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Visual Art Source Review - Jeanne Silverthorne

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Editorial: Features

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Jeanne Silverthorne
Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica, California
Review by Suvan Geer

Continuing through January 3, 2015

Jeanne Silverthorne casts her sculptures in synthetic rubber and with that surprising physicality she earnestly but also playfully autopsies the life out of the contemporary world. “Down the Hole and Into the Grain” is the artist’s continuation of an ongoing examination of nature morte, (dead nature) that plays on the tradition of still life. The translucent softness of the rubber, which Silverthorne has referred to as a kind of “flesh”, makes familiar objects selected from things in her studio and daily life decidedly strange and provocative. Pseudo rolls of wood grained flooring, huge lumber packing crates, blooming flowers, dentures and rolling wood dollies all drop their physical ties to the natural world and become oddly artificial in ways both layered and disturbing.

The artist says in her statement that she is “looking for something that has been lost”. Displayed here in neat aisles like preserved specimens from an underground vault her color-blanched objects offer us the opportunity to ask questions about what is about the natural world that generally goes unmissed in a world of rampant representation and life-like simulation.

What indeed are the signs of life in our brave new world? Living things have an animating force; they move and reproduce. Technology and science have copied and messed with that simple formula until the boundary between naturally alive and life-like is a blur. Silverthorne joins in the fray. In the past she has constructed sculptures that used mechanics to actually move. Some of these sculptures potentially glow in the dark like bioluminescent denizens of the deep, but none of them actively move. Instead Silverthorne parodies procreation. By copying in miniature some organic shaped chunks of rubber left over from the oozing mold making of her sculptures she laughingly treats her fabrication process as female labor and the ongoing copies she makes of the real world as a simulated progeny. It’s a clever shift.

Living things however, also die. Silverthorne’s sprawling coils of cast electrical cable, naked silicone light bulbs, and rubber power boxes give us the industrialized world’s version of life’s animating force reframed as instruments of allegory. With them she brings us to the weirdly absurd activity of considering still life in a world of simulation. Her limp rolls of wood grained rubber flooring signal the process of natural decay by sprouting clumps of equally artificial weeds. Some pristine looking unreal planks crawl like rotting logs with similarly unreal bugs or flies. Her simulated lumber shipping crates sometimes sag towards collapse, but others sit like pale graphic shrines displaying miniature cast self-portraits or posthumous sculptures of people from the artist’s life. In these small figures a pinch of real human hair wildly erupts from each of their colorless little heads. The hair, like growth rings on a tree, is a residue of actual living growth. But here it stands out as the hairline demarcation between life and a manufactured life-like representation. (I have a feeling that visual pun, like others in the exhibit is intended).

All the tromp l’oeil crossovers between real and artificial life and death make for quite a hallucinogenic journey. There are piles of rubber scraps teeming with fake caterpillars, a colorless black and white sunflower committing a slow suicide with a noose made from the cord of a useless electric lamp and elsewhere dead flies pile up beside a stack of ignited gummy dynamite. Yet the tradition of still life images as moral messengers pushes us to read more blatant ecologically related life and death messages into pieces like “Top of the World”. In this sculpture a teacher’s desk globe, totally smooth and eerily white, empty of seas or landmasses, sits beneath a plastic vitrine on top of a fake crate. At the top of the globe two miniature white skeletons are having sex while big black rubber flies either suckle at the globe or lay lifeless beneath it. It’s an emotional and unsettling vision of natural inevitability given an unnatural, toxic connotation by virtue of the artificial materials. A tidy little parable about this reality I don’t want to remember but still find hard to forget.

Rachel Lachowicz featured in Blouin Artinfo

ARTINFO.com

William Poundstone’s Los Angeles County Museum on Fire

October 6, 2014, 7:29 am

“Variations: Conversations In and Around Abstract Art”

LACMA is debuting a couple dozen newly acquired pieces in “Variations: Conversations In and Around Abstract Art.” Gerhard Richter’s St. Andrew (1988) is the frontispiece, but almost everything else was made in the past few years. (At top is an Aaron Curry next to paintings by Christopher Wool and Mary Weatherford.)

