Nichole van Beek’s gouache paintings are like Magic Eye images for grown-ups: they’re hypnotic, colorful, and contain promises of secret knowledge for those willing to put in the effort.
Van Beek is as much a sculptor as she is a painter, and her mixed-media installations are crafted with ingenuity (she enjoys making her own tools) and an eye for spareness from materials like driftwood, tape, yarn and grip-tape. Both the two-dimensional and three-dimensional brands of van Beek’s work will turn viewers googly-eyed, which is probably the point. She gives you full permission to stare.
Mark Giglio is a machine of productivity. The Southern California-born artist runs his studio and workshop, Pen Pencil Stencil, out of Oakland, and wastes no time in cranking out fine drawings, prints, photography, (see below) wallpaper, sculptures (like the nine-piece set of trees made from scrap wood above) limited-edition t-shirt designs, stickers, tote bags and zines. Whew.
Luckily, the quality of Giglio’s work more than matches the quantity. A preference for clean, colorful and minimalist shapes turns each image into a visual treat. Mark’s blog keeps things moving right along with travel bulletins, observations and experiments. It’s almost like being a fly on the workshop wall.
If you find yourself in San Francisco, check out Mark’s serigraphs in PRINTED MATTER 7, Giant Robot’s show that runs from December 5th through January 6th of next year.
We absorb art in different ways. There’s art that makes you grin, art that makes you gag, art that you meet with a perfectly neutral expression. Then there’s art that slaps you in the face with its sheer loony brilliance. Occupying this last category is Meredith Dittmar, a Portland-based sculptress who works with clay to produce tableaux as wacky and gorgeous as something out of a dream (or nightmare).
Influenced by a childhood of pet pigs, spy games and hay forts combined with a computer science education and a career in interactive design, Dittmar creates her work primarily with Premo polymer clay and wire. In a nutshell, it’s unlike anything we’ve seen before. Read an interview with the artist at Fecal Face, then check out her website. Kinda makes you want to spend an afternoon inside her brain.
Argh! In this bewilderingly speedy age, technology practically becomes obsolete before we figure out what all the buttons do. What’s a potentially annoying problem for the average civilian, however, is fodder for artist Brian Dettmer, who collects cassette tapes in order to fashion anatomically-correct skulls and skeletons from ye olde bygone analog media.
Dettmer keeps his process a secret, revealing only that the pieces are made without any outside materials except for tapes. Maybe black magic is also involved.
The artist Petah Coyne refers to her sculptures as “girls”, and who’s to argue with her? At a given exhibition you’ll find the girls suspended from the ceiling or stationed on the floor, their anatomies formed of earth, trees, branches, roots, silk flowers, ribbons, wax, hair, chicken wire, plywood, rubber, tar, hay, sand, taxidermy and….other stuff. Lots of it.
The Oklahama City-born and NYC resident cites as her influences Dutch still lifes, baroque sculpture, her strict Catholic upbringing, Miss Havisham (from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. The artist engineers her sculptures to look delicate but they’re actually behemoths, weighing enough to crush a human if they fell from the ceiling. Some of them are layered in 75 coats of wax. Others resemble wedding dresses. You could easily stare at a Coyne sculpture for two hours and still not exhaust the interpretive possibilities of the work, which can’t be said for most contemporary sculpture—even the best of it.
Having a sense of humor is crucial to being an artist. Carrie Schneider appears unafraid of absurdity, flirting with comical undertones in her visually jarring creations– so she’s already a step ahead of so many self-serious peers. There’s always something off in her lovely photographs, an unexpected juxtaposition often provided by a strange sculptural element Schneider has dragged into the image, or an alarming pose. For instance, check out her portraits of artists in their studios… where they all seem to have unexpectedly passed out on their paint-splattered floors. Okay, weird! But fun!
Once upon a time, Brad Troemel was an acclaimed young Chicago photographer who maintained a personal website full of clever and visually striking images organized in the typical portfolio way. He also ran an incomparably shrewd and culturally attuned blog on the side, full of funny and sad musings on art, sharp interviews with his heroes and contemporaries, and best of all, grotesquely marvelous found photos and video culled from depressing MySpace pages and party-photo sites for all ages Miami night clubs. Both of those sites are now gone.
