Ashes to Ashes
Cover image: 'FUTURE,' 2017.
'3018' will be on view at Galerie Perrotin's Lower East Side location through October 21, 2018.
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Cover image: 'FUTURE,' 2017.
'3018' will be on view at Galerie Perrotin's Lower East Side location through October 21, 2018.
Gal Schindler, Wishing Well, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Raised on the work of de Kooning, Lee Krasner and Milton Avery, Schindler’s work exudes a sense of fluidity and ambiguity. Further citing influences ranging from old-style Disney characters and antique botanical wallpaper, the artist combines a charming illustrative style with gestural strokes and a unique scratching technique to depict figures reclining languidly leaning in and against their pastel backdrops, merging into one indecipherable composition.
Gal Schindler, Fire Fountain, In the Meantime, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
At the heart of Schindler's practice lies an exploration of the human form. Her nudes serve as conduits for a multitude of emotions, embodying the fragility and mutability of the human, and particularly female, experience. Further drawing on influences from her childhood, the artist references intricately depicted anatomical drawings, her loose figures and strokes blurring the boundaries between flesh and canvas.
Undoubtedly spring-like in their palette, Schindler’s works are both optimistic and uplifting, with the artist referencing themes of renewal, regeneration and growth in her playful alternatives to traditional nudes depicted under a male gaze. There’s a sense of performativity, appealing to both a female and a younger gaze by creating fluid figures that defy categorization. Schindler’s paintings are sweet without being saccharine and sensual without being overtly sexual, instead, they occupy a liminal space between categories, appealing to anyone who may be a little ground down by moody palettes and sterile compositions. The transitory nature of Schindler’s composition speaks to the flux of the human form and an inability to contain and categorize the human form.
Gal Schindler, Live the Questions Now, Paint the Rain, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Gal Schindler, Crystal Clear, A Promise, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Wishing Well is a playful collection of fairy-tale figures that lean between sensual characters and traditional forms, with the transitory nature of the compositions creating a sense of impermanence that comes from the artist's unique technique of scratching into wet paint to create transitory forms. Schindler's works occupy a realm between landscape and figuration, where bodies float in a nebulous non-space. Beginning with instinctual colour planes, the artist overlays rapid structural lines, leaving behind traces of gesture and memory. The resulting figures blend seamlessly with their visual surroundings, their forms emerging from the depths of the canvas like reflections on still water, calling to mind the “Wishing Well’ in question. Life ripples on still water, Schindler’s figures remain distorted and alluring, half-emerging and half-hidden, they occupy somewhere between imagination and reality.
Wishing Well is on view at Ginny on Frederick, 99 Charterhouse St, Barbican, London EC1M 6HR, United Kingdom until May 24th, 2024.
Thomas Blair, Crashed Car (Flat)
White Car Crash, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Kapp Kapp.
Upon entering the show, the viewer meets Blair’s Crashed Car (Flat) (2024), a cropped snapshot of a wrecked vehicle, doused with splashes of violet and rust on its body. Upon closer examination, the image feels unstable or uncanny, not quite hand painted but also not entirely photographic. This effect of image hybridity epitomizes Blair's inkjet paintings — depicting generated images of car crashes (an overt Warholian homage to the Death & Disaster series), they interrogate how the feeling of a painterly moment can be manufactured in an iterative negotiation between human and machine.
In his towering White Car Crash (2024), layers of ink appear to vibrate and bleed into one another, an indication of Blair’s multistep process of producing images in AI, slicing them into layers, then repeatedly running each layer on canvas through a printer. The result is a reverse engineered painting — Blair’s approximation of a human touch via machine achieves, paradoxically, a potent expressiveness.
Kunning Huang, Untitled (nature of art), 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Kapp Kapp.
