Wendy White

Work from her oeuvre.

“At street level, New York is buried beneath a dense, dirty layer of signage and posters, graffiti and stickers, texts and other markings that represent every degree of legibility, legitimacy, and endurance. Heavily trafficked spots take on a life of their own as these elements trace a cycle of accumulation and decay, shouting over one another through the ambient noise. A resident of Manhattan’s Two Bridges (a downtown neighborhood adjacent to the Five Points mythologized in Gangs of New York), Wendy White is exposed to this war of words on a daily basis, and it exercises a continuing influence over her work. “There’s something profound about the relationship between architecture and disembodied marks,” she reflects. “It’s haunting—like a previous tenant.”

Initially a sculptor, by the mid-‘90s, White had moved toward painting. Yet she never neglected the third dimension, and has gone from exhibiting objects alongside her pictures to making the panels themselves more object-like. Increasingly, they also have a “modular” quality, like flat-pack furniture. (“It feels more modern,” she has said, “if things can be broken down and moved.”) White has also incorporated both studio-made and externally fabricated components, again exploiting resources offered by the city. The results are slippery, hybrid creations in which the languages of painting, photography, printmaking, collage, and digital imaging—as well as writing—are fused with the solidity of real-world places and things.

In making her series Fotobilds—parts of which appeared in Pix Vää, the artist’s 2012 solo exhibition at New York’s Leo Koenig, Inc.—White digitally manipulated original photographs of metropolitan sites and then had them printed onto vinyl. She juxtaposed these with painted canvases to arrive at large-scale, multipaneled works in which structural components overlap one another or rest on the gallery floor. Stacked and abutted, these parts also act in concert with one another, even—or especially—when they reproduce the jarring mishmash of their referents. Fotobilds (the German title suggesting, to an English speaker, construction as well as picturing) comes closer than any single-medium work could to a physical, visual, and associative palimpsest of the city itself.

The real locations represented in Fotobilds are also referenced in their titles. El Rocko Lounge, 2012, for example, incorporates a washed-out mirror image of the eponymous bar printed sideways across its upper half, while 197 Madison, 2012, reproduces shots of burgers and sandwiches from a deli at that address, their colors sun-bleached to pale magenta and dirty yellow. The “accidental aesthetic” of the latter is something for which White feels affection, alluding as it does to a human project lost in part to entropy. She is more interested in change than in that which pretends to permanence, limiting the amount of time she spends on any given work in order to maintain an atmosphere of flickering transience. “When I set out to make ‘Fotobilds,’” she remembers, “I’d been poring over the NYC Municipal Archives, thinking about historical photographs versus Instagrams; amateur versus professional; how manipulation of photographs is de rigueur and no one really believes in images anymore. The Archives—real photos of real places and of people now long-dead—felt real to me in a way that painting alone didn’t anymore.”

In the works’ painted portions, gestural marks—airbrushed Twombly-esque scribbles and scrawls—are combined with fragments of “real” text: lettering that almost but never quite adds up to a complete and correct word or words. Initials, abbreviations, and individual letters and numbers drift across hazy fields of color. Other elements interrupt the conversation. In the series Text Constructions, certain letters seem on the verge of breaking free from the rest of the composition, abandoning the rectilinear plane to become dimensional forms in their own right. In Part, 2010, for example, the titular word perches atop a panel, extending from its edge like some sort of linguistic battlement.

White’s interest in language extends beyond her current location and period. While immersed in New York, she has her eye and ear on other sources too. “I thought a lot about Faulkner when I first started using text in my work,” she remarks, “because I’d lived in the South for many years and felt convinced that Northerners had historically underestimated the power and intelligence of the Southern vocal cadence and accent. I wanted to make paintings that were a little manipulative in how much was left unsaid or unwritten. Concrete Poetry as also an influence, at least as a general concept.”

