Random stuff I saw in NYC – part II

A small sampling of Chelsea galleries

Peter Sacks: Aftermath
Robert Miller Gallery, 524 W 26 St., New York

The first thing you notice about these paintings (or collages? or constructions?) is their monumental size, drawing you in even from the street. Then there’s the texture – what’s that all about? So you have to go in and take a closer look, and there, you will not be disappointed. The texture is all from physical objects: Shirts complete with collars and buttons, crocheted doilies and other frou-frou lacey and fringey household things, corrugated cardboard, chunky blocks, and lengths of fabric upon which the artist has typewritten passages from texts of interest to him. All of it is pressed down onto a canvas, stiffened with some kind of medium, and in some cases painted over to obscure most of the original color, but in some cases left as is. The result is a mesmerizing visual feast.

From the press release:

Sacks uses an original, almost ritualistic technique of combining painting, adhesion, typewriting, burning, and compressing so that the works resemble archaeological sites or debris fields. He evokes a shared history of suffering, displacement, imprisonment and exile, all implicit themes that were drawn from Sacks’ experiences in South Africa and ongoing in our world at large.

Sacks applies multiple layers of materials on canvas, such as handmade lace, cloth, and threadwork, corrugated cardboard, clothing, shrouds, prison shirts, fishing nets, which he transforms by burning or painting over. Where they include textual elements, these are hand-typed by the artist on fabric using a manual typewriter and then incorporated into the overall matrix. Through this process, the artist alters our understanding of the medium of painting itself. From a distance, the canvases read as abstract and painterly, but close up, they abound with astonishing and vertiginous detail. Rigorously formal, they are at once encyclopedic yet intimate, creating a series of highly charged encounters.

Sacks has a very good website with great zoomable photos of lots more work plus reviews and downloadable catalogs of past shows.

 

Eric Wesley: Daily Progress Status Reports
Bortolami Gallery, 520 W. 20th St., New YorkAdams-_MG_3045-

This show consists of a series of 20 48×37-inch works with a limited color scheme. They look like oversize pieces of heavy paper complete with doodles, sketches, spills, folds, and other markings, but the medium is listed as oil and/or acrylic on aluminum. There are some impressive trompe l’oeil effects, like the oil paint blob with its surrounding stain. The paintings’ sketchy, impromptu appearance is fresh and appealing, possibly belying what may be a much more rigorous process. It appears that the artist wanted to indulge in exploring a multitude of techniques and styles, and he created the “Daily Progress Status Reports” device as a underlying unifying theme — although in some cases the Progress Report is missing entirely, as though he just got so caught up in the joy of making a painting that he covered it completely. From the press release:

An artist who often thematizes various rubrics of success and failure, Wesley’s newest works are large paintings that depict “Daily Progress Status Reports.”  Each DPS is a blank form for assigning and evaluating the efficiency of a workday; broken up by the hours of the day (from 10:00 am and 6:00 pm), it has space for delegating an “assignment” for each hour and a box to note whether or not these tasks have been finished satisfactorily. Wesley’s paintings show these DPS worksheets after they have been “completed”: scribbled on, evaluated, crumpled up, stained, faded and folded.

Wesley constantly reinvents his means of working — each body of work bears little if any resemblance to previous projects — and for these new works he experiments with ”trade secrets” of painting, using  oils, acrylics, airbrushing and various methods of screenprinting and stenciling.  The painstaking trompe-l’œil technique at which he ultimately arrived contrasts extravagantly with the apathy and ennui which the marks on each form convey, making the exhibition a droll meditation on artistic labor and the constant demand to be productive.

 

Antony, Jorge Queiroz, Kara Walker, Marc Handelman, Marlene McCarty
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., 530 W. 22nd St., New York

This was a group show of five artists, but evidently I only found two of them interesting enough to take pictures of. More information on the group show is here.

By far my favorite of anything I saw in the galleries are these smallish (9×13 or so), delicate mixed media pieces by an artist who just goes by the name Antony, thus making him a bit difficult to Google. Antony also has a “critically acclaimed musical career as a singer and composer.” His musical career proved more easily researchable. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t have his own web site for his art work, but you can read an interview of this “future feminist” and see more of his work here. These particular works are “made from found, and sometimes ephemeral materials that reference the natural world and our relationship to it.” There is no information regarding the materials used other than “mixed media.”


Adams-_MG_3098Antony, Untitled, 13 x 9.75 inches, mixed media
Adams-_MG_3096Antony, Untitled, 8 x 10.625 inches, mixed media
Adams-_MG_3094Antony, Untitled, 13 x 10.25 inches, mixed media
Adams-_MG_3095Antony, Untitled, detail
Adams-_MG_3093Antony, Untitled, 16 x 22.125 inches, mixed media

 

I also liked these large-scale graphite and ballpoint pen drawings by Marlene McCarty. These drawings “represent the final gesture to her earlier body of work known as the Murder Girls, a series of monumental portraits of teenage girls who had committed murder.”

Adams-_MG_3099Mary McCarty, installation view
Adams-_MG_3091Marlene McCarty, 14, 71 x 94 inches, graphite and ballpoint pen on paper

 

Note the interesting hanging method.Adams-_MG_3092

 

Paul Sietsema at Matthew Marks Gallery
522 W. 22nd St., New York

“Sietsema’s works address the production, consumption, and proliferation of cultural objects and the systems in which these objects circulate. One work, addressing the idea of transfer between the artist and viewer, portrays a phone with its receiver lying beside it. Another depicts a red expanse of paint with exposed areas of raw linen. The image, which resembles a materialist painting in the vein of Arte Povera, suggests that paint can make its own forms. The exposed linen sets the rendered image of paint beside the actual material of painting.”

