IJ: Your work examines war, and also seems to be in dialogue with the generation of Expressionists that emerged after World War II, like Francis Bacon and Giacometti. At that time, both Existentialism and Expressionism materialized as a reaction to the horrors and carnage that ensued throughout Europe.
LD: Yes, my work is very much about mediated imagery of war, and contemporary mechanization. With my entire adulthood being post 9-11 in the age of the Internet, I can view whatever I want to view—but I also know that it comes from a highly abstracted source. We all have near and distant points of entry.

IJ: At first I was thinking about how there’s this Post-modern distance and detachment in your work, but then I realized that Francis Bacon was also very detached. We always seem to interpret the past through our own skewed perspective in the present.
LD: What’s hard for us, especially with the post-nineties identity ideas, is that we want a straight line between someone’s identity and the themes that they talk about. It’s a laziness I think, on our part, because we are in a world of free-association. Boundaries are continually crossed. I am a woman, who grew up in the Midwest believing that I could do everything that the boys could do. I played sports and made art. These two things existed for me in a similar fashion. I helped my dad make furniture in his woodshop. I grew up next to the wrong side of the tracks … I was just barely on the right side. I grew up believing that boundaries are permeable. I still believe this very strongly. We’re artists and we can talk about whatever we want.

IJ: I agree with you, and there’s a certain artifice in everything.
LD: Exactly, you know what is it to be empathetic … it’s really to build a fantasy, and imagine what being inside that world would be like, and that’s how you forge some sort of idea of empathy. I aim to get into this space via my making process, which is highly performative. My process isn’t a narrative; it is a construct. Granted, although the formal or emotive ideas are coming to my imagination via the consumption of actual, real events. However, I’m learning about these events via the Internet, so the drama and consequence are very mediated by that point.

IJ: There is a lot of anonymity in your work, and it’s not as much about you, as it is about the ideas taking center stage.
LD: It is so strange. What does authenticity actually mean and whose definition do we follow? In the history of art, we push the boundaries of authenticity, and I think that’s our job in a way. I am advertising my contemplation and reflection, and using my art as a billboard or a commercial. However my work is sculptural, always out of a performative formal intervention of play and aggression. My work has to be dirty in a way that is hard for a screen to capture. I use a lot of wood and leather. Leather is literally skin, and I can cut wood like flesh. I use yoga mat material as well. Yoga mats to me symbolize a synthetic, contemplative space. I believe that yoga mat material is much more durable than the indulgence that happens on top of it.

We all have different ways in which we deal with United States’ involvement in various conflicts. As an American, I think that everyone has his or her own different ways of avoidance or acceptance, curiosity or bewilderment. For me, through making things, I can start to navigate my feelings and ideas about my own involvement or lack of involvement. I want to cut things up, and put them back together. I want to sand the surface and leave it raw.

IJ: How do themes of identity inform your work?
LD: When you were saying that my work is anonymous, that makes me think of vacancy. I really like the vacancy of video games, these landscapes where you may see a character hiding around the corner with a gun, but their face is always blurred. Yes, throughout my adulthood we’ve seen the destabilization of many of the countries in the Middle East and Central Asia. We’ve been directly involved in that destabilization. While I’m thinking a lot about that, there is a kind of vacancy, in the destruction, and fighting for freedom. What is freedom? Does the United States define freedom? No, we only define freedom for us. We don’t define it for everyone else. So, that emptiness or that void, all of those things that I don’t know about, leave such a wide space for me to creep on in, and make up my own ideas and forms.

IJ: How do you think our time period collectively is different than the Vietnam era?
LD: In comparison to the Vietnam Era, the contemporary American public doesn’t really know how to protest (in a traditional sense) anymore. Putting our bodies in a certain place and having our voices collectively heard seems futile in a way, when we can connect so fast via social media. There is the idea of “slacktivism,” that’s come about through the Internet. Is it slackitivism if you’re thinking about something?

IJ: It’s similar to the idea of the coffee house revolutionary.
LD: A coffee house revolutionary seems a little hippie-dippy to me … And, I guess so does Vietnam Era protest at this point. Do we have to hurl our bodies in mass, with a bunch of other bodies, out onto the streets, or read poetry by candlelight? Potentially. What I want to know is how does the art world deal with these ideas? How do we deal with these things formally in a way that we can communicate content? I definitely don’t think that it is productive to turn a blind eye because our identity isn’t so directly related to certain ideas. Our identity is a collective identity at this point. Period.

IJ: It can also be solipsistic, too, to assume that you can only speak about your own experience through your own eyes.
LD:  I mean, we are always speaking through our own experience through our own eyes, but it’s what other people define as an acceptable narrative that can be limiting.

IJ: The push toward identity politics in art is a remnant of the nineties. A lot of work was focused on that at that time.
LD: Yes, absolutely. It’s like the Francis Alys piece where he drips the paint line on the disputed boundary between Israel and Palestine. I wonder what would have happened if that hadn’t been the real boundary? What would have happened if he had constructed a space, and symbolically drawn that line? How would that piece have changed?  That’s just as interesting and valid of a way to communicate an idea—to use art as a staging area to open up a conversation.

IJ: That brings it back to Francis Bacon and the theatricality of horror and pleasure.
LD: Absolutely. Using the boxing ring as an arena for contact, or the contorted face as a highway for exaltation.

IJ: Your work is so much about the fragility and impermanence of the human being.
LD: Thinking about the disintegration of the body and the fragility of the body, really made me realize that we’re just these membranes filled with goo … towers with too many hinges. And what does a membrane filled with goo symbolize, a very thin veil holding in a very fluid bunch of ideas.

