Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith 1954-

        I meant to write about Kiki Smith around the time of SMFA's InsideOut sale (as she had a piece in it; Born last image - one of her many depictions of the red riding hood tale) but somehow I managed not to do so.
        Kiki Smith is one of those artists where I've had an impossible time choosing images to put up here. This is not only because I love her work so much (definitely one of the artists I aspire to be like), but also because she works across so many mediums that it's absolutely impossible to give any kind of window into the breadth of her work. Nevertheless, I have chosen some of my favorites, and tried to give a small taste of what she's about.
        Smith has said that she strongly identifies with her gender, and it is definitely clear in her work, which re-contextualizes and reconstructs stories, myths, and histories; through her female eye. The two sites I've included here have way more information about her than I could possibly share or even summarize, so I suggest you take a look at one or both.

-awesome MoMA interactive site from their 2003 show Kiki Smith: Prints, Books & Things with lots of her work and lots of info.
-Art:21 on Kiki Smith (in the "Stories" episode)






images: pbs.org & moma.org

Fefe Talavera

Fefe Talavera 1979-

        Since I am home for the holidays I was going through a bunch of old Juxtapoz magazines to check if I could throw them out, and stumbled upon a few great artists I had overlooked the first time, including Brazilian street artist Fefe Talavera, whose work is both beautiful and badass.
        Her myspace explains that her monster paintings "are metaphors for strong and subconscious human emotions like anger, fear, dreams or desire", and that she connects them to the "dark side of her inner self". Her cultural roots also play a large part in her work, as she (who is half Mexican half Brazilian) was raised in São Paulo which is known for its graffiti scene, and has also affected some of the deeper meanings and intentions behind her work. Inspired by her heritage she also incorporates Aztec and Mayan mythologies into her work.
        I just thought her images were really strong and definitely worth putting up here, so take a look.

Talavera's blog ,
myspace ,
& flickr .




images: flickr.com/photos/fefe_talavera

2009 wrap-up

        In case you haven't been following my every move this year, here are my top ten favorite discoveries (all are artists that I had not known of before this year, since I sometimes write about long-time influences of mine):

April 18th : Bianca Casady (knew of her before 2009, but not her artwork)
April 29th : Jan Švankmajer
June 5th : Nadine Byrne
June 7th : Miwa Yanagi
July 24th : Compagnia della Fortezza
July 29th : Andrea Marshall
August 12th : Ali Scarpulla
September 23rd : Bert & Bertie
October 9th : Susanna Majuri
December 21st : Miru Kim




        I realize that the majority of this list is women, and while this did not surprise me (I tend to seek out female artists), I was slightly surprised after a bit of investigation, that the reasoning for this is also partially that the male artists that I've written about this past year are almost entirely artists I had prior knowledge of (and therefor did not include). This coming year I'll try to find some guys who are new to me.

images (top to bottom): Miwa Yanagi, Bert & Bertie, Andrea Marshall & Susanna Majuri

Reed + Rader

Back to normal posting from my 2 week hiatus! Midterms are over and I am ready to go.

        And of course I am back with something bizarre and fascinating. I usually try not to post more than four images, but since these were just so amazing, and because I've been gone for two weeks, I possibly went a little overboard. But I'm not apologizing, because as I said, the images are amazing.
        Reed + Rader is made up of fashion (photography/ video/ installation/ graphics) duo Pamela Reed and Matther Rader. What initially attracted me to their work was the strange feel and unconventional look. Two minutes into their website I was hooked.
        I can not tell you much about the artists themselves, other than that they are 26 and live in New York. Their website also states that they "enjoy cats, stuffed animals, nintendo, pizza, robots, deli sandwiches and computing on the internet". I imagine that they are fun to be around. What I can speak to is their work.
        While all of their work is very different, it is all distinctively theirs. Looking through their website, I began to notice that images were moving (a startling discovery at first), sometimes animated very subtly (a blink or breath). While many of their photographs and videos are simply set up to be strange and other-worldly, many of them have also had some sort of outside intervention, whether that be drawing strange sci-fi additions over the photos, collage, photo manipulations, and animation. While I am always excited to see anything different going on in fashion advertisement, their work is particularly interesting because it also speaks to other things, such as technology, medium and contemporary culture. Their work very successfully resides in both the worlds of fashion and art, and comments on both.

