July 7 to November 7, 2021
79 Montauk Hwy, Water Mill, NY 11976
Parrishart.org

On a balmy evening this summer  at the Parrish Art Museum, in open fields surrounding the museum, the grass swayed to the rhythmic beats and plaintiff chants of an ancient Algonquin ritual, performed by Shane Weeks and Kelly Dennis, members of the Indigenous Shinnecock Nation. The event celebrated the opening of Tomashi Jackson: The Land Claim, an exhibition of the artist’s new multi-media works.

The predominantly white audience of museum members and VIPs intermingled with comparatively diverse groups consisting of members of Jackson’s entourage and representatives of communities that are the focus of the museum’s outreach programs. Stirring prescient memories of  historical racial divides, the ritual incantations were intended to remind us that these very fields were once home to Indigenous people living in what have become the “Hamptons,” the necklace of affluent townships strung across the East End. These fields then became the displaced habitat for African American slaves who harvested domestic produce from them. Today, they are workplaces for Latinx workers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants, fearful about their future, denied the options available to those they serve.

Houston-born Tomashi Jackson (b. 1980) is well known for the prolific social and cultural research that informs her art, most notably for her works at the 2019 Whitney Biennial which explored the destruction in 1850 of Seneca Village, a Black community, to make way for Central Park.  When I toured the current exhibition with Corinne Erni, Senior Curator of ArtsReach and Special Projects at the Parrish, she recalled how “Jackson, unfamiliar with the East End community, immediately asked, ‘What is happening here with people of color?’ I told her about the immigration plights of Latino people, often detained by ICE for alleged traffic violations.” This fueled the direction of Jackson’s 2021 artist-in-residence project at the nearby Watermill Center, a laboratory for the arts and humanities where she created the works and organized the archival material for The Land Claim. While this title draws from the ongoing efforts of the Shinnecock Nation to reclaim their land, it relates to the exploitation of various people of color—including Indigenous, Black and Latinx. Jackson spent much of the Covid lockdown interviewing members of these communities virtually. “I learned about multiple issues,” she told me during a telephone interview, “about the Long Island Railroad intruding on land; Indigenous people dispossessed, violated and exploited while resisting and advocating for themselves and others.” From Donnamarie Barnes, curator and archivist at Sylvester Manor Educational Farm, Jackson learned that in the seventeenth century the Sylvester family brought enslaved Black people from Barbados to work a provisioning plantation on Shelter Island. Kelly Dennis, an attorney and member of the Shinnecock Nation, told her about the dislocation of Indigenous people from their lands, and the desecration of local burial grounds by developers. And Minerva Perez, Executive Director of OLA (Organization Latino-Americana), updated her about the plight of the Latinx community, their fears of deportation exacerbated by a lack of basic housing, access to public health care, and transportation.

The exhibition begins outdoors, under the eaves of the museum where visitors can listen to an audio montage, simultaneously broadcast stories told by the exhibition’s nine interviewees. Snippets of individual histories intermingle with one another and then, windswept, fade into the very landscape where ancestors once picked potatoes. Something similar occurs visually within the seven multi-media works comprising the exhibition. The narrative, never didactic, evolves as you focus on a particular work. Past merges with the present through Jackson’s deft handling of expressionist color and sculptural materials. Beyond her commitment to social research, however, Jackson is an abstract artist whose merge of form and content is a tour de force.

Consider Three Sisters (2021), constructed on canvas with collaged layers of textiles, paper shopping bags, a storefront-like awning and vinyl strips. Jackson projected photographs of people onto this surface and hand painted their portraits, adding blocks of bold, saturated color, wampum dust, local soil and printed text. The work’s title references an Indigenous method of intercropping three different vegetables—corn, squash and beans— in ways that encourage each variety to thrive. It likewise relates to the integration of ethnic types with tintypes of two early East End Black women residents juxtaposed with more recent photos of women at a Shinnecock family gathering. Jackson layered these portraits on canvas and vinyl strips, painting them with halftone intersecting lines and setting them within and against vivid blocks of orange, yellow, blue and purple. This collision and fusion of  abstract color and figuration causes the photographic likenesses to emerge and fade within the composition, depending on the viewer’s focus, a phenomenon that speaks volumes to the ways in which color as a racial marker defines how white  society perceives people of color. But according to Jackson, “Indigenous, Black and Latinx people are not invisible or expendable to each other and that is the perspective I’ve been empowered by. The issue that arises here is about value and how value is determined: value is a term used with chromatic color and value refers to how people are regarded.”

Color, used metaphorically and formally in this way, drives these works, but there is more to it than meets the eye. Jackson’s integration of color and social relevance draws distinctly from two treatises: Josef Albers’ color theory and Thurgood Marshall’s stunning opinion in the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown vs The Board of Education, which declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Albers in his landmark book Interaction of Color (1963) demonstrated how color constantly deceives us because color perception is relative to its surroundings. He also proffered that what appears to be transparency when colors overlap is actually a new color, one that combines elements of neighboring hues. There are uncanny similarities between this language and Marshall’s discussion of the gerrymandering of neighborhoods to segregate public schools.

You needn’t know about these influences to appreciate the compelling narratives and the abstraction in Jackson’s works, but the more you understand the connections she makes between the languages of art and the rest of life, the more poignant these works become. For example, the labyrinth of blue lines in Among Protectors (Hawthorne Road and the Pell Case) function like gerrymandered roadblocks framing news stories related to the Shinnecock battle to recover stolen land. In one section of this grid an Indigenous person blocks the advance of a truck to prevent the desecration of Shinnecock land by developers. In another, a photographed figure painted in red on vinyl strips sings in prayer at a development site where Indigenous human remains were unearthed. As halftone lines in sacrificial red interact, as blocks of light and dark blues intersect, the racial realities history so often forgets, collide, collapse and merge. Jackson’s energized abstractions contrast the transparent with the opaque, the figurative with the non-objective, the ordinary with the extraordinary— in terms both painterly and aspirational.

This well-documented, important exhibition includes an archival display of source materials and photographs, many of them reproduced in the seven exhibited works, as well as drawings by Martha Schnee of the individuals Jackson interviewed for this project. A 96-page catalog, due this fall, includes additional scholarly research by Erni and curatorial fellow Lauren Ruiz, as well as the in-depth stories of the nine interviewees. Jackson considers all these curatorial elements, along with her multi-media works, as integral constructs of this project.

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The vibrant pulse of  Mexico City’s cultural renaissance didn’t miss a beat during La Semana de Arte (Art Week) (February 4-9, 2020), tenaciously ticking throughout the city from the mega blockbuster Zona Maco fair to the edgier Feria de Arte Material, and onto neighborhood streets enlivened by a heady stream of  exhibitions. Besides the fairs, Mexico City’s new-millenial status as an international art hub was evident in the growing community of young expat artists and gallerists drawn to  warm sunshine, an inexpensive lifestyle and, most important, an openness to diversity. Add to this the fluid and bustling mix of international galleries with emerging and well-established Mexican venues and you have a juggernaut; a brisk global marketplace enticing collectors and art aficionados of every stripe.

