Hasta La Ideas

Seven artists tackle organizational and cultural systems

An innovative group exhibition, “Systemic” at Carolina Nitsch Project Room tasked seven artists to submit work representative of their relationship to process and organization. The result is a mixed bag of takes on systems and structures that range from the mathematical to the organic. Each personal approach has implications for collective behavior, with the exhibition functioning as a kind of societal meditation on the way we process our surroundings.

We recognized E.V. Day‘s “Pollinator” from Art Basel, and her three-dimensional reflective sculptures of mirrored flower organs held up the playful, free-form end of the organizational spectrum. Richard Dupont presents the strangely appealing “Head Head”, made from solid cast polyurethane resin. Dupont embedded the larger sculpture with masks cast from his own face as well as masks of random celebrities—ranging from Leonard Nimoy to Beethoven—that were sourced from the Internet.

Within the cast head, Dupont included aged epoxy rapid prototypes of himself and his wife as well as two antique glass heads. The work was especially interesting in the context of the show, providing a physical representation of mankind’s organizational system in real space. Dupont’s use of biography and pop culture in the masks created a narrative of memory and storytelling that informed other works within the exhibition.

Also of note are Tauba Auerbach‘s die-cut paper sculptures. Completely collapsable, “[2, 3]” is a series of giant pop-up books that unfold into wild geometric forms and can be closed to become books at any point. Another geometric work, “Spiral (for LB)” by Alyson Shotz is a life-sized hanging sculpture inspired by Louise Bourgeois’ “Spiral Woman”. The sculpture’s reflective surface plays with light in the space, changing according to day and season.

A floor-to-ceiling woodcut print comes courtesy of Aaron Spangler. Titled “Christian Separatist Home Birth”, the piece is constructed from basswood panels that were sourced from northwestern Minnesota, where the artist lives. Adjoining this piece was “Speech Bubble” by Jürgen Drescher, an amorphous silver-plated sculpture that distorts the viewer’s reflection. Spencer Finch exhibited “The River That Flows Both Ways”, a sequence of handmade paper panels that show the change in color of the Hudson River throughout the day.

“Systemic” is on view at Carolina Nitsch Project Room through 11 August 2012.

Carolina Nitsch Project Room

534 West 22nd Street

New York, NY 10011

London calling. From left, BT Artboxes by Gerry Judah, Rob and Nick Carter, sculptor duo the DnA Factory, and, below, Benjamin Shine. (Courtesy BT)

When it comes to classics of British design, few objects rival Giles Gilbert Scott’s telephone kiosk. Immortalized in forms ranging from a popular series of UK postage stamps to an America’s Next Top Model photo shoot, the red telephone box known as the K6—whipped up by Scott in 1935 to commemorate King George V‘s Silver Jubilee—has been reimagined in whimsical full-size replicas that are scattered about London through July 18. Peter Blake, Zaha Hadid, Philip Treacy, Nina Campbell, and some 70 others artists and designers were up to the task of creating “ArtBoxes” for the project, sponsored by BT to raise money for ChildLine. Some interesting themes emerged: fashion designer Julien Macdonald and singer-songwriter MM both opted to cover their boxes in butterflies, while Ian Ritchie and coin-loving Jane Morgan went straight for the copper. Zandra Rhodes had something more precious in mind and ended up with a “Fantastic Golden Wiggle Pagoda.” Bert Gilbert transformed her phone box into a white padded cell, and Benjamin Shine‘s similarly buttoned-up approach (pictured) invites would-be callers to sit a spell on a red Chesterfield. Think one of these would look smashing in your living room? The ArtBoxes will hit the block later this month through a partnership between eBay and Sotheby’s.

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Artist Esther Stocker has built a disjointed grid of black blocks across the floor, walls and ceiling of Z33 – House for Contemporary Art in Hasselt, Belgium.

The arrangement of the blocks suggests a grid that’s only half visible, leaving the viewer to mentally piece together the remaining elements.

‘Based on a Grid’ is part of Z33′s current exhibition ‘Mind the System, Find the Gap’, in which more than 30 international artists offer their interpretation on the idea of gaps in the system.

The exhibition continues until 30 September 2012.

