We don’t talk much about “art” when I see Jeremy Davis. We end up goofing around or talking about songs, movies, just about anything else. Sitting down with him in his Portland studio, I learned more about his philosophy and process than I ever would have otherwise. Davis has most recently shown his art at the Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center at Oregon State University, with permanent installations of his work there, as well as The Studio Museum in Harlem’s “Speaking of People: Ebony, Jet and Contemporary Art.” During this studio visit, Davis and I got to talking about his most recent paintings and a few of his affinities found on Tumblr.

I walked in to see a massive painting he’d been working on. The painting brings together imagery inspired by the cover of We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite; an Oregon State University student protest; portraits of John Coltrane, Max Roach, and Charles Mingus; a quotation from Ralph Abernathy; and a large black gestural stroke on an abstract background of yellow and orange hues. At eight-by-six feet, this commissioned piece goes along with 25 smaller portraits of black leaders for the Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center at OSU.

PAUL MAZIAR: What are you working on?

JEREMY OKAI DAVIS: These 25 portraits lining the wall and this painting that’s been kind of morphing over the past few weeks. I’m trying to keep things loose.

I was talking to a friend who was here earlier and was telling him I want to do a really gestural black stroke across the painting. It’s funny because I’m kind of over-thinking it, when the idea of gestural is to just do it. I think I need to be in the right mindset to be that free and loose. It’s kind of intimidating. Usually it happens if I’m working on something else. If I’m doing something, I’ll look over there and think, Now, it’s time.

Do you think that gesture has anything to do with the sounds you hear from the Roach album? It has a lot of moments…

Punchy moments. Maybe that’s what it’s gonna take. Like when Abbey Lincoln screams. Maybe it takes getting invested in those tracks to make me do something crazy. Like a moment. The painting is called Predicting a Movement.

You’re waiting for the moment to make that brush stroke… you want to get around doing it a certain way.

I want to make an actual gesture. It’s difficult, though. I want it to be gestural, but to tell yourself to be loose and free, you’re putting yourself in this box. And for me that mark is such an important part of the piece. I want it to be free, but it’s a big part of the piece so it has to be right, strange.

Where are these images from?

The OSU archive. In 1969, the Black Student Union had staged a walk-out, when Fred Milton, an OSU football player, was asked to shave his beard; he didn’t want to, and the coach threatened to kick him off the team. They did a lot of things like this, but this image is one I was really drawn to. The image of union and movement.

Is that what accounts for the drips and splatters in your figurative paintings?

I think so. For me the drips and that kind of thing make it feel more like a painting. When you get in close and tight on them, taking little squares out to look at, they’re a bunch of little abstract paintings. That’s how I come at it, instead of smoothing out everything.

When I go to galleries and museums, I enjoy myself more when I move around the paintings, seeing how the work shifts. The richness and buildup of the paint are super important to me. I get disappointed sometimes when I see something online that I really love, and I go to see the piece in person at an art show — and it’s exactly like it was on the Internet! Like a flat jpeg with a smooth surface, etc. — no improvisation. I think you hope for a new experience.

There’s this other element to your paintings that, to me, is shared with jazz, experimental music and poetry — where you return to it and see something new. Like you’ve never encountered it before.

I’m just now starting to get into jazz and investigating it, listening to Money Jungle (1963) a bunch; I’m getting so much out of it. Every listen feels different, depending on your mood. That’s the amazing thing about jazz: it’s timeless and location-less.

I see a lot of movement in Predicting a Movement. Has this album been a recent influence?

I don’t think one song in particular, but yeah, jazz in general has been.

I was going to bring up affinities. Your Tumblr has a lot of good stuff on it. Some of it seems to have a timelessness about it. Do you think much about tradition or trends?

No. I don’t think about that at all. Well, I do. I think about them and try to avoid them.

You’ve got a lot of powerful imagery here. How about the museum guard photograph, where the man is standing there looking at a painting?

