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Walead Beshty's Revolution Will Be Colorful
Walead Beshty's work with photograms hangs on a crucial moment of interpretation. Beshty creates seductive, colorful surfaces, ostensibly abstractions although their texture demonstrate visible curls and depth to suggest the artist's indexical mark and spatial depth. These images come with a backstory,namely the artist's rigorous mode of production and controlled inexpressiveness, formal constraints that include using only the basic CMY printing inks, delicately timed repeat exposures, and a constructed deployment of chance. Beshty makes an analogy of his practice to a game, "where the range of outcomes is implict to the rules, and the rules become more or less the important thing." The nature of this game has to do with the viewer's recognition of the rule's creative limits and the contingency of viewership within the exhibition context, and depends upon the viewer's inclination to do so.Read More
Gerald Incandela: In Touch With the Negative
Careful to differentiate his photographic output from photography as such, Gerald Incandela's series of "photographic drawings" take on the figure study as a tool to propose the erotics of the sketch and the formal potentials of the nude. Incandela alters his photographs of men in relaxed poses and various stages of undress by hand-brushing developer on the print. The results are the sitters are coaxed out of their isolation with vivid, highlighted lines and broad, expressive brush strokes; or else entirely erased, literally pushed out of the frame by Incandela's touch.Read More
Sam Moyer Pulls The Rug Out
Sam Moyer's studio occupies the basement below the Williamsburg apartment she shares with her boyfriend, artist Eddie Martinez. Each day she descends the stairs to her studio to work, a process journey has involved rugs purchased from Ikea, the fabric of which Moyer picks them from its weave to create various abstractions and patterns. The process is like drawing, or etching in the ground of the cheap carpet. When she's satisfied with her plucking, Moyer heats encaustic on a frying pan and brushes it onto the composition. She applies the encaustic until the rug is sturdy but flexible; hung in box-frames, they hang slightly off the wall and cast shadows like outsized cobwebs.Read More
In Profile: Edsel Williams
Summering Hamptonites are not noted for bringing art with them for the season. And among the Hamptons, the swampy The Springs neighborhood of East Hampton are more or less a ghetto—famous for its art history and remarkably preserved, which means it lacks the South Fork's requisite McMansions.Read More
Judging a Book By Its Number
I first met collector Philip Aarons thanks to a mutual interest in the artist Wallace Berman. I was studying the work of Berman and had received a grant to pursue my interest further; Aarons read about my project in a newsletter and reached out. Entering his apartment it turned out he had an (extensive, and generous) interest not just in Berman, artist-publications, or the West-Coast avant-garde, but all things rambunctious and contemporary in art. I subsequently worked with him on an exhibition and catalogue of queer artist-made publications primarily the Aarons' collection, both called Queer Zines, which launched at the 2008 New York Art Book Fair.Read More
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Butt Johnson's "Untitled Floral Pastiche" series consists of four drawings, each of which is organized around a different flower. Johnsons had long co
