Art

Joshua Lutz Meadowlands, and First Thursday SF

Initially, I had not planned to attend First Thursday this month, given all the music shows and such. But at the last minute I decided to venture out on a very rainy evening and found some surprises.

First, I visted Robert Koch Gallery, where I have found several interesting photography exhibitions over the past year. This month they were featuring the Meadowlands series by photographer Joshua Lutz.

The Meadowlands is a sprawling area of marsh and landfill in northern New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from New York City. Growing up in New York, it was a place I passed by countless times on the New Jersey Turnpike, but really did not know. This is an experience that many New Yorkers have had with the Meadowlands, including Lutz. His photographs are part of a decade-long project that features both the natural and artificial landscape of the area (and how the two are irrevocably intertwined) as well as portraits of its residents.


[Photos by Joshua Lutz, provided courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery. Click to enlarge.]

The are the highway structures over the marsh, familiar to the “drive by” experience, but also small-town storefronts and businesses, and portraits of individuals. These people and places are only a few miles from New York City but are a completely different world. And as Lutz points out, it is relatively challenging to get into and out of the Meadowlands from the highways, and easy to get lost inside. (I have my own experience taking wrong turns off the roads near the George Washington Bridge and having a hard time finding a way to get back on). One photograph I picked up on featured an older Indian man sitting among some plants near a truck stop, which was an interesting mix of subject, and seemed at once posed and spontaneous. Some of the places seem quite natural, with streams and trees, but there is always something from the human world that intervenes, a highway in the background, train tracks, the remains of a car, etc. Many of these images are reminiscent of decaying urban (and suburban) landscapes that tend to get my attention when I travel on my own. Lutz has turned his similar interest to other locations beyond the Meadowlands, and the exhibition also featured several photographs from his recent series Am✡Dam. You can see more examples at his or the gallery’s exhibitions page.

As a side note, we realized that we both grew up in the same town just north of New York City at about the same time. Small world indeed!

James Castle. Courtesy of Gallery Paule Anglim

Across the street at Gallery Paule Anglim, I saw their exhibition of the work of James Castle. Castle was born deaf, never learned signing or lip reading, and apparently lived a very quiet and somewhat isolated life in a rural homestead near Boise, Idaho. He created unique works on small found objects and materials, such as bits of paper, matchboxes, and soot. Many of the pieces include both drawings and text, as in Unititled (3 Z $). The content, text and small images reminiscent of icons, feels very contemporary, although the materials and the texture of the work give it a more aged feel.

Jack Fischer Gallery featured Josedgardo Granados’ incredibly intricate drawings. Although one can see many examples on his website, it is really impossible to see the detail except in real life. Even at full scale, one needed a magnifying glass (conveniently provided by the gallery) to see the individual lines of the drawings, which placed natural and sci-fi elements against detailed skies and landscapes.

Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art presented “State of the Union”, a group exhibition in which artists presented images and interpretations on “events of the present and recent past at home and abroad.” Francesca Berrini’s maps of imaginary places, including Tributary and Lazy River, are created from torn maps of existing places – I was able to pick out some locations in North Africa and the Middle East.
Alessandro Busci’s Rosso is an image in red featuring construction cranes over what appears to be a ruined landscape.

The (now closed) exhibition Five Year Plan at Steven Wolf Fine Arts included large representation of a crossword puzzle by Kent and Kevin Young that caught my attention. The clues are missing, which of course makes the puzzle all but impossible to fill out.

SF Recology Artists in Residence

Last Friday, I attended an exhibition for the Artist in Residence program at Recology San Francisco (formerly known as, SF Recycling & Disposal, Inc.). Yes, this was an art opening at the SF dump. The program has been around for almost twenty years, and provides space and support for artists who work with materials from the city’s waste stream, including recycled wood, paint and metal. Pretty much anything the artists can scavenge. This exhibition marked the end of the residency for artists Erik Otto and Christina Mazza.

We first enter the gallery through an anteroom, with some smaller works including Erik Otto’s Rebuild, featuring the title word cut into scrap paper (including a musical score and furniture assembly instructions) and illuminated by a recycled light box.

