ampersand in words 2007 - 2009

MAY : word : MATTHEW HUGHES BOYKO : art : VANESSA MARSH

2009-05-14T16:09:00.000-07:00

Vanessa Marsh: Model Sentimentality

an Interview by Matthew Hughes Boyko

“Always Close But Never Touching”, that is the title of your exhibition. Why did you go with this specific phrase, I’m curious?

“Always Close but never touching” was the title of a series of photographs I was working on earlier. The two photographs in the show are from that series, the sculptures grew out of that work.

Vanessa didn’t really answer my question. I should have asked, “What do you mean by...?” I guess this is just one of those wonderfully abstracted intriguing themes that artists provide and you have to assume that it means something to the artist, to the work and hopefully the viewer...

You grew up in Seattle, a recurring theme in your work. Why are you in San Francisco?

I have a weird relationship with the place, specifically with Western Washington, West of the Cascades. These models are all from Western Washington. I decided to move away from Seattle because it couldn’t provide me with what I wanted from life... and as an artist, what I needed from art.

When I decided to apply for my Masters study none of the schools in Seattle really spoke to me. I knew I didn’t want to continue to live there, since that’s where I lived for my entire life and I knew there were certain things Seattle couldn’t provide. I picked San Francisco as an area I felt I could settle down in for a little while. Part of why you go to graduate school is to find out how to build a community and begin your network of people. The idea of doing that and leaving right afterwards (leaving Seattle) just didn’t make sense to me at that point. Now I’m part of a community, I know people and people know who I am.

I first met Vanessa when she was going to school at CCA, she was in her 2nd year of the MFA program. The community she talks about are some local favorites: Mitzi Pederson, Sean McFarland, James Chronister. Schools help to nurture the special community of art friends you develop while you are in the 2-3 year program. The relationships you initiate while in school tend to last and are integral in your professional development as an artist.

Can you give me a little history of your art making practice? How did you arrive at the model pieces that represent a majority of this exhibition?

I began making the models to create a certain type of photograph. I would create the model with a certain image in mind; both with the end result of the photo piece and the role the model would have in the photograph.

The “False Horizon” series that I was doing in graduate school (2003-04) and the work that I did during my time at the Headlands Center for the Arts were made by my buying model kits, putting them together, weathering (painting) the model and then photographing it. Sometimes I would only finish the model to the point it needed to be worked just for the photograph. I had always wanted to make models of specific places, but I didn’t have the skills at the time to build it from scratch.

In this last year I had a job at a place called Figureplant, a model making business. It was a fabrication plant and I was working on a project for the Conservatory of Flowers building models based on San Francisco landmarks. Detail and recognition were key points of the job and that experience helped to develop my model making skills. After that I got more comfortable with building things. I was excited because I recently went to Seattle, took some reference shots of my memories growing up there and started to develop the model work based on these new/old locations.

It was a combination of factors, like having that job, going to Seattle, taking those shots of specific places and wanting to create models that I felt a lot of sentimentality towards...a longing to be at this place had a fair amount to do with this work.

This term sentimentality comes up a lot during the interview. Vanessa’s use of this concept, how it is built into her practice and how she defines it has certainly made me reconsider how I see her work and the sentimental aspects inherent to the psychological places she creates.

That was certainly a clear explanation of your process in making the physical piece. What decisions have you made when considering the conceptual frame of the works?

How do you keep the composure of psychology in this method of art making? Of creating models instead of photographs, how are you using the mediums involved and dealing with the spatial requirements demanded of a three-dimensional work versus a photograph?

With the photographs the dreamy/surreal quality of that visual look is coming from putting the model in front of my camera and taking a picture of it outside in a real environment. Creating an image that looks real, but that also has a dream-like quality in the sense that there is something super realistic about them. It was about being able to enter into the photograph and go into a place, experience a place that I remember, or want to remember.

There’s something special about building the models, I really enjoyed the tactileness of them... I liked the perspective that I get when looking at it. A photograph is a photograph, it’s a flat two-dimensional thing and the psychology involved comes from the picture plane. The models can be viewed in a different way, in that you can get close to it and have that psychological experience with this recreated physical place. You see them from different angles, different perspectives, literally and figuratively.

I am making a work of art, not a model. I want it to be presented almost like a painting or a sculpture, as opposed to it just being a model, not “oh I’m a model-maker and I make these models...” I want it to be something that has more to it than just a model. These places are built from a time in my life when I knew that I wanted to be an artist. I started to feel a lot of creativity in high school, I got my first car, my first camera and I would go on these long drives to the places I am referencing in the models. I would trespass. I would take pictures and spend a lot of time by myself in these places.

Vanessa’s history is in direct correlation to the works she has made. This is always the case with artists and the art works they produce. Being able to see and understand that subtext may or may not offer additional insight into the work but it is always entertaining. An artist that allows you to build a narrative from their artwork, to construct your own fantasies of what is happening or what has happened is a good thing. Vanessa has created pieces that do not force a prescriptive viewing; rather they softly open the window of interpretation for the viewer, granting them their own narrative and personal histories they associate with the sites she has created.

How does the element of your history get to the viewer without you being right next to them telling them why the places are important to you? Is this a concern you have with your work?

I guess one would hope that the work is good enough, that something just comes through...

The foundation I use when making these pieces is about me revisiting those places, revisiting a time when I started on the path that has led me here today, those starting points. I think it’s okay for people to come to them and bring their own stories, their own impressions of what it is they are looking at.

The titles and the artist statement are available and it describes what you are asking to some extent.

I first made the “Waterfront Building, Aberdeen WA”, then the “Georgia Pacific Storage Warehouse, Bellingham WA” then the “Incomplete Freeway On-Ramp, Seattle WA.” and then I made the “Cement Factory Seattle WA “ and the “Bridge House, Harbor Island WA” at the same time.

Out of the 5, the “Incomplete Freeway On-Ramp, Seattle WA.” is the closest to me, this is the most sentimental, this is actually a point that I’ve been to multiple times in my life, a place I have multiple memories from. It’s in the Arboretum, they were planning on building this whole crazy freeway network and they never finished it.

I want there to be immediacy between the works, I don’t want there to be a barrier for anyone.

Did you jump off there (referring to the end of the freeway)?

I did, I jumped off from it in High School a few times, into the lake, in the summer.

I ask this question because when I look at that On-Ramp... One part of me does react to the piece as a model, I think of an abandoned bridge/freeway thing going over water but... one part of me, just looking at the railing detail, reminds me of the Little Piney River Bridge, just on the outskirts of Newburg, Missouri and relentlessly recalls the fact that I never did jump off, not once.

The detail work in these pieces allows me to enter my own memory of a like place. How are you considering feeling in relation to the physical process of producing these sculptures?

A lot of the production quality and surface textures were made with aesthetic purpose. I wanted to take an approach with these sculptures that was really honest and not over thought. I didn’t want to sit around my studio wondering why I was doing what I was doing. I wanted it to be a more organic process. In that way, it’s been a very liberating experience to make this work. Just being in my studio and being like, “Oh I have a pile of old shelves, I’m going to cut them up and see how they look as a pedestal!” or “Hey, I have this piece of wood, I wonder...”

In a lot of ways I’m really nervous and scared about this show because it’s still really new to me and I just don’t feel super confident about it. They are all abandoned places, except “Bridge House Harbor, Island WA”. But even that one had an interesting vacancy about it because, even though there was someone living in it, it felt like the building and the people were abandoned somehow... that’s the type of mental response I am trying to evoke from these works.

That the viewer is able to find a “like place” in their own set of memories is a good response since I am attempting to instill a sentimental experience with the artwork. I mean, that’s the artist’s hope, right? Even in the most abstract painting there’s some sort of emotion that goes into it from the artist and if you were the artist creating that type of work you would hope that emotion would carry through to the viewer. This was another case of my letting myself go in terms of how I was working and letting myself create a literal level of abstraction with the painted sections in the model pieces.

Vanessa truly does take license with the soothing level of abstraction the watered areas of her sculptures. The painted abstractions add a feeling of unease and pollution to an already dilapidated building structure that feels deathly quiet and unwelcomingly serene as a real location.

Vanessa’s use of sentimentality to describe her work seems congruent to the finished pieces. She uses the concept to emotionally invite the viewer into these places. They are art works that requires you to minimum ally believe that these model sculptures mean something special to Vanessa and subsequently something to you, the viewer, which will eventually claim their own special memory and interpretation of the work.

I wanted to ask Vanessa why she had not included the same people models that were indicative of her earlier photo works into the model sculpture works. Her answer to the question satisfied my understanding of Vanessa Marsh, the artist and finished our interview with the sentimental thought that I would hope anyone seeing her art comes away with. The romantic intrigue of the artist, the exciting mystery surrounding the work and the patient wonder to see what this sentimental person will create in the future.

The work you are showing me, this model slide show of Vanessa’s life growing up, her memories of these spots and feelings accompanying them... why in these works are there no model people, no evidence of you being in them?

I think that’s one of the main reasons for having the ”The Girl Standing” photograph part of the show, that image is me. ”The Girl Standing” photograph, in a lot of ways... that’s me.

MAY : word : SARAH STONE : art : VANESSA MARSH

2009-05-14T15:57:00.000-07:00

When rain fell,

were she foolish enough to ask herself ‘who am I’ she would fall flat on her face. That’s why thought, she says, means fear. Language goes with us into the house, the gap between mistake and morning sickness. First you break the windows, then you are the windows. The word ‘dream’ is not a word that closes.

Only in connection,

with a river do mists make sense. Days begin to orient themselves as I sleep without so much as a nightmare. Unable to find my own things in the darkness I pick up the objects ‘happiness,’ ‘unhappiness’ and ‘as much hot water as you wanted.’ I can see the tax collectors coming through the pines.

But this duration

wandering the open country, a rush of water. Where I feel most comfortable, simply to move twenty minutes to the west, so I can wander in your darkness. Crossing huge stretches of grass with a fat orange moon in the sky, I finally came to prefer memory. I find so much of you there I don’t think about arriving.

SARAH STONE 2009

MAY : word : RAY DAVIS : art : CHRISTINA LA SALA

2009-05-14T15:45:00.000-07:00

Ray Davis, April 2009

In writing, it's called "a strong voice." Across materials, across moods, a sense of continuous engagement with another. Maybe not quite the human being you meet at the reception, the reading, or the party, but not a pose or a persona, no formula. Something wholer than that, someone you recognize when you enter the room.

In the voice of Christina La Sala, there's wit and "inwit" (as Middle English called "conscience"), with no hint of smirk. There's painstaking elegance, insisting on beauty even in shabbiness and loss. Art is what this voice does, and making art is necessarily making do.

There's a sort of dyslexic synesthesia, modal wires crossing at a dreamlike concept both reasonable and uncanny: Braille chewing gum, for example. ("'Well, I've tried to say How doth the little busy bee, but it all came different!' Alice replied in a very melancholy voice.")

There's a poised sense of confrontation: a dare to make the first move, to cross this line, tip this balance, pop the bubble, eat me, shatter me.... We're being asked, I think, to make a decision: to consume and have done, or to live with the experience. To live at all is to live with one's decisions and actions and circumstances.

Which is to live with one's art. The least escapist of artists, La Sala affirms without flurry or bluster, but hour by hour, week by week, over what Louis Zukofsky called "a poem of a life": the work of a life in work. Duration itself becomes preoccupation: the times that bind, as in the obsessive stitching of La Sala's "Stay Awake" bedsheet, with its dare to fall asleep.

