Something I’ve been reminiscing about with some old friends was how we noticed, in retrospect, an implied expectation in school of having to digest and metabolize the entire arc of 20th century painting in four years of study. Students rise and die with Modernism in the classroom. They start you off with the observational stuff, and then you move on to maybe some expressionistic-but-still-representative things, and eventually you make it to abstraction, which then gets discarded in favor of conceptualism and the immaterial art object. I’m exaggerating, of course, and not everyone did that! But it was a common narrative, and funny to watch people sneer at whatever previous method they’d been using once they had “evolved” to the next step.

All this to say is I’ve run the gamut. I took a stab at everything when I was starting out. As a young painter I’d sometimes try and figure out how to make the paintings of an artist I was obsessed with—it was like a fever, and the cure was understanding something about their process. Once I vaguely succeeded I’d lose interest, and be able to move on with my life. I’ve made knock-off Alan Shields, Alex Katzes, Manets! I’m not making the “kind” of work I thought I would be making at all. You metabolize your influences, and climb out of the maze.

MH: Your mark-making has a decidedly casual feel to it, but many of your compositions end up being quite complex. I see a number of art historical connections that could be made, but who are some of you favorite sources of inspiration?
TB: Composition is one of those things that I can’t rely on myself to reliably produce. I need some source material, food, or otherwise I’ll fall into the same three tricks over and over. Certainly other paintings are great sources. I lived in Paris during high school, so I spent a lot of time on the weekends at the big museums. The Raft of the Medusa is an old favorite. I try and visit that thing every time I go home. Caravaggios, too. Those have some crazy compositional gestures.

I certainly owe some debt to the Supports/Surfaces artists, as well as 60-70s painterly painters that were collected in Katy Siegel’s excellent 2007 show, High Times Hard Times. I’m also consistently obsessed with Milton Avery, as everyone should be.

MH: What other sources of inspiration do you find in the world around you?
TB: I derive a lot of inspiration from pop culture and humor especially. I watch a lot of stand-up and also improv, which I particularly adore. So much of humor is derived from cadence and timing, just like paintings. There’s rehearsal, where you accumulate muscle memory, and then the act of painting is really rhythmic where you’re continuously responding in real time to external and internal stimuli. Knowing when to stop, knowing when to land the punchline, that’s all very tricky.

I finally broke down and took an improv class at the UCB theater this summer. I was terrified—I am absolutely not a performer and don’t enjoy being onstage. But in the end, it was unreservedly the most fun I’ve had in ages. I hadn’t been around adults who were so unselfconsciously playful and collaborative. It made me realize how infrequently we actually play games in regular life, and it was just unbelievably helpful for painting. I learnt so much, and I’m still unpacking that experience.

MH: I’d maybe describe you as an abstractionist for the most part, but a good deal of your work also flirts with representation. It’s clear no one has to feel pressure to land on one side or another these days, but it makes me curious whether or not the more sparse abstract works you create come from somewhere in the “real/lived” world somewhere.
TB: Everything has a referent. Just as all representation is abstraction, all abstraction gets filtered through a mind that, through force of habit, reads language and representation into everything. It’s not just that you can’t have one without the other; they’re simultaneous.

MH: Much of your work deals with an economy of expression when it comes to your handling of the paint. How do you know when to stop working on any given piece?
TB: That’s the big hat trick, ultimately. I don’t know a single painter that doesn’t continue to struggle with that one. I mess this one up a lot on either end, by under-working or over-working. It feels like sexual edging: you have to stop yourself right at the cliff edge without going over. I have this feeling that the very best painting, regardless of speed, stops just short of being “done.” Where you’re able to imagine what could happen next. In that way it acts as an irritant and makes you complicit in its life.

Of course this method runs the high risk of being undercooked and unsatisfying mush. That’s what makes it fun, and hard—when you succeed it’s transportative and experiential like nothing else.

MH: In your Tent works, the structures you paint on are built in the round as multi-sided stretcher volumes draped in canvas and painted. I love this work. I had seen images, but first saw one in person at the show About Space at the ArtBridge Drawing Room. I like your decision to put them on casters, giving them an implied movement and transportability. Can you tell me a bit about how this side of your work came about?
TB: When I was younger I think I felt typically torn between what I assumed were different postures, the abstract and the depictive. I’d think of some paintings as “concave” and “convex”—the concave being of the illusionistic variety, and the convex as the assertive “objecthood” objects. But what I came to understood is that in my work these two modes actually operate in the same way, at the same time.

I strongly anthropomorphize my work. This is something we all do, involuntarily. To ignore that is to ignore a facet of human perception. Just as every concave painting is three-dimensional object in space, every convex one leads a double life as a legible, depictive symbol. It was my feeling that while the recent history of painting has roundly addressed this first principle, we have not yet had so much work addressing the second.

Everything is a body. Everything is a cartoon. Everything has a dick, etc.

