'Talking Pictures: Camera-Phone Conversations Between Artists' will be open through December 17th, 2017.
Sam Penn, Late Morning II, 2023
The largest portrait in the room presents the artist Martine Gutierrez gazing directly at the room with a hand partially obscuring her face, while the smallest portrait depicts Ethan James Green elegantly posing on the couch, both exuding a keen awareness. In a separate series, glimpses of bodies in contact (belonging to Sam Penn and her girlfriend) are shown, hazy and dreamy yet never revealing their entirety — alluding to the fact that there are aspects of oneself, certain details, disclosed only to a select audience (friends, lovers, those we entrust behind a camera), while some may remain fully unknown.
The skin, as the outermost boundary of the body, symbolizes the ego's interface with the external world. It is the boundary between the inner world and the outer environment, serving as a barrier that separates and protects the psyche from external influences. There is indeed, a lot of skin you’ll notice, yet even more that will never be yours, or mine, to see.
Turn My Way is a three-person show featuring artists Ethan James Green, Martine Gutierrez, and Sam Penn. The show is up through March 31st at OCDChinatown.
Ethan James Green, Living Room Self-Portrait, 2023
Ethan James Green is a photographer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Time, Vogue Italia, W Magazine, WSJ Magazine, and more. He has released several books, including Young New York (2019, Aperture) and Bombshell (2023, Baron), and has also collaborated with a range of fashion labels, among them Alexander McQueen, Dior, Fendi, Louis Vuitton, Miu Miu, Prada, Tom Ford, and Versace. In 2022, he founded New York Life Gallery.
Martine Gutierrez, Untitled, 2024
Martine Gutierrez is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist. From the fall of 2022 to the spring of 2023, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented her piece Supremacy as a billboard on the facade of 95 Horatio Street. Gutierrez’s photograph, Masking, Starpepper Mask (detail) (2018) from her project Indigenous Woman (2018), appeared on the cover of Artforum’s January 2019 issue. Gutierrez’s Indigenous Woman also notably featured in the Central Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale curated by Ralph Rugoff.
Sam Penn, Late Morning III, 2023
Sam Penn is a photographer and author of the zine Some Girls, published by New York Life Gallery. This is her second time showing with OCDChinatown following last year’s three-person show, It’s Personal. She was featured on Cultured’s 2023 list of young photographers.
A significant source of inspiration for A Day's Work stemmed both from Nin's fascination with fire and the Italian Renaissance practice of buon fresco mural painting, a technique in which artists apply pigments directly onto wet plaster on a wall or ceiling, typically completed in a single day, thus a nod to the installation's name. Armando Nin draws inspiration from a tapestry of urban subcultures rooted in the city, all while maintaining a keen fascination with fire as an artistic medium. In his work, he bridges the chasm of time, engaging with artistic visionaries like Michelangelo in a manner that feels as though they are present in contemporary moment. He tells me about the challenges faced by Renaissance artists — referred to by him as "middle age problems".
office sat down with Nin to talk about his craft, his creative process, and what hot candle wax feels like on your face.
Sarah Hersom— Hi Armando! Am I saying that right?
Armando Nin— Yeah, unless you're French, I think that’s good.
I’m definitely not. How are you today?
I’m good.
Tell me about A Day's Work. Why did you choose that name for this installation?
Fresco paintings are made in sections, and one would do that in one day. That’s where the title came from.
Installation shots by Stephen Fraught, courtesy of Foreign & Domestic and Armando Nin
And you did these with candle soot, did you do this in the dark?
Yeah, I worked by candlelight. I wanted to use candles because in medieval times candles were the only source of light, and candles also represented wealth. If you had a lot of candles, it also meant that you had staff to clean up after you because the more candles you had, the more dusty your house would be.
Did you have any fails where you burned through the canvas?
Of course. There’s a lot of trial and error.
And how long does it take to make one piece for an instillation like this?
It takes some time. It can take me a couple of days, but it took me my whole life to figure this out. I usually do it until the flame goes out. When the candle dies, that’s my cue.
Why choose to work through such a laboring process?
I always had this connection to searching for something. My work connects to loss, and loss and searching go hand in hand for me. I think part of my craft is working with things that are out of my control. Leaving some things up to chance.
Does it make the finished product more satisfying?
