Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Susan Bee at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Brooklyn, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Sep 132024
 

The paintings above are from Susan Bee’s 2023 exhibition Apocalypses, Fables, and Reveries, at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn.

From the gallery about this exhibition-

The exhibition centers on paintings depicting figures—particularly women—engaged in battle with demons, dragons, and other beasts, inspired by medieval mythology.

Twelfth-century illuminated manuscripts and hagiography serve as Bee’s primary source materials. Seven of these paintings playfully reinterpret imagery of multi-headed monsters taunting religious populaces in apocalyptic scenarios. Others show Saint Martha taming the fearsome dragon the Tarasque, and Saint Margaret praying beside the dead dragon whose belly she managed to escape from after being swallowed whole. In earlier eras, these figures were seen as icons of devotion. But in Bee’s treatment, they transmogrify into prescient myth: their stories presage the end-time fears and social injustices that plague our more secular times.

The medieval-inspired paintings are augmented by canvases offering a different vision of how we might engage with nature and fantastical “others.” These paintings feature witches and birds flying alongside one another across the daytime sky, as well as trees whose limbs culminate in eyes, hands, and other appendages. They imagine landscapes where friends might meet, or where humans and animals might find themselves in unexpected affinity.

As in her past paintings, Bee uses a mixture of linear and eccentric shapes, building up layers of oil and enamel in intensely vivid color. Blending familiar gestures with the unexpected, these works ask us to confront our present while paying homage to the past. The syncretic blend of the remembered and remade turns monumentality on its head.

Her current solo exhibition Susan Bee: Eye of the Storm, Selected Works, 1981-2023 is on view at Provincetown Art Association and Museum until 11/17/2024.

Flashback- David Alfaro Siqueiros at the Whitney Museum in 2020

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Painting / Painters
Aug 232024
 

This painting by David Alfaro Siqueiros, Our Present Image, 1947, was part of the Whitney Museum’s exhibition Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945 that ran from February 2020 through January 2021.

From the museum about this work-

In this painting, which demonstrates how Siqueiros would continue to develop the techniques he pioneered at the Experimental Workshop long after he left New York, the artist has replaced the face of a man with an oval stone to signify not one specific race or nationality but all of humanity. Rejecting the fixed perspective of more traditional painting, Siqueiros employed multiple viewpoints that cause viewers moving through space to experience the figure in motion. Although the exact meaning of the figure’s foreshortened arms and outstretched hands is ambiguous, Siqueiros was a dedicated Communist who believed in the ultimate triumph of the proletariat. Hands, for him, symbolized the heroic strength of the worker. The people, as he wrote in another context, march from “a distant past of misery and oppression… toward industrialization, emancipation, and progress.

Flashback- Los Angeles Art Shows- Haim Steinbach at Tanya Bonakdar

 Architecture, Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Conceptual Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Quotes, Sculptors / Sculpture, Writers
Aug 162024
 

What does a wall of color make you feel? Does that change if it exists in a gallery? What about the specific color? And if you add text?

These are some of the questions that arise when viewing Haim Steinbach’s mypoemisfinishedandIhaven’tmentionedorangeyet, 2019. The work was part of his 2019 exhibition Appear to Use at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles.

From the press release-

Holding a wall of the back gallery is an expansive wall painting consisting of the color orange along with the line—mypoemisfinishedandIhaven’tmentionedorangeyet—from the poem “Why I Am Not a Painter” by Frank O’Hara. Here, Steinbach challenges our perception of architecture in the relationship between language, color and cultural structures, encompassing the core themes of the exhibition.

Here is the Frank O’Hara poem being referenced-

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

And below is Michael Goldberg’s Sardines.