When these characteristics coincide, there's nothing anecdotal about the result, but we're tempted to narrate, to put this perplexing artifact in its place in some known story. The voice resists us. The Rapunzel-length hair-and-steel-wool braid of La Sala's "Straw into Gold," for example, intertwines aging's fairy-tale transmutation of brown-to-gray with our age's science-fiction transmutation of organism-to-machine. Its weave is clean; the tangle is in the yarns we spin.

A return to glasswork after many years, "Petrified Forest" carries La Sala's voice at its strongest. In writing, it would be called a serial poem, a unified work made up of sets of paired individual works:

There's a row of large glass panels etched with various patterns -- floral garlands, diamonds diamonded, curved boxes, pinstripes -- made more elaborately decorative by shadow-play as each leans against the wall from a painted wooden platform -- which, in turn, has been marred by carved tally marks.

There's a column of squat glass strips, smeared by tally marks, as if by a fingertip dipped in acid. Each bar is held flush close against the wall; the shadows turn them into a trompe l'oeil of greasy icicles or streaked unguents.

Naturally, I'm tempted into narrative. I recognized one pattern from gift wrap or wallpaper of my childhood, and then I thought of cargo cults and Renaissance reliquaries: how the fragmented kitsch of one culture, after everything falls apart, inspires the high craft of another culture. And a prisoner in the ivory tower leaves marks which, preserved and honored after everything falls apart again, become reproduced in their turn. As Alan Squire said in The Petrified Forest, "I've formed a theory about that that would interest you. It's the graveyard of the civilization that's shot from under us."

But my ramshackle construction, full of plot-holes, hardly matches the piece's confident coherence. Perhaps I should be thinking instead of natural history and microbiological cultures: a science museum with brittle slabs impressed by ancient ferns, flowers, floods, and crystals, and with slide mounts demonstrating, oh, the effects of antibiotics?

But that hardly conveys the piece's aggression, humor, and endurance. I might as well take the etymological approach: Arizona's fossilized trees are extinct members of a botanical family that includes the Chilean monkey-puzzle tree, named Araucariaceae for the Arauco people who live in the region. "Contrary to popular belief, the Quechua word awqa 'rebel, enemy', is probably not the root of araucano: the latter is more likely derived from the placename rag ko 'clayey water'." Yes, that's clear as mud.

Or maybe it's best if I pass this to the strong voice of Alice Notley, a poet born in Bisbee, Arizona, about 300 miles south of Petrified Forest National Park:

"This is distinction, says a voice,

Your features are etched in

ice so everyone can see them"

"Poverty much maligned but beautiful

has resulted in smaller houses replete with mysteries"

"there's the desert beyond them that I try to keep housed from

no thin flesh there no coursing fluid no thought"

Ray Davis, April 2009

Amplifying the Twilight

2009-03-17T16:28:00.000-07:00

Curatorial Statement
Brian Andrews & Marc LeBlanc

Human history has etched an expanding curve from myth to science. Its path crosses territories that were once sacred but came to be viewed as either knowledge or superstition. As culture and technology advanced, so did the boundary between what was rationally determined and cosmologically intuited. The evolution of culture and science resides at this fringe, expanding outward, in the twilight where human knowledge begins to break apart into the unknown.

In 1973, writer Arthur C. Clarke declared in his Third Law of Prediction, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The law collapses the differences between a scientist and a magician to milestones on the path leading to modern humanity.

Amplifying the Twilight investigates this dialectic of the romantic and the rational as it is visualized in contemporary art. The exhibition explores what kind of experimental thought and feeling are possible at the boundary of rationalism and "magic", drawing from esoteric and self-made spiritual practices, scientific research stations, and icons from popular science fiction.

David Coyle's video triptych Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, reinterprets the speculations of science fiction as a form of personal horror. Coyle dresses up as the Tin Man, a magician, and a hominid monster, all historical archetypes of technology and its implications. The self-portraits chant “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”, the infamous quote from Clarke’s 2001, when a computer gains consciousness and murders its human creator. Shashana Chittle and Alison Ruttan’s artistic practices methodically investigate the diffuse boundary of science from opposite sides. Alison Ruttan was artist-in-residence at the Bonobo Research Station at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Her digital print Bred in the Bone humorously documents the parallels of human and primate behavior. Shashana Chittle’s meticulous drawings archive her experience awakening each morning, capturing her fleeting visual perceptions as an amateur scientist recording mythical forms at the edges of her perception. Sayre Gomez and Ryan Fenchel employ the art historical trope of abstraction to illuminate ambiguous structures of the universe, from the microcosm of Fenchel’s OIO, to the expansive macrocosm of Gomez’s Formal Exercise Make and Do.

Amplifying the Twilight can be viewed as a reconciliation between the idealism of romanticism with the realism of modernity; a brief image of the moving edge between what we can think and what is beyond our perceptions.

Brian Andrews & Marc LeBlanc

FEBRUARY: word and art: JORDAN ESSOE

2009-02-12T22:44:00.000-08:00

Illegible Spaces (Part One)
A note about Semaphores
By Jordan Essoe

Author’s Note: I wrote this article after receiving multiple requests to issue a more or less comprehensive text about the Semaphores exhibition project. I am indebted to this support, kindness, and interest. Below is the first part of the resulting statement, which focuses on the broad context and content of the project as a whole. Part two, which will be published in the following weeks, will address the individual works in the exhibition. If you have comments or feedback, please write to me at jordan@essoe.com

Introduction

Semaphores is an exhibition project about globalization, physical manifestations of psychological geography, and the legibility of the environment around us. The project questions our relationship to illegible spaces, and how it defines and manufactures exile and empathy. The work is multidisciplinary, and includes works of collage, video, painting, performance, photography, writing, and sculpture; and incorporates materials ranging from oil on canvas and handwriting on notebook paper to sugar cubes, peg board, and shredded brown paper bags. As an exhibition, it has a linear design, with separate galleries intended to be experienced by the viewer in sequence. As a visual exercise, the project pursues a sense of spatial uncertainties and [dis]quiet. Conceptually, the project considers specific economic, political, and military aspects of globalization towards an understanding of communication structures allowed by – and in some cases a byproduct of – free marketeering, intergovernmental agency, and mutual defense imperialism. I’ll begin this note by addressing the general context for the project before moving into a discussion of the individual works.

Communication Failures

The successes of global communication structures are no more or less important as the failures, but it is through looking at the breakdown or limitations of information technologies that we can better understand how illegible spaces in the global village are created and maintained. Communication failure occurs both by error and by fault, but many of the consequences are consistent. Anywhere in the world, for example, insufficient access to education is the single most compelling risk factor connected to poverty. Information asymmetry can and should be thought of as directly enabling wealth concentration. Concentration of wealth forges exiles of both the haves and the have-nots, with dense illegible spaces dividing the population. Therefore, in all instances and to all degrees that communication structures fail to achieve egalitarian exchange of information and reciprocal interconnectivity, they are not inert conditions. They are the conditioning responsible for actualizing a world with nurtured illegible space and manufactured exile.

Failures or flaws of communication structures are not limited to lines or methods of communication not used responsibly, or even limited to systems that are constructed intentionally for deceitful transmission. An appropriate definition of failure also includes a refusal to develop communication systems within and for illegible spaces where none currently exist (with respect paid to maintaining levels of appropriate privacy in accordance with regional culture and international human rights standards). This is an important secondary ethical aspect to the dialog about communications infrastructure, because lack of information not only enables poverty, but also deactivates empathy through the uneven preservation of distance. The promotion of empathy is an attractive replacement for the Chicago school’s brand of self-interest towards the common good, but distance remains one of empathy’s reliable cures. Consequentially, if distance needs to be deactivated in order to promote empathy adequate enough to stimulate the development of interconnectivity, then this is a Catch-22, and a stabilizing effect for illegible spaces.

Distances

It is remarkable how and why distances are enacted and enabled or preserved. Forces of globalization are often described as tools for compressing space and making distances appear smaller. Since we have acquired the technologies and resources to accomplish either compression or inflation of space, distance should be thought of as a potential feature without default value that requires deliberate activation or deactivation. Bodies of government and transnational business do not usually elect to deactivate distance unless it is in their specific self-interest to do so – frequently to make use of an opportunity of unfair advantage – and common citizens do not typically behave much differently. In many cases, to varying degrees, individuals may elect to promote their own isolation and fortify the distance around them. Why? Distance enables private property and a sense of entitlement. Distance enables a sense of individuality and security. Distance disrupts empathy and places it at arm’s length, replacing it with more comfortably egocentric sensations like apathy or guilt or fear. Distance enables robbery, rape, and expulsion to occur in secret.

Even when people do not actively pursue or protect their own isolation, it is sometimes protected for them – by law enforcement, economic restraint, or cultural norms – and this can seemingly validate a feeling of homelessness inside the global village. Illegible spaces between neighbors are promoted by the powerful because illegible space prevents, among other things, popular uprising. Qualitative isolation exists with ubiquity within the elite sectors of the Global North in ways that are defined by concepts of privilege. It is commonly contrived as a privilege to feel divorced from your neighbors, immediate and far.

Displacement

There are different forms and expressions of exile, all representing characteristics of fracture in the global village. Since exile is binary, and defined by which side of a dividing wall you are on, two distinct types of exile are considered by the Semaphores project. The first is psychological exile, typified by a sense of anomie or symptomatic detachment from one’s local, regional, and/or international community. The other is literal, violent, physical expulsion.

Multiple works in this project specifically examine an ongoing crisis in Colombia. In its northwestern region of Chocó, tens of thousands of indigenous Afro-Colombians are being brutally expelled from their agrarian communities at gunpoint. Their homes and natural territory are immediately overturned and converted into palm oil plantations in the service of junta entrepreneurialism. From a global perspective this is, unbearably so, not a fully unique circumstance. There are other contemporary scenes of systematic pillage that similarly confess an expulsion directed by factors of economic globalization – and the peculiar sociopolitical envelope into which the fragile awareness of evictions of this kind tends to disappear into. This specific case in Colombia felt urgently appropriate to the Semaphores project for multiple reasons.

Of primary interest is Colombia’s contradictory proximity to the United States. The U.S. continues to be Colombia’s profound sponsor, primarily in military and “law enforcement” matters, but we have not yet awarded the country a “free-trade” agreement (fortunately, considering that, among other facts, more trade unionists are murdered in Colombia than in anywhere else in the world). You can fly from Miami to Bogotá in 3 ½ hours, but tourist traffic is spare. Ostensibly, a neighbor as physically near and as economically associated with us as Colombia should feel closer. But the informational and cultural geography make it distant, and the purview feels deeply obfuscated.

In shear numbers, Colombia has the second largest internally displaced person population in the world, behind only Sudan. Over four million Colombians are exiled within their country, a figure roughly double of that for Iraq. The tens of thousands of recent victims joining this haunting statistic in Chocó are displaced through a polygonal arrangement: right-wing paramilitaries working in conjunction with the domestic agrofuel industry are employed by the Colombian government and publicly supported by President Alvaro Uribe and his ambition to emulate the lucrative palm oil boom in Malaysia and Indonesia. Their actions are financed, in part, by the United States through its USAID program. If the paramilitaries wish, they execute those landowners that resist or organize against evacuation. Once the target land is stripped and developed into operational plantations, palm oil is harvested for export, primarily to be used as a biofuel or food additive. As an additional convenience, the plantations are useful money laundering fronts for coca trafficking, a more traditional revenue source for paramilitary operatives.

In essence, a coalition of governmental, corporate, and mercenary pirates are eliminating the rightful owners of legible space and restructuring these spaces as foreign, manufacturing exiles. Witnesses are strangers, watching through soiled windows.

