Happy New Year!

As 2013 closes, we would like to thank you for reading and supporting our blog. We couldn’t help but reflect back on what an incredible year of incredible artists we had and re-read some great interviews. As we look ahead at 2014, we plan to continue our efforts to bring you even more studio visits and showcase even more great work.

Cheers,
Jonathan & Lorraine

Studio Visits from the past year
Michael Aitken
James Payne
Sarah Sieradzki
Bradford Kessler
Christopher K. Ho
Trudy Benson
Ben Wolf Noam
Korakrit Arunanondchai
Sean Fitzgerald and Alex Da Corte
Cynthia Talmadge
Picture Menu
Michael Assiff
Jules de Balincourt

1. Artists Talk: Brian Chippendale

2.Mike Kelley: Art21

Don’t forget to check out the expansive retrospective of Mike Kelley’s work at PS1 up until February 2014

3. Gerhard Richter in the studio

4. Mickalene Thomas Studio Visit

5. PHILIP GUSTON: A Life Lived

http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/art/reviews/n_9444/

6. Interview with Helen Frankenthaler

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/22/arts/design/helen-frankenthaler-at-the-gagosian-gallery.html?pagewanted=all

7. Art Talk: Daniel Richter

8.Art Talk: Gregory Crewdson

9. Artists Talk with Alia Shawkat and Lance Bangs – Marcel Dzama – MOCAtv

10.Art Talk: Gregory Crewdson

We arrived in front of Jules de Balincourt‘s studio, a 2-story building formerly the site of Starr Space in the heart of Bushwick. The studio expands the entire first floor of the building and is a large open space with lots of natural light streaming in from the skylight above. There’s a wooden stage built into the floor at the end of the room, a souvenir from Starr Space’s past performances.

Our first reaction was one of awe as we saw his new body of work, hung together in a salon style, giving it a different context than if hung in the white walls of a gallery space. The paintings stacked one atop another, gave us a glimpse of his process of painting effortlessly upon multiple paintings and moving in between each without hesitation. While we were taking everything in, de Balincourt was casually riding his skateboard and was perfectly at ease in his studio. We talked to Jules de Balincourt about his new body of work and about looking back and looking forward.

Jules de Balincourt’s first UK solo show, Itinerant Ones is on view starting today to December 20th at Victoria Miro Gallery. His work will also be exhibited at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts from November 28th to March 23rd. For more of de Balincourt’s work, take a look at his latest book by the same name, published by Rizzoli Publications.

Image courtesy of the artist

Image courtesy of the artist

F: Your paintings are very multi-layered. How do you go about starting a painting? Do you start with an image in mind or do you start with a specific concept or is it more of an intuitive process?

JDB: Even though the images look really thought out and composed, most of the time, these pieces come from a purely intuitive place, a place where in the initial steps of making an image, there is no regard to space, place or regard to capturing something real. At first, it is a more primitive dance of sorts which eventually leaves chaos behind or something to respond to and react with.

F: Your work seems to be as much about drawing as it is about painting. There are a lot of steps that go into your paintings. Figures and objects come in and out of existence through the act of drawing, cutting, masking, painting and re-working each layer of the surface. How do you approach building up these images?

JDB: Usually I am working on ten pieces at once and bouncing around from one to another depending on my mood and which piece I am most compelled to work with. There are days when the tool of the trade is a big six inch wide brush with a bucket of washed out oil paint and loud music, other days or minutes later, a super fine three haired brush and the sound of silence.

F: Some of your paintings have become progressively lighter with more luminous washes like in Firepeople and Visionquest which consequently makes it easier to see the logic behind the way you construct each painting. Can you talk about this approach to painting versus your more labored intricate paintings such as in High and Low or in Itinerant Ones?

JDB: I think for a while using taping and masking became a bit of a crutch. So working on this show, I wanted to be more direct with making the work which meant not taping and masking as much and waiting days or weeks for paint to dry, since with the masking there is a tendency for paint to be thicker or that was the effect I was going for. In those two paintings you mentioned, instead of dragging it out for weeks by taping, I was able to work on them continuously every day and keeping my engagement with it fresh and painting directly more with the translucence of the paint and doing big washes compared to the denser more massive taped gesture. One is free and fluid and the other tight and dense…

F: In your new show, Itinerant Ones at Victoria Miro, the painting of Alex is scaled up to encompass the whole surface while in the figure on the beach paintings, the scale shifts so that the landscape takes up most of the space and the figures play a lesser role. What is the idea behind this dramatic change in scale?

