MEAN AND SNEAKING-update

The show is up-looks great..here's the info as it played out in the end:

Mean and Sneaking

Elizabeth Adams, Elaine Angelopoulos, Jennifer Bevill, Matt Callinan, Jeff Feld, Matthew Lusk, Michael DeLucia, Mai Braun, Laura Braciale, Drew Shiflett, B. Wurtz, Amy Yao

Mean and Sneaking

Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath….It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live…always on the limits …a very ancient slough….”

Henry David Thoreau: Where I have Lived and What I have Lived For, Economy

In Thoreau’s influential work Economy, he advocates for a life away from conventional social and material mores. In part of his account of the bleakness woven into common society, he describes the condition, caused by poverty, where people are forced to live in mean and sneaking ways, where promises get made that can’t be kept, where “I’ll pay you later” is an empty guarantee. It is not a deceptive nature, or deliberate cunning that brings about this inveigling, but a need to live and progress despite a limited ability to give back.

When Thoreau advocates for Economy, he does so with faith that people need not join the cycle of needing and taking, but can follow a life aside and alone, where resourcefulness and self-sufficiency allow ample contentment with available resources. In Thoreau’s case Nature is an alternative and providing companion. But Thoreau presents an alternately peevish and gloomy attitude. Not everyone is so ready to head for the hills.

The artists in Mean and Sneaking borrow select pages from Thoreau…using what they can find at hand, at home and around to make a living and art. They are awake to the potential of found and conventionally wasted material presented by a society relatively unconcerned with its excess. They make their art from accessible bits and pieces, leftover commercial wares, and common discarded debris. They are self-sufficient and scrappy, but they celebrate and elevate the material available to them. Their life on the outskirts is festive, lively and communal. The work they make provides an obvious reward. In this way our title becomes tongue in cheek, there is nothing mean or sneaking about the end result.

This exceptional exhibit showcases twelve very diverse artists and their intellectually rigorous work. Whether using textiles and cotton based material (Elaine Angelopoulos, Jennifer Bevill, Drew Shiflett), or construction material (Jeff Feld, Michael DeLucia, Amy Yao, Laura Braciale, Matt Callinan), or common household goods (B Wurtz, Mai Braun, Matthew Lusk, Elizabeth Adams); the artists are alert to the creative possibilities inherent in freely found material. They are most inspired by what is close at hand and they exploit the everyday world to potent effect.

Vicki Sher

No Plans For Today

Here's the latest show I am curating-I'm including my own work in this one with lots of great artists who embrace an open-ended way of working.

Some of the artists included so far are:

Franklin Evans

Lauren Luloff

Brion Nuda Rosch

Joseph Hart

Ky Anderson

Shaun Krupa

Vicki Sher

Daniel Wiener

Elisa Lendvay

Here's an initial statement for the show's theme:

“ I don’t even think it’s been a conscious choice of mine. I’ve only known one way to work and it’s been to follow, you know…my mind goes with the wind and where it goes I follow…”

David Scher

“I love studio practice”

Dona Nelson

I made a simple drawing of a houseplant with the words No Plans For Today at the bottom. It got a lot of attention from studio visitors. I think the words resonated in a way that was both communal and personal. When given the opportunity to show this work and I thought I'd bring together other artists who work this way--open-ended-ly.

Many artists go into the studio with an open end. These artists value their commitment to the studio as a venue for exploration and risk taking. Their avenue toward fresh and original results requires dispensing with a carefully devised plan of action. That is not to say that restrictions and specificity are not in play. Even artists who surrender to accident and surprise still enjoy setting complex limitations and devising systemic parameters. Their joy in the studio, in striking a balance and/or duking-it-out between strategy and reckless abandon is evident in their work.

It is a fitting time to celebrate this mode of working. The economy is down, and no one needs to be locked into thematic production to satisfy the market’s expectations. The instability of an uncertain economy has benefits in the studio. Artists can do what they want -as they should be doing all the time- but sometimes forget when the rigors of deadlines and financial pressure takes freedom away.

drawings 2010

Mean and Sneaking

This is a curatorial project I am working on for March 2010--Five Myles Gallery, Brooklyn:

Mean and Sneaking

B Wurtz, Mai Braun, Michael DeLucia, Laura Braciale, Amy Yao, Drew Shifflett, Jeff Feld, Matthew Lusk, Matt Callinan, Elaine Angelopoulos, Jenny Bevill, Andy Coolquitt, Josh Faught

“Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath….It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live…always on the limits …a very ancient slough….”

Henry David Thoreau: Where I have Lived and What I have Lived For, Economy

“People forget that I am trying to disappoint”

Gabriel Orozco; defending his Yogurt Caps.

"Mean and Sneaking" is taken from Thoreau about the state of living on the periphery; needing to make promises that can’t be kept, scrounging, borrowing, and removing oneself from the mores of the conventional social order. When Thoreau advocates for Economy, he does so with faith that people need not join the tide of material and commercial wealth seeking, but can follow a life aside and alone, where resourcefulness and self-sufficiency allow ample contentment with Nature as an alternative, substantive, and providing companion. But Thoreau presents an alternately peevish and gloomy attitude. Not everyone is so ready to head for the hills.

The artists in Mean and Sneaking borrow select pages from Thoreau…using what they can find at hand, at home and around to make a living and art. They are awake to the potential of found and conventionally wasted material presented by a society relatively unconcerned with its excess. To Thoreau they say “Thanks!” for validating and poeticizing life away from the rat race, the scrappy persistence and all, but “No thanks!” to the lonely and unsociable attitude. Their life on the outskirts is festive, filled with gift giving and celebration.

