galleryIntell videocasts

Exhibition on view April 9 – May 30th, 2015

Besides never sleeping, New York City also never stops growing and expanding. The familiar orange construction netting, with carefully rounded perforation squares, seems to float through the various neighborhoods of the city, briefly annunciating an impending birth of a new structure. And then it’s off to another street, another project, another new beginning. But the army of paint-splattered, dust-covered, helmet-shielded workers behind the magically growing glass and concrete structures often remains unseen. Well, they are, of course, the center of many jokes, complaints, stereotypes and soft-drink commercials, but most of us perceive these builders as one with the structures they build.

Not so with Arne Svenson, who came to see these men and women in a new light after completing his previous series of photographs ‘The Neighbors’ — an intimate series of partially obscured portraits of wealthy residents going about their lives in a glass building across from the artist.

The absolute transcending beauty of ‘The Workers’  lies in the way Svenson translated the ordinary person inside an ordinary city scene into a jewel-like cameo filled with motion, gesture, light and a mille-feuille of internal narratives. He is, very obviously, not interested in a posed sitter, instead finding beauty in the moments before and after. “I take the photographs and don’t look a them for 3-4 days, allowing the excitement of the moment to die down. Then as I examine each one I have to once again “find” that space and moment within the oval.” And it is these moments that allow the viewer to construct his/her own dynamic narratives. In fact, the viewer is expected to make as much effort in interacting and establishing a personal bond with the photograph as Svenson made in creating it. And that’s fair. “I start the sentence; I give you a paragraph, but you must finish it,” says the artist.

On a personal note, I found it interesting that in an earlier interview, Svenson referred to himself as someone who immigrated to NYC from California. A term rarely used when describing movement within he same country, intentional and final as it may be. “I was done with California. I left with no intention of coming back” he clarified when I mentioned the article just before we started taping. And so I find this connection particularly fascinating, since most people who traditionally come to build our cities, and in all probability subjects of his photographs, are themselves immigrants.

For this interview Arne and I met at his exhibition at Julie Saul Gallery in Chelsea and talked about some of the important visual and conceptual aspects of this series, as well as the connections between his portraits and some of the well-known examples from the centuries past. Here is the first part of our interview.

Arne Svenson: Everything from the Baroque, to Renaissance, to Mannerism, to the Edward Hoppers. And I didn’t see it at first because I was looking for something completely different in these images, but as people started telling me this – I started seeing it. So I went to The Met and I looked around and not being a student of art history I don’t have the academic knowledge, but I was looking for something different. I was looking for: how does the light rake across the canvas and is that my light?

So, when I started this new series, ‘The Workers’, I used that knowledge of not only critical analysis of my own work by others, but I used my trips to The Met. And one thing I did see immediately with this new work, with ‘The Workers’, was that I had to use an oval and it was a very tough decision to make because it’s an extraordinary statement – an oval. It has a lot of connotation. And part of the motivation behind this particular series was that I wanted to illustrate and show us the people that build the palaces for ‘The Neighbors’. So, I started looking in neighboring buildings, and buildings up and down the street and out of the neighborhood, and looking through glass and seeing workers and as I saw them, it came to me that it was a noble profession and how is nobility shown in many-many paintings and through history? It is through the oval. So, I turned the tables, in a way so that ‘The Neighbors’, the wealthy inhabitants of New York City were relegated to these harsh and geometric containers, and ‘The Workers’ were awarded the oval.

When I started ‘The Neighbors’ series I had a large lens and was looking through to the neighbors’ windows and I photographed the action, or the lack of action. And I kept analyzing, why could this not be successful – it’s a beautiful vignette, it’s beautifully lit… And I realized that there was no indication that I was shooting through a window. Then one sunny day the light was raking across the windows of the neighbors’ and it hit every particle of dirt and dust on the glass, thereby diffusing the scene behind it into, almost, a painterly scene. It broke up the surface and I realized that if I broke up, if I focused on the dirt then this would be the secret that I was looking for. This would also be a way of flattening the planes. I didn’t want dimension. I wanted it to appear that all this action was projected on a ¼” plane of some sort.

