Month: July 2019

The Importance of Small Moments (revisited)

The New Art Examiner just published my review of the exhibition, Nares: Moves, which is on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum until October. With this publication I am now a contributing editor with journal. It’s a small moment maybe, but a really nice one!

My original post on this exhibition includes the text of the review. I am revisiting the material here for the chance to consider some of the work that was omitted from the publication. The exhibition is a complicated mixture of ideas and objects–too much to fit comfortably into 900 words. Following is some of what was left out.

Two rooms in the gallery space are devoted to items from the artist’s studio. Included are homemade brushes, sketchbooks and casting experiments, short videos, and a variety of objects.

Also located here are a number of works: sculptural arrangements of pigmented hydrostone, photographic series, and projected light drawings. In showing the experiments and objects of interest, the combination of works in such diverse materials and the studio items, the exhibition provides a view into the artistic process. The studio is not all completed work; there is much musing and playing and thinking and making of things.

The idea of experimenting and playing that is so evident in the studio section is also clear in the single-stroke paintings and those made with street-marking paint. The contrast between these ways of working could not be more pronounced. Nares has created luscious, monumental works with very different methods.

The thick, lumbering, thermoplastic “paint,” applied with a street-marking machine, has hundreds of tiny glass beads scattered in its surface. The works are stark but richly textured and reminiscent of (Motherwell’s) abstract expressionist strokes. Here though, the paint has been applied via a flaming, hot machine, by an operator swathed in protective gear. The stroke is not a brush in the hand of the artist, but the spewing dragon of a machine that lays down the rough lines.

White on black ground, covered with sparkling light, the works are non-functional crosswalks, street-markings gone wild. Chaotic and dangerous, they are contained and controlled when transferred in their rectilinear forms onto the gallery wall. They are confusing and gorgeous at the same time.

As the main image used in the marketing surrounding the exhibition, the single stroke paintings should take center stage in the exhibition. The fact that they don’t is mainly due to the richness of this artist’s practice. These works are amazingly delicate and graceful. In a demanding process that requires the artist to be suspended over the horizontal canvas, the works are made with elaborate, homemade brushes, and sometimes multiple attempts at accomplishing an acceptable single-stroke. Some include interference pigments that reflect and transmit light, creating color that shifts during the process of viewing. Even here, in what seems to be such simple imagery, the artist’s process and viewer’s experience is complicated.

These approaches to making paintings have some commonality, despite their dramatically different visual conclusions. Whether the artist’s activity involves a machine and protective gear, or the performance of a brushstroke that is tried and wiped away repeatedly, both groups of works have at their foundation the idea of gesture or movement. The artist’s body in deeply engaged by each process, there is an intense physicality required in each making.

One of the many works in the exhibition where movement of the artist’s body is at the core is the Giotto Circle. Can this be considered as one work? Maybe better thought of as a series, there are two iterations represented in the exhibition: Giotto Circle #1 and Giotto Circle (Tooled), both from 1975. Originally Super8 films, they show the artist’s body transformed into a mark-making tool. The artist, of tall and narrow frame, with arms outstretched, in circular movements, makes marks on a wall. A study in anatomy and engineering, the movements are quick and graceful, the marks are simple yet visually powerful.

The two films, made very early in the artist’s career, are supplemented elsewhere in the museum by Giotto Circle #4. Created onsite in a 2019 performance by the artist (start video at 6:50 for the artist’s entrance), this Circle is different than the first works, which is appropriate to the over 40-year distance of its making. It is acrylic and graphite on canvas, and will exist in physical form beyond the video documenting its creation. For now, the work occupies a beautiful spot, at the museum’s lakefront second entrance.

Giotto Circle #4 (2019)
Giotto Circle #4 (2019)

This artist’s long career has included much experimenting and play with different media. The threads of inquiry are consistent through the work and over the years. Movement and gesture, exploring materials and forms, this is intriguing and beautiful work.

Nares: Moves is on view from June 14 to October 6, 2019 at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

The Importance of Small Moments

The New Art Examiner just published my review of the exhibition, Nares: Moves, which is on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum until October. The text to the article is below, and the images here are mine. See the online article for the higher-quality images provided by the museum for press-use.

With this article I am now a contributing editor with the New Art Examiner. It’s a small moment maybe, but a really nice one!

20190612_104546.jpgThe new exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum, featuring the work of Jamie Nares (formerly James), is an intriguing retrospective covering five decades work by an experimental, playful, curious and inventive artist. It also marks the first MAM exhibition curated by the museum’s director, Dr. Marcelle Polednik.

