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07 December 2017 by nathaniel

Artist feature: Gregory Klassen AND Review: Back to School at Villa Terrace

The only disappointing thing about my visit to Gregory Klassen’s studio a few weeks ago was that I hadn’t, rather, visited with him years ago, so as to include him in my upcoming book, Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics. Just… wow.

I define an ecological approach as one where we take account of, and speculate on, agents, processes, thoughts, and relations – together. We concern ourselves with how humans and nonhumans, matter and concepts, things and not-yet-things, politics, economics, and industry, past, present, and future, for example, are all actively shaped in, and as, their interrelations. We wander and wonder around “How?” and “Why?” and “Where to?” for each. I argue that it is both an ethical and aesthetic practice to think- and act-with in such a way. After all, we must look and see, sympathize and desire, as part of thinking and acting and making decisions with and for our world, with and for and each other.

And Greg’s work approaches ecology and relation in precisely this way. It embodies and amplifies the generally imperceptible “actions” of “things” around us, so we might sense and perceive what they do, and want, and are - what they could be, how we might be, and what we might all make, looking towards the future.

The image above, for example, pictures a snapshot result of Klassen’s studio sweepings. I kid you not; for Nature Floor, he continuously swept piles of dirt and dust and garbage from the floor, into one large mound, and let that build. Over months, as he fancied, he also began to sprinkle it with water, some seeds, some interesting bits he found walking outside around the studio, and gift it with light. And… there it is, teeming with life and signs, compositions and decomposition. At stake here are our understandings of, and interactions with, the fields of influence, the potentials and capacities for birth and transformation, which are a part of each and every thing.

Greg sets up systems that help us to see and feel these forces, and just a fraction of their outcomes. Or, sometimes, he just puts extant systems (and/or their results) on display.

Retrospective Aggregate was more of an “accident,” and what, in part, set him on this path of ecological framing. Klassen spent almost a decade attempting to coerce paint – through splashes, drips, and swings of both the paint and canvas – into organic movements about… well, mostly, organic movement. And the results were indeed beautiful, written about brilliantly in this review by Mary Louise Schumacher in the Journal Sentinel. But it was when Greg rolled up his studio carpet, which he had been working “on” (in the more literal sense, as in, “on top of”), and found paint that had actually escaped to its underside – seeping and drawing, pooling and crawling, saturating and evaporating – that the artist felt he was really onto something. This became his solo exhibition at the Museum of Wisconsin Art: an eight-year work of art, where the paint itself did all that he had been trying to urge it to do, and more, but without his explicit direction. Here, and elsewhere, Greg presents works that are less an expression of human gesture or symbolism, and more a result of what paint, or plants, or dirt, themselves, do and want. Klassen encourages life and non-life as they are: growing, decaying, and growing again – and exhibits how they move and are moved.

For Greg’s Nature Table, he had the help of artist Brent Budsberg in constructing a wood structure to house and display dirt, and he gives it cycles of light and water, occasionally dropping whatever seeds are on sale at the hardware checkout over the top. Over years, it sees death and prosperity continuously emerging in and out of earth and rubber, grain and compost.

It’s nothing, really. It’s every-thing. It’s his interest or the lack thereof, the temperature in his studio, the light it gets or doesn’t, what’s on sale, what’s in the water, what people see and say, point out and ask him to enhance, and, and, and…

Currently, at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum, Greg is showing Plants: a room full of upended and upside-down, dead, potted plants, on tripods and dramatically lit, that mirror the strange, vintage, designer floral wallpaper in one of the upstairs rooms. Here is a forest of “dead media” in the most literal sense; it’s dusty and rigid, but also tangled between its own organic feel, and the sprawling desire to “be alive” from the papered shrubbery around the room.

At moments, it feels like Greg’s not-yet-decaying plants are bursting from the walls themselves. Infesting, propagating, taking over; aestheticizing, slipping through cracks, making strange; presenting, performing, redirecting; intervening, interacting, interesting.

