Goodnight, Good World

From Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, Illustrated by Clement Hurd

Trying to look at art with my children, two boys ages five and seven, can be an exercise in frustration. Pursuing my own thoughts and reactions while fielding their questions and trying to keep them from backing into artwork is next to impossible. I by no means idealize a child’s reaction to art, nor do I elevate their opinions for being “more pure” than my own. As far as I am concerned a child is just another viewer, and one less inclined to pick up on art historical references or contemporary context. I am happy to leave to them naive encounter; I like my informed one. That said, there are times when looking at art with my children, and in a sense as they do, seems to yield a particularly nice experience.

This weekend I went to the The Front with my sons. It was the Sunday after the Saint Claude shows opened, two Sundays before they came down and I worried I would miss them if I didn’t just go, entourage and all. There were two shows at The Front. The show Clouds/Cows occupied rooms one and two. The show is described this way on The Front’s website:

"Clouds/Cows, a collaboration between visual artist Jessie Vogel and performance makers Nat & Veronica, was initially conceived and presented as a theater piece. In this exhibition the artists attempt to access the same material through a different entry point by recontextualizing the work in a gallery."

In the second room there was an untitled installation. I learned later that it had been the set of a performance. A piece of plywood with a large, circular hole separated the ordinary space of the gallery from a scene on the other side. The gallery side was dark and the other space–pastoral, fantastic, and otherworldly–was lit for an effect sort of like the dioramas in the Museum of Natural History in New York. I was also reminded of a book I had as a child, a book I now read to my children each year at Easter time. We read it just yesterday. 

In the book, titled The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes by Du Bose Heyward, illustrated by Marjorie Hack, there is an Easter egg with a tiny scene inside. Looking for the proper name for “eggs with scenes inside” I found an article about Victorian sugar eggs in The New York Times. The article is titled The Better World Inside The Sugar Egg. Exactly. This idea of an idyllic world you can only look into goes back so far in my consciousness that is seems to predate my consciousness. This idyllic place, this illusion inside the egg, or illustration, or diorama, is so perfect that as a child you pine for it though, what do you know about pining? This pining is at the very root of my addiction of looking into paintings, of making them. This piece at The Front, seeing it with my children too I suppose, reminded me of the early magic of the enchanted view, the promise of an alternative and perfect place.

"It’s a cloud!" one of my sons said. "It’s a rabbit!" the other added. Floating above the grass was a rabbit-shaped cloud! There was real green grass on the ground! And carrot stubs! Not the slimy nubbed kind that you buy in a crowded plastic bag at the grocery store but the fresh air market kind that look more natural, more old fashioned, more like we really want carrots to look! This word “real” hovered in my mind , a crucial part of my experience looking at this piece.

This rabbit-shaped cloud was made of wool, I think. Wait, back up: I am still not sure if it was really rabbit-shaped or if my sons and I imagined it, though I find the carrots a pretty good clue that we were on the right track. Inside this cloud were the bluish flickerings you see sometimes in a lone thundercloud. I don’t suppose Victorian sugar eggs or children's books were on the minds of the artists, but still...through a circular hole was a landscape over which floated a rabbit-shaped thundercloud. I was reminded of another children’s book, two, actually, written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd: Good Night Moon and The Runaway Bunny. In the former there are illustrations of a sort of weird, slow, idealized world held together by dreamy lines like “Goodnight nobody...Goodnight mush.” In The Runaway Bunny there is …wait for it…a rabbit shaped cloud!

From The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown, Illustrated by Clement Hurd

Because my children were there I was not tempted to think too hard about the meaning or making of this installation and for that I am glad. I simply enjoyed the cascade of nostalgic references it provoked. I am still enjoying them as I write this. And this is not the topical and overused collective hipster nostalgia of mixtapes or instagram filters that seem to almost eradicate true nostalgic response by efforts to seize and brand it. In fact, I am not sure that the artists were even going for nostalgia, which was probably why I was able to access it. This nostalgia reached back to the recesses of early childhood, maybe just before or just after I dropped the spoon from the highchair enough times to understand “real” space. Once upon a time the distinction between real space and illusory space was nebulous. We learned to navigate real space by trial and error: dropping the spoon, trying to grasp the cylinder of water coming from the faucet, by falling down. The illusory world remained a mystery because access was available only through looking. We came to know the illusory world in pictures books, in landscape paintings on the wall, in small color TV screens containing seemingly tactile, pre-CGI worlds like the enduring and bizarre stop motion animation television special Here Comes Peter Cottontail.

