Dispatch

Gleaners

Shape of a Pocket

 Grace Munakata: through May 2 at b. sakata garo.

Many artists try to capture the shape and feel of human consciousness; but painter David Wetzl attempts something even more ambitious: the depiction of human existence as a tug-of-war between all of the isms that have ever existed. Never mind the so-called zeitgeist. Wetzl wants to show how every belief system in human history continues to shape our experience.

In most of his works, Wetzl uses grids as a general organizing principal to represent networks, both human and digital, as well as landscape. Over these he lays tribal masks, bridges, broadcast towers, figures, color fields, landmark buildings, highways, cities, circuit boards and animals. If you feel a sense of vertigo there’s a good reason: Each panel is the product of hundreds of hours of labor in which multiple layers of imagery have been laid down, sanded and varnished to create a transparent, labyrinthine effect reminiscent of “Brazil,” the Terry Gilliam film that portrayed the world as a bureaucratic maze of endless ductwork.

Linda Day: Pulse Beyond Between # 10

In “Horizons,” an exposition of nine acrylic paintings, Linda Day has taken the basic tenets of hard-edge, geometric abstraction and turned them upside down.  Where in the recent past she employed the orthodoxies of the genre — precise lines, bold colors and repetitive shapes — to create an optical buzz, her paintings now reveal something entirely different: references to landscape that inject moodiness into what has historically been an icy, formalist province.  

 Unlike Kenneth Noland and others of his ilk who formulated this style in the early 1960s, Day embraces beauty and the sheer tactile joy of manipulating pigment.  In horizontally stacked layers of mostly muted colors laid down in wavy and sometimes jagged lines that spill out over the edge of the frame, Day’s new paintings display a visible, archeological record of their creation. 

Pulse Beyond Between # 8

 You may think you’re looking at conventional stripe paintings, but such thoughts dissolve quickly.  How, exactly, this happens is unclear.  But there are clues.  One is that Day’s lines are never straight.  They roll and slope and pile up like towering confections in a plethora of close-hued colors whose glossy textures recall pulled taffy.  (From “Pulse: Between/Beyond # 8,” a painting looks good enough to eat, I recorded more than a dozen shades before exhausting my color vocabulary.)  Another clue is that these colors are achieved by an improvisational process of layering which yields unintentional Rorschach-like artifacts that linger amorphously below the surface. 

 Bands of colors define themes and counter themes.  Gently loping lines tap out rhythms and polyrhythms, and subsurface shadow blots add accents.  If it’s true, as Josef Albers said, that “the origin of art is the discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect” then “Pulse: Between/Beyond # 8″ qualifies as Exhibit A.  It’s an orchestra for the eye.

 The same holds for the other major work in this show, “Pulse: Between/Beyond # 10.” A large-scale (3 x 11′) mash-up of forest and sea rendered in blue/green shades, it evokes a never-ending horizon – something that hard-edge abstraction (or color field painting as it was also known) claimed to do but rarely achieved.  Day’s ambiguous lines and interleaved colors produce a hypnotic, transporting effect.  

Chime # 3

 It’s instructive to note what preceded the current Pulse series.  “Chime #3″, from a body of work made in 2006, features short vertical bands organized in a grid that start out pale at the edges and build to a searing orange crescendo at the center.  Combined, they form multiple perspectives of what looks like a constructivist cityscape bisected vertically by a superhighway — an update of Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings in which opposing color swatches stand-in for ones and zeros to represent an information-saturated universe.  The contrast between the two bodies of work couldn’t be sharper; it demonstrates the distance she’s traveled in a short time.

 Stuart Allen’s sculptures, which reference light, space and flight with kites and other forms made from sail cloth, were an interesting counterpoint.  Five were on view here in “Measured.”