This all “matters.” The etymology fits: all matter matters. Yes, I too am a life-long humanist, who spends more time worrying over the homeless than rainforests, thinking about American politics than recycling lithium ion batteries (for better or worse)… But Klassen reminds us that we humans are not the center of everything. Far from it. What lives in the dirt, comes from the sun, floats around the water… these “facts of the matter” are far more consequential. As a matter of fact (so to speak), there is nothing human at the center of a human. We are made of the same quarks and electrons as that table, the same liquids and bacteria as that yoghurt, are much smaller to the earth (universe!) as that rat or rock are to us. We are a habitat as much as we inhabit, and can easily fall prey to what we ingest or what infests us, to pollution or other environmental factors.

And we must start to think in different scales and times if we are to survive, together. Klassen asks us to attune to the usually softly-spoken life and non-life around us. He makes it sad but beautiful, quirky and ethical, humorous and loud. Attunement recognizes different notes and tunes we make and are a part of, which always resonate with and across one another in the everyday. We may not hear or perceive each and every note, we may or may not be in harmony, but there are always multiple songs and scales, improvisations, chords, and tunings. When we attune, we listen to and act on our and other resonances, creating purposeful harmonies and amplifications, interferences and differences, in dialogical, playful, and/or productive styles.

And while I’m on the topic…an exhibition review within a feature!

Greg’s Plants is shown alongside another work of his: Tropical America, a colorful drawing of a toucan, circa 1973 – a very early artwork for Klassen. Obviously somewhat tongue in cheek, Greg also not-so-subtly reminds us that we think about these things, though perhaps can’t articulate them quite so precisely, from an early age. Who among us has not played with life and death, with color and matter? What child does not wander and wonder on where they themselves, and their rooms, homes, and habitats begin and end? And… a tropical America. I mean, why not?

These two works are exhibited as part of “Back to School,” which, according to the organizers, “invited a select list of accomplished artists to display artwork from their current portfolio alongside work they created while they were in school, presenting unexpected juxtapositions of past and present that reveal insights into both the changing perspectives and the persistent threads of artists’ pursuits over time.” (Co-curated by Brent Budsberg.) It’s an impressive list of regional artists, several of whom I’ve already written about even in the short time since this blog’s relaunch: American Fantasy Classics, John Balsley, Demitra Copoulos, Nicholas Frank, Nina Ghanbarzadeh, Zach Hill, Jon Horvath, Greg Klassen, Kim Miller, Harvey Opgenorth, JoAnna Poehlmann, Miguel Ramirez, and Lynn Tomaszewski.

What I like about this “back to school” show (launched shortly after the semester started!) is that it is almost like a bunch of abridged retrospectives. The reason why I love solo exhibitions so much is that these are less about a curatorial vision that is umbrella-ed by a current theme, and more about a kind of material research practice, over years, which we can engage with in an artist’s work. And here, we see some art from each artist (or collective) from decades ago, alongside their current inquiry, to see and feel a similar long-term quest. And each artist also writes about that trajectory, in a fun and free notebook/catalog as part of the show.

For example, there is Jon Horvath (my first reboot review!) and his ongoing and playful portraits of and with his father (recent video clip shown above as a GIF). Harvey Opgenorth shows his ongoing material/visuality investigations, which have become more subtle over time. And Nina Ghanbarzadeh explores life and materiality with/in paint, contrapuntally getting rougher and more physical over the years.

Check out “Back to School,” and especially Gregory Klassen’s work, at the Villa Terrace in Milwaukee until January 28, 2018 (Wednesday – Sunday, 1-5). The show overall provides several interesting, potential research narratives, and Klassen, specifically, asks us to listen to humans, nature, and politics, together and apart – then act in accordance. His is subtle and important work.

