Category Archives: Art

A HISTORY OF ANYWAY

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A HISTORY OF ANYWAY
Intermedia
by Nance Van Winckel

Sad lad of the far north, you with no means and no true lassie, with no way home and no home anyway, you voyage on.

And yes, as per usual, just when the key to all seems within reach, the dreaded forever descends.

[click images to enlarge]

Three feminine figures in white dresses and ornate orange headpieces speaking to someone dressed as a servant or clown, against a mountain backdrop. Text: A History of Anyway, The degradations happen, In poor light. In the meantime. Found poetry on the page of an ancient book, which reads: ASS AND MOTHER. far, far was the babe for fees; no one thought himself home. Next to the text, an angelic figure speaking to a cloaked figure. Found poetry on a yellowed page, which reads: lad stretched then went not for her. Next to the words is an image of a royal figure holding a bird, next to a warrior holding a sword.Found poetry on a book page with a floral border. Text reads: given ths no, all high up fixed, with A.K.A in the corner. An image on the page shows a royal figure wearing a large gown, with the words "A.K.A.," "Clouded Thoughts," and "hidden tail" next to them.Found poetry on a page surrounded by a floral design, which reads: big white rooms ran to one edge. his bear dared not look He left afraid it danced. In the top right corner is an image of a bear laying on it back in chain and a cloaked figure standing over the bear.Found poetry on a stained book page. Title: THE KEY TO FOREVER LOST FOREVER. Text: her eyes begged but you your world, and dumb she went. Image of feminine figure looking into sun next to tall object with closed eye on it. Ornate art piece depicting animal-like royal figure wearing coat, accessories, and head gear. Stands against blue starry sky with black birds flying above and large colorful birds flying adjacent to the royal figure. Ghostly figure on top right. Text: To welcome what arrives to blacken the flowered fields.

Nance Van Winckel is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Our Foreigner, winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series Prize (Beyond Baroque Press, 2017), Book of No Ledge (Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series, 2016), and Pacific Walkers (U. of Washington Press, 2014). She’s also published five books of fiction, including Ever Yrs, a novel in the form of a scrapbook (Twisted Road Publications, 2014), and Boneland: Linked Stories (U. of Oklahoma Press, 2013). She teaches in the MFA programs at Eastern Washington University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. Read more at her website. 

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STILL AND YET: Photographs by Richard Kagan

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STILL AND YET
Photographs by Richard Kagan

Born in Philadelphia, Richard Kagan is a photographer and former furniture maker whose artistic career took a curiously circuitous path. He began as a self-taught street photographer while a student at Temple University. However, after leaving college to practice Buddhism under a visiting Japanese Zen Master in New York, Kagan became impassioned with the silent eloquence of handmade objects and pawned his camera to buy woodworking tools.

Following several years of apprenticeships, Kagan opened his own furniture workshop and founded the Richard Kagan Gallery—the first nationally recognized gallery for contemporary furniture artists. He taught at the Philadelphia College of Art (University of the Arts) for 10 years and exhibited furniture in museums and art institutions throughout the U.S. A back injury put an unexpected end to his woodworking career and opened the possibility to return to photography, thus bringing him back to where he began.

Beginning photography again in 1988, with academic studies and assisting other photographers, Kagan went on to have solo photography exhibitions in the United States, Great Britain, and South America. He taught photography at Drexel University in the mid-1990s. An early grant from the Arts Council of Wales enabled an extended project in the U.K. and Europe, culminating in an exhibition at the Royal National Eisteddfod. That project solidified a love of landscape photography first begun in Italy some years before.

Not surprisingly Kagan brought to photography some of the same aesthetic concerns with which he made furniture—a quest for quiet, understated, and elegant forms. His main bodies of work include Land/Spirit/Sky, landscapes photographed primarily in Europe; Iron Portraits, a series of austere yet sensuous portraits of antique tools and objects; and Blurred Time: Sacred Places In Kyoto, nighttime photographs taken on the grounds of temples and shrines in Japan (and on exhibit at the Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral).

[click on any image to enlarge]

Iron Portraits

EXHAUST MUFFLER No. 1 (2008) | Floating in a black space, a fallen-off and run over, rusty automobile exhaust muffler. How ordinary and how humble in its sensuous skin of iron. And, like us, how vulnerable and how precious. I picked this up on the street as a 21-year-old living in New York’s East Village. Some 40 years later I photographed it.

EXHAUST MUFFLER No. 2 (2008) | Another muffler which, after I photographed it, I realized was influenced by a single still life painting that I also discovered at 21, and which had a profound influence on everything I’ve ever done. (Dali, Basket of Bread, 1945 — the year I was born. Not to be confused with his earlier version.) So many of my photographs have been about making something so absolutely still and yet possessed of an internal icon-like energy. Stillness is a major link between the objects and the landscapes, I think.

OIL CAN WITH LONG NECK (2004) | How could I not photograph this proud, elegant, oil can?

RECUMBENT SHEARS (1992) | About 14 inches long, this rusty pair of shears, like all of the objects I photograph, are just things that are part of my life. They live on shelves or stands throughout my home and studio.

DANCING PLIERS (2005) | For 20 years, prior to my career as a photographer, I worked with hand tools on a daily basis as a furniture maker. Working with wood was an expression of reverence and sensuality and I gave it up only as the result of a back injury. The silver lining in that dark cloud was that I got to pursue an earlier love, photography. Nonetheless, I am still inspired by the gentle grace and beauty of handheld tools.

SUGAR NIPPERS (2008) | Two centuries ago, sugar nippers were used by the wealthy, for table or kitchen use, to cut small pieces of sugar from conical shaped sugar loaves.

 

Land/Spirit/Sky

NEAR SIENA Tuscany, Italy (1990) | A clump of Italian cypress trees amidst a farmer’s land. This was the first of my landscape images. It spawned a decade of landscape photographs throughout Europe, the U.K., and Ireland.

CHAPEL OF THE MADONNA Tuscany, Italy (2001) | I knew I wanted to photograph this little family chapel with its two cypress trees, but it took a long afternoon of searching for the perfect point of view. In the actual (print) photograph, the chapel is bright white, while the rest of the image is a warm pink — a laborious technique of chemical split toning that affects the various tones of a black and white photo differently. In Photoshop it would only take two minutes.

RETURN TO GRANADA Andalusia, Spain (2000) | I like to photograph at night, though it has its own problems. During the 8-minute exposure that produced this photo, I covered the lens with a hat when cars were approaching. Somehow, I didn’t hear this car and thought the headlights had ruined the photo, but actually it’s what made it. Drawn to this image, but not happy with what I was getting, I worked on it in the darkroom for several days. Ultimately, I eliminated a house, tree, and other extraneous information.

PARQUE DE DOÑANA Andalusia, Spain (2000) | To make this photograph, I remember standing on a rental car roof with the 2 legs of the tripod astride my own and the 3rd tripod leg precariously perched on the top rail of a chain-link fence. A strong wind threatened to throw the camera, tripod and me over the fence. Stillness is a balm for the confusion of my life.

MONTURQUE Andalusia, Spain (2000) | What a joy when after days of fruitless searching, a horse, a building, and a hole in the clouds came together for the camera’s delight!

CAMPO DE SAN JUAN La Mancha, Spain (2000) | In Spain, I followed the route of Don Quixote along the path of Cervantes’ near-mythical hero.

The photographs in the Iron Portraits series were taken with a view camera — the old-style camera with a 4 x 5″ negative. The prints were made in a traditional wet darkroom in sizes ranging from 16 x 20″ to 36 x 46″.

The photographs in the Land/Spirit/Sky series were taken with Kodak 2475 Recording Film, a special purpose film with a very grainy, soft-focus quality that at times can resemble a drawing or mezzotint. They are 8 x 10″ and were also made in a darkroom.

◊◊◊

Photo by James Blocker.

A native of Philadelphia and a former furniture maker, Richard Kagan has been teaching, traveling, and photographing for over thirty years. When he is not in his darkroom hand crafting the fine nuances of black and white prints, or on the computer making color ones, he enjoys reading (Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous), meditating (on the mysteries of importing his AOL contacts into Gmail), and his cat (Takuhatsu). “I take relatively few photographs, compared to some photographers, but I spend a lot of time making work prints and thinking about each image on the contact sheet. I look for trends, I look for what’s happening that is consistently running through the contacts as well as for new directions. And from that I discover something about how I see.” Visit Richard’s website at richardkaganphoto.com for more photos and interviews.

PASSAGES: An Installation in Progress by Cheryl Harper

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PASSAGES: An Installation in Progress
by Cheryl Harper

 

I am one of those artists who thinks my work has to say something. I have nothing against paintings that bring together a disparate room décor or just make one feel good, but that’s not what I want to do. If you happen to like my work for any of those reasons, that’s fine, but if you are intrigued and compelled to think about bigger issues, that is my goal.

Since 2006 I’ve been making small statues of politicians, particularly of women in the national spotlight, in addition to works that address issues like anti-Semitism, terrorism, and gun violence. But in the last few years, I’ve been thinking about how I came to where I am now, a Jewish woman who lost extended family in the Holocaust and who married a direct descendant of a Southern plantation family that owned other people. I am a descendant of the oppressed who married into a family who oppressed.

I used to think of this in terms of predator/prey imagery but I’ve become more immersed in the complex history of both families, especially through the lens of today’s rising intolerance. We now live at a time to witness the last generation of Holocaust survivors, the rise of white nationalists, and the progeny of many generations of African slaves who are struggling with the past — and we see how these histories intersect. For example, American Jews were helping achieve civil rights legislation for African Americans in the 1960s, after half of the world population of Jewry was enslaved and mass murdered in Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, many whites in America are descendants of those who escaped persecution in Europe during the years of the Atlantic slave trade.

• • •

[click any image to enlarge]

Passages dress in progress, 2017, at James Oliver Gallery, Philadelphia

My current project, Passages, is a proposed traveling installation to American colleges. I am hoping to create dialog about who was privileged, who was enslaved, and how to approach a better understanding of our generational histories in order for all to move forward.

The point of view is female. There are original family wedding dresses overlaid with other clothing and accessories owned by mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers.

There are hangings and floor objects related to their standard of living and aspirations. Hand-printed wallpaper brings together imagery culled from family photographs and objects that refer to immigration, plantation life, and slavery.

My mother was a daughter of immigrants from the Pale, an area that straddles Poland and Russia. Her parents were first cousins, often the case in Europe, who scrabbled for a living in tiny villages, ironically similar to the practice of cousin marriage in royal families who sought to keep their families blue-blooded. My new-to-America grandparents were considered a match even in their teens, perhaps earlier; it was not a matter of love. My zayde (Yiddish for grandfather) had the responsibility of bringing over siblings to America. He was a man of very modest means, a cantor of Jewish Orthodox tradition, moving his family of four daughters and a housewife with poor English skills to a small town in New York State.

My European family in the 1930s

Here is a photograph of the other family members he was obligated to bring to America. The man in the oval, the father, was deceased. The two daughters died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In this photograph, the girls hold proof they are educated as one holds a book and the other a scroll. Had my zayde and bubbe not emigrated, this likely would have been the fate of their four daughters, including my mother. I always had a sense of being hunted and unsafe, probably because of family stories that in childhood I overheard between adults. Post-war was a very confusing time for Jewish children in America. We knew everyone was sad but we didn’t know anything specific. It was only as teenagers when we read the Diary of Anne Frank that we began to understand what was lost. That was the beginning of our awakening.

• • •

A slave auction advertisement placed by my husband’s ancestor

My husband’s family came to the Colonies in the late 17th century. Isaac Lesesne was Huguenot, one of the French Protestants who suffered severe persecution at the hands of the Catholic majority and who emigrated for religious freedom and opportunity. It didn’t take him long to establish a rice plantation, then an indigo plantation for dyestuff. He settled in the wetlands near Charleston, known as Daniel Island, eventually expanding to several plantations and a dry goods store in Charleston. Lesesne had many slaves, the majority of whom were likely from Sierra Leone and knew how to grow rice and indigo. We found evidence of his family ancestors, particularly the Laurens, who marketed slaves, and an early runaway slave advertisement by the Lesesnes in the main regional newspaper.

A branch of my husband’s Southern family in the late 1920s

My husband and I researched objects that came down through his family through the centuries, studied the permanent exhibit of an archaeological excavation of the Daniel Island Lesesne plantation at the Charleston Museum, and visited the 18th century Lesesne family cemetery. We know who married whom and how the Lesesne branch of our family migrated to New Jersey through family fortune based on slave labor.

In this project, I am taking inspiration from Lesesne family objects dating back to the plantation, never sold, as the family was still wealthy during the Depression. In fact, this branch of the family was still collecting sterling silver service, Chinese snuff bottles, and semi-precious necklaces well into the 20th century.

• • •

 

Detail of an 1878 mizrah paper cutting, still in the extended family

Family heirlooms, augmented, passed down from my husband’s family

My family had no trappings of wealth, only entering the middle class in the mid 20th century. Among the very few objects passed down in my mother’s family was a brass plate, brought over in 1913. My father’s family, one generation ahead in America, had a few more objects of value such as cut glass and a pair of English brass candlesticks dating back to the 19th century. By sheer chance, we discovered a wonderful paper cutting dating to 1878, made by my great-grandfather’s brother as a going-away gift. In fact, it turns out to be a very important example of an artistic tradition in Galicia, Poland. Called a mizrah (Hebrew for “east”), it was mounted in the Brooklyn family home in the direction of Jerusalem. I used elements from this image, still owned by a branch of my family, as a part of my installation’s wallpaper. The lions, gazelles, birds, and snakes all had spiritual meaning to the maker and the recipient.

 

Wallpaper patterns made for Passages using block prints, stencils, and woodcuts

 

I saw similarities between the photos in families, such as little girls wearing matching dresses. I also saw differences. In my family, the clothing was the product of my great-grandfather’s home sweatshop, probably sewn by him, his wife, and older daughters. In my husband’s family, the picture I used was of my mother-in-law and her sister, who lived in a charming mansion in Northern New Jersey; their dresses were certainly not homemade. I also looked to the industry of the plantation, where the product alternated between indigo, then rice, then back to indigo.

 

Studio study of ads for runaway slaves

 

In this installation, I plan to use Isaac Lesesne’s own words in an ad he placed for his runaway slaves, whom he considered lost property. As a culture, we need to acknowledge how black slaves were monetized, and the sorrow of Jewish slavery in recent history. If loss and misery can be shared and understood beyond our singular point of view, I think it will be helpful. The enslaved never leave this trauma behind completely.

I want to share these family histories through my art to create an experience and a vehicle for dialog. I envision a forest of dresses and collected objects and photos surrounded by wallpapers for an immersive experience. Beneath and above the dresses and perhaps in the floor spaces are collected objects that refer to the lopsided domesticity of the families, evidence that reflects privilege, hardship, ownership, and aspiration. Depending on the size of the space, the installation — as does history — can expand or contract.

 

artist cheryl harper in her studioCheryl Harper is an artist and independent curator in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area. She holds a BFA and an MFA in printmaking (Tyler School of Art and The University of Delaware) and an MA in art history (Temple University). Harper has received numerous awards and honors including a residency in 2018 at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Fleisher Challenge (2008) and first prize in sculpture in Pennsylvania Art of the State (2008). She has had two solo shows at the James Oliver Gallery in Philadelphia, was a juried artist in ArtShip Olympia (2016) and many other exhibitions. Her curatorial projects include the upcoming Seamless: Craft media and Performance (spring 2020) at Rutgers-Camden. Visit Cheryl’s website at www.cherylharper.com

Mid-Century Hipster, a visual narrative by Emily Steinberg

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Mid-Century Hipster
A visual narrative by Emily Steinberg

MID CENTURY HIPSTER by Emily Steinberg Panel 1: It's been quite a year. Last June I went under the knife. And got a new hip. 6.5 years ago dancing like a 20-something freak at my niece's wedding, my left hip snapped.

Panel 2: Yeah, I know, brilliant move. This led to bursitis, joint trauma, bone-on-bone, and physical therapy. Then guided steroid injections, to limping badly. Every step excruciating, and, finally, walking with a cane.

Panel 3: Doc said I would know when I was ready for hip replacement surgery. What? But I'm only 48.... March 2018, age 53, I knew. Complete physical breakdown.

Panel 4: Couldn't walk. Became immobile. Blew up round as a full balloon. 

Panel 5: The night before surgery was a stunningly beautiful June evening. The last night with my old, crumbly, irregular, jagged hip joint. I was scared. 

Panel 6: I saw this commercial: If you had hip surgery between 2009 and 2016 and it went BAD, call this number! Very reassuring. And I took a shower with weird special orange antibacterial soap... Remember! Don't get it in your eyes or genitals.

Panel 7: I needed to pack a bag. Looked at the moon. Can't sleep. Heart racing. Wake up 4:30. Hospital 5:30. Surgery 7:30.

Panel 8: Surgery is otherworldly, from the disinfection shower the night before to the mysterious phone call the day before surgery telling you when to show up to the hospital.

Panel 9: The reception desk was quiet. But once they wheeled me back to pre-op there was a buzz of professional gaiety.

Panel 10: The chipper drug nurse waived her giant syringe with a grin and assured me all would be fine. Then, like at a pit stop, enrobed docs swarmed me, cut me open, sawed out my gnarly old hip, and put a new part in.

Panel 11: I woke up. Swam out of the anesthesia on the verge of rebirth, like Lazarus crawling out of the dark tomb and back on the road.

Panel 12: Day one. Don't remember much. Fainted on the way to the bathroom. Alarm went out. 30 people rushed in to help.

Panel 13: First night. Slept on my back, not allowed to move. Legs in compression hose and wrapped in compression sleeves that palpitate your calves to keep them from clotting. Giant yellow foam-cheese wedge-like thing strapped between my legs.

Panel 14: Bathroom 5:00 am. Nauseous, clammy, sweaty, anesthesia mucking up the works.

Panel 15: June days, long and gorgeous, pass. Peering out from my swanky private room it looked like the lavender fields of Provence through my Oxycontin haze.

Panel 15: June days, long and gorgeous, pass. Peering out from my swanky private room it looked like the lavender fields of Provence through my Oxycontin haze.Panel 17: ...grabber, raised toilet, Oxycontin, ice bags!

Panel 18: Hip replacement precautions: No twists! No bends! Don't cross legs! Knee can't be higher than hip or it might dislocated!

Panel 19: Day 4 Post op. Obsessed that I haven't pooped in 5 days. Monday morning, 6 days out, fixated on lack of poopage. Amazing, how it all comes down to poop. Tuesday morning, 7 days out, still not a sliver of poop in sight. No one tells you that Oxy equals constipation. Finally, late Tuesday... redemption, deliverances, joy. When the machinery works, it's a beautiful thing.

Panel 20: 8 days post-op. Feeling better; still sleeping on my back. Can't bend. Limited movement. Went outside for the first time in 5 days. One week and three days post-op. Sleeping better... exercises... more exercises... bridge... lift butt....

Panel 21: Weaning off pain meds. More exercises. The clam! Progress, progress, progress.

Panel 22: Walker, 3 weeks, roughly. Used a cane through the fall. Now, a year later, walking 10,000 steps a day. Humbled and grateful for each pain-free step.

Emily Steinberg is a painter and graphic novelist. She has shown her work in the United States and Europe. Most recently she was named Artist in Residence at Drexel College of Medicine. Her memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine and her short comic Blogging Towards Oblivion, was included in The Moment (HarperCollins: 2012). She earned her M.F.A. and B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently a lecturer in Fine Art at Penn State Abington. You can see more of her work at emilysteinberg.com

 

Full Text:

Panel 1: It’s been quite a year. Last June I went under the knife. And got a new hip. 6.5 years ago dancing like a 20-something freak at my niece’s wedding, my left hip snapped.

Panel 2: Yeah, I know, brilliant move. This led to bursitis, joint trauma, bone-on-bone, and physical therapy. Then guided steroid injections, to limping badly. Every step excruciating, and, finally, walking with a cane.

Panel 3: Doc said I would know when I was ready for hip replacement surgery. What? But I’m only 48…. March 2018, age 53, I knew. Complete physical breakdown.

Panel 4: Couldn’t walk. Became immobile. Blew up round as a full balloon.

Panel 5: The night before surgery was a stunningly beautiful June evening. The last night with my old, crumbly, irregular, jagged hip joint. I was scared.

Panel 6: I saw this commercial: If you had hip surgery between 2009 and 2016 and it went BAD, call this number! Very reassuring. And I took a shower with weird special orange antibacterial soap… Remember! Don’t get it in your eyes or genitals.

Panel 7: I needed to pack a bag. Looked at the moon. Can’t sleep. Heart racing. Wake up 4:30. Hospital 5:30. Surgery 7:30.

Panel 8: Surgery is otherworldly, from the disinfection shower the night before to the mysterious phone call the day before surgery telling you when to show up to the hospital.

Panel 9: The reception desk was quiet. But once they wheeled me back to pre-op there was a buzz of professional gaiety.

Panel 10: The chipper drug nurse waived her giant syringe with a grin and assured me all would be fine. Then, like at a pit stop, enrobed docs swarmed me, cut me open, sawed out my gnarly old hip, and put a new part in.

Panel 11: I woke up. Swam out of the anesthesia on the verge of rebirth, like Lazarus crawling out of the dark tomb and back on the road.

Panel 12: Day one. Don’t remember much. Fainted on the way to the bathroom. Alarm went out. 30 people rushed in to help.

Panel 13: First night. Slept on my back, not allowed to move. Legs in compression hose and wrapped in compression sleeves that palpitate your calves to keep them from clotting. Giant yellow foam-cheese wedge-like thing strapped between my legs.

Panel 14: Bathroom 5:00 am. Nauseous, clammy, sweaty, anesthesia mucking up the works.

Panel 15: June days, long and gorgeous, pass. Peering out from my swanky private room it looked like the lavender fields of Provence through my Oxycontin haze.

Panel 16: Day 3 Post-op. Friday, 3:00 pm I went home with all of my gear. Walker, compression hose…

Panel 17: …grabber, raised toilet, Oxycontin, ice bags!

Panel 18: Hip replacement precautions: No twists! No bends! Don’t cross legs! Knee can’t be higher than hip or it might dislocated!

Panel 19: Day 4 Post op. Obsessed that I haven’t pooped in 5 days. Monday morning, 6 days out, fixated on lack of poopage. Amazing, how it all comes down to poop. Tuesday morning, 7 days out, still not a sliver of poop in sight. No one tells you that Oxy equals constipation. Finally, late Tuesday… redemption, deliverances, joy. When the machinery works, it’s a beautiful thing.

Panel 20: 8 days post-op. Feeling better; still sleeping on my back. Can’t bend. Limited movement. Went outside for the first time in 5 days. One week and three days post-op. Sleeping better… exercises… more exercises… bridge… lift butt….

Panel 21: Weaning off pain meds. More exercises. The clam! Progress, progress, progress.

Panel 22: Walker, 3 weeks, roughly. Used a cane through the fall. Now, a year later, walking 10,000 steps a day. Humbled and grateful for each pain-free step.

SEEING LEAVES OF GLASS, Glassworks, Essay, and Poetry by Paul J. Stankard

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Three clear glass paperweights with ornamental flowers, grass, and bees inside them

Paperweights. (1980s) Photo: Douglas Schaible

SEEING LEAVES OF GLASS
Glass Art & Homage to Walt Whitman
by Paul J. Stankard

 

HONEYBEES

In the hive
honeybees
breed
virgin queens.

Scented foragers
guided by sun
dance their language
about harvesting
to be done.

Dusted murmuring bodies
rubbing pink clover
wing repeated visits
lured by field’s odor.

Nectar
gathered in sun
made into honey,
Nature’s continuum.

—Paul Joseph Stankard, 2019

When I entered middle age, I hit a glass wall.

I felt that I was losing my creative mojo—the work was not evolving and I felt the need for more spontaneity. Feeling frustrated, I started to write poetry, seeing it as a medium to satisfy my creative need.

I was no stranger to poetry. As a child, I was a poor reader; I’m a dyslexic, a term that was barely known at that time. But my mother, who didn’t understand why I was such a poor reader, tutored me daily through my middle-school years. Books were a struggle for my tutoring sessions, but when Mom switched to poetry it was fun. She would read the poem first, and with my good memorization skills the words, rhythms and meter clicked with me, and I—for perhaps the first time—felt that I was comprehending written expression, an idea compressed into words.

Suddenly, the words were not my enemy. They were images of an expressed idea!

Three decades later, those boyhood lessons floated back into my creative consciousness as I was struggling to advance my artistic vision and interpret nature with new allusions.

So, feeling stymied with the glass, I decided to write a poem, which led to a series of poems paying homage to native plants.

BRAMBLE

Fertile decay nourishes
arched stems, green
growth; blossoms soften
thickets hooked thorns;
showy stamens satisfy
June insects; hairy
drupelets swell to juicy
blackberry.

The challenge of painting a word-picture paying homage to a flowering plant had an appeal to me. Interestingly enough, my verbal interpretation of the plant paralleled my interpretation of a crafted plant in glass—even though I had no idea at the time how to articulate this mode of expression in my art.

As an adult, I was self-taught. While enduring the stigma of being a poor student, I discovered I was not stupid, which motivated me to teach myself. Traditional education, including art school, would have just produced more frustration. I wanted to learn about art, so I began a journey of self-education by visiting museums and galleries. I wanted to acquire a broad education that would enable me to become more than a pair of hands; I wanted to become a well-rounded person in ways that would bring artistic maturity to my work, so I began listening to books on tape.

One of those tapes was Walt Whitman: A Life, by Justin Kaplan. I was introduced to an unusual person of heroic stature—someone who was largely self-taught. Whitman, I realized, to my delight, expressed nature in an intimate way that would come to influence my work.

After I read the line from “Spontaneous Me,” from Leaves of Grass…

Clear glass sphere with figures of bees, flowers, grass, and a honeycomb inside it

Honeybee Swarming a Floral Hive Cluster d. 8.0 ” (2010) Photo: Ron Farina

The hairy wild-bee that murmurs and hankers up and down…

…I went outside in the hot summer sun and captured a honeybee in a jelly jar—and was surprised to notice how hairy it actually was. That led me to experiment with the hairy allusion in glass. This made the bee a credible component that was a focal point of my floral interpretations.

But there was more to it than just reproducing the hairy aspect of the honeybee: the influence of Whitman, exemplified by his poetry, led me to interpret nature referentially. As a result, I began to learn from the process.

As I re-read my favorite Whitman poems, I noted in many instances he went beyond realism, along a journey leading to an almost spiritual realm. His words challenged me to attempt the same journey: to go beyond crafting realistic botanical models.

Like most, I didn’t connect with Whitman’s genius on the first read, and began to revisit the poems in ways that eventually allowed me to absorb the insightful intimacy of the words as they formed pictures in my mind.

The influence of Whitman’s words, coupled with my respect for his genius, led me to display excerpts of his poetry on the walls in my studio and exhibitions. Whitman was my guide through walks in the woods and Leaves of Grass became my textbook. I wanted to articulate the same depth of feeling on a visual level in glass as Walt did in words.

I was touched by the abstract idea of how Whitman portrayed a morning glory in “Song of Myself.” He elevates a simple flower to a spiritual level:

Clear glass sphere with wilted grass, daffodils, and blue flowers inside itA morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the meta- physics of books

My poem about blackberries, as well as my later glass interpretations, were complemented by Whitman’s unusual word choices, enhanced by the spiritual force relating to all living things. He expressed this in another line from “Song of Myself”:

…the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven

As a craftsperson who worked with his hands for four decades, I was heartened with Whitman’s intuitive insight into hand skills when I read this line from “Song of Myself”:

Clear glass sphere with flowers, bees, and a honeycomb inside it

Flowers and Fruit Bouquet with Swarming Honeybees d. 6″ (2014) Photo: Ron Farina

…the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery

Whitman’s poetry led me to pursue a convergence of writing, teaching, and glass art-making. I hadn’t been to art school and didn’t share the often-exotic influences referenced by my contemporaries. But Whitman infused me with confidence. His celebration of the ordinary as extraordinary gave me pride in my celebration of the familiar things into crafted glass components: blossoms, bees, roots and leaves encased in glass.

