Some Walls

ESSAY

Lisa Rock and Sam Carr-Prindle are painters with separate studio practices who also share an ongoing collaboration in which both make paintings based on a non-representational drawing or collage either of the artists produces and both agree to work with. While the resulting paintings, which would commonly be labeled abstract, share certain characteristics—image, shape, color—each artist inevitably applies her or his own sensibility and touch to the painting’s process, surface, and edge; the resulting works aren’t duplicates or copies, but rather something more like fraternal twins. Since the paintings produced are based on a shared source, they are not really abstract but are closer to representational, though they are not attempts at reproduction or realism; that is, both artists work from the same given source, and each painting attempts a translation, interpretation, or painted representation that resembles, but doesn’t reproduce, the source.

It’s not uncommon for artists to work from the same source at the same time; anyone who has worked from a model or still life in a studio, or has ventured en plein air and shared a landscape, knows this. But it’s much less common—in fact, surprisingly, no precedent comes to mind—for two abstract painters to share an absolute, single source in order to each produce an independent painting. Certainly, there are many artists who produce paintings that share certain characteristics and imagery with those made by others, though this is more in the realm of influence and emulation. But to intentionally share the same source, as Rock and Carr-Prindle do, is unique.

There are of course precedents for duplication, but these are quite different from Rock’s and Carr-Prindle’s case. For example, Robert Rauschenberg’s well-known pair of nearly-twin 1957 combine paintings, Factum I and Factum II, are of course produced by the same hand. Bernard Piffaretti makes abstract paintings that are divided down the middle; on one side he makes a painting, usually rather gestural, and then does his best to duplicate it on the other half of the canvas. This approach allows him to paint just about anything he wants, since his art’s main idea is based on replication and its success or failure, not in the single image. Of course, there are many examples in history of painted copies, some by students or apprentices in workshops or studios, and some by the original artist; Clyfford Still painted copies of his own work, and Giorgio de Chirico is know for practically cannibalizing is oeurve, but an extreme example is now known from the recent revelations about how the Prado Museum’s copy of the Mona Lisa was likely made by someone working next to and following Leonardo’s process during the making of the original. In painting, however, given the variation in medium, tools, and individual ability, we will never see the level of literary replication achieved in the version of Don Quixote produced by Jorge Luis Borge’s character Pierre Menard.

The pairs of paintings by Rock and Carr-Prindle under discussion are actually quite different from each other, similar to how various musicians or singers will cover the same song differently; consider the differences in texture and impact of Buddy Holly’s recording of his song Not Fade Away against The Rolling Stones’ version. Rock’s touch is painterly, with brush strokes and soft edges, and her layers of paint and buildup of strokes show her in search of the image, drawing in mass and shape. Carr-Prindle’s paint is even and flatter with firmer edges, and his process is more premeditated with a graphic-like quality. Seen together, the different approaches are striking. Rock’s version of Happy Recalcitrant contains a shimmery, blurry field of indeterminate depth on which a shaky, two-fingered, yellow armature is improvised and leaned together, while Carr-Prindle’s presents a precisely constructed and stable version of the yellow armature on an even, gray field. In Untitled (pink), Rock’s stack of multi-colored, boulder-like shapes settles into a somewhat expected and believable feeling of pictorial form and gravity, yet the sense of space and layers of Carr-Prindle’s stark, planar, silhouetted shapes, though crisp and orderly, is ambiguous and unsettled. Family resemblance compels comparison and contrast. An initial sense of sameness turns to close looking and double takes. An uncanny, resonating twinness gives way to strange yet significant difference, ultimately revealing each work’s individuality. We find that a common source does not lead to a common art work.

Within the project’s context, and during simultaneous exhibition, the finished pair of paintings give rise to a number of interesting ideas about artistic production, originality, quality, and cooperation.

For example, consider an artist’s search for imagery and subject matter: Which matters more, what one paints, or how one paints it? Is one idea or image as good as another? How much do artists trade in ideas or images, and what is the balance of the two? If an artist’s focus is on ideas then perhaps how it’s expressed or communicated—painted, printed, projected still or moving, performed, or using words—matters less. If the artist is a painter, and that medium is primary to the artist’s work, aren’t ideas ultimately in the paint? Willem de Kooning, whose work shuttled back and forth between abstraction and figuration, said, "In art, one idea is as good as another," and also, "It’s really absurd to make… a human image, with paint, today, when you think about it… But then all of a sudden, it was even more absurd not to do it." In other words, why shouldn’t a painter do this or that, and remain flexible and adaptable and open to suggestion?

The conditions of Rock’s and Carr-Prindle’s collaboration questions notions of originality and authenticity: What does it mean for artists to share and copy a common image? Although artists want to claim originality, most ideas and images are received, so given one or the other the artist will typically attempt to make it one’s own. Personal taste, sensibility, age, ability and other factors will affect the use of an image or idea and contribute to meaning, so the place of idea and image may be secondary to medium. Artists can’t always identify or control their work’s ultimate and various subjects, content, or meaning, and in the long run they can’t control their work’s relationship to that of other artists. Art’s use and standing is arguable, fluid, and mutable. Art operates in the domain of openness and arbitrariness, social situations and influence, accident and reaction, reflection and iteration, and even the absence of choice. Overarching intention can shut down dialogue; instead, honest, unconditional, and agreeable exchange can extend art’s reach, touch, affect, influence, and communication. Rock and Carr-Prindle confront this head on by accepting idea, sharing image, and focusing on painting. Evidenced by their individual and collaborative work, both artists here maintain a high degree of exploration,

Given two contemporary paintings based on the same image, how do we know which is the better painting, especially when each artist has a different material approach? Perhaps it comes down to personal taste: one viewer likes brushwork and more paint, and another prefers a flatter, cooler approach. It’s likely that these two collaborating artists don’t even think competitively; there is no race to be best. In the project considered here, judgment of aesthetic quality and success is circumvented and suspended, instead turning assessment into a case of difference—each artist’s performance and production—and dependence—the similarity of works by two artists hanging in proximity, establishing affinity, gurgling individuality, co-exiting peacefully. This is an interesting and potentially fortunate situation in which an artist can operate: making and exhibiting one’s work within a context where failure is moot and dynamic exchange is imminent.as long as the two works are exhibited simultaneously. Recognition that the artists have cooperatively exercised conceptual foresight and providencethat ensures meaning and life for their art is compelling, even if unplanned.

Lisa Rock’s and Sam Carr-Prindle’s joint project is a demonstration of friendship, trust, and generosity. For many, and perhaps especially artists, setting aside one’s specific interests and direction to work collaboratively is not easy; the idea of collaboration is a sign of rapport, but the continued act itself is unselfish. The context in which these two artists have chosen to operate beyond individual studio work locates social acts within art. Engagement in joint process, production, and exhibition is an affirmation of alliance and solidarity, empathy and support, commitment and reliability.

Chris Ashley
Oakland, CA
April, 2012

RÉSUMÉ

Lisa Rock

Lisa Rock was born and raised in Massachusetts. She studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. Upon graduation in 2007, she moved to Oakland, California where she currently lives and works. She has been included in various shows around the country. Most recently she has had a solo show at Bonny Doon Vineyards in Santa Cruz, CA and a duel show with Sam Carr-Prindle called “Double Vision” at Classic Cars West in Oakland, CA. View more work and information at lisa-rock.com.

Sam Carr-Prindle

Sam Carr-Prindle was raised in Santa Barbara CA. He received his BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has worked as an intaglio printmaker at Paulson Bott Press in Berkeley, CA since 2007 and currently lives in Oakland, CA. He recently had a two person show with Lisa Rock called "Double Vision" at Classic Cars West in Oakland, CA. Additional work and information can be seen at happinessisideal.blogspot.com.

Protected: Things to know about Some Walls

admin — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 02:45:21 +0000

Sherman Sam

admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:54:24 +0000

Sherman Sam: "Over the Rainbow: some paintings and some drawings for Some Walls”

January 28, 2012 – March 18, 2012

Press Release | Images | Essay | Résumé

PRESS RELEASE

Some Walls is pleased to present its thirteenth exhibition, Sherman Sam: Over the Rainbow: some paintings and some drawings for Some Walls,” from January 28- March 18, 2012.

Sherman Sam is an artist, writer, and curator based in London and Singapore. His paintings and drawings contain tender imagery and a tough attitude.While his paintings and drawings reference nature and reverie, there is a contrary sense of longing and determination. The paintings, no taller than twelve inches, are painted on heavy, wood panels; the drawings, slightly larger with quavery, layered lines on irregularly shaped paper, are shown in the plastic sleeves in which they were shipped, taped to the wall. In all there is a searching, slow, offhanded quality used to assemble pictorial space, recover memory and experience, and realize an image as an incomplete ideal.

See images, an essay, and biography.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Guestroom, Brussels, Belgium; Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, Ireland; One-Hour Gallery at The Hayward, London, UK; The Suburban, Chicago.

Recent group exhibitions include: Feature, Inc., New York; Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, Brooklyn; The Drawing Room, London; Sue Scott Gallery, New York; Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, Ireland; Kunsthalle Centro Cultural Andratx, Majorca, Spain.

Sherman Sam is represented by Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, Ireland. He has written extensively for the Brooklyn Rail.

Some Walls is a curatorial and writing art project founded in 2009 in a private home in Oakland, California. Some Walls is open by appointment only. View the exhibition online at somewalls.com. To schedule a visit, or for more information, please contact Chris Ashley at info@somewalls.com.

Previous exhibitions at Some Walls:

Jeffrey Cortland Jones: “Recent Paintings, ” 2009

A. Bill Miller: “Samples from the Gridworks Collection Project Archives," 2009

Frederick Bell: “Return Trip: Bologna Antwerp Oakland Brussels," 2010

Lorna Mills: "Zen Dog," 2010

Douglas Witmer: "Fruitville," 2010

Bruno Fazzolari: "New Work," 2010

Patrick Michael Fitzgerald: “New Paintings & Drawings,” 2010

Joseph Hughes: "Works on Paper – Four Decades – 1970s – 2000s," 2010-11

Paul Pagk: “Drawings from the Series: The Mesquite Drawings,” 2011

Eve Aschheim: "Drawings and Photograms," 2011

Ken Weathersby: "Time is the Diamond," 2011

Mira Schor: "Painting in The Space Where Painting Used to Be," 2011

IMAGES

ESSAY

Sherman Sam: “Over the Rainbow”

While looking intently at Sherman Sam’s paintings and drawings hanging in a line on the wall and taking notes, observing color, line and space, and enjoying the surface but clearly sensing a roiling within or beneath the surface of each work, this English nursery rhyme, a memory of childhood readily recalled, suddenly sprang to mind:

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And pretty maids all in a row.