JDB: In the last year I have slowly integrated large scale life size or larger then life figures. As a “figure” painter, it was something I was always fearful of or simply negated. I suppose “Alex” is different than most paintings in the sense that most people or places in my paintings are purely fictional and made up and Alex exists and happens to be a close friend. It seems most of my work always takes on this distant observational gaze and in this case, I wanted to get closer to the subject in a more intimate, not in the obvious sense of her being naked, but intimate in the sense that she is really looking at you and is larger then life, a life force that she is and am simply glorifying.

F: This new body of work steers away from some of the last show’s more charged subject matter. This world that your paintings live in is very serene. In this hazy ‘world’, the micro communities of indescript people are performing unidentifiable activities. The painting seems to be based on memories and looking back.

JDB: Essentially, I am trying not to look back. I’m looking now, living now and somehow transmitting that experience into some sort of visual language.

F: Many of your paintings have contained or isolated groups of people away from society. These paintings are reminiscent of the values of nature and the American westward expansion.

JDB: My first show at Zach Feuer in 2003 was called “Land of Many Uses,” a slogan for all California national parks…So yes, I guess I am going back to my roots or looking back…Or after years of doing this, you realize certain things really matter to you and a lot of the rest is BS.

F: One painting that stands apart from the others is the Flower to the People painting. What does the role of the painting play within the rest of the body of work?

JDB: I always think of the burst or the flower paintings as the decimator or information of the show or the Big Bang or orgasm of show which is the life and death of the show.

F: Switching gears, since this is a blog about studios, what do you look for in a space and what is a typical day in studio like?

JDB: You mean like what do I like in a space? Nice light, no clutter, white walls, a clean palette and brushes waiting to be tarnished. A typical day in studio…luckily there never is one, is one day working on the roof garden and on other days, painting fluorescent monochromatic paintings with a backdrop of my euro cousins dancing around manically in the studio…

Jules de Balincourt’s first UK solo show, Itinerant Ones is on view starting today through December 20th at Victoria Miro Gallery in 16 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW.

Jules de Balincourt, the exhibition will be on view from November 28th to March 23rd at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1380 Rue Sherbrooke Ouest Montréal, QC H3G 1J5‎.

You can see more of Jules de Balincourt’s work at www.julesdebalincourt.com

We met with Michael Assiff to talk about Bali Ha’i, his current solo show now up at the Culture Room. Green monochrome paintings fill the room alongside small prop items which seem casually placed within the space. Four large paintings face each other while a series of extinct animal pattern paintings are hung stacked vertically on the third wall. Found in the corners of the room are five mangos with various labels marked Bali Ha’i, a Monster Energy drink can, a pair of green plastic shoes, and a New Yorker type cartoon that hint at the dialogue between the paintings and the objects.

The slash marks found predominantly in his pieces are directly inspired by the logo of a Monster Energy Drink he found in the jungle of Costa Rica. Within the gallery space, a physical Monster drink can is “littered” in the corner beside the heat furnace, working as a literal reminder of his inspiration. Assiff’s larger pieces are influenced by the jungles of Costa Rica and the perfectly manicured lawn of Bali Ha’i, a Vegas golf course and resort of which the show is titled after. His work plays with the contrasts between the natural plant imagery found in his paintings and the green plastic synthetic coating he uses to cover the surface.

Bali Ha’i is on view until November 10th at the Culture Room which is located at 163 Starr Street #4L in Bushwick, NY. Open only by appointment.

F: At first glance the paintings appear as though they are simply poured on and the image is being organically created. Only upon closer inspection, you realize that the organic pouring is a ruse. The relief is carefully and meticulously rendered by hand using the plastic material. Can you talk about your process and the organic read of the image versus its calculated creation? Also, the decision to depict the natural world in a green plastic manufactured looking surface is an interesting choice. Can you talk a little bit about that?