The annual Material Art Fair, in particular, allows one to view all these elements afloat in a cultural petri dish of sorts; to watch an evolving art organism spread its tentacles from this indigenous landscape to New York, Berlin, London, Stockholm, Tokyo and beyond. This cultural mashup was much on display in an eccentric performance that took place on the  sun-drenched  Plaza de La República. Paloma (2020), by Estonian artist Kris Lemsalu (b.1985), in collaboration with her American husband, musician Kyp Malone and Mexican designer Barbara Sánchez-Kane, was organized by arts performer and producer Michelangelo Miccolis.  It featured a  bicycle-propelled figure of a giant paloma, a bird-symbol of peace made with  Acapulco chairs and lilies, set against the  Monument to the Revolution. Malone’s amorphous instrumental accompaniment to the plaintive refrains of Mexican singer  Luis Pablo, spirited this fantasy dove from the summit of the plaza down to the Frontón Mexico, the Material exhibition space. Lemsalu and Sánchez-Kane, dressed in lavender suits embellished with plastic eggs, followed behind strewing lily petals towards an appreciative crowd.

Hoping to create a niche for lesser known Latin and international artists, Brett Schultz, Creative Director of the Material Fair, and his current partners, Isa Castilla and Rodrigo Feliz, have grown the shoestring project begun 2014. It took guts to time this exhibition to run simultaneously with Zona Maco and  insist on affordability. But so was it great marketing strategy to welcome international well-recognized  gallerists to participate, giving them a venue for their own emerging artists that large numbers of collectors were unlikely to otherwise see.

And no other fair looks like Material. Counter to the  generic-fair labyrinth of white cubes, Material occupies the Frontón México, an Art Deco jai alai arena imaginatively reconfigured to echo street markets, a procession of open stalls  where vendors hawk everything from vibrant embroidered wearables to car parts. Three levels of scaffolding— a series of  Piranesi-like catwalks, ramps and stairs— support exhibition booths flanking narrow walkways around the perimeter of each floor. These simultaneously  open and intimate spaces foster easy hands-on camaraderie, something  reflected in the exhibition’s focus on the physical connection between the artist and the art object. Hence the Material title.

This casual and playful ambiance encourages easy visual conversations between the emerging and the arrived. For example, textile artists Cecy Gómez (b.1992) and Yann Gerstberger (b.1983) recall their ethnic roots as ancient craft and modernist art respectively. Muy Gallery,  a recently formed initiative promoting the works of  Native artists, represents Gómez who preserves the weaving traditions and mythologies of her Tsotsil-Mayan community in a direct, naive style. Nevertheless, her unique fabric works —made on cloth from traditional skirts worn by indigenous women, and with natural plant dyes—convey contemporary feminist and ecological themes. Works by French artist Yann Gerstberger (b.1983) represented by the well-established gallery, OMR,  are by contrast elegantly conceived in the visual language of early modern abstraction. For his enormous tapestry, Untitled (2020), he hand-dyed burrs of cotton mops, glued them to vinyl and combined them with local  fabric finds to create imagery steeped in Yoruba  ritual and Nigerian folklore.

Mexico-based galleries accounted for twenty-five percent of the exhibitors. Other stand-outs among these venues included LuLu gallery, a small gem co-founded by Chris Sharp who selected a series of gorgeous paintings by Argentine-born artist Santiago de Paoli (b. 1978). De Paoli’s small luminous canvases consist of sensuous, erotic and eerie abstract figures recalling early modern isms, but dwell in a surreal world of their own. Stepping from here into the installation by Irak Morales (b.1981) crossed the line between sensual eroticism and porn. Represented by Neri/Barranco, a Mexican project billing itself as a “nomadic gallery with no physical space,” Morales’s work comments on pulp porn as, he said, “a young Mexican man’s source of sexual information in the 60’s.” His multi-media installation, “Deme 3×5, con tode y pallevar!!!” (2020) included cut-outs  from vintage pornographic  comic books, some shaped as pork-chops suspended from the ceiling as mobiles, others plastic-wrapped around  Mezcal  bottles, or collaged within the frames of religious altarpieces.

Political commentary was most notable in an interactive project by Mexican artist Erick Beltrán (b.1974) at Labor gallery, known for controversial art. Visitors to his installation, Nothing But the Truth (2020), were invited  to write down a lie in an open notebook. Throughout each fair day these lies were compiled, printed as giant posters in a  variety of typographies, and plastered to every inch of exhibition wall. Writ large lies, little and grandiose, merged and, like our daily confrontations with distorted social and network media news, they read as new alternative truths.

Gabriel Orozco’s (b.1962) work, Tracing Money (2020) at the internationally  well-established gallery Kurimanzutto politicizes the graphic form and symbolism of money.  Orozco made prints from layered banknotes— double exposed transparencies merging the currency images of different nations into single blurred composites. Along with drawings, this extensive installation contrasts paper bills as historical and cultural symbols; their ephemeral qualities disturbingly underscoring the existential fluidity of money as a global vehicle of power.

Exhibiting international galeries represented works by Mexican artists and those from their own countries.  New York’s Thierry Goldberg Gallery  featured paintings by Mexican artist Maria Fragoso (b.1995) and included a  triptych featuring an extended family crowded around a typical Mexican dining room, La Peor es Nada (The Worst is Nothing) (2017), unmistakably alludes to the Last Supper. In it Fragoso meshes a comical depiction of loving and dysfunctional family life with the tradition  of Mexican mural painting.The pull of one’s culture is also embedded in works by the team of Lina Mazenett (b.1989)  and David Quiroga (b.1985), Colombian artists represented at Instituto de Visión in Bogatá, a gallery that seeks to trace the Mexican roots of conceptual thinking in Latin America. The artists’ jewel-like reliefs replicating Aztec designs are made of green circuit boards mimicking the brilliant patina of fine jade.

Yngvild Saeter (b.1986), the solo artist featured at Stockholm’s Andréhn-Schiptjenko gallery, makes much scarier outsized jewelry-inspired sculptures from motorcycle parts that she reconstructs, paints and embellishes with feathers, chains, metal spikes and metal rivets. Saeter says these works relate to the euphoric life/death moment she experienced during brain surgery when she momentarily “died,” then revived. She recalls that mystical lapse as a vision in which she was surrounded by motorcycles. Thus did the  biker cult fuel her art: otherworldly helmets, masks, breast plates and shields, the regalia of punk or gothic vampires, perhaps, but like the artist’s strange ordeal, as alluring as they are terrifying.