Those are some of the things the tents are trying to address. They sprung out of a curiosity I had, wondering what a painting would look like broken up, exposed, and hanging out in our human space, while occupying a human amount of space. I’m untrained in any form of sculpture, so I’m amused in the way that they’re the product of an unskilled person working their way backwards, problem solving with the only skills available to them—in my case, painting skills, like stretcher building.

I love the tents a lot, at this point they’re a familiar, friendly shape to me. They’re more mobile and assertive than even I as a person get to be, and they are wonderful vehicles for ideas.

Tatiana Berg, Joanna Tent, 2013. Acrylic on canvas, wood, casters. 60 x 38 x38 in. Image courtesy of Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden.

MH: Is the fact that they are on wheels a playful invitation to the viewer, enticing them to walk around the work? Can I get your permission to push the next one I see around the gallery and really ruffle some feathers?
TB: One of my favorite things is the way the tents suggest a possible function, while having none. They definitely feel like potential furniture, or containers for something, or possibly a very specific and weird tool.

With the tents it seems like they want us to touch and move them and play with them. They’re saboteurs. They seem friendly but are deliverers of sneaky ideas, I hope.

I’d love for people to be able to touch them all day long but it’s sadly impractical because some people aren’t so respectful! One of the funniest things I ever saw was someone using a smaller one as a little drink coaster at an opening. Just set your cup of wine down, and wheel it around with you while you circulate.

MH: In a time where other art exploration is always seeming to invite viewer participation, this decision seems to be pointing an accusatory finger at the art world’s long standing position of frowning on the viewer’s ability to touch a painting.
TB: I think about usefulness, and touch, a lot. I wonder what the use of a painting is. Ostensibly, once it’s “done” a painting just sits quietly on a wall, looked at but never touched. Maybe its greatest moment of “use” is the painter using it and touching it for their personal expressive purpose, and then that’s it. A painting is a one-use thing that’s almost discarded when it leaves the studio—which is a melodramatic idea I love.

You know what else I just love? Mary Heilmann’s chairs. It’s such a goofy thing, to like sit on a “painting” while looking at paintings. I like work that does stuff that. It’s irreverent in a way that seems dumb but is actually aggressively smart.

MH: Your marks seem so brusk and intuitive, made quite quickly—yet a lot of the structures you paint on in the Tent work seem like they took some time to build. Is there some amount of planning that goes in to how each tent piece will eventually look? Or once you have the surface ready do you just bang them out?
TB: Two modes of thinking are necessary, in life and in painting: there’s the fast and performative, and the slow and designed. Oscillating between the two is healthy and I like that the tents embody both. They’re difficult and time-consuming to build, and then I don’t treat their surfaces differently than my “flat” works; I bring my best self to the party, respond to what’s in front of me, and let ‘em rip.

I read this book over the summer, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, which is like a treatise on the psychology and latest neuroscience of human behavior. I think it did a great job addressing these two modes of thinking; how our brains have two broad ways of working and what activities are best suited for them. I suspect I design in slow mode, and then paint in the fast mode—similar to athleticism and what we often call “intuition.” It’s an interesting read and seemed to confirm a lot of my suspicions and half-baked theories of how my own brain operates while I’m working.

MH: I see a lot of your new work on assorted social media. (Yes I stalk you.) Do you tend to burn through materials? Did this factor into your recent move to works on paper? Or had you been working this way all along?
TB: I burn through materials like a nymphomaniac on death’s row. Not really; but I do alternate through fallow periods of contemplation and relative laziness, to bursts of manic output. I have what I consider a high failure rate (for a painter, anyway). I live for high-risk painting—anything else bores me—and if going to fail, I want to really go down in flames.

Anyway to answer your question, yes, I have sort of always worked this way, and finding the right kind of paper has been a godsend. It allowed me to really pick a speed that’s almost impossible to maintain with other media. Canvas and stretchers are just inherently costly, so I had to find other ways to allow failure; some of my earlier abstractions have many, many failed paintings hidden beneath the final product.

MH: Each of the paper works seem to be painted on two pieces of paper placed together to make a single composition—is this move a practical way to work larger, or does it intentionally reference the painting tradition of the dyptich?
TB: The move was definitely started by a practical need to work larger, at first, but it has become a deliberate part of the content now. It’s a push/pull, gap-thing that doesn’t operate in the same way when it’s a single sheet. It also has that effect, you know, when you cut up a giant pizza into little squares, you end up eating more? It’s like that.

MH: Please clue us in on some new exhibitions or exciting projects to look forward to in 2014.
TB: For the time being I’m looking forward to exhibiting my thesis work at the end of my Columbia MFA, but beyond that I don’t yet know of anything for certain!

The post Everything Has a Dick: The Work of Tatiana Berg appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

As you enter the space, the first thing you likely become aware of is 270 degrees of cabinet, hang half open all the way around the three available sides of the gallery. They are desperate to be touched, doors all ajar. Yet, as they are hung tight to the ceiling, they are definitely out of reach. To your left, a fedora lies abandoned, upside down, holding a set of gambling dice. It references the absence of the artist as much as it entices the viewer to take a chance in staying a minute or two to absorb the work

Straight ahead, a small amp feeds music from a song playing off of a video in the back room. It leans menacingly at an acute angle from the floor facing a simple paper snowflake, which is choked between two layers of suffocating plastic wrapped over what appears to be a modest set of stretcher bars.

