September 27 - November 18, 2007
(Artist profiles include occassional comments by guest respondents Adam Lerner, director of The Lab, Belmar, and Patti Ortiz, director of the Museo de las Americas.)
Life and Art have always intertwined themselves in peculiar ways for me. I have sought to use experience as a trigger for the propulsion of an idea into another reality. Somehow, through some course of creative banter or happenstance, this “other” reality necessitates further examination and revealing.
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Forces like virtue, desire, peace, and pain shape our lives and create ripples of remembrance. In a world of forces constantly pressing upon us, who and what we are shift and change like the folds of a cloth blowing in the wind. Our lives, like cloth, are fibers of characteristics and traits woven together to create the whole of who we are. The form of our being goes beyond our mere physical appearance and rests with something deeper and more poignant without a set visual shape. Just as the form of cloth is fluid and ever changing by the influence of internal and external forces—so also are our lives. Moments of exceeding joy or pain leave us changed for the better or the worse. Part of the struggle in life is based upon doing what we want to do and what we know we should do. Sometimes the twain meet, and other times they create a contentious rift within in us. The cloth, like life, dances to the forces around it. A dance that moves through every step, from the most violent to the most graceful, and leaves us with a memory of those life-altering moments that form who and what we are.
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Tobiano 1 & 2, 2001–02
Lithograph and drawing
A Tobiano is a description of a paint-horse color, where the majority of the animal is white, with colored markings. It seemed fitting at the time to have this Spanish title for a whitewashed or flattened, almost obliterated shape. As the pieces evolved, adding and changing this repeated form led to questioning the choice of a dog as an iconic image - it was a constant, an underlying structure, not only the structure of my actual day, but a visual and metaphorical drive for many prints and plans.
The language of printmaking is in these works, but there is more involvement through drawing. My tendency to use print as a window was challenged in this series, and the role of stitching things together fused with ideas of memory and witnessing our world as it changes. Often, I’m drawing and writing, embedding thoughts that come to my head as I’m listening to the radio news. Through persisting with the recognizable, I use the draw-able image for its ability to function as emblem, as metaphor for messages we wish we could send.
“The idea of drawing a beautiful tree is now almost passé, now we draw a beautiful cell phone tower.” —Patty Ortiz
“Seeing the image of the dog that’s cancelled, the print that’s cancelled, does speak to ideas about beauty today. Because artists who demonstrate particular skill—of the hand, abilities in representing beautiful things—often deliberately pull their punch or ‘cancel’ their achievement. Today, simply showing your skill is recognized as not being enough, but to show it and then erase it…”—Adam Lerner
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A Film for Esequiel Hernandez, 2007
Digital video
A film for Esequiel Hernandez is a very short digital art piece created as a rememberance of a tragedy. It is a response to the quiet, ongoing, militarization of the US border. All of the participants were US citizens, as was the victim.
The piece is an exploration of intimate digital media, and is available for free for those with iPods with video capabilities at:
http://www.mogopop.com/mogos/3722
The piece is also viewable in another form at:
http://www.rafaelfajardo.com/projects/ezekiel.html
“This piece is very accessible to me. I don’t so much get pulled into the idea of the sadness of this man being killed because he was identified wrong as much as the fact that this is a truth. It’s just what’s happening—that stereotyping is going on all the time. So, that is what touches me.” —Patty Ortiz
My work celebrates the transgressive beauty of subversive gender experiences. I use my own perspective as a queer person to examine cultural conceptions, and facilitate a dialogue about the experience of the Other. By visually representing the effects of the daily performance of gender I hope to make visible the mechanisms by which people’s experiences are mediated. I strive to provide a counter-perspective to that of the heteronormative.
Sewing the Façade
At age 14, I underwent a double mastectomy as a result of gynocomastia, a disorder in some boys that results in the formation of breasts at puberty. The surgery left me with large scars across my chest and around my nipples. These scars represent my own painful experience with nonheteronormativity. These photographs attempt to take control back over my body in a way that celebrated that experience while acknowledging the pain.
Be Your Own Cage, 2007
Net-art, found sound, and interactive art
www.johnmiltoncage.org is a net-art piece using found sounds and altered instrumentation to create an entirely sonic-based interactive homage to the art of chance or Dada music composition.
Mechanics and Aesthetic:
The project consists of 160 recorded found sounds created using a methodology similar to John Cage's 'chance' recordings. There is no visual aesthetic other than the white box of a blank web page, and the viewer is meant to create the sonic composition by moving their mouse over the page.
Directions (Waist) Series, started in 2005
Sewing patterns, latex rubber, wood embroidery frames,
electrical elements
This series explores sewing patterns as directions – both in a practical application to make a garment, but also as societal cues and stereotypes. The actual patterns are decidedly feminine (ballerina outfits, cheerleader uniforms, princess dresses, etc.) and all are the brand “Simplicity”. Overlapped between layers of latex rubber, the result is a kind of roadmap that confounds all sense of direction and resembles a confused blueprint that seems suspended in a skin-like pelt. Blatant text on the sewing patterns alludes to “correct” measurements and their corresponding sizes. Implicit, and yet forgiven, are the assumptions inherent in these patterns in terms of “normal” body size, when garment sizing systems are highly divergent (a Liz Claiborne size 10 is very different than a size 10 from Victoria’s Secret). The diameters and titles of each form correspond to the waist sizes of celebrity women over the last fifty years. While most won’t admit it, we are fascinated by celebrity, and are fastidious purveyors of body and appearance of those who are considered famous or fashionable. While celebrity men often escape this undue attention, our culture holds celebrity women to a much higher level of scrutiny.
