Thursday, May 8, 2008
Displacement
I've had to shift my work to a temporary space -- they are putting sprinklers in my space. It's proven to be surprisingly off putting. I've worked in temporary spaces before; usually, I find the change of scene conducive to my work. Not this time. It's dead quiet, with absolutely no interruptions. Just me and the work. And this is not a space in which I can be particularly messy.
Friday, May 2, 2008
Deterioration In Art
I've been thinking quite a bit about deterioration in art. It's natural, especially with when the art process involves a great deal of experimentation and envelope pushing.
Pollack's paintings supposedly shed chips (the paint was household paint, so made to fall apart really). I find the shedding of the work interesting.
The paint has come off classical statuary -- to the point that we view classical as white and unadorned.
Da Vinci's Last Supper is more myth/legend (not sure the proper term, really) than painting, since it started to deteriorate rather quickly and has been in-painted, etc.; yet the myth/legend is strong.
Cave paintings survived for thousands of years precisely because they were hidden from view; now, discovered and exposed, they are deteriorating.
Great buildings fall to time, weather, war, and new construction.
Some deterioration is ironic: fairly quick crackling in Mondrian's work undermines his utopian ideals.
Yet, old master paintings are valued in part because they managed to survive hundreds of years (some level of care taking by some set of people valuing the works enough to preserve them).
The art I showed at The Artist Project was based on scavenged images and materials, included decades old paper and yarn found in my childhood home after my mother's recent passing. Here are some stills from the video I took of my installation at The Artist Project:
What Comes of This
Nomad/Herd
Discards
Snuggles
The venue wasn't the best venue for my work, which is conceptual and tends toward the ephemeral. Live and learn.
Pollack's paintings supposedly shed chips (the paint was household paint, so made to fall apart really). I find the shedding of the work interesting.
The paint has come off classical statuary -- to the point that we view classical as white and unadorned.
Da Vinci's Last Supper is more myth/legend (not sure the proper term, really) than painting, since it started to deteriorate rather quickly and has been in-painted, etc.; yet the myth/legend is strong.
Cave paintings survived for thousands of years precisely because they were hidden from view; now, discovered and exposed, they are deteriorating.
Great buildings fall to time, weather, war, and new construction.
Some deterioration is ironic: fairly quick crackling in Mondrian's work undermines his utopian ideals.
Yet, old master paintings are valued in part because they managed to survive hundreds of years (some level of care taking by some set of people valuing the works enough to preserve them).
The art I showed at The Artist Project was based on scavenged images and materials, included decades old paper and yarn found in my childhood home after my mother's recent passing. Here are some stills from the video I took of my installation at The Artist Project:
What Comes of This
Nomad/Herd
Discards
Snuggles
The venue wasn't the best venue for my work, which is conceptual and tends toward the ephemeral. Live and learn.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Upcoming: The Artist Project
It's been a while since I posted. Busy getting ready for The Artist Project. Even tonight, I am varnishing pieces, which is taking a fair bit of time. I am excited about how the work has come out, both because it feels consistent in theme and because it is visually interesting. The pieces I am showing are scavenged memories, predominantly made from materials I have scavenged, especially from my parent's home as we packed up the house following my mother's recent passing. It's a combination of refined and unrefined.
A couple things happened as the show neared. One, I've had this piece I have been working on mentally for a while with styrofoam heads I got at a garage say for a couple bucks and a newspaper shroud. The heads have really turned out, in a way that makes it somehow wrong to cover them, and the newspaper shroud itself is an interesting sculpture. I'll try it in different arrangements when I set up at the show, but my sense is the heads will not be shrouded. Two, I've let loose my prehistoric art references, for the most part, for these pieces, using instead my own interpretation of modern animals (ibex from Serengeti/Ngorogoro Crater and eland) and chairs. There's carryover in method and depiction but not literal animals from the caves. Query if it will still seem literal to some... even though the work has never really been about being literal (as opposed to carrying representational elements into abstractions) but rather, at best, symbolic.
Preview Apr. 24, 6 to 9, exhibition Apr. 25-28, Merchandise Mart, Chicago. Booth 8-3123.
