Eric Zimmerman
Austin Museum of Art, Austin
Through February 13, 2011

By Lana Shafer

Eric Zimmerman, Neil Armstrong, 20 November 1956, 2010, Graphite on paper, 11 x 14 inches. Collection of Jenny Schlief and Gene Morgan.

Eric Zimmerman’s exhibition at AMOA, We Chose to Go to the Moon, is particularly prescient at this juncture in American history when partisanship and a flailing economy threaten our nation’s progressive future. Central to the exhibition is America’s history of exploration, industry, and innovation—particularly the duality of progress and failure. Utilizing a vast array of artistic media and historical references Zimmerman’s work incorporates realistically rendered graphite drawings, audio, sculpture, and text related to the exploration of space and other frontiers. Also on display are two artist’s books and a newspaper that reproduce historical texts, iconic images, diagrams and writing by the artist.

Curated by AMOA’s Assistant Curator Andrea Mellard, Zimmerman’s drawings are installed in groupings echoing the form of celestial constellations. Smaller drawings are paired with larger compositions, which themselves juxtapose seemingly disparate images into a poetic dialogue. One work includes Clint Eastwood as the gunslinging Josey Wales (borrowed from a 1976 film still) alongside representations of Pieter Bruegel’s Tower of Babel (1563) and Albert Bierstadt’s sublime landscape Yosemite (1868). Other drawings reproduce American icons such as Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis in flight and notorious entrepreneur Cornelius Vanderbilt. The smaller drawings are more intimate, not only in scale but also in subject. Paired next to Vanderbilt’s portrait is a drawing of George Eastman’s (the inventor of Kodak roll film) suicide note—adding a touch of humanity to the science and business worlds. These intimate works appear to orbit the larger pieces as they relate to each other as signs of American progress.

Zimmerman also features several sculptural elements: a pedestal upon which sits a stack of newspapers, a vitrine containing small sculptures and collectibles and a reading desk after a 1925 design by Russian Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko. Highlighting the power of journalism, the newspaper includes a letter by Thomas Jefferson as well as President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 speech at Rice University affirming America’s commitment to the space race (and the origin of Zimmerman’s exhibition title). The vitrine displays geometric sculptures constructed from pictures of the first lunar landing from a Life magazine spread, a further deviation of journalism, alongside cassette tapes, records, and a postcard all referencing the moon landing. An audio installation permeates the space with a compilation of music, sound and spoken word—ranging from JFK’s oration to Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage” from the 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon.

In his public gallery talk, Zimmerman noted that his drawing of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific genius behind the atomic bomb, embodies the paradox of progress and failure due to his destructive, albeit brilliant, invention. This duality is presented in Zimmerman’s work through historical symbols of Manifest Destiny, the Wild West, scientific advancement, and the final frontier. However, in an art museum the dichotomy also references the modernist paradigm of progress and a postmodern refusal. While Zimmerman employs pastiche through his appropriation of images from varied sources, he recontextualizes their meaning to produce a network of new associations. It is important to note that Zimmerman also chooses to meticulously render his subjects in pencil rather than to simply re-produce them photographically. The presence of the artist’s hand, and the immense amount of time it took to execute each drawing, creates a formal link between space, time and image. Nonetheless, the viewer’s experience is also essential. The reading desk is meant to be used, the books and newspaper meant to be held and perused, the audio to be heard. These tangible formats call attention to the way history is recorded and understood, how our collective memory is formed and maintained, presenting an open-ended query to the way historical artifacts can be powerfully re-presented in an age of easily accessible digital information.

Lana Shafer is a freelance writer and art historian based in Austin, Texas.

---

Anthropogenesis
Visual Arts Center, Austin
Through December 18

By Lee Webster

Anthropogenesis (exhibition view), 2010. Courtesy of the artists. Photo by Ben Aqua.

Anthropogenesis, broadly speaking, is the scientific study of the origin and evolution of the human species. It is used more specifically by philosophers to denote the evolutionary moment when Homo sapiens branched off from the rest of the animal kingdom and became defined by the abilities we presume to be uniquely human: self-consciousness, language and reasoning. This small group show in the Center Space, the student curated project room at the University of Texas’s new Visual Arts Center, has been one of the freshest and most compelling shows of the VAC’s inaugural season. Curated by Ariel Evans and Lauren Hamer, the show features work by six contemporary artists exploring the anthropogenic moment, as well as the meeting of animals and humans in a contemporary world.