A clamp light on a cymbal stand is hung and left for dead on the right wall, face removed of it’s utility by a heavy wrapping of black plastic. It hangs perilously close to the plug that can give it life, yet is helpless to plug itself in, cord lying limply against the ground in solemn defeat. This piece perhaps most obviously states the artist’s intention of removing the useful nature of a given object in order to imbue it with a new purpose that is divorced from the original use of the thing we comprehend.

In the back room, a floor installed TV plays a series of video clips recorded by the artist on a trip across the US. Each segment shows Payne hiding behind a series of plein air landscape paintings. He plays the soundtrack to the exhibition on his acoustic guitar, sliding behind the easel that faces the viewer to play his song before sneaking away upon its conclusion without ever showing his face to the camera. These songs slink throughout the airspace intermittently, becoming the cyclical soundtrack of the exhibition, which build and wane with each passing of a song dedicated to a very specific vista encountered in the artist’s journeys.

One of the most startlingly beautiful aspects of this work is the artist’s attention to local light and the passing of natural time. As the sun goes down, the lights of the neighborhood bleed in through the glass front windows. We become silhouettes on the back wall; flowing reds, greens, and grays making the cabinets shift and slowly move around us like imagined planes in an abstract painting. They also serve to show ourselves to ourselves, as we are active observers whose likenesses are projected throughout the space.

As an ambulance goes by our reality is kicked into an excited frenzy, colored fragments of light dancing frenetically throughout the space. It reveals the exhibition as a multifaceted camera obscura, reflecting the interior experience, while returning one’s thought to the fact that this all exists in a state of some slightly morbid, existential flux. The patient in the ambulance may be fine at the end of the day, but the work seems to nod as the blinking lights fly by, knowingly acknowledging the possibility of immanent defeat.

Here the objects have not only suffocated from being separated from their utility, literally choked out by an impenetrable material, but die an honorable death of some sort, limply giving themselves over to this other world of deceased presentation. They exude an understanding that the hereafter will provide the viewer some sort of way out, a means to understand a new reality of the object that may only exist within the mind of the spectator. This seems to be fine with Samuel Payne. He has created this environment after all, and wants it to be a slowly opening bloom of experience. Like the selenicereus grandiflorus, it may only be alive to the viewer for one night, but if it blooms at all, that will likely be enough.

By Matthew Hassell

The post Night Bloom: New Work by Samuel Payne appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

NYA: What artists were important to you during your development? Was there a particular artist or movement you were looking at in your formative years?
JS: Piero Della Francesca, Peter Paul Rubens, Goya, Carravaggio, Picasso, Madonna, Janet Jackson, Bjork, Neo Rauch, Lisa Yuskavage, Dana Schutz, Deee-Lite, Grace Jones, Marlene Dumas, Chris Ofili, Kara Walker, Joseph Beuys, Inez and Vinoodh, Antonio Biaggi, Paul Mcarthey, Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Adriane Piper, Matthew Barney, Terence Koh, Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis, Dreamcast, Playstation, and music video directors like Mark Romanek, Chris Cunningham, and Michel Gondry—just to name a few out of a ton of influences.

NYA: Aside from performance, anything from photography, fibers, drawing, or computer-generated environments seem to make their way into your work. Is there a rhyme or reason as to the medium you decide to create a work with?
JS: The mediums I choose to work with are components of a more grand idea. Photographs and drawings are static, and give me the opportunity to make focused gestures in my work; those mediums are where I am most didactic. The CG animation and costuming is where the fun is. That is the territory where I am negotiating story, colors, textures, space, and composition.

NYA: The performative aspect seems to bleed through into a lot of what you do, whether in the form of actual performances, incorporation of these works into the realm of video, or stills taken from one or the other. How do you see your own body in relation to the work that you make? Is it just another tool or do all the creative ventures point back to it in some way?
JS: When talking about the work I usually use pronouns like “he”/ “him” to speak about the passive bodies that flow around in my animations. The way that I use my body in my work is similar to how I’d play with G.I. Joe dolls when I was a kid. The way I mediate my body between the animation and drawings gives it an unlimited terrain for what it can do and participate in. I have been outsourcing performances from others lately, and seeing what happens from there. I guess it’s like I’m getting 500 more G.I. Joes for my toy box.

NYA: Your work deals a lot with a personal or familial history. Can you tell us a little bit about what makes your background so important to the nature of your work?
JS: My background is important to my work, because I am the only person in the world with my background. You are the only person in history with your background, so by default it’s a great platform for original material. A lot of the content in the drawings are schematic documents of occurrences that happened around objects and the home. It’s my mother’s journal documented by short sentences and drawings of objects. The family photographs are separate performance documents that act as evidence that the objects in her drawings existed in her home, and people performed around them. So I usually mediate between the drawings and familial documents to influence a more surreal possibility for how those objects could function in the present animations.