IJ: Yes. The most realistic depictions of humans are usually the least realistic.
LD: Yes, completely. When I think about Picasso’s Bathers, really it’s just these balls touching other balls! That’s a really funny but honest way to think about how fleshy and architectural forms interact.

IJ: You do riff off of Modernism a lot, the comical qualities, the gesture, the feet do look like Picasso, there’s a relationship with Cubism.
LD: Yeah, it’s mining this vocabulary that I’ve been interested in ever since I was a little kid, which is how do artists and artisans represent forms in a synchronous manner?  It would be neglectful to say that Modernism and Cubism are strictly Western Constructs. Provisionalism leads to many of the same solutions.

IJ: There’s this violence, directness, and quickness to the way you do things. They’re very gestural, and your approach makes sense with the content, because I think that when work dealing with conflict becomes too finessed or too pretty, it hides the content with the veneer. Like sugar coating a pile of shit!
LD: Sugar coating a pile of shit, would be a triumph, actually! My process is really physical, and I never finish things, in a traditional sense. I always leave things so it could be used for another piece, or deconstructed even further, or if it fell out of a window you could still set it back up, and the bruises wouldn’t ruin the form.

IJ: That’s a Duchampian idea.
LD: It’s incredibly Duchampian, and I’m really interested in the wear and tear of a readymade. While I rarely use a store bought, readymade item, I’m interested in the readymade affectation that comes as a result of contact in any sense. Obviously, the main contact in my work is myself to the materials, but if other things should happen along the way, it’s definitely a point of contemplation. I don’t always heal it and fix it, and sometimes the scars are part of what make the work honest.

The post Irena Jurek Talks Art and Danger with Leah Dixon appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Leah Oates: How did Associated Gallery form and what is your collective vision for the gallery?
Associated Gallery: Associated evolved out of Weeknights Gallery, a previous curatorial project that Jen had been running in her studio at The Active Space. When time came to renew the lease in the space, Theresa and Jen, who are both painters and had neighboring studios, thought to combine forces and share studio #28 for painting and turn #27 into a full gallery, which became Associated when they asked another friend, artist, and curator, Julian Jimarez-Howard, to join. We collectively aim to engage the community of artists and showcase those who are underrepresented. We also have aimed to bring totally new ideas to the curatorial world, like with our plant show, “You Are My Sunshine,” in the fall, which received a Critic’s Pick by Jerry Saltz in New York Magazine.

LO: Bushwick has a thriving art scene composed of galleries, non-profits, artists studios and performance spaces. How do you see Bushwick changing and growing and is it the place where the newest, freshest art is being created and/or is its now getting to expensive to pull these things off as much?
AG: We were just talking about this! We are excited for the possibilities that the growing community lends itself to, but also nervous that the increasing rent costs will drive out the thriving art scene before artists really have a chance to settle in the neighborhood. We are worried that Bushwick is becoming more about commercial consumption rather than artistic production. This might seem to be good news for us as a gallery because we rely on people buying work from us (hey collectors!!), but it’s a kind of double-edged sword as we constantly consider the eventuality of being priced out of this neighborhood that we all consider home, or even worse, being stuck in an overly commercial and artificial neighborhood, like what has happened in lower Manhattan since the 80’s.

LO: Are the three of you artists and what do you think of artist run spaces?  There seems to be a resurgence of artist collectives and artist run spaces in the NYC area. Do you think that artists bring something to the table that non artists do not?
AG: We are all artists actually. But our energy as a group isn’t really like an artist collective. Artist run spaces like ourselves, Regina Rex, or Parallel Art Space operate like a standard gallery, showing the work of other artists, and not our own work. The fact that we are artists definitely informs our curatorial approach and aesthetic, but at the end of the day, at Associated, we’re three curators working together to create professional and compelling exhibitions.

LO: What advice would you give to emerging artists who are just out of BFA/MFA programs or who have just settled in NYC?
Julian Jimarez-Howard: Buy lots of vegetables because they’re cheap and healthy, even better, farm them.
Theresa Daddezio: Stay positive and motivated.
Jen Hitchings: You have to work together, and stay in touch with your mentors/professors.

LO: Who are your favorite artists and why?
TD: Artemisia Gentileschi because she’s badass.
JJH: Gabriel Orozco and Francis Alÿs have been decent sources of inspiration for me over the years, but really my favorite artists are my friends. I think that probably goes for all of us, though.
JH: Allison Schulnik, John O’Connor, Lisa Sanditz, and some musicians such as The Caretaker, since music makes a big impact on my painting practice.

LO: What shows and projects do you have coming up at Associated Gallery or elsewhere.
AG: Our next show, opening in late February, is a group show of artists who work with materials in the outdoors, or who create work that exists just outside of the “art world.” It’s a broad take on “outsider art.” The following show is a two-person exhibition concerning landscape, and in May we will be showcasing some BFA candidates from SUNY Purchase (where Theresa and Jen graduated are alumni). We hope to eventually have some exhibitions travel elsewhere, but that’s an idea for the future.

The post Leah Oates Asks Associated Gallery the Hard Questions appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Both the black, austere palette, and the physicality of the reliefs bring to mind Louise Nevelson’s found object assemblages. Black acts as a formal and conceptual unifying force, giving cohesion to the oddball eclecticism.

A large mushroom cloud looms over the entire show with its immense aura. Yet it remains more of a symbol of the a-bomb than an actual threat. Its absence of color, and its sculptural, containment transforms it into more of a movie prop.

