August 8 – September 26, 2010

Press Release | Images | Essay | Resume

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, moving 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

[View with PicLens]

ESSAY

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, moving in and out of the image’s space in order to recall, consider, revisit, and validate

 

In Fazzolari’s paintings, shapes and strokes in green, blue, yellow, magenta, pink, black, and gray are scattered across the canvas’ white ground. These marks and fields, pulled, pushed, dabbed, nudged, smeared, wiped, and caressed, some deliberately, even fearlessly, awkward, teasingly assert figuration and imply visual space while remaining beyond the firm grasp of a single word, phrase, or idea. They present as if made by someone highly literate who has chosen to abandon words: think of the energy and movement of bison and deer in Spain’s Altamira Cave painted by an artist with a Pop sensibility whose longing for the archaic is filtered through urban experience. Abstraction’s historical gesture, misleadingly thought masculine, is here confronted by a determined suffrage-like enterprise where opposites—heavy and light, quick and slow, empty and filled, impulsive and studied—are integrated and balanced. There is beauty here, but also artless determination, plangent vulnerability, heatfelt generosity, healthy doubt, and not a trace of coy skepticism or strategic irony.

 

Fazzolari’s photographs are like set pieces found in the urban theater, moments of city’s nature. Even when not photographed in the city, the photographs come from places where people go; one has to go very far to escape the human footprint, of spaces shaped for human use. Stumbled upon or arranged, their color connected to the paintings (do the photographs help define his painting’s palette, or does this palette determine what he photographs?), they evoke contemplation and absorption through wandering, noticing, and selecting. One wonders: are these photographs taken of a scene’s first encounter, or are these images part of the cityscape through which the artist has repeatedly walked past and suddenly seen new? The reverie of private time and vision in public, whether that public is urban density, the park, the beach, or a campground, is personally political and necessary: take something found, that belongs to another, or even to everyone, and make of that moment, a slice of life, a new image. That Fazzolari’s photographs are connected to his paintings and drawings through shape, framing and color speaks highly of vision and outlook; this broad array of visual work comprises a larger project: a way of seeing, questioning, making, and presenting.

 

In an effort to manage and make sense of these images we attempt nouns but have no certain names, try adjectives but can’t identify action, and employ description and conjecture in the absence of a concrete situation or topography. But this is not to say that images are closed or hermetic; rather than discouragingly shutting out the viewer, these images- primal, resonant, organic- are surprisingly open to multiple associations and ideas. They act for the viewer like repositories of faintly archetypal places and newly conjured experience, triggers for memory and wonder, spaces in which we wander to encounter imagination, another point of view, the social and political world, ourselves. This is what visual art should do, and what Bruno Fazzolari’s art does do— it is not a consumable, but it is time-consuming, endless, and rewarding.

Chris Ashley
Oakland, CA
August 2010

RESUME

Bruno Fazzolari is an artist and critic. He has shown with Feature, Inc., Gallery Paule Anglim, Gallery 16, and Michael Kohn Gallery, and has been included in shows at the M.H. de Young Museum and the Katonah Museum of Art.

His work has received attention in Artforum, Art in America, Art Papers, the New Yorker, the San Francisco Chronicle, Artweek and the New York Times.

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.

Education

• 1996 M.F.A. Painting.
  San Francisco Art Institute.
• 1991 B.A. Comparative Literature: English, French, Ancient Greek, Critical Studies.
  Highest Honors.
  University of California, Berkeley.

Solo Exhibitions

2010

• 2nd Floor Projects, San Francisco
• Jancar Jones, San Francisco
• Some Walls, Oakland, CA

2009

• Cold Turkey, Gallery 16, San Francisco.

2001

• Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco.

2000

• Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday. Debs & Co., New York. (Catalog).

Selected Group Exhibitions

2010

• Library Show. Curated by Johnathan Hartshorn. Albuquerque, New Mexico.

2003

• Food Matters. Katonah Museum of Art. Katonah, New York. (Catalog).
• 2003 Sweet Tooth. Copia, the American Center for Wine, Food, and the Arts. Napa, California. (Catalog).

2002

• Grey Gardens. Curated by Bruce Hainley. Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles.

1999

• Museum Pieces. DeYoung Museum, San Francisco. (Catalog).

1998

• Pudding. Feature, Inc., New York.

1997

• More Than a Feeling. Four Walls, San Francisco.
• brunofazzolaripaulsietsema. ESP, San Francisco.
• Whatever. Southern Exposure, San Francisco.

1996

• Sequence. San Francisco State University.
• 1996 Friends. 2451 Harrison Street Artspace, San Francisco.

1994

• SF Introductions. Terrain Gallery, San Francisco.

Awards

2001

• The Art Council. Grants to Individual Artists Program. (Catalog).

Public Art Commissions

1996

• San Francisco Art in Transit Program SFAI Centennial: Market Street Kiosks.

Teaching

2010

• California College of the Arts

2008

• San Francisco Art Institute, Individual Study.

Writing and Curatorial Experience

Present

• Regular Contributor to ArtPractical.com

1995

• Curatorial Intern. Department of Media Arts. S.F. Museum of Modern Art.

1992 – ‘97

• Freelance Critic for local, national and international publications, including: Artweek, WorldArt.

1990 – ‘91

• Managing Editor. Berkeley Fiction Review.

1989 – 91

• Founding Editor. (sic) A Review of Things.

Bibliography

2009

• “Opening and Closing,” Kevin Killian, SFMOMA Open Space Blog, May 12, 2009.
• “Fazzolari at 16,” Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle, May 2, 2009.
• “Bruno Fazzolari: Cold Turkey,” Laura Chenault, ArtBusiness.Com, April 3, 2009.

2003

• “An Exhibit Stocked with More Food than Many Pantries,” Benjamin Genocchio, New York Times, August 31, 2003.

2002

• “Report from San Francisco,” Stephanie Cash, Art in America, June, 2002.
• “Bruno Fazzolari,” Bruce Hainley, Artforum, January, 2002.

2001

• “Bruno Fazzolari,” David Bonnetti, San Francisco Chronicle, November 24, 2001.

2000

• “Art,” The New Yorker, March 20, 2000.

1999

• “Local Heroes,” Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle, November 20, 1999.
• “Genial Deconstruction of DeYoung Museum” David Bonetti, San Francisco Examiner, November 26, 1999.

1998

• “More Than a Feeling,” Ella Delaney, Art Papers, May-June, 1998.

1997

• “Whatever…” Donna Leigh Shumacher, Art Papers, July-August, 1997.
• “Que sera, sera: whatever at Southern Exposure,” Bay Area Reporter, February, 1997.

1994

• “Bruno Fazzolari at Terrain,” Roberto Friedman, Artweek, August, 1994.

Catalogs and Publications

2007

• Publication without title, 240 pp. Feature, Inc., New York.

2003

• Food Matters, 48 pp. Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, New York.
• Sweet Tooth, 120 pp. Copia, Napa. 2003.

2001

• The Art Council Awards Show, 40pp. The Art Council Inc, San Francisco. 2001.

2000

• Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday, 20pp. (Solo Catalog). Debs & Co., New York. 2000.

1999

• Museum Pieces, 37 pp. M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco. 1999.

June 19 – July 25, 2010

Press Release | Images | Essay | Resume

PRESS RELEASE

Some Walls is pleased to present Philadelphia-based artist Douglas Witmer’s exhibition Fruitville from June 20 – July 25, 2010.

