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.

The post Subverting Deadly Materials: The Work of Jesse Sugarmann appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

The short answer, which we have lived with for 100 years is the self and a community. That is, individual determination and communal validation. Often the latter helps along the former, and vice versa. One’s desire to make followed up by a willingness or drive to share it, collides with a community, be it esoteric, academic, or market driven, who’s affirmation propels forward to art-dom. This narrative can be reversed of course, as we have seen with the quilts of Gee’s Bend.

In the current three-person exhibition at Portland, Oregon’s Adams and Ollman both roads, self determination and institutional validation, have been traveled. On display are works from Acharya Vyakul, Chris Johanson, and Chris Corales. Three artists who’s work, in production and/or content, involve the meditative.

For the Indian painter Acharya Vyakul (1930-2000) the meditation or inspiration to create was a wholly spiritual endeavor.  In the tradition of Tantric paintings, Vyakul’s works were all created in the throes of divine ecstasy. The four small pieces here, the largest still under 12 inches, range from a central focus pointed concentric triangle in red, oddly cropped at the top of the page, to receding tubular forms in two-tone lavender, as well as abstracted calligraphy. The page is barely able to contain these forms. The works are all dated circa 1990, the year after Vyakul was first exhibited in the controversial Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, on the heals of 1989 NY MOMA show, Primitivism. This was an exhibit Martin wished to distance himself from as he saw it as more of the same old Western colonialism. While looking at Vyakul’s paintings one can’t help but think of his state of mind at the times of their creation. The immediacy of the line, coupled with the quirky compositions, run counter to the delicacy of the palette, resulting in a vibration upon the viewer’s sensibility.

Immediacy is a hallmark in the paintings and installations of Chris Johanson. Since the mid 1990’s, through his sprawling installation, which extended into in the stairwell in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, to his more recent sallies into abstraction, as well as his musical output with bands such as Sun Foot, he has constantly given us an honest reflection of society. His work, as Jon Raymond wrote so succinctly, “is both corrosive and deeply sympathetic, burning with irony but never outright judgment.” On view are examples of his wit, floating from the mind of simply painted men who’s sage quips burst out of cartoon speech bubbles. His tone ranges from the potent, That bump in the road was sure a bump in the road, 1999-2013, to chilling, as in the painting Selfish expressionism #1, 1994-2013. Here a nude man in a non-Euclidean spaces wonders, “Is today a good day to shave off some of my medication?” Also included are two of his abstractions. One What is or can be, 2013 is done in Johanson’s version of a refined style, brightly colored and skewed geometry. The other Everywhere you look, 1994-2013, blends more of his cartoony style and pastel passion with a spatial delineation made of wispy marks, evoking the 1911 compositions of Wassily Kandinsky.

The delicate abstract collages of Chris Corales also conjure the work of the early 20^th century avant-guarde. Corales is a collector of fine and prosaic vintage paper which he utilizes in skinny slivers and square chunks as in formal explorations of compositional space.  Here worn and faded record sleeves for 78’s are cut short, and accented with half circular tabs of reds, blues, and whites. The arrangements are landscapish forms and repeat in a series titled, Dune Kiosk (1-4) 2013.  The paper exudes a material history: time has left their color and finish bleached, and some contain faint sun-spotted patterns. The colors on the tabs are rich and flat, though differing high fiber content provides lovely texture for the careful viewer. Corales is currently living in Philadelphia, but hails form the same punk DIY Bay Area scene as Johanson. While one would shy away from placing Corales in the late 1990’s Mission School, there are correspondences in his reuse practice, passion for color, and intense work ethic. Not to mention the shared community and camaraderie, which spurred them both past the Art border guards and towards lasting careers.

This exhibition provides a platform for aesthetic pleasure and philosophical thought regarding the path that images, objects, and people have to traverse in order to attain the title of Art and Artists.

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

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