MA: I will admit I have, which I think is pretty common, both a wonderment and a deep repulsion to plastic. In practice I try my best to avoid touching it, eating out of it, strapping it to my body. But I felt in order to talk about environmentalism in painting, I had to create a type of thing that could contend with the type of objects that are being produced by the systems that are so engaged with environmental exploitation – petroleum and plastics. So the short of it is that I seek to make a mass-produced continuous plastic surface that not only depicts but embodies the layered reality of manufacturing, land-use and nature.

But yeah, I am still a “painter” and I will continue to have these humble means of production that I use to interrogate this large scale subject matter. I think it is important that I am harnessing this “made in china” language while standing in my studio in Brooklyn. I guess I’m interested in what happens when you find out this mass produced looking object is one of a kind. Like the way paintings are historically supposed to be one of a kind. What if we all drove one of a kind cars? Texted with bespoke cell phones. But I should say friends should be relieved to know that the materials I landed on are non-toxic and I’m hopefully not gonna die like those 70s West Coast resin painters.

F: Earlier, you mentioned that you were influenced by your recent trip to Costa Rica, can you talk a little bit about that and how you landed on the Monster logo imagery in your work?

MA: I stayed in Costa Rica with some friends that run a yoga / surf retreat called the Yoga Farm. It is stuck right where rainforest meets the sea in a microscopic town that is close to the Panama border. I had brought watercolors and pencils and my smart phone which has a camera in it. But I felt these were extremely reductive ways for me to engage with the rainforest. I instead spent days walking the beach collecting sea plastic.

What fascinated me was that Monster Energy Drink, or the logo rather, is really popular in among the Ticos – that the local people are making their own Monster logos and sewing them to their clothes, painting it onto their ATVs.

There is something loaded about the violence of the three slashes, about the green glow. Its like on one hand its some dark forest beast spirit, yet on the other hand its this western agro kind of thing. When I was there I had a lot of conversations about deforestation. I mean its naked to see, these pastures, these clear cut cow pastures with these sick skinny cows. Apparently no one has a clear idea about why the cattle are not thriving down there. But the monster slashes became this metaphor for slash and burn, clear cutting.

F: Your work is very monochromatic and neutral except for this particular shade of green. It’s very prominent in your work. How did you land on this color?

MA: I looked for a ubiquitous shade of green that would not draw attention to any particular variation of its warmness or coolness. I wanted a green that is closer to a noun than an adjective. I guess I write about the green being an average of garden hose, john deere tractor and MTA green. Also USDA certified organic green. These things were all in my mind when I was mixing this green, but in the end I sort of just cleared my head and did kundelini yoga and drank green tea and then it came to me.

Also just to say out loud “I make green plastic paintings” creates a sort of linguistic content that speaks to the content of my work – you know, its about the way the word “green” is used these days.

F: The negative space left through the absences of the green paint is reminiscent of a topographical map of lakes. What role does the idea of maps play with your paintings?

MA: So I started with the big Henri Rousseau paintings. I was copying Rousseau’s landscapes pretty faithfully except for the animals and people. Where these creatures appeared I would leave blank allowing the canvas underneath to show. The paintings began to appear as land masses with these subtractions being bodies of water. In the new paintings these absences are planned using golf course maps to determine the negative space. The blank spaces being the fairways. To me, this kind of land use is highly aestheticized deforestation. I am embarrassed how intrigued I’ve become with golf course design. Its really beautiful the kind of shapes that are used.

F: The way the extinction pattern paintings are stretched, enveloping the surface and bunching up in the corners, draws attention to the plasticized material and I see them more so as objects than paintings. The addition of the repetitive animal patterns and prominent slash symbol start to draw ideas of textiles, logos and branding. Can you describe your feelings of these paintings as objects?

MA: The extinction pattern paintings definitely take heavy cues from designer handbags. I was looking at this green S/S 2013 Louis Vuitton handbag as inspiration. I went to Macys to hold a LV bag in person. I had never handled one before, and I was worried these paintings I was making weren’t luxurious enough. I was actually a little surprised on how the bags feel. They are much cheaper feeling then I thought they’d be. I also found out from the salesperson that the bag online that I’d been referencing was a knock-off and that LV didn’t actually produce bags in the brilliant green color.

The pattern paintings are actually very top heavy conceptually. Each painting’s pattern motif is from a species of animal that went extinct in the the year of the painting. The year of the painting is indicated by the number of monster slashes. The shade of color and the title beginning in A/W or S/S refers to the time of year the species was believed to have perished.