Douglas Witmer is well known for his paintings which intuitively combine simple geometric imagery, emphatic color, and subtle manipulation of surface physicality. In addition to this widely-shown and growing body of work, for the past several years Witmer has worked on a series small three dimensional pieces using found wood as a support called Fruitville. This exhbition is the first time the Fruitville works have been shown publicly. Witmer has said about this series:

The Fruitville Pike is a road where I grew up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It’s a major thoroughfare, but it doesn’t go to, from, or through anywhere called Fruitville. My efforts to find Fruitville, if there ever was such a place at all, have been inconclusive.

 

So Fruitville exists in my imagination as a kind of Eden; a place of purity, clarity, and quiet delight. It manifests itself in an ongoing visual process of experimentation with wood, paint, glue, paper, ink, light, and shadows. The things that make up my Fruitville exist to be in relationship to the places where they can be seen, and also in relationship with each other.

The sensitive, direct, and quirky color, spatial, and textural qualities that appear in Witmer’s paintings and works on paper are also found in the Fruitville series, continuing his approach to making art that is lush, playful, and deceptively simple, yet rigorous, iconic, and commanding.

Ten additional Fruitvilles works and five paintings- four on canvas, one on paper- are also available for viewing.

 

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:

• Jeffrey Cortland Jones: “Recent Paintings”
• A. Bill Miller: “Samples from the Gridworks Collection Project Archives”
• Frederick Bell: “Return Trip: Bologna Antwerp Oakland Brussels”
• Lorna Mills: "Zen Dog"

IMAGES

[View with PicLens]

ESSAY

Well-known for his paintings, most recently widely-exhibited works with precisely-placed bars of evocative color that float on casual-appearing yet skillfully-intercepted washy black-stained canvas grounds, Douglas Witmer’s Fruitville series might initially appear to be quite a different direction for the artist. The appearance of three dimensional art objects, small and intimate at no more than eight inches in any direction, might seem sudden, but actually Witmer has slowly worked on this series with great consideration for over ten years. These pieces have never been shown with his paintings, and in fact they have never before been publicly shown at all except on the artist’s web site. The Fruitville series are interestingly connected to Witmer’s paintings, and spark additional dialog about his overall ongoing project.

 

With some examination it becomes clear that the Fruitville series is another body of work with origins in Witmer’s working ideas. He writes, "A painting is not a statement. It is the evidence of painting[1]." In other words, painting is a unique activity that does not "say" anything; it is instead an activity with a visual result, and that visual result is a real thing that the viewer experiences. Witmer continues, "I want to believe that the relationship of painting values inquiry over conclusion[2]." The Fruitville works continue Witmer’s line of visual and material inquiry through the use of paint, surface, shape, space, color, line, and edge to make an object that engages the viewer in a worthy experience.

 

An encounter with Sienese painting during a difficult period years ago instigated Witmer’s investigation into the making and meaning of visual space with simple means on a flat surface using certain iconic-like shapes or motifs. In an interview this author conducted with Witmer in 2005, he related that, "…around that time I started investigating the issue the opposite way, by making tiny wooden reliefs—the Fruitville series— that projected out from the wall, but were subtly manipulated to make them appear flatter[3]." As further background Witmer says:

The Fruitville Pike is a road where I grew up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It’s a major thoroughfare, but it doesn’t go to, from, or through anywhere called Fruitville. My efforts to find Fruitville, if there ever was such a place at all, have been inconclusive.

 

So Fruitville exists in my imagination as a kind of Eden; a place of purity, clarity, and quiet delight. It manifests itself in an ongoing visual process of experimentation with wood, paint, glue, paper, ink, light, and shadows. The things that make up my Fruitville exist to be in relationship to the places where they can be seen, and also in relationship with each other[4].

The Fruitville works are made with single and combined pieces of found and scrap wood that have minimal but sensitive and explicit additions—one might even say interventions—of color in response to the wood’s surface and shape, usually with paint, occasionally with graphite, and sometimes collage. Works made with a single piece of wood are hung flat on the wall as low relief, while other works consist of two or more pieces that are stacked, aligned or counter-posed, or pedestal-like. Each work looks different; while some seem heavy and stable, others are light and precarious. All exert a kind compressed space that verges on the illusionistic but is suppressed by the object’s material presence and small size. They suggest an imaginary monumental scale that in reality can be cradled in one’s hand.

 

Rough and handmade, having remade something old or cast aside into something new, they range from funky to noble, homely to statuesque, naked to well-attired. Some pieces have barely anything done to them. One might think of the natural and used surfaces of these chunks as analogous to the backgrounds in Witmer’s paintings, where the effects of gravity on thinned black paint produce another kind of found surface. As in his paintings, where their making is evident, so too in the Fruitville works Witmer hides nothing; there are no tricks—the skill is in the finding, the combining and positioning, the addition or intervention.

 

Example: A narrow strip of roughly cut wood is horizontal, about one inch by eight inches, the two opposite ends of which are cut at an angle so that they face the viewer; the left end is painted a pale blue gray, the right is white—our eyes flit back and forth in binary fashion from one end to the other, forcing a kind of looking akin to closing one eye, then opening it and closing the other—while the wood’s vertical grain on the front plane is bare and seems to force it’s way out exaggeratedly into the viewer’s space, but because the material is so raw the depicted space constantly struggles to fully assert itself against the actual shallow space of the material, creating an odd tension in something so small.

 

Example: Two works made from wedges of wood are each hung vertically on the wall so that the heel of the wedge become the horizontal top of the piece—one wedge is long and thin, the heel end painted a smooth white, the edges of which have been sanded so that what would otherwise be a sharp-edged rectangle becomes a kind of floating pool of white at the top of a long thin shape, turning the wedge into a kind of stand, or altar, for a vaguely rectangular, sliver-thin, flat layer of white glowing above the dark weathered wood beneath it; the heel of the second wedge, thicker, shorter, and blunter, angles down slightly towards the viewer and is painted in six bands of orange, red, white, green, yellow, and blue, a motif closest to some found in Witmer’s paintings, here laid out like a carpet or serape, or the tip of a torch with a low level multi-colored flame, or a puddle of melted ice cream atop a post-modern cone—this piece feels like a slice of life. 

 

Example: Four short pieces of smooth, thin wood, flat molding, perhaps, each about three inches high and one and a half inches wide, are stacked staggeredly and glued together, their beveled top edges aligned to suggest a stair-step space or slight ramp away from the viewer, but each slab’s end grain alternates left or right to make a zigzag that appears as a succession of furrowed fields, or a plaza stretching off in the distance, or a tightly tiled patterned floor, all spaces and images found in paintings by one of Witmer’s inspirations, the Sienese Master of the Osservanza (active 1430-1450)[5].

 

While the works in the Fruitville series share materials and process, each is a unique example of Witmer’s extended investigation, demonstrating his wish to believe that, "the relationship of painting, when one devotes oneself to it, extends beyond the boundaries of a painting, however indefinite or unmeasureable this extension may seem to be[6]."

1. Douglas Witmer: A Painting is Not a Statement. http://douglaswitmer.com/not-a-statement/
2. Ibid.
3. Chris Ashley: Interview With Douglas Witmer. 2005. http://www.minusspace.com/2005/12/interview-with-douglas-witmer-by-chris-ashley/
4. Douglas Witmer: Fruitville. http://douglaswitmer.com/work/fruitville/
5. An example of the Master’s work can be found in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art:. http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/103590.html. An overview of the Master’s work is online at the Web Gallery of Art: http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/m/master/osservan/.
6. Ibid.

Chris Ashley
Oakland, CA
June 2010

RESUME

Douglas Witmer was born in 1971 in Winchester, VA and raised in Lancaster County, PA. He has lived and worked in Philadelphia since 1995.

