Joshua Pieper: Makings

Pieper is one of those elusive types of artists that people can refer to but can't possibly recall how intrinsically beautiful his work is until another exhibition arrives to his credit. Blankspace provided another opportunity to take a look July 15 through August 19th with Makings, a solo show of Pieper's selected images taken from packing materials and discard at spaces where Pieper works as a preparator.

Pieper’s archival inkjet prints portrayed such re-usable entities, formed and then again reformed for the safe transport of art, as reviewed or reassessed sculptural work of their own merits: packed atop garbage cans, folded and organized on a flat wheel dolly bed, a lone broom and pallet partnered flat against a wall.

Safety of art articles are a business onto itself and whilst Pieper supports his creations in part by ensuring the delivery and display execution of other artists’ work, Makings read largely as a moment of still aftermath. All of Pieper’s prints presented the formally used as vehicles working towards the ‘greater whole’ (so to speak), a means to an ends, and most intriguingly-- a tenancy of sculptural forms at work in their own right. That said, Makings resisted any far-reaching statement on the materials that are not of any rare specimen by far, (packing bubbles, spray paint cans, masking tape, et al), but did take notice of the fragility of art and article, a phase apart from origination. The sculptural forms found within the materials posed as prop are a work of assembly, a redirection of the utilitarian. Overall, Makings seemed to be wrought heavily in the immediately visible: no larger contextual argument or message needed to be distilled—just a consequentially thought-out conceptualized arrangement of form and materials in their natural environment.

Makings was a quiet exhibition that either had relevance or not depending on the time spent assessing the shapes and structures of the materials and the visual satisfaction of the contrasts (materials, colors, compositions) that lain therein. What made Pieper’s exhibition fragmentally unreadable, or lacking of continuity at times, was the sense that Pieper nervously filled the space of the gallery with physical matter as plausible matching hosts of the materials captured in the prints. As such, the physical matter proved to be unmatched twins, and acted only to take away from the prints, (gorgeously framed), that lined the wall. The authenticity of the articles featured in the prints went lost against the immediate filler that clogged up the gallery space.

Also on view: Pieper produced limited edition handmade artist books available at Blankspace in conjunction with Makings. Minimally constructed, filled with images resulting from Makings, these books are well worth the travel up San Pablo.

http://www.blankspacegallery.com
http://www.joshuapieper.com/

Kathryn Spence: Objects & Drawings

Kathryn Spence’s sculptures lend likeness by transforming the abject. Past exhibitions contained sculptures of pigeons, wrens, blackbirds and other ubiquitous species assembled out of old newspapers, thread, fabric scraps and pieces of trash. In her recent exhibition, she moves beyond these common urban species to focus on a more rare type of bird. Although they’re mysterious, nocturnal birds, the owls that take center stage in this exhibition are all subspecies that can be spotted in the Bay Area, and they are creatures that Spence has observed first hand.

The pair of burrowing owls standing like gatekeepers on the floor of the large gallery normally make their home on a marshy patch of land next to the Oakland airport. At dusk, the barn owl seen perched on a high corner of this gallery can sometimes be seen diving for field mice in an old municipal dump site in Berkeley. The great horned owl that sits regally on an opposite wall has been spotted roosting in an ancient oak tree just north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Even though they live in our midst, we hardly ever notice them unless we are actively looking and listening. The ability to see and identify a bird comes from developing a sharpened sense of one’s environment. Owls especially often lurk in hidden spaces that may lie just beyond our normal habits of perception. Spence seems to revel in the types of observations that a heightened state of perception will yield, and the discoveries she makes through careful watching and listening enter her artwork to then undergo another type of examination.

