The show is emphasizes that limiting one’s gaze to the masters of Contemporary Art does not allow the mind to acknowledge he innovative practice of artists such as Lisa Williamson, Dashiell Manley, Hugh Scott-Douglas, Oscar Tuazan, Ryan Sullivan and Carol Bove to name a few. What makes this group of young contemporary artists stand out among their generation is their ability to pilfer from the past and make it their own. The exhibition sheds light on the more intricate and complex thought process being the objects they are making and demonstrates how they are deserving of more than a footnote in a rich history of abstraction or a nomenclature preceded by “Neo” or “Post”. The dialogue each of these artists is having with history builds upon that of previous generations, but it is important to recognize that each has something novel to say, providing us with a different way of seeing art while foxing us to acquiesce not only what it is, but what it can and will be.

For over a decade, Lipps has been developing a photographic process that involves cutting out images from publications, arranging them in sculptural still lives, re-photographing the arrangements, then printing the image several times larger than the original objects. This process, while decidedly hand crafted, evokes digital and contemporary ideas of appropriation, montage, and the evolving nature of photographic technology.

In HORIZON/S, Lipps focused on source material from the American arts and culture magazine, Horizon, which debuted in September 1958. The publication provided a popular visual platform, disseminating various art historical narratives, especially the grand arc of Modernism. Focusing on the first decade in print, Lipps carefully cut out images from vintage issues and curated these selections into unifying groups that betray the original context and meaning of source imagery. These groupings are then lit and re-photographed into complex tableaux that rupture historical and cultural narratives about how we relate to images, artifacts, and the collections that help us interpret them.

Matt Lipps received his MFAfrom University of California, Irvine in 2004. His work is in the collection of Los Angeles MOCA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Saatchi Collection, London, UK. In early 2011, Lipps’ work was part of LAXART’s billboard project in Los Angeles. He lives and works in San Francisco and Los Angeles. He is currently the Assistant Professor of Art at San Francisco State University.

HORIZON/S is Lipp’s first solo museum exhibition and the first time that the entireHORIZON/S body of work has ever been exhibited MattLipps: HORIZON/S is organized by UCR California Museum ofPhotograhy, and curated by UCR ARTSblock Exhibition Designer Jeff Cain.

UCR ARTSblock, which includes California Museum of Photography, Culver Center of the Arts, and Sweeney Art Gallery are located at 3824 & 3834 Main St., Riverside, CA 92501. The three venues are open Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m., plus 6-9 p.m. for First Thursday ArtWalks. Admission is $3, which includes entry to all the venues and is free during First Thursday ArtWalks (6-9 p.m.). For film screenings, Culver Center opens 30 minutes prior to the start time.

Krowswork is pleased to announce DocumentO, an exhibition of visual art coming out of Oakland in 2012.* The art included captures the energetic, radical, and creative Oakland zeitgeist. The show is organized as an unofficial satellite of Documenta 13, taking place from June 9-September 18 in Kassel, Germany. Oakland seems to be perfectly positioned to speak to the questions (above) that Documenta’s curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev posed for this year’s exhibition.
Oakland has spent much of the last year in a state of siege. And before that, and before that.
Oakland has perpetually been a source of hope for change for itself. But now, its state is as a model of what hope” looks like in America and the world.  Oakland has spent its history in retreat. Its very nature is one of withdrawal from naming or declaring itself.  Oakland right now is being asked to perform for the world. 

Please join us on June 22, from 6-9, at the opening reception for the exhibition.
Krowswork is located at 480 23rd Street, side entrance, Oakland.
www.krowswork.com

Featuring:

D-L Alvarez
Anonymous
Jonathan Berger
Michael Bilsborough
Matt Borruso
Kathe Burkhart
Luke Butler
David Everitt-Carlson
Brendan Carroll
Mavado Charon
Sam Dargan 
Pia Dehne
Daniel Derwelis 
Eric Doeringer 
Peter Eide 
Carl Ferrero 
Gregory Green 
Teenie Harris 
Cliff Hengst 
Christian Holstad
Scott Hug 
Dennis Kane 
Brenda Ann Kenneally 
David King 
Lisa Kirk 
Noah Lyon
Michael Magnan 
Yeni Mao
Darrin Martin
Rachel Mason 
Jan-Holger Mauss 
Salvor (Ross Menuez) 
John Monteith 
Glynnis McDaris 
Mary Nicholson
Mark Ohe
Gwenaël Rattke 
Nick Rule 
Tara Sinn 
Superm (Brian Kenny Slava Mogutin)
Paul Taylor 
Margaret Tedesco 
Scott Treleaven
Jan Wandrag