NYA: How would you describe the relationship you have to your mother’s drawings?
JS: I watched my mother make her drawings since I was a child; she told me if I wanted to assist her in making them, I’d have to learn to be a better draftsman. So it technically is the genesis of my art practice. I also was the best at drawing Jesus in bible school. That was a minor influence on my ambition to pursuit art.

NYA: Her drawings seem always to have been translated to a new medium, either in being prints of the originals, or having been re-drawn into a 3D modeling environment. Do you see her need to create as flowing through your work in some way?
JS: The use of them is my system for restraining my creativity. They give me order and rules.  It’s also a way to continue a creative lineage. The sheer volume of the drawings makes it necessary for me to use them to their full potential.

NYA: I hope you don’t mind me saying this—there is certainly an aspect of humor that comes through in many of your works. Can you share a little bit about the way this operates within your work?
JS: I think humor is a great subversion technique. It’s a great medium to deliver heavy content. I’m also a really goofy, nerdy, perverted guy … so it’s also a subconscious default.

NYA: You seem to have a very organic relationship to the technology you use, that is to say, you know exactly how you want it to operate and you are less concerned with a professionally polished look, and more interested in making the technology work for your project. Is this by necessity or design?
JS: I think it’s by necessity and design. My process is very analog because of tracing, rotoscoping, modeling, scanning, and performing. The design automatically results into a D.I.Y. aesthetic. I am satisfied with that, because it’s more human and porous. As I continue to learn and grow with the medium, things become more sophisticated.

NYA: Tell us about the inspiration behind the wild nature of the worlds you create, do the performances exist to be inserted into the worlds, or does the process usually happen the other way around?
JS: My live action performances are just as much of a world-building technique as my 3D animation videos; they co-exist. A lot of the footage from my live action performances informs the imagery in the animations. I compare it to an Ala Prima landscape painter like Milton Avery, Monet, or Edward Hopper going into the landscape with a sketchbook and easel, to return to their studio and make a refined project from it. I work from observation, and performance is the way that I observe the world.

NYA: Is there anything about your process or your oeuvre that you feel people overlook when encountering your work?
JS: Not in the current moment, which makes me desire to blur the lines a little more.

NYA: What upcoming exhibitions or projects do you have in the works that you are willing to share?
JS: I’m excited about a project I’m working on at Recess Art’s Sessions program. I’m outsourcing performance from the public. They’re invited to choose one of 500 drawings to re-inact on the green screen. It’s kind of like a performative Rorschach test. I’ve been working with the Kinect and 5D Camera to explore motion capturing too. Regarding upcoming shows, I am excited about Monya Rowe’s Inaugural Group Show for her new space on Orchard Street, Radical Presence Black Performance in Contemporary Art at the Grey Art Gallery and Studio Museum in Harlem this fall, my solo show at The Bindery Projects in Minneapolis, Minnesota, some upcoming solo projects in Oslo, Norway, and Mallorca, Spain at Mallorca Landings Gallery, and Untitled Art Fair in December. The 2014 stuff is tentative, but even more thrilled about that.

The post Playing G.I. Joes with Jacolby Satterwhite appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

The first floor you enter steals the show, and as you move upward, although still quite nice, in comparison the next two floors fall a bit flat in amassing successively conceptual work. It seems to work less well as the objects lean heavily on art history and theory, asking for a contemplative, informed viewing from the spectator. This kind of viewing experience is not conducive to the art fair in general, simply given the volume of both foot traffic and work presented.

One perk on a warmer day such as Saturday was surely the rooftop cafe, bookstore, and lounge. Half-covered in a clear plastic tent, all the beautiful people were able to congregate and smile at one another while they sipped beer, ate sandwiches, and smoked cigarettes, while absorbing the much needed sunshine. The eclectic nature of the inventively designed seating arrangements was enticing as well.

My picks for most engaging pieces from each floor would be arranged as follows. On the second floor, I enjoyed the playful, yet austere wall sculpture series on tambourines by  Paul Lee for Maccarone Modern Art. The third floor had some great airbrush on canvas works from the late 60’s by Xanti Schawinsky with Broadway 1602. One corner of the fourth floor pleasantly surprised me with brief, whimsical video work by Roman Signer for the gallery Art: Concept.

Overall, The Independent gets my selection for best March art fair of 2014.

By Matthew Hassell

The post Best March Art Fair of 2014: The Independent appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Volta rises above all this in allowing the work to shine, growing in importance by opening the viewer up to visual relationships from piece to piece. The organizers have created a viewing environment that feels professional without reverting to the typical big fair art sprawl. As spectators, we are able to see something of how a career is developing, rather than having to settle for a singular statement that offers one stanza in the developing poem that is an artist’s complete body of work.

As someone who doesn’t have any spare cash in my decidedly meager bank roll, collecting isn’t really an option. I think anyone else who is in this art game for the love is or has been in a similar situation. This leaves us to be attracted to fairs that are focused on giving something back to the viewer, like allowing one to see and compare the work with our impression of how it contributes to the larger conversation. Volta affords us this opportunity, and for this we can all be glad. The fair closes on Sunday, so get over there this weekend for a fair experience that won’t leave you with tired eyes and a mushy feeling brain.

By Matthew Hassell

The post Shoulda Coulda Gone to Volta appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

The art that inhabits these spaces fits the theme as well. It is curated by a group of independent curators who each have their own space, giving each former classroom it’s own distinct style and feel. The artists are of the younger generation for the most part, pumping out ambitious work that still feels slightly less polished, and teems with that obvious creative excitement that young hands seem to have in ample supply.

This isn’t to say that this fair leaves anything to be desired. If you look around on opening night, you see smiling faces sharing laughs, making connections, and congratulating one another on putting together a great show. The pretension and thick, stuffy air that can be found wafting through most any other fair is nowhere to be found at Spring/Break. I think the artists and curators alike do their best to keep it that way.

It should go without saying that the experience is not to be missed. You may never get another chance to rumble through classic movie make-out scenes in a custom painted VW bug, to make a wish on a sumptuous wishing pelt, or hang with a sculpture made out of actual human bones. Go back to grade school before it’s too late.

The following images are a selection of some of our favorite works to be seen throughout the exhibition. We won’t tell you who they were made by. You have to go to Spring/Break to find out.

By Matthew Hassell

The post Get Loose With Us at the Spring/Break Art Show appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

In a certain light, Smolenski’s entire body of work seems to be encapsulated within this project. Having learned a lot from his time working as a student in an influential sound lab in the Fine Arts Academy of Poznan, Smolenski always saw audio and visual art pursuits as being two elements of the same exploration. From Smolenski’s view, sound work seems to be the contemporary zeitgeist in the Polish art scene. More and more visual artists are beginning to express themselves within the realm of audio art, in part stemming from the forward thinking of a scene growing out of the audio culture fostered by sound labs, including the one where Smolenski got his start at the Fine Arts Academy of Ponzan.  It’s an exciting trend and Smolenski finds himself right in the thick of it.

One of the artist’s more exciting current projects is being an elemental member of the band BNNT.

Acting as a duo, Smolenski teams with Daniel Szwed to become two members of a sound-bombing experiment, traveling about performing sonic assaults on improvised public settings, gallery spaces, and musical festivals as BNNT. The project has been ongoing since 2007 and serves as a fitting example of Smolenski’s understanding of art being equal parts audio, visual, and performance; a creative cocktail of expression which the artist sees as integral pieces to the same experiential puzzle. Smolenski’s work seems to present a disdain for making distinctions between audio and visual creations, about this the artist states, “There are no definitions or clear cut distinctions. I try to blur them in search for a total reception…Often the perception of art is limited by habits. I aim at creating a more open experience.”

BNNT’s sound is raucous and dissonant, ominously dark and distorted. Incorporating recorded elements such as political speeches, crowd grumblings, and other sonic disruption to build a sonic output defined by a feeling of unrest and unease, the work as a whole seems very much about the nature of politics both in the subjects approached by their songs and the nature of how they put together performances.

The DIY style of their work is immediately present in their mobile truck stage, guerrilla approach of their often unannounced shows, and outfits styled after balaclava-wearing revolutionaries and other agents of forced change and dissatisfaction. Smolenski’s creation of a baritone electric guitar with a body styled after a hollowed out tomahawk missile adds the finishing touch that points to a need to be taken seriously as a carefully considered art performance bent on change.

The work seems appropriately timed given Smolenski’s ideas about the lack of open minded-ness in the public’s approach to art paired with the state of flux and economic difficulty the European union has undergone as of late.

The venue that seems likely to be the most in need of the change Smolenski and Szwed can provide would probably be the world of art, although it is hard to say in most instances whether politics guides culture or if things actually happen the other way around. We are pulling for the latter. In either case, the next time the BNNT rolls into town we would all do well to bum a ride.

By Matthew Hassell

The post Sonic Weaponry with Smolenski and Szwed appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

MH: Your work comes across as really photographic in some way. When I first saw a show of yours online, I imagined them to be selectively exposed passages of color photo paper. How did you arrive at using ink in this way?
CC: Your observation is interesting—I build up layers of ink in quite a traditional way, using large brushes and a lot of water. Although not photographic in the literal sense, the process can be linked to a photographic one, the liquid developer slowly revealing shadows on the light-sensitive paper. In fact, the colors change while drying. The more layering, the darker and shinier the surface becomes. It gradually resembles a black mirror, a reflective surface saturated with water. I need to wait for it to be completely dry, and to remove the masks that protect the white part, to see the painting really appear.

MH: Given the compositions you construct, I imagine you get compared to Blinky Palermo quite a bit. Is there a connection there? What artists (if any) do you look to for inspiration?
CC: I have great admiration for Blinky Palermo’s work, of course. My primary intention however does not reside in formal concerns. My work comes out of a stretching of the light, disclosing brightness under veils. The need to construct—to construct liquid—comes as I work;  the search for a structuring device for this unlimited space. I do not look for inspiration outside of the components of the painting. Nevertheless, I could refer to the work of James Turrell, Agnes Martin, Joseph Albers, Claude Monet, Shitao, etc.—in addition to Blinky Palermo.

MH: Who would you choose to show beside you in a two-person museum show?
CC: On Kawara, Fra Angelico…

MH: Some of your lighter color choices are openly vibrant and luminous, while your darker forms seem decadently rich, sometimes almost receding away from the eye indefinitely. What is your inspiration or what do you think about when it comes to choosing a certain color for your next work?
CC: In fact, I do not make color choices prior to the painting. I can have a desire for a certain tonality but the color is not given, it arrives. The color and the shape are intricately connected. A dialogue exists between the initial gesture I make and the surface reaction, which I carefully observe in minute detail. It does not allow for repentir and implies definite choices, in openness to the potentialities of the painting. That is the reason I do not limit myself in terms of chromatic range, from dark to light.

Claire Chesnier, Résonance, installation view, 2013. House of Arts of Beijing, China. Photo Credit: Yge Gou.

MH: Do you see your work as opening up as spatial windows, or is your intent more about compositional decisions suited to a flattened, more analytical representation of space?
CC: My paintings are both an assertion of the surface and a search for a “light depth”. A presentation of a space specific to painting, not a representation. The combination of hard edges and spread colors creates this dual perception of flatness and depth. Depending on their temperature the colors recede or come forward, the whiteness around produces a perceptual oscillation. They can be seen as fragments of extent. As Paul Valery wrote, “Ce qu’il y a de plus profond en l’homme, c’est la peau (what is most profound/deep in man is skin)”

MH: As someone who also works on paper, I enjoy to your decision to hang your work without a frame. Is there something art-historically tired about a frame these days? What is you opinion of frames as a measure to elevate works on paper to a more marketable level as a commodity?
CC: From the beginning, I never wanted to frame my work. Not so much for the art historical concerns you mention but because the question of the frame is at the heart of my preoccupation, in terms of composition. Thus, I do not want to redouble the frame by adding one outside the painting. Furthermore, I wanted to avoid turning the painting into an object. I am aware that this inevitably occurs, but my attempt is to present my work as straightforwardly as possible so that the viewer can enter the materiality, feel the subtle nuances, the presence of the painting itself.

MH: What projects do you have coming up that you are excited to share?
CC: I will have a show in January in the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Val-de-Marne (Mac/Val) where two of my paintings just entered the collection. I am also very pleased to have been awarded two art prices: Foundation François Schneider and Art Collector, which will both result in an exhibition in the Fall 2014, and which will also lead to a catalogue. Until then, I have a project with Galerie du jour agnès b. in Paris and a production residency at the Centre de l’Estampe et du Livre in Lyon.

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I think a lot about the physicality of a thing versus an image of a thing—structure and surface, form and pictorial space. I think about things like solidity and weight, permanence/impermanence, balance, precariousness, and fleetingness. In this regard I get ideas just by standing next to things in the world, feeling the physical proximity of something and then looking at something else, perhaps a small detail across the room or across the street. You have to commit to both simultaneously.

I also like to look at architecture, mostly at the visual and physical relationship of body to space and for the transitional elements—seams that transition space to plane or frame an experience.

I like to look at archeological artifacts for the way they reveal a collective desire to locate meaning in form; I’m always fascinated that similar approaches (geometry, mark, monolith) are found across cultures and centuries. But my interest is also in what is missing – the void of information surrounding an object. I like the idea of the specific but unknown.

Recently I’ve been looking at heraldry and armor. I like the protective, fierce and ancestral nature of these things and also their strange relationship to surface and structure, or body and skin, or painting and support and in the case of heraldry, symbol and language. And also abstraction. The little tick marks used on crests stand in for fur or hide and have a nice relationship to the individual brush marks that build up a painting. I like to use that type of indexical mark/symbol in my work.

MH: Your recent work seems to be so much about design, with each piece asserting a wealth of composure and balance—are these works pretty mapped out from their inception, or does intuition play into the process somewhere along the way? 
RB: I think about this difference in terms of “asking” and “telling”; the idea of intuitively responding to what is there versus needing to actively plan in order to actually get these things built. There are times when I need to tell the piece what I want from it; for example, when I need to cut out an exact shape that I’ve templated, taking that intentional action on the material is a ‘tell’; I’m telling it what I need it to be. Then there are times when I need to step back and ask it: who are you, how are you working, what and how do you mean, what do you feel like spatially and physically, what do you need, who ARE you?

I generally start a work or body of work with a lot of asking in the form of digging through past ideas, pulling out old tests and running new ones, making sketches and notes, trolling my image bank and just looking around and being open. I have a very active drawing, template, maquette and sample making practice. A lot of intuition (as well as experience) about form, scale and proportion comes into play at this stage.

Once I’ve decided on the forms I’m interesting in making, I need to commit and make them. And that’s pretty much a straight build or “tell”. There’s not much room for error here, but if something’s really not working I will hack it apart and rebuild it. This doesn’t happen often though, because by the time I’ve decided to build something I’ve lived with the ideas, the drawings, the full-scale templates; I’ve tried it many different ways and asked it many different things. That said, the built objects are always a surprise.

Back in “ask” mode, I then need to establish the surfaces and how they will interact with the form. Some of these have been intuitively clear to me from the beginning, from the drawings, while others require some digging. I do a lot of drawing on the forms with chalk pastel, acrylic and spray paint, and collaging of cut paper. What I learn through this process informs my decisions about a final surface. I do a lot of trial and error and sanding. I want the surfaces to feel specific and inevitable, tight but not tortured. I want them to hold the planes and act on the forms. Be both of the form and apart from the form. I like to get it in one shot, and if it’s wrong, I sand it back off and try a different approach. In my newest work I’m leaving more and more of the raw surfaces and letting in some gesture.

I put a lot of leg work into arriving at the final piece but I don’t know that design would be the right word, perhaps it’s more like analytic intuition or intuition in conjunction with experience and analysis. Or more simply, ask and tell.

MH: In your current show at Blackston, there seems to be an interesting play between the work you are showing. The front room seems so balanced and ordered, rigidly symmetrical, while in the back room the forms feel a bit more playful and whimsical. Are these two modes of creation moving in different directions from one another, or are they integrated in some way that I’m not currently picking up on? 
RB: These works were developed simultaneously. There are numerous connections although they do operate as counterpoints to each other. My desire to explore strength and precariousness both of form and of human experience is something that carries through. With the symmetrical sculptures, I wanted them to feel stoic and planted, somewhat threatening but still human-scaled. I wanted them to express that certain type of foot-planted determination that is required of us. With the contrapposto pieces I wanted to capture some of the buoyancy and levity that is also required of us humans. Two different kinds of strength. I think the symmetrical pieces have a greater relationship to one’s body–you feel those physical voids correlating to your torso and head, whereas the relationship in the offset pieces is an internal relationship of the two distinct parts. I would say the symmetrical work expresses a certain singularity or oneness while the other work expresses a very precise two-ness.

Both types were developed out of shapes left over in my scrap pile after building other work. I became drawn to these triangles and parallelograms that were the typical end-bits and cut-offs, and also to these rectangular shapes with one swooping corner that is the shape that results from cutting in with a jigsaw to remove a negative shape. After having lost my studio in Sandy, perhaps there was something meaningful about literally picking up the pieces, picking up where I had left off. Or perhaps it’s more telling of the way artists seem to continually eat their own work in a regenerative way. Either way, the reclaimed forms hold an idea about ancestry and etymology of meaning that is central to the concepts in the work.

Rachel Beach, Long Standing installation view, back room. 2013. Image courtesy of Blackston.

MH: You have a very nice handle on the one word titles, each of which add something personal while being perfectly in line with the way the work operates formally. Are these titles arrived at somewhere along the way? Or are they a peek into what you were trying to convey with each piece? 
RB: Throughout the time I’m making the piece, right from beginning sketches through to installation, I make lists of words. In the back of my mind I’m thinking about future titles, but I’m also trying to get a grasp on how the pieces are working and the ways in which their forms or surfaces are pointing to meanings. Finding these words helps me understand what I’m trying to do with a given piece and with the body of work as a whole. If a word/meaning combination starts to make sense, I may steer a piece more in that direction, but mostly I let those words loosely float about and let the thing coalesce as it will. I don’t finalize titles until after the show is installed and usually end up pulling at least a couple of words out of the air. In each case there is an attempt to suggest something of the “character” of the piece, its personality. It’s usually something specific but open enough that it can capture a little round-up of meanings and references that the piece might have.

As with other aspects of the work, what I’m after is balancing the specific with the open, the formal with the referent.

MH: Tell me a little bit about your surface treatments—how do you decide on color, pattern, and how to select each of these things for each form? 
RB: In thinking about the color and surface choices generally I’m after a couple of things. I aim for these surfaces to affect the form–to make the object feel lighter or heavier than it is, to flatten or deepen certain areas, to steer the focus towards a part of the form or towards a certain referent that appeals to me and makes sense with the overall character of the piece. There are perceptual elements at play as well–I want to confound the form, to have the surface at times contradict or reinforce the form, to create some reversals. I want to make the image and the actual contingent on each other.

MH: What is the ideal home for one of your sculptures? Where do you imagine they will live some day? 
RB: Phew. If I thought about where these things were going to end up I would never make them! I have a kind of a phobia about heaviness and logistics and the futility of objects—so much labor, accumulation, and waste. I can only live in the now of the objects’ making, not the future home of the object, or else I panic. I mean really panic. I tend more to imagine the sun imploding in 2000 years and everything being gone. In that way the objects are a push-back against time; a really laborious, weighted grinding out of the here and now, a hedge against death. That said, they’d be great in a living room. Beside a Matisse.

MH: Windows, or holes clean through your work, seem to be something that reoccurs both in your sculpture and your wall based work. Is it important that the viewer can look through the work? 
RB: This is entirely central to the work. And it came out of my background as a painter. Thinking about an image on an object (aka a painting) and the space that an image occupies, I became obsessed with that transition from physical space—the space that we are standing in—to pictorial space, which is found as your eye crosses over the edge of that stretcher. When I started making sculpture, I wanted to invert that relationship so that the transitional edge became the physical sculpture and the image became the void. I think I’ve moved a little beyond that now whereby all the elements—form, image, and negative space—are more cross-contaminated. I’ve been working on the holes inside the work and the spaces created around and between the works, trying to make them operate as physical elements—persistent enough in their presence that they become objects themselves.

I also think about these negative spaces in terms of archeology and void—missing information.

I also think about them in terms of framing and contingency of meaning: that the reading of the object is contingent on context—what you see through it and around it.

I also think about them in terms of windows and seeing: foreground versus distance/vista looking; the space you’re in versus the space beyond/the space you’re looking at, and the back and forth between those. It’s kind of a figure ground relationship and reversal.

And of course I’ve already mentioned the body relationships.

MH: I’m also a bit of a sucker for your paintings. They are really nice. Did you start out making wall-based work and move to sculpture, or was it the other way around?
RB: I started out as a painter. In fact, my sculptures are still built like big shaped painting stretchers, hollow with two faces. I identify with that kind of surface-based, planar construction and I’m very steeped in color and mark (reductive though it may be). I think my whole practice grew out of staring at the side of a painting and thinking about how this whole object was being ignored in favor of image and pictorial space. Frank Stella was one of my early heroes—that kind of painting that is aware of itself as an object.

MH: Do you work your wall-based work in tandem with your sculpture? Are they connected or separate in regards to your process?
RB: They both grow out of the same scrap pile of thoughts and I work on them both simultaneously. A surface test for a sculpture may become a separate wall piece or vice versa. The basic thread is that spatial and physical dissonance; that connection between image and object, form and void, logic and mystery. Both have ideas about framing, contingency and human experience, and the references all play around with the same sorts of things. I guess with the objects I think much more about the body and with the wall work I think more about the eyes.

MH:What’s next for Rachel Beach? Please tell us about any exciting upcoming projects.
I’m currently an Artist in Residence at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation through Aug 2014, so am pushing the work forward there and will host an open studio in the spring. My solo show at Blackston just came down but I have a few works up in group shows through November/December (Meta Vista curated by Matthew Gerhing and Come Together: Surviving Sandy curated by Phong Bui). I’ll be in Miami at Untitled with Blackston in December. And then look for new work early next year at BAM in Brooklyn (alongside Katie Bell and Carolyn Salas curated by Holly Shen) and at Sargent’s Daughters in LES, where Gelah Penn and Inna Babaeva are curating a raucous sculpture show.

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No Core is the first monograph of Pamela Rosenkranz’s work as published by JRP|Ringier. Selecting the title No Core suggests an attempt towards a body of work where something integral is purposefully left out or missing, yet here Pamela Rosenkranz seems to find it difficult to avoid referencing the body at every turn—or at least the absence of it. The more we look at the work, it becomes apparent that the body that is missing is not that of the artist, but our own.

What does it mean to have no core? Traditionally the center of a being is closest to the principal nature of what makes the thing characteristically itself. As one moves out from this center, each layer of being that we encounter towards the outer limit becomes more superficial and more about appearance than substance.

Not to possess such a grounded or relatable center must mean the ability for an object to take on the nature of the one perceiving it. Is this not what all unguided visual experience will become anyway? When encountering a work, the less information that is provided means the more we are left to fill in for ourselves, given the visual and informational baggage that we carry with us to the viewing experience.

Maybe what Rosenkranz is saying here is that the principle or original nature of an object intending to find its way into art history depends less on the intentions of the maker and more on the perceived impact it makes through the lens of those with a greater knowledge of where things fall in relation to the artwork that came before it. No matter what the original core may be, we will eventually erase its meaning and replace the origin point of the work with whatever history will see fit.

Postmodern, Contemporary, Post-postmodern? Rosenkranz’s work posits to the fact that these labels matter very little in the end. They are merely handles for us to cling to as we wave our hands madly in the darkness, trying to contain the swirling overflow of art-historical information. Our difficulty with this experience is accelerated by the constantly evolving pull of informational technology. Rosenkranz knows this just as much as anyone. Her work is an act of release. It is a letting go of the anxiousness that has previously enveloped our need to define all that is set before us. Rosenkranz’s work simply is, and in letting go of the desire to self-describe, it is able to become a body of work overflowing with potential.

Reviewed by Matthew Hassell

No Core is available at Sequence Press.

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