Stuart Allen: Air Water Kites

 One, a box kite, hung from the gallery’s clerestory ceiling; the other four were wall-mounted and used repetition as a key ingredient.  “One consists of seven sail-shapes affixed to a wall with turnbuckles; another featured 60 small box kites deployed perpendicularly around a corner, a possible reference to molecular geometry.  While Allen’s work deals with environmental factors, it typically appears indoors, which means it can sometimes feel a bit constrained when not arrayed across big spaces as it was in 2007 at the San Antonio Museum of Art. 

 Yet the opposite can also be true.  “A Kite for Flying in the Air” and “A Kite for Flying in Water” – two well-paired departures from Allen’s ultra-minimalist aesthetic – resemble battle shields garnished with braided rope.  That uncharacteristic piece of ornamentation thrust the work into a different realm, bringing to mind the kinkier aspects of Mathew Barney’s work, which in this context was not a bad thing. 

 Both Day and Allen seem to have inched out of their comfort zones.  Day simplified, Allen complicated, and in so doing they created a symbiosis of compatible opposites – one that points toward fresh and exciting directions for both.

 ”Horizons” by Linda Day and “Measured” by Stuart Allen closed at JayJay October 25, 2008.

Much has been written about Katherine Sherwood’s recovery from a cerebral hemorrhage that debilitated the left side of her brain and paralyzed the right half of her body.  The event, which occurred in 1997, forced her to not only relearn language and basic motor skills, but also to paint with her left hand.  While the story of her rehabilitation feeds our thirst for heroic reinvention and fuels the myth of disability as a door to enhanced perception and self knowledge, it also seems to have also obscured what makes Sherwood’s art so compelling. 

            In this compact show of eight large and small-scale works from 2006 to 2008, Sherwood, in what amounts to a visual roman á clef, demonstrated why she is one of the most important painters working today.

            At first glance, she appears to be tilling the now-familiar soil of biomorphic abstraction, but her forms are so uniquely stylized that they can’t really be compared to any of the biologically based formulations we’ve seen in this genre.  Her work is sui generis.  One reason is that every painted line in Sherwood’s work is derived from a 17^th century text containing images known as Solomon Seals – symbols that the biblical king devised to summon spirits and extract wisdom.  In Sherwood’s hands, these forms appear not as stamps, insignia or crests, but as highly controlled paint pours.  They puddle and crack and then taper off into thin, loopy lines that recall both Franz Kline’s architectonic geometries and Pollock’s late-period flirtation with figure-like forms; which is to say, they rivet the eye in a way that makes them elegantly iconic.

Cajal's Revenge

            She also photo transfers to almost every canvas angiograms of her own brain, which contrary to what you might expect, look like the veins of aquatic plants or exotic trees.  She also transfers more easily recognizable images of the cerebral cortex from 16^th century medical texts. Typically, Sherwood also includes strong horizontal lines painted atop interlocking geometric blocks.  Combined, these elements ignite a visual dynamic that blurs the distinction between representation and abstraction, since much of what appears to be abstract in her pictures is really photo documentation of scientific fact.  As is her trademark, plastic activity, rendered in what she calls “ugly colors,” takes place off-center, against mostly neutral grounds – either crème-colored, pale yellow, ochre or pea-green.

            The most powerful example of these oppositional forces shows up in “Firmer Spirit,” a 42 x 36″ print in which paint poured in the shape of a loosely caricatured face, floats atop a cyan-hued tangle of brain matter framed by two orange geometric boxes.  This visage appears to be staring at an unseen point beyond the picture like a leering mask, mocking the hubris of an artist (or a viewer) who thinks she can one up nature by creating abstract shapes that are more compelling than the microscopic forms that reside inside her own skull.  I doubt that Sherwood entertained this thought, but the picture certainly lends itself to such interpretations.

            On the other hand, by coupling digital representations of the body with man-made symbols of magical conjuring that have been manipulated beyond recognition, Sherwood is keenly aware of the common ground shared by art and science in their quest to explain the human spirit.  The results, as seen in the pictures on view here, feel a lot like puzzles: they challenge you to consider (and confront) the very nature of consciousness and, by extension, the abyss of mortality. 

