September 9 to October 9, 2016
155 Suffolk Street, between Houston and Stanton streets
New York City, pierogi2000.com

For the past 20 years, Sarah Walker has been developing super complex paintings that speak to the technological imagination—webs and labyrinths of densely layered patterns and lines that hum with things we’ve never quite seen, but intuitively recognize.  Networks and nerves, conduits and constellations, all mash up in a hovering, aerial perspective.  Her work alludes, also, to a scientific, radiant mental space of indeterminate scale and equivocal organization, one that reverberates more brainbow than intergalactic awe.

Her multiple realities are hard-edged and clear. It is essential to her purpose that the work function at the edge of overload, dazzling and hypnotic.  Her paintings have been described as orgasmic and psychedelic, and they’re only getting more so, on both counts.

“Space Machines” is Walker’s 5th solo show at Pierogi gallery, and her debut in the gallery’s new Manhattan space. In the new work, the superimposition of forms has become more pronounced, with an increased implication of motion and depth.  Hot orange and yellow clusters of circuits, organs, or perhaps a cyborgian combination of both, orbit from a central spot, lifting off, or maybe levitating from the painterly ground, mapped with coagulated acrylic pools.

I met with Walker in her Brooklyn studio where she works and lives with the artist Andrew Ginzel, and their son, Walker, now 10.

MARY JONES: I want to ask about your father. He went from medicine to neuroscience and then to psychiatry and you’ve described his way of thinking as an important influence on your work. Does that account for your merging of the technological with the psychological?

SARAH WALKER: My father was in some sense the initiator of how I regard space and how I think through process in my paintings. I remember my childhood foremost as the dynamics between people, which solidified for me- a visual thinker- the reality of mental space and its “objects”. In abstraction this might be described as a grasp of embodied patterns of occurrence. I often view technological space as an extension of mental space. Space and pattern are key elements for me.

Do you feel a relationship with other artists with a similar aesthetic?

Though different from mine I feel connected to the work of Bill Komoski, Tom Burckhardt, Sharon Horvath, Glenn Goldberg and Barbara Takenaga.  Each in their own way coalesces from their spaces “figures” that blink into form, but just. I respond to these as selves in the midst of multiple forces, both material and nonmaterial. It’s my way to describe to myself living in the midst of change.

There’s a greater duality in the new work, more separation between the figure and ground. 
Are you relating to a mind/body dialectic? I thought of Gaspar Noé’s film, “Enter The Void,” while considering your hovering compositions.

It’s a growing preoccupation, this momentary contraction of space into object, which could be described as figure and ground or self and other. Held within the architecture of the painting a multifaceted occurrence flickers into being, emerging from multiple fields yet somehow separate and unique. This may be coming about because the painting’s physical aspects adhere to psychological principles. I’m interested in gravity as attraction; the gravitational pull of one form wanting to be next to or merged with another. As this process happens, other things will get displaced, repressed, projected; they move around through the layers, alternately subsumed then revealed by way of psychological movements.

Does the “Space Machine” of the show’s title refer to anything specific?

I use outer objects to describe inner ones but I don’t think people will necessarily see literal machines. Instead, the paintings themselves offer a way to move through lots of spaces or states at the same time. I hope they work on the viewer’s psyche as visual devices.

Are these mandalas?

Yes, perhaps in how they function. I feel the title “Space Machines” is relevant here, in that my work can generate a different sensibility of existing in space, an alternate form of cosmos.  I feel they can operate as useful filters for complexity. We have a simplified perceptual structure that filters out information to aid our survival. It seems, however, that the terms of survival are changing fast, and we have to be more porous and flexible in how we view the intersection of all the different kinds of material and nonmaterial realities that exists around and inside of us.  What happens when all these are influencing one another in subtle and not so subtle ways is how these paintings are built, nothing goes away, it all sticks around.

Surface seems very important to you, the canvases are very considered, smooth and meticulous, a synthesis and compression of the painterly events that really show your control of the medium.

