These developments and their repercussions are the subject of Susanne M. Winterling’s most recent work. Her exhibition “Drift” revolved around the motifs of the hand, skin, and radiant surfaces. Her art examines this question: How does our physical contact with the immaterial, illuminated images on electronic displays all around us alter our relation to reality? One of the videos that was on view here, Handstift (Hand Pen), 2014, can be read as an allegory: Seen in close-up, pencils and crayons (symbolizing the age of handwriting) are broken in two over a black mirror, and their splintered halves are then scattered over a blue blanket. The cool sleekness of our screens is echoed in “Über Gewissheit (Screen Version)” (On Certainty [Screen Version]), 2014, a series of five digital prints on acrylic glass that show hazy images of a glove. These picture-objects, with their rounded corners, resemble smartphones or tablet computers, but contrary to this suggestion of manual operability, they stay on their metal wall-mounted shelves, untouched, defeating the crisp depth effect of the glove hovering beneath the reflective dark surface.

The title of the installation Touch Me, 2014, by contrast, can be taken at its word. Panes of black acrylic glass are set up on two easels. Colorful handgrips of the kind that are bolted onto climbing walls encourage the visitor to take the panes and arrange them on pieces of foam mounted on mirrored surfaces, laid out here and there on the floor; as you can take the panes in hand, you encounter the mirror image of your own face (and the gallery space around you). The surfaces of these pieces reflect ambient light, just as powered-off screens do. The framed work A Skin Too Thin (Light to Pink, No.1), 2012, meanwhile, absorbs ambient light, which slowly causes its color to change: It consists of a sheet of photographic paper that has not been treated with fixer. The projected animation Diademseeigel Immersion Prototyp (Diadem Sea Urchin Immersion Prototype), 2014, evokes the world of bioluminescent animals. A pair of white gloves resembling those worn by Mickey Mouse floats through empty space. Propelled solely by a mysterious rotation of the thumbs, the gloves come closer and closer until the viewer can make out individual fibers of the fabric. Then, suddenly, the image of a bioluminescent sea urchin is superimposed on the gloves. The ballet of the animal’s undulating spine resembles human fingers feeling their way in the dark.

Recording and reflection, radiance and refraction: Winterling’s works catalogue the ways light affects bodies and their properties. In view of the effects she showcases, which inevitably involve visual distortion, we have reason to be skeptical of the assumption that light is a particularly persuasive emblem of a higher principle or the Enlightenment’s belief in reason. Reality in all its complexity is literally beyond the grasp of the luminous phenomena on display on the screens that are increasingly our main access to reality. Not without reason do we associate physical contact with sympathetic connection: our devices may have touch screens, but they screen us from the emotions that would come from actually being touched.

Art fair veteran Jessica Silverman participates in six to eight a year, bringing a curatorial theme that runs through the works in a visually and conceptually engaging way.m For the Dallas Art Fair, Silverman will explore the process of layering, with Dashiell Manley’s stained glass pieces benefiting from the actual location of the booth. Says Silverman, “Our Dallas booth is placed near glass windows, where tons of light floods inside. Not only do glass partitions reflect the concept [of layering], but they also allow natural light to literally shine through the artworks.”

Other abstract and hyper-figurative work by Hugh Scott-Douglas, Ian Wallace, Hayal Pozanti and Ruairiadh will round out the booth. As the gallery’s roster includes artists that have been acquired by the likes of the Tate Museum, MOMA, LACMA and the Whitney, Jessica Silverman is a must-stop on any fairgoer’s agenda.

The first major survey of Kasten’s work opened at the University of Pennsylvania’s renowned Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia on February 4 and will run through August 16. The exhibition presents a selection of her work from across nearly five decades, as well as the debut of a newly commissioned piece, Axis (2015), paired with ephemera surrounding Kasten’s work in both fine art and commercial contexts, and her role as an activist for women photographers.