Curated by Billy Miller

http://www.munchgallery.com/up_against_it
Munch Gallery
245 Broome Street (at Ludlow St.)
New York, NY 10002
212.228.1600 / 646.209.5457

This commitment to recording the histories and bodies that become consigned to the periphery, particularly queer and feminist histories, has been ongoing throughout Carland’s artistic practice. From 1997 to 2005, she co-ran Mr. Lady Records and Videos, an independent record label and video-art distribution company that was dedicated to the production and distribution of queer and feminist culture. In the 1990s, she produced a series of influential fanzines, including I (heart) Amy Carter. Carland has contributed to the album art of underground bands like Bikini Kill, The Fakes, and The Butchies. She exhibits her work internationally, and her photographs have been published in many books, including The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire and Lesbian Art in America. She is represented by Silverman Gallery in San Francisco and is an associate professor at California College of the Arts, where she also chairs the photography program.

One example of Carland’s apt utilization of absence is her 2002 project, Lesbian Beds. Seen from a bird’s-eye view, a bed fills each frame in this series. Each bed is unique, with their rumpled comforters and sheets of different colors, strewn pillows, a single sock, a shadow from a window above, a book tucked under a blanket, or a cat crawling to where its owner recently slept. The images feel intensely personal and voyeuristic; this is the everyday, fresh-out-of-bed view of a bed. There are no hospital corners or perfectly arranged duvets on display. Identifying these uninhabited quarters as the sites of lesbian domesticity, Carland seems to be representing the dearth of queer representation itself. Viewers are confronted with the home life of subjects who have been relegated to societal inequality because of their choices of people to share their life.

These beds are absent of their partners. Viewers cannot see the women who inhabit them, but we are made intensely aware of the details of the everyday setting of their intimacy. While all this sounds politically serious, one still feels the artist’s playful intervention in the imagery. Centered in the bed of Untitled (Lesbian Bed #13) is a throw pillow bursting out of its coverlet, stretching into a vaginal shape. This is the authentic yet light touch of Carland’s approach: the staged vaginal reference feels lighthearted and humorous without diminishing the import of underscoring the marginalization of lesbian life.

Humor is a regular tool and preoccupation of Carland’s, in particular stand-up comedy and the often-obscured history of female comics. Her 2010 body of work, I’m Dying Up Here, is a series of photographs of bare stages, either vacant or with a lone female performer. All of the images with performers capture their subjects mid-routine: hunched over in a banana suit, face covered with a mop, doing a handstand with cowboy-boot-adorned feet splayed in the air, wearing a paper bag on her head with a hole cut out for her tongue. The subjects also have their faces covered; they are anonymous entertainers on the quest for a laugh. Many of these images are funny, but mostly they are thick with an uncomfortable desperation and isolation. The title of the series points directly to that cringe-worthy moment when the joke has died, the audience has turned, and the stand-up’s efforts are in vain.

Carland has exhibited these photographs along with framed punch lines from famous female comedians like Phyllis Diller and Moms Mabely. Many of these punch lines were of a self-deprecating nature; for those few women in this boys’ club, demeaning themselves was a common tactic to get a laugh. Though comedy was and is a place where gender roles could be made more flexible and societal mores potentially loosened, many early female comedians were discouraged, disgraced, and effaced by their male counterparts. Carland’s photographs re-perform the flailing female comic as both a tribute to the history of these women and as a poignant record of their vulnerability and self-humiliation.

The series’s images of empty stages, with only a microphone, stool, and glittery backdrop, come almost as a relief from the pain of the implied failed routines. The absence of the female performer in these works is the potent reminder of the histories deemed less significant and of the figures who struggle to be seen. The persistence of Carland’s practice is that she not only refuses to give up on the overlooked subjects but she is also committed to reminding viewers of the ongoing ache of this omission. 

Link

Non-representational photography lives in this contested middle ground between material reality and photographic illusion—fact and fiction—first and second natures. Today, anyone who has a cell phone can take and send digital pictures instantaneously. In response to this “snapshot” culture, many artists are returning to the study of photography’s underlying properties to consciously construct an image of reality. Second nature looks at the contemporary embrace of the highly fabricated image as a return to an earlier time in photography’s history. As such, this exhibition takes up the subject of abstract photography through a temporal pairing—presenting the scientific and expressionistic experimentation of photography in the first half of the 20th century from the Museum’s collection with explorations of the medium today.

