Joel Shapiro, Untitled, 2013. Gouache and charcoal on paper, 13 7/8 x 18 3/8 in.

Joel Shapiro: Works on Paper 2011–2013
May 9 – June 28, 2014
Pace Gallery
508 West 25th Street
New York City
pacegallery.com

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The only other artist in my family was my great aunt. I never met her, but one of her paintings of a swan on a lake hung over her sister’s fireplace. It was magical to me as a child.

LO: What are the themes of your work and what inspires you?
KM: The major themes in my work have to do with temporal and spatial experiences of the body that cross over into a psychological engagement. I am interested in how we construct past experiences in the present and perceptions of dislocation and connection.

LO: Did you begin as a video artist? One sees painting, drawing, and photographic references when viewing your videos. Please tell us more.
KM: I make videos, but I also paint and draw. I work on the videos as if they were paintings and the paintings as if they were videos, or a part of a longer narrative over time. The ideas in my work are the same regardless of medium, so I can freely move back and forth.

LO: What is your working process? Each artist is so different in how they approach their work. How do you approach the creation of your work? Do you plan things out or play in the studio?
KM: When I begin a new phase of making work, I experiment in the studio until some theme begins to reveal itself. I then focus on this theme until its internal logic builds into a body of work. I feel it’s akin to asking a question and then letting the answer take its time to unfold. I make art because I enjoy this process.

LO: Why do you think art is important for the world and why is it important for you as an artist?
KM: I am an artist because making things is the way I process and understand the world around me. It’s like thinking with my hands.

Art is important because it performs the double task of reflecting culture while pointing beyond it. Art simultaneously embraces and critiques culture.

LO: What advice would you give other artists who are emerging?
KM: Do what you love. If you don’t love what you are doing, it’s not worth your time. And protect your solitude.

LO: Please talk about upcoming bodies of work, shows etc. that you have coming up.
KM: I just returned from a two and a half month research trip in Japan in preparation for a collaborative sound/video project with composer Akemi Naito. The project is based on Kobo Abe’s 1962 novel “The Woman in the Dunes”. The music is scored for percussion and the eighteen minute video is made up of stop-motion animation. Abe’s story is a post-war Sisyphean tale that I think still resonates today. The DVD is planned for release next year.

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Courtesy of the artist.

The field of possibilities seems endless and confusing until I look for a place to put a color, then another. A line might turn into a shape or ask for more color. Once it starts, the balance swings from my hand to the painting. What does it want; equivalence, harmony, or is tension part of the flow?

There is always tension in the beginning as the idea in my mind and the image on the canvas or paper rejects or corresponds the imposed images. What comes next is the beginning of a concert, a unity in itself, as what is emerging becomes seen.

pamwhiteart.com

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Image courtesy of the artist.

My work aims to take a fresh view on what you see, far away from conformity. It is not that I take on a distant or distinguishing view: it is rather through my very personal and individual perspective and power of expression that the work speaks to the spectator.

Living today in a world with multiple stimuli from all kinds of sources, I visit my inner spiritual inspirations and thoughts rather than the external world for my work. I combine and compose different shapes, moods, and colors to become very close to nature, the nature which gave birth to all of us and which is still inherent in us.

Isabelle Habegger studied from 1994-1998 at the University for Design (Schule für Gestaltung) in Zurich. She is also a sculptor; Art teacher and a performance artist.

kunst-schaffende.ch / kunst-schwyz.ch

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How powerful is that illusion of a real presence, when a ramshackle and effaced effigy, an ugly or beautiful scarecrow clothed and stuffed with snips of film, contradictory statistics, detritus of consumer goods, notations from books read and transactions made, can be mistaken for a double of the artist?

Within a week of my first viewing of John O’Connor’s October 2013 exhibition at Pierogi Gallery, “The Machine and the Ghost”, I saw a special screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s rarely shown 1994 self-portrait film JLG/JLG.  The coincidence of the two triggered a recognition.  In both works, I saw an aggregation of parts that seemingly taps the yearning for contact with something intimate, an actual person.  In each case I found works that, seen clearly, leave that hallucination undone.

In JLG/JLG Godard’s figure and words materialize and disappear throughout the film. Images are overlaid with a shifting litany of onscreen texts and voiceover. JLG/JLG moves both toward and aside from the actual Godard via displacement, redirection, substitution—a simultaneous presentation and disintegration of the presence of the author and subject tracing paths around autobiography. There is a sequence concerning a blind film editor.  As the editor snips and rejoins sections of film according to the cryptic verbal instruction she is given by Godard, who is off screen, we witness a formal reordering of recorded data (captured images of the subject, of time, light, space, i.e., film). One system of sequence and incident is rearranged by being conjoined with another system. That other system is an arcane or maybe arbitrary numerical order injected from outside the frame, a re-encoding of the data, a shuffling of evidentiary exhibits.

In “The Ghost and the Machine”, as with his previous exhibitions, John O’Connor’s works track and re-organize information and events.  Pieces of evidence are delayed, mingled, organized, toyed with, compared, made graphically visible, made invisible as codes.

