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Take a quick glance at Coop Gallery’s current exhibit, While Away, and you might not see much: just ultra-minimalist sculptures made from commonplace household objects. But a closer look reveals surprises: The pieces aren’t static sculptures at all, but witty and elegant dynamic installations. An aerosol can sits atop a cardboard box, emitting a steady stream of white vapor; a doorknob inserted into a haphazardly placed beam of wood is silently turning. By bringing life to domestic clutter, these pieces turn the banal into something simultaneously eerie, charming and thought-provoking.

While Away is the first Nashville show for Lisa Walcott, a Michigander who is currently finishing up a residency at Chicago’s Threewalls Gallery. Her art involves, in her words, “objects that people can relate to.” Mini-motors, like those found in children’s science fair projects, bring her work into motion in ways that are familiar yet disconcerting. “When [the object] is doing this quirky gesture, you can bring your experience to it, and it maybe just sort of flips it in a funny way,” she says.

Walcott’s pieces mimic the moments of fragile equilibrium that sometimes transfix us in our daily lives — a bouncing ball, a smoking cigarette, a recently tugged lamp cord swaying rhythmically. Electricity uncannily extends these moments, suggesting household objects that move even after those responsible for animating them are gone.

“Threshold” is a sort of deconstructed door — a few planks of wood leaning against the gallery wall, one with a knob placed at hand height. Look closer and you’ll see the knob is slowly and continuously turning. The effect is unsettling. Similarly, in “Fine, Thank You,” a crumpled brown paper bag protrudes from the wall, expanding and contracting as if being breathed into.

In “Everything Is Different When It’s Over,” a lighted lamp leans against the wall. Black specks are suspended from wires above, resembling an annoying swarm of flies. The arrangement is similar to a traditional mobile, but instead of changing shape as the air around it moves, this piece makes use of simulated serendipity. The wires rotate; a strategically placed piece of rubber tubing periodically impedes their movement, creating an insectile jerky movement. The tableau (the kicked-over lamp, the flies) suggests a minor domestic meltdown. On the opposite wall, a flyswatter hangs, impaled by a kitchen knife: Did it fail to please its user?

These installations merely suggest such questions, inviting spectators to invent backstories without providing any definitive answers. “I like to leave it really open-ended,” Walcott says. “I’m more creating a mood than a full narrative.”

While all this may make While Away sound like an intellectual challenge, the show isn’t short on aesthetic appeal. “On and On” is especially simple and elegant. A lamp cord hangs from a wire that’s attached to a beam of wood placed near the ceiling. Every seven seconds, a spinning mechanical arm plucks the wire, making the cord bounce manically. Judging from audience reactions, the piece was a favorite; one art crawl visitor declared, “I want that over my bed at night.”

That would be a fitting place for it. These objects’ repetitive motions possess a soothingly meditative quality. They draw the spectator into the present moment, even as their unnatural persistence makes us paradoxically aware of the passage of time.

Keeping viewers mesmerized was Walcott’s goal when she started working with moving parts about four years ago. “I was always talking about transitional spaces and gestural objects and that kind of thing,” she recalls. “I always had a really active studio process. But when I showed my work, I’d just show the remnants of what I had done. So once I started actually animating the pieces themselves, it kind of made the form meet the function — everything clicked at that point.”

While Away makes clear that Walcott has found the perfect vehicle for her ideas. She describes her work as “pieces that [are] breathing in the moment, but have that threat of idleness sitting really close by. I like that sort of relationship with a double-edge aspect. Almost every good thing in life, I feel like, has something that threatens it.”

Pretty Good Shape materialized from the musings and survival of an artist in residence. While making on top of life, daily sustenance blends into material and back out again, agitation swarms and looms and humor emerges from a hole in the wall; regardless it all continues on. The act of supporting creativity without overindulging and spoiling it is precarious and never the same. Marks in space act as cairns; a way to push forward and find the next thing while leaving a path to backtrack, keep record and maybe begin to understand the present moment.

Maybe it’s supposed to
hole in the wall, soap, water, container, tubing, motor

I feel so sorry for you in those hot pants II
table base, motor, white table cloth

Still Life in Balance
hot cocoa powder, paper scrap, cough drop, tape, pink packing peanut, twist tie, bagel on napkin, paper towel piece, orange rind, onion skin, honey, sugar cube, eyelash, oatmeal, rock salt, pepper, sugar cube, staple, toothpaste, two rubber bands, painted cardboard piece, wrapper, contact lens, cinnamon, penny, wrapper corner, plastic protector, match, avocado skin, pin, sawdust, napkin bit, bread crumb, used birthday candle, eye lash, thread, mini marshmallow, red wine stain, two popcorn kernels, ribbon, gorilla glue, drywall, box fan foot, avocado skin, salt, tag piece, thread, rice, cup, ketchup packet

Nonetheless
wax, sinkers, thread, wire, motor, wood

Untitled (from the Kitchen Table Series–2 drawings)
ink, graphite and acrylic on paper

29 left over birthday candles from the thrift store, refrigerator rack, 4 plastic pamphlet racks

Like someone just grabbed their coat.

wood, door stopper, bar of soap

vs.

piece of concrete, candle wick, match dipped in honey, mini marshmallow, duct tape, two rolled oats, napkin, windex, bagel half, eyelash, bread tie, onion peel, sugar cube, cinnamon, orange rind, grain of rice, eyelash, pin, ribbon, pencil, coupon to keep

March 8-21, 2013
Opening Friday, March 8 from 6-9pm
threewalls (119 N. Peoria #2c Chicago, IL 60607)
An exhibition featuring work I’ve made during my residency…give or take a couple things.

