“It is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye”

- Walter Benjamin, Little History of Photography (1929)

Abstract photography challenges our popular view of photography as an objective image of reality by reasserting its constructed nature. In his essay on the history of photography, Walter Benjamin articulates photography’s second nature as its inherent ability to detach and abstract the visible from the real. Non-representational photography lives in this contested middle ground between material reality and photographic illusion – fact and fiction – first and second natures. Today, anyone who has a cell phone can take and send digital images instantaneously. In response to this ‘snapshot’ culture, many artists are returning to the study of photography’s underlying properties to combat digital image fatigue. Second Nature looks at this embrace of the highly fabricated image as a return to an earlier time in photography’s history. As such, this exhibition takes up the subject of abstract photography through a temporal pairing – presenting the scientific and expressionistic experimentation of photography in the first half of the 20^th century from the museum’s collection with explorations of the medium today.

Freed from its duty to represent, abstract photography continues to be a catchall genre for the blending of mediums and disciplines. It is an arena to test photography. By intermixing works from deCordova’s collection by Gyorgy Kepes, Harold Edgerton, and Aaron Siskind from the 1930s-1950s, with works by photographers practicing today including Eileen Quinlan, Arthur Ou, and Yamini Nayar, Second Nature focuses on the continual probing and questioning of the medium and conventions of picture-making that complicate our understanding of photography. The artists in Second Nature grow the ever expanding field of photography by revisiting themes of hyperrealism, constructivism, and the materiality of time through light.

Since the rise of digital photography in the 1990s there has been a reactionary and renewed interest among artists to return to the “slow” techniques of analog photography. Artists are finding their way back into the darkroom, working in low-tech and labor intensive processes that include camera-less photograms, solarized printing, and chemical cyanotypes. This emphasis on photographic process as subject – photography about photography – foregrounds the debate on the medium’s tie to representation. In their return to the early days of photography, many contemporary photographers build from the same lines of inquiry that absorbed scientists and artists in the early part of the 20^th century, but now armed with a conceptual undergirding, propose alternate modes of thinking about and framing pictured abstractions.

Mel Bochner’s Photography Before the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2011) illustrates this conceptual repositioning. In the 1960s Bochner began to take notes on the “misunderstandings” of photography through literature, writing particularly telling quotes on 3 x 5 notecards. Decades later Bochner photographed one of these cards, a quote from Encyclopedia Britannica that reads, “Photography cannot record abstract ideas” and printed the negative in six different pre-20^th century photographic processes: albumen, platinotype, collodion–chloride, gelatin, salt, and cyanotype. Taking up Walter Benjamin’s critical essay, “Art in the age of mechanical reproduction” that discussed the destruction of any “authentic” or “original” artwork by modernity, Bochner’s hand printed multiples sardonically question photography’s ability to represent the real or the “authentic”, through history and today. Recognized as one of Conceptual art’s pioneers, Bochner was one of the first artists to make written language the basis of his work. In a return to his 50-year-old “misunderstandings” project, Bochner circles back to his initial investigations of photography and linguistics, revisiting photography’s capacity to communicate.

Bochner is just one among many artists working then and now, who have made the questioning of photography – its mechanical roots and potentiality to transcend the pictorial –  the heart of their study. This exhibition is not intended to be a survey of abstract photography, but rather a focused study of art being made today that revisits and continues some of the themes and creative explorations of early 20^th-century photography. The tracing of this lineage, made evident through historical juxtapositions, will overlay a contemporary lens with which to interpret our modern predecessors and bring new attention and scholarship to the museum’s photography collection.

Studio still-lifes by Eileen Quinlan and Yamini Nayar will be seen alongside Kepes’s constructivist photograms, exposure studies by Sharon Harper and Bryan Graf will be paired with Edgerton’s stroboscopic experiments, while Siskind’s expressionistic cityscapes will find new company alongside Isaac Layman’s psychologically charged domestic portraits. The exhibition will also feature artists working in film and video, ranging from avant-garde experimental filmmakers from the 1950s to today. Artists under consideration include: Anthony Pearson, Arthur Ou, Eileen Quinlan, Hugh Scott-Douglas, Yamini Nayar, Barbara Kasten, Isaac Layman, Alejandra Laviada, Meggan Gould, Luke Stettner, Mel Bochner, Jennifer West, Sara VanDerBeek, Stan Brakhage, Mariah Robertson, Julia Hechtman, Gareth Long, Caleb Charland, Bryan Graf, Cree Bruins, Matt Gamber, Aspen Mays, Greg Hayes, Daniel Phillips, and Daniel Lefcourt. Second Nature will take place in the Dewey Family Gallery, the Catherine S. England Photo Study Space, the Media Gallery, and in the second floor arcade gallery.

May 26, 2012 – Apr 21, 2013

Organized by Lexi Lee Sullivan, Assistant Curator, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.

deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA

From Huffington Post Arts:

Haiku Reviews: From Vivaldi To Vivid Pop Art (PHOTOS)

First posted: 01/06/2012

HuffPost Arts’ Haiku Reviews are biweekly features where we invite critics to review exhibitions and performances in short form. Some will be in the traditional Haiku form of 5x7x5 syllables, others might be a sonnet or even a string of words. This week Peter Frank and Laurence Vittes give quick takes on visual arts, theatre and classical music from ‘invisible artwork’ to the Los Angeles avant garde. Is there a show or performance that you think people should know about? Write a Haiku with a link and shine a light on something you think is noteworthy. We’d love to hear about it!