[ click any image on this page to enlarge ]

Clear glass sphere with flowers, bees, honeycomb, and fruit inside it

Honeybee Swarm with Flowers and Fruit, d. 6″ (2012) Chicago Art Institute Rubloff Collection; Photo: Ron Farina

Clear glass rectangle with a mask inside it, topped with flowers, fruit, and one bee

Tea Rose Bouquet Botanical with Mask h. 5.5″ (2004) Photo: Douglas Schaible

During his time, Whitman thought that his poetry was under-appreciated and that his worth would only be understood by future generations. Similarly, this idea of spiritually connecting to the future, long after I die, motivated me to write this poem, which I offer as homage to Walt Whitman:

Clear glass sphere with bouquet of colorful flowers inside it

Walt Whitman’s Garden Bouquet d. 4″ (2018)

Receive this glass
it holds my memories
crafted blossoms
suspended in stillness
to be pollinated by your sight
anticipating your touch
through time.

Happy 200th Birthday, Walt Whitman.

 

Close-up of Paul J. StankardInternationally acclaimed artist and pioneer in the studio glass movement, Paul J. Stankard is considered a living master who translates nature in glass. His work is represented in over 80 museums around the world. Stankard is the recipient of numerous awards and honorary doctorate degrees. He most recently received the Masters of the Medium award from Smithsonian’s The James Renwick Alliance and the Lifetime Achievement award from the Glass Art Society. He is an Artist-in-Residence and Honorary Professor at Salem Community College. Stankard authored three books: an autobiography in 2007 titled No Green Berries or Leaves, an educational resource in 2014 titled Spark the Creative Flame, and most recently, Studio Craft as Career: A Guide to Achieving Excellence in Art-making. Visit Paul and his works at paulstankard.com

INSPIRED TO SEE: Paintings by Giovanni Casadei

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Painting by Giovanni Casadei. The Music Pier and the Ferris Wheel. Oil on panel, 10.5 x 13"INSPIRED TO SEE
Paintings by Giovanni Casadei

I was born and raised in Rome, Italy. Since the age of four I have been exposed to art, thanks to my Uncle Roberto, who religiously picked me up every Sunday morning to bring me to a museum to contemplate art. At the age of fourteen, I bought my first oil painting set with my savings, and I painted on my own for the next eight years. From 1978 to 1980, I studied at the Scuola Libera del Nudo (Free School for Drawing and Painting sponsored by the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome) under the instruction of the Armenian artist, Alfonso Avanessian. From 1980 to 1981, I was enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, then from 1981 to 1983, studied further under Alfonso Avanessian, during which I experimented with drawing, oil pastels, dry pastels, tempera, watercolor, acrylic, and oil paintings. It was a very productive, creative, and formative period for me.

On December 1, 1983, I arrived in Philadelphia. At the age of twenty-seven, I was beginning the biggest adventure of my life—to be an artist.

When I first arrived in Philadelphia, I worked as a house painter by day and as an artist by night. In 1988 I enrolled in a four-year certificate program at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where I studied under Seymour Remenick, who became my mentor and friend for the last ten years of his life. Seymour gave me the support to make my own mistakes and to learn from them. His love for art, painting, and people was contagious. This love is an integral part of my vision as an artist. Seymour reinforced my belief in following my heart and what I love in life.

Since 1997 I have been teaching painting at various art centers in the Philadelphia area. I enjoy teaching and sharing my knowledge and experiences from my studio and as an en plein air painter with my students. I have found teaching to be inspiring, challenging, and creative. My approach to painting is to communicate to the viewer my love for life and humankind. I strive to capture in the act of painting a moment that exists in me, inspired by the light and colors that nature offers us every moment.

I am and always was inspired by light.

I have been painting for forty-eight years and I still remember my fascination for the light in Caravaggio’s paintings when I was six years old, and when I was a young adult I would spend hours watching the changing light from the crest of the Gianicolo over the rooftops of Rome. I would say that light is the subject matter of my paintings, and I still carry the nostalgic experience of light from Rome now in my work.

I paint from life, going on location to paint landscapes and seascapes in the Alla Prima Technique (resolving them in one sitting), or staying in my studio to paint still lifes in the Multiple Sitting Technique. I always paint from direct observation, and this is because I want to have the experience of seeing more than reproducing an exact copy of nature.

I want to describe the experience of seeing that comes to me as the feelings and intuitions I get in the act of painting. I want to express, with a kind of shorthand application of paint, the unspoken aspects of Nature as it is revealed by the ever-changing light. Light transforms objects; light transcends concepts. Light creates space.

As light breaks down forms into masses of illumination and shadow, and as light drains or saturates colors into spaces of moving intensities, the experience of seeing is endlessly changing, infinitely fluid and changeable. I have been painting landscapes and still lifes for such a long time because I see the world with new eyes every time I paint.

Communicating this spontaneity and the immediacy of nature through my process of painting, I hope to inspire others to consider the beauty of everyday life. To be present in the moment is what makes our lives richer.

[click on any image to enlarge]

Ocean City, Big Clouds. Oil on panel, 12.5 x 13.5″

Ocean City, 14th St. Fishing Pier. Oil on panel.

Sunny and Windy Day at the Beach. Oil on panel, 8 x 12″

The Music Pier and the Ferris Wheel. Oil on panel, 10.5 x 13″

Approaching Sunset. Oil on panel, 9 x 14″

Light and Dark. Oil on panel, 7.25 x 11.75″

Cloudy Day on the Delaware. Oil on panel, 12 x 12″

Strawberry Mansion Bridge. Oil on panel, 12 x 14″

The Columbia Bridge. Oil on panel, 12.5 x 14″

Headshot of Giovanni Casadei

Giovanni Casadei was born and raised in Rome, Italy where he studied at the Scuola Libera del Nudo and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, as well as under the instruction of the Armenian artist, Alfonso Avanessian. In December 1983 he arrived in Philadelphia, where he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under his mentor Seymour Remenick. He has been showing and selling his work in Philadelphia and other major cities for the last twenty years. More at www.giocasadei.com.

MINDSCAPES: Photographs by Denise Gallagher

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Everyman Gazes into the Future. Rovinj, Croatia 2017

MINDSCAPES
Photographs by Denise Gallagher

I consider myself a painter who photographs. I had given up on painting about ten years ago since I didn’t feel I could authentically express what was mine to express. Then, about eight years ago, I fell into photographing what I came to call my “magical landscapes.” These images came almost effortlessly and opened up worlds I never imagined. I credit this experience with giving me the courage to explore the real world. During the last five years, I have traveled around the world twice for extended periods of time. I tend to perceive now that most every landscape has the potential to be a magical landscape, given the right lighting and composition.

When I travel, I love to simply wander, to experience a place with no agenda, simply to be available to receive the beauty of the moment. It is an open and receptive state and, in a way, capturing the image is just part of the process of relaxing and seeing 180 degrees. I’ve heard there are books on the zen of photography. I would say I fell into it naturally.

I’m from Philadelphia but I currently live in Fairfield, Iowa. When I return to Iowa after traveling, I create “Ritual Art Events” which I show at our local art gallery. At these evenings, I interweave short films I have created with my images, using transitions and movement (à la Ken Burns), spoken word, and soundscapes. One of my latest films combines the real with the imaginary magical landscapes. Having the imagery projected large, merging with other images and set to music, feels closest to what I consider my authentic voice.

[ click any image to enlarge ]

Magical Morning in Val D’Orcia. Tuscany, Italy 2016

Walking In the Shire Near Bishop’s Castle. Shropshire, England 2017

Fall Magic Near Lake Pukaki. Canterbury, New Zealand 2013

Morning Comes Over Me. Glass House Mountains, Australia 2017

Solitary Woman. Lembongan, Bali 2017

Lightly Tethered in Lembongan. Lembongan, Bali 2017

Arabian Sunset. My Kitchen, Fairfield, Iowa 2015

Holding the Fallen Angel. My Kitchen, Fairfield, Iowa 2017

You Never Can Tell. My Kitchen, Fairfield, Iowa 2014

 

Denise Gallagher is a photographer/painter, occupational therapist, and world traveler, currently living in Fairfield, Iowa. She has exhibited her paintings and photography extensively in one-woman and group shows, and has produced ritual art events at ICON Contemporary Art Gallery in Fairfield and also, on a smaller scale, as she travels. She believes her therapy work and art work are intimately connected, one informing the other. Denise received a BS in Art Ed from Temple in 1979, including a year at Tyler Rome, and went on to receive an OT degree from Jefferson College of Allied Health in 1986. Denise has traveled around the world twice during the last five years, photographing daily. This past year she did volunteer work with Syrian refugees in Greece and taught Tai Chi in Bali. Visit her website at www.denise-healer-artist.com

ACTIVE CONFLICT ZONES by Francesco Levato

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ACTIVE CONFLICT ZONES
by Francesco Levato

My visual and textual work tends to be palimpsestic; layered, erased, meaning bleeding between frames and lines. I am interested in what is left unseen or unsaid, hidden in the density of image and language. I am also interested in construction and deconstruction as methods of visual and textual composition. I build from found audio, video, objects, and texts; disassembling and recontextualizing them, often using appropriation to resist or subvert asymmetrical power structures.

Active Conflict Zones is one such project, a series of visual poems constructed with language appropriated from Executive Order 13780, Protecting The Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into The United States, and screen captures of digital video compression artifacts found between frames in Battle Beyond the Sun, an Americanized, English-dubbed, version of the 1959 Soviet science fiction film Nebo Zovyot.

I found hidden within the language of security in Executive Order 13780 the underpinnings of a xenophobic worldview that simultaneously aspires toward empire. In the text of the poems I sought to lay bare the underlying mechanics of power inherent such colonial impulses, and in the visuals I sought to subvert the legitimacy of claims to security from an administration compromised by foreign power. In attempting to hide the Soviet origins of the film Nebo Zovyot the American director of the retitled Battle Beyond the Sun replaced Soviet spacecraft with U.S. ones, obscured all text that appeared in Russian, and replaced the names of Soviet actors with those of English voiceover actors in the film’s credits; the screen-captured compression artifacts, the bleed through of data between the video’s keyframes and the P and B frames (usually hidden and containing only partial information from the surrounding frames), for me served as visual metaphor. —Francesco Levato, June 2018

[click to enlarge images:]

Francesco Levato is a poet, a literary translator, and a new media artist. Recent books include Arsenal/Sin Documentos (forthcoming 2018, Clash Books); Endless, Beautiful, Exact; Elegy for Dead Languages; War Rug, a book length documentary poem; Creaturing (as translator); and the chapbooks A Continuum of Force and jettison/collapse. He has collaborated and performed with various composers, including Philip Glass, and his cinépoetry has been exhibited in galleries and featured at film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. He founded the Chicago School of Poetics, holds an MFA in Poetry and a PhD in English Studies, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Literature & Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos.

THE BROWNIES AT WORK by Nance Van Winckel

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THE BROWNIES AT WORK
by Nance Van Winckel

Welcome to Cleaver’s brand new genre, INTERMEDIA, where word and image intersect to create newly mediated spaces between the literal and the figurative—part word, part image, and deviantly part-way! And what better way to start off than with “Brownies,” those there-but-not-there creations that inhabit the virtual terrains and ordinary realms of our creative lives. —Ed.

Nance Van Winckel is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Our Foreigner, winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series Prize (Beyond Baroque Press, 2017), Book of No Ledge (Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series, 2016), and Pacific Walkers (U. of Washington Press, 2014). She’s also published five books of fiction, including Ever Yrs, a novel in the form of a scrapbook (Twisted Road Publications, 2014), and Boneland: Linked Stories (U. of Oklahoma Press, 2013). She teaches in the MFA programs at Eastern Washington University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. Read more at her website. 

FRANCES by Maria Brandt

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FRANCES
by Maria Brandt

Frances had skipped two periods before she realized what was going on. “I’m lucky,” she bragged to Sarah over milkshakes at the corner store. “I haven’t had my period in eight weeks, no tampons for me, I beat the system.” Sarah’s mouth dropped, and that’s when Frances became aware of the extent of her self-deceit. Now, she sits cross-legged on the floor in Jack’s bedroom shuffling a deck of cards while Jack moves laundry from the washer to the dryer in the basement, his parents in the city at a hospital benefit.

She remembers decorating the basement in her own home two years earlier for her sixteenth birthday party. Her mother had been in one of her moods, so her father had picked up Sarah and taken the two of them to CVS to buy twenty-seven feet of multi-colored streamers and a bag of medium-sized balloons. “I think we should make a giant stethoscope,” Frances said to Sarah while climbing an old step-ladder, “like the one my grandmother has.” “Why not a heart?” Sarah replied. She remembers thinking Sarah lacked ambition.

Still in Jack’s bedroom, Frances puts down the cards and lies on her back on the floor. Spreading her fingers so her palms press into the wood, she can hear Jack banging around the basement and wonders whether or not he uses fabric softener. She knows fabric softener contains toxic chemicals like ethanol and camphor that deteriorate a person’s neuropathways, and others that cause pancreatic cancer or fatal edema, and she berates herself for knowing this but not putting two and two together about her missing periods.

She thinks again about that night two years earlier, about trying to make that stethoscope, wrapping her fingers around the streamers, twisting them into lines and curves, then asking Sarah for her opinion. “It looks like a glazed doughnut,” Sarah said. Later, at the party, Jack gave Frances a present wrapped in old newspaper. She had invited him because he offered unusual anecdotes about medical breakthroughs in Mr. Elwise’s Biology class. “Did Elwise ever get back to you about that monkey neurogenesis study?” she asked when he handed her the present, the overhead lights making his nose look slightly larger than it was. “Nah, he’s useless,” Jack replied. After ripping open the newspaper and finding a used copy of Gray’s Anatomy like the one her grandmother had on the bookshelf in her living room, Frances felt her stomach flutter. That night, right before the ambulance came, she kissed Jack for the first time while Sarah cheered them on from the corner.

“Hey,” Jack says, laundry basket in his arms, Frances lying on his bedroom floor. “What are you thinking about?”

“Do you use fabric softener?”

“Of course not, fabric softener contains neurotoxins,” Jack replies. He watches while Frances sits cross-legged again and while she picks up the deck of cards. “You wanna play Strip Poker?” he asks.

“No, idiot.”

“Then what?” He sits next to her on the floor, his hand resting casually on her bare knee.

“I thought maybe we could tell fortunes,” Frances says. “Sarah taught me last week.”

“Sure, and then we can drive to the beach.”

Frances pushes his hand off her knee, but she misses him when he crosses the room to open a window. She finds the four Queens and turns them face-up on the floor. “Okay,” she says, “now you have to ask a question.”

“How bad will traffic be on the bridge?”

“It has to be a yes/no question.”

“Will traffic be bad on the bridge?”

She’s impressed that he doesn’t miss a beat, that he can rephrase his question so expertly. She wants to tell him this but instead asks him to concentrate and to choose a card from the deck, so he chooses the Three of Diamonds, and she places his card above the matching Queen of Diamonds. “Diamonds mean maybe,” she explains. “Traffic might be bad, might not.”

“That’s playing it kind of safe, don’t you think?”

“My turn,” Frances says. She squeezes her eyes tight until small tears begin to form, then chooses a card. It’s the Nine of Diamonds.

The night of her party, two years earlier, her father collapsed while making homemade popcorn over the stove. Frances heard the crash, then her mother’s screams. She rushed upstairs and saw her father lying stiff on the floor. She flung herself across his torso and felt her mother pulling her shoulders, trying to get her off him, but she knew blood wasn’t moving through his body, which meant no oxygen was getting to his heart, which meant his heart’s cells were dying rapidly and she didn’t know what kind of monkey tests had been done to shed light on the regeneration of a left ventricle.

She places the Nine of Diamonds above Jack’s Three of Diamonds and remembers thinking months after the funeral that her father would never have a conversation with Jack, would never know that Jack’s nose in fact was lovely, would never know that two days after the party, when she was sick with grief, Jack had quizzed her on the cellular make-up of bone marrow, would never know that she didn’t mind when Jack found out she used to think Gray’s Anatomy had been named after the television drama and not the other way around, would never know that Jack had figured out the streamers at her party were supposed to look like a stethoscope and not like a glazed doughnut or unambitious heart.

“No fair,” Jack says. “You need to ask your question out loud, that’s what I did.” His hand rests on her knee again.

“Okay.”

“Well? What did you ask?”

“Give me a minute,” Frances says and breathes more heavily than she would like. “Will you and I have a baby?”

Jack squeezes her knee and sort of lies on top of her. “I hope so, Frannie girl,” he whispers while shifting his weight, “I hope so.”

“No,” Frances says, “I meant will we have a baby now.”

“Now?”

“Like, now.”

“But—”

“Well, in seven months,” she says with finality.

Years ago, Frances’s parents took her and Sarah to the beach. They drove over the bridge, then parked the old station wagon in Field Three and carried chairs and a cooler up wooden stairs and over dunes to a spot near the lifeguard. Her parents spread a blanket over the sand and Frances watched while her mother touched the back of her father’s neck and whispered something in his ear. “What’s up?” Frances asked, but her mother took out a magazine and leaned into her chair. Later, Frances watched while her mother offered her father a sandwich. “Can I have one?” she asked, but her mother closed the cooler and looked to the waves. In the silence following her proclamation in Jack’s bedroom, Frances wonders if her mother wished that day that Frances would get sucked into those waves, or discreetly swallow enough neurotoxin to reduce her brain-energy metabolism, or do anything to disappear so her mother could make popcorn alone with her father every night before climbing into their great big bed.

“A baby in seven months,” Jack repeats. “Teeth are forming right now, an inner ear, even sex organs.” He pauses, then moves his hand to her belly. “May I?”

“You’re being awfully formal,” Frances says, but she lets his fingers make small circles on the skin under her t-shirt.

“What now?” Jack asks.

“What do you mean?”

His fingers linger on her belly and he slides closer so her head can rest against his shoulder. “My grandmother left me her ring,” he says. “Frannie girl, that ring is yours.”

Earlier that week, when Frances was doing her own laundry, her mother and grandmother were making grilled-cheese sandwiches upstairs in the kitchen. “I miss him,” she heard her mother say. “You need to take care of Frances,” her grandmother replied. “You always think of her, never of me,” her mother said. Frances opened a new box of fabric softener and thought about putting a sheet in with her mother’s underwear. Instead, she closed the box and hid it behind some old pipes.

“That ring is yours,” Jack repeats. She holds his hand and looks into his eyes, which remind her of her father’s eyes, brown like dirt overturned to dig a hole deep enough for a coffin. She remembers that shortly after she watched that coffin go into the ground, her grandmother pushed her stethoscope across the kitchen table. “It’s yours now,” she said to Frances, “I was alone, but I used this every day in my practice, it kept me company.” Frances remembers thinking her grandmother wasn’t alone, not really, because she had Frances’s mother, just like Frances’s mother wasn’t alone because she had Frances.

“Your eyes are like dirt,” she says to Jack, then regrets it, but he smiles.

“Freshly-turned dirt,” he says, “earthworms expanding and contracting their bodies to burrow and make things grow.”

Frances wonders how she got so lucky, how she found someone who understands her so well. “Yes,” she says.

“Yes to earthworms?”

“Yes to the ring.”

Later that afternoon Sarah braids her hair. “You really said yes?” Sarah asks while placing her hands firmly on Frances’ scalp. “What about college? What about med school? Why didn’t you use the cards, do more fortunes, don’t you think that would have been wise?”

“Sarah.”

“I’m serious. Diamonds mean maybe, Hearts mean yes, Spades mean no, Clubs mean probably, you just match your cards, they make the decision for you, it’s easy, you can’t go wrong.”

“I said yes.”

“Did you mean it?”

Frances looks down at her hands. “I don’t know,” she says. A year after her father died, she overhead her mother talking on the phone with her grandmother. “It’s hard for me, it’s hard for all women,” she heard her mother say. “Not you, you became a doctor, you beat the system, but—” Her mother stopped talking, and Frances wondered what system she might have meant, or what she might have realized that shut her up. Later that night, Frances decided to beat the system herself. She took off Jack’s jeans for the first time, let him take off her underwear, told him she loved him and that she wanted to experience penetrative sexual intercourse.

“I think I meant yes,” Frances continues while Sarah still braids her hair, “but I don’t know.”

“Why not?” Sarah asks.

“What if I’m like my grandma?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if I become a doctor and stop loving Jack, or care so much about being a doctor that I don’t pay attention to it? Or if I’m like my mom and love my husband but don’t ever really love it?”

Sarah’s eyes get all misty. “That’s a baby, Frannie,” she says, “not an it.”

“It’s a fetus, maybe even an embryo, but not a baby, and I can get an abortion.” Sarah pulls hard on Frances’s newly-braided hair and Frances welcomes the pain.

The next day, she sits at her grandmother’s kitchen table and looks out the window while her grandmother boils water. She watches a squirrel circle up a black locust and thinks about the locust’s trunk, wide and sturdy, almost threatening with its weight. By the time her grandmother brews two cups of chamomile, Frances is kneeling outside on the patio studying a pile of dirt. “Frannie,” her grandmother says, “what’s wrong?”

“It’s these earthworms,” Frances says through tears, the black locust looming over her head. “I think they’re copulating.”

“Frannie.”

“No, look, they’re lined up with their backs against each other, facing different directions, that means they’re copulating,” Frances continues. “Did you know earthworms are hermaphrodites? Did you know they have both male and female sex organs?”

“I know, Frannie.”

“And they make this thing called a slime tube, kind of like mucous, and they each ejaculate into the slime tube, sending sperm into the other earthworm’s sperm receptacle?”

“Frannie, what’s wrong?” Frannie leans back into her heels and starts making small noises. Her grandmother puts down the tea cups and kneels beside her, holding Frances’s damp face and rubbing her cool fingers into the back of Frances’s shoulder. “What is it?”

“Why did you have mom?”

“Is she at you again?”

“No, I want to know why you had her, you didn’t want her, you know you didn’t want her, that she would get in your way, but you had her anyway, why?”

Her grandmother pulls back and brushes some of Frances’s hair from her face. “Frannie, I did want your mother, I love your mother, what’s this all about?”

“Do you remember when I was younger and used to work with you?” Frances says. “You used to let me take your patients’ blood pressure, you taught me how to find their pulses and how to hold the stethoscope over their arteries, the same stethoscope you gave me after Dad died?”

“I remember.”

“I’d listen until I could hear the first pulse beat and then listen until I couldn’t hear anything at all, that’s how I read their systolic and their diastolic pressures, how I read the way their blood moved through their bodies, everything was so precise, everything was so clear.”

“I know.”

“That’s when I realized, even though I didn’t have the words,” Frances says, then looks again at the black locust, and at the maple just beyond, its branches fanning out from its trunk.

“Realized what?”

“That I wanted to be a doctor, like you.” Her grandmother rises and carries a steaming cup of chamomile to where Frances still sits huddled on the patio. “Why can’t we be like earthworms?” Frances says. “Why can’t we share slime tubes so everyone has eggs and everyone’s eggs get fertilized?”

That night, Frances and Sarah make popcorn over the stove. Sarah rambles on about the Ten of Clubs she drew after asking if some boy in their U.S. History class last year would break her heart, about how thin the card was, its paper face already bent with time, while Frances thinks about her father and his heart, cracked open like paper, like a broken kernel of corn. “It’s not fair,” Frances whispers.

“No kidding it’s not fair, why can’t boys step up? I don’t mean Jack, he’s one in a million, I mean normal boys, boys who don’t know how many bones are in their feet.”

While Frances melts butter for the popcorn, she wonders if her mother only had room to love her father, and if her grandmother only had room to love her work, and if traits like the capacity to love a child have a genetic component. She puts the popcorn bowl on the coffee table and goes into the bathroom to throw up.

In the morning, she notices the veins in her breasts and that she has gained two pounds. She takes out a deck of cards and pulls a Six of Spades which means abortion is no longer an option, which means she needs a new idea. Her grandmother’s car isn’t in the driveway when she arrives, so she sneaks around back. In the yard, she touches the black locust as if listening for that first pulse, that first marker of systolic pressure, but she keeps her eyes focused on the maple and its outstretched branches.

Getting to the first branch is easy. From there, she holds onto the trunk with one hand and feels for the next branch with the other, then pulls her body up again, then again, then again, until she’s sixteen-and-a-half feet from the ground, three times her body height. She makes sure soft grass is below before pressing her back into the trunk. Eyes closed, she pretends she’s an earthworm sending sperm into her mate’s receptacle, sending her uterus into her mate’s receptacle, sending her embryo, her fetus, her baby into her mate’s receptacle. She imagines the dirt and the slime and the release. Then, positioning her body so she doesn’t land on her neck or head, she jumps.

When Jack finds her, ten minutes after she texts him, she’s lying on her side in the grass, unable to move. “The cards didn’t work so I needed to figure out another way to beat the system,” she says, “and I might have killed our baby.” Jack moves to cradle her in his arms. “No,” she says, “lie next to me, but behind me, and face the other direction.”

“Like earthworms?” he asks. “When they copulate?”

Her back pressed against his back, she takes his hand and pulls it around to her slightly swelled belly while the locust, tall and forbidding, reaches for the sky.

Maria Brandt has published plays, fiction, and nonfiction in several literary magazines, including InDigest, Rock & Sling, Arts & Letters, Prime Number Magazine, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, VIDA, and upstreet. Most recently, her collection New York Plays was produced by Out of Pocket Productions and published by Heartland Plays, and her novella All the Words won the Grassic Short Novel Prize. Maria teaches Creative Writing at Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY and is a founding member of Straw Mat Writers. She lives just outside Highland Park with her son William.

 

 

Image credit:  Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash

LIVING AS ART by Matthew Courtney

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Anarctic Moon

LIVING AS ART
Ceramic Works
by Matthew Courtney

[click on images to enlarge]

matt courtney art

All World Camel

To be in the presence of Matt Courtney’s ceramic art is to be embraced by a feeling at once familiar and unanticipated — a sensation that comes not only by directly looking, but also sensed, unsolicited, out of the corner of the eye. It’s a kind of well-being and heightened awareness that can happen while sitting outdoors, perhaps beside a percolating stream or a mile-wide river: small wonders, big sky. It’s all good.

Almost instinctively, Courtney’s ceramic pieces bring that palpable sensation indoors, where they acquire something domestic, grounded in a place that feels like home. That hits home.

Our connection with ceramic objects has always been like this. For millennia we humans have lived with objects made of clay. Fashioned with purpose and imagination, they have accumulated in our living spaces around needs of food and shelter, desire and memory. To live by the possibilities of clay is, really, to live by the possibilities of art: clay objects take the shape of our lives while shaping the course of our lives, and ultimately become the tangible signifiers of the art of living.

How fortunate, then, to encounter Courtney’s ceramic works at a place called the House Gallery — a gallery that’s actually the real-life home of Henry Bermudez and Michelle Marcuse. Located at 1816 Frankford Avenue, it’s in the heart of Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, a stone’s throw from the Kensington High School for the Creative and Performing Arts.

◊ ◊ ◊

house gallery matt courtney art

Inside the living room at House Gallery

Knock on the door, enter a tile-lined foyer, and step inside. You’re now in the wide-open living room of a typical Philly row house, with an antique fireplace and Grotrian-Steinweg grand piano at one end, and a renovated eat-in kitchen at the other. The morning sun pours through windows while a white cat (“Bobby”) spies from the top of the stairs (there are, in all, three cats living here, it turns out). Meanwhile, one of Courtney’s three-headed camels peers out the window; there’s construction going on down the block.

This is the House Gallery, a non-commercial gallery in a private residence where established Philadelphia artists have the opportunity to show their work as “house guests,” and where First Friday openings are just like house parties. It’s a work of love — and vision. Henry, who’s from Venezuela, and his wife Michelle, from South Africa, are both artists (Henry represented Venezuela in the 1986 Venice Biennale and met Michelle at his first solo show in Philadelphia). Seven years ago Henry and Michelle had the idea of re-imagining their living space, not just for themselves, but as a shared “open salon” for artists, an everyday, comfortable meeting place where neighbors and artists could rub shoulders. Today, original details of the house — the faux marble of the fireplace, carved chestnut staircase railings, and worn hardwood floors — blend in seamlessly with the scrubbed white walls and sleek modernist kitchen. It all feels “lived in,” just as Courtney’s work feels “lived with.” A perfect match.

house gallery matt courtney art

“Four Spires” at the House Gallery at 1816 Frankford Avenue

Stepping back, the House Gallery is also a refreshing assertion about how to experience art in our daily lives. It’s not an entirely new idea — think of the princely collectors centuries ago whose sumptuous palazzi became the museums and galleries of today — but it’s perhaps a more nobly aspirational one, presenting art and artists in a more intimate, immediately accessible way.