This children’s poem may at first seem innocent, but among many explanations is the claim that it is a religious allegory of Catholicism: "bells" represent the sanctus bells; "cockleshells" are the badges of pilgrims en route to the shrine of Saint James in Spain (Santiago de Compostela); and "pretty maids" are nuns. Another explanation connects the poem to Mary, Queen of Scots: "how does your garden grow" references her reign; "silver bells" invoke Catholic cathedral bells; "cockle shells" insinuate a faithless husband; and "pretty maids all in a row" are her ladies-in-waiting.

Perhaps Sam’s delicately dappled and repeatedly limned images, which summon the intimacy of garden and path with bits of color and layered lines stacked and overlapped into skewed perspectives of alternating, brightly lit open and denser, closed spaces, triggered the memory of this poem. Maybe the painted and drawn sense of outdoors and flora connect to the shape and sound of "bells" and "shells." The rhythm of the poem is propelled by its sing-songy string of hard and soft sounding, one and two-syllable words, and the rhymes inside lines one and three that drive the reader on, and at the end of lines two and four that boldly punctuate; this music moves us as if walking along the edge of a planted flower bed. But finally, it seems that the word "contrary," the only three-syllable word in the stanza, might be the main target of identification: why is Mary contrary despite, apparently, the pretty things and attendants at her service? The order, abundance, and precision in the last three lines contrasts with Mary’s antipathy; despite the garden, Mary is unsettled, contradictory, and headstrong.

In the case of Sherman Sam’s art there is a contrariness, both the desire for the garden and an aversion to simple beauty. His dawdling line and slow daubs of painting are achingly thoughtful, yet he resists hard focus and conclusion; what remains is an impression of perception and apprehension, something seen and not quite known. He attempts to find or create order, but with a knowing hesitation and agitation, as if a painting, a picture that is only a narrow or thin slice of nature or experience, finds strength in adhering to the scale of its limitations: the painted, flat, non-projecting surface; abstract imagery that is hard to put a finger on; depicted rather than real space or light that is dependent on the viewers sensitivity, openness, and imagination; the viewer’s attention in a fast-paced, distracting world.. In images embodying presence and reticence, it as if Sherman’s anterior goals—strong will and doubt, search and equivocation, the complication of layers—force an introvert towards extroversion.

It seems natural to initially think of Sam’s awkwardly luscious and off-handedly beautiful imagery as the handmade, recovered visual memory of bucolic setting and experience. Two paintings, The Sound of a Gentle Word and Sealed With a Kiss evoke a hazy, unraveling tapestry of memory and sensation, a slightly psychedelic and skewed perspective, vaguely threatening yet deliciously inviting. These small, delectable paintings on heavy, obviously-carpentered wood panels, neither taller than twelve inches, hint at nature as a place of dance and worship, an organic, agrarian disco where the ripe strawberry or unfolding rose is the glistening mirror ball from which shards of colored, reflected light momentarily illuminate a personal and private reverie in shared, public spaces.

Sam’s drawings consist of a variety of lines: quavery, staccato, patterned, gestural or ruled, rubbed and erased, faint and wispy or dark and direct, arching and zigzagged, scribbled and hatched. Larger than the paintings and on irregularly shaped paper, the lines build and layer in a searching, slow, casual quality to assemble pictorial space, align memory and experience, and realize an image as an incomplete ideal. In SS-003-SWO, the buildup of lines on the right side suggest perspective, a road, railings, and stairs, while along the bottom a loping line tagged with circles functions as a decorative frame; to the left, a mass of erased lines, rather than creating absence or emptiness, suggest volume and open fullness, as if a field in contrast to its busy, neighboring structure. The two adjacent networks of misshapen diamonds in SS-002-SWO suggest lumpy hillocks and clumsy harlequins, a potentially homely image that is instead tender and, though childlike, firm and descriptive; in this drawing the volume and space become psychically real and tantalizingly near-tangible. The ruled, angled, cross-hatching lines in SS-001-SWO softly aggregate as a Cubist-like, angled, light-drenched inhabitance of object and void. With the barest of faint means, Sam asserts a something from near nothingness, insisting that nature is complex, sensation is fugitive, and art is something meaningful against all odds.

Sam’s title for this exhibition, Over the Rainbow, recalls, of course, the Harburg/Arlen song that Judy Garland, as Dorothy, sings in The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy is trying to tell her aunt and uncle, too busy to listen, about her run-in with Miss Gulch (who, later in the film, is the Wicked Witch of the West), and Aunty Em tells her to, "find yourself a place where you won’t get into any trouble." Walking off, Dorothy wonders aloud to Toto, her dog, "Someplace where there isn’t any trouble. Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto? It’s not a place you can get to by a boat, or a train. It’s far, far away. Behind the moon, beyond the rain," and begins singing the now familiar lyrics about a place over the rainbow where, "Dreams that you dare to dream/Really do come true," "Where the clouds are far/Behind me," and "Where troubles melt like lemon drops," ending with the sadly knowing lines:

If happy little bluebirds fly
Beyond the rainbow
Why, oh why can’t I?

While the lyrics allude to a gap between one’s aspirations and reality, the melody of the song and Garland’s delivery create a longing for an ideal place and a determination to find it, even if one doesn’t know how to get there. We witness Dorothy’s initial contrariness, but ultimately she reconciles with her real world circumstances.

But Sherman Sam’s contrariness is intact. We see in his small, delicate, even tentative art works that, given consideration and time, they exude toughness and tenacity. Existing in our world they remain, as do any difficult art work, a place to get in trouble, yet his aspiration, like the bluebird’s, is to seek. Rather than a place beyond the clouds, though, his art resides knowingly in the thick of foliage and weather, line and color, flatness and space, hand and material. One must be a contrarian to fight this fight.

Chris Ashley
Oakland, CA
February, 2012

RÉSUMÉ

Sherman Sam (see a complete biography at Rubicon Gallery)

Education
- 1987 Foundation, Parson-in-Paris, Paris, France
- 1988-90 Otis Art Institute of the Parsons School of Design, Los Angeles, US
- 1991 BFA, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, US
- 1997 Master of Letters in History of Art, University of Oxford, UK
Recent Exhibitions
- Solo: Guestroom, Brussels, Belgium; Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, Ireland; One-Hour Gallery at The Hayward, London, UK; The Suburban, Chicago, Illinois.
- Group: Feature, Inc., New York; Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, Brooklyn, New York; The Drawing Room, London, UK; Sue Scott Gallery, New York; Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, Ireland; Kunsthalle Centro Cultural Andratx, Majorca, Spain.
Representation
- Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, Ireland.

Mira Schor

admin — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 18:10:38 +0000

Mira Schor: "Painting in The Space Where Painting Used to Be”

October 22, 2011 – December 18, 2011

PRESS RELEASE

Some Walls is pleased to present Mira Schor: "Painting in The Space Where Painting Used to Be,” an exhibition of paintings from October 22 – December 18, 2011.

Mira Schor is a New York-based artist and writer noted for her advocacy of painting in a post-medium visual culture and for her contributions to feminist art history. This exhibition presents a unique opportunity to see her work, as it marks the first time she has shown in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Schor shows five paintings, each of which depicts the complex and engaging interaction of figure and language; installed and encountered as a group, they offer a rich dialog about painting’s purpose, gender, speech, and creative life.

In her essay "Modest Painting," from her most recently published book, A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life, Schor writes, "Modest painting does not aspire to historical importance through physical domination of the viewer or the room in which it is placed via monumentality of size." Schor’s paintings may be small in size, but the scale of her work is ambitious and generous. Seemingly simple, minimal, and schematic, Schor’s paintings, direct and modest in size, raise big questions, offer pleasure and intrigue, provoke sizable commentary, and propose enormous possibility and imagination.

Recent solo exhibitions include: CB1 Gallery, Los Angeles; and Momenta Art, Brooklyn.

Recent group exhibitions include: Schroeder Romero & Shredder, New York; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA; and David Nolan Gallery, New York.

Schor is the author of A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life, and Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture, editor of The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, and co-editor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism. She has a blog of her writings on art and politics, A Year of Positive Thinking.

She is an Associate Teaching Professor in the MFA Fine Arts Program at Parsons The New School For Design, and is represented by CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles.

See images, an essay, and biography.

Some Walls is a curatorial and writing art project founded in 2009 in a private home in Oakland, California. Some Walls is open by appointment only. View the exhibition online at somewalls.com. To schedule a visit, or for more information, please contact Chris Ashley at info@somewalls.com.

Previous exhibitions at Some Walls:

Jeffrey Cortland Jones: “Recent Paintings, ” 2009

A. Bill Miller: “Samples from the Gridworks Collection Project Archives," 2009

Frederick Bell: “Return Trip: Bologna Antwerp Oakland Brussels," 2010

Lorna Mills: "Zen Dog," 2010

Douglas Witmer: "Fruitville," 2010

Bruno Fazzolari: "New Work," 2010

Patrick Michael Fitzgerald: “New Paintings & Drawings,” 2010

Joseph Hughes: "Works on Paper – Four Decades – 1970s – 2000s," 2010-11

Paul Pagk: “Drawings from the Series: The Mesquite Drawings,” 2011

Eve Aschheim: "Drawings and Photograms," 2011

Ken Weathersby: "Time is the Diamond," 2011

IMAGES

ESSAY

Mira Schor: “Painting in The Space Where Painting Used to Be”

Writings about New York artist Mira Schor’s paintings on the occasion of her recent solo show at CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles[1] reference the historical, theoretical, and feminist context for her work, insightfully describe and explain her use of words and punctuation in the paintings, and offer Schor’s work as, given the history of continual assault on painting, a new kind of painting or, even, a model pointing the way towards painting’s continued viability.

In the excellent catalog essay[2] for Schor’s exhibition Amelia Jones notes the importance of Schor’s study in the Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts, and provides background about Schor’s work as an artist, writer, thinker, and feminist. Regarding Schor’s work, Jones writes, "…she paints in order to ‘paint paint,’ or— as I would slightly revise this to encompass the radical fleshiness of her practice—her practice enacts painting the act of painting, thereby extending but radically updating the classic modernist project of addressing in each medium the characteristics of the medium itself (to paraphrase Clement Greenberg)." In terms of Schor’s pursuits and intention, Jones cites Schor’s essay "Modest Painting" published in her most recent book, A Decade of Negative Thinking, and points out that the paintings, "…may look to be low key and unassuming. But, when engaged with the full range of haptic sensation that they elicit, the paintings can open to complex worlds of affect as well as what Schor in "Modest Painting" champions as ambition for painting itself rather than career ambition. By making thought (and feeling) material, they achieve a kind of exchange of potential meaning, feeling, and experience that only non-explicit modes of communication can attain."