That this is Kasten’s first major survey is shocking. While her influence is clear, especially during the Digital Age, her recognition has been minimal despite her place as a dexterous link between 20th century art movements and the 21st century. When surrounded by her work, it becomes instantly clear that Kasten has been heavily influenced by Russian Constructivism and Bauhaus design. In fact, while attending California College of Arts and Crafts, Kasten studied with Trude Guermonprez, herself a second-generation students at the Bauhaus, working in textiles. Kasten’s early work reveals Guermonprez’s influence (whose masterfully weaved textiles transcend into forms and representation previously dominated by sculpture and painting) openly through her use of textile in sculptural works and her Photogenic Painting series of cyanotypes.

Despite these historical references, Kasten keeps an eye ever-forward. The aesthetics and form of her most famous work from the 1980’s, her series of Constructions, capture a distinctly modern visuality. Each construction entails a sculptural installation (Kasten calls them “props”), the arrangement of meticulous lighting, which she then photographed with polaroid film. From her cyanotypes to these constructions, we see Kasten’s fascination with the interplay of three-dimensional spaces translated into two-dimensions, how documenting a space not only flattens it, but confuses it. This confusion is doubly so, since Kasten uses her props (sculptures, glass, and mirrors) and her lighting to fracture the planes of the space, ensuring that the complexities of her three-dimensional constructions are doubled when one dimension is removed.

While Kasten uses this seemingly basic exercise in form as the basis for many of her subsequent series for the next two decades, her aesthetics in doing so have remained prescient of visual cultural tastes. Her architectural site series, in which she moved her constructions to a grand scale by using newly constructed architectural spaces as the set for her variety of mirrors and props and lighting, presents a series of images that evoke the digital age that would come to take unfaltering prominence in less than a decade’s time.

Digital visuality favors the easily fragmented and manipulated. High contrast has, in the past decade, switched to a preference for over-saturation, which has been a characteristic of Kasten’s lighting for the past thirty years. The power in her images are that they once presented a well-crafted foreignness, but now can be found in copies of form and color in hundreds of thousands of Instagram feeds.

Her work, though an inspiration to present day digitally-altered images, does not, however, share in the same infinite reproducibility of those images. In many ways, her work counteracts the idea of the cheap image—that an aesthetic eye and moderate technical skill in Photoshop can create a thing of lasting beauty and fortitude. While these images are demanding of attention, they are essentially without cost or value. Kasten’s work is meticulous and it shows and this, more likely than her foreshadowing taste, is the lasting power of her work.

In a video shown on the ICA’s second floor, we watch as Kasten and her assistants orchestrate Architectural Site 17, August 29, 1988 at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. The event is grueling. Working all night, her and her group arrange and re-arrange props and lighting equipment. Then they sit and wait. She takes photograph after photograph as the light shifts throughout the night. Soon people have arrived for work, but eager to capture how the soft morning light will interact with the site, she has an assistant block the doors. The video illustrates Kasten in masterful control of her art—a kind of control that requires technical skill, determination, and a magisterial attention to detail.

Beyond the impressiveness of Kasten’s prescient eye or her commitment to the quality of her craft, is her devotion to nearly five decades of study to one essential idea: the interplay between three-dimensional and two-dimensional space. This fidelity to creative research is of a bygone era. Art culture—now largely inseparable from digital culture—for many overindebted MFA graduates demands constant reinvention. A personal kind of one-upmanship fostered by a wrongfully enshrined sense of neoliberal individualism.

This is why the show’s newest work, a video titled Axis (2015) that was commissioned for the exhibition, feels cheapened in comparison to her other work. It is a logical step for her studies in light and form over the past decade, but loses the materiality that so endears her earlier work. In a show amassed with concentrated studies of a singular concept through gradually transitioning mediums, the leap to video is a shock. It suffers from its singularity. With this being said, Kasten’s mastery of moving from three to two-dimensions is enough to keep me attentive to any futures attempts she makes in video.