As the latter citation suggests, White also manages to combine allusions to current and historical art with the casual beauty presented by her immediate surroundings. Alongside the aforementioned hints of Twombly, there are borrowings from domestic DIY. And while the gentle spirit of Belgian master Raoul de Keyser seems to haunt their delicate abstract sensibility, so too does the bold look of a children’s toy (see in particular the series 3-Stripes, with its sporty graphic borders). Robert Rauschenberg’s “combines” and “cardboards” and Ellsworth Kelly’s shaped panels are clear influences too.

Yet White’s work is more individual and instinctive than any such spelled-out heritage might suggest. And while maintaining her aesthetic focus, she clearly feels free to experiment by introducing new elements and allowing them to establish their own rhythms. Take, for instance, the series Shatter Ball, in which pale-hued canvases inscribed with the specters of letterforms (they look, characteristically, to have been produced using rough stencils made from lengths of tape) are studded with halved footballs and baseballs surrounded by the starburst patters of what looks like shattered glass—a jokey toy repurposed as sculptural-painterly punctuation.

At the time of writing, White’s next scheduled exhibition is a solo appearance at Maruani & Noirhomme in Brussels. The work for the show evolved, she explains, from a painting in Pix Vää that was inspired by a local building, and addresses “the intersection of Grand and Chrystie Streets—the architecture, the lay of the land, specific businesses, the park, the entrance to the D train.”

“I’m still figuring out the relationship between what happens in the studio,” she concludes, “and what happens on the street.”” – Michael Wilson for New American Paintings, April 2013.

Jeremy August Haik

Work from A Unique and Non-Repeatable.

“This chapter is about copies, reproductions, recycled histories, and the poetics of science. More at non-repeatable.com” – Jeremy August Haik

Derek Frech

Work from Secure Document at Actual Size.

“Actual Size is pleased to present Secure Document, an exhibition of recent works by Derek Frech, curated by Park Myers. Secure Document consists of three main works in which Frech has established a lexicon of encryption using security measures and mechanisms of information protection. Each work as well as the exhibition in its entirety strips its original content to a point in which the constructs and devices intended to provide security become the content.

Secure Document is comprised of works that seize encryption technologies and alter them symbolically and materially. Works in the exhibition include Encrypted Documents, a series of layered prints in which an appropriated and reformed algorithm used for the encryption of visual information is applied to documents containing redacted information. Only a selection of the prints from this series will be on display, while the additional prints will be housed in a protective case in the gallery. Untitled, a screen-based animation, distorts information to a point of unintelligibility to address the cycles of abstraction that data must undergo in order to be communicated. Tamper Evident is created through a print and removal process on metal in which forms of residue and mark making become physical allusions to digital distortion.

The exhibition restructures the hierarchies of information transmission and reception to direct the viewer to the hidden mechanics of communication. Secure Document focuses on the issues of how supposed authenticated information is understood, and the invisible modifications, mediations and subsequent forms of reception that are involved in visual communication.” – Actual Size

Xavier Cha

Images and video from “Body Drama” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

“New York–based artist Xavier Cha incorporates video and installation in performances that play with multiple perspectives and deferred access, reflecting our fractured contemporary experience. For her new work Body Drama, Cha transforms the gallery into a mysterious setting in which an actor performs while wearing a body-mounted camera. In between performances the resulting footage is projected on the wall, offering viewers two versions of the same experience, both of which center on disorienting psychological and physical space.” – Diana Kamin, the Whitney

Nicolas Moulin

Work from Steppterminal.

“Steppterminal was conceived as an ensemble of hybrids between architectural fragment and autonomous sculpture. The series presents a set of ghost structures, without status or future, evoking a perpetual present—that of ruins, or unfinished construction, isolated in its own sovereign failure. Nicolas Moulin’s new piece will be composed of a total of 6 elements, the first two of which appear here. The piece draws from technical principles used in the modular constructions of brutalist architecture from the 1960s and draws particular inspiration from parts of existing buildings, reduced to 1:6 scale, here the IBM Center in La Gaude, designed by Marcel Breuer (Steppterminal 1) and Boston City Hall by Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles (Steppterminal 2).