Mike Minelli’s extensive review[3] provides a mini-overview of Schor’s painting of the past two decades, from the earlier "word and punctuation" series, to the subsequent "thought balloon" works, which he calls transitional, and on to the more recent figurative works. Citing Lacan’s discourse of difference as affording, "…early seventies feminism a working model from which to describe, represent, and in turn resist the machinations of patriarchal oppression," he suggests that Schor’s use of language in painting, specifically her use of terms employed by Lacan, defies historical and gender-based expectations for painting, opening it to the possibility of proposing or presenting the female body, consciousness, and experience in a way not before possible. "In place of the assertive criticality seen in Schor’s earlier word paintings," Minelli writes about Schor’s "thought balloon" paintings, "one now reads vulnerability and the creep of abstraction. What are words for? What are pictures for? What is paint for? How does one paint their failure?" Finally, he calls the recent stick figure works both comic and tragic self-portraits, in which the schematic figure is, "…seen sitting, reading, writing, thinking, and walking…the self as a schematic," and that, "In effect, by rendering a sketch of what one does, one sees one’s self…as in a mirror. It is through this act of recognition that the self is then spoken. No longer stopped up, now the idea is free to leave the mouth: ‘This is what I do’; ‘This is me.’"

Shifting from others’ words[4] to look closely at a few individual paintings, we can observe what they share and how they’re different from each other, and, based on what is actually present in the materials and her marks and decisions, discuss several possible ways to look at, think about, and experience Mira Schor’s paintings.

On the occasion this essay documents, five of Schor’s paintings, two of words and three figurative works still referencing or using language, are hung in a single row, with two just a little closer together to ensure their shared dialog is observed. Two paintings are dated 2011, two are 2010, and one, Lack, is from 1997. All of the paintings measure 12 x 16 inches; while the stretchers of the four newer works are 1.5 inches deep, the 1997 stretcher is .75 inches deep. All are oil on linen, except for Thinking of Thinking, 2011, which is ink on gesso on linen. At a glance, the palette these works share is simply black, white, and umber. The surfaces vary: shiny versus matte; brushed versus spread and smoothed with a knife; and direct and opaque versus layered or translucent. A range of approaches to painting are used: the word "lack" is made by rubbing into and erasing the Flemish-like field of dark brown paint; on Thinking of "Thing," delicate strokes of ink sink into and bleed forward from the matte gesso surface, a combination of glaze and fresco; on Thing the title word is written in cursive and surrounded by gray paint carefully following and caressing the letters’ contours (I think of Morandi); the figure and objects in First Idea uses sgraffito stained and wiped with umber, like scored clay or an etching plate; and on the sparse, flat, creamy, sleek surface of The Space Where Painting Used to Be, thin Dufy-like calligraphic strokes of liquid black rapidly draw a seated reading figure and delineate a few words. All of the paintings include words, except for First Idea, in which text is referred to by roughly scratched-in lines across the pages of an open book the figure carries; Thinking of "Thing" contains a similar image. These observations serve as evidence not only of Schor’s knowledge and use of painting’s history and techniques, but also are useful in understanding how the use of different painting techniques inform and effect meanings and ideas.

Encountering Lack, those who know Lacan’s work will recall the notion that lack is the cause of desire, and that symbolic lack, for example, the lack of phallus, or the lack of a signifier in the Other, can lead to difficulties or confusion with identity, distinguishing self, or identifying with Other. But beyond this knowledge and the title, what do we know about Schor’s painting? A field of thick, oily, almost sludgy umber is evenly spread across the surface with a palette knife, collecting and clumping around around the canvas’ edges. The sides of the canvas are smeared with wayward paint and fingerprints, and a few drips and snags of colors from previous underpainting. The canvas looks used, at least second, and perhaps third generation. The umber paint has been rubbed into or brushed away along the lines of a word written in swirling cursive painted with a thin brush beneath the umber surface so that the word "lack" is formed in two ways: the pre-existing painted letters, and the halo of erased paint around the letters. We know this word is "lack" because of the painting’s title, but if one didn’t know this the word guessed might be "look," "lock," or "luck." Or, is it even a word? Is this a swirl of practiced looping lines, or an abstract still life or landscape? The effort to create a painted field and then to carve or erase something out of it is both additive and then subtractive; make something "full" and then empty part of it, creating "lack." The effort is determined, even a struggle, as if the word, as void, fights to exist despite the field painted over and covering it. Why is the word not capitalized? Is this an isolated segment of a longer word, or is this a word "lacking" in definitive identity, so not yet deserving, or thinking it deserves, capital status? The "l" is so much larger than the other letters, most prominent and erect; the negative space in the top right quadrant of the opaque brown field formed by the top edges of the letters and reaching down past the painting’s center is like a single pointing finger or, perhaps more ominously, a hanging male appendage. Can we say that no matter the creative individual’s efforts, and the language employed to fight against it, there is always the hierarchy of male privilege hanging overhead and interfering? Even the painting’s thinner stretcher profile, noticeable in this lineup of four other paintings with deeper stretchers, is a physical occurrence of lack despite the painting’s endeavor to find equal identity regardless of differences in physical size or depth.

Two paintings, Thinking of "Thing" and Thing, hang close together; though separate works, here they have a special relationship: the single sign-like painted word "thing" in one painting, and in its companion the figure’s recall and contemplation of that painting while engaged in study or leisure. The letters of "thing" in Thing are casually written in right-leaning contemporary print-cursive in umber with a brush and surrounded by gray. The five letters are spaced out like still life objects. The "t" is lowercase but looms as high as the "h"; like a cross its horizontal bar is longer on the left and tilts upward on the right, lending a hint of perspective in an otherwise relatively spaceless image. Only the letters "h" and "i" are connected: "hi." The modesty of a straightforward "n" anchors the word in the canvas’ field. The final "g" is the most cursive-like, with a tail that loops around and exits the painting’s right edge; while, oddly, the space inside the looping tail is filled with the same gray paint that surrounds each letter, the inside circle of "g’s" head reveals a thin greenish underpainting. What is the "thing" here? Is it the painting as a thing (object) in itself; is it simply the word "thing" (read or as sound); or is the "thing" the image on the painted surface (representation)? As a word, "thing" is generally thought to lack specificity, though ultimately it is a declaration of existence or objecthood, even if the word is only a temporary stand-in for a more specific word or concept. To use the word "thing" is to attempt to make something out of uncertainty, whether it is uncertainty about what the thing is, or the inability to identify or recall the word or concept for the thing one wants to make known. To paint a "thing" may answer the artist’s question, "What should I paint?’ while answering the viewer’s question, "What did you paint, and what am I seeing." The care Schor uses to write and paint the word "thing," beautifully brushing and scraping a lush gray around the words, shows that a thing, even if it is simply a "something," or perhaps a "nothing," is a subject worth contemplating.

On and within the delicate dry white surface of Thinking of "Thing", thin ink strokes depict a figure sitting with an open book on her lap (let’s assume that the figures are all female and represent Schor’s life as an artist and writer). In the top right corner is a small rectangle, a representation of the painting Thing, which in this installation hangs immediately to the right of Thinking of "Thing". The figure reclines with legs propped up; though she is not supported by an actual chair, the shape and angle of the body suggests a chaise (highly unlikely that it’s a La-Z-Boy!). On the figure’s boxy head two horizontally-aligned rectangles represent eyeglasses; a mass of lines from the rectangles streaming down to the book’s pages suggest reading, while a similar mass of lines emanate from the figure’s forehead towards the small Thing painting, perhaps initially implying that the figure is multi-tasking—thinking of Thing while reading. Is the figure reading to better understand her painting? Does the reading recall, evoke, or inform the painting? Or, can the artist not stop thinking about her art; in the middle reading, is she distracted by the thought of her painting? Or, is this small floating reproduction of another painting akin to Schor’s "thought balloons," a memory or a thought about Thing? Perhaps the text in the open book is important to the art’s purpose or existence, or maybe this is a scene of the artist in her element, living her life fully, with meaning and pleasure: the strands of liquid ink lines are absorbed into the gesso, and earlier ghost-like lines faintly, beautifully seep back towards the surface; this web of lines and layers gently assert depth and complexity, dimension and integration. Thinking of "Thing" suggests that art making is not an isolated activity; not only is it connected to the world through thought and text, but it is also, even in private, a strand of one’s complex life, and that each painting is connected to various nodes in the artist’s oeuvre.

Similarly, First Idea depicts a figure holding a book, but this time she is walking along the painting’s bottom edge, about to exit at right. The book is held below waist level, thus below reading level, and each of the two exposed pages contains rough, parallel lines meant to suggest lines of text; the figure holds the book more as a display turned toward the viewer. The figure is walking, not reading, and she and the book cast a shadow in the bottom right corner. She again wears rectangular glasses. A second, larger pair extend off the back of the figure’s head—perhaps the "back of the mind"—and several horizontal lines shoot out from one lens of this pair and exit the canvas’ left edge towards something which is outside of the painting. Allen Ginsberg told Phillip Glass, "First idea, best idea," meaning, respond to and act on ideas. In other words, in the context of First Idea, all of the world’s texts cannot tell the artist what to paint, and what painting is about. The subject of painting may be found in the act of painting, but is also a response to something outside of the painting. Noam Chomsky advocates for the view that our brains are hardwired for language, yet in their book The First Idea, Stanley Greenspan Stuart Shanker claim instead that our ability to reason is founded not on genetics (language) but on emotional responses formed by environment and interactions, a link between symbols and language. The artist’s engagement and interaction with the world is essential to identifying content and beginning the creative process. At the same time, the artist’s engagement with the material of her painting is equally essential. First Idea’s white surface is smoothly and evenly spread. The drawn lines defining the painting’s figurative components are made by scratching through the wet white paint with, say, the opposite end of a brush’s handle—sgrafitto—and then umber paint is rubbed into the lines, à la intaglio. The figure’s attention is drawn outside the painting in search of an idea, or content, or a "thing" to respond to. Schor as a painter digs into the surface to find her image and print it. Both kinds of attention are required to make a painting.