Rachel Lachowicz’s Cell: Interlocking Construction (2010) is an assemblage of plastic polyhedra containing blue powders—cosmetic eye shadows. This experiment in feminist chiaroscuro is shown next to Lachowicz’s Lipstick Urinals, 1992, that LACMA bought in 1995. The pairing makes a concise introduction to Lachowicz. You can say the same for groupings by Sterling Ruby, Mark Grotjahn, and Mark Bradford.

LACMA must have been one of the first museums to acquire a Bradford (in 2003). This year it added two large recent works. Shoot the Coin is one of the best in any museum. Carta (above) has a faux basketball that might recall Joe Goode’s milk bottles.

Speaking of bottles, Amy Sillman’s Untitled/Purple Bottle recapitulates a history of postmodern bottle painting, from Giorgio Morandi to Mike Kelley.

Rashid Johnson’s Afro-futurist psychoanalytic couch, Four for the Talking Cure (left), is from a series shown in London in 2012 “inspired by… an imagined society in which psychotherapy is a freely available drop-in service.”

Think contemporary art is an exclusive club? Dianna Molzan’s Untitled (2012) conjoins a frame with a velvet rope.

A downside of the global art market’s feeding frenzy for contemporary art is that even mid-career artists may be unaffordable by the biggest museums. Going by the quality and quantity of what’s on view, LACMA has moved to the forefront of institutional collectors of art here and now.

Nearly all the work in “Variations” was donated by private collectors, and no single name dominates. LACMA is collecting the old-fashioned way, by persuading wealthy citizens to buy top-of-the-line art and donate it to their city’s museum for the good of all. That’s a “variation” from the L.A. model of even a few years ago. Amen to that.

SWG New Artists Announcement

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is delighted to announce we are now representing

Sabrina Gschwandtner

and

Abdul Mazid

!

SABRINA GSCHWANDTNER

Hearts and Hands Brown and Blue

,

2014

Sabrina received a BA with honors in Art/Semiotics from Brown University (2000) and an MFA from Bard College (2008). She lives and works in New York.

ABDUL MAZID

Occum Nimbus

,

2014

Abdul received a BA in Economics from UC Santa Barbara (2003) and an MFA from Claremont Graduate University (2014). He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Catherine Wagley reviews Yvonne Venegas: San Pedro Garza Garcia



Yvonne Venegas: San Pedro Garza Garcia
Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica

 

Yvonne Venegas, Zally, 2013. Courtesy Shoshana Wayne Gallery

After finishing school, the Mexico City-based photographer Yvonne Venegas worked for a few years for fashion photographers in New York, assisting Juergen Teller and Dana Lixenberg, two photographers known for walking the line between glamour and grit. Without reading too much into those years, it’s worth noting the respect she gives to her subjects’ beauty, and their desire to be beautiful. She frames her subjects in ways that make them immensely pleasing to look at, even when her images have complicated undertones. In the early 2000s, for instance, she photographed the wealthy matriarch Maria Elvia Hank, looking glamorous and composed, placing Christmas candles on a Reindeer-shaped candelabrum. But a servant bends down behind Mrs. Hank, picking up a candle she has dropped, revealing the infrastructure supporting the smooth presentation.

Venegas’s current exhibition, on view through October 25 at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, is called San Pedro Garza Garcia, after the community it depicts. A suburb of Monterrey in the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon, San Pedro Garza Garcia has a population of about 150,000 and the highest per capita income of any Latin American municipality. This attracted Venegas to it, as did the city’s singular ability to ward off the effects of the drug war that has ravaged so many other Mexican communities. 

Yvonne Venegas, Rosina and Models, 2013. Courtesy Shoshana Wayne Gallery

Her photographs don’t allude explicitly to this socioeconomic context. Instead, they portray in between moments in an attractive world that appears relatively self-contained. A group of seven models, all brunette and all in white shirts and jeans, look at fashion magazines underneath a chandelier.  Three of them level gazes at the camera. A bride, alone underneath a romantic painting of cupid and a candelabrum, adjusts her dress. Two adolescent girls, lanky and maybe bored, sit on a wrap-around beige couch in a living room that’s impressively clutter-free. It’s pristine but languid: The Truman Show meets The Ice Storm. Even her cityscapes, which suggest the existence of a bigger, rougher world, are suspiciously calm. 

Venegas’s subjects are mostly unattainable anomalies but her portrayal of relatable moments behind the scenes blurs the abnormality into normality and makes her work compelling. Her images invite you to try to pick apart the roles people are playing, especially in San Pedro Garcia, where it’s clear class and hierarchy matter, but it’s never clear who has what power in the various moments she’s portrayed. 

