In the warm breeze of Southern California’s endless summer, the 20th Century dream of life in the early evening after work: a large backyard covered in concrete and grass, a hammock or a lawn chair, cold beer, and a blazing grill. Ground meat sizzling above a glowing bed of charcoal soaked in lighter fluid. Underneath the avocado tree. Or the oak tree. Or the whatever tree. Putting the last 8-10 hours of your day out of your mind and enjoying your “free” time. A nuclear family fantasy repeated across hundreds of millions of suburban and semi-suburban homes and half a century of North American lives.
Pattern recognition is the primordial ooze from out of which living consciousness and intelligence crawled into the minds of animals. The ability to recognize repetitive relationships and recurring phenomena. The habits of food, the faces of your loved ones, and the sounds of human language. From automobile factory assembly line and the discount drug store cash register today to the taxi cab’s driver seat and patent lawyer’s office tomorrow: unconscious software is slowly and not-so- slowly aping the abilities of the living mind.
Reading without eyes. Recognizing without consciousness. The outsourcing of understanding. You’re Fired!
The first U.S. museum survey of his work, Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century, is currently on view at the Whitney Museum in NYC.
The 2023 Emerging Artist Exhibition in Creative Pinellas’ gallery space highlights work from the ten Pinellas County artists chosen by the organization for this year’s Emerging Artist Grant.
Above are sculptures by Amy Wolf. She has written several articles for the Creative Pinellas website which give some insight into her work and are worth a read.
According to artist Kimberly Engel, the paintings above “explore vibrant color interaction while inviting viewers to meditate on an illusive horizon line where sky meets water.”
From the Creative Pinellas website-
Kimberly Engel is a contemporary abstract painter who lives and works in Clearwater, Florida. Her distinct gestural style combines a love for color interaction with spontaneous mark making. Engel’s paintings explore levels of transparency, evoking depth and light. She is inspired by the constant presence and changing states of large bodies of water. She has lived on the shore of Lake Erie in Euclid, Ohio prior to moving to the Gulf Coast.
Engel describes her process as an exploration of herself and ultimately the dissolving of herself mirrored in the process of making and deconstructing works. Her gestural marks have been described as both compulsive and somewhat calligraphic. They undulate and disappear under thin veils of color.
Denis DeBon created the unique glass works seen above.
His biography from the gallery website-
Dennis DeBon is the creator of EnergyWebs, which are one-of-a-kind works of modern glass art. He is often been compared to artist Jackson Pollock. Like Pollack, Dennis uses simple artistic techniques and has combined reverse painting on glass with spin art and taken both to a whole new level.
Each EnergyWeb is cut from a large sheet of plate glass, then free-style hand-cut into shape, scalloped, polished then spun. Dennis uses a multitude of application techniques and color combinations when creating each piece before firing and hand-signing them.
Every EnergyWeb is a unique, one-of-a-kind work of modern glass art and he is the only artist in the world creating them.
In addition to selling his artwork at fine art festivals across the country, Dennis was commissioned as the artist to create the Richard Dawkins Awards. In addition, his past creations have been presented to James “The Amazing” Randi, Carl Sagan’s widow, Ann Druyan, and the Zora Neale Hurston and the Koi Society of America award winners.
Dennis was born and raised in Buffalo, New York and attended the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, where he studied photography and graphic design.
He now lives in Saint Petersburg, Florida and when he isn’t creating art, you might find him writing screenplays or in the boxing ring . . . working as a professional boxing referee.
For more of the artists in the exhibition, head to the pages below.
These days it’s hard not to think sometimes about the end of the world. But have you started putting together a plan? Thought about who would be good in a crisis? Put together a pros and cons list of your friends, family and acquaintances? Wondered if things would actually be better?
Finn Schult’s current exhibition Everything You’ve Ever Wanted at Gallery 114 at Hillsborough Community College’s Ybor City location, presents an interesting take on the current state of things for those with the end on their minds. It includes paintings, animal traps, an ipod and walkie talkie, as well as a book containing photos, prepper information, journal entries, drawings, and some pros and cons for the people in his life, including his mom. The paintings are titled “L’appel Du Vide” a French phrase meaning “the call of the void” or the urge to jump when you are standing in a high place.