Michael Goldberg, “Sardines”, 1955, oil and adhesive tape on canvas, image via Smithsonian American Art Museum

California Art Shows- “Summer Splash” Group Exhibition at Skidmore Contemporary Art in Palm Desert

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Palm Desert, Palm Springs
Aug 102024
 

Melissa Chandon, “Abstract Blue in Ultramarine”, 2023, Oil on canvas (left) and Kory Alexander, “Night Splash 2”, 2024, Oil on canvas (right)

Skidmore Contemporary Art, which recently moved from Bergamot Station in Santa Monica to El Paseo in Palm Desert, is currently showing the group exhibition, Summer Splash.

The exhibition features the work of eleven California-based artists, including Melissa Chandon and Kory Alexander, whose paintings (pictured above) are perfect for these hot August days.

This exhibition closes 8/30/24.

 

Flashback- The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Illustration, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Pennsylvania Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Pittsburgh, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
Aug 092024
 

It was Andy Warhol’s birthday this past Tuesday, August 6th, so today seemed like a good time to post some images taken at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Warhol was a prolific artist and the museum does an excellent job at presenting both his body of work, and the essence of what made him such a unique presence in the world.

Below are a few selections from what was on view in February of 2024.

Warhol made several film works including Screen Tests, his series of portraits in which the subjects attempted to remain still for around three minutes. The results were then played back in slow motion. Many well known names participated.

The museum has a room dedicated to their recreation of his delightful installation Silver Clouds.

From the museum about this work-

“I don’t paint anymore, I gave it up about a year ago and just do movies now. I could do two things at the same time but movies are more exciting. Painting was just a phase I went through. But I’m doing some floating sculpture now: silver rectangles that I blow up and that float.”
—Andy Warhol, 1966

In April 1966 Warhol opened his light and music extravaganza the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI), a complete sensorial experience of light, music, and film at the Dom, a large dance hall in the East Village in New York City. Running concurrently with the EPI was Warhol’s bold and unconventional exhibition at the prestigious Leo Castelli Gallery that comprised two artworks: the Silver Clouds and Cow Wallpaper.

Constructed from metalized plastic film and filled with helium, the floating clouds were produced in collaboration with Billy Klüver, an engineer known for his work with artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Yvonne Rainer, and John Cage. Warhol originally asked Klüver to create floating light bulbs; an unusual shape that proved infeasible.

Klüver showed Warhol a sample of the silver material and his reaction to the plastic sparked a new direction, “Let’s make clouds.” They experimented with cumulus shapes, but the puffed rectangle was the most successful and most buoyant. The end result was w hat Warhol was looking for from the beginning— “paintings that could float.” Silver Clouds, like the EPI with its flashing lights and overlapping films, was an explosion of objects in space and presented an immersive, bodily experience for the viewer.

 

Warhol was always experimenting with new ideas and processes. Pictured above is Oxidation, 1978, and a closer look at the canvas. It is part of Altered States, an exhibition of this body of work and its creation.

Below the museum explains Warhol’s process, and how the paintings were altered both during past exhibitions, and again when the museum lost power and climate control.

Andy Warhol’s Oxidation paintings represent the artist’s radical approach to Abstract Expressionism, a movement popularized by painters like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko after World War II, and a style Warhol didn’t experiment with until late in his career. Between 1977 and 1978, however, when Warhol began testing the corrosive effects of oxidation by mixing copper paint and urine, the beautifully iridescent canvases were a critical breakthrough at a time when his standing in the art world had taken a hit. The Oxidation series, along with abstract works like the Rorschachs and Shadows, allowed Warhol to reinvent himself yet again.

To create the Oxidation works, Warhol and his assistants mixed dry metallic powder in water before adding acrylic medium as the binder.

Canvases were spread out on the studio floor and coated in copper paint. Warhol’s assistants or Factory visitors were then invited to urinate on the canvases while the paint was still wet. As the urine acid oxidized the metal in the copper paint, a range of unpredictable patterns emerged.

Before Warhol’s death in 1987, the Oxidation paintings were exhibited only three times, including the Paris Art Fair FIAC at the Grand Palais, where the artist first noticed the volatility of the works. “When I showed them in Paris, the hot lights made them melt again,” he said.