Anthropogenesis walks a fine line. Many of us suffer a real weariness of animal imagery in contemporary art. A few years ago galleries across the United States experienced a deer overpopulation problem that eventually spilled over into popular culture. Now deer can be seen gracing the t-shirts of the hip, and with them, everywhere. Cats, deer, coyotes and owls have all landed in the t-shirt animal kingdom. A few of these animals pop up repeatedly in Anthropogenesis, making it all the more commendable that these artists use animal imagery towards visually interesting and uncharted territories.

Jill Pangallo’s “What’s Sexy For Summer,” a six-page magazine spread published in Art Lies this past summer, shows the artist and her cat photographed snapshot style against a plush black background modeling trends that sound entirely unwearable in the summer heat, or just plain unsexy: pantyhose, birthday hats, visors, bears and camouflage. The spread’s introduction is a first-person sermon expounding on the importance of “being sexy,” à la amateur YouTube channels offering beauty tips via instructional videos. Riffing off Internet memes from cats to webcam girls, Pangallo’s piece establishes a tongue-in-cheek tone that gives the show a sense of self-awareness and understanding of the glut of animal imagery we see in every popular forum, from Facebook to the mall.

Jules Buck Jones catalogues animals using systems that reference taxonomy and scientific classification, but seem to have a logic and language all their own. Of Jones’ pieces featured in Anthropogenesis, the most compelling is Pa-Hay-Okee (2010), an 8-foot circular painting that connects drawings of animals from a platypus to a duck with lines that conjure celestial constellations. The associations and relationships, at least to the casual viewer, are opaque, and provoke thoughts on how and why human systems are created and imposed on the natural world.

Jonathan Keats’ The Honey Bee Ballet, 2006-ongoing, turns the tables. Here, the animals are the artists, with logic and systems invisible to most of the human world. The ballet, “conducted” by Keats through planting flowers that alter a bee colony’s pollination path, is viewable to humans only through a map that documents the planting locations and calendar.

What stands out as the most successful, delicate and humorous treatment of anthropogenesis is the poem “Big Beautiful Eagle” by S.E. Smith. In thirteen stanzas written plainly on white notecards, an eagle, an osprey, rabbits, men and women are caught in impressionistic vignettes of life in “the piney woods,” or sitting on barstools philosophizing on the form that love takes, be it a woman, a dead rabbit or a fish. Smith carefully illustrates what parts of us may be more animal than woman or man, and what parts are something else entirely. At their core, the works in Anthropogenesis are seeking the same revelation, what separates us from animals. But as Smith describes in the stanza below, classification is a science of vagaries and variances more than answers.

“BIGGER SEXIER EAGLE

An eagle and a rabbit are one.
An eagle and a rabbit and a woman
are two things, though. Somehow

a woman is always a woman
no matter how many eagles
are involved.”

Lee Webster is an artist living and working in Austin, Texas.

---

KUU
Unit B Gallery, San Antonio
Through January 1, 2011

By Wendy Vogel

Jaan Paavle, The Face of God, 2004, Video. Courtesy of the artist.

The word KUU, Estonian for moon, conjures metaphoric associations from long winter nights in the Baltic Region to the recent economic difficulties of the former Soviet state. In reality, the title of the exhibition at Unit B organized by Artpace’s Riley Robinson alludes to a much cheekier reference (literally): the bare bottom of Jüri Olaver in the video Medium Waves, Long Waves (2007). Olaver is one of four Estonian artists currently featured in the San Antonio artist-run space. As the title suggests, the videos and photographic work in this concise show are linked through their exploitation of humor, a tactic that elevates their seemingly vernacular subject matter to absurd or poignant ends.