F: Most of the work in the show takes the pretty traditional form of a painting on canvas. The addition of the mangos with the ‘slash’ logo labels, the Monster can, the commissioned New Yorker cartoon, and the green plastic coated shoes work as physical objects hinting at your sources of inspiration. What was your approach to setting up the show and choosing these specific pieces and objects?

MA: I think that as a painter working with such a specific vocabulary that I have the responsibility to provide clues to the audience. Yet I am completely aware that there is no way at the audience arriving at the same meaning that I had in mind. Also, it is important for me to have “the work” live along side non-art objects as well as objects created by other artists. I’m just a bit wary of the solipsism of one isolated vision. I hope populating the gallery with other kinds of objects may force something I can’t completely control into the conversation.

But to be more specific about the mangoes, they have altered produce stickers that refer to this fictive island that the Bali Ha’i golf course painting also refers to. That is about the fiction we imagine about the country of origin when we buy produce.

I hung a New Yorker cartoon that I had my friend Clay Schiff draw with the Monster in jail counting the days by scratching into the jail cell wall. The idea was that it would, in very illustrative terms, describe my appropriation of the Monster slash as tally mark, counting down to extinction!

Courtesy of the artist

F: What are you currently working on? Are there any future projects in store?

MA: Yeah, I’m starting work on this show at Good Weather. I am thinking about portraiture, the psyche, stress balls, clocks, anxiety, etc. The show is opening on Valentine’s Day so it has to have some romance. Whether that’s the romance of anxiety or alienation or whatever. I’ve had really intense protocols on how to make art about landscape and animals with plastic. I want to find out what language I can use to represent people and time. I don’t know, it could all change but that’s where I’m at now.

I’m also working on a two person show with Sterling Wells. We have some shared interests in nature and landscape and plastic. The show revolves around this historical site in our shared home town of St. Petersburg. This site has all of these indigenous peoples’ mounds and is said to be the place Panfilo de Narvaez landed in the 1500s to colonize Florida.

Bali Ha’i is on view until November 10th at the Culture Room
You can see more of Michael Assiff’s work at www.michaelassiff.info.

Michael Raedecker “Tour” @ Andrea Rosen Gallery
Sep. 7th – Oct. 5th
544 West 24th St, New York

“The Decline and Fall of the Art World, Part II: The Other 99%” featuring Damien Crisp, Cristina de Miguel, Noah Lyon, and Laurina Paperina @ Freight + Volume
Opening: Sep. 12, 6 PM – 9 PM
Sep. 12th – Oct. 12th
530 W 24th St, New York

David Ellis “Hudson River Alley” @ Joshua Liner Gallery
Opening: Sep. 12, 6 PM – 8 PM
Sep. 12th – Oct. 19th
540 West 28th Street, New York

Angel Otero “Gates of Horn and Ivory” @ Lehmann Maupin
Opening: Sep. 12, 6 PM – 8 PM
Sep. 12th – Nov. 2nd
540 W 26th Street, New York

Josh Smith @ Luhring Augustine
Sep. 13th – Oct 19th
531 West 24th St, New York

Anne Truitt “Threshold: Work from the 1970s” @ Matthew Marks Gallery
Opening: Sep. 12, 6 PM – 8 PM
Sep. 13th – Oct. 26th
522 W 22 Street

Jon Rafman “You are standing in an open field” @ Zach Feuer
Opening: Sep. 12, 6 PM – 8 PM
Sep. 12th – Oct. 26th
548 West 22nd Street, New York

View Chelsea Gallery Guide in a larger map

Fittingly, we communicated with the the curators via email about the challenges of the show and constant reexamination of the relationships between the works.

‘Elastic de Facto’ is on view at Carter & Citizen until August 17th. However, the images can be viewed on Picture Menu’s website at any time.

F: How did the idea for the show come about?

PM: Elastic de facto developed from conversations between the three of us about how to approach the inherent problems associated with any attempt at articulation through the configuration or organization of artworks. These discussions began to broach themes of fluidity between documentation and art space, the cache and compilation of images and texts online, the question of whether the primary site of a show is physical or web-based, and the question of how time and a kind of “second guessing” or attention to second, third, fourth, thoughts might elucidate artworks.

