Luke Jerram, E. Coli (detail)

The human body. The human being. Expectation and convention might suggest, I suppose, that I talk about the aesthetic gaze as it is sculpturally focused on the human body. But I’ll slide sideways a bit, so that while the human body, the human being, is indeed the focus of work I want to talk about, there is nary a representation nor visual reference to the aforesaid anyway in sight. This is about the foreign invaders, those intrusions (intended or not) into and upon the body that, for the most part, fall into two distinct groups: viruses and bacteria and pathogens on the one (by-and-large unwelcome) side, and the oral medications we so increasingly consume to deal with myriad physiological and psychological maladies on the other. Viruses and bacteria and other pathogens are generally of the natural world, while medications are obviously no such things. The oppositions of the natural and the synthetic come into play here, but intentionally so, and I proffer by way of examples the work of two artists, Luke Jerram and Colleen Wolstenholme – one British and the other Canadian.

Luke Jerram, E. Coli

 

I’ll begin overseas and with the work of Luke Jerram (www.lukejerram.com). He’s a glass artist whose sculptural and installation work has been shown widely and internationally. It’s his “Glass Microbiology” series that is pertinent here, work in which Jerram has created glass sculptures of some of the bacteria, viruses, and pathogens that invade our body – like the SARS virus, E.coli, malaria, the Zika virus, avian flu, and HIV. These pieces are, of course, macroscopic iterations of microscopic entities. And Jerram has rendered them all neutral – in clear, uncoloured blown glass – in deliberate opposition to the falsely colored representations we are more used to seeing.

This is truly the stuff of nightmares – Ebola, and the like, the more horrific devastators of life, of cultures, of entire populations – but even nightmares have their own particular beauty. Created by Jerram at the level of the macroscopic, and rendered in neutral, transparent glass, they seem benign and utterly aesthetic (and, indeed, are), stripped of the hellishness the microscopic originals unleash upon us. They’ve become artefactual. His E. Coli links in our minds to a living thing; the main body of the bacteria is encompassed by flagella that Jerram recreates so as to suggest motion and life – activity. And T4 Bacteriophage (a bacteria that infects E. Coli) is a sculpture that seems decidedly zoological, like some oddly recognizable living creature, perhaps scuttling about deep in the ocean near some thermal vent but something that corresponds in our mind to the natural world. But his HIV resembles nothing whatsoever of the natural world with which we think we are familiar. It’s decidedly sculptural, decidedly aesthetic, and in that respect inert. I don’t suggest that as a criticism, but rather that it has an overt and insistent stillness and artefactuality about it – is even, in some respects, decorative. And yet, there it is doing its thing (the real thing, I mean), out there well beyond the level of our unmediated visual experience. That which enters our body, unbidden and unwelcome, are dimensional forms that alter life dramatically.

Luke Jerram, T4 Phage

 

In a widely exhibited series or sculptural works based on pharmaceuticals, Canadian artist Colleen Wolstenholme (www.colleenwolstenholme.com) engages the body and the systems of the medicines that have grown up to accommodate its needs and shortcomings – and, increasingly, to manufacture needs and shortcomings. Now, ‘big pharma’ is a phrase most of us have become familiar with, especially in light of the sometimes quite dubious practices undertaken by some entrepreneurs to bump up the prices of drugs that have long been affordable (Martin Shkreli, anyone?).

Wolstenholme doesn’t address that issue directly, but rather goes to the heart of the other ethical and moral issues involving how such drugs are so often prescribed, especially to women, and for what reasons. What’s she done involves scale: she’s created cast  and carved plaster sculptures of different drugs – especially that class clinically know as SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) but which we know as antidepressants – blown up to the proportions of self-consciousness and self-awareness of what these things actually are. This is what we are consuming to deal with our ills (real or those that big pharma advises we might have), albeit shown here at a vastly larger, even bloated, scale. Like her sculptures of the anti-anxiety drug Buspirone (marketed as Buspar), sprawled like ungainly things across a gallery floor. These geometric shapes are less in-your-face when resting in the palm of the hand than they are lying on floor as sculptural objects (notably, not on plinths, but shown as if scattered things accidentally dropped on a bathroom floor in the course of being dispensed). There, they are impediments at both physical and intellectual-emotional levels. They insist on being seen, on consideration, and that consideration mirrors the bloated status they’ve achieved via relentless advertising pointedly insisting that, no matter their shortcomings – their often shocking and distressing side-effects – that this pill will cure what ails ‘ya.

Luke Jerram, E. Coli (detail).

 

This is an issue especially pertinent to women, for whom antidepressants are disproportionally prescribed and dispensed. No argument that they have a critically important role and place, but they’ve very quickly become first resort rather than last, and so Wolstoneholme seeks to aesthetically point out their intrusive presence in our world. And she does it very well.

Wolstoneholme’s work has been the target of drug companies arguing copyright infringement. No matter. She’s moved from the scale of gallery works to the scale of jewelry, to wearable art, creating pieces for wrists and necks adorned with miniature iterations of the drugs in question, much more to scale.

This isn’t mere adornment. This is work that is as equally insistent of consideration as her gallery pieces, work that will be seen and will be eloquently heard.

By Gil McElroy

Ernest Daetwyler, Ice Bubbles

You can blow soap bubbles in the wintertime, and do it outdoors; it’s not just a summertime, outdoors thing. If you do it carefully enough, you can watch the completed bubble begin to freeze. But there’s a catch: the bubbles, alas, don’t last very long. Freezing creates cracks, and cracks allow trapped air to escape, and, well, you can figure out the rest.

I first encountered Canadian artist Ernest Daetwyler’s work, in the form of his bubbles, in 2004 on the frozen surface of a lake in northern Ontario (while he maintains no website of his own, examples of his work are easily found via a Google or here. It was the first iteration of the biennial “Ice Follies” exhibition in which a number of Canadian artists are invited to respond to the seasonal challenges and promises, and the geography of a large, shallow (and incredibly scenic) lake around which the small city of North Bay has grown. Until this series of exhibitions began, the only structures that might be found strewn across the lake’s icy expanse would have been fishing huts, small shelters resembling outhouses usually mounted on skids so as to facility easy and rapid movement from one spot to another as well as removal.

Ernest Daetwyler, Time Bomb

 

Some of the sculptural work shown that first year was clearly and directly based on this ubiquitous winter thing. Daetwyler’s contribution, Ice Bubbles, made for an interesting variant on the theme: a series of five bubbles, all made from skins of translucent bubble wrap with shape provided courtesy a series of curved steel ribs rising from small wooden bases. One was tiny, the others only just big enough to crawl into (the bubble wrap could peel away in one spot to allow entry)–ice huts, of a sort, providing some shelter from the harsh winds scouring the broad surface of the lake, shaking and yielding somewhat to its icy gusts (but holding fast).

But shelters they were not. Dream Catchers – a First Nations creation, a wooden hoop within which a web is woven – hung suspended within. These were spaces to dream in (or about), little more than actualized translucent membranes for the making of metaphor. I consequently tend to think of Daetwyler’s work in terms of closing the circle, both literally and metaphorically

Ernest Daetwyler, life is but a dream

 

Ernest Daetwyler is a Swiss-Canadian multi-disciplinary artist who studied sculpture in Italy and Switzerland before moving to Canada two decades ago. His work is exhibited regularly across Canada, and he has shown internationally. He is one of the founders of CAFKA, The Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener and Area, a biennial exhibition in southern Ontario (www.cafka.org).

When I summon forth the notion of the closing of the circle as critical in his work, it has pretty much everything to do with the fact that the bubble – the orb, the sphere, the three-dimensional iteration of the circle – figures centrally in a number of his works. For the 2006 exhibition “Your Place or Mine?”, he installed a series of bubbles in the proverbial white cube of the Durham Art Gallery, all of varying sizes, some at floor level, some at the ceiling as if they’d become unmoored and drifted off. life is but a dream is another variant on the bubble: a piece that could be likened to an early satellite, a version of Sputnik, comprising a small central sphere sprouting numerous arms going off madly in all directions, all of which collectively manifest the circumference of a bubble, and each of which ends with a small electronic component that responds interactively to the presence of gallery-goers. Outside, he’d strewn his bubbles in a forested landscape at different heights), one suspended from a single long cable so that it swings, articulating space with a ride-along passenger ensconced within.

Ernest Daetwyler, Forest Cell (installation detail)

These are all spherical works with an aesthetic and structural lightness to them, in keeping with the dream aspect of his Ice Bubbles. Weight and mass are to be found elsewhere, in a work called Time Bomb, a spherical sculpture he constructed for an exhibition in Germany that is almost 4 meters in diameter and composed of thousands of individual pieces of discarded wood. Situated outdoors, it rises from a single point of contact with the earth (and so seemingly about to topple from the hillock on which it rests, ready to roll away in one direction or another), one of the few such works he’s done in which a foundation is aesthetically fundamental. Daetwyler’s bubbles are, with a rare exception, foundation-less, and lack an aesthetic sense of permanence, of rigidity and lastingness. Bubbles, after all, tend to burst. They aren’t here to stay.

Time Bomb is (clearly) no bubble. It’s a sphere of an entirely different order. It’s in-your-face threatening and devoid of the quietness, the stillness of Daetwyler’s smaller, translucent bubbles. Despite its elemental geometry, it is visually shaky, unkempt, incomplete, and really rough around the edges. It is noisy and disruptive. In virtually every way, it is counter to his bubbles, their utter antithesis. The circle closes, here, in an entirely different way than it does in Ice Bubbles, shutting out and excluding reverie. It’s aesthetically authoritarian, brutally imposing itself upon its landscape rather than gently alighting upon it.

Daetwyler is currently at work on The Boat Project, a site-specific permanent sculpture commissioned by McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario for the McMaster Museum of Art’s Artist Garden (see www.museum.mcmaster.ca/about/bews/daetwyler). It’s a piece that employs large pieces of scavenged driftwood transformed into a vessel form.

Shades of Time Bomb.
Perhaps.
But aesthetically unmoored. Like Ice Bubbles.

By Gil McElroy

Anne Ramsden, Anastylosis – Inventory (installation). Photo by Don Gill

Through the first half of 2018, the Gardiner Museum in Toronto – an eminent institution devoted to ceramics – mounted The Riverbed, a gallery installation by New York City-based artist Yoko Ono.

The primary component of the exhibition was the titular work, an installation of stones from a riverbed that Ono had installed to form a winding, sinuous curve of rock. They were large stones, generally bigger than the hand, that visitors were free to pick up, handle, and spend some time contemplating. Some had text written across their surfaces by Ono herself (one of which became newsworthy when it was apparently pilfered by a gallery visitor).

That installation comprised half of the exhibition. The other half was made up of two components, basically divided between lines of twine gallery-goers were encouraged to use to link up different areas of the gallery (Line Piece) and an area of shelves, and tables and chairs where we were encouraged to fix (intentionally) broken pottery.

Anne Ramsden,, Anastylosis – Inventory (installation detail). Photo by Paul Litherland

 

Mend Piece, it is called. Set in the middle of the tables were piles of broken crockery – cups, plates, saucers – along with spools of twine, thread, and string, and rolls of different tapes. Ono’s recommendations were simple: “Mend with wisdom mend (sic) with love. It will mend the earth at the same time.”

So a friend and I spent close to two hours participating, “mending” broken crockery, taping and twining shards of once-usable ceramics into somethings that were most certainly aesthetically “other,” and then placing our creations on the shelves along with the contributions of previous visitors. Thusly it shall go until June, when the exhibition closes.

I’ve spent all this time talking about Yoko Ono’s participatory exhibition because there are artists who have engaged with and explored this aesthetic region – that of “mending,” of aesthetically repairing and thus recreating anew – in  a deeply meaningful way. One of them would be Canadian artist Anne Ramsden (www.anneramsden.com).. Her background includes a BFA from the venerable Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, and an MFA from Concordia University in Montréal. She’s now a professor at the Université du Quebec in the same city. (She also has a Wikipedia entry.)

Anne Ramsden, Anastylosis – Inventory (installation 2). Photo by Don Gill

 

Ramsden has exhibited work widely, and not just sculpture but photography and video as well, and her work is represented in major museum collections. But it’s a sculptural/installational piece of hers I want to focus on, one of Ramsden’s best-known works: Anastylosis: Inventory, a work that directly addresses the issue of entropy – the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, actually, often blithely summarized with the phrase “things fall apart” – in an aesthetically sharp way. It’s all about the mending.

The premise is relatively simple: Ramsden acquired nondescript, utile ceramics as might be commonly found in households of different economic levels, and then proceeded to break them, either smashing each artifact with a hammer, or dropping it. At this level of creative process, there is an echo of a work by Chinese artist Ai WeiWei, a photographic triptych entitled Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn documenting him, well, dropping a Han Dynasty urn, destroying an apparently valuable 2,000 year-old piece of ceramics. That’s the point where Ai’s work formally ends, but it’s where Ramsden’s is just getting started, for after destruction comes (re)construction: she embarks on a process of “negentropy,” effecting repairs to the destroyed ceramics, gluing them back together as wholes and setting the resultant re-creations upon shelving, there to be seen and considered anew.

Anne Ramsden, Anastylosis – Inventory (installation 3). Photo by Don Gill

 

There’s an extant tradition of significance that feeds into this: Japanese Kintsugi, the repair of broken pottery using lacquers mixed with powdered gold so that the breakage and consequent joinery is made aesthetically evident, and the reconstructed vessel often more beautiful than its previous unbroken iteration.

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that this aesthetic procedure is based on the fact that ceramics is pretty much a one-way street: fired clay cannot be brought back to its primary mud, and then refashioned and refired. The proverbial slate cannot be wiped clean. All that can be accomplished is the rejoining of fired shards into some semblance of the whole, and the fractures will typically be evident. Kintsugi honors that, and an artist like Ramsden embraces that in moving creatively forward.

The “unrupturing” of an artifact like a clay vessel is also an archaeological technique; it’s a part of museology, and that background too is fundamental to Ramsden work. The reglued shards of plates and bowls are, in Anastylosis: Inventory, artifacts exhibited on commercial metal shelves, and not plinths, as might be used for storage and not for display. The message is straightforwardly museological and curatorial; it openly points towards conservatorship, towards a dominant context of preservation, maintenance. This is the negative of entropy, of things falling apart. Ramsden’s, then, is sculpture of a kind of self-preservation, of the shattered past being brought forward into the present and future as something akin to a whole.

Anne Ramsden, Anastylosis – Inventory (installation detail 2). Photo by Paul Litherland

 

But past the references to archaeological preservation, past the museology, past, even, the allusions to a kind of connoisseurship, and we come to the much more contemporary aesthetic of the multiple. In Ramsden, it’s a multiplicity comprised of singularites. Anastylosis: Inventory comprises not shelves of ranked sameness, but shelves of dissimilarities, of vessels and containers that are not multiples of oneness, of the same thing.  British ceramist Edmund De Waal has given us sculptural gallery installations comprising multiples of fired white porcelain vessels (the ceramic equivalent, in some ways, of the grid), a veritable sea of remarkable sameness foregrounding repetition. Ramsden, instead, gives us a multiplicity comprised of ones, of singularities and uniqueness. To be sure, this is commercial pottery with which she works (readymades, in a sense), but a product has become transformed through and by entropy. Things have (intentionally) fallen apart, and the consequences re-shaped into something new, something other. Anne Ramsden’s Anastylosi: Inventory is the sculpture of the shard, the broken, the fractured, the re-formed – of that which endures when the inevitable rupture of time and entropy is itself ruptured.

If only temporarily.

By Gil McElroy

Jannick Deslaurier, Sentence, souffle, et linceul

Representation. Well, there’s a loaded term if ever there was; a veritable minefield. It has myriad meanings, associations, connotations, what have you. So let me narrow it down – quite a bit, actually – to what I’ll call “standing in place of.”

By that I basically mean the displacement of something – in this instance, aesthetic displacement – and that shape of the consequent void being occupied by something “other,” something, well, something “standing in place of.”

I choose the automobile as that “something,” that massive cultural, economic, social, environmental, and technological game-changer that completely defined the course of the 20th century, and I choose the artists Shelly Rahme and Jannick Deslauriers as the aesthetic displacers, the fillers of the subsequent void with something decidedly other. And they are both artists who have worked with sculptural incarnations of the veritable automobile.

Rahme is an Ontario-based artist (while she no longer maintains a website for her work as an artist, examples of it can be found on-line) who studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in Halifax, and obtained her MFA from Southern Illinois University (Carbondale). She’s exhibited widely across Canada, including the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Toronto, and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and her work is represented in private and public collections. Rahme turned away from the art world and is a farmer now, living and working in Northern Ontario (www.northernharvest.info).

Shelly Rahme, Front End, exhibition installation.

 

Full disclosure: I curated a two-person exhibition that included Rahme in 2011, and it’s one of the pieces she showed that I want to focus on here. It’s called Front End, and at first glance appears to be a bit of a dog’s breakfast. It looks like an enormous snarl of vines and branches – vegetative detritus, really, that, outdoors, would handily make for the constituents of a backyard brush pile, with a bit of odd wire thrown in for good measure. It’s unkempt, it’s messy, it’s… a truck.

Well, the front end of one anyway, minus most of what might constitute the shell of bodywork. We’re talking about the technological guts of the thing, here: the tires (or rather gnarly aesthetic signifiers of such things, anyway), an engine of sorts (is that a carburetor up top?), radiator, front bumper, and even the steering wheel.

It’s 1:1 scale, or as close as you can get when dealing with the kind of abstraction that inevitably extrudes from the untidiness. And it’s something akin to a sculptural whirlwind; the twisting and tumbling of material carries with it the powerful suggestion of unarrested motion (it is a vehicle, after all). It’s even evocative of painterly brushstrokes rendered three-dimensionally.

Shelly Rahme, Front End, exhibition installation.

 

And it’s important to note, here, that the piece is based on Rahme’s truck. This is personal, not aesthetically distant. There’s a sort of kinship to what we once called cargo cultism. It’s not that Rahme is fashioning a simulacrum of her vehicle as a form of distorted wish fulfillment, as a means of somehow magically willing a transformation of this sculpture into the real deal – into a consumer product. Rather, she’s manifesting quite the opposite: a thing of mass production become a one-of-a-kind, a thing of decades of technological innovation reverse engineered into something decidedly biotic, wires and pipes become branches and roots. With Front End, “transmission” ceases to be the noun it has evolved into.

Jannick Deslauriers (www.jannickdeslauriers.com) is a Québec-based textile artist. A graduate of Concordia University in Montréal, she’s shown throughout Canada and Europe. Like a number of other textile artists (Toronto-based Dorie Millerson who’s taken lace-making into the sculptural realm comes immediately to mind, but there are of course many others), Deslauriers has been using fabric and thread to create large sculptural pieces. At a glance they look a wee bit like soft sculpture, like something akin to one of Claes Oldenburg’s pieces. But this is work of an entirely different order.

There’s nary a hamburger around – this isn’t Pop in any way at all – and Deslauriers’s aesthetic interests orbit objects like a handheld drill, a sewing machine, a household trunk, an industrial crane, a house, a power pole, a…tank. Like soft sculpture, these pieces flop and are crooked and have trouble standing upright. They look wobbly and insubstantial. And they rely on outside help: Deslauriers suspends them from a gallery ceiling to hold their shape. Like the aforesaid tank.

Jannick Deslaurier, Sentence, souffle, et linceul

 

Tank Textile is a piece comprise of white crinoline and thread. Nylon lines run from the ceiling to hold the work in three-dimensional space, as lumpy and saggy as it is. But it’s definitely a tank, alright, barrel and all. Beyond the armature of nylon lines that provides the sculptural to this work, it’s apparent that Deslauriers’s piece is in fact a drawing, albeit one rendered three-dimensionally. In our digital age, that’s nothing new, but Tank Textile is in no way a digital rendering. This is a thing of the hand, and while we typically regard thread as a device for joining things together – as structural – Deslaurier utilizes it aesthetically, thread as drawn lines. The juxtaposition of white crinoline and black thread makes this overtly apparent with Tank Textile.

Less so with a work in the recent exhibition Sentence, soufflé et linceul (literally translated as Sentence, breath and shroud). Tank Textile, despite it’s malevolent form had a benign quality to it, its lumpiness and sagging draining away the evil of the thing it replicated. But this, the central element of this show is so very much darker. It takes the form of an automobile – a smashed-up automobile. Laid out on a long plinth, it has an “Exhibit A” quality or aura about it, as if it were part of a display comprising a cautionary tale of what could happen if (if you drove too fast and recklessly, if you drove drunk, if…). The sagging and lumpiness of the textile form doesn’t drain away tension, here. Rather, it heightens it. A relatively benign form that is an everyday object achieves real malevolence. It’s the anti-tank. The doors are almost torn entirely from the body; the front end twists and sags in damaged ways; hub caps are entirely separated from wheels; the engine has fallen from its mounts and sits below the car… All of it wrought in fabrics and threads. And the work has a strange, overall sense of decay, as if it has been sitting somewhere for some time, being overgrown by vegetation.

Jannick Deslaurier, Sentence, souffle, et linceul

 

But that’s all overt. What about subtleties? This piece might very well speak of the rise and fall of technology, of a society economically, socially, and politically structured around a kind of consumption in which the new means the abandonment of the old. We’ve all seen it: abandoned technology littering the landscape (cars, refrigerators, what have you). It’s the hollowing out of our world, its utter degradation courtesy the “something” of unfettered consumerism.

Works by Shelly Rahme and Jannick Deslauriers stand in place of, displacing (however briefly) the “something” of the engines that power unleashed greed. This is what art can do.

Long live standing in place of. And long live the displacers.

By Gil McElroy

Don Maynard, Tidal Mass (installation detail)

This starts with glass. Again.

This time, though, it’s not the hot glass of the studio, but rather the commercial and industrial variety. Like Pyrex, that stuff so familiar to us through its use in durable kitchenware for cooking (and maybe less familiar for its use in laboratory glassware). And the setting is of course neither a kitchen nor a lab, but an austere gallery space – your standard white cube. Along one long wall stand 700 long and thin Pyrex rods. The rods are transparent, and actually lean relatively untidily against the wall.

It’s a discreet work, seemingly unassuming and visually undemanding of attention. It’s entitled Looks Like Rain, and it’s a work by Canadian sculptor Don Maynard. But appearances, as the cliché goes, are deceiving, for Maynard has wrought a work that is insistently experiential. Its title gives some inkling of things; overall, the angled setting of the rods is of course suggestive of a heavy rain falling.

Don Maynard, Looks Like Rain

 

But that’s perceptually static, and this piece is anything but. Walking up and down along the extent of Looks Like Rain reveals its dynamic aesthetic core, born of simple physics and human perception. The varied angles of the leaning glass rods randomly catch the gallery lighting, refracting and reflecting it in disparate ways, and the experience is that of tiny bits of light in motion like tiny drops of rain in motion.

Don Maynard, Tidal Mass

 

It’s a simple and elegant piece, minimalistic in structure and material, but not locked into its own tight and exclusive core of self-referentiality. It points elsewhere, proffering the interactive and experiential. Looks Like Rain is inclusive.

And that is rather a hallmark of Maynard’s work: experiential and inclusive. He’s long been based in the university town of Kingston, Ontario, and has exhibited widely throughout Canada and the United States. And while glass is by no means his central material focus, he’s done interesting work with it. Falling to Pieces was an installation Maynard created as a companion piece for an exhibition featuring Looks Like Rain. In a small, almost cramped gallery space, he installed several hundred mirrors along all the walls, extending from floor to ceiling. The space was poorly lit – purposely, mind – and the mirrors – small and of myriad square and rectangular shapes – were all affixed so as to point off in slightly different directions. This was no funhouse carnival of self-reflections, here, but rather a view – or, more accurately, non-view – of fractiousness, of the incomplete and broken. Human narcissism might have lured us into the space of this work to see and even admire ourselves whole and complete, but Maynard was having none of it. Where Looks Like Rain may have been discreet, Falling to Pieces addressed the discrete,the shards of reflection mirroring (pun intended) the shards that comprise the human self. “I am large,” Walt Whitman wrote, “I contain multitudes.” We think we see ourselves as we really are in a mirror, but we indeed we see only aspects of the vastness that is the self. In frustrating our vanity, Falling to Pieces speaks to that reality. Through a glass, darkly.

Don Maynard, Tidal Mass (installation detail)

 

Tidal Mass is a gallery installation made up of almost 2000 fluorescent lighting tubes – used fluorescent lighting tubes. As in: they no longer function as intended. Maynard arrays them out across the floor in several long rows traversing the length of the space. Each of the rows, comprised of hundreds of tubes lined up together, undulates from one end to the other vertically and horizontally. The gaps between each row are ragged and uneven; tubes from one row might extend into and intrude upon the adjoining row, and where the gaps are wider the space below the work is made evident, and the whole sculptural mass rises and falls in waves. Again, this isn’t tidy minimalism. Tidal Mass is a grid, to be sure, one laid out horizontally and delimited by the gallery perimeter and punctuated by supporting posts across the space. But it resists the static impetus of the grid; the undulating rise and fall of the tube rows of course conveys a sense of rolling motion (the work was inspired by Maynard’s readings on the melting of the polar ice cap and how that will affect rising sea levels), and the undulating, uneven gaps between rows convey an almost tectonic sense of shift.

And of course the light. The non-functional tubes may suggest a light source, but they are obviously no such thing. Function has been excised, leaving form to give shape, a shape  lit from both above and below, the former reflecting off the translucent white surfaces of the fluorescents, the latter passing through them.

Don Maynard’s sculptural work argues reflection and refraction as a means of aesthetic transmission.

Through a glass.

Lightly.

By Gil McElroy

Christopher Reid Flock, Basking Gaussian Noise

I would suggest that there are two primary paths through clay and toward the sculptural: one through (or into) the vessel, and the other not so much.

Okay, that’s not so profound a statement, but really it does rather boil down to this kind of polarity. Either you embrace the fact that clay has pretty much always been about the vessel form and all of its utilitarian associations (and I am here ignoring the fact that clay was actually once the primary means of written communication, but never mind) and work your way through that field towards its sculptural ends; or you pretty much bypass it completely. Do an end run, so to speak. The powerfully abstract sculptural work of an artist like Peter Voulkos might strongly suggest that he took the latter course, but he was no stranger to the pot.

Magdolene Dykstra, Invasion (detail)

 

If nothing else, working with the vessel form teaches you what clay can do. It can be an end in and of itself— and for most ceramists, it is – but it can also be a means to an end.

So I want to talk about the work of two Canadian ceramic sculptors— Christopher Reid Flock (www.studioreid.com), and Magdolene Dykstra (www.magdolenedykstra.com)— and how they forged different paths toward the sculpture of clay.

I place Flock first because his path tends toward the more traditional, though the ends are most decidedly not. He comes to clay from a background in literature and music, only then studying ceramics at Sheridan College in Toronto. Following that, he moved to Japan, where he lived and worked for nine years before returning to Canada in 2009. He’s been actively showing since 2007, exhibiting across Canada, in Asia, and in the United States, and won the prestigious Winifred Shantz Award for Ceramics in 2014

Christopher Reid Flock, Basking Blue

 

To be sure, his work is most definitely about the vessel form, and much of it is derived from his time in Japan. Take Basking Blue, for example. It’s an intense primary monochromatic color (blue), a vessel with seemingly myriad handles. Well, okay, maybe only two at either extreme of the oblong vessel; from its rim billow wide ribbons of clay extending out and away and up. Flock has stated that these pieces are rooted in the realm of textiles: specifically, his interest in the sashes of the kimonos he saw while in Japan. Basking Gaussian Noise is thematically similar, though of gentler colors and smaller, tighter ribbons that cleave closely to the central vessel. In Basking Harajuku Wedding, Flock spatters and streaks the vessel and its ribbons with red and blue.

I see these forms, these ribbons extending away and above the primary container at the core of these works (and they have become inextricably identified with Flock— his hallmark, if you will, though he of course continues to do other work), and I analogously see solar prominences, the filaments and loops solar plasma extending out and away from the surface of our host star in photographic images and film. I see activity, motion and movement of the sort that rococo attempted to emulate. There’s no stasis in these pieces. They’re sculpturally dynamic.

Magdolene Dykstra, Nest

 

And it’s not just loops. Basking Aubergine Arrangement, another monochromatic work, is another oblong vessel form from which sprout 13 sections of hose— two complete with the metal connectors found on the real deal – like a floral arrangement gone awry. But the vessel form is clearly pivotally central to his work. Everything sculptural both literally and figurative emanates from it.

Magdolene Dykstra comes toward sculpture and clay from a somewhat different direction: the sciences. She holds both Bachelor and Master’s degrees in science, and has long worked as an educator. Currently finishing up work on her Masters on Fine Arts Degree at Virginia Commonwealth University, she’s exhibited widely in Canada and the U.S.

Significantly, perhaps, is the fact that her contemporary work with clay in no way involves the vessel form (early work included the sculpturally figurative). Her sculptures are indeed containers— as are all artworks, of course— but they have no genealogical roots in the vessel. Where Flock’s aesthetic is that of the object, arguably Dykstra’s is that of the subject. I would proffer, by way of example, her piece Framing Landscape. A conventional wood frame hangs suspended conventionally on a wall. But convention ends right there, for within the contextualizing borders of the frame raw clay droops and oozes; the upper left quadrant of the frame is empty, the clay seemingly sagging courtesy the effects of gravity and on the lower right of the frame entirely escapes from (and out of) conventions. There is colour and texture, here, but there is aesthetic activity. In an entirely different way than Flock’s, Dykstra’s work is highly dynamic. Dramatic, even, in this instance exceeding (ignoring?) the aesthetic authority of the frame.

Magdolene Dykstra, Colony

 

So she dispenses with it entirely, though stays with wall in the piece Nest. Tucked into a corner, it’s a work of reclaimed earth, roughly triangular, but lumpy and bulbous, straggling tendrils hanging down. Its surface is seemingly porous, pockmarked with small holes, and comprises a visually complex amalgam of shapes and patterns. You can call Nest a sculptural object, if you want, but to do so would be to delimit it, stick it back between the confines of a defining frame. But Dykstra’s already moved past that. “I am large,” Walt Whitman wrote. “I contain multitudes.” Nest works within that metaphor.

So too does Colony, and in ways that go well beyond the title. It’s a floor-mounted installation comprising several independent elements. The idea of a parent and her/his progeny springs to mind right away; at one extreme is a visually central element, far larger than any other, tall and occupying a large footprint of space. Like Nest, it’s physically complex, multitudinous— arguably a colony unto itself, perhaps made up of smaller elements that have amalgamated, cohered as a whole. Lumpy and pierced through, geological, even, though not quite. Tendrils hang down, but others poke up and out, bristle seemingly more defensively. Keep away. There’s a consciousness that protrudes, that which is earthy and even a bit geological but from which emanates some sense of sentience. Presence.

Christopher Reid Flock, Basking Gaussian Noise

 

And arrayed about it are a number of smaller entities, most lumpy but some which are flatter and more extended. Surface textures seem to evoke the surface of the brain, the folds and convolutions of the core of intelligence, of consciousness. And they bristle too, though in a way more akin to something botanic. Almost as if they were just flowering.

The gallery installation Invasion takes Colony to its abstract extreme. There’s nothing benign about this work— it’s messy, ugly, intrusive, and threatening as hell. It sprawls across floor and wall (in fact, extending up along a wall and across a ceiling). Invasion is indeed invasive, and unsettlingly so. Dykstra has established it so that it appears as if it is opportunistically seeping into the exhibition space from openings in the wall. We are under attack. Sculptural abstraction is poised, here, as aesthetically insidious and highly dynamic. There are myriad levels of tension in this installation.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: this is what clay, what mud and earth, can do. The sculptural work of artists like Christopher Reid Flock and Magdolene Dykstra extends across the chasm between objects and subjects, positing new relationships, new paths.

Pushing. Always pushing.

It’s an aesthetic that is as clear as only mud can make.

Gil McElroy

Susan Rankin, Soft Blue with Blue Delphinium

I came of age – the late 1970s – in an artistic environment in which artists, and not curators or gallery directors, were taking the lead. In Canada, this led to the founding of galleries right across the country that were programmed and run by artists. One of the credos of this movement was the idea that you were an artist if identified as an artist.

I liked that. Still do, but there are of course issues with such a credo. I think that primary amongst them was the implication of the diminishment – even the demeaning, even the dismissal – of skill. If anyone could be an artist, what happens to things like, say, an ability to draw representationally, to those who seek to work aesthetically in fields in which the acquired skills that we know of as “training” is imperative – fields typically long marginalized, if not even denigrated.

Susan Rankin, Soft Blue Seed Developing (detail)

 

I’m of course talking here about that area we’ve long called “craft” so as to separate it from the “fine” arts – talking about ceramics, textiles, woodcarving…

Or glass. I mean, you can’t just walk into a glass studio, into a hot shop, pick up a pipe and blow glass. There are levels of technology, here, that require expertise, practice – the acquisition of skill. And anyway, isn’t that also the case in fine art fields like sculpture or printmaking? You can’t call yourself a lithographer without ever having acquired the knowledge and skill required to pull a print from a stone.

So I wonder why glass and glass artists are, with a few notable exceptions, still struggling to clamber across that phony chasm separating the fines from the fine-nots?

Susan Rankin, Steel Blue over Chartreuse with Blue Poppies

 

Which at last brings me to Susan Rankin (www.susanrankin.com). She’s a Canadian glass artist who’s acquired all the myriad skills she wields from places like the renowned Sheridan College School of Craft and Design in Toronto, and the even more renowned Pilchuk Glass School in Washington State, and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine.

That’s just her credentials, her acquisitions of skills. None of it an artist makes. That comes from somewhere else and is evident in a long curriculum vitae detailing her exhibitions dating back to the late 1980s and which include showing throughout Canada, the US, and Asia.

There are three primary bodies of work she’s engaged with: vessels, columns, and wired forms that include glass elements.  As with clay, Rankin’s vessels would comprise the most “traditional” kind of work she’s done with glass, blown forms – vases, primarily – that include primary floral elements. Rankin’s reaching back into glass history here, moving a tradition forward with these works, tall vases wider at the lip than at the base which are engirdled with colourful glass flowers, like the trumpet-shaped Steel Blue over Chartreuse with Blue Poppies , or Soft Blue with Blue Delphinium.

Yet we would, very likely, not regard or consider these as sculptural forms. Why? Because of the representational nature of the pieces? Nah. Because they are of a comparatively small scale and made more for the domestic realm than the gallery environment (where, in fact, they are not at all out of place)? Maybe. Or because (and this is the likeliest of reasons) they are vessels and thereby directly engage the utile?

Susan Rankin, Soft Blue with Blue Delphinium

 

As with clay, it might seem, so with glass.

Rankin’s series of Columns make a more straightforward sculptural argument that steer clear of that damning link to the utile. Essentially comprised of colored glass disks mounted along tall poles (though some are made up of more overtly petal-like glass pieces), the pieces still clearly reference the floral, though in a less overtly representational way, and thus respond aesthetically to light. Rankin’s shown these pieces as gallery installations, and in outdoor garden settings as well, settings for which they are actually intended.

Her wired forms are curvilinear floral sculptures based around the elemental seed. With Soft Blue Seed Emerging, petals or leaves of wire curve around a blue conical glass shape – the titular seed, itself encased in wire collars – the tips of which curve in opposing directions. In Soft Blue Seed Developing, the glass seed element forms a half-moon shape cradled within a case of wire that is one of three (the two on either side of it are empty) which graceful curve within the confines of a kind of wire saddle form.

Susan Rankin, Glass Forest

 

It’s here Rankin is at her most abstract, aesthetically extending away from the particulars of floral forms into evocations and expressions of the underlying geometry of the flowering plants on which the work is based. It’s here that Rankin is clearly at her most overtly sculptural – and by that I mean work in which the severance with the utile is most evident.

But it’s all sculptural, isn’t it? The issue of utility and function really is spurious. What’s really going on is that Susan Rankin moves easily between the realms of the representational and the abstract. So what if her deeply representational work is part and parcel of vessel forms, of working containers.

It still speaks volumes about the sculptural.

Volumes.

Gil McElroy

Gordon Monahan, Speaker Swinging

We’re not unfamiliar with the use of sound to shape or reshape a physical space. I mean, in a way isn’t that what Muzak was intended to do?  Infect psychological space, inner space, and have us respond by, say, spending more money in a carefully structured physical space set up to enable just that? And haven’t I read about the use of classical music piped into outdoor settings to drive off young people who might otherwise congregate there? Isn’t that physical space being aurally reshaped to make it less amenable to a select and specific few?

Those are, of course, really minor examples of much more extraordinary and insidious uses of sound to reshape space (like, of course, the military interest in the technique, most famously used, if I recall correctly, to drive former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega from his chosen place of refuge after a US military invasion toppled him from power in the late 1980s – create an inhospitable, if not downright painful, acoustic environment).

But artists have long been at a forefront of aesthetic intentions that address (in a far more benign manner than that of military forces, though perhaps no less pointed) the sonic environment and how space can be (and is) aurally sculpted and re-sculpted anew. John Cage’s famous (or infamous) 4’ 33” is perhaps one of the best known examples of such work, bringing to individual consciousness the immediacy of the physical and sonic environments which constantly envelops us and to which we tend not to pay a lot of attention unless they annoy us. And Canadian composer R. Murray Schaffer has devoted much of his career to exploring and writing about what he terms the “soundscape,” and the damage that is done by aural pollution.

So it’s of course not surprise at all that visual artists have also long been interested in the shape of our acoustic environments. Amongst them would be Canadian artist Gordon Monahan (www.gordonmonahan.com).

Gordon Monahan, Piano on Frozen Lake Nipissing

 

Monahan began his career as a musician and composer. I first encountered his work in the mid-1980s when he won the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s National Radio Competition for Young Composers and released an album of piano compositions, Piano Mechanics. John Cage thought very highly of his work, as do a lot of others (including, well, me). But Monahan wouldn’t be confined within music composition, and began creating works that physically and sculpturally interacted with their environments. As he put it in an interview, “making reference to space and architecture has become a major theme in my work,” and the consequence of this has been numerous exhibitions of his work around the world, and in 2011 a major retrospective entitled Seeing Sound organized by nine galleries in Canada and Europe.

Of course, much of Monahan’s body of work involves performance, as with perhaps his best know piece, Speaker Swinging, originally done back to 1982 and which involves performers (the number varies) swinging working audio speakers about them which are individually lit and trace out circular paths in the air, an aurally and visually compelling work absolutely response to specific physical and aural environments, a sculpture of geometry and paths and traceries.

Gordon Monahan, Speaker Swinging

 

But what I think is the really interesting visual/aural work Monahan has created involve pianos and piano wires as primary visual elements. In an earlier blog, I wrote about Ice Follies, a site-specific exhibition held every two years out on the ice surface of Lake Nipissing, a large shallow lake in northern Ontario on the shores of which lies the city of North Bay. For the 2014 iteration of Ice Follies, Monahan installed Piano on Frozen Lake Nipissing, comprising an old upright piano, a rickety trailer installed some distance away on the snow and ice, and 200 foot-long piano wires connecting the two. In the trailer, recordings are transmitted along the wires courtesy small motors attached to each (piano works by Chopin and Henry Cowell that Monahan has “re-composed,” as he puts it), but the wires also respond to the immediate circumstances of their specific environment, acting as a kind of Aeolian harp, singing in the winds that scour the lake surface. Monahan reshapes this place, giving us to hear it anew, to see it as something other than background, as something other than Nature-as-wallpaper. He gives it another meaning, visually and aurally, displacing the status quo.

Gordon Monahan, A Piano Listening to Itself – Chopin Chord

 

This general structure – piano and extended piano wires – comprises several other incarnations of this piece: in A Piano Listening to Itself – Brno Variation done in the Czech Republic in 2013; and originally in A Piano Listening to Itself – Chopin Chord, installed in the square of the Royal Castle in Warsaw in 2010, the wires connecting the piano in the square below to the top of the castle’s tower. In each instance, the wires responded to both pre-recorded music assembled by Monahan, as well as to the specifics of the physical environment in which they are located. The works are utterly responsive to site.

The point is that by sonically redefining a place, it can be re-seen, re-configured, transfigured, even. Its physicality is altered, seen as something other. Gordon Monahan is good at aesthetically displacing the status quo that accretes around a place by letting us see its sounds

Very good, in fact.

By Gil McElroy

Paula Murray, Abandoned Shell

Medium specificity again.

It’s something that can be hard to get away from for some artists. Trueness to materials can exert a very strong aesthetic pull, and ceramics is one field in which medium specificity has had a truly overwhelming grip on things. Perhaps too overwhelming a grip.

I’m not saying that disparagingly, or as a way of dismissing such an approach (though I do think the notion that medium specificity is virtually sacrosanct isn’t useful). Indeed, it has, of course, led to remarkable work, and the enquiry into clay’s limitations is hardly near any sort of end as ceramists continue to push boundaries.

Well, there are boundaries, and then there are boundaries. Step beyond the insistence (or need, or tradition, or whatever you might want to call it) of medium specificity and other things can happen.

Enter Paula Murray (www.paulamurray.ca). She’s a Canadian sculptor working in the realm of ceramics who has a background in the sciences. She studied ceramics at the renowned Sheridan College in Toronto, and did a number of residencies at the equally renowned Banff Centre in the Canadian Rocky Mountains.

Paula Murray, Sanctuary #14

 

This is an artist who knows her way around clay, and who has chosen to push its boundaries in an unconventional way. By that I mean she’s no purist – there is no absolution in her work that locks it within the constraints of her chosen medium. Instead, she’s invested it with ideas and approaches and material from the outside. Call it a kind of renewal, if you will, but know that Paula Murray is no traditionalist.

What’s she’s done is combined the strengths of clay with a non-natural material: Murray mixes porcelain and fiberglass. Heresy, no doubt, to some. But think about it. Porcelain gave ceramists the ability to make artefacts – usually vessels – that were stronger and thinner than earthenware and stoneware. Porcelain lent the natural unwieldiness of clay and elegance and lightness it had hitherto been denied.  So, how about mixing in an industrial product like fiberglass and see where it goes?

Why not? Heretics take things in interesting directions, and that is exactly what Murray has done with her work. By literally mixing things up, introducing a kind of contamination into the purity of clay, she’s taken the medium in sculptural directions it otherwise would – and could – never have gone.

Paula Murray, All that Remains (detail)

 

See, the last big revolution in ceramics would have been porcelain, and really, there’s nothing new about it. But it revolutionized the field, allowing the making of artifacts that were stronger, lighter, thinner than its country cousins earthenware and stoneware. Murray, then, is continuing on in that vein to create sculptural objects otherwise unattainable via the current norms and conventions of clay.

Here’s something of an analogy to work with: think of cinnamon sticks, those thin shells of cinnamon bark curled around one another. Fragile things.

Murray’s wall-mounted work Hollow Reeds (2012) aesthetically articulate an iteration of this sculptural shape, thin porcelain forms – reeds – twisted around themselves (unlike the cinnamon analogy, which rather falls apart at this point), impossibly thin by ceramic standards, and yet…here they be, rising and falling in their showing, gathered together as a meaningful whole upon a gallery wall.

Sanctuary 14 (also 2012) perhaps better represents my cinnamon analogy. It comprises a series of vertical porcelain tubes – small diameter, and each of which is segmented – arranged on a narrow shelf. They’re not precisely straight, not imitative of the manufactured but rather of the natural world. Like the trunks of trees (can’t seem to let go of that cinnamon analogy, can I?), slightly bent, imperfect…meaningful and lovely, and way beyond what unadulterated clay can do.

Paula Murray, Abandoned Shell #2

 

And the thing is, natural forms predominate in Murray’s work. And why not? The pliancy of her heretical porcelain allows her to push towards the organic in interesting and beautiful ways. Like in her Abandoned Shell series (2008), and particularly #2 of the series. Horizontally exhibited, it’s like a peeling of a thing, curled up and split from, oh I don’t know, being dried out maybe, an oblong form, a distended oval tapered towards each end. Something creaturely might once have lived here. Its surface has the classical crackle of some ceramic glazes, but here it goes beyond the superficial and is part and parcel of a decaying form. The crackle permeates through the porcelain. It’s fracture we are confronted with, the achingly elegant beauty of decay and entropy. Something creaturely may have indeed lived here once, and shed this shell, this carapace, as it grew. But didn’t. Murray made this, capturing and expressing a narrative in its delicate shape.

Paula Murray, Hollow Reeds

 

And she made All That Remains (2005). More overtly a shell-like thing (it has a resemblance to the fascinating geometry of the shell of the Nautilus), it’s the porcelain remnants of a coiled form that’s been broken asunder, left behind. More decay, more aesthetic residue of entropy, but thereby evidence of a creation of something akin to a container that is a home.

And that’s where Paula Murray’s sculpture is important. To work with clay is to inevitably be faced with the imperatives and aesthetics of the container, the vessel. Well, Murray’s work is that of the vessel, but certainly not the caricaturish utile thing we tend to assume and expect. Murray tells us of the aftermath of the vessel, of the container that no longer contains and which has thereby transcended the narrow limitations of form and function and become the teller of narrative tales.

By Gil McElroy

Yukon Street

That single word evokes and suggests and even yearns. Stripped down and devoid of any patina of emotion, it of course points to something physical, tangible – something real, something constructed, functional, useful. That might be fine and well for the Gods who have risen above human feeling, but for the rest of us mere mortals it is a word fraught with sensation at the emotional and psychological levels. It’s a word of intimacy, of family and love. Add “less” to it, and all those things are devastatingly ripped away.

There are of course myriad artists who have explored the notion of home; the French writer Gaston Bachelard’s groundbreaking book The Poetics of Space became a guide for many of them, exploring the emotional spaces that grow up within the physical spaces and structures that are our homes. Among those artists are those literally excising aspects of those structures, stripping away portions of physical spaces so that emotional spaces might resonate more loudly within the context of the aesthetic

The most famous of that small group was probably the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark who, in the 1970s, did a series of extraordinary works in which he cut away sections of buildings scheduled for demolition. A work in Paris in which he cut through two townhouses, and a piece in which he did the same with a townhouse in Chicago are among his most famous works. They’re dramatic works, bold and intrusive – an aesthetic of vivid and brutal negation. Matta Clark died shortly after creating these pieces, but his influence has remained strong.

Trenton Place

 

And that brings me, at long last, to the contemporary Canadian artist Emily Neufeld (www.emilyneufeld.com). She’s a Vancouver-based sculptor who studied at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in that city, and much of her work embraces (though is in no way limited by) an aesthetic of negation.

Like a lot of cities, Vancouver is undergoing enormous and radical transition as older homes are sold, demolished, and newer (usually much larger) homes put in their place. Tastes have changed, often not for the better. But between the old and the new there exists a space of interlude, a pause after the sale and before the demolition, and that’s where Neufeld comes in. Like Matta-Clark, Neufeld secures permission to enter these abandoned and doomed spaces, and create something fleeting. Often it’s a negation she literally carves out of the existent space, but not always.