Medium Waves, Long Waves serves as the show’s sculptural anchor. Installed in Unit B’s far corner, the work is a repurposed Soviet-era radio, painted a funky metallic fuchsia, in which the dial has been replaced by a digital video of Olaver mooning the camera while perching on a rock in the sea. A pun linking radio waves, ocean waves and the artist’s long black trench coat “waving” in the wind to expose his backside, the piece creates a visual equivalent to illicit foreign broadcasts from the days of Estonia’s political oppression.

It is not for mass appeal alone that Olaver chose to enact such a rock-n-roll gesture for his video. Popular music was a cornerstone of Estonia’s fight for independence from the USSR in 1991 -- so much so that it was dubbed the Singing Revolution. Jaan Toomik, the best-known artist in the exhibition and a former Artpace resident in 1997, claimed in an interview that “during the Singing Revolution you started to identify with this land and nation.” He rightly accords music and sound design a pride of place in his visually arresting video-performance works, four of which are on view. Dancing With Dad (2003), a video in which the artist frenetically boogies down to Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Child next to his father’s tombstone, transforms the metaphor of “dancing on someone’s grave” from mockery to homage. Waterfall (2005) draws a simple parallel between man and land, in which Toomik has synched the sound of the waterfall to be heard only when he opens his mouth while standing in front of one. Seagulls (2004), a trance-enducing work of just a few minutes’ duration, adeptly mines the theatricality of a frustrated attempt to communicate with lush visuals. Toomik plunges into a deep aquamarine pool with a weighted belt on, and filmed from the pool’s floor, attempts breathlessly to sing through a plastic tube to a barely-audible acoustic guitar melody heard from above.

Jaan Paavle’s and Paul Rodgers’ works turn their attention to the documentation of quotidian life. Paavle’s video The Face of God (2004) focuses in close-up on the faces of country dwellers and to the misogynist jokes they tell while taking grisly action -- slaughtering a sheep. Though aiming for the sublime, its choppy editing of methodical, mortal action falls short in comparison to the other video works’ punchy brevity. Ühislinn, translated as “Common City,” is a text and photography project by British-born Rodgers that was commissioned to celebrate Tallinn’s (Estonia’s capital) designation as Europe’s Cultural Capital of 2011. Rodgers has staged semi-fictional scenarios from his postwar British childhood around Tallinn, which he photographs with a dispassionate eye reminiscent of August Sanders’ “types” and accompanies with a book in which he has penned short story captions for each image. His most effective photographs capture his droll sculptural interventions, such as a rejected “public sculpture” of a man spitting water in a town square, a black valise slung over a park bench reading “this is not a bomb” to assure public safety, and a mysterious tongue-shaped bar of soap in a public restroom. The same bar of soap is installed in the “flesh” on Unit B’s sink (and has, not surprisingly, gone unused)."

KUU offers a snapshot of some of the most celebrated artists in Estonia. Working across media, their refreshing work elicits comparisons with generational peers in the post-Soviet constellation working in conceptual veins, from Croatian Sanja Iveković’s feminist interventions to Czech artist Martin Zet’s photo-performances. Even when the artists’ politicized daily lives may be the implicit content, their open-ended works retain a wryness, lightness of touch and accessibility for even casual art enthusiasts. But for those who seek more, particularly to Toomik’s work, they will find a depth and pathos not easily lost in translation.

Wendy Vogel is Editor of ...might be good.

---

Weasel
Inman Annex, Houston
Through January 8, 2011

By Michael Bise

Brina Thurston, Harm, 2007, Single channel video, ed 5, 3 minutes; looped. Courtesy of the artist and Inman Gallery, Houston.

Weasel, an exhibition curated by Kurt Mueller and Chelsea Beck at Inman Gallery’s Annex Space, purports to once again lift the wool from the viewer’s eyes. Beck and Mueller create an analytical framework around an exhibition that includes Joe Zane, Eva and Franco Mattes (aka 0100101110101101.ORG), Jim Nolan and Brina Thurston by commissioning not one, not two, but four different press releases authored by the Austin writer S.E. Smith.