Posted in art, artist feature, culture, exhibition, milwaukee art, reviews · Tagged aesthetics, art, artist feature, brent budsberg, ecology, greg klassen, jon horvath, milwaukee, trees ·

Archives

02 December 2017 by nathaniel

Artist feature: Jessica Fenlon

jessica fenlonOver six feet tall, with pinkish-purple hair and a keen interest in teaching, digital culture, and what they can mean, together, Jessica Fenlon has energy and drive that are palpable. She can easily wax lyrical about technical needs and skills (codecs and codes, arduinos and Pis, Processing and Jitter), but is far more interested in what these things are and do, and their implications for prospective futures and forgotten (media) histories. She’s just… fun to talk to, has so much to offer from her experience and knowledge and sheer curiosity; and I’m super thrilled that Jessica will be teaching Art 316: Interactive and Multimedia Art for us at Peck School of the Arts (UWM) next semester. Yesterday, I took a bit of time to learn about some of her work.

Jessica Fenlon has created, for lack of a better phrase, a whole lot of stuff over her career, ranging from meditative experiences to uneasy marks between text and activity. She works with so many media and materials, so many ideas and engagements – and the work is all, well… good. And I love it precisely because I had to spend some time with it; despite its “digitality,” it doesn’t fit into a prescribed notion, a blog post (ha) or tweet of easily digestible “concepts.” And I got all that from documentation; I can’t wait to see the work in situ! Each piece or series works, disrupts, or celebrates. Every action or image or software builds on or intervenes in ideas presented in others. Fenlon’s work tells stories: of struggle and women, of matter and technology, of politics and relation, of seeing, looking, remembering, and being seen.

I met up with Jessica and asked her to talk about a few pieces of recent work, to get a glimpse of how she thinks – and that’s what I’m giving you here and now. But… spend some time at her site (and when she exhibits). All worth a visit.

portableNeurosis.perfectionism 

portableNeurosis.perfectionism pulls from a database of common phrases we say to ourself: self abuse to achieve goals or keep up appearances. It organically marks and scores a projection with gashes and cuts of red and green, black or white, shifting between abstraction and signification, building up an affective field of anxiety and remorse, a drive to push through and an overwhelming sense of need: for ourselves, for the world, to do better. I wonder if we cast shadows when walking through its space: literally and metaphorically. (Fenlon proudly asserts that this work is all coded in Processing, all runs on a tiny Raspberry Pi, for easy gallery installation.) What do we say to ourselves, and how does that project outward? Cast doubt? Enfold cuts and bruises…

automata.ungun

For automata.ungun, Fenlon decays a series of images of guns, slowly swapping out sections of every image with an/other section in that same image, cut up and regrouped, until there is nothing recognizable. This speaks back to a larger series of hers, Maps of the Forgetting Curve, where she finds (and credits) photos online, to “swap…. blocks of pixels inside the image continually, creating decay… I’m continuing this work meditating on forgetting, recognition, loss, avoidance, etc.”.

Maps of the Forgetting Curve : Graveyard C

Maps of the Forgetting Curve : Graveyard C, above, uses VirtKitty’s Graveyard photo as the source [ www.flickr.com/photos/lalouque/3170008733 ] and again, Processing, to achieve this effect. While I absolutely appreciate the gesture of the guns, what they mean and do regarding memory and materiality, loss and endurance, conceptually… I find the color images far more impactful as a visual series. I wonder at how these processes, materials, and concepts might better collide, fold us into the world of violence towards memories – and all that phrase might mean – that guns, tweets, and images have created, alongside us. I look forward to seeing where Fenlon goes with this, in the longer term.

Honestly, it’s easy to get lost in Fenlon’s web site (and spend some time with her Flickr!), as she has so much work, including participatory and community efforts. But her stories are the most engaging for me.

One of the my favorite gems the artist shared was when, recently, she showed a number of glitched videos on campus at UW Fox Valley, in Menasha, Wisconsin. Here she was merely playing with materiality and discovery, with the politics of data on and off campus, by feeding back and running filters across the stream, which was on LCD billboards in and around university traffic. But… the university freaked out. Campus police got a number of calls, ranging from fear to antagonism, worrying at how the technology was breaking around them, not understanding the work and its thoughts and goals, and more concerned with the notion that there was “something wrong.” In the end, Fenlon had to add in a clip lead and title, frame it as “art” at its outset, and send visitors to the gallery if they wished for more information. The work practiced the experience it created, made for the dialog that was just waiting to happen, around security and insecurity, damage and control.

