Lauren: Zdzisław Beksiński

Zdzisław Beksiński was a Polish artist who was born in 1929 and died in 2005 and left a lasting impression in contemporary surrealism. Growing up in the midst of World War II and the German occupation of Poland doubtless influenced how he viewed the world; many of his works illustrate a fascination with barren landscapes and post-apocalyptic scenery. However, Beksiński did not get his start in the art world until the late 1950’s.

Born in a small town in Poland, he studied commerce in secondary school. In 1947, after Poland’s liberation from Germany and under pressure from his father, who was a surveyor, he entered the Faculty of Architecture of the Cracow University of Technology. Although Besiński had dreamed of attending film school, his father convinced him that construction was the most practical path in war-devastated Poland. After earning his degree in 1952 he began working as a supervisor on construction sites but was never happy with his career; in the following years he started to dabble in the arts as a hobby. Seeing an art as a way to potentially exit his construction job and live out his dreams of being involved in visual arts, he applied himself more seriously to developing a body of work in the late 1950’s.

His earliest works were concentrated in photography and abstract plastic sculpture; in 1958 he began to show his work in exhibitions across Europe. Much of his photography depicted recurring themes that would appear in his later paintings: a fascination with texture, landscapes, wrinkled faces, and disturbing images like portraits where the face was obscured or hidden; his sculptures also displayed clues into a style that would eventually evolve into fantastic surrealism and expressionism.

In the 1960’s, feeling technical limitations in photography, he began to experiment with painting, and it was this body of work that brought him his first successes within the art world. With no formal training, his first images were abstract and gradually developed a more surrealistic tone.

Beksiński’s paintings are often classified into two periods: a “fantastic realism” period and a period in his later years that returned to abstraction. His style was consistent through both of the periods, however: dominated by surrealistic fantasy and dream-like imagery, and executed with minute precision. He completed his paintings in oils on hardboard, painting meticulously so that no brushstrokes were visible. He also made many meticulous pencil drawings throughout his artistic career. Beksiński’ described his own work as either “baroque” or “gothic”, depending on the subject matter; the first was dominated by representation, and the latter by form. As his career progressed, the gothic form-dominated images became more and more frequent, but it was his baroque “fantastic realism” style that first garnered him attention in the art world.



His first major exhibition of his fantastic realism works took place in the Stara Pomaranczarnia in Warsaw in 1964, where all the pieces shown were sold. Within a decade he was hailed as the best painter in Poland. During this period his work often depicted surreal, post-apocalyptic scenes: deserts, deformities, death, skeletons and emaciated figures, all painted in lush, subdued colors with carefully rendered textural details that emphasized their dreamlike quality. The tone of his work may well have been influenced by the fact that he grew up in Poland during the German occupation of World War II; the rubble of bombed buildings were a part of his daily landscape.

Beksiński described his work as photographs of dreams and the subconscious, but interestingly he always insisted that his work was misinterpreted as being grim. He saw his images as lighthearted and sometimes even humorous, though he also stated that he did not know the exact meaning of his work. He would stubbornly refuse to apply any ideology or meaning to his images, and shunned critics who attempted to decipher his work. None of his work had titles and was signed on the back. Instead of expressing a message within his work, the only thing that mattered to him was the way an image would be painted. The process itself of laboring over texture and form is what drove him to create his imagery. However, the loaded iconography of his work makes it difficult for even the causal viewer to try to discern intent.

Beksiński himself was a charismatic but extremely secluded man; he rarely appeared in public and refused to allow anyone watch him work in his studio, where he would spend twelve hours a day working to classical music. The only point where his creative process was documented was when he allowed a camera to be set up in his studio to capture him working. The film showed that during the first week of his process, everything on the hardboard was vague until one day it would suddenly take form as he executed what would appear to be the most tedious and laborious portions of the painting within the space of a day.

He never attending his own exhibitions and the more popularity his work garnered, the more he shunned his celebrity, eventually moving out of his hometown of Sanok to live in Warsaw in 1977, where he hoped to mingle anonymously within the crowd of the city. By this point in his life, he only gave one or two interviews a year and would never speak about personal or current events. He also refused to accept awards and medals.

Artistically, he felt out of place in contemporary society where tradition was shunned in the art world. Instead, he felt close affiliation with 19th century painter, writers, and musicians such as Klimt, Turner, Bocklin, and Friedrich. But in both technique and subjects, he drew from no outside influences, only his own subconscious; the images made themselves without paying heed to the traditional role of the painting. His work spoke to the a public interested and absorbed in psychoanalysis and existentialism.

In 1977, Beksiński destroyed a portion of undocumented work in his backyard. Through his own account, these works were expressionistic in nature and recalled the styles of Polish artists Cwenarski and Wróblewski. During this period he worked quickly and large, sometimes completing up top five paintings in a day, refusing to polish anything to be critical of what he was producing. In an interview he said, “I think that was the only time I was really sincere. Or maybe just naive?” But no record exists of what his work looked like during this period; perhaps the very reason Beksiński destroyed it was because he felt it was too naïve and clumsy, too much of a departure from the tightly controlled style of his other work.



