Firework Explosions Captured on Paper — Rosemarie Fiore featured @ The Creators Project

Rosemarie Fiore, Smoke Eclipse #21, 2015, 28x 28 inches

By Noémie Jennifer 

"Painters usually have to work with the element of gravity, with paint dripping down. With me it's the opposite. My materials want to shoot up, and the challenge is to force them down onto the paper," explains Rosemarie Fiore on the phone from Los Angeles, where a show of her paintings opened last weekend at Von Lintel Gallery. The works, which feature circular pools of rich colors, make up a new series entitled Eclipse. Like planets orbiting silently, they cross each other’s paths and seem to vibrate on the paper.

 

Rosemarie Fiore, Smoke Eclipse #21, 2015, 28x 28 inches

Fiore lives and works in the Bronx and has been using found machinery to create artwork since her residency at Skowhegan, completed after her years in graduate school. Her first experiments with fireworks began during a stint in Roswell, New Mexico, with an accident. “I was lighting off a smoke bomb and dropped it, and as it moved it left a blue dotted line,” she says.

Photo by Ross Willows, courtesy of Rosemarie Fiore Studio and ART OMI, Ghent, NY

Since then she has crafted increasingly sophisticated tools to capture color and smoke. “At first I was just duct taping fireworks to a broomstick and dragging it along the paper,” she says. Now her laboratory includes various containers on wheels, with spouts specially designed so the lit smoke bombs hit the paper with the right pressure. The tools are perpetually in development: “While I’m creating the work, I’ll see that I can add a new extension. I’m always editing the tools and developing things.” For the Eclipse series, she modified a trash can lid and named it "Space Oddity."

She describes her process as a meditative dance on top of the paper, carried out in silence—these are smoke bombs, not fireworks with gun powder. “Some machines move better than others. It’s like a dance partner: when you have a good partner, you don’t have to force anything. You can anticipate each other’s movements and move together smoothly.” The dance has strict time limits: once the smoke bombs run out of pigment, the show is over.

The Eclipse works are pared down compared to the larger paintings Fiore previously made with smoke bombs, which used collage to create hectic, layered compositions. “This show is much more about the simplicity of the smoke, about the colors interacting and creating subtle depths.” The use of a smooth printmaking paper also helped to yield those dreamy hues.

Larger pieces in this series are in the works. In coming months, Fiore will be collaborating with the metals department at UNC Greensboro to create a huge “eclipse maker tool” four feet in diameter.

Since then she has crafted increasingly sophisticated tools to capture color and smoke. “At first I was just duct taping fireworks to a broomstick and dragging it along the paper,” she says. Now her laboratory includes various containers on wheels, with spouts specially designed so the lit smoke bombs hit the paper with the right pressure. The tools are perpetually in development: “While I’m creating the work, I’ll see that I can add a new extension. I’m always editing the tools and developing things.” For the Eclipse series, she modified a trash can lid and named it "Space Oddity."

She describes her process as a meditative dance on top of the paper, carried out in silence—these are smoke bombs, not fireworks with gun powder. “Some machines move better than others. It’s like a dance partner: when you have a good partner, you don’t have to force anything. You can anticipate each other’s movements and move together smoothly.” The dance has strict time limits: once the smoke bombs run out of pigment, the show is over.

Rosemarie Fiore, Smoke Eclipse #52, 2015, 28x 28 inches

The Eclipse works are pared down compared to the larger paintings Fiore previously made with smoke bombs, which used collage to create hectic, layered compositions. “This show is much more about the simplicity of the smoke, about the colors interacting and creating subtle depths.” The use of a smooth printmaking paper also helped to yield those dreamy hues.

Larger pieces in this series are in the works. In coming months, Fiore will be collaborating with the metals department at UNC Greensboro to create a huge “eclipse maker tool” four feet in diameter.

Rosemarie Fiore, Smoke Eclipse #42, 2015, 28x 28 inches

 Read full feature @ The Creators Project

MICHAEL WAUGH: BOOM AT VON LINTEL GALLERY — Daily Serving Feature

Michael Waugh. Les Règles de l’Art, 2015
ink on Mylar; four panels, 102 x 42 in. each

Written by Calder Yates

Michael Waugh's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Boom, is currently on view at Von Lintel Gallery. Using ink on Mylar, Waugh reimagines an assortment of 19th-century tableaux, depicting quaint scenes of countryside estates and horse stables, as well as turn-of-the-century buildings on New York City streets. These representational drawings consist wholly of handwritten text: Scribbled sentences produce the contour lines of buildings as they crumble to the ground, while epistolary markings provide contrast to form the underside of a horse. Letters and numbers further constitute the hands and faces of male figures. Waugh has painstakingly scrawled and layered words and sentences across the sheets of Mylar to construct the entirety of every image, spending three to four thousand hours to produce each piece. The amount of labor alone puts Waugh’s drawings on par with the historical legacies of endurance works.

The incongruous titles of the drawings, such as Unfettered Markets (FCIR, part 4) (2015), hint at the content of the words and sentences used to create them. Waugh uses the Congressional Financial Crisis Inquiry Report to form the images of stately manors and equestrians. In Derivative (FCIR, part 5) (2015), the phrase “too big to fail” delineates the horse’s genitals. For the largest piece in the show—a four-panel work depicting a crowd watching a building collapse—Waugh plums Les Règles de l'Art (The Rules of Art) written by the philosopher Pierre Bourdieu. Like a gunshot, the stupendous amount of time and labor put into Les Règles de l’Art (2015) is immediate and breathtakingly obvious. 

