Linda Francis, John O'Connor, Ken Weathersby

 197(dccch), ken weathersby

Linda Francis, John O'Connor, Ken Weathersby
Suite 217, 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn, NY
June 6 - July 15, 2013

Thoughts on 

“Linda Francis, John O’Connor, Ken Weathersby” 

at Suite 217

He had shown that the image did not exist, only chains of images, and that the very way these were assembled, from the genetic code to the Renault production chain, this assembly itself constituted an image, an image that reflected how we fit into the center or the periphery of the universe.

--Jean-Luc Godard, “Changer d’image”

In a video commissioned for French television in 1982, whose narration is quoted above in translation, Godard wrestles with the question of whether and how images can resist commodification.  The exhibition that joins works by Linda Francis, John O’Connor, and Ken Weathersby similarly makes me think about how artists can have a critical relationship to the near-omnipresent forces of the commodity market, in a culture of capital that has expanded even further over the past few decades.  The artworks here provoke questions about the flow of capital exchange that seems to saturate every aspect of our lives.

Fluidity, flexibility: oft-cited keywords of the transnational corporate economy, which penetrates public space and institutions through privatization, and personal experience through digital information technology.  The mobile realm of production contracts labor wherever profit is greatest, while the deregulated financial industry increasingly speculates on the flow of symbolic capital itself.  Smooth operation is ostensibly the order of the day.

Placing high stakes, making hearts ache / He’s loved in seven languages / Diamond nights and ruby lights, high in the sky / Heaven help him, when he falls

--Sade, “Smooth Operator”

Linda Francis’s recent work is based on electron-microscope images of the surface of a failed heat shield of a 1990s space shuttle, images that she overlays repeatedly on the computer.  Her pieces present technological visualizations of physical structure—a structure designed, unsuccessfully, to harness resistance.  The artworks also incorporate into the imagery evidence of the media that produce them, such as pixelation.

In Interference, the crystalline components arrayed within the image suggest patterned organization while eluding it.  Across the multiple silkscreened prints assembled in the piece, repetition and alignment at the edges structure the image. Thus pattern recognition in Interference is both fugitive and precise.  Indeed a strong diagonal current crosses a literal gap to a separate, larger panel that leans on the floor against the wall.  Shifts in scale and near-repetitions are vertiginous.

Also patternlike but dizzyingly evasive, We Can Build You is a more physically factured, painted version of the image at greater magnification.  It resembles representations of biological code, and its title (taken from the Phillip K. Dick novel) evokes the manipulations of biotechnology, and more generally the way technological capitalism works on us.  Francis’s pieces invite contemplation of hypermediation and replication, as well as contingency, fissure, and friction, with a coolly observant gaze.

John O’Connor also indexes research material in his drawings, which underscore the imbrication of psychological experience with an information economy.  As the Surrealists channeled the illogical logic of the unconscious, O’Connor cultivates delirious overloads of information processing.  He produces drawings by using shifting, idiosyncratic codes: converting text into numbers, reversing letters, translating letters into colors by randomly devised systems, running garbled text through an electronic dictionary.

Turing (named for the computer scientist and his famous test of whether machines can think) presents an oval loop of linked bits of textual data.  The loop surrounds a set of inwardly folding, bunching shapes that evoke an organism introjecting and expelling.  O’Connor generated the incomprehensible data by a dialogue between his free associations, processed through multiple overcodings, and an electronic dictionary’s responses (one of which eerily speaks to Alan Turing’s persecution for his sexuality).  Characteristic of the artist’s work, the drawing appears both diagrammatic and indecipherable.

In SUSEJ, a drawing of intricately colored grids, O’Connor includes notations of his text-to-color coding at the paper’s edges.  The piece invites us to comprehend the design of the delicate arrangement of colors, but its structuring principles are opaque.  Similarly, the thin, almost weightless sculptures Future Rods are covered in blocky text concerning prediction, which resists deciphering.  Obtruding on the gallery floor, they evoke the forces of futures speculation that invest contemporary life. 