Freed from its duty to represent, abstract photography continues to be a catchall genre for the blending of mediums and disciplines. It is an arena to test photography. By intermixing works from deCordova’s collection by György Kepes, Harold Edgerton, and Aaron Siskind from the 1930s-1950s, with works by photographers practicing today including Eileen Quinlan, Arthur Ou, and Yamini Nayar, second nature focuses on the continual probing and questioning of the medium and conventions of picture-making that complicate our understanding of photography. The artists in second nature grow the ever expanding field of photography by revisiting themes of hyperrealism, constructivism, and the materiality of time through light as well as processes of analog photography.

This exhibition is not intended to be a survey of abstract photography, but rather a focused study of art being made today that revisits and continues some of the themes and creative explorations of 20th century photography. The tracing of this lineage, made evident through historical juxtapositions, will overlay a contemporary lens with which to interpret our modern predecessors.

Artists include: Mel Bochner, Stan Brakhage, Cree Bruins, Caleb Charland, Harold Edgerton, Matthew Gamber, Meggan Gould, Bryan Graf, Greg Hayes, Julia Hechtman, György Kepes, Alejandra Laviada, Isaac Layman, Aspen Mays, Yamini Nayar, Arthur Ou, Anthony Pearson, Daniel Phillips, Eileen Quinlan, Mariah Robertson, Hugh Scott-Douglas, Aaron Siskind, Luke Stettner, Sara VanDerBeek, and Jennifer West.

second nature: abstract photography then and now will be installed on two floors with different durations:

The Catherine S. England Photo Study Space, the Phyllis and Jerome Lyle Rappaport Media Space, and Arcade Gallery (2nd floor): May 27–August 12, 2012

Dewey Family Gallery (3rd floor): May 27, 2012–April 21, 2013

The exhibition features nineteen artists and artist groups who work in a variety of media and with a range of methods. Select artists in You, Me, We, She take the public or groups of people as their subjects and investigate social and relational concerns; others create work that conceptually speaks to communal identity. Additional artists in the exhibition are engaged in a practice that is defined by a performative, process-based, or site-specific approach. While the level of finish or output varies between artists, all share a concern with the idea of exchange and exploration of quotidian experience – artworks act as social interstices and attempts to redefine community revolve around the complex forms of identification that exist between individuals and larger collective entities, identities that are in re-negotiation through encounters with others.

Artists in the exhibition:

Becca Albee & Kathleen Hanna, Art Book Club, Anna Banana, Johanna Billling, Tammy Rae Carland, Stephanie Diamond, DISBAND, Annika Eriksson, Kara Hearn, Donna Henes, Corita Kent, Fawn Krieger, Justine Kurland, Jennifer Levonian, Shani Peters, Mika Rottenberg, Julia Sherman, Francine Spiegel, Martha Wilson

Events in conjunction with the exhibition:

DISBAND performs at AUX Performance Space 
Wednesday March 14 at 9 pm

DISBAND was active in the downtown art scene in Manhattan from 1978 to 1982. Members Ilona Granet, Donna Henes, Diane Torr and Martha Wilson reunited in 2008, and continue to blur the line between performance and live music with their feminist acappella songs.

AUX Performance Space, 319 North 11th Street, Philadelphia, PA
http://www.auxperformancespace.blogspot.com/

Community of Community at Fleisher/Ollman
Friday March 16 – Saturday March 17 during gallery hours

Stephanie Diamond gathers with collaborating artists for Community of Community, a retreat wherein participants and visitors interact, share and support each other in a variety of ad hoc activities.

The Art Book Club at Fleisher/Ollman
Saturday March 31 at 3 pm

The Art Book Club-a group of artists based in New York City that meets regularly to discuss an assigned reading-invites the public to take part in a conversation about Katy Siegel’s book, Since ’45: America and the Making of Contemporary Art.

http://artbookclub.wordpress.com/

About the Artists:

Collaborators Becca Albee and Kathleen Hanna asked New York City women, “what do you carry that gives you a sense of security?” The resulting installation In Case of…New York City represents not only an archive of physical objects that these women carried daily on their person, but also the shared experience of post-traumatic stress in a post-September 11th society.