That was a film shot at the Portland Art Museum. My friend Nate and I were just walking around and we saw him standing there looking at that painting for a really long time. It’s a really great painting: just the sea, that’s all it is. It’s one of those things you can just get totally lost in; the water starts moving if you look at it long enough.

Imagine how many times he’s seen that painting!

Maybe he does that every day; maybe getting lost in that painting is his break.

Vince Staples’ Señorita (2015) video is amazing. At the end where he opens up his coat and it’s just a black hole. That part is insane!

That is a crazy video. I’m super inspired by a lot of what’s happening in hip hop right now. There was a long period of time where musicians weren’t considering their audience, and the music videos weren’t considerate of the audience either. It seems like right now, more than the last 15-20 years, the artists are really thinking of the audience and this video is just another example of that.

Everything in that piece, considering the cultural climate right now, is really important. I think I posted two in a row, that one and Close Your Eyes and Count to Fuck (2014) by Run the Jewels. They share similarities. The Vince Staples video is like a zoo, basically, where people are just watching the chaos, like all the news reports right now. And with the Run The Jewels song, with Zach de la Rocha, the scenario is a young black man and a middle-aged cop. They’re just wrestling, moving through the streets; it’s a choreographed fight. They end up in a house pouring milk all over each other and end up totally exhausted at the end. It’s supposed to show a dance that cultures have been having for years and years and how we’re trained to fight, trained to be at odds.

It seems like you’ve always had cultural references in your paintings.

Definitely. Whether it’s just pop culture, celebrity news, or the real news that people want to pay attention to. I pay attention to it all. It makes its way into my work, always. But it’s never in your face. I’ve always tried to make sure my paintings aren’t grandstanding. I want people to see it, think about it, go home and let it stick. They hear a news report or they’re listening to jazz and might think of this painting. I just want these little moments in time with my paintings to kind of bubble up.

What’s the idea behind the series of smaller portraits?

I wanted to find inspiring African-Americans from history. Pictures of them, not as kids, but young, before they were legendary. The reason being is that I wanted them to be relatable to the kids who’ll see them. To show possibility: they were bright-eyed kids just like you. So it’s these and then the Lonnie B. Harris portrait with the rest alongside him.

What’s next?

My mom’s from Liberia and I am just now realizing I don’t know a lot about her. I want to do a body of work that’ll be an investigation of Liberia and her in some way, relating to the disconnect that I have from my mom and Africa. A charting of my education of where she came from in my paintings. I have images in my head of what it’ll be, but I’m not sure yet.

I’ve always tried to temper my excitement, but it’s hard for me to think about this work being at OSU for all time and not get stoked. This stuff is going to be permanently installed. As an artist, that’s kind of my goal, to inspire for all time. I look at someone like David Hockney, and a lot of these artists, the pieces they made in the ‘60s and ‘70s. I still call back those for inspiration. To think that the possibility is out there that some kid in 2070 might stumble into the Cultural Center and see my paintings and decide to be a painter, is pretty amazing. I think that’s the kind of the goal for me. It keeps the ball rolling, you know?

Are all children artists?

I think so. Everybody has a creative side. I think everybody can exercise that if they choose to. Some people don’t have the desire to exercise it, they have other things that are important to them, which is fine.

It takes a certain person to let it take over. It’s a fun thing to do, but to let art take over your life is kind of scary. To let it be the thing that you do can be kind of frightening. I think everybody isn’t a genius, but everyone has the capacity to be a genius at their chosen vocation.

The post Politics on the Canvas, Online, Now: A Studio Visit with Jeremy Okai Davis appeared first on artcritical.

Karma: June 15 to August 30, 2015
39 Great Jones Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery
New York City, 917-675- 7508

Harlem: July 16 to October 25, 2015
144 West 125th Street between Lenox Avenue (Malcolm X Boulevard) and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard (7th Avenue
New York City, 646-242-2142

Two exhibitions, running concurrently, afford an exciting opportunity to think about Stanley Whitney. A selection of works from the 1990s are on view at Karma Books and Gallery while more recent works, from 2008 to 2015, can be seen at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The downtown exhibition, marking the publication of a sizable book on Whitney’s work by Karma Books (reviewed earlier this summer at artcritical) is comprised of five large paintings in the main gallery and 84 small paintings and works on paper salon hung in the entrance space. At the Studio Museum, 29 paintings, six color gouaches and five black gouaches afford ample indication of where Whitney is right now.