Witmer’s work intuitively combines simple geometric imagery, emphatic color, and subtle manipulation of surface physicality. It is an inquiry into the materiality of seeing, perception, feeling and memory.

His work has been exhibited internationally. Recent venues include: P.S.1/MoMA, Blank Space Gallery, and The Painting Center (all NYC), The Philadelphia Cathedral, Pharmaka (Los Angeles), The University of Maryland, The University of Dayton (OH), Sydney Non-Objective (Australia), and Bus-Dori Project Space, Tokyo, Japan.

Education

• 2001 M.F.A., The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
• 1993 B.A., Goshen College, Indiana

Solo Exhibitions

2010

• “Ring The Bells Anew,” Blank Space Art, New York, NY
• “Fruitville,” Somewalls, Oakland, CA

2009

• “Field + Stream,” The Painting Center, New York, NY
• “Joseph’s Coat,” The Philadelphia Cathedral
• “Joseph’s Coat,” Plymouth Congregational Church, Minneapolis, MN

2008

• “Today is the Day,” M55 Art, Long Island City, NY

2006

• “The Black Keys, and other paintings,” Gallery Siano, Philadelphia, PA
• “Contemplations,” Red Door Gallery, Richmond, VA

2005

• Minus Space, Brooklyn, NY

2002

• Peng Gallery, Philadelphia
• Goshen College, IN

1997

• University City Arts League, Philadelphia
• University of Montana-Western, Dillon

Selected Group Exhibitions

2009

• “I Decree Today,” Marx Gallery, Covington, KY
• “Touch Faith,” Semantics, Cincinnati, OH
• “246 Editions,” Pocket Utopia, Brooklyn
• “Back on My Feet Benefit,” Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Philadelphia
• “My Certain Fate,” Pharmaka, Los Angeles, CA

2008

• “Minus Space,” PS1/MoMA, Long Island City, NY
• “Considerable,” University of Dayton, OH

2007

• “Summary, 2007,” Gallery Siano, Philadelphia
• “Escape from New York,” Sydney Non Objective (SNO), Sydney, Australia (traveled to Curtin University in Perth, 2008, RMIT University School of Art in Melbourne, 2009)
• “Across the Borderline,” collaborative works by Chris Ashley & Douglas Witmer, University of Dayton, OH
• “I Walk the Line–Three Abstract Artists in the 21st Century,” Mary Early, Linn Meyers, & Douglas Witmer, University of Maryland, College Park.

2006

• “Suitcase,” Bus-Dori, Tokyo, Japan

2005

• “Douglas Witmer & Sandi Lovitz,” Pfenninger Gallery, Lancaster, PA

2004

• “From the Studio,” The Center for Emerging Visual Artists, Philadelphia.
• “Repetition and Transformation,” The Philadelphia Cathedral.

2003

• “Dennis Lo, Leslie Wagner, & Douglas Witmer,” Peng Gallery, Philadelphia
• “New Talent,” Signal 66, Washington, DC
• “White Light,” The Beehive Salon, Philadelphia.
• “From Abstraction to Representation,” The College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA.

2001

• “10 Young Painters,” Miami University of Ohio, Oxford
• “Art in City Hall,” Philadelphia City Hall, Philadelphia

Bibliography/Videography

2009

• Alexander, Steven, “Douglas Witmer at The Philadelphia Cathedral,” Steven Alexander Journal, February 14.
• Kirsch, Andrea, “Philadelphia Notes: Contemplative Minimalism” Fallon & Rosof’s Artblog, Philadelphia PA, February 9.
• Langley, Matthew, “Douglas Witmer at The Painting Center,” Matthew Langley Art Blog, June 18.
• Mattera, Joanne, “Witmer, Patterson, at The Painting Center,” Joanne Mattera Art Blog, June 17.

2008

• Hallard, Brent, “How Soon is Now?,” interview, Visual Discrepancies blog, Tokyo, Japan, December 5.

2007

• Colaizzi, Vitorrio, “A Vigilant Turn from Complacency,” exhibition review, Brick Weekly, Richmond, VA, January 10
• Koo, Li, “Gallery Notes: I Walk the Line,” podcast interview, University of Maryland, March
• Newhall, Edith, “Summery Summary,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 3
• Wagner, Laura, “Art Pals Feature Works in Rike,” Dayton Flyer News, University of Dayton, Ohio, January 19.

2006

• Gierschick, Tim, “Douglas Witmer at Gallery Siano,” exhibition review, Gierschickwork (on-line), December
• Strickland, Heather, “Eclecticism on Display at Red Door Gallery,” The Collegian, University of Richmond, December 7

2005

• Ashley, Chris, “In conversation with Douglas Witmer, essay and interview, Minus Space, Brooklyn, December
• Hallard, Brent, “X Marks the Spot,” Project 131 (on-line / Tokyo, Japan), July
• Hill, Lori, “First Friday Focus: Gallery Siano,” Philadelphia City Paper, Thursday, October 6
• Holzman, Paula, “Two Takes on the Abstract,” Lancaster Intelligencer Journal, October 21
• Romaniello, Vincent, “Artists on Video,” Romanblog (on-line / Philadelphia), January
• Silverthorne, Alexandra, “Artists Interview Artists, Thinking About Art (on-line / Washington), July

2004

• Doering, Elizabeth H., “Repetition and Transformation,” essay for exhibition of the same title, The Philadelphia Cathedral, January 2004
• Fallon, Roberta, “A-List: Repetition and Transformation,” Philadelphia Weekly,” January 21

2002

• Hill, Lori, “First Friday Focus: Peng Gallery,” Philadelphia City Paper, Thursday, April 4
• Patterson, Carrie, “From Abstraction to Representation,” exhibition catalogue essay for exhibition of the same title, Andrews Gallery, The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, November
• Walz, Jonathan F., “Reality Check,” exhibition brochure essay, Peng Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, April

Residencies | Lectures | Critiques

2007

• Lecture, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York
• Visiting Artist/Critic, University of Dayton, OH

2006

• Artist-in-Residence, Saint Mary’s College of Maryland, Saint Mary’s City

2005

• Artist-in-Residence, Glen Arbor Art Association / Sleeping Bear Dune’s National Lakeshore, Glen Arbor, MI

2002

• Visiting Artist/Lecture, Goshen College, IN

2000

• Residency, Vermont Studio Center, Johnson (residency grant)

Collections

• The Fellowship of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
• Duane Morris, LLP, Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Atlanta, Lake Tahoe, San Diego, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City
• Wolf, Block, Schorr, and Solis-Cohen, LLP, Philadelphia
• NanoSystems, King of Prussia, PA
• Numerous private collections in the United States

April 3 – May 9, 2010

Press Release | Images | Essay | Resume

PRESS RELEASE

Some Walls is pleased to present Toronto-based artist Lorna Mill’s exhibition Zen Dog from April 3 – May 9, 2010.

Zen Dog began as a small ceramic object found in the home of the artist’s mother. Scanned, laser printed, cut, and hand-glazed, the installed piece consists of twenty seven tiled sheets of 8.5 x 11 inches paper pinned to the wall. A superb specimen of a noble creature, is Zen Dog a servant, a companion, a guru, or just a doG(sic)? Read an essay about the work and see images at somewalls.com.

Lorna Mills has actively exhibited her work in both solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990′s. A founding member of the Red Head Gallery and Persona Volare, her practice has included obsessive photography, obsessive painting, obsessive animated GIFs, and recently, obsessive digital video animations incorporated into restrained installation work. She co-produces the artist blog Sally McKay and L.M.. More of her art can be seen at her web site.