The Space Where Painting Used to Be presents another reclining figure who sits inside a rapidly drawn rectangular frame—a room—reading a book; we see the cover, on which is written, "POST." Above her head is a larger rectangle inside of which is written, in all caps, "SPACE WHERE PAINTING USED TO BE." To the left hangs another rectangle inside which is written, in cursive, "Sociality." This is a complex situation. Is Schor suggesting that painting can’t function without language to inform or describe it, and thus language supercedes image? Or is that painting is supported by and dependent on language and our social nature, our tendency to form friendships and community, yearn for common ground, and share experience? "Post" has several meanings: after, or later; to put up a sign; an official place or assignment; a pole or upright support; to send mail or, more recently, to post an email, a message (Facebook), or a piece of writing (blog post). The figure, alone and at her post, has posted two signs questioning the place of painting in an era when, saturated by media, it is almost post-pictorial. And yet, all of these possibilities about painting’s purpose are raised via a handmade, painted picture.

Often when scale in painting is discussed the concept is used erroneously; usually, the speaker is really talking about size: measurements. What scale in painting is really about is the relationship of all the painting’s components—what is depicted, material, color, line, stroke, etc., but also the subject and content of the painting—to the surface and the size of the painting: an integrated, holistic entity that, in addition to its own actual size, can suggest grandness or intimacy, or something in between and appropriate to the painting’s subject. In her essay "Modest Painting," from her most recently published book, A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life, Schor writes, "Modest painting does not aspire to historical importance through physical domination of the viewer or the room in which it is placed via monumentality of size." Schor’s paintings may be small in size, but the scale of her work is ambitious and generous. Seemingly simple, minimal, and schematic, Schor’s paintings, direct and modest in size, raise big questions, offer pleasure and intrigue, provoke sizable commentary, and propose enormous possibility and imagination.

Chris Ashley
Oakland, CA
October 2011

Mira Schor: Paintings From The Nineties To Now. November 20, 2010 – January 9, 2011. CB1 Gallery. Los Angeles.
http://www.cb1gallery.com/exhibitions/mira-schor-paintings-from-nineties-to-now.html

Jones, Amelia. Mira Schor: Making Thought Material, Painting (the Act of) Painting (catalog essay). CB1 Gallery. Los Angeles. 2010.
http://www.cb1gallery.com/files/Mira-Schor-brochure.pdf

Minelli, Mike. Mira Schor: Paintings From the Nineties To Now. X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. Los Angeles. Fall 2011.
http://www.x-traonline.org/past_articles.php?articleID=442

Schor’s 2009-10 CB1 Gallery exhibition also received the following reviews:

Mallinson, Constance. Mira Schor. Art in America. April 2011.
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/mira-schor-1/

Knight, Christopher. Art review: Mira Schor at CB1 Gallery. Culture Monster. Los Angeles Times. December 16, 2010
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/12/art-review-mira-schor-at-cb1-gallery.html

RESUME

Mira Schor (for complete biography and more information see the artist’s web site and blog, A Year of Positive Thinking)

Education
- MFA in Painting, CalArts, Los Angeles, 1973
Recent Exhibitions
- “Mira Schor: Paintings from the Nineties to Now" (solo exhibition)
  CB1 Gallery, LA, November 20, 2010 – January 9, 2011
- “Vivid: Female Currents in Painting"
  Curated by Janet Phelps. Schroeder Romero & Shredder, New York, November 18, 2010-January 22, 2011
- “Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism”
  The Jewish Museum, New York, September 12, 2010– January 30, 2011.
- "The Visible Vagina"
  David Nolan Gallery, New York, January 28 – March 20, 2010
- "Books of Pages: New Work by Mira Schor" (solo exhibition)
  Melville House Publishing, Brooklyn, February 1st – 26th, 2010
- "Substitute Teacher"
  Curated by Regine Basha and Stuart Horodner at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, March 5 – May 16, 2010
- "Suddenly" (solo exhibition)
  Momenta Art, Brooklyn, March 20 through April 20, 2009
Writing
- A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life
- Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture
- Editor, The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov
- Co-editor, M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism
Teaching
- Associate Teaching Professor in the MFA Fine Arts Program at Parsons The New School For Design, New York
Representation
- CB1 Gallery, Los Angeles.

Ken Weathersby

admin — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 23:21:08 +0000

Ken Weathersby: "Time is the Diamond”

August 7, 2011 – September 25, 2011

PRESS RELEASE

Some Walls is pleased to present Time is the Diamond, an installation of very small works by Ken Weathersby, August 7, 2011– September 25, 2011.

Ken Weathersby is known for art works he describes as "meticulous, perceptually active paintings using tight geometric patterns" interrupted "with physical insertions, reversals, dissections or displacements. The painted patterns generate moiré effects, phantom color and elusive hints of space."

Time is the Diamond comprises twenty-two small works in less than twelve linear feet—miniatures, actually—using many of the same motifs and interventions found in Weathersby’s larger paintings; the smallest measures approximately 2.5 x 1.5 inches, the largest just over 8 x 5 inches.

Time is the Diamond is the title of a song by the American band Low. The song’s dense, abstract, almost impenetrable lyrics have a folk quality, listing things the singer is not, or has lost, akin to the hybrid and transgressive qualities in Weathersby’s art that are ultimately resolved in his finished works:

If I’m not a lion
And I’m not an island
If time is the diamond
Well all right.

Weathersby’s most recent solo exhibition, Perfect Mismatch, was held at Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn in 2010. Selected recent exhibitions include: The National Academy of Art Museum’s 183rd Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art, New York; Continuing Color Abstraction at The Painting Center, New York; Postconceptualism: the Malleable Object, Stamp Gallery, University of Maryland; and Visual Phrasing, Maloney Art Gallery, College of St. Elizabeth. He is the recipient of a Mid-Atlantic Arts / New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Painting.

Ken Weathersby grew up on the gulf coast of Mississippi. He received an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Detroit and has lived in or near New York City since 1990.

See images, an essay, and biography.

Some Walls is a curatorial and writing art project founded in 2009 in a private home in Oakland, California. Some Walls is open by appointment only. View the exhibition online at somewalls.com. To schedule a visit, or for more information, please contact Chris Ashley at info@somewalls.com.

Previous exhibitions at Some Walls:

Jeffrey Cortland Jones: “Recent Paintings, ” 2009

A. Bill Miller: “Samples from the Gridworks Collection Project Archives," 2009

Frederick Bell: “Return Trip: Bologna Antwerp Oakland Brussels," 2010

Lorna Mills: "Zen Dog," 2010

Douglas Witmer: "Fruitville," 2010

Bruno Fazzolari: "New Work," 2010

Patrick Michael Fitzgerald: “New Paintings & Drawings,” 2010

Joseph Hughes: "Works on Paper – Four Decades – 1970s – 2000s," 2010-11

Paul Pagk: “Drawings from the Series: The Mesquite Drawings,” 2011

Eve Aschheim: "Drawings and Photograms," 2011

IMAGES

ESSAY

Ken Weathersby’s "Time is the Diamond"

Some argue that painting, like Humpty Dumpty, has fallen off the wall, taken a great fall, and can’t be put back together again: dropped, cracked open, oozed out, and finished. But painters like Ken Weathersby have shown that painting appears to continue living a healthy life long after its reported demise. Paintings do things and are about things that other mediums can’t match. While much art continues on a seemingly rapid path towards newer technologies and entertainment, encouraging fast looking and sound bite-like understanding, the technology of most painting, handmade and viewed slowly, at a finely granular level, might gradually be seen as anti-technology, or rather, as a kind of antidote to quicker, bigger, and shinier art. The technology of painting is more like Fred Flintstone’s car, made out of stone, wood, and animal skins, and powered and stopped by the driver’s feet.

In addition to the fundamentals of painting, however, its literal and conceptual deconstruction is an issue inherent to the medium throughout history. Painting has moved from being made on a specific wall, to being made for a specific wall or setting, and ultimately made to be completely portable and adaptable to different environments. Patronage has shifted among the church, the state, the wealthy, and the commoner. And, periodically, the question asked again and again is, just what is a painting: what shape is it, is it flat, how does it hang, what size is it, and must it be made with paint?

Ken Weathersby’s art engages smartly and sensitively with the possibilities of painting. Simultaneously clear-minded and intuitive, rational and risky, he pulls painting apart and puts it back together, making something new and quirky and thoughtful. Canvases are sliced and diced, but unlike Lucio Fontana’s cuts opening a void, Weathersby’s cuts are surgical, so that parts can be reattached, or transplanted, or opened to view another level of the painting. He cuts, rotates, shifts, reverses, and inserts. The classic grid or checkerboard is interrupted or made imperfect. Fronts and backs visibly co-exist, and the rarely seen chassis, staples, nails, screws, and threads are exposed. Elaborate carpentry normally behind the scenes becomes a central player. Weathersby’s paintings don’t merely question what a painting is, but provide physical evidence of several visual and philosophical resolutions to the properties, problems, expectations, and contradictions of painting by exploring front and back, inside and outside, the plane of the surface and depicted and actual space, pattern and disruption, and craft and art.

Weathersby’s small works, made with foam core, linen, wood, tape, and the images of his work reproduced on exhibition announcements, are not exactly studies. Although they use many of the same motifs and structures and share the same subjects and concepts found in his larger size work, they are individual pieces that can stand alone. To call them miniatures would not be an insult or diminution, but instead a useful label to place these small pieces as a specific set within Weathersby’s body of work. And though small, each works scale reads as large and full-sized, or, rather, right-sized.

Lined up on a simple shelf and leaning against the wall are twenty-two works in less than twelve linear feet, the smallest measuring approximately 2.5 x 1.5 inches, the largest, a real outlier, at just over 8 x 5 inches. This installation, Time is the Diamond, titled after a song by the American band Low, provides an overview and record of Weathersby’s invention, wit, and curiosity, of what painting might be, aspires to be, and can’t overcome. The song’s dense, abstract, almost impenetrable lyrics have a folk quality, listing things the singer is or is not, or has and has lost, akin to the hybrid and transgressive qualities in Weathersby’s art that are ultimately resolved, over time, in honed, precise, finished works:

If I’m not a lion
And I’m not an island
If time is the diamond
Well all right.

Weathersby’s art is extremely forthright but not immediately fully forthcoming; initially appearing accessible, it is complicated, dense, and full of rich and intriguing contradiction. At a quick glance, his images are of a type one might expect to be manufactured, but instead we see that every single aspect of the work is handcrafted, from the elaborate stretchers and framing, to the taped and painted areas, to the surface cuts and insertions. Materially and structurally, he makes plain how the object is made, but there is often a sense of peekaboo or sleight of hand in the layers, displacement, and disruption of image and spaces. One would expect the use of the grid and checkerboard to lead to stability, but more often than not these normally regular fields are set ajar, slid apart, flipped open, broken, or misaligned. This is not art that panders, but rather insists that we engage by visually assembling, disassembling, and reassembling each work’s constituent parts in order to see, experience, and understand a holistic image and object. This is one way that Weathersby’s art extends painting’s possibilities.