Horseshoe Bay

 

Where Matta-Clark’s interventions were brutal (in one work, he bisected a entire house from roof to foundation) and of that kind of epic, even heroic scale that seemed rooted in the male machismo all too typical of his era, Neufeld’s are more subtle and in many instances involve additions and alternations to existent structures rather than aesthetically loud and showy excisions from them. Like Matta-Clark before, however, Neufeld’s work exists in documentary form, as secondary photographic imagery of the works which virtually no one would have ever had the opportunity to take in first-hand. Pieces are titled after the locations of the works. Like Yukon Street. In one image Neufeld shows us the unfolding/revelation of a wall interior, carefully having removed a section of plaster to reveal the underlying lath structure (a clue as to the period in which the home had been built) and in so doing shaping an elegant and sinuous wave form from end to end. In the kitchen of the home, it’s not a subtraction that’s occured but rather an addition: the double sinks are containers not for water or dirty dishes but instead the greenery of grass. The kitchen of Trenton Place has a neat rectangle cut through the floor and joists directly in front of the sink, framed by lines extending from the corners of the cleavage up to the kitchen walls like rays of, oh I dunno, darkness, of non-light. The excision here becomes something more than merely just a negation of the physical space, something more than a black hole absorbing our attention. And in Grand Boulevard, large swaths of the house’s wall-to-wall carpeting have been cut away to reveal the turquoise underlay like waterways gently coiling around marooned, uninhabited islands of carpet.

Grand Boulevard

 

Where Matta-Clarks excisions were in part about the drama of the large scale (and make no mistake about it, they were very very good), Neufeld’s are more rooted in a human scale. Horseshoe Bay is another wall reveal, but this time not to the lath beneath plaster, to a substratum, but instead to transparency. The geometry of a deep vee notch cut through existent drywall panels of the home’s construction shows the otherwise hidden armature of wood on which the wall depends, and aspects of the home’s wiring and heating upon which the function of the home depends. But it also shows through to the room beyond. There is revelation proffered, here, a contextualized look upon the domestic realm, for sure, but there is more. Much more. There’s a breaking of barriers, a rupture in the membranes of the home’s myriad metaphors.

In his Poetics of Space, Bachelard wrote that “it is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.” Neufeld’s work is deeply committed to the notion that “home,” however we imagine it, is ultimately transitory, ever-changing and shifting in keeping with the ever-changing nature of our Self. These homes within which she creates only barely exist in these, her images, as places on the very cusp of radical transition. Impermanent.

And Emily Neufeld lets us see right through them.

By Gil McElroy

Marlene, Creates, excerpt from Larch, Spruce, Fire, Birch, Hand

I spend a lot of time at a nearby beach on Lake Ontario, drawn by wind and wave, and especially by the rocky shingle of the shoreline. More often than not, I begin re-arranging stones, sometimes walking the beach’s length (about a half-mile or so) placing larger stone markers amidst the smaller stuff at the very edge of the surf.

And I do this because of Marlene Creates (www.marlenecreates.ca). She’s a Canadian artist who has exhibited throughout Canada, the United States, Europe, and China and who is currently the subject of a career retrospective that will tour Canada through 2019 co-organized by the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick and the Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax. Much of her practice is photo-based, and she’s made a career-long enquiry into our experience of place, and how we reshape it with and in memory. Since 1985 she’s been based in Newfoundland, one of the country’s two island provinces. The other (Prince Edward Island) is all mud, no stone. Newfoundland, on the other hand, is all rock.

And it was rocks that brought me to a first-hand encounter with her work. In the mid-1980s, I met her as she was preparing to install a site-specific work along the shoreline of Lake Nipissing, a large, shallow body of water a couple of hundred miles north of Toronto. She was having an exhibition in the lakeside city of North Bay at artist-run centre, and was using the nearby shoreline as a place to make something new. She installed a series of carefully selected rocks in a pattern that echoed overlapping waves washing up onto the shore at one very particular place.

Marlene Creates, Shoreline, England, 1980

 

It was temporary, of course. The sands would shift, the water would inevitably flow and wash upon the shore in a slightly different direction, someone would probably move some of the rocks just because they could. Entropy would inevitably show up in varied, and sometimes entirely unexpected, ways.

All as of course it should be. I watched over Creates’s work for some time after the exhibition, making drawings of the changes as they accrued, until I moved away from that place and went to another.

I’m trying to be vaguely poetic here for a reason: Creates’s work is intensely poetic, all because of something akin to the Hippocratic Oath. You know, that oath sworn by doctors, which is remembered by most of us for the words “first, do no harm.”

It’s actually not there in that form, but the import of those words certainly is. And Marlene Creates took that into the aesthetic arena to create site-specific works that inflicted no lasting change on site.  So for the series Paper, Stone and Water (1979-1985) she employed a roll of paper within a landscape, draping the wet stuff across seaside stones. Or wove it through the standing stones of a Neolithic burial chamber in Wales.  And in one of my favourite of her earlier works, she carried seven stones from the ocean shore to the top of a headland in Newfoundland and photographed them there.

Doing no harm.

Marlene Creates, Stones Carried from the Shore to the Top of a Headland, Newfoundland, 1982

 

Creates’s work is, in many respect, the antithesis to the invasive machismo of much of what we celebrate as land art, or earth art, or whatever we call it. Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Amarillo Ramp required massive amounts of machinery to enact, wreaked change upon their landscape (at least with Spiral Jetty and a permanent work done in the Netherlands, Smithson was working in degraded environments already deeply scarred by industry and technology). And another of the pantheon, Michael Heizer dug monumental gashes into the sides of a mesa in the American southwest for his Double Negative. As much as I love these works (and I truly do), their aesthetic is that of a kind of despoilment, a brutal subsuming of Nature to the imperatives of Art, in many ways replicating at another, more artistic level what we’ve always done to our home planet in the name of politics, money, what have you. And I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that.

But I do know that I come back, time and again, to Creates, to an aesthetic approach to the natural world – to place – as something other than a site of exploitation of any sort (even emotional).  To place as a site of integrity and wholeness. I come back to a work like, say, her photographic series Sleeping Places, Newfoundland (1982), a sequence of 25 b& images of sites where she slept in the open, all places of matted, trampled grasses and a disorder of the most temporary sort. It’s an intensely personal work, intensely sculptural, built upon the aesthetic imperative of the human body and its absence. Or I come back to Fire and Water, Nova Scotia (1985), a gallery installation of wood charred and blackened, and wood found at the water’s edge, softened by long encounter with the elements.

Marlene Creates, excerpt from Sleeping Places, Newfoundland, 1982

 

I’m talking, obviously, of older pieces here. Creates continues her ongoing exploration of place and memory, focussing increasingly on her own particulars: the six acres of forest she owns where she lives in Newfoundland. Larch, Spruce, Fir, Birch, Hand, Blast Hole Pond Road, Newfoundland is a photo-based work begun in 2007 and still on-going. Creates makes the particulars of place intensely personal, photographing her hand in the intimate gesture of touching the trunks of a number of trees. We might see a forest, but Creates sees the trees, individual and unique.

This is relationship, and in relationship, first we do no harm.

By Gil McElroy

Allyson Mitchell, Ladies Sasquatch

Okay, so I start, at the titular level, with a cosmological reference: the idea of the missing mass in the universe, that those all-important galaxies strewn throughout the cosmos (and within one of which we exist) don’t seem to contain enough mass to account for galactic rotation. Herein was born the idea of “dark matter.”

I choose it as a metaphor, as a way into writing about the work of Canadian sculptor Allyson Mitchell (www.allysonmitchell.com). Toronto-based, she teaches at York University there, the same institution where she obtained her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. She’s shown her work widely (and I’m really doing her a disservice by calling her a sculptor, for her work is truly inter-disciplinary and encompasses performance, film, and video) across North America and Europe. It’s an extensive body of work she’s produced, and I want to focus on but a small slice of it, an installational work, shown in solo exhibitions in Canada and the United States, entitled Ladies Sasquatch.

In a narrow and superficial way, the title pretty much explains it all: the installation largely comprises six enormous sculptural figures (the titular sasquatches, all of them female – as Mitchell describes them, “lesbian feminist sasquatches”), with a greater number of comparatively tiny figurative works. Images of the installation tend not to do Ladies Sasquatch any justice, for the figures are all grouped and arranged around a central fire in various poses, and the subdued gallery lighting, the deep shadows cast, lend great visual drama to the scene.

Allyson Mitchell, Ladies Sasquatch

 

There is meeting occurring, here, and not merely a gathering. There are narratives in place, stories these creatures tell.  Mitchell has written that “Ladies Sasquatch is meant to work as a point of departure for thinking about decolonized, queer, politicized bodies, sexuality and communities,” and that the work is based on such diverse sources as Playboy magazine photographic images from the 1970s, and the bodies of actual living lesbian activists.

All critically important, all meaningful at levels that extend well beyond the aesthetic. And that’s the importance of Mitchell’s sculptural work: it isn’t in a tight, self-referential aesthetic orbit that excludes or minimizes engagement with the real world. Her sasquatches constructed of textiles, appliqué, and even actual taxidermic supplies such as would be typically used in the stuffing and mounting of trophy fish and game – as well the tiny woodland critters that accompany them, some in the most literal way as they roam across individual bodies – are visually expressive constructs, to be sure, “magnifications,” meaningful caricatures, etc. They are truly individuals. And in being so, they carry a hefty load of potential meaning at social, political, and even scientific levels.

No, I’m not a believer in the sasquatch myth (though I will hasten to add that neither am I a believer in the notion that somehow the natural sciences have pretty much gotten a complete grasp of the total extent of what comprises the creaturely world). Rather, I want to suggest that Allyson Mitchell’s sculptural work – intentionally or not – proffers an engagement with metaphors based on large cosmological ideas related to the concepts of dark matter and the universe’s missing mass – oh, and the holographic universe too.

Allyson Mitchell, Ladies Sasquatch

 

Okay, that sounds a bit weighty, I’ll admit, but bear with me if you can. I mentioned missing mass at the beginning of this blog, and so I’ll come back to it first, the idea that things at a cosmological level aren’t quite what they might initially appear, and that there appears to be stuff missing. And maybe that “stuff” is stuff we cannot see – dark matter.

So Ladies Sasquatch. There’s a working metaphor available, here. At the near level, it suggests that there is of course more to Mitchell’s sculptural creatures than meets the eye. They overtly seem threatening – they are enormous, and they do rather loom – but time spent with them suggests that there is so much more to them than merely that exterior shell of visual identity. Alas, we tend to assign so much to looks, to appearances, that we miss the “dark matter,” the missing mass, of creaturely identity.

But it goes much deeper than this, for every work of art is essentially unknowable in its entirety, isn’t it? Layers of meaning and interpretation accrete around an aesthetic object, sometimes to be wiped away, but always new layers, new meanings inevitably gather. We can consider only the overtness of Mitchell’s sasquatchs – the materials of their making, the frankness of their sexuality evident in their poses, the social interactions of their togetherness – but we can, simultaneously, engage them at even more intense levels for which the aesthetic provides a gateway, dig into the dark matter of this microcosmic universe. It’s there for us to do. It’s available.

Allyson Mitchell, Ladies Sasquatch

 

And then there’s the other metaphor that I’ve pilfered from cosomology, that of the holographic principle, which at one level utterly upends my previous argument. Born of the unproven postulations of string theory, it suggests that the information of a volumetric space can be completely described within the constraints of a two-dimensional surface. I know, I know – I’m really pushing, here. But I’m trying to suggest alternative paths for fully engaging with a hugely complex work like Ladies Sasquatch. The aesthetic, social, cultural, and political information is pretty much all there, essentially inscribed or encoded within the two-dimensional surface that encompasses each sculptural work; mass plays perhaps no more than a literally supportive role for these engaging creatures, but ultimately isn’t it illusional, just there to carry the weight of surface meaning? Despite everything I’ve previously said, we do after all interpret and find meaning in appearance, don’t we? We create depth and dimension from the skin of surfaces. And Mitchell’s are exquisite surfaces, complex and multi-faceted, rich and fecund with possibilities.

Ladies Sasquatch can exist as something monstrous in our thinking, in our imagination, or it can more as easily take the rich and fecund shape of what Allyson Mitchell herself called “a kind of queer utopian dream world.”

We can ponder long upon its dark matters.

By Gil McElroy

Cedric Ginart, Molecular, 2013

Think of glass in a sculptural context and, well, it’s likely that the first (if not only) artist who comes to mind is Dale Chihuly.

Glass, it seems, has a bit of a perception problem. Either it’s showy sculptural installation of the Chihuly sort, or it’s the functional stuff of everyday, domestic use (within which I include the showier utilitarian stuff). Glass is a bit either/or that way, despite the best efforts of contemporary artists seeking to expand its presence, to bridge the fecund middle ground between the utile at one end of the spectrum and the ornamental at the other. So what’s an artist to do?

Well, here’s some work by contemporary Canadian artist Cédric Ginart. I first encountered him several years ago in a solo exhibition at the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery in Waterloo, Ontario, perhaps the premiere public gallery in Canada showing contemporary work in these two undervalued mediums. Ginart is a French-trained scientific glassblower, an expert in creating one-of-a-kind glass instruments designed for use in narrow, highly specific and specialized scientific and industrial endeavours. His creative work, outside of the laboratory, parallels the ultra-utilitarian nature of these instruments, and (not surprisingly) is rooted in it. One realm feeds the other, and the consequences tend to be work of meaning and substance.

Cedric Ginart, Distilloscope (detail)

Distilloscope speaks of and to this. It takes the sculptural form of a small, refracting telescope – the kind with a long tube through which one looks from an end – mounted on a simple wooden tripod. Resemblance is established through form, and then upended, subverted, for this telescope is not a device for seeing through, but one for looking at, for being regarded – for being a source of aesthetic marvel and thought. And, well, it actually really is for “seeing through,” for it is of course entirely transparent, a transcription of a form into the “throughness” that glass can proffer. Our Platonic ideal of this telescope would be comprised of an interior series of lenses aligned within a darkened tube so as to enable a seeing via this device. Ginart’s is no such thing. In places of the disks of lenses there are instead spheres and a long coil – both of glass. We’re dealing with an entirely different level of seeing, here.

And then there’s the title.  And there’s the glass coil. Ginart of course is referencing the process of distillation as well – you know, the creation of alcohol – and that leads me to two notions: that Ginart may be making reference to cosmological issues (specifically, molecular clouds of alcohol that have been reportedly seen drifting about in our universe), or possibly to something much more mundane (ie. that alcohol has been humankind’s primary means of altering perception, something the telescope did much later in the course of human evolution and in a much more meaningful way).

And the transparency of glass. Ginart’s is a telescope as container, as a vessel. The astronomical telescope is a means to an end, an artefact through which something (light) passes through and is magnified, but Ginart’s is a kind of holder. Phenomena do no pass through relatively unscathed to be observed at the far end with Distilloscope. Rather, they emanate from it.

Cedric Ginart, Equilibre, 2012

 

I’ve spent so much time talking about one work because I think it has some importance, especially in relation to what we conventionally expect of glass in terms of aesthetic experience. Ginart points it elsewhere, inextricably linking it back to science and industry, where it has always had an important place. His isn’t glass as a modernist experience, entire unto itself. His is glass as part of a fabric larger than the merely aesthetic.

Équilibre plays with many of the same generative conventions and tensions. We encounter another recognizable artefact, one which we more readily and commonly know of as our everyday experience with glass: the drinking glass. Well, more accurately, a variety of the sort of stemmed glasses we typically associate with the drinking of wine or even some spirits, that utensil evocative of some degree of elegance, of a slight bump or rise in the mundane everyday curve of the domestic realm.

And Ginart renders it all into something of a carnival, glasses enmeshed in the sculptural arc as a kind of frozen tumble, end over end, each linked to the other, falling. Équilibre is a kind of aesthetic apprehension of impending chaos, of a fall from grace of a number of elegant vessels that can only resolve in the solution of shards.

Cedric Ginart, Equilibre, 2012

In a sense, isn’t this our possibly our primary relationship with glass, a substance we take for granted and give little heed to in its own right until we must deal with it as a broken entity, all dangerous bits and pieces that might do us some degree of harm?

And yet Équilibre does none of this. It is whole and entire, shardless. It’s all about expectation, what we bring to the piece based on past experience, and we bring it to an elegant tumble of transparency, all of which is stopped dead to allow us to see phenomena differently, as something “other”.

Glass can transcend the utile/ornamental duality that seems to tenaciously grip the medium. Cédric Ginart’s is one possible approach.

Gil McElroy

Evan Penny, Self Portrait after Gericault’s Fragments Anatomiques, 2017, pigmented silicon, fabric, resin, 57 x 78 x 18 in.

When last we spoke about what I’ve been calling “figuration ” – the aesthetic drive towards representing the living, breathing organisms that populate this here planet (even if only in our fevered imaginations – I’d introduced work that tended towards the smaller scale, towards sculptures that referenced figurines, addressing issues raised by such mass-produced items of collectible nostalgia, like Hummel or Royal Doulton figurines, or the even smaller stuff that once came with the tea bags we purchased.

Evan Penny, Ali, 1984, 133 cm. height, resin, pigment, hair

 

But of course we can and do go beyond the necessary reductions entailed by the figurine, its relationship to domestic clay ware and the limitations of the kiln, and move up and out. So to the realm of 1:1 and beyond, and to two sculptors who approach the human body in very different ways.

Meet Kathy Venter and Evan Penny, both Canadian artists. Venter (www.kathyventer.com) is South African-born, having emigrated here in 1989. She works with clay, building up full-scale sculptures by hand (no molds here), shaping work – much of it installational in nature – that she’s exhibited in Canada, the US, Europe, and Africa. I first encountered it at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto several years ago, the exhibition Life comprising several installations of life-size sculptures and busts of women, as well as architectural elements – Greek columns – also made of clay.

Venter’s work is figurative, but not in a hyper-vigilant, obsessive sort of way, not held hostage by the imperative of absolute fidelity. In her work we never lose sight of the material of representation; Venter ensures we are always aware of what we see, aware of what makes the made, and what we see of these made things of hers are representations in mud. The alternative story of biblical Genesis is of some use, here, the one in which Adam has not an Eve (not yet; she comes later in this version), but rather a Lilith, created of the same proverbial dust, the same mud, as her equal (unlike Eve). But she has some very different ideas of how things work, refuses to subsume herself to Adam, and leaves.

Kathy Venter, Coup d’Oeil Series 3, polychromed ceramic

 

In a sense she returns in Ventner’s Coup d’Oeil Series, full-size clay figures of women (six in all) standing before us on the gallery floor, unplinthed. It’s not possible to forget that these are representations of truly living beings, of individuals, real people, each a unique creation utterly unlike any other; there is no refuge, in Venter’s work, in the intellectual distancing made possible via abstraction. And it’s not possible to forget that these are figures confronting us as equals – in physical scale, yes, but also emotionally and mentally. There’s no emptiness in Venter’s work, no aesthetic distance being dictated and determined. We come up against mud, but mud made human and intimate.

There’s more. Ventner’s figures (nudes, all of them) are the color of clay. But something painterly intrudes into that scheme of things. Venter has messily applied colored slips (a watery solution of clay) to the figures. They seem contaminated, brutalized, even. It’s a little bit shocking, actually. But a closer look reveals brushstrokes, and while the slip indeed dribbles down the figures, there is real intention here beyond intrusion. The slip is suggestive, perhaps of clothing, of adorning ornament and decoration. And it is a reminder, too, that the classic Greek sculptural figures we so admire and even revere were often painted, and apparently in somewhat garish colors. Austere monochrome may satisfy the modernist in us, but it’s not necessarily historically correct. And in any event. Kathy Venter work is not austerely cool and distant. It is absolutely present, front and center, and conceptually and emotionally impacting.

Evan Penny, Self Portrait after Gericault’s Fragments Anatomiques, 2017, pigmented silicon, fabric, resin, 57 x 78 x 18 in.

 

Like Venter, Evan Penny (www.evanpenny.com) is also South African by birth, now a Canadian citizen. He’s been exhibiting since the late 1970s, and has shown in North America, Europe, and Asia. I’ve fibbed a bit in contextualizing him within the limitations of 1:1 scale. Penny’s work comes close, and yet at the same time doesn’t. But it does engage hyper-realism in a very big way. I first saw his work in 1984, a piece entitled Ali. It’s the figure of a nude standing woman, seemingly casually resting her weight on one foot and staring off into the distance. It was a disconcerting work to see. Critic Gary Michael Dault called it “over-real,” and that absolutely sums it up. Not quite a full-size reproduction of its subject (it was based on a clay original from which Penny pulled a mold), its absolute exactitude, its excruciating fidelity, seemed to extend far beyond representation of the real. I recall feeling a headache coming on as I looked at it, overwhelmed by what it was aesthetically proffering. Intense.

Kathy Venter, Coup d’Oeil Series 3, polychromed ceramic

 

Yeah, that would indeed be the correct word: intense. I sweep across several decades, now, from the hyper-realism of his full figures (and busts), and into much more recent work directly organized around pivotal points in art history. The intensity of Penny’s vision is so unremitting, it’s overcome, even entirely dispensed with, the aesthetic equivalent of the blood-brain barrier. I offer, by way of example, his Self Portrait after Géricault’s Fragments Anatomiques. Best know for his dramatic and controversial painting The Raft of the Medusa based on a horrific shipwreck that became a national scandal in France, Theodore Géricault also painted a series of works –studies, apparently – depicting severed limbs and heads he obtained from a morgue.

They’re gruesome, to be sure, but safely contextualized within the plane of canvas, tidily distanced from the real by oil paint and gestural brushstrokes. We’re safe here on the other side of representation. The membrane of aesthetics is whole and unbreached.

Well, it was. Working with silicone, his usual material, Penny re-invests the third dimension so as to rupture painterly illusion and give us Géricault’s source as a sculptural work. It’s harder to evade the real, here, more difficult to hide behind the aesthetic (and of course there is one) and seek respite in our usual means of distancing. The brutal and the beautiful are truly co-extensive in Self Portrait after Géricault’s Fragments Anatomiques.

It’s perhaps even more so with the more massive Hanging Torso, a work that is exactly what its title says it is. Suspended from  a metal chain, it’s a chunk of human body (hanging upside-down) as represented via silicone, and detailed with (but of course) actual bodily hair.

Evan Penny, Hanging Torso, 2017 pigmented silicone, hair, steel, 65 x 48 x 34 inches

But there’s a kind of flickering going on ere, an instability courtesy the work’s decided resemblance to a chunk of marble (but then there’s that hair, you know….), and even via a kind of sculptural abstraction that conceivably could let us off the emotional hook (so to speak).

But there’s the hair, you know, tugging us relentlessly back to the meaningful ickiness of the real, and anyway (let’s be entirely honest, here) the availability of refuge in abstraction is really only due to an urgent need we might have to distance ourselves, to kid ourselves.

Penny’s Hanging Torso is border blur, unsettled and indeterminate. It may be hanging, but it is in no way pinned down.

That’s good. That’s really good.

By Gil McElroy

Robin Peck, Crania installation view, 2015, CANADA, New York

In an earlier blog posting, I wrote about the “school” of 1:1 sculpture as it had manifested itself in the work of some faculty and students at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax. Amongst the names was one artist whose work I didn’t discuss at any great length because in some ways it stood apart, despite having been extremely influential in the goings-on at the aesthetic hothouse that was the sculpture department of the period: Robin Peck.

Peck’s taught at universities right across Canada – literally from one ocean to another, with stops in-between – and is now on the faculty of Saint Thomas University in Frederiction, New Brunswick. Needless to say, he’s exhibited his own worki extensively since the mid-1970s. (While he maintains no website, his work can be viewed on Pinterest, as well on via his Facebook page.)

I first encountered him in the mid-1990s, while he was still teaching at NSCAD and in the midst of preparing for an exhibition. During this period he was working with crystalline forms – specifically, the crystal structure that comprises the mineral gypsum, widely used in the construction industry (drywall, anyone?), in farming, and of course in the sculptural realm as the main element of Plaster of Paris and as a carving medium in its own right.

Robin Peck, Gypsum Crstal II, 1994-1996, plaster for bronze, 29 x 64 x 28 cm.

 

Peck’s work was truly influential upon the 1:1 scale sculptors (damn, he taught an awful lot of them), but simultaneously stood apart in that he wasn’t committed in the same way they were to one overriding parameter of scale. A gypsum crystal, after all, is microscopic, and Peck’s work involved scaled sculptural iterations of its form, macroscopically evoking, revealing and exploring its geometric aesthetic.

It’s a body of work that touched on and explored any number of possible aesthetic directions, while truly embracing none of them. Peck’s earlier minimalist work – like Synthetic Monolith (1989), a solid rectangular block of plaster, all clean, sharp right-angles rigorously representative of the architectural volume of the exhibition venue in which it was shown – gave way to another kind of representation, and an encounter with one aspect of nature’s underlying geometry. These are the bones of the world that Peck made manifest in his gypsum sculpture, expressions of what lay beneath the meat of appearance.

Okay, so maybe I’m laboring my metaphor. I’m trying to do two things, here: invoke the importance of Peck’s evolving work, and lead up to what he’s currently sculpturally engaged with and in. Bones and meat are, I think, metaphorically apt images, because they can lead up to the head. I mean that literally, for the body of work in which Peck is currently engaged comes under the collective title of Crania. 

Sculpture (Crania #61) Upper section, circumferential materials: Sandstone, plaster, aluminum, steels, plaster and burlap, porcelain clay, steel, plaster…Lower section, non-circumferential materials: quartz, steel, Plexiglas, rubber, steel, hydrocal, plaster… …shellac and carnauba wax. 14 x 15 x 13 in. 55 lb.

 

We’re into a kind of minimalism again, but one that is undermined by a form of aesthetic subliminalism (stay with me, here). “Crania” of course pluralistically denotes skulls, and that’s what these sculptures are.

Well, sort of. Peck’s are variable shapes, mostly closest to half-domes, really (though some extend upwards as something vaguely expressive of perhaps a head atop a spine). Mark-making is powerfully evident on their surface; Peck’s crania are not blandly neutral and smooth sculptural domes, but unique and individual pieces, scored, incised, rough and uneven – rather like the human equivalent, perhaps?

We still come up short with that yardstick I’ve laid down, however; many of Peck’s crania (and they are sequentially numbered, coming in at over 100 so far) have seemingly little relationship with and to human anatomy. Crania 30 (2015), for instance, is rather more bluntly conical than anything else, its base flared out in a decidedly un-skull-like way, more mountainous than anatomical, really.

Crania 30, 2015, materials circumferential from dual centers:
a. petrified dinosaur bone, oil-based clay, aluminum…
b. cork, aluminum, iron…plaster, reactive bronze paint, patina, carnauba wax. Size: 7.5 x 6 x 9 in. Weight: 14 lb. Signature on bottom. Collection: James Carl, Toronto, Canada (photo: James Carl)

 

But we’re still at the level of appearance, here, and so much more is in aesthetic play. Substance matters – matter matters – not necessarily in opposition to form, but undercutting any tendency to see and treat these pieces at a strictly superficial level. Interiority is central; Peck’s crania contain. Crania 21 (2014-14), for example, is an early piece from the series (and one less visually comparative to a skull). Peck description of the piece goes thusly:“materials circumferential from the center: birch wood, glass and plaster, aluminum, hydrocal, shellac, wax.” That’s the work’s layered insides, the meat inside a proverbial shell. Matter.

The unseen within clearly factors into a consideration of the piece, and while it makes no obvious visual reference to the human skull, the aspect and importance and meaningfulness of the work as a container most certainly links it indelibly to that which the human skull harbours: the brain.

The aforementioned Crania 20 has two material cores, likening, of course, to our brain’s twin hemispheres (or our bicamerality, if you prefer), based upon a petrified dinosaur bone on the one hand, and a soft piece of cork on the other. And Crania 61 (2016), a fairly massive fifty pounds of heft, is a piece that, at its center, is comprised of rock (sandstone, to be more specific) surmounted by layers of plaster, aluminum, steel burlap, clay, more steel and plaster, the exterior surface finally finished with a burnishing of shellac. (And that’s just the uppermost aspect of the piece, for its lower, base-like aspect – a brain stem? – independently comprises layers of plaster, steel, rubber, and Plexiglas wrapped around a heart of quartz.)

So here amidst Robin Peck’s crania, we are at both an expression of and response to the central mystery of the human condition – a consideration of mind, if you will, the “heads of the town up to the aether” I suggested back at the start (a title that I shamelessly borrowed from the late great poet Jack Spicer) – and a kind of aesthetic negation of the serene, unaffected flatness that is the hallmark of the minimalism that Peck came out of.

And I’ll posit this wild suggestion: maybe, just maybe, we’re even confronting a response to the expressive passion of, say, a Rodin. Peck’s Crania 102 (2017), a work in progress, comprises a sculptural form with two distinct lobes conjoined into a whole. Rodin’s The Kiss comes immediately to mind, the heads of the lovers, their twoness cohering as one, Rodin’s representation and figuration subsumed and re-configured by Peck, sculptural abstraction wrought as a kind of gesture. Rodin wrestled his intertwined figures from marble, Peck has inserted a piece of basalt – volcanic rock – as the beating heart of his work.

Rodin? Really? Well, I dunno, maybe. A bit of a stretch, perhaps, but these things happen when you think of matter not as inert but as a process, and you’re trying to match the speed of sculpture.

Gil McElroy

Janet Macpherson, Migration

I don’t have knick-knacks, but I do have a dog.

Not a live one, but a small ceramic representation of a reclining German Shepherd. It has a chipped ear. And it was made in West Germany, which dates it, and me as well, for it’s something that I’ve owned most of my life.

I have no idea how it came my way, but likely via my parents. I don’t recall having acquired it, but it amazingly it has somehow been along for the ride. I’m surprised that it’s survived relatively whole through the decades, save for the missing chunk of ear. Now it sits safely ensconced on a high shelf, overlooking my living room. There’s nothing remotely aesthetically pleasing about it; it’s only meaning for me is nostalgic in nature, evocative I suppose of a lost or fading connection to my family’s past.

Which brings me to those small ceramic figurines that were once pretty commonplace because they came free in boxes of teabags. Lots of people used to save them, even collect them, and for a short while they had a small place in my family’s life. As a kid I would occasionally play with them, and arrange them into tableaux, like toy soldiers. I would provide them a narrative meaning, however temporary. Their much more “high-brow” contemporaries were and are collectible ceramic figurines, typically depicting 18th century days of yore. Maybe one wouldn’t arrange them on a battlefield (and actually, I’ll get to that) because as collectibles they would tend to spend their time safely tucked away in a cabinet. But they were intended to be dreamed upon – they were (and are) engines of nostalgia.

Janet Macpherson, Migration (detail)

 

It’s all stuff we humans do, and do very well – indulge in nostalgia, I mean, build stories and significations around the things in our lives. And of course all of this is, too, part and parcel of the making of art, and so much of it, then, ends up caught up in an aesthetic of representation solely as a means of looking backwards.

But what about, say, looking sideways?

That brings me, at last, to my subject: some contemporary work in figurative ceramics, primarily as it has occurred in Canada of late. I think first of the British artist Claire Twomey (www.clairetwomey.com), and Piece by Piece, the massive sculptural ceramic installation she did at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto in 2014. Working with the gallery’s permanent collection of historical and contemporary ceramic works, Twomey chose three 18th century porcelain figurines from which she created moulds to produce over 2000 unglazed, undecorated copies of the originals. These were arrayed on and across the gallery floor, a vast expanse of teeming figures trapped within a large rectangle and seemingly engaged in myriad dynamic scenarios at times resembling war-like marches and skirmishes (as well as their aftermath: discomforting piles of figurines like accumulated bodies), and even what appear to be attempts to scale the artist’s working space, a table at one end of the room, where Twomey would occasionally cast new pieces. At the far end of all of this mayhem, the figurine originals coolly overlooked the scene from on high, separate and disengaged in the safety of their glass-enclosed cases.

Janet MacPherson, Decoy (detail)

 

In part it was the idea of the multiple at issue, here, the inexpensive and relatively easy reproducibility clay affords, which factors enormously down in the mundane, nitty-gritty of everyday life (plates, bowls, and mugs, anyone?) and which yet still feeds into the aesthetic at various levels.

Canadian artist Shary Boyle (www.sharyboyle.com) strips all this all multiplicity and mass-production back down to naked singularities, and well into the distortions of the skewed world of surrealism. Like Twomey, Boyle has worked with the aesthetic contextualization of the collectible ceramic figurine, but done so with a decided twist. Like the work Maypole, for instance, a piece from 2010. Atop a circular ceramic base sprouts a mass of lace out of which a spiraled series of legs arise, each tipped with a golden shoe and each attached to a tiny golden chain that gather together atop a central column comprised of women’s heads – seven in all, actually. Or there’s the equally disconcerting Tumbleweed, a female figure, all lace and ruff, seemingly fallen backwards atop something like a stump, her arms and legs spread out in a typically human response to such an unfortunate mishap – but with her cleanly decapitated head nestled amidst the dress’s massed fabric between her legs.

Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.

Where Twomey works explores the situational dynamic of the proverbial masses, Boyle’s razor-like focus is on individual, isolate monstrosities of a sort, extruded from some parallel dream world and set upon pedestals as objet. Critically, both artists are drawing upon the many contexts (historical, aesthetic, economic) of the ceramic figurine, its evocative representation of some idealized bygone era and what that means for contemporary audiences who lap up the stuff (hint: nostalgia). Clay can do this. Clay has that kind of aesthetic malleability.

Janet MacPherson, Migration (installation view)

 

Which brings me, then, to Janet Macpherson (www.janetmacpherson.com).She’s a Toronto-based artist who’s just been exhibited in a solo show at the Gardiner Museum; my line of thought was originally spurred by the work of her gallery-sized installation there, A Canadian Bestiary. We’re still, of course, within the realm of clay (porcelain, actually), and while it’s an encounter with the many, it’s not an encounter with the multiple, with sameness and repetition. Macpherson’s is the many of the myriad.

For starters, Macpherson’s realm is a mix of the fantastic and the true-to-life. A small deer stands on the floor, seemingly attentive and attuned to what goes on around it. But perched on its back is a wolf, as if this were the normal thing to do. And atop it rests a small tree stump to which clings an owl with gilt-gold eyes. But: the owl is Janus-like, with two faces, and its neck is ringed with a kind of garland of small heads ranging from something mouse-like to an eagle with a golden beak to a horned goat to a horse….

See what I mean?

It’s from a larger work, Decoy, but its stands on its own as a kind of singularity. The myriad is in her Migration. There’s a long, shallow arch – a bridge, really – behind which Macpherson has installed a projection screen. But I’ll bypass that to focus on the microcosm of the sculptural arch and its denizens passing across it – migrating. These comprise small, porcelain figures, creatures of real-world expectation – goats, sheep, pigs – and creatures of the unexpected, like a two-headed bear, or a bird with a horse’s head (or even one with what seems like a human head), creatures of a nature gone awry, wearing head coverings that sometimes extend over their eyes, literally rendering the individual blind to what is going on around it. This is Boyle’s realm of horrors, but at a less surrealistic and campy, and far more pointedly political level; and it’s Twomey’s seething and confined masses, but moving with a very different, more coordinated kind of intention. Escaping, yes, less from one another and more from some unknown fate. (But you can guess, right?)

All of this – the work of Twomey, Boyle and Macpherson – is light years removed the nostalgic pull of conventional ceramic figurines, be they found in a box of tea bags or in a household curio cabinet. None of this takes up nostalgically back to some gussied-up caricature of “olden days.” Rather, its clay and “figuration” used to shine an aesthetic light off to the sides, to make us look at what lurks there.

Like Neil Young once said, the ditch is a lot more interesting than the middle of the road.

By Gil McElroy

Ilan Sandler, Double Storey, 2003.

I first encountered the work of Canadian artist Ilan Sandler in the summer of 2004. By “encountered,” I mean the experiential thing, not the second-hand meeting of a sculptor’s work – the mere seeing of it – in an image. This is an important distinction at so many levels, but for me it had to do with a meaningful encounter with scale. With big.

Sandler was showing a single work at the Toronto Sculpture Garden, a site that for decades typically programmed a couple of exhibitions a year on a tiny parcel of land (once a small parking lot) in the heart of downtown Toronto that comprised a grassed area, a walkway, and an artificial waterfall in one corner. Double Storey sat on the lawn facing the brick walkway and an adjacent building. “Facing” too is an important distinction to make, because Sandler’s piece was a chair. A really really big chair.

Ilan Sandler, Double Storey, 2003.

 

It was a lawn chair, to be more exact – or the metal frame of one, to be even more precise about it. And to be perfectly precise, it stood 18 feet high and was created from stainless steel tubing. It made for a kind of ungainly, even awkward presence in the garden, despite the pointed link between lawn chair and, well, lawn. It’s a “backyardy” sort of thing, a relic, actually, of an earlier era, one that’s been supplanted, by newer, cheaper technologies. But they were ubiquitous things, these folding metal-frame chairs, and are still kicking around in large supply. What was missing from Sandler’s outsized sculptural iteration of a cultural icon was the woven webbing that formed the (uncomfortable) back and seat of the chair. It was always the first thing to go on the real thing anyway, and so here Sandler proffers it barebones, as something skeletally akin to a sort of aesthetic fossil, looming over the street just beyond the confines of the garden. Giants may have lived here. More precisely, sat here.

Ilan Sandler, The School Chair, 2013

 

Sandler has worked with sculpturally enormous chairs since – on a beach in Denmark in 2011 (where the metal tubing was encased in see-through polycarbonate sleeves into which sand was packed, allowing tiny beach critters to worm their way within and utilize the sculpture for home, work, or, presumably, play); and with School Chair, a 2013 public art commission done just across the harbor from Halifax, Nova Scotia (where Sandler now lives) for a former school transformed into a residential building in downtown Dartmouth.

So not surprisingly, scale tends to be a major factor in Sandler’s work. So too, it turns out, is language – or text, to be yet again precise. The Book is a permanent installation Sandler undertook for a downtown public square in the city of Mississauga, Ontario, adjacent to the municipality’s library in 2016. There’s a slight bit of a kinship to sculptor Richard Serra’s work, here, for Sandler utilizes heavy-gauge sheet steel for the work’s vastly oversized pages, steel that evokes a pliancy. There are two components to the piece: the titular book itself, its pages ruffled (that material pliancy coming through) as though being turned or blown about by wind, set balancing on the bottom edge of the back cover, and the oversized single sheet of a page several feet across from and facing it, as if torn from the book and itself somehow positioned standing upright. So there’s naturally a dialogue between the two components, facing off against one another, and (as Sandler himself notes), a kind of anthropomorphized duet in progress. And being a page and a book, naturally words, letters and even symbols come into play, cut into the steel so that light passes through, shadows can be cast, meaning can be had for the cost of attention. “The steel book,” Sandler writes, “is a monument poised between eras in the evolution of thought.”

Ilan Sandler, What’s Your Name, 2011.

 

What’s Your Name? is a piece that’s five years older, a precendent work with text cut into sheet steel, marking the real beginnings of Sandler’s aesthetic engagement with language. It too was a commission, one done for a school board in Ontario and installed at the North Toronto Collegiate Institute. It’s a kind of sculptural lean-to made of two books forms set spines downward, their pages splaying out above creating a space between through which one can walk (and, of course it’s big – like The Book, it towers at over 13 feet in height), it comprises pages of the printed names of the students who attended the school over the years, as well as signatures in cursive of current (at the time of the sculpture’s creation in 2011) students and faculty.

As the scrawl of cursive writing is unique to an individual (for those still able to write that way, anyway), so too is the human fingerprint. A singular signifier, cut from a single large sheet of steel, The Left Index rises up, almost tree-like from its source, inscribing identity via an enormous and almost abstract whorl of patterns readable (and hence utile) in biometric identification. It’s part of a larger series that will, when complete, comprise Sandler’s ten fingerprints.

Ilan Sandler, The Left Index, 2012

 

This is work a long way from Double Storey; seeing it in relation to The Left Index, there’s a kind of innocence in it that is lost as we move into issues surrounding personal identity. Handwriting may have once formally denoted it, and, oh sure, fingerprint identification has been around forever, long predating the Cold War technology that gave us the folding lawn chair. But now it’s becoming socially and politically ubiquitous – as was the lawn chair to mid-20th century America, it seems, so too is biometric identification to this, our still rather brand-new 21st. Ilan Sandler would have us note the correspondences, for they are meaningful.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Precisely.

By Gil McElroy

Marc Courtemanche, Toolbox of Tools (detail), 2010, stoneware and metal, to scale

There is, as a lot of people might remember from their art history classes, the renowned story related by the Greek writer Pliny the Elder concerning the artist Zeuxis, and of the claim that his painted representation of grapes achieved such fidelity to their subject matter that the birds attempted to eat them.

It’s a famous story, but there’s more to it than just that well-known anecdote. According to Pliny, Zeuxis was in a contest with another noted artist of the period, Parrhasius, and after the bird incident Parrhasius slyly asked Zeuxis if he wouldn’t mind unveiling his painting for him. Turns out, the curtain that supposedly hid the painting was itself the painting, leading Zeuxis to famously say “I have deceived the birds, but Parrhasius has deceived Zeuxis.”

A floral chair.

 

Thus endeth the (art history) lesson. My point has to do with artistic representation, with fidelity – or in the context in which I am going to attempt to write, high fidelity – to subject. We perhaps best know it through the painterly techniques and approaches of photo- and super-realism, but it clearly goes without saying that fidelity to subject matter has long been a part of sculpture (well, duh!). But here, I want to write about the aesthetic exploration of what were (and are) interesting contemporary expressions of kinds of high fidelity within the medium.

I know it best via its manifestation at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD in Halifax. It’s an art school that’s been around since 1887; one of its founders was the writer and feminist Anna Leonowens, she of “The King and I” musical fame based on her 19th century memoir having been teacher to the children of the King of Siam (now Thailand). It was a sleepy, provincial art school until an explosion occurred in the late 1960s when artist Garry Neill Kennedy took its helm and radically upended things. NSCAD quickly became one of the most important art schools in the world, and Conceptualism found a welcome home there.

Marc Courtemanche, Tromp L’oeil Chair, 2010, solid paint, to scale; and Toolbox of Tools, 2010, stoneware and metal, to scale

 

But about the sculpture department: really interesting things went on there courtesy the faculty artists and the students they taught. NSCAD came to be an amenable home to a certain aesthetic school of thought that had much to do with scale: specifically, 1:1 scale. You know, the sculptural iteration of an object accurately proportioned. Faculty sculptors like Thierry Delva led the way. (He has no website, but some of his work can be seen here. Much of it was fascinating stuff, though not always. Sometimes such work relied far too heavily on simple dichotomous strategies – ie. if an object is made of some mundane, everyday sort of material (like, say. Styrofoam), then iterate it in a more ‘precious,’ aesthetic medium (like, say, marble). But by and large, Delva’s work in this vein was extraordinary. Working with sandstone and limestone in the mid-1990s, for example, he carved a series of box works iterating such mundane, throwaway objects as tissue and florists’s boxes, sculpturally detailed right down to the carved folds of the inexpensive cardboard originals. Another series of seemingly abstract works comprised 1:1 scale plaster casts of those strange-looking (but cleverly utile) Stryofoam inserts set within cardboard boxes used for shipping consumer electronic devices.

Working in cast bronze, sculptor Greg Forrest (a NSCAD alumnus) created unusual amalgam works, like his Stanley Cup Washing Machine, a 1:1 scale iteration of a front-loading washing machine with, well, hockey’s big prize, the Stanley Cup, perched atop it; and, oh yeah, there was the disarrayed components comprising the typically destroyed aftermath of the late Who drummer Keith Moon’s drumkit, also done in cast bronze, and exhibited appropriately scattered across a gallery floor (you can see a review of his work here. And more recently there’s Zeke Moores (another alumnus now teaching in Ontario), who also often worked with cast metal, creating faithful high fidelity iterations of , say, a cardboard beer case, or, working in aluminum, full-size sheets of plywood detailed right down to the marks and scars of use. And all, of course, 1:1 scale (see here.)

Marc Courtemanche, Turning, 2004, stoneware, to scale

 

Others deviated from this norm, pursuing alternative approaches toward the issue of scale. Like Robin Peck. (As with Delva, Peck was a NSCAD grad student who then taught there before eventually moving on. And as with Delva, he maintains no website, but some of his pieces can be seen on Pinterest.). Scale is approached from another angle in a body of work which aesthetically encompasses crystal forms, especially those of gypsum and selenite (a form of gypsum) – you know, that stuff used in construction wallboard for homes, in plaster of Paris, etc. The crystalline nature of gypsum is microscopic, but Peck expresses it at a macroscopic level, magnifying it to a sculptural scale with pieces that are aesthetically recursive – that is, made of the very stuff they signify (gypsum) – and which are remarkably modernist in their angularity and geometric abstraction. They are, in short, gorgeous.

Robin Peck, Gypsum Crystal III, 1993-1994, gypsum plaster for bronze, 38 x 72 x 40 cm.

 

Which brings me to Marc Courtemanche, a NSCAD graduate now living and working in the province of Quebec. We’re back to the world of 1:1 scale, but with something of an interesting aesthetic twist on the notion of high fidelity. See, Courtemanche largely works with clay, but we’re not talking thrown ceramic forms here. His are not vessels, but rather representational sculptural clay artefacts that are subject to, and shaped by, techniques and processes of another medium – woodworking – which has been (like ceramics) long lumped under the convenient rubric of “craft.”  See, Courtemanche is a kind of furniture-maker, working with clay to produce artefacts like tables chairs that are virtually indistinguishable from their wooden antecedents. And not only that: he constructs these objects as if they were wood, turning a chair’s clay spindles (as an example) on a lathe, and afterwards painstakingly painting them to further the visual resemblance. Very high fidelity, indeed.

Marc Courtemanche, Western Hammer, 2007, stoneware, to scale

 

This is fascinating, if ever-so-slightly troubling stuff. Courtemanche is clearly expanding our understanding of what constitutes ceramics, no question about it. Seemingly utile artefacts – tables and chairs, in this instance – that are worked as if they were made in another medium blow a big hole in all sorts of pre-conceptions and notions we might shelter. The question is: what’s on the other side? Where might Courtemanche be taking us? Where will this lead?

I have no answer for that, nor in all honesty would I proffer one if I did. I would rather stand in awed consideration of what is going on here, dealing with what Courtemanche has actually wrought and less with where it might head. I would rather gaze upon his sculptural furniture, upon the tools (clay hammers, chisels, screwdrivers, clamps, etc.), that he has also shaped to further flesh-out this fascinating aesthetically parallel universe, and reflect upon all he has undercut and challenged with this ongoing body of work.

And yet… I worry that what Courtemanche is so eloquently expressing might, like so much of that which takes high fidelity as its guiding tenet (like photo-realism), turn out to be an aesthetic cul-de-sac.

But I’m a worrier, and this is very good work. Very. So I truly hope my concerns are all for naught.

By Gil McElroy

Jennifer Angus, Black wings

Like a lot of people, I suspect, I’m fascinated and utterly engaged by that in the world which I’ll call the “neither/nor”. That is, I’m taken by things – primarily works of art, but also literature, film, theater and even the more mind-boggling realities revealed by science – that are not tidily assigned to very specific categories, things that don’t fit into convenient intellectual or aesthetic boxes, that aren’t amenable to easy labeling and categorization. I’m talking about the equivalents, I suppose, of littoral zones, those ecological areas that straddle the meeting of land and sea – areas that are really neither/nor – and which are, intererestingly, fecund with life. Nature, it seems, often prefers such areas; hedgerows in farmed areas, the edges of forests – all are extremely amenable to the creative process that is life.

