All About Prints

by Jill Conner


Asteriskpix is always on the road to something new, creating flawless animations that fit smoothly into larger productions. On a recent visit, Richard O'Connor showed some of the work that was done for All About Prints, a project that was aired on American Public Television in May 2009 as well as some fragments from their soon-to-be-finished project titled The Buddha. Although O'Connor still insists that the studio's work is not about avant-garde, high-art but rather about the confluence of creativity and research, the imagery that emerges from this animation studio suggests otherwise.

All About Prints breaks past the wide-spread assumption that prints are less valuable, and a more affordable alternative, to the purchase of an original work of art, like a painting or sculpture. While that is partially true, this show opens up the long history of print making and reveals the fact that not only were these images intended to be low-cost for easy purchase but they were also designed for quick dissemination to a broad audience. Deborah Wye, Chief Curator of the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum of Modern Art, points out the central role that prints still have in the work of contemporary artists like Christian Marclay and Swoon. Artists throughout history such as Albrecht Duerer, Rembrandt, James McNeill Whistler, Edward Hopper, Kara Walker, Jacob Lawrence and Ellen Gallagher have also explored this as a form of commercial art. However the most interesting facet of this program is the role that the print-making process played throughout both America and Mexico during the 1920's and '30's.



While unemployment swept throughout the mid-Western states, union strikes became more frequent. Moreover, the American population that lived on both coasts was largely unaware of the hardships that had developed throughout the central United States. The WPA was begun by President Roosevelt in 1935, to put unemployed Americans back to work on public projects, but in near-by Mexico, prints thrived where a revolution was underway. Emotional illustrations were passed out in large volume, with the hope that the economic and political struggles of this vast country, located south of the American boarder, could be seen around the world.

Will Barnett discussed his own personal engagement with these life-changing events and stated that American artists were doing their greatest work in the 1930's, which is true given the Red Scare that developed nearly 20 years later. Mexican artists such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros held strong sway over artists who wanted to join the cause for workers rights and social justice, to get the word and image out together. Barnett first worked as a printer for Jose Clemente Orozco and later became the Master Printer at the Art Students League, where he specialized in lithographs.





Although the American Abstract Expressionists took print-makers by surprise, the medium returned with a new focus on popular, consumer culture. Robert Rauschenberg, for instance, created prints that showed images of events as they occurred, an early pictorial suggestion of real-time. Andy Warhol took the print out of the realm of politics and couched it more closely to fashion and consumption. Despite this revival, however, the American print genre will most likely not possess the same degree of political muscle as it did during the early half of the 20th-century.

Arshile Gorky at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

by Eliot Markell

Gorky is one of those well known artists whose work we think we know, but this retrospective is a like finding an open diary. All sorts of intimate things are revealed. Gorky’s seductively drooping, elegantly looping curvilinear forms are his signature move, but to supplement that impression you need to get down to Ben Franklin Parkway by January 6 and re-introduce yourself to this artist’s odyssey.

His life began and ended in trauma and tragedy, in between he made art that sprung from a psyche imbued with creative instinct. The Armenian Genocide of his childhood shaped everything in his art. After the forced marches of Turkish ethnic cleansing, and then watching his mother starve to death, he emigrated to the United States and in an effort to forge a new life and identity changed his name to Arshile (Russian for Achilles) Gorky, in homage to the Russian dramatist.

Fortunately this exhibit contains plenty of drama, particularly the second part of his career. I found the early work after his arrival from Armenia in Boston MA, getting off to a slow start. Some nice, well crafted, but derivative cityscapes and abstracts that don’t hint much at whats to come. The first things that grabbed my attention were a series of works on paper and paintings called Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia based on a small De Chirico painting “Fatal Temple”. The De Chirico is included in the same room which provides a vital connection to Gorky’s inspiration. I’ve always thought of De Chirico as one of the most influential picture makers of the 20th century. Everyone from Fellini to Guston owed De Chirico a painterly debt, so it was encouraging to see some of Gorky’s seminal art emanating from Giorgio D C.