Milan-based gallery Clima featured the startling work of Italian artist Matteo Nasini (b. 1976) who also channels the dream world, but  from a clinical perspective. His installation of sculpture and tapestry sources data from encephalograms taken while a subject is dreaming. Using a variety of hi-tech software he translates these data into sound, tapestry, and porcelain sculpture using a 3D printing process. Nasini’s intriguing practice eerily suggests that our thoughts have a hidden structural armature, that they are not as ephemeral as we think, and that we can somehow render them immortal as sculptural form. If this boggled your mind, and if you needed a break from cerebrally processing the riotous visual party of this art fair, you would happily aim for  Aria McManus’s (b.1989) Relieviation Works (2017). McManus, an artist and product designer, created an installation for Los Angeles-based gallery AA/LA: a seemingly mundane office environment with hidden healing mechanisms including  a calendar with deliciously edible date pages, and an illuminated name plate radiating the physical and mental nourishment of sunshine.

Coincidentally,  the current Whitney Museum exhibition in New York, Vida Américana, which explores the  impact of  Mexican muralists — Clemente, Orozco and Riviera—on American art, bows to both Mexico City’s vibrant art moment and the art historical importance of its cultural heritage. But it’s perhaps more important that the city is today a magnet for contemporary art and artists, not because of cheap space, sunny days, and hungry collectors, but because of the rationale driving such efforts as the Fiera de Arte Material: from its architecture to its openess to diversity, it represents a metaphoric ideal for a much needed world without walls.

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JOYCE BECKENSTEIN: I was always captivated by your early, incredibly modest sculptures made from things like twigs, bottle caps, and rubber bands. What started this fascination with the mundane and when did your “this is art” light go on?

DONALD LIPSKI: Ever since I was a kid I was making things out of whatever was around: taking apart a leaf, peeling the flesh off the veins; twisting a paperclip into a knot. When I got to graduate school at Cranbrook I started saving these things, thinking they had something to do with making art.

Funny how second nature that is to you: as we speak you’re playing with three pieces of string, winding them around one another.

This string fell off our deck’s sisal rug—I’ve done similar pieces as bracelets for my wife Terri.

Beyond your intuitive play with things, who and what else shaped your art education?

I didn’t think seriously about making art until graduate school. I was a history major at the University of Wisconsin. But somehow I took this ceramics course with the legendary potter, Don Reitz. I was hooked. At Cranbrook, I learned from Richard DeVore and Michael Hall to trust myself, to learn by just doing.

Robert Morris’s Notes on Sculpture influenced me, though at the time I found it questionable when he said that he was as happy working with tools and materials as he was sitting at a typewriter. But now I understand it. When I’m in front of a computer designing large-scale art I am just as focused as I was making things as a kid. John Baldessari was a big influence: His Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (1973), knocked me out! He also had a picture of a stump of a pencil and he wrote that it had something to do with art. I took that literally.

Your success was nothing short of phenomenal: an exhibition at MoMA by age 30. How did that come about?

Soon after I moved to New York in 1978, I had a show at Artist’s Space of thousands of my little sculptures pinned to the walls. I called the work Gathering Dust. Some MoMA curators saw it, loved it, and invited me to have a show. After that I was invited all over the place.

By the time you were doing this work many thought there was little that others from Duchamp to Warhol hadn’t already done with the object. Did that pose issues for you? How did your work add to the conversation?

Really? What can be done with objects is endless. I was fearless and blew away questions like that. One critic accused me of a Jimmy Stewartesque attitude: “Aw shucks, I’m just doing stuff,” but that is really what I was doing all those years. In 1990 at Pilchuck (Glass School) they nicknamed me ‘What If” because I would say, “What if we took this stick and put in molten glass, or what if we take molten glass and spill it in the stump of a tree?” Then, we’d find out.

You soon progressed from making palm-sized objects to making much larger works. What happened after Gathering Dust?

I was invited to Varna to show Gathering Dust in a US State Department International Contemporary Art exhibition, The Artist at Work in America, (1981). Bulgaria was a Soviet Bloc country at the time and while hanging out with local artists in the Artist’s Union, I learned that they worked with a tight set of rules. When I got back, I somehow threw out all the rules I had for myself. I had brought home a cast iron dumbbell I found and used it to replace the receiver on my dead home phone, then moved the work to the middle of an otherwise empty studio floor. Over the next months, that floor filled up. Tribeca was rapidly changing from factories and warehouses to living lofts at the time, and I started collecting things abandoned along Canal Street, fantastic things found in dumpsters—paintbrush handles, old ledger books, abandoned tools. I lugged them all up to my sixth-floor walk-up on Greenwich Street and used them to make the sculptures in the series Passing Time (1981), so titled because that is all I knew about what I was doing at the time.

Where did you put all this stuff you collected?

I took Louise Bourgeois ’s advice to young artists: “Get lots of storage,” and in 1983 moved into a huge studio—an old theater—in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a cavernous drive-in space. I was always attracted to obsolete things and I could now take “fertile” objects and, with no plan, really, amass this palette. It was effortless because I had this huge storage space.

Your eclectic arrangements of unrelated art objects contain many references to minimalist sculpture, and so much of your work proceeds along conceptualist lines. This is especially true of Building Steam (1982-87), a mash of minimalist, surreal and conceptual forms. How did this pared-down art coalesce within your much larger, complex installations?

I was deeply influenced by the minimalists and by conceptual art. Carl Andre, Sol Lewitt, Agnes Martin, Robert Smithson, and others who used mundane and neutral materials moved me. Yet what was showing up in my studio was anything but. Though I often explored the repetition of simple objects, they were hardly neutral. There was, for example, the shit-load of razorblades I found and then used exclusively for The Starry Night (1994) at Capp St. Projects in San Francisco: 20,000 blades sliced right into the sheetrock, making patterns like magnetic fields. The blades seemed to disappear as you walked past them and saw them edgewise, but you would see their shadows which had more substance than the blades.

And conceptual art?

I think all art is conceptual, but Wow! The physical impact of those razorblades was breathtaking. Sometimes the conceptual is paramount. I once gave a blackboard performance at Cranbrook—I wrote, “Prove: √2 is an irrational number,” something I remembered from algebra class that impressed me as a kind of beauty I hadn’t known. You start by assuming it’s a rational number, and when you work it through, you contradict yourself.

I believe you’re saying that there was something beautiful in the flow of that proof that for you resonates with the oddly poetic relationships you find when you pick up two things, not rationally related, and put them together.

It is like a poet who puts surprising words together. Something wonderful happens. I wrap a rubber band around a safety pin to make something that’s more than the two things taken separately; or broken glass spilling out of a circle of buckets (Free Reef, 1987), or a crystal ball placed on a telephone (Building Steam #3170,1985).

You often talk about your work in terms of making things beautiful, and there is an uneasy beauty about razor blades sliced right into sheetrock walls. How do you define beauty in your works?

