June 13
Andrew Hotis
Red Hook Box


There was something heartbreaking about this little box  labeled RED HOOK DRWGS in stamped capital letters followed by a period. You name something by place once you have left that place or once you suspect you will leave. I guessed this piece was made with the knowledge or hindsight of departure. It was labeled on two sides the way moving boxes or boxes going into storage are. The color the box was painted was the tone and color of an interior wall. I could imagine the color was called sea foam or something like that. The drawings were made on the pages of a paperback book.  To the touch they felt like household textures: wax and interior paint. 

The drawings inside read like Diebenkorn when seen in reproductions. But after they were taken out of the box, moved around a large, narrow wooden table, they read more like interiors. They still seemed abstract but the way a bare wall is abstract, or a corner, or light coming under a pulled down shade. Home. Or a former home.

Anyone who has lived in New York and left knows that it means something to leave New York. I admit, I am projecting this on the piece, and can follow the biography of the artist. Even so, the small scale spoke to me of a New York apartment. The permission to move the drawings around the table reminded me of rearranging furniture in a small space. The drawings were packed up and labeled with the name of a neighborhood in a city almost everyone leaves eventually, or at least leaves a few apartments and neighborhoods behind.

But you don’t have to have lived in New York to appreciate the gesture of this piece. We have all moved more places than our parents. We have left many rooms we once occupied. The drawings were both full and empty like an apartment you’ve lived in, when you are looking around after your furniture has been moved out. 

June 12

Bobby Tilton

Wreck

I did not spend two hours with this work as I have most of the work in the series so far. I came into the gallery out of sorts and unfocused. A small child in my care suffered a choking episode. My house has suffered the neglect of my distraction for two weeks now. I owe people phone calls and emails. My bank account is wobbling. So my reading of this piece may very well be hampered or encouraged by this condition.

I remember my mother, a mother of seven, using the phrase “I was a wreck”.  Nowadays people often say, “train wreck” instead of simply “wreck” and they mean “a mess.”  I prefer wreck, for its openness, lack of grandiosity and sense of observed spectacle (Nowadays nothing is anything if not observed).

One of the elements of this piece that enjoy thinking about is the title. Wreck. It can be a verb or a noun. It actually does not describe the object (a wrecking ball) but what the object does, or causes, or maybe the person it for who it is a stand-in. So the greatest tension in this piece is between the title and the object.

There is also tension between, the ball and the chain that comprise the piece. The chain is a predictable metal chain, slightly rusted. The ball is white and covered with a cake frosting texture and free-hand filigree, though it appears harder and denser than frosting. The ball did not quite transcend its material (plaster?) to appear soft, cake like. It was enjoyable to think of what the piece would look like if the ball could really be mistaken for cake or was cake. Then again, it was enjoyable to think of it, heavy as it was (you could tell that it had weight by the way it moved slowly and slightly) smashing into the walls, table and wine bottles.

Male-female tension was brought up by some of the viewers. But couldn’t shake my perspective that was inextricably linked to that moment. I saw the wrecking ball as a stand-in for one person, the tension within one person. Weighted and potentially menacing, but unlikely to find the assistance to really do some damage.  

June 11
Daniel Atyim

The Strand of Power

Can an abstract painting be funny?

I have never considered this question before. Maybe that's because I have never seen a funny abstract painting before this one. This abstract painting has a figurative moment. Floating in the middle of a pink rectangle was a fleshy form that I read as most probably an ass, though there is a deliberate (I believe) anatomical discrepancy in what would be the upper thigh. We, the other viewers and I, disagreed and discussed what form this was. An ass? balls? (I don’t exactly see that one), a nose? (I don’t exactly see that one either.) Two asses! Someone called out, after the conversation had moved on. Funny, right? So After seeing the ass I returned to the title. It's oxymoronic. A strand is not rigid; power seems necessarily rigid. Ha!

What else was funny about this painting? So here we have this fleshy form suspended on a nauseating pink rectangle. It especially appeared nauseating along the lower edge where it butted up against an equally nauseating green. (I can see here that in the reproduction the relationship between these colors does not come across accurately.) So this fleshy form was painterly. The edge of the painting allows it to sort of float. Like it is a painting within the painting. A figurative painting within an abstract one.It is held on the surface as if being presented. Look Mommy, an ass!  Funny. 

