A Memory of Artomatic (Washington, DC)

It has been a couple of weeks now since I spent the day in DC touring the officeless office building where the most recent edition of Artomatic was housed. I'd never been before (though it's been going on for around 10 years) and I wasn't sure what to expect. After entering the lobby and taking the elevator up, I found nine floors of work by artists mostly unknown to me, perhaps mostly unknown in general. Taking in so much visual information in a such a short amount of time quickly becomes tiring; it is quite difficult to give full attention to everything in such a situation. Most often I found myself passing over many displays in search of something that would simply grab my attention. This happened only once, when I came upon a series of small drawings done with colored pencils which depicted ambiguous scenes taken from anonymous internet videos. I do not remember the artist's name, unfortunately, but the fuzzily rendered images remain fresh in my mind.

Some Thoughts on the Sondheim Prize

The Sondheim prize is a relatively new award given yearly to an artist from the Baltimore/Washington region. For the past three years the finalists have displayed their work at the Baltimore Museum of Art prior to the announcement of the winner. This year there were six finalists, including two artists who were also finalists last year, Molly Springfield and Karen Yasinsky. For the first time a youngish artist's collective, Baltimore Development Cooperative, made it into the competition. Overall, the show contains some interesting ideas but the works themselves seem less than compelling. My initial thought was that Karen Yasinsky might win by virtue of her having been a finalist before and the fact that she offered something new this year while Molly Springfield (the other two time finalist) displayed work that looked very similar to last year's. When the winner was announced last Saturday evening I was surprised that the award went instead to the Baltimore Development Cooperative (who built a "participation" dome on the front steps of the museum). After some consideration, though, it all made sense. Compared with the somewhat dry artwork by the more "experienced" artists, the DIY kids may have seemed like a breath of fresh air to the three jurors entrusted with awarding the $25,000 prize.
http://www.artbma.org/exhibitions/special/2009_Sondheim/#Sondheim

New American Paintings #81

New American Paintings (Juried Exhibitions in Print) issue #81 has just arrived on magazine racks. It covers artists throughout the Mid-Atlantic region and offers a selection of work by forty painters living in Pennsylvania, Virgina, and Maryland. The juror for this particular issue is George Kinghorn (Director and Curator, University of Maine Museum of Art) who states in the opening essay that "...there is no prevailing style in painting today". While this may be true in some sense, a casual glance through this as well as past issues reveals a few very obvious trends popular among painters these days. First, and most striking of these, is the use of animal imagery. In previous editions of the publication one regularly happened upon pictures depicting rabbits; more recently, deer seem to be the animal of choice. The current issue contains at least one painting in which deer can be found though past issues have often included multiple examples. Another "style" seen over and over again is the seemingly offhand placement of figures (animal, human) and structures within large expanses of negative white space. In #81 I counted no less than ten artists using this approach. Again, prior volumes contain many more examples. The third "prevailing style" encountered from issue to issue is the partially abstracted and fragmented apocalyptic landscape. These sometimes combine expressionistic brushwork with overlays of computer generated designs and shapes to present overly busy visions of instability and "flux", as the artists themselves explain in their accompanying statements. Rather than providing insight, these statements only serve to confirm the symbolic overload of much of the work here. In the midst of this, the paintings of Robert Kogge, Charles Ritchie, and Larry Francis provide refreshment by virtue of their directness and relative simplicity .
http://www.newamericanpaintings.com/

Poltergeist

I went to this exhibit while in LA at the CAA conference and thought it might be of interest. I visited Rebecca's studio while in my last semester at VCFA while she was getting ready to present her studio plan to the gallery and all her installations were in miniature in her studio. The picture to the left, "Gretel" was finished and leaning against the studio wall. It is (and this is a guess) about 9' by 7'. I am sorry that I couldn't post any pics of the installation pieces but you could look at a couple of them on the LA Louver site. She is an amazing painter. But the piece that dominated the show was her black velvet wrapped tree that spread over about half of the main room of the gallery. Rebecca said that the Poltergeist refers to a mischievious spirit, but I did find that it was a little difficult to relate the title of the show to the actual pieces.



Rebecca Campbell
Poltergeist
LA Louver Gallery

26 February - 28 March 2009

Best-known for her bold, representational paintings, in
Poltergeist, Campbell expands her visual vocabulary to includesculpture and video, which she presents in an immersive installation setting.

