blinnk

Friday, January 3, 2014

journey to the sun

Labels: Elizabeth Huey, Harper's Books, Jess Frost

Sauna Domes, 2013, acrylic and oil on wood

Elizabeth Huey: Radiant Swim

Harper's Books

Oh, yes -- give me beachfront motels, turquoise pools, cabanas and coconuts,
flaming heat. Take me there. Now.

Or, take me to Harper's Books in East Hampton where the blazing white sun bears
down on a group of masterful swimscapes by Elizabeth Huey. Being immersed in
these paintings is like vacationing in a Sam Fuller movie where dreamy panoramas
of poolside leisure and boozy, bikini-clad evenings are scorched by light day and night,
as if the sun were afflicted by lens flare.

The paintings -- a blistering mix of flatness and depth -- are electrifying.

Observation Pool, 2013, acrylic and oil on wood

Jess Frost, curator of the exhibit, selected works that move through narrative and composition with breakneck speed -- nearly flying off the canvas at every turn -- yet they manage to linger, like memory.

Huey's imagery is nostalgic but fugitive, or illusory, with passages that function like flashbacks from a dream or a long ago family vacation. Tinged with fleeting, alluring dramas, they captivate the eye. My own memory of soaking in the steaming salt baths outside Las Vegas on a chilly February morning -- the mountains silhouetted against a crisp blue sky -- comes alive here.

Sunblind Splash, 2013, acrylic and oil on canvas

A hot sky absolutely fries the canvas over Sunblind Splash, a painterly aggregate of scumbling, scraping, brushwork and, well...splashes. There's so much activity in paintings such as this one that you end up reading them like a book, scanning the surface for tension and psychology, spatial disparity and subversions in tone, perspective, distance. An amalgam of cutaways, jump cuts, perspectival structures and glorious leaps of faith, Huey's sumptuous brush and knife work combines with aspects of collage to startling affect.

In many of these works, the pool functions like a proscenium stage with small dramas played in it, around it, and in spite of it. Huey understands theatricality, and she lays down her scenes with powerful vistas in two and three-point perspective. The pools, which lay foreground or midground, variously stand or recede, bouncing in between front and back, and they usually possess a sense of perspective that grounds the entire composition. Like a generous lead act, they function as gemstones, inviting the peripheral action to take center stage in spite of, or perhaps because of, their glint.

Violet Moonrise, 2013, acrylic and oil on wood

Huey's cavorting tourists are slathers of thick brush work defined by deep fleshy strokes, as if the artist is channelling the late great Richard Diebenkorn. Gorgeous.

In Violet Moonrise (above) the open umbrella tipped at mid-ground doubles as a slice of that ubiquitous and mouthwatering Florida orange and all the while, a purple sky hangs in the distance. It's exhilarating.

Private Pool Party, 2013, oil on linen

Huey lives in Brooklyn, where painting has recently been reinvented. She studied psychology at George Washington University, and by all accounts has maintained an lifelong interest in the science of the mind.

In Private Pool Party, plinths and partial walls rise from the poolside like ancient portals held inside a dark vessel. The road sign that hovers above looks like a full moon in the pitch dark sky yet the leisure set lingers on, bathed in hot white light. It's an otherworldly place where night and day coexist, linked as if poised between culture and psyche.

Radiant Swim, 2013, Acrylic and oil on panel

Huey is also an avid collector of vintage photos and a crack photographer in her own right, and she derives subject matter from a pastiche of found and created photographs. The exhibition namesake above, Radiant Swim is a concise work with sharply defined compositional elements that skewer the picture place. The reiteration of those hulking golden arches, an aspect of the retro-architecture that inhabits much of the artist's visual field, anchors the image field with the sort of grand gesture that only a seasoned painter can pull off.

Moonlight Soak, 2013, acrylic and oil on canvas

At day's end, the faceless sunbathers, palm trees and shiny pools huddle together like potent signifiers from our collective memory bank, a powerful visual elixir. But it's the confidence and vision with which Huey executes her paintings that will draw you to and keep you looking at this work.

Red Sky Submersion, 2013, acrylic and oil on canvas

It's always a good time to see wonderful paintings, but today is a great day to see the sunshine.

