Photo:  Gabriella Radujko; reproduction of content on retired Edward Ruscha business card

There is no School of Edward Ruscha, but if there were, prerequisites would include an embrace of ambiguity and the spirit world–its students paraphrasing quotes such as these from his recent talk with Paul Holdengräber at the New York Public Library on March 6, 2013:

I have a deep need to make a book.

It doesn’t matter what it is about.

The idea for a book comes first.

As book artist, Ruscha challenged his interviewer and the audience.  There was puzzlement among the literati, perhaps, because as book readers, according to  Walter J. Ong, we humans are so literate that it is “difficult for us to conceive of an oral universe of communication or thought except as a variant of a literate universe”.

Ruscha’s practice, an alternate universe, is more rooted in oral communication than literacy and inspired by “a spirit that jumps”.  Think leaping flames.  It is no wonder that Ruscha is fascinated by fire or that he suggests that time for reading Holdengräber’s list of books selected with him in mind might only be possible “in another life”.

Thus was born Twentysix Gasoline Stations, his first artist’s book, published in 1963 in black and white and so named, for what exactly?  “Critics want to know; what is it?” inquires Holdengräber, with emphasis on the “is”, so that it sounds like “tis it?”  “What tis it?” Ruscha, of course, won’t tell what it refers to, only what it doesn’t.  It is not a reference to the 26 letters in the alphabet.  It is not a reference to the 26 rides (each way) hitchhiking to Florida from Oklahoma City and back again.

“There is no agenda with gas stations, says Ruscha.  The title came first and then needed to be carried through.  Art needs to be something that makes your scratch your head.  Ambiguity is a good thing.  Art needs to be wide open”.

“Ed Ruscha Books & Co.”, March 5-April 27, 2013 at Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, NY will coincide with the publication of MIT Press’s Various Small Books: Referencing Small Books by Ed Ruscha (2013) which documents ninety-one of the books inspired by Ruscha’s own, reproducing covers and sample layouts from each, along with a detailed description.

Aerotone #7 © Ryan Zoghlin; all photos courtesy Photo Review

The complete portfolio of competition winner images can be viewed at: http://www.photoreview.org/competition/portfolio.php/38/1

Ryan Zoghlin is the First Prize winner of the 27th annual Photo Review International Photography Competition juried by Robert Mann.

Gabriella Radujko: Thematically, your portfolios explore being “on an edge” or “on the edge” (as opposed being edgy). These include:

• Surf-o-glyphs: where surfers are on the edges of water
• NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) where industrial power encroaches on the periphery of modest single family homes
• Aerotones and Airshow which capture airplanes performing aerobatic maneuvers at the Chicago Air and Water Show

Why does this theme appeal to you?

Ryan Zoghlin: I am glad you ran a thread through these works. Maybe it’s just that things are more interesting where worlds intersect. Whether this is where the water’s edge meets the land or when the circus rolls into a small town. On the edge is where relationships and juxtaposition can be complicated and hopefully more visually interesting.

Funny, though, I do tell myself when working technically that “I’m working on the edge.” For some reason, I like to come up with elaborate schemes to produce images. These seem like great ideas in my head, but often in practice don’t work out.

My equipment tends to be more on the edge, also. Cameras with multiple lenses and shutter, hand held 5×7 and 8×10 cameras, pinhole and fingerprint cameras.

GR: You received First Prize for Aerotone #7, an Orotone of two planes performing flying maneuvers punctuated by vapor trails. Talk about why this particular photographic process was used and why does it work aesthetically?

RZ: Originally, I had done the airshow as straight black and white to print. I probably shot the show ten years in a row. I was trying to move beyond the straight prints and I was thinking more about the real sculptural affect that the contrails make as the airplanes were flying. I was trying to make a more three-dimension effect for the images. I started shooting it with a 5 x 7 camera, knowing that I wanted to do some contact prints, originally thinking that they might be platinum, or something like that. I was at an antique image show in Chicago and ran by an Orotone print that someone was selling. Not knowing if I had ever seen one before, I was pretty blown away by it. I asked the seller, “What is this?” and he said, “An Orotone print”. And I asked him, “How do you make these”? And he looked at me and he said, “How would I know?”

The three-dimensional affected me but I also liked that it was an older process that gave a classic, vintage look to the image. It took me a couple of years to figure it out. I did a lot of research on Orotones and tried to find out how they are made and learned there is no written recipe. With experimentation, I made several Orotones and then took them from there. It has a kind of granular effect, playing with the gold powder, there’s a metallic feel to it. All these things work together to make the image really interesting.

GR: Minor White spoke of photographs as mirages and the camera as a metamorphosing machine. He said it was incumbent upon the photographer to free himself of the tyranny of the facts before him to get from the tangible to the intangible. What helps you capture the intangible?

RZ: Whenever I approach something, I try to make it my own. I once spoke to someone who was afraid of shooting an event because he said it was shot a million times. Like the air show, there are millions of spectators there and there are thousand of cameras photographing it. I’ve just been able to feel the kind of image I want to see on the wall. I say, okay, here’s my subject matter, how do I want this to look?

How do I make it intangible? I think I’ve been very fluid in photography. There are the kinds of things you can’t describe to someone who hasn’t practiced photography for a really long time.

Like the one I’m working on now. I knew what I wanted to do and to get there I knew I had to have a camera made. There wasn’t a camera that existed that did what I needed it to do. I contacted a friend of mine who was a woodworker and he did a great job building me a camera with the specifications I wanted. I have been able to create the tools I need to get to the specific goal that I want to reach.

I also understand how photography and cameras make the normal an abstraction automatically. That’s one thing I love about photography. It’s why I like to shoot in black and white–the abstraction.

I don’t mind working in color at all. In the case of NIMBY, it had to be color, because NIMBY is so real. What I always say about color film and color work, is that I don’t like color work because it’s too real. With more cerebral work. I tend to work more in color with that type of work. With more abstract work, like Aerotones, I work in black and white.

GR: Which photographic images and/or photographers inspire you? Which non-photographic influences inspire you?

RZ: There are so many and I would like to give people due credit. When I was in college, I spent hours looking through books. Harry Callahan was very important, and of course, I loved Minor White. I like photographers who explain a lot with a little. There was the influence of Giacometti sculpture for example. I was also influenced by early Christian, religious art. There were things they were trying to say, a certain flatness about their work.

GR: Some say we are in a post-photographic age. What are your thoughts about the photograph in an age of digital media?