And more… of course. This is just a glimpse. I really appreciate how Fenlon thinks, in and around media and materials, politics and discourse, aesthetics and ethics, and how they intertwine. Welcome to Milwaukee, and UWM, Jessica! Your work, aesthetic, and intellect will bring new energy, ideas, and perspectives into our community.

Posted in art, art and tech, artist feature, exhibition, technology · Tagged aesthetics, art, artist feature, coding, culture, digital studio, milwaukee, teaching, technology ·

Archives

20 October 2017 by nathaniel

Artist feature: Shane Walsh, Milwaukee-based painter (UPDATED!)

ROCOCO BEATBOX, Shane Walsh

Shane Walsh is a friend and colleague I used to share an office with, and we’ve even shared a beverage once or twice (OK, twice. Once hot, once cold). He is a teacher and artist I respect greatly as a peer at UWM – he is in Painting and Drawing, while I mostly teach in Digital Studio Practice – and so I feel like this post has been a long time coming (er… well, I only restarted my blog recently, but you know what I mean).

That said, Shane’s work is kind of amazing.

Something often coveted but almost never fully realized in contemporary art – and especially painting – is a balance between abstraction and representation, a way to play out affective tones and modulations, or gestures and resonances on the one hand (think Rothko, Pollock, or Twombly), while still engaging with perfect mimetic copies of the real world on the other. Where and when do you play between easy recognition and subjective internalization? And Walsh’s attempts at this question are smart, funny, and overall, extremely effective.

Shane Walsh, recent work (2017)

What looks like photocopies, or smeared ink, or a photoshop “find edges” filter, or cut outs, or watercolor, or dozens of other media… is always paint. In other words, Walsh is producing what appear to be abstract images in pen and pencil, frivolous gestures with machinery, and / or coded or other media forms; but each is actually painstakingly and perfectly representational: of one medium (actually, several of the aforementioned) by another (paint). The results accomplish a strong and strange duality, where I am moved, first, by the compositions and what they feel like, and then again by their histories: the craftsmanship and irony, the detail with which Shane paints faux frivolity, the performance that is both the painting and Shane’s practice, and overall the core history of Painting’s (yes, it’s a capital “P”) continuous forms, all at once.

Walsh’s newer work is all in black and white, calling even more attention to the early 20th century’s obsession with photographic influence on painting (as material and practice), as well as to early video art, lithography, and “the office,” but his earlier works in the trajectory, too, show a similar old/new, abstract/real, celebration/critique tension that is humorous and charming, while never losing site of how painting is and always will be at the center of every discussion of critical art, contemporary or otherwise. So when Shane paints sculptures, or digital art, or what look like geometric paper landscapes, they are always with a self-reflection on who he is, how he works, and what is at stake in “representation,” or the lack thereof, when working with his medium/discipline.


His newest black and white work, above, feels even more like “traditional” abstract expressionism in its gestures and forms, without some of the grids from his last few shows. But on closer inspection (left), we see what seems like it must be the photoshop line/paint tool, what should be a dry brush, a scraper, paint drippings, ink, watercolor… but all of them are, we learn, laboriously crafted by Walsh – representationally rather than gesturally. These are not performative – e.g. created by an embodied performance – but performances themselves: masks, pretense, a “playing at” of gestures, with paint.

