has given me a lot of starting points in recent years.

What I find fascinating or worth further research isn’t important to the work beyond getting me to begin it.  I am just trying to make pictures that contribute to the dialogue of painting. I see each piece as “a painting” not a painting about this or that.

HH: When did you start using collage, how do you approach this process?

RW: I have always made collages. As far as how I apply it now it began by wanting edges harder than I could make with paint. I was cutting out images and shapes from paper to get this type of edge and collaging those pieces into narrative, architectural paintings. As the work began to abstract more and more I still had these piles of cut paper and mylar laying around. Some pieces were of recognizable things and some were just scraps with color and texture that I had built up.  I shared a studio at the time with the artist Joseph Hart. He uses cut paper and collage as a primary method in his work. He moves the pieces around on the page and makes malleable compositions that he plays with until they are glued down. I found this technique to be a fast way to find surprising results that I employed in my own work. Having this detritus around I was able to experiment with familiar material during this period of transition.

HH: Your paintings reference both the celestial and the grid, is there a logical intersection for the magical and the rational?

RW: When I present a piece like (((Ω.))) Cycle,

http://www.ryanmwallace.com/Guerrero8.html

those are the precise kinds of concerns that I am hoping to incite within the viewer. I try and keep any opinion out of the work but use materials and visual cues to guide its reception.

Courtesy of the Artist

HH: Your works seem to champion a level of instability; there is a sense of both momentum and collapse. There is something dystopic, though your paintings are composed of light there is darkness, where do you fit in this contradiction?

RW: The notion of serenity subverted is a common theme. This brings us back to the blur and fuzziness of perception that I am interested in. With those paintings, I am aware that they reference Ross Bleckner’s light paintings at the same time as aboriginal dot paintings. The big bang and the big crunch. This white light is our symbol of creation and of death.  I like the ambiguity of all of this.  I think it breathes mystery into works that at first glance feel so direct. I find that it helps the viewer come to the work on their own terms.

Courtesy of the Artist

HH: The introduction to your recent catalogue quotes Pierre Chardin. Can you elaborate on the significance of “the omega”?

RW: The Omega Point is a term that he coined in his book The Phenomenon of Man. Chardin’s theoretical “Omega Point” describes evolution as a process that leads to increasing complexity, culminating in the unification of consciousness. While I find these types of theories beautiful I am wary of lofty singular ideas and predictions: the end of the world, a raison d’etre for evolution, one supernatural being, universe, politic, etc. The nature of this singular event is subverted by painting more than one.Here is total consciousness….wait, maybe it’s this one.

I used this idea as the starting point for works in a recent solo show at Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco. A critic wrote this about this installation:

http://www.ryanmwallace.com/Guerrero1.html

“This visual reverie is interrupted in the installation by the sheer  repetition of nearly identical canvases in tight proximity to each other. The frequency seemingly degrades the potency of each piece, shifting the interpretation of the sequence of paintings to the act of repetition itself. Robbed of this perceptual intimacy, the series as a whole shifts to a veneer of pop decadence, as if the canvases were nightclub promotions.”

He really understood what I am doing, though I’m not sure that he realized it. I found this very complimentary, I think it was meant to be critical.

HH: We’ve talked about your influences, from sci-fi to physics. Who are some of the contemporary artists you’re looking at today? Is there anyone who you feel pushes you?

RW: I find the artists closest to me to be the biggest inspiration.

Last week the best shows that I saw were by Mark Grotjahn, Picasso, Sol Lewitt and Katy Moran.

Tara Donovan’s show of pin paintings at Pace was exceptional as was the recent Rudolf Stingel show at Gagosian.

HH: Your starting a gallery in East Hampton, tell us a little bit about it.