The long lens helped with that because that kind of foreshortens and then focusing on the glass further reduced the depth of the action, so it appeared as if it was happening as though it was imbued in the glass. To me it was like photographing stained glass. It was almost that…. I shudder to say a religious experience, but it was an experience that gave everybody, and especially The Workers’ – all my subjects grandeur and respect, I think is the term I am looking for because it suddenly became bigger than a photo.

This video and transcript © galleryIntell. Artwork © Arne Svenson and courtesy of the artist and Julie Saul Gallery.

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There is so much force condensed inside Charles McGill’s large scale Tondos, on view at Pavel Zoubok Gallery in Chelsea, that you can’t help but be mesmerized by these frieze-like sculptures. The tondos (from the Italian rotondo – round), totems and smaller free-standing sculptures are created by re-assembling golf bags that have been torn, cut apart, pulled in all directions, collaged and made to comply with the artist’s will.

And there are so many layers of contradictions contained within these sculptures. There are surfaces that appear to be soft and pliable, but are neither and as soon as you make that discovery, you see stiff plastic tubing crushed into submission, zippers glaring in cold indifference, screws, nails, brads and other metals piercing the leather in the most violent ways. Expectations of calm dictated by the circular, halo-like shape of McGill’s tondos instead reveal hurricanes brewing inside each one. So much so, that these sculptures are still vibrating with the artist’s determination of making the materials conform to his will.

‘Target 51’, ‘Territories’, ‘Little Indian’, ‘White (Tondo)’, ‘Scull’, ‘Goat, Bull, Rooster, Horse’, (don’t you just love the titles?) along with every other work in this exhibition, were born without studies, without plans, without the slightest notion of their final states. For Charles McGill the process is fundamentally intuitive. There is a need to create and because of this need he allows the materials to guide him, but theirs is not a passive relationship. A “tug-of-war” is how he described it when we sat down to discuss the exhibition and his creative process.

Video interview transcript:

Charles McGill: I don’t think there is real symbolism for me with the circle, however, there is a compositional challenge within a circle that I’ve always kind of been interested in.

The first one I did was the white tondo and I didn’t really know what to think about it, and I sent it to a friend of mine in California, Joe Lewis, who is an artist also and he sent me back a Michelangelo tondo, which was strikingly similar to the one I had just made. And it really blew my mind and gave me an affirmation that this was probably a good direction to go in.

I’ve been working with the golf bag material for several years. It’s a material that seems to not want to cooperate with my intentions for it. So in that process there is a lot of tug-of-war. A lot of wrestling, a lot of stress and emotions spent. In that process comes something that I don’t expect as a result. But when I am finished, I am, most of the times, happy with the results I have achieved.

Taking a vessel, if you will, and an object that is meant for leisure and the kind of emotion I spend with that material is the exact opposite of the emotion you would carry out on to the golf course.

The fact that these golf bags are manufactured to be durable, to have longevity, to stay together and not come apart, those elements of that material are the thing that kind of a catalyst for me. If they came apart easier, I don’t know that I would get the same work.

Certainly, Philip Guston. I wouldn’t say he is a direct influence, but it’s certainly hard not to make that connection if you have a hooded figure, so I do look at him from time to time. And of course Michelangelo and Nancy Grossman. I can’t say enough about her work. I’ve never been that familiar with her work in terms of a studied relationship with it, until very recently. I’m almost kind of ashamed to say that, but as I look at her work, the kinship with the way she worked with leather and or vinyl, and the way she incorporated zippers, and the way she manipulated the material to do what she wanted it to do, I really identify with that process.

I don’t remember the name of the piece, it might have been during a Google search, when a piece popped up. A vertical piece that I have never really seen from [John] Chamberlain popped up and it made a stunningly immediate influence or, impact I should say. I didn’t want to look at it too long, I didn’t want to sear into my brain, but I was aware of its impact and I thought, I understand what he is doing there with that material and I want to know if I can “translate” that with my own materials.

