Bushwick Open Studios Highlight: Axel Ventura

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According to Robert Bellah’s book ‘Religion in Human Evolution’, biologists sometimes enjoy using the computer terms of ‘online’ and ‘offline’. When some organism or person is ‘online’ he/she is engaged in the processes required for survival – hunting, foraging, working etc. When one is ‘offline’ one is in the lounging around stage. Yet, I’m not so sure there’s a hard and fast line between these states for human beings. I was just at my laundromat – was I online or offline waiting for my stuff to dry while chatting with neighbors? If we are reading a challenging book or riding on the subway while engaged in meaningful thought, are we offline? Maybe the perfect life is one where online and offline are perfectly integrated so that you are always a bit online and always a bit offline.  Who knows!?

Axel Ventura seemed to play with this notion of the offline state in his series of drawings “I once lived in a two-story house.” which was a highlight for me of the Bushwick Open Studios event.  Assuming there is such a thing as living offline, it seems to be our most desired state and we see young folks in this temporary state of being in Ventura’s drawings. They are in the state where we are the most benign to the world and others and where pressures can be suspended for a while. What happens or can happen when we are in this zone? What do we need or crave in this state?  From three drawings in the series we can see one guy needed a Coors (although he seems a little irritated – maybe he wanted a Corona but only a Coors was left?), another was hoping for one last slice of hopefully not so moldy pizza and another is going to try to catch some shut-eye.  Ventura captures, with a subtle humor, the contented state where, basically, youthful people are not trying to do anything nor do they feel compelled to do anything. Time is on their side.

I also liked some paintings by Ventura which were obviously based on the tradition of 20^th century muralism. We see two images here of very muscular figures who are compressed within the frame of their paintings. So my first interpretation is that these are muscular guys – immensely powerful – who are being subjected to some form of oppression represented by the frame. The oppression must be extreme since, as I pointed out, these guys are pretty darn brawny but are still stuck in contorted positions between the borders. So the paintings could work as a statement on the nature of oppression and how effectively and often inexplicably oppression can bottle up even enormous strength. The positive conclusion to be drawn might be that such immense strength will, of necessity, be harnessed sooner or later for liberation.

My second interpretation would be that Ventura is making a broader statement about the visual arts. By its very nature art constricts life, which can give certain pieces of art a type of explosive potential energy. So, according to my second interpretation, the contorted figures represent the pith or raw force of the most worthwhile meaning an artist might shoot for. In the process of attempting to capture and convey that meaning, it is placed in a restrictive ‘frame’. Thus, we get the muscular guys waiting to be liberated or liberate themselves from a narrow structure established by the artistic process itself. It could be that Ventura is asking the question: Is it possible for the artist to really convey something transformational and to reach others with something amazing or is this type of communication impossible, with the inner truth the artist perceived always locked within the frame of the canvas and the very pigments and ingredients of the paint itself?

The artist’s web page: http://www.axelventura.com

Bushwick Open Studios Highlight: Satirical Animated Paintings by Federico Solmi

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So Gilbert Stuart painted the iconic portrait of George Washington we can see at the National Portrait Gallery. And Washington deserved a nice big portrait, didn’t he? After all, he beat the English so that we could gain our freedom and he served as first president. Yet, a reputable historian has suggested that George Washington may have supported the American Revolution primarily because he had horribly mismanaged his finances in regard to his tobacco plantation and was hopelessly in debt to English businessmen – nothing like booting the debt-holder’s army off the continent to relieve your financial crisis.

Gilbert Stuart - Washington - National Portrait Gallery

Furthermore, George’s generaling skills were not always what you’d have hoped for. In a battle in Manhattan he stupidly allowed about half of his army to get captured and these men languished and died slowly and agonizingly in English prison ships (you can visit their monument in Fort Greene Park). For big chunks of the war he, basically, did nothing but maintain a camp. At the Battle of Yorktown – the final battle of the war – it was the thousands of French soldiers and the French navy which made the difference, and Washington was not even allowed to create the strategy for the battle since the French king did not trust him with such a large chunk of the French military. Basically King Louis said, “We’ll let you be there George, but we’re running this show, baby. We’ll do the work, you take the freaking glory.”

So this lionizing process of first obfuscating mediocrity and then elevating the mediocre and greedy and power-hungry is what Federico Solmi seems to lampoon in his visually stunning animated paintings which were one of the highlights of the Bushwick Open Studios.  Solmi will be having a show in LA at the Luis de Jesus Gallery in which three of the works he showed in Bushwick will be displayed as part of a new series called The Brotherhood. The ‘Brotherhood’ is an organization which has been comprised of ‘leaders’ of now mythic proportions (and future ‘leaders’ of mythic proportions) who have had the goal of maintaining ‘chaos in the world’ while working toward ‘the degeneration of the human race’.  The three members of the Brotherhood that will be shown in LA are Montezuma, Washington and Columbus. In these ‘animated’ paintings, you see figures attempting to move with grace and decorum through public areas to receive adulation, but something seems horribly wrong.

These animated paintings are like Dorian Gray images where the truth of each exalted and grandiose person suddenly winds up making it to the forefront even though the public image will remain pristine and unchangeably perfect and magnificent due to the lack of real journalism and the existence of public apathy. Solmi seems to attack the false narratives that get written about most leaders – that they are driven by integrity, concern and compassion, when, in reality, each one is driven by an all-consuming desire for power, fame and money. Each of the members of the Brotherhood has mastered the art of demagoguery and rhetoric and will say (perhaps from a teleprompter) what people want to hear while pursuing his/her own agenda.