In the case of the owl sculptures, the artist ponders how to give these creatures a spatial and physical presence, especially if most people’s experiences of them are limited to images seen in books or footage seen on the nature channel. She does so by engaging a visual vocabulary that talks around the bird instead of defining it literally. How do you take old men’s suits, torn up stuffed animal pelts and various other discards, and camouflage them as plumage and markings? How do you suggest an abbreviated form through scale and posture without having to recreate every feature? Which features are necessary for recognition, and how much of this information can you record in the split second glance the bird offers you before it flies away? The artist may have sought answers to such questions in the midst of observing these elusive creatures, and her findings have made their way into the sculptures to offer eerily convincing likenesses.

A newer body of work that Spence refers to as “object drawings” fills the other half of the exhibition. These pieces bridge the space between 3D form and 2D representation by bringing the two together. Small, indistinct objects made out of stuffed, sewn together fabric, are placed on pieces of paper that contain painstakingly detailed, colored pencil renderings of them, so that the drawings appear to complete the objects, and vice versa. The process of making a detailed rendering of an object so pulpy and indistinct as to only be describable as a “blob” may seem nonsensical, but it also distills the act of representation into a very pure practice. One cannot fall back upon any preconceived notions of what this object is, or what it should look like, but must rely upon immediate modes of perception in order to represent this unrecognizable “thing”. Bringing actual object side by side with the rendering of the form may also hint at systems of taxonomy, not unlike the process of classifying birds: you first spot a bird, and then you try to identify it by looking at a drawing in a field guide. Spence’s object drawings may be seen as a purposefully fussy exercise to similarly give the viewer a map towards recognizing something unnameable.

One of the most compelling object drawings incorporates the shapes and colors of a cluster of cut, printed fabric leaves lying on the paper. The distinction between the image of the leaves on the paper, and the fabric lying on top comes close to collapsing here, because the object itself is a mass printed image that has been copied painstakingly by hand. The piece is complex and beautiful on many different levels, not only because it elevates the common and the mass produced into something rare and unique, but also because the leaves have a feathery quality that further reference the bird sculptures in the room. Similarly, the potency of Spence’s sculptures and object drawings may have to do with their ability to hint at the recognizable and the tangible while stopping short of explication, thereby leaving ample room for a multitude of different associations.

The exhibition ran May 3 through June 10, 2006

Downtown San Jose

Before The Carpenters, Burt Bacharach asked, “Do you know the way to San Jose?” If you live in San Francisco, here’s a hint: It is part of the Bay Area. Think of it as the south shore. If you don’t know the way, you’ve got options—there is Caltrain or if you want to drive, you can go via 280 and enjoy the lush scenery. Whatever the route, figure it out sometime—anytime—this week. ZeroOne “A Global Festival of Art on the Edge” and ISEA 2006 (International Symposium for Electronic Arts) are on through Sunday, August 13, 2006.

More than 200 international artists have descended on Silicon Valley and have brought artworks that breathe technology and drop jaws. Some more than others, perhaps; but by sheer numbers alone you are bound to find your own version of plug-it-in-art-love. More exciting than this technological bacchanalia is some of the titillating and sharp programming curated by local talent. You could walk in just about any direction in downtown San Jose this week and find stuff to dive into, but for what it is worth, here are my top five downtown destinations:

• “Jennifer Steinkamp” and “Edge Conditions” at San Jose Museum of Art. Steinkamp’s glittering masses of flowers dazzle. “Edge Conditions”, curated by techno wunderkind and ZeroOne/ISEA director Steve Dietz, presents more than a dozen cutting edge digital artists.

• Steve Lambert’s hilarious “Simmer Down Sprinter” focuses on ‘competitive relaxation’ at Anno Domini.

• “Frontera Electronica” at MACLA, a group exhibition of local artists that explores the dynamics between ideas of the frontier and the border through digital media.

• San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles presents three solo exhibitions that examine relationships between textile art and technology.

• Anchoring First Street with their brand new expansive location, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art’s “Next New” presents emerging new media artists selected by a bevy of established artists in the same genre, among them this year’s SECA awardee Kota Ezawa.

This week the peripheral is the center, just as Beuys would have liked it. San Jose has risen to the occasion and met the Bay Area’s need for a substantial art fair to converse with the international contemporary art discourse, on the subjects it knows best. While it lasts, the South Bay art scene is making the most of it.