Weathersby also extends paintings’s possibilities via the emotional and psychological spaces and situations it instigates. Intellectually, we might encounter his work as a visual puzzle to be solved, but there is more at stake here. What is the emotion of assembly and disassembly, visibility and invisibility, regularity and disruption, and why is this interesting and how does it enhance our lives? What is the psychology of gaps, slips, incisions, displacements, and what use is this to us? Weathersby’s art isn’t cruel or demanding, but is instead made with the utmost regard for the viewer, conveying integrity, openness, and generosity. Respectfully but rigorously, the spaces of the paintings echo the intimate, perplexing, meaningful spaces of ourselves, our bodies and thoughts, the things we acknowledge and know and attempt to share but are often beyond words. In this work we encounter our own self-knowledge and contradictions, aspirations and ambiguity. By confronting the parts of Weathersby’s art we can experience something in bits and pieces as right and whole in many different configurations and encounters. This is Weathersby’s diamond, painting’s health, and Art’s payoff.

Chris Ashley
Oakland, CA
August 2011

RESUME

Ken Weathersby (see artist’s web site for complete biography and blog for more information)

Education
- MFA in Painting, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI
- BFA in Painting and Drawing, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS
Recent Exhibitions
- 2011
  - Postconceptualism: The Malleable Object (curated by Mark Cameron Boyd), Stamp Gallery, The University of Maryland, College Park, MD
  - Therely Bare (curated by John Tallman and Ron Buffington), AVA Gallery, Chattanooga, TN, Zeitgiest Gallery, Nashville, TN, Kent State University, OH
  - Visual Phrasing (curated by Virginia Butera), Maloney Art Gallery at the College of St. Elizabeth, Morristown, NJ
  - Armory Show, with Pierogi Gallery, NY, NY
- 2010
  - Perfect Mismatch (solo), Pierogi Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
  - Continuing Color Abstraction (curated by Rella Stuart-Hunt), The Painting Center, NY, NY
  - Seven Miami, with Pierogi Gallery, Miami, FL
  - Aqua Miami, part of The Coil Project with Horse Trader Projects, Miami, FL
  - Centennial Exhibition, USM Museum of Art, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS
  - LACE Benefit Auction 2010 (selected by David John), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, LA, CA
  - San Juan Street Art, (organized by Alexis Figueroa), San Juan, Puerto Rico
- 2009
  - The Reverse Side Also Has a Reverse Side (solo), Kent Place Gallery, Summit, NJ
  - The Grid, Milepost 5, Portland, OR
  - Postconceptualism (curated by Mark Cameron Boyd and Fernando Batista), Moderno, Washington, DC
  - New Jersey State Council on the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship Exhibition, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ
  - Exposed (curated by Patterson Sims), Pierro Gallery of South Orange, South Orange,

Eve Aschheim

admin — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 04:39:42 +0000

Eve Aschheim: "Drawings & Photograms“

June 11, 2011 – July 31, 2011

PRESS RELEASE

Some Walls is pleased to present "Drawings & Photograms" by New York artist Eve Aschheim June 11, 2011– July 31, 2011.

Eve Aschheim’s approaches to image-making—drawings, photograms, and paintings—concern line and light, interior and exterior space, rhythm and pattern, and gesture and a sense of play conveyed using each medium’s unique processes and material. As a single body of work, Aschheim’s luminous, shimmering, intimate drawings and photograms evoke architectural and natural space, and affirm the value of the handmade, constructed, and seen. Each resulting image captures the presence and process of emotion, searching, and thinking; for the viewer, looking at the images provokes feeling, exploration, and thought. Aschheim’s assembled and constructed images retain a semingly contradictory sense of vulnerability, openness, and surprise.

Eve Aschheim is Senior Lecturer at the Visual Arts Program at Princeton University.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Galleri Magnus Aklundh, Lund, Sweden; Galerie Inga Kondeyne, Berlin; and Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.

Collections include: Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; and The Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM.

See images, an essay, and biography.

Some Walls is a curatorial and writing art project in a private home in Oakland, California. Some Walls is open by appointment only. View the exhibition online at somewalls.com. To schedule a visit, or for more information, please contact Chris Ashley at info@somewalls.com.

Previous exhibitions at Some Walls:

Jeffrey Cortland Jones: “Recent Paintings, ” 2009

A. Bill Miller: “Samples from the Gridworks Collection Project Archives," 2009

Frederick Bell: “Return Trip: Bologna Antwerp Oakland Brussels," 2010

Lorna Mills: "Zen Dog," 2010

Douglas Witmer: "Fruitville," 2010

Bruno Fazzolari: "New Work," 2010

Patrick Michael Fitzgerald: “New Paintings & Drawings,” 2010

Joseph Hughes: "Works on Paper – Four Decades – 1970s – 2000s," 2010-11

Paul Pagk: “Drawings from the Series: The Mesquite Drawings,” 2011

IMAGES

ESSAY

Eve Aschheim’s approaches to image-making—drawings, photograms, and paintings—concern line and light, interior and exterior space, rhythm and pattern, and gesture and a sense of play conveyed using each medium’s unique processes and material. As a single body of work, Aschheim’s luminous, shimmering, intimate drawings and photograms evoke architectural and natural space, and affirm the value of the handmade, constructed, and seen. Each resulting image captures the artist’s presence and process of emotion, searching, and thinking; for the viewer, looking at the images provokes feeling, exploration, and thought. Aschheim’s assembled and constructed images retain a seemingly contradictory sense of vulnerability, openness, and surprise.

The drawings—mixed media on pad-size Mylar, which provides a background of frosted translucency—are additive: marks build up, overlap and layer, echo each other or are positioned in contrast. They may be covered, erased, or moved and redefined before finally set in place. Drawing is the search for a way to depict and describe, a kind of translation or transliteration from something one sees, knows, imagines, strives towards, or stumbles across into marks, gestures, forms, or fields. But in the end, a drawing is neither the thing nor idea one works from or towards; drawn space is its own real and primary space. As obvious as this sounds, it’s worth repeating that a drawing exists as only itself; it is not something else. Aschheim’s drawings—lines and marks arranged and composed—gather or scaffold into perspective-based relationships of tension and harmony. While the image may reference space or form we think we know, the depicted place is unique, a new site to encounter.

In contrast to the drawings, Aschheim’s photograms—a process by which objects are laid on photo paper which is exposed to light—contain a different sense of light, depth, and focus. Some photograms are made using the drawings on Mylar as a negative, which allow enough light through to expose the photo paper, ultimately a kind of printmaking. The compositions of many other photograms, however, are achieved as arrangements, almost like sculpture or relief captured as a final, flattened, printed image. Initially, because these photograms are made with real objects placed on or near the photo paper, we recognize that it is a silhouetted photo of real things. While a photogram is finally itself, too, it also has a certain and undeniable relationship to the objects used to make it, things obviously not hand drawn such as coils, disks and rings, and translucent balls and sections of cylinder. The depicted photographic volume, perspective, or layering renders the arrangement’s depth of field in and out of focus, and is a record of the actual objects once position on the photo paper. Unlike the drawings’ constructed space, the photogram references an atmospheric, actual three-dimensional space.

The two bodies of work share certain linear qualities, but work in opposite directions. While the drawings work from abstraction towards realism, the photograms work from realism towards abstraction. In the drawings, despite the abundance of lines, there is a striking sense of how sunlight shining on a building can momentarily erase lines and dissolve edges. The marks are present, on the surface, but describe form and depth. In the photograms, depicted space is actually quite shallow, like a picture box, and unlike the drawings, tends towards flattening. Yet in all of the images, we sense both intuition and reason at work, alternately hesitant and assured, in the moment, open and keenly aware.

Reflecting on the experience of looking at Aschheim’s images in these two mediums—and thorough looking is a complex enterprise involving visual, physical, intellectual, emotional, and psychological engagement—one notes, despite their outward differences, consistent qualities in her work. Characteristics emerge and are noticeably sustained: contrasting black and white (though the drawings sometimes contain hints of color, the basic read is dark and light); a marked sense of bright light and exposure; interior and exterior architectural structure and space; natural space, both open and more closed; structures rarely in complete stasis but instead either in the middle of being erected, unassembled, or collapsing. From this several themes emerge: the tenuous process and intimacy of image-making; the fragility of the spaces and environments around us; how qualities of light change and effect what we see; the slippery relationship between abstraction and representation; and how our shifting points of view can obscure and clarify. Despite its smallish size, Aschheims’s art activates for us large-scale experience and recognition of feelings and ideas.

Chris Ashley
Oakland, CA
June 2011

RESUME

Eve Aschheim (See artist’s page at Lori Brookstein Fine Arts for a complete and current resume)

Born 1958, New York, NY
Senior Lecturer at the Visual Arts Program, Princeton University
Recent solo exhibitions include: Galleri Magnus Aklundh, Lund, Sweden; Galerie Inga Kondeyne, Berlin; and Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.
Collections include: Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; and The Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM.

Paul Pagk

admin — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 04:00:13 +0000

Paul Pagk: "Drawings from the Series: The Mesquite Drawings"

April 9, 2011 – May 29, 2011

PRESS RELEASE

Some Walls is pleased to present "Drawings from the Series: The Mequite Drawings" by New York artist Paul Pagk April 9, 2010 – May 29, 2010.

At Paul Pagk’s New York studio in September 2010 we spent a good amount of time looking at and talking about several large, complex, impressive paintings. It was a wonderful visit. Shortly before I left he began pulling out boxes, stacks, and piles of drawings in various media and different sizes; it was an amazing sight. Among these were The Mesquite Drawings, about which Pagk says, "I made these drawings and others in two drawing pads during and after my visit to Marfa and the Chinati Mountains." From this visit a plan was hatched to bring a selection of Pagk’s drawings to Some Walls in Oakland.

Eighteen drawings are hung close together in a three-row, six-column grid. Each are 14 x 17 inches, made with graphite, crayon, oil pastel, and watercolor. These drawings not only demonstrate how Pagk thinks through and develops motifs for his painting, but also deserve examination and appreciation as finished works themselves. Line and form move between architectural and organic, emanating light and air. His imaginative structures and varied spaces tweak perspective and hint at intimate and surreal experience. They bring to mind Bachelard’s favorite images in The Poetics of Space—houses, cellars, huts, drawers, nests, corners, and human bodies—and we how subjectively experience these spaces. Joan Ockman says in her review of Bachelard’s book, "…space is the abode of human consciousness." Bachelard writes, "I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace."