The ICA, which has made a name for itself by coupling exhibitions of new talents with established (and often under-appreciated) powerhouse artists for shows that run for months. The runtime is kept fresh by a focus on amazing programming, bringing in artists and curators to comment on the exhibition, giving it new breath every few weeks (not to mention their frequent celebrity visitors, including both Questlove and Dev Hynes in recent memory). Barbara Kasten: Stages is no different with upcoming discussions with art-designers Peter Shire and Martino Gamper as well as Kasten herself alongside David Hartt, Takeshi Murata, and Sara VanDerBeek.

Pozanti’s soothing palette belies the disturbing statistics at the root of her works. Purposefully made in earthy, non-digital tones (think warm grays instead of icy blues), her paintings are full of soft curves and hand-rendered edges. The source statistics pertain mostly to the influence of technology on our social and private lives: self-censorship, limited journalistic freedom, online stalking, surveillance and hacking threats.

Some of the information is shocking: one in ten people check their phones during sex. (Appropriately, 1/10 is painted in fluorescent pink and hot red acrylic.) Some of the information is, sadly, unsurprising: two thirds of those employed in computer occupations in the US are men. (2/3 stretches 6 feet 3 inches tall, a looming, human-sized canvas covered in bland hues of greenish beige.)

The four sculptures in Ciphers are made from blocks of painted foam, carved to reference the intersections of overlapping shapes in the surrounding paintings. The titles are snippets of tech jargon, things you might overhear as a group of start-up employees walk past your office window, like data-positive and chief privacy officer.

For this series, the square canvases become cubes, and the additive process of layering paint is reversed into the subtractive process of carving, shaving and shaping the foam. In varying shades of gray, the bulbous sculptures sit on the floor or atop more cubes – slick powder-coated metal tables.

The CSS animations hang behind the gallery’s front desk, with one monitor in the back showroom. Here the statistics return to the digital realm. The custom animations translate text into Pozanti’s characters, which scroll across the screens horizontally and vertically at varying speeds. It’s a bit like watching data flow in The Matrix. But instead of special-effects mumbo jumbo, these animated loops contain real statistics, making them more like a modern-day version of the 19th-century practice of cross writing.

As the “tech habits of teens” move from left to right, vibrant purple shapes scroll against a sparkly gray background. Next to the muted paintings and sculptures, the monitors practically vibrate.

Despite the density of information and the continuous stream of characters, the animations are impenetrable. Pozanti’s work is a puzzle. Certain discrete shapes become identifiable – or at least I like to think I figured out what “1” looks like – but without the key, the ciphers remain wholly her own.

Pozanti believes privacy and data encryption are the main issues of her generation (she was born in 1983), hence her interest in the statistics at hand. Her substitution cipher may not be advanced cryptography, but it is an enactment of the very issues preoccupying her. Her invented symbols create a framework for each sequential body of work. A letter becomes a glyph, the glyphs combine, their overlap becomes a sculpture, and so on and so forth.

Pozanti’s methodology has the logical precision of sequential steps, and yet it doesn’t grow old. Her 31 characters have been the basis for her practice for the past 5 years. This visual language couches the unsettling in the familiar trappings of abstraction, continuously jolting viewers from complacency to surprise. Just as 10 brings about a moment of self-reflective anxiety (do I have an internet addiction?), the works in Cipher position the viewer within a visualization of their own data, leaving us to consider the implications of freely giving that data to those who would gather it.

Manley employs a labor-intensive process to make the large, enveloping New York Times–based paintings that constitute the bulk of the exhibition. For each, he transcribed in watercolor pencil the entire front page of a week-old New York Times onto canvas, covering the surface with pastel words that read both horizontally and vertically. Individual words and phrases are mostly illegible—the result of layering and the physical smearing that occurs as the artist’s hand traverses the canvas. The paintings are finished with a silver-tinted wash, adding a subtle reflective luster that further obscures the text. Ten of these paintings are installed just a few inches apart in the front room, effectively wallpapering the gallery with old news. As viewers, our eyes roam each canvas, seeking words or phrases that would locate them in time and geography, but the artist’s formal choices prevent a resolution.