In short, I like the things of the world that flicker back and forth between possible aesthetic stances (to narrow things down to the context within which I am writing), never quite holding firm or committing absolutely to one or the other.  The late Canadian poet bpNichol used the term “border blur” in talking about literary work that that embraced and championed such an absence of fixed position.

That brings me to the work of three Canadian artists, work which has taken on the border blur – the aesthetic littoral – between image and artefact: Lynne Heller, Jennifer Angus, and Panya Clark Espinal.

Lynne Heller, Three Cloths.

 

Heller’s a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist who acquired her MFA back in 2004 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before going on to get her doctorate from University College in Dublin. She currently teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) University.

Heller’s work (see www.lynneheller.com) straddles seemingly disparate realms, from graphic novels to photography to performance to installation and sculpture. Textiles often figures in it prominently, as does the aesthetic of the flicker. Three Cloths (2008) is a good example. As an installation it is multi-faceted, incorporating a video-projected element, but the piece centers around our response(s) to the employment of the kinds of patterns and imagery we’ve come to associate with textiles. It messes about with our preconceptions, in many ways. In the gallery space we encounter three long and low rectangular plinths, each overlaid with a long, rectangular canvas. They’re actually floorcloths, long used as floor coverings usually by those unable to afford rugs and carpets, and Heller has applied floral imagery upon each that are derived from seventeenth century Dutch vanitas paintings.

If we regard these as paintings, they’re of course mounted in a way we typically don’t associate with the medium, leading to some visual confusion. If we regard them as nothing more than floor coverings – as utile things – then why are they contextualized by plinths, and how do we aesthetically process the source of the imagery painted upon them? Does Heller intend for us to walk upon paintings? What takes precedence: imagery or artefact? What comes first?

Neither/nor. Three Cloths inhabits the littoral region that is border blur, shifting and flickering back and forth between aesthetic realms we’ve long cleaved apart so as not to contaminate one with the other, but never unequivocally settling into one. There is an un-ease to the work, a resistance to categorization.

Jennifer Angus, Black Wings (installation detail)

 

Like Heller, Jennifer Angus too obtained her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago after getting a BFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She now teaches at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, and mounts installations of her work around the world (see www.jenniferangus.com) .

And Angus too manipulates and draws upon the manifold that comprises the realm of textiles and the centrality of pattern to it all. Amongst recent exhibitions of her work was a gallery installation she did at the Acadia University Art Gallery in Wolfville, Nova Scotia in late 2016, but I often hearken back to her show A Terrible Beauty mounted at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto ten years ago, a somewhat labyrinthine space of small, interconnected galleries, and how she utterly transformed it. Angus works in large part with preserved insect specimens (such as might have been found in myriad cigar boxes of yore and as were avidly collected by amateurs – the great Charles Darwin amongst them – but also comprising hugely important scientific collections delineating the myriad species of our planet) which, in some instances, she has installed on gallery walls in specific patterns that often (though not always) reference those of textiles.

Now this is border blur of the highest order. Photographically (or from a distance) it is the image that tends to predominate in elements of Angus’s work, the overall pattern of or to things is visually foregrounded. We see the big picture (and I mean that literally), but closer-up, at a more intimate, personal level, we see and respond viscerally and aesthetically to the particular, to individual insect specimens – to color, yes (for the colors are intense and visually striking), but also to the incredible shapes and forms of these creatures, to what is akin to sculptural detail. Distance flattens, renders it all two-dimensional, but proximity foregrounds the artefactual, the structural dimensionality behind pattern, the aesthetic richness in her work.

Angus’s wall pieces engage the art of the flicker, inhabit the littoral space between absolute extremes, borrowing from and even pillaging both, but shunning the rigid, narrowing decisiveness of choosing one allegiance over the other. There is vitality and fecundity here, a field of possibles. Life.

Panya Clark Espinal, Lost in the Wood

 

Panya Clark Espinal is a Toronto-based artist who studied at both the Parsons School of Design in New York, and the Ontario College of Art and Design. Her sculpture has included a body of work entitled The Visitor in which she worked into existent artefacts – containers of all sort and vintages, like suitcases, jewellery chests, typewriter and wooden hat boxes, etc. – and reconfigured their interiors into brightly colored geometric compartments (a worn, antique wooden bucket, for instance, was sculpturally reworked so that its otherwise-empty interior comprised a series of circular containers evoking, of all things, the architecture of the Guggenheim Museum in New York – well, for me, anyway).

Of more pertinence here is her more recent multi-media installation Lost in the Wood. Plywood, felt, ceramics, and wool congregate together to create what almost seems to be a kind of cartoon-like image of a bunch of 2×4 pieces of wood leaning against a neutral white gallery wall and splayed across its polished wooden floor.

It’s trompe-lœil, of course, the specific gravity of a form of border blur. What Espinal has wrought is, in fact, sculptural and responsive. The piece-as-image is passive, a purely visual construct, but the sculptural Lost in the Wood is anything but. On Espinal’s website (www.panya.ca) it is described as an “immersive, participatory environment that acts as a completely unique and extraordinary meeting place, engaging with those occupying the work in a sensual and tactile way.” What appears from a very specific and narrow point of view (and I do mean that literally) as a two-dimensional image is actually robustly three-dimensional, comprising a table and seating area complete with plates, trays, cups and bowls into which one might enter and take part. It is socially and domestically and aesthetically mobile and flexible. It provides, and it bends, it yields.

Herein too is border blur.

By Gil McElroy

Dawn MacNutt, Columns, twined willow

You know how often I reference the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in my blogs? A lot, actually, in part indicative of my familiarity with and respect for the institution (having lived and worked in Halifax for a number of years, and having curated and written about a number of its faculty and graduates). But mainly it’s indicative of the importance of the place; in the late1960s artist and teacher Garry Neill Kennedy utterly transformed a staid, provincial art school into a veritable power house that came to have international prominence. Conceptualism became indelibly linked with the institution, and even departments traditionally considered realms of “craft” (like weaving and ceramics) felt, even embraced, its impact. NSCAD is long past its heyday when it was arguably considered the best art school in the world (perhaps exemplified in John Baldessari’s lithographic print I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, done at NSCAD in the early 1970s), but the reverberations of what happened half-a-century ago continue to shape its path as it struggles for survival and relevance in the 21st century.

Dawn MacNutt, Rebirth, Forgiveness, and Resolution, willow

 

That being said, this has nothing to do with that. Okay, I’m not being entirely honest. The artist I want to talk of, Nova Scotia-based sculptor and weaver Dawn MacNutt www.dawnmacnutt.com, never went to school there. She hold a BA from Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick (a small university town in the southeastern part of the province that, per capita, very likely has the highest number of artists making it their home), and her post-graduate training and education is in social work. Her textile-based sculpture is exhibited internationally, and she is represented in collections and through commissions in Canada and the US. Oh, and she’s taught in Canada and the US as well.

I evoke the presence of NSCAD in talking about this non-NSCADer (though she taught there as well for over twenty years) because it represents a way of thinking, an embracement of a new approach that transcends the norm. Which is precisely what MacNutt has been doing for decades: transcending norms, pushing at boundaries, taking weaving into the realms of the sculptural and the architectural.

Dawn MacNutt, Column, twined willow,

 

Weaving is, in so many ways, about the human body – about clothing it, keeping it warm and dry – ornamenting it, even. Arguably, the human body is the root of the field, and MacNutt uses that as the significant aesthetic factor in her sculptural work, and for that to happen she employs that form of weaving we know as basketry.

Baskets, of course, also have everything to do with the human body, extending from their making to their function and purpose. MacNutt takes that to its logical end, for a large number of her sculptural works are constructed of basket-woven wood – like her many works made of willow. Like the work Column, for example. Long, slender branches of young willow are gathered and arranged vertically in a circle, woven together at the base and at five points within the verticality of the piece to form the titular column. It’s not clean at the top; the vertical branches extend to individual heights. Column supports nothing, nor could it, in fact, support anything at all beyond itself. Touch it and it would wobble. Push it and it would fall. For all its architectural reference, Column is fragile. Gentle. Right?

Well no, it’s not. MacNutt’s column defies such stereotyping, and it has everything to do with her choice of sculptural material. Willow is pliant. It will bend, but it’s strong, hard to break, and yielding (it must be noted) does not equate to fragility. Pliancy is about toughness, endurance, bending but not giving out.

Dawn MacNutt, Timeless Figure, bronze

 

At 200 cm in height, Column is also proportionally to a human scale. It’s visually equitable, approachable, experiential. It is so with her other woven manifestations of the column form; some of them are just over 300 cm in height (and cleanly terminate at the top with capitals that mirror their bases) – tall, but not overwhelmingly so. The relation to the human body is maintained. Physically overwhelming us is not part of her aesthetic agenda. Importantly, MacNutt resists the monumental impetus.

Nowhere is this more evident than in her woven figurative sculptures, works that are powerfully akin to her columns and so reinforce the body relationship. A cluster of such pieces – Rebirth, Forgiveness, and Resolution – are visually demonstrative of the link. Like the columns, many of the figurative works are made of woven willow. And they begin as tubular forms (as in the columns), though more misshapen, uneven, “wriggly,” even. Just like a human body. Many are pinched, the woven structure tightly tapering to a point, a narrowness from which it then widens, articulating perhaps the narrowness of a waist, say, or the neck that leads to a head. Abstract, yes, but demonstrably figurative in origins and intent. And while they vary in height, MacNutt will have none of the monumental. We are not to be cowed, are not to look on (and up) in awe. We are to be given relation, to be afforded a kind of equitable communion.

Woven willow is Dawn MacNutt’s primary sculptural medium, but not her only. She’s woven with seagrass, and with copper wire, as in arguably her best know body of work, Kindred Spirits, a series which possibly cleaves most closely and overtly to the human form. She’s also worked extensively with copperwire cloth. But wood – willow – is where her heart seems to beat strongest, and it has made for an ideal leap into the processes of casting metal, as in Timeless Figure, one of a number of works she’s rendered in bronze.

Timeless, yes. But ever resistant to the monumental.

By Gil McElroy

Judith Scott, Oakville Galleries exhibition installation detail

No, this has nothing to do with Aleister Crowley and his ilk dabbling in the ridiculous “black arts,” but has, instead, everything to do with real science. “Occultations” are a part of the realm of astronomy and astrophysics, and refer to the passing of one heavenly body in front of another, the former obscuring, blocking, hiding, “occulting” the latter. There’s much science to be had in such events, bucket-loads of learning about the workings of our universe that occurs because of them. Occultations provide, and, interestingly, they can provide within other contexts as well. It’s the aesthetic that concerns me, here.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude might come to mind first when thinking of artists in some way employing occultation as a primary aesthetic factor. To wrap a thing – the bridge that is the Pont Neuf in Paris, for example, or the building that is Reichstag in Berlin – is to clearly engage in occultation, and to perhaps reveal something new about a thing that might be taken for granted, that has, over the course of time, come to be little more than proverbial wallpaper. Occultation of the sort Christo and Jeanne-Claude have pioneered can allow us to see something anew, see past the overly familiar and discern other aspects of a thing. That’s one direction.

Eric Cameron, Thanatos #91

 

There are at least a couple of Holocaust memorials in Germany that employ occultation in some sort of permanent way. Jochan and Esther Gerz’s Monument against Fascism, erected in 1986 in Hamburg, is a twelve-meter high column of aluminum and lead that was, over the course of several years, slowly lowered into the ground until it entirely disappeared and was covered over with stone; and Horst Hoheisel’s “negative-form” monument built smack in the center of City Hall Square in Kassel comprising a large, inverted pyramid that was lowered into the ground until its base was flush with its surroundings. The artefact has been disappeared, essentially. There and experientially knowable at a distance, but physically inaccessible. This is occultation in an extreme form, rendered as the aesthetic equivalent of blotting out the Sun, and thus agonizingly effective as the monuments these pieces are. (Detailed information about both projects can be found in James E. Young’s The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning published by Yale University Press in 1993.)

Installation view of Judith Scott at Oakville Galleries.

 

I bring up all of this because of an exhibition at Oakville Galleries just outside of Toronto (www.oakvillegalleries.com) running through the end of 2016 devoted to the work of the late American artist Judith Scott. Scott, who was deaf and born with Down syndrome, spent a lot of her life institutionalized. Rescued by her twin sister, as an adult she encountered art through the programs offered at the Creative Growth Art Centre in Oakland, California, and began to produce a body of exceptional work encompassing forms of occlusion. She worked in textiles and employed wrapping techniques, using selected colours of yarn, thread and fabric to entwine found objects (and not merely singular things, but often accumulations of things) and thus subvert their utile purposes or visual intentions. The cumulative works (they have no individual titles) often reveal much of their interior, found structure – a plastic disk here, a long medical hose there, all of it held in tension – both physical and aesthetic – by her windings of yarn, thread, and fabric. There are myriad worlds, here, complex and multi-leveled. In Scott’s work, occlusion can be partial and it can be complete, as it is with some pieces in which singular objects are totally entwined and encompassed beyond recognition and assigned significiation, and so achieve both abstraction and a mysterious otherness. Colour is fundamental to this process, yet in one work, done while briefly lacking access to her regular source of found materials, she created a shockingly monochromatic sculpture of torn bits of paper towels, for all the world like some mummified object.

Eric Cameron, Chloe’s Raw Sugar (1,456)

 

And Scott’s singular venture into monchromatism brings me to the work of a Canadian artist. He’s a painter, actually: Eric Cameron. (Some of his work can be seen on his dealer’s website: www.trepanierbaer.com.) An expatriate Brit, he came to Canada in 1969 and taught for a number of years through the early 1980s at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax before heading off to the University of Calgary, where he still teaches. It was while at NSCAD, in the heady days of conceptualism that gripped the college in the late 1960s and put it on the international map, that he began his ongoing series of Thick Paintings in which he would painstakingly apply a layer of acrylic gesso or paint to an object each and every day for years at a time, allowing the accumulations of layers –the process – to utterly transform the host object into something – well, something with a quality of absolutely “otherness.”

Some works, like Edwin’s Egg (comprising 5,212 total applications of gesso and acrylic, which Cameron carefully tallied), Lettuce (10,052) or Mathilda’s Chestnut (5,397) carry through the generally roundish shape of the host object, but Cameron’s is the occlusion of abstraction. In a work like Chloe’s Raw Sugar , several thousand layers of gesso and paint have accreted to form a sculptural abstraction, something perhaps vaguely resembling a geological model but which, in any event, has no stringent  visual references hobbling it to its origins. Transcendence achieved.

Eric Cameron, Lettuce (10,052)

 

Many of Cameron’s thick paintings date back to the late 1970s, but the installation work Thanatos is from 2011. He took 100 Remembrance Day poppies such as might be pinned on the lapels of one’s coat, and coated them with accreting layers of latex paint. Gravity has its decided way with these pieces; they tend to have long, stalactite-like elements hanging down from the heavily paint-encrusted poppies suspended on monofilament from a gallery ceiling. Some are seemingly more heavily coated than others, and the whole of the work comprises sculpturally obese shapes hanging in rows. And abstraction is paramount; the central poppy of each work is long-since entombed, its shape obliterated, its referent denied and disabled.

There and known, perhaps, but unseeable, ever occulted. A blood-red flower – or its simulacrum – at the heart of art.

By Gil McElroy

Brandon Vickerd, Sputnik Returned

Clichés being what they are, I’ll nevertheless risk one and say: it’s an image that looks like something out of a bad science fiction movie. A late-model car, otherwise innocuously (if somewhat illegally) parked in a No Parking Zone, has been, well, “cleaved” shall we say, by, of all things, a satellite. And not just any old satellite. Resting atop the remains of the vehicle’s badly dented roof, it’s Sputnik, the very first satellite, put up into orbit by the Soviets in 1957, circling the earth and emitting a beeping sound that was monitored by amateur radio operators around the world (oh, and the highly annoyed US military as well).

The real Sputnik did indeed fall back to earth. Well, in a way. It actually burned up on re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere in 1958, so there is no artefactual evidence of it around. But its aesthetic iteration – all polished and shiny and new, unmarred by the travails of atmospheric re-entry – marries it to a more earthbound vehicle (an Acura sedan, to be more specific) to comprise a work entitled Sputnik Returned #2 (2015) by Canadian sculptor Brandon Vickerd.

Brandon Vickerd, Sputnik Returned #2

 

He’s a graduate of the redoubtable Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax (and how many times have I mentioned that institution in my past blogs) who went on to acquire his MFA at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, and since the clocked ticked over into this new millennium has been exhibiting his work –sculpture and kinetic works – across Canada, the US, and Europe.

In a sense Vickerd’s work is about mythmaking. Certainly, Sputnik Returned #2 hints at it, but in its original incarnation, it’s more overt. Sputnik Returned (2013) concerns itself with the central artefact, of course – the classic satellite – but here it’s not one that’s crash-landed atop an automobile, but, instead, skidded to a stop in a field after having ploughed a long furrow in the earth courtesy the energy of its descent. The sky has fallen. Icarus has plummeted back to earth, his hubris quelled, nullified. The central myth of technology – that it can overcome, can transcend – has fallen, been shown to be fraudulent. Vickerd proffers us the aesthetic evidence, the aftermaths, if you will.

So that fall figures prominently in a number of Vickerd’s other sculptural work. Like the bronze piece, Monument to the First American in Space (2014). A steel chair atop an ornate wooden plinth (its ornateness shaping a resemblance to the capital from atop a column) holds the representational bronze space-suited figure – a skeleton, actually – which, of course, is not that of a male biped – look at the teeth – but possibly one of the rhesus monkeys which were sacrificed for the sake of science as space exploration was brand new. Albert was actually the first, riding aboard a German V2 rocket (war booty) and suffocating to death for his trouble in 1948. Or maybe it’s Ham, a chimpanzee who was the most famous of the original primate astronauts (as a child, I had a book about him), part of the Mercury program that got American men into space.

Brandon Vickerd, Ghost Rider

 

There’s a point to listing all of this information. Monuments are commemorative artefacts, and so definitions that circumscribe context are at issue. Most of us would of course be surprised to note that the Vickerd’s work doesn’t commemorate a member of the human species, but instead a close relative. It is very likely Ham, but without personal knowledge of the piece you can’t be sure, and anyway such specificity would tend to blur away the sacrifices of those who came before him. We tend to forget that spaceflight was never an entirely human achievement (and yes, I do mean that “passive” animal passengers contributed enormously), which actually raises another definitional question: what exactly do we mean by “spaceflight”? Go ahead, try and define it. It’s a tricky, liminal thing.

Vickerd’s Dead Astronaut (2008) has more clarity. Carved of wood, it is most decidedly human, the skeletal remains of a figure – indeterminately male or female – fully encased in its spacesuit, its tomb. Of note: it is standing, not prone, the body so stipulated, perhaps, owing to its massive and constraining cocoon of technology. Ghost Rider (2015) somewhat thematically carries this concept along further, a red fiberglass and metal figure, standing, encased from head to toe in the protective wear of a serious motorcycle racer. Only the absent visor on the helmet reveals the skull within, frail human muscle and flesh displaced by a more robust exoskeleton.

Brandon Vickerd, Dead Astronaut

 

Much (though by no means all) of Brandon Vickerd’s sculptural work articulates how very much we have become creatures indelibly mediated by technology, our bodies aided and abetted by the outreach of technology, the proprioceptive capacity and quality of our flesh and blood increasingly nudged aside in favor of devices of subtler distinctions. In a sense, we’ve all become dead astronauts, ghost riders, wrapped up in technologies that while extending us, also displace us. The central myth of technology has indeed been rendered evident to us, but we’ve widely ignored. We’re in a strangely liminal state, now, and if our planet doesn’t collapse under the pressures we exert upon it, the zero point of our unnecessity creeps ever nearer.

The sky is falling.

By Gil McElroy

Niall Donaghy, Superfortress

How many sculptors got their start in model-making? I’m talking kits, here, the making of model airplanes or cars or ships or, hell, even figures. Maybe they might’ve started off building those plastic kits that were once so ubiquitous (and which, as with so many of my boomer generation, I grew up with), and maybe, just maybe, they then moved off to something more a bit more sophisticated, maybe something that led them deeply and irrevocably into art.

If you built model airplanes of the plastic kit sort, it might’ve led you to building actual flying models. And, at one time (and to a degree even now), that would’ve meant working with wood. Balsawood, to be exact, that extremely lightweight material that, cut and shaped, made for the internal structure of things like wings and fuselages, and for things that might actually take flight.

That direction too might’ve led to art, and that brings me, a long way around, to the art of Niall Donaghy. He’s a sculptor based in Ontario (www.nialldonaghy.com). Donaghy’s another graduate of the influential Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax (from whence so many of Canada’s best sculptors have come), and obtained his MFA from York University in Toronto (another sculpture hot-bed). Much of his aesthetic focus has come to rest on the place and meaning of cultural icons, and Donaghy does that, in part, via a form of model-making.

Niall Donaghy, Spitfire (installation view 2)

 

I give you, by way of example, the Supermarine Spitfire, the single-seat fighter aircraft that has become synonymous with WWII, and especially with the Battle of Britain in which the German Luftwaffe attempted to bring England to its knees with a concerted aerial bombing campaign, and in which the Spitfire is remembered (not entirely accurately) for its heroic defense of King and Country. In short, it’s a major 20th century icon, hugely loaded with cultural significance. Donaghy’s sculptural Spitfire encompasses much of that. Structurally, it’s essentially a very large model aircraft, the wooden framework of wings and fuselage devoid of the original’s cloth skin. It’s naked. And, oh yeah, the airplane’s elegant wings are reconfigured, here arching forward. And, um, they curve down, as it happens, for Donaghy situates his artefact vertically, its nose resting on a pillar. Well, not its nose – its beak, actually, for the engine compartment and propeller of the iconic forerunner are, here, rendered as the head and beak of an eagle. Iconic, n’est pas?

Niall Donaghy, Superfortress (installation view)

 

Superfortress is more somewhat more straightforward, more subtle. It’s based on the B-29 bomber, the aircraft used to drop atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII and incinerate them so as to force the Japanese to surrender. (The fact that the aircraft was also accidentally instrumental in the discovery of the jet stream flowing high in our atmosphere is largely forgotten in the light of its more horrendous role.) Again, Donaghy has created a large model aircraft, stripped of skin, weapons, engines, etc. – a minimalistic incarnation of the original. What is here aesthetically feeds off the iconic status of the original, and that is enough. Even the merest skeleton of the thing is enough to suggest, some sixty years after it wrought devastation, from whence it comes. Those who were incinerated by the actions of the original hadn’t even that left to give evidence of their having been. Some left just shadows imprinted on the ground. Superfortress belongs to that realm.

Niall Donaghy, Eagle (installation view)

 

Donaghy’s most contemporary aircraft-based sculpture is Eagle. It’s based on an aircraft currently in use by the US military: the F-15 Eagle, an interceptor jet capable of enormous speed and great firepower. Eagle, of course, has none of it. Again, it’s a skeleton, a wooden cadaver, of sorts, just the bare bones delineating the form and outline of an iconic symbol of what passes for American might. The original weapon of destruction, of course, isn’t constructed of wood as is Donaghy’s, and in any event his sculptural artefact doesn’t even attempt to duplicate the aerodynamic qualities of the symbol it aesthetically conveys; the twin-tails, for instance, resemble more shop sawhorses than anything remotely air-worthy.

And why should they? Donaghy brings an icon to earth (metaphorically and literally – in one gallery showing of the work, it sits outside, exposed to the elements, in the sculpture courtyard of a public gallery, occupying much of the space of a wooden deck, its fierce profile pointed at a couple of tables and chairs with protective umbrellas where people sit and chat and drink coffee. It’s been tamed, reduced, somewhat demeaned and brought to earth. A threat no more.

Niall Donaghy, Torqued DC-3.

 

And then there’s Torqued DC-3. It perhaps has most in common with Spitfire because here, Donaghy’s aesthetically messed with the fundamentals – in a rather big, overt way. This classic, iconic transport airplane that dates back to the 1930s (with both military and civilian applications, and which is still flying today) has been transformed into something akin to a proverbial trained seal. Torqued DC-3 rests on its back on the gallery floor. Like Donaghy’s other aircraft-based sculpture, it’s made of wood, a skinless fuselage and wings, the bare bones of the thing. But it appears like it is performing, for crying out loud; its tail is arched up and back, its nose the same, as if the two were stretching to meet one another. For all the world it looks like one of those performing Orcas at Marine World, beaching itself for the crowd’s astonishment and amusement, arching head and tail into the air on command…

Niall Donaghy, Spitfire (installation view)

 

Or maybe it’s a scenario that could, instead, be read as suggestive of plight, the airplane like a turtle upended and struggling to right itself. The artefact as manifestation of a state of crisis.

I may very well be giving the impression that Donaghy’s aesthetic is entirely bound up within an enquiry into the iconography of aviation, and by no means is that the case. One of his largest and most compelling works is Labyrinth Coaster, a floor-mounted piece comprising an enormous, incredibly intricate and complex model of a wooden roller coaster which aesthetically intersects with a manifestation of the mythological labyrinth of Minoan Crete in which the Minotaur was reputedly imprisoned. Too, his Labrys series of wall- and floor-mounted geometric sculpture also reaches back to the symbology of the ancient Minoans….

So, perhaps the legend of King Minos imprisoning Daedalus – he who designed the labyrinth for Minos – and his son Icarus – he who ended up flying too close to the sun when both escaped their captivity – found its way “further north,” as it were, became aesthetic fuel for Niall Donaghy’s fascination with the iconic designs of our recent past century of flight?

Maybe. Whatever the impetus, I’m good with the consequences.

By Gil McElroy

Sarah Saunders, Assembly Line, 2011.

I first encountered the work of Sarah Saunders in the late 1990s when I was the curator at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. I was fortunate enough to include her in an exhibition of sculptural ceramics, and had the opportunity to write about her work for a catalogue, and then later review her work in magazines.

Though I knew Saunders as a ceramist doing sculpturally interesting things with clay, she is, not surprisingly, so much more than that. Even a cursory look at her background demonstrates someone not zealously adherent to the narrow tenets of medium-specificity but far more broadly oriented and encompassing: after acquiring her B.Sc. in biology, Saunders then went on to study dance in Toronto, and drawing and sculpture in Paris, before then returning to Canada and getting her BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. And all of it shows up in her work.

Sarah Saunder, Assembly Line (installation detail).

 

The Saunders I first encountered in the late 1990s was (amongst other things) a maker of books. Ceramic books, to be precise, her sculptural take on clay’s ancient role as a medium for permanently preserving textual inscription (ancient Sumerian cuneiform embossed on clay slabs, for instance). Saunder’s series of earthenware books are codices each comprising two “leaves” (some quite thick) bound together by metal hinges or leather straps; in one – Unfinished Song (1999) –her biological background comes directly to the fore, text on the verso page describing the processes by which seeds are spread by a plant is matched on the recto by inscribed images detailing the process of the division of a cell. Song of Sanctuary and Refuge (1999) has a pentagonal shape to its two leaves (that, when the book is fully closed, evokes an intentional visual reference to a house), the outer surfaces embossed with the text of a poem by Emily Dickinson. Opened, the book reveals the tattered remnants of a bit of wallpaper on the verso side and the tiny bones of the rib cage from a small animal on the recto arching protectively above the embossed image of a clock face.

Sarah Saunders, Cryosphere, 2012.

 

A later body of work involving earthenware cutlery – enormous knives, forks, and spoons – led to the gallery installation Assembly Lines (2011). A row of large inkjet prints on paper depicting flatware – silver spoons, actually, of variously elaborate patterns – hang on a wall behind a long, makeshift table comprising a couple of pieces of plywood resting on sawhorses. This variant on the plinth as a kind of domestic table is set not with tableware but rather with a series of textile-based artefacts done entirely in unglazed white porcelain. They’re 1:1 scale porcelain sculptures of period clothing – dresses once intended for newborn children – standing upright on the table surface. Arranged in front of them are corresponding ceramic knit bonnets as children once wore. The body of work also includes a number of clay handkerchiefs.

Saunders has even worked underneath the artefacts of human culture and into the specifics of human anatomy using porcelain. She’s sculpted lungs of clay and lace in Breath Suspended (2003), and with Lumbar Blue Willow and Lumbar Rose (both 2011) reproduces a portion of the human spine, each glazed ceramic disk elegantly detailed with a floral decoration as if it were part of a set of china – which, of course, it is. The body – or a portion of it, anyway – indeed become artefact.

Sarah Saunder, Assembly Line, 2011.

 

But of course her work has also extended outside of and beyond the myriad and ongoing sculptural possibilities of clay. Saunders is no ceramic purist – clay is a means to an end. So she’s worked with salt as a medium, for instance, encrusting tree branches and chair spindles with the stuff, and, in the series Doilies (2014) heavily encrusting and impregnating the cloth of these decorative textile artefacts with coarse salt and shaping them into vessels as they dry until they begin to resemble, say, beautiful marine shells or corals.

Saunders’s aesthetic includes the exploration of the temporal via site-specific installations. Like Rhizosphere (2013). Extending from the base of a mature maple tree growing in an urban Charlottetown park, Saunders traced out its root system across the lawn using white sand and minute glass chips that were luminescent at night. Heaviest and thickest nearest the trunk of the tree, the representative lines of roots weren’t simply drawings on the sod, but sculpturally raised features that gradually tapered out furthest away at the tree’s drip line. And for Cryosphere in 2012, she suspended an enormous nylon net filled with 400 lbs. of ice from a crane parked outside the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in the heart of downtown Charlottetown, a work that lasted as long as it took for the ice to melt entirely away as darkness fell (eight hours, as it turned out).

Sarah Saunders, Song of Sanctuary and Refuge, 1999 (photo by Ruth Skinner)

 

After I had left the Charlottetown in 2000 and returned back to Ontario, I eventually lost track of Sarah Saunders’s work. My bad.

Won’t happen again, I can assure you.

By Gil McElroy

Brendan Tang, Manga Ormolu ver. 4.0-w (2016)

Bear with me, here.

I’ll date myself and risk saying that, as is usually the case, those of newer generations of us homo sapiens are stereotypically deemed by those of the previous to suffer  shortcomings of the mind, body, or spirit. “Why, when I was a child…” is often how such critiques start, followed by a great deal of tsk tsking as more recent humans are taken to task for faults and flaw and defects that their forebears have miraculously been apparently unaffected by. And I’ll go out on a limb and say that perhaps the greatest flaw newbies on planet earth are accused of is a short attention span, courtesy their exposure to the vicissitudes of contemporary culture from the word go. Technology, the thinking goes, is making us idiots, unable to focus.

My, but we baby boomers are judgmental, aren’t we?  In any event, whether or not any of this is actually true, or has any even the slightest relationship to fact, isn’t the reason for my bringing it up. The flip-side to the apparently damnable sins of something as apparently venial as channel surfing and flitting from one idea or image to another without settling on the particular is the opportunity to link the disparate and seemingly unrelated, to maybe see or even create new wholes from fractures and displacements – to possibly find, in short, entirely new relationships and consequent meanings. This is how metaphor is created. It’s akin to what the late French philosopher of metaphor Paul Ricoeur called “deviant predication,” and I’m bringing this up as a way of establishing a bit of contextual basic for introducing the work of Brendan Tang.

Brendan Tang, Manga Ormolu ver. 5.0-s (2016)

 

He’s a Canadian artist, born in Ireland in 1975. His visual arts education began at Malaspina University College in British Columbia on Canada’s west coast, and then shifted to its east, when he studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (now NSCAD University) in Halifax, receiving his BFA in 1998. NSCAD is renowned for its ceramics program (at one point in its history the university became so strongly aligned with the conceptual art movement that all the pottery wheels were removed from the ceramics studios), and Tang parlayed that critically important background into an MFA obtained from Southern Illinois University. All the while he was exploring the aesthetic possibilities of clay, of what it might sculpturally do if the seemingly incompatible were conjoined into a new whole – if, in the meeting of disjunction and discordance, “deviant predication” might occur.

This is the aesthetic of something akin to the short attention span, of the free movement between the widely disparate diverse, of the aesthetic collision or mashing together of things to spawn new and strange collusions between aforesaid and same – of seeing the truly new spawned from the sediments and residues of the old. And it works – big time. The consequence of it all is a remarkable body of sculptural ceramics Tang calls Manga Ormolu.

The less familiar term “ormolu” is an English word dating back to the 1700s used to describe a technique for veneering gold over top of a bronze artefact (aka “gilt bronze”) and, the more familiar and contemporary, “manga” is, of course, a term used to describe a style of cartooning originally developed in Japan.

Brendan Tang, Manga Ormolu ver. 4.0-o (2012)

 

See? Even at the titular level it’s the collision and collusion of things seemingly remote and disparate that is foregrounded, the creation and advocacy of the new. And Tang’s work indeed overly resembles the product of collision, abrupt meetings of culturally and historically disparate artefacts and meanings. Tang himself notes that “I liken aspects of my artistic practice to channel surfing, where I absorb, interpret and bank a great deal of visual information to inform my personal aesthetic.”

Collision. And resultant aesthetic collusion. Tang’s work in Manga Ormolu links porcelain ceramic features hearkening back to Chinese Ming dynasty pieces of the 16th and 17th centuries (when such work widely came to the attention of the West) with acutely contemporary technology. From the internal dialogue that occurs, something utterly new shows up. In Manga Ormolu ver 2.0-o (2009), for instance a Ming-like plate is engaged within what might be something remotely akin to the disk brake system of an automobile. In Manga Ormolu ver. 4.0-w (2016) the shape of Ming plate resting on a small wooden easel has yielded to, been grossly distorted and almost folded in half by, a smaller wheel insistently pressing against it, a series of multiple audio jacks dangling down from the wheel’s armature.

Pop culture is hugely important in Tang’s work, and in numerous works its role is almost overtly comical. Manga Ormolu ver. 5.0-s (2009) takes the form of a small, elegant lidded Ming jar from the bottom of which sprouts a tripod of technologically contemporary “legs,” the jar thereby assuming a bodily signification enhanced by the folds in the vessel walls as it fits atop its odd 21st century enhancements. The old makes way for the new, one melds into (or is absorbed by) the other.

Tang’s work respectfully straddles the realm of ceramics – his work tends to be of the traditional scale of the vessel form as it has come to be shaped by the need of the utile and the limitations of the hand. Many works are intended for the small easels typically used to display plates and the like. But while Tang may work loosely within a tradition, he simultaneously blows it to smithereens. The significations of the utile are all afforded due homage, but the sculptural imperative is paramount. To go hugely out on a limb, Tang’s work is broadly demonstrative of how cultural or social movement absorbs what it displaces. And as if to exemplify that, as of this writing, Brendan Tang is a finalist in the Gardiner Museum’s Ceramic Sculpture Competition, to create a site-specific outdoor work for this downtown Toronto institution located directly across the road from the august Royal Ontario Museum.

Deviant predication.

By Gil McElroy

Maura Doyle, Collapse (detail)

Funny the things you miss. When I lived for three years on Prince Edward Island (PEI) on Canada’s eastern coast, it was rock. Not the music – the geology.  See, PEI has none of it. No rock. The island province nestled along New Brunswick’s northern shore is basically just a whole heck of a lot of red mud, with a little bit of gravel thrown in for good measure. It’s this red mud, this fertile soil, which has made the province famous for its potatoes and, indeed, the literary figure of Anne of Green Gables. But while I lived there it made me avidly hungry for things like rock outcrops and lumpy, bumpy, stony soil, both of which I immersed myself in during visits back to Ontario and the hard geography and geology of the Canadian Shield.

Actual rock turned out to be a somewhat surprising status symbol on the island. For some, anyway. A neighbour of mine went to great trouble (and no little expense) importing a large boulder to use as a kind of decorative ornament on their front lawn, trucking it from New Brunswick on the mainland via what was then the ferry link to PEI. What money can do.

Maura Doyle, Erratic Boulder (photo courtesy the artist)

 

I mention all of this by way of talking about a site-specific work installed for six months in the heart of downtown Toronto several years ago by artist Maura Doyle. An artist who is as comfortable exhibiting in commercial galleries as she is artist-run centers, she studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax on the Canadian east coast, and the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver on the west. More towards the middle of the continent, in 2004 she was invited by the Toronto Sculpture Garden to create a work for their pocket-sized site in the city’s downtown. There’s a New Boulder in Town was the result, a ten-ton moss-covered boulder transported from a spot in eastern Ontario and plunked down on Garden’s small plot of grass with a nice brass plaque attached to it.

It’s known as a glacial erratic, a massive chunk of rock demonstrative of the enormous power of the glaciers that effortlessly carried them along from their original locations to wherever the ice floe stopped and dumped it as it receded away during another of the planet’s climate shifts. We’re talking processes that happened eons ago. (In the interest of full disclosure, I now live near one these chunks of rocks: the Bleasdell Boulder, considered the largest glacial erratic boulder in Ontario.)

Maura Doyle, Erratic Boulder (photo courtesy the artist)

 

In the course of such time scales, Doyle’s movement of this enormous boulder from where she found it long ago abandoned by glacial recession (near a town called Bobcaygeon northeast of Toronto) south to this site in downtown Toronto barely registers. But it does register, it does significantly matter, in other ways an at other levels of consideration. For starters, the work has an interesting aesthetic lineage. Like Robert Smithson’s Broken Circle and Spiral Hill (1971) a permanent, site-specific work he did in the Netherlands that incorporates (much to Smithson’s annoyance, who was unable to remove what he called “a geological gangrene”) a large glacial erratic stone. Or, more recently, Michael Heizer’s  Levitated Mass (2012), a truly enormous rock (340 tons worth) he transported from a California quarry to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in order to to dramatically suspend it over a trench with a pedestrian walkway. Not an erratic, but damn big in any event.

Maura Doyle, Reclined Jug (photo courtesy the artist)

 

And Doyle’s piece matters as well because it so eloquently mirrors and addresses the displacements that humans have long wrought upon place, disturbing, evacuating, changing, utterly transforming their surroundings to suit myriad evolving needs and desires. Into this place, this site, Doyle brought in this enormous, aesthetically delightful and meaningful equivalent to a black hole, an object that absolutely distorted the highly artefactual and plastic surroundings of a small part of urbanity. Gravity, in a way, became different around it, for a time relationships between things were aestheticaly stressed by an interloper from another time and place. Doyle’s exhibition also included a map she painstakingly compiled detailing the presence and location of other “erratic” boulders (some no larger than a waste paper basket) she found around downtown Toronto.

The point of it all, of course, was the potential web of connectivity, not only between geological objects (most of which were as artificially transported here as Doyle’s) but that real and meaningful link back to a kind of pre-history, to place before it was “place,” and how that artefactual definition was constructed. The tissue of circumstance is thin, but it is indeed very real.

Maura Doyle, Bone Dump (photo courtesy the artist)

 

I’ve not written, here, of Doyle’s other, more recent bodies of work, especially her exploration of ceramics with her Bone Dump pieces, unfired sculptural porcelain 1:1 scale bones that evoke (amongst other things) the realities of what the aesthetic of “bone china” really means and entails; or her more recent low-fire sculptural stoneware pots (some more akin to industrial artefacts) that simultaneously transcend or defy utility while wholeheartedly, even playfully, embracing its range of referents.

It’s exceptional work, all of it, and variations on the concept of displacement are clearly central to so much of it. Years ago, Newfoundland-based artist Marlene Creates did an eloquent work photographically tracing her transfer of a small rock from the bottom to the top of an English hill. Of course that’s a vast oversimplification of a beautifully complex piece (in which the consideration of pre-history is significant), as are these, my words trying to encompass Maura Doyle’s post-glacial transfer of a chunk of planetary geology from the rural to the urban.

By Gil McElroy

20 Flowers. Photos by Ted Hodgetts and Harald Glass.

Ceramics as a sculptural medium still concerns me, as do issues concerning scale that arise out of it. So about the latter, then: at what point along the continuum that is scale do aesthetic objects cease being sculptural – or at least, considered sculptural? Certainly towards the large end of the spectrum it really isn’t an issue (see work by any number of sculptors for whom the monumental is critically central), but towards the smaller end of things it perhaps tends to get a bit dicey. What might we say about realm of the nano, about an artist intent on exploring this atomic or molecular area with a sculptural aesthetic in mind? Would we award recognition or even acknowledgement of artefacts created at such a scale as possibly being sculptural intent and execution?

I’m exaggerating, of course, but not absurdly so; after all, there are artists working, for example, at the biologically cellular level, so it’s not too much of a stretch to head deeper into the world of micro. But in the other direction, and going up just a few notches, there’s work aplenty to be found. In the March issue of Sculpture I contributed a short article I wrote about the work of Dorie Millerson, a Toronto-based textile artist working in the realm of lace, exploring its potential as a sculptural medium with minute works, some no bigger than a spool of thread – and to great effect (see “Dorie Millerson: The Matter of Scale”, Sculpture, March 2016, pp. 54-57).

Torcitura. Photos by Ted Hodgetts and Harald Glass.

 

From that end of the spectrum I’ll rebound further yet up the scale to the work of Canadian ceramist Angelo di Petta (dipetta.com). Born in Italy, his family immigrated to Canada while he was a child. He majored in ceramics at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, and then went on to teach there. Importantly, his aesthetic vision encompassed the crossover possibilities that lay in ceramic’s industrial uses and applications, and he spent time in Europe studying those processes. From his own studio outside of Toronto, he has produced work exhibited in Canada, the United States, and Europe, and also undertook public commissions for permanent installations at various sites in North America.

The vessel is, not surprisingly, the dominant theme in his work – but the vessel with a twist (and I do mean that both metaphorically and literally). With his series 20 Flowers, for instance, he married the vessel form with the geometry of the structure of flowers, giving the utile a bit of a sculpturally aesthetic twist via a re-reading of form and function. But it’s most strikingly evident in his major gallery installation, Torcitura. Perhaps not surprisingly the title is Italian for “twist.” And it most certainly does, comprising a single clay sculpture, somewhat cylindrical, that’s 50 feet in length and which at the larger “macroscopic” level appears to be a long, almost worm-like, spiral, twisting itself through three full rotations along its length.

Dancing Form. Photos by Ted Hodgetts and Harald Glass.

 

Of course there’s so much more to it than that, and much of that pertains to the nearness of the more “microscopic” aspects to the piece, for in a very modernist way, it’s an entirely self-referential work. The entire spiral is made up of 56 individual segments – or modules, as di Petta calls them – that are self-similar. He’s not a ceramist of the usual ilk; we tend to overly ascribe the medium to those who throw clay on wheels, and he’s most certainly not that. His work has long involved the use of moulds and casts (here’s where his interest in and exploration of industrial ceramic processes comes into aesthetic focus in a very fundamental way). The 56 hollow modules in the work – low-fired earthenware clay – are absolutely identical, products of a plaster mould that incorporates a slight twist to the shape. When the segments are conjoined into a whole,  that minor twist accumulates into the long, extended spiral that spans a gallery space.

Additionally, longitudinal differentiations in each module – one half is straight slip-cast clay, the other press- moulded clay mixed with sawdust – add additional complexities and layers of possible meaning to the simple, elegant, yet enormously meaningful form that is a spiral. Torcitura, then, encompasses references to the cosmologically vast – the realm of the myriad spiral galaxies scattered throughout our universe – as well as to the microscopically small – the shells, say, of tiny sea creatures.

I know – I’m pushing my metaphors to their limits. But of course that’s what good art does – it pushes at the envelope, doesn’t settle. With a piece like Torcitura, Angelo di Petta pushes ceramics beyond its traditional comfort zones, aesthetically addressing issues of the spectrum of scale by venturing into the large and macro without abandoning the relevance of the small and proverbially near.

By Gil McElroy

Heidi McKenzie, China Bound No. 1, detail, (photo courtesy the David Kaye Gallery)

Since I wrote about Canadian ceramist Alexandra McCurdy’s porcelain gridded boxes a couple of blogs ago, I’ve been re-engaging with interpretations of the container as an aesthetic form. Sure, Donald Judd’s boxes I evoked in that blog are there (and how could they not be), but so too is a sculptural work like Richard Serra’s One Ton Prop (House of Cards) done in 1969, one of his self-supporting pieces comprised of four massive square lead panels leaning against one another so as to give shape to, well, a box. The form as aesthetically self-referential, brilliantly evoked by Serra.

Heidi McKenzie, China Bound No. 5 (photo courtesy the David Kaye Gallery

 

I don’t think I’d be out of line in saying that there is, of course, a certain machismo to the work, as there is with much of Serra’s work, a heroic, even epic quality. (In the interest of full-disclosure, and just in case you hadn’t noticed) his is work that I admire very much.) Beyond the issue of materiality of his work (the earlier lead pieces, his concrete “earthwork” Shift done back in 1972 and situated just north of Toronto, and his ongoing exploration of monumental forms and the possibilities of Cor-ten steel) it’s the scale of things that matters enormously, the human body’s response to and interaction with these works. And so they are all containers, marking out and denoting the shapes of the spaces they encompass.

I’ll be blindly obvious, here, for a moment: art works of any kind are, of course, all containers, be they overt material expressions and manifestations of the conceit, or more indirect conceptual, intellectual, emotional evocations of the idea of what can be held and embraced – of what it is to contain something.

And that actually leads me back to the issue of scale, down towards the smaller end of the spectrum, and to a medium with little heroic or epic quality but which has long had absolutely everything to do with the concept of the container: clay. Putting aside clay’s early use as tablets for cuneiform writing, as recording surfaces (which are, clearly, containers of a kind), this is a medium that has long had absolutely everything to do with those containers that are vessels. You know: pots, bowls, jars, vases…

Ghita Levin, Skate Pod (photo courtesy the artist)

 

So it’s here that I find myself returning, time and again, to a consideration of Skate Pod, a piece by Canadian ceramist Ghita Levin (ghitalevinpottery.ca). It’s small, and like so very much in the field of ceramics, it’s intended to be held in the hand. It’s a 1:1 scale representation as well, based on something from the natural world: the egg casing of the skate, a fish of the ray family. These casings can be found washed-up on the beaches not far from Levin’s home and studio in northern New Brunswick, and they are, of course, vessels, containers. And Levin’s representation of this small, fascinating bit of fauna is, of course, sculptural in intent and outcome, a perfect marriage of medium, meaning, and form. Levin has long worked with the representation form in her work, creating exquisite representational sculptural forms of creatures like birds (in addition to her work with vessel forms like pots and bowls). But it is her egg casing that makes a sculptural case for the idea of the container.

From Maritime Canada to downtown Toronto, and a recent exhibition by ceramist Heidi McKenzie (heidimckenzie.ca). It’s work that’s overly all about the vessel, but the utilitarian component that’s seemingly been all-but permanently welded into our notion of what constitutes ceramics has here been, well, literally deconstructed. McKenzie’s explored and extended the conceit of the thrown vessel form, rising up in the ceramist’s hands from a shapeless lump of clay spinning on a wheel. When you think about it, that constructive motion – moving clay articulated in the skilled grasp of human hands – actually shapes out a spiral, and McKenzie made it sculpturally manifest in porcelain pieces like her China Bound series, ribbons of fired portion just barely articulating the shape of a vessel. The containers of this series may materially decay into the elemental shapes of unarrested motion – those lazy ribbons of spiraled porcelain flopping onto themselves or the objects they ostensibly contain, or even straining upwards seemingly in defiance of gravity – but it is multiple meanings, allusions, and connotations that gather and hold true, contained within the work’s sculptural parameters.

