Margo Wolowiec. Evergreen, Searchlight, Rosebud, 2017; installation view, Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco. Courtesy of the Artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery.

Margo Wolowiec’s work intersects many planes: physical and virtual spaces, pleasure and danger, analog and conceptual practices, and the mediums of painting, sculpture, textile, and installation. Wolowiec’s exhibition Evergreen, Searchlight, Rosebud at Jessica Silverman Gallery, on view through May 27, explores these thresholds through her multidimensional practice.

Wolowiec sources her images with a digital program that captures photographs from social-media platforms like Instagram and Facebook using predetermined hashtags, such as #BlackAndWhite, or geolocations, like the Louvre or Dubai Mall. Additionally, she sources text from screenshots of established and fake online news sites. She prints the compiled images onto strands of thread with a sublimation dye printer, and manually weaves them with floor loom; the final textile is mounted on a frame or in a freestanding support.

For this body of work, Wolowiec drew heavily from the hashtag “rosegarden.” The variables in Wolowiec’s methodical process result in pixelated images of text and flowers. In Imagine How Many (2017), Wolowiec combines text with images of flowers in a grid-like formation. Hyperlinks and blue highlights are identifiable in the text, but the text itself is abstracted to illegibility, preventing the viewer from knowing if information is false or verified; an editor’s “delete” symbol punctuates this layered indeterminacy. The visual ambiguity—disorienting among familiar, lush floral imagery—denies meaning, indicating the slippage of translation.

In this series, Wolowiec incorporated a new material, copper mesh, in her freestanding diptych structures. The interlocking copper rhymes with the warp and weft of the nearby textiles, while the wire’s rigidity contrasts with the supple textiles, creating a luminous, jewel-like screen through which one may view the works. Wolowiec’s screens reference Faraday cages, copper-wire mesh enclosures that block electromagnetic fields; [1] these shields suggest that we might need protection from our seemingly innocuous and ubiquitous phones, computers, and televisions. Wolowiec’s copper layers are simultaneously inviting and threatening, functioning both as a viewing screen and a protective partition.

Because social media often projects an idealized version of reality, online experiences can trigger desire and longing, as well as anxiety and insecurity. Wolowiec’s work, which directly and indirectly relies on the internet and digital interfaces, poignantly illustrates this tension. Although Wolowiec’s copper mesh doesn’t enclose the viewer as a Faraday cage would, it nevertheless threatens to negate her own process. Wolowiec’s screens provide a partial intervention for our internet-saturated lives, and suggest that social media, though enticing, is unknowable and precarious.

Evergreen, Searchlight, Rosebud will be on view through May 27, 2017.

Becca Roy-O’Gorman is a writer and educator in the Bay Area.

[1] Jessica Silverman Gallery. “Margo Wolowiec: Evergreen, Searchlight, Rosebud.” Accessed May 9, 2017.  http://jessicasilvermangallery.com/exhibitions/evergreen-searchlight-rosebud/

Julian Hoeber. The Inward Turn; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

Imagine departing on a journey in which your destination is simply a return to the same place of origin. Upon your return, you find yourself unchanged. Intact. Undigested. Whole. And exactly where you started. The Inward Turn, Julian Hoeber’s solo exhibition at Jessica Silverman Gallery, offers such a proposal.

In all of its twists and turns and deviations, the exhibition’s paintings, sculptures, and works on paper always turn the viewer inward. And yet, in this closed, infinite system, there is more to ponder than the paradoxical experience of such a visual journey. The texture, imperfections, and meandering tangents of the system itself offer reprieve from the loop, and a space to meditate upon the causal binary relationships of loop and looped, of mold and cast, and of viewer and visual artifact.

Read the full article here.

Barbara Kasten, Construct VI-B, 1981 / Polacolor 10 x 8 inches Edition: 1 AP

A few years ago, I found myself wondering: what is the essence of existence? After some thinking, I came to the conclusion that the simplest evidence of existence is interaction. Even at an infinitesimal level, if something doesn’t interact with something else, there is no way to prove it exists. That being said, there are different ways to measure interactions, both direct and indirect. For more than 30 years, Barbara Kasten has used light, planes, and dimensional layering and flattening to make the invisible visible.

