Andrew Wright

Artist
 

Works I can't stop thinking about

Fernando Mastrangelo

CHAREST-WEINBERG
250 NW 23rd Street #408
November 29–February 29

Fernando Mastrangelo, Stella (2), 2011,gunpowder, 10' 1 1/2" x 7' 1" x 2".

Fernando Mastrangelo has spent the past few years condensing powders into bricks of social critique. He pressed corn meal pressed into an Aztec calendar criticizing NAFTA. Human ash became MS-13 gang tattoos in a blend of violence and religious iconography. Seventy thousand dollars’ worth of cocaine became a sculpture of life-size Colombian coca farmer Felix, 2009. All of these represent an exact pairing of content and meaning, and a direct relationship between the piece and how it should be understood. Now, in a look back at the cold war’s existential dread and ideological infighting, Mastrangelo presents “Black Sculpture”—three-dimensional renderings of work by Frank Stella and Ad Reinhardt cast from compressed gunpowder.

The sculptures aren’t a precise chromatic black. A close look reveals subtle gradation and crystallization in the gunpowder, itself on the precipice of a bright flash and cloud of smoke. As such, Mastrangelo’s black hues primarily relate to their cultural connotation: negation. While not overly necrotic, they do present the act of painting today as a destructive, or at least disruptive, process. Is black the lack of information, as in a blackout, or is it the product of every piece of information ever, printed line upon line until the paper becomes a solid textual wall (everything) and a void (nothing)? Whereas with Wade Guyton, for instance, the black of an Epson printer is both painterly information and our ability to communicate it, Mastrangelo’s monochrome, in turn, connotes the height of modernist dogma—a complete flow of Greenbergian thought and the seizure of contrary opinion. His use of incendiary material only increases the tension between something and nothing.

One can easily compare the warring camps of modernity and cold war diplomacy, especially when one considers the role of CIA patronage in that chapter of American artmaking. As such, gunpowder is an apt medium to reflect this tumultuous period. If black signifies both everything and nothing, information and its transmission, it also represents historical lineage and its abdication. These sculptures are both in line with midcentury heroics (a virtue often found on the battlefield) and combatively at odds with the summoned past.

— Hunter Braithwaite



 

Filed under  //   Fernando Mastrangelo   works I can't stop thinking about  
Posted February 11, 2012 by Andrew Wright 
 

Works I can't stop thinking about: Roman Signer, Old Shatterhand (or anything by him, really)

via youtube.com

Swiss artist Roman Signer might at first be thought of as 'artist as trickster.' For years he has probed simple phenomena, properties of the physical world, and the artist's relationship to often surreal realities of corporeal existence. 

"Signer adds a further dimension to the concept of sculpture as we know it, a medium which, in the course of the ongoing subversion of traditional boundaries launched upon in the 1960s, had already been expanded to include unconventional materials and actions. Put simply, he examines the basic elements of fire, water and air in terms of their sculptural qualities, albeit not in the manner of Land Art, which tends to effect an overt rearrangement of natural materials within or upon the landscape."

The work, Old Shatterhand, like many of his videos, films, performances, and photographs, is downright slapstick in its simplicity, complex in its implications and ultimately indicative of the problems that we all face as we move through the world. No matter how hard we try, we can't shoot the can...

This video on YouTube I shot (surreptitiously...) at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in 2007 where there was a comprehensive survey of Signer's works.

Filed under  //   Hamburger Bahnhof   Roman Signer   Works I can't stop thinking about  
Posted June 14, 2011 by Andrew Wright 
 

Works I can't stop thinking about: James Nizam @ Birch Libralato

Home -make that an empty home -is where the art is for Vancouver's James Nizam. The artist, who was longlisted for the 2011 Sobey Award, has done several compelling projects in abandoned domiciles. Now, with a CONTACT festival show on in Toronto, Nizam talks to Leah Sandals about Jenga, junk heaps and jogging our collective memory.

Q You built these sculptures in Vancouver's Little Mountain housing complex just before it was demolished in 2009. How did you proceed?

A I didn't have a design governing what I was doing. I was just taking materials and working almost like a kid with Jenga. My basic restrictions were stacking, leaning, assembling and letting materials dictate the form. I think the most successful ones came out really quickly; they kind of border on collapsing themselves. Thinking about the structure that they're actually built in -this social housing block that's sitting there, towering and about to be knocked down -I kind of like that there's a mirroring between the form and something that's about to unbuild itself.

