Mia Goyette

Work from The blues, you lose

“Goyette employs a wealth of materials, from fake flowers and electrical wires to resin casts of consumer goods; she couples production with anti-production to expose an alternative physical world.

For her installation at Vitrine, technological, natural and domestic worlds sit together; taken as a whole, they suggest the passage of time and display the remains of a potential future. ‘The blues, you lose’ traces a physical relationship to these objects: a puddle of dirty water, discarded window boxes, detritus.  It envisions a plausible world composed of a hybrid landscape of many segments and modes of display – the earnest replication of familiar objects becomes a record of its own failure.

In her 2012 installation Antifreeze (Fortified Flower Vases), Goyette recreates a quotidian display of leftover drinks, in the artist’s words: ‘’Clear bottles are scattered around the room, plastic or glass, a record of what I’ve had to drink over the past month: Club Matê, mineral water, 1 bottle of gin, 1 bottle of whiskey, Evian 0,5L, more mineral water, Coke Zero.’’ Each bottle filled with fluorescent water and a white flower becomes a casual, aesthetic arrangement where the repurposed remains of human consumption act as a cipher for our own fading youth.

In her latest works Goyette continues to engage with the materiality of language, production processes and the transmutation of structures, liquids, nature and artifice, which sees the artist navigating the allusive space between bodies and objects.”

Jeff Elrod

Work from his oeuvre.

“Jeff Elrod (American, b. 1966) creates abstract paintings using basic computer software as a starting point for his artistic process. He began painting abstractions of video game imagery in the early 1990s before using computers, starting in 1997, to facilitate paintings through a technique he calls “frictionless drawing.” While software allows for the production of lines and color fields without direct intervention of the artist’s hand, Elrod aligns his work with the long history of painting and abstraction.

Without preconceived plans for his canvas, Elrod employs the computer to work, save, and re-work hundreds of drawings, and the paintings in this exhibition are made from the artist’s previous works. For this show, Elrod abandoned his process of transferring the digital image to canvas by hand, and used printers to produce the final work. These new paintings are based on the artist’s series of hundreds of computer-generated drawings created in homage to the exchange between artist and poet Brion Gysin (1916–1986) and writer William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) surrounding Gysin’s “dream machine,” a device built by Ian Somerville in the late 1950s that uses oscillating light frequencies to stimulate the optical nerves while the viewer’s eyes are closed. Evoking the hallucinatory effects intended by Gysin’s machine, Elrod processes his original drawing into blurred images to create visual fields that resist coherence. The space, shapes, and lines from the artist’s original drawings are lost and the indeterminate blur that he produces becomes the paintings’ dominant aesthetic form.” – MoMA PS1, New York

Jason Dodge

Work from We are the meeting at Casey Kaplan

“Dear Jason,

To anticipate an exhibition by you in the gallery has always given me an unusual sense of exhilaration. A sensation similar for me to staring out at the ocean – giving me space to think about phenomena that I cannot experience but that I know exist. It is exciting, but in an uncertain way. Uncertain because I tell part of the story, which is not clear until the moment that it happens.

Hence,

We are the meeting.

In the last exhibition at the gallery, you connected a copper pipe in the main space to the water supply for the gallery and ran it out into the center of the room. At the end of the pipe was something similar to a hose crank handle and a small paper tag attached to the pipe that read, “Build a great Aquarium”. A few years later the gallery flooded and was destroyed. Years of work and the lives of many paintings, sculptures, documents, ephemera, prints, photographs, writing, and more were lost. These objects had so much history, and so much potential. The history of the space changed in a surge, flowing in and out, like a breath. We all think about it differently, remember it differently, and a different energy now persists.

Seeing aquariums in the space will be hard. Drawing a line around the electrical charge of the space gives visual and physical life to this energetic presence. Smoke from the chimney is absent, and the sky is turned on its side. Voices and sounds from Mongolia, Georgia, Israel and Brazil, will be trapped inside devices that send them across oceans, forests, deserts and skies, and the gallery itself will breathe light instead of water, from rose to white, white to rose.

A hint of Optimism…

I just read this in Matthew Dickman’s poem:

“A Buddhist monk will wake up early on Sunday morning and not be a fork and not be a knife, he will look down at the girl sleeping in his bed like a body of water, he will think about how he lifted her up like a spoon to his mouth all night, and walk into the courtyard and pick up the shears and cut a little part of me, and lie me down next to her mouth which is breathing heavily and changing all the dark in the room to light.”

