September 9, 2016 to January 14, 2017
500 Capp Street (at 20th Street)
San Francisco, 415 872 9240

Skellig Michael, a rugged island off the southern coast of Ireland, is known for the austere, beehive-like monastery built there in the 6th century. In 1993, the Conceptual artist David Ireland and his friend, photographer and filmmaker Jane Levy Reed, traveled to Skellig Michael for inspiration for their 1994 exhibition, “Skellig,” at San Francisco’s Ansel Adams Center for Photography, a show that consisted of photographs of shared authorship, objects in his studio, and pages from their travel journals. Ireland was primarily a sculptor and painter, with this being his first major use of photography and film. Through it, Reed wrote, Ireland “sought to convey the monastic experience of Skellig as a metaphor for his own acts of artistic creation.” The name itself translates as “Splinter of Stone,” a reference that held special meaning for the artist.

That Skellig is now the subject of “The Echo,” the third curation at the newly opened 500 Capp Street Foundation, by Bob Linder and Diego Villalobos, the foundation’s co-curators. Linder was a student and personal friend of Ireland, and Villalobos was a student of Linder. The rooms of Ireland’s house have remained essentially as he left them, but, using documentary photography from the span of Ireland’s history in the house history, Linder and Villalobos curate additional artworks and objects (such as furniture) that contextualize of refer to the artworks within each quasi-quarterly exhibition.

Downstairs, viewers enter the Foundation into a former accordion workshop, where a suite of Ireland and Reed’s photographic works from the 1994 Ansel Adams show is hung. There are two images of a staircase carved into the sheer face of a cliff leading up from the sea to the island’s monastery, an ancient stone cross, and a wash basin, with jars, which may be from either Ireland’s own house or from the monastery. Rust-colored Constructivist squares are painted on top of the black and white photographs, with large areas masked by white paint, creating a play between documentation, illusion, and object. In one photograph in this entry space, viewers can see a repurposed band-saw machine for giving films the bobbing sensation of being afloat appears.

Ireland was born in Bellingham WA and studied printmaking at the California College of the Arts, before serving in the military. Afterward, he worked as a tour guide in Africa, a carpenter, an insurance salesman, and ran an African import shop on San Francisco’s high-rent Union Street. (Sculptures shaped like Africa or elephant ears can be found throughout the home, especially upstairs.) He returned to art school in his 40s, enrolling at the San Francisco Art Institute, and fell under the artistic influence of John Cage, Joseph Beuys, and especially Marcel Duchamp, who is pictured many times around the house, such as in Ireland’s bedroom and study.

Ireland purchased 500 Capp Street in 1975, and, like Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau, made the run-down Victorian not only a site for artistic production, but also an artwork itself. Resembling his prints of the time, the building’s walls emphasize their own hand working, cracks, and blemishes, glazed all over with polyurethane to preserve their history of imperfections. Paul Greub — the former occupant of 500 Capp Street, an accordion maker who ran his business out of his home for 45 years and, evidently, never threw anything away — provided Ireland with a treasure trove of readymades and inspiration: Greub’s hoard of old jars, old brooms, old chairs, old lamps, etc. There are small brass plaques that commemorate aspects of the renovation, as when Ireland helped Greub move a heavy safe out of the house by rope and plank, and the safe fell twice, damaging the walls and floors. Ireland installed two plaques at the base of two stairs to commemorate the event: The Safe Gets Away for the First Time November 5, 1975 and The Safe Gets Away for the Second Time November 5, 1975 (both 1975).

Upstairs, one finds more renovation projects, as well as a catalogue of Ireland’s work. Complexly twisted wires fall somewhere between sculpture and drawing. Several bookcases are filled with his own work and knickknacks, as well as Greub’s jars — filled with sawdust or other materials gathered in the house’s reworking. Ireland remarked on these as being like small exhibitions of their own. He made more than 200 “dumbballs,” small balls of concrete that were the by-products of his “meditations,” i.e. passing them back and forth between his hands, and which he duly stationed around his house, sometimes stuck in the corners of rooms or on the ceiling, other times carefully displayed in buckets or basins, or on tables.