Poltergeist is an exploration of the connections and
distance between the theoretical and the physical.
Theoretical notions of nostalgia, time and the sublime
are considered through the juxtaposition of materials
that connote particular and disparate time periods and
cultural pedigrees. The works of art become artifacts
of ideas being processed through physical experiences and the inevitable distortion that occurs
between these ideas and their practice.

At the entrance of the exhibition the visitor encounters two
closed, large wood doors. Campbell has retrieved the front doors from her childhood home in Salt Lake City, Utah, to serve as a portal into the psychological and visual landscape that lies beyond. The doors are surrounded by hundreds of individual abstract paintings that together convey the bricks of a house.
Crossing the threshold, the visitor is confronted with a large tree that Campbell has harvested from the Los Angeles' neighborhood in which she lives. The leafless, sinuous tree is enrobed in black velvet and sits in a pool of salt crystals, while perched on its limbs rest dozens of glass birds filled with brilliant blue Windex. Beyond the tree, six hundred copper bees (Utah is known as the “beehive” state) comprise the sculpture Satellite. Each bee floats in space, suspended on a thin filament of nickel plated wire affixed to circular walnut panels on the floor and ceiling, to create a shimmering, swirling swarm.

A free-standing arched wall bears one of several paintings inthe exhibition. Entitled Gretel, the painting depicts a young girl with blonde plaits, who crouches by a stream in a wooded landscape. Sunlight dapples the landscape and reflects off the child's golden locks and pale skin. The viewer is drawn into the girl's interior life, through the animation of the landscape that surrounds her: the dense wood canopy is rendered in small, impastoed marks, while broad brush-
strokes convey the ebb and flow of the stream below.
Beneath the painting, on the gallery's floor, a wool shag carpet*, of varying green hues that convey a series of steps, is surrounded by a wood balustrade.

A domestic vignette is presented with a disjointed, destabilized kitchen table and chairs that appear to be partially thrust into the wall. A cake made of glistening chrome seems to slide off the table's surface, in peril of falling ontoa colorful rag rug (that the artist has made from her ownpainting cloths), upon which the table stands. Opposite, a1970s avocado-colored oven, engorged with the books of

Campbell's childhood, is inset into a panel of hand-painted wallpaper while its clock runs backwards in staccato fashion.

Campbell left Utah to study at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, Oregon, receiving her B.F.A. in1994. While continuing to make art, she worked as an independent exhibition curator in Salt Lake City1994 through 1998. In 1998, Campbell received a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and in 1999,
moved to Los Angeles where she earned her MFA from UCLA in 2001. Poltergeist is Campbell's third solo exhibition at L.A. Louver. In addition to Los Angeles, Campbell's paintings have been exhibited inNew York and Basel, Switzerland.

Rebecca's artist statement:

Merriam-Webster defines nostalgia as a combination of the Greek root nostos meaning "return home" and the Old English genesan meaning "to survive." In my current body of work Poltergeist I explore the often sentimentalized and disregarded significance of this experience. In exploring aspects of childhood, memory, and nostalgia I hope to address nostalgia's disruptive effects on linear time and to propose that this phenomenon might be considered under the rubric of an archetypically feminine sublime, as an underestimated strategy for finding meaning in the face of loss and death. For example when a person is having an acute experience of nostalgia, time collapses and the past, the present and the future become one. A nostalgic moment for me might be triggered by a memory of walking through the forest behind my house when I was five but that memory then triggers others, dancing to Boys Don't Cry while drinking black label beer at the Liberty Park, cutting lavender for the dinner table yesterday afternoon and ultimately a sense of the loss of experiences I have yet to have. Time becomes nonlinear and it's both sad and sweet at the same time. Nostalgia somehow enables us to sing along to the tune of our own deaths.

In this work I'm also concerned with the connections and distance between the theoretical and the physical. Inspired by Barthes premise in Pleasure of the Text that "Whence, perhaps, a means of evaluating the works of our modernity: their value would proceed from their duplicity. By which it must be understood that they always have two edges. The subversive edge may seem privileged because it is the edge of violence; but it is not violence which affects pleasure, nor is it destruction which interests it; what pleasure wants is the site of loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation, the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss." I am creating works that seek out the seam between ideas and their performance. In specific, theoretical notions of nostalgia, time, and the sublime are considered through physical acts of making paintings, installations, sculptures and films creating documents of these connections and distances. The works of art become artifacts of ideas being processed through experiences and the inevitable distortion that occurs between these ideas and their practice.

