Pre auction exhibition for The Pomona Rotary Foundation 6th Annual Art Auction Fund Raiser Benefiting the "Wounded Warrior Fund" at Casa Colina Center for RehabilitationPARTIAL LIST OF PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: Michael Aschenbrenner, Karl Benjamin, Leslie Brown, Kimber Berry, Karen Chick, Dee Marcellus Cole, Steve Comba, Alex Couwenberg, Sally Egan, Craig French, Lynnette Howe, Karen Kauffman Phil Marquez, Fr. Bill Moore, Lisa Myer, Tom Pathe, Roland Reiss, Ken Sheffer, Michael Salerno, Thomas Stubbs
Great Gatsby' is auction theme
F. Scott Fitzgerald will be in full effect on Saturday, May 9, when the Rotary Club of Pomona adopts a "Great Gatsby" theme for its 6th annual Art Auction Fundraiser. The auction, to be held at Pomona's historic Fox Theater, supports wounded soldiers from the Iraq / Afghanistan deployment who are receiving rehabilitation care at Casa Colina Centers for Rehabilitation.
Auction guests are encouraged to wear attire from the 1920s and '30s as they peruse dozens of donated works by local artists, including Michael Aschenbrenner, Father Bill Moore, Karen Kauffman, Roland Reiss, Alex Couwenberg and Karl Benjamin.
The evening's events begin at 5 p.m. with a special VIP reception to meet the artists. Remaining guests will arrive at 6 p.m. for dinner and the auction, which in 2008 yielded a Rotary Club donation of $48,000 to the Casa Colina Centers for Rehabilitation. A silent auction also will be part of the night's festivities.
Since 2001, more than 30,000 service members have been injured in Iraq and Afghanistan, with 60% to 70% of the injuries affecting the brain. The Veterans Administration and military hospitals have transferred many soldiers to Casa Colina, as well as other private rehabilitation facilities across the country. Casa Colina has established clinical and administrative relationships with top surgeons at Bethesda Hospital. These same doctors recommend Casa Colina repeatedly to families seeking another option and/or a place for their loved one to rehabilitate.
Tickets to the auction are $100, and can be purchased by contacting Beth Brooks, 909-229-5921, P.O Box 7787, La Verne, CA 91750. Several levels of event sponsorship also are available. There will be a pre-auction exhibition: dba256 Gallery Wine Bar, 256 South Main Street, Pomona, CA 91766 April 4 ~ 30. Receptions: Saturday 4/11, 6 - 9 PM again on 4/25, 5 - 9 PM. Call gallery for other hours: 909-623-7600. Information on Art or artist call: George Cuttress 951-202-0059.
Jewels of the South works by Rachel Ferguson and Justine Holmes
July 12 - September 6, 2008
The American Lifescape works by Kimber Berry, Amy Bystedt, Sally Egan, Ed Freeman, Corina Gamma, Jeffrey Gillette, Sant Khalsa, Alan Kupchick, R. Dean Larson, Amy Maloof, Doug McCulloh, Thomas McGovern, Greg Miller, Donnie Molls, James Austin Murray, Steven Poster, Stijn & Marie, and David Wade
June 14 - July 5, 2008
The American Lifescape essay by Mark Zimmermann
“…American art should be weaned from its French mother.” --Edward Hopper (1927)
“The artist in America is, by comparison, like a barbarian. He does not have the superfine sensibility toward the object that dominates European feeling. He does not even have the objects. This is, then, our opportunity, free of the ancient paraphernalia, to come closer to the sources of the tragic emotion. Shall we not, as artists, search out the new objects for its image?” --Barnett Newman, The Object and the Image (1948)
Once the legions of immigrants (in this nation of immigrants) became American, there were obvious calls for an “American Art”--an art to reference and aspire to the as-yet unknowable vastness of the new nation. In due time, an American art evolved that was the scion of European traditions and its tastes. It was the refined literary work of Eakins and Sargent. But in the 1940s, a strangely original “American Art” emerged. This was the romantic, grimly profound art of postwar American painting. This was the art that stormed European shores and venues, creating a feverish rush to free the application of material to surface in the nations of the continent. This art was big in intent, scale, proportion, and ambition--like America itself and its propulsive drive. Somewhat ironically, however new and aggressive this art appeared, it rested surely, if not altogether comfortably, with the elegant traditions of formal landscape representation. As Newman admonished, the American artists had found their new objects. But in the end, they were far from new…
The landscape has enthralled us as viewers and creators since the stained hand first scrapped against a cave wall. It is the inescapable, the given, the undeniable… Looking out the window to my left, I see the windows of my neighbors and the building across the courtyard below. There is a sliver of West 15th Street and the view of approximately half a tree from its plot of soil in the sidewalk. Above it all, a brilliant spring blue sky, cobalt blue mixed liberally with flake white… Looking north from the front door of my Brooklyn studio, there are the factories and cranes of the Navy Yard, the gray East River, and the overpass of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. In my mind’s eye, there is the landscape of western Kentucky, the bottoms along the muddy Ohio River, the line of trees across the expanse that is Missouri, the red dirt banks furrowed by rain and erosion. These are the landscapes of America. Add to that the Santa Monica Mountains, and the strip malls and palm trees along Ventura Boulevard…
There are many ways to discuss our American lives and our American landscapes. Our landscapes have changed. Our need to embrace them, to understand them, and to tell their story has not.