“It’s very weird.. they never stopped dripping.” More than 45 years later, unpredictability remains a hallmark of the series. In June of 2020, after a power outage disabled the museum’s climate control for several days, staff conservators noticed changes similar to what Warhol observed in Paris. New drips appeared on the surface of Oxidation (1978), shown here, and the areas of corrosion changed color.

This presentation seeks to answer a deceptively simple question:

What happened? Museum conservators, with help from colleagues in the field and scientists, have been hard at work finding answers. The examination and analysis of the Oxidation paintings in the museum’s collection will contribute to proper stewardship, preservation, and treatment of the nearly 100 other works worldwide.

Several of the paintings on view are in his signature style, including his portraits of famous (and less famous) people, and in one room, different skulls in various colors.

From the museum-

Warhol’s Skull paintings have often been considered memento mori, recalling the centuries-long tradition of art that reminds us of our mortality. Memento mori, from Latin, translates roughly to “remember that you are mortal” or “remember you will die.” Warhol’s own near-death experience happened in 1968, when troubled writer Valerie Solanas shot Warhol in the abdomen after claiming the artist had lost a script she had written. After reportedly being declared dead upon arrival at the hospital, Warhol’s life was saved during five hours of surgery. After nearly two months, he was released from the hospital but required further surgeries over the following years.

On one of the floors is The Archives Study Center. There, behind glass, are some of Warhol’s Time Capsules- boxes he filled with a wide variety of items, sealed and put into storage.

On the same floor is the Great Dane pictured above, Champion Ador Tipp  Topp (“Cecil”), who Warhol bought at an antique store after being told the dog had belonged to Cecil B. De Mille. The dog remained in Warhol’s office until his death.

A little more detail from the museum-

This mounted Great Dane, called Cecil by Warhol and his associates, was once a champion show dog. Born in Germany in 1921, original name was Ador Tipp Topp. Owned by Charles Ludwig, a top breeder, Cecil was sold to Gerdus H. Wynkoop of Long Island who entered the dog in several shows earning him the title of Champion by 1924, and Best of Breed at the Westminster Kennel Club.

After his death in 1930, Cecil’s remains were sent to Yale University in Connecticut, where they were mounted and displayed with 11 other breeds in what was known colloquially as “the dog hall of fame” at the Peabody Museum. However, by 1945, the canine display was removed to storage and forgotten.

In 1964 Scott Elliot, a Yale drama student, went to the Museum to find birds for a new play. He found the birds and also bought all 12 dog mounts for $10 each. When Elliot had to move a few months later, many of the mounts were left with a friend who put them in rented storage, which went unpaid and the contents were dispersed.

Warhol came across the display in an antique shop on 3rd Avenue several years later. He was told that the dog had belonged to film director Cecil B. DeMille. Warhol bought the story and the Great Dane for $300. Cecil found his final home at Andy’s office, where he was kept until Andy’s death in 1986.

Cecil’s current appearance differs from his championship form. His coat was originally black and white but exposure to sunlight has faded it to brown. Over the years, it sustained damage to the ears; they were repaired in April 1994 in anticipation of the opening of the Warhol Museum, to reflect the style of current breeds.

This is just a brief selection of what was on view. The museum collection also includes his early commercial paintings, some of his collaborations, television work, and more.

One of the great things about Andy Warhol is that no matter how much you know, there are always new things to learn. Even more than thirty years after his death, he remains as relevant as ever.

 

 

NYC Art Shows- “Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than The Real Thing”

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Glasswork, Illustration, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
Aug 072024
 

Lotus L. Kang, “In Cascades”, 2023-2024

Lotus L. Kang, “In Cascades”, 2023-2024

The Whitney Biennial ‘s 2024 edition, Even Better Than The Real Thing, presents a large group of artists, working in different mediums, with many pieces directly dealing with social and political issues. The show does have a certain heaviness to it, but with all of the issues currently happening in the world it would be impossible for that not to be reflected in the artwork.