Barbara Kasten figured importantly in the “photographic revolution” of 1970s California, contributing specifically, and majestically, to the formal experimentation that characterized so much of the work from this era. Light was (and remains) not simply Kasten’s medium, but her preoccupation, and she played with the effects of light on semi-reflective surfaces, its transformation through lenses and refracting structures, and the simultaneous fluidity and fixity it can evince when run through elaborate series of geometric baffles. This small, tantalizing Pacific Standard Time-adjacent survey includes Kasten’s mid-’70s “photogenic paintings,” with their ripples and shadows and granular fields; the “amalgams” that followed, collapsing space as light composes what seems solid, even cubic, one moment, ephemeral the next; the early-80s “constructs,” elaborate interplays of form and color (that, in their geometric language, conjure the Bauhaus); and a few works from the past year, continuing and conflating all these inquiries. (Luisotti, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave. #A2, S. Monica; thru Jan. 7. www.galleryluisotti.com)

- Peter Frank

BARBARA KASTEN, Construct PC-IX, 1982, Polaroid Polacolor print, 24 x 20 inches

November 19, 2011 – January 7, 2012

Gallery Luisotti is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Barbara Kasten: Experimental Photography from the 1970s, opening November 19th. Kasten’s early concern with the interplay between sculpture, light, and installation in her art mirrored the greater interest of the then burgeoning California light and space movement arising in the 1960s. Formally trained as a painter, and rooted in the visual dialogue of Constructivist art, Kasten’s work has been a continual practice of mediating and reconciling opposing ideas, from sculpture to photography, light and shadow, and objects to immateriality. The exhibition marks Gallery Luisotti’s contribution to Pacific Standard Time: Art In L.A. 1945-1980.

Pacific Standard Time is an unprecedented collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California, coming together to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene. Initiated through grants from the Getty Foundation, Pacific Standard Time will take place for six months beginning October 2011. Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty. The presenting sponsor is Bank of America.

Please join us for the artist’s reception on Saturday, November 19th from 6:00 to 8:00pm. For further information please visit Gallery Luisotti’s website or call the gallery at (310)453-0043.

View more work from the exhibition on artnet.com.

October 24, 2011

By Anthony Pearson

Barbara Kasten has been creating inventive and influential images for more than 40 years. Artist Anthony Pearson talked to her about theatricality, her approach to photography and what it means to ‘think like a painter’

Barbara Kasten’s artistic practice takes place in front of the camera as much as it does behind it. Though the final product of her work is often a photographic print, the journey there draws on her experience of working with found objects, sculpture, painting and architecture. In the 1970s, she began building large-scale models in her studio and photographing them, combining a sculptural and photographic practice in a way that appears uncannily prescient today. Recently the artist returned to the studio to create two new series of abstract photographs that use light and the properties of photography to create form.

Anthony Pearson How did you first start using photography?

Barbara Kasten I was never drawn to photography as a documentary medium; I was never enthralled with the magic of the darkroom. I came to it out of necessity, in order to take a part-time job while I was in grad school. The only class I took in photography was as a graduate student at California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco [now CCA] in 1968, and that was where I met Leland Rice, who later became my husband and introduced me to many photographers. The earliest works I made were screen photograms, like Untitled 13 [1974], which was made with a fibreglass screen material that I was using to demonstrate some techniques while teaching fibre sculpture. For me, this work was still part of the process of painting. I hand-coated BFK Rives paper with cyanotype emulsion, so it still involved an application of paint with a brush. When I began including coloured inks in the emulsion, as in Untitled 76–6 [1976], it added another reference to painting and colour. If I had been taught to do cyanotype, I don’t think I would have experimented in that way.

AP It’s always interesting when an artist takes on aspects of a certain medium without being trained in it: it becomes more inventive.

BK And that’s what appealed to me about experimenting with photography. I wasn’t interested in finding ways to push the boundaries of photography but rather in finding ways to be innovative with painting and sculpture. The Bauhaus was also a big inspiration for me because the woman that I studied with at CCAC, Trude Guermonprez, had been a second-generation student there. I was attracted to the interdisciplinarity of the Bauhaus and, through that, discovered the Stenberg brothers, who designed sets for Soviet Constructivist theatre. Their sculpture inspired some of the props I built. I also collaborated with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company while I was an artist-in-residence at the Capp Street Project in San Francisco in the 1980s. They later performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with my set and costumes.

Studio Construct 8, 2007, archival pigment digital print

AP Your work does seem to have a theatrical quality in that it seems like you’re constructing or staging something, especially in the early ‘Constructs’ series, which you began making in 1979. It feels like the images are a total environment, as if we’re looking onto a set.

BK At that time, I was interested in translating space into a two-dimensional plane. I was making a three-dimensional form in front of the camera with large-scale geometrically shaped mirrors and other found or constructed props made of industrial materials. But I was also engaging in a dialogue with the ground glass of the view camera, to see the form compressed into a flat plane. People are surprised that the first camera I ever used was an 8×10-inch view camera, but it is actually the simplest camera and allows for the most control. The controls are meant to correct the perspective in the image, but I used them for distortion – to change a sharp, focused line into a blur – somewhat like making a mark with a brush and paint. I was interested in creating an illusion using the camera, so the set itself wasn’t very important. After I was finished photographing, I took it down or re-used sections of it. In addition to photographing constructions in my studio with the 8×10, I was also using the 20×24 Polaroid camera, which was the newest colour technology at the time. I was one of the first photographers to have had quite a bit of access to it. In fact, they even brought the camera to my studio while I was in New York on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982. It was a great situation because I would give them an artist’s proof from the edition in exchange for the use of the camera. I also learned so much about studio lighting from John Reuter, who was the Director of the 20 × 24 Studio in New York.