I know I always say this, but you really, seriously, need to look at their website. I couldn't post the moving images or their videos here, and there is just so much more on the website that I wish I could've posted. All of it really.

their website -so many amazing things here
their blog meowzas -has a complete list of their other projects and sites (flickr, youtube etc) on the links page






images: reedandrader.com
(last one is a video still)

MPH Art Salon

        I've been (and will be for the next few weeks) really busy because of midterms, and since I don't really have the time to dedicate to writing up an artist today; shameless self-promotion! In all seriousness though, this show is for a really good cause. The Michael Peter Hayes Art Salon is currently having a show of ATCs (artist trading cards), and the participating artists got to decide if they would donate 50 or 100% of the proceeds for their pieces (set at $50 each) to the National Cancer Center.
        As someone who has had people very close to me both overcome as well as pass away from cancer, it is something that has had a heavy effect on my life, and I know that a growing number of people are affected in some way by it. Being a part of this show was my way to honor these people, as well as contribute to fighting cancer and promoting cancer awareness (my pieces are all 100% contributions). The four trading cards that I created are, albeit in a quiet way and personal way, in conversation with the effects of cancer on the way I live my life.
        If you live nearby Locust Valley, NY, you should definitely check out the show, which is open until November 27th. The artists involved are highly talented and some even have pieces in museum collections.

Exhibit page (the first card (with the owls) is one of mine!)
general info on what ATCs are

And here's the gallery info if you'd like to go:

MPH Art Salon
169 Forest Avenue, Locust Valley, NY 11560
516.671.5011
www.mphsalon.com

(click to enlarge poster)

images: ATC poster, c. mph salon and respective artists
first image, "heart", c. daylynn richards

Karl Baden

        This past Thursday I went to another photographer's lecture at my school with less than high expectations and came away with a fresh view on things.
        I went to the lecture (Boston area photographer Karl Baden) only knowing of Everyday, which he began in 1987, and consists of straight on neutral images of Baden's face, taken once a day for what is coming up on 23 years. (I haven't seen the project in person, and had only seen documentation of it as it was presented in the Howard Yezerski Gallery in 2007 - as small photographs arranged chronologically on three walls of a room). An interesting concept, but I was unsure what made it too different from all the (horrendous) time lapse photo a day nonsense everyone is doing of themselves on youtube these days.
        As it turned out, not only is Baden's body of work much more expansive than this (not a surprise, I was not expecting that this had been his only project) but the different ways Everyday have been presented were also particularly interesting and made a good argument for the ability of photography to be entirely transformed by the way it's presented.
        Baden started the project based on his interest in incremental change, specifically the way that if you look at the pictures one by one in order change is hardly noticeable, but if you look at the first and the last it's entirely in your face. He has made an effort to show the series of photographs differently each time, and the setup has ranged from simply being installed on a wall (such as at the Yezerski Gallery, where they were available individually for sale for I forget, something like $10), to buttons of just his eye for each election year, to all shrunken down to barely thumbnail size and featured on a single piece of paper, to two time lapsed pieces shown together - of the same video length but increasing by different increments of time - one by day and one by month. He has also made a special piece, covering a year in the 1990's when he was diagnosed with and overcame prostate cancer. The piece is a ~15minute time lapse of the year's worth of faces, with audio from conversations with doctors and family members. The piece is a particularly strong look into the effects of cancer, which are so infrequently seen by those who are not personally effected by it. Comparable to Hannah Wilke's self portraits of her deterioration from Lymphoma (a major difference being that she passed away from it, in 1993), Baden's work is particularly strong because you are confronted with extremely personal dialog, while being looked directly in the eye by Baden's thinning face.
        His other and earlier work also displays a heavy interest in time and the ability to occupy more than one space in one time, (or visa versa) as well as a much more humorous edge. He began with street photography and self-portraits while traveling the across US in his twenties, which he then described as "self-images"- because he believed they were not self-reflective, something he now laughs about acknowledging that they couldn't have been more so. The images are both awkward and funny, featuring things such as his open fist around his stubbled chin against a sunset, and employed a great deal of double exposing (all of his great strange work was done pre-photoshop, and usually in camera, though in a later project also by cutting up prints and inserting himself into other photographs). This evolved to using sheets of paper to plan out entire roles of film so that the contact sheet would create a surrealistic mutant composed entirely of Baden's body parts. He also created collages, scratched and burned negatives and used selective toning (later abandoning such projects that were non-replicable, something he believes is an important part of photography). Though much of his work is humorous, he notes that it is always "about photography".
        Other projects he presented included images created by printing pieces of the negatives that are next to one another on the film (something that is done more frequently now, but he did not know of anyone doing at the time, and used to explore the idea of two spaces existing in one time), the documentation of his wife's pregnancy and his daughter's babyhood (culminating in a book with simultaneously humorous and yet very serious pages from his diary at the time), and a project where he inserted himself into pictures that have ended up with particular weight in photo history.
        An all around interesting man... I really liked the way he thinks.