Since I view De Chirco as a painter first and a Surrealist second, I also find Gorky’s origins more about the personal than the graphically inclined imagery of Surrealism’s post World War I dogma and angst. Gorky really starts to get juicy working from a photograph of himself and his mother. Although the oil painted portraiture from this group is a bit on the stiff side, there is a small ink rendering that is as forceful as any Rembrandt pen and ink. Its here that his story becomes almost as compelling as the art you are about to witness. This small work on paper is so freighted with memory and poignancy that it’s almost like a love note, and you know that this sentiment will propel and infuse everything else Gorky touches.




One constant that I found throughout this exhibition is that Gorky’s studies on paper seem to better represent his highly skilled abilities as a draftsman, and generally provide a deeper sense of his visual poetic narrative. I say this with some remorse since I think most artists (including myself) run up against this sentiment. Thats not to say Gorky didn’t paint some highly evolved oils on canvas that contain nuanced and profound composition, just that oil paint is resistant to causal manipulation. Twentieth century artists more interested in interpretative imagery generally put aside the technically demanding requirements of polished oil painted perfection.

Even though Gorky could probably have made his paintings more classically proficient, to his credit he chose to purse a more innovative approach. By the mid 30’s Gorky was ensconced in a studio near Union Square in NYC. His prestigious neighbors included Stuart Davis and De Kooning. There is small group of portraits on paper of some of his cohorts that extol the virtues of fine lines and a steady hand. These drawings carefully carve their subjects like two dimensional busts in a way that Picasso should have envied. Gorky’s painting to this point has not been too exciting, but as he continues to delve into the wellspring of his childhood, a series of paintings called “Khorkom” (based on his Armenian hometown) begin to move into a more unencumbered realm. Color brightens and the rigidity of cubist form starts to loosen and detach from a concrete ground and gain some fluidity.



During the Depression Gorky hunkered down in Union Square while he got involved in the WPA. Although I found his surviving full sized Newark Airport murals overly blocky and heavy handed (obviously influenced by Davis, and not in a particularly good way), again his studies save the day. One small, elongated rectangular format for a mural design including a tri-engine aircraft, is so precise it seems to morph into an abstract graphite engineering blueprint for propellers. There are also a couple of small, playful gouaches that look like plans for toy planes.




In the forties Gorky begins to enter into his most energetic period. Putting aside his portraiture he launches a series of abstract paintings and gouaches based on his plein air sketches. He and his wife and two daughters relocated to the rural Virginia estate purchased by his father-in-law. Gorky had started to work from nature a few years earlier in Connecticut, but paintings such as “Garden of Suchi” based on memories of his father’s gardens in Armenia inform and infuse the work from his Virginia oeuvre. A bucolic dalliance with the birds and the bees inhabit the identity of these paintings, which finally integrate the intimate act of drawing with the broad flourishes of oil paint and gouache. Bursts of color saturate the canvas in transparent washes, fusing intricate lines that seem in a constant state of flux. Solids juxtapose the flatter planes becoming more dimensional, the fuller bodies of these pictures have become more substantially satisfying compositions to the eye. That Gorky’s mature work arose from his interaction with nature defines and sets him apart from his Abstract Expressionist brethren. I find this to be a breath of fresh air in the domain of sequestered urban studios of most other painters of that time (excluding Pollock’s studio in the Springs, but as far as I know although he painted outside, he didn’t paint from nature). Evocative titles such as “Scent of Apricots on the Fields” and “How My Mothers Apron Unfolds In My Life” populate his work from this period and reflect the fecundity seen spread out in this gallery. (Overall I like the way this show is laid out, but for some unfathomable reason the walls in the large room containing all the Virginia work have been painted with large brown swathes in a straight edged design, moving up and down the walls like a graph?!) But even as his work rose to new heights theres still lingering doubt for me surrounding the vacancies and voids that haunt his later art, especially in relation to a sense of missing figure /ground connections. Its as though a fog permeates the croma, subsuming and weakening his
resolve to work through and completely express a sensation.