In her current exhibition at Jessica Silverman Gallery, Kasten manipulates the interplay of light and surface, both transparent and opaque, to create abstract tableaus. While the work has a strong connection to the Constructivist aesthetic, the photographs relinquish much of the practicality sought after by artists in the 1920s and reintroduce aspects of the autonomous, nonfunctional art object. This isn’t to say that the work has come full circle; instead Kasten utilizes both historical and contemporary methodologies.

Barbara Kasten, Construct LB/6, 1982 / Polacolor 10 x 8 inches

The works exhibited range from Polaroids made in the 1980s, to pigment prints made in the last five years. The installation is beautifully lit, with only three florescent tubes in one bay window of the gallery, and a light projection in the other. The low lighting, supported by heavy curtains on the windows, completely separates the gallery from the outside world. The projection reflects off a mirror and onto the wall on which the contemporary images hang, transforming the formerly three-dimensional tableaus, now turned into two-dimensional photographs, into a four-dimensional interface between the photographic object and projected film.

Barbara Kasten, Behind the Curtain Installation view, 2013

In addition to the multi-dimensional leap-frogging, the photographs and installation are very much about control. Kasten meticulously arranges the objects in her photographs to achieve the angles, shadows and reflections in her compositions, and then “paints” them with light. The combination of elements reveals that which would not be visible otherwise, and plays a trick on our eyes. Flat planes suddenly have depth, lines seem to create impossible shapes, and sharp points and dramatic colors draw an aura of mystery and violence.

Barbara Kasten, Studio Construct 127, 2011 / Archival Pigment Print 53 x 43 inches

Kasten works as the master of her spaces, whether they are within the camera frame or the confines of an installation. Viewers and experiencers of the exhibition become a part of the works, as light bounces off the bodies in the room and figures reflect in glass. The viewers’ organic movements through the space combine with the calculated dynamism of the video projection to produce the final layer of the installation. The next challenge and proverbial cherry on top would be to somehow gain access to an even higher-dimensional view of the gallery space and photograph it and install that image with the others. Talk about meta.

Behind the Curtain is on view at Jessica Silverman Gallery until January 26, 2013.

One of my favorite occurrences in the Art world is when an artist acknowledges the viewers’ expectations, and actively denies them. In a time seemingly ruled by art with the highest sensational value, I can’t help but root for the heroic and/or obstinate people unabashedly making minimalist conceptual art that allows for none of the easily digestible catharses one might hope for. This is not to say that the work is underdeveloped or shallow; I think a closed door holds as much if not more mystery, potential narrative and freedom to expand upon than an open door through which we can clearly see everything. It is the same “closed door” potential that completely saturates Edits, the current exhibition of Jason Kraus’s work at Jessica Silverman Gallery.

Inside the gallery, the installation is seductively minimal and almost entirely monochromatic. Extracted pieces of Kraus’s studio walls hang mounted in frames, the dry-wall marked with the charcoal smudges and traces of the artist’s process. A large-format, b&w photograph titled An Empty Space documents the void created by hundreds of drawings made on Kraus’s studio wall, where the charcoal that escaped the paper’s surface marks off the edges of the absent pieces of paper. The Serra-esque drawing board learning in a corner reinforces the trompe l’oeil effect of An Empty Space; the two objects acting as the signifier and signified of something that is much more abstract than the expected tangibility of a sign, such as a chair.

The real star of the show, however, is the pairing of two wooden crates locked with combination locks, and a framed envelope that Kraus mailed to Jessica Silverman, the gallery owner. Completely unassuming, the crates (probably) hold all the drawings that we see the traces of in the surrounding works. The corresponding envelope contains the combination that opens the locks on the crates. This is a simple enough concept: there is a lock, and there is a combination that opens the lock. The punch-line is that the two pieces may never be acquired by the same person, ensuring that the drawings will never be revealed. Now, I have to admit that the inner-brat in me loves this restriction. As I see it, basically Kraus is saying, “Oh, you wanted to see the art we’re talking about? Too bad.” Of course, the work absolutely should not be pigeon-holed in the sort of school-yard teasing with which I indulgently associate it. The dialog between the works in the show also heavily references the performative act of making art, emphasizing that the process can hold just as much importance as the final product.

Edits is not a show for anyone looking for an easy entry point or sensational reward from the viewing experience. It is not obvious, and demands that viewers release their typically tight grasp on what part of the art-making process we think should be presented. It is also not overly pretentious; the work does not pretend to be something that it’s not. Instead, Kraus expands the aura of the show through omission, and shows the viewer, “This is what I want you to think about.”