F: The documentation of the the work seems to be as important as the changes within the work. It acts as another level of curation. Can more than one work be manufactured with the same object through placement/documentation?

PM: Presentation and documentation were always crucial to our previous Picture Menu projects and were heavily considered, but the shows up to this point were all either one-person or two-person shows that focused more on the individual artist’s objectives or possible connections between the two, and were mostly only open for one night. This project at Carter & Citizen was not bound by the same brevity and we saw it as an opportunity to continue to consider the relationship of presentation and documentation more carefully and closely, along with exploring some different questions.

PM: We also knew that not all three of us would be able to spend the entire month outside of New York, and the difference in location became a topic of conversation. Eventually, this led us to fully and openly negotiate how the documentation of the show could become an even more important and active element. The fact that the physical location was decidedly more concrete yet our relationship as a group to this place was more temporal became a defining element of the exhibition and our means to staging it.

PM: The show is a performative approach to curating, or a curatorial approach to performance. The act of documenting is part of the performance, in which the amount of mediation and assumptions behind presentation become blurred, along with the typical separation between images of the show and images in the show. Documentation of the work, at times, becomes the work itself.

F: Are you just as invested in how the space changes online as well as in the physical space?

PM: All three of us democratically set up the initial iteration of the show for the opening; but as you know, the plan from the outset was for Rachel to stay in Los Angeles throughout the duration of the show. Therefore, she is choreographing the show on-site and Michael and Keith are making observations, suggestions, and writing other, more poetic, responsive texts. Rachel is then posting excerpts of these texts online, often after editing and splicing them together in surprising ways that sometimes counter their original meaning. The correspondence is integral to the development and progress of the exhibition and the three of us are all simultaneously experiencing it as participants and observers, which is quite exciting to us.

F: Is viewing it online on par with viewing the work in the physical space?

PM: We are all three artists, acting as curators in this instance; the question of separating these two roles is central to the exhibition. Additionally, we each recognize a current divisiveness between certain camps’ adherence to the exhibition space or allegiance to digital representation. We find such hard lines drawn to be problematic distractions and instead seek to conflate and contradict the two in order to try to focus on the relationships between artist, artwork, and art viewer.

PM: Having said that, when selecting the works we did, we wanted to have a diverse grouping of artists and artworks to cull from and recycle in order to mold the show, while complicating the framework and challenging ourselves and our viewers. Since we purposely set out to not have a direct, didactic theme, but rather one that was more malleable (hence the title), this allowed us (as well as the artists) to have some freedom and fun. What is originally embedded in any given work will likely always remain to some degree, but the way in which it was perceived on opening night hopefully can and will be open to new interpretations on day 4, 7, 12, or 18.

F: There’s a great deal of humor in each of the works from Brad Troemel’s vacuum sealed bitcon with the book The Violence of Financial Capitalism to Benjamin Bellas’ Filming a TV being shown on a TV. Can you talk a little about the connection with each of the works in relationship with one another?

PM: For example, in Brad Troemel’s TSA No Fly List series, by vacuum sealing recent leftist writings published by Semiotext(e) together with physical bitcoins, he is dealing with communication (or the lack thereof), the subversion of subversive acts, and the balancing of obscure rhetoric with an even more obscure subculture. This piece is related to Benjamin Bellas’ video where he knowingly tapes over his only copy of his wedding tape with the episode of Everybody Loves Raymond where Raymond tapes over his only copy of his wedding tape with a New York Jets football game. Benjamin then staged a “living room” set-up and filmed the entirety of the new mash-up work being viewed on a mini TV/VCR combo in HD and we displayed this hybrid video on a flat screen. The deliberate nature of both of these acts combined with the self-awareness to balance autonomy and complicity is not only humorous and perplexing, but very slippery. We felt this initial sort of relationship lucidly illustrated what we are after with this project.

PM: There is also an acute sympathy between Vlad Smolkin’s work and Victoria Fu’s. Vlad’s intensely elaborate investigation of an abandoned private pool near his family’s home is an unexpectedly hopeful work. There is a sublime quality and absurdist humor to the unfurling details within his binder of images he took of the pool’s grounds; these are complemented by other mysteriously sourced images, as well as each of the repurposed physical objects he procured from his trips. The slow revelations that come from spending time with his works parallel those that come from watching Victoria’s video of a dancer attempting to create a visual palindrome through planned choreography and reverse footage. This trancelike work is emblematic of the show’s premise; it is symbolic in that the three of us are planning, choreographing,responding, and retracing our steps throughout this show.

