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.

Wrapping Up

I had my last meeting with my mentor this morning. We went over my project and discussed presentation.   This represents several individual prints. I have no idea how much space will be allotted and I don't know how much I will be able to hang at one time. My mentor has encouraged me to think beyond the traditional presentation of prints hung in a row. I will push this even further in the coming weeks and hopefully there will be a few surprises in January.
I know this is crazy small  and not easy to view but I wanted to give you an idea of how they work together.

Moving Forward

This combination of images represents an edit of some of the images I have been working with. I hesitate to post it as it will most likely change, but what hasn’t changed that I have I posted. In my last meeting with my mentor we talked about a hierarchy in images: subject, object and site (although I thought she meant sight and in a way, I sort of prefer that). The presence of a person in an image makes that person the subject of the image. I wanted to explore these images beyond their historical references and look at them as images themselves. I re-photographed them using my digital camera and eliminated all but traces of the original subject. What emerges is a kind of synchronic narrative. We talked about the work of Wolfgang Tillman’s in terms of bringing forth new meaning through the relationship of one image to another. We also looked at the work of Douglas Gordon, Paul Sharits, Chris Marker and Tacida Dean. We also talked about "The Poetics of Space" but I have not gotten past the introduction. Maybe after I finish the reading for Critical Theory.....

These are actually all separate prints, the large being 17x22", the medium, 11x17" and the small about 4x6". I have about 50 images I am working with. 

Movie Clip

Here is a 5 minute clip from movie I have been working on. Learning the new program has bogged me down a bit. There were many reshoots for both video and sound. Syncing them became a bit of a nightmare. End film will be about 15 minutes.
The sequence is about memory, perception and time (historic and real) as well as the ephemeral nature of photographic imagery. I hope to be able to project it onto a translucent screen that the viewer can walk around to view.

It just took me about an hour to figure out how to size this to upload and I'm not real happy with the rendering. You will have to wait for it to load. Please be patient.  It shouldn't be this difficult! I am ready to shoot myself! This is not the only thing on my to do list today! I am ready to scream.....
I guess as I get more familiar with this program things will be less frustrating.

Film Strip

I started working with new images, still projecting them on translucent material and re-photographing sections of them on both sides of the screen. I am now playing with them, creating a made up narrative within the scene.

October Gallery Hopping in New York

Last week I had a chance to go over to Chelsea and stop in a few exhibits. The Pace Gallery was showing Social Media a group show of artist that explores “public platforms of communication and social networks thorough an aesthetic and contemporary lens”, featuring works by Christopher Baker, David Byrne, Jonathan Harris, Robert Heinecken, Miranda July & Harrell Fletcher, Sep Kamvar and Penelope Umbrico (my mentor).

Here are a few highlights:

Learning to Love You More,  Miranda July & Harrell Fletcher

  Murmer Study, Chroistopher Baker

 According to Google,  Emilio Chapela Perez

 Democracy in Action/Apps, David Byrne

 Google Portrait Series, Aram Bartholl

 Flickr Sunsets, Penelope Umbrico

 Flickr Sunsets (Detail), Penelope Umbrico

 Personal Subjects (TVs from Craigslist), Penelope Umbrico

Sideways TVs, Penelope Umbrico

Sideways TVs (Detail), Penelope Umbrico

Later that evening I attended a talk at SVA where Penelope was speaking about her work.

This week  I was lucky enough to find myself in the Lower East Side where galleries are rapidly sprouting up. It reminded me a little of the East Village in the 80’s but it still lacks the energy of those times when you could barely walk down a street and not find a store front gallery with an open door. The Lower East Side takes a bit more diligence to find the galleries as they are spread out, but if you make the effort to seek them out, you would find some amazing things.

As we strolled down Orchard Street we were curious to see through a window a woman in blue overalls attacking a large layered block in the center of an otherwise empty space. Not really sure if it was a gallery or not (you can’t always tell) we poked our heads in. We were greeted warmly and invited to come in. What we had stumbled upon was a site specific, mixed media performance and installation sponsored by the French Institute Alliance Francaise as part of a month long festival Crossing the Line. The artist is Amelie Chanbannes, a French born Brooklyn based artist. In her studio she had built this large rectangles shaped object, burying within its structure numerous personal items. As she excavated the piece she would expose her hidden “treasures.” The gallery filled with the aroma of spices and flowers as she struck a section containing curry and lavender, which her mother frequently cooked with in her native country. She also unearthed images of idealized woman/girls. With every whack she took, she exposed another layer of the piece, another layer of herself. It evoked memories, both joyful and painful, sometimes pointed towards stereotypes she had to confront and overcome to become the individual she was. The piece speaks to all woman and the obstacles we struggle with and overcome as well as the layered complexities of our lives of how we embrace them. 

She will continue to chip away all weekend and can be seen on a live feed here: 

Amélie Chabannes: Intimate Immensity and Lagerstaten | Wed–Sun, Oct 12–16, 2011 | Crossing the Line 2011: FIAF Fall Festival, Sept 17-Oct 16

It was really quite amazing to watch and she was quite friendly and enjoyed conversing with us about her work. It was pretty refreshing.

We spent the entire afternoon down there and saw many exhibits but as this blog is already too lengthy so I will stop here. I encourage you to find your way down there on your next trip to New York. Feel free to contact me for gallery listings. There are also great places to stop for lunch, coffee & pastries, a glass of wine or beer or dinner. Cheers