Still from Here Comes Peter Cottontail

The New York Times article explains the remembered lure of the sugar egg: "The diorama was a glimpse into a blue-sky world, whose tiny inhabitants hunted colored eggs or enjoyed a springtime picnic. These were the sort of genteel activities I longed for, but understood were unattainable." The excruciating pleasure of longing, the pull of unattainable worlds haunts both art making and childhood. My older son is working tirelessly on building a hot air balloon. He wants to fly over the neighborhood. And why not?

Across the street on the ground in front of Good Children Gallery my sons found a scattering of beads, maybe from a broken necklace. One of the beads was a plastic, coral-colored peace sign the size of a penny. My younger son just learned to recognize a peace sign though he is still fuzzy on the concept. Inside the gallery, he was then enchanted to find a large painting of a peace sign, Study For Dark Peace by Stephen Collier. Huh, I thought. 

Today I woke to news of bombings, this time in in Brussels. Now, as I write this, the idea of unattainable worlds floats lazily in my mind with the cloud-like thought that everything has meaning, everything is connected. Praise the artists and children. Praise the idyllic world.

From Cows/Clouds by Jessie Vogel and Nat and Veronica

From The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes by Du Bose Heyward, illustrated by Majorie Hack

Stephen Collier   Study for Dark Peace   Acrylic, Pencil and Enamel on Dyed Canvas

Aaron Collier, Continued...

Aaron Collier                  Photo Courtesy of Jonathan Traviesa

This post will make more sense if you read the previous piece about Aaron Collier's show at Tulane.

Aaron Collier and I exchanged emails before I wrote a post about about his show. When it was finished I sent him a link to the piece I wrote about his work and invited a response from him. I told him that I am more interested in a dialogue than hit and run art writing. It is not customary for artists to respond to art reviews, but I am not really a critic. I aim to articulate my experience of artworks and my thoughts about art more broadly. I asked Aaron to share his thoughts about what I wrote and he did. I found these passages illuminating and asked him if I could post them here. I have his okay. His comments are in blue. 

On the medium:

AC: One of the mesmerizing features of using the Flashe, which I think you picked up on but relate to differently than I did, is its ability to seep and flatten and settle without any texture. Whereas you noted that the effect was like trying to meet the gaze through mirrored sunglasses (feeling denied "entry"), I perceive the lure to keep pulling me as the viewer closer, closer, closer into the work, with the scale of the painting filling the periphery and enveloping.  But, the lines do, in my opinion, too, remain elusive. I don't find myself "stopping" at the texture or the viscosity of the paint in the same way that oils stop me at their swell or shiny surface...  With Flashe, I don't follow the allure only to pull back and declare the surface distant so much as persisting in following the mark into a seemingly endless recessive space.

This issue of surface is so interesting to me and it comes up again and again when looking at and talking about paintings. Surface is related to what with some paintings feels like an ideal viewing distance. Sometimes I see a painting that draws me in but as I move closer the image stiffens or the illusion of distance closes. Sometimes though what you see from a distance gets stranger upon closer examination. I like that. I like leaning in and wondering how is that put together? 

On the owls: 

AC: The three owls, in my own estimation, were a way of suggesting that the physical world is not necessarily more revelatory than the illusory world of the images, so yourself feeling scattered back to the images is great to hear...  The pigeon reference was super sharp and poignant there, and I had not even considered such!  The owls seeming so physical and present and certain at first, only to break down and reveal their plastic seams and decoy-ness, was a hope as I considered their inclusion. 