Solmi is a past winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been exhibited widely. There will be a gallery show of his work in New York at Postmasters Gallery on 54 Franklin Street on September 9^th.  Join him on Facebook and he’ll let you know the details. You should be able to access one or two of Solmi’s non-Brotherhood pieces below, to give you an idea of how he uses technology from the video-game industry, as well as more traditional materials, to create these large, framed video pieces.

https://vimeo.com/126604334

https://vimeo.com/124342616

The artist’s web page:

www.federicosolmi.com

Daniel Gauss - a guy who is pretty damn good at writing about art :)

Daniel Gauss

De Colores – a Group Show at the Buggy Factory (for Bushwick Open Studios), Curated by Enrico Gomez

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If you were to think of songs associated with the labor union movement or various union strikes, the songs of the prolific union activist and songwriter Joe Hill might come to mind. Once, when a company hired a Salvation Army band to play loud enough to drown out the chants of strikers, Hill simply wrote pro-union lyrics to the music the band customarily played, and the strikers were able to sing along to the music, loudly expressing their anti-management sentiments. Other than the work of Joe Hill, union classics might include: Whose Side Are You On?, Bread and Roses, Solidarity Forever…but, did you ever hear of De Colores?

If you started your Bushwick Open Studios walk from the south, you might have come across the Buggy Factory, which was one of the information hubs. At the Buggy Factory Enrico Gomez curated a group show of seven amazing and accomplished artists around the theme of De Colores, which was a song commonly sung during the darkest days of the United Farm Workers Union’s attempt to secure justice for migrant farm workers.  It’s really not exactly the type of song you’d expect at a labor union rally as it is a song which praises the colors of nature and the joy these colors bring. It’s a Spanish-language folk song with religious undertones, with early versions that can be traced back to the 1600s.

So the song De Colores was sung in response to the callousness and greed of the farm owners and the hatred directed at Cesar Chavez, Delores Huerta and the workers and families of workers they represented. Singing the song was a way to refrain from being engaged on the possible level of malice created by the situation and to direct one’s thoughts elsewhere while the UFW endured and until everything could be resolved. Instead of being worn down and torn down, the farm workers refused to return hatred for hatred and replaced that with the serene emotions engendered by the beautiful De Colores. Like the song De Colores, upon stepping into the Buggy Factory's amazing exhibition space, one was engaged and uplifted by thought-provoking work incorporating a variety of colors and forms by the following seven artists:

If you’ve seen any colorfully painted cement mixer trucks around Bushwick or environs, that was probably Andrea Bergart’s idea. After spending time in West Africa, where artists paint on almost anything, apparently, she floated an idea by a cement mixer truck company and they allowed her to create various designs on some of their trucks. For the De Colores show, we see the same type of clash of strong and bright colors that Bergart seemed to be influenced by in Africa, where the colors and designs of clothing often add a contrast and uplifting element to bleak environments.

http://andreabergart.com/

From Ben Godward’s website it seems that his art of accretion is a response to our ‘slick, saturated media’ and references things from sex to food to toxic sludge.  His work derives from a culture of ‘material excess and imperial gluttony’ where ‘Pure carnival joy harmonizes unselfconsciously with commodity culture.’  

http://bengodward.com/home.html

Anne Russinof seems to use a wet-on-wet painting technique in which she – from what I have gleaned from her web page – uses gestural, abstract expressionist techniques accompanied with a more minimalist concern for structure. 

http://www.annerussinof.com/

The thick strips of aqua and white in the work of Jennifer Ditacchio seem to be derived from the natural environment and the artist herself once pointed out that she has deeply influenced by the light and colors of the Cape Cod landscape where she grew up.

http://www.jditacchio.com/

Denise Treizman is a native of Chile who did her MFA work at SVA. At one point started a program where the athletic shoes of Chilean national soccer team players were used to create art by various artists as a fund raiser for Chilean earthquake victims. According to her artist statement, her work often involves, ‘…informality, improvisation and new forms of abstract assemblage…’ from a process that embraces chance and uses whatever might be available.

http://www.denisetreizman.com/

In Doreen McCarthy’s artist statement she states that ‘My production often appears to present aesthetic oxymorons that occupy both sides of formal and conceptual oppositions such as material versus effect.’ In the centerpiece of the show we see one of her site-specific pieces - a curling and tube-like structure that I dubbed ‘the eternal sausage’ because it’s like viscera defying the laws of entropy with no beginning, no end and no production of waste. 

http://www.doreenmccarthy.com/

Inna Babaeva, originally from Ukraine, tends to use industrial foam to stimulate thought about ‘mass production, recycling, function, materiality, gravity and time.’ Often the foam serves as a means to undermine the function of another object and sometimes the foam is allowed through chance operations to assume its own unpredictable and often absurdly ridiculous shape mimicking some type of organic form.

http://innababaeva.com/home.html

De Colores

The Buggy Factory

June 5 – 7

14 Kossuth Place

Brooklyn, NY 11221

www.thedoradoproject.com

Daniel Gauss - the guy who writes some of the best art gallery reviews in the city.