• Art Organization: Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Great Rivers Biennial April 11 - August 8, 2010 Cameron Fuller: From the Collection of the Institute for the Perpetuation of Imaginal Processes

From the Great Rivers Biennial trifecta, Cameron Fuller’s exhibition is comparable to a musical composition based upon familiar tunes. Combining basic melodies of recollection, wanderlust and adventure, the exhibition rekindles the juvenescent enchantment of the natural world. Creating a museum within a museum, Fuller’s exhibition - video, diorama, photography, and installation - brings the viewer into a world beyond the Contemporary and into the fantasias of imagination.

The Institute for the Perpetuation of Imaginal Processes is assembled from Fuller’s virtuosity of set design, taking cues from theater production to create moments of static cinema. Entering into Fuller’s Institute, the exhibition begins with a contemporary, sci-fi slab of the natural world. Titled As it is, this full-scale diorama displays taxidermy forest animals inhabiting their portion of an astro-turfed earth, roaming at ease under the cover of a starry and geodesic sky. What, at first, may seem akin to the tradition of a natural history museum, is Fuller re-appropriating the conventions of historicizing presentation. Creating this fantastical version of the natural world, Fuller causes the audience to conjure up a story of their own. As it is revives the notion of the frontier, claiming its existence within our own imaginations.

Through the templates of diorama and performance, Fuller aims to preserve the storytelling apparatus, creating a platform for its preservation and transformation. His technique facilitates a self-analytical, self-historicizing reaction – where we can see ourselves more readily from the outside, to realize the ways in which we define our world, the interconnectedness of our ideas, and ways we relate to one another. The Institute for the Perpetuation of Imaginal Processes is on view at the Contemporary until its closing date August 8, 2010. Come by and visit The Institute.

• Art Organization: The Pulitzer

Free Art/Food Tomorrow

Kathryn Adamchick, an Art/Food organizer, talks about how Art/Food relates to the work of Gordon Matta-Clark and a 1971 pig roast under the Brooklyn Bridge.

As part of the Contemporary’s “Homegrown Summer,” and to celebrate the closing of the Pulitzer’s Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark, the two institutions will together host Art/Food tomorrow, June 5, from 1-4pm. For full event details, please visit our event page.

To get an idea of how this multi-layered event came together, I interviewed one of the key organizers, Anna Poss, Administrative Assistant to the Departments of Curatorial and Community Engagement at the Pulitzer.

AB: What has your role been for Art/Food?

AP: I have been working with Kathryn Adamchick, an independent art education consultant, and Alex Elmestad, from Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, in developing and planning this event. We wanted to create a collaborative event that represented the themes of our respective shows. For the Contemporary and their Great Rivers Biennial, the goal is to feature local and sustainable food. For the Pulitzer, the aim of the event is to incorporate the ideals of Gordon Matta-Clark from his restaurant Food and his performance pieces that incorporated food, like the pig roast he had under the Brooklyn Bridge. Food and art both have this amazing capability of bringing people together from diverse backgrounds and uniting them. Art/Food really highlights this connection and celebrates it in a way that is rarely done. Read the rest of this entry »

Interview with Greg Stimac

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.

-Lynna Borden, Intern

• Art Organization: White Flag Projects

Interview with Michelle Grabner (Part 4 of 4)

Michelle Grabner is an artist, curator, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also the curator of Newtonland, the current exhibition at White Flag Projects. I had the pleasure of interviewing Michelle on the morning of the show’s opening; this is the final of installment of that interview.

Lynna Borden (White Flag Intern): Did you and Brad make your piece specifically for the show and did you do it before or after you found the other artists?

Michelle Grabner: We’ve been making mobiles for some time and they always include some of my static silverpoint drawings. We like the contradiction between drawings comprised of silverpoint on panel and something vernacular, in this case, aluminum sections of bleacher seating, which implies a kind of spectatorship. So they’re formal, there’s mathematical proportion being played out and so forth, but there’s always this collision between something vernacular and recognizable in terms of material, and then degrees of abstraction.

So we’ve been working with those collisons for a long time. For the piece here, we were drawn to the structural space and the I-beams articulating the physical space and volume of White Flag Projects. Again, this work is more of a hanging screen than a mobile. What I really like about this piece and how it echoes the main space of White Flag is that you have these secessions of I-beams that horizontally dissect the volume of the space, and then you have the suspensions of these horizontal bleacher sections that echo the I-beams. I like to see it as a metaphorical gesture of flattening out the space that is White Flag Projects.