All of the Everyday shots
Baden's Yezerski Gallery page
Boston.com write-up of the 2007 show at the Yezerski Gallery
Covering Photography Baden's web project, "a web-based archive and resource for the study of the relationship between the history of photography and book cover design."




images: various sources, c. Karl Baden

Charles Goss

        I've mentioned my mentor a few times in previous posts, and I feel like following Ray Johnson is a perfect time to bring him to the focus of a post. Charles Goss has been teaching at the Museum School since 1979, and (with fellow Museum School teacher Robert Siegelman) started the artist in residence program Art In Amsterdam in 1996. I took his class "Art as Process" my first semester at the Museum School, in 2007, and immediately asked him to be my mentor. He is brutally honest, and forces me to expand my ways of thinking and push myself out of my comfort zones and open up in a way that I have infrequently been asked to in art school. Goss' teaching, as well as his artwork, inspires expansion of the way art is looked at. If I became frustrated with a piece, he would tell me to rip it in half, or turn it on its side. In class projects would be outlined in simple terms that begged for consideration of exactly what they could be warped to mean, such as "draw every person you know".
        The playfulness and ability for everything to have multiple layers and meanings that I described in Ray Johnson is present in every aspect of Goss, personality, work, and intent. His work ranges from collage and painting to large scale installations. His solo show, A Vertical Life at the Bromfield Gallery (where he is represented) in 2008 displayed all these talents; the show included 63 collages (shown together and deceptively titled 60) - some of which make references to Johnson, displaying instructions on how to draw a bunny- a bulletin board covered in what seemed to be thousands of notes (Charles is never without scraps of paper literally covered in names, times, etc), a ball of socks hovering over a photograph of the edge of Goss' face looking upward -the socks collected from family and friends, attached together so that the socks from the ones closest to him were closest to the inside of the ball- poles with tiny scraps of metal, found in Amsterdam and Boston, sticking off the edges, a ball of digital watches on a pole, all originally set to go off at the same time, slowly growing apart due to slight differences in their mechanics (I happened to be there at one of the times when the watches went off, it was amazingly cool) as well as a few other pieces, including a couple tongue in cheek references to work.
        Goss' work is not only visually intriguing, but all very meaningful and often humorous. He and Johnson would undoubtedly have gotten along. In addition to his artist's statement, Goss shares on his website an "artist's focus", which, in perfectly descriptive of Goss fashion reads (click to enlarge):

Goss' website
Bromfield Gallery
Art in Amsterdam program




images: charlesgoss.com

Ray Johnson

        I don't even know how to begin discussing the genius that was Ray Johnson, and this post would be much better left to someone who knows more about him (a couple people very close to me hold Johnson very close to them), so I'm going to focus on few specific aspects of Johnson and his work, because I do think that it is important that I address him as someone who has inspired me. For the greater picture, I can't express enough how much I believe everyone (artist or not) should watch the documentary How to Draw a Bunny, which focuses on Johnson's life, death, and work.
        *note: the links in the following paragraph are to excerpts from How to Draw a Bunny
        Johnson, who is most well known for his collage work, basically lived his life as performance (some speculate, including his mysterious suicide in 1995). He has been hailed the "most famous unknown artist", and not only made really awesome work, but was a really intriguing and genuinely quirky character. Though he is described as a relative unknown, it is more a reference to the way many people did not realize exactly how prolific he was until his death, at which point thousands of works were found, and also because of the way he has been somewhat of a cult gem in contemporary art history. His work is owned by various museums, including the MoMA and he was friendly with many pop figures at the time, including the much more widely recognized Andy Warhol.

