OCTOBER - NOVEMBER : word : PATRICIA MALONEY : art : JEFF MORRIS

Spring and All: new work by Jeff Morris.

Plexiglas is such that it aspires toward perfection: it is made to think it can be so, perfect in form and being, ever and always. And that is essentially its undoing, because that which has the potential to be perfect must be perfect in every way, and so it must endure. Endurance is a form of perfection, or at least a long-distance training exercise for the afterlife. It is as the writer Joe Wenderoth describes the serious Christians, looking toward eternity. “It is terrible to be real, I know, but it is more terrible to be long” he warns them, or us, or perhaps the clear plastic shields of bus shelters and drive-thru windows. For Plexiglas does nothing so well as endure, and we, taking advantage of that attribute, subject it to elements and chance, and without fail, defeat its aspirations.

In other words, by the time the material comes to the artist Jeff Morris, it has done its time in service to the community, and in return, it has been scratched, cracked, scrawled upon, and generally made to suffer the indignities of everyday use. Morris, in turn, takes it upon himself to disavow the degradation his material has borne. He does not stoop to assignations of mundaneness and preciousness, the recovery of the overlooked or the elevation of the undervalued. He is not interested in heightened awareness. Instead he wants to make an object that is wholly itself. Morris does not erase the meaning of one system — the everyday — to impose another — art — so much as allow the material to yield to it. As a result, the Plexi doesn’t yearn for its lost potential. It is ready to be itself, reborn in a new sum of parts.

The results of Morris’ resurrections are small-scale sculptures of clear, thick slabs accented by thin sheets of colored plastic used for garbage or newspaper bags. He pokes a thin wire covered in beads through a small plane of Plexiglas, and props it in the corner. It is held up by its own weight, but sags awkwardly, like a plant stem uprooted or tired of standing upright. For another, Morris upturns a U-shaped channel onto its end, and stretches three layers of green film across the top to hang down like banners. He alters a clear piece of Plexi — salvaged from a shattered bus shelter after a car accident — simply by bending it into an acute angle. He upturns another scrap to form a jagged bowl with a swarm of frenetic wire tentacles waving out from and around it. Finally, he takes a L-shaped piece, clean and clear, and adds a misshapen piece of yellow plastic film to its base, creating a grotesque shadow spilling from its edges, undermining its order, hinting at some prior incarnation, some violent past, in which the scars are visible but their origins unknown.

Installed in proximity to each other, Morris’ sculptures nevertheless remain discrete, self-contained, as if stubbornly refusing to partake of their environment or allow the viewer to consider anything but their physical attributes. They are not recognizable as objects with identity, but as objects adhering to an internal, self-constructed logic, so that the appropriate question the viewer might ask is not “What is it?” or even “What does it mean?” so much as “What does it owe to itself in order to be real?”

The same inquiry is applicable to the drawings, which are entirely composed of straight lines of varying thickness and pressure, laid down with a ruler. Taken individually, each line keeps going until it stops. Then the next begins. And slowly, the lines become form the way words collect and combine, until both line and shape — words and text — are simultaneously visible, unrepentantly relying upon each other to make sense. The question of why one word should be here on this page is not raised when it is followed by another and combined into the coherence of a sentence. Similarly, Morris’s line are so stringently lines that one apprehends shape and texture and illusions of depth by recognizing how the lines stand together, where they come apart, or where they stop.

The spaces in between the lines are therefore just as important, the interruptions akin to moments in which the drawing is allowed to clarify its shape, its purpose, itself. Both Morris’ drawings and sculptures bear an affinity with the poetry of William Carlos Williams, in which the gaps between words are where the images are realized, and the reader can recognize the distance that has been crossed from one thought to another. For example, in The Locust Tree in Flower (second version), bareness yields to form as both object and image.
Among
of
green

stiff
old
bright

broken
branch
come

white
sweet
May

again

As with Morris’ sculptures, there is a prior life referred to in the poem’s title, but without reading the first version, one is unaware of what the latter is missing. The reader has been spared the season’s loss, the sweet-scented flowers overlooked, quickly shed, and little mourned, the way spring’s sharp freshness yields so readily to summer’s blast of heat and daze and lulling forgetfulness. Like Williams, Morris seems aware that we do not ache in spring the way we ache in fall, when every day we come closer to life shutting down and closing itself off. Perhaps that is why his greens — which can’t quite shrug off their origins as garbage bags and therefore their association with containment or confinement — are the greens of winter, when things are expected to die. But winter is also the moment to look forward and wait for things to return as they need to. Therefore, if anything, Morris turns us towards a moment of anticipation and perhaps even awareness of what endures.

