Jim Roche’s life is such a good yarn, there is a danger of it overshadowing his work. Before Roche was out of graduate school at the University of Dallas, he was one of the first artists ever to exhibit ceramics at the Whitney; in 1987 he was the record holder for the La Carrera Mexican 1,000cc Motorcycle Road Race; he won an NEA fellowship in 1982; his work was shown at Dave Hickey’s infamous gallery A Clean Well Lighted Space; and he made a brief appearance as a televangelist in the movie The Silence of the Lambs. Yet these anecdotes don’t reflect the prolific meditations included in Jim Roche: Cultural Mechanic, curated by Bradley Sumrall at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Roche is an artist who has been majorly overlooked in the last decades—his work Two hundred years keeping animals down, done brought Da Snake crawlin back around, Flashin Symbols for One and All; Don’t Tread on Me No More Y’all: Piece was last shown at the 37th Venice Biennale in 1976—yet his work is more prescient than ever.

Jim Roche. Cultural Mechanic, 2015; installation view. Courtesy of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Photo: Richard McCabe.

The Loch Ness Mama is the mythical character that dominates many of Roche’s drawings—forty-four of the 150 works in the exhibition depict her. Part snake, part amphibian, and with a three-breasted head, this cartoon creature is deceptively simple, yet she’s the protagonist in a dense, hallucinatory, Dada-esque world. Roche said, “The Lochness was something I had thought about for a long time. I guess I saw myself as this creature that no one new about. But I knew I existed.” Other characters in this play include another creature called a Penniemama, happy birds, transparent boxes, and flowers. In Loch Ness Mama Getting It in Open Water (1969), Roche opens the story with the title character frolicking in the water. This drawing is clean, precise, and annoyingly upbeat. However, twenty-five drawings later in the series, Loch Ness Mama Reduced for Quick Sale (1972) shows a composition covered in obsessive and baroque marks. There is a clear subtext that nature is fundamental to our existence and humankind is doing a terrible job of existing symbiotically within it.

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Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Forrest McGarvey reviews Tomokazu Matsuyama’s Come with Me at Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco.

Tomokazu Matsuyama. Warm Water, 2015; acrylic and mixed media on canvas; 67 x 104 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.

In Come With Me, Japanese American artist Tomokazu Matsuyama brings together an array of visual inspirations from his multinational background for his third solo show at Gallery Wendi Norris. Seemingly disparate elements collide in his acrylic paintings to create something new and unique, but they ultimately reveal how some visual resonances are more potent than others.

The bulbous canvas of Warm Water (2015) undulates from rounded corner to rounded corner, like a flag in the wind, or perhaps an unfurling scroll. Four figures stand among a thistle of Japanese maple leaves and orchids, as a bright red string flows throughout the composition, ending in a knotted bow floating above them. The figures’ hair blows wildly in the wind, making fluid shapes that harmonize well among Matsuyama’s bright patches of airbrushed gold and electric hues. They are dressed in traditional Japanese kimonos with details of Western clothes—such as shirt pockets, the lapels of a suit coat, and buttons—sewn into their patterns. As figurative forms give way to intricate patterns, amorphic forms, and precise applications of paint, Matsuyama’s work questions the line between representation and abstraction.
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Today from our friends at REORIENT, we bring you an excerpt from Nicola Baird’s review of Islamic Art Now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Baird notes that “the dialogue surrounding the validity of the term ‘Islamic’ as a meaningful art-historical classification continues to attract attention. Indeed, what is Islamic art, and is such a term appropriate?” This article was originally published on February 16, 2015.

Abdullah Al Saab. Technology Killed Reality, 2014. Courtesy of the Artist, Tamara Keleshian, and Museum Associates/LACMA. Photograph © Djinane AlSuwayeh.

Currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is Islamic Art Now, the first major exhibition showcasing the museum’s impressive collection of contemporary Middle Eastern and North African art, and the largest of its kind in the United States. Featuring twenty-five works in a range of differing media, including photography, sculpture, video, and installation art by twenty artists from Iran and the Arab world, such as Wafaa Bilal, Lalla Essaydi, Hassan Hajjaj, Mona Hatoum, and Shirin Neshat, Islamic Art Now can be seen to constitute, in the words of CEO Michael Govan and Director Wallis Annenberg, the “contemporary counterpart to LACMA’s world-renowned historical Islamic art collection,” as well as demonstrate the profound connection between the past and the present.

LACMA houses one of the most significant collections of “Islamic” art in the world, consisting of more than 1,700 works, including (but not limited to) glazed ceramics, enamelled glass, inlaid metalwork, and illustrated and illuminated manuscripts from southern Spain to Central Asia. The museum began to concentrate seriously on the arts of the Islamic (for lack of a better term) world in 1973 with the acquisition of the Nasli M. Heeramaneck Collection, during a time of rapid change and growth in the study of Islamic art. By 1972, thirteen professors and seven curators of Islamic art had been appointed at American institutions; less than two decades prior to this, only one full-time teaching position existed, with just four curators in employment across the entire country. Cultural and charitable establishments responded to the sudden escalation of Western interest in the Middle East, and in 1975, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened its original suite of galleries for the display of North America’s largest and most important collection of Islamic art. The following year, London hosted the inaugural World of Islam Festival, a program of exhibitions and events designed to introduce Islamic culture in its aesthetic, scientific, technological, musical, and intellectual entirety to the West.

Read the full article here.

Photographs have many potential uses. They can serve as objective documents of history, standing in for memory, ideas, and sensory representations, but they also have the capacity to manifest images of fictional narratives that are markedly creative. Nando Alvarez-Perez’s photographs, often produced in a series, mirror the many capacities of the photograph, capturing an array of past and future meanings, motifs, styles, and contexts.

Nando Alvarez-Perez. Primary Document 022415, 2015; archival pigment print; 40 x 60 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

At the core of Perez’s work is a specific interest in photographs as “translations from the material world into the perceptual—as I play within the memory of photography and imagine what its future could be.”[1] In his ongoing series History Pictures, Perez explores what he calls a “symbolic ecosystem of shared signs” by creating the many possibilities of the image all at once. In Primary Document 013015 (2015), Perez creates a digital photograph of what reads as a traditional still life that is a staged set of interrelated visual, aesthetic, and structural similarities that include photographs within the display.

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Hayv Kahraman’s current solo exhibition at Jack Shainman is captivating. A suite of large paintings, produced in 2014 and 2015, shows women in patterned garments interacting within simple architectural forms; Arabic script annotates the figures. The gallery text explains that the works depict “memories from Kahraman’s childhood in Baghdad and as a refugee in Sweden.”

Hayv Kahraman. Barboog, 2014; oil on linen; 108 x 72 in. © Hayv Kahraman. Courtesy of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

The women are suggestive, and refer to other artworks as diverse as Persian miniatures, ukiyo-e prints from Japan, and John Singer Sargent’s Madame X. With their bare, rounded shoulders and graceful hands, they seem poised to seduce, and yet they are completely engaged in their own affairs and thus devoid of affectation and coyness. Most don’t acknowledge the viewer—or when they do, the gaze is direct and the expression is indifferent. Arguably, these figures are interchangeable (the artist photographs herself as a reference, so they all have the same lithe bodies, thick eyebrows, and lambent eyes), but rather than clones, they are like sisters; their expressions and postures are subtly different, from playful and wily to demure, serious, and fierce. Additionally, the intricately patterned clothing implies that the women are merely ornamental, meant for the viewer’s gaze alone, but this is belied by their total absorption in each other.

The scale of the paintings gives the women ample room to inhabit a universe of their own, and the rich colors work beautifully against the background of dull tan. Though the paint is applied to the rough surface of raw linen, each stroke is as crisp and sure as if it were painted on glass, even in the delicate lines that form the Arabic script. The artist’s marks are at their most confident at the perimeter of the women’s hair, where the paint is dry-brushed into airy swoops that give the figures a self-assured grace. Kahraman’s use of negative space in the patterning of the women’s garments is attractive in the original sense of the word; I found myself moving closer and closer to each painting in order to experience the play between flatness and dimensionality.