Recent solo exhibitions include: Galerie Eric Dupont, Paris; Baukunst Galerie, Köln; Markus Winter Gallery, Berlin; and Moti Hasson Gallery, New York.

Recent group exhibitions include: Jason McCoy inc. New York; Sue Scott Gallery, New York; Exit Art, New York; Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis; Geometric Progressions, Edward Thorp Gallery, New York.

Collections include: Fonds National D’Art Contemporain (FNAC), France; Le Bon Marché (LVMH group), Paris, France; Springfield Museum of Art, Ohio; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire; L’Artotec Limoges, FranceFRAC Picardie, France.

See images, an essay, and biography.

Some Walls is a curatorial and writing art project in a private home in Oakland, California. Some Walls is open by appointment only. View the exhibition online at somewalls.com. To schedule a visit, or for more information, please contact Chris Ashley at info@somewalls.com.

Previous exhibitions at Some Walls:

Jeffrey Cortland Jones: “Recent Paintings, ” 2009

A. Bill Miller: “Samples from the Gridworks Collection Project Archives," 2009

Frederick Bell: “Return Trip: Bologna Antwerp Oakland Brussels," 2010

Lorna Mills: "Zen Dog," 2010

Douglas Witmer: "Fruitville," 2010

Bruno Fazzolari: "New Work," 2010

Patrick Michael Fitzgerald: “New Paintings & Drawings,” 2010

Joseph Hughes: "Works on Paper – Four Decades – 1970s – 2000s," 2010-11

IMAGES

ESSAY

About Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space Joan Ockman writes, "…space is the abode of human consciousness[1]." In this book Bachelard, "considers various kinds of ‘praiseworthy space’ that attract and concentrate the poetic imaginations: spaces of intimacy and immensity[2]," such as rooms, closets, corners, cellars, huts, forest, nests, shells, and human bodies, what he calls "primal images." His interest is in how we subjectively experience “intimate” spaces as we daydream within them; he writes, "I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace." Dreaming, in this sense, means to imaginatively inhabit these spaces, to associate towards and from them, and to feel and think about these spaces and our place in them. These primal images are attractive entities of concrete essence that transcend memory and hold intimate, fundamental values.

Paul Pagk’s paintings, larger and materially denser than his drawings, are more heavily worked and layered, often undergoing radical changes in form and color during their making. This text’s concern, though these comments can also be applied to his paintings, is his "looser," quicker work on paper, in particular The Mesquite Drawings, about which Pagk says, "I made these drawings and others in two drawing pads during and after my visit to Marfa (Texas) and the Chinati Mountains."

The spaces and construction in Pagk’s paintings and drawings appear logical but are often slightly and suddenly otherwise: they may not abide by the absolute rules of perspective or physics, or are sometimes simply incomplete or unexpected. Each work’s image, however, a combination of field, diagram, and gesture, is a definite structural place emanating light and atmosphere. Scale may be either or both intimate and monolithic. Color is strong yet natural, marks are searching yet confident, surface is built yet porous. Pagk’s work hints at primal imagery, presenting a wide variety of spaces of "intimacy and immensity," and create material situations, visual structures, and pictorial space that prompt affective responses, the poetic imagination, and identification of and yearning for archetypal places and spaces, and the body’s relationship to these things. While the handmade spaces Pagk draws can function as primal images, the several ways he draws does not aim straight at archetype but is instead intentionally ambiguous and open for the purpose of varied personal and public experience. Using poet Jules Supervielle’s words, which Bachelard quotes (p187), we become:

Habitants délicats des forêts de nous-mêmes

(Sensitive inhabitants of the forests of ourselves)

On paper, using pencil, crayon, oil pastel, and watercolor, Pagk develops and rehearses motifs that may or may not find their way into the paintings. His imagery incorporates geometry and nature, design and incident, rendering and marks. Spaces and structures are made with line, gesture, colored field, outlining, and overlay. Skewed or incomplete perspective creates cubes and open boxes, wedges, channels and canals, planes, frames, notches, braces, curves, shells, sprials, and a sense of assembling and collapse. Diagrammatic drawing, schematic like a wire frame model and composed of straight, curving, spiraling, and repeated and layered lines, make both solid and fragile human spaces. There is the architecture of design and DNA, order and wildness, inside and outside, measured proportion and rhizomatic progression, and there is a full sense of light and atmosphere, whether natural, urban or artificial. Additionally, and in contrast, there is a touch of the (decidedly lower-case) surreal, "the disorienting, hallucinatory quality of a dream; unreal; fantastic[3]." But always, as David E. Denton’s comment about Bachelard’s images affirms, "The image always breathes the vibrations, the rhythms of intimacy, warmth, and attractiveness, and always functions on the ‘human plane[4].’"

There is nothing without narrative; that is, everything has a story, and without story nothing exists to us. It is how we experience and know and remember everything. To deny narrative is to deny past, present, and future, and to deny our relationships to each other and the things around us. To deny narrative of any type in an artwork is to be in stark and terrifying existential denial. Narrative in an artwork has multiple strands, the immediate of which are: our seeing, reacting to, and thinking about the art work; the evidence of the work’s making, the materials, the artist’s hand, and the process; its place in history and relationship to other art; the context and institutional frame in which the work is seen; the memory carried away from it; and so on. Pagk’s art not only works within and uses these narrative strands, but also allows us entry as sensitive inhabitants to the structures, spaces, and forests of the spaces he creates, as well as the structures, spaces, and forests of ourselves. This is a complex yet fundamental and necessary visual, intellectual, reflective, and meditative function. A final Bachelard quote reminds us of the primacy and experience of the kinds of images Pagk conjures: "The grace of a curve is an invitation to remain. We cannot break away from it without hoping to return. For the beloved curve has nest-like powers; it incites us to possession, it is a curved corner, inhabited geometry[5]."

Chris Ashley
Oakland, CA
April 2011

Joan Ockman. Harvard Design Magazine. Representations/Misrepresentations. Number 6, Fall 1998. http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/back/6books_ockman.html
Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press. Boston. Translated by Etienne Gilson. 1964.
"Surreal." Dictionary.com. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/surreal
David E. Denton. Notes on Bachelard’s Inhabited Geometry. Environmental & Architectural. Phenomenology Newsletter. ND. http://www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/Bachelard.htm
Ibid.

RESUME (See a complete and current resume)

Paul Pagk (web site)

Born in England UK, 1962
Lived in England, Austria, France and lives and works in New York since 1988.

Education:

1978 to 1982: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2011

Mesquite Drawings, Some Walls, Oakland CA, USA

2010

Recent paintings: My Red Maybe Your Orange, Even, Galerie Eric Dupont, Paris, France

2009

Children of the Revolution Cosmic Sex Poem, Exhibition, New York, USA

2008

Home is where the heart is, Baukunst Galerie, Köln, Germany

2007

Recent Paintings, Gallery Eric Dupont , Paris, France

To K from P with love, Markus Winter Gallery, Berlin, Germany

Aftermath & Lexicon, Moti Hasson Gallery, New York, USA

2005

Open Project Space, New York, USA

Galerie Eric Dupont, Paris, France

2003

Batlle Pagk curated by Adrian Dannatt, Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, USA

Selected Group Exhibitions

2011

70 Years of Abstract Painting – Excerpts, Jason McCoy inc. New York, USA

PAPER A-Z, Sue Scott Gallery, New York, USA

Geometric Days, curated by Papo Colo, Jeanette Ingberman, and Herb Tam, Exit Art, New York, USA

2010

Painting and Sculpture, Foundation for Contemporary Art Benefit, Lehmann Maupin, New York, USA

Informal Relations, curated by Scott Grow, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis, USA

Geometric Progressions, Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, USA

Lush Life, curated by Franklin Evans and Omar Lopez-Chahoud, Scaramouche, New York, USA

2009

A fleur de peau II – Le dessin à l’épreuve, Galerie Eric Dupont, Paris, France

2008

Present, curated by Jay Murphy, HP Garcia Gallery, New York, France

Group Show, Galerie Eric Dupont, Paris, France

Untitled (On Paper), Moti Hasson Gallery, New York, USA

2007

Inside the Pale, curated by Frank Schroder, Thrust Projects, New York, USA

Orthodoxe/Hétérodoxe : choisir sa ligne, Le 10neuf, C.R.A.C. Monbéliard, France

Beyond the Pale, curated by Candice Madey and Tairone Bastien, Moti Hasson Gallery, New York, USA

2006

Trait, ligne, écrire l’;espace, F.R.A.C Beauvais, France

Twist it Twice, curated by Franklin Evans, Moti Hasson Gallery, New York, USA

Hands up/Hand down, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, USA

A fleur de peau, Galerie Eric Dupont, Paris, France

Awards

2000 The Sheldon Bergh Award, USA

1998 Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York, USA

1987 Prix Fenéon, Université de la Sorbonne, Paris, France

Selected Public Collections

New York Presbyterian-Cornell Hospital, New York, USA

Fonds National D’Art Contemporain (FNAC), France

Le Bon Marché (LVMH group), Paris, France

Springfield Museum of Art, Ohio, USA

Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA

L’Artotec Limoges, France

FRAC Picardie, France

"Les Abattoirs", Musée de Toulouse, France

Ville de Brétigny-sur-Orge, France

Joseph Hughes

admin — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 20:07:18 +0000

“Joseph Hughes: Works on Paper – Four Decades – 1970s – 2000s”

December 5, 2010 – January 16, 2011

Press Release | Images | Essay | Press | Resume

PRESS RELEASE

Some Walls is pleased to present four decades of works on paper by San Francisco artist Joseph Hughes from December 5, 2010 – January 16, 2010.

During his five decade painting career Hughes, whose work has often been seen in the context of Radical Color Painting, has consistently produced works on paper in pursuit of a profoundly visual, emotional, and intelligent experience of color, light, and space.

Spanning four decades, this exhibition, Joseph Hughes: Works on Paper – Four Decades – 1970s – 2000s, the works presented are personal icons for believers in the transcendent experience of color and its role in exploring the reaches of our psychological and spiritual nature. They call for and support our discovery of self and other via observation, conjecture, intuition, and reason. In experiencing these paintings we find an ideal—an archetype for a way to look, think, and feel.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Bergner + Job Galerie, Mainz, Germany; HDG Gallery, Wheeling, WV; George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, CA; and Takada Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

Collections include: Kolumba Museum, Cologne, Germany; Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Antal-Lusztig Collection, Debrecen, Hungary; Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA; C.G. Jung Institutes, Los Angeles and San Francisco, CA.