Like Gabriel Orozco, these artists stay connected and awake to the matter of daily life, but unlike Orozco, these artists aim to please, gratify and/or entertain. They are guided by a persistent homonym: Presence=Presents. Their use of cadged and modest material celebrates detritus, and shapes it into a generous gift.

OBSERVANT

OBSERVANT

by Vicki Sher

Artists: Cynthia Lin, Paolo Arao, Jenny Dubnau, Chris Doyle, Molly Springfield, Mike Bayne and others.

 

“The attempt to create beauty as perfectly as possible has led these artists to emphasize craft -- not at the expense of vision, but as its instrument.….superior craft intensifies sight so that it becomes insight,…”                       

                                                            Donald Kuspit,1999, describing the New Old Masterism

 

Donald Kuspit was referring to artists such as Odd Nerdrum, Julie Heffernan, and Eric Fischl, who aim for mastery in their paint and a forward path for representational work. The artists participating in OBSERVANT turn masterful technique toward a new source material: the digitalized image.  They all possess brilliant technical skills and a steadfast belief that reproducing the seen world faithfully will provide insights into that world. They also demonstrate that looking, when done with devotion, done methodically, or even with religious seriousness, approaches something the opposite of religion. Here, seeing is believing. The artists are "observant" and "extremist" in their painstaking depictions but, despite the religious fervor that those words bring to mind, they offer a decidedly undogmatic course: devotion to visual fact, specifically, digitalized visual fact.

 

These artists aim for exactitude, in a struggle to find a language with which to describe and explain, in all its complicated particularity, the world around them.  They take on their subjects with scientific eyes.  In all these cases, a technological support underlies the work but, paradoxically, the support is subverted in the end.  The computer, the scanner or digital camera speed our fluency with pictures, but these artists take opportunities to slow things down and re-assert the human pace and human comfort with slower absorption.  In doing so they posit that without full absorption, there is no meaning, or a diminished return from “just looking.” Translating a photo to drawing, Xerox to paint, etc., re-invigorates the image and at the same time demands of the viewer an act of concentration whose reward is a startling intimacy.

 

It is, moreover, a recurring act of faith for an artist to sit down and reproduce a photograph.  The power of an attentive hand is ages old, but has a peculiar contemporariness.  These images not only represent our world as it looks today, but also reflect our current technological tools for image-gathering and our specific ways of combining old and new.  How we see has changed as much as what we see, so even the basic art tools (pencil, oil paint) have new jobs to do to reestablish their validity.

February, 2009

Recital

"Lake Water Drawing"  by Vicki Sher, pencil on paper, 22" x 18", 2008.

I came across  the Poem "Lake Water" by David Ferry in the New Yorker last summer (2007).  I liked it, but filed it away in the back of my mind.  The longer the poem stayed with me, the more I realized its perfection.   I'm making drawings by copying the poem over and over.

Lake Water Drawing, 2008.

Lake Water Drawings, (installation view of progression of first 4).

LAKE WATER

by David Ferry

It is a summer afternoon in October.

I am sitting on a wooden bench, looking out

At the lake through a tall screen of evergreens,

Or rather, looking out across the plane of the lake,

Seeing the light shaking upon the water

As if it were a shimmering of heat.

Yesterday, when I sat here, it was the same,

The same displaced out-of-season effect.

Seen twice it seemed a truth was being told.

Some of the trees I can see across the lake

Have begun to change, but it is as if the air

Had entirely given itself over to summer,

With the intention of denying its own proper nature.

 

There is a breeze perfectly steady and persistent

Blowing in toward shore from the other side

Or from the world beyond the other side.

The mild sound of the little tapping waves

The breeze has caused—there’s something infantile

About it, a baby at the breast. The light

Is moving and not moving upon the water.

 

The breeze picks up slightly but still steadily,

The increase in the breeze becomes the mild

Dominant event, compelling with sweet oblivious

Authority alterations in light and shadow,

Alterations in the light of the sun on the water,

Which becomes at once denser and more quietly

Excited, like a concentration of emotions

That had been dispersed and scattered and now were not.

Then there’s the mitigation of the shadow of a cloud,

And the light subsides a little, into itself.

 

Although this is a lake it is as if

A tide were running mildly into shore.

The sound of the water so softly battering

Against the shore is decidedly sexual,

In its liquidity, its regularity,

Its persistence, its infantile obliviousness.

It is as if it had come back to being

A beginning, an origination of life.

 

The plane of the water is like a page on which

Phrases and even sentences are written,

But because of the breeze, and the turning of the year,

And the sense that this lake water, as it is being

Experienced on a particular day, comes from

Some source somewhere, beneath, within, itself,

Or from somewhere else, nearby, a spring, a brook,

Its pure origination somewhere else,

It is like an idea for a poem not yet written

And maybe never to be completed, because

The surface of the page is like lake water,

That takes back what is written on its surface,

And all my language about the lake and its

Emotions or its sweet obliviousness,

Or even its being like an origination,

Is all erased with the changing of the breeze

Or because of the heedless passing of a cloud.

 

When, moments after she died, I looked into

Her face, it was as untelling as something natural,

A lake, say, the surface of it unreadable,

Its sources of meaning unfindable anymore.

Her mouth was open as if she had something to say;

 

But maybe my saying so is a figure of speech.