Jeremy Sigler is the type of person many students of the arts want to be when they “grow up”. If you don’t know much about him, learning about his extensive work in contemporary art and poetry definitely compells broad admiration. Having received his BFA from the University of Pennsylvania and his MFA in sculpture from the University of California, Los Angeles, Sigler has made a career out of crafting experimental work in multiple genres, earning him the position of Lecturer in sculpture at Yale University. Artists in the academic realm do not always cross over into the public sphere, but Sigler makes a consistent point of it, most recently with a two-page, malleable clay journal called Rational/Irrational, installed in the bookstore café of MoMA’s P.S. 1.

Sigler is also an artist with words, bridging the realms of prose and poetry. He has published four books: To and To (Left Hand Books, 1998), Mallet Eyes (Left Hand Books, 2000), Led Almost by my Tie (with Jessica Stockholder, Ruth Lingen Editions, 2007), and Math (Ubuweb Editions, 2008). In addition to publishing his most recent book, Crackpot Poet, with The Brooklyn Rail (Black Square Editions), Sigler also contributes regularly to the monthly journal as a columnist. In a recent interview with poet and novelist Eileen Myles, the two writers bonded over their common love of the film and novel Being There and how writing poetry is like releasing a valve (read full interview here).

Tomorrow evening at 8 PM, Jeremy will be reading his own humorous poetry at White Flag, to compliment the current exhibition Time Wounds All Heels, an examination of humor’s potential effect on form and perception.

For more information about tomorrow’s event, our current show and other upcoming programs and events at White Flag, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

What may seem like a mere supplement for the lack of gallery visibility from external view, White Flag Projects’ vinyl banners were initially produced to hide the street-facing garage door. Slowly evolving from a witty, ad-hoc solution that functioned as an oversized poster – including text to advertise events and exhibitions – the banner now operates as a public art initiative, enlisting artists to create new work within the 13 x 13′ space.

The banner’s transformation into an art object began with the 2009 exhibition FX3, when the banner revisited the most memorable bikini scene in cinema history, presenting an enlarged, cropped film still of Phoebe Cates just before unclasping her red bikini top. Themes and scenes from the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High were appropriated in fragmentary distillation as images to promote the third iteration of the Fast Times student exhibition series. Introducing the banner as public art, the provocative image at once became a platform for controversy as it elicited several complaints from the local government and members of a nearby senior living home. In an attempt to quell complaints, a citation was made against White Flag Projects but ultimately failed as an insufficient case of impropriety.

The second “fine art” banner was created for the exhibition Destroy All Monsters: Hungry for Death. Celebrating 1970s Detroit-based noise band, White Flag showcased items culled from the collective’s large archive. The exhibition’s banner, a recreation of an original collage by Jim Shaw, displayed a highly graphic image of Charles Manson’s face against a winsome blue and cloudy sky, with the text “Love means never having to say you’re sorry – Erich Legal, Love Story”. Juxtaposing the tagline of the popular 1970 melodrama with the image of the notorious 60s counterculture cult leader and serial killer generated both emotional and volatile responses from viewers. One evening at the building’s entrance, Matt Strauss recalls the angered reaction of a middle-aged woman drawing her knife in an agitated state of rage at the sight of Charles Manson. The lady showed ready signs of slashing the banner with her weapon, but was eventually calmed, as Matt assured her that a member of the arts collective would gladly answer any questions she had about the banner’s content if she attended the exhibition’s opening – thus redirecting her wrath.

In September 2010, the New York-based artist Garth Weiser produced a new painting as the banner for his solo exhibition. Starting with a blank square of white vinyl, Weiser rendered in water-soluble media a new work his highly graphic practice of geometric abstraction. Originally designed as a time-based piece that would erode from wind and precipitation, the blue acrylic paint remained steadfast, not bleeding into the white areas or disintegrating as Weiser anticipated. Thus the banner now remains a lasting piece from Weiser’s show, accompanying the his two other works exploring temporal effects.