I don’t define it.

But can you talk around it?

(laughs) Ok, I made Water Lilies #32 (1990) that ended up at the Corcoran Gallery. I made it from glass tubes filled with roses floating in a preservative solution, sealed with stainless steel fittings— a beautiful piece. Years of exposure to sunlight turned the liquid a tea-color and bleached out the roses. Eventually everything turned black and opaque. The sculpture looked like a solid piece of stone, not glass, which I thought was particularly beautiful. But the Corcoran asked me to rebuild it. I did, putting it back into pristine form. I liked seeing it as it was on the day it was made. And I enjoy knowing that someday it’ll turn black again. We all die.

Serendipity and intuition fuel most of what you do,yet you did go through a particularly political phase. Will you talk about that?

Not much of my work is blatantly political, except the flag pieces that I made on the eve of the Gulf War. In 1989 many ideologues were pushing for an anti-desecration flag amendment and I thought that was a laughably stupid idea. So when The Fabric Workshop and Museum asked me to work with them I said, “Ok, let’s do a flag show—which became the series Who’s Afraid of Red, White & Blue? (1990). Their artisans made mountains of flags for me, and they hooked me up with the Humphrey Flag Co. in Philadelphia that gave me bolts of uncut flag fabric. I used the flags the way I use any other material: I wove together the stripes, wound them around tools, bound them into books, and rolled them into balls. I made a huge flag ball, eight feet in diameter with slick nylon flags.When the show came down, I wanted to soften it up, so I asked Hillwood Gallery at C.W. Post College if I could keep it on the grounds where it would weather. After two years it became more and more faded and fragile, more and more moving and beautiful. It was slated for a show at the Whitney. But after a news conference during which Representative Peter King protested the piece, someone slashed it to pieces with a box cutter. It was still bright on the inside, like an eviscerated deer, and there was something compelling about the insanity of someone who, presumably thought I was disrespecting the flag, attacking flags with a knife.

You rely on others to produce many of your large-scale works. For someone who’s “hand” is so apparent, is this difficult? How did this come about?

Organically. Things would come up: using seamstresses for the flag works, or working with companies like Verdin Bell for my installation, The Bells (1991). When I moved from New York to Houston in 1992, I unloaded all the things I had amassed in my studio and dumped them in the Grand Lobby of the Brooklyn Museum for an exhibition, Pieces of Strings Too Short To Save (1993)—eight truckloads of odd and wonderful things: masonite packing cases for artillery shells, giant ceramic funnels, an old amusement park ride, and hard candy packed for fall-out shelters. Once all those things were gone, my art started happening more in my mind, and that went hand in hand with my discovering the computer.

What was the first public work?

Tom Finklepearl, back then the director of the art program for New York’s schools, invited me to create a sculpture for a new school in Washington Heights. I came up with The Yearling (1993), a life-sized horse looking out from atop a giant child’s chair. But the people in Washington Heights, a Dominican neighborhood, did not embrace the piece. A Yeshiva across the street had fought the building of the school for years. One man had offensively said, “Why spend good money to educate animals?” It was mentioned that the horse was a symbol of oppression for the Dominicans, since the conquistadores had horses. It wasn’t going to happen. My first lesson in public art. The Yearling wound up outside the children’s wing of the Denver Public Library.

Yet you kept at it.

Some clients are great. Others are skittish, or afraid of appearing foolish. But if the situation is good and the budget is adequate, I will work through it. Listening is important. Learning about a situation makes the art better. An example is my recent installation, SPOT (2018), for the Hassenfield Children’s Hospital at NYU Langone Medical Center. The piece is a 24’ tall Dalmatian balancing an actual New York City taxicab on its nose. My original presentation featured a teddy bear cuddling a taxicab, a toy holding a real object as a toy. Everyone loved the idea, but as I talked with the staff, one doctor said the teddy bear seemed a bit babyish. That got me thinking: I had only thought about the kids as my audience, yet about 1000 people work there, and it’s for them too. The big dog, rather than the cute teddy bear, conveyed nobility and the attributes of a great doctor: focus, patience, skill, sweetness. It was a better piece because I was listening.

The scale of “SPOT” makes a big impact, but more compelling, I believe, is the way in which you think of scale metaphorically. Here—as you did with The Yearling—you approach the subject through the lens of a small child for whom the world looks huge. But on another level, the scale of childhood—sick children in particular—is psychologically huge, and that is something that resonates in the work. Scale and proportion play a likewise compelling role for the piece you did in Boston for The Cathedral Church of St Paul, The Ship of Pearl (2013).

The church, built 200 years ago as a Greek Revival temple, was a prominent edifice on Boston Commons until surrounding buildings dwarfed it. A planned pediment sculpture was never completed. I was commissioned to design one. I wanted to work with the proportions of the Greek Temple, and those proportions derive from the Golden Section, a mathematical ratio that the Greeks considered to be “divine” because it exists throughout nature and, when applied to architecture and sculpture, it produces dynamic symmetries that the ancients associated with the promise of a harmonious universe. This brought me to a slice of chambered nautilus shell that now completes the pediment. Its “golden spiral,” so evocative of all that is harmonious, represents a spiritual presence that is not religious. This was important because, while this is the cathedral for the Episcopal Church in Massachusetts, it is wildly welcoming. It hosts Chinese and Muslim congregations. They have regular services for the homeless. It is truly a sanctuary for everyone.

All these wonderful projects must give you an enormous amount of satisfaction, but as I notice that you’ve now completed the delightful little woven charm you started when we began our conversation, I wonder— do you miss the hands-on experience of working alone in the studio.

Oh, I do get my hands dirty from time to time. My studio is again filled with things. There is for me no real difference between what I did then and what I do now. I do it for me. Yes, I listen to clients. Yes, I work with budgets, engineers, and architects. But it’s so satisfying. Instead of my palette being the physical objects in front of me, it’s anything I can imagine. I’ve found great people to work with. It’s like magic—I dream something up, and bang, it’s there!

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JOYCE BECKENSTEIN: What sparked your interest in the relationship between art and science?

ELLEN K. LEVY: I loved art and natural history museums from an early age, particularly Wunderkammer collections. My father’s friend, the artist Charles Seliger was an important influence because we would do watercolor painting together. He would look for areas with wild outgrowth, push back the brush and have me select an inch of the landscape. We’d each paint what we saw and then compare our sketches. This way I learned to closely observe nature and monumentalize things not immediately seen. While at the school of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, I worked nearby at Harvard Medical School in the pharmacology department. At the time, Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel were researching the neural basis of visual perception for which they were awarded a Nobel prize in Physiology. They led the foundation for work on visual perception, and established that during perception different parts of the visual cortex respond separately to motion, orientation, and color. An important question was called the binding problem: How do these different attributes bind together as one? How do we make coherent sense of what is going on in the world? Those, like David Hubel, working on these problems along with lab workers such as myself, would go to art galleries during our lunch breaks and discuss relationships between art and science, especially perception.

