Til Will

Departure From Medium

By: Til Will

9/15/2022

FRC is innovating the approach to showing/selling art online by offering new art collectors access to the market. There are certainly interesting conversations between the works for this selection, but what really binds them is the nuance in being experienced only through screens. I’ve never seen any of these paintings or drawings in person, and so I want to consider the importance of things being in actual space—specifically how images/art are experienced in your space.

I was ecstatic that FRC reached out to me because I’ve previously written on the issue of emerging art lacking simple platforms like this that support young artists in a very direct way. This was an opportunity to pull from writing I shelved in mid 2019 pertaining to emerging art and art collecting. I was thinking and writing often about the language associated with essays/statements about art—how it can be vague, noncommunicative, or even cause for further confusion. This led me to make the case for the simple, positive act of experiencing art as it is in space.

Good art writing should help the reader expand on something they already enjoy in the work rather than impose itself on the impact of an artwork. Art writing is language fabricated from images with no real language in the first place (most paintings). In the words of the legendary art ride-or-die Dave Hickey, “a lot of art is best talked about by talking about something else” (25 Women: Essays on Their Art, p. 3).  Statements and criticism shouldn’t give some heady explanation of true meaning of a work. Looking at any given 2D expression, what's happening for me is pretty much not what is happening for you. I don’t really want to fill your head with what I think you should be seeing. 

Analog artworks (paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture) carry all of the energy of the setting of their making and past works they may be referencing, like they are having a conversation with the ether of all of the artwork ever made. Analyzing artworks brings all of one’s own experiences into that fold, and therefore one’s interpretation must be unique. Though ultimately as artists we are all curious about how our work is experienced, so here I’ve created a bit of text that you would find printed out at the show.  Let me guide you through this exhibition as if you were in actual space with these artworks.

(now, you’re in the gallery)

(you just picked up the print-out)

The featured selection of works in this gallery can be categorized as vaguely representational. We recognize shapes as flowers, leaves, and figures–each work having some haziness, or obscurity between us and the thing being represented. Perhaps this is most so in Isabel Monti’s “Burning Apparition.” Centralized form with a distinctive border and weight, compositionally characteristic of a renaissance portrait, draws us into an image that feels familiar while also being indefinable. There’s playful and sensitive layering, pulling darks gently away to reveal only inner light. 

The deciphering is left to us in most of these works, where we are often left in the weeds of abstraction. Most literally in Tom Wixo’s “Palm Springs Cowboy” we are left to solve the visual puzzle of foliage, with levels of technical plays, first by collage between images, next by their perceived transparency, and last by their drawn space-between-things to shape the thing. 

When everything is drawn but the flowers are they really drawn? In “Soft Stock Rodeo IV” a similar riddle teases the eye with layers of implied hooks. Things we ought to recognize drawn in pure and precise line create momentary and recurring abstraction by their overlapping. Emma Barnes implies a larger untold story in her work “Split” that we are left at guessing. An almost dadaist assemblage of things—a print of daisies, a vague lamp shape, a sponge—feels like it references a specific fragment of memory. Left mysteriously open-ended, printed images onto plaster encourage closer examination, and conjure our own associations and memories. 

There’s a sense of paintings working themselves out of being paintings, a sort of in-betweenness that continues to be expressed in some of these works, which might be reflective of a larger phenomenon where painting and sculpture are dissolving into one another. 

Mark Mcleod’s hybrid collage painting “Maeghan’s Noise” hangs on a wall but also asks to be recognized as sculpture. This work in particular relies on viewer movement and participation as part of the design experience, with what I imagine to be varying display possibilities in the order of the stack of pages, as well as subtle shifts in the image when moved about in space.

Lauren Rice’s painted collage “Nebulous Bones” rides similar lines between painting, sculpture, and textile. This work dazzles the eye with textural and compositional subtlety, inviting us to swim through the wefts like a fish in a reef. Its presence is like a dripping relic pulled out of a psychedelic space bog; decomposition is occurring and a wet hollowness is palpable. There’s some continuation or connection in this work to the spatial treatment in Elizabeth Murray’s “The Lowdown” (2001), whose zany paintings-as-sculpture have certainly fueled this entire contemporary phenomenon of painting/sculpture fusion. Rice’s “American Dream” is toying instead with forms floating in a deep and prismatic expanse, while happily adventuring beyond the rectangle. Although less compositionally dynamic, this work is still remarkably sculptural thanks to a torn diagonal overlap that momentarily pulls us out of the painting field.

We might be witnessing the departure from medium as we know it, and this selection and format are an illuminating sample for study. It’s hard not to notice the widespread influence by artists that make painting, video, and sculpture in a media-fluid way, and how readily we continue to embrace tech in art by the way we show it (again, I am talking about art I’ve only seen on a screen). Although perhaps the most painterly of all, Rachel Glasser’s work “Living on this Hill Day/Night” seems to be in touch with this media-fluidity through subtle pantones and awareness of itself on screen. Unmistakably design driven, and pulling generously from the likes of Stuart Davis and other early 20th century designer artists, there is great implied movement in extreme flatness. A calculated left to right emblem with almost clock-like color gradation evokes passage of time, or perhaps the sun changing position in the sky—another reminder for us to notice the subtlety of real-time.    

(end exhibition)

( now picture yourself opening this book, which is resting on a plinth in the gallery )