Author: jameswagner

Haeri Yoo Untitled 2006 acrylic and gouache on canvas 12″ x 12″ [installation view]

While I was in Thomas Erben‘s gallery yesterday I couldn’t help thinking about the fact that I was looking at the work of one established artist, one just beginning to be recognized and sought, and a third who has hardly been seen at all. Only while I’m writing this now do I also notice that each of these artists is a woman.
The artist who is becoming increasingly visible is Chitra Ganesh, and she deserves even more than all the goodies that have been said about her. The underknown artist is Haeri Yoo, whose small drawings Barry and I first encountered in the Queens International two years ago.
I had not seen anything of hers on canvas until yesterday, but if this very beautiful small figured “landscape” is representative of what she can do, I expect my earlier enthusiasm to me more than just renewed if she contiues to work in this medium.

Dona Nelson Untitled 2004 acrylic on canvas 69″ x 80″ [installation view]

[detail]


Dona Nelson Walnut Way 1999 charcoal on canvas 88″ x 106″ [installation view]

[detail]


Dona Nelson Gaucho Groucho 2005 acrylic and cheesecloth on canvas 88″ x 106″ [installation view]

[detail]

I think it’s a great show. I went into Thomas Erben’s gallery this afternoon pretty much ignorant of the work of Dona Nelson, although I knew enough to realize that was a lamentable admission. Nearly an hour later I left her brilliant installation, “Brain Stain“, very impressed, also thoroughly charmed, and wanting to know more.
The work could speak for itself in any environment, but I have to say something for the installation: It manages a huge success of its own, balancing the paintings in the way normally only a good museum show can, while accomodating the fortunate visitor’s access to both sides of two of her extraordinary double-sided canvases.
Five years ago Roberta Smith wrote in her review of the artist’s solo show at Cheim & Read that “Ms. Nelson is painting up a storm.” The end of her last paragraph, “. . . these works suggest that the dead horse of modernism still has plenty of kick.” could have been written for the current show.
I was told that Nelson was fully responsible for the installation herself, so perhaps I should ask her forgiveness for giving the priority of location here to the untitled red (very red) painting hanging in the project room behind the main space.
Check the gallery’s press release for more about the artist’s technique and some “performance” notes, but if you are in the New York area and you find what you see here the least bit seductive you really should visit 26th Street in person.

UPDATE: The artist who created the object has finally been identified on a label attached to the window (see the credit immediately below the image here), and it seems that the window is now the responsibility of something called Art Production Fund. Some geometric abstractionist cognescenti (I confess: not including me) will immediately notice that the title of Anthony’s piece has a history.


Anthony James New York City II 2004 [installation view]

I like it, but I have no idea who did it. This piece has been installed inside the Kantor/Feuer Window on 10th Avenue since Tuesday at least, but there’s no label and the website hasn’t been kept updated.
The box, punctured in a number of places for the passage of a number of colorful neon tubes, is constructed of a better grade of plywood and lined with a reflective material, perhaps mylar.

later the visitors did actually “step over the body bags” to reach the backyard bar

See Barry for the word on Susan Dessel’s first review. The writer seems to have gotten it just right, and this account of a Williamsburg show appears in the middle of a recap of Chelsea openings last week. Goodness.

Alejandro Diaz Unknown Artists at Unheard of Prices 2006 purple neon sign 24″ x 36″ [installation view]

I’m drooling.
Alejandro Diaz attached this [sad/happy?] image to an email greeting this morning and I couldn’t resist broadcasting it further. It also gives me a device for reminding myself and anyone reading this that the message of this piece is still valid, and in a new age of hype and price inflation it’s more exciting than ever.
There’s plenty of “affordable”, cheap or even free art by “emerging”, underknown or even secret artists still out there waiting to be discovered and picked up by intrepid patrons and impecunious collectors. I don’t know the price of this one, but it’s an edition, so at least the cool message could potentially keep several people warm.
More on this subject, including “less than the price of a movie ticket”, here and throughout the archives of this site.
More on Diaz here, here and here.

[image from the artist]

Chie Fuyeki The Nature of How We See 2005 acrylic, mixed media, paper/wood 96″ x 72″ [installation view]

[detail]

I’m not sure when I last walked into Mary Boone on 24th Street, (these days much of my decision-making about worthy gallery stops has to resemble the ordinary dilemmas confronting emergency workers in administering triage), but I have to admit I was happy about our visit yesterday. Chie Fueki’s paintings, in a show titled “Lucky, Star, Super, Hero“, manage to be both scary and cheery at the same time, while broadcasting the kind of rich textured detail usually seen only inside the glass case of a renaisance treasury.
I have to admit that the subjects she chooses were responsible for at least some of my interest.
Remember the Bill Maynes!