Visit http://www.01sj.org for more information.

Out of Our Control: 100 Flip Books by Margaret Tedesco

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) selected four artists to make works about this historic disaster from a contemporary perspective. Margaret Tedesco was one of four artists commissioned to make new work for the SFAC Exhibit “The Dust Never Settles.” Tedesco proposed an edition of ten copies of ten flip books (100 flip books for the 100th anniversary year). Her initial point of departure, Tedesco said, was historical eyewitness accounts written by individuals who lived in San Francisco at the time of the quake. However, she proposed to represent the psychological meaning of the disaster by using excerpts, not from historical documents, but from contemporary films selected from a range of film genres including adventure, science fiction, horror, and thriller. Her real interest, she said, was in exploring “the possible states one might experience under a catastrophe…where control of our surroundings is no longer available.”

On a Saturday afternoon in late July, I visited Tedesco’s flip books at the SFAC Gallery in the War Memorial Performing Arts Center on Van Ness Avenue. Like most flip books, these works are diminutive (each volume is 4 ½ inches wide and 3 inches tall). At the SFAC Gallery, they are carefully laid out in a row on a white wall shelf. From the outside, each of the ten books is identical, bound in a glossy brown paper cover saying “nineteen hundred o six – two thousand o six.” It seems clear that we are supposed to look at these ten volumes as part of a single work. The ten books are for sale as a complete set of ten volumes and in her proposal, Tedesco refers to the “accumulated viewing” of the fractured narrative contained by the set of books. However, it is equally obvious that both the ordering of the different flip books and, to an unknown extent, the narrative sequencing of the images within each book has been mysteriously disrupted. All we can piece together is that the world has been shaken out of its accustomed order and that we are not in control of the forces that have been unleashed. In one book called “magnetic fields” a young Jane Fonda in glittering sci-fi costume grapples on the floor with unknown forces. In another book—“a feeling coming on”—a young Richard Chamberlain fiddles with his car radio while driving in the rain. As water begins pouring in through cracks in the radio casing, we realize that the car has been submerged in water, and a final scene of drifting hands and floating fruit suggests that we are viewing a scene of death by drowning. In another flip book titled “jump jump” a young woman smiles as she jumps from a high place in view of a crowd that is horrified (and yet perversely excited) by the dangerous scene and the possibility of disaster or death.

I found the experience of flipping through Tedesco’s books unsettling—which I think is exactly what she intended. Although the moving pictures (both in flip books and in their big sister—the cinema) are evidence of our increasing ability to manipulate technology, the sense of control is illusory. The complex inner and external dramas encompassed by personal experience, history, and film remind us that the illusion of order and control can be disrupted at any time by unpredictable events.

Although there were three still images from the source films displayed on the wall in the Arts Commission Gallery, I wish that Tedesco had provided a few more references to the historical eye-witness accounts or film extracts that provided the source documents for her flip books. In particular, I am curious about how she compiled her flip book versions of the film narratives—whether she selected the images to go into the flip books through an ordered sampling of the film stills (i.e. one still from every “x” feet of film) or whether she thought about how the stills would flow together in the flip books.

Sidebar: Flip books are small hand-held booklets with drawings or photographs on each page that, when flipped, create the illusion of moving pictures. They were patented in 1868 and enjoyed popularity as novelty items at the turn of the 20th century. To a later generation, they were well known as giveaway prizes in Cracker Jack boxes. In recent years, flip books have gained some popularity as a format for artist books. In 2005, the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf, Germany put on a comprehensive international exhibit, “Daumenkino: The Flip Book Show” that documented the history of the genre and featured work by contemporary artists and filmmakers. For more information about flipbooks visit http://www.flipbook.info

June 15 – August 26, 2006
San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, 401 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco; also on display at the San Francisco Public Library, Main Branch, Book Arts and Special Collections Center.