Blog
May 25, 2017, 9:28am
Jean Alexander Frater: Fold; Don't Spindle and Mutilate
What it looks like is, ok, like the hurried ancillary sculpture of an active hand, like a Monument to a Moment, the slip—in the course of creation—of fabric, the errant falling and perfect, frozen fantastic memory of a bolt in some divine designer-artist's atelier, a static haint of a kinetic flourish, the same ephemeral, cigarette-smoke beauty we find curling from a hot cherry or in the letting down, the glorious, luxurious exhale, of an up-do or cascading over the side of some steep embankment, Niagara, Victoria, Angel; it looks like the terrible, painful Monument to a Moment One Would Rather Forget, like a broken arm—the radius and ulna snapped through, the spasming, spider-sprayed-with-bleach digits dangling, the grotesque thing held together by extensor and flexor carpi radialus, flexor and extensor pollicis longus and brevis, radialii, digitorums, palmaris longus, pronator teres, the lonely exertions of the biceps brachi—but only when viewed with the negative and corporeal in mind; it looks like mis-caught pizza dough, with its pallid spine draped over the hand like an examined necklace, or a sea cucumber being garroted, and only all of these things—minus the textile—if one ignores the colors, the combination of GO Transit green and raw, creamy canvas, which gives it a Gilded Age flair even as gravity leaves it dangling in its belly, but what Green Stripes Event (so perfectly named!) does not look like, at first blush, is a painting; it's obviously painted, of course—those stripes aren't woven, didn't come from nowhere—and has those various things a painting would have, where it to be broken down anatomically—and it is the protrusion, like a compound fracture, of the painting's support, broken at the top, dangling at the bottom, which gives it both its injurious and closet-ready qualities, although the former is far more important, and keeping with the spirit of the show, than the latter—but it does not sit like a painting, compose itself as a painting should, back straight, belly tight, against the wall, a tidy lie, telling us that it exists in two dimensions… - B. David Zarley, Chicago Contributor
Jean Alexander Frater | Green Stripes Event, 2017. Acrylic on canvas and support, 78 x 40 x 14 inches. Image courtesy of THE MISSION
April 28, 2017, 8:16am
Art New Mexico: Shawn Turung
Like many artists who work in mixed media, Shawn Turung is difficult to neatly categorize. She paints with a muralist’s sensibility, constructing a vertical narrative within the architectural space the work inhabits. She deliberately works toward the edge of chaos, pushing painting to behave more like sculpture, and fluid ink brush painting to imitate the stylized forms of graffiti. - Diana Gaston, New Mexico Contributor
Shawn Turung | Wayfinder installation, 2016, mixed media: Sumi Ink, latex house paint, adhesive and plaster on composite board, 8.5 x 10 feet x 2.5 inches
April 15, 2017, 9:10am
Dallas Art Fair 2017
Any one of the 90+ national and international galleries that exhibited at the 9th annual Dallas Art Fair this past weekend will likely agree on one thing: Dallas is serious about building relationships. And of course with those good relationships comes good business. It’s that process that I’ve seen expand and sharpen over the past five years I’ve attended the event. What’s really unique about this fair extends to what is really special about Dallas and that is an accessibility that isn’t easily found within larger cities. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there were plenty of VIP events and high end meet ups but there were also open invite after parties where everyone from Journalists to Dallas based artists danced with international gallerists, collectors, and local graduate students. What happens outside the manageable sized fair allows for visiting galleries and artists to actually spend time in the city further connecting with Dallas as an arts destination and home to a thriving arts community. What was happening inside the fair was a scattering of phenomenal paintings throughout two floors at the F.I.G Building in Downtown Dallas. – Arthur Peña, Dallas Contributor
Katherine Bradford, Prom Swim, Green, 2016, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 in. Courtesy of CANADA Gallery.
March 22, 2017, 9:39am
A Conversation: Stanley Whitney
Arthur Peña: We first met in 2011 while I was at RISD and what stuck with me from that meeting was a story of how your father wasn’t allowed in museums because they were still segregated. How I remember the rest of the story is you saying that when you did have your first museum show you wanted to make paintings big enough that they wouldn’t fit through the door and the museum would have to work to get them in. Did I remember that right?
Stanley Whitney: Well it’s true that my father couldn’t go in to the Philadelphia Museum. Jack Whitten calls those years the “American Apartheid.” I have lots of stories of paintings not fitting through doors but I don’t think it’s exactly those circumstances. Although, I might have mentioned something like that. It could have been related to a story from around 2006 when my dealer José Freire came to me and asked me to make the biggest work I could make to take to Basel to try and make things happen because he kept putting me in shows and no one was paying me any mind. So I made the biggest painting I could make in my studio, 96 x 96 in., and to get it out we had to cut it in half to get it through the door. We showed it on a big expensive wall and it didn’t sell.
FOCUS: Stanley Whitney at The Modern in Fort Worth, TX
March 14, 2017, 8:20am
A CONVERSATION: ROSS BLECKNER
This interview took place on the occasion of Bleckner’s solo show, “Find a peaceful place where you can make plans for the future” at the Dallas Contemporary.
(L to R) Dome, 2016, Oil on linen, 84 x 84 in. Ladder Painting, 2016, Oil on linen, 96 x33 in. Dome, 2016, Oil on linen, 120 x 78 in.