Aaron Collier  Looking Into  Photo Courtesy of the Artist

Aaron Collier    Looking At    Photo Courtesy of the Artist

On contrasting experience:

AC: I found it interesting that you connected with the piece that sought to deny connection, those horizontal bands resisting "entry" or the "picture as window," an allusion that many of the other paintings were intended to construct.  Looking At is intended to contrast Looking Into, its neighbor to the right, the former obstructing entry (perhaps for the blue snippet in the bottom left?) and the latter inviting it.  But, I totally believe that we ask paintings to woo us in our own idiosyncratic ways...

I am caught on the phrase "intended to construct." Maybe this is part of what I sense in some of the works: the construction following the intention rather than the construction occurring simultaneously with, not so much intention as a hunch. Maybe the paintings in which the intention was accomplished successfully lack an open-ended quality or weirdness that I am attracted to. The piece titled Looking At is weird and I like that. Of course another viewer may have the opposite reaction, seek a kind of intention or closure. 

(Aaron, thank you for your thoughts and for extending the conversation.)

What I Found There

Aaron Collier, Exhibition View, Photo by Jonathan Traviesa

Aaron Collier

Something There 

Carroll Gallery, New Orleans

There were six large, dark, abstract paintings in the main room of Tulane’s Carroll Gallery, black rectangles reflecting in the polished floor. The effect was powerful. In New Orleans it is a rare pleasure to stand in the middle of a spacious gallery filled (but not over filled) with large paintings.

The palette widened on approach, blacks giving way to other darks, blues, mauves, medium grays and some sparse passages of translucent silver. Two of the six paintings contained sculptural elements. In Revisitation, a scrap of lumber deckled with yellow spray foam insulation leaned in a corner formed by two canvases. In A Certain Uncertainty one of those decoy owl statues used to deter pigeons sat on a shelf in front of the lower left corner of the painting.

Aaron Collier, Revisitation, Photo by Jonathan Traviesa

When an object is imposed on a painting it is an act of rebellion. The object undermines the sovereignty of the painting if not the sovereignty of Painting with a capital P. Robert Rauchenberg, Jasper Johns, and other Neo-Dada and Pop artists knocked Painting down a peg or two with their constructions combining objects and paintings. These artworks did not ask to be read as paintings in the traditional way; they ask paintings to function as objects. Painting contains an illusory world like a window, real but untouchable. Set as the backdrop to an object (containing the shadow of that object), a painting becomes an object itself, a surface to look onto rather than into. Imagine a vase of flowers in front of an abstract painting–a Cy Twombly, say, or Joan Mitchell. The vase of flowers would change the way we perceive the painting. In Peter Rostovsky’s Epiphany Models  the artist places miniature sculpted figures on pedestals in front of landscapes reminiscent of works by Caspar David Friedrich. I am not sure if these works are ironic or sincere but the viewers are not likely to study Rostovsky's paintings the way they would the originals. The object-painting dialogue is an artist's inside joke. In the work of  the artist Daniel Atyim, found and constructed objects are placed in proximity to a drawing/painting. These objects appear born of the same media, like they came from the two-dimensional world. They remind me of that A-Ha video in which a sexy stranger escapes a comic book and throws himself violently against the walls to lose the remaining sketch marks that keep him from appearing fully human. The objects in Daniel’s work look uncomfortable in the material world and redirect us into the illusion of the two dimensional space. But these hybrid works do not employ the traditional materials and vocabulary of painting and do not ask to be approached as traditional paintings.

Aaron Collier, A Certain Uncertainty, Photo by Jonathan Traviesa

Aaron Collier’s two works, Revisitation and A Certain Uncertainty, are pretty conventionally presented paintings on canvas. The objects only slightly violate the space of the painting while the paintings passively accommodate their objects. The artist’s relationship to these objects seems to be a tentative one. Painting is a proposition; an object can reduce it to a prop. The rest of the works in the gallery seem to strive for a different purpose and tone.

