Wac6arts

Reminder - Isaac Layman closes August 14

This just in from Scott Lawrimore. Couple days left to see the big Isaac Layman show. Isaac is a huge talent, the real thing. You should see this work if you don't already know it.

Sounds like Scott is moving, too; will have to get to the bottom of that.

From: scott lawrimore [mailto:scott@lawrimoreproject.com]
Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2010 2:11 PM
To: William Carleton
Subject: Reminder - Isaac Layman closes August 14


Last few days to view Isaac Layman's 110%

Exhibition closes this Saturday, August 14.

UPCOMING
Our new space in Pioneer Square opens September 2nd with:
Isaac Layman - Double Down
A critical response created in the wake of  110%

Details forthcoming.

 Lawrimore Project • 831 Airport Way S • Seattle, WA 98134

Isaac Layman Show at Lawrimore Project

The new Isaac Layman show at Lawrimore Project is very different from the prior one.

First impressions of the new show: 

• There's an older person's sensibility at work here, at odds with Layman's youth. An older sensibility, but contemporary, not belated.
• The photos are now actually paintings, in spite of being photographs, or layers of images, or digital renderings (I'm not sure which). The fact that a camera is involved merely means these paintings are rendered without paint. 
• What results is a kind of reductionism: the surfaces of the canvas have no texture. The photographic-like smoothness of each surface rhymes, too, with the consequences of the portraitist's choice to give the subjects time to prepare for the shoot: the oven has removed its racks, the cupboard has ordered its dishes, the doors have walked out of the frame and have taken their hinges with them.
• The scale of the Otter Pop paintings means you have no choice but to relate them to color field paintings from the last century. But Layman's have so much more narrative resonance than those paintings ever could.

Cherry Trees and iPhones

The more I watch, the more I am convinced that, in our present-day society, no one is ever doing nothing. People share a space they like to call "public," but are usually distracted by their technological devices, be it a cell phone, iPhone, iPod, or game console. Don't we all crave contact with other human beings? We hide from each other, yet seek connection at the same time. -- Margeaux Walter

Saturday, March 6, 2010, yesterday, was glorious in Seattle. The sky had never been so purely blue, so deeply, for so long an early spring afternoon. It was the perfect day to see the cherry trees in blossom on the University of Washington campus, and hundreds did so.

photo by mcoughlin, used under Creative Commons license http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcoughlin/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

Almost all came in groups, as families, friends, or couples. Every group had a picture-taker; many had two or more. There were digital SLRs, point and shoot cameras, and camera phones. Much distraction by technological devices, indeed: but all focused on another, or the group, or recording the fact that a social ritual had been observed, an experience shared, or captured. It was one of those moments from a David Brooks column: we're all in the future and behold, we're acting out the communal values of our great-great-grandparents (or something like that).

In the peak of the sunshine, at the southernmost corner of the quadrangle, where the cherry trees are younger and the branches hang lower, a young woman in stylish boots, green taffeta skirt and pink sweater posed patiently while a retro-spectacled young man wearing glow-in-the-dark jeans used a slick, white point-and-shoot camera to take close up after close up of her next to a dipping bough of blossoms. Or so he tried. She was evidently not pleased with the rushes on the device's LCD, as she relieved him of the camera, resumed her pose, and took photos of herself from her own outstretched arm. (He at that point very competently shouldered her oversized, polka-dotted purse.)

 photo by Brian Dorsey (taken with an Apple iPhone 3GS), used under Creative Commons license

At the next tree over, a mother tried to help a reluctant girl climb into the "v" between the tree's two main branches. A photographer circled, looking for the least awkward moment. They were in the wrong place: plenty of kids were finding footing in the crooks of larger trees (one pictured above) on the northern half of the quad.

Good Luck, Assholes (at the Frye)

Twirl, don't promenade, to the Frye to see "The Old, Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art," a traveling exhibit organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

The show is a hodgepodge, which means you can slip right past the works that don't pull you in, and focus on the gravity wells of genius that do.

Not to be missed, for my money:

• The show's signature piece, a kinetic sculpture by Cynthia Norton entitled "Dancing Squared." Here's how the catalogue describes the facts about it: "Aluminum, hardware, electric motors, dresses, wire. 90 x 180 x 180 inches." But you have to see this in motion. It is as good as you can imagine it from a still or video.