However this struggle may actually increase Gorky’s aesthetic credibility, he’s not so interested in heroic results as he is in the emotional authenticity of his marks. You can tell he never pandered to critics or collectors; his work and soul is laid bare for all to see, complete with faults, foibles and failings. What a Sisyphean task his life became at the end. Rectal cancer, a younger wife grown weary of illness and depression takes up with a peer, a devastating studio fire that most likely consumed some of his best art (after losing some of my own best works on paper in a gallery fire in Maine last year, I can attest to the acute sense of loss), and then suicide.

Not only did Gorky endure until the end, but he focused his creative energies as a cathartic cure, throwing himself into the series of paintings called “The Plough and the Song”. The first canvas oozes a murky morass of sepia tints, but you can make out the vaunted Gorky passages emerging. By the time he got to the fourth and last version his mood has lifted significantly. The mise-en-scene recalls a sun drenched picnic of abstracted delight. There the good cheer ends. The last few rooms are devoted to his most fatalistic work. The series of paintings titled “Charred Beloved” are a gloomy bunch of smoky grey and black visages that seem less of an homage to the lost art, and more a funeral. Then suddenly the “Betrothal” paintings appear personifying everything Gorky strived for. Inverted lily pads drift downwards pulling our gaze along into a vivid dusk populated by unknowable entities striking classic poses like players on a stage. These epic narratives epitomize the unfettered nature of creative intuition, freeform and dreamlike, yet ironically they were closely engineered by Gorky. Some of his most striking late studies on paper employed the academic grid technique to facilitate assembling his imagery on larger scale. Yet his grids turned out to be a means to an end; they become integral to the visual integrity of his compositions on paper. Its testament to his savvy and guile as a painter that the “Betrothal” paintings seem so animated and elastic.




Of the final work “Diary of a Seducer” is truly spooky and prophetic. Spectral, ghost-like figures gracefully undulate in a softly darkened scene. Prefiguring Guston, a succinctly painted eyeball nestled on a black pillow stares out into the abyss. Finally, in 1947 “Limit”, his last painting, embraces Gorky’s ever recurring void. The black, splotchy form hovering mid-field simplifies everything. There is no doubt that this portends death, but theres no sense of urgency. The feel is of profound ambivalence, its not that he didn’t care, just that there was nothing else left to paint. Arshile Gorky 1902-1948 “I never finish a painting, I just stop working on it for awhile”

Kandinsky at the Guggenheim Museum

by Jill Conner

Several Circles (1926) oil on canvas

The tumbling art economy has led to a renewed interest in blue-chip art, with a special focus on European Modernism. Much to the surprise of New York’s contemporary art community, the Gagosian Gallery exhibited the late works of Picasso during the late Spring, once reviled as his weakest but suddenly considered to be his best. The Museum of Modern Art currently hosts an extensive show on the Bauhaus while the Guggenheim Museum features a focus on one particular member of the Bauhaus, Vassily Kandinsky. While celebrating the 50th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright’s building, “Kandinsky” stands to be the most significant retrospective since the previous one in 1984 at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. As each painting is placed chronologically along the museum’s spiral structure, this retrospective not only moves past its predecessor 25 years prior, but it also reveals the influence that Kandinsky’s work had upon the design of the building’s unique and intricate structure. However the sheer number of paintings by Kandinsky creates an entirely separate experience, one that is purely retinal, nostalgic and deeply psychological.


Vassily Kandinsky hailed from Tsarist Russia and, like many members of the general public, grew extremely jaded by the monarchy’s exclusive, singular opulence. Although he studied law, economics and statistics, Kandinsky developed an affinity for the various types of everyday décor that appeared inside private middle-class homes. None of this may seem relevant, but the artist was attracted to the ideas of intellectuals such as Vladimir Sokolov, who disdained material wealth. In other words, the commodity symbolized aristocratic values, not that of everyday society. As a result Kandinsky opened the discourse for non-objective art, a genre that attempted to conflate the spiritual with the visual. Colors, in his view, reflected various musical notes, suggesting that if one spent a significant amount of time looking at his paintings, the viewer could eventually hear a symphony play out in one’s mind.

