Archive for the “Art Articles” category
John Seven • 7th Jul 2010 • Art Articles, Berkshire Arts • Massachusetts, North Adams
Boston-based artist Liz Nofziger was last seen showing in North Adams in 2005 with her show, “Trödelmarkt,” which had her creating an installation from household items that she gathered from area thrift stores.
This time, Nofziger is starting from the outside and working in with her contribution to this year’s DownStreet Art, which has her tinkering with the shell of the former Artery Lounge on Holden Street to create an experience that memorializes — and updates — the abandoned bar.
“I was most interested in the Artery Lounge because I liked the recent history that was so present in the remains,” Nofziger said. “The way that it almost felt violently scraped out, so freshly removed, and the stickers on the walls and the bar with no bar top, obvious spots where things had been forever — where the cooler was that held the beer. I liked the scale of it, the intimacy, the storefront. It felt like that recent history gave me something great to work with, as well as the amazing name. That alone was a great starting point.”
Nofziger’s process of transforming a space is a combination of long-term planning and in-the-moment improvisation.
“A lot of times I use materials that I have or have collected waiting for the right site, to be used,” she said. “This challenge of figuring out how to make a work in often a very limited amount of time and a limited set of materials is what makes work fun for me, so this challenge of collaborating with restrictions and the space, I find satisfying. I think without that kind of pressure and spontaneity I don’t know how to work.” (more…)
John Seven • 1st Jul 2010 • Art Articles, Berkshire Arts • India, Iraq, Jarvis Rockwell, John Walker Linh, North Adams, Rasa, War on Terror
Another member of the Rockwell family has brought artwork to the Berkshires — this time it’s Daisy Rockwell, Norman’s granddaughter, whose show “Rasgulla: Rasa Paintings” is featured as part of this summer’s DownStreet Art in Galerìa Inqilab at 5 Holden St.
Rockwell’s paintings pull from the Indian tradition of Rasa, an ancient aesthetic theory that is best illustrated in her series “Rasa I,” which features panels of a woman performing a classical Indian dance, the type still taught today to depict nine Rasa gestures.
“They’re very set: To show fear, you do a certain thing with your hands and a certain thing with your feet and a certain thing with your eyes. It’s a very strict dance form,” Rockwell said during an interview this week. “You see this to this day in these modern Bollywood movies, and I think a lot of people are aware that they’re showing Rasa. It’s just instinctual, culturally, that you have a certain scene — night and day, fall and spring — and automatically everyone knows what the mood is going to be.” (more…)
John Seven • 28th Jun 2010 • Art Articles, Comics • Bill Caldwell, Brenden Fletcher, DC Comics, George Cochrane, Joe Staton, Kamandi, Karl Kerschl, Mass MoCA, Metamorpho, Michael Allred, Neil Gaiman, Paul Pope, Supergirl, The Flash, Wonder Woman
Art books and comic strips are two understandably different things, and many people would put them within opposite spectrums of the totem pole, if not at the very points of it.
DC Comics has managed the meld the two in the new over-sized book “Wednesday Comics,” which uses the serial-cartoon organizing principle as a way to gather illustrative works in order to admire the big picture within a context of good fun.
As painter George Cochrane explored in his Mass MoCA show “Long Time Gone,” the illustrated sequential page is the equivalent of a canvas, the single work that builds to the whole, as experienced in a show.
The Storefront Artist Project’s Joe Staton show and the Rockwell Museum’s “LitGraphic” are other pieces in the curatorial journey to find a place for the page in galleries. In this context, story equals show, and the parts range from the most formalistic and traditional to the wildest and experimental — and that goes for just about any artist.
If each work in a show by Gregory Crewdson or Dario Robleto or Alexis Rockman builds up to a complete text, so it is with, say, “Supergirl” or “Deadman.” Each page is a designed work unto itself to be brought together for a complete thought that appears on gallery walls or within covers of a book. (more…)
John Seven • 22nd Jun 2010 • Art Articles, Photography • industrial decay, Massachusetts, Pittsfield, Polarioid
Photographer Susan Mikula sees beauty where some see only waste, and her effort to capture these visions are part of an aesthetic race against time in more ways than one.
Mikula’s new show “American Vale” follows up on “American Device,” which had her depicting plants and refineries in California and Texas.
Mikula has now turned her lens to capture the same landscapes in Pittsfield, an extension of her aesthetics, which date back to her upbringing in New Jersey. Mikula proclaims her home state beautiful — all aspects of it, including the industrial landscape that many see — and she finds the same pleasure elsewhere.