The artists exhibiting in The American Lifescape offer us several mediums and a vast arsenal of materials to engage the subject of our contemporary culture and its aftermath.
From New York City, James Austin Murray brings a unique understanding of landscape that recedes from any notion of popular culture and ties itself firmly to the pylon of history and a specific seriousness of intent. An alignment of the urban and pastoral, these rigorous--indeed violent--works speak to us foremost as painting, yet the sculptural value of these efforts cannot be ignored.
Like Murray, the Southern California artist Greg Miller gives us material innovation and a potent example of what could be truly called “American” subject matter. Miller’s paintings show the wear and patina of a subtropical urban world--oblique references to contemporary culture, the surface buildup of resin. These are labors of intensity and statement, and they reflect the feverish creativity of an artist moved by his culture and its trappings.
Any discussion of art and landscape could be said to be incomplete without the inclusion of photography. R. Dean Larson evokes the mysteries of Hopper’s America in his lucid, dignified prints, while Alan Kupchick and Corina Gamma present images of the majestic, mundane America of our highways and amusement parks in bold chromatic offerings. The strength of this photography lies in the sheer visual poetry involved. Kupchick’s work wears its beauty well, but reaches its realization in the knowing actuality of its subject matter. The Swiss-born Gamma allows the suburban thrill of the roller coaster an architectural, radiant grandeur.
In the end, it is important for us to realize that, outside of any pedestrian political agenda or need, the word American is, in many respects, an adjective that can reflect stature and power, as well as commercial development and materialism. It may also reflect a verbose creativity and an ever-shifting challenge to the artist to create an “American” art—proud and visceral.
Mark Zimmermann
NYC 6.3.08
Ink'd works by Beth Caspar, Rolo Castillo, Alex Couwenberg, Dirk Hagner, Nancy Jo Haselbacher, Denise Kraemer, Ron Pokrasso, Terry Davitt Powell, Michael Salerno, Michael Woodcock, Marco Zamora
May 3 - June 8, 2008
Essay by Christopher Michno
The print is a metaphor for the artist’s body; in pulling a print, ink becomes physically embedded, tattoo-like, in the paper. Cuban expatriate novelist and critic, Severo Sarduy, addresses the idea of structural integrity and idealism expressed in the tattoo. The skin is one more surface to ink: metal, stone, wood, flesh. Closing the physical and conceptual distance between surface and support, tattoos resolve the distinction between the surface of the print and its structural support. Part of the skin, the tattoo can be removed only by destroying the support – that is, destroying the skin.
Ink’d, is devoted to printmaking – a practice which is ancient, technical, regimented, and, unlike the abstract expressionist manifesto on action painting, non-heroic. Printmaking is process oriented and aligned with the trades. It requires rigor, and it must be repeatable – enough to pull 20 or more prints consistent enough to be called an edition. Extensive knowledge of colors, inks, retarders, thinners, and chemicals is required.
What impels an artist to practice printing? It is somewhat of a letdown, although still titillating, when Sarduy offers body painting – which is after all, painting, not printing – as verisimilitude of tattoo. He points to Veruschka, fashion model-cum-art-object, who was photographed by Holger Trulzsch for the coffee table book, Veruschka: Transfigurations. Her nude body is painted, trompe l’oeil, to resemble various environments, and Veruschka slips, chameleon-like, from photo to photo, dancing through the pages of Transfigurations, as door post and stone. It is glamour photography turned to art.
The artists in Ink’d are familiar with traditional printing materials and processes, and in this show, they reveal a decidedly progressive approach to their work as printers. Also proficient in other media, these artists take a cross-disciplinary tangle, adding embellishments, hand-painting, drawing, and even stitching to push the formal means of the medium. Some works are clearly identifiable as prints, and others strike surprising resonances.
Michael Woodcock’s five compositions are graphically tight and meticulously executed with hand painting and graphite. His work is visually beautiful and often wickedly witty. Woodcock’s work offers varying levels of encoding, which is ultimately full of personal symbols and narratives, making it necessary for us to invent something for ourselves. The clarity of the colors and strength of the images make these five prints compelling and sensuous. The five color silkscreen, Maybe He Became Ill, is a blatant rip-off of Roy Lichtenstein’s famous painting, but the colors are stronger. In a twist, Woodcock’s print becomes an existential statement about art-making itself. Cunnilingus, a lithograph, hand painted with pigmented ink, turns art-making and writing into the equivalents of a sex act.
Nancy Jo Haselbacher plays with the dichotomy of seeing/not seeing, and she calls attention to the surface of the print as illusionistic pictorial space. In the screenprint, The Ten, Haselbacher pulls back the surface of one image to reveal another “beneath” the surface. Condensed, a digital and screen-printed triptych, superimposes what appears as a trompe l’oeil frosted window over a bucolic landscape. This print is technically sophisticated, and you can literally see droplets of condensation on the frosted glass. Sentinel, an inkjet monotype, looks much more like a traditional medium; it is surprising and sensuous and ghostly.
