Title of the painting show:
" hovering over the universe I aim my laser pistol into the eye of the universe
and time slowes down, is splayed out so I can see the interlocking spirals
and splatted fractal glowing shapes, all different sizes and moving different
speeds,
but when seen from this vantage point, their spiney glorious and gorgeous perfection
when seen alltogether..."
The artists in the show:
Nina Bovasso
Mark Grotjahn
Rebecca Morris
Katie Grinnan
Mary Heilmann
Glenn Goldberg
Brenna Youngblood
Matt Chambers
Heather Brown
Susie Rosmarin
Nikko Mueller
JP Munro
Kristin Calabrese (me)
The gallery where the show
will be held:
Honor Fraser Gallery
1337 Abbot Kinney Blvd.
Venice, CA 90291
(310) 401 0191
The particulars about the show as it relates to the
gallery:
The gallery is small: ten feet wide by thirty feet long. The idea is that
one painting by each artist in the space, each a medium sized painting (somewhere
around the arm span of a medium sized woman as the limit for the width) shown
together in the space would give the viewer a more physical impression of the
paintings. The sides of the canvasses are as important as the front of the
canvas and the physicality of paintings as objects would be much more apparent
because
of the proximity of the viewer to the works when navigating the space. There
will also be one sculpture. Altogether, an artwork by each of these artists
should prove to be hair-raising. It is anticipated that some people will faint.
The opening will be July 28, 2007
Curator's Statement:
"...frontiers
of consciousness beyond which words fail though meanings still exist"
(T.
S. Eliot, 1950)
When you are confronted with a painting, ideally you are having an experience
with an object that communicates actively in some way with you. Certainly you
can choose not to participate by not looking, since a painting cannot jump
in front of you and wave it's arms or make noise (although if a painting has
speakers attached to it that do make noise is that part of the painting or
is that another element all together that cannot be considered as included
within the painting?)
Some paintings frame a view of the world and act as a portal. A painting of
this type could be somewhat realistic however there is often some sort of filter
applied to perception, such as cubism or impressionism or some sort of more
contemporary photoshop process or simply painterly ness, amongst others. These
paintings are thought to give the viewer access to inhabiting the point of
view of the artist as the artist sees, feels, and thinks about the world. Nikko
Mueller's painting of Disneyland can be seen as an example of this kind of
painting.
Many artists today do more than one thing simultaneously on one piece. While
nikko's work views the structure of our society from an aerial view in relief,
painstakingly constructed with paint and tape and xacto knives, he is also
making a painting that could be seen as super controlled lines and lumps, made
with a restricted palette, that dot and crisscross the picture plane.
But I think instead I should write about what it is about each artist's work
that made me fall in love. Curating is a labor of love for me, colored by reverie,
with the fevered terseness of obsession. Nikko Mueller is my studio mate and
I have painted on the opposite sides of a wall for more than two years. How
do I say that sometimes the arc of one of his lines makes me breathless? His
perfectionism in making the line exactly what he set out for it to be, raising
the line above the surface, yet somehow arriving at something that looks less
like it was made and more like it was born.
In 1993, I worked at a coffee shop in San Francisco. I was a barista, although
I hadn't heard that word yet. Nina Bovasso was a painting major at the san
francisco art institute and so was I. She was a senior and I was a sophomore.
She was one of the painters at the school radiated an air of mystery and
importance. It seemed clear to me that she had some sort of secret or understood
something about painting that I didn't know and she carried herself that
way. She hung some of her paintings at the coffee shop where I worked and
one day came in while I was behind the counter. I felt lucky to have an opportunity
to talk to her about her paintings and I asked her about them. What Nina
said to me was, "I turn my brain inside out". And to me it looked like that was true. I received her words like someone seeking enlightenment being in the presence of a sage. Her paintings then were similar in some ways to what they are now: polka dots and spirals and splatters... The particular Nina Bovasso painting that we have in our show is one that she made by a process she calls "reverse accretion".