(thrift store purchase of a pack of 29 left over birthday candles floating in water)

Gallery Hours: Friday & Saturday 11-3pm

“While Away” includes gestural and kinetic sculptures highlighting both the charms and risks of domesticity with vignettes that are inviting, safe and content in the moment as well as stuck in place, lazy and bored. Often worn and mostly ubiquitous objects employ their physical qualities to hold their position. These qualities (weight, warmth, dullness, softness) as well as the metaphorical characteristics (mysterious mist or illuminating light) become subject matter for the work. In a Fischli and Weiss vein of exploring “the way things go” and the way things are, familiar objects pin themselves in place or balance precariously either embodying (if kinetic) or alluding to (stationary pieces) a cause and effect. The objects become caricatures reaching and referring beyond themselves; familiar, but more vivid than before. Sometimes poignant and halting, often uncanny and slightly humorous and occasionally requiring some logical deduction, the objects left behind celebrate the resilient residual while gesturing toward the ongoing nature of life.

by Joe Nolan
Saturday, 6-9 p.m. on Fifth Avenue Downtown

March is a good month for art and artists. On March 10 we’ll all spring our clocks forward, shake off our sunlight deprivation and psychologically prepare for spring and the busy art calendar that always accompanies it. This month’s First Saturday event features out-of-towners, newbies and a big announcement from a Nashville homeboy.

Craig Brabson is a native Nashvillian best known for the photographs of rusting metal he started snapping in the 1990s. These studies of color, texture and line are hanging in offices, institutions and homes all over the city. Brabson exhibits his work at fairs and festivals around the country, all the while creating new imagery back at home. Visitors to the opening celebration of the Craig Brabson Fine Art Photography Gallery in The Arcade should expect pictures of vintage signage, iconic Nashville cityscapes, architectural studies and at least a handful of painterly, colorful photographs of rust on metal. They should also expect a crowd.

This month, Coop will be hosting installation artist Lisa Walcott in their space at The Arcade. Walcott’s work makes sophisticated statements about time and the joys and pains of the mundane, but it’s also accessible and full of humor. While I’m never exactly sure what to expect from a Coop installation, a visit to the artist’s website offers some clues: Walcott’s elements often move or operate in some way, as in the piece that includes an endlessly smoking cigarette, or the one with an ever-steaming cup of coffee. Another installation features a red rubber ball that’s strung to a spinning mechanical arm mounted in a gallery’s rafters. The precision of the setup creates the gravity-defying illusion of a self-bouncing ball while the monotonous sound of the rhythmic bouncing draws viewers into an acute awareness of the present moment. I’m hoping Walcott brings similar delights to Saturday’s Art Crawl.

Twist and Twist Etc. will be showing an exhibition of collaborative art by students from Antioch High School and Hillsboro High School. The Loop Project was organized by Cheekwood, and the students were facilitated by local painter Hans Schmitt Matzen and New York-based photographer Gieves Anderson.

Painter Metra Mitchell’s Sea Vessels is a collection of sexy beach-going nudes. At 40AU, Mitchell’s frolicking femmes seem happy enough, but there is something off about these scenes, as gallery curator Megan Kelley writes in the show’s press release: “Though playful, Mitchell’s figures seem suspended in a fugue, detached from the viewer and avoiding interaction with an outside gaze.”

Rounding off The Arcade highlights, Open Gallery will be hosting a group show from Chicago collective Adds Donna. Between Hearth & Campfire will likely be typical of Adds Donna group shows that include work in several media, loosely organized around a central theme.

At Tinney Contemporary this month, painter Pam Longobardi’s colorful, abstract landscapes on copper and paper make metaphors about humanity’s impact on the environment, and what it might mean for us and our world in the future. Some pieces seem wholly alien, as if the artist is predicting star travel to emerge from humanity’s relentless technological progress — and maybe she is. I hope Longobardi’s work in this show will come off more pretty than preachy, and that she doesn’t forget British alternative rock band Love and Rockets’ sacred dictum, “You cannot go against nature / Because when you do / Go against nature / It’s part of nature too.”

Longobardi’s work will hang alongside similarly nature-inspired works on paper that her husband and studiomate Craig Dongoski created in collaboration with a chimpanzee named Panzee. I haven’t seen the man/ape mash-up yet, but I really like Dongoski’s pen and pencil drawings, and I’d hate to see the simian turn this display into too much monkey business.

St. Mary’s Church at 330 Fifth Ave. N. has joined the Art Crawl, and Saturday they’re hosting exhibitions by Nashville painters Megan Behrens and Niki Adams. This is Behrens’ first exhibition of her oil portraits. Adams creates abstracts and cityscapes with spray paint and acrylics.

Keep crawling. It’s almost springtime.

Email arts@nashvillescene.com .

vs.

a birthday card for a very special someone

vs.

birthday card for a special someone, detergent cap, jar lid, packing peanut, wire whisk, stone, rice

Video: Ceal Floyer performance d13
Duration: about 1.20 min before the press conference to documenta (13) offered a brief Ceal Floyer “Nail Biting Performance”

‘Til I Get It Right at dOCUMENTA (13) by Ceal Floyer is a loop that is created from a song of the same title by the American country music singer-songwriter Tammy Wynette. Ceal Floyer just used the lines “I’ll just keep on” and “‘Til I Get It Right,” to create an endless mantra-like soundtrack.