I suppose it’s a sensory thing- riding the line between seeming flawlessness and the ardent physicality of liquid pigment feels really good. The zone I’m after is where the surface seems dematerialized yet is thick with visceral activity, gritty yet flat, expanding and contracting simultaneously. That place is the seam between mind and body, technology and reality; the physicality of one’s mental space that’s shot through with feelings and textures, time and memory. That’s what I’m after.

How intuitive are they? How do you begin?

Intuition is a great tool. I begin with a totally fluid situation, pouring on a lot of very thin paint.  The drying pattern is important.  Sometimes I’ll flood the surface with water and drop color into it.  I allow those events to flow in whatever direction the surface chooses.  Once dry those chaotic liquid forms become the skeletal structure of the painting and they remain emphatically visible through all its layers.

To what degree does the process determine your images?

In the beginning to a great degree, then in the end there’s more negotiation. The paintings are formed slowly over time, arising from all that’s happened on the first liquid layer. It’s parallel to how a child grows into an adult. You don’t get to set the terms so much in the beginning, but one gets to play one’s hand more or less effectively as time goes on. The more risk, the more interesting and transformative the choices must be. The more wayward, awkward or poor those choices, the better the chance the painting will turn out vivid and come bundled with some new language. I can’t game the system, I must make my wrong turns and deal with unintended detours. It’s very important to me that I save the voice of every layer, even the disappointments, so they influence everything that comes after. Save everything, keep building.

I think of you as having a signature palette, in particular a very warm blue. Is this an intentional metaphor for space?

Yes, when I use blue it underscores space itself. Increasingly technology’s screens reinvent space to be even more blue, more cool, narcotic yet sleepless. Then I find myself using orange and other warm colors to tug in another direction. There’s an urge to make the oldest or least solid layer appear to be the last thing added- what should be sinking pulls forward and vice-versa. The painting breathes with this conundrum.

What are the rewards of complexity?

Multiplicity is what I’m after. My favorite position is where I can entertain several very different trains of thought at the same time, or be able to grasp something holistically as it’s happening.  My paintings help me do that. They create a context for me to actually build the state of mind I most enjoy. That place is ambiguous, not one thing or another, maybe it is “yes, and…”.

Is science something that you follow alongside your work?

Science, also fringe science even pseudoscience. I’m intrigued by how people arrange information to create their facts. The edge of physics now is particularly fraught with ambiguity and contradiction, which makes it so fascinating. I decide to take seriously beliefs or certain worldviews if only for a period of time. I marinate in several of these narratives and the work adopts the shapes that arise from their collision or collusion.

For instance…  

A recent favorite is the asteroid narrative, “Planet X”, for which I named my last Pierogi exhibition.  We don’t know what Planet X is, but a lot of people think they do, and project upon it. Whole world-views have been assembled around this possibly totally fictional entity crashing into Earth or that it is an alien space craft, or our sun’s binary star on a dangerous elliptical orbit, or… So it’s an open ended scholar’s rock, a mandala, a narrative generating machine. It sparks fires in the limbic system, and can adapt itself to any association it meets. It’s always due back any day now, and ironically it was supposed to smack into our planet on my birthday, July 29th.

What was the narrative for this series?

Among other things I was reading on reincarnation. Thinking about a cyclical view of the human soul lent its language to how I approach the painting process.  Alongside this I was entertaining the idea of morphic resonance, as developed by biologist Rupert Sheldrake. For him memory is stored outside of the brain in electromagnetic fields, the brain being the receiver. His idea is that you tap more specifically into that which is most related to you, and then less so the more general the connection. Preoccupying myself with these things provides me a way of moving through the painting process- it’s like choreography.

Do you think these narratives and ideas are discernible to the viewer?

No, I hope they fall away. The ideas were scaffolding. Narrative structures that play in my imagination, like color choices, guide the process. However where I cared and where I pushed away, or focused and then fell apart, what I loved and then rejected that nonetheless returned- people can feel those movements. The weave of decisions and positions is dense enough so that the painting can assemble itself for each viewer using their own unconscious diagram. Each painting is different, allowed to develop through improvisation along its own path. Each is like an egg; carrying with it the nutrients needed to sustain scrutiny. They are sturdy enough to exist anywhere and still transfix someone, anyone.