I visited Shane’s studio today, and got to see some of his newest, in-process work (right, and below). Walsh has – after some feedback and constructive critique from several peers – decided to venture back into color, and, with his kind of work, this is much harder than it at first sounds. While the artist wants to continue his exploration of media forms and how they think-and-feel-with-paint, the style he works in, once colorized, could easily be misread as decorative arts, or Pop art, or Typography and graphic design. There is, of course, nothing “wrong” with these genres and movements, but they are not part of Walsh’s inquiry into form, performance, and information, and so… I’ll admit I had a bit of a blast brainstorming around new possibilities of where he might go instead! Could Walsh continue his black and whites, then layer them with construction-paper-like color? Make photocopy-ish paintings, as before, then paint on top like a coloring book, or make them look like splatters and drips? Reference printmaking, like woodcut, litho, or lino “key” blocks, and etched or screened “color” blocks around them? Shane has a lot of work, and far more potential, in front of him. It’s going to be so cool.

What happens in that space between affection and reflection, between what we sense, and how we make sense? How do our media and materials impact meaning-making in our everyday, and overall? Where do we per-form, where is there already form, and how do we in-form each other across these spaces? If what we feel and see is always already a part of who we are and what actions we take (and why), then when do aesthetics become ethics, and what are the implications in that question?

These questions are not idle ones, and Walsh invites us into them with skill, intelligence, beauty, and a bit of fun.

Shane Walsh shows with The Alice Wilds in Milwaukee, and has studio space in Walker’s Point, Milwaukee, and Brooklyn, New York.

UPDATE: here’s the completed work from above!

Posted in art, artist feature, culture, milwaukee art, pop culture, theory · Tagged aesthetics, art, artist feature, digital studio, milwaukee ·

Archives

27 September 2017 by nathaniel

Artist Feature: Bryan Cera and Critical Machining

Bryan Cera is a former student of mine (he did both his BFA and MFA with me at UW-Milwaukee), and I couldn’t be prouder. Not that I can honestly take any responsibility for the person and artist Bryan has become – one who far surpassed his teacher long ago; but rather, I am proud to call him a friend and colleague, proud of the hard work he has done, and what he has achieved with it.

Cera was the featured artist at Maker Faire Milwaukee last weekend – the largest Maker Faire in the country – showing off his custom-designed 3D/ceramic printer, and some Daft Punk cosplay, among other things. The former’s main innovations are a vertical shaft worm gear box in order to seriously increase torque, so as to work with standard clay (rather than the over-watery liquid that often doesn’t hold form in most models), and real-time, manual  controls to similarly adjust speed and viscosity as needed. The latter (which gets heaps of Interweb hits), he happily told us, uses an Arduino Nano and addressable RGB LEDs.

But it is not Bryan’s technical innovation nor his open source attitude alone that make me proud. He was always this way, generous and smart, able to figure things out and willing to help others understand them. (See some of Cera’s best tutorial shares here.)

What continues to intrigue and impress me is Cera’s ability to smoothly move between cool pop culture fun, and important questions about how we perform and understand technology, ourselves, and the worlds they together make and change. For him, and for anyone who spends any time with him, art and craft, technology and culture, philosophy and fun, are never far apart – and the stakes in that distance – or the lack thereof – always have consequences.

When I met him, Bryan was making traditional art and going through school on the one hand, playing with technology and his sense of humor on the other. He didn’t see these two lives as connected until he was pushed to explore his fun and geeky side in his (home) work. What initially came out was various versions of Supercontroller – a full-body, interactive interface for Super Mario Brothers. Delightfully fun, we grab coins and jump over (or on top of) turtles to rack up points; this piece’s various iterations also begin to show how digital realms do not enhance our behaviors: they actually limit them in how we must face the screen and interact. Pung – the title a cross between the 80s game Pong and the word sung (like singing) – sees us control the up/down paddles of the classic table tennis arcade game with our voices. Here microphones stick out like robot arms from the screen, and gallery-goers sing and scream into their controllers in order to make it go. It’s a hilarious amplification (literally!) of the weird things we do to make our technologies function (watch the video!), between play, performance, and habit.

