Brian Gaman, an exhibition

installation view, ArtHelix, photography Kevin Noble

B R I A N    G A M A N

An Exhibition of Works: 1987-2014

ArtHelix  |  Bushwick

Untitled, 1987, cast aluminum, 63 x 93 x 62 in, photography Kevin Noble

On view at ArtHelix through this weekend, an extraordinary exhibition of works by the artist Brian Gaman, who died earlier this year -- well before his time. The art, the installation, Gaman's visual precision and his bright and immaculate intelligence -- taken altogether, it's a revelation. 

Organized by Bonnie Rychlak, the artist's wife, and ArtHelix owner and gallery impresario Peter Hopkins, the show circles Gaman's oeuvre with sublime acuity, inviting historic works to resonate alongside recent ink jet prints, some mural size, video and other manifestations of the artist's thinking. 

A poet friend once said to me, "There's nothing vague about great poetry. The language is precise, exacting. It's not obtuse." And so it is with Gaman's work. What may first appear unknowable is the result of meticulous clarity -- a sort of aesthetic bull's eye -- that permeates the breadth of his focus. Take it from me, Gaman's art will live on but there will never again be an exhibition of his work so pure of heart as this one. I urge you to see this stunning show.

Below, a few thoughts about Brian's art from myself and others, along with an excerpt from his own writing. 
  

installation of untitled globes, circa 1980s, steel, cast iron, aluminum, photography Kevin Noble

"The older work, from the 80s and then into the 90s, was iconographic groupings, 
looking like world globes and eyeglasses and some other things; images and objects congruent, bound up in minimalist seriality and meant to have something to do with the decay of the programmatic. It was precise, but presented as degraded, never cleaned residue left from casting, or mill sale, or rust."

Brian Gaman

above/below: untitled globes at LongHouse Reserve in Diversities of Sculpture/Derivations from Nature, 2012

"This current work is now more disposed toward what's around media and images -- images as such are gone from the current work -- in wider and wider spectacular use. 

Elements and parts from the older work get scanned and pushed through a 

digital sieve and stood up against what's taken to be immaculate is 

scuffed up, scratched, dusty and soiled."

Brian Gaman, courtesy ArtHelix

installation, ArtHelix, photography Kevin Noble

"Sweeping from micro to macro vision, Gaman's works on paper seem to 

move toward distant space, identifying a future that is neither seen nor unseen. 

Extracted from the artist's video sequences, the works infer the phenomenon of 

sight and the evidence of vision as opposed to the merely visible, with imagery 

that is both fleeting and at the same time persistent -- bursting open and 

dissolving into memory simultaneously.

...Absurdity, existence, absence, presence -- these are the seductive 

and unknowable concepts that permeate much of these artist's historic works of 

art and literature. Gaman, an unabashed Beckett devotee, has referred to 

perceptual endgames in his art and the process of seeing, and in this he breaks 

bread with the aforementioned [Bruce Naumann, George Kubler, Robert Smithson], 

embracing the sorts of ambivalence that define (or seek to define) the existentialist mind."

From Blinnk, December 2013

Untitled, 2011, ink jet print on paper, (2 sections), 98 x 88 in, photography Kevin Noble

"At Yale in grad school Gaman was interested in artists concerned with the gap between 

knowing and saying.  That means neither knowing nor saying. So the work is terse 

bordering on mute—hence the difficulty of discovering that occasionally those 

spheres are actually bubbles of hilarity, hiccups escaping from a 

Beckettian black humor hole. Indeed, inebriation 

is the genesis of pieces from the late 90’s"

Howard Foster, Romanov Grave, 2011

"...it's not possible to discuss Gaman's work without acknowledging its 

philosophical margins and the sense of an imagery that is constantly going 

away or moving toward an inevitable void. His imagery, a language of circles, 

spheres and lenses that function both to focus in and focus out is at once 

simplistic in the absurd and all encompassing in its magnitude. Like 

Gaman's antecedents, it places the ironic squarely in his field 

of vision, and this is key to his work."

excerpt from Blinnk, 2013

Untitled, 2010, ink jet print on paper, 153 x 448 in, edition of 5, photography Kevin Noble

installation view, photography by Kevin Noble

Untitled, 2013, inkjet prints, Parrish Art Museum, Artists Choose Artists

In 2013, Gaman was selected by the artist Keith Sonnier for Artists Choose Artists at the Parrish Art Museum. His installation, above, was breathtaking. Two immense ink jet prints on multiple sheets of paper -- titanic in scale -- dominated one wall of the museum, holding their own amid soaring ceilings and the building's velvety, natural light. Enigmatic and absolute, the works were majestic. 