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:

• Jeffrey Cortland Jones: “Recent Paintings”
• A. Bill Miller: “Samples from the Gridworks Collection Project Archives”
• Frederick Bell: “Return Trip: Bologna Antwerp Oakland Brussels”

IMAGES

[View with PicLens]

ESSAY

Zen Dog

 

A majestic dog nobly stands looking right in perfect profile. His– it sure looks likes like a "he," anatomically speaking- his paws are firmly planted, his ears are at attention, and although his tail seems relaxed he is on guard, poised to run or pounce in an instant. His straight back and locked hips and shoulders excude confidence and might. His chest is full and proud as he apears to breathe calmly and with focus, his concentrated and unerring gaze peering off in the distance, ready to act. His shiny lustrous coat indicates the picture of health, an exceptional, prime specimen, a heroic being, a goD(sic). What a wondrous animal!

 

Except this isn’t really a dog, or rather, it isn’t a picture of a real dog. The sheen on the his coat is too shiny, with swirling rainbow highlights that don’t strictly follow a real dog’s contour. And he hangs on a wall, perhaps twice the size of an actual dog, but flat and in pieces. There’s something just a little to ideal and unreal here.

 

Zen Dog began as a small ceramic object from the home of the artist Lorna Mills’ mother. Mills says, "I can’t remember when it appeared or when I noticed it. It’s one of those things that happened to be there amongst a lot of anomalous decorative objects… There wasn’t a major emotional tie or sentimental value attached to it but it has a strong aesthetic pull on me. Of course as an artist, I am thrilled when something particular and peculiar can be expanded to something bigger and unexpected."

 

The ceramic dog began its transition to Zen Dog laid on a scanner bed. Captured, sliced, printed, cut, hand-glazed with acrylic, and attached to plain white paper, the final piece consists of twenty seven tiled sheets of 8.5 x 11 inches paper. When pinned to the wall in the correct order these accumulated sheets present a glorious glossy canine almost four feet high and nearly five feet across. The bottom of each sheet hangs unpinned and free, curling slightly or fluttering in the room’s circulating air so that the overal image doesn’t quite settle onto the wall.

 

This is not the kind of image production commonly possible with large scale printers, easily accessible to Mills, a very tech-savvy artist. Rather than uploading an image to a commerical printing house’s server and getting back a nice big clean print in a cardboard tube a few days later, Zen Dog is printed in what might now be thought of as an old-fashioned way: in sections, hand-cut, glued, glazed, and assembled. In that Mill’s production process doesn’t keep with latest developments, the approach is almost anti-technology: why, in this day and age, should anyone go to so much trouble? Why produce a larger whole from so many pieces? Does all of this effort indicate or demonstrate that the dog, our best friend, was handled with great love and care?

 

In the case of Zen Dog the handmade does matter because it means a unique set of decisions. For example, the constituent pieces of Zen Dog, like building blocks, tell us that the resulting image is scaled up from the handheld original to something new and wall-spanning, as well as something that is portable and easy to store. The contrast between each printed and glazed section and its support is an important effect: we know that each section was trimmed and carefully placed, and the glazed areas constrast with and stand in very low relief against the surrounding plain white matte paper. The buckling of the paper would not be acceptable from a factory-produced piece, yet here this effect addes additional body to what is otherwise thought of as a flat image. And "handmade" can also mean using tools in ways for which they aren’t really intended: the ceramic is an object placed on the flatbed of a scanner, a technology instead suited for capturing flat images but here instead employed as a kind of camera, and not with the usual expectation of a good scan’s fidelity.

What might Zen Dog stand for? Is he ready to help, or is he simply well-trained, and expecting a treat? Is he on duty? What or who is he looking at or waiting for? How did he come to such patience?

Zen Dog as an image is an ideal: his perfect posture, his shiny coat, his presence and eternal gaze make him familiar and desirable, the perfect companion, a family member, a sign of domestic bliss. He has no appetite, no fleas, and leaves no muddy prints across the kitchen floor. He is an iconic beauty with great presence: enigmatic and unknowable, yet the one you want to bring home, the one you want sleeping at your feet, who barks when someone knocks at your door, the one who rescues innocent children from burning buildings and impulsive men who deserve a second chance from overturned cars.

Zen Dog’s pose may make us think of Chinese guardian lions, which have magical protective powers, though those are always in pairs, a male and female; dogs aren’t magical, in the sense given to guardian lions, but they can be supremely loyal, intuitive, and generous. We might also think of a kouros, a sculpture of a Greek standing male, as well as a sphinx; our dog is as handsome as any of those, and seems ready to fulfill any task those beings could.

Zen is a school of Mahayana Buddhism, a Japanese word translated from the Chinese word Chán, which in in turn derives from the Sanskrit dhyana, which means “meditation.” What does our hero ponder? How far off is he looking? Or, as anyone involved in sitting meditation is instructed to do, are his eyes focused a foot or two on the ground in front of him? He has such perfect posture. He is attentive; perhaps his thoughts are self-contained and in the moment. These questions might appear as attempts to attribute ridiculous intentions and abilities to a dog, but remember that Dōgen Zenji (1200-1253) was a Japanese Zen Buddhist teacher born in Kyoto, and the founder of the Soto school of Zen.

Zen Dog may be flat and still, but he sees and knows.

Chris Ashley
Oakland, CA
April 2010

RESUME

Lorna Mills has actively exhibited her work in both solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990′s. A founding member of the Red Head Gallery and Persona Volare (link: http://www.personavolare.com/) her practice has included obsessive photography, obsessive painting, obsessive animated GIFs, and recently, obsessive digital video animations incorporated into restrained installation work.

 

She has also been a Director and Flash game programmer since 1994. Mills recently taught a studio course in Web-based Art Practices, at the University of Guelph, in Guelph, Ontario, Canada.

 

Lorna Mills co-produces the artist blog Sally McKay and L.M.

January 23 – March 14, 2010

Press Release | Images | Essay | Resume

PRESS RELEASE

Some Walls is pleased to present Brussels-based British artist Frederick Bell’s first U.S. solo exhibition, “Return Trip: Bologna Antwerp Oakland Brussels,” from January 23 – March 10, 2014.

 

Frederick Bell’s “Return Trip: Bologna Antwerp Oakland Brussels” is a single work consisting of thirteen inkjet prints, one drawing, and two paintings pinned directly to the wall in four rows and four columns. The cities in the title refer to four locations from which images for this work originated: the Morandi Museum in Bologna; the exhibition space Ruimte Morguen, in Antwerp, where Bell has regularly exhibited, most recently in spring 2008 and fall 2009; an installation of three inkjet prints of installation views of the 2008 Ruimte Morguen exhibition installed in a home in Oakland; and Bell’s studio and home in Brussels.

 

“Return Trip: Bologna Antwerp Oakland Brussels” is an intimate, thoughtfully composed group of images that provoke consideration of: time and place; the act of looking, thinking, and reflection; uses of memory and documentation; the balance of logic and intuition; and linear and non-linear narratives and iteration.

 

Images, an essay, and biography are at somewalls.com.

 

Frederick Bell’s “Looking at looking (a retrospective),” took place in fall 2009 at the cultuurcentrum Hasselt, Belgium; a PDF of the catalog can be downloaded. Installation photos of the recent exhibition, “Looking at Looking (new work),” at Ruimte Morguen, Antwerp are at Bell’s blog.

 

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.