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In October 1997, Ewa Stackelberg’s husband died in a plane accident in Costa Rica. Among the belongings sent to her after the tragedy was her husband’s camera, which had been smashed to pieces in the crash—almost like a foreshadowing of the turn that Stackelberg’s life and practice would take in the years to come. In the search for a new artistic language to express her grief, photography—or rather, the production of photograms—eventually became Stackelberg’s chosen medium. Nearly two decades later, the tragedy continues to inform her oeuvre, in which metaphors of life and death, in their gloriously distilled forms, have found permanent imprints on light-sensitive paper. It is this aesthetic sensibility that underpins Fotogram (2015), a retrospective of Stackelberg’s work—taken over a period of fifteen years—at Fotografiska.

Ewa Stackelberg. Divan Grottan, 2011; photogram; Divan series. Courtesy of Ewa Stackelberg and Fotografiska.

In technical terms, the photogram is a photographic image made without a camera, an old method that was, in the 19th century, employed by pioneers László Moholy-Nagy and Anna Atkins to create photographic illustrations with the cyanotype process. To create a photogram, objects are placed between light-sensitive paper and a light source; when exposed, the areas of the paper that receive light appear dark, and the parts that do not receive any light appear lighter. The silhouette that gradually emerges is a negative shadow image that shows variations in tone, depending on the degree of opacity and transparency of the objects used. As with the photographic pioneers, Stackelberg’s process in the darkroom is one of conscious experimentation with the image-production process. A usable print or a favorable outcome is never assured—Stackelberg readily admits that there are more bad prints than good ones—but it is precisely this aesthetic uncertainty that’s so alluring, especially when the creation of a photogram is akin to engaging in “a dialogue between the unconscious and the artistic material” each time light, chemicals, and objects interact.

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Surround Audience, the latest triennial exhibition at the New Museum, surveys fifty-one emerging artists, from twenty-five countries, whose practices are informed by their lived experience immersed in the digital landscape. The triennial has always billed itself as a predictive rather than reflective survey, and this iteration is no exception, with a focus on the culture of the immediate present and where it’s hurtling. Though the show’s description never uses the word digital, all of the works are made by a generation of artists whose lives have been marked by the unprecedented proliferation of digital technology over the past three decades. The exhibition claims to address such lines of inquiry as: “What are the new visual metaphors for the self and subjecthood when our ability to see and be seen is expanding, as is our desire to manage our self-image and privacy? Is it possible to opt out of, bypass, or retool commercial interests that potentially collude with national and international policy? How are artists striving to embed their works in the world around them through incursions into media and activism?”[1]

Josh Kline. Freedom, 2015; installation view, 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, New Museum, New York. Courtesy of the Artist and 47 Canal, New York.

The triennial is co-curated by Ryan Trecartin, an artist whose own practice wrangles with these questions. What no longer exists for Trecartin, the artists in Surround Audience, and those who choose to categorize their work as post-internet art is the idea of an online/offline boundary; offline existence is impossible, as is privacy. Whereas earlier internet artists often made work that could be seen solely online and explored the implications of the new, widespread accessibility and audience, post-internet artists mine the state of mind they grew up with, a consciousness built to utilize the systems of online networks that define and organize daily life. A recent International Data Corporation (IDC) study found that the average person in the United States between 18 and 44 years of age checks their Facebook status fourteen times per day; 62 percent of these 18-to-44-year-olds check their smartphones immediately upon waking up.[2] What does being constantly plugged in, visible, interactive, and trackable do to one’s sense of self? Questioning the effects of a rapidly evolving culture on “our sense of self and identity as well as on art’s form and larger social role”—as the exhibition claims to do—has been a concern of varying degree within the arts since the early modern period and will likely continue to have new permutations every generation. What Surround Audience frames successfully is the shift in focus from understanding the internet as a tool to instead understanding it as an exponentially developing biosphere that we exist in and are helping to shape.

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