The Art Book Club is a group of nine artists living and working in NYC (Amanda Friedman, Carolyn Salas, Christina Leung, Fran Holstrom, Gina Beavers, Inna Babaeva, Letha Wilson, Saira McLaren, and Stacy Fisher) that convenes regularly to host member studio visits and discuss an art text. The groups’ previous reading material will be on display for viewers to access.

Anna Banana is a major contributor to the mail-art phenomenon and has been circulating her publications and engaging with the public since 1971, when she first took to the streets in Victoria, British Columbia. Banana created her first publication the Banana Rag in 1971 and still actively mails and offers subscriptions, fostering community through correspondence art.

Johanna Billing’s film I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm (2009) is based on a live recording of a workshop involving amateur dancers and acting students in Romania. Led by renowned Swedish choreographer Anna Vnuk, there is no ‘final performance’ as the video weaves several days’ activity into a continuous process of live improvisation. Referencing Yvonne Rainer’s explorations of everyday movement, Billing investigates the sense of having a body and how we ‘perform’ our being.

For her Outpost series, Tammy Rae Carland traveled to lesbian women’s intentional land communities in rural and remote America to photograph, write and spend time in dialogue with the women who live and create these self-sustaining cultures. The resulting photographs on view document the unpopulated encampments within the “women born, women only” space of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.

Stephanie Diamond will be creating a Community of Community during the exhibition by occupying the gallery floor for two days with several local artists. Visitors will observe a group interacting, sharing, conversing and supporting each other, and can take part themselves if they wish. Diamond’s Community of Community is a series of retreats for community-based artists to gather around a theme, skill-share, support each other and themselves and explore the lineage of the field.

DISBAND is an all-female band composed of artists living in New York City and was active in the downtown art scene from 1978-1982. DISBAND screamed, shouted, sang, and stomped through the heyday of New York City’s new- and no-wave scenes, blurring the line between performance art and live music; their acapella songs were informed by the collective feminist experience. DISBAND reunited in 2008 with members Ilona Granet, Donna Henes, Dianne Torr, and Martha Wilson.

Annika Eriksson’s video The Great Good Place (2010) was filmed in Istanbul and takes a community of local stray cats as its subject. The video makes reference to Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place which argues that “third places” – places where people can gather, put aside the concerns of work and home, and hang out simply for the pleasures of good company and lively conversation – are the heart of a community’s social vitality and the grassroots of democracy.

Kara Hearn’s video Tremendous was filmed with the participation of more than 170 visitors during a three-month residency at Recess Activities, Inc., a storefront gallery program in New York City. Hearn’s resulting video, composed of interviews, reenactments, and performances conceived of in collaboration with visitors, is a complex but cohesive narrative about the experience of being overwhelmed.

Donna Henes is an artist, urban shaman and member of DISBAND. On view will be a selection of photographs documenting her contemporary rituals and performances created for the New York City public over the last thirty seven years.

Corita Kent, also known as Sister Corita, discovered the power of printmaking and used serigraphy to campaign for spirituality, social justice, peace and love during the 1960s. On view are a suite of text-based serigraphs that promote this activist message.

Fawn Krieger’s Architectural Organs is composed of a series of pink ceramic sculptures housed on a wooden platform made from a demolished Quaker Meeting House. Krieger’s sculpture references American architecture and the foundations upon which they are built, often looking at how bodies construct, inhabit, and navigate such spaces.

Justine Kurland drove cross-country with her one-year old son, stopping at some 45 locations (including national parks, beaches and campgrounds) to take photographs of other mothers and children that she met along the way. The resulting Of Woman Born series (a nod to the 1978 manifesto on motherhood by the feminist poet Adrienne Rich) depicts landscapes of women and their children actively free and wandering like tribes or fertility goddesses.

Jennifer Levonian creates stop-motion animations using watercolor and collage; her practice draws inspiration from history, literature and personal narrative. In her recent animation, Rebellious Bird, Levonian researched archived stories and images of women who cross-dressed to pass as men in order to fight in the Civil War. In the animation, Levonian weaves together the stories of contemporary protagonist Wendy Ramsburg, a female American Civil War re-enactor, Albert Cashier-a transgender Civil War soldier, and the artist’s own recent pregnancy, thus raising larger questions about gender roles in society.

Shani Peters actively took to the Harlem streets to preach her message in We Promote Knowledge & Love, borrowing the aggressive street advertising tactics of pawnbrokers in low-income communities as a vehicle to promote knowledge, wisdom, self-empowerment and love rather than commerce or monetary wealth.