O’Connor’s artistic practice mines the extra-aesthetic, representing processed information from the provinces of socioeconomics, politics, science, mass culture, and personal life.  His work does not so much assimilate these realms into absorbable images, but rather creates incongruity, discordance, uncanny disconcertment.

Ken Weathersby, on the other hand, makes dissonant the constitutive elements of conventional art objects themselves, specifically paintings: that is, paint applied for perceptual activity, canvas or linen, and wooden support. 

In 198 (dc),  paint is applied to a wood support, but that substrate is also image: it’s an elaborate grid of layered wood strips, which cutouts in the painted front surface reveal from the picture plane.  Meanwhile the painted image, an optically active grid of black and white squares, is a material slab of acrylic film directly glued to the wood.  The resemblance of the grids, and the equivocation of figure and ground at the level of image and physical material, confound distinctions between structure and surface.   

In the freestanding 194 (z), another painted grid of tiny squares echoes a larger grid of wood strips that supports the painting.  In this piece, the wood strips enclose the painting, holding it within.  The structure is a delicate cage that partially obscures the painting, here in its conventional form of acrylic on a rectangle of fabric over stretcher bars.  Planar yet viewable in the round, the hybrid 194 (z) presents us with ambiguity about what is supportive structure and what is visual display.

Weathersby’s work foregrounds how the realms of visual image and material production are implicated with each other.  It is as though painting is posing questions about its constituent terms.  In 197 (dcch), what looks like a painting—a thin plane of an optically active grid of colors—is dissected to present a literal, physical interior that contains overlapping parts of other gridded paintings and wooden grids.  The piece highlights a sense of imbrication and conditionality.

Interestingly, the container is also a key figure in contemporary economics; the container ship is pivotal to global exchange, as it’s designed to make the supply chain as smooth as possible.  Indeed, as the forces of transnational capitalism are ever more pervasive, they operate largely below the threshold of perceptibility.  The artwork of Weathersby, Francis, and O’Connor each raises issues of imbrication, of congruence and incongruity.  It resonates keenly with the extra-artistic socioeconomic situation, and its discontents.

Michele Alpern

2013

James Kalm's visit to the show (Kalm Report video)

Silent Opera

model for a silent opera (maquette 1 inch = 1foot)

Silent Opera

April 19, 2013 - May 26, 2013

Reception: Friday April 19, 6-9pm

One River Gallery

49 N. Dean St., Englewood, New Jersey 
 

Ken Weathersby’s exhibition, Silent Opera, presents works that transpose and shuffle optical and physical aspects.  In the paintings, grids of primary color or high-contrast black and white are interrupted, displaced, removed, enclosed or cut into.  In the collage-based works, found images are submerged under dense, wooden grids.

The idea of a painting’s face or a photographed human image as a site of display is muted and complicated by these interventions.  When an object is exhibited, it is like a performer stepping forward onto a stage; if the sound of the song is cut or muffled, though, we hear the sound of the performer’s footsteps, the incidental stage business, the bump and clatter of conventions that normally surround the song…

“Responding to the given conditions of painting gives me something to work against.  I’ve tried to separate the parts of physical language of painting, the paint surface, the wooden support, the canvas or linen, and reset them in new relations. Recently I’ve also been cannibalizing my bookshelf, taking whole pages mostly from art books, and building on top of them; hiding them, replacing them, saving them, burying them.” (Weathersby)

#  #  #

Neo-Ex & Power Chords

Untitled Dieter Krieg, 1985, 105 x 61 inches. Collection of the artist.

originally published in NY Arts Magazine, 4-5-13

Neo-Expressionism and Power Chords

by Ken Weathersby

Hearing the guitar riff toward the end of Boston’s 1976 rock song “Peace of Mind” from a passing car radio the other day, I was a little surprised to find myself gripped by the sound, just as when I was a teenager and predictably compelled by such things many years ago.