IMAGES

[View with PicLens]

ESSAY

In Section I of Pensées, “Thoughts on Mind and on Style,” Pascal ponders the difference and integration of the mathematical and the intuitive mind, and writes that “True eloquence makes light of eloquence… to make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.” One might extend this to the idea that to be a true artist is to make art that makes light of, or reveals, characteristics of Art’s foundational basis, including personal aspects such as sight, reason, and feeling, institutional aspects such social relations, value, and politics, as well as an artwork’s material and aesthetic aspects. A conceptual work such as Joseph Kosuth’s “One and Three Chairs,” 1965, may have shed light on Art’s purpose, while also, unfortunately, to this writer’s mind, shedding personal, material, and aesthetic aspects, ultimately becoming merely a kind of visual text providing a minimal art experience.

 

For eloquence and philosophy, consider a recent work by Brussels-based British artist Frederick Bell. His “Return Trip: Bologna Antwerp Oakland Brussels” is a single sixteen-part work consisting of thirteen inkjet prints, one drawing, and two paintings pinned directly to the wall in four rows and four columns. The cities in the title refer to four locations from which images for this work originated: the Morandi Museum in Bologna; the exhibition space Ruimte Morguen, in Antwerp, where Bell has regularly exhibited, most recently in spring 2008 and fall 2009; an installation of three inkjet prints of installation views of the 2008 Ruimte Morguen exhibition installed at Some Walls in Oakland in summer 2008; and Bell’s studio and home in Brussels.

 

“Return Trip: Bologna Antwerp Oakland Brussels” is an intimate, materially humble, thoughtfully composed group of images that provoke consideration of: time and place; uses of memory and documentation; the balance of logic and intuition; and linear and non-linear narratives and iteration. In this piece Bell continues his exploration of the experiential and cognitive act of looking at, seeing, and thinking about art, the artist’s and viewer’s roles in that act, the influence of art institutions as scholarly, solitary, and social places that frame this act, and how this multi-leveled and layered experience provokes and sustains sensation, memory, cross-references, the impulse to understand, and the need to create. Bell’s work involves observation, order, and logic, but is also intuitive and emotional: philosophical inquiry complemented by poignancy and eloquence.

 

For all of its order, it can be confusing to outline or describe the relationships between the pieces which comprise this work, although it is much easier to grasp this when viewing the images as they hang together. The genesis of “Return Trip” is a photo of a salon-style hanging of Morandi’s paintings shot during a visit to the Bologna museum. The subsequent pieces comprising “Return Trip” have spun out over time from this initial image. For example, a neighboring photo shows the view of a group of paintings by Bell, similar in size and tone to Morandi’s paintings and hanging in the same salon configuration, installed at Ruimte Morguen in Antwerp. Another photo shows the same Antwerp hanging from the point of view of the viewer, and another is of Bell’s painting of this same group of paintings hanging in his studio. Photos, drawings, and paintings from this group were incorporated into Morandi Sequence, shown at Ruimte Morguen on the same wall in spring 2008 as the previous paintings after Morandi. Documentary photos of Morandi Sequence were emailed as JPEGS, printed and hung at Some Walls in summer 2008, and photographed and sent back to Bell. To further interconnect images and places Bell made drawings and paintings from the Oakland installation of his Antwerp photos, and used a photo and made a painting from this photo of the previous Some Walls exhibition, work by A. Bill Miller, which hung on the same wall on which Bell’s “Return Trip” hangs during this exhibition.

 

Similar to other works by Bell, “Return Trip” employs and repeats a number of images and ideas which, because his method and attitude is porous, absorbs new material over time as his art circulates. This work includes: a set of motifs of personal significance; the same walls in Bologna, Antwerp, Oakland, and Brussels used repeatedly; cycling from original to copy and back to original (the actual artwork, the view of the artwork, the documentation of the artwork, the copy of the artwork, any of which can become another artwork); references to, place, chronology, and distance; and the notion of how context affects what we see, and how objects affect context.

 

Bell’s work is about how looking, thinking, and remembering can be connected and holistic acts. As viewers we observe and hypothesize about the artist’s narrative and process, about how what he sees is extrapolated from or connected to another image, a specific place, a similar idea or context. “Return Trip” takes us from one location to another over time; we know we are seeing an artist’s work, but also his life. We enter into those places and shifting times. As we observe this, we also begin to observe ourselves, and think about how we connect and inter-relate images and contexts in our own lives. Bell’s “Return Trip: Bologna Antwerp Oakland Brussels” heightens our own awareness of what we see, what we notice, where meaning lies, and how we think about it, making light of both art and life.

 

Chris Ashley
Oakland, CA
January 2010

RESUME

Education

• 1982-83 – Foundation Studies in Art & Design, Faculty of Art & Design, Sheffield City Polytechnic
• 1983-86 – First class BA(Hons) Degree in Fine Art, School of Art & Design, Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham
• 1992 – Masters Degree, awarded a scholarship to Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, University of Dundee, Scotland

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2010

• ‘Return Trip: Bologna Antwerp Oakland Brussels,’ Some Walls, Oakland, California

2009

• ‘Looking at Looking (a retrospective),’ Cultuurcentrum, Hasselt, Belgium
• ‘Looking at Looking’ (new work),’ Ruimte Morguen, Antwerp, Belgium

2006

• ‘Mass Observation #2,’ Ruimte Morguen, Antwerp

2004

• ‘The Scheme of Things,’ Ruimte Morguen, Antwerp

2003

• ‘The Uncertainty Principle,’ Ruimte Morguen, Antwerp

2000

• ‘Mass Observation,’ Ruimte Morguen, Antwerp

1999

• ‘Souvenir,’ Ruimte Morguen, Antwerp

1998

• ‘…some corner of a foreign field,’ Waterloo, Belgium

1995

• ‘The Pastimes of Private Life,’ Ruimte Morguen, Antwerp

1992

• ‘Museum Piece’ (intervention in the collection), McManus Art Galleries and Museum, Dundee, Scotland
• ‘Photographies,’ Centre Culturel Jacques Franck, in collaboration with Espace Photographique Contretype, Brussels

1991

• ‘Frederick Bell,’ Galerie DB-S, Antwerp

Selected Group Exhibitions

2008

• ‘The Field of Art,’ Fotogalerie Wien, Vienna
• ‘Alignment,’ Ruimte Morguen, Antwerp

2007-08

• ‘New Collection,’ Stedelijk Museum, Lier, Belgium

2007

• ‘Variety – Ian Breakwell,’ Lokaal 01, Breda, Netherlands

2005

• ‘Wahlverwandtschaften,’ Forumschlosswolkersdorf, Austria
• ‘Montagne,’ l’Usine Gallerie, Brussels

2004

• ‘Stilleben – Ausstellung II Interieur,’ Fotogalerie Wien, Vienna

2003

• ‘Pictures of This,’ The Nunnery, Bow Arts Trust, London
• ‘For Your Eyes Only,’ Feel Estate Kunstenfestival, Gent, Belgium

2002

• ‘Kamers,’ six artists selected by and including Luc Tuymans, Ruimte Morguen, Antwerp

1997

• ‘The Contradicted Desire,’ International Cultural Centre, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp
• ‘Musio’ (intervention in the collection), Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, UK

1994-95

• ‘The Deconstructed Image,’ Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham, UK -
  Ruimte Morguen, Antwerp – J&J Donguy, Paris – Kunstverein, Steyr, Austria

1990

• ‘Messages from the Self and Society,’ Museum of Photography, Antwerp
• ’2ème Biennale International pour la Photographie d’Art et de Recherche,’ Paris