RZ: Photographs are so ubiquitous. Cameras are in everyone’s pocket. I don’t’ know how we can be beyond the photograph, though, maybe we are beyond the print. I do see a lost generation of print, which I feel badly about.

On the other hand, when I don’t have a camera, and I want a photograph, it’s very convenient to have a phone and to be able to share it with other people. It cuts both ways. I feel terrible that quality has been usurped by convenience. When I shoot two and a quarter or 4 x 5 or 8 x 10 negative, I am always amazed at the great quality I get, even when I scan and manipulate it later. Also, film is still relatively inexpensive and it lasts forever.

I know in the end, digital will win. I just hope the quality comes back in photography. I am a little tired of post-production. I want to get it right the first time when I do the photography. I want to get it right in the camera. I never wanted a desk job. If I wanted a desk job I would have gotten a job that pays good money. Photography has become a desk job. I hope the character doesn’t disappear.

Origami Shark © Marc Fichou

Marc Fichou is the Second Prize winner of the 27th annual Photo Review International Photography Competition juried by Robert Mann.

Gabriella Radujko: Origami Shark is a photograph of a three-dimensional origami shark figure superimposed on the original, deconstructed kraft paper used to make it. What was the formative idea for this piece in particular and the series in general?

Marc Fichou: With the origami series, initially, we notice the image of a thing or animal. Then we become aware of an origami, a piece of paper. Finally, we realize that they are the same thing, just different facets which are revealed in different stages of time and space. It was my idea to first stimulate the mind, the imagination of the viewer, then to draw him inside the image, within the space where the origami is. Finally, through reasoning, he returns to reality and sees that what is actually before him is nothing but a sheet of paper.

I wanted to demonstrate how increasingly evolving technologies enable us to merge the real with its image. Subsequently, we record reality and revisit it in the form of images. But our memory can only retain the real time moment for a few seconds before becoming memories which furthermore evolve over time.

Memories reactivated by our minds involve a consciousness of who we once were as in “I am the child I once was.” In contrast, memories captured using technologies like the still camera or video are somewhat dead. These images, then, transport us to a time that has disappeared or no longer exists while simultaneously suggesting that we are experiencing that reality in real time. The images we capture are those of the past only; we cannot escape the material world.

GR: When discussing your work, you mention reuniting matter and its image, presence and absence, here and there, before and now. How are these concepts manifested in Origami Shark?

MF: In a classic photograph, the subject is captured in an image and then printed on paper. The image reunites us with the absence of the subject, i.e. “it or he was there at that time.” In contrast, Origami Shark is the material support, the sheet of paper on which it was printed. Indeed it was captured in different moments and shapes, but it is one and the same thing. With Origami Shark, the absence of the origami is connected to the presence of its double, the sheet of paper.

GR: Thirty years ago, in 1981, the exhibit “Cubism and American Photography 1910–30” was held at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House. It rekindled a debate about cubism’s role in ushering in modern photography in the early 20th century. To what extent does cubism influence your photography?

MF: The appearance of photography in the 19th century and its ability to capture events and people robbed the painter of mnemotechnical work and challenged representation, changing the role of the artist in the process. The reaction was Impressionism, something that photography could not grasp. Since then and into a period of widespread use of photography through the 1990s, photography has tried to become recognized as a major art form, thus using ideas found in movements like cubism.

In my work, I have chosen to combine mediums and use a variety of technologies available to me to realize my ideas. With the origami series, I used photography because of its ability to freeze the moment as well as painting to color the sheet of paper with the blue color of the ocean. As for influences, I am not looking to transgress but rather remain open to ideas and movements. That would include cubism as it appears in my origamis, but it was not planned.

GR: What emerging trends in fine art photography interest you? How are you integrating those trends, if applicable, to your own practice?

MF: I am interested in plastician photography in general, but I especially like the works of artists like Lauren Marsolier who has been able to transgress her medium using the technological tools of our time. To some degree, the artist integrates the work of his peers within his own, but as far as I am concerned, it is never intentional. But once the work is completed, it is often apparent.

GR: Which photographic images and/or photographers inspire you? Which non-photographic influences inspire you?

MF: Joseph Kosuth’s conceptual photography interests me. He juxtaposes an object, its full-scale photographic reproduction and its dictionary definition. Also, the work of plastician photographer Sophie Calle, primarily her use of photography as narrative, but also her displays where the support is made prominent and takes on a sculptural form. We find similar experiences in Rene Magritte’s paintings. He combines words and images with their support, subsequently questioning the real and its representation. Video art pioneers like Nam June Paik and Peter Campus are also influences. At the other end of the spectrum is outsider art. I like it for its spontaneity and because it both conceals and reveals the psychology of its creator. But my most important influences come from philosophy and psychology, especially the ground-breaking theories developed by Henri Bergson and Jacques Lacan.

Odette England is the Third Prize winner of the 27th annual Photo Review International Photography Competition juried by Robert Mann.

Gabriella Radujko: While working on WPA assignments, the writer Eudora Welty took photographs of people she encountered while travelling through her home state of Mississippi. The results can be found in the book One Time, One Place, Mississippi in the Depression: A Snapshot Album, which she described as “a family album.” She wrote that while making the “snapshots,” she imagined herself into the lives of her subjects. Have you imagined yourself into your photographs in the Self Diagnosis series?

Odette England: I think to a degree, I have, and that was a relatively easy task because every single snapshot in the series features me in it. Nine of the ten snapshots in the series were made by my mom or my dad. I had a really long familiarity with these images in the family album as something that has been shown to me and that I have grown up with. My mom, like many moms, is the gatekeeper of our family album. So for me to even borrow from it, to undertake this project, was something unique in it’s own right.

The family album is something that has always been very closely guarded but shared socially with friends and family. It think that current technology has changed that because most people don’t necessarily make snapshots and put them in an album and then use the album as an opportunity for friends and family together. In a way, this project, for me, was realizing some of the still special quality that comes from the actual print of a snapshot and where it resides in the album and what role it has in sowing facts or storytelling about someone’s past and how I have been coming to manipulate that and knead it and mold it in some way to fit my own artistic purposes.

GR: Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, in the preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity, wrote, “But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence…illusion only is sacred, truth profane.” Is Self-Diagnosis illusion or truth?