In the following group exhibition, Which Witch is Which? and/or Summertime, artist Tamar Halpern created two original works using the exhibition banner as a template – producing one for the gallery floor and the other, titled See No Evil, for its usual spot at the building’s exterior. Resisting strict formal categorizations, Halpern presented the banner as a sculptural art object. For both works, Halpern printed a black and white image onto the banners’ surface, leaving a border of blank white vinyl instead of covering the whole area. This gesture plays against the banner’s parameters, asserting the work’s pictorial value while calling attention to the banner’s physical presence, material and form. The placement of Untitled on the gallery floor re-iterated this experience as viewers were allowed to walk across the work, as image and material exchanged roles.

Loosely constructed around ways in which humor informs art, the group exhibition Time Wounds All Heels presents the banner as an original artwork in a piece by Adam McEwen. Currently on view, McEwen’s banner enlarges publicly what was once a much more private, virtual form of exchange –a text message. In a practice that focuses heavily on society’s perception of human progress, this work emerges from McEwen’s collection of text messages sent from friends, as he refigures them into framed works on paper – or in this case, in a work on vinyl. Untitled Text Msg (Vicodin), an inkjet print on vinyl, displays a reproduced image of a private caller’s text to McEwan’s cell phone: “Hey happy new year. Do u know anyone I can buy vicodin from?”. This work, along with others from the text message series, upsets the banal and the familiar by thrusting it into a context with an unaccustomed degree of public exposure – i.e. the highly trafficked, municipal route of Manchester Boulevard.

The transformation of White Flag Project’s banner into an art object is traced along a natural line of collaboration between the curatorial and the art practice. No longer a means to merely advertise exhibitions, the banner is now property of several artists’ bodies of work. Whether facing the busy thoroughfare on the building’s exterior or within the gallery space, the banner has become absorbed as a signature fixture of White Flag Projects’ programming.

Time Wounds All Heels is open through Saturday, February 26, 2011. For more information about this exhibition and other upcoming programs and events at White Flag, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

Time Wounds All Heels makes the audience reconsider the purpose and creation of the works that it features. Upon first glance at the gallery space, one immediately questions the unity of the ecclectic pieces presented, but upon closer examination, the link becomes clear: duplicity.

A prime example of this is Do The Right Thing, 2009 by Donelle Woolford. The piece is composed of different pieces of wood put together like a puzzle. Each piece of wood has a different thickness than the one adjacent to it, making this work more of a relief sculpture than a traditionally hung rectangular composition. What makes Woolford’s work so interesting is that it is actually the product of a fictional character created by the artist Joe Scanlan, who hires actresses to play the role of Donelle. After completing a number of wood assemblages, like the one included in Time Wounds All Heels, Scanlan felt that they did not fit within his body of work; hence, he decided to invent the alternate persona of Donelle Woolford – a young African-American female who harnesses aspects of her cultural identity to create abstract compositions. In hiring an actress to claim responsibility for the works, Scanlan makes us question the importance of artistic ownership and the role of personal identity in informing a given artwork.

The Spanish-born artist Jaime Pitarch’s Theory of Evolution, 2009 also fits perfectly into the exhibition’s exploration of duplicity. This spiral arrangement of household cleaning products on the floor of the gallery immediately catches the viewer off guard and makes one question how cleaning products can be considered art. I walked around the piece for a while before I decided to look up its name. Then it hit me: Theory of Evolution was an arrangement of cleaning products that chronicle the creation of the earth, plant, animals, and mankind. Beginning with Big Bang, the spiral finds its end with Mr. Clean.

Finally, Adam McEwen’s Untitled (Richard), 2007 is a fake obituary written for the artist Richard Prince. The odd thing is, Prince is not deceased. This faux chronicle of Prince’s life makes the viewer question McEwen’s intent when he created the work. McEwen exemplifies again how multiple meanings can inhabit the same piece. What the underlying social critique of Untitled is, I am not able to tease out; but, perhaps there is no neat punch-line in this, or any of the displayed artworks.

