Episode 4: Two Weeks/Two Works: Grier Edmundson

Two Weeks/Two Works: Grier Edmundson

Fourteen30 Contemporary

 

By Daniel J Glendening

The final episode of Fourteen30 Contemporary’s four-exhibition series, Two Weeks/Two Works, features the work of Grier Edmundson: an oil on canvas diptych, “Hans Blix and Pink Mittens,” from 2006, hung on a wall papered with screen printed newsprint, “Optimum Expansion (After Iain and Ingrid).” “Hans Blix and Pink Mittens” is just that: two paintings, one 48″ x 48″ depicting a pair of nearly red gloves on a white ground, hands crossed at the wrist right over left, the other a small 10.5″ x 7.5″ portrait of an aging man, presumably the titular Hans Blix, a Swedish politician. Both works evidence sketchy, rough brushwork which leaves the bulk of the canvas un-painted, but that focuses in on some detail: the rim of Hans’ glasses, or the line of his nose. The question of the significance of Blix as a subject is ultimately left unclear—he is a diplomat and politician, who has worked over the course of his life for responsible atomic energy and in 2003 served as a monitor of Iraqi nuclear technologies for the United Nations. This put him, ultimately, at odds with the US and British Governments, who he claimed were greatly exaggerating the threat of nuclear proliferation in Iraq. “Optimum Expansion (After Iain and Ingrid)” is titled (I think, after some cursory research) after Iain and Ingrid Baxter, founders of the 1967-78 Canadian art collective N.E. Thing; visually, the work is kaleidoscopic: an image of branching trees cropped into a diamond and repeated ad infinitum over the surface of the wall, the paper buckling here and there, the seams not quite aligned.

“Two Weeks/Two Works: Grier Edmundson” Exhibition view. Photo courtesy Fourteen30 Contemporary

All of these little clues—one would expect them to add up to something, maybe, but they don’t—or, at least, whatever that thing is remains invisible. An unfinished painting isn’t really unfinished; it simply wants the viewer to think about unfinishedness. And a wallpaper of screen-prints on newsprint isn’t really wallpaper; it just wants the viewer to consider the possibility of wallpaper, of wallpaperness. People talk about provisional painting—painting that tosses aside craft and quote-unquote talent in favor of something rougher, cruder or less quote-unquote finished. If there is a provisional painting, and a painting is a body, is there a provisional body: a body that is half-formed or that exists in the interstices, that takes on a split or fragmented life across varied surfaces and spaces? The suggestion of a body and a space is enough to bring that body and space fully formed into the world—it’s an idea inscribed on its self. I’d say we’re all provisional bodies: we’re all forming and reforming all of the time as we experience new stimuli, as our cells age and reform, as we spread personae out over varied social and professional groups, web profiles and identities. We’re all becoming, all of the time.

Google Image Search 2013-4-11 5:31:07 PM: “provisional painting”

Google Image Search, 2013-04-11, 5:33:45 PM: “provisional body”

 

Episode 3: Two Weeks/Two Works: Andrea Longacre-White

Two Weeks/Two Works: Andrea Longacre-White

Fourteen30 Contemporary

 

By Daniel J Glendening

The third installment of Fourteen30′s Two Weeks/Two Works all but eliminates the loose hand and physical body of previous installments in favor of the digital. Andrea Longacre-White‘s pairing features “8/127″—a sculptural scatter-art nod composed of what appear to be several plaster casts of Apple iPads and pieces of silver Aluma-foil cut in the shape of iPad screens—and the framed digital print “Pad Scan (gallery cinder block wall)”—an abstracted image of a scan of an iPad while said device displays a photographic image. There’s something funereal to the work, and to the relationship between the pieces—something in the vein of ashes to ashes, etc to etc. The plaster and Aluma-foil work a sort of carcass—a scattering of bones, the plaster forms just barely recognizable as something we know, something that is, or was, an early step towards a cyborgian world. “Pad Scan” serves, then, as a pixilated placard, a designation of what was and what now lies at our feet, trod upon. This is the eye looking in upon itself, showing us something we can’t quite recognize.

There’s a feedback loop built into the relationship between the pieces, one leads to the other leads to the other. We have so many screens we don’t know where to look, and we scan the horizons with an electronic eye. Does it imply something that with this installment we’ve not only shed the body of the flesh—the muscle and blood of Ruiz, the dirt and sweat of Hutchins—and traded it for screens and self-referential digital eyes, but that we’ve also shed color? Grey and white and black and silver: everything reflecting or drawing in. Is Apple a new brutalism? A design aesthetic of oppression, forcing its silhouettes into human consciousness and lodging there? It’s ubiquitous: the round-cornered rectangle, the screen a prosthetic enabling fingertips to reach into the digital world. These scattered casts and surfaces are our bodies, our flesh, our bones.