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Brenda Zlamany has long been known for exploring and revitalizing traditional portraiture. Her technique is impressively old world (Rembrandt and Holbein are cited influences) and her command of oil painting affirms serious dedication and mastery of the medium. But Zlamany’s work is decidedly contemporary in the way it questions and sometimes confounds the usual relationship between subject and artist.

This exchange is central to Zlamany’s current work, which has become more openly interactive than ever, even performative, as she paints the portrait in front of the subject as they observe her. For a project in Taiwan funded by a Fulbright grant in 2011, the artist painted 888 watercolor portraits on location, which led to 12 paintings of aboriginal teenage boys. Now, she’s taken on an equally difficult demographic: the New York art world. Her year-long project, “Watercolor Portrait a Day,” is actively underway with artists, friends, family and casual acquaintances all coming through the studio in an intricate web of connections. Each sitting is concluded with the artist taking a photograph of the subject holding his or her portrait. The photo is then posted to Facebook and Instagram, one portrait every day.

It’s become quite the phenomenon. She gets hundreds of “likes,” comments and criticism with each post and was thrown off Instagram once for a day, (see the posting of day 193). No money changes hands and the portraits remain Zlamany’s property.

And every subject entering the artist’s studio encounters the nemesis and progenitor for this project: an imposing oil painting, in progress, of seven women in 19th-century costume. This is a commissioned portrait from the Yale Women Faculty Forum, and the depicted women are the first women to receive PhDs from Yale, in 1894. The painting is set to hang in Yale’s prestigious Sterling Memorial Library.

I met with Brenda in her Williamsburg studio in late November where she lives with her 15-year-old daughter, Oona. At the time, the “Watercolor Portrait a Day” count was in the low 200s.

MARY JONES: You’ve said this project began as a way to counteract the pull and the gravitas of the Yale commissioned portrait. The women in the Yale painting are all historical, they’ve felt like ghosts, people that you’re divining or bringing to life, and you wanted some live people coming through as a counter balance.

BRENDA ZLAMANY: It’s coming along, don’t you think? I knew the Yale women were going to want a lot from me, this painting was going to take me to the depths. I needed to keep one foot out the door and a portrait-a-day project would keep me from getting over involved. It was such an injustice they weren’t painted in their lifetime that I do feel there’s a pull from these women, such a desire to be painted. I want it to seem like I know each and every one of them. I have to know them to the point that I’m dreaming about them and they’re real to me–that’s part of the technique. Most of my reference photos of the actual women aren’t very good and there’s too few of them. To create their personalities I’ve got to place them all into a certain age that’s quite different than my source photos. I have to create the color, make hairstyle adjustments and they need clothing. I have to imagine their bodies, and to do that convincingly I’ve researched and found living surrogates for each of them.

It seems like the Yale commission is very private, and the “Watercolor Portrait a Day” project is very public. We see pictures of it every day on Facebook.

But the “Watercolor Portrait a Day” project has made the Yale girls public too, because everyone who sits comments on the painting and on the women. So the portrait-a-day feeds the Yale commission but it also makes me anxious. The “Watercolor Portrait a Day” is dangerous because it’s freaking Oona out, it’s hard on her to have all these people coming through the studio. She even referred to a sitter as “fucker” the other day, and these girls also would not like it to be here. So I’m struggling against different interests.

Why would the Yale women object to the “Watercolor Portrait a Day?”

I don’t want to seem like a mystical person, but you can’t help but get into these women. They want my undivided attention, and they would squeeze every ounce of painting ability out of me if they could. Things in the late 19th Century weren’t good for a lot of people, and these women had such privileged lives that you don’t have to feel sorry for them. They were educated, they traveled, but they were not welcomed by the boys at Yale. One of the reasons that I’m right for this job is that I know to get this done well I have to subjugate my ego. I’m a vehicle for them; this painting is not about me, or my art.

So is the “Watercolor Portrait a Day” about you?