I let it sit for a couple of weeks and. I got a piece of wood and I just said, I’m going to make an attempt to visit that place. Because I really understood the language and having never seen that piece before I wanted to know, can I converse in that language? I started and I made “Corset ”, which I love.

Target 51 is probably the most personal piece in the show. It’s about my father dying at age 51. He died at 51 when I was 30, so for the last 21 years I have been kind of aware of this age out in front of me.  This “target age” in front of me that I wanted to get to. …. When he died I automatically thought and continued to think for the next 21 years that maybe something will strike me down at age 50 – 51 and I wouldn’t live that long. So when I had my birthday in January, I made it to age 51.

The physicality of actually making the work really is the over-riding characteristic of the work, I think.  If the materials were easier to handle, I don’t know that I would get the same result. A lot of what happens in the work is the direct result of how frustrating it is to work with the material.

I have to say, I rarely know what’s next. Working with this golf bag, or working with this material for the last 15 years, at each stage I thought, ok, that’s it, I’ve exhausted it, I can’t really do anything more with this material. At each stage something else revealed itself, so in a sense I’ve kind of let the material guide me as to where it might want to go next. At the same time I’m coercing it to do what I want it to do. It’s a tug-of-war, it’s a wrestling match. I really would not have it any other way. As frustrating as it can be to make the work, those are my ideal conditions. I don’t want serenity.

This video interview © galleryIntell. Images featured in this interview © Charles McGill, Nancy Grossman. Courtesy the artist and Pavel Zoubok Gallery.

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“…these  marks are in constant motion, swarming over the surface the moment we look away and then, the moment we look back, returning to their rightful places, the positions in which we initially found them: the places in which they belong. […] They create an odd synesthesia, they make us hear sounds, music – the way the paintings of Arthur Dove can seem to make us hear a foghorn… ” 

— Francine Prose, Terry Winters Prints 1999 – 2014

These new silkscreens by the American artist Terry Winters were the focus of Two Palms booth at The Armory Show this year. The 12 large scale vertical prints with a restricted palette of black, silver and white were inspired by Georgy Ligeti’s 1961 composition Atmospheres.

The title of the series comes from a 1961 symphonic work by the Hungarian composer György Ligeti that exemplifies his concept of ‘supersaturated polyphony.’ What this signified for Ligeti was a canonic structure so intensive that it resists penetration, as he once observed, “like a densely woven cobweb.”*

The artist’s prints from 1999 – 2014 are currently the subject of a solo exhibition at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne and an in-depth exhibition catalogue from Prestel Publishing that contains a forward by Sharon Corwin, Carolyn Muzzy Director ad Chief Curator at Colby College Museum of Art and Michael Semff, Senior Director at Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München as well as articles by Francine Prose and Michael Semff. In the book you will find 70 images and a great deal of information about the various subjects, techniques, narratives and in prints featured in the Munich exhibition.

Evelyn Day Lasry, Founder Two Palms Gallery: This is a new set of 12 large-scale silkscreens by the American artist Terry Winters. These are newly published pieces from 2014 – 2015 and they are a part of an exhibition in Munich right now.

The show is Terry Winters: Prints 1999 – 2014 and this series here are his newest prints and they are at the start of that exhibition in Munich. The images are inspired by Hungarian composer György Ligeti, and the complexity of the image relates to the density of the music. Think of them as cobwebs and multi-layered images.

He brought his sketchbooks to his studio, the printmaking studio to inspire him.

The first step is painting on a large piece of Mylar, the scale of this piece of paper and he would use an oil stick or a paintbrush to paint an image on the Mylar. That first image went into the silkscreen exposure room, was shot onto a screen with photosensitive emulsion and then that became the first layer on the paper. Once it’s printed he may decide to build up that layer and print that one screen multiple times, but then he takes another piece of Mylar and based on the image on the paper makes a new layer to this image. So this is a call-and-response process.

