June 15 to August 12, 2016
487 West 22nd Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 727 8585

Memory rarely resolves itself with the acuity we might wish for. Our past can never neatly unwind and allow us to recall with precision the where, when, and why of things long gone. It is, as William Faulkner famously noted, not even past, but rather an ever-evolving accumulation that grows, both foreshadowing and changing the present. In this way, the act of remembering is more piecemeal, the skeins never quite unfurling gracefully, but growing and evolving, the story changing each time we stop and pause to recollect.

In the work of the Scottish-born painter Steven MacIver, the presence of the past is acknowledged and questioned, often drawing on both the familiar and hazier areas of memory to explore how these inflections continue to inform and alter the present. With a new work on view in the compact space of Dillon Gallery, MacIver employs the physical geography and his own childhood memories of    his native Orkney, to produce a series of complexly realized drawings. MacIver began with studies of the island’s topography, gradually incorporating the forms of World War II lookout posts, which dot the coast of the United Kingdom. Like the hard-edged geometric paintings of Frank Stella, these works create space out of surface; paint and copper leaf is surgically applied to birch panels, shapes forming their own echo, patterns knitting together and forming the compositions.

In Aspect B (all works 2016), the utilitarian form of the lookout post never entirely emerges from the flawless perspectival space rendered in ethereal white against a moiré of birch. MacIver played in and around these posts as a child, and depicted here, the spaces are partial, skeletal, like the memory of a dream. A pair of panels, Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 2, at first appear as complementary positive and negative variations of each other, with gold lines intersecting one another at acute angles, but on closer inspection, the patterns formed are themselves subtle inversions, their differences yielding a larger harmony. Previously, MacIver has employed similar radiating forms, frequently using geography as a springboard, allowing patterns to emerge from nature through the act of drawing.

This transition, from the three-dimensional spaces of geography to the flat plane of the drawing, is subtle, and upon first glance, one might be inclined to place this work alongside mid-century breezy geometric abstraction, such as the prints of Anni Albers or the films of Len Lye. MacIver’s works share the tensions, the agile tactility that is latent in much of the high-Modernist output, the anxieties that artists faced in a century that constantly riled and upturned precedent. Apprehensiveness runs through MacIver’s work, and while there is an undeniable Minimalist repetition present, a greater debt could be paid to Robert Smithson and his Gordian non-sites in MacIver’s dislocation of place. Smithson’s relocations of the natural into the gallery setting questioned the very strictures of the space; MacIver’s ruptures are less dramatic, but equally assertive in their examination of space.

At a time when the world appears to be taking an inward turn, MacIver’s spatially questioning drawings seem to propose an alternate, more open view; in his expanded topography, both of memory and place, the blunted edges of the past are formed into precise geometries. The geography of memory is not logical, yet it arises from an accretive process, like the erosion of a coastline. Here both are liminal, evanescent spaces. In Strata B, triangular planes cascade down, or perhaps up, forming a larger construction that appears to disperse, colors fusing into the grain of the wood. Spaces are undone in these works, even as they coalesce. While the frictions in this work are many, between memory and geography, the natural and the manipulated, the physical and the abstract, all exist easily at the convergences of its exceptional lines.

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Peter Hujar: Lost Downtown at Paul Kasmin
January 28 to February 27, 2016
297 10th Avenue (at 27th Street)
New York, 212 563 4474

“One is not only a little individual, living a little individual life. One is in oneself the whole of mankind, and one’s fate is the fate of the whole of mankind.”
-D.H. Lawrence

Chris Killip and Peter Hujar — in 1976, an ocean apart — photographed a boy and a man, respectively, wearing combat boots. In both photographs, the combat boots are broken in. Leather is scuffed at the toes and sides. Around the ankles, the boots have wrinkled where the laces have been pulled tight, time and again. The rigid soles have softened and worn along the gait. Imprints and residues, scratches and bashes: marks that are on the boundary between body and life.

The geographical separation of these two photographs in 1976 has now, 40 years later, been reduced to a few New York City blocks. It is very easy to be comfortable, insular, and at home in Hujar’s “Lost Downtown” at Paul Kasmin Gallery. Vince Aletti, a critic at the Village Voice, a close friend and subject of Hujar’s, wrote that Hujar “defined Downtown.” Viewing Hujar’s photographs of the intellectual and creative elite, at a time when New York City was at a cultural zenith, could be limited to nostalgia and regret of what New York was and what we have lost. But, in relationship to Killip’s series “In Flagrante Two” at Yossi Milo, both series of photographs metamorphose into universals.