There is an additional, emergent sense of a persona in “Ghost and the Machine” that seems new.  I have observed people asking O’Connor if he is the Psychopath described in Portrait of a Psychopath, if his drug and binge cycle narrative Butterfly is a true story, if his “Dear John” exchange of emails with “Beyonce” in Love Letters (Diptych) is real. Use of the first person in such text-based works and the deployment of photos of himself for his sunspot series create the illusion of a reveal, an unmasking of the personal.

In a series of identically-scaled photographs titled by their dates, patches that resemble huge lesions or birthmarks blossom across O’Connor’s face, extreme and shocking.  He seems vulnerable and tenuous, maybe desperately ill.  But the marks are only photographic records of the sun’s activity, superimposed on the face, following a logical calendar-like system.  The personal image is divorced from intimacy in order to be fully engaged in the violent play of objective content.  Everything is factual, but the implications we might read are not true.

JohnO’Connor, Self Portrait with Sun Spots, May 2, 2013. Inkjet print, Ed. of 3, 17 x 14 in.

The artist has also certainly deployed phantoms in these works, in the form of chatbots, which converse in exchanges transcribed in text-based drawings.  Among these, and hovering over them, a phantom rises up in the guise of John O’Connor himself, just as for a long time now the knots of graphic information in his data-driven works have sometimes tended to suggest figurative apparitions, as in Kooky Yoga, 2005.  Before this exhibition, though, the personages or chimeras evoked did not particularly become him, nor did they usually tend to give rise to something existing off the paper, wanting to occupy real space. Interestingly this new development coincides with O’Connor’s very convincing deployment of fully three dimensional works, embodied as, in one example, a helical loop, made of epoxy, writhing in roughly the shape of an infinity sign, a snake of words, choking on its own tail (Strange Loop, 2012).

O’Connor seems quite alert to registering what are self-evidently problems of this historical moment (as is Godard in his later films), the same conditions noticed and tracked by science, in the media, by political structures, by the culture.  The spectrum of difficulties observed really pertains to O’Connor as an individual only in the sense that it is conditioned on the chance location in time (history), space (geography), culture, and genetic inheritance that the artist as observer happens to occupy.  We all now exist in an information reality that includes access to a radically expanded quantity of data points (facts but also an expanded field of lies and tricks). The works perhaps act out an attempt to deal with this with objectivity and a desire for a factual grasp, where confessions of personal emotional responsiveness and angst are not really the point, but are factors among many. They are disturbing and complicating factors, as they shade and distort a picture that’s already permanently unstable.  The point seems to be, at least partly, to locate accurately that constantly moving hairline juncture of banality and crisis: the present.

By Ken Weathersby

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Featuring: Adam Green, Alia Shawkat, Macaulay Culkin, Fabrizio Moretti, Austin English, Devendra Banhart, Dustin Yellin, Taylor McKimens, Alexa Chung, Matt Leines, Toby Goodshank, Allison Silva, Jeffrey Lewis and Jack Walls

Adam Green and Friends: Hot Chicks
January 1 – 31, 2014
Opening: January 1 from 6-9PM
The Hole
312 Bowery
New York City
theholenyc.com

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Image courtesy of the artist.

I am a young Mexican artist, travelling in Sub-Saharan Africa for over 7 years, with the character Mikinemi, inspired by the famous Catrina, this offers a free space of overlapping imaginations and cultural experiences which allows all of us to arrive at our own interpretation of my experiences and so forth. Like Catrina, the original character, a traditional Mexican symbol, Mikinemi, masks her identity to integrate into other social and cultural systems, I compose work as mythology to represent a way to connect society which is neither tabus nor indulgent.

eugeniavelis.com

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For a limited time only!

Two of Long Island artist Ewa Banas‘ works are available for purchase through Broadway Gallery. Ewa is a self taught artist whose dedication to her craft has been delicately cultivated through countless hours spent painting and drawing on site, en plein air. These two beautiful works are among her largest and most attractive compositions to date, and are being offered fully framed and ready to be hung immediately. Please email editor.nyarts@gmail.com to place your bid.

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Image courtesy of the artist.

My work is a series of relations, between the day-by-day life, my own memories, history, and irony. In the works, the audience is brought through a world where obscene and the impure are put on display,arranged in a paradoxical and surreal make-believe world.

Usually everything is installed together, combining different medias, such as painting, graphic printing, and drawings. My work is based on my gut instinct and whatever I feel like doing in the present moment. Therefore none of my work is planned beforehand, only loose ideas, that if the right combination of circumstances occur, are put together into a new piece.

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–Jean-Luc Godard, “Changer d’image”

In a video commissioned for French television in 1982, whose narration is quoted above in translation, Godard wrestles with the question of whether and how images can resist commodification.  The exhibition that joins works by Linda Francis, John O’Connor, and Ken Weathersby similarly makes me think about how artists can have a critical relationship to the near-omnipresent forces of the commodity market, in a culture of capital that has expanded even further over the past few decades.  The artworks here provoke questions about the flow of capital exchange that seems to saturate every aspect of our lives.

