Hasta La Ideas

Artist Ellen Lesperance weaves new meaning into knitwear with an exhibit honoring women activists

Fair Isle fans have long fetishized the winter staple, but Ellen Lesperance‘s upcoming exhibit at Seattle’s Ambach & Rice Gallery explores the sweater as more than a cozy way to keep warm. Named “The Strong, Star-Bright Companions,” after an elegiac poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the show features Lesperance’s gouache paintings of sweaters worn by female activists, as well as three actual sweaters knitted by the artist herself—all rendered with precise attention to detail.

Lesperance painstakingly replicates the pattern and gauge of yarn in large paintings, piecing the whole pattern together from photographs into flattened-out diagrams. Much of her source material came from archival photos of the Greenham Commons Women’s Peace Camp. For nineteen years, from 1981 to 2000, women camped out to protest the storage of nuclear missiles in Berkshire, England. While they waited, they knitted—incorporating their ideologies, in the form of fish and axes, into intricately innovative patterns. “I’ve been knitting for over 20 years. I used to work at Vogue Knitting in New York, and I’d never seen patterns like these,” Lesperance said from her home in Portland, OR.

The exhibit also features the artist’s tightly-gridded visions of sweaters worn by contemporary women, like Nawal el Saadawi, the famed Egyptian feminist activist. And Lesperance commemorates the darker side of activism in the form of triangle-shaped patterns that serve as death shrouds for activists who died in the line of duty, including Helen Thomas, who was driven over at Greenham Commons Women’s Peace Camp, and Italian activist Pippa Bacca, who was raped and killed on a symbolic peace protest while hitchhiking to Jerusalem. “They were definitely maligned for being stupid young girls,” said Lesperance. “There’s definitely an interest in elevating them.”

By memorializing and replicating these sweaters, Lesperance also lends a deeper resonance to the simple, utilitarian act of knitting a sweater. As Rosa Parks might have suggested, in the face of greater forces there’s something very powerful about the act of sitting down, taking your time and creating a useful object of beauty. “Sweaters can be worn,” said Lesperance. “You can stretch out the experience of being with the work. You could wear the sweaters for years, if you wanted to.”

“The Strong, Star-Bright Companions” is on view through 15 May 2011 at Ambach & Rice.

From post-apocalyptic imagery to pop culture references, two painters explore a single theme

When close friends Casey Diebold and Adam Devarney both graduated from Pratt University their journeys as artists naturally took them to very different places. Devarney returned to the serenity of his native Burlington, VT, while Diebold stayed in Brooklyn to work as a commercial storyboard artist. Their diverging paths have finally crossed again in the form of “Godspeed,” a collaborative exhibition opening 9 April 2010 at NYC’s Sacred Gallery.

The loose concept comes from Devarney’s suggestion of the phrase “God Speed”—a term that allows for their their work to be comfortably contained under one main theme, as well as individual interpretations. While Diebold played off the term more literally, depicting ungodly speeds and high-powered action, Devarney saw “Godspeed” as the loose English translation of the French salutation, bon voyage.

Heavily influenced by skateboard culture and ’80s illustration, Devarney’s work mixes mediums, styles and aesthetics. “I am excited by the idea of taking things out of context and re-purposing them, the chemistry interests me,” he explains. Working with wood panels, Devarney explores voyaging characters on the brink of self-destruction. His paintings follow the “vagabonds of the great beyond,” who are fighting the inertia of their movement.

The past might inform the resulting anachronistic portraits, but they’re firmly in the future. Delvarney says, “my work in this show comes from a soulful place. I am exploring characters, weary and worn down, voyagers who have been pushed to the limit. That is something everyone can relate to.” While Devarney’s stoic aviators put the viewer on edge, Diebold captures cinematic realism in incredible detail at frightening speeds.

Diebold creates surreal graphics with dizzying movement and beautiful texture, an approach he says is informed by his “fascination with future dystopian culture and science fiction like ‘Logan’s Run,’ or fictional gang movies like ‘The Warriors.'” His love of films shows in the multiple layers of allusion in his work, from Alex Cox
to George Miller. His choice to depict the action at a particular moment in the narrative forces viewers to think of the infinite possibilities, creating a dreamlike effect.

“Godspeed” opens at Sacred Gallery this Saturday, 9 April 2010, and runs through 30 April 2010.

Collages, calligraphy and grids in a retrospective of the late Beat painter Brion Gysin’s work

by Isabelle Doal

The work of British-Canadian artist Brion Gysin, defined by techniques like mixed collages, systematic repetition and “cut-up” (a method he invented), is experiencing somewhat of a revival since his death in 1986. A stream of contemporary artists have recently taken interest in the artist and the newly-opened “Alarme” exhibition at Paris’ Galerie de France illustrates the scope of his oeuvre, following two recent important exhibitions of his contributions.