There’s a great deal of natural light in the house, emphasized by the gloss of the urethane-coated walls. One room emphasizes this fact especially. Another, a dining room whose table is particularly full of sculptures, is slightly darker: an untitled piece is composed of a copper printing plate covering a window. A reel-to-reel tape is included here, of Ireland enumerating the things seen from that window, which had been broken, before sealing it entirely.

Two other rooms, a guest bedroom and a study, are stripped to their natural white state instead of the urethanic ochre. They reprise the Skellig photographs, with a contact sheet marked with a red cross, set on a shelf in the guest bedroom, and a Skellig photo on a desk in the study. Here also are several recurring images: a water buffalo skull from Africa; a picture of Duchamp and an homage to his In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915), made with a shovel trapped in a banded cord of wood; several Constructivist-indebted paintings, including some on cardboard boxes; and memorabilia from Ireland’s life.

The rooms read like mysteries strewn with possible clues: an opened book on James Lee Byars, its pages burned, a sting of lights shaped like fishes from Ireland’s hometown, allusive sculptures, personal possessions. Ireland’s work is understated, beautiful and intriguing but not precious. In “The Echo, Linder and Villalobos honor Ireland’s life and art, much in the spirit of Ireland himself, who venerated and preserved the contents of the former owner of 500 Capp Street. Linder and Villalobos’s actions not only create a continuum, with Ireland’s intentions and work, but underscore the basic human need to remember and make meaning from the history and stories of our lives.

David Ireland’s house was rescued by artist friends and wealthy supporters who thought that 500 Capp Street should be preserved. Carlie Wilmans, head of The Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, bought the home in 2008, shortly before Ireland’s death the following year, at the urging of many of his friends. Ireland referred to his work in the house as “stabilizing things,” but ironically the first job was to shore up the unstable foundation weakened by his ongoing excavations. He, and we, are lucky the house did not collapse on itself. The small, guided tour offered at the house ends in the dining room where we were seated around a big table laid with silver dessert bowls filled with concrete blobs and silver spoons. The antique gas lamps, the religious figures, the horns, the altar to Natalie Wood, the cabinets lined with reliquary jars of sawdust, the balled-up wallpaper, the leftover birthday cake for Greub — it’s all still there in all its unorthodox glory.

The post Reverberations: Revisiting David Ireland’s “Skellig” Work appeared first on artcritical.

March 11 to May 29, 2016
701 Mission Street (at 3rd Street)
San Francisco, 415 978 2787

In her recent exhibition at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Samara Golden captures the eerie feeling of glancing into your neighbor’s apartment to realize that its floor plan is identical to your own but in reverse. For “A Trap in Soft Division,” Golden has appropriated the Center’s natural skylights, iterating the same set of furnishings across the 18 lit alcoves, making three groupings of six installations. Each furniture set is mounted upside down in a skylight, visible in a large, tiled mirror placed below the entire installation. Structured identically throughout — with a couch bookended by table lamps facing a low-coffee table and, behind, floor-to-ceiling windows — divisions between the three sets are denoted by minor transformations of light and ornamentation.

Although illuminated by the natural light from the real windows in each room, the character of each space is dramatically altered by the shift from that existing warmth to the cool tones introduced by the additional artificial light. The decorations surrounding the windows further the divide, defining each room’s style and classing it atmospherically and temporally. The array of rooms may be read either as a single space across a span of time or as six different chambers occupied in different ways. Strewn-about ornaments confer the semblance of life on these spaces, which are at once alien and uncannily familiar.

The unexceptional essentials of life are concentrated into these cubicles of space — disparate tasks brought into an unusual proximity. The arrangement of the accessories hazards a casual tone, one set by a computer, in one variation, which is open and ever so slightly askew, or by a blanket tossed nonchalantly across the stiff back of the sofa in another. Details like an abandoned plate of pasta, still slathered with cooling food, create a space that has just been absented, caught in physical and temporal states of suspension. However much these small gestures are intended to open these spaces to us, their rigidity and uniformity rebuff entry. We are warmly invited into a space that we cannot occupy, in a literal sense, because of its inverted orientation, but also because it is not plastic enough to accommodate the multiplicity of our forms.