It’s about relationships. In the Yale project, I might spend a whole day on a detail, like an eyebrow, trying to figure out, “Is this person thoughtful, angry, or happy?” and make all sorts of changes. But the “Watercolor Portrait a Day” has rules. Among the rules are that I have to accept whatever I get and I can’t change it after the person leaves. I’m not driving it intellectually. The Yale painting is a purely intellectual pursuit. All the pistons have to be firing 100% for me to do it. If I feel distracted or tired I could lose somebody. I could lose a face, I could lose a personality. I was working on Cornelia till midnight last night, painting her and then photographing the work every hour. I kept going over the photos on the screen to see if I was losing something because I could see she was starting to come into being. I saw the glimmer of who she was going to be and it was really fragile.

But the other thing about the “Watercolor Portrait a Day,” and I was talking to Alex Katz about this yesterday, is that I’m learning you can get incredible things if you let go of control. If you can see things without intellectualizing them it might be more than what you could have done if you were trying to stay in control. So it’s interesting to have one project that requires such focus and control up against this other project, which is about accepting what happens.

And you open up yourself and your home and encounter all kinds of people.

Portraits are really an intense experience and most people who come want something more than just a portrait. It can be anything, something to divulge or confess, or something to prove for so many reasons. Sometimes they have an agenda, and it can be really big. Most of the people I’ve painted are artists and they tell me about their careers, or their lack of a career, their rent, their illnesses and their fears. Do I secretly believe I have any healing powers? Maybe I do a little bit. I feel it’s important to have this kind of interaction. It’s not a product-oriented project although I like it when the portraits are good. It’s experiential, we’re sitting down and we’re trying to achieve some kind of closeness. Whatever happens on the page is the evidence of that. You never know what you’re going to get, and sometimes it’s more than you’ve bargained for and I take that into the day. It all happens in a very short time, and I have to think on so many levels and stay focused to actually make the art. I let them talk the entire time and I’ve heard a lot about people and their lives. But it’s a two-way street: I’m talking too, and confessing things, too. I find myself telling something to someone that I’ve never said before. It does create closeness, but right now I don’t know if it will last.

How do you connect to the subject’s appearance and character?

At any given moment you can choose what you want to see. Recently I painted a woman who at first looked nondescript or even plain. In fact, she came in telling me that she wasn’t attractive and that she wasn’t photogenic, either. I was really conscious that there was a side of her that could be attractive; you can go either way with anybody. I worked on the angle. I saw that her lips were full and her eye color was beautiful. Right away I could see her best lines and most attractive features and I knew that not only could I paint it but that I could photograph it, too.

I see the photographs as a collaboration, and sometimes a compromise between you and the subject. You want the portrait to look good, but your subject is also invested in having the photograph be flattering.

The photos are just as hard as the painting. Nothing is accidental. I usually take about 100 photos and they’re really careful and discussed. The photo begins with the painting. I have things I’ve learned to do, some conscious, some unconscious, to put the subject at ease. I know the problem areas and how to address them in a particular way to relax the person. They’re telling me things without knowing it. I’ m reading them and taking a lot of cues from watching their face as they’re watching me paint them. When you’re painting someone and they’re watching and judging how you see them, you also become the subject in some way.

After painting all these people, has it changed the way you judge character?

I used to hitchhike everyday after high school for fun, and that’s how I became a good judge of character. I got out of school at 1 PM and I had nothing to do so I just hitchhiked till dinnertime. You put your head in the car and you look at the person’s face. You have to decide in 10 seconds whether you’ll get into that car, if it’ll be a good conversation or whether you’ll get raped or murdered. That’s good training for portraiture.

Did your parents know?

My parents weren’t paying attention, they had an infant at home, and I was a teenager and they didn’t notice. I was invisible to my parents.

You got yourself into art school away from home at an early age, 14. How?

It came out of hitchhiking. Somehow I ended up at the home of Allan Shestack of the Yale University Art Gallery. He and his wife Nancy had some Jim Dine prints, so I showed them my drawings. They were impressed and hooked me up with the Educational Center for the Arts in New Haven, and the Yale College Before College Program. I hitchhiked an hour every day to New Haven to go there, and gradually I just didn’t go home.