AP Because you were using Polaroid film, you were making a singular image each time, so you had to use the material very precisely – you’ve referred to it as ‘etching’.

BK The surface of a Polaroid is different than other photographic papers: the layers of colour build a thick emulsion on a heavy backing, so high contrast – black on white for example – appears in relief, or what I call an ‘etched line’ in the emulsion. I photographed materials like pieces of wire or mirrors, which translated really well into the Polaroid’s relief-like edges.

AP In the ‘Constructs’ you can see how light is illuminating not just the surfaces but also the edges of the materials. It really emphasizes the idea of light being the subject of the work, as opposed to form or colour. Were you also influenced by the Light and Space movement in Southern California?

BK Absolutely. During the ten years I was in Los Angeles – from 1972 until 1982 – there was a lot of experimentation with the phenomena of light, particularly by James Turrell and Robert Irwin, and with light and materials, by artists like DeWain Valentine and Larry Bell. Their work interested me more than any photogrAPhy that was being done at the time. Photography, although it was experimental, was much more personal and narrative, whereas I was thinking: what can I make this light do? I was also influenced by the Minimalists, particularly Agnes Martin. I think of her every time I look at my white ‘Screen Cyanotypes’ because they were a direct result of being enamoured with her work.

AP Your works bring together all of these different influences – Minimalism, Constructivist tendencies, your experience with fibreglass art materials, and then, of course, Light and Space – but using the materials of photography. So, in a piece like Studio Construct 127 [2011], you’re making a picture of a non-representational subject but you’re using a representational medium to capture it. It occupies a very distinct position.

BK That’s right. The piece is not a documentation of anything but an object within itself. The glowing, geometric shape is just the projection of light hitting the Plexiglas, so it’s really an ephemeral form that only happens because of the way the light hits the material. The photograms that I made in the 1970s were also created by the penetration and refraction of light with materiality. But the physical process – the action of arranging the screening mesh on the emulsion-coated paper and then placing a heavy glass over it – was also very important to me. I placed the layered structure out into the light where that glorious Southern California sunshine exposed the form I created on the paper, and then I immersed it in water, which developed it into that beautiful blue. Everything comes back to my physical interaction and intervention with the materials. Photography just happened to be in the right place at the right time for me.

Construct I-A, 1979, polaroid

AP Many artists today use photography conceptually in a similar way, to represent their sculptural or studio activity. I imagine back then, even though sculpture and painting were more primary to your practice, your work was understood as ‘photography’. How did that impact on the way it was received?

BK The photography world embraced and supported what I did, but I’m finding out now that it was at the expense of the rest of the art world knowing about it. People are seeing this work for the first time now, even though it existed in the photography world for a long time. From 1982 until he closed the gallery in 2001, I was with John Weber, a highly respected, well-known gallerist who was showing people like Sol LeWitt and Robert Smithson – great company for me to be in. He brought a lot of my work into an art realm, at a time when photography was just beginning to be acknowledged by the art world.

AP In the 1980s, you went from building your ‘Constructs’ in the studio to constructing in a much larger environment – the landscape.

BK The ‘Constructs’ I was building in my studio for the Polaroids were in fact large sets, even though in the photographs they look like they could have been made on a tabletop. They were the forerunner to me photographing on location for my series of ‘Architectural Sites’ in the mid-1980s. I wanted to use photography to fragment architectural space, so I employed cinematic studio lighting, coloured gels and huge suspended mirrors. I had a gaffer who directed a crew of 12 or 15 people. I was in heaven: it was like creating Bauhaus theatre, and I was the director. I did the first ones in New York at the World Trade Center and the Lipstick Building for Vanity Fair, though they were never published in the magazine. To continue on my own, I approached museums that were building new architecture, like the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. I produced big, colourful Cibachrome prints, which were the epitome of colour at the time. When they see them now, a lot of young people immediately think they are digitally produced.

AP And this went on for five years?

BK About five years, yes. And then I started travelling a lot in the 1990s, doing projects in the Southwestern United States, in Native American territory. I also spent time in Turkey, making work with archaeological sites or objects. I did a project with the Museum of Underwater Archaeology in Bodrum, in 1996, where they allowed me to take the amphoras off their walls and put them on cyanotype-coated paper. In 1998, I came back to Chicago; in 2006 I received the Distinguished Artist award from Columbia College in Chicago, where I was teaching, which was a two-year grant to develop work, and that’s when I went back into the studio and started a new series of ‘Studio Constructs’.

AP How did this new series differ from the ‘Constructs’ you were making in the late 1970s and early ’80s?

BK I thought more like a painter in the earlier days. Maybe I still do, but now I know more about the optics so I’m more sensitive to what happens through a lens. I wanted a materiality that causes light to become shadow, so I use Plexiglas planes as a solution because you can see right through them yet the physicality of the material still casts a shadow. In the ‘Incidence’ series from 2009–10, for example, the short coloured lines came from the abrasions on the Plexiglas. When you look at the Plexiglas with the naked eye, you can’t see them; but when a light is projected on it and you look at it through a lens, you get that effect of prismatic colour picked up in the scratches. If I moved the lens a few inches in one direction or another, you wouldn’t have that.

Juxtaposition 2, Jackson Pollock Studio, 1988, cibachrome

AP I love that you’re using a representational medium to forge an abstraction. So there’s a slippage: I keep trying to reconcile the fact that I’m looking at a representational image that doesn’t have a true representational reveal, even though all the components are representational.