There are other resonances between Killip’s Youth on a Wall, Jarrow, Tyneside and Hujar’s Christopher Street Pier #2 (Crossed Legs). The boots on Killip’s youth seem too large for him. He sits in the crick of a brick wall with his knees drawn to his chest. His face is turned down: his chin tucked and his eyes closed tight like a fist. He pushes his forehead into his hands — hands that are in turn gripped by his knees. His suit jacket with mismatched pants is rumpled and stained. These also seem too big — both in the grown up style and size. Though he fights the collapse, he is being crumpled into a ball. Hujar’s “crossed legs” are laid long: one leg pulled up, the other across his knee, while the torso recedes, back flat. The legs’ length is accentuated by dense, delicate hair bookended by combat boots and denim cutoffs. Two elbows poke from the sides like fins seeming to place his hands behind his head. In Hujar’s photograph, the man balances precariously, on a wooden beam high over the Hudson River. There is little fear, though, in his languid sunbathing. Overwhelmed in clothes and imploding posture, it is Killip’s youth who is more vulnerable.

The solitary figures play with ambivalence. The pose of Killip’s youth is uncertain: what has happened to him? Is he hurt or is he in trouble? The repetitive monotony of the brick wall provides little clue — the photograph feels imprisoning and claustrophobic. For Killip, there is uncertainty in the relationship between the youth and his surroundings; the unknown people and places that define his life. Hujar’s man is confidently at leisure. His surroundings are glimpsed in another seated figure, a large boat, and buildings across the river. Rather, the indecision is contemplation: daydreaming and open to possibility. Ambiguity exists not because of the unknown, but all possibilities are present and imaginable.

Killip’s In Flagrante Two series is being exhibited for the first time in its entirety in America. The series was photographed in the Northeast of England from 1973 to 1985. It features photographs of the largely working class community as it was reacting to the economic turmoil of inflation, recession, challenges to the unions and widespread strikes. Social rebellion, particularly punk rock, rejected the mainstream — punk expressed freedom. In flagrante has a multi-faceted meaning. The term is more typically used in exposing a crime. Here, Killip’s camera is catching people in the act. The photograph becomes a document not of a crime, but of a way of life under threat. Bever’s First Day Out, Skinningrove, North Yorkshire (1982) depicts one man sitting in the driver’s seat of a small car leaning out of the window. Another man throws his body against the car as if to put his arm around the man inside it, instead leaning on the roof. The expression of the standing man’s face is difficult to read. An illegible tattoo slits his throat. His fingernails are short and dirty. Both men look to the left towards a small wedge of ocean. That this is Bever’s first day out is seen in his sallow skin, the squint of his eyes unused to sun, the pucker of his lips in an unfamiliar sigh, and the awkward way he leans against the car. (Though perhaps, Bever is the man in the car, who has yet to get out.) Bever’s pose is of one unfamiliar with a day out, he is attempting the comfort in Hujar’s “crossed legs,” but his body does not quite lay that way.

Hujar’s portraits adjoin death. Not long after these were taken, the AIDS epidemic (and subsequent Culture Wars) killed a generation of artists, including Hujar. In “Lost Downtown,” it is the people that are gone. Death is unambiguously referenced in Hujar’s seminal Candy Darling on her Deathbed (1973) and Sydney Faulkner, Hospital (II), from 1981. Hujar explicitly linked life and death in the only book he published in his lifetime, Portraits of Life and Death (1976). The similarities between the reclining postures of many of Hujar’s portraits with Faulkner show the easy mutability between life and death. Faulkner’s eyelids droop. He looks, perhaps, towards Hujar, but the gaze is unfixed. Fine white hairs at his temple and just under his nose, a hard place to shave, are indescribably poignant. Death is ever-present while the body still finds small ways to grow. The contradiction in life and death is of little relevance as the bond of love is constant. Hujar’s death and those in many of the photographs on display could be a memorial of sorts. Downtown maybe lost but the vivid presence of this community, its creative force and impact on American culture, is potent.