Each press release is designed to highlight and reaffirm aspects of the curators’ theoretical intentions behind Weasel. Judging from these essays, the impetus behind the exhibition is to first implicate the viewer and then make them aware of their participation in the deceptive yet consensual act of making and viewing art. The most revealing and convoluted of the four essays opens with the famous snatch of dialogue from Shakespeare’s Hamlet between the main character and the duplicitous spy Polonius. In the exchange, Hamlet points out a cloud and proceeds to expose Polonius’s spinelessness and dishonesty by claiming its resemblance first to a camel, then a weasel, and finally a bear. In a servile effort to maintain Hamlet’s trust, Polonius agrees, like a true politician, with each radically different assertion.

It is in this dialogue, and the author’s possibly conscious misinterpretation of it, that we are able to recognize the curators’ understanding of the viewer in relation to the works on display. In the essay, Smith writes: “Hamlet conduct[s] Polonius through a meditative trance of representational receptivity in which the cloud both see above them transforms at Hamlet’s will.” A more accurate interpretation of the dialogue is that Hamlet is fucking with Polonius to reveal him for the corrupt idiot he knows him to be. Much of the work in the exhibition functions in this way as well. While curators Beck and Mueller and essayist Smith claim that the exhibition’s “intention...is not to frustrate but to tease–doubly, to play upon art-going conceptions and to tease out the inherent hopes with which one approaches a gallery wall,” an encounter with the works themselves made me feel like I was simply being fucked with.

The problem with much of the work is that it is too easy to see the cracks and fissures in the facades that are meant, if only for a moment, to jolt the viewer out of their “idealized aesthetic experience.” While Joe Zane’s fake neon sign depicting his last name, complete with electrical outlet, and his blown glass vase of flowers are the most flagrantly fraudulent, Brina Thurston’s video is the most obviously manipulative. In the three-minute video Harm (2007) we see what appears to be a miniature poodle on a pink blanket looking happy, innocent and dumb. What we hear, on the other hand, is a woman’s voice hurling a slew of obscenities and degradations at the hapless pup. The intended effect is shock and repulsion, hopefully activating that part of our brains that causes us to cry when we see that Sarah McLachlan-scored ASPCA commercial. The ASPCA commercial, however, is much more sophisticated and successful because the animals’ reactions and facial expressions are perfectly in synch with the syrupy music. But anyone knows that when a dog is being yelled at, as it is in Thurston’s video, it will run, snarl, cower, or do something other than calmly and placidly endure the harangue. Though the manipulation technique is exactly the same (a decontextualized image is overlaid with a soundtrack carefully designed to elicit a specific emotional response), the ASPCA commercial accomplishes the not insignificant task of crashing the viewer’s limbic system even as their cerebral cortex’s bullshit detector is on full alert. Unfortunately, Harm’s spell is broken before the incantation can even leave Thurston’s lips.

Eva and Franco Mattes’ single channel online performance titled No Fun, recorded on the social networking site Chatroulette, depicts a split screen where one side displays a real time image of a man, presumably having committed suicide by hanging, in an apartment made to look like a dingy hovel. The other side of the screen shows the reactions of people who have happened upon the scene via the website, which allows participants to randomly pair up and have web-based conversations and interactions. Either through selection and editing or because of human nature, the young people who happen upon the hanged man invariably behave in the predictably vulgar manner Larry Clark has trained us to believe is the essential nature of anyone under the age of thirty. Conceived as an online experiment, the work does not survive its move from the Internet to a flatscreen monitor at Isabella Court. While the deception is plausible in the relatively unpoliced Wild West of the World Wide Web, the performance loses its power when it becomes a $10,000 editioned video in the polite space of the commercial gallery.

I’m not afraid to admit that, through a kind of willful obliqueness, Jim Nolan’s formalist assemblages of plastic sheeting, folding stools and socks effectively prevented me from interpreting them as either weasels, whales, or bears. Enigmatic but oddly specific titles like P.S.F.U. and 12 apostles/market fluctuations (both 2005) seem to indicate some concrete interpretation that never quite materializes. In this way, Nolan’s sculptures seemed closest in spirit to Hamlet’s manipulation of Polonius. So, taking my cue from the exhibition’s organizers, I decided to view Nolan’s objects as Hamlet might: lighter than air with meanings and titles infinitely but meaninglessly malleable.