Dirk Hagner’s large scale woodcuts have long addressed his interest in artists, poets, writers, and actors – always with some very personal fascination. These people are celebrities – although, some are rather obscure. Previous prints of iconic identities include Klaus Kinsky, somewhat of a dark horse, having starred in Werner Hertzog’s films in breakout roles like Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre. There is inherent romanticism in Hagner’s work, which, perhaps, is not surprising for an heir of German expressionism: Hagner believes in magic. He subscribes to the moment of illumination – or transcendence – when a work of art gets inside of you, and you feel euphoric.
It would be a mistake to perceive Hagner’s homage’s as analogous to Warhol’s celebrity worship. One of Hagner’s portraits in this show is of German printmaker Horst Jannsen; Hagner’s interest as an artist is akin to a man’s interest in his forebears. His portrait of Vincent Price is at once appealing and unsettling.
Denise Kraemer’s silhouettes of women – or are they girls? – wearing bobbed hair cuts and frilly dresses conjure up the bygone era of the 1950’s and the accompanying expectations of women – to have a cocktail ready at the door rather than an opinion. The phrase “little woman” takes on fresh abrasiveness accompanied by Kraemer’s imagery of diminutive figures attired in baby-doll dresses. In the mixed media litho and monotypes, Pretty in Pink and More Than a Pretty Face, the contours of women’s brains are exposed – a metaphor for social control. Get Out of the Kitchen is printed on a kitchen towel and detailed with a hand stitched silhouette. In adapting traditional women’s skills and tools to her work, she unravels the social fabric of domestic work.
Alex Couwenberg supplies three monotypes of delicate formal construction and finely tuned proportion; Couwenberg clearly enjoys playing with the legacy of abstraction, Ad Reinhardt on one end, Robert Motherwell on the other. Iron oxide, cadmium red, and yellow ochre bleed together. Weighty geometric shapes suggest stone. The heft of these shapes is offset by strokes of graphite, ranging from thready to fat, laid out in quick improvised rifts. Couwenberg’s work feels intuitive, and when he approaches symmetry – look for a diagonal axis – he falls back and breaks the balance.
Move Over, Beth Caspar’s minimalist sequence of linocut orbs on rice paper betrays a conceptualist slant. Like people crowding to the back of a bus, the four color discs cavort across the surface of the paper from print to print. Laid out in a contiguous line from left to right, an imaginative, whimsical and humorous reading relates to the body. Caspar’s process is modular and allows geometric recombination of image from print to print.
Rolo Castillo’s eye-popping, silkscreen homage to Devo front man, Mark Mothersbaugh, which comes out of his Icons series of celebrity images, is, in equal measure, homage to Andy Warhol. Four prints of Mothersbaugh with variations, some subtle, others pronounced, dominate the wall. Mothersbaugh appears, oddly appointed with thick metal frame goggles, peering out at us like some seer. It’s a candy-apple experience, and you may want some perceptual enhancements as you stand before him.
Michael Salerno’s digital ink-jet prints on vinyl coated canvas owe a great deal to his work as a painter, and his manipulations of digital images ultimately aim to optimize visual experience. The prints have a superflat quality about them; they have lost the evidence of the human hand. Rightly so - the mass of minute visual information on Salerno’s prints is possible only with digital manipulation. Salerno’s concerns are consistent with finding and explaining the limits of human perceptual acuity. He pushes the eye around his canvases and tinkers with how the eye perceives color.
Ron Pokrasso’s mixed print media works have the feel of a television drama or a magazine advertisement for diamonds. They seem to lack irony, and rather than comment on popular media, these prints purchase popular narratives. Terry Davitt Powell’s two small works, Ikat and Powder Perfect, may have started out as prints, but they end up as paintings on panel. They have very pleasing color harmonies and a glossy, brushed acrylic medium surface. Marco Zamora’s screen prints have some interesting social concerns. It would be interesting to see his work scaled up – significantly – maybe billboard size. Now that would be heroic. But, in the end, it’s not about heroism, but about creating engaging work – so throw out the manifesto.
Sum of Parts Irene Abraham, Lisa Adams, Hollis Cooper, Rebecca Hamm, Virginia Katz, Rebecca Niederlander, Coleen Sterritt March 8 - April 26, 2008
Essay by Kathryn Hargreaves
Can artworks affect us the way, say, singing certain types of songs can measurably shift our brain activity from one hemisphere (namely, the left) to the other (the right), with consequent mood and creativity enhancement (among plenty of other great things)? The "songs" in said experiments are simply repetitions of certain elemental sounds using a certain rhythm. In other words, they are chants. Is there anything in the way an artwork can be structured that would similarly affect us? We're not talking content here. Most people don't need the Ayurvedics to tell them that certain images will elevate their mood (and others will decidedly not). So, is there a (silent) visual equivalent to chanting, a "visual music," as it were? Tibetan monks contend that their sand mandalas, depictions of entities enmeshed in specific geometric structures, evolve the spirit of their viewers. Aside from studies in how color and value affect mood, it seems little scientific research has been done on "how patterns of changing shape and colour affect our mood," to quote British mathematician/programmer/molecular biologist/animator James Crook. However, being an animator, he's probably talking about repetition in time, not across a two-dimensional surface. Chladni plates are proof that certain sounds affect physical objects in certain ways. However, gazing upon them probably will not affect you in the way, say, the producing sound (or producing the sound) might. On the other hand, researchers have noted that the Jackson Pollack works deemed masterpieces are the ones with a fractal measure (level of complexity) closest to that of nature. It's not quite a case of non-time-based repetition of elemental visual elements shifting our metabolism. Or is it? At the very least, we are attracted to things that mimic nature in some parameters, most likely because we first adapted to a milieu of a certain visual complexity. Would that certain abstract images could evoke a mental sound current that could transform us!