BK Absolutely. The challenge is how do you use light and shadow to photograph an object in such a way that it questions the veracity of what you’re looking at? I do leave some small traces of reality on the materials, such as rough edges, smudges and scratches, but I don’t want to create a narrative or a metaphor. I’d rather suggest a sense of mystery.

AP I really identify with this. I never wanted to use a camera to address the real world, because the real world is infinitely more interesting than pictures of it. So, by turning the photographic apparatus onto your sculptural works, in a painterly sense, you’ve created things that are very specific to you and how you made them.

BK Well, that’s it. As artists we want to reveal our thinking. We want that particular point of view, that particular sensation, to come out through the work.

AP But getting at it through photography is very unusual, I think, because generally photography is a device that points outward, to record something external.

BK Yes, it usually is a ‘thing’ that is photographed, right? But the way we use photography, we turn a concept into an abstraction rather than extracting a form from the world. That means that our inner selves are part of the process. My approach is more of a concrete abstraction where the process ultimately reveals an object. I think that’s also evident in the videos I’ve been working on lately. I’m using the same type of set up I use in the still photographs, but I’m adding movement by placing them on a rotating stage. The original video is then re-videotaped in subsequent projections on architectural forms that I’ve built. For my installation ‘REMIX’ at applied Arts in Chicago earlier this year, I edited two finished pieces into a new one and added my edited sounds of Lucky Dragons, a talented young LA-based experimental music duo.

AP So you’ve always established a set of conditions and parameters wherein you can allow something very specific to happen.

BK The first time I did a slide show of my work, I found it surprising that I could see the continuity of my thinking, not just a formal connection. For instance, both Untitled 13 and Studio Construct 127 have a screen pattern. I’ve had that material for 30 years. It’s fibreglass window screening. I bought a roll of it and I’ve taken it with me to the many places I’ve lived and I still use it.

AP That’s very unusual – the same material recurs again and again, but you’re transforming it each time.

BK It was just the process of working through it. Some people have a misconstrued idea that a photograph is one snap of the shutter. The reality for me is that there are multiple steps along the way to making the final result, without knowing what that is until it arrives. And then, when it’s on your doorstep, you say: yes, I was expecting you.

Barbara Kasten lives and works in Chicago, USA. In 2011 she had solo exhibitions at Galerie Kadel Willborn in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Tony Wight Gallery in Chicago. Her solo exhibition, entitled ‘Experimental Photography from the 1970s’, opens in November at Gallery Luisotti in Santa Monica, USA, in conjunction with ‘Pacific Standard Time’.

Anthony Pearson

is an artist living in Los Angeles, USA. In 2008 he was the subject of a solo exhibition at Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, which was accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Tim Griffin. Additional solo shows include Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, USA, in 2009 and David Kordansky Gallery, LA, in 2010. In 2011 he was featured in ‘The Anxiety of Photography’ at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, USA.

Barbara Kasten Talks With Heidi Norton

GUEST POST BY HEIDI NORTON

As a photography student of the mid/late 90′s, Barbara Kasten was of great significance to me. I lost track of her during the first decade of the millennium, as the contemporaries of the Becher’s school (Gursky, Ruff, Struth) dominated the art market with their dry, representational Deadpan Photography. Now, as an educator 11 years later, I relish in Kasten’s renaissance. Abstraction is transcendental to me, but above all, I see Kasten as a pioneer of contemporary relevance.

Most people know her as photographer, but Barbara Kasten is an artist. Photography is a material to her, the camera’s use- very calculated and intentional. She treats it with equal significance to the rest of her materials–mesh, plexi, screen, mirror, glass, and light. Her influences are vast and span many decades: Irwin’s light and space movement of the late 60′s; Judd’s studies and use of modern industrial material; Post-Minimalism, and its tendencies toward performance; Process art; Site-Specific art; and Abstraction of the 40′s (Moholy Nagy), 90′s, and present. She is presently celebrating her first solo show in Chicago at Tony Wight gallery, Ineluctable, which runs through October 22^nd.

Barbara and I sit down and talk art–mostly me picking her mind. But flattered I am, as she is inquisitive about my work as well. See below!

H: Material became important to you very early on in your career. You were trained as a sculpture and a fibers artist. As a fibers instructor, you used fiberglass screen as a teaching tool to model 3d forms. Talk about your transition from fiberglass as a 3-D sculpting tool to its appearance in your first Cyanotype, Untitled 13, 1974. When and how was the camera introduced?

My first photographic works were photograms. When I discovered the industrial screen as a way to create 3D weaving maquettes, I also tried creating a 2D illusionistic rendition in the form of a photogram. That was in 1974, and I still use the same material today in the Studio Constructs.  In the process of arranging the photograms. I liked the way that shadows were captured in negative shapes.  I was also making life size arrangements using packing boxes and other geometric forms I built for that purpose.  At that time, Polaroid was a new color photographic medium; so when I was offered some 8×10 Polaroid film, I learned how to use my first camera, an 8×10 view camera.

H: Speaking of the camera, let’s talk about the relationship between the image created, the materials (light, plexi, screen), and the exhibited object (the print or projection). When we spoke, you talked about the “several stages of development before the image is where it should be”. Please explain this. Can you talk about the integral relationship between the construction/sculpture and how it is mediated through the camera? A minimalist like Robert Morris might have said that there is a “dematerialization of the object via the process of it being photographed.” Do you see the camera and photographic print as more, less, or equal in relevance to the process and materials?