Women are cast in Mika Rottenberg’s films for their notable physical features and talents; they perform routine factory-line duties, at times manufacturing inane items worth less than the labor required to make them. In Cheese, Rottenberg constructs a farm-like, wooden maze atmosphere to host her long-haired women (alluding to the famous Sutherland Sisters) who ‘milk’ their hair and pet goats to produce the eponymous product.

Julia Sherman’s works, while at first glance read as minimalist forms, are, in fact, glass-mounted photographs of acid-treated mirrors from a Manhattan convent (a gesture taken by this community to limit vanity). In addition, Sherman has recently started working with the eight Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, an order of sisters in Dayton, Wyoming, to re-brand their collection of hand-made soaps and creams named Monastery Creations.

Francine Spiegel’s photographs document her largest performance to date, Curse of the Century Old Egg. Culling researched imagery from monster magazines and horror films, her goo and food-laden feminist heroines live somewhere between the erotic and the horrible. Calling to mind Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine, Spiegel works with stereotypes from the male-manipulated world of porn and uses them to make feminine and feminist works of art.

Martha Wilson is a feminist performance artist whose personal practice takes the female body and women’s identity as subject. Wilson is a member of DISBAND and the Founder of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. in New York City.

 

By drawing on a collection of signs and strategies from the areas where these languages overlap in a continuous redefinition of the concept of form, the artists turn their attention to the primary principles of painting through the use of unusual, often simple, rough materials, denoting their place of origin and the experience the artists have shared with them.

These works, hybrids of painting and sculpture or painting and photography, are intensely and delicately conceived with a subtle sense of balance. It is interesting to note how each artist has a specific approach to the material that constitutes the artwork, from which poetic language is born. While Aaron Bobrow’s canvases incorporate the accidental in aesthetics by exploring the life span of industrial materials (which are intent on becoming artwork through gestural signs), for the most part Phil Wagner works with poor materials, objects that have been found, recovered and recycled through a continuous expressive nexus between painting and sculpture; Alex Dordoy’s works are initially also perceived through their physical medium and take the shape of industrial debris, in this case saturated in a mixture of pictorial substances. The pictorial approach is particularly present in the work of the collective Leo Gabin where the canvases conceal a social critique conceived through an aesthetic re-elaboration that aims to stimulate the imagination which has been kept in check by stereotypes offered by the proliferation of media images, but also the works of Oscar Murillo, which is concentrated on an archaeological process of collapse/ruin/restructuring whereby even the traces of dust on his studio floor are wilfully highlighted on his canvases.

David Hominal, instead, returns to the ancient technique of encaustic painting to operate on a wide range of mediums through a process of construction and deconstruction of the image. Other artists choose to express themselves through artistic techniques that have almost procedural features, like Heather Cook, whose denim frottage in this exhibition investigates the confines between material and image by means of a phenomenological approach involving the subtraction of pigment thanks to the mechanical action of rubbing, or Ned Vena, where an aluminium panel incorporates layers of vinyl creating geometric, hypnotic plains furrowed by a pattern of ridges characterising the plastic material which has been applied. Andrew Gbur uses dribbles of serigraphic ink which seem to oppose the constriction of the adhesive tape which takes on the role of a stencil in his works, seemingly a visual distortion inherited from Op Art. Experimentation and process are behind the works of Hugh Scott-Douglas who retrieves an ancient cyanotype printing technique to elaborate once again minimalistic optical compositions. Nazafarin Lotfi’s works, on the other hand, border on monochrome and dark surfaces which devour light negating any form of visibility, here and there heterogeneous and misleading elements are made to emerge: a fishing line, staples, adhesive tape, rather than materials these are clues the artist sets before the viewer, necessary players in the theatrical representation of the void.

