Mar 19, 2013 | art fairs, installation, painting
One large-scale canvas that was covered only in colored pencil underpainting took up an entire wall of Tang Contemporary’s booth at The Armory Show. The canvas was surrounded by flying flecks of color, the same colors that should be on the painting instead of around it. It was just a simple landscape scene, a valley surrounded by green hills that led the eye off into the distance, but spreading the paint everywhere keeps you inside the booth instead of letting you escape into the scene like typical paintings intend.
A scattered, abstract way of interpreting absence versus presence, the piece is titled “A painting-Landscape,” and was created by contemporary Chinese artist Wang Yuyang in 2010.
The piece mimics the Dr. Suessian notion of smacking color right off of the objects they belong to – you can almost see the artist finishing the landscape, hating it, and then KERSPLAT! He slams the canvas against the wall and paints flies everywhere. Of course, the canvas can’t be left completely empty since then there would be no correlation between the colors and what they used to represent, so the pale outlines and colors remain within the 85 x 55 cm rectangle.
There’s a connection between past and present, what used to be and what is now, all compared to what should be. Societal standards are overrated.
A miniature version of what the painting was intended to look like stood beside it, allowing viewers to compare color with the lack of it, although it’s hard to tell if this painting was ever really completed or just filled in with computers. Similar to one of those cube-scaling projects each art class has on its curriculum, the miniature version lets your eyes fill in the appropriate emptinesses of its older brother scene whose paint has flown the coop.
If you look close, you can see that all the little flecks of paint aren’t just oil and water, they have a plasticity to them that makes them more substantial than if they’d just been merged and flowed across a landscape scene. Each individual shade of green, yellow, gray, white, blue and black stands independently – defiantly almost, refusing to become part of the whole and wanting its own space on the wall to be noticed by passing viewers.
Tiny colored flecks even fall on the floor beneath the painting, bringing this contemporary art piece all the way to your feet.
Wang Yuyang is a 34-year-old contemporary Chinese artist whose work deals with technology and our relationship to it, along with the aesthetics of brokenness and pilings of material waste.
“I like the traditional Chinese philosophy because it talks about the relationship between 1 and 0, on and off, black and white, something and nothing,” Yuyang explained, “My works explore this connection.” He is also particularly interested in exploring what he calls “the zero state” – an emptiness filled with nothing but silence and stillness.
For more of Wang Yuyang’s work, see his bio pages from the galleries who represent him, White Rabbit and Boers-Li.
Mar 18, 2013 | street art
Three of the Angry Birds sit on a wire. They look just as unhappy as they do on your iPhone, except we’re not the ones controlling them and they don’t seem to have much of a purpose with no blocks or green elephants to knock down. Here they’re perched on the edge of an actual wire fixed to the outside of this building – gray followed by red followed by yellow – three little puffs of color with makeshift tails and upset eyes. There’s no reason for them to be angry on this wall but otherwise we might not recognize them.
Alexey Menschikov is a Russian artist peppering the streets with his brightly-colored art while pursuing photography in black-and-white. He turns something physical about a fence or a wall into the starting point for each drawing, combining something that’s actually there with something two-dimensional, merging his imagination with reality in a public place. Often these physical lines start out as cracks or wires, but Menschikov turns them into ground lines and tree branches and perches birds or shapes or shadows on top.
The saxophone is the subtlest of them all, each of the three brackets that hold the pipe to the wall stretch out to hold up the painted shadow of a make believe musical instrument – turning something ugly and functional into the idea and shape of something beautiful. The saxophone’s slender neck slips down to ground-level and loops up.
The little yellow bird that sits on cracked red pavement has his eyes closed. The tree branch he struts across has only become more than a crack in the ground because of one little painted bird.
Alexey’s second pavement crack turned tree branch happens on gray ground – the little tree reaches up from the manhole cover that caused the crack, and it’s painted with pale green leaves. On the right branch sits two little owls, one mommy and one baby, both with eyes wide open and green-yellow bodies simply decorated.
All images from the artist’s Live Journal.
See Alexey’s Facebook page for more of his work.
Mar 15, 2013 | art fairs, features
VOLTA NY is a showcase of individual minds and hands – hands that painted, sculpted, collaged, and sewed something incredible to be here. It’s held annually in both New York and Switzerland, and last week it took up two stories of 82MERCER in SoHo, and more than 22,000 people showed up.
David Kennedy Cutler, represented by Halsey McKay, East Hampton.
The show’s design lead you around through two rows of art per room, and even though it was a bit cramped when tons of people showed up, the art took up most of the space, and the artists were sometimes there to greet you and discuss their work which is very exciting but also kind of nerve-wracking David Kennedy Cutler’s sculpture stood right in the fair’s halfway point, greeting visitors as they walked towards the stairs and up to a whole new level of art – this one with higher ceilings and exposed brick walls.
Marc Fromm represented by Jarmuschek + Partner, Berlin.
A whole crowd was gathered around Marc Fromm’s levitating piece – the girl somehow miraculously held up by the seemingly slack rope draped causally around her wrist. The bear and the girl together make for an interesting pair: the bear’s furry face is still somewhat ferocious looking, and even though the flying girl is all dolled up with flowers and everything, there’s hardly any expression behind her empty doll face.
“One Day at a Time,” 2012 (paperback books, acrylic varnish)
by Brian Dettmer represented by Kinz + Tillou, NY
“An Encyclopedia of World History” by by Brian Dettmer
Brian Dettmer’s works appeared the most labor-intensive at VOLTA. His towers and wall sculptures are made from encyclopedias and involved hours of pouring through old books and carefully cutting and rearranging. “One Day at a Time” actually reads ‘One Word At A Time’ with each of the letters carefully filled in with thousands of individually cutout letters.
Hae-Sun Hwang represented by Gallery Simon, Seoul
The SoHo area around VOLTA was busy the entire weekend, the whole city buzzing with art fair fever. And even though thousands of people walked through the same space in four days, it somehow still had a personal feel. Each booth was dedicated to one artist’s work so viewers were individually immersed in different artists’ styles as they walked from one white-walled booth to the next.
“People were already talking about it before we even opened,” said Amanda Coulson, VOLTA’s Artistic Director. “People were already talking about it before we even opened…and then the quality of the space itself, with the wooden floors and huge daylight windows, is just putting everybody in a fantastic mood. Along with the solo artist concept, which is now being picked up more strongly at all the major events, visitors are leaving with only enthusiastic comments. Suffice to say, we are extremely pleased.”
Long-bin Chen, represented by Frederieke Taylor Gallery
by Sarah Hardesty
Armando Marino’s “The Revolutionary,” 2013
oil/paper
Represented by 532 Gallery T. Jaekel, NY.
A Flickr album for VOLTA is currently in the works, and expect a lot of future descriptions of the incredible work that was there.
See more of VOLTA on their website.
Mar 15, 2013 | photography
Dave Engledow is recording his daughter’s childhood in a way more creative than most, but then again he is a professional photographer. He calls this series World’s Best Father, and manipulates pictures of him and his daughter doing dangerous things together – the kinds of things people call Child Protective Services about as soon as they’re out the front door.
Keep an eye out for his not-so-deserved World’s Best Father mug that makes an ironic appearance in every scene.
His tiny daughter Alice always has the most adorable expression on her face, while Engledow’s is purposely overdramatic and hilarious, wide-eyed in wonder or weeping like a sad clown might. He endearingly calls her by her full name, Alice Bee, on his Facebook page and writes, “I love photography, and (to paraphrase Garry Winograd) my main drive to shoot is fueled by my eternal curiosity to see what the world looks like in photographs. I am fascinated by light and shadow, form and shape, lines and composition.”
Alice always looks like she’s having a good time though, except in scenes where she’s forced to do chores or fulfill her father’s expectation to raise an Olympic swimmer. Her bright blonde hair is always styled to fit the part too – tied up in cute little buns and ponytails on top of her head, and extra wild when she’s on the loose.
The manipulation on the photos matches the detail put into comprising the scenes too, often with a shiny surreal sheen over them that somehow just makes the scene look more realistic. In one photo he’s scolding her through an iPad even though he’s right across the couch, but Alice doesn’t care because there’s no way she’s eating those peas.
Images from Joe’s Daily, and the artist’s Facebook page. Like his page to keep updated on Alice’s new adventures.
Mar 14, 2013 | design
Image from artist’s 2008 solo exhibition at Gallery HANGIL, in Paju, Korea.
Byung-Hoon Choi makes seats and benches that look too precarious for real use, but you can sit on them as long as they’re not part of an art exhibition. Someone might yell at you.
Some of these seats are made of one smooth solid piece of sculpted wood and others balance that wood on stones, playing with gravity as if it were a separate medium all its own.
Image from artist’s 2008 solo exhibition at Gallery HANGIL, in Paju, Korea.
These stools are abruptly flat on top while their legs curve elegantly outwards until reaching the floor, a matching pair in deep mahogany. The left-hand stool is punctured by an asymmetrical hole, like a perfect tree had grown around a dinosaur egg only to be turned into a chair. The stool on the right stretches higher, an upside-down tear shape cut out of its middle makes it look more like women’s legs cut off at the hip or a really groovy pair of flared jeans.
The chair below appears the most dangerous for actual sitting, but thanks to very heavy weights, balance only looks like it would be a problem. Have you ever gone to sit down when your friend pulled out the chair beneath you because he thought it would be hilarious to see you fall on your ass? That reactionary feeling of uncertainty – a subconscious verification of free fall, is what these works evoke, because to sit in them would mean trusting in the artist more than what your own eyes tell you.
Image from artist’s 2008 solo exhibition at Gallery HANGIL, in Paju, Korea.
Choi currently works as a dean and professor at Hongik University’s College of Fine Arts in Seoul, South Korea. He previously worked as the director of Hongik’s Museum of Art and his work can be found in nearly every museum in Korea including the Seoul Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Museum of Contemporary Art. In addition to seating, he also constructs intricate sculptures along with tables and other kinds of furniture that can be improved aesthetically.
Image from artist’s 2010 solo exhibition at galerieDOWNTOWN, in Paris.
See more of Choi’s work on his website.