            “Transports Instantaneously,” a 72″ x 72″ canvas, uses the shape of a cross as a portal through which you view images of the artist’s angiograms overlaid by biomorphic blobs that look like crossections of brain matter.  These appear in quadrants of a window framed by lava-like flows of navy-blue paint that open out onto looping ovoid gestures.  “Cajal’s Revenge,” a 64″ x 50″ painting named for an early 20^th century brain researcher, unfolds with a similar dynamic. It juxtaposes the tree-like shape of an angiogram in the top left corner with an accretion of multicolored, cracked paint spills that fill the picture’s bottom half and resemble an exposed archeological dig seen from the air.  Thin lines connecting the two halves suggest the fragile link between body and brain.

            In only one work in this exhibition, “Hush, Hush,” a 38″ x 30″ print, does Sherwood depict one of the seals realistically.  It’s a circular shape whose interior forms recall the medieval motifs that show up frequently these days in P&D.  And while it’s instructive and interesting to see Sherwood’s source material unfiltered, the image, even while offset by other, more lyrical shapes, makes the picture feel diminished in comparison to her richly hued, highly textured canvases.

Hush Hush

            If a recent (2008) painting, “Body Bingo,” is any indication of a trend, Sherwood may be starting to express herself more economically.  This 48″ x 60″ canvas is dominated by two dark puddles of paint that sit at the bottom center.  Running up the left side are three horizontal bands topped by another of those orange boxes.  Higher up, Sherwood superimposes a calligraphic shape over a bingo board and a small swatch of an angiogram, which here looks like an x-ray printed as a cyanotype.  The painting, like so many in Sherwood’s oeuvre, is an enigma – one you can’t stop looking at.                                                                                                      

            Part of what makes her work so alluring is the sheer number of styles that coalesce: gestural and geometric abstraction, photography, minimalism and color field painting.  Sherwood maintains she hasn’t studied or employed these styles in a conscious manner, but instead arrived at pictorial conclusions through a laborious trial-and-error process.  In the end, there’s a fierce compositional logic at work in these paintings, and it exerts an almost vertiginous pull, bringing viewers face to face with Sherwood’s obsession with the brain’s mysteries.  

            Her paintings and prints don’t do much to explain those mysteries; Sherwood isn’t much interested in illustrating medical science, only in amplifying the mysteries and casting them in sharper relief.

Abstract painting has had plenty of passionate, articulate champions over the years, but few have exercised as much material inventiveness as Roland Reiss.  In the firmament of LA art, Reiss occupies a unique station – that of cutting-edge artist and academic visionary. 

There and Here

   For 30 years beginning in 1971, Reiss led the art department at Claremont Graduate University, taking a fledgling program and transforming it into a creative laboratory, equal in strength and prestige to the best institutions on the West Coast.  He also maintained a highly successful studio career with gallery and museum shows throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia.  Reiss retired in 2001, but only from academia: that year he launched the Painting’s Edge program at Idyllwild Arts, a two-week forum in the San Jacinto Mountains that painters and critics say is the best idea exchange of its kind.

Begin at End

“Painting is first and foremost always about light,” Reiss observes in his downtown LA studio. “But the idea that you can refract, reflect, contain and transmit light in new ways, including the exposition of it in colored, transparent volumes or iridescent, pearlescent and interference-colored surfaces of different densities is exciting.”  Reiss speaks fluidly and emphatically in a commanding baritone, projecting the force of an intellect that has always linked media and message.  Semiotics and behavioral research, for example, have been long-term interests.  So when Reiss says “the psychological aspect of visual perception” is what drives him “to intensify the power of abstract form as signifier,” you begin to understand that his paintings aren’t just random collections of environmental artifacts, but explorations of consciousness.   Reiss first attracted international attention with the Plexiglas-encased, diorama-like slices of life he called “miniatures”. Fueled by Umberto Ecco’s writings on semiotics, Robbe-Grillet’s novels and the films of Fellini and Bergman, these quasi-anthropological investigations into conformity, family ritual, consumerism, mobility and corporate culture mixed voyeuristic thrills with biting social commentary.  Critics, curators and collectors embraced them.  But by the time the Barnsdall mounted a 17-year survey of that work in 1991, Reiss “had grown tired of social subject matter and wanted something deeper, more spiritual.”  So he quit sculpture for painting that year and vowed to take the medium “beyond where it has been.”

