Few artists make work that both looks good and manages to make the world a better place, but Aubrey Roemer is one such artist. Her artistic career spans oceans and continents, from a strip club in Brooklyn to the sugarcane fields of Nicaragua, and from the islands of eastern Indonesia to the migrant camps of Greece. Everywhere she goes, she uses painting as a way to make genuine connections with people and foster awareness of social and environmental issues both locally and globally.

I first became acquainted with Roemer’s work in the spring of 2014 when she had just moved to Montauk to work on her “Leviathan” series, in which she attempted to paint 10 percent of the town population in the course of a summer. Painted in blue on domestic fabrics donated by the local community, the portraits were installed on the beach where they were free to flutter in the wind, their blue and white forms flickering between sea and sky. I’ve been consistently impressed since then by the way she builds rapport with her subjects and then installs her work with an aim of serving the community that inspired it. Her story illustrates how an artist can change the world, one painting at a time.

Though she’s been painting her whole life, Roemer’s practice of community engagement began in 2013 with the “Demimonde” exhibition at Pumps strip club in Brooklyn. She was invited by Pumps’ pinups director Laura McCarthy to do a solo show of paintings at the club, and the show was such a success that Roemer went on to curate three more exhibitions/burlesque nights there. The shows featured Roemer’s paintings of the dancers alongside work by Brooklyn-based artists such as the painter Jesse McCloskey, who has kept a studio around the corner from Pumps for the past 10 years. Roemer fostered collaboration between two communities that had hitherto coexisted side by side without interacting very much, and perhaps both groups discovered that they had more in common than they might have thought.

Hopping from residency to residency since then, her adventures have become increasingly fantastic and inspirational. With support from World Connect, Roemer traveled to Nicaragua in 2015 to do a project with La Isla Foundation, a non-governmental organization that fights the under-publicized epidemic of chronic kidney disease from unknown causes (CKDu), which is ravaging Central America and other equatorial regions around the globe. It is especially prevalent among agricultural laborers worked to death in hot climates—their kidneys fail, from overwork in extreme heat and possibly also as a result of the chemicals used in industrial monoculture. Because sugarcane is a major revenue stream for the national economy, La Isla Foundation gets far more pushback than support from the Nicaraguan government on the matter.

Roemer spent one month living in the Chichigalpa region, where she watched trucks full of sugarcane rumble past while painting portraits of deceased workers on discarded sugarcane sacks. She also painted protest banners, which have since been used by a local grassroots movement agitating for research on CKDu and compensation. As tensions heightened between La Isla Foundation and the government, she had to leave before the project was complete. Just last month Roemer returned to Nicaragua and displayed the completed works in the ruins of an abandoned church, and then gifted them to the community.

Her next project took her to Indonesia, where she set sail from the island of Lombok with a motley crew of artists on board a traditional wooden phinisi sailboat to explore the culture of the remote eastern islands. During this time Roemer completed another project, titled Maccini Sombala (“Seeing Sails”), in which she traced the hands of the people she met on the islands and printed them directly onto the sails of the boat. She used a range of greens that both reflected the lush environment of the islands and tipped a hat to the Islamic culture of Indonesia. This spring, Roemer will curate the next residency aboard the boat, called the Al Isra, proceeds from which will go towards the installation of a solar-powered trash collection wheel at the mouth of the nearby Mataram River, which it’s estimated will stop 10 tons of plastic from entering the Indian Ocean every day.

After returning to Long Island for the summer, Roemer and her boyfriend traveled to Greece to see how they could be of service to the flood of migrants washing up on the islands. Roemer embedded herself in a refugee shelter for migrant boys on the island of Lesvos. Titling the work Khamsa, she created 99 prayer flags using reclaimed fabric from deconstructed life preservers and emergency blankets. The “Khamsa” is a North African talisman of a hand with an eye in its palm, so she traced the hands of 66 women who she met there, and then added images of the women’s eyes to complete the works. The khamsas were also accompanied by 33 prayer flags upon which male migrants were invited to write prayers and protests. The number 99 was chosen to represent the number of beads on an Islamic prayer necklace, and the ratio of men to women was intended to counter the media narrative that portrays the migrant crisis as consisting primarily of men.

After traveling to China to exhibit Khamsa at 203 Gallery in Shanghai, Roemer followed the work back to Greece where it was installed at Athens’ IFAC Gallery, which gave Roemer an opportunity to show Yasamin, a girl she had met in a refugee camp and who had become her assistant for the project, their work installed in a professional setting (though only through Whatsapp, as Yasamin was still held in immigration custody on Lesvos). Reflecting on the project over Skype, Roemer told me “The most important form of contemporary art I could make, the most compelling thing I could possibly do, was to be standing by this young girl’s side and making art with her. It actually didn’t matter what it was at all, just the fact that I was standing next to her.” Proceeds from sales of the work go to Greek NGO Desmos, which is active on the frontlines of the refugee crisis.

In his 2006 book of collected essays, Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight, the poet and critic Alan Gilbert suggests that art can serve as a means of “imaginative resistance” to the systemic problems that plague our world, through “tactics imaginatively employed on a daily, local, and global basis (with the knowledge that when the effects of globalization reside everywhere, local activities have global ramifications and vice versa).” This is what Aubrey Roemer is doing with her painting practice, through which she not only publicizes relevant issues affecting marginalized communities, but also directly empowers and uplifts the members of those communities with whom she works. This is contemporary art at its finest.

The post Aubrey Roemer: Helping the World, Painting by Painting appeared first on artcritical.

March 18 to April 23, 2016
2, 151/3 Đồng Khởi
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, +84 8 3824 8284

For his second show at Saigon’s Galerie Quynh, Hanoi-born, Saigon-based artist Nguyen Manh Hung chose the title “Farmers Got Power,” inspired by the TV show America’s Got Talent. This title sounds strikingly similar to a communist slogan, suggesting the possibility that the artist might be making of a veiled parody of the party line (i.e. a straight faced assertion that the farmers of Vietnam really do hold the power, which would be a laughable claim, unfortunately). But if questioned by a censor, it would be possible to insist on a non-ironic interpretation of the title; in this manner, Hung deploys a cryptic language of doublespeak that makes room for subversive thought with plausible deniability built in.

As the pervasive censorship of artists in Vietnam generally causes many to self-censor for survival, the delicate dance with authorities has become an art unto itself. As Hung explained in a 2011 Independent Curators International interview with curator Zoe Butt: “Censorship has now become one of the mediums for art making. In a way it forces artists to push themselves further and requires them to look for other ways to express their artistic languages and viewpoints.” Hung could be seen doing this in his recent show, which featured paintings, sculptures, and photo-collages that transplant cultural symbols from Vietnam’s past into contemporary contexts. This is a bold thing to do, given that the Communist Party likes to maintain a monopoly on the visual representation of Vietnamese culture, but Hung is able to pull it off brilliantly through his own sly brand of surrealism that resists fixed definitions through sheer open-endedness.

The show is anchored by five trompe l’oeil paintings, all of which feature images of people and animals out of place. In the painting Guard at Night (2016) we see a bored looking man dressed in a bright red uniform of the sort once worn by palace guards at the royal city of Hue. In one hand he holds a halberd, while in the other he holds a chicken on a leash. The bright image of this guard and his bird is flatly overlaid onto a night scene of an airport runway, with the blurry silhouette of a jet preparing for take-off in the middle distance. Similarly, in Le Petit Tirailleur, (2016) a barefoot boy of about 10 casually holds the reins to a giant snail, while bearing in his other hand the five-colored flag of Vietnam, a traditional standard representing the five elements from Chinese medicine and philosophy. As in Guard at Night, the figure and animal are unnaturally lit within their gloomy environment, this time with the flashing lights of a police cruiser glaring ominously in the background.

Because of their bare feet, one might interpret these people as the eponymous “farmers” of the exhibition’s title, perhaps press-ganged into military service, as was the fate of so many generations of Vietnamese farmers throughout millennia of foreign occupation. The coq gaulois was a prominent emblem of the French Revolution, so it’s easy to interpret the animals as an arrow pointing blame for the unequal wealth distribution towards Vietnam’s traditional antagonists: China, France, and the US. (The juxtaposition of a fighter jet and a Vietnamese farmer obviously evokes memories of the ruthless bombing campaign undertaken by the Americans during “The American War,” as it is known here, though planes carry additional personal significance for the artist, whose father was a fighter pilot in the North Vietnamese Air Force.) However, when I first laid eyes on these paintings, the term Hai Lua came involuntarily to mind, which transliterated means “rice farmer,” but is in fact a derogative hurled by city folk at the sort of country bumpkins liable to stand in the middle of the street blocking traffic with their livestock. Vietnam is supposed to be classless according to party dogma, so this subtle reference to class inequality within Vietnamese society might also lead us to a critique of the corrupt party politics that governs the country as a whole, enabling rich industrialists to use bribery to evict the poor and/or pollute the environment in order to increase their already vast fortunes. Such issues feel particularly salient right now, as Vietnam is currently experiencing unprecedented, country-wide protests in response to government inaction over a catastrophic fish kill, presumably caused by toxic waste from a brand new billion-dollar steel mill on the central coast.

There is another animal which appears regularly throughout the show, and that is the giant tortoise. In the modestly sized bronze sculpture Checkpoint (2015), three soldier/farmers pose with weapons atop a giant tortoise as if it were a tank or Humvee. All are shoeless and all wear the traditional conical hat of Vietnam, a combination that makes them look like Viet Cong, the communist guerrillas who fought to liberate Southern Vietnam from the French, the Japanese, and the Americans in turn. However, instead of carrying the rectangular flag of the VC, one holds the five-colored flag, which associates them with a more ancient idea of Vietnam, one that predates the existence of the communist party. If the slow and plodding tortoise is a totem of the VC, and by extension, the party, this hardly seems like a flattering association, although an apt one, given the glacial speed of the communist bureaucracy. On the other hand, it bears noting that slow and steady wins the race, as evidenced not only by the story of the tortoise and the hare, but also by the American War, which North Vietnam and the VC eventually won through an almost 20 year long battle of triage. So, while there may be some genuine national pride at work here, I also detect a cynical attitude towards the still ubiquitous propaganda images that pit Vietnam against the outside world. For those generations born after the war ended, dealing with an infuriatingly corrupt and intractable government is probably much more of a relatable issue than any conflict with foreign powers; in fact, foreign influence is generally seen as desirable by the youthful population that dreams of taking its place on the world stage, a dream crystallized in such TV shows as America’s Got Talent, or it’s local equivalent, Vietnam’s Got Talent.

While the physical works themselves are crafted well enough, it is in their conceptual cargo wherein lies Nguyen Manh Hung’s true strength: combining symbols in such a way that their possible significances proliferate, and if some of those possible readings turn out to be subversive in nature, there is always a patriotic counter-reading available to cancel them out. Given how rarely Vietnamese artists dare to even approach political issues and national symbols, this makes Hung a truly exceptionally character, and one of the most exciting contemporary artists working in Vietnam today.

The post Power and Politics in the Paintings of Nguyen Manh Hung appeared first on artcritical.

The exhibition “Rear Window Treatment,” currently at Louis B. James Gallery, is a group show that explores the concept of voyeurism, and by extension, implicates the viewer in voyeuristic acts as well. While it is traditionally considered a shameful thing to be a voyeur, the six artists in this show are unabashed in their representation of voyeuristic perspectives, exposing the extent to which the desiring gaze has come to inform contemporary sexuality and interpersonal perception in general. These are artists who like to look.

The star of the show is Betty Tompkins, who in recent decades has met with belated critical acclaim for her “Fuck Paintings”: large-scale reproductions of pornographic close-ups, usually depicting heterosexual penetration. Scandalous at the time of their debut in 1969, her paintings have garnered more and more attention over the years. Whether this is due to a gradual acceptance of women artists into the canon or a gradual decrease in American prudishness is open to debate.