OE: It’s an excellent question, and I think it’s both, depending on how a viewer comes to it versus what my intent for the work was. I think of Self-Diagnosis as a strange relationship between hiding and showing, where I teeter on some sort of basic collapse of public showing of family snapshots alongside the exposure of who I might be, via and according to a very narrow and deliberate edit of a selection of snapshots from the family album. Showing the snapshots that aren’t revealing don’t necessarily reveal anything deep or mysterious about me but combining it with the results of an inkblot test doesn’t either. Ten snapshots from a collection of hundreds do not a “complete me” make. So I think of this as a little bit of playing hide and seek with the viewer, the nature of photography, and myself.

GR: Many photographers (Nicholas Nixon, Sally Mann) make their children their subjects. What challenges does intimacy present in photographing one’s family?

OE: I think one of the biggest challenges is how the imagery is ultimately going to be read. When I think of Sally Mann’s work and having read interviews with Sally Mann, her claim has always been that she never intended for her images to be read in some of the more detrimental, negative light in which they have been. I’ve been asked a similar question about Self-Diagnosis.

I thought this work is as much about this hiding and showing of me or this expression of failure where I don’t really show myself, nor do I completely show or clearly show the snapshot in which I am in, as double-exposed on the Rorschach card. But it’s also a relationship of boss and subordinate. This is what is particularly relevant about Sally’s work. For me, the subtext of Self-Diagnosis is one of the relationships of power, of mother/daughter or father/daughter. In the case of the Rorschach card — the clinician/patient; in the case of my artwork, of artist/viewer.

The editing, the collating and the showing parts of the family album is invested with personal bias. Albums are maintained in a certain way, just as the inkblot test is. So there’s a transfer or a transaction of imagery and story, and therefore it’s proof when one is shown an album, or a snapshot, or an inkblot or an artwork. Access to my own childhood through the album is heavily mediated and therefore predetermined by maternal preferences. They were mom’s wishes and tastes at how it would be presented and therefore in an aegis sense doomed to fail in providing a true picture. The inkblot test is an orderly two-page form, which once completed suggests this semi-standardized systemized idea in writing of who you might be. The dynamics that are inherent within snapshots are reflected in the structure of the collection, of the collection itself, and they don’t always necessarily show what the author intended it to be read because the viewer will come at it using their own bias. Whilst the content of my imagery is very intimate, it’s not necessarily giving a whole lot away, and for me, the failure in the work makes it a great success.

GR: You state, “I don’t take photographs. I make loss.” In her book, Necessary Losses, Judith Viorst writes about the universality of loss including the loss of childhood, the death of family members and friends, and finally our own deaths. Do you embrace loss as well as make it?

OE: I embrace it as much as I am willing to. I have a love/hate relationship with loss. I embrace the notion of it as something that I can use as a creative lever — I cannot make work unless it’s personal. One of the many foundations in being personal, is it has some sense of loss of the past and in particular what it means to love home and leave home. When I think of loss, I think of the fact that childhood is a reverie. It’s a place of longing, a place I wish to go back to, but cannot. The world is just one big “un.” It’s uncomplicated, unhurried, unpressured. At some point, the “un” leave home before we do. I need a remedy or proper treatment for my loss. Maybe photography is my rehabilitation or perhaps I need proper therapy, which is why I tend to use Rorschach tests in order to appropriate work. In embracing the loss and in taking very personal artifacts, which are soon “snapshots to be,” I am playing with the role of photography in this idealistic association between childhood and innocence by leveraging its very illusory nature. I think the fantastical qualities of childhood and its apparent innocence are part of this creative inquiry that I have and why I rely on snapshots so heavily in my work. Snapshots are always a part of loss.

The word I keep coming back to is mirage. It means to look at and to wonder at. I think of snapshots as mirages. They are these lovely things that you can wonder at and think about and contemplate the past, but they ultimately show a moment of loss, because the moment the shutter is pressed, the moment is gone. It’s only recording this moment of loss, which is terribly sad, but I tried to take a more happy, modernist approach by freezing aspects of everyday life which are often very natural and spontaneous and giving them this strangeness with the cold and diagnostically frank and the scientific, which in this case is the Rorschach test.

GR: Which photographic images and/or photographers inspire you? Which non-photographic influences inspire you?

OE: I am in the process of drafting my thesis, so I have had to think very carefully about whose work I particularly draw from and why. For many and varied reasons, I tend to go towards the work of those who pick very personal subjects, but illuminate them in a way that I haven’t seen before. There’s someone like Nancy Rexroth, for example, and her series Iowa, in which she took a dinky, little toy camera called an Diana, and from 1970 to 1976, she made images in Ohio that reminded her of Iowa and she made the series accordingly. So none of the images actually show Iowa except for Nancy’s interpretation. But from this dinky, little camera she makes these gorgeous platinum prints that are so beautifully rendered and capture all sorts of fleeing, transitory dream-like moments.

I also really like the work of Larry Sultan, in particular his pictures from Home Series which he made over a ten-year period and was inspired by when his father Irving was forced into semi-retirement from a job that he worked for 30 to 40 years. Larry started making the work in his early to mid-thirties and he was feeling restless about his home and his life and his idea of what it meant to be family and to have roots planted in a specific location. He invited his parents to narrate alongside the images he was making. So its this lovely, poignant subject of not just his relationship to home, but a relationship he has with his parents.

I am embarking on a similar style of project, which is why I have been doing a great deal of reading about those two, in particular. But there are other photographers whose work I admire. Tracy Moffat, the Australian photographer, her series Plantation, which she made in 2009 from pictures she took ten years earlier of these very strange, exotic landscapes, which she never actually gives away the location of where these were taken, which is part of the mystery behind the work — the fact that there’s no real narrative going on; there’s this strange, mysterious male character who continues to appear. All the projects that I speak of are deeply personal and they don’t really give a great deal away, so there’s a wonderful proximity for me as a viewer to enter the work and apply myself within the work.

It’s almost as though we can exchange places. I can see myself in the imaginery and I can see myself thinking about the imagery. Mostly, I veer toward literature that has a personal bias. Gaston Bachelard and the other French philosopher, Georges Perec and his Species of Space and Other Pieces. Susan Stewart’s On Longing. Tim Ingold has a book called Lines: A Brief History. Numerous authors who write about things about place. I am half-way through Ken Jennings’ book Maphead, which is deleriously funny if you love the study of maps and geography. Anyone who is writing about place and location and what that means to one’s current and past.

Additionally, she works as a freelance journalist and is a regular contributor to Artcards Review where she writes about contemporary art, focusing on fine art photography. Her poetry can be found in two anthologies, The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow (2010) and Gape-Seed (2011).