See images, an essay, and biography.

Some Walls is a curatorial and writing art project in a private home in Oakland, California. Some Walls is open by appointment only. View the exhibition online at somewalls.com. To schedule a visit, or for more information, please contact Chris Ashley at info@somewalls.com.

Previous exhibitions at Some Walls:

Jeffrey Cortland Jones: “Recent Paintings, ” 2009

A. Bill Miller: “Samples from the Gridworks Collection Project Archives," 2009

Frederick Bell: “Return Trip: Bologna Antwerp Oakland Brussels," 2010

Lorna Mills: "Zen Dog," 2010

Douglas Witmer: "Fruitville," 2010

Bruno Fazzolari: "New Work," 2010

Patrick Michael Fitzgerald: “New Paintings & Drawings“

IMAGES

ESSAY

During his five decade painting career, Joseph Hughes, whose work has for some time been situated in the context of Radical Color Painting, but which is also clearly quite contemporary abstraction, has continually produced works on paper in pursuit of a profoundly visual, emotional, and intellectual experience of color, light, and space. However, unlike many artists, about whom the label "works on paper" brings to mind drawing, something perhaps less than a complete art work but rather a study or preparatory exercise for canvases, Hughes’ pieces are actually fully-realized, stand-alone paintings. In fact, some of his works on paper are larger than some of his canvases. Among painters it is rare to find in a single artist’s oeuvre a committed equal emphasis on the painted surface of a canvas and a work on paper.

Looked at over decades, one can see in Hughes’ art recurring ways of applying paint and handling color. The paint is fairly liquid, whether watercolor or more fluid acrylic, and is applied to paper that is vertical, often attached to the wall, rather than flat on a table where it might behave more predictably by spreading, pooling, or being absorbed. Gravity is a partner, and downward-flowing fields, streams, and rivulets of color are set in motion and carefully caressed, nudged, diverted, or blocked. Although each work’s palette is intense and tends towards close relatives and neighbors—red to brown in one, blue to green in another, a variety of associated yellows—there is often a contrasting or surprising under painting, and Hughes’ color range overall is diverse and unusual. Thalo, Dioxazine, and Acra are powerful and luminous, yet these staining colors are so difficult to work with that most artists simply avoid them. But even when Hughes uses the more common Ultramarine or Siena—and he has a special way with white and gray—his color remains clear and brilliant because his command of paint, especially acrylic medium, used in alternating glazed and opaque areas, allows him to achieve the jewel-like, lapidary qualities found, for example, in Rembrandt, whom Hughes greatly admires.

Despite the many consistencies, however, examining works from the last four decades also reveals an enormous range of differences. From the 1970s to the 2000s paint washes and flows, drips and accumulates, cascades and veils, and splatters and frays.

Earlier works, such as 1973/ XI C 37 (Soft Red Flow), 1973, might be seen initially as a more traditional watercolor. Thinned washy red paint, paler along the sides and more densely filling the central field, flows down but not off of the paper. Deep red pigment collects along the central field’s outer borders which bow out towards the sides of the paper, creating a barrel-like shape that reads as both full and empty, solid and space. Are the paler vertical left and right edges simply background around this barrel shape, or are they like parted curtains swept back to reveal a scrim-like red, or a void? The subtle drawing Hughes achieves with color makes either situation possible.

On the surface of 1987-D III (Dk Blue Violet), 1987, a steady downpour of blue and violet runs down and builds up a dense thicket over a dark background. Small knobs and buds of acrylic collect and accumulate at the ends of thin streams. This crowded, compact image feels like a heavy force of nature, practically impermeable, but is transformed momentarily into something open and wondrous by the glaze-like layers of lustrous acrylic which catch and throw off color and light.

In 1990-D III (Cadmium Yellow), 1990, the streams of paint flow down and turn into veils and mist. Whereas the thick, downward pummel in 1987-D III (Dk Blue Violet) can feel impassable, 1990-D III (Cadmium Yellow) is soft and inviting; the darker of the yellows seem instead to rise up from the bottom as figure-like shapes, making the kind of space that one can enter, walk into, and through.

In the previous decades Hughes’ paint is applied at the canvas’ top and flows towards the bottom edge; continuing this in the 2000s, he also introduced the technique of throwing paint from the bottom to the top. A work such as 2004-D I (Jenkins Green), 2004, brings into play a new kind of physical, active engagement: the paint hits the surface, splatters, and fans out. The lush green, a glaze over a dark ground, has a crystalline or dendrite quality; that this green maintains its luminousness is a testament to Hughes’ mastery of acrylic paint.

Hughes’ works on paper are unusually finely crafted and finished. Each is resolved, whole, and complete. Unlike much current painting that is intentionally unfinished, as if leaving a conceptual rabbit hole, a corner of ambiguity, or a veneer of lack of commitment or faith, Hughes’ surfaces and edges are considered and integrated; they are seamless, classic, accomplished, and impeccable. Viewing his paintings, we confront consistency and purpose, beauty and rigor, and a magnificent color experience.

Chris Ashley
Oakland, CA
December 2010

PRESS

Paint Left to Its Own Devices. San Francisco Chronicle. December 23, 2010.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/12/22/DDMA1GL5EH.DTL

RESUME

Joseph Hughes (web site)

Exhibitions

Recent solo exhibitions include: Bergner + Job Galerie, Mainz, Germany; HDG Gallery, Wheeling, WV; George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, CA; and Takada Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

Collections include: Kolumba Museum, Cologne, Germany; Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Antal-Lusztig Collection, Debrecen, Hungary; Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA; C.G. Jung Institutes, Los Angeles and San Francisco, CA.

See a complete biography, list of exhibitions, and bibliography at Joseph Hughes’ web site.

Patrick Michael Fitzgerald

admin — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:56:36 +0000

“Patrick Michael Fitzgerald: New Paintings & Drawings”

October 2- November 21, 2010

PRESS RELEASE

Some Walls is pleased to begin its second year of programming with new paintings and drawings by Irish artist Patrick Michael Fitzgerald from October 2- November 21, 2010.

Fitzgerald, who lives in Zalla (Vizcaya), near Bilbao, Spain will show two paintings and six drawings, all completed in 2010.

In a recent essay, Sherman Sam wrote, "Patrick Michael Fitzgerald, as an artist, really is a farmer. What is it to say that an artist is farmer? I mean he grows art; it is organic produce. Art today does not seem to be grown; it is manufactured, produced, industrially fabricated, even battery farmed in a few instances. Who grows art any longer? Just a small handful."

In a review in the Brooklyn Rail of Fitzgerald’s recent exhibition at Guest Room in Brussels, John Yau wrote, "Fitzgerald’s vocabulary is basic—there is nothing elaborate or stylish about his lines and circles, rough and ragged shapes. He relies on colored pencils, ink, and collage—nothing fancy. And yet—and this is why Fitzgerald seems to me to be on the verge of becoming an important and singular artist—the work comes across as taut and fresh, brimming with an awareness that the act of seeing is a construction, at once fluid and disrupted."

Fitzgerald’s recent solo exhibitions include: Drawings, Guest Room/Contemporary Art, Brussels, Belgium, 2010; Bihotz, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, Ireland, 2010; and Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris 2008.

Group exhibitions include: Collecting the New, Recent Acquisitions to the IMMA Collection, Irish Museum Of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland, 2010; and Alpha, Drei Raum für Gegenwartskunst Cologne, Germany, 2009.

Work in public collections include: O.P.W. Irish State Collection; ARTIUM, Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo, Vitoria, Spain; Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, USA; Irish Museum Of Modern Art, Dublin; and C.C.A. Andratx, Mallorca.

See images, an essay, and biography.

Some Walls is a curatorial and writing art project in a private home in Oakland, California. Some Walls is open by appointment only. To view the exhibition online please visit somewalls.com. To schedule a visit, or for more information, please contact Chris Ashley at info@somewalls.com.

Previous exhibitions at Some Walls:

Jeffrey Cortland Jones: “Recent Paintings, ” 2009

A. Bill Miller: “Samples from the Gridworks Collection Project Archives," 2009

Frederick Bell: “Return Trip: Bologna Antwerp Oakland Brussels," 2010

Lorna Mills: "Zen Dog," 2010

Douglas Witmer: "Fruitville," 2010

Bruno Fazzolari: "New Work," 2010

IMAGES

ESSAY

But shadow enlivened by atoms of sunlight
Constantly crisscrossed by sleepless flies.

Mute Objects of Expression by French poet and essayist, Francis Ponge (1899 – 1988)

Ponge’s lines, to which artist Patrick Michael Fitzgerald has referred[1], describe and evoke the buzzing and movement of tiny and microscopic objects—shadow energized by and contrasting with almost imperceptible light, the random flight paths of non-stop insects that effortlessly draw a grid in the air without plan, the color and atmosphere of a designated space and the activity within it—and begin with a "But" that acts as a contradiction, an "instead of," a proposal that the objects in our world, even the smallest ones, are not inconsequential. These objects and their changing, dynamic qualities matter even without our attention or presence, and can be seen and experienced if one is attentive and patient. The world around us, which we often think of as still, a theater turned off when we aren’t looking, is instead constantly in motion at the smallest and least tangible level.

Ponge is associated with phenomenology, the philosophical movement founded by Edmund Husserl in Germany in the early 20th century. Simply, phenomenology is a philosophical method for the objective study of topics typically regarded as subjective: consciousness and the content of conscious experiences such as perceptions, emotions, and judgments. Although it seeks to be scientific, phenomenology does not study consciousness from the perspective of clinical psychology or neurology, but rather, through systematic reflection, to determine the essential properties and structures of consciousness and conscious experience. Ponge’s poem attempts to bring a heightened conscious sensitivity and awareness to the phenomena of nature: light, living things, motion, sight, and perception.