LB: It’s interesting that you talk about spectatorship because the piece really does change the way you view the rest of the show. You can only enter from the left side of the gallery and if you’re standing on the right, you’re forced to look through this kind of screen.

MG: Yep, it was funny because my concern was that it was going to be much more obtrusive or opaque. That the viewer wasn’t going to be able to penetrate it, but you’re right, to get a clear view of the work you do have to be in one space or the other. You can see work through the horizontal stretches of the bleachers, but not clearly, so you start playing with strikingly horizontals frames.

LB: Do you think that doing this show and working in this space will inform or influence what you do next?

MG: Well, I can tell you that it already has influenced my new work. In the past, the mobiles were true mobiles, where things were moving in multi-directions, balanced out and so forth. We’re working on a piece for New York, a show that will open in April that elaborates on the piece here though, it’s more suspended sculpture than mobile. There are also some architectural elements and references involved in the new works that come directly from working through Newtonland.

LB: Thank you so much for your time!

• Art Organization: White Flag Projects

Interview with Michelle Grabner (Part 3 of 4)

Michelle Grabner is an artist, curator, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also the curator of Newtonland, the current exhibition at White Flag Projects. I had the pleasure of interviewing Michelle on the morning of the show’s opening; this is the third of four installments of that interview.

Lynna Borden (White Flag Intern): Yes, I found this idea of disconnection and the lack of traditional support and structure very thought-provoking. Would you be able to talk a bit more about why you think that’s relevant today?

Michelle Grabner: From a studio perspective, and as a painter, the idea of the support, the idea of edges, of contours, or boundaries, or limitations has been something that has been pushed at and is perennially challenged. In theory, we discuss rhizomes and topple vertical and stabilized position, so we’ve been playing with structure and the ideas about structures for years. One of the histories of modernism is based on a relationship of how we unravel, dissolve, and reinforce these kinds of structures.

But as of late, our relationships to networks, how we move through time and space, and how we negotiate our own narratives in the age of social-networking, has us re-evaluating old dependable structures and unable to recognize the ones that shape our current condition. I like to think that the dissolving of a boundary, or a surface, or a support is a critical gesture but that might be too idealistic.

Realistically, I think the renewed interest in mobiles is not a critical breaking down in a kind of post-modern execution or an undoing of frames; instead, it ends up being something that is much more external and reflects a network condition.

LB: I think it’s interesting that you talk about social networking because that’s not something I’d originally considered as an aspect of this show, but it makes a lot of sense. Now, you can have five minutes of real-time interaction and then continue your “friendship” through these various interfaces like facebook, text messaging, and twitter. It’s sort of disconcerting.

MG: Yeah, see, that’s really great because then you’re talking about these structures of time or just being in the physical space of somebody else before you can develop a friendship, those things have been pulled away. Space, time – those kind of organizational foundations are not necessary anymore, but then you have to talk about the quality of friendship.

LB: Right. It’s definitely not the same.

LB: The show also relates a lot to science, of course the title, Newtonland, the idea of gravity, and Painlevé’s compilation of films entitled Science is Fiction. What do you see as the relation between all of these elements?

MG: This is where I’m quite simple in terms of the idea of Newton and gravity. So we’re talking about some contours and structures that have been pulled away, but we still have this overarching natural, albeit weak, force called gravity. Within the deep seas, gravity and pressure is distorted, but here, in this space, gravity is literally being featured. The law of gravity takes the spotlight. Structures may be dissolving around us but things aren’t floating away quite yet, though they’re coming close.

Science is Fiction is a kind of wonderful thing too because there are other forces at play so there’s a kind of corrective element to Painlevé’s title of how he thinks. Again, it’s a construction of science, an investigation that doesn’t add up to a kind of truth, but the perception of truth.

So I value gravity and do not take it for granted. I need it as a law of nature to literally and figuratively get out of bed in the morning. There’s something welcoming about some universal truths and, as simple as gravity is, at least it gives you something to work with. A lot of the work in this show works through the poetics of gravity, harnessing it to create these beautiful systems of balance and movement within this natural force.

LB: Many of the pieces also recall Calder’s mobiles. Why did you choose to bring those back into focus right now?

MG: Right now, Gagosian gallery in Manhattan is hosting a big Calder show and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago has a collection of Calder’s works and they’re going to be opening in June along with contemporary artists influences by Calder. It’s funny, thinking about and seeing more suspended and dispersed work in contemporary art. A couple years ago, sculptors were thinking about the aggregate—pulling together, packing, compressing. Now we’re seeing this different kind of approach to organizing form. This is an interesting phenomenon—artists are choosing to do away with cohesion.