Practically speaking, I circumscribe "the midst of bliss" by choosing signs, materials and techniques that give forms to the premise. One notion I am interested in is landscape. The sign I have chosen to represent this with is the tree. Perspectives on nature, wildness and space are examined by animating the tree in various media and interpretive techniques including monumental gestural painting, documentary film footage and life size sculptural construction. The content also unfolds through investment in metaphoric materials. My interest in the nostalgia's transgressive effect on linear time is expressed through the juxtaposition of materials that connote particular and disparate time periods and cultural pedigrees. These materials include, oil paint on canvas, bronze, copper, shag carpet, acrylic paint on drywall, velvet, glass, Windex, etc. The amalgam of these textures allows me to embody my ideas about time without reducing them to a didactic argument. The resonance is one faceted with the familiarity of the body and the fiction of the mind. Marguerite Duras describes these phenomena as "Dreams of another time when the same thing that is going to happen would happen differently. In another way. A thousand times. Everywhere. Elsewhere. Among others, thousands of others who, like ourselves, dream of this time, necessarily. This dream contaminates me."

Rebecca Campbell

Pour Your Body Out

Pipilotti Rist
"Pour Your Body Out"
MOMA

by damali and diedra

I don't usually feel comfortable at MOMA, with all of the nose-in-the-air snobs. Pipilotti Rist's Pour Your Body Out changed that, if only for a brief moment. Having sofas and people taking their shoes off was part of it. Maybe the snobs avoided this installation. Or perhaps it's hard to be stuck up with your shoes off or sitting on the floor. I sat on the floor against the wall, as all the seats on the round central sofa were taken. I sat there for a long time watching the video and watching the people. The vivid colors in the video were entrancing. A woman who also couldn't fit in the sofa area, sat in the middle of the floor and breastfed her child with giant flowers and body parts projected on the wall behind them. This "performance" seemed right at home in this environment.




There were three large walls with projections on them. Flowers. Lots of pink. Clear close ups of eyes, face, body. Some images looked like being inside a jello cube. The contrast in scale of all the visitors and the one body being projected was astounding. You think you are so big, in the moment of looking at the self and then there's all these other people each with their own inside, close up, in the mirror, in the self and then many are brought together under the exaggeration of scale. Many and one. It reminds me of Iyengars yoga meditation inhale with all the people of the world and exhale the self joining with them. One and many. Together. Perspective and scale and moments.

Elf World: Inneractive Apiecolypse

Speaking of girls pointing cute plastic guns, I saw a paper mache life sized elf on a bison pointing a machine gun that had been colorfully decorated in a zigzag pattern. Attached to her bison was a cart with a tent full of freshly baked apple pies.

I am deeply interested in immersive environments for play and the great panorama of Elf World lured me in. The colors were spectacular and thoughtful, lots of saturation and brightness and textures. The quilt of hexagons and other textures made for a watering hole.

We heard there would be pies for the eating. There were pies inside the cart but no cutlery. A clear sign these were not the pies to be eaten. Amidst our search, Barbara approached us and announced there are pies and tea in the back for the eating.
Her husband Tom was selling souvenirs, you could even get a pattern to make the ply wood structure of the bison.

Feeling under dressed, and like a tourist to Elf World, as I ate my slice of apple pie, I sifted through the colors and textures and observed my surroundings, the variety of American symbols - apple pies, guns, teepees, great landscapes of the west, traditional native american patterns, a contemporary windmill, the bison, a "factory" of elf women on the pie making mission from the gathering of grains, picking the apples to baking them. Suddenly I felt the distance between my food source and the makers of my food in my own everyday.

Nevertheless, to complete my blue-jean wearing tourist experience of this art installation, I had to have my picture taken eating the said pie. mmm mmm



Elf World: Inneractive Apiecolypse
Space 1026

Guns and Chandeliers at Gallery Imperato, Baltimore MD

Gallery Imperato's current exhibit features work by two very different painters: Shannon Cannings and Jessica Dunegan. Both artists have limited their subject matter here and the pairing makes for an interesting contrast. While Cannings' paintings depict plastic toy guns (packaged and unpackaged) executed in smooth and realistic detail, Dunegan's work examines chandeliers and their complex structure in a more subjective and dreamlike fashion. Where Cannings uses oil on canvas applied in the traditional manner to portray familiar children's playthings, Dunegan makes her hanging, luminous objects appear fuzzy and stringy through the use of white resin seemingly encased in a field of reflective black. Along with these, Dunegan displays another variation on her theme: a series of chandelier images seen through filmy colored glass.