Fitzgerald’s art provides for the viewer a visual experience roughly parallel to Ponge’s written example. His attunement to visual phenomena in his and our environment—phenomena in the natural, constructed, social, and political world that we inhabit and navigate over time incidentally and accidentally, circumstantially and intentionally, in isolation and repetitively, whether consciously or not—is filtered through and presented via the primary and elemental handmade language of drawing and painting: line, shape, color, surface, gesture, layers, cuts, and collage. His response to nature is not merely filtered through selection, reduction, abstraction, or interpretation, but is instead the living and breathing experience of seeing, acknowledging, using, and reusing, an experience that is nuanced and complicated, human and murky. The artist’s process requires immersion, reflection, dissection, isolation, reorganization, multiplication, expansion, repetition, variation, compression, and iteration. Fitzgerald’s art is the result of this non-linear process, and his observation, making, and presentation—perception, emotion, and judgment—ultimately provide for us flat, rectangular wall-hung objects on the surface of which are organized rich and intricate, earned and determined images. Our job—a function and a privilege of our sighted, conscious, and discerning existence—is first to objectively discover, confront, and engage with Fitzgerald’s visual objects in an attempt to know his subjective presentation, and to then attempt to know our own subjective experience. Through systematic observation and reflection we determine first the essential physical properties and structures in Fitzgerald’s art, and secondly to hypothesize, reflect on, and confirm the artist’s and our consciousness and conscious experience. Ultimately, our objective contemplation of the subjective painted object makes us aware of our subjective experience, and more aware of the world in which we live.

Fitzgerald’s images combine several image-making methods in single works, an approach that might sound premeditated, procedural, layered, and dense but instead results in sensitive, intuitive, highly-conscious, and coherent images. Our experience of these layers requires observation and cognition—the process of thought. For example, in his small painting Peso (verde), 2010, three different pictorial approaches are combined and integrated. First, across the background surface a field of dabs and dribbles is obscured by the foggy atomized cloud of white spray paint, on top of which a brushed green tree-like shape or figure reaches from the top to nearly the bottom. Adjacent to the left is collaged a strip of red-stained fabric. The foggy field is achieved via a mechanical process that applies paint without touching the surface and reads as recessive, while the green figure is gestural, drawn, and constructed by touching the surface on which it sits. The red fabric anchors or stabilizes the green figure, and is a real thing that reminds us that the painting is a physical object. In a strange way this red fabric, nubby and frayed along its top edge, counter-intuitively connects and mediates the two other painted areas.

Another example of Fitzgerald’s approach and process is the drawing Spine (blue & red), also 2010. In this drawing scribbled gestural lines are between and on top of ruled lines, while areas of white paper contrast with colored areas; these areas are the actual drawn aspect here. But there are two more forms of drawing, each of which in turn have two facets. First, two kinds of cutting, which are really kinds of drawing, take place in Fitzgerald’s work: precise cuts into and through the paper, analogous to the ruled lines, create shaped negative or see-through areas, while pieces of more freehand-cut paper from existing drawings are collaged into the drawn field. Secondly, there are two kinds of collage: the cut fragments of drawings just mentioned, and found objects applied to the surface, in this case one end or handle of a paper fan, a real thing as opposed to a drawn thing, placed vertically in the middle top part of the entire drawing, and which itself contains see-through cuts in a scroll pattern. Like phenomenologists, through objective observation we gain insight into the factual aspects of Fitzgerald’s processes and products, which leads us to the possibility of assessing subjective aspects such as the artist’s motivation, desires, and decisions, and finally, with reflection, to the content of conscious experiences such as perceptions, emotions, and judgments.

Recently a great deal of excellent and helpful writing about Fitzgerald’s art has been published which examines and explains the physical, aesthetic, and conceptual properties of his work, while also relating and reflecting the heightened conscious experience his paintings and drawings make possible. This writing is not only helpful in describing and gaining insight into Fitzgerald’s work, but is also particularly useful here for briefly conveying various approaches to thinking about his paintings and drawings, and for surveying the growing consensus of experience and opinion coalescing around his art.

In a recent catalog essay Frank Lubbers, a curator and writer based in Brussels, notes Fitzgerald’s associative imagery, and perhaps the artist’s sources, saying, "There is some reminiscence of flowers, flowering trees, branches and twigs, either in spring, autumn or winter. His titles may give a hint, like Jardín (Garden) or Tree. In other works there might be a kind of untidy, but beautifully structured grid or wire mesh laid over the painting, in which oddly shaped forms are hung, like laundry, drying on a line. It can seem as if the wind took some nicely coloured irregularly torn rags and blew them into a rusty fence[2]"

London-based artist, critic, and curator Sherman Sam introduces the notion of Masanobu Fukuoka’s idea of farming, which suggests, "how to not do too much, in fact how not to do anything at all, and, instead, work with nature. Hence no fertilizer, no ploughing, no herbicides, no insecticide". Connecting this to the idea that Fitzgerald’s art has an organic, integrated, and human basis, Sam continues, "Patrick Michael Fitzgerald, as an artist, really is a farmer. What is it to say that an artist is farmer? I mean he grows art; it is organic produce. Art today does not seem to be grown; it is manufactured, produced, industrially fabricated, even battery farmed in a few instances. Who grows art any longer? Just a small handful[3]."

Finally, New York poet, critic, and curator John Yau explicitly identifies the role of specific and homespun visual characteristics and qualities found in works in Fitzgerald’s 2010 exhibition at Guest Room in Brussels when he writes, "Using a vocabulary that consists of a few vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines (a skeletal geometry) juxtaposed against ragged and rounded shapes, and perfectly cut, collaged circles, and pristine cut-out spaces, Fitzgerald responds to something palpable in the world. The often-layered space, while alluding to nature, also conveys drawing as an accumulation of decisions, as well as a visual indication of time past. One both sees and sees into these drawings, with the layering reiterated by the use of collage in the form of the perfectly round circles." Yau concludes that, "Fitzgerald’s vocabulary is basic—there is nothing elaborate or stylish about his lines and circles, rough and ragged shapes. He relies on colored pencils, ink, and collage—nothing fancy. And yet—and this is why Fitzgerald seems to me to be on the verge of becoming an important and singular artist—the work comes across as taut and fresh, brimming with an awareness that the act of seeing is a construction, at once fluid and disrupted."

Patrick Michael Fitzgerald’s art is rich and complicated, yet accessible and based in perception and feeling. As Lubbers says, "The real great capacity of a painter is… to amaze us. This surprise is mostly in the imaginative, unusual and unexpected angle from which the painter sees reality, and by which he provides us with a fresh and unexpected look at the world around us[5]."

Chris Ashley
Oakland, CA
October 2010

[1] Fitzgerald, Patrick Michael. Crisscrossed. Le Roseau Pensant (blog). March 22, 2010. http://patrickmfitzgerald.blogspot.com/2010/03/crisscrossed.html.
[2] Lubbers, Frank. Patrick Michael Fitzgerald: A world of paint. Paintings and drawings by Patrick Michael Fitzgerald. Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, June 2010. http://patrickmichaelfitzgerald.net/?page_id=29.
[3] Sam, Sherman. Farming drawing: Patrick Michael Fitzgerald. Guest Room/Contemporary Art, Brussels. 2010. http://patrickmichaelfitzgerald.net/?page_id=29.
[4] Yau, John. Patrick Michael Fitzgerald Drawings. Brooklyn Rail. 2010. http://www.brooklynrail.org/2010/07/artseen/patrick-michael-fitzgerald-drawings.
[5] Ibid.

RESUME

Patrick Michael Fitzgerald (web site | blog )

Born 1965. Lives and works in Zalla (Vizcaya), Spain

Education

1983-84
Norwich School of Art, Norwich, England.

1984-87
B.A. Hons Fine Art.
Chelsea School of Art, London.

1987-88
Master in Fine Arts.
Chelsea School of Art, London.

Exhibitions

Recent solo exhibitions include: Drawings, Guest Room/Contemporary Art, Brussels, Belgium, 2010; Bihotz, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, Ireland, 2010; and Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, 2008.

Recent group exhibitions include: Collecting the New, Recent Acquisitions to the IMMA Collection, Irish Museum Of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland, 2010; and Alpha, Drei Raum für Gegenwartskunst, Cologne, Germany, 2009.

See a complete list of exhibitions and bibliography at Patrick Michael Fitzgerald’s web site

Bruno Fazzolari

admin — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 18:42:56 +0000

“Bruno Fazzolari”

August 8 – September 26, 2010

PRESS RELEASE

Some Walls is pleased to present new paintings and photographs by San Francisco artist and critic Bruno Fazzolari from August 8 – September 26, 2010.

Bruno Fazzolari’s art is puzzling. His paintings and photographs occupy a strange zone where it’s difficult to put your finger on… well, let’s not start with ambiguous and unsatisfying statements. Try again:

Bruno Fazzolari’s art is not necessarily evasive or oblique, unfriendly or unclear, but it is difficult to identify precisely or definitively what the images he makes represent, mean, or allude to. His paintings and photographs refuse to… ah, statements in the negative aren’t helpful. One more time:

Bruno Fazzolari’s art is complex: it is sensitive and forthright, materially apparent and thoughtfully conceptual, well-crafted and expressive, fully intuitive and keenly intelligent. He says, "Art is interesting to me when it creates more problems than it resolves… I want my work to offer resistance to habitual ways of viewing." His images, perpetually on the edge of representation and abstraction, keep the viewer in a kind of visual, pre-lingual limbo-state where the experience of identifying and talking about something specific—what one sees, knows, and understands—is continually encouraged, suspended, and re-engaged. Fazzolari’s art requires and inspires a cycle of observation and conversation, where the viewer looks, responds and reflects, back and forth, movinheatg in and out of the image’s space in order to recall, consider, revisit, and validate.

As is all good visual art, Fazzolari’s work it is not simply a consumable, but is instead time-consuming, endless, and rewarding. It must be seen in person.

See images, an essay, and biography.

Bruno Fazzolari’s most recent solo exhibition, Cold Turkey, took place in 2009 at Gallery 16, San Francisco. Upcoming solo exhibitions in San Francisco include The Lost Paintings (2001-2004) in September 2010 at Second Floor Projects, and Mirror 5 in November at Jancar Jones Gallery. He has shown at Feature, Inc., Gallery Paule Anglim, and Michael Kohn Gallery. His criticism appears regularly at ArtPractical.com. He earned an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1996 after graduating from U.C. Berkeley in Comparative Literature with a focus on critical studies, French and Ancient Greek.

Some Walls is a curatorial and writing art project in a private home in Oakland, California. Some Walls is open by appointment only. To view the exhibition online please visit somewalls.com. To schedule a visit, or for more information, please contact Chris Ashley at info@somewalls.com.

Previous exhibitions at Some Walls:

Jeffrey Cortland Jones: “Recent Paintings, ” 2009

A. Bill Miller: “Samples from the Gridworks Collection Project Archives," 2009

Frederick Bell: “Return Trip: Bologna Antwerp Oakland Brussels," 2010

Lorna Mills: "Zen Dog," 2010

Douglas Witmer: "Fruitville," 2010

IMAGES