“Two Weeks/Two Works: Andrea Longacre-White” Exhibition view. Photo courtesy Fourteen30 Contemporary

Episode 2: “Two Weeks/Two Works: Jessica Jackson Hutchins”

Two Weeks/Two Works: Jessica Jackson Hutchins

Fourteen30 Contemporary

 

By Daniel J Glendening

The second installment of Fourteen30′s Two Weeks/Two Works series features “Cursive,” 2012, and “Daily Sickness,” 1999, from Jessica Jackson Hutchins. “Cursive” is a 63″ x 49″ work composed of burlap, the stretched brown surface mottled and stained with blue-green pigment and streaks of deep umber. Woven through the burlap in primarily horizontal bands are five strips of cloth in various colors, some of which retain markers of their previous form as clothing: a sleeve hem in a brown and white floral pattern; a pink, white and green strip of child’s swimming suit. Across the bottom is a band of synthetic ivy leaves and vines, a creeping plastic rhizome. There’s something to “Cursive” that offers a shifting perspective: one moment a landscape, the ivy and brown toned cloth offering up a horizon line as cloth-clouds populate a blue tinged sky, then a perspective from above, torn and lost garments strewn across a dirty ground, and, in both, an implied yet not fully formed body. There is an absence, a lack, the figure/ground equation left off balance and unfulfilled, and something or someone is missing or, perhaps as implied by the work’s title, running.

The counterpart to “Cursive” here is “Daily Sickness“, a 9″ x 12″ collaged work on paper: a small thumbnail-sized smear of yellow ochre oil paint bleeds out, forming an arc of golden halo, into a small white piece of paper taped to a yellowing sketchbook page. Here there is a malady of mind or body that is as sure as the rising sun: a ritual of age, a ritual of struggle. Between the completion of “Daily Sickness” and “Cursive” is a span of thirteen years, the former dated 1999: precursor to the new millennium, the anxieties of social media, and the ubiquitous conversation about the speed of change. This is, perhaps, not a rising sun but a setting sun, a shedding of old habits and doubts in hopes of something new. The implied body becomes a temporal body: rather than the body of sweat and fluid and mass present in Ruiz’ installment we have here a body unbound, shedding—moving through time unfettered, running.

 

“Two Weeks/Two Works: Jessica Jackson Hutchins” Exhibition view, photo courtesy Fourteen30 Contemporary

Pilot Episode: “Two Weeks/Two Works: Conrad Ruiz”

Two Weeks/Two Works: Conrad Ruiz

Fourteen30 Contemporary

By Daniel J Glendening

Two Weeks/Two Works, at Fourteen30 Contemporary, is an experiment in exhibition: a suite of four two-week exhibits, each featuring two works by a single artist (Conrad Ruiz, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Andrea Longacre-White, Grier Edmundson). One stated intention in limiting the exhibitions to two works each is to allow space to move around the work, physically and psychologically. Pairing two works has other effects, as well–two pieces are brought into direct conversation with one another: a back and forth that invites comparison, debate and dialogue. It seems that one can expect each to be an exhibition in and of itself, a highly focused glimpse into the work of each artist. There may (or may not) also be the slow emergence of a dialogue of between works across exhibitions–each a small piece of a larger whole, or an episode in a gradually developing miniseries.

The pilot episode of Two Weeks/Two Works features two works by Conrad Ruiz: “Nova,” a 24″ x 19″ watercolor and oil on paper grey-scale painting of a tightly muscled male torso, as the subject peels off a shirt and clutches in one hand what appear to be, perhaps, cycling goggles, and “Punch Monster,” a 53″ x 35″ watercolor on canvas piece depicting an abstracted field of spare, intricate marks that generate what appears to be the surface of red liquid–water under red light, a bloodied sea or, perhaps more to the point, red punch flavored Monster energy drink. There’s a strong dichotomy of difference between the works: just as the virile masculine body is drained of color and, by extension, vitality, it is also rendered in such a way as to flatten the body, the man’s pectorals an almost geometric form, while the abstraction-leaning “Punch Monster” is pumped up into high contrast hypercolor–a color field that moves and ripples. The body becomes inert, isolated, while this other thing that fuels us, that we can see but not quite see, that we can grasp but not quite grasp, radiates.