To the right of the nuclear explosion, a pair of skeletal arms, peer out from beneath a chained wooden floorboard. The meticulously rendered wood of the floorboard as well the highly detailed bricks imbue the piece with a sense of time and history, and could very easily be the backdrop of an Edgar Allen Poe story. Although, unlike Poe, the gesture seems more funny than creepy, and it brings to mind the nudge, nudge, wink, wink, attitude of so many horror movies that took place in the eighties and early nineties.

At the end of the main wall, a human hand removes a lobster from a tank of a dozen or so lobsters, lying bleakly at the bottom. Their carefully sculpted bodies break apart the shape of the relief and disrupt the rectangle. The scene is reminiscent of David Foster Wallace’s essay; Consider the Lobster, which he wrote for Gourmet magazine, describing the gluttony and horror of the Maine Lobster festival. Similarly, a feeling of empathy and hopelessness pervade in the relief. Titled, The Hand of Fate, the impression is that our own fate is not dissimilar from that of the lobster.

On the left wall, a cozy domestic scene, complete with a fragment of a comfy couch, a trophy fish, and a curtained window, remain in tact although most of the room’s wall has been ravaged by some being that tore a doorway through to the outside world. It takes a moment to grasp what exactly has just happened, making it one of the most mesmerizing pieces in the show. There’s an eerie tension between the tidy domesticity of the room and the seemingly boundless nature of the evergreen woods and mountains peering through the impromptu doorway. A path of footprints in the snow lead directly into the scene of the crime, indicating that whoever or whatever did this has not yet left the premises.

Rosenblum’s darkly playful ruminations on death remind us of how impermanent and fragile everything is, and touch upon one of the most universal experiences in which everyone for once becomes truly equal.

By Irena Jurek

The post Theo Rosenblum’s Grim Equality with Vito Schnabel appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Warm, transparent, hues of honey and coral, alongside lush ultramarines, powder blues, deep purples, blacks, and cool whites, result in a palette of harmonious tranquility. The colors are subdued and muted aside from a rebellious burst of monochromatic hot pink emanating from a hanging wall sculpture nestled in the corner.

Greenberg’s approach to abstraction is not a transcendental experience, instead it’s very earth bound, celebrating corporeality. Seduced by materials, Greenberg reveals an expansive knowledge of his favored medium from piece to piece, manipulating urethane resin and pigment. Although there is an underlying structure and plan throughout all the work, whether it’s the molds used in the process or the hard-edged, geometry of the welding, Greenberg still allows the powers of chance and accident to come into play. This brings to mind the process artists of the sixties, and specifically Lynda Benglis.

Two pieces stand out because of their larger scale and their prominent placement on the first wall walking into the gallery. They seem bodily, in that the fleshy, transparent resin adheres to the welded skeletal forms. The one to the left has a simple, black, tumescent welded bar running through its middle. A chalky, mid-hued blue and black color scheme creates a mood of somber elegance. The sculpture hanging next to it is equally long, but slightly narrower. The more intricate rectangular, orange metallic under structure, along with its sunnier, amber colored resin, together create a nuanced contrast to its companion.

Three brick sculptures, each on their own pedestal are neatly placed in a diagonal line, in front of the two wall sculptures. Each of the bricks is not completely formed, and the inchoate quality imbues each brick with a tenuous sense of instability. If bricks are the building blocks of civilization and architecture, then Greenberg’s bricks are the remnants of time, and entropy, from a place in which ideals of progress and advancement are irrelevant or no longer exist.

Five smaller tablets hang in a straight line to the left. Their translucent surfaces ooze, percolate, foam, drip, and quiver with climactic enthusiasm. Reminiscent of both mucous as well as bacterial cultures, the finishes become simultaneously enticing and repugnant. All of these works provoke and tease the viewer with their contradicting mixture of decoration and repulsion. Shredded, torn, and embedded with bb pellets, both the forms and materials evoke violence. The ferocity along with the fetishized, sultry surfaces are reminiscent of the sadomasochism of Alexander McQueen. In the end, Greenberg achieves his own chilling and perilously engaging vision of sinister beauty.

By Irena Jurek

The post Jesse Greenberg’s Sensual Materialism at Derek Eller Gallery appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

IJ: Well, yeah. We all lie to ourselves, and others constantly without knowing.
BC: Yeah, all the time. So, I wanted to explore that or to use that framework to be like, “Hey, I have all these stories, I’ll embellish a few, I’ll fuck with them a little bit, I’ll tell some white lies.” The crux of the story will still be there, but then you land in this liminal space, if I may, between a fictional/non-fictional space through the text that works around the idea of honesty. For me, my own honesty is the material. Honesty is a rare commodity in art.

IJ: I think that society privileges honesty or pretends to. Often, the truth is the last thing that people want to hear.
BC: That’s absolutely true, and at the same time in my life and in my work, I’m very open. I think that being open is a mode of operating, but honesty is not a mode of operating. It’s more of a moral code. To be honest is to be trusted, right? I think that as an artist, my responsibility is to do the opposite. I think of Oscar Wilde’s essay, “The Decay of Lying”. In it, Wilde essentially proposes that, “lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.” Honesty in the late Capitalist world in which we live is like a commodity. So lying is an anti-commodity, art is an anti-commodity, until collectors and the market overtake it.

IJ: It’s interesting that you brought up Oscar Wilde since he was also an advocate of uselessness, and the idea of robbing something of its utility and giving value to that.
BC: Yes, he advocated for that. I chafe against the utilitarian value of art. The beauty of art is that it’s useless.