Floater

             ”I live in LA and I think my work is about the experience of LA light,” says Reiss.  “It is about my experience of the world, about how I feel, see and think.”

Rogue Wave

Nature's Way

Ian Harvey/Koo Sung Yoo Figure Detail

If awards were given for the most labor-intensive art of 2007, Ian Harvey and Koo Kyung Sook would surely be contenders.  During a residency at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, the couple collaborated on two 9′ x 11′ “paintings,” each composed of 2,112 individual abstract works executed on blank business cards.  For five months they worked 15-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week to create the pictorial elements that are stitched together in these eye-grabbing, materially rich pictures.

            Harvey, who joined the Sac State faculty in 2006, is a formalist.  His art is all about paint and how it can be pushed, prodded, poured and mixed with other ingredients that, when applied to paper or canvas, look like snapshots of geological processes.  Koo divides her time between Sacramento and her native South Korea where is a professor at Chungnam National University.  Her sculpture and installations focus on the body: specifically, the physical, biological and cultural essence of being female in Korea, one of the most patriarchal societies on Earth.  While her work often begins as a social statement realized through organic, photographic and industrial processes, it almost always ends up addressing larger issues.

Harvey & Koo in Bemis Studio

            She’s built totemic structures out of bamboo and seaweed; rolled her body in photo chemicals to make life-sized, Yves Klein-inspired “bodygrams” (or “anthropometries” as Klein called them); poured molten iron into concrete molds to cast the shape of infants; and woven seaweed into clothing that’s been allowed to rot and sprout fungus.  Harvey’s output is equally diverse.  He’s roamed from thinly painted, abstract “narrative” works to highly controlled paint “spills” to quasi-representational pictures that mix African color sensibilities with a kind of surrealistic pointillism.

            “Collaborations” fuses Koo’s bodygrams with Harvey’s paint pouring to achieve stark, corporeal forms with a texture that recalls Dubuffet’s Corps de Dame.  As a team the artists find common ground improvising: figuring out at the moment of creation, what, exactly, their materials will do and how they will respond to what happens.  (Prior to this, Harvey hadn’t done much figurative work, and Koo had never assembled anything from “readymade” parts.)  The result of their collaboration is a kind of cut-and-paste Art Brut, an electrifying vision of human life as a turbulent cycle of regeneration and decay.

            “Figure 2″ details the former.  Its swirling, psychedelic colors look like they were poured onto the cards from a bucket of egg yolk mixed with various shades of enamel: red, blue and black.  Each picture element appears to be in one of two conditions: molten and ready to slide off the wall, or else sun-baked and brittle.  At the center they combine to form a figure, but not one you can easily bring into focus.  Shard-like, fragmented and shot-through, it gyrates and pulses, sending the eye lurching back and forth across the picture.  This deliberate creation of a central image with no visual center forces viewers to contemplate messy, gluey essence of human life as a fluid transaction with all that surrounds it.  Which is not at all unpleasant, as each component piece is a fully realized painting worthy of prolonged contemplation. 

Figure 1

And while this fact begs the question of whether the parts are more interesting than the whole, what really matters here – and what’s truly amazing – is that the artists have built a coherent picture from such seemingly inchoate pieces.

            The same holds for the companion piece, “Figure 1.”  Viewed from the edges inward, its orange-hued neutral colors gradually dissolve into to a headless figure that appears to have been constructed from burnt cinders – a sort of frame-by-frame vision of a funeral pyre.  But the picture (whose key ingredients are shellac and graphite) is highly nuanced.  The areas surrounding the figure vibrate with ovoid forms that read as cellular structures in transition.  This emphasis on atomization, on fracturing, injects a certain levity that speaks more about natural cycles than of the weight of history or its overarching mythologies.  Yet there’s an epic quality, too, owing to the sheer scale of the enterprise.