Those relationships have been together since ancient times, through the Renaissance and into the 19th and 20th centuries when technology, beginning with the camera, changed how we see the world. Where does your art fit within this enormous arc art/science curve?

My focus has always been in biology and organisms as opposed to chemistry and physics. I studied art at a time when there was a hiatus in the dialogue between art and science— a period of structuralism and post-structuralism in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s when art discussion took place on a theoretical level. At the time I became intrigued with the paleontologist Steven J. Gould’s work, particularly his 1981 book, “The Mismeasure of Man.” It had to do with (mis)judgments people have made. One example stayed with me. Gould related a time when people filled skulls with marbles and then counted the contents to determine intelligence. Gould tried to repeat the experiment filling female and male skulls with marbles. He at first found more in the female skull but then realized he had miscounted— subconsciously wishing to find more marbles in the female brain. Gould exposed this way of doing science, and his work underscored the impact of bias on our judgments. After reading that book I became interested in the way in which attention patterns affect our perceptions. The searchlight effect is a metaphor for the brain’s focus on such patterns: if you cast a spotlight on a particular problem or image it catches your attention, but so does it often conceal what is happening outside that circle.

Your video installation, Stealing Attention (2008-09), is a wonderful example of that. How did that work come about?

It resulted from a collaboration with Michael Goldberg, a neuroscientist at Columbia University. But the two-part back story for the work relates, first, to a talk I attended by one of the directors of the Baghdad Museum about the looting that went on after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. One night a masked man broke into the director’s office with a rifle, but—to his relief—he was not a looter but someone wanting to rescue some of the precious museum artifacts, promising to return them, which is what he ultimately did. Second, shortly after hearing this talk I went to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas and saw paintings by Caravaggio and de la Tour of card cheaters. In thinking about “Stealing Attention,” I wanted to stage a reflexive experience for viewers; to have them think they had seen something, and then realize, in the process, that they had not seen something else. I created an image of museum artifacts pictured sitting on shelves. This became a background for a superimposed card game of the con game, Three Card Monti. The viewers were instructed to watch the video and count the number of times the Queen of Hearts appeared on the screen. Over the course of the ten minute game, the ten artifacts in the background disappeared one by one. When people were asked to describe what they had seen, most answered with the number of times they thought the Queen of Hearts had appeared—but they missed seeing the objects removed from the shelves.

Wasn’t this similar to the Invisible Gorilla project of Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris highlighting the phenomenon of “inattentional blindness”?

Yes. Deliberately so. In that experiment people were asked to count basketball exchanges during a game and were oblivious to someone in a gorilla suit walking across the basketball court. But in my installation I wanted to see what would happen to perception if viewers were given some clues about what they had not seen. I also wanted the objects not seen to have emotional import. Walking through a series of rooms after they’d seen the video they viewed an empty shelf with Xeroxes of the ten artifacts seen in the animation. Torn sheets with information about those artworks were scattered on the floor and tacked on the walls. When people leaving the exhibition viewed the video a second time most of them were aware of the background activity in which the depicted sculptural images of the looted antiquities were clearly disappearing.

What does this tell us about perception?

Giving people clues helped them reconstruct the circumstances of the video. Visually the “Stealing Attention” animation plays with the shift between foreground and background space, the most basic art relationship. The brain, however, focuses on one part of the experience or another when assigned a task. If you are too distracted by one small part, you may miss the context the larger picture. But—and this is the mystery of perception— an ah ha moment can occur when everything becomes clear. It can happen in an instant or take time, and is a matter of triggering memory and association. When memory kicks in there is yet a larger picture. The juxtaposition of the card con-game with the artifacts assumes political dimensions: we realize that the con-game we were fed regarding weapons of mass destruction—a political distraction—got the US embroiled in the Iraq war.

Your “Meme Machines” exhibition likens the transmission of knowledge through library systems to neural networks. Can you define “meme” and explain why you chose libraries as metaphor for the brain’s activities as a neurological conduit for information?

According to Richard Dawkins, memes are the cultural equivalent of genes. The difference is that memes are contagious; they are ideas that circulate. “Meme Machines” consist of four painted prints related to four different specialized libraries and an animation that shows you a more global perspective of libraries. Together the animation and still prints relate parts to wholes; each library system is like a node within a much larger information system. The context for this work is the current time of migrations, ecological problems, and military invasions. At the heart of this project are communication and information technologies and how we get this news out to the public.

Are you saying that the focus of each library creates a partial view that temporarily blocks one’s ability to see a full picture? That you need the entire system to create pathways to full knowledge, just as the brain binds clues to take us from one piece of information to another?

In a sense, Yes. Each of the four libraries referenced in this show is a stand-in for a person or organism. Its collection makes it unique because it comprises a separate set of experiences and history. I create imagery to suggest how this history might reflect the impact of social, political and/or ecological trauma. For example, the Mama Haidara library in Timbuktu has a collection gathered in Haidara by a man who traveled along the Niger River contacting people living in tribes who possessed ancient manuscripts. There were religious factions that made it illegal to have these manuscripts, so he collected and assembled them at enormous personal risk. To express this I show what the library looks like, but embed the physical structure in threads of the manuscripts that wrap around the building and transform it. The Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago is another example that is related to “Stealing Attention.“ This library helps counter the destruction of war by maintaining a database of looted antiquities. My still image of this library has references to archeological sites where looting took place.

What role does the animation play in “Meme Machines?”.

“Meme Machines” was another collaborative project, this one done with neuroscientist Justine Kupferman whose work isolated neuronal paths and dendrites. She believes that the nodes and branches she isolated specify a sites of learning. For me, the animation suggests similar transitions, such as the evolution of libraries over time. For example, the viewer sees threads of manuscripts lifting off the pages and enmeshing the Haidara Library, and sees flows of information emanating from the Patent and Trademark Office. I mimic a neural network in the animation with  a visual moving line that is punctuated with each library as a “node” along a continuing route. By contrast, the mixed media still portraits depict a single state.

When artists put their work out in the world they trigger multiple new pathways: viewers’ interpretations of the works become part of their own networks which today often go viral on the internet. What is the impact of that in terms of evolving “organisms?”

I think we are reaching a place where an incipient mass consciousness is developing and we become aware of other people’s perspectives. There are good and bad aspects to this: the negative is that two things are being threatened. One is our attention; we are easily diverted. But I also think we lose our sense of the physical embodiment of things in virtual space. When you hold a book in your hand you have a different sensation than you do when reading online. The old manuscripts I referred to had a distinct odor, texture and sense of place that you don’t have when they are reduced to digital formats.

And for all the available information at your fingertips, so is there a loss of sensation that is related to our lost and misdirected attention. As an artist how do you deal with that?

Much art today has a political dimension. We see the politicization of things that were once not political. I think the subject of attention is now one of those subjects that artists are dealing with.

The post Neural Networks: Ellen K. Levy on her “Meme Machines” and the thinking behind them appeared first on artcritical.

JOYCE BECKENSTEIN: The title of your new book is “Absurd Thinking”; what is absurd about the way you think about art?

ALLAN WEXLER: Absurd thinking relates to the way I work as an artist. I do not problem solve: I play with irritations, accidents, and things we don’t really understand. These are my materials, and I use them to explore the other side of function. I’m asking myself, “Where is the softer side of architecture—poetics, spirituality, and metaphysics?” When I am working I sit on the edge of the conscious and the unconscious; fine art and applied art.

It’s hard to pin down where the rational ends and the irrational begins when fine art and architecture cross paths in your work. You’ve made up business cards to explain this when people at cocktail parties ask, “What do you do?” Will you read us one?
I am not uptight about whether I’m labeled an artist or an architect—it’s the ideas that are critical. I was responding to the question, “What kind of work do you do?” Cocktail party response card #11 reads: “I was exposed to contemporary art at Rhode Island School of Design in the ‘60s. Andy Warhol’s initials, AW, were the same as mine. This coincidence was too amazing to ignore. I wanted to become the Andy Warhol of architecture.” As a student, I approached work as artists do, flipping things around, ricocheting from the functional to the abstract, the absurd to the rational, the conventional to the unconventional.

Can you give a specific example of that?
Hat/Roof is a good example. Water is a precious commodity and the peaked roof hat collects water and funnels it into a bucket worn on my back. I was inspired by an NPR news report at the time about Cubans escaping in small boats. It described how refugees facing life and death constructed a funnel out of a piece of plastic to catch drops of rainwater. In Hat/Roof I become the architecture, and that makes the piece humorous and absurd—but it conveys a serious message. It says, Take inspiration from architecture’s primary building blocks: water, gravity—the laws of physics—and translate them into shelter to meet human needs. 

Your senior architecture project appears to draw more from a subversive impulse than from traditional fine art and architecture.
I attended RISD in the ‘60s when pushing authority was in the air. I pushed back when a professor assigned a design problem for an alternative school in Maine for troubled kids. He wanted the expected—but before drawing plans for a dormitory structure on the grounds of the school, I first interviewed the students. They felt isolated and bored! So I created a mobile campus that utilized Howard Johnson Motor Lodges as dormitories: It would have travelled across the US allowing kids to take courses across the country. I did this because I believed that architecture could change education. But to do that required thinking about more than modular structures. This was irrational thinking, to be sure, but thinking that encouraged educational alternatives. I ruffled feathers in that class, but looking back, I think the work I made at school was strong.

Your explorations of the rational/absurd began early—they’re evident in a series of small buildings that you discuss in the first chapter of your book, Abstractions. How do they reflect the way you evolved your process?
Process is critical to making art. It’s like taking a ride to an unknown place. How will this piece of wood look with that piece? What do the materials want to do? For the series of small buildings I arbitrarily devised a rational system within which to work: specific tools, specific amounts of time—tight restrictions that resulted in unexpected results. For example, I created a miniature lumber yard of two-by-fours and plywoodI working from a stream of consciousness kind of way, allowing one day to each creation. Each small building was different, and each one was a surprise.

Why do you put such enormous limits on yourself?
The irony is that a rational system of restraints allows extremes to develop. Every artist knows the tyranny of the blank canvas, the blank page. I saw how Sol LeWitt’s exquisite wall drawings came out of mathematical restrictions he gave himself. When I work with self-imposed rational structures, I am always amazed at what evolves. You can’t make this stuff up! If you can think of it beforehand it already exists. For me these limitations are tools to breaking through preconceptions. These small buildings were made like quick sketches on paper. When everything but one element is constant, the situation triggers the unconventional. That can make an enormous and refreshing difference.

Who, besides Sol Lewitt, influenced you?
John Cage’s writing and music; Rauschenberg’s early, conceptual pieces, and Marcel Duchamp. Just as Duchamp de-functionalized the functional object- a urinal, for example —to create an unexpected result, my works often put a spotlight on functional common objects, turning everyday mundane tasks into theater.

In some of my works I re-functionalize the artwork. Can a painting of a chair also have the function of a chair? Can I sit on my painting?

Working from the mathematical to the expressive to the absurd must exercise both sides of the brain.
Yes, and I try to exhaust myself physically when I work. I work spontaneously, like a Sumi painter. I don’t stop; I have to move forward or the thinking brain kicks in and all’s lost. I work from my subconscious irrational side. It is a meditation on making. Things reveal themselves as I work in the third dimension.

But I sense that beyond your desire to tap both irrational and rational sides of consciousness, you’re searching for something more fundamental. In the Landscape chapter of your book, for example, you ask where nature ends and architecture begins.
I am searching for the vibrant dialectic between opposite things. Ice can feel hot to the confused nerves in our skin. There’s a vibration between two poles. I am drawn to gradations between things. There’s earth, wind and fire over here, and mathematical structure over there. Where does one blend into the other? Where does the earth become the floor and the sky above our ceiling?

Where then does nature become architecture?
Someone walking in the hot sun seeks relief in the shade of a tree. The decision to walk beneath the tree is architecture.   A detail from the work Reframing Nature, on the cover of my book, reflects this nature-into-architecture question. I choose a crooked tree trunk growing near my Long Island studio. Its shape illustrated its growing conditions in the windy and sunless deep woods. Its shape kept it from functioning as lumber. I intervened, cutting slits, and then inserting wood wedges into its curves to straighten it. I “technologized” nature.

You similarly explore the invisible—elements of gravity, stability, and movement – as the underpinnings of architecture. Can you describe how you accomplish this?What does it take to float a plane—raise a platform off the ground towards the heavens? Pratt Desk is an outdoor public artwork at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. It consists of a horizontal plane “floating” besides a chair—a simple desk complicated by its scaffolding, my mechanism to subvert gravity. The desk and chair are bright red, the scaffolding soft gray aluminum. It’s similar to Japanese Bunraku puppetry where the puppeteer is dressed in black: Your eyes see the puppets and your mind blocks out the puppeteers. Pratt Desk’s visual and conceptual elements play Bunraku-like hide-and-seek with one another. The desk seems to magically defy gravity. It’s the kind of work that ignites a spark between what we see and what we don’t. Between simple things and things that are, actually, quite complex.

Another work, Slanting Table and Re-Slanting China, relates to your performance piece, Coffee Seeks Its Own Level in which you explore gravity in terms of human nature. How are these works connected?
In Slanting Table and Re-Slanting China I created an indoor hill by placing wedges under a table’s legs, an absurd dining situation that caused food to roll off plates and water to spill from cups. I corrected the situation by re-slanting the china. I’m drawing a line between stability and instability.

