Check out our Current Exhibitions page for more information on our upcoming shows!
The Bricoleurs, Curated by Christian Fuller and Risa Shoup
Figured, Curated by Kris Nuzzi
Wednesday, January 25th, 7-9pm
at the BRIC Rotunda Gallery
33 Clinton Street
Brooklyn, Ny 11201
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By Juliet Helmke
This is your forewarning: Youth and Beauty – Art of the American Twenties on at the Brooklyn Museum until January 29 is not a small or simple overview of the twenties best offerings. It contains everything; the failures and the successes. Know this beforehand and your subsequent visit will be an enjoyable exploration of 20s experimentation. If you’re looking to see what you’ve already seen before, a slick and successful narrative of Hoppers, Strands, Demuths, Hart Bentons and O’Keefes, then either stay away or be prepared to hunt through over 60 others.
Youth and Beauty is then perhaps a confusing title as it’s not only the ‘beauties’ of the twenties that we see hung across five large galleries. Rather it is a demonstration of these artists’ pursuit of the new beautiful. They were the pioneers of emerging art practices in a decade that roared with economic prosperity and brought radical political change and shifting social mores. It was the era of speakeasies, and the Charleston; Babe Ruth and Cole Porter; and when women in the United States embraced a boyish fashion and their newly granted power to cast a vote. Here in Brooklyn the twenties ushered in paved roads and saw the construction of the largest promenade in the world at the time, the Coney Island Boardwalk.
George Ault, Brooklyn Ice House, 1926
These heady historical moments run underneath all the work exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum. The show attempts to address all of these changes, in themes running from “Body Language,” “The Erotic Natural,” and “Modernity at the Kitchen Table,” through “Heroics,” “Silent Pictures,” and “Uneasy Peace,” among others. But the size and amount of work in the show makes the sections a little confused, you end up not quite sure if you’re being directed toward the plants, people, or buildings in the artwork before you. Grant Wood’s 1929 Woman with Plants, the direct precedent to his enshrined American Gothic, hangs far away from the portraiture section, though surely the meticulous painting of his proud mother set against a frontier-scape is more than just still life. The points made in the text panels in all of these categories are quite perceptive, but in a show this large brevity should be key. Provide the background information and let the works illustrate the decade from which they sprang.
Peter Blume’s Flower and Torso in a section titled “The Erotic Natural” captures much of what was at stake in art at the time and would have slipped nicely into any or all of the aforementioned sections. An angular nude cropped at chin and pelvis clasps two flowers to her chest. It’s a still life, female nude, and landscape. It’s figurative and folk, yet has a long, slopping greyscale triangle cutting the image diagonally off at the bottom which seems to betray a modernist inclination.
Peter Blume, Flower and Torso, 1927
George Ault’s Brooklyn Ice House (1926) is painted in the reductive modern style with nary a living soul to clutter the scene. The only movement comes from a black plume of smoke rising from the stark factory building against heavy steel colored clouds. The simplicity and naïve rendering of this dreary sky is like much of the imagery in the surrounding industrial scenes hanging on adjacent walls. And though it is quite beautiful in its strong greens and grays, the tone is ominous. A prophesy of the approach of an age where these buildings would take over the greenery that is still present in the foreground? Though he chose it as his subject matter, Ault was not so swayed by the marvel of urban progress that dominated thinking at the time. “The tombstones of capitalism” was how he referred to the skyscrapers that were rising up from New York’s horizon. They weren’t yet signifiers of global warming, rapidly receding greenspace and the squandering of precious resources.
It’s a youthful idealism that glints from around the sharp corners and off the sleek surfaces of most the art of the American twenties, but what the Brooklyn Museum can be congratulated for is showing the artists whose ideas did not align with either the overriding mentalities or conform entirely to the twenties aesthetic. Elsie Driggs’s trimotor aluminum airplane (an invention that recurs at least three times in the following rooms), Joseph Stella’s The Birth of Venus, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Self-Portrait as a Photographer are some decidedly odd offerings in technique, composition or subject matter. But what they—along with the other works in the show—have in common is their pursuit: to create an image of beauty from the new and preexisting landscape of American life.
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Aldrin Valdez: Let’s start from the beginning, how did you get into making art?
