Regina Hackett takes her Art to Go
Never bought a gay skin mag? Get ready to purchase, probably the
October issue of Unzipped, as painter Brian Murphy debuts as its foray into art. (Post here.)
If Unzipped decides to give art within its theme a longer run, here’s two
more suggestions from Seattle:
Jeffry Mitchell (Good Counsel)
Steven Miller (Proof of Homosexuality in Nature)
This is the kind of body featured in Unzipped, a sex mag for men.
This is the body soon to be featured in a piece written by the peerless Dave White.
Have
devotees of the rock hard decided to lighten up on their
fat phobia? It’s better than that. Their putting their phobias aside to
embrace art. Unzipped wants to add more substantial content to its theme, starting with Brian Murphy‘s self-portraits.
In a culture that fears fat the way ship captains
fear fatal storms, Murphy celebrates his bountiful flesh, turning his
face into a moon squashed against the picture plane and his torso into
a sky, with drifts of himself floating by.
Within his theme, his range extends beyond the celebratory. He can render
versions of his body with the tender exactitude Kafka used to describe
Gregor Samsa after his metamorphosis.
Jenny
Saville paints opalescent mounds of fleshy female (and pig) torsos,
sometimes but not always attached to fleshy heads. She works from photos; he works
from life.
To paint himself, he peers into a small, hand-held mirror, memorizing
as much of the results as he can carry in his head, painting that and
repeating the process.
Saville works with a grid. Murphy’s internal balances are far more
precarious. Saville paints slabs of meat; Murphy paints pieces of sky.
His flesh floats. It’s a massive volume with no weight, a pageant ready to melt into colored air.
Only a young person could wish for his too solid flesh to melt. Should he live longer, it will.
Claire Cowie, one of 12 watercolors….
inspired by Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji.
Inka Essenhigh, Blue Wave…
inspired by Hokusai’s The Great Wave.
(Original post, announcing Betty Bowen Award finalists, here.)
Finalists this year are Jovencio de la Paz and Josh Faught from Oregon; Jenny Heishman, Sean M. Johnson and Matthew Offenbacher from Seattle. The Northwest’s oldest award for visual artists is now $15,000 with two runner-up awards of $2,500. Jen Graves wrote that she thought that Heishman and Offenbacher were the “ones to beat.”
I’m glad I’m not on the jury, because I’d want to give it to all of them. This is the strongest lineup of Bowen finalists in the history of the award. If I had to pick one, it would be Sean M. Johnson, but that’s partly because I know his work best.
(Photo, Gretchen Bennett)
During the day at Seattle’s Dirty Shed, an exhibit conventional in format if not delivery hung on the walls. On
one side were paintings by Jason Hirata. He made them by mixing with
blue pigment the sweat he generated in cleaning out the space.
Facing them were the tiny collages of Sol Hasemi. He made them using wood
samples from a flooring shop with keepsake-tags for scrapbooks ordered
online.
One, in particular:
At night, however, Hirata and Hashemi improvised with florescent tubes of light.
Photo, Gretchen Bennett. Left to right, Hirata and Hashemi.
Hoedown from Rodeo from Eleanor Stewart on Vimeo.
Throw Momma From The Train reaches a satisfactory conclusion with the presentation of a pop-up book. In 1987, when the movie came out, such books were slender threads in the world of literature, and their childishness could be assumed as a plot device.
The connective between pop-up and moving image is the flip book. Twenty-two years after momma got the boot, artists have managed to create a form of everything at once: drawings, pop-up books, flip books and videos. William Kentridge comes to mind first of all, but there are many others, including Stewart and, in Seattle, Cat Clifford, her installation below.
From painter Joanne Mattera, here, including number one, which is, Don’t Jump!
Small world department: Edward Winkleman opened a thread this morning on the subject of dealing with bad reviews.
I’ve written my share, even though if I’ve freely chosen the artist (as opposed to being assigned), I’ve rarely picked someone whose work I find to be without consequence.
A review is an engagement, an examination of the specifics of a response written to evoke response in others. Who wants to dance with the dead? Nothing will come of nothing. As Grace Paley noted, where there is real disagreement, there’s no point arguing.
At worst, a review articulates the limits of a critic’s imagination. (I can’t see you.) A negative may be intended by critics as a prod, but it always serves as their mirror.
Hyman Bloom died Wednesday at age 96. (Holland Cotter’s obit here. Image via Art Critical.)
Selma Waldman died last year in Seattle at age 78.(My obit here. Images via Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.)
Although he enjoyed wide critical favor in the 1950s, both artists are essentially outsiders. They are center stage in a particular moment only in so far as their work is misunderstood in it. Where they find resonance is with each other.
Even though he was mystical and she materialist, they are each best understood in the context of their shared Jewish culture, what Bloom called a “weeping from the heart.” A weeping and a joy. Jewish culture was existentialist thousands of years before the French defined the term. Bloom and Waldman confront the horrors of life and pay them back with radiance.
an ArtsJournal blog
