Gillian Willans. Mise-en-scene: Red Room, 2012–13; acrylic and oil on canvas; 12 x 16 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Telephone Booth Gallery, Toronto

Gillian Willans’s series Mise-en-scène: The Paris Suite is on view at the Telephone Booth Gallery in Toronto, Canada, until July 21, 2013. The series resulted from Willans’s time in 2011 as one of sixteen international artists in residence at Parsons Paris, an experience, she says, that reshaped her. “It was a good thing,” she says.

“I went to Paris being a post-Impressionist junkie and was attracted to artists such as Vuillard and Bonnard. I came back to Canada transformed by artists such as Corot, Courbet, and Manet, all of whom had a huge impact on the advent of what is known as Realism in painting. I became enamored by the color and the shift of subject matter in that mid-1800s period when painting stepped out of the academy rules and into the personal realm.”

Gillian Willans. Mise-en-scene: The Library, 2012–13; acrylic and oil on board; 13 x 15 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Telephone Booth Gallery, Toronto

From Parisian flea markets Willans collected black-and-white photographs and postcards, which ultimately became the sources for these new paintings. Meditating on the influence of early photography on painting, Willans made color bear on this series more so than in her previous work. She added black to her palette as an homage to Manet and Courbet and used gray tones “because Paris is in itself at times a gray city—built with gray stone that is tinted and transformed by reflected light and dashes of color like the parks and store signs.”

I happen to be in Paris right now, and nothing strikes me more true than when Willans says:

“Because most of my sources are found images, there is no guarantee that they are exactly from Paris. That being said, whether it be from reading, movies, paintings, photographs, we all have some sort of visual invention of what Paris is like, which is much more than brick-and-mortar. Paris is rich. Paris is at once both light and dark. Paris is always framed.”

Gillian Willans. Mise-en-scene: Prelude, 2013; acrylic, oil on canvas; 11 x 14 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Telephone Booth Gallery, Toronto

Mise-en-scène: The Paris Suite is characterized by a curious absence of people. The scenes are tonal and pregnant, haunted by almost totally unaccounted for people and, alternately, the images seem to be waiting for those players to come back into the frame. No one could doubt that something has happened in these places and will happen here again: life.

Moreover, the series is meant to denote Willans’s relationship to cinema. “Directors like Atom Egoyan, David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock,” she says, “use ‘the scene’ to create part of the rationale behind character development. The scene is active rather than passive,” as in her mise-en-scène (“the arrangement of scenery and stage properties in a play”).

“As for the mise-en-scène, these rooms are stage sets of sorts—staged for the people once there. I am at times more fascinated by the social constructs they suggest. I have always been interested in the narrative potential of the pictorial. I started as a figure painter and found over time that it was more likely to become too illustrative rather than suggestive when the figure was present. I found the chair will always embody the figure, even in his or her absence.”

Gillian Willans. Mise-en-scene: Manor House, 2013; acrylic and oil on board; 18 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Telephone Booth Gallery, Toronto

The paintings, too, are quietly preoccupied with how light behaves naturally and domestically. The harsh white light of a lampshade, catching in a gilded mirror, sunlight washing over the surfaces of walls and tables and glowing in doorways testify to the definitive powers of light. “Being from Northern Canada,” she says, “I have always been very conscious of shifts of light between the seasons and between times of the day.”

And matched with the other barometer that is color and the still-life-like abandoned domestic fixtures, the gentle fluxes in light speak tensely to the people out of sight. For a few years now, Willans has taken the interiors and exteriors of familial homes as her subject. “A house,” says the artist, “is a container for emotion and lost time…” It is an analogue for the interior lives of the people who mysteriously inhabit them every day.

Paint the household. Paint the conspicuously empty crib and the invitingly overstuffed armchairs, and they will flesh themselves out. Mise-en-scène: The Paris Suite, above all, is an elegant solution to narrative in painting. It is one sure way to talk about the daily lots of people—by taking them out of picture.

Yukihiro Kaneuchi, "Plate" from "Lamia" series, 2013. Dyed resin and fig.