In light of the recent furor surrounding Wikileaks, which I skeptically support, I continued to ask myself when viewing the exhibition, to what end are we being deceived? The art-viewing audience is certainly one of the most intellectually sophisticated publics in our society. The often unacknowledged reality is that anyone who has read this article, viewed Weasel or read Hamlet with any curiosity has already had the scales lifted from their eyes over and over again. I’m conflicted by Weasel because I am skeptical of the organizers’ and the artists’ motivations. At what point does a genuine desire to reveal hidden truths become a cynical manipulation? When the truths revealed become trivial, or worse, nonexistent, the viewer becomes little more than a mark used to bring a sophisticated con game to its predetermined conclusion. I don’t believe Weasel is quite so cynical, but like many contemporary works and exhibitions, it comes dangerously close to intellectual nihilism. As I left the exhibition, I felt a little more hopeless than when I walked in.

Michael Bise is an artist living and working in Houston.

---

Tomo Savić-Gecan
Jeu de Paume, Paris
Through February 6, 2011

By Virginie Bobin

Tomo Savić-Gecan, Preparatory and positioning image for the film Untitled, 2010, 2010. © Tomo Savić-Gecan. Photo by Jasenko Rasol.

Drinking water from Bergen Kunsthall, Norway, has been turned into ice cubes.

This typewritten sentence, printed on small sheets of paper, is the only documentation of a performance by Croatian artist Tomo Savić-Gecan that happened at Jeu de Paume in Paris during the FIAC (International Contemporary Art Fair) on October 23. A rather perplexed audience gathered in the great hall conscientiously to drink the melting ice cubes in rum cocktails, while being congratulated by curator Elena Filipovic for physically contributing to expanding the in-between space in which his work occurs. The performance was conceived as a counterpoint to one of two much more complex and challenging pieces produced by Savić-Gecan for his first solo show in France, Untitled, 2010. The text printed on a wall near by the entrance of a small, empty white cube reads:

Two identical exhibition rooms have been built, one in Jeu de Paume in Paris, France, and the other in Bergen Kunsthall in Bergen, Norway.
Upon entering the room in Jeu de Paume, each of the visitors affects the dimensions of the room in Bergen Kunsthall;
conversely, upon entering the room in Bergen Kunsthall,
each of the visitors affects the dimensions of the room in Jeu de Paume.

Tomo Savić-Gecan deals with the imperceptible and the non-presentable. He works in situ, but his work cannot be situated. It negates the possibility of experiencing an artwork in a single space and time. As Filipovic points out in the excellent text she wrote for the catalogue, the visitor entering one of his pieces may not see anything, or even be aware of the piece. He or she has a different perception from a person who, in another space, will experience a result—which he or she may not notice either—provoked by the entrance of the first visitor. This physical experience is also distinct from that of the final receiver, who will read the work’s description in a gallery or in a book. For example, the visitors of the 2005 Venice Biennial found out that

During the 51st Bienniale di Venezia each entry of a visitor to W139 Center for Contemporary Art in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) changes the temperature of the water in the Spordiklubi Reval-Sport in Tallinn (Estonia) by 1°C.

However, unlike conceptual art, the sentences that document and represent the artwork—all of them untitled, in order to avoid triggering any fantasy of a narrative—do not replace the artworks. They are constitutive of it, as are the host institutions, the spaces, the complex technical devices and the visitors who activate them. Thus the work happens in the different relations at stake between them, without being “relational”, as the community it produces doesn’t share an illusion of connectedness in the here-and-now.

More specifically, Untitled (Jeu de Paume / Bergen Kunsthall) questions the hegemony of the white cube as the “perfect” space for reception of art by hijacking its so-called neutrality. Criticizing the ideology of the gallery space has been a topos for artists and theoreticians ever since the release of Brian O’Doherty’s seminal collection of essays, Inside the White Cube. Savić-Gecan’s second work in the show takes the idea further, displacing it to the territories of image and representation through his first-time use of the film medium. The artist placed his camera in front a damaged screen in a disaffected open-air cinema in Zagreb, now invaded by weeds and shrubs, right where the projector used to be.