Irene Abraham http://www.ireneabraham.com used to be a research biologist. Her work is, not surprisingly, often analytical. Her drawings look like maps, and some of her grid paintings look like histograms or 2D Fourier Transforms. She consciously presents mappings between logical systems. As with the algorist group OuPeinPo, she enjoys the problem solving necessary from imposing constraints. In her Sudoku-based paintings, she uses the structure of such puzzles to evoke "questions about how we perceive and read image and pattern." Besides this cultural decoding, her drawings and her grid paintings (both the free-form and the systematic ones) seem to visually create rhythms in the brain: the grids are the pulse and the foregrounds the overlaid rhythm.
Lisa Adams http://lisamakesart.com/paint.htm puts the tendril to good use with images from the subconsious that sometimes evoke mortised typography ornaments devoid of their copy and sometimes dream catchers, among other things. Some nice visual jokes aside, her content is nearly Ayurvedic-proof: it makes you feel better for looking at it. Her birds seem happy, her objects fly through dreamy skies. Hers is a contemplative landscape that offers a visual sanctuary.
Hollis Cooper http://www.holliscooper.com does paintings right at the edge of control, with the medium flying about with Pollack-like fractal measure close to nature's. In her acrylic-on-PVC installations, she constructs virtual environments with an infinite number of vanishing points, twisting and folding geometric interpretations of chat rooms onto themselves. Suddenly, the multiple perspectives are melded into one, all the conversations overlap, in a visual atonalism. Illusion of depth flattens and vise versa. She perturbs this even further when she installs the resulting images so they visually morph the architecture. What we have is a metaphor for what space might be like if the Many melded into One, or the illusion of time disappeared and we could see everything at once.
Rebecca Hamm http://rebeccahamm.net of course gets very close to nature's pleasing fractal measure, because she is working directly from it. She does watercolors that from far away hint at the earlier work of watercolor uber-master Joseph Raffael. Often her content is nature taking over what she calls "human constructs." What could be more satisfying than that, seeing nature recuperate from humans?
Virginia Katz http://www.uber.com/virginiakatz# sometimes collages with string instead of glue, Annette Messager style. The nodes are cut-up paper detritus, but Katz has pooled the fragments by color, so you get what looks like a topographical map or a nebula. This and her other work invoke images of real things, most often as satellite views of the planet. Though her working process is much more complicated (e.g., multi-layered mono-printing and dry pigments, for starters) than the mere rendition of nature, we feel perfectly at home with her images.
Rebecca Niederlander http://www.becster.org is the master of creating work with sophisticated detail hierarchies and visual movement. In her plastic-coated wire pieces, she puts in twists and turns that make your eyes want to follow them, stimulating (or satisfying) your natural urge to move. Sometimes they are also delightful "toys" with jumping-jack mechanisms that secretly store their own latent movement. That said, pretty much all her pieces are a visual score that makes you hear their music synesthesia-style, and it's euphoric music!
Coleen Sterrit http://www.coleensterritt.com makes sculpture by concocting a brew of naturally grown objects and human-constructed ones, with intact and scrap instances of both. She manipulates the materials minimally to skillfully construct unexpected objects. They are most delightful when they mimic natural proliferation; then they have all the satisfying size hierarchies found in nature. Best of all, they are ebullient: they make hay out of the mishmash of human and natural constructions with which we currently live. As for the drawings, they have similar properties, looking like what Richard Artschwager might do (although he doesn't draw like that at all).
As all artists know, it's one thing to look at art and another to make it. With the chanting effect described at the beginning, the physical act of making the sound helps produce the outcome. It may be the case that with visual artmaking, the kinesthetics of marking, mousing, or building is what enhances the spirit, working a sort of EMDR meditation that pushes things through neural networks and/or that balances the brain hemispheric functioning. Perhaps this is the "movement of the spirit" that the curator saw in these artists' work: the act of summing together parts to make whole both artist and viewer.
February 9 - March 1, 2008
Naked Truth: Figure as Form and Spirit works by Daniel Albrigo, A.S. Ashley, Barbara Berk, Leslie Brown, William Catling, Davis & Davis, Linsley Lambert, Laura Larson, Andree M. Mahoney, Herb Olds, Thomas Pathe, Darren Saravis, Joseph Todorovitch and More
Naked Truth: Figure as Form and Spirit
It is just short of overwhelming to think about the development of the human race over the last few thousand years, and when it comes down to it, evolutionists and creationists alike will concede that a human being’s existence, in the vastness of everything that is possible, is indeed something miraculous. Most of us rarely think about ourselves in this way. We don’t see ourselves as incredible entities, fragile beings that through our intelligence, developed to survive this passage of time. We overlook the essence of what it means to be human so easily. We collect things, relationships, debts, and dollars. We more rarely collect ideas and articles of lasting significance, but that happens as well. It isn’t that we should discount all that we amass far from it. These are integral aspects of our survival. Our bodies do not equip us with much to this end: no fangs to secure prey, no claws to aid in our defense, no fur to insulate in cold. We are vulnerable without our collections. But the truth of it is, as we stack up our possessions into neat little protective barricades, we cover ourselves; we bury our humanity in an effort to achieve security. So it becomes paradoxical: our very nature inhibits us from examining our very nature. We make it impossible to see the very thing we are fighting to protect the stripped down version, the vulnerable thing, the naked truth.