The small sculptural objects that fill the center of the gallery likewise echo newspaper formatting, but these are less successful. They are perched on nine white pedestals with mirrored sides. They vary in size, each box made from glass, zinc, and silver. Some of their faces are either glazed, so that viewers struggle to see inside, or mirrored, so that we only see ourselves. The top of each pedestal is sized to match the broadsheet format of the Times—a key detail that is not immediately apparent—and the sculptures on top are intended to echo the placement of the photographs on the front page. The tension between mirror and window that makes the paintings so engrossing is lost in these confusing objects.

The exhibition resonates with photographic practices on another level as well, taking its title from an essay by the filmmaker and art critic Hollis Frampton on the serial photography of Eadweard Muybridge.² In the essay, Frampton asserts that Muybridge sought to make photographs that were more than just frozen moments in time. Manley’s paintings likewise remove newspapers from the mere dichotomy of past and present, news old and new.

WOVO: When we met I couldn’t tell where you’re from and I thought your name sounded like a flower in Latin. Can you tell me more about where you’re from; what do you do and also what does your name mean?

HAYAL POZANTI: Thank you, that sounds beautiful. I was born and raised in Istanbul, with an overlay in Houston for elementary school. I am an artist and have been splitting my time between New York, Los Angeles and Berlin for the past two years. My parents fell in love during a hitchhiking trip in the 70’s, and on a later trip met a fisherman who had a  daughter named Hayal. It means daydream in Turkish. They thought it was perfect for a girl.  

WOVO: You have created your own alphabet – have you always been into typography and language?

HP: Yes. In a way, I had to be. From an early age, language has presented itself as an obstacle to overcome. As an only child, I was tasked with finding playmates for myself on our summer beach holidays. At four years old, I was surrounded by European children and had to improvise gestures to communicate. We played for hours in the sand with not a common word between us. Later on, when I turned 8, as our impending move to the United States approached, I asked my father “Will they let me stay even if I don’t speak their language?” My fears were unfounded and I became completely fluent in English within 3 months of our move. These experiences fundamentally changed my understanding of the world. Barriers of language seemed frivolous and obsolete. Presently, my work is an attempt to keep this idealism alive by creating a visual language that transcends the limits of speech.

WOVO: When I look at your work and read about it I can’t escape some references to new materialism and semiotics. Are there any books that have transformed your way of making art? 

HP: Yes. Too many to count. I’m far from my library at the moment but I’ll attempt to make a list. Not in any particular order.  Jean Baudrillard – Passwords, Boris Groys – Art Power, Hal Foster – Design and Crime, Peter Sloterdijk – Spheres, Paul Virilio – The Information Bomb, Jonathan Crary – Suspensions of Perception, Sherry Turkle – The Second Self, Life on the Screen: Identity in the age of the Internet, and Simulation and It’s Discontents, Robert Motherwell -The Writings of Robert Motherwell, Jan Verwoert – The Beauty and Politics of Latency: On the Work of Tomma Abts, Wouter Davidts and Kim Paice – The Fall of The Studio: Artists at Work, All Tiqqun, Hito Steyerel – Wretched of the Screen, Paul Graham – Hackers and Painters, Carolyn L. Kane – Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetic after Code. 

WOVO: Artist Dafna Maimon once told me that she wants to speak 7 languages and that art is also one of them. Do you think that art is a language?

HP: No. I think all artists strive to communicate through art, but I wouldn’t combine their efforts under a universal definition. I like to think that all artist speak their private language. There may be overlaps and families with similar roots, but the beauty is in their uniqueness. 


WOVO: Once when I was working on a site specific projection I ended up with having 3x3m screen, a massive square. In person it was great and overwhelming but online every still looked like an image cropped to fit the Instagram realm. A friend told me then: ‘Instagram killed the square’. But you use the square dimension in this particular reference in you work. Do the social media platforms and technology provide you with a symbolic framework?

HP: Yes, they have been. I studied Visual Communication in university, so my initial impulse is to analyze the world through this perspective. As my practice evolved to include painting, I simultaneously started to think of the work’s representation within the digital world. Our eyes are confined to the dimensions of both the screen and the predetermined media dimensions within screens. It seemed logical to mimic these proportions both in terms of understanding their relationship to my body and also to ensure that the work could exist in both the digital and the physical realms. My paintings have so far been in the exact proportions of iPhones blown up to human size or have mimicked the square of twitter avatars, instagram feeds and Facebook photos.