Alison Britton, Yellow Pot (photo courtesy the Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

 

As I’m writing this, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (www.vam.ac.uk) is mounting Alison Britton: Content and Form, an exhibition of forty years of work by the renowned British ceramist, forty years of her intense exploration of the vessel as both a utile container and a stand-alone sculptural form. We’re not talking, here, about some ornament and decorative features simply adorning a working vessel and passing the consequent amalgam of things off as a legitimate piece of sculpture. Britton’s work (not thrown on a wheel as is conventionally expected of any form akin to a clay vessel, but rather sculpturally created of slabs of clay) uses the domestic associations that have accrued around the vessel form as a point of aesthetic departure as she takes a utilitarian form and makes it decidedly sculptural. But what’s utterly elegant about Britton’s work is that the working vessel is still present and accounted for; her pieces – like the enigmatic Yellow Pot from 1990 – hover in that aesthetic space of either/or between the decidedly and domestically utile and the articulately sculptural. Here is where meaningful slippage between disparate realms can occur, where one can become the other – and then back again – without categorization and aesthetic decidedness and fixity. The conventional holding patterns we’ve assigned to forms give way.

None of this – neither Levin’s work, nor McKenzie’s and Britton’s – is about shape-shifting. It’s about fluidity of another order.

It’s about the making of forms that live.

By Gil McElroy

Field, 2009.

Canada has two provinces which are islands unto themselves. Newfoundland, the larger, directly confronts the North Atlantic, but the smaller, Prince Edward Island (PEI), is in a somewhat more sheltered locale along the north shore of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Its location, and its famous rich, red soil, made it ideal for farming, earning it the nickname the “million-acre farm.” PEI became the equivalent of Idaho in terms of the celebrated, near-mythic status its potatoes have achieved (so naturally, there are even songs about it).

Blue Ribbon Bantam, 2011.

 

It all, of course, comes with a heavy price: a deep dependence on chemical fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides… Run-off from agricultural fields pollutes waterways and kills fish and other marine life. The “topping” of potato plants – spraying the potato vines with herbicides to kill the above-ground growth, permitting the rooted potatoes to develop thicker skins for better storage and longer shelf-life – leaves fields blackened and ugly, not to mention badly polluted. The situation has, of course, stirred activism. It’s also stirred the making of art.

That’s of course where Gerald Beaulieu comes into the story. While he’s lived in PEI for almost thirty years, he’s a “from-away,” a transplant from his native Ontario. He’s also a graduate of the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto who has shown his sculptural work in solo and group exhibitions throughout Canada, and in the United States and Europe. In the past few years, his work has begun to specifically and pointedly address ecological issues, and the role corporate agriculture has played in damaging ecoystems.

Drift Detail, 2010.

 

Corn is one way. Cornfields seem like benign things, symbols of the rural world, harbingers of late summer feasts. But really, it’s not like that at all on the larger scale. Corn is increasingly industrial, and the ripening fields running in neat rows to the horizon now denote a corporate approach to the environment. For corn is grown less, now, for human consumption; less, now, for animal field; and more, now, to power our contemporary world via the ethanol (produced from it) that is a significant fuel additive for vehicles. Corn has become a chemical.

Beaulieu’s response to this was Field, an installation comprising a number of corn stalks each mounted on its own plinth and the whole arranged in the kind of grid formation akin to the real thing. But Beaulieu’s pieces are anything but. Artefactual and 1:1 scale, they’re made of wood and aluminum, and coated with a thick, noxious layer of tar, black and glistening beneath gallery lights. This is about as far from food production as you can get yet still maintain meaningful visual referents. Off-putting at virtually every level (including and especially the olfactory), Field is clear in its targeted meaning (as is a related work in which individual stalks of wheat emerge from an array of disturbingly multi-colored test tubes). Beaulieu isn’t messing around.

The same can be said for Blue Ribbon Bantam. It’s a gorgeous (and at almost five feet in height, decidedly not 1:1 scale) sculpture of a rooster. But its orange feathers, sweeping beautifully back and terminating in a flurry of blue at the back end, are in fact made of hundreds of disposable syringes, testimony to the widespread use of antibiotics and growth hormones in today’s hyper-corporate agricultural world where time is of course money, and the sooner a product can ship to market the better the profit. The barnyard rooster strutting about is a nostalgic relic of the past, for today chicken is grown largely indoors under controlled settings, in a way as artefactual a thing now as is Beaulieu’s savagely critical homage.

Prince Edward Island is, of course, entirely surrounded by the sea, and its maritime locale and the industries that have long been built around harvesting the resources the ocean has for so long proffered haven’t escaped his notice, especially in the light of damage that’s been done to such ecosystems by overfishing and pollution. Tuna is a hugely valuable catch (fetching big bucks on the international market), and Beaulieu has created a permanent outdoor sculpture in his home province of a 1:1 scale Bluefin tuna using hundreds of stainless steel spoons.

Bluefin Bullet, 2011.

 

Beaulieu’s bluefin speaks to the depletion of natural resources, to scarcity and loss as a species is monetized and consumed. Drift addresses the horrors of massive environmental change and degradation. Another installational work, it’s a garbagey looking piece, stuff suspended from a gallery ceiling at various heights and densities. They’re jellyfish (again, 1:1 scale), and are made of plastic (the long dangling tentacles of the real thing) and unwholesome-appearing coloured gels (the main bodies). Beaulieu, here, takes on the twin catastrophes of our massively polluted oceans full of our waste plastics drifting across the planet, and the issue of invasive species destroying whole ecosystems. It’s aesthetically pointed work, a sharp tip straight into the conscience.

What Gerald Beaulieu does best, out there on the million-acre farm.

By Gil McElroy

True Blue (detail), 1997.

When we think of modernism and the visual arts, we’re usually thinking of painting (of, say, abstraction by the likes of Jackson Pollock), or sculpture (perhaps Mark di Suvero or Richard Serra), or even architecture (Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, etc.)

But unless we have a specific interest in the field, we rarely think of ceramics within the framework and tenets of modernism, rarely consider, say, the abstract sculptural ceramic pieces of Peter Voulkos as integral to the wider aesthetic discussion.

Blue Box with Garnets, 2015.

 

We absolutely should, of course, but I’m not here to argue the importance of Peter Voulkos in the history of modern art (it has, of course, been established, if not to the degree it should have achieved). I’m here to talk about boxes and grids. And clay. And Alexandra McCurdy

The boxes and grids are the contextualizing part of this, for both are formative elements in the development and unfolding of twentieth century modern art. There are two artists who perhaps exemplify its aesthetic employment: Joseph Cornell and Donald Judd. Cornell’s boxes, of course, are more traditional sorts of containers or frames – vessels, of a kind – shaping the context of the visual elements he would arrange within them, holding and sustaining the microcosmic magic of the worlds he created within their confines. The flip side of the coin might be the clean, minimalistic boxes of Judd, spare, quietly eloquent elements telling only of themselves and of the self-referential essences of artefactual things.

And then there is the grid, the emblematic visual device that powers Agnes Martin’s incredible paintings, and which has found its way into pretty much every nook and cranny of the visual arts, an absolutely fundamental element borrowed from the world of textiles though rarely credited or acknowledged for its influences.

Alexandra Black Box with Weaving and Wallpiece, 2014.

 

Of course all proverbial roads eventually lead to Rome, and the paths I’ve been slowly heading down ultimately lead to clay and to the sculptural work of Nova Scotia ceramist Alexandra McCurdy. To her boxes and her grids, more specifically.

McCurdy is a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, long a strong centre of ceramics practice and teaching in North America. She obtained her Master’s degree from the Cardiff Institute of Higher Education in Wales, for a long time one of the few places post-graduate work in ceramics could be had. She’s been a longstanding presence in the Canadian and international ceramics community, and while she’s made her share of vessels (and continues to do so), it’s her porcelain boxes and wall hangings that are pertinent here.

McCurdy’s work integrates textiles and ceramics, and has so for some time (an enquiry into the historical evolution of textiles and the absolutely pivotal role played in it by women formed the basis of her Master’s thesis), and wonderful wall hangings of woven ceramic grids and/or flat porcelain plates with textile-based decorative elements are a not-unexpected consequence of this melding of disciplines. (see www.amcurdyceramics.ca)

But the boxes are something else entirely. For starters, like some of the wall-hangings, they’re comprised of extraordinarily delicate porcelain grids (incorporating a wire underlayer) for all six sides, stitched together at the corners to hold the work in geometric shape.

True Blue, 1997.

 

McCurdy’s are not Juddian boxes, nor are they Cornellian. They are not minimalistically clean and decoratively quiet as with the former; McCurdy employs pattern and ornament, much of it inspired by the textile work (once done using animal quills) of the indigenous Mi’kmaq people of Atlantic Canada. And they are not containers in the conventional sense of providing a frame or a context for their contents as per the latter. They are indeed a part of modernism: they are their own contents. But they are, as well, utterly post-modern: strongly decorative and ornamental. McCurdy’s work comprises its own unique Boolean aesthetic encompassing aesthetic realms we otherwise so cartoonishly deem separate.

In her more recent pieces like Black Box with Lucky Rock or Blue Box with Herringbone (both 2015), McCurdy states that she “intentionally utilize[s] the feminine principal of containment and enclosure.” As boxes, they are unopenable; they have no lids and are not boxes-as-containers in the conventional sense. Their interiors are intentionally locked away, made physically inaccessible, though visually available as viewed through the grids comprising their sides. We cannot touch the aesthetic heart of these things; utility has been excised from the aesthetic equation. We are intended to deal visually with the outwardness of things, with the exteriors of these artefacts – nudged toward an encounter with colour and pattern (the textile-inspired herringbone of the blue box, or ornament (a small rock attached to the top of the former, for instance), and left to ponder upon what is held within.

Yet for all of that nudging, we are still very much engaged in a dialogue with thingness, here, something that ceramics has always ably managed to support, typically when we were least aware. It’s a process rooted in our experiences of everyday dealings with utile objects, a lot of them made of clay (coffee, anyone?). Fine. That works. It gives us a just a little bit of an in when we meet up with one of Alexandra McCurdy’s small, enigmatic ceramic boxes and the ultimately unknowable worlds they really harbor at the heart of the thing.

By Gil McElroy

Lyla Rye, Sanctuary Interior, 2012.

When first encountering the installation work of Canadian artist Lyla Rye, it’s perhaps not a huge surprise to then learn that, before she studied Fine Art at York University in Toronto, and before she then ventured on and obtained her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, she studied architecture.

I say that because her most recent exhibition of sculptural work at General Hardware Contemporary in Toronto is entitled Eaves. And it is exactly that – all about eaves, I mean, sculptural manifestations taken from that architectural/structural roof element common to an awful lot of buildings. Rye’s sculptures (seemingly 1:1 scale artefacts, neither miniatures nor exorbitantly out-of-scale distensions) are made of plywood painted white and of course exhibited contextually isolated from function and structural purpose, sitting, unplinthed, directly on the gallery floor – all of course so as to encourage an alternative, purely aesthetic reading. Divorced from a role in the real world (and by the fact that they are, effectively, like extracts or portions of larger elements), these are artefacts that cleave more closely toward a spare, even stringent, geometric abstraction, all clean lines, elegant and minimal, more akin to the work of, say, Donald Judd than they are to a mundane rooftop. And they are exquisite.

Lyla Rye, Eaves Installation, 2015.

 

Which is, in significant ways, exactly like much modernist architecture – clean, elegant, and aesthetically pleasing to the eye (though perhaps the human body might be an entire other issue, as much modern architecture was more pleasing to look upon than to live in – think of the glass houses of Philip Johnson or Mies van der Rohe, perhaps, or Frank Lloyd Wright’s insistence on designing the furniture to fill his homes). The thing is, though, eaves tend to be more closely associated with the domestic realm, with the house-structure that tends, by and large, not to have a lot to do with modernism in any overtly aesthetic way (and I’m wildly generalizing here, I know). So Rye has engaged in a reimagining of them, recontextualizing a minor, truly  uninteresting and ignored architectural element (though one eminently utile and important), investing it with a keen aesthetic edge it has either entirely lacked, or which has been eroded or stripped away over time. I mean, c’mon: eaves aren’t exactly visually riveting things, right?

Lyla Rye, Eaves Awning, 2015.

 

But Rye makes them riveting , makes us consider them anew, think of them differently (that’s her job, after all, one she does exceedingly well) because we encounter them in an aesthetically centered context which is of course nominally absent in real-world applications. As an element wrenched from its utile, unthought of role, the eave as an artefact is reseen. Or maybe just seen, and actually thought of. It emerges into the aesthetic light of day from it’s murky, utilitarian world.

This is kinda what Rye does, in a larger way and on an ongoing basis. Several years ago, as part of an exhibition entitled Cyclorama at an art gallery in Ontario that was located in a converted grain mill, she installed the work Memory Palace in the gallery’s airy third-floor loft, a space left untouched by the gallery’s conversion into something akin to the standard white cube. Worn and weathered posts and beams traverse the otherwise open space which Rye proceeded to aesthetically shut down, using a bunch of large tarpaulins and bungee cords to create a series of seven separate spaces – rooms, really – within the larger enclosing structure. Rather like indoor tents, if you will, but more spatially elaborate and intricate than most temporary structures of this kind. One, for instance, cleverly fashions interior dormers around the existing loft windows, and another – with the assistance of a pair of electric fans attached to a traversing wooden beam – creates a rather elegantly room of white tarpaulin and high, arched ceiling.

Lyla Rye, Memory Palace Dormer, 2012.

 

This, of course, is architecture reinvented, refashioned, aesthetically reimagined and recontexualized, a nomadic form of that field installed within the fixed shell of a repurposed industrial building-become-art gallery.

And of course it’s not just the secular churches that are art galleries which Rye architecturally re-purposes. The year of Memory Palace (2012) was also the year of Sanctuary, an installation mounted in a downtown Toronto church in which tarpaulin and bungee cords, and even nomadism again figured. Working in the nave – the central area in which the pews are situated – Rye constructed a long tent (essentially a variant on the classic wedge-shaped pup tent form) and suspended it above several of the pews, high enough to permit someone to sit beneath and slightly within its shelter. It’s a canopy, of course. If you absolutely must, you can think of it as an aesthetic variant on the concept of the dropped ceiling – that retrofit often imposed upon older buildings to bring the ceiling height down but which became a ubiquitous staple of bad, utilitarian modernism.

Lyla Rye, Sanctuary Installation, 2012.

 

But we shouldn’t. While Rye may be working within the context of spiritual space with Sanctuary, her work much more broadly addresses our need – our craving, even – to make space meaningful, to articulate the realms in which we spend our lives as domains of contextualized aesthetic definition, where we respond to the very shape of the spatial envelopes in which we live and function – and which respond to us. It’s what architecture is supposed to do, but in all but rare exceptions doesn’t.

Lyla Rye does.

By Gil McElroy

Detail, Frank Stella, K.144, 2013. ABS RPT with stainless steel. 80 x 97 x 53 in. (203.2 x 246.4 x 134.6 cm). Collection Martin Z. Margulies. © 2015 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

During the first Inside 3D Printing conference at the Javits Center in New York City in 2013, scores of vendors and speakers showed up to discuss the various applications of the technology. Focused on the consumer, as opposed to larger events like RAPID, greater emphasis was placed on what could be done at the desktop level of 3D printing. Some speakers showed off the applications of various industries—from engineering, to fashion, to culinary arts—with a mind on how that could trickle down into everyday home use. Most fine art examples of the application appeared limited to custom jewelry and baubles, with perhaps one notable exception. During a lecture of his work in yacht designs and aerosystems, one presenter—an engineer named Igal Kaptsan—slipped in some examples of work he was doing for Frank Stella.

Frank Stella, K.144, 2013. ABS RPT with stainless steel. 80 x 97 x 53 in. (203.2 x 246.4 x 134.6 cm). Collection Martin Z. Margulies. © 2015 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

 

It may surprise some to learn the painter who eased Abstract Expressionism into Minimalism is using 3D printing in his creative output. However, Frank Stella has used additive manufacturing in his work for more than a decade: a natural progression from his relief paintings of the 1970s. “He doesn’t think of it as a technological break through,” remarked Michael Aupig, Chief Curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and curator of Stella’s 2015 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art, which runs through February 7, 2016. Aupig notes that Stella has been using such technology since the 1990s. “It is an expedient kind of pencil.”

While Stella’s oeuvre seems defined by geometry, for a guy who once told David Hockney he couldn’t draw, it seems less likely he would be working with 3D-software. For millennia master artists have been working with assistants, so it should be no surprise that Stella has a design team assisting him. One of the key team members is Kaptsan, and before meeting Stella he had never heard of him.

Frank Stella, K.144, 2013. ABS RPT with stainless steel. 80 x 97 x 53 in. (203.2 x 246.4 x 134.6 cm). Collection Martin Z. Margulies. © 2015 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

 

Born in Moldova. Igal Kaptsan was raised and educated in Israel, where he received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, and a master’s degree in information technology.  In 1998, Kaptsan moved, with his family, to the United States spending a number of years designing aerospace systems and developing engineering software for various computer-aided CAD & PLM (product lifecycle management) design companies.

In 2003, Kaptsan began consulting for Francis Design in the United Kingdom, helping them convert their yacht design process from surface design to parametric design, which allowed the company greater ease for customization. The design firm also dealt with architectural projects, and late in 2003 the owner of the company, Martin Francis, introduced Kaptsan to Frank Stella and Veronika Schmid, an architect and key member of the Stella team who oversees the fabrication and installation of Stella’s completed projects. The introduction resulted in Kaptsan consulting on a project that, three years later, became “Frank Stella on the Roof,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. After meeting a few times in London, Kaptsan recalled, “one day Frank asked me where I lived. I told him I lived in Philadelphia. And he responded, “Why are we meeting in London? I live in New York!”.

Meeting regularly in Stella’s New York studio, Kaptsan quickly identified that the working methodologies for artists and engineers differed. “My working process was, if you give me the requirements and the dimensions, I can design the object. With Frank, I had no clue what he wanted.” Stella’s three-story studio was full of stuff. To Kaptsan, none of it had functional meaning: a contrast to his years of creating objects with functional purposes supported by investments. With that mindset, their first two years of working together could best be described as rigid. Kaptsan required more detailed instructions to try to comprehend what Stella wanted to achieve. Then, Kaptsan had a minor accident: he used a design method that generated an unexpected result. “The shape looked interesting and I showed it to Frank. And he liked it. So that’s when Frank said, “show me everything you do. Don’t be tied into the requirements I give you.””

Frank Stella, K.144, 2013. ABS RPT with stainless steel. 80 x 97 x 53 in. (203.2 x 246.4 x 134.6 cm). Collection Martin Z. Margulies. © 2015 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

 

Over the course of an interview, Kaptsan gave me a glimpse of his working process online, and opened a past project, along with a series of screen captures. (A similar example can be found on YouTube) Starting with the shape of a disc, he used the software to punch a hole through its center, followed by several cuts radiating from the center like the teeth of a circular saw blade. With the software he can asymmetrically inflate and deflate the various segments, and experiment further with bending and twisting each section. “A box: you’re eye can understand how a box was built. Looking at this, your eye can’t.” The process is further complicated when two geometries are interplayed. These shapes get perforated, intersected, smashed together, and subtracted from one another, leaving an impression like a body pressed against memory foam. In the end, the final form possesses enough variety within its surfaces and shapes that it would be difficult to reverse engineer. With each significant step, Kaptsan saves a copy of the file: a working process contrary to his engineering background. As an engineer, if a client wanted X, Kaptsan delivered X. For Stella, he delivers a whole alphabet, complete with ligatures, and punctuation.

Frank Stella, K.144, 2013. ABS RPT with stainless steel. 80 x 97 x 53 in. (203.2 x 246.4 x 134.6 cm). Collection Martin Z. Margulies. © 2015 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

 

To produce the work, Kaptsan knows 3D printing isn’t the only option available to Stella. “When I start producing the final work, I know which machines work best with which materials.” That doesn’t eliminate speculation: In one instance, Kaptsan thought glass would be the best solution, and asked around to see who could make it in glass. Everyone said no. “Since I am an engineer I don’t take no for an answer.” As a result, he learned how to blow glass, creating elegant vessels with a variety of size and form. “I’ve been blowing glass for seven years. And in that time I have learned that this shape cannot be made in glass,” Kaptsan admits. “But I learned a new skill!”

Blowing glass is not the only skill he has learned. In his years working with Stella, Frank showed him how to look at art. “Before I would walk past it and think it was useless. Why would I spend time looking at it?” Today, Kaptsan spends a lot of time looking: learning from nature: photographing his discoveries. “It serves a purpose in my mind now. An aesthetic purpose. A beauty purpose. It requires your mind to think how it was created, and what it represents.” Kaptsan uses his engineering to make art; Stella has engineered the artist.

By John Anderson

Perfect Forms – Horizontal Handwork

Barry X Ball’s jammed schedule includes the unveiling of a huge commission in Europe in November, but he took time out to show me his huge studio and to discuss his reimagining of Umberto Boccioni’s 1913 Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, which Ball has named Perfect Forms. “First I 3-D scanned one of the posthumous bronzes in Switzerland. Then we re-sculpted every curve to make it the Ferrari of Boccionis. It took about two years to re-sculpt it using ZBrush and other programs.” Barry X Ball’s work has been in numerous exhibitions, including a major show in Venice in conjunction with the 2011 Venice Biennale. He is also busy overseeing the creation of a new state-of-the-art 17,000-square-foot studio complex in Brooklyn scheduled to be completed in 2016.  It will be the only comprehensive high-tech stone sculpture studio in the world dedicated to one artist’s work.  Ball and architect Andrew Berman (recent PS1 additions, the Sculpture Center, etc.,) have designed a unique building and garden with a strong aesthetic that will contain everything for creating advanced stone sculptures: a digital sculpting studio, massive-scale CNC cutting / milling machines, gallery, metal shop, wood shop, hand-carving studios, a sandblasting room, twin 20-ton bridge cranes, good work facilities for 20+ assistants, roof gardens, art storage, an outdoor stone yard, and more.  This supplements Ball’s also-new satellite facility in New Haven which houses, according to Ball, “one of the largest, most accurate multi-axis CNC stone mills ever produced.” This six-axis CNC machine with diamond tooling is about 30 x 20 x 15 feet in size and includes a water filtration system to carry away the stone dust.[i]

Computer Controlled Stone Milling Machine – Installation

 

At Ball’s current Williamsburg studio, I learned more about his stone-crafting processes and viewed many new sculptures in varied states of completion. My main mission, however, was to witness the parts of the process of making one sculpture. Ball has fifteen assistants, each with special skills sets, and he has already given me six folders filled with some of the twenty versions of his sculpture Perfect Forms along with dozens of sculpture folders, many of which appear on his website barryxball.com. The Perfect Forms folders show work in different scales from 21” to 325” tall and in materials including gold and mirror-polished stainless steel.  At the studio, he showed me Perfect Forms made from rare Belgian black marble that had been completed the day before my visit.

Perfect Forms (rendering) – Belgian Black Marble – Original Scale

 

Here are the basic steps:

Step 1. Select the art work. Perfect Forms is Barry X Ball’s reinterpretation of Boccioni’s 1913 sculpture.  Boccioni was dragged to death by a horse in 1916 during World War I – before his art was cast into bronze. Later bronze casts of Boccioni’s sculpture are at MoMA, The Metropolitan Museum, the Tate, etc. Ball chose one of these posthumous bronzes from a collection in Switzerland for his 360-degree digital scan (a non-contact process).

Step 2. Computer modeling. For over two years, Ball and his team of artists and computer engineers adjust the 3-D scans to heighten the movement, the majesty, and the other characteristics of the original work. They make rapid prototyped models to cross-check their digital work.  Further refinement of the digital sculpture is done based on analysis of these physical models.  Once this refinement is complete, the sculpture is ready to be realized in a more permanent, costly material.

Perfect Forms – Original Scale Layout

 

Step 3. Select the stone. This work’s Belgian black marble was quarried in Wallonia, southern Belgium outside of Brussels. It is the only black marble in the world with no venation, according to Ball. A two-ton block has been used to create the final 700-pound sculpture, meaning that 3300 pounds of marble gets vaporized during the carving process.

Step 4. Cut the block into the rough dimensions of the sculpture.

Step 5. Lay out the figure on the block.

Step 6. Mill the bottom of the stone block and add holes for mounting and alignment on the CNC machine.

Step 7. Insert stainless steel threaded inserts that will later be used to mount the sculpture onto its permanent base.

Precision Rotary Table with Vacuum Block

 

Step 8. Create a vacuum jig out of stone for the rotary table of the CNC machine.

Step 9. Mount and align the sculpture block on the vacuum jig within the CNC machine.

Step 10. CNC-cut the stone with diamond and carbide tooling, cooled by water. Over about four days, the rough form emerges.

Step 11. Slower milling work, over a couple of months. If needed, reinforce any fault lines, fissures, or cracks by boring holes and inserting high strength fiberglass rods, which have an expansion co-efficient equivalent to stone.  Ball notes, “If you choose only “perfect” stones that have to be consistent, they are generally boring. I often respond to the stone and alter a sculpture to best utilize its natural features.”

Step 12. Mount the milled sculpture in a crate specially engineered to safely cradle it.

Perfect Forms Original Scale – Figure Emerging from Block

 

Step 13. Transport the sculpture to New York for further handwork and finishing.

Step 14. Use specially designed armatures to lay the artwork on its side so the bottom can be finished.

Step 15. Create a permanent ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) plastic base layer to cushion the bottom of the stone.

Step 16. Attach the ABS to the bottom of the stone with UHB (ultra-high bond) adhesive.

Step 17. Flip the sculpture upright and work on it vertically.

Step 18. Refine the surface of the sculpture with a variety of hand and power tools.  At this stage the hand carvers remove the milling lines left by the CNC machine.  They also refine all the edges and details.

Step 19. Polish the surface. A team of three to four people polish the sculpture for over 3000 hours, bringing it up to a glassy, mirror finish.

Step 21. Wash the sculpture.

Perfect Forms Original Scale – Roughing Pass Complete

 

Step 22. Mask the polish and use ultra-fine sandblasting on all un-polished surfaces to make the surface matte, silky, and non-directional. Eliminate all evidence of traditional handwork.

Step 23. Remove the masking and wash the sculpture to remove any sand or grit.

Step 24. Impregnate the sculpture with resin to protect the stone, prevent oily fingerprints, and make it more dust and dirt-resistant.

Step 24.  Remove the excess resin with cotton wadding and cloth.

Step 25. Mount the sculpture on its permanent base.

Step 26. The sculpture is finished.

One studio room contains second and third generation models for other iterations of Perfect Forms. For Ball, Perfect Forms achieves a fourth dimension “where Boccioni would have wanted it to go in his dreams.” The gleaming form towers above me, yet cascades around itself. Its gleaming curves and angles form a modern masterpiece – the handwork far exceeds what even Bernini and Borromini devoted to their masterworks.

Ball is generous as an artist, and he loves to talk about his influences and his processes.  I reveal here a rendering of his solid gold portrait head of Prince Albert II – Barry X Ball flies to Monaco in November for the unveiling of the finished work, to be permanently installed at the Palace, on The Sovereign Prince’s Day.  He has an even bigger gold commission flowing his way. Needless to say, a unique gold sculpture like this is worth more than its weight in gold.

Prince Albert II of Monaco Portrait Sculpture Rendering

 

By Jan Garden Castro

[i] All factual data is from Castro conversations and emails with Barry X Ball in 2015. See also Castro review of Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital and the video link with a gold version of Perfect Forms

See more about Barry X Ball processes here and here

Bad Neighbour, oak, pine, fir and birch veneer, resin, 2014. Photo by Richard Winchell

It’s not the most profound thing to say that we humans like the look of things. The whole notion of doing things like “getting to the heart of the matter,” or seeking out the “essence of things” is really just a load of philosophical bollocks, don’t you think? We are visual, aural and tactile beings that seem to prefer to skim along the surface, take in the touchy-feely-smelly-tasty-noisy patinas of the world. We do seem largely estranged from seeking meaning in and from depth – even if it were indeed possible.

So we do tend to get excited about patinas of all sorts, don’t we? Our whole notion of beauty, when you come right down to it, is built around surface appeal, around superficial attractiveness. There are of course whole industries that have risen around this, endlessly marketing the facades of things to us. And even if at some “deeper” aesthetic level, we might find ourselves, say, looking close-up at the brushstrokes of a painting, wanting to comprehend how this accumulation coalesces into an aesthetic whole, in the end it’s still all about surface stuff.

Okay, so perhaps I’m stretching things a bit, but I have my reasons. They’re twofold, actually: Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky.

What leaf, what mushroom? , brass and aluminum foil, glue, 2014. Photo by Richard Winchell

 

Canadian artists both, amongst their larger aesthetic efforts (which includes photography), they’ve built a body of sculptural work aesthetically centered on the object as little more than a thing of patinas. Literally. Both are MFA graduates from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and have collaborated for years. The appropriately titled Veneers is the body of work in question, one that is relatively recent, and, well, truly empty at the core.

Take me at my word, for Weppler and Mahovsky have constructed aesthetic artefacts that, while having a mimetic, outward resemblance to everyday objects, are in fact utterly superficial. They are truly nothing more than fragile constructions of veneers, that thin wooden stuff so often used in the making of furniture to disguise, for instance, an inexpensive material beneath (after all, it’s the surface that counts, right?). Their work literally encompasses absence, void, for inside there is nothing there.

Hanging Up My Boots, copper, patina solution, 2014. Photo by Richard Winchell

 

Here’s one: The Visitors (all works referred to are 2014). It’s a wooden door, typically exhibited as an object resting on the gallery floor leaning up against a wall. Seemingly comprised of multiple boards arranged vertically and held together with a couple of horizontal elements, it’s actually entirely made of veneers taken from (of all things) wine casks used in the aging of Scotch whisky (Glenfiddich, to be precise). From these thin shavings, Weppler and Mahovsky painstaking recreated wooden boards and the consequent artefactual door sculpture, a truly fragile thing not of any real strength against the elements but merely aping the appearance of such.

Bad Neighbour takes this to the extreme. It’s a self-supporting sculpture – a fence, really, complete with posts and vertical boards mounted along its length. Pretty non-descript and ordinary. But it’s a rickety looking thing; boards are cracked, longitudinal wooden patches (representations of hollow doors, actually) have been applied in places, and there are even lean-to boards helping hold it all up, set to offer this artefact a bit more of the support it clearly appears to need. And oh yeah: there’s a four-drawer cabinet attached on one side as well.

Bad Neighbour, oak, pine, fir and birch veneer, resin, 2014. Photo by Richard Winchell

 

I’m doing the work a descriptive injustice; it’s far richer, far more aesthetically nuanced than I can possibly convey or connote. The point is that it’s all, of course, a sham, for everything here is insubstantial, again made entirely of veneers assembled to represent objects of substance and integrity – to stand in place of, to merely visually suggest, the real thing. Only the representation of the hollow-frame door has any trueness to its subject. The central tenet, here, is the evacuation of the metaphorical meat of things.

In an extension of this approach toward representation of the object, Weppler and Mahovsky did a series of pieces that could be likened to the shells of displaced objects.

What leaf, what mushroom?, comprises for all intents and purposes a dessicated sculptural birdcage, seemingly about to collapse into itself, and a shopping cart, which has already done just that, lying virtually flattened on the gallery floor. It’s as if Weppler and Mahovsky carefully gutted these artefacts of their “essences,” leaving behind empty and dead husks collapsing under their own weight. Hanging Up My Boots is titularly literal: a pair of high-top boots hanging by their laces from a hook on the wall. But these “boots” are shells, actually made of single sheet of thin, patinated copper foil. So too Rotten Squash (Living Inside This Shell), a floor-mounted piece comprising a ring of squashes, connective vines, and garden stakes (and, for oddly added measure, a single coat hanger), again all made from a single sheet of the same copper foil.

Rotten Squash (living inside this shell), copper, patina solution, 2014. Photo by Richard Winchell

 

So Weppler and Mahovsky have created a body of marrowless sculptural artefacts, empty vessels, as it were. Which brings to the fore a possible interpretive stance, one born of the practice of ceramics and the realm of the vessel in which clay materially articulates and gives utile shape to the void that is the very point of the exercise.

Emptiness, of course, has its uses, can become the space we fill with intention, purpose, thought, wishes, fears – an absence in which we can aesthetically invest. As creatures adept at pattern recognition, we’re also pretty damn good at finding (or even creating) meaning where none may be overtly present. So tucked away beneath the thin, fragile, patinated surfaces of the recent sculpture of Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky might be just such space, roomy enough for meaning to be wrought.

On second thought, maybe we are pretty good at looking beneath the surface of things.

Yes?

By Gil McElroy

Trio in a Box, nylon Spinnaker, 2006.

Max Streicher’s art is lighter than air.

Okay, that’s literally not true. The work of this Toronto-based sculptor is decidedly comprised of stuff, made of things. It’s artefactual. It has weight and mass. So what I’m trying to employ, here, is a metaphor, for Max Streicher’s art is indeed lighter than air.

All that being said, then, I also need to say that Streicher’s work definitely tends toward the large-scale. His pieces are enormous. But they really aren’t about their mass, which in any event is rather negligible rated against their scale. They are, though, all about volume – which is considerable. And most certainly about space. Oh, and they’re representational to boot.

Stuck Unicorn, recycled vinyl, 2003. Kunstalle Erfurt, Germany. Photo courtesy of Kunsthalle Erfurt.

 

They’re inflatables, works temporarily shaping aesthetic space, objects blown full of air to give them momentarily important shape and volumetric substance. Like Lamentation, the first of Streicher’s works I saw firsthand back near the narrow end of the millennium. It comprises an installation of five enormous white swans made of Tyvek – you know, that white building material used to wrap the exteriors of the plywood shells of newly built homes just before insulation and siding are put up. Streicher used this stuff to fabricate the volumetric bodies of these sculptural creatures (as well as for many of his other works). And a “lamentation,” by the by, is one of the collective nouns used to describe a group of swans.

Their long necks extend upward to the gallery ceiling, their heads actually the fans that keep these sculptural bodies inflated and fully volumetric. They’re surprisingly un-static; by switching the fans on and off causing the bodies to slightly deflate before reinflation, Streicher introduces motion in to the aesthetic scheme of things; these artefactual birds rub and bump up against one another, rocking slightly in the crowded confines of the space.

Lamentation, Tyvek, fans, 1996, Southern Alberta Art Gallery

 

In other pieces, motion is less of a concern. Maybe not surprisingly, Streicher has a thing for clouds, and has worked with them in a number of installations. Like with Architecture of Cloud, for instance, a piece, as it was installed at the Art Gallery of Hamilton in Ontario back in 2010, in which tendril-like cloud formations (again, made of Tyvek and given shape via electric fans) seemingly tumble down a gallery wall and onto the floor. Or Alto Cumulus, another cloud work, this one brilliantly installed suspended above a university pool in Toronto. Or Cloud, a piece shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario and which comprised an enormous, soaring cumulus cloud and which was hollow within, permitting visitors to enter its interior space.

Though representational, Streicher’s cloud pieces of course verge on the abstract. In a decidedly more representational vein, he’s worked with the figures of both animals and humans. Trio in a Box comprises three 1:1 scale human figures (fashioned of nylon), lying prone on the ground, legs splayed. From the navel of each extends a hose, all of which meet in a cardboard box set in the middle of the trio and in which is the fan that gives the work its literal shape, these figures their presence. Rather unnervingly (and unintentionally) akin to one of the rock band Pink Floyd’s inflatable pigs used during concerts, Stuck Unicorn is partial, the forward half of the mythical beast, emerging from (well, stuck in) a the rooftop dormer window of a lovely old German building, as if fully engaged in making the transition from the imaginary to the real, from the dream to a thing of substance and aesthetic wonder.

Alto Cumulus, Tyvek, fans, 2006, Hart House, University of Toronto; Photo Credit, Gordon Belray

 

Streicher, originally from Alberta, has been exhibiting work since the late 1980s after graduating with a Master of Fine Arts degree from York University in Toronto, and his entire career arc has been built around the possibilities of the inflatable. But what is aesthetically central about these pieces is the cognizance in them of entropy, of the third law of thermodynamics – essentially, that things fall apart, that all is, in a very real way, flux. Impermanence is a central truth that, as a species, we seem to rail against, and in a very real way, strive against with art, attempting to make permanence out of what is most decidedly transitory and ephemeral. We want to leave our mark.

Max Streicher’s work (available at maxstreicher.com) will have none of it. The fans will shut down, the figures and shapes will inevitably deflate, becoming really little more than the disorderly skins of things, a heap of stuff with little aesthetic interest in and of itself. In a very decided way, the magic in his work is its ephemerality, and in a very decided way that’s precisely the point. Clouds disperse, people and horses pass away, unicorns exist only in imaginary ways…. The aesthetic point is powerful in the very fact of its transitory nature – intense and concomitantly fleeting.

Being is momentary.

It’s lighter than air.

By Gil McElroy

Showtime Tower. Courtesy the artist.

Brooklyn-based artist Wade Schaming spent the month of August as an artist-in residence at the Museum of Human Achievement in Austin. The Museum of Human Achievement, also known as MOHA, is a multi-disciplinary arts space located in a warehouse (previously a sex toy factory) on the quickly changing east side of the city. During his time at MOHA, Schaming made and presented a series of found object sculptures using his own particular system of collection, arrangement, and ideological construction.

Shine Tower. Courtesy the artist.

 

Schaming chooses to arrive at his residencies without art making supplies; instead he uses only found objects from the space and surrounding area. In this regard MOHA was the perfect site, being a rambling and ever-changing experimental warehouse located in Canopy, a larger creative complex of galleries, studios, and fabrication spaces. Rife with unused and discarded items, the complex provided a wellspring of materials.

Schaming’s found objects are altered as little as possible- rarely cleaned and never physically changed from the state in which he finds them. Stacking and nestling are his primary tools instead of saws or hammers: no fasteners of any kind to be found. His sculptures are made up of collections of objects but once they are finished he considers each mass to be an autonomous sculpture in its own right, not fragments that make a whole but instead a complete and fixed object. They become ideologically attached with his decision to call a sculpture finished. This also relates to the importance of photography in the work- once a sculpture is photographed it can no longer be altered; it has cemented itself in the world. He calls them towers, relating to architecture and their overwhelmingly vertical appearance. Categorizing them as towers also changes the way that his sculptures orient themselves in the world, the same way that the arrangement of the work close to the wall shows the sculptures with a clearly delineated front and back.

Dolly Tower. Courtesy the artist.

 

Attending residencies has become integral to Schaming’s work since graduating from the School of Visual Arts in 2010. As an artist working in Brooklyn, space is at a premium and several years ago he decided that his sculpture making practice would be better suited to residencies than a traditional studio practice. This has opened up his ability to work larger and with a greater sensitivity to space. Using his experience in Austin and the specific objects that he chose at MOHA- church pews, a piano, wooden stairs, chairs, and chicken wire among many others- Schaming built a series of sculptures called “Texas Towers” as a responsive action to place.

To see more of Schaming’s work please visit wadeschaming.com.

By Gracelee Lawrence

Additivism Manifesto, courtesy of Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke

In creating a thing, there is implicit a dream of making it appear spontaneously. Apart from the detailed processes of craft that we might call the act of sculpture, there is a small part of the mind that somehow hopes the artwork or object might be conjured into existence from nowhere, as if replicated directly from the imagination.

So when we learn about 3D printing, there is perhaps a sense in which this is what we imagine. Like a paper printer that replicates the screen, that replicates a piece of paper, shouldn’t a 3D printer replicate the imagination, that replicates the world? Anything that the mind can conceive, can come out of the print nozzle and into existence. Whether furniture, food, fashion, or firearms, all you have to do is click “print.”

Additivism Manifesto, courtesy of Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke

 

That isn’t the case, of course. 3D printing is a form of manufacturing like anything else, although highly custom. Many prefer to call it “additive manufacturing,” because this encompasses a range of technologies, from the consumer-grade desktop models that lay down layers of melted plastic, to the laser sintering processes that are used to construct expensive aerospace engine components. Additive manufacturing is not magic, like a science-fiction replicator that can make anything so long as you hit the print button, but uses a variety of techniques to add material little by little, rather than sawing, carving, drilling, or cutting it away.

This doesn’t mean that there is no magic in the process. The Additivist Manifesto, and the forthcoming Additivist Cookbook written and organized by Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke seek to explore that sense of spontaneity and power that the limited technology of 3D printing can provide. The Manifesto proposes self-conscious elaboration of this urge: “We want to encourage, interfere, and reverse-engineer the possibilities encoded into the censored, the invisible, and the radical notion of the 3D printer itself. To endow the printer with the faculties of plastic: condensing imagination within material reality.”

Material Speculation: ISIS, King Uthal, by Morehshin Allahyari, courtesy of the artist

 

What if that urge to physically replicate the imagination was not just used to create new designs of end tables, or produce endless consumer trinkets? What if it could be used to remake ourselves? The call for submissions to the Cookbook speculates that one day we might think of our bodies as flexible as we now consider our identities, and exploring additive manufacturing processes might help us get there. What if it could be used to remake history, as in Allahyari’s own recent Material Speculation: ISIS work, that replicates historical artifacts destroyed by militant groups in Iraq? What sort of objects might additivism create, that are not replications, but are things that have never existed before? Perhaps there are ghosts, glitches, and flaws in these new design and fabrication mechanisms that will take on a life of their own, like our ruins, cracks, fissures, and flaws have in other artistic mediums.

Material Speculation: ISIS, Lamassu, by Morehshin Allahyari, courtesy of the artist

 

New technology most often changes society by not improving current structures, but by creating new ones. We know this well: it is the idea behind the famous story of Henry Ford saying that if he asked consumers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse. But what will new 3D printing technology systems do to sculpture? We tend to think of aesthetics as something more vital, more implicit to humanity than our social structures. Provocatively, the Additivism Manifesto suggests: “The Beyond now begs us to be moulded to its will, and we shall drink every drop as entropic expenditure, and reify every accursed dream through algorithmic excess. For only Additivism can accelerate us to an aftermath whence all matter has mutated into the clarity of plastic.” In what sense this will be true, or simply a parable of humans inclination to believe in their imaginations, only the future knows.

By Adam Rothstein

Steven Laurie, Handheld Rubber Burner Performance

I’ve read that there are really only a handful of places left in the world where you can encounter a truly natural soundscape, one not impinged upon, and radically reshaped, by the aural residue of human artefacts.

That’s very sad but not entirely surprising news. We’re a very noisy species, we humans. In a suburban area on a warm summer evening, evidence of our presence likely takes the form of the clarion call of lawnmowers noisily doing their thing; in a more urban setting, maybe the lower frequency sounds and vibrations of passing streetcars and subways tell of human invention, and social and economic need.

But always – and I do mean always – the primary sonic re-shaper of our soundscape is the automobile. Its ubiquity makes it so. From the hiss of tires on wet pavement, to fingers-on-chalkboard sound of the car alarm, to the deep, throaty roar of a high performance engine (and specialized muffler that shapes its sound), the automobile in all its incarnations is the unfortunate “gold standard” of our aural world. Silence is long gone as background. It is the sound of the car against which we now aurally measure the quality (or lack thereof) of our sonic world.

Steven Laurie, Tamper. 3D Digital Prototype Model.

 

And no, I didn’t forget to mention that unforgettable activity of “burning rubber,” the squeal of tires of a rapidly accelerating vehicle burning its imprint (intentionally or not) onto the surface of a road.  I left it for last because here’s where I bring in Canadian sculptor Steven Laurie. Appropriately, he’s originally from the city of Oshawa, just to the east of Toronto, long one of the centers of Canadian automotive manufacturing. He’s also a graduate of the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto, and received his MFA from the University of Western Ontario, just down the road in London, Ontario. His sculptural work runs aesthetic rings around our fascination – even obsession – with the automobile.

I specifically link him to the car-based activity of burning rubber because of a body of work he his “mark-making machines”. Like Handheld Rubber Burner. It’s a small sculptural work comprising a simple steel framework (essentially two hand-holds, front and back) painted a bright orange and which holds a small gasoline engine, a fuel tank, and a chromed exhaust pipe all powering (by a motorcycle-like chain) a small rubber wheel. It’s utile, a hand-tool of sorts (think of a powerful masonry saw, which it resembles), and Laurie employs it in performance pieces in which he loudly (and odorously) burns “donuts” – circular marks – onto a paved surface, standing in the middle of the circle, holding it at either end, manipulating the small machine around him as the engine roars away powering the rubber wheel, leaving what are, for all intents and purposes, black skid marks behind.

Steven Laurie, Donut. Machine Performance

 

It’s exhibited as a static sculpture in gallery and museum settings (Laurie has shown his work across Canada, in the U.S. and in Europe), alongside pieces like Static Revving Machine. It’s Laurie’s automotive take on an exercise machine. Using stuff you would buy off the rack at any automotive supply store, he’s assembled a sculptural work you can participate in and with: running boards, a metal seat at one end of a steel frame upon which you can precariously perch, a powerful engine – all shiny chrome at the other, and a accelerator pedal. Oh, and even a courtesy mat set on the floor in front of it. Something to wipe your feet on.

And the point of it all is power. Seated within the work, the motor can be revved, making a lot of the kind of automotive noise we’ve become accustomed to – if somewhat exasperated by – from  young men (and I do intend the gender reference) in their vehicles, showing off, demonstrating the keen edge of what something like testosterone does to a human brain.

The difference here, though, is simple yet profound. Static Revving Machine accomplishes absolutely nothing beyond sonic irruption and exhaust fumes contaminating the air. It’s a tool, of sorts, but not a utile one. One cannot of course drive away in the end. Just exercise temporary power over the soundscape courtesy the usual movement of a foot against the pedal of an accelerator.

Many of Laurie’s sculptures are like that – utile but useless. His mark-making machines may not accomplish anything profound, but they have a useful utility – of a sort. But Static Revving Machine is part of a collective group of sculptures he calls “sound-making machines. Wild Thing is another small, handheld artefact based on a chainsaw. But in place of the cutting chain there is a carburetor. Wild Thing may start and sound like a chainsaw, but all it accomplishes is the making of noise and the production of exhaust. So too Boom Tube, a small floor work comprising a gasoline-powered motor, long, chromed exhaust tube, and a foot pedal. Placed on the ground or floor in front of a chair, it can be uselessly revved to everyone’s annoyance.

Steven Laurie, Stationary Revving Machine.

 

Laurie is, of course, aesthetically commenting on the gadgets and things that seem to excite an awful lot of men (and certainly more than a few women): machines that make a lot of noise while accomplishing small tasks but which denote the smallness of personal power exercised on an environment comprised of everything (and everyone) within hearing range. He’s simply stripped away the tasks, the marginal usefulness of a lot of the devices on which his works are based, and shows them for what they are: infantile toys.

But there’s something more profound at work here, too. It’s not merely the infantilism of so much of this class of stuff that he’s pointing out. It’s also the sonic reconstruction of our world that’s been based on it. As a society and a culture, we’ve largely accepted our automotively shaped soundscape as the price paid for the economic model we’ve embraced. And Steven Laurie wants us to take note of that, look and actually hear again what the aesthetics of the motor actually comprises.