Accessibility is absolutely central to Courtney’s artworks. First off, they’re made of clay, a timeless, universal material with a long, built-in history of familiar human connections. Then, his objects are always immediately recognizable: game balls from various sports, human figures, animals, vessel forms. Additionally, he makes work at scales meant to inhabit living spaces as gracefully as gallery spaces. Ultimately, there’s an underlying human authenticity at work here: artworks sprouted from daily life, planted in real-life contexts, and holding their own among the overgrown artifices of the art market’s gallery scene.

skydivers matt courtney art

Minoan Octopus Urn With Skydivers

Courtney’s subjects are firmly rooted in real life, specifically his childhood, where he spent his time at home drawing, playing sports, and exploring the nearby woods. An important part of his art practice is about maintaining that innocence, a sense of wonder and play while making art, even after years of formal education, teaching, and residencies abroad. One technique is to use molds — industrial molds, molds he makes of everyday objects, molds he makes of his own pieces — to create multiple parts which are then assembled in seemingly random ways. The results: improvised replications and reconstructions of memory and instinct. Another technique involves creating large clay tubular cylinders, and allowing them to slump naturally while still wet; these can be assembled to become deformed rockets, statements about power and its contradictions (and a nod to his childhood hobby with model rockets). Another is to “raw fire” his pieces, a process that’s risky because moisture trapped inside the clay may not have time to burn off, resulting in mini explosions inside the kiln. Life happens, his pieces insist.

While many artists look to art for inspiration, Courtney is most informed by the lives of people he knows — friends, fellow teachers, or former college roommates, such as Susie Brandt, a fiber artist whose commitment to art is about investigating her family history and her mother’s dedication to the household. “Susie Brandt was my roommate for a year when I was at Philadelphia College of Art,” Courtney remembers. “She taught me about the importance of making art, that it was a serious thing, not a frivolous thing. The beginnings of my art making and thinking began with me trying to find a connection to my past that was at the foundation of the person I had become, similar to Susie’s connection to her mother’s skill at running a household.”

Early on, then, the domestic, lived-with vibe was there. It’s the human connection that matters, the conversation in the room.

camel triptych matt courtney art

Camel Triptych

“Another big influence was Kirk Mangus,” Courtney continues. “Kirk was my graduate school professor at Kent State and was hugely influential. I had an odd relationship with Kirk. I really admired him as an artist and teacher but it seemed as though he was always disappointed in me. He was very hesitant to tell any of us that he thought we were making good stuff. It wasn’t until much later that I heard from Eva (his wife) that he thought we (Monica Zimmerman, Keaton Wynn, and I) were the best students to come through Kent. His main teaching method was to come into the graduate studios where he also had a studio and talk about things like poetry, Greek history, or Korean folk pottery.” (Kirk Mangus passed away in 2013; read Matt’s moving — and funny — tribute here.)

“Another person is John Parris. He’s a high school friend with whom I do collaborations. John came with me down to Georgia to do a residency at Keaton’s school. We are currently brainstorming ideas for a new collaboration. John works like Keaton: idea, then drawing, then art. I seem to just start with clay and then the ideas develop.”

sixpin matt courtney art

Six Pin

Courtney’s conscious decisions around intention, material, and process allow for the incidental and the accidental — the non-scripted, the unplanned — and this in turn allows for a sly, playful ambiguity in his works because they can never quite be taken literally. Layered and metaphoric, while emphatically real, they tease our curiosity, tacitly prompting multiple reactions and interpretations. In a medium in which “everything has been said and done before,” Courtney thinks of it as jazz improvisation, letting himself and others have their own spin. (His late father was a musician who played upright bass in the Philadelphia Orchestra.)

“The not knowing is part of what excites me about making my work,” says Courtney. “It’s also a source of anxiety. I get very very bored when I know what it’s about. But, not knowing puts me in a bind when people ask me about my work, because I’m not sure. Not knowing makes the work alive for me but I feel uneasy not being able to give a quick and clear answer when I’m asked.”

“I’m most comfortable when I’m making art,” he confesses. “My studio’s in my basement, where I have four kilns. Plus, my side yard, where many of my pieces live outdoors.” One such piece, a massive series of chains, dominates an entire wall at the House Gallery. Each link is handmade, weighty and weathered, splotched here and there with a green mossy coating that naturally thrives on terra cotta that’s been left outside through summers and winters.

Small wonders, big sky. It’s all good.

chains matt courtney art

Ship Chain

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During this holiday season, you may find yourself sitting in front of a cozy fire, or wanting some company while sitting in front of a computer screen. If so, grab your headphones and settle into this lively, free-wheeling living-room conversation between artist Matt Courtney and DJ Ed Feldman on The Morning Feed show on G-Town Radio, where they share insights and commentary on everything from Chinese politics and Western aesthetics to Philly football and Czech beer. Enjoy!

MorningFeed with Matthew Courtney and Ed Feldman >>

morning feed with matt courtney

 

 

 

 

Matt CourtneyMatthew Courtney lives and works in Philadelphia as a sculptor and teacher. He received his BS at the University of the Arts and his MFA at Kent State University. A recipient of several fellowships and residencies, he currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of the Arts, and Drexel University. Courtney’s recent exhibitions in Philadelphia include New Work (House Gallery) and Divergences (Cerulean Gallery). In 2015 and 2017 he was selected as artist-in-residence at Lanzhou City University in Lanzhou, China, where his work was exhibited in Post Painted Pottery. View Courtney’s complete works at matthewcourtneyart.com/home.html

List of Works:
1.  Antarctic Moon, ceramic, 36 x 60 x 9″ (2014)
2. All World Camel, ceramic, 20 x 15 x 10″ (2015)
3. Four Spires, terracotta, each rocket approximately 60 x 20 x 20″ (2016)
4. Minoan Octopus Urn With Skydivers, ceramic, 24 x 8 x 8″ (2012-2017)
5. Camel Triptych, ceramic, 10 x 26 x 7″ (2017)
6. Six Pin, mixed media (clay, wood, glass), 12 x 26 x 8″ (2017)
7. Ship Chain, ceramic, 96 x 120 x 24″ (1994-2016)

Photography by John Carlano.

 

BERLIN STORY: Time, Memory, Place by Emily Steinberg

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Sketch of woman with brown hair and face that's painted yellowBERLIN STORY: Time, Memory, Place
by Emily Steinberg
with an introduction by Tahneer Oksman

Like fresh snow covering over a messy urban landscape, there’s a kind of concealing but also unifying quality to the fourteen central images of Emily Steinberg’s “Berlin Story.” Following a four-panel introduction, in which our narrator introduces herself as having grown up an anxious, fearful depressive, lost in the grip of, among other things, the “images of death, murder and gratuitous Nazi sadism” shown to her in Hebrew school, we are presented with still portrayals of an uninhabited, idyllic setting.

Each drawing, contained in an unframed rectangle, presents its viewers with a narrowed angle, or point of view, proximate to or regarding the famous Wannsee Villa, a mansion located in the suburbs of Berlin. The drawings are in black and white, cramped with details composed from demarcated lines, some of them even slightly wobbly marks. From four cherubs adorning the villa’s rooftops to two tree trunks gracefully tilting somewhere in the vicinity of the house grounds, we glimpse this locale as either a deliberately or unintentionally naive visitor might; this is a structure embodying decadence and wealth, good taste and fine craftsmanship. Here is a sculpture to admire, swaddled in a bouquet of well-groomed foliage. Here is a fine urn, hefty, ornamented, inviting contemplation. We walk its grounds, invited to by our guide. We revel in its beauty.

Still, none of this history seems teachable, transmittable. Steinberg’s sequence reveals how, despite all efforts to the contrary, despite all inclinations to conceal, the horror nonetheless lives on. 

The handwritten dispatches, scrawled sometimes beneath and sometimes beside these postcard pictures, interrupt our reverie. “On Tuesday, 20 January 1942 at noon, Reinhard Heydrich, S.S., unveiled the extermination policy for Europe’s Jewish population, euphemistically known as the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, to leaders of the Nazi Party, over a pleasant lunch.”

What’s startling is that with these words, the images don’t suddenly transform; no visible traces of that exchange, or its consequences, are apparent in the pictures here, even in the intimate and exhaustively rendered tiny lines, the single- and cross-hatches of our once-depressive guide, who has “never completely” let go of those horrifying images presented to her in her youth, part of her Jewish heritage. The words tell us not only, or simply, of the terribleness, but instead fill us in on details presumably meant to help us picture what is, in fact, impossible to conjure up. Thirteen men, officials, ranging from thirty-two to fifty-two years old, gathered for a ninety-minute meeting dedicated, in part, to discussing the eradication of Jews. A thirty-six year-old Adolph Eichmann was charged with taking minutes. “There is no record of what was served for lunch that day,” another narrative accompaniment tells us. “The waiters served cognac, butlers and adjutants gave out liquor.” Ultimately, neither images nor words, here or elsewhere, can fully convey to us what took place, can help us imagine what is unimaginable.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the conference, the Wannsee Villa was finally made into an educational and memorial site. Another quarter of a century has now passed. Still, none of this history seems teachable, transmittable. Steinberg’s sequence reveals how, despite all efforts to the contrary, despite all inclinations to conceal, the horror nonetheless lives on.

—Tahneer Oksman, December 2017

1. Woman wearing jeans and a t-shirt with a happy face on it. Text: "Hello! I was born on September 8, 1964 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. To say I'm obsessed with Nazis and the Holocaust is a gross understatement. The Nazi terror reached into my suburban, North East American, 1970s childhood in large and small ways. Exactly 20 years before, in upper Austria, about 12 miles East of the city of Linz, a transport arrived at Mauthausen Concentration Camp carrying 83 persons of German, Hungarian, Polish and Russian nationality. Persecution status: Jew, Ethnic targets and Other. So... twenty years before I was born, this unbelievable shit was going down."

2. Profile of person's head with sections of their brain labeled as, "Obsessions, Depression, Feeling Weird, Anxiety, Fear, More Anxiety, Despair, and Bullshit." Below this floating head is a small woman stuck in a clear box, looking up at the head. Text: "In grainy black and white films in Hebrew School, we saw images of Death, Murder and Gratuitous Nazi Sadism. Gym class morphed into 1930's GYMNASIA peopled with the cool, stern rectitude of Aryan Youth. I was anxious, analytical, depressive and completely uncomfortable and awkward in my own physicality. The idea of Nakedness for me, was tied up in Naked Women, in recoiling in fear, being shot into pits. There was nothing remotely romantic or sexy about it. Organized sporting events of any kind brought the rapturous crowds at Nuremberg to mind. Anything to do with authority made me scared and uneasy. I couldn't understand how anyone could be happy and carefree when this had happened, in the world. Eventually, I managed to push these images to a less central part of my brain. But Never Completely...And to this day, when I'm in a crowd of people, I always make sure I know where the Exit is."

3. Woman sitting at a table with a lunch tray and cup of coffee. Text: "Against this Psychic Backdrop I went to Berlin. The Belly of the BEAST, the Epi-Center of all things THIRD REICH."

4. Sketch of woman wearing track pants and a sweater that says "Ich Bin Ein Berliner." Text: "I wandered the city streets where Hitler and his Henchmen MOTORED around in their over the top 1940's MERCEDES. So many levels to Unpack here... The Glorious History. The Nazi History. The Soviet History. Such a Mass of Strange Juxtapositions."

5. Sketch of three large gargoyles on top of a building. Text: "But, I was most struck by my visit to the WANNSEE VILLA, in the Far Western Lake District of Berlin, where on Tuesday, 20 January 1942, at Noon, REINHARD HEYDRICH, S.S., unveiled the extermination policy, for Europe's Jewish population to Leaders of the Nazi Party over a PLEASANT lunch."

6. Sketch of courtyard with large stone fountain in front of a stone house. Text: "The Villa was built in 1914 by Ernst Marlier, a wealthy Berlin businessman. He commissioned the well known architect Paul D.A. Baumgarten to create to Neo-Classical confection which sat gracefully on the edge of the large lake. Grossen wannsee."

7. Cherub statue holding a bouquet of flowers in a garden. Text: "The 16,000 S. ft. house has 2 floors and is surrounded by 7.5 acres of Wooded areas. from each room are Spectacular views into the gardens and onto the Lake."

8. Side profile of a life-size sculpture of a man. Text: "Around the house and grounds are several good Neo-Classical Replicas of Greek and Roman figurative Sculpture and Urns."

9. Fountain made up of several life-like figures holding up the bowl of the fountain in front of a stone house. Text: "In 1940, Marlier's Lakeside Villa was Sold to Heydrich's S.S. to be used as a Guest House retreat and a place of "comradely interaction" for S.S. officers."

10. Living area inside an ornate mansion with a nude sculpture to the left. Text: Heydrich, Chief of the Reich Main Security Office, Age 38, invited 13 high ranking Nazi officials, all men, between the ages of 32 and 52, to the villa and presided over the 90 minute meeting. Adolph Eichmann, age 36, Director of the Reich Security Main Office, Section IV, B4, Jewish Affairs and Expulsion, took minutes. 8 of the 15 men present held doctorates in their fields."

11. Stone carving of a fountain next to a walkway. Text: "The men vigorously debated what constituted a REAL JEW. Should a MISCHLINGE, a person of MIXED blood, be deported? Sterilized? Evacuated to the East?"

12. Corner of stone house with bay window. Text: "They discussed various methods of execution, such as, the recently tested gassing vans and the great successes on the Eastern front of the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads who committed mass murder primarily by shooting."

13. Stone staircase leading to a pathway in the forest. Text: "The men stressed the necessity of not ALARMING local populations and all agreed that the liquidation process needed to be streamlined, bureaucratized, and made less messy, so, that everyone involved, both victims and perpetrators, be spared excess trauma."

14. Two trees inside a fence. Text: "All of the participants acknowledged that they must be strong in the face of such a difficult task, and they all pledged their full cooperation. It was at Wannsee when the trajectory of the Nazi terror pivoted from Organic Mass Murder to Mechanized Genocide. The House itself is a crime scene."

15. Close-up of cherub statue holding grapes and other fruits. Text: "I imagine that as the 90 minute conference wore on, attendees might have looked out the windows, stretched their legs, thought about their wives and children, or, maybe gone outside for a breath of fresh lakeside air."

16. Terrace of a stone mansion, with life-size lion gargoyles. Text: "I imagine walking on the slate patio just off the conference room, having a smoke, and taking in the sight of the classical statue of Bacchus under the portico."

17. Indoor terrace of a stone mansion. Text: "There is no record of what was served for LUNCH that day. Elchmann later testified that it was conducted very QUIETLY and with much courtesy, with much friendliness, and it did not last a long time. The waiters served Cognac, butlers and adjutants gave out Liquor, and in this way it ended."

18. Four statues of cherubs on the roof of the stone mansion. Text: "8 Putti, fleshy baby boys carved out of stone, stand on the roof of the Villa. 4 watch over the entrance, 4 watch over the lake. They take in the comings and going of the House. Haunting Totems, Momento Mori to the Slaughtered."

19. Woman slouched in airplane chair, with headphones in. Text: "On the plane the next day, contorting in ever more challenging yoga like positions, the themes of time, memory and place resonated. How could that even have happened? What dark worn hole of humanity allowed and embraced it? Then they served lunch."

Sketched headshot of Emily SteinbergEmily Steinberg, a painter and graphic novelist, has shown her work widely in New York and Philadelphia. Most recently, images from her visual narrative Broken Eggs were featured in an exhibit titled Sick! Kranksein Im Comic: Reclaiming Illness Through Comics at the Berlin Museum of Medical History at the Charité in Berlin, Germany. She is also a founding member of Fieldwork International, an improvisational diaristic collaboration between herself, Damon Herd and Sarah Lightman. Her graphic novel memoir, Graphic Therapy, was published serially in Smith Magazine. Her short comic, Blogging Towards Oblivion, was included in The Moment (Harper/Collins.) Her visual narratives A Mid Summer Soirée, Broken Eggs, and The Modernist Cabin appear in previous issues of Cleaver. She currently teaches painting, drawing, graphic novel, and the History of Comics at Penn State Abington. She earned her M.F.A. and B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and lives just outside Philadelphia.

Sketched headshot of Tahneer Oksman

Tahneer Oksman is a writer, teacher, and scholar based in Brooklyn, NY.  Her criticism on women, visual culture, and memoir, as well as some personal essays, have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Comics Journal, the Forward, Public Books, The Guardian, and Lilith. An Assistant Professor of Academic Writing at Marymount Manhattan College, her first scholarly monograph is “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (Columbia University Press, 2016).  She is currently working on a book exploring memoirs of absence, loss, and grief. (Author portrait by Liana Finck.)

WHAT WE SEE FEELS LIKE THE THING ITSELF by Micah Danges

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WHAT WE SEE FEELS LIKE THE THING ITSELF
Photographs
by Micah Danges

[slideshow_deploy id=’31067′]

 

[ click any image to enlarge ]

My drive to take photographs is rooted in the unpredictability of such a seemingly predictable process. I use the precision of the camera in conjunction with the limitations of its mechanics to generate a series of inspiring problems that I can solve. I know that the assumptions that I make while shooting the photograph, about how life will translate onto film, will be proven wrong after it is developed and printed. This shift compels me to slow down, study the printed image and isolate key moments of transformation. From there, I consider the surface of the print and build a material relationship with the image that celebrates its singularity.

I want to continue to explore the photograph as a flexible medium that has the ability to be both image and object, and to find meaning in that dual understanding. My practice of joining other materials to the surface of photographs comes from an interest in deconstructing photography in a way that viewers can understand. I am not interested in stepping further away from certain elements of traditional photography. I am interested in exploring how both the strengths and shortcomings of the medium can be used to support the needs of each artwork I make.

 

Micah Danges (b. 1979) works and resides in Philadelphia. His work hovers between image and object, pushing the limit of what a photograph can be. He uses optical distortions that create abstract scenes from everyday items and places, in a distinctive merging of materials and process. For Danges, who prints on unconventional materials like silk, acrylic, and cotton, photography is a flexible and tactile medium. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Abington Arts Center, the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, Cabrini College, and Vox Populi Gallery, and in group shows at The Michener Art Museum, Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, The Print Center, and Fleisher/Ollman Gallery. Danges is a recipient of a 2012 Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, a 2013 Wind Challenge Grant from the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial and was named a 2015 Fellow by The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.

More images and information may be found at Danges’ website: www.micahdanges.com

Works:

Installation View, Summer Show
Abington Art Center
2015

Key, 4-6
Pigment Print on Adhesive
14″ x 11″
2015

Installation View 5
After Now, Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery
Philadelphia, PA
2017

Untitled 12 (Maestri Series)
Acrylic, Resin, Magazine Pages, and Photographs
15″ x 12″ x 3/8″
2016

Untitled 13 (Maestri Series)
Acrylic, Resin, Magazine Pages, and Ink Jet Photographs
15″ x 12″ x 3/8″
2016

Two Legs
Ink, Museum Board, Newsprint, Book Page
15″ x 12″ x 3/8″
2016

Installation View 2
After Now, Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery
Philadelphia, PA
2017

Two Parts (Section 4, Section 8)
Acrylic, Ink Jet Photographs
Each piece is 15″ x 12″ x 3/8″
2016

Two Parts (Section 4, Section 5)
Acrylic, Ink Jet Photographs
Each piece is 15″ x 12″ x 3/8″
2016

Two Parts (Section 14, Section 9)
Acrylic, Ink Jet Photographs
Each piece is 15.5″ x 12.5″ x .75″
2016

Two Parts (Section 17, Section 10)
Acrylic, Ink Jet Photographs
Each piece is 15.5″ x 12.5″ x .75″
2016

Material information about specific work selections

Maestri series
In these works, sections of photographs and magazine pages are cut, collaged, and face mounted to a frame-like acrylic form. A larger intact image is then face mounted to a solid acrylic rectangle with the same exterior dimensions. These two layers are stacked, then merged when the visible area over the larger image is filled in with a translucent resin.

Two Legs
This piece is composed of a portion of a magazine page, fixed between pieces of newsprint and suspended in wax. The composition is set into an ink-tinted museum board panel.

Two Parts series
Photographs depicting fragments of plant materials suspended between two sections of highly reflective acrylic panels. A rectangle is excised from the center of the top panel and replaced with a different section of photograph from the same series.


DEFT PERCEPTION by Hannah Thompsett

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DEFT PERCEPTION
Works of Porcelain and Paper, Plausibility and Pause
by Hannah Thompsett

[click on images to enlarge]

Deft Perception: installation view

We all accumulate knowledge of our world through experience. Unconsciously, we learn to trust our perceptions as truth. But when this truth is challenged, our trust falters. We’re suddenly aware of the malleability and subjectivity of each of our constructed realities, our beliefs and expectations.

To explore and test the boundaries of that trust, I created Deft Perception: Allusions of Reality, a body of work in porcelain, paper, and photographs. When is something easily perceivable or believable? When do we need to take a second look to reassure or reevaluate our expectation of truth? To address these questions, I decided to slow down the process of visual perception by using constructed objects in spatially arranged situations. As an artist, I want us to consider the delicacy and individuality of our assumed truths and to become newly conscious of how the world of exterior phenomena informs and reassures — even as it contradicts and challenges — our perceived realities.

◊ ◊ ◊

I have been working in ceramics since my days as an undergrad. I began working with paper several years later and photography another year after that. Eventually I took up the process of folding paper forms, translating them into ceramic, and recording their arrangements with photography. I was interested in how information could be transferred through different materials and dimensions: from a flat drawing to a dimensional paper form to a ceramic object to a record. How does information change through these transformations and what roles do material and form play in translating and expressing that information? These questions and processes have all led to my thinking about perception (specifically visual perception) and are the impetus for my current practice.

Sheets of paper or porcelain memories?

When we step into Deft Perception, one of the first things we may realize is that the sheets of “paper” leaning against the wall are actually made of thin sheets of colored porcelain. They began as folded or crumpled pieces of paper, which I directionally sprayed with various white, grey, and black liquid porcelains called “slips”. These shades of slips recorded the paper’s peaks, valleys, creases, and puckers as a tonal image. At this point, the porcelained paper was very wet and pliable, so I could smooth it out and, when dry, fire it in a kiln. This burned away the paper and yielded a thin, flat, rigid panel depicting the original paper’s topography. The resulting porcelain object was no longer paper, but a representation of paper, a memory of paper.

Images or objects? Paper or porcelain?

What’s revealed in the slow, meticulous process of constructing these porcelain panels is a striking tension between two kinds of information: the representation of crinkled paper as an image and the materiality of the flat porcelain object. The panels allude to paper through their representation of paper’s surface, their rectangular format, and their thin, white edges. But though the panels reference paper, they are never mistaken for paper because the materiality of the porcelain is so prominent. And because I set the panels on the floor, leaned them against the wall, and stacked them against each other, their stiffness and physicality as objects is even more clearly emphasized. Moreover, because I used a different range of grey scales to create each of the panels, they’re distinguished even further as individual objects while being drawn farther away from the allusion to paper. It is this give and take, between image and object, that gives us pause and asks us to question what information is more important or truthful, if any, in forming our perceptions.

These kinds of tensions and contradictions exist in all representational images, often without our realizing it. Out of habit, and without consciously thinking about it, we recognize familiar situations in images and automatically transgress our own spatial and temporal reality to enter into their constructed realities. However, it is not possible to completely ignore our own real place in time and space, and so there is a paradox whenever we view pictorial representations: we simultaneously recognize, believe, and accept two separate situations or realities. Trompe l’oeil and illusion are attempts to eliminate this paradox through deception, but I enjoy the sense of this paradox, and I employ allusion instead of illusion where allusion is suggestive, but not deceptive.¹

Which is real? Which is a photo? Are they all objects?

To further complicate things, the framed images hanging on the wall in Deft Perception are actually enlarged photographs of the ceramic panels. At first, they appear as crumpled paper or images of crumpled paper. However, they are actually images of the ceramic record of the original piece of paper. By translating perceived information again, this time though photography, another layer of material information is added. Displaying the photos closely with the ceramic panels, it’s easy to compare the two. We see their similarities as images, but also recognize the difference between the materiality of the panels and the photographs as objects.

On closer inspection, we see that the photographs are enlargements of the ceramic panels, emphasizing the texture of the sprayed slip particles. This dotted texture is reminiscent of pixelated information, an artifact of digital photography, but the “pixelation” here is actually an artifact of the ceramic process, not the photography process. This pixelation is often interrupted by flaws in the ceramic surface that happen during the firing, such as ruptures and cracks. Ultimately, the photographs simultaneously depict both paper and ceramic as subjects.

Light and shadow: real or fake?

But how truthful are these photographs? Even as they record the flat surface of the panels, the light and shadow depicted are fake. Instead of actual light and shadow, the photographs capture a flatly lit representation of light and shadow. This information becomes evident because of the presence of the ceramic panels nearby. Comparing the photographs and the panels slows down the process of perception and allows time for the viewer to consider the many levels of information presented.

I am still a novice in photography, but as I utilize it, I enjoy what it contributes conceptually to the work through its process and history. At its dawning, photography was regarded as a mechanical reproduction of reality, capturing visual phenomenon with truthful, objective authority. It has since become clear, though, that this process is distinctly separate from actual visual perception for many reasons. Authorship, disengagement from time, staging, framing, and manipulation of process are a few examples of why this implied veracity cannot be assumed. However, as a medium, photography is primed to explore both the notion of truth and that of representation.²

A ceramic pyramid stands against repeated photos of ceramic pyramids. Which is more “believable”? “Objective”?

To interrogate those notions in Deft Perception, I installed two large ceramic pyramids and a field of smaller ceramic pyramids within the space as a break from allusion and representation. These physical solids, pure in form and mass, provide a visual and haptic experience bound to the present. They engage the entire space and emphasize the materiality of the other objects. The wallpaper, on the other hand, is a photographic representation of the pyramids from a separate viewpoint, digitally repeated to create an abstract pattern. The three-dimensional objects and their two-dimensional translation create a kind of easy fiction, or uneasy friction, an opportunity to compare the experience of perceiving both.

Our accumulation of knowledge through experience is constant; we continuously perceive our surroundings and build expectations and beliefs that inform our future encounters. Our mentally archived stores of knowledge are constantly in flux, distinctive to each individual. The process is automatic, and we are unaware of it until our trusted beliefs or expectations are challenged. My aim is to slow down the process of perception — visually and spatially — to draw attention to it, while gathering moments to consider, and consider again, our personal truths.

A field of ceramic pyramids, gathering moments of light.

—

¹Jonas F. Soltis, Seeing, Knowing, and Believing: a Study of the Language of Visual Perception (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company Inc, 1966), 137-138.

²Lyle Rexer, The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography. (New York: Aperature, 2009), 195.

Hannah Thompsett received her MFA in ceramics from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2016. She received her BFA in ceramics from The State University of New York at New Paltz in 2011. During her time between degrees, she was an artist-in-residence at the Flower City Arts Center. She is currently a Ceramic Art Technician at Alfred University and continues her studio practice in Alfred and Wellsville, NY.

To see more of her work, visit www.hannahthompsett.com and @hannahthompsettsculpture on Instagram.

List of Works:
1. Deft Perception: Allusions of Reality, digital prints, ceramic, wallpaper, 2016, installation view
2. Arrangement 3 (five panels), ceramic, 2016, 64” x 32” x 4”
3. Arrangement 7 (three panels), ceramic, 2016, 32” x 33” x 2”
4. Deft Perception: Allusions of Reality, digital prints, ceramic, 2016, installation view
5. Photograph 3, digital print and wooden frame, 2016, with frame: 28” x 42” x 2”
6. Detail of White Pyramid, ceramic, 2016, 24” x 24” x 36”
7. Field of Pyramids, ceramic and wood, 2016, 58” x 58” x 14”

 

AMERICA UNSPOKEN: Paintings by Tina Blondell

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AMERICA UNSPOKEN
Paintings
by Tina Blondell

“The Down Side of Up.” This painting explores my views concerning our national obsession with medicating citizens in an effort to subdue and dampen personalities. I believe this carries a steep cost in lost creative potential.

It is perhaps because I spent the first eight years of my life being uprooted from one country to another that I developed a keen skill for observing human behavior. I struggled to learn new languages and to fit in, often with great difficulty. It was during these formative years that I developed a personal language freed from words — the language of drawing and painting. By the time I arrived in the U.S. at the age of seventeen, I had formed a sense of self that allowed me to perceive the world with the eyes of an outsider. I was fascinated not only with the diversity of American people, but also the world they had shaped around them. And although English is the lingua franca across this great country, variation in the spoken word fascinates me to this day.