The musical gesture is certainly a cliché, but I listened; a cluster of chords form a simple, blocky, repeated figure. The fully cranked electric guitar and amp pump out a sound soaked in a humming spectrum of overtone distortion. All other instruments drop out during the break and let it hang excitingly in the air. The aural space around it for that moment is vast.

The brief rhythmic guitar break is a statement of the drive that’s layered up and elaborated throughout the entire song - but here it is stripped down for a minute, right to the heart of the matter. Its a sonic emotional mission statement by the long-haired, red-eyed stoner at the center of it all. He soars for a moment through an inner space of pure feeling, whipping out an energy in this riff that majestically trumps all that boring “corporate ladder” and “competition” crap.

As I listened, the emotional freight carried by this guitar riff called to mind something of what I encountered later in life in the loaded brush marks of Neo-Expressionist paintings. I spontaneously visualized big German pictures from the 1970s and 1980s. I first actually saw such canvases at the Toledo Museum of Art in 1988, in the traveling exhibition “Painting Refigured”. That show, organized by the Guggenheim Museum and Williams College Museum of Art, took stock of German painting between 1960 and 1988, with an emphasis on the return of figuration, but also a high concentration of the heavy-duty use of oil paint on enormous canvases. Artists in the show included Baselitz, Kiefer, Lupertz, and Polke.

I remembered standing in the museum taking in the way a particular painting featured a massive stroke from a paint-loaded brush that seemed to have been the size of a broom. The colors were mixed right on the canvas, inside the smeared mark, to make unexpected contrasts and crazy marbled streaks. Countless bleeds and clots could be found within an individual swipe of paint. This memory, as it was focused in my mind’s eye, was of a huge painting made with a single monumental mark. It read as abstraction and at the same time as an indirect representation of the presence of a giant, a towering artist who might have created this work in a flash, with a single dab. After locating and consulting the exhibition catalog for “Refigured Painting”, I couldn’t find a record of this particular painting anywhere. I realized that my memory of this piece was closely associated with a couple of untitled paintings from 1985, by Dieter Krieg. Looking at the reproductions now, I see that they are neither fully abstract nor composed of a single stroke.

One represents what looks like a chicken leg and a thermometer, and the other one depicts a huge fish hook piercing a scrap of paper with the word “idiot” scrawled on it. Looking at these in the “Refigured Painting” catalog, I realized that my recollection of a monumental single-stroke painting was a false memory, essentially an invention of my own. It didn’t exist, but was maybe accurate as an involuntary distillation of part of my impression of the show at the time. The Krieg paintings certainly were composed of the kind of heavy, fraught marks I thought of hearing that Boston song.

The macho (almost all were men) German painters whose photos appeared in the back of the catalogs (I pulled out and consulted another catalog of a similar show, “Expressions: New Art from Germany”, which included many of the same artists and toured US museums earlier in the ‘80s) were dressed and styled as tough rebels, attempting rock star glamour. Though maybe more punk rock than arena rock, from out of their black leather jackets, five o’clock-shadowed chins bore hardened scowls. A 1981 painting in “Refigured Painting” by Helmut Middendorf called “Singer” is dominated by a hunched, skinny figure holding a microphone stand, which was clearly directly copied from a photo of guitarist smashing his instrument on the stage from the cover of the Clash’s “London Calling”(1979).

As there is something signaling excess, even hinting at chaos in an overdriven distorted guitar on the edge of feedback, so there is in the touch of a gigantic brush dripping with a giant blob of mottled oil color. Each contains potential worlds within itself-- and each can present a virtuosic dishing out of monumental forms, fat floating slabs for the ears or the eyes. In both cases the expression is a presumption of intensity and power deployed. In both cases the awareness of the touch of a creating hand invites one to identify and emulate by miming a swinging gesture of a brush, or a thrash at an air guitar. It’s a seductive image of mastery, full of grandiosity.

