Art

Wordless Wednesday: Installation Views

Wordless Wednesday: Household Gods (Open Studios Preview)

This is one of many new pieces I am presenting at Art Explosion Spring Open Studios in San Francisco this weekend. It’s the most stylized and provocative piece to date.

Wordless Wednesday: One Way

While here, please check out my Fun with Highways article as well.

Wordless Wednesday: Variety (LACMA)

As always, check the comments for some info on the picture. But please also check out the associated review of my LACMA visit.

Ellsworth Kelly and Metropolis II at LACMA

While in southern California for NAMM last month, I made a point of stopping at the LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art). The museum and the trip to get there through downtown LA were the perfect coda to the overload of NAMM. And by chance, it was the opening day for a retrospective exhibit of works by Ellsworth Kelly.

I am quite familiar with Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings through SFMOMA (see my review of the Fisher Collection show from 2010 which featured several large pieces). His large panels in single colors with rectangular or curvilinear shapes are quite iconic, as are his grids of colored squares. But in LACMA’s comprehensive exhibition, which focused on Kelly’s printmaking along with some drawings and paintings, I was exposed to different and unexpected directions in his work. There was a room of minimalist panels, but all in black and white instead of his usual bright colors. There were also pieces with organic and complex patterns based on plants and rivers. In between there were brightly colored abstract works that seem to bridge the gap between the organic and the minimalist.

An example of the familiar and unfamiliar in Kelly’s work appears in the first gallery. Around the corner from a large set of four solid shapes is a piece with a similar curvilinear shape but a rougher and more natural looking texture.

The next section featured Kelly’s studies in abstraction, influenced from his time in Paris in the 1950s. Here were see experiments with different pairs of colors on the same shape, with simple titles such as Orange over Blue (Orange sur Bleu). The shapes, rounded rectangles and arrows, seem manually cut and have the imperfections of natural (or at least handmade) forms. But through the medium of printing with different colors, they become more mechanized.

The next room was the most surprising. All the works here were in black and white, something which I had not associated with Kelly up until this moment. One wall featured the same curvilinear or angular shapes as his more colorful abstract works, but in monochrome they are far more severe. But this is good thing. In monochrome, he plays with contrasts and positive and negative space with the shapes without the distraction of color.

But even more unexpected were his monochrome prints based on natural forms, which were in this same room. He did a series of lithographs of botanical forms in the late 1960s that featured simple line drawings that capture the imperfections of natural subjects. I would never have guessed these pieces were his without the labels. More recently, he did a series of large monochrome prints based on the texture of the moving water in the some of the world’s most famous rivers.

So how does one fit these in the context of Kelly’s more colorful abstractions? Certainly, the black fields can be seen as simply another color study; and the rivers can be seen as abstract but complex textures informed by nature. The textures of the rivers can be seen reflected in abstract piece Red Curve (State I) from the first room of the exhibit. The botanical pieces are the ones that are the most difficult to place in context aesthetically, the artist himself states that “the drawings from plant life seem to be a bridge to the way of seeing that brought about the paintings of 1949 that are the bases for all my later work.” It is possible to see the repeated curving shapes in his abstract work as inspired by plant forms.

The final room featured more of the style that I most associated with Kelly: angular solid fields and color grids.

It was in this last room that another museum visitor came up to me and asked, “Why is this good? What do you see in it?” I’m sure I was gazing rather intently at various pieces which probably signaled to her that I had a genuine interest in this work. I did my best to try and answer her question, which seemed to be as much about minimalist artist general as Ellsworth Kelly in particular. For me, good abstract and minimalist art captures my attention and “arrests the mind” (with apologies to James Joyce). Additionally, all art and perception of art has context. There was the context of each piece, even if a single-color panel, within the greater body of work on display. There was context of my experience, and joy in looking at these works in the quiet gallery, the calming effect. There is also the execution, choosing the right colors and the right proportions for shape and size of each piece, that Kelly was able to do consistently. I’m not sure the woman was particularly satisfied with my answers. She walked away saying “I guess I just don’t understand why this belongs in a museum.” I did my best – I do truly want to share the enjoyment of modern art, and especially abstract art, with others, which is why I write articles like this.

Also on view at LACMA was Metropolis II, large kinetic installation by Chris Burden. It features stacks of highways weaving their way among densely packed buildings. A continuous stream of cars speed along the highways, some of which are six lanes across. The result is a frenetic pulsating vision of a future city, or an imagining of the pace and anxiety of a contemporary city. This piece is best experienced in motion, and you see a bit of it in this video:

This piece of course appealed to me as a person who loves cities and the urban landscape and who has a fascination with the patterns of roads and highways. Looking from above, the traffic is simply a current like moving water and provides none of the stress that one experiences on actual city streets. I can also admire the amount of work that must go into making something like this. The toylike scale of the installation also gives it a playful quality. It was just fun to experience.