There is no easy way to explain who Americans are. We are a complex accumulation of beings with unique and varied cultures, traditions, and genetic histories. Perhaps this is why I feel most comfortable expressing my thoughts concerning American identity visually. My models are friends, family, and neighbors—all people with whom I have a personal connection. I have tried to capture something of their stories in my imagery.

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“Urban American Gothic.” I got the idea for this piece while hanging out with the models around their backyard pool last summer. I was immediately reminded of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” This work is a tribute to all families, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or gender. The Human Rights logo on the cap is the only hint that this is a same-sex couple.

This painting is entitled “I Walk the Line,” after Johnny Cash’s song of that title. It depicts a young father and daughter, with a nod to Caravaggio’s “Pilgrims Madonna.” With this work I address the blurring of gender roles in contemporary families and examine the archaic stereotypes of the past.

“These Boots Are Made for Walking.” This work is in honor of all women who have survived difficult times in their lives with their dignity intact.

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” –Friedrich Nietzsche. This painting is named “A Boy Named Sue,” after Johnny Cash’s song of that title. It’s a personal piece about my son Sascha, and the effect his name had on him as a young child.

“Chinese Take-Out” is a now retired roller girl with the Minnesota Atomic Bombshells. She is a first generation Hmong from Laos. I wanted to include a Hmong woman in this series to honor the contributions they have made to American culture and history.

“Mr. VanMadrone” is a local blacksmith working in his shop in Minneapolis. He apprenticed to learn the trade in northern Wisconsin. This painting honors the working class and all who use their hands to create things. I am always eager to embrace the challenge of working with light.

In this piece, I have painted Ms. Antimony Bishop as the fictional character Nubia, a comic book superheroine published by DC Comics. The original Nubia was created by Robert Kanigher and Don Heck, and debuted in Wonder Woman #204. She is a symbol of the inner strength and determination of women everywhere.

“Mr. DuBois” is a now retired commercial diver and underwater welder originally from Louisiana. His job required him to perform under the most challenging of circumstances, to be highly trained, certified, and to be in peak physical and mental condition. This painting honors those who work behind the scenes and accomplish things we never question and take for granted.

“Ms. Jessica” is a painting of a friend who is the drummer in a Minneapolis punk rock band. I tried to capture her bad-ass enthusiasm for her craft.

“The Fire Tamer” is about a friend who is skilled in the art of fire performance. She performs locally and nationally with the Infiammati Fire Circus. Although she is trained in a number of performance skills, I was most interested in the challenge of painting fire, and the way the light of the fire played on her face and body.

“Upper Mississippi Valley Sicilian.” This is simply a painting of an Italian-American friend here in Minneapolis. I have a soft spot for Italians, having grown up in Livorno, Italy, and I am interested in the challenges a Mediterranean temperament can create in a northern Nordic culture.

This painting, “A Convenient Myth,” explores my views on how women are portrayed in history. In the ancient world women filled many leadership roles, however a fundamental shift appears to have happened sometime prior to the advent of our Common Era. Many of the myths and legends concerning powerful women of the ancient past were modified or appended, with the objective of portraying them (and by extension – all women) in a less positive light. The ancient Greeks, Persians, and Romans may have started this process, but it was enthusiastically carried forward by the monotheistic descendants of the Sons of Abraham. The legends of Medea, Eve, Jezebel, and Joan of Arc are but a few examples of stories designed to undermine women’s influence in human society. This piece explores how women have been villainized in religion and history, but also reveals how our ancient inheritance survives to the present – albeit just beneath the surface.

 

Tina Blondell was born in Salzburg, Austria, to an American father and Austrian mother who encouraged her early interest in art. Crucial to her education as an artist was her firsthand encounters with art in Italy, where she lived until 1971, particularly the work of Caravaggio and of Artemisia Gentileschi. Other influences are Goya, Francis Bacon, and Alice Neel, whose paintings combine an emotional impact with a vision of the human condition. Blondell’s involvement with earlier art informed her technique and interest in narrative, as well as her referencing images from the history of art in decidedly contemporary work.

In the mid 1990s, Blondell settled in Minneapolis, where she continues to live. Blondell has exhibited her work widely both nationally and internationally. Her work is in many private and public collections including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Weisman Art Museum.

More images and information may be found at her website: tinablondellstudio.wixsite.com/tinablondellstudio

Works:

The Down Side of Up, (2008-09) oil on panel, 60 x 19 inches
Urban American Gothic, (2008) oil on panel, 49 x 38 inches
I Walk the Line, (2008) oil on panel, 60 x 30 inches
These Boots Are Made for Walking, (2007) oil on panel, 29 x 34 inches
A Boy Named Sue, (2008) oil on panel, 49 x 30 inches
Chinese Take-Out, (2012) oil on panel, 51 x 38 inches
Mr. VanMadrone, (2009) oil on canvas, 60 x 39 inches
Antimony as Nubia, (2011) oil on panel, 36 x 48 inches
Mr. DuBois, (2013) oil on panel, 16 x 20 inches
Ms. Jessica, (2010) oil on panel, 50 x 39 inches
The Fire Tamer, (2011) oil on panel, 60 x 41 inches
Upper Mississippi Valley Sicilian, (2009) oil on canvas, 66 x 22 inches
A Convenient Myth, (2007) oil on panel, 36 x 24 inches

WE ARE ALL MIGRATING TOGETHER by Shira Walinsky

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WE ARE ALL MIGRATING TOGETHER
Painted Bus Routes and Immigrant Roots
Mural Arts in Philadelphia by Shira Walinsky

Introduction by Raymond Rorke

Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love and home of the famous LOVE statue by Robert Indiana, is taking love to new places.

If you happen to be in Philly, chances are you’ll catch sight of the 47 Bus. You can’t miss its bright blocks of color or its bold, emphatic message: WE ARE ALL MIGRATING TOGETHER.

 

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This “mural on wheels” is the brainchild of Shira Walinsky, mural artist, and filmmaker Laura Deutch. It runs daily from South Philadelphia’s Whitman Plaza, on through Center City, and all the way up to 5th and Godfrey in North Philadelphia, connecting several multilingual, multiethnic neighborhoods and commercial corridors. Riding the bus through this cross-sectional slice of the city you’ll inevitably hear a cross-cultural variety of languages spoken, while being wrapped in a welcoming collage that represents the patchwork of diverse people whose lives intersect every day. The back of the bus reads “We Are All Migrating Together”—words from the mouth of one of its drivers—and along the way you’ll see murals by and about refugee groups who have recently settled in Philadelphia—the Karen and Chin of Burma, the Bhutanese, the Nepalese.

The bus’s first stop, 8th and Snyder, is the site of Southeast by Southeast, a public arts space and social services community center originally founded as a six-month, pop-up storefront in 2011 by Shira Walinsky, artist Miriam Singer, and social worker Melissa Fogg under the Mural Arts Program with funding by the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services.

Karen Dancers

Karen Dancers

Five years later, Southeast by Southeast is still going strong, a space for immigrant and refugee families to learn from one another, gain access to important social services, and lend their voices to highly visible public art projects. There, with the help of many volunteers and artists within the refugee community, Southeast by Southeast hosts regular ESL classes, citizenship classes, and grandparents’ groups. Monthly workshops draw from refugee skills and talents and include Burmese food night, Bollywood vs. Breakdance events, weaving and sewing demos, and more.

And there’s more ahead. Along the 47 Bus route you’ll find that Shira has created a number of murals in collaboration with refugee groups to mark their collective stories of identity and migration.

The 47 Bus Route and Mural Locations

The 47 Bus Route and Mural Locations [click to enlarge]

MURALS ALONG THE WAY

Namaste (7th and Shunk) depicts a monastery in Bhutan. This mural was originally for the owners of Namaste Grocery.

El Chilito Loco (8th and Jackson) appears at the restaurant El Chilito Loco. Shira worked with the restaurant owner to create a mural using iconography from the Mayan number system and the Aztec calendar.

From the Mountains to the City (7th and Emily) tells the story of leaving home, being forced to flee, and moving into the city. Most of the Karen, Chin, Burmese, and Bhutanese refugee groups who have settled in South Philadelphia have come from very rural areas or refugee camps.

Farming Up the Mountain (8th and Emily) tells the story of farming in a rural area and here in South Philadelphia. Most of the recent immigrants in South Philadelphia were farmers in their home countries. This mural is next door to the Growing Home Gardens, a refugee garden project by the Nationalities Service Center. The colors come from Karen and Nepali textiles.

Storefront (7th and Dudley) is the site of the original Southeast by Southeast location. This mural is evocative of textiles by the Karen people of southern and southeastern Myanmar (Burma).

Language Lab (7th and Moore) celebrates the over thirty languages spoken in South Philadelphia. If you are waiting for the 47 Bus you can learn a word in another language!

* * *

Poem About American Identity by Teenage Refugee

Poem About American Identity by Teenage Refugee

But all these projects and programs go beyond public perceptions of ethnic, immigrant minorities. There’s also the private joy and insight that comes from getting to know a refugee personally.

Shira writes:

There are many inspiring community members, but working with Ma Kay Saw has been really inspiring. Ma Kay Saw is a refugee from Burma. She grew up in Eastern Mountain Burma and is part of the Karen ethnic group. The Karen and other ethnic groups such as the Chin have been oppressed and engaged in civil war with the Burmese government for many years.

Ma Kay Saw had a 4th grade education, and worked helping her father farm in Burma. She also learned to weave. Each ethnic group in Burma has its own weaving traditions, and Karen weaving has beautiful, richly saturated colors.

Ma Kay Saw and her family fled from Burma, escaped through the jungle, and made it to a refugee camp in Thailand.

She arrived in the U.S. in 2011 with her husband and five children. She came with no English. She has been coming to the Southeast by Southeast community center since 2012 for ESL and women’s group activities. She has learned English and knows the 100 citizenship questions and is preparing to take the test.

Ma Kay Saw

Ma Kay Saw

A goal of the Southeast by Southeast community center has been to identify artists in the refugee community and find frameworks for their work. When I first saw Ma Kay weaving and making Karen clothing I was blown away by the complex patterns and rich color. I asked her if she would be able to do a weaving demo. At the time, a translator was needed to help present the demo, and she was somewhat hesitant, but in subsequent years she has led many demos and sales with confidence. Today, Ma Kay feels happy to connect people with Karen identity and traditions.

I am glad to be in a space where traditional and indigenous artists are given a framework and space for their work. I am inspired each time I see Ma Kay Saw and see her weaving—to see a resilience, an ability to learn, and to continue traditions from home.

* * *

Philadelphia, one of our nation’s forty sanctuary cities, has long been known as “a city of neighborhoods,” and South Philadelphia has long been a welcoming neighborhood for immigrants—the Irish of the 1840s, the Italians of the early 1900s, the Eastern European Jews of the 1920s, the Vietnamese and Cambodians of the 1970s, the Mexicans of the 1990s. Today, it’s the Burmese and Bhutanese who are arriving and settling in, and the annual Philadelphia New Year’s Day Mummers Parade, largely made up of South Philadelphians, is just around the corner.

We are all in this together, migrating together. Happy New Year.

—Raymond Rorke, December 2016

Postscript: It turns out that the Southeast by Southeast Brigade—Burmese, Sham, Chin, and Nepali dancers from the refugee community in South Philadelphia—got to strut their stuff in their very first Mummer’s Parade this year! Young members gave out Lao-style sukwon/mut khaen blessings, while elder women showed off their dancing skills.  “We were such a small group compared to the others we marched with, but everyone was very nice to us, and we heard from so many folks about the diversity, inclusivity, and culture we brought to the parade,” says Catzie Vilayphonh, a South Philly native who grew up watching the Mummers. “I think this may be the beginning of some great New Year traditions!” —RR

Dancers from the Southeast by Southeast Brigade in the Mummer’s Parade

Headshot of Shira WalinskyShira Walinsky lives and works in Philadelphia. As a painter, printmaker, muralist, and educator, she is focused on expanding the possibilities of partnerships between artists and communities. Shira received her MFA in painting from the University of Pennsylvania, and has completed eighteen murals in Philadelphia under the Mural Arts Program. In addition she created a series of seven lunch trucks focusing on identity, immigration, and work. She is currently co-teaching at the University of Pennsylvania with Jane Golden, Director of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. While pursuing interdisciplinary work both in teaching and her own work, Shira is interested in the cultures and subcultures of the city. How do personal stories fit into larger issues of the city? How has immigration continued to change the narratives and the face of the city? Shira’s work with people in local communities helps transform public spaces, and each project is a new hybrid with new sets of challenges for artists and communities to grow from. Visit www.shirawalinsky.net

Headshot of Raymond RorkeRaymond Rorke is an ardent fan of Cleaver Magazine. As a longtime writer and designer who has lived through the evolution of hand-set type into hand-coded webpages, he is fond of tinkering with words—and what goes into making them sing. Check out his ceramics portfolio here.

SPRING STREET: Works on Paper by Thom Sawyer

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SPRING STREET
Works on Paper
by Thom Sawyer

Unhappy small towns are all alike—claustrophobic, gossipy, dying.
—Timothy Egan

I have lived and worked in such a small town as this. Quiet, nondescript streets link manicured lawns and well-kept homes; neighbors guard their privacy as they intrude on the lives around them, paying close attention to the comings and goings of others, particularly those of relative newcomers. It is a strange mixture of the private and public, with odd boundaries that seem fluid—simultaneously hiding and displaying glimpses of interior narratives, opinions, rumors and expected codes of behavior.

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My town is a place that echoes David Lynch’s fictional Lumberton and “things that are hidden within a small town… and things that are hidden within people.” Some of those hidden things were revealed during the renovation of the house my wife and I live in—one of the neighborhood’s knock-off mid-century modern homes. Stripped bare, uncovered surfaces inside the structure tell fragments of distant family histories, many of which are highly private; others merely reflect the mundane public face of the neighborhood.

This series of paintings and drawings chronicles the process of fitting into—or not fitting into—a closed community, as well as the discoveries of long ago buried personal stories and events. The works are done on site, from life. As a result, the surrounding environments become integral to the process of making and thinking.

Often, unanticipated moments help shape formal and conceptual directions. Many of these decisions find a place in the final image, but just as many move from a central focus to a periphery status, which may or may not appear in a later image. In this and other ways, working from life is central to the images’ fluidity and flexibility around visual and conceptual possibilities.

Cliff's Japanese Maple and Sonja's Crabapple Tree

Cliff’s Japanese Maple and Sonja’s Crabapple Tree (2013)

Mark making is also a central focus of this body of work. Marks are used directly with little, if any, rendering or modeling. Uninflected, each mark carries as much information as possible, combining with other marks to construct a greater complexity of form, space and light.

Such a process requires a high degree of focus: shape, line, mass, color, gesture, and spatial relationships are all considered and combined simultaneously. A dichotomy exists between this process of close observation and the final images, which often appear to have a strong graphic quality, as if the images came together in a single pass, or through a paint-by-number template. The ability of the paintings to flip back and forth across the boundary or edge between a flat surface and the illusion of depth, as well as abstraction and figuration, echoes the often permeable boundary between the past and present as well as the private and the public.

Other elements in the work refer to these dichotomies simultaneously. Windows, although not included in every image, play an important role throughout most of the series. Clearly, they function both as pathways into and out of the private and public. Windows rarely appear unobstructed—they are usually coupled with an element that responds to or blocks the outward view. This response or blocking corresponds to a conscious sense of community and the decision to actively engage or resist exchanges and communication with the neighborhood.

2012-fpr-newtown-good-sm

For Newtown (2012)

Semi-opaque plastic drop cloths function in both roles. Originally, the thin plastic tarps were used to isolate parts of the renovation within the structure, but they soon began to play a greater role in an evolving narrative or context.

In the piece Color Test, Mailbox and Elmo’s Stairs (2013) the drop cloth alludes to the flowing curtain that appears at the start of Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet.

These thin sheets of plastic refer as well as to tragic private and public events: in For Newtown (2012), the drop cloth, while still evident in the upper right corner, has been pulled back to reveal a holiday tree hung upside down in a stairwell with a large window that looks out onto the neighborhood. This watercolor was completed at the time of the Newtown shootings and responds to that horror with a communal view (both from the inside and outside) using a well-known symbol frequently tied to the concept of peace. By setting this object on its head (and literally hanging it), many of its collective associations are subverted.

Thom Sawyer lives and works in New Mexico and Washington State. He received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. His work has been exhibited in solo and group venues including the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), The Contemporary Austin (Austin, Texas), the Creative Arts Workshop (New Haven, Connecticut), the Sierra Arts Foundation (Reno, Nevada), the Washington Street Art Center (Somerville, Massachusetts), C. Grimaldis Gallery (Baltimore, Maryland), ARC Gallery (Chicago, Illinois), the Indianapolis Art Center (Indianapolis, Indiana) and Rogue Community College (Grants Pass, Oregon). His most recent show, titled 36 Views of Baylor Canyon, took place at the Branigan Cultural Center in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Sawyer began his series Spring Street in 2012. Between 2010 and 2012 in southern New Mexico, he completed 36 Views of Baylor Canyon, a series of color pencil drawings focused on the intersection, or collision, between a private, domestic world and a larger, more far reaching global view. Since 2003 he has continued work on another series, Julia’s Garden, which examines aspects of love, language and the landscape.

More images and information may be found at his website: thomsawyer.net

Works:

Mildred and Helen, 2013, color pencil, 18 x 24 inches
Alice’s Closet, 2012, watercolor, 26 x 20 inches
New Mexico (Bed) (For Julia),  2015, watercolor, 20 x 26 inches
Color Test, Mailbox and Elmo’s Stairs, 2013, watercolor, 20 x 26 inches
Dropcloth, 2014, color pencil, 18 x 24 inches
Elmo’s Rathole, 2013 and 2015, watercolor, 20 x 26 inches
Crazy Muriel’s, watercolor, 20 x 26 inches
Vent, 2013, color pencil, 18 x 24 inches
Boomerang, 2015, watercolor, 26 x 20 inches
2 x 4 (For Uncle E.), 2013, color pencil, 24 x 18 inches
Intercom (For Aunt J.), 2013 and 2015, watercolor, 26 x 20 inches
Cliff’s Japanese Maple and Sonja’s Crabapple Tree,  2013, color pencil, 24 x 18 inches
Pink Dresses, 2013, color pencil, 24 x 18 inches
For Newtown, 2012, watercolor, 26 x 20 inches

A PILGRIM’S FUGUE: Fiber Works by Dennis Potter

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A PILGRIM’S FUGUE
Fiber Works
by Dennis Potter

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Dennis Potter is an artist whose work spans an interesting period of thirty-plus years. We sat down with him to talk about his journey as a contemporary artist now working in a traditional craft medium.

Let’s start at the beginning. Where are you from?

I grew up in the Deep South—in Huntsville, northern Alabama—and then lived in San Francisco after earning an MFA in painting at UC Berkeley in 1983.  Along the way, I’ve also lived and traveled in Asia, where for ten years I taught art and studied Asian art before returning to the Bay Area in 2012. And just this year I moved back to Huntsville.

So you’ve come full circle?

In more ways than one. It’s certainly been a journey. After thirty years of figurative painting and printmaking I realized I wanted something more, something different. I wanted a new context for making art, and for being an artist. Although I’ve shown my work extensively in San Francisco, Boston, and New York, and have pieces in several public collections, the gallery art world is very contentious and difficult, really frustrating. I was very unsatisfied. I’d been teaching art to support myself and had total freedom in my own work, but it was a trade-off situation. Long story short, I wanted to go beyond myself, get away from my background and training as a painter and printmaker. I had a strong foundation in modernism with expressionist qualities, and I had gotten pretty sick of making figures and narratives, even in abstract formats.

White, cream, and brown colored fabrics woven togetherWhat did you do to get outside of yourself and the art world you had been working in?

Ever since high school, I’ve been fascinated by Buddhism. At a certain point in my life, feelings of emptiness, groundlessness, and detachment began to influence my thinking—I blame the 90s, when I felt overwhelmed by the commercial art market. So I began to seriously study Buddhist art history, and I was surprised to encounter fresh new concepts, mainly about “art” as I knew it as a Westerner. For the Buddhist in Asia, art is not something peculiar in our lives, but integrated with our everyday existence. Asian art forms are highly traditional and familiar, marked by each maker’s particular approach. Individual expression is not the exalted purpose, but rather the development of an exalted form.

This is very much like how it is with the traditional Japanese raku teabowl, a form which began in the 16th century and is still being made, with contemporary variations, even by the same Raku family fifteen generations later.

Yes. Very much so. Objects and forms integrated with everyday life. The word “raku” comes from the place where it began — Juraku, near Kyoto. Juraku was the name for the special clay used to make the teabowls, and the word “raku” has been passed down through the generations as both a family name and a ceramic style. Just think of that: a place, a style, a family name, a patch of clay—one and the same!

White cat with black spots sitting on red fabrics, ribbon, and meshWhat was it like, this new path you took—of seeing art as something woven in with everyday life, of perhaps even seeing your life as a kind of work of art itself?

To me it meant a relief from the dead-end emptiness of self expression, from an insistence on the primacy of the individual ego and the singular self. It meant embracing new depths of being, and being part of a whole, the whole of human awareness. My purpose became one of achieving greater consciousness, and to share that with other sentient beings. For me, this is a finer and more lasting purpose than self expression, though it’s impossible to entirely separate the two sides of that false dichotomy! I am after all a Western man with an art education steeped in the self and its expression. A non-joiner, a dropout, yes—but with such a strong background in modernist process that I must use that practice, not deny it.

That must have been tricky, to throw out the bathwater, but not the baby. How did you go about continuing to make art that was “not art”?

I wanted to at least shift my purpose and practice. Since I was living in Taiwan and studying Asian art, I started by painting images of kimonos, of figures wearing kimonos; I took photos of models in kimonos, wearing geisha or kabuki makeup. These exercises soon seemed appropriated and hollow and I realized I needed to be making objects themselves, that I was no longer interested in the pictorial representations of things. At the same time, I wanted to create things that were abstractions, that is, non-objective. Does that make sense? I wanted to be creating things where the process and materials were more important and evident than their subjective “objectness” or narrative. I wanted, ultimately, to create something not representing something, but actually being something, as physically as possible.

My breakthrough came when I encountered the pilgrim’s robe (called henro hakui) while studying the Shikoku Island Pilgrimage in southern Japan. The Shikoku Pilgrimage (henro) is a very popular and traditional pilgrimage, and involves visiting the island’s eighty-eight temples. The hakui worn during these pilgrimages are simple, over-sized kimonos of handwoven cotton or hemp, and what I noticed right away was how beautifully worn and weathered they were. I saw the hakui as a kind of skin, expressing the pilgrimage experience, tattooed with wood-block printed stamps identifying each temple visited and inscribed with sutras by the temple monks in Sanskrit or Chinese. The hakui I saw were stained and faded because many pilgrims wear the same hakui for years on repeated pilgrimages. When a hakui bears all eighty-eight temple stamps, it is mounted and framed and proudly hung on your wall at home. Also, traditionally, if you die while on the trail, your hakui becomes your burial shroud.

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Pilgrimage garment variations, a progression in paper and fabric

All of this was a revelation for me: here was an object that was also a living canvas, whose ultimate meanings were fluid and lasting, real and abstract, everyday and otherworldly. I wanted to do something with these fascinating relationships, and I went to work, happily obsessed.

And so your own art pilgrimage began?

Haha–yes! Although initially, as I copied the hakui form and borrowed Chinese and Sanskrit characters, the work was not fulfilling. So I began using Western style imagery along with English text, transfers prints, collage. Then I began making the hakui in paper, which was better. The shift in material separated my objects from the original, and my hakui became something new. It wasn’t long before I began making the paper myself in order to construct more abstracted hakui and garments relating to the pilgrimage.

When looking at your body of work, we see, over and over, a kind of continuous construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction process going on. For example, in your weavings, it can begin as a way to make a solid piece of fabric, but then it loosens up to become a grid with tiny spaces, which then open up into holes, which then get reintegrated as drawn or torn circles on a solid fabric again. And sometimes the linear grids and weaves in your pieces can suggest a loom, itself a constructed object from which weavings originate, and once again we come full circle, from material to object to material.

Yes, this way of working is like making multiple pilgrimages, like circling an island eighty-eight times. It’s the same journey, over and over, but each time it’s new. In the beginning, I was searching for a universal form with historic, time-tested meaning that could stand on its own, as both Western abstraction and Eastern philosophy, and once I started to tap that vein, I found my way. First was the hakui or pilgrimage kimono, a worn, bruised but beautiful skin of actual pilgrim experience. Then I went deeper and found the mandala, a cosmic map of the universe, depicted in the form of circles within squares. The gridded, embedded squares embody secure belief, while the circles imply constancy of change. A mandala shows “the way,” how to detach from earthly experience to achieve enlightenment.

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Circles within squares within circles: embedded mandalas in paper and fabric

The very structure of a mandala seems to be embedded in your weavings and constructions, layerings of linear grids and circular holes.

That’s true. I find this approach endlessly fascinating and useable if you remove the absurd paranoia about cultural appropriation. Did you know that even ancient pagodas are mandalas, circles inside repeated squares, with a central pole—the “Tree of Life”—physically detached from the structure but holding it stable even in earthquakes? Pagodas are very early versions of today’s quake-proof buildings. Anyway, I later discovered the kesa, a Buddhist priest robe that developed in the Edo period as a way for temple goers to give costly gifts to monks who were forbidden to acquire wealth of any kind. In an oddly Japanese approach, they would work gorgeous fabrics into simple robes, pieced like quilts, and therefore considered without value. This lack of value, even in something gorgeously constructed, became another useful model for me. I had collected quilts for thirty years but never considered my fabric constructions as quilts until I made kesa and—voila, I saw I was making quilts, in another context. Later on, I began to dye my own found fabric scraps and turned to making thangka, devotional images, sometimes as paintings, sometimes as pieced fabric. Thangkas are usually hung on walls—a bit unusual for Asian art objects but probably the object most like Western art in form and use. Thangkas are seen as living gods, and always employ the mandala as a central structure.

Flat-lay photo of white, brown, and cream-colored crafting supplies including fabric and ribbonIt seems as though your work keeps getting “reborn”—or finding its way—by following these archetypal forms and structures.

I’m really trying to structure materials in an honest, rough, handmade process. I’m trying to get to a truthful, fundamental way of creating objects that can be universally read, visually, beyond their context. Along the way I find materials in nature—or even man-made, salvaged materials like orange plastic snow fencing or mattress webbing—and process them in a minimal, primitive way for my own use. The result is sometimes ancient in appearance, sometimes more Pop, almost. And while my work may have an Asian look, it’s no more Asian than modernist minimalism. If there’s a thought or a meditation there, I want it to arise out of the object itself, regardless of style or form.

It’s interesting how you put together materials that become everyday objects, and in turn you also use everyday objects that become your material.

This is the heart of the matter; how to make something that arrives at being purely itself, not a mere container for “something else.” It’s a paradoxical kind of emptiness, a journey or process of becoming wholly, singularly oneself and yet connected—materially, spiritually—to everything else. The simplest description of this kind of emptiness in Buddhist teachings is this passage:

This is because that is. A flower cannot exist by itself alone. To be can only mean to inter­-be. To be by oneself alone is impossible. Everything else is present in the flower; the only thing the flower is empty of is itself.

In other words, the thing is itself, nothing more or less. I always hope that the simple accretion of materials in a woven or sewn process suggests that’s all there is, in some evocative way that might lead to growing awareness.

And where are you now, on your “pilgrimage”?

I consider the most important part of my work is to bring together a philosophy of being with physical materials and processes. I also like that my work can be appreciated as a crossover from craft to art or art to craft.

While living in San Francisco all those years ago, I escaped the violence of growing up gay in Alabama and found freedom of identity. It was glorious—though dangerous and scary as AIDS entered the picture—and I loved it deeply. It is gone now, that San Francisco, and I’ve retired to a more affordable, easier life. Huntsville is an odd place, sophisticated if conservative, with high levels of education, art appreciation, and quirky genius mixed with the gritty reality of the South. A hybrid place, as I am a hybrid, reconstructed creature. As we all are.

These days, I don’t consider myself a fiber artist per se, though I value and love the explosion of fiber works which have become an important part of the art world’s mix of media in recent years. It’s an explosion, a freedom, but it can also be a liability, giving birth to a kind of pointless, commercialized diversity in the current art market.