IJ: You mentioned that your family is from South Africa, how do you think that’s shaped and formed the way you perceive things as an artist?
BC: That’s a good question. I think, and you might be able to relate, being a first generation American, and having that dual citizenship, having that complex background—not overly complex, I’m just not a straightforward American. Particularly also being an only child has given me the sense that I’m always on the outside looking in. I think any immigrants that come to America, unless they assimilate, that outsider looking in is always part of us, and its certainly been passed down to me through my parents. That informs my work I suppose in terms of comedy, comedy is premised on observations and things that have happened to comedians and/or artists. These things happen to you and you search for the humor in it. So, I feel like if you’re constantly sensing yourself not as an outsider, but sort of the outside looking in, you potentially are observing constantly in a way that might be different, say from someone who are in and were assimilated before they were even born. I think that in order to tell the stories that I am telling I always have to stay on the outside of pretty much everything.

IJ: Your literary background comes through within the work too, obviously. Something that I was struck by is the minimalist way in which you approach the text and I was reminded of Raymond Carver’s short stories. There’s such a terse and pithy way in which you frame language. You’re trying to get at the essence and something more direct and concise.
BC: I feel that to achieve an economy of language is extremely difficult. When I think of Raymond Carver, I take that as a huge compliment, by the way, but when I think of Raymond Carver, or Hemmingway, or artists who achieve an economy of language, they work for that. I was trying to employ that actively, but for a different reason than Raymond Carver would, for example. When you read a book, there’s an act of intimacy that happens; like the trope of turning the page.

IJ: It’s a very private, personal experience.
BC: Mine isn’t. Mine is very public. What I’m trying to do also with the pacing of it, I’m not only asking the viewer to work, but I’m also asking the viewer to engage with the piece, and then to become intimate with it. It’s like my way of having sex with my viewers! How my work functions, is that it essentially asks you to imagine the visual for yourself. In Nietzsche, a leaf is not a leaf it’s just a metaphor for the thing itself. What’s interesting is if you employ that in a Raymond Carver setting or in my work, your notions of what a casual encounter may be, or an email is are very different from the next person. I am attempting to present an essence of something which is the content, but the way that that content takes place in the viewer’s brain is different from the leaf or the next leaf or the next leaf, because each individual is different in how they view the work.

Barnett Cohen, still from Radical Honesty, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.

IJ: What you’re talking about made me think of Ed Ruscha’s City paintings; the way in which the word stands in for the actual thing itself.
BC: Yes, Absolutely.

IJ: In the video, you’ve included the more interesting aspects of your life; it’s not about banality.
BC: That is correct. I think that it comes full circle to the work that I’ll be working on next, which is my sex disco. Not all the stories have a sexual innuendo or are straightforwardly about sex, but another thing in which I see a lack of and in which I’m responding particularly to in the work of my peers is a rejection of sex. It’s sublimated in some work, but I prefer to use it and have it thrust, so to speak towards the viewer! That sounds very graphic, but yeah, I like the idea of being sexually graphic in the work but still not overdoing the work. Think of it as Playboy as opposed to Hustler.

IJ: I would have to agree that a lot of work avoids sex in general, which seems strange since so much of our life revolves around sex.
BC: I just realized that sex is one of the many materials with which I work and the joy of working with it is that it is malleable particularly when it comes to text-based work. There are infinite ways to attack it, to confront it, and to employ it. An anecdote comes to mind, Tom Waits was interviewed by the BBC about what inspires him to make a record and he responded that he goes to his local record store, searches for a record he would like to hear, comes up short, and then goes home and makes it himself. His work is a response to a lack and in some ways perhaps mine is as well.

IJ: The text in your video is structured the way in a joke is structured. The simplicity of it also helps because humor has to be very direct and straightforward. If it becomes too clunky it becomes too convoluted and confusing.
BC: When I started writing, I guess you would call it writing, these text pieces, I was thinking very much about comedians and how a joke functions. I think that as an artist it’s incumbent upon oneself to ask this question, which is, “what do you want to do to your viewer?” For me, the audience is considered to a point, and I think that the work stems out of my love of comedy, which started as a kid, and how word play and comedy operates. There’s a very famous Eddy Murphy joke, where he uses a very boring, overplayed story about a woman coming home to find her husband in bed with another woman. And she starts screaming at her husband, “You’re fucking this woman, you’re fucking this woman, you’re fucking this woman!” And they have this argument, and he says, “Yes, you want me to admit that I fucked her? Yes! Yes, I fucked her!” He overemphasizes the word “fuck,” and he says, “If you’re going to let a fuck come between us making love then there’s something wrong with you, woman!” I just think that the word play in comedy is for me, very exciting, and I think that my intention is not only to thrust myself upon my viewers, but also to make them laugh. Art that is humorous and isn’t ironic, sarcastic, or overly self-aware, is for me some of the most effective artwork.

IJ: Irony is almost an easy way out. I don’t believe in this blind devotion to the altar of seriousness and reverence in art, but irony is too easy. It’s become the norm, it’s too accepted. You’re almost expected to be ironic.
BC: Particularly in text pieces, a lot of work that I see has a lazy approach to text. For me if your material is text, you have to be exact and know what the hell you’re writing about.

IJ: Although you talk a lot about the humor in your art, is there an underlying serious or philosophical message that you want to get across to the viewer, through the use of humor?
BC: I think of comedy as being a more effective political tool. It’s like the court jester. So someone comes before the king and he says something and the king lops off his head. In King Lear, he had his jester around and the jester could speak truth to power in front of the king because supposedly he wasn’t taken as seriously as someone who might provoke the king to anger. Humor allows me to touch upon subjects of sexual relations and gender and the fluidity of sexuality in a way that is less didactic than it would be if I were not employing humor.

The post Irena Jurek talks Honesty and Sex with Barnett Cohen appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

IJ: Your work also seems to reference a pagan ideology that predates Judeo-Christianity. Niki de Saint Phalle comes to mind.  All the circles remind me of the ancient idea of continuity. From an Occidental standpoint, people tend to think of life and death as separate. It’s actually more of a life-death-life cycle.
EF: It’s a wheel, definitely. Circles are the most perfect shape. It’s in way more related to a feminine depiction, but it can also be very cosmic, celestial.  We can talk about what a mandala is and how it functions as a tool for journeying. I hope that these function as portals or stimuli for having that sort of experience.

IJ: They also remind me of Persian rugs. There’s this intense labor that goes into them and there’s so much complexity. At first you look at them and it seems as though the patterns are repeating and that there’s symmetry—but there’s always something a little bit off. There’s an idea in a lot of rug making, that the rug maker leaves a few flaws. Not necessarily a flaw, but…
EF: There’s an acknowledgement that a human being can’t create a perfect thing. That, that’s only done by a divine source, so they intentionally make something off or leave one part undone.

IJ: The funny thing is that nature often leaves things off, too! The idea of perfection is so elusive because the world is so deeply imperfect.
EF: Right. Well, it’s very important to me that these things look like a human being made them, that they’re not machine made, and that my individual hand is present. These are objects that need to be seen in person.

IJ: That’s important, since the visual experience is often taken for granted.
EF: It’s very important to be making objects that really need to be experienced in person, and to be making tactile things that actually exist in the real world.

IJ: There’s this overwhelming power to your work, because it commands your attention; it’s very celebratory and ritualistic.
EF: Well, that reminds of this text, Heaven and Hell, by Aldous Huxley. He basically talks about visionary experience first through mescaline and then through art. He talks a lot about precious materials like gems and gold and why human beings value those things. It’s because they’re precious and rare, but if you think back to the ancient world, these materials were the most brilliant and shiny and colorful things. They were thought of as being keys to some sort of heavenly or otherworldly realm. Rhinestones are obviously thought of as the poor man’s diamond, but because of the way they reflect light and the brilliant nature and color of the gems, it stimulates the eye in a similar way, and it’s riffing with stained glass windows.

IJ: I was actually going to say that these pieces look very much like stained glass windows. And stained glass windows were intentionally created to evoke this transcendental experience for people through the use of translucency and the way in which the light played or refracted.
EF: Exactly. Beauty is obviously important in this work and in my personal relationship to thinking about the power that beauty can have in a way that isn’t just superficial. Yet I’m taking the most superficial materials and trying to make them really serious.

IJ: It’s almost subversive to be thinking about beauty at this point, just because it’s been shunned so much. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that American culture is so largely based on both Protestantism and pragmatism. This pervasive push towards pragmatism attempts to eliminate anything that isn’t seen as the essential core.
EF: So, I’m working with rhinestones on denim and studs on leather, which is a form of embellishment. It’s decoration and you could say it’s almost superfluous in terms of the added adornment of bedazzling or studding your jacket. And maybe that’s why it’s perceived to be trashy in a way, too.

IJ: But, I think that that’s very essential to the roots of culture and civilization in general. Adornment has existed from the beginning.
EF: Of course, it’s a way of identifying you and your tribe, and what tribe you belong to—as well as what your values are and who you are as a person.

IJ: What were you trying to achieve in your current solo show at Jeff Bailey?
EF: I’ve been working with these materials for quite a long time. In this body of work I was trying to really narrow my focus, through making up these rules for myself, like limiting the palette in a very direct way, and also playing a lot with the negative space in the forms. The negative space in the forms becomes as important as each of the additive parts of the painting. They each have a mandala shape, where there’s a central point that emanates outwards, and even if it’s not symmetrical on four points, it’s reflective in its symmetry. They’re all, some more so than others, relating to traditional tapestry, rug work, or mosaic work.

Evie Falci, Ipos, 2013. Studs on pleather. 48 x 36 in.

IJ: This dialogue with crafts traditions also makes the work feminist, the same way that the feminists tried to remove themselves from the male tradition of painting in the seventies.
EF: Oh, yeah! Pattern is obviously very important in this work and its relationship to textiles and getting out of the heroic traditional type masculine painting.

IJ: There’s definitely a dialogue with AbEx in that the scale is bodily, and it reminds me of walking up to a Rothko. What you’re doing is similar to the way that the feminists in the past, like Lee Bontecou would subvert canvas by creating these intensely strong vacuums and voids.
EF: Oh, she’s my home girl! Love her!

IJ: And what you’re doing with the denim and the leather, I think that that’s such a conscious decision. There’s this celebration of femininity through the use of adornment and referencing these crafts traditions, and I feel that that’s really important because a lot of women are shying away from Feminism right now.
EF: Oh, well, God. How could you argue with what feminism is, and if you’re like “I’m not a feminist,” then you’re giving power to the people who have slandered that term and made it a dirty word.

IJ: The women who are rejecting feminism now, don’t seem to realize that they wouldn’t even have a platform to speak from it wasn’t for the feminists of the past who laid out the grunt work.
EF: People don’t have a memory of what it was like at an earlier time, and they take it for granted, this world that we are in now, except that there’s still such a divide. That’s why I want to make such aggressively feminine, aggressively beautiful paintings. At the same time, I don’t want to make vagina art! I don’t know—maybe these are cosmic pussies?!

IJ: There is still such a tendency in so much of the art world to downplay the importance of work that is feminine.
EF: Well, there was the pattern and decoration movement in the eighties, and this work is tied to that as well. Textiles and patterning are also associated with women’s work and feminine work. In the text, Ornament and Crime, Adolf Loos, is not specifically talking about women but you could read it this way too. He’s mostly talking about “savages” from Papua New Guinea who are involved with tattooing, piercing, and decorating their everyday objects. He claims that civilized people shouldn’t need to do that, and he fetishizes straight lines and unadorned surfaces. It’s a text that makes the case for modernism and imperialism.

IJ: Modernism has always struck me as coming out of an ascetic Puritanism.
EF: Totally, and this work is very anti that as well, being “more is more is more!”

IJ: It’s very problematic to me, the way that previous generations looked at abstraction with such unquestioning faith and idealism.
EF: That it’s a universal language that can be read by all?

IJ: Yeah, or even that’s it’s removed from the corporeal filth of actual existence.
EF: In a way, I do believe that abstraction can function that way, and maybe because these materials are so populist, that there’s already a very open point of entry for engaging with this stuff. That’s why I love outsider art and ancient art because it comes from such a place of fervent desire and an undeniable need to make, that I find lacking in a lot of work.

IJ: A lot of work almost begs permission for aligning itself with an academic dogma. So many artists still talk about demystifying art, and I feel like that may have been interesting twenty years ago, but it’s no longer relevant, because our ideas have progressed and our conception of the world has become more pluralistic and complex. I almost feel like we need to bring the magician back!
EF: Hey, I’m here!

The post The Necessary Magician: Irena Jurek Talks Work With Artist Evie Falci appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

IJ: Your newest series, “What the F*shion,” parodies the fashion show genre, and deconstructs identity, status, and misogyny. Can you talk about what motivations led you to satirize fashion specifically?
CJE: I wanted to have a laugh with my generation about the way we are marketed to more than about fashion, specifically. I do think the fashion industry can be sexist, classist, and boring and so can any industry. But, I also think that the idea of the way people dress themselves is fun. It’s fun when people look cool and when they look insane.

IJ: I agree with you that any industry can be sexist and classist, but fashion more so than any other industry evokes notions of power, status, and body dismorphia. Before Twiggy came onto the scene almost fifty years ago, eating disorders were relatively obsolete. It seems to me that the fashion industry is the ideal vehicle for your subject matter.
CJE: I cannot attest to the history of eating disorders, but I disagree that their origin is Twiggy considering admen and corsets predate her. And I’ll add that my eating disorders are only a small part of my subject matter. I find that there is institutionalized sexism everywhere to be made fun of.

IJ: What is it about the way that your generation is marketed to that struck a chord with you?
CJE: The way my generation is marketed to struck a chord with me mostly because the way I’m marketed to doesn’t strike a chord with me. I’m alienated by most content that is supposed to be speaking directly to me or to my demographic.  And I think that dynamic is heartbreaking and hilarious. I’m in love with the idea of exclaiming false platitudes to an audience that doesn’t relate and then being like, “Right, ladies?!” Especially when there are men in the audience. Right, ladies?!

IJ: Much of your work comments on the disparity between the textbook definition of the male gaze and the way that the actual objectification of women operates in every day life and pop culture. What are your thoughts on the inconsistency between the two?
CJE: I think it is part of our language to not say the thing that is actually happening, but to just keep talking. And honestly, I’m just a baby girl in a baby world, after all.

IJ: Your humor often seems to rely on drawing our attention to the thing that is happening that is not being said. In one episode, you give tips on “how to dress for men,” which seems to be in tune with the way that much of fashion is marketed.
CJE: “Girlz Dressing 4 Guyz” is not a thing.  It seems like it could be a thing, but it’s actually not.

IJ: You mentioned that you remember the day that you became aware of the double standard and how largely patriarchal our society is. Could you describe that day?
CJE: I just remember feeling bloated as I stared up at the ceiling and thought, “Oh hell no.”

IJ: You use avatars, animations, and your actual self to create a public representation of your identity. Yet, your work often seems personal. Can you describe the way in which you take ownership of your image through the use of self-portraiture?
CJE: I self-objectify.

IJ: What made you decide to use the avatar in particular as a form to depict yourself?
CJE: The processes of creating my 3D avatars are intentionally convoluted and they’re very difficult to make and animate.

IJ: Why is having an intentionally convoluted avatar important to you, and why is the difficulty important to your process?
CJE:  If they’re difficult to make, then they are difficult to recreate.  My images and 3D models are visually encoded.

IJ: With the current emergence of so many social networking sites, where literally anyone can have a public platform to perform, your videos seem especially timely. How has social networking affected the current landscape and do you believe that the current saturation of social media is here to stay?
CJE: We will know the questions to those answers to those questions in 500 years, maybe.

IJ: You curate a continuing series called “Aboveground Animation,” that’s been held at Ramiken Crucible, The New Museum, and MOCA. How has your role as a curator influenced your views on art as well as your own art practice?
CJE: I founded Aboveground to build a community that my work and I can be a part of, also to propagate the work that I think is important.

IJ: How do you decide which work is important?
CJE: The animations presented in Aboveground are images, techniques, and concepts that shock me because I have never seen or realized them before.  It’s important to me to help share that experience with as many people as I can.

IJ:  Do you have any upcoming shows or projects that you are working on?
CJE: I’m performing stand up all the time and I’m making new 3D animations and 3D prints, robots and holograms.  And yes, I’m being serious.

caseyjaneellison.com

The post 3D prints, Robots, and Holograms: Casey Jane Ellison appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Brent Birnbaum: Certainly. I was collecting and saving things before I was making art. I just knew I was attracted to certain objects and I would save them. I wasn’t sure why or what I was going to do with them.

IJ: You have the largest collection of Vanilla Ice memorabilia in the world. A few years ago you held a performance as Ice Ice Maybe, your incarnation of Vanilla Ice’s alter ego.  Many of your ideas seem to emerge from the objects that you collect and are drawn to.