Erik Otto. Rebuild, 2010. (Click to enlarge.)

The title and the materials of this piece set the tone for the show. In addition to my standing interest in text as a visual element, I liked the inclusion of music as part of its texture.

Moving into the main room, one immediately sees Otto’s Road of Prosperity (The Start of a New Beginning), with over one hundred small wooden houses suspended from the ceiling on fishing line, forming a chaotic spiral that descends towards the ground.

[Erik Otto.  Road of Prosperity (The Start of a New Beginning), 2010.  (Click each image to enlarge.)]

The houses, made of recycled wood, all have a similar iconic shape. Stepping back, one can see the the wooden frame at the base is itself another house. Indeed, the houses reappear throughout Otto’s work, either as central or peripheral elements, in his paintings and mixed media pieces and even in a video installation featuring recycled television sets:

Erik Otto. In the Abundance of Water, We Are Still Thirsty. (Click to enlarge.)

I am drawn to recurring icons in a series of work. So what is the significance of the houses? Certainly, they are a symbol of our current economic crisis, and a very visible part of natural and human-made disasters. Otto’s own words are informative:

My work is a narrative told by the recurring characters/elements I use often in my artwork. The house is a physical embodiment of our spiritual being. Inspired by the notion that being home is “knowing” – knowing your mind, knowing your heart – that if we know ourselves, we are always “home”, anywhere. It is often depicted in chaotic landscapes and is found seeking safety from a storm and/or rising water levels, which refer to our current social and economic climate.

His paintings, which also prominently feature the houses, include other elements such as found text, such as the “OPEN” sign in the large painting Moment of Reflection. Devotion 5 features a house (perched on stilts above a body of water) painted over book covers and a Scrabble board – certainly a powerful symbol of out-of-context text.

Erik Otto. Moment of Reflection. (Click to enlarge.)

Erik Otto. Devotion 5. (Click to enlarge.)

While Erik Otto’s work seemed to focus on discrete elements, icons and text, Christina Mazza’s pieces were about more continuous textures. Many of her finely detailed drawings feature entanglements of string or rubber bands or rope.

Christina Mazza. Construction. (Click to enlarge.)

She takes this theme of complex tangles to a larger scale with this wall piece made of shredded packing paper.

Christina Mazza. (Click to enlarge)

Mazza presents a very different texture with Redemption: SF Dump, which features a video inset in a wall made of brightly colored wood panels. Up close, one can see the imperfections, nails and slightly off angles of the the recycled wood. From a distance, it can seem a texture of precisely generated color rectangles with a moving image at the center.

Christina Mazza. Redemption:SF Dump. (Click to enlarge)

Mazza found inspiration in the discoveries she made at the dump, and documents her adventures on her blog. Looking through the images, I can see piles of discarded items that served as “subjects” for her drawings. One image which I found interesting but was not reflected in the pieces at the show was a discarded Chinese paper frame .

Christina Mazza. Chinese paper frame.

I find this image a fitting conclusion as I turn my attention to other recently visited exhibits and my own upcoming projects.

Thanks to Recology SF for providing many of the photos for this article. You can see more pieces from this exhibition and previous artists in residence at their flickr site.

First Thursday, January 2010

We at CatSynth present a few notes from our gallery visits here in San Francisco on the first Thursday of the year.

Peter Focault, courtesy of Micaela Gallery

First up, we visit Micaela Gallery for an exhibition of work by Peter Focault and “friends”. Focault’s large ink-on-paper works build up complex structures from simple lines and strokes. The textures can be come very intricate and dense, such as in this detail from Four Square Squared Series #2. Several pieces also have a very architectural quality, while others such as the Evolution Series #1 have a more organic feel.