Grand Design

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, a short story written by Jorge Luis Borges in 1940, is used throughout Semaphores as a type of conceptual informant, and many of the works in the project take their titles from the text. The narrative, which Borges plainly suggests is an allegory about totalitarianism, is in this context a useful lens through which to debate the problematic of remaking the world by grand design under the larger heading of globalization. Borges’s story contains myriad literary nuances too intricate to address here with precision, but importantly it is about the charmed conception of a fictional world that manifests control over reality and, with increasing, modular strength, threatens to substitute it completely. The grand design, despite having initially less treacherous intentions, can be described as the promotion and mass manufacture of virulent illegible space.

This new world order is summoned through the careful efforts of a vast secret society of intellectuals dating back to George Delgado (a linguist who in real life proposed and completed an original universal language in the 1650s) and philosopher George Berkeley. The project’s aims were originally limited to the creation of an imaginary country named Uqbar, but two centuries later, on a different continent, the ambition of the idea was revised:

Buckley listened with some disdain as the other man talked, and then burst out laughing at the modesty of the project. He declared that in America it was absurd to invent a country, and proposed the invention of a whole planet.

Tlön is the name of the emerging usurper world, and Orbis Tertius is the title given to the secret society’s project to improvise its blueprint, manufacture evidence of it, and covertly disseminate it. The primary communication lines for distributing the ideas of Tlönist doctrine are encyclopedias, those traditional guides of selective “total” knowledge. As Tlön increases in strength and influence, we are told that some of its more nonsensical cultural geography or self-contradictory concepts are curbed as a way of compromising with the status quo reality. Regardless, the more integrated that our reality and Tlön’s unreality become, the less stable and knowable any of it appears.

The story is narrated in the first-person by a fictional double of Borges, in an almost dry, journalistic tone. Many other characters have real-life counterparts, including Borges’s good friend and sometimes collaborator Bioy Casares (and, as previously suggested, several historical figures). Owing to these and many other illusive exchanges between fact and fiction, and Borges’s recurring play with reflection and metaphors of doubles, the level of acquaintance with one’s environment is hazy (for both character and reader). The instinct to preserve the self, and the sphere of the familiar that compliments it, is put into question.

Due to contact with Tlön, unnatural objects are manifested purely through a mentalist process of hoping for them (extremely heavy cones, made of metal that does not exist in this world), deteriorating relics are preserved simply through the incidental witnessing of them (a stone threshold which lasted as long as it was visited by a beggar, and which faded from site on his death), and the continuity of unique personal identity is replaced with corporate identity (All men, in the climatic instant of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare). The philosophical ideas Borges pursues with Tlön advance beyond Berkeleian immaterialism (whose chief percipient and anchor is God) into a brand of panspychism that altogether denies the existence of objective, material reality. Hence, Tlönic language refuses all nouns.

Forces of economic globalization (back here in the real world) are directed by either immaterialist or materialist points of view, alternating between them depending on what or whom are being evaluated. Similar to the commonly insensitive mindset of people who are distracted by the complexity of their own lives, business always believes in the existence of its own objective reality, but only sometimes believes in the objective reality for other things and of other people. The materialist worldview is applied bilaterally in instances where strong displays of public empathy make it otherwise difficult to deny the reality of external human consequences. In many other circumstances – where empathy is uncertain, divided, or otherwise illegible or invisible – objective reality beyond the back fence is treated insouciantly as a set of theoretical and profoundly malleable constructs (constructs without nouns). From the perspective of Tlön, our world is its awkward fiction, and from the perspective of international business, native populations in the way of opportunity have fictional rights. From the perspective of the narrator, a witness to terrible corruption from a distance, he or she themselves can feel rendered fictive through their isolation and sense of abject powerlessness.

Trafficking

This exhibition project gained its titled Semaphores because of the irregular history of the word – a concept and a name that has been used for many dissimilar communications technologies over the centuries, from telegraph towers in 18th century France, traffic lights in 19th century England, and today’s digital regulators that manage data flow between multiple computer processors. Importantly, a semaphore is never the message itself, but the method of delivery, and it often dictates the speed and timing of a transmission. Beyond this, its definition is fairly mercurial, and it is easy to begin to think of the word “semaphore” as a prevailing concept or metaphor unto itself, elastic and available for broad interpretation.

Applied to this project about globalization, the title Semaphores is intended to function in two ways. On a purely conceptual level, it describes in general terms an emphasis on communication structures, and asks the viewer to consider the parameters of that proposal in a global context. Secondly, the title presides specifically over a group of constituent interdisciplinary artworks that utilize many different communication technologies and formats towards a unified whole. Yet, of course, contact with each artwork facilitates a signal independent from that whole, which returns us to thoughts of compartmentalization, information asymmetry, and the bifurcated nature of communication traffic.

Jordan Essoe’s Semaphores runs through February 28, 2009 at Ampersand International Art, in San Francisco.

Please visit www.essoe.com or www.ampersandintlarts.com for more information.

Part Two of Illegible Spaces will be published in the following weeks.

JANUARY : word : KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH art : JORDAN ESSOE

2009-01-06T17:58:00.000-08:00

http://essoe-semaphores.blogspot.com

http://www.shotgun-review.com/archives/ampersand_international_arts/jordan_essoes_semaphores.html

http://ex-ungue-leonem.blogspot.com/

" Thoroughgoing ignorance about the ways of others is largely a privilege of the powerful"

Kwame Anthony Appiah

OCTOBER - NOVEMBER : word : DEWITT CHENG : art : ANDY VOGT

2008-10-23T11:12:00.000-07:00

ANDY VOGT

The ruin has a distinguished history in Western art. Piranesi, Lorrain, Turner and Friedrich depicted the crumbling glories of imperial Rome or the then-recent Middle Ages. Images of architecture returning to nature had a moral purpose as well, serving as a kind of public-sector vanitas (the name for those sobering Christian still-life paintings featuring skulls nestled among the fruit and flowers, books and busts): this too shall pass; as I am, so shall you be. Some artists even carried the Ozymandian tottered-statue conceit into the future: the American Thomas Cole in the 19th century imagined the rise and fall of the as-yet nonexistent American empire.

Construing Andy Vogt’s architectural/geological constructions and drawings as contemporary (or future ruins) might be going too far, however, no matter what the condition of housing or repossession industries. It’s a natural inference, certainly, for the wall pieces like skin & bones or 2 sided creeping, which suggest partial models of stick-frame houses or condos with their laths exposed by shattered roofs, their wall paneling splintered like the jagged, sublime, abstract mountains and flames in Clyfford Still, and their beams and trusses fading off into space like Giacometti’s figures, or as if immersed in a Chinese or Central Valley fog. (With their exaggerated or collapsed, perspectives, they also recall the geometric paradoxes of Josef Albers and Al Held.)

I see them, rather, as transtemporal — depictions of things simultaneously coming into being and vanishing — as if a time-traveling version had been added to the spatial multiple viewpoints of Cubism. With people we know we can summon up their appearances at earlier ages; with a little effort we can do the same for strangers, or even imagine their future grayer, heavier selves. Vogt’s work, particularly in the more recent stencil drawings (next, laminated/reduced, drained) and planar constructions with black “shadows” (landcrawler, folded back, epitaph), seems to me to be concerned with time and memory infused into building materials — hence his predilection for scavenged lath, which he laboriously alters to fit his emerging conceptions rather than just load up at the Depot. Leo Steinberg described Jasper Johns’ numbers and flags as objects waiting for humans in a desolate solitude. Vogt seeks instead, I believe, to see his materials poetically and make solid compositions from them, and for them; he’s a builder guided by intuition and a perspective larger than the average mortgagee’s onescore and ten. His mixing of the geological and the architectural equalizes manmade and natural environments. Buildings, all pretensions aside, are hominid burrows or nests; landscapes with road cuts and lofty beetling crags can be replicated with plywood scraps, paint and nails.

DeWitt Cheng
October 2008

OCTOBER - NOVEMBER : word : PATRICIA MALONEY : art : JEFF MORRIS

2008-10-23T10:41:00.000-07:00

Spring and All: new work by Jeff Morris.

Plexiglas is such that it aspires toward perfection: it is made to think it can be so, perfect in form and being, ever and always. And that is essentially its undoing, because that which has the potential to be perfect must be perfect in every way, and so it must endure. Endurance is a form of perfection, or at least a long-distance training exercise for the afterlife. It is as the writer Joe Wenderoth describes the serious Christians, looking toward eternity. “It is terrible to be real, I know, but it is more terrible to be long” he warns them, or us, or perhaps the clear plastic shields of bus shelters and drive-thru windows. For Plexiglas does nothing so well as endure, and we, taking advantage of that attribute, subject it to elements and chance, and without fail, defeat its aspirations.

In other words, by the time the material comes to the artist Jeff Morris, it has done its time in service to the community, and in return, it has been scratched, cracked, scrawled upon, and generally made to suffer the indignities of everyday use. Morris, in turn, takes it upon himself to disavow the degradation his material has borne. He does not stoop to assignations of mundaneness and preciousness, the recovery of the overlooked or the elevation of the undervalued. He is not interested in heightened awareness. Instead he wants to make an object that is wholly itself. Morris does not erase the meaning of one system — the everyday — to impose another — art — so much as allow the material to yield to it. As a result, the Plexi doesn’t yearn for its lost potential. It is ready to be itself, reborn in a new sum of parts.

The results of Morris’ resurrections are small-scale sculptures of clear, thick slabs accented by thin sheets of colored plastic used for garbage or newspaper bags. He pokes a thin wire covered in beads through a small plane of Plexiglas, and props it in the corner. It is held up by its own weight, but sags awkwardly, like a plant stem uprooted or tired of standing upright. For another, Morris upturns a U-shaped channel onto its end, and stretches three layers of green film across the top to hang down like banners. He alters a clear piece of Plexi — salvaged from a shattered bus shelter after a car accident — simply by bending it into an acute angle. He upturns another scrap to form a jagged bowl with a swarm of frenetic wire tentacles waving out from and around it. Finally, he takes a L-shaped piece, clean and clear, and adds a misshapen piece of yellow plastic film to its base, creating a grotesque shadow spilling from its edges, undermining its order, hinting at some prior incarnation, some violent past, in which the scars are visible but their origins unknown.

Installed in proximity to each other, Morris’ sculptures nevertheless remain discrete, self-contained, as if stubbornly refusing to partake of their environment or allow the viewer to consider anything but their physical attributes. They are not recognizable as objects with identity, but as objects adhering to an internal, self-constructed logic, so that the appropriate question the viewer might ask is not “What is it?” or even “What does it mean?” so much as “What does it owe to itself in order to be real?”

The same inquiry is applicable to the drawings, which are entirely composed of straight lines of varying thickness and pressure, laid down with a ruler. Taken individually, each line keeps going until it stops. Then the next begins. And slowly, the lines become form the way words collect and combine, until both line and shape — words and text — are simultaneously visible, unrepentantly relying upon each other to make sense. The question of why one word should be here on this page is not raised when it is followed by another and combined into the coherence of a sentence. Similarly, Morris’s line are so stringently lines that one apprehends shape and texture and illusions of depth by recognizing how the lines stand together, where they come apart, or where they stop.

The spaces in between the lines are therefore just as important, the interruptions akin to moments in which the drawing is allowed to clarify its shape, its purpose, itself. Both Morris’ drawings and sculptures bear an affinity with the poetry of William Carlos Williams, in which the gaps between words are where the images are realized, and the reader can recognize the distance that has been crossed from one thought to another. For example, in The Locust Tree in Flower (second version), bareness yields to form as both object and image.
Among
of
green

stiff
old
bright

broken
branch
come

white
sweet
May

again

As with Morris’ sculptures, there is a prior life referred to in the poem’s title, but without reading the first version, one is unaware of what the latter is missing. The reader has been spared the season’s loss, the sweet-scented flowers overlooked, quickly shed, and little mourned, the way spring’s sharp freshness yields so readily to summer’s blast of heat and daze and lulling forgetfulness. Like Williams, Morris seems aware that we do not ache in spring the way we ache in fall, when every day we come closer to life shutting down and closing itself off. Perhaps that is why his greens — which can’t quite shrug off their origins as garbage bags and therefore their association with containment or confinement — are the greens of winter, when things are expected to die. But winter is also the moment to look forward and wait for things to return as they need to. Therefore, if anything, Morris turns us towards a moment of anticipation and perhaps even awareness of what endures.