• Greta Pratt's "Nineteen Lincolns," an affecting series of portraits of contemporary Lincoln impersonators. Pratt photographs each to reveal his individuality, even as the similarity of costumes, postures and beards throughout the series asserts a common allegiance to an American ideal of the genuine. Lincoln Number Three has the uncannily sorrowful aspect one imagines the actual President might not wish to have revealed in his own portraits, but did. You can see images of all of the Lincoln work at Gretta Pratt's site, linked to above, but the prints are worth seeing at scale and arranged in a grid on a large wall at the Frye.

• Eric Beltz's graphite drawing, "Good Luck, Assholes: Thomas Jefferson's Vision of Death," at once hilarious and sublime. All elements of Beltz's vocabulary are fully realized in this piece: detailed rendering of period architecture; expert, currency-worthy founding father portraiture; subversion of the cursive font of authority; selective use and repetition of iconic motifs; and more I can put my finger on (the elements work together and yet are discrete) but can't quite explain.

"Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea"

The best art show I've seen in years -- among the best I've ever seen, possibly destined to rank in my memory with Matisse/Picasso at the MoMA when MoMA was in Queens, or last century's Mondrian retrospective at MoMA  -- is one featuring 12 relatively young, commercially-savvy artists from Korea, now running at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The show is called "Your Bright Future," and as you view the work the three-word title resonates by turns as propaganda, pedagogical imperative, corporate insinuation, sarcasm and earnest sentiment.

I've been wanting to blog about this show ever since seeing it with my brothers at a member's preview in June (I had to join the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to get in; I'm glad I did). But I've been stymied by the facts that (a) I took no pictures of the show (signs said I shouldn't, and each exhibition space had an attentive guard equipped with an unobstructed view), (b) every image I saw had prominent copyright notices attached or embedded, and (c) the LACMA (there, I've given in to the museum's marketing department's acronymic branding; it is convenient) website, initially, didn't show anything other than the flash animations of YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, specially commissioned for the show.

Circumstances have changed, a bit. For one, I've recently reviewed the fair use doctrine and feel more confident about my mission here on wac6arts.com. For another, the LACMA site now has videos and photos posted -- a ton of them, almost as many as there were works in the physical show -- and not every photo is immune to a right-click to a new window that can be copied.

The photo above is of Haegue Yang, but she is not in the show. Rather, her work, Storage Piece (2003/2009), also pictured here, is. The artist is sitting at the corner where you enter the show at LACMA -- it is the first exhibition space to the right of the entrance lobby. Yang's work is about the practical problems an artist has when a gallery show of her work closes and the work that does not sell is returned to her. Rather than unwrap the returned work, though, this time Yang leaves it packaged up, and exhibits it that way. It is a brilliant turn. The stylized arrangement of warehouse pallets suggests to me that the work is destined always to be in transit, or even that its status as art derives from it being always imminent without ever being consumed or revealed. (I do understand, however, that the artist will make one or two appearances at LACMA, and that some of the pieces may be unpacked; I'd like to get down there again to see one of these events.)

This second photo is of the second room you come to in the show, just after the exhibit space for Storage Piece. This next room, and the one that follows it, exhibits sculpture and video by Gimhongsok. Gimhongsok is also a writer; the wall texts that accompany his pieces (even the video pieces) are perceptive, arch, funny and accessible. The piece that interests me most in the room pictured above, and perhaps in the whole show, is the box within the plexi-glass box on a stand off the left wall. The writing on the wall to the left of the box tells its story, which is of a conversation between Mao Zedong and Richard Nixon that secretly took place in Switzerland in the early1970s. The CIA, the story goes, captured the conversation and secured it for posterity within two boxes, one of which was given to the Chinese government but has since been lost. Thankfully, the box in the show is known to survive. The piece may be known as Mao Met Nixon, but I am not sure and I don't know what year to attribute to it.

There are other things you must see if you travel to this show. These include Jeon Joonho's digital animation, The White House (2005-2006), an extended portion of which you can currently access on the LACMA site. (I can't give you a direct link to the video; you'll have to scroll right to get to the column about Jeon Joonho. In the physical show, the video is much more dramatic, as it is projected onto a wall that is probably some 30 feet wide.)

