As part of our ongoing partnership with KQED.org, today we bring you a reflection on Moment to Moment, a collaboration between San Francisco’s THE THING Quarterly and Levi’s. Author Roula Seikaly explores the art historical precedent for the project and questions the relationship between artistic endeavors and corporate sponsorship. She notes, “the THING/Levi’s Made & Crafted union is troublesome, if only because the partnership defies the critique posited by [artists] whose work interrogated pervasive consumer culture.” The article was originally published on September 17, 2013.

Moment to Moment, installation view, Castro Muni Train Station, San Francisco. On floor: Starlee Kine. On right wall: Susan O’Malley.

If you’ve boarded a train at the Castro Muni station since mid-July or spent time near the intersection of Market and Sixteenth Streets, you may have noticed the large text panels and billboard installations currently on view and wondered what you were looking at. Well, wonder no more. San Francisco–based artists Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan have temporarily intervened in our daily comings and goings with Moment to Moment, the latest installment in the ongoing project THE THING Quarterly, on view first in San Francisco and later in New York City, London, Los Angeles, and Tokyo. (Though the San Francisco exhibition was scheduled to be up from July 22 to August 18, as of this writing it was still on view in the Castro Muni station, though how long it will remain is anyone’s guess. Companies that own public ad space will often wait until the next campaign is ready before swapping out the old one.)

What is THE THING Quarterly? Broadly described, it is a publication…with a twist. Each iteration of THE THING is conceived of and executed by different collaborators. Since its inception in 2009, an impressive roster of artists and writers have contributed, including Miranda July, Allora & Calzadilla, Dave Eggers, Tauba Auerbach, and the annoyingly ubiquitous James Franco. Each project produces a useful object, such as Eggers’s readable shower curtain, July’s forlornly notated window shade, and a switchblade Franco commissioned to honor the memory of friend and fellow actor Brad Renfro. Through subscriptions and sales of these unique items, Herschend and Rogan have established both a sustainable business model for small arts institutions and thrown a wrench into our thinking about the form and lifespan of a publication. For Moment to Moment, Herschend and Rogan drew from the work of conceptual artist Dan Graham. Graham was inspired by the musings of the nineteenth-century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who considered the book as a performative, collective experience. Between 1966 and 1968, Graham co-opted commercial advertising space in publications as wildly different as Harper’s Bazaar and The New York Review of Sex. In each instance, he drew attention to text-based work and proposed that publications, conservative or radical, were ideal locations for intervention.

Read the full article here.

From our friends at Beautiful/Decay, today we bring you paintings by Tsherin Sherpa, who states: “if we […] analyze these Buddhist images, one will find that they are a means to develop a practitioner’s (Buddhist) goal towards enlightenment, which means that the images are not the ultimate goal but rather a vehicle.” This article was written by Russ Crest and originally published on October 2, 2013.

Tsherin Sherpa. UNTITLED, 2010; gouache, acrylic and gold leaf on paper; 30 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist

Tsherin Sherpa, born in Kathmandu Nepal, originally trained as a traditional Tibetan thangka painter with his father Master Urgen Dorje. From the age of twelve, he underwent six years of intensive training before travelling to Taiwan to study Mandarin and computer science. Since then he has returned to thangka painting but has added a contemporary twist to the traditional paintings leaving behind the traditional confines of the age old practice. His work now mixes the techniques and imagery of thangka with contemporary subject matter.

Read the full article here.

Located in the heart of Toronto’s historic garment district is Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art. While this might seem at first an accident of geography, it gains significance in light of Prefix’s recently opened group show, Trade Marks, in which the featured artists explore textiles, their relationship as First Nation artists to trade, and the contested geographies and histories of Ontario.

Trade Marks, curated by Betty Julian, includes works by Keesic Douglas, Meryl McMaster, Nigit’stil Norbert, and Bear Witness in association with ImagineNative. Photographic works dominate the show. In one of the most striking images, McMaster freezes in time the cyclonic motion of a flock of birds twirling frantically around her head.

Nigit’stil Norbert. Fractured Origin, 2013; inkjet print; 20 x 20 inches. Courtesy the artist and Prefix ICA.

For Norbert’s series of photos, the contested nature of Toronto’s geography is revealed in mundane, sometimes shabby urban spaces, devoid of people but inhabited by persistent vegetal growths. Sprouting from fractures in concrete and asphalt, these poplar and sumac seedlings defy the logic of the hard surfaces that typically characterize metropolitan infrastructure. Norbert’s meditation on these places redirects our urban gaze to reconsider histories whose roots extend below the hard surfaces, breaking these surfaces and interrupting the perceived logic of the city. As Norbert reminds us in her work, these non-space spaces are in fact historical locations of indigenous congregations.