It is so beautiful.

I can’t wait, thanks Jason.

Love, L”

Yuki Kimura

Work from her oeuvre.

“Gluck50 is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Italy of works by the Japanese artist Yuki Kimura.

Yuki Kimura’s artistic practice is based on the medium of photography. She uses both her own and found images which she reassembles in different contexts, giving them new meaning.

The perception of the images is influenced by the dissolution of the genre borders between photography and sculpture. And indeed the artist transforms her images into sculptural elements, which she then uses to create spatial installations. In doing so, Kimura gives the photograph a physical presence in space, thus amplifying the relationship among the photographic images. She pays particular attention to interiors, and especially deserted home settings. Removed from their original context, the images pose questions about their own intrinsic dimensions, linked to the past and to the passing of time.

In order to create the current exhibition in Milan, Kimura spent a period of time in residence at Gluck50. She has conceived a sculptural installation based on life-size photographs found in Milan and New York, using them to compose a mix of photographic images from different periods and settings. Mounted on sheets of glass, the photographs are placed alongside empty glass panels and a marble column. What makes these glass supports so unusual is their strength and thickness, as well as their shape, which recalls the frames made by Fontana Arte. The photographs are of interiors, some of which are framed by wooden doors left ajar, leading us into intriguing, enigmatic worlds outside. In terms of their composition, these images suggest parallels with Renaissance paintings, in which three-dimensional landscapes recall Alberti’s concept of a “window on the world.”

The door motif has already appeared in some of Kimura’s previous works, such as postdisembodiment (origin)of 2006, in which she cut the picture of a door out of its original arch and made a copy of it, which she then placed in the installation as a separate element. In this photograph, the door – which would normally convey an idea of depth – is thus transformed into an object in its own right, depriving the image of its own potential for illusion.

Similarly, Kimura creates an illusory installation in the exhibition space, drawing the viewer into an ambiguous game of seduction and heightened sensitivity, while revealing the eloquent nature of the images.” – Gluck50, Milan

via Mousse Magazine

Nathan Gilson

Work from Epiphany 3000.

“Smart person : Nathan, you called me to give you an interview about your new project,
which I find very immature and arrogant. Anyway, I’m here, let’s do this quick.

Me : Hi !

Smart person : Please try to speak intelligibly, I really
don’t understand your french accent.

Me : I said «hi», and I’m from Belgium.

Smart person : I know, that’s why you’re not very smart, what is this ugly thing on the floor ?

Me : He was up there ! I woke up once and I saw him ! In my living room !

Smart person: What do you mean ?

Me : He appeared ! I was totally fascinated and at some point I could hear him whispering something.
So I came closer, put my ear against him and he said…

Smart person: Nathan, I don’t have time for that.

Me : He said that we’re all fucked up, that we’re too dumb to understand the main idea of Christmas.
He saw us begging our families and friends for expensive and useless shit
when gifts are supposed to be spontaneous signs of affection. He said that we should be freaking glad
to celebrate such a nice event when some of the Earth people are currently suffering
and that maybe we should care a little more about them. At some point I asked him why he looked so flabby and
he replied that he came because his entire planet is melting because of us.

He also said that my art is terribly bad and he selected me to create things about Christmas,
so humans would be so ashamed of me they would stop celebrating it.
I really don’t understand what he tried to tell me about gifts and stuffs
but he said that it would probably make me famous. ” – Nathan Gilson

Marie Sester

Work from Access.

“ACCESS lets you track anonymous individuals in public places, by pursuing them with a robotic spotlight and acoustic beam system.

ACCESS presents control tools generated by surveillance technology combined with the advertising and Hollywood industries, and the internet. It refers to political propoganda and media manipluation.

Beware. Some individuals may not like being monitored.
Beware. Some individuals may love the attention.

scary-fun / obsession-fascination / control-resistance: it is impossible to determine who is actually in control.” – Marie Sester

Ericka Beckman

Work from her exhibition at Galerie 1m3.

“Throughout her three-deade career, Ericka Beckman’s playful yet formally demanding films have challenged traditional esthetics and cultural narration codes. Superimposing a fairy tales lexicon on the structures and codes of traditional games, her work is a sharp criticism of the rites of learning in Western societies. In parallel with exhibition of her recent work at 1m3, LUFF hosts a retrospective of her 8mm and 16mm films.” – Galeris 1m3

Gilles De Brock

Work from Liquid Design and The New Public Space 

“Liquid Design

Imagine, you’re living in the 14th century, somebody tells you the printing press will be a catalyst in a scientific revolution. You would probably think this person is exaggerating. You do understand the principle of reproduction and distribution of thought, that’s not the problem. However, you can’t imagine that such a simple thing as a change in medium can have such a profound impact.

