58th Annual Citation Show

Roberta Smith, former art critic for the New York Times, wrote this regarding an exhibit by American artist Ray Johnson in 2015:
“Mr. Johnson’s efforts teem with art-world names and related iconography,
But what I like best about them is, again, never being quite sure how a piece came to be…these collages begin with the unending mystery of how they were made, which still looks new. ”

The last sentence is crucial. What Johnson cracks open (and Smith sees it) is a wormhole into the artist’s process…into a work’s moment of creation. We’re given clues, through comedy and mystery, to how and when a work was made. Art comes from clues (glitches) stumbled upon, intuited or learned from dedicated studio practice. Glitches imply the verbs of making. Verbs, as in nature, produce the nouns we make and see around us. Art, lumped in with every other noun, is in uneasy territory. My job here is to pick things out and give it a number. It’s fraught with inequity. If artists truly mimic nature’s processes then to hand out prizes suggests a hierarchy. We’re not entitled to say, for instance, that this cloud is better than that one. It might be different but its not second rate. So here goes.

The categories, Studio Art and Design (illustration) are interesting mainly because Art is always Design but Design is not always Art. The work I’ve selected for mention here leap beyond Design and into Art. Celissa McCurdy’s, very simple and elegant Taboo is great for what it needs to be. The font, kerning and messaging are perfect for the solitude of the color choices and geometry. Madeline Souder’s Untitled doughy-eyed cats eerily animate a lawn-like patch with strewn florals and butterflies. The cats are cute and a little threatening. Sunset’s Tidings, by Elizabeth Pierce, while illustrational, goes beyond being an adjunct to story telling. The painterly application of the graphic media is highly accomplished. It wants to BE a painting. These same qualities are seen in their Goode Night, Nuna.

In the Studio category. Ollie Willis’ Nude Study #6 and perhaps #7 is more than one thing. It’s a painted drawing or a drawn painting. I can’t decide which. The quick brevity of the brushwork is studied and deliberate without being labored. We all know what it feels like to weigh something and Willis convincingly positions these
bodies, sculpturally, in their space. Souder’s All My Love, is an image of newlyweds. It’s a collage in the best sense. Layers of nostalgia coexist with a contemporary kind of satire saying that everything you see (feel) may not be everything there is. We just don’t know who’s being taken for a ride here. Similarly, layers of technique and ways of seeing merge in Cassandra Scholten’s Homegrown Tomatoes. It could be illustrational but it could also be a painting or even surface design for textiles. The print seems to be about color even though its black and white. Sholten’s Jemime Puddleduck Dinnerware was a favorite of mine as well.

Coleman Hook’s Emerald Tunnel, is my selection for the exhibit’s Best of Show. From across the room, I didn’t know what it was. The photograph acts like a painting or drawing. Had it been just an “abstraction” or a design I don’t think I’d have voted for it.
From a distance it rewards us with one identity: an abstract design with a source of light at the center. Closer up we see it for what it is, a compelling image of mundane subject matter. The pier’s colonnade marches toward a kind of vanishing point that also reads as a light filled room at the end of a tunnel. Its full of symbolism.
This gets to what Art’s job is: to find the mundane in the grand and the grand in the mundane. It’s what we should seek in pictures and people.

Lisa Freiman, Cheif Curator, Indianapolis Art Museum chose my work for inclusion in New American Paintings Midwest Edition.

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