In addition to the wall presentation, there was a live performance and creation of a new drawing. This was a collaboration of Focault, musician Jake Coolidge, and Jonathan Grover. Coolidge performed live processed bass guitar with loops and other samples. The audio was then interpreted by a robot that moved with a pen on a surface in response to changes in the sound. The long curving strokes with back-and-forth motions gradually produced an image that was similar in style to completed works. You can see a brief sample in the video below from Jake Coolidge’s blog, along with a more detailed description of the process:

Shannon Ebner’s Signal Hill at Altman Siegel depicted every day objects, some with text, some with symbols like stick figures, some bits of manufactured material, that all convey information or “signals” in contemporary society. I identified with the simple and geometric elements and incorporation of text in her large photographs as well as her sculpture, as well as the sparse presentation by the gallery.

Shannon Ebner, courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

The photographs also had a very three dimensional texture, such as one photograph of an international graphic symbol (included in the photograph above) that one often sees on a very smooth surface.

Holly Andres, courtesy Robert Koch Gallery (click to enlarge)

At Robert Koch Gallery, I saw Holly Andres’ Sparrow Lane series. The photographs this series feature a group of adolescent women. The photographs seem to be narrative, as if the girls are exploring and investigating, but they are also disjoint without any real story line. As she explains in this interview, Andres spends a lot of time carefully crafting the images, including the clothing worn by the models and the walls and furnishings of the spaces. The clothing was very well done. Most seemed vintage mid-century and featured skirts and dresses with straight lines and solid colors that gave the characters a modernist “early 1960s” feel. On the other hand, the props and settings seemed more baroque and and did not really hold my interest. The one exception was the The Missing Bird (presented here), which places the characters in a grittier basement covered in media images with a cat in the background.  I did find myself contrasting this series with the Dystopia exhibition I saw at this same gallery a year ago – it would be intriguing to see them side by side. (The exhibition will remain on display at the gallery through the end of the month.)

While exploring the photographs at the Koch Gallery, the air from the doorway carried the heavy tones of electric blues. I followed the sounds next door to the Haines Gallery, where a blues band was playing. It turns out the band was led by Mike Henderson, whose paintings were featured in the current exhibition.

I tend to be drawn to minor keys and modes, so minor blues holds a special place in my musical vocabulary. His paintings have geometric shapes with complex textures, overlaid with various line drawings and lettering. Some have a very bright texture akin to a wood surface, while others are dark black with small light shapes and figures.  It is interesting to consider the connection between the music and the visual art.  Unlike the collaboration described above where the connection was direct, the connection here is more emotional or evocative.

Stephen Wirtz gallery presented Catherine Wagner presented large highly-detailed prints of specimens from the California Acadamy of Sciences. They were arranged by biological taxonomy, but also visually. From a distance, one can focus on the overall texture, while up close one notices the details of each specimen. Hits by Rick Arnitz featured large canvases, each of which seemed to take on a different geometric theme: brightly colored circles, a texture of red a black vertical lines, stars on a light blue field, etc. I often like discovering pieces from the permanent collection on display in the back room – I recall Ulrike Palmbach’s soft sculptures of cats from a previous visit – this time it was Marc Katono’s Half Light, a large light canvas with very delicate curves and lines. The piece was reminiscent of organic fibers and would have seemed at home among Wagner’s prints.

Randy Hussong, Courtesy of Gallery Paule Anglim

Across the street at Gallery Paule Anglim, I saw Randy Hussong’s Sculpture and Lithography exhibit. All the images were based a large steel box held up on one side by a stick with a chain, essentially a “trap” of sorts. The box itself was shown in the center of the room as a piece entitled Prey and Weight.  Along the walls were combination photographs/lithographs based on images of the box in outdoor setting, based on photographs at different times of day. The box is clearly artificial, but it’s coloring and worn texture allow it to merge with the natural environment. Additionally, there was one pure black-and-white lithograph entitled Trap.

At A440 Gallery, Dominic Alleluia’s large mixed media works had a very contemporary feel. They combined large abstract elements, color textures and shapes with energetic dark swirls and waves reminiscent of graffiti. A third dimension in some works included objects and materials such as wooden dowels and metal. I found this video of the “artist at work”, and I thought the music expressed the energy of his pieces the exceptionally small gallery space.