RW: It is called Halsey Mckay Gallery and we are now open. The name is a combination of our grand mothers maiden names. Mckay is also my middle name. I opened it with my good friend Hilary Schaffner. She is an artist and in recent years has focused more on curatorial endeavors. She has a strong background in photography so between the two of us we have a pretty thorough appreciation of a broad spectrum of work. We are working with several artists but for the main exhibition area of the gallery we are focusing on one and two person shows. You can see images of our first show by Patrick Brennan here:

http://www.halseymckay.com/patrick-brennan-there-is-an-ocean/patrick-brennan%E2%80%93there-is-an-ocean

We are really excited to bring artists that we are close with and whose work we believe in to the Hamptons where there is a great understanding, history and support for visual art. It all happened very quickly and I feel very fortunate to have such amazing artists to give opportunities to and a great space to show the work in. The artists that we have in our schedule are truly emerging. They are all showing in New York and abroad and have exciting careers but may not have appeared in a biennial or major museum show yet.  We are hoping to be able to exhibit these artists work in a setting that doesn’t have all of the pressure of a big New York show but still is exposed to serious patrons, artists and those who appreciate great work. The community in East Hampton can provide this.

HH: What are your plans? Upcoming shows?

RW: It’s a busy summer that I am really excited about.

I will be in Grasping for Relics at Zieher Smith organized by Patrick Brennan.

Summer Whites at Rachel Uffner curated by Eddie Martinez and Sam Moyer.

I’m releasing a book that I made with Oakland publisher Land and Sea at my friend Annabelle’s shop on June 17th. This is a joint release along with beautiful books made by Dave Kennedy Cutler and Ruby Sky Stiler.

I will be in a show at Blackburn 20/20 as part of a fellowship that I did at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop.

I am curating a show at Eric Firestone Gallery in East Hampton called Domestic Goods. May 28-June 28. This is a large group show of some of my favorite people and artists.

At Halsey Mckay we are putting on five exhibitions from the end of May through September:

Patrick Breannan May 20-June 7

Joseph Hart & Ruby Sky Stiler June 10-July 4

Chris Duncan July 8-July 31

A Group show curated by Rachel Uffner August 5- September 6

Glen Baldridge & Bryan Graf September 6-October 3

Courtesy of Morgan Lehman

To be honest, I haven’t found myself spending very much time in Chelsea as of late. For one reason or another I find myself chasing the promise of art in the Lower East Side along Orchard Street, or running through the galleries scattered across Williamsburg.  This said, I was happily surprised when I walked into Andrew Schoultz’s opening last week at Morgan Lehman gallery. The gallery features primarily young, emerging artists and the exhibition felt all the more vibrant considering its 23^rd street environs.

Courtesy of Morgan Lehman

The exhibit, Unrest, is a gargantuan attempt at wrestling with the American psyche. The artist mines symbolism from our national mythology, combining a sense of history with the dissonant bustle of contemporary life. Hulking brick monuments crumble and atomize, obscured by a swarm of personal and historical imagery. Trappings of mysticism and state authority recall the visual vocabulary of our founding fathers. The gallery’s press release explains that “The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Japanese Earthquakes and the BP oil spill all fuel this new body of work.” While none of this is perhaps readily apparent, what we do see is a certain level of zeitgeist, an expression of the collective unease. In “Black Flag Storm” an arc like boat, with sales made from collaged squares of international currency is assaulted by a hail of black flags (traditionally a symbol of the anarchist.) As in many of his other pictures, it is as if all the  trappings  of the establishment have themselves arisen from slumber to aimlessly mill about in an anxious moshpit of  sacred regalia.

Courtesy of Morgan Lehman

Perhaps what I enjoyed the most was the level of whimsy. There is a sense of playful abandon and optimism that evokes art’s ability not only to remind and empower but also to distract and refresh.  In an age of Fox News, where politics is dominated by punditry, Schoultz’s brand of esoteric caricature is all the more refreshing. We are shown the thin line between the rational and the irrational between the official and the personal. What we are left with is a sense of unease and the possibility of subtle disobedience.

