To place Melanie Schiff in the context of a staid photographic genre would be counterproductive to the poetic space her work inhabits. In her first solo show at Kate Werble Gallery in New York City, “Run, Falls,” she draws us into conversation with the light of Los Angeles — where she has lived since 2008 — and the way it bounces off windows, bends around form and reflects to create layered compositions.

Schiff’s work began as colorful still lifes born of parenthetical youth culture and prosaic inanimate objects: moody mise-en-scène self-portraits with beer bottles in the aftermath of a party scene; half-nude women playing in wild landscapes; references to iconic musicians and albums within images; meditations on light hitting unremarkable objects. She was recognized for it with inclusion in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Her current work is a negotiation of the manmade set against the natural environment in a motif that calls for a visceral sense of place in reimagined quotidian scenes. In the aesthetic tradition of photographers like James Welling — whose work is among the canon of post-conceptual Los Angeles artists — Schiff continues to experiment with her medium, elevating the photograph beyond the frozen moment, using multiple or long exposures, unexpected juxtapositions, and as in earlier work, a play with light refraction and reflection. But whereas Welling uses tools like colored gels to alter space and create layers on top of the found environment, Schiff gently intervenes, adding texture with tangible objects (a textile, a window), or using technical processes like motion blur to further manipulate space. Sometimes Schiff doesn’t interfere at all; she allows light to trace its path and reference form. She only gives the viewer the most palpable subject of the image in her titles, freeing the mind to experiment with an underlying narrative syntax that she beckons through movement and enduring heliacal energy.

Throughout Schiff’s series, textiles and manmade materials commingle with textures of natural objects. Sometimes waterfalls are overlaid with pattern: a blanket becomes backdrop to weeds, and multiple exposures of a tattooed dancer are an energetic force in an otherwise rigid industrial architectural environment. Those latter pictures, Double Dancer and Dancer and Broom (all 2014) call to mind and provide a contrasting reference to Imogen Cunningham’s portraits of dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham.

On the farthest wall of the gallery, Threadbare I and Threadbare II set the tone for Schiff’s work. The images, which are some of the only color works in the exhibit, are a foray into the artist’s muse: Southern California’s harsh, warm light, which emanates through and peeks around worn oriental rugs. And perhaps by curatorial decision, environmental light is reflected a second time into the images: by light bouncing into the glass frames from the adjacent gallery door. While other reflections abound, smaller framed black-and-white landscapes spaced throughout the exhibit act as reference points, anchoring the series back to earth. There are works like Falls, which fits into the genre in a traditional sense, celebrating the watery life-force as portrait, and its counterpart, Triple Falls which is a suggestion of the same waterfall as an abstracted form approaching Cubism. There are less traditional landscapes too, like that of an image of a limb and its darkly clothed body written with light shining through a wicker chair. Where color shows up, it is overshadowed by the sun, which illuminates the composition, turning a monotone world into a spectrum myriad of hues.

A series orchestrated in a roving soliloquy that drifts between genres, Schiff makes work that’s an authentic representation of her social, geographic and solar environment. She plays with ubiquitous objects and asks us to consider their singular situational relevance, further eschewing boundaries set by formal elements of photography to reframe our expectations of narrative. In a time when a constant stream of imagery has the power to dilute conscious photographic practice and experimentation with process, Schiff’s work shines. Perhaps she gives us an escape, even if it’s simply in her own reflection; perhaps we just can’t avert our gaze from the sun.

The post Sun and Earth: Melanie Schiff at Kate Werble appeared first on artcritical.

The post James Welling: Flow at David Zwirner appeared first on artcritical.

June 10 – September 2, 2010
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

New York City endured a near-death experience during the 1960s, and the steep decline of lower Manhattan precipitated the rise of a vibrant underground culture. The City began to acknowledge the pioneering efforts of artists to create live-work spaces or lofts within this wasteland of residential and commercial buildings in the 1970s by rezoning them as “mixed use”, albeit in piecemeal fashion and with much rancor. Within a decade, the empty lots and ruined real estate property that had incubated a wealth of sinewy conceptual art were transmuted into Soho gold.

If “mixed use” as a real estate term inspires this show’s outward theme, it implicitly applies to “artistic practices and strategies” in transition over a four decade period, as well. Curators Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp present a considerable array of films, photographs, texts, and sound installations by 40 artists spanning several generations. The city as performance space or experiential sphere of creativity becomes the unifying frame around projects of wildly differing intention, and the show often suggests links between specific works by artists who might otherwise appear to have little in common.