Conrad Ruiz, “Punch Monster” 2012, Watercolor on canvas. 53 x 35 inches. Image courtesy Jessica Silverman Gallery.

MOST RECENT EVIDENCE OF A LANGUAGE YOU HAVE BEEN LOOKING AT: Jared Haug and Brooks Dierdorff, “Window Smokers”

Jared Haug and Brooks Dierdorff, Window Smokers

Recess Gallery

 

By Rebecca Steele

 

All I could do was to break the whole thing down and show that it is no longer possible.  -Gerhard Richter

 

Jared Haug and Brooks Dierdorff, “Window Smokers.” Photograph by Rebecca Steele.

An evolving methodology in contemporary art might be the trend of using one medium to critique the failure or relevance of another. When sculpture relies on photography for its language or successes, then we can conclude a failure of the singularity of media. This also serves as critique of the set of circumstances that allowed for certain types of work to exist as singularities. This new methodology could be called one of alignments, such that neon lights frame a photograph only to obscure it. In the exhibition, Window Smokers, the artists, Jared Haug and Brooks Dierdorff, fabricate the evidences of a panoramic view of terrain and possible altercations of landscape by insinuating the punctuation of one medium by another. This strategy could be described as contrapuntal and adheres to certain ideas invoked by the artist Gerhard Richter, who approached the act of painting a landscape as not an act of representation but as looking at what is to be represented through a glass darkly. It is arguable that this has become in and of itself a strategy. To lift the lid of the scanner in the moment of scan in order to create a photograph by act and action, and then to speak about the form within this photograph as being related in some way to a melting iceberg, is both contrapuntal and darkly meditative. Rather than speaking about the ability of light, through gestural manipulation, to create an angular form that slowly leaks its cause, the act is used to create a representation of the act.

Window Smokers often suggests light and its physical traces, capable of interruption and usurpation. Five framed digital prints are titled according to the actions that created them: “Held Steady,” “Slight Rise,” “Continuous Rise and Fall,” “Rise and Fall, Rise and Fall,” and “Held Steady, Then Lifted.” These images are high contrast abstract compositions that are punctuated by bits of color and graded lines. “Haug and Dierdorff search for nature and representation where the unenclosed can be depicted in its disappearance.” The digital prints made by lifting the lid of a scanner create abstract “photographs” that use light in its burn and retreat as a set of tight compositional constraints. The Photograph is used elsewhere as a representative of or dummy landscape as in “Organizing Principles” or “Late Season Tactics.”

“Transfer,” from Jared Haug and Brooks Dierdorff, “Window Smokers.” Photograph by Rebecca Steele.

There are times when works of art seem to conspire against the viewer through tense aesthetics and closure. In Window Smokers the artist’s aesthetic language is dexterous and full of material alignments. The works “Transfer” and “Merger” are photograms, evidencing an image created through the trace or positional affectation of a natural element on to a two dimensional surface. “Merger” was created by ice melting and moving food coloring across a sheet of paper—in its rusty streaks it is possible to find the remnants of a thing’s end: winter, ice, light. In the case of “Transfer” fake leaves sit in front of construction paper faded in the area not blocked by the leaves. This is also the case with a series of works in the main gallery space: “Red Heat Tremors 1-7,” “No Mercy Traveling North 1-5,” “Summer Nights Land of Doom 1-3,” and “Vertical Limit Under the Volcano.” These works are landscapes made on light-faded construction paper and though simple create a feeling of the elegiac beauty found in faded photographs of evening landscapes, of night vision palette, paper cut collage, or Luc Tuymans Allo Social Housing. The ambiguity and dexterity of these works is disorienting and, though small in scale, suggest the degrading effects of light and sight—or possibly that the landscape itself is the source of degradation, not of culture or moralities but of being and representation.

“Late Season Tactics,” from Jared Haug and Brooks Dierdorff, “Window Smokers.” Photograph by Rebecca Steele.

In “Twitch” and “Organizing Principles” traction, implied opening, interruption, and the kill are physical maneuvers in time and space where the integrity of one physical body is interrupted by the integrity of another physical body. A block of ballistics gel sits on top of a pedestal and holds a photograph against the wall in “Organizing Principles,” and presents a formally satisfying arrangement. Sculpturally, “Organizing Principles” employs the dynamics and materials of hunting. The ballistics gel that holds the hide (photograph) to the wall looks slightly oily and resembles cast acrylic; the photograph seems to be of animal hair that looks blond, sharp, and damp. The video “Twitch” depicts a deer that has been shot and lies barely twitching in a field of grass. The projector and a thick slab of acrylic, serving as projection screen, lie on the floor and cast a greenish glow in the space. The video is very still, and viewed through the thickness of the acrylic is blurry, suggestive rather than intelligible. The strategies of these two works find their fullest realization in “Late Season Tactics,” in which a large piece of smoked acrylic pierces and folds a digital image of an organ (possibly a heart or liver?) laying on the grass. There is something simple, elegant, and intriguing about this situation. “Late Season Tactics” suggests a forever of open possibilities born of contradictions, and two flat surfaces that provoke a narrative through interruption.