Fluidity, flexibility: oft-cited keywords of the transnational corporate economy, which penetrates public space and institutions through privatization, and personal experience through digital information technology.  The mobile realm of production contracts labor wherever profit is greatest, while the deregulated financial industry increasingly speculates on the flow of symbolic capital itself.  Smooth operation is ostensibly the order of the day.

Placing high stakes, making hearts ache / He’s loved in seven languages / Diamond nights and ruby lights, high in the sky / Heaven help him, when he falls

–Sade, “Smooth Operator”

Linda Francis’s recent work is based on electron-microscope images of the surface of a failed heat shield of a 1990s space shuttle, images that she overlays repeatedly on the computer.  Her pieces present technological visualizations of physical structure—a structure designed, unsuccessfully, to harness resistance.  The artworks also incorporate into the imagery evidence of the media that produce them, such as pixelation.

Linda Francis, We Can Build You, 2013 Oil on wooden panel, 38 x 95 in.

In Interference, the crystalline components arrayed within the image suggest patterned organization while eluding it.  Yet across the multiple silkscreened prints assembled in the piece, repetition and alignment at the edges structure the image. Thus pattern recognition in Interference is both fugitive and precise.  Indeed a strong diagonal current crosses a literal gap to a separate, larger panel that leans on the floor against the wall.  Shifts in scale and near-repetitions are vertiginous.

Also patternlike but dizzyingly evasive, We Can Build You is a more physically factured, painted version of the image at greater magnification.  It resembles representations of biological code, and its title (taken from the Phillip K. Dick novel) evokes the manipulations of biotechnology, and more generally the way technological capitalism works on us.  Francis’s pieces invite contemplation of hypermediation and replication, as well as contingency, fissure, and friction, with a coolly observant gaze.

John O’Connor also indexes research material in his drawings, which underscore the imbrication of psychological experience with an information economy.  As the Surrealists channeled the illogical logic of the unconscious, O’Connor cultivates delirious overloads of information processing.  He produces drawings by using shifting, idiosyncratic codes: converting text into numbers, reversing letters, translating letters into colors by randomly devised systems, running garbled text through an electronic dictionary.

Turing (named for the computer scientist and his famous test of whether machines can think) presents an oval loop of linked bits of textual data.  The loop surrounds a set of inwardly folding, bunching shapes that evoke an organism introjecting and expelling.  O’Connor generated the incomprehensible data by a dialogue between his free associations, processed through multiple overcodings, and an electronic dictionary’s responses (one of which eerily speaks to Alan Turing’s persecution for his sexuality).  Characteristic of the artist’s work, the drawing appears both diagrammatic and indecipherable.

In SUSEJ, a drawing of intricately colored grids, O’Connor includes notations of his text-to-color coding at the paper’s edges.  The piece invites us to comprehend the design of the delicate arrangement of colors, but its structuring principles are opaque.  Similarly, the thin, almost weightless sculptures Future Rods are covered in blocky text concerning prediction, which resists deciphering.  Obtruding on the gallery floor, they evoke the forces of futures speculation that invest contemporary life.

O’Connor’s artistic practice mines the extra-aesthetic, representing processed information from the provinces of socioeconomics, politics, science, mass culture, and personal life.  His work does not so much assimilate these realms into absorbable images, but rather creates incongruity, discordance, uncanny disconcertment.

John O’Conner, SUSEJ, 2011. Colored pencil on graph paper, 43 x 25 in.

Ken Weathersby, 197 (dcch),
 2012. 
Acrylic & graphite, linen, wood
. 25 x 15 in.

In 198 (dc), paint is applied to a wood support, but that substrate is also image: it’s an elaborate grid of layered wood strips, which cutouts in the painted front surface reveal from the picture plane.  Meanwhile the painted image, an optically active grid of black and white squares, is a material slab of acrylic film directly glued to the wood.  The resemblance of the grids, and the equivocation of figure and ground at the level of image and physical material, confound distinctions between structure and surface.

In the freestanding 194 (z), another painted grid of tiny squares echoes a larger grid of wood strips that supports the painting.  In this piece, the wood strips enclose the painting, holding it within.  The structure is a delicate cage that partially obscures the painting, here in its conventional form of acrylic on a rectangle of fabric over stretcher bars.  Planar yet viewable in the round, the hybrid 194 (z) presents us with ambiguity about what is supportive structure and what is visual display.

Weathersby’s work foregrounds how the realms of visual image and material production are implicated with each other.  It is as though painting is posing questions about its constituent terms.  In 197 (dcch), what looks like a painting—a thin plane of an optically active grid of colors—is dissected to present a literal, physical interior that contains overlapping parts of other gridded paintings and wooden grids.  The piece highlights a sense of imbrication and conditionality.

Interestingly, the container is also a key figure in contemporary economics; the container ship is pivotal to global exchange, as it’s designed to make the supply chain as smooth as possible.  Indeed, as the forces of transnational capitalism are ever more pervasive, they operate largely below the threshold of perceptibility.  The artwork of Weathersby, Francis, and O’Connor each raises issues of imbrication, of congruence and incongruity.  It resonates keenly with the extra-artistic socioeconomic situation, and its discontents.

by Michele Alpern

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