Exalting the radical and austere expression of raw concrete in buildings used for collective housing, administrative centres, and companies, brutalist architecture developed exponentially during the Trente glorieuses (the thirty-year boom following WWII), as well as during the Cold War. It was presented as the “terminal” expression of a now- extinct great modern utopia, its dying breath. The brutalist aesthetic—once called the “romanticism of the mal foutu (the badly made, or misshapen)” by Le Corbusier—combined a potential vision of the future, whose duty was to respond to the new needs of a mass society, with archaic principles of construction, thus creating a paradoxical image of buildings that seem to have foreseen their own obsolescence. Today unpopular, associated as they are with the aesthetic of the “ugly” and the social divide created by a collective imaginary now influenced by the standard neutrality of the bungalow aesthetic, these buildings convey the asynchronous image of a modernity fallen into disuse, a kind of inter-zone that continues to be traversed and inhabited nevertheless.

By rebuilding these constructions, by having them be contemplated, analysed, and read (one of the founding principles of brutalist architecture being the readability of a building’s structure) as fragments, real-fake simulacra, Nicolas Moulin temporalizes these ghosts, reassigns them a transitory function.

At once outsize model and sculpture bled dry, a potential space drained of its playful dimension, reminiscent of Matta-Clark’s building cuts, Steppterminal recalls these “white elephants”—monuments abandoned mid- construction, never having housed the human activity for which it was intended. Financially too costly, symbolically facing destruction, they remain unproductive monuments, concrete spectres that continue to inhabit the landscape of the living.

For this project, the artist must proceed as engineer, with precision and calculation, taking into account the weight, balance, gravity, and tension between the modules derived from an analogous material, in this case from by- products of concrete blends.

Nicolas Moulin makes present a world that is absent, using this absence and disintegration as the building elements of our current condition. Here, the “aesthetic of disappearance” (Virilio) reaches its ultimate form, and, paradoxically, a quality that is gradually more concrete: ruins as architectural project, as becoming.” – Clara Guislain

Greg Allen

Work from Exhibition Space.

“In August 1960, the fledgling NASA launched Echo I, a mirrored spherical balloon, or “satelloon,” 100 feet across, which was inflated 1,000 miles above the earth. Nominally a reflective communications satellite, Echo I’s primary mission was to be visible to the naked eye by the earth’s entire population. Early promoters, including Dr. Wernher von Braun and Manhattan Project alumni, considered it an “American Star” rising “in the West” and images of it in orbit were captured by photographers around the world.

Exhibition Space considers the aesthetic and conceptual implications of photography during the Space Race and its role in our shifting perception of the universe. Echo I’s mission to visually colonize the frontier landscape of space followed an ambitious 10-year effort, completed in 1955, to photograph the entire visible universe. In scientific, conceptual, and technical terms, the 1,870 plates in the National Geographic Society’s Palomar Observatory Sky Survey constitute one of the most advanced photographic projects ever undertaken. The photographs, films, and objects in the exhibition mark the transformation of space from the site of earthbound study to one of scientific, military, political, and cultural production and display.” – Apex Art

Trevor Paglen

Work from Nonfunctional Satellites.

Developed in collaboration with aerospace engineers, the nonfunctional satellites are space-worthy sculptures designed as small, lightweight satellites that expand to become large, highly reflective structures. Placing one of these objects into low-earth orbit would create a visible “sculpture” in the night sky, visible from the earth below after sunset and before dawn as a bright, slowly moving, flickering star. The sculpture would remain in orbit for several weeks before burning up upon reentry through the atmosphere.
These designs are responses to the question of what aerospace engineering would look like if its methods were decoupled from the corporate and military interests underlying the industry. The nonfunctional satellite recasts the old question of “art for art’s sake” within a different context, asking whether we can imagine something like “aerospace engineering for aerospace engineering’s sake.”

William Pope.L

Work from “Gold People Shit In Their Valet” at Catherine Bastide, Brussels.