Patricia Maloney
October 2008

SEPTEMBER : word : PATRICIA MALONEY : art : ELLEN BABCOCK

2008-09-16T14:12:00.000-07:00

Passage
In May 1845, the English captain Sir John Franklin set out with two ships and a crew of 128 men on an expedition to establish the Northwest Passage through the Arctic Ocean. Among the ships’ provisions was an ample supply of canned meat, enough to last them several years. The final European sighting of the ships was in August of that same year; none of the crew ever returned. The ensuing mystery of their disappearance occupied popular imagination in the United States and Great Britain for the latter half of the 19th Century, and sparked numerous voyages to locate the vanished ships. Subsequent explorers and surveyors unearthed well-preserved, frozen bodies as well as bevies of odd supplies. They also recorded the stories of the Inuit, who had encountered small bands of survivors, the last of whom were seen in 1851. Based on these stories, the routes the crew had embarked upon were nonsensical in direction and distance. This perplexing question—along with that of the strange gear the men chose to take with them after abandoning their ships—was perhaps finally answered in the 20th century, when forensic examinations revealed not only scurvy and starvation as causes of death, but also lead poisoning, the result of consuming the improperly canned meat.

Passage
The renowned Hudson School artist Frederick Church was among those fascinated by the disappearance of the Franklin expedition, to which he paid homage in his 1861 painting Icebergs. The broken mast of a ship in the lower left foreground is an elegiac nod to the doomed voyage. But his main subjects are the icebergs themselves, which he first sketched on his voyage to Newfoundland in 1859. The mast did not make its appearance in the painting until 1863, after its initial unveiling was met with tepid interest and no buyer. Ironically, the painting also disappeared. For decades, the only evidence of its existence was a chromolithograph, until 1979, when it was discovered on the third floor landing of a little-used stairwell in a children’s group home in Manchester. The house had once been the private country estate of Edwin William Watkin, an English railroad magnate who partially financed the construction of the Canadian Pacific transcontinental rail line, billed as the “Northwest Passage by land”. After its recovery, the painting was sold at auction for $2.5 million dollars and subsequently gifted to the Dallas Museum of Art.

Passage
Both Franklin and Church expected that the ice would yield to them. Franklin was searching for the places where the ice gave way to the forward momentum of an expanding world. Church attempted to wrap its sublime beauty in the romantic spectacle his audience craved. The artist Ellen Babcock, no less enthralled by the majesty of the glaciers—and fully aware of how the disappearing ice has come to herald our planet’s potential demise—wants instead to restore their distance from us, to re-establish the impossibility of comprehending them. She couples a photograph of an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland with a small watercolor of the same image. In both, a sheet of ice looms up on the left, dwarfing the ship cruising toward it, the Iceberg Quest II. The photograph is a record of her journey to see the icebergs off the Newfoundland coast while the watercolor holds the image apart from anything we might claim as experience. Her relationship with her audience stands firmly in the realm of representation. Babcock refrains from imbuing the work with irony, metaphor, or elegy. Her restraint is a reminder that there are limits of human intention and knowledge. She operates with things we know to allow the things we don’t know to remain remote. She erects a polystyrene iceberg that fills the room, and it is familiar to us, we instantly recognize the material from which it is made. But Babcock hold sus back from indulging in illusions of the Arctic’s mysteries or wonder. Sitting on the table next to the sculpture is a book with a photograph of the painting by Church. There in the image is the iceberg that she has modeled her sculpture upon. It is a reminder that so many layers exist between what lies off the coast of Newfoundland and our comprehension of it. Regardless of how close we stand, Babcock ensures that we feel the distance.

Passage
Two sheets of insulating polystyrene hung together as a diptych, their protective coatings of blue plastic pulled up slightly from the bottom to create a low horizon. The wrinkles of the pulled fabric form ripples, like the wake of an unseen boat. Color and line create the sea and the heavens: a jewel-like blue, lapis lazuli, ultramarine. Above the water is a large and empty sky, unperturbed by the waves below. The wake points us forward; it is our passage. Passages are dependent upon movement. They exist only as a state between here and there. Dr. Russell Potter said that it is probably impossible to be as lost today as Franklin was, but there are still places in this world that we do not know. Way leads on to way, as Frost observed, the understanding that we could turn back, but don’t. We keep going until we no longer can.
PATRICIA MALONEY 2008

MARCH : word : JAMES SERVIN : art : " HOW FAST YOUR WORLD IS CHANGING "

2008-03-07T18:13:00.000-08:00

Change It Up

What, in this life, is ever static? Even stones have molecules vibrating at a low (extremely low) rate. In past decades, the world may have been a bit more like those stones. Now, it's a buzzing bee. We live in an age which has access to more information than any other preceding it. The human body, its nervous system, has never had to deal with processing so much data. We are aware of change closer to its happening, and maybe because of this, change is speeding up. Through televisions, cell phones, Blackberries, camcorders, iPhones, digital cameras, the world is speaking to itself like never before, documenting itself, inspiring further adjustments and shifts, pushing forward, backward and sideways with each new bit of knowledge. Information is cause, change effect, and vice versa. Concurrently, a backdrop to this informational quickening, is a planet in upheaval, torn apart by earthquakes, hurricanes, floods. And then there's the election…

This is the era of the shifting sands, the ground continually moving underneath our feet. It's a time that is both exhilarating and terrifying, promising and frustrating. Commenting upon, and in some cases replicating the dynamic essence of our lives today, the artists chosen by Lori Gordon do so with wit, compassion, insight, attitude and inventiveness, furthering Gordon's ongoing creation of a leap-of-faith-taking, belief-challenging artistic and curatorial vision she has designated "social sculpture." And so, in his photo-documentation project "Shadow Followers", Markuz Wernli Saito enlisted fifteen local people in Bao Loc Vietnam to document everyday things they found important, Monday through Saturday for one month (amassing 1200 prints, edited to 72). Gallery goers, in turn, are enlisted in the respectful act of mailing the negatives back to the picture-takers.

In her installation titled "long shadow (tail)" Jessica James Lansdon invites visitors to cut loose a collection of objects attached to the wall by strings. In her artist's statement, she ponders the role of art in its physical form, and how that relates to our material-based culture. She writes: "…the holidays can get you thinking about the role of gift giving in a materially glutted culture, like what do you get the person who has everything, when everyone has everything similarly problems around objects are central to the art these days- how can we still make things?"

Some artists invoke the beauty of a direct human connection. In "Walk With Me: 30 Days of San Francisco", Hope Hilton explores the fourth most populous city in California, taking participants on a variety of silent walking excursions, with participants contributing to the design of the project in the form of directions, suggestions, and documentation in words, objects and sounds.

Inspired by the funeral of a friend's grandmother during which the bereaved was serenaded her favorite song by friends and family, Jennifer Delos Reyes, in "Choral Society (for Lori Gordon)" pays tribute to her friend and this show's curator. A group of Lori Gordon's friends singing John Lennon's "Instant Karma" at the show's opening will be documented on film and play in a loop, the virtual replacing the physical, sending the love out for the duration of the show.

Self-described "hobby archivist and librarian" Christine Hill will be generating a series of posters from her Berlin-based studio, Volksboutique, in a long-term project which comments upon both the vacuity and the comfort derived from a linguistic cultural staple that she drolly refers to as "The Uplifting Quotation." Harrell Fletcher captures the stirring quality of this election's unfolding by simply broadcasting a daily installment of "Democracy Now", a news program hosted by Amy Goodman. This mirrors the change-related topic that's at the forefront of everyone's minds, and provides the handy public service of an always-welcome news update.

The theme of the show is the theme of life: change. Lori Gordon says she came upon the idea for it while reading Carl Sagan's Contact, being drawn in particular to this quote in the book: "Considering how fast your world is changing, it's amazing you haven't blown yourselves to bits by now. That's why we don't want to write you off just yet. You humans have a certain talent for adaptability—at least in the short term." What will act as a cohesive element in the show is the shifting of some of the art in stages throughout the exhibition, bringing a new level of interest to the observer. And so, one visit to this show will not be enough. Gallery goers may have to adjust their usual habit of seeing, absorbing, analyzing and moving on and revise this pattern, incorporating a return trip into their schedules return to see what has happened after some artists have pressed the "refresh" button.
JAMES SERVIN 2008

James Servin began his career in New York in 1986 with an entry-level job at GQ. After contributing articles in his second year at the magazine, he launched a successful freelance writing career, placing feature articles in a variety of publications, including British Vogue, Allure, Elle, Metropolitan Home, Details, Organic Style and Natural Health. He has written for many sections of The New York Times, including The New York Times Magazine, the "Page Six Magazine" and "Styles of the Times" sections. He was a contributing editor at Harper's Bazaar for three years and was executive editor at Nylon magazine. He currently writes for House & Garden and Black Book, among other publications.

JANUARY : word : PATRICIA MALONEY : art : NICK GRAHAM

2008-01-22T09:49:00.000-08:00

The Silence of History

A medley of art stars, political figures and fast food icons beam out from an imaginary history - a backwards-looking future moment that pay tributes to the visionaries of 21st Century American capitalism. Here are the leaders who brought us into a golden age of consumption, one that - according to Nick Graham - culminates in no less that the wholesale acquisition of our sovereign nation. From the holy trinity of Pop Art - Father Warhol with Hirst the Son, and Koons off to the side, jester or Holy Ghost - to Father and Son Bush staring vacantly or squinting blindly at the havoc surrounding them, we are presented with the protectors of American culture who freed us from the burden of production and guided our great nation into excess and debt. While our children grew bountiful and complacent licking the lead off their Happy Meal™ toys, these innovators beckoned us toward greater heights of acquisition and convenience, all the while selling our franchises and our self-interests out from under us.

In Graham's Popaganda, the commercial and political actors currently colliding into each other (as the line between news and corporate interests grows ever more blurred) are further juxtaposed against the propagandist paintings of Maoist China. While he is trafficking in ready icons and tropes - the symbols of prosperity and free expression commingled with those of oppression and the party line - Graham is not simply substituting capitalism for communism. Nor is he scolding us with a morality tale, warning against the giddy embrace between the two. In mixing icons and ideologies, he recognizes that all myths and fables possess the same elements; the intrepid hunter and the big bad wolf can easily exchange places depending on the story told and who is doing the telling.

For example, an outsized vision of Al Gore looms above the frozen tundra, arm raised in salute, mouth open, commanding the fleet of Hummers below, and either halting them to stop or urging them onward. Does he really want to save the world, or does he want to be the one who gets to say “I told you so.”? It is an almost immaterial question; Gore's bases are covered; he will be the Great Prophet if the world comes to an end and the Great Savior if it doesn't.

Perhaps it is still too early to poke fun at the Oscar-winning Nobel Laureate. We have shared his pain for the past seven years and are still a bit tender. However, while Graham is reminding us to view the world with a bit of brevity, he is also wondering what do we care of history if we do not remember it? There is the silence of the past: after the clamor of the parades and the rallies, the speeches and the campaigning dies down, what are the words that linger? Perhaps for that reason, Graham retains the faces of the anonymous workers, who somehow become more eternal than the politicians and art stars juxtaposed amongst them. In our age of consumer convenience and immediate obsolescence, the voices of the latter become trapped in a particular moment; they begin to speak from a distance too far away to heed.