Radujko received a Master of Library and Information Science from Rutgers Universityin 2005 and has worked in libraries as diverse as the Oradell Public Library, Oradell, NJ, Cipriani Club 55 Library, New York, NY and the Sri Narayani School Library, Tamil Nadu,India.

Website: http://modernartswriting.wordpress.com/

BMW Guggenheim Lab exterior view from East 1st Street, NYC (Photo: Paul Warchol)

Last winter I stood on a cold subway platform and told Y about my new crush: David van der Leer. “Who is he?” she asked, distracted. She was peering down the dark tunnel, hoping to see train lights headed our way. It was one of those very snowy late nights in New York, and we had fallen victim to the slow timetable of weekend trains. I don’t know, I said. Some curator at the Guggenheim. Y turned her gaze on me. “You don’t even know who this dude is?” she asked. I shrugged and told her I liked what he’d been curating. She shook her head. Who falls for someone’s curation?

In van der Leer’s case, lots and lots. Google him and up comes one article and interview after the other profiling either the assistant curator himself or the shows in which he’s had a hand. The man has fans. That’s how I came across van der Leer—reading an admiring write-up about the Frank Lloyd Wright show he’d assisted with and then later when I was researching Futurefarmers, a San Francisco-based art collective he brought to New York last spring. Then, one warm, rainy night last June, a friend and I happened upon Pedro Reyes’s Sanatorium, the first in the stillspotting nyc series van der Leer oversees. The pop-up exhibition was held in a high-ceilinged storefront in MetroTech—that curious, liminal area of downtown Brooklyn—and it featured men and women in lab coats offering spiritual and physical ministrations beneath fluorescent lights. The severe sterility of the space recalled hospitals, a nice counterpoint to the typically warm and busy aesthetic of New Age therapies. (Think here of the myrrh-scented, cluttered woo-woo shops along Bleeker, and you’ll know what I mean.)

Like elements of the Futurefarmers exhibition, stillspotting nyc roams outside of the Guggenheim’s famously curved walls. The transient and mobile quality of the installations is replicated in the BMW Guggenheim Lab, an ambitious, multidisciplinary arts showcase that will travel to nine cities around the world in six years. It launched in the East Village last fall, when the public could choose from myriad happenings—lectures, block parties, tours of toxic sites—offered by the lab, which claimed “comfort” as the topic under its microscope. It next travels to Berlin, where the lab will appear in a different incarnation in May. (Plan ahead now; Berlin is lovely in the spring.) Stillspotting nyc also continues apace this spring, extending the migratory reach of the Guggenheim, perhaps one of the most exciting aspects of van der Leer’s curation thus far. I spoke to him about his efforts with the lab, which he co-curates with Maria Nicanor, and his curatorial approach and found out why so many find the curator worth profiling.

BMW Guggenheim Lab site before construction (Photo: Kristopher McKay)

CL: Why did you choose comfort as the first topic for the BMW Guggenheim Lab to study?
David van der Leer: We were looking for themes that are slightly emotional, that people can respond to without having a big knowledge of the themes you would normally associate with cities. Domestic space is usually related to comfort, so when people hear “comfort,” they immediately think of a fluffy bed and all that kind of stuff, but not necessarily about what comfort means in a city. If we ask people very specifically what’s “comfort” in a city context, they usually respond, “Oh yes, a park along the river,” but what does it mean when you start to confront those notions?

CL: Tell us about where the lab will be traveling.
DvdL: It’s important for us to go to bigger cities and cities all around the world. Smaller cities are also interesting, but I think that’s a different project. For instance, I’d love to do a project on suburbia, but this project is built to look at metropolises around the world. Berlin is a little smaller, but, all in all, they’re quite big cities.

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“I think as soon as you take something out of the museum and place it in an urban context, it becomes a very different animal. It becomes something that people can respond to … If we had done the same installations at the museum, it would have been impressive but not as effective.”

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CL: How do you think a larger city versus a smaller city or the different regions informs the themes of each two-year cycle?
DvdL: Some of the bigger issues in cities, such as transportation and housing, become a little more sharp in even bigger cities, so that’s why it’s interesting for us to look at the biggest places. I think it will differ from city to city and will be based on what the lab team does. In New York, it was fairly abstract because the team decided to look at the city as a system. In Berlin, it will be a very different project, much more practical. Also, the public programs around it will shift and change.

CL: Urban issues seem to be of programmatic interest for curators. There was the Global Cities show at the Tate Modern in 2007 and last year the Festival of Ideas for the New City organized by the New Museum. Why or how are urban issues a curatorial concern?
DvdL: One of my frustrations if you look at this type of show is you get a lot of photography. You get a lot of diagramming and maps, and they give you a sense of the reality of cities. They almost want to say, “Okay, we understand the city,” whereas I think the complete opposite. All of those tools are very valuable and helpful, but I don’t think we understand cities at all.

I think it’s important to approach it from another end, which is why we created a project that was much more about people than about the data that’s all subjective anyway. We created a project where people would be the core element of all the conversations, and at times there are poetic moments.

Diagram illustrating one venue of the BMW Guggenheim Lab

CL: What makes you say we haven’t figured cities out?
DvdL: I don’t think we can know what a perfect city is. We know how to create utopias on paper, but utopia has never materialized. You get driven by how a city is organized, and here especially the grid system creates a fairly anxious city. You never stop. It has to do with city form and the organization of cities.

CL: You mentioned poetry a little while ago, and you’ve referenced it in previous interviews. The poetic or lyrical seems to be valuable to you. How does it show up in your curation?
DvdL: I think it’s nice when things aren’t necessarily catered to a conclusion or an answer. I like it when projects are more layered, and people need to find their way through it.  It’s basically way-finding, which I think happens with the lab, as well as in stillspotting. Futurefarmers, too. You run into things you may not have expected. That can be fairly poetic.

CL: Why is way-finding a preferred approach for you, and what do you think it offers visitors?
DvdL: Everything is so direct in how we live our lives that, for something to really have an effect, you sometimes have to do the opposite. More intriguing can be super effective. For instance, with stillspotting, we’re running two years of programming on stillness around New York. Normally, you would start off with numbers—”Noise is bad for this reason”—and we’re using that type of language, but we’re trying to get people to go to one or three or perhaps all of them and realize, “This is something I could find myself, too, without necessarily having to make drastic changes in my life.”