Patricia Maloney
October 2008

SEPTEMBER : word : PATRICIA MALONEY : art : ELLEN BABCOCK

Passage
In May 1845, the English captain Sir John Franklin set out with two ships and a crew of 128 men on an expedition to establish the Northwest Passage through the Arctic Ocean. Among the ships’ provisions was an ample supply of canned meat, enough to last them several years. The final European sighting of the ships was in August of that same year; none of the crew ever returned. The ensuing mystery of their disappearance occupied popular imagination in the United States and Great Britain for the latter half of the 19th Century, and sparked numerous voyages to locate the vanished ships. Subsequent explorers and surveyors unearthed well-preserved, frozen bodies as well as bevies of odd supplies. They also recorded the stories of the Inuit, who had encountered small bands of survivors, the last of whom were seen in 1851. Based on these stories, the routes the crew had embarked upon were nonsensical in direction and distance. This perplexing question—along with that of the strange gear the men chose to take with them after abandoning their ships—was perhaps finally answered in the 20th century, when forensic examinations revealed not only scurvy and starvation as causes of death, but also lead poisoning, the result of consuming the improperly canned meat.

Passage
The renowned Hudson School artist Frederick Church was among those fascinated by the disappearance of the Franklin expedition, to which he paid homage in his 1861 painting Icebergs. The broken mast of a ship in the lower left foreground is an elegiac nod to the doomed voyage. But his main subjects are the icebergs themselves, which he first sketched on his voyage to Newfoundland in 1859. The mast did not make its appearance in the painting until 1863, after its initial unveiling was met with tepid interest and no buyer. Ironically, the painting also disappeared. For decades, the only evidence of its existence was a chromolithograph, until 1979, when it was discovered on the third floor landing of a little-used stairwell in a children’s group home in Manchester. The house had once been the private country estate of Edwin William Watkin, an English railroad magnate who partially financed the construction of the Canadian Pacific transcontinental rail line, billed as the “Northwest Passage by land”. After its recovery, the painting was sold at auction for $2.5 million dollars and subsequently gifted to the Dallas Museum of Art.

Passage
Both Franklin and Church expected that the ice would yield to them. Franklin was searching for the places where the ice gave way to the forward momentum of an expanding world. Church attempted to wrap its sublime beauty in the romantic spectacle his audience craved. The artist Ellen Babcock, no less enthralled by the majesty of the glaciers—and fully aware of how the disappearing ice has come to herald our planet’s potential demise—wants instead to restore their distance from us, to re-establish the impossibility of comprehending them. She couples a photograph of an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland with a small watercolor of the same image. In both, a sheet of ice looms up on the left, dwarfing the ship cruising toward it, the Iceberg Quest II. The photograph is a record of her journey to see the icebergs off the Newfoundland coast while the watercolor holds the image apart from anything we might claim as experience. Her relationship with her audience stands firmly in the realm of representation. Babcock refrains from imbuing the work with irony, metaphor, or elegy. Her restraint is a reminder that there are limits of human intention and knowledge. She operates with things we know to allow the things we don’t know to remain remote. She erects a polystyrene iceberg that fills the room, and it is familiar to us, we instantly recognize the material from which it is made. But Babcock hold sus back from indulging in illusions of the Arctic’s mysteries or wonder. Sitting on the table next to the sculpture is a book with a photograph of the painting by Church. There in the image is the iceberg that she has modeled her sculpture upon. It is a reminder that so many layers exist between what lies off the coast of Newfoundland and our comprehension of it. Regardless of how close we stand, Babcock ensures that we feel the distance.

