Jennifer Juniper Stratford. Program Vista, 2014 (still); video projection. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo by the author.

Allison Schulnik’s EAGER is a jumble of grotesque and beautiful scenes that begins with a dance of skeletal female figures who communicate with their long, stringy hair, since their faces are absent. They come in contact with a gauzy, blue-stained witch and a comically sad clown–horse with an erect, red, swinging dick. Then one woman unzips the others’ stomachs to wear them like backpacks through a wild and carnivorous forest of flowers and trees reminiscent of the garden of live flowers from Alice in Wonderland. The influence of choreographer Pina Bausch is apparent, but so too the terrifying early psychedelic cartoons of the 1930s. What this lavish animation encompasses makes words feel ineffective, but any attempt would have to include life, death, rebirth, sex, competition, nature, self-expression, female empowerment, and reproductive power—thanks to all of the rotting, deformed, and beautifully hand-sculpted figures. Schulnik even places herself in the work in a photographic stop-motion sequence, wearing a costume that resembles the blue clay witch. This is the first animation for which the artist has commissioned accompanying music; in the past, she used existing music from artists. Schulnik says that working with Olson was her first collaboration, and the creative agency this allowed is evident in the film.

Allison Schulnik. EAGER, 2014 (video still); stop-motion animation with sound; 8:30. Courtesy of the Artist and Mark Moore Gallery.

The paintings from Los Angeles-based Jake Longstreth’s series Particulate Matter (2013–2014) are meditations on mark making and form. Using the hills surrounding Los Angeles as subject matter, Longstreth makes small, precise brush strokes to create the depth of the topography while leaving the sky a perfectly smooth gradient. Los Angeles is a city of sunlight, but if you live here, the quality of the light becomes one of the only indications of a passage of time—the color of the sky and the light reflecting off of the surrounding hills is powerful—and indicative of the season, levels of pollution, cloud cover, and moisture. Longstreth somehow, almost magically, manages to capture not only the varying qualities of light on the hills, but the feelings they invoke as you see them change daily from your house or the freeway.

Jake Longstreth. Particulate Matter #3, 2014; oil on canvas; 17 x 13 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Peter Scherrer’s expressionistic oil paintings of the California desert are rich tapestries with layers of symbols built into the landscape. Craggy mountainsides become human characters, trees turn into snakes, cacti resemble testicles—there are a lot of possible and probable hidden reproductive organs—as well as a dagger perched precariously at the edge of one painting. This landscape is a purely subconscious one, where each element has a personality and life of its own, but none of it feels sinister. Scherrer’s landscapes feel like old friends making themselves known.

Peter Scherrer. Red Hill, 2014; oil on linen on panel; 16 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Jesse Wiedel’s strange, somewhat crude paintings of low-life characters in small California towns are the only pieces that directly deal with civilization in the show, although the civilization depicted is a surreal fiction. In The Tropics (2014), a woman dances for a man with his pants down around his ankles outside of a motel called The Tropics while a sleepy-looking alien lumbers behind her. In The Incinerator (2013), a pair of terrifying meth-head men walk both toward and away from the viewer, carrying a red cooler under a tie-dye sky, as though they were stuck circling the sawdust incinerator in their small town for eternity. These paintings display the depression, helplessness, and total disconnect from the land that happens in small towns (note the “Tropics” motel, which is anywhere but), even though these places are often more remote and therefore enveloped in the landscape.

Jesse Wiedel. The Tropics, 2013; oil on wood; 16 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

The links between the pieces in Landscape City are tonal more than anything else. The feelings evoked by Aaron Olson’s score for EAGER are echoed again and again in the pieces throughout the show—a calm navigation of our place in the vastness of our physical world.

Landscape City is on view at Eagle Rock Center for the Arts through December 11, 2014.

Western Exhibitions in Chicago is currently presenting The Power of Selection (Part I), the first in a series of three exhibitions organized by Chicago-based artist and independent curator Ryan Travis Christian. The exhibition, which features works by Alika Cooper, Mike Rea, Allison Schulnik, Marissa Textor, and Eric Yahnker, loosely explores the idea of contemporary figuration. Works in the exhibition range from a massive anthropomorphic wooden sculpture by Mike Rea, who also exhibited in DailyServing.com’s 1000 DAYS exhibition in Los Angeles last May, to new video work by recent DailyServing.com interviewee, Allison Schulnik.

The exhibition series is designed to bring new creative talent to the Chicago area by artist who rarely exhibit in that region. Curator Ryan Travis Christian works diligently, as he has noted, “to increase the circulation of contemporary artwork”, not only in Chicago, but also as a correspondent for Fecalface.com and through his daily artist selection through Facebook and Beautiful/Decay.com. The young artist and curator has organized recent exhibition including West, Wester, Westest at FFDG, San Francisco, SPORTS at Synchronicity, Los Angeles, and Control C, Control V at EbersMoore Gallery in Chicago.