"Don't Tread on Me" Three Channel Video installation. Performance still, Momenta Art, 2011 (Photo: Alesia Exum)

Chelsea Knight is a New York based video artist. She recently completed residencies at the Whitney Independent Study Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and was a 2007 Fulbright Fellow in Italy. She is a current resident at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program.  Her video installations tackle the dynamics of political and social control. Her narratives blend fiction and reality in a singular fluid motion. Her subjects have included professional dancers, military instructors, prison inmates and the artist’s own parents. She encourages her characters to improvise, creating a tension between the personal and the scripted.  The artist’s videos examine the ways in which both governmental and domestic forces control our emotional, political and social reality. It is Chelsea’s great strength to lay bear the wires by which humans manipulate and entrap one another. I recently had a chance to stop by her studio in lower Manhattan to chat about her work, recent projects and future plans.

"I Am Not a Man, Not Now" Single Channel Video, 14 Minutes, 2011

Howard Hurst: Your recent piece “The End of All Resistance” features two U.S. army interrogators as they role-play official “emotional interrogation techniques” taken directly from the Army Field Manual.  You then had two female actors and your parents improvise upon a re-enact the script. Where did the impetus for this project come from?

Chelsea Knight: I was reading a book about non-violent interrogation by Matthew Alexander (How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq, Free Press, 2008), and I found it really interesting to think about removing the physical extreme of torture from an interrogation, being left with a series of nonviolent, institutionalized emotional manipulations. I feel like the American population is so galvanized for or against the use of physical interrogation techniques but aren’t having many mainstream conversations about the nature of verbal interrogation, do we need it, what should it include, what does it mean, etc. The army manual on which I based my project (US Army Field Manual 22-2-3, 2006, available free online) has a specific list of “emotional techniques” that seems to borrow from popular culture —one technique encourages the use of good cop / bad cop, and is named “Mutt and Jeff” after the cartoon characters. I was interested in making a work that backed away from torture and focused more on the way emotional manipulation in these techniques borrows both from the language of intimate relationships and the media.

HH:  In “End of All Resistance”, as well as other projects, there seem to be a focus on relationships of power.

CK: I feel relationships of power are at the core of every social interaction, they affect the way we use and interpret language, and in like manner, language affects the way we understand and use power. I’ve always been drawn to writing and art that reveals roles of authority or control in extremes: work that either lays itself bare and exposes its intention, or hides itself, its violence, its power and its truth in language. In “The End of All Resistance” the power relationships are laid out in the manual very clearly, almost embarrassingly so. I was fascinated by this as an openly published thing, almost as if a secret was being revealed. What wasn’t being addressed in the manual was the accepted fact that this is how interrogations should be carried out, this was the way bodies should be regarded, played with, manipulated. It was treated as self-evident. I began thinking about the ways we learn social codes from watching others, and how our intimate lives mirror these unspoken rules and the play element of power.  I wanted to make work about that.

"Acting Out" Single Channel Video Installation, 19 minutes, 2010

HH:  Your videos seem to be quite complex, and labor intensive, is there a finished product in mind from the beginning? How much of the process is intuitive?

CK: I set up a specific framework for each piece, and then within that framework there is a fair amount of improvisation. The participants I work with are usually people authentic to a given field: interrogators, or diplomats, Tea Partiers, etc., so they drive a fair amount of the content within each piece, and we always discuss how much of a piece will be true vs. fictional, intimate vs. alienated, etc.  So yes, the process is intuitive to a degree, including the editing, but is also mapped out in a pretty specific way beforehand.

HH:  You are a graduate of the Whitney Studio Program. The director Ron Clark is known for his very specific theoretical focus. How was that experience?

CK: I enjoyed the ISP, we read an interesting range of theories: feminist, psychoanalytic, queer, economic, etc. The main thread for me was the formation of the subject, and the ability or inability of that subject to resist larger frameworks of power, both on an intimate or self-reflexive level, and in relation to larger ideological frameworks. I think the program affected my work in lots of ways; I’m still processing it.

HH:  You recently screened an installation of your project Don’t Tread On Me at Momenta Art. The video takes members of the Tea Party as its subject. What drew you to this project?