Being a male who works in fiber—I don’t think about it. I’m not a joiner, never have been, I just search for good artists who get it, who understand what I do and what I am as they are searching. I’ve always done things women do, I’m a feminist, a kitchen artist, finding materials at home and in grocery stores, hardware stores, junk stores.

My recent paper and fabric constructions came after a ten-year hiatus from any showing at all, after a period of almost “making it” in the commercial and competitive gallery world of the 90s that turned me off. Now I’m making and showing again as I please—at local venues, in national juried shows, and within the big circle of my hometown of Huntsville, which, personally, is the most satisfying. Soon I will have a studio at Lowe Mill, a huge historic factory building that is now a major arts center. You might look it up. It’s wonderful.

 

Headshot of Dennis PotterDennis Potter has been a painter, printmaker, and fiber artist for more than forty years. He grew up in the deep South and has lived in the Bay Area since earning an MFA from the University of California at Berkeley in 1983. His work has been shown extensively in San Francisco, Boston, and New York. For the past ten years his work has been focused on a Buddhist conceptual model, and in 2016 Lowe Mill presented “Holes,” an extensive showing of his work. Lowe Mill is a historic mill building which has been redeveloped into artist studios, galleries, and performance venues, and is now the largest privately owned arts facility in the United States.

 

Works:
1. Measure. Painted and woven, sewn web straps, fabric, ribbon. 46 x 54″ (2016)
2. Indigo Weave. Dyed, woven and sewn straps, leather, paper, interfacing. 42 x 52″ (2016)
3. Enzo Thangka.  Painted and woven, sewn web straps, ribbon, fabric. 40 x 34″ (2016)
4. Indigo Thangka. Antique and vintage Japanese indigo Boro, pieced, sewn, layered, pierced. 40 x 34″ (2016)
5. Cha Wan Thangka. Pieced and sewn found fabrics, ribbon, screen, net. 40 x 36″ (2014)
6. Black Enzo. Painted and woven, sewn web straps, belts, ribbon, braid, fabric. 42 x 36″ (2016)
7. Inked Kimo. Inked and woven, sewn web straps, ribbon, fabric. 60 x 48″ (2016)
8. Black Mendicant Kimo. Woven, sewn web straps, belts, braid, fabric. 54 x 48″ (2016)
9. Oni Camo Hoody. Woven and sewn web straps, braid, ribbon, fabric. 74 x 50″ (2016)
10. Cold Mountain Hakui. Ink-painted sewn and woven paper strips. 74 x 38″ (2016)
11. Hole Thangka. Woven, sewn web straps, ribbon, lace, cord, fabrics, screen. 54 x 48″ (2016)

COLOR OUT LOUD: Paintings by Chilean Artist Jacqueline Unanue

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COLOR OUT LOUD
Paintings
by Jacqueline Unanue

I was born into a family of artists, and for as long as I can remember I have been surrounded by music and painting. From an early age, my father encouraged me to carefully observe the rich palette of colors in the mountains of my native Chile, and, when we were at the beach, to make drawings in the sand. My mother encouraged me to listen to classical music.

When I studied graphic design as a university student, I was fortunate to have artist-teachers who were very talented and sensitive. Their lectures opened my eyes to a new kind of world, one that forever changed the way I looked at the environment. One of these teachers lectured on Wassily Kandinsky, an artist whose works were inspired by music and whose theories about art were shaped by his subjective experiences. The ideas in Kandinsky’s book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, defined art as something enigmatic and mystical, born from the inner necessity of the artist and claiming its own free-standing life, its own spiritual breath. These ideas deeply touched me and remained with me, dormant until recently. I am now painting canvases inspired by music—not simply by having it on the background, but as an element alive and breathing in my work.

In spite of living far away, I feel always connected to Chile, a place I refer to as “my ancient land.” Several years ago, the nostalgia for my homeland made me recall the work of two Czech composers, Antonín Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana, whose music conveys their own love for their country. Dvořák’s New World Symphony became the incentive for a new series of paintings I began, “From The New World,” and with Smetana’s My Fatherland as inspiration, I started “My Ancient Land” series.  The sense of belonging to a place is personal and universal, and this is the reason I could and can very much identify with these musical pieces.

From the New World II, inspired by composer Antonín Dvořák
My Ancient Land II, inspired by composer Bedřich Smetana

As my work evolved, I turned to Chilean classical music — six composers in particular: René Amengual (1911–1954), Eulogio Dávalos (b. 1945), Juan Orrego-Salas (b. 1917), Enrique Soro (1884-1954), Sylvia Soublette (b. 1923), and Jorge Urrutia (1905-1981). Some of these composers were stirred by the same Chilean landscapes and locales of my memory, others by the same experience of tapping into an inner “cosmos,” and one of them—Eulogio Dávalos—I was actually fortunate enough to meet in person. With this inspiration I continued painting for the series, “My Ancient Land,” which has been part of a traveling exhibit in the U.S., Chile, and Spain, curated by Gloria Garafulich-Grabois.

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Many of the paintings in “My Ancient Land” series were created on large-scale canvases mounted onto walls. My ritual is as follows: once the canvas is ready, I prepare sheets of watercolor paper and smaller canvases on easels, a palette of up to twenty or thirty colors in containers, a variety of paintbrushes, and, finally—but essentially—the piece of music. I begin by quietly listening to the music. Only when I start feeling the music within me do I begin to paint. Once immersed in music and painting it becomes very physical, and I find myself expressing both the movement of the music as well as my own emotions in free and spontaneous brushstrokes that are as gestural as they are musical.


Nothing is planned, it all happens—not from the mind or intellect, but from inner emotions and sensations. I stop often to observe what is happening on the canvas and then continue, painting in layers as the movements of the music accumulate. My brushstrokes express melodic patterns as I “write” my own pictorial composition. Without a rational purpose, this is how I “paint-and-write” the music, preferably using circles, ovals, and flexible lines in a kind of dance. From there I direct my arm and hand, and in turn my brush, to follow these shapes as if they were natural musical tempos and dance figures.

Through this kind of “writing”—if I were to name my creative process—I feel most free. First, to write and paint musical notes as an artist-musician, and then to interpret them as if I were a conductor. My baton is my brush. It interprets the voices of the composers, and the silences. The bass sounds are deep blues. A variety of yellows—ranging from a bright lemon to a yellow-orange—suggest a mystical air. White is the air itself, offering a transparent hint of layers below: the musical notes that repeat themselves in the colored sounds. The choice of colors does not stem from intellectual decisions, but rather from internal perceptions, wordless sensations. Kandinsky wrote: “the sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with bass notes or a dark lake with treble.” For me, the most powerful part of that observation is that all of us knows what he means, without being taught, without putting it into words. It is as if we all have an inner homeland in common, a place where we are most free to color out loud.

Jacqueline Unanue is a Chilean born visual artist of Spanish ancestry who has resided in Philadelphia since 2000 with her husband Ricardo Guajardo, who is an artist and designer as well. She studied design at the Universidad de Chile de Valparaíso. While a student, she became interested in the rock art found in her native country, traveling extensively through Chile’s Atacama Desert. She also traveled to the pre-historic Altamira caves in the Basque Country. Unanue has received numerous awards and grants—among them the Latin American Women in Art and Culture Tribute in 2015—and has widely exhibited her work in Chile, Spain, Finland, Ecuador, and Argentina, as well as in galleries in Washington DC, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York. Her work can also be found in many private collections in the Americas and Europe, and she is currently represented by the 3rd Street Gallery in Philadelphia. www.jacquelineunanue.com

Works:
1. From the New World II, | acrylic on canvas | 2013 | 60″ x 66″ (153 x 168 cm) | Inspired by composer Antonín Dvořák
2. My Ancient Land II | acrylic on canvas | 2013 |  30″ x 40″ (76 x 102 cm) | Inspired by composer Bedřich Smetana
3. My Ancient Land, Symphonic Prelude II | acrylic on canvas | 2014 | 63″ x 72″ (160  x 184 cm) | Inspired by Chilean composer René Amengual
4. My Ancient Land, Sextet III | 2014 | acrylic on canvas | 60″ x 70″ (163 x 178 cm) | Inspired by composer Juan Orrego-Salas
5. My Ancient Land, Cueca for Pablo Neruda I | 2014 | acrylic on canvas | 57″ x 73″ (145 x 185 cm) Inspired by composer Eulogio Dávalos
6. My Ancient Land, Fantastic Dance III | 2014 | acrylic on paper | 25″ x 31″ (63  x 79 cm) | Inspired by composer Enrique Soro
7. My Ancient Land, Roman Mass IV | 2014 | acrylic on canvas | 63″ x 72″ (160  x 183 cm) Inspired by composer Sylvia Soublette
8. My Ancient Land, Suggestions of Chile V | 2015 | acrylic on canvas | 30″ x 40″ (76 x 102 cm) | Inspired by composer Jorge Urrutia

Note: The above recordings are protected by copyright and are used with explicit permission from the publishers. These recordings are not for download or reproduction. All images copyright Jacqueline Unanue. 

THE STIGMA OF BEAUTY, THE STAIN OF GLASS Glass Art by Judith Schaechter

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THE STIGMA OF BEAUTY, THE STAIN OF GLASS
Glass Art
by Judith Schaechter

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I am fairly certain that many people experience my pieces kind of like this: Judith Schaechter is an artist who makes images in stained glass of anguished women set against highly decorative backgrounds. People often see my works all at once as a group — presented in a show or reproduced in an article — but to me, each piece is vastly different and each one arose over long periods of time. But yeah, I get it: anguished women and lush, decorative backgrounds.

The Birth of Eve, 57″ x 31″, 2013I started working in glass when I was a painting student at the Rhode Island School of Design. I took a stained glass elective course and was hooked. Looking back, I think that had a lot to do with time and tedium. I was in the habit of painting fast and furiously, with a lot of anxiety about the blank canvas. It was easy enough to cover that up, but I would later gesso over the parts that weren’t working and found that ultimately I was looking again at a blank canvas. With glass, on the other hand, it takes a long time to bring about a transformation. It can take days to make the glass do anything, and I found that during that time I would achieve what psychologists call “transference.” In other words, I’d grow deeply attached to the work.

Glass is a magical medium. I am using that word specifically because it alludes to the sort of Vegas-y glitz that has led some people to disrespect it as a medium and to distrust it as a serious contender for art making. Glass is one of the few materials that looks good before you touch it, and that’s dangerous because anything you do to it risks ruining it, as opposed, say, to clay, upon which anything is a vast improvement. But glass can be far more than merely superficial.

New Ghost, 32″ x 19″, 2014Abbot Suger (the 12th century monk who designed the Basilica of Saint-Denis) cited the spiritual promise of stained glass when he said: “stained glass is enlightenment embodied.” And how true that can feel when inside a cathedral (even if you are not religious!) But the flip side is that stained glass is particularly guilty of disillusionment; it promises so very much that when it falls short, it is extra disappointing. Stained glass suffered as a medium when demand for it decreased during the Protestant Reformation, and it suffered further as art became more and more separate from the Church. When I started working in glass, my first thought was that no one had done anything new with it in centuries, with the exception of Tiffany (whom I happen to dislike). I liked the challenge of working with a risky material and I particularly liked its neglected history.

As it turned out, the distorted, anguished figures and decorative backgrounds that looked like a pantomime of teenaged angst when I did them in oil paint, looked a lot more authentic in stained glass. Perhaps they needed real illumination to make them seem as though they were burning inside.

And so, glass it was.

◊

Today I’m often asked, “Why do you do those things you do?” Understandably, that’s what people want to know from artists, and if we could make sense of that in words, we’d be very lucky indeed, because part of the reality is that if we could say it, we wouldn’t need to make it.

It helps to narrow it down some to two questions: why does it look the way it does, and how do you choose a subject.

I doodle a lot and I would go so far as to say I don’t have “ideas” per se. In order to launch a project, I need to literally draw it out of me. Inspiration is something that resides in me like a swamp monster in murky depths. I don’t see things in my head first and then draw them. I draw in order to see them. And so I doodle — and I see flowers, animals, female faces. Why? I honestly have no idea, and can only give a tautological response: because they interest me.

Anchoress, 35″ x 25″, 2015I can, however, say a few words about the significance of realism in my work. First off, perceptual realism (“realistic” realism) is not of interest to me. My flowers and faces don’t exist in nature. I have an urge to distort and reinvent — one reality is plenty in my life! — and I am attracted to other art forms of distorted realism, such as Gothic art, much Asian art, and some modern art, such as Expressionism.

As for the female faces, I think sometimes I am engaged in doll play, in that they can take on any role in a sort of proxy of selfhood. They are not self-portraits. In fact, one of my main concerns is that I want my pieces to be eternal and universal so that anyone can empathize with them. It bothers me, though, that casual observers see them as depressing. I am fascinated with the nuances of human expression and try very hard to create faces that express several emotions at once, preferably conflicting ones. So they are never just in agony, but agony tinged with ecstasy; grief offset by hope; rage tempered by serenity.

Now, about those backgrounds: they take a long time to make, longer than the figures. There is this thing in the two-dimensional arts known as the “figure-ground dilemma” — the question of what to do in the background after you’ve made a figure. Distinguishing this second dimension from the first lies at the crux of what makes us human: the ability to recognize and utilize symbolic abstractions. This is critical because one cannot help but empathize with the figure, and so its location becomes a reflection of where you are. As it was once explained to me, art is a “You Are Here” map. I hesitate to say anything mystical, or deeply philosophical (since I feel both foolish and unqualified to do so) but here goes. One of the ways art is significant beyond mere entertainment is that it contextualizes our existence in the cosmic sense. One sees an image, and one is able to echolocate off it. It’s not communication so much as telepathy.

Acedia, 44″ x 27″, 2013My backgrounds perhaps act as a foil for the ambivalent figure. Or maybe they’re projections of their possible psychological state, a hallucination, a dream, or even a visual representation of their speech if they could talk. However you want to see it, I consider my backgrounds to be an extension of the figure.

Some artists are content to paint a blank area around a figure. Most are content to depict a realistic space around a figure. But I have always found it to be more challenging and rewarding to place the figure in an undetermined, abstract space.

I believe that beauty is a Good Thing, and my works usually involve plenty of bright colors, contrasts, and patterns — abstract signifiers of beauty. But since questions around beauty have been a bugaboo in art for most of the 20th century, beauty can also be a confusing thing. Is it good for us like spinach or is it good like candy? Is it morally good, or sensually good? Mind-good or body-good? In the end, I think asking this question misses the point that beauty can be both — or, as the Abbot of Saint-Denis put it, “enlightenment embodied.”

Headshot of Judith SchaechterJudith Schaechter has lived and worked in Philadelphia since graduating in 1983 with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design Glass Program. She has exhibited widely, including New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, The Hague, and Vaxjo, Sweden. She is the recipient of many grants, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Crafts , The Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, The Joan Mitchell Award, two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts awards, The Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and a Leeway Foundation grant. More at www.judithschaechter.com and judithschaechterglass.blogspot.com. Visit her work at Claire Oliver Gallery in New York.

Works:
1. Cold Genius, 35″ x 43″, 2009
2. Three-Tiered Cosmos, 30″ x 40″, 2015
3. Feral Child, 25″ x 42″, 2012
4. Horse Accident, 33″ x 45″, 2015
5. Our Ladies, 22″ x 25″, 2012
6. Waiting Room, 22″ x 32″, 2014
7. Lockdown, 21″ x 31″, 2010
8. The Sin Eater, 25″ x 46″, 2009
9. The Battle of Carnival and Lent, 56″ x 56″, 2011
10. Odalisque, 24″ x 33″, 2015
11. Harpy, 37″ x 33″, 2013
12. An Invocation, 26″ x 34″, 2009
13. The Birth of Eve, 57″ x 31″, 2013
14. New Ghost, 32″ x 19″, 2014
15. Anchoress, 35″ x 25″, 2015
16. Acedia, 44″ x 27″, 2013

A PRESENCE IN WOOD Wood Sculpture by Miriam Carpenter

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A PRESENCE IN WOOD
Wood Sculpture
by Miriam Carpenter
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Throughout my life I have sought the companionship of trees, and have developed an ever deepening reverence for them. Trees are intelligent, resilient, majestic, and adaptable. When a tree has reached the end of its life, the shadow of what once was presents another gift in the form of a satiny, warm, sensual material.

Each piece of wood has its own story—reflections of moments specific to place and time within the architecture of a species. Each tree has its own experience and characteristics uniquely formed by its geographical location, the effects of the seasons, wind, rain, and what grew beside it. The history of each year is physically recorded in each ring slowly reacting to external and internal stresses after it has died and been cut into lumber. Reading this story in the grain is just as exciting to me as transforming it into an artifact. The more time I spend with each piece of wood, the deeper my understanding grows. Respecting its capacity and understanding its potential, I can be more thoughtful in how I bring the piece to completion.

Everything that I create is an experiment. Whether the approach is multi-axis split turning, bending, or carving by hand, it is always an exploration of the material’s unique potential.
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My current passion is fueled by an evolving series of delicately carved wooden feathers. Species with the most porous early wood, tight growth rings, and strong medullary rays provide the type of structure I have found to be most resilient. The dense medullary rays project radially through the rings, offering an ability to shape incredibly thin undulating forms that expose the delicate pores, while the tight rings offer a dramatic visual texture through varying densities.

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My process is of making—of staying present in the moment, of focus and flexibility—and is an ongoing lesson in non-attachment. As I work, I allow myself to pour out love with such intensity that what I create becomes embodied with a life that is viscerally connected to me. I do not believe that handmade artifacts are simply objects or things; I believe they are imbued with heart and soul. Our energy passes through us and into what we are making. Bliss, anxieties—these things are reflected in what we produce. We exchange matter. When we create a baby, far along in its gestation, its DNA floods the mother’s body. When a baby is born, some of its DNA remains in the mother’s body forever. There is a constant exchange in whatever we create, and being mindful and deliberate about how we do what we do is of utmost importance to how we share our gifts and our lives with everyone and everything around us.

Living creatively shifts the way I move through the world and expands my perceptions. The inclination to create art sets us apart from other living things on this earth. It is an active universal language that creates ties, discovers compatibility, and allows us to realize connections. While creating ties, my hope is to evoke something in others that might broaden understanding and help perpetuate a passion to learn, nurture, respect, and explore.

Miriam-Carpenter_amber-johnstonMiriam Carpenter is an artist, researcher, and designer based in New Hope, Pennsylvania. After graduating from RISD in 2006, she designed furniture alongside Mira Nakashima for seven years. In 2014, she was awarded the Windgate ITE Residency sponsored by the Center for Art in Wood together with four wood artists from Japan, Canada, West Ghana, and the United States. The year following, she lived, worked, and studied with furniture makers, sculptors, scholars, and environmental stewards in Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand. She is currently working as an independent artist while enjoying teaching across the country.

 

Author photo credit: Amber Johnston

The sculptures:

Bliss, 2014, Turned and carved bleached Ash. Finished with whitewash and 4″ liming wax. 4″ x 9″
Concentra, 2008, Turned and carved Mahogany. 4″ x 13″
Feather 11,903, 2012, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. 4.5″ x 2″ x .875″
Feather 11,902, 2012, Hand-carved Silky Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. .5″ x 1.5″ x 4″
Feather 11,901, 2012, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. 4.5″ x 1.75″ x .875″
Feather 11,900, 2012, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. 4″ x 1.875″ x 1.25″
Feather 11,899, 2013, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. 1″ x 1.25″ x 3″
Feather 11,898, 2013, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. Holly box. .75″ x 1.25″ x 3″
Feather 11,892, 2014, Hand-carved White Oak endgrain. Steam-bent Wenge spine. Pyrographed and dyed. 1.75″ x 2″ x 2.5″
Feather 11,889, 2015, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. .625″ x 2″ x 3.75″
Feather 11,888, 2015, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. .75″ x1.5″ x 4″
Feather 11,887, 2015, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. 1.25″ x 2.375″ x 4.25″
Feather 11,886, 2013, Hand-carved Wenge. Finished with wax. 7.5″ x 2″ x 3.75″
Feather 11,883, 2016, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. 4.5″ x 2.25″ x 1.25″
Sisters, 2014, Multi-axis split-turned and carved Basswood frame, finished with India Ink and burnished with beeswax. Mirror glass backed with Dacron and wool. 25.5″ x 18″ x 1.75

WHY DRAW TREES by Laurel Hooker

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WHY DRAW TREES?
by Laurel Hooker

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Before I went to art school, before I decided to become a painter, before my work and classes carried me far away into the world of fine art, all I really wanted to do was draw. I drew the way a lot of teenagers do–carefully, self-consciously, and often. I drew unaware of the complications of critical analysis, ego, sophisticated processes, and expensive materials that would soon converge in the realm of my higher education.

When I was a student at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, drawing nice pictures soon became the farthest thing from my mind. In that four-year whirlwind of studio classes, I roved quite far from simple drawing. I studied glassblowing, ceramics, on-loom weaving, and figure modeling. As a painting major, I took drawing classes, but they were secondary to my painting classes. After graduation, I went home to my parents’ house in east Tennessee, where I listened to the drone of cicadas in the evenings and slept until noon. For the first time in four years, my life slowed to a walking pace. I made a couple of paintings; I carried a small watercolor kit with me as a way of keeping in habit. And I was doing something I hadn’t done in a long time: I was looking. Looking at things that I didn’t get to look at during the years I was living in North Philadelphia: Trees. Grass. Flowers. Mountains. Rivers. The ground at my feet, even.

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“Katsura Tree,” pen and ink, 9”x12”, 2015 – Click to enlarge.

Had I ever really looked at the ground? Had I tried to separate pebble from milkweed with only my eyes? Or looked into the matrix of blades and buds, clustered and sprouting, snaking in ribbons, spurting from muscular stalks? What about the trees? Had I ever examined every leaf? Had I watched the entire narrative curl of a single branch into its stems?

One of my drawing professors in college once told us, in a dramatic moment of frustration, that she hated student drawings of trees. “Please, please, no more trees!” she sighed, rolling her eyes. I was perplexed. No trees? Should we just omit them? Draw only buildings? The ground?

And yet, I understood her point. Trees are hard to see. And even harder to see well. I could suddenly imagine legions of students mass-producing the same childhood version of the classic crayon-book tree, a generic shorthand of cylindrical trunks and cartoon foliage. It made more sense for us students to invest our senses in the moment, in the perceived spaces around us, without getting caught up in trees we’d learned by heart.

“White Pine,” pen and ink, 6”x9”, 2015

“White Pine,” pen and ink, 6”x9”, 2015  – Click to enlarge

But I’m not a student anymore. Last August, I moved back to Philadelphia and, being without a painting studio, I picked up my drawing pen and dipped it in ink. I wanted to draw something from life. I wanted to draw something in front of me, something present. I looked out across the front porch and saw a small arched ash tree. This was what I wanted to draw.

Trees and plants have been my subjects ever since. With pen-and-ink I can capture gesture, immediacy, and fluidity with precision. India ink, which can be diluted with water, allows the full tonal range of graphite, but without the option to erase. I find that this restriction stimulates my attentiveness. While I do draw trees and plants out of admiration for their singularity and form, I consider my tree drawings exercises in bearing witness, not pretty pictures. In art, plants are often relegated to background status; wrongly so, in my opinion. Drawing them intimately helps me appreciate the savage power and poetry of vegetal life.

When you begin drawing a tree or a garden, you become locked into its convolutions, and an endless, groping attempt to understand the living network of light and shadow. It’s a task I will never completely master—and that’s what I like about it.

The Drawings:
“Sedgwick Street Garden,” gouache and ink, 9”x12”, 2015
“Carpenter Lane Garden,” pen and ink, 9”x12”, 2015
“Porch on Pelham Road,” pen and ink, 6”x9”, 2015
“Little Ash Tree,” pen and ink, 6”x9”, 2015
“Katsura Tree,” pen and ink, 9”x12”, 2015
“White Pine,” pen and ink, 6”x9”, 2015

Laurel-HookerLaurel Hooker is an artist living and working in Philadelphia. She received her BFA in painting from Tyler School of Art at Temple University. Brought up exploring the mountain wilderness outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, the natural world remains a central source of inspiration for her work. Her additional enthusiasms include all things musical, ethical, and edible. Further images of her work can be found at www.laurelhooker.com

WORKS ON LOVE by Michelle Doll

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WORKS ON LOVE
by Michelle Doll

Mother Child (KA2), 2014 Oil on Canvas 60 x 60"

Mother Child (KA2), 2014 Oil on Canvas 60 x 60″

My paintings are about felt moments, both the visible ones as well as the ones that we aren’t able to see. For years, I used to create work about feelings of disconnect and loss. When I’d leave the studio, those feelings and the difficult emotions surrounding them would become amplified. But today, both my life and my work are focused on love and connection, what I see as the root of intimacy.

Such moments exist as I go through my day. I find myself constantly witnessing how people connect. Living and working in New York is a source of inspiration, as I can absorb these intimate interactions openly, on the streets. I’m attracted to the physical and metaphysical energy that’s going on between individuals — the touch between a couple, the closeness between a mother and child. By capturing these private moments, my paintings seek to bring together the mind, body, and soul through the physical substance of paint.

Couple (JT5), 2014 Oil on Canvas 60 x 60"

Couple (JT5), 2014 Oil on Canvas 60 x 60″

I naturally express myself through touch, and the very tactile quality of paint allows me to express myself. Each brushstroke is a way of recording the dialogue between bodies and minds during moments of closeness. For me, the greatest quality of oil paint is that it allows me to explore these expressions of intimacy. The nature of the body and the often elusive nature of love is no longer hidden from view. It is given texture: sometimes rough, often sensual, at times gentle, but always present. The touch of paint to the canvas is also a presence that I can share with viewers of my work.

Couple (AJ6), 2015 Oil on Board 30 x 20"

Couple (AJ6), 2015 Oil on Board 30 x 20″

There is an inherent vulnerability I experience while revealing the relationships between people, and the painting process allows my own emotions to come through. I allow myself to feel the beauty and weight of my sitters, and whether I feel bonds of love or fear and loss, I pass it along through my work.

This said, it is all very transitory. When I start a painting, I ask, how does this feel and what is the importance of the moment? I usually focus on certain areas in the painting while allowing other areas to “fall away,” not fully rendered. In that way the painting when complete feels similar to the way intimate moments have been experienced. It becomes essentially a stand-in for multiple sensations that would otherwise be lost to time.

Couple (JT1), 2013 Oil on Canvas 40 x 28"

Couple (JT1), 2013 Oil on Canvas 40 x 28″

These transient, hidden flashes of physical human contact hold meaning in the creases, crevices, overlaps, folds and weight of connecting bodies. Each stroke of the brush is, for me, a way of grasping and holding this.

The paintings:
Mother Child (KA2), 2014, oil on canvas, 60 x 60″
Couple (JT5), 2014, oil on canvas, 60 x 60″
Couple (AJ6), 2015, oil on board, 30 x 20″
Couple (JT1), 2013, oil on canvas, 40 x 28″

Michelle-DollMichelle Doll’s paintings capture quiet, intimate moments hinged on personal connections between her subjects, as well as their interactions with the world around them. Doll’s recent works are imbued with femininity and introspection, and explore the themes of love, desire and connection. She earned her B.F.A. from Kent State University and M.F.A. from New York Academy of Art where she graduated cum laude on both. Her work has been exhibited and featured worldwide at galleries in New York, St. Barth’s, San Francisco, Chicago, Basel, London, and Olso. She is represented by Lyons Wier Gallery in New York City and Galleri Ramfjord in Oslo, Norway. Michelle currently lives and works in Hoboken, New Jersey.

THE DOGS OF SAN JUAN AND THE FISH OF PHILADELPHIA by Paula Rivera

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Si me caigo de cabeza

From the series “Si me caigo de cabeza,” 10″ x 10″, India ink, gouache, and watercolor on paper, 2015

 

THE DOGS OF SAN JUAN AND THE FISH OF PHILADELPHIA
Works on Paper and Beyond
by Paula Rivera

I started drawing when I was a baby. My first subject was an elephant, done in orange Crayola marker. My parents have the drawing to this day. I’ve always had a strong feeling for drawing animals; like many children, I believed I understood animals, and I’m still fascinated with animals.

I went to Philadelphia’s High School for Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA), a magnet school for art students. I was convinced that an arts school environment would be best for me, even though I suspected that you cannot teach a person how to create art. The art environment was good for me in many ways, but the Western conceptions of teaching art messed with my head and feelings.