From afar the four remaining works in the room were somber, impressive, hitting full low notes like cello music. In relation to the room and each other (as well as the objects in the other paintings) they alluded to architecture. Looking closer, the interiors of the paintings contained contour lines that were more organic than architectural or geometric. With a couple of exceptions these contour lines did not fully describe any figures or objects. They were concentrated in the centers of the pictures, relatively few lines straying past the edge of the canvas. In some passages these contours accumulate to the point where I would expect a build up of paint and inevitable texture, but the surface remained almost uniform and matte. The medium is listed as Flashe, a type of acrylic described this way on the Dick Blick art supply website: “extra-fine vinyl-based paint dries evenly with intense coverage to a uniform, velvety matte, opaque finish.” Thus the smooth surface and absence of luminosity. The resulting effect is incongruent, active and expressive searching lines on a surface that stands aloof. From a distance these paintings were luring, but when I moved closer to the individual works, I couldn’t get closer to them. I couldn’t get into their headspace. I felt a little like I was trying to meet the gaze of someone wearing mirror sunglasses.

Aaron Collier, (detail) In A Line..., Photo by Jonathan Traviesa

The work in the two smaller galleries varied widely in scale, palette, presentation, material and painterly vocabulary. Compared to the body of work in the main gallery the palette was wider, more vibrant, and included pastels and fluorescents. The works ranged from miniature at six by four inches to over seven feet in height. They were on paper, found paper, panel, Dura-Lar, and canvas. The paint was applied in contour lines, opaque color fields and washes.   The exhibition as a whole contained such a broad range of materials, sizes, and art-historical allusions I wondered, why isn’t this show more of a mess? I think Aaron Collier can, with little effort, make order of chaos. I wonder if the exploration of materials and surfaces might be the artist's attempt to challenge his ability to make order, to challenge his habits, his control of paint, his tendency to establish balance within a pictorial space. If that's the motivation I think is necessary and courageous for an artist to do though as a viewer I want to see that there are also convictions at the core of the work.

Aaron Collier, Where Light Is As Thick As Darkness, Photo by Jonathan Traviesa

I saw the bright, synthetic green in the painting Where Light Is As Thick As Darkness as an effort to rabble-rouse an otherwise tasteful palette. It was a color suited to cause a disruption, but when a blotch of green that would be rebellious in volume or as a rogue mark, is  threaded tastefully into the composition it acts as–in Apartment Therapy terms–an accent color. (I really like the strange window reflection looking mark in the top of this painting.) A scrap of cloth collaged onto the canvas surface (In a Line, But Out of Order) was placed neatly in a corner, on the line of the golden ratio, parallel to the edges of the painting, its colors in harmony with the palette. If these are efforts to undermine conservative or repetitive impulses in the artist’s art-making process, these gestures are not disruptive enough to propose a true challenge to an artist who can, it seems, effortlessly make an attractive painting.

Aaron Collier, Exhibition View, Photo by Jonathan Traviesa

In addition to the two dimensional works in one of the smaller galleries is an object, a shelf with three owl decoys. These owls are identical to one in the main gallery except they have been painted with Flashe. This piece, A Lack Of Sight Not Being The Cause Of Darkness is reminiscent of Haim Steinbach’s work, not only in his use of mass-produced objects (including owls), but his signature wedged shelf. It is hard to know if this quote was intentional or the inevitable result of two artists employing the same quotidian objects. In front of the painting the owl introduced one batch of art historical references, as multiples on the wedged shelf it recalled another artist and set of ideas. As totems I sort of liked this watchful predator in the gallery, but I could not figure out its function in the show other than to be what it is, a decoy. This piece, hung well above eye level does not invite examination; it redirects me (like a pigeon!) to the rest of the show.

This body of work (or bodies of work) represented hours of labor and thought, broad investigations of materials, and a wealth of art historical knowledge. The exhibition as a whole was thoughtfully curated, impeccably hung and a pleasure to attend. But when I tried to make contact with individual works I repeatedly felt like I was presented with a decoy.  This might have been the intention of the work, to be evasive, to keep me moving, but I wanted to connect more–more deeply, more emotionally, more physically–with the individual pieces. 