Seth Curcio: You have recently completed exhibitions with great success in London, Rome and New York City. You also have an exhibition of new works currently on view at Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles titled, Home for Hobo. This exhibition continues to explore different emotional states through your hobo clown protagonist. Can you tell me a little about what is included in the exhibition?

Allison Schulnik: Its a little bit of his world.  He’s got a home, his sanctuary. There is Rug Girl, Possum, and Klaus…  friends and companions, maybe alter egos and bizarros.

SC: Within this exhibition, several different characters appear in your paintings, sculptures and animations, many of which you just named. Most, if not all, reoccur in your other bodies of your work too. How did you decide on these specific characters, and are they rendered completely from imagination or are they based on anything in particular?

AS: They come from different places. Mostly they come from drawings that I do. Sometimes I get inspired from a photograph or another painting or sculpture or film or dance or song, then I draw that or something inspired by that, and it becomes something else.  Sometimes I just draw from my imagination. Often for months, even years I’ll have an image or character continuously reappear to me and not know why, until it proves important enough to get immortalized in oils. Then, I still don’t know why I painted it.  One day I might figure it out.

SC: The animated video Forest, which is also on view at Mark Moore Gallery, was used as the music video Ready, Able for the Brooklyn-based band Grizzly Bear. This is the second video that you have created which utilizes a Grizzly Bear song, however this one became their official music video. Talk to me about how this collaboration began. How was the video created and what takes place?

AS: I asked them for permission to use their song Granny Diner on my last film, HOBO CLOWN.  They approved and a year later they asked me to do a music video for their next album, Veckatimest.  I agreed. They gave me the song, and I made an animated film for it. It is an abstract kind of narrative, if anything. It follows the Long Hair Hobo character through an alternate type world, Forest, where he encounters a bizarro world version of himself.  Then things begin to happen…

SC: The animation seems like such a natural synthesis of your paintings and sculptures, and Grizzly Bear’s music really adds a different element to the work. Are there any other collaborations similar to this that you’d like to explore? I know that you play in a couple of bands, have you ever considered composing your own music for future animations?

AS: Yeah, I have a couple bands in mind I’d really like to work with.  I’d like to have music composed for my next film too, rather than using something that already exists. I’ve thought about doing some sound and music myself as well, but that might not be a good idea.

SC: Learning that you are an avid painter, sculptor, animator, dancer and musician, and by viewing the myriad of works listed on your website and your exhibition schedule, it appears as if you are a very prolific artist. What is an average day like for you in the studio?

AS: Once I get into the studio I stay there all day, sometimes all night.  I like privacy.  I sit and stare a lot.  I like to snack, and to look at stuff. I find weird little things to do.  Sometimes painting comes in a very concentrated way.  Then, sometimes it comes with a fury of dancing and singing. I put on some good Babs show-tunes, some epic Angel Witch, some atmospheric doomy metal, or maybe a little Peabo Bryson… it just depends on my mood.  But, the music is always loud. I don’t have computer or TV at the studio, because procrastination involves those kinds of things.  I just don’t have any kind of method that I can count on.  One thing works one day, and doesn’t work the next day.  I’m fickle with a short attention span.

SC: It seems as if you still manage to complete a lot of work even with a short attention span. What are you working on in the studio right now? And, what projects are on the horizon for you?

AS: Well, I just finished all my work work for this show, so I am taking a little break for a minute.  Going to let some ideas brew in my head for bit… you’ll just have to wait and see!

It’s unfortunate but rare that art, particularly video work, moves me to the point where I’m exaggeratedly weaving words like “love” and “obsessed” into conversations about it–confessions that some might say belong more within the confines of teenagers’ online message boards about “Twilight” than within the discussion of serious contemporary art. But such is the case with Allison Schulnik‘s claymation video Hobo Clown (2008). The few minutes that it runs are some of the most heartbreaking, kaleidoscopic, breathtaking and gracefully tragic that you might ever spend on viewing art. Schulnik has created a messily pinched and sumptuously colored world of upside-down-smile wearing clowns, dragging along a vast lonesomeness of delicate floral arrangements and faded landscape, to the mesmerizing music of Grizzly Bear. You just want to climb inside the video and wrap the folds of clay around yourself, maybe fall asleep to the heartbreaking guitar strums. Around the point when the song’s first lyrics hum “Why don’t you do any dishes?”–which surprisingly isn’t at all distracting, as is the case with much of the music played over video work–things turn psychedelic, but in an honest and fresh way. Hobo Clown is currently on view at Marty Walker Gallery in Dallas, Texas.

Allison Schulnik lives and works in Los Angeles. She received a BFA in Experimental Animation at the California Institute of Arts in 2000. Her paintings have been exhibited internationally at venues including Basel; The Armory Show, New York; Rokeby Gallery, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica; and Bellwether Gallery, New York.