Adams-_MG_3082

Adams-_MG_3086Paul Sietsema, White Painting, 69 x 46 inches, enamel on linen
Adams-_MG_3088Paul Sietsema, White Painting – detail

 

This is getting way too long, so I’ll break here. More to follow tomorrow.

October 5th, 2014|Interesting Artists|Comments Off on Random stuff I saw in NYC – part II

Circles, lines, and lots of patience – The exquisite drawings of Lena Ohlén

Ohlen1
Untitled, 14.5 x 13.5 inches, ink & pencil on paper, ©2013 Lena Ohlén

 

Despite its obvious drawbacks, Facebook can be great for certain things, not least of which is discovering new artists. But it can also have some  unexpected benefits. Sometimes you can win a great piece of artwork by being the 100th “like” on an artist’s page, which is how I came to acquire this very cool drawing.

Ohlen1-detail

Untitled (detail), ©Lena Ohlen

Lena Ohlén is a Swedish artist who creates drawings using only simple markings like tiny lines and circles, with pencil and pen. She achieves rich texture and pattern, plus a wide range of values and mesmerizing depth, with nothing more than these very basic markings. It must take a very long time to do, and I can imagine that to create an entire drawing is a thoroughly soul-cleansing experience.

Here are a couple more from her web site. I love this one with the straight lines. It looks as though the surface is an old wall, perhaps made of wooden shingles, slowly collapsing under its own weight. I get the feeling I could reach out and touch the rough surface and experience every ridge in the intense texture. It puts me in mind of some of the El Anatsui tapestries.

drawing by Lena Ohlen
Untitled, ink & pencil on paper, ©Lena Ohlén

 

Here’s my favorite, a color line drawing based on water. The blog is in Swedish, but thanks to the magic of Google Translate, you can get a decent approximation of what she says about her work.

ohlen3
Untitled, colored ink & pencil on paper, ©2013 Lena Ohlén. (See the high-res here.)

 

See more of Lena Ohlén’s work:

Web site
Blog
Facebook

August 11th, 2013|Art, Interesting Artists|1 Comment

Garish: Roadside Color Polaroids

 

gar·ish

[gair-ish, gar-]  adjective
1. crudely or tastelessly colorful, showy, or elaborate, as clothes or decoration.

 Garish: Roadside Color Polaroids, the new book by my friend Robert Jones, is a feast for the eyes. Even if you’re not an aficionado of the extended road trip, as I certainly am, you will find yourself experiencing a certain sense of déjà vu as you page through this book. The photographs tell a tale of an era that could be considered bygone, yet whose artifacts are still so present in so many forgotten little corners of North America that it seems its influence will never be erased completely.

Robert Jones -Mexican Taqueria
Mexican taqueria detail
Farm-to-Market Road 2790, Somerset, Texas, February 2007

As Jones tells us in the intro, this collection of Polaroid prints, taken with his trusty Colorpack III, “represents a quarter-century’s quest to find beautiful, vivid, man-made color.” His color sense influenced by the “revelation” of David Lynch’s use of surrealistically brilliant hues in Blue Velvet, Jones has driven “untold thousands of miles” to find outstanding examples of these intense colors. He says,

“Ironically, these hues are most deeply intensified when driving across endless lonely stretches of highway in the American Southwest and Mexico, where the people use buckets of brightly colored paints to break the drab monotony of the brown stubble and caliche that characterize that region’s landscape. The crisp, clean air in Canada has given me skies with the deepest blues, and the most luminous greens and reds.”

The Polaroid film serves to exaggerate and shift the color in a nostalgic, yet slightly unsettling way.

Robert Jones - Motel roomsMotel rooms
U.S. Route 130, Burlington County, New Jersey, May 2004

As to the artist’s intent, there is no attempt at a hidden message here; it is straightforward and without pretense. To understand what the photographs represent, a passage from “Coloring Outside the Lines,”  the essay by John DeFore included in the book, is enlightening:

“Where someone else might have culled through the hand-painted signs and statuary here in search of ironic juxtapositions, or framed them in ways that suggest a new layer of meaning is being created, Jones is happy simply to celebrate what he has found. This collection isn’t a straightforward, undiscriminating catalog of roadside oddities, but neither is it a monograph treating those objects as mere fodder for an artist hovering on a higher plane. Jones takes his pictures seriously, but he clearly respects what he’s photographing as much as he does the image he’s creating.”

Robert Jones - Hoppers and landscapeHoppers and landscape
U.S. Route 87, Union County, New Mexico, February 2002
Robert Jones - Stop sign and street cornerStop sign and street corner
Town plaza, Villa Union, Coahuila, April 2002

Are these photographs truly “garish”? I suppose that’s something best left up to the viewer to decide. Perhaps my judgment is compromised by my love of this subject matter, but I would say they are hauntingly beautiful, celebratory of the overlooked magnificence that can be found in forgotten little corners of the world, sometimes sparked into momentary transcendent splendor by a brief angle of sunlight, other times waiting patiently for decades for an appreciative glance, or for nothing at all. In this age of Instagram and Hipstamatic and instant-whatever-the-matic, in which anything and everything becomes fodder for an overload of superficially formulaic “artiness,” I find it comforting to think of Jones out there on the road, recording these images with this all-but-lost technology, a piece of paper with chemicals that in its own time revolutionized the art of photography.

Robert Jones-Evan Jones and hillbilly figureEvan Jones and hillbilly figure, miniature golf course
Seawall Boulevard, Galveston, Texas, February 2007

For more information and to see more photographs by Robert Jones, please visit his website. The book Garish: Roadside Color Polaroids is available on Amazon.com. It’s also available as an ebook for Kindle on Amazon and as a NOOK book at Barnes & Noble.

September 15th, 2012|Interesting Artists|Comments Off on Garish: Roadside Color Polaroids