For this painting, she made several small drawings of flowers and lines and
spots on a white ground on a piece of plastic. After they dried, she peeled
them off the plastic and adhered them to the surface of the painting in reverse.
Again to me they had the look of something that had always been there and
when I peer into them they give me many thoughts and questions and each questioned
is answered right there within the painting in a way that seems similar to
that way of thinking in mathematics where if you take the number one and
divide it in half, and then divide that in half again, and divide that in
half, forever, even though you get a smaller and smaller number you never
get to zero. Nina Bovasso's paintings describe infinity to me.
Conscious, slowed down, all in one place gathered together, phenomena..
Everything all together so that it can be comprehended.
Better than a bottle of nail polish, which does have its place within the natural
order,
The cosmos, somehow the end of the tail of a fractal, undeniable, existing,
and I guess if you look at that bottle of nail polish somehow you might be
able to see how it makes sense as how all the parts of the universe are articulated
within it, but somehow paintings really condense the parts, coalesce to describe
much more of everything at once, to cause sensations of being in the presence
of the uncanny, meeting your doppelganger, having some sort of wordless communication
with an object.
More.
I have never met Susie Rosmarin in person. I have only met her paintings.
Since the organizing of this show I have now exchanged a few emails with
her and talked on the phone once. The painting of hers that I met was hanging
in a friend's apartment. It was a small galaxy painting in shades of off
white. The overall impression of the painting was somehow warm and friendly.
I was in the room with the painting at informal get-togethers maybe 3 or
4 times before it really dawned on me that her painting was perfect.. I think
it started maybe the 2nd time I got to be with the painting. I looked over
and I was like, "hmmmm." There is something about that painting which is
a big full empty space. I don't know precisely what it is about that painting
still, but I new that I loved the painting. I think it affected me more on
a physical level than on a visual level but certainly some of that is because
of what the overwhelmingly complex yet simple way the painting presents itself.
Her galaxy paintings, like Nikko Mueller's paintings, are constructed with
tape and knives. Each line is a built up plateau of paint. If I were a detective
working on how this painting were made I would think that each line was made
by the outside edges of two pieces of tape. The paint is the space in-between
the tape. There are many of these lines in one of her paintings. They crisscross
in a way that is so complex that even though all the steps are superficial
(right there on the surface of the canvas in plain view) it is difficult,
if not impossible to ascertain the steps that she followed to get the result
that she arrived at. When approaching one of her paintings I have a natural
inclination to try to count and sort the methodology behind which line when
where was applied when to unravel the central kernel around which the painting
is built, however since I do not have asperger's syndrome I cannot keep track
of a layering of more than 7 systems at one time so my train of thought disintegrates
into something of a dusty milky way of submission and enjoyment of existing
within a molecular system and not being able to comprehend it all at once.
Maybe with some grid paper and a pencil where I sit down and make notes and
draw graphs and diagrams with arrows pointing from one sentence to another
I might be able to make sense of or make a map to how to make a Susie Rosmarin
painting, although I think my instructions would be confounded and much more
incoherent that the simple act of being with the painting. If the words did
not get away from me then they would surely just get in the way.
I think that Heather Brown does not make her paintings while upside down, with
one leg and one arm tied behind her back, while laying on her stomach with
an eye patch over one eye, painting with a stick, although if I found out that
she did I would not be surprised. I know from heather brown's drawings that
the world around her is quietly and carefully observed. When I look at them
I can feel something of the same kind of tone in all of them.. Maybe it feels
to me like a yellow and green color, exactly like the experience of standing
outside, under a leafy tree, with the sun dappling down through the leaves
onto and around you. Heather's paintings are more strange and unreal. In her
paintings she is much more involved with color, which she puts on, wipes off,
covers, applies sometimes to what looks like a taped edge but more often not,
but not in a clean or neat way.. They always look as if there were some sort
of struggle to articulate something which usually seems like a physical sensation
and in the paintings it also looks as if when she started painting she may
have had some sort of general image in her mind's eye to paint but by the time
she got there it looks very much altered from where it began. Heather Brown's
paintings seem to contain some sort of experience that is divorced from something
observed because of this. The paintings have shapes and lines and colors and
sometimes lines that are shapes. Some of the areas are somewhat flat color;
other times there are indications of volume and the paintings use overlapping
areas to make the illusion of space but also warm and cool color relationships.