            Their effort has drawn comparisons to several artists, most notably Chuck Close.  But where Close uses a repetitive, carefully calibrated series of interlocking, marks to create riveting, photo-realistic portraits of individuals, Harvey and Koo use abstraction to build genderless composites that represent humanity’s carbon-and-water essence.  Another obvious difference is that close-up, Close’s portraits don’t yield much pleasure; his squiggles, while supremely functional, are about as entertaining as coffee beans.  The Harvey-Koo pictures work on both the micro and macro level.

            Collaborations often entail self-cancelling compromises.  But in this case, the compromises, whatever they were, showcased only strengths: Harvey’s as an alchemist and Koo’s as an explorer of biological destiny – something that may not have been obvious to casual viewers, despite the inclusion in the show of two bodygrams from Koo and three small Harvey paintings.

            Luckily, a well-orchestrated confluence of exhibits allowed Sacramentans to make those connections vis-à-vis Harvey’s 15-year survey at JayJay in May and Koo’s appearance in three group shows last fall: one in Davis at the Pence Gallery and two at Sac State, the latter of which she curated and timed to run concurrently with “Collaborations.” Together, they demonstrated their capabilities and established their bona fides locally.

            However they choose to work in the future, together or apart, I eagerly await the sequel. 

Ian Harvey – Koo Kyung Koo “Collaborations” closed at the University Library Gallery Annex Jan. 11, 2008.

Installation View: Strange Fascination

"Strange Fascination: New Sculpture by Julia Couzens," is a sprawling, near-gothic accretion of accumulated "junk" that is both installation and performance.  It spreads "parasitically" across floors, walls and ventilation ducts, and reveals a continuously changing face, owing to periodic revisions by the artist over a three-month run at the Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento. It’s Technicolor jumble cum jungle.  Spread out across a compact, low-ceilinged space, Couzens’ raw materials (steel cages, yarn, electrical tape, cloth, lighting fixtures, pipe cleaners, fabric, crocheted blankets and doilies) reveal an obsessive, hyperactive working process whose apparent governing principle is to resist any force (read: intellect) that might dictate a predetermined outcome.   Couzens, one of the region’s most accomplished artists, has intellect to spare, but she’s is adamant that her art not be "about anything."  "Art is a barricade to the act of making," she says, quoting Terry Allen.  But like many process artists who work intuitively with found (i.e. non-art) materials — Jessica Stockholder, Annette Messenger and Judy Pfaff are a few influences that come to mind — Couzens readily concedes that materials and objects carry their own charges, and that the working process often reveals unarticulated thoughts and emotions.  That’s certainly the case here.  But unlike previous Couzens exhibits where references to the body and to nature prevailed, these works, even with their allusions to natural forms, push right up to the edge of topicality, with symbols of domesticity and femininity abounding. 

Insomia

The centerpiece, "Insomnia", pulls viewers in with a black negligee suspended from the wall in the shape of a witch’s cap.  Midair, it connects — via a bra-shaped piece of fabric — to a highly ornamented chandelier that rests on the floor like an anchor.  The object is wrapped so thoroughly in tape that it appears to be painted — black.  Add to that, cords of brightly hued electrical tape and bits of cloth and you have something that borders on fetishistic.  What’s striking is how each of these elements is transformed into its opposite:  An otherwise sexy night gown becomes an outsize piece of Halloween garb; a light fixture becomes a weight, sunk by the artist’s Rococo excess.  Strangely, I felt as if the piece could become self animating a la Tinguely and dissolve in a puff of smoke.  The difference of course, is that the noise you hear isn’t mechanical, but a kind of psychic clanging in your head. Similar inversions of meaning take place in "Strange Fascination," the show’s title piece.  It’s a thicket of crushed metal cages crudely wrapped in colored yarns to which a crocheted blanket was later appended and twisted into the shape of a figure with bound feet.  To that point-blank (and wholly self-explanatory blast at suburban domesticity) Couzens added a small collection of crocheted bottle caps which she found in a thrift store.  You’d be hard-pressed to find a more blatant example of craft run amok.  Obsession, as evidenced by Couzens’ repeated use of yarn and tape to wrap nearly everything, is what gives this exhibition its nervous, animating force.  It’s a force that seems to call into question conventional meanings by linking the component parts of each piece in metaphorical chains of causality. 