Soft Wind, 2013, acrylic and oil on wood

Elizabeth Huey: Radiant Sun is on view through February 18th. Don't miss the opening reception tomorrow, January 4, from 6-8pm at Harper's Books.

Thursday, December 26, 2013

vanishing point

Labels: ArtHelix, Artists Choose Artists, Bonnie Rychlak, Brian Gaman, Bushwick, Grover Andrea, Jennie Nichols, John Monti, Keith Sonnier, Parrish Art Museum, Peter Hopkins, Samuel Beckett

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!

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

a few thoughts on coming together

Labels: artist's studios, arts community, Come Together, Dedalus Foundation, Industry City, Phong Bui, Sandy victims

Foreground Right: James Siena, Red and Black Spirals, Connected; Midground: Anton Lamazares, Untitled; Corbin Walker, Danny Boy

COME TOGETHER: SURVIVING SANDY

at Industry City

curated by Phong Bui

It's always something.

This Sunday was the last day of the über-exhibition Come Together: Surviving Sandy, Phong Bui's tribute to the survival of the New York art community one year after super storm Sandy. I'm happy to say I was able to spend much of the day there. The show was a commemoration of the hard hit artists and galleries that have worked through the year to get back on their feet. More than 200 artists filled over 100,000 sq ft of warehouse space -- inside and out -- with installations of painting, sculpture, video, photography, drawing and all the rest. I'm not sure I agree it was the best show of 2013, but on the whole it was immensely satisfying.

2nd Floor stairway exploding through floor: F: John Newman; B: Mel Kendrick, Allan Graham AKA Toadhouse, Loren Munk

The show sprawled out over four massive floors of the gargantuan (and now infamous) warehouse complex in Sunset Park known as Industry City. A lot of big names, a lot of small names; everyone commingling in a salute the come-back kids that make the art world go 'round.

What I didn't realize on Sunday is that the space Surviving Sandy briefly occupied used to house hundreds of working artists, now displaced by the new landlords who bought the building(s) and promptly raised rents by 50%. Ughh.

Better informed people than me have written about this, (see links below) so I won't belabor the details. But this makes for one helluva messy aesthetic experience. Celebrating survival in a warehouse that has evicted 90% of its artist tenants is a brutality that is almost too much to bear.

Brooklyn's Industry City, Buildings 1-10; photo by Dean Kaufman

For more information click on these links:

Lise Soskolne's Who Owns a Vacant Lot on Shifter

and William Powhida's Surviving Rent on ArtFCity

looks like studio space to me -- the empty square footage of Industry City; photo Lise Soskolne

Anyway, I really was just planning to post some pictures of the show. There's so much to it I've just added some of my favorite things. And, as for all the rest, well...what could be better than the idea of coming together?

So, for all my friends who couldn't make it to Surviving Sandy, enjoy the ride.

On the ground floor, two inflatable rats heave over Pizzatopia, courtesy Bruce High Quality Foundation, like psalms to the diminishing reality of affordable artist housing...

Bruce High Quality Foundation; F: Pizzatopia, 2011; B: Stay With Me, Baby, 2011 (two inflatable rats inhaling/exhaling)

James Hyde, Climate

Bui recounted to me the visit Stephen Antonakos made earlier in the year to site his installation, a stunning neon work on the 2nd floor. He died just two weeks later. A wonderful artist; a lovely man. He felt very present here.

Stephen Antonakos, Blue Incomplete Circle on Blue and Red Wall, 1978

Benjamin Keating, Portrait of her by a sculptor 7:30pm, 2013

amalgams of wall, floor, corner, video, installation and neon works on every floor

A triumph of color, Joyce Robins shares the gallery with Thomas Nozkowski, among others.

Joyce Robins, Untitled, 1993

Gandalf Gavan, Breach, 2013

Fantastic Juan Gomez:

Juan Gomez, Mawinzhe, 2013

Beautiful gallery:

L: Sheila Pepe, Corner piece redux #2, 2012; R: Carrie Moyer, Jolly Roger, 2013

Amazing installation from the Vivre Series -- artist made backdrops line the length of the gallery. Works were offered at auction earlier this year to support the rebuilding of Red Hook. Various artists.