B: Process has been the core of all of my work- whether it was the sculptural fiber pieces I did in Poland while on a Fulbright, the photograms in the early 70′s or the most recent Studio Constructs and video work.  The shadow- and the light that causes it- has been my conceptual grounding.  I am not interested in the object itself but how it serves as the means of recording light and shadow.  The photograph becomes the object when the light is merged with form and shadow on a 2d surface. It’s really the light that completes the action, whether it is in direct contact with light sensitive material or passing thru the lens of a camera.  The Studio Constructs go through many configurations before I arrive at the final image….The ‘sculpture’ stays set up in the studio giving me time to live with it and the images I make of it.  I can expose many pieces of film before I’m happy with it.  Why not digital…many reasons but the main one is that I like a slower process so I can think about the work as I make it.

B: How about you, Heidi? You currently have a show up at Northeastern University, Not to Touch the Earth (Reception this Friday, Oct. 21st,  from 6-9). In some of your work, the photograph seems to be a document of your process and in other work, the plants or objects are integral to the piece by their physical inclusion.  Talk about these different approaches and how you decide when to create a sculptural piece versus a ‘recording of the piece’ -if you see it that way.  If not, how do you think about the role of the plants?  Does the photograph play a different role in each of these approaches?  Tell me about the importance of the object in your work.

H: All of this work began from the image Whitescape, 2010, where I painted all the objects, including the plants, white by hand. Several weeks later, I was at my studio and noticed that the Dieffenbachia plant I used had begun to grow out of the paint. The painted leaves died and fell off and new life began to sprout from the center. I was intrigued by this–a very pleasant surprise– as painting the plants had left me feeling guilty.  The material of the paint was killing, yet at the same time preserving and stimulating growth. I included that same Dieffenbachia plant in the piece Deconstructed Rebirth- my third still life construction made for the camera. In that piece you see the new sprout and the decayed white leaves hanging from the plant. Almost a year later in My Dieffenbachia Plant with Tarp (Protection), the same plant reappears as a whole new plant. Only through the use of the camera as a recording mechanism is one able to see the inclusion of this narrative. With the camera’s ability to freeze time we can see the plants in varying states through life to disparity to death. Evolution of a Plant is a more literal example of this idea.  I think of the “New Age Still Life” series as sculptural construction. Like yours, these have several stages of development before they become images or objects on the wall. Higherself and Mango are shot in a studio with a plexi-glass shelving unit that was created to compress the space further within the 2D plane.  In the sculptural objects- glass and wax pieces- the plants are pressed to glass or embedded in wax. These materials are also meant to preserve, freeze, and maybe illicit death. The pieces are meant to activate one another; whereas the photographs are fixed- frozen in one state, in the way that Barthes talk about the “Death of an Image”. He sees death implicit in each photograph. He is struck by how the photograph moves you back through time, how you always have the past with you- the photograph as a kind of resurrection. The sculptures will transition in front of your eyes over a span of time based on the nature of the plant. Plants in various states between life and death, wax melting, the color of the plants from green to brown- they are in constant flux.

H: In the Alex Klein essay that accompanied the group show at Shane Campbell in 2010, “Terminus Ante Quem” she compares your process to that of process and earthworks artist, Robert Smithson. She writes, “he famously challenged what he saw as the misperception that art objects function as a kind of culmination or terminus as quem of artistic achievement.” Basically stating that the object supersedes the process, or the process is a building up to the object. People see your works, the final product, a very polished and refined photograph or projection, different than the “documentation” of the 70s. How has being grouped into a movement of photographers whose work is notable for its formal beauty and technical execution changed how the work is interpreted?

B: I happen to like beautiful objects, but beauty alone isn’t enough.  Some investigations of beauty can bring out the underpinnings of a structure or idea or process that doesn’t possess that same kind of beauty as the surface. However, I think that my process is important to the understanding of the work which ultimately becomes an object…. a beautiful object. The traditional photographic process is different than mine.  I carry on a continual dialogue with the subject, changing each step along the way, much like a painter might do. The process is intense and intimate and can include aspects of performance, documentation and sculpture.

H: You mentioned you are reading Donald Judd’s essay on the “specificity of objects” and the discussion of the “under developed rectangle”. Please explain it’s relevance to your work. We talked about using light on reflective surface to break or reconstruct space within your work and that reduction is the abstraction. Talk more about this.

B: I was in a show at Ballroom Marfa this year and visiting the Chinati Foundation re-sparked my interest in Judd.  Just to witness his immersion into the simple architecture of a small western town and how it became an extension of his vision and art. The barracks, containing row after row of polished, reflective boxes illuminated by the Texas sun, was an incredible experience of landscape and geometry merging through the medium of the sun.  Judd is straightforward and yet incredibly complex.  Its a position that I hope to develop more in my work and thinking.

H: Architecture within the constructed space and the architecture of the gallery seem integral to the work and installation. Please discuss the distinction between phenomenological space and imagined space, and how unambiguous, or understandable for that matter, the difference is between the two experiences.

B: An example of how I like to incorporate architecture is in the installation of ‘Ineluctable’.  The three 11×14 silver gelatin prints are positioned so as to include the corner when the viewer looks towards the work.  Upon close observation, one becomes aware that there is a corner in each of the pieces that reinforces and establishes the importance of the architectural element in situ.  The video ‘Corner’ also plays with the identity of generic structural architecture and light projection that alters its dimensionality.

B: What about the space and environments you create in the gallery’s space? Do you think of your work as environmental installations?  For instance the inclusion of architectural pedestals as in the piece, Michael 2011, shown in Jason Foumberg’s September 2011 Frieze review, or the collaborative piece with Karsten Lund, presenting shelves of books that were focused on plant life in “Not to See the Sun” exhibit at Ebersmoore last April?