Finally, I would like to mention seeing the exhibition Diane Arbus‘ photographs at Fraenkel Gallery.  The exhibition, titled Christ in a lobby and Other Unknown or Almost Known Works by Diane Arbus, were selected by sculpture Robert Gober from a collection of little-known photographs.  The photographs, which were relatively small in size, did fit into the context of Arbus’ better known images in that they depicted a wide selection of people, some very everyday and some a bit more challenging.

Weekend Cat Blogging: Works of Art

I managed to get this photo of Luna sitting in front of a ledge overlooking the downstairs. I think she matches the works of art on the wall quite well.

Astute readers may recognize the large black painting from one of our reviews last October. See if you can pick out the artist.

Weekend Cat Blogging is being hosted this weekend by The Meezers.

The Carnival of the Cats will be up on Sunday at iMeowza.

And of course the Friday Ark is at the modulator.

no editions – live video series 2009

A little inspiration for things to come in 2010:

no editions – live video series 2009 August 17 New York from no editions on Vimeo.

I saw this via an article on PLANET magazine. Primarily a fashion article reviewing Christian Niessen and Nicole Lachelle’s No Editions label, but tt seems to intersect with various ideas of my own at this particular time, the combination of electronic music with visual experiments. The clothing becomes a canvas for the video, which in turn records people wearing the clothing.

Rain and Resurface

I usually try not to be intimidated by the rain here. But it was coming down pretty hard as I wondered the familiar streets of SOMA and South Beach looking for a particular gallery not far from the former Fremont Street overpass that I photographed on a sunnier day. I was trying to catch an exhibit before it closed on Sunday, only to find the gallery itself was closed for the extended holiday weekend.

So now I had not only the pouring rain around me, but also a large caption reading “FAIL”. Not a big deal per se, but we did need to get out of the rain. We headed down 2nd Street, looking for someplace that would be at least dry and somewhat comforting, a cafe or a bar that had not opted to close for the holidays. I was surprised to find that 111 Minna was open, and in fact quite well populated. They were having some sort of fundraising event with work from several artists. However, I found myself more interested in the permanent exhibit, Resurface, a solo exhibit by local artist Micah LeBrun. LeBrun had taken a hiatus from his work, which primarily focused on painting, for a year in late 2008 and early 2009 to travel through Central America, Asia, Australia, Africa and Europe. During this time, he focused on photography, and only returned to painting after returning home. The exhibit included examples of his photographs (partially obscured by the art being displayed for the fundraiser). I was more drawn to the stark landscape images, which reminded me of my own adventures in the desert and sparsely populated areas, than to the portraits. Among the paintings, I was also drawn to the non-portrait pieces, such as the large red canvas with the words “the New Yorker”, and another piece featuring an algebraic equation (the solution to which was of course 0.5). Both pieces are visible in this promotional image, featuring the artist in his studio:

[Click to enlarge.]

Afterwards, I did visit LeBrun’s website, and found myself more interested in some of his earlier work, such as the combination of figurative and abstract paintings from 2005 and 2006. There were several works that focused on black and shades of pink. It was interesting to view one of his figurative pieces, such as “high maintenance” next to an abstract work like “take it easy”, as if one is a distillation of the other (small versions of both works are displayed to the right). You can see other works from this series at his online gallery.

Gallery Notes: Chelsea (November 24, 2009)

Last Tuesday, I spent a few hours wandering the galleries in the Chelsea district of New York. This article presents some brief reviews of what I found.

In truth, the highlight of the afternoon was not inside the galleries, but out on the street. I wandered around my favorite neighborhoods architecturally speaking, and visited the High Line for the first time since it opened. Both the refurbished elevated structures and the surrounding post-industrial landscape are quite photogenic. I presented a couple of my photos on a previous post.

After spending time outside taking in the neighborhood at both street and aerial level, I came indoors to a solo exhibition of works by Dan Flavin at David Zwirner. Flavin’s large-scale pieces were series of fluorescent lights in alternating colors. The simplicity of the lines and lights and spare nature of the large white concrete rooms of the gallery made of a stark contrast with the intensity and energy of the city just outside. The way to experience these works was to take in the expanse from the center, and then slowly walk along the perimeter with the lights, a sort of walking meditation.