A couple things happened as the show neared. One, I've had this piece I have been working on mentally for a while with styrofoam heads I got at a garage say for a couple bucks and a newspaper shroud. The heads have really turned out, in a way that makes it somehow wrong to cover them, and the newspaper shroud itself is an interesting sculpture. I'll try it in different arrangements when I set up at the show, but my sense is the heads will not be shrouded. Two, I've let loose my prehistoric art references, for the most part, for these pieces, using instead my own interpretation of modern animals (ibex from Serengeti/Ngorogoro Crater and eland) and chairs. There's carryover in method and depiction but not literal animals from the caves. Query if it will still seem literal to some... even though the work has never really been about being literal (as opposed to carrying representational elements into abstractions) but rather, at best, symbolic.
Preview Apr. 24, 6 to 9, exhibition Apr. 25-28, Merchandise Mart, Chicago. Booth 8-3123.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Your Studio Winner
Alix Rule, Saatchi Online Magazine’s regular Berlin correspondent, picked my image, "Guardian," as the winner of this month's Your Studio, commenting ‘If Max Beckmann had had a mouse he would definitely have clenched it and whacked out a sinister, reverberating enigma such as this.’
The Saatchi Gallery now will donate £500 to Children's Memorial Hospital here in Chicago. Fantastic! Every month, a critic selects an image, and Saatchi Gallery makes a donation to a hospital selected by the artist.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Still Making Art?
The proliferation of online artists sites underscores how many people are creating art regardless of how little room there to filter through and make a sustainable career from art. Daunting. It's said as a truism that the vast majority (95%) of art students are not creating art five years out of school. Given the numbers of self identified artists out there, I am skeptical; people might not be making their living at art, or might be relegated to making art outside of the hours of another career or day job, but more must continue creating than this truism suggests.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
The Current MCA Exhibition
I saw the Gordon Matta-Clark and Karen Kilimnik exhibitions at MCA. Thanks to Marianna Buchwald for her tour; she had lots of information and background about the artists.
The Kilimnik exhibition did nothing for me. I sort of appreciated the gazebo shaped enclosed space with a video of an installation of trees and little ballerinas periodically popping in and out of the scene in dances, but to me the environment felt overdone. I thought most of the pieces in the exhibit felt either over or under done.
The Matta-Clark exhibition, on the other hand, was phenomenal and spoke to me, intervening with space and architecture. It feels very much like he is cognizant of the viewer's reception of the work. Matta-Clark is known for taking a chain saw to buildings and slicing out pieces, or in one case, splitting a building in two down the vertical. The cut-out chunks are physical remnants of the building and retain their identifies as parts of a building, yet also feel like paintings. One piece that sticks in my mind is the floor (blue tile) of one apartment and the ceiling of another; it reminds us that people once occupied the places he cut into. We occupy the same space in apartment and office buildings, with floors, ceilings and walls dividing our separate lives. He also dealt with the way light flows through a room as it passed between his cutouts; in particular, I was struck by documentation of his cut-outs in a waterside warehouse, which he photographed from the outside and from the inside, and the shapes made by that the light passing through the cutouts.
The Kilimnik exhibition did nothing for me. I sort of appreciated the gazebo shaped enclosed space with a video of an installation of trees and little ballerinas periodically popping in and out of the scene in dances, but to me the environment felt overdone. I thought most of the pieces in the exhibit felt either over or under done.
The Matta-Clark exhibition, on the other hand, was phenomenal and spoke to me, intervening with space and architecture. It feels very much like he is cognizant of the viewer's reception of the work. Matta-Clark is known for taking a chain saw to buildings and slicing out pieces, or in one case, splitting a building in two down the vertical. The cut-out chunks are physical remnants of the building and retain their identifies as parts of a building, yet also feel like paintings. One piece that sticks in my mind is the floor (blue tile) of one apartment and the ceiling of another; it reminds us that people once occupied the places he cut into. We occupy the same space in apartment and office buildings, with floors, ceilings and walls dividing our separate lives. He also dealt with the way light flows through a room as it passed between his cutouts; in particular, I was struck by documentation of his cut-outs in a waterside warehouse, which he photographed from the outside and from the inside, and the shapes made by that the light passing through the cutouts.
Saturday, March 1, 2008
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