1989

• ‘Lies, Lies, Lies,’ Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, UK

1985

• ‘Young Contemporaries,’ Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK

Bibliography

• A file of collected materials is available in Special Collections, The National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (1997 – ongoing)
• ‘B-sides and Rarities,’ Frederik Vergaert, Lokaal 01, Breda, NL (2009)
• ‘Looking at Looking (a retrospective),’ Cultuurcentrum Hasselt, BE (2009)
• ‘Umfeld-Kunst,’ Bilder Nr. 231, Fotogalerie Wien (2008)
• ‘Looking at Looking: Frederick Bell’s “Morandi Sequence”,’ Chris Ashley, Look, See (2008)
• ‘Lápiz’ Nr. 224, Madrid, ES (2006)
• ‘Stilleben,’ Fotobuch Nr. 33, Fotogalerie Wien (2004)
• ‘Stilleben II, Interior,’ Bilder Nr. 196, Fotogalerie Wien (2004)
• ‘Ontspoord,’ Peter Bondewel, Cultuurcentrum De Werf, Aalst, BE (1999)
• ‘The Contradicted Desire,’ Royal Museum of Fine Arts, International Cultural Centre, Antwerp (1997)
• ‘The Waters,’ Chloë Brown, University of Derby, UK (1997)
• ‘The Deconstructed Image,’ Angel Row Gallery, Nottinghamshire County Council, UK (1994)
• Artefactum Magazine of Contemporary Art in Europe, Vol. XI/53 (1994)
• ‘Investigating Galleries,’ Debbie Duffin, AN Publications, The Arts Council of England (1993)

]]> http://somewalls.com/?feed=rss2&p=273 0 http://somewalls.com/?p=159 http://somewalls.com/?p=159#comments Wed, 18 Nov 2009 04:43:08 +0000 admin http://somewalls.com/?p=159 Samples from the Gridworks Collection Project Archives

November 15, 2009 – January 10, 2010

Press Release | Images | Essay | Resume

A. Bill Miller is currently an Associate Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and an Instructor at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. He lives and works in East Troy, Wisconsin. He is noted for his Gridworks Project, which comprises abstract ASCII drawings, ink drawings, animated GIFs, and video which are frequently shown in the U.S. and internationally.

 

Some Walls is pleased to exhibit twelve of Miller’s inkjet prints, with additional prints available for viewing. This is Miller’s first solo exhibition in California. Additional ASCII drawings can be seen on Miller’s blog, and more images, animations, and video are at his website.

 

A. Bill Miller’s ASCII drawings are made at the keyboard with text– characters and letters. He draws/types grid-based and grid-defying images that are surprisingly varied and dynamic, pictorial and spatial, rhythmic and dynamic. As writing has overwhelmingly moved from the pen to the keyboard and monitor, it also makes sense that drawing might make a similar move from the pencil. By making prints, Miller transports his images from the flickering, pixilated digital realm to our analog, tactile world of paper and ink. Seeing his drawings outside the monitor is an entirely different experience from online viewing; where the digital image scrolls by intangibly, the art work as object allows the viewer to see and contemplate a crisp, satisfyingly still, human-scaled image. In these prints one can fully assess Miller’s range of ideas, visual invention, and unique skill.

 

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.

[View with PicLens]

 

A. Bill Miller makes drawings with ASCII text. What does that mean?

 

Just as writing has overwhelmingly moved from pen to the keyboard, it makes sense that drawing has made a similar move from the pencil to the mouse. Prior to the mouse and paint programs, however, users made computer drawings with the keyboard. In the earliest days of computers and the Internet, before image files and the Web, everything was text, and images were made using ASCII text characters[1], most often as email signatures. Anyone who has had an email account for some time has likely seen an ASCII image, but the chances of that have decreased since Web browsers began displaying JPEGs and GIF, which eventually led to the ubiquity of graphics embedded in emails. The earliest ASCII images in emails were typically relatively simple patterns of characters surrounding inspiring quotes, information about the sender, and simple graffit-like figures on the order of “Kilroy was here[2].” Eventually a kind of underground of more complex ASCII art[3] emerged, most commonly replicating photos and cartoon characters from popular culture. In the rapidly-paced history of the Internet, ASCII images, an medium over forty years old, is not merely old school, but decidedly archaic.

 

Little truly original art has been made with ASCII, much less images that aspire to being rich, serious, and resonant art that is visually and conceptually meaningful, has a relationship to art history, and which bears repeated viewing. Additionally, serious abstract art in ASCII is especially rare. One exception is the painter Frederick Hammersley (1919-2009), who in 1969 in Albuquerque produced a too little-known series of seventy two ASCII computer prints[4]. A more recent exception is A. Bill Miller, who in addition to his ink drawings, animated GIFs, videos, and performances, has for some time produced a varied, compelling, and growing corpus of ASCII drawings that explores a range of pictorial ideas, associative qualities, and visual complexity. Rather than ASCII being a little detour in his production, such as with Hammersley, Miller’s ASCII drawings are central to his art.

 

Truman Capote accused Jack Kerouac of a kind of lifeless Beat prolixity when he said about On the Road, “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” Somewhat similarly, one might say that a ASCII drawing is simply typing, too. But of course, just as Capote was wrong, assumptions about what drawing is tend to be too narrow. Drawing is a peculiarly flexible word, concept, and practice; one needs merely to think of using a stick in sand, lengths of tape on a wall, or a finger against a fogged window to see the possibilities for drawing. In Miller’s hands text becomes a truly descriptive and elegant drawing medium capable of great expression, delicacy, and impact.

 

An ASCII drawing is basically a text document, a grid-based field of horizontally and vertically distributed characters and spaces. Of course, the grid is thought of as the epitome of modernist structure. Land is often subdivided in grid-like plots, as are cities and suburbs. Newspapers and magazines layouts are grid-based, and ledgers and databases, too. The grid in modern and contemporary art is practically a cliché, supposedly representing or alluding to reason and order, ideal and purity. But Miller manages to draw/type grid-bound images that are firmly grid-defying. The grid is shifted, tweaked, and twisted line by line into surprisingly diverse compositions that are pictorial and spatial, rhythmic and dynamic, varied and engaging.

 

Still, when normally confronted with text we want to read it, scanning from left to right, in an effort to make sense and understand the characters before us. But Miller’s relatively small visual vocabulary of dashes, underscores, forward and back slashes, equals and plus signs, resist literary reading. The thing to be read, or rather, seen, is an image. Our curiosity about the phonetics of the keyboard symbols may remain, like Concrete Poetry, and it is possible that this adds a layer of experience, meaning, flavor, or color to Miller’s drawing, But ultimately, any kind of lingual relationship or interpretation is resisted. What remains is strictly visual: verticals, horizontals, and diagonals; pattern and interruption; density and empty space; line and form; structure and flow.

 

Naturally, Miller frequently posts his ASCII drawings on his blog[5]; it might seem logical that art in this medium remains solely within an environment where it can be easily requested and delivered to a Web browser for viewing on anyone’s monitor. But Miller takes an important next step: by making prints, he transports his images from the flickering and pixilated digital realm into our analog, tactile world, reified in paper and ink. Seeing his drawings outside the monitor is a markedly different and important experience; while digital images scroll by almost intangibly in daily rushes of groups and fragments framed by the browser window and the monitor, the art work as a standalone, real object allows the viewer to see and contemplate a crisp, satisfyingly still, human-scaled imag. Hanging a group of prints on a wall allows for comparison and contrast. In these prints, seen in our space of light, air, distance, and intimacy, we note each image’s graphic quality, presence, and associative qualities, and the fully assess Miller’s range of ideas, visual invention, and unique skill.