“To my eyes, these places have always been places of wonder — and in the same way that someone else might find when they’re looking out at the beach or out at a mountain,” Mikula said during a recent interview. “I think that sort of wonder and the mystery of the physical objects — the buildings or the oil tanks or the warehouses, whatever those things are — I find them numinous, like there is that little bit of mystery, there is that ghostly beauty to it. I think it goes way, way, way back and it never has left me. I really love those places. I love them as a part of who we are as Americans.”
Mikula believes Americans were defined by the Industrial Revolution, on a personal level as well as on a national, economic one, and is attracted to the remnants of that history. She points out that, like it or loathe it, industrialism — and that includes the mistakes of industry, even the devastating ones — are an important part of the American landscape in both the past and present. Often, it’s the sites’ movement through time that makes them so alluring, the fact that they are dying or dead but still stand.
“A lot of what you see, though not everything, in ‘American Vale’ is GE,” Mikula said. “With what we know about GE and what’s happened to the Hudson and the bodies of water around it because of the PCBs and what’s leeched out of those labs, I think it’s extremely hard to look at those old places for some people and see the loveliness of shape that I see — the divine, the color, the way they sit in the landscape, the way they work in the neighborhood.
“In Pittsfield, as well as when I was doing the coast for the other show, these are things that people see from their homes. In Pittsfield on Tyler Street, those houses sat just across the street from these places, so it’s very much part of Pittsfield’s residents’ lives.” (more…)
John Seven • 13th Jun 2010 • Art Articles, Book Articles, Comics • Edward Sorel, Jules Feiffer, Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Spirit, Village Voice, Will Eisner
Jules Feiffer is well known as a master of all trades and a jack of none when it comes to storytelling — a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, novelist, children’s book author and illustrator, Tony-nominated playwright, Academy Award-winning screenwriter — and a new autobiography celebrates his over 60-year career.
Feiffer’s memoir, “Backing Into Forward,” was released this year by Doubleday. He will make a Western Massachusetts appearance at the Eric Carle Museum for the Children’s Book Festival in Amherst on June 12, an all-day event featuring a talk by Feiffer at 2 p.m. He will be the subject of a major show at the Carle in the fall of 2011.
Feiffer, 81, boasts many high profile achievements — including authorship of the screenplays for “Carnal Knowledge” and “Popeye” — in a career that began more humbly in 1946 in the studio of revolutionary cartoonist Will Eisner, where Feiffer apprenticed for six years, starting at age 18. Eventually Feiffer ended up writing scripts for Eisner’s innovative detective series about The Spirit, a character recognizable to many people, thanks to the recent Frank Miller film.
“Eisner was instrumental in how I thought and how I learned to work — before I went to work for him he was one of my heroes,” Feiffer said in a recent interview. “I studied him, those early Spirit stories that were in newspapers.
“It was an extraordinary opportunity and a great education for me, just being around his office, as a kid who really was incapable of doing anything right for a long period of time until I accidentally backed into writing The Spirit stories. It was the one thing I could do in the office. I couldn’t do any of the drawings — I just wasn’t able to do that kind of comic book illustration — but I could write it. That surprised him and it surprised me.” (more…)
John Seven • 6th Jun 2010 • Art Articles • Ferrin Gallery, Massachusetts, Mountain Park, Pittsfield
As a longtime steel fabricator, sculptor Julian Halpern runs his own furniture and design shop, creating functional items from recycled and reclaimed objects — but his sculptures use the same kind of material to express a more abstract side of his soul.
Halpern’s work is part of “ReObjectification: Art + Object,” showing through June 13 at the Ferrin Gallery, 437 North St. in Pittsfield.
For the Ferrin show, Halpern took his interest in auto transmissions and transformed the design of the valve body into a maze, suitable for hanging. He had used the same transmission part in an earlier work and become interested in utilizing it further. After searching the area for material, he scored multiple transmissions and set to disassembling them.
“I harvested all these parts out of these valve bodies — each one was different from the next, and visually I thought they were really amazing,” Halpern said during an interview this week. “They reminded me of Keith Haring’s work — they called up a lot. I was thinking about how I could utilize them in sculptures and realized they totally reminded me of a maze, so I proceeded to make that piece into a maze.” (more…)
John Seven • 4th Jun 2010 • Art Articles, Film • Art Articles, Association for the Pickers of Jardim Gramacho, Brazil, catadore, documentary, Jardim Gramacho, Lucy Walker, poverty, Rio de Janeiro, Tião Carlos dos Santos, Vik Muniz
As with evolution, the ways in which gallery art can change someone’s life are often hard to witness with the naked eye. But you do have more of a chance of seeing a human absorb the work and experience in encounters with art and applying it to life than you do spying a bacteria transforming into a human being.
The latter, in fact, is impossible, but the transformative power of not only viewing an artwork, but also participating in the activity of creating an artwork and collaborating with a capable artist is very attainable, if not actually common.