I had the privilege of working with Brian Gaman on a few occasions. Below, his installation for The Moby Project in East Hampton made powerful connections to the moon and sky, to compasses, and to the circles and spheres that have been a constant in his work.  

Untitled, 2013, installation at Mulford Farm, The Moby Project

Earlier this year, Gaman also participated in Redacted, a show I curated for Islip Art Museum. We selected a piece (on view at ArtHelix, below) that functioned a bit like a gigantic sampler of pixels from a digital film or video.  Huge rectangles of white, gray, and black hovered in the image field while a minuscule photo peered out from the lower margin -- like a view to another world.

The work arrived at the museum in a long, cardboard box. The crew and I donned our white gloves and opened the box. I cautioned my young crew to use the utmost care, but they had no idea what we were about to see. We pulled the paper roll from its protective sleeve, and allowed it to slowly unfurl. Everyone in the room gasped. 

"Oh my God!" they said. It was the blackest black, the richest pigment, the most beautiful, big, big page. The moment was spine-tingling, with everyone in the room a bit frozen. 

Brian had advised that the print should be installed with only three push pins, which he provided. I winced as I ran the pins into each corner, and then in the center. When we let go, the sides of the paper were curled dramatically.

"It's so sculptural," said one of the staff members.

I've never had an experience quite like that and it's one I'll never forget. We stepped back from the wall and everyone stared quietly for a very long time.

Untitled ink jet prints, c. 2013, photography Kevin Noble

Brian Gaman (1948 - 2014)

exhibition on view through  October 19, 2014

ArtHelix

299 Meserole Street

Brooklyn, NY 11206

and

16 Harrison Place
Brooklyn, NY 11206

vanishing point

Brian Gaman

Artists Choose Artists, Parrish Art Museum

Lost or Not, Art Helix, Bushwick

On view at the Parrish Art Museum, two immense inkjet prints stretch across a long passage of white wall with a combination of silence and grandeur. Sweeping from micro to macro vision, Brian Gaman's works on paper seem to move toward distant space, identifying a future that is neither seen nor unseen. Extracted from the artist's video sequences, the works infer the phenomenon of sight and the evidence of vision as opposed to the merely visible, with imagery that is both fleeting and at the same time persistent -- bursting open and dissolving into memory simultaneously. 

 

Brian Gaman, Untitled, 2013

The little pictures inserted along the perimeter of both prints represent the photographic origins of the larger images, and they provide evidence of a more finite reality. It's as if an invisible lens was morphing the visual target from big to small and back again, and in this way the works possess a sense of velocity. Here, vision seems to be pulled from consciousness and from the smallest fractions of the act of sight. That zap of apprehension -- the Gestalt of it -- is riveting. 

Untitled, 2013, in the studio

The recent spate of essays on the work of the remarkable and sometimes misunderstood artist Ad Reinhardt has reopened those existentialist gates in which works by artists the likes of Samuel Beckett, Bruce Nauman, George Kubler and Robert Smithson are framed. Absurdity, existence, absence, presence -- these are the seductive and unknowable concepts that permeate much of these artist's historic works of art and literature. Gaman, an unabashed Beckett devotee, has referred to perceptual endgames in his art and the process of seeing, and in this he breaks bread with the aforementioned, embracing the sorts of ambivalence that define (or seek to define) the existentialist mind.

I might be getting in a little over my head here, but it's not possible to discuss Gaman's work without acknowledging its philosophical margins and the sense of an imagery that is constantly going away or moving toward an inevitable void. His imagery, a language of circles, spheres and lenses that function both to focus in and focus out is at once simplistic in the absurd and all encompassing in its magnitude. Like Gaman's antecedents, it places the ironic squarely in his field of vision, and this is key to his work. 

Gaman was selected for the Parrish's biannual exhibition, Artists Choose Artists, by Keith Sonnier whose dazzling work in the same gallery electrifies the room. Sonnier's and Gaman's works do something together -- a divine occurrence or, more likely, the vision of exhibition organizer, Andrea Grover -- that allows them to explode into view from the long, vaulted hallways that have come to define the Parrish.