That’s deeper.

By Gil McElroy

Guttersnipe, 2012. Photo by artist.

A couple of pictures showed up on a Facebook page in late June. Images of the human body. Or parts of them, anyway: a torso and arm of a male figure in one, an indeterminate hand (left) in the other. While they were au naturel, they were also, paradoxically, clothed – in a way. With powdered sugar, to be exact. And not just randomly dusted with the stuff; there was pattern evident in the application.

Lace. The complex patterns and utterances of lace.

These sugar images are ephemeral pieces by Canadian sculptor Cal Lane, and are consequent upon a couple of earlier works that date back ten years: Powdered Tires, in which she spread sugar on old tires the treads of which had been reworked into floral patterns, and then rolled them across the floor to create an impression; and her Dirt Lace installations, in which she would spread a section of lace on a gallery floor, brush dirt across it, and remove the lace to leave its negative image behind, then repeat the process so as to form a large grid.

Top Left: Dirt Lace 2014, ongoing. Image courtesy of Cal Lane
Top Right: Laced, 2015. Image courtesy of Cal Lane
Bottom Left: Laced, 2015. Image courtesy of Cal Lane
Bottom Right: Dir Lace, 2014, ongoing. Image courtesy of Cal Lane

But it’s actually not the temporary or intentionally ephemeral I want to speak to, not sugar and dirt. Rather, it’s a far less transitory aesthetic, one shaped of metal, and by fire.

Like lace, much of Lane’s aesthetic concerns what is not there. It’s about absence, about the all-important gaps: the metaphorical zeroes to the world’s many ones, the nothings that give all the somethings context and meaning. In much of her sculptural work, Lane accomplishes this with the controlled application of fire and heat to things metal. She’s a welder by background, trained in the field in the mid-1990s after getting a diploma in the fine arts in her native British Columbia. She then moved from one side of the North American continent to the other and to the port city of Halifax on Canada’s east coast, where she obtained her BFA from the legendary Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. From there, she went southwest to the State University of New York for her MFA, all the while exhibiting the work she produced in exhibitions in North America, Europe and Australia.

And that work focused on the articulation of careful aesthetic subtractions from existent things. I proffer, by way of example, a piece entitled Five Shovels. Done in 2005, it’s simple and elegant: a series of store-bought shovels, the steel blades of which have been painstakingly cut away with a plasma torch to leave behind the intricate and fine traceries of floral patterns. Wheelbarrow, done two years later, reiterates her approach: remove, cut away the extraneous, use emptiness to contour and shape and re-define somethingness, and transform a utile artefact – a tool, essentially – into something totally other.

Shipping Container, 2012. Photo by artist.

And it’s not just about the aesthetically appealing and decorative. Lane’s work has social political implications and intentions. Fossil Fuel, a piece from 2009, comprises an old tank that is still in use for storing home heating oil. Lane’s cut away its containing solidity to leave behind the equivalent of lines of latitude and longitude that circumvent its non-earth-like shape, and includes our host planet’s land masses amidst the gridded regularity of the map.  Filigree Car Bombing, from two years previous, is an untidy pile of twisted and broken car part – doors, hood, bumpers, etc. – that she’s worked into with her plasma cutter, burning out a delicate skein of interconnected lace-like lines weaving together the shapes and patterns of flowers and plants, the whole installation then dusted with a lace of dirt. And Ammunition Box from 2011, a wall-hung work, is made up of two of the artefacts, their toxic containment roles effaced by an elimination that leaves them resembling something akin to wrought iron fencing, though Lane has been careful to leave the embossed metal text elements on each, tugging the work semantically back to its awful original use and setting up a powerful tension between what was and what is. As is the case with all her work.

“Pantie Can” 2014

It is, of course, the aesthetic of oppositions that’s going on here, taking one thing and utterly stripping away – even expunging – its conventions, usage(s) and understood meaning(s) and turning it into something diametrically opposite. But Lane is so very very good at employing this conceit with devastatingly spot-on consequences. Her work means. 

Guttersnipe, 2012. Photo by artist.

She’s refined the approach she’s taken with her dirt and sugar lace patterns, transforming the concept into light. Guttersnipe (2012) breathtakingly demonstrates this. Materially, it takes the form of a half-section of large steel pipe – sewer pipe, actually – cut along its length. From it she’s done her cut-away work, leaving behind a wildly intricate landscape filled with tall buildings, bombs, and winged angel-like creatures all caught within and held in place by a complex web of organic curling vines. The work leans against a gallery wall, and within the arced space it creates below itself, she’s installed lights that project shadows of her imagery onto the gallery wall and ceiling, the crispness of shadows nearby becoming blurred and indistinct as they move further away, until the darkness becomes whole.

The same year she created Guttersnipe, Lane was invited to participate in the Sydney Biennale along with several other Canadian artists. Her work was an enormous steel shipping container, painstakingly cut away on three sides so as to transform it into a kind of menagerie, botanical patterns of curling vines or tree limbs (which she extended up beyond the top of the container) populated with birds, rodents and dragon-like creatures, underscored by four-legged animals cavorting about beneath it all.

Lane’s moved beyond the abstractions of lace, now. Pattern alone no longer suffices. Meaningful representation beckons. Where she’ll take it will be interesting to watch, but be assured: it will mean.

By Gill McElroy

Cal Lane was featured in the July/August 2014 issue of Sculpture magazine. You can read the entire article online here. She was also a recipient of the International Sculpture Center’s 2001 Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Awards.

‘Foundling’ Installation. Photo by Liz Lott.

Four the four years of university, I had a summer job working on the grounds maintenance crew – the “garden gang” – of a psychiatric hospital in the city of North Bay, Ontario, about 200 miles north of Toronto.

It was an enormous facility, situated, campus-like, on hundreds of acres carved out of the northern Ontario bush in 1957. Lovely on the exterior – flower beds, gazebos, etc. – the institutional brick complex of interconnected buildings housed the demons that society deemed should be shut away and apart from society, miles away from the city of which it ostensibly was a part. One – or maybe some – of those demons inhabited a person I worked with briefly, and who ended up beating a staff member to death.

Little Flower Sanatorium, ‘The Healing Room’. Photo by Liz Lott.

 

We do that time and again – shut away and separate the ill, I mean, or those who might scandalize society, upset social conventions and challenge prohibitions. Those with mental illness, tuberculosis, leprosy, AIDS – or, once upon a time, those who had committed the cardinal sin of having a child out of wedlock. We’ve been very good at separating and shunning, as if proximity would be contagious, and we’ve excelled at using separation and social isolation as a particularly vile means of punishment.

And this is where Michèle Karch-Ackerman enters the story. A Canadian installation artist with a particular interest in textiles who has lived in a rural part of southeastern Ontario for many years, Ackerman is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design (now OCAD University) in Toronto. She’s exhibited her work widely across Canada, and she’s been the focus of a recent retrospective.

Little Flower Sanatorium, detail of ‘Requirement List’. Photo by Liz Lott.

 

I mention the North Bay psychiatric hospital – now demolished – because in 2010 Ackerman did a month-long residency at the North Bay Regional Health Centre (where psychiatric in-patients now reside) working with hospital patients. From that she created the sculptural gallery installation Little Flower Sanatorium exhibited in North Bay and, more recently, at the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington (VAC) just to the east of Toronto. It evokes the sanitoria once used to house those suffering from tuberculosis, and involves, in part, the creation of a “hospital room” made out of four hundred white handkerchiefs stitched together to form translucent curtains (many of which have been ornamented by Ackerman with “tatting,” a form of lacemaking once used as occupational therapy for tubercular patients) entirely enclosing a small space occupied by a small wooden dresser (on wheels) and a stool. The VAC installation occupied the center of an expansive third-floor gallery loft, and down below in the main gallery spaces on the first floor were the other elements of the exhibition: wall-mounted installations of the items patients would have brought with them to the sanitorium – sleepwear, towels, and a few personal items (like a teddy bear) – and several hundred ceramic plates, all with rose motifs grouped in clusters along two walls, that evoke St. Therese of The Little Flower, the Catholic saint who died of TB.

Little Flower Sanatorium detail of ‘Requirement List’. Photo by Liz Lott.

 

This is what the aesthetics of separation might look like. In Foundling, an earlier installation, Ackerman drew upon a familial source: as the Great Depression took root in the late 1920s, her then-teenage grandmother became pregnant and was institutionalized in a home run by nuns. Her name was taken away and she was forced to wear a black veil and not make eye contact with anyone else. Isolation as punishment. In her installation, Ackerman hung one hundred hand-made sleepers for babies (made from old curtains) in the gallery space, contextualizing them with a long institutional-like table set with a long single line of one hundred tea cups that intentionally echoes Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party. But there is no celebratory joy, here. This is about mourning, loss, and the diminishment of the human spirit. “I work with the ghost world,” Ackerman’s been quoted as saying.

Her work, then, is largely about the social and cultural act of circumscribing, of setting apart that which upsets (or even upends) norms. Out of sight, out of mind. Ghosts. So she literally aesthetically re-places the outcast, the forgotten, the discarded via the intimacy of textiles and those everyday, utile artefacts of the domestic and the household. It’s poignant, even gut-wrenching work. Mournful. Gentle. Compassionate.

Little Flower Sanatorium. Photo by Liz Lott.

 

In 2001, Ackerman stood on a Newfoundland shore and dipped eight small hand-sewn coats into the icy waters of the North Atlantic Ocean. It was about immediacy of grief and loss – the deaths of three young men earlier that year in the same spot as they jumped between ice floes – and, too, about remembrance and recall. The installation Lost Margaret – of which the coats were a part – was based on story in a novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery novel (of Anne of Green Gables fame) about the death of a sea captain’s beloved, and inspired by Montgomery’s personal loss of a child. Those eight coats were part of “Travel Kits for Lost Souls,” which included white knit hats, gloves, sweaters, and even hand-sewn sleeping bags and backpacks. Textiles in the guise of sculptural artefacts, hung suspended at eye level in gallery space.

We can’t help but encounter ghosts.

By Gil McElroy

Check out some of Michèle Karch-Ackerman’s past exhibitions at the Kennedy Gallery, Canadian Clay and Glass Museum, Gallery of Peterborough, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, and the Yukon Arts Centre.

Shadows (vacant lot) – mesh on steel, tallest structure is 27′, 2014. Image courtesy the artist.

The Berlin Wall sits in my desk drawer.

Well, a tiny piece of it, anyway. It’s in a small, zip-locked bag with a certificate of authenticity. I acquired it by correctly answering a question posed on a program broadcast by the shortwave radio station Radio Deutsche Welle in 1989 as the Wall fell, and the two Germanys moved toward reconciliation.

Walls. We’re damn fond of them, and they are of course exceptionally useful in terms of keepings things either in or out. And they have a devastatingly political dimension, as the Berlin Wall so capably demonstrated through the latter part of the twentieth century, and as other political walls – the one separating much of Mexico from the United States, the one separating Israelis from Palestinians, separating Catholics from Protestants in Northern Ireland, etc. – continue to show.

That political aspect can clearly inform sculptural work based around the idea of the wall. And it has with the work of Toronto-based artist Ryan Legassicke.

This is Wood – wood, 16′ long, 1999. Image courtesy the artist.

 So time for full disclosure: I’ve previously worked with Legassicke on a couple of occasions, including his work in a group show I curated back in 2003, and then curating him in a solo exhibition in 2007. Those earlier exhibitions had nothing to do with walls, and indeed, the first had everything to do with a simple bench.

Legassicke has an educational background that cuts across the conventional categories we like to employ – like “fine art” and “craft.” Legassicke originally studied furniture design at Sheridan College just outside of Toronto, a school renowned its design and ceramics programs, amongst others. He moved on to the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary in 2002 to study glass and sculpture, but not before having created the work that brought him to my attention.

This is Wood isn’t a complex piece. Essentially it comprises three separate chunks of soft maple wood – long, lateral slices cut from the trunk of a tree, bark still adhering to their narrow edges – that are assembled together to make a simple bench. One section of wood is set on edge, part of it resting on the floor, and held in position and stabilized with a short vertical piece of wood at one end notched into it at right angles. And the sitting part of the bench comprises another slice of maple set horizontally and itself intersecting at right angles with first long piece. Simple, and yet so much going on. At over four meters in length, it’s a fairly massive work that doesn’t really speak to another quality it contains: it has a certain musicality to it. The wood slab of the seat connected to the rest of the work at but one end means that it can reverberate, like a ruler held along the edge of a table. Okay, maybe it’s not “musical.” Perhaps “proto-musical.”

In 2009 Legassicke received his MFA from SUNY-Buffalo, and it’s here where walls began to come into focus.

Shadows (suburbs) – mesh on steel, tallest structure is 27′, 2014. Image courtesy the artist.

In the early 1970s, in the heyday of the split between East and West, an East German psychiatrist attempted to describe, in an encompassing way, the variety of mental illnesses apparently suffered by his compatriots who had to deal with the monolithic presence of the Berlin Wall on a daily basis. He called it “Wall Disease.”

It’s a concept central to Legassicke’s sculptural work over this, the second decade of the new millennium. In 2011, he installed States of Security/Security States along the outer wall of the former Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, a facility closed at about the same time as “Wall Disease” was first described over forty years ago. It’s a wall-hung work depicting, in 1:1 scale image form, a kind of “penal” sculpture – the sculpture of the wall. Legassicke depicted, in full-scale cross-sections, the walls that separated West from East Berlin, the USA/Mexico Border Fence in Arizona, the Israel West Bank Separation Barrier, the Peace Line Walls of Northern Ireland, and, interestingly, the temporary security fence installed in downtown Toronto during the G20 Summit in 2010 that cordoned off a large chunk of the city core from its inhabitants.

States of Security / Security States – Eastern State Penitentiary. Historic Site, Philadelphia, PA;
tar on mesh, wall, 30’sq., 2012. Image courtesy the artist.

 

Images iterated were soon reiterated, becoming sculptural works, in and of their own right, with Shadows: Wall Disease. These pieces – again, replicating at a 1:1 scale the originals, range in height from the closely human size to tall monoliths that can’t help but evoke the mysterious monoliths of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Legassicke’s aren’t about sparking intelligence and leading humanity away from its cozy nest on earth. They’re about the shape and power of political and social containment. Unlike some of the walls on which they are based, Legassicke’s Shadows have a certain transparency to them; made of metal frames, they’re wrapped in black metal mesh. They obscure the other side of things, but don’t make it unobservable. But they of course carry the meaningful weight of what separation entails. You may see through them, but you certainly can’t touch what’s there.

Legassicke mounted them out-of-doors as part of an exhibition with the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space in New York City in 2014. In the context of the urban garden in which they were shown, black monolithic structures rising amidst (and high above) trees and plants in this small oasis made the pieces even more sinister and disruptive. They uncomfortably intrude into the natural and social milieu of urban place. Legassicke has exhibited them indoors, as well, showing them at the Sculpture Centre in Cleveland last year. Too large to fit inside in the state in which they appear out-of-doors, he laid them on their sides, making the gallery space claustrophobic and crammed, forming a kind of maze through which one must perilously navigate.

Shadows (wall disease) – Sculpture Center, Cleveland, OH;
mesh on steel, digital prints, dimensions variable, 2014. Image courtesy the artist.

 Wherever and however he’s exhibited them, Ryan Legassicke’s walls are true to the intentions of the makers of the originals on which his works are based. And like Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, commissioned for, installed at, and then removed from the Foley Federal Plaza in New York City after a protracted legal battle, Legassicke’s walls transgress and disrupt, aesthetically reshaping spaces – not necessarily in the ways we might want it to occur.

Fences – walls – tend to do that.

By Gil McElroy

For further information, check out www.ryanlegassicke.com

3-D–printed bust of President Obama created by the Smithsonian using 3-D scanning technology
(Photo courtesy of Digital Program Office / Smithsonian Institution)

It’s been nearly a year since President Obama’s 3-D scanned and printed portrait bust was unveiled at the first White House Maker Faire on June 18, 2014. In February 2015, during President’s Day weekend, the bust made a brief appearance at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, where it—along with the 3-D scanned and printed presidential life mask of Mr. Obama, and the set of data used to make the bust and life mask—are now a part of the permanent collection of the museum.

When first unveiled in June 2014, a writer at Fast Company characterized the likeness as “kinda creepy,” commenting that the eyeballs looked “dead.”

That didn’t stop visitors to the National Portrait Gallery from oohing and aahing, or snapping selfies next Obama’s portrait mug. And, as the 3D Digitization Program Officers, Adam Metallo and Vince Rossi, the so-called “laser cowboys” who first proposed the notion of scanning a sitting president pointed out, these are data sets, not an artistic rendering.

The National Portrait Gallery’s Chief Curator, Brandon Fortune, referred to the work of Houdon, who sculpted the portraits of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, amongst others. “When he came to America it was because he wanted to make a life mask. What he didn’t want was for an American artist to make a portrait and send it to him.” From the still and rested features of the facemask, Houdon could translate the features into more animated poses. “There is something to the way a gifted artist works with materials to give the likeness more life and energy.”

3-D–printed bust of President Obama created by the Smithsonian using 3-D scanning technology
(Photo courtesy of Digital Program Office / Smithsonian Institution)

 

Metallo and Rossi didn’t migrate into the 3D Digitization Program Office (DPO) until 2010 and 2011, respectively. Previously, both had worked in the Office of Exhibits Central (OEC), applying traditional skills in sculpture and painting toward the creation of exhibitions. After a little tinkering in 3-D software of ZBrush and Rhino, they wrote grants for OEC to acquire laser scanners and 3D printers to make more accurate models for exhibition.

“One of the first things that Adam and I did was to scan each other’s faces,” recalled Rossi. “It was a fun lunch-time activity.” It wasn’t merely goofing off: such exercises helped them push the boundaries of what they could do with the technology since, “scanning dead immovable objects is a relatively straight forward task.” Amongst the first still objects they scanned were Abraham Lincoln’s hand casts, from the National Museum of American History, in 2009. Once promoted to digitization program officers, their attention broadened from exhibitions to include other Smithsonian interests of research, education, and conservation—and with it an interest to scan the life masks of Abraham Lincoln. As Günter Waibel director of DPO pointed out in a blog post, and numerous news pieces, scanning Lincoln’s life mask was the catalyst to scan the president. “It was a pretty natural step to think about applying this [3D capture] technology in a similar way that Leonard Volk and Clark Mills used plaster with Lincoln,” noted Rossi.

Despite having several state-of-the-art commercial scanners at their disposal, the highest quality image that could be captured the fastest resided on a light stage at the University of Southern California. Designed by Paul Debevec, chief visual officer of the Graphics Laboratory at USC, the light stage has been used to capture the data of dozens of actors for films like Avatar, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, King Kong, and Spiderman 2 & 3.

Debevec was invited to speak about his work at the Smithsonian x 3D Conference  in November 2013, presenting a variety of projects. For those interested in research and conservation, they learned about his virtual restoration of the Parthenon and its sculptures, which was included in broadcasts on the 2004 Olympics and on PBS’s NOVA. But, his presentation soon turned to his work on big budget films in Hollywood.

3-D–printed bust of President Obama created by the Smithsonian using 3-D scanning technology
(Photo courtesy of Digital Program Office / Smithsonian Institution)

 

In the spring, Debevec received an e-mail from Waibel, inquiring of Debevec’s interest to travel back to DC for a scanning project: sometime in the next couple of months. “We had guesses as to who it might be,” noted Debevec, whose team had been building a mobile version of the light stage. “If Günter was asking, it might be someone important.” By late May his team received a phone call indicating a date of June 9, with the President of the United States. “We had four very actively inventive days in our lab over Memorial Day Weekend to finish the presidential scanner,” Debevec recalled.

The mobile light stage presented several design problems. Considering the narrow hallways within parts of the White House, his team had to consider how to rig the equipment to fold and fit in a crate. Their designs limited the stage to 50 light sources, which Debevec found to be poetic, “one for each star on the flag.” But other issues were anticipated due to time constraints within the president’s afternoon schedule: issues concerning camera focus, working in ambient light, and calculations of the right illumination. “With an A list actor we have five–to–ten minutes to adjust cameras and retrain focus,” noted Debevec. “This was a case where that time was not available.” With all of the custom cameras and circuitry, despite numerous trials and test runs—both in California, and while setting up in the White House on June 8 and 9—one thought hung in the back of Debevec’s mind. “On the day when you press the button will the cameras and lights synchronize?”

Well aware of possible hardware and software failures, the Laser Cowboys were prepared with hand-held structured light scanners. In fact, they used two. “mostly to cut down on scan time,” recalled Rossi, “with the added benefit being that if one of the scanners was to fail we’d still be able to get what we needed.” Part of that need arose from a limitation in the design of the light stage, which could only capture the frontal features of the president’s bust. “We made many practice runs in the weeks leading up to the POTUS scan,” Rossi remarked. Arguably, he and Metallo had been making practice runs since they first started scanning their faces over lunch, six years ago.

By John Anderson

Check out this video

David Greenwood (American, b. 1944). Do You Still Love Me?, 1992-1993. Wood, paint, stain, dried plants.
Collection of the Artist. Image courtesy of David Greenwood

Boats have always captured the human imagination, and their associations run deep. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Charon the boatman ferries departed souls across the Acheron River into Tartarus, the Roman underworld. The central nave of the Christian cathedral owes its name to the Latin word navis, meaning ship. Boats were an integral part in Anglo-Saxon and Viking burials; the opening staves of Beowulf recount the elaborate ship-burial of Scyld Scefing, legendary king of the Danes. Multimedia artist David Greenwood’s exhibition Stop Motion, on view through May 17 at Michigan’s Grand Rapids Art Museum, is a witty and playful presentation of the boat and its many connotations.

Having grown up in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Greenwood has been around boats for much of his life, and his art is largely about the tactile physicality of the boat itself. He observes that we grant them human qualities; we generally call them “she.” Indeed, walk through any marina: every boat has a name painted on its stern.

But Greenwood’s sculptures also address universal human emotions and experience. He uses the boat as a metaphor, and his work often eludes clear-cut interpretation. Rather, like an abstract painting by Mark Rothko, his sculptures unobtrusively guide the viewer toward a specific frame of mind, but then let the viewer approach the work on his or her own terms.

David Greenwood (American, b. 1944). Waiting for Redemption, 2004. Wood, paint, stain, shells, mixed media.
Collection of the Artist. Image courtesy of David Greenwood

 

Greenwood infuses his sculptures with subtle humor and irony (starting with the show’s title), which sometimes belies the poignant subject matter his work addresses. Do You Still Love Me presents viewers with a canoe balancing improbably on a small stick, and containing a skeleton lying in repose upon a bed of dried and withered leaves. A kneeling pad in front of the canoe makes the sculpture seem like a sort of shrine. Replete with all the trappings of a traditional vanitas, the decayed body and withered leaves imply the inescapable passage of time. Likely the most straightforward sculpture in the show, Do You Still Love Me touches on the universally human desire to be remembered once we’ve made our crossing over.

His other sculptures are more allusive. Waiting for Redemption depicts a figure desperately clinging to his broken boat, his eyes and head turned heavenward.   Are we observing a desperate man in his final moments, or do we see him just before miraculous deliverance?

David Greenwood (American, b. 1944). Sudden Demise (Why is Timing Everything?), 1987 Wood, stain.
Collection of the Artist. Image courtesy of David Greenwood

 

The GRAM describes Greenwood’s art as realist, and it certainly is, but sculptures like Sudden Demise (Why is Timing Everything?) seem like something straight from the mind of Salvador Dali. And like surrealism, these sculptures are vehicles to tease out associations from our subconscious, which is why each viewer will inevitably walk away from the show having experienced something slightly different. Depending on our own personal journeys, the boat could either be the vessel that leaves us drifting aimlessly, or as for Homer’s Odysseus, the vessel that finally brings us home to Ithaca.

By Jonathan Rinck

Additional information and images can be found on the GRAM’s website: http://www.artmuseumgr.org/art/current-exhibitions/

David Greenwood’s exhibition at GRAM has been extended through June 28, 2015.

Interior with pool. Image courtesy artist.

Let’s be entirely honest, here: our aesthetic experience of sculpture, of work that moves through our world in the time-space continuum of four experiential dimensions (one of time, and three of space), by and large has little to do with the experiential at all. It’s arguable that we rarely actually experience sculpture as it was intended to be.

What we typically encounter in its place, then, is the primacy of the image. Like just about everything else in our world (including our world itself), we experience sculpture second-hand. In books, exhibition catalogues, magazines and journals, on screen…. But right in front of us? Not so much. I mean, really, how many of us have ever experienced/walked upon/touched/tasted Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty? We know it purely photographically. Or Richard Serra’s Shift, located just north of the city of Toronto and one of only two works he did in concrete rather than the Cor-Ten steel that has become his trademark medium. How many of us have trespassed on the private property of the site to go and find it, to walk it, feel beneath our feet its relationship to the landscape of its environment? We know it from its images in books, magazines and blogs – visual reports from the rare few who have sought out an encounter with it.

Exterior with shadow maquette. Image courtesy artist.

 

Or pick any sculptural work – period. Odds are we know it only through the photographic image, the two-dimensional reproduction.

That of course isn’t unique to sculpture. Any work of art at all is usually experienced thusly. And, really, sculpture gets a better crack at things than does, say, painting where thorny issues of correct color reproduction often arise, or a work becomes reduced to little more than a graphic (as could be argued has long been the case with the work of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings).

All of this preamble is by way of talking about the work of Canadian artist Carl Zimmerman. He’s chosen this central issue of the visual availability of sculpture to be the primary pillar in his aesthetic. Zimmerman, in effect, is a sculptor who largely (though not exclusively) works at it once-removed, who cuts to the proverbial chase – to the dominance of the image of the thing, rather than the thing itself.

Exterior with columns maquette. Photo courtesy artist.

 

Zimmerman lives in a relatively remote part of Nova Scotia on Canada’s east coast where he moved after having studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. From the remove of his studio, he’s been generating a series of gallery installations and photo-based works that have absolutely everything to do with the sculptural, and with our experience of space and how it is shaped. A good chunk of that has to do with the aural; with the installations Beach (1997) and Interior with Musical Excerpts (1996), Zimmerman reshaped extant environments – the former a gallery space, the latter an empty office – with the sound of waves crashing on a beach for the one, and brief snippets of Ralph Vaughn Williams’s Symphonia Antarctica for the other. With little visual information to work with (a pair of handmade Art Deco speakers for Beach, and general construction detritrus, including a rolled-up carpet, for Interior…) aural signifiers became enormously important, aesthetically subverting expectations that might have assembled around the few visual cues Zimmerman made available. He was sculpturally shaping space with sound.

But his major bodies of work are built around the visual image. Photography. Lost Hamilton Landmarks (1997), Landmarks of Industrial Britain (2006), and Cold City (2010 – present) each comprise a series of photographs of unbelievably epic architectures, images of the interiors and exteriors of immense structures drawn out of some weird, parallel universe. They’re akin to the kind of mind-bogglingly vast structures envisaged by French architect Étienne-Louis Boullée in the eighteenth century, or what Albert Speer had planned for the triumphant Third Reich in the twentieth. The few figures in them are dwarfed by the vast and cavernous spaces of these Art Deco-inspired structures.

Exterior with shadow. Image courtesy artist.

 

And none of them exist. These are unbuilt edifices, the product of Zimmerman’s imagination and aesthetic inspirations. They exist only as painstakingly created sculptural maquettes and models he has constructed for the sole purpose of their photography, moving them out-of-doors to expose them to natural light and backgrounds. Lost Hamilton Landmarks, documenting a fictional, alternative history of Zimmerman’s industrial hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, was strictly a photographic project – framed and wall-hung images. Landmarks of Industrial Britain was more installationally oriented; Zimmerman included four of the sculptural maquettes he used to create images of a parallel universe version of a nineteenth century London, England comprised of empty, monolithic structures. And instead of mounting the photographs of these maquetes traditionally on the wall, he constructed special tables for the gallery spaces in which the exhibition was mounted, and upon which images were laid out flat for viewing. Subversion of another convention.

Zimmerman’s current body of work, Cold City, deals with another semi-imaginary architectural landscape, a possible cityscape that twentieth century Cold War America had little exposure to: the “secret” cities of the Soviet Union, highly restricted places of military and technological significance that were situated in remote regions of the country. Again, this is maquette-based work, sculpture built so as to generate photographic imagery of Brutalist concrete structures of an unimaginable size and scale, places where the human scale – the human being – is utterly evacuated.

And it’s all sculptural – or sculpturally based – in any event. So while Carl Zimmerman may destabilize some conventions, his work actually fits right in with “tradition”. After all, aesthetic experience of sculpture has predominately been via the image. Zimmerman’s work just makes that a front and centre issue.

By Gil McElroy

More information at www.carlzimmerman.ca

Tableaux For Transformation, 1998, detail. Mixed media installation: hundreds of natural materials and seeds, paint, wood and glue. Dimensions: 8 x 20 x .5 feet. Photo: MN Hutchinson

It’s a long way – a very long way – from Australia to the northern part of the Canadian province of Alberta and its capital city of Edmonton.

It involves a kind of planetary inversion, if you will, a shift between geographic, seasonal, and ecological extremes. But it’s an inversion artist Lyndal Osborne made, living now as she does on the edge of the North Saskatchewan River which winds along just behind her property in a rural part of Edmonton.

And the two extremes – Australia and the more northerly reaches Canada – truly inform her sculptural and installational work at the most fundamental of levels.

Osborne’s installations are as binary and in many ways oppositional as her trans-equatorial shift from southern to northern hemispheres. Within their sculptural context, she combines naturally sourced materials from different environments and ecologies on the one hand, with the artefacts of human invention and engineering on the other. Aesthetically, her work stands in place of place. It represents – sort of. It’s about landscape.

Sort of.

Shoalwan: River Through Fire, River of Ice, 2003, detail. Mixed media installation:7,500 recycled glass jars, recycled phone books, wood, lights, Plaster of Paris, and over 400 varieties of collected natural and industrial materials.. Approximate dimensions: 3 x 70 x 35 feet.
Photo: Bernd Hildebrand

 

Shoalwan: River Through Fire, River of Ice demonstrates this. It’s a work Osborne created in 2003, and which was recently exhibited again at the Art Gallery of Burlington just outside of Toronto. It’s a floor-mounted piece largely comprised of glass jars and bottles – 7,500 of them, to be exact – set on the floor cheek by jowl in an enormous, irregular shape. Punctuating this veritable sea of glass at various points are kinds of “islands.” Most are raised slightly above the gallery floor, and can also be likened to platters, of a sort, for their surfaces harbour accumulations of things – small bowls filled with nuts, the stems from gourds (like squash), even small, empty shells of scallops. It’s a rich bounty of nature’s plenty Osborne has laid out, like some sort of offering, or the elements of a feast.

Other islands in this glass sea are more singular, each comprised of but one thing: the remarkably large seed pods of some species of plant or tree on one, pieces of what seem to be tree branches arranged vertically to form a pyramidal shape on another. They’re all islands of organic materials, save for just one comprised solely of pieces of metal, artefacts (like springs and gears) of something mechanical. It’s a jarring, but, alas, apt and accurate inclusion of humanity’s incursion into and reworking of our planet.

Shoalwan: River Through Fire, River of Ice, 2003. Mixed media installation:7,500 recycled glass jars, recycled phone books, wood, lights, Plaster of Paris, and over 400 varieties of collected natural and industrial materials. Approximate dimensions: 3 x 70 x 35 feet. Photo: Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Banff, Alberta

 

Some contextualizing background to Shoalwan: as part of an artist residency in which she participated in 2002, Osborne spent time living along the Shoalhaven River in the Australian state of New South Wales. The area had been ravaged by forest fires, and during her time there, Osborne experienced their lingering after-effects. Some of the organic materials included in this sculptural installation were collected there.

The second source of aesthetic reference for the work is the North Saskatchewan River that wends its way behind her home, and the irregularly shaped sea of glass is, in fact, denotative of the shape of the river, as well as reflective of Osborne’s observations of how it begins to freeze over as winter sets in, forming independent pancake-like ice forms before eventually freezing solid.

There’s yet another reflective element, here: the apparent underlying organizational principles in Shoalwan – accumulations of materials and artefacts in clearly separate containers – are clearly indicative of Osborne’s strong collecting impetus. In some ways, her installations are like aesthetically re-engineerings of the so-called “Cabinets of Curiosities” (or Wunderkammer) that date back to the 16th century and which mark the very beginnings of the scientific methodology (as well as museology). Osborne is a collector, a kind of hunter-gatherer, actively seeking out and accumulating the things of the natural (and, to a lesser degree, the not-so-natural) world, organizing and categorizing them as elements of her installations, like Tableau for Transformation (1998), an enormous display case with over 300 separate compartments containing small, organized accumulations of natural and artefactual objects.

Archipelago, 2008, detail. Mixed media installation: sunflower stalks and grapefruit skins chine colle with lithograph drawings or painted, wire, glass beads, DNA model connectors, laboratory glassware, metal caps and Bunsen burners, sea balls, seed pods, sculpey, silicone rubber, resin, papier mache, paint and dye. Dimensions: variable: approximately 2 x 30 x 25 feet. Photo: Mark Freeman

 

But this isn’t just obsessive collections of things that make up her art work. Osborne’s is an organizational scheme further reflective of the deeper structure of our world (indeed, our universe), a structure that is “granular,” cellular, one of fundamental discontinuities. Our universe is discrete. Osborne’s sculptural installations cannot but be representative of that very reality.

Her Archipelago, a piece dating back to 2008, comprises everything from dried grapefruit rinds to wire and thread, and even the connectors for models of DNA structure. Again, it’s a floor-mounted work. Like Shoalwan, it has an island-like structure of 16 discrete circular structures of wire and thread each containing an accumulation of objects that range from shell-like dried grapefruit rinds and dried sections of the stalks of sunflower plants that have been individually lithographed, to painted seed pods. The wire and thread structure completely encloses each island, and atop them rest tiny bowls, each complete with its own miniature garden.

Nature and its primary, essential elements. But science has arrived here, as well; test tubes, beakers and Bunsen burners rise like a strange forest amidst the islands of the organic, and while they are explicative of the very underlying structures of our world, simultaneously they of course pose a threat to its very being.

A planetary inversion, if you will. Something a hunter-gatherer like Lyndal Osborne would know all too well.

For more info click here.

By Gil McElroy

Middle of somewhere, 2007. H 10.5 cm x W 226 cm x D 8.5 cm .
Blown and hot formed glass, topographical map, steel shelf. Photo by Trent Photographic

Glass.

We’ve got a kind of either/or relationship with the stuff. Either it’s the ubiquity of, say, the common run-of-the-mill drinking glass, perhaps lying shattered in a gazillion little lethal splinters and shards on the kitchen floor at our feet, or it’s something like one of Dale Chihuly’s massive and complex sculptural blown glass installations, breathtakingly beautiful, sinuous amalgams suspended, perhaps, above our heads. 

I’m indulging in a couple of stereotypes, to be sure, seeking out a couple of oppositional extremes so as to better talk about, and map out a place for, the work of Canadian glass artist Brad Copping.  Copping emerged in the early 1990s from Sheridan College in Toronto, an institution that’s been one of the hotbeds of clay and glass teaching in Canada. He’s done time at the Pilchuk Glass School in Washington State, and at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine, and worked and studied with sculptor David Nash in Scotland. He now lives and works in a small rural community in eastern Ontario.

Brad Copping, Forest glass (group), 2010. H 12 x Dia 9 cm. Blown glass. Photo by artist

 

And on the continuum I marked out with aforementioned extremes, Copping’s aesthetic in many ways tends much closer towards that of the drinking glass. Much closer. Literally, in fact, for the drinking glass figures prominently in a number of his sculptural pieces.

And here, before going any further, is where it need be noted that Copping is in no way a glass purist, devoted to the aesthetic, medium-specific singularity of this remarkable stuff. His work does things using glass, and bypasses utter devotion to the expression of artistic technique (which, I hasten to add, he has plenty of). Copping’s work isn’t self-focused. It points outwards and away into the world.

Entangled, 2007. H 11 cm x W 11 cm x D 11 cm. Blown glass, found rope, steel shelf. Photo by artist.

 

So this is glass, but glass with a bit of a twist (no pun intended), rooted in the mundane but remarkably fecund realm of the utilitarian: in the drinking glass. Domestic Fuel, a piece from 2009, makes my point. Though Copping is no stranger to integrating non-glass elements into his work (wood, paper, wire, the casings for artillery shells, and even books figure in some of his sculptural works), Domestic Fuel in some ways toes a narrow aesthetic line. It’s all glass, from top to bottom. And the larger part of it is, well, comprised of glasses. A small, moulded glass house, pitched roof and all and about the size of a small doll house, comprises the base from which the work rises up, for you see, in many ways it’s all about a kind of weightlessness. The house’s chimney transitions into a tall, thin, not quite straight column of drinking glasses stacked, upside down, one onto the other. And in keeping with the conceit that this is denotative of smoke rising from the house, the glasses are blackened and filthy; dirty streaks even run down along the roof and sides of the house.

Middle of Somewhere (2007) is a wall-mounted installation that does incorporate non-glass components. But the heart of the piece is glass – in the form of (you guessed it) glasses. Along the length of metal shelf are a series of clear drinking glasses that are pierced through on either side (blown this way by Copping) to permit the intrusion of a tubular length of tightly rolled-up topographical maps that runs from one end of the work to the other, joining all the elements together.

Detail of work on Reflecting – the mirrored canoe project. Photo by Shane Climie

 

And even earlier than that, in 2005, he created Level Conversation, another wall-mounted works made up of two (ahem) drinking glasses, each independently resting on its own small shelf, connected to one another via a long vinyl tube running out the bottom of each and sagging down towards the floor. Water fills the tubing and the glasses and it is, of course, an aesthetically delightful iteration of a simple water level.

All this isn’t, obviously, to suggest or imply that Copping hasn’t got the chops. Boy does he. The water glass may be fundamental to his work, but he’s more than amply capable of blowing exquisite glass for non-installational purposes that surmounts the blandly utile. When the G8 Summit of world leaders was held in Canada in 2010, Copping created Forest Glass, a beautiful series of blown water glasses used by the meeting leaders. Back in 2001, he created water glasses and goblets for the Canadian Embassy in Japan. And he’s even created unique wine bottles for a prestigious Canadian winery. In short, he’s more than capable of being medium-specific; he’s more than capable of blowing extraordinarily beautiful glass vessels. He can do the aesthetically straight and narrow. It’s just that larger issues are perhaps best (and quite possibly more interestingly) dealt with via sculptural installations incorporating non-glass elements.

Brad Copping, Level conversation, 2005. H 150 cm x W 28 cm x D 11 cm (variable). Blown glass, vinyl tubing, water. Photo by Trent Photographic

 

Which inevitably brings me back to, yes, drinking glasses. Entangled (2007) is another variant of this common, everyday object. It’s also pierced (again, specifically blown this way), numerous holes in the vessel negating any utile function and making way for a weave of rope in, around, and through it.

In his mixed media sculptural works, Copping marries glass to the world, a marriage that is all about transparency, about a specific kind of seeing through and into the world that only glass can truly address, a medium at once visually porous (though not exclusively and absolutely), and yet all about a surface that can aesthetically root our seeing (though too not exclusively and absolutely). Glass permits.

Currently, Copping is finishing up an artist residency at the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ontario, working for the past seven months on a project that involves completely encrusting a full scale, working cedar-strip canoe in mirrors for an upcoming exhibition.

At this stage of his artistic journey, it’s apparently time for some reflection.

By Gil McElroy

Susi Brister, Bahamian Breeze. Photo courtesy the artist.

Susi Brister’s work tiptoes between the intersections of photography, temporal sculpture, and performance. While the finished product comes to us as a traditionally hung photograph, Brister’s process is undeniably both sculptural and performative. The creation of the performance props are both time consuming and complicated, demanding many hours learning about hair extensions, silk flowers, or a particular type of fabric. During the shoot itself the physical reality of the sculptural prop and the activating body collide, creating a situation that has aspects of both control and variability. The separation between synthetic materials and the natural environment is an idea that Brister has chosen to focus on in her most recent body of work. 

Susi Brister, Silky Straight. Photo courtesy of the artist.

 

Using ideas of camouflage and exposure to examine how we create associations between “realness” and “fakeness”, Brister found herself drawn to the juxtaposition of plastic party decoration palm trees when compared to living palm trees. Her interest in these fallacious ornamentations speak to her interest in the strange gap between what we recognize as real and a blatantly synthetic parody of reality. Although we call both the plastic version and the rooted variety a ‘palm tree’, the language that we use to categorize these objects leaves a large slippery and ambiguous space between the two. We recognize what the plastic trees are signifying even though their physical reality bears little resemblance to the true tree. The seduction of this fantasy space draws us in. Dancing in this space of slippage is exactly what Brister’s photographs do at their best.

Susi Brister Neon Shag. Photo courtesy of the artist.

 

With two BAs from the University of Texas at Austin, in both Anthropology and Studio Art, Brister has spent a sizable amount of time pondering mysticism, magic, and ritual. Her thesis work in Anthropology was dedicated to the totem, a theme that has carried over into her photographic work. Looking at the shrouded bodies in her photographs as a type of totem, Brister is interested in the creation of a fantastical space that the viewer enters with complicity, a complicity tempered with the desire for something beyond what has been commonly decided upon as normal.

Brister’s process can be chiefly described as reductive. During a shoot, a variety of poses and images are taken that are then sorted through after the fact. Although at times the composition is premeditated, it is usually determined on site. Bringing a plethora of different props and sculptural elements to each landscape, Brister intuitively chooses the elements and composition. For each prop, a single image is chosen as the final product. The space for narrative, or the self-imposed narrative applied by each viewer, is increased exponentially by having only one image per particular set of variables. The singularity of the moment allows for extrapolation, a broadening within the limitation.

Susi Brister is a photographer living and working in Austin, TX. She received her MFA from Concordia University in Montreal. To see more of her work, please visit www.susibrister.com.

By Gracelee Lawrence

Foraging (detail), wire, silk and cotton threads, metal screen, plexiglas mount, 56 X 66 X 22 cm.

We’re all familiar with that dictum by probably the best known theorist of war, Carl von Clausewitz, that war is “the continuation of politics by other means.”  So much meaning, so much horror and waste and pointless destruction and sacrifice of lives hidden there within a few short words.

I don’t intend to lay that philosophical legacy at Canadian artist Kai Chan’s aesthetic doorstep, but the structural conceit of the metaphor, it linguistic bones, if you will, offers a kind of entry point into talking about his work.

Chan’s an artist who works primarily – but not exclusively – with textiles. Originally trained as a biologist in his native China, he studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto in the early 1970s and at the Banff School of Fine Arts in Alberta in the early 1980s. Throughout all of that, he was showing his work, more often than contextualized, as per the period, as “craft.”  But not always, and Chan found international footing for and interest in his work as something other than pieces that were easily contextualized within a craft paradigm.

La Primavera – Homage to Botticelli, silk and cotton thread, 203 X 493 X 3 cm.

 

But about “craft”. It has, far too gradually and with a lot of proverbial kicking and screaming, evolved from a term of rigid fixedness into something for more aesthetically and delightfully slippery. It’s become, in a way, a kind of threshold word, and thresholds are most definitely where interesting stuff happens. Like that ecological zone between the sea and the land, for instance: the littoral, a place where live thrives in great abundance. Or something as ordinary and everyday as a hedge at the edge of a suburban lawn, home and shelter to myriad species.

The same, of course, goes for art; aesthetic life flourishes where one zone, one realm, one medium, one way of doing things, bumps headlong into another. The fact that these “zones” are defined and delimited, unfortunate as that is, offers at the very least the possibilities of fecund “transgressions” that can be remarked upon in the critical language of different mediums.

Morning Star, bamboo, dye, oil paint, 76 X 74 X 11 cm.

 

So I turn to some of Chan’s recent work to point a transgressive way forward, to pieces demonstrative of his aesthetic demand to work outside the proverbial box that is “craft” while utilizing many of its conceits and concerns, its materials and its processes. Like Morning Star, a wall-mounted piece made of bamboo that’s been dyed red. Chan’s woven an uneven, ragged ring out of the stuff. It’s a rim, of sorts, and extending inward from it, like spokes of a bicycle wheel, are thinner, finer pieces of wood, dozens and dozens of them, all overlapping and intersecting, some heading off sideways and not toward the centre, toward the core, where the fingers of wood end and nothingness is shaped: the titular star, framed by the tendrils of thin, fragile sticks of dyed bamboo. The object, the artifact, and the negative space it meaningfully articulates.

Foraging ostensibly speaks more to abstraction, while still highlighting material and process. It’s another wall-hung work, not particularly large. A mélange of wire shapes a volumetric three-dimensional space across which stretches woven lines of yellow, purple, and blue-green threads, as well as the mesh of a series of copper screens. All of it serves to contain a space within which resides the shape of a tightly coiled yellow spiral. Myriad readings are available, here, of course, courtesy Chan’s abstraction and the “crafty” foreground of material, but the spiral of yellow tugs the work as a whole toward an aesthetically viable suggestion of rendering or modeling the expression of a kind of multi-dimensional cosmology – toward, in short, something vastly greater than the sum of its parts.

The Weight of Belonging, mixed threads, balsawood, peach wood, oil paint, 198 X 38 X 28 cm.

 

Sculpture, in short.

And then there is the problematic case of La Primavera – Homage to Botticelli, the star of this exhibition, a piece occupying the entirety of one long gallery wall. I say “problematic” because this work is in no way overtly sculptural. It’s a textile work, in the purest and simplest senses, a long, flat piece of silk and cotton thread – nothing more. And at that it’s barely there, a monochromatic, minimalistic black skein of threads that in the loosest possible sense resembles a torn fishing net in dire need of mending.

But of course it’s no such thing; analogies clearly have their limitations, but you get my point. Visually, it reads rather narratively, comprising vertical sections of clearly demarcated differentiation horizontally brought together into a whole. Parts are full of holes of varied sizes, and in some instances it looks like Chan has woven threads into the voids to create delicate filaments of connective tissue. In other areas, the threads tightly coalesce into dense, dark knots of fiber. Such oppositions recur across the entirety of the piece. And the work is absolutely straight along the course of its upper edge, the lower unevenly sagging.

It’s clearly a wall hanging. A flat wall hanging. But that being said, Chan’s sculptural impetus is still demonstrably present and accounted for. There’s a push-pull of visual tensions in the work, particularly in one section that is, in some sense, the most classically textile part of the work, displaying a recurring, corrugated rhythm of pattern along the vertical axis, visually pulling the piece away from flatness, toward dimensionality.  The articulation of space becomes an overtly central concern, here, framing any reading of the piece as a whole.

Sure, it’s entirely illusionistic. No question about it – Chan’s cheekily messing about at thresholds. But arguably La Primavera – Homage to Botticelli is, like the work of Eva Hesse half a century ago, a continuation of sculpture.

By other means.

