shed a little

TRUDY BENSON / RUSSELL TYLER

East Hampton Shed

Trudy Benson, Yellow Shade, 2015, oil and acrylic on canvas

Tucked away among a forested stretch off Buckskill Road, East Hampton Shed is changing the way we think about the barns and outbuildings dotting the back forty of homes on the East End. Four years ago, Hadley Vogel and Nate Hitchcock transformed a modest structure behind the Vogel Bindery into a space so crisp and white it's suitable for framing.

East Hampton Shed, behind the Vogel Bindery in East Hampton

More than a lean-to, less than a guest house, the Shed has morphed into a micro-gallery exhibiting some of the most interesting young artists between here and Mexico City. Exhibitions have included Lauren Luloff, Landon Metz, Brian Kokoska, Rebecca Ward, Abigail Vogel and Jean-Baptiste Bernadet, among others. Two Brooklyn-based painters, Trudy Benson and Russell Tyler open the season this year.

Russell Tyler, BBPG, 2014, oil on canvas

The evolution of the Shed goes back a way. While studying at Chicago's Columbia College, Vogel began to adapt a curatorial platform. Drawing on Chicago's do-it-yourself aesthetic, she mounted an apartment gallery, maintaining it for three years. "It was a labor of love," she said, noting that the gallery came long before her knowledge of the art market.

Hitchcock and Vogel eventually teamed up, and their shared affinity for contemporary art led them to Mexico City, drawn there in part by Gerardo Contreras's groundbreaking Preteen Gallery. Since then they've mounted off-site events and exhibitions and participated in art fairs in Miami, New York and Mexico. Hitchcock, also an independent curator, has organized shows at galleries such as Johannes Vogt in New York and LA's Honor Fraser. 

detail, Benson's Yellow Shade, 2015

Back at the Shed, single works by both artists activate this dynamic space. Benson's work is a layered melange of calligraphy, cutaways and viscous swaths of pigment, with strata of gestures pushing forward and sliding back at the same time. Fast paced and blithely haywire, Yellow Shade is a meditation on destabilization. 


While the pictorial field is filled with spatial ruptures, formally the painting thrives on compositional rejoinders like background, foreground and middle ground -- its cacophony yielding to formal balance. 

Benson's strategy is frisky, skillful and tight. She lays down a ground of sprightly lines, creating a hazy playground of airbrushed doodles that pop in an out of focus. 

Mid-ground, abstract shapes function like architectural gateways that both anchor the image field and act as a window into the painting. 

In the foreground, contours of extruded pigment fly over the surface, marking the field like Nazca lines. The effect is radiant and dizzying.

   

Trudy Benson 

Russell Tyler and friend

   

On an adjacent wall, Russell Tyler's painting BBPG is ravenous, imbued with an explosive painterly finesse. In his rigorous studio practice Tyler has moved nimbly from the figurative to geometric abstraction, continuing outward from there, always with a long interpretive glance.

Known for paintings that possess a raw structural precision and evocations of obsolete technology, vintage computer graphics and video games, his abstractions convey a deep sense of nostalgia. 

Russell Tyler, BBPG, 2015, acrylic and oil on canvas

Tyler's appreciation of mid-century American abstraction is also nostalgic, and it taps into Reinhardt, Hoffman and Still with a distance that is reductive, refreshing and free of post-modern angst. In figural works he has referenced Goya, and here, BBPG is a tour de force homage to Phillip Guston, abstract expressionism and the New York school. 

His material sensibility is one of such viscidity and so much depth that the paintings veer toward the sculptural, possessing a powerful physical presence.

With a palette that's more Dow Chemical than, say, Per Kirkeby's naturalist, feel-good coloration, Tyler's synthetic colors source the likes of TV screens, patio furniture or plastic refuse. Not unlike Guston, his exploration of color gradients is often limited in tone and hue. 

In BBPG, Pepto-Bismol pinks rub shoulders with blacks and a range of baby blues, cobalt and Payne's gray. The effect is stunning, with blues and grays commingling dead center in a collision of slurpy clouds, painterly schisms and muscular, effusive marks. Tyler is a painter's painter.