CK: After my year at the ISP, which was very politically left-focused, I felt I wanted to experiment with political persuasions different from my own, and see what bridging (if any) might be possible. So I collaborated on the piece with members of the Tea Party, libertarians, and Ayn Rand enthusiasts who are right-leaning, to see what conversations might arise. An important part of the final performance and video was some physical choreography by the participants based in some ways on their ideology. Though we weren’t able to find many common points of view, the image of their bodies moving through space creates a vulnerable counterpart (the body) to the firm and fixed authority of the political views being spoken.

HH:  What seems to unite your various projects is an interest in peeling back layers of perception, fictional and otherwise.  This involves a mix of scripted performance, improvisation, and actual interview. I imagine each piece as an evolving performance, where the juiciest bits happen in the margins, off script.  I am thinking especially of “Acting Out”, where you filmed prisoners inside the County Jail in Skowhegan, Maine  performing scenes from Ubu Roi. How does this process work? When you embark on a project, when you choose a script, what are you hoping to find?

CK: Each project is a collaboration in some sense, though I ultimately edit or co-edit the pieces and have control over how they are seen, but in many ways the meaning is arrived at collectively. In “Acting Out,” a collaboration with artist Austin Shull, we chose the location, the script, the actors and even a director, but the overall project was driven by the convergence of all of those elements. The piece re-enacts a nineteenth century political parody play, with some absurdist twists, within the confines of a jail. We were struck most of all by how prejudiced our ideas about confinement were, what it meant to be “in jail” and to perpetuate stereotypes about what a prisoner does and who he or she is. Recognizing this, we chose the title based on Freudian term “Acting Out” which denotes an inability to work through something, the tendency to perpetuate it by acting it out over and over again. The piece therefore isn’t documentary but isn’t strictly fiction either, it’s a depiction of how people respond to an environment beyond their experience but firmly fixed in their imagination.

"The End of All Resistance" Single Channel Video, 29 Minutes, 2010

HH:  How do you fit into this process? How has making videos like “The End of All Resistance” effected  you? Are the results expected or anticipated?

CK: I’m always surprised by the results of my projects. The End of All Resistance turned out much the way I originally envisioned it—that piece was more based on transcription and careful planning than some of my other work. And yet I was not anticipating the intricacies of my father and stepmothers’ interpretations of the process of interrogation, nor the fact that the actresses would choose to interpret the interrogative transcripts as though they were on a cop show, or the kindness and professionalism of the army interrogators themselves. Each relationship I filmed and participated in both contracted and expanded as we went through the process together.

I was surprised, perhaps naively, most of all, by the outcome of the Tea Party project, “Don’t Tread on Me.” I expected to find points of convergence and softening between myself and the participants. Instead I found I got along well with the people involved, but felt myself completely shut down by their views, and polarized more to the left by what I was reading, hearing and understanding. Reading right wing essays left me feeling enervated and depressed, I expected to be more resilient.

HH:  You also have done several projects of photography. How do you view your prints in relation to the videos?

CK: In my work with the Tea Party, I used photographs as ancillary to the videos, connected but also stand-alone. The images in that project depict stereotypes about freedom in the US, and include an image of two wall-street executives wearing Greek masks. The videos don’t have any direct reference to the photographs, but there is a kind of slippage between them. In other cases I make photos without any accompaniment, but they always relate heavily to themes embedded in my other video and performance work. In a recent project dedicated entirely to photography, “The Historical Contemporary,” I appropriated old filmstrip images from 1970s educational filmstrips on European, Asian and African cultures.  Some images show women being instructed by men in various industrial and commercial environments. Others show women instructing their daughters in domestic spaces. I was interested in the way women were portrayed as workers in these images, but always childlike, under the watchful eye of a man, and in turn they are allowed to instruct their daughters—actual children—but only in matters of the home. That series was shown on its own at a recent group show at Harvard University, but will be shown again alongside a current project I am working on about women and labor.

HH:  What are you working on currently? You just finished filming a project at the Met?