Q How did you get access to the complex?

A When I was younger, I was like, "Yeah man, I broke into so many spaces! I'm hardcore!" But I don't like to get too brazen anymore. For this, I wrote a letter to Sam Rainboth, a senior manager at BC Housing, and I just made a pitch: I'm a photographer interested in heritage preservation, I think it's important for me to document the site and I'd like to do something site-specific. And -I mean, actually, it was too easy -I got the keys to 224 apartments. Like the entire complex, basically. The apartments were completely empty and beautiful. This is actually the sad part -that they were heated, that there was hot water and they were just sitting vacant. I collected materials from all over the building, but the only room I was able to use for photography was an apartment on the third floor that wasn't boarded up. The entire complex was boarded up because of copper thieves and people breaking in.

Q So where were all these doors and drawers from, exactly?

A Bedrooms, living rooms -just everyday space. I was thinking about Gaston Bachelard, a philosopher who looked at shelves and drawers in the home as structures for memory and imagination. I like that these are the shelves that actually held personal belongings. These are the doors that opened into private spaces. These are the chairs where people sat in a community room and discussed issues. These are the lights that illuminated bathrooms, the things that people manicured themselves in front of. There's neat meanings in objects and materials, as mundane as they maybe seem.

Q You've done other projects in empty or abandoned houses. Why is this a recurring theme?

A A lot of these works came out of a specific time in Vancouver. PreOlympics, Vancouver was going through this massive transformation, and I think I was just responding to my neighbourhood. I saw wall-busting going on a couple blocks from where I lived -massive blocks of homes getting torn down. So these types of spaces were actually really easy to access at the moment that I was making the work. I also think a fair bit about the idea of home and ruin in Vancou-ver. You have all these empty homes -a lot of real estate that's bought up but just sitting and sort of waiting.

Those empty homes are there for just a second and then they disappear.

One of my other projects was called Anteroom, after the space that exists between two spaces. To me, these homes are a kind of interstice between shelter and rubble, void and ruin.

Q So what does the Little Mountain area look like now?

A It's really sad. It's an empty lot. It seems like maybe the development was overbid and there wasn't enough money to actually realize it. I don't know what's happened with the people. Everyone did get paid a stipend to help them move. But there were a lot of people who were very resistant and were there until the diggers came in.

Q And what's next for you? A I'm trying to come up with a process whereby I can use photographic emulsions on the surface of architecture. I've done camera obscuras -kind of like turning entire rooms into pinhole cameras -before; now I'd like to actually graft an image onto a wall and cut that wall away and show a fragment of a wall, but with a chemical memory on it.

- James Nizam: Memorandoms shows at Toronto's Birch Libralato to June 4.

via nationalpost.com

A wonderful show! James' work is quite amazing and right up my alley. Congrats on the show and the National Post piece James.

Media_httpwwwcanadian_acndp

Filed under  //   Birch Libralato   James Nizam   National Post   Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival   Works I can't stop thinking about  
Posted May 25, 2011 by Andrew Wright 
 

Works I can't stop thinking about: Juan Geuer, WIS, 1999

It's been just over a year since my friend Juan Geuer died in Almonte, ON.  He was 92.

I met Juan after a particularly difficult meeting with one of my thesis advisors, Sylvie Bélanger, when she simply said to me "you need to go see Juan."  "--Who the hell is Juan?", I replied.

I can't remember how it all happened after that, but my friend Keith and I got ourselves to Almonte and I think we simply presented ourselves on Juan's doorstep.  Juan and Else greeted us with more warmth than is deserved for complete strangers and we spent the day drinking tea, eating pastries, and being regaled with stories of Juan's obsessions, explorations, and a life at the border between science and art.  I was worried that Keith, who was finishing a Master's in Civil Engineering at the time, would be bored.  But Juan's Loom Drum, a work that chronicles the frequency and intensity of earthquakes over 50 years in North America, was right up his alley (Keith's thesis concerned the susceptibility of unfinished cable-stayed bridges to seismic activity).

I kept running into Juan after that and he always greeted me as an old friend.  We were extremely honoured and grateful that we were able to have him participate in CAFKA in 2003.
Juan was a gem.  The depth of his curiosity and enthusiasm for the wonderment of the world was matched only by the length of his eyebrows. He was our own version of Einstein.