Since the piece is so slow, I sped up the video to 8x faster than it actually was.

wood, screws, steel rod, window shade motor

In this first iteration it’s:
pot lid, thread, two kernels of popcorn, light yellow bar of soap (used), pile of pepper, two sprays of Chanel No. 5, pistachio shell and remainder of supporting string

vs.

small white plate with a kernel of popcorn and two eyelashes, broken piece of concrete, eraser from a pencil, small spoon, lemon and plastic wrapper

Blown Away, 2013
Fan, wedge, hammer, paper, pin

Still life in balance II, 2013
Forks, wood, string, hook

A work in progress including a horn loudspeaker and a drip of water.

If you’re in Chicago, feel free to get in touch (lisa@lisawalcott.com)–I would love to show you what I’m working on! Also, my studio space will be open to the public during threewalls events.

Saturday, February 9, 2013 at 7pm: Mary Patten, Schizo Panel
CANCELLED! Sorry for the inconvenience! Wednesday, February 20, 2013 at 7pm: Monika Szewczyk, Knocking on Doors Walking Sleeping Dogs: A Kick-Off Presentation

Open Gallery: Saturday, February 16 2:30-4pm CST
Closing/Lecture: Thursday, February 21 6-8pm CST

The things that slip through your fingers, flash before your eyes or hover in the spaces between are captivating because they are impossible to hold onto. From these intangible places, comes work that is lyrical, sensual and uncanny. It is constantly moving, but stuck in a single moment; isolated, but full of room to guess; familiar, but more vivid than before. My interest in fleeting moments & transitional spaces has led me to create a body of work including quick twitches, gestural bounces and subtle revolutions often alluding to a larger physical presence. Instead of referencing intangibility or the space between, physical motion naturally explores such ideas as the pieces themselves are constantly changing and moving within these spaces. The work becomes as much about what is present as what is not–purposely subtle and allusive leaving room for contemplation and asking for awareness. In addition to mechanical movement, I’ve recently begun to explore other ways to include or imply gesture such as the residue of an action– stains left behind, the position or combination of objects in space communicate past action in their stillness. Sometimes poignant and halting, often uncanny and slightly humorous and occasionally requiring some logical deduction the objects left behind celebrate the resilient residual and while engaging the ongoing nature of life.

The vignettes are both inviting and safe as well as stuck in place and bored highlighting both the risks and charm of domesticity. The use of ubiquitous objects may at first make them dismissible and their meaning assumed until considered further–brown paper bag references containment or a fly swatter becomes violent. Physical qualities (warm, cold, sharp, dull, hard or soft) as well as the metaphorical qualities (mist disperses mysteriously, a lamp illuminates and casts shadows) become subject matter for the pieces as the objects becomes caricatures reaching and referring beyond themselves.

Artist Lisa Walcott’s simplistic works displayed at Krasl

December 21, 2012 | EVAN GILLESPIE | South Bend Tribune Correspondent

“Dunnit” by Lisa Walcott

ST. JOSEPH — Don’t expect to walk into Lisa Walcott’s show in the artlab gallery of the Krasl Art Center and just stand and look at art.

You’ll hear the art, for one thing, and you’ll see it move. You’ll want to walk all around it, look at it from all angles, and you’ll want to crouch down low to get a better look at it.

You should do all those things, because these are not pieces that are at their best when they’re merely looked at. They beg to be experienced, to be examined and to be talked about. They’re simple in themselves, but they open the door to potentially bigger things.

Holland’s Walcott says that she’s interested in “fleeting moments and transitional spaces,” and her interest is evident in the handful of pieces that make up the show. She’s interested in making art that occupies a place in time, not just in space, and rather than pursue purely temporal arts — music, theater, performance art — she makes objects that change. She makes objects that sit in a gallery, like paintings or sculptures, but that change the gallery space, turn it into an experience or a setting for action. It’s an uncomplicated idea, and Walcott’s uncomplicated pieces embody it well.

Several of the pieces are mostly about motion. “On and On” is a string that dangles above the gallery floor, hanging from a wooden bar overhead. A metal rod rotated by a small motor periodically tweaks the string, making it quiver and dance around the visitor’s eye level. Another piece operates similarly; a rotating string makes itself jiggle when it comes into contact with a bit of plastic tubing. “Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge or Vice Versa” is more showy and more fun; here, a rotating rod bounces another rod on which is hanging a rubber ball on a string, making the ball bounce rambunctiously on the gallery floor.

In one way, these pieces feel industrial — the constant whir of their motors gives the gallery the air of a factory floor — but the way they’re cobbled together out of string and wire makes them seem haphazard and fragile. The most intriguing thing about the pieces is their rhythm. Because everything is triggered by rotating motors, the movement is cyclical — what at first seems random is actually a set of movements that happens over and over again.

Other pieces are more subtle in their movements. “Threshold” is a jumble of boards and a brass doorknob whose lock button twirls incessantly.

“Everything’s Different When It’s Over” consists of a floor lamp and some socks that don’t move at all. And “Fine, Thank You” makes efficient use of a motor and a paper bag to make an unassuminglittle piece that is creepy out of proportion to its size.

Creepy is a good word to describe “Dunnit,” too. In this piece, a flyswatter is pinned to the wall with a large kitchen knife. Here, Walcott is setting up a question; her unexpected and unsettling placement of these common objects makes us begin to construct a story in our heads to explain how these things got here. Something similar happens with “A Lot,” in which some towels are hung unobtrusively in a corner. These objects are nothing significant in themselves; the art is in what they suggest.

The show is capped off with a pair of ink-and-acrylic mixed-media pieces. Because they’re works on paper, and because they’re framed and hung on the wall, they conform to the idea of what art is supposed to be. They’re whimsical and unconventional, but next to the strange goings-on in the rest of the gallery, they seem positively quaint.

Walcott’s work will be a challenge for many visitors. There’s very little beauty in the show, and there’s not much in the way of obvious craft, either. Visitors who define art by those criteria probably won’t appreciate what’s going on in the gallery. But those who are willing to let art ask questions rather than answer them might find something worthwhile here, and those who will let art make them laugh certainly won’t be disappointed.

What do you see: Breathing Room at SiTE:LAB

by Holly Bechiri on Friday Sep 21st, 2012 02:34pm in OPINION

Tucked away in the back of a large venue is a quiet space to breathe.

Upstairs in the expansive venue at the old Public Museum curated by SiTE:LAB, one room, seemingly unfinished and filled with boxes, leads to another room with curious little breathing piles of bubbles. The entry is “Breathing Room” by Lisa Walcott .

When I visited the first time, as I was walking out, a couple was standing in the room full of boxes looking around, confused: Is this an art entry? What’s going on? Did we take a wrong turn?

I turned to them, pointed to the room beyond it, and reassured them.

“Yes, you definitely want to go in there.”

Unlike many other SiTE:LAB entries, “Breathing Room” doesn’t use old preserved birds and animals or body parts and science displays. It’s a small empty room with holes in the walls and the ceiling, filled with nothing but peeling paint and unfinished floors. But on those floors are living, breathing creatures: bubbles coming up from little spaces in the floor, forming islands of life in the middle of what could be mistaken for a forgotten room.

The space makes me want to slow down, to observe, to watch and see what happens.

I sat down the second time I visited, with the luxury of being alone in the space, and just watched. The installation, with its simple tools of moving air and soapy water, holds my fascination, even after repeated visits. By sitting with Walcott’s work, I became part of a historical building’s breath, our communal breath.

Maybe that sounds overly dramatic or excessively emotional or like I’m giving you complete hogwash. But visual art- just like good theatre and accomplished original music- can move us in ways we don’t normal experience running around in our busy lives. It takes a lot to get us to stop and get intertwined with the physical and historical significance of the world around us. Walcott’s work accomplishes this in a subtle and powerful way.

When in the “Breathing Room,” I am breathing with a living observation of the space around us.

“Having access to a site with as much history, life and residue as the Old Grand Rapids Public Museum, I am able to tap into this for part of the content of my work,” says Walcott.

Walcott was drawn to the space as she saw a possibility for interacting with that history and life.

“In my work, I investigate relationship to space, transitional moments, uncanny possibilities, cycles and change,” she says. “I’m interested in many things that are impossible to hold on to.”

We can run around all over ArtPrize, trying to find the most impressive, the biggest, the most complex… when perhaps one of the most moving pieces is tucked away, in the back, in a poorly-lit “empty” room- empty of anything except the pure observation of air and breath and the heartbeat of a building.

Idiosyncracies, the Mundane, and More at The Land of Tomorrow

February 18th, 2012

The Land of Tomorrow in Louisville collaborated with Country Club to curate a broad show of many different artists, many of whom are well-known in Cincinnati (such as Aaron Morse and Jimmy Baker). Only certain artists were given their own individual rooms (The Land of Tomorrow’s group), and are my focus here: Taylor Baldwin, Lisa Walcott, Jacob Isenhour and Willard Tucker (in collaboration), and Amanda Church.
Taylor Baldwin’s I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts (2009) features a laborious blend of unusual materials and meanings. The chainsaw, the topmost element, is made of transparent polyethylene, an “idiosyncratic” combination of material and function inspired by approaches to art practiced since the 1960s. This idiosyncratic approach (as it is commonly referred to for artmaking in this style from that period) usually relies on minimal form to isolate a sense of the unexpected (e.g. Claes Oldenburg and, more recently, Tara Donovan). Baldwin, instead, complicates this approach by putting idiosyncratic components with other idiosyncratic ones, resulting in a jarring plethora of ‘disassociations.’ In I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts, the aforementioned fragile transparent chainsaw rests above a central stump-form (idiosyncratic–forgive my overuse of this term–in its hollowness and intricate composition of small, straight pieces of recovered wood) and two shipping pallets (surprisingly made of plastics).

As if these juxtapositions were not enough to visually digest, the complex description of his materials violates the essential idea of artistic “repurposing.” The gallery handout includes a paragraph-sized, diligent listing of the varied sources of the sculpture’s materials (such as “cutoff from Lisa Walcott’s ‘My Pleasure’ installation” and “copper nodule from the San Manuel Mine”). It encourages the viewer to separate the material from its function in the form. It also highlights the process of production when the process is not so visually evident, or even relevant.

The final result is a negative aesthetic that disturbs. It is meant to do so. According to the curator’s statement, his work “deals with anxiety and the specter of imminent catastrophe.” The resulting piece, like many of his others in the show, is a curious amalgam of the anti-modernist tendency in the arts of the past fifty years, if not further back (if one includes its Dadaist aspects). Yet, its bombardment of the mind and the senses (or mind versus the senses) perhaps best reveals the kind of stimuli of which the most recent generation, habituated to the intensity of electronic media from the cradle onward, demands. Perhaps also the obsession with materials and their properties indicates an uneasiness with the unreality of digital, virtual space. In such a case, the task of the arts is not the subsumption of matter to form but to remind us that matter matters.

While Baldwin’s work is an in-your-face approach to visual art (a central piece in his show featured a life-sized skeleton on a pseudo-life raft), Lisa Walcott’s My Pleasure (2011) kinetic sculptures are subtle. An eye-level brown paper bag extending from the wall grabs one’s attention upon entering as its expansion and contraction makes a rhythmic crinkling sound (it is supposed to mimic hyperventilation). Yet, it is curiously tender, as if its fragility required assistance. Likewise, other kinetic objects slowly make their way to one’s attention: small soap bubbles appear and collect around a hole in the floor; a miniature black object imitates a fly trapped in an erratic orbit under the central ceiling light; and a nearly unnoticeable cigarette rests slightly “lit” on the floor. The mimetic element here is what makes these four objects/installations so effective, as the artist reveals an appreciative attention to details in the world about her. Their duplication here, placed in the framing of the gallery on old floorboards, gave me the sense of a curiosity cabinet of the everyday. A particularly personal narrative for me was that of an evening with an elderly smoker gazing quietly out a large window from a room in which he restlessly was trapped.

A Colder Friday, a collaboration between Jacob Isenhour and Willard Tucker, features varied elements involving an enclosure around a window. The enclosure, a smaller “room” in a larger room, is composed of straw bale and grey disaster blankets. Curiously, the smaller room is centered about one of the gallery’s windows, open to the outside with a fan blowing in frigid, 35-degrees air. The straw bale, a green building component, served to keep the cold air in the enclosure, a curious inversion of its usual function in architecture. Isenhour and Tucker placed other sculptural elements in and around the enclosure, such as a gold-painted cement mixing rod, some pieces of styrofoam, and cement blocks. I was unable to make anything of these elements, although apparently some were encased in ice at one time. The strength of the work resided in its inversion of architecture and the relationship to the weather, an unexpected experience in the gallery.

The final solo show, “Hollywoodland,” featured the abstract/Pop paintings of Amanda Church. Large (typically 72×80 inches) and highly stylized, her work features bright hues painted within strongly delineated lines. The artist abstracted from drawings she made in Los Angeles (from “hotel exteriors and interiors, pool shapes, billboards” and more). This is evident in Man with a Big Heart (2010), an dematerialization of a man’s jeans, shirt (with a geometrical pattern), and what appears to be animal to his left. The abstraction of the original form implies that the relationship of color and line are more essential than whatever subject matter her initial drawings drew from. Yet, I had difficulty with her bold colors, perhaps due to my experiencing them in the midst of winter. I found myself preferring how they looked in reproduction (such as the jpg included with this article) due to the way in which the small scale made her work intimate.

–A.C. Frabetti

The four other exhibitions included Hollywoodland by Amanda Church, Prodrome by Taylor Baldwin, A Colder Friday by Jacob Isenhour and Willard Tucker and works by Kamrooz Aram, Jimmy Baker, Sheila Pree Bright, Cheryl Dunn, David Ellis, Evan Hecox, Harmony Korine, Barry McGee, Aaron Morse, and Clare E. Rojas all Courtesy of Country Club Projects (more info).

Related:

My installation titled “It Most Certainly Will” was inside an 8x8x20 foot container including a red rubber ball that bounced from a string like Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge or Vice Versa and an inflating and deflating brown paper bag on the back wall.


It Most Certainly Will, 2011
wood, motors, timer, tubing, bag

Opening: September 14 at Ford Gallery
Exhibition Duration: August 31-October 5

Hecho en Casa/ Home Made
Curated by Alberto Aguilar and Jorge Lucero

A program of events that verge on acts of domesticity. Behavior that touches upon ideas of home, the local, hospitality, homemade-ness and the personal, all within an exhibition space. This series of events will be accompanied by a collection of objects and artworks that each invited artists found to be in conversation with the ideas of “home”. These objects can be viewed during the scheduled event hours.

Participating artists:
Alberto Aguilar & Madeleine Aguilar
James Kubie
Jorge Lucero
Gwenn-Aël Lynn & Hermes Santana
Bryan Saner & Teresa Pankratz
Christopher Santiago
Vanessa Smith
Samuel Sotelo-Avila
Hui-min Tsen
Lisa Walcott

>>MORE

The short story — how modest in bearing! How unassuming in manner! It sits there quietly, eyes lowered, almost as if trying not to be noticed. And if it should somehow attract your attention, it says quickly, in a brave little self-deprecating voice alive to all the possibilities of disappointment: “I’m not a novel, you know. Not even a short one. If that’s what you’re looking for, you don’t want me.” Rarely has one form so dominated another. And we understand, we nod our heads knowingly: here in America, size is power. The novel is the Wal-Mart, the Incredible Hulk, the jumbo jet of literature. The novel is insatiable — it wants to devour the world. What’s left for the poor short story to do? It can cultivate its garden, practice meditation, water the geraniums in the window box. It can take a course in creative nonfiction. It can do whatever it likes, so long as it doesn’t forget its place — so long as it keeps quiet and stays out of the way. “Hoo ha!” cries the novel. “Here ah come!” The short story is always ducking for cover. The novel buys up the land, cuts down the trees, puts up the condos. The short story scampers across a lawn, squeezes under a fence.

