ARTifice and friends at "Quart Bag," Civilian Art Projects

A few pics from the well-attended opening for "Quart Bag: A Community Art Show," at Civilian Art Projects: (all photos by n.p.)




"Quart Bag" featured a widely varied assortment of works from over 100 DC area artists. Works were displayed inside of quart-size plastic bags, and were priced at $50 or $100.

Recent AU alum Lauren Rice's "Seedling"


2008 alum Brian Barr's "Self-Portrait as a Tough Guy"


Bonner Sale's "a little longer" (current AU student)


Nikki Painter's "Optimist" (current AU student)


ARTifice friend Alex Ebstein's untitled drawing (Check out some more great images from the opening on Alex's blog There Were Ten Tigers.)


Rachel's "Girls Grow Up Faster"


Cara Ober's "Truth sounds like a pistol"


Megan Blafas's "Parts of a Whole"



Matthew Spahr's "Mr. Blake died in Wisconsin" (ARTifice does not know Matthew Spahr, but we thought this work was nice.)


To see even MORE images from the opening, check out artist Nikolas Schiller's blog, The Daily Render. Schiller also had work in "Quart Bag" (see previous "Quart Bag" post).

"Quart Bag" is on view at Civilian Art Projects until August 16th.

"Quart Bag: A Community Art Show" at Civilian Art Projects

"Without You I Am Lost," by Nikolas Schiller


AU artists Bonner Sale and Nikki Painter will have work in "Quart Bag: A Community Art Show," opening Friday, August 8th at Civilian Art Projects.

Recent AU Alumni Brian Barr and Lauren Rice will also exhibit pieces in "Quart Bag."

AND Artifice blogger buddies Alex Ebstein of There Were Ten Tigers, Rachel Fick of ArtCade Forum, and Cara Ober of BMore Art will have work in the show.

Here's some more info:

QUART BAG: A Community Art Show at Civilian
August 8 - August 16, 2008
OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, 8/08/08

Inspired by the many things you can do with a quart bag, Civilian Art Projects has invited 100 DC area artists to participate in a community art exhibition called Quart Bag. The exhibition provides an imaginative opportunity for artists to use thirty-two ounces of space within a plastic quart size bag. All works of art will be sold for $100 or less, providing an opportunity for all people to walk home with a piece of art that is FAA approved.

When: Friday, August 8, 2008 - 7:00pm to 9:00pm
The exhibition will run from August 8 - 16, 2008.

APES/FIASCO - After the opening, head up to Comet Ping Pong for beer specials, pizza, ping pong and rock. 10pm. $10.

Comet: 5037 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC

Partial List of Artists participating in QB:
Seth Adelsberger / Brigitte Anders-Kraus / Brian Barr/ Jon Bobby Benjamin / Matthew Best / Kristina Bilonick / John Bohl / Marissa Botelho / Martin Brief / Emily C-D / Colby Caldwell / Nick Carr / Page Carr / Erin Cluely / Cynthia Connolly / Patricia Correa / Dane Austin Criner / Caitlin Cunningham / Dmetrious / Mary Early / Alex Ebstein / Steven Eson / Briony Evans / Annie Ewaskio / Edward Fendley / Rachel Fick / Steve Frost / Scott Gursky / Paul Jeanes / Rebecca Juliette / Brook Halvorson / Elizabeth Huey / James Huckenpahler / Anamario Hernandez / Bridget Sue Lambert / Alberto Gaitan / Victoria Gaitan / Carlos Gomez / Jason Gubbiotti / Annie Gray / Adam Griffiths / Erick Jackson / Amanda Kleinman / JW Mahoney / Katherine Mann / Nathan Manuel / John Marra / Cara Ober / Ayo Okuseinde / Betsy Packard / Nikki Painter / Annie Peters / Dana Reifler-Amato / Ding Ren / Lauren Rice/ Bonner Sale / Sara Seidman / Emily Slaughter / Matt Spahr / Noelle Tan / Denise Tassin / Lisa Marie Thalhammer / Robert Tifford / Rene Trevino / Justin Tsucalas / Andrej Ujhazy / The Scott Twins

Images from Proximity: MFA Thesis Show

These are a few selections of work by AU's graduating MFA class. "Proximity" will be on display at the Katzen until May 18th.


Geoffrey Aldridge

(video)



(detail from drawing)



Brian Barr








Andrew S. Blair








Tim Campbell









Bradley Chriss








Lily Desaussure




(detail)





Katherine Knight











Amy Misurelli Sorensen










Max Perry




(video)




Cory Oberndorfer





(photos by Alex Ebstein)




Lauren Rice









Sharon Servilio





(image from art book)


Come check it out!

Proximity: MFA Thesis Opening, this Friday!!!

