Art in time of conflict is not for the faint of conviction. For its makers, it can be leveraged for communication, catharsis, or an attempt at clarity; Brooklyn-based artist Shanti Grumbine engages with all three. She cuts found text and images in reconsideration of the boundaries between absence and presence—between profane and sacred content. Her drawings, prints, and collages make hay of what remains from the material’s original consumption. She neglects no inquiry, sourcing hymns from religious scripts, patterns from antiquated textiles, and most recently, coverage of global political discord in the New York Times. What results are deconstructed presentations of a text’s individual parts, both physical and lyrical.

Ashley Stull Meyers: We met during your residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and your studio immediately gave the sense of how interested you are in detritus. Your process seems conceptually connected to ephemera and the craft of remaking. How did that begin, and what’s your investment in it?

Shanti Grumbine: My interest in cast-off or found materials started when I was young, influenced by my mother, who was an artist. When I was sixteen, I began working with linoleum tiles that had been pulled up from the floor at Simon’s Rock College, where I went to school. I liked knowing what my substrate would be—a repeated grid—and I got to know the material nature of the tiles. For a while I saved my tea bags, emptying the tea and replacing it with small objects, sewn lines, text, and images…again, a gridded accumulation. It was a type of diary, replacing the daily ritual of drinking tea with the ritual of documenting. Now I work with certain materials for a long time, like the plastic New York Times newspaper sleeves that my subscription comes in. I began making textiles with them at the Bemis. I guess it’s a bit of an anti-capitalist gesture, to spend time with detritus.

It’s also a nod toward the longevity of an object—its shifting narrative role in the physical world. I started to keep the eraser filings when I was working on Names of the Dead because they looked like ashes; I display them with the thin strips of removed text below the redacted newspaper pages. Uncoupled from its original function and value, detritus becomes something freed from its place within language and is, as a result, full of suggestion and possibility.

Read More »

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, Shelley Carr reviews YOGAFLOGOGO at Southern Exposure in San Francisco, California. 

Neon colored tape, fanny packs and leotards, animated speaking hairballs, and videos of aerobic booty shaking—there was a lot going on at Southern Exposure on Saturday, February 21. In YOGAFLOGOGO, a performance organized by artist Olivia Mole, a trio of actors carried out a series of actions in an attempt to perform the synergy between the loss of individuality as young women nearing adulthood and an absurdist take on the dumbing-down of pop consumer culture.

The latest iteration by Mole—part of three two-week process-based performance and video projects—is set in a cartoonish space divided by plastic barriers, large stones, a TV set, and a yellow couch. Three projections positioned high on the walls offer humorous asides and a clunky, animated endoscopy set to lurid sound effects.

Read More »

Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you Maria Porges’ review of Bill Owens: Suburbanites and Socialites at Mills College Art Museum. The author notes, “When I think about the tidal wave of changes that were moving through the political and sociocultural landscape at that time, there is something both tender and awful about the reality Owens captured. It is a reality we are fortunate to have a record of, as imaginary as it now seems.” This article was originally published on February 19, 2015.

Three girls carrying batons parade across hideous houndstooth wall-to-wall carpeting. They look focused on their practice; a fourth girl, dejected or maybe just bored, sits in the background by a wall of trophies (awards for twirling, possibly?). This black-and-white photograph from 1973 is one of thirty-three featured in Suburbanites and Socialites, a small but compelling research-driven exhibition at the Mills College Art Museum. The photographs—recently donated by Robert Harshorn Shimshak and Marion Brenner—were selected from Suburbia, Owens’s 1973 landmark book of images and text, later followed by Our Kind of People (1975), Working—I do it for the Money (1977), and, decades later, Leisure (2004).

In the early 1970s, when Owens took these pictures in and around Livermore, California, few photographers had shown an interest in portraying life within the vast sprawl of housing developments that would become home to sixty million Americans in the decades after World War Two. Having discovered photography during a stint in the Peace Corps, Owens took a job in 1968 as staff photographer for The Independent, a small newspaper in Livermore. Going out on up to six assignments a day made it easy to get to know the people, places, and events of the community Owens was documenting. Along the way, he became one of the most important chroniclers of his time, known for images so memorable that they have become part of our unconscious template for how suburbia should look.

Read the full article here.

Photographer Jason Engelund is distinctly aware of the conceptual and metaphorical capacities of landscape. Engelund works with a single series of photographs at a time to capture one motif, location, technique, or compositional strategy from various positions. However, these discrete bodies of work resonate with one another as part of a long-term vision—an ongoing project, or more aptly a study of photographic mechanisms and the ways they mark and demarcate landscape.