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Here’s some more about the exhibition:

‘Based on a Grid’ , commission 2012 – Esther Stocker In ‘Based on a Grid’ (2012),

Esther Stocker creates a spatial system from a series of black painted wooden blocks in the entrance hall of the Z33 exhibition building. The visitor is drawn into the installation, as it were, and is challenged by the system, the grid that is there but not immediately visible. For Stocker, the system is implied as much by its gaps as it is by its contours. But do we want to look for the system or are we happy to lose ourselves in the chaos of scattered elements drifting apart? A decision which according to Jan Verwoert, contributing editor at Frieze Magazine and freelance author, depends on the position one takes or is willing to take with regards to ordering structures. He therefore concludes: “Using abstraction as a medium, [Esther Stocker] formulates a critical position with respect to the authority of ordering structures.”

‘Mind the System, Find the Gap’ is this year’s summer exhibition at Z33 – House for Contemporary Art. More than 30 international artists seek out the gaps in the system.

Our society is governed by all sorts of systems and structures that organise and steer life. No system, however, whether political, judicial, economical, socio-cultural or spatial, can comprise life in its entirety. Every system has gaps, leaks and ambiguities.

The artists in the exhibition Mind the System, Find the Gap seek out these gaps. They set forth from this intermediate position to unveil, circumvent or criticise ruling systems and structures.

‘Mind the System, Find the Gap’ does not proffer an overly simplified critique on the notion of systems and structuring principles, but aims to seek out its complexity.

For the past few years, strong thematic exhibitions on societal issues have been Z33’s trademark. It is Z33’s ambition to challenge the visitor to look at the day-to-day reality with a different set of eyes, as do the artists in ‘Mind the System, Find the Gap’.

June 3 – September 30 2012
Z33 – House for Contemporary Art
Zuivelmarkt 33
3500 Hasselt
Belgium

Look up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! Yup, it’s a plane, and it’s slowly turning somersaults all summer. This mesmerizing mechanical marvel, “How I Roll,” a new work by artist Paola Pivi, is the latest project of the Public Art Fund, which has installed the engineless six-seater in Central Park’s Doris C. Freedman Plaza on the corner of 60th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York. It will be spinning slowly there through July 26.

Born in Milan and now based in Anchorage, Alaska, Pivi is fascinated with industrial machines, particularly when they are removed from their usual settings. Before getting rolling with the Piper Seneca, she created works the featured a tractor-trailer turned on its side and an upside-down helicopter. (The artist swears that she had no involvement with the beaching of the Costa Concordia earlier this year.) “‘How I Roll’ reminds me of a famous anecdote about the birth of modernism,” says Nicholas Baume, director and chief curator of the Public Art Fund. “Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, and Fernand Léger are said to have visited the 1912 Paris Air Show together. Observing a propeller, Brancusi said, ‘Now that is what I call sculpture!’ Paola’s work suggests that the love affair between modernist artists and industrial design is still able to generate remarkable visual poetry.”

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Our interview with the artist about sand-blasted books, ethereal paintings and a transcendental point of view

Examining evolution through the dual lens of spirituality and science, Montreal-based book sculptor Guy Laramée creates miniature landscapes from antiquated paperbacks. Drawing upon over three decades of experience as an interdisciplinary artist (including a start as a music composer) and an education in anthropology, Laramée carves out an existentialist parallel between the erosion of geography and the ephemeral nature of the printed word.

Laramée also evokes notes of nostalgia and the passing of time with his paintings of clouds and fog. A self-professed anachronist, Laramée takes inspirational cues from the age of Romanticism and the transcendentalism of Zen, exploring “not only what we think, but that we think.” Laramée’s distinct, conceptual medium and thematic study of change has involved him in such contemplative projects as the “Otherworldly” exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design and an impromptu collaboration with WIRED UK.

We caught up with Laramée during his recent exhibition, “Attacher les roches aux nuages” or “Tying Rocks to Clouds”, at Expression: Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinte in Quebec, to learn more about his process and philosophy.

What inspired the ideas for your book sculptures and what is the process that is involved in creating them?

The bookwork came in the alignment of three things: a casual discovery, my undertaking of an MA in anthropology and the building of La Grande Bibliothèque du Québec. The undertaking of this grand library fascinated me because at that time (2000) I thought that the myth of the encyclopedia—having all of humanity’s knowledge at the same place—was long dead. I was, myself, going back to school to make sense of 15 years of professional practice and was, once more, confronted with my love/hate relationship with words. Then came this accident, so to speak. I was working in a metal shop, having received a commission for a theater set. In a corner of the shop was a sandblaster cabinet. Suddenly, I had the stupid idea of putting a book in there. And that was it. Within seconds, the whole project unfolded.