Proximity

An exhibition of this year's graduating MFA candidates

Opening Reception Friday, April 18th, 6-9 pm

Featuring the work of:

Geoffrey Aldridge
Brian Barr
Andrew S. Blair
Tim Campbell
Bradley Chriss
Lily Desaussure
Katherine Knight
Amy Misurelli Sorensen
Max Perry
Cory Oberndorfer
Lauren Rice
Sharon Servilio

Work will be exhibited from April 19- May 18 at the Katzen.
Click here for museum information.

Glenn Brown at Gagosian

Brian Barr

This past may Glenn Brown had an exhibition of paitnings at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. For anyone familiar with the faux impastoed paintings of Brown little from this exhibition will be of any surprise. The works were all in the trademark style and subject matter. The works of either anamorphic blobs or rococo young women swinging or posing in some fashion.
Brown’s work deals with the relationship of painting to mass reproduced images. Seen in reproduction Brown’s paintings appear to be heavily impastoed paint as in Frank Auerbach’s work. The stark difference is that in actuality, the paintings are as flat as can be imagined and the surfaces are highly slick. In essence he is making paintings that look like reproductions of paintings. This is Walter Benjamin taken to the extreme, perhaps flipped on his head, art in the age of mechanical reproduction, where the original now takes on the aura of a reproduction rather than the original losing its original significance because of reproductions.
I will grant that these ideas are interesting and the work is impressive in person in its technical finish. The thing is the ideas and paintings were interesting ten years ago when Brown achieved his early success and they have not changed since. Brown is making “Glenn Brown Paintings”, essentially copies of himself. However ironic this may be in connection with his conceptual basis, the works seem geared to offer collectors a chance to own a Glenn Brown of their own.
The most compelling works of the show were the paintings where the figure was removed in favor of blob-like form of fake brushstrokes. The questions this show raised to me were more related to the art world in general rather than Brown’s work. That being the dilema facing artists who achieve that level of success and the demand for a consistent product by galleries eager to appease their collectors. How can an artists avoid this inevitable trap? I don’t really have the answers, and I know there are certainly artists who have been able to continue making work that is still identifiable stylistically as theirs while still pushing and asking new questions of themselves and their work. In a prior review I referred to the most recent Dana Schutz show as an example of this. I acknowledge Brown has been around the scene far longer than Schutz and time will be the judge of her ultimate success. I will say this about Brown’s work, it is packaged beautifully. He filled the gargantuan space that dwarfs small museums with consistently well crafted paintings. He delivered the goods.

Francesco Clemente at Mary Boone

Brian Barr

From May 5 through June 30 Francesco Clemente had an exhibition of portraits up at Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea. I have to be honest, I am somewhat conflicted as to my personal feelings about Clemente’s work. I can remember being a teenager and seeing the film Great Expectations, for which Clemente created all the original art works. The portraits he created of the cast for that film had a great impact on me, as untrained as my eye and critical judgement may have been at the time. I really thought, and largely still think, those works were exceptional for what they were: Portraits. Those works had an influence on my decision to pursue figuration and portraiture as a means of creative expression within the context of contemporary art.
It has only been within the past five years that my feelings began to change. The more research I have done the more I have discovered, in terms of the writing, and in most cases lack there of, on Clemente and other Neo Expressionists; the relationship of critical art, to blatantly “expressive” works to the point of commercialization. While I concede certain points of the criticism of the works of these artists, particularly Clemente, those portraits still have an impact for me each and every time I see the film.
The criticism at large about Clemente’s body of work and career taken into account, and my own personal fondness for Clemente’s portraits will form the basis for this review. The twenty or so portraits in this exhibition were all around five by eight feet. They were of either married couples or solitary early middle aged females. All the sitters are obviously wealthy, as made clear by their jewelry and fancy dresses. Perhaps they are patrons of Clementes, perhaps personal friends, perhaps that distinction is impossible to make?
Even with my professed affection for Clementes portraiture their was little for me to be excited by in this show. It could be my lack of ability to empathize with such obviously wealthy people and the blatant commercial motivation of the body of work (each had a sticker price of $200,000 – $250,000, and the show nearly sold out ). I don’t think that is enough of an explanation however. Each of the paintings in Great Expectations was commissioned for the film, and each was of well known actors, who are also wealthy. I think the answer lies in the lack of success of these paintings as paintings, as images, as engaging works even if only on a personal, emotional level. There were traces of the Clemente of old, in say for example how the eyes of one woman were painted or the hands of another, but on a whole they were very bland.

Dana Schutz at Zach Feuer

Brian Barr



This past April Dana Schutz had an exhibition of new paintings up at Zach Feuer Gallery in Chelsea. While the body of work as a whole had Schutz’s usual sense of playfulness, obsurdities and obvious love of painting, there was something different in the new work that I haven’t noticed from her previous work. By this I mean paintings that are blatantly about painting as much as the stylization of Schutz’s early work. Everything from a painting referencing an undergraduate art class painting from a model to purely abstract works and even references to other painters like Alice Neel and Da Vinci.
She gives us a new take on the most reproduced, appropriated and lampooned image in the western art canon, the Mona Lisa. In Schutz’s painting however the world has turned and we see our beloved Mona in profile, giving us a glimpse of lies beyond the frame of the original masterpiece. What at first could be seen as an obscure figurative abstraction takes on an entirely different context as soon as one looks at the title, “Mona”. Even the title changes the context of the original and presents a far more informal, yet personal association on first name basis with the mysterey woman, yet with hair covering her face she has become perhaps more obscured.
In other paintings such as “Male Model” and “Tom” I see what to me are obvious references to Alice Neel, the prior being her later more famous style and “Tom” bares resemblance to Neels early career works.