From the museum-

The eighty-first edition of the Whitney Biennial—the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States—features seventy-one artists and collectives grappling with many of today’s most pressing issues. This Biennial is like being inside a “dissonant chorus,” as participating artist Ligia Lewis described it, a provocative yet intimate experience of distinct and disparate voices that collectively probe the cracks and fissures of the unfolding moment.

The exhibition’s subtitle, Even Better Than the Real Thing, acknowledges that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is complicating our understanding of what is real, and rhetoric around gender and authenticity is being used politically and legally to perpetuate transphobia and restrict bodily autonomy. These developments are part of a long history of deeming people of marginalized race, gender, and ability as subhuman—less than real. In making this exhibition, we committed to amplifying the voices of artists who are confronting these legacies, and to providing a space where difficult ideas can be engaged and considered.

This Biennial is a gathering of artists who explore the permeability of the relationships between mind and body, the fluidity of identity, and the growing precariousness of the natural and constructed worlds around us. Whether through subversive humor, expressive abstraction, or non-Western forms of cosmological thinking, to name but a few of their methods, these artists demonstrate that there are pathways to be found, strategies of coping and healing to be discovered, and ways to come together even in a fractured time.

There’s a lot of great work to see. Below are just a few selections and some documentation from the museum.

For Lotus L. Kang’s In Cascades, (pictured above), the artist has hung sheets of photographic film from steel joists suspended from the ceiling that are gradually changed by the light inside the gallery. She refers to the exposure process as “tanning” and, like our skin, the film is changing over time with its environment. On the floor are little sculptures, as well as a a suitcase, all suggesting movement and change.

Kiyan Williams eye-catching outdoor installation Ruins of Empire II or The Earth Swallows the Master’s House, has the White House is sinking into the ground with an  upside down American flag at the top.

Kiyan Williams, “Ruins of Empire II or The Earth Swallows the Master’s House”

Maja Ruznic, “The Past Awaiting the Future/Arrival of Drummers”, 2023

The description of Maja Ruznic‘s painting from the museum-

Ruznic has said that The Past Awaiting the Present/Arrival of Drummers “looks at how multiple things can be true at the same time: birth, violence, pain, suffering, joy, and music.” She has described the horizontal format of the painting as inherently linear, implying a past, present, and future. The movements suggested by the figures’ feet—some in profile and others pointed toward the viewer—collapse these temporalities into a single symbolic image.

Mary Lovelace O’Neal, “Twelve Thirty-Four “(From the “Doctor Alcocer’s Corsets for Horses” series), 2023, Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas

From the museum about Mary Lovelace O’Neal–

Mary Lovelace O’Neal began the series that included Blue Whale aka #12 (from the Whales Fucking series), after two whales caught her imagination as she walked on a beach near San Francisco. “And watching them, I thought, imagine the tons and tons of water they must displace when they’re fucking!” It is this sense of excitement and desire on a grand scale, the energy of the light in their spray, that she worked to capture in paint—more than the image of the whale itself.

Such a dynamic, independent, sometimes slightly outrageous point of view has driven Lovelace O’Neal throughout her sixty-year career, which has unfolded alongside heated debates about what painting should or should not do and prescriptive views of Black artists and abstraction. While Lovelace O’Neal was deeply involved with the civil rights movement on a political level, she resisted calls to make representational paintings that would illustrate or inspire the struggle, insisting that forging her own path in abstraction—as she does in each of the paintings on view here—was equally relevant to Black life.

 

Isaac Julien’s immersive video installation was really absorbing. The sculptures added an extra dimension to what was on screen.