By Gil McElroy

Antipersonnel – 1998 – ongoing – knitted yarn – variable dimensions (life-size replicas)

Taken as a species, we humans could collectively be taken as, well, rather bi-polar. By that I mean we seem to easily oscillate between two opposing states: creation and destruction.  We are, individually and as a species, very very good at making, at creating the new. And we are, individually and as a species, very very good at destroying. A young child stacks wooden blocks atop one another, and then sweeps them away with glee. Is this simple gesture, this act – making and unmaking – genetically prescribed in us? Are we coded at the molecular level to be that way?

I haven’t a clue – sorry. Certainly no pat answers around here. But I bring up this intensely thorny and complex issue that neither religion, culture, nor science have any definitive responses to by way of talking about the work of Canadian artist Barb Hunt.

Root Dress – 1994, plasma-arc cut steel, 210 x 100 cm

 

Hunt’s been exhibiting art work since the 1980s. A graduate of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg who obtained her MFA at Concordia University in Montreal, Hunt taught at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario before becoming a Professor at Memorial University in Newfoundland.

The culture and meaning of craft, and the longstanding notions of what constitutes “women’s work” have long been addressed in Hunt’s work in aesthetically intriguing ways. Like her body of Steel Dresses from the mid-1990s. They’re like enormous versions of the paper cut-outs of the type once popular with children. But Hunt’s are made of thick steel,  and they are cut through with patterns courtesy the use of an industrial plasma-arc welder. And they’re life-size, not miniatures. And they’re only dresses in the loosest sense; seen, they clearly resemble the flattened outline of a dress, propped up against a gallery wall, intricately inscribed with complex and beautiful patterns. The titles tell the whole visual story: Web Dress, Root Dress, and Leaf Dress, the pattern of each comprising the body of the dress.

Orchid Dress – 1993, plasma-arc cut steel, 210 x 100 cm.

 

The body. It’s also important in Hunt’s work. With her interest in working with ideas of what constitutes craft, how could it not be? But Hunt takes the body in unexpected aesthetic directions. Still interested in addressing the things – the clothing, the apparel – within which we cocoon it, Hunt began working with military uniforms. Specifically, with camouflage.  Ostensibly intended to make the wearer less visually obtrusive in a natural environment, camouflage has of course long been co-opted by fashion to do just the opposite, and Hunt explores those push and pull directions while simultaneously expanding on them, giving them more meaningful social and political edge. Taking a standard set of camouflage fatigues, for instance she painstakingly embroidered around all the blotchy patterns imprinted on it – in bright pink thread. Incarnate (2001-2004) neutralizes the cloak of invisibility often attributed to such wear, dissolves the malignancy of what is, in essence, a weapon of war, and renders it neutral – almost friendly, even.

The color pink has a way of doing that (which it the reason it’s often used in holding cells to calm those placed there). And nowhere is pink more evident, more aesthetically significant, than in the work antipersonnel.

It’s a widely exhibited piece Hunt began in 1998 and which is open-ended – meaning that she can contribute into it on an ongoing basis as circumstances change. (I’ll explain that shortly.) Collectively it comprises dozens and dozens of individual pieces, well over one hundred of them to date. They’re sculptural objects of various sizes and shapes – some are box-like, some long and rather tubular-shaped, others are circular and disk-like, and one for all the world even resembles a toy elephant that’s been flattened.

Antipersonnel – 1998 – ongoing – knitted yarn – variable dimensions (life-size replicas)

 

It’s not, though. These are landmines. Or, more accurately, Hunt’s 1:1 scale sculptural rendition of the actual landmines produced and actively used by nations around the world (and when I referred to circumstances changing, I meant the advent of new landmine designs – for it’s a booming business – to which Hunt can continue to aesthetically and morally respond). And they’re all pink, every single one of them. Oh, and they’re made of knitted yarn. Every single one of them.

So Hunt deals head-on with one of the most malignant and vile things humanity has ever created – a device of horrific physical negation. Landmines are pure, unmitigated evil. They render places uninhabitable – land cannot be farmed, lived on, even walked upon. And when they do not kill outright, they maim – horrifically so. In many regions of the world where conflicts seem to rage on a semi-permanent basis, they are ubiquitous, a devastating presence in the lives of the innocent. They devastatingly alter the fabric of human existence.

So Hunt made them sculptural – unique, one-of-a-kind reproductions, of a sort, based on originals mass-produced in the tens of thousands . She made them pink. And she has knitted them. The sculptural part is aesthetically straightforward. And pink is, of course, the aforementioned color of neutralization, of the draining of malevolence – of the benign.

Antipersonnel – 1998 – ongoing – knitted yarn – variable dimensions
(life-size replicas)

 

But about knitting. Knitting has layers of meaning, of course, much of it engaging the notion of “women’s work.” But it has a larger context, one pertinent to the aesthetics of Hunt’s work. “Knitting functions as a metaphor,” Hunt has written, “for recuperation, protection, and healing.”

So, drain the pernicious evil from a horrifically destructive human creation with simple color. And render it in knitted yarn to try and heal the wounds it has caused.

All symbolically or metaphorically, of course. Landmine use is widespread, despite international treaties and the efforts of individuals and organizations around the world. So antipersonnel, then, could be likened to objects of a cargo cult – fetishes, of a kind – things intended to retrieve wholeness from a world splintered and tearing itself asunder.

See, sculpture can do that. It can intend.

And Barb Hunt most definitely intends.

By Gil McElroy

“A-Line China”, 2014 30”H x 30”W and 10”H x 10” W, MDF board, acrylic paint, “Delft Blue” porcelain chopsticks, porcelain bowl, nails, Mixed Media Wall Relief.

What is it that provokes or in fact actually shapes a shift in aesthetic focus from the flatness of painting to the real dimensionality of sculpture? Why would an artist choose to make that trip, risky as it might very well be? Why leave the fixed confines and known aesthetic parameters of the canvas plane to work in the multi-dimensionality of the sculptural, littered as it is with so many variables and unknowns? 

Well, maybe politics might have something to do with it – the politics of gender and ethnicity, to be more specific. It was so for Frances Ferdinands

She’s a Sri Lankan-born artist whose paintings are held in the collections of galleries and corporations in Canada and the United States.  Until recently, she was based in Toronto. But she’s transplanted herself to the Northumberland Hills, a rural region just to the east of the city (but still within its umbra) that is home to numerous artists and writers. With that move came another move – an artistic one. Frances Ferdinands discovered that she was turning into a sculptor.

Installation View of Dress. Art Gallery of Northumberland, Cobourg, Ontario, Canada Sept. 9 – October 18, 2014 Exhibition titled “Mining Beauty”

 

But first the back story.

Ferdinands’s painting has long centered itself around the representation of the human figure. Even today, it can still be rather tricky working with the body. Its aesthetic depiction is still mired in the risks of cultural and – let’s be totally honest – religious blowback. The human body is still something of landmine; one misstep, and things can blow up in your face pretty damn fast.

It’s all, of course, because the body carries a heavy load of baggage, enveloped as it is in a thick haze of associations (sexual and otherwise), connotations, and references. It’s deeply coded, in short, and part of that coding – even perhaps a very large part of that coding – directly involves the stuff of which we clad it: textiles.

“From Doilies to Dustmasks: The Poetry of Protest” (front), 2014. Approximately 60”H x 20”W, doilies, dustmasks, image transfers, acrylic paint, acrylic gel, thread, sequins, pearls, ribbons, sheer curtain fabric, lace, vintage wire dress stand.

 

Now, as a painter, Ferdinands directly engaged that world of textiles by enquiring into the narrow, even more intensely coded sub-realm that is high fashion. Haute couture. Specifically she became interested in how fashion is advertised, how it markets itself to the world, and how we can be sucked into its magical mythmaking. Out of that came a series of painterly diptychs juxtaposing images based, on the one hand, on old advertisements in which fashion is foregrounded as a sales mechanism, and images drawn from some of the most immediately recognizable works of art on the other. And cleaving the images horizontally, extended the breadth of the painterly plane are textual elements that both cryptically brings the imagery of the diptych together and yet simultaneously splits it apart.

And, yes, this is clearly not sculpture. Not yet. We’re only just beginning to get there, for Ferdinands’s next small step in that direction was a body of work in which she articulates a more abstract vision born of the realm of fashion, of textiles, work in which things literally begin to lift off of the canvas, if ever so slightly. Migration is a triptych in which the painterly approach comes apart at the proverbial seams; the flatness of the canvas plane is violated by the intrusion of small textile-related objects – like buttons, hooks and eyes, and dozens of pins – as Ferdinands begins tentatively moving away from pure, unadulterated imagery and towards the vision of something truly sculptural.

But we are, however, still aesthetically functioning within the parameters of a wall-hung canvas plane, simultaneously entering into the very personal world of Ferdinands’s own familial migration from Sri Lanka to Canada, a process fraught with racism as authorities forced her family provide proof of lineage dating back to the 16th century and the beginnings of Dutch habitation and economic exploitation of her country.

Here, she takes us to the very bones of fashion, the roots of textiles, in a literal way by incorporating imagery of the likes of the human skeletal structure on the one hand, and in a more metaphorically way by incorporating objects, text, and the very paper patterns integral to the making of a piece of clothing. The bones. The roots.

And the beginnings of something “not-painting”.

“From Doilies to Dustmasks: The Poetry of Protest” (Detail), 2014. Approximately 60”H x 20”W, doilies, dustmasks, image transfers, acrylic paint, acrylic gel, thread, sequins, pearls, ribbons, sheer curtain fabric, lace, vintage wire dress stand.

 

Sure, you can still call it collage, but Ferdinands is beginning to push ever harder against the delimitations of the canvas plane. The aesethetic wants to pop off into the fully dimensional. poised, here, at the edge of a leap into the sculptural unknown. The dimensional artifact is ready to spring forth.

One more step, though: an intermediary work entitled A-Line China. On two separate pieces of dense and heavy MDF board, Ferdinands gathers together a number of porcelain chopsticks, and assembles them together into a fan shape. It is, in fact, the shape of an A-line dress. Above it, on the second, smaller piece of board, a small china bowl visually addresses us head-on.  “Head” on.

She calls it “relief.” I call it proto-sculpture, and it leads at last to this: From Doilies to Dustmasks: The Poetry of Protest.

Here is sculpture: the human figure, fully dimensional at last, the body rendered 1:1 scale as a dressmaker’s dummy, clad in a garment, a kind of dress. Exteriors matter, of course – fashion is built on that premise – and Ferdinands uses textiles to play with our visual expectations. Much of what we see is what we might expect to see in something that is ostensibly an item of clothing: a dress with an apparently elegant bodice of lace, with some sheer trim along its bottom edge. But it’s deceptive. Look closer: the bodice is in fact composed of doilies, and the sheer trim is wrought from the translucent drapery of mundane privacy curtains.

But it’s what’s literally in-between those two polar extremes that is of real, deeply historical, social and cultural importance. Ferdinands has formed the dress out of dozens of white paper dust masks – you know, the disposable kind with the elastic straps that hold it against your face. Masks of any kind have their own enormous auras of meanings, associations and connotations – many of them involving duplicity and intent to cause harm in an anonymous way – but all of it is of less importance than the role Ferdinands has assigned them here: she’s researched into the history and development of women’s rights in Canada, and then textually inscribed it individually onto each of the mask.  For example:

“1917 B[ritish].C[olumbia]. becomes the first province to give mothers the same legal rights as fathers regarding children.”

“1940 Quebec becomes the last province to make it legal for women, excluding those from a racial minority already banned from voting in other provinces, to vote and run for office.”

This, this, is the meat of it. From Doilies to Dustmasks enacts a narrative of the history of women’s rights as they were grudgingly given in Canada, moments and times inscribed entirely around its physically articulated representation, the body – the female body – encased , masked, in the unexpected textiles of the story. This, then, is what sculpture can do, and what it’s permitted Ferdinands to do.

“A-Line China”, 2014 30”H x 30”W and 10”H x 10” W, MDF board, acrylic paint, “Delft Blue” porcelain chopsticks, porcelain bowl, nails, Mixed Media Wall Relief.

 

From the representation of the thing that was the painterly image, Ferdinands has moved to the representation of the thing that is a sculptural artefact, all the while pointedly reminding us that the aesthetic is deeply political. Textiles and fashion may very well seem to tell of superficial cultural trivialities that seem to come and go, but actually are much more meaningful, much more deeply encoded than that.

The question now is: how is Frances Ferdinands going to sculpturally explore that world? It’ll be interesting to watch.

By Gil McElroy

Large Vase Recordings, 2013, ceramic.

One of American poet Wallace Stevens’s best-known poems was entitled “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself.” The poem famously ends with the line “It was like/A new knowledge of reality.” 

And when I read that, I think of Adrian Göllner. More accurately, I think about his work.  Göllner is an artist based in the city of Ottawa, Canada’s capital, and his work of the past several decades has had everything to do with ideas of things, and the things themselves, and always – always – has to do with shaping a new knowledge of reality.

Vase with sound of man coughing, 2013, ceramic, 8×3.75×3.75”

 

Göllner accomplishes that by being non-specific. Actually, by being medium non-specific. He’s not a painter, though he paints. He’s not an installation artist, though he does installations. And he’s not a sculptor, though he does sculpture. He does light, too. And sound as well. We’ll get to that, but first some background.

Göllner’s a Fine Arts graduate of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario (and is currently in the midst of pursuing his MFA), and over the course of his career to date he’s worked through and in numerous mediums. In a show entitled No, No Joe mounted in Tennessee in 2004, for instance, he used signage vinyl tape and lettering to visually graph and on a gallery wall a timeline correlating the hit songs of country singer Hank Williams and American nuclear weapons testing done in the 1940s and ‘50s.

Working more ephemerally, he once blew smoke. Handel’s Cloud (2011) comprised a visual and aural installation in an old Gothic church involving puffs of white smoke emanating from high in the vaulted ceiling that were timed to coincide with the enormously slowed-down music of the titular composer’s masterpiece, The Messiah.

And light. Well, Göllner’s worked with it more than once, including an outdoor installation entitled Rain Barrels in the city of Vancouver during the Winter Olympics of 2010, and, several years before that, with a permanent installation, Harbinger, mounted atop a condominium tower in downtown Toronto. It omprised a “beacon” of light that flashed a two-storey high column of colour that was determined by the speed of the wind around the building – blue for calm, deep red for dangerous winds.

Maybe that paints something of a picture of the range of work Göllner does. Or a bit of it, anyway. More recently clay – ceramics – has begun to figure in a fascinatingly conceptual way.

Vase with sound of alarm clock ringing, 2013, ceramic, 5.5×7.5×7.5”

 

Since 2013, actually. Well, the artefactual, created things of clay date back to then, but the idea of the things dates much further back. To 1982, for it was then that Göllner watched an interview with an archaeologist who put forward an astounding idea: that ancient pottery vessels harboured within them the actual sounds of ancient culture as it occurred within the acoustic environment of where and when it had been made; that somehow, the turning of a clay vessel on a pottery wheel managed also to inscribe the aural world of the time in the wet mud being shaped by a human hand.

It’s an idea that’s long since been dismissed, but it stuck in Göllner’s mind, and in 2013 he finally did something about it. Collaborating with Ottawa-based ceramist Carolynn Pynn-Trudeau, who created the actual vessel forms, Göllner devised a recording apparatus akin to that invented in the late nineteenth century by Thomas Edison. A makeshift cylinder into which sound is fed is attached to a needle that responds to the vibrations, inscribing a track like that on a vinyl lp into the leather-hard surface of an unfired clay vessel as Göllner manually rotates it around its central axis.

And the choice of what was recording ranges from the mundane to the more aesthetically elevated. Titles of works are self-descriptive: Vase with Sound of Child’s Voice, Vase with Sound of Man Coughing, Vase with Sound of Alarm Clock Ringing… All the conceptually mundane on the one side is contrasted on the other with Vase with Sound of Summer Rain, Vase with Sound of Canary, and Urn with Recitation of Keats’ Ode to a Grecian Urn. .

Just looked upon as visual things, the works of Vase Recordings strongly resemble modernist ceramics of the mid to late-twentieth century: monochromatic in colouration, with bands of inscribed, slightly wavy parallel lines horizontally encircling each vessel. There is the inevitable evocation of, say, the gridded paintings of Agnes Martin that brilliantly epitomized late 20th century modernism. But Göllner’s is the inscribed lineage of sounds, albeit ones unlikely to ever be transposed back into an aural medium. Unlikely, but not impossible.

Creating Vase with sound of alarm clock ringing, 2013 (photo: Andrew Wright).

 

Vase Recordings is currently an ongoing concern of Göllner’s. Being non-medium specific, though, means clay won’t end up the be-all and end-all of his aesthetic output, for, no matter the strictures of Wallace Stevens, he has some very definite ideas about the thing.

And about a new knowledge of reality.

Just watch. And perhaps listen. And…

By Gil McElroy

Against the Velvet of the Long Goodbye, 2013. Fender guitar and amp, vinyl rain curtain, tinted light site-specific installation: MINUS SPACE, Brooklyn, NY. Courtesy of MINUS SPACE

Reducing Work To Its Essence

It takes courage to be spare. Artists have to trust audiences to understand minimal work or be brave enough not to care if they don’t.

Reductive artist Lynne Harlow has had solo shows at MINUS SPACE in Brooklyn, the de Cordova Museum in Lincoln, MA, the Chapin School in NY and Cade Tompkins Project Space in Providence, RI. She often orchestrates dance, music and sound “reactions” to her work, either on or off-site. Her work was selected for ArtForum’s Best Of Issue in 2012.

So I Built a Raft, 2013. Vinyl rain curtain, tinted light, 55″ x 55″ x 55″. Site-specific installation: deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA. Courtesy of the artist

 

Lynne Harlow asks “How little is enough? How much can be taken away before a piece crumbles? I arrive at my pieces by reducing physical and visual information. This process of reduction is ultimately intended to be an act of generosity. In each piece, I’m looking for the point at which these reductions allow me to give the most. It’s an appealing contradiction because it prompts one to reconsider the concept of abundance and the nature of giving”.

Harlow works in all media – whatever gets her to where she seems to urgently need to be, whether it’s laser-cut Plexiglass, acrylic fibers, chiffon, painted aluminum, plastic net, string, theater curtains, vinyl, music, guitars, amplifiers. Wherever her materials land, the work is often Day-Glo bright, powerful, yet spare. Her work is minimal, but not at all quiet. As her Minus Space statement says, “With restricted use of very particular materials, sheer and lightweight, the installations suggest the presence of light and the absence of weight”.

Basking In Light

Harlow’s use of Day-Glo vinyl and fabrics wryly references both the hot and the cool of modern spaces. Yes, we’ve always basked in this kind of bright sunlight, but her work’s intense color calls attention to an ‘un-nature’ – or certainly a super-charged electrical nature – that evokes a place we want to be.

In a time when curators are more interested in interdisciplinarity than they’ve ever been, Harlow’s work cannily lends itself to collaboration with dancers, musicians and videographers. Her pieces have many lives: as objects, as interactions, as performances and in an online-afterlife of recordings and videos.

Lexi Lee Sullivan’s curatorial statement for rhythm…distance, a rooftop performance at the de Cordova Museum says, “While she pulls inspiration from the work of Minimalists as well as Light and Space artists from the 1960s, she breaks new ground by also incorporating sound into her investigations. Projecting music or noise into her spaces, she not only creates new iterations of colorful form but also tempts viewers to discover the ways in which space, color, and sound inform and engage with one another”. Her work has a willingness to drink up space while creating volume in both the occupation of space and sound.

Against the Velvet of the Long Goodbye, 2013. Fender guitar and amp, vinyl rain curtain, tinted light site-specific installation: MINUS SPACE, Brooklyn, NY. Courtesy of MINUS SPACE

 

An installation entitled The Velvet Of The Long Goodbye was accompanied by this statement, “With their limited components, the installations delineate spaces that can be navigated and explored, both visually and physically, by their viewers…These pieces rely on the participant to absorb and synthesize the given information and thus complete the piece with his own thoughts and actions. Most important is the resulting relationship of trust and collaboration between the artist and the participant.

We see Harlow’s unusual generosity. She offers audiences a gift of beautiful light to do with what they will.

Find out more with these links

Lynne Harlow: http://lynneharlow.com/

De Cordova rooftop performance: http://lynneharlow.com/home/work-2/decordova-biennial-gallery/

Cade Tompkins: http://www.cadetompkins.com/artists/lynne-harlow/

Old Stone Bank performance of Tangerine, Providence, RI: http://www.cadetompkins.com/exhibitions/lynne-harlow/

Harlow is a member of American Abstract Artists: http://www.americanabstractartists.org/

Composite image of completed 3D prints, photographed before being shipped.

Ben Franklin rises again. Only, this time instead of being an undead character in a series of children’s books, Ben Franklinstein is the loving nick-name given to a project that crowdsources the 3D-printed reproduction of Jean-Antoine Houdon’s portrait bust of the inventor and founding father. For Todd Blatt, organizer of the project, this is his second crowdsourced 3D-printing project of the year.

In late January, various maker and 3D printing blogs were aflutter about a crowdsourced 3D printing project of a bust of George Washington. The group behind the project was We The Builders, consisting of six people (Todd Blatt, David Fine, Matthew Griffin, Amy Hurst, Ryan Kittleson, and Marty McGuire) who banded together during the Art Bytes hackathon at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD. After scanning Giuseppe Ceracchi’s portrait bust of Washington, they sliced the model into 110 sections and posted them on line. People registered to participate in the project, downloaded a section, and got to work printing their model.

3D Illustration of how the Franklin bust was sectioned

 

“Shortly after we started, I got a request from 3D Print Show in NY that said, ‘if you finish well put it at the front of the show,'” Recalled Todd Blatt, who spearheaded the group. That lit a fire under the project, and the team had a rush to see the prints get completed and shipped. Blatt began asking friends, participants, and his social network to invite other friends. Files were tracked. People who had registered and downloaded a part were messaged through the website to learn if they would complete their print in time, the farthest coming from China.

George made it to New York with little time to spare, and has bounced around parts of Manhattan, Baltimore, Washington, DC, as well as a jaunt to SXSW in Austin. Reception was favorable. “It is new to people that you can make a large thing,” reflected Blatt, noting how some thought the work was a quilt because of it’s patch-work quality. “When people learn it came from all over the world: that is exciting. Not everyone has a printer. But when they know they can be involved, they want to sign up and get involved, and I get new people signing up all the time who are waiting for the next project.”

The next project began to take shape in July. Side-stepping anything presidential, the focus of the second crowdsourced project still supported a tongue-and-cheek reference to the founding of the country once Blatt discovered Houdon’s portrait bust of Ben Franklin. “Franklin was an inventor and a tinkerer,” noted Blatt, and the project, in a way, became a nod to one of our nation’s first hackers. Blatt further observed that Franklin didn’t file for any patents, citing a quote from Franklin’s autobiography regarding his belief that people should share their inventions freely and generously. In other words, Franklin was into an opensource community more than 200 years before it was fashionable.

To get the project off the ground, Blatt turned to someone he knew that already had scan data of Ben Franklin: Michael Raphael, founder of Direct Dimensions, a 3D scanning company in Owings Mills, MD. “I’ve known Michael Raphael for five years or so. He’s a friend and he has the best scanning stuff around… He did a scan of a [Houdon] replica, and he had it in the office already. So, I asked him and he sent it.” The scan data captured at Direct Dimensions involved an arm scanner, which uses a laser and captures more details. “When you scan something you get raster info. You don’t get a smooth surface: you get points,” explains Blatt.  “If you do that with a lower quality scanner you’ll see the triangles.” Since arm scanners are of higher quality than a hand scanner, and not as portable, the scan of the replica was done in the lab. With the amount of data captured, Blatt was able to scale the model up to nearly three-times its size: comparable in scale to the Washington bust created earlier in the year.

Composite image of completed 3D prints, photographed before being shipped.

 

After prints were completed, individuals shipped the pieces to Blatt with a little reimbursement from Tinkerine Studios, a 3D Printer company that Blatt works for as VP of Market Direction. As pieces arrived by mid September, he took notice of the differences in materials. PLA and ABS parts were expected. However, some makers changed out filament colors, or used markers to color the plastic, creating a rainbow of colors in one built part. “George had a wood filament part, and we metal plated a part. This time for Ben I received a resin part, a piece made with bronze powder and PLA: 80% bronze by weight and someone did an acetone treatment on an ABS print, which smoothed the stepping in the z-axis. There’s also a part made of pla mixed with pha.” The nature of how this print was constructed might give cause to conserve the outcome, although the variety of  materials in the prints might make for a conservation issue. Blatt is less concerned, especially if the objects have limited exposure to sun and heat.  “I do think this stuff will be around for a long time. PLA they say is biodegradeable, but it isn’t going to just melt away.” And, as the nature of the project would suggest, if there was a problem with a part in the future, it can simply be reprinted and replace.

Completed bust of Ben Franklinstein
photographed at the Silver Spring Maker Faire.

 

But the soul of the project is not so much within the final object created: it’s within the community it builds. Crowdsourced 3D printed projects are few at present. However, just as the desktop 3D printing market expanded exponentially in the last five years, it’s safe to assume the volume of crowdsourced 3D printing projects will explode in the coming years as well. Blatt is keeping his ears open to other crowdsourced projects, and through his network is telling others. On his radar currently is a project called E-Nabling the Future, a volunteer community that creates 3D printed prosthetic hands. It has Blatt reflecting beyond the production of patchwork replicas of Classical busts. “We’ll be faced with other challenges in the future where things need to be distributed really quickly. Ben Franklinstein indicates what can be done with the technology. With e-Nable we have people across the world who have printers and there are people with a need for prosthetics: There are so many other problems as a society that we can fix. Getting involved with this today is pretty neat.”

Check out this time-lapse video of Blatt and Marty McGuire assembling Ben Franklinstein.

By John Anderson

Floating World (detail).

It was late 2012 when I first saw the work of Billy Friebele at the Hamiltonian Gallery in Washington, DC. A pen hovered above a pedestal, tethered to a cluster of Mylar balloons floating above it. The pen bobbed and bounced across the surface of a piece of paper attached to the pedestal beneath. As I approached the pedestal, a motion sensor triggered a fan to turned on, firing a gust of air toward the balloons, causing the pen to skitter wildly across the surface of the paper, where it reached the end of its tether, landed, and scribbled the limit of its orbit on the page. While the finished piece for purchase was a drawing, it’s difficult to peg Friebele as a drawer. This is especially so, given the interactive nature behind the creation of his drawings, and the construction of the objects and machines that draw them. Since 2012, Frieble has been a Hamiltonian Fellow,  a kind-of “post-doc” program for select emerging artists in DC, created by physicist Paul So in 2007. As the summer winds down, so to does his last solo exhibition as a fellow in the program, where he is exhibiting a motion-activated drumming robot that captured people’s interaction with the machine using sonar. We took a few moments to talk about his creative arc since 2009, his process, and his penchant to tinker.

JA: Over the last five years, there is a clear thread of mapping within your drawings.

Billy Friebele: It starts first with working in a public space: in making works in the infrastructure of the city. That extends into how the city is organized and the hierarchy of the city. I think we are all interested in our own pathways through the city, but it is interesting to see what other people are doing. So with the map: what are the rhythms and flow that other people generate when moving through the space. In terms of thinking about drawing I am more interested in extending the way I think about drawing. So, a way of extending beyond that is thinking of drawing as a noun and drawing as a verb (the object as distinct from the process).

Current Recorder.

 

JA: What I’ve found interesting in the drawings is that you use so many other things to create them: balloons or propellers and wind, GPS, sonar, people. Really interesting capture strategies.

BF: Someone said what I make is a recording process. I am trying to see things that I can’t see. So, creating kinetic sculptures that are inherently reactive has been an interest. Creating flexible objects that contort with the wind, like the balloons. Drawing is just a way of making invisible things visible. And each time I do that it opens up more questions, which is why I move through various materials.  Each tool opens up a new question—how can I refine the way that tool reacts. Sonar was interesting because I had been using these binary processes to map, and I wanted something that was more fluid.

JA: Clearly, there is an element in most of your works that is tinkered, or hacked.  Is that a starting point or an ending point behind the ideas in your work?

BF: Certainly a starting point. What I’ve been thinking about lately is each object and machine has its own algorithm: sense of motion: way it would draw. So, when you collage those inherent properties… it’s a starting point to investigate what each machine can do.  The ending point for me is what those things produce. In many cases it’s a drawing on paper, or a print, and the machine is hacked together to absorb some flow, and translate it into another form. So each machine is there as a form of translation.

JA: There is an anti-aesthetic to your works: a seemingly limited effort to disguise how it is made. What’s the intention for that?

BF: I’m interested in the simple hack—the limited means it takes to get something to happen, whether that is zip ties or fishing supplies. The other part of the Anti-aesthetic is putting the objects out on street corners or in public spaces. I want them to camouflage with their environment, to looking like things that might be found on the streets. It’s something I have been asking myself: how slick does this work need to become? I don’t think that kind of finished veneer is necessary. It’s more about utility than surfaces.

Floating World.

 

JA: Where does the art exist in the work: with the machine or sculpture making the work, with the final output, or with the marvel at the process and the idea?

BF: The work exists in the connection between all of those things. Clearly it is an effort to translate—making a static form from something that is dynamic. The other side is a lot of the works are in motion for the viewer in the gallery. So the heart of the work is watching the piece change or draw or perform some action. But there’s some slippage between the action and the record, and you lose some of that dynamic in the process.

JA: Having seen your wind-drawing machine in action, it tends to be a very popular work with young and old, artists and non-artists. It’s simple, imaginative, and accessible: something that anyone can do, but everyone seems to respect that it was done (rather than dismiss it like Pollock). Is there some sort of inner idea that, if you can reveal how one of these machines is made—if you can reveal the structure of a work—that it liberates any non-artist into realizing an artistic potential?

BF: It goes back to that idea of the simple. I’m interested in the potential that objects around us have, and in that sense reality does not have to be what we take it to be. Mundane objects can be used in strange ways. And I realize it follows in the tradition of readymades—Duchamp. I can’t avoid that reference in the work. But at the same time, I am interested in downplaying my role as innovator. That is one thing that is going on in digital art. So many people are helping each other and offering their code to help others. There is a shift in innovation where we can share our knowledge really easily. So, since I create something with these materials, I don’t feel the need to obfuscate the materials to make them more magic.

JA: The drumming machine installed at Hamiltonian was not your first drumming machine. Tell me about the Memory Drum (that use a Kymograph).

JA: How did the Memory Drum project come about?

BF: I was a musician before I was an artist. And some of those experiences of playing music have bled into my work: collaboration, and interest in temporal events. So, to go back to that Kymograph piece, it was one of those times I had this object in my studio for a number of years and wasn’t really sure what to do with it. And I combined it with other things in my studio. I had this drum. So, it was with an idea of memory as a machine that conjures up images, but also changes how we remember them: I wanted to create this machine that makes a sound but also distorts an image as it is creating.

Also, being a part of the Hamiltonian Fellowship, I’ve been encouraged by other artists and the curatorial team to investigate music more. That’s why it appeared in my recent exhibition. I thought it would be interesting to combine sonar with music, since it would take an ultrasonic frequency and turn it into a low frequency we can actually hear. So, I thought that could translate into how Duke Ellington interpreted the city around him. Duke observed flows and characteristics of the city with his senses and used these impressions as material. Creation entails an input and an output of sensorial information. Both are ways of externalizing mental processes. One being the act of remembering and the other being the act of composing music based on what you see in your surroundings, or translating your surroundings into music.

JA: You’ve mentioned that your recent exhibition, U Street Chromatic (for Duke), is transitional. In what way?

BF: Certainly the technology, because I just learned how to use Arduinos and Processing. And once I learn a new technique I ask myself if what I am making is innovative or part of the logic of the object. Where does the tool’s influence end and where does the creator’s input take over?

The other aspect is this homage to Ellington, using his story and connection to DC as a framework to make decisions about the work: where to put the machine, the rhythms to create, how it envisions those rhythms. So that is what makes it transitional: Lots of new content and new tools. Maybe more time with those tools will lead in different directions.

By John Anderson

Grandmas Doily and a Chevy Rear axle, 2012. Ceramic, wood, Grandmas doily. 60”x 18”x 42”. Photo Credit Art Mur

Clay. Again.

Seriously, how can we not talk about it? Clay is fundamental, truly elemental. And clay really has no abstraction, for if you talk about it, then you have to talk about the very “thingness” of the world. You have to talk about tangible stuff.

Cars comprise a lot of that stuff; the automotive has become a hugely fundamental part of our world’s thingness. So wouldn’t it be interesting if it could somehow be a part of a discussion about clay?

One Yellow Rose, 2012. Ceramic, wood, cloth. 70”x 30”x 40”. Photo Credit Toni Hafkenscheid

 

But cars and clay? Really? It’s not often that the two are thought of in the same sentence. Oh sure, there’s a bit of overlap between them in a very general way courtesy the important but culturally little-known realm of industrial ceramics, and in a slightly more direct way because collectable old automotive signage tends to have a ceramic component that lends it its value. But none of this is stuff that really enters our thinking about a possible clay/automotive relationship at any overt level, and certainly not at the aesthetic.

Enter Clint Neufeld. He’s a Canadian artist working with clay who grew up in a rural farming area out in the prairies. A graduate of the University of Saskatchewan, he did post-graduate work at Concordia University in Montreal before returning to his rural roots and to create work that enquired into the thingness of the world. More specifically, he went home to cars. Even more specifically, to engines.

Valve Grinding and other Sunday Activities, 2012. Ceramic, found tea cart. 40” x 16” x 29”. Photo Credit Toni Hafkenscheid

 

The automotive and the rural go hand in hand. On a farm, the ability to make quick repairs on site to machinery – especially to common but important farm vehicles like trucks and tractors – is crucial, and this, finally, is where clay enters into the story. What Clint Neufeld learned growing up on the farm became the source of his work in ceramics.

It started, perhaps appropriately enough, with tools. As part of his post-graduate work, Neufeld began to make them – to make tools out of clay, I mean. One of his first pieces was Estwing Framing Hammer, from 2005. From a mould of a long-handled framing hammer meant for use in the construction industry, Neufeld made a number of casts using clay slip. The 1:1 scale, monochromatic white ceramic products were accurate in every way to the tool that gave them aesthetic life, except for the fact that they were, of course, utterly stripped of any degree of functionality. Neufeld made them things to look at and contemplatively regard, and not things to handle with unselfconscious skill in the service of some utile end.

Trailer Queen, 2010. Ceramic, wood, vinyl. 32” x 30” x 44”. Photo Credit Toni Hafkenscheid

 

What he did with the simple hammer was the origin of a pattern he’s since followed in a literally and metaphorically larger way when he began to work with tools of another scale and level of technological complexity: automotive engines. Two years after the hammer, Neufeld produced the first of his 1:1 scale ceramic engines, Ten Thousands Over (2007-2008). Working with a friend, Neufeld purchased and disassembled an old car engine, scrupulously cleaning it of any grease and oil, then made plaster moulds of its component parts so as to produce casts of clay slip that were, in turn, assembled to sculpturally recreate the original piece of technology. Ten Thousands Over (the title makes reference to the re-boring of engine cylinders by automotive enthusiasts interested in making an engine more powerful) steered away from the pristine monochromatism of his earlier hammer; though the bulk of the engine is ceramic white, some parts – like spark plugs and piston rods – were cast in a purple hue. No matter the color, the evacuation of the technological aim and end – of purpose and utility – was utter.

But there’s way more going on in Neufeld’s work than just aesthetic displacement of purpose. Monochromatism tends to factor through virtually all his work, like Left for George (2011) or Pink 350 (n.d.), but it’s tempered by his employment of important contextualizing installational elements, and also by the subtle use of decorative imagery.  Left for George is a 1:1 scale sculpture of an automotive axle – all pristine white ceramic – is exhibited integrally with two beautifully decorative wooden stands that hold and support it, while Pink 350 is a full-size automotive transmission in soft pink ceramic, exhibited mounted upright on an antique wooden side table, displacing, say, a lamp, or maybe a trophy that more logically might have sat there.

Left For George, 2011. Ceramic, wood. 48” x 30” x 16” . Photo Credit Charles-Frederick Ouellet

 

Neufeld widely indulges in such jarringly keen juxtapositions between sculptural machinery and found elements like end tables or divans, often exhibiting works as if in repose on furniture. One Yellow Rose (2012) is like that, a full 1:1 scale engine and attached transmission, done in pale green ceramic, stretched out its full length on an old antique love seat.

In a surreal sort of way, it’s as if the machines have risen up against us, have displaced us from the couch to stand about (as we do in the gallery setting in which these pieces find themselves) or sit on the floor. They’ve made themselves utterly at home, put their proverbial feet up on the couch – have, in a nutshell, become us. And it’s a conceit that is backed up through the second contextualizing element in his work: his intriguing use of imagery. In a number of works – One Yellow Rose, Left for George, and Pink 350 amongst them – Neufeld has “tattooed” his sculptures, subtly ornamenting the works with decorative decals of a decidedly floral motif.

One Yellow Rose, (detail) 2012. Ceramic, wood, cloth. 70”x 30”x 40”. Photo Credit Toni Hafkenscheid

 

The juxtaposition between images of lovely flowers spread across sculptural representations of machinery is brute enough on its own. But it’s the installational context that mixes and compounds a critical level of meaning with the decorative; Neufeld has transposed industrial, manufactured things into personalities – into people, of a sort. These ceramic pieces may be based on artifacts produced at an industrial scale, but each is in fact a one-of-a-kind, a singular and unique individual, sporting its own one-of-a-kind tattoo, sprawled across a divan, lazing in a chair, or, as in Cream Before Tea (2012), a sculptural white carburetor (minus a tattoo) nestled like some pampered cat atop a pillow.

There’s a kind of entitlement being evoked here, here, Neufeld maybe reminding us that the “thingness” of the world that we take for granted gives all that stuff we accumulate a kind of privilege. We may take it for granted, get angry at it when it doesn’t do our bidding, but boy, are we ever dependent upon it. In Clint Neufeld’s work, thingness takes the best seats in the house. And we stand there, watching it.

(Some of Clint Neufeld’s recent workis part of the MASS MoCA-organized exhibition Oh, Canada, currently on tour and showing at four galleries in Eastern Canada until the end of September. See www.mta.ca/owens/exhibitions/index.php. Neufeld maintains his own website at www.clintneufeld.com.)

By Gil McElroy

Sin Titulo, (detail) 2013. Granito, 1200 / 1100 /650mm, Talla directa. Peso aproximado: 1.500 Kg.
Fotografía: Pablo Javier Comadran

Tachuela, como reza su pseudónimo, es un artista de la piedra. Nacido en Paraná-Entre Ríos, se ha dedicado casi exclusivamente al trabajo en esta técnica, introduciendo en el lenguaje plástico el uso del sistema Braille. Un trabajo de este tipo, no hace sino integrar los discursos que puedan darse entre los videntes y los no videntes, llevándonos a una reflexión que nos permita conectarnos con una enorme cantidad de terminales sensibles ligadas al tacto, acercándonos –a quienes tenemos la dicha de ver- a un universo nuevo donde la obra de arte pasa a ser un mensaje distinguido que vincula, une y comunica a través de la experiencia sensorial concreta. Una obra que se desprende de lo que solemos ver en la actualidad y que instantáneamente nos remite a producciones ambiciosas y antiquísimas, donde el trabajo en piedra parecía ser el modelo de legitimación por excelencia. Con alta demanda física e intelectual, Tachuela busca dejar grabado en la piedra, un mensaje perpetuo.

 
Photo of the artist by Sergio Santi

MCB: Seguramente sean varios los materiales y las técnicas que manejas, ¿cómo llegas a la piedra y la elegís como protagonista?

Tachuela: trabajo con hierro, madera y piedra, pero toda mi atención está dirigida hacia la piedra. Mi trabajo nace de la soledad del taller a partir de procedimientos propios. No me considero un escultor de técnicas clásicas y tengo gran afinidad con las maquinas y los registros que dejan sobre los materiales. Creo que elegí este material por haber nacido en Entre Ríos, un paisaje antagónico a Mendoza –allí vivo y trabajo-, donde la piedra define el horizonte. Aquí basta levantar la vista para encontrar grandes rocas y creo que también en parte por no sentir “lo imposible” es que la elegí como materia prima. La piedra me provoca el silencio y la quietud que necesito; una velocidad, un pulso que me es familiar. Si tengo que ver lo incompleto del hombre y lo irresuelto en mi obra prefiero hacerlo en un material noble y eterno.

MCB: Aun cuando dices ser autodidacta, el trabajo con el material me da la pauta de cierta “formación formal” detrás. Entiendo que Jesús Rafael Soto es un gran referente así como el arte óptico y cinético en general. 

Tachuela: Nunca concurrí a una escuela de arte, tampoco viví la experiencia de ser aprendiz  en el atelier de algún maestro. Lo más complicado en el arte fue tomar decisiones en medio de tantas alternativas y aprender a simplificar mi trabajo. Es allí cuando aparece Soto hablando de una monotonía que yo no podía ni he podido parar de hacer, fue él quien me atrajo hacia el arte óptico: su preferencia por los elemento simples como el cuadrado y el punto, que lograban mostrar que cualquier forma material podía despersonalizarse y convertirse en algo contrario a si misma cuestionando su propia estructura. Yo contaba con la cuadricula como elemento simple y la piedra como materia. Gracias a esto puedo re-significar mi registro sobre la piedra, es aquí donde nace el concepto de “La piedra como soporte para la desmaterialización”. En mi escultura y sus procesos  también siempre están  presentes los pensamientos y escritos de Eduardo Chillida.

 
Título de obra: Chacarera. Suprasensible. Medidas: 1200 / 700 /500mm. Año: 2013.
Material: granito gris. Técnica: talla directa. Peso aproximado: 420 Kg. Palais de Glace 2013

MCB: ¿Porque elegís trabajar en piedra aun hoy, en medio de la vorágine del arte contemporáneo que marca –a las claras- otros caminos? 

Tachuela: Es el material que me propone mayor seriedad, me da el temple y esto se refleja en mi búsqueda. Me pone en el estado de conciencia en el que prefiero sostener mi pensamiento, provocándome una irreverente prudencia el desafío de lograr una estética moderna y hasta sofisticada. Cuando trabajo puedo sentirme un artista contemporáneo, o por lo menos no un escultor clásico.

MCB: Tus obras son esculturas abstractas pero que, asimismo, guardan una figuración geométricamente estructurada. 

Tachuela: Me importa el bloque encontrado y evito cualquier asociación figurativa, voy buscando el equilibrio entre lo estético, lo conceptual y lo práctico. Lo difícil es sostener una constancia. Una connotación figurativa me parecería ser la respuesta rápida a una escultura. Esta obstinada repetición tiene un objetivo: profundizar el concepto de la desmaterialización con la piedra como soporte. En este sentido el camino recién empieza y exige algo de fe.

MCB: El tramado de las obras es de una profundidad espectacular; intimida pensar cómo fueron hechas esas perforaciones en la piedra que parecen quedar allí eternamente. En lo personal, las esculturas en piedra me transmiten ese sentido de “seguridad” por sobre lo efímero. 

Tachuela: Comencé a partir del damero, un registro poco profundo, epidérmico. Trabajé rápido escapándole a estos miedos, a los paradigmas de la escultura y sus tecnicismos. A medida que fui apropiándome de este lenguaje, la retícula se profundizaba en el bloque, enfocándome en lo instintivo. Esta seguridad a la que te referís podría transformarse en inseguridad si mientras trabajo sobre una obra pienso que estoy sobre uno de los materiales menos efímeros en la tierra y llenarme de inseguridades, perder libertad y terminar trabajando con esa prudencia que nace del miedo y que en el arte podría terminar endureciéndolo. Contrario a esto, existe una prudencia que escucha con el oído lento y persigue un instinto.

Título de obra: sin titulo. Medidas: 1200 / 1100 /650mm. Año: 2013. Material: granito. Técnica: talla directa . Peso aproximado: 1.500 Kg. Fotografía: Pablo Javier Comadran

 

MCB: ¿Cómo se da esta asociación de la piedra con el sistema de lectura Braille? Esto se ve en tu muestra “Hombre Binario” en el Museo Municipal de Arte Moderno de Mendoza en 2010

Tachuela: Durante mi adolescencia me dediqué a estudiar otras cosas, no hice la escuela secundaria. Estudie música, idiomas y alfabetos, fui radioaficionado donde aprendí código Morse -sistema binario de puntos y rayas- y recuerdo haber utilizado el alfabeto dentro de las canciones que componía. Varios años más tarde, tallando cuadriculas sobre la piedra, note que estaba haciendo un registro binario como el Braille. Y si bien muy complejo, es sin duda, más interesante y plásticamente mucho más bello. Hombre Binario es una muestra compuesta de 12 obras escritas en Braille, con más de 4000 kilos de piedra en total, donde varias de ellas tienen canciones que escribí a los 18 años. En el museo, se dispusieron especialmente para ser visitadas por personas no videntes, utilizando  una cinta texturada y señalización en Braille que permitía autonomía en el recorrido. Hoy estoy cambiando los caracteres del alfabeto Braille por caracteres propios. Hombre Binario fue una muestra pensada para el Museo, teniendo en cuenta su iluminación y disposición espacial.

 
Título de obra: sin titulo. Medidas: 2200 / 1750 /850mm. Año: 2014.
Material: granito gris. Técnica: talla directa. Peso aproximado: 5.600 Kg.
Fotografía: Juan Pablo Lemos

MCB: Imagino debe ser complejo relacionar un trabajo de este tipo con los espacios de exhibición. Entiendo que son los espacios públicos – la intemperie en genera-, donde más cómoda se expresa tu obra. ¿Cómo se vincula esto con las galerías y espacios “de legitimación”?

Tachuela: Mi obra es más versátil de lo que aparenta y esto permite que se pueda adaptar a distintos lugares; el granito es de una fortaleza excepcional. El vinculo entre galeristas, museos, espacios y artistas es algo que aparece naturalmente. Los coleccionistas exigen y el mundo quiere encontrar algo nuevo cada día, los espacios se abren, necesitan jerarquizarse y el arte es utilizado con este fin. Actualmente mi obra la maneja la casa de subastas BASS. Ellos vieron en mi obra un lenguaje, una impronta sobre un material clásico como la piedra, con un enfoque actual; todos estos elementos  provocan que exista una demanda por parte de los coleccionistas. Este aspecto comercial no interfiere en decisiones sobre mi obra. Yo prefiero mantener mi atención en cultivar lo cultural, lo espiritual y económico como tres esferas que intento sostener equilibradamente.

MCB: Pienso en las dificultades: de transporte, de comercialización y costos, dados los formatos tan grandes de las obras. ¿Cómo resuelves estos temas si es que se presentan como un problema?

Tachuela: Los formatos de mis obras han ido de grandes a mas grandes, intento superar los formatos y este inconveniente me obliga a crecer y  gestionarme, lo cual requiere el ejercicio de poder sentarme con un empresario y contarle mis proyectos e intentar sumarlo a ellos. Si yo no hiciera esto no movería ni una de mis piedras. Llevo cuatro años con empresas como MAKITA ARGENTINA, FISHER, 3M las cuales se interesan en mi trabajo y aportan insumos y herramientas o no podría ni comenzar a proyectar una muestra.  Comencé con piedras de 100 kilos y hoy estoy trabajando piedras de 5000. Probablemente con el tiempo esto siga creciendo, pero también comencé a trabajar piedras pequeñas del tamaño de la palma de mi mano, formato que siempre rechacé. Entonces pasó que por la noche, sentado en la mesa observaba las obritas pequeñas y las giraba por largos ratos contemplándolas, cosa que no puedo hacer con obras grandes. Cada formato es necesario porque en cada uno descanso del otro y, normalmente, si lo cambio es por necesidad.