All photos courtesy of Picture Menu.

F: I think a key line in one of your emails is “Viewers and Rachel are subjects, players.” How do you define each of your roles in this project?

PM: What we are pointing at in this show is an exposed process wherein curation is made vulnerable to time, change, and distance. Meanings accrue between objects and images as they are displaced. The idea of curatorial “vision” becomes deflated as new iterations pile up, and the notion of physically locating the show becomes irrelevant as our prose breaks apart in both misunderstanding and deliberate rearrangement.

Elastic de facto is up until August 17 at Carter & Citizen, 2648 La Cienega Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90034. You can see more of Picture Menu’s process at www.picturemenu.org.

When Cynthia Talmadge is not painting, she’s translating her concepts into full scale sets or designing clothes. In the heart of Dumbo where her studio is located, we talked about navigating through her different modes of working from sand paintings to building a fake rehab center room. Her work was featured at Petrella’s Imports and her collaboration with Kevin Zucker was recently featured in ‘Being Paul Schrader’ at Monya Rowe Gallery.

CT: I’ve been making paintings entirely out of colored sand. The one I’m working on now is probably called Divorced and Selling the Beach House. The sand paintings are all still lifes, but I want them to look as much like prop tables for the sets of seedy movies as art historical still life setups. The collections of things are always over the top, full of theatrical angst or sentimental to the point of ridiculousness- bathos- but maybe, hopefully, they take the melodrama so far that it comes around again to the viewer feeling genuine empathy with whoever’s stuff is being depicted. So this painting has a bay window looking out over moonlight on the water, framed by curtains; the centerpiece is a ship in a bottle but there’s a recently sawed-off shotgun, an open but empty safe, kleenex, a subpoena, and so on.

F: And the color is coming from the sand?

CT: Yes. I dye the sand to get specific colors or mix different proportions of already colored sand; I have this process where I use adhesives and a vinyl cutter to make them from Illustrator drawings. The process is more mediated, but to me it seems like a natural progression from the pointillist paintings I was making before.

F: Why are you interested in sand as a material?

CT: While I’m making these sad sand paintings I’m also building this set in my studio for a series of four photographs- one for each season- of heavily styled rooms at different fancy rehabs. I’m approaching it sort of like a photo editorial from an upscale interior design magazine targeted to the addicted or mentally ill; sourcing fabrics, picking paint swatches, self-help books, and objets d’art therapy. I think it’s dark and funny the way these facilities have class connotations and are seen as status symbols- aspects of a lifestyle, to be chosen the same way one might pick a handbag or a couch. US News could do a companion issue to their college rankings. So I made that literal: “Sierra Tucson is the can’t-miss destination for Summer ’14″; “Hazelden for the Holidays.”

F: After you build each “set,” you go on to shoot it as a design product, a space where someone would eventually stay?

CT: Yeah. It might even be perversely aspirational on my part: I don’t have health insurance, but if I did I might want to spend 28-32 days at Promises Malibu. Of course there’s the whole history of romantic or sentimental views on or from these sorts of institutions- Ciao Manhattan, Joan Didion, on and on- and I’m trying to address how seductive those aesthetics are, indulging them while keeping a sense of humor (dark, I guess) about it.

“We don’t Have to Save Her, We Just Have to Get Her Through Three Weeks in July, 2013″ Collaboration between Cynthia Talmadge and Kevin Zucker. Courtesy of the artist.

F: [The institutions] have this unique problem where they’re selling it to someone that is not necessarily going to buy it. They’re selling to the [psychiatrist or] parents of the person that’s going there.

CT: If you go to their websites, the marketing is sort of half-lifestyle, half mental-health. I’m not particularly critical of the programs’ approaches- they’ve helped tons of people- but the aesthetics are really confused. I’ve been around a certain amount of this stuff in my life, and the disconnect between the package that’s presented and the personal experiences is extreme. Never mind the literary or movie translations or the way Promises in Malibu is presented on TMZ or whatever, where it’s just one part of a whole package you’re supposed to desire. That tension between internal experience and the way it’s represented publicly is interesting to me, as is the sense of fraudulence when lived experience does align with the cliche. I’m working on another series of sculptures- four of them, called, respectively, “Actresses Crying in Real Life,” “Actresses Crying on Cue,” “Actresses Crying on Cue in Real Life,” and “Actresses Crying for Real on Cue”; It’s kind of like that.