There are these pokey little sticks too. They look like sticks because the paint is raised. They remind me of piñata batons. I imagine they are trying to hit or poke at the ass or the painting of the ass. Funny. Maybe dark...

How the did I read the rest of the painting? I saw a deep space in the upper right corner. I was attracted it was largely obscured. There is a thread of color that seems to glow or represent something that glows: neon or the camera blur of lights at night. From behind the pink rectangle is a sort of explosion shape. If the artist wanted to paint an explosion he could have. But this form is flattened, constructed of deliberately rigid diagonal marks. 

There was a mark that bothered me. It was the vertical line rising from bottom edge of the painting and disappearing behind the pink rectangle. It formed a border between two textured color fields. I did that annoying thing that everyone does in graduate school; I held my hand over that line. I sort of hated that line. I did not like that it almost anchored the pink field, kept it from floating the way I wanted it to. I didn’t like that I did not know why it was there. Or maybe it seemed to stabilize the painting in a way that I didn't want it to. Wait...maybe this was the Strand of Power. That I was irked by a line is funny! It is funny and strange and wonderful that there is a language of colors and gestures and lines that we cannot decode precisely. I have a hunch that this painting was supposed to provoke, that it was making a joke, but one that might have been offensive or cynical. It’s pretty amazing that a painting can do that. 

EF

June 10

Z Behl

Wood Oscar

Will the Real Oscar Please Stand Up

This evening’s piece continued to address the question what is real? though it utilized a very different vocabulary. Oscar, four years old, interacted with a painted, wooden cutout of himself in identical clothing. Wood Oscar was attached to a piece of fishing line that had been cast over one of the ceiling beams and real Oscar spent nearly an hour hoisting the other up and down while answering some of the unscripted questions of the artist and audience.

Oscar:  He's not even real!

Z Behl:  He’s not fake...

Oscar:  But when I talk to him he's not even talking back!

Finally, artist and subject (or more accurately, collaborator) decided to nail the painting to the wall. The final ten minutes or so were spent watching the four-year-old hammer nails into the painting, at one point telling everyone that someone hammered nails into Jesus. (I was waiting for someone to bring up Pinocchio but no one did.)

This piece was completely irrational. And then I think what kind of art is rational? Really. This was not a painting. And ce n’est pas Oscar. Mais…There was a kind of courage present, of faith in the moment that was amazing to see and impossible to categorize. This piece was absurd, ridiculous, and utterly charming. 

June 9

Yasser Aggour

From the Private Collection of Dr. Sausa

Who is Dr. Sausa?

Authorship is a mysterious thing. This piece consisted of a wall text in vinyl lettering, one black and white photograph, and six color photographs. If the wall text is to be taken as fact, Dr Sausa, pictured in the black and white photo, was a pediatrician whose amateur soft-core pornographic photographs ended up at a New Jersey flea market. If the wall text is to be believed.

Why wouldn’t we believe the wall text? It was signed with the author’s initials. Why would the author tell us a story that wasn’t true? Ahh…

When I first saw the piece and read the text I laughed out loud at the story of the man with egg-shaped head, ugly little teeth and enormous glasses. I was also touched by it. If we make art, we must relate to his assertion when he declared “I am an artist.” That it came to him after waking from “an especially brutal syphilitic fever” is very, very funny. If we make art, we are laughing not only at him, but at ourselves.

The same sort of goes for the women in the photographs. The women are posed, bear-breasted, and in postures of attempted (albeit rather awkward) seduction. These soft-focus women with out-modish hair and out-modish breasts possessed slightly odd features. One was cross-eyed, one with red hair seemed to have a shadow of dark hair (or possibly just a shadow) over her upper lip. In other words, in spite of the bare breasts and flirty poses these were not sexy pictures. In fact, they rendered the convention of these mildly dirty pictures quite absurd and somewhat sweet. In the moment of the piece both endeavors, art and sexuality, seemed a little misguided and rather touching.

So did Yasser Aggour create Dr. Sausa? I mean there is a photograph here of someone.