CL: You’re so focused on the internal architecture of the visitor. Can you speak to that?
DvdL: Things can be so, so direct. It’s fairly easy to get people to have an emotion, but these projects are less direct in terms of information. They can go to the core in a different way. For instance, with stillspotting, I could’ve made a show with fifty objects all nice and beautiful, and it would’ve been a nice and quiet show. But I think as soon as you take something out of the museum and place it in an urban context, it becomes a very different animal. It becomes something that people can respond to. In the museum, it becomes abstract. If we had done the same installations at the museum, it would have been impressive but not as effective.

CL: How do you judge effectiveness?
DvdL: Getting some emotion out of people. When you’re emotional, it’s sometimes easy to learn something, and that’s something we’re trying to get at. People respond very positively and sometimes very negatively, but I like that there is some sort of response to things. Otherwise, the type of show you referred to earlier is important and interesting, but it’s very difficult to respond to it. You pick up some information, and that’s usually it.

CL: So how would you advise someone interested in becoming a curator?
DvdL: I’m the worst example actually, because many curators are probably art historians and often know for a long time that they want to be a curator. I’m trained in urban and architectural theory and then worked for architects and ended up here not entirely by accident, but it was some sort of accident. What I’m trying to say is for some curators there’s definitely a path and it’s very logical, but it can have a little bit of a twist.

CL: Right, you don’t have the same perspective.
DvdL: Well, I share many of the same perspectives, but I’m less driven by objects. In many cases, curators are forced to think about objects. That’s the nice thing about our projects. They’re either about discussions or emotions, and often an object is a part of that but it doesn’t have to be so romanticized.

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Cielo Lutino is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and editor covering culture, urban, and technology topics for clients including Econsultancy, NYU-Polytechnic Institute, and Bloomberg Businessweek, where she is a weekend editor.

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All images courtesy of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Installation, Can I Get a Witness, 2011

Joshua Abelow set out to create a personal, visual archive through his blog, “ART BLOG ART BLOG,” but within a year he was getting up to 900 hits a day from over 125 countries. Less than two years later, the blog has materialized into a physical, artist-run gallery space, ART BLOG ART BLOG, with nine independently curated exhibitions, open through October 29, in a donated space located in Chelsea at 508 West 26^th St, Floor 11.

“ART BLOG ART BLOG” (the blog) emerged in early 2010 as an important way for Abelow to build a community over the web and engage with artists in other cities. Now back in New York, Abelow maintains his blog as a diaristic visual journal, with daily posts including other artists’ work, book and album covers, posters, personal work and photographs, poems and quips, and more. I had a chance to sit down with Abelow, and the curators of the upcoming exhibition, “Can I Get a Witness?” to find out more about the project.

Artcards: How did you start the blog? Where do you find your material for the blog?

Joshua Abelow: I guess I never set out to create a “blog” so much as an archive, a means of keeping a visual journal for myself. I find the blog format interesting because of the immediacy.  Instant contact with a relatively wide audience is the exact opposite of what it’s like to be alone in the studio all day.

I often find out about other artists’ works through the Internet and by sifting through emails. The material I post is a mix of other artists’ work and my own personal contributions. I take a diaristic approach to posting…I see it as a visual radio show and in that sense it is important for me to update the site regularly.  It also gives me something to do when I’m waiting for paint to dry and I don’t feel like sharpening pencils or stretching canvases or whatever.

Do you read other blogs? Also, I find a lot of art-related blogs to be criticism-based; do you read any art criticism?

I look at a few other blogs like, AH HOLE AH HOLE (published, or rather curated by Tisch Abelow and Dakatoh Savage).  It is more like an art project than a blog – I’d love to see it projected on a big wall every morning when I wake up. I also look at ANABA, KCLOG and HKJBLOG regularly.

As for art criticism, I like to read what my peers’ are writing. I enjoy 16 Miles of String (Andrew Russeth) because it’s art criticism from a younger point of view and he covers a lot of stuff that bigger publications overlook.

How did “ART BLOG ART BLOG”, the blog, turn into “ART BLOG ART BLOG,” the gallery?

Ross Bleckner invited me to use his studio space to organize some shows for the summer and fall.  The project is a group effort and I’ve invited several individuals and groups to curate shows in the space.  Jon Lutz (Daily Operation), NUDASHANK, and Regina Rex have all presented exhibitions in the space thus far.  It’s funny and interesting to see a blog go 3D.  The exhibition space is a direct extension of the blog, which is why I gave it the same name.

There’s a lot of hard work going into this and, of course, it would not be possible without Ross’s generosity (thank you Ross!). It would also not be possible without all of the talented people involved. The spirit of the project is one of generosity: the space was a gift from one artist to another, which is a gift to many other artists. It’s exciting to be exhibiting work by both emerging and established artists, unknowns mixed in with bigger names. In a way, this is reflective of the Internet – a weird flattening device that levels the playing field.  This project, both the blog and the gallery, provides me with a chance to examine this moment as we proceed further into the 21^st century.

Artcards: What can we expect from the newest show, “Can I Get A Witness?” How was the show curated between the three of you?

Abelow/Friedrich/Savage: We are exhibiting works by Joshua Abelow, Matt Connolly and Joachim ‘YoYo’ Friedrich. We also have a reading corner featuring artists books by Kevin Gallagher, Lukas Geronimas, The Kingsboro Press, Davida Nemeroff and Eric Veit.

While researching for the show, it became clear that Matt, Joshua, and YoYo’s work cosmically related. We found it interesting that the artists whose work was the strongest together happened to be ‘the men in our life.’ The curatorial process came about only in the most natural way. Including the reading corner is a way for us to support other emerging artists we admire and because punk lives.

“Can I Get a Witness?”curated by Tisch Abelow, Jashin Friedrich, and Dakotah savage, opening on Thursday, July 14, will be the fourth exhibition at ART BLOG ART BLOG.  Up next for Joshua Abelow is a solo exhibition at Tomorrow Gallery in Toronto, Canada, who will also be publishing the book, “Painter’s Journal,” a diaristic journal in six parts about Abelow’s experience as a young artist moving to New York at the turn of the century.

A full version of this interview can be found here.

ART BLOG ART BLOG is located at 508 West 26^th Street, Fl 11. Hours: Wednesday-Saturday, 12-6pm. More info: www.artblogartblog.com.