Watch for the next iteration at the East Hampton Shed -- it's sure to be memorable.

if walls could talk

PERFORMATIVE PRACTICE

curated by Ryan Steadman

at HALSEY McKAY 

Donna Huanca, MOM, 2015, Paint and latex on reflective material, 47 x 39 x 2 in

If I were a wall, I can't imagine a fuller purpose than to be the thing that artists push against in the creative act. To feel all that psychic and intellectual muscle rubbing against, bearing down on, crushing into one's surface -- what a marvel that would be. Even better if evidence of the act, no matter how simple, was left in its wake, like a vestigial stamp -- neither past nor present -- an indicia robust enough to be both representative of itself and of its own creation. 

Distinct from performance, the performative in art implies a relationship to the viewer as well as to action, reaction and result, and it asks the audience to engage in a different kind of discernment. Of action painting, Harold Rosenberg famously called the canvas "an arena in which to act," noting its inherent theatricality. The canvas is an apt metaphor for artists working in a closed system where aesthetics and methodology are so closely linked.

Recently, a young artist talking about his work said to me, "the content is that I do it." So there. Situational, event driven, documentary; the new performative is not parenthetical, it is the parentheses.  

At Halsey McKay in East Hampton, the nine artists in Performative Process offer works focused on the provocations, signifiers and trace elements resulting from actions inside distinct sets of circumstances. Organized by the artist, writer and independent curator Ryan Steadman, the show delivers a lively examination of process, theater and action.

Donna Huanca creates installation-based works that draw from her travels, and from memory, motion and gesture. Huanca's MOM, installed in the upper level gallery, included an interactive performance by a pigment-drenched model. As in other works by this Chicago born artist, the human form embedded in the installation functions more as a collage element than than a theatrical one, but it is dramatic, nonetheless. 

Mostly still, when the model did move she pushed against a gallery wall leaving behind a soft violet pentimento. The live painting is a sort of paean to the collaborative process, and its nuanced afterglow offers a glimpse of the intersection of visual art and performance.

Keltie Ferris, L: Venus of Tan-Tan, R: Animal; both 2013-2014, oil and powdered pigment on paper, 40.25 x 26.13 inches

It's refreshing to see Keltie Ferris step away from the fantastic, hallucinatory abstractions for which she is known. Here she addresses figuration in body prints that recall X-ray technology, Rorschachs and the snow angels we made as kids. Raking inky body parts across broad sheets of paper, she leaves behind shadowy after-images of thighs, bellies, breasts and torsos. The results are life-size, ghostly and transformative, calling to mind Yves Klein's "Anthropometries" and the popular death masks of the Quattrocento.

Ben Morgan-Cleveland, Western Rat, 2014, Dirt, debris, binder on burlap, 55 x 120 in

Ben Morgan Cleveland virtually throws himself under the bus to achieve works that exude the grit and pace of city life. Cleveland places assembled sheets of burlap along the busy cobblestone roadways of industrial Brooklyn. As non-stop traffic pounds over the sheets en route to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, the fabric absorbs weeks of non-stop traffic and brutal weather. By the time Cleveland retrieves them they're painted with an urban slag that feels ancient, as if pulled from the hands of the cave-dwellers and poets that live underground. Their patina carries in it an aspect of the urban psyche, and on the white wall they feel like a memento mori or an ode to urban decay. 

Kate Gilmore, Break of Day, 2010, Video, 18 minutes 24 seconds, ed. 2/5

Similarly excruciating and yet sublime, the artist Kate Gilmore slogs through absurdist situations of her own design in performance and works in video, sculpture and photography. In her work, the artist devises ridiculous, often insurmountable physical challenges. Then, dressed in a stylish cocktail dress and pumps, she takes on these self-imposed objectives, often at her own peril. With her allegiance divided between exhaustion and devotion, she embarks on dueling resolutions that anxiously tyrannize the politics of gender, equality and correctness.

In Break of Day, the artist transports gallon after gallon of fuschia paint up a precipitous set of stairs, only to throw each container overboard into a void of structural beams below. Everything breaks, all the paint flies, and the artist, clearly exhausted, is triumphant, if only in the futility she achieves while meeting the directives in a predetermined set of circumstances. 