For example, several of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills from 1978 (#25, #60, #83, #63), hang near Barbara Probst’s Exposure #9, New York City, Grand Central Station, 12.18.01, 1:21 pm from 2001. Probst’s six-part work features a female model, photographed simultaneously from six distinct points of view. Clearly, Sherman’s and Probst’s concerns, conveyed through distinct conceptual and technical approaches to picture-taking and picture-making, are strikingly different and decades apart. Yet the juxtaposition of these selected works highlights a common interest in the instability of photographic verity, set right in the midst of some of New York’s most familiar public spaces.

By contrast, photography as a straightforward accomplice to performance pertains in Babette Mangolte’s Woman Walking Down a Ladder from 1973. The ladder in question is that of a rooftop water tower. Contact sheets reveal a figure descending perpendicular to the ladder with no visible sign of a harness or guide wire. At close range, we see that she wears a nondescript blouse and skirt, while her face is obscured by her hair. At medium distance in profile, her descent appears even more precarious against the void of sky; and she is a mere speck when the photographer pulls back to reveal the full height and might of the building on which the water tower is delicately perched.

New York City’s rooftop water towers are also featured in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s 15-part array of fine black and white photographs from 1988. Echoing a 19th century trend to assemble photographic archives of like things for civic records, the Bechers adopted a similar methodology in the 1960s to make comparative studies of decaying industrial architecture in Europe and the US. Their systematic approach dovetailed with strategies of conceptual art being forged in that era, and the Bechers’ typological studies of water towers, gas tanks, blast furnaces, and other industrial relics have been highly influential.

Typologies abound in Mixed Use, Manhattan. From John Miller’s enigmantic series Clubs for America (1993) to Moyra Davey’s Newstands (1994), the streets of New York are teeming with similar things made unique by happenstance and style as much as wear and tear. The windows of urban buildings are the common denominator for Jennifer Bolande’s Globe series, which features blue metallic orbs with maps that are forever out of date. In a different key, Gordon Matta-Clark’s deadpan, black and white Window Blow-Out from 1973 depicts an abandoned building whose grid of broken windows is animated by a lone dog’s vigil.

The line between typology and series is porous. They synchronize neatly in William Gedney’s 1960s views from his apartment window. Entertaining a play between the static camera and everyday movement in the world beyond, his window is the theme for a set of variations. James Welling employs much the same strategy in Eastern Window #1-24 (1997-2000) except #8, 11, 12, 23. A chair on the neighboring rooftop changes position; light alters the buildings’ forms; the moon changes phase and disappears. Welling’s introduction of occasional color in this black and white world of ideas is mildly startling.

If still photography lends itself easily to urban typologies, photography on the move offers other possibilities. Sound and physical movement predominate in David Hammons’s video Phat Free (1995), in which a hand-held camera follows a performer kicking a can down the street. In David Wojnarowicz’s well-known series, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978-1979), a figure wearing a crude paper mask of the poet’s face traverses Coney Island, Chinatown, and the deserted streets of the West Side, enacting the artist’s taste for romantic irony and despair. With less drama, the painter Christopher Wool would photograph streets at night while walking home from his studio, studying incidental marks.

Images of the bygone West Side Piers stir piquant nostalgia for many New Yorkers of a certain age. In all their decrepit glory, the Piers were a magnet for aesthetic prowess as well as sexual trysts. From 1975-1986, Alvin Baltrop photographed their interiors and exteriors, observing cruisers, lovers, and yawning empty space in exquisite detail. When Gordon Matta-Clark cut an enormous, half-moon aperture at the far end of one pier, Baltrop noted its impact on the huge space as sublime cathedral or camera obscura. Peter Hujar’s haunting nocturnes of the Canal St. Piers, from 1983, submerge their secrets in velvet hues of photographic black. What’s left of them in 2010 amounts to jagged rows of decaying piles, as shown in Emily Roysdon’s gray-hued photographs, The Piers, Untitled (#2-5).

In 1971, the Piers were the site of an ambitious series of conceptual art pieces by 27 artists (all male, as it happened). Curated by Willoughby Sharp, photographed by Harry Shrunk and Janos Kender, the consistent format and high quality of the small, gelatin silver photographs establishes a collaborative framework within which each artist had his own word-and-image solo. Because the works were installed in a long corridor of the museum, viewers walking past the sequential imagery might experience it like stills from short silent movies. Vito Acconci, for example, spars with a reputed stranger who threatens to push him off the pier. Besides Acconci, the list of illustrious participants included John Baldessari, Keith Sonnier, Michael Snow, Daniel Buren, George Trakas, and others.