— By Catherine Wagley  09/29/2014

An Interview with Yvonne Venegas

A Conversation with Photographer Yvonne Venegas

September 16, 2014

Yvonne Venegas | San Pedro Garza Garcia | Shoshana Wayne Gallery | September 6 – October 25, 2014 | http://www.shoshanawayne.com/

I had the opportunity for a Q&A with artist Yvonne Venegas, whose photographs, entitled “San Pedro Garza Garcia,” are currently on exhibit at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery.

How did you first get into photography?

My father is a wedding photographer with a business in Tijuana, and he gave me a camera when I started high school. At first it was just for fun. I found photography to be an easy extension for me as I found in it another way to relate to people, which I enjoyed. At seventeen, I took portraits of my twin sister for the first time. That was, for me, a revelation, as I saw something that, in that moment, I thought I could keep doing for a long time. After that, I began to take photography classes at a community college in San Diego, and that was how my studies in photography began. It was 1988.

How has your work evolved since you first got started?

I kept working with portraiture for many years and studied in various places, including the International Center of photography in New York, which was the first serious photo school I ever attended. I assisted many photographers and soon realized that I wanted to focus only on my personal work. I then did an MFA in Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, and that experience gave me the tools to continue producing the projects that I have been doing since. My work now is a bit more complex than in the beginning. Now my effort lies in producing complex documents that will hold up in time, and that gives the spectator the possibility to interpret what s/he sees. I am interested in Mexican societies, upper and middle, and making visual interpretations of the various constructions.

Who are the photographers who have influenced you? And the artists?

Over the years, so many! Dana Lixenberg, Rineke Dijsktra, Martin Parr, Tina Barney, Diane Arbus, Ruben Ortiz Torres, Jennifer Pastor, Paul Pfeiffer.

How do you choose your subjects to photograph?

It is an intuitive process, and usually, it has to do with curiosity. I am attracted to subjects that carry a certain level of mystery, and in my work, I try never to reveal it directly — that is, I respect it.

What makes the most successful shoot for you?

It varies. I am still not sure what the formula is, but usually, if I arrive to a shoot not knowing what to expect, I leave with the best feeling. I like to work in a level of the experience. I am living the experience of being with certain people, talking, drinking, and participating, and also photographing. I must feel I know the people I am with in some way in order to produce work that I like.

What makes for the most interesting shoots?

People that are relaxed about how they will be portrayed.

What equipment are you currently using?

A Mamiya 7 with Kodak Portra 400 film.

When you photograph individual subjects, how much time do you use to get to know them?

I go straight to the pictures. If there is time, I stay longer and sometimes keep in touch afterwards for a possible second shoot. Many times, I make friends that I continue to see over the years.

How much planning do you do for each shoot and how much happens naturally?

The planning lies in setting up a meeting time and place. The rest is usually natural. Lately, I have been doing more portraits, which requires a bit more direction. I think there is something great about arriving at a place, like San Pedro Garza Garcia, and simply finding out who is available and willing to be photographed. I also need to plan things when I want to get particular people that I am interested in including in my project, and I think that this is the chapter that I am beginning now in my work.

Can you talk about some technical aspect of your work and photography in general?

When I began to take pictures, I was very much into making beautiful pictures. I studied composition, and I was very good at it. Over the years, I have continued to be interested in beauty, but it is no longer the mainstream view of beauty that I used to enjoy. Now I see beauty in things that can be of balance and imperfect, and this interest has extended onto how I solve images formally. I have been told by photographers that I admire very much that my flash technique is poor. Yet when I hear that word, I wonder, poor according to what standard? I really like how the flash looks, and I have been taking flash pictures for at least fifteen years! So I can say I am not the most spectacular technical person. I have stayed with the same camera and film for a very long time, and I am never the first one to try new gadgets. But formally, I think that my work makes sense with my discourse, both in composition and technique. I tend to print my own work, and that is crucial for me. Overall, I think that to use intuition is more important to me than using the latest of the most perfect technique.

What would you be doing if you were not a photographer?

I think I would be a sociologist or a writer.

Is the process of creating your photographs emotional for you?

