“The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from ourselves, images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.” -Andre Malraux (adventurer, author, and statesman)
“Chaos is just order waiting to be deciphered. All the great truths are trivial and so we have to find new ways, preferably, paradoxical ways, of preserving them, in order to keep them from falling into oblivion.” -Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel (writer, critic and philosopher)

The idea behind a work of art has always fascinated me—in the best sense of the word you could call it propaganda, though artists prefer to call it their vision. As an avid consumer of art, I want more than what’s just in front of me. I want the mechanics of art, the living innards, be it a painting, a book, a movie, or a play, to turn me every way but loose, to wake me from the dead, to hold me captive, to lift me to the next plateau, to enlarge me as a human being. Like Poe’s Annabel Lee, I want winged seraphs to whisk me away to heaven. A good work of art attempts to do that. A true masterpiece, to use an overworked and frequently misapplied word, does just that. Here—shades of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”—there is an infusive, god-like bonding between the art and the viewer, and in no small way the artist, where all become one. The lucky ones get to take this epiphany home with them, and like the very best of marriages, continue the conversation.

The special section, Complex, But Not Complicated, in NY Arts’ fall issue is about the ideas, and ultimately the structure behind the work of 12 artists, none two exactly alike. I have selected artists whose work, from first viewing, caught me off guard, and pierced my very armor. I asked each artist to supply the text—using their own words— to explain the ideas behind their work, be it about their specific work or works on the page, or their overall aesthetic. The reader should bear in mind, as is the case with many artists: the artists in this section are not tethered to the one medium on display. In fact, most of the painters can sculpt, and most of the sculptors and conceptual artists can draw as well as paint. It is particularly enlightening to reflect on how each artist’s ideas, some subtle, some not so, work their magic.

The age of the artists in this mix ranges from early 30s to late 60s. Added up, there are some 500-plus years of experience. A few of the artists are represented by a gal¬lery; most are not. One could say that their place in the art world, if one wants to count the number of years they’ve been on the scene, varies from the near-, and continually emerging, to that of a grand master, a painter’s painter, if you will. Nearly half—Judi Harvest, Lori Nelson, Carol Salmanson, Gae Savannah, and EJay Weiss—live and work, and in some cases teach, in and around New York City. The other six, many of whom exhibit internationally, live abroad. Derek Besant and Steve Rockwell are from Canada. Anne Ferrer is from France. Helga Griffiths is from Germany. And Resi Girardello and Barbara Taboni, Italy. Last but not least, adding a welcome bit of country flavor and Southern hospitality is Bristol, Tennessee’s own Val Lyle. I hope that readers enjoy this section as much as I enjoyed assembling it. For me it was an act of love.

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Making a Meal Out of a Cubist Still Life

Steve Rockwell

“There has been nothing new in art since 1915” was something that I blurted out to an art professor 21 years ago at a party. It turned out to be an awkward conversation stopper, and obviously untrue in terms of art history. I was only trying to get across that the seeds of most of the art that followed had already been sown by then. Personally, the notion has proven to be a nugget of nutrients when it came to panning ideas. Collage elements in a typical Cubist still life from the year 1912, not only banished illusionism, but made it possible to view the painting and its components as concrete objects. By serving an actual sandwich as art, as I first did in 1989, the object was consumed and ingested as well as viewed.

In a recent show, I embedded Dutch Panter cigar tins, clear Cuban cigar tubes, food lids, and a wine cork into mahogany supports. My focus had been various forms of human consumption, in this case eating, drinking, and smoking. Frequent subjects of early Cubist works were pipes, wine bottles, playing cards, and fragments of daily newspapers. A popular inclusion was the word “journal,” which could be variously sliced into “jour” and “jou,” day and play respectively in English. “Journal” and “jou” happens to be other Cubist elements that I have “actualized” in my work. The journal is dArt International magazine, which I released in Los Angeles in 1998, and continues to be served. “Jou” refers to Color Match Game, which was created in 1987 and continues to be played in tournaments across North America. One could say that the bulk of my work may be apprehended through reading, eating, and playing. ?

www.steverockwellart.com

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A Billowing of Beauty

“I restrict the form with the stitches and seams, so that they will become intricate organisms as the pieces balloon.” –Anne Ferrer