Fortunately, since the barriers first started to go up, there have been artists working to tear them down to give us even for the briefest of moments the opportunity to find truth. Standards in dealing with the body have ranged from the simplest depiction of outlines on cave walls and idealized marble sculptures to sensual romantic portraits and highly sexualized advertisements. The truth of the human condition has been argued to be both objective and subjective, and this is why the human form is the most ancient of all artistic subjects and arguably the most controversial. For as long as there have been those who wish to explore the human figure, there have been those who wish to cover it, and thus defiance becomes an element inherent in its portrayal. It is a subject that raises political controversy, forces reflection, soothes the soul, and ignites passion. It is a form that ranges in shape, color, and size with endless potential for abstraction yet simultaneously demanding of exact replication. Naked Truth: Figure as Form and Spirit brings together a collection of contemporary works from both emerging artists and established masters that explore this range of interpretation in celebration of the human body.
Daniel Albrigo uses soft, romantic lighting for his paintings, but he opts for a non-traditional use of the figure. In Glamorous Glue, Albrigo alternatively suggests that the sensuality comes not from the nude woman, but from the shape of her feet, and in Lepus, he sprinkles a map of the constellation over his masked subject, raising the figure itself to cosmic status. A.S. Ashley took molds of his own hands for his mixed media piece Venus de Hey Zeus, perhaps in reference to the development and martyrdom of both the artist and his subject over the ages. The juxtaposition of Christian iconography like the cross and fish with a two-dimensional depiction of a classic Roman sculpture infuses the piece with a deliberate tension. Barbara Berk’s political video installation is a critique that boldly mocks standard conceptions of naked women, objectification, and censorship. The softness of Leslie Brown’s cool colored pastels conveys a deep sense of spirituality. There is a consistency in the pallor of her skin and the coolness of her liquid surroundings, the position of her body suggesting fluidity of motion and the hypnotic sound of quiet waves; the viewer senses that what keeps the woman afloat is her soul, that what gives her breath is from something completely intangible.
William Catling’s sculpture bestows the human spirit with the gift of flight by winging his abstractions of the human form, but rather than suggest an actual ability, Catling focuses on the hope and potential through the smooth, closed eyes and the earthiness and elongation of the body. Davis and Davis employ antique dolls to amplify nostalgia and whimsicality, the brightly colored plastic accents enhancing the playfulness of the photographs that utilize the timelessness of imagination and transience of toys. Linsley Lambert’s very traditional oil painting Apotheosis is unsettling as her nude, male subject embraces a squirming puppy in delight. The absence of a background enhances the dreamlike intimacy between the viewer and the subject, making the viewer an unwitting conspirator in this unorthodox action.
Laura Larson’s sculptural installation treats the abstracted female figure as a decorative object framed in fanciful colors or gilded metallic, the overlaid etched glass casting delicate shadows. Mahoney’s porcelain sculpture highlights femininity in the abstracted form of a kneeling woman with pastel colors and flower petals. For all the fragility of color and materials, the sculpture commands a surprising weight that embodies the female spirit. Retired master Herb Olds’ mixed media piece is fraught with emotion, the stark, charcoaled outline of a woman collapsed in fetal position offset by a heavy presence of interlaid, independent images.
Pathé begins his study of the human experience with the study of the human body, but allows for malleability both in his subject’s pose and in his layering of materials. He playfully intertwines colorful oils on Plexiglas to create a dreamlike quality and evanescence that softens and sharpens throughout the piece, much like how elements of a dream may come in and out of focus. Darren Saravis questions the impersonality of the figure by hiding the women’s faces and using their bodies as idealized sculptural elements while simultaneously projecting their own stories as shadows across their bodies. The models pose, but not in recumbence, imparting a sense of tension ¾ a dynamic sort of balance that relies on the energy of the figure itself to offset the dichromatic palette, underscoring ideas of subject and shadow, intimacy and impartiality. Joseph Todorovitch paints in a traditional style, but the subject is contrived; he renders his model¾an imperfect, robust woman from memory, with a moving softness.
The pieces rely heavily on their given media to communicate each artist’s interpretation of the human form, and the span is encouraging in its diversity. For with each representation, we are reminded that, although the human form itself is timeless as an artistic subject, each figure is unique, and each model is her own entity. The diversity is a reminder that truth is objective in its existence, and its rendering a beautifully crafted subjectivity, and we are grateful for the opportunity, for the briefest of moments, to be invited into someone else’s understanding, to be shown how to break down the barriers, how to discover the stripped down version, the vulnerable thing, the naked truth.