The inability to understand the transition to a newer medium can have severe influences. From the moment the printing press made it’s first appearance a new group of disadvantaged became apparent, the illiterate. This group was unable to read, spell and write and could therefore not interpret the new medium. For them the world became more and more a place they could not understand.

In the 21st century not only the illiterate are the ones that are unable to understand the new current medium. A new group is created, those who can not understand an ever changing medium. With the arrival of the internet it becomes relevant to ask if a human being and the graphic designer can really cope with an ever such changing medium.

The modern illiterate
There is a new group of disadvantaged because of the nature of a developing or established medium. This, in essence, is what happens with every new medium, as it asks of it’s user to undergo a process of unlearning and learning. Besides vocal language, people had to learn how to interpret written language, they had to unlearn to write the same as they spoke and refinements were expected along the way .
But what happens if a new medium is introduced that is not only different from it’s predecessor but also constantly changing? The process of learning and unlearning becomes a constant state. Alvin Toffler wrote the following about this:
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

If we take a look at which medium might be the biggest change towards the printed word, the internet is likely to be picked. Our environment is more and more designed for quick communication in which we are hardly limited to geographical location, our social relations are maintained by platforms and applications and the amount of people that use smartphones, tablets and laptops is growing exponentially. All developments largely dependent on the internet.

With our daily and sometimes even uninterrupted use we give ourselves the interpretation that we also understand. We use a smartphone so we “are” on the internet, we use google so we use the internet. But do we truly understand what internet is? Is using applications that are on the internet the same as understanding? Maybe we are fooling ourselves, and maybe we are the new generation that does not understand it’s environment. And perhaps worse: we aren’t even noticing it.

From solid to liquid
An important cause of if we do or do not understand the internet is most likely the wrong interpretation of it’s nature. Up until we had internet all our media was invariable, as soon as they were produced. A book, newspaper, flyer or poster: as soon as they are produced they are solid. The internet on the other hand is not solid at all. For example news-websites can add and change content at any moment of the day. If you look at a news website you merely see a snapshot of an ever changing image. But if internet knows no solid state which state does it have then? Maybe liquid?

In core the difference between solid and liquid is easily described, however it is very clearly defined by Zygmunt Bauman “[…] in simple language […] liquids, unlike solids, cannot easily hold their shape. Fluids, so to speak, neither fix space nor bind time. While solids have clear spatial dimensions but neutralize the impact, and thus downgrade the significance, of time (effectively resist its flow or render it irrelevant), fluids do not keep to any shape for long and are constantly ready (and prone) to change it; and so for them it is the flow of time that counts, more than the space they happen to occupy: that space, after all, they fill but ‘for a moment’.

Not only the visual qualities but also time plays an indispensable role. A picture of a liquid form needs a time indication, because when the picture is taken, the liquid form has already changed. A solid shape however is hardly affected by time. As easy as liquid shapes change they manoeuvre around solid shapes and hardly feel impact. They can ‘flow’, ‘spill’, ‘run out’, ‘splash’, ‘pour over’, ‘leak’, ‘flood’, ‘spray’, ‘drip’, ‘seep’ and ‘ooze’. Even better, just as it takes energy to hold a liquid form stationary, it takes energy to make a solid form move.

The comparison between solid and liquid is highly relevant when we are talking about internet. The internet doesn’t know the solidness as we have known in media up to now. The internet does not feel any friction when being moved: it flows from one side of the world towards the other in a fraction of a second. Images can be duplicated with a friction that is almost negligible. News-reports don’t have a specific moment in time they are only snapshots of a liquid form.

Liquid Design
The underestimation of changes and their impact, and the wrong interpretation of the nature of the internet, can have profound effects, as Toffler indicated: the rise of a new generation that can’t interpret the media around itself. Especially because of these factors it is very important to address a group that is extremely dependent on the medium of this time and it’s interpretation: the graphic designer.

