Archives for 2009

The lace that peers
out of pockets and lines a neck
like blind worms
in search of soft earth
was free, but Goya charged
extra for hands.

Allowed into a painting, they have the tendency to take over.

 Oskar Kokoschka let them.

Bruce Nauman assigns them lowly roles (false friend or pugilist).

Hannah Wilke, right hand drawn by the left, tracked cancer.

Debra Baxter provided one of hers with a fallback position. She may not be able to take you down, but the brass emblem of intimacy sheltering her middle finger will.

Eduardo Calderon – Caliban in love with unattainable beauty.

Fred Muram – portrait of the artist as an incompetent. (Besides offending left, note limp right in rear.)

Hugo Ludena – male bonding.

Holly Lynton – riding Mother Earth.

Tim Roda – like father, like son.

Shot taken in Seattle at 17th Ave. and Harrison St., an affluent, gracious old homes portion of Capitol Hill:

From George Chacona via Devon Cannon:

From Charles Krafft, occasional poet:

God told the Jews to leave Egypt.

He told the Mormons to go to Salt Lake City,

Set up a giant choir, and a 7up bottling plant.

Then God told me to give you the finger

The next time I saw you.

It is not that God is angry with you,

You cannot anger God.
It’s just that
He wants to be sure

You still believe in miracles.

Bob Zoell (Click to enlarge)

Paul Stout:

Stout’s sculptural models are filters through which he distances himself from the world. As a kid, he worked in a hobby
store. Systems tinkering was mandatory. The geeky youth he must have been is now blinding us with science and passing it
off as art. From his cracked accounts, the tragedy of our
cracked relationship with the earth takes slippery and uncertain shape.

Susan Robb:

She works in the gap between flesh and fantasy, nature and technology,
attraction and repulsion. Her meanings slide across each other like
tectonic plates. What grinds to powder between them is the audience’s
certainty that it knows what’s going on.

Double Standard, 1961, via MAN

Audubon killed his models to paint them alive. Since his day, more artists have tended to let the dead be dead. Lately, there are a lot of dead out there.

Roni Horn

[Read more…] about Birds past their pull date

Charles Ray, Plank Piece, 1973

Jennifer Zwick, Hanging Front, Hanging Back, 2007

Letters sideways and shuffled in the middle (via):

Do the letters spell out Lancelot, LA’s Chance Lots or Jack Pierson’s title, Last Chance Lost? Just as dyslexics don’t limit themselves to one meaning, the work itself invites multiple readings. Pierson’s battered cluster of light-struck letters is the equivalent of Thelonious Monk’s embrace of wrong/right notes…

Because everybody knows that in art, wrong can be right.

(Baldessari)
Stephanie Syjuco at James Harris Gallery through May 2.