Riding Couple (1907) oil on canvas

However Kandinsky’s ideas were as avant-garde to Western Europe as Modernism was to America in the late 1920s. After arriving in Munich in 1896, the artist studied painting with Anton Azhbe and eventually continued at the Munich Academy with Franz von Stuck, a German Symbolist who was active in Art Nouveau and founder of the Villa Stuck. Although two of Kandinsky’s early paintings from 1907 titled, “Riding Couple,” and “Colorful Life,” reflect the arrangement of colors and contrasts seen in stained-glass windows, he sought to open up the canvas further, to make painting entirely independent of an art historical past.

Impression III (Concert) (1911) oil and tempera on canvas

When “The Blaue Reiter Almanac,” was published in 1912 with fellow artist Franz Marc, Kandinsky had created a platform for the ethereal nature of colorful space even though German Expressionism held the public sway. “Impression III (Concert),” (1911) portrays a small group of figures on the left, swamped by a deluge of yellow on the right. The composition does not make sense when seen in terms of a narrative. However this piece is its title: an impression made after experiencing symphonic sound.

Landscape near Murnau with Locomotive (1909) oil on cardboard

Two years prior, a painting titled “Landscape near Murnau with Locomotive,” (1909) reflects Kandinsky’s gradual development toward color abstractions. In this instance the green of trees, hills and field blur together when not defined by a dark contrast. The white clouds, smoke and flowers also appear synonymous except for their shapes. By contrast “Little Painting with Yellow,” and “Painting with Red Spot,” (both from 1914) disband with the object entirely and capture a swarm of colors that move spontaneously throughout the picture plane.

Painting with Red Spot (1914) oil on canvas

During the same year, Kandinsky stated at a lecture in Cologne: “I did not want to banish objects completely. I have in many places spoken at length about the fact that objects, in themselves, have a particular spiritual sound.” (1) The cityscape returned in “Moscow I,” (1916) but as a non-linear, spherical scene. Soon before the start of World War I, Kandinsky was forced to flee Germany and return to Russia, where he felt even less at home. The artist’s subsequent paintings lost their bright vibrancy and became darker in tone. Times had changed and he lost a close friend, Franz Marc. Despite this setback, Kandinsky continued his investigation of color as a source of feeling.

Moscow I (1916) oil on canvas

But in the early 1920s, the artist made a return to Germany as a teacher at the Bauhaus. Stark geometric angles and sharp, straight lines characterize much of his work during this time, serving as small frames for the light hues that blur together quietly throughout the background. “Several Circles,” (1926) reached further, toward the edge of the canvas that ultimately came to frame this series of otherworldly, soft-colored circles set upon a black background.

Kandinsky’s work was introduced to American audiences in 1912 but became notable in 1913, at The Armory Show. His reputation grew and by the 1930s he received offers to teach at the Art Students League in New York as well as an artist-in-residence at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He refused both offers and never visited the United States, feeling far more comfortable in Europe despite its political upheavals.

Various Parts (1940) oil on canvas

Although Kandinsky spent the rest of his life in Paris, following a move in 1933, his ideas found no place within the artistic circles there. By lightening his colors further to light pastels and transforming the canvas into a site for oddly playful biomorphic forms, Kandinsky’s search for the absolute remained a lifelong quest. Coincidentally when Baroness Hildegard Rebay von Ehrenwiesen arrived in New York City to see how the ideas of the Non-Objective artists had been received, she was struck by the lack of its presence and found American art to be far inferior to what was being produced in Berlin: “America has no style. I am too modern for this country…In this country no cocks crow for non-objective art.” (2) Rebay soon became a colleague of Irene and Solomon R. Guggenheim. Eventually she became an advisor for their private art collection that came to reflect Non-Objectivism, a genre that has influenced generations of American artists.