From the gallery’s website-
Everything You’ve Ever Wanted is a solo exhibition of new work by Finn Schult (b. 1993, Naples, FL) reflecting on the inevitability of the end of the world and the fantasy of apocalypse as catalyst for utopia. Schult’s multimedia series exists as fragments, sketches and interludes distilled from an otherwise deranged web of theories. At times, the artworks presented in Gallery114@HCC feel terroristic, violent and unbearably bleak–at other times, they remind us of the beauty inherent in loss, longing and love. Schult’s work yearns for a world that doesn’t yet exist and mourns for a world that isn’t yet gone, answering the cry, “How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?” with “The only way out is through.”
There is also a video in the exhibition, Where r u rn? which mixes a variety of imagery with a bit of author and mystic Terence McKenna’s 1999 final interview where he discusses “the fire in the madhouse at the end of time”- the possibility of the craziness in the world being a sign of the dying of our species.
Morean Arts Center in St. Pete, Florida, is currently showing Fresh Squeezed 7, their annual exhibition of emerging artists in Florida. It’s a great opportunity to see some of the best artwork being done by local artists. The exhibition closes 6/22/23.
From the the Morean Arts Center’s press release-
As always, our selection panel culled over 120 applications from across the state, narrowing the exhibition down to the six artists featured here. It’s always a joyful and heartbreaking process, seeing so much inspiring good work and only having a limited amount of space in which to show it all.We were looking for diversity in medium, in ideas, and in geographical location, all of which somehow comes together to form a delightful, cohesive whole.
While we don’t necessarily plan it that way, themes and commonalities do emerge among the artists selected for the exhibition. We’re happy to announce this is the first year that we have an ALL FEMALE line up. And due to the inclusive interpretation we use to define an emerging artist (no previous solo shows in Florida), you’ll find artists here who are still pursuing their MFAs (KJ Skidmore and Leeann Rae) AND artists who are returning to their first love of art after finding fulfillment in decades of other related careers (Latonya Hicks and Deborah W. Perlman).
Other themes you may notice as you peruse the galleries are the inventive (and exuberant!) use of materials. Denise Treizman and Latonya Hicks both incorporate cast off, recycled and vintage materials in their dimensional wall work. While Denise’s process is more spontaneous and Latonya’s is deliberate and measured, they both create joyful works of art that invite contemplation and perhaps a spark of recognition from the viewer.
KJ Skidmore and Laura De Valencia both deal with contemporary issues and pop culture in their work, though to wildly different effect. KJ’s humorous mixed media paintings address the notion of the male gaze, and the women who must endure it. Laura’s installations use fashion culture as a jumping off point to raise questions about international stereotypes and the borders (both visible and not) that immigrants have to experience on a daily basis.
Both Leeann Rae and Deborah W. Perlman create work that challenge the viewer to look longer, and to think deeper. With their disparate materials (Leeann with soft pastel and Deborah with cut paper), they raise notions of space, whether physical or mental, real or imagined, in the present or a memory from the past.
KJ Skidmore “Squeeze ‘n’ Block”, Acrylic and coffee
KJ Skidmore
KJ Skidmore “Angel’s Bar”, Acrylic, fabric, trim, paste and wood paper
The work above is by Tampa based artist KJ Skidmore.
Morean Arts Center’s information about the artist-
KJ’s current work is based in painting/drawing that extends into3-D space through multimedia installation. Her immersive spaces are chaotic and aggressive, but at the same time alluring. She works within her own bizarre and disjointed narratives and themes containing warped textual elements, strange cartoon characters, and color palettes that are both grimy and fluorescent. Her material use is variable and may include masses of hair clumped together with canned beets, pink stained carpet, fabrics, wood, plaster, teeth, rain jackets, and Smurf-themed objects.
