For the upcoming exhibition Computer Aided, the Masur Museum is showing works by the artists Keliy Anderson-Staley (AR), Joshua Chambers (LA), Harold Cohen (CA), Craig Damrauer (LA), Hasan Elahi (MD), Jenny Holzer (NY), John Rodriguez (LA), Marni Shindelman & Nate Larson (GA & MD), Jes Schrom & Graham Simpson (LA), and Kate Shannon (OH), in addition to short video loops from well-known artists Mat Collishaw (UK), Damien Hirst (UK), Shepard Fairey (LA), Jenny Holzer (NY), and Bill Viola (CA), purchased online.

Computer Aided takes a hard look at hierarchy in contemporary art, considering the Masur Museum’s own position as a small institution in upstate Lousiana. By purchasing videos from s[edition], a company founded two years ago to sell limited-edition digital art, the Masur can exhibit these famed contemporary artists “who are otherwise beyond the Mansur’s means,” says curator Benjamin Hickey.

Since the works have been translated to a new kind of art object to be displayed on the screen and bought online, meaning is inevitably altered. Viewing these fabrications or reductions of esteemed visionaries is strange, as is the case with Hirst, Fairey, and Viola. Holzer and Collishaw seem better suited to this format: Holzer’s slogans move across the screen and feel like the kind of art that makes sense to be distributed as a digital file; Collishaw’s Whispering Weeds (a recreation of Albrecht Durer’s Great Piece of Turf, a watercolor from 1503) is beautiful and loops perfectly.

Mat Collishaw. Whispering Weeds, undated; still from s(edition) digital limited edition video; edition 129 of 10,000, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and s(edition), London. Pending accession to Permanent Collection of Masur Museum of Art, Monroe, LA.

Bill Viola’s video A Phrase from “Chris”, part of his Transfiguration series, is so short that it feels incomplete and its transcendent power is stripped away. Hickey says the “Viola[‘s] work here is like the title, a phrase. You get what you pay for, [a] very short excerpt.” In this case, the art has been reduced to a repetitive backwards loop.

Bill Viola. A Phrase from Chris, 2011; still from s(edition) digital limited edition video; edition 45 of 5,000, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and s(edition), London. Pending accession to Permanent Collection of Masur Museum of Art, Monroe, LA.

S[edition] wants to tap into an unexploited market of consumers with limited funds for art collecting. This is not a new idea—it seems like the same kind of thing as selling cards and magnets in museum gift shops. The word seditionis worth defining here—”the stirring up of rebellion against the government in power.” Hickey notes “It is no mistake that s[edition] puns on the word sedition, because it circumvents traditional critical outlets and brings a segment of the current art historical canon out of its ivory tower to be critically appraised.” S[edition] seems to challenge the existing gallery hierarchy, but I imagine people buying these art pieces primarily as screen savers.

Shephard Fairey. Día de los Muertos, n.d.; still from s(edition) digital limited edition video; edition 118 of 5,000, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and s(edition), London. Pending accession to Permanent Collection of Masur Museum of Art, Monroe, LA.

The limited edition digital art reminds me of illusory Wall Street financial products, created by imaginative use of contracts and paperwork. S[edition] has strict rules for owning and exhibiting purchased art. “All s[edition] art must be streamed online. This is one way for the site to monitor the dissemination of its content and make it less likely to be distributed or purchased outside of its purview.” Most other kinds of media allow you to use the media while offline, and S[edition]’s Frequently Asked Questions section notes, “Moving images or videos are not currently available to download…Free s[edition] apps to support offline video viewing will be added soon.” And like the recent lessons of Wall Street, these works raise many questions: what ensures that this art will hold its value? What happens if s[edition] fails?

Keliy Anderson-Staley. Ellie, 2010; wet plate collodion tintype with back mounted hook for hanging; edition 1 of 5, 46 x 36 in; also displayed as archival pigment print back mounted on aluminum disband; edition 1 of 1, 11 x 14 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the Masur Museum of Art, Monroe, LA.

Hickey describes how the s[edition] videos will be shown: “All of the purchased pieces will loop endlessly while on view in the exhibition. The five s[edition] artists will be displayed together in one of the two main galleries to illustrate the hierarchy concept of the show. Viola and Hirst will play on ceiling mounted projectors. Holzer, Collishaw, and Fairey will be shown on tv pedestals. Hickey says “In the bottom of the pedestals you will be able to see the laptop playing the video. The non-s[edition] artists will have larger installations of their work in the three galleries on the second floor above the main galleries.”

Nate Larson & Marni Shindelman. Tell me I'm not making a mistake. Tell me you're worth the wait #fb, 2011, Geolocation: Tributes to the Data Stream; digital chromogenic print; 24 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artists and the Masur Museum of Art, Monroe, LA.

Hickey selected artworks that utilize mass-market electronic technology, so that “museum visitors can take stock of newer art forms as well as evaluate technology’s potential impact on culture in broad terms.” Bringing together “a variety of artists at different points in their careers” emphasizes the non-heirarchical approach to curating a show that the internet allows.

John Rodriguez. Concentric Code, 2013; digital image. Courtesy of the Artist and the Masur Museum of Art, Monroe, LA.

Computed Aided is on view at the Masur Museum from June 26 through October 5, 2013.

When I attended the artist’s tour, the five spoke of the narratives of their texts, the translation of the symbolic language to sculpture and image, and compressing the narrative. A book’s structure can be compared to snakes, a river, a labyrinth. These artists break the temporal and spatial barriers of the linear text.

Guy Laramee‘s lush valleys sparkle as we assume the aerial viewpoint looking over verdant landscapes. Within an unreadable text, a cave glitters as though looking into a geode. I imagine mountainous islands, the kind of primitive area imagined in stories of the south seas and exploration of new lands.

Guy Laramee, Mushroom Island, carved book, pigmented ink, gold.

Guy Laramee was born and lives in Montreal. He says, “I still have a hard time considering myself a book artist” because it’s only a portion of his work—he was first a composer then went back to school at 40. “I had the idea of putting a book in the sandblaster.” He dug holes in the books and coated them with shining pigmented ink. When he spoke of his art, he told the story of a people, “after the fall of the Great Wall of America, they find stories of their own culture.” He invents stories to make meaning for these works, so that his projects have purpose, and to delve into the unknown. He names his “Caverna” after Saramago’s latest book and refers to Plato’s allegory. “One gains true knowledge through erosion, not accretion,” the catalog says.

Guy Laramee, The Way Out, carved book, pigmented ink, and lamp.

Long Bin Chin says, “I create another space for the book.” He has carved many heads of warriors and Renaissance men. Here are fantasy artifacts, looking like carved stone with sedimentary layers. A little color has been painted on, dusting the faces like makeup.

Long Bin Chen, Culture Warrior White.

Not pictured here is a pile of books on a shelf. Within his dioramas, he gives us fantasy worlds, the kind of thing we hope to enter when we read a book. In a pile of books on a shelf, Chin has made a tiny series of stages within the books, amplified by a peep hole. He says they are maybe nonsense or maybe a reaction to the title. These little figures remind me of one of Duchamp’s later pieces, installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Étant donnés. When looking through the peep hole, you see an erotic scene, bizarre with its flowing waterfall and pastured grounds. Within Chin’s carved book “The Scalpel and the Sword,” a woman lies naked on the floor, maybe dead in the middle of the room hung with images of Christ and two women. Two women stand over looking at the figure, whose hand lies across her chest. “On the Outskirts of Hope” shows a big Mickey Mouse and a soldier, both with articulating gestures. I recalled reading one of the last chapters in Errol Morris’s collection of essays, Believing is Seeing. Chapter 5 describes controversy over the placement of a Mickey Mouse doll and other children’s toys in Lebanon warzones.

Brian Dettmer, Universal Standard.

Brian Dettmer was born in Chicago and lives in Atlanta. His postcard rack of books shows modernity overlapping. He began making art as a painter, loving its tactile qualities, and exploring the “difference between art and communication.” Some say, “art is a universal language,” but “nothing is universal” he says. “I was feeling really guilty about ripping up books,” but “I continued to carve—it was literally like reading, going one layer at a time.” It’s a collage, a sculpture, and like a painting. His characters come alive from the pages, lines thickened in 3D.

Brian Dettmer, Manual of Engineering.

Dettmer spoke about how “we are losing access to having our files on our computer” because of cloud storage. Our data is vulnerable and there is a “threat of loss” with our modern digital technology. These books, on the other hand, are obsolete. He says his “Standard American” is a “multicellular landscape” and an homage to Duchamp’s urinal. He is “breaking out of that box…that Joseph Cornell type box.” “I peel back the cover and seal the edges.” “The book is a machine.” “These little fragments break apart a story.” He references a totem pole and the labyrinth of Borges’ library.

Francesca Pastine, ArtForum #40, Unsolicited Collaboration with Zoe Leonard.

Francesca Pastine, from New York to San Francisco, says “I tend to take my time with my work. I like time-intensive activity.” She came of age in the 70s and was exposed to Civil Rights, the Women’s Movement, and the Vietnam War. In 2005, she started using Art Forum because her “friends had a tremendous amount of Art Forum magazines in their houses and no one wanted to throw them away.” She describes her process: “I take my inspiration from the cover and use a #11 exacto knife to make a topography.” Using the thick glossy packet of icons, dripping with gravity, Francesca says she is “manipulating cultural production” in order to “manipulate something that supposed to be manipulating me.”