In the discussion inspired by this piece I learned about the Storyville photographs of E.J. Bellocq and the role of the artist Lee Feelander. I looked up the history later. Bellocq photographed the models (they were prostitutes). Later, Freelander purchased the negatives, printed them and by doing so, re-contextualized them.

I know from a conversation with the artist that the work was made “semi-site-specifically.”

We look at these photographs and ask, Are these people really characters and not "real" people? The wall test is signed with the artist's initials. Is he also a character?

In Chapter One of Milan Kundera’s Immortality the narrator is sitting by a pool. He is watching a woman in her sixties taking a swimming lesson from a much younger man. When she leaves, she turns to the young man and waves. "The essence of her charm, independent of time, revealed itself…and then the word Agnes entered my mind." Agnes, the novel's protagonist was thus born. Later the narrator is identified as the author, Milan Kundera. In this book and others he, Kundera playing himself, interjects. He appears as the creator, mixing with the fiction. In Chapter Two he asks: "Who is Agnes?"

In 2003, J.M. Coetzee delivered his Nobel Lecture in which he addresses the mysterious relationship between the author, the characters and the reader. If you can, listen to the audio here.

“...Daniel Defoe. What was not clear from the children’s encyclopedia was how this man fitted into the story. The encyclopedia referred to the man as the author of Robinson Crusoe but this made no sense since it said on the very first page of Robinson Crusoe that Robinson Crusoe told the story himself. Who was Daniel Defoe?”

This work read to me like a piece of short fiction. Still, we have photographic proof. Who is Dr. Sausa? Why would an artist tell us a story that wasn’t true? 

EF

detail

June 8
Kensuke Yamada
Catch the Rabbit


Stockholm Syndrome

What do you do when you look at a work of art and have no strong response? In a group exhibition or a museum you can just move on. When a piece is the only one in the room and you have committed to spend a while you have to get to know it a little. Some people are comfortable arriving at a decision and spending no more time with a work if they do not like it.

Here is where I am with that: if you invest your time and attention into something it will return something. You may begin to like a work, a kind of visual Stockholm syndrome. Or, maybe some germ of thought will form and that can be its own reward.  And then there is the fact that we change over time. When I was in Paris many years ago I visited the Picasso Museum. I figured that if I were ever to be won over, this was the place. Nope. I was unmoved. A week or two ago I saw a Picasso calendar on the table in my friend’s apartment. I looked at one, then another of the images. I still didn’t like them exactly but I could see them. They were extremely powerful. And this in a bad reproduction!

Savvy design, seasonal colors, the profusion of seductive imagery on every level of advertising enters our brains; we cannot stop it. Advertising, meant to appeal, often to the widest possible audience, is going to be conservative and our general tastes may absorb its influences. This is what Holland Cotter wrote about taste in the New York Times:

“Taste is habit, a form of learned behavior. And habit is what we rely on to make us feel at home and comfortable in the world. So judgment based primarily on taste, like most art criticism, is inherently conservative, predictable, fixed.”

I think of the poster of the girl crying I used to visit in the bookstore of the mall near my house. I was twelve and the original drawing was pastel on black paper. A tear streamed down her face, catching the light. I want to say there was the reflection of a man (on horseback?) in her pupil. Very corny. I loved it. Later, in graduate school, I formed opinions. Really worked on them. So much talking. 

I have entered an age of greater humility. I no longer submit my vote, thumbs up or down. In my own work I am suspicious of paintings or passages that I like. Recently I sat in my studio in front of two large paintings on paper. One had been more or less resolved and the other was in what I always think of as the awkward phase. I became very aware that my eyes wanted to be in the mire of the most awkward passage of the more awkward painting. I have to learn this over and over again.

I have never really had a strong response to ceramics. I did not understand the symmetry of the work. I didn’t really like this piece. But I walked around it and around it, spent time with it, refrained from lobbing my judgments at it. Not to preserve it, but to preserve myself, my humility, my receptivity. This piece now exists detailed and intact in my memory. Someday it may bloom into some thought or idea I am grateful for. “Art prepares the soul for tenderness.” This quote is attributed to Chekov, though I cannot find the original source. Artists like this quote because it justifies in a very large way what we do. We can also keep it in mind when we look at other people’s work. I want to be prepared. 