Chie Fueki Toward and Away 2005 acrylic, mixed media, paper/wood 86″ x 60″ [installation view]

[detail of “OUR BACKYARD: A Cautionary Tale” as it was being installed yesterday]

“They’re wrapped in the material used to make sandbags. The sandbags always arrive when it’s too late, don’t they?” Susan C. Dessel was answering a friend’s question about the outer layer of each of the pieces in her installation at Dam, Stuhltrager while she arranged the twelve differently-sized figures on the newly-sodded lawn behind the gallery building.
She bent over each wrapped figure, softly talking to the silent shapes and tenderly placing and positioning them (as family units?) according to a plan she had obviously been thinking about for a very long time.
Dessel had been with all of them from their birth. They were born in her creative mind and then throughout a very hot summer in her warm studio she had spent long hours shaping fully-formed individual bodies from the synthetic “clay” of the modern sculptor’s bucket. In the end, like the countless victims of the hideous unnatural disasters they call up from our conscious or unconscious, individual or collective guilt, they were wrapped in blankets, sealed in plastic and laid back in our yard.
There the beauty of these veiled figures partially confounds the horror of their significance.
How does an artist work in the environment we have created? Dessel’s sensitive installation invokes no specific wars; no specific catastrophes, whether the result of criminal negligence or deliberate policy; and no specific crusades embarked upon by an ignorant, manipulated and frightened populace, but it is clear these bodies do not represent natural deaths and that they have to be seen as our friends, neighbors and relations. Their presence here, in this very ordinary, even universal “backyard”, speaks to the continuing personal responsibilty we share for their deaths. Even an artist cannot make them disappear, but a humble moral and bold political awakening now would mean that the dead could be given a proper burial, and it would shut down the slaughterhouses which threaten the living.

In reply to an email request I made earlier today, Susan responded within minutes with this wonderful description of her construction proces:

For the adults I began with the basic, but generic, form of female and male using mannequins as my models (three female, one male). The kids were made totally from freehand and for them I used cement and fiber glass bits.
I thought of each body as a representative individual, i.e., I did not give them names – I always bond with my pieces. The process is very important to me, and over the time that the whole piece takes from idea to research to selection of materials to actually making the work the work becomes a part of me. I think that most artists experience something similar.
I thought of each as a body type representing a human condition in a general situation. I made more females than males to represent the fact that it is the innocent (i.e., non-military, or what our government refers to as collateral) that are so often among the dead.
The forms (bodies) are made out of many layers of plaster gauze. (this is gauze already permeated with plaster that you dip into water to activate). I made each figure in two halves and then wrapped the gauze around the halves to create the whole.
I altered the forms after the initial body form was made (i.e., the first two layers or so of the gauze). For instance one woman is pregnant, another is fat, the others have slightly different bust sizes, arm and/or feet form/direction, body language. This is the same with the men, e.g. one of the men is emaciated. The infant, child, and adolescent are more based on size to represent stages in life than a particular body type or situation.
When the bodies were dry (you do recall the environmental challenges during the time I was working. UGH!), I covered each with two coats of marine shellac. This is for exterior use, primarily on boats. In particular I did this because the installation is an outdoor installation and it is sure to precipitate over the course of the exhibit.
This also eased my uncomfortableness with the fact that the plaster layers were basically white (as in caucasian). I wanted these forms to represent humanity not people of a particular background. So while none have dark skin the effect of the shellac was to turn them to shades that were creamy to light brown.
Also, as I do not believe that any of us is perfect (in any way. and how boring that would be, no?) there are lumps and drips and bumps, such as we each have.
The bodies that we see in print and the electronic media are wrapped in blankets and then sometimes in plastic. I selected medical emergency blankets that are used by EMS teams around the country. The color – amber, yellow, or whatever – represents to me caution and that was appropriate for the essence of the piece. Also the blankets are poly with about a 1/16″ layer of foam on the backside. The blankets are wrapped around the whole body and the edges hand sewn into place.
I decided to use sand bag tarps for the outer layer, because of the elements over the duration of the exhibit and because it is fitting for dead bodies that are to remain unidentified and in the public eye.
Sand bags are usually used when a disaster has already started (to shore up the banks of a body of water, etc.) and often do not work to prevent a disaster. Thus it felt like a good fit. These were also hand sewn to close the openings and tied (self ties, i.e., also sand bag tarp material) in the fashion that dead bodies are tied. The size of the three non-adults is emphasized by the outer wrapping that hangs below (the feet) and above (the head) of the actual body form.
For a dignity which is very important and often not heeded, the outer covering is an attempt to protect the body when it is no longer able to protect itself, or even try to.