Doug Beube, Tract.

Doug Beube was born in Ontario, lives in New York and works as a carpenter. His background is in photography where he modeled himself after Diane Arbus. His “sensibility as a photographer is to collapse space then expand it in the imagination.” He’s fascinated with a sense of the “other” and transforms obvious objects into something very sensuous, “like a body.” He created a “tract” on the floor of the gallery, a path, but don’t walk on it. Made from 50 romance and mystery novels, it shows a sequence of cut layers, like the narrative, a single forward moving line but seen at once. He tells us that it resembles a sine wave and also the GI tract of a human body. The work is like a “hyperlink” allowing us to move between temporal states.

He used a paper guillotine for the sliced works. For his maps, he used a belt sander to erode the paper. They are layered, looking moth eaten. His disaster series looks like birds. He calls them twisters. It reminds me of seeing body builders who rip phone books in half on tv.

Doug Beube, Disaster Series, Twister.

All of these works are subtractive; they carve away the book pages. They also stack and reconnect the cut pieces, so they amalgamate edited parts too. Sometimes editing brings together the most poignant content of the book, and for others, new narratives are created. Rebound is on exhibition until July 6th in Charleston, SC. This project is sponsored by Bibliolabs and supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Kyle Austin Dunn, Balled Up Color and Lines, 2013. Acrylic and enamel on polystyrene and PVC, 32 x 50 x 16 inches

Some of Kyle Austin Dunn’s artworks look sugary and delicious with factory-made colors. He rejects the colors of nature for the neon inventions of man, leaving me curious as to his relationship to the natural world. The paintings seems very California–a feeling of newness and plasticity, and the rainbowed/dayglow color palette and graphic quality is reminiscent of commercial culture, screenprinting, and street art. Dunn says he’s gotten that response before: “more specifically L.A.,” but he’s not sure why exactly. In response to his palette, he says “pure chroma is more abstract than earth tones or more subdued colors, and I’m drawn to that quality of it. It’s enigmatic in addition to being striking.”

Viewing his paintings, I assume the natural world must be uninteresting to him, but he replies, “It may be surprising to hear that the outdoors are my favorite place to be…perhaps it is that I try to avoid reproducing nature in any way because it is never as incredible as the real thing.” I think this is correct. His paintings are not about reproducing reality or real space.

“I think that I enjoy the landscape here as much as anything. Having grown up in a such a flat place, it’s inspiring to be on cliffs that overlook the Pacific, or nearby mountains that offer a view extending hundreds of miles into the distance. The landscape and weather in California change so drastically from place to place, prompting a lot of outdoor exploration for me personally. I’m always itching to see what’s around the corner of a hiking trail or down some unmarked dirt road. …where I live (which is the East Bay right now), there seem to be so many younger artists like myself, which definitely creates a sense of belonging and purpose.”

Kyle Austin Dunn, A Line and Its Body, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 55 x 40 inches

Often pairing bright colors with neutrals, his expansive gray spaces feel like being next to the hull of a huge ship or concrete wall. A Line and Its Body is large and precise but feels very tender and humanized. Its bizarre forms remind me of playing a computer game with its simplified shapes, smooth edges and applied surface design.

His twisted pieces of metal remind me of Rauschenberg’s metal sculptures though the materials are new rather than found/recycled. His oversized paperclip reminds me of Oldenburg. He cites influences such as John Chamberlain, known for his crushed car sculptures. Dunn says Fred Sandback is a favorite; the influence of his minimal linear sculpture is clear.

Dunn playfully explores geometric and formal/spacial concerns, sometimes pulled together in disparate and awkward compositions. His paintings are completely imagined, fantastical, and explore formal concepts by way of geometric forms, many of which look unreal. His sculpture brings reality to the kinds of the spaces that he paints. Four Spaces is very much about space, but also has a sense of humor.

Kyle Austin Dunn, Four Spaces, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 88 x 76 inches

The sculpture and paintings allow for two approaches to similar content. Dunn says “the sculpture and the painting feel very much the same thing to me. Things three dimensional are usually painted, and occupy space in ways that often mirror how forms do in two dimensions.” Looking at Studs, Dunn challenges the environment that the art inhabits.

Kyle Austin Dunn, Studs, 2012. Acrylic on wood and floor, 48 x 68 x 96 inches

Dunn makes art from his studio as a graduate fellow at the Headlands, north of San Francisco. He shares a home with his wife and friends in Berkeley and makes his living building custom furniture for clients around the Bay Area. He relishes in “the unique opportunity to travel between the bustling hyperactivity of San Francisco and soberingly calm environment of the Marin Headlands on a daily basis.” He recently completed his MFA at UC Davis.

Sandra Erbacher, #116 (I kept this part away from you), 2013, digital billboard, 14 x 48'. Photograph by Jim Escalante.

At first, Sandra Erbacher’s sculptures and installations seem simple, dealing with space, geometry, and formal concerns in a playful way. After learning that she lived in Germany until age 19, her identity emerges more fully, contextualized in the era of the Berlin wall and her divided country. She says that her imagery “can equally refer to former East Germany, former Soviet Yugoslavia, the Communist Manifesto by Marx, Minimalism or Brutalist architecture-all instances or manifestations of failed Utopian thought.”

On the surface, her work is an antidote to our often overwhelming/overstimulating world. She uses common material, often industrial or commercial products, but renders them anti-monumental. She calls this approach “material failure”, showing the “inadequacy of the object or image to reveal its history and former or indeed current function.” For her digital billboard display, the image first appears as a landscape, especially from a distance. But upon deeper investigation, the viewer is rewarded when the material is detected.

Sandra Erbacher, #116 (I kept this part away from you), view from a distance. Photograph by Jim Escalante.

Erbacher explains this temporal display: “It is a photograph of the opening of a battered, old cardboard box…. Formally, the image vibrates between the illusion of landscape and the representation of an object. …Displaying an image of a discarded object that has outlived its use-value on a billboard, a tool of communication reserved for the marketing of products earmarked for consumption, creates a subtle sense of disruption….”

Sandra Erbacher, #117, wall paper collage, approx 6ft x 20ft.

She describes her #117, wall paper collage as “the ruins of a WW II war memorial are resurrected and translated into the burnt out skeletal structure of a house”, provoking the viewer to consider the state of Germany after WWII, and the past in general as it reverberates through the present. Though there is “no literal translation of a personal narrative,” she tells us, Erbacher describes the connection between mass memory, history, and her identity: “My work is certainly marked by a sense of personal displacement stemming from my departure from Germany almost 15 years ago (at the age of 19) and my move to, first the UK and now the US. This displacement led to a constant search for a sense of belonging and roots, and a curious feeling of nostalgia combined with a sense of detachment towards my country of birth. This personal search for identity and history, which is marked by an acute sense of loss or melancholia and the wish to recover past memories is coupled with an analytical fascination with the history of my country and a more general need to understand and deconstruct a political or social system, its structures and ideologies as well as the mechanisms through which it perpetuates itself. In particular, the works deal with the idea of the breakdown of a system, the obsolescence of monuments and ideologies and the voids these leave behind. They are in essence the result of a process of borrowing and sampling in a continuous rewriting and questioning of history.”

Sandra Erbacher, #118, spray paint on wall, approx. 4ft x 12ft.

When viewing Erbacher’s #118 spray paint on a wall, images of graffiti on the Berlin wall immediately come to mind. Upon first seeing a piece of the wall, I was mystified by the layers of paint–the transformation of the structure shows an eruptive need for art and the how citizens dealt with the imposing form. Erbacher’s #118 is directly informed by the wall, Berlin, and her experiences of being a tourist in her own country.

She recounts her experiences of Berlin as she struggles to understand her identity: “It was only while I was already living in London that I spent my first summer in Berlin in 2001. All of the reference points that I had of the city until then were filtered through media images. I remember watching the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 on TV with my parents. I was moved to tears like everyone else while at the same time I was struggling to understand the politics or actual scale/meaning of the situation. It seemed like a strange mythological event, distant yet at the same time ever present. When I finally arrived in Berlin it was very different than what I had expected. I remember feeling curiously detached and adrift while searching for resonances, fragments of history, and a sense of belonging. Buildings and places look familiar yet at the same time alien, undefined and constantly in flux. …I am searching for meaningful scraps of the past – a past that I can only imagine – that might offer a sense of belonging in an unstable world marked by uncertainties. I walk the streets with a map of the wall that formerly divided the city struggling to find and follow its trajectory. Instead of the ruins I was hoping to find that would give me a clue to the city’s troubled history, I am confronted with streets, apartment blocks or wasteland – pauses inscribed in the patchwork fabric of the city. It is only at a closer look that Berlin’s everyday environment, which seems to be filled with conflicting architectural styles, empty spaces or absences, offers us its story. Far from being silent, these gaps speak of a city marked by multiple erasures and inscriptions of ideological struggles. Burdened with the weight of history and in constant search for its identity, there is no other city like Berlin manifesting the instabilities of ideology in such a dramatic way.

Speaking directly about #118 spray paint on a wall, Erbacher says: “The work clearly echoes my many visits to the city of Berlin…. In particular, it relates to a sequence of images I took in the Berlin subway station ‘Oranienburger Tor’. They index the passing of time and the ideological and territorial struggles that have taken place and have been inscribed in the walls of the subway station. Whose city is it and whose stories are heard? On these walls, history is continuously erased and re-written. The result of these multiple acts of obliteration, however, is not a silencing of voices or chapters of history but an emphasising of the fragmented nature of history, its multiple points of view and the struggles that have taken place.”