WOVO: Do you feel that as an artist you have to deliver a concept manifest in the visual form which will be noticeable, liked and acknowledged by a certain group of people?

HP: This is a great question that I think about frequently. Certain aesthetic tropes have overtaken visual production merely because they look better on screens. Instant online sharing enforces us to dream collectively. How can one maintain uniqueness without unplugging? I’ve tried to find a solution to this conundrum by inventing my personal shape system. A unique visual language that does not appropriate but seeks to invent new forms. I would of course like to be acknowledged by my peers whose work I respect, but I would not go out of my way to make my work look like what I believe they would like to see. I feel that all good art finds its audience eventually and the most important thing is to stick to your guns and make what you believe in.

WOVO: I know that you make digital sketches first and paint later. Why do you stick to traditional and tangible methods? Why do you need to paint a painting?

HP: I’ve come to paint in a roundabout way. I guess I used to be what you would call a net artist. In time, sitting for hours in front of a screen generated an undefined anxiety. It felt as if there were hundreds of voices screaming at me simultaneously for attention. I just felt a need to be alone with my thoughts. Or to rediscover what they might have been. I was also frustrated by printing. Printing things never looked as good as they did on a screen and I felt a there was always a failure in translation. In short, painting for me is about making a statement by reclaiming my physicality. By painting, I am stepping away from the computer screen and the immobility it confines my body to. By painting, I am freeing myself of the imposed aesthetic sensibility of computer programs. I am embracing imperfection. Through painting, I can enjoy the physicality of my body without a gym membership. I can think about how colors exist in real life as I mix them. I can meditate on complex thoughts as I fill in large areas of color. I can dance while I work. I continue to make digital work and also program, but it feels great to have both realms coexist in my life. I feel grateful to be part of the lucky few who gets to step away from their computers for extended hours daily.

WOVO: Would you ever consider working with a fashion label? How would you feel as a new Caravaggio on Givenchy sweatshirt?

HP: I worked in fashion for 5 years after I graduated from university. I was designing and producing shop windows for the Turkish equivalent of Barney’s; Beymen. Within the same company, I started designing clothes, t-shirts and fabric patterns (basically whole collections) for its sister street-wear label, t-box. I have also designed a best selling Istanbul t-shirt for Mavi. So it would not be a new experience for me, that’s for sure :)



WOVO: You are based in New York, could you recommend WOVO some exciting places?

HP: Hmm I’m not sure about exciting lol but I like to walk by the river. It’s super close to my house in Chinatown and perfect for morning exercise. I like the Parish Art Museum that’s upstate. Beautiful building and drive upstate. My friends have recently opened a project space at PS1 called ALLGOLD, they’ve been hosting great sound projects.

“San Francisco feels like the center of the world,” says Sabrina Buell, formerly the director of New York’s Matthew Marks Gallery, who is now a partner in the art advisory firm Zlot Buell + Associates. Buell, a Stanford graduate, helps successful start-up founders – many of them her former college classmates – begin collecting. “The tech community is in many ways defining culture,” she says.

On any given opening night at Jessica Silverman ‘s namesake space in the city’s gritty Tenderloin neighborhood (488 Ellis St.), the crowd is likely to include luminaries of the industry such as the Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger or the Jawbone creator Yves Béhar (Buell’s partner), with whom Silverman collaborated on a curatorial project, “Fused Space,” at his Potrero Hill design studio. “The tech community includes a lot of philanthropic intellectuals that are open to visual experimentation,” Silverman says.

Et Al. (620 Kearney St.), run by Facundo Arganaraz, Jackie Im and Aaron Harbour, is housed in the basement of a dry cleaner’s, exhibiting a well-curated selection of mostly young up-and-coming artists. Meanwhile, housed in 49 Geary Street — a multiuse building that was once the heart of the San Francisco art circuit but now houses mostly tech startups — Claudia Altman-Siegel ‘s eponymous gallery continues to promote a roster of artists that draws critical acclaim and the attention of its neighbors.