H: I am interested in creating an atmosphere or environment in all of my spaces- the gallery, the studio, my apartment. When making work, I like to assume the personality of an avid plant collector, a botanist- my studio is a hybrid of herbarium and art studio.  I speak mantras to my plants. There is dirt, roots, wax, film and photographs everywhere. I am a creator and nurturer of things and sometimes these things have difficulty co-existing in the same space—precious archival pigment prints shot with 4×5 transparency film made on expensive baryta inkjet paper do not mingle well with dirt, wax and resin. But I like this mix- taking something precious like a photographic print or plant and submerging it into hot wax–pushing the integrity of the material outside of it’s natural limits.  Michael, the piece you mentioned, is maybe a good example of when these two polarities collide—to me, it’s both photographic and sculptural. When I created the display stands for the piece, I intended for them to not look like pedestals that reference high art. I wanted them to assume some anonymous person’s makeshift constructions. “After the Fires of a Little Sun”, the installation of books and mirror, are to reference a mantle and book collection.  Not necessarily my own collection (though all the books are/have been used for personal research and relate in some abstract way to my work), but maybe someone whose interests vary from botany, to color theory, to a 1970s back-to-the-land manual. The project grafts new imagery and typewritten text directly onto the pages of existing books. The artist and writer’s responses become merged with the research materials, producing an unconventional artist’s monograph/zine, fueled by the symbiotic combination of three elements: the original texts, the writer’s typewritten thoughts, and the artist’s wide-ranging visuals. The effect of leafing through this material (now collected in one volume) is a bit like stumbling upon some anonymous person’s avid research materials — perhaps a mad botanist with a flair for detours into the histories of art and counter-culture.

Ineluctable is on view until October 22nd at Tony Wight Gallery.

Not to Touch the Earth is on view until October 28th at Northeastern Illinois. Opening Reception, October 2nd, 6-9pm.

Heidi Norton received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. She lives and works in Chicago. Norton has presented solo exhibitions in Chicago and San Francisco. Group exhibitions include How Do I Look at Monique Meloche Gallery, The World as Text at the Center for Book and Paper Arts, Snapshot at Contemporary Art Museum in Baltimore, and the Knitting Factory in New York. Norton was published in My Green City (Gestalten) in 2011 and her spring show at Not to See the Sun, EbersMoore was reviewed in Frieze, September 2011. She currently is collaborating with writer Claudine Ise in a seasonal column for Bad At Sports called Mantras for Plants. Norton is represented by EBERSMOORE gallery in Chicago. She is faculty in the photography department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Studio Construct 118, 2011

Eye Exam: Concrete Light

Sep 27, 2011

By Regan Golden-McNerney

Since the 1970s, Barbara Kasten has been developing a distinct approach to abstract photography. Inspired by the simple forms used by Bauhaus artists from the 1930s, Kasten begins her process by arranging basic shapes and colored backdrops atop glass and mirrors. These “constructions” are photographed at dramatic angles, using traditional cameras and printed digitally. Kasten describes her work as “concrete photography” because her goal, as she explained in a recent interview with photographer Heidi Norton, is not to render the physical world immaterial, but to make something as ephemeral as light palpable as it bounces off reflective objects and surfaces. In her current exhibition at Tony Wight Gallery, Kasten’s photographs, created between 1974 and 2011, are linked together by her consistent approach and interest in light.

In her photographs from the early 1980s, brilliant light illuminates vibrant yellow triangles and green cubes, setting up a sharp contrast between these objects and a white backdrop. In a gradual shift over the past three decades, Kasten’s new photographs relish the ambiguity that light and shadow can create on translucent objects set against a neutral backdrop, obscuring the borders in bright light or erasing them with shadow. In “Studio Construct 118,” 2011, two thin sheets of pale green glass cut across a warm black background, edges illuminated. The objects in Kasten’s new “constructions” are only vaguely identifiable, and turn out to be materials that are typically peripheral to a studio photographer’s practice: leftover sheets of glass or disposable rolls of Seamless Paper used as quick backdrops. These materials are placed slightly askew in precarious, suspended arrangements, creating visual puzzles of glass and paper.

Despite these ephemeral materials, there is a remarkable tactility to Kasten’s new large digital photographs in which any shift in color or crease in the surface appears monumental. In the photograph “Studio Construct 125,” 2011, panes of glass gently lean against each other, but the corner of the glass has made a small hole in the gray backdrop paper suspended behind it. There is incredible tension between these two materials: the sheets of glass seem poised to cut through the paper background, while the slight slope of the paper suggests it will soon send the glass sliding onto the floor. Kasten’s photographs are less an attempt to transcend everyday surfaces toward a pure form of abstraction, and more an attempt to expose their plain and simple beauty.