In quite another register, Charles Simonds, Gabriel Orozco, and Bernard Guillot found in the city places for reverie and magical thinking. Simonds, a sculptor, made a 16mm film called Dwellings in 1972. With children as his witnesses in blighted neighborhoods on the Lower East Side, Simonds uses tweezers to move tiny clay bricks into wall crevices. He explains that he’s creating miniature cities for “Little People” who will be moving in soon. (Simonds’s ephemeral archaeology eventually found its way into permanent niches, such as the stairwell of the Whitney Museum). Orozco’s color photograph, Isla en la isla (1993), also plays with changes in the cityscape’s scale. Wooden planks and other debris lean against a traffic barrier in a parking lot beside the Hudson River, mimicking the World Trade Center buildings and piers along the skyline due south. Guillot, in a series of photographs titled Orpheus and Eurydice from 1977, reinvents a mythic tale of tragic love, death, and descent into the underworld as photographic views of forlorn territory on the West Side.

The richness and variety of these projects is daunting. They attest to the elasticity of photographic and cinematic media as co-conspirator to artistic vision, be it performance, conceptual art, architectural intervention, socio-aesthetic political commentary, memento mori, extreme ballet, found object, available view, topographic documentation, lyrical serial existentialist anarchy, rough play. Cumulatively, the show exudes an inviting sense of spontaneity and hard-won freedom. I was particularly moved by Glenn Ligon’s harrowing, 20 wall-panel narrative of his residences, from his youth in the Bronx through a series of legal and illegal sublets early in his career, to, more recently, a stable situation in a condominium. Ligon’s true story is a bracing reminder of the anarchic forces of city real estate and the crucial, double role of the home-studio environment in an artist’s life.

It should be remembered that many of the works in Mixed Use, Manhattan were not seen publicly at the time of their creation. Some of the work on view came to light only through the efforts of dedicated curators and/or the survivors of loved ones. With equanimity and to fascinating effect, the curators have conjoined informal, private, and underknown works with widely known icons. Despite the real estate theme, as I see it this exhibition primarily draws inspiration from artists of the 1960s and 1970s who intentionally kept their work out of mainstream systems, creating alternative avenues for reception and distribution. A long perspective on the sensibility they set in motion can be found here, in disparate works that embrace plurality and resist categorization, revealing quixotic and tantalizing whispers of desire.

The post Vitality Amidst the Ruins: Lower Manhattan’s gritty golden age appeared first on artcritical.

“Color Your World!” proclaims the headline of the February 2010 Connecticut Cottages and Gardens, typed over a detail of Nina Bovasso’s limited-edition, vivacious floral carpet. Though I am neither a resident of Connecticut, nor possess a home or bank account suitable for the purchase of such a rug, I am seduced by its exuberant Pop sensibility and relentlessly bold, cheery hues. Inside the magazine, in an article cheekily titled “Art Under Foot,” it shares a page with other kaleidoscopically bright, geometric rugs, but it is likely that this is the only rug commissioned by a commercial art gallery that also represents such artists as Mequitta Ahuja, Thomas Nozkowski, and Amparo Sard.

In just under a year, John Lee and Meredith Rosenberg of BravinLee Programs, a Chelsea gallery, have commissioned artists Peter Halley, James Siena and James Welling, as well as Bovasso, to create lush designs for rugs made of hand-knotted, tightly woven wool or silk. “Each rug is one of a kind and has been crafted by weavers in the Kathmandu area, whose skills have been passed down through many generations,” says the website, and each rug displays “rich texture and subtle color variation.” Lee and Rosenberg selected the weavers, based in Nepal, for their high-quality production and laws against child labor, after several test runs with rugs made in India, Morocco and Mexico. They made it a priority to join GoodWeave, a certifiably child-labor-free program that donates part of its profits to educating children in Kathmandu. Each rug is artist-signed, and bears an individually numbered GoodWeave label as a symbol of ethical business.

The process of creating the rugs always begins with the artist’s design, which can be either drafted completely anew or adapted from a previous work—most often a painting, drawing, or photograph. The design is then sent to Nepal, where yarn color samples are chosen and shipped back to BravinLee for approval by the artist. While the original design concept belongs to the artist, it is up to the weavers to interpret the designs, resulting in a process that is ultimately collaborative and dependent on the stellar, by-hand craftwork of the weavers. The weaving process itself takes about three months—with each rug measuring around 6 x 9 feet, this seems no small endeavor—and rugs are usually produced in editions of fifteen with two artist’s proofs. In this way the process is not unlike printmaking, in its scrupulous repetition and production of editions, and in fact Meredith Rosenberg describes it as “the alternative to an editioned print.” Right now, she says, the rugs range from $4,000—$12,000, in an attempt to keep them at a competitive price with other high-quality rugs in the design market. So far the clientele has mostly included the collectors with whom the gallery is already familiar, but interior designers and decorators have been showing interest as well. The ultimate hope is, of course, that even those who have no previous interaction with art galleries will be interested in purchasing the rugs, and interested in the BravinLee Editions project.