Gerhard Richter has made the claim that to degrade something is to get at its truth, and so contradictions of material and media can be their own narrative and solution. In Window Smokers, the landscape is subjected to and created by physical change. It is this interruption or alteration—in the form of an organ on the grass, of ice or light on paper—that demonstrates the human temporal and the natural as unresolving change.

Daniel Baird, “This New Ocean”

Daniel Baird, This New Ocean

Appendix Project Space

 

By Daniel J Glendening

At the rear corner of Daniel Baird‘s exhibition, This New Ocean, at Appendix Project Space, is a slowly turning object. It is small, about hand-sized, and is held just a hair’s breadth off of the ground. It would be easy to miss, but motion grabs the eye.

From Daniel Baird, “This New Ocean.” Image courtesy the artist and Appendix Project Space.

 

It appears to be a rock, painted silver. It turns on a vertical axis rising up out of the concrete floor from some unseen buried motor. The rock is sort of wedge shaped, rough contoured, pointed. It could be used as a weapon, or a path marker pointing the way. It could be cast aside—it is, after all, a rock.

It turns, clockwise. It could be pointing to the hour, the minutes, seconds, of some unmarked clock. It is an arrow, after all, but a rock, also. It turns, slowly but visibly—maybe about the rate of a second hand revolving around the face of a clock, marking the passage of time, on and on, relentless. There are no numbers on this clock face—indeed there is no face of the clock, only grey painted concrete floor, but still we know what it is.

This is a rock, and a clock, and time is moving onward, no matter what. We can see it, here, passing: one revolution, two revolutions, three revolutions.

But it is a rock and it is not a rock. It’s silver, and rocks are not silver (unless, in fact, they are silver, but this is a rock). Its surface is marked by not just rough angles and broken edges, but some regular striation, as if we could see here the layers of sedimentary earth made small—millimeters of sediment: millimeters of layered time—but this rock is not a sedimentary rock, it lacks the planar regularity of sandstone or shale and carries the broken and chipped hardness of flint, or granite or—I only know my rocks so well.

So, this is a rock and also is not a rock—it’s maybe a replicated rock—though I don’t know for sure—how can one know for sure without some unavailable knowledge? It is a rock and not a rock: it turns about a vertical axis, it is silver, its surface marked by thin thin striations of layered material formed, perhaps, by lasers and resins and 3-D printing technology. This is a fabricated rock, ejected from the smooth and fluid digital sphere into the physical world, bringing with it the layers of its digital past and butting up against a world marked by, above all things, time.

Time moves, always.

We say that maybe we can escape time, maybe we can turn back time, maybe we can bend time through the manipulation of physics we don’t yet understand and maybe we can rewrite time and come to understand time as not simply a line on a page that never ends but as a continuously folding over space that is knotted up and porous like a sponge. We, though, get old.

We die.

Does the earth die?

Does data die?

Geologic time moves at a rate we can’t see except in small punctuating bursts when something suddenly gives way, when the forces of age and change sudden pierce through and shake the surface or the tension suddenly ejaculates a flood of magma, smoke and stone.

Otherwise, we only see the evidence—hills painted with bands of color: lake sediment and ash, the mulch of leaves and fallen forests. We see mountains slowly crumbling, the cleavage of stone by ice, the carved path of a river through the desert. We see sand dunes shifting and we see where water once was and now is not, where water was not and now is. We age, our hair grays and our faces crease and we die.

Does data age? Does a stream of digits that codes for the shape of a stone for rendering in a three-dimensional modeling program replace itself over and over through time? Does it make mistakes and replicate those mistakes? Does it accidentally develop a wrinkle, or a cancer? Does time exist, there?

This is just a rock on the floor, slowly turning. This is just a relic, a piece of evidence—the ejection, the erosion, the subduction. Everything old will be destroyed, and reborn.

This is just a rock on the floor, ticking off the seconds, one by one.

MSHR, “Earthly Door”

MSHR, “Earthly Door”

MSHR, Earthly Door.