Passage
Two sheets of insulating polystyrene hung together as a diptych, their protective coatings of blue plastic pulled up slightly from the bottom to create a low horizon. The wrinkles of the pulled fabric form ripples, like the wake of an unseen boat. Color and line create the sea and the heavens: a jewel-like blue, lapis lazuli, ultramarine. Above the water is a large and empty sky, unperturbed by the waves below. The wake points us forward; it is our passage. Passages are dependent upon movement. They exist only as a state between here and there. Dr. Russell Potter said that it is probably impossible to be as lost today as Franklin was, but there are still places in this world that we do not know. Way leads on to way, as Frost observed, the understanding that we could turn back, but don’t. We keep going until we no longer can.
PATRICIA MALONEY 2008

MARCH : word : JAMES SERVIN : art : " HOW FAST YOUR WORLD IS CHANGING "

Change It Up

What, in this life, is ever static? Even stones have molecules vibrating at a low (extremely low) rate. In past decades, the world may have been a bit more like those stones. Now, it's a buzzing bee. We live in an age which has access to more information than any other preceding it. The human body, its nervous system, has never had to deal with processing so much data. We are aware of change closer to its happening, and maybe because of this, change is speeding up. Through televisions, cell phones, Blackberries, camcorders, iPhones, digital cameras, the world is speaking to itself like never before, documenting itself, inspiring further adjustments and shifts, pushing forward, backward and sideways with each new bit of knowledge. Information is cause, change effect, and vice versa. Concurrently, a backdrop to this informational quickening, is a planet in upheaval, torn apart by earthquakes, hurricanes, floods. And then there's the election…

This is the era of the shifting sands, the ground continually moving underneath our feet. It's a time that is both exhilarating and terrifying, promising and frustrating. Commenting upon, and in some cases replicating the dynamic essence of our lives today, the artists chosen by Lori Gordon do so with wit, compassion, insight, attitude and inventiveness, furthering Gordon's ongoing creation of a leap-of-faith-taking, belief-challenging artistic and curatorial vision she has designated "social sculpture." And so, in his photo-documentation project "Shadow Followers", Markuz Wernli Saito enlisted fifteen local people in Bao Loc Vietnam to document everyday things they found important, Monday through Saturday for one month (amassing 1200 prints, edited to 72). Gallery goers, in turn, are enlisted in the respectful act of mailing the negatives back to the picture-takers.

In her installation titled "long shadow (tail)" Jessica James Lansdon invites visitors to cut loose a collection of objects attached to the wall by strings. In her artist's statement, she ponders the role of art in its physical form, and how that relates to our material-based culture. She writes: "…the holidays can get you thinking about the role of gift giving in a materially glutted culture, like what do you get the person who has everything, when everyone has everything similarly problems around objects are central to the art these days- how can we still make things?"

Some artists invoke the beauty of a direct human connection. In "Walk With Me: 30 Days of San Francisco", Hope Hilton explores the fourth most populous city in California, taking participants on a variety of silent walking excursions, with participants contributing to the design of the project in the form of directions, suggestions, and documentation in words, objects and sounds.

Inspired by the funeral of a friend's grandmother during which the bereaved was serenaded her favorite song by friends and family, Jennifer Delos Reyes, in "Choral Society (for Lori Gordon)" pays tribute to her friend and this show's curator. A group of Lori Gordon's friends singing John Lennon's "Instant Karma" at the show's opening will be documented on film and play in a loop, the virtual replacing the physical, sending the love out for the duration of the show.

Self-described "hobby archivist and librarian" Christine Hill will be generating a series of posters from her Berlin-based studio, Volksboutique, in a long-term project which comments upon both the vacuity and the comfort derived from a linguistic cultural staple that she drolly refers to as "The Uplifting Quotation." Harrell Fletcher captures the stirring quality of this election's unfolding by simply broadcasting a daily installment of "Democracy Now", a news program hosted by Amy Goodman. This mirrors the change-related topic that's at the forefront of everyone's minds, and provides the handy public service of an always-welcome news update.