KJ’s painted series Burger Time caricatures leering male clientele as flat, monster-like cartoons that interact with a staring waitress to explore gendered tropes and forms of voyeurism. This series reconstructs reality in relation to being female by presenting experiences like getting stared at or groped within a hokey themed attraction called “Burger Time” restaurant. Her series is meant to revolt the viewer through acknowledging the male gaze, while also celebrating its trashiness and the culture surrounding it. She uses humor to poke fun at this harmful and uneven power dynamic. The series presents this sickening concept through more palatable presentation such as expressive cartoon figures and bright colors.
KJ is from Gainesville, FL, but was living on the West Coast until recently. She is back in Florida pursuing an MFA at USF in Tampa.
For more of the artists in the show, continue to the next page.
Between 1915 and 1970, in the wake of racial terror during the post-Reconstruction period, millions of Black Americans fled from their homes to other areas within the South and to other parts of the country. This remarkable movement of people, known as the Great Migration, caused a radical shift in the demographic, economic, and sociopolitical makeup of the United States. A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration brings together twelve contemporary artists to consider the complex impact of this period on their lives, as well as on social and cultural life, with newly commissioned works ranging from large-scale installation, immersive film, and tapestry to photography, painting, and mixed media. Featured artists are Akea Brionne, Mark Bradford, Zoë Charlton, Larry W. Cook, Torkwase Dyson, Theaster Gates Jr., Allison Janae Hamilton, Leslie Hewitt, Steffani Jemison, Robert Pruitt, Jamea Richmond-Edwards, and Carrie Mae Weems.
A Movement in Every Direction presents a departure from traditional accounts of the Great Migration, which are often understood through a lens of trauma, and reconceptualizes them through stories of self-possession, self-determination, and self-examination. While the South did lose generations of courageous, creative, and productive Black Americans due to racial and social inequities, the exhibition expands the narrative by introducing people who stayed in, or returned to, the region during this time. Additionally, the Brooklyn Museum’s presentation centers Brooklyn as another important site in the Great Migration, highlighting historical and contemporary census data about the borough’s migration patterns. Visitors are encouraged to share their own personal and familial stories of migration through an oral history “pod” available in the exhibition galleries.
About Robert Pruitt’s work, pictured above, from the museum’s wall information plaque-
“A Song for Travelers” celebrates the individual and Black collective experiences that have shaped the histories of rural East Texas and Houston’s Third, Fourth, and Fifth Wards. In this drawing-based on an early 1970’s photograph of a reunion of the artist’s family in Dobbin, Texas -sixteen people gather around a seated central figure about to embark on a journey. During the creation of this work, the masked traveler became a stand-in for Pruitt, who had recently left his hometown of Houston.
Pruitt often draws inspiration from his and others’ family photographs while examining historical events that have impacted Houston’s Black communities. Wearing costumes and adorned with items that reference various aspects of Black culture found in schools, social clubs, and religious spaces, the figures in the work reflect the numerous networks that remained and flourished in the South. Merging the Great Migration period with the present, Pruitt centers the Black neighborhoods across the southern region that served as safe havens and rich sites of cultural expression for migrants during the twentieth century. This link extends to today as many Black Americans leave the northern and western cities that once attracted their elders and return to the South.
Allison Janae Hamilton’sA House Called Florida, below, takes the viewer on a journey through part of northern Florida’s natural beauty.
From the museum’s information plaque about the video installation-
Allison Janae Hamilton produced the three-channel film installation A House Called Florida in her hometown region of northern Florida. The breathtaking landscapes of Apalachicola Bay and the swampy Blackwater Lakes of Florida’s Big Bend frame musicians, dancers, motorists, a Victorian house, and a slow resounding rhythm.
The artist references French Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar’s 1946 short story “Casa Tomada.” (“House Taken Over”) about ghosts that slowly take over a home and eventually push out its owners, room by room. Hamilton echoes the story’s theme of displacement with two regally dressed, spirit-like protagonists who move about the house engaging in mark-making and ritual performances. Hamilton’s film pays tribute to the Black Floridians who remained in the Red Hills and the Forgotten Coast regions, despite the racial violence and environmental precariousness they faced throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Carrie Mae Weems‘ personal and moving contribution is in two parts- a series of photographs and a unique digital video installation.