Of course there are virtues associated with smallness. Even the novel will grant as much. Large things tend to be unwieldy, clumsy, crude; smallness is the realm of elegance and grace. It’s also the realm of perfection. The novel is exhaustive by nature; but the world is inexhaustible; therefore the novel, that Faustian striver, can never attain its desire. The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains. And the short story can even lay claim to a kind of completeness that eludes the novel — after the initial act of radical exclusion, it can include all of the little that’s left. The novel, when it remembers the short story at all, is pleased to be generous. “I admire you,” it says, placing its big rough hand over its heart. “No kidding. You’re so — you’re so —” So pretty! So svelte! So high class! And smart, too. The novel can hardly contain itself. After all, what difference does it make? It’s nothing but talk. What the novel cares about is vastness, is power. Deep in its heart, it disdains the short story, which makes do with so little. It has no use for the short story’s austerity, its suppression of appetite, its refusals and renunciations. The novel wants things. It wants territory. It wants the whole world. Perfection is the consolation of those who have nothing else.

So much for the short story. Modest in its pretensions, shyly proud of its petite virtues, a trifle anxious in relation to its brash rival, it contents itself with sitting back and letting the novel take on the big world. And yet, and yet. That modest pose — am I mistaken, or is it a little overdone? Those glancing-away looks — do they contain a touch of slyness? Can it be that the little short story dares to have ambitions of its own? If so, it will never admit them openly, because of a sharp instinct for self-protection, a long habit of secrecy bred by oppression. In a world ruled by swaggering novels, smallness has learned to make its way cautiously. We will have to intuit its secret. I imagine the short story harboring a wish. I imagine the short story saying to the novel: You can have everything — everything — all I ask is a single grain of sand. The novel, with a careless shrug, a shrug both cheerful and contemptuous, grants the wish.

But that grain of sand is the story’s way out. That grain of sand is the story’s salvation. I take my cue from William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand.” Think of it: the world in a grain of sand; which is to say, every part of the world, however small, contains the world entirely. Or to put it another way: if you concentrate your attention on some apparently insignificant portion of the world, you will find, deep within it, nothing less than the world itself. In that single grain of sand lies the beach that contains the grain of sand. In that single grain of sand lies the ocean that dashes against the beach, the ship that sails the ocean, the sun that shines down on the ship, the interstellar winds, a teaspoon in Kansas, the structure of the universe. And there you have the ambition of the short story, the terrible ambition that lies behind its fraudulent modesty: to body forth the whole world. The short story believes in transformation. It believes in hidden powers. The novel prefers things in plain view. It has no patience with individual grains of sand, which glitter but are difficult to see. The novel wants to sweep everything into its mighty embrace — shores, mountains, continents. But it can never succeed, because the world is vaster than a novel, the world rushes away at every point. The novel leaps restlessly from place to place, always hungry, always dissatisfied, always fearful of coming to an end — because when it stops, exhausted but never at peace, the world will have escaped it. The short story concentrates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there — right there, in the palm of its hand — lies the universe. It seeks to know that grain of sand the way a lover seeks to know the face of the beloved. It looks for the moment when the grain of sand reveals its true nature. In that moment of mystic expansion, when the macrocosmic flower bursts from the microcosmic seed, the short story feels its power. It becomes bigger than itself. It becomes bigger than the novel. It becomes as big as the universe. Therein lies the immodesty of the short story, its secret aggression. Its method is revelation. Its littleness is the agency of its power. The ponderous mass of the novel strikes it as the laughable image of weakness. The short story apologizes for nothing. It exults in its shortness. It wants to be shorter still. It wants to be a single word. If it could find that word, if it could utter that syllable, the entire universe would blaze up out of it with a roar. That is the outrageous ambition of the short story, that is its deepest faith, that is the greatness of its smallness.

My lecture is at Harold Washington College
30 East Lake Street, rm. 102
Chicago, Illinois

Tuesday, April 26 · 2:00pm – 3:00pm

I will be presenting my work, specifically discussing my process relating drawing and kinetic sculpture.

A detail of my installation “From Whence They Came”.
18×8 feet
wood, water, soap, air, motors

And the rest of the trip:

Water/Vinegar Based Stains from Chisel Me Timbers.

To me, a vinegar-based stain is the closest I’ve ever come to seeing real magic (and the neighborhood kids are as fascinated by it as I am). You put on a clear liquid, and, depending on the wood, from 10 to 20 minutes later, color appears. Color will depend on your formula components and the type of wood used.

Vinegar & Galvanized Nails is known as “Pickling,” and was popular in Colonial days for aging and graying-up wood. Simply, get a jar, pour in some distilled white vinegar, and wait a few days for the nails to dissolve. This does not produce a dark stain, but a light-to-deep gray on most woods. Stretch out your stain by diluting it with water up to 5-1 water/stain without loss of tint. Color can be tweaked with Universal Colorant or Acrylic craft paints.

Vinegar & Steel Wool or Iron Nails produces a darker stain, from a brown and reddish-brown on pine/fir trees, to a deep black on oak. Toss a hunk of steel wool or nails into a jar, cover with distilled white vinegar,cap the jar, and in about 24 hours your ‘stain’ will be ready. Leave the jar uncapped, and after about 24 hours, add some water to encourage oxidation (rust) for a more reddish hue. This type of stain can be diluted up to 20-1 with water, without loss of effect, or with tea or coffee to add a touch of reddish color. Colors can be tweaked with Universal Colorants or Acrylic craft paints.

