Whitney Museum of American Art: Recent pages: Exhibitions/2010Biennial

Tam Tran

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:50:02 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/TamTran

According to Tam Tran, she trains her camera on “everything and anything my eyes see and love.” Tran’s series of photographs presents her subjects as multifaceted characters, who explore and experiment with their respective identities by taking on a multitude of personas. In the series Raising Hell (2008), the artist’s nephew enacts the typical childhood fantasy of being a superhero. He is featured wearing a costume of pajamas and a cape and uses a broomstick as a weapon. Each of the five photographs captures a different moment in the battle between the boy and his imagined backyard adversary. Seen from different angles, from above or below, Tran’s nephew appears alternately monumental and diminutive—a fierce warrior and a little boy. Through this collaboration, Tran and her nephew take on a variety of roles: family members, playmates, and artist and subject.

Ania Soliman

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:49:42 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/AniaSoliman

NATURAL OBJECT RANT: The Pineapple comprises twenty-six montages, each corresponding to a letter of the alphabet, and twenty-six text panels that explore the pineapple’s history as an exotic commodity tied up with the politics of colonialism. Reminiscent of Dadaist photomontages from the 1930s such as those by German artist Hannah Höch, each montage is a hybrid of two digital images, sourced from the internet. The accompanying panels of text are written by the artist and informed by her research and impressions on the subject of the pineapple and its historical significance. Soliman provides a political and cultural context for this tropical fruit—a prized object from distant lands that exemplifies luxury, conquest, and consumption.

Storm Tharp

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:49:26 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/StormTharp

Storm Tharp builds his strange and beautiful characters by first drawing contours on the page with water. Before the water has a chance to dry, he applies drops of mineral ink, resulting in unruly and expansive bleeds on the paper. This process is repeated in various instances to build forms and light sources. Once the adequate amount of ink has been dropped and dried, the artist manipulates the form in a variety of ways, such as drawing and erasing. Tharp takes his inspiration from a wide-ranging set of influences including 1970s American cinema and Japanese portrait prints. His characters have names, histories, and narratives, but they suggest multiple interpretations. Is the woman clutching a knife in Pigeon (After Sunshen) defending herself or is she a vengeful murderess? Is the girl in Dolores tethered by the medal around her neck or free like the bird perched on her head? In these enigmatic portraits Tharp investigates the performance of identity and the point where the myth of a person supercedes reality and becomes truth.

Stephanie Sinclair

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:49:09 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/StephanieSinclair

In this series of photographs, journalist Stephanie Sinclair documents Afghani women being treated for extensive self-inflicted burns. These women, who were being cared for in a rudimentary public hospital in the town of Herat in western Afganistan, set themselves on fire in acts of utter desperation. Some of the women shared their personal histories of prolonged abuse at the hands of their husbands or families with Sinclair.

Sinclair’s images mark an exchange of trust and compassion. By consenting to be photographed at their most vulnerable, the women in these images demonstrate a rare bravery. The representation of their suffering exposes the everyday violence against women that is made more pernicious when it remains hidden. Partially in response to the widespread attention these images received from media outlets around the world, a new burn unit was created in Herat.

Scott Short

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:48:50 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/ScottShort

Scott Short’s evocative compositions explore the limits and possibilities of painting. In works such as Untitled (white), Short considers the concepts of authorship and reproduction. He begins by photocopying a blank piece of colored construction paper onto a blank piece of standard copy paper—a method that results in seemingly random black-and-white patterns printed on the copy paper. He then copies that copy, repeating the process multiple times and continuing the random patterning process. Once the artist selects a final permutation, the abstract image is then photographed, formatted as a slide, and projected onto a primed canvas. In the final stage, Short painstakingly recreates this image, taking care to remain true to the particular patterns and shapes generated by the machine. In Short’s process, the painter and the photocopier undergo a role reversal: the copier creates the abstraction and the painter reproduces the copy. By removing the emotive quality of the artist and leaving the authorship to a machine, Short reinvents traditional painterly practice.