Born in 1984, Yukihiro Kaneuchi grew up in Fukuoka, on the north shore of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four major islands. Fukuoka is a large city, larger than Kyoto but also very environmentally friendly, and Kaneuchi describes the place as “sea/forest/mountain.” At any rate, his hometown is not a “crazy city” like Tokyo, and Kaneuchi keeps studios in both places. He acquired the shell, cuttlebone, and fishbone for his new series in Fukuoka where his space is close to the water, but put it together in the capital. It is called “Lamia.”

Yukihiro Kaneuchi, "Knife," "Fork," "Spoon" from series "Lamia," 2013. Organic materials, thread, resin, brass.

Kaneuchi studied design at Tama Art University and graduated in 2008. In 2009, Benetton awarded him a scholarship to do a year’s research at Fabrica, their communications research centre near Venice. “Fabrica,” they say of themselves, “is not a school, advertising agency or university. It is an applied creativity laboratory, a talent incubator, a studio of sorts . . .” Their home base is a 17th century villa rehabilitated by self-taught Japanese architect Tadao Ando, and it was there, working as a product designer, that Kaneuchi says he learned products “can/must” have “criticism and motivation.”

Yukihiro Kaneuchi, "Fork" detail from "Lamia," 2013.

I wrote to Kaneuchi about “Lamia.” The series consists of four pieces, or “products”—a plate, fork, knife, and spoon. When he made them, Kaneuchi was thinking about the essence of a product, which he calls “first intention.” He will mention the oldowan: a hand axe and the earliest stone tool, it is has been around for 2.6 million years. But now the minds and hands that have historically finessed rocks, metals, and animal parts into objects of special use are participants in an “incessant” global production-consumption model. “We need,” Kaneuchi says, “to reconsider the value and role of products to avoid over-saturation, decreasing quality, and negative environmental impacts.”

In fact, I thought the title actively referenced lamia the ‘carnivorous fish.’ I took the unthinking hunger of that fish as commentary on our global consumption patterns. But more specifically, Kaneuchi says he’s referencing Keats’ narrative poem of the same title, in which Keats rails against Isaac Newton for “unweav[ing] the rainbow“—for “destroying,” Kaneuchi says, “imagination/fantasy/feeling/sense.”

Yukihiro Kaneuchi, detail from "Lamia," 2013. Resin-beaded on thread.

In “Lamia” we have some atavistic things, artifactual tools concerned with eating. But when ‘forks, knives, and spoons’ are meaninglessly manufactured, it is possible to lose sight of what it is they do for us. It is possible for human acts, assisted as they are by tools—now commercialized products—to depreciate. Though what could be more universally important than the act of eating? Kaneuchi approaches these tools not just as a means to an end, but as expressions of humanness in its simplest form. “Lamia” becomes a cerebral, elegiac meditation on the loss of that humanity.

Yukihiro Kaneuchi, "Tiny landscape in a coffee cup," 2010. Stained ceramic.

Yukihiro Kaneuchi is talking about products that are well-made and -loved. He’s talking about the Velveteen Rabbit of eating utensils. It’s clear “Lamia” is a continuation of Kaneuchi’s earlier work. His preface to “Tiny landscape in a coffee cup” (2010), for example, reads brilliantly here:

When a product is created, it is as though new-born, with no memory or understanding of the world around it. These relationships are formed through user interaction over time; the product “ages” and gains knowledge of its purpose in the world. The stain’s image is a representation of the product’s feelings and memory as the product ages through use.

Recently, I was going to leave my boyfriend’s house with a noteworthy spoon. But I have been known to lose flatware in the depths of my car, and when my boyfriend saw me with the spoon, he said, “Not that one,” because it had been his grandmother’s, one of a few left. That scene came to mind when I found “Lamia” in my inbox. It is an ancient scene: humans and their tools, clever primates finding ways to walk termites out of their dens with sticks. We make tools and they make us human in turn.

Photo by Hye Kim, courtesy of SCAD MOA.

In a 1975 interview for for the Archives of American Art, Antonakos said,

With all the simplicity, if a person really looks at the neons when they are on, I think there will be a lot to see and understand. They are simple when you say, “a square, a tube, a square box, a cube.” The words are simple but look what happens to simple forms with neon tubes at certain locations on the walls. It is very different and they become very complicated then. It takes, I think, a person who must be interested in evaluating the problem. Of course, a person just casually seeing it as a tube and not analyzing it, he walks away happy, of course. It is just part of a tube on a wall and that is it.