Troemel’s new home on the information superhighway is an collective Tumblr page called Jogging. It’s not completely clear who else is the group, and that seems to be how Troemel likes it. Rather than producing artwork in the format of tidy projects to be archived on individual artists’ static websites, Jogging’s ephemeral and anonymous format enables Troemel and his conspirator(s) to create an endless stream of new material updated regularly– freeing them from consciously curating their own work. It also allows the artists to explore different mediums without forcing them to adhere to specific labels. For instance, a photogaph of a banana resting precariously on a rusty nail can be an “installation,” while an image of a potato suspended from a wall by a band-aid can be a “sculpture.” There’s a tounge-in-cheek commentary on the conceits and expectations of contemporary art running throughout the work on Jogging, and it’s that sense of humor that allows Troemel to transcend the formal seriousness the blog’s artwork seem to be founded upon.
In spite of Troemel’s somewhat convoluted concept (see: the only statement of any kind on the site, an erudite interview with Troemel conducted by fellow Vice magazine shooter Maciek Pozoga), the work itself is indelibly fun. Who doesn’t like to see the unsettling texture of Gogurt out of its ordinary context? Who isn’t curious to read a full-length spec script for a brand new episode of Friends? I especially like the solemnly methodical video pieces on Jogging, like the conspicuously unreal eleven-second wonder A Renewed Interest in Craft: I Make a Basketball Shot, and Fountain, Rain, Sprinkler, in which we are treated to 41 seconds of a fountain and a sprinkler wasting gallons of water on an anonymous vast and well-manicured lawn during a rainstorm. Check out Untitled, a brief yet endearing video of a “performance” Troemel enacts on a slow day at the mall.
If only everything could interface with everything else! Now it can, in Christian Weber’s photographic series of dream hybrids, Object. Allow the unconnectable to connect! All cords are connected to every device. All ports are open for business.
Slugs vs. three-dimensional grids! Birds vs. board rooms! Deserts vs. office buildings! The battle between the wild, untamed heart of nature and the cold, pragmatic logic of modernist design is heating up in the work of Dutch artist Semâ Bekirovic. Working in video, photography and sculpture, Bekirovic demonstrates a knack for mirthful experimentation, tackling themes of spontaneity and control, and mixing mysteries of the artificial and organic variety to create an atmosphere of carefully measured absurdity.
Semâ was kind enough to answer a few questions for our ongoing series of Where the Wild Things Are micro-questionnaires.
Is Where the Wild Things Are popular in The Netherlands? What do you remember about it from your childhood?
Where the Wild Things Are is called Max en de Maximonsters here. I remember my sister and me loving the book. We saw a childrens’ musical of it when I was six or so. I remember being quite enchanted by it. My sister and I used to stage plays with monsters in them ourselves.
I remember trying to stack three classmates on top of each other to fit in a homemade dragon costume, and how they tumbled out of it on stage. We always finished the costumes and props at the last possible moment, so there was never time for rehearsals. So our plays always ended up as text-less chaotic performances with lots of amazing props.
The contrast between nature and culture seems to be a strong theme in your work. Growing up, were you captivated by the idea of escaping your bedroom for an untamed wilderness, like Max does in the book?
Yes, but my sister and I (we were a team) would actually escape, usually. We would, for example, take our bikes and try to cycle to Belgium (which is about 300 kilometres from where we lived) and end up getting lost in some suburb of Amsterdam by the end of the day. We would ask a passerby for the way back home and by the time we got back in the middle of the night, we would find our mother in a state of near collapse. She had to call the cops quite a few times to look for us. We always thought she exaggerated.
But when I look back I guess we were quite out of control.
Monsters (loosely interpreted) figure prominently in Taylor Baldwin’s work. His drawings and sculptures feature such visual stimuli as skulls, fossils, ghost figures and an oversized kachina doll updating his personal software.
A young artist currently working out of Provincetown, Massachussetts, Baldwin sources his material mostly by bartering, stealing, borrowing and salvaging from locales both mysterious (a house destroyed by arson) and humble (dumpsters). The resulting works deal cheerfully with themes of mutation, history, material culture and the ebbs and flows of civilization. These are pieces worth pondering.
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