Aurel Schmidt

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:48:29 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/AurelSchmidt

Aurel Schmidt’s intricately detailed drawings include objects and creatures such as flies, condoms, and cigarette butts that are pieced together to form larger figures. Master of the Universe: FlexMaster 3000 is a portrait of the Minotaur, the half-man, half-bull mythic creature who represents both creation and destruction. Through exquisite draftsmanship, Schmidt questions conventions of beauty and masculinity as well as standard associations with decomposition, rot, and refuse. She relates her interest in finding the beauty in ugliness to the idea of the human condition as a cyclical process of renewal and decay. By using the detritus of our lives as the building blocks for her subjects, Schmidt’s work becomes a sort of memento mori—a reminder of our own vulnerability and mortality.

Emily Roysdon

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:45:52 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/EmilyRoysdon

Emily Roysdon explores the intersection of choreography and political action. The photographs on view in 2010 depict two scenes. Three black-and-white photographs picture New York’s Christopher Street Piers, a site of social and political action for the gay rights movement since the 1970s. Roysdon photographed the piers as a way to look for traces of avant-garde activities on the site, imagining and commemorating past events without making any new interventions in the landscape.

On an opposite wall are color images of rows of chairs set in another unmarked urban space. The chairs act as placeholders for an audience, while screenprinted figures create a visual score for a future dance performance. In Impossible Always Arrives (I’m Sorry 1) the figures, arranged within and around the space of the chairs, challenge the traditional divide between the audience and the action on stage. Framing Impossible Always Arrives (bas relief) are figures that resemble a frieze—conveying a historical narrative—similar to those found on classical buildings. The future performance will likewise interpret a historical narrative, but in contrast to monuments, will leave no mark on the site. Taken as a whole, these works are an open-ended exploration into the social transformation and choreographed political action that affects past and future public spaces.

Charles Ray

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:45:37 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/CharlesRay

Charles Ray on his Whitney Biennial showing
—Los Angeles Times (February 2010)

Frog in Hand Worth Two Glances;
—New York Times (June 2009)

Dude, You’ve Gotta See This
—New York Magazine (June 2009)

Talks about Hinoki
—Artforum (September 2007; note: registration required)

Picks: Charles Ray
—Artforum (May 2007; note: registration required)

The Shape of Things
—Frieze (November 2007)

Charles Ray at Regen Projects
—Frieze (March 1998)

Charles Ray, Fashions at Feature
—Frieze (May 1997)

R.H. Quaytman

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:45:23 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/RHQuaytman

R. H. Quaytman’s paintings to date, which are organized into chapters, can be seen as an ongoing archive in which each new painting or series is informed by what came before it. A single image or event acts as a starting point for each chapter. For example, Distracting Distance, Chapter 16, which was specifically conceived for the Biennial, references the Whitney’s building and history. The central motif is the Marcel Breuer–designed window in this space, which appears in Quaytman’s restaging of the Museum’s Edward Hopper painting A Woman in the Sun (1961). The artist K8 Hardy stands in for the woman in the sun. Silkscreened optical patterning attunes viewers to the physical act of perception, while trompe l’oeil depictions of the panel’s edges remind the viewer that the paintings are physical objects rather than simply images. In the artist’s words, “I seek to maintain and simultaneously disrupt painting’s absolute presence.” Quaytman allows these contradictory attitudes toward painting to emerge and reverberate across this carefully installed exhibition space.

Lorraine O’grady

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:43:29 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/LorraineOGrady

Lorraine O’Grady’s diptych series pairs images of nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire and twentieth-century American musician Michael Jackson—artists she considers to be “the first and the last of the modernists.” O’Grady maintains that Baudelaire and Jackson, artists separated by nearly 150 years, occupied pivotal positions in their genres and shared surprisingly similar traits, including dramatic flair, aspirations to greatness, unrelenting perfectionism, drug addiction, and ambiguous sexuality. Choosing from tens of thousands of internet images of Jackson to pair with the few available images of Baudelaire, O’Grady represents the two men at roughly the same ages, tracing their trajectories: Baudelaire’s descent from an aristocratic family into poverty and Jackson’s rise to wealth and fame. Made in part to reconsider the life and career of Michael Jackson, The First and the Last of the Modernists raises questions about the roles of art and popular culture as well as how modern figures are presented, flattened, and distributed through the news media.