Another must-see is Kimsooja's "6 channel video projection," A Needle Woman (2005). One wall of Kimsooja's piece, as projected at LACMA, is pictured above. (Again, an excerpt of the work can be accessed on the LACMA site. This excerpt shows better in the smaller web-video format than does the excerpt of Jeon Joonho's piece.)

In the last exhibit space in the show, before you return to the entrance lobby, are two very dramatic large scale architectural models by Do Ho Su. One of the works, the extraordinary Home within Home (2008-2009), pictured below, was commissioned by LACMA for this show.

Margeaux Walter, Visual Twitterer

Margeaux Walter, a New York based artist and designer, has a new series of iterative, personal landscapes called "Interludes."  Each of these pieces measures four and a half feet by two feet, and each features multiple images of the artist in slightly differentiated costumes, wigs and poses, photo-shopped into minimalistic, monochromatic sets:  a library; an idealized backyard fence; a wall of sinks and mirrors in a public washroom.  Each image realizes a distinct, highly stylized design, but all pieces in the series utilize the vocabulary of repetition and variation, and a cinematic-like chronology, or the narrative of a filmstrip.

Three pieces from the series, "In Search," "Boundary" (pictured above), and "Reflect," are on view through July 7, 2009, at the Winston Wachter gallery in Seattle. 

The Winston Wachter show is also featuring pieces from Walter's profound and slightly terrifying "Horizon" series.  The "lenticular" images of each piece in the Horizon series are laid, or set, on one of the six surfaces of large, free-standing cubes (and the cubes themselves may be stacked or arranged into larger rectangular blocks).  "Lenticular" refers to the process by which the images are layered in strips and then overlaid with a ribbed laminate so as to display different images of the artist in variant postures, depending on the physical position from which one views the piece.  The point is to suggest motion in the transitions of the images as the viewer steps one way and then another.  (Walter's lenticular images are very much like the 3-D baseball cards I remember retrieving as a kid from boxes of corn flakes, only Walter's 3-D cards are larger, meaning you don't move them so much as you move yourself in relation to them; and, unlike the baseball cards, they really work in a satisfying way.)

Reviews and other written material I've found about Walter's work emphasize her concern with the de-personalizing aspects of technology, or else the artist's struggle to maintain vestiges of individuality or "imperfection" in the face of the forces of homogeneity.  Here's a paragraph from the Winston Wachter site about the current show:

Walter employs digital strategies to explore concerns of social reliance on technology and its threat of replacing many analogue skills. Walter observes, "This is happening without our awareness and it is camouflaging itself as natural evolution." She addresses fears that as we modify our lives and routines in order to keep up with technological innovations, our freedom and ability to engage the world as unique individuals is diminishing.

This critical approach may be useful in encountering the paradoxical allure and claustrophobia of the "Horizons" series.  But I don't think these themes begin to acknowledge the humor and liberating subversiveness of the "Interludes" series. 

In both series, Walter makes use of small, iterative changes in posture.  In "Horizons," the tightly circumscribed spaces are arresting; and the introduction of the lenticular animation is actually paradoxical:  because the movement is so constrained, and circular, the images in a way are actually more static than the broad, truly horizontal landscapes of the "Interludes" series.  The vocabulary of iteration and variaton in the "Interludes" series, however, suggests to me that change is afoot.  The "world" of each image may have been drawn and populated by an autocratic intelligence, an architect with an intent to pre-determine the outcome, perhaps even a marketer with crass commercial purposes; but the replicated figures are themselves already individuating and considering how to be uncooperative. 

And if each physical figure in a given piece is but a separate aspect of the same intelligence, reflected within her own construction, so much the more powerful is the affirmation of personal efficacy.  It makes me think of a tweet posted by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey at 6:37 pm on May 5, 2009:

Twitter is a life's work inspired by those who bring transparency, discovery, and discussion into everything they do. You define our future.

Or think of each setting in the "Interludes" series as an iPhone social networking app.  As the inhabitant of the setting or the user of the app, you may drop into the same skin others are using and you may even adopt group behaviors as you situate yourself into what seems to be the current convention.  But if you find any reason at all to continue to use the app after its newness wears off, you will bend it to your own purposes; and if the app is any good at all, the purposes of its intrepid users will redefine the app's originating purpose.