Many of the paintings tend to be of one overall value, which adds to the sense
of being engulfed by some sort of world that is not the day-to-day world we
live in but maybe an interior psychic reality that is parallel.
It's tiny, it's huge!
In a painting, the size of things is up for grabs.
Maybe you could have a tiny painting, like six inches square, and within that
picture plane you could have a dirty gritty yellowish greenish field that goes
from the top of the painting to leave a tiny wedge of the palest blue. I don't
think any of the paintings in this show will look like the one described, but
because painting is not just the size of the canvas and the relationship between
that and the viewer, that small yellow area could be huge, and when looked
at could occupy the same space that the whole world occupies in the mind of
the viewer. It is focus that makes scale unless there are actual objects rendered
within the picture. When heather brown paints a six inch person in the middle
of a fuscia octagon, does that mean that a real live human being is actually
6 inches, or so far away that they look six inches in perspective, say 2 blocks
away, or does that locate the viewer, empathizing with the figure, inside of
his own mind seeing the smaller within image of himself inside of felt scenarios?
Ok, so I went to the LA art fair to see JP Munro's painting. This is a vertical
painting that was mostly green and red. The green looked to be, while not a
realistic depiction, something like a deep forest of trees. Towards the top
of the painting the green gives way to yellow suggesting sky and towards the
bottom to a dark blue that suggests water and the forest depths. Overlaid on
top of the deep receding ground are painted arcs of flat red color. Similarly
to heather brown's paintings there is an overall denial of the lightest lights
and the darkest darks, which feels to me like being enclosed. The red arcs
or half moon shapes of JP's painting run into one another and are almost painted
to look like the ink on paper that results from printing a woodcut. Because
of the color red and the flat way that it is applied, in a lacey way all over
the entire surface of the painting, in an unevenly distributed way, most of
the red paint seems to be the exact surface of the canvas, which is similar
to the edge of a mirror where dust would collect. This red on the surface of
the painting makes the green in the back seem even further away and the red
acts as a screen where anything that might be some sort of landscape or scene
in the green is obscured. Even though the red paint is applied to look like
a woodcut and the green like a landscape, all certainty of meaning or event
or happening within the pictoral space of the painting is obscured.
Red and green... I saw Mark Grotjahn's painting Green Butterfly Red at the
Painting in Tongues show at MoCA about a year ago and when I encountered
it I stopped and stared and my head spun. This painting was really really
really really green, a big green painting. The paint on the painting was
thick, really thick, like ¾'s of and inch thick.
The reason I know that the paint on the painting is that thick is because dug
out of the surface (or masked off?) is Mark Grotjahn's name and his name is
red. The red is a bright shiny oily opaque red, as is the green. Mark's paintings
seem to me to have been arrived at by a tug of war with extreme restraint and
then jumping away to try to find more free terrain, between the masks and the
butterflies, blossoming into masks mated with butterflies, resembling their
origins but being a whole new animal. Mark's recent butterfly paintings are
really interesting products of a fiercely restricted framework, limited palette
and severely constrained format where there was just too much passion and pushing
against the edges of his self imposed limits that the paintings burst out and
became puffy, exaggerated and then sprouted his signature.
I've been obsessed with Mary Heilmann's paintings for a long, long time. Her
paint crawls all over her canvasses almost like dye in a bowl of water that
easter eggs are dipped into. The paint gets on the canvas but it seems in the
way that the paint crawls around the sides of the canvas that the canvas just
moved through a web of paint in the air and the paint got on the canvas as
an imprint from somewhere else rather than being applied to the canvasses.