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

E3-HS9, 2011

Tree Drawings, Nightwalks, Insect Flight Paths, Restorative Device, For the Baron, Postal Works, and his latest Recorded Delivery.  Those are the work titles of UK based artist Tim Knowles. You can pick up on the artist’s sensibility simply from those titles – simplified to bare bones – no more, no less. When I first experienced one of Knowles’ Nightwalks photographs at Bitforms Gallery, I was indeed speechless. One could easily muse at Knowles’ Nightwalks images and be inspired to write. Understanding the process behind this creation though, shows us a slightly different story. The artist uses all the natural elements as his materials, which forms a spontaneous and performative act. No, this has nothing to do with performance art, more like behavioral studies. Looking at Knowles’ body of work all together leaves me at this comfortable space that is somewhat ambiguous yet extremely familiar. Who would have the guts (or time) to wire-tap the inside of a package with audio/visual recording devices and send it off on a 902 mile journey?  I wouldn’t. It must’ve also required a period of trial-and-error before the package is ready to set off. The result, “an artwork which captures the topsy-turvy world of a parcel in the post.”  Recorded Delivery, created with permission from the Royal Mail, is currently on view at the Bitforms Gallery, NYC, until the 27th of May.

E3 3TT 18:21:41[E3-HS9

HW: I am fascinated by your Post Box project. It seems to be a progression from your previous Postal Works.  What is the inspiration that led to this entire series of work?

TK: I had been making drawings produced automatically by systems beyond my control, such as a series made by a pen suspended below a buoyant helium balloon which traced out the wind’s movements on paper. I was exploring different possibilities and began to think about ways in which the act out delivering an artwork might produce the work.  The postal drawing works and the vehicle drawings were conceived at the same time – the postal works particularly as a low cost and simple way of making a work for exhibitions further afield.  For my exhibition Music of Chance I drove down to Milan, Italy producing a drawing onto a roll of slowly moving paper in the back of the car. As I traveled the drawing recorded forces at work within the car as it drove along motorways, up and down mountain passes and around city streets.  Departing with a blank roll of paper a drawing is created over the duration of the journey, which maps the roads and traffic conditions with very distinct sections.

TK: Similarly, with the postal drawings, I seal a blank piece of paper into the parcel and neither myself nor the recipient (gallery / collector) knows how the piece will work out until it is opened when it arrives.  And with Post Box E3-HS9 when I downloaded the 20,000 images taken over its 902 mile journey there is a real sense of excitement to see what has been captured.I had been working with long exposure photography and experimenting with time lapse so Spy Box the first camera parcel was a logical progression.

HW: Do you plan to further develop it?

TK: Yes, and the crate work presented in the Bitforms 6th floor project space was a first step in that direction, but I don’t really want to give further developments away at this stage.

Recorded Delivery (Installation view), 2011

HW: A large part of your work seems to be based on the natural phenomenon of chance vs. control. Can you tell us a bit about working in this method?

TK: Akin to scientific experimentation, a situation is engineered and the work carried out – rules, limitations and boundaries may be set and to some extent affect the outcome of the work but with the exception of ending the experiment, I relinquish control. The work frequently utilizes tailor made mechanisms in its production, be they custom made parcels, weathervane helmets.

Roman Signer describes his practice as using actions (such as an explosion, a fall, etc.)  to sculpt  - cause and effect – he presents the results of actions. Similarly, my work presents the results of processes and experiments.  The situations I construct though carefully and genuinely adherent to the process are not scientifically rigourous and a multitude of external factors come into play.

My more recent works such as the Windwalks made in London are less predictable and allow for greater number of possibilities and outcomes, and a greater potential of the unknown for me the participant.  I set off guided solely by the wind venturing into unknown territory, the constantly changing wind is channelled, diverted and redirected or blocked and reversed by buildings, eddies shift, passing vehicles create air currents, etc.  The drawing produced as a part of the final work accurately maps my random meandering, which collides with the city’s structure and obstacles.

The Post Box work takes an image every 12 seconds. These images capture random moments, at times the parcel moves through the postal system, at others sitting still observing the system working around it. With works such as the tree drawings the outcomes are relatively predictable – clear connections, characteristics and patterns often existing between trees of the same species, though all the drawings differ.

Though notions around determinism, free will, chance, randomness and prediction are a significant aspect of the work, it is certainly not solely about these concepts.   The work does not assert a particular fixed position with regard to the concept of determinism,  certainly not a hard determinism incompatible with free will.  I’m currently developing works which explore the idea of the butterfly effect, and the way in which events are connected in an infinite global network of causes and effects, the world in constant flux.

Crate work #1, London - New York City, 2011

HW: Your Tree Drawings are delightful and hint at a playfulness that most of us as adults have forgotten. What influenced you to make this project?

TK: I think a sense of playfulness is very important and often goes hand in hand with a desire to explore, sadly can be looked down upon by some as connected to childishness. According to Stephen Nachmanovitch, play is the root and foundation of creativity in the arts and sciences also as in daily life. Improvisation, composition, writing, painting, theater, invention, all creative acts are forms of play, the starting place of creativity in the human growth cycle, and one of the great primal life functions. Play may also serve as a pretext, allowing people to explore reactions of others by engaging in playful interaction. Flirting is an example of such behavior.

Tree Drawing - Hawthorn on Easel #1, 2005

HW: What is your system of research, from concept to realizing an idea? Do you put aside project ideas and revisit them in the future?

TK: Ideas are refined and resolved over time until they are realised or not, as the case may be – in many cases there is a level of logistics, organisation, the production of mechanisms, before the project can be executed and/or realised. There are a number of different but connected strands running through my work be, it the mail art works, the Nightwalk photographs or the Windwalk series. There are connections between the strands – long exposure photography was used in my Insect flight paths, Full moon reflection photographs and in the night walks – which connects with the Windwalks and Restorative Device #1 and Suit which spills a trail of seeds as I walk through a barren landscape, creating a living trail. The notion of drawing a line, a pathway recorded is central to all of the work.

HW: What was the experience like producing the Nightwalk photographs?

TK: The Nightwalks are performed over a new moon so there is no moonlight. A large format camera is set up on a tripod looking out into the landscape, the shutter is opened and then I walk away from the camera into the dark night landscape carrying a number of very powerful flood light torches.  As I move through the darkness the lights illuminate the landscape revealing my path. Whilst one can see the ground within the bubble of light immediately around you – as I walk, my position in the landscape and orientation to the camera are steadily confused and I just try to follow the ridge I’m walking, a path or a compass bearing.

TK: For different works I have walked for between 45 minutes and an hour & a half, subject to the landscape and the camera’s view point.  When I reach the point that I want the walk to be finished or I’ve moved out of the camera’s view I turn off the lights and turn to the direction where I think the camera is, carefully retracing my steps in the dark until I can see a light signalling that the camera shutter has been closed by an assistant, I acknowledge with a signal back and then make my way back to the camera with a head torch. Each of the long exposure photographs takes 2 to 3 hours by the time I’ve returned to the camera and 2 or 3 walks are made each night.

