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From the Archive: Dike Blair's Good Year
Last year on the ocassion of Dike Blair's show at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, in Greensboro, North Caroline, we announced that the installation and multi-media artist "is having a good year." Said year pales in comparison to his fall 2010, when the artist, born in 1952, shows for the first time at Gagosian. In this exhibition, Blair has constructed an ambulatory installation that links the aspects of his inter-related sculptures and paintings. Here is an excerpt of our Steel Stillman's studio visit with the artist, last year:
The Serious Joke: The Objects of Jay Heikes
For the past five years, Jay Heikes' work has revolved around one big joke. In the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the artist showed stills from a video that showed him as a stand-up comic, puppet in hand, telling a joke about a pirate and its obstinate parrot. Shot in one take while Heikes was finishing graduate school at Yale, So There's This Pirate (2005) follows the parrot's refusal to obey its owner and the pirate's resultant identity crisis, mimicking the artist's constant evaluation of his own work.Read More
Vested Histories: Shinique Smith
Painting has a romance with itself, and its history; fabric's attractions are always to someone else. An intrinsically disembodied medium, fabric connotes apparel. Yet what it suggests—nudity and erotic intimacy; the line in the sand between profanity and propriety—seems too loaded to be properly unpacked. Fabric seems to always ask "who?" As in: who wore it, owned it, discarded it, designed it, sweatshopped it, mass-marketed it, knocked it off, etc. When fabric is used in the construction of an artwork, this whisper of "who" follows the work, disrupt the object's autonomy. In the case of artist Shinique Smith, whose sculptural work primarily comprises used clothing, re-configuration and re-contextualization are uncertain steps toward that autonomy.
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Tamed With a Frame: Sebastian Black
The work in 24-year-old, New York-based painter Sebastian Black's debut solo show, "The Playful Paw-Strokes of the Wilderness," sounds simple. At Chelsea's Kathleen Cullen Fine Art, he will show paintings of dogs comprising two gentle drooping curves that form a docile pet with long, flat ears. The enclosed space is filled with a patchwork of triangles, horns, and candy-colored pizza slices. Black's paintings have a thick, rich surface, and the longer you look at them, the more the shapes lend themselves to re-configuration as different characters, particularly a female nude. The experience of looking at Black's paintings is like Magic Eye or the primordial scene: you can only see the naughty truth, once the the puppy's nose is revealed as a swatch of pubic hair. Black's friend and mentor, Adam McEwen, asks him why it's necessary to tame his paintings:ADAM MCEWEN: How many of these dog paintings do you think you have made so far?
SEBASTIAN BLACK: I think there are 11 or 12, only eight of which I am comfortable wrapping up and saying, "I'm done." And then there are a lot of other similar ones-dog piles of them.
MCEWEN: What do you call the paintings, when they're in the studio?
BLACK: Puppies.
MCEWEN: Are there grown-ups?
BLACK: These are the kinds of dogs that kids draw, and which would be young themselves, with big soft eyes and floppy ears.
Poster Pop: Rupert Goldsworthy
Painter, academic, curator, gallerist and author Rupert Goldsworthy gets most enthused by signage, the cult of charisma and the melding-and clashing-of cultures in urban space. Taking the iconography of radical histories as his starting point for many of his large, poster-style paintings, the English-born artist brings together faintly familiar figures of old that were used as tools for propaganda, with his own text, rococo patterning, Ben-day-like dots and copied signs from Islamic food shops in Berlin, military graves and mass media. The juxtaposition feels far from a mere mishmash of appropriated imagery; it's the tracking of the history of images that is central to the work. Goldsworthy has previously run eponymous gallery spaces in Berlin and New York. His recent solo show, "New Paintings" at Ritter/Zamet Gallery in Whitechapel, East London, explored the continuity and contraditions of an aspiring post-racial Berlin today.LAURA K JONES: Your large-scale paintings here are all on brown wrapping paper. Why not canvas?
RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY: I like the tactile quality of wrapping paper, and its ruggedness. I like the excessiveness of the size. A work at this scale on paper feels relaxed and intimate in a way that canvas doesn't. I wanted the works to live and breathe on their own terms, to feel expansive, not cramped.
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Mixed Media. Courtesy (recently on view at) James Fuentes LLC, New York.
For her most recent show, artist and Gang Gang Dance singer Lizzi
