Erik Parker

I recently visited Erik Parker's gorgeous Williamsburg studio. 

Erik has a gift for storytelling. His expansive breadth of inventiveness creates the impression that anything can and will happen within these paintings.

The exuberant humor and the fantasy-based surrealism in Erik's paintings reminded me immediately of the Chicago Imagists. The way in which Erik utilizes the visual complexity found in the vernacular of pop culture is also reminiscent of the movement. Erik and I discussed our kinship with the Chicago Imagists and we spent some time looking at his elegant Ray Yoshida catalogue. Since I grew up in Chicago and studied under Barbara Rossi while I was at the Art Institute, I feel strongly connected to the Imagists.

The Imagists' defiant sense of autonomy seems so thoroughly Midwestern to me, now that I've spent some time living in the East Coast. Chicago's visual culture is saturated by the Imagists, and I remember always being immersed in their aesthetic, whether I was seeing Karl Wirsum's mural, PlugBug, on a daily basis, or looking at the Jim Nutts at the MCA. During lunch breaks as a student, I used to visit the hauntingly beautiful Ed Paschke, that hung, of all places, in the Modernist furniture section of the Art Institute. With Paschke's highly individualized and otherworldly palette as well as his bizarre sense of subject matter, it's interesting to consider how much of an impact he had on his most famous student and assistant, Jeff Koons.

Many of Erik's stylizations have a nostalgic quality that seems to share an affinity with the golden era of animation. However, Erik disrupts the nostalgic aspects of the imagery, by introducing bright, pulsating color as well as incorporating collage elements that reference a more recent time in the history of pop culture. By mixing references to various time periods, Erik creates an idea of time in which elements from the past and present simultaneously coexist.

All of Erik's work has a sense of rhythm and movement, even when it is not referencing animation directly. This is an edition from a series of prints that Erik has been working on. Each of the prints in this series has individual elements  and colors that separates it from all of the other prints. Each print is a one of a kind, in its own right!

Erik's work shares a history with the grotesque, which can even be traced as far back as ancient times.  During the beginning of the Renaissance, Europeans tried to emulate the neatly contrived, Apollonian tenets of Greek Classicism into their own art. Later on during the Renaissance, ancient Greek carvings were discovered in the grottoes, that entirely undermined the idea that the Greeks were only invested in Classicism, which in turn forced the Europeans to rethink their simplistic conceptions of ancient  Greek culture. The discovery of these splendidly wild and humorous carvings of animal headed beings fucking, eating, and celebrating corporeal reality defied any prescribed conventions of figuration, as well as perspective and space.  These carvings seemed to follow their own internal logic,and embraced a  Dionysian sense of excess.  The word "grotesque," was taken from the root word "grotto," and is used to describe all work that contains incantations of the chthonic. 

This is a detail from the painting below. I love the contrast between the matte and shiny paint and the way that Erik painted the water. The decision to include a vista in the upper left hand corner made me think of Titian, since he often did that in his paintings of odalisques.

This painting was still in progress when I visited Erik's studio. Notions of Utopia are conjured up in many of Erik's paintings. The cool and lonely desolation of the room is contrasted by the boundless, warm hues of paradise, that seep in and break through in the periphery. That's the most literal interpretation of this painting, it can also be viewed as a dream sequence, or as a metaphor for the self, contrasting the internal world of the individual with the external world that contains everything else. This painting has a personal, anthropomorphic quality. The room seems to be human and alive although the antiquated television, that operates like a brain, appears to be numb and detached, despite being the most specific and complex object in the painting. It seems as though the beauty of the external world  will never infiltrate the cool emptiness of the room.

Inna Babaeva

Visiting Inna's otherworldly Long Island City studio feels like stepping into another time and dimension!!

Inna's piece reminds me of those wonderful Daumier caricature sculptures, both in its playfulness and anthropomorphic grotesqueness. During my visits to the Art Institute of Chicago as a child, the Daumier sculptures were always among my favorite things in the museum's collection.

There's some serious Simulacra and Simulation going on here!! In the act of photographing Inna's image of an image, I'm perverting reality further, accessing semiotic hyperreality full on, and widening the gap even more between us and the true nature of being. Baudrillard would be overjoyed to witness this moment if he were still alive today, and especially if he happened to be guzzling down some of that choice whiskey of his!!

Inna and I discussed the idea of taking a utilitarian object and robbing it of its usefulness. Furniture legs, music stands, buckets, industrial pipes, and wine glasses are just a few of the objects that are stripped of their function and that undergo a metamorphosis in Inna's unabashedly ebullient work. She combines these objects with spray foam that she later spray paints.