Nothing happens in the film, yet it records more than the invisible passage of a single time: behind the screen, Savić-Gecan installed a copy of another “white cube”, namely a room from the former Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art. For an exhibition in 2002, the artist had blocked the access to the original room in Zagreb with a glass wall, thus exposing the white cube itself. In 2010, for another exhibition, he built a concrete wall instead, making the room invisible. In the meantime, the building had been returned to a family that was expropriated by the Socialist government to create the museum. No one saw the “installation” of this reconstitution in the open-air cinema, and neither the history of the room nor the room itself—the view of which is blocked by the screen—are actually visible in the film. Yet this loaded absence is fascinating and the piece acts as a “developer”, drawing on the metaphor of projection implicit in Savić-Gecan’s works. Although never vain, his oeuvre runs the risk of being reduced to an accumulation of witty self-reflections on Art and its milieu. Here it reaches another dimension, and unfolding the multiple narratives hidden behind the “untitled” becomes a collective affair in the true sense.

Paris-based Virginie Bobin works as a project coordinator for Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers research and residency art center by day and as an independent curator by night.

---

J. Parker Valentine
Supportico Lopez, Berlin
Through January 15, 2011

By Ali Fitzgerald

Jessica Parker Valentine, The perfect landscape (exhibition view), 2010. Courtesy of the artist.

In writing about J. Parker Valentine’s work I recall a recent trip with a journalist friend to interview a beer visionary and master malter in North Berlin. As he combed around a batch of slowly gestating whiskey and I lost myself in its surging, retreating shapes, I was reminded of an associative practice that I perfected in front of a lava lamp in a smoky dorm room. Valentine’s work at Supportico Lopez leaves me equally glassy-eyed. Her pieces throb with association, are insistently open and demand a visual pluralism that brings to mind the more insightful critiques I had in grad school, the kind that disavow innate artistic hierarchy and focus on unearthing images at a slower, less determined pace.

In the Supportico Lopez space, which is located below street level in a charming and only slightly moist basement, Valentine nods coyly to the aesthetics of pedagogy, tacking elegant exercises in pattern and mark onto a large gray board. Alongside these drawings, Valentine includes photos of cacti, as well as a highly saturated video of a man skinning a deer (dog?) that reads as both instructional and disturbingly sexy. Across the room, large MDF panels are propped against each other in a lazy, knee-high labyrinth. This gesture seems especially well-suited to curious viewers who want to camp between the shapes and tease out some meaning from the moody graphite.

Valentine’s work clearly recalls de Kooning, more specifically late de Kooning, when beatific senility had softened his aggressive hand in favor of a more sparse sincerity. With her own gently assured line, Valentine steers viewers through an exposed but deftly constructed world in which spatial relationships assert themselves mysteriously, if at all.

I went back to Supportico Lopez a second time in search of specificity because I was afraid this review would too closely resemble my old dream diary (purchased around the same time as my lava lamp). This time I brought my journalist friend Sabrina, who gave shape to the shapeless, literally calling out images and forms as she excavated them:

“There’s a mouth.”

“See? That’s an animal head.”

“Those are definitely teeth.”

“That’s lipstick.”

Judging from Sabrina’s catalogue of images, there is something wild, sexual and even sinister happening in Valentine’s work.

Or, there’s something wild, sexual and sinister happening in Sabrina.

I think if Valentine’s installation at Supportico Lopez exalts one thing, it’s the joy inherent in multiplicity of meaning. Like a good, meandering critique it revels in mystery.

Ali Fitzgerald is an artist and comics writer living in Berlin. She contributes regularly to the PBS blog Art:21 and recently started a visual travelogue for The Huffington Post.

In Conversation with Erin Shirreff

By Chelsea Beck

Chelsea Beck had the pleasure of catching up with Brooklyn-based artist Erin Shirreff after viewing her two recent exhibitions: Still, Flat, and Far in the Project Space at the ICA Philadelphia (September 15 - December 5, 2010) and the group exhibition Immaterial at Ballroom Marfa (on view through February 20, 2011).

Chelsea Beck [CB]: I want to start by talking about your project for Triple Canopy, Shadow, Glare (available for download here). It is described on their website as “light shifts in a visual field,”
the “visual field” being the screen of a computer. I love how this program mimics something so familiar and ultimately annoying: glare! Can you describe your thought process for this project?

