Art and Fashion preview

I have been busy working on completely new things recently here is a tiny look at some of it.

A little phone pic preview of some of my more recent embroidery artwork

maliamillais playtime pinafore in maroon

sleeveless pastel rainbow blouse

Will happiness find me?

I had an art exhibition back in February!! And I was really happy with how it all turned out. The work was kind of inspired by Chris Krauss' book 'I love Dick' and I am feeling too lazy to go into depth about it, but it was kind of about revealing and owning the personal aspects of our lives and the things we normally keep hidden. I embroidered secrets, or gossipy type facts about people with glow in the dark thread and then displayed them all on this big frame in a black room, with lights strung up behind the embroideries that flashed on and off. I really enjoyed the aspect of being in a small black room as part of an art exhibition as sometimes it can be weird going to an exhibition especially if you are by yourself and have no one to talk to, or you can feel 'on show' how you are viewing the art etc. Anyway I like the fact that being in a dark room took away this aspect of being watched and made the experience more relaxing (definitely for me as the artist being there). The fact that the sculpture was kind of maze like meant that when the lights flashed off you would be kind of trapped in there so as not to trip over the art work in the dark, this meant that you were forced to spend longer with the work than usual. Because the light flashing on made the room quite bright, it would take a while for the embroidered glow in the dark words to be visible to your enlarged retinas when the light flashed off and the sentences would slowly grow on you after several sequences of the light flashing on and off. Everything came together at the last second exactly how I wanted it to. But because of the nature of the work the images don't really convey the sense of it very accurately.

I worked sewing the embroidered sentences onto the frame til about 5am then had to be at work at 9am.  Lovely Dan learned to sew so that he could help me for a few hours in the middle of the night, and a few of my other super lovely friends came in to help too. Adele wrote an amazing catalogue essay for me and did the floor sheet. The switch to make the lights switch on and off at an interval of 10 seconds had to be custom made and was only finished on the day of the opening as the previous arrangement I had stopped working a few days earlier. It was all fairly hectic and a pretty big relief when it was over, still I was glad to make something which for once I did not cringe over (apart from the personal secrets revealed).

My friend Ben took the photos above and some pretty good photos from the night too, but there are a bunch up already here.

Luxembourg

something is

i pretty much love everything posted on this blog something is something else

Happiness

I finally put up this lovely sculpture I bought from Amy Joy too many weeks ago. I'm quite happy with this one tiny section of my house now, it makes me happy just seeing this one spot of harmony and colour in my super messy, unorganised house. It looked even nicer with cupcakes on the cake platter. I also finally found a laminex table and chairs today! Only $85 at the church garage sale, I can't believe how easy it all ended up being, now just to take a photo of it when it's not covered in things...

Romance

Looking at beautiful romantic art. Liking the emptiness and the similarities.

Ryan Mcginley

Peter Doig

Gallery finds NY

I went to a few smaller galleries while in New York quite a while ago now. These were from Clare Grill's exhibition at Jen Beckman gallery on Spring Street. I love the soft Michael Borremans, Luc Tuymans feel about these paintings, while still being strong and not too wishy washy.

Clare Grill

Power lines mach II

While trawling the web today, came across this artist, whose paintings are depressingly similar to my newest travel project. I guess it was inevitable that I would not be the first to be stunned by the melodrama of these lines across infinity...

Images from Granthaffner.com

Cut paper

Little Ampersand, Green Spot, Turbine, Vessel,

Catch

Matthew Rich, latex paint on cut paper. I found these today and really liked them. I have recently been really interested in geometric shapes in art work. I've come across a lot of Constructivist art work recently and am finding influences of this movement in a lot of contemporary art that I have viewed in the last couple of months. Again Matisse could be mentioned in connection with these works.

Matisse, The Snail

Matthew Rich, Matisse

Hello Chris Ofili

And so now here I am again, back in Europe. It was nice getting to see the Chris Ofili exhibition in London, but that was pretty much the highlight, and 5 days once again felt too long. However I would definitely recommend the Chris Ofili exhibition at Tate Britain. This was my main reason for going back to London this time, and it was really good. I had already seen one of his paintings in SFMOMA, and was familiar with his work from Art Now, Matthew Collings interviews, etc so the first few rooms of paintings at his exhibition were not particularly new. Obviously they look better in reality, and the mass of lots of similar works, similar size, subject matter, medium is much more powerful than when viewing one painting of his amongst other artist's work, as at SFMOMA. But for me the real high point was 'The Upper Room'. I had heard about this work previously in a controversial light, as it was purchased by the Tate Britain, on whose board of trustees was Chris Ofili, conflict of interest much? However upon seeing it I had to agree with the decision to purchase. You walk down a dark wooden corridor to a dimly lit room, wherein the paintings are lit from directly above, leaving the room in virtual shadow. You enter at the back of the room and along two sides of the walls are paintings, each a different colour, each depicting a monkey facing toward the end of the room. And as is natural at an art gallery, you stop to view each painting. But the real power of this work is viewing it as a whole. It is when you look with the monkeys toward the far end of the room, toward the queen, that you can start to imagine the inner workings of these monkey's minds. You feel almost one of them, bowing toward your superior, the hushed light of the room provides a feeling of reverence and I almost felt that I should bow my head and shuffle out backwards. The rest of the work in the exhibition, the newer work, was good to. I especially liked his paintings all in shades of blue, starting from 2 tones of similar blue together, and becoming progressively more contrasting. But 'The Upper Room' was definitely the highlight. Oops I forgot to mention the elephant dung, never mind, there it is.

artfagcity also mentions similarities between Ofili and Matisse (I think generally Ofili's newer works like Iscariot Blues, picture top). I only mention this because I love Matisse, and so appreciate when other artist's honour him (even unknowingly perhaps).