This is not to say that the compositions are in any way imperfect or accidental,
on the contrary what I'm saying is that the paint looks again like some sort
of natural occurrence that the canvas happened to be at the right time and
the right place and collected some of that real stuff. The beautiful Mary Heilmann
painting that we have in our show is a small canvas covered with a yellow ochre-like
color. It looks like she used the handle of a paintbrush to draw lines into
the wet paint. The lines in the wet paint are simple. The suggest looking at
sand as it goes away from you to the water with grasses cropping up on the
way there, although the lines do not get much closer together as they recede
so the viewer is given a perspective that is more akin to a mind's eye view
of the sand going to the ocean, one where you would be hovering over an expanse
of sand from maybe ten feet in the air, still at an angle where you would be
facing the sea. I might be reading a lot into the painting that isn't there.
It also looks a bit like a quick sketch of bricks in a wall. I would not believe
that the painting was intended only as a collection of lines with no space
and no reference to landscape however.. When I am with Mary's paintings I feel
as if I can really breathe better. I can really feel my heart beat and my blood
flow.
One day last year I got an email from Glenn Goldberg. I hadn't spoken to him
in a long time. He was one of my teachers when I studied for a semester in
new york. He is a man's man, hard-hitting painter. When we would talk in my
studio I felt like I was talking with a star baseball player. He is really
in the thick of painting and he has been forever. Glenn has painted mandalas
and flowers and butterflies. He is all about the paint and the composition.
This email he sent me asked how I was doing. He expressed that he hoped that
my work is going well because he thinks I'm a good painter. Attached to that
email was a blurry photograph of one of his mandalas. It was so beautiful and
moving that I showed it to my studio mate and really just kept thinking about
it and looking at it. That jpeg picture was one of the catalysts for putting
together this show.
Painting is love and poetry and pure thought on canvas. Painting can do something
that nothing else can do. This is because painting is physical visual and conceptual
and paintings do not have any specific defined function that they are required
to perform.
Brenna Youngblood's work dances all over the key issues of painting and representation.
She uses multiple surfaces including large pieces of discarded paneling or
bathroom linoleum. She paints in many ways, with brushes, with spray paint,
with tape. Mostly she paints large areas of mottled color with sharp edges
that delineate some sort of interior space, but sometimes she illusionistically
paints an object like a light bulb on to the canvas. She is fluent in many
kinds of image making so that light bulb that she painted onto the canvas or
the linoleum or whatever suits her fancy as a painting surface, could be painted
to look like deconstructed shapes, more blue than a real light bulb. Brenna
also affixes actual photographs of objects and people on canvas within the
painted spaces, and then perhaps she might make a flower shape out of cut out
bits of photographs and stick them on a canvas and add some paint that drips
down the canvas both to give the flower a stem and also to bisect the canvas.
All means of visual and physical description of space are within Brenna's grasp
and she mixes and matches them freely to make paintings that have space and
flatness and the poetry and emotion in a drip as it makes its way all the way
down the surface.
Rebecca Morris, articulate without image, falls solidly in the abstract camp.
Sometimes they fall into mandala or medallion but usually in a really garish
way. Rebecca's paintings, like mark grotjahn's, have really pushed out against
their limits and constraints, although the constraints with Rebecca's paintings
are not as obvious as mark's. She uses spray paint and acrylic paint but
mostly she uses oil paint and oil mediums. Rebecca's paintings use the things
you're supposed to use in ways you're not supposed to use them. For example
she uses stand oil as a medium to make big bubbled lumpy areas. Stand oil
takes months to dry and is the consistency of thick honey. The top edge where
the stand oil is exposed to air dries first and the stuff under the dried
skin dries more slowly so as the under part of the stand oil blob dry, the
top edge becomes wrinkly like the surface of a brain. She makes these blobs
with the canvas flat on the ground so it doesn't run, but when she picks
it up and hangs it on the wall many weeks or months after application, the
blob puckers and sometimes bursts spilling blobs of clear and colored goo
onto the canvas that later dries. Rebecca has ridiculous mottoes like, "if it's not working, spray paint it gold," which
she does!! She also makes use of disturbing and ugly surfaces and color combinations
that look to flaunt really bad taste and fashion, in a really conscious and
aware painting. A Rebecca Morris painting is a thing that's hard to swallow
that the experience of viewing is a confrontation with an aggressively loud
and proud object.