Please tell us a bit about your collaboration with Wired UK and creation of the Black Tides project.

Tom Cheshire, one of the associate editors of WIRED, wrote me one day, saying that he loved my work and inquiring about my future projects. Off the top of my head and half jokingly, I told him that I had the idea of doing a piece with a pile of their magazines (that was not true). He picked up on the idea and suddenly, a pile of magazines was being shipped to my studio. I had had a lot of offers for commissions—all involving my work with books—and I refused them all because they all made me so sad. People were trying to use my work to fit their agendas but the collaboration with WIRED truly inspired me because it fit perfectly with a project I had on my bench for a while, and for which I had found no outlet. The Great Black Tides project is the continuation of The Great Wall project. It gives flesh to a short story written in the mode of an archeology of the future.

The first piece that came out of this project is WIRELAND. It is both ironic and beyond irony. It is ironic that a high-tech magazine would include such a low-tech work in their pages—and foremost a type of work that looks so critically at the ideologies of progress. And it is beyond irony even, because the piece is beautiful. It is beautiful for mysterious reasons but I like to think that the way Tom Cheshire trusted me was a big factor in the success of the enterprise. So if there is a message in all this, I would like to think that it is this: never stop relating to people who defend worldviews, which seem to contradict yours. There is a common factor beyond all points of view.

In addition to your sculptures, you also paint. Please tell us a bit about your painting process and what inspires your fog series.

The 19th century painter and emblematic figure of Romanticism, Caspar David Friedrich, said, “The eye and fantasy feel more attracted by nebulous distance than by that which is close and distinct in front of us.” That sums it up all very nicely. What is blurred and foggy attracts your eye because you want to know what is behind that veil. It is a dynamic prop to set you in motion.

Your work frequently explores themes of the ephemeral, surreal and nostalgic. What draws you to these themes and influences them?

The Great Nostalgia is my main resource. It is not nostalgia about a lost golden age (which never existed). It is the nostalgia, here and now, of the missing half. We live between two contradictory and simultaneous worldviews: the participant and the observer. I work along the thesis that all of humanity’s joy and sorrow come out of this basic schism, something most of the great religions (Buddhism, Sufism, etc.) evoke abundantly.

My work is existential. It may depict landscapes that inspire serenity, but this is the serenity that you arrive at after traversing life crisis. You can paint a flower as a hobby, but you can also paint a flower as you come back from war. The same flower, apparently, but not really the same.

Could you please share your thoughts on the theme of the Guan Yin project and how it manifested in the exhibited pieces?

Originally the project was a commission for a local biennale here in Quebec, an event that celebrates linen. The theme of that biennale was “Touch”. I started with used rags, the ones that are used by mechanics and that are called “wipers”. I started by sowing them together without really knowing what I was doing. I was attracted to the different shades of these rags. They are all of a different grey, due to the numerous exposures to grease and the subsequent washings but meanwhile, my mother died. I was with her when she gave her last breath. Needless to say, that gave the project a totally different color.

So, I decided that this project would help me pass through the mourning of this loss. I decided against all reason—you don’t do that in contemporary art— that I would carve a statue of Guan Yin, the Chinese name for the Bodhisattva of compassion in Buddhist lore. It took me four months. I had never carved a statue in wood. Finally, the statue came out of a syncretic version of the original. It is still faithful to one of the avatars of these icons but there is a bit of the Virgin Mary in there. Then, I built an altar over the statue and put the altar on this 16×16 feet tablecloth made of 500 used rags. The piece was first shown in an historic Catholic church which was almost a statement about the possibility of an inter-faith dialogue—even if that was far from my concern at the time when I put it up there. To me, these rags, with the hands of these women over them, became the metaphor of our human condition. As a Japanese proverb says, “The best words are the ones you did not say.”

“Attacher les roches aux nuages” will run through 12 August 2012 at the Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinte.

Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinte

495, Avenue Saint-Simon

Saint-Hyacinthe (Quebec), J2S 5C3