Tachuela ha exhibido sus obras en destacados espacios como la galería Zurbarán y el Palais de Glace en Buenos Aires, Museo Emiliano Guiñazu, Museo de Arte Moderno y Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo de Mendoza, entre otros. En 2011 fue galardonado con el Primer Premio Salón Vendimia en Mendoza, el Premio Forner-Bigatti en el Museo Sívori de Buenos Aires y Mención Salón Nacional.

By Maria Carolina Baulo

Links:

http://artetachuela.wix.com/escultu

Gareth Lichty, Hamper, 2011. Wrapped construction fence. 18 foot diameter by 4 foot high, 550cm by 120cm. Photo by: Katrina Jennifer Bedford

Weaving. It’s the stuff of cloth, for the most part. Or perhaps basketry. So, essentially it largely boils down to things that we wear, or something container-like within which we might artfully arrange other stuff. It might lay on the floor as a carpet, or even (more rarely) hang on the wall as, say, a sampler, or (even more rarely) as a tapestry.

But it’s not sculpture. Right?

Well, no, not right, and I would put forth Canadian artist Gareth Lichty by way of making my case. See, Lichty’s a sculptor, educated in Canada and England, who has chosen weaving as his broadly sculptural medium. Our cultural marginalization of weaving has long been in contradiction of its fundamental place within our world and so Lichty has, in a very real way, been reclaiming its unquestionably nucleic cultural, social and even natural role. For the world is indeed woven together, you see.

Gareth Lichty, Range, 2009. Hand woven garden hose. 30 foot by 30 foot by 3 foot high, 920cm by 920cm by 92cm. Photo by: Katrina Jennifer Bedford

 

But let’s ease into this, start gently, start, well, with the work Range, a piece (or actually, pieces, for it is a work comprised of sections) that dates back to 2008 and which is, in many ways, an ongoing concern. Lying on the gallery floor, it resembles quite large and very flabby green mats, exhibited untidily strewn across the floor. It’s actually separate but exactly similar elements of an enormous collapsed tube woven out of ordinary green garden hose – quite literally miles of the stuff – that weighs in at well over a ton. In a very real way, it’s a form of basketry run totally amok, a kind of wildly out-of-scale woven vessel that can’t self-support its own structure. And look closer, for the very weave of which this thing is made is itself woven; all those miles of garden hose are comprised of a watertight braiding of material that simultaneously stabilizes the shape of the hose and ensures its flexibility. So, in Range, the macroscopic structure of the piece is reiterated at a more “microscopic” level; the weave of the world recursively underlies itself.

Gareth Lichty, Hamper, 2011. Wrapped construction fence. 18 foot diameter by 4 foot high, 550cm by 120cm. Photo by: Katrina Jennifer Bedford

 

By comparison, Hamper (2012) is a far more neat and tidy work. Like Range, it too is several miles in size, comprising what is essentially a large, tightly wrapped coil of woven plastic construction fence (also used in more northerly climes as snow fencing to catch and block drifting banks of the stuff), that has more than a passing resembling to an enormous orange roll of toilet paper lying on its side.

Okay, maybe not the nicest of comparisons, but it definitely provides an accurate imagining of the piece, and, in any event, contextually works. Hamper resounds of Lichty’s interest in the use and exploration of industrial materials. They’re the elements that have absolutely dominated his more recent works.

Gareth Lichty, Gabion Tower, 2012. Hand woven galvanized steel wire and Virginia creeper. 12 foot high by 6 foot diameter, 370cm by 185cm. Photo by Chérie Fawcett

 

So it is with Gabion Tower (2013-2015). It’s an outdoor sculptural installation Lichty’s done for the Cambridge Sculpture Garden in Cambridge, Ontario, a city located southwest of Toronto (cambridgesculpturegarden.ca). Visually, it has a vague resemblance to the shape of an old-fashioned incandescent light bulb: a vertical stem that rises tube-like and which flares out to become really quite bulbous at the top. It’s constructed out of a series of woven wire mesh cages arranged around a central steel pillar that provides physical support for the structure. These mesh cages actually have a name: they’re called Gabion baskets, and are commonly used in civil engineering projects; filled with, say, rocks, they shore up eroding hillsides, or redirect the flow of water. In other words, they’re hugely important and utterly elemental in urban development, and Lichty has used them to construct what is, essentially, a sculptural likeness, done in miniature, of the enormous water towers that dominate the skylines of many Ontario communities.

But for all of that, it’s not really about the representation of something that is of real significance here, for Lichty has other, more subversive intentions. Shortly after Gabion Tower was originally installed in the summer of 2013, he planted Virginia Creeper, a native species of ivy, at the base of the piece, Over the course of time, the ivy has grown up and through the work, scaling the top of its 12 foot height, and opportunistically filling in the wire mesh of the gabion baskets.

So Gabion Tower is utile, functioning  as a kind of sculptural, lattice-work trellis, an aesthetic tool for enabling the fecund stuff of the growing, organic world to go at it and weave its myriad patterns – the warp and weft of Nature’s processes – in the midst of an urban environment that is largely oriented toward processes that are unnatural, with decidedly artifactual ends in mind. Lichty gracefully subsumes any aesthetic intention of his own to the imperatives of the wild, of the other.

Gabion Tower may well be a noun of a thing, but it harbours the verb of the world’s complex, ultimately seditious, unending weave.

And that makes Gareth Lichty quite the troublemaker.

By Gil McElroy

Road Kill, 2011 stoneware & wood,12 x 92 x 92 cm.

Death, of course, changes everything.

And (also of course) almost dying can utterly transform a person. Knowingly faced with the very real possibility of your own imminent demise, everything becomes quite timely. Personality can change. Priorities and attitudes can be dramatically altered. What’s really important can suddenly become very clear. Tomorrow isn’t, but now most certainly is.

It happens, everyday. It happened to Keith Campbell, a ceramist living and working in Northern Ontario. Actually, it’s happened several times. Campbell has serious issues with his health. His heart, to be specific. He’s almost died several times – most recently, this past fall – and undergone numerous surgeries – most recently, this past fall – to repair and replace what could be repaired or replaced.

Being acutely aware that you are living on borrowed time inevitably changes you, and Campbell is no exception. His career-long exploration of ceramics began in the mid-1960s at Sheridan College in Toronto, long a hot-bed of ceramics, and led to teaching gigs at institutions across Ontario before finally settling in the Northern Ontario city of North Bay to head up the ceramics department at Canadore College, all the while creating his own one-of-a-kind work. Campbell quickly became renowned for his mastery of porcelain and the beautifully exquisite and complex range of vessels he gave form and substance to, objects ornamented with designs and imagery done using an air-brush technique that he pioneered. Exhibiting widely, he found representation in major gallery and corporate collections across Canada.

Alexander Wood: Gay Pioneer (Canadian Amphora Series), 2009, porcelain, 52 x 26 x 20 cm.

 

But then there was this pesky problem with his heart. And in changing absolutely everything in his life, it spilled over and dramatically altered the course of his aesthetic journey. Keith Campbell, creator of beautifully crafted vessels and containers, was no more. In his place, now, was an artist with a wickedly dark sense of humor, a keen and abiding interest in satire that found fresh material in both historical and contemporary Canadian politics, and a desire to push his work into the sculptural realm. A link to Campbell’s work can be found at www.keithcampbell.ca

This has all occurred over the course of the last five years, and in that time Campbell, while still addressing the aesthetic issues central to the vessel, has stretched his proverbial wings and engaged in creating sculptural ceramics in which the vessel form has no place. Alexander Wood – Gay Pioneer (2009), a piece commemorating a 19th century judge from the city of Toronto who is today remembered as, well, as a very early gay pioneer in Canada, definitively weighs in on the vessel side of the aesthetic equation (it’s an amphora, actually, a part of a larger series utilizing and exploring this form). But it’s a vessel with a sculpturally wicked bit of a twist: the handles of the vessel, you see, are penises, much smaller versions of which also ring the neck of the work by the dozens. Choose this piece, and you choose the man.

There’s work that has come out of this new direction that delightfully straddles the realms of vessel and sculpture. Like Queenston Cannon, a piece from 2011 based on a famous early battle in the War of 1812 (a war Canadians and Americans still can’t agree who actually won, but for the record, the Battle of Queenston Heights saw the defeat of American forces). In Campbell’s work, the titular cannon, a deadly artifact wrought here in less-than-murderous stoneware, is gently recontextualized as a vessel, a container, with its mouth pointed directly upwards from its pedestal-like place on a steel cradle, images of Sir Isaac Brock, the leader of British forces who died during the battle, airbrushed on its side. Hippies may have placed daisies in the rifle barrels of National Guard troops in 1960s, turning weapons into vases, but Campbell extends the gesture backwards in time. With the more recent Smith & Wesson (2013), Campbell sculpts a handgun as a satirically obscene handle for a vessel – a cup – itself air-brushed with the image of D’Arcy McGee, a 19th century politician martyred in Canada’s first assassination.

Smith & Wesson, 2013, porcelain, 20 x 28 cm.

 

And then, of course, there’s work that is purely sculptural, echoing, if only faintly, the sculptural ceramics of California Funk of the 1960s, but which addresses, in a dark and pointedly satirical way, the political and historical weight of treasured Canadian icons. Pieces like Road Kill (2011), a rather silly but politically spot-on piece which depicts a beaver, that quintessentially Canadian symbol, squished flat and imprinted with a tire tread. Nothing, our political masters here have deemed, will be allowed to stand in the way of extracting maximum profit from our ever shrinking natural resources – not even a symbol. In Assassination of D’Arcy McGee (2010), his first aesthetic kick at the can of political assassination, Campbell sculpturally incorporates both handgun and bullets used in the politically motivated murder framing both positive and negative silhouettes of the victim whose killing still reverberates today. In D’Arcy McGee in Blood Red (2013), murky images of the politician on the sides of a covered jar are doused in blood-red glaze and protectively guarded over (mourned?) by a sculptural ring of beavers sitting atop what might be a kind of funerary urn.

Over all of this hangs the spectre of death, perhaps most darkly, overtly and very personally in To Be Toast (2011). It’s a sculptural self-portrait involving a 1:1 scale stoneware toaster with a shiny silver glaze out of which two pieces of porcelain bread pop. Burned – um, toasted – onto each slice is an image of the artist’s face.

To Be Toast, 2011, porcelain and stoneware, 21 x 25 x 25 cm.

 

Point taken. Campbell has been forthright in stating that the major thematic strain running through his new work is “Death becomes us.” This isn’t morbid preoccupation, simply cognizance and exploration of a reality to which he has bluntly been forced to deal with, one which many of us would prefer not to think about. But Campbell is gutsier than that. No surprise, then, that there’s a real sense of urgency in his work of the past few years. The “now” of things has become absolutely pivotal to his creative output, and so there’s been a prolific outpouring of new pieces which, amongst other things, has given shape to an exhibition that tours through the end of 2014.

Making hay, while the sun still shines.

Right now.

By Gil McElroy

I recently moderated a panel discussion at the Center for Architecture in New York City, Please Touch: The Programming of Public Art. Panelists were artist Vito Acconci, architect Vishaan Chakrabarti and David van der Leer, the Executive Director of the Van Alen Institute. Because of the divergent professional roles of the panelists, each considered key issues pertaining to the public art field through the lens of their work: how do visitors interact with public sculpture? Are buildings enlivened or compromised when a sculpture fills a plaza? Does the meaning of an outdoor work change from city to city, from country to country? Questions focused on the traditional, figurative public art monument to its transformation through the mid- and late- twentieth century as modernist symbols of civic and corporate status to its future role as interactive artworks that mobilize neighborhoods and urban centers. Acconci remarked that only a small percentage of the works proposed by Acconci Studio are ever realized and views his projects in the realm of architecture rather than sculpture. Chakrabarti, whose recent book, A Country of Cities: A Manifest for Urban America, argues for the societal benefits of urbanization, spoke of new projects and the potential for the integration of public art in contemporary architecture. Van der Leer described contemporary artists who work has had great impact in the public realm as well as his role as organizer of the mobile BMW Guggenheim Lab which traveled to New York, Berlin and Mumbai.

Photo from wikipedia.com

 

What fascinated me was that three of four slide presentations displayed images of Mark di Suvero’s Joie de Vivre, 1998, a seventy-foot high towering steel public sculpture on view in New York’s Zuccotit Park. That work unwittingly became a focal point of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 when activists and hangers-on used the sculpture as a symbol and platform to mark their cause. Di Suvero’s red industrial-scale object had its most photogenic moment because the public transformed the meaning of an abstract sculpture into a clarion call. Although it is not by any means a monument in the traditional trajectory of the bronze, figurative sculpture of a male statesman, the role of Joie de Vivre is analogous to the academic works that have recently radicalized cultures in public squares: Iraqi citizens and American marines toppled the statue of Iraqi leader and dictator Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square and the ferocious fall of the monument to Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin in Kiev last December which was widely documented. Reuters reported that seething protesters pulled down that sculpture using ropes and metal bars before assailing it with hammers. The name of the site where this took place: Independence Square.

Toppling of Saddam Hussein statue in Firdos Square. Photo from wikipedia.com

 

Unlike the outsize likenesses of Hussein or Lenin which were disappeared through violent, physical gestures symbolizing the shifting tide of politics and regime change, Di Suvero’s sculpture is still standing, an abstract icon which the Occupy movement never brutally vanquished but used for its camera-ready form. The images of sculpture as emblem have captivated print and social media. In continuing the conversation begun at the Center for Architecture, what do readers think is the future of public art? Will political factions rally around non-figurative art to propel urgent action?  Have monuments to leaders and statesmen assumed a new role as twenty-first century activism moves from the streets of the 1960s and 1970s activism to the urban square which regularly hosts statues of leaders?

By Brooke Kamin Rapaport

Detail from Karla Black’s 2014 solo exhibition at David Zwirner, New York Photo by Maris Hutchinson.

Perhaps one challenge of using everyday materials to create sculpture is revivification: how best to proffer a solution using recognizable materials when a formulaic response will seem cliché or tired?  Some artists create extraordinary work from ordinary objects through accumulation — whereby the same object is used incessantly — and ask viewers to reconsider a known form through refreshed perception. Beginning in the late 1950s, Arman (b. France, 1928-2005) collected rubbish to make sculptural objects called Poubelles (“trash bins” or “garbage cans”) as well as identical pieces (violins, clocks, tools), generating relief sculpture. In 1962, Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929) crafted a work, Accumulation of Stamps, 63, which riffed on Minimalism and on the sameness of one form through collage. Tara Donovan (American, b. 1969) has used clear plastic drinking straws, pencils, buttons and Styrofoam cups to create vast organic forms that are as ethereal as they are ephemeral. Repetition of a consistent form is how some have expertly resolved the problem of creating work with mundane, castoff objects.

Detail from Karla Black’s 2014 solo exhibition at David Zwirner, New York. Karla Black, Take Its Place, 2014. Plaster powder, powder paint, Sellotape, bath bombs, and nail polish. 393 3/4 x 669 3/8 inches (1000 x 1700 cm). Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London. Photo by Maris Hutchinson.

 

In a recent exhibition at David Zwirner in New York, Karla Black (Scottish, b. 1972) installed a complete environment of abstract form also using everyday materials: powder, cellophane and over three hundred floor-to-ceiling lengths of Sellotape, the British brand of adhesive tape. Black doesn’t traffic in accumulation, but in the transformation of daily materials as sculptural form. On the floor, a large pink and white striped expanse is beside a pastel blue area. The soft powdery surface spreads across the floor, evoking a blurred, unfurled flag.  Above the striped section, the artist hung strands of transparent tape which reflect light and shimmer over the powder carpet. Echoing the display of ground stripes were the equally linear threads of this see-through ribbon. That tape is clear evidence of the artist’s course: her pink fingerprints are visible across the surface, implicating both her presence and her process. In the far reaches of the gallery, bulky pink and blue paper sculptures lurked – intruders on the minimal scene where floor and space became interchangeable. These informal hulking sculptures loomed over the scene. The artist added intermediary, hanging objects almost as a bridge between the supple ground and the invasion beyond.

Installation view of Karla Black’s 2014 solo exhibition at David Zwirner, New York.

 

Black was on the shortlist for the Turner Prize in 2011. On the occasion of her Turner nomination, she told an interviewer: “Sculpture is what is important to me. It’s its physicality that matters.” Black continued to describe her process and the reason for the primacy of a sculptural object in comparison to a wall painting or a text. “Any sort of physical engulfment by or absorption in material reality can be more of an escape than the optical, cerebral one offered by representational painting or the narrative storytelling of language. That sort of physical engulfment or absorption in the material world is actually the most complete freedom that can be felt.”

In her display at Zwirner, there is a cellophane window which beckons the viewer into the scene. One expects a crystal clear sight through this opening, but because the material is draped and folded, fragmented or distorted views of the artist’s installation ensues. The artist’s intentional skewed lens through that window leaves an ambiguous perception of the powdery and chalky sculpture.

By Brooke Kamin Rapaport

Acorn Steam, Sacramento International Airport

“You have two experiences in an airport,” veteran public artist Donald Lipski (American, b. 1947) recently told an interviewer when describing the viewer experience in an airline terminal. “You are rushing through and hardly see anything. Or you are stuck here and have hours to kill. To try to come up with something to serve both of those situations is challenging and I love that.” Lipski has focused in recent years on creating commissioned work for public transportation sites: major American airports, bus terminals, and train stations. It is an unusual choice for an artist whose studio work was once composed of isolating found, cast-off materials and for organizing dense, layered installations which were noted for their quirky materials and taxonomic systems. Instead, today Lipski is following his instinct to collaborate with engineers, fabricators, architects, lighting designers, and community groups. He doesn’t blink when confronted with the red tape of transit commission bureaucracy. “Making art in the studio is like being a writer. It is a very solitary thing. You sit there and do your work. Public art is highly collaborative,” he explained.

Got Any Jacks? at Miami International Airport, photo credit: Mark Menjivar.

 

Lipski has made three major public works in American airports: Miami International Airport, Sacramento Airport and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. There is a pending project at the San Antonio International Airport. The work in Miami, Got Any Jacks?, is a wall piece and consists of five-hundred taxidermied tropical fish arranged in abstract forms.  The artist tapped into the local ecosystem and featured sea creatures. Acorn Stream, 2011, in Sacramento, was made of thirty-feet long lifelike tree limbs with Swarovski crystals dripping off the branches to reflect light. In Atlanta, Lipski also chose thousands of elegant Swarovski crystals to install a chandelier of netting and bling, Rebilace, 2012. The planned work for San Antonio, scheduled to open in the next few years , is a wall relief of water-filled glass tubes in the form of a map of the San Antonio river.

Got Any Jacks? at Miami International Airport, photo credit: Mark Menjivar.

 

Unlike a gallery exhibition in Chelsea or a museum show, it’s unlikely that most visitors to these airports will even know who is Donald Lipski. If ticket holders have time to linger in the concourse, they’ll have the opportunity to think deeply about the meaning of the sculpture, why it was sited where it is, and the materials and process behind the work. As to identifying the artist, Lipski affirms that each site has a wall label or plaque identifying him as the creator. “I don’t imagine that because of all of the tens of thousands of people a day who see my work that my name will become a household name,” he said. The name recognition isn’t what has propelled Lipski to seek and get these commissions. It’s the process, really, and the power of completing work for throngs of travelers. “One of the most beloved pieces of public art is Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate. People in Chicago call it The Bean. Even people who love the piece don’t know it is Anish Kapoor’s work,” he said.

If fame hasn’t made Lipski’s a household name, that doesn’t deter his pursuit of these projects.  What is important to him, he says, is that he’s respected by his artist peers. “Public art isn’t really respected in the art world the way gallery and museum art is,” according to the artist. “I understand that.”  Lipski’s work in the public sphere is sure to continue. His talk a few years ago for the public art program in Fort Worth was titled: “Public Art: What the Hell Was I Thinking?”

By Brooke Kamin Rapaport

Donald Lipski, Atlanta Airport

The Metropolitan Museum’s current exhibition, Jewels by JAR, has attracted extensive print and online notice because it showcases opulent pieces created by a living jeweler. On view are 400 necklaces, brooches, earrings and rings in sapphire, diamond, topaz, ruby, and garnet by the American-born, Parisian jewelry designer Joel A. Rosenthal (born 1943).

JAR Butterfly Brooch, 1994. Sapphires, fire opals, rubies, amethyst, garnets, diamonds, silver and gold. Private collection
Photograph by Katharina Faerber. Courtesy of JAR, Paris

 

Rosenthal is best-known for his boldface name clients and for his use of a pavé technique whereby stones are so closely set that they form a carpet of jewels. The Met’s director Thomas P. Campbell described Rosenthal’s work to The New York Times: “He’s almost like a sculptor in gems.”  The idea of the sculptural presence in jewelry is legitimate. But the fact that a number of prominent mid-twentieth century sculptors created jewelry is fascinating in light of the attention to the JAR bling. They were foremost identified as sculptors.

Whereas JAR leads with splendor, these artists lead with sculpture. Mid-twentieth century sculptors were steeped in modernist materials and methods; their process for creating jewelry mimicked that of their work. It is worth considering how sculptors from the Abstract Expressionist-era — Harry Bertoia (1915-1978), Alexander Calder (1898-1976) and Ibram Lassaw (1913-2003) — each created modernist jewelry distinctly channeling their studio work.

Bertoia Jewlery, silver brooch – “fishbone” style courtesy HarryBertoia Foundation

 

(Calder’s jewelry was featured in a Metropolitan Museum exhibition in 2008.) Art Smith (1917-1982) trained as a sculptor before becoming a studio jeweler and Margaret De Patta (1903-1964)’s jewelry was inspired by Constructivist sculpture. The forms in their bracelets, rings and necklaces resembled the forms in their art: undulating imagery that reflected or amplified nature and the human body. It was a way for Surrealist-inspired forms and organic abstraction to physically link with the human body. The body was seamlessly linked to the ornament. Oftentimes the jewelry was so substantial that it would consume the wearer.  To be sure, comparing the Met’s show which displays a designer working in traditional materials, forms and themes with the output of vanguard artists is a study in contrasts: period, geography, clientele, materials and market all diverge when comparing haute gems with innovative sculptural practice.

JAR Zebra Brooch, 1987. Agate, diamonds, a sapphire, silver, and gold. Private collection Photograph by Katharina Faerber. Courtesy of JAR, Paris.

 

JAR works in a tradition that celebrates marrying the realism of flowers and butterflies, for example, with spectacular stones.    And while some say that Rosenthal’s pieces straddle the line between jewelry and sculpture (certainly the scale of some of the objects would present a challenge for the wearer), he is foremost considered a designer, not a sculptor. His glittery materials oppose the brass, silver and gold which twentieth- and twenty-first century sculptors used to create jewelry.  Their goal was to communicate and enhance the elegance of the neck, the reach of the finger, or the extension of the wrist through an economy of materials.

Most recently, vanguard sculptors continue to create jewelry with contemporary materials including plastic, nylon, polyurethane, steel, Lego, recycled materials and rope.   An exhibition last year at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art in Virginia Beach, Out of the Box: Trends in Contemporary Jewelry blurred the dividing line between art and design. The museum’s website comfortably handled the debate: “As patrons move through this exhibition, they won’t have to ask whether it is sculpture, installation or jewelry. The answer will be yes to all of the above.”

What are readers’ thoughts about modern and contemporary jewelry design in the realm of sculpture? Why do contemporary sculptors create jewelry? Are they compelled by the opportunity to physically incorporate the human form into their work?

Jewels by JAR is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through March 9, 2014.

By Brooke Kamin Rapaport

Featured image: JAR Multicolored Handkerchief Earrings, 2011. Sapphires, demantoid and other garnets, zircons, tourmalines, emeralds, rubies, fire opals, spinels, beryls, diamonds, platinum, silver, and gold. Private collection Photograph by Jozsef Tari. Courtesy of JAR, Paris.

To museum-goers of a certain age, a poster from the gift shop was the ultimate. One could carry home and display a reproduction of a favorite painting or sculpture. It served as a memory of a blockbuster exhibition. It was a tacked-up status banner on a dorm room wall.  This fall, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC launched the contemporary version of the museum reproduction: scanned collection objects are available online for the public to download and print on a 3-D printer. An Alaskan Killer Whale Hat dating to 1900, an 18th century decorative chair from the Cooper-Hewitt collection and Abraham Lincoln’s Life Mask of 1865 are each ready for download via Smithsonian X 3D, an initiative which brings major collection works free to the public through 3-D scans to be uploaded onto a 3-D printer.

If this 3-D technology is best suited to natural history museums and for decorative arts objects, some wonder how the 3-D evolution will impact contemporary art.  Will artists whose works are in the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden or the National Portrait Gallery green light their works for this project? An email query to Gunter Waibel, Director of the Digitization Program at the Smithsonian, awaits reply, but some sculptors are unconvinced that 3-D is the next great leap in the creation, fabrication and realization of their work.

Arlene Shechet (American, b. 1951), an artist who pushes and prods the definition of the vessel through her clay objects said recently that “Like most artists, I am always happy to learn about and use new tools.” But Shechet stopped short of endorsing 3-D printing as a process of real significance to her sculptures. “This technology is no more or less than that… not an answer or an end in itself but rather a vehicle for possibly getting something done.”

Installation view: Arlene Shechet: Slip Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
© Arlene Shechet/Images courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Installation view: Arlene Shechet: Slip Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
© Arlene Shechet/Images courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Installation view: Arlene Shechet: Slip Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
© Arlene Shechet/Images courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Installation view: Arlene Shechet: Slip Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
© Arlene Shechet/Images courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Installation view: Arlene Shechet: Slip Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
© Arlene Shechet/Images courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Installation view: Arlene Shechet: Slip Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
© Arlene Shechet/Images courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Installation view: Arlene Shechet: Slip Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
© Arlene Shechet/Images courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

 Shechet’s fall 2013 exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins in New York was almost antithetical to any consideration of technology in art.  Roughhewn handcrafted ceramics with wonky appendages and lovingly-applied glazes demonstrate the mastery of artist over materials.  And if there are planned contradictions in Shechet’s works – rough and smooth, balance and imbalance, perfection and imperfection, symbolism and literalism – then technology vs. gesture isn’t embedded here. “Four or five years ago, I used 3-D carving/printing technology for a segment of my exhibition at MCA Denver,” she said. “…The process was laborious, involving quite a bit of time working with a specialized computer technician…Though I found the process too stilted to use regularly, the existence of the technology permitted me to dream up these images.”

Similarly, Jean Shin (American, b. Seoul 1971) is skeptical about the power of 3-D printing for her work. Shin, who is best-known for a labor intensive process of gathering multiples of tossed off objects and amassing them into sculptural installations, revealed that she’s not yet worked with a 3-D printer, “but I have considered this possibility on a previous project.” Like Shechet who found the process cumbersome and costly, Shin stated that when she did review the 3-D option to realize objects, “the scale I needed to make this form was cost prohibitive at the time. I imagine when the costs come down with demand, it might be a process I incorporate into my work.” Shin’s 2013 exhibition, in the New Directions series at the Montclair Art Museum, was on view through January 15, 2014.

Jean Shin, Host, 2013. Museum Purchase,
Acquisition Fund Commission in honor of the Museum Centennial Permanent Collection,
Montclair Art Museum, NJ

Jean Shin, Host, 2013. Museum Purchase,
Acquisition Fund Commission in honor of the Museum Centennial Permanent Collection,
Montclair Art Museum, NJ

Jean Shin, Host, 2013.
Museum Purchase, Acquisition Fund Commission in honor of the Museum Centennial Permanent Collection,
Montclair Art Museum, NJ

Jean Shin, Host, 2013. 
Museum Purchase, Acquisition Fund Commission in honor of the Museum Centennial Permanent Collection, 
Montclair Art Museum, NJ

Jean Shin, Host, 2013. 
Museum Purchase, Acquisition Fund Commission in honor of the Museum Centennial Permanent Collection, 
Montclair Art Museum, NJ

Jean Shin, Host, 2013. 
Museum Purchase, Acquisition Fund Commission in honor of the Museum Centennial Permanent Collection, 
Montclair Art Museum, NJ

Jean Shin, Host, 2013. 
Museum Purchase, Acquisition Fund Commission in honor of the Museum Centennial Permanent Collection, 
Montclair Art Museum, NJ

While Shin’s work is identified for its extensive gathering of real-world abandoned detritus, she does rely on technology to create her projects. “Because of the scale of my site-specific installations, technology is a critical tool to help me visualize and innovate in the work. For some of my research-based projects, I’m using historical images and reworking these photographs digitally to create a new form and context in my work… It’s fascinating for me to imagine continuing the next digital possibility into three dimensional forms.”

Shin is prescient when looking ahead to further incorporating 3-D printing into her work: “As more of our lived experience is mediated through new technologies, it seems inevitable that 3-D printing is here to stay.”

While Shechet and Shin may have dubious interest in this process, 3-D printing  is slowly creeping into the realm of the possible for a number of sculptors. When considering materials for a new work, or discussing future opportunities for artists, 3-D printing inevitably enters the conversation. If this dialogue accelerates for certain sculptors, it will relate to the printers as they come to accommodate scale and a diversity of materials.

By Brooke Kamin Rapaport

Despite the headline-grabbing hype, the promise and the premise, artists remain mixed about the viability and use of three-dimensional printing in their work. Some have embraced this new technology while others are skeptical about certain limitations (namely, scale of objects produced) at this still-early stage of the technology, which is traced to a 1984 patent, but has become more common in the last decade. With 3-D printing, hoary debates about the “artist’s hand” are mute because computer technology has evolved as a necessary standard in much sculpture created today. 3-D printing allows an individual to make an object in, for example, Alumide (a hybrid material of aluminum dust and nylon), steel, plastic, brass, silver, bronze, sandstone or ceramic. Objects are built up layer by layer directly from a computer file. And while some prominent artists are wary of drawbacks found in using this process, they are endorsing it for their students who must simultaneously distrust and embrace this method. An internet search reveals that Jeff Koons is a supporter of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms which marries computer science with physical science to “study how to turn data into things,” that Frank Stella has used 3-D printing to create metal and resin components for sculpture, and that Alice Aycock first used this technology several years ago to create a piece that was around two feet high.

“I have not yet used it myself but we are introducing the technology for our studio classes this year,” commented sculptor DeWitt Godfrey, the president-elect of the College Art Association and a professor of studio art at Colgate University. According to Godfrey, 3-D printing is “an essential tool for our students to be familiar with, whatever art or design field they might enter.” Godfrey cautions that “the danger in any new technology is its perceived promise, the magic bullet that can do anything. As art educators we need to teach these innovations critically, we need to learn what tools, what materials to use when, to meet our expressive needs.”

2013, Waltzing Matilda Reinforced fiberglass Approximately 25” high x 24” wide x 29 1/3” deep Edition of 5+2AP Courtesy Alice Aycock/PAPC & Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin

 

At the School of Visual Arts in New York where sculptor Alice Aycock teaches undergraduates, there are 3-D printers for student use.  “I encouraged my school to get 3-D printers,” she said in a phone interview. “Any process, any technique that is available that is useful, I will use,” Aycock emphasized. “It’s just the idea has to be good enough. It’s the idea, not necessarily the technique… The 3-D printer is part of an overall revolution for me in how I get to work and how to examine complex phenomena structures such as fluid dynamics that I’ve been thinking about for years.” Aycock’s next exhibition, on the Park Avenue Malls, will open in February 2014 with seven or eight monumental sculptures, all of which has been rendered with computer technology, but not via a 3-D printer due to limitations of scale still hampering the technology. 

Three-dimensional printing may seem cutting-edge to the general public, but the automobile and aeronautics industries and the military have evolved the technique over several decades.  Artists have been open to using computer programs to design and fabricate their work for some time. A current exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, “Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital” features artists, architects and designers who work with 3-D technology. As part of the show, a representative from Shapeways, an online site where 3-D printing and commerce collide, stands in the galleries to assist visitors in making objects or in answering questions about the creative process.

Shapeways is a commercial venture where a consumer has an idea, uploads it to a web site, and selects the material for fabrication. Shapeways’ Duann Scott (whose business card reads “Designer Evangelist”) said that his firm receives over 60,000 uploads per month and that they print around 100,000 objects per month. Although Scott can’t identify the exact number of artists making objects in this manner, he suggests that “artists have definitely been a major component of the early adopters” of 3-D printing and that many use laser sintered Nylon for its versatility, malleability and strength. Through EOS printers, the scale of objects ranges according to the consumer’s wish: tiny objects visible only through a magnifying glass to life size bust of a figure.

The continuation of 3-D printers to make sculpture may be generational as younger artists assume this technology as the definitive tool for their needs. For today, the issue of scale may be the hindrance to the ubiquity of 3-D printing. By eliminating the need for a professional fabricator to realize computer-derived objects, the 3-D printer may be an accessible, cost-effective means to create new work.

By Brooke Kamin Rapaport

Los Angeles artist Aaron Curry (b. 1972) has taken on his most monumental public art project to date: he’s installed fourteen vibrantly colored metal sculptures throughout the Josie Robertson Plaza at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Curry was an undergraduate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received his Masters of Fine Arts from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He lives and works in Los Angeles. Curry’s influences – great modernist sculptors – are often noted when critics and curators describe the work. As often as Curry relies on the human form, he has assiduously credited Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi and Pablo Picasso as inspirations to his projects. His is the revivification of modern masters whose work was out of favor for some years.

 
MUSHMIND, 2012. Painted aluminum, 109 1/2 x 49 1/4 x 46 3/8 inches, 278.1 x 125.1 x 117.8 cm.
(Inv# CUR TBD 13). © James Ewing Photography, courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London.

Curry’s installation, Melt to Earth, will be on view in New York through January 6, 2014.  The objects dwarf human scale — some reach nineteen feet high — and stand in contrast to the austere geometry of the Plaza’s buildings and to the radiating patterning on the Plaza’s terrain.  Unlike the strict lines of Lincoln Center’s theaters which face onto the Plaza, Curry has inserted an homage to the organic forms of modernism which embodied humanist values as opposed to the strict lines which favored an industrial bearing.

Curry’s pieces are colorful, whimsical and cheerful; even more so when sited across the pedestrian thoroughfare that typically animates the space.  He has painted details on some of the sculptures adding humorous swatches of yellow, green and blue to a red surface, for example. The cut out aluminum character share a comic vitality and may remind art world viewers of Elizabeth Murray’s cut out forms from her 1980s paintings. Curry’s pieces are equally exuberant.  And their siting at the foremost music center in Manhattan enables the abstracted figures to have a theatricality summoning the performances inside the buildings and the active street life of pedestrians crossing the site.

 
UGLY MESS, 2012. Painted aluminum, 217 x 59 9/16 x 95 11/16 inches, 551.2 x 151.3 x 243 cm.
(Inv# CUR TBD 9)© James Ewing Photography, courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London.

Since the 1960s, the parade of operagoers and classical music aficionados rushing to make an 8 P.M curtain – or catching a smoke between acts – have  energized the flat plane of the Plaza. Today, Curry’s sculptures are on view as surrogates for the human drama that unfolds daily. They are semi-figurative aluminum pieces which are arrayed around the Revson Fountain.  Like massive chess pieces on a playing board, each sculpture pushes into space, an attempt to bring ebullient forms across a flat field. The geometric purity of the Lincoln Center Plaza was surely a challenge for Curry. In addition to the buoyant flow of the Fountain which shoots upward, Curry’s site is a uniform surface bordered by modernist icons.

Lincoln Center and Metropolitan Opera House opened in 1966 and were designed by architect Wallace Harrison. Max Abramovitz was Avery Fisher Hall’s architect, opening in 1962. Philip Johnson was the architect for the New York State Theater, dating to 1964 (now called the David Koch Theater). Tucked into this trio of severe 1960s edifices are Curry’s sculptures which enable a visitor to see anew a familiar site.

By Brooke Kamin Rapaport

All Photos: © James Ewing Photography, courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London

PEACEOUT 2012 Painted aluminum 54 7/8 x 161 13/16 x 94 3/16 inches 139.4 x 411 x 239.2 cm
(Inv# CUR TBD 16)

BERZERKPLE 2012 Painted aluminum 97 1/2 x 113 3/16 x 61 1/8 inches 247.7 x 287.5 x 155.3 cm
(Inv# CUR TBD 14)

WEIRD MIRROR 2012 Painted aluminum 121 1/2 x 91 1/4 x 55 5/16 inches
308.6 x 231.8 x 140.5 cm (Inv# CUR TBD 12)

Zap 2012 Painted aluminum 121 11/16 x 92 5/8 x 82 11/16 inches
309.1 x 235.3 x 210 cm (Inv# CUR TBD 11)


GREEN GIRL 2012 Painted aluminum 143 3/4 x 118 5/16 x 60 1/16 inches
365.1 x 300.5 x 152.6 cm (Inv# CUR TBD 10).

BLUBAT 2012 Painted aluminum 121 5/8 x 95 x 51 1/8 inches
308.9 x 241.3 x 129.9 cm (Inv# CUR TBD 8)

Melt to Earth, Lincoln Center, New York City Josie Robertson Plaza,
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. October 7, 2013 – January 6, 2014.

Melt to Earth, Lincoln Center, New York City Josie Robertson Plaza,
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. October 7, 2013 – January 6, 2014.

Melt to Earth , Lincoln Center, New York City Josie Robertson Plaza,
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. October 7, 2013 – January 6, 2014 .

Melt to Earth , Lincoln Center, New York City Josie Robertson Plaza,
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. October 7, 2013 – January 6, 2014 .

SHREDHEAD 2012 Painted aluminum 173 7/16 x 140 3/4 x 72 1/16 inches
440.5 x 357.5 x 183 cm (Inv# CUR TBD 19).

LAZY COMET 2012 Painted aluminum 120 x 110 1/8 x 64 1/4 inches
304.8 x 279.7 x 163.2 cm (Inv# CUR TBD 20).

BIG DRAG 2012 Painted aluminum 216 x 118 1/2 x 59 1/2 inches
548.6 x 301 x 151.1 cm (Inv# CUR TBD 21)

HOMEWRECKER 2012 Painted aluminum 132 x 124 x 64 9/16 inches
335.3 x 315 x 164 cm (Inv# CUR TBD 22)

An installation in The Cloisters’ Fuentidueña Chapel demonstrates how contemporary art can invigorate a historic setting. The Forty Part Motet, 2001 is a fourteen-minute sound installation by the Canadian artist Janet Cardiff (b. 1957). Within the twelfth-century limestone apse in this Romanesque space, Cardiff has installed forty human-height high fidelity audio speakers which line the boundaries of the room. The speakers are displayed at eye level on a thin support and summon a figurative presence.

 
Janet Cardiff, The Forty Part Motet (2001)
Fuentidueña Chapel at The Cloisters museum and gardens
Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Wilson Santiago

Each speaker emits separate voice recordings of a section of the 16th century composer Thomas Tallis’ forty-part composition Spem in alium numquam habui (In No Other Is My Hope). A capella voices  — bass, baritone, alto, tenor, soprano — spill from distinct speakers, so visitors to the chapel can hear individual parts or take in the full chorus.  It is a transporting auditory and physical experience as inanimate electronics are suddenly animate because of the power of the musical composition they generate.  Visitors to The Cloisters become absorbed because an austere, traditional sacred space is newly relevant when a contemporary interpretation revitalizes its historicity.  The visual simplicity of Cardiff’s installation vivifies the Medieval surround.

The Forty Part Motet is in an edition of four.  The Met’s loan is from the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. The work is also in the artist’s collection, The Museum of Modern Art and Inhotim in Brazil. The piece has been exhibited extensively and internationally: in 2012, it was on view at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, England. Last spring, the Cleveland Museum of Art hosted the work. In previous venues, Cardiff’s project was  displayed in a standard gallery setting: a clean, white room became a disappearing backdrop.  Here, in a setting with rich acoustics and sacred meaning, new significance imbues the work. It is the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first gambit in showing contemporary art at the venerable Cloisters.  Anne L. Strauss, Associate Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met, collaborated with Peter Barnet, Senior Curator in the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. According to Strauss, “The Forty Part Motet is the first presentation of contemporary art at The Cloisters, and it’s also the first exhibition of sound art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Cardiff’s sound engineer (his official title is “tonmeister”) worked with the curators to set up the installation.

Because of the subtlety of The Forty Part Motet – the reverence of the historic period, the sculptural simplicity of the work — it is a discriminating choice. The artist has commented on how sound art can command a three dimensional space, not only through physical objects in the room, but by the overwhelming humanistic presence of voice. “The main emphasis is on the sculptural quality,” Cardiff said about her installation, “and the sense that audio can be a physical construct.”

Janet Cardiff, The Forty Part Motet (2001) Fuentidueña Chapel at The Cloisters museum and gardens Image:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Wilson Santiago

Janet Cardiff, The Forty Part Motet (2001) Fuentidueña Chapel at The Cloisters museum and gardens Image:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Wilson Santiago

Janet Cardiff, The Forty Part Motet (2001) Fuentidueña Chapel at The Cloisters museum and gardens Image:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Wilson Santiago

Janet Cardiff, The Forty Part Motet (2001) Fuentidueña Chapel at The Cloisters museum and gardens Image:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Wilson Santiago

Janet Cardiff, The Forty Part Motet (2001) Fuentidueña Chapel at The Cloisters museum and gardens Image:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Wilson Santiago

Janet Cardiff, The Forty Part Motet (2001) Fuentidueña Chapel at The Cloisters museum and gardens Image:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Wilson Santiago

Janet Cardiff, The Forty Part Motet (2001) Fuentidueña Chapel at The Cloisters museum and gardens Image:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Wilson Santiago

“The Forty Part Motet” is on view at The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, New York, through December 8, 2013.

Click here for a short excerpt of The Forty Part Motet.

By Brooke Kamin Rapaport

Henry Klimowicz, a sculptor based in Millerton, New York, has used cardboard exclusively in his work since 1986. He creates reliefs and three-dimensional pods, layered topographical studies, decorative wall hangings resembling outsize textiles, and organic forms summoning sea coral. There are discs which are six feet in diameter where the artist pummels, squishes, crimps and “beats up” the stiff paper.

 
Henry Klimowicz, Untitled, 2013. Cardboard, hot glue
34 x 12 x 14 inches. Photo by KEN EK PHOTOGRAPHY

And there are twenty-foot high curtains of woven cardboard that emit light. Klimowicz also makes surprisingly durable benches with decorative surface pattern. His signature material simultaneously poses limitations and advantages. Recently, to relieve the persistent uniformity of the cardboard, skeins of dried white glue and an infrastructure of wire supports were added to the list of artist’s materials. “The hot glue gun is the binder. It’s beginning to have a structural place in the work,” Klimowicz explained. “The use of the wire is critical sculpturally. My intent is to treat the wire with as much reverence as the cardboard,” he said.

Despite glue drips and a wire foundation, cardboard, with its earthy brown color and landfill aura, dominates. There is no guesswork on what each piece is made of; viewers are free to consider process and subject matter. Klimowicz pushes the material – the common, everyday corrugated stuff of packing boxes – as far as possible. The cardboard is as rugged as a supermarket packing container: printed product letters, small surface tears, even box creases are visible and celebrated on the surface or verso of Klimowicz’s pieces. The material’s past isn’t hidden or disguised, but reconfigured from grocery store castoff to sculpture.   “I don’t buy any new cardboard,” the artist recently told a visitor to his show at the Morrison Gallery in Kent, Connecticut. He gathers his material, jettisoned by the local hardware store or saved for him by art collectors whose shipments are secured with cardboard. “There isn’t a shortage of cardboard in this world,” he acknowledged.

 
HENRY KLIMOWICZ, Rectangular Volume 1, 2013
Cardboard, hot glue. 240 x 120 x 72 inches

Klimowicz credits a great aunt, Molly Nye Tobey (1893 – 1984), who hooked rugs first as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, as an influence on his work. “I have a fiber background in my DNA,” he described. “This was a part of my self and a part of my sense as an artist.” He shares the intensely repetitive process of hooking a rug, quilting, or creating a needlepoint so much that his process veers toward craft. Pointing to his projects, he smiled: “It’s part of being a real feminist craft artist.”  Geographical distance from a major urban area and his base in Dutchess County has allowed the artist to keep bees. “There are definite references,” in his work to the beekeeper’s tasks. “I know what a drone cell and a honeycomb look like,” he described, alluding to forms in his sculpture.

But the artist is hesitant to make clear comparisons to visual clues in his work. “My work is minimal and abstract and derives from natural forms, but I am leery about setting the course any viewer would take with it. Describing his art, Klimowicz happily acknowledged the mundane character of his material: “Everything that is done is my personal uplift to it. It doesn’t come with a cultural weight or value. This has a lot of other side benefits. It’s a nonthreatening material.”

By Brooke Kamin Rapaport

HENRY KLIMOWICZ Rectangular Volume 1, 2013 Cardboard,
hot glue 240 x 120 x 72 inches

HENRY KLIMOWICZ Plated and Cut, 2013 Cardboard, hot glue 77 x 82 x 3 inches

HENRY KLIMOWICZ Stones #2, 2011 Cardboard, hot glue 96 x 84 inches

HENRY KLIMOWICZ Circle #2, Cell Weight, 2013 Cardboard, hot glue 80 x 76 x 2 inches

HENRY KLIMOWICZ Circle #9 Rocks, 2009 Cardboard, hot glue 82 x 82 x 4 inches

Henry Klimowicz Disk #3, 2013 Cardboard, hot glue 240 x 240 x 14 inches
Photo by KEN EK PHOTOGRAPHY

 Visitors to the Guggenheim Museum this summer look a lot like Sistine Chapel tourists. They are all gazing heavenward.  In Vatican City, they are exalting in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam fresco. In New York, crowds are rubbernecking at James Turrell’s light installations, especially the artist’s Aten Reign, 2013 which fills Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda with successive rings of subtly shifting color.  At both sites reverence, meditation and a profound viewing experience result.

James Turrell
Photo: Florian Holzherr © James Turrell

 

Turrell (American, 1943) was born in Los Angeles, is based in Flagstaff, Arizona and has a home in New York City. He presently has simultaneous exhibitions at the Guggenheim, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Turrell was a leading representative of California’s Light and Space movement of the 1960s which focused — through light, color and scale — on perception as the fundamental matter in art. Other artists affiliated with Light and Space included Larry Bell (American, b.  1939),  Robert Irwin (American, b. 1928),  and John McCracken (American, 1934 – 2011).  Bell, for example, made geometric structures of light in coated glass. Irwin’s work used a simple scrim through which light altered a physical space. And McCracken’s spare “planks” of plywood covered with fiberglass and resin were monochromatic forms challenging our space.

James Turrell, Aten Reign, 2013
Daylight and LED light, dimensions variable
© James Turrell. Installation view: James Turrell, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, June 21–September 25, 2013. Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

 

If those artists chose to work with light in a three-dimensional manner by creating sculptural objects, Turrell’s masterwork at the Guggenheim is a lesson in how light becomes a transforming sculptural medium because it fills and holds an architectural space. Turrell once told the British newspaper The Independent: “Light is a powerful substance. We have a primal connection to it. But for something so powerful, situations for its felt presence are fragile. I form it as much as that material allows. I like to work with it so that you feel it physically, so you feel the presence of light inhabiting a space.”