Take, for example, the metal garden gate that is the focal point of "Untitled 2005".  Like the chandelier in "Insomnia," it, too, is wrapped in black cloth tape.  Far more ominously, Couzens attaches an ungainly assemblage of yarn and cloth that looks, literally, like a home-spun malignancy.  Beneath, on the floor, rests a heap of multi-colored fabric swatches known as tulle – the diaphanous stuff teen-age ballerinas wear.  Just don’t look for any Sugar Plum Fairies in this not-so-sweet home.

Before the Glorius

Couzens isn’t always trying to tear the smiling face off life’s surfaces.  Sometimes sheer beauty suffices.  "Before the Glorious" is a small, delicate, wall-mounted construction of hair-thin wire that looks like a wisp of smoke.  It is a throwback to an earlier period in which organic abstraction – particularly references to dense foliage in the Sacramento Delta — played a more central role in Couzens practice.  Another reminder of Couzens’ lighter side is an untitled "drawing" made from tiny bits of orange tape on notebook paper.  The pieces are arrayed in a mandala-like fashion, a code to be deciphered, but also savored for its pure, lyrical quality.  As a child growing up in Auburn, Couzens spent a lot of time outdoors "digging," she says, "for China."  Now, in the same spot, caring for an aging parent, the two sit side by side on a sofa.  One cross-stitches; the other wraps found objects in yarn, tape and electrical wire with no apparent sense of irony.  The mother’s obsession is self-contained and oriented to completing a specific task.  Couzens’ operates unconsciously, directing her energy outward — "Pushing my way through a thicket, hard in my position" is how she describes it.  That act, in and of itself, summarizes as well as anything, the sort of material alchemy that has always been at the center of Couzens’ art.  Think of it as surrealism without a manifesto. Peter Stegall’s work couldn’t provide a sharper contrast.  A painter who’s leaned toward shiny, alluring surfaces and shapes that recall Matisse cutouts, Stegall is a formalist to the core.  Weight, balance, form, spacial relationships and especially color, are his paramount concerns, and in "Paintings and Constructions," he proves just how well he can juggle those elements.  The paintings, most of them about a foot square, are highly seductive owing to gloss enamel paint.  Problem is, these flat, brilliantly colored surfaces don’t always give viewers a way in, even though in larger works Stegall warps the forms to add dimensionality. His 3-D constructions — enamel-coated, wall-mounted, wood pieces, also about a foot square – tell a different story.  They look like models for the kind of massive steel sculptures seen public spaces.  The advantage, here, at this intimate size, is that you can really see the artist’s thinking.  It’s a potent synthesis of Constructivist shapes and multi-colored lines of the sort favored by Sol Lewitt.   The lines appear as stacked grids, and are interrupted by various shapes (triangles, circles, half-circles, squares and biomorphic shapes and lines) that cast provocative shadows.  Whether they’re an overt nod to painter Elizabeth Murray or a wry comment on the act of painting itself is hard to tell.  What’s clear is that Stegall’s acute attention to detail and his mastery of form, color and balance are things to behold when he expresses himself three-dimensionally.  Here’s hoping he gets the opportunity to do so on a much larger scale.

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  "Strange Fascination: New Sculpture by Julia Couzens" and "Paintings and Constructions" by Peter Stegall closed February 26 at the Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento.