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.

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.

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.

On Saturday April 17th, White Flag Projects will be hosting an all-day, all-night screening of David Lynch’s campy television series Twin Peaks. All 30 episodes will be shown consecutively. Doors open at 8 pm and the screening beings at 9 pm.

David Lynch is one of the last filmmakers you’d think to see with their own T.V. series, and that’s part of what makes Twin Peaks compelling. Famed for his complex, surrealistic, and often-unsettling films, such as Eraserhead (1976) and Mulholland Dr. (2001), Lynch has garnered a following that’s a far cry from mainstream. Transitioning from obscure films to primetime television is no doubt a difficult task, but Lynch has succeeded in doing so without compromising his signature style.

Set in a small town somewhere in the Pacific Northwest where diner coffee and cherry pie predominate, Twin Peaks offers a gaze into the secret lives of its seemingly simple characters. Like many of Lynch’s films, the series follows the unraveling of a mystery—the murder of a high-school girl named Laura Palmer (it also features dreamscapes and creepy little men that dance and speak enigmatically, things you’re probably familiar with if you’ve seen a lot of Lynch films).

The series first aired on ABC in the 1990’s and, while its mainstream success was short-lived, it developed a cult following and even spawned an annual festival. The show’s relevance lies in its ability to offer an engaging escape into the uncertain; packed with eccentric characters, strange happenings, and unfulfilled desires, Twin Peaks brings us into a mythical world that can only live on in one’s mind.

This is a FREE event and we encourage you to bring whatever you’d like (BYOE- Bring Your Own Everything), from snacks (pie, doughnuts, and “bacon, super-crispy, almost burned, cremated—that’s great”), to beverages (damn fine coffee!), to sleeping bags and chairs. You’re also welcome to come and go as you please. The screening will last until approximately 9 pm the following day.

For more information on this event and upcoming White Flag Projects exhibitions, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

On Friday, April 7th at 8 pm, White Flag Projects will be screening three short films by Japanese American artist, Bruce Yonemoto. He is currently a visiting artist/professor at Washington University in St. Louis and the recipient of 2009-10’s Freund Fellowship.

Yonemoto has worked in collaboration with his brother Norman Yonemoto since 1975 and is known for his focus on media-based social commentary and trans-cultural investigations. While Yonemoto employs strategies gleaned from mainstream television, cinema, and advertising as a means to manipulate his audience, he also strives to make viewers aware of how these strategies are working. With a mix of parody, psychoanalytic undertones, and broadly attuned cultural awareness, Yonemoto examines the shaping of a collective consciousness. His films stand as both a critique of current social constructs and rich artistic documents.

The 1986 film Kappa deals with the tales of Oedipus and Kappa, a malevolent Shinto god of water. By dissecting themes of reality versus fiction, this film demonstrates the power of cultural mythos. 1984’s Vault assembles a clichéd narrative of love and loss in order to explore themes of desire through subversion and Freudian tropes. Lastly, 1980’s Garage Sale II follows a troubled punk couple played by video artist Tony Oursler and actor Wendon Baldwin.

Yonemoto has shown widely in the United States and Japan. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, among others. He has also received numerous awards and grants for his films including the Maya Deren Award for Independent Film and Video Artists in 1993.

The evening’s program is curated by Washington University Professor, Robert Gero. The event takes place Friday, April 7th; doors open at 7 pm, screening begins at 8 pm. For more information on this and upcoming WFP events, please visit www.white-flag-projects.org.

You may remember Craig Norton, a self-taught artist whose drawings and collages dealt with themes of social justice and racism, both current and historical. Norton’s solo exhibition at White Flag Projects in 2007 presented many of the same works currently on view at his most recent show at the Jim Kempner gallery in Chelsea, which was recognized in a New York Times review by art critic Roberta Smith.

Bill Smith, whose solo show at White Flag in September 2006 inaugurated the space, creates sculptural work that marries science and art. One of Smith’s kinetic sculptures featured in Pulse, an annual art fair held in New York City and Miami, was written up in The Huffington Post (and accompanied by a photograph! And video!) as a new media work that artist Erik Sanner would “remember for sure.”

Ian Weaver, who received his MFA from Washington University in 2008, recreates records of his family’s past by painting starkly realistic images of birth certificates and the like. His solo exhibition, Document, at the Saint Louis Art Museum contained the 10 paintings included in White Flag’s May 2008 show FastX2.

We’re pleased about the accomplishments of these local WFP veterans, and we’d like to wish continued success to all of our past artists.

For more details on past exhibitions, upcoming events, or our current exhibition Newtonland, visit www.white-flag-projects.org.

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!

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.

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.

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.