Appendix Project Space

by Daniel J Glendening

MSHR, a collaborative project by Brenna Murphy and Birch Cooper, presented “Earthly Door” at Appendix Project Space in Portland, Oregon. The work consists of an interactive installation and a performance. As an installation, “Earthly Door” resembles a found-object architectural model of a disco-rustic beach house, complete with conversation pit. The surfaces are all wood and mirror, with carefully arranged seashells and rocks, and a black vase holding one sprig of dried sage.

Electrical wire is intermixed with chunks of subtly carved driftwood—wire wrapped around branches and stones, buried in loose sand. A glass bowl bubbles, brewing fog, and a low drone emanates from a pair of speakers against the back wall of the gallery. The room lowly vibrates.

MSHR, “Earthly Door”

Preceding the June 28 performance, the artists spent time with the audience, inviting them to interact with the installation. Murphy, smiling, served as a guide: she picked up a pair of cycling gloves wired into a mirrored box and helped a visitor put them on. He began moving his hands in the air and high-pitched tones emanated from the machine. Murphy guided two women to a pair of metal trays joined by a wire. She advised them to remove their shoes, stand on each tray, and hold hands. The machine squealed; lights flickered.

Murphy and Cooper left the room as the sun set, and “Earthly Door” shifted from a space of collaborative interaction to a site of ritualized performance.

The duo returned moments later in black sunglasses, Murphy having changed into a costume of black body suit and a custom leather utility belt. At the rear of the gallery, Murphy and Cooper executed a set of mirrored movements clutching a conch shell between them. Cooper blew a series of notes on the shell and relayed them through an echoing set of effects. Murphy, executing a series of slow, awkward movements, made her way to the recessed space at the center of the installation. She donned the pair of sonic cycling gloves, coaxing sound out of a series of poses somewhere between tai chi and voguing.

MSHR, “Earthly Door”

The performance concluded with a mirroring of its introductory movement: Murphy and Cooper took up position at the front of the installation, standing barefooted on the metal trays. They touched hands to faces, hand to hands. The sound and light faded as their touches lightened, and the performers took their leave.

“Earthly Door” contains a multitude of binary relationships, and is strongest when those relationships begin to break down: the duality of gendered bodies, of audience and performer, the technological and organic, hard and soft surfaces and the nostalgia that is embedded in the aesthetic of retro-futurism. Allowing audience interaction and play, the artists invite users to incorporate themselves into the work and complete a circuit with their bodies. Everyone, here, is a conduit: the artists a conduit of information, the audience members as conduits of energy.

However, as Murphy and Cooper transition from roles as guides to those of techno-tronic performers, eyes hidden behind black sunglasses, the audience is from the work. The sequence of movements executed by MSHR hovers between dance and ritual, and remains enigmatic and opaque—it is a fledgling ritual, not yet fully imbued with meaning. While an intimacy lingers in their movements—hands on faces, hands on hands—audience access is largely predicated on having experienced the work through earlier bodily interaction.

MSHR, “Earthly Door”

MSHR’s “Earthly Door” may have too many edges, too many facets competing with each other for attention. The retro-futurist aesthetic, for instance, serves as a lure while simultaneously recalling a cultural history that never was. The physical installation’s function as performance set potentially trumps its role as an interactive environment, as the audience ceases interaction and shifts into spectatorship. Stepping in as performers, MSHR resets the power dynamic to a hierarchical state.

This shift undermines what seems to be the aim of the work, and evidences that maybe one can’t have some things both ways. In our screen-bound era, it’s refreshing for the audience to suddenly become, of its own accord and with only minimal guidance, performer, entwining their own bodies with this techno-organic musical cyborg machine.

Bobbi Woods, “Warm For Your Form”

Bobbi Woods, Warm for Your Form.

Fourteen30 Contemporary

by Daniel J Glendening

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Once you’ve seen them, it becomes difficult to un-see them.

“California Light (Some Like It Hot),” courtesy Woods and Fourteen 30 Contemporary

Bobbi Woods’ Warm for Your Form, at Fourteen30 Contemporary, includes a looped video containing text in white on a black screen. The piece, “California Light (Some Like It Hot),” 2011, includes that line, tucked in among a script that sits somewhere between directorial notes and cut-up poem: “deep space / Palm trees / strong shadows / INSERT – CLOSEUP / I have no sense of proportions. / there’s something about you…” Woods’ text operates with multiple functions. It is at once a text-based interpretation or analysis of a lost film, recalling some vanished piece of history, and a Burroughs-via-Hollywood-Boulevard narrative, alluding directly to e.e. cumming’s “Now Does Our World Descend”: “If it’s all the same, / it’s time you unbecame.”