It is the same distance occupied by a future looking back into the present, the point at which optimism becomes naiveté. These images are the artifacts of our current moment, seen from a perspective that appears wiser only because it knows what remains relevant and who has faded to obscurity. They successfully operate as such because our cultural icons have become so apparent to be rendered mute. We do not need to linger with them to understand what they are telling us - a passing glance is enough. But caught in that glance and refusing to be overlooked is the golden beaver; the ultimate anomaly, a symbol of industry in an age of drive-thru delivery. Is he taunting us or imploring us? It remains too soon to tell.
PATRICIA MALONEY 2008

JANUARY : word : NEIL O'ROURKE : art : ALBERT REYES

2008-01-11T12:03:00.000-08:00

Shit Happens
The Art of Albert Reyes

if exposure is the measure of success, Albert Reyes is doing pretty damn well for himself.
After his spit art was featured in the New York Times ‘ Year in Ideas Review , a self-published YouTube clip of him in full spitting act has attracted some 1,542.950 viewers.

Assuming each of them watched all 3 minutes 27 seconds of his oral artistry, by Warhol calculations he’s snaffled some 336,363 people’s 15 minutes of fame from right under their noses. Some detractors may try to write off his spit art as a novelty act , but you can’t argue with those figures -- especially when Mr. Reyes is far from being a one trick pony. “To me the spit art is just another weapon in my arsenal”, Albert explains.” I want to do a lot of different art . I want to do idea art. I want to make drawings. I want to paint... do etchings. Make video. Make film. Act. Direct.

“My spit art is just part of all this. Just some performance art that happened to become really popular. Here in the US it got me on television, on the Jimmy Kimmel Live show. I never thought that spitting water out of my mouth could get me that kind of exposure.”

But exposure it gave him, and with his approach to art, the bigger the audience the better. To all intents, Albert is a reporter. A visual documenter of, and a commentator on, our times. His socially-charged aesthetic couldn’t have found a more exciting era to chronicle either.

Politically-fuelled wars -- or is that just political fuel wars?
Global warming. The ever-growing gulf between the rich and the poor. It’s all there for him to assimilate into his work and L.A. seems to be the perfect vantage point from which to observe the world as we know it. “Everything that happens in the world affects me and what I do. That I’m American , everything I do touches lots of other people too. The reason we can have so much in America is because other people have so little and I’m aware of that”

“I am aware of the impact of our foreign policies. How corrupt my government is. Being from L.A. , I’m also aware how materialist we are. People here are kind of shallow, superficial. They are obsessed with what is on the outside not the inside”

Balancing the political and materialistic shortcomings of our culture with scenes of everyday folks leading everyday lives, Albert’s work makes those shortcomings even more apparent. However, while he challenges the viewer to make a difference to the world we live in, his work is as pessimistic as it is optimistic. Such is the polarity of life, the two outlooks are inextricably linked. “You can’t have good without bad. That’s the yin and yang of life. We are all negative. We are all positive. It’s about the choices we make. Are we going to do what’s right or what’s wrong?”.

There is no doubting Albert has taken the path of light. Not just in terms of his art’s call to action with regards to tackling the ills of the world. Since graduating high school he’s been involved in various programmes teaching art to the young. It’s always been a two-way learning process though. “the kids I have worked with have really influenced me. They come at art from a different approach. they are untainted . They are not doing art for money. They are not doing it to be topical. They are doing it out of love. That’s how i try to approach my work. Trouble is , as an adult that is not easy. I’m trying to produce a diverse range of art. Trying to make a living... trying to put my religious and political beliefs out there. It’s very complicated now. I strive to be true to my artwork, but as an adult I have to function in the world we live in. A world that’s corrupt”

It’s ironic it was a symptom of that corruption that brought Albert’s work to much of the world’s attention. While it has its use , YouTube is in many ways a prime example of today’s fame obsessed cult of celebrity.
The Z-list Warholian nightmare we live in . At least Albert has the substance to back up his style. His 15 minutes won’t be ending any time soon.
NEIL O'ROURKE 2007
pimp magazine

NOVEMBER : word : GILLES DELEUZE + FELIX GUATTARI : art : FREDERIC VINCENT

2007-11-05T13:54:00.000-08:00

Contemplating is creating, the mystery of passive creation, sensation… The plant contemplates by contracting the elements from which it originates - light, carbon, and salts - and it fills itsef with colors and odors that in each case quality its variety, its composition : it is sensation in itself.
GILLES DELEUZE & FELIX GUATTARI 1994
What is Philosophy ? 1994 / trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchill, London, Verso

There are images, things are themselves images, because images aren't in our brain. The brain's just one image among others. Images are constantly acting and reacting on each other, producting and consuming. There's no difference at all between Images, things, and motion.
GILLES DELEUZE 1995
Negociations 1972-1990,/trans. Martin Joughlin, New York : Columbia University Press

By means of the material, the aim of art is to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition from one state to another : to extract a bloc of sensation, a pure being of sensations.
GILLES DELEUZE & FELIX GUATTARI 1994
What is Philosophy ? 1994 / trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchill, London, Verso

NOVEMBER : word : REM KOOLHAAS : art : CANNELLE TANC

2007-11-05T13:19:00.000-08:00

Goodbye to Hollywood

After some complex foreplay, Edgar Bronfman Jr. asked us on December 15 1995,
to design a new headquarters for Universal Studios Hollywood, a compagny he had recently acquired. Edgar was the grandson of Samuel, the founder of the « Seagram Compagny » who had in'54 asked Mies Van de Rohe to design his Headquarters on Park avenue, reputedly at the urging of his daughter Phyllis Lambert, an architect herself. To position the building in the right location on the Universal City site-a hybrid of Film Studio and Theme Park-Bronfman also asked OMA to look at the huge property as a whole…A large team spent six weeks in an office on John's Jerde's City Walk- a mixture of purgatory and fascination. It soon became apparent that the commission was less straightforward than it seemed. Where in'54 Seagram was a single entity that would be relatively stable during the five year minimum that any architectural enterprise takes from beginning to end, that was no longer the case : by the mid-nineties, the substance and nature of any corporation was in constant flux, if not turmoil.
Where in'54 a building could be a « portrait »of a known entity, forty years later it needed to be a device that was able to create a degree of wholeness from a permanently changing cluster of ingredients and latencies. A building was no longer an issue of architecture, but a strategy.
That insight triggered the birth of OMO-OMA's mirror image- a new organization that proposed, given a situation where built architecture was simply too slow to capture mutating organizations, to explore the possibility of applying architectural thinking in its pure form-liberated from the need for realization. If we could not build a building for an organization that was in an absolute state of flux-from the share value to the permanent buying and selling of its components and the constant imminence of mergers and acquisitions, we could at least imagine a conceptual model of a « structure » that could, if not anticipate, at least accommodate almost any eventuality and actually exploit the given instability to define a new territory for architecture…
The trajectory was a sobering confrontation with architecture's most inconvenient demands- time and money-and a first glimpse of a distant, seductive hint of its return as a purely conceptual medium. REM KOOLHAAS Content ed.Taschen 2004

OCTOBER (Paris) : word : PATRICIA MALONEY : art : AMANDA HUGHEN + ARNGUNNUR YR

2007-11-01T13:51:00.000-07:00

AMANDA HUGHEN

2005 Firmament : Turpentine gallery : Reykjavik Iceland
2006 Firmament : ampersand international arts : San Francisco Ca
2007 Firmament : galerie Immanence : Paris France

A RNGUNNUR YR

FIRMAMENT

According to the Book of Genesis, on his second day of work, God created the firmament right after separating light from darkness, when the earth was still “void and without form” . It is interesting to note the priority given to shaping the expanse over shaping the void. First there was the edge of comprehendible space, and somewhere below it, existed a raw, unseen, and unformed earth. The word firmament derives from the venacular firmamentum, used to translate the Hebrew raki'a, which specifically denotes something hammered or forged in order to be extended. Ancient civilizations - Hebrews, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans - all believed the firmament to be a solid dome beaten from the hardest metal, a wall strong enough to separate the celestial reservoir from the waters of the earth.

The intention to configure nature to the specifications of the built environment is also evident in Hughen's wall sculptures and drawings. Evocative of the rugged and fog-laden coast of Northern California, whose dominating atmospheric conditions create an ever-shifting vista, her landscapes are vast, abstracted, and still in the process of formation.
The marks Hughen makes are repetitive, uniform, and mechanical. The artist strives to remove herself - her hand, her judgment, her experiences - from their creation, allowing the process to take over and this new world to form its own geological history. Bunched together, the shapes coalesce into undulating and overlapping patterns that resemble eons of physical upheaval compressed into a single space and moment.

Multiple histories collapse and intertwine upon each other; eddying streams and eroding cliffs occupying the same plane as shifting continents. Unfettered by scale, these panoramas are as intimate as they are vast. Hughen's drawings become objects which become land masses with attending incisions and outcroppings. We as viewers are caught between a state of suspension and submersion, hovering above these topographies and crashing down into them when we shift from observing the whole in order to focus on a detail.

It is this elevated perspective - as if viewing from the crown of the firmament - which Hughen's drawings share with Yr's oil on panel paintings, whose weighty accumulations of cumulous clouds stretch the atmosphere to dizzying heights. Both artists expand their views beyond what the eye can naturally register, as if placing the viewer at the edge of comprehension. Each builds careful layers in their work, eschewing a simple association between surface and dimensionality, but with very different results. Where Hughen's patterns swoop across the surface, Yr's accumulated brushwork saturates it. The former entangles the viewer; the latter absorbs; yet both exert a force that aspires to penetrate the heavens.

In Yr's landscapes, voluminous clouds build larger and larger, expanding over a barely discernible ground. Simultaneously evoking the majestic heavens of 18th C. vedute - or view - paintings and the volatile, sparse Icelandic terrain, they impart a muted, infatuating beauty and uncompromising sense of isolation. The skies are dense, energetic and almost solid. Closer inspection discloses a surface that is scraped away, revealing layer upon careful layer of riotous color. Rifts and gouges erode the celestial barrier; scars shape the horizon. It might be difficult to affix oneself within this space - the atmosphere climbs beyond any possible point of contact - if not for these fissures. They create a subtle push and pull, drawing one in, continually shifting one's gaze until all the breaks in the firmament appear.