In Lucy Walker’s documentary film “Waste Land,” the title reaches back to the T.S. Eliot poem and refers as much to the world’s largest garbage dump as it does to the lives of the people who wage a living by picking through it to gather recyclable materials, known as “catadores.”
Located in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the workers’ lives are not so much a waste in terms of usefulness — in fact, most of the people presented in the film emit the sort of guile only the proudest of survivors can possibly exhibit — but rather as they are framed by the location of their endeavors, the circumstances that lead them to the work and the way the class-oriented society of Brazil views their honorable labor.
At the center of the film is contemporary artist Vik Muniz, a Brazilian native whose ascent from poverty to world renown within the world of fine arts begins to draw a circle in his life path when he decides he wants to direct his penchant for unusual materials into portraits of workers at Jardim Gramacho, the world’s biggest landfill — fashioned out of garbage. (more…)
John Seven • 1st Jun 2010 • Art Articles, Film
A new documentary film by Michael Sladek captures one dangling thread from the New York City art world explosion of the 1980s — the controversial figure Mark Kostabi — and imbues the legend with a level of humanity that does not soften his impact, negative or otherwise.
Sladek’s film, “Con Artist,” screens at the Berkshire International Film Festival on Saturday, June 5, at 9:15 a.m. at The Triplex in Great Barrington, and Sunday, June 6, at 11:15 a.m. at the Beacon Cinema in Pittsfield.
Kostabi burst on the scene with a blend of outrageous showmanship, media pandering and questionable artistic subversion. His pivotal moment of controversy came as he announced that he did not paint his own paintings — he merely signed them. Kostabi was a contemporary of Basquiat and Haring — and, for some, the important third point in a triumvirate with them — but his influence did not loom large over the years following. As the New York City art scene diminished from national attention, Kostabi’s fame waned outside those walls, and he began to function as an enfant terrible within a very cloistered world.
By the time Sladek caught up with him, he had partly morphed into a public-access game show host.
“I had never actually heard of him or known anything about him before landing in his studio one summer,” Sladek said. (more…)
John Seven • 27th May 2010 • Art Articles • Flannery O'Conner, Leslie Scalapino, Mass MoCA, Nu Shu, sculpture, taxidermy
Sculptor Petah Coyne is known for her use of unusual materials and her allusions to literature in her work. With a retrospective that also features two new works, Coyne continues her obsessions with one of her largest sculptures yet.
Her show “Everything That Rises Must Converge” opens at Mass MoCA on Friday, May 29.
Coyne is an obsessive reader, and it’s a practice that informs her sculptures and operates as a thread in her life. Her mother was a writer, and that discipline has always influenced her work. Not only is she entranced by the ability to utilize the spoken and written language for communication in a heightened way, but she also admires how those words create an abstract and visual experience for the person reading them.
“The way you can walk into a book and be lost in it is so amazing to me — that you can go to these places and never leave anywhere,” she said in an interview this week. “Those images that you create in your mind are so powerful.”
Of particular influence to Coyne is author Flannery O’Connor, whose work the sculptor has read and reread over the years and absorbed into her own visuals. In one of her new works, “Scalapino Nu Shu,” she fills an apple tree with taxidermied peacocks as part of a reference to O’Connor. (more…)
John Seven • 19th May 2010 • Art Articles, Berkshire Arts • digital art, Hudson River School, Interactive Telecommunications Program, ITP, NYU, science fiction. Blade Runner, Thomas Cole
Plenty of painters work in the style of the Hudson River School, but digital artist Jeremy Rotsztain has the audacity to update that style by looking for the visual cues within the works and drawing a line to the landscapes of the future by bringing science fiction films into the mix.
Technology was represented with a level of foreboding by painters such as Thomas Cole and others in the Hudson River School, but through software written by Rotsztain, manmade wonder is flexed into a modern form of poetry.
Rotsztain’s software analyzes Coles’ paintings and 150 images from 150 science fiction films for color matches, and then recreates the paintings by comprising all the parts in a digital mosaic. Rotsztain’s installation includes two digital prints and two computer simulations that reveal the process through which the digital prints are created — the journey from Thomas Cole to “Blade Runner” is revealed in this animation.
“When you look at the digital print, you see the image from ‘Blade Runner,’ but what that image is composed of is hundreds of samples of others science fiction films,” Rotsztain said during an interview this week. “It’s hard to tell because it’s like paint brushes — so the software goes pixel by pixel to all these stills from different films and looks for colors that are similar to the ones in the ‘Blade Runner’ still and copies those, like little swatches of color.”
“The software simulation actually shows the stills from the movies that I’m sampling, and it shows the cursor going step by step through the image. When it finds something that it deems similar to an area of color in the ‘Blade Runner’ movie, then it copies it and moves it over to a simulation of the ‘Blade Runner’ image.” (more…)