The Pompidou showed a film, jointly produced by Gysin, William Burroughs (the two were good friends) and Antony Balch, demonstrating “semi-conscious states and trances,” while his work on sound-collages, a medium he conceived with his former NYC studiomate Ramuntcho Matta, was featured in a group show on the topic at Galerie Anne Barraulthe.

Gysin’s based his works on crossings, formally represented by the constant use of grid patterns. Most of the time he employed a rudimentary printing technique, rolling a paintbrush on a paper sheet over a canvas of wire threads, consistently incorporating script letters and photos into the grids.

Both poet and painter, and part of the Beat Generation, Gysin has always played with words and letters as graphic materials. He arrived in New York during World War II and started experimenting with literature and various kinds of writing experiences. He created “permutation poems,” repeating a single sentence several times with the words rearranged in different orders so that each reiteration is a new discovery, for example “I don’t dig work, man/Man, work I don’t dig.” Many of these variations he derived using a random sequence and was inspired by free verse, but several also followed a mathematical structure.

The cut-up technique was used by writers such as John Dos Passos and laid the foundation for “Naked Lunch.” “Alarme” shows a couple of artworks featuring pieces of text from the pivotal novel, using letters as signs on small square water-colored papers, created by rolling paintbrushes on metallic grids.

A couple of panels show the four-year-long construction of the Pompidou through a photographic series consisting of vertical stripes stuck together. Small square photos from contact sheets act as grids, one by one incorporated into inked columns reminiscent of skyscrapers.

Completing the overview, a series of ink-painted letters in Asian and Arabic scripts speak to Gysin’s devotion to painting and drawing. The artist, who spoke Japanese and Arabic, played with the opposition between the Japanese vertical script and horizontal Arabic writing with an interest in painting these figures to make crossings and grids.

“Alarme” runs through 2 April 2010 at Galerie de France.

Resurrected dreams in emerging artist Jason Bard Yarmosky’s portraits

Rife with the painful vulnerability of reclaimed innocence, Jason Bard Yarmosky‘s painting series “Elder Kinder” reflects the parallel behaviors of growing up and growing old. Exhibiting at his first solo show (which opens this Friday at Brooklyn’s Like The Spice gallery), the works depict a cast of characters portrayed both in bold paintings and equally intriguing but more softhearted drawings. No matter the medium, meeting the direct stare of “Ballerina” or “Cowboy” is looking face to face with the raw sincerity of the subjects.

Yarmosky explains in detail, “Elder Kinder juxtaposes the young and old to push the limits of social norms and freedom of expression. As a child you learn to walk, but later in life you learn to un-walk—the raw freedom that is so much a part of youth gives way to borders and boundaries placed on adult behavior. But the dreams of the young, often sublimated by the years, never really disappear.”

Echoing the heroic themes of his earlier work, the models—Yarmosky’s Brooklyn grandparents—wrest their purest form of self from a lifetime of adult demands and responsibilities. His deft rendering of their worn faces is outdone only by their poignantly complex expressions.

Yarmosky’s work was shown this year at Aqua Art Fair in Miami, as well as Scope Art Fair—both concurrent with Art Basel. “Elder Kinder” opens at Like The Spice Gallery in 11 February 2011 and runs through 7 March 2011.

Tiffany Bozic’s stunning paintings showing the emotional side of living creatures

Masterfully melding science with fine art, self-taught painter Tiffany Bozic explores the subtleties of the natural world through her bold and beautifully executed works. Her whimsical illustrations of instinctual behaviors in the wild result in works that at first blush look straightforward, but an up-close view reveals much more complicated dynamics at play. “Confiding To Strangers“—currently on display at the Joshua Liner Gallery in NYC—continues her exploration of how all living things (humans included) relate and live among each other in the wild.

When possible Bozic studies her subjects in their natural habitat, much like her favorite artist John James Audubon. While travels span Papua New Guinea with a bird scientist (who she later married), Namibia, Australia and beyond, when Bozic isn’t in the field she does research at San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences or examines creatures through her digital photographs.

Painting with acrylic on Maple panels or watercolor on paper, Bozic uses her subjects to metaphorically express her emotions. As she explained in a recent video, her painting about sexual selection dubbed “Passion in Paradise” (above right) visually portrays the story of two male animals whose horns got stuck together while fighting over a female. Turning the horns into connected Birds of Paradise, Bozic says the story shows just how powerful the female species can be.

With 31 new works in total, “Confiding To Strangers” is a gorgeously thoughtful exhibit about the numerous complex relationships we have with the living environment. The show is on view at Joshua Liner Gallery through 11 December 2010.