It is difficult to choose a single work to highlight here.  Al Asnaam, 
Loom Drum, Karonhia...all would qualify.  

But here is WIS (Water in Suspension) from 1999:

"WIS appears, as do many of Geuer’s works, to be some sort of purpose-built, scientific instrument. A spare metal frame supports a pump, a laser light, some plastic tubing- not much is revealed in its utilitarian form. The only additional element is a lamp with blue light placed at the back of the room. The pump is calibrated to deliver a minute amount of water through the tubing. On the end of the tubing is a pipette, where a single droplet of water forms. The droplet is positioned in the warm orange beam of laser. In a darkened room, the light from the laser projects through the water and onto the wall, and we see magnified to wall-sized, the interior of the swelling droplet. This projected image is animated by the gradual swelling and falling of the water, as one would expect, but the rational definition of the event bears only a factual relation to what actually appears on the wall. As it strikes the droplet, the beam of light is bent by the surface curvature of the droplet, as well as by whatever impurities it contains. The refractions and reflections thus created assume a variety of astonishingly elegant geometric and organic shapes, continuously changing as the water droplet forms, swells and falls from the end of the pipette and as the next drop slowly takes its place. . . Regardless of our level of knowledge of these things, the images that appear before us seem to occupy both a microscopic and cosmic scale. Like plasma being formed into a galaxy, stars emerge from the tumultuous interplay of light. Squiggles of matter glow. At the same time we might also see the outline of our own shadow cast by the blue light at the back of the room." Christina Ritchie

 

 

(download)

We miss you Juan. I like to think that the light from the sparkle in your eyes, that burned with the intensity of a truth-hungry fire, is forever travelling across the universe

Juan

 

Filed under  //   Juan Geuer   Works I can't stop thinking about  
Posted June 21, 2010 by Andrew Wright 
 

Works I can't stop thinking about: Mariele Neudecker, Another Day, 2000

Mariele Neudecker: Another Day (Simultaneous Record of the Sun Rising and Setting in Two Opposite Locations On The Globe - South East Australia and West Azores), 2000, Two 19min DVD loops

The sheer poetry of this work astounds me.  I mean we know that theoretically it would be possible to do this.  That despite the vagaries of the Earth's surface, despite what are vast differences between the highest mountains and the lowest seas, the earth is still a perfectly smooth and round spheroid (geographers are fond of reminding us that if the Earth were the size of a billiard ball, it would be as smooth). With Another Day the entirety of globe is observed: 2 points of view are connected through the mutual acknowledgement of the same phenomenon at the same time--but across an impossibly vast divide. And that divide accounts precisely for the entire scope of our existence.  Neudecker updates Caspar David Friederich's notion of the sublime simply by adding a second observer and in so doing suggests that achieving understanding--if possible at all--can't occur from the privileged position of the singular eye, but may only happen at the junctions between us.

.

I am fortunate to be included in a group show with Neudecker, curated by Celina Jeffery that is slated for 2011.  It's called Preternatural.
For more work by Neudecker, visit her site at http://www.marieleneudeker.co.uk

(download)

Filed under  //   Mariele Neudecker   Works I can't stop thinking about  
Posted April 16, 2010 by Andrew Wright 
 

Works I can't stop thinking about: Murray Favro, Sunlight on Table and Floor, 1991

At first sight, "Sunlight on Table and Floor" appears to be an ordinary domestic interior, but on closer inspection we realize that the impression of light cast onto the table and floor is illusory. By sanding and painting the wooden surfaces, the artist has replicated the pattern of sunlight entering through a window, playing with light and shadow just as a painter would in a naturalistic work. The result is startling in its realism, yet we are made aware of the artifice and the gallery setting. The piece captures an ephemeral moment and demonstrates Favro's exploration and reproduction of objects and perceptual phenomena.(from the NGC website)

Imageserver

Filed under  //   Murray Favro   Works I can't stop thinking about  
Posted April 12, 2010 by Andrew Wright 
 

Works I can't stop thinking about: Michael Snow, La Région Centrale, 1970

Michael Snow's La Région Central (sic) along with Iain& Baxter's vertical landscape slide work (which I can't seem to find anywhere online) are two of the most profoundly influential works I have ever seen.

(download)

Filed under  //   Iain& Baxter   Michael Snow   Works I can't stop thinking about  
Posted April 12, 2010 by Andrew Wright