Kelly Nipper

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:43:10 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/KellyNipper

Kelly Nipper is an artist who “uses choreography to shape [her] ideas about space and time and weather and emotions.” She works with videos, installations, and live performances to explore the moving human form through deliberate, ritualized gestures. Nipper often integrates detailed notation systems and vocal directives with choreography and repetitive movements. Weather Center is closely based on German Expressionist choreographer Mary Wigman’s solo Witch Dance, first performed by Wigman in Munich in 1914. Wearing a mask that obscures her face, the dancer in Nipper’s video enacts highly charged movements that resemble weather patterns, while a voice-over counts from one to ten.

Daniel Mc Donald

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:42:22 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/DanielMcDonald

Daniel McDonald humorously blends images from popular culture with dollhouse-scale narrative tableaux to address contemporary social issues. His precisely detailed, three-dimensional dioramas are peopled with toy figurines from different, incongruous cultural sources. In this work, McDonald presents an allegory of the current U.S. economic crisis. American pop-music icon Michael Jackson, wearing garb from his epic 1982 music video Thriller, steps onto the boat of Charon, the ferryman who, in Greek mythology, transports the recently deceased to the underworld. While Jackson offers a coin as payment for his voyage, Uncle Sam, unconscious and inebriated at the other end of the boat, has no money to appease Charon. The absurdity of the scene is heightened with theatrical effects such as stage lighting, a smoke machine, and variations in scale. In this witty melding of imagery, McDonald juxtaposes iconic figures to create a potent satire.

Babette Mangolte

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:41:52 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/BabetteMangolte

Artist’s website
—babettemangolte.com

Five From the Whitney Biennial: Babette Mangolte
—Art in America Online (February 2010)

Babette Mangolte: Broadway 1602
—Artforum (January 2009; via findarticles.com)

Life in Film: Babette Mangolte
—Frieze (September 2008)

‘Models of the Pickpocket’: Where are Bresson’s Thieves Today?
—New York Times (September 2004)

Jim Lutes

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:41:32 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/JimLutes

Jim Lutes integrates representation and abstraction through his use of images and lyrical marks in the same pictorial space. In some works, Lutes employs egg tempera—a classical medium not often used in contemporary art—which allows for a great level of fluidity, depth, and luminosity. Lutes’s work references his interest in the material qualities of paint and a narrative that blurs present and past. For example, Piece of Barbara, on view on the Museum’s second floor, takes its figurative image from a publicity still of Barbara Payton, a 1950s B-movie actress whose career was overshadowed by a tumultuous personal life and premature death. According to Lutes, to paint a likeness is to “paint in opposition to the form, which is both the failure and pleasure of painting.” By incorporating freely applied gestures with Payton’s portrait, the idea of representation—or the reality of any image—is thrown into question.

Martin Kersels

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:41:14 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/MartinKersels

Martin Kersels’s oversized assemblage of found and fabricated objects, on view in the Whitney’s lobby gallery, is both a sculpture and a performance space, which he and other artists, musicians, choreographers, and directors will use throughout the Biennial. Its five constituent objects can be arranged by the performers as individual units or used together as a single, mutable stage. When not in use, a turntable plays the silent groove from the end of a record to suggest the presence of an absent performer.

While Kersels’s sculptures have long incorporated action or performance, this project suggests a specific parallel between making art and making a pop music album. Each section of the stage is titled as a different “song,” and, in the way that an album is composed of “singles,” each functions as an individual work as well as a part of a larger whole. By serving as a vehicle for performance, the objects also take on a time-based quality, one inherent in music but not often associated with sculpture.

