Archives for 2010

Norman Lundin is slow to embrace the new. He stakes his studio practice in the pre-modernist 19th century, as an off-shoot of the Barbizon School with a hat tip to 17th Century Dutch still life. His palette is sliver-gray and mossy green. When he hits a hot note, it’s usually an emergency, like a fire.

The Fire at Petersons Crossing
oil / canvas, 2008
unframed: 38 x 86″

About the artist’s own life I know little, but his paintings live in the world as depressed solitaries. The he who is their unseen narrator drives alone on country roads. Usually it’s raining. If he stepped outside, his shoes would sink into muck. If there’s light ahead, he hasn’t reached it.

Tornado Weather Northeastern Wyoming oil / canvas, 2010
42 x 90″

In describing his studio, the narrator allows himself a few flourishes. Like the Dutch before him, he can paint a bowl with the qualities of ceramic next to translucent glass and the dull sheen of polished tin. As a view beyond his leaded-glass windows, he can articulate spindly winter trees in a foggy purple haze.

Studio in Half Light II
oil / canvas, 2009
31 x 91″

The play of light interests the narrator more than what it plays upon. Light is never redemptive, but it’s worth the time it takes to notice its qualities. Objects are interchangeable, like roads or tables or nude women reclining on beds.

Room with Three Jars oil / canvas, 2010 
40″ x 66

Here’s the entirety of Lundin’s artist statement:

The less you have, the more important what is there becomes.

In the go-go part of the 1980s, when the well-heeled were drinking champagne from glass slippers at the Mary Boone Gallery and Robert Hughes was wringing his hands at the corrupt excess of it all, saying, for instance, that young Soho collectors had the “discrimination of vacuum cleaners,” back then, Doug and Mike Starn introduced the pathos of the beat-up photograph.

Starn Twins Macabre Still Life, 1983 (Image via)

Nearly 30 years later, Sean McFarland‘s version of the seen-better-days photograph is far more modest, as befits his subject. Formerly known as the Golden State, California appears to have lost its luster.

And how to weave with glass, bottle caps, license plates, light, film rolls, corks, spit and packing peanuts, peanut butter and jelly, fire.

Jack Daws – TWO TOWERS, 2003
Chromogenic print of artist-made construction from McDonald’s French fries and Heinz ketchup
photographed by Richard Nichol
50 x 40 inches, Edition of 10

Toots Zynsky (image via)

El Anatsui

Ross Palmer Beecher – AUTO LOG CABIN QUILT, 2009
Aluminum license plates, tin, Hot Wheel cars and mixed media, 76 x 87 inches

Gail Tremblay

Claude Zervas – d6,
custom electronics and programming, LEDs, high/flex wire, stainless steel wire,
82″h x 22″w x 7″d

Marita Dingus – Glass Baby With Corks All Around

Alex Schweder La – Spit Skin,
Saliva and biodegradable loose fill packing peanuts,
96″ x 42″ x 120″ in December 2006, 18″ x 48″ x 72″

Ryan Pfluger – Bagged Lunch, 2007

Etsuko Ichikawa

McMahon
Doyle

If Zoe Scofield were a fictional character, she would be Lisbeth Salander, who made her debut in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

It’s not the physical resemblance, although it’s striking:

(images, Juniper Shuey)

It’s the meaning of their movements,Salander in a boxing ring, Scofield on stage. Scofield never would have made it as a ballet dancer, she says in the video below, because she “couldn’t stay in line.” Any line other than her own. She is light on her feet but owns the floor. Gravity
loves her without being able to contain her. When she jumps, she hangs
in the air, feet extended and slightly curved, fingers flared. When she crouches, she’s a menace to society.

Scofield is married to artist Juniper Shuey, with whom she collaborates in videos, photos and stage settings. (Their website, Zoe/Juniper, here.)

At the MacDowell Colony for the last two months, he created a series of photos that present the Scofield as a sexless series of white shadows in a wood. There’s a hint of Matthew Barney in the ritualized ceremony, but Shuey is indie-rock to Barney’s opera, low rent to high palace.