Michael Waugh. Derivative (FCIR, part 5), 2015 (detail)
ink on Mylar; 42 x 65 in

None of Waugh’s drawings contain a single image of a woman. Waugh depicts men circulating among more men through fictional thoroughfares or rowing along on a polite, tree-lined river. Even inside the stables, only studs are found. Waugh evokes an old world based on good manners, pedigree, and male dominance. In the far right panel of Les Règles, a couple of men grope each other. Pleasure, here, flows only between men.

By combining three basic elements—images of 19th-century “good taste,” words describing 21st-century financial catastrophe, and dominant masculinity—Waugh implies that our current economic boom-and-bust cycles are rooted in a history of gendered aesthetic calculus. In other words, the “good life”200 years ago—a life that included property, leisure, and commodities, and that excluded any instances of women or people of color—continues to inform our present-day, exploitative, unequal economic system. Waugh’s drawings are a veiled swipe at an earlier era’s role in the construction of our inherited conditions of hierarchy.

Michael Waugh. Before Our Very Eyes (FCIR, part 2), 2015 (detail)
ink on Mylar; 25 x 25 in.

As a result of their illustrative qualities, Waugh’s drawings serve primarily as a demonstration of his argument, acting as a simple equation toward his artistic logic. The works indicate a cognitive tension, all the while allowing viewers to walk away with no visceral uneasiness—mostly due to the drawings' benign imagery. The only tension in the works lies exclusively within Waugh’s implied argument that 19th-century male-dominated society may be ipso facto the very problem we have today. The drawings hint at—rather than declare—this argument, which is an unsurprising one that has already been well-articulated over the past half-century.

Other artists have created this cognitive tension while also exploring material and visual tension. Glenn Ligon's text-based paintings, for example, contain similar, damning references to hierarchies of class, race, and power. Ligon's works, however, also contain an exploration of materials: coal dust mixed with acrylic, silkscreens on unstretched canvasses, neon lettering, and powder-coated aluminum. Waugh seems to ask viewers to look past his use of materials (ink on Mylar) to consider only his imagery, while Ligon's use of materials deliberately confuses image and ground, never taking the white surface for granted.

Michael Waugh. Derivative (FCIR, part 5), 2015
ink on Mylar; 42 x 65 in.

Waugh's drawings and the tidiness of his argument suffer from the very processes he hopes to critique. Beyond the horse scrotum cheekily formed from the words “too big to fail,” there is little surprise or confusion in his work; the drawings are fun and easy to look at. Where is the moment when the viewers of the work are implicated in the drawings' depictions of hierarchy of class and power? This is the irony of easily digestible (and purchasable) critiques of hegemony. Like a flu shot, the hegemonic system has taken in and processed its critique, and becomes stronger and more entrenched as a result. When does looking at these drawings move beyond a gentle and agreeable experience, and into an uncomfortable one, in which one cannot—ought not—look away?

Read original article @ Daily Serving

CANAN TOLON: Sidesteps | Parasol Unit — Reviews

CANAN TOLON | Sidesteps — Solo Exhibition @ Parasol unit, London

Canan Tolon: Sidesteps

15 January - 16 March 2014

Preview: 14 January 2014, 6.30 – 9 p.m.

Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art is delighted to present a solo exhibition of works by Turkish-born artist Canan Tolon. This, her first major exhibition in a London institution, provides in-depth insight into her works from 1986 to the present day. It includes Futur imparfait, 1986–1999, a series of 33 ink-wash and crayon figurative drawings that were recently acquired by the British Museum. At Parasol unit they will be on show all together for the first time in the UK.

Canan Tolon was born in Istanbul and grew up in various European countries. After earning her baccalauréat from the École Française d’Istanbul in Turkey, in 1975, she studied design in Edinburgh and London. In 1980, she received a BA from Middlesex Polytechnic / Architectural Association, London, and that same year moved to the Bay Area of San Francisco to study for a Masters in Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley. After graduating in 1983 she worked for about ten years in several architecture offices while continuing her work in the visual arts. Her paintings and installations have been exhibited internationally. She has works in a number of major public collections, including the British Museum, London; Istanbul Modern; IKSV (Istanbul Foundation for Culture and the Arts); the Nesrin Esirtgen Collection, Istanbul, Turkey; and the di Rosa Collection, Napa, USA.

Canan Tolon lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA and in Istanbul, Turkey.

This exhibition is curated by Ziba Ardalan, Founder/Director of Parasol unit.

Canan Tolon: Sidesteps is accompanied by a comprehensive book, including an artist interview by Ziba Ardalan and essays by Bill Berkson and John Yau, published by Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art. A related programme of educational events at the gallery will include lectures, poetry readings, animation and storytelling workshops.

Read the full press release.

Parasol unit is grateful for the generous support of Berna and Tolga Tuglular, Mehves-Dalinc Ariburnu, Isik Kececi Asur, Mine - H.Cem Bahadir, Aylin Benardete Sarihan, Şeli Elvaşvili, Nesrin Esirtgen, Öner Kocabeyoglu, Caroline Landin, Derin Mermerci, Ebru Ozdemir, Aysegul - Ömer Özyürek, Yosun Reza, Edwina Sponza, Billur-Atilla Tacir, the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism and those who wish to remain anonymous.

View online @ Parasol unit