 

For example:

• 0178 is a spare, rugged landscape of filled and empty spaces defined by horizontal and vertical lines: a crusty trunk; an arid rippling mirage in the distance; a secret entry; two structures, one close and one far away.
• 0134 alludes to where floor meets wall: conveyor belt-like torrent of slashes and pipes flow parallel to the floor, bend, turn, and seep back at the bottom of the baseboard, while another stream of slashes and pipes pour down the wall, run across the floor, and skitter, bounce, and drop off into the foreground.
• gridworks2000-blogdrawings-collage-01 lays out an elaborate design for a secret weapon or spacecraft; diagrams a sophisticated home entertainment system; outlines a very complicated family tree; or captures a dense supply chain or business practice.
• gridworks2000-blogdrawings-collage33 is an accumulation of dashes, slashes, and pipes made by capturing a drawing, creating several layers of the same drawing in Photoshop, coloring the text, and misregistering the layers to produce: an ecstatic red and blue Tron-like schematic[6]; an atomic or celestial starburst; a decorated chamber with a center aisle that initiates must walk towards a powerful, light-filled enlightenment.
• gridworks2000-blogdrawings-collage38 is a side view of a Tibetan sand painting; a vibrating cross-section of a multi-storied building; a saturated, hairy, pulsating, organic, energy-producing machine churning at maximum production.

 

And so on. The descriptions above are little tastes of what these images make possible, yet there is still more to discover.

 

The ASCII drawings are an important component of Miller’s Gridworks Project, and it is interesting to widen our view of this project by looking at another component, his ink drawings, which also incorporate multiple approaches to the grid. Hand drawn, the ink drawings introduce even more variations through wobbly and wonky, fast and slow lines, all doing their part to work with and go beyond the grid. While not restricted to the columns and rows of text, the ink drawings are evidence of Miller’s overall vision, project, and consistency. Scanned and printed at the same scale of his ASCII prints, the ink drawings confirm the broad scope and deliberateness of Miller’s work.

 

More examples:

• gridworks2000-0028 contains an aerial and a street view of a rickety sidewalk or fence, which puts the viewer at a distance over which we view an urban street where a large Buckminster Fuller-like public structure looms over the floor plan of a domestic building of individual but inter-connected units.
• gridworks2000-0011 shows a radial array of dots exploding beyond a rectangular boundary which fails to contain them; an aerial plan for crops; a diagram for irrigation or digging a network of tunnels; a unraveling crocheted ziggurat tipped over on its side.
• gridfont5-mobydick_page_001 is a dense build up of open and closed rectangles form paragraphs of unexplainable code; an unplanned but organically ordered urban development; decomposing language, crumbling and falling apart leaving all meaning lost; the electric hum of energy coursing through uncountable channels, dwellings, and appliances.

 

Despite Miller’s spare chosen media and deceptively simple vocabulary, observations and associations like those above are possible because his drawings are knowingly crafted and visual; the conceptual aspects of his work are subservient to the visual aspects: seeing before ideas, ideas supporting seeing. Drawing is a primary act, a foundation, proof of concept, execution, and value. It is fortunate that Miller has found a medium that he can push beyond what it was intended to do, that is relevant and meaningful in contemporary art practice, and with which he can thrive and connect to the other branches of his oeuvre.

 

Chris Ashley
Oakland, CA
November 2009

 

[1] American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII.
[2] Kilroy was here. Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here
[3] ASCII art. Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art
[4] Frederick Hammersley’s computer prints. Artnet.
http://www.artnet.com/Galleries/Artwork_Detail.asp?G=&gid=563&which=&ViewArtistBy=&aid=7751&wid=424639071&source=artist&rta
[5] http://gridworks1.blogspot.com/.
http://gridworks1.blogspot.com/
[6] Tron, Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(film)

(condensed)

A. Bill Miller (website; blog)

Professional Experience

• Associate Lecturer, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.
• Web Design I, Net+Art, Art Explorations Web Design Instructor, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.
• Observational Drawing, Kinetic Drawing, Experimental Animation.

Education

• MFA, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee; Milwaukee, WI; Painting and Drawing.
• MA, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee; Milwaukee, WI; Painting and Drawing.
• BFA, University of Wisconsin – Stout; Menomonie,WI; Studio Arts.
• Northbrook College; semester of study in Worthing, West Sussex, UK.

Exhibitions

2009

• Performance Art Showcase, Milwaukee, WI.
• Pixilerations [v.6], New Media Festival, Providence, RI.
• The End of Television, Video Program Broadcast, The Nerve, Pittsburgh,
  PA.
• FILE, Electronic Language International Festival, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
• Crosstalk Video Art Festival, Godor Club, Budapest, Hungary.
• Flickers of Recognition: Technology and the Self Portrait, Peninsula School
  of Art Guenzal Gallery, Door County, WI.
• Visionary Drawing Building, Online Drawing Archive. http://www.drawingbuilding.org.
• Flight Box, Present Music Event at Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI
  Terminal.
• 1st Annual Short Film Festival, Terminal Gallery at Austin Peay State
  University, Clarksville, TN.
• Gridworks2000, Add-Art Firefox Plugin Exhibition, http://www.add-art.org

2008

• Illuminators Exhibition, Koltsovo International Airport, Yekatenaburg, Russia.
• MFA Exhibition, Inova/Arts Center, UWM, Milwaukee, WI.
• Digital Media at La Nau, Valencia, Spain, v1b3 program. http://www.v1b3.com.
• Media Arts Show at Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature, Organization Conference, Vancouver, WA.
• Make Your Own History, Group Exhibition, Historic Blatz Brewery, Milwaukee, WI.
• Locally Groan, Collaborative Film and Video, UWM Union Theater, Milwaukee, WI.
• Art Architecture and Music for the New Milwaukee, Present Music Event at Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI

2007

• MA/MFA Exhibition, MA Group Show, Inova 3, UW-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI.
• THE.SURREAL.DEAL, Group Show, Lakefront Gallery, Madison, WI.

2006

• v1b3, Video In The Built Environment, Summer 2006: Orange, CA and London, UK.

2005

• Transforming the Grid, Group Show, Opensource Gallery, Champaign, IL.

2004

• Visible Fringe Festival, large and small group exhibitions, Thorpe Building North east Minneapolis and MCAD Gallery at Calhoun Square, Minneapolis, MN.

Curatorial

• Phosphene, Video Installation Event, Borg Ward, Milwaukee, WI.
• SPRAWL, Group Exhibition, Borg Ward, Milwaukee, WI.

Collections

• Special Collections, Golda Meir Library, UWM, Milwaukee

Artists’s Books And Zines, Publications

• MungBeing Magazine,Issue #23 of bimonthly online magazine, December 2009.
• Illuminators Exhibition Catalog, 2008. Cream City Review, Spring 2008, semi-annual UWM journal.

Conferences & Presenations

• “Line, Space, Time” Presentation on Panel “Tools, Models, and Ideas forChanging the Way We Think About Line” Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE), Biennial Conference 2009, Portland, Oregon.

]]> http://somewalls.com/?feed=rss2&p=159 0 http://somewalls.com/?p=19 http://somewalls.com/?p=19#comments Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:16:30 +0000 admin http://somewalls.com/?p=19 Recent Paintings

September 10 – October 31, 2009

Press Release | Images | Essay | Resume

PRESS RELEASE

Some Walls is a new curatorial and writing art project located in a private home in Oakland, California. For the inaugural exhibition, Some Walls is proud to present “Jeffrey Cortland Jones: Recent Paintings,” from September 10 – October 31, 2009. Images and an essay about the exhibition are at Some Walls.

Jeffrey Cortland Jones is Associate Professor at University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio. A painter as well as a curator, he is much admired by peers for his lush and serious work, disciplined and productive practice, broad and active exhibition schedule, and friendly and generous spirit.