In Huang’s answer to the “problem,” his referential strategy summons the history of Chinese imagery and rice paper, attaining a lyrical balance between past and present. In the anterior of the gallery, his piece titled Untitled (nature of art) (2024) broadcasts the tongue in cheek thematic tagline “Nature of Art,” alongside imagery lifted from an early Qing Dynasty painting manuscript — a graceful pond scene, complete with grass stalks and dragonflies. But the objects and their surroundings seem tonally inverted and actively glitching, indicating Huang’s treatment of rounds of image processing in the preparation stages of his practice. Quilted in tiles, each panel of the work undergoes an intensive process: a specially rigged Canon printer impresses onto an acrylic sheet and thereafter, Huang rubs the printed ink directly onto rice paper, continuing a technique performed in ancient Chinese woodblock printing. The porous nature of the material causes the CMY ink colors to separate, culminating in a pleasurably pixelated texture. In this manner, Huang’s historically enriched approach demystifies present day conceptual concerns and technologies as existing within deeper lineages.
Waseem Nafisi, Bar Peasants (after Malevich), 2023
Second Impressions (after Malevich), 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Kapp Kapp.
Nafisi similarly leads with an art historical reference — the paintings of Kazimir Malevich — in his playful interventions into the thrust of post-modernity. In Bar Peasants (2023), a distorted copy of a brightly colored Malevich painting is bisected by a stretcher bar that literally juts out from either side of the canvas, while also appearing to nudge forward a horizontal sliver of the image — yet this tromp-l'œil unit remains physically flat on the canvas. Nafisi accomplishes this effect by constructing a to-scale miniature “stretcher bar” fixed onto a page from a Malevich monograph, then photocopied and printed onto the canvas. As Malevich serves as a stand-in for the crushing sensation of art history standing on one’s shoulders, Nafisi triumphantly pierces the purified image to assert his place in the “now.”
In Second Impressions (After Malevich) (2024), he employs a similar technique of flattened physicality, in this instance introducing a hand-painted wooden feature in the foreground. True to theme, the only occurrence of paint in this exhibition of paintings is merely an image of paint. This ironic demonstration reveals a self-conscious strategy by Nafisi: the painter’s hand itself becomes an image.
It may come as no surprise that as art school peers, Blair and Huang both trained as photographers, while Nafisi studied more traditional painting — all three departed their mediums and converged in the center at technologically-driven painting practices. The culmination of these young artists’ experiments suggests that painting can trudge through the societal jungle of images and increasingly intelligent technologies of today by borrowing from the toolkit of the past — a promise that digital acceleration can, in fact, enhance the joie de vivre of making and experiencing art.
Canon is on view at Kapp Kapp, 86 Walker St 4th Floor, New York, NY 10013 until May 11, 2024
In January, Creative Capital announced this year’s grantees, a beautifully colorful and expansive list of artists sending powerful messages through the visual arts and film/moving image. A total of 54 artists will each receive up to $50,000 of unrestricted project funding as well as opportunities to build their network and creative community. So Creative Capital is not only helping to ignite the fire in each artist but assuring that it burns on fiercely even beyond each new work. “We’re committed to not only helping these brilliant artists realize their projects, but to also create the conditions that will enable their artistic practices to thrive,” President and Executive Director Christine Kuan echoed.
This year’s grantee group is made up of 80% artists of color — 20% of which are Native or Indigenous individuals. Northern Cheyenne painter and printmaker Jordan Ann Craig is among that category. Craig uses her work to fuel her imperative pursuit of bringing visibility to the place she comes from.
Jordan Ann Craig always infuses her upbringing into her work, speaking from her personal experiences. Her Creative Capital-supported project will be in collaboration with her mother, Brigit Johnson. Within this work, Books Not Returned to the Library, Craig and Johnson are speaking with authority on an epidemic that has flown largely under the radar for the general public: the rapid disappearance of Native women occurring every single day, at unimaginable rates. This work will include handmade books, each representative of one missing or murdered Native woman, girl, or two spirit — telling their stories on a larger scale, as they deserve to be told.
Below, office spoke to her about her Creative Capital-funded project and what it means to open doors for others, as it has been done for her.
Kayla Curtis-Evans — How do you continually infuse your Northern Cheyenne heritage into your work?
Being a Northern Cheyenne woman, I feel everything I make is inherently Indigenous and Northern Cheyenne. In my practice, I bring in specific design elements inspired by Cheyenne and Northern Cheyenne beadwork and quillwork. I study beaded and/or quilled moccasins, baby carriers, and pouches, adorned in beautiful Plains Indian motifs. I feel very lucky to have incredible art to study and bring into my own art.
How does your current setting of Northern New Mexico influence your artistic outlook?
Color is very important to my work and how I experience my surroundings. In New Mexico, color is highly concentrated and vivid. I often bring that saturation and contrast into my paintings. I am also surrounded by an amazing community of makers and artists in Northern New Mexico which keeps me motivated.
Tell me about your experience so far with Creative Capital and what it means to you to have this organization assist you in spreading this message.
Having Creative Capital support my collaborative project with my mother is huge. Our project is a big undertaking, and we are currently at the beginning phases of our timeline. Having Creative Capital’s support and resources will undoubtedly help us carry out a successful project.
Your installation, Books Not Returned Library, will explore the major epidemic of Native women rapidly disappearing. How does your work act as an amplifier for the many Native stories that go unheard?
Books Not Returned Library is a collection of handmade books in which each book tells the story of a missing or murdered Indigenous woman, girl, or two-spirit. This library is overwhelmingly full, a powerful indicator of a severe and heartbreaking problem in our society. Collectively and individually, the books share the horrific reality of the violence happening against Indigenous women and girls. These books are a physical place for stories to live on. Every person has a story, and many of these stories have been untold or erased. This library is Brigit Johnson’s vision and idea. As her daughter and collaborator, I’m helping her bring this library to life. We are doing this for the countless Native women whose stories have been swept under the rug, including my mom’s sister Amy Johnson, who went missing in 1986.
Tell me about the research that will go into this project, as each “book” in the library will tell the story of a missing or murdered Indigenous woman. How did you discover the stories you wanted to bring to the surface?
Books Not Returned Library is at the beginning stages of research. With the generous funding awarded by Creative Capital, my mother and I are embarking on a research-heavy project that will require community engagement as well as consulting from a range of experts. We will be working with librarians, MMIWG2S experts, bookbinders, craftsmen, and most critically, the many families impacted by MMIWG2S.
You create abstract paintings, prints, and artist books. In this project’s case, you depart from those mediums, the books providing an in-depth visual analysis of just how grave this phenomenon is. Walk me through the process of creating these books and the technical skills applied.
Book Arts is truly a beautiful craft and art. I have been enamored by handmade books ever since I learned binding techniques in college. Each book will be handmade with love and attention to detail. We will be using traditional bookbinding techniques, and add details like letterpressed text to the spines.
Why is it important to you to use your vision to advocate for stories that do not always receive visibility — what do you hope the collective reaction is to telling these stories on a larger platform?
We want viewers to experience the gravity of the MMIW2S epidemic through Books Not Returned Library. We want people to feel overwhelmed, angry, and saddened by the amount of books in the library which translates to missing or murdered life. We want change, we want dialogue, and we want justice. More people need to know of this overlooked huge issue in our society. We are humanizing the available data to ultimately encourage change while also providing a safe space for families affected by MMIW2S to heal and share their loved ones’ stories.
How can we continue to support artists in the ways Creative Capital does?
My mom used to say, “If you just open the door for her, she will thrive.” I have been so lucky in my career that some big doors have opened up for me, giving me the chance to grow, succeed, compete, and thrive. As artists, we get a lot of “no’s” and closed doors. Taking a chance and providing a platform where you can say yes to artists and open those doors can be life-changing.