Aaron Collier, Looking At, Photo by Jonathan Traviesa

I suspect the work in this show succeeds in accomplishing what it sets out to. And the work is all handsome. But me, I am drawn to art that comes closer to failure, like a racecar taking the corner too fast, threatening to skid into the wall and burst into flames. That said, sometimes an artist’s most exciting brushes with disaster are slower and quieter than a racecar. In this show the piece I found the most exciting was titled Looking At. It was modest in size at seventeen by fourteen inches and painted in casein on paper. The palette was muted, warm grays and pastels with the exception of a subtle cameo of orange and teal. Horizontal bands of color descended nearly the length of the vertically formatted painting. These wobbly bands didn’t exactly look like window blinds but to me they felt like window blinds, closed, askew on the bottom as if raised by momentarily by one’s thumb, revealing a second space beyond them. There a wedge of muted blue, cut by plum colored dashes, maybe a sliver of wavy water. Yes, this was just my impression, my fantasy. But the point is that I was lured to fantasy. I was not thinking about art or mark making or anything in the material world, I was within the world of the painting, within its unique proposition. In this piece there was a lack of fussing, a directness. I was reminded of post-Futurist Morandi, not because this work resembled that but because of the similar abandonment of devices. In Aaron Collier’s painting Looking At there is both chaos and order. This humble and audacious painting was a racecar on fire, silent and in slow motion amidst the spectacle of the exhibition.

Looking Good

In Memory, Photo Courtesy of the Artist

Rachel Jones Deris

Specters

Diboll Art Gallery, New Orleans

Our daily lives expose us to constant visual stimulus. Persistent and cursory engagement of our eyes seems to leave little room for more deliberate deployment of sight, which is to say, looking. Of the sight verbs–to see, to glance, to glimpse, to watch, and to look–looking seems to be the most directed, but it also implies an openness, a receptivity. It is the one most useful in engaging with art.

The first time I saw a painting by Rachel Jones Deris was in 2008. She is a confirmed painter who does not laurel-rest, who seeks new ground, and her work is continuously fresh. Compared to previous exhibitions, this group of paintings relies less on lyrical titles to buttress the content, and the content is harder to define. These paintings were surprisingly difficult to write about perhaps because they encouraged a suspension of thought, a resistance to conclusion. There are few or no conceptual footholds, save the title of the show and a couple of more expansive titles of paintings. The paintings lean toward abstraction but not closely enough to own that label nor are they descendants of notable abstract painters. They are representational but not in that irreverent I just found this image online-way. They are not geometric and they do not emphasize drawing. They are not political, narrative, or about anything you can easily put your finger on. I guess you could say they are landscapes in the sense that they (loosely) depict flora and in one case, fauna. All the things that these paintings are not lead us to what they are about.

In the end, I think this work is actually about looking. These paintings are a result of the artist looking, suspending her understanding of an image. I imagine that instead of looking at an image and concluding, I know what is there, she keeps asking what is there? What could be there? As a result we ask the same.

Rachel Jones Deris works from photographs, collected, altered, pared down. Paintings, any paintings, change and shift as you look at them, change from one viewing to the next. If a photograph freezes a moment, a painting lets it loose, leaves a moment eternally without conclusion. This is the mysterious potential of painting. These paintings, though they begin with a photographic image are not about photography or even image. If in an abstract way they are about looking, more practically they are about paint, lush, juicy paint. The designation “a painter’s painter” describes an artist who exhibits a confident and intuitive handling of paint while not subjugating this inherently unruly medium. Rachel Jones is a painter’s painter.

These paintings are made on Yupo mounted on panel. Yupo is synthetic paper, in layman’s terms it's plastic. Ad copy boasts its properties as stain-resistant and non-absorbent. You can see in these paintings how the paint sits on the surface of the Yupo, stains it to a degree, but doesn’t mingle with the ground. I confess I am a Yupo skeptic. While many painters work on a ground of acrylic gesso, which is also in part plastic, gesso contains calcium carbonate, or, chalk. This chalk is found in nature and brings to gesso a bit of nature’s unpredictability. I am not concerned about the archival integrity of the Yupo, its more of an aesthetic question: What would these paintings look like if they had been painted on gesso or even directly on panel?  On the other hand, Yupo resonates with the source material and process. The origins of these paintings are slick: a photograph, magazine page or inkjet print. It might make sense that the paintings begin on an equally sterile surface.