The touches between Killip and Hujar are in the individuals they photographed: combat boots, days off, life and death. The specter in their future is for us to define them as lost. This explanation is too trite, and provides us a nice, comfortable distance from which to mourn. It is a stance that does a disservice to Killip, Hujar and those they have portrayed. Their fate is ours.

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curated by Bella Easton and John Stark
January 4 to February 19, 2016
19 Neptune Quay
Ipswich, Suffolk, England, +44 01473 338654

Royal Academy-trained painter and independent curator Bella Easton lives and works in South London. Last year she interviewed regular artcritical contributor Paul Carey-Kent about his show “The Presence of Absence.” Carey-Kent now takes the other side, talking to Easton about the latest in her series of “Collateral Drawing” exhibitions.

PAUL CAREY-KENT: You are, first and foremost, an artist. How did you come to be organizing exhibitions?

BELLA EASTON: I grew up in a creative family: my father is a painter, and mother an oil painting restorer. For as long as I can remember I knew I would also train as an artist. After studying at the Royal Academy Schools, I exhibited my work for some years before I started organizing my own exhibitions nomadically. I then set up and ran a project space in South East London for four years, to 2015. I continue to promote and collaborate with others and have many future projects and exhibitions lined up in the UK and abroad. Being both artist and curator has enabled me to work with a diverse range of artists, writers, journalists, gallerists and curators.

What is “collateral drawing”?

Collateral Drawing is an on-going project run under my curatorial platform, BEASTONprojects. For each project I invite a co-curator, such as you, Paul, for the Berlin version. Collateral drawing explores the by-products left behind from the artist’s working process. Each invited artist reveals elements from their practice that would otherwise remain unseen by the public, alongside a finished artwork. That can take many forms, but I’m especially fascinated by the way each artist’s methods inflict marks on their surroundings. Whether dripped, scratched, taped, cut, erased, smeared, or hammered — all are repetitive and typically unguarded instances of drawing. The wall, floor or table acts as a raw surface to capture these ongoing ritualistic activities. Those work surfaces are rarely displayed, but hold a fascination of their own: not just as a documentation of the creative process, but as an insight into the relationship between what is subconscious and conscious in the artist’s work.

This is the fourth in a series of shows on that theme. Why a sequence, and how many do you expect there to be?

When Collateral Drawing was launched at Plymouth College of Art, two years ago, there was no particular emphasis on where its 10 artists came from. Subsequently, the artists have had some connection to each venue’s location, including at two international project spaces. Beton7, which was staged in Athens in 2014, showed Anglo-Greek artists. And rosalux, in Berlin in 2015, brought together artists linked to London and Berlin. The fourth show, in Ipswich, features 16 artists with an East Anglian connection.

The whole project is documented through the Collateral Drawing website. I’m keen to expand the sequence as far as I can take it. Three more are planned for London, Margate and Toronto in 2016 and ‘17. I am aware, though, that funding will be necessary! I hope it will eventually be possible to produce a book of the project.

Where is Ipswich, and what makes a good place to put on this show?

It’s near the East coast in Suffolk, East Anglia. Collateral Drawing will be presented in a public gallery within the new university site at Ipswich Docks. Having begun my artistic training in Suffolk, I have always been aware of the vibrant artistic community East Anglia attracts, and am at a stage in my own practice where exhibiting the project on home territory provides a platform for my own artistic reflection.

The series feature a high proportion of painters. Why is that?

I’m not sure that’s been planned, but perhaps my painting background has led me to work with curators who, like me, are inclined to select painters; and painting does provide a visceral and tangible way into the collateral process. That’s changing though: this show includes some artists who don’t work in conventional terms of painting or sculpture. So that the notion of collateral drawing is being challenged and expanded. I’m expecting the London CD to include several photographers, and I’m co-curating the 2017 Margate CD with photographer-curator Julia Riddiough.

Are studio visits an important part of the process?

The ideal would be to visit each artist’s studio. That isn’t always possible, but I am always conscious of the importance of picking up on the subtle habits each artist’s workspace holds — and which they themselves may not recognize because they’re so absorbed in the making.

Could you give an example or two of collateral drawing that struck you from the previous shows?

Goodness, that’s a hard task. It’s all interesting. I was intrigued by Frances Richardson’s use of an eight-by-four-foot sheet of MDF as a work surface, which, over time, built up drill holes and saw marks. It was beautifully intricate and like an artwork in itself. Or there’s the way Mark Titchner’s paperback books related to the inkjet prints set alongside them, which edited and magnified their back covers to a point where the statements printed on them were reinterpreted.