1. Kandinsky (New York, NY: Guggenheim Museum, 2009) 30.
2. Ibid., 113.

7 Days in the Art World

by Eliot Markell

Hi Joel,

Thanks again for sending me the hardcover edition of Seven Days in the Art World, I think. Truly the most irritating piece of narcissistic, non-fiction I couldn't put down. Well I shouldn't say I won't put it down, just that I read it without chewing more than I had to. Starting with the "how-attractive-am-I-come-hither-you-influential-art-stud" jacket photo of Ms Thorton, with continued liberal doses of female pheromonal innuendo continuing throughout. Ah yes, it helps to be a sex siren to get ahead in an art market populated with dirty old white men.

I must admit that she can shows flashes of knowledgeable commentary, and clearly knows her way around the hierarchy of cynically corrupt art world masters of the universe. I suppose knowing that the owner of Christie's auction house controls how dealers market artists work in his collection should be of some significant consequence to the laymen, but the whole thing comes as no surprise to me. She does occasionally manage to show a modicum of restraint when it comes to praising Cesar, but goes on to dote on the glories of the pinnacles of art star power without burying anyone. It's this kind of infatuation with the moguls of Chelsea and London (before their recent downfall) that aggrandizes the idea that art only exists if someone is willing to pay for it.Guys like [Takashi] Murakami will succeed in a conspiracy to put in a retail counter to sell womens' accessories in a museum retrospective only if its profitable. Murakami may even have some ability as an artist but, that's not what really interests him,. He'd just as soon sell commodities like oil or gold if it could get him to the top of some heap. It's all about ambition and winning.

By far the most dreary chapter details the day into evening long "crit" at CalArts. A more fundamentally bullshit excuse for tenure you couldn't make up. The so-called "art teacher" [Michael] Asher, who conducts these interminably long, insufferably boring, sessions of delusional post grad mental masturbation, interrupted only by pizza breaks and loudly snoring "students" has really gotten away with one. And like all the rest of the charlatans he actually gets paid. Good work if you can get it.

The chapter on the Turner Prize is also rather depressing. That the nominated artists are so blinded by careerism that they permit themselves to be lined up for a beauty contest must really be humiliating to them in retrospect. Just the fact that they are even in the final four means they already have achieved enough of the goodies to establish themselves for life. For these artists to proceed anyway is a sad statement about how vanity has obscured, and even replaced the real value of making art because you love doing it.

Despite the best efforts by the fashionistas at the helm of the art market to convince everyone otherwise, creating art objects that contain a lasting relevance requires a dedication that transcends financial reward. This is not to say that artists shouldn't get what they deserve, but that they should establish their creative priorities as a way of life and have enough courage, resolve, and ingenuity to stick with it despite temptation.

Water - Edited by John Knechtel

by Jill Conner

Water (2009) is a forthcoming anthology from MIT Press edited by John Knechtel and consists of several essays that attempt to capture the subject of water in various conditions ranging from raw sewage to domesticated back-yard pools, while underscoring its significance as a vital component to the natural eco-system. While the first two essays by Knechtel and Timothy Stock wax romantic in an attempt to identify a very illusive subject that finds definition in its complex scientific properties, the photographs of Carolyn Turner, Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley collectively reflect both its static simplicity and historical mystique. But no matter how one approaches the subject of water, it is a paradox that cleans, pollutes and destroys; it is life-giving as well as life-taking.


The human race needs water to live, but as the population continues to increase, its viability has been thrown into question. Christie Pearson’s essay titled, “The Public Bath and the City,” for example, reveals the anthropological manner in which human kind clusters itself around this particular resource cum product due to the fact that good supplies effectively build stable communities that are set up to nurture future generations. Although water is seemingly available everywhere, it is most often not fit for consumption. Robert Kirkbride, moreover, explores the fact that neighborly communities which grow around water can end up posing as a detriment to future water supply. Kirkbride’s essay titled, “On Water and Development: A Cautionary, Microcosmic Tale for a Watershed Near You,” identifies the natural cataclysms that are set into play when man-made irrigation and plumbing systems are extended into once secluded, untouched natural environments. Despite the fact that our bodies consist primarily of water, water is a tragic force when seen in the ocean or the mountains. When it connects with clouds, through a heightened level of humidity, it changes currents and generates large waves.