What’s sticking, though, is that line about the ghost.

The bulk of the exhibition is comprised of poster works, paintings on Hollywood adverts. “In the Mood,” 2011, is composed of a framed folded poster for the film of the same title, creases quartering its blue-violet gradient. It’s all atmosphere, color and space with the dust of use.

There are five iterations of “Warm For Your Form,” 2012, painted silver enamel on poster paper, hung simply without frames. The surface of the poster paper is almost entirely obscured by silver enamel. In something of a break from past work, streaks, handprints, and the swiping of fingers across the still-tacky paint mar the paintings’ slick surfaces. Looking closely, the text and imagery of the poster is just barely visible through the enamel—they are film posters for the critically derided 2007 comedy, “The Brothers Solomon”—but the text and imagery is reversed.

“In the Mood,” courtesy Woods and Fourteen30 Contemporary.

The paintings are mirrors—worn and weathered, their silver backing flaking and water-damaged—reflecting in their haze a somewhat inconsequential advert that, in the end, is only substrate, a surface to be manipulated. They reflect light and motion in the room, but imprecisely, fogged over with breath or steam. They are streaked with fingerprints, handprints; the traces of some unseen entity: an invisible being, a ghost—something trapped behind the surface clawing for escape.

There are other ghosts here too: specters of history. All around are remnants of a California dream in the cast-off detritus of failed films, in the video without actors, sets, or sound. “California Light (Some Like It Hot),” through its title, alludes to that sun soaked Hollywood of yesteryear: of palm trees and ’57 Cadillacs with teal paintjobs. It hints at the haunted hotel that served as a shooting location for Marilyn Monroe’s film, and towards a different Los Angeles, the L.A. occupied by the group of artists making their home in the city in the early 1960s and who came to be loosely affiliated with the California Light and Space movement.

“Warm For Your Form,” courtesy Woods and Fourteen30 Contemporary.

With “Warm For Your Form” we get surfaces with the potential for capturing the sheen of light and reflectivity of a John McCracken slab or a Helen Pashgian sphere, but interrupted with the hand—the physicality of the body—and held by a thin paper substrate that warps and curls slightly on the wall. Something of the expressionist painter creeps in to an otherwise phenomenological object—the libidinal body smeared across the minimalist plane.

Certain occultists, in a practice known as scrying, utilize a mirror to commune with spirits or divine the future.

Turn out the lights, stand in front of the bathroom mirror, and call her name three times.

Paul Clay, “How to Immigrate to the United States of America”

Paul Clay, How to Immigrate to the United States of America

Recess

by Daniel J Glendening

Paul Clay’s exhibition at Recess, “How to Immigrate to the United States of America,” is made up of three digitally composited, high-sheen and high production value video works, circling around themes of ethnic and cultural identity, immigration, and human rights. At least, ostensibly.

In the first floor lobby of the Recess complex is “Paul Clay on Lopez Tonight.” Clay has digitally inserted himself into a segment of the talk show “Lopez Tonight,” casting himself in the role of Latin pop-star Enrique Iglesias. The piece is a brief segment, looped, in which Lopez and Clay discuss fashion trends among Latina women.

“Paul Clay on Lopez Tonight,” image courtesy Clay and Recess. Photograph by the author.

Upstairs, the main gallery is split in two by a temporary wall, creating two viewing rooms, each housing another of Clay’s works. One of these, “24/7 Waterfall,” is a mock newscast narrating the story of Felipe Salazar, a fictional immigrant who has moved from Mexico to the United States looking for opportunity. In his time here, the character Salazar has worked as an agricultural laborer, has run a (since-closed) restaurant, and has now taken up offering his services as a human waterfall. Clay has cast himself, again, in the role of the narrative’s protagonist, Salazar. The video boasts high-end post-production, with the contemporary news-cast’s graphic overlays and spinning logos, and features several scenes of Clay, as Salazar, toting his waterfall: a neon “OPEN” sign around his neck and a showering cascade of water pouring out of his chest and pooling at his feet. He walks towards the camera in stoic measured steps, water pooling around him, through the aisle of a grocery store and across a parking lot. He stands, water flowing, atop some granite boulders in tree-dappled light, and looks around.

“24/7 Waterfall,” image courtesy Clay and Recess. Photograph by the author.