Elise Adibi, Gold and Osage Aromatherapy Painting, 2014, Rabbit skin glue, gilding glue, 24-karat gold leaf. osage pigment, oil paint and myrrh, bergamot and cedar wood essential plant oil on canvas, 20 x 20 in

Responding to the lack of natural smells in the Bushwick neighborhood Elise Adibi lived in some years ago, she began an investigation of aromatherapy. Her paintings, an amalgamation of grids, oil paint and plant oils, not only smell good they are evocations that carry the process and the act within. Adibi doesn't think of herself as an abstract painter; her works attempt to be nothing more than a record of her pourings.

Brie Ruais, Two Gather (Two Pushes Merged) 268 lbs., 2015, Glazed ceramic, hardware, 84 x 43 x 15 in

Brie Ruais's voluptuous Two Gather (Two Pushes Merged) 268 Lbs, towers among the ground floor installation. Its surface, a briny melange of metallic sheen, footprints and raw physicality yields to the afterglow of what looks like a mammoth struggle between human endeavor and wet clay. 

Ruais also employs a rule-based system that functions within strict boundaries (only so much clay; only a specific angle; just to a certain height, etc.). The creative act takes place inside these margins, complying with the instructions of its making. For instance, the work above references "two" individuals, their combined weight a mere "268 lbs;" each pushing their own mound of clay upward and then merging both elements into an upside down "V." The results chronicle a peer to peer search for the self, as if the two artists were pushing on the earth from the inside out.

Like other artists that have worked in and around instruction-based media -- Susanne Lacy, Sol LeWitt, Kate Gilmore -- the environment Ruais creates folds into itself to become a third thing, the way a glacial rock forms under pressure.

Reuben Lorch-Miller, Untitled, 2011, ceramic, 11 x 5 x 6 in

Reuben Lorch-Miller and Adam Marnie also impose an artistic autocracy on works that possess aspects of formal precision, balance and austerity before havoc is wreaked on them. Lorch-Miller's ceramic sculptures feel like ritual objects, their planar structure sharing formal concerns with the likes of Richard Serra and Anthony Caro. Scorched in a cinderblock kiln, the small sculptures appear ancient, and yet for all their formal balance and materiality they exude a restless ambiguity.

Adam Marnie, Last of the Mohicans, 2015, Hardwood maple, wood putty, spray paint, 63 x 3.5 x 5 in

Likewise, with its precise geometry collapsed at the site of a decisive clobbering, Adam Marnie's Last of the Mohicans offers a glimpse of the artist's DIY minimalism and architectural intervention. Its clean lines shattered, the diagrammatic calm is torn asunder.  

Back to the sublime, Milwaukee-based artist John Riepenhoff paints the night sky in real time, with little more than a small lantern to guide his eye and hand. Plein Air (East Hampton), shown below, was painted here on the East End in the dark of night. As Riepenhoff channels the natural world and its 19th century proponents, the scumbled surface and loose gestures also conjure Dadaism, automatic writing and a painterly choreography that is based in the performative. 

John Riepenhoff, Plein Air (East Hampton), 2015, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 72 in

Halsey McKay is located at 79 Newtown Lane in East Hampton

http://www.halseymckay.com/

terra firma

Hiroyuki Hamada

at Lori Bookstein

#81, 2011-2013, painted resin, 24 x 54 x 25 in

Hiroyuki Hamada's new work, on exhibit at Lori Bookstein through November 9th, is a perfect amalgam of mutability and permanence. Pushing and pulling volume, surface, and line as if carving directly in space, Hamada finds a balance between the organic and the geometric -- the physical and the ethereal, if you will -- in a selection of works that are variously intimate, plastic, tactile and blithely unpredictable.

Associations run wild among angular plinths that are butt against spheres in a collision of flat and round. Henry Moore said that his viewers only needed to "feel shape simply as shape, not as description or reminiscence." Similarly, Hamada intuits form, inviting it to morph between the humanistic and the industrial in a fusion of the body's curves, mastaba-like stacks, swollen balloon forms and architectural landscape. Infusing irony and tenderness, the works are at once intellectual, emotive and they possess a sort of aesthetic benevolence that is sensuous and wholly diverting.