Stag, Photo Courtesy of the Artist

The paint seems to sit on the surface and the illusion of distance is built not by omission but addition. The artist piles on paint in spaces other artists would address with the sparest vocabulary. These are landscapes (all but one) but there is almost no deep space. Untitled (Grove) relies on an erasure to articulate trees. Meanwhile, the space between the trees is built up, a complicated articulation of color and directional marks bringing the distance past the foreground to the surface of our eyes. In Stag I find the inverted relationship cleaner cut and less convincing. The painting as a whole is way out there in its palette and spatial logic. But the popular and likeable shape of a stag, sits neatly center stage at a likable scale, keeping the painting from being too strange. The space may not have held its own without a form to anchor it, but the way that form was drawn, undermines the painting’s sense of freedom and confidence.

There were two paintings in the show that were like nothing I have seen. In Memory is a still life, a bouquet. A bouquet! Sill life is the wallflower (pun intended) of all the genres. Nonetheless I kept going back to this painting. My heart rate actually accelerated when I looked at it. It is gorgeous without being pretty. It is a still life, an inanimate object that seems to vibrate and sway. Many of the flowers are articulated in warm browns on white and when pink was used it was not as the color of the flowers but the shadows. The warm, saturated blues of the background press forward to tangle with floral greens, which do not seem to content to remain in the bouquet or even within the edges of the painting. And this bouquet is not anchored in a vase; the blue background continues across the bottom of the painting, the flowers pressing forward toward us.

I can compare looking at In Memory to looking at other paintings of flowers. But I can’t compare looking at Untitled (Weed) to any painting I have seen. On the left there is a dark passage cut by yellowish lines. On the right, the illusion of grass is confused by light blue hatching, almost a shape, dissected by lines of greens and browns. This illogical light blue has a satellite mark, a mark of the same blue resting strangely on top of an already strange passage of browns and yellows. To describe this painting is almost futile because the experience of looking at it is optically baffling, it makes vision feel like a physical activity. The palette, the composition, the articulation of the subject are completely original, the result of an artist who will bushwhack, who will step off the path and find her own way, who will treat each painting as a discovery. There is not a single uninteresting square inch in this painting.

It troubles me that so much of what I see in the world I have no choice about and also that I make the wrong choices about what to look at: advertisements, products, signage, screens, cars, junk mail, etc. A countermeasure to all that is to go look at paintings, especially paintings this stimulating, this good. These paintings require no discipline to look at them. They will seduce you into looking and when you eventually leave the gallery you will find yourself more attentive to leaves, and light and stones, and shadows, and spaces.

Please note: This show has been extended through December.

Untitled (Weed), Photo Courtesy of the Artist

Untitled (Grove), Photo Courtesy of the Artist 

Good People

James Taylor Bonds   Good Country People   48 x 48 in

James Taylor Bonds

Good Country People

Coup d’oeil, New Orleans

To Ken Capone, the director of Coup d’oeil (with whom I have had many conversations about art) I said, I don’t think I like these paintings...but I don’t think these paintings are trying to make me like them. For that I totally respect them.

The characters in these paintings are, well, off-putting. Some are pitiable, inspiring the urge to politely look away. Others are kind of scary. You want to look away but you don’t. These figures, often nude, sometimes clothed in sober neutrals do not look like good country people. In fact, even the country itself looks bereft of natural beauty. Take another route altogether if you can, but definitely don’t stop your car around here. 

  

James Taylor Bonds  The Felling   30 x 24 in

I don't know if any of these characters belong to Flannery O'Connor's short story Good Country People or even if the show is referring to this story, but they certainly share the author's sensibility and the looming air of malice in so many of her stories. 

Content aside,  most of these works are painted with a narrow palette. The couple that aren't seem like they might belong to an adjacent but different body of work. The breakdown of space is complicated, the figure/ground relationship somewhere between convincing and not convincing. The surface is reserved; only occasional brushmarks rise to a texture.