Water has become a primary subject of concern for an increasing number of artists, architects, scientists, filmmakers and writers. In 2002, the architectural duo known as Diller+Scofidio built the Blur Building over Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland. As part of the Swiss National Expo, this temporary structure could only be reached after crossing a long ramp, and it consisted of a cloud of mist that was pumped upward from the lake's water. Five years later, contemporary artist Roni Horn opened the Library of Water in Iceland for the purpose of offering visitors a place where one could either view the surrounding waters or look at the various ways in which Horn has successfully turned this element into her muse. Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World was released the same year, in 2007, and documented the small civilization of scientists who live upon and study the local ice-scapes, in addition to the unique sea life that flourishes below, along the ocean's floor. In November of this year the Cynthia Reeves Gallery will be hosting H2O Film on Water which will appear soon after the release of Water.

THE BUSHWICK BIENNIAL

by David Gibson

The constant flowering of bohemia is not a construct of advertising, nor of the whims of a dozen infamous gallerists. It is the generational engine of youth culture, alive and well, striving at the border of the mainstream, throwing out its various statements while at the same time contributing to a community that has registered a similar creative echo for at least 25 years.

Bushwick is the locus of new creative energies, the same ones that are active in many other parts of Brooklyn, especially its neighboring wards of Williamsburg and Greenpoint. This year saw the emergence of its first official celebration, The Bushwick Biennial, brainchild of NURTUREart gallery director Benjamin Evans, in collaboration with Austin Thomas of Pocket Utopia, Chris Harding of English Kills, and Jill McDermid of Grace Exhibition Space. I first heard Ben utter these two words over a year ago, and since then he has worked hard to make it a reality. As the director of NURTUREart, he has seen first-hand what sort of influence the art community as a whole can exert when given proper focus within the scheme of the larger art world.

Certainly the word ‘Williamsburg’ echoes out into the international art world, and so should its generative offspring. Just as Soho created the possibilities for Tribeca and Noho, Williamsburg has spread into the outlying areas of Greenpoint and Bushwick, and further, all along the corridors of the L train and the B61 Bus, and into the minds of New Yorkers, Americans, and people around the world.

Each of the three galleries I visited that weekend had a different focus of interest. The show Fortress to Solitude (an event that was actually part of the yearly organized Bushwick Open Studios, overlapping this year with the Biennial), curated in an independent studio space by Guillermo Creus and hosted by Brooklyn Fireproof landlord Burr Dodd, featured the work of some 22 artists, many of them working out the formal strategies of abstraction, some figurative, and some with text and a combination of elements. Paintings by Amanda Church, Peter Fox, Lisha Bai, and Anna Pedersen presented drippy phantasms that were either visceral, limpid, or gossamer. Other abstract works were more structurally based, combining radically different mediums such as oil and spray paint (Guillermo Creus, Baptiste Ibar), making naturalistic allusions (Diane Carr), and stretching into hard edge materialism (Tom Meacham, Gary Petersen). Another work by Peter Fox is a pale light blue canvas with two words painted in bold red letters, spelling out the expression ‘Idiot proof’, which is to say, anyone can get my art, and anyone could have made it. One very iconic portrait of President Obama by Tom Sanford is overlaid with the words What You Believe Is Already True emblazoned over a half quizzical facial expression of our fearless leader; is this just sloganeering, is the artist poking fun at authority, or is this just a painting about painting? Perhaps we will never know. The title of this exhibition, a play on words originally describing the re-birthed spiritual home of the comic book legend Superman, is a telling narrative about the nature of creativity and how it is specifically vested in areas such as Bushwick. The overwhelming presence of abstraction in the exhibition can be characterized not only as the aesthetic bent of its curator (a painter him self), but also as a statement on the manic focus of Bushwick artists, whose concern is with forms of expression, and though they are a fairly idealistic bunch, such values do not always lead them down the primrose path of ideology. They remain committed to the formalism which inspires them. Hung randomly with a lot of white space between them, we get the effect that spatial concerns still matter in the Bushwick of 2009 as they did in the Soho of 1969, and that giving artists room to think, and showing their work as existing within a systematic but disinterested locality is the best thing for them.