Edits is on view at Jessica Silverman Gallery from 7 September­­–20 October, 2012.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Standing), 2010 | 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

Seth Curcio: So Matt, currently you have an exhibition on view at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco, titled HORIZON/S. The series pulls from cultural images that transcend time, location, and cultures. But, before we dive into these ideas, I’d like to learn some basics, like how these images are constructed. They seem so mysterious – can you walk me through the process of finding your source material and constructing the image?

Matt Lipps: Sure, this body of work, like the majority of my work since 2004, is an entirely analog process involving sculpture, collage, and theater staging on a small scale with a cast of paper dolls that I’ve cut out and propped up with supports so that they may stand on their own. For HORIZON/S I pulled from the first 10 years of Horizon Magazine, a bi-monthly hardback arts journal first published in September 1958. The magazine’s inaugural issue sets up a general invitation to the American people to join the editors of the magazine on a voyage towards an imagined “horizon” of high art and culture – examining art(ifacts), architecture, theater & film actors, and serving up what would be fine “taste” for those who weren’t in the know – a relatively antiquated way of thinking about art objects.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Form), 2010| C-print, 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: Your work is ultimately exhibited as photography. Yet, your process starts with an appropriated image, moves into sculpture, draws heavily on painting, and employs the tools of theater. Ultimately it arrives back at an image. What do you feel happens in this transformation of material?

ML: I’m not sure that I know, but the transformation is evident, and heartfelt for me, too – which is what keeps me engaged in making the work. For me it has something to do with an embodied, phenomenological experience of encountering an image in a dislocated context at an unexpected size. Certainly, the scale of the image is key to this transformation, and photography allows me to play with scale and depth in ways that traditional collage doesn’t. I’ve done several works that exist as sculpture, but it’s generally a frontal presentation that fails to some degree when attempted to view “in the round,” and, the work feels diminished somewhat as mere paperdolls of an expected size.

Re-photographing those images back into a photograph brings a certain amount of seamlessness to the foreground and background that, I hope, holds the viewer’s attention for slightly longer. This is especially tricky in HORIZON/S when you’re confronted with photographic reproductions of varying quality and scale, that depict stone sculptures, painting fragments, illusionistic spaces, portraits, landscapes, etc., and it’s all tied back together and hermetically sealed under the photographic picture plane.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Reach), 2010| C-print, 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: I like to consider how you categorize images and ideas in your practice and how this aligns and deviates from the basic cultural structuring – or lumping – that engages most museums. I know that HORIZON/S is also further divided in to two parts: Private and Public Collections. What are the main distinctions of these two collections?

ML: In assembling a cast of about 200 characters, obvious trends presented themselves – not only in my image selection process, but also in the kinds of images that were reproduced in the original magazine. This is highlighted when examining what size they were reproduced as, and whether or not they were printed in full color, black and white, or at times photogravure.

These decisions were made by the editors, thereby producing a secondary hierarchical structure. When all of the images are set to stand on their own, it’s clear to see what was deemed central to the idea of cultivating good taste, and what genres of art were seen as marginal or clearly dwarfed in comparison.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Women's Heads), 2010| C-print, 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

An example of Public Collections – the first photograph I made in the series – is Untitled (Women’s Heads). I pulled from the group every image I had cut out that was only of a female head and shoulders, to see what that image would look like. In the magazine, as in art history and by extension museums and archives, it’s necessary to organize objects by region, chronology, and/or genre so that they can be “knowable,” or classified into a system. My project aims to question the logic of that practice, and asks what else can be learned from a different system of objects if set free from the typical constraints of the archive and introduced to elements of chance, disorganization, and a personalized re-mixing of art and art historical objects.

But, there were other connections I was making with individual objects that had no logical connection, other than the fact I was compelled to make pictures incorporating them. From this started the parallel series I call Private Collections – the idea being, rather than making a photograph curated around a single homogeneous premise to communicate a single idea, I would make photographs of disparate objects culled together by an individual taste. This act allows for a more narrative story about the individual who may have collected them to emerge.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Marble), 2010| C-print, 40" x 33" | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: In this way, you are able to simultaneously mine images and objects that are collected and organized by institutions, and then by you as an artist. Obviously, the result speaks to your own taste, however someone else sets the parameters. This type of curating from existing structures references our remix culture. How do you feel the ubiquity of images and excelled sharing of cultural information affects our perception of the world? Especially since so much of this information is already organized or “curated” by others.