CK: I just finished a collaboration with artist Elise Rasmussen, where we explore Antigone in its references to the roles of women in ancient Greece. We read the play as both a proto-feminist play and a misogynistic one, where the protagonist engages in acts of brave civil disobedience, but is also 
used as an example of a stereotypical feminine tendency to feel rather than think. Elise and I try to draw attention to the way language is used against women in the play, its loss and gain of intention through time, and its relevance today. We were lucky to be able to film part of the project at the Met museum. I’m also working on a collaboration with writer Melissa Seley, a colleague of mine at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program, with a performance and video to be shown at the LMCC open Studios on May 13-15.

Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery

At the risk of generalizing, I’ll admit that I am often suspicious of art that presents itself as “conceptual.” What frightens me is the disconnect that often exists between concept and experience. Discussing this idea with an acquaintance at a party several years ago I was asked mockingly “do you seek to be moved?” I do, and firmly believe that successful conceptual art can elicit not only a cerebral, but also a visceral physical response in the viewer.  With this in mind, I had few expectations when I wandered into Sean Kelly Gallery in Chelsea last Wednesday. What I found was a mixed, but ultimately satisfying exhibition of works by Joseph Kosuth.

Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery

The first two installations present relatively standard fair in terms of Kosuth’s oeuvre.  There is a recreation of the artist’s first gallery show in 1968. The ten photo works on aluminum present his famous black and white dictionary definitions of  “nothing”.  While the pieces might be slightly obsolete on their own, the pleasant scent of nostalgia hangs in the air to good effect.  A neon installation based on James Joyce’s Ulysses from 1998 was on display in the next room. This installation was perhaps less impressive considering the glut of uninspired neon at this years Armory show. Having said that, it would be foolish to discount Kosuth’s early and frequent mastery of this medium.

Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery

Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery

The main gallery features an ambitious, never before exhibited work. The cavernous space has been transformed into a black walled void. A single band of neon spells out excerpts from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and from his lesser-known Texts for Nothing.  Hovering just below the ceiling, the author’s words are eerily disembodied from their surroundings.  The muted light only emphasizes the thick sense of blackness oozing through the room. The only sound is the hum of electricity. The artist is undeniably present, contemplating the void from dimly lit margins. The result is both disquieting and meditative. I circled the walls of the gallery four times before realizing it. As I stumbled through Kosuth’s amalgam of borrowed language I felt my stomach tighten. What I encountered was the punch in the stomach I have been waiting for. Kosuth’s strength plays expertly in the space between meaning and its presentation, and Texts (Waiting for-) for Nothing’ Samuel Beckett, in play, is no exception.

Courtesy of the artist

Vince Contarino is a New York based painter. His multi-layered canvasses explore the  language of abstraction.  From first glance there is something illusive in Contarino’s canvases, a tension between the forthright and the concealed. The artist often repurposes forgotten brushstrokes and colors, pasting them into his collages and works on paper. The result is something both beautiful and challenging, a floating soup of the painterly. Contarino’s belief in the ongoing relevance of abstraction is mirrored in his extracurricular activities. His most recent curatorial project, “The Working Title”, organized with painter Kris Chatterson, opens at the Bronx Art Center next Friday. I recently had the chance to speak with the artist over the phone.

Courtesy of the artist

HH: Perhaps you could tell our readers a little about yourself. When did you start painting, how are your recent works different from the older ones?

VC: I made a conscious decision to move to NYC and become a painter right after receiving my undergrad from the Ringling School of Art & Design, near where I grew up in Sarasota, FL. It was an eye-opening experience, and I was pretty much starting from scratch in terms of developing work that I could call my own.

I’ve always been interested in the idea of seeing the artist’s hand in paintings, but also respond to work that involves conceptual thought and decision-making. There is a certain trance-like state that we all enter to varying degrees when we make our work, but I am invested in balancing that with more conscious thinking about the marks I make and the relationships they have to each other in the paintings.

Having a simple approach is important to my process. I love the economy of drawing with pencil on paper and the free-handed unpredictability of translating those ideas into my paintings, that in the earlier work were more directly fluid.

I worked for years like this until I eventually took a break from this approach and began making collage works on paper composed of discarded marks that opened up a more assertive and investigative way to expand the language of my paintings.