The resultant rooms seem to speak in the aesthetics of urban living, of existing carefully on the surface of a space without putting down roots. But they also engage in the wider phenomenon of standardized form: you sit, alone, in an architecture shared by hundreds of others in the tens of blocks surrounding your own. You start at the noise of your alarm, only to relax apprehensively with the realization that the sound has emanated through your floor from the apartment below. The objects that occupy these in-between spaces are as signs that become representative of their makers, expressions of identity as subtle (or as blatant) as laptop-stickers. These are the materialized inscriptions that allow us to lay claim to mass-produced forms. The discomfort of Golden’s show is in the recognition of how uneasily and superficially these assertions of individuality lie.

“A Trap in Soft Division” speaks to cultural standardization that begins in tract housing and apartment blocks and proceeds into the minutiae of our lives, from our electronics to the shirts that we wear. Peering over the barrier into the magic mirror, we are bestowed with an omniscient understanding of the ubiquitous forms that rule our world; the computer built into this upside-down installation could very well be the tiny laptop into which I am now typing these very words. The exhibition’s title speaks to this sense of complacent, comfortable limitation. It’s a trap because we are not truly given a choice, yet it is not so restrictive as to force a change.

Golden sees her own work as a solution to the problem that it proposes, which “effectively breaks through the solitude it is meant to depict, fleetingly carving out a space that brings visitors together through a joint experience.” While persuaded by the alienation that the artist has captured so thoroughly in her representation of contemporary existence, I remain unconvinced by the community that I am meant to have joined; rather than inspiring a lonely companionship, “A Trap In Soft Division” heightens my sense of distance from those strangers whose curious eyes I avoid in the cold surface of the mirror.

The post Little Boxes: Samara Golden at Yerba Buena appeared first on artcritical.

April 8 to April 23, 2016
Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street (at 24th Street)
San Francisco, 415 243 0825

For three weeks this April, CAPITAL, the San Francisco gallery co-run by Bob Linder and Jonathan Runcio, is flying its banner at Minnesota Street Project (a brand new art venue in the City’s Dogpatch neighborhood) with the group show “BLACK STANDARD.”

Three artists are featured in this pop-up exhibition: Davina Semo, a New York artist who showed at CAPITAL in September and October of 2015; Phil Wagner, based in Los Angeles; and the Bay Area’s Survival Research Laboratories (SRL), which was founded by Mark Pauline in 1978 and has been labeled a “robot art collective.” The exhibition — which encompasses a large gallery, an adjacent screening room, and part of the atrium — resembles an architectural construction site.

Two hulking SRL devices, Pitching Machine (1999) and Inchworm (1987), are currently parked in the Minnesota Street Project atrium. They’re gargantuan (each larger than a car) and capable of strange feats; Pitching Machine can launch two-by-fours at immense velocity, like a nail gun, while Inchworm’s stack of metal pincers can hoist, mash, and tear apart large objects. The machines are remarkable for their exposed components: gears, chains, wires, rivets, batteries and tanks are all discernible.

Running Machine (1992) stands in the main exhibition space, its lanky arm piercing the air above with a terminal knife-like appendage. Smaller wiry “props” dot the gallery floor, appearing like hazard beacons, all called Prop (Offspring) and made in 2015. The gadgets are exhibited in a quiescent state, but the unmistakable acrid odor of burnt fuel is a reminder that these are functioning contraptions. A raucous din emanates from the adjoining screening room in which footage from prior live performances depicts the machines in action. They tug, heave, crush objects and each other, spew fire and blast sound waves, enacting processes similar to demolition and gutting.

The walls in the main area are hung with four sizable paintings by Wagner and mixed media works by Semo. Two of Wagner’s untitled canvases, densely layered with the names of materials used in some of the art on view, offer an inventory of sorts: BRONZE, CANVAS, CLAY, FOAM, GLASS, INK, OIL, RUBBER, STEEL, VINYL, WAX, and WOOD. Lists and plans are alluded to with another pair of works featuring the word “AGENDA” painted repeatedly in vertical columns. Semo’s larger contribution, WE DON’T WIN ANYMORE (2016), is a giant “XX” rendered in black, powder-coated steel chain; it stands sentinel, like a safety barricade. Smaller square-shaped pieces — concrete slabs cast with steel, leather, glass, or other elements — utilize industrial materials in unexpected ways. For example, SHE HID HER FACE IN MY ARMS AND THE WATER STREAMING OVER HER HEAD MINGLED WITH HER TEARS (2016) is comprised of a concrete square layered with striated, woven carbon fiber-copper fabric, its face bisected by an embedded horizontal glass rod.