Overall, Dunegan's work commands more visual and conceptual interest; its technical complexity and subtle imagery encourage one to linger a bit longer. Cannings' work, while nicely painted, only takes the viewer so far. Two of the paintings show larger than life toy guns in their retail packaging, complete with pushpins holding them to the wall. Another series, of single squirt guns lying on a white surface, presents the objects as plastic "still life". The one painting which breaks from this mode consists of a tiara wearing little girl pointing a toy gun directly at the viewer. This work, with its heavy handed imagery, removes whatever opportunity Cannings' other paintings offer for a variety of viewer responses.

January 30 - March 14, 2009

www.galleryimperato.com

Farewell Franz

The Baltimore Museum of Art's Franz West retrospective has closed and the work is now being packed away in crates marked FRAGILE. Fragile is a word that could be applied to the work itself, not only for the materials used to make it (papermache, cardboard, and plaster, among other things), but also for the feeling it evokes. West is an Austrian artist who grew up in the unsettled (and unsettling) atmosphere of post WWII Europe, a period which he describes as "a time of darkness". A sense of unease pervades the work, though it is not without a wonderfully dry and deadpan humor. With his pieces titled "Adaptives", West invites the viewer to experience the work in an unusual way. During the BMA's show, visitors could pick them up and try them on for size. Though they serve no specific utilitarian purpose, each adaptive offers the user the possibility of engaging physically with something usually off limits in museums: a work of art.
The show travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and will open there in March. An excellent catalog is available titled FRANZ WEST: To Build A House You Start With The Roof, Work 1972-2008, by Darsie Alexander.

Purcell and projections at Joyce Soho

This weekend I got a chance to be part of a fun project at Joyce Soho in New York City. It was a workshop performance by Jody Oberfelder Dance Projects: a multimedia version of Dido and Aeneas, an opera by Henry Purcell. The story of the opera is excepted from the Aenied by Virgil, but Jody updated the setting and recast Dido and her lover Aeneas as a modern Hollywood supercouple, hounded and eventually separated by media moguls and paparazzi, instead of the gods of Mt. Olympus.

The production was unusual not only because of the updating, but Jody used live musicians on stage (sadly increasingly rare in dance performances these days): a small orchestra conducted from the harpsichord, plus a quartet of wonderful opera singers singing the lead roles, each of whom was mirrored by an equally wonderful principal dancer portraying the action simultaneously. Jody also created witty projections that played on the wall behind the dancers, as well as on their bodies as they moved about the stage.

The choreography was athletic, sensuous and funny, and the production really gave this baroque opera a fresh twist. Hopefully the piece will tour in the future. Road trip!

Here are some clips from the production...

And some upcoming projects by the Jody Oberfelder Dance Projects!

It was really an energizing and inspiring way to start the New Year. Cheers!

Composition, color and craftsmanship

Shelley Thorstensen - The Preponderance of Evidence
The Print Center
1614 Latimer Street
Philadelphia, PA

This was a show of prints on paper using various printing processes such as lithography, etching, screen printing and relief printing.


"Charge" silkscreen 7 x 10 inches

I'm still thinking about Shelley Thorstensen's work. My experience of seeing her series of framed prints spread across four walls of the room. I carefully looked at each print up close, engaging in the layers of color and form. I loved them. The layers. The subtle depth of color. The play of light. The outlines ~ the gentle repetition of the drawn lines, precise yet sensual. Wondrous moments of visual pleasure, upclose and personal with the detail. From further away the blocks of light or darkness take on larger, organic forms. The opening reception was on a freezing, rainy night and to feel the color and have that experience with the work was remarkable. I think Shelley's work is about process of making beautiful spatial images. This abstract, atmospheric world of warm hues was truly beautiful, visually and conceptually.

Upon more reflection because of writing this blog, I was thinking about my experience of standing in front of Shelley’s work. I was thinking about the physical form of the paper, the process the paper had been through the printing, Shelley’s craftsmanship, working the paper, printing process and the image, and the materials being inherent to the making of the image. It made me appreciate the prints in a way I hadn’t considered, as corporeal objects, and through this reflection, I couldn’t help but think of my own physicality, substance as a body standing in relation to the work. My body, my materiality vs the materiality of the work, and our temporality. Body to body.

"A lot of those songs were the response to what struck me as beauty, whatever that curious emanation from a being, or an object, a situation, or a landscape. You know, that had a very powerful effect on me, as it does on everyone. And I prayed to have some response to the things that were so clearly beautiful to me, and they were alive."

Leonard Cohen, from the film “I’m Your Man”