The implication of a controlling agent behind these expressions, able to propel and direct such potent stuff, suggests to me now that the appeal of these forms and the identification they offered promised compensation for adolescent male anxiety, a fulfilling of lack, an allaying of fear. It went without saying that all my male high school friends liked that guitar sound (it was beyond assumed), just as my colleagues in art school were excited about those big German smears of paint. It was a feeling. It was more than a feeling.

Nearly The Neutral:

image: "160", 2008

"Nearly Neutral" 

curated by John O'Connor

January 29 - February 26, 2013

Heimbold Visual Arts Center at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY

Artists:

Michele Alpern, Ivin Ballen, Dawn Clements, Matthew Fisher, Linda Francis, Rachel Hayes, Ridley Howard, Allan Macintyre, Jerome Marshak, Ryan Mrozowkski, Matthew Northridge, Bruce Pearson, Antonia Perez, Shahpour Pouyan, Kanishka Raja, Timothy Smith, Bruce Stiglich, Ken Weathersby

Cache:

"Cache" 

A solo show of five new works at NIAD Art Center, Richmond, CA, through February 25, 2013.

image: "202 (best wishes for 1981", 2012

"For his new collages, New York artist Ken Weathersby has taken to cannibalizing his bookshelf. Using entire pages from an art book, mostly images of Greek sculpture, or other figurative images, Weathersby buries each under one of his signature wooden grids. The pieces become elegant and complex explorations of the picture plane. Cache: New Work From Ken Weathersby, a selection of the artist’s most recent collages are on view in NIAD’s annex gallery."

--NIAD Gallery Director Tim Buckwalter

Focus...:

Focused Field: an online exhibition at Curating Contemporary 
curated by Brett Baker
This exhibition presents the work of seven artists, Sarah McNulty, Kazimira Rachfal, Dan Roach, Henry Samelson, Altoon Sultan, Ken Weathersby, and Brett Baker, whose small-scale and miniature works free abstract painting from the confines of its own recent history. Through an attentiveness to this under-explored scale, each artist challenges and extends the language of abstract painting. The results push the boundaries of gestural abstraction, site-specific painting, materials, and process, while forging fresh connections with painting’s past.

 see exhibition

Focusing the Field (essay)

Expanding the visual field is one of the essential innovations of the New York School. This innovation redefined scale in painting so decisively that subsequent movements including Color Field, Pop, Minimalism, and even installation art all adopted it without question. Yet, while nearly every other aspect of abstract painting has been exhaustively investigated and re-imagined, examples of focusing the field to a small scale have been isolated and few. Miniature abstract paintings are almost non-existent. 

My first encounters with Abstract Expressionism’s signature expansiveness, in works by de Kooning and Rothko, made me want to be an abstract painter and convinced me that scale was a crucial component of the language of abstract painting. For a over a decade, I painted almost exclusively on a large scale, until circumstances forced me to radically scale down my work.

I moved from a large studio upstate to a small Manhattan apartment that functioned as both a studio and a home for my family. The change was fortuitous, though, for it opened my eyes to new painting problems. Instead of rehashing the problem of creating an intimate experience from immense scale, I concerned myself with preserving that immensity on an intimate scale. At first, a two foot square painting felt like a postage stamp to me, an impossibly small area. Ten years later, many of my works measure only 4 x 5 inches.

Recently, it’s been a pleasure to discover other painters - Sarah McNulty, Kazimira Rachfal, Dan Roach, Henry Samelson, Altoon Sultan, and Ken Weathersby - equally invested in small, even miniature scale abstraction. Though sharing a similar format, each artist challenges and extends the language of abstract painting in a different way. These painters use scale not as a commentary, but rather to push the boundaries of gestural abstraction, site-specific painting, materials, and process while forging fresh connections with painting’s past...

Ken Weathersby’s interest in miniatures was sparked by a scale model for a gallery exhibition of his larger works in 2010. He recalls, “it started as just a pragmatic process. But the feeling of seeing things reduced very small or, when next to full-sized pieces, seeing the huge leap in scale, became interesting, trippy, like Alice in Wonderland. It becomes uncanny and gets the imagination going.”