Finally Utopic is not just a pun, it’s the last show in the space that was once the studio of its director, the conceptual artist Austin Thomas, and features work by all the artists she has championed since her project began only two years ago. It has always existed as a sort of playground for artistic intentions, not taking itself too seriously, looking at art as if it were a form of conversation rather than a political slogan or commercial advertisement. Molly Larkey, who is usually a sculptor, here presents gestural rather slapdash gouaches that intimate the beginnings of an idea that may later take physical form; Valerie Hegarty cracks the plaster of the wall before pasting a poster over the hole, that will ultimately rip the image along its ragged edge; Rico Gatson installs Systemic Risk Funky Revolutionthat is one part tautology and one part puzzle. The air overall is one of tentativeness, as if no one statement should predominate and none will last beyond the end of the space itself.

A strong tenor of idealism was evident in works at NURTUREart, curated by Benjamin Evans, though this motif was not always comprehensible in the same way; the works here were by and large non-abstract, or at least not within the limits of a formalist bent. His own curatorial statement states that “These fourteen artists in- volve both optimism and melancholy, and reflect the tensions between doomed worlds, better places and personal mythologies. Themes of transformation and strategies of transformative experience run through the work and link it to the neighborhood that is transforming all around (and partly because of) them. Mike Estabrook’s video loop The Road to 'Nam is both entertaining and pensive, as it combines images of brutality in war and the dour countenances of Kissinger and Nixon with a Bob Hope and Bing Crosby song "If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Of Baked A Cake." We recognize the images from the front page of The New York Times, of a US Okie aiming his gun at a Viet Cong, with politicians thrown in for good visual sense; but the whole arrangement falls apart with the song resounding. It’s so cheery and chummy that war can almost be seen as a big party in which we laugh until we have to cry. Audrey Russel made a special installation on the adjoining rooftop that created a visual and physical spectacle which gallery guests had to step around as they talked, drank, and shared their experiences of the past evening’s activities. Made from pink foam insulation, a large wooden pylon and Xmas lights, Beam Tower with Pink Grass waved around the roof like the froth of an ever renewing tide.

There is something very energizing about always living on the edge, engaging with what seems newly relevant. The Bushwick phenomenon has us looking for the next aesthetic event around every corner.

Don Voisine at McKenzie Fine Art

by Jill Conner

Don Voisine’s show of new work at McKenzie Gallery, that opened in April and closed in June, continued the artist’s exploration of empty space, intersection and movement upon square, wood surfaces. Echoing the mid-century design phenomenon that upheld the fabrication of reductive geometric designs, these paintings focus on specific combinations of color. Black and white typically appear in the center as brighter hues provide a visual framework around the edge of each piece.

Thru and Thru (2009) captures a thick black line, juxtaposed to itself in the center of the picture plane, creating the representation of line that moves gradually in opposite directions on both sides of the piece. The red and thin yellow strips of color further reveal that each component of Voisine’s work is equal in measurement. Moving point by point into the realm of flat space, the artist’s overall construction of a painted blank surface is peculiar due to the fact that the titles given to each work create a demand for narrative.

Parisian Heiress (2008) for instance, features two thick black lines that intersect within the center of the wood panel. Both strokes reveal two different types of black paint that layers rather than bleeds. Gloss finish clashes with that of matte suggesting the proliferation of pictorial depth. Although the figure is absent from this work, the lines appear to move back and forth within the frame suggesting bodily movement.

Ding (2008) moves further and plays with the different textures within each medium. In this instance the tilted square lying in between the black and white ones give the impression of a round shape that attempts to roll within the static pink frame. A similar concept surfaces in Sidekick (2008) which consists of two halves that are inverted against each other, creating a sense of staggered movement.

By denying narrative, Voisine’s paintings leave one suspended within moments of contemplative stasis, between our own fantasies and the otherwise vacant character of reality. The artist does not try to mislead the viewer with too many illusionistic embellishments, but instead uses a series of juxtaposing small angles that force a second look. The use of pure geometry accompanies crisp, clean forms that lead the eye toward more space rather than less.