However, as Besiński’s life progressed, his work did become noticeable less controlled, complementing his departure from complicated and detailed subject matter as he moved on to abstract form and simplistic, powerful compositions during the 1980’s. There was a distinct simplification of form and subject, and a more subdued and monochromatic approach to color during this period. He focused on disquieting buildings, monumental structures on barren backgrounds, and surreal silhouettes that are suggest form but evade identification. Despite the abstraction, he continued to focus on realistic perspective and lighting, which grounded the images into surreal alternate reality.

In 1997, with computer art beginning to emerge, he started experimenting with photographic composites and digital montages, a medium he concentrated on until 2005 when he was murdered in his apartment by the son of his landlord after he refused to lend the boy money.

Beksiński’s legacy is one of a unique artist of his time: an artist who loaded his images with scenes from nightmares and horrific distortions, yet stubbornly insisted they bore no meaning, who worked in a period where the concept of art was seen to transcend the technical execution. But to him, the execution was all there was: the laborious, meditative act of simply creating. His process became an autobiography of sorts, in which he created for the sake of creating without allowing himself to be influenced by the expectations of the art world…and in the process of refusing to name his intent, he allowed his audience to immerse themselves in his work and create meaning themselves.

Revised Artist Statement - Lauren

My work depicts a mythology and world of my own creation. I have always been inspired by fantasy, and as a child it was only natural for me to begin to create my own stories. Over the years, these stories have grown into a world that is monumental in scope, and that world is the driving force behind the majority of my work.

I work in a style I call surreal fantasy, attempting to blend psychological undertones with aesthetics. I am fascinated with the strange, the macabre, and the beautiful; the universe by nature is as cruel as it is magnificent and the content of both my images and the structure of the world itself reflect that. Legends and specific characters are portrayed with a focus on pathos and narration, and my future works will continue down this path of slowly unfolding a new part of history with each new work.

James G: Tony Oursler

Tony Oursler works with the uncanny. Freud wrote “the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” Tony Oursler is an artist who works with video projections onto different surfaces that trigger uncanny feelings. Commenting on culture’s relationship to technology, his work follows surrealist ideas about psychology and postmodern ideas about art and culture. His videos project eyes, lips, faces, whole people and many other things onto sculpture or landscape. Tony Oursler’s work is creepy and highly relevant to postmodern thinking in the way he approaches video and projection.

Tony Oursler was born in 1957 in New York City. Shortly after, his family moved to upstate New York. For college, he moved to California in 1975 in order to attend the California Institute for the Arts. He received his BA in 1979. He had moved back to New York by 1981, where in addition to doing freelance film editing, he promptly was able to show his video work at the MOMA in New York, in an exhibition called Video Viewpoints. Entranced and involved with the alternative punk counterculture of the Reagan eighties (he directed a music video for post-punk icons Sonic Youth in 1990), the aesthetic of his early video work is reminiscent of the countless sarcastic neon cartoon album covers of underground punk bands. In what he admits is a pop aesthetic, bright colors construct cartoonish scenes that are narrated with a comical voiceover that sounds like it is trying too hard to narrate something abstract and silly. Oursler describes the videos as “very poetic fractured narratives.”

Obsessed with the idea of television and the culture surrounding it, Oursler thinks of TV as a medium that is socially unifying but also as something “unattainable” by the masses. While the majority of people will never be on television, he says, the portable video camera gave him “instant access to a pop space that was unattainable, that was reserved for another part of culture.” The first commercially available portable camera was released in 1982, making the medium extremely new to the masses. But, as exciting as the medium was, Oursler disliked the idea of the television set acting as a piece of furniture, and looked for a way to break from that. He wanted the video to act as its own work, not through the context of the television set.


In the early 1990s, with the invention of LCD mini video projectors, Oursler began to use video projections as a way to break outside of the screen. Artist Constance DeJong credits Oursler with “a singular, major contribution… He released the moving image from the rectangle.” In 1991, for a piece called Window Project, Oursler projected a video of a ghostly woman onto an arched glass window looking out into the city street. In 1992, he exhibited an installation called The Watching where he projected video of faces onto different sculptures. One was projected onto a sphere in the top corner of a room, another onto a faceless figure made from stuffed fabric. There were also security cameras throughout the gallery feeding to a control room on the top floor where gallery goers were allowed to aggressively confront other viewers in the gallery. After The Watching, Tony Oursler’s work began to move from video productions towards projection.

Tony Oursler goes into detail about his relationship with projection in an interview with Christiane Meyer-Stoll. He says that “many of my works play with the projection as skin, as identity.” He thinks of his projections of faces to be sexually ambiguous and finds that “one viewer sees a woman projected onto a figure, the other sees a man… [The viewers] are projecting onto the figure as well, psychologically.” This dual meaning of the word projection is what drives his work. The uncanny nature of the projections conjures disturbing images and feelings, which ultimately becomes a reflection of our own psyche. His eagerness for people to draw their own conclusions about the work is not only what makes his work postmodern but also what ultimately makes the work successful.


In 1996, Tony Oursler presented an installation called Eyes. This work consists of several videos of eyes watching television projected onto large fiberglass spheres. Larger than a human head, the projected eyes blink, twitch, and dart back and forth almost frantically with the reflection of a television screen reflected in the pupil. The overt references to watching television combined with the disturbing eyes are clearly referencing the troubling and addictive relationship people have to television. The eyes are instantly creepy and unsettling. Interestingly and ironically, in Oursler’s struggle to separate video from the television set he has returned to the television as a metaphor.