Believing a couple of the works were painted in oil, I thought maybe the artist used some low-quality oil paint. Then I learned that they were acrylic. This fact can account for flatness as well as the stiffer articulations of flesh and other textures. I have to admire what the artist accomplished in acrylic but I wonder if the attraction part of the attraction/repulsion response would be even stronger with optical complexity and luminosity of oil paint. And there are passages in the The Chosen (oil on canvas), in which the flesh gets really fleshy, not quite Lucian Freud fleshy, but fleshy.

This work is sort of haunted by art historical ghosts, though I find associations hard to pin down. The palette and composition sort of echo Thomas Hart Benton. The flavor of southern gothic reminded me of George Rodrigue’s pre-Blue Dog group portraits (which, in spite of myself, I find kind of interesting) Good Country People also reminded me of a Picasso painting. two actually, that I was recalling as one: Boy Leading a Horse and Family of Saltimbanques. Maybe it was the strangely posed figures, the rigid nudity, or the psychological heaviness. (By the way, I don’t really like Picasso’s paintings but you won't hear me argue that he was a genius.)

So while I cannot say I like these paintings this artist has my attention and respect. In the end I see something really important: the evidence of work, of hours and hours of labor and consideration, highly developed skills, and most significantly an artist pursuing his own strange vision on a scale that isn’t playing around.

One more point, not about the artwork but about the gallery, Coup d’oeil. On a local level, weird is okay but ugly is not. Not this kind of ugly. Not naked hillbilly ugly. In addition to acknowledging the artist’s chops and guts, I have to appreciate Ken Capone who owns a commercial (as in for-profit) gallery. He encourages artists to pursue their work as they feel compelled to even if (I imagine) profits might not follow. This work must be a hard sell for the kind of local art buyers who hang artwork in their dining rooms. One might not want to eat, sit, or sleep below a painting like The Chosen but Ken will show it anyway. And he deserves real props for that. 

(Some nice person should buy this painting and gift it to the Ogden.)

James Taylor Bonds   The Chosen   72 x 60 in

Wise Follies

Alex Podesta

Distractions and Follies: New Finished Works in Progress

The Front, New Orleans

Alex Podesta    Detail Untitled (Paddle)

There are five sculptures in Alex Podesta’s current exhibition at The Front. Artists showing large work in one of The Front’s four small galleries must overcrowd the art in order to exhibit a body of work or support the concept of an exhibition. This show is an example. On one hand, I would have liked more space surrounding each piece, but on the other, the curatorial balance would have been offset by omitting even one of these sculptures. The larger, more complex pieces especially needed more elbowroom. The Front, the collective with what is arguably the strongest exhibition program in town, could really use a big exhibition space. But about the work…

In Untitled (Bat/Boy/Bunny) A boy's head with rabbit ears was mounted on the wall leaning into the room, a blank stare on his face. The boy/bunny was half-sheltered beneath a transparent umbrella held by a man-sized right hand. Near the hand holding the umbrella, another man-sized right hand held a wooden baseball bat. The boy’s head was mounted at a height notably higher than the viewer's. Move in close and the bat looms above you, but you won’t quite feel threatened. You will be partly but not completely sheltered by the umbrella. I couldn’t figure out the ideal proximity or approach to view this piece although, as I said, the space does not allow for many options.

  

Man as a human-rabbit, or human dressed as a rabbit, is a trope of the artist. I have seen Alex Podesta's work before and never really questioned the function of the rabbit suits (or rabbit-humans) because it made sense in the weird world of the work. But in this case, with this piece, I find myself asking, wait, why does that boy have rabbit ears? Maybe its because they are not realistic (like the antlers in Untitled (All Hands), another work in the show) nor do they resemble a fluffy bunny suit, which comes comically loaded. Unlike the other elements of the piece (except the neck on which the head is mounted) these ears retain the look of having been fabricated. They also add a detail that may, along with the other props in the piece, be one too many. Without the rabbit ears the piece might be effectively creepy. The ears make it feel like a joke that doesn’t quite land or the topical effort to make a creepy proposition less creepy.