Earlier this week, Hiroyuki and I shared some thoughts about work, life, and questioning authority:

Janet Goleas: The anthropomorphism in the new work is luscious -- do the works relate to non-human form?

Hiroyuki Hamada: Well...I started to make things in order to explore the mysterious quality of seeing the profoundness and the striking familiarity in the unfamiliar things, the part in "art" that I see as essential and special.  I didn't start expressing because I had particular stories or issues. To me, what was interesting was getting to the depth and the richness of our direct relationship to our ability to sense the unknown and I believe that's the key to evolve and explore while very much grounded to "being human".  It's our cutting edge way to feel the edges of possibilities and solutions.  And it's about being connected to them -- the viewers -- through that mysterious place...sharing the attitude and the result as we live and feel the time and place we share.  

JG: You've moved from the iconic tablets, gumdrops and torpedoes to fleshy, bulbous forms. In some cases the work looks even fluid. 

#73, 2011-2013, painted resin, 46 x 70 x 25 in

HH: We are all human and we do have a root which we all can share and grow together. My approach has been to totally disregard the narrative elements, symbolic elements, or any other conscious efforts to tell stories, just to make sure that I stick to that special place. I'm theorizing -- as an afterthought -- that maybe I need more layers to express a complexity in matters as my life gets complicated with responsibilities of being an adult, living in a time of change, being a parent and so on. The shapes are more complex and they seem to have more directions. 

But they are not made to be metaphors. They are made to be the experience.

Foreground, #72, 2011-2013, painted resin (in work), 28 x 53 x 29 in, mid-ground, the artist

JG: In your earlier works, the surface treatment seemed almost language based -- like cuneiform tablets -- with subtle articulations that scored or striated the face and sculptural body. These are all but absent in the new sculpture. I'm interested in the way -- at least to some extent -- that form here overwhelms surface here.

HH: I think there is still a good amount of surface work in them. It's a way to incorporate an element of time and pulling and pushing of the surface by painting, texturing, shaping and etc. I have a painting background so it's something that comes natural to me. But you are absolutely right that I've been realizing the power of the 3D form. In a way, I am learning the very basic nature of "sculpture."







When I started to make sculptures, it was a great mystery why sculptors are so oblivious to the surface.  It was almost unthinkable to me that they just cast things, expecting that pouring material in the mold would take care of the surface. Now I feel the strength of 3D forms in space.  

#74, 2011-2013, painted resin, 24 1/2 x 24 1/2 x 57 in

One could argue that it is strong enough to carry the expressive burden while the material gives focus to the main event -- the "sculpture" -- the 3D form in space.

HH: There is an interesting mention about that in the Wall Street Journal review of the show. The text is extremely positive in general which I very much appreciate, but the reviewer sees my surface treatment as somewhat redundant. I am guessing this assessment comes from the tradition and the preconceived ideas about sculpture. To me, that's not really a consideration.


JG: Some of the new work is held inside, or feels as though it's held within or stands on top of leather or steel casements. This is a whole new language for you, yes? Do you have thoughts about uniting pedestal and form?

#75, 2011-2013, painted resin and painted plaster, 13 1/2 x 14 1/2  x 28 in

HH: Well, the ideas often go much faster and they can be quite adventurous.   I do have many different directions in my sketch books but only the practical ones and promising ones come out to be actual pieces.  Which is a shame. 

#78, 2011-13, painted resin

I still quite haven't figured out how to incorporate more spontaneous process in the making.  But dealing with the base for a piece like #78 has given me an opportunity to brainstorm a solution in a quite spontaneous manner. It was pretty immediate to have the idea of having a really angular, heavy looking bottom beneath the light, organic shape. And I think it went pretty smooth capturing the idea without damaging its essence during the process. I had a great time working with those pieces.

And in terms of steel parts, I learned about it from my friend artist Kim Matthew. She was painting her sculptures with this acrylic paint which had metal powder suspended in it. So when you apply activator, you can give it a real oxidized surface. It's really a versatile surface perfect in some of my current pieces. 

#79, 2011-2012, painted resin, 26 x 35 x 20 in

JG: Your new drawings are wonderful -- they're a little like found objects.