Time Wounds All Heels is currently on view through Saturday, February 26. For more information about this exhibition and other upcoming programs at White Flag, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

If you’re unfamiliar with Golden Age, this is the perfect time to become acquainted. Hailing from the hot-bed of creative activity that is Chicago, Golden Age will set up shop in our space next weekend, from October 1-2. Join us Friday evening for the opening of Golden Age: Permanent Collection I and a first look at the goods on sale. This “pop-up” shop will feature a lovingly curated mix of artists books, exhibition catalogues, and limited edition tote bags, so you can carry that special book you’re eyeing safely home. Golden Age will stay open on Saturday from 12-5pm, after which it will be back on the road.

Their dynamic catalog includes everything from a North Drive Press box set containing artist multiples and interviews to a bootleg cassette of Javelin’s recordings. They have recently published Can I Come Over to Your House, a comprehensive 10th anniversary review of The Suburban, the Oak Park-based exhibition space co-run by Michelle Grabner, curator of White Flag’s exhibit Newtonland, from last season.

North Drive Press 05 – Various Artists | Can I Come Over to Your House

In addition to distributing books, zines, and albums, Golden Age hosts exhibitions and performances in-store. Cadaver Corpse presented a playful collection of exquisite corpse works from artists around the world. Zachary Kaplan’s Popular Reactions to September 11 invited participants to engage in a conversation centered around film, music, and text through the project’s weblog.

As a creative nexus, Golden Age works with an amazing variety of artists and idea-generators. Come see for yourself at our pop-up shop event – whether your obsessions lie in magazines, artist interviews, or sonic experimentation, Golden Age: Permanent Collection I is bound to satisfy that niche craving.

Golden Age: Permanent Collection I will open the evening of Friday, October 1st and continue through gallery hours on Saturday, October 2. For more information on Golden Age, visit www.shopgoldenage.com. For more information about White Flag and upcoming events and exhibitions, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

Included in the current exhibit of Garth Weiser’s paintings is a piece, I wouldn’t have worn mascara if I knew I was going to be taking a trip down memory lane, assembled from pages of an artist’s book of the same title. The publication, produced by the Parisian onestar press, renders an original Weiser painting into book form – resulting in yet another non-traditional approach to the otherwise traditional medium of painting that is consistent with the two other works on view.

onestar press’s “no editing” approach to working with artists means that the entire project has Weiser’s metaphorical fingerprints all over it. Each page of the book depicts a section of his 2008 painting and is printed with a number on the back. Instructions on the front dictate: “Please rip out the pages and assemble them according to the key on the back cover.” Read: minor assembly required for a fantastic result. onestar’s publishing know-how has produced a book-as-installation that can bring Garth Weiser’s graphic wizardry into your living rooms – be it on the coffee table or on the wall, you decide.

onestar press has worked with artists as varied as Marina Abramovic, Pierre Huyghe, and Jonas Mekas. Marina Abramovic’s book, 100 Pisama / 100 Letters, chronicles the first sentences of all her received correspondence from 1965 to 1979. Other artists include John Armleder and Olivier Mosset, both of whom had a local joint exhibition in 2008 at the Contemporary. Liam Gillick, who will be part of the upcoming group exhibition, Which Witch is Which? and/or Summertime, opening November 6 here at White Flag, has also published an artist book with onestar, in collaboration with Sean Dack.

onestar’s philosophy of book-as-object informs its work with artists. “When an artist makes an installation, he wants to control the process,” explains founder Christophe Boutin. In the same way, with their book production, “the artist takes charge of every stage of the prepress.” Each book is conceived of and designed by the artist and printed in editions of 250 on the modest “one star” press.

MoMA purchased the entire collection in 2007, housed in a Lawrence Weiner bookshelf:

Also founded by Boutin and cousin to onestar press is Three Star Books, which publishes handmade, limited-edition fine art books that garner at least two more stars in terms of luxury. “Three Star Books,” its website proclaims, “are artworks.” Previous collaborators have included Liam Gillick and Tobias Rehberger.