Erik Lindman uses a satin canvas as the surface on which he intervenes with paint and pieces of fabric, reorganizing the surfaces and transforming material into image: a dark, rippled area gives way to an almost uncut section, like a poster which has been ripped to reveal what is underneath. Dan Shaw-Town makes use of the traditional visual language of design, his works hark back to an elementary model generated by lines and graphite signs, however, these designs don a variety of surfaces and textures achieved through meticulous processes of sanding, cancelling and painting: the surfaces thus eroded, lay bare rather than remove the signs of the work’s creative process. The salient features of N. Dash’s work are an underlying purity and a private, introspective language where the artist-demiurge’s touch remains in the folds and creases of the fabric, changing the material irreversibly; the result is an almost random process, sealed with indigo pigment, a colour originating from India and endowed with ancient anthropological value. More than anything else, Ben Schumacher is interested in the concession of the object in image and he analyses this theme in depth through sculptural installations which he documents through images, creating a visual pretence of the original object. Alongside Schumacher, other artists underline the sculptural aspect which seemingly cannot be left aside when dealing with material: Joseph Montgomery’s works extend beyond the limits of the canvas, they become pictorial objects through collages of plastic elements in wax, fibreglass and cardboard, while Lisa Williamson investigates the expressive potential of objects through repositioning them, in a rigorously formal work where materials take on intuitive and cognitive functions.

Finally, Nick Van Woert does not hide his interest in architecture, a discipline which has a strong influence on his work: indeed, the artist believes in the semantics of material and focuses his interests in common materials and building materials; at the same time, his works are a criticism and service to the built environment and the human tendency towards territorial expansion.

For the full article, click here.

Super 8 is an artist-curated video art exhibition organized by the Los Angeles-based Christopher Grimes Gallery. Eight artists from eight different cities across the globe were invited to present their own videos and, in addition, invite four other artists from their respective cities to present works as well. A total of 40 artists from Berlin, Dublin, Lisbon, London, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, and Tokyo are represented in the project. A unique feature of Super 8 is that this collection of diverse work in one-, two- and three-channel formats, selected through a peer-to-peer curatorial process, accumulates into a serial format exhibition with a global scope. The diverse selection of videos include Brazilian artist Thiago Rocha Pitta’s Homage to JMW Turner, a performative video honoring British Romantic painter Joseph Mallord William Turner; Los Angeles-based artist Euan Macdonald’s The Healer, which questions the illusion of the recorded image; and Dublin-based artist Jaki Irvine’s The Actress, which addresses issues of the human condition. The artists/curators are Marco Brambilla, Takehito Koganezawa, Reynold Reynolds, Julião Sarmento, Tunga, Richard T. Walker, Walker and Walker, and Wood & Harrison. Additional invited artists include John Baldessari, Nate Boyce, Yuki Okumura, and João Onofre.

For more information on this exhibition, please click here.

1) Can you talk about your background a bit? Are you from Istanbul? I went last year and totally loved it.

I was born and raised in Istanbul, but spent a significant part of my childhood in the States. My mother is a computer engineer and my father is an MD PhD who manages hospitals and clinics. From a very young age I have had access to server rooms, custom programmed computer games, giant MRI machines and lasers that make things magically disappear. All of this has had a major impact on my fascination with technology and its impact on our lives. Before becoming fully engrossed in art, I was making work for the fashion and music industries, for companies such as Nike, Converse and Mavi. I also worked for a high-end fashion retail store to design and produce shop windows. I made posters for dance clubs in Istanbul. Meanwhile I was preparing personal work for shows in Europe, the USA and Turkey. It was a very high-speed time in my life where too many things were happening all at once. I had a “Devil-Wears-Prada” breakdown and decided to focus only on my art. I applied to MFA programs and got into Yale. After two years in New Haven, I now live in New York

2) Your earlier work is very much inspired by the visual culture of the internet-manga, porn, hipster GIFs. Why were you drawn to this? Is it still worthwhile?

I’ve always been fascinated by the darker sides of the human psyche. The anonymity and censorship free environment of the Internet provided a portal for me to explore this deeply. I had infinite access to people’s deepest and strangest dreams. I could explore the furthest corners of their most secret fantasy worlds. I found this exhilarating and mind-boggling. Kind of like consensual voyeurism. Before long, I was reading sexual love letters that people had written to their deceased pets. I still believe these things are worthwhile and significant in the sense of sharing information freely. We should be doing everything in our means to make sure our right to share and access information remains intact without fear of censorship, control or surveillance from governments and/or corporations.
An Island In Your Arms, 2011

3) Can you describe why and how you switched from digital collage to painting?

I started having strange impulses of reaching my hand into the glowing world of the screen and pulling a handful of it into physical reality. Years of sitting and staring into a rectangle had started making me restless. I wanted to remember how it felt to use all of my body and senses while creating. The static screen and its predefined tools were not versatile enough to accommodate me in this sense. I wanted gravity, resistance and mistakes. To remember what it felt like to not be able to take something back. To patiently focus my attention and contemplate the value and meaning of every single move I was making. To stroke with my fingertips, smell the wood I painted on and wonder at the colors that I mixed. To separate myself long enough from the dream life of screens to simultaneously enjoy the sensual pleasures of tactility. To make physical love after an extended period of virtual play.

