The title of the exhibition is taken from California’s third largest city, calculated by square miles. Its history and characteristics mirror many faded southwest towns. Real estate speculators bet on the water coming, which it has yet to do, leaving parched pavement to be reclaimed by the sands.  The vast emptiness of California City’s forty square miles have been a beacon to off-road vehicle enthusiasts, bonfire parties, and weapon testing from Edwards Air Force base.  The results of this ongoing history became the jumping off point for the works in this show: two videos and five works of napalm on acrylic, all from 2013,titled California Bloodlines.

Sugarmann’s past works have deftly engaged with the history of the automotive industry and the legacy of quirky visual culture it has generated. In sculptures involving mini-vans, windscreens, and beaded car seat covers, he has assembled attractive visual jokes, which monumentalize these ubiquitous ready-made materials. These works notably include videos and performances of vehicles on collision courses set in motion by fork-lifts and air mattresses where Sugarmann has slowed down the moment of action into an anticlimactic theatricality, allowing one to ponder the aesthetics within the moment of a split-second car accident. In California City he both continues his work within auto industry and deviates from it.

In the five-minute video California Bloodlines (GPS dozen) a driver attempts to navigate what remains of the streets in a California City neighborhood with the assistance of twelve GPS devices.  The many computerized voices synchronize and dissonate with one and other, advising the driver to make turns on streets like California Boulevard, a barely visible trace where sand and sage brush have taken over. A choir of “recalculating” is called out again and again as the driver aimlessly wanders.

Where Sugarmann veers off from the car culture are a series of map-like drawings depicting tracks of land found in this too-big-to-fail town. These images are lined out in napalm on 24-inch square of acrylic and then lit on fire. The acrylic is thick enough not to warp under the heat, but the burning ooze does melt away and bubble up the plastic, leaving a brown scar upon the surface defined by the black smudges of the smoke. Napalm is a mixture of a viscous material and gasoline. Its sticky quality is what makes it so deadly and why it was chosen by the US military and the artist to be used as a mark maker. Napalm’s origins track back to the Second World War, but its almost pop-culture reputation comes from its extensive use in Vietnam, which coincides with California City’s incorporation in 1965.

The burnt and smoky quality of the drawings leave one with a haunted feeling, while their fiery origin and abstracted nature posses an air of early 20^th century modernist occult, and bring to mind the strange bed fellows of rocket scientist Jack Parsons and mystic Aleister Crowley. These references to rituals are reinforced by the ultra crisp video playing in the back room of the gallery, California Bloodlines (parts 1 and 2).

Unfolding over thirty minutes total, the first and shorter part of the video depicts a man and woman in matching faded denim and gray T-shirt sweeping and painting with mops on a stretch of sand covered road. Within the cast space, they push around and paint the shell of an open wheeled dragster.

The second part of the video unveils some of the production of the napalm drawings. A sheet of acrylic is hung between a frame of lumber, the napalm has already been laid out, the camera is in front of the plastic, looking through to the desert, and soon the napalm is lit. The camera captures with incredible detail the flame that emerges and quickly spreads over the drawing, leaving a demonic smoke that soon blackens the entire work. We watch it burn and bubble until the artist decides that it has done enough damage, he extinguishes the fire with splash and then washes the piece with soap and water, wiping away the smudges that he can, leaving the work as we see it in the gallery.

In one of the final scenes of the video, the legs of the wooden structure holding the drawing are on fire and we see Sugermann wearing a respirator as he is wiping away at the drawing. The theatrics of this moment recall the 1950 Hans Namuth film of Jackson Pollock working on clear surfaces. It is a reveal of process, an elevation of stature, and a wickedly powerful image of the artist playing with fire. In it he is the artist conjurer, not in the way Marinetti wrote, “about the love of danger, about the use of energy, and recklessness as common daily practice” but rather a taming of the weapon. Sugarmann turns them around in order to create theory object rather than instruments of war.

Mack McFarland is an artist and curator at the Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Philip Feldman Gallery + Project Space in Portland, OR.

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Marcy Brafman: I was always drawing.  The first thing I remember doing was drawing.  I always thought of myself as an artist even as a very little kid.  When I started painting in school I was unsure of myself as everybody else’s work looked so good and polished and mine was such a mess.  I liked to draw all the characters first, the narrative and whatnot.  Then I remembered I had to fill in the ground and I tried to paint around the detailed story figures.  The teacher told my mother that I had a very active imagination.

My father, now deceased, was an artist, a very good one.  He gave it up and would never tell us why, and got really angry when my brother and I gave him art supplies as a present one birthday.  When he got older and was in ill health he told me that he couldn’t stand the idea of people judging him and his work.  I mean, who were they?  He hated the idea of my subjecting myself to that scrutiny and the possibility of failure.

He made a living as a Boss Painter, a painting contractor.  That man could mix a color like no one else.  I learned a lot from him.  I still have drawings he made as a teenager.  My grandfather was also a house painter.

LO: What are the themes of your work and what inspires you?

MB: I have worked in video and TV and think of myself as a media artist who paints.

My paintings are meditations on Jackson Pollock, the end of nature, comic strips, cartoons, rock n roll, John Singer Sargent, and a long toxic immersion in the living billboard of electronic and digital life. They are mix-mastered with Marshall McLuhan, Velazquez, Karl Marx, Thorsten Veblen, daytime television, and the motion poetry of the great American highway of picture image world.  I have an ongoing fascination with character in all its aspects as self-portraiture.

I am super interested in ghosts. Ghost images, ghosting, ghost writing. Vanishing memes, disappearing images, mirrors and doppelgängers, Id and superego. The eternal duality of good and evil, interior and exterior realities.

I’m painting about the Split, the Strike, the Bolt.  The verge between sound and picture, time and space, still and motion, light and dark.  Being and nothingness, after all – every painter paints himself.

LO: What is your working process? Do you plan things out or play in the studio?

MB: Both.

I do intensive writing, drawing, and picture research online while developing a concept. I also take a lot of pictures.  I’m always shooting something glimpsed in the street. Mostly on trucks.  I pretty much have a color plan and a compositional strategy.  I do an old school “cartoon”- a drawing onto the canvas to start.

Once I get into the work though, the paint takes over.  David Gibson called it, “the specific gravity of the paint.”  The blueprint of the bollix. We are always surprised by the outcome.

LO: Each artist is so different in how they approach their work. How do you approach the creation of your work?

MB: I consider myself a serious person and a serious artist. But not self-serious, I hope. I feel compelled to make the work I do, like there is a specific number and task list and I have this responsibility within a finite time span to meet the image load.

To me, the painting I admire from the past tells me something about the time it was made in.  It reaches out across time to speak to us.

I once saw a Titian where the hand of the Deity reached out to me.  I realized that Titian had painted his own hand and he was reaching out over 400 years to me – as if he was present in the room.  That is the power of true art.

LO: Why do you think art is important for the world and why is it important for you as an individual artist?

MB: Art is very important because it allows the random to exist.  To blossom or fester as you will.  It asks people to think about their condition.  Good art does that.  It makes you think about what is around you.  Art is the willing partner of a free society.  When people don’t think they are easily led by powers that are not always in their interest.  It asks you to take notice about what is true.  The nature of things.

It is important to leave a record of the time we lived in.

LO: What advice would you give other artists who are emerging?

Just to keep working.  Once you are out of school there are no assignments, no expectations.  Just keep working.  Or not.  Nobody cares until they do.  It is up to you to see if your practice is one you need, or the world needs.

LO: Please talk about upcoming bodies of work, shows, etc. that you have  coming up.

MB: I am working on a series called “The Ghost Paintings.” So far I have completed “Schizophonia” “TROLL gone Ghost” “Crazy Ghost Fish” and “Dutchmasters (Ghosts of Dutch Repainting.)”I am completing a diptych on small painted panels called “Commedia/Tragedia” and “Maltese Cross on Fire.” Also a series of drawings in color about the nature of alphabets.  Just completed “the name of the snow leopard.” A series of drawings of frames from antique black and white television shows.  Entitled the “History of Television” series.

I am participating in Lucky Draw 2013 at the Sculpture Center.  Summer 2013 I will be installing a piece for Vellum Projects as part of their Sound and Art Purple Satellite Project.

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