From the museum-

Unfolding across five screens, Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) reflects on the life and thought of Alain Locke (1885–1954), philosopher, educator, and cultural critic of the Harlem Renaissance (played by André Holland) who urged members of the African diaspora to embrace African art in order to reclaim their cultural heritage. The installation includes sculptures by Richmond Barthé (1901–1989) and Matthew Angelo Harrison (b. 1985), opening up a conversation about Black artists’ legacies that extends across modern history. Julien has described the work as a form of “poetic restitution,” speaking to the ways museums have collected African art. The artist refines this critique by creating a visual and sonic meditation as a “diasporic dream-space.”

In the work, Locke contemplates the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford—where he was the first Black Rhodes Scholar—and the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia, founded by one of Locke’s interlocutors, Albert C. Barnes (1872–1951), played by Danny Huston. Barnes also debates a skeptical Locke on his heritage, a sequence that distills many of the questions that the installation raises: Who gets to define Black modernism? Who has the authority to speak? How do men negotiate power, or queer desire?

Cannupa Hanska Luger “Uŋziwoslal Wašičuta (from the series Future Ancestral Technologies)”, 2021

From the museum-

Cannupa Hanska Luger proposes: “This installation is not inverted . . . our current world is upside down.” For the artist, upending our grounding in time and space makes way for imagined futures free of colonialism and capitalism, where broader Indigenous knowledge can thrive. The work here, Uŋziwoslal Wašičuta (a Lakota phrase meaning “the fat-taker’s world is upside down”), celebrates Native technologies by using the shape of a tipi—a word that the artist has also turned into an acronym, standing for Transportable Intergenerational Protection Infrastructure (TIPI). Luger looks at the complex structure as an example of the innovations created by his ancestors of the Northern Plains tribes. Luger’s materials, such as deadstock fabric, found objects, and clay, reflect the artist’s commitment to sustainability and reuse.

One of Suzanne Jackson’s works

Work by Suzanne Jackson

From the museum about all of the unique creations by Suzanne Jackson–

Suzanne Jackson made these suspended paintings without canvas, slowly building up many layers of acrylic, detritus, gel medium, and objects from the natural world, including seeds from her garden in Savannah, Georgia. Jackson has been experimenting with acrylic paint since the 1960s. “It’s painting another way,” she explains. “I don’t call it collage because it’s not another material. It’s all paint—acrylic on acrylic. And it’s suspended: paint suspended in space. . . . The paint becomes an armature for itself.” This “armature” is not fixed, however; Jackson thinks of the paintings as living things and is very open to the fact that they are malleable and will reshape. The layered paint seems to have a kind of agency and an ability to change independently. Looking at its iridescent quality up close creates an afterimage—a lasting mental image that continues even when a viewer has shifted their gaze away.

Two of Eamon Ore-Giron’s paintings from “Talking Shit”, Mineral paint and vinyl paint on canvas

From the museum-

These three paintings are part of Eamon Ore-Giron’s Talking Shit series, in which he reimagines deities from ancient Peruvian and Mexican cultures. Reflecting on a famous sculpture of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, the poet Octavio Paz (1914–1998) traced an evolution from “goddess to demon, from demon to monster, and from monster to masterpiece.” This line of thinking resonated with Ore-Giron, who recognized that symbolic figures are continuously reimagined as cultures shift and collective and personal identities are redefined. The series title Talking Shit reflects the artist’s desire to explore this idea and a living ancestral past in ways that are open, informal, and personal.

In these works, Ore-Giron focuses on Andean folklore. He has pictured Amaru, a powerful, protean creature related to water and the underworld, as a zigzagging abstracted dragon. To depict the mythological rainbow made by the creation god Viracocha, Ore-Giron represented the celestial phenomenon as a double-headed snake moving through the sky.