Caroline Woolard: I don’t know when I started making art. My mom is a design historian, so I grew up around people who made, thought about, and loved functional and dis-functional objects, well-designed experiences, and good craftsmanship. I suppose that I committed myself to art when I applied to Cooper Union, asking my parents to trust my 18-year-old enthusiasm to attend art school. Cooper Union allowed me to pursue my own interests in a space of rigor and accountability, connecting me to artists who care deeply about public space. Cooper also allowed me to graduate with a BFA, debt-free, something that is currently under debate: http://freeasairandwater.net/mission/response/1vbjkk1zeqs0
Valdez: What projects are you currently working on?
Woolard: I’m working to make infrastructure for radical becoming, and this means I can’t follow the trend to produce new projects that only last a month. To make change, you have to commit. Each project is one that will evolve with time… grassroots organizing and economic activism at SolidarityNYC, two barter networks, teaching two classes, and running an 8000sq ft studio space. I’m also mapping the “art world” to show a wide view of what an artist can do, join, and be.
Valdez: In your work, it’s very clear that art is not exclusive to the studio. You make sculptures and performances that foster a community the foundation of which is artistic creation and sharing of individual artistic and craft skills. I’m referring specifically to your project Trade School. Could you describe what Trade School is?
Woolard: Trade School is a non-traditional learning environment that runs on barter. Anyone can teach a class, and teachers are paid in barter items that they request. Trade School is not my project. Trade School was started in 2009 by three of the five co-founders of OurGoods: Rich Watts, Louise Ma, and myself. From there, it grew to be a much larger collective with different organizers each year.
Art has never been made exclusively in a studio, for a white cube gallery. Growing up with an art historian for a mother, I was always reminded of the silly nature of that short-sighted version of history. (http://austinalchemy.com/home.html#Publications)
Valdez: Could you talk about the aspect of play in your work?
Woolard: I like to create multiple entry points into my work: via function, via play, and via critical discourse. Embodied experience carries an intelligence that distant thought cannot touch. As Yvonne Rainer said, “the mind is a muscle.” Sitting, swinging, talking, and physically engaging with things connects people to the world directly.
Caroline Woolard, Subway Swinging
Valdez: Have you always made art that engaged public participation?
Woolard: I’ve always made work where people gather: the street, the subway, and now, the Internet. Before, I made interventionist attachments to existing city infrastructure. From 2004 to 2006, I made 20 public seats and attached them to stop-sign posts around NY. I maintained the seating and watched as all kinds of people used it for reading, relaxing, and waiting. I also made a backpack that transformed into a subway swing, inviting strangers to engage in an act of play and trust despite the public announcements of suspicion and terror. Now, I build collaborative infrastructure: Trade School, OurGoods.org, and SolidarityNYC .
Caroline Woolard, Public Seating
Valdez: The SolidarityNYC website contains loads of useful and empowering information about banking and credit unions. I’m focusing in on the following statement: “We have to radically change the way we relate to each other and the purpose of economic activity.” Wall Street is a big hulking abstraction that makes it very difficult to think about economy and money as real material forces moved and embodied by real people. What are your thoughts on the Occupy Movement? How would you define the purpose of economic activity?
Woolard: I am thrilled to be living at this moment in history. With #occupy, I am having more radical conversations about “the economy” than ever before. For most people, “the economy” signifies wage labor in a capitalist market. But for me, for the Community Economies Collective, for SolidarityNYC, and for many other people, there are diverse economies that allow people to meet their needs together: sharing, volunteering, giving, bartering, commoning, and more.
What is the Solidarity Economy? Solidarity Economies meet the needs of interdependent communities (everything from financial services to food) by utilizing values of justice, sustainability, cooperation, and democracy. The Solidarity Economy focuses on grassroots economic justice, connecting businesses and initiatives that emphasize democratic member control, member economic participation, member education and empowerment, environmental sustainability, and cooperation between initiatives.
The Solidarity Economy asks “Why?” and lets “How?” follow from there. Why share? Why Cooperate? Solidarity Economies focus on the principles that guide interaction and behavior. For me, successful models always depend upon the individual people that breathe intention and interdpendence into them, living the principles that stand behind every action. As Ethan Miller writes, the Solidarity Economy evolves the existing system via defensive, offensive, creative, and healing actions:
- Defensive action: to protect ourselves and our communities from immediate harm
- Offensive action: to challenge the current structures of oppression and exploitation in all of their racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, and otherwise exclusionary forms
- Healing action: to work through and recover from the pain and brokenness that has been imposed upon us in so many ways
- Creative action: to build alternative structures that meet our daily needs and help us secede from the oppressions of the dominant society and economy
(from Solidarity Economics: Strategies for Building New Economies From
the Bottom-Up and the Inside-Out, Ethan Miller)
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The December 2011 curated by Juliet Helmke
This month’s shortlist comprises a group of artists working with sculpture, new media or performance, whose aesthetic is characterized by an element of play. Joan Grubin’s paper strips painted bright, fluorescent colors rising out of the wall surprise by their simplicity and optical trickery. Cat Del Buono takes on the societal propensity for stereotyping in a video installation that acts out some gross generalizations and asks the question: Do I look Italian Now? Dave Rittinger literally puts a kink in the system withPole Dance, a subway-car intervention where the pole for travelers to hang on to is knotted in the middle. And his Love Connections—four double ended power cords yearning their perfect fit—is reminiscent of Rachel Selekman’s abnormal watering-cans. There is a lovely humor in both distortions of these ordinary objects. The amorphous suits worn by Lizzie Scott’s performers in Styrene Fantastic allow for a similar bizarre banality, when the wearers repeatedly rise from the ground then flop back down wearing expressions of utter nonchalance. Though a list of works with disparate mediums and aesthetics, all are characterized by a strange and often-surprising element of whimsy.
Head to the Artist Registry to check it out! And while you’re there, why not join up and add some work of your own?
http://registry.bricartsmedia.org/
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Tamika Sur Une Chaise Longue, 2008, mixed media collage, Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York
Mickalene Thomas describes her collages in “More Than Everything” at Lehmann Maupin’s Soho gallery as more accessible than her large paintings. Known for engulfing, rhinestone studded canvasses that overwhelm the viewer in an aesthetic pastiche of 70’s femininity and blaxploitation, Thomas is here giving viewers a glimpse into where it all starts: with a photo taken in a wood paneled corner of her studio.
Though the end result is glittery pop-art meets pin up, these early mock-ups are quiet, intimate works, puzzled together with a keen eye for color and detail. The initial photographs of African American female models are individually collaged into a scene invented by the artist from other photos and found clippings. In Tamika Sur Une Chaise Lounge, (2008) a black female model addresses the camera with an unbroken stare while rather passively lounging on clashing orange drapery. Though clothed, she’s all legs and cleavage; a 70’s Olympia being impinged upon by a busy background patchwork.
In “More Than Everything,” utmost care has been given to framing and presentation. The thick matte borders and sturdy frames lend a precious quality to work that in its initial form is very raw, an amalgam of colored pieces that come up at the edges.
Not all the works are small and intimate. A lone black and white Polaroid portrait of a bare chested woman that faces the viewer as they enter the gallery is striking not only for its size—roughly 2 ½ by 3 feet—but also for its lush black velvet and curved gold frame. As well as for the woman’s steady stare. Three more such images can be found in the adjoining room – two single nude portraits and one intertwined female couple. It’s easy to luxuriate in their sumptuousness, and difficult to resist wanting to run ones hands over the glossy curved edges of the frame or through the velvet mat. The images themselves are tinted chocolate brown and the women’s’ skin glows. But they hearken back to an exploitative tradition that is not so pleasant to recall and tinges the photos with an uncomfortable undercurrent.
Courbet 2 (Melody: Centered), 2011, polaroid, Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York
The collages are presented Salon style, an exhibition method re-popularized by Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo at the birth of modernism in their crowded collection at 27 Rue de Fleurus, Paris. But it dates back to the original Paris Salon that had its heyday in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries where art was hung from floor to ceiling for maximum exhibition space. An artist’s status was defined by how close he or she came to the middle line. Filling up the cavernous space at Lehman Maupin would have been quite a feat with these small works, so instead they are arranged in an amorphous cloud formation upon the wall. Each image bounces off and is influenced by its neighbor. It’s hard to look at them individually, separate from the surrounding colors and scenes.