HH: To paint abstract today is a loaded activity and can mean so many things. Do you feel the pressure of previous generations?

VC: I think artists working with abstraction today have the advantage of hind sight, and rather than being intimidated or exhausted by the weight of history, these conversations with previous generations offer a variety of methods in developing your own voice. When I look back at the hard-lined stances of particular movements of those that came before us, there is a pattern of reactionary abandonment, or dismissal of certain approaches by the latest generation in order to move things forward.

What is happening now feels like it takes on a less defensive stance on making art, and encourages the freedom of working in an open dialogue with the past, seeking out and elaborating on previous approaches that may have been have marginalized or forgotten.

Courtesy of the artist

HH: I am especially drawn to your acoustic series, along with your recent collages which seem to be a point of departure in your painting. Can you speak to these works, where did they come from?

VC: I started the acoustic series over the summer as a way to further explore using discarded marks in a limited setting. Kind of similar to how a singer/songwriter might come up with a new song on an acoustic jam.

Some other things on my mind while working on this project have been the lingering effect of early cinema, particularly Film Noir, cut-and-paste DIY punk show flyers, and a desire to create this ever-evolving black shrine that I can reference when working on my paintings.

The removal of color gives them the preliminary quality of a drawing while searching for ideas through value, texture and placement. Instead of attempting to reinvent form, I’m left with works that create a visual dialogue based on my collections of shapes and gestures. I prefer to allow the complexity to reveal itself in the process by creating depth on a flat surface and organizing the finished works through various configurations in my studio.

HH: What part does editing and self selection play in your work?

VC: An important part of my studio practice involves searching for casual gestures and pairing them with more deliberately constructed forms. While there is room for chance and discovery, I try to operate in a middle ground that is neither restrictive or self indulgent, continually editing down the paintings to their most important elements.

HH: Let’s talk about your upcoming show, The Working Title. What gave you the motivation to start curating shows? Why abstraction?

VC: This show in particular came out of an online project called Progress Report, that I co-founded with painter Kris Chatterson. It is dedicated to artist features, studio visits and is intended as a curatorial resource for ourselves and others. We wanted to create something that was highly visual, had a more editorial, photo-journalistic feel, and would give our readers a glimpse of the creative process from the working artist’s perspective.

Both Kris & I are interested in the elasticity and possibilities of abstraction in our own work and were offered the opportunity to put this show together based on the work we were featuring on Progress Report.

The organization of this exhibition was specific about arranging contrasting approaches that would encourage unpredictable relationships from a curatorial perspective. Minimalism, post-modern, geometric, gestural, formal, process-driven works occupying the same space. Our feeling is that artists are now more able to work as painstakingly detail-oriented, gesturally-free, or conceptually focused as they please, employing and breaking systems to be absorbed and enter into the work.

Courtesy of the artist

HH: How do you feel curating ties into your artistic practice? Are there tie ins from the studio or vice versa?

VC: One of the best things about living in NYC is the direct access you have to other artists through studio visits. The art world can be a hyper-social place where real connections and critical conversations are hard to come by. While we were both already exchanging studio visits, Progress Report was instrumental in meeting artists that we respected and our artist features acted as a time capsule of what others were making in the moment. Staying active and interested in what your peers are making and being dedicated to your work is a healthy extension of your own practice.

HH: When and why did you start Progress Report?

VC: Progress Report was founded just over a year ago, and born out of my contributions to an online visual journal, started by Kris Chatterson called KCLOG that was a log of all the exhibitions we were seeing throughout NYC. We were particularly invested in the increasing number of artist-organized shows that started appearing during the recession of the past few years.

Being in the NYC hotbed of chaotic, creative energy…your work improves (or not) at a pretty rapid pace. The single most important part about living here for me has been the support and intellectual exchanges with my peers. The art world is a business, and should be treated as such, but the relationships you share with other creatives are the ones that you must nurture and develop, as they have made the same commitment and sacrifices you have in deciding to live the life of an artist.