This show is especially appurtenant considering Minnesota Street Project was itself a place of construction merely a month ago. It also acknowledges the Bay Area’s current art moment. In addition to the debut of Minnesota Street Project, the home of conceptual artist David Ireland, at 500 Capp Street, was transformed into a museum; the new Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed BAMPFA opened its doors; and SFMOMA, currently undergoing a major expansion, is set to reopen in May.

In this context, the show’s title holds special relevance. The term refers to a black flag, which historically has been associated with revolutionary groups, symbolizing an ethos of “No Surrender.” “BLACK STANDARD” salutes the resilience of the local art community which, despite the “tech invasion,” gentrification and soaring rents, continues to lay exciting new foundations.

The post Black Flag: CAPITAL at Minnesota Street Project appeared first on artcritical.

In 1967, Robert Smithson took a bus from New York City to Passaic, New Jersey, to investigate the definition of the word “monument.” Instead of any grand structures meant to mark history and stand the test of time, Smithson found significance in the mundane: a bridge, a parking lot, a sandbox. Nearly 50 years later, curator Joseph del Pesco from The Kadist Foundation in San Francisco asked photographer Jason Fulford to read Smithson’s essay, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” and visit Passaic to make photographs, using the essay as a point of departure. Fulford invited writer Hernán Díaz to join him and to create Monument (2015), an online, multi-media photo essay presented on The Kadist’s website.

Fulford’s photographs demonstrate a masterful ability to illuminate uncanny correlations and bizarre banalities of vernacular culture through sequences of otherwise unrelated images. In Monument, the combination of Fulford’s imagery with Díaz’s words exists in a translational loop, where information transitions back and forth between visual, textual, and abstract forms. Whatever manifestation the information takes, it remains anchored to the concepts of codes and ruins. The final sequence in Monument begins with an image of a pharmacy’s façade where an awning and a wall sign both read “Lucy’s Pharmacy.” While one sign is clearly worn and the other is newer, they create an almost perfect redundancy — a visual stutter. Beneath the image, Díaz’s words appear onscreen, typed letter by letter, as a female voice reads a Spanish translation of the text. A few slides later, a question in Spanish types onto a black screen as the same female voice recites the English translation. On the next slide Morse code beeps as it types below an image of a two-dimensional black dog on a stake casting its two-dimensional black shadow on the lawn it ornaments — another visual stutter. The Morse code answers the previous slide’s question:

Q: ¿QUÉ ES LO QUE QUEDA CUANDO NO HAY RUINAS? [trans: “WHAT IS LEFT WHEN THERE ARE NO RUINS?”]

A: … ___ __ . _ …. .. _. __. .._ _. _ ._. ._ _. … ._.. ._ _ ._ _… ._.. .

[“SOMETHINGUNTRANSLATABLE”]

The next and last slide is black and silent, then the whole sequence starts again in an infinite loop of its own.

Monument functions much like a book, albeit a digital one, though without the tacky skeuomorphic designs like animated “page” turning. Instead, Monument translates the qualities of a book into the digital, multi-media platform. In general, reading a book and using a computer are solitary, private pastimes. They can occur in public, but the reader/user focuses on the book or computer, and not her surroundings. Books and the Internet can connect us with billions of other people, and they can freeze time, existing in a temporal limbo when they are closed.

With the seemingly endless torrent of artist websites, blogs, and online magazines, it is easy to ignore — or at least be ambivalent about — the majority of art displayed on the Internet. In almost every case, viewers experience the work through some kind of standardized manner, such as an image carousel, slideshow, or grid. When we click, scroll, and swipe through countless images, how many truly affect us? On its most basic level, Monument is a digital slideshow of images, text, and sound. In this iteration, however, Fulford, Díaz, and Pesco elevate the format’s stale viewing experience to a method that is both novel and nostalgic. As an alternative to the monotonous click- or scroll-through presentation pervading the web-based photo world, Fulford, Díaz, and Pesco developed a dynamic and interactive method that necessitates greater participation and offers a greater reward.