Though they hold their own as singular objects, it’s fair to say each of Thomas’s works is informed by what she has made before, what she will make after, and the multitude of cultural products she has been influenced by along the way. None of the work can be regarded without a thought to the assertive female characters portrayed by Pam Grier, Matisse’s Odalisques, notions of female beauty as reiterated in artistic depictions of women throughout history, the portrait photos of Carrie Mae Weems, or the conventions and methodologies of art exhibition. It seems a disparate mix, and surely the list goes on. But it is Thomas’s ability to combine elements—whether color and pattern or differing thematic concern—that makes the small works at Lehmann Maupin as attention-grabbing as all her glitter and gold.
–Juliet Helmke
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As BRIC’s Contemporary Art program marks its 30th anniversary this fall, it seems only fitting that our Artist of the Month be one of the very first five associated with the organization, Despo Magoni.
BRIC Rotunda Gallery’s founding director, Jackie Battenfield, selected Magoni’s work for the gallery’s third exhibition, Figurative Works on Paper. She revealed to me that Jackie’s optimism was contagious and played a pivotal role early in her career, by introducing her to other art venues, including the Alternative Museum. Despo’s love of life and art is contagious. As I sat down at her work table in her Cobble Hill studio, amidst charcoal and discarded bits of paper, she walked me through her own personal history of art. She has devoted her work- including paintings, works on paper, and handmade books to the most universal of themes, the human condition. One might say that her demeanor is in stark contrast to the art before us. Despo Magoni’s work exists in the ether between darkness and light. As an expressionist, she reveals and challenges our truly exquisite yet damaged inner selves; calling out the id, ego and super-ego all at once. Inspired in her youth by artists such as El Greco, Van Gogh, and the later works of Goya, her work travels the fine line between beauty and the grotesque— tantalizing us with a passionate emotion within the confines of conformity.
Born in Greece, Despo is now a die-hard New Yorker who has lived in Brooklyn since 1969. Her imagery harvests a rich heritage steeped in mythology and literature superimposed with contemporary social and political issues. When asked “Why do you create?” she replied, “I create because I feel certain things have to be said that no one else cares to say.” In general, her work focuses on bringing issues to light—whether political, cultural, or pulled from her own personal experience.
Reading the New York Times everyday inspired one of her earliest series People in the News. In 1977, New York City experienced a brutal heat wave, the Son of Sam terror spree, a serious financial crisis, and the lost power resulting in one of the worst episodes of looting in New York history. Despo created artworks where the expressions of the individual portraits, painted on the newsprint, reflected the hidden drama and intensity behind the events mentioned in the text. Each title is taken verbatim from text written somewhere on the page.
It seems tragically ironic that as I write this in September 2011 we’ve just concluded one of the most violent 72-hour periods in New York’s recent memory, with over four dozen shootings, not to mention the current financial crisis and an unemployment rate of over 8%.
A Better-Fed World, 1977, 22.5 x 14.75 in., oil pastel on a page of the New York Times
The Proposal, 1978, 22.5 x 14.75 in., oil pastel on a page of the New York Times
With her next few series, Despo shifted to more personal and socially inspired imagery, but her work retained an underlying theme of the struggle that divides the self inwardly and outwardly. I’m most fixated on her 1986 exhibition at the Alternative Museum entitled, Recent Paintings. Magoni utilized the figures of a magician and his assistant to focus on two issues: suffering and the relationship between men and women. As highlighted by Barry Schwabsky’s essay On Pathos,
“Magoni’s men are ‘magicians’ – charlatans, performers, imposters. Whatever supernatural potency they claim to possess, one look at them shows that they can barely keep up appearances. Archaic emotions of fear and rage are always just below the surface. Magic claims to give a kind of effortless control over objects and other people. In fact it exists in order for fragile egos to maintain a modicum of control over themselves… Magoni’s women are the ones who undergo the real risks of the performance, who stand transfixed as the knives fly past them. They are the ones who give the magicians’ theatrical act in tragic dimension, for it is our empathy with their suffering that evokes pity and fear.”*
For me, the most poignant role these images play is not merely defining an exterior struggle between the masculine and feminine but rather highlighting the internal one. I am simultaneously the magician and the assistant, and yes, they are constantly at battle – one does not exist without the other.
Poseidon’s Phobia, 1984, 40 x 30 in., pastel on paper
The Ghost, 1985, 17 x 14 in., pastel on paper
While her older work remains powerful and significant even today, at this phase in her career Despo is purging her acquired ephemeral; not discarding but re-purposing. She remains dedicated to examining the human condition and expressing it through figurative representation. In her latest body of work, The Music Within, this translates into separating an old anatomy book into individual sheets of work then rebinding them and creating smaller books. She directed my attention to two rows of pages carefully laid out over archival white paper scroll on the floor. I’m the type of person who gets excited opening a book – eager with the anticipation of what the paper will feel like as I turn the page. For a brief moment, I was anxious to see the individual papers lying there – alone – separated from their loving bind. Perhaps having sensed my distress, she immediately handed me a finished new book. I liked this – art you can touch! It’s intimate and engaging. This is not her first series of books and I suspect it will not be her last. When asked what she likes about creating books versus an isolated image, she replied, ”There is an element of surprise in an art book, as different ideas develop from page to page inviting the viewer to revisit the book often-finding new meaning at each reading.” The process of creating this new work is a meditation on the body dealing with growth, mortality, and the process of grieving.
In our over saturated world, inundated with disposable imagery and text messaging, it’s refreshing to experience art that demands more of the viewer. Throughout her career, Despo’s work has served as inspiration not only for lesser known artists but for critically acclaimed ones as well, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat as art historian John Angeline mentioned in his thesis Head to Head: Magoni, Basquiat and Forgotten Soho.
Despo’s work , Celestial Crossings #1 from the Sky Watch series in 2009 can be seen currently as part of BRIC Contemporary Art’s exhibition 30: A Brooklyn Salon.
-Bonnie Portelance
*Barry Schwabsky, from Despo Magoni, recent painting: April 2-April 26, 1986, The Alternative Museum, 1986.
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Factory Fresh’s recent surrealist exhibition is a sometimes nightmarish, often unsettling, and uniformly unconventional exploration of the artist’s unconscious. The show is marked by its diversity – a simple white sculpture or sparsely painted canvas coexists with dizzying collages and vividly bright paintings – but the pieces share an almost palpable sense of the uncanny. The works that are figural are also dysmorphic – skeletons and animals pose as human, body parts are replaced with inanimate objects – and the abstract pieces are cryptic and difficult to grasp.
Many of the pieces share a thematic sense of struggle with the unconscious. Most blatantly, Ryan Michael Ford’s “Me vs. Myself,” is an almost literal presentation of the artist wrestling with his own unconscious; this “self,” positioned against a man in boxing position, is a monstrous shape emitting open mouths, wailing ghosts and paint brushes. From this distorted vision, Ford offers a glimpse into the horrifying realm of an unquiet psyche. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Kevin Curran’s “The Woods” is simple and elegant – quiet in every way – though it, too, is marked by subtle evidence of strain. The plain white sculpture shows a tiny body stretched over a boulder-like mound, his arms gripping tightly and his golden face frowning. This, though less blatant than Ford’s work, nevertheless suggests struggle, which may or may not be a cryptic reflection of the figure’s psyche.
The entire gallery presentation is somewhat out of the ordinary, with curatorial choices that blend seamlessly with the bizarre vibe of the art. Factory Fresh is the 2008 Brooklyn off-shoot of the now-closed Orchard Street Art Gallery, considered the first and only street art gallery of its time, and which served also as the home of owners Ali Ha and Ad Deville. While the space no longer doubles as a living room – though the cat settling itself freely amongst the art made it seem possible – the Brooklyn gallery shares with its Manhattan predecessor an unconventional method of display. Indeed, one can easily forget the static space of the gallery when confronted with oddities such as art labeling so miniature that it almost disappears into the wall, or British grafitti artist Sweet Toof’s signature pearly teeth over lurid pink gums painted on the doors. These and other touches blur the line between curated exhibit and street art aesthetic. There is nothing to prevent the viewer from entering fully into the dreamlike sensibility created by the artists.
~Georgina Wells
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Celebrating Thirty Years of Contemporary Art
September 15 – October 29, 2011
Opening Reception: September 14, 2011, 7-9pm
Curated by Elizabeth Ferrer, Director of Contemporary Art
30: A Brooklyn Salon has been organized to celebrate BRIC Rotunda Gallery’s status as Brooklyn’s oldest continuously operating contemporary art space and to offer a look back at the wealth of artists who shaped the character of our exhibition program over three decades. With work by some 50 Brooklyn-affiliated artists, the exhibition presents a diverse segment of the nearly 1,500