Discussion Topic: Seven of Nine, 2005
Acrylic Transfer on Canvas
Actual Size, 2007
Medium: Acrylic on Canvas
Discussion Topic: One of Nine (perfect), 2005
Acrylic Transfer on Canvas
Susan Whitely, 2006
from the Portrait Project: Child Survivors of the Holocaust
Graphite pencil and graphite stick on
clay-coated silver point paper
“The Holocaust in its enormity defies language and art,
and yet both must be used to tell the tale” ……… Elie Wiesel
Susan Whitley was born in Amsterdam and is a therapist living in Evanston Illinois. When I met with Susan we didn’t talk about her war experiences, she only told me that her father was an important rabbi in the Amsterdam Jewish community. When we met she discussed that she doesn’t understand American culture and still does not feel American even though she has lived here for over forty years.
Susan gave me a copy of a book she wrote about her war experiences. Susan, her mother and younger brother were placed in several camps where she fought with grown women to keep her cot to sleep on. Her mother fell ill and Susan had to feed her. Her father was killed and after the war she saw a man beating a German and wrote that it made her feel good. When she immigrated to Chicago at ten years old she cried for a week.
“I think that it’s a beautiful endeavor…The desire to draw by hand the likeness of somebody who’s a survivor in order to ensure that they survive again. What’s interesting to me is that for an artist like Joseph Beuys, the question of truthfulness is always an open question—but for this one, that question is not open, it’s closed. That this person is a survivor should not be questioned.”—Adam Lerner
Personal Statements
“Each work of art relates in some way to my experience in the real world. Paintings must resonate clearly enough to locate the viewer at the center of their own experience as well. To bring that experience into the world with sincerity and depth, I rely on the quality of color.”
COLORIS, Nelson Macker Fine Art, 2006
“My job is to make the most beautiful object I can, and by that I don’t necessarily mean pretty. If successful the paintings convey a sentient truth.”
March, 2007
“My life in art has been a reckless drive to strange and senseless beauty.”
PRIMAL ELEMENTS, Linda Fairchild Contemporary Art, 2007
Wave #17 (10 seconds to 30 seconds), 2006
Pinhole photograph, archival print
The Xerces Society, Installment VII: from London to Marrakesh
Single channel video
2006
http://lalehmehran.com
The Xerces Society, a contemporary work of performance and installation art, addresses the blurring intersections between art, science, religion and politics. The primary character the one around whom much of the action circles - is Sir Samuel Cropia, a world-renowned lepidopterist known for his
extreme dedication to the preservation and proliferation of butterflies. Sir Samuel Cropia¹s name makes reference to the cecropia moth, which is one of the largest moths found in North America, and is a member of the giant silk moth family. This moth was chosen as the reference, due to its physical characteristics, which include crescent moon shapes and ³eye spots². The intention of The Xerces Society, whose title refers to a North American butterfly conservation society of a similar name, as well as to Xerces, the famed king of ancient Persia, as it enters its ninth year, is to investigate the complexities of fanaticism and ideology under the auspices of art and science.
The Enterprise, 2006
Sculptural installation
While it depicts a landscape, The Enterprise is somewhat contrary to the romantic landscape tradition, one that evokes vistas relatively free of human presence or corruption; The Enterprise is busy with activity, activity suggestive of, well, enterprise.
Visually and aurally there are cues that suggest science fiction, another landscape tradition in its way. Uncharted vistas, exploration, a small group of people cast adrift, banding together, good against evil. And then there’s The Lonely Surfer, the song that plays intermittently on the soundtrack. He’s more Thoreau than he is Emerson: he’s all alone on that perfect, endless wave.
Why make a landscape? Why research a history of American optimism and folly? Why explore the desire of Americans, considered perhaps the most individualistic of peoples, to live together in unusually collective systems of governance? Why interject the future?
