It’s Grey, It’s Grey
Dave Hardy
March 20 – May 2, 2009
Art in General
It seems like every really great piece of art puts you in a place where it is impossible to exactly describe that point of tension between what the work is doing to you and what it is. Confronted with Dave Hardy’s towering, room length wall of chocolaty vinyl wood shingles obscuring blinding tubes of white neon light, it’s impossible not to feel that tension.
The work could easily be called an odd, post modern take on the conflict between anti-minimalism vs. minimalism: think Eva Hesse vs. Sol Lewitt or Dan Flavin. But the departure is in the way these elements of anti-minimal and minimal combine; purity of obstruction meeting purity of abstraction is such an earnest sight. Hardy has created a spectacle that mediates two ideas so perfectly that the conflict between them is equally as perfect.
One can’t help but wonder if Hardy himself is fully aware of what he’s done. The impression given by the press release is that the work exists in his mind not as an action but as a symbol. The glowing light represents an undefined interior, while the hand made plastic shingles are a metaphor for mass production. In other words, Hardy sees his visual collision as more of an idea about collision and not an action before his viewer. If he wanted us to see a representation of ambiguity, he probably should have left the neon at home. The war between light and dark alone leaves no room for uncertainty and even less room for speculation. This piece is all about the visual impact and the uninterrupted experience. It is the viewer reveling in the light of discovery and equally wrestling with the darkness of imperfection, seamlessly, in the immediacy of one on-going moment. The effect should not be explained, it should be lived.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Deeply, Satisfyingly, Unattainable
Angelina Nasso
MIWIS
February 26 – April 11, 2009
Winston Wächter Fine Art
The oil paintings in Angelina Nasso’s fourth solo New York show are not a surprise, nor are they surprising to look at. Large and sparingly titled, comprised of warm colors, blotched, blurred and streak-dripping down the paper; it is easy to see why Nasso has had so much success with her style. These paintings are easy on the eyes because they are equally reflective and dense-totally meaningful and completely meaningless. In Untitled #15 thick cascades of white paint hover around large masses of dark color, giving the illusion of depth, but the shapes are shadowy and undefined. Embers #22 is comprised of cloudy, watery patches of blue, violet and green, offset by warm red and yellow subtly draining toward the center of the composition.
Wandering around the gallery makes me feel like a child looking through windows in the rain. Nasso explains her work as reflections on the darkness of her childhood, where out in the Australian wilderness the lack of streetlights made the night into oscillating, pixilated shapes. For me, they are more like a state of deep meditation; the way the world looks when eyes are half open and the mind doesn’t bother to make sense out of the visual world. It is an area in space and time that where thoughts are still and meaning is not yet a tangible thing, only a feeling. It’s the reason Nasso’s paintings are so likable; they connect to the place that exists between consciousness and dreaming, between moment and memory. Their elusive quality is what makes them most appealing.
MIWIS
February 26 – April 11, 2009
Winston Wächter Fine Art
The oil paintings in Angelina Nasso’s fourth solo New York show are not a surprise, nor are they surprising to look at. Large and sparingly titled, comprised of warm colors, blotched, blurred and streak-dripping down the paper; it is easy to see why Nasso has had so much success with her style. These paintings are easy on the eyes because they are equally reflective and dense-totally meaningful and completely meaningless. In Untitled #15 thick cascades of white paint hover around large masses of dark color, giving the illusion of depth, but the shapes are shadowy and undefined. Embers #22 is comprised of cloudy, watery patches of blue, violet and green, offset by warm red and yellow subtly draining toward the center of the composition.
Wandering around the gallery makes me feel like a child looking through windows in the rain. Nasso explains her work as reflections on the darkness of her childhood, where out in the Australian wilderness the lack of streetlights made the night into oscillating, pixilated shapes. For me, they are more like a state of deep meditation; the way the world looks when eyes are half open and the mind doesn’t bother to make sense out of the visual world. It is an area in space and time that where thoughts are still and meaning is not yet a tangible thing, only a feeling. It’s the reason Nasso’s paintings are so likable; they connect to the place that exists between consciousness and dreaming, between moment and memory. Their elusive quality is what makes them most appealing.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder?
This Place Called Home
Matt Wilson
February 12 – March 14, 2009
I feel a little guilty for liking Matt Wilson’s photographs so much, mainly because I like them without hesitation. You see, I’ve been trained by the church of the twentieth century (and what little there has been of the twenty first) only to like art that has put me through the stages of art grief: disorientation, rejection, self doubt, re-evaluation and then finally, acceptance/like. I am trained to ignore art that gives me an immediate, pure sense of satisfaction on the grounds that anything that hasn’t been wrestled with cannot be trusted to mean something real. That very well may be true, but it also assumes that there are rules for what makes good art.
The next battle to be overcome in this epic of my star-crossed art love, is photography. This medium seems unsettled in the art world; no one is sure what it is supposed to do, or how it should be handled. I don’t trust Matt Wilson’s farmhouse sitting on a grassy windswept hill in the warm twilight of a summer evening-I know it’s my nostalgia he has captured—but the fact that it's a photograph makes me want to believe it anyway. The images are small, and looking at them feels a little like peeking curiously through glowing keyholes: these images are innocent, there is nothing about the hardness of living in them. Cars veer around midnight corners in a blur of happy adrenaline, children pull brightly colored shirts over their faces to hide from things they don’t like and laugh while the world spins behind them, youth stands in the warm light of a sweaty street corner, and the texture of the rooftops is reflected in the texture of the street. I want to live in Wilson’s mediated reality, where he uses photography to pretend things could feel this perfect in life.
Show me this again in two months and my cynicism may seep back in and remind me to disregard Matt Wilson and call him sappy or pointless. But like anyone who has just fallen in love at first sight, it feels too good to be talked out if it.
Matt Wilson
February 12 – March 14, 2009
I feel a little guilty for liking Matt Wilson’s photographs so much, mainly because I like them without hesitation. You see, I’ve been trained by the church of the twentieth century (and what little there has been of the twenty first) only to like art that has put me through the stages of art grief: disorientation, rejection, self doubt, re-evaluation and then finally, acceptance/like. I am trained to ignore art that gives me an immediate, pure sense of satisfaction on the grounds that anything that hasn’t been wrestled with cannot be trusted to mean something real. That very well may be true, but it also assumes that there are rules for what makes good art.
The next battle to be overcome in this epic of my star-crossed art love, is photography. This medium seems unsettled in the art world; no one is sure what it is supposed to do, or how it should be handled. I don’t trust Matt Wilson’s farmhouse sitting on a grassy windswept hill in the warm twilight of a summer evening-I know it’s my nostalgia he has captured—but the fact that it's a photograph makes me want to believe it anyway. The images are small, and looking at them feels a little like peeking curiously through glowing keyholes: these images are innocent, there is nothing about the hardness of living in them. Cars veer around midnight corners in a blur of happy adrenaline, children pull brightly colored shirts over their faces to hide from things they don’t like and laugh while the world spins behind them, youth stands in the warm light of a sweaty street corner, and the texture of the rooftops is reflected in the texture of the street. I want to live in Wilson’s mediated reality, where he uses photography to pretend things could feel this perfect in life.
Show me this again in two months and my cynicism may seep back in and remind me to disregard Matt Wilson and call him sappy or pointless. But like anyone who has just fallen in love at first sight, it feels too good to be talked out if it.
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