Our conversation reminded me of Oscar Wilde, since he was an advocate of making useless things out of an entirely Hedonistic desire. I first read The Picture of Dorian Gray over a decade ago, and the book's unapologetic and antiauthoritarian attitude still resonates with me. The juicy descriptions in which Wilde objectifies beautiful men are also memorable and gratifying! I wrote this passage down and hung it on on my studio wall while I was still studying at the Art Institute:

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

 Inna also takes photographs of both found images and scenes of everyday life. These are stills from Godard's Pierrot le fou that she plans on using in a future project.

This is another ongoing series of sculptures that Inna has, and this body of work operates in an entirely different way conceptually from her foam sculptures. The foam takes on an expressionistic quality in its organic, boundless form, and also has a relationship to Surrealism in its unearthly and bizarre color and shape. The way in which the foam pours out of the can and resists being entirely controlled as a medium, seems to metaphorically reference the parts of life that can't be neatly categorized or understood using the faculties of reason alone.

These wood and plexiglass sculptures have more of a relationship to Minimalism and seem to be more accepting of clearly defined boundaries and parameters, in their carefully measured, hard-edged, geometric forms. 

All of the sculptures in this series are modular and can be arranged in an endless amount of ways.   

Inna's signature exuberance and lively sense of mischievousness shows up in various moves, like attaching this bicycle mirror to the sculpture. The sophisticated sense of play and non sequitur decisions imbue Inna's work with a feeling of spontaneity and fun.

Rachel Schmidhofer

Is it Christmas in March?!! It's actually Christmas all year round in Rachel's studio.

Pussy in a tree!!!

   Rachel never had Christmas trees growing up since she was raised Jewish.The cultural lens each of us looks through can effect the way we interpret the meaning behind something even as banal as a Christmas tree. The compulsion driving Rachel to paint these trees is intriguing, and her project would take on an entirely different meaning if she were Christian, but by having grown up in a different tradition, Rachel is removed and detached from the original cultural connotations of the iconography she borrows from. On the surface, these Christmas paintings seem to contain a celebratory feeling of pleasure and delight, but there is also a somber sense of an outsider looking in, just as in a Toulouse-Lautrec painting; the artist is not participating in the joviality but instead depicting it.

     Rachel's paintings reminded me of Klara Lidén's installation of discarded Christmas trees at Reena Spaulings last year. Lidén filled the entire gallery with trees that she had picked up off the streets of New York and placed a couch in the space for the viewer to breathe in the heavy smell of pine and to ruminate over the evergreen funeral ground. My friend Brent, recommended I go see that show, and it turned out to be one of the most haunting shows I saw all year. I felt uneasy being surrounded by these dying, beautiful trees that had been flippantly cut down for a few weeks of folly. How easily the entire room could have gone up in flames with a mere flick of a lighter! My thoughts surrounded the anticipation and hopes for happiness that so often go unfulfilled during the holiday season, and the resulting anticlimactic sadness after the holidays. Joy always seems to happen spontaneously, it's never anything anyone can go looking or planning for. 

    .

Rachel's objects reinforce this almost childlike sense of wonder and magic present in her paintings, which reminds me of Karen Klimnik's paintings and installations. In all of Klimnik's work the lifeless cult of reason is suspended, and the rules of fairytales are instead favored. Rachel's objects perform similarly but often contain a more surreal, and internalized logic, unlike Klimnik who references folklore, pop cultural icons, and whose work abounds in art historical references. 

Much of Rachel's work integrates rococo opulence with everyday objects. There is a welcoming populist accessibility within this all this decadence and it doesn't seem to be concerned with ivory tower exclusivity. Here, Rachel combines two separate puzzles with different images printed on them, that share the same pieces as well as amount of pieces, and creates an entirely new image out of them. Although in theory all the pieces should fit perfectly into this new puzzle, some pieces refuse to fit so seamlessly or even fit at all, just as in life.

Aside from being a clever conceptual idea, there is a potent metaphor that emerges within this series that addresses the complexities and mysteries of existence that go beyond the limitations of our own level of understanding.

This poignant sculpture was my favorite object in Rachel's studio. Rachel found this damaged lawn ornament and reassembled it. Through the act of picking up a broken and discarded object and giving it a new life, Rachel imbued the piece with heart wrenching beauty.

Joshua Abelow

The genius at work!!!

Joshua came into my life when I was still a fledgling student at Cranbrook! He quickly became an important mentor figure for me. Joshua taught me how to fly, and then immediately after, he stole all of my ideas!! When I confronted him about it in his studio, all he could say is, "Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal!" What can I say? He stole those words, too. 