Monument requires decoding, both literally and figuratively, and in this way the project takes full advantage of its digital existence. Fulford and Díaz insisted that the Morse code be copy-pastable so that viewers could translate the anachronistic cipher. Reading Smithson’s essay alongside Monument amplifies the project’s process of re-contextualizing the past within the present, making the essay’s online presence in PDF form a valuable asset (unless you have a copy of the 1967 Artforum lying around). In his essay, Smithson writes about a landscape by Samuel F.B. Morse, and remarks on its lack of finitude: “A little statue with right arm held high faced a pond (or was it the sea?). ‘Gothic’ buildings in the allegory had a faded look, while an unnecessary tree (or was it a cloud of smoke?) seemed to puff up on the left side of the landscape.” Fulford and Díaz continue Smithson’s line of questioning comparison of fabricated binaries: pond/sea, tree/smoke, dots/dashes, zeroes/ones, monument/parking lot. And they propose “Samuel Morse put an end to vastness. With the telegraph, immensity became a ruin.” The telegraph imploded our notions of size and speed in the 19^th century. Today, we can carry infinity in our pockets and the instantaneous speed of digital technology erases the present: the future is immediately translated into the past, a ruin. Monument asks, “What is left when there are no ruins?” A more appropriate question may be “what is left when there is nothing but ruins?”

The post Something Untranslatable: A Digital Homage to Smithson’s “Monuments” appeared first on artcritical.

January 22 to February 22, 2014

515 West 24th Street
New York, 212-206-9300

Photorealist painter Robert Bechtle’s source images are most likely not trending on Instagram. His trademark subjects, when reviewed as a list, sound tearfully forgettable: parked cars, covered parked cars, middle class suburban houses, trees, peopleless streets. Yet, he conjures something moving and miraculous with these ascetic ingredients. The watercolor Six Cars on 20th Street (2007) centers on a beige, empty road that fills the picture to the brim, save for a small glimpse of blue sky in the corner. A few precisely placed, transparent cars are enjoying small patches of shade, leisurely anchored to San Francisco’s hilly street as if casually immune to gravity. It feels as if the very Californian sun it portrays dried off the paint. Bechtle’s nonfiction of the most overlooked moments in life can send viewers to the verge of panic about becoming enthralled by the beauty of sheer banal insignificance.

Bechtle’s current exhibition at Gladstone Gallery provides a much-needed respite in a world serving up artworks constantly growing bigger, louder, and more ingratiating. The artist himself sheepishly peers out from one of the few oil paintings in the show, Bob’s Sebring (2011), next to a silver convertible a bit too snazzy for his outfit, in front of a square garage. Born in California in 1937, Robert Bechtle seems to have arrived at his minimal subjects and technique after carefully rejecting all that was cool. He was exposed to German art while serving as an army private there in the 1950s, and enjoyed Pop art shows at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1962. He purposefully avoided Richard Diebenkorn’s painting courses while studying at the California College of Arts, in fear of becoming influenced by his contagious energy. After some short-lived trials, he found his long-term subject: keenly scrutinized painted portraits of everyday cars and empty streets, based on snapshots. The paintings are furnished from a Kodachrome, sun-bleached palette, and a seemingly interminable supply of time.

Most of the paintings in the show are based off of images taken in San Francisco and the Northern California suburbs in its vicinity, where the temperature dial is locked at 55 degrees and the sun’s simplifying rays expel clouds, distinguishable seasons, and palpable deadlines. The time of Clay Street, Alameda (2013) appears to be just past noon according to its telling, jewel-blue shadows. The supposed subject matter lingers at the edge of the well-measured composition, perfectly skewed to avoid approaching the edge of motion. Car-lined streets extend to the horizon as people patiently await the discovery of worthwhile destinations. Brief, poetic painterly details do not awaken their enervation; rhythmic telephone wires drape past the sky like garlands, and the unevenly trimmed canopies are feathered by brilliant numberless shades of green. A dirty, rectangular blotch in the middle of the street hides an attempt to restore something -– what sort of excitement could have possibly disturbed this neighborhood? Meanwhile, the still sunlight embalms the scene like room temperature formaldehyde, so clear it’s practically negligible. The photographic qualities of this work are apparent, but the shutter’s ability to capturing fleeting moments is irrelevant as time itself seems to be immobile anyway.

