Hasta La Ideas

Frank Yamrus’s self portraits take inspiration from a midlife crisis

Debuting a series of self portraits at NYC’s Clamp Gallery today, Frank Yamrus returns from a photographic hiatus after several years of soul searching from out behind the camera. “I Feel Lucky” marks the photographer’s response to his mid-life crisis, reproducing significant moments from his life in an exploration of faith, relationships, mortality, photography and health. Reveling in the changing lines of his face and facing demons of his past, Yamrus creates a thoroughly personal examination of his life to date.

Many of the themes from the series are explained in a brutally honest essay that accompanies the exhibition book. Yamrus admits hitting a creative wall in the years leading up to this show, feeling consumed by his photographic work. Accompanying this shift was the marked change in his appearance, from his jowls—which he associates with his father—to his expanding midsection. Rather than shirking these shortcomings, Yamrus prints them in high definition for the world to see.

Sexuality is a recurring theme in the photographs, building off the success of his “Rapture” series. Critical moments like Yamrus’s last female relationship; moments with Frank, his partner of 30 years; and his thoughts on parenthood are among the featured moments. While he isn’t a parent, Yamrus recalls a pregnancy scare with an old girlfriend and his role as an uncle as influential factors on his personal development and his transition to maturity.

The images play between reality and fiction, at once playfully spontaneous and highly staged. True to the experience of memory, his constructions are partly informed by past events, filled in by his own imagination. Spurred by the difficulty of aging, the collection becomes a celebration of his life to date, full of instances that reaffirm and validate his many stages.

Clamp Gallery

16 February – 24 March, 2012

521-531 West 25th Street

New York, NY 10001

All images courtesy of Frank Yamrus and the Clamp Art Gallery

Two exhibitions explore a legendary New York artist’s fight for linguistic liberation

The character of Rammellzee is one of the most compelling to emerge from the NYC street culture scene of the late 1970s and ’80s. The Queens native began his career tagging the side of A train cars in his home borough and later moved into the budding hip-hop scene, where he emerged as an influential lyricist. Rammellzee’s obsession with futurism and linguistics led him to establish the eponymous persona, at times referred to as “The Equation.” A duo of upcoming exhibitions at the MoMA and The Suzanne Geiss Company explore the work of the reclusive artist, his manifestos and the science fiction-influenced culture that he embodied.

Created over the course of 14 years, “The Letter Racers” sculptures are on view in NYC for the first time. They represent the artist’s manifestos “Iconoclast Panzerism” and “Gothic Futurism,” two works written in Rammellzee’s idiosyncratic language. The written and visual works explore the slavery and corruption of language and its liberation through the artist’s own work.

The complex theory behind “The Letter Racers” has to do with the freedom of language from its historical fetters. As Rammellzee writes, “In the 14th century the monks ornamented and illustrated the manuscripts of letters. In the 21st and 22nd century the letters of the alphabet through competition are now armamented for letter racing and galactic battles. This was made possible by a secret equation know as THE RAMMELLZEE.”

Playing with metaphysical concepts in the physical world, Rammellzee used found objects from the city streets to create the sculptures. A collection of perfume caps, spray can triggers and other small detritus comprise 52 “letter racers,” armed for linguistic and galactic warfare. Witnessing the series as a whole lends insight into the man behind Rammellzee’s self-made masks as well as the impact of street culture on the American dialect.

Two years after his premature death, The Suzanne Geiss Company is exhibiting “Rammellzee: The Equation, The Letter Racers” from 8 March to 21 April 2012. At the same time, the MoMA will present a few pieces from “The Letter Racers” as part of the “Print/Out” exhibition starting 19 February 2012.

The studies that inform Arne Quinze’s monumental installations

Best known for massive, vibrant wood canopies installed in metropolitan locations, Arne Quinze presents “My Home, My House, My Stilthouse“, a collection of smaller works that helps to explain his larger undertakings. On view now through 31 March 2012 at the Vicky David Gallery in NYC, the new pieces explore themes of escapism, order and voyeurism. The exhibition gives a fascinating glimpse inside the quiet studio work that underpins Quinze’s precariously balanced structures.

While many see his work as chaotic, Quinze is quick to correct. “I don’t believe in chaos,” he says. “There is absolutely no chaos. There is only structure. I don’t believe in chaos in life.” His work is a constant building, whether that be structures or relationships, and it seeks a democracy in art that confronts and challenges. As people build fences and walls to keep things out, stilt houses to keep things below, Quinze seeks to restructure the world in a manner that is open and engaging.

Lamenting the shortage of markets, squares and other places of interaction, Quinze aims to force the issue through public art. “Today we live in a world where everything goes very fast. People are not used to saying ‘hi’ in the streets.” The victory of his work, he explains, is inspiring a dialogue: “They have a kind of openness in themselves, they have a smile, they have something to share, something to communicate with each other. For a moment they forget who they are and they communicate so much easier with each other.”

If the large works explore interpersonal interaction, the studies encourage an interface with the artist himself. “My Safe Garden” is a work enclosed in glass and backed by a large mirror. At once inspecting the work and becoming part of it, the viewer is meant to feel a connection to the locked-away corners of Quinze’s imagination. This is only possible to an extent. As he explains, “I give more questions than answers because the safe secret garden is very personal. I will not tell you what is happening in my safe secret garden, but you can be like a voyeur.”