There are only a handful reliable registries that give us exposure and offer opportunities, so we wanted to start something that was more invested in giving a deeper understanding of the artists, their process, and why they make the work that they do. Keeping this self-generated approach as the focus of our project by supporting other artists’ work in tandem with the artworld-at-large, was and remains the impetus for Progress Report.

Courtesy of the artist

HH: Can you tell us about the recent initiative, artists selecting artists. ( Does this new Progress Report initiative have a name?)

VC: The idea for Progress Report from the beginning, was to get other artists more involved in who was being featured on the site. To this end, we came up with a new section called “Take Five”, an opportunity for previously featured artists to feature five artists of their choosing that would allow the project to generate new content in an organic way and give the site a more diverse feel.

Artist Websites -

vincecontarino.com
progress-report.org

Biographical Dance of Combined Stories

Last week, I headed to Bryce Wolkowitz in Chelsea to chat with artist Jose Parla about his upcoming solo show. When I arrived Jose was busy attacking the front hallway of the gallery. The artist likened the space to an alleyway, one he had already begun to cover with a series of tags. Each signature had a story, a small remembrance of friends and writers from the past. Discussing the wall at hand, the artist smiled from ear to ear as he explained his homage with borrowed strokes of a paint marker.

A product of 80s Miami, Parla is possessed by the power of the paint encrusted street corner. There is an element of photorealism in his canvasses; each a re-exploration of a space once visited. The vivid and unruly paintings on display document and celebrate the beautiful underbelly of urban space. An avid traveler and long time resident of New York City, the artist pulls reference from a staggering mental and photographic data bank of urban facades. Brown tarnish mingles with the wriggling marks of phantom graffiti writers, conjured up from the depths of the artist’s mind. Each painting is a wall, each wall a port key to experience, a touch stone for memory. It is through this type of reflection that perception is given its layers. The artist speaks of painting as if it were theater; each work unfolding through a long process of remembrance. To ignore this is to ignore the high drama at play.

Dekalb Avenue Station

Order Pattern Organization Form and Relationship

Victory

Not given to generalizations or quick answers, the artist is drawn to complexity, and to “chaos”, something he mentions often. Both forces reign supreme among his new works. The new paintings are all large, befitting their performative nature; however they run a gamut of mood and tone. There is a palpable range of emotionality in “Walls Diaries and Paintings”. That said, Jose’s gestural calligraphy is by no means forthright. The artist paints using a personal vocabulary of text that weaves in and out of the decipherable. There is a formal wonder , especially in the black and white paintings, which keeps one at arm’s length. In his own words he describes this process “like a diary which you can lock with the turn of a key.”

This state of latency is a source of beautiful tension; the viewer is caught between quotation and reflection, between memory and the street. An overwhelming body of work, these latest paintings are not easily digested, and warrant more than one visit. The exhibition opens today, March 3^rd, on 24^th street. I will be there, you should be too.

Courtesy of the New Museum

George Condo was born in 1957, meaning he is 53, the same age as my mother.

The artist’s newly opened retrospective “Mental States” at the New Museum, was exceptional in part for this reason. It was refreshing to see an exhibition of this weight and vitality at the New Museum. It was especially exciting considering the artist is not “younger than Jesus” but 4 decades into his mature career.

At the risk of seeming vague or trite, or both, there is something timeless about George Condo’s Work. During the 1980s, while friends like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Mary Heilmann were developing their own signature styles, Condo wasn’t. Rather, he was constructing his toolbox. The artist has become a master of appropriation, not of material but of style. He has an uncanny ability to pull inspiration and support from across art history. An avid museum visitor, the artist constantly footnotes artists as disparate as, Picasso, Bacon and Fragonard.

Courtesy of the New Museum

Mental States begins in the cavernous fourth floor gallery, the back wall is plastered with paintings. Hung in the classic salon style, one gets a sense of the history with which Condo plays. Here, accompanied by a strong dose of wry humor, are the cubist-esque jumbles, the Bacon inspired anguish, and even the brown soup of a renaissance style portrait background. Rather than feeling disconnected, the display unifies. Each painting functions, as a unique facet of the artist’s idiosyncratic, and ultimately rewarding oeuvre.