And then there's me... for a long time I have been slipping in and out of
abstraction and realism. When I say abstraction, I mean abstract expressionism.
When I say abstract expressionism, I mean an awareness of the object ness and
flatness of the picture plane. I usually don't make that the most obvious part
of the painting because hide the lines that I paint on the canvas within the
realistic interiors and figurative paintings that I make, however my awareness
of the edges of the painting and my conscious choices regarding centering an
image or coming up to the edges but not getting there or ending a room to start
another room towards the bottom of the picture plane are all related to composition
and a painting as an object and not a window with which to view the world through,
although I do also use a painting in that way, as a frame to a view finder.
My paintings are often very large so that the viewer is inside of my painting.
The subject matter of my paintings is always psychology in some way. Sometimes
my window/ object picture plane is instead a mirror. The mirror is usually
a mirror that does not give the viewer a view of himself... so it's a mirror
that doesn't mirror. The painting for this show that I am making is a realistic
rendering of a shattered window overlaid with a pink crocheted web that sits
on top of the cracks in the glass. What is on the other side of the window
is not revealed; instead the window reflects the sky, the clouds, some trees.
Katie Grinnan, sculptor, will be making plastic and bamboo tree parts with
images on the parts of the tree sculpture. The images on the tops of the crafted
leaves will not be the same as the ones underneath the fronds. This piece will
interact in some way with the palm tree stump that is in the small porch walkway
behind, yet part of honor's gallery. Like all Katie's work, this piece has
an uncanny way of articulation the sun, the moon the seasons. In the way that
it is different from a different viewpoint, the parts that are in the light,
or known about are different from the hidden, but the hidden are still there
nonetheless.. Katie's work has a way of intervening with nature, changing it
in some way to give nature the kind of conscious awareness and communicative
language that a human might have. It's almost as if Katie grafts herself and
a tree in this piece, or gives the tree qualities that she possesses.
In Summary:
This show came together in an organic intuitive way. Basically all of these
works are works that I love and want, want to have or be a part of in some
way, and then because I am open to seeing and learning new and unexpected
things there was no constraint placed on what work might go together, more
it was just a matter of something feeling right, or if someone in the show
gave me a piece that wasn't quite what I expected, it changed the tone of
the show and then that suggested different people to include as I put the
show together. It started with seeing Susie Rosmarin's painting in my friend's
apartment. I really wanted that painting. Wanted to be around it, wanted
to have it be in my home and to have it be part of me. Then there was Glenn
Goldberg's email and the beautiful magic blurry image he sent me over the
internet, that even though not a real painting, but an image, combinded with
it's blurriness which I think made it communicate to me even stronger, made
it into a piece separate from what was originally photographed. after that
my mind is always on Nina's work, my studio mate Nikko and I with our late
night painting pep talks and how we do the absurd thing of talking about
color and shape and how we are so involved in each other's processes, JP's
painting at the la art fair that made me swoon, aghast, couldn't believe
what I was looking at, filed far back in my mind, my awe at Gark Grotjahn's
green butterfly, Mary Heilmann who is a true sage of incredible nets of living
surface, so physical and transitory that they are hardly even physical at
all, to Brenna who just came into my warehouse looking for a studio, who
once we started talking about paint and when I looked at her images on the
web I realized they were perfect and asked her to be in the show even though
I though maybe there were already too many people and then the goddess of
abstraction, Rebecca Morris, a painter who's paintings are way too smart
and stupid for most people, my cracked reflection, and what would a painting
show be without a sculptor (Katie Grinnan).