In their rows of rounded shapes and loosely brushed compartments Whitney’s earlier paintings resemble shelves or cavities, reading like sections of a catacomb or stacked fruit. Stacking is significant as the paintings are evidently constructed to accommodate color building with units or blocks of color; this has, indeed, become foundational to all his painting since the1990s. The artist spent five years living in Rome during the 1990s when he also visited Egypt and it seems clear that the nature of those built environments, including the Pyramids, were important constructive ideas for his subsequent development. The structure in the earliest of the large oil paintings at Karma, Radical Openness, (1991) evinces an already begun absorption in image making that combines drawing and painting through repetition and difference. By this I mean that, rather than change a basic structure from one painting to the next, the basic structure remains the same: graphic invention and shifts in color space become the painting’s subject. Though continued right through to the present day, there is no sign of this structure inhibiting or reducing the possibilities of emotional or intellectual expression, of inquiry through color and line. In fact, it becomes indexical of changes along the way. It is color that made this format necessary—emerging slowly, as can be seen in the 84 small works at Karma. Drawings indicate a range of possible directions, but it is color that definitively led to this particular structure.

The smaller paintings and drawings are like episodic, graphic narratives. Picasso’s The Dream and Lie of Franco, (1937) comes to mind, as might the way Bonnard uses drawing and mark making to define spatial elements in his paintings. In each new iteration, enough is carried from the last painting to the next to make the playoff between repetition and difference central to his effort. The sectional frontality and scale changes act like amplifications or diminutions of sound. The analogy with music is an obvious one, but no less relevant for that. The main difference, from the point of view of Whitney’s work, is that music occurs in a prescribed temporal sequence whereas in painting time only passes for the viewer: colors change as you look at them depending on where the eye is resting or moving.

Drawing is implicit in the way Whitney wields his brush: the degree to which he leaves traces of the latter visible indicates its role in the placement and organization of color. In the recent paintings this drawing element remains crucial although with the reduction of one color placed over another it is the individual color blocks that carry the energy. The color blocks are kinetic. It can be argued that nothing we see is static for our means of perception, but color complicates this, as it is already a fugitive phenomenon that operates between the phenomenological and the conceptual. There is nothing neutral when it comes to color, no known definitive form, and it is this that is so decisively at play in Whitney’s paintings. As Walter Benjamin put it, “Color does not relate to optics the way line relates to geometry.” In Lightnin, (2009), for instance, a 40 x 40 inch painting, one constellation of color supersedes another in even a few moments of looking. The vertical narrow rectangles of each side and the bottom edge pulsate, sending the eye on a rotating journey; adjacent colors pair up, blue and red on one side, green and yellow on the other. Similar animation happens everywhere across the painting: recombinations of color and pictorial space are endless. This transforms painting into something like a time-based medium in which time runs in every direction and at a constantly varying speed.

Whitney’s working method constitutes what could be described as lyrical pragmatism. The way the paintings look to have been made, from top left to bottom right, is analogous to reading script, or painting a wall methodically. He typically completes a picture over two sessions, with three to four drying days between. This speed of execution allows for surprises and time to absorb what is happening in the painting. Rather than the painting being the fulfillment of a set plan, therefore, it is a result of allowing any number of sources from life to inform and influence its outcome. The vitality of the paintings attests to the success of this strategy, leaving the viewer with a desire to see more, however much each completed painting refuses to be still and known. Repeated viewing appears to be a requirement, one that can sustain thought and pleasure in equal amounts.

The post Structured by Color: Stanley Whitney, Works from the 1990s and Now appeared first on artcritical.