Section of B. Ingrid Olson’s installation

Section of B. Ingrid Olson’s installation

From the museum about B. Ingrid Olson’s photographic and sculptural installation-

This installation intermixes two series, Dura Pictures and Indexes. Each work in the Dura Pictures series presents one photographic image physically embedded within another, what the artist describes as placing a “moment in time within a different moment in time, just like memory does of the past in the present.” The photographs were made in the artist’s studio and record B. Ingrid Olson’s own performative interactions with handmade props and assorted materials, such as mirrors or printed matter set within constrictive ad hoc spaces. The images alternate between showing a first-person vantage point with a torso or toes breaking into the picture plane, and offering a mirrored reflection of the artist, often only partially seen.

Proto Coda, Index is a single artwork with thirty constituent parts—each is a replica of one of the thirty reliefs made by the artist between 2016 to 2022. With concave interior surfaces and irregular hanging heights, the forms each suggest a container for a specific body part, like a piece of armor or a casting mold. The reliefs mark the entire length of the wall, serving as placeholders for an absent body, both fractured and multiplied.

 

Ser Serpas, “taken through back entrances . . . “, 2024

Ser Serpas’ large sculptural installation, assembled from found objects, grew more interesting when seen at different angles.

From the museum-

Describing sculptures like those included in this exhibition, Ser Serpas has said that “the act of making is a choreographed performance, of which the assemblage is the aftermath.” The performance begins in a city—in this case, New York, and specifically Brooklyn—with the artist collecting discarded objects that speak to her through their color, the ways they have become worn or torn, and their structural openness to being combined. Then she works with the objects’ orifices, odd junctures, and gravity to combine them into provisional sculptures. This process yields a feeling of potential energy just at the moment before an object’s collapse. The resulting sculptures become a kind of dual portrait: first of the city as seen through its cycles of consumption and decay, and then of the artist herself through the expressive choices she has made.

It’s often difficult to see many of the videos that are part of the exhibition due to time constraints. This year the museum partnered with MUBI and you can watch eight of the films for free on their site for a limited time.

On Sunday 8/11/24, the last day of the exhibition, the museum will be free all day with events that include making creature collages with Eamon Ore-Giron (whose work is pictured above).

California Art Flashback-Jessie Homer French at Palm Springs Art Museum

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Collage, Conceptual Art, Fiber Arts, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Palm Springs, Sculptors / Sculpture
Aug 022024
 

The above image is of Jessie Homer French’s  Mapestry California 2012, 2012 (fabric, thread, fabric paint, and pen), which was on view in 2018 at Palm Springs Art Museum.

From the museum about the work-

This work is from a series of “mapestries” that the artist made between 2012-2017. These textile works graphically map out natural elements and forces in California, from prominent flora and fauna, natural monuments and mountain ranges, as well as hidden fault lines that spur the earthquakes that constantly threaten the region and its inhabitants. The work reflects the artist’s hyperawareness of the environment around her. Their flat, graphic qualities are similar in form to the artist’s paintings. The mapestries were made specifically for Californians, as artworks that could do no harm hanging over one’s bed in case of an earthquake.

One of her paintings is currently part of the benefit exhibition Art for a Safe and Healthy California at Gagosian Beverly Hills. The exhibition, presented by Jane Fonda, along with the gallery, is raising money to protect communities from toxic oil drilling.

NYC Art Shows- Leslie Wayne at Jack Shainman Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Aug 012024
 


Jack Shainman Gallery is currently showing two bodies of work by Leslie Wayne for her exhibition This Land.  One half of the show is paintings based on photos she took of landscapes from an airplane window while traveling from New York to the Seattle. Abstract work influenced by aspects of the natural world makes up the other half.

In a recent interview with designboom, Wayne was asked how perception and memory influenced her process for this work-

Perception is just an interpretation really, of what one sees, and while the paintings in ‘This Land is Your Land’ series were made directly from the photographs I took on a flight to the Pacific Northwest, they are infused with the feelings and memories I hold dear of my childhood. I’ve lived in New York since 1982, but I grew up in California and I still have a very strong attachment to the West Coast and to the geology and geography of the West. Even the abstract work in which I am manipulating thick layers of paint, I am drawing on those sensations I remember having of being in nature where the tectonic and geologic forces are right there for one to see and feel — millions of years of layered strata, of compression and subduction, of gravity and erosion, and certainly of the shifting plates that cause earthquakes.