HH: I constantly draw. It's my way of brainstorming visual ideas. This has been an important part of the making process. I get lots of spontaneous ideas, and I use drawing to refine existing ideas. 

 


The digital drawings in the current show are a new development for me. I would start as I always do--a 2B pencil and a sketch book. Then I scan it to continue drawing in my computer.  It's very low tech though -- more like working with a black and white enlarger, which I also used to do.  

JG: Do you listen to music when you work? 

HH: Music really used to be a crucial thing in the studio but lately I am spending more time stopping, seeking different perspectives on the work, contemplating and so on without going with the flow of the music on a long stretch. But when I do listen, I opt for milder, contemplative music as oppose to aggressive, dynamic types.  I think I use music to get myself in the mood to focus. But I do love uplifting, exciting sort of music which I grew up on as well. Also, for the past years, since the internet has replaced TV and radio about current issues and things that matter...

I am really finding reading and contemplating as a very important process in grounding myself in the context of the time and the space.

I often let my phone read--there are apps that read texts for you--articles, essays -- or I listen to pod casts, radio shows and so on while I sort of look at the pieces and try to see what they need.

JG: Tell me something about your process. You've spoken so much about focus and contemplation -- is this something you learned or is it something that comes with being an artist?

HH: Making things is really a non linear process for me. I really think some children who have learning difficulties -- kids with ADHD and the like -- are born with natural tendency to be artists. Making a piece with a cohesive presence that encompasses the harmony of matters that are relevant to our real lives is extremely hard. 

You can't miss any clues that the elements are emanating to you. In the making process, anything else becomes secondary.

So when I hear about kids not paying attention to the teacher that's telling them to sit down, stop talking, do this or do that, it really hurts to feel that for those kids those orders are just absolute bullshit compared to what they have to attend to. And many of the things we learn at schools are in fact useless for us but very useful for people who try to control us. Anyway, that wasn't the topic here.

#76, 2011-2013, painted resin, 46 x 37 x 31 in

JG: Maybe the idea of surrendering to the creative process comes naturally to young people with certain learning disabilities. Maybe there is greater flexibility there.

 

HH: I often think that it would be great if the schools could teach about the process since it is crucial in any creative endeavor. I feel the whole educational system needs to shift toward self reliance, creative solutions, cooperation and sharing away from obedience, following instructions, authoritative structure, competitions, and so on. Our kids need to cultivate the skills and knowledge to guide us and contribute to a healthy democratic process.  We really can't keep creating the mass which keeps allowing the powerful few to exploit and subjugate on a global scale.

JG: You're so so right. On another note, you mentioned having some visitors to your studio in advance of the show at Lori Bookstein -- Jack Youngerman, Bill King and Connie Fox -- all very seasoned and revered artists. Tell me about those visits.

HH: Well the very special thing is that the creative process is very slow and personal yet it is very much universal and timeless.  We do have a huge generation gap and the cultural differences, but as soon as we talk about art, we are standing on the same ground.  We are just people talking about something we feel passionate about.  I feel that to be the essence of humanity.  

JG: Thank you Hiroyuki. This has been thoroughly enjoyable.

HIROYUKI HAMADA at Lori Bookstein is on view thru November 9th

hybrids and homilies

detail: Forest Creature #1, 2012, graphite, oil on Yupo paper, 26 x 20 in

LUCY WINTON: CREATURES

Glenn Horowitz Bookseller

It's not often that I'm taken by surprise. It's not that I can't be impressed -- lots of things impress me. But true surprise is different. Picasso's Mosqueteros at Gagosian, 2009 -- that surprised me. New Zealand's Marmite shortage -- big surprise. An art fair in Atlantic City...um, somewhere between surprise and fatigue. Not that surprise in and of itself is key to art making -- not by a long shot. But after a long time of looking and thinking about art, being truly surprised is a little like falling in love. 

Enter Lucy Winton -- surprise, surprise, surprise.

Donkey Bull #2 (Love to Edwin Landseer), 2012, charcoal, graphite, airbrush, oil on vellum, 37 x 25 in

 
Now on view at Glenn Horowitz, Lucy Winton: Creatures, a small group of paintings on paper that are seductive, sentimental, cheeky and fresh. This is the real thing -- a must see.

