Tara Merenda Nelson (with Madge of Honor). Beautiful Secrets, Episode 2, 2014; video still.

For five weeks early in this year, half of a modestly sized art space in Boston’s South End became a field of infinite possibility, courtesy of chroma-key green and the kijidome group. Susan Metrican, Lucy Kim, Carlos Jiménez Cahua, and Sean Downey don’t consider it a gallery but a space for collaboration, and this project, Green Dream, was all about collaboration. The group created a green-screen room—which allows digital projections to be layered into video along with live actors—and put a call out to artists they knew or wanted to work with to come and play. The resulting anthology of sixteen videos screened on February 8 before an appreciative audience in a larger studio upstairs.

All the videos were recorded in the presence of Dushko Petrovich’s Green Screed, a ceiling-to-floor text on the space’s fourth wall. By turns funny and anguished, the screed exposes the fatuousness of “green” discourse in contemporary culture and its almost comically feeble consumerist-based “solutions” to the impending ecological tsunami. Nothing is spared, from bumper-sticker slogans and organic veggies to technofuturist idylls of unlimited sustainability. But what the text dwells on most are the mental feints and blinds we use to put off the day of reckoning. The densely packed lines of shiny green vinyl and rounded, nonthreatening font almost appear to abet these equivocations, inviting the eye to slide away. Thus green ultimately figures as “the very plane of fantasy” on which we project our doomed—but artisanally crafted—dreams.

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Tom LaDuke, Run Generator, 2009. Graphite, glue, mirror, 6 x 19 x 9 1/2 inches

On Saturday, April 13, 2013, ten artists representing a range of painterly approaches and hailing from Los Angeles, New York, and the Bay Area gathered in San Francisco to take the pulse of a practice that is denigrated as often as it is celebrated. Linda Geary and James Gobel (the chair and associate chair, respectively, of California College of the Arts’ painting program) organized the symposium, which was attended by a large, enthusiastic audience, and introduced it with the stated intention to address issues of practice and theory as well as matters of material, form, and context that seem urgent in contemporary painting. They addressed neither the specter of Rosalind Krauss invoked by the title of the day’s proceedings nor the legitimation of painting after the advent of conceptualism, paving the way instead for an exemplary range of perspectives linking painting to both life and art. The subsequent ten-minute presentations by each of the invited artists set the stage for two roundtable discussions in which shared concerns and interests quickly coalesced.

Any unease caused by the prospect of one hundred minutes of painterly presentation was instantly dispelled by the Los Angeles–based practitioner Tom LaDuke’s high-octane, confessional exposé of the “humiliation” of painterly practice. With deadpan drollery, LaDuke raced through a gamut of concerns, from abject life to brutish death, presenting images of paintings that veered from the photorealistic to the abstract and of extraordinarily painstaking, lifelike sculptures. He candidly voiced the angst of striving to sustain a hermetic studio-based existence, of imbuing painting with conceptual and metaphysical validity, of being stuck with oneself and one’s compulsive behaviors, and of constantly seeking the means to short-circuiting one’s predilections in pursuit of an innovative artistic practice that retains urgency for both practitioner and viewer. In situating the development of his art directly alongside his life experiences, and in expressing doubt and desperation, LaDuke placed painting firmly at the center of a sentient artistic practice. In a way, he said it all.

Read the full article here.