Danielle Baron Pomona, California
December 8, 2007 - February 2, 2008
Selections from New American Paintings 2007 Pacific Coast Edition (Juried by Alma Ruiz, Curator, MOCA, Los Angeles)
Juror’s Comments
Alma Ruiz Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles
I have noticed that in recent years there has been an increase in artists who paint. Not that the act of painting was heading towards extinction, but for a while it seemed that artists who were interested in the medium were doubting themselves, or perhaps more likely, were doubtful of their ability to sustain a career as painters at a time when collectors, curators and gallerists were seemingly more interested in other media. Photo-based work, installations, video, digital work and the emergence of drawing as an independent form-as the spotlight has shone on each of these, painting seemed to become less appealing. Painting was acceptable as long as it was done by artists with a proven trajectory such as Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Bridget Riley, John Currin or Lari Pittman, to name a few. Young, emerging artists had a tougher time. However, in a world of changing tastes, this is true no more.
Judging by recent museum exhibitions and gallery shows, West Coast artists are openly expressing a strong interest in painting, and the results could not be more encouraging. Rejecting East Coast sensibilities and moving away from conceptual art, artists are embracing painting and a wide array of subjects ranging from abstract to figurative (including portraiture) to landscape (both rural and urban) to traditional (historical and still life). This is evident in the broadly divergent works that were selected to be featured in this magazine. As a curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, I recently organized the exhibition “MOCA Focus: Alexandra Grant.” A local painter, Grant created five large “drawing-paintings” in which text, drawing, and painting come together in a harmonious integration of shapes, colors and textures. Grant’s unwavering confidence in her chosen medium echoes the attitude of many of today’s West Coast painters, among them Sandow Birk, who stuck to painting even when it wasn’t the sexiest thing to do. Birk has become well known for his large pseudo-historical paintings depicting contemporary American themes. Sharing a similar interest in art historical painting, Eric Wert and Sherri Wolf
both seem to delight in the straightforward representation of contemporary versions of Dutch still-life painting. Wolf, in particular, demonstrates her ease with different painting styles by contrasting the fluid brush strokes of her mythological scenes with the crispness of the fruits and flowers found in her still lifes.
Portraiture in a landscape or urban setting appears frequently in contemporary painting: for example, the adolescent girls sitting or standing around a pool, as seen by Deborah Hamon, or Marci Washington’s depiction of a lifeless young woman, dressed in a white nightgown, who floats in a pond. Autobiographical references are found in the work of Ana Teresa Fernández, who portrays herself in situations such as striking a sexy pose on top of an ironing board.
Aron Wiesenfeld’s haunting portrait of a beautiful girl in a hoodie and short skirt is exquisitely rendered in monochromatic tones. She stands in the foreground of an austere landscape, her lost gaze, directed towards an indeterminate point outside of the painting’s frame, adding to the tension evoked by the dark gray hues. A decidedly male point of view is expressed by Danny Keith’s paintings of young men standing by a river. Beautifully executed, these works harken back to a postimpressionist painting style, yet feel very contemporary.
The suburban landscape is present in works by Danny Heller and Scott Foldesi. Jeffrey Gillette’s landscape of shantytowns on the outskirts of cities in southern California and Asia and Wendy Heldmann’s depiction of a house in the aftermath of a natural disaster resemble images that have become commonplace on TV and in newspapers, while Amy Bird’s and Will Noble’s respective views of woods and rivers, seem to represent a longing for a simpler time. Setting themselves apart from this kind of interpretation are Don Scott Macdonald’s semiabstract landscapes.
The artist’s murky palette of blacks and browns is very effective in creating the sensation of speed--it is as if one were looking out the window of a speeding automobile.
While abstraction seems to be outnumbered by representation, a most interesting effect occurs when painting hovers between the two modes. Among the most interesting examples of this hybrid style are the thickly layered works of Ali Smith, the large semi-architectonic compositions of Sarah Cain and Iva Gueorguieva’s sumptuous landscapes.
Tara Tucker, Jessica Bagley and Timothy Anderson submitted works that fall into the category of works on paper. Because New American Paintings’ primary emphasis is on painting, these works may initially seem out of place here, but because of their artistic merit, they deserve a mention: Tucker’s carefully detailed and exquisitely executed drawings are in the style of Albrecht Dürer; Anderson’s subject matter, surrealistic in nature, exhibits an appealing horror vacui; and Bagley’s pen-and-watercolor works tend to reflect more contemporary issues. Totally outside of the competition’s parameter is Chris Natrop, whose entry consists of a room-size installation made with white tape on cut white paper, thread and nylon netting.
It is encouraging to see that young artists continue to choose the West Coast as a place to develop their careers. In Los Angeles, the various art schools and availability of affordable studio space have contributed to this phenomenon. More generally, all along the Pacific Coast artists no longer feel they have to be validated by the New York art market, especially now that art fairs have usurped its primacy. It is more important for artists to be represented by galleries that routinely participate in international art fairs than to be with those that continue to rely on more traditional sales techniques. In addition, a place to think and be productive, at a pace that suits the individual, is often more precious than being in the middle of an art scene where how the artist looks or what he or she is wearing has become a hallmark of success. After all, it is the art-not its creator-that should capture our attention.
