James Wagner

Jesse Burke Pink & Black 2005 C-prints detail view of installation


Jesse Burke Pink & Black 2005 C-prints detail view of installation

The two images above are elements of a larger work by Jesse Burke which we encountered while in Rhode Island last week.
While we were having dinner in Providence we met several young artists who were dining together at the next table. They all had some connection to the Rhode Island School of Design, and before we left the city we visited that school’s installation of work by artists who had just completed its graduate program. There we encountered this piece by Jesse Burke, one of the people we had spoken to at the restaurant. We thought his Pink and Black was the strongest work in the entire show. I will be very surprised if he isn’t adopted by a good New York gallery very soon.
The complete work we saw at the RISD Museum is shown below.


Jesse Burke Pink & Black 2005 C-prints

The artist’s statement:

The idea of masculinity is so incredibly fragile, so sought after, because of what it stands for, because of the history of men. A delicate balance exists between the heroic ideal of masculinity – strength, endurance, toughness – and the true, fragile reality of men as seen through my eyes. My work is an autobiographically driven investigation into the notions of masculine identity and the presence of vulnerability and sensitivity that acts as forces against the mythology of male dominance and power.
My notions of what it means to be a man are romantic. I believe an innate part of our psyche needs us to be the Iron John of Robert Bly, yet we are responding to that primal urge in a new way. We have grown into a new fragility. We identify and illuminate within ourselves what it means to be men through the examples we see in our families, in the media, and in our peers. We are bombarded by images defining what it means to be male, and we are helpless but to give in part way to these campaigns. We are fragile.
I photograph my life and the lives of the men in my social and family circles in an attempt to understand from where our ideas of masculinity originate. As the author I act as an interpreter of a specific culture and mythology. I am most drawn to the moments when we are vulnerable or emasculated; where there is a presence of a rupture or wound inflicted in some way, whether it be physical, emotional, or metaphorical. I employ concepts such as male bonding and peer influence, masculine rites and rituals, homosocial desire, physical exertion, and our connections to one another as well as the landscape that we interact within to expose these instances.

[image at the bottom from Jesse Burke]

Jürgen Mayer H. In Heat detail of room-size installation/painting


Alex Schweder Lovesick Room detail of room-size installation

I’d want to do a post on this show even if the images weren’t so spectacular, and I now have an additional reason to do so: Only tonight, as I read the press release while typing these lines, did I learn that this is the last exhibition for Henry Urbach Architecture in the current space (no further information, and the gallery site is “under construction”). Henry is a very special gallerist; I hope we will soon be pleasently surprised with the announcement of his next chapter.
Both artists in the current show are architects who have worked both here and in Europe. On 26th Street this month Mayer H. has built a three-dimensional painting which incorporates all six planes of the gallery and which includes seating as well. Some of the surfaces lose color with body contact, however fleeting. Schweder has covered the walls of the adjacent gallery space with “striped wallpaper that emits a delicious, cake-like odor.” In a recess on one wall a small monitor projects a moving endoscopic image, suggesting that the visitor is located both inside and outside of this fragrant architectural body.

David Ratcliff Embroidery 2005 acrylic on canvas 72″ x 66″


David Ratcliff Floatation 2005 acrylic on canvas 72″ x 96″

The show was over even before we got home on Saturday after visiting it for the first time, so I can’t blame my current indisposition for this belated encomium.
I thought David Ratcliff’s recent show at team was absolutely beautiful, and I didn’t even think of Warhol until someone else brought up the name.
I also had not yet had the advantage of information the gallery supplied about Ratcliff’s inspirations and his process. From the press release:

David Ratcliff’s first solo exhibition takes as its title a line from Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho. Ratcliff’s compendium paintings share with Ellis something of the elegant formal violence that seemed the only way to give voice to the decade that most relished acquisition for acquisition’s sake. As a matter of fact, Walead Beshty, the artist and writer, has called Ratcliff’s new works “1980’s history paintings.”
. . .
Ratcliff, like Ellis, is fond of lists, allowing the gathering together of signs to do the work of cultural critique. In a sense, the collecting together of material is as crucial as the manner in which it is deployed.

For his imagery Ratcliff builds his own stencil cartoons on his computer and then prints them onto paper which he cuts out and attaches to the surface of a black-painted canvas. He chooses a single vibrant color for each piece and sprays the surface. The wet paint destroys the stencil and leaves the edges of the images somewhat less than precise.

[images from team gallery]