“Mail Art has no history, only a present” - Ray Johnson

        I've been thinking about Johnson a lot lately, because I'm hoping to embark on some sort of mail art project, and Johnson has often be considered the father of mail art (which he began in the 1950s). The above quote greatly characterizes Johnson and his work; a playful pun (present meaning gift) but also a statement that can be taken more seriously and analyzed in the greater contexts of the evolving art world.
        I think what Johnson started with his mail art was so important, a sense of community and collaboration in art, wanting to give without some sort of expectation that something would be returned. It is this sense of community that art can bring about that is so important to me, and the reasons why I would like to start creating and exchanging mail art amongst my many creative friends. Ray Johnson, as much of an oddball as he may have been, totally knew what was up.

Again, cannot emphasize enough how I think everyone should see How to Draw a Bunny, but here are some other Johnson sources as well:
(also note that the work I posted only represents his mail art, definitely try to get a look at the rest of his body of work, even if you just google him)

cool short essay on Johnson and mail art
source for a good number of his mail art images (difficult website to navigate, but click basically any link and an image will come up)
official website of the estate of Ray Johnson (nice bio, images, general info)
Ray Johnson: Correspondences (if you have $70 floating around)




images: various sources, including artpool.hu

Toyen

        Czech painter/illustrator Toyen denounced her name and family (she was born Marie Cerminova and formed her own family of surrealist poets), referred to herself in the masculine, made explicit artwork, and earned herself a place in the infrequently infiltrated by women surrealist movement of the 1930's. She was by all standards, a badass.
        This is a large piece of why I love and admire her so much. Toyen was in command of herself, both as an artist and as a woman. She pushed the tight gender roles, refusing to be marginalized. This is reflected in her artwork, much of which is suggestive. It is important to note that female genitalia was no stranger to surrealism, and was in fact frequently represented on the male side of surrealism, but on completely different terms. Surrealism being very much about desires and fears, it from the male standpoint often presents the female form as either an object (desire) or as the archetypal castrated figure (fear). In Toyen's work the female form is much more commanding. They are still absolutely about sex, but she instead speaks from the female side of desire, creating a voice that was not typically seen in surrealist art (or most art in general). Toyen also frequently depicted the male genitalia (which was much less frequently represented), often making them proportionally larger than life to other figures in the drawings, a clear commentary.
        Toyen's body of work spans from paintings to drawn illustrations to photo collage. Her drawings are what first roped me in (the first image I posted being one that has been burned into my brain, something about it just resonates with me), but her entire range of work (which literally ranges from doodles of girls dreaming about penises to more typical surrealist paintings of barren landscapes littered with strange objects) is very strong. She frequently collaborated, both with painters and poets within the surrealist movement.

I was unable to find an online collection of her work that shows the true range of her work, but for now you canclick here, google image search her, or head to the library. (and if anyone knows of a larger online representation of her work please share!).




images: c. Toyen

Andrea Marshall

        I am currently really digging Andrea Marshall's series Witch A BOOK OF BANANAS FORKS SPOONS + HEARTBREAK. Witch features self-portraiture photography, collage and painting, and involves what Marshall herself best describes in her artist statement;
"My work consists mainly of self-portraits that explore the Self in relation to traditional archetypal concepts of the nature of womanhood. I attempt to visually render this juxtaposition through a symbiotic dialogue between history and contemporary culture. Through a range of media, including both painting and photography, I examine internal psychological conflict through Personas reflecting the idealistic and tragic nature of the prototypical female. Through self-portraiture, syncretized with symbolic female Personae, I strive to connect, rather than isolate, the female experience and contribute to evolving, yet eternal, female imagery."

        Her Witch book is not only visually stunning, but wildly interesting. The recurrent imagery; bananas, the sexualized female form, birds/feathers, Egyptian and Christian imagery (the list goes on), begs the viewer to question everything they know historically about witches and their connection to the female identity. She hints to some of these answers in the title and last page (which is all text), but most are hidden within the images themselves.

        I believe the series is extremely effective, fitting her statement to a T and making me really think; about the female identity, history, current culture, symbolism. As an artist deeply interested in the female identity, I think I could learn a lot from her.

To see the full Witch book, as well as more of her work, take a look at her website.
and for a brief interview check out the bit BlackBook mag did on her.




images: andreamarshall.com