Keith Sonnier, ACA, 2013

They are side by side, more or less, divided by a huge corner of the gallery. Both works flirt with gestural form, with Sonnier's radiant lines stopping and starting with such alarming grace that the work seems to coalesce and deconstruct in front of you. 

In not an altogether dissimilar way, Gaman's work moves toward a visual field that is so optically maximal that it transcends vision -- and then it ricochets back again with hypnotic effect. The gash of form that travels horizontally across the surface seems to move with the speed of light in a logic-bending visual expanse.

Concurrent with the Parrish show, Gaman's work can be seen in Bushwick at an outpost of Art Helix, Peter Hopkins' immersive and refreshingly inventive gallery concept. Curated by the artist Bonnie Rychlak, Lost or Not is a paean to the sorts of ghosts and shadowy afterimages that circulate within histories of place.

Brian Gaman, Untitled

For Gaman, the concept dovetails nicely with his long research into the process of seeing and the development of a language that employs variants of the visual process. Here, the artist's sculptures invoke pairs of eyeglasses (one might even deduce they are the famed spectacles of Samuel Beckett) that maintain a broad and infinite upward gaze. Affixed to elaborate steel frames, the structures appear designed to collapse into a huge pocket. That there are two works that echo one another adds another layer to Gaman's episodic investigations into the visual field. 

What they see is another matter altogether.

Lost or Not is situated in an empty lot on Harrison Place where Gaman shares the geography with sculptors John Monti and Jennie Nichols. The effect of the installation is not unlike a Zen garden, with works selected by Rychlak that are contemplative, exuding multiple associations to the interior mind and eye. 

John Monti

John Monti's glistening black lozenge seems to cap off the top of the world, its underneath a secret place of unknown proportion, place or mood. Jennie Nichols' cast wax cases and books are layered with the notion of temporality, as if the works have been staged for departure from an invisible train station. They look like aged chocolate, and references to antiquity and the passage of time haunt the installation. Together, the works move through an array of metaphors that leap from solitude to fraternity to identity, absoluteness and poetry.

Jennie Nichols, Stacked Cases and Books, 2013

This is a wonderful show that you won't want to miss -- on view in Bushwick through December 30th. You can see the Parrish Art Museum's Artists Choose Artists through January 19, 2014.

Brian Gaman, Lost or Not

And check out more of Brian Gaman's work at briangaman.net



cheers!

letter from bushwick

detail: Cape Breton Drawing, 2012, watercolor and gouache on rice paper, 27 x 27 inches

Jene Highstein

The Cape Breton Drawings, 2008 - 2012

ArtHelix

The Cape Breton Drawings, courtesy of Danese Gallery

 

It's such a pleasure when amid the long arch of an artist's development another

body of work -- one for which the artist 

is less known-- is revealed. Think Dan Flavin's watercolors, John McCracken's mandalas, even Chamberlain's foam rubber or twisted foils. Such works provide insights that broaden our experience of the artist, sometimes exponentially. Oh, those mystic truths.

For Jene Highstein, an artist renown for sculptural works that are resolutely physical -- often massive in scale -- his current exhibition of The Cape Breton Drawings, on view at ArtHelix in Bushwick, is a revelation.

The paintings are elastic and bright. Highstein's splashes and throw lines surge across rice paper mushrooming into squalls of pigment or explosive speckles, loops and switchbacks. They are filled with a transcendence that feels like it contains the whole of the dome of the sky and with it, the fleeting beauty of the sublime.

Organized by the artist and curator, Bonnie Rychlak, the works are installed without any of the conventional restraints, allowing them to flutter lightly with each passerby. 

 


For Highstein, whose sculptural works range from human scale to the Herculean, Nova Scotia's soaring, vaulted ceiling of sky and its eternal horizon has found a pilgrim soul.

courtesy Danese Gallery, Jene Highstein, New Sculpture: Towers and Elliptical Forms, 2011

Earlier this week, Jene and I spoke on the phone about bogs and inlets, Chinese brushes, magic and the undulating landscape of northeastern Canada. 

The fact that Cape Breton is far away, hard to get to, and lacks any real popular culture has made it something of a destination for nirvana-seeking New York artists. By the 1970s friends of Highstein's were already entrenched there, but he and his family only began visiting the area some 8 or 9 years ago. They were smitten. The town they settled in on the east coast has only twelve houses; the nearest village, some ten miles away, boasts a population of 750.