The museum’s description of the work-
Carrie Mae Weems explores a painful family story: the disappearance of her grandfather Frank Weems, a tenant farmer and union activist who was attacked by a white mob in Earle Arkansas, in 1936. Presumed dead, he narrowly escaped and made his way to Chicago on foot, never again reuniting with his family. Frank Weems may have followed the North Star to Chicago. Weems’s series of seven prints, The North Star, makes an apt metaphor for Frank’s life. In Leave! Leave Now! Weems conjures the figure of her grandfather with a Pepper’s Ghost, a late nineteenth-century form of illusion first used in theater. By weaving historical events with fragmented family stories, photographs, poetry, music, and interviews, the artist reveals the tragedy of her grandfather’s disappearance and the aftermath.
This exhibition will close on Sunday, June 25th, 2023.
The above photos are of Sanford Biggers’ sculpture The Oracle when it was located at Rockefeller Center in NYC in 2021, where it was part of a multimedia installation.
It now resides outside the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, on the new outdoor sculpture pedestal on Wilshire Boulevard and Glendon Avenue. It will be there until March of 2024.
From the Hammer website about the work-
Anchoring this corner is Oracle (2021), a cast bronze figure weighing 7.64 US tons (15,280 pounds) and standing at 25 feet tall. This monumental commission from Biggers continues his “Chimera” series that hybridizes the canonical figures and gestures of Greco-Roman sculpture with an assortment of iconic African objects from the 14th–20th centuries. Unlike Biggers’s other “Chimera” sculptures that are made in marble, Oracle is cast in bronze. The seated figure in Oracle is a depiction of the statue of Zeus at Olympia, while the head is a composite of several masks and busts from different African cultures, including the Luba Kingdom and the Maasai.
Biggers sculpturally patchworks historical depictions of the body and their subsequent myths, narratives, perceptions, and power. Biggers is intrigued by the recent scholarship about the academic and historical “white-washing” of classical Greco-Roman sculpture simultaneously intersecting with the early twentieth-century “black-washing” of various African sculptural objects. Oracle challenges the associated cultural and aesthetic assumptions about their source material while acknowledging the often dubious origins of the original objects themselves.
A member of the Seneca Nation, Watt also has German-Scott ancestry. Her layered and complex influences include Indigenous knowledge and Iroquois proto-feminism, the matriarchal structures of certain Native American nations, the rise of social activism throughout the 20th century, and the anti-war and anti-hate content of the 1960s and 1970s music scene.
Central to the exhibition are three Sewing Circle pieces that were initiated at communal gatherings at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2022. Watt’s sewing circles are cross generational, multicultural gatherings that she has been organizing for over a decade. Inspired by poet laurate Joy Harjo’s (Mvskoke/Creek) poem Singing Everything, Watt collects words from the participants of her sewing circles with the prompt, “what do you want to sing a song for in this moment?” The submitted words are then embroidered or sewn onto patches of fabric during the sewing circle. For the Whitney Sewing Circle, with over 300 participants, Watt, for the first time, used all the submitted words. Each panel is patterned in a way that stays true to the original hand. She thinks of ones handwriting as an extension of the cadence of one’s voice and in this project, it becomes part of a larger chorus. By composing large-scale wall works from these pieces of fabric, Watt creates collaborative artworks that interweave many individual handwritings, touches, and the stories that were exchanged in a shared space.
When entering the gallery, the visitor is greeted by a sweeping, 24-foot-long neon sign spelling out the words “deer, skywalker, heron, bass, great lake, woodland, beaver, turtle, wolf, lowly, muskrat, rat” in various hues that evoke the sky on the horizon during sunset and sunrise. While the piece represents a new direction in Watt’s work, she views neon as an extension of beadwork. The glass itself is at once thread and bead, and both neon and beads have a relationship to trade. They both envelop light, color, and sound, embodying sunrises and sunsets on the horizon.