Ellsworth Kelly: Prints and Paintings will be on display through April 22, and Metropolis II is ongoing. Both are worth seeing if you are in Los Angeles.

Intermezzo on Water

Intermezzo on Water

The words and sentences float losing their coherence as the visions and narratives of seaside communities decay into dreams of filtered sunlight and free verse and fog and failed concentration and ambiguous affections and terraced layers of improbable houses and the percussion and the solitude and concrete ruins washing into the ocean.

From the dissolving darkness a faint buzzing punctuated by clicks spirals outward along silent waves. In its wake sparks radiate and melt into the meandering trail of a melancholy story.

[Originally written September 15, 2003]

Todd Hido: Excerpts from Silver Meadows, Stephen Wirtz Gallery

One exhibition I have come back to a few times over the past month is Todd Hido’s solo photography show, Excerpts from Silver Meadows at Stephen Wirtz Gallery.

[Todd Hido, Untitled #10121-A,2011. Courtesy of Stephen Wirtz Gallery]

The show features large images that were taken near Kent, Ohio, where Hido grew up. We see wintry scenes of modest houses and fields in a flat landscape with a few trees. The effects of snow, wind and the windshield of a car give the images a somewhat blurry quality. Interspersed among these pieces are a contrasting set of clear, high-contrast images featuring female models in vintage dress or poses. All the pieces bear very dry titles that are presumably based on serial numbers of some sort, a detail which I find interesting for what are emotionally strong images.

[Todd Hido, Untitled #10106,2011. Courtesy of Stephen Wirtz Gallery]

[Todd Hido, Untitled #10473-B,2011. Courtesy of Stephen Wirtz Gallery]

At first glance it may seem to like two shows mashed together into one, a stark wintry landscape in a small community, and stylized portraits of female subjects. The often blurry effects of weather and glass in the exterior images also contrast with the hyper-clarity of the indoor portraits. But taken together they do form a narrative whole that is very film-like. Indeed, I had the impression of stepping into a David Lynch film. The wintry exterior is a small town somewhere in the Midwest that seems perfectly normal. It’s a not a picture postcard of a the archetypical “small town” adorned with a layer of snow, but rather a place that is maybe a little more bleak, a little more tired, a little more isolated. But afterd entering a few of the snow covered houses, a more eerie and eccentric reality emerges within, populated with unnerving but seductive characters. The effect is accentuated by the fact that several of the portraits feature the same model in very different roles and appearances (something I would not have recognized if it were not pointed out to me), but by the dreamlike effect of the inclement weather and dark skies in the outdoor photographs.

[Todd Hido, Untitled #9221,2010. Courtesy of Stephen Wirtz Gallery]

My impressions seem in line with Hido’s mission in this collection, “the artist’s metaphorical reckoning with his own past, while providing a majestic summation of the suburban childhood experience in general…homes built similarly to convey stability actually conceal lives seething with sexual and psychological instability.” I also like how he uses road trips as his part of his execution of this vision (indeed, the feeling of looking out a car window in stormy weather permeates much of Hido’s outdoor imagery). It suggests a dark corner of one of my “Fun with Highways” posts.

[Todd Hido, Untitled #1843,1996. Courtesy of Stephen Wirtz Gallery]
[Todd Hido, Untitled #10502-42,2011. Courtesy of Stephen Wirtz Gallery]

The cat portrait is a bit random, but it is quite humorous and does fit into the overall structure. I thought it worked especially well paired with the classic head portrait reminiscent of the late 1950s or early 1960s.

The show will continue at Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco through February 25.

Wordless Wednesday: Electric

Sh@t Synth People and Art World People Say

Among the countless riffs based on “Sh%t girls say”, these two seem quite appropriate for CatSynth:

From iloveanalogue, via matrixsynth:

And from CreativeTime via Hyperallergic:

Sh*t Art World People Say from creativetime on Vimeo.

Farewell to 2011

As has become a tradition here at CatSynth, we present our end-of-year image.

[Click to enlarge.]

It was a bit of a challenge to decide what to put in, as there were so many this time. But I think these are particularly representative. And it’s also significant that it is more colorful than previous end-of-year images.

The first few days of this year were quiet and a bit dark. That changed quickly, with tumultuous events around the world, and new experiences close to home. It’s the year I finally had a photography show, and by the end of the year I had several. There were new surprising types of performances and the costumes to go with them. I deepened my connections back in New York with friends, music, art and the landscape. And I no idea what I would have the chance to participate in something like the Occupy movement . There were many sad moments as well, with the loss of friends.

In all, 2011 has been particularly rich and productive, if sometimes a bit chaotic. If one had told me at the end of 2007 or 2008 (or 2001 for that matter) that this is what life would be like now, I would have been pleasantly surprised. There is a sense, however, that the patterns of this past year are not sustainable. This will have to be part of the plan for 2012, in particular getting organized, staying healthy and trying to make good choices. We will see how that unfolds as the new year progresses…

Happy New Year and thank you for all the support and warmth from those who read these pages!