I wouldn’t have worn mascara if I knew I was going to be taking a trip down memory lane is available for purchase at White Flag Projects and online at onestarpress.com. Garth Weiser will remain on view through October 23, 2010. For more details on the exhibition and upcoming events, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org

8/31/10
Garth Weiser, painter and manipulator of geometry and proportion (PAMOGAP), is to make his presence known here at White Flag Projects in three parts: one, a 57 foot-long mural that will occupy the entirety of the gallery wall; two, a large, ephemeral, water-based painting on the gallery exterior; and three, an installation of manipulated pages from his artists book. I’ve seen Garth’s work online – rectangles of canvas depicting quiet battles between straight-edged geometry and subversive squiggles. It’s hard to see how it’ll translate in real life – I’m betting the colors will translate differently off-screen, and texture is impossible to parse from the network of pixels.

In many ways, though, Garth’s works at White Flag represent a departure from his practice. Known for producing cool compositions that pit hard-edged abstraction against conventions of Western painting (the horizon line being one of them), he now conducts a new experiment with variables tweaked – scale, medium, and time are all new agents in this creative laboratory.

9/2/10
I walk in Thursday to a jolt of blue. Garth Weiser and his wife, Francesca DiMattio, also a painter, are in coveralls that, judging from their general splotchiness, have proved their usefulness. Garth is working on the large inside mural while Francesca paints the banner that is to be hung outside. This is how it goes: Garth tapes off a section, paints it, maybe picks up a spray bottle and fires off something illegible in the language of gesture. He deliberates over a blank spot on the wall with Francesca. He goes back to work, taping and rolling paint and spraying. With a “canvas” stretched to the size of 57 feet, everything gets bigger. Paint gets rolled or sprayed onto the wall and the effect is immediate: all black and blue, bold stripes and aggressive scribbles. The playlist for this undertaking includes Ween and Led Zeppelin.

On Tuesday I had walked into an empty gallery – only one wall had been prepped with a coat of black paint. As Jessica Baran led me through the space, she pointed out a dead fly on the floor. “Our new installation piece,” she laughed. The room had the potential to become many things: a zen retreat. A warehouse. An uncomfortably pristine isolation chamber.

What resembled a giant’s black chalkboard on Tuesday is now a construction of parallel lines and not-so-parallel ones, a subway map fraught with obstacles. As Garth works, an undercoat of blue graffiti-like scrawls receives the tape treatment – strategic areas are cordoned off with long stretches of masking tape in parallel dashes and backslashes. These then get painted over with a primary blue that jostles against the flat black. My hands are momentarily unoccupied, so I masterfully tape off a section of the wall that needs blue striping and roll on the paint. After the tape comes off, there’s no way to tell who’s done what on this wall – except for the blue and black splotches (courtesy of Garth), which lock into tension with the rigid, impersonal stripes. With the scale of the painting as it is, it’s less about the artist’s hand and more about the execution. And if the way things look now is any indicator of the final piece (and it is, of course it is), then I’m looking forward to an electrifying result.

Garth’s exterior painting will take the form of a banner that, for previous exhibitions, has featured digital printouts promoting the exhibitions inside. Now that banner will unfurl for an entirely different reveal: With time, and the addition of water, the web of white and blue stripes that Francesca and Mel, another White Flag intern, have started painting today will transform. Geometric strategy will yield to the caprice of time and chance. And as a time-lapse piece, the work resists the possibility of a complete viewing. This makes it more imperative than ever to see the piece in the flesh – now more than ever, Garth’s work requires the viewer’s physical presence to fully realize its potential.

The final piece, to be assembled using pages from his artists book, I wouldn’t have worn mascara if I knew I was going to be taking a trip down memory lane, is the last phase of the project, and remains yet to be seen. All of this maverick experimentation, it occurs to me, is no doubt enabled by White Flag’s mission to take artists to a place they haven’t been before. The space invites would-be-experimenters and artists ready to surrender their practice in the name of trial and error – a proposition that Garth has tackled with aplomb, spray-gun set to maximum precision.