The new millennium brought another new direction for Oursler. In the fall of 2000, he showed an exhibition entitled The Influence Machine. Originally shown in Madison Square Park in New York City, the work consisted of many ghostly projections onto parts of the landscape, including buildings, trees, a fountain, a fence, and smoke. The title references a discovery in the 1700s that eventually led to the invention of the television, as well as a completely unrelated essay that explained a psychological condition where patients felt their actions were being controlled by an external source. The work is also directly referencing a device called the phantasmagoria, which was a projection device invented in the late 18th century that was used for ghost shows.

The reference to the phantasmagoria seems pertinent to his overall work because of a reoccurring theme of interaction with technologies. With The Watching, The Influence Machine and Eyes, Oursler references both cutting edge and outdated technologies, both of which stupefied their audiences at their conceptions. Television continues to enthrall popular culture, and is ironically linked to global increases in both violence and laziness. Tony Oursler seems to be very interested in the psychological effects of new addictive technologies.
Oursler’s focus on technology’s effect on human psychology is very relevant to the work that I have been doing. Common themes of obsession, addiction, and an overall humorous outlook are present in his work, which are things that interest me and have recently been propelling my work. His comments on technology and culture’s relationship to each other are smart and witty, and his use of uncanny imagery is creepy and intriguing, just as it should be. Tony Oursler has been a working artist for almost 30 years and has consistently been producing quality work. His work serves as a model as how to work in a new and evolving medium.

Derek Hess: Influence of Alternative Art, Angst, and Aspiration

Born in 1964, Derek Hess grew up in Cleveland, Ohio with his father Roy Hess, chairman of Industrial Design at the Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA). (Answers.com) Hess’s relationship with his father holds a great deal of influence on his start and continuation in the art field. Roy Hess’s abilities created a feeling of aspiration in Derek and fostered his great talent in the arts. (Hess 1) This wasn’t the only thing that sparked Hess’s interest however. Derek found a strong connection with the comic superheroes of his time, much like many other children and remembers his father illustrating the war fantasies Derek would playfully create. (Answers.com) These things, along with encouragement, allowed this artist’s talent to flourish and grow. As a young boy, Derek’s parents placed him in Saturday art classes at CIA, helping him to develop and delve into the arts even further. (Pantsios) Encouraged to draw whenever boredom struck and memorized by the artistic abilities of his father, Hess pursued art once he graduated high school, beginning his professional journey toward fine arts. (Answers.com)
As a high school student, however, Hess turned down a dark road that lead him into a relationship with drugs and alcohol, one that seemed to only get worse when he reached the college level. (Pantsios) Taking advantage of his father’s position as chairman at CIA, Derek found it easy to take things for granted and fall victim to this temptation. (Pantsios) Falling behind in his work and taking semesters off to avoid facing this problem, Hess seemed to be digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole. Trying to escape using his father’s position as a crutch, Derek decided to transfer to the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit and study both illustration and design. (Hess 1) It was here that Hess faced his problem with substance abuse, using campus resources and groups to become sober in 1987. (Pantsios) With this shift in his approach to life, there was also a shift in how Hess approached his work. It seemed to the artist that his emotional connection to creation was no longer blurred by sustenance abuse and that now he had an excess of time to devote to his work. (Pantsios)
During the period that Hess was emerging into his skin as an artist and an adult, the music scene was undergoing developments that would ultimately affect Hess and his body of work. One development would become known as the alternative movement in music. More importantly, the concept of poster designs promoting music events would become a large aspect of both the music and design industries, as well as a large part of Derek Hess’ life. (Pantsios) Abandoning the idea of getting a degree, Hess started to work at the Euclid Tavern in 1990, where he in turn developed posters to promote bands and shows that he had booked for the venue. (Pantsios) This would soon become the beginnings of Derek Hess’s long relationship with both poster creation and the music scene. Utilizing his background in design, fine arts, and printmaking, Hess’ posters became widely coveted by teens and music junkies due to his dedication to craftsmanship and hands-on work. Although computer programs were becoming a large part of design during the nineties, Derek decided to stick with the foundations that he knew and could execute well. (Pantsios) It was this decision and his craftsmanship that would push Derek Hess into a career destined for success.