EF


Update: I have thought about this piece literally every day since I saw it. I am not sure why. Here is a full view: Catch the Rabbit

June 7
James Bailey

Bad Bunny

Dirty Funny Things


Red light cast down from the track lighting and the print was hung not on the gallery's longest, dominant wall but in a little corner in the back of the room. The lightweight paper wiggled lightly from the turning of the ceiling fans.In the constellation of carved forms I saw the little image of dogs mating and I laughed. I continued to identify the pictures, all sexual references, as other viewers came closer. 


It was fun to witness the little eruptions of laughter. It was an adolescent-like pleasure to point out the dirty jokes or solve for the benefit of the person next to us a sexual pun they could not identify. The images floated in the pink negative space and I felt like we had discovered a naughty cave painting. It was a perfect fusion of dainty and vulgar and made sex seem anything but sexy. My favorite image was the forked-tongue snake rising from a little pair of pants. Ha! Who wants to bet that the first joke ever was a dirty joke?

                                                                                                                         EF

June 6

Lara Schaberg

Scrolling

1. Touch

A long time ago I was told not to smudge the graphite to create tone when drawing faces. Much later I taught students to model by adjusting the pressure on the pencil. Otherwise, I would caution, you are creating an unintentional medium you did not intend to create. Graphite + the dirt and oils of your fingers. Here I when I see this method applied I see the interaction with creator and creation. The literal mixing of these 2 entities.

2.Duality

There is a passage on this piece in which a cattail is—I don’t know whether to say filled in or fleshed out—with finger-smudged graphite. This passage is effort-filled and tense. The graphite gives way to plum colored paint as the cattails continue through  the piece. In contrast to the cattail rendered in graphite with a kind of myopic control, there is another described with the most distant and casual mark, the drip. It is suddenly interesting to me, the contrast between effort and grace. I see in this piece a record of the tension between the artist and the artwork.

3.Time

The format of the scroll offers a temporal experience. You move from one end of the painting to the other. Also horizontal and dependent on time: landscape and music.

4. Music

This piece made me think of music, the progression and variation of abstract elements moving through time.

5.Courage

I believe it takes courage to enter a work of art as its creator. Soon it refuses to be subservient and takes you to the edge of a world that very well might be flat.

June 5

Brad Allen

Pentastar Fleet

So Much Depends...

This piece was funny. I think. Sculpture is not my primary visual language but I think I recognize a joke when I see one.

I walk into a room. There are wheelbarrows arranged, front wheel facing out, handles crossing to form a geometrical shape, a pentagon. And in white chalk, on the floor, a pentagon is drawn, holding the shape together. Inside each of the wheelbarrows there are words, logos, rather, some of which I recognize: Toyota. Nissan… This is when I begin to suspect that this is a joke or pun. These are car brands on wheelbarrows.

The associations I conjured were mine alone: my brother giving children rides in a wheelbarrow in the mountains where he was delivering firewood as a teenager; Terry, my friend and landlord wheeling bricks down the sidewalks between his almost hand-built houses. Less easy to explain, the Joni Mitchell song Big Yellow Taxi”…They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot.”

I realize I like wheelbarrows. They are so nice. 


Is this a proposal to replace cars with wheelbarrows? What would that look like? For a few minutes I think about that. I do notice though that these automakers have been selected by some criteria not obvious to me. I don’t see Ford for example. Hmm. Admittedly, I do not know very much about cars.

There was an artist’s statement that I did not read until after I had seen the work. The statement was full of information I did not already know. The pentastar is the geometric design used by Chrysler...  According to Cars.com, 5 of the top 10 “American Cars” are produced overseas... True-Temper wheelbarrows, according to company claims, are made in the USA. “However”, the statement continued, “almost all wheels and tires…” You guessed it. They are made in China.

I am not sure if the statement was part of the piece or not. The more I think about it, the less I understand artist’s statements, that is, their function. Are statements supplemental reading or part of the piece? I’m not sure.

So I returned to my original, naïve reading of the piece. I think I gleaned the spirit of the artist’s intention even as I was ignorant of all of the facts and intentions. I found humor. A little dark, a little sad, maybe, but humor. Just now I looked up the word humor. On its Wikipedia page there was a quote by E.B White. "Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind." 