Turrell’s ability to create “form” from insubstantiality is what causes viewers to contemplate Aten Reign for long periods. The piece takes as its medium an ephemeral source and makes it enduring. The mastery in this work is that color – deftly shifting circuits of whites and greys to blues, purples, pinks and red to orange and peach, to moss green and emerald – mystically becomes object. Through a non-referential language, Turrell has created a hallowed experience. The work is without irony or political motivation. It doesn’t flaunt a contemporary trend or traffic in an accumulation of found objects. The artist recently told Interview magazine: “It’s about perception. For me, it’s using light as a material to influence or affect the medium of perception. I feel that I want to use light as this wonderful and magic elixir that we drink as Vitamin D through the skin—and I mean, we are literally light-eaters—to then affect the way that we see.”

Is Aten Reign a sculpture? Does light’s ability to consume a three-dimensional space permit its categorization? Somehow art historical classifications fade when viewing Aten Reign, just as Turrell’s colors dissolve into one another. Turrell has challenged the very way we see.

James Turrell is on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York through September 25, 2013.

By Brooke Kamin Rapaport

James Turrell, Aten Reign, 2013
Daylight and LED light, dimensions variable

© James Turrell. Installation view: James Turrell, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, June 21–September 25, 2013. Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

 Richard Dupont’s hanging masks are an unexpected display of oozing rubber faces, drooping off of the wall.  They evince an overburdened coat, hung behind a door and slumped over time. Rather than a piece of clothing, Dupont (American, b. 1968) creates bleak self-portraits. A sculptural face is enervated because its material – silicone rubber – follows its will.

Going Around by Passing Through (8), 2012-13
Silicone rubber
approx. 72 x 20 x 16 inches (152.4 x 50.8 x 40.64 cm)
1 from a series of 9 unique variants

 

Unlike an inflexible death mask, Dupont’s work gives permission to the material to create form; the artist cannot fully predict the image’s ultimate outcome.  “Certain materials cannot be fully controlled, and have their own formal logic,” the artist wrote in a recent email.  “This is true of rubber.  All the distortions of these pieces are determined by the way in which the rubber hangs or sags.  The overlap of a narrative form, such as a life mask, with this more arbitrary process and material, creates unexpected expressions.”  The masks have the flexibility of a rubber glove and the coloration of grisaille painting.

Going Around by Passing Through (5), 2012-13
Silicone rubber
approx. 60 x 20 x 16 inches (152.4 x 50.8 x 40.64 cm)
1 from a series of 9 unique variants

 

They are grey, charcoal, and black.  But there is also a surprising, hopeful character in these works: they evoke a natural cycle where an outer layer, or skin, is sloughed off.  That layer retains Dupont’s facial form even as he pulls an ear up to the forehead level, or pushes an eye to the side – a nod to the planar compositions of a Cubist visage.  Dupont, though, doesn’t cite Cubism as a direct influence for these works.  “These new silicone rubber pieces are related to the Body Art and Process Art of the 1960s and 1970s in that the artwork is a visualization of the behavior of the material,” he said.  For artists like Lynda Benglis (American, b. 1941) or Eva Hesse (German, 1936 – 1970), the process of creating a work of art dictated its final outcome.  Similarly, Dupont follows the lead of the material.  To create these objects, he brushes a layer of rubber over a large form and peels that layer off of the head.  The rubber is revealed in one piece, “like an enormous mask,” the artist explained.

Going Around by Passing Through (1), 2012-13
Silicone rubber
approx. 60 x 20 x 16 inches (152.4 x 50.8 x 40.64 cm)
1 from a series of 9 unique variants

 

Dupont has regularly focused on sculptures of his complete body, as well as selected areas of the figure.  He always uses his own form as his subject matter.  Self-portraiture has a storied tradition in art history, but these works depart from an idealization of the self because the figure is disfigured. If Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) wears a disguise to mask her likeness in her photographs, Dupont is out front with his identity, although its pliability is the essence of his new work. “My work is framed by a more recent period historically,” he said. “It is about the loss of identity, the loss of privacy, the stripping away of the self.” In Dupont’s current sculpture, that self pushes away from self-portraiture as the work becomes a metaphor for the anguish of the human condition.

Richard Dupont’s sculpture will be on view at the Museum of Arts and Design in “Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital” opening in New York on October 14, 2013.

By Brooke Kamin Rapaport

In a recent column on Vulture.com, critic Jerry Saltz quoted dealer Gavin Brown about the outsize scale of contemporary art reflecting the outsize scale of the art world: “When we are able to fly around the globe in 24 hours, and that is a common occurrence … these large-scale works might be an unconscious attempt to rediscover awe.”  (Never mind that 1960s and 1970s Earth Works were awe-inspiring, supersized, and propagated in the vast landscape of the American West.) Curiously, today there is an antidote to king-size sculpture: an increasing interest in pocket-size work. Parallel to the incredible shrinking sculpture is that these pieces are handwrought by the artist. Embedded in the fast-paced, technology-based, global reach of the early twenty-first century is a simultaneous hankering for intimately created and displayed art. These little works may just be the next big thing.

Thelma, 2005. Rubber, hair and phosphorescent pigment.
4 1/2 x 1 1/2 x 2 1/4 inches, 11.4 x 3.8 x 5.7 cm. Edition of 10

 

This is a quiet counter movement by some artists who choose to make diminutive objects rather than massive ones. Matt Hoyt’s (American, b. 1975) small sculptures of hand-held, hand-crafted rocks, chain, bone or twigs were on view in the 2012 Whitney Biennial. Christiane Lohr (German, b. 1965) makes tiny plant sculptures from burrs and thistles. Charles LeDray (American, b. 1960) sews miniature suits of clothing that could fit an elf.  And Jeanne Silverthorne (American, b. 1950) is using platinum silicone rubber to create figures that are small in stature but big in attitude. While Silverthorne also makes installation projects of rubber tubing that can span a gallery, her human forms are the size of a coffee cup. When her mini people are poised, seated atop a tall platform, their littleness is exaggerated.

“I really like a range from tiny to large because shifts in scale are like shifts in power,” the artist wrote in a recent email.  “If you are looking at something tiny, you are in control of the object, you dominate. But if you are in a room-sized installation or facing a large object, then you are dwarfed by it, disempowered to some extent.”

Thelma, 2005. Rubber, hair and phosphorescent pigment. 4 1/2 x 1 1/2 x 2 1/4 inches, 11.4 x 3.8 x 5.7 cm. Edition of 10

 

Their stature reflects a shift in human experience in the world. When enormous work destabilizes the viewer even while enveloping him, the tabletop object offers an opportunity for quieter reflection and even some humor. “I guess there is an aversion to monumentality,” Silverthorne stated. “Somehow the grandiose gesture doesn’t fit with [my] obsession with mortality and extinction.”

Silverthorne’s little people are acutely honed in rubber because the material “was touchable, felt like flesh. It bounced and was funny.”  The artist adds pintsize details to each form such as a rumpled sweater, wrinkled flesh, a smear of lipstick or a decorative bracelet. Silverthorne’s figures’ have a yellow bile hue (called “phosphorescent” by the pigment manufacturer, it enables the objects to glow in a darkened room) and she adds human hair to their heads.  Through this very current material (Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, Mona Hatoum, Mathew Barney, and Chakaia Booker have all used rubber in their work), Silverthorne is able to reclaim historic sculptural techniques including traditional modeling and casting.

Dad, 2013. Rubber and hair. 5 1/2 x 2 1/4 x 3 1/2 inches 14 x 5.7 x 8.9 cm. Edition of 10

 

She began working with rubber in the mid-1980s and has continued her fascination with the material. “It literally has no backbone… and therefore it flops around like a slap-stick vaudevillian. Also, rubber effects an ever-so-slight blurring of details, a kind of smoothing out, almost as though there is an echo of fluidity left after the pour has set,” Silverthorne explained.

Intrinsic to her use of rubber to create likenesses of people is the tension that rubber conjures; traits that are dreary, industrial, and dull. But Silverthorne makes objects reeking of vitality: human figures, thriving organic forms and plant matter. “I don’t really see it as lifeless and inanimate…” she said.  “Perhaps there is a certain inertness to the material and that would certainly underscore the theme of entropy, of inevitable decay and loss of energy that runs throughout everything I do.”

By Brooke Kamin Rapaport

Here & There – New York. Installation View. Courtesy Pace Gallery

When Maya Lin (American, b. 1959) created “Storm King Wavefield” in 2009, she was in sync with the mores of late 1960s artists including Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, Dennis Oppenheim and Robert Smithson, each of them prominent in the Earthworks or Land Art movement. Lin’s “Wavefield” is an undulating terrain of grasses rolling across an eleven-acre site within the five hundred-acre sculpture park in Mountainville, New York.  Because the scale of that project was vast, because it prodded visitors into physically confronting the landscape and because of her use of natural materials to sculpt the work, Lin updated Earthworks with contemporary meaning and accessible siting (compared to Land Art projects often placed in remote locales in the American West).

Pin River – Hudson, 2009.
Maya Lin. Steel Pins. 84″ x 60″ x 1 1/2″.
© Maya Lin Studio, courtesy Pace Gallery.

 

Yet simultaneous to these outsize sculptural gestures in the landscape, Lin has pushed her work beyond the formal means of twentieth-century Earthworks into twenty-first century environmental activism. “Smithson and his non-sites were extremely influential,” she explained recently. “The connection between actual landscapes and a drawing or mapping that then brings that landscape inside” is Lin’s current focus.

Her work, now on view in Here and There, at Pace gallery venues in New York and London, is a new level of sculptural inquiry where sinuous groupings of straight pins outline the contours of maps.  She began the series of pin rivers in 2006. Lin has regularly selected common materials to create sculpture based on the landscape: hardware store wire, fir or hemlock 2 x 4 boards, and straight pins have all found a place in her projects. But her straight pins have a heft and density that belie those in your grandmother’s sewing box. “The pins are custom made for me to be a certain weight and length,” she said in describing the chosen material for her pin rivers.

When studying the wall reliefs, viewers must fathom the contemporary risk Lin is outlining. When she plots the site and charts geographical issues, she is mapping metaphor: how the fallout of a heavy-handed human species has caused a global environmental dilemma.  River by river, with scholarly devotion and a humanist’s concern, Lin has studied the exploitation of waterways and the challenges to the ecosystem. In one wall relief, Pin River Sandy, the artist maps the estuaries, inlets and rivers which became devastating floodplains during last fall’s Hurricane Sandy.  Another pin map, Crossing Midtown, delineates the flow of two midtown Manhattan creeks (first identified on a seventeenth-century map) and comments on their disappearance – at least at today’s street level.  With a bird’s eye view, Lin has also imagined American waterways in recycled silver.

Pins have long been used to pinpoint exact locations in cartographic exercises, for nautical refinement, in home study, or for strategic military simulation and training. Here, the pins purpose is inverted as they become the medium rather than the accessory affixed to paper or parchment. “I chose the pins because of the ability to describe and capture the dispersion limits of the waterways,” she explained. “…sometimes more ethereal and ambiguous than the simple linear flow of water, but at times much more diffuse in character.”

Crossing Midtown, 2013. Maya Lin. Steel Pins, 8′ 9-1/2″ x 10′ 4-5/8″ x 1-1/2″. © Maya Lin Studio, courtesy Pace Gallery.

 

When she creates sculpture that is not as physically massive as the geographical terrain she maps or the memorials or Earthworks she previously created, Lin’s work is concentrated.  In a way, through these subtle maps which chart changes in geographic boundaries due to natural or man-made disasters, her work is a wake-up call to viewers. “Water has been a major focus in my work, with rivers in particular being of great interest. They are vital for us and every other species,” Lin wrote recently in the catalogue accompanying her Pace exhibition. “Our largest cities have grown around significant rivers in every corner of the world, and each has gone through significant environmental changes because of us.” Lin’s new work – using a material as ordinary as straight pins – will focus viewers on their extraordinary obligation to the environment.

By Brooke Kamin Rapaport

Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; photography by Joseph McDonald; © FAMSF.

Two museums exhibitions – one in San Francisco and one in Brooklyn – attest to the pliability of metal and how that material can be resilient, refined, and even shape-shifting. Compared to Mark di Suvero’s commanding industrial-scale steel beams or Richard Serra’s imposing sheets of weatherproof steel, two other artists have taken on metal for its ephemerality rather than its endurance.

Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; photography by Joseph McDonald; © FAMSF.

 

On view now at the de Young Museum in the Hamon Tower lobby is an ongoing installation of fifteen works by the San Francisco artist Ruth Asawa (American, born California 1926) who crochets and weaves brass or monel wire into hanging mobiles. Currently at the Brooklyn Museum through August 4 is a retrospective of the Nigerian artist El Anatsui (African, born Ghana 1944) whose hanging curtains and floor pieces of found metal materials — bottle caps, tin can lids and copper wire — are positioned with cascading folds to feature the flexibility and maneuverability of the material during creation and installation.

Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; photography by Joseph McDonald; © FAMSF.

 

Asawa’s wire sculpture began in 1949 following a period earlier in that decade when she was Josef Albers’ student at Black Mountain College, the experimental art school in North Carolina. Through the 1950s and 1960s, she created organic pieces that floated alongside and above the viewer. These lacy biomorphic wire works evoke nature but they are also investigations of how wire can be used as a medium to make undulating layered forms.  Because of the open, woven surface, we can see into Asawa’s sculpture where additional layers of forms create a shape within a shape.

Since their creation over fifty years ago, Asawa’s wire sculptures have been part of a hoary debate circling around process and materials: what distinguishes between a craft project and a sculpture? Asawa’s process of weaving and knitting with wire was reminiscent of artisan techniques, but these delicate, buoyant wire objects are in league with the work of sculptors Alexander Calder or Harry Bertoia. In a 2002 interview with the Archives of American Art, Asawa discussed the craft versus art dispute and found it unimportant:  “It doesn’t bother me. Whether it’s a craft or whether it’s art. That is a definition that people put on things… It’s just that that happens to be material that I use. And I think that is important. That you take an ordinary material like wire and you make it, you give it a new definition. That’s all.”

Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; photography by Joseph McDonald; © FAMSF.

 

El Anatsui uses wire for structural durability and connectivity in his work. Close examination of his wall reliefs and his floor sculpture finds copper wire threading through row on row of metal shards, such as colorful liquor bottle caps or condensed milk tins, to weave fragments together into a vast tapestry of sparkling, saturated color. The artist twists and turns throwaway metal pieces from a bottle distillery in his current hometown of Nsukka. His rise to global art world star began around 1998, when he inaugurated his series of boundless metal hangings, sometimes stretching thirty feet across. The artist taught sculpture at the University of Nigeria from 1975 to 2010 when he became professor emeritus. He has also created work in wood and clay, although the metal pieces now in Brooklyn are the reason to visit the exhibition to appreciate rapturous spans of hammered found objects.

Anatsui has added a dimension of inconstancy to this work: each installation of these metal sheets will yield a new formal presence. Pleats and ridges on view at one venue may disappear at the next showing.  It is an unlikely consequence for a material known for its staunch presence. The artist told Art 21, the PBS documentary series: “My work has been about change, the idea of regeneration. Giving form to new life, bringing about new hope.”

By Brooke Kamin Rapaport

When a sculptor leaves the studio and descends into the basement, her process can be invigorated. For the figurative sculptor Judith Shea (American, b. 1948), a tour of the storage facility of the National Academy Museum in preparation for an exhibition led the artist to confront portraits of female academicians dating from 1846 to 1994 and to create new sculpture inspired by the historic works. Shea has worked in bronze, wood and presently polystyrene across her four decade career.

Installation view. Photo by Judith Shea.

 

There is often a feminist undercurrent in her pieces: female figures gaze straight ahead and hold assured postures. Determination and stridency are components the artist carves into her subjects.  Yet organizing an exhibition was a departure for her. By studying paintings on storage racks, consulting with an in-house curator, and making selections of objects, Shea was spurred to make new work in a continuum with those she chose. They are a departure because the individuals are identifiable and members of the National Academy: Louise Bourgeois (American, b. France 1911 – 2010), and Elizabeth Catlett (American, 1915 – 2012). A life-size sculpture called “Still Standing” may be Shea’s self-portrait and her personal response to works on view.

Shea, who has been a member of the Academy since 1995, selected twenty-six painted portraits to appear in the exhibition “Her Own Style: An Artist’s Eye,” which was on view in New York and closed on January 13.  For admission into the Academy, members were formerly required to donate a self-portrait to the collection. According to Shea, there was great significance in these portraits “where the artist was taking this requirement as an opportunity to be remembered in history,” perhaps because men ruled the membership ranks. Shea stressed that there were “so many fewer women to begin with and they were not very well known.” Included are works by the nineteenth century artists Cecilia Beaux and Ferdinand Thomas Lee Boyle. Early twentieth century selections are by Mary Shepard Green Blumenschein, Gladys Rockmore Davis, Gertrude Horsford Fiske and Mary Fairchild MacMonnies Low. Contemporary artists included in the show are Emma Amos, Susanna Coffey, Jane Freilicher and Alice Neel.

Judith Shea, Portrait of Louise Bourgeois

 

“Women brought something different to portraiture,” Shea said on a recent visit to the Museum. “Do they present themselves as women or as artists? What is your best shot at being taken seriously?,” she questioned. In the life-size sculptures of Bourgeois, Catlett and Shea, torsos are carved from dense polystyrene and sealed with casein. A wood bottom and top stabilizes the work and the heads are carved in air-dry clay. Shea’s figures are dressed in neutral tones with an industrial felt costume draped over each form. In a demonstration of the resolve and tenacity it takes to be a woman artist, the figures each have one fist clenched. And, in a nod to her subject matter, each of the three is a figurative artist.

Shea trolled through the Academy’s history to assemble a group of images of women who depict identity, challenge artistic style, and critique the tradition of portrait painting.  Will this project continue to influence Shea’s studio output? “I’m stuck on that question right now,” she said. “I have so many ideas. To do a whole body of work on women artists… it exists in photographs, but it’s different in sculpture.”

By Brooke Kamin Rapaport

In the deep wintertime – on the eve of a colossal snowstorm – you would not imagine half a dozen artists creating work based on nature in the middle of the Bronx. Yet six artists – Manuel Acevedo, Zachary Fabri, Asuka Hishiki, Maria Hupfield, Paloma McGregor and Linda Stillman – are facing the dormant winter landscape at Wave Hill, a twenty-eight-acre public garden and cultural center in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, and initiating works inspired by their surroundings as part of a six week Winter Workshop Program.

Generations removed from Earth Works and Land Art, these artists’ objects are smaller in scale and less globally political and theoretical than the exploration in the vast terrain of the American landscape that occupied Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria in the 1960s and 1970s.  Instead, mirroring a preoccupation by some artists today whose work dwells in memories and personal experience, the Wave Hill group looks inward and uses keen observation as a source in their work. If the artists find materials such as branches, dried flowers, or holly leaves on the Wave Hill grounds and in its greenhouse, some have also trolled the surrounding neighborhoods to locate tossed soda bottles or other urban castoffs. Either way, they use these materials to summon intimate, individual history.

Linda Stillman, Daily Drawings: Wave Hill winter, 2013, flower stains on paper, each 6” x 6”, installation dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

 

Every day, Linda Stillman receives a small collection of colorful dropped flower heads from the Wave Hill greenhouse gardeners. Stillman rubs the blossoms to make stains for works on paper. The Flower Diary becomes a colloquial recording of this regular exchange between a horticulturist and an artist. Stillman has created diaries before – gardens that she planted and cultivated in upstate New York in 2001 formed a calendar grid to mark the monthly growth and the ultimate degradation of annuals and herbs. The August garden was at the height of ripeness and intense color while, by November, the site was overgrown and bleak. The artist said that her investigation of gardens has connected her projects across a decade. “Thematically, they are linked as they both change, fade and die, an important concept in most of my work,” according to Stillman.

Asuka Hishiki, Butterfly Tree (tentative title), 2013, Mixed media (graphite on paper, print on vellum, gesso, insect pins, poly panels), 90” x 44”. Courtesy of the artist

 

It is the stages of the progression of nature that have also influenced Asuka Hishiki. The watercolor painter conceived a three-dimensional collage of hundreds of vellum Pink-Tipped Satyr butterflies resting in a two-dimensional tree drawn in graphite for her Wave Hill residency. Butterfly Tree  measures 7 feet 5 inches x 3 feet 6 inches, and documents the painstaking recording of a butterfly’s movements.  Hishiki affixed each butterfly with specimen pins to the paper ground. If the viewer thinks that this work is in homage to a rabble of active butterflies, they may be incorrect. Rather, the red, pink and beige insects are preserved examples of the abundance of a species in anticipation of extinction. “My main theme is the celebration of the beauty of nature,” Hishiki wrote in an email. However… many species are facing extinction and, by contrast, a few kinds — including human beings — are increasing. This is always here on my mind.” The particular butterfly in Hishiki’s work was her “first love,” an insect she was fascinated with as a child.

If Hishiki has scoured memories for subject matter in Butterfly Tree, Zachary Fabri has combed the local neighborhoods for different mediums – all with an eye to finding castoff objects he can paint with a white stripe to mimic the arborist practice of whitewashing the bottom of tree trunks.  Fabri explained that while walking around the grounds, he was “baffled” to observe the ring of white latex paint circling many trees.  It is a practical, protective coat meant to insulate bark against sunscald, insect infestation and small animals.  But Fabri found a layer of meaning in this additional, applied skin and he anticipates using this visual cue to make new work. “The painted white ring implies care and consideration for the tree,” Fabri stated. “I wondered if I could have a similar relationship with objects – a certain intimacy with their material properties.” The artist has now gathered objects on the streets surrounding Wave Hill including latex and work gloves, a kitchen cabinet door, a green umbrella, and a heart-shaped candle to serve as materials for his work. “It is important that the white paint highlight the formal properties while also allowing the urban narrative to remain,” he explained.

Zachary Fabri, Forget me not, as my tether is clipped, 2012, video still, transferred from 16 mm film, 14:50 min, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

 

Brooke Kamin Rapaport

On November 13, sculptor Gabriel Orozco (born 1962, Jalapa, Mexico) and art historian Benjamin Buchloh had a public conversation at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The occasion was the opening of Orozco’s exhibition, Asterisms, which closed at the Museum on January 13.  Orozco’s installation was in two parts: Sandstars displayed collected detritus from the sea washed ashore onto a protected beach in Isla Arena, Mexico; Astroturf Constellation categorized and displayed found objects by color and scale that the artist and his team unearthed from the Astroturf on a playing field in Lower Manhattan. Sandstars is a vast collection of 1,200 objects organized directly onto the gallery floor. Astroturf Constellation also used 1,200 objects, however the project was shown on a hip-high platform under a vitrine and the collected pieces were diminutive by comparison.

Gabriel Orozco, Astroturf Constellation (detail), 2012. 1,188 found objects, including plastic, glass, paper, metal, and other materials, and 13 photographic grids, framed, each comprising 99 chromogenic prints. Found objects: overall dimensions vary with installation; photographs: each print 10.2 x 15.2 cm, each grid 123.2 x 147.3 x 5.1 cm. © 2012 Gabriel Orozco. Photo by Gabriel Orozco

 

For these projects, Orozco is working within a tradition of removing found objects from their conventional site. He transforms mundane castoffs into sculpture and empowers the viewer to re-think consumer culture and the power of the everyday.  The discarded pieces differ according to scale. Sandstars included sea-soaked wood logs; blue and clear light bulbs; buoys in various colors; green, blue, clear and amber bottles; and several construction hats. Astroturf Constellation featured crumpled but shiny discarded foil candy wrappers; rubber bands; wads of chewed chewing gum; cigarette butts and cigar stubs. (The artist photographed the pieces individually and these images hung on the gallery walls adjacent to the installation.)  Perhaps Orozco’s materials propelled the viewer to the question if throwaways are ever truly tossed and lost.

Gabriel Orozco, Sandstars, 2012. Approximately 1,200 found objects, including wood, metal, glass, paper, plastic, Styrofoam, rock, rope, rubber, and other materials, and 13 photographic grids, each comprising 99 chromogenic prints. Found objects: overall dimensions vary with installation; photographs: each print 10.2 x 15.2 cm; each grid 123.2 x 147.3 x 5.1 cm. Installation view: Gabriel Orozco: Asterisms, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, July 6–Oct. 21, 2012. © 2012 Gabriel Orozco. Photo by Mathias Schormann

 

As part of the dialogue, Buchloh described Orozco’s work as a “transformation of the readymade” and placed the artist in the context of others who had re-presented the found object:  Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Jean (Hans) Arp and, more recently, Arman and Claes Oldenburg.  Orozco’s objects are “detached from function value and exchange value,” according to Buchloh.

Orozco described his process of accumulating pieces of debris and the potential for creating works of art from typically overlooked things. “I am intrigued by every single material in the world,” he said. With these materials, the artist does not simply lift the object from one physical and sociological context and plunk it into another. Rather, Orozco described a rigorous process of identification and accumulation.  It is a taxonomic method where objects are arranged by type, form and color. “It’s not just accepting chance,” he explained. “It has to be explored, analyzed. You have to start exploration into the shapeless. It is a morphology of the shapeless.”  Orozco later explained: “The reason I order the objects is to show them with more clarity. I wanted to have a sense of the constancy.”

By Brooke Kamin Rapaport

When artist Valerie Huhn (American, b. 1962) was a bachelor of fine arts student at the San Francisco Art Institute in the mid-1990s, she lived in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco.  “I lived in a neighborhood of mainly transgender, gay, black, Latino and Asian. There were also a lot of students, like me. A lot of my neighbors were really desperate. It was the remnants of crack and enormous drug use, prostitution, and homelessness. The area had so many of the fragile and most vulnerable. It came down to race and class,” Huhn said in a recent interview.  It was Huhn’s reaction to seeing her “marginalized neighborhood full of marginalized people” that caused her to create art from fingerprints, work she continues to today. Speaking about hostile police behavior towards her neighbors, Huhn stated: “I would watch them get arrested for trivial things. It seemed incredibly unfair. I could see that these guys would be taken down, fingerprinted, maybe even roughed up, and no one would speak for them.”

Fingerprint Bureau Pin Drawer

 

It was the symbol of the fingerprint that Huhn – who today lives in New York and will soon open a New Jersey studio — grabbed to exploit as a source and subject in her art. Her use of fingerprints actualizes her memories of these California experiences: they are a testament to aggressive tactics from the authorities, a visualization of the arrests of her neighbors, and document her sensitivity to individual rights. “People have used fingerprints for mark-making since the earliest recorded days of civilization,” she wrote in an e-mail message.  “Yet fingerprints today are far more likely to be used for marking others than for stamping a claim of ownership or creation. They are most widely employed by the police and forensic labs, banking institutions, and government health services.”

So while Huhn is sympathetic to the transition of this most basic human mark in the larger culture, she uses the fingerprint as a sign of individual identity. The artist has created an unusual self-portrait where she tucks row on row of tiny fingerprinted circles with sequin-like shimmering translucency into the void of a bedroom bureau’s drawer. She transforms regular wood dressers owned by friends and family into works of art. Sometimes, she fills a single drawer with circles. Other times, she sets up a different style of fingerprint art in each drawer of an entire bureau.

Fingerprint Bureau Pin Drawer Detail

 

With her right index finger, Huhn first adheres pigment to a four by ten foot expanse of acetate and labels each of the thousands of fingerprints on the acetate with the date the mark was made. She next hole-punches through the center of each fingerprint and collects the punched out circles. By spearing four of these circles to a 1 1/4 inch long straight pin, she arranges them standing in the snug confines of a dresser drawer. In each drawer, there are more than one thousand small circles.  Her work’s title Fingerprint Bureau Pin Drawer is an exact description of Huhn’s materials and process. (I first saw Huhn’s work last summer when I served as the juror for the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition exhibition.)

The viewer, anticipating a dresser drawer stuffed with socks or t-shirts, instead sees neat geometric rows of iridescent dots. Those dots play off one another and shine in the overhead light the artist installs above the sculpture. Her beauteous colors transform a mundane material like acetate into small gems of pigment. “The only color I won’t use is black because that is the standard booking color,” Huhn acknowledges.  Huhn’s Fingerprint Bureau is a narrative initially based on a collection of lives and continues today as the mark of her own presence.

By Brooke Kamin Rapaport

She works with plant stalks and grasses; airborne seeds from thistles, ivy, dandelions and cattails; and tree blossoms.  She finds her materials in the Italian countryside or the city of Cologne, Germany “on the periphery of urban agglomeration” as she rides her bicycle to the studio. Christiane Löhr’s mediums don’t have the vast physical scale of 1960s and 1970s Earthworks or the political expressions of Land Art. Rather through quiet natural plant materials, Löhr (born in 1965 in Wiesbaden) creates delicate sculpture which pulls elements of the landscape indoors.  “In gathering the plants, I take them out of the cycle of growth and decay,” she wrote in a recent email message.

Christiane Löhr (B. 1965), Giant Seed Cloud, 2010. Thistle seeds, hair net. 43 1/2 x 110 1/4 x 110 1/4 inches, 110 x 280 x 280 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Jason McCoy Gallery, NY

 

“They then take on a state which makes them seem as if they were frozen.” She is neither creating living sculpture resembling topiary nor making work that needs garden upkeep, such as fertilizing and watering. By gathering small pods, seeds, or burrs and drying them, Löhr dissociates the plant from its environment and its life cycle. And while contemporary sculpture and installation art’s increase in scale obligate museums and galleries to build airplane hangar size space to accommodate current work, it is an anomaly to find an artist like Löhr whose works are purposefully diminutive.

Some of her sculptures are best considered in centimeters because of their pocket-size dimensions. Beginning in 2008, her series Little Domes are made of various plant stalks, and assume the color of the plant material: green, brown, yellow. The tiny works measure 9 x 8 x 8 centimeters or 12 x 11 x 11 centimeters. They are secured to a wood platform by putting the stalks into holes made after the artist creates a precise “ground plan” for each sculpture.  Typically, Löhr only places the object under a glass box “when I give them away” for protection. The little domes could be a helmet for a mouse or a sanctuary for an insect.

Löhr has also grown her work into large projects. She has also made outsize sculpture with plant materials. Giant Seed Cloud included thousands of thistle seeds secured in a hairnet. Its 10 x 10 x 10 foot expanse floats over the viewer’s head and is an ethereal ode to capturing nature. “The placement of a work in space and in relationship to the viewer is also key,” the artist explained. “As an observer, I perceive an object differently if it is at eye level, or if it hangs over my head,” she said.

Fattoria di Celle, Gori Collection, Pistoia 2004

 

Giant Seed Cloud has been on view at the Fattoria di Celle, Gori Collection in Pistoia, Italy in 2004 and Piattaforma Internazionale Arte Contemporanea (PIAC) in Ragusa, Italy in 2006. Two years ago at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, Löhr installed the enormous pillow of seeds on the Museum’s lobby ceiling. The work reappeared this past spring on 57th Street in New York City’s Jason McCoy Gallery.  It is a vigorous itinerary for sculpture that seems inherently fragile. The artist, however, has considered the issues: “When I began working with organic materials I wasn’t at all concerned with their fragility, but later I had to think about durability and preservation. I have managed to gain quite a lot of experience in this matter. The form itself doesn’t change after it dries but especially the green color tends to lose its brightness which I can accept,” she stated recently.

Her Dandelion Carpet, 2005, is a white and yellow floor covering created with dandelion seeds that measures around twelve feet in diameter. It is simultaneously an homage to the repetition of form of Minimalism’s floor pieces and a revocation of the asceticism and rigid geometries of that movement. “More so than to Land Art, I feel an affinity to Minimalism,” Löhr wrote. “I have the sense that my work process itself is strict.” Yet her work also draws on modest and ephemeral materials, like those used by the Arte Povera artists of the late 1960s and 1970s including Jannis Kounellis with whom Löhr studied at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf between 1994 and 1998.  “When I was a student, I discovered books on Land Art, Arte Povera, Conceptual Art and Minimalism,” Löhr wrote. “I was totally enthusiastic; these movements really caught my imagination… More important than the organic materials was the idea of using the whole world as a studio, or as a source for ideas.”

By Brooke Kamin Rapaport

At Socrates Sculpture Park, the 4.5 acre greensward in Long Island City, a 13-foot tall Virgin Mary stands pensive and composed. Like a cathedral sculpture from the Renaissance, the figure’s robe cascades into folds of drapery, her arms gracefully extend as a gesture of maternal embrace, and her countenance is unguarded as she looks outward rather than up to heaven or down as if in prayer. Cracks in the work’s surface suggest a historic piece. But the sculpture, by Fernando Mastrangelo (American, born 1978), isn’t made of marble or from a plaster cast like the Our Lady of Guadalupe figurines from Mexico where the artist grew up. The sculpture, titled Feed, was painstakingly carved in birdseed.

As the sculpture stands outside, it offers both sustenance and sacrifice to nature: birds will peck at the work to feed on the seeds and the Virgin Mary will slowly disappear.  The artist looked at popular birdseed wreaths and ornaments and tweaked a formula of gelatin, flour, and corn syrup into an edible glue so that the Park’s birds could safely consume the sculpture’s material. The artist has said that he doesn’t choose to theorize on the disintegration of the figure he has created, but rather surveys and documents the sculpture’s changes with an automatic, outdoor time-lapse camera. “I just present the situation for it to happen and allow nature to take over from there. It was a way to position myself neutrally, ” he explained.

Mastrangelo’s work straddles irony and adoration. “The birdseed piece was a way to ask questions about symbols and religious iconography. Birdseed seemed the most eloquent and poetic resolution,” the artist said in a recent interview. Responding to the open-air site and working to steep sculpture in message, Mastrangelo chose a religious subject he has taken on before in other materials including sugar, goat’s milk, and gunpowder. “There is always politics tied to materials, controversy of some nature. I can’t even imagine making a sculpture that doesn’t reflect that. If you are approaching a subject, how would you not use the material to describe it?” he questioned.  Here, birdseed serves as a literal and symbolic offering. Pigeons, warblers or sparrows will feast and finally overwhelm the figure who serves to nurture them.

Mastrangelo, who received his MFA in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2004, and who maintains a studio in Brooklyn, is keenly aware of the art historical and contemporary precedents of bringing the Virgin Mary into his work. And the tradition in Christian iconography of tending to animals is storied; perhaps the resonant example is of St. Francis of Assisi, who preached to the birds.  Mastrangelo has studied and visited the great churches where examples of Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque niche sculpture of the Virgin Mary are framed by an architectural surround. “Classical sculpture is so beautiful and so powerful, I love going into cathedrals to look at these works. I try to re-contextualize them in a new way,” he said.

He has also focused on contemporary practice where artists Andres Serrano, Robert Gober, and Chris Ofili, for example, have been challenged for their provocative and controversial use of Christian imagery. Yet, the iconography of the Madonna was not simply art historical but palpable for Mastrangelo who grew up in Mexico. “Guadalupe is in just about every corner of every neighborhood…I grew up seeing the Virgin everywhere I went, in my friends’ homes, on the side of the road. And the same thing in Los Angeles,” he said referring to his move to California in 2010 to pursue a sculpture project.

Despite the tangible roadside iconography of his youth now seeded in memory, Mastrangelo is an atheist. It is ultimately the sculptural presence that drew the artist to make work which relies on a traditional form with wholly contemporary materials. “It’s all part of the dialogue of trying to expand on this one image, this one symbol which is so powerful,” he said.

Feed is on view at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens, through March 31, 2013 in EAF12: 2012 Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition. Brooke Kamin Rapaport is on Socrates’ board.

By Brooke Kamin Rapaport

R.M. Fischer’s sculpture has undergone a transformation. Fischer—whose works are in the collections of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, the Dallas Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City; whose public art projects include a 50-foot-high steel and bronze arch in Battery Park City, New York, 30-foot-tall steel gates in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, and monumental lighted wall sculpture in a Gifu, Japan train station; and who was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2011—has gone from creating outsize pieces in aluminum, brass, steel, and electric light to utilizing vinyl, fabric, thread, and felt in domestic scale works.  His work has evolved from hard to soft, from industrial to hand-wrought, from muscular to buxom. But the artist has some disdain for a masculine vs. feminine assessment of his new projects compared to his sculpture from the 1980s and 1990s. “I never really considered those associations in the making of the work,” he wrote in an email message. “I know those may be generally accepted associations. I think my work has always had aspects of both masculine and feminine.”

RMF 2031, 2010
75″ x 52″ x 24″
vinyl, fabric, thread, felt, polyester fiberfill,
brass, steel, and stainless steel cable

 

His work was recently on view at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, New York. Today, Fischer’s sculpture is made of materials that may be more at home in a traditional sewing circle than in the studio of a long-term, downtown Manhattan artist. The current pieces straddle the line between pillow and doll, recognizable and abstract, sculpture and plaything. There are wall pieces, freestanding floor works and tabletop sculpture. Each work is titled with the artist’s initials and a number following as in RMF 489 or RMF 2031.

What caused a recognized artist with national commissions to abandon his trajectory, materials, and public outreach by turning to soft sculpture which has the scale of a cuddle toy and the form of a surreal object? “The sewing thing sort of came out of nowhere, it seems,” Fischer explained. “I found locally made, handcrafted pillows in a thrift store in Baltimore when I was visiting my daughter at college. I took them back to the studio and started sewing things on them and in the process changing their form.” Because stitches are visible on the sculpture’s surface, they emphasize the hand in the handmade, yet have a sense of irony and sophisticated knowingness. His colorful work veers towards figuration because of regular additions of sewn-on eyes, gaping mouths and padded limbs.

Fischer doesn’t perceive a disconnect between his earlier, industrial scale objects and his latest work in terms of the artist’s process. “I have always worked in my studio with my hands, even while being involved with public art projects, on constructed human scale sculptures,” he explained. Perhaps it was the artist‘s openness to reinvigorated materials and a change in method that enabled him to find a new form in sculpture. “I had been struggling in my studio during the late nineties and early 2000s searching for a fresh content for my studio work…and during this time I became interested in ‘designer toys’ that had become a phenomenon, selling from specialty stores such as Tokyo Toy and Kid Robot. I started collecting some of these toys.”

Fischer has created a sculptural language that is part homespun and part vanguard. The works nod to Hans Bellmer’s photographs of mangled and manipulated dolls of the 1930s, Claes Oldenburg’s 1960s soft sculpture and Yayoi Kusama’s 1962 sewn armchair and couch with phallic forms. But Fischer’s project is impossible to shoehorn into established art history styles or movements. Rather, the new work may channel a return to the solitary creation of handcrafted work in a high-strung art world.

Installation View, KS Art, New York

It’s not a new movement. There isn’t a widespread revolution reflecting drastic change in sculptor’s materials. Yet a spot check reveals that, over the last decade, contemporary artists are incorporating rope — a hardware store standby — in their work, reviving a vanguard sculptural material from the 1960s and 1970s. This is a reexamination of some Minimalist-era art where the process of creating an object is allied with the identification of a straightforward material.  Rope can be twisted, stretched, or piled to exaggerate its limitless capacity, and can also serve as a three-dimensional line in space.  In conversations with artists and dealers about this quiet phenomenon, they point to renewed interest in textiles and fiber arts as one reason for rekindling the medium.  And rope’s modest stature as an anti-status material may reflect backlash to current art world flash. 

Rope’s utilitarian nature was emphasized in two early 1960s sculptures by Christo (b. 1935) when he tied the cord across a fabric package and next secured a bundle to a wheelbarrow. Jackie Winsor (b. 1941) created work with rope beginning in the late 1960s by accentuating the process of making an art object with hemp, a natural fiber. The physicality of rope as a material in league with other textiles has intrigued Magdalena Abakanowicz (b. 1930) since the late 1960s and early 1970s; her sculpture and rope installations magnified the material for its physicality. Rope became part of a headless human form in a 1967 sculpture by Bruce Nauman (b. 1941) and, later, rope was the subject of a drypoint print by the artist. Eva Hesse (1936–1970) used latex-covered rope in 1970 to create a hanging installation of delicate, evanescent forms in space.

Perhaps the past and present are tied together in a current exhibition of the work of Bill Bollinger (1939-1988). On view through July 30 at SculptureCenter in Long Island City is Bollinger’s retrospective.  His Rope Piece, 1967, was reconstructed last year and is installed in the Center’s first floor. The work is a Minimalist drawing where rope behaves as a line on a wall and simultaneously juts into the viewer’s space.  Metal clamps and bolts secure the material to the floor. Because it is a common material, the viewer isn’t encumbered with the character of the rope.

Bill Bollinger (1939-1988) Rope Piece, 1967 (2011). Manila rope, clamps, eye bolts, turnbuckle. Dimensions variable, rope diameter: 0.5 inches. Reconstruction. Copyright SculptureCenter, Photo: Jason Mandella

 

“I consider rope to be an anonymous material which I like because I don’t feel weighted down by blinding associations,” said Orly Genger (b. 1979) whose Brooklyn studio houses lengths of climbing rope that the artist paints and crochets by hand to create large-scale installations. Genger’s room-size installation, Big Boss, was created for MASS MOCA in 2009. The piece contained one hundred miles of lobster trap rope which Genger painted red, crocheted, knotted and then piled into massive sculptural strata. Genger riffs on the asceticism of the Minimalist movement by making layered pieces where her handiwork defines space. She appraises the technique of traditional women’s crafts like crochet as she forms outsize environments using the same techniques. “The reason I first used rope was because I was looking for a way to translate my process of knotting yarn on a smaller scale to a larger scale… I found nylon climbing rope,” she wrote in a recent email.

Genger’s signature material is industrial rope – oftentimes used by fishermen or climbers — that she locates for each project. For Moor, a 2001 installation at the Stockholm Konsthall, Janine Antoni (b. 1964) twisted her own expanse of rope made with coconut husks, dish towels, a kitchen apron, and a hairnet – all materials equal to rope in their mundane character. Yet these materials were from people acquainted with the artist, so the handmade rope becomes a personal narrative. In an interview, Antoni told the PBS series Art21: “And because Moor is made out of materials from my friends, I thought I could make a rope from materials of my life and walk it like a lifeline.” In Moor, this lifeline stretched across indoor and outdoor spaces.

If some artists have used rope as the singular material in their work, John Newman (b. 1952) incorporates several materials in his recent tabletop sculptures, including rope. He has used this material in pieces including White Wicker Fountain, 2006, where rope, woven wicker, Japanese paper, and papier mache resonate not for their implicit materiality, but for their role in creating a new language. In Hanging Bridge and Royal Wood, 2009, Newman brings coconut fiber rope, Japanese wood and papier mache together. “I conjoin these different materials and processes in the hopes that their collision or connection will create some kind of allusion; a third meaning that comes from being squeezed out of the two or hovering above the two. So something is happening that is more than the literal,” Newman stated in a recent conversation. Rather than leading with the identity of the rope and isolating one material as a subject, he is striving to free rope from “the singular associative aspects of tying, lassoing and knotting,” to create new metaphors with materials. “Rope… lent itself to ideas of process art very well in the 1970s and that’s why it made sense,” Newman explained. “To me, rope isn’t so interesting,” he said. “It is what you do with it.”

John Newman (American, b. 1952) Hanging Bridge and Royal Wood, 2009.
Found Japanese wood, coconut fiber rope, qouache on painted wood putty, acqua resin, papier mache, foamcore, armature wire. 14.5 x 24 x 15 inches

United States Steel introduced Cor-ten steel for railway cars in the 1930s. By the 1960s and 1970s, sculptors including Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, Beverly Pepper, Richard Serra and Tony Smith took to this industrial alloy as a miracle material because of its formal character (Cor-ten’s other name is “weathering steel” and, over time, its surface exhibits a velvety rust-colored patina) and its tough durability (a boon for making large-scale outdoor public art works).  Half a century later, prominent sculptors including Anthony Caro and Anish Kapoor are still using Cor-ten. However, some artists, conservators, curators, and public art guardians are wrestling with the material’s promise as they work to stave off unanticipated outdoor forces like water accumulation, acid rain, smog, humidity, and pollution from traffic while simultaneously trying to save major sculpture from being mothballed.

In a 2007 discussion with the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Conservation Institute in in Los Angeles, Storm King Art Center director and chief curator David Collens noted that Cor-ten did not fulfill its initial assurances. “There are endless surprises with Cor-ten scultpures… the wonder material that did not turn out to be one,” said Collens. “They have problems of decaying on the inside, no matter what maintenance you do… It really is engineering. Bolts, welds, concrete foundations underground – a whole range of things that became far larger projects than originally anticipated.”

Louise Nevelson, Night Presence IV, 1972.

 

Case in point is Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk, 1963-67, a massive twenty-six foot tall sculpture in front of Houston’s Rothko Chapel. Challenges with the geometric structure of the Cor-ten as well as its placement over a reflecting pool have necessitated two rounds of conservation, the first between 1983 and 1984 and the second beginning in 2004. Broken Obelisk was re-installed in 2006.[1] In documenting the restoration process, former Menil conservator Laramie Hickey-Friedman described how the metal had deteriorated so severely that conservators and a committee considered “the radical option of bringing the sculpture inside and possibly making an exhibition copy” for outdoor display. [2] Ultimately, this prospect was denied by the Barnett Newman Foundation.

Another key example of Cor-ten sculpture maintenance is Louise Nevelson’s Night Presence IV, 1972, a towering twenty-two foot tall public artwork located for four decades in the median strip at Park Avenue and 92nd Street in Manhattan. The artist donated the work to New York City and chose the installation site as a symbolic gateway between the Upper East Side and Harlem neighborhoods. After monitoring the piece for over a decade, “by 2007, it became apparent that adverse conditions of the Cor-ten steel were accelerating,” according to Jonathan Kuhn, Director of Art and Antiquities for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.  In February of 2011, the sculpture was removed for restoration, and Kuhn anticipates that Nevelson’s work will be back in place by next year.  This may be optimistic timing as the conservation team must first weather the sculpture off-site for up to one year to “allow the various elements to integrate (unify) visually” before its re-installation on Park Avenue, Kuhn emphasized.

Night Presence IV will have a facelift that, pragmatically, includes shoring up corroded sections with stainless steel so that the sculpture has a prolonged life. In consultation with Nevelson’s original fabricator, Lippincott, and sculpture conservators, segments of the work will be reinforced with “stainless steel internal framing, interior protective coating, and internal hidden cavities that will permit air to circulate and mitigate moisture entrapment,” Kuhn said. The City’s goal is to retain as much of the original Cor-ten as possible.

Nevelson’s first public work in her adopted city was based on a small sculpture of 1955 called Model for Night Presence IV in the collection of the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami in Coral Gables. The model is made of painted wood and measures just over two feet high. What was a tabletop sculpture of castoff wood fragments was transformed and magnified into magnificent architectural scale in the form of Night Presence IV.

Those who live near the site where the Cor-ten sculpture stood now witness an empty pad of turf and sidewalk with a sign directing inquiries to the Department of Parks and Recreation. At a recent gathering of neighbors to discuss the sculpture and to seek additional funds for restoring Nevelson’s work, the most urgent question asked of Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe was “When do we get it back?”

Featured Image: Louise Nevelson, Night Presence IV, 1972.