BB: It’s a combination of the objects I collect and the particular space I’m invited to do a show. The venue for Ice Ice Maybe was an old Tower Records and I knew 2010 was the 20-year anniversary of Ice’s To The Extreme Album. It was an alter ego but also an homage to my love of camp. My recent performances have been moving in the opposite direction involving just me, or me with one object, and addressing very different concerns than the kitsch.

IJ: It seems that lately your work is shifting from the spectacle of pop culture to more existential themes of life and death as well as questions of meaning and purpose.

BB: Very true. My interest has shifted. I spent a lot of time thinking about objects that are not used in an art context and objects that other artists have not used. It’s been a good run, but I’ve just become more interested in existential questions and even formal issues.

IJ: You have an upcoming museum solo show at Casino Luxembourg, called Ride (W/) The Wind. You mentioned that the show is based on Einstein’s definition of insanity, could you talk a little more about that?

BB: Sure, his definition is repeating the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. I combined that with another phrase, which is “wearing the world like a loose garment.” I see Einstein’s definition of insanity as a real negative force. The museum show is designed like a labyrinth. There are nine rooms and you must pass through them all once you enter, in order to exit. All of the rooms are going to look very similar, just in different colors. It’s supposed to be disorienting giving the viewer a sense of repeating the same thing over and over again.

Then the other phrase is the positive force, wearing the world like a loose garment. Which actually goes back to your first question about collecting things. I’m at this transition, and wearing the world as a loose garment is about letting things flow through you either physically or mentally. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, after moving to the Rockaways. Before I had been living in Greenpoint for eight years where I had been able to amass really large collections of things. I went through a purge where I filled two dumpsters and threw out sixty boxes.

IJ: So it’s almost a show about duality.

BB: Yes, that’s a good way of putting it.

IJ: Your idea also reminds me of the idea that all painters paint the same painting over and over again or Ad Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings, where each painting at first glance appears to be the same, but under further inspection reveals a work of great nuance and variation.

BB: When you say that the show is about dualities, it is. And the title, Ride (W/) The Wind, is referencing the ups and downs of our life. We all have the highs and lows. We are always living in the dualities.

IJ: Yeah, because nothing is ever perfect. Things are always off.

BB: Or you feel really good about one thing and really shitty about another, and everything just flows. The nine rooms are a microcosm of people’s lives. It starts with references to childhood and it ends with references to death. It covers everything in between; in rooms two through eight, it talks about your dream job, how much money is in your bank account, your sex life, lying, cheating, stealing, and it ends referencing the afterlife and what you think happens to you when you die.

IJ: Audience participation is really important to your work; a lot of work doesn’t consider the viewer’s experience to the same degree.

BB: I feel like I’m more in the Tino Seghal camp. I need other people to complete my projects. My desire to do performance lately has stemmed from my curiosity of engaging with strangers and combining that with my art making practice.

IJ: So there’s a lot of chance and improvisation that comes together in the performances. There’s this variable that you have no control over.

BB: Yes, there’s no foreseeing what comes out of my mouth or how I react. I like that risk, this unknown territory with an art show. The participatory direction I’m moving in is more into the unknown area where I’m not as controlling with how I want the outcome to be.

IJ: Much of your work seems to be about defining and redefining these patterns and meanings in the world. You come up with these elaborate systems and you often position one system against the next. Before you were doing these intricate, maximalist installations and collages, whereas now you’re going toward a more minimal idea. It seems like the idea of dualities not only exists in the upcoming Luxemburg show, but is also a recurring thread in your work.

BB: Yes, I get excited by exploring new territory and new modes of working and not just for myself, I’m also excited by other artists who are pushing the boundaries of how art can be made, like Nate Hill, Ryan McNamara, and I previously mentioned Tino Seghal, of course.

What I like about performative work is that the history is still largely unwritten and there’s more opportunity for me to explore so many more different areas and possibilities.

The post From Kitsch to the Coffin: Irena Jurek talks to Brent Birnbaum appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

IJ: Like a sacred medium?
CC: Yes, it’s like a sacred medium or respected or feared in a way. That’s why I’ve always been inclined to keep paintings on the stretcher, and I haven’t been the type of artist who wants to do assemblage. I want to maintain that as a face, there’s this history or trajectory of painting and I want to use how I display paintings to speak about that. I want to use my paintings as weapons but they are also used sometimes to enact violence.

IJ: Can you talk more about painting being a metaphor for a battlefield?
CC: Painting is the best way that I know how to communicate. It’s essentially me throwing my ideas at you in a literal, slapstick way. People are always invested in seeing the painting upright and on the wall. They’re almost invested in this safe way of viewing.

IJ: It’s like a control group almost.
CC: Yeah, I want them to see a painting on a catapult or they see it away from the wall. Makes them think about it differently. That whole conversation of painting as object, painting beside itself, is a typical conversation around painting. I view painting as an object, and there’s just as much conversation coming out of its back, the stretchers, where the stretchers came from, the canvas that it’s on, and the signature on the back; there is as much information as on the front. The back speaks to this history and the front has the ideas. I view them both as speaking at the same time, so it’s necessary to show both. As far as painting as battlefield, I’ve never wanted to make it seem like I’m against painting. It’s not that I hate painting, I love painting.

IJ: I could see that, but I think there is a history of the idea that there is this romantic battle; painting a painting is a battle, especially found in the works of the Abstract Expressionists or Expressionists in general. There is a certain sense of humor found in that aspect of your work.
CC: Right. Sometimes you come into the studio and it’s the best studio day and you think that you made the best piece of art ever. Then the next day you think, “this is shit, I don’t know what this is but I’m never going to show it.” I want to show you that battle on the canvas. I think all artists have to deal with their medium as a battlefield, and that’s just the process of creation. It’s never a straight lined good thing, or if it is you’re doing it wrong! Or you have way too many assistants or you planned everything out too early.