Forest Creature #1, 2012, graphite, oil on Yupo paper, 26 x 20 in

Lucy Winton seems to do most of her thinking at the cusp of imagination, commingling the romance of animal consciousness with her own psyche, and there she pulls out quite a plum. Diving into the rabbit hole without a hint of irony, Winton dabbles in the unheimlich (Ger., uncanny) and in social taboos, absurdism and territories unknown from the past, future and present tenses.

Her paintings are intimate and luxurious, moody and gothic, and they bring to mind the likes of Poe, Lewis Carroll and Flannery O'Connor. For the artist, whose influences run the gamut from children's literature to Edwin Landseer and Jorg Immendorf, there is a special power in the creatures, places and things that populate her world, a parallel universe of visual non sequiturs filled with rich metaphors and a sweeping and poetic mindfulness. 

After War, Snow, 2011, charcoal, graphite, oil on vellum, 25 x 37 in

In After War, Snow, the artist snuggles with doe-eyed cattle that lounge among her fleshy brushwork and velvet fields of gray. Little mountains of snow fall on this softness like errant globs from another world, laying across the composition with little regard for reality. Her paint application here is subdued, evoking the Spartan curves and naturalism of Georgia O'Keefe.
 
And then -- without warning -- Winton fiercely effects a sort of painterly dismount in which she suddenly channels the hand of Frans Hals or John Singer Sargent and their swashbuckling strokes of pigment. She swirls over broad expanses, canoodling with her brushes among fleeing rabbits and bursting star shapes, tree trunks and stairways. 

Gliding her brush across swaths of Yupo paper, Winton advances into breathtaking passages of pure paint. Her brushwork is frisky and deliciously wicked, as if there's alchemy in each stroke. If you know the feel of a paint-saturated brush, you're right there with her -- skating across the icy translucence of this waxy white geography. 

Recently, Lucy Winton and I exchanged a few thoughts on content, context and the chimerical in her paintings:
  
Are there specific references to the snow in your work?

My snow is definitely a reference to Jorg Immendorf's Cafe Deutschland, The Wizard of Oz snowfall scene, and the calming -- even opiate -- feeling I get from that. I also grew up in very snowy Minnesota.

installation view with sculpture, L, Androclea and the Lion, 2012, papier mache, balsa wood, oil, 12 x 12 in, variable

There seem to be elements of Shamanism in your work, and a sort of luxurious communion with animal spirits.

I fantasize about communing with unreachable mammals...so when I paint me sneaking up on a deer or lion, I really get pleasure. That pleasure is spiritual."

Farm Whorl, 2012, graphite, charcoal, oil on vellum

Lurking within these dramas, it also seems there are the things of social taboos, repressed memory, dreams and the uncanny, or unheimlich, experiences, whether actual or intuited.

In Freud's 1919 landmark essay, The Uncanny, he talks about the uncanny experience as:  


"...that class of the frightening which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar."
  
Winton's examination of the unheimlich is far less dark than Freud's, but the idea of a parallel universe where the unfamiliar is familiar again, is an irresistible connection.

But, I digress. Winton's images and the animal consciousness they evoke are spectacularly weird and wonderful. At the same time, they seem to come from our shared childhoods or deep inside some collective unconscious.

I lived in India for about six months a long time ago. I have definitely referenced one Brahman cow eye about 6 times -- same darn eye over and over.
 

Donkey Bull Parachutes #1, 2011, graphite, charcoal, airbrush on vellum

 

Your works seem to have a floating narrative that is familiar but fleeting. Are you inspired by specific works of literature?

Mostly I am inspired by children's book illustrations -- sometimes regardless of the narrative. One weird personality marker I have is that I am inappropriately religious, indecisively so...and from an atheist, humanist background. That can leak out in my work.

Forest Creature #3, 2012, graphite, oil on Yupo paper, 26 x 20 in

The idea that (on top of everything else) part of Lucy Winton's visual psychology is driven by wanton religiosity -- makes me like the work even more. 

"The compulsion to erode boundaries between herself and 

other creatures is one of Winton's great creative strengths."

April Gornick, BOMB, Summer, 2012

Don't miss this beautiful show, on view at Glenn Horowitz through January 1.