I have the desire to achieve in my sculpture an accessible, spontaneous experience for the viewer that is bold, exuberant, swollen, but also exquisitely delicate and smart. I combine two mediums that seem to naturally accomplish this best: air and lightweight colorful fabric. I restrict the form with the stitches and seams, so that they will become intricate organisms as the pieces balloon. I use this unexpected alchemy to achieve beauty, through a sensual lightness and a bold presence, all the while, smiling at what Parisians breathe. It is an “Air de Paris” filled with fashion, seduction, appearance, futility, irreverence, and humor. This “souffle,” impulsion of freedom is inspired by the energy and boldness I discovered and loved in American art while I was an art student at Yale in the 80s. I earned my MFA there in 1988. American art critic, Julie Johnson, writes that this work is “light, air-filled, and sewn of hot colorful fabric. The sculptures are luscious, ripe, and over-the-top. With time, they have expanded to take over the entire space, crowding up to the walls. Some have been edible collaborations with pastry chefs, and lately some are created with perfumists as well as composers. They are a feast for the senses, a visual ravishment. Like the original Gargantua, who was born from a feast of tripe in a delicious garden, the work was born from associations with delicious consumption, beauty, and sexuality, but also from the world’s aggressive or violent associations. This is the line where pleasure and the disgust of over-consumption meet.” I want my work to be totally vain and essential.

www.anneferrer.com

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A Lighted Conversion

Carol Salmanson

I started working with light so that I could take the spatial and color concerns of my painting into a different realm. By developing a vocabulary of various lighting technologies, reflective materials, and structures, I’ve created works that fully activate their surrounding areas. I focus on both object and space, exploiting walls and other surfaces, as well as the work’s surroundings.

My window installation, Diaphany, at Mixed Greens Gallery in New York in the winter of 2008-2009, used the building’s architecture as its starting point. It incorporated the windows’ mullions, sills, and fire escape into its geometry. A total of 2,642 LEDs joined with the hard edges and soft blends of gel filters to change the experience of the urban street.

The wall piece, Luminous Layers, uses different colors of LEDs beamed through prism rods for a jewel-like effect. They are nestled into angled stainless steel to create multiple reflections. These three pieces work together to amplify each other’s effects and create a warm, inviting sensation from what should be a cold, sterile material.

My most recent work, All That’s Left, was shown last winter at the East/West Project in Berlin. It consisted of ten boxes with LEDs embedded into reflective sheeting and backlit with white light, to depict brick fragments. They transformed the heavy feeling of salvaged masonry into an evocative, ethereal experience.

All of my work is about the unspoken intricacies of human interaction, which I learned to observe to compensate for a hereditary hearing problem. Like the best theater, which captures hidden dynamics to go beyond words, the work explores the energy in subconscious perceptions and calculations, the things you see and know without realizing it. Information intersects with emotions to create a specific kind of knowledge that is nonverbal, precise, and intense.

www.carolsalmanson.com

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Waves of Influence

Helga Griffiths

I work with scientific data to test and reshape perceptions of everyday phenomena by presenting them in unfamiliar ways and contexts. Perceptual forms are interchanged and complex codes created, often beginning with the deconstruction of the familiar to open up new avenues of reception. Our confidence in familiar sensory perception is shaken, and an experiential space is created in which emotions, memories, and associations can grow and move freely. This can develop into a play between proximity and distance, for example, by having information that we normally receive only through touching an object suddenly perceived remotely through our senses of sight or hearing. The information is received through a completely different channel from what we are used to. My recent installation Wavespace is an example of this technique. This multisensory installation combines light and sound elements in novel ways to recreate the experience of weather and the sea in the exhibition space.

Weather and climate are complex, chaotic phenomena. We humans are exposed to the weather and respond to it on an individual level. We might feel the rain or snow on our skin, but we do not fully comprehend the complex mechanisms that cause the drop or the snowflake to fall just then and there. Our ability to predict future atmospheric events is also quite general and limited to short intervals of time and space. We influence the climate with our behavior and actions, but we are not in total control of the complex climate.