Jeffrey Inaba

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:40:55 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/JeffreyInaba

As part of the Biennial, the Whitney commissioned architect Jeffrey Inaba’s architecture collective INABA and C-Lab to design an installation for the Museum’s restaurant space and Lower Gallery. Inaba believes that no matter how authentic or bold the architecture of a building, as the furnishings of a building change over time even the most beautiful modernist interior can, according to Inaba, “verge on looking like a dentist’s waiting room.” In contrast to the stark architectural design and natural materials of the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer building, Inaba used synthetic materials for the three large, suspended lanterns on view here. The lanterns cast a soft light on the restaurant and the store and offer what Inaba describes as a more “human” feel to the space.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:40:22 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/JessicaJacksonHutchins

Jessica Jackson Hutchins explores the relationships between people and objects and how they both form and inform each other. To create this work, Hutchins glued newspaper articles about Barack Obama on the surface of a sofa repurposed from her childhood living room. Ceramic pieces, grouped haphazardly on the couch, can be viewed as surrogates for the people who once sat on its cushions. Couch For a Long Time fuses public and private moments, creating a sense that monumental world events can pervade everyday life.

Alex Hubbard

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:40:03 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/AlexHubbard

Over the course of Annotated Plans for an Evacuation (2009), on view on the Museum’s third floor, Alex Hubbard continuously alters the appearance of a used Ford Tempo. Whether spackling the rear tires, balancing a water jug on the engine block, or spray painting the driver’s side windows, Hubbard approaches each task with a deadpan purposefulness. His process seems to follow a deliberate plan, yet each action ultimately appears to serve no larger aim than sustaining relentless activity. Hubbard’s continuous transformation of the car is shot in static profile by a camera attached to the side of the vehicle. Hubbard has compared the shallow space of his videos to the surface of a canvas; indeed, as much as Annotated Plans for an Evacuation documents a working process, it can also be understood as a changing pictorial arrangement of the car—its planes, lines, and colors.

Sharon Hayes

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:39:25 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/SharonHayes

Through her performances, films, and installations, Sharon Hayes examines the intersection of history, politics, and speech, with a particular focus on the language of twentieth-century protest groups. Parole, the title of this installation, refers to the term used by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure to distinguish individual acts of speech (parole) from a larger system of language (langue). In this installation, several distinct scenes present examples of public speech in different contexts. In each of the settings, which include Hayes’s recent performances as well as fictive scenes without an audience, the same figure appears, recording sound but never speaking. Hayes draws on historical texts—such as early lesbian activist Anna Rüling’s 1904 speech

What Interest Does the Women’s Movement Have in the Homosexual Question—that “re-speak” to new audiences. These historical speeches, and Hayes’s work in general, explore the construction of gender and sexuality and the articulations of political protest, revealing unexpected resonances across time periods. Parole encourages the viewer to think about how past forms of protest can inform the present and how the effects of public speech are altered in the process of documentation.

Hannah Greely

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:07:02 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/HannahGreely

Like many of Hannah Greely’s sculptures, Dual replicates everyday objects—here two booths in a dark bar—but with subtle incongruities of material or form. Visible indications of these discrepancies, like the length of the seat cushions and the height of the tables as well as the obviously handmade pay phone, take on a surreal presence within the otherwise mundane setting of a dive bar. Even the tears in the vinyl seats or spots of discoloration on the wood-paneled walls are carefully crafted by the artist. The partition that divides the work compounds its uncanny effect. As the sculpture invites an intricate play of similarity and difference, the familiar becomes strange, and a sense of psychological unease emerges in the gap between what is a real-world object and what is a sculptural facsimile.