The theme of the show is the theme of life: change. Lori Gordon says she came upon the idea for it while reading Carl Sagan's Contact, being drawn in particular to this quote in the book: "Considering how fast your world is changing, it's amazing you haven't blown yourselves to bits by now. That's why we don't want to write you off just yet. You humans have a certain talent for adaptability—at least in the short term." What will act as a cohesive element in the show is the shifting of some of the art in stages throughout the exhibition, bringing a new level of interest to the observer. And so, one visit to this show will not be enough. Gallery goers may have to adjust their usual habit of seeing, absorbing, analyzing and moving on and revise this pattern, incorporating a return trip into their schedules return to see what has happened after some artists have pressed the "refresh" button.
JAMES SERVIN 2008

James Servin began his career in New York in 1986 with an entry-level job at GQ. After contributing articles in his second year at the magazine, he launched a successful freelance writing career, placing feature articles in a variety of publications, including British Vogue, Allure, Elle, Metropolitan Home, Details, Organic Style and Natural Health. He has written for many sections of The New York Times, including The New York Times Magazine, the "Page Six Magazine" and "Styles of the Times" sections. He was a contributing editor at Harper's Bazaar for three years and was executive editor at Nylon magazine. He currently writes for House & Garden and Black Book, among other publications.

JANUARY : word : PATRICIA MALONEY : art : NICK GRAHAM

The Silence of History

A medley of art stars, political figures and fast food icons beam out from an imaginary history - a backwards-looking future moment that pay tributes to the visionaries of 21st Century American capitalism. Here are the leaders who brought us into a golden age of consumption, one that - according to Nick Graham - culminates in no less that the wholesale acquisition of our sovereign nation. From the holy trinity of Pop Art - Father Warhol with Hirst the Son, and Koons off to the side, jester or Holy Ghost - to Father and Son Bush staring vacantly or squinting blindly at the havoc surrounding them, we are presented with the protectors of American culture who freed us from the burden of production and guided our great nation into excess and debt. While our children grew bountiful and complacent licking the lead off their Happy Meal™ toys, these innovators beckoned us toward greater heights of acquisition and convenience, all the while selling our franchises and our self-interests out from under us.

In Graham's Popaganda, the commercial and political actors currently colliding into each other (as the line between news and corporate interests grows ever more blurred) are further juxtaposed against the propagandist paintings of Maoist China. While he is trafficking in ready icons and tropes - the symbols of prosperity and free expression commingled with those of oppression and the party line - Graham is not simply substituting capitalism for communism. Nor is he scolding us with a morality tale, warning against the giddy embrace between the two. In mixing icons and ideologies, he recognizes that all myths and fables possess the same elements; the intrepid hunter and the big bad wolf can easily exchange places depending on the story told and who is doing the telling.

For example, an outsized vision of Al Gore looms above the frozen tundra, arm raised in salute, mouth open, commanding the fleet of Hummers below, and either halting them to stop or urging them onward. Does he really want to save the world, or does he want to be the one who gets to say “I told you so.”? It is an almost immaterial question; Gore's bases are covered; he will be the Great Prophet if the world comes to an end and the Great Savior if it doesn't.

Perhaps it is still too early to poke fun at the Oscar-winning Nobel Laureate. We have shared his pain for the past seven years and are still a bit tender. However, while Graham is reminding us to view the world with a bit of brevity, he is also wondering what do we care of history if we do not remember it? There is the silence of the past: after the clamor of the parades and the rallies, the speeches and the campaigning dies down, what are the words that linger? Perhaps for that reason, Graham retains the faces of the anonymous workers, who somehow become more eternal than the politicians and art stars juxtaposed amongst them. In our age of consumer convenience and immediate obsolescence, the voices of the latter become trapped in a particular moment; they begin to speak from a distance too far away to heed.

It is the same distance occupied by a future looking back into the present, the point at which optimism becomes naiveté. These images are the artifacts of our current moment, seen from a perspective that appears wiser only because it knows what remains relevant and who has faded to obscurity. They successfully operate as such because our cultural icons have become so apparent to be rendered mute. We do not need to linger with them to understand what they are telling us - a passing glance is enough. But caught in that glance and refusing to be overlooked is the golden beaver; the ultimate anomaly, a symbol of industry in an age of drive-thru delivery. Is he taunting us or imploring us? It remains too soon to tell.
PATRICIA MALONEY 2008