San Juan to Philadelphia, a story of fire to water. about 2ftx2.5ft

“San Juan to Philadelphia,” a story of fire to water, about 24″ x 30″, India ink, gouache, and watercolor on paper, 2015

 

After CAPA I attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to study drawing and painting. Sure enough, by the third year I was completely sick of it. So I left, planning to work for a year and save enough money to move to California to study animation. But even after a year of working, my California dream was still too expensive—and I didn’t want to go into debt for student loans. Before I knew it I was auditioning for acceptance at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas to study animation. I was leaving my adopted home, Philadelphia, to return to my birthplace, San Juan, Puerto Rico.

My original goal in character animation was to learn to create figures that made anatomical sense, to create “live” figures instead of “cartoon” figures (bodies “made of bones” as opposed to bodies “made of rubber”). You can see what I mean by this if you look at work by the Studio Ghibli, or compare the Disney approach to animation versus Looney Tunes or Cartoon Network.

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​Untitled, India ink on paper, 8.5″ x 9″, 2015

But as time went on, my work became less figure oriented, and more emotionally centered. Instead of trying to create the “correct” moving figure, I began making work in which the sun was the center, surrounded by life. Sometimes, I draw two or three suns. They are providers of life and nourishment. Sometimes they are crying, sometimes they are angry, but they are always full and bright.

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Untitled, Chapter 1 from a book in progress, India ink on paper, 8.5″ x 11″, 2015

As my time in San Juan drew to a close, I found myself drawing a lot of dogs under this bright sun of Puerto Rico. I was inspired while walking my own dog, Miro, through the barrio Santurce, where we lived. Together, we saw amazing things, taking in all the sights: buildings, cars, plants and fruits, other people and other dogs. I had adopted Miro in February. He was the first dog who was my own, as opposed to my family’s dog, and I see him as a new chapter in my life as an independent dog mom. Miro has brought much joy and new experience.

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Untitled, paint on longboard, about 40″ x 10″, 2014

Now that I’ve returned to Philadelphia, my “Dogs of San Juan” series has evolved into a new series: Fish—a new emotional state. The idea of fish came to me instinctively. San Juan is fire; Philadelphia is water. It’s not something I can explain logically, because the images I create come directly from feeling, but in my new emotional state while living again in Philadelphia, I feel like a fish in water.

Paula-RiveraElephant-drawing-250pxPaula Rivera was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her family moved to Philadelphia when she was two and a half years old, and ever since she’s lived her life as an artist. Her usual media is ink and paper. She has studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico. She lives for sun, big sky, and water. She aspires to create a few animated films, start a small art school, and build her own art studio in the desert. Currently she lives with her new family — her beloved and loving boyfriend and her dogs.

 

 

All works © Paula Rivera. Click any image for a higher resolution.

Works Discussed:
1. Untitled, from the series Si me caigo de cabeza, 10″ x 10″, India ink, gouache, and watercolor on paper, 2015
2. “San Juan to Philadelphia,” 24″ x 30″, India ink, gouache, and watercolor on paper, 2015
3. ​Untitled, India ink on paper, 8.5″ x 9″, 2015
4. Untitled, Chapter 1 from a book in progress, India ink on paper, 8.5″ x 11″, 2015.
5. Untitled, paint on longboard, about 40″ x 10″, 2014
6.  “Elephant,” Crayola marker on paper, 8.5″ x 11″, 1994

ART AND HEALING by Donna Levinstone

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ART AND HEALING
Pastel Landscapes
by Donna Levinstone

Art enhances the healing process. My work is meditative and has been used in hospital settings and other situations where healing is called for. My mother and a few of my friends, in the last stage of their lives, have used my work as a source of calm and focus during their bed-ridden illnesses. As a cancer survivor, I, too, have found that artwork provides calm in my life. My pastel landscapes have often been referred to as “landscapes of the soul.”

The use of wide skies in my work promotes a sense of well-being. I have memories, as a  young child, of riding in our convertible and gazing up at the sky for hours. According to Jack Borden, founder of For Spacious Skies, people who have sky awareness in their lives often have an added sense of optimism. They look at their lives, like the skies, with an endless sense of possibilities.

My drawing “Daybreak” was acquired by Sarah Campbell, curator for Memorial Sloane Kettering Hospital:

Daybreak-24'-x-36'-Courtesy-of-Memorial-Sloane-Kettering-800

Daybreak, pastel, 24″ x 36″, Collection of Memorial Sloane-Kettering, 2013.

“Marshland” was commissioned for the University of Connecticut Health Center. Both drawings provide a sense of calm and light. Patients are able to feel safe, inspired and comforted while looking at these works. There is a direct link to content of the images and the brain’s reaction to stress and anxiety. Merely looking at art makes the hospital environment less stressful.

Marshland-48x60--800

Marshland, pastel, 44″x 60″, Collection of University of Connecticut Health Center, 2014.

Spiritual healers often use color and chakras in their practice. For example, green is the color of nature, creating balance and harmony, and linked to the heart. Blue is cooling, positive energy and connected to the throat. My pastel “Changing Skies” also speaks to the beauty of nature and changing skies.

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Changing Skies, pastel, 10″ x 14″, Collection of Wendy Schrijver, 2014.

I have also found comfort in the darkness. When my father was dying, I would stay at a hotel by the ocean and study night skies and the moon for hours. In those moments, there was an instant connection to God and healing.

I recently completed a series called “Nocturnes,” a grid of pastel drawings:

Nocturne Grid, Pastel 18" x 18", Collection of the Artist, 2015. Click for higher resolution image.

Nocturne Grid, pastel, 18″ x 18″, Collection of the Artist, 2015.

My work provides a sense of calm in the midst of fear and exhaustion. My pastel landscapes have an added advantage of allowing patients to dream and travel away into their memories. A lot of my work has this reflective light. “Eternal Waters,” a black and white pastel, is another example:

Eternal Waters, B/W Pastel, 18" x 28", Collection of Tom McCarthy, 2013. Click for higher resolution image.

Eternal Waters, b/w pastel, 18″ x 28″, Collection of Tom McCarthy, 2013.

Donna-LevinstoneDonna Levinstone’s pastel drawings have been included in many private and corporate collections, including Pfizer, Citibank, Time Inc, Nabisco, IBM, and Verizon. Her pastel drawings are part of the collection of the Library of Congress, the New-York Historical Society, the Museum of the City of New York, and the US Department of State. A black-and-white pastel drawing from her 9/11 Series will be part of the new 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York. Her work appears on several book covers and has been published in The New York Times and Drawn in New York: Six Centuries of Drawing and Watercolor, among others. As an arts educator, Levinstone has also received various grants to teach art to the elderly and to cancer patients. Her teaching work also includes working with various school aged children. She is also a member of the Cloud Appreciation Society. More at www.donnalevinstone.com.

All works © Donna Levinstone. Click any image for a higher resolution.

Works Discussed:
1. Nocturne Grid, pastel, 18″ x 18″, collection of the artist, 2015
2. Eternal Waters, b/w pastel, 18″ x 28″, collection of Tom McCarthy, 2013
3. Marshland, pastel, 44″ x 60″, University of Connecticut Health Center, 2014
4. Daybreak, pastel, 24″ x 36″, collection of Memorial Sloane-Kettering, 2013
5. Changing Skies, pastel, 10″ x 14″, collection of Wendy Schrijver, 2014

A Now for MENAM by Orkan Telhan

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NOW IN ELSEWHERE
A Now for MENAM: A Calendar That Curates Time
by Orkan Telhan

The Middle East. North Africa. The Mediterranean. Asia Minor and the Levant. These refer to inexact geographies. It is hard to tell where each begins and ends. As names, they may take on different meanings when they refer to people, languages, belief systems, and politics, all of which constantly negotiate their identities with respect to one another. As places, they may bring together a series of disjointed lands unified as an imaginary cultural construct, yet whose presence lives everywhere, whose lands have produced many diasporas around the globe. Today, someone from Little Syria, New York, uses the same recipe for hummus that a grandmother uses in Syria. And it tastes different; taste belongs neither here nor there, and changes every moment.

Installation view from CULTURUNNERS RV, Armory Show 2015, New York.

Installation view from CULTURUNNERS RV, Armory Show 2015, New York. Click for higher resolution image.

It is often an oriental gaze that renders these uneasy, tenuous connections. This is a gaze that comes both from the desire to belong to a place and the fear of its possibility. Thus the Middle East, North Africa, or the Mediterranean always exist as mediated elsewheres where only others can belong. Or where we belong as others.

Making sense of all of this today is an art. Is opinion really in the eyes of the beholder? What is there to look at when our interpretation will always be skewed by what is selectively mediated for us? Where or whom do we belong if opinions are already others’?

“A Now for MENAM” is an artwork that responds to these questions. It reflects on our habits of looking and making meaning out of what is thrown at us by media. It proposes a different kind of interface—perhaps a less complacent window or mirror—that tries to present the other in its fluidity; with enough room for fact and fiction.

The artwork is designed as a real-time calendar that brings together different moments from history to curate a “now”—a minute-long media excerpt collected from online sources that broadcast content from or about the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean (MENAM). Its algorithm queries different sites and brings together texts, videos, facts and historical trivia that are related to contemporary issues based on the current month. For instance, in March 2015, we see news about the upcoming anniversary of the Armenian genocide, the current death toll of immigrants crossing the Mediterranean, and watch an excerpt from Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour—the only film by the French writer who now rests in a Spanish cemetery, in Laresh, Morocco.

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Almanach du Levant (The Levant Almanac)

By design, the calendar’s format references two predecessors: Almanach du Levant (The Levant Almanac) and the Saatli Maarif Takvimi (Educational Calendar with Time).

Almanach was published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the Ottomans to address the needs of the minorities living in the Levant region, which we today identify as the area that spans Cyprus, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. It featured the current dates in Turkish, Greek, French, Bulgarian, Armenian, and Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) with respect to the specifics of the timekeeping practices used in these geographies.

calendar1958

Saatli Maarif Takvimi (Educational Calendar with Time)

Saatli Maarif Takvimi also dates back to the early 1900s but is still in use today in Turkey. It features both the Gregorian and the Hijri calendar, which is mainly used to indicate the daily prayer times for Muslims based on moon cycles. In addition to timekeeping, the educational calendar also includes daily items such as weather predictions, recipes, suggested names for newborns, jokes and trivia about past events that happened on that day. It works like a serial publication written by an anonymous author who tells you what you need to know for the day.

As a mobile application, “A Now for MENAM” runs in real time yet pays homage to these printed formats, both in form and content. The layout is broken down into sections that organize the information in quadrants. Every minute we see content based on a new topic related to one of the countries in the region—immigrants in Libya, austerity measures in Greece, the banning of Berber names for Moroccan babies. A video feature on the topic appears on the upper right corner of the page, matched with a looping gif animation, which counters both its speed and message with humor or satire. On the lower left, we see a visualization of facts or real-time information, such as stock exchange tickers or real-time widgets reporting on currencies and markets of MENAM, while on the lower right there is a Twitter feed where everyone can contribute to the current topic with a selection of hash tags.

A Now for MENAM, detail. Click for higher resolution image.

“A Now for MENAM” curates a running critique on issues related to current times. The four-quadrant format presents multiple perspectives on the same topic by showing adversarial opinions in the same frame, with information collected from different outlets such as personal blogs, mainstream media, and scientific journals. In the age of social media, this calendar does not presume to feature the “right” point of view; rather, it tells a story from the perspective of different tellers. As with any narrative, the result is always subjective and incomplete. Every minute-long “now” is a possibility negotiated between an algorithmic selection and a series of curatorial decisions programmed by the artist.

The calendar can be accessed anywhere in the world, 24/7. However, it is primarily designed to be a travel companion—a temporal navigator—that will find its place next to the GPS in our cars. Currently commissioned by the CULTURUNNERS Project and the Armory Show 2015, the calendar will travel across the United States and visit different cities inside an RV. During the calendar’s trip, its algorithm will detect the current location of the RV and pull its content accordingly, from sites and sources created by those who identify with MENAM in the visited places.

Like all narratives, the cultural constructs we call the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean will always unfold in fragmented ways. The “Now” calendar, as a work of art comprising a series of curated moments, will never render a clear coherent image of the land or the other but rather help us reimagine a different MENAM every time we look at it.

For an example page of the calendar, visit here: orkantelhan.info/now_for_menam_single. For more information about the project, visit culturunners.com/projects/a-now-for-menam.

Orkan TelhanOrkan Telhan is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and researcher whose investigations focus on the design of interrogative objects, interfaces, and media, engaging with critical issues in social, cultural, and environmental responsibility. Telhan is Assistant Professor of Fine Arts–Emerging Design Practices at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design. He was part of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Laboratory and the Mobile Experience Lab at the MIT Design Laboratory. Telhan’s individual and collaborative work has been exhibited in venues including the 13th Istanbul Biennial, 1st Istanbul Design Biennial, Ars Electronica, ISEA, LABoral, Archilab, Architectural Association, the Architectural League of New York, MIT Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.

Image credits: Educational Calendar with Time, Page from July 4, 1958: gittigidiyor.com; Almanach du Levant, T. Pavlidis on theopavlidis.com.

A MID SUMMER SOIRÉE by Emily Steinberg

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A MID SUMMER SOIRÉE
A Visual Narrative
by Emily Steinberg
Introduction by Tahneer Oksman

 

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First sort through Emily Steinberg’s A Mid Summer Soirée in quick succession. Then go back and read it slowly. This appealingly energetic set of captioned images is a storyboard of sorts. Each slide displays a beguiling creature or character, and sometimes a pair, pictured just above a crisply worded sentence encased in a neat, if bourgeois, font. We are presented with a simple trajectory: the individuals, spotlighted in medias res, are about to attend, or are attending, a party. These experiences do not clearly build on each other: “He’d been out of circulation a while.” “They argued just before arriving.” “She rooted through her closet and was dismayed.” Trying to fill in the narrative gaps is part of the pleasure of the journey, as is, on the contrary, moving past those gaps in favor of experiencing the piece’s seductive rhythm.

The artworks—some fashioned in delicate colors, some in black-and-white—are offset by clean white backgrounds. Many of the images are clearly collages, intricately inked cut-ups of crossword puzzles, newspaper articles, and cartoons. “I’m interested in the idea of chance, and what happens when you don’t control the situation,” Steinberg explained about the piece’s composition.

Viewing A Mid Summer Soirée, one is cast into a framework in which whimsy and fantasy meet a morning coffee-and-newspaper ritual. To transform daily minutiae into otherworldly events, to dive into the looking glass: therein lies the delight of this piece.

—Tahneer Oksman, June 2015

Emily-SteinbergEmily Steinberg, a painter and graphic novelist, earned her M.F.A. and B.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and has shown her work widely in New York and Philadelphia. Most recently, she exhibited in a solo show at SFA Gallery, Frenchtown, NJ, and at the Woodmere Museum in Philadelphia. Her graphic novel memoir, Graphic Therapy, can be read online at Smith Magazine. Her short comic, Blogging Towards Oblivion, was included in The Moment (Harper/Collins 2012). Her visual narratives Broken Eggs (2014) and The Modernist Cabin (2013) have been published in Cleaver. She currently teaches painting, graphic novel, and the History of Comics at Penn State Abington. She lives in Philadelphia.
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Tahneer Oksman is the Graphic Narrative Reviews Editor for Cleaver Magazine. Her book, “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs, will be published in February 2016 by Columbia University Press. She is Assistant Professor and Director of the Academic Writing Program at Marymount Manhattan College.

Excerpts from BOOK OF NO LEDGE by Nance Van Winckel

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Excerpts from BOOK OF NO LEDGE
by Nance Van Winckel

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The Book of No Ledge

As usual, it starts with love. I had my heart set on the door-to-door encyclopedia salesboy. Maybe eighteen or nineteen, he said he was working his way through college. He winked a turquoise eye at me and asked if I was the “lady of the house.”

Well, I wasn’t. I was thirteen-going-on-seventeen and vaguely trying to flirt. My mother came out on the porch to see who I was talking to, and NO, she said, we don’t need any books. She smiled, though, and wished him luck in school.

I followed him down the walk and told him to come back tomorrow after I’d had a chance to work on my mother. Sure, he shrugged, why not.

I could really use those encyclopedias for my school projects, I told my mother later. And so could Sally (my sister). My dad was suddenly behind it. His family had been a bit more bookish than my mother’s.

When the cute guy returned the next day, he was all business. I watched as he showed my parents the full set. The pages were silky. Thirteen volumes and an Index. As I passed Volume N (with the information about how the nose worked!) back to him, he caught my eye and gave me an appreciative nod. My tween-size heart felt too large for my chest.

Of course once the check was written the boy evaporated back into summer’s humid mist, never to be seen again. But I could walk by and caress the books and in so doing call him again into my mind, which I did for years. For years I dipped into those encyclopedias. The knowledge of the world was inside. I perused. I skimmed.

Much to everyone’s surprise, most of all mine, I did indeed use them. With friendly and helpful manners and the smoothest, most confident voice of The World, an all-knowing authority, almost godlike, stepped forth from the text. Dinosaurs. The sad and short lives of the poets I was just beginning to read. The ALL I needed to know about the states to which my family would move in the coming years: Illinois, Wisconsin, Washington, and the states in which we’d previously lived: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, New York, Connecticut.

Every page offered a surprise! Every page featured Mr. Explainer giving me the lowdown with a winking turquoise eye, a nod, or sometimes a shrug because I was getting older and the books had begun to have a bit of a musty smell and he was beginning to feel unsure I still loved him as I had, especially when I turned into a much older woman and had these nice sharp scissors and even X-Acto blades, and Oh, you’re not sure that the white man helped the tribal people as well as I’ve so carefully outlined? No, dear, the solar flares aren’t scary. Please don’t fret. And please point that glue stick elsewhere. Surely you won’t chop away that whole paragraph about the wonderful westward expansion and put some little poem in its place. A poem is not a fact, dear. Wait! We’ve been together for almost half a century! How could you! You know I loved you first. You know I loved you best!

—Nance Van Winckel, June 2015

nance-vanwinckelNance Van Winckel’s newest books are Ever Yrs., a novel in the form of a scrapbook, and Pacific Walkers, her sixth collection of poems. Book of No Ledge is forthcoming in 2016 from Pleiades Press. The recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner, she has new poems in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Field, Poetry Northwest, and Gettysburg Review. She is on the M.F.A. faculty of Vermont College of Fine Arts. More of her visual photo-collage work may be viewed at: photoemsbynancevanwinckel.zenfolio.com.

Hidden in Plain Sight

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HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT
Instagram Photography
by Tara Stella
Introduction by Raymond Rorke

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A century ago, in 1916, American photographer Paul Strand would attach a false lens on the side of his camera so that he could photograph candid portraits of unsuspecting subjects. Later, in the 1930s, French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson painted his small Leica with dull black paint so that he could unobtrusively capture “the decisive moment.” Before the decade was out, Walker Evans was hiding his camera under his coat, the lens peeking through a buttonhole, to photograph riders on the New York City Subway just as they were.

Today, in this time-honored tradition of street photography, New York photographer Tara Stella takes Instagrams. Her subjects, too, are candid moments, but her camera is a cellphone, hidden in plain sight. And while Evans didn’t publish his collection of subway photos until 1966, Tara’s photos are shared instantly online with a worldwide public.

TrioTara is one of over 300 million active users of Instagram, the popular mobile app that enables cellphone users to grab an image and share it on social media. Since its debut in 2010, over 30 billion photos have been generated by users, ranging from the National Geographic Society to Kim Kardashian. Its distinctive features: a square format; hashtagging and geotagging; and digital darkroom filters for special effects, such as Toasting to age the image or Slumbering for a retro, dreamy look. On an average day Instagram users post 70 million photos and click the “Like” button 2.5 billion times.

UnderneathBut while today’s brand of hi-speed mass photography can compress the distance between photographers, subjects, and viewers into a preemptive blur, these snapshots can also create a curious kind of slowing down, a friendly interruption that taps us on the shoulder and draws us closer. In Tara’s images we see not so much a flash-frozen instant as we do an instant prolonged. There is patience in her gaze, a sense that she pauses, however briefly, to spend time with her subject, finding composure in the moment, coaxing complicity. Hers is an eye that looks, clicks, and connects us with a mind that sees.

boundWhen one of Tara’s daily Instagrams appears on my Facebook feed, I invariably pause in my scrolling to take in the subject and to make sense of the random details collecting around the margins — so many flat pixels, each one democratically lodged next to its neighbor, swept up like trash off the street or stray fragments of ad copy on subway signs. And since each of her tagged photos is connected to sprawling networks of similarly tagged photos posted by fellow Instagrammers, the photo I am looking at becomes a singular data point whose truth and realness register not because it’s arrestingly odd, or insistently memorable, or significantly about “the other,” but precisely because it’s part of a larger collaborative narrative that’s accumulating with countless other authenticities, bit by participatory bit, byte by accessible byte.

focusedThese days, when everyone is distractedly looking down at their cellphones, I am often struck by how people reveal themselves, and how naturally and unguardedly they hold themselves in public. When using the phone, they—we—slip easily in and out of solitudes, gracefully solo and intact. And so there’s a kind of satisfying symmetry in the realization that Tara’s photos are themselves so unselfconscious, natural, and unfiltered—ordinary in gesture, matter-of fact—and that they can give another cellphone user pause.

revealedWe live in a time when it is practically unthinkable to be alone, equipped with devices that ensure that we are not alone or even perceived as loners. Yet Tara’s photos of ordinary non-loners, their public selves caught up in the collective gaze of social media, have a poignancy in their declaration of privacy that speaks to the human condition in ways perhaps more urgently present than earlier pioneers of street photography. And whether she’s geotagged in New York, Bangkok, or Sydney, Tara’s serial extensions of everyday moments allow us to see ourselves enlarged in them, hashtag nofilter, hashtag followme, hashtag reallife.

The result: glints of humanity, hidden in plain sight.

—Raymond Rorke, March 2015

Tara StellaTara Stella is a street photographer living and working in New York City. She grew up in Los Angeles and received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied both photography and ceramics. Today Tara spends most of her time roaming the streets of New York, capturing moments she believes to be beautiful and unique. View more of her online photography, as well as her Instagrams.

 

Raymond-RorkeRaymond Rorke is a ceramic artist whose professional background includes designing museum exhibitions as well as designing and writing for online communications. With the University of Pennsylvania as his alma mater, he has become, over the years, a Philadelphian who has been lucky enough to teach ceramics, be featured on a Mural Arts mural, and co-edit The Painted Bride Quarterly (with Karen!). Raymond’s ceramic work is exhibited locally and nationally, and is part of this year’s NCECA Biennial, an international juried ceramics exhibition. He also recently co-curated “Pervasive Clay,” an exhibition of contemporary ceramic artists at the University of Pennsylvania.

STARING AT THE SEA by Julianna Foster

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STARING AT THE SEA
by Julianna Foster
Digital Photography

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Several years ago I came across a story about a nor’easter that hit a small coastal town.

The morning after the storm, residents of the town reported having seen something they had never experienced before or since—fleeting visions, every one. Strange sightings out at sea, like clouds of smoke rising from the horizon, orbs of light, and unrecognizable objects floating on the water. Yet, as soon as they appeared, they were gone.

But was it ever really there? Or was it simply an illusion? How do you explain the fact that several people reported having seen such different, albeit similar phenomena? I couldn’t get the story out of my head. It stayed with me for days, weeks. My curiosity was piqued.

In the report, one resident tried to explain the peculiarities of what she had seen:

It was early morning, somewhere about 6:30 AM. The brunt of the storm had mostly passed overnight and the weather had calmed. But it was still raining and rather foggy. “You must know, I don’t believe everything I see. And I don’t have problems with my vision—or my mind. I saw what I saw. I can’t explain it, and I don’t need to. Mother Nature works in mysterious ways, and I don’t pretend to know, let alone understand, why things happen the way they do.”

As I read her account, I imagined myself walking on the shore, like her, staring at the sea. There was no separation between the sea and sky; it was all one tone of grey. Then, suddenly, the sea began to swell, and I saw what she saw. This was the moment when the visions formed, constructed and invented—or were they?

My work usually begins in this way, drawn from an existing narrative, story, or text that, for whatever reason, I can’t let go of. The series, Swell, started with that story of the aftermath of a nor’easter, which transformed into a retelling of events as I interpreted them to be. Swell consists of digitally manipulated images—a combination of photographs that I have taken and found. Those that I shot directly are of natural landscapes and architecture as well as hand-made, model-scale, built environments (again, of both architecture and landscape) that are lit, photographed, and digitally manipulated. Through this series, my intention is not to illustrate in a literal sense or to dictate and record the witness version of the experience, but instead to take liberties with a narrative account of an event and reconstruct the outcome, of sorts.

The Images:
1. Swell series, Three Figures I, inkjet print, 46 x 34″, 2014
2. Swell series, Three Figures II, inkjet print, 46 x 34″ 2014
3. Swell series, Iceberg II, inkjet print, 30 x 20″, 2014
4. Swell series, Dark Cloud, inkjet print, 34 x 26″, 2013
5. Swell series, Seascape, inkjet print, 34 x 26″, 2013
6. Swell series, Room I, backlit film, lightbox, 46 x 36”, 2012
7. Swell series, Fireworks, inkjet print, 30 x 20″, 2014
8. Swell series, Moon, newsprint, 30 x 20″, 2014
9. Swell series, Orbs II, backlit film, lightbox, 46 x 34″, 2013

Julianna-FosterJulianna Foster lives in Philadelphia and teaches at The University of the Arts in the Photography Program and MFA Book Arts and Printmaking Department, where she received her MFA in 2006. Foster was an artist member of Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia from 2006-2013, where she had four solo exhibitions—In a Vale, From Morning On, Kirkwood, Swell—and a three-person exhibit titled Relic. In addition to her individual ventures, she has collaborated over the years with various artists on projects that include artist multiples, artist books, and series of photographs and videos. Foster was a 2014 Artist in Residence at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center. She has participated in international group exhibitions in England, Romania, Spain, and, most recently, Korea and Bulgaria, and her work is featured in private collections across the country.

OF PINHOLES & PEEPSHOWS by R.C. Barajas

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OF PINHOLES & PEEPSHOWS
by R.C. Barajas
Pinhole Photography

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You can’t return to the days of Polaroids. Not really.

There are modern approximations—crafty mimicry that recalls the once ubiquitous family camera. I like the app Hipstamatic, a high-end photographic fast food that can reproduce the bygone look of analogue photography with the convenience of a cell phone. Then there are the dogged geniuses of The Impossible Project who recently reinvented the defunct self-developing film. But if you grew up during the days of the first Polaroid cameras, those instant snaps became forever entwined with your childhood. Here’s one of me with our cat, and our mother’s handwriting. Typical in our family, the photo was about the cat, not the child:

Lucy-Can't-Wait
Our parents were unsentimental, and discarded the old camera when something smaller and lighter came along. But during the 1960s, theirs was the J66 Polaroid Land Camera, gargantuan by modern standards, with a 14mm f/19 lens (according to the manuals one can still find online). It was a complicated machine compared to the later iconic Polaroid cameras that spit out one photo at a time. The film came on a roll, and the user had not only to move the film through the pressure rollers to start the process, but also had to wrench the protective paper out of the camera to initiate developing. After counting to ten, you opened the camera back, peeled out the photo, and immediately preserved it with careful, even swipes of the peculiarly aromatic fixer tube that came with each roll of film. It was a ritual I reverently watched my mother perform countless times, in slack-jawed admiration. The photographic options of the J66 were streamlined to near point-and-shoot levels, the assumption being that users didn’t know their way around a camera, and didn’t care to. “Learn to hold the camera steady by pressing it against your face,” the manual suggested helpfully.

On my lap now is a family album dated 1961-1965, containing 3 x 4 inch deckled-edged pictures taken with that Polaroid camera. The instant gratification the camera provided meant that it was used often, recording seemingly mundane moments that would otherwise have been forgotten. I see not only the faces and stuff of our childhoods, but a shocking revelation that the house was once tastefully, even sparsely furnished, showing clean lines long since obscured behind lean-to bookshelves, walls over-populated with pictures, and thickets of knickknacks. Even the oak floors were visible—before the ’70s buried them in wall-to-wall. Many things haven’t budged in all this time. When the everyday is photographed and archived—and then fifty years pass—the frozen scenes acquire a gravitas they lacked at the moment.