The second piece in the main gallery is “How to Immigrate to the United States of America Via International Arrivals at SFO.” Here, Clay adopts the role of narrator/spokesman in a corporate instructional video detailing the proper means of immigrating to the United States, boarding a plane in Mexico City to San Francisco, and how to pass through customs without attracting undue attention. As in “24/7 Waterfall,” the work adopts the aesthetic of its satirized form, incorporating computer-simulated visualizations of the airplane interior and airport.

One gets a sense here that Clay has, if not an agenda, then definitely a stance. The work starts to point towards political discussion around immigration law and immigration reform, and the status of those members of US society who willingly contribute to a system that, often, demonizes them, in hopes that eventually things will get better. The work Clay presents in “How to Immigrate to the United States of America” is satirical in tone, and seems to be attempting, at least, to point towards a critique of the flawed immigration policy currently in place in the US—the satire, though, falls flat.

“How to Immigrate…” image courtesy Clay and Recess, photograph by the author.

Clay identifies as a “Canadian-Irish American,” according to his website bio, albeit one who spent his preschool and kindergarten years in Costa Rica, and several months in Mexico and Barcelona in High School and College. He “dreams of one day being a Latin Pop Star.” However, despite whatever intentions drive the work, and despite the extent to which Clay has been exposed to the culture of Latin America, the artist is working from a position of privilege. The three videos on view are, at best, problematic. Clay has cast himself as a person of a cultural heritage not his own, digitally inserting himself into a dialogue here removed from context, and what we see is a white man speaking on behalf of the exoticized other.

Here, I’m going to shift gears a little bit: while I am always only offering my personal read of a work I write about here, and make no claims to speak for any other party in my interpretation, this exhibition may draw out some more personal, more political, lines of investigation. However blurred and self-made our identities might be in the twenty-first century United States, in Portland, I also speak from a position of privilege: I am a citizen of the United States; I am a Caucasian male; I did not grow up wealthy, but I definitely did not grow up in poverty. I was raised in Northern California; at least one of my parents has a college degree.

So, how do I unpack a series of works in which a Caucasian man casts himself as a range of Hispanic or Latino characters, in a series of moderately high-production videos, in order to talk about immigration? Something about the premise makes me uneasy, and I don’t buy the explanation that that uneasiness stems from my own set of prejudices or expectations of identity. It comes, I think, from an examination—or, at least, a consideration—of power structures: economic, social, political, cultural. Somehow, a corporate presentation video outlining a MEX to SFO airplane trip, however satirical, fails to capture the nuances or tragedy of the reality of US-Mexico immigrant relations; according to statistics compiled by the Arizona Human Remains Project, 2,381 bodies have been found in the Arizona desert since the year 2000, primarily the remains of people attempting to enter the US illegally from Mexico.

A faux news-cast following a fictional migrant worker’s success as a human waterfall does little to speak towards the reality of the migrant worker’s experience which, according to reports, is often inhumane—agriculture laborers often work long hours for very little pay, with poor and crowded housing and exposure to unhealthy or even toxic conditions.

Perhaps it was the artist’s intent, through his work, to stir just these concerns.

It’s the role of satire to offer up a critique through the guise of humor, however biting. The work, to that end, doesn’t push far enough. Clay’s work doesn’t reach a point of self-reflectivity that empowers the artist, as satirist, to point out the hidden or suppressed flaws in not only their audience, but also in themselves. The artist is hidden behind a digitally produced facade—he’s there, but he’s not there—and how can I, as a viewer, believe this cold, flattened entity?

To take on the guise of another—to imagine the world through the eyes of one of another culture, ethnicity, gender, political-stance, upbringing—this is the challenge of character building. People do it all the time, in novels, film, theater, art, the list goes on. For such a project to succeed, the audience needs more than a shell—more than a name, more than an accent, more than a brief line of dialogue. The audience needs to believe in the totality of the character, in the breath of their lungs and the electricity of their mind, in the memories, successes, and failures of the character. The audience needs to believe, at least temporarily, that the character is real. Clay’s characters don’t feel real—there are too many holes, not enough history—they serve a function and little more. I can’t see the weight of the life that could be Salazar’s life, and I’m not convinced Clay can, either.

In order to be believed as someone else, you’ve got to become someone else.

Dan Gilsdorf, “Sentences”

Dan Gilsdorf, Sentences

12128

by Rebecca Steele

“The aesthetic experience is not a gratuitous epiphany. Viewers must bring their knowledge and training to the encounter with the work of art.” -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Text based work can be challenging.