More on the show from the press release-

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present This Land, an exhibition of two kindred bodies of work by Leslie Wayne that express the nature of the American West through perception and memory. In each piece, Wayne considers different ways in which we interpret and imagine geological space, exploring landscape both as a vertical, abstracted force and a horizontal, figurative expanse. Named in homage to Woody Guthrie’s heartland ballad “This Land is Your Land,” Wayne offers a contemporary vision of Manifest Destiny—imbuing her symbolic, and experienced, westward voyages with topographies that are sensorial, memorial, and tectonic.

In a series of dimensional abstract paintings on large, metronome-like planks, Wayne uses a dramatic and vibrant palette to mold paint so that it cascades down the wood panel in a multitude of ways. Applying the paint in heavy layers, she encourages the influence of gravity and refines her materials to their most basic form, color, and behavior. Adopting, rather than controlling the rhythm of nature, these compositions are fluid to the viewer’s myriad associations with this image of momentum—be it reminiscent of the rush of an avalanche, the swell of hot lava, or the pileup of driftwood on a seashore.

In her series entitled This Land is Your Land, she creates compact, observational paintings based on snapshots she took from her seat as she flew west over the Rocky Mountains all the way to the Cascade Range in Washington State in 2021. Creating a precise mise-en-scène by placing each painting in a frame that resembles the Boeing 737 window she peered out from, Wayne transports her viewers into a precise sensation: beholding our nation as the land settles into one continuous, harmonious expanse—stripped down to simple shapes and shades. Her portholes offer a view into a terrain of awe, reminiscence, and omniscience, a collective vision of a region fraught with, and fractured by, territories and borders.

Extending beyond the format of the airplane-window frame, Wayne has also created two unique works inspired by the same journey. The first is a twenty-two-foot-long painted scroll entitled From the Rockies to the Cascades, in addition to High Dive, a large-format painting in which she stretches her canvas onto a frame of coiled springs—materials that simulate a bird’s-eye view of the landscape as if seen by a skydiver descending towards a trampoline. The paintings from this series are accompanied by a vitrine displaying Wayne’s special limited edition This Land, a handmade accordion book that illustrates the aerial photographs from her voyage, alongside Taylor Brorby’s poem “The Ages Have Been at Work” and the lyrics to Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”

In German, heimat is a term used to describe not only the characteristics of a place, but the complex and interdependent physical, social, and mental associations with a homeland. For Wayne, this sentiment stretches, folds, and bends from the west coast, her childhood home, to the east coast, where she has resided since 1982. Treading across this land, psychic routes unfold, and Wayne savors “That path [which] is never straight and always various, each time opening new ways of seeing and thinking about the world we occupy, the ways we inhabit nature, and the legacies we leave behind.”

This exhibition closes 8/2/24.

California Artist- Eva Slater at Palm Springs Art Museum

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Palm Springs
Jul 262024
 

This beautiful painting, San Jacinto Mountains, was created in 1960 by Eva Slater. It is currently on view at the Palm Springs Museum of Art. You can also see her study for the painting on view as part of the exhibition A Shadow Set Free.

California Desert Art has more information on the artist as well as an image of the study.

From the museum about the work-

Eva Slater’s painting, San Jacinto Mountains, conveys the majesty and mystery of the mountain range that dominates the western boundary of the Coachella Valley. Its clean lines, broad areas of rich color, flat simplified forms, and well-defined edges are characteristic of the California Hard-Edge style of painting that Slater helped to establish. However, the delicate triangles that flow throughout the composition are a unique contribution to this movement. Slater described these forms as “cells” that functioned much like the cells in our body. Each triangular “cell” is stretched and molded to conform to the contours of the layered mountain peaks, and the subtle color changes create a sense of atmosphere and depth.

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