An entertaining, animated oral narrator in person, Bryan Zanisnik is also highly talented at telling stories through visually complex works, stacked with symbols, metaphors, and signifiers. In a sort of choose-your-own-adventure visual narrative, the viewer is allowed to piece together the information to create, or re-create, his or her own personal story. Zanisnik photographs complex tableaus constructed from personal and found objects, stages absurdist performances, and shoots videos that follow a New Jersey couple (his parents) through domestic and familiar spaces. His new body of work, Brass Arms Upper Eyelid, is currently on view through February 19, 2011 at Horton Gallery. In conjunction with the exhibition, Zanisnik will present a live performance on Saturday, February 5, from 4-6pm.
Bryan Zanisnik (b. 1979, Union, NJ) lives and works in New York, NY. He received an MFA from Hunter College, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and is currently an artist-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program. He recently performed at Galeria On, Poznan, Poland; PS1/MOMA, New York, NY; and Marginal Utility, Philadelphia, PA. This summer he will perform and participate in an exhibition at the Times Museum in Guangzhou, China. Continue Reading More »
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. Continue Reading More »
It is uniquely appropriate that Maren Miller’s exhibition at Important Projects is set between the change of the calendar year. Miller’s show, like the experience of temporal boundary of the New Year, allows for an unexpected moment for reflection. Miller’s two untitled pieces expose the ponderous phase change materially between painting and sculpture, while also slipping between formal and conceptual.
The pleasure of seeing “Now that I know” arrived after I had left the small room and the suite of object/paintings, and grew as time passed. The strength of Miller’s presentation lay in the paring of her objects, an unstretched shaped canvas on the wall and a stuffed worm-shape covered by the alphabet on the floor. The canvas used, the always popular, faux realism to allude to a textile being stretched, which though clever relies on the non sequitor of the floor piece. Although the floor piece is quite strong alone, it is enhanced by its neighbor and the confined quality of the Important Project’s space. Miller’s “Now that I Know” expands the notion of visual experience beyond the present object into ideas and transitional phases. Like the alphabet so clearly and thoughtfully marked on the worm-form, an essential system of communication can lose its familiar meaning and become a lovely form of decoration.
“Now that I know”
Maren Miller
Important Projects, Rockridge, Oakland, CA
December 11, 2010 – January 15, 2011
Lush and tactile, the canvases heavy with paint, José Lerma is known for his texturally seductive, semi-abstract paintings that allude to the idea of a formal portrait. Recognized for his abstract, expressively personal paintings, Lerma ventures off the canvas to a conceptual, almost sculptural practice in his latest show, “I am Sorry I am Perry” at Andrea Rosen Gallery. In three parts, the bankers, the curtain, and the keyboards, Lerma references both personal and historical narratives, yet encourages the viewer to create their own.
José Lerma (b. Spain, raised in Puerto Rico) lives and works in New York and Chicago, where he is on faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently, he has a solo show at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, NY. “I am sorry I am Perry” is on view through January 22, 2011. Additionally, “A Person of Color/A Mostly Orange Exhibition” – a group show curated by Lerma, opens at Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI, on January 22, 2011.
Amanda Schmitt: Rather than just a showing of new paintings, “I am sorry I am Perry” seems to me to be a very thoughtful exhibition with clear formal and conceptual intentions. Are you both the artist and the curator?
José Lerma: I planned this exhibition around 3 elements that I had worked with in the past. Curating is a good way of putting it. Even before I started making art, I loved Mardsen Hartley’s paintings of Von Freyburg. I like the idea of a collection of objects and stories collapsing on each other and becoming, in effect, a portrait. In that sense, all my shows are a kind of curated self-portrait. However I didn’t want it to feel like discreet parts that were there to be decoded instead I wanted the viewer to arrive at kind of “fourth reading”; I love when clarity devolves into babble and facts become aesthetics. What I mean is that what matters to me is the effect that the parts have on each other and not their individual meanings. Continue Reading More »
Over the course of seven years, photographer Timothy Briner created “Boonville”, taking place in six different towns spread across the U.S. from New York to California. During this unique solitary road trip, his itinerary consisted of New York, North Carolina, Indiana, Missouri, Texas, and California. Importantly, Briner did his best not to be an anonymous traveler just passing through, he chose to ground himself within the communities for weeks and months at a time. He became familiar and close with the locals and was fortunate to get to know the rhythms of their everyday lives. Within the portraits of hunters and smoke stacks, Briner has a clear opinion, which is never condescending or reductive. These images of different zip codes all with the name Boonville form a unique series of the commonalities of small towns in contemporary America, as seen from the inside. Currently, he has a solo show of the work at the Brauer Museum of Art in Valparaiso, Indiana and a trade edition of the book is in progress.
Briner was born in Indiana. He currently lives in Brooklyn, and is represented by Daniel Cooney Fine Art in New York. Continue Reading More »
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