When I recently visited the exhibition CR(I)SES AD(JUST)MENTS (COLLAPSED) at Flux Factory, a solo show by French artist Christine Laquet, I was immediately seduced by a white circular platform featuring red high-heeled shoes and imagery projected onto it from the ceiling. The images fluctuated between close-ups of slow-moving jellyfish and blurry snow scenes, and were accompanied by a captivating audio track. Titled “If by love possessed,” the audio is an interview Laquet did with a “Doctor in Monsterology” — a discussion of what, where, and who could be the contemporary monster, read by a teenage girl.
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One aspect of all of artists’ workshops and residencies is that in making work side by side, artists inevitably begin to understand each other despite their differences. Empathy is a fundamental ingredient in most art, and while individual works are vastly different from each other, much art confronts and offers unique answers to such essential questions as, what does it mean to be human? Artists are vital to easing political friction because by fostering a vision and purpose, they can dissolve borders and provide a psychic geography.
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I’ve always been attracted to the macabre in art and literature. I have a vivid memory of pronouncing Edgar Allen Poe my favorite author we had read that year in 7th grade; most of my classmates preferred Harper Lee or Mark Twain. While walking through the group exhibition A Wake: Still Lives and Moving Images at the Dumbo Arts Center, which combines video, cinema, and photography to explore the theme of death, I had a similar experience to when I first read Poe.
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Often the role of an artist is simply to disrupt and create a perceptual shift. This past April, I was invited to participate in a residency program where the studios were on the outskirts of a small town, scattered among a forest. The residency promoted its relationship between artists, nature and quiet contemplation. Upon arrival, I was confronted with this somewhat contrived environment, but also with performance artist Jordan McKenzie.
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Artist Fernando Orellana is making work for a very specific audience: the recently departed. His current project, Shadows, consists of interactive works designed for posthumous use. Inspired by paranormal research, spiritualism and ghost folklore, Orellana’s machines continuously search for the dead, attempting to allow the departed a chance to interact with the world they left.
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During last night’s Arthur Miller Freedom to Write event, writer Salman Rushie talked about the fact that censorship exists to change the subject. When it is introduced in the realm of art, it becomes the subject; the attack onto the work becomes the work. As Rushdie said, “Assumptions of guilt replace assumptions of innocence.” The question redirects to, why are artists so troublesome?
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Studio portraits do not document an event; the making of the photograph is the event. In order to create a series titled Free Sitting, artist Nora Herting got a job as a trade photographer at a portrait studio in a JC Penney department store in Ohio.
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Monica Cook’s Volley features a full cast of blemished bedazzled half-human, half-monkey sculptures. When I asked one viewer what he thought his response was, “It’s pretty dark, I mean, this ain’t no Winnie the Pooh you know …”
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The Skybridge Art & Sound Space inside the Eugene Lang College currently has an installation on view until January 31, 2012. Artifix Mori, by John Ensor Parker and Jason Krugman, both visiting artists in the visual arts program at Eugene Lang, is paradoxically whimsical and ominous in its collision of science, nature, art and technology.
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In October I had the opportunity to go to the opening of Tour and Trance, Matt Blackwell’s exhibition at the Edward Thorp Gallery. It’s a strange animated narrative that contains a whole cast of characters experiencing events and simultaneously forming and disintegrating in one moment. That evening we had some conversations on his life and thoughts and the stories that came out felt like some of the missing puzzle pieces. So, we began a conversation. I realized, I didn’t want to ask him the details behind specific pieces or anything detailed in general. I wanted to ask him vague open questions with a lot of room for rambling so we could meander around in his thought process the way his paintings meander around this weird world.
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