The Rain Room @ Museum of Modern Art
May 12–July 28

Everyday, 10:30am-5:30pm
West 54 Street, between Fifth & Sixth Ave

PUNK: Chaos to Couture @Metropolitan Museum of Art
May 9-August 14

Everyday
Sunday–Thursday: 10am–5:30pm
Friday and Saturday: 10am–9pm

Hopper Drawing @ Whitney
May 23–Oct 6

Wed-Sun 11am-6pm
Fri 1pm-9pm

The Bruce High Quality Foundation: Ode to Joy, 2001–2013 @ Brooklyn Museum
June 28–Sept 22

Wed, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.
Thurs, 11 a.m.–10 p.m.
Fri–Sun, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

James Turrell @ Guggenheim Museum
June 21–Sept 25

Sun-Wed, 10 am–5:45 pm
Thurs, CLOSED
Fri, 10 am–5:45 pm
Sat, 10 am–7:45 pm

Erika Vogt: Stranger Debris Roll Roll Roll @New Museum
June 5-Sept 22

Wed, 11 am–6 pm
Thurs, 11 am–9 pm
Fri–Sun, 11 am–6 pm

On the 4th of July, we headed to FJORD Gallery in Philadelphia, PA for an early look at their latest show, ‘Body Without Organs.’ ‘Body Without Organs’ is an installation showcasing the material-based paintings of Sean Robert Fitzgerald alongside the playful unconventional sculptural work of Alex Da Corte. Together, the work is playful but the colors and materials combined create an eerie dream-like environment. We were able to talk with Sean and get his insight on working collaboratively on the show while simultaneously running a gallery space and curating shows. After our interview, we wondered around upstairs to the studio spaces where Sean’s own studio is located.

Fjord Gallery is the creation of Philadelphia-based artists, Lindsay Chandler, Liam Holding, AJ Rombach and Sean Robert Fitzgerald along with Natessa Amin, Cameron Masters, and Justine Jividen. The 3-story building holds a gallery on the ground floor with studio spaces on the 2nd and 3rd floors. ‘Bodies Without Organs’ is FJORD’s 13th show in the gallery’s 1.5 year history and is on view from July 5-28th.

Courtesy of FJORD Gallery

SF: The show is a collaborative work in progress between Alex and I, who met about a year ago and really hit it off in an artistic way. We quickly found that there were a lot of weird parallels between our work that we never even expected because we both work in very different ways and with very different subject matters. We collaborated earlier this year on a project for Title Magazine called ‘A Love Sonnet for Jack Smith’, which was a lot of fun. We made these short little animated GIF’s that were structured as a sonnet and inspired by imagery culled from some of Jack Smith’s films. We’ve had the idea brewing for this show for a while now, where Alex would basically make these props for my paintings. And by doing so, the paintings themselves are inevitably changed through the very act of collaborating. I came over to his studio and brought 15 or so paintings and told him he could choose whichever ones he wanted. We’ve been throwing these ideas back and forth for a couple of months and here it is!

F: How did you and Alex work together to create the final pieces? Did you re-work the paintings after or did you give Alex complete freedom to do what he wanted with your paintings?

SF: Some of them were more like – “You can do whatever you want,” whereas some of them were much more collaborative. Or sometimes I’d provide him with a loose sort of guideline for how I wanted the piece to be displayed. For example with this piece, the only real requirement I had was that both sides of the paintings had to be visible because a lot of the times, I re-work paintings by flipping the canvas around and re-stretching it. This one, I really liked from both sides. But, for example, the trapdoor piece In the other room we built together and it came about in this really almost unspoken organic way when Alex and I were hanging out in his studio one day. The show is very much about theatricality and parlor tricks so we thought how perfect to stick this little painting in this trap door hovering over this piece of black velvet.

Courtesy of FJORD Gallery

F: It has that cartoon humor, but in this super physical, textural and constructed way. It has this weird mix.