"It's extraordinarily beautiful there. The environment 

is so magical -- you forget New York City. We take 

amazing walks on the peninsula -- day long 

walks -- along the shore and the bogs and high 

above the sea. You see seals and otters, but 

you don't see people."
 

The Cape Breton Drawings have developed over time, more as a collaboration with nature than as aesthetic observation. Highstein absorbs the natural world around him, intuiting it and recalling it in his mind's eye when he is back in the studio. He noted that in Chinese landscape painting, artists don't paint on site -- they absorb the landscape and carry it with them -- painting it not only from memory but from a psychic, or perhaps spiritual, connection.

"I feel totally liberated in this practice. I paint on 

rice paper with Chinese brushes. They're made 

so well -- I feel like the brush acts as an 

intellectual extension of my thought. "

On the stunning clarity of the Cape Breton Drawings, Rychlak noted that the artist's process 
is one of "a channeling of the natural world" -- an apt
description of these nuanced
and meditative fields of color.

Highstein emerged in the late 1960s just as minimalism, 
the dominant language of the time, was at the cusp of its own reinvention. He torqued geometry, pulling form away from the classic structure of
minimalism. Organic ovoids, urns, columns and saftig, swollen cylinders emerged.

His materials are varied, but whether Highstein employs hand-troweled cement, hand- hammered stainless steel, carved wood or bricks of ice, 
one of the salient features of his sculpture is the treatment of surface. If there is an abiding sense of anthropomorphism in his work, it resides in the skin by which the works are contained. The surfaces seem to pulse and heave as if they are breathing or waking, resting or funneling inward.

Human Scale Black, reinforced concrete, 6 1/2' x 55' x 50', Guggenheim, Bilbao, Spain

Highstein has exhibited worldwide and has created major public works and installations across Europe and the United States. He's traveled and worked in China since the 1970s, near the South China Seas where they have, according to the artist, really good factories. A collaborative spirit has resulted in projects that range from experimental theater and dance to a mesmerizing ice construction created in Finland with the architect, Steven Holl.

"You have to remember -- my generation grew up collaborating. In the 1970s, the audience, the performers and the artists were 

all the same people." 

Jene Highstein and Lawrence Weiner collaboration, 2012, Bowery Poetry Club

Most recently, Highstein  

and Lawrence Weiner 

worked in concert to 

create a mural size print 

for the Elizabeth Murray 

Art Wall at The Bowery 

Poetry Club. 

The print, which measures 

a whopping 12 x 16', is a one-off that merges  

Weiner's text-based art 

with Highstein's visual 

joie de vivre. Definitely 

a punchline with a twist.

 

 


Highstein and his wife have a farm in upstate New York, too, and there a parallel body of paintings is in development. The landscape is vast, filled with rolling hills, hardwood forests, and barns. "Grandma Moses country," he remarked. The sky is an open canopy, surrounded by woodlands.

"The skies are different there -- they move fast, 
but the clouds are big and puffy, like strange 
Tiepolos. And the woods are special -- very 
magical. All those vertical lines 
-- they make me think of Ucello"

Back in Bushwick, Bonnie Rychlak and I walk the gallery, examining the face of each painting. 

The qualities are mysterious and the longer you take them 
in, the more broad the scope of the paintings becomes.

Some are full and 
flecked with pools of irridescent color, 
others are spare -- like the face of the moon.

There's music in 
them -- or sound -- 
and a silent rhythm  
that seems to 
coalesce among 
the sky and reeds 
and water as
it spills out 
across the 
gallery.

 

  
You won't want to miss this show, 
on view at one of Bushwick's most forward thinking galleries,
Peter Hopkins' ArtHelix, 
through February 25th.

ArtHelix

56 Bogart Street

Bushwick, Brooklyn
(Morgan stop on the L train)

mind, matter and exquisite things

detail: Daniel Wiener, Mongrel, 2008, Apoxie sculpt

diversities of sculpture/derivations from nature

longhouse reserve

curated by bonnie rychlak 

On view this season, the artist/curator Bonnie Rychlak has assembled stunning works by six contemporary artists. The show, now on view at LongHouse, includes Ronald Bladen, Ann Chu, Brian Gaman, Jene Highstein, Judith Shea and Daniel Wiener. 

another form of art, also at Longhouse

Rychlak's mission was to assemble divergent works that would create a dialogue not through a thematic concept but across genres, focus, and places in history. A signature work, The X, by the late Ronald Bladen sets the stage for a cross-generational exchange.  