The printing press was on it’s own nothing more then a technique; it was the human who by a (specific) implementation gave value to it. He duplicated documents, made books, made posters, flyers and derivatives. From this development the graphic designer evolved, a person who has the task to visualise a message in the media of it’s time.
Here arises a paradox: graphic designer is rooted in history of solid forms, but it’s his task to use the medium of nowadays which is mainly liquid these times. Because the medium is so different, omnipresent and growing, it is the graphic designer who should critically review himself. The graphic designer must go from solid (static) design towards liquid design. We shouldn’t learn to write and read differentially in order not to become subordinated; we need to learn a skill to handle constantly changing state of our new media. This is not a simple task for a graphic designer, because he is inclined to think in terms of solidness, rules and grids. It is almost an inhumane transition. It is in our nature to think in heuristics in order to make our daily life manageable: who are and are not our friends, what I do and do not like, etc.

Maybe the transition to liquid design is still ungraspable and we should take a step back and realise that we underestimated the internet, it’s nature and impact. Even language limits us.
Comprehending, grasping, materialising are conceivable descriptions of a change in thinking in which statements are made in terms of solidity.
Factors like these make it an excellent task for a graphic designer to rove the internet in a visual way. By not only understanding it and holding it down but also by letting it ‘flow’, ‘drip’ and ‘ooze’.

The New Public Space

If posters can be created on demand, what does that mean to our perception of them? This project is an experiment on a poster that refreshes itself endlessly to current relevant matter. Can we design a poster that shows an interpretation of the current world at all times? And what happens when you do, can this application be thought of as a representation of the future?”

Peter Wu

Work from his oeuvre.

“Wu questions the relationship between painting and drawing. The two are interwoven, building up forms and images creating a dense space that recedes into a macabre, yet psychedelic, world of patterns, motifs and pure abstractions. It is a visual battlefield where electric color explodes through compacted and intricate ink drawings which seem to float on the surface like apparitions. Sometimes functioning like a Rorschach test, the viewer becomes indelibly involved within the act of seeing. Wu constructs an all-over composition, searching for significant new forms and combinations.

Seemingly chaotic, these paintings on the contrary are painstaking in their construction. Wu renders a tightly organized presentation of chaos. The obsessive and meticulous nature of the work is contrasted by, yet bound to, his intuitive process of creating the work. This results in a hypnotic and visually arresting experience. ” – Patrick Painter

Alex Da Corte

Work from his oeuvre

“Unquestionably, 29-year-old artist Alex Da Corte is an heir to the American school of pop. But Da Corte, who was born in Camden, New Jersey, also lived in Caracas, Venezuela, until he was eight, and some of South America’s appreciation for bright, lysergic colors, swirling surfaces, andcelebratory life-and-death imagery can be seen in his rambunctious multimedia productions. “There is a certaindecorative motif to Latin American culture that inspires me,” he says. “Like the festive nature of the Day of the Dead and the life-size piñatas with lots of sequins and glitz.”

Da Corte, who is currently at Yale University getting his M.F.A. in sculpture, seems to revel in that kind of gleeful explosion of candy and papier-mâché. His sculptures operate partly as high aesthetic comedy—one of his first serious works was a hand-sewn 15-foot-long ketchup bottle madeof vinyl—and more recent projects have included stuffed-animal snakes, rattlers made of crystals and acrylic fingernails, and homemade batches of cola repurposed on the floors of P.S. 1 as dried, minimalist grids.

Nevertheless, this pop appeal doesn’t come without an ensuing punch in the stomach. Many of Da Corte’s sculptures turn mournful or macabre—or just plain heartbreaking—right in the center of the party. In one work, a Christmas tree appears almost strangled by the extension cord that allows a second tree to be illuminated. In others, a bouquet of flowers is on fire, happy lightbulb faces are mixed with frowns, anddeclarations of love are amended with slurs like “so much it makes me sick.” “The idea for a work trickles down from everything I see, watch, and collect,” Da Corte says. “I take one idea and I want to add to it, flip it, or just turn it on its head. That’s how it mashes into my own.” Currently, for his thesis, Da Corte is building an elaborate sculpture based on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s cult classic film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) that includes a fur island and the figure of Petra floating in the center and holding a hose that shoots out soda. “It’s her choice,” Da Corte explains. “She can leave the island or stay, but the soda that is pouring out is slowly cutting her off.” It is an image that neitherFassbinder nor the ad execs at Coca-Cola might have ever envisioned, but it is one that says everything about consumption and self-destruction—the interchangeable anthems ofDa Corte’s work.”

text via Interview