Although Joshua's paintings are great in and of themselves, his highly methodical and intriguing process does add yet another dimension to the work.  There is something in the intricate systems he employs and the emphasis that he places on the importance of the idea of the painting before it is made that is redolent of Sol LeWitt.  Only, unlike Lewitt, Abelow is a one-man operation and he has no qualms about reintroducing the artist's hand once he's achieved his initial plan, allowing subtle drips to rupture the seamlessness of the hard-edged abstraction.

Joshua told me that when he was a student at Cranbrook he was very frustrated with his work and wanted to start over from scratch.  He said the best way to get started was simply to squeeze out different colors, mix them together, apply them to the canvas, and record the results.  He made many paintings by layering paint this way and filled up a number of little black notebooks with the results.  “It was very trial and error. “  After graduating in 2008, Joshua moved to Berlin and began using these notes on color to make small abstract paintings.The Berlin work culminated in a series of “gold paintings” which he told me he made because “gold is a good investment in difficult economic times.“

 René Magritte
The Subjugated Reader, 1928

Joshua bought this postcard while he was visiting the Magritte Museum in Belgium. He enjoys having it up because of the connection between Magritte's painting and the relationship to language in his own work.

These paintings are going to be part of a new installation of cell-phone number paintings titled, “Call Me Abstract.”

Mr. Smiley Face!!! Doesn't he look dashing in his top hat? How can he be so hateful lookin so stylish, especially with all them endorphins coursing through him?! I love how it looks like Josh, painted Mr. Smiley Face using ketchup and mustard! The smiley face is a lot like God, in that if the smiley face did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Harvey Ball invented the smiley face in 1963, and he was paid $45 for it. This is yet another example of an artist’s ideas being shamelessly stolen by a certain SCHMABELOW!

Life is Art and Art is Life. Do the paintings inform the Cheerios or do the Cheerios inform the paintings? The way in which the separation between Joshua's art and his own life often seems indistinguishable reminds me a lot of John Dewey's Art As Experience. Dewey believed that experience is our most important way of engaging with the world and he was against any attempts at elevating art above every day reality. If John Dewey were alive today I imagine that he would be a huge fan of Joshua's paintings, and that the two would become best buds!

Joshua also runs Art Blog Art Blog, which he updates daily. Thanks to his fresh perspective as well as his encyclopedic breadth of knowledge about art, his blog regularly draws a huge and growing following. BLOG HIM HERE

DOWN WITH YOUR ART!!!

  No, really.  

This fantastic little painting is by Gene Beery, whom Joshua interviewed recently.  Before our studio visit, Joshua suggested we do some role-playing and read the interview aloud.  Joshua played the role of Joshua Abelow and I played the role of Gene Beery. Since we are both such great actors, it was an exceptional performance!!

Two relics from the past!  This beautiful ceramic jar is a birthday present I bought Joshua while I was camping down the Pacific Coast Highway with my friend Julie over five years ago. The jar possessed a certain je nais se quoi that immediately reminded me of Joshua.  It was VERY expensive, but Schmabelow is totally worth it!! The detail of the painting in the background is a nude painted in 1995 when Joshua was eighteen.  Notice the striking similarities between the two works of art!!

Joshua's drawings are so different from his paintings, but both are indicative of his methodical and unconventional mind. The drawings are organic and more intuitive than his highly systematic, geometric paintings. Although he starts out with a specific intention in both mediums, the one-shot process he follows in the drawings imbues them with a sense of spontaneity and risk. He never erases, so if a drawing isn't successful, he just throws it away.

Pictured above, we have the ultimate orgy; A couple of sexy ladies, Jackson Pollock, and some dapper gentleman wearing a top hat, a pipe, and a hard-on!

Joshua's recent drawings have become more layered and surreal. There's an ebullient energy springing from his expressive line that makes these drawings very enjoyable to experience first hand. The infectious pleasure and amusement that Joshua derives in making his work also makes these drawings so rewarding to look at.

Melissa Brown

Where it's at!!

Melissa has an ongoing series of rock paintings. During our visit, she expressed her interest in choosing quotidian objects as her subject matter. The way in which Melissa approaches painting seems to align itself more philosophically with a historically Eastern attitude, since the Judeo-Christian ethos does not traditionally embrace mundane reality, despite the fact that banality has become a prevalent  theme in contemporary art. When James Joyce wrote Ullysses, chronicling the events of one ordinary day in Dublin, it caused a revolution in Occidental thought.   