For Bechtle, a stationary mobile car is a powerful symbol of ennui. The watercolor Covered Car on De Haro Street (2013) is accompanied by an almost identical charcoal incarnation, Covered Car on de Haro Street II, where every grain of paper is mobilized for expression. This miniature portrait of a parked car, humbly presented in a size befitting the deceptively minor subject, is possibly the most immediately arresting work in the show. In a view reminiscent of that from the spontaneous cropping by a surveillance camera, a shapely cluster of spectral yellow tarp covering a vehicle is suspended on a slanted street, triggering a gentle, engaging instability. There is something weighty and insouciantly sublime about this unmanned outline of a car and its Hopper-esque stillness. Momentarily, this effort to alleviate sun damage assumes the mysterious tick of a filled body bag, but imaginative viewers might be disappointed by its content: it is probably just another Sebring.

The post Bob’s Sebring: Robert Bechtle at Gladstone appeared first on artcritical.

On the back cover of Phaidon’s new Chris Johanson monograph is a close-up of I AM CLEAR NOW (2004), a vignette featuring two reclining figures on a green expanse of urban lawn, painted with acrylic and latex painting on paper. One says to the other, “I AM REALLY GLAD THAT WE TOOK THE TIME TO COME AND BE TOGETHER HERE. I HOPE THAT YOU KNOW YOU ARE REALLY IMPORTANT TO ME. OH, I ALSO WANTED TO GIVE YOU THIS. OH BY THE WAY I AM ON THESE NEW MEDS AND I FEEL REALLY GOOD NOW. I HAVE COMPLETELY STOPPED OBSESSING ABOUT THE HOLE. I AM CLEAR NOW.” This little ramble, which spills out past its thin corral of a speech bubble, is the perfect window into Johanson’s career to date.

Chris Johanson first rose to prominence in the 1990s in the San Francisco Bay Area music scene, skateboarder circles, and underground art communities. His early visual output was influenced by the stimulation of living in San Francisco; leftover paint from jobs as a house painter and the fruits of dumpster diving provided his first art materials. Now in his 40s, Johanson has distinguished himself among contemporary artists, and accordingly has received increasing institutional attention, including recent participation in shows at P.S. 1 and a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2009, and two San Francisco Museum of Modern Art survey exhibitions in 2010 and 2011.  His particular visual vocabulary is a mixture of text, simplified representational forms, geometric abstraction, and a Technicolor palette. Johanson describes his early works as fueled by dark moods, but declares in an interview found in these pages that recently, “I’m seriously into peaceful art. That’s it. I’m only doing that from now on.”

In keeping with the formula for Phaidon’s Contemporary Artists series, Chris Johanson presents the artist to us with a recent interview, a career overview, an essay on a specific subject in the artist’s oeuvre, and finally texts selected or written by the artist. This format is worthy of praise for keeping the texts closely tied to the artist’s own words and choices, but there is room for such a recipe to go awry. The opening interview with Hammer Museum curator Corrina Peipon, for example, served as a poor introduction; it was edited in a way that veraciously preserved Johanson’s trailing remarks and circumlocutions, but without necessarily bolstering a deep understanding of his practice. Critic Bob Nickas’s survey essay, on the other hand, was excellent in its breadth and provides a solid thematic foundation for the other writing in the volume. Nickas’s important feat was to wrest Johanson from the clutches of the Pop Art label and the bipartisanship of figuration and abstraction, finding instead that the artist’s “inspiration comes from […] vernacular ramblings and the pulse of his emotional life.”  I only wish that Nickas could have addressed in greater length Johanson’s curatorial and critical ties with Outsider Art—due in equal parts to his self-education and his guileless aesthetic—a label the artist uncomfortably side steps, but continues to play a role in his reception.

Noticeably missing in Chris Johanson, and other Contemporary Artists volumes, is an introduction by the editors beyond the dust jacket copy. Though Phaidon succeeds in illustrating Johanson’s achievements and significance, it has not explained the publication’s timing—why is a critical perspective crucial at this point in Johanson’s career? A peaceable answer might be found in one of the excerpts selected by Johanson, from Jonathan Raymond’s 2004 novel The Half-Life: “He felt resigned to the fact that the pattern of his days had already gone full circle, and that everything ahead of him was likely just a variation on what had come before. […] At times like this he actually believed he had achieved some wisdom in this knowledge and that some strength was to be found in his abiding passivity.”