With work that seemed to stray from the ideals of the fine arts world and became more a part of the music underground, Derek joined many artists in the lowbrow movement. This recently founded movement (founded circa 1994) is defined by the characteristics of “alternative comix of the sixties and seventies with hot rod culture of the fifties” along with a splash of eighties punk art. (Feldman) and (Esaak) Artists like R. Crumb set the groundwork for a whole new vision in art, one that was considered below the world of fine art, but that in turn created a more relatable and interesting appeal to the common person and aspiring artists. (Feldman) Lowbrow didn’t strive for pretentious standing in the art world; rather, it was most interested in using common significant references and styles. (Easak) It was also a style and mindset that was placed on a public pedestal through the creation of Juxtapoz magazine by Robert Williams. Juxtapoz hit the stands and the public eye featuring lowbrow artists’ work and showing that they too were part of a larger community. (Esaak) The acceptance of this new culture in art created a comfortable, almost perfect, home for the work of Derek Hess; a place that allowed artists of the lowbrow movement to participate in the current artistic dialog.
After finding a home in the world of poster design and his groundings in areas of fine arts, Hess took to a career that became more profession based. Beneficial to this shift, was Hess’s partnership with Marty Geramita in 1993, a poster collector and dealer. (Hess 1) This relationship allowed Hess to gain enough financial backing to focus on production of art as well as boosting his recognition. With a style that was recognizably his own, Hess’s posters became in-demand for events and promotions around 1993. (Answers.com) Shortly after, Hess decided he needed to focus on his own messages rather than strictly commissioned projects. In 1995 Stretch Marks, Derek’s first show opened at the Busta Gallery in Cleveland kicking off his venture into the fine arts world. (Pantsios) Hess continued to move forward in production creating a number of originals, as well as prints, posters, album artwork, and even clothing. (Hess 1) Through these means Hess created financial stability and was able to enter his work into shows across the country and even has his 1993-1994 portfolio included in Louve’s permanent collection. (Gross) Over the years Hess has developed a dramatic style and maintained a close connection with production and the creative process.
With a distinct and edgy style, Hess has drawn in the support of many fans, as well as a solid level of exposure. Drawing influence from both comic book illustrations and the music world, Hess creates a strong idea of the figure, sketched lines, and angst into dramatic visions. (“Stefan” at BlogSpot.com) These highly graphic images catch the eye and smartly address issues pertaining to current political and social states, such as a recent campaign poster for President-Elect Barack Obama. Maintaining this distinct style over the years, Hess uses popular culture and political situations to fuel growth in his work. In Closer to Life Hess takes a figure and depicts it in a stylized, graphic nature filling the space around him with a sense of a simplistic and almost surreal environment. A nine color plate lithograph print, Closer to Life was created in 1989 as part of Hess’s printmaking study and shows the strong foundation of Hess’s artistic identity. In this piece, Hess depicts a large male figure taking up most of the space of the 30” by 22” print. This figure is poised in an almost floating manner among nondescript clouds and colors that create a backdrop. With a knife in hand, the subject seems to be cutting his ring finger off of his rights hand in a seemingly matter-of-fact way. Although color is brought into the print through the use of brown, red, blue, peach, and black, the figure is described in a relatively flat manner. Hess uses simple, sketchy lines to lay out space and creates a dramatic sense of negative space around the figure’s body by doing so.

When compared to some of his later and more current work like Floater and Not Dead Yet, Hess describes the figures in a very similar fashion. Maintaining a strong sense of sketchy lines and bold marks, Hess builds tension while also creating a simple description of form. Colors grow far bolder in his newer pieces however, and compositions become more playful in structure. In these later works the images of wings are utilized often, as well as the technique of collage. Hess combines the image of Captain America, the famous Marvel character into his piece Not Dead Yet revealing his attachment to comic icons. Although description is very similar to Hess’ earlier works, the collage aspect fills in much of the solid toned negative space around the figures and creates a more dramatic setting for his pieces. When Hess’s original artworks are compared to his prints, a similar approach can be observed. The figure and composition in particular closely mirror the printmaking process. Hess plays with the collage process in the way printmaking can utilize many different layers and carries over his takes on color and characters throughout each branch of work. In Floater (2008), a piece in which an angel-like figure is seen floating on a water line above submerged garbage cans and tires, Hess creates an interesting matte for the scene by laying a map around the piece’s border. Over the years, Hess has created work that pulls inspiration from the world around him, but that also continually maintains strong imagery, a sense of angst and of visual drama. Within this body of work Hess varies his inclusion of color and his choice of subject, but keeps a continuous description of the figure and constant line quality.

I almost fell upon the work of this talented artist in an event that seems much like a random chance occurrence. While watching an episode of LA Ink, Derek Hess made an appearance in the television program along with a fan both looking to get new tattoos. The art of each tattoo was striking and related to the style that I was personally very connected to and were both the designs of Derek Hess. After watching the episode, I took time to research Hess and discovered more work that proved to be a great source of inspiration. While reading about Hess’s style, I found an attachment to the printmaking process as well as related to his visual vocabulary. I feel comradery with Hess’ work, having created similar visions of figures and narratives in the past. My own work relates to Hess’s approach to mark making and the reduction of figures to lines. This new idea of companionship in the art world, even though it was one of distance, created a strong sense of confidence in me and led to further discovery of similar Lowbrow artists. Artists such as Audrey Kawasaki, Tara McPherson, Mark Ryden, and Robert Williams as well, all seemed to have similar edge to their work, incorporating everyday imagery and styles to shape new and distinct ones. With this idea of artistic company, I abandoned the idea of sticking to a style that I had considered the expected fine arts model in high school and started to develop a personal connection between my own conceptual intent and inspiration. I referenced images that I had only created on personal time to now form a new template of visual language in my work.