To the southeast, Chris Perez’s Ratio 3 (2831A Mission St.), with a line up of art-world darlings including Ryan McGinley and Takeshi Murata, was one of the first galleries to eschew the city center, opening instead in the traditionally Latino, rapidly gentrifying Mission District in 2004. Now that the neighborhood is home to numerous start-ups and nightlife options, other galleries have followed suit. Kiria Koula (3148 22nd St.), founded this past October by Rodrigo Peñafiel and Leticia Vilalta and directed by Juana Berrío, has already made a name for itself; one of its artists, Jose Leon Cerrillo, will be included in this year’s New Museum Triennial.

For gallerists like Silverman and Altman-Siegel, who both have shows opening this week – the 2014 Whitney Biennial participant Dashiell Manley and Matt Keegan, respectively – the interest in their work goes both ways. On one hand, tech collectors are becoming increasingly discerning with regard to contemporary art, pushing gallery owners to exhibit artists with higher profiles. “People in the tech industry,” Ratio 3’s director Theo Elliott says, “are broadly very curious about art.” And though gentrification has caused some artists to leave the city, for others whose work addresses issues of the digital age San Francisco is an increasingly compelling place to live. As Buell observes, “artists want to be where the ideas are.” Local galleries, in turn, are raising their international profiles: Silverman, Ratio 3 and Altman-Siegel will all be showing at the Frieze Art Fair in New York later this year.

The Bay Area tech scene’s invigorated interest in contemporary art extends beyond gallery walls. Illuminating the western span of the city’s Bay Bridge, Leo Villareal’s $8 million computer-programmed light sculpture installation, “Bay Lights,” was made possible in part by donations from Marissa Mayer and the tech-world power couple Mark and Ali Pincus of Zynga and One Kings Lane. And with a massive expansion project underway by the Oslo-based architecture firm Snøhetta, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has since 2010 brought on 12 new board members, at least half of whom come from the tech sector. And last September, at the opening night gala for Ai Weiwei’s Alcatraz-based installation “@Large,” many of the tech world’s heavy hitters — the Goodreads co-founder Elizabeth Chandler, Pincus and Béhar among them — mingled with art world movers and shakers. Throughout the night, attendees could be overheard discussing apps and and art exhibitions with equal enthusiasm. Entrepreneurs, as Buell says, “find points of deep resonance with the artistic community.”

 Since the early 1990s, I have made several works that focus on the construction site. In a large five-part series titled Construction Site (The Barcelona Series) of 1992, I photographed the housing construction for the summer Olympic athletes that year.  I recently returned to that theme in the quartet of canvases titled Construction Site (Olympic Village) that showed the construction of the housing for the athletes for the Vancouver Winter Olympics of 2010. Other recent examples that expand on this motif includeConstruction Site (The Miro Building) of 2004 and Construction Site Quartet of 2012.

My thoughts have since evolved to consider more complex relations rotating around the concept of a “work in progress”—relations that consider the everyday landscape of the modern city as a world “produced” and “in progress,” which is yet unfinished, just as a work of art is produced. Part of this theme of production includes human labour, and how I like to show the fabrication of my work in progress. The architectonic formation of an image fixes the phenomena of the dynamism of labour into an icon of temporality, the formative moment of construction revealed as material history. By this emphasis on the notion of production, I am interested in unravelling the latent forces that inform the shape of the world in which we live. In this sense the motif of the construction site acts as a concrete, material cipher for meditations on the production of history. The photographic document provides a witness to this historical formation, a critical reflection on the new nature of our reality. But embedded in the context of the work of art, the photographic image is also a construction, a pictorial simulation of the real that is a subjective expression objectively produced, and which has its own aesthetic demands and contradictions, in which the rhetoric of the sublime and beautiful dramatizes this dynamic development of the new monumental landscape of the modern city and offers a motif for thoughts and investigations of the super-structural forces of modern life.

— Ian Wallace