His tiny “model” paintings led to a group of diminutive works exhibited together as one work entitled Time Is the Diamond at Some Walls, an apartment gallery in Oakland, CA. In his essay for the exhibition Chris Ashley wrote, “To call [the small works] miniatures would not be an insult or diminution, but instead a useful label to place these small pieces as a specific set within Weathersby’s body of work. And though small, each works scale reads as large and full-sized, or, rather, right-sized”

“Rightness” of scale is significant to the achievements of each of these painters, born of individual visual concerns yet essential to the expression of each artist’s vision. 
 
--Brett Baker

Notes
(1) Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters," The Tradition of the New, Da Capo Press, 1994, p. 25.

The Structural Catalyst:

An illustrated essay regarding the exhibition

"Mark Dagley 35 Years 1976-2011" at Kent Place Gallery,

presented by my robot:  The Structural Catalyst, Ken Weathersby, 2012

At KPG:

“Mark Dagley 1976 - 2011”

The Kent Place Gallery will present a chronological selection of artworks spanning 35 years by Mark Dagley, from Monday, September 10, through Friday, October 5, 2012.  There will be a reception for the artist from 6-8 pm on Friday, September 28.

Mark Dagley’s visually dazzling, exploratory abstract art has been exhibited in New York and internationally since the mid-1980s.  This Kent Place Gallery exhibition is a carefully selected timeline, including strong pieces from all periods, reaching back to a few very early works from 1976 and concluding with recent paintings. (To coincide with this overview, Minus Space gallery in Brooklyn will open an exciting show of Dagley’s newest works, called “Structural Solutions.” The Minus Space exhibition runs September 7 – October 27.)

In the paintings, works on paper and sculptures at Kent Place, one can see Dagley developing a wide range of artistic possibilities, including hallucinatory optical and retinal color effects, intense patterns, contradictory painterly spaces, and geometric constructions.  There is a through-line of abstraction, and of surprising wit and inventiveness, evidence of a rigorous and playful sensibility linking all the objects on view.

One of the most striking pieces in the show is a chunky, stacked “ziggurat” from the mid-eighties that seems to be both a sculpture and a painting.  Its squat monumentality and position on the floor say sculpture—sculpture that refers to architecture.  Its black, reflective surface is lush and slick, almost reading as standing liquid. This surface is clearly a poured paint film, and the stretched canvas visible on the sides of each of the object’s “steps” further links it to traditions of painting in general, and to other black paintings in particular.  One can think of Stella’s “pin stripe” paintings, or of the black square images of Malevich.  The glossy surface and simplified formal progressions in such works by Dagley also resemble early video game icons, introducing a flavor of the digital. The condensation of these implications and more into this elegant self-contained object has unusual humor and poetry.

Gallery Director Ken Weathersby said, “I am very excited to be able to present this show at Kent Place.  Mark Dagley is a significant artist, someone whose achievement and ongoing uncompromised creativity I greatly admire.   When we first discussed the possibility of his exhibiting here, it was his idea to do a chronological overview. What could be better in a school setting, for young artists to see, than a record of someone creating, developing and experimenting over three and a half decades?  We included a group of working drawings as well as finished pieces.  Mark’s thinking is present in all of this, but seeing his process and notes to himself in the drawings gives a peek behind the curtain, to some of how he gets there, which will be great for my students. This is also a show that contemporary artists will want to see.  I can think of many active painters in New York (myself included) who can be informed by it.”

Mark Dagley was born in Washington DC and lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.  Venues for his recent New York solo shows include Minus Space, and Up & Co.  He has shown extensively in the US and Europe since the mid-1980s, including many important solo and group exhibitions, and is included in many major public and private collections.

Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ.  Gallery hours are Monday – Friday, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm.  For more information call (908) 273-0900, or visit www.kentplace.org.

#          #          #