Alma Ruiz, Los Angeles
November 5- December 1, 2007
Liquid Light paintings by Lita Albuequerque, Dawn Arrowsmith, Alexander Couwenberg, Jimi Gleason, Andy Moses, Roland Reiss, Gregg Renfrow, Michel Tabori, Sharon Weiner, Patrick Wilson and Suzan Woodruff. Essay by Shana Nys Dambrot
“I have an interest in the invisible light, the light perceptible only in the mind...I want to address the light that we see in dreams.” – James Turrell
In the study of American art history the remarkable quality of natural light in Southern California has taken on a heroic cast, beginning with the luminous and hard-won balance of grandeur and naturalism in Albert Bierstadt’s landscapes. And though his may not be the first name that comes to mind when contemplating the architectural, atmospheric multi-sensory experiences of James Turrell’s fiercely physical and puckishly conceptual constructs, Bierstadt’s privileging of ambient light over features of the territory so that the very towering canopies and soaring stones of awe-inspiring Yosemite played straight man to the spun gold of late afternoon laid the foundation for subsequent generations of artists who have produced a nearly infinite universe of variations on Bierstadt’s awe.
Turrell speaks of the properties of light all the time of course, and it is easy to see why certain kinds of painters take his observations to heart. It could have been Bierstadt, or Ansel Adams, or Robert Irwin or John McCracken who said this (but it was Turrell): “Light is a substance that is, in fact, a thing, but we don't attribute thing-ness to it. We use light to illuminate other things, something we read, sculpture, paintings. And it gladly does this. But the most interesting thing to find is that light is aware that we are looking at it, so that it behaves differently when we are watching it and when we're not, which imbues it with consciousness.”
Liquid Light celebrates and responds to the much-anticipated installation of the only public skyspace in Southern California constructed by this iconic and iconoclastic artist, currently open at nearby Pomona College. The group of eleven painters assembled by the gallery share a few basic traits; they all live and work in Southern California, they occupy in a broad sense the territory of visual abstraction (though employing starkly diverse conceptual and formal processes), and each of them has found a route by which to negotiate the intersection of the imagined and the natural, reducing the operations of perception to what they consider its essence.
Roland Reiss regularly experiments with layering transparent surfaces, pushing the boundaries of two-dimensional compositions as far as possible without abandoning the painting idiom for sculpture, incessantly experimenting with non-traditional materials and weighing the demands of theory with the desires of form. Like Reiss, Lita Albuquerque’s crisply defined shapes lack object-counterparts, and her expressive atmospherics manage to be both precise and ephemeral. Often flecked with gold as both a symbolic and optical gesture, she achieves a paradoxical stasis between line and color, faithfully rendering the contours of her imagination with the fastidiousness of a portraitist. Alexander Couwenberg’s tectonic formalism is both monumental and malleable, casual and deliberate, bypassing referents and getting straight to the basics of perception, eliciting space and depth without recourse to imagery.
Patrick Wilson also balances the architectural and atmospheric. He plays with scale, situating passages of concise linear action at the margins of serene color fields, giving the viewer a sense of survey and discovery while also capitulating to the human impulse toward mark-making. Dawn Arrowsmith shares Wilson’s quality of deceptive simplicity. Her unapologetically spiritual take on minimalism, like Op-Art Suprematism, creates a still moment of contemplation, the visual equivalent of meditation, and generously leaves room for whatever the viewer brings to the encounter. Like Rothko, she is engaged with the psychological and emotional impact of color.
But not everyone is so well-mannered. Jimi Gleason’s confectionary paintings are saved from whimsy by the folded, pleated, kneaded evidence of labor-intensive, obsessive activity; they plead a case for beauty and joy, even as their dense passages of rich geological detail dare viewer’s to solve the mystery of their making. Gregg Renfrow paints on cast acrylic, creating refractive dimensions for the light to bounce around in, and slick surfaces that both emanate and absorb light and movement. Like Renfrow, Michel Tabori’s enthusiasm for the coquettish melodrama of the finish fetish derives from a desire to replicate his encounters with natural phenomenon, rather than narrate them. His large-scale images refer to blurry impressions of landscapes passed at great speed, a sense of motion evoked in the ceaseless kaleidoscope of reflection and refraction of his high-sheen surfaces.
Suzan Woodruff is also concerned with motion, but not her own. She deliberately abandons the evolution of her compositions to the laws of the natural world such as gravity and friction, so that her emotional and sensual poured-paint images are often read as landscapes not because they picture them but because they are made from the same elements and so resemble them without representation. So too Sharon Weiner’s poured layers, saturated and translucent pigmentation, and organic shapes evoke rather than render the roiling atmospheres of what could be either clouds, microorganisms, both or neither. And Andy Moses, for his part, makes a concerted effort to take on all these issues and more. His striated compositions come within a hair’s breadth of seascape as multiple horizons and diffuse light sources, elusive, rich hues of deep rose and indigo and iridescent pigments of pearly white and mystical platinum look like the ocean at the edge of the world. In fact, it is the other way around. These paintings are not about how the divergence of abstraction and representation, but rather about the inscrutable mystery and illusion that persist in the world of objects.
From the disciplined and scholarly to the capricious and whimsical, from the precious to the exuberant, from the lusty to the stoic, from the refined to the romantic and from the soulful to the cerebral, perhaps the most important thing these artists share with Turrell really is Bierstadt’s legacy: an inexhaustible capacity for seeing that which is, and that which is not, there.
Shana Nys Dambrot Los Angeles 2007
Inland Emperors September 8 - October 27, 2007
Works by notable Inland Region artists include Karl Benjamin, Alexander Couwenberg, John Divola, Tim Ernst, Robbert Flick, Sant Khalsa (with poetry by B.H. Fairchild), Doug McCulloh, Thomas McGovern, Susan Rankaitis, Sandra Rowe, Paul Soldner and Larry White. Critical essay by Peter Frank.