ML: Previously, I had always talked about my work in relationship to “desire,” rather than “taste.” But, with HORIZON/S – a broader examination of taste-refinement is brought to the fore.

To answer your question about the ubiquity of images and excelled sharing of information…I only feel safe answering how I feel it affects my perception of the world. It’s fantastic! It’s horrific! There are images I can never scrub out of my mind – that I wish I’d never laid eyes on…there are others I’ve had deep and meaningful relationships with/to (and, I mean this with much gravity). As an appropriation artist, I’m grateful to have these tools to employ, and I aim to do so with integrity and sincerity. If I were to offer a word of caution about the endless production and distribution of images, it’s that one might grow comfortably numb – that they’d lose their affect and ability to trigger outrage and mobilize change. Or, that people think they know the operation of any given image before taking the time to read it, because of some imaginary typological vault of pictures that contain finite and quantifiable data. That seems lazy to me, and, in part, with this project, I was trying in my own way to “re-mix” that.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (bar), 2008 | C-print on aluminum, 46" x 33" inches | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: That’s great insight on how you relate to imagery, both images selected by you and the endless barrage of images in the world. I’m also interested in how HORIZON/S remains so seemingly objective in nature, in contrast to the pictures in HOME SERIES. Was there a shift from your previous work that caused you to engage in a project that allows for your personal narrative to remain distant?

ML: There has been a shift, but for me, it’s been at a glacial pace starting from the first photograph I can remember cutting out when I was thirteen years old. The practice has always been about having a relationship with a person, place, or object – a photographic distance announced in the mediation of that object in its image-ness.

Early on in my work, this longing was explicit: my desire to be with a body pictured in a magazine to act as surrogate lover/boyfriend, resurrected from a late-1970’s pre-AIDS moment in time. It was a willful exertion of my desire for him to sit with me on our bed, and to take his portrait, thereby re-flattening him into a Barthesian photographic flat-death (again). For me, that work is about melancholia and loss in as much as it’s about a personalized, magical desire.

Coming to terms with my own sexuality and understanding the operation of these images in relationship to my desire, I was able to formalize a vocabulary around my work and turn it into a language that was legible across multiple genres of photography. This, in turn, allowed me to move past my immediate biography (though, never that far removed from it), and look at broader reaching themes in my work.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Satin), 2004| C-print on aluminum, 40" x 30" | Courtesy of the Artist

Fast-forward to the HOME series, I still incorporated ideas of desire (or, taste, or, selection) and loss in relationship to a personalized history of photography literally housed and cultivated within my childhood home. There, I’m compiling a cataclysmic dichotomy of “high vs. low” that examines the accrual of objects and memories in an intimate, domestic space in relationship to an unpacking of heroic baggage.

And, now with HORIZON/S, where it might appear as though I’ve stripped back all of the personal narrative found in earlier modules, I still employ my vocabulary of image-making, and its deeply concerned with ideas about photographic representation and the desire to understand its operation with respect to art history and the cultivation of taste. It still feels very me, even if I’m less apparent than before.

SC: Do you feel that you have reached a state of completion with HORIZON/S? Is there often a clear stopping point in your series, or do you feel that you can continue it indefinitely?

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Sculpture) 2010| C-print, 33" x 80" | Courtesy of the Artist

The impulse to “re-mix” HORIZON/S was endless – so, yes, it could have gone on indefinitely! In fact, I shot at least 50 images that I thought worked well – but it was ultimately edited down to about 22 photographs. Being a photographer and carrying the burden of seriality is always a delicate balance of editing, and having good friends and mentors helping you see your blind spots.

But, I ended up working on HORIZON/S for almost two years, mostly pre-production and making decisions about the look of the final image. Now, I’m feeling pretty done. Though, I will say that it was fascinating to watch people look at these images, and their need to know who each person/object was – a desire to unlock a deeper logic, or to give name to something that seems familiar but forgotten. I would be curious to push that notion further, partnered with my own fascination with how images traditionally operate, and how I might continue to confound that.