4) Your painting seems to be marching towards more and more minimal abstraction. Can you talk about this progression? I’m projecting a lot here, but it seems like this type of painting is very popular right now as an antidote to the hyper-busy work of people like Ryan Trecartin. However, it also seems to be an extension, wherein the basic composition and pure fields of color seem to mimic the pixel as a basic unit of visual representation. What do you think?

I am more interested in the idea of slowness. I guess that’s where my work would speak to Ryan Trecartin’s. His work addresses the hyper-speed of overproduction and over-consumption. Mine address this more indirectly by proposing painting as a means of slowing down. Bringing the daily life of the artist and art-production back into a contemplative practice in the studio. Resisting the destructive and spiraling speed of daily contemporary life through selective online presence. Blocking uncontrolled bombardment of communication and information by generating focused time for physical creation. My interest in abstraction is also an extension of this. I could say that my art practice at the moment is an experiment of sorts. To implement the following clauses and see what the results would be: no Internet in my studio, no smart phone on my body and working in isolation. I choose to be selectively disconnected and try to invent a whole new abstract world that does not appropriate or refer to anything in my digital image archive – which holds around a million images I’ve been collecting through years of online activity.

5) What are you working on for your new show?

I am working on three large-scale paintings, three cutout shape paintings and some animated GIFs that are super-slow. The large paintings have the exact proportions of an iPhone screen, but enlarged to human body scale. I wanted to physically experience the proportions of an everyday screen in relation to my body. To try and step into that screen as it were. Or vice versa, bring the screen into physical reality. To somehow reconcile the virtual and the tactile worlds. Generate an analog digital. This is where the title of the show comes from. Co-Real. To me, the world of the screen is an infinite universe of daydreams. Much like the surrealists aimed to reconcile the world of dreams and reality, I would like to explore the possibility of inventing a new reality from the merging of the virtual and the tactile.

For the full interview, click here.

My conversation with Desiree began a bit wobbly, and I spent a few moments fumbling for a way to create a sense of comfort between us. And though it took a bit of time we finally, together, rounded a corner and our talk took on a natural and easy tone. We chatted a lot about the complexities of human bonds and intimacy, and the ways in which we grapple with and secure identity though our attachments and connections with others. Desiree’s work often uses humor, fantasy worlds, and theatricality to create a platform from which she acts out and explores the realities of these relationships and affinities. At some point in the conversation, I asked Desiree why the topic of social and familial ties was so endlessly fascinating to her. It’s a subject matter we can all relate to, and I certainly find it endlessly fascinating, as do most other people I’m sure. But I was just curious to see how she would answer the question, what kinds of words she’d put together, and maybe what kind of backstory might come through in her answer. Well, she surprised me (and herself) by cutting to the chase and sharing a very personal detail concerning her own upbringing and how it might inform her work. The power in Desiree’s act of disclosure wasn’t so much in the actual information, though it was revelatory, it was in her willingness to share a part of herself she hadn’t been prepared to until the moment it happened. For me, that unexpected moment brought a bit of magic into the room— it closed a gap, created a rapport, and it made me pause and think about how important the state of being connected is, how much we all long for it, and how in a way it’s all we are after, and yet how surprised we always are when we actually find it.

When people ask you what you “do”, how do you answer?

I am a professional artist. I also teach part-time as adjunct faculty at California College of the Arts. I like being adjunct because that way it doesn’t ever feel like a job, and I can go in and teach with a really open heart and fully engage with students and their ideas.

Do you have a day job? What is it? What does it mean to you?
My primary day job is my studio practice, which is a large part of my identity and worldview. I see being an artist as my purpose, but I recognize that shifts and expansion are occurring in terms of my identity mostly due to the fact that I am now a mother, too. But being an artist is a “lifestyle job”— it permeates everything, and I’m constantly engaged in work that asks questions about humanity. When I confront these questions in my work, I also have to confront them personally.