Coffee Seeks its Own Level deals with similar issues on a human level. This performance piece questions how four people sitting at a table drinking hot coffee can feel equal. I choreograph the situation: all four cups are connected by vinyl surgical tubing. If one cup is lifted before the others, gravity forces the coffee downwards, into the lowest cup, and it overflows into the saucer. Participants must therefore coordinate their movements and drink at the same time, so the work becomes less about drinking coffee, and more about orchestrating community and empathy.

Yet for all this talk of absurdity many of your works—such as Crate House, for instance, featured in the “Private Space” chapter of your book—deal with pragmatic issues of personal space.
I use the word absurd to describe what is difficult to describe—the act of creating. Crate house is a variation on Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond; a meditation on isolation and privacy. A tool I often use is to take apart our daily lives, to look at the fragments of how and where we live. The crates reduce our belongings to the barest minimum—a pillow, dish, flashlight, ketchup— for the solitary resident in the 1990s. They can be read as objects in a museum diorama—a looking at the present historically—or as privacy, isolation, and survival kits.

This isolation theme brings your Prison Project to mind.
You’re right. This project was commissioned to be installed in Eastern State Penitentiary, a spectacular, defunct early 19th-century prison in Philadelphia. I am conflating being a prisoner in a cell with being an artist in retreat. I made the work in my basement studio that in my mind I transformed into a cell. I did not leave. Food was brought to me and I rarely saw daylight. The cell contained the functional objects needed but lacked many of the comforts one wishes for. I set about making myself comfortable through the small niceties of daily living, and limited my materials to what was original to the cell, or repurposed from the contents of the brown lunch bags that I had delivered each day. The work was then installed in the prison cell, where I changed the cell door lock to be on the inside of the cell- the difference between being a prisoner and an artist in the studio.

So you once again set restrictions on yourself as you did when making the small buildings.
Yes, I made paint from different colors of coffee—black to light with cream; and primary colors from mustard, grape jelly, and ketchup. Sheets of toilet paper laminated with milk became working canvas; coke cans held the “paint”. I made a paintbrush from a piece of the broomstick and a lock of my hair. I made a color wheel by mixing ketchup, mustard and grape jelly to create green, orange, and purple. This retreat became a closed system in which I used functional objects to make non-functional works of art. I was interested in the question, “What do you use when you have nothing?”

That is but another —living —example of how you physically occupy that space between art and architecture. In your recent works on board you do the same in a spiritual and metaphysical way, mutating gravity into human gravitas. Why did you do them?
This landscape series represents my search for our first acts on earth. They explore subterranean excavations that represent humanity’s need to go underground; to be alone and to be safe. We dig a hole to create a void and shelter. We move earth up and over to create positive forms. They’re titled Breaking Ground, and each one begins as a sculptural plaster landscape with paper props. The landscape assumes new meaning when I photograph and print the images in small sections, and then glue them to wood and board, adding hand drawing. I am searching for the beginnings of habitations, for remnants of the history of architecture that disappeared long ago. The works feel spiritual and I try not to talk about them – like with ancient creation stories they are difficult to talk about without destroying the mystery.

These works seem to ask, “Where does architecture become spiritual and the spiritual become architecture?”
Yes, it is about how the physical is transcended.

You have said, “I want to be architecture”. What do you mean by that?
I’ve done a number of works where I mold the shape of my body into a wall.   How can my body and architecture conjoin? Where does my clothing end and architecture begin? I want to connect my skin and the sheetrock. I want to become my work. Perhaps, like Pygmalion, I want the inanimate to come alive or conversely I want to become my artwork.

All your explorations coalesce in the public art projects you’ve done in collaboration with your wife, Ellen. How does the work Two Too-Large Tables in Hudson River Park prove the practical potential of your absurd thinking?
We set out to create a public project where people would interact in unexpected ways. The two artworks are elevated planes- one at table-top height and one at roof height. Thirteen chairs are embedded in the two planes, creating a community table and a shelter. So the two floating planes are absurd, but as they are at the specific heights of 30 inches and 7 feet – they alternate between working table and rooftop. People sitting in the chairs become one with its architecture. People sitting at the table, or sitting beneath the roof, experience one another and the river view differently. They are interconnected within each form, but they interact from different perspectives.

You’re known to be an inspirational teacher. What do you want your students to come away with?
I want them to feel like magicians. I want them to recognize the opportunities they have been given to create spaces that enhance the lives of those interacting with the work. I also want them to provoke, challenge, and innovate in ways that both soothe the senses and create a sense of awe.

And finally, what does this new book represent to you?
The book is a portable art exhibition. A retrospective of my first 45 years of experiments. The book is my body and my mind on paper. It’s a diary revealing how and why I think the way I do. The book offers a roadmap to new ways of making, and, in the end, I hope it inspires.

The post The Andy Warhol of Architecture: Allan Wexler talks about his art and thinking appeared first on artcritical.

October 22 to December 31, 2016
158 Main Street
East Hampton, NY, 631 324 0806

When art historian Gail Levin approached Connie Fox about a joint exhibition of her paintings with sculptural works by her late husband, William King, Fox reported to friends that she was incredulous. What do Bill’s quirky figurative sculptures have in common with her convulsive abstract paintings? But Levin persisted—thankfully so. Her instinctive grasp of the empathy that across three decades connected—and inspired—this prolific artist couple has resulted in an intriguing, thoughtfully integrated exhibition.

King and Fox, together since 1983, married in 2007: it was his fourth marriage, her third. Easy going with a quiet but barbed wit, King grew up in Jacksonville, Florida which he left to study art, first at the Cooper Union and then, as a Fulbright Scholar, in Rome. Returning to New York during Abstract Expressionism’s headiest moment, King made an unexpected splash with his signature figurative works — wacky but humble spoofs on human types that mimicked his own his leggy 6’2” frame. Fox, a no-nonsense mid-westerner, was born in Fowler, Colorado, at the edge of the dust bowl. In 1950 she biked through the shambled ruins of postwar Europe before studying art in Albuquerque, New Mexico. There she met Elaine de Kooning, who in 1978 convinced her to move to East Hampton. Spirited, independent and, like King, immune to art’s various “isms,” Fox pursued her unique brand of expressionist abstraction.

Throughout this exhibition and in her concise catalogue essay, Levin peppers their respective biographies with tales of old love affairs, Hampton friendships, and the couple’s shared love of early modernism, music, literature, and politics. All of this informs Levin’s sharp visual pairings, such as the duo greeting viewers — King’s My Pleasure (2007), a life-sized, stilt-legged figure dressed in a red vinyl suit, flanking Fox’s Bill’s Vinyl Man with Stool (1985). King’s vinyl characters usually portray slick sinister scoundrels, but this red-hot fellow stands lovingly by Connie, whose acute sensitivity to his work clearly animates her own abstract painting. When she saw strips of King’s vinyl fabric strewn about a table, she reinvented them as a pile of abstract brushstrokes set beside King’s studio stool.