Sandra Erbacher, exhibition installation.

Sandra Erbacher, #114 (The diagonal frees itself from the current order of things), 2013, light box, wood, approx. 8' x 4'.

Erbacher tells us that her “multidisciplinary practice evolves from a symbolic act of translation: the dislocation, fragmentation, and re-contextualization of visual signs.” For the wooden sign she created, she uses Deleuze and Guattari’s “A Thousand Plateaus” (1980), a text which is itself formally fragmented in its attempt to examine fragmentation in language. She tells us that it is not a direct quote but instead “a deconstructive ‘enactment’ of the performativity of language as suggested by these theorists” and “a kind of counter-method or theory turned against itself.” The statement present on the wooden sign (The diagonal frees itself from the current order of things) was created when she “combed through the book picking random fragments of sentences” mimicking the “performative and rhizomatic character of language pinpointed by Deleuze and Guattari”. Erbacher wonders about this work, “Is there a larger meaning at play or is what we see a rebellious gesture of refusal whose potential for action or defiance is arrested by its obscurity?”

Upcoming exhibitions by Sandra Erbacher include “Neon and Light Biennial: A national exhibition of artists using light as a medium” at the University of Wisconsin, Stock Pavillion, April 19 & 20, 2013; “Sandra Erbacher and Eddie Villanueva” at Circuit 12 Contemporary, Dallas, June 29-August 3, 2013; and “System Failure”, a group show curated by Erbacher, represented by The Contemporary London, September 2013. Erbacher studied Sociology and Cultural Studies and graduated with an MA and BA from Goldsmiths College, London, in 2003 and achieved a BFA in painting at Camberwell College of Art, London in 2009. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the School of Visual Arts (New York), Kunstverein Speyer (Germany), Umbrella Gallery (Leeds), and Five Years (London). She is the recipient of a University of Wisconsin Fellowship, winner of the city of Madison Blink Grant 2012 and is currently studying towards her MFA at UW Madison.

When viewing the body in the series “with” by Marta Systiak, I wonder if I should be aroused or not. Or, if I am aroused and the artist did not intend this, what does that mean? Sexuality is often part of the viewer’s attraction to the nude, even when the work does not overtly sexualize the body. Stysiak further complicates this notion by depicting the nude singularly, alone and autonomous, yet paired with a pet.

When considering Stysiak’s photographs, the 1781 oil on canvas by Henry Fuseli titled The Nightmare comes to mind. It depicts a woman, her body draped by a nightgown, in a pose of ecstasy while dreaming, depicting a demonic creature alongside the head of a horse with piercing eyes. The animals and objects in the room act as symbols in the dream, expressions of the subconscious. Though Stysiak’s works are based in reality, they can be read in a similar, intimate and symbolic, way. How a person organizes their space, how they occupy it, and what animals they choose as their friend, all offer insights into their personality. Stysiak’s photographs observe aspects of the human pysche, rather than ideals of bodily beauty.

Henry Fuseli , The Nightmare, 1781

I think of Peter Greenaway’s film A Zed & Two Noughts (1986), which, in part, speaks to the relationship between man and animal. Two twin zoologists, in shock after the simultaneous death of their wives, examine the process of death and decay in search of understanding their suffering. Venus de Milo, a vampish colleague, tries to seduce the scientist brothers to liven them up a bit. In a bedroom scene, she is naked and talking with one of the brothers as he lay in the bed, holding a glass plate of snails, observing and touching them, talking poetically about their vital role in the processing of decaying material. The scientist is more interested in the snails and his work, and viewing his nude body with the little creatures becomes unerotic and depressing, but beautiful. The snails seem to bring more refuge than the woman.

Since antiquity, the nude has been used  to present the ideals of human form. Examples of non-sexualized or non-idealized nudes are not common in the early history of photography. An early and bold departure from this tradition is found in the photographs of Diane Arbus. Retired man and his wife at home in a nudist camp one morning, N.J. (1963) shows the ideals of nudism–no shame in exhibiting the body in its most natural state.

Diane Arbus, Retired man and his wife at home in a nudist camp one morning, N.J., 1963

Trying to understand her subjects’ basic connection to nature, Stysiak depicts them as nude, alongside whatever connection to natural world she can find in their lives. In the city, this means pets, parks, potted plants or the bathtub. The objects and the space tell a story too, revealing some of the identity of the portrayed subject. The gritty filmstock shows the process of the photographer–I imagine her entering the space with a small unobtrusive camera, no tripod, without lighting equipment, in the comfort of the darkness of night. The use of flash photography gives the impression that the images are not posed, but pulled from a collection of vernacular photos.

All of these images are taken in the city, where “the animal becomes the only link a person has with nature,” according to Aleksandra Szymczyk, who writes about Stysiak’s work on her website. Szymczyk continues: “The relation with the animal becomes a substitute for the old forms of community, because the anonymity and loneliness in the city are much more painful.”

Stysiak’s photographs do not seek to flatter,  nor to take advantage of her nude subjects. The view of the body gives clues about age and lifestyle. The pairing of a pet with the nude body shows that the intent is something other than simply revealing the beauty of the body. Instead, the images are about the relationship between figure and animal. Pets provide their caretakers with a special kind of companionship. We are often willingly nude around our animals – our platonic friends. Some people are more or less comfortable with their pets being around while they engage in sex. A dog seems to know what is going on, but we don’t consider it coherent enough to be embarrassed. Still, an intelligent animal has some understanding.

Stysiak’s images reveal a range of relationships with the animals. For example, the woman posing with her horse is much more erotic than the man sitting on his sofa next to the fishtank. It seems a bit taboo to talk about animals in the context of sexuality. Animals have no shame in expressing their sex drive.

Viewing the nude body in the public context is often conflicting–for some, there is a natural urge to eroticize (or be repulsed or offended by) the body. For others more accustomed to seeing the it, there is a greater acceptance of the utility of nudity. Knowing they are being photographed, Stysiak’s subjects enter into this conversation, as they display their bodies in a public place, the internet.

Mirka’s photographic series Swallow is deeply veiled. She returned to the Czech Republic, Spain, and Germany to photograph with the intent of confronting memories. As if trying to analyze another person’s dreams, I freely associate in order to make sense of the images. But by doing that, I mostly analyze my own mind. Thinking about Carl Jung, dreams are highly unique to the dreamer and the dreamer has vital knowledge to decoding the dream–that is, all the experiences of their life. And so, the artist has a special first hand knowledge of their art. I want some memories to apply to these images, but the images feel intentionally secretive. Perhaps I can look at them as if they are tarot cards trying to send me a message.

After sending Mirka my description of her images, she replied with only a little detail.

I’m attracted to the foliage of this mountainous location, looks like Spain. Are these flowers growing under the shade cloths?

Mirka: Spain? yes.

shade cloths? yes, its a net.

Saying the word ‘swallow’ as I look through the images immediately gives basic meaning when looking at hands swallowed by a tree, a person soaking in the river, the cat squeezing through a tight space. What is this first image, a black form submerged in of water? a hand–I see a tiny bit of flesh?

Mirka: It is ink over my face.

My thoughts later as I read Jung’s ‘Man and His Symbols': The literal reading might be the obvious truth. You don’t want us to see your face. You show us a vivid scene but not a clear depiction of your body. Ink is black; ink is text; ink is the substance of tattoos. Water is a great beauty and beast–it is seductive, refuge, baptism, cleansing, life-giving, stormy and suffocating.

This is the first figure to appear before us, covered by a palm frond–a sign of the location, Spain. The figure looks as though standing or sinking, not alive or dead. And in the next image, unneeded stuff and an overgrown bush–not sure what type of plant this is but environment looks hot and arid, central is the netted yellow ball. Seeing the poured cement roof, I imagine a quaint house above.

A mysterious cave–how is it illuminated?

Mirka: I did a installation with almost 200 grave candles in a ocean flooded cave in Spain…

In the corner of a small room, keep the pillows off the floor while you change the sheets. There’s a big guy napping in the park next to a cedar tree. Where a fish had begun to decay, there is prolific life. Some big foliage going wild behind the hotel’s dumpsters and you are stuck in the dusty little rented room. The coffee machine used by so many looks gross. Knives hang where pictures used to be, faded wallpaper in this old place. A figure in a black jacket in a shallow river just dunked their head–was it cold?

Mirka: Yes-it’s a river in czech republic-where my grandparents had a hut. The jacket is from my grandfather. He wore it when he was fishing.

Faded screen by flash–wish I was out there walking the beach. That’s a pretty cactus, but you can make it prettier with red plastic. Covered like the meticulously constructed cloth houses, red in the center like the red cave. The only other figures are two distant men–one on a tv walking alone on the beach and another napping father who appears not to see you–and a distant child. These images all seem taken in isolation. I wonder if you are the figure and if there is another camera person?

Mirka: They are all self-portraits except the guy–that is my father under his favorite tree next to a forest where we have a little hut in Czech republic-where he originally came from. There’s also one of my mom.

I am left asking myself–How do we decode a message presented to us in images alone? Does my description of your work do anything to reveal her message? Or does my looking at these images reflective the state of my own mind?

