Object Permanence Presents: A New Materiality (list of artists' works)
Migration Reform. Plexiglass, acrylic resin, Cylindropuntia bigelovii (Teddy-bear Cholla). dimensions unknown. 2013
Artist’s biologies are difficult to create. Zak was born in Homer, Alaska in 1977. He grew up looking for things in the dirt. There once existed a Pterosaur with a 45-foot wingspan. Zak regrets nothing more than not seeing that life form. Zak received a BA in Theater Studies from Yale University one fine spring day in the year 2000. Afterwards he pruned trees in Central Park, attempted bicycle messaging, built a three-story house, fished commercially, stayed up late as a dockworker, worked in mental health, traveled to Japan, Southeast Asia, and Peru, almost buckled under the weight of American war-fever and drove to Tucson for further instruction. Effecting his decision to live and study in the Southwest was an interest in tracing the life and work of Frederick Sommer. There are many influences, but Sommer ranks with honored primacy. After receiving an MFA in Photography from the eclectic and good-hearted University of Arizona, Zak was hired by the Abbie Loveland Tuller School in Tucson. Zak is currently making art and teaching sciences and PE to a lovely mob of K-8 children. Zak loves nature and is edging closer to it at all times. He is equally grateful for found nature and made nature. At a recent art event populated by other practitioners of art I felt a need to explain why I do what I do now, which is to teach in a disparate field, to children and young adults. Those amongst the group of artists who know me best know that teaching primary school is a fitting thing for me to do. But to those who do not know me, I feel a persistent need to explain. The art scene can extend... self-cultivate to be bothersome and rude, misguided by illusory pretensions and trumped up by alienating speech. Case in point, ‘It is all about neo-shamanistic cyborgs right now’, (overheard one evening, perhaps in jest, though one can rarely tell). It is modestly enjoyable to avoid a life sentence of art speak and popularity schemes. Granted, it would be equally enjoyable to surround oneself with a steady stream of art and ideas and equally committed creative workers... But, i am going to say this now, for those who do not know me well, I made my life around art because i am interested in its ability to answer some basic questions. The questions are like this:
Where does consciousness come from?
What is the purpose of creativity?
What houses the spirit best?
How is my desire to make things linked to the universe’s desire to make itself?
How can play become work and vice versa?
What role does childhood play in how this world should exist?
A fine laboratory for observing others ponder these questions is the classroom, if the classroom is done well. We would be foolish to believe that, as adults, we are able to endeavor with these questions in any superior fashion than that of our children. It all takes place in the school yard, all the same questions that I was ever interested in working on. And if someone brings up neo-shamanistic cyborgs on the playground, one can tell such a comment is germinating through the earnest soil of humor and play.
2. & 3. Rebecca Ruth Peel
Untitled.Paint, canvas, wood, chain, rope, digital print. dimensions variable. 2013,
Rebecca Peel, b. 1990, is a Portland-based artist working under a variety of disciplines. She received her BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art.
"~…just as several lives may overlap and intertwine, so too do these beautiful
~…and form a mesh. A cooperative object that obeys dynamic laws, and serves
a rather binary purpose…on the one, a binding embrace; on the two, a binding restraint.
…and what is now often forgotten is this: as transcendental object, when rendered along the contours of self-indulgence, tend to disintegrate in quality... as unifying experience, will more likely maintain divine and mystic properties."
Untitled. Canvas, lithographic ink, broken part of an IKEA closet. dimensions variable. 2013
b. 1988, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, is an artist living and working in Portland, OR.
"A closet is a site of constant interior/exterior flux. Clothes in addition to personal belongings are cleaned, hung/folded, stored, to potentially used never again (or ever be used at all), collected, preserved in pristine or soiled condition, organized by color, fabric, style, brand, occasion, season, etc. Memories are embedded within or washed away to be reassembled into new compositions that give rise to new meanings through the experience of daily life. A closet in this light becomes a space of nurturing for forms. In the very sense that it serves as a clearing where being takes place-- specifically the development of style and self-image. A closet "receives, takes in, and possesses without in turn any correlative impression" (EG).
This is exemplified by the metonymic object of the closet (fragment of a portable Ikea closet), but also this aspect becomes significant in the form of creases. Folds and lines become the reestablishment of this loss/absent semblance to the space. Objects and garments are folded to compartmentalize or in a more dramatic means, cramming and condensing content into a snug container of meaning. The result appears in the physical world as excess.
This excess is a point of interest in the work, especially with the multidextrous definition of line which spans literal to more genealogical interpretation, to something more quotidian as language.