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Depending on who you ask, anywhere between eight thousand and thirteen thousand people attended the vernissage of the world’s newest art fair, Sydney Contemporary. By the end of three and a half days, the fair had attracted almost twenty-nine thousand visitors eager to see the offerings from eighty-three Australian and international galleries, presenting the work of more than three hundred artists. The physical scale was vast, making good use of Carriageworks, a former industrial site well suited to enormous events and to the presentation of contemporary art.

Shaun Gladwell. Storm Sequence, 2000; single-channel video, sound; 8 min. Courtesy Sydney Contemporary

Acerbic art critic Charlie Finch once declared that art fairs are to looking at art what porn is to making love: “a wide variety of partial impressions which … shatter the whole experience.” One might ask whether the world really needs another art fair. Sydney, however, has embraced it with enthusiasm. Galleries saw an opportunity to make contact with new buyers and extend their global reach, and locals came out in force to look.

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I walked into Culver City’s Mark Moore Gallery last Saturday a little road weary, which is quite standard here in L.A. I deliberately marched past the front desk and into the spacious main gallery to investigate a giant double canvas that was prominently featured.  What I saw was a candy-colored jungle of organized visual chaos: crisp geometric shapes that seem to be made of pulled taffy amid gestural dry-brush strokes, marker-drawn stripes like ribbon candy that abruptly end and become sections of bare, unprimed canvas with thousands of parallel lines obsessively drawn in ballpoint pen. The room was full of such paintings—alive and bright, busy and complex—their lines, textures and materials all so distinctly separate they create the appearance of having been painted on different surfaces, cut out, and glued onto one canvas  (this is not so, but the illusion of collage it creates is mesmerizing).

Feodor Voronov. All the Right Moves, 2013; acrylic, marker, ballpoint pen and spray paint on canvas; 62 x 96 in. Courtesy the Artist and Mark Moore Gallery

Relics is Feodor Voronov’s first large-scale solo show. When I had earlier avoided the front desk, what I was really avoiding was the temptation to grab a list of works and read the titles, which have everything—and nothing—to do with the pieces themselves. I knew that this show was a variation of his trademark Word Paintings, which the artist made by choosing a word almost randomly (by intuition and shape and not meaning or sound) from an online list (“words that will make you sound smart and not pretentious”) and beginning with the word as a formal “armature” onto which he builds the rest of the painting. In Relics, Voronov plays with combinations of words overheard or found in his daily life.

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Bean Gilsdorf is on the road this week—look for her reports from Krakow and Warsaw in October—so today we bring you a reprint of a column from July 23, 2012. Help Desk is an arts-advice column that demystifies practices for artists, writers, curators, collectors, patrons, and the general public. Submit your questions anonymously here. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. Help Desk is co-sponsored by KQED.org.

I work for a commercial gallery space and have been approached by male collectors who express an interest in taking me out. More often than not, I have no interest in these men, but I am always anxious my boss may be upset that I get a bit cold in order to put them off. What do you think is the appropriate way to handle this situation?

The easy way out is to buy a decoy engagement ring, a big eye-catching piece of sparkly glass, and wear it to work. If you’re a man, you could try the same with a traditional-looking thick gold band. It won’t stop all comers, but it might scare off the majority.

Rob Swainston. Centennial, 2009; woodblock print on paper, each scroll 36 in. x 10 ft. Courtesy the artist

But it would be better if you understood your employer’s expectations so that you could stop feeling anxious, and the only way to do that is have an open and honest conversation. Then the two of you can decide together what course of action to take. There’s no need to feel awkward; just ask for a quick meeting and state the facts: collectors are asking you out and you’re not interested. Say, “How would you like me to handle this situation?” Probably your employer will direct you to act similarly to how you already are, but if she tells you to do something that you’re not comfortable with, you must speak up calmly but immediately: “I don’t think that’s going to work; can we find another solution?” Both parties need to put their cards on the table; that way you will know what’s expected and your boss can get your back should an uninvited flirtation get out of hand. You need to know that your boundaries are respected in the workplace, if not by the clientele then at least by your colleagues. And, of course, if your boss tries to pimp you out in the interest of selling some work, you’ll know that it’s time to grab your bag and run for the door.

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Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses (250–400 words) 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, Danica Willard Sachs reviews Ryan McGinley’s YEARBOOK at Ratio 3 in San Francisco.

Ryan McGinley. YEARBOOK, 2013, Installation view, Courtesy the artist and Ratio 3

For his latest project, YEARBOOK (2013), Ryan McGinley has wallpapered the interior of Ratio 3 from floor to ceiling with latex Inkjet studio portraits of nude youth, all on poster-size paper and mostly in color. The result makes for an oppressive and chaotic visual experience. McGinley first started making studio portraits in 2009 as a way of auditioning young models to appear in his photographs. The resulting images marked a stylistic departure from the depictions of youth romping through pastoral settings depicted in McGinley’s better-known work. With their moody grays and spare, minimal quality, these 2009 portraits were used by the artist to establish his own aesthetic within the lineage of photographic portraiture.

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