Connection to Hess, as well as the other artists mentioned above, was not a strictly visual one. There was also a resemblance to inspiration in comics and their visual style. Hess speaks of how as a student in the arts most of his classmates would try to relate their work to artists who were, and still are, held in high standing in the art world. Instead of following suit, Derek would relate his work to the artists creating comic book heroes and epic visual stories. I too, found inspiration in comic books and additionally graphic novels as well. Taught that this was not a true fine arts pathway, I abandoned this connection in many personal pieces. Returning to it only when I did art for pleasure rather than for assignment based purposes, this aspect of my art become something hidden away. With Hess as an important influence, I’ve taken a new sense of pride in my work. Hess opened my eyes to many artists who use the same vocabulary I am attempting to develop and allowed me to adventure even further into these ideas. He provided a figure of creativity based on the common, everyday man who achieved the status of an artist, which in my mind, and the mind of many other aspiring artists was similar to the status of a comic book hero. Derek Hess demonstrates that this was a status that was attainable and inspired the passion in me to fight for its achievement.

Trenton Doyle Hancock

"I get a lot of inspiration from garbage that I find, whether it be tops that I pick up out of the bin at the Laundromat, or something that I saw on the side of the road and was so inspired that I had to stop the car and get it and put it in the trunk. There's something about getting something that is free that is appealing to me, for one. But then the things that people throw away...oftentimes they throw them away because they're old. I see these objects that have this patina to them, that have this obvious history. It's been loved and hated and loved again, and ultimately discarded. There's [sic] so many stories to be told within these objects. And oftentimes once they've been thrown away and you find them in the garbage, they're pale imitations of what they once were. And it's just sometimes very intriguing and exciting to see what these objects have become. And so I set them up and then make up my own stories about them."

–  Trenton Doyle Hancock

           

            Trenton Doyle Hancock’s semiautobiographical drawing-collages curl onto the floor loaded with words, multiple drawing styles, paint, fake fur and cut fabric. His overwhelming all-encompassing installations pull viewers in like a vortex. Through a personal narrative of his own design, Hancock tackles sticky subjects and addresses the conflict surrounding life, death, and the nature of good versus evil. The ongoing semiautobiographical saga he fabricates weaves allegory, word play, satire, and humor into an inventive, multimedia collage. Trenton Doyle Hancock’s art reveals an obsession with feelings and conveys associations that are personal and universal, factual and fictive.  Creation myths, Bible stories, and the baser instincts of humanity instills an alternately comic and tragic tale of struggle and survival.

            Hancock was born in 1974 in Oklahoma City, OK and raised in Paris, Texas. He earned his BFA from Texas A&M University, Commerce and his MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia. As an undergraduate at East Texas State University, Hancock studied drawings under Lee Baxter Davis, a leader of the cartoon-illustration movement, and painting under Texas artist, Michael Miller. At that time he familiarized himself with the work of graduates Gary Panter, an illustrator and Georganne Deen, a painter, and eventually decided after feeling torn between painting and illustration, that he could do both.

            This conscious decision to fuse drawing with abstract expressionist painting/collage has resulted in Hancock’s acceptance into the 2000 and 2002 Whitney Biennial exhibitions, becoming one of the youngest artists in history to participate in such a prestigious review. Hancock has also been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, TX, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami. The Houston-based artist became the recipient of many rewards, those of which include the S.J. Wallace Truman Fund Prize in the 181^st Annual Exhibition (2006), the Joyce Alexander Wein Award from Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (1999), a Skowhegan Camille Hanks Cosby fellowship for African-American Artists, Maine (1997); and an Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Award from the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas. Hancock currently lives and works in Houston where he was also a 2002 Core Artist in Residence at the Glassell School of Art of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

            Influenced by the history of painting, especially Abstract Expressionism, Hancock transforms traditionally formal decisions—such as the use of color, language, and pattern—into opportunities to create new characters, develop sub-plots, and convey symbolic meaning. Hancock’s paintings often rework Biblical stories that the artist learned as a child from his family and local church community. In an interview with The Scotsman, Hancock discusses his sources of inspiration and influence: “There are a lot of ministers in my family and the women are even more intense about spirituality than the men. I hung out with my aunts and my mother, they were a big influence on me. Often I don’t have a biblical story in mind and then I realize I’ve just re-written the story of Noah or something” (Mansfield, Susan “Son of a preacher man,” The Scotsman). Hancock is surrounded with a sense of community filled with stories and music. These stories become valuable resources for his personal narratives such as characters like Loid and Painter. Hancock defines Loid as the very strict father energy that perceives the world in black and white. Painter is the spirit character with mothering energy. Wherever there is color within Hancock’s work, he notes that it is because of Painter’s presence. Hancock even goes on to say that his mother is the personal embodiment of these two characters as having the smiling face of Painter, but at the same time the sternness of Loid. Hancock’s prints, drawings, and collaged felt paintings also work together to tell the story of the Mounds—a group of mythical creatures that are the tragic protagonists of the artist’s unfolding narrative. These creatures, half human half plants, were the result of an ape-man masturbating on a field of flowers 50,000 yrs ago. In many of his other drawings, Hancock depicts human parts co-mingling with vibrant colorful plant forms. Each new work by Hancock is a contribution to the saga of the Mounds, portraying the birth, life, death, afterlife, and even dream states of these half-animal, half-plant creatures.