The lines are enveloped by the folds creating a path of colors that drift in and out of sight, occasionally encountering one another in various states. In what direction they are moving is uncertain. It’s just a minor thread(t). "
"(Make do with what you have
Take what you can get
Pay no mind to us
We're just a minor threa(d))"
1. Longitudinal extension
3.A thread extended to direct any operations
4. The string that sustains the angler’s hook
5. Lineaments, or marks in the hands or face
8. As much as is written from one margin to the other; a verse
10. Work thrown up; trench
13. Equator, equinoctial circle
14. Progeny, family, ascending or descending
15. A line is one tenth of an inch
16. A letter; as in, I read your lines
www.kraquipiso.tumblr.com/
Assemblages of Labor. Silk, terracotta bricks, rope, acrylic paint, environment, conversations with laborers. dimensions variable. 2013
b.1982 Boston, MA USA. Is an artist who combines found and sought materials to complete simple site-specific gestures. She is also the founder of The Object Permanence Project and organizer of A New Materiality.
This work is part of an ongoing exploration of materials and their origins. In some ways this is a very personal process as I seek out materials that have some conceptual significance. Gathering the materials often leads me to industrial sites or factory producers/distributers allowing me to engage with people from many trades and crafts. This process highlights the power of materials in their unmediated forms while bringing people into the conversation of contemporary art who are often left out. Who gets credit for labor is often a topic that is not directly addressed by the art world today.
Working site-specifically this work was imagined ahead of time only as an amorphous shifting of materials in space. It's improvisation arises out of a physical presence and a conceptual openness. I am always trying to uncover the unseen.
Music from Saharan Cellphones. 2 vinyl records
Christopher Kirkley is a music collector and archivist focused on the Sahel of West Africa. His work examines contemporary popular musics, the interplay of localized traditions with trans-global influences, and new modes of cultural transmission.
"Music from Saharan Cellphones" are vinyl compilations of MP3s that were collected from memory cards of cellular phones in Northern Mali. Here, the cellphone is re-appropriated as a personal device that stores and playbacks music and permits file sharing in direct proximity transfers, creating a vast digital network across the Sahara. In this subsequent transfer, the MP3s are made remade again, realized as physical, analog copies."
3 Digital Rings,3D printed stainless steel impregnated with bronze. dimensions variable. 2012
The Opulent Project (T.O.P.) is a conceptual jewelry and design studio located in Portland, OR. It is made up of designer/maker collaborative Meg Drinkwater and Erin Gardner.
T.O.P. was founded in 2007 as Meg and Erin finished the BFA
Program in Jewelry and Metalsmithing at The University of Oregon and the following year they established a studio in the Old Town/Chinatown neighborhood in Portland, OR. T.O.P. values a conceptual approach to the making process and their practice is defined by a tendency to experiment, a desire to learn and propensity to exploit a technique, material or concept. They use both traditional methodologies as well as current technology to produce projects and their work is ever oscillating between the worlds of craft, art and design.
T.O.P. has been carried at stores such as The Shop at The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, The MoMA Design Store, The Walker Art Center Shop and most recently was included in The Norton Museum of Fine Art’s Bijoux! event in West Palm Beach FL. Gallery representation includes Gallery Loupe in New Jersey and Galerie Noel Guyomarc’h in Montreal, Cananda. T.O.P. has been featured in publications such as Glamour Italy, Metalsmith Magazine, Harpers Bazaar and the book, “A Girl’s Best Friends: Creative Jewelry Design.”
T.O.P. has also organized and participated in both site specific and traveling exhibitions. It embraces a collective method to promote the individual practices of emerging jewelers through themed collections and projects. Included in this was the well received, Costume Costume show, which was first featured at the Sculptural Object Functional Art Fair in New York City with Sienna Gallery and later in Lenox, MA at Sienna Gallery.
This ring was constructed digitally using 3 different open source 3D ring models found on Google 3D warehouse. These appropriated files seemed to be intended solely for the virtual world and were never intended to exist in a tangible form. Perhaps they were created for use in Second Life or in a 3D online game.
The 3 chosen ring files represent the accepted and understood visual language for translating the idea of a ring, and thus they act as symbols. By combining these symbols into one ring we further emphasize the caricature of what a ring is in our collective mind.
http://www.theopulentproject.com/
Untitled. Acrylic on raw canvas, 8.5x11. 2013,
There's something familiar about Israel Lund's work, a built in memory you can't quite trace, peering into the static of a television or the pixels of a familiar JPEG. While his tongue-in-cheek paintings of Xeroxes of his own paintings of Xeroxes play into the banality of post-post-modern art's pillar of self-referential commodity, they are presented with a certain grandeur and beauty that eventually betrays their blatancy, and simultaneously exposes and negates their intimacy. Process painting in the Meta age produces a result that is both serial and nebulous, critical and trivial, which Lund's work manages to comment on with humor and visceral splendor. Like Warhol's Pop silkscreens in an age where the subject of celebrity finally been nullified, or replaced, instead, by the artist's own ego. Lund has a history of reproducing his own property, whether created, worn or found by him; using zines, books, sculpture and internet portals like Tumblr to distribute his work, gaining him an underground and international notoriety. Rob e rts&T lit on marks his first solo show, which opened Saturday at Roberts & Tilton gallery in Los Angeles, and he is currently exhibiting in group shows at both Galerie Torri in Paris and Middlemarch in Brussels. We caught up with him on opening night in LA for a few questions about his work.