Kasten’s “Studio Constructs” could be read as individual observations of small changes in the studio that fail to connect to the outside world, but the works actually have the opposite effect of making us more aware of the subtle shifts in light and atmosphere around us. Abstract photography is sometimes dismissed as detached from reality, but this is far from what its progenitors anticipated. Abstraction was invested with idealism by artists like Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, one of Kasten’s influences, and Josef Albers, who both taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany before fleeing to the United States prior to World War II. They argued that abstract art could improve society as a model of efficiency and accessibility.  Albers wrote, “Our desire for the simplest and clearest forms will make mankind more united.” There was a sense that abstraction was the visual vocabulary of their time and the best way to invoke an orderly new reality. Today, abstraction is one of a myriad of ways that artists work, so what explains its resurgence, or its particular relevance at present? Is it escapism into the realm of color and form, an avoidance of the political, or a way of refocusing on the “concrete” in a world awash in virtual reality

The subtle materiality in Kasten’s work suggests the latter is true, but this might also be said about several exhibitions of abstract art in Chicago over the past year: from the gritty paintings by Philip Vanderhyden at Andrew Rafacz this past spring, to the photographs of ink drawings on wrinkled aluminum by Anthony Pearson at Shane Campbell last fall. Both artists, like Kasten, use a limited palette of neutral colors to reveal subtle changes in a textured surface. This is quite different from the work of contemporary abstract artists like Odili Donald Odita’s shiny, colorful paintings on Plexiglas, or Walead Beshty’s vividly colored photograms. Both artists’ works resonate more with Kasten’s work from the 1980s in their combination of angular forms and intense color, so perhaps what we have been seeing in Chicago over the past year is an approach to abstraction that puts texture before color, ambiguity before clarity, and reminds us of the scuffed-up surfaces of everyday objects, rather than the cleanliness of form that Albers and Moholy-Nagy first envisioned as being integral to abstract art.

Barbara Kasten shows at Tony Wight Gallery, 845 West Washington, through October 22.

ARTFORUM

09.30.11

Author: Claudine Ise

09.09.11-10.15.11 Tony Wight Gallery

Since the mid-1970s, Barbara Kasten has been making abstract pictures that reveal and exploit the medium’s underlying properties—in particular, photography’s dependence on light to record material phenomena and its tendency to flatten or otherwise distort the viewer’s perceptions of a given volume, spatial relationship, or object. Kasten will typically build a still-life tableau in her studio, using pieces of glass or Plexiglas, mesh screens, mirrors, and other materials that can be transparent, reflective, or both. The resulting compositions slide between the hard-edge dynamism of Constructivist painting and the dematerialized object of Light and Space art.

Titled “Ineluctable,” Kasten’s current solo exhibition situates a few of her key cyanotype and Polaroid works from the 1970s and ’80s in dialogue with a larger selection of recent photographs. A shimmering piece of mesh at the center of Screen Cyanotype, 1974, finds its counterpart in the undulating, wavelike patterns created by light hitting layers of moiré and mesh in Kasten’s Studio Construct #127, 2011. Similarly, the Plexiglas edges that appear as multicolored rays in Studio Construct #118, 2011, echo the projecting lines of yellow, red, and black crayon that Kasten drew around the edges of a rectangular shaft of light in Untitled 4, 1979, as if she were diagramming or reinscribing the shaft’s volumetric form.

In these and other works, the viewer’s perception of material reality abuts photographic illusion. And yet, the backdrop of Studio Construct #125, 2011, shows several creases, a small hole, and a larger gash, results of a piece of Plexiglas pressing into the paper. À la Roland Barthes’s punctum, Kasten’s “puncture wounds” literally point to the composition’s grounding in the real, and to the inherent fragility of her tableaux. With this simple gesture, Kasten also refers us back to photography’s fast-fading origins as an indexical register, a medium where form is derived from the immaterial—yet utterly ineluctable—impression of light on paper.

The road to recovery starts with recognizing that you have a problem. The good news is that Chicago’s problem has finally been diagnosed. Local collectors are not powerful, sexy or charismatic enough to sustain or promote the city’s art scene. So instead of crying like little babies about it, several dealers shook off their skeletons and lured collectors from out of town into a little somethin’ somethin’ with Gallery Weekend Chicago (GWC), Sept. 16-18, 2011.

Wisely modeled after Berlin’s gallery weekend, GWC was spearheaded by, GWC was spearheaded by dealer and veteran art-fair hand Monique Meloche, along with Whitney Tassie, her gallery director, and a team of other people. Eleven galleries were invited to participate: Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Corbett v. Dempsey, Devening Projects + Editions, Donald Young Gallery, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Monique Meloche, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Shane Campbell Gallery, Threewalls, Tony Wight Gallery and Western Exhibitions.

Judging from the tales and the looks you could say GWC was a success. I know they’re already planning to do it again in 2012.

The opening celebration took place at the swanky James Hotel, where local art-fair mogul Tony Karman toasted Lisa Freiman, curator of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the U.S. pavilion in the 2011 Venice Biennale. Other guests included L.A.-based collector Jane Glassman, Cincinnati-based curator and entrepreneur Christian Strike, and Christopher Vroom, the New York collector who founded the Artadia Award.

Mercedes Benz cars chauffeured these and other VIPs around town from gallery to restaurant to gallery again, with tours of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago MCA thrown in.

Saturday night the New Art Dealers Association sponsored a party in an empty house, which I hear has been on the market for quite some time. Chivas Regal whisky, which was sponsoring the event, transformed the place into a trendy club with huge open bar, fake Picassos and girls dressed in glitzy minis. People were tipsy happy and having a good time, including NADA director Heather Hubbs and the Los Angeles contingent of L.A. caterer Nino Mier and Mary Leigh of Cherry and Martin Gallery, artist Erik Frydenborg and art star Amanda Ross-Ho, who started her career here in Chicago at the now-defunct gallery Dogmatic. Ross-Ho is one of many homegrown talents that leave the city every year to enjoy greener pastures in L.A. or N.Y. The list is so long and depressing I will name no more names.

“Not too shabby for something that was conceived just five months ago,” said Scott Speh, owner of Western Exhibitions, one of Chicago’s edgier commercial galleries, which currently has on view a solo project by the New York artist Maria Petschnig (b. 1973). “Gallery Weekend Chicago is a good platform to build upon,” he added.