At the end of the evening two people showed up at the gallery in a pick-up truck. We could see them through the storefront window. They walked into the room smiling strangely. A little excited, a little embarrassed maybe. The artist had contacted a few local farms and non-profits offering the gift of a wheelbarrow. It was a very nice moment to see, these farmers, these non-artists, taking their wheelbarrows away.

Incidentally, what came to my mind when I first heard that the piece incorporated wheelbarrows was a poem by William Carlos Williams that I keep memorized and somehow find applicable here.

So much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

EF

June 4

Jess Pinkham

A Swell Way to Keep from Working...

“Or don’t you like to write letters.  I do because it’s such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you’ve done something.”   - Ernest Hemingway

Whose handwriting do you know by heart?

Jess Pinkham's show closed 18 hours ago and I am still trying to figure out how to talk about it. She photographs things. And people. And animals, events, and signs.  Her photographs come in black and white or color, vertical or horizontal. Formally speaking it is difficult for me to find and trace a common aesthetic. What her photographs possess is something rare in the age of the artist-professional. The photographs say: I don’t know what I am looking for until I see it.


But wait. There is also the fact that many of these photographs are images of something that someone else has done or made or altered. For example, there is the black and white photograph of a window on which is written Merry Crisis. The artist did not write this; she introduced it to us, the way a good host would. I think what I am saying is that the subjects seem more than subjects in that they do not seem captured by the one with the camera. The opposite seems true. The photographer seems to be the one who was captured by them.


But these photographs were only part of the exhibit, which was something between an exhibition, an event, and a get together of mostly young, creative people. Jess Pinkham's photographs skipped their incarnation as prints on a gallery wall under frame glass.  They had become postcards. Attendees--invited by invitation and with a paper sign on the street--were invited to fill the postcards out, address them to whomever they pleased, and place them in the mailbox by the door. Surfaces on which to write were provided. A desk for solitude, a dining room table to be near others. Pens were provided, as were stamps. Those who had not memorized addresses were invited to email the address to the artist.  This show was a gesture and it was generous.


In their time in front of the photographer the subjects were honored. In our time with her, we--those who came to see her work--were. I guess this is why I was asking myself whether or not I had seen an art exhibition. The exhibition is usually the moment the ego of the artist is allowed to indulge in itself. I don't know if this artist's ego showed up.


Was this art? Good art? Photography? Performance Art? Blah blah blah. After hours of asking myself these kinds of questions I just wanted to tell myself to shut up. Don't take this all so seriously. Enjoy. Something told my ego to be still. Isn't that a success?
http://jesspinkham.com/



EF

June 3
Allyn Stewart
Geography


Each of us has our own, personal geography and we apply it to our own form of mapping, rich with symbols that only we can access. We forget that location is not something universally understood or collectively experienced.

It took me a while to put my finger on what was unsettling about this piece. Geography was a vertically hanging print, and a small book labeled "Maps" on a small wooden table. In the book and on the wall piece were images of the world, illustrations of a circular earth, simplified, and antiquated. But there was a tension between the images and the title of the work. And then I realized what it was. This work did not to refer to the broader world.

The dominant imagery was interior, interior as in indoors and interior as in within a self. Images of objects or flora or designs overlaid ornate patterns that might adorn ancient walls, tapestries, or books. Even the fauna looked stylized and felt local: a beehive, a cage bird, an illustrated rabbit.  This looked like the world proposed by, someone who has elected not to engage in the world as it is. This is a world created inside a room, a room with (or wanting) ornate wallpaper, windows constructed from the pages of an old illustrated dictionary or almanac. This work was about travelling Emily Dickinson-style: in the imagination.

The more I looked at Geography with this idea in mind, the more curious I became about the work and the person (or persona) behind it. For some reason this work compels me to refer to the persona of its creator. When we discuss poems we say the speaker, allowing that the poet might be writing from a viewpoint she does not necessarily or entirely occupy.