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: Between the Desert and the Deep Blue Sea
By Peter Frank
In Southern California, places don’t seem to have boundaries unless they are cities or counties. Freeway and street signs tell you when you’re passing from Los Angeles into West Hollywood or Inglewood and out again, or when you’re crossing over from San Diego County into Riverside. (And of course, they make sure you know when you’re passing into Mexico.) But they don’t tell you when you’re leaving the L.A. mindset and moving into Orange County’s – or leaving the part of the basin that orients itself to the water and passing into the part that orients itself to the scrub. This ambiguity leaves the question hanging: Where does “Inland” begin?
It doesn’t begin, or end, with its artists. Rather, it embraces them. They are at its heart. Inland artists are notably manifold and various, in style, attitude, and accomplishment, and their very disparity militates against any sort of artistic “Inlandism.” Photography is a hot item in these parts, but so are clay, woodworking, installation, and painting. While admittedly smaller in size and scope than the Los Angeles scene, the Inland artpire is demonstrably just as eclectic – and, contrastingly, just as keenly responsive to its environment.
What distinguishes the art scene east of the 605 – okay, the 57 – is less its variety than its longevity. The Inland region is one of the cradles and incubators of California art, and has been since the California idea of hip art was plein air landscape. It’s not hard to determine why the Inland communities have a history of artfulness: the towns of Riverside, Pomona, San Bernardino, Redlands, Cucamonga, Temecula, and other municipalities beyond the grasp (if not the reach) of L.A. are relatively old, founded on civic and aesthetic values that now seem foreign to the local lifestyle. In their day these grand old communities represented a concentration of wealth, success, and a sense of connection with the land. (If the Inland Empire had a flag, it would look an awful lot like a citrus crate label.) Between this sea of established patronage and a dramatic natural environment – now being rapidly replaced with a manmade environment that, for better or worse, is dramatic in its own way – art has long seemed a natural part of life out here. Furthermore, with the establishment of some very liberal arts colleges in these parts, places like the Claremont Colleges or the University of Redlands that almost from their inceptions placed some importance on the making as well as the studying of visual art, artists have long had access to a forum for their ideas as well as practices, and access as well to a steadier means of income than that provided by sales to hoteliers and grovemasters.
Indeed, the Inland art scene has arguably been more sophisticated for a longer time than its L.A. counterpart, even anticipating and influencing southern California models for educational and patronage structures. It was out here, after all, that a confluence of artists and critic-curator-historians came together fifty years ago to cultivate and identify a new sensibility, a “hard-edged” response to abstract expressionism that seemed at once universally applicable and drawn from the sun and soil of a climate suspended between desert and ocean. “Abstract Classicism” foretold both southern California’s finish/fetish and light-and-space movements and the wider minimalist surge of which they were a part. To be sure, hard-edge abstraction was emerging in Paris, New York, London and Düsseldorf (among other places) in the late 1950s, but few of those local developments cohered for very long as a distinct phenomenon. Usually, the term “hard edge” was given to any geometric abstraction that married ab-ex scale to constructivism, but only in Claremont did the tendency coalesce into a statement – a statement ultimately broadcast across the ocean. Karl Benjamin was one of the four painters featured in the survey of “Abstract Classicism” shown in Los Angeles and London; like Frederick Hammersley, another one of the four, and Peter Selz and Jules Langsner, the organizers of the show, Benjamin worked and lived near the colleges.
Around the same time, around the same campus, another development would have an even more profound impact on art history. It would shape not simply the subsequent course of sculpture, but would liberate those who work with clay – and ultimately all materials and practices once thought of, and dismissed, as “craft” – from their second-class status in artistic discourse. The first shots of the “ceramic revolution” were fired (figuratively and literally) in Claremont’s kilns. Ceramists were no longer mere potters; whether or not they were making vessels, they were now making discrete objects whose form sufficed to justify their making. Paul Soldner was a leading figure in this artistic sea – or, rather, earth – change.
The level of artistic activity – not to mention innovation – taking place Inland still yields ideas and accomplishments whose ramifications circle the globe. A geographic locus such as the Inland region – or, for that matter, Los Angeles itself (of which Inland is at worst a part) – no longer defines, much less confines, its movements. We now expect regions to produce variants on international trends; but we can see such trends gestating in such regions before they leap onto the international stage, and we can also see such trends find continued nurture in such regions – especially in their universities, but also in their increasingly numerous museums and galleries – after their fifteen minutes of global fame has passed. Artists who have made their mark on international artistic discourse but who may yet have their best work to do often find it propitious to leave the city for the nether reaches; and artists who will make their mark often come from these outlying places, not infrequently schooled by the veterans of previous phenomena.
As it is with upstate New York, so it is with the Inland Empire. New concepts, new practices, and new wrinkles on given concepts and practices are as likely to filter in from beyond the city’s limits as from its heart. Art’s own heart, after all, beats in many different places at many different rhythms at once. The slower rhythms of the desert and the grove – and even the faster, pinging rhythms of the housing development and the mega-mall – drive an artistic “body” every bit as viable as the urban artistic corpus. Watch this space; the best may be yet to come.