Some Walls will show four small recent paintings made with enamel on acrylic panels. Known for his use of industrial materials, institutional colors, complex layering, and vigorous mark-making, Jones had in the recent past used a more wild and vibrant palette. The four paintings in this exhibition head in a slightly different direction, however. Returning to his previous use of green and white, Jones has quickened, reduced, and softened his paint application, resulting in images that, though abstractions with a strong physical presence and object quality, with their vertical format and horizontal spatial divisions hint at the wintery-like atmospheric image of haze just as the sun is about to burst through.

Some Walls is open by appointment only. To view the exhibition online visit somewalls.com. To schedule a visit, or for more information, please contact Chris Ashley at info@somewalls.com.

IMAGES

[View with PicLens]

ESSAY

Jeffrey Cortland Jones: Recent Paintings at Some Walls, 2009

Long known for his use of industrial materials, various kinds of paint, institutional colors, and a complex layering of transparent and opaque paint akin to glazing, Jeffrey Cortland Jones had gradually shifted towards a brilliant, vibrant palette, and a vigorous, painterly, graffiti-like approach to mark-making. Recently, however, he returned to his former more subdued color set, and radically reduced and refined the materials used in order to make a large and continuing series of new small paintings, each enamel on 10 x 8 inch acrylic panels. The resulting flat fields, smeared strokes, close contrast, and horizontal divisions, while appearing initially and deceptively simpler than previous work, are confidently abstract, visually evocative and associative, and, despite their size, surprisingly monumental.

In this new work Jones’ painting is quick, soft, flat, and deft. The speed at which Jones makes and completes each painting is rapid and decisive, without hesitation and worry. The four paintings exhibited at Some Walls, all basically green and white, evidence play with paint and ground. Surprisingly, for such small work, the paint is often rapidly applied with large brushes, spread, smoothed, or scrubbed, and sometimes wiped and buffed to expose the clear acrylic ground. In areas where no paint appears on the front, the backside of the acrylic is often painted, adding depth to the frontal plane and changing the color of the side of the panel. The edges and corners of each panel’s front are handled differently: fully covered with paint; or exposed by strokes that pull away from the edge; or built up where a dragged brush spills paint over the edge to form a small lip. When hung, small spacers on the back of each panel push them off the wall one eighth inch or so, adding depth and heft. These small differences, immense to a painter, become significant to the carefully observant viewer. The resulting paintings, intentionally created objects, have a sensitive, physical presence, and are containers of human activity, seeing, and thinking; their presence is a sign of recognition and resolution.

Jones’ approach—the large strokes, the broad effects, working with and incorporating the surface—make the paintings feel larger than they are. Because the objects are painted and physical, and despite a photographic quality, in terms of size and surface, it’s possible to feel that not only one is looking at an image, but that one is also a part of or inside the image. Size is one thing, and scale quite another. Looking at a painting, feeling our body in relation to the object, is one sense of scale, but being inside the image is something else, a more psychological and emotional experience. A shift from seeing size to experiencing scale is why these paintings feel monumental; this is difficult to achieve, especially in a kind of abstract painting where no other form, line, or spatial devices tells the viewer the scale of the image being viewed.

Associative aspects of paintings are useful ways of describing visual and emotional experience. In these paintings the vertical format, horizontal divisions, and cool color hint at the wintery-like atmospherics of haze over a landscape just as the sun is about to burst through. This feeling of faintly seeing into a distance, of wanting to see what is beyond the haze, and the effect of light and atmosphere, is a kind of abstraction, a covering over, of preventing our looking for and latching onto something “real.” It is time-based, keeping us present, watching, and wondering. Although each painting can stand absolutely and successfully alone, as installed here a few inches apart in a single row these paintings interact, like four views of the same place within minutes of each other, almost a time lapse sequence. This is one example of the narrative possibility of a abstract painting, however nonlinear and pre-lingual that narrative may be. But there is little outside of these paintings that can help us understand them more. Our understanding remains in the experience of looking.

In a recent essay, Matthew Collings commented about an exhibition of Robert Motherwell’s “Open,” series of paintings, “I like the way the ‘Opens’ simply refuse any possibility of looking up things in books,[1]” meaning, I take it, that the paintings are intensely visual and abstract, with no other agenda than painting, and are only accessible through observation and interaction. One has nowhere else to turn to figure them out. What Collings admires in Motherwell applies to Jones—the painting is itself.

Jones says, “This work is honestly only about the painting: how it’s applied; how it sits on the surface; how most of it is matte but then a few moments of gloss hang around the edges; the shift from a cool white to a warm white; its relationship to the wall; what happens with the space between the painting and the wall; etc.[2]” In an excerpt from a recent statement, he tells us, “Painting is simply obsessive, correcting, locating, apprehending, pigment, fog, field, continuous, resistance, painting.[3]” Jones confirms that his making paintings becomes for the viewer a process of participating, observing, and paying attention.

Chris Ashley
Oakland, California
September, 2009

[1] Collings, Matthew.”The Known Unknowns” Modern Painters. London. September 2009. Pages 24-26
[2] Email from the artist to the author, August 25, 2009.
[3] Email from the artist to the author, August 20, 2009.

RESUME (condensed)

Jeffrey Cortland Jones (website)

Professional Experience August 2003-Present

University of Dayton. Dayton. Ohio.
Department of Visual Art: Associate Professor.

June 2003-2005

Art Academy of Cincinnati. Cincinnati. Ohio.
Master of Art in Art, Education Program: Graduate faculty.

Education 1998 – 2000

University of Cincinnati. Cincinnati. Ohio.
Master of Fine Art: Painting and Drawing.

1994 – 1998

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Chattanooga. Tennessee.
Bachelor of Fine Art: Painting and Drawing.

Selected Exhibitions

2010

• 303 Grand. Brooklyn. New York.
• Art and Shelter Gallery. Los Angeles. California.
• Soulard Art Market. St. Louis. Missouri.

2009

• Pharmaka. Los Angeles. California.
• Some Walls. Oakland. California. (solo)
• Pocket Utopia. Brooklyn. New York.
• Mt. Comfort. Indianapolis. Indiana. (solo)
• Marx Gallery. Covington. Kentucky.
• The Art House. Atlanta. Georgia.
• Semantics. Cincinnati. Ohio.
• Northern Kentucky University. Highland Heights. Kentucky.
• AISLE. Cincinnati. Ohio. (2 person)
• Link Gallery. Dayton. Ohio.

2008

• Weston Art Gallery. Cincinnati. Ohio. (solo)
• Green Line Art Projects. Philadelphia. Pennsylvania. (2 person)
• Link Gallery. Dayton. Ohio. (2 person)
• Richmond Art Gallery. Richmond, British Columbia, Canada
• Hoffman LaChance Contemporary. St. Louis. Missouri. (3 person)
• New Arts Program. Kutztown. Pennsylvania.
• University of Dayton. Dayton. Ohio. (solo)
• Krafthaus. Cincinnati. Ohio. (2 person)

2007

• Zonadearte. Buenos Aires. Argentina.
• T he Wooltex Gallery. Cleveland. Ohio.
• New Arts Program. Kutztown. Pennsylvania.
• The Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center. Covington. Kentucky.
• Invited to the Biennale Internazionale dell’Arte Contemporanea. Florence.
  Italy.
• Green Line Art Projects. Philadelphia. Pennsylvania.

]]> http://somewalls.com/?feed=rss2&p=19 0 http://somewalls.com/?p=1 http://somewalls.com/?p=1#comments Mon, 16 Feb 2009 23:07:16 +0000 admin http://somewalls.com/?p=1 Some Walls is an curatorial and writing art project based in a private home in Oakland, California, USA.

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