Mirka: A quote that I was accompanied by throughout the whole project is by Haruki Murakami from his novel, Kafka on the Shore. Until a minute ago it felt so real, but now it seems imaginary. Just a few steps is all it takes for everything associated with it to lose all sense of reality. And me-the person who was there until a moment ago now-I now seem imaginary too.«

Reading Dr. Jens-Ole Rey’s writing about this work tells me that Mirka’s photographic process was cathartic.

“The major part of our memories
is virtually “asleep” within us, waiting to be
“awakened” by some outer cause, in which case
we suddenly realize those memories consciously
and allow them to, once again, gain a tremendous
sensual presence. ”

“Once arrived, painful
memories can lose their terror when processed
artistically and/or emotionally.”

“Only by means of photographic fixation, Mirka
Laura Severa is able to add form and structure [to memories],
by which they are stabilized and completed.”

The images show the ambiguity of memory by being ambiguous and avoiding interpretation.

“…the self-portraits staged in detail: A
state of uncertainty between depth and surface,
between veiling and revelation, between then
and now. “

By examining the past in the same location, Mirka intentionally “projects herself on the past…”

“In the photograph which shows her
lying on the bed of her deceased grandparents,
she increases this realistic examination of her
memory by wearing her grandmother’s dress.”

“…the whole series
is divided into two parts: In her self-portraits
she (re-)constructs her memories by accurate
arrangements, in which fundamental objects of
her own past appear as props. The other photographs
show mostly vacant “spaces” …”

And by intentionally refraining from much verbal detail, she wants a subjective reading of the images and to stir the viewers’ memories rather than reveal her own.

“In analogy to the subjectivity of memory,
Mirka Laura Severa deliberately leaves the viewer
in the dark about her personal archive and
seals herself off to a concrete interpretation.
”

“The pictures describe moods and
feelings rather than concrete situations”, says
Mirka Laura Severa. She explicitly invites us, the
viewers, in this very moment, to share our feelings
with her, which, to return to Murakami, may
seem imaginary in the following minute.
”

–Dr. Jens-Ole Rey
A Museum Of Things
Berlin, Germany

The work “Swallow” consists of 74 image in total, which were made into a book and a small edition of handmade analog c-prints with sizes raning fom 80/70 to 110/75cm.

Josh wrote about his paintings as “inventions shaped by forces of society, economics, technology, and nature, moving in a trajectory of constant re-invention,” and it made me wonder if his paintings were from source material or imagination? It seems like these pieces have some image underneath them that has been totally obliterated, layers of mark-making cover over each other. In Folding, there are shadows behind the caged form. Linear, geometric objects appear in a strange compressed/folded perspective. Some images seem ripe for reading into, for example, ‘Imploding’ appears to me to be a ship at sea. His images seem to reference his physical surroundings, but is formal experimentation more important to the painter?

Josh Highter, Folding, 30" x 40", 2012

“During construction of this work, I often start with fairly nebulous forms, but as I keep layering and taking away, the structures really begin to find themselves…I hope that the viewer sees moments of destruction and creation in them, of spaces coming together or being broken apart. There is something so bound to the earth about these ideas, but I love taking them somewhere else. ‘Folding’ was really a quick piece. I wanted to make a painting completely out of spray paint. I definitely had elements I wanted to incorporate into it, a sense of heaviness at the top, a feeling of lightness at the bottom.

Your question about whether or not the images I paint represent actual spaces is at the heart of my process as a painter. I started painting very traditional landscapes on location in my home state of Vermont. I grew up in what I now recognize as one of the most beautiful parts of the US…I would just take an easle, go for a hike, and go for it. I spent a lot of time painting like that.

I began to realize that what draws me to the landscape is this sense of exploration…but when I am the one creating the space I get to fold into it a lot of elements that just speak to me, like a moment, a line or some color, from another place and time. I moved away from painting on location to painting from models (which kept a lot of the integrity of the original space) to painting from collages or composite drawings that are based in reality but are really created spaces. …I am still in many ways an observational painter.”

Josh Highter, Forming on the Bottom, 51 x 57", 2011

“I think my experiences working with my dad in the woodshop really made me interested in the process of creating. I often think of painting as building. So, for example, a technique I learned from my dad is a process called bookmatching where you cut a piece of wood into two and then align the pieces so they form a mirror image of one another. I like that this type of repetition is both organic and architectural. This is a look I wanted to recreate in ‘Forming on the Bottom’…I painted on a large plastic sheet and then used that as a sort of printing plate, which I pressed onto the canvas.

…I really missed the rugged sort of lonely landscape of Vermont. For me, my immediate experience with ‘Forming on the Bottom’ is that type of ruggedness. …[But] the narrative of the place, once I’m in the process of painting, becomes much less important to me than actually creating the space within the canvas. For most of my work I tend to paint and then scrape down over and over again to build up the canvas.”

Josh Highter, Imploding, 48" x 48", 2011

“I think of my paintings as invented spaces but they are definitely formed in a process of taking memories and moments from my own experiences and observations. With ‘Imploding’ I had been working on a collage, cutting out pieces from photos and drawings. The red repeating lines in the painting were actually a pattern from fence posts that I walked past frequently in Bloomington [Indiana].

The bottom of the piece, all of the bits of green and white, I drew in with the intention that it would be an aerial perspective of a forest. …when I was visiting Vermont and hiked up Mount Abe, the view from across the mountain was this series of trees that was exactly what I was trying to reference. So I guess there is an iterative process in that way to the work…. It’s cool that you think this piece look like a sailboat. I look at my work and I recall a series of moments from my own life, I like that someone else can look at these and create their own stories for how these spaces are formed.”

Josh Highter, Fault Line 1, Digital Collage, 2013

“Being in California, the one biggest change is that I’ve begun to really be interested in light again. For example, the piece ‘Fault Line 1′, something I think of as a drawing but that I made on my iphone, really plays with themes of space and patterning… I’m also working on watercolors and drawings based on observations direct from the source, which I haven’t done in a while. I guess that’s another thing about being in California, I’m outdoors all the time and I’m taking the work outdoors again as well.”

Josh Highter is an MFA graduate of Indiana University, Bloomington, and previously taught drawing and painting at Herron College of Art and Design in Indianapolis.

———–

Vancouver-bases artist, Jason Gowans currently serves as the Director of Gallery 295 and  is a founding member of The Everything Co. art collective. He received a BFA in photography at Concordia University in Montreal.

Celie Dailey: Regarding your series titled 5 Landscape Modes, what do you mean by the word ‘modes’ exactly?

Jason Gowans: I like the word ‘mode’ because it sounds like modus operandi. A mode is sort of a way of being. Representation of landscape reveals it’s structure. I also like the word ‘mode’ because it makes reference to art history’s two rectangles: portrait and landscape. To make this series, I built my maquettes and then photographed them with a 4×5 camera in multiple exposures. I literally rotated my model to photograph it from different perspectives. This rotation was significant and when thinking about a name for the work I liked the idea of people with smartphones cameras, rotating them portrait mode to landscape mode.

Jason Gowans, 5 Landscape Modes, Installation at Gallery FUKAI

Jason Gowans, 5 Landscape Modes

CD: The standard 35mm format of a photograph dramatically diminishes the immense scale of an exterior space. Shooting in medium format, you enlarge beyond the model’s size, but I don’t think your interest is to display the awe of landscape. Rather, you combine a variety of materials to talk about the constructed space of landscape (evidenced in the visible plywood).

JG: The format of film is a funny thing in my work. I shoot all the models with large format 4×5 inch film and thus there is a hyper realism to the models. The plywood is crisp and detailed even when printing large scale. However, my source material is often 35mm images from the 60’s and 70’s. This is not something you can tell from web reproductions but the different formats of film act a bit like plains of focus. Some areas are very sharp, some very soft, and this is meant to talk about how the camera views things as opposed to our eyes.

Jason Gowans, 5 Landscape Modes

CD: It seems that these works are about the photograph, what it does to space, and how editing can abstract the landscape. You refer to Robert Smithson’s Provisional Theory of Non-sites, a confusing little essay,  but I get a sense of your influence when he says “Between the actual site in the Pine Barrens and The Non-Site itself exists a space of metaphoric significance…. The Non-Site…is a three dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site in N.J. (The Pine Barrens Plains)…. A logical intuition can develop in an entirely ‘new sense of metaphor’ free of natural or realistic expressive content.”

JG: Smithson describes Sites being the location and experience of the actual landscape (actually being immersed in the space) and non-sites are everything else we can take away or map from the site. A photograph of a site (taken without artistic intent) would therefore be a non-site. The artwork is in between site and non-site.

CD: You reference western movie sets–in the idea of spacial facades– by your framing of the mountainscape. I see the appeal of the orange/sienna palette with Le Region Centrale, the 1971 movie by Michael Snow.  Watching part of the film on Youtube, long slow moving camera shots and no dialogue make this film a meditative experience, an homage to the landscape while the viewer sits inside. A hum in the background feels like the camera itself or perhaps the sound of the “motorized tripod” and the intermittent synth sound is like a bug coming up in the ear.  The shadow of the camera pans along, over the field of vision.