You also got yourself to the San Francisco Art Institute for a summer when you were just 15. How did that come about?

I had a fake ID that said I was 18, and I applied with it and I got in. It was a good thing that I wasn’t on my parent’s radar at that time, they would have stood in my way, and I wouldn’t have been able to get anything done.

That’s an unusual way to start. It’s also kind of unusual to see someone working today with a camera lucida. You’ve told me they’re pretty hard to find. How did you discover it?

I was in David Hockney’s studio in the late ‘80s when he got his camera lucida and Maurice Payne, his printer, also spontaneously gave one to me. I later heard that David wasn’t too pleased about this, and maybe felt Maurice was giving away trade secrets. I kept it in storage for years. I was curious about it but didn’t use it; I was busy with other projects. When I went to Taiwan to paint aboriginal Taiwanese people I thought to use the instrument so they could see the painting happening. I practiced before I left, and really learned to use it there.

What does it add to the current project?

It’s about speed. Because you plot the points, you can go very quickly and you also cover the whole page. But you still have to redraw it and paint it, so it’s not going to give you any art. It does help shorten the phase of looking at the blank page and thinking about what to do. Still, I spend about 5 minutes with the blank page figuring out the best angle and how I want to compose it. But then immediately it’s on, and you have to move. It gets you moving very quickly and that’s really useful.

How do you organize and choose the subjects?

I’m only booked a week ahead. Every Sunday I panic that I haven’t gotten it all lined out. I really can’t fall behind and, so far, I haven’t. I worry about a cancellation on a day without a back-up person. There’s always someone who wants to be painted but I have to manage the schedule and set it up. The more I go into the “Watercolor Portrait a Day,” the less it becomes about the product. It’s about the ritual, about somebody sitting down and me making them comfortable, my contacting them and their response, posting it on Facebook and their friends all seeing it and commenting. The portrait is a very small part of it, but now having done so many I have more control and they’re getting better. Now I know I can do it, and I think more about what I can bring to the table, what I can learn about them and how I can say it in the portrait.

You’re known for your portraits of men. You’ve painted Chuck Close a number of times, also David Hockney, Glenn Ligon, Alex Katz, James Siena and Leonardo Drew, just to name a few. Now with the Yale portrait, and the “Watercolor Portrait a Day” project, you’ve also painted lots of women. What are the differences?

Before, I felt there was something about male beauty — or, let’s say male vanity — that’s more painterly. Also, I really like, and am interested in, men. But now after painting these Yale women, and having talked to so many women through the project, most of them over 40, I’ve become interested in women as they age. I don’t think we’ve looked at them enough. The next body of work will be portraits of 24 women. From the “Watercolor Portrait a Day,” I’m less afraid of dealing with the emotions of female vanity. When I post the paintings of really pretty women there are always comments that “she’s prettier in real life.” So if you’re painting someone really beautiful the portrait is never going to be good enough. We really judge women. I never wanted to take that on before.

And the men on your radar?

Fred Wilson — I’ve gotten really good at painting hair. I love his hair, I love his face. I think he’s a terrific artist. He’s got all the elements that I want. And I want to paint Dawoud Bey, because he’s a portraitist. He’s fabulous looking and I love to paint the portraitist. He said he would do it, but I have to get him when he’s in town. He’s amazing, and he’s a really big guy. But I also want to paint Oona in her latest phase. And I’m due for a self-portrait.

The post A Portrait A Day — And Back In The Day: A Studio Visit with Brenda Zlamany appeared first on artcritical.

March 22 to April 21, 2013,
177 North 9th Street, between Bedford and Driggs avenues
Brooklyn, 718.599.2144

Sarah Walker’s art is like visual quicksand. From a distance, these pulsating, energized paintings with their alluringly complex, multi-patterned surfaces seem rationally concrete and firmly structured. But upon closer investigation, subtle incongruities quickly leave us unmoored.