In the accompanying catalogue introduction, Polednik defines the challenge of presenting a retrospective of Nares’ work. “These objects,” she writes, “have little to suggest that they are the works of a single artist, much less that they are connected to a sequential biographical or art historical narrative.” Her solution is to present the works, not in strict chronological order, but rather in thematic sections.

Polednik’s curatorial approach emphasizes three concepts–gesture, time, and movement—which are interwoven throughout nine sections of the exhibition. These nine “chapters” are also explored in an accompanying catalogue and a gallery guide. Additional programming—film screenings, a dance performance and discussions with the artist, collector Julian Schnabel, and musical collaborator Thurston Moore–will expand upon the gallery experience.

Embedding the display within such rich programming and publications is an important choice for this material, as there is not much explanatory text within the gallery. It is helpful, for example, to more fully understand the impact of defining personal experiences, such as the artist’s youthful move to New York City in the 1970s. Details about unusual methods and materials are also informative and lead to a fuller appreciation of the works. The deeper dive not only provides more opportunity to grapple with the complexity of this work, but also provides strong reinforcement of the exhibition’s premise, that the lines of exploration threading through Nares’ long career are consistent across surprisingly varied media.

The exhibition’s organizational scheme is successful in demonstrating visual and conceptual relationships between works in disparate media from different periods of the artist’s life.

The introductory room, which also serves as the exhibit’s conclusion, presents a pair of works: the 2008 video, Riding with Michaux, and an untitled high-speed drawing from 2014. Although not far separated in time, the works intersect in multiple ways. The video’s imagery of sunlight on water has visual similarities to the linear forms of the untitled drawing but, more importantly, they share process. A relationship is made here between the artist filming with a camera on a moving train, and the artist holding a brush to a rotating sheet of paper. Motion, not only in the visual field, but as part of the making, is central to the artist’s practice.

Film and video have a strong presence throughout the galleries. From early works like Giotto Circle #1 or Game, shot in TriBeCa of 1970s New York, to Element #1 (2009) and a series of Portraits (2016), Nares’ long-standing passion for moving images is clearly evident. The subjects may seem at first unrelated—the artist drawing a circle on a wall, small hand movements, a heavy ball swinging over an empty street, the slow eruption of bubbling mixture—but all have important elements in common.

Pendulum (1976), with its groaning sound and almost dizzying, hazardous motion, explores the movement of an object through an eerily empty urban space. In the luminous Street (2011), made with a high-speed camera, scenes of now-occupied city streets have been slowed to a glacial pace. The camera, instead of focusing on moving objects, is here itself in motion, driven along city blocks, capturing unstaged images of people, the details of Manhattan daily life, made graceful and dramatic via slowed
motion. Both works chart time and movement to very different ends. Nares’ innovative use of a high-speed camera is only one example of the artist’s intellectual curiosity.

The monumental paintings presented in the exhibition fully display the artist’s capacity for invention. Nares has created luscious works with various strokes: thick and lumbering, made from tiny glass beads, thermoplastic “paint,” and a street-marking machine; or the single stroke paintings, delicate and graceful, made with elaborate, homemade brushes and, at times, interference pigments. At first glance, they bear no relation to each other—heavy, textured, black and white or gorgeous, delicate, ribbons of color–yet all refract light, suggest motion, and basically disrupt the expected experience of looking.

The show’s most recent works are a series of large-scale images with gold leaf. Originating as rubbings of cut-stone street surfaces in the artist’s old New York neighborhood of Tribeca, the works incorporate both a technological interest—with Evolon, a non-woven, high-tech microfiber paper—and a social acknowledgement unusual for this artist. The stone surfaces are described as having been cut by immigrant labor in the city’s early days. When thermoplastic street markings become abstract paintings, and 19th-century street stone is transformed into shimmering gold, the artist is not only an inventor but also earns the title of alchemist.

It is clear that Nares has been grappling with movement for a long time. A note from a sketchbook captures the artist’s interest in a playful way:

things in motion; motion in things

The phrase provides an opportunity for exchange, a back and forth, a circular form that is mirrored in the intentionally circular path within the gallery. The exhibition ends where it begins: with a video and a drawing, both exploring motion and time, with directness and grace. Nares celebrates small moments in her work, transforming simple gestures into fascinating experiences worthy of our time and consideration.

Giotto Circle #4 (2019)
Giotto Circle #4 (2019)

Nares: Moves is on view from June 14 to October 6, 2019 at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

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