Yes. I go through all kinds of feelings, from delight to confusion or from complete confidence to feeling absolutely vulnerable. I think all of these feelings are important as I am trying to create truly authentic documents, and all of those feeling make me think that I am headed in the right direction.

What projects have you planned in future?

I want to try focusing a complete project on masculinity. I am interested in power and fraternity. I have been looking at an all boys school in Mexico called Cumbres that is managed by an order of the Catholic Church called Legionarios de Cristo. Also, I want to start using video as part of the work that I am doing.

What is your present state of mind? What would be next for you if the sky were the limit?

I feel very positive and focused. I am very happy with the work in this show as I feel it brings together a lot of the things that I have been looking at in my past projects, and I think it has the possibility of having many more layers than I have ever tried. I want to publish the book of my past project called “Gestus,” and in a couple of years, the “San Pedro Garza Garcia.” I want to continue producing this kind of work and finding easier ways to finance them as well as to finance my family’s lifestyle. I want to travel to Japan to study bookmaking. If the sky were the limit, I want the work to be in the best collections around the world and to find its place in contemporary art.

KCRW on Rachel Lachowicz at LACMA

Variations at LACMA

Hunter Drohojowska-Philp finds much to admire in new show of contemporary abstract painting

First Clue: Sculpture and video are both featured in this exhibition exploring abstract painting. Why? Because the curators are presenting “Conversations in and around Abstract Painting,” on view through March 22. As in any conversation, varying views come into play and, one may agree or disagree. It is an agreeable way to pass the time in any case, especially since most of the works on view belong to LACMA. Like most museums, LACMA does not have the gallery space to keep everything on view so this is an opportunity to see new aspects of their expanding collection of contemporary art.

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A pivotal example is a four-sided bench upholstered in zebra skin with a gathering of plants and a four-sided open black diamond shape in the center by Rashid Johnson, who is about to have a solo show at David Kordansky Gallery. Four for the Talking Cure (2009-2012) was originally made as a place where people could sit and discuss his work. Now owned by LACMA, that is no longer possible but the idea of this exhibition does follow. What do we mean when we talk about abstract art?

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The opening salvo from LACMA curators Franklin Sirmans and Nancy Meyer is St. Andrew (1988), a squeeged smear in the colors of blood and chocolate by Gerhard Richter, the German artist who has done so much to complicate the discussions on the meaning of painting. Purchased by LACMA when it was made, it is one of the earliest pieces in the show. In the ‘90s, LACMA purchased a large raw canvas covered in drawn shapes in charcoal, some of which are filled with color, by Laura Owens, another artist who consistently demands more from her painting.

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Most of the other works in the show are much more recent, with a hefty percentage being artists from L.A. who now have a significant international presence: Mark Grotjahn, with his paintings of carefully distributed layers of increasingly baroque color as well as two cast bronze masks; Sterling Ruby, with his peculiarly L.A. day-glo landscapes made with spray paint but also his grafitti covered wall operating as pedestal for ceramics; Analia Saban, with her white paintings that document their own process of becoming or unbecoming along with a her white marble Kohler countertop mounted on raw canvas, (a gift from John Baldessari); Mark Bradford, with enormous recent paintings, is concerned with issues of mapping both geographic and historic.

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Anthony Pearson brings a refined formalist instinct to his work in non-traditional materials such as subtle shades of gray plaster held in a thin walnut frame; Rachel Lachowicz filled shaped plexiglas containers with variants of blue cosmetic powder — eye shadows! — to construct a powerful wall of geometric abstraction. There is an earlier work, a trio of small urinals made from lipstick. Mary Weatherford’s enticing abstraction melds the flowing paints of color field artists with the mysterious voids of caverns. All this from LA and more: Aaron Curry’s painted sculpture, Diana Thater’s video, it goes on and on.

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While there are powerful works by artists who are not living in on the left coast — Theaster Gates, Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, Amy Sillman, Howardina Pindell and many others — a conversation about abstract painting is being held in earnest in L.A., which has never been held in high esteem for its traditional painting, abstract or not. It now seems that L.A. artists have re-invented the subject in ways that reflect this area’s ideational as well as pictorial sensibilities. Conceptual abstraction, if you will, is a way for artists to continue to explore the painting of previous generations but to re-interpret it in a way that is newly meaningful. It is an ongoing conversation but this show is a welcome part of it.

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The show opens to members today, August 21, and to the public on Sunday. For more information, go to lacma.org.