IJ: I think that it’s also more of a newer attitude to show that aspect, to show more vulnerability in art. Older generations weren’t as prone to do that.
CC: It’s totally different from this idea of bad painting, where somebody consciously attempts to show a struggle that is not real.

IJ: It’s almost hyper ironic, bad painting. It’s self aware of being bad. By using the metaphor for painting as battlefield, you’re actually reintroducing the idea of effort or importance and significance.
CC: In all of those battles, which go down, the end result isn’t always the same. There are times when the painting survives and becomes the most important part of the installation, and it doesn’t get graffittied or covered up. Then there are times that it does, and the sculpture or installation has to win in order to redeem the whole project. Sometimes the paintings are heralded, and celebrated, they’re put on a pedestal literally and other times they are leaning over like they’re ready to commit suicide. I’m interested in showing all of that. It’s just more real. It is just really the process of working in the studio, and the studio is a battlefield, you know?

IJ: Sometimes you set paintings on fire, using fireworks. There is this performative element to you work. How important is your role as performer/painter to authorship? Where do you see yourself? Are you always present?
CC: I guess the question is am I the perpetrator or the savior? I’m definitely a performer in my work. I never want to be present completely in the physical way. In the Loyalist installation, where I had the canon fuse, it was never my intention to show the canon fuse being lit in the gallery. It’s theater that isn’t meant to be seen, it’s theater that’s happened in the past. It was supposed to be a past action; this canon fuse had already set off a canon that was shooting at the other painting, the Queen Victoria painting. I’m more interested in you seeing all of those layers of possible destruction, and the actual painting that was previously there, than I am watching the whole disaster go down. Either I would show up before the action or after the action, but I wouldn’t show the action itself. I think that takes a lot away from people seeing two-dimensional objects like paintings.

I’m trying to concentrate on this 2D/3D tension where you’re moving through different realities. You’re creating a reality through painting, and the sort of reality of seeing ready-made or constructed objects next to each other. Performance is just another can of worms that I’m not interested in opening.

With my installation at the Brooklyn Museum, there’s two pieces that have the potential to be launched, and there’s one piece that has been launched. I’ve debated in the past whether I’d show a painting being launched as a performance, that’s the obvious question that everyone asks. I would never show a painting being launched.

IJ: You have a recurring cast of characters in your paintings, you have this amphibian every person creature, the black santa, and the sexy bunny, among others. Could you talk more about the characters in your work?
CC: The Golem character, the every body, everything character, is actually from Jewish folklore. There are tales of this anthropomorphic being that gets created out of clay or sand or dirt and then becomes animated and then essentially kills its creator.

IJ: That’s almost like a twist on the Narcissus myth. Do you identify with any of the characters?
CC: If I were to identify with anybody, I would say it would be the Golem figures, but they identify with everything. Their purpose is to be chameleon like, I identify with that sort of way of living. You have to be a chameleon to be at a certain party, you have to be dressing like everyone else. Golems can be any color, and sometimes they have to change genders.

I’ve always had this narrative of a post-human world. Maybe they’re aliens that have come back that are trying to pick up the pieces of American civilization.

IJ: There’s definitely this idea of time in your work, you’ve recreated the DaVinci catapults for your installation at the Brooklyn Museum. Could you talk more about that? 
CC: It’s funny that we were just talking about the Golems taking over the future, but most of my work is about the present or the past. I have a personal fascination with history, but I’m also interested in war and politics. I really don’t want to talk about those things that specifically.

IJ: It almost seems that there is a sense of play and humor that references much more serious issues. That’s a way of allowing people to think about those things using satire.
CC: It could be considered satire, because the paintings seem light-hearted on the surface. Depending on how you look at them. If you’re just looking at the paintings, things could come out looking quite humorous and light-hearted, but if you look at everything at once you get a different interpretation. I’m not trying to necessarily make fun of war or politics, I’m just trying to give light to the fact that things you would think are very serious are humorous at the same time. When I make pieces like the Sarah Palin paintings or paintings of politicians in them or black Santa, or the Easter Bunny girl, they’re all equally fictional and absurd. The humor exists in recognizing that Sarah Palin is not much different from…

IJ: There’s this fallibility in the characters. Although none of them are really human, even Sarah Palin, they’re all deeply human on a level. By removing the human elements, you make them more human in the end.
CC: Totally. That’s the purpose that the Golems serve. It makes it easier for me to insert dialogue, whereas to put humans in the paintings, for me, would make them very weighed down. These Golems can be whatever I want them to be at any given time.

As far as the whole satire and war, it’s not that I’m trying to make war seem lighthearted, but I’m trying to get people to recognize that these things are not sacred. These things are a part of who we are. At the same time as I’m representing Queen Victoria, Britain, and America as a battle, it’s also connected to how we all have these times of great hatred for other people, fights, and jealousy. We all shoot the canon and launch paintings.

IJ: There’s a little heaven and hell in all of us.
CC: It’s not that there’s humor in that, it’s just that I’m trying to point out the humanity in war just as much as I’m trying to point out the humanity in laughter.

IJ: Do you have any upcoming events coming up?
CC: As far as upcoming events, I am curating a show, TIS BANK, at Torrance Shipman Gallery, in Sunset Park. It is an artist-run space I co-run. The show will feature work by Lisa Cobbe and Troy Michie. I will also be giving a talk at the Brooklyn Museum on August 29 with art writer and critic, Nick Faust.

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