There were words positioned next to some of the images. These words also began to read like decoys to me, like trompe l’oeil paintings on the wall, giving the illusion of space. “Circle of Longitude”. At first the phrase suggests a shape that encloses the massive  earth. Then I realize that that shape encloses a diagram of the earth. Circles appear throughout the book and the print as maps of the world and decorative elements. This makes me think of someone meditating on the world from a desk, drawing pictures of or writing the name of some foreign place over and over. But that place is vague. The most vague place there is: the world.

When I first encountered Allyn Stewart’s work she was fixated by, tormented by––I cannot think of an accurate or suitable word here–– the war crimes being committed in the Kosovo war. Her collages fused beautiful imagery (patterns, butterflies) with simplified silhouettes of soldiers and bodies. They were framed by scripted descriptions of the genocide. This ugly world came in through the internet and the New York Times. She would not look away. This latest piece, Geography,  might be the creation of someone (or some persona) who had enough of that world.

One word printed within the book is “omitted.” This word appears near two birds that look like not quite scientific illustrations. On the facing page are two diagrams of the earth. What is omitted I ask myself, looking back and forth between the pages? I mean, nearly everything has been omitted from this beautifully ornate, private paper world. What remains? 


EF

June 2
Zane Stucker

Natalya

Looking at work online or in reproductions encourages an intellectual enjoyment of art. It often prefers, accepts or processes the conceptual aspect of a work. Accompanying text often directs us to the back-story. Visually, it smoothes the rough surfaces.

A few months ago I saw a young woman on her way home from having hair and makeup done for her wedding. Her makeup was heavy and strange and her hair was stiff and moulded. After a bizarre moment, I realized it was for the benefit of the photographer and videographer. It reminded me of newscasters and the strange corpselike way they appear when you see them off-camera. The make-up was done for the wedding photographs and not for those present. The practice of looking at art in reproductions has encouraged an era of artists who on some level make work for electronic communication.

As we accustom ourselves to looking at artwork in electronic reproductions, our appreciation of qualities of presence, like luminosity for example, becomes slack. Naturally, other qualities emerge as eye-catching, or more accurately, mind-catching. Artists need to convince their viewers (or would-be viewers if we insist that one must be present to truly view a work) that their work is worth taking note of. So notes they write. These are the artists statements. There is no artist statement in this room. Zane Stucker does not try to lure you in with method or motive confessions. He presents you with this small and strange painting. That’s it.

Back to the qualities of an artwork. There is a pictorial intelligence and it is separate from language and its function in the mind. There is little to say about the small painting “Natalya”. I could write about it technically. The reminiscent use of glazes. The warm blues and cool reds— But that is not really what I am thinking about. There is little to say and yet when you stand in front of it, it invites you to look and to keep looking.

This painting is strange, its color, surface, form. It also makes me think of this strange thing we do, rendering faces in oiled-up pigments, manipulating the earth's elements. We compose, create.  We want to be little gods, maybe. Or maybe it’s Natalya. In the painting a woman (or a girl?) seems to be walking into the depth of the space. But she has paused and is turning to look at us. The space suggested is vertical, possibly a cathedral. The vertical format also emphasizes the presence of the viewer, the one at whom she gazes. This gaze is a gift; I am sure of it. Maybe humans paint to be like little gods and maybe humans paint because we are human.  We exult the gaze of a person, to return the gaze. We are here. I don’t know. But I like standing in front of this beautiful little painting. I like that it poses no solutions, makes no arguments, but ignites in my imagination tiny votive thoughts about enormous things. 


EF

June 1
Constanze Flamme      
Troubled Water     

How to be present in front of a photograph.

I first saw the photographs of Constanze Flamme on my computer. But I could not really see them until we met at the gallery. It was quiet there and the quiet of the room drew out the quiet from within the images. The horizon ran out of one photograph and into the next and the next. The horizon was like a stage on which events, human and natural, occurred. Or it was like an ongoing rhythm or tone over which a melody played and then ended. These natural and human events occurred in the frame of one photograph and then disappeared in the next, replaced by an event or image that recalled the one before it with a kind of visual rhyme or resonance. These photographs did not merely document the aftermath of a certain event (The BP oil spill) that affected a certain place. This sequence of photographs made me think about the fragility of our bodies, our ancient dependence on water, and compared to waters and the world itself, the almost imperceptible duration of our lives here on earth.


EF