The paintings convey a Baroque sensibility with their soaring spaciousness, evocation of grandeur, drama, and tension.
Just as the firmament conceals the mysteries of the deities, Yr's indomitable and wondrous skies probe at something deeper.
Yr's world - where the canopy covering the feeble earth seems to threaten to tip it over - is perhaps a reflection of our own, where the certainty of life could easily be upended.
The earth shifts on a regular basis, both below and on the surface, so it was not accidental that the ancient myths affixed the concept of eternity to the solid and immutable heavens. They wrought it as metal, and gave it the potential to be infinitely forged. In turn Hughen and Yr shape the world over and over again. For them, void is never formless, but an endless number of places to make visible and real. "
PATRICIA MALONEY 2005
(excerpt from exhibition catalogue )

SEPTEMBER: word: JEFF LANE + JERAD WALKER : art: JAMES SANSING

2007-09-06T17:12:00.000-07:00

My family and I own three James Sansing works acquired over the past few years. Our first piece is a large sculpture, an intricate assembly of cement, wire, metal braces, rubber, found objects and miniature models of boxes and doors, which took James well over a week to painstakingly install in our home. At first glance, the sculpture seems challenging with its darker tones, enormous size and jumble of broken pieces of cement and plaster. And yet, my wife and I, as well as visitors to our home, are drawn to it by the work’s intimate, enchanting detail and delicate beauty. We take great joy in living with James’ sculpture and have since acquired two smaller works.
*
James works in varying media and dimensions, ranging from his larger installations, as previously shown at Ampersand and the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, to smaller, handmade books, photographs, works on paper and, most recently, castings of concrete and graphite. Despite these physical differences, much of James’ art seems to share a common theme and inspiration, the sublime beauty of decay. The art is rich in images of things which existed in the moment of their viewing but carry the memory of their past: found objects, crumbling swimming pools, broken freeways, dangling cement, dust and most prevalent, imagery from the ruins of an abandoned home for troubled juvenile girls.
*
When I acquired our first Sansing piece, I was unaware of the source of its inspiration in James’ experiences in late adolescence and his early 20’s visiting the ruins of that strangely beautiful place, which have since been torn down. James had risked arrest, regularly sneaking into the home as it stood derelict, surrounded by chain linked fence. In solitude and in the sanctuary of the home’s litter and decay, James found his own psychological harmony as well as a treasure trove of debris, broken fixtures and furniture and crushed boxes. Also in the refuse, Sansing found soiled, yet enchantingly beautiful journals, hand written by the counselors recounting the stories and lives of the troubled girl residents. These journals’ stained, moldy pages are the subjects of the two smaller Sansing works in our home.
*
Living with Sansing's work, we feel unexpectantly at ease and comfortable, possibly approaching how James himself felt as he took refuge in the juvenile hall. I admire James’ success in experimenting with new and novel artistic formats yet consistently incorporating his memories to convey the subtle wonder of decay and the return of manmade objects to nature and dust.
JEFF LANE 2007

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I think of Rothko, the alienation he seemed to suffer, the light that was in him, awake in his paintings.
I think of carbon. The paintings are dark and shiny. Diamonds are made of carbon.
The paintings have holes in them.
There are holes in the dark, where one can see through to the white. The thought makes me happy. I see what you are saying…I am grateful to be here.
JARED WALKER 2007

SEPTEMBER: word: STEPHANIE BAKER + JERAD WALKER : art: DAVID FOUGHT

2007-09-06T16:49:00.000-07:00

SOUNDFILE of
cut-ups inspired by
Untitled: 3( 5)wires and Untitled: 5 (3)sides by David
Fought

nose time
of small
of movable
strings from
STEPHANIE BAKER 2007

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

with the object:
reflections on recent work by David Fought:

You don't look closely at the white wall, do you? You're not supposed to. David spent hours re-plastering it, sanding it, painting it. In essence, he sculpted the wall to become part of the piece, but an incidental part. You wouldn't notice 5 (3)wires in the same way if you noticed the bumps and imperfections in the wall. But now maybe you'll notice that no wall is perfectly straight although it seems to be. And the wires in the wall are not straight either even though your eye at first glance sees them that way– as clean, crisp, straight lines. Take a closer look at the walls in your own bedroom and observe the way they have dips, slants or bumps. Then walk around your neighborhood and observe closely to see how "straight" all the buildings appear, how they hold themselves up under their own crooked weight.

*

I am listening to an R.E.M. song in our living room and I have the volume cranked way up so the walls throb and pulse and I am cleaning up the floor of our closet. I move a bag filled with miscellaneous items from the shelf to the floor and all of a sudden I hear a man's deep crackly voice overlapping the music like someone is talking in the adjoining hallway through an amplified source. The voice is familiar. I've heard this person somewhere before but the music from the living room is much too loud for me to discern what he says. Then I realize that I have inadvertently pushed the play button of my Microcassette Recorder that is in the bag I jostled from the shelf to the floor. The voice is David's. The moment where I heard my husband's voice in a new context replicates my experience of viewing his recent work. When I first enter the space of 3 (5)wires, I know there are shapes created by the bent wires and their shadows as I move around them and take them in at different angles, but I'm not sure what's familiar about them. They look the same. They are not the same. Is it a cityscape? I have to look again to understand the slight variation of repetition that is occurring among all three. Within each set of wires, one or two are placed one or two steps up or down in relation to the one next to it. And when I look and look again, a sense of movement begins like these are notations for a minimalist musical score or these are the leaps and lurches of an oscilloscope.

*

When I look at 5 (3)sides, I am also struck by how these shapes are familiar but un-placeable. Each plaster vessel shape is determined by 3 waxed wire hoops, and they are sitting in a variety of poses. They are all from a family whose name I don't know, but I can imagine where they are from. A mathematician had an idea and brought her 2D model on paper to life as a 3D object. A theoretical physicist made a model to demonstrate a discovery about space, time and mass. An engineer made a cast of a part of a machine or some piping. A geomancer has cast some earth in divination and this is the resulting shape. It has aged on his shelf.

*

David's materials are humble: coat hanger wire and a coarse, Fix-All® plaster. He doesn't purposefully obscure his process, but you have to look closely to see the scars and gouges on 3 (5)wires where you might have glanced and thought the wires to be perfectly straight. David's 'hand' is more readily apparent in the bumps and grooves of the standing sculptures. His process begins with collecting coat hangers with the largest gauge he can find. He hauls them to the beach, makes a fire in the middle of the day and burns them. He brings them home, oils them, takes them apart with pliers and then hammers them so they are not quite straight. He bends them into shapes. He holds them. From all that repetition, intimacy, time spent with the object, he discovers something about the object that is beyond an easy, clever explanation. He could get a machine shop to straighten them, or buy them pre-cut at Home Depot, but he prefers to spend time with them in an imperfect state. He has said that the process of being "with the object" is easily as important as the final work.

*

The delight of discovery, finding things in the woods, in the creek, on the street. David has an intimate, visceral connection with found objects and materials. He sees things I do not. He makes beautiful what has been discarded. When I first met him, he drew my attention to all of the blackened, dried banana peels in the city gutters, which I had never noticed. Years ago, he collected crushed batteries of all sizes from city streets, wrapped them with thread and then installed them in a box like a bug collector might collect a series of moth cocoons. Once he took some pieces of a heavy truck tire and made a mold of their shape from lead. Then he put the treads on our wall. He has an amazing collection of balls found all over the world (we used to have a stack of Bocci balls next to our bed). He says he doesn't know why he does this, but he likes to live with these things.

*

For David, readymade objects carry a previous meaning–a was-something or a did-something. Even paper was a "thing" before we cut it up or applied pigment to it. For work, David used to haul TV guides in a semi-truck from a manufacturer in the Bay Area to a distribution center in L.A. He thinks of the lives, past and present, of objects and things. He always wants to know where things come from. He once asked me, "Where do they make the backs of TV sets?"

*

From my studio window where I write, I watch him work, arms coated with plaster. He starts with three hoops, places them in a box, fills the box with plaster, then carves all the plaster away except for the plaster directly in line with the hoops so there's a straight line from one hoop to the next. He works in a trance-like state. He doesn't measure, but intuitively feels the shape that emerges. He shaves and files with a variety of metal rasps. I am struck by how similar my process is to this when I trim and rasp the hooves of horses. I give them a pedicure using a sharp, flat file. They have bones instead of hoops, which dictate the basic, pleasing shapes of their feet–a cone, a triangle and a truncated dome. For David, the plaster is the flesh, the shadow that fills the space between.

*

In Mr. Van Lannan's 4th grade class, David remembers that he was a cut-up, a class clown. But instead of sending him to the principal's office, this wise and discerning teacher made an artist out of a 9-year old. Mr. Van Lannan told David he could stay in the class and listen to whatever was happening, but he had to stay at his own work station (an area with tables, a sink and a collection of art supplies) and make whatever he wanted. David recalls making a paper mâché dog and layering it with different paints as he changed his mind about what color he wanted it to be.

*

I open How to Write by Gertrude Stein and read a few sentences from the chapter entitled "Sentences":

They are many ways to think alike about sentences.
It is very little that they open and close.
Close it.
It is useful to be and useful. Used. Any word may be in a sentence. A word is a noun. What is a noun.
A noun

Gertrude Stein's writing is not opaque or abstruse, but object-like and suggestive of the underlying shapes and forms that make up thinking and writing. She uses grammar in the way David uses physical shapes to suggest something about how we construct meaning or what David calls "objecthood" from the basic materials of wires or words. "What" is a noun just as 3 (5)wires or 5 (3)sides are objects.

*

David said about his work in a recent artist's statement: "these objects are what they are." One of David's favorite sayings from Stein is the following: "there is no such thing as repetition". John Cage (as quoted by David) says this in another way: "In Zen they say, 'if something is boring after two minutes, try it for four minutes. If it's still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on.' Eventually one discovers it's not boring at all."

*

David prints out photos of 3 (5)wires and 5 (3)sides onto 8.5x11 paper and I use an Exacto knife to cut out the shapes made by the cast shadows, or I cut out the shapes made between the wires of each piece, or I cut out the entire shape of the piece itself. I place the stencils on top of related texts: a journal entry written while sitting in his studio, a book on Wabi-Sabi, the collected writings of Donald Judd. The result is a series of pleasing cut-up poems made from words and letters and parts of words. Read aloud, the sounds are bits of a passing conversation. The vowel or consonant sound-bytes draw attention to the phrases, sentences or words that are more whole. Performed with another reader, these poems become sound sculptures. The text does something similar to what David's objects do: it draws attention to the meaning inherent in the shape.

*

Here is my favorite paragraph that David wrote (from his Thesis):
In general, when we 'see,' we are not purposefully pointing our eyes and logically deciding what is there, even though that is what our eyes would have us think. The act of looking is no more manageable than are feelings of desire, and what we 'see' is at least as subjective as the act of falling in love. The simple materials that comprise these sculptures, placed in this particular manner, offer a puzzle to be solved by the viewer. The work both triggers and rewards scrutiny as one seeks sculptural resolution. As the viewer unpacks the puzzle, the objects become dissected into its disparate parts, only to be reconstructed into something un-nameable–all the result of looking. What we bring–how we see–is an important ingredient of this work. By making (and changing) decisions about what is actually there, the viewer consciously conspires with the object in a process of constructing phenomena.

*

What can you find that astonishes you about objects in space? What pulses can you discern in the life of some object's trajectory in an adjoining universe? The machine pauses for a second and there is the shape. 5 (3)wires emerged over the course of a year as David experimented with variations of a coat hanger stuck into a white wall. When he saw Donald Judd's work in New York last fall he was inspired to ask these questions: Why do slight variations in a pattern call our attention back to what we are looking at? How does a series of slight variations in a group of wires/objects create space and sonic resonance?

*

If I were an art critic, I would argue that David's work exhibits a tension between a modernist aesthetic (geometric, sharp, precise, clean, line-configured) and the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi (organic, dull, vague, crude, bowl-shaped); that is, the controlled light, cool shadows, and mathematical pattern of the straightened wires vs. the rough, distressed, one-of-kind plaster shapes. And yet elements of one are in the other. The dark, scarred wire that gives them their fundamental shapes goes through the same process–was burnt in the same fire and bears the same imperfections from the same hammer.

*

3 (5)wires and 5 (3)sides are different solutions to the same question: what happens in the spaces in between differently shaped wires?

*

The wires in the wall serve as lines AND as objects simultaneously. The shadows are lines indicating the 2-dimensional, flattened aspect of a 3-dimensional object (the wires). 3 (5)wires begs the question: Does the object draw the shadow or does the shadow draw the object? 5 (3)sides are 3-dimensional in the way the wires in the wall are not: they deal with gravity by sitting or leaning; they have mass and texture and surface with an inside, front side, and back side.