The signature bright vermilion hue of Quinze’s work, he notes, is a color of contrast. As blood, it is both life and death; as fire, both warmth and burning; in nature, both attraction and warning. The majority of the artist’s works are constructed from wood, a “warm” material that gives flexibility and strength to his technically complicated installations. While working with a small team and city engineers, Quinze hand-builds small models to plan each project. The result is then rendered on a computer and adjusted to accommodate structural considerations.

Quinze sees his art originating from the “safe secret garden”, a concept essential to his works. For him, it marks the deepest place a person can go, one that is often hidden from the rest of the world. This theme fits with the city installations, inspiring openness and communication.

“The studio is what is really happening in my mind—my safe secret garden,” explains Quinze. “And I think from my safe secret garden I create my own world, my own vision of how I perceive, how I absorb the world and how I want to create.” Mapping his own obsessions, Quinze uses elements of these experimental pieces when thinking about how to confront viewers in his installations. Invariably, the audience is transported into his vision, forced from their own consciousness to engage with that of the artist.

My Home, My House, My Stilthouse

2 February – 31 March 2012

Vicky David Gallery

522 W. 23rd Street

New York, NY 10011

All images courtesy of the Vicky David Gallery and Arne Quinze Studio.

Standout films and documentaries from this year’s film festival

This year’s Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, presented the requisite set of features and documentaries with the not-so-surprising general consensus that the smaller, independent works transcended the generally lackluster star-studded blockbusters. Whether speaking to current issues that plague the American conscience or shedding light on new innovators, each film we saw or heard about felt unique to 2012. We’ve selected a combination of documentaries and narratives that stood out and set a tone for this year’s new ideas and political issues.

Arbitrage

Nicholas Jarecki’s financial thriller Arbitrage premiered on Saturday. The film presents a novel perspective of the financial crisis through amiable hedge fund executive Robert Miller, played by Richard Gere, as he struggles to cover up a series of his crimes. In spite of Miller’s problems—cooked books, multi-million dollar debts, a fed-up mistress and a suspicious wife—he’s able to talk his way out of almost every conflict and, most impressively, he ultimately charms the audience. Jarecki leaves us wondering whether we might make the same choices in Miller’s position—a tack that filmmakers don’t usually employ when examining Wall Street. Jarecki explains, “I didn’t want to do a Bernie Madoff story because I had heard something Madoff said in jail: ‘Fuck my victims. I carried them for 25 years. Now I’m doing 125.’ To me, those were just the words of a sociopath, and I thought that was too limited of a character.”

Jarecki collaborated with cinematographer Yorick LeSaux (I Am Love) and composer Cliff Martinez (Drive) to build momentum through landmark locations of NYC’s financial world including the Sherry Netherland and Four Seasons hotels and the GM building. Nate Parker and Sundance alum Brit Marling perform on par with their superstar co-stars Gere, Susan Sarandon and Tim Roth.

Finding North

The documentary Finding North premiered on Sunday, offering an eye-opening tale of hunger in America on the heels of its sister film Food Inc. Finding North defines America’s problem not as food scarcity, but as “food insecurity”—that is, when one does not know from where one’s next meal will come. This condition, which one half of Americans face today, leads to the purchase of processed junk food and cheap carbohydrates, turning obesity into a close cousin of starvation. The film was helmed by Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush, with supporting star power by Jeff Bridges and Silverbush’s husband, chef Tom Colicchio. Cinematographer and Sundance alum Dan Gold follows the subjects through their daily life, searching for the source of their next meal. The strong pop score by T-Bone Burnett and The Civil Wars adds a unique emotionality to the film.

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

Besides the two features we caught, there were several titles drawing buzz throughout the festival. Reports abounded of audiences being driven to tears by the intensely revealing documentary, Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present. During the spring 2010 show at the MoMA, performance artist Marina Abramovic would sit for hours on end inviting audience members to sit down across from her and stare. The lauded film traces Abramovic’s quest to “archive” her art by imparting her performances to younger artists, and her heartbreaking love affair with fellow artist Ulay.

Indie Game: The Movie

The documentary Indie Game: The Movie focuses on several independent video game artists as they work for years on a single project outside the confines of a major developer. Launched in May 2010 as a Kickstarter project, first-time filmmakers James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajote single-handedly produced, shot, directed and edited the film, picking up the award for cinema editing in the festival’s grand jury vote.

Our latest favorite music for avoiding the outdoors

As winter sputters along in New York, we’re finding plenty of reasons to be homebodies —an activity that calls for the appropriate soundtrack. Like Atlas Sounds’ opener “The Shakes,” some of the best music for the season seems engineered for playing on vinyl, a choice that helps conjure warmth on even the coldest, darkest nights. We also included some cheerful songs, perfect for the intimacy of always being indoors, and a few rebellious shouts (“Yella Diamonds” by Ricky Rozay, Waka Flocka and Ludacris on “Rich and Flexin'”) to get you amped for work when you’d rather be snuggling. Remember, you have to be ready to be reborn come spring.

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