After the weekend I called up Ohad Jehassi, a collector who splits his time between Miami and New York. Jehassi owns works by artists like José Bedia, Carlos Estévez and Purvis Young as well as Neo-Geo Chicago painter Geoffrey Todd Smith and conceptualist Joseph Grigely.

An art fair veteran, Jehassi said “the vibe in Chicago was laid back, intimate, friendly, enthusiastic.” Yes, but had he bought anything? He said he had his eye on one or two works.

The galleries all had openings, of course, and one good one was at Tony Wight Gallery in the West Loop gallery district, where Chicago photographer Barbara Kasten (b. 1936) unveiled “Ineluctable,” her new show of large-scale abstract photographs. A true master, Kasten develops incredible vastness through transparent planes, shadows and traces of light as seen through glasses over large-scale, black-and-white colored assemblages. In Studio Construct 119 (2010), a pointy glass corner punctures a tiny hole on a black piece of paper ever so slightly, a rupture that is as delicate and intimate as the cosmos. Photos are $11,500 in an edition of 5, and still available at the time of my visit.

I couldn’t keep to the 11 GWC galleries, so I ventured to 65GRAND gallery. One of Chicago’s most respectable spaces, it features the enjoyable “Picture Framing,” a solo show of figurative paintings by William Staples, his third at the gallery. The new works, small and flat, use irregular canvases, sometimes with holes cut into the surface to create a bit of literal depth. Thought, not as dramatic as Lucio Fontana, they are still effective. My favorite, Sea Cliff, in pasty burnt oranges and blues, is Staples’ version of the famous French Etretat Cliffs once painted by Courbet. Prices at this show range between $800 and $2,000. Once again, none had sold at the time of my visit.

Another gallery I visited off the beaten path was SideCar Gallery. Its address is in Indiana, a 20-minute drive from downtown Chicago. SideCar is run by Michael Kaysen, a 25-year veteran of the Art Institute’s installation department, who has plenty of good stories to tell about artists’ egos. Those can’t be repeated, but he does report that Anselm Kiefer and Robert Ryman are very laid back.

The show at hand “Air: Tasteless, Odorless and Colorless,” features works by two Chicago artists, Claire Ashley and Mark Booth. I was engrossed by Ashley’s inflated plasticized sculptural canvases, which are propelled to life by small electric fans. One can’t help but think of the oversized color-field balloon installations of the German artist Katharina Grosse. The difference here is that Ashley’s paintings relate specifically to the human body, occupying a tactile space between flaccidity and tumescence.

Crease, for example, is a voluptuous bag with brightly colored geometric lines and shapes painted on its surface that reminds me of the way people stand on a bus shelter. Prices for Ashley’s works — which can be easily stored once they’re deflated — fluctuate between $1,200 and $2,000. None had sold either at the time of my visit.

The work in all three shows I visited is good and very reasonably priced. Now, all we need is a ballsy collector to move in and make a killing. Let’s hope somebody does and that GWC fulfills its promise.

PEDRO VÉLEZ is an art critic and writer hibernating in Chicago.

link – http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/velez/gallery-weekend-chicago-9-28-11.asp

ED JR., which formed in 2010, consists of Edra Soto, Deborah Boardman, Jeroen Nelemans and Ryan Richey. (ƒ)utility, founded in 2009, is Paola Cabal, Michael Genge and Christopher Grieshaber. Eight of ED JR.’s collectively created video paintings, disarmingly simple geometric exercises built of luminescent blue lines and graceful human shadows, project on and through the adjustable white scrims that (ƒ)utility have arranged throughout the gallery space.

There, inexplicably, hovered a 2005 photogram by James Welling. The form of a female torso rose suggestively from the curves of a wavy piece of mesh, which Welling had laid just so on photosensitive paper before exposing it to light. Darker than the indigo of ED JR.’s translucent ink, darker than the pure cyan of Kasten’s blueprint, “Torso 9″ looked as if it had plunged into the depths of the sea, where only the barest shimmer of light could penetrate, just enough to make out its floating voluptuousness.

Being a photogram, of course, the truth was the very opposite. The more transparent the material, the more brightness that gets through, the shadowier the result. Since the early 1980s, Welling’s pictures have often manifested this kind of honest craftiness, using simple props like aluminum foil and plastic tiles to create strikingly abstract images. “Torso 9″ was no exception, save that it proceeded in exactly opposite fashion, from plain material to subtle human form.

Three artworks seen in a single day, all colored blue and white, all comprised of straight lines and the spaces between, all revealed through light projected on screens — a beguiling convergence, certainly, but ultimately just a meaningless alignment, or more?

Resonance reveals, it doesn’t conceal. Artworks, people, objects and texts align intentionally and not. It isn’t coincidence itself that means a thing, but the meetings, the interactions, the kinships, associations, rhymes and sympathies.

One blue line combines with another, and the world is animated.

“CoLaboratory” runs through November 2 at Glass Curtain Gallery, Columbia College, 1104 S. Wabash Ave. Free; 312-369-6643 or colum.edu/DEPS

“Barbara Kasten: Ineluctable” runs through October 15 at Tony Wight Gallery, 845 W. Washington Blvd. Free; 312-492-7261 or tonywightgallery.com

“Bruce Nauman: Combinations Described” and James Welling run through October 14 at Donald Young Gallery, 224 S. Michigan Ave., Suite 266. Free; 312-222-3600 or donaldyoung.com

link - http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-09-21/entertainment/ct-ent-0922-art-waxman-nauman-review-20110921_1_utility-projects-paintings-collaboration