Theaster Gates

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:06:37 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/TheasterGates

Sculptor, urban planner, and performance artist Theaster Gates transformed the Whitney’s Sculpture Court into an installation that functions as a communal gathering space for performances, social engagement, and contemplation. The spare architecture of the main pavilion reflects the artist’s interest in Eastern philosophy and art. The other throne-like structures suggest shoe shine chairs. These architectural elements infuse mundane labor with dignity and elevate the status of simple and found materials. The wood that makes up the main pavilion and surrounding pathways was salvaged from the former Wrigley gum factory in inner-city Chicago and cleaned by Gates before it was repurposed for this work.

Throughout the Biennial, Gates will collaborate with historians, artists, and street musicians on a series of “monastic residencies.” These creative residents will transform and reinvent the Sculpture Court by adding what Gates describes as “commentary, bling, and acts of sincerity.” to the installation.

Maureen Gallace

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:04:26 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/MaureenGallace

Maureen Gallace finds inspiration in the modest edifices and rural environs of her native New England. She paints intimate landscapes featuring serene, unpeopled houses. Deceptively effortless in their appearance, Gallace’s paintings take shape through careful observation and decisive omission. In this series of works, boxlike cottages are surrounded by bright hues of thriving summer greenery and a luminous pale sky. Visible brushstrokes, applied in wet-on-wet layers of oil paint, describe areas of color that appear infused with light. In some of her paintings, descriptive architectural details such as windows and doors are absent, leaving the viewer free to attach his or her own associations to the structure.

Suzan Frecon

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:04:12 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/SuzanFrecon

For more than four decades, Suzan Frecon has produced abstract works that reveal a deep reverence for the practice of painting. Frecon carefully plans her images, first deciding on the dimensions of the work and the paint colors to be used (often grinding her own pigments to achieve the desired effect). She then figures out the precise imagery in sketches, using geometric formulas as well as her own visual intuition to create related forms in which dissonant features are suspended in balance.

In embodiment of red (soforouge), two heaving shapes, painted in earth red hues that vary in tone and luster, seem to dissolve into the background and assert their materiality through strong contours. The figure-ground relationships in each panel derive from the canvas size: in the top panel, the rounded form’s width is identical to the panel’s height, while the curved form of the bottom panel connects two of its corners.

Frecon’s abstract forms may invite associative leaps to architectural or art historical references—she has cited her interest in varied art historical sources such as the Chartres Cathedral, Minoan labyrinths, Byzantine painting, and Pomo baskets—but ultimately, the works remain non-referential.

Roland Flexner

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:03:50 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/RolandFlexner

Roland Flexner expands the definition of drawing by creating intricately detailed works of ink on paper using only his breath, chance, and gravity as tools. The works on view in 2010 were created using a Japanese decorative art technique in which paper is laid on top of ink floating on water or gelatin, creating a marbled effect. However, Flexner departs from the traditional technique, altering the composition in the moment before the ink is absorbed by tilting, blowing, or blotting the paper. The resulting images oscillate between illusionistic landscape and pure abstraction.

The drawings relate to Flexner’s interest in the seventeenth-century European practice of collecting geological samples (often polished cross-sections of stone) that resemble images such as those found in landscape painting. These collections were inspired by similar traditions in Asian cultures in which contemplating stones was meant to inspire meditation on nature’s transformations. In turn, the landscapes that seem to emerge out of abstraction in Flexner’s drawings reveal our own tendency to project pictures or interpretations onto ambiguous images.

Julia Fish

Whitney Museum of American Art — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:03:32 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/JuliaFish

Julia Fish produces paintings that approach abstraction but in fact derive from the imagery of her home, studio, and garden. Her most recent series, Threshold, comprises six paintings (three of which are on view in 2010) that depict the space between two rooms. In one-to-one scale, the paintings show the surfaces of two floors meeting one another, recreating the exact size of the actual thresholds. In Threshold, SouthWest-Two [spectrum: green], linoleum tile meets wood and stone, framed on either side by the silhouette of doorjambs and an open door. Fish’s exploration of transitional space is undertaken with a deliberate attention to color. The carefully applied bracketed areas of paint highlight the central image of the flooring.