Drawing with the Sun & Sea 60 (2015) is part of Engelund’s 2015 series Meta-Landscapes & Visual Ambient Drones, which depicts a succession of landscapes. For these images, Engelund experiments with intervening in the images—marking the negatives and overlaying frames—before they are developed, and he often does so on-site in direct response to the presence of the landscape itself. The stylistic visual qualities of the subject matter, such as a mountain emerging from an ocean, have been reversed through the artist’s experiments with exposure time; dark and light have switched to make the landscape look snow-covered and unreal, with an ethereal black circle emerging from the center of the frame.

Read More »

Future Ruins, Rodrigo Valenzuela’s exhibition at the Frye Art Museum, is indeed monumental, incorporating a range of media including print, sculpture, video, and sound. The exhibition does not present a quiet, post-apocalyptic landscape that fetishizes decay; rather, Valenzuela addresses divisions of labor and the nature of work, making these complex issues manifest through the specter of the 21st-century economic landscape. And though it is discordant at times, the installation requires sensory friction to make its point.

It is the artist’s firsthand experience as an undocumented worker that lends dimension to his creative practice and vehemence to his politics. Valenzuela emigrated from Chile to the U.S. by way of Montreal in 2005, and for three years, he picked up odd jobs through labor agencies and by waiting on the street, bouncing from Boston to Olympia before finally settling in Seattle in 2006. “Minorities often get invisible jobs,” he remarked in a 2014 interview. “When you get to your office, school, or restaurant, look around. Look at the trash and the bathrooms. If you don’t see anything, then that is a well-done, invisible job, often executed by disposable people.”

Valenzuela’s vision of the future is a close examination of the present. The exhibition is organized in three sections, and each of the varied components operates similarly to a stage, serving up satire to make way for speculation. The visit begins in a darkened room where two short videos, Maria TV (2014) and Diamond Box (2012), are shown on a loop. It is here that we are introduced to the laborers whose contributions to the mechanisms of daily life are undeniably crucial yet remain invisible.

Read More »

Today from our partners at Art Practical we bring you Rebecca Gates’ fascinating examination of the nexus of sound and textile processes. Be sure to spend some time with this piece—perhaps with headphones on—to really grasp the points at which these seven artists find inspiration. This piece was originally published on February 26, 2015.

A sweater pulled overhead, brushing the ears, both muffling sounds and creating a gentle cacophony. The highly rhythmic rattle of a textile mill in operation, any time from the height of the Industrial Revolution to the present. The meditative tempo—to and fro, clicks and clacks—of a loom beater in motion.

When one considers the relationship of sound to textiles, one’s focus can shift scales, from the sound of fabric moving over skin to wearable sound-producing technology; from the unruly knit of an artificial fur Deadcat windscreen damping the impact of wind on a microphone to the simple fabric covering a loudspeaker emitting sounds at great volume.

Ever present, sound has only in the last century been framed in terms of art and its vocabulary, its sensory and expository qualities explored and incorporated in contemporary art works and theory. As the discipline of sound art develops and becomes more common, artists, including those working in textiles, are exploring ways to relate to and collaborate with sound.

Read the full article here.

“Grids punctured with crosses in varying patterns” is perhaps the best—and admittedly, the most simplistic—way of summing up Ding Yi’s oeuvre. Ivory Black at the ShanghArt gallery is his latest iteration of these basic, severely geometric forms, in varying shades of blue, black, and white hues, distinguished only by date and serial number. Like an astronomer’s chart of the night sky, Ding’s gridded, ordered forms lend a semblance of artificial order to infinite black space as the plus and X marks pulse and shimmer with subtly placed colored accents on a dark background. Yet they offer no central focal point that draws the eye; it just isn’t possible to look at the flattened layers of vivid colors and patterns and pick out a distinguishing mark to begin a detailed examination of the canvas. Without a visual anchor, viewers can only drift within the spaces in which grid and cross intermingle, uncomfortably caught between two- and three-dimensional spaces where boundaries between pictorial depth and surface flatness begin to get fuzzy.

The masterful, intricate complexity of the Appearance of Crosses (2014) series is impressive and unsurprising; after all, Ding’s unswerving commitment to rational abstraction began nearly thirty years ago, in the years of socio-political upheaval following China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Like many artists of that time, Ding’s earliest venture into abstraction was a personal act of rebellion against the earthy tones and glib smoothness of Russian socialist realism, a figurative style that had heavily influenced the propagandistic art of the revolution. Looking instead to the Post-Impressionists, the Abstract Expressionists, and the De Stijl movement, Ding painted Taboo (1986) out of a limited palette of muted tones and bold, long brushstrokes depicting a dynamic combination of marks, its anxious, forceful energy seeming to mirror the turmoil of state and self in the aftermath of the revolution. Just two years later, he had created the first of his so-called “cross paintings,” a template of abstraction that he would follow for the next three decades as the contemporary Chinese art world made its own great leap forward.

Read More »