Another exhibit that lent itself to a more slow, contemplative viewing was Spencer Finch’s The Brain — is wider than the Sky. This exhibition consisted of three works. The Shield of Achilles (Night Sky over Troy 1184 B.C.) featured a series of cans hanging from the ceiling, each containing a light bulb and a small hole in its base to let out a point of light. Viewers were invited to lie on a mat below and gaze upward, as if looking at the night sky. Although the cans are meticulously arranged to represent ancient Greek constellations, I found myself thinking of them simply as an abstract array of lights and cylinders. Nearby, 366 (Emily Dickinson’s Micalous year) interpreted the 366 poems Dickenson wrote in 1862 as a colorful spiral labyrinth composed of candles, each of which is colored according to the corresponding poem. The candles are lit in sequence, one a day, so that when I saw the piece several of the candles were already melted. The third piece Paper Moon (Studio All at Night) consisted of gray four-sided shapes as was described by the artist as “a very boring piece and clearly not for everyone.”

Matthew Ritchie’s solo exhibition Line Shot at Andrea Rosen Gallery stood out for me, with the abstract, mathematical quality of both the sculptural and two-dimensional pieces. The swirling, intricate forms with circles, curves, latticework and polyhedra suggest both a mechanical or computer-generated origin, and an organic living structure at the same time, perhaps a large city in space or a rather complex molecule. The two dimensional pieces seem to be projections of the sculptures onto a flat surface, with added layers of color. I was particularly drawn to the title work of the exhibition, Line Shot, an animated feature film with moving versions of his projected sculptural forms, with floating text and spoken word, and a sound track built from metallic resonances – and sound that is very rich but also familiar and inviting. I was impressed to read about Ritchie’s past and present collaborations with physicists, musicians, writers and a host of people from other disciplines; I wish I had been around to see The Long Count, a related performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music back in October.

At Greene Naftali I saw Paul Chan’s sexually charged show Sade for Sade’s sake. At first glance, the drawings in the first gallery were simply abstract nude figures drawn with curving black lines, and reminded me a bit of the charcoal drawings of Reiko Muranaga. The sexual dimension becomes more apparent in the accompanying video animations, which feature the similar abstract-figurative shapes moving and convulsing while geometric shapes float in the background. Chan also created a set of fonts (available for download) in which individual keys are mapped to sexual phrases that can be used for generating live poetry or performances. In the gallery, he presents several large-scale panels presenting the character set for each font. In the center of this room was a computer keyboard in which the keys had been replaced with modernist geometric tombstones.

At Stricoff, I once again saw Catherine Mackey’s Wharves and Warehouses (I had previously seen her and her work at Open Studios. It was interesting to see her work, which focuses on the modern urban landscape, paired with the work of other artists in the gallery, such as Zachary Thornton’s woman in a yellow dress set against a dark background.

When I saw the sign Edward Burtynsky’s photographic series Burtynsky: Oil at Hasted Hunt Kraeutler Gallery, I was thinking, “oh, ok, another politically charged photo series…” and not expecting much. But the images were surprisingly beautiful. There were area views of open pit mines that had an abstract beauty with their curved contours and subtle shades, if one can dismiss the ugliness of the practice being shown. Other symbolic images included towers in oil fields, and a highway interchange from Los Angeles, a theme of which I am quite fond (and featured in an old Fun with Highways post).

Some other quick notes. I saw early drawings of Jean-Michel Basquiat at Stellan Holm Gallery, which displayed the frenetic combinations of text, figures and shapes that characterize his paintings. Yvonne Jacquette’s intricate and detailed wood carvings featured familiar scenes from around New York City, including buildings, bridges and the waterfront. Hope Gangloff’s large canvases at Susan Inglett Gallery included one nude figure with a cell phone and beer, and another with a writing bad surrounded by abstract shapes, as well as several figures with interesting clothing. Robert Motherwell’s Works on Paper at the architecturally interesting Jim Kempner Fine Art were simple and quite calming, with little bits of detail to discover like cut sections from musical scores.