Here is an excerpt from William Barrett's study of Existentialism, Irrational Man, explaining this shift in thought:

       The deflation, or flattening out of values in Western art does not necessarily indicate an ethical nihilism. Quite the contrary; in opening our eyes to the rejected elements of existence, art may lead us to a more complete and less artificial celebration of the world. In literature, again, the crucial example is Joyce's Ullyses. It was not a literary critic but a psychologist, C. G. Jung, that perceived that this book was non-Western in Spirit... For Ulysses breaks with the whole tradition of Western sensibility and Western aesthetics in showing each small object of Bloom's day- even the objects in his pocket, like a cake of soap- as capable at certain moments of taking on a transcendental importance- or in being, at any rate, equal in value to those objects to which men usually attribute value.

I first attempted reading Ullysses about a decade ago, but I wasn't quite feeling it, and didn't get passed the first few pages despite the fact that I recognize it's greater philosophical and societal worth. Perhaps I should give it another shot? Past a certain point one is expected to be able tie one's shoes and to have read Ullysses, although in much of Academia you will be judged more harshly for not having read Joyce than not knowing how to tie your own shoelaces. There's this great Mark Twain quote, which is, "A classic is something everybody wants to have read, but no one wants to read." 

 Check out how Melissa's phat rock made my mani pop!!!

I noticed that many of Melissa's paintings are structured in a way that an object or tree blocks the viewer from having an immediate point of entry into the painting. Melissa talked about how she began composing her paintings in this way, after thinking about the way in which Konrad Witz structured The Pietà, in the Frick. She also explained that her favorite parts of Medieval paintings, are the landscapes, which are typically treated as just a backdrop, so her solution was to remove the figure altogether and focus on the landscape. Although Melissa's paintings reference art historical practices aesthetically, they deviate from the ideological aspects of European painting traditions. This painting especially derails the anticipated format, since it seems to share more of a relationship with portraiture rather than landscape, despite the absence of the figure. Historically, in Eastern painting, nature was depicted as being infinite and endless and the human being was represented as small and inconsequential. We see this in Fan Kuan's traditional Chinese paintings from the tenth century as well as in the much later 19th century Japanese prints of Hiroshige and Hokusai. In European art practices, the reverse was true for hundreds of years, the human was always shown as the most important and powerful being in the universe, and nature was treated merely as a decorative background meant to compliment the queen's magnificent wardrobe and jewels. In our current milieu, globalization has erased and blended these diametrically opposed tendencies towards pictorial representation. Another factor that has contributed to the breakdown of being able to assess cultural influences and tendencies as easily in art is the way in which contemporary art practices borrow freely from all available sources. It also seems glaringly obvious, but necessary to point out that the internet has played a key role in diluting traditional cultural influences.

Computers have completely altered how we perceive pictorial representation. Melissa comments on Computer-mediated reality, using pathos and humor, in these paintings of laptops with floating screensavers that are blocking the viewer from actual, physical nature.  Although technology grants us the luxury of accessing endless knowledge in the matter of seconds, it also has the potential to alienate us from others, our selves, and even our own environment. Being abstracted from our own lives and the true nature of being isn't exactly a new phenomenon or a sole by product of technology.
Barrett begins Irrational Man by quoting Kierkegaard, which I have quoted before on this blog, since it's such a powerful parable, and one that I think about often:

The story is told (by Kierkegaard) of the absent-minded man so abstracted from his own life that he hardly knows he exists until, one fine morning, he wakes up to find himself dead.

Steve Jobs offered a solution to Kierkegaard's conundrum during his commencement speech at Stanford, when he said, Live every day like your last, because one day it will be. Many people flippantly repeat, "Live every day like your last," but they don't really mean it. After a while it becomes yet another clichéd, weightless expression that causes more aggravation than anything. By adding, "because one day it will be," Jobs' pithy mantra adds a sense of actuality. It's much easier said than done, but considering the alternative, living life fully and fearlessly appears to be the only option.

Melissa collects money from many time periods and cultures. She also uses it as source material. I took a picture of Saddam, since it was the bill that resonated with me the most. It was such a strange and disgusting day when he was executed, the feelings I felt then were akin to the way Plath described the Rosenberg trial in The Bell Jar. We talked about the brutality of that day, and how humanity really hasn't progressed much ethically since the times of the Romans. At least the Romans were more honest with their penchant for blood thirst. Feeding Christians to lions kept them entertained for hours!!! Considering our ADHD and social-networking addled brains, it would take a lot more than that to keep contemporary Americans engrossed. 

By painting the manhole,  Melissa once again takes an everyday, overlooked object. There is a certain tenderness to how she anthropomorphizes the manhole and  imbues it with meaning. Although Melissa's painting has more of a sense of contemporary urgency, I was reminded of Roger Brown in the way this painting conveys the sense of mystery that surrounds urban life.