Honey (Sweetness), 2007
Porcelain
Scent:
This work is based on the exploration of Scent, or better, the scientific process by which we smell. In 2004, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Richard Axel and Linda Buck for their discovery of how the Olfactory System works. Their research proved that 'shape' was the key element in determining scent. The shapes of molecules interact with receptors to create patterns in the olfactory center of our brains. These patterns allow us to differentiate and experience the thousands of different scents in our world. The scents I chose, fall under four themes borrowed from Michael Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire: Beauty, Sweetness, Intoxication and Control. These basic human desires link us to the natural world in that it is through desire that we have propagated, harvested, modified, and sought out such substances. Although actual scent is absent, our bodies know these biological processes of smell and shape recognition even if we are relying on our memories of them. “This is where information gives you more and pushes you into understanding. It used to be that a beautiful painting was a beautiful painting and we were in love with it, but now it’s like our mind wants to be involved more. Now we really need that brain interaction with beauty. The punch line is this is honey or this is potato, and we can go ‘Oh!’ The idea that odor has physicality to it…”—Patty Ortiz
“Ceramics historically suffers from the same thing that beauty suffers from—it relates to ‘skill’ and ‘handmade’ and simple mastery of technique and is therefore associated with the feminine and the decorative. And beauty borders the decorative, and when beauty is disparaged, it’s disparaged in the same way…and the gender implications of that are alarming.”—Adam Lerner
Mini-Movie Fest: DU, 2007
Multimedia, people
Photo: MicroMovie screening in Berlin
OUR AIMS
Hideous Beast is a collaborative effort between two artists, Josh Ippel
and Charlie Roderick. Through organizing structured participatory events
we attempt to encourage cultural activity outside the bounds of mainstream
entertainment and fabricated desire.
Critical of the audience as a passive participant, Hideous Beast seeks to
coordinate events in which an acknowledged exchange between the event
(as entertainment) and the spectator (as collaborator) can generate meanings
beyond traditional formalized modes of entertainment.
It is our intent as artists and beings in common to shift perceptions of
authorship and participation within the realm of constructed entertainment
and art generated activities.
This might change though.
“It reminds me very much of Andy Warhol—in that you could say ‘is it art?’ because it’s accidental, and in a way Warhol did that in terms of saying ‘this is your culture.’ He was flipping it to say it’s a readymade, art is an experience, these are tidbits of what anybody can say: this is beautiful, this is sad, and collectively it becomes an accidental aesthetic of us, it’s like a readymade.”—Patty Ortiz
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Wade, Eagle Scout No. 1, 2007
Archival digital print on canvas
In 2005, I gave birth to a son. During my pregnancy, I became acutely aware of gender conditioning as I was inundated with gifts that were blue in color and toys that consisted mostly of cars and trucks. This project is a response to this experience and poses questions regarding how we as a culture condition our children and specifically our boys.
Scouting is significant in terms of conditioning and its obvious ties to the military in protocol, uniform, badges and terminology. This project focuses on boys aged 13-17 who have achieved the highest rank in scouting – the Eagle Scout. The formal portraits are constructed to reference Renaissance and Baroke paintings of boys depicted in full military prowess and invite the viewer to investigate the para-militaristic aspects of scouting.
“You go into the whole Americana good boy, who is an achiever, who collects stamps, but then their eyes may tell you something else. I’m sure the way I’m seeing it is completely different from the way you see it.”—Patty Ortiz
“In cultural debates, nostalgia is a negative, but actually it can be a kind of positive, and can be manipulated for an aesthetic response…these kinds of cultural forms evoke nostalgia in us.”—Adam Lerner
Biological Narrative #7: Danaus, 2007
Digital video, sonic bioinformatics translations
http://www.biotica.org/bionarrative/danaus.html
“Biological Narrative #7: Danaus” is a digital video and biological/genetic music hybrid whose platform is built upon electronic translations derived from the locative protein complex of the migratory North American Monarch Butterfly. The work is based in the genotypic origins of this navigational system in combination with the phenotypic expression that is exerted to fulfill this annual journey across the North American continent from Canada to Mexico and back. This protein-based sun compass translates the lifeform’s relationship to color wavelength, as well as terrestrial and biological time. The work builds on the sonic equivalents of these locative proteins, developing a multi-layered audio score derived from genetic sequences of the blue, ultraviolet, and long wavelength opsin proteins found in the vision system of Danaus plexipus.
This sonic work is joined with the visual characterizations of this migration consisting of video field recordings, time-lapse documentation of the organism’s migratory path, and virtual reality of the butterfly’s microscopic anatomy. The resulting work bends the sensibilities of the Danaus specie across multiple data scales to re-mediate the essential ties that all organisms have to journey, vulnerability and survival.
The intent of converging these sonic and visual equivalents into captured and performative works is to speculatively restore our ecological memory while broadening a recognition of the fragility of lifeforms that sustain the biocultural commons.
Other links to Biotica Lab/works by TImothy Weaver:
http://lab.biotica.org
http://www.primamateria.org
“Art beauty is not so much about the physical beauty, but whether it touches me—that can become beautiful. That’s why you fall in love. If you think he or she is beautiful, it’s because you see something in them that’s beautiful.”
—Patty Ortiz“There is a certain romantic quality to this combination of science and the natural world. There are references to romantic painting and the romantic landscape. And then there’s really that shift in scale between the microscopic and the panoramic which you could call ‘spectacular.’ I think that the question of spectacle is related to the question of scale. It poses interesting questions because we have to ask if spectacle is a gimmick or is it the very thing? Is it the simple enlargement of the thing that is not compelling in its own right, or is there actually a vocabulary of spectacle? Is it interesting in its own right? Can it go beyond surface effect?”—Adam Lerner
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