Dazed Digital: What is the process of making these paintings?
Israel Lund: All of my paintings use silk screens to screen print on raw canvas, but unlike the traditional process of screen printing there is no image per se that I am starting with. Instead I used a standard 8.5x11" piece of paper to burn in to the screen, which determines the size of the painting and which I also work within to generate the image. The subsequent image is a result of how much pressure I apply with the squeegee, how much ink I use, and the raw canvas texture. For the paintings in the show at Roberts & Tilton I photographed a small b&w painting with a PDF making app on my phone, blew up the image to 34x44", and burned that image back into a silk screen. That image was then screen printed through a de facto cmyk process (except no black was used), and since the canvas is raw it resists a perfect image to be printed and leads to the variation.
DD: How does technology influence your work?
Israel Lund: I've recently taken to using a few PDF making apps to reproduce images of my paintings (previous iterations I photocopied the paintings), but I wouldn't really consider that "technology". It's actually more quotidian than technological.
DD: Is it all about painting or all about images?
Israel Lund: Both.
(Taken from: http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/16045/1/israel-lund)
http://www.israellund.com/
Untitled, Silk Painting, silk and dye, 1x1m. 2013
Elizabeth Jaeger is an artist and co-owner of an artist press, Peradam. Originally from San Francisco, she is currently living and working in New York. Her work consists of lightweight silk paintings, mid sized books and ceramics, and heavy, life-sized figurative sculptures.
Previously her work consisted of large scale ceramic and plaster figurative sculpture that dealt with intimacy and sexuality. Upon moving to NY she was faced with a lack of space as well as a lack of resources. She subsequently transformed her sculptural practice, painting images of her would-be sculptures on silk scarves.
Untitled, Vinyl flooring, tar, acrylic paint. 15cm x 15 cm. 2013.
b. 1979 Lowell, Michigan USA. Lives Istanbul, Turkiye
Raised on a small lake surrounded by forest, Marga’s observations and intrigue of the natural world led her to replicate these tactile sensations by way of mixed media paintings and sculptures. A restless energy is constant throughout her work reflective of the tumultous and often volatile relationships peolple have with nature.
www.margapatterson.carbonmade.com
"Everything I make is an experiment: a spontaneous creation inspired by memory, dream or
experience. All my work is energy based. I am interested in creating movements, rhythms,
and tensions. Creating active surfaces that pull the viewer in all directions. Open to the
unknown and curious about the new."
Untitled. Vinyl adhesive material. dimensions variable. 2013
b. 1981 in Yankton, South Dakota. Currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
She enjoys light for all its tricks, dances, shadows, illuminance, illusions, and ultimate warmth.
www.reedyshardware.com
Documentation of a Ceramic Vessel. Ceramic, paint, digital photographic print. dimensions variable. 2013
b. 1988, has spent most her life in the bright light and nocturnal nights of the Sonoran Dessert in Tucson, Arizona.
"I like to think of my work as an adaptogen, a term used in herbal medicine, for the soft but strong actions a physical substance might take to assist the body’s ability to cope with and adapt to stressors. I use the adaptogenic qualities of ceramic (composited particulate matter seduced through the juicy moistening of fluvial affects into arrested affinities), as healing weights to balance the contemporary socializing effects of the digital screen. This practice is taken on in an effort to revitalize excitement in alternative ways of communicating outside of text and image (bound and fixed positions), into empowered, yet vulnerably visceral physical forms of insurrectionary beauty pageantry. I use marbled clay, a medium that is highly likely to explode under the pressures of the kiln due to differences in various clay bodies, to show my belief in taking the risk of physical contact."
"Life appears: a complex dampness, destined to an intricate future and charged with secret virtues, capable of challenge and creation. A kind of precarious slime, of surface mildew, in which a ferment is already working. A turbulent, spasmodic sap, a presage and expectation of a new way of being, breaking with mineral perpetuity and boldly exchanging it for the doubtful privilege of being able to tremble, decay, and multiply."
--Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones
www.liamarion.tumblr.com/