            "I like to play with language, word-play and puns, alliteration and onomatopoeia, poetic devices within the work. Since the writing aspect of the work has become so much more important, I see fit to draw upon all those elements to get things done." Rememor with Membry (2001) displays exactly this. In a forest he pieces together on canvas, trees are entwined with the phrase REMEMOR WITH MEMBRY, forming an endless stream of roots and vines. Words become shapes while once recognizable forms simultaneously transform into abstract ones. Nature, like memory, appears as a place that is very much alive and ultimately untamable. Hancock’s application of acrylic and mixed media form a dense world in which the viewer is engulfed.

            Painter and Loid Struggle for Soul Control (2001) is of a spiritual journey tied explicitly to autobiography. Composed of a cacophony of surfaces, shapes, colors, and materials, the work belongs to a larger comic book-inspired, fictional world of "the Legend," who Hancock has depicted as the recently deceased, stripped, mound figure hovering in the lower right hand corner of the composition. Fighting for the Legend's recently departed soul are, "Painter," represented by strokes of bright color, and "Loid," the black and white text that infiltrates the branches and trees. Through their struggle, Hancock represents more than just the triumph of good versus evil. Instead, he uses these abstracted superheroes to take us on an epic journey inside the workings of his myth-inspiring imagination and to share along the way his private personal battles and discoveries.

            I,I,I,I, Etc ... (2002) is a colorful illustration of one of Hancock’s typical black and white striped Mound creatures nestled between vibrant variations of flowers. This would be a quaint picture if it were not for the multiple bloodshot eyes protruding from the Mounds upper body. Some might even say that Hancock’s color usage within his illustrations and drawings is slightly reminiscent of Dr. Seuss and other children’s books. His personal narrative at times humorous as it is serious, places his work at a highly imaginative and sophisticated level.

            Trenton Doyle Hancock has developed work from internal sourcing his imagination and experiences in life. Growing up in a religious environment stemmed his interest in external sources like the Bible and gospel music. Hancock’s use of photographic material of family members, trash, and other odds and ends also provide him with inspiration. I can relate to Hancock in his interest in fusing painting and illustration into one work as it is something I like to incorporate within my own work. His use of color and implementation of abstract forms within his collages are also something that I am drawn to in my process of creating them. Hancock’s interest in trash and old and new forms is what I admire most about his working process and character.

            In an interview with PBS’s art in the 21^st century Hancock expresses his thoughts about the incorporation of personal narrative through his work." The idea of these beautiful stories- these archetypes of heroes going through toil and trouble and coming out all the better for it, or teaching us all a lesson not to go through...to take a different path-I wanted to incorporate that kind of thing into the way that I tell stories." Hancock combines mixed media and elaborate tales that connect passages of time from his childhood to present. Trenton Doyle Hancock is not only a fine artist, but also a fine storyteller.

CHRIS GILMOUR

Chris Gilmour was born in 1973 in Great Britain, but now resides in Italy. He attended two colleges, South Trafford College in Manchester, and the University of the West of England in Bristol, where he eventually earned his Bachelor’s of Arts Degree. He has had several solo shows in New York City and Padova, in addition to participating in group shows around the world (Biography).
Chris Gilmour’s work consists of cardboard sculptures of everyday objects, which are “carefully chosen for their evocative and conceptual power, for the potential for mnemonic narration that they contain” (Bartorelli). He revels in “the game of contrasts-real/not-real, functional/non-functional, heavy/light” in his work, and the resulting sensation those dichotomies invoke in those who experience his sculptures (Interview).
His work is decidedly post-modern. Though he does not make any reference to the Dada Movement when he discusses his inspiration, it is clear that Duchamp is Gilmour’s artistic antecedent. Consider how William Arensberg defended R. Mutt’s Fountain, “an ordinary object” whose “useful significance disappears” when it is placed on a pedestal (qtd. in Godfrey). Duchamp’s work recontextualizes the functional object by putting it on display, while Gilmour first copies them exactly in cardboard, then does the same.
In an interview on his website, he said sculptors who are as obsessed with their chosen medium as he is with cardboard particularly influence him (Interview). He listed Anish Kapoor, Andy Goldsworthy, Tom Friedman, and Bill Woodrow. Their work is very diverse, but there is a common fascination with raw material. Gilmour compared it to the “classical ideas of sculpture about the ‘soul’ of the material, but instead of a block of marble it is being applied to leaves of washing machines,” or cardboard boxes (Interview).
The two materials, cardboard and glue, Gilmour relies on to construct his pieces, contrast sharply to the materials that are commonly used in classical sculpture. Unlike marble and bronze, cardboard is not encumbered with high art connotations. Rather, it is commonplace, a material of the masses, which is seldom elevated into the high art realm. Gimour’s work “creat[es] a language which is understood by many”(Interview). Yet through the years, the condition of the cardboard he uses has changed.
His earlier work consists of pristine cardboard surfaces that create “a hyper-realistic effect” which made those who viewed his work sometimes mistake the cardboard renditions for the “real” objects they represent (Interview). People assumed that Gilmour had merely painted found objects brown or covered them with butcher paper. Instead of transforming the objects into cardboard, Gilmour was transforming cardboard into the objects. The craftsmanship of these early sculptures is perfect, yet, especially when compared with Gilmour’s later work, their precision seems sterile.
He eventually began composing his sculptures out of discarded cardboard that retained creases, labels, and remnants of tape, which Gilmour refers to as the cardboard’s “natural state” (Interview). As a result, the spell was broken, but the work does not suffer. Instead it acquires a purpose: creating “beautiful objects” out of “material from the waste basket” (Interview). Gilmour admits that there are practical reasons for using cardboard in this state. At first, it was an economical solution. It is easily obtained, unlike more traditional sculptural media. Yet he was drawn to it because it is overlooked by society. He rescues the cardboard shells “which has been thrown away after the coveted objects it contained have been removed” and reinvents them into objects that are coveted even more highly (Interview). He makes that which has been discarded precious.
His work underwent a shift in subject matter as well. His earlier work consisted of ordinary household objects, while his more recent works are translations of “objects which are larger and belong to a broader cultural context” like the Aston Martin (Interview). Yet the underlying reason for choosing each object remains consistent throughout his entire body of work. He becomes fascinated with objects that “call up memories and emotions” and “imply an action or interaction of some sort” between the viewer and the sculpture (Interview). One of his private jokes is watching people attempt to control the urge to reach out and touch his sculptures. Earlier work seems to inspire this inclination because the pieces are based on familiar objects.
When asked to identify a turning point in the subject matter of his work, he referenced his sculpture of a wheelchair. Gilmour goes on to explain that the wheelchair incited a different reaction from those who saw it. While other pieces seem to beckon to the viewer, no one reached out to touch the wheelchair. Gilmour attributes this reaction to the fact that the wheelchair is “a slightly disquieting object” (Interview).
Gilmour’s work elevates the ordinary—cardboard and familiar objects—to the high art realm. His sculptures cause his viewers to reevaluate the world around them. By recontextualizing both cardboard and everyday objects, Gilmour is accessing the uncanny artistically.