It’s hard to believe that in just a couple of weeks White Flag will inaugurate its fifth year of shows, and it seems similarly odd that the forthcoming exhibition by Garth Weiser is the first time we’ve presented a one-person exhibition by a painter. It’s a little interesting to see how that first-ever invitation to a painter has taken form in the current exhibition: While Weiser is earning growing attention internationally for canvases reflecting his thoughtful treatment of abstract painting’s history (FlashArt’s “Top 100 Emerging Artists” listed him at #14…in the world…), there won’t be any canvases on view. Instead, Weiser will take this opportunity in St. Louis to execute the largest painting of his career directly on the gallery wall — a 57 foot-long temporary mural that will be one of three paintings of differing form, each emphasizing “discrete intentionalities and temporal relationships to their substrates and mediums.” The other works include a momentary, monumental painting in water-soluble media on the exterior of the gallery and an installation of 150 pages torn from I wouldn’t have worn mascara if I knew I was going to be taking a trip down memory lane, an artists book reproducing Weiser’s 2008 painting of the same title. (More on the very cool Onestar Press in Paris that published it in a future post…)

We’re expecting Garth’s show here at White Flag to provoke a lot of substantive conversation, which you can be part of when it opens on Saturday, September 11 from 7-10 pm. It will be added to Weiser’s impressive record of exhibitions elsewhere, including one-person shows at Casey Kaplan in New York and Altman Siegel Gallery in San Francisco, in addition to serious group shows like “The Triumph of Painting; Abstract America,” at the Saatchi Gallery, London, and “Greater New York,” at PS1 MoMA, New York. Good for him, good for us, good for anyone else who decides to come by and see it. More updates on the installation next week.

This Saturday night June 5 from 7 to 10 pm White Flag Projects invites everyone to join us for the opening reception of Ernest Trova (1927-2009), the first posthumous survey of artwork by the St. Louis native who died last year at the age of 82. Focusing on the artist’s serial use of abbreviated human forms, the exhibition will include sculpture, painting, and prints spanning Trova’s 60-year career, including major works from his notable Falling Man series, as well as many artworks that have gone unseen for more than 40 years. The exhibition remains on view through July 17, 2010.

In the 1960s and 70s Ernest Trova was among the most successful and widely acknowledged sculptors working in the United States. In 1969 his work was heralded by the New York Times as “among the best of contemporary American sculpture,” and for two decades significant examples of his work were prominently displayed in The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and The Walker Art Center among a dozen other major museums. But despite the long ago success that resulted in Trova being invited to participate in a Documenta, three Whitney Annuals and three Venice Biennales, today the eccentric art of Ernest Trova is largely forgotten.

Ernest Trova (1927 – 2009) presents the artist’s morose and uniquely comic expressions of the human condition for reconsideration, and includes many of his most significant sculpture and paintings from every important phase of his development. Ernest Trova (1927 – 2009) is accompanied by www.etrova.org, an all-new website featuring hundreds of artworks, studio photographs and clippings from the Trova archives collected especially for the exhibition.

Greg Stimac is a Chicago-based artist who currently whose solo exhibition of work is currently on view at White Flag Projects. Below is an interview I did with Greg, where he discusses his artistic process, the White Flag show, and some of the themes that recur in his work.

Lynna Borden: I’m interested in the idea of the photographs depicting dead bugs accumulated on small Plexiglas sheets attached to your car. Can you discuss the origins of this project and where these works fit into your oeuvre?

Greg Stimac: Three years ago, I was with my friend Billy Joyce in Portland, Oregon. We had just driven up from Oakland, California and the front of my car was covered with bugs and dirt from the drive. We taped some pieces of mat board to my bumper and drove to Chicago. Most of the debris just flaked off by the time we arrived and we forgot about it. After some time I started thinking about how to bring that idea into photography. I settled on using Plexiglas sheets fastened to the grill with bailing wire.

Untitled (Chicago to Memphis to Little Rock) was the first one made in the series. Arriving in Little Rock at night I pulled over, removed the Plexi, connected a flatbed scanner to my cigarette lighter and made a scan at roadside with the lid of the scanner removed making the background of the image black. It worked out that the black of the image was actually the dark of the night sky.