Art 21
@Lisson Gallery

My contribution to the exhibition…

Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge of Vice Versa, 2011
rubber ball, string, motor

Currently, I feel so sorry for you in those hot pants, 2011
bistro table, table linen, wood, fan, brass vent

Bless You, 2010
feather, pepper, thread, motor, wood

In a Shaft of Sunlight, 2011
mug, drywall, laminante, drain, water, heat element

Will not stay in place, will not stay still, 2009
ink jet photograph

My installation for Art Prize 2010 in Grand Rapids was at West Michigan Center for Arts and Technology (WMCAT). It consisted of two separate, but related parts–thirty pullstrings extending down through removed drop ceiling tiles and a dripping sprinkler. The space above a drop ceiling is called the plenum space. It is where all of the energy for the building is routed. Due to my interest in potential energy, overlooked objects and spaces, and site specificity, dealing with the top third of the space I was given was a natural progression.

Through the gesture of the pullstrings which extended from within the plenum space and the tromp l’oeil industrial sprinkler which bridged the two spaces, the piece alludes to things happening overhead–activating the plenum space. “Plenum” also addresses history as the removal of the ceiling tiles revealed the original plaster ceiling with layers of pealing paint and an old drop ceiling grid above the currently used one. I was also interested in the way the removal of the ceiling tiles broke the convenient drop ceiling grid.

Repetition is a common theme in my work. Repetitive motion as a vehicle toward a meditative way of viewing something. Even though the same thing is happening over and over, ideas can compound with each repetition. The last time I had a drip in my work it was immediately evaporated away by heat below a metal bucket (No Vacancy). This time, I decided to allow the drips to accumulate in a series of plastic buckets. Accumulation is a connection to history, pushing the idea of time further into the work. Time is in the history of the building revealed by the removal of some ceiling tiles, time is in the accumulation of water in the cluster of buckets and time is referenced by the rhythmic ticking of the drips into the bucket.

Video detail from an installation created during my residency at Ox-Bow in September 2010.

Almost NothingFalling ScrewRotating Mirror Circle Let Me Show You The World

RELATED POSTS: displacement at the uica

On and On, 2010
strings, motors, pullstring tips

DUSK

STRAIGHT

FULL

The Displacement Show at the UICA is up through early August! Check out my deflated installation!

TS Eliot At the Still Point of the Turning World
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

Running to Stand Still

standstill: a state characterized by absence of motion or of progress : stop

1 Kings 19:11-13
11The LORD said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.”
Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. 12 After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. 13 When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.
Then a voice said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

Specific Antonyms: general, indefinite, uncertain, vague

I really enjoy subject writing and with my thesis on it’s way, I thought I would engage in an exercise of defining modern mythologies. Whether or not they go directly into the thesis writing, I imagine this will be a helpful in the creation of my work as well as understanding what it means. Much like Barthes writing (I’m not equating myself to him, I swear) my work deals with the mythology of an object, idea or trope of culture which I present physically and highlight what it is and what it means. I was thinking about why the banal subjects in “Mythologies” become so interesting. I mean, he’s discussing plastic and soap and Einstein’s brain….shouldn’t these things be interesting on their own? All he’s doing in his writing is putting into language what these things are–defining them. I suppose this is the entire scope of semiotics-the relationship between the signified and the signifier.

In some ways, this is what I am trying to do in my work only the signifiers are summoned; they exist in the mind of the viewer and are therefore open to whatever he/she brings to the piece. For example, the floor boards I have been using have deep dark cracks in them. The constant bubbling coming up from below highlight a whole world of “underneaths” from experience or imagination. It could be the crayons that used to fall into the depths beneath the deck. It could be the way the rabbit hole is imagined. It could be swimming under the dock. It could be the lyrics from The Drifters “Under the Boardwalk”. I am summoning any and all of these ideas. By isolating what is happening and placing this object in an art context where we demarcate signifiers more than we naturally would I am engaging in a sort of physical semiotics (if that’s even possible).

A To-Demystify List

Play
Chain Link
Dust
Home
House Fly
Tickle
A Pork Chop with a Butcher Knife in it on a Cutting Board
Blinds
Dangling Carrot
Microwave
Picnic Table
A crack in the floor or sidewalk
Conveyor

Swing-like rope in my studio

Rope swing images from Google

RELATED POSTS: Dusty & Musty

Gober creates uncanniness through moods of aloneness, voyeurism and lack of sense place and time.

Primal Fantasies: the fantasy is not the object of desire, but it’s setting
Gober creates the setting putting the viewer into a space like a Magritte painting or a Kafka novel.

Delay and suspension are fundamental to desire.

Connecting childhood memories with new experiences or information changes the meaning of the memory.

The branches were literally bent to the ground and bound there by ice. It has been interesting how the ice has destroyed and supported the “structures” at the same time. Today I needed to rescue the tree. I had visions of the branches being set free and bouncing back to their original state. No such luck. Here is documentation of my attempt.

This project reminds me a lot of creating my fly piece in respect to possible harm to living things. The concepts have prevailed unanimously thus far.

The piece is still in progress. I am currently worried about the tree branches which seem to be really struggling with the weight of the ice. In some places the icicles are getting close enough to the ground that I am hoping they will begin to support the burdened branches. The bush is also quite bent over and it becoming more solid by the minute! I have spent quite a bit of time outside between last night and this morning where I have barely felt the cold because I get so wrapped up in the oscillation of the sprinkler and the forms on the branches. It’s so unnatural, yet it mimics something that is completely natural and common.