Works Cited

Bartorelli, Guido. “Chris Gilmour.” http://www.chrisgilmour.com/en.antologiacritica.html.

Di Palma, Marco. Photographs. http://www.ChrisGilmour.com.

Gilmour, Chris. Interview. http://www.chrisgilmour.com/en.intervista.html.

Godfrey, Tony. Conceptual Art. London : Phaidon Press Limited, 1998.

James G: Kelley, Nauman, Simmons, and Dion

Mike Kelly works with sculpture and video in order to talk about memories and culture. His video pieces are cheesy and reference a ritualistic culture, referenced through a high school setting in “Day is Done.” His filmmaking style reminds me of the famous pop work “Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?” by Richard Hamilton in the way that it is referencing popular culture in an over the top way.
Bruce Nauman’s videos of his art studio at night or of him drilling into the ground remind me of the film “Empire” by Andy Warhol, 8 hours of footage of the Empire State Building where nothing happens. These are different in the aspect that viewers are waiting for a mouse or cat to scurry by, rather than watching nothing, but I feel like the both drive at a similar point of nothingness.
Watching Laurie Simmons make a movie from her previous work was really exciting. The puppets performing a musical was hilarious, her sense of humor reminds me of Dada or Pop while the themes remind me of feminist artists like Cindy Sherman or Barbara Kruger. I feel like she drives at similar points but with a sense of humor.
I feel like Mark Dion walks a fine line between science and art, which is really interesting. His intense research and technical outcomes are interesting, while his persistent referencing to nature is exhausting. He reminds me of Robert Smithson’s earthworks, with the laborious amount of detail and the attempts to subvert nature.

Revised artists statement

I began painting by learning the skills and techniques associated with traditional style landscape. I have used these skills to create more abstract pieces highlighting objects that hold a powerful presence as sculptural and painterly entities.
My latest works have emerged from an examination of the properties of painting and paint as a tactile material. I've created two-dimensional and 3-dimensional works that explore form through texture, line and color. I'm fascinated with the relationship that could exist between painting and sculpture together. In turn, I've used line and saturated colors to investigate the spacial quality of a material originally used for 2-dimensional work.

Cody & Relatable Artists

What I find most interesting about Bruce Nauman is when he talks about his drill video piece. He says he doesn’t know if anyone will take this work seriously as art, though he makes it clear that he does. He doesn’t offer up much of an explanation but says blatantly, “It is because I say it is.” This inspires many questions about the first question we were asked as freshmen in college, “what is art?” Nauman’s pieces all utilize the aspects of his lifestyle (ex// studio, ranch, etc.) and turn them into artwork. His most interesting pieces are the ones in which he doesn’t create, but uses daily existence to comment on the viewer’s interaction with the piece. This is reminiscent of Duchamp’s work in the Dada movement, in the aspect that they both take found objects, or “found actions” in Nauman’s case, and turn them into art.

Mike Kelley brings his past into play when it comes to creating artwork. He is both internally and externally inspired in his art, fusing his memories and childhood experiences along with tangible sources to develop concepts for his work. He talks about his ritual fascination, which is incredibly apparent in his work. Kelley’s painting featured in the video, The 13 Seasons, made me instantly think of De Kooning in the style of paint application, brushstroke and color usage. Both artists’ works feature abrasive stroke and saturated color with use of heavy black.
After doing further research, Kelley’s work directly relates to the De Stijl movement in the early 1900’s. His paintings utilize collage in a Dada-esque fashion, but the overall composition, minimalism and structural properties mirror those of Mondrian and Huszar. The compositions also mimic Modern architecture.