I enjoyed making photographs that were composed by driving and the road itself, and not really knowing what imagery would emerge. All I could control was the time of night/day, season and rate of speed. I imagined the process to be somewhat akin to the collodion process of old, where the photographer coated their glass plates, photographed and developed in the field.

LB: Travel and cars, specifically, are featured directly or indirectly in many of your artworks, including most of the work in the White Flag show. Would you discuss how the automobile figures into your process as both a means of production and as a motif?

GS: To me the car is just as important an instrument as the camera. I often make work that features automobiles and the road because it is something very present and close to me, it has become part of my lifestyle.

LB: Do you think being a first-generation American has much to do with your perspective on American culture?

GS: Not so much. I was born and raised in Ohio (the heart if it all).

LB: Do you consider your work to be documentary or autobiographical in any way?

GS: I think about documentary photography and the work may have some documentary attributes, but often in more of a ridiculous, mundane, and playful way such as in the series’ Bottle of Piss and Mowing the Lawn.

LB: Do you think road photography and other road narratives as an inherently masculine subject? Do you ever consider your work as being gendered in any meaningful way?

GS: History shows us many woman photographers who engage in this mode of photography. Dorothea Lange for one.

LB: Is your work dependent upon being American and in America?

GS: It’s where I live and work right now. I can’t tell what I’d be making if I lived elsewhere, but why would I? America is a fascinating place.

LB: Do you see your work as any kind of critical commentary on American culture?

GS: I suppose at times certain works carry those layers more than others, such as Bison Silhouette, which is represented in the White Flag show. I had been thinking about the vast herds of bison that had once roamed the Great Plains and the West, now absent except places such as Yellowstone National Park and the occasional meat ranch. I came across this black rusting metal cutout of a bison positioned in the landscape along Hwy 20 in the Methow Valley in north central Washington state, and to me it sadly represented that negative space.

LB: The work in the White Flag exhibition was made over the last several years. Is there anything you’re working on currently that you can discuss?

GS: I’d like to do some aerial video work this summer.

Greg Stimac is on view through May 22, 2010. For more information on this exhibition and upcoming events, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

White Flag Projects is pleased to announce the opening of a solo exhibition of artwork by Greg Stimac, which will take place this Saturday, April 24th from 7-10 p.m.

In the summer of 2009, Chicago-based photographer Greg Stimac set out on a cross-country road trip with a sheet of Plexiglas adhered to the front of his car. Each time Stimac stopped and set out toward a new destination, he attached a fresh sheet of Plexi, removed the old one, and scanned it to make a printed image of the smashed insect carcasses and other debris collected on the plastic surface. Not your typical roadside activity (plugging a flatbed scanner into your car’s cigarette lighter and creating art) but each image turned out strikingly beautiful. The flattened bodies of insects, flecks of dirt, and other airborne particles transform from waste into constellation-like collages against a stark black background. Each image in the series, though similar in terms of theme and material, has its own distinct pattern and character. The works stand as documents of Stimac’s journeys, evidencing the conditions he encountered as he traveled.

Continuing in the tradition of the American road narrative, Stimac also takes photographs along the way; however, he doesn’t capture images of the stunning scenery or historic sights. Instead, he serially documents the arguably more mundane traces of human life such as bottles of piss that litter the side of the road. This series of works, titled only by their location will also be on view at White Flag alongside a video of Stimac’s, showcasing three identical white Mustangs wearing out their horns in an atonal chorus.

Most of Stimac’s work focuses on the American cultural landscape. Whether it is the mowing of lawns in suburbia, lone campfires against the Pacific, or a group ready to fire at a shooting range, Stimac’s work sheds light on American identities and ideologies that are too easily forgotten by mainstream culture.

Greg Stimac opens Saturday, April 24th, 2010. The opening reception will take place between 7 and 10 PM. The exhibition will remain open through May 22nd. For more information on this exhibition and upcoming events, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.