Downstairs, on the third floor, the exhibition is broken up into three galleries, loosely organized by theme. The first room, labeled “Melancholia” is home to a group of particularly forlorn couples. I was particularly struck by the characters depicted in “The Stockbroker”. Awkward and misshapen; the strain of Condo’s cartoon subjects is almost palpable. The next room, “Manic Society” is almost a relief, though the bacon-esque contortions of these paintings are hardly cheerful.

Courtesy of the New Museum

The last room is a testament to the artist’s ongoing relationship with abstraction. “Black and White Abstraction” from 2005, is a particularly aggressive reference to de Kooning’s black and white paintings from the 1950s. At first glance, this and the other paintings in the room seem masterful exercises in gesture and tone. Upon further examination, the languid cartoonish drawl of Condo’s figurative vocabulary begins to reveal itself, one eye, nose and face at a time.

This is what is so wonderful about the artist; there is a fantastic tension in each painting. Subsumed in a variety disguises, it is only after real examination that the artist begins to emerge, peeking out from an imagined past.

I met this week’s featured artist, Robert Janitz, at Momenta Art in Williamsburg, where he is part of the new exhibition, Winter Break. Janitz grew up in Germany, and honed his artistic practice in France. His relationship to the space reflects this background. He arranges his paintings like installation, employing artificial backdrops made of cardboard. His interventions push as much against the old architectures of Western Europe as they do against the white of contemporary art galleries. When he speaks of the old great halls, and palaces of Europe, there is awe in his voice, though he speaks of tradition as an impossibly binding force.

When I first encountered them, the four paintings included in his show seemed sparse and harshly minimal. Looking closer, I realized each painting functions on a variety of levels. In them we see evidence of process, whether it’s the back of a canvas, or a portion of the stretcher, viewed through a translucent varnished surface. There is a serious level of self reflection in these paintings. This is not merely process painting, or art about art. Though they might speak with a different accent and walk with a strange gate, these are paintings nonetheless. To view Janitz’s work is to join the artist on a circuitous journey. Following him one gets the sense that the artist is searching for a new kind of space, somewhere to create work that is both powerful and approachable.

How do you view your paintings in relationship to their surroundings?
They eat the surroundings. Well, hmmm, let’s see. There’s a current show at Guggenheim “Classicism and Chaos” which i think reflects on skepticism about the architectural framing of art. One would think that a painting would have an autonomy that would be independent of architecture. Scratch that assumption. I walk away from that game entirely.

In relationship to the tradition of painting?
Parasites are quite abundant in a healthy ecosystem. Eliminating cash is getting rid of corruption. Every society needs a black market.

You have lived in New York for about a year and a half, before that you spent several years in Paris. You were raised in Germany. How do you think these shifts have effected your working practice?
It is a cornucopia of inspiration to me, how people enjoy their suffering and how they create their environments/cultures to do so. And they don’t want to be cured. I love New York and New York loves me.

You often utilize materials, such as tulle, unprimed canvas, varnish, and cardboard in your work. There is an often industrial feel to these materials, can you speak to this?
I’d like to tie in the surface issue and the notion of flatness. How in some pieces it is about scraping the surface and in others it’s about shiny, matte, glossy or muted. They provide planes of focus, from behind and in front. For instance the cardboard piece pulls you behind the surface. In a way its size and casualness dilates the focus.

Your paintings seem to subvert traditional notions of painting. Do they function as paintings in the traditional sense? What is it exactly that you are challenging/ negating?
They are a double negation.

How integral is installation to your process?
I envision painting with the canvas hung on the wall and then presenting it laid out flat on a table. When we’re talking about the place of the cardboard I think about the architectural constraints of fucking – or the evolution of the glory hole.

Do you work with an idea or space in mind, or does the final installation come as a secondary consideration?
If you think like a maggot: it would chew through what ever it is in. There is no consideration at all. There is just unmediated action. That is the point of my work.

(images courtesy of the artist)