March 13, 2017, 12:34pm
Cinema Fatalité: Ben Murray at Monique Meloche
Up close, buried in it, approached with a loupe, it feels like … Christ …. like static on the wire, like the first crepuscular creepings of dextromethorphan—mucilaginous medicine the color old blood sloshing down sulci and optic nerves and then back up again—like a cataract, hot shimmering light and textual fuzz, an uncanny fading in, selachian skin rising up from a great obfuscating darkness—the darkness of the upstairs hallway when someone other than your parents had to put you to bed; the darkness of water the first time you are bifurcated by it; the darkness of every corner after a horror movie; the darkness of depths, of fainting, of dying—which is, despite its nature, because of it? you recognize the darkness, it's the door, but you don't know it, but it's shimmering, glistening, with promise and menace both—don't shark eyes glisten, and cobra hoods, and hypodermic needles, and freshly mopped floors, and sugars and fruits and feathers and halos?—and the simple fact of the matter is, presented with nothing but this great obfuscating black door, cruel Janus!, which seems to shine like the cheek bones of a post-performance circus artist and the soft spears of light the color of heliotropes, the gentle envoys of the blinding OR brightness behind the great obfuscating black door, you have all manner of reference points—a lifetime of them, memories and experiences and impressions and moments—but not a single solitary fucking cardinal direction; is the door holding something back? is it holding you back? should you go through it? should you hope and pray and scream and kick so that you never cross its threshold?
Do you die? – B. David Zarley, Chicago Contributor
Ben Murray | CLOSE – DOOR, 2017. Acrylic and ink on canvas, 84 x 78 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.
January 25, 2017, 9:00am
The Art of Resistance
In the last few weeks, artists have gotten involved in creating signs, banners, and other creative march accoutrements for the Women’s March on Washington, as well as at least 240 other domestic and international cities. Artists such as Shepard Fairey, Jessica Sabogal, and Ernesto Yerena Montejano, donated their time and creativity, offering free poster downloads like these. These ten prints were seen in many shapes, sizes, and iterations at marches worldwide. – Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor
"Women’s March 2017" featuring one of Shepard Fairey’s “We the People” downloadable prints as a sign at the Women’s March in San Diego, CA | by Bonzo McGrue is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
January 10, 2017, 8:35am
Art New Mexico: Ted Laredo
I'm visiting one of two studios that Ted Laredo occupies, and he shows me an anomalous piece with text that reads: Art is easy. It's an unexpected bit of humor in his otherwise refined body of work, and not what I expected. This piece upends his minimalist aesthetic, and hints at the range of his studio practice, which is expanding in all kinds of ways. - Diana Gaston, New Mexico Contributor
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Ted Laredo, Blue Bead mountain study, no.1, 4 x 6.7 inches, acrylic and glass micro beads on mdo
December 28, 2016, 10:20am
Rebecca Morris: On Blood and Abstraction
Here we have presented, in a perfect circle, as if in a petri dish or memorial china plate or a porthole—which, by the way, is the vanguard of windows, the aperture we gaze at when we want to be kept safely, securely, hermetically safe from whatever is on the other end of the thin pane we slick with the heat of our faces—the kind of pleasing gridded surface, so straight!, so soothing!, so perfectly correct and uniform!, bone white squares cut by aurelian lines ostensibly lineal but in actually imperfect, bulging a bit, a bit sloppy, like a military garrison on parade—so close to perfect, but still (for now) human!—or the grout lines in your bathroom … yes!, it's a bathroom floor, encircled in the petri dish, viewed through the porthole, bathroom tiles gridded out with gold, surrounded by marble (of course!), perfect save a pox, the red of dried blood—it's the brightest color in the whole room, really, this dried-deoxygenated-but-still-too-fresh blood, each splock with its own idiosyncratic hair style, pili radiating as is from the weakest sun, clumping into constellations, gentle parabolic forms like arched eyebrows, carrying in them a sense of ad-hoc exigency, the kinetic beautiful violence requisite for their application demonstrated in their forms, an abstract take on a passage from a Bret Easton Ellis novel—The bathroom reeks of bleach and disinfectant and the floor is wet and gleaming even though the maid hasn't started cleaning in here yet; Glamorama, pg. 256—a form of silent violence, an echo of a moment captured in all of its chaos atop a bone white grid, gleaming with gold, surrounded by marble, a porthole into God's own bathroom…- B. David Zarley, Chicago Contributor
Rebecca Morris | Untitled (#01-16), 2016. Oil and spray paint on canvas, 68 x 69 inches. Photo courtesy of the artist and Corbett vs Dempsey, Chicago
December 20, 2016, 10:11am
17 Artists (+2) To Watch in 2017
Twenty-thousand years after man first huddled in a dimly lit cave and consciously placed marks upon a wall in an attempt to better understand, and perhaps change, the world, contemporary artists continue to make marks on two-dimensional surfaces with much the same intent. No matter how many times painting has “died” over the years, it keeps coming back to take another shot - reanimated, reinvigorated and ready to deliver the goods. And why not? People still respond and attend to the oldest of mediums with a reverence that no other artifact of cultural production can elicit.
In 2016, artists continued to make paintings, while galleries and cultural institutions dedicated the majority of their exhibition space to their display. During art fair week in Miami in early December, which was marred by low attendance due to post-election malaise and the specter of Zika, there was more painting on view than ever. Photography and other media were scarce. As was evident last year, much of the painting of display was representational with the preponderance of figurative subject matter being notable. Even at the younger fairs such as NADA, there was an almost complete absence of the type of bland, process-based abstraction that had been everywhere for the last five years. Ever aware of the latest trends, smart dealers of all levels have scrambled to bring image based painting into their programs.
I am happy to see that many of the artists that I selected for last year’s list had stellar years. Brian Belott seemed to be everywhere having been taken on by both Gavin Brown and Moran Bondaroff in 2016. Emerging artists Loie Hollowell and Laeh Glenn both became collector darlings in 2016, and mature artist Nancy Shaver had a very strong outing at Derek Eller that received positive critical attention. – Steven Zevitas, Editor/Publisher
Nancy Shaver
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