Erin Shirreff [ES]: Well, for the last few years I’ve been thinking about different kinds of attention—how it seems to change dependent on the medium we’re experiencing as viewers. A good example is screens in museums: people gather around videos and adapt to that condition of viewing almost immediately, maybe because of their familiarity with computer and TV screens or something about an implied “beginning” and “end” of the aesthetic experience. It’s a sensation of easy absorption that momentarily affects your sense of time. That absorption can happen when viewing a painting or sculpture too of course, but it seems to arrive a lot differently.

So when Triple Canopy commissioned me to do a project for the web, I thought about screens and how working at your computer was its own unique viewing scenario—and how it was also a situation in which time sort of evaporated. I wanted to make a project that was very much about the experience of working at a desk and staring at a computer.

CB: In your videos intended for larger, public screens, I am aware of your role in animating the moving image. You light still images in different ways, re-photograph them, and then piece the new images together—it’s actually a very physical, hands-on process. For Moon (2010), recently on view at both the ICA Philadelphia and Ballroom Marfa, you were the only person who actually experienced light moving across an ersatz moon in real time when you were working in your studio, while the viewer gets what is essentially a time-lapse composite of the event. In Shadow, Glare, however, since it is essentially made by coding a software program which effects whatever one might be viewing on their computer’s desktop, there is no “real time” other than how the viewer experiences the program each time the application is launched. Your touch as the maker and narrator is less present, but the overall experience of viewing the work is quite intimate. (Fig. 1)

ES: Yeah, I like the one-to-one relationship that happens in Shadow, Glare. Sometimes it is so subtle that it goes without notice, then other times I’m looking at my screen and I see an imaginary visual halo. I’ll think the program is running but it isn’t. The screen takes on a strange, seemingly very thin physical dimension.

I want the images in the recent videos I’ve been making to have a physical dimension too. I use HD for these videos because the clarity afforded by that format reveals the particular texture of, say, a glossy photograph, which bounces light off its surface in a way that a matte photograph doesn’t. That detail helps create the visual oscillation that I hope happens for viewers as they watch the videos: being in the space of the image, and then pushed out onto its surface.

CB: Yes, the videos seem to engage with the limits of our technological and material perception. Distortion becomes a material itself. It's amazing how you build that into the video in such a conscious way. You go so far as to represent an afterimage, like the light and heat that gets caught in your eye after looking at something bright.

ES: The kind of light and the angles I was using to shoot Moon created these cheesy effects, like lens flare, at times. You can apply these effects in post-production using Photoshop, but here they were actually happening by chance in ways that I didn’t anticipate.

CB: Your sculptures are very subtle as well. They quietly react to their environment.

ES: The sculptures commissioned for Ballroom Marfa are called Untitled (Shadows). In some ways, they’re born out of my experience working on Shadow, Glare. I had been making these “shadow” shapes on my computer for the program that I hoped would be allusive but also pretty abstract, then I went back down to Marfa and that’s all I could see. I’m always bowled over by the incredibly intense light there. Even the signage in town takes advantage of it: the lettering of the City Hall sign is raised off the surface of the building and is more legible as shadow. The four new sculptures I made at Ballroom are a lot flatter than ones I had been making up to that point. I wanted them to be more like silhouettes.

CB: I can understand them as planes of light and shadow. But I also like thinking of them as fragments or shards of architecture that come from something very large and abstract—something so substantial that we can only comprehend in pieces, and even then, only vaguely. (Fig. 2)

ES: I see the ones at ICA as more architectural. I was thinking about the Ballroom forms as shadows against the wall that were pulled upwards into space and set askew, hardened, and then leaned back. But both groups of sculptures have very simple contradictions in them that I like: they are each fairly large and heavy but also delicate and shallow. They are discrete objects but seem partial. They have nondescript modern profiles, yet the ash/plaster surface looks rock-like, lending an appearance of relics. (Fig. 3)

CB: They have a very strong relationship to the body and to the gallery space. They have this really casual posture but also are really uptight.

