Trying to Get Back on Track

Spent last week going through my notes and sorting out my thoughts. I’m having a hard time getting my bearings and not sure where to start. I’ve decided I’m suffering from Post Residency Unproductive Depression Syndrome, PRUDS. To help jolt me out of my blues I decided to take a trip down to New York and visit some galleries. I started out in the Lower East Side. I had seen a notice for an exhibit at LMAK that looked interesting.

Liselot van der Heijden was exhibiting her new 3 channel video project “ Les Uns et Les Autres (The Ones and The Others) As you enter the gallery you are confronted with a suspended screen displaying a video of the back of a woman’s head. I could not help but think of Gerhardt Richter’s painting of his daughter Betty. Richter painted this portrait of Betty based on a photograph that had been taken years earlier. Richter poised his figure looking into the scene as Frederic Church had placed figures in the foreground of his landscapes, with their back to the viewer, allowing the viewer a vantage and entry point to the painted landscape. In the case of Richter, the landscape is one of his large grey paintings. In the case of van  der Heijden it is Occupy Wall Street. As you walk around the suspended screen the woman’s face is revealed as she gazes out at you and at another video of herself in a crowd of people. Here we are both observing and being observed. Our vantage point shifts as we are invited to experience the space as well as our own relationship to the experience of observation as we examine our role in it.

A bit more walking around and then I headed up to Chelsea to meet some friends.There is a great show at Marlborough, Blind Cut, a group show curated by Jonah Freeman and Vera Neykov. “The works included address diverse notions surrounding the themes of fiction or deception.” Here are a few of my favorite works.

Andrea Longacre-White, Ceiling

Fia Backstrom

Another Eileen Quinlan

Daniel Lefcourt, Surplus II

Other notable exhibitions:

Danziner, New Photographers

Bruce Siverstein Annual , a show where 10 curators are invited to submit one artist each for the exhibit.

Andrea Rosen, The Wedding (The Walker Evens Polaroid Project) Amazing! To die for!! Exhibited with Roni Horn photographs of the back of birds’ heads (again the back of the heads) furniture. It was a pretty amazing curatorial feat to not loose the tiny Polaroids in the massive gallery.

Walker Evens

Steven Kasher Gallery: Vivian Maier and Weegee

Luhring Augustine: Joel Sternfeld, First Pictures, Images from the 80’s but recent ink jet prints.

Also at Mary Boone, Ai  WeiWei It's hard to photograph.

I did not get to see all I wanted so I will revisit soon, I’m hoping after my meeting with my new mentor, Randy West. 

Going Forward While Looking Back

This past residency brough up for me  many past issues. While I have been struggling to find a direction to expand my work it became clear this residency how embedded old sensibilities are in me. It became known that my very influential undergraduate instructor, Jan Groover, passed away while we were in Boston. I missed the impromptu tribute held in her honor with other past students. I am not the only one who orbits her star. As I read the many tributes written about her I heard echos of my current and past artist statements, things like “ the space between things is more than the things themselves” and “without narrative or representational associations”. Her constant mantra was “form is everything.”

I created these two SX-70 pieces in 1980 while studying under her at School of Visual Arts. They were exhibited at the Polaroid Gallery in Boston in a group exhibition of student work curated by Victor Schrager, another formative instructor. Going forward I will remember my lessons from the past.