Farrah Karapetian: Stagecraft at Von Lintel Gallery

2685 S La Cienega Blvd (between Alivar and Cullen streets)
January 17 to February 28, 2015
Los Angeles, 310 559 5700

When I was a child my father would delight me by playing Ken Nordine’s word jazz. We’d listen and laugh along with the absurdist poetry delivered in Nordine’s mellifluous baritone accompanied by bebop improvisations, breathy flute trills, the swish of a brush across a snare drum. I’d close my eyes and stare with my ears at the scenes Nordine sketched with words — short, jokey stories brimming with onomatopoeic ornamentation and witty little rhymes. His 1966 album, Colors, is a collection of 34 roughly one-and-a-half-minute vignettes, each characterizing a color with anthropomorphic anecdotes: ecru is a critic, for instance; burgundy is bulging and fat; lavender is an old, old, old, old, old lady.

I thought briefly of Ken Nordine after seeing Farrah Karapetian’s exhibition of new photograms and sculpture, “Stagecraft,” at Von Lintel Gallery. The comparison is perhaps a bit corny, I admit, but there is some correspondence to be found between Nordine’s evocation of colors through words and music, and Karapetian’s evocation of music through shape and color. There are shared elements of playfulness, improvisation and mood; with both, our mind fills in what the eyes do not see. While earlier works alluded to subjects with political weight (portraying riot police, protestors, guns and contraband), this series uses the accoutrements of music and performance as a vehicle to investigate the mutability of perception and the rhythmic possibilities of light, color, and space.

Karapetian began with bronzes and blues — the colors one feels listening to jazz, according to what Karapetian’s father revealed to her about his own sensations when listening to music. In Got to the Mystic (all works 2014), we see her father as a ghostly figure playing a skeleton of a drum kit, his face obscured by the hi-hat; the drum stands and rims and closures and cymbals register a stark white against the ruddy ground of the photogram.

Karapetian’s painstakingly crafted replica of her father’s drum kit — minus the skins and shells, leaving just the armature, the metal lugs, rods and stands — sits in an adjoining room. The cymbals are formed from glass, allowing light to pass through. A spotlight positioned on the floor of the gallery illuminates the sculpture from below, casting its shadow against the wall, and revealing the apparatus at play in Karapetian’s photograms. Many artists go to lengths to conceal their processes, but Karapetian, in the service of transparency, divulges her sources, shows us the “negative.”

The viewer, however, does not get the full experience, rather just a glimpse of how things work. In Three Muses one can clearly see the three bodies in space, but one can only imagine the haptic experience of three people trying to position themselves in a completely dark room, waiting for the flash of light that would inscribe their shadows on the paper. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. Pause. Flash.

Karapetian spoke to me about the primacy of physical interaction in her work, from situating her subjects in the darkened space to the handling of the paper and processing. The viewer sees only the final result, limited to the perspective of the paper itself. We see only what the paper sees, as it mutely records the impression of shadow and light across its surface. It bears other marks, too, though. Around the edges, little fingerprints are indelibly smudged, and the pricks of the push pins that held the paper in place are visible. The prints hold a remarkable texture, impossible to capture in the jpegs you’d see online.

There are bronzes and blues — but also crimsons and yellows and indigos and deep, resonant greens. Yes, resonance: the colors here have it, just like sounds do. Light waves that linger. My memory of the electric greens and cyans of Kräftig — the color is so pure, so saturated and intense — challenges the colors I now see in the digital reproduction of the piece on my laptop and in the exhibition catalogue. Strange, how variable color is in real life and in reproduction. Stranger still, to think of these vibrant greens and blues produced by red and magenta lights. In the darkroom, the gap between perceived and resultant color becomes a playground of improvisation and experimentation, “a very present tense experience,” as Karapetian put it. Like a jazz musician mounting the stage, she may already know the riff, but where the song goes from there will always be a surprise.

The post In Colors: Farrah Karapetian at Von Lintel appeared first on artcritical.