Mark Dion’s rat and tar piece about the introduction of rats to an island is a little vague. Although the concept is sturdy, the piece does not necessarily portray the idea behind it. I feel his botanical piece, entitled “Neukom Vivarium” is much more successful. He has created and controlled his own space by building a large greenhouse holding plants and a watering system to mimic nature. This directly comments on artificiality, human interactions with nature and need for control. Dion’s affinity for nature reminds me of Emily Clark instantaneously. He collects samples and details from nature just as she does with insects.

Laurie Simmons is very interesting with her theory on inanimate objects, especially ventriloquist dummies. She explains how they are a metaphor and I feel that concept could go very far and have many possibilities for work. She takes the inorganic object and adds humanistic qualities to it, whether it be speech, movement or body parts. Her works can coorelate with the Surrealist movement in the fact that she gives inanimate objects the ultimate air of anthropomorphism and stresses the objects non-human quality through giving them body parts. Also, the mixture of these objects and human properties directly relates to Max Ernst and his “figure” paintings created from household items.

Kelley, Dion, Simmons, and Nauman

Mike Kelley’s work is primarily based on the idea of memory and described in Art:21 as being fairly consistently film based. His pieces allude to memories and not only of Kelley, but ones that are also relatable to the viewer. In his piece “Day is Done”, spoken about in the article assigned on Mike Kelley, an obvious allusion to high school pep rallies and pride functions is created. Kelley takes this relationship one step further and places a sense of surreal actions, garments, and acts into what could be everyday activities. In his collaged stuffed animal pieces/sculptures, Kelley creates a very similar sense than that which is observed in “The Day is Done”. Kelley states that these pieces spurred off the audience’s reaction to stuffed animals and their reference to child abuse. This idea then became one that Kelley seemed attached to, and that further grew and evolved. When viewing Kelley’s “More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid" and "The Wages of Sin”, I felt a strong connection to the work of Marc Chagall due to the idea of referencing memory or heritage and the visual theme of the broken image. In Chagall’s work “The Village”, this idea is displayed in his use of color and fracture and in Kelley’s work it seems to come through in the broken segments of the video and piecing the stuffed animals together.

Bruce Nauman is an artist whose work does not seem to stick to the guidelines of a singular media. It, instead, ranges from large site specific sculptures to video recordings and everything in between. In the article on Nauman, one specific piece is primarily discussed. This is a piece that seemed to happen as an accident and began with the idea of to catch a mouse that was in the artists studio on camera. The idea then evolved into an intimate view into the artist’s studio and its life when the space was supposedly inactive. Another piece that stood out was one based on the idea of the standard step and how it can become a rhythm when walking down a set of stairs. Playing with this idea, Nauman varied the step sizes and their distance apart to control the experience of the person experiencing it. Many of the pieces created by Nauman share this idea of questioning purpose or trying to invert the purpose of an object. This is an idea that shares close strides to the work of artists and followers of the Dada movement. Marcel Duchamp was a big contributor to this movement and the idea of changing an object’s function, whether it be his infamous urinal piece entitle “Fountain” or the idea of changing the definition of art, these two artists seem to share a common thread in their works and thoughts.

The next artist’s work is strongly influenced by the idea of collection and cataloguing. The work of Mark Dion places pressed specimens of plant-life, such as a variety of seaweed, into an artistic content. Each work strives to preserve pieces of natural beauty that look both aesthetically pleasing and intriguing. Dion’s works hold a strong thread relating back to the collection and preservation of different specimens and creates a visual catalogue for the viewer. It is also a body of work that has great appeal to different science-based organizations, which is discussed in the short clip viewed online, as well as the article. With this strong foundation the work of Dion is very close to the work of a taxidermist. The forms take on a different being once Dion’s artistic process is complete, however, and begin to form intriguing drawings. In the visual sense, these images are reminiscent of the line quality created in Jackson Pollock’s paintings. The plants seem to create erratic lines and compositions and although they are structured far more formally than the process of Pollock, their end results are similar in appearance.

Lastly, the work of the artist Laurie Simmons is structured around the idea of photography, but is contextualized in video pieces as well. Simmons describes her works as starting with the idea of creating a larger-than-life camera and then placing it on the person who taught her everything she knows about photography. This idea evolved into so much more as Simmons’s career and work developed. Her idea of placing large objects onto simple white silhouettes of legs turned these sculptural objects into something with much more life behind them. Later, these pieces became inspirations for video segments in which a gun danced on two white legs much like in an audition setting. Simmons creates a sense of surrealism that relates very openly to the idea of collage and piecing unrelated things together to create a singular image. This idea is one that was used largely in the Dada movement and an idea that very commonly comes to the surface in many pieces that are collage based. The pairing of two objects that seem so distinct and different creates an interesting partnership and is an act that can be seen largely in the work of Hannah Hoch, especially her piece entitled “Grotesque” which also uses a pair of white clad legs as a large component in the piece. The idea of creating something new by combining two everyday seemingly ordinary objects is one that can create a great amount of diversity out of the everyday, as well as artwork that can be very interesting.