“Pope.L’s new exhibition at Galerie Catherine Bastide Gold People Shit In Their Valet, titled after one of the new paintings featured in the show, will present five large-scale paintings on canvas and twenty smaller ones on paper closely related to the artist’s Skin Set Drawingsproject (1997-ongoing). The Skin Set projects visual, gestural and aural ambiguity. Skin Set was begun in 1997 with declarative sentences riffing for example on racist affirmations about black people (“Black People Are The Root Of All Evil”) and continues today with various other colors assigned to people and absurd, poetic sentences that are intelligible yet not reducible to a simplistic meaning. The paintings are titled after the text inscribed on them, the larger paintings referencing Gold People and the smaller referencing Gray People. In a short video interview for the Whitney Museum, Pope.L says the Skin Set project was created “to interact with language at the level of the mixed message, where people say two or three things at the same time.” The paintings in Gold People Shit In Their Valet bear slogan-like text that is at times decipherable, and at others obscured by the gestural abstraction of the paint.

Some paintings show words that are clearly decipherable yet unintelligible, such as Gold People Blue Movie. The text is inscribed in pink lettering with light orange and paler pink accents over white paint on the top half and raw canvas on the bottom half, while a blue downward curved line underscores the word “blue” over the white background; a green shapeless brushstroke inside the curve of the “G” accentuates the top half whereas a yellow dot placed where white paint and raw canvas meet on the lower right side balances the composition. The painting’s description indicates that the paint hues being used are “flesh pink and white” on canvas, a nomenclature clearly ignoring the billions of people whose flesh is neither pink nor white – especially Gold People.

Elsewhere are puns that work visually but not aurally. For example, the viewer of Gold People Shit In Their Valet, will recognize “valet” is the visual cousin of “wallet,” but then realize another painting in the series is Gold People Shit In Their Vale. These visual puns, while present in the title, are not clearly legible within the painting; on the contrary, they belong to paintings where the overall effect is closer to gestural abstraction, as is the case with the two other paintings in the Gold People set. The same variations can be observed in the smaller paintings on paper, with Gray People Peonie or Gray People Smell Like The Universe veering toward almost total abstraction. Pope.L states that his “primary interest is the gestural aspect of language as enunciation, as performance, intention and desire.” Here traces of the body’s action on language present in the physical act of painting blur the already ambiguous and absurd message, the humor present in the words often deformed by pictorial gestures.

Additional objects such as Skin Set T-Shirts and Skin Set In A Bottle will be displayed on specifically designed banisters made to interfere with the space and disrupt the visitors’ view. The bottle labels of Skin Set In A Bottle reference the colors of the Belgian flag and sport the mottos “Belgium Are Nice” and “Belgium Are Lice,” revealing Pope.L’s “mischievous way of conflating commodity, language, nation and abstract expressionism into one container.”” –  Catherine Bastide

Johnny Abrahams

Work from his oeuvre.

“On first encounter with Abrahams’ work one lets oneself slide comfortably into comparison with known oscillators of our viewing pleasure… Riley, Albers, Vasarely, Stanczack, Biggs and Collings and Cruz Diaz amongst others. There is a continuity of tradition evident, however, with each successive artist having the advantage of hindsight, different circumstance, and the knowledge of a new world, each has brought us a different speed, a new take, aesthetically and conceptually. By setting himself up in broad comparison to these artists, Abrahams ultimately feels encouraged and inspired, like his antecedents, to try to bring something different to the previous practitioners in this space bringing something new to the party.

Abrahams shares with the op artists a focus on making the viewer the subject, emphasizing the effects of one’s movement around it. He is exploring what can be done only with line to the exclusion of the other elements (colour, shape, texture, space, form), and in subsequent series he plans to gradually introduce these individual elements one at a time. This, he anticipates, will likely be a very protracted pursuit evolving over many years.

This exhibition involves works from Abrahams first two Series. Series 1 is an ongoing exploration of the fundamentals of design, testing and pushing the possibilities of the most basic element of design: line. Within the panel, the collections of black and white lines create a strained and dissonant juxtaposition. The termination of many lines along an implied edge creates the impression of many suspended planes interacting with one another above a white background. Approaching a work, a design may appear subtly constructed of two tones or tone gradations, but within a certain distance threshold these reduced elements become vibratory, destabilizing the fixed gaze of the eye and generating afterimages of colour as light is broken into its constituent colors due to the interaction of so many dark and light figure-ground relationships.