Photo by John McKinnon, courtesy of SCAD MOA.

Antonakos’ exhibit “Tessares” is showing at Savannah College of Art and Design’s (SCAD) new Museum of Art until March 4th. (It is his third exhibit at a SCAD campus.) The title is the English of τέσσαρες (“four”): each of four glass showcases on the exterior front of SCAD MOA houses one of the artist’s neon back-lit panels.

The first time I see them, in the late morning, lavender and peach are barely breathing behind the first white panel; lavender and ultramarine discreetly bleed out behind the next panel, which is black with gold-leaf; peach fuzzes around a second white panel; and I can’t even see that there’s light-life behind the last red-orange panel. But in the evening, when I return, the sherbets have hardened, and by nighttime these are not the same walls. At least, they don’t feel the same.

Photo by Adam Kuehl, courtesy of SCAD MOA.

Such are Antonakos’ “theaters of light.” The slow chromatic flux is staged to emotional and perceptual effect. There are subtle changes all around. The relation between two otherwise straightforward geometries—a square and a plane—develops according to the colorful actions around them. And we understand the players differently as the show goes on.

At night, ultramarine pools around the black panel. The nearest section of wall has flooded, but the panel can raft us. All the colors are out full-force—I’m unsure we knew they had it in them.

David Hockney, Untitled 26 December 2010, iPad Drawing. Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

David Hockney included himself among the iPad’s expectant lovers. Since 2008 he’s used the application Brushes to draw on his iPhone—but what he can do with the app on the oversized model, oh. He can draw with multiple fingers and recently a stylus.

His show Me Draw on iPad is exhibiting until August 28th at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, outside of Copenhagen, Denmark. 20 iPod touches, 20 iPads and a triptych slide loop through several hundred still lifes, landscapes, portraits and self-portraits looking, I think, especially Matisse. On display the bright screens color in the dark galleries like panes of stained glass, what else. They light like the screens we hood our hands over in movie theaters. And, how weird—to come to a museum to stare into a face probably like the one stifled on your person.

Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Photo credit: Brøndum / Poul Buchard.

One iPad drawing reads,

made for

the screen

totally on

the screen

it’s not an

illusion

I am able to watch these works come into being thanks to an animation playback feature—the ghost in the machine going through the motions again, his intense lines. Someone at my shoulder remarks, “Det godt.” It’s good.

There is no saying what the implications of this new form are for making. The form is easy-to-access and convenient-to-create. Apps aren’t messy, no. Witness this playback of Hockey’s flora, watch how it blooms to life something like child’s play. Then consider the immediacy of the process. How there is no consequence because you can choose not to “Save” and take it out of the world lickety-split.

The thing no one’s saying about this show is that it’s all more or less politeness. When art is an omnipresent file on a portable showcase, do we need to get hung up on museum walls? Obviously this is not “street”; it’s something else. Hockney likes to send his flowers and sunsets to the inboxes of friends. In fact, he has, over the course of this Louisiana show, continuously emailed new drawings to the exhibition. Unless you count yourself as an intimate of Hockney’s the museum seems like your window in. But theoretically, that won’t prove true. Maybe Hockney’s “iPad period” is not a phase.

Hockney has always had a big pocket put into his tailor-made suits, ad hoc for sketchbooks—but now that pocket is reserved for his iPad. As technology advances, I wonder if maybe what is next is subscription services. Art with a capital “a,” delivered like RSS feeds or Netflix—like milk in the old days—right to you. Pay-per-view? (Holograms?) I do not know that we can only interrogate in hallowed white spaces. It was said that no one would shop online. That the Video Home System would flop because we want to be swallowed by the cavernous theater. It wasn’t the same. And no, it isn’t the same. And yet. We can get the soul of a book without the spine. And I’m looking at a Hockney drawn on an iPad.

Katharina Grosse’s solo exhibition, Hello Little Butterfly, I Love You What’s Your Name, is occurring until November 7th at ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, in Ishøj, Denmark, within breath of Copenhagen.