The time is nearing, after almost sixty years, when the house will no longer be ours. I find myself compelled to photograph and archive this place that retains so much history, so many pieces of our lives in the very walls and wood. My three siblings and I ran amok here, grew up, moved out and in many times. Our parents grew old here. Grandma died in the cottage behind the house, and Dad in the living room. Our mother is old, so old she wanders in her mind and forgets that her husband died over a year ago. She fears that he won’t fit next to her in the narrow hospital bed that replaced the sagging king-sized one in their room at the top of the stairs. How do I memorialize this house, these people? It is a place where change had happened reluctantly or not at all, and now irrevocable change is looming. For now, at least, some change is held at bay: drink time is still four o’clock, and so it will be until none of us come here anymore.

And so I have taken to photographing in a manner antithetical to the lickety-split days of modern documentation. I am using pinhole cameras that I make myself. The basics of a pinhole camera are simple: There is a container (a box, or can, or other such empty enclosed space). There is a tiny hole to let in light, and something to cover it when you wish to prevent light from entering. Finally, there is the photo-sensitive surface—paper or film—placed inside the container. The Polaroid J66 took snapshots in a fraction of a second. The exposures I make must, by nature of the pinhole’s technology, sometimes take as long as forty-eight hours. Because I am looking back over extended, stretched time, it seems fitting that snapshots should give way to the long, stretched exposures afforded by a pinhole. Time, as we experience it, is fickle. I am slowing things down, and breathing in and out thousands of times as one simple latent image evolves.

I set my cameras around the house, beginning each exposure by peeling off the black tape from the pinhole. A camera watches, unmoving, spying for as long as I allow it. It sees the light and dark and begins to gather the two, pulling them in, creating tonal ranges, drawing the lines and curves of the vista within its angle of view. People can go about their business, might even stop and stare, but they pass too quickly to register. Not even a ghost of them remains—unless it is my mother, who sits in her chair for hours on end these days. Only the still and the illuminated will be laid down on the emulsion.

I do not tidy the clutter of the house or clean off the dust. Beyond clearing a space for the camera, I leave things be. The results show the inherent distortions and sometimes unpredictable occurrences of pinhole photography, a scene strewn with blinding highlights and murky shadows as the sun comes and goes and returns again outside the windows, and the lights of the inside are turned on and off in their normal course. The images are like a day’s worth of security camera footage, condensed into a single frame.

I’ll do this until I can’t anymore: choose a spot, and with a giddy sense of reverence, reveal the pinhole and walk away to go about my business. “Go ahead,” I murmur. “Do your thing.”

The Images:
1. Entryway, silver gelatin print from 5 x 7″ paper negative, 2014
2. Coat Closet, silver gelatin print from 5 x 7″ paper negative, 2014
3. Living Room, silver gelatin print from 5 x 7″ paper negative, 2014
4. Living Room Piano, silver gelatin print from 5 x 7″ paper negative, 2014
5. From the Top of the Stairs, silver gelatin print from 5 x 7″ paper negative, 2014
6. Austen’s Room, silver gelatin print from 5 x 7″ paper negative, 2014
7. Mom’s Side of the Bed, silver gelatin print from 5 x 7″ paper negative, 2014
8. Dad’s Side of the Bed, silver gelatin print from 5 x 7″ paper negative, 2014

R.C.Barajas_Photo
Russell Creger Barajas was born in Stanford, California. She attended college, skipping from UC Berkeley to College of Marin to San Francisco State like a stone across a pond. She eventually garnered a degree in art. For ten years, she worked as a goldsmith. While living in Colombia in the early ’90s, she began writing nonfiction and short stories, and has published in magazines and newspapers on a variety of topics. The uneasy intersection of art and writing is what excites her most. Russell currently lives in Arlington, Virginia, with her husband, three sons, and two or three dogs. Her short story “You Were Going to Tell Me” appears in Cleaver’s Issue No. 2.

INSIDE REX by Mimi Oritsky

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INSIDE REX
by Mimi Oritsky
Oil on Linen

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I was born in a small town sixty miles northwest of Philadelphia, called Reading. It was an industrial city on the Schuylkill River, full of brown-brick factories and heavy gambling with lots of strip joints. It usually appeared dark with silvery smoke in the air.

Fine art and culture were not nearly as popular there as building automobiles, shooting squirrels, and drinking Old Reading Beer. However, the town was surrounded by mountains and farmlands, and this landscape was filled with cornfields, milk cows, and small herds of sheep. It all appeared to me much lighter and more colorful.

Twenty years later the town’s industry stopped, and my personal gaze turned to the river, which had sustained generations of factory workers, in the hope of illustrating their livelihoods.

My mother, Marcia Sarna, went to school in Philadelphia and went on to become an illustrator for Harper’s Bazaar until the end of WWII. My early exposure to art and design was in the home, and also inside the studio of my mother’s sculptor friend. Here we spent time rubbing 100-year-old gravestones with charcoal. This was my first experience with the creative process. As a four-and-a-half-year-old, I was taken by my father on an airplane to his job in New York City. After turning green and throwing up, I was in awe of being above the land—looking down on Berks County, Manayunk, Newark, and eventually the Statue of Liberty. At six I experienced New York City at ground level; everything I saw there remains with me to this day.

My working process involves the quality of airspace and how it can be translated into paint. While drawing the elements from above, I am aware of how we lose eye-level perspective and normal angles. These losses force me to explore space, scale, and time. In moving away from the aerial sense of perspective, but remaining above the view, I watch the air as it is contained within its predefined spatial parameters. When I am moving fast, as on a moving train, the elements seem to have a sense of urgency, a desire to catch up, within the vast stillness of the airspace.

The Inside Rex series of rock and tree debris is inspired by a random and scattered landscape along Rex Avenue, near my neighborhood in Philadelphia. In this sense, I come to terms with my environment to create a space organized by light and a surface marked by the rhythm of moving air.

 

The Images:
#1: Inside Rex #1, 2014, oil on linen, 14 x 14″
#2: Inside Rex #2, 2014, oil on linen, 14 x 14″
#3: Inside Rex #3, 2014, oil on linen, 14 x 14″
#4: Inside Rex #4, 2014, oil on linen, 14 x 14″
#5: Inside Rex #5, 2014, oil on linen, 14 x 14″
#6: Inside Rex #6, 2014, oil on linen, 14 x 14″

Mimi-OritskyMimi Oritsky is an abstract landscape painter residing in Philadelphia, Pa. She entered the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts) in 1968, and transferred to the Maryland Institute, College of Art in 1973 where she earned her BFA degree. In 1976 she entered the Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania, earning her MFA in Painting and Printmaking. Oritsky has travelled the world and has shown extensively in museums and galleries in the United States. Her current work can be viewed at the A.I.R. and the Amos Eno Galleries in Brooklyn, New York, as well as the Chestnut Hill Gallery in Philadelphia.

THIRTEEN MUSINGS AROUND MY CREATIVE PROCESS by Anthony Cuneo

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THIRTEEN MUSINGS AROUND MY CREATIVE PROCESS
by Anthony Cuneo

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I
I’m a big fan of uncertainty. I wish to God that the Nazis had been less certain that Jews were vermin. Not knowing you’re doing it right is a good thing. It makes you stop and think.

II
Finding, not executing; searching, not knowing.

III
I don’t know many artists who talk about their “art;” the preferred term is “work.” I’m guilty of this myself. “Work” demands respect, and suggests what you’re doing is serious. But the truth is, when I paint, I’m playing just as much as I’m working. I’m experimenting. I’m trying this, or that. I’m asking questions. And, a lot of the time, I’m not sure I’ve got the right answers.

IV
So I have mixed feelings about describing what I do as “work.” It (sort of) fits, but it also has a slightly bitter, puritanical aftertaste. There’s an implication that, if it’s not work, it’s a waste of time. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, after all. We need to get over that. Making art is really hard, but it’s also deeply satisfying; I like slopping paint around. It’s the reason I wanted to be an artist as a kid, and I think it’s still a fine reason to paint. Art is one of the most natural things in the world, fundamentally useless, but hugely pleasurable and very important.

V
For myself only, because there are so many different, valid ways to go about making art, I have no interest in expressing a concept I think I already fully understand. If I know the answer, there’s no reason to make art about the question.

VI
Like a chronic, low-level case of malaria, the constant ache of dissatisfaction with the results you get when you paint is part of what keeps you creating. You’re never finished because you’ve never really got it right, or complete. And if you ever did get it right you’d probably stop working. There’s that word again.

VII
“I have to change to stay the same.” —Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning, Woman V, 1952-53

Willem de Kooning, Woman V, 1952-53

VIII
Images carry meaning. It’s probably impossible to convey that meaning in words. If it weren’t, painters would be poets, and use language instead of images. But there is a part of our brain that looks for patterns, sees structures, and judges relationships; that is attuned to the textures of the physical world; and that resonates to the language of the visual. When you draw something, a large part of the struggle is just in trying to comprehend exactly what it is you’re seeing. You have to get it into your head before you can get it onto paper. And I’d say that, if you can’t draw a thing then you don’t really understand it.

IX
There’s a page from one of Leonardo’s sketchbooks that shows a fetus in a womb. It’s an image I think about a lot. The hunger for understanding is palpable, and the page is beautifully rendered. Even the letters sing. But there’s something awesome (in the old sense of the word) and a little awful about the page, as well: truth and beauty, in complex, charged tension. Does the very truthfulness of something, no matter how distasteful it seems, make it beautiful? Can something be truly beautiful if it’s false?

Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of the foetus in the womb, c. 1510-13

X
I don’t know if the universe is fundamentally ordered or random, but, standing in front of an Italian Renaissance crucifixion (which is, let’s remember, an image about torture and brutal execution), with its balanced and orderly composition, its clear and lucid colors, and its beautifully idealized human forms, I can test the proposition that there is structure to existence. I can try how that idea tastes. I can roll it around in my mind. I can test it against my own experience. Sometimes, when I paint, I feel like I’m trying out different propositions about the nature of reality, or, at least, my experience of it.

XI
Used to be, I was sure that rationality was the path to truth. I still think it’s of fundamental importance (yeah, evolution is established science, and believing doesn’t make something true, no matter how much you want it). But life has surprised me, repeatedly, with the surprising insight that emotion can be just as critical in finding truth. In fact, I doubt now that we can know the most important truths about ourselves without it.

XII
An art that only wants to be about what’s pretty (not even beautiful) is thin soup. What is the point of art if it can’t help us deal with loss and grief, with anger, or with mystery?

XIII
Have you ever noticed how maxims seem to contradict each other? If “a stitch in time saves nine” how can it also be that “haste makes waste”? Try playing this game: think of an old saw; then try to think of another one that, basically, says exactly the opposite. In nearly every case there’s a matched saying, a black for a white, a fast for a slow. Why is that? I think it might be that, even though there is probably an ultimate truth out there somewhere, we just don’t have the perspective to get it. We’re like the blind men encountering an elephant for the first time, and, feeling different parts of the animal, conclude that an elephant is like a snake, or a tree, or a sword. Understood another way, there’s wisdom in the idea that for every thing, there is a season: a time to sow, a time to reap. That complex, charged tension between apparent opposites—chaos and order, emotion and intellect, creation and decay, high and low—is the text of my current painting; also, how the impulse for beauty wrestles with the desire for truth.
blackbird (1)

Anthony-Cuneo

Anthony Cuneo was born in Chicago, and grew up there, and in the New York area. He received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1981, and has an extensive exhibition record. He taught at both the collegiate and secondary levels, serving as Department Chair at Montclair Kimberley Academy for many years. He was a finalist for the Princeton University Excellence in Secondary Teaching award in 2002. He was represented by Amos Eno Gallery in Brooklyn, one of the oldest non-profit art spaces in New York City, where he also served on the Board of Trustees. Tony, as he was known to all, died on August 5, 2019. See more of his work at www.anthonycuneo.com.

 

The Paintings:
1. Unwanted Literature, #14, oil and alkyd on archival panel, 12″ x 12″, 2010
2. Fresh Stuff, #2, oil and alkyd on archival panel, 12″ x 12″, 2011
3. Fresh Stuff, #3, oil and alkyd on archival panel, 12″ x 12″, 2011
4. Fresh Stuff, #4, oil and alkyd on archival panel, 12″ x 12″, 2011
5. Fresh Stuff, #5, oil and alkyd on archival panel, 12″ x 12″, 2012
6. A Drawing a Day, #42, marker, gouache, oil pastel, colored pencil, and graphite on paper, 4″ x 8″, 2014

All works © Anthony Cuneo

Other image credits: Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of a Foetus in the Womb, c. 1510-13 and Willem de Kooning, Woman V, 1952-53, on Wikipedia. Blackbird courtesy of Open Clipart Library.

BROKEN EGGS by Emily Steinberg

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BROKEN EGGS 
A Visual Narrative
by Emily Steinberg
Introduction by Tahneer Oksman

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To read Emily Steinberg’s autobiographical visual narrative, Broken Eggs, a set of sixty-seven images accompanied by sprawling text and recounting her struggles with infertility, is to witness a series of concurrent, sometimes even conflicting, emotional transformations. From the first, our narrator appears engaging, intimate, and raw. She sits on the ground, her hands wrapped around her knees and her brow furrowed, delivering a back-story for the whirlwind series of events that follows. [Image #1]  She spent her twenties as an artist [Image #3] and her thirties unsuccessfully looking for love, while other life events—depression, anxiety, her mother’s dementia— got in the way as well. [Image #4]  This is how she finds herself “on the cusp of forty,” [Image #5] just married, trying to have a baby, and suddenly encountering the possibility that what seemed like such an inevitable life course might no longer be a possibility.

Steinberg’s narrator figures prominently throughout almost all of the pages, but particular visual details often shift. In one image, depicting herself undergoing interuterine insemination, her midriff and thighs widen, as though her body is stretching itself to accommodate this  new surreality. [Image #23]  In another image, she draws herself shrinking as she transforms into a rodent: “I became a fertility guinea pig,” [Image #17] the text reads, and the last two words are repeated, like a directionless  echo, in thin capital letters. These serial, shuffling portrayals are at times accompanied by smudges of color: some mark a short-lived, fiery optimism, while others more ominously seem to cage the narrator in the space of her recollections. Over the course of what seems like an otherwise straightforward, self-explanatory narrative—the text is colloquial and confessional, sprinkled with expletives and interjections—we sink into the story. The sequence of events might sound somewhat familiar—expensive drugs, repeated trips to the doctor’s office, probes, statistics, frowning attendants [Image #37]—but the individual depicted on these pages is dynamic, a substantial and vigorous presence. [Image #46]  Her experience touches us, even transforms us, as we witness her unraveling.

While authentic portrayals of the daily ins and outs of motherhood (from the mother’s point of view) in comics are still somewhat rare—Nicole Chaison’s The Passion of the Hausfrau springs to mind, as do Lauren Weinstein’s online comics and some of Aline Kominsky Crumb’s works—it seems even harder to find honest depictions related to motherhood and loss. Phoebe Potts’s graphic memoir, Good Eggs, addresses, like Steinberg’s, the painful experience of infertility, and Diane Noomin has drawn about her struggles with miscarriages. Nicola Streeten’s Billy, Me & You recounts the death of the author’s two year old son, Billy, and her subsequent attempts to cope with the unimaginable loss. These texts are brave and powerful, in terms of their searing honesty and the way each explores the graphic aesthetic somewhat differently in order to best tell the story. But they are also significant because they actively, and graphically, dispute a culture that favors only particular kinds of depictions—of the satisfaction and ease of family life, of fertility, of positivity in the face of grief and loss, of closure. As Steinberg’s narrative ends, we know the fragile shell of hopefulness and inexperience has been irreparably broken, replaced permanently by a gaping, if artful, exposure.

—Tahneer Oksman, September 2014

 

Emily-SteinbergEmily Steinberg, a painter and graphic novelist, earned her BFA and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and has shown her work widely in New York and Philadelphia. Most recently, she has shown work at SFA Gallery, Frenchtown, NJ and at The Woodmere Museum of Art in Philadelphia. Her graphic novel memoir, Graphic Therapy, can be read online at Smith Magazine. Her short comic, Blogging Towards Oblivion, was included in The Moment (Harper/Collins, 2012). Her illustrated story The Modernist Cabin was published in Cleaver in June 2013. She currently teaches painting, graphic novel, and the History of Comics at Penn State Abington. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, photographer Paul Rider, and her puppy, Gus.

oksman image

Tahneer Oksman is the Graphic Narrative Reviews Editor for Cleaver Magazine. Her book on Jewish identity in contemporary women’s graphic memoirs is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. She is Assistant Professor and Director of the Academic Writing Program at Marymount Manhattan College.

CATS by Alli Katz

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CATS 
by Alli Katz

“If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.” —Mark Twain

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Mark Twain never met my cat.

Five seconds with Albany, watching him throw his body against our kitchen cabinets early in the morning (and again in the afternoon, and at bedtime) for six ounces of “classic beef” or a scoop of prescription urinary health dry food, or watching him raise his leg to lick his crotch and then forget what he’s doing, or him leaping on a tiny table that would never support his girth to try to press his face into a cactus, is easily enough to dispel the idea that a cat has any kind of dignity at all.

And it’s not just Albany. You can watch my friend’s cat Walker slide across a wood floor to play fetch with tiny foam balls, or my mom’s cats Egon and Janine spoon, pressing their back paws awkwardly into each other’s face. My childhood cats, Strip-ed Tiger and Super, would attack our toes under our blankets as we tried to sleep. Even my dad’s dearly departed Jessica Rabbit the Cat, the most aloof of felines, would drool in his mouth to wake him up in the morning.

A quick Google search would do it, too (if only Twain had been able to Google): Tumblrs dedicated to embarrassing cat behavior, and hundreds of YouTube videos of cats falling—off perches, during poorly-timed leaps, and into the toilets that they, like dogs, drink from.

The idea that cats have dignity is a lie we tell ourselves to explain why our cats don’t bother to lift their heads when we walk into a room. It’s what we say when we’re feeling down and call our kittens, only to have them slink past us on the way to the litter box.

I love my cat Albany despite his distance—just as I’ve loved my cats before him: Egg, Kitty, and the aforementioned toe-destroyers Super and Strip-ed Tiger. Loving cats is an exercise in human devotion. Cat, we love you, and we love you even if you are an asshole. Even if cats are opportunistic, emotional manipulators who make sure we feed them every day, yet would eat our corpses if we had the misfortune of dying in their presence, cats are our test of unconditional love.

Throughout the winter and spring of last year, I painted cats. I requested photos—most cat owners have a million—and whipped out watercolors to capture the cats as their cat parents see them. It was partly a selfish study. Cats come in a million colors and shapes, so painting them makes for an excellent daily exercise.

But I also just wanted to celebrate the particular weirdness of the cats—and the love of their owners.

Alli-KatzAlli Katz is an artist, Etch A Sketcher, cartoonist, and a channeler of Ernest Hemingway. A graduate of Oberlin College, she now lives in Philadelphia, and has written for Philadelphia City Paper, The Observer, and Grid Magazine. She’s the Program Coordinator at Kelly Writers House, and posts comics and drawings at lookhowhappyiam.com. Alli is working on her fourth first novel.

 

 

The Paintings:
1. Rufus, gouache, colored pencil, and ink on paper, 6″ x 6″, 2014
2. Rosie & Oink, gouache, colored pencil, and ink on paper, 6″ x 6″, 2014
3. James & Elvin, gouache, colored pencil, and ink on paper, 6″ x 6″, 2014
4. Lola Mae, gouache, colored pencil, and ink on paper, 6″ x 6″, 2014
5. Riley, gouache, colored pencil, and ink on paper, 6″ x 6″, 2014
6. Olivia, gouache, colored pencil, and ink on paper, 6″ x 6″, 2014
7. Walker, gouache, colored pencil, and ink on paper, 6″ x 6″, 2014
8. Wild Bill, gouache, colored pencil, and ink on paper, 6″ x 6″, 2014
9. Bearmonkey, gouache, colored pencil, and ink on paper, 6″ x 6″, 2014
10. Cobra Commander, gouache, colored pencil, and ink on paper, 6″ x 6″, 2014

All works © Alli Katz

NOTICING WATER by Nancy Agati

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NOTICING WATER
by Nancy Agati
Public Art

agati_why-waterAs you travel along the river—any river, stream, creek or body of water—what do you notice? Do you see the changing currents, the light that bounces and travels from wave to wave? Do you feel the rush of water at a rock’s edge? Can you hear water lapping at the shore? Do you sense the flow that ceases to part as it travels?

I believe that there are times when one becomes acutely aware of the act of perceiving. There are moments when a heightened sense of awareness highlights things that might otherwise go unnoticed. Trying to accurately describe this sensation, this shift in perception, is difficult. There is a certain silence in the experience, it overcomes you and narrows your focus. Like a camera the eye zooms in, crops, and brings into view specific visual aspects of life. Objects in nature can take on a presence and that presence for a short period of time heightens all the senses. I wonder if this happens to everyone, or if it is a gift or curse for the artist? When I begin to experience this shift in perception (and the moments are fleeting), I want to share the vision. These are the times when I notice what I am noticing.

My work often focuses on the things that I presume go unnoticed in the world: the tiny veins of a decaying leaf, the pattern of light bouncing off a flowing stream, the millions of cracks and slivers in a broken piece of glass. In the process of making, I attempt to expose and redefine those unnoticed fragments from life.

The movement of water has been a recurring subject in my work for quite some time. It began as an exploration of light, depth, color, and translucency. The initial works investigating water consisted of a series of small paintings on Mylar. The smooth material allowed me to manipulate the manner in which the watery pigments flowed across the surface. These three paintings, entitled Arroyo Hondo, are part of an extended group of images that focused on the depth and flow of water along the Wissahickon Creek in Philadelphia.

agati_arroyo-hondo1-2-3

Click to see “Arroyo Honda” in larger resolution.

I soon realized that my attention to a form of visual awareness, along with a fascination with water, tended to be revealed through light. My interests quickly shifted from making intimate paintings to building sculpture and site-specific installation projects that could engage the viewer in a more physical manner. I first had an opportunity to create a large-scale public art piece in 2005 at THE LAND/an art site in Mountainair, New Mexico. This work, entitled Fluir, meaning “to flow,” was based on wind and water patterns from the area. Fluir consisted of four silk panels, two of which had patterns of wind and water movement burned into the silk with incense sticks.

hands

When sunlight shone through the patterned panels, the light streaming through the burned holes created a mirrored pattern on the solid silk sheets. The patterns shifted and appeared to flow throughout the day due to the angle of the light and the direction of the wind.

"Fluir", 2005

“Fluir,” 2005

I am interested in the way in which the process and concept of one work can inform and lead to another. The repetition of mark making based on the wind and water patterns for Fluir led to observations of visual similarities or analogies of pattern. As I continued to pay attention to the patterned flow of water and its interactions with light, I began to take note of analogous patterns found in nature.

"Trees are Like Water", 2007

“Trees are Like Water,” 2007

One such visual analogy was that of growth patterns of tress to the flow and movement of water. From this interest arose a piece entitled Trees are Like Water, a photo light box made in 2007. The images were shot along a stand of maple trees in the spring. On this particular morning the sunlight cast deep camouflage shadows of the leaves across the trunks of the trees and in circular patterns along the ground. The framed image is a photographic diptych of the same tree and its surroundings from two separate vantage points.

"Trees are Like Water", 2007, viewer and detail

“Trees are Like Water,” 2007, viewer and detail

The diffusion glass, held by a movable arm, is situated in front of the image for viewing sections of the photograph. The viewer is invited to grasp the scope and readjust it to observe portions of the image. The glass scope defines the vantage point for viewing and engaging with the work. Although it appears as a focusing device, its wavy, diffused texture is actually intended to further break up and distort the image while offering the illusion of movement. Color and light revealed through the glass mirrors the phenomenon of light reflecting along the surface of water or the reflection of trees upon a flowing stream. By observing the blue-green photograph through the scope the viewer sees an image which suggests the existence of a visual analogy between forms of water and other natural elements, such as trees.

It is in the juncture between active seeing or perceiving, and the unconscious or passive glance, that I want my artwork to exist. Several recent public art projects have offered me an opportunity to continue to explore the act of seeing and perception. The project that I undertook for Art in the Open Philadelphia, in 2010, emphasized the manner in which we see, recognize, and identify visual input. It was designed to directly engage the viewer, and the format invited participants into an intimate experience of meditating on a small, defined section of the Schuylkill River. For this project, River Meditation, a simple viewing device was constructed to isolate a segment of the Schuylkill River. Audience members listened to a guided meditation and instrumental music that muffled nearby highway noise, while gazing through the viewfinder directed at the water. The concept was to create a singular area of focus in order to draw attention to the intricacies and beauty of flowing water.

"River Meditation", 2010

“River Meditation,” 2010

The intention was to offer the work as a means for reflection and to allow the viewer to take note of something that may have gone unnoticed. The viewing area was purposely quite small, blocking out the river surroundings in order to direct the gaze. This vantage point accentuated the pattern of movement, the flow of currents, and the effect of light on the water. Surprisingly, many participants noted experiencing an abstraction of the scene that consequently altered their perception of the water.

"River Meditation", viewer's vantage

“River Meditation,” viewer’s vantage

"River Meditation" viewer

“River Meditation,” viewer

Churn Ripple Flow was proposed and executed for Philadelphia’s 2014 Art in the Open event. Again, it was the movement and flow patterns of the Schuylkill River that led the way for this public participation project. To begin the process, photographs were taken from different viewpoints along the river from The Waterworks to Locust Street. From these photos, drawings were made on six-foot lengths of pine boards. The patterns on each board were then edged with a router in the studio. There were three 18-foot triptychs, each representing a different flow pattern: the churning water from over the falls, ripples from wind across the water’s surface, and the gentle flowing water between Chestnut and Locust Streets.

“Churn Ripple Flow”, Art in the Open Philadelphia, 2014

“Churn Ripple Flow,” Art in the Open Philadelphia, 2014

During the three-day outdoor event, the public was invited to assist with carving the negative spaces of the patterned boards in order to create a series of large-scale engraved wood blocks. Over 100 participants, adults and teens, took part and lent a hand to carve the patterns. Most people worked for 15-20 minutes at a time, several stayed and worked for more than an hour. One woman, Yuvette, worked on a panel for over two hours, then returned the following day to help complete the piece. The objective of Churn Ripple Flow was for the public to intently observe the patterns, reflections, and currents on the water’s surface as they learned simple carving techniques along the river’s edge. Jody Walker, one of the first contributors, stated that “it felt like you were on the water, because your hands were moving with the pattern and in the direction of the water.” Karen Young, director of Fairmount Waterworks Interpretive Center, described the process as “very relaxing, meditative, and mindful.”

“Churn Ripple Flow”, Art in the Open Philadelphia, 2014

“Churn Ripple Flow,” Art in the Open Philadelphia, 2014, first day

The positive effects of the carving process were a welcome benefit, and somewhat of a surprise, for many who expressed enjoying the focused nature of the task, the peaceful sounds of mallets and chisels, and the act of slowing down—taking time to create.

“Churn Ripple Flow”, Art in the Open Philadelphia, 2014

Public art projects offer an opportunity to work in an alternative manner, engaging the viewer and creating alongside them. I am interested in continuing to design audience participatory works that present the concepts by which we see, perceive, notice, and experience our surroundings.

agati_carvehands1

The meditative quality of the art making process and the act of seeing are areas for in-depth investigations within my work. I anticipate that the flow of water will return and ripple through my mind’s eye, as I attempt to remain aware and develop works from that which I notice.

Nancy AgatiNancy Agati’s work addresses transformations in nature, and often speaks of time elements through physical investigations of materials. She has exhibited her work throughout Philadelphia and nationally, with solo exhibitions at Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia; Hillyer Art Space, Washington, DC; Whitaker Center for Science and the Arts, Harrisburg; The Crane Arts Building, Philadelphia; Abington Art Center, Jenkintown, PA; ARC Gallery and Educational Foundation, Chicago; and others. She holds a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Alfred University and an MFA from The University of the Arts. In 2012, she worked as an artist-in-residence at Lo Studio dei Nipoti in Calabria, Italy. Recently awarded a Tending Space Fellowship from the Hemera Foundation, Nancy has been investigating the intersection of mindfulness and meditation as it relates to the art making process. For more information visit her website: www.nancyagati.com.

