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.

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.