Grosse makes canvas of architecture, erecting varicolored walk-abouts by using hundreds of litres of spray paint; mounds of earth; mammoth, leaning discs; and other big, wadded-up shapes. Viewers are not allowed any of the usual aloofness in their relationship to the artwork, as they literally walk through an airbrushed terrain. That status quo is dissolved. At once dreamy and seemingly protean, the space still renders you surefooted but takes your wit from you, bringing you into an unfettered realm. Appropriately, all of her installations are a one-time deal—they are site-specific and short-lived, as if reveries.

Born 1961 in Freiburg, Germany, Katharina Grosse is a graduate of the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where she studied with Gotthard Graubner and Gerhard Richter. She now lives and works in Berlin. Her last group exhibition was at the Miami Art Museum, Miami Space as Medium (2009); and her most recent solo exhibition, prior to the Arken, was Shadowbox at Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin.

Jacob Holdt is showing a selection of some 200 photographs, handpicked from four decades of work documenting the injustices of the American human condition. Faith, Hope, and Love, is ongoing until February 7th at Lousiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, in Humlebæk, Denmark, near Copenhagen.
Jacob Holdt captures the insider scene, intimate frames telltale of the gross disparity between the have’s and the have-not’s in the United States. Taken together, the collection outdoes the normal ability of the viewer to bear witness to an event; it is a salient report on the contingency of life chances, and a competent reply to the-world-is-your-oyster mythology. Viewers are necessarily taken aback and empathized by this poignant, in-your-face presentation. The photographs are further authorized by the option to use your mobile phone to listen to Holdt narrate the footage.

Jacob Holdt was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1947, the son of a Danish minister. In 1970, with about a mere forty dollars to his name, Holdt intended only to pass through the US and into South America from Canada. Instead, he stayed on more than five years chronicling American society with a cheap camera–hitchhiking his way across country and staying with hundreds of families who invited him into their homes (and who ran the gamut from pauperized farm workers to the silk-stocking Rockefeller’s). He published a compilation of his work upon returning to Denmark, American Pictures (1977). Now he is a lecturer and writer besides photographer, and has presented slideshows of his work in hundreds of American institutions of higher education and abroad.

Political pop artist Qi Zhilong‘s work is showing in a group exhibition titled, CHINAMANIA, taking place until January 3rd at ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, in Ishoj, Denmark, not far outside Copenhagen. CHINAMANIA diversely collects 24 works by 11 contemporary artists, and investigates the Chinese national scene, the international vista, and even the intimate effects the (inter)national level has at the local level for individuals.

Zhilong paints head shots of women that cross-reference China’s warm memories for its Revolution with today’s advertisement portraiture, the-selling-of-soap-with-sex trend. His work in CHINAMANIA, from his Chinese Girls series (2008), showcases three portraits of female red guards. He conspicuously omits the very tell-tale red star from their caps, and contrary to the brave visages of the famous youth soldiers, Zhilong renders these women uneasy, alarmed, and apparently shell-shocked. The portraits seem to point out the impinging nature of sociocultural shifts on person-hood, the feeling of having a rug pulled out from beneath you in wildly changing times.

Born in Mongolia in 1962, Qi Zhilong graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China in 1987. He resides in Beijing still. His last solo show, The OLYMP – Works on Paper occurred at the Galerie Burkhard Eikelmann, Dusseldorf in 2008.

Elliott Hundley‘s work mashes up the diligence of entomology displays with the audacity of pop-up books. He accumulates bits and pieces of lo-fi media like string, paper, and beading, and collages photographs – glues, pins and inlays for an atomistic, yet overall integrated scene. Color, texture and clipped images are made to beautifully butt heads in numerous intimate, epic conflicts. The effect is discursive, overlooking chronology and didacticism in favor of studying the nature of the conflict between the medias he pits against each other.

Hundley’s work is showing in a group exhibition, The World is Yours, ongoing until January 10 at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, just outside of Copenhagen, Denmark. The exhibition’s title promises the world, but also means to insinuate “the real world”: as diehard, breakneck times; as an empty/broken promise; and as a manque dream – usually could’a, should’a, would’a been, but isn’t.

Elliott Hundley received his BFA in printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design in 1997, and his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2005. His most recent solo show, Hekabe, occured this past spring at Regen Projects, Los Angeles, CA, and he will be in the forthcoming group exhibition, Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum Rotunda, at the Guggenheim in New York City this February 19 – May 16.

View Elliot Hundley’s previous feature on DailyServing.com