Fox and King’s stylistic differences consistently bow to one another. The figurative elements she embeds within her energized brushwork attest to own her grip on representation. King’s proportions, simplicity of line, and play of negative and positive space affirm his keen eye for the abstract structure of things as underpinnings to character. Both artists were influenced by early modernists: Fox gravitated towards Klee, Kandinsky, and the Delaunays; King towards Picasso, Braque and Elie Nadelman. Both artists were particularly fascinated with Marcel Duchamp. Fox’s Marcel’s Star: You don’t have to be a star baby to be in my show, (1993) featuring Duchamp’s famous star-shaped tonsure, is here paired with King’s carved wooden portrait of Duchamp. Fox and King also independently pursued Duchamp’s iterations of Rose Sélavy as explorations of their own alter egos through self-portraiture.

Almost all of King’s figures embody the artist’s physical self — from his early Self in San Francisco (1955), to Bill Dogg-Hampton (2003), a bulldog head atop a King-like torso. Early on, in 1955, Fox drew Self-Portrait as Flower, the seed of a “self-as” theme that culminated in her 2007 series of drawings of herself as Colette and Max Beckmann (exhibited earlier this year at the Parrish Art Museum). Though these specific works are not in this exhibit, Levin discusses them alongside King’s alter-ego portraits of himself as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Hepworth, Nefertiti and a Degas ballerina.

But it is romance — soaring on art historical wings — that drives this exhibition. While androgynous themes tease conflicting layers of each artist’s self-identity, they also — as they converse across the gallery space — merge the personae of these artistic soul mates. Romance gives lift-off to Bill on his knees embracing a Connie-headed airplane in Marry Me (2010), a sculpture he made after they’d been together for twenty-seven years! Photographs of the couple at Sammy’s Beach — one of them a study for King’s double portrait, Jolies Fleurs (2007) — capture this romance in more ways than one. Bill hated the beach. He went there because Connie loved to swim in this tranquil place. It churned over her imagination for decades, ultimately inspiring the daunting series of large Sammy’s Beach paintings, two spectacular examples of which are included in this exhibition.

Music also kept this relationship humming. King fiddles away in Talent (1994), and a dancing dog gyrates to a rapping cluster of jazz musicians in Fox’s Fox Dog/Jazz (1985). Both works undoubtedly relate to the artists’ membership in a band, The Art Attacks, organized by Audrey Flack.

We would feel magic in any exhibition devoted separately to Bill King or Connie Fox. But here sparks palpably fly between the two. In life they spoke little about their works but affirmed them –or not- with the kind of glance long-married people know well. Fox recently mentioned how King once summed up their influences on one another by saying, “I learned from her and her feet grew bigger.”

The post Your Feet’s Too Big: Connie Fox and William King at the Guild Hall, East Hampton appeared first on artcritical.

November 1, 2014 to January 10, 2015 (extended)
535 West 22nd Street, Sixth Floor
between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-255-8450

“Silent Movies” is an unusual exhibition for Michelle Stuart, an artist best known for her iconic land art, sculptural scrolls, artist books, and installations. This show adds consummate photographer to her achievements. Using a gridded format she integrates her own photographs with her wunderkammer collection of images, merging and manipulating them all to produce profoundly imperfect impressions. Smudged, erased, scarred, and layered, they unfold on their architectural frames as different filmic genres. Each is tied to Stuart’s personal journey as metaphor for a grander human odyssey.

Rue Cart presents an overlay of narrative and formal photographic manipulations as a grid of twenty-eight panels set cheek by jowl,.  It reads like the story board of a Surrealist film. The first panel, depicting a hand against a constellation map, recalls Stuart’s early cartographic drawings of the moon. . Commonplace things—postage stamps, streetlights, antiquated buildings—reference Stuart’s memories of her years in post-war Paris. The cloud of war hovers over all as she transforms starry imagery into a hail of light spots; a ballistic pox assaulting everything, even, by illusion, the photographs themselves. But in the grander scheme of this apocalyptic vision it is memory, imagination’s alter-ego, that perseveres as an imprint, acquiring new significance as it is transformed in the mind’s eye of tomorrow’s viewer.

Stuart’s transcendental similes may include humorous interventions. In Navigating the Stars II she pays homage to Captain Cook’s eighteenth-century stop in Alaska, wrapping his voyage in her own excursion to the inlet that bears his name. In this fifteen-paneled grid, the surround of a star-spangled milky way frames vintage sailing vessels, the architecture of seafaring curiosity. To connect these worlds of sea, space and intellect, and to leave behind an imprint of her own presence, Stuart placed flashlights in the mud which she then photographed to suggest far-away stars impossibly reflected in water, as Cook could not have seen them while sailing through, centuries ago.

A Foreign Territory Within expresses transcendence through painterly abstraction.These photographs, their edges frayed and details erased—by time or by Stuart— present a severely bruised landscape, struggling to reclaim its lost identity. Stuart’s filmic instincts have set these nine panels apart giving breathing space to her shifting abstractions of place, its features stripped down to Rothko-like bands of textural darks and lights juxtaposed with gestural drawings of line anxious for form. Vaucluse, an asymmetrically disposed grid, unfolds similarly abstract compositions. These works recall Stuart’s exquisite frottaged paper scrolls of the 1970s, rubbed and pounded with earth and stone and subtly hinting at the specific sites that brought them into being. A Foreign Territory Within and Vaucluse likewise capture mere fragments of a site, leaving viewers to ponder its true scope.

The sublime peaks of Machu Picchu are, on the other hand, immediately recognizable in Sacred Solstice Alignments. Stuart captures them with the panning effects of a motion picture camera. Assembled as monochrome harmonies, their sights aimed skyward, these peaks align with starry signs from the heavens that with spot-on accuracy prompted the ancients to plant and to sow. This unfurling of the Andes as a celestial clock resonates with Stuart’s Stone Alignments/Solstice Cairns, (1979) in which aligned stone boulders incised with lines designated the summer solstice.

If there are characters besides Stuart in this exhibition of gridded movie-stills, then Claudius Ptolemy (c. AD 90-c. AD 168) and Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) are her co-stars: cartography betrothed to perspective. Ptolemy’s nascent efforts to graph cosmological space ultimately led to flat maps enabling sailors to navigate the seas. Alberti’s codification of perspective permitted painters to pin onto rational space the otherwise messy stuff of human life. Like those sciences graphing the complexities of three dimensions on two dimensional surfaces, Stuart has with “Silent Movies” flattened out a fourth dimension — that elusive place where memory of what we believe we know finds larger truths in the spaces in between.

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