All works © Nancy Agati

Works Discussed:
1. Arroyo Hondo 1-2-3, mixed media on mylar, mounted to acrylic panel, 2″ x 10″, 2004
2. Fluir, polyester/silk organza with burned markings tracking wind and water patterns, four 5′ x 10′ fabric panels, 2005
3. Trees Are Like Water, digital photograph, light box, steel articulated arm, diffusion glass, 57″ x 18″ x 4″, 2007
4. River Meditation, canvas viewfinder isolating a section of flowing river water, audio podcast with guided meditation, 2010
5. Churn Ripple Flow, nine 6′ x 17″ carved pine panels, 2014

THE TIMES, THEY WERE A-CHANGIN’ Photography in West Philadelphia by Stephen Perloff

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THE TIMES, THEY WERE A-CHANGIN’
West Philly Days: A Photo Essay
by Stephen Perloff

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When I arrived at the University of Pennsylvania as a freshman in 1966, men were required to wear jackets and neckties to dinner—and most of us wore jackets and ties to football games. The men’s dorms in The Quad were several blocks from the women’s dorms at Hill House, and you couldn’t have a woman in your room past 10 p.m., and maybe a little later on the weekend.

But there were confounding juxtapositions and experiences. Who was that strange guy with the huge head of curly hair and the button that said “Frodo Lives”? What did that mean? (Most people now don’t know that The Lord of the Rings trilogy started to become a popular phenomenon in the U. S. in the mid-1960s.)

And then there was the war in Vietnam. Back home it was hardly a topic of conversation—and, even if it were, who wouldn’t want us to fight the evil Communists? They might as well have been alien invaders as depicted in many sci-fi movies at the time. Who knew that Ho Chi Minh had once been staunchly pro-American and that the U. S. government had subverted the free and fair elections we promised the Vietnamese? Well, a lot of us soon did. Plus, far too many young American soldiers were being killed. And that could one day be us unless we resisted or went to Canada.

While the civil rights struggle had made some progress—the Voting Rights Act had just been passed in 1965—it was far from over. There had been few blacks where I grew up in Kingston, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Wilkes Barre, but as a Jew who as a child had witnessed pogroms in Russia, my father instilled in us a tolerance toward all people, especially those struggling for their own rights and for equality for themselves.

Coming to Philadelphia and Penn, I interacted with African Americans on all levels, from workers to professionals, from neighbors to students I taught as a substitute teacher in junior high and elementary schools in West Philadelphia in the fall of 1970. It seemed natural to bring a camera to school and make portraits during recess. The students were proud to pose. (But I can’t imagine it would be allowed today.) At the time, in the spirit of the era, we all seemed to be just people, with a common bond being that we all believed in fighting oppression. And there was still plenty of that in Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia.

When I first came to Penn, there were no photography classes. A year or two later I saw a sign for a photographer advertising a private class at his apartment in nearby Powelton Village where he would teach developing and printing. I signed up and took my first class with Michael A. Smith. Later, when I was in graduate school at Penn, I took Michael’s advanced critique class that met at his farm in Stockton, New Jersey. That was all the formal training I had.

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As with many young photographers starting out, my vision was a bit scattershot. As my vision matured I tended to look for longer-term projects and most of those “in between” images were never printed. But as many somewhat older photographers do, I have been reconsidering my archive and have discovered that many of these early images do tell a story, particularly in the ’60s and ’70s as the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the sexual revolution, and especially the antiwar movement, radically changed American society—and as photography was beginning to be considered more widely as a fine art.

By the fall of 1967 jackets and ties were out, jeans and T-shirts were in. We still went to the football games at Penn but you were more likely to smell marijuana in the stands than to see someone with a flask. Men burned their draft cards and women burned their bras—well, some did. We sat in at College Hall and marched a million strong on Washington to protest the war in Vietnam.

These images made in West Philadelphia capture a bit of what life was like at Penn in those years and portray some of the extraordinary people, young and old, in what has been since that time a diverse and racially integrated neighborhood. While not without its problems, West Philadelphia most often shows the best of how we can live together.

stephen-perloffStephen Perloff is a photographer, curator, and the founder and editor of The Photo Review, a critical journal of international scope publishing since 1976. He is also the editor of The Photograph Collector, the leading source of information on the photography art market. Perloff has taught photography and the history of photography at numerous Philadelphia-area colleges and universities and his photographs are in numerous public and private collections. He received the Colin Ford Award for Curatorship from the Royal Photographic Society in 2012. You can view more photos at his website, www.perloffphoto.com.

Author photo: Judith Harold-Steinhauser 

The Photographs:

Horizontal:
1. The Quad at Night, Snowfall, University of Pennsylvania Dorms, Philadelphia, winter 1967, archival pigment print, 12″ x 18″ 
2. Charles Frank, the Doggie Man, at Work at the Palestra, Philadelphia, January 1970, archival pigment print, 12″ x 18″ 
3. Jim Wolf Jumps Center against Julius Irving and the University of Massachusetts, January 17, 1970, at the Palestra. (Penn won 75-65. Penn players Bob Morse, Dave Wohl, and Corky Calhoun, left to right), archival pigment print, 12″ x 18″ 
4. Schoolboy, Philadelphia, fall 1970, archival pigment print, 12″ x 18″
5. 5000 Block Baltimore Avenue, Philadelphia, spring 1971, archival pigment print, 12″ x 18″
6. Young Boy, Philadelphia, spring 1971, archival pigment print, 12″ x 18″
7. Four Plus One, Philadelphia, spring 1971, archival pigment print, 12″ x 18″
8. Tailor, Philadelphia, spring 1971, archival pigment print, 12″ x 18″
9. Peachy, Who Sold Newspapers from His Wooden Kiosk, 36th and Market Streets, Philadelphia, October 1973, archival pigment print, 12″ x 18″
10. Penn Football Team during Warmup, Franklin Field, Philadelphia, November 1973
11. The Gaze, Philadelphia, November 1973, archival pigment print, 12″ x 18″
12. Class of 1900, Penn Alumni Day, Philadelphia, May 17, 1985, archival pigment print, 12″ x 18″

Vertical:
1. Anti-War Teach-in, the Palestra, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, October 1969, archival pigment print, 18″ x 12″
2. Two Schoolgirls, Philadelphia, 1970, 18″ x 12″
3. C, Philadelphia, November 1973, 18″ x 12″
4. Louis Kahn, Philadelphia, February 1974, 18″ x 12″
5. Red Cap, 30th Street Station, Philadelphia, November 24, 1975, 18″ x 12″
6. Glen Torraine Family, our next door neighbors in Powelton Village, on their way to the Easter Parade, Philadelphia, April 18, 1976, 18″ x 12″

Stephen Perloff’s exhibit “West Philly Days” is on view at The Gold Standard Café, 4800 Baltimore Avenue, Philadelphia, September 8–October 29, 2014.

All works © Stephen Perloff

ON SNAPSHOTS by Jay Pastelak

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ON SNAPSHOTS
by Jay Pastelak

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
—Susan Sontag

On Easter Sundays, when we were kids, after mass and before we changed from our Easter clothes, our mother would parade my sisters and me out to the yard and pose us before the forsythia for a photo. Sorry—for a picture. We knew those things that came from a camera were photographs but we called them pictures because, well, that’s what they were: pictures of us.

Later, I’d come to call them snapshots, these little segments of our life, but at the time they were just pictures. They were important to us, but they weren’t photographs. Photographs depicted bigger, important events: the school photographer made photographs because he had those lights and the camera wasn’t hanging around his neck; it wasn’t even in his hand but mounted on what I came to understand was a tripod. That was serious. That was photography. At home, we took pictures.

Everyone takes pictures. My mother-in-law had boxes of pictures from years before, some going back to her early 20th-century girlhood, some older than she. She knew who was who, what was going on, and the minutiae of the relationships between those depicted in the pictures. No visit was complete without a review of the photos, an oral history of my wife’s family back two generations.

Years later, as she was packing to enter assisted living, I acquired a shoebox of pictures no one else wanted: pictures in which no one could name the subject or the event or some combination of important information on the who-what-where continuum. I took them because I like looking at snapshots and I thought I could work a presentation about different photographic visions from the contents of the box, considering myself clever to use family snapshots for the visuals. But when it came time to organize the presentation, I found I couldn’t do what I’d so smugly assumed that I could because the box really only contained one kind of vision. Sure, there was a variety of pictures, and a variety of views, but they were really all the same picture: a person, usually fully contained in the frame, sometimes indoors, sometimes out, sometimes beside a car or in front of a house or by a Christmas tree. Despite the pictures’ various trappings, each was the same: a person modified by an event or an object.

In grad school, I learned about the “Snapshot Aesthet-ic,” pictures in which heads are deliberately cut off and horizons purposefully tilted in an attempt to utilize the “flaws” of snapshot photography, creating an intentionally random kind of photographic vision. Such pictures are formal and completely self-conscious. But the snapshots in my shoebox were informal and completely unconscious. The makers of the photos in my box weren’t concerned with the formal qualities of photography; they were concerned with making sure the person or thing being recorded was safely contained within the picture. My mother would look at her envelope of pictures when they came back from wherever they were “developed” and chide my father if he had accidentally cut off the top of someone’s head or not centered his subject. (He never could seem to get it right.) The random, off-key photos made by people like Mark Cohen would have been completely unacceptable to Mom’s aesthetic. It wasn’t important that the faces were too magenta or the grain from her disc camera partially obliterated details, as long as she could identify the person and the person was wholly in the frame. Despite the conceits of art photography, snapshots are often carefully composed, such as they are.

Other photographs are primarily about observing, about looking at things. And outsiders looking in at something make them. Snapshots, on the other hand, are made by someone on the inside, a participant looking at things without observing them. In a snapshot, there is no objectivity, only partisanship. If photographs act as a fetish for the memory, then snapshots are the ultimate fetish objects. They’re about recording Uncle Henry, not for the purpose of observing how Uncle Henry carries himself or looks when he’s distracted, but because he’s Uncle Henry and we have to remember what he looks like. And hopefully he’s smiling because we want to recall Uncle Henry as a pleasant, even jocular fellow. Even if Uncle Henry rarely smiles, he smiles for the camera.

We’re supposed to like Uncle Henry, so to photograph him in what appears to be a compromising position would be an affront to Uncle Henry. Call it naiveté or fear of upsetting social norms; snapshots have a language based in something other than detached observation. Makers of snapshots, and there are probably billions, don’t care about observation or the objective “photographic truth” of the kind that seems to populate the world of photographic art.

Snapshots can be utterly charming; the best can border on real observation. And yet, I suspect it’s some viewer other than the maker who applies that observation. I culled the most interesting, the most “aesthetic,” the best, if you will, from the box I received from my mother-in-law, but I doubt she would approve of my choices. Mom-in-law cared that “This is Hazel.” As for me, I care mostly about the organization of elements within the frame and that strange sense of dislocation that comes from not really knowing who is who or what, actually, is going on. It’s not that I don’t care the subject is Hazel; I just care less than Mom.

Except, I care when they’re mine.

There are three photos hanging above my desk right now: a portrait of my wife wearing a blindfold prior to taking a whack at a piñata and two Polaroids of my friend Roy, taken in the 1970s. In one, Roy sits in a chair smoking a cigar, holding a Styrofoam cup of beer. Behind him is a pumpkin on a windowsill that appears balanced on his left shoulder. In the other photo, he’s wearing opaque, protective goggles that went with a sun lamp. On the bottom of the photo I wrote, “Roy in the best of all possible worlds.”

The picture of my wife is more serious, a 10 x 10 black-and-white print. But the photos of Roy are SX-70s, taken at parties, no doubt, when we were both a lot younger. They have timelessness for me; when I look at them not only do I recall Roy, I return to that time and all that went with it. And that, I suppose, is the ultimate magic of the snapshot: a way to keep time at bay at least for a little while, a way to hold on. Because photography is not only about looking and remembering but it’s also about proof, and about eternity: I stood in front of that forsythia, I was there at that party, I was. Here are the pictures that prove: I was.

◊

The Images:

  1. My sister Kay and Cathy Christman, c. 1969.
  2. Boys on a street in probably Pottstown, no date.
  3. Christmas tree at my Babba’s house, Pottstown, 1950s.
  4. My father dressed as a knight, Pottstown, late 1940s.
  5. Combat “play” in Korea, c. 1950.
  6. My uncle Joe Pinder fishing in the Poconos, c. 1955.
  7. My sister Kay in front of the unbloomed forsythia, c. 1966.
  8. My parents and me, Millersville, PA, c. 1955.
  9. My cousin Karen, Aunt Dorothy, sister Janee, my mother, Promised Land Lake, c. 1966.
  10. Unknown disaster, no date.
  11. Girl in Sand, SX-70, no date.
  12. Roy With Cigar, SX-70, 1970s.
  13. Roy in the Best of All Possible Worlds, SX-70, 1981.

Jay-PastelakJay Pastelak has been making pictures most of his life. He began painting at the age of eight, and received his BFA in painting from Kutztown University and his MFA in photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology. He currently teaches digital photography at The Art Institute of Philadelphia. Jay makes art photographs and resides in suburban Philadelphia with his family.

 

 

PORTRAITS OF FRIENDSHIP Oil on Canvas by Ilana Ellis

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PORTRAITS OF FRIENDSHIP
Oil on Canvas
by Ilana Ellis

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These past few years, my work has been fueled by two passions that tugged me between them. The first is that I want to be a painter of great skill. And the greatest skill takes years of continuous training and practice, which I still need. The second is that I want to paint life. I want my works to be so real they almost breathe, and so fluid they seem caught in motion. So when I focus on the ongoing problem of increasing my skill, I often have technical realizations that allow me to see the world as if I have never seen it before. After a few days of being stunned by the overwhelming beauty of everything, I am desperate to capture what I see in paint. Which leads me right back where I started, because inevitably there is something wonderful about the physical world that I don’t yet have the skill to reproduce.

This cycle is what led me to produce my most recent body of work. In these past few months, I painted a series of three portraits: a self-portrait accompanied by portraits of two of my close friends. These paintings are very personal, because they commemorate two important relationships from this phase of my life. And what better way to capture life than to capture my current friendships? I got to honor my friends and express everything that made me care about them while at the same time honing my skills in one of the most exacting and traditional forms of art out there. I love portraits, because I love faces. The human face is unique in its ability to reveal so much while concealing almost everything concrete.

Portraits are very much collaborations between the painter and the sitter, and with these pieces much of the structural decisions were spontaneous. I painted the clothes they happened to be wearing, because people’s daily presentations reveals so much about them. I painted their hair as they wore it. In the painting of my friend Myya, this meant I had to change her hairstyle halfway through the piece. Myya has an eclectic sense of fashion and is always changing her hair. In this case, she left for spring break with caramel extensions and came back with her hair natural. So I altered the painting to match.

I try to strike a balance between the structured and the spontaneous with my work. I am very aware of structure and think it’s hands down the most important element of art—more than idea, more than technique. This is because structure provides a body to house the soul or spirit of the piece. But structure that is too composed often houses dead art, I feel. So I have been training my eye to pick out patterns and shapes from real life that are strong enough to support a piece, so when the time comes to plan a composition for a painting I can trust my instinct and not overthink it. With these pieces I put my friends through a variety of poses until I found ones I liked. When people sit for the first time they are often shy, and this makes their poses stiff and unnatural, something I try to avoid. Once I have the right pose I let my friends talk to me while I work, even if this means they move around a bit, because I want them to be alive in my paintings.

These pieces are studies of reality as much as they are my way of capturing people I care about so that I will always have record of who they are at this moment. For this same reason I am drawn to self-portraiture—you never fully see your immediate self, at least not as clearly as you can see the person you were a year or more ago. Self-portraiture is my attempt to preserve that immediate self. Change is constant, but the present is beautiful and is worth honoring. As I continue to grow and study, I hope I will be able to render life’s beauties and complexities in paint.

  ◊

The Paintings:

  1. Self-Portrait in Profile, Oil on Canvas, 16 x 20, 2014.
  2. Myya, Oil on Canvas, 16 x 20, 2014.
  3. Elisa, Oil on Canvas, 16 x 20, 2014.
  4. Elisa and Liv, Oil on Canvas, 16 x 20, 2014.
  5. Helen, Oil on Canvas, 11 x 15, 2013.
  6. Self-Portrait, Oil on Canvas, 8 x 11, 2013.

 

Ilana-EllisIlana Ellis has just graduated Williams College, where she received her degree in studio art. She is excited to attend the Florence Academy of Art in Italy next fall, to begin academic training as a professional realist painter. She was recently the recipient of the Frederick M. Peyser Prize in Painting.

FUJIKO NAKAYA, FOG ARTIST by Myra Lotto

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FUJIKO NAKAYA, FOG ARTIST
by Myra Lotto

"Veil", Philip Johnson Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut, 2014. Photo ©. Richard Barnes, 2014

“Veil,” Philip Johnson Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut. © Richard Barnes, 2014

On the last Saturday morning of April, my husband and I put our two young children in the car for the hour-long drive to New Canaan, Connecticut. We were on our way to attend the opening event for my aunt Fujiko’s newest art installation, Veil, on display at architect Philip Johnson’s former residence and National Trust Historic Site, the Glass House.

Fujiko Nakaya, or “Fuji” as her family calls her, is an artist working with fog as a medium. As many times as I’ve described her work, I am always surprised by what should be, by now, a predictable reaction of bewilderment. That morning, my five-year-old son was no different:

“But Mommy, how does Fuji make fog?”
“She uses nozzles to turn water and air into fog.
“Can Fuji make ice like Elsa from Frozen?!”
“No, just fog.”

The author's son in the fog at the Philip Johnson Glass House, April 2014.

The author’s son in the fog at the Philip Johnson Glass House, April 2014. Photo: Myra Lotto

Across a forty-year partnership with Mee Industries, a fog nozzle company, Fuji developed a technology and art out of spraying potable water into the air, creating natural water fog clouds that can hover, billow, or flow away in response to existing environmental conditions. Mee’s nozzles are found in grocery store produce cases, greenhouses, and other spaces that need to maintain consistently high levels of humidity. Like most of us, my son had seen this technology many times, but not yet understood it as art.

At the Glass House, Fuji’s Veil shrouds the house for 10 to 15 minutes every hour. The small, rectangular, transparent building vanishes under the cloud, peeking out, disappearing, and reappearing as the fog dissipates. As I approached the entrance, I watched the fog flow quickly past the building, reacting to a strong gust of wind. I shuffled slowly to prevent slipping on the slick walkway as my son sprinted past me, running full speed into the mist.

The adults laughed nervously, responding to our own temporary blindness, hoping not to bump into each other or into the glass. My son’s laughter was of quite a different sort. Once inside, the volume of the fog’s moisture was apparent. Streams of water cascaded down the outside walls, which were mostly opaque. Johnson’s sparsely furnished residence has only a bed, sitting area, dining set, a small service kitchen, and little else. The house, with views of the landscape in every direction, boasts “expensive wallpaper,” as Johnson once called it. Turned white with fog, the space felt suddenly tomb-like.

The Glass House, the surrounding buildings, and the 49-acre property are a mix of contrasting aesthetics. Classical and modern influences combine, uniting the austerity of Palladian architecture with the sculpted nature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape painting. Into this mix, Johnson inserts spare, angular buildings like Da Monsta, completed in 1995, a black and red behemoth, almost cartoonish in appearance, drawing on German Expressionist design.

Veil enters this hybrid landscape as an equalizer, seeming perfectly at home against a natural backdrop or swirling around the foot of a bunker-like, minimalist house with expensive wallpaper. A cloud feels disorienting to the person standing inside of it. Viewed from afar, fog creates a preternatural scene, rolling across the ground as if the sky had fallen. Humorous in either context, Fuji’s fog relies on nature as its ally and ultimate designer.

◊

Fuji’s first sculpture was presented at Expo ’70 in Osaka, the first Worlds Fair in Japan, which was organized on the theme of “Progress and Harmony for Mankind.” In late 1968, Fuji was surprised to receive a call from engineer and Bell Labs veteran Billy Klüver, who wanted to hire her as the local coordinator for the Expo ’70 Pavilion.

Fuji had heard of Klüver by reputation. An important figure in the art world, Klüver was director of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). Klüver had heard of Fuji as well, from Robert Rauschenberg and David Tudor, who accompanied the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to Japan in 1964; she had been enlisted to help with local performances.

In Rauschenberg, Fuji found a close friend who invited her to his home whenever she was in New York. He loved Japanese food, and with so few Japanese restaurants in the city at the time, she would buy fish at Fulton Street Fish Market, whipping up her own versions of Japanese dishes in the antique kitchen of Rauschenberg’s studio on Lafayette. Rauschenberg, in return, treated her to Texas-style stew with chunks of beef, beans, and tomatoes that had simmered on the stove for hours.

Rauschenberg and Tudor had collaborated with Klüver since the start of E.A.T., hosting press conferences, exhibitions, and occasionally bankrolling the project. As E.A.T. grew, so did its ranks. Performance artist and Robert Whitman and engineer Fred Waldhauer were also founding members; the eventual roster of artists included John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Öyvind Fahlström, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer.

Klüver, a magnetic personality and a person of seemingly bottomless creativity, also became a dear friend. He passed away in 2004, but Fuji still recalls with great fondness how she could rely on him to think with the objectivity of a scientist while still being moved by the beauty of humanistic thoughts and practices. Klüver was a democratic thinker confronting an American art scene very much associated with capitalism. He always operated in the spirit of democracy, where he grounded his aesthetics and his practice.

Fog Bridge # 72494 at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

Fog Bridge # 72494 at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

E.A.T. was founded to promote collaboration between artists and engineers, providing the research and infrastructure necessary to realize challenging, interdisciplinary projects. The goal was not simply to convince engineers to lend their technology to artists, but instead to find opportunities for genuine collaboration. John Cage described their work as “not about artists and engineers talking; it’s about hands on, working together.”

With only eighteen months left before the Pepsi Pavilion was due for completion, E.A.T. sent their artists and engineers to work on site in Osaka. In subsequent months they made more than 100 trips between New York and Osaka.

Artist and filmmaker Robert Breer, Whitman, Tudor, and sculptor Frosty Meyers designed the Pepsi Pavilion, with Kluver, Waldhauer, and Rauschenberg contributing. Their idea was to build an exhibit encountered through sensory perception. They hoped to overcome the conventional relationship between artist and audience—ending the practice of showing and being shown—by providing a live environment filled with sounds and images where people could form their own experiences. The exhibit would react to its visitors, transforming itself.

The Pepsi Pavilion was designed as a white, spherical, air-structured balloon, with an internal mirrored surface, requiring maintained air pressure, durability, and a strategy to deter vandalism. It measured 27 meters in diameter: the largest spherical mirror ever attempted. In theory, images should appear as holograms in mid-air, just one of a range of optical effects that would occur inside the dome.

Breer designed seven white, dome-shaped moving sculptures, placed on the plaza in front of the Pavilion. Their movement and sound were barely perceptible, but they would immediately change direction when they encountered something. Meyers designed a triangular mirror to follow the sun, reflecting its rays onto the Pavilion.

Early in the design process, the artists decided to shroud the Pavilion with an artificial cloud. Fuji quickly took interest and volunteered to assist. Her late father, my grandfather, formerly a low-temperature physicist at Hokkaido University, left Fuji with relevant contacts at the Department of Meteorology. Klüver immediately put her in charge of the cloud. She began the long process of learning. Was it possible to create and maintain a large amount of natural water fog outside, at the peak of summer? If so, how?

There are many ways to generate artificial fog, but most cooling methods are prohibitively expensive. Dry ice was not feasible with such quantities; it would have posed a hazard, expelling CO2 and attracting mosquitos. Fuji decided it would have to be natural water fog, so she embarked on a search for a fog spraying system, but could only find sprayers to produce a misty rain. The 20-30 micron diameter droplets of water required seemed impossible to fabricate. Although she expressed concerns, Klüver remained optimistic.

In May, Fuji began a series of experiments on-site, using a model of the topography surrounding the Pepsi Pavilion, testing wind patterns via wind tunnel simulation. By June, Klüver had located Thomas Mee, whose company had just developed an artificial fog made with ammonia and chloride, used for farming. Fuji insisted the fog be breathable, so that people could play in it, so she asked Mee to modify his system for use with potable water. Shortly after, her first fog sculpture was realized.

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In the decades since Expo ’70, Fuji has produced more than 50 fog installations and performances featuring natural water fog, including 14 permanent installations. Her Fog Sculpture #08025, “F.O.G.” is installed at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, cleverly named for the architect of that building, Frank O. Gehry. Fog Sculpture #94925, “Foggy Wake in a Desert: An Ecosphere,” is a permanent installation in the Sculpture Garden at the Australian National Gallery, Canberra.

Fog Sculpture #94925 "Foggy Wake in a Desert: An Ecosphere," Sculpture Garden, Australian National Gallery, Canberra

Fog Sculpture #94925 “Foggy Wake in a Desert: An Ecosphere,” Sculpture Garden, Australian National Gallery, Canberra

Asked to describe her art, Fuji immediately notes its whimsical nature. Fog conceals features of a landscape, hiding them from sight while also rendering the invisible as visible. She designs her pieces to obscure, like the Glass House, but she is also conscious of what her clouds reveal: the pathway of the wind, the humidity of the atmosphere, and the environment to which her art responds.

Fuji’s art also reveals a prejudice against fog. As a potential hazard to travelers, fog is assumed to be disruptive. It is something to avoid and view only at a distance. Aerial photography of cloud cover is stunning from afar, but up close a picture of fog looks like a photographic error: white, blurry, and overexposed.

Fog Sculpture #08025 "F.O.G.," Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain

Fog Sculpture #08025 “F.O.G.,” Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain

The first time I saw a fog installation in person, I was in my late teens, and throughout my childhood, “fog art” and “fog sculpture” had sounded completely absurd. Language, I later realized, had failed to describe an art so powerful as to blind and deafen its audience, entering the body with every inhalation, covering the skin with a thin sheet of water.

Instinctively, adults do not know how to react to fog, but children do. Those who visit Fuji’s installations are charmed by the immersive, multi-sensory experience. For the young ones, it can be terrifying and liberating. Finally, something they are encouraged to touch, where play is an integral part of appreciating the art. For the grown ups watching them, it is similarly novel.

Veil is Fuji’s second recent installation in the U.S., following Fog Bridge #72494, installed in April 2013 for the opening of the San Francisco Exploratorium. Until recently, few had heard of her work, and with so many barriers of description and access, even fewer could experience or understand it. But following these installations and an extremely successful project at Paris’s Place de la République, titled Fog Square (2013), Fuji is busier than ever as the size of her audience swells.

Social media technologies and camera phones have played a role in popularizing fog sculpture and making it accessible to global audiences. Visitors are obviously enchanted and eager to communicate the feeling of stepping into the fog. But when Fuji visits one of her installations, it’s the children she likes to watch: they are her most ardent fans. She knows that children love something about fog that the rest of us have outgrown. When children step forward, they are delighted by how the fog steps back. They dive in as the fog wraps around them. When they look, it hides. When they chase, it disappears. When they emerge, they’re typically soaking wet, a bit breathless, and flushed in the cheeks. But they are happy, and so is she.

Veil is on display at the Glass House through November 30, 2014.

Fujiko-Nakaya

Fujiko Nakaya is an artist living in Tokyo, Japan. Her sculptures can be found in art museums, parks, theaters, and public squares around the globe. Representative works include Foggy Forest at Children’s Park in Showa Kinen Park, Tokyo (1992), and installations for the Yokohama Triennale (2008) and the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012). In addition to her work with fog, Nakaya has long been regarded as a pioneer of video art in Japan. Since 1971, she has created video artworks based on the theme of communication. In 1972, she co-founded VIDEO HIROBA, Japan’s first video art collective, and in 1980, she opened Video Gallery SCAN in Harajuku, Tokyo, where she organized workshops and competitions to promote young video artists. For four decades, SCAN hosted video exhibitions and international festivals for cultural exchange. Photo credit: Nelson Oliveira/New Canaan News

Myra-Lotto-headshotMyra Lotto is a scholar and teacher living in New York City. She writes about about rural-themed literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, landscape and garden architecture, laboring-class literature, and disability. She has taught courses on British Literature, poetics, writing, and communications at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. Her ongoing pedagogical interests involve forming communities to promote learning and employing interactive technology in early childhood education.

 

Videos:
Veil by Fujiko Nakaya at Philip Johnson Glass House, courtesy Myra Lotto
Fujiko Nakaya: Veil. Fog Installation at The Glass House, by Heinrich Schmidt, courtesy VernissageTV
Fog Sculpture by Fujiko Nakaya at Toyota Municiple Museum of art in Toyota, Aichi
Fog Sculpture by Fujiko Nakaya for Dynamo at the Grand Palais, Paris

Image Credits: Wikipedia, except where noted.