Jason Gowans, 5 Landscape Modes

JG: I’ve mentioned Robert Smithson and Michael Snow but I probably could have listed a number more artists who, throughout the 60’s and 70’s, began to atomize the structure and theory of landscape art. Michael Snow claimed he wanted to make a gigantic landscape film equal in terms of film to the great landscape paintings of Cezanne, Poussin, Corot, Monet, Matisse, and in Canada, The Group of Seven. See also Joyce Wieland’s work 109 views.

Works like Le Region Centrale expose the tropes and construction of the landscape genre. Upon a repeat viewing I had forgotten how slow the camera moves and how saturated the film stock is. I have a memory of it where the camera is moving faster and much of the time the image on screen is devoid of any horizon line. It was not the romantic imagery I was interested in but how he mechanically dissected every angle and possibility of the space. 

CD: A Youtube user comments “Is this better than going outside?” which gets at the conundrum of photography or artistic representations of reality in general, especially of the natural world–is a representation ever as good? As Lucy Lippard says, talking about the spiritual element of being in the landscape, “For those who have literally “seen the light,” no painting or photograph comes close to the power of the experience itself.”

Jason Gowans, 5 Landscape Modes

JG: I work as a photography technician in Vancouver Canada, a city on the edge of a beautiful wilderness. Vancouver is not without a lot of amateur landscape photographers. It’s a genre that’s quite prominent in this city and the more I see it the more I am aware that a tradition of composing a landscape has carried out through western art. William Gilpin wrote some general rules of how the picturesque landscape should be composed, these same rules are carried out today in the images from hoards of nature enthusiasts with digital SLRs.

In a sense, I’m guilty of this as well. I did my education in Montreal, on the east coast. Landscape was not part of my vernacular while I was living there. As soon as I came back to Vancouver I immediately started taking photos outdoors. I am a bit of a poser as a landscape photographer because my dedication to being outside is pretty low. Most of my imagery comes from finding negatives in second hand shops, images from the internet, and scans from books. When I’m missing pieces of a composition, that’s when I’ll go out and photograph. Photographing, for me, is just finding a piece of a puzzle to complete the image.

CD: It is funny that you have little interest in being in the landscape but choose it as your subject.

JG: I really do like being outdoors but as a photographer I’m not interested in taking my camera everywhere or waiting for the right shot. Jeff Wall talks about starting to make an image by “not photographing.” He’ll see something happen in the street and decide to recreate it in the studio. I think this is similar to my approach on landscape. I’m not interested in the constant waiting, timing, and paying attention to weather, that comes with photographing landscapes. I would rather my relationship to the outdoors be a casual one where I can use the time to think and look.

CD: The young jagged mountains of the West that you portray are very different from the East’s.  Upon seeing the Rocky mountains, the journals of Meriwether Lewis say “While I view these mountains, I felt a secret pleasure in finding myself so near the head of the heretofore conceived boundless Missouri, but when I reflected on the difficulties which this snowy barrier would most certainly throw in my way to the Pacific, it in some measure counterbalanced the joy I’d felt in the first moments which I gazed on them.”  He expresses a true awe, seeing both fear and beauty in the landscape, and disappointment of the failure to find a water passage to the Pacific Ocean.

JG: I like that when settlers first came that there was a (justifiable) fear of the landscape. The western mountains were deemed ugly because they had little to do with the English countryside that was considered a proper landscape to experience nature. Now we approach nature with a sort of groomed sublime. The west is now like the English garden, still vast but structured, no longer a terrible beauty. 

———–

Years ago, my friend Jessie was talking to me on camera while I lay in a bathtub in Pittsburg. We were there on a high school field trip, and were making a video called “art in the world,” looking at whatever we found along the way, especially bridges, sculpture, trashed tvs, etc. Jessie told me how it made her kinda sad that you can make-out in just about any movie. I said, “I wonder why? Cause some movies are so bad, you just have to make out? That you lose interest in them so much?”

Jessie replied, “Well, it’s not even that the film is bad, cause I think that you can make out in almost any film, but the point is that sex will always beat art, like, it doesn’t matter, sex will always kick art’s butt.”

Giordanne Salley, Trina and the Moon Jellies, 2012. Oil and mixed paper on canvas. 76in x 50in

Visual art doesn’t usually cause physical excitement in the viewer; no one claps or makes noise at the museum. People gasp in movies and music gets people to move and dance, but visual art is often taken in as a solitary observation with a stillness and gaze.

At gallery openings, I find that most people don’t talk about the art so much. Maybe they point out a few things they like and provide a few remarks to justify or explain why. Sometimes I’ll see a couple walk from piece to piece interpreting meanings and making observations. There is something about their intimacy that allows for this type of walk, a freedom of expression that permits insight to be constructed. People seem to pair off when it is mutually beneficial, and at least for a while, this can be blissful before power dynamics begin to develop. To gain insight in a conversation with a stranger can be euphoria.

Giordanne Salley, Promise? Promise., 2011. Oil on canvas. 18in x 24in

Looking at Giordanne’s paintings this morning, I think about love, being alone in the studio and remembering someone, being pulled toward the other person. It is easy to become obsessed with love, a need for connection, to be present with another. Alone in the studio is a vacuous but elated feeling. We are very social beings, but often art is created in a space isolated from others. We experience loneliness deeply, yearning for the other, but we also seek to be alone in order to find ourself.

Artists often works in solitude, creating from memory as Giordanne does. Making art puts you in a vulnerable state. Love and friendship are fundamental to the human experience, but the art-making experience can be uniquely anti-social. Despite this notion, sociality and human interaction remain at the core of Giordanne’s recent paintings.

Giordanne Salley, untitled (white painting), 2012. Oil on canvas. 16in x 16in

Alone in a gallery (or now viewing a webpage), I seek out the other, the artist’s whose work is before me. If I like the work, the artist has spoken to me, we have engaged in one-way communication. I feel like I know this other person for a moment. I like it when I write to the artist and we begin a conversation about their work that comes from a shared vision—their images somehow succeed to communicate.

“My most recent work is about being in love, and how it feels to think about those feelings while I am alone on my studio. I think the experience of being in love with people and places and things is a very big and overwhelming feeling in both good and bad ways. I am trying to use pictorial tension with the flattening and bulging of the space to create a similar feeling for the viewer.”

Giordanne Salley, Crowded Boat, 2012. Oil and mixed paper on canvas. 60in x 48in.

I said to Giordanne that she flattens spaces and brings together specific fields of color and patterning. Characters don’t seem to lack anonymity even though you can’t see the face. Diving/falling reminds me of succumbing to fate or “going with the flow” but making an active choice to do so, showing the moment of decision, and following others.

Giordanne has affection for her media and treats her subjects with delicate lines and big regions of color. A record of the quotidian. Characters and narrative are produced with a quickness, capturing memory with an elegance that conveys emotion. Her paintings show intimacy and explore the everyday beauty that surround us.

Giordanne Salley, Night Swim, 2012. Oil and mixed paper on canvas. 38in x 48in.

Almost every painting shows water. Life around the water, fishing birds, boats, and swimming are her favorite subject matter. She seems to love outdoor adventuring and the bounty of nature, depicting buckets of collected mussels in her Boat Painting, and other excursions.

Giordanne says of her work: “All of my work is about memory, love and loss. The people and places in them are very specific to places I have been.”

Giordanne Salley, Boat Painting, 2012. Oil and mixed paper on canvas. 96in x 78in.

Giordanne is an MFA painting candidate at Boston University. Her work will appear in the upcoming northeast edition of New American Paintings #104. In 2012, she exhibited in several university spaces including the Boston University Sherman Gallery, Boston University 808 Gallery, and Boston University Commonwealth Gallery. In 2011, she had a solo show at Vermont Studio Center, Gallery II, Johnson, VT.

————————————-

Potomac, Montana, created where Matt Hamon currently lives near the Blackfoot River, is part of his en plain air series. Done on site like many painters past who seek to capture the essence of place, the work takes on wider reference to human manipulation of the landscape. Hamon says: “I consider drawings and paintings to be records of a performed relationship with a subject….Much of my interest is in expanding what that record might suggest or contain. Once finished, the large paintings are cut at random into pieces of varying size. By assembling the resulting pieces in piles, stacks, and sometimes as individual paintings, they evoke disorientation, reference abstraction, and re-present the landscape.”

Matt Hamon, Potomac, MT, 2012, oil on panel

Lucy Lippard says in her book, The Lure of the Local, that landscape is always shaped by its inhabitants, and in art, an idea of the landscape is formed through the act of framing, rendering, or interpreting. She tells us that “British geographer Denis Cosgrove defines landscape as ‘the external world mediated through human subjective experience.'” She continues: “The word landscape originated in the German fifteenth-century term landscaft–a shaped land, a cluster of temporary dwellings or more permanent houses, the antithesis of the wilderness surrounding it, according to John Stilgoe…Today the word is commonly conflated with place, nature, view, scenery, and has radiated out into any number of meanings from the popular pretty rural scene to a complex social construction or produced space.”

Hamon says he is influenced by Walter Benjamin’s idea of “aura”, the sense of uniqueness or originality about a piece of art. Benjamin tells us “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art” but what has been spawned is a type of art which is made to be reproducible and has no original, such as photography, cinema, and text. Viewing an artist’s website (as I do often in writing this column), we are faced with a reproduction. There is a diminished view of the art (especially sculpture), but an opportunity to explain and curate ideas and a greater potential for public viewing than the traditional gallery setting.