To his interest in what it means to live in a body, Shuey contributes a haunted unease, an inability to connect. The gap between him and other people equals the gap between him and himself. He involves the audience in his perceptual play, shrouding visitors in doubt the way fog rolls over the moors when Sherlock Holmes walks on them.

In the early ’60s, kids who sniffed the ink on mimeograph paper switched to glue. While it still meant stuck-on-you, it acquired a penumbra of the outcast otherworldly. Titled Nascent, Gerri Sayler‘s transparent, kinky, hot-glue strands hang in the air in Suyama Space like cloud tendrils. They are neither metaphors for sexual attraction nor reminders of the functional, but there is a hint of lives wasted.  If they were ribbons, they’d be the kind purchased straight that bounce back curly when run along a knife’s edge. That, or unraveling lace.

More than 2,000 strands make an overhead cove in the gallery space. Each one is a vertical drawing, a dissolute calligraphy lost in the chorus of its fellows.

Diaphanous membranes are having their moment. It would be nice to see a range of them in one place, including, for example:

Alyson Shotz

Lead Pencil 6 Columns, 2006 Government grey nylon 12 x 18 x 1 feet Edition of 3

Victoria Haven DOUBLE OR NOTHING (white variant), 2008
Cut steel with white powder coating and fasteners
27 x 25 x 1.75 inches
Variable edition of 6 (2 variants in each of 3 finishes)

Teresita Fernandez
  

Deborah Ascheim

Yuriko Yamaguchi

Caroline Lathan-Stiefel

Beth Sellars would be an excellent choice to curate it. Of the 8 artists shown above, she has featured five at Suyama Space.

Gerri Sayler at Suyama through Dec. 17.

Ryan Horvath

Previous. Horvath is currently in a show at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc.

Wherever he lives – from Seattle but of Lithuanian heritage and largely in residence there in recent years – Andrew Miksys finds worlds inside the world.  

Here or there, he connects.

Andrei Codrescu:

His greatness lies, I believe, in the extraordinary swiftness with which he establishes a relationship with his subjects, a relationship that is unfailingly empathetic.

While still based in Seattle but traveling around the country, Miksys concentrated on bingo, where he has roots. He won his first game at 11, collecting the impressive sum of $280, and in high school delivered a newspaper his father published, Bingo Today.

Lipstick, New Orleans, 1997

Hickey, Seattle 1997

In 2007, he published a book of portraits featuring Lithuanian Roma titled, BAXT, which is a Romani word for destiny, fate or fortune.

Rustam, Lithuania 2006

Miksys:

This week my BAXT series
about the Roma (Gypsies) of Lithuania will be shown at FOTOHOF in
Salzburg (Austria) and the Vilnius Contemporary Art Centre (Lithuania).
 At Fotohof I am excited to be showing with Ugnius Gelguda and Indre
Serpytyte in an exhibition entitled TRYS (Trys=Three).  In Vilnius I will be taking part in the “Lithuanian Art: 2000-2010: Ten Years”
exhibition, a retrospective of Lithuanian art produced in the last
decade. 

Two American classics:

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, opening sentence:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off–then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

 Zoe Strauss:

Charles LeDray debuted in Boston with a solo show at the ICA through Oct. 17. Sebastian Smee in the Boston Globe loved it:

LeDray is one of contemporary art’s brightest stars, and this show, organized by the ICA’s Randi Hopkins, is the most beautiful, poignant, and witty show the ICA has mounted since moving to its new waterfront home in 2006.
LeDray treats clothes as surrogates for human identity, particularly male identity, and for the many types of work that go into constructing it. As such — and unlike the fashion industry, which is founded on an unblinking faith in the potential of clothes to communicate power, beauty, and self-worth — his work is intensely alive to the pathos clothes can communicate, and to the many senses in which they just don’t . . . quite. . . fit. (more)

LeDray’s workworkworkworkwork travels to the Whitney Museum of American Art (the entire third floor, November 18, 2010-February 13, 2011) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (dates TBA). Although LeDray comes from Seattle and was a guard at the Seattle Art Museum, his exhibit is not scheduled for a Northwest stop.