Nightwalk - Valley of the Rocks #1

HW: Have you thought about other ways of capturing the light other than using photography, ie. shooting with video?

TK: I have looked at other ways of capturing light including video but photography also has the quality of being able to compress time into a single image often revealing things that weren’t apparent to the eye – the pattern of the full moon’s reflection on undulating water or an hours walk captured in one of the Nightwalk photographs.

HW: Your work addresses some environmental concerns (eg. the Seed Suit and Wind Walks), yet romanticized in its own right.  How do you feel about the environment that you’re living in now?

TK: Much of my work, particularly the Tree Drawings, Windwalks explore and investigate the natural world, drawing attention to it but without taking a political position. The new works made for the Horticultural Society introduce the notion of a restorative environmental gesture – I find the idea of restorative environmental design fascinating and something that will be required more and more if we are to preserve the world around us.

The world is changing fast, and in many ways that are deeply worrying – I feel that we need to pause, consider what kind of world we want to live in and change a lot of the values we currently hold.

HW: What are you reading these days?

TK: A little time back I read Our Ancestors – a collection of 3 great stories by Italo Calvino one being Baron in the trees from where the title for the Horticultural Society Exhibition originates.I’ve just started reading The Gift by Lewis Hyde.

HW: Any upcoming projects to share?

TK: I will be presenting a collaboration with Brazilian Artist Carlos Eduardo Costa (Cadu) at Galeria Vermelho, Sao Paulo in June – the project explores weather both on a local and global scale. There are others upcoming projects but they are staying under wraps at the moment!

(Images courtesy Bitforms Gallery)

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

Reclining Plate Face, 2009 ©Andrew Guenther

Paper Plate people, hotdogs and drug paraphernalia. These are some of Andrew Guenther’s subject matter. Referenced from his own life and pop culture, his work is highly personal even though it may seem even the slightest bit anonymous. Guenther’s unique aesthetic sensibility combined with vibrant colored drawings and paintings, immediately grab the viewer. His silver gelatin photographs look like they could have been taken decades ago. His latest sculptures of fish and naked ladies accompanied by a photograph of the full moon seem pure and earthly.

Andrew Guenther is based in Brooklyn and was born and raised in Wheaton, Illinois. Andrew has exhibited widely both in the US and abroad, and curated an artist’s storefront space in Brooklyn for a few years called Arts Tropical. He is represented by Freight and Volume Gallery in New York.

Carissa Pelleteri: Your art seems to be inspired by your everyday life and surrounding objects. What do you do regularly that inspires you, which is manifested into your work?

Andrew Guenther: I do a lot of things regularly—my schedule is pretty predictable and my likes and dislikes are very idiosyncratic. I don’t think any of these things manifest themselves in my work. I walk a lot. Walking is where I do most of my thinking and I’m alone with my thoughts. I guess it’s this byproduct of walking that translates most often into my work. Since I don’t write things down on the walk, the only things that fall into my art practice are the things that stick.

American Medicine II, 2009 ©Andrew Guenther

CP: While some of your work may be viewed as humorous and wacky, it also holds a kind of pure, raw sexual energy…and some escapism. Hotdogs, Plate Faces with women’s bare chests…American Medicine. What are you saying to us?

AG: It’s interesting that you picked up on the escapism. One’s own thoughts can be both visionary and toxic. I make my work for myself, first, and I’ve always felt like an outsider watching things develop around me. I still take responsibility for my actions and thoughts but I think a lot of my own mental energy is tied to the greater public consciousness and that is when people can relate at some level to what I am doing.

For me, “American Medicine” suggest everything that is right and everything that it wrong. Medicine is supposed to relieve or cure illness. It can also damage parts of the body while working on another.  “American Medicine” is apple pie, macaroni and cheese, baseball bats, rock music, anything bought or sold, water in plastic bottles, meth, illegal firearms, foreign policy etc. I think “American Medicine” is the title of an unwritten poem that crept it’s way into a few artworks that I did.

Hotdog Nap, 2009 ©Andrew Guenther

Cork with a Whisker, 2010 ©Andrew Guenther

CP: How did “Hotdog Nap” and “Cork with a whisker” come about?

AG: I work very intuitively. “Hotdog Nap”—saw the light, had the sausage, and set up the tripod. “Cork with a Whisker” came out of a family conversation at the kitchen table. I found a whisker near the window where the cat suns herself and there was a champagne cork rolling on the table. We were talking about street vendors hawking products in the city and I put the two items together as a joke, exclaiming “get your cork with a whisker here!” The object became very special to me as something that should never exist. I’ve been collecting the whiskers for about three years now and have about 12 different sculptures.

The Painter, 2008 ©Andrew Guenther

CP: In the drawing: “The Painter” this character has a face. When did you decide to stop creating faces of physical beings in your work? Why was the plate face born?

AG: I still make drawings of the figure in “The Painter” but he is really skeletal and cartoon-ish with his bulging eyes and flailing tongue. He’s this over-sensitive drug addled investment banker that takes long lunches in the park to stare at women or smoke DMT in the bushes.

But you are right—I have stopped working with the face of the figure because I don’t want to conjure the spirit of someone I don’t know. I’m superstitious like that. I don’t draw from photographs or use friends in the work anymore, in particular, because I believe that the rendering of a face carries a spirit of an individual whether invented or from reproduction. I don’t want to fill up my studio with this spirit energy–I don’t know if the conjured entity is good or bad.  It sounds kind of foolish but when you are sitting in front of a painting and you have drawn this face staring back at you in convincing detail, you know that that person exists or has existed somewhere. The plate faces give me this blank, unaffected and childish playfulness, so that I can focus on composition.

Bite Me, 2008 ©Andrew Guenther

Horse, 2010 ©Andrew Guenther

CP: The vibrant color scheme in your paintings, drawing and sculpture work is fantastic. The inspiration and execution in your photographs is played out a bit differently. Why photograph in black & white and not in color?

AG: I feel that I am able to use photography in trade for some things I used to do in painting. I like to keep the paintings uncluttered with cultural references and black and white seems to have a documentary aspect to it—very to the point. I also like the relief of not having to decide how to depict specific objects or things.  I could never paint the horse to get the same weight the photograph carries. I could have probably done a linear study in pen and paper of Hotdog Nap to achieve the joke layer, but I would have never shared that afternoon light pouring over the textured fabrics of the headboard and sheets. I also like the immediacy of the photograph despite the long process from camera to paper.