Absolutely. It's not even that hard, to be honest. I'm used to wax falling on me now, so it doesn’t feel dangerous anymore. If this were the Middle Ages, we would have to send letters back and forth with each question. Can you imagine that? This interview would probably take us a year and a half.
Earlier in the call, you referred to this as your “mental museum”. What did you mean by that?
I notice I say things without even thinking about it. I have this language with my art, and the paintings are a dialect of this language that I’ve been trying to make up in this searching. And the language is the instructions of how to search for something.
Have you ever sat in the tub and pushed water with your hands and seen it bounce and dribble? I don’t know how old you are, but I love just sitting in the tub.
I don’t have a tub, unfortunately, so I don’t get to do that a lot.
Yeah, but you know what I’m talking about.
Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re talking about.
Yeah, so that’s what I'm doing with smoke. And I’m doing it sideways, and in the dark. I’m trying to draw with a cloud for no reason. That’s what’s happening here in this mental museum. I’ve always been interested in different ways of making marks without paint. I joked around with my pals about being “the paintless painter”. A majority of my work is leaving marks and impressions of some sort.
I’m always trying to do something that makes somebody go “huh?” and then “wow!”
I definitely think you achieved that with this installation. It looks amazing.
Thank you so much, that means a lot. Even though the pieces come from a personal place, the art comes from a universal set of ideas from fresco paintings. But they also come from a present-day space. I grew up in New York and I remember seeing candle residue on ceilings and not knowing where that came from. Then getting older and finding out what that was like, oh, it was from fire.
A Day's Work is up through March 10th at Foreign & Domestic.
Have you had any apples today?
No. Although we both like apples they do not appear on our food palette all too often.
How come the film is called Apples and Colors — is it hinting at something serpent? The visuals and the rhythm feels very sober and sympathetic.
We were surrounded by apples and lots of colors, the colors of nature and the colors of paint. It was the title the director chose, and, just like colors — the idea stained.
When pressing play the viewer is transformed to a slice of earth where it feels like reality is put on pause — what does this portrayal illustrate to you, and how come you decided to welcome an audience into a place so personal?
It’s the place where we grew up, flourished. It's just our natural habitat and so when deciding the location with Massimiliano this place just made the most sense. The only sense of sense.
Working with video is also a new medium to the two of you. At what part of the process did Massimiliano Bomba enter the picture, or rather, film?
We spoke a while before actually deciding to actually create something together, and since Massimiliano seemed to have a particular idea we went along with it. For us it was more or less doing what we usually do at a place we call our home, a portrait of us. Perhaps his portrait of us, the painted and the painter together.
Even though you always work in collaboration, the span of that is usually exclusively to the tandem of two of you, how was it to let another artist into your practice?
Very Intimate. Yet we totally trusted Massimiliano. It wasn't difficult but an interesting space to be in.
Early on in the film you tell us that “the place does not have a name,” inevitably it hints at the ethos flowing through your creativity as a whole; no need to label, to explain, even to speak - the two of you, as artists, already function in symbiosis, could you tell us about that practice?
Words are often just not enough, they hardly express everything, if anything, there is to express. At least that is how we see it. That’s probably why we like to express ourselves with lines, brushstrokes or photographs. Perhaps why we were keeping it short.
How early on did it develop? How many works are scratched because one feels like the other messed it up?
From childhood onwards. It’s hard to say how many works are scratched, it depends on how one defines messing up and we two could argue about that endlessly, haha.
Have you ever tried to finish a painting by oneself, or do you paint as a means to come even closer to each other?
Yes but that usually feels as if the work is missing something. As for coming close, we are close enough already. We definitely don’t need to work together to become closer. We work together because for whatever reason it feels like it is the thing we have to do. But of course, we inevitably become closer through this process, but its not so much striving for a destination in our relationship as much as an essential part of the work.
Your motives are determinate yet sophisticated, foremost centered around the female figure which you not only have experience with though your own body but also by spending time with your other - could they be considered a love letter to each other?
We were always drawn to the female figure and Inevitably those figures are probably influenced by spending so much time with each other since we are born. But they are not love letters to each other, no, we don’t need that as there is and will always be unconditional love between us, no matter what.
Is she – your twin– a means to envelop and develop yourself as an individual?
No, we very much like to do our work together. Developing as an individual happens more outside our work process.
Is there any way this feeling or process could be put into words?
Unfortunately, not with words.