Calder’s stabile or mobile presentations are iconic, acutely negotiating, color, shape, movement, and balance. Calder hasn’t been rediscovered by contemporary artists—don’t get me wrong, his pieces are extraordinary, but there’s something beyond Calder, something within a greater context that I believe compels artists to the idea of suspension. Calder may be the grandfather, but why Calder was exploring this vocabulary and why artists are looking at this now isn’t comparable. The context is different, and I’m interested in exploring this trend and, hopefully, this show starts to ask those questions.

• Art Organization: White Flag Projects

Interview with Michelle Grabner (Part 2 of 4)

Michelle Grabner is an artist, curator, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also the curator Newtonland, the current exhibition at White Flag Projects. I had the pleasure of interviewing Michelle on the morning of the show’s opening; this is the second of four installments of that interview.

Lynna Borden (White Flag Intern): You’ve worked with a couple of the artists in this show before, Jan Van Der Ploeg and Elizabeth Bryant, what attracts you to their work?

Michelle Grabner: Good question. They have a really solid foundational practice. Jan is a classical abstract formalist—interested in elemental, two-dimensional vocabulary and known primarily for his wall paintings that explore architectural constructs: interior/exterior, public/private. There is a kind of great graphic sensibility with Jan’s work that is super compelling and I am always pulled to it.

Elizabeth Bryant is really interested in the negotiation of nature and culture, and you see that with her work presented here—a manufactured photograph of a landscape. Playing with an innocuous mass-produced vista, she pulls out shapes, looking for other types of topographical elements that get worked into this clichéd landscape. And she’s been doing that for a long time, looking at gardens, looking at different kinds of landscapes and integrating cultural objects into that. At what point do these integrations break? When do they create balance and harmony? I think the piece here does that with a sense of balance, movement, and physical and illusionary space.

Also, both Jan and Elizabeth are solid mid-career artists, which is something I am really committed to. They’ve really been slugging it out for years and all too often that doesn’t get rewarded in the larger contemporary art apparatus. The contemporary art landscape prefers the new and the young so I have a commitment, as a mid-career artist myself, to look at the work of those who have been around the block a few times.

LB: Did Jan create his piece specifically for this show? His other work is very different, especially in the way it’s bound to the wall.

MG: My guess is that his mobile is a prototype. It has this kind of sketchy potential—color and movement overlapping. When we were installing it, Matt was astute to notice that maybe it’s supposed to be this flat viewing plane that is at the heart of this work. Identifying where these colored circles are overlapping each other is at the core of this mobile. Jan has made objects before, but my guess is that this may be the first time he’s integrating movement in the form of a mobile. I look forward to seeing more from him in the future.

LB: When I was first looking at the artists in this show and thinking about their work, the one I had trouble relating was Jean Painlevé. Can you talk a bit about why you chose to include his videos and how they relate to the other works in the exhibition?

MG: Some of it has to do with my own love of his film making, which is vast, funny, and erudite. There’s fantasy and surrealism as well as delight in the formal investigation of movement, shape, balance, and color, which this show features. Even the straightest documentary- nature-oriented videos, the ones that are looking at nature in the most empirical way, still have a soundtrack or a narration that is not “good science.” So, there is this great subjectivity that he brings to the natural world exploiting our wonder. There are hyperbolic-like spaces that get articulated in the underwater creatures he films. But formally, the movement of some of those animals, how they are suspended and move through another realm, is formally exquisite.

LB: Yeah, after spending more time with the works and watching the videos, you can definitely see the similarities in movement and form but, at first, on the surface, I found it difficult to relate.

MG: That’s right and this is why I brought Elizabeth’s mobile into the exhibition, to give context to the nature videos with another piece that negotiates images or constructs of nature.

When we were installing the show, what I really liked was that you can see the show as three distinct spaces— and each space is shaped around an investigation of distinct formal elements and movements. You have the front space with Greg Bogin, and then the piece that I did with my husband Brad Killam that starts to make reference to text and has signifiers, and then there are the works that play with reflection and dynamic movement and so forth, and then you have the two works that pull suspensions of nature into the exhibition.

-Lynna Borden, Intern

• Art Organization: White Flag Projects

Interview with Michelle Grabner (Part 1 of 4)

Michelle Grabner is an artist, curator, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also the curator Newtonland, the current exhibition at White Flag Projects. I had the pleasure of interviewing Michelle on the morning of the show’s opening; this interview will be posted here in four parts.