Colors that appeared transparent reveal themselves to be opaque, and lines that seemed to float on the surface turn out to be artifacts from earlier layers. Metaphors mutate from the cosmic to the subatomic. A form collapses into a hole, and patterns cohere into gateways to other dimensions. Each painting is a labyrinth: trying to deconstruct how these works are made could lead to madness. Nothing is ever what it initially appeared to be. Surrendering one’s mind to Walker’s twisted relational structures is to become a mental fly caught in a sticky web of visual contradictions.

Planet X, Walker’s title for her fourth show at Pierogi, is neither about the solar system nor X-rated, although her work can feel, both cosmological and orgasmic. There are nine small acrylic paintings on reverse-beveled wood panels, and a constellation of works on paper from a series called Near Earth Objects. The paintings are abstract, but not in a conventional sense. Though they do not represent figures, still-lifes or landscapes, the language used to describe them is resolutely pictorial. Allusions to quantum fields and cellular processes spring inescapably to mind, even though no actual scientific principles are illustrated.

Volatile Compound (2012) – a painting that is easy to overlook, exiled over Pierogi’s flat files in the gallery’s outer vestibule – is a vital bridge between the other panel paintings, with their allusions to subatomic energy fields, and the Near Earth Object series on paper which seem to depict “floating objects” —— “objects” which don’t float so much as emerge from fogged over fields like a detail from a forgotten memory.

Initially, Volatile Compound, at 20 by 22 inches, presents itself as a planet-like form occluded by clouds. But like some crazy Rorschach blot, the form continuously morphs from a flat patterned ellipse to an ovoid, to paired fetuses, to fungus-engulfed egg, to an aperture through which can be seen some kind of electromagnetic field. And the “clouds” which, too, change from misty to flat and textured, seem to reveal a “sky” that looks like a ‘50’s textile. But the variable ultramarine shapes are actually painted on top of both the clouds and the form, and upon this perception, they become fin-like appendages to the ellipsoid.

Layering is the obvious key to Walker’s transformations. The advantage of Walker’s paint of choice, acrylic, lies in its ability to be quickly applied in translucent layers. Building up her image, the artist is combination surgical scrub nurse and tattoo artist, continuously mopping up puddles of half dried paint that she has randomly poured and tilted to form drips, and then carefully filling in the dried edge of a spill with a different colored puddle. Walker employs layers not only physically, but metaphorically, too.  The pleasure in viewing her work lies in the constant perceptual shift induced by competing interpretive fantasies.

Walker challenges abstraction’s canonical values of flatness, simplicity, and suspicion of control. She evokes an alternative historical lineage for herself which, in contrast to that of many of her peers, starts with cubism and references important artists that have also rejected status quo painting, such as Al Held.

Walker has adopted many of Held’s abstract pictorial strategies, such as creating space by recognizing that diagonal lines, trapezoids, and ellipses can have a dual pictorial identity—–these lines and shapes can be both flat and spatial simultaneously. And also that negative space can be transparent or opaque depending on what it reveals or conceals.

Walker also shares with Held a similar reference to classical architecture as evinced by an etching of the Pantheon she keeps on her studio wall. But though Walker’s paintings are as complex as Held’s, her work is intimate both in scale and feeling.  But unlike Held, her universe is discontinuous and hints at a disturbing irrationality at its core.

With Walker, the most contentious painterly issue is control. She vacillates between wanting the paint to behave in a natural, fluid way and dominating the hell out of it——alternating painting personas of Cinderella and her evil stepmother. Part of this results from her desire to preserve elements of every successive layer she uses, which she has amusingly attributed to her upbringing in the households of hoarders.

The resulting visually complex surface invariably strikes an anxious note for many viewers. But managing information overload has become our contemporary condition and Walker masterfully structures these paintings both physically and metaphorically to accommodate fickle attentions spans. But whenever complexity threatens to overtake her painting she fogs over the offending areas with her painterly equivalents of Klonopin, so we can relax and prepare to be sucked in once more.

The post Quantum Fields and Cellular Processes: Sarah Walker at Pierogi appeared first on artcritical.