For this specific project, I gathered data on extreme weather events measured over a period of 100 years, a period longer than my own lifespan, and transformed it into an abstract and imaginative interpretation that could be experienced through light and sound elements. The historical data were augmented by real-time data from a wave sensor located in the nearby sea and thermal detectors that sense the presence of visitors in the exhibition space. Information about events remote in time and space can thus be experienced with different senses in this walk-through installation, where they are perceived as constantly changing waves of blue LED light and sound moving through the exhibition space. For the acoustic element of the installation, of which the importance is at least equal to that of the visual aspect, I avoided naturalistic sounds for the most part, in favor of sounds created with a wide range of percussive instruments.

The thermo sensors in the exhibition space itself detect heat radiated by visitors, providing information that is used to modify the sounds and light patterns, so that visitors experience direct interaction with the installation, a microclimatic analogy to man’s influence on world climate. In this constantly changing atmosphere of sound and light, participants can experience the fragility of their environment in relation to their own presence in space. The juxtaposition of historical weather data with real-time information provokes a reassessment of one’s own position on the climate timeline, and provides an effective counterpoint to conventional perceptions of weather and the sea.

www.helgagriffiths.de

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Concrete Meanderings

Barbara Taboni

In this age we are often surrounded by concrete, and in most cities you will find concrete areas in the process of construction. The name of the cement widely used in the world is Portland, hence the title of my work. The elements of iron scaffolding, used on construction sites and rusted by time, give me the chance to build a strong geometry, made up of the relations of forces calculated to the millimeter. This architecture allows the viewer to enter and walk in the workspace and engage with it. Parts of the human body in white concrete are placed under scaffolding; its disaggregation is symbolic: spiritual, cultural, social, and political.

These act as a base to the whole structure. As in Gothic cathedrals, there are figures that support the building, which become its points of strength. The human body always accompanies my imagination. In Portland, it functions as a mirror; it forces you to ask questions. Mankind is called to support a tottering age, balancing its relationship with the universe. The video is visually a uterus, a concrete mixer that mixes the raw materials. The cement turns inside the machine, which acts as a sound box, accompanying the exhibition with a soundtrack similar to a mantra that covers any other noise, canceling any distractions. Now you’re inside of Portland, which requires thought to be present. I chose to do a loop; the repetition is a character I have been experimenting. It is a circular rhythm, like all rituals. The small screen on the ground, with light and sound, is the beating heart of the installation. The goal of my work is to open questions, at times ironic, at times dramatic. This is what the artist can do; the answers come from the viewers.

www.barbarataboni.carbonmade.com

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Drawing Near by Drawing Far

“I paint people in their distant mode, complex, ready for some undefined or internal episode, but still far enough away to be generalized.” –Lori Nelson

The thing to do when looking at a city is try to not look closely or sharply at the city. Look blurrily and let the shapes mass. Sometimes you’ll get the opportunity to be above the city while at the same time remaining within the city. You will be on the rooftop of a building (a friend has a key) looking around and down, laughing and joking about falling accidentally, dropping your phone, or spitting. Not from an airplane, but from this high building, you may possibly understand for a maddeningly slippery moment that the city is only one entity, a mass, a single body, breathing and solid, complex, but not complicated from this vantage where the details recede enough to unify the pieces. If you can stop talking for about a minute, you’ll understand that the city is really only just one massive thing and the many busy pieces that make it up will seem hard to grasp, though you know they do exist.

www.lorinelson.com

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Blinding Glitz

“Glamour Trance freezes time and stunts emotional development, yet supremely entertains, quixotic escapism. All the same, behind the puerile myopia, irony lurks.” -Gae Savannah

Rhydal, seen here in detail, speaks to Glamour Trance. 21st-century Americans court oblivion in shopping, fundamentalism, hegemony, pedigree, capitalism, sugar, and fashion. The list is long. Calling to mind the protagonists of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels or Rita Hayworth in the film Gilda, the sculpture’s hypnotic sizzle is intoxicat¬ing. Glamour Trance freezes time and stunts emotional development, yet supremely entertains, quixotic escapism. All the same, behind the puerile myopia, irony lurks. We turn a blind eye to our culture’s scourges: droning slaughter and daily torture of gentle farm animals. While ultimately Fitzgerald left the city of illusion, New York, many of us continue to eat at the trough of la-la, celebrity glitz.

www.gaesavannah.com

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Scraps of Appalachia

“ … I use common burdock and cockleburs to create sculptures that point out the various elephants in the living rooms of our country without taking sides.” -Val Lyle

Appalachia has been the smoky base flavor of my work even as I’ve lived in New York City, Florida, Hawaii, and Arizona. Living now in my family hometown in Bristol, Tennessee, I look to my roots directly. I am troubled by the artistic gentrification that would rob me of a heritage. Because I’ve come to think that a voice with a clear sense of heritage and place is the freshest voice in contemporary art, I address global issues through an Appalachian lens, and interpret rural Appalachia with a contemporary eye.

My current immersion installation focuses on the vanishing wooden barn, with large-scale paintings of interior and exterior views rendered in a contemporary, cropped, and abstracted style alongside drying tobacco, hay bales, and farm tools. Eight-foot-tall figurative rope sculptures stand next to their humble inspiration, a strand of bailing twine. Giant projections of barn imagery loop to live, old-time music. The strong play between positive and negative space carries through the individual artworks and the exhibition itself. Viewers spontaneously crawl through hay tunnels and gush their own “barn” stories brought to life by familiar scents. The interiors become a vehicle for embracing the vulnerable child that we all once were. The barn exteriors acknowledge the inevitable loss of innocence and time that occurs so naturally. Light shining through board slats becomes saturated with meanings.

Arte Povera could be applied to much of my current work, for I use rope, burdock, and other discarded materials. But making art out of common stuff comes naturally to me, perhaps from a tradition steeped in “making do,” a way of life in Appalachia, where both materials and means are scarce. I continue to use all appropriate media to execute a visual and physical artistic concept. With a nod to Merritt Oppenheim’s fur-covered teacup, and a humorous wink in the title The Sticky Subjects series, I use common burdock and cockleburs to create sculptures that point out the various elephants in the living rooms of our country without taking sides. A tea service titled Tea Time for Darfur references Great Britain’s role and the world’s non-action in the staggering number of deaths in Sudan. In this day of Octomoms, loving couples without children, and unplanned marriages due to pregnancy, the Cocklebur Fetus is hope and fear made visible. A life-size ‘M16’ needs little explanation in burdock. The series continues to grow. So does the burdock.

www.VGLyle.com

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A Fluid Display for the Masses

“I learned long ago, that work inside a gallery or museum was quite something else when you attempted to integrate it into the reality of urban settings.” –Derek Michael Besant

At one point I asked myself, if the human body is 90-percent water, then what makes up the other ten percent? This question started me photographing people I knew in stages of submerging in and out of water. I’ve often used my friends as models in my experiments, so they are cautious when I make any request for them to participate in one of my art projects. I even have an exhibition of this work, reconstructed as photo-based images, printed larger-than-life scale by thermal transfer into veil scrims. The veil material I work with has a sheen to it that acts like water tension or refraction on its surface, and the veil moving slightly on a wall when a person passes near it, gives another presence that a viewer might take more time to look at out of the corner of an eye.

Water. Something we can drink, bathe in, or swim through. The element that freezes solid, falls through our fin¬gers like sand, or is sometimes used to baptize the faithful. I have always been drawn to the fact that it can obliterate one’s vision or clarify the suspension of a body, like floating in air in slow motion. It is akin to a lens of sorts. Something to look through…

I read somewhere that British filmmaker Peter Greenaway always mentioned that the minute one discusses water, there is the possibility of drowning. And that has surfaced as a discussion every time I exhibit a full exhibition of this work in a museum. But the other relationships arise as far as the Pre-Raphaelite painters’ obsessions with classical themes, such as Ophelia. I think there will always be lines drawn between similar subjects, themes crossed among the trodden route, and attempts to define water in some rituals that deal with cleansing, healing, or washing away of something to oblivion. In my case, I tend to follow an idea that takes me to new ways of looking at things I thought I knew about.

I learned long ago, that work inside a gallery or museum was quite something else when you attempted to integrate it into the reality of urban settings. So, I started observing how signage functioned outdoors. This led me to the billboard industry, where I still do much of my research. New technologies have yielded incredible materials and ways to build work for settings where they operate differently. For instance, I can plan a series of images of people underwater that arrive on construction site scaffolds for a week or less. Images 30 feet by 30 feet across a building façade not only create an opportunity to consider scale, materials, and methods, but also how imagery reads as art rather than advertising.

One of my upcoming projects with water as subject matter will involve installing 100 images of submerged people that wrap onto buses and subway trains, like an outdoor museum exhibition in motion around a city. The technology for this is changing as rapidly as computer programs do, so I wait to output imagery until the last moment, to capitalize on the latest applications. The audience captured by this act is much larger than the audience who would normally see my work in a museum space. There is also the surprise encounter in the traffic. Watch the bus next time. It might be one of my works going by.

www.derekbesant.com

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Everything Is Vanity

Resi Girardello

Water, for me, is a place to research. Primordial water is the birthplace of works of art. Everything originated from small organisms that float in the waters, which were once transformed, not only in our imagination, into fantastic beings, like seductive sirens. Tenuous forms come to life through light, and suggest shapes through their absence. In my works—works built with ancient constructive techniques, but talking of the modern condition—the theme is the shell, the being in its appearance, sometimes without a real presence, in a society in which empty appearances scare us. The frame is real; the content evolves and escapes. To construct shells of magical moments, sirens remain floating shells, tiny primordial beings magnified and revealed in their structures that guard the secrets of futuristic architecture. These shells with the worthy attributes of mythical goddesses of the past—small figures of small worlds, past or here—are meaningful and full of personality. Sometimes my intricately woven “costumed” shells appear on dishes, as if they could be consumed in an ironic dinner. Another theme finds them swinging on swings, as in the mythical Rococo era, when elegance and delicacy were the main themes of art. The swing series focuses on elusive and non-existent women, as if to find that steady archetype of femininity that only our grandmothers could have, and that, despite the emancipation of the contemporary, sometimes is looked at with longing by those who seek their true identity. The reality is revealed in its reflection: elusive as love, which is the engine of the world … yet fleeting and ephemeral as the pleasure of swinging on a swing. Today in Berlin it’s raining outside, but my characters have escaped. I know they want to walk over the rainbow.

www.resigirardello.com

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The Bee’s Omen

“Soon after I was building beehives in my studio, one cell at a time, just as the honeybee does.” -Judi Harvest

When I saw that Einstein had said, “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination … no more men,” I began researching Colony Collapse Disorder, a recent worldwide phenomenon in which worker bees from a beehive or honey bee colony abruptly disappear, leading to the death of the hive. Soon after I was building beehives in my studio, one cell at a time, just as the honeybee does.

Illustration, left:

Judi Harvest, Monumental Bee Hive, 2008-09. Porcelain, beeswax, gold leaf, resin, wire, collage materials, light, and sound, 80 x 50 x 32 inches. Photo credit: James Dee. Courtesy of the artist.

www.judiharvest.com

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Escaping Measures

EJay Weiss

I am compelled to explore the bounded, yet infinite depth of the picture plane. I find the territory within the second dimension to be paradoxical, especially since paint is just a physical substance without form. The same set of physical forces that holds paint to the canvas also binds us to the planet, and gives movement to the tectonic plates that formed the continents. In a painting, there is an added dimension of timelessness. By definition, the second dimension is timeless, having height and width, but no real physical depth. Painting tends to be illusory, relatively free of time and distance. Without distance, there can be no time, only the now. Einstein pointed out space/time bends and is a continuum. Time requires fixing a point in space, in order to measure it. Where we “enter” or “exit” a painting is relative, as we tend to see a painting at once, as a singularity, or as a unified field.

Painting represents a multilayered process of viewing inward, outward, or otherwise. The metaphysics of this process substantiates the visual poetry that results in all great painting, no matter what period or style of painting we are referring to. Some 35,000 years ago the Paleolithic cave painters of Lascaux, France, produced masterpieces that rival Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling in imagination, breadth of imagery, form, and color.

What unfolds within the field of the painting provides a mirror to nature, which we didn’t create. But we do create art to reflect both nature and ourselves. My paintings express what is a seemingly natural and organic order. The canvas provides me with a grounded space in which an evolutionary process in paint occurs. What evolves is the geological structure of the painting itself, as an event, which tends to bend and transcend the visual limits of time and space back into its original matrix. Each painting evolves in its own spatial dimension, a bounded and infinite reflection of the way our own world is paradoxical: com¬plete, beautiful, harmonious, yet continuously unfolding before us. These recent seascapes exemplify the process I have outlined here.

weissejay@netzero.net

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This article appears courtesy of NY Arts Magazine and will be appearing in their October 2010 issue. Visit them at www.nyartsmagazine.com