Then there are the two completely abstract pieces, “Cleveland” and “Abstract Model”, along with the more obvious, “How we would give birth”. This last painting portrays a woman giving birth, with the new born child’s head and arms exiting an exposed, bloody vagina. The mother however is more concerned with the landscape painting in a highly ornate gold frame on the bedside wall than her partially born child. While the reference to Painting and its history is obvious, this image still retains a degree of ambiguity to me. It can be read as perhaps a statement about the importance of art and culture in the nurturing and education of children, or a statement about art as distraction from what perhaps the artists feels are more important things in life.
Finally there is the monumental, “How we cured the plague”. Everything from its huge ten by twelve foot scale to its subject matter reference a long tradition of historical painting, but the most unique aspect of this painting when understood in the context of Schutz’s full body of work, is the dramatic depth of perspectival space. Never have her paintings been concerned with conventional, western one point perspective, as this painting clearly is. Even her pallette shifts push the background further away, showing off her chops in this supposedly archaic technique in painting.
Any one of these paintings isolated from the rest might not add up to much, but as I walked through the space I couldn’t help seeing the connection between them all; Painting itself, its history as well as the act and practice of it. For me what was most successful about this body of work, while I concede problems with individual pieces, was the infusion of this content within a stylization that has become easily identifiable as Schutz’s, and yet at the same time I didn’t feel she was making copies of herself and past successes. I felt growth and challenging of her own value system. These works seem to be questioning and championing these values simultaeneously.

Crossbar Hotel: Jim Wright at Rare Gallery in Chelsea

Brian Barr

Crossbar Hotel which was up at rare Gallery in Chelsea last month featured the strangely curious paintings and scupture of Jim Wright. Wright’s work is playful to be sure, full of bright colors, bizzare imagery, and psychodelic references. His work borders upon the absurd and the paintings seem to be taking cues from the work of recluse outsider artist, Henry Darger. Yet Wright is by no means an outsider. He received his MFA in 2004 from Hunter College in New York.
Wright is thus no doubt well versed in art historical trends and movements and the interest in outsider artists as a curiosity. His sculpture seems to take the influence of Darger a step further by removing them from the realm of imaginative fantasies and creates concrete objects in three dimensions to be interacted with physically rather than merely psychically. Wright is one of many young artists using the stylization of quasi naïve as a tactic in which to approach his image making and bringing to it the polish and wit of an MFA degree. Upon investigation however, it is clear that these works are sophisticated in there decision making.

In the painting-sculpture, “Scofflaws’ Widdendrem” we see a painting of a cottage in the forrest. In the foreground is a tree that has just been cut down, fallen right beside its perfectly severed stump. The stump and tree however are three dimensional. The stump rises off the painting in relief and the tree has fallen out of the picture plane all together, leaving Wright’s day dream and entering our space; quite literally bridges the gap between “window and object” in painting.

One of my favorite pieces in the exhibition was the small work on paper, “Peace Machine”. In this painting there is a fork in the road where two strange vehicles; which appear to be wagons with only one set of wheels as opposed to the two sets which gravity would require to hold off the ground, are on a collision coarse with each other. Both are occupied by curious figures in the black and white stripes of prison suits stereotypical of the early half of the twentieth century. In the wake of both is an oozing rainbow spewing from there legs where their feet should be. Out of their wrists (in place of hands) are projected arched rainbows and crescent moons surrounded by twinkling stars respectively. Amidst all of this artificial interjection of “Peace” and happiness is the oddity of the fact that the engines of both vehicles are spewing black smoke and yellow-brown smog, commenting perhaps on the notion that no matter how hard we humans try to manipulate our environment for the better, we leave behind a trail of pollution.

The show also consists of two works that are sculptures, “Dulocray’s Disboscation” and “Verticordious and Scopperloit”, yet both sculptures are painted. Both purposefully noted in there description: “Acrylic on foam”, “Acrylic on foam and wood”, described the same manner as the paintings which are “Acrylic on panel”, “Acrylic ink on paper”. These notions of painting/sculpture, window/object seem to be the binaries that Wright is concerned with. Judging by the decsriptions of his materials, Wright is giving primacy to Painting with a capital P. He is not calling it paint on foam, but rather giving it the specificity of the type of paint on foam, thus questioning the nature of painting and its function. That being said, for all the questions I feel that Wrights work raises, there is still a lack of pretentiousness. His paintings are fun, strange and interesting.