What mediums do you work with? How would you describe your subject matter? What themes seem to occur/reoccur in your work?
For several years, I’ve been focused on making multi-channel video installations and drawings. Fantasy is both my method and my subject matter— it’s a liminal space where the confines of everyday life don’t exist and normal conventions aren’t as influential. I create as well as depict role-playing narratives that typically use figurative stand-ins like dolls, figurines, digital avatars and so forth. The theme of attachment both in group and interpersonal forms, and whether it’s from a biological or post-biological perspective, is a very strong thread in the work. 

What are you currently reading, listening to or looking at to fuel your work?
I’m currently reading theory about the clinical practice of psychodrama. It’s a method of psychotherapy that moves away from talk and instead utilizes action (dramatization, role-playing, etc.) to gain insight. Psychodrama interests me not because I want to employ it necessarily, but I see myself as a Dungeon Master in a game of Dungeons & Dragons. I’m the storyteller, inviting all these performers to play out a narrative structure I’ve provided, along with props, but they take on their own roles how they see fit.

What are your biggest challenges to creating art and how do you deal with them? How do you navigate the art world?
I’ve recently become a mom and I can no longer work whenever I please. It’s teaching me to be sharply focused in the limited 20-25 hours a week I do have in the studio right now.

As for navigating the art world, I try to stay primarily focused on experiencing the work of artists. The love of art is the driving force and it’s important to keep it central.

What does having a physical space to make art in mean for your process, and how do you make your space work for you?

In addition to being a locale for production, a showroom for the work and a testing ground for presentation, the studio becomes a living, breathing, sketch book. It’s a place to think with and through the images and objects I create. Right now, as I am in the beginning phase of a project, my studio is somewhat of a clean slate. Older work and its’ remnants are tucked away in storage.

I’m aim to have a flexible space. My needs change according to the project and phase of production. Mold making, drawing, sewing and digital processing are some of the processes I use that necessitate shifts in the environment. Most of the furniture is on castors or can be broken down to maximize the flexibility of the space and suit my given production phase.

 Has there been a shift or change in your life or work that has led to what you’re making now? Do you see your work as autobiographical at all?
I am in new territory at this time. Much of my psychic energy is invested in my family. Formerly, at any given moment I would be thinking about my work. This isn’t the case now while I’m nursing my infant. There is less space and time for reflection. When I have my free time to work in the studio, it’s simply time to do. I feel compelled to make without a deep rational process sandwiching my impulses. This advent is welcomed.

Is there something you are currently working on, or are excited about starting that you can tell us about?
I’m currently working with Brian Caraway at Magnolia Editions in Oakland to publish a small edition of my work. The publication will be a short run multiple of a series of backlit watermark, new media images— an original technique recently invented by Donald Farnsworth. Simply stated, this process turns imagery from several of my drawings into watermarks on paper. The images can only be seen if light shines through the paper. They are going to be gorgeous. I will probably have to mount each of them on a light box, which will create an even lighting so the images can fully come through.

I’m simultaneously beginning another new project and I don’t clearly understand what I am going to do which is highly unusual for me. I do know that I am really interested in mythologies about extra terrestrials and I’m enjoying dressing up in E.T. costumes.

What are you most proud of?
I’m most proud of my son and husband.

What do you want your work to do?
I want my work to enter at a gut level and then travel up your body to your mind.

What advice has influenced you?
“You can live your life by circumstances or by vision.” This is a quote I read somewhere but it’s great advice,non?

How will you know when you have arrived?
In terms of the qualitative aspects of being an artist, I always hope to reach new ground. I hope the practice is one that teaches me about myself, the world, my relationships, and spirituality in an ongoing journey. I specifically don’t want to arrive per se. Moving and evolving is closer to my ambition.

Now I’ll approach this question from a practical perspective. My work has been sustaining itself financially for several years. That was a mark of arrival for me. Now I’m setting the bar higher and am looking for the work to create sustainable income that helps support my family and our future.

 Are you involved in any upcoming shows or events? Where and when?

My work will be featured in a number of upcoming group exhibitions. Currently I have two drawings in the SFMOMA’s “Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards” through April 3. In March 2012, my work will also be in group show called “Big Reality” curated by Brian Droitcour at 319 Scholes Gallery in Brooklyn. I have a video that will be shown in NYC at the Big Screen Plaza in May 2012 as a NADA special presentation curated by Stephanie Dodes. Lastly, in 2012, a video show “Super 8” will be traveling to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Kunstlerhaus, Berlin and the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro.

To see more of Desiree’s work:
www.desireeholman.com

Desiree Holman at In The Make