Reproduction allows for a mass cultural experiences. New media allows for new kinds of perception.  Similar to the idea of withering aura, Lippard sees the reproduction of a landscape as inferior to the original. “I personally get a lot of pleasure from looking at landscape paintings, though not as much as from landscapes themselves; a painting, no matter how wonderful, is an object in itself, separate format the place it depicts.” Hamon has a similar boredom: “I love the process of landscape painting as a way of interacting with a place. However, landscape paintings as images don’t interest me so much. The solution was to deconstruct them and reformat them. It’s amazing what a table saw can do for one’s work!”

Matt Hamon, After Albert Bierstadt’s Deer in a Clearing, 2011. Mixed media, 16"h x 10"w x 8"d, 2011.

About his construction of an oil rig on a strangely verdant land, Hamon says, “Regarding After Albert Bierstadt’s Deer in a Clearing, Bierstadt was a member of the Hudson River School, an informal association of painters who promoted westward expansion through their sublime and luminous images that idealized the American west via hyperbolic light, color, and scale. After Albert Bierstadt’s, Deer in a Clearing, is a playful and somewhat sardonic response to this late 19th century painting.”

Landscape paintings often harken traditional values – a view of man and nature in harmony – or perhaps a lost eden, or maybe the landscape embodying an expressive mental state (infiltrating the ambivalence of nature). Today, in an era of mass reproduction, uniqueness of place and landscape are often obscured by malls or mickeydees, asphalt, or industry.

“Though Benjamin was likely arguing in favor of this democratization of images and objects, I personally lament the loss of this aura in visual art,” Hamon says.  By using mass produced objects in his Beneath series, and layering icons of mass consciousness, Hamon has brought back the sense of aura, making a unique object out of reproductions. The objects present a narrative by engaging them in a new way in physical space.  Benjamin tells us that this loss of aura is useful: “The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition” and by allowing the “beholder or listener” to meet the reproduction in his/her own context, there is a “shattering of tradition” which allows for a “liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage”. Hamon engages in this shattering when evokes history and heritage in a work such as Four hundred eighty-five years of U.S. History.

Matt Hamon, Four hundred eighty-five years of U.S. History, 2011. Mixed media, 15"h x 10"w x 12"d, 2011.

“Four hundred eighty-five years of U.S. History is a reference to the first (failed) colonies near what is now South Carolina. Above the two “Native American” figures is a somewhat banal scene with a woman mowing a pristine lawn at the border of an arid space. The home is illuminated by a television playing the sequence What Makes the Red Man Red from Disney’s Peter Pan. I recently purchased these two caricatures of a Native American boy and girl at a national home improvement retailer. It is abhorrent that such figures which caricaturize, exotify, and reduce marginalized cultures continue to be produced and collected.” The power of the miniature is that it distills details to the most essential elements, and like a liquor or stew, it renders into a more potent version.

The iconography of the west is shown ballooned up in the ceramic figures, hidden basis of the modern landscape.  The underground reflection of the above civilization shows us artifacts of place and time. Often history can be wiped away when creating new structures, and the total change of the landscape can be the result of innovation and progress.  This narrative of the destroyed, covered, or hidden landscape is evident in Hamon’s en plein air paintings too.

On a drive through Montana, you can see a huge open pit mine when going through Butte. Through Washington state, often memorialized in murals is the wealth that logging has brought and continues to bring. A sense of loss permeates the “post-rural” collective that Hamon’s art is part of. Edgar Smith, another collective member says that “Exploited, ravaged expanses can loom just behind a ridge from pristine peaks and prairies.” His works present a “response to public vs. private land issues in the Northwest. The paintings and wall constructions focus specifically on the Clark Fork River drainage in Montana, from Silver Bow Creek and Butte, to areas just west of the Missoula valley.”

Edgar Smith, Square Mile of Public Land 36”x36” house paint on panel, hammer, chain.

Hamon describes the process of the “post-rural” collective as “the experience of coming of age in remote, rural areas of the country and later contextualizing these experiences in the narrative content of contemporary art.” A play on the idea on the illusive concept of post-modernism, Hamon and his friend joked that they were “more post-rural than anything else.”

“We were laughing at our “redneck” backgrounds and how authentically belonging to (or emerging from) a rural environment was likely creating a lens through which we viewed education, the zeitgeist, and the metropolis…. This was at a time (early 2000s) when it seemed deer antlers (images or otherwise) were ubiquitous in west-coast, contemporary art. Of course, antlers easily become kitsch as soon as you remove them from a rural domestic space.”

Matt Hamon, Weidmannsheil, 2005.

Lippard sees the role of artists as “envisionaries” who “should be able to provide a way to work against the dominant culture’s rapacious view of nature, reinstate the mythical and cultural dimensions of “public” experience, and at the same time become conscious of the ideological relationships and historical constructions of place. The dialectic between place and change can provide the kind of no-one’s-land where artists thrive.”

A sense of place is the feeling that contrasts locations with each other. Lippard differentiates place (understood from the inside, being there) from landscape (seen from the outside, looking at it). As we ask where we belong in the world, we search for unique features or flourishing culture that appeals to our own identity. There is limited bombardment and a quietude that allows for a vast expanse of fantasy and curiosity in a rural environment. But, there is an isolation from a wider social group in the country. Our cities can be thriving places because of their inhabitants. Lippard tells us that neither nature or culture are deterministic in forming human identity, yet nature, culture, and our concept of self all inform each other and are not separate from each other.

Describing his rural upbringing, Hamon says: “I grew up in Igo (population 600 at most and down the road from Ono and Ogo)… a small, remote town in Northern California. A sense of place informed by wandering the woods as a child” inspired his enquiry into a variety of media including painting, drawing, sculpture, and video. Matt teaches in the School of Art at the University of Montana in Missoula and is a featured artist in Scott Ligon’s forthcoming book from Watson-Guptil/Random House, Digital Art Revolution.

KATSU ISHIDA, BUDDA, mixed media on handmade paper, 2011 72 x 60cm

At Aqua Art Miami, Japanese artist Katsu Ishida‘s primarily black and white drawings on paper were filled with tiny faces, reminding me of writhing souls in hell piled up on each other. Ishida told me that he makes all his paper and brushes himself, and the forms are dictated by the materials; he sees faces in the paper.

Richard Nesley, Untitled.

Later in the day at the same fair, Haitian art collectors Spiralis Ventures presented works associated with the Center for Art in Port-au-Prince, the only art school in Haiti, and the Saint Soleil style. Richard Nesley’s river-like intertwined humans conjure up spirits, connected with animals in a mesh of existence. Richard is the son of Antilhome, one of the leading Saint Soleil painters.  Jean-Daniel Lafont, ambassador of Spiralis Ventures, explains this painting as a mother tree or mother nature, saying: “The multiple spirits that inhabit earth both on the inside and the outside are shown moving up an down and around the sacred ‘Poto Mitan’ or sacred trunk three. This is where the spirit rest peacefully.”

David Douard, City Sickness, 2012
Ground, metal, motor, straw, toys, rope, plaster, wood, paint, 270 x 100 x 100 cm.

As I continued to think about figuration in contemporary art, two kinetic artists caught my eye in the main convention center. Lacking citizens in a miniature world, David Douard‘s City Sickness show the relics of the human ecosystem and an underworld with ladders to climb the social strata. Squeaking as the object spins, positioned high above the viewer, the piece resembles a game or playground ride.

Jon Kessler, photo by Celie Dailey.

John Kessler‘s strange machines utilized skinny, pale children in a way that addressed concerns about our mediated world its relationship to the human body. His bubble-blowing machine housed a stagnating youngster in a box that is only seen after moving around the sculpture.

Nelson Leirner, photo by Celie Dailey.

A collection of figurines from Nelson Leirner paired husbands and wives of all sorts on a layered platform. Upon closer glance, the male/female dichotomy was not so clear, with angels, soldiers, and apostles pairing up. It reminds me of the kind of games that girls play when imaging their future roles with dolls, but also the fight scenarios that little boys situate.

And finally, I spotted these elegant fine line drawings of hair, mostly views of the back of the head. Shortly after viewing, I found that the work belongs to a beautiful tall person whose gender pronoun preference I would like to have asked. Instead, I asked “why no faces?” to Jono Vaughan. And, I received a reply that these works are about the ambiguity of identity. According to Vaughan, the works allow the viewer to impose their own concept of identity on the art. A highlight of Vaughan’s bio printed in the Art Pages program guide (called “The Triumph of Medocrity”) tells of a previous performance project where Vaughan “invited members of the public to become clones of the artist through hair cutting and makeup application”. An artist, especially in our reflective post-modern world, must deal with identity presentation, heightened by facebook and internet anonymity. It feels nice to stand face-to-face with Vaughan and hear the quality and sincerity of voice.

Tabitha Soren’s photographs of turbulent water are steeped in her experience and emotion rather than simply being an homage to the beauty or majesty of nature. Like Alfred Steigliz’s photographs of clouds which he called “equivalents” and other Cloudscape photographers, nature is a catalyst for the phenomenological content of the photographer. The way that forms can be seen in clouds is like looking at an inkblot, and water acts in the same way, producing random formations on the surface.

Tabitha Soren, "Panic Beach" series, Oceanscape 15763-4.

Soren says of these images: “For me, the waterscapes are taken in response to the random tumultuousness of the human experience. In fact, I got knocked down quite a bit by the ocean taking these pictures. This project is an invitation to dive into the complexity of life – and into the unpredictability of it.  (It’s not as if we have any choice about the havoc anyway.) But, then, I remembered how much I respond to the beauty AND meaning in J.W.M. Turner’s paintings and to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs.  My oceanscapes are in wild contrast to Sugimoto’s calming black and white seascapes but nonetheless, inspired by them.”

Tabitha Soren, "Panic Beach" series, Oceanscape 00107-8.

“The compelling colors and patterns of the ocean may draw you in but the ferocity and brutality of the water are lurking too.  Each photo attempts to blur the distinctions between earth and sky, and flat and deep, which is how unbalanced I feel when a crisis hits. Rapidity is brought to a still in the image. Like the flow of information on a television screen or in our urban environment, we are normally washed over by the rapids, and encountering stillness gives a moment of peace and reflection.”

Soren’s subjects are set-up as though part of a narrative, but they are not actors, just acting. The confluence of intent and acceptance of the unknown are essential to her process.

Tabitha Soren, "Running" series, 000516, 2012.

“My Running series attempts to explore panic, mortality, resilience and the role of the accident in life.  The images involve a lot of pre-production, but then once the person starts running, I have no idea how the picture will turn out. The images also rely pretty heavily on a mixture of natural and artificial light.  The combination of light sources, planning and spontaneity serve as comment on contemporary photography.  Is it true? and does that matter? The Running photographs are also as much about what is outside of the frame, as what is inside it.  The viewer has to mine their own secrets to fill in the narrative. Finally, when people run their bodies contort and we get a glimpse at emotions that are normally kept hidden.”

What provokes the runners remains out of view in the images, but in reality, it is the photographer who instigates the photographs.

Soren says, “I want the people in my pictures to have something at stake. (Those kinds of people are also the most interesting ones to have in my life.) Life at every moment is terribly costly and terribly beloved.”

Tabitha Soren, "Running" series, 000073, 2012.

A friend of mine asked me the other day if I believed in fate. I thought no, I don’t, you edit your life, you’re given a set of circumstances and you pick from the best.  But then maybe I do. I feel like I’m making choices here in the moment, but perhaps I’m not able to be really free in my decision making. When I asked Soren about her concept of fate, she responded: “In my mind the people in the running pictures are making choices in the moment. All of us are presented with unlucky situations and sometimes, threats to our survival. This is when we see what we are made of. Fight or flight are not the only two options. It takes a great amount of resilience, durability, bravery and understanding to alter your fate.”

Tabitha Soren, "Weathering" series, Mistakes Will Be Made.

Rushing water is metaphor for fate. In a strong current, you can hardly stand on your feet. Water is thick and viscous, resistant to flow, sticking to, revealing, and moving the objects that it encounters. Liquids have surface tension, enabling the ability to float, but also making movement through the surface challenging. Running through water or swimming at the surface is much harder than swimming below. Submarines are fast under water, avoiding the agitation of the surface. Air expands and fills a space but water is virtually incompressible.

“Generally speaking, [my] work speaks to the twists of fate in life that can unhinge us. Whether it’s images of people mid-flight in my series Running or in Uprooted, the ruined scenes of post-Katrina New Orleans, I’m most interested in what human beings can survive — and what they can’t.”

Tabitha Soren "Uprooted" series, Robert Lee Boulevard, Lakeview, 2007.

We often hear of catastrophic floods that sweep away homes and civilians. Our coastal cities are vulnerable because of their proximity to the ocean, but there is something so compelling about the vast water along the land’s edge that drives a huge portion of the world’s population to live there, myself included. New Orleans is where Soren’s husband is from, a city that she describes as “part of the fabric of my life” since meeting him in 1996. The iconic city continues to be rebuilt on tenuous delta land. Living on the coast, there is always a question of how long this place will last, and a compelling need to capture it.

Tabitha Soren, "Uprooted" series, Robert Street, B.W. Cooper, 2007.

A flood is an act of god the insurance policies say, and the story of the great flood that wiped away the sins of the world, the act of vengeful god promised Noah never again by covenant of the rainbow. The River Styx formed the boundary of the Underworld, Dante’s fifth level of hell, the angry water leading the the banks of the Stygian marsh. And yet, being dipped in the Styx made Achilles invulnerable, except for the spot which was not submerged, his heels. The sacred Ganges has purifying powers to Hindus, but suffers from great pollution problems today. The danger of the water’s power seems to be brought under human control, but then we find ourselves needed to re-engineer. We dike, we dam, we harden shorelines, we divert the flow to feed the land, but we seek out the rushing water for the feeling that wells up in us. Water is baptism, water is cleansing, as it is catastrophic. Water is ambivalent; water is a medium for meaning.

Tabitha Soren, "Weathering" series, Who You Might Turn Out To Be.

Soren mentioned, “For me, photography is about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.  It’s a release of elation and pain. I see my pictures as metaphors for the difficult twists and turns of everyday living.  And even though the visual approach to each series can shift, I feel pretty strongly that they all start from this basic premise.”

Soren grew up around the world with her father in the Air Force and spent her teenage years in Destin, Florida. She came to the Bay area with a fellowship from Stanford where immersed herself in the darkroom, studying under fine art professors Joel Leivick, Alex Nemerov, Robert Dawson, and Lukas Felzman. Images from her “Running” series were recently featured in McSweeney’s Quarterly issue #39.

What kind of elation do you get from your study of mathematics? You have taken a journey from studying mathematical systems to producing unique visual analyses of that data. How might you square up the concept of free will with a seemingly deterministic universe?

Mathematics to me is an expression of the inner workings of our animal thought machine. It can do things like laugh and catch a ball and we know why, to some small immediate extent, and with mathematics  we glimpse a little bit of the how. A tiny tiny tip. We humans know so little mathematics, though it’s ever so much. To me, mathematics does not have that deterministic quality which it is standard to associate with it. I see the fuzziness in its structure. At its core it is based on a notion of duality – things are or they are not – and I believe, or rather feel, that reality quite comfortably exists in contradiction, that this is not the exception but the rule. The ancient Platonic conception of the perfect mould in heaven and the imperfect instances of it on Earth to me is entirely the reverse of reality. Perfect objects are intensely complex and human attempts to simplify them produces imperfect shadows in our minds, which we call logic. So for me there is no dichotomy between determinism and free will. They are two faces of a hugely complex shape.

Iavor Lubomirov, Three-Phase Cylinder I & II, 2012, 100 Micron Clear Film 21 x 27.9 x 4.6 cm.

“The origin of conic sections is unknown – the earliest reference we have is in the work of Apollonius of Perga around 200BC. Traditionally, Apollonius and the spate of mathematicians who followed in his footsteps over the centuries, used a cone sliced by a plane to define the circle, ellipse, parabola and hyperbola. Three-Phase Cylinder departs from the reductivist approach used to isolate these regular shapes and instead flirts with the methodology itself, letting a whimsical curling plane (mathematically defined by oscillating trigonometric functions) intersect three regular cylinders to produce a mathematically inutile set of shapes.”

This method of playing with a shape in physical reality as a means to grasping some mathematic complexity before it was written symbolically shows how these generalizations are functional and elegant.  It reminds me of a trip that I took to see Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona earlier this year where I saw Gaudi’s method of understanding the form and load-bearing capacity of his arches by making upside-down string models hung with weights. It allowed complex mathematics to be used and understood in a simple and direct way.

Iavor Lubomirov, Ersatz Biblical Synaesthesia, The First Book of Moses called Genesis, 2012, Giclée Print on Hahnemühle 21 x 27.9 cm.

“The works are composed by a computer program which processes the numerical ASCII codes of the characters in the English text. The program uses a bespoke logic to convert the resulting numbers into hexadecimal RGB colour codes, with which it colours a square digital image pixel by pixel. A typical Old Testament book will contain around 200,000 characters, resulting in a seemingly random, highly pixelated image, which nonetheless is a faithful rendering of the King James text. The fact that a human will not be equipped to ‘read’ this visual text is an important comment on the nature of translation and the long history of a text which has so often been inaccessible to people whose lives were nonetheless deeply affected by its substance, interpretation and political appropriation.”

I imagine that you must enjoy the detail and tedium of your works–some artists might say it brings them to a meditative state–do you have that kind of spiritual component of your life?  In light of your ‘Ersatz Biblical Synaesthesia’, I’m curious to know what kind of beliefs you hold about religion, Christianity, spirituality, and/or the mind/body problem. The content of ‘Ersatz’ seems to be the mutability and evolution of these texts through translation.

Going on to religion, spirituality and existence, I find myself a bit overwhelmed as to how to begin to answer such a complex and rich matter. I have read a lot of historical and scientific texts on Christianity – both about the small Jewish sect founded by Jesus under Roman occupation of Jerusalem and about its later transformation into a European spiritual religion, primarily through the early writings of St. Paul, who brought us the myth of the resurrection. I have also made some researches into Islam and to a very small extent Hinduism and Buddhism. What interests me in the major religions is their influence on the overwhelming majority of contemporary world society, which can remain enmired in these early and simple forms of human philosophy even while living in an age of radically evolved understanding. Reality is of course immeasurably grand, inhuman and terrifying – much more so than a vision of a universe ruled by a compassionate and essentially human maker. I don’t deny god – that would be arrogant indeed. But nor can I seriously allow myself to believe in medieval and ancient conceptions of what god is and which have been shaped for centuries by the political and philosophical conveniences of their day.

Iavor Lubomirov, In Hind Sight, Fabriano Watercolour Paper, 2006-2009.

“‘In Hind Sight’ considers objects in 4-D space (3-D space with time) and tries to show them from a new visual perspective. Its starting point is a video of a 34 second movement performed by two artists in an empty space and filmed at 25fps. The video was decomposed into 850 individual stills, each was cut out of paper and the whole was then assembled.”

A work such as ‘In Hind Sight’ seems like it would take quite a lot of work to cut by hand and the edges are so perfect.

It took me over a year to cut and assemble ‘In Hind Sight’, with some more and some less intense periods of work. The hardest part is finding the time to indulge such an inexplicable activity. One might expect that it would be the tedium of cutting – which you perceptively see as a source of joy rather than pain – but this in fact is largely mitigated by the observation of the slow evolution of the work and its many beautiful hidden moments, which are revealed and then obscured by the process.

Upon first viewing ‘In Hind Sight’, I saw what immediately resembled a Chinese lion dance costume to me. The analysis of two bodies in motion is not something I would have guessed from looking at the work, but that content was there in an intuitive way. How did you deal with the negative space between the figures—did you need to smooth out the lines to make it work?

The negative space in the piece is accepted honestly and there is no trickery designed to evade it. Some of it is hidden inside the work. Other negative spaces simply make it quite fragile in totality. The two dancers worked very close to each other in a confined room, so they did not create very large gaps between their bodies for this short piece.

Your ‘Prototype for a Romance’ brings back an architecture space from a 2-D rendition into real space. The collaborative process and the meeting of two minds is like a romance. We can never unify or see through another’s mind but we insatiably try.

Iavor Lubomirov, Prototype for a Romance in Many Dimensions, 2012, Multiple Giclée Prints on Card Four pieces, each 21 x 27 cm.

“This series of four architectural works is a prototype for a planned collaboration with painter and printmaker Bella Easton. It was created by hand, using 359 identical prints of Easton’s ‘Rule 174′….Lubomirov and Easton take calm stock of the visual and compositional purpose of the grid established last century. They accept its validity as an overt presence…” Bella is currently creating 180 finely graded prints which I will shape into a sculpture.

Your website suggests that the grid is a kind of scaffolding for art rather than a constraint. It makes me wonder about your relationship to the landscape in general. A sense of place is often defined by our artifacts, and when considering the grid, I think of the city laid out over the land, and the grid is a structure that makes a vast city comprehendible and navigable. But there are layers of landscape before/below/inside/above the grid. The grid has a capacity to wipe out history or to let a place evolve and learn from itself in a strategic way.

Iavor Lubomirov, Heliothis.zea, 2007-9 graph paper 45x55x3 cm.

“In the gallery, the work was placed on a small white desk, into which a rectangular hole was cut, very slightly larger than the grid in the pad. Thus, when a viewer sat down to examine the graph pad, they were able to see their own legs through it and through the desk.”

Iavor Lubomirov, Schema for a New Grid System (Liverpool), 2008, graph paper 45x55x3 cm (installation view).

I missed your question about my relationship to the landscape. To me it is incidental. Fishes swim in the sea, birds in the air, worms in the earth. Crabs and humans crawl about on the bottom and occasionally look up. Each substance is a sea and a landmass, depending on your own incidental density and the speed of time. If you put a piece of lead on the ground and speed up time so that a thousand years is like a second, you will see it sink down like a rock thrown in the sea. You see these old houses with stone fences that lean after a hundred years and you realize that they have been built on mud and are floating and bobbing on top of it. Everything is fixed and in constant flux too. Time is just a dimension. Nothing ever disappears.

Iavor Lubomirov was born in Bulgaria completed his degree and Masters in Mathematics at Oxford University in England and his BA in Fine Art at University of East London. Part of his ‘Three-phase Cylinder’ will be on show at the all inclusive CGP Gallery Open show opening on Sunday, November 11th. His selected solo and group exhibitions include: Vegas Gallery (2012), Angus-Hughes Gallery (2011), The Magnificent Basement (2010), August Art Gallery (2009), Calvert 22 (2008), Liverpool Independents Biennial (2008), and The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (2007). Iavor is a co-founder of the art network ALISN, supporting emerging artists in the UK and abroad. In 2012, with painter Isabella Easton, Iavor opened the Lubomirov-Easton Project Space.

Kevin has made several renditions of rooms filled with ceramic objects, using screen printing and acrylic paint to label his imperfect things. He is currently pursuing an MFA in printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) after graduating from University of California, Davis in 2010. In February he’ll be participating in a printmaking group show at the Sol Koffler Graduate Student Gallery at RISD and in May, he’ll be a part of the RISD Graduate Thesis Exhibition at the Rhode Island Convention Center. Kevin was enthusiastic to reflect upon his art to me via email, so here follows our conversation.

Kevin Frances, Our Bathroom Shelf.

Why so much love for the commercial object world?

I’m endlessly fascinated by people’s objects. I will probably go through your medicine cabinet. I’m really interested in the idea that the objects people own, they way they organize their environment can give us a window into their personality, their state of mind. They form a kind of portrait, however incomplete.

Kevin Frances, Our Desktops: A Love Story.

How do you see your role as an artist who is remaking non-art?

In the piece Our Desktops: A Love Story, I remade three desks, mine, my girlfriend’s, and our coffee table, and all the objects on them; books (loved books and those we aspire to love), notes, bills, coffee cups, computers. The importance to remaking them was to prompt the viewer to evaluate each object as a potential carrier of significance. Every object is rather intentionally clumsy, I don’t want to be Richard Shaw, it’s not about fooling the viewer, it’s about telling a story, or maybe more accurately: asking the viewer to tell a story.

Kevin Frances, That Melancholy (the aftermath of a party).

That Melancholy was a nice piece because the objects seem to speak to each other. Is this a remake of a real scene?

The photo That Melancholy continues along a similar train of thought–except the space is fiction. I created a scale model of an apartment, something of a mashup of apartments I’ve lived in, and my memories of friends’ houses. It tells the story of three months of the life of a young woman moving into an apartment: she moves in, buys furniture, decorates, cooks dinner, does exercise videos, has a party, a romantic encounter. And this is all told through still photos of her objects. That Melancholy (the aftermath of a party) comes near the end of the series. It stems from a comment someone said to me recently that the moment right after everyone leaves a party is one of the saddest moments imaginable. That’s kind of an exaggeration obviously, but part of what this story is about is the tragedies and triumphs of everyday life–until something earth shattering happens to you to really put things into perspective, we live our lives totally zoomed in, and the little peaks and valleys are all we see.

Kevin Frances, Kitchen, F St.

Your objects are so soft looking that I cannot help but think of Claes Oldenberg though you working on a smaller scale, but generally I’m not sure who you are inspired by.

Claes Oldenberg is interesting, but I would say I’m more influenced by Wayne Thiebaud, Milton Avery, Giorgio Morandi. I’m also very interested in literature–I’ve been reading a lot of Stewart O’Nan recently, he writes mostly short books with defined time spans, for example he wrote a book recently called Last Night at the Lobster, which is about the last day at a Red Lobster restaurant that’s being shut down. The manager is trying to hold it all together, but there’s a blizzard, and employees are rapidly jumping ship. O’Nan writes with such empathy for his characters, it’s really stunning, and he’s pretty funny too, he often writes about sort of average people with average lives. I think I want to do something like what he does, but in a visual form.

Kevin Frances, The Useful Life of a Tube of Toothpaste: a Play in Ten Acts.

When I saw your stages of a toothpaste tube it made me think you should be doing video.

I’ve gotten that reaction before, and I think it’s because they’re about the passage of time, which I’m really interested in, but what I like about books or series of images in contrast to video is that they let the viewer go at their own pace, they can go back, forward, skip around, and perhaps most importantly they can choose not to look–a video will go on without you, but a series of still images requires some commitment from the viewer.

Kevin Frances, Kitchen F St.

Tell me about your personal space. Maybe it is like the spaces you’ve tailored but maybe divergent too. Maybe you are really messy with stacks of paper everywhere or living the Ikea dream.

My personal space is usually pretty messy, very cluttered. I think really messy desktops can be really amazing compositions; although looking at that Our Desktops piece, they don’t really look that messy. I think my aesthetic sense is generally pretty clean, I guess in contrast to my nature. I think that comes across in my print Clothes Piles. Somebody told me once that they really liked that one, that they thought it was really funny, because it was like some dirty teenager’s bedroom. I got kinda embarrassed, haha, like jeeze, I didn’t realize people would be judging my hygiene, I just really liked that composition.

Kevin Frances, Our Desktops: A Love Story.

Do you like technology? Is it making the world a better or worse place?

I like technology. I’m generally an optimist. In the physical realm, it seems like we’re really approaching a new world of how objects are made, much more from scratch, with 3D printers and such, and I think that’s really exciting. Combined with other new things like the growth of crowd funding websites like kickstart make me think that individuals and small groups will have much easier times creating things. With Apple’s app store, there’s all these people selling millions of apps, and some of them are just one person who had a simple idea. I can easily see a future where a model exists like that for physical objects.

I don’t particularly like the attitude that “if it’s not cutting edge, it’s nothing”. I think it’s really fascinating to see what people are doing to push the boundaries of new technology, but I don’t think it makes older ways of making obsolete.