Lynna Borden (White Flag Projects): What attracted you to this space? I know it’s very different from both the Suburban and the Poor Farm.

Michelle Grabner: Well, Matt and White Flag Projects have an excellent reputation. Not being from St. Louis, I don’t really have a grasp on how White Flag plays out politically in St. Louis but, since I’ve been here, I’m really getting a sense of its uniqueness and how it holds a complementary relationship to programming at the Contemporary, the Kemper, Boots, and even Laumeier Sculpture Park. As a visitor, I find this very exciting.

After talking to Matt the other day, I realized that White Flag embodies the same sensibility and relationship to contemporary art as Midway Contemporary in Minneapolis. I have great respect for Midway’s programming, so I’m really at home here in terms of White Flag’s commitment to not just playing out exhibitions that feature local talent, but actually contextualizing them within international art practices. This is always a difficult, but necessary, project if one is really committed to raising the cultural stakes in cities that are left of center. Institutions like the Contemporary here or the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, certainly that is their mandate, but because they operate on a larger scale, their programming and their curatorial ideas get played out in a very slow way, sometimes so slow that they often appear behind the curve when it comes to examining what is contemporary. It’s spaces like Midway, LAX in LA, or White Flag Projects here that I think are doing the good work in terms of risk and breadth of contemporary practice and discourse.

LB: That’s true. Here, we can incorporate more artists and have exhibitions more frequently than larger institutions.

MG: That’s right, and institutions like the Contemporary or the MCA have obligations to various audiences. They’re always analyzing who their audience is and catering to them and their many expectations. Sometimes these institutions develop really great educational programs but sometimes catering to an audience leads to watered-down programming and an over-emphasis on making the institution social. But here at White Flag, it seems that your primary audience is the international art apparatus. Although this is my first time here, I’ve been following the on-goings at White Flag over the last two years from my vantage point in Chicago. I know there are curators and artists in Europe who have asked me specifically about White Flag, so my observation is that White Flag is more expansive and constructed very differently from the audiences that comprise other institutions.

LB: I feel like the work here can also push the boundaries a little bit more than in a larger institution.

MG: That’s right, or try things out—risk something. That’s my complaint all the time about other institutions. They play it safe. Artists and/or curators can try something out here and bigger institutions can’t fathom failure.

• Guest Blogger: Amy Broadway

Catching up with Laumeier

Mike Venso, the director of Communications at Laumeier Sculpture Park, interviews Kim Humphries, Director of Exhibitions and Collections, and Mark Newport about Newport’s art in the exhibition Self-Made Man.

• Art Organization: White Flag Projects

Robert Ryman at White Flag Projects

The next installment of White Flag’s DRINKS series will take place Wednesday, February 10th from 5-7pm and will feature a 1979 interview with American artist Robert Ryman (in addition to free happy hour drinks, of course).

You could say that Robert Ryman (b. 1930) came to painting by accident. His first artistic interest was jazz music, which he pursued at the George Peabody School for Teachers in his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. It wasn’t until 1953, when Ryman took a job as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, that his interest in painting began to take shape.

A self-taught artist, it’s as if Ryman’s paintings are a series of experiments playing with the effects of texture, brushstroke, thickness, and surface in order to call attention to the work’s physicality. This individualized method of painting calls for a similarly unique method of viewing. Since Ryman’s paintings are purely non-representational, they are not about symbolism, narrative, or even abstraction. Instead, they muse on their relationship to broader elements, such as the behavior of their medium and the environment in which they exist. The conceptual dimension of Ryman’s work is dependent upon his essential commitment to white paint, which, through its neutrality, brings forth more with less. The almost transparent quality of the tone allows viewers to consider the light, space, surface, and other such elements that usually fade into the background of a work.

Ryman is a much-lauded artist who’s had major exhibitions at the Tate Gallery, London (1993); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1993); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1994); and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1994) to name a few. He has also participated in national and international exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial (1977, 1987, 1995), Documenta (1972, 1977, 1982), and the Venice Biennale (1976, 1978, 1980).

DRINKS with Robert Ryman will be held Wednesday, February 10th from 5-7 p.m.; interview screening beings promptly at 6 p.m. For more details on the DRINKS series and other events at White Flag Projects, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

• Guest Blogger: Amy Broadway

Catching up with White Flag Projects

Matthew Strauss, the founder and director of White Flag Projects, describes the current and upcoming exhibitions for 2010.