Ronald Bladen, The X, 1965, painted aluminum

Bladen was an icon, and back in the day his impact on my generation of artists was profound. Elegant simplicity, exacting minimalism and economy of means torqued our meanings and the way we, as artists, assimilate symbols, language and abstract form.

 

Nearby, 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient Judith Shea presents an elegiac work titled Idol. Part of her 9/11 series, The Legacy Collection, Shea's cloaked man overlooks the gushing Black Mirror (by Ray Smith and Associates), that presides over a curious trinity. Flanked by the fountain that is so reminiscent of New York's 9/11 Memorial at ground zero and Bladen's monumental "x", Shea's powerful figure appears at once pensive, judicious, and archetypal.

Judith Shea, Idol, 2011-12, bronze, stainless steel, aluminum

Black Mirror (Ray Smith and Associates)

At first glance, Ann Chu's Maranao Man appears like a boy Harlequin, but closer inspection reveals a disagreeable scowl -- not the stuff of your average jester. Chu's intriguing contradictions bounce between satire and folklore, delivered here with a touch of whimsy and a little intimidation. 

Ann Chu, Maranao Man, 2004, bronze

The Maranao, for which her sculpture is named, are Islamic inhabitants of Lake Lanao in the Philippines. Theirs is a tribal culture that is defined by its Kulintang (gong) music, art and artistry and traditions fueled by folklore. Their complex imagery, derived from legends, storytelling, and their own tropical environs, is noteworthy. Okir, perhaps the best known of Maranao ornamentation, combines the geometric and the organic in complex floral patterns. Chu's Maranao Man is similarly festooned -- his costume embellished with elaborate floral designs -- rendering him sympathetic in spite of his onerous expression.

Brian Gaman, Untitled 3 Globes, 1987, cast iron and steel

The luscious patina on Brian Gaman's orbs is a phenomenon owed to this exhibition, as the works had never before been sited outdoors. The elements have provided a painterly surface treatment, with time and process accumulating in rivulets of color.

As Rychlak notes in her astute catalog essay, these works express a monumentality even though they're not that big. As a concept, "the globe" is immense in and of itself and here Gaman's Untitled 3 Globes reiterate the curvature of the earth, a physical imperative that is implicit among the wide expanses at LongHouse.

Form determines content in Jene Highstein's soaring Flora Tower, a looming stack of hand-hammered stainless steel segments that are gently imposing, ceremonial, and iconic. Highstein has said of his work:  

"Stone age tools, ceremonial objects, and idols fascinate me and are among the source of materials for my work. The content of my work is not so much nature abstracted, but a form which is evolved in relation to nature and which carries with it natural associations."  from The Mattress Factory

For some four decades now, Highstein's body of work has straddled the tenets of modernism and minimalism, yet it remains independent of both. Materiality, process and gesture -- ceremony and ritual -- the evolution of Highstein's art defies categorization.

  

Daniel Wiener, Mongrel, 2008

Functioning at the other end of the kaleidoscope, in Daniel Wiener's installation, Mongrel, three distinct sculptural forms convulse with energy under the dappled sunlight of this pastoral setting. The works possess a writhing, psychedelic restlessness that is exquisitely modern, and the Guggenheim seemed to agree -- Wiener received a Guggenheim Fellowship earlier this year.

Made of a self-hardening epoxy component and pigmented with swirls of color, the works are exuberant and sensuous, exerting a nervous immediacy and visual intrigue in which there seems to be no rest. A whorl of rubbery barnacles transits into a plinth here or a horizontal riff there, like an exotic coffee table set out in the middle of Arcadia.

Still, the drama and visual ferment in Wiener's sculpture is more subtle than it at first appears.

Intrinsic in these works is their unknowability -- they gush color and form like a subset of action painting, slipping in and out of their own passages as form boils over into structure.

It's summer on the East End when LongHouse opens. Bravo to Bonnie Rychlak for assembling this provocative show among the bucolic meadows of East Hampton's most prized public garden. 

Visiting hours to LongHouse vary throughout the summer. Visit their website for hours, directions and special events.

For more information on Bonnie Rychlak, see Jennifer Landes's informative profile in the East Hampton Star.