In the end I felt like I failed to experience what I was supposed to looking at Untitled (Bat/Boy/Bunny), failed to "get it." It’s not that I need to understand a work of art, but I want to be convinced by its weirdness. 

Untitled (All Hands) is another human-animal hybrid. The boy is part deer. Its  body was made of plywood that retained the pencil markings and holes that alluded to the process of its making. The boy/deer is captive, tethered by a sheer white ribbon held loosely by two (human) hands mounted on the wall nearby. I diligently noted all the details: the posture of the hands, both the boy/deer’s and the captor’s, the fact that the face of the boy/deer looks boyish but the hands belong to a man not a boy, that the ribbon is not a rope or chain. I noted detail upon detail but the sum did not quite cohere, nor was I overwhelmed by its absurdity. I never lost sight that I was in an art gallery. 

The three remaining sculptures were fantastic in their pared down weirdness. 

In Untitled (Pointer) a hand points to a map in an atlas on the floor. The hand is connected to a smooth rail of spruce tapering upward to join a finger, slightly bent, resting on the wall or pointing to it. Or if you follow the logic of the map below, it may be pointing to some place beyond the top of the mapped earth, to some place  far in the universe. The finger below points to the coast of Louisiana. I guess I can see one more thing here that points to here. If its this good that is.

In Untitled (The Resilience of Charles Ray), two fingers rest on the image of a red easel on the page of a charcoal stained catalogue or book. The gesture of the hand strikes me as specific and personal. Maybe it’s the hyper extended index finger. This gesture also recalls an inverted pose of the hand associated with icons of saints. The hand is connected smoothly at the wrist to a piece of pine lumber, I think it's a 2 x 4. As it rises from the hand the rounded wood regains its square dimensions and has burned to charcoal toward the top. One might accept this burning as a destructive gesture but I see the making of a giant charcoal drawing tool. I wonder if the easel in the photo illustration is a piece by the sculptor Charles Ray (who also used found materials and cast body parts in his work). In spite of the potential of this rather minimal work to be a one-liner I find it expansive, encompassing the idea of artistic heritage and raising questions with the mysterious directive represented by the fingers on the page.

A mahogany and spruce paddle leaned on the wall, blade up; in place of its handle is a hand. In Untitled (Paddle) the hand points with or rests two fingers on the floor. The paddle itself is a beautiful object, the light and dark wood alternating symmetrically so that a long dark stripe (reminding me of Barnett Newman!) runs down the center of the piece. Paddles are prehistoric objects laden with symbolic potential. (I saw a photograph of one from 6,200 BC!) This paddle gives way to a hand. If you took this paddle and held it as if  to propel a boat one of your hands would grasp the object at its center and the other would hold... its hand. Hand/handle. (How is this pun not corny!?) Finally, as the blade leans on the wall the hand is pointing with those two fingers to what? To the floor? To the earth? This piece is concise and funny, mysterious and weird and I really like it. 

The title of the show is Distractions and Follies: New Finished Works in Progress. The first part, Distractions and Follies could refer to the absurdity of making art, any art, let alone this art with its sense of humor. Finished Works in Progress is a funny bit of exhibition rhetoric, an artist's joke. I am going to consider the work finished and these are my conclusions: I don’t really connect with the larger works but I might have in a different space.  As I said, my first awareness in the gallery was of material. We intuitively register sculpture in our bodies. Its physicality relates to our physicality. The two more elaborate works in this show steer me away from this physical awareness to a more cerebral processing. This is art. What does this art mean? What do I think about it? But the the three wall-leaning works are witty without being weightless, funny and yet somehow authoritative, slapstick but omonous. They are nice to look at, the fabricated, altered and found components in perfect accord with each other. They do not feel like amputations or morphed humans-objects. They feel complete in their corpus and purpose. They feel wise in their absurdity.

Alex Podesta  Untitled (The Resilience of Charles Ray)

Alex Podesta   Untitled (Bat/Boy?Bunny)

Alex Podesta   Untitled (All Hands)