*

The literary connection most obvious to me is that of the Haiku where the spare use of language creates the space for a moment of enlightenment. A something you realize or didn't see before.

boot crushed
on muddy trail
first bloom of spring

*

David hums the notes and chords that are 3 (5)wires.
STEPHANIE BAKER 2007

Works Cited
Baker, Stephanie, unpublished haiku, 2007
Cage, John. I Have Nothing to Say and I Am Saying It. West Long Branch, NJ: Kultur, 1990.
Fought, David, Personal Interview, June 15, 2007.
Fought, David, non-Specific Objects (objects in-between), Master of Fine Arts Thesis, California College of the Arts, June 2004.
Judd, Donald, Complete Writings: 1959-1975, The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Nova Scotia, and New York University Press, New York, 1975.
Koren, Leonard, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, 1994.
Stein, Gertrude, How to Write, Dover Publications, New York, 1975

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I think of children, playing, outside on a playground.
Inside there are wires, connected to shadows.
We are like sundials. Our projections move, around with us, in light. We can’t escape them, but they seem to disappear when we allow them to be there.

There are rings on a shelf. We try them on like memories. Like a wedding ring, there seems to be another dimension beyond the linear. Somehow we know this, somewhere we remember.
JARED WALKER 2007

JUNE: word: MAURICE BLANCHOT : art : CESAR COFONE-DADAMO & MARION JANNOT : Endgame

2007-09-06T16:36:00.000-07:00

Whoever is fascinated doesn't see, properly speaking, what he sees. Rather, it touches him in an immediate proximity ; it seizes and ceaselessly draws him close, even thought it leaves him absolutely at a distance. Fascination is fundamentally linked to neutral, impersonal presence, to the indeterminate They, the immense faceless someone. It bears the same relation, neutral and impersonal in itself, with that of seeing the eyeless and shapeless depth, the absence one sees for it is blinding.

MAURICE BLANCHOT
The Space of Literature

APRIL: word: LYDIA MATTHEWS + word : JUVENAL ACOSTA : art : STEVEN ELLIOTT

2007-09-05T18:47:00.000-07:00

Angela Hennessy’s Forecast: Precipitation On the Way

Aeromancers (or more specifically “nephomancers”) are individuals who meditate on the clouds in order to divine the future. During the medieval era in Europe, they would practice their craft by summoning the ghosts of ancestors, requesting that they project spectral images from the future onto clouds so that their earth-bound brethren might know what would happen next. Nephomancers believe that the past, present and future form a telling continuum—so long as one is willing to study the heavens and trust in something that will perpetually transform and ultimately disappear

Perhaps we are all nephomancers to some degree or another. When we hear a radio voice announce today’s forecast as “partly cloudy,” our first instinct is to move to the bedroom window and glance up at the sky. Will those random and constantly changing vaporous shapes produce rain or burn away by the day’s end? Does their location and shade of grey promise physical relief or potential threat, and how will that vision shape our mood? Clouds can be disturbingly ambiguous or comforting in their predictability. Even if we no longer assume that ghosts have inscribed messages on them for our benefit, our mundane “readings” of clouds trigger a multitude of unconscious dreads and deep-seeded desires on a daily basis.

Likewise, Angela Hennessy’s recent “Partly Cloudy” installation at Ampersand International Arts evokes the psychological weight we inadvertently invest in those insubstantial, fantastic forms, reminding us that weather doubles as a psychic metaphor. She sets accumulated black strands against the gallery’s white walls to resemble a morose bank of clouds, and extends their threads downward to mimic sublime rain showers on a distant horizon.

Trained in traditional textile production, Hennessy literally “undoes” her own history as a maker when fabricating these clouds: she slowly and relentlessly unravels black velvet, shredding it so that its materiality is barely recognizable. The by-product of this mesmerizing, laborious process is loose black fuzz that resembles discarded nappy hair. Hennessy plays off the fact that black velvet—with its “uncanny” evocations of erogenous luxury— is also slang for African American women. She sweeps up these nappy piles from her studio floor to create “Hemisphere,” a perverse postcolonial simulation of a Victorian era paperweight. As cultural critic Celeste Olalquiaga explains in her eccentric book, The Artificial Kingdom: On the Kitsch Experience(Pantheon, 1999), Victorians were in the habit of encasing once vital flora and fauna in glass, forever reducing them to generic specimens for visual pleasure. Unnerved by mass industrialization and obsessed with death, they fetishized carefully preserved objects on their parlor shelves: the more exotic, the more entrancing. Hennessy’s dark clouds and sculptural forms are particularly unsettling because we don’t know which specific narratives her meditations have conjured, yet they feel familiar and haunted, and harbor a quiet sense of urgency. Her aesthetic sensibility is both elegant and gothic. It manifests our futile desire to fossilize social histories as well as personal memories—even painful ones— in an ongoing effort to divine the future, ephemeral as it may be.
LYDIA MATTHEWS

Velvet
A texture can be violent as a poem written to invite transgression. Poetry: text of what is vulnerable. Something delicate as a textile woven in a context of vulnerability can be an invitation to violence. The artist who works with velvet knows that well as she takes it apart, as she deconstructs it in order to understand it: velvet is a like a text that is being read to find in it the poetry of delicate dissolution. She knows that velvet can be separated with fingers; that it can be translated into fuzz and thread. She knows that fingernails can take it apart, can unweave it, unravel it, so that out of that disintegration something unknown can take place. She knows that once separated its elements talk to each other with longing and that this longing creates a tension between them: she somehow negotiates this tension when she puts them back together, once she has translated the chaos of dissolution into meaning. The chaos of momentary death into fragile resurrection.

JUVENAL ACOSTA

APRIL: word: MARK SANFORD GROSS art : STEVEN ELLIOTT

2007-09-05T18:42:00.000-07:00

Birthdays
Steven Elliott paints with a wood burning device. Barely bent over, just enough to seem comfortable, his hand is as steady as his gaze. His workspace is simple. Absent are the cans filled with brushes and squeezed tubes of paint. Instead, a handful of bullet-like scorched metal tips lay on the tabletop beside his current project. On the wall behind him, a duet of images that must have been born on the road from this artist’s heart to his memory. I was hypnotized by his concentration and apprehensive about my trespass into his mental images.
He burned emotion into his work. Work that is void of the colors that bleed on conventional palettes. While it is difficult to articulate the feeling of watching him use hot and destructive material to create beauty and fragility, it is easy to feel the life in his work.
He worked. He burned each line as if he were creating a person, vein by vein. Emotion by emotion. While invited, I felt intrusive and oddly vulnerable. I turned to the wall, to the images, with a cautious tilt of my head, feeling guilty as if I had stumbled across a close friend’s open journal.
There is a time when art touches your own palette. There is a time when an artist’s work is a minefield for your own emotions. And there is a time when art goes into quiet places. The place inside your own soul. An ageless place. One that has traveled your existence. The place found in old attic trunks and dusty boxes. A place that people record into diaries. One place that has not been photographed. Steven’s work takes me to these places. He records the delicate lyrics of time’s song. As if a precious memory was being branded into a piece of stretched canvas. A tattoo inked into skin.

I asked Steven to explain his work. More as a formality or, perhaps, to fill the vulnerable silence. I learned about his images, his process and the mechanics. The basics you learn during a first meeting with an artist. When you’re still strangers. And while he spoke of his focus, his method and his craft, I heard the depths of his passion and emotion. I watched guarded joy grin in his eyes.
I am drawn to the lone passenger in “Dreaming of Home.” It brings me to thinking about how many times I have felt away from home as I sat on the doorstep. It reminds me of the dark times when I believed there was another place shimmering with pearls. It brings on an unexpected shiver. I thought of the homes I have lived in. The ones I rowed to. And, the ones I ultimately found. I felt the lonely waters that lay between them and the tides that seemed to be running on batteries almost drained.
Steven’s work contains a simple painted color. A base layer of uncomplicated blue, subtle as a morning vacation sky. A fragile blue. Like tissue paper in a gift box that protects the pearls he uses on his choice of canvas. Glistening “pops” that seem to percolate in faces, like the ones children stare at in the moon. Fractured pellets of lights in hollow windows. Translucent angels nodding their heads in rays of light..
I am also drawn to the image drawn from the Boy Scout Handbook chapter on “How to Save a Struggling Body.” Two figures glide uneasily above the surface of dark water surrounded by a cascade of pearls that acts not so much as a frame but as an aura. I see a saving hero and a struggling body. I think about one person being born out of another person within himself. Drowning infused with metaphor and physical manifestation.
I am brought back to one summer day in my childhood. Maybe the same time the books that Steven uses for inspiration were illustrated. My mom was engaged in a pool-side game that four women play around a square plastic table while their husbands fill up their forty-hour time-cards. The sky was the same blue as in Steven’s image. I remember running around the rectangular pool, laughing and careless, an illustration in a 1950’s first-grade reader. I never felt the concrete floor disappear. I noticed the big number 7’s painted on the tiled walls around me rise quickly above my head. The sunlight diffused, breaking into drops and colors like the pearls in Steven’s image before me. My arms stretched to the sky more as if I was in a dance than in a struggle. I do not remember fear. I remember peace and comfort as if I was being wrapped up in an overstuffed blanket. And then a giant arm snaked around my seven-year old chest and took me on a torpedo ride to the surface. Decades later and far from the Catskills, I find myself in Stevens’s studio thinking of my nameless giant and the glistening pearls.
I believe that the pearls of life shine a dim light around dark corners and give direction. They are the buoys to grab onto atop the surface of deep oceans. They are the eyes of the one who reaches out and leads you to safety in the darkness. Steven’s work frames moments in life. His tender hand guides heat and metal to scorch characters onto a stage made from a block of wood. He sprinkles them with the subtle vibrancy and glow found in the tenderness of carefully selected pearls and beads that come from places and people with their own stories.
One of Steven’s reference books – a tattered grade school science textbook from 1954 – reminds me of the book my grandfather read to me every day as I tried to learn the words. I remember the joy I felt when I finished “Fun With Dick and Jane” for the first time by myself. The book still sits on my shelf.

Steven Elliott has managed to burn a handful of memories into wood as they have been burned into my memory. But it is more than this. He managed to capture everything since that day by the pool and those days on my grandfather’s lap. A stranger to my life, his few works spoke in detail of my journey from dreaming of home to coming home.
There is an abundance of art in our world. I have many responses to exhibitions, installations and pieces of work. But Steven’s work invokes a new response. It is work that I trust. Like trusting that someone will come wrap their arms around me in a dark place. Art that I feel with an absence of words.

MARK SANFORD GROSS 2007

FEBRUARY: word: JAMES NESTOR art : JEFF MORRIS

2007-09-05T18:35:00.000-07:00

JEFF MORRISStraight lines. Crooked lines. Horizon lines. Cracks and fissures. Lines that separate the mountains and sky and sea.

Lines are the subjects of Jeff Morris’ work. But not just lines. It’s the spaces outside and inbetween the lines, around the lines, their shapes and colors, where they start and stop – these are the real players in these pieces. Because as each line is magnified and manipulated and abstracted in form and in hue, so are the spaces that surround it, so is the meaning and our perception also changed. Light turns to dark, day to night, unmoving earth becomes ephemeral air – definition is redefined

And plastic, always plastic. For Morris the used plastic bag isn’t trash, it’s a bright exclamation mark punctuating a gray landscape. It’s “found” color. And it’s mimicking nature too. Like the spore traveling from the flower to its growing place in the earth, so too does the plastic bag travel from the super market, trash can, or arthritic hand, floating across the landscape until it lands on the barb of a rusted fence. But unlike the spore, which will grow then die, the plastic bag will remain on the fence, or in a weedy lot, or buried underground -- in our memories – forever, never fading, never disintegrating, always bright and colorful.