This piece behind me, Atmospheres 8, went through the press 38 times, so it’s a multi-layered process that’s built along the way. His oil on canvas pieces are beautiful, colorful abstractions, he is also known as a colorist and because his pieces are so complex, he wanted to get rid of the color. There are 3 colors: black, white and metallic gray.

The artist is also inspired by images from nature, molecular structures, close up images of cobwebs or honeycombs or pollen. That can explain some of the imagery you see in these prints.

Artwork featured in this article:

A portfolio of 12 screenprints

* Terry Winters Prints 1999 – 2014, Page 104.

This video and article © galleryIntell. Images © Terry Winters. Courtesy Two Palms.

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It requires a certain amount of concentration, curiosity and geographical knowledge to fully appreciate the work of Nikki Rosato, a New York-born, Boston-based and New Orleans – represented artist. But that’s nothing compared to the intensity, accuracy and concentration it demands of the artist. Nikki Rosato cuts into road maps like a sculptor cuts into stone – slowly, precisely and methodically, revealing a lacework of familiar silhouettes: full scale figures, busts and heads. Rosato arrived at her current technique after discovering a box of old road maps at a university book shop. Suddenly she saw that the yellow, red and black serpentines of roads and highways, the blue ribbons of rivers meandering through the map “mimicked” the arteries and veins running through our own bodies.

She had been tracing the lines on her own body for her previous body of work, so it was only a matter of time before the correlation became apparent. She realized that just like blood vessels carry information through the body, so do roads and rivers depicted on those road maps. The symbolism and similarities were too obvious to her not to explore the medium further.

We talked to Nikki during her solo booth exhibition at the 2015 installation of VOLTA New York fair where she was represented by the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery.

Here is the transcript of the video interview:

Nikki Rosato: Prior to doing the work with the road map I was working on a series where I was re-drawing every line on the surface of my body. Fingerprints, footprints, the wrinkles around my eyes and in the midst of that project I stumbled across a box of used road maps. When looking at the maps I instantly had an inspirational moment when I saw something very human within the lines of the road map itself. The rivers and the roadways mimic the lines that not only cover the surface of our bodies but also our internal makings. Such as veins and arteries – the things that make us alive and human. And the map is mapping out these places, these locations are also very much alive, just as we are alive.

What I do, is I basically dissect the roadmap for only the lines, so I’ll use a tiny exact-o blade and cut away piece by piece all of the land masses, leaving only the roads and rivers behind. In the end it’s kind of creates this delicate lacy structure. And the people that I’m representing in these pieces are the places that are very important to these people specifically.

So, when I use myself as a model, for example, in this work, I am using a place that is important to myself – part of my own history, my own journey. A place that has an impact on who I am as a person today. So this one, for example, is of NYC and NY in general, where I was born, so it’s an important part of my story, and my journey.

I also work with friends, family members to create individual portraits. I’ll talk to them, interview them as to which place best represents who they are as a person. I’ll take their photo and then make their portrait out of that place. So, for example, San Francisco, where this girl was born, or Brooklyn, NY. Detroit, MI – it’s often the places, where people have started and began their life journey.

Images featured in this article:

Nathan: Buffalo, NY, 10.5″X6.5″, Hand cut road map, 2009

Untitled (Self-Portrait), 20″X16″, Hand cut road map, 2010

Kim: Boston, MA, 20″X16″, Hand cut road map, 2013

Jennifer: Chicago, IL, 20″X16″, Hand cut road map, 2013

Untitled (Connections), 13″X8″, Hand cut road map, 2012

Couple: Boston, MA, 11″X14″, Hand cut road map, 2009

Untitled (Connections), 16″X10″, Hand cut road map, 2012

Untitled (Mouth to Mouth), 11″X8″, Hand cut road map, 2014

This video and article © galleryIntell. Images © Nikki Rosato and courtesy of the artist and Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans.

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Anyone who has ever seen Franz Kline‘s expressionistic black slashes of pigment on a white background will instantly draw connections between those famous compositions and color choices of this Burundi-born artist. But that’s where the similarities end. Serge Alain Nitegeka, an artist represented in New York by Marianne Bosky Gallery bases his paintings on the installations that precede them. Each a snapshot of a specific place within the site-specific construction. The installation at the Armory Show featured the artist’s signature black beams, unpainted shipping crates and Mondrian-like red squares and rectangles that snap the viewer out of the monochromatic trans. As Nitegeka explained in the interview, the work — a labyrinth of strict lines, spontaneous in construction, is only complete when interacted with by the audience. It demands an unconformable passage, drawing physical and emotional parallels between migration experiences of victims of illegal human trafficking in Africa and around the world.

The artist has recently wrapped his first solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky’s Clinton street exhibition space Boesky East in New York.

Interview transcript:

Serge Alain Nitegeka: Second-hand crates have a history of moving things across borders. Essentially, when I started working I was drawing myself in the nude on the sides of the crates. That translated to dealing with narratives of human trafficking. I found the crates to be very convenient to use … it allowed me to explore illegitimate travel of people from A to B. I was able to talk about slavery, I was able to talk about human trafficking, to talk about the illegitimate travel across borders, and that’s where the crates came in.

I thought of the idea of starting to use materials and sculpture that explore a narrative that would be inclusive of the viewer’s experience. And I ended up developing an idea of the sculpture that would have to be fulfilled or completed by the viewer. The viewer has to be IN THE space, the viewer has to interact, the viewer has to negotiate their way. The viewer has to feel like they are made to move in a particular way, essentially fulfilling, or talking about forced migration. I make an installation from a site-specific point of view. It’s a one off and it’s adapted to the space. Refugees and asylum seekers – they have to improvise, they have to find means and things in the environment they can use that will enable them to do what they want or what they have to do to survive.

I’m very interested in geometry – the idea that lines have to add up, they have to make sense. How can the space inform the lines that I am going to take.. .The way I work with installation…as a kind of self-generated sculpture in a sense that one line informs the other. Coupled with the fact that it has to be structurally safe, so there has to be some structural decisions that are being made when, for example one piece has to be added on or the first piece has to be supported. So that carries on until something emerges. When I start working, I have no idea how it’s gonna look like, I don’t have a sketch. I just have the materials, I have the space and that’s kind of how I work…

This article and video © galleryIntell.

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on view September 11 – October 11, 2014

This solo exhibition at Morgan Lehman Gallery in Chelsea draws attention to the challenges of sustaining environments for some of New York’s native species. Paul Villinski, the artist who has been working with the image of the butterfly for the last couple of decades, this time uses his signature image in conjunction with several live species of this most celebrated insect. Working together with one of the leading Lepidopterists, Dr. Rudi Mattoni, together they were able to construct a special system, a butterfly machine as it became to be known, that allowed breeding generations of butterflies in a controlled studio environment.

From the gallery:

“The exhibition’s principle sculpture, Self-Portrait, is a life-size figure fabricated from slender steel rods, clothed in fine nylon mesh. Each day, a handful of native butterflies bred by the artist will occupy the enclosed interior volume of the figure. Over the course of the day, the butterflies discover openings in the mesh and exit, causing the figure to slowly exhale its living occupants. The exhibition also includes a series of three circular forms made with the artist’s signature medium of discarded cans, meticulously hand-cut in the forms of over thirty distinct butterfly species – all either endangered or extinct.”

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What inspired you to build the butterfly machine?

Paul Villinski: I’ve been working with butterfly imagery in my work for about two decades now and I employed it in a primarily symbolic fashion. I was essentially interested in the symbolism and metaphors the butterflies represent. Several years ago I was introduced by a curator to Dr. Rudi Mattoni, Ph.D., who is a leading lepidopterist in the United States and he and I became fast friends. He started to teach me about the actual butterfly biology About that time I started thinking about creating an art work that would employ live butterflies and an image of a human figure, filled with actual living butterflies struck me. So I started to move in that direction. Rather than simply purchasing butterflies that have ben bred by someone else it became very interesting to me to think about breeding butterflies in the studio, particularly, butterflies that are native to New York State, and butterflies which we caught ourselves.