Two blanket towers, her signature sculptural works, appear in the show but now with tin bells or jingles added to the reclaimed wool blankets. This choice of added material felt like a natural extension to Watt. She writes: “Blankets are danced and so are jingles, there is something healing about them both. They are objects of comfort” – by way of touch or sound. “Jingles acknowledge the Jingle Dress Dance which began as a healing ritual in the Ojibwe tribe in the 1910s during the influenza pandemic. The Jingle Dress Dance was also a radical act. In 1883, the United States banned Indigenous ceremonial gatherings. Though the ban was repealed in 1978 with the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, during its century-long prohibition the Jingle Dress Dance was shared with other tribal communities. Today it is a pow-wow dance and continues to be associated with healing. The relevance of this dance extends beyond pandemics.” By including jingles Watt brings the potential of sound into her work, adding to their visual and tactile aspects.
While drawing from long craft traditions such as textile or glass work, Watt is expanding her work by including contemporary stories and both individual and collective experiences. Her primary interest is to think about art as more experiential, rather than only visual, a direction she plans to explore further.
Currently on view at Bortolami is Tom Burr’s excellent multimedia exhibition. With new discoveries around every corner, the show keeps you engaged, at times even on an emotional level.
From the press release-
Once more Burr has assumed his dual role as artist and exhibition maker, relocating the act of making from the traditional studio space into the gallery. An architectural intervention of four walls defines the show, a deconstructed box whose contents have been scattered both in view and out of sight yet remain connected on levels of materiality, memory, biography, and history. Moving through the gallery, the viewer is directly confronted by Burr’s work, activating the artworks and the physical space created for them. As the interconnectivity of the different facets of the exhibition comes into view, not only here and now but in its connection to the entirety of Burr’s career, we begin to understand this as not merely an assortment of objects as artworks, but on a larger scale as a total artwork.
Four new wooden panels populate each makeshift wall, continuing the signature plywood sculptural series begun in the 1990s. Each painted a different color, the artist loosely utilizes the shipping crate motif, a point of interest for Burr. Adhering stainless steel and brass plates to each panel, the images portray the artist himself as well as his own simulation of stereotypical “faggy gestures,” as he refers to them, creating an intersection of public expectations of artistic sensibility, identity performance and exposure.
Also on view in the main gallery are a series of furniture-based sculptures. Set behind the walls, each work draws the viewer into the constructed architectural space as they grapple with themes of legacy, memory, and biography. Pulse utilizes various items once belonging to the “lounge” at Burr’s project space in Torrington, Connecticut—a disco ball, a couch, a lamp, a wool blanket — the disco ball being a relic from American Fine Arts, the legendary SoHo gallery run by Colin de Land where Burr exhibited throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Accompanying the work is a wall text listing the various academic definitions of the word “pulse,” while the last line, a new addition by the artist, is a reference to the infamous shooting at the gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, a signal to both the individual and communal meanings associated with the word. Similarly, the artist has gathered various items belonging to his father to create Johns (my father’s chest)—a chest of drawers, long johns, a metal storage box, and a handkerchief— evoking the same ideas of legacy and biography.
A new photo series entitled Capricornus I, II, III, and IV lines the outer walls of the main gallery. Depicting Burr in the three public bathrooms of his Torrington space, he is in the midst of various movements—lounging, laying down, reading. In a string of associations from Bruce Nauman to Francesca Woodman, as well as nods to his own past work, here the studio becomes a stage as Burr equates the everyday banal and artmaking.
Occupying the small gallery space, Floor Model (adolescent), is the most recent continuation of the artist’s series His Personal Effects, while in the office Burr has installed a series of new collages made in homage to Stefania Bortolami. The Visit, I, II, III depicts images of a visit by Bortolami to Burr’s space in Torrington, CT, as well as images of plant foliage from Burr’s seminal work, Construction of An American Garden, currently installed in the Torrington space. In the words of scholar and curator Blake Oetting “the body of the dealer emphasizes the commercial system that supports Burr’s work and translates it into exchange-value, a framework, he reveals, that often moves beyond the physical boundaries of the gallery.”
Work by Trinity Oribio (left) and Manon VanScoder (videos on right)
Currently on view at The USF Contemporary Art Museum is SOMEDAY YOU’LL HAVE TO SAY IT OUT LOUD, an exhibition of eight students graduating with MFA degrees from the USF School of Art and Art History.