These two works embarked Cera on a journey around precisely the tensions between such things. One breakthrough open-source piece that got a lot of attention was Glove One: a fully functional phone you wear on your hand. Though a lot of folks really loved it – you dial on your fingers, do the classic “call me” gesture to speak and listen with your thumb and pinky, hang up by slamming your fist – there was a much funnier, and more critical, joke to the entire gesture. You see, there’s this great hand-phone you can use with natural movements and that looks super cool… and all you have to do is give up all other uses of your hand. You can’t do anything else. Pick things up, hold hands with your partner, wipe – none of it is a go. And Cera’s argument is that we often give up just so much when we adopt our new tech toys. Even when our phones are not there, for example, when we try to shut down and shut off, we feel the phantoms ringing in our pockets, pulling away our attention and our time…

ARAI: Arm For Artistic Inquiry (pronounced array) goes in another direction, but explores similar concepts. We constantly hear how robots are going to outperform us, steal our jobs, become more human. One core argument for this future is so that we humans can spend more time doing important things… What if, Cera asks, we made a robot more human, by having it do the things that humans would actually do in that free time? So… he made a robot that procrastinates. I kid you not. ARAI constantly opens the fridge, peers in, then closes it. It surfs Facebook for pictures of cats. It stares at magazines but does not read them. Ironically, says Cera, the more human the robot becomes, the more useless it is to us. Scary, funny, something to think with… He talks about it brilliantly in the TEDx talk above.

I’m super excited to see what’s next from Bryan Cera. Now an Assistant Professor of Craft and Emerging Media in the Media Arts Department at the Alberta College of Art and Design (that’s a mouthful of awesome right there), he seems to be playing out how more general materials think and act, and how they may change our media, alongside and within them. His beautiful Video Crystals, for example, shape moving images into moving sculptures, and he is in the process of imagining ceramic robots.

Good job, Bryan. Thank you for your work.

Posted in art, art and tech, artist feature, culture, me, milwaukee art, philosophy, pop culture, research, technology, theory · Tagged aesthetics, art, artist feature, bryan cera, coding, culture, digital studio, ecology, engineering, maker faire, milwaukee, teaching, technology, TEDx ·

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24 September 2017 by nathaniel

Wednesday Sept 27: Morehshin Allahyari at UWM

Morehshin Allahyari is an Iranian artist who moved to the US ten years ago, and produces work across Internet art, video and installation, sculpture, writing, and other forms, all of which explore, she says,  the political, social, and cultural contradictions we face every day.

Two of Allahyari’s recent and most well-known works are The 3D Additivist Cookbook (with Daniel Rourke), and Material Speculation: ISIS. The former is a book of 3d .obj and .stl files, critical and fictional texts, templates, recipes, (im)practical designs and methodologies from over 100 world-leading artists, activists and theorists.

And it is absolutely free.

Download The 3D Additivist Cookbook here, or torrent (yes, a completely legal bit torrent!) the archive here.

Material Speculation is a reconstruction of 12 selected (original) artifacts (statues from the Roman period city of Hatra and Assyrian artifacts from Nineveh) that were destroyed by ISIS in 2015. Allahyari 3D modeled and 3D printed these forms, creating, in the artists words “a practical and political possibility for artifact archival, while also proposing 3D printing technology as a tool both for resistance and documentation. It intends to use 3D printing as a process for repairing history and memory.” She includes a flash drive and a memory card inside the body of each 3D printed object, making each a kind of time capsule with images, maps, pdf files, and videos gathered on the artifacts and sites that were destroyed.

She is also a friend: generous and fun, smart and friendly, I highly recommend you try to make it to her talk this week, September 27, 2017 here in Milwaukee.

Artists Now! lectures take place every Wednesday at 7:30 pm in the Arts Center Lecture Hall on the UWM campus. They are always free and open to the public.

Posted in art, art and tech, artist feature, milwaukee art, news and politics, philosophy, technology, theory · Tagged aesthetics, art, artist feature, culture, digital studio, ecology, Morehshin Allahyari, philosophy, technology ·
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nathaniel stern is an awkward artist, writer, and teacher, who likes awkward art, writing, and students.

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