It challenges in its stripped revelation of successful form/content paradoxes. Much text based work states what it is trying to do, its function laid bare. Where the function is also the form and the vehicle, all the associated parts must be screwed together pretty tight or the end result becomes little more than a rusty fiat. Text based work at its best either becomes agitated political arbiter, absurdist/minimalist joke, or a mythical incantation (Ligon, Nauman, Beuys).

Dan Gilsdorf, “Sentences,” at 12128. Photo by Rebecca Steele.

That being said, Dan Gilsdorf’s exhibit, Sentences, at 12128, is both provocative and dry, and by dry I mean to imply sandy, shifty, unstable. The pieces are constructed of type geometrically situated on white expanses of digital photographic paper, with one video monitor. They hover between tightly executed minimalist forms and typographical gymnastics. There are eleven pieces, one of them being the video. The ten prints appear to be analogue type written exercises. The font is something similar to “American Typewriter,” and viewing them becomes slippery: they assume hand execution, rather than computer generation, to perform minimalist poetic Borgesian tricks.

The texts are mostly directives for the executor of the type. “Type very carefully and thoughtfully one hundred times really quite long sentences each being longer by no more than a single word relative to the sentence that precedes…” is repeated for the duration of the page in such a way that the statements construct particular patterns and forms that seem irrelevant of their implied content, unless you begin to consider the text as rooms with various mirrored corridors. The meaning of the sentences acts as a kind of hex dump for the implied image.

Hallway Mirror (after Borges) has type that forms a trapezoid and repeats the sentence “in the hallway there is a mirror that faithfully depicts all appearances,” a quote from Borges’ Library of Babel. In this text Borges’ narrator describes the universe as a series of interlocking hexagonal rooms equipped with all necessities for human survival. On four walls of each room are bookshelves containing books each of exactly 410 pages. Though the order and content of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just a few basic characters (letters, spaces and punctuation marks). This thesis could also describe the working process for Gilsdorf’s Sentences, where design and formal structure are an illusion and the repetition and instructions gibberish — the human conundrum of necessitated meaning as an allegory for the labyrinth as a form of existence abstracted.

Dan Gilsdorf, “A Short Sentence.” Photo by Rebecca Steele.

The video, A Short Sentence, contains one statement that flashes on the screen on a timed loop: “On a video monitor, display a single sentence for a length of time that is slightly shorter than the duration required to read the sentence.” It is neither frustrating, as implied by the text, nor particularly revolutionary in its fraught symbioses. The work’s thinness might come from the simple claim being overwrought in relation to its provocation, or possibly being dis-serviced by the shift in medium.

Gilsdorf’s Sentences formalizes the aesthetics of exercise — the act of an exercise as a chant wherein meaning lies not in words said but is located in repetition, as action over content and tone becomes the vehicle for transcendence. This is not unlike the artist’s previous works, Black Mass and Diabolus in Musica, in which the artist utilized repetitive actions to outline the reach of the human gesture, as well as the possibility of transcendence through simple gesture. The piece Sixty-Six is composed of the phrase “sixty-six times by sixty-six spaces followed by sixty-six characters,” descending in diagonally striped banners down the page.

A Hopeful Manifesto attains transcendence in its arrowed square, stating, “a hopeful manifesto of a visionary genius,” and simultaneously “the polemical rants of a dogmatic ideologue.” These sentences both pull at each other as well as suggest meaning as authored set and the form as its own dogma. Where the sentences begin to switch places and trade words, an arrow is formed on the page by the diagonal of space. The arrow points down, suggesting the viewer, this place in time, or the failure of meaning to supersede the form of its transmission. One pole really does not differ from its oppositional statement, and given enough interaction all words create a similar kind of gibberish, or a sentence that might as well be rhythm created by mirrored form.

In The Novelist’s Lexicon, Jonathan Lethem answers the query of what key word opens the door to his work with “furniture,” and says, “it is widely believed that after Borges, mirrors are forbidden as symbols in novels. However it is cruel to deny the characters in a novel sight of their own faces; hence mirrors must be provided.”

Dan Gilsdorf, “200 Sentences.” Photo by Rebecca Steele.

I would not reason that Gilsdorf’s Sentences do their best work as mirrors, but they do relate to some activity that is mirror-like. In some pieces, like 200 Sentences and A Hopeful Manifesto, the activity that is implied by the fictionalized exercise of typing, what is typed, and its eventual form, collapse in such a way that stimulates sentiments not unlike those implied in The Library of Babel. More so than mirrors, this experience simulates our intuition of space as exercised in type.

While Borgesian libraries are “minor horrors,” Sentences maintains a cerebral visual geometry: quiet angles inviting contemplation, despite the contention between form and content.