CP: Tell me about the plate face made in gold and silver leaf. (I love it). Your latest sculptures are in a simple, pure white base. Why the more minimal aesthetic versus the colorful work?

AG: I have been attempting different methods to work over the photographs in the studio for some time. The paper is difficult to work with in a lot of media. I like Araki’s take on using different media over the photograph, but even his end up as simple color splashes or stains. In working with photography I have also found the medium is most often approached very traditionally. Much like a ceramics studio where everyone is using these earth-tone glazes over things that look like pots. I always enjoy perversions of a medium—sort of like when I tried to get screaming active guitar pickups in a traditionally buttery sounding Les Paul.

Tropical Hotdog, 2010 ©Andrew Guenther

CP: Can you tell me about your recent show in Japan?

AG: Japan was very exciting and overall the show was received very well. It was my first trip to Japan and I had all these ideas about the country beforehand. I think media and film had filled my head with a neurotic city with busy and frantic people. I found Tokyo and the vicinity to be one of the most relaxing places I have ever been. Returning to NYC, I found my appetite sickened by what I was eating before I left. There is a special level of care and quality put into food in Japan, presentation aside, that I would feel better after eating basashi [raw horse meat] rather than a slice of New York pizza. I could see myself living there for a few months of the year. In relation to my work, I feel that some of the humor was mis-interpreted or lost, but I think parts of it were appreciated in a different way—the more serious and poetic elements.

Plate Face, 2008 ©Andrew Guenther

CP: What can we expect to see at your show at Kaycee Olsen Gallery in Los Angeles this coming May?

AG: Papier-mâché plate face lady reliefs, formal color paintings, and small photographs to carry out the narrative. I just found out today that papier-mâché is French for chewed paper . . . so I think it is perfect for the plate faces. I originally started to use papier-mâché because of its low environmental impact versus slabs of paint.

Artists site: guentherart.com

When I walked into Thierry Drefus’ aged mirrors firmly planted on the wooden floors of the Invisible Dog – it was during the opening of (naked) absence – (blinding) presence, which also coincided with their holiday dinner party back in December. The entire space being spliced by these large reflections, instantly drew me to knowing who was the artist behind the installation. Eiji Sumi soon joined the party, and over a bowl of homemade cocktail, the artist Thierry Dreyfus introduced himself and advised us to see his other piece in the back of the gallery. Walking through the door, the room opened up to something of a lucid dream. The diffused light changed the dimensions of the air, and without knowing what to expect, I became in sync with the heartbeat that was intensely thumping in the background. Peaking in and out of the white shadows is a godly figurative sculpture. Then, hearing muffled voices from other human figures, the magic spell was broken. A few weeks later, after the artist returned to Paris, I decided to investigate Sir Thierry Dreyfus, an internationally renowned and respected artist, through the eyes of a New York based emerging lighting artist, Eiji Sumi. Both artists, living in influential cities, tell their stories using the element of light.

Eiji Sumi: What is it about Light that fascinates you and has made you pursue it as an artistic medium?

Thierry Dreyfus: There exist materials (sound waves, fragrances…) that are not applied and often, don’t settle on any surface – but rather, that find their echo in volumes. Light is one of these materials: it murmurs, holds back or screams – without ever attaining our eardrums. Much as these languages that speak, but whose message we are incapable of decoding although their resonance is instinctively familiar.

My research on light stems from a need to work its matter on diverse supports – like so many writings emanating from one single alphabet: as a flat by capturing an image; as a volume on a private/personal luminous object – or an existing volume when I stand before a monument, a building or a city.

ES: Tell me one of the most vivid episode, accident or story in your previous work?

Last October, some 50,000 people stopped to look up at Notre Dame and discover it as they had never seen it before. Looking at them slowly move around the central aisle and dark corners was like a suspended moment in time, no more gravity.

ES: One of the strengths in using light as a medium is that it can be projected in a grand scale. What are the aspects that you pay special attention to when creating large scale lighting productions?

I always pay attention to human beings and human feelings, putting their dreams and emotions first, to inspire them, and lead them far way from their daily life, into a more poetic scenery. When I twist existing proportions, I am able to create another point of view, leading to poetic sceneries. In the end, they never feel like they have been to the same space, building, or historical monument as before.

ES: The technology that artists use to create and the spaces in which they exhibit their work have probably changed over the past 30 years. How do you think they have changed and how would you like to see them evolve in the future?

Some need to use new technologies as a media, some just use emotion as a media. I belong to the second half. The flicker and warmth of a candlelight hasn’t changed for decades.

ES: There is a sense of climax in your productions, such as the Eiffel Tower piece “Ondes Visibles III” and the “ND1” installation in Hong Kong as well as in your latest piece “(naked) absence – (blinding) presence” at the Invisible Dog. Do you think your earlier experiences in the Opera world had any influence on this?

Maybe, but to be honest, the day-to-day life has much more influence on me since I always try to fight against, and escape, the speed and stress our lives imposes on us. When going to the opera, the audience comes to enjoy a musical/theatrical  moment; and during that moment, the guidelines are created by the music scores and annotations of a number of directors, or the composer him/herself. In my work, the only guideline is to offer a vision that people will share. For me references and written formats aren’t guidelines, instincts and pure emotions are.

ES: Do you think that your works and productions have any French influence?

Maybe you can answer, I can’t.

ES: What piques your interest these days?

Cities. And looking at cities with a different point of view at night, lighting them up in a different way one sees them during daytime.

ES: What are some proverbs or words that you keep in mind for inspiration?

« Lights turned off
From the limpid sky a star comes forward
And enters through the window »
– Natsume Sôseki (Haiku)

The light was so intense we had to clear a path through it, as if through
a thicket. – Vassili Grossman

The work of Art operates like a sample,
A questioning close-up.
Make surprising the peaceful, the simple, the understood,
The usual and the best accepted and shared by all.
– Marc-Alain Ouakin

Never ask for directions from someone who knows the way
For then, you couldn’t get lost. – Rabbi Nachman de Braslav

The work lives off the way one looks at it. It is not limited either to what it
is, nor to he who produced it, it is also made by he who beholds it. My
“painting” is a space of questioning and meditation where the meanings
one gives it can come, be made and unmade.
– Pierre Soulages

Artist Links:

Thierry Dreyfus

Eiji Sumi

(photos courtesy of the Invisible Dog)