Rosenberg, who has a Masters Degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology, says she is fully committed to opening up the often esoteric and insular (not to mention expensive) world of contemporary art to a larger audience, as well as further breaking down the boundaries between fine art and design. She discovered the project through Lee, her thesis advisor at FIT, and it coincided with her particular field of study at the time: “I was doing my thesis on marketing conceptual art,” Rosenberg explains, “and how to take something conceptual and make it into a commodity.”  The partnership that became BravinLee Editions was formed not long after, and the “commodity” point of departure shifted from conceptual art to work that is, perhaps, more easily marketable. The website for BravinLee Editions echoes Rosenberg, in that the mission is very much to “explore and experiment with other ways in which fine art and fine art imagery can be utilized as the basis for a design platform.” In exploring the rugs, their strong graphic sensibilities and vibrant colors, I was faintly reminded of a certain strand of modernism that embraced the world of industrial design, that strove to emphasize the purity of materials and craft. The legacy of the Bauhaus seemed nigh—or perhaps it was just the lingering ghost of the recent MoMA exhibiton—but especially that of Anni Albers, whose vivid, austere, and texturally complex formal influence can be found in the bold grids of James Siena’s rugs and the stark, black and white abstract rug by James Welling.

There is, needless to say, a long modernist precedent of artwork that complicates the distinction between visual art, architecture and design, from the Bauhaus, to De Stijl, to Russian Constructivism. If the overarching aim of the BravinLee Editions rug project seems to be to create a utilitarian object that channels the blue-chip aesthetics of artists like Halley and Welling into a completely different medium, this begs the question of why textiles at all? Why not chairs, tables, light fixtures, kitchen appliances? How do the selected artists’ practices, which range from painting to photography, translate into the textile medium? Does this reveal more to us about the depth of their artistic practices; does it actually challenge or inspire the artists to adjust how they view their own work?

Within the last five or ten years, New York in particular has seen the growth of a certain textile zeitgeist and a resurging interest in the “tapestry fetish object,” as Rosenberg put it, in addition to interest in the rich history of the medium. This all was perhaps ushered in with the magnificent tapestries shown in the 2002 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence,” so popular it spurred the 2007-08 sequel “Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor.” There was the moment early in 2010 when James Cohan Gallery mounted “Demons, Yarns & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists,” just across the street from the BravinLee gallery which, at the same time, was showing the rugs created by Bovasso, Siena and Welling. Such exhibitions have revealed the relative lack of textile work by contemporary artists, the end product of which, in its labor-intensive and detailed process from the wool-dying to the loom, can be quite stunning. It is often the warmth of textiles—of woven materials, carpets, throws—the tactile, tangible sense of presence and handmade craft, of home, that makes this medium come alive. Perhaps these qualities are what make the prospect of owning a unique, artist-designed rug so compelling.

Most of the artists selected by Lee and Rosenberg work in the two-dimensional mediums of painting, drawing and photography, making their work easier to translate into the carpet format. Rosenberg says, “We’re really interested in [taking] the painting off the wall and living with it on the floor.” This gives the notion of living with artwork on a day-to-day basis a slightly different meaning, when it is a work on which one must constantly worry about spilling crumbs or red wine. Bovasso’s Flowers on a Walk (2009), which runs at a cool $8,000, seems to have garnered the most press attention, with the Connecticut Cottages and Gardens cover, and brief features on the Apartment Therapy and Better Living Through Design websites. The rug does not stray far from Bovasso’s paintings and drawings, which are filled with rich colors and swirling with spastic, orgiastic patterns. The rugs of James Siena—Global Key (2009) and Nine Constant Windows (2009)—also echo and eagerly transcribe his complex, rigidly formal geometric paintings and drawings, which visualize mathematical formulas and sequences. James Wellings’s New Abstraction #1A (2009) seems to channel Franz Kline; based on an abstract photograph, its beautiful, graphic swaths of black seem ready-made for a room composed of clean lines and modern architecture. The vital strength of each rug chosen by BravinLee is the utter translatability, the enhancement of each deceptively simple design in this flexible, heavily-textured medium. The rugs are incurably modern, but this is their strength too, knowing full well that, in the end, each rug must easily match the color scheme of the rest of the parlor or living room they will eventually inhabit.

In the preface to her book On Weaving, Anni Albers wrote: “Though I am dealing in this book with long-established facts and processes, still in exploring them, I feel on new ground. And just as it is possible to go from any place to any other, so also, starting from a defined and specialized field, can one arrive at a realization of ever-extending relationships”. Albers was able to constantly comprehend and learn anew as she pushed her textile practice to the limits, even when it fell out of fashion. One could argue that the artists and weavers who produce rugs for BravinLee Editions are doing the same but with different stakes, producing an object that is tricky to define, skimming the line between fabulous decorative art object and pragmatic design piece.

The post Where contemporary art can get knotted: Kathmandu appeared first on artcritical.