For the artists’ statements about their work, as well as more information on the exhibition, the museum has produced this PDF.
The show will be on view until 5/6/2023.
Installation by Molly A. Duff, another view
Alicia Watkinson, “Notations in Passing II”, 2023, plywood, lightbulbs, ceramic bases, timers. Duration of light set daily according to the previous day’s activities and observations
Alicia Watkinson, “Notations in Passing II”, 2023 (detail)
Photo transfer on glass by Rachel Treide
Still from video by Rachel Treide
Caitlin Nobilé, “The gap in the door”, 2023 triptych, acrylic on wood
Willow Wells, “Whispers”, 2023, oil painting on panel
It’s the last week to see the Gerhard Richter exhibition at David Zwirner. The show includes a group of Richter’s last paintings from 2016-17, two of which are pictured above, as well as a new glass sculpture and recent works on paper.
From the press release-
Celebrated worldwide as one of the most important artists of his generation, with a career spanning from the 1960s to the present, Richter has pursued a diverse and influential practice characterized by a decades-long commitment to painting and its formal and conceptual possibilities. The artist has consistently probed the relationship between painting and photography, engaging a variety of styles and innovative techniques in a complex repositioning of genres. In Richter’s work, dual modes of representation and abstraction fundamentally question the way in which we relate to images.
The exhibition will bring together a significant group of Richter’s last oil paintings, made in 2016–2017, a number of which will be shown in New York for the first time. Richter stopped making oil paintings in 2017, and the final work on canvas he made will be on view in the exhibition. Part of the artist’s Abstrakte Bilder (Abstract Paintings) series—a cornerstone of his practice since the 1970s—the works on view exemplify Richter’s investigations into chance occurrences and the painted medium’s historical and material properties. With their highly worked and intricately stratified surfaces, the last paintings foreground the sheer physical presence of paint and color, enacting a mode of composition that is aleatory yet deliberately planned.
Centrally featured will be 3 Scheiben (3 Panes) (2023), a new glass sculpture that continues Richter’s exploration of human perception and the built environment. Comprising three sequential rectangular panes of transparent yet reflective glass—each one positioned upright and measuring almost ten feet in height—the installation invites viewers to look at, through, and beyond its surface, revealing the inherently subjective and situational nature of perceived reality. Richter has consistently created glass and mirrored works since 1967, often presenting them alongside his paintings and drawings and placing them in the larger context of their surrounding architecture. Crucially, while sculptural, these free-standing glass works are also positioned as a literal reflection on painting and image-making; they respond to the art-historical notion of the painting as both a mirror and a window, while also acting as a powerful corollary to the blurred effect of Richter’s photo paintings, which the artist began experimenting with in the 1960s. As critic Hal Foster notes, “The felt analogy between a composed painting and a contemplative viewer is so fundamental that we are not aware of it until it is interfered with. And this is precisely what the glass pieces do: our reflection, in the sense of our mirrored image, disrupts our reflection, in the sense of our contemplation.”1
An expansive suite of new works on paper from 2021–2022—some made with ink and others with graphite and colored pencil—will also be on view. Richter’s drawings constitute a significant element of his practice, allowing him to explore another aspect of the role of the artist’s hand in the creation of a dynamic and abstract pictorial narrative. Many of these works feature passages of cloudy graphite rubbings juxtaposed with equally hazy semi-erased portions. The artist embeds a sparse network of crisscrossing arcs and lines amongst this backdrop, forming an enigmatic topography that seems to map out the very possibilities of image-making itself. Other drawings on view are composed of abstract monochrome washes of ink and graphite, taking on a decisively painterly appearance; as Richter describes, these works on paper chart out a parallel but complementary path to his painted oeuvre, much like that of “a poem and a novel by the same author.”2
Also on view will be mood, a group of inkjet prints that relate to a recent series of colored ink drawings by Richter, both of which debuted at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel in 2022. Part of the artist’s extensive career-long experiments with the iterative translation and interplay of mediums, these vibrant prints are almost indistinguishable from their ink counterparts, revealing Richter’s continued fascination with the possibilities of image reproduction.