Tompkins’s paintings aren’t on display here, rather, a group of small studies in ink on paper and photographs. Created between 2012 and 2014, these six drawings are more reserved than her photorealistic paintings in that the explicit content has been drawn (or drawn over) with loosely quivering scribbles of ink. Some of the scribblier works depicting vaginas, such as Photo Drawing #7 (2013), begin to approach a transcendental level of abstraction. Other works, such as Photo Drawing #3 (2012), with its highly explicit depiction of double penetration, are more in keeping with her original oeuvre while also incorporating the expressionistic scribbles to pleasing effect.

Other artists in the show invite us to look at porn, and invite us to touch it too. Michael Mahalchick’s Acid Rain (2014) consists of cardboard DVD covers from porno films, folded together so as to create a “crude” un-bound book that sits on a shelf. Visitors are welcome to flip through it, although they might not want to, as the covers have a used look about them. The absence of actual DVDs hints at the hollowness of pornographic consumption, wherein the object of desire is inevitably elsewhere. The DVD covers feel anachronistic when considered in relation to Deric Carner’s interactive Tip If You Love Me (2014), a spidery black sculpture proffering touch-screen tablets streaming live-cam pornography. The structure resembles a mutant mic-stand carved out of wood, and the tablets are all tuned to the website chaturbate.com, each one showing a different sort of pornography. The wooden armature lends the installation an organic tactility that offsets the impersonality of the cyber-sex component, perhaps suggesting that digital voyeurism is a natural extension of human sexuality.

The title of the exhibition, “Rear Window Treatment,” is adapted from Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), in which Jimmy Stewart plays a newspaper photographer with a broken leg who passes his convalescence by watching his neighbors from the window of his apartment. Barb Choit, a Vancouver-based photographer, mimics this scenario by presenting photographs of her neighbors going about their daily affairs. The pictures are simply exquisite: taken under low light, the colors are rich and saturated, and the framing device of the window lends them extra drama. The scenes hover between the banal and the touching, such as a cheesy kiss on television glimpsed through a neighbor’s drapes. In another, a beautiful woman brushes her hair behind slatted blinds. The photographs are so loaded with untold stories that they feel like film stills.

The exhibition’s only film work, William E. Jones’s Mansfield 1962 (2006), consists of edited archival footage taken by the police through a two-way mirror in a public bathroom during a gay sex sting operation in 1962. Many of the men in the video were prosecuted under sodomy laws, a chilling reminder of the restrictions on gay rights less than 50 years ago. Back then, state-of-the-art visual technologies were being used to out gay people; today, the latest visual technologies are being used for things such as chaturbate.org.

Finally, Brad Phillips pays homage to the legendary Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý with a series of watercolors based on Polaroids that Phillips took of women in New York City. Tichý (1926 – 2011) was often mistaken for a crazy person with a fake camera because of his sketchy appearance and his homemade cameras constructed from cardboard tubes with hand-ground lenses. He almost exclusively photographed women in public, which eventually got him banned from the local swimming pool in his hometown of Kyjov. The four watercolors by Phillips are each titled Your Miroslav Tichý (all 2014), and they emulate Tichý’s style by depicting sexy women’s legs with all else cropped from the frame. However, the conceptual connection ends there, since Phillips’ watercolors lack the dream-like soft focus that makes Tichý’s photographs so magical. There is a clean quality about Phillips’s work that betrays the fact that he is not an inveterate voyeur like Tichý, although he may aspire to be.

The exhibition raises questions about the morality of spying on people for one’s own pleasure, but most of these artists appear to be in favor of the practice. The exception might be Jones, whose work reads as a condemnation of police surveillance and discrimination. Nevertheless, even Jones’s video carries an element of voyeuristicdétournement in that the source footage has been repurposed for our pleasure and edification. We want to see everything (especially sex) and the evolution of visual technology is being employed towards that end. Mahalchick’s empty DVD sleeves remind us that the voyeuristic gaze can be an unfulfilling substitute for a physical human connection, but if you like to look, rest assured you are not alone.

The post The Artist as Voyeur: Group Show as Peep Show appeared first on artcritical.