ES: Super uptight!

CB: How did you start using compressed ash to make the sculptures? What does that material mean to you? The surface appears both zoomed out and zoomed in, and also a bit dulled. The prints also had this same kind of psychically used quality.

ES: I do like the idea of making something out of remnants of other things. For instance, one of the sculptures at the ICA is made from the remains of a maple tree. That is cool to me. It makes me think about how gypsum is made up of tiny ancient sea creatures. But I digress… The blooms of ash on the surface come from hand-packing the material into the mold (the blooms are all handful amounts).

The prints in the show are all on non-archival newsprint. I wanted to give the images a physical, and I guess temporal dimension. They have a familiar tactile texture but the newsprint really locks them into the past. I’m interested in the prints for what they depict, but also as documents––as objects themselves. The ICA exhibition title Still, Flat, and Far refers to the properties a form takes on when it is flattened into a picture or video. ‘Still’ and ‘flat’ might be obvious, but ‘far’ was the quality I was interested in exploring the most, in all its emotional, psychic and philosophical aspects.

CB: At the ICA I started to think about how memory distorts things over time, similar to the way light does. Were the images in the show things that you collected over time or for the exhibition specifically?

ES: The series is called Markers (2010) and they are little representatives of the motley crew of images I've amassed in my studio over the years. I collect and keep them because they are resonant for some reason, I often don’t know why. The ones I picked for the show create this strange open-ended narrative about landscape and building and melancholy. (Fig. 4)

CB: I don't know whether this is because I know you or not, but you seem to be so present in the work at the ICA. The prints especially seem to reference the limits of your own personal experience with memory and the passing of time. A printed image does not age in the same way our memory of an image does. You make that disconnect physical. In the course of retaining a memory, it becomes something very separate and distinct from the actual event.

ES: I love that you think that. I feel very present in it too - exposed, actually - but I would assume a lot of people wouldn't get that impression. I think that in a lot of ways, the camera helps me negotiate the world. It severely limits and affects what you experience, but being able to view something, separate it, and regard it…that is a relationship to experience that I respond to, or rather, that process helps me respond to experience.

CB: Let's talk about Marfa. Did the vastness of the landscape and Judd or other southwestern land art legacies impact your thinking while you were fabricating your work out there? I know you have spent a lot of time in the desert.

ES: You know, someone was talking to me about my work in relation to land art the other day, and maybe it’s surprising, but I was genuinely mystified about why they would talk about that in relation to my work. I mean, I rarely think about those dudes. If their idea was to go out into the world to make art, my idea is very much to take a picture from the Internet, go to my studio, black out the windows and shine a light on it.

CB: So why do you use images of such monumental objects as James Turrell’s Roden Crater, Tony Smith’s Die, the moon, and the United Nations building? (Fig. 5)

ES: All of those things exude a strange affect of blankness. I respond to their quality of muteness/indifference. Smith's forms are huge, blank, hollow things that have a generous aspect to them in the sense that they are radically inexpressive—pure math forms that adhere to this rigorous geometry. From the vantage point across the East River, the UN building is this big blank face. Roden Crater too, from a distance, is a lump in the landscape, formed forever ago, hyper ordinary, but also awesome in the real sense of that word.

CB: So it is a formal connection to these things and not necessarily a narrative?

ES: It’s a formal connection in the sense of how you and I use the word formal. Not just shape, “end of story,” but rather in the sense that shape becomes the story. There is no explicit political statement in the UN video for the viewer, for example. I do wonder how we can look at, relate to, or understand art or architecture from the past. I wonder what has changed in the physical experience of viewing these things now that we are, as a culture, more image-oriented. But I hope these ideas are conveyed by the works’ affect on a more experiential, visceral level.

Chelsea Beck, recently co-curated Weasel at Inman Gallery Annex. She lives and works in Houston, TX.

Texas News

Austin News

Houston News

Marfa News

News

Austin Openings

Austin on View

Austin Closings

San Antonio on View

San Antonio Closings

Houston on View

Houston Closings

Dallas Openings

Dallas on View

Dallas Closings

Marfa on View

New York Openings

New York Closings

Houston Lectures