Has there been a line of development over the first three versions?

There has been a gradual process of editing down how many collateral elements represent the process of each exhibiting artist. John felt there needed to be a further reduction with the current CD and as a result we feel this has achieved greater clarity between the collateral clues and the finished artwork.

You’ve included your own work each time. What do you think you’ve gained from that double involvement?

It’s helped me to be far more objective about my own practice, and made me consider the methods I use more thoroughly and openly when I return to my studio. It is a very direct and honest way to develop as an artist, similar to peer learning.

You also have a co-curator, also an artist in the show and a local resident. Can you tell us something about John and his work, and how you have collaborated?

We were introduced through John’s gallerist, Zavier Ellis and found we had Suffolk in common. John recently moved to Aldeburgh with his wife, Da-eun, after living in South Korea. We both studied at the Royal Academy Schools, albeit at different times, and I like John’s philosophy and humorous outlook on life. He’s been a real asset.

The last time I saw Glenn Brown’s work, it occupied the whole of the Gagosian booth at Frieze. How did you persuade such a high profile and commercially successful artist to take part in such a modestly funded and provincially located show?

Yes, and John was especially thrilled when Glenn agreed to take part as he admires him very much as an artist who — like him — has made a successful career from re-working old masters. Glenn grew up in Norfolk and now lives and works between London and Suffolk. He really liked the unusual concept and was very understanding about the (lack of) budget. He has loaned a drawing from that Gagosian project, together with palettes and his light box, which holds photo reproductions. Glenn likes to support worthwhile local projects, and in 2012 he exhibited in the Aldeburgh Festival’s visual arts program.

Ryan Gander is also well known internationally. I imagine, with his love of playing with what a work of art can be, that he took particularly readily to the concept of the show?

Yes like Glenn, Ryan also lives between London and Suffolk. He instantly agreed to participate and is showing Things that mean things and things that look like they mean things (2008), a fictional documentary film that explores the production of an artwork that doesn’t exist. That brings an interesting angle: John describes Ryan, Daphne Warburg Astor and Kayle Brandon’s works as “utilizing the collateral, which then feeds back into or becomes the art work, a chicken and egg situation which could be described as an ouroboros.”

You are also featuring Matthew Collings and his wife, Emma Biggs. He’s an artist better known as a critic, especially on TV. Did he have anything to say about CD from that perspective?

Yes, I can quote him:

I think criticism is unrecognizable now. In practice it’s someone that calls him or herself a critic saying more or less random things, whose only purpose is to make clear to an audience that figures and ideas in art with which the audience is already familiar are very well known to the critic as well. From the position of the sort of art critic I am, I would say the Collateral Drawing is really well conceived because it brings into focus the process of making.

Matthew and Emma have made a painting for the exhibition and show an old studio table that has years’ worth of layers of cheap paper masking taped to its surface, placed as a way of always having a more or less clean and tidy surface. Matthew states that, “at the stage we offered it to the Collateral Drawing exhibition it had some scribbled quotes in charcoal on it from YouTube interviews with Francis Bacon because I was writing an article about a show called ‘Bacon and The Masters.’”

Daphne always records the work she makes each day. How does that flow into the collateral way of things?

For CD she started working on May 22, 2015, in a temporary studio in an empty garden shed on a farm surrounded by plants, bees and migrating birds. Her collateral is through recording and collecting, and her work is always connected to the land. Elements, such as wheat and pollen in this piece, are then utilized to make the drawings, which are incorporated into the final installation; so there is a slippage between the collateral and the final artwork which John and I found very interesting.

I often find that unexpected conjunctions emerge from a group show. Is that the case in Ipswich?

Always. These formal things are what interest me the most in bringing a show together. This exhibition seems to adopt a visual contrast between the industrial and synthetic versus the raw and earthy. There is an interesting dialogue between the real and the unreal. And light is important in many of the works. Trisant’s shiny enameled paint surface draws the outside in, whereas Chris Hawtin’s sci-fi landscape creates a synthetic light through its painted illusion; the ethereal illumination in my fabricated landscape contrasts with the intimate candlelit space of John’s painting. And there’s much more: you can find surprising conjunctions through all the artists shown here.

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