Chris Johanson (Phaidon Press, 2013)  160 pages, 200 color illustrations, ISBN-13: 9780714856940. $59.95

The post In Praise of Peaceful Art: A Chris Johanson Monograph appeared first on artcritical.

ink on paper, reproduced in the July issue of Harpers Magazine along with other works by the artist to accompany the article “We Still Torture: The new evidence from Guantánamo,” by Luke Mitchell. Walker is to be the subject of an exhibition this fall at the Meridian Gallery, San Francisco, opening September 12.

This was an artcritical PIC in July 2009.

The post Sandy Walker at the Meridian Gallery, San Francisco appeared first on artcritical.

November 1 to December 14, 2006

Minimalism strikes me as being quaintly obsolete, deriving from a formalist aesthetic that indulges in endgame polemics, arrogantly defining itself as the logical terminus of all previous painting and as the ultimate position that painting can take. As an artist with reductionist inclinations how do you engage in this severe legacy other than by proving yourself as a yet further reduction of your predecessors?

Eleanor Wood whose work is on display at Don Soker Contemporary Art in San Francisco has skirted the periphery of Minimalism for her entire career, fine-tuning her obsessive, hypersensitive and exquisite miniature technique. In 2002 she moved from her native England to California, the displacement serving as catalyst for a body of work that demonstrates a departure from her previous practice, and rift with Minimalist orthodoxy.

Joinery, grid-work, weaving, sewing, scarification, and wound dressing are among the material associations the work evokes, a virtual compendium of fabrication techniques. The insistent reminder of age and wear, as if the images had somehow been allowed to mature and steep over lengthy periods, as if what we see were merely a vestige of the result of corrosion or patination (see no: 6), evokes a poignant sense of reflection, memory, and loss.

The fragility and apparent age of these images tempers their insistent sense of order, order that we sense rests on implicit but radical contradictions.  Take the  downplaying of the relationship of  image to the paper’s edges, or the deliberate uncertainty about what constitutes the image. This involves an unexpected union of the negation of geometric hierarchy common to Abstract Expressionism, with the precision, and compactness of Minimalism.  One might expect the pervasive grid format employed by Wood, albeit subtly subverted on occasion, to brace itself against the edges of the support, to assert its completeness and finality. However her work defies this expectation, placing the colored rectangles in singles or couples far enough from the paper’s edge as to suggest that any proportion, other than the insistent but nuanced proportion contained in the grid, is secondary. Each work embraces a sense of infinitely plotted spatial extension, while at the same time instantiating a finite, precise, insistent, rigidly contained, eye-catching, hypnotic singularity. Arguably the most significant proportion is the relative thickness of the image, built out of multiple layers, to the scale of its dimensions. If these measured 8.5 x 8.5 feet instead of inches the colored rectangle would be at least two inches thick to retain this proportion!

The intensely saturated rectangles that at once appear to hover above the surface, (notice the soft, shadows surrounding the rectangles in no: 13), while simultaneously appearing to be woven into it, (notice the grid-work of strips of wax punctuated with pinholes in 20) ultimately seem like manifestations of an infinite, slumbering latency. It is as if Wood is evoking a limitless spatial continuity, a type of invisible mathematical progression that becomes periodically visible through a temporary window-like opening.

The assertive color saturations are new to Wood’s previously monochrome repertoire. They are achieved through painting washes of watercolor onto the reverse side of absorbent paper. Waxed Japanese paper is then glued over the front surface as a barrier on top of which intricate layers of oil pastel are applied. The effect is one of finely calibrated pulsations of light and matter that mirror, on a microcosmic level, the tension between enbedment in and flotation above the paper support of the central colored rectangles.

Ultimately it is not the sense of contradiction that animates the work so much as an alternating visual current. This constantly switches between the centrifugal sense of expansiveness and indefiniteness inherent in the colored rectangles and their insistent symmetry and eye-catching centripetal focus. The work suggests that the universe, both internal and external, emerges and dissolves with respiratory regularity, and in this sense it is actually breathtaking.

The post Eleanor Wood: Mixed media on paper appeared first on artcritical.