SF: That’s something that I found really interesting when working with sculpture and collaboratively with Alex. As soon as you turn something with this cartoony aspect into something physical it becomes really uncanny and strange. Have you ever seen when they turn things we know as cartoons into real life? It becomes really disturbing. Everything about it feels just wrong and I love it.

F: How do you feel about your canvases and these paintings that are very formal? You can look at them as image driven pieces but the way you are presenting them completely negates that.

SF: I actually really like that. Any opportunity in which an artist gets to see their work in a new context is automatically helpful. Even if you don’t like how you’re seeing it, it helps you think about it in a different way. I like how my paintings become objects in a very different way than if they were stuck on the wall. They have a completely different physicality in the space as part of a sculpture.

F: Was there one particular piece that you see totally different now?

SF: Yeah, this one over here is really cool. So going back to the idea of trickery or theatricality and parlor tricks, this one, I now see completely differently. First of all, the yellow wall completely sucks out this actually bright cadmium yellow and makes [the painting] into this poopy green. So that totally changed and the fact that this painting was re-streched over another support. The whole thing is really disturbing in that magic-trick or cartoon way because it looks like it’s floating when actually, if you look closely, the entire piece is supported against the the wall by this crystal heart at the top. It’s nice to give the viewer these extra little nuggets of detail that they can notice should they want to really engage with the piece in a more than superficial way.

F: The illusion is broken by having the heart there. It’s a smack in the viewers face which is great. How did you determine what the color of the wall should be? Did you create the pieces and then choose a color from
the objects?

SF: The wall colors came from a couple of different things. In certain aspects, the choices for the wall colors were formal, but they also help to relate the pieces back to each other and form this sort of narrative throughout the show. Also, this Grace Jones album cover was a big inspiration for a lot of it which really just clicked as soon as Alex showed it to me and then everything came full circle and made total sense.

Courtesy of FJORD Gallery

F: Yeah For sure! This is exactly like the promotional image with the figure in black tights.

SF: Absolutely, which goes back to the Grace Jones cover, which goes back to this figure sculpture, which goes back to the title, which goes back to the ‘body without organs’ idea and the act of collaboration. It’s all a big circle.

F: There’s also this domesticity about the objects as well. I feel that this is a strange out of place apartment that I’ve walked into. The space feels like an apartment. Was it ever one?

SF: Yeah I think it was before it became Fjord. There’s actually 9 studios upstairs but it probably was an apartment and probably will be again which is really weird to think about. There’s definitely this really uncomfortable stage set thing going on. We made the installation and set the lighting knowing it was going to be primarily viewed at nighttime, so the lighting is very specific. For example, The other room is terribly uncomfortable in the way its lit. There’s only 2 lights and they’re really dim so it feels like you’re on the set of a David Lynch film or you’re stuck in a bad made for TV movie. In this space with the plant, you get the impression you’re in an office waiting room and everyone else waiting is smoking these cheap cigarettes and you just want to get out but you can’t.

F: All the details have been stripped away where this is a stand-in for an entire space stripped down to its very basic parts. Also with the idea of a cartoon, the logic of when you make a caricature, you draw certain attributes to create an intimate recognizable thing and this has the same vocabulary.

SF: I agree, especially because everything is a prop for itself. The clock doesn’t work and the palm tree doesn’t grow. It’s a really good way of thinking about it.

F: When you look at the space that way, you seem to notice the construction of the building too.

SF: Its funny, all of those things disappear when the walls are painted white. As soon as you paint them a color you’re transported to that house that hasn’t been built yet and you start to notice that the ceilings aren’t properly finished and maybe all of these things are actually floating off the ground a few inches.

F: All the objects feel like they came out of this apartment too.

SF: Yeah, this apartment that doesn’t actually exist. Or this cartoon apartment turned into this real-life nightmare tragicomedy with a man that you can only see out of the corner of your eye. Dressed in black, moving things around.

F: Also you have the transparent brick pattern over brick.

SF: A fake of a fake. The show is very much about things you’re not actually supposed to see. As if we were watching a magician from behind.

‘Body Without Organs’ is up until July 28 at FJORD Gallery. You can see more of Sean Robert Fitzgerald’s work at www.seanrobertfitzgerald.com.