+ + +

Untitled and When Yes on N Becomes No on N

Remove all the words from a dictionary and what do you have? Blank pages, bound paper -- a fresh start. This is the approach Morris took to a series of banner flags. Hanging from buildings like stalactites, these flags traditionally have one purpose: to instantly grab our attention to sell us something, to lure us into a convenience store, car wash, mini-mall gym. But when the words are removed, when the color is stripped away and they no longer serve the purpose for which they were made, what are these flags? Morris suggests they are blank slates, “fresh starts,” to which we can apply our own colors, words, and meaning. On the creation of When Yes on N becomes No on N:

“I was a huge proponent of Proposition N in Oakland, where I live. I put a bunch of these election signs in my front yard. When the proposition failed, the message on these signs was useless. I wanted to remove the failure I felt when I looked at them, to be able to look at them in a different way – a new life.”

Drawings

Morris has always been attracted to tide charts not for what they are communicating – ebb and flood, wind direction, swell height -- but how they communicate it. “I’m fascinated by how all the colors [on tide charts] are assigned to a movement or a time of day, how there is meaning attached to each color,” he explains. “They make the abstract concrete, in graceful, simple way.” Morris sought to redefine both color and meaning in this series of color-pencil drawings. His goal was to remove the affiliation and meaning of the colors, and allow us to appreciate the tide chart on a different, aesthetic level. In doing so, the concrete is made abstract, again.

“Yesterday I came upon a plastic quart bottle of oil, run down by a car, with its contents exploded on the side of the building, flowering in an arc, an incredible pattern. You start looking at it, really looking at it, and all these different shapes and their permanence start to reveal themselves.”

JAMES NESTOR 2007

FEBRUARY: word: PATRICIA MALONEY art : SARAH SMITH

2007-09-05T18:22:00.000-07:00

The Regalia of the New Republic: the work of Sarah Smith

I was six years old during the Bicentennial celebration of this country’s birth and what I remember most clearly about that year was the 4th of July parade. My entire family dressed in colonial garb and stood along Hackensack Street in Bergen County, NJ, waving to the similarly attired Minutemen who recreated the route taken by Washington and his troops two hundred years previous. Afterwards, permanent navy-and-gold signs were erected to mark that same path, and though I walked passed one on a daily basis, it was years before I bothered to notice what had actually been commemorated was Washington’s retreat from and near defeat at the hands of the British.

It is within such disjointed spaces such as this - between the real history of a place and the history that one is taught, or between that teaching and its subsequent recall – that Sarah Smith situates her drawings and wall tableaux . She reassembles the regalia of the New Republic into contemporary allegories in which might succumbs to disillusionment and certainty yields to loss. In the visual narratives Smith offers her audience, banners, radiant bursts, crowns of acanthus leaves, and neoclassical friezes share the same space and temporality as tree stumps, burnt and broken arrows, preying eagles, and prone wolves.

The term “theatre of war” is used to delineate the specific geographic region where a conflict occurs, but once removed from that context, carries the implication of spectacle and posturing, of prevarication and illusion. There is a close link between the current war’s theatricality – particularly in its false pretenses, its punditry, and our sense of removal from it- and the construction of Smith’s drawings, either on paper or as sculpture. It is not accidental that she utilizes the same muslin employed in constructing backdrops or, as in Overture to Memory’s Passage, her 2005 installation at Kala Art Institute, approximates a proscenium arch from Doric columns morphing into broken tree trunks. Theatre is both escape and illusion, and Smith traffics heavily in the need to convey and preserve illusion.

What distinguishes Smith’s work from theatre, her tableaux from stage sets, is the lack of human presence. Her installations do not intend to be immersive, nor do her narratives require human actors in order to unfold. In other words, the scenes she creates are not in limbo, waiting to be activated by their audience. They already exist as part of a continuum that presupposes them; embedded in a collective memory that conflates history and myth in order to point to glory. The symbols that recur throughout Smith’s works are loaded with this memory, but cannot bear the weight of it.

For example, in Strongly into the Everafter, a 2006 wall sculpture installed at Stay Gold Gallery in Brooklyn, an eagle with wings outstretched perches on a shield of draped cloth supported by branches, from which hang garlands of roses entwined with song birds. The roses are wilted, however; the branches are bare, and the birds limp and lifeless. As a result, the imposing eagle resembles less a majestic bird of prey and more a carrion crow. This is not the heraldry of a victorious army; it is the coat of arms of a decimated idealism.

Similarly, in an untitled installation at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2006, 800 arrows encircled the columns in the third floor exhibition space of the former military barracks. Smith borrows the composition directly from the crepuscular rays frequently found on altarpieces to denote the glory of God. In this piece, though, all the arrows were broken and the end of each was charred. The arrow is a loaded symbol, acting both a weapon and a graphic representation of direction or force. For Smith, the number added another layer of significance, as a quantity concrete enough to be recognized but too large to be quickly counted. Any individual arrow was lost in the mass of them – just as an individual soldier is more readily recognized as a statistic of war.

Nothing is whole and nothing is new. Every element is recycled, not only her recurring emblems, but her materials and colors as well. Smith restricts her palette to sepia washes, browns, and grays. A composite gold leaf is a recent addition, but even that is corroded with acid to sketch out her figures. Besides the acid, she draws with acrylic and ink, on muslin and most frequently, salvaged wood. Her choice of materials and palette enforce a particular stance towards her symbolism, simultaneously one of nostalgia and of distance. Again, Smith does not have the intention to immerse the viewer in her allegories. While her imagery possesses an historical specificity and resides in collective memory, there is no emotional resonance to the symbols themselves. Instead, the nostalgia that is evoked is for a set of ideals that were lost long before they were learned.

Perhaps, then the most poignant figure that occurs in her tableaux is a lone wolf, reduced in scale, caught up in webs and chains, or standing at a precipice. It exists in a stillness that becomes an eternity. It is not predatory; instead, it bears the burden of representing both the inception and the decline of an empire, one often invoked in comparison to our own. It resides, as we might, in the void between the idealism and hubris, glory and destruction.

PATRICIA MALONEY 2007

JANUARY: word: JENNIFER PILCH art : JENNIFER STARKWEATHER

2007-09-05T18:05:00.000-07:00

THERE AND BACK AGAIN

Tracing the skin on an oblique plot, slowly the
Field of memory pops. Even the shadowed and
Veiled, windows on the map. And yellow
Aspen mandalas, spinning tops to orient us?
The bluff, microscopic, lumbering across a
Sample plate? Through receding puddle rings
Over alien mud shingles, you return to the
Daily fix: the tear, the puncture, the cover-up
The crop. Marks adorn and bind us to the picture
Are we journeying back or anchored toward?
Snowflakes falling in a silent story? Constellations
Groping through murky atmosphere? A tree's
Silhouette each year slightly changeable? A
Stranger form from barely escaping, more
Beautiful the light

JENNIFER PILCH,2006

JANUARY: word: BRIAN ANDREWS art : LAUREN DAVIES

2007-09-05T17:59:00.000-07:00

In 1926, Carl Akeley died a cinematically appropriate death. Overcome by fever, he collapsed leading his fifth safari expedition into the dark continent, and was buried in the jungles of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While his name is not commonly known, his work still tints the lens of how we see the natural world and the role of our species in it. Akeley was a premiere turn of the century naturalist. He developed revolutionary techniques of taxidermy at the Chicago Museum of Natural History (now the Field Museum), and was entrusted with building the primary collections and displays for the American Museum of Natural History in New York. To fill the museums’ halls, Akeley led massive expeditions into the colonial lands of Africa. He hunted in the bush with cameras as well as firearms, returning with specimens, hides, photographs, and masks of his kills cast in plaster. These materials were transformed into breathtaking displays, the likes of which were never previously seen. No longer the stuffed automata of the curious collector, Akeley had the skill to mount his taxidermy as if alive in the wild. He presented the wild in romantic visual narratives: a herd of elephants alerting to a threat; a pride of lions protecting their kill; a mother giraffe with her new born calf; the great silverback gorilla staring down the viewer with self recognition. Tableaux spoke of predation, reproduction, and hierarchy within an aura of uncanny truth seeping from the cured hides. If defining something truly gives one power over it, then Akeley’s effect on our visual culture is deep. Akeley exhibited nature as nobly wild: ferocious, sensual, and honorable. He can be seen like a character from a Jules Verne novel, grandly carrying western ideals into unknown places only to have his own psychology reflected in his vision. In the unfolding decades he has been critiqued as a sexist, racist aristocrat who projected his anthropomorphisms and political fantasies into lands around him. All of which is probably true. But his animals still stare back at us, asking us to see nature as a story, an image, a diorama.

Lauren Davies has not been to Africa. Nor have I. And more than likely you, dear reader, haven’t either. But we talk about it. We talk about tourism and politics. We talk about safaris, race, climate change, genocide, giraffes, hunger, music, colonialism, trade routes, diamonds, deserts, jungles, malaria, AIDS, indigenous traditions, festivals, chimpanzees, bush meat, Christian missionaries, Islam, corruption, globalism, celebrity activism, art, oil, and lions. This conversation revolves around a place we only know from discourse. Our knowledge of Africa comes from a cascade of frames crossing in and out of the classroom. The work of Akeley begat National Geographic begat the Discovery Channel begat Wikipedia. With all of our contemporary knowledge, we don’t think of ourselves as in the same trap of fantasy as Akeley. Somehow our fluidity of information and a post-stucturalist self awareness relieve us of colonialist anthropomorphic guilt. If anything, it’s more fun this way. More insightful. We believe we can talk about things and understand their political subtexts at the same time.

It seems entirely appropriate that Lauren Davies’ investigation into Dominion began in a flea market in provincial France with the purchase of an aging map of the African continent. From this object she created African Map a series of digital images taken from the map and printed on cloth. The images focus on the deteriorating patina of the cartography where lines and figures compete with moldy stains for visual and cognitive meaning. As we explore its surface, we see political demarcations from times past, its facade littered with names of places both real and imagined. The surface has aged away completely in some areas, its regions twisting into an abstraction of linen and pulp, as if the territory was reclaiming itself from the mapmaker.

Davies directly engages the visual legacies of natural history museums with her wall mounted dioramas. In Petting Zoo / Pongo a glass display case contains a loose installation of string, cardboard and various foam rubbers. A matted furry hand of a primate is perched on a tube and set against a graphite line drawing of a banana on ruled paper. The materials feel educational, as if salvaged from an aging elementary school. A stenciled cardboard placard reads “Pongo” identifying the primate hand as the student and subject of the institutional pedagogy. This museological frame is reduced to its roots as a Wunderkammer - a cabinet of curiosities where we witness one of our closest genetic relatives prove its cognitive abilities as it is enculturated into a western educational framework. Our own presumptions of the natural world are viscerally challenged by Glove, a mate to the primate hand in the diorama which has been littered on the gallery floor. This hand is not mounted and displayed as a clean specimen behind glass, rather it resides in the same space the viewer occupies revealing its severed materiality. This intimate observation exposes its construction as plaster layered in paint and animal hair. It simultaneously evokes a cast off garment and a trophy from a bush meat hunt. An unknown violence has placed this object in the viewer’s path, asking us to surmise its trauma. These two hands bracket the range of relationships our species maintain with our close relatives in the natural word. We look around only to find ourselves as fellow members of Akeley’s safari: scientists, educators, and hunters.

As I noted before, Lauren Davies has not been to Africa. But she’s been to the museum and been entranced and terrified and perplexed by what she’s seen. And that’s fascinating.

BRIAN ANDREWS, 2006

References:
Akeley, Mary L. Jobe. Carl Akeley's Africa: The account of the Akeley-Eastman-Pomeroy African Hall Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History. New York: Blue Bell Books. 1931.
Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc. 1989.