Series 2 continues to work within the restraints of line to the exclusion of other design elements, focusing on the interaction of two sets of parallel lines suspended above a white background. Inclining the top set of parallel lines by a few degrees here or there creates an unpredictable phasing and a superimposed pattern of interference emerges, generating organic and natural patterns from the very rigid and limited constituent elements. As the different groups of parallel lines become indistinguishable, the original signals are lost and an alias is generated in its place. The work titled “interference study” is an example of this new direction. In this painting he has essentially created two sets of parallel lines with the top set angled at 5 degrees from the bottom set, the resultant wave patterns being caused by this phasing of lines. If it reminds you of a photograph of a television screen, the same principles are at work.” – Vigo Gallery

Amanda Ross-Ho

Work from Who Buries Who at The Approach.

“WHO BURIES WHO is a new installation by Amanda Ross-Ho that demonstrates her vested exploration into photography as an analogue to experience, the archaeology of activity and time as a material. The artist has transformed the gallery into a cryptic tableau, operating as both theatricised photography studio and abstracted crime scene. Employing symmetry, scale shifts and a forensic gaze, she creates an environment reminiscent of sites of production, examination and dramatisation.
The central work in the installation, THE UNSUB, is based on a found image mined from a vintage text used to describe the effects of light on objects for the purpose of interior decorating. In the source, a single mask is composited into the same picture plane 8 times using different lighting effects, producing a chorus of faces betraying simultaneous timestamps like a sundial. Like phases of the moon, or incremental nuances between Comedy and Tragedy, the confrontational gaze of the masks presents a dramatized diagram of universal structures. Produced to the exact proportions of the page in the original text, painted canvas provides a backdrop for the masks which are enlarged as individual photographs and a pair of photo umbrellas on stands frame the scene, suggesting a moment of capture. Photographic umbrellas are a tool used to direct light onto a subject, sculpting it for pictorial effect. Here, the umbrellas are stripped of their utility, operating as props and signifiers of a photographic condition, invisibly pantomiming the lighting effects taking place in the photos. The word unsub, short for Unknown Subject, is a term used to describe a person of interest in the context of criminality. Here, the term could also refer to the self-consciousness of the tableau as photographic subject.

On the direct opposite side of the gallery, TWIN REFLEX (DOUBLE TRAGEDY) acts as photographer in the production tableau created by THE UNSUB. This doubled found image illustrates the stereotypical pitfall in amateur photography of allowing the finger to obscure the lens. Here, the camera also obscures the face, creating another mask. The aperture that has captured the staged photograph, remains silently on the other side of the image, in the realm of the viewer.
Through shifts in scale, an anatomical intimacy with form is demonstrated and the sensation of a ‘close up’ is produced, heightening a viewer’s awareness of their gaze as an optical apparatus.

Various other pairings teeter throughout the installation. A massive pair of upscaled blue nitrile gloves–native to both studio environment and the space of examination– suggest undisclosed rigorous activity. Large-scale hair bands and bobby pins scattered on the floor refer to the 0 and 1’s of binary language, representing a relationship between opposites and a constant flow of information and data. Replicas of used X-Acto blades suggest surgical precision now inert and dulled through activity. A pair of upscaled crystal glasses filled with simulated iced wine evokes the duality of a conversation in progress and act as a timepiece—the paused melting of ice suggesting the perpetrators of such a discussion have freshly left the scene.

The title WHO BURIES WHO is appropriated from Harry Nilsson’s track “Down by the Sea”, made in collaboration with John Lennon in 1974. The song woozily describes a couple who have sold it all and escaped to seaside retirement after a long full life, taking stock of their remaining responsibilities…

“…And now the big question is ‘Was it all worth it?’ and ‘Who buries who?’ You bury me or I bury you?…”
Linguistically, WHO BURIES WHO is a core sample of a never-ending pattern, a looping question and a philosophical moebius. Like this bombastic query of finality, this exhibition investigates the questions and artifacts that time itself presents.” – The Approach

via Contemporary Art Daily