Tate, timeout and thank you artfagcity

Jane and Louise Wilson

We are trying to be stingy at the moment, so today we went to the Lisbon Centre de Arte Moderna, as Sunday is it's free entry day. Almost every museum over here seems to have some day or time when you can get in free or cheaper. In the USA most galleries have a suggested amount you can pay to get in, but if you ask about it, you can pay much less. In Europe a lot of the galleries seem to have special prices for people under 25 (yay) and the unemployed (still yay!). Anyway the Lisbon CAM had a smallish collection but was actually a pretty interesting gallery. The collection is mainly made up of British and Portuguese artists. Since I have had more than enough of the contemporary art gallery favourites, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein, this was a welcome relief. The featured exhibition was by Jane and Louise Wilson, British artists and twins. It included video and photography as well as sculpture/installation. I have been really impressed with the video art I have seen in Europe so far, there is a much higher level of production than in previous video art i have seen. This exhibition was entitled, 'Suspending time', or 'Tempo suspenso' in Portuguese, as the exhibition was held in Lisbon. I think 'Tempo suspenso' has such a nice sound to it, there is more of an actual feeling of the build up of time, the anticipation of something happening, which is what the first work we viewed felt like. It was a video piece entitled, 'Hypnotic suggestion' in which the two sisters were filmed apparently being hypnotised. As often happens when viewing video art at galleries, you do not enter the room at the start of the work, so may come in at a stage not normally intended for the beginning. I began viewing this video piece at a moment when all that was in view was a blue curtain and silence. After awhile maybe at least a minute, the camera pulled back to show the Wilson sisters in identically outfits and swivel chairs, heads lolling in a state of hypnosis as a heavily accented voice from an unseen speaker started to tell them to relax, first in English, then later in a language I was not familiar with but which made me feel nonetheless relaxed. The interest for me was what didn't happen, the suspense of waiting for something to occur. And for the length of time I watched, nothing really did. Often to me this is the issue I have with video art, an eventuality is promised, which never occurs. This was not the case with the later video works by the Wilson sisters which felt highly realised and developed.

The photography I have seen in recent exhibitions has also heightened my interest in photography. I'm sick of looking at rooms of tiny black and white photos all beginning to look the same, and only interesting because of the time period they were taken in or the conditions. It is nice to see photographs that are commanding not just due to their size, but also luminance and subject matter. as Louise says,"That's the trouble: colour brings in a different dimension, it heightens realism. Monochrome flattens it out ... And we've chosen not to shoot in black and white as you get so much visual pleasure, and so many emotional cues, from colour." Postemedia.net I loved the Wilson's series of photos of the oddments room in London's antiquarian bookseller, Maggs Bros Ltd., some including Louise Wilson in the shot, and some just of books. As a librarian it is nice to see something approaching a library and possibly a librarian depicted in art works. Apart from this, they are also interesting in other ways. The figure pictured is always shown from behind, so it seems as if you are following her into the rooms making the photo and the books like a kind of doorway. Artwork depicting books has historically signified that the owner is learned and/or wealthy, in this case it becomes even more obvious as the books in question are old, valuable looking books, even if these particular ones are in the oddments room because they are not quite complete, all are missing something like part of their spine or the frontispiece. I shall stop here as Postemedia.net states that Jane and Louise Wilson's 'Reluctance to overtheorise their work is what has enabled others to load so much onto their work instead'. Too much apparently, I think this is my longest post, oh dear.

images from artnet, CAM

David Zwirner gallery New York

Craig Kauffman

The highlight for me in New York was obviously the galleries. I didn't get to as many as I had planned via my New York Galleries book. I did make it to MOMA, Guggenheim, MET (briefly), Brooklyn Museum, New Contemporary Art Museum, and David Zwirner, as well as a few tiny galleries I don't know the names of. Anyway there's always next time I fly thousands of kilometres around the world to New York. David Zwirner gallery represents some of my favourite artists such as Michael Borremans, Luc Tuymans, Chris Ofili, Alice Neel etc. Anyway I suddenly remembered on one of my last days in New York, that David Zwirner is based in New York, so I looked up the gallery and went. They were having an exhibition of Dan Flavin and other American minimalist artists who came to recognition during the 1960s. other artists represented included; Craig Kauffman, Larry Bell, Peter Alexander, Helen Pashgian. Most of the works were focused on light and the way light or the lack thereof affects the space around it. Had already seen quite a few similar works in galleries like MOCA, however it was nice seeing it all together. And I loved the shiny highly polished exteriors. By far my favourite piece was the extremely beautiful and fluid 'Untitled' by Craig Kauffman. To me this sculpture feels perfect.

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