Dr. Mattoni and I began to forage in the neighborhoods of New York City, including my own neighborhood. I caught my very first butterfly under his tutelage. We brought these butterflies back and set up a very rudimentary system for rearing butterflies in the studio.

Is the metaphor of transformation evident in other aspects of your work, if so, how?

Paul Villinski: My work has been involved with transformation for many, many years. In the simplest terms I’ve been involved in working with found materials – generally things that have been found on the streets of my neighborhood and that have no apparent value. And in the last decade or so, quite a bit of work done with aluminum cans. These cans are crushed by traffic passing over them. They really have no value at all. My task has really been to take these worthless, cast-off materials and transform them into something that has particular meaning, has this kind of resonance and has some aesthetic quality. That’s one of the reasons the image of the butterfly has been important to me over the years. The butterfly itself is a symbol of transformation and rebirth. And it’s really the universal symbol for metamorphosis and transformation. My practice of transforming materials in the studio, and the symbolism of the butterfly have held hands very nicely.

How does this project speak to the environmental issues that plague the butterflies? Do parallels exist between the butterflies’ issues and our own? Does damage to the environment affect us in similar ways?

Paul Villinski:

Paul Villinski: What I hope to suggest with this self-portrait figure sculpture, which contains live butterflies and releases those live butterflies, exhales live butterflies during the course of the day. What I am hoping to suggest there is there is really no separation between homo sapiens and the rest of the natural world. We are all one.  There is no difference between what happens to the flora and fauna on the planet and what happens to us. Ultimately, what happens to the butterflies will be our fate as well.

Dr. Rudi Mattoni, Ph. D: The most troublesome feature that we face today is the deterioration of the environment. Scientific efforts have failed to communicate this problem to the public. [Paul and I] got together and collaborated on how to use the now-living butterflies as a vehicle for touching some part of the public consciousness and morality. At the beginning of the Paleolithic Era there was only one insect that was depicted in the cave paintings – it was the butterfly! It’s interesting to have this connotation of this great beauty of the butterfly that’s touched, somehow, the human soul, or the intuition or whatever you may want to call it and this is the issue I would like to see exploited, because we have to do something to change the current situation.

Do you see this endeavor shaping future projects?

Paul Villinski: One of the big take-aways for me with the butterfly machine is that it’s incredibly hard to recreate a natural system in a human environment. We basically have spent a tremendous amount of time and effort trying to create a bio system that could support a handful of species of butterflies. The minute you remove both, the host plants and the butterflies from their natural environment, where they are surrounded by a kind of bio diversity that we can’t really even describe, they fail to flourish and they wind up being subject to all kinds of problems.  It has proven to be far more difficult than I ever imagined it would be.

The butterfly machine ultimately represents to me a kind of dystopian vision of that world could be like, if we continue down this path of climate change and habitat destruction. We could, conceivably, wind up in a place where the only butterflies we see are reared in controlled environments. That they only way my four-year-old child is going to see a butterfly when he is my age is in a controlled environment, by going to some zoological display where butterflies have been reared artificially. I want to raise these kinds of concerns as an artist.

Paul Villinski: My work with the image was largely symbolic and then, over time my interest has really expanded to include the actual biology and the creatures themselves. And on Dr. Mattoni’s suggestions I went to the Peruvian Amazon last summer for a neo-tropical Lepidoptera field course. An astonishing experience – it was led by five of the top lepidopterists in the world. We flew to Lima, then flew to Iquitos, which is a city of a million people that doesn’t have a road connecting it to any other major city. Then we went up the Amazon for four hours in a boat, stepped off the boat, walked into a jungle into a research center and took a very extensive 100-hour class on butterflies and moths. Over the last two and a half year I’ve become very deeply involved in witnessing the life cycles of these species of butterflies that we are rearing now and this is part of what I want to try and share in this exhibition.

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This video and article © galleryIntell

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