the light at DIA:Beacon

For several years now, I've been shooting regularly for the DIA:Beacon museum.  The light there is always inspiring and the way that the light and artwork work together, whether it is Louise Bourgeois or student work from DIA's program with the Beacon public schools, always amazes me.

Students from the Beacon City School District recently performed in the Richard Serra torqued ellipses gallery.  Students composed and improvised their own music with instruments and voice while the community was invited to draw their responses to the music.

Then a few of the students 'read' drawings that community members made in response to artwork.

Louise Bourgeois

Fred Sandback

Dan Flavin

 

Student work from DIA's teaching artist program with Beacon Public School 2nd graders.

Robert Irwin

color studies

color study #47

A couple of weeks ago I gave a short talk on some new work that I've been making.  It both is and isn't a big departure from the photos I have been making since I began taking pictures 20 years ago and I am really grateful for the opportunity to have to put those thoughts together and discover connections that I didn't know were there until I started to line these images up and put pen to paper.

Here's a link to the talk where, thankfully, you see my photos and not me!

present and absent with melissa mcgill

A couple of years ago my friend Melissa McGill called me up and said, "I've got an idea and it's a big one."  Her idea was a big one - as far as her artwork goes, the biggest she'd ever had.  She wanted to create a site specific, public art work using the ruins on an island in the Hudson River, not far from where we live.  This island, known to most as Bannerman's Island, was once owned by Francis Bannerman who constructed both a home for himself and castle-like storage space for his military arsenal.  Shortly after his death, the castle was partially destroyed by an explosion.  Weather and time have have also been unkind.  Melissa's idea is to create a 'constellation' of lights that would loosely echo the shape of the former arsenal.

Why do this? Melissa's idea fits seamlessly into the study she has been making of absence and presence since she began making art.  Whether casting molds of the insides of porcelain figurines or creating paintings from discarded plaster forms, her pieces examine the ideas of memory, preservation and phenomenology.

To me, there are 2 kinds of memory, the kind that you keep in the front of your mind and the kind that needs to be awakened.  Melissa's work falls gracefully in between.  You are, at once, with what is and what was but you are also suspended between the two where your own histories are evoked. When I witness her work, my mind wants to immediately fill in the blanks, create stories, my heart swells in a lot of different directions.

And so I was thrilled the other cold and slushy night when Melissa asked me to join her on a mission to various places along the river to see what we could of a couple of prototype 'stars' that were temporarily up on the island.  It was great to get a first glimpse of this project in practice after watching her work so hard to make it happen.  When we got to the first viewing location there was a moment of worry that we wouldn't be able to see them but then, there they were, beautiful, not too bright to make you squint - just enough to make you wonder how long that star had traveled to get there and about all of the experiences it had along the way.

For more info:  http://melissamcgillconstellation.com

Here are a few pics from our adventure:

the view of Bannerman's Island

a train headed our way

lights from a car across the river

And here are a few more pix from Melissa's studio and home.

kim markel and her dancing chair

Meet designer/fabricator Kim Markel and her ghostly furniture.  Kim takes traditional, Louis XVI style furniture (mostly found) and casts the wood in a mold so that she can then remake each piece in resin.  The result feels at once old and new.  Light, because it is a translucent material but still heavy with it's luxurious scalloped detailing.  See dancing chair video below.

john fanning, underwater

here are some underwater portraits of musician john fanning for the cover of his upcoming ep 'here in the deadlights'.  john is the leader of the loom.  well worth giving a listen!

seeking a sober mind and an ardent heart

color study #47

Whenever there is a review by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker, I do my best to read it.  More often than not, it's over my head with many ideas and references that I just don't get, but sometimes, just sometimes, I get it in a big way and I read it over and over just for the pleasure of his writing. His recent article about a survey show of abstract art at MOMA is one of those cases. One of my favorite sentences comes early on in the article when he is describing the work of Sophie Taeuber-Arp:  "The work bespeaks a subtle eye, a sober mind, and an ardent heart."  I don't know who I admire more in this case:  Taeuber-Arp for being a person who could be described so amazingly or Schjeldahl for recognizing these qualities in her and putting them together in such a beautiful, succinct way.  He describes her work:  "Rectangles and squares in black, red, blue, gray and two browns, arranged on an irregular grid, generate a slightly dissonant, gently jazzy, visual harmony that is pleasantly at odds with the tapestry's matter-of-fact, nubbly texture."  Delightful!  I know!  And then, and this is the best description of why anyone would make abstract art that I have ever read: "If you could make something like that, you would drop everything else and do it.  You wouldn't need any great reason."  And there it is.  I came to my love of abstract art late and my minimal practice of it even later, but for me, Schjeldahl's description of why to do it is on the nose:  it just feels good and right.  I came into my jello pictures out of a need, as a photographer, to do what I do, that is, make pictures, while not representing something.  It was a relief to me to pull the context out of my photos and just pay attention to shape and color.  Picasso, Schjeldahl informs us, did not think abstract art would fly.  He thought that without any recognizable representation in art, there would be no drama.  I disagree.  I think color and form and the relationships of forms to other forms can, and have been proven to, say a lot.  These things are visceral.  They go straight to your gut.

lucy ruth wright rivers

If you live in Chicago, I have a treat for you.  This Friday night, go to the Packer Schopf Gallery and meet Lucy Ruth Wright Rivers who made the amazing work here.