Charles Gaines
aesthetics, politics and philosophy
This week’s art selection features the work on noted conceptual artist and teacher Charles Gaines. Gainses’s work engages formulas that interrogate relationships between objective and subjective realms. Using many forms - photography, musical composition, sculpture, video, etc. - Gaines examines identity and power and the fault lines of capital’s utopia. His is some of the most engaged and ambitious work being made today.
“His work belongs to a branch of conceptual art concerned with processes and systems. The aim was to remove subjectivity from art by following self-determined rules and procedures. His breakthrough came in 1973, with his “Regression” series, in which he wrote sequential numbers in the squares of a hand-drawn grid to generate an amorphous form that grows from drawing to drawing, each generating the next. ‘One of the joys was the fact that I could experience things that I couldn’t predict, that I couldn’t anticipate.’”
Photo Credit:
Colossal,Through Monumental Sculpture of Moving Chains, Artist Charles Gaines Confronts the Enduring Legacy of American Slavery
Paula Cooper Gallery, Charles Gaines
ARTFORUM, Differing Equations: The Art of Charles Gaines
LA Times, How the dense grids of artist Charles Gaines took the ego out of art, Carolina A. Miranda
Jonathon Griffin, Charles Gaines
Wade Guyton
digital inkjet abstractions
This week’s art selection features the untitled works of Wade Guyton. Guyton uses an inkjet printer for his large paintings, letting the printers mistakes and inconsistencies arise. Initially his work was geometric, minimal and abstract; more recent offerings focus on the mundane: his studio, the daily paper, the incidental, juxtapositions of the everyday. Printed out in variations, a feedback loop that frames the process of absorbing images into the mind, examining what constitutes “representation” in our digital reality.
“Digital technology and indistinct copy-right laws have set off avalanches of artistic appropriation. But amongst bouts of nostalgia, bland remakes, reenactments, and reconstructions that mindlessly rehash old formulas and found objects, Guyton’s work stands out as a subtle reminder of the complexities and uncertainties of our time.”
Photo Credit:
Matthew Marks Gallery, Wade Guyton
Artnet, Wade Guyton
Emergent Mag, Reena Spaulings, New York City
Whitney Museum of American Art, Wade Guyton, New York City
Warwick Collection, Wade Guyton
Zabludowicz Collection, Wade Guyton
Ignant Magazine, The Work Of Art In The Age Of Compulsive Reproduction: Two Decades In The Oeuvre Of Wade Guyton, Thomas Pirot, Anna Sinofzik
Jennifer Bolande
post conceptual objects and images
For our Wednesday art post, Dennis Kane features one of his favorite artists Jennifer Bolande. Her work uses photography/ sculpture to create quietly arresting moments that examine instances around the periphery of thought. She indexes and points to fault lines of power and ideological habit. Check more of her work at her website.
“Coincident with Bolande’s conscious deployment of dichotomies is an intense concentration on the meeting places between objects, the points where two differences border and thus define themselves.
Bolande pays an almost surrealist attention to loci of simultaneous meeting and division as sites for potential transformation”
Photo Credit: jbolande.com
Quotation Credit: Art Forum, Something to Do with Jennifer Bolande, January 1989
Portrait Credit: Jennifer Bolande, Chambre D'amis
Sam Durant
Public Protest
This week’s art post features the work of Sam Durant. Durant is a multi media artist whose works focus on hierarchies of power, referencing historical moments and social acts of resistance or response. Durant’s works are often made for public display outside of art institutions and attempt a larger public discourse.
Sam Durant, Untitled (drone), 2016-2021
Sam Durant, Proposal for Public Fountain, 2021, Sadie Coles HQ, London
Sam Durant, Like, Man, I’m Tired (of Waiting), 2021
“Since the 1990s, Sam Durant has developed a research-driven artistic practice in which he dissects and reframes both dominant historical narratives and forgotten facets of our collective past...
(L)ight boxes are based on hand-drawn protest signs that the artist found in photos of street protests. By giving the personal phrases and slogans from protest movements an existence as a colourful light box, Sam Durant emphasises their necessity, and often also the humorous or utopian character of the messages.”
Photo Sources:
ArtNet, Unit London
Mousse Magazine, Sam Durant, Proposal for Public Fountain, Sadie Coles HQ, London
Unframed, Sam Durant, Like Man I’m Tired of Waiting, LACMA
ArtLead, Billboard Series #21, Sam Durant and the Art of Dialogue
Toward Freedom, Untitled (Drone), 2021
Matias Faldbakken
creative vandalism
This week’s art post features the work of Matias Faldbakken. Faldbakken’s sculptures/ combines have an absurdity to them, a dark comic theatricality and resonant gestalt. He is represented by Standard Oslo. In addition to his visual art he has written several novels and a collection of short stories.
“Faldbakken... (has an) ability to bite his own tail by making works that unite vandalism and creativity, while both celebrating and lamenting the constant commodification of rebellious acts.
More than anyone, he understands that frontal critique only reinforces the classic master-slave dialectic, and that true radicality consists of infiltrating and perverting the system from within. ”
Photo credits:
Simon Lee Gallery, London, Hong Kong
Occula, Gallery Chant Grousel, Paris
Renaissance Society, “Fear of Property” Installation, University of Chicago
Mousse Magazine, Museum Boijmans, Rotterdam
kunstkritikk, Nordic Art Review, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo
Erica Baum
photograph poetry
For the first Wednesday art post, Kane has selected the photo collage work of Erica Baum. Erica is represented by the New York gallery Bureau. Baum’s work is a quiet but intensely resonate examination of looking, fragments, slices, folds, traces. Dynamics of power enfolded in the mundane. A sly challenge to the habits and presumptions of form.
Untitled (Simbolismo), 1994, (Blackboards), gelatin silver print, 20 × 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Bureau, New York.
Erica Baum, A Methode of a Cloak, 2020, exhibition view, Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf
“Erica Baum’s photographs examine the ways we use language to classify, index, and assert knowledge. Working primarily with obsolescent media from the twentieth century—card catalogs, player piano rolls, sewing patterns—Baum isolates serendipitous interactions among fragments of text and the surrounding visual field. Her carefully disorienting framing, as well as her more active interventions, grant a poetic charge to these encounters. ”
Photo Credit: Bureau NYC
Artviewer, Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf, Germany
Quote Credit: Rajesh Parameswaran, BOMB Magazine