I’ve created my own ice storm within the snow storm we’re having.

The sprinkler had been oscillating for about an hour an a half when these pictures were taken. It’s dark now, so I will have to wait until morning to see what has happened in the hour and a half afterward.

Sisyphus’ plight once again visits my work creating a narrative where work is being done unnecessarily and constantly. From this needless watering (where no kids are playing and no grass is being nourished) a ring has begun to form and harden on the ground and the trees have begun to crystalize.

I may want to find a space that you are more able “enter” so that the experience is less escapable. I have also been wrestling with what to freeze in there. Strings could be beautiful, objects could hover and solidify nicely. It’s a time capsule. I will put some more time into solving this! I know it can be done!

There is a piece formulating in my mind using dust. I’m not sure about everything yet, but a finger wiping dust off of something is really interesting to me. The mark left is interesting with the soft dust compared to the clean, shiny surface. It’s a test of “is it clean enough”. Imagine the white glove that removed the dust.

Google image results for dust:

*I accidentally removed this video, but am keeping the post for the sake of record keeping. There was a little bit of urgency at this point before the thesis show! (2/12/11)

I ended up desaturating my entire studio in order to create a sort of sepia tone. In the back of my mind I have been really wanting to create a space from the photographs I was taking last year with the light behind the magazine page.

The themes I was cycling around are cleansing, absence, surrealism and wonder. The lack of color and branding…etc in the studio pushed the nostalgic mood and the idea of absence. There were loose symbols floating around the studio. A rope extending to the ceiling. Screws and holes in the walls where things had been. The floor was even textured by hand as was the chalkboard and some of the windows.

I’m interested in the way the suds come from a dark space beneath the floor. There was actually quite a bit of labor involved in getting them to come through. Once they are through the grow vertically and touch my face. According to Roland Barthes “Mythologies” (in the book refer to p. 36, in the pdf it’s p. 19) suds are luxurious and can be a sign of spirituality as the spirit has the “reputation for being able to make something out of nothing.” Something clicked for me when I realized my drawings were about systems and cycles. Things go in and things come out. Things pile up and get put away. It is exactly what has been ingrained in me from church my entire life. Sin and forgiveness–the ongoing cycle. In some ways it seems like that is what life is about!

It’s not evident in the photo’s or the video, but I entered and exited for the performance in a way that sort of formed a loop (in one side and out the other). It was the most criticized part of the performance. It seemed sort of “default” I guess. There is still room to explore these methods–and luckily doing a video allows me to edit this part out completely!

Documentation during the live performance (not the video piece):

RELATED POSTS:TAKETH AWAY

I ran across this while google image browsing for a piece I want to make:

Great, huh?

I saw this piece installed at Chicago’s MCA over the summer. The piece hits on quite a few things that I really like in art work. The essence of the material informs the content of the piece. Air is used in a powerful and interesting way. There is also a nice balance of simplicity, delicacy and a hint of violence. There are elements of this train of thought in my pieces Fly on a String & Burnt (see below).

February 2009

Anyway, here is what I have come up with so far:

Poetics of Space (Guston Bachelard): Currently reading in order to understand the theory behind space, memory and experience

Part Object, Part Sculpture (Helen Molesworth): This is an exhibition catalog from a show curated by Helen Molesworth at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2007. The exhibition is based on differentiating DuChamps readymades from the 1960′s from the one’s he debuted with in the 1920′s. From this thesis, she explores the way postwar sculpture challenges the Minimalist/Post-Minimalist sequence maintained in most accounts of the period. As my work teeters between art object and everyday object, this conversation is quite relevant for me. The artists in the show are a cross sections of so many of my favorites: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Robert Gober, DuChamp…

The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Rosalind Krauss): I have already read a few of these essays (the grid and surrealist photography) and was quite enlightened as far as understanding the theoretical framework in which my ideas lie.

Mythologies(Roland Barthes):“[Mythologies] illustrates the beautiful generosity of Barthes’s progressive interest in the meaning (his word is signification) of practically everything around him, not only the books and paintings of high art, but also the slogans, trivia, toys, food, and popular rituals (cruises, striptease, eating, wrestling matches) of contemporary life . . . (quoted from a review by Edward W. Said)

This is a mock up for a piece that I have been trying to realize for months. For now the jump ropes are attached to the wall and the mechanism is being turned by a hand held drill. There are a few aesthetic things to figure out here, but I am pretty sure I will make the piece to be free standing (no architectural support) and will mount the motor so that it can run for extended periods of time on it’s own. Without further ado…

This piece has transformed itself many times since it’s conception. It was going to be excerpts from “carefree” songs (such as those by Jack Johnson) with a torso-esque figure attached to the wall doing a shoulder dance. For awhile it was going to be powered by a tape player motor. I tried making an armature out of lego’s and erector set, wood and pully’s. Each of these things hit it’s own road blocked and pushed me into the direction of this final piece. It was critiqued last week Tuesday before we left for Thanksgiving break.

I’ve got a fly on a string in my head. My drawings have repeatedly included this image of lightbulbs with a swarm of flies buzzing around them. I decided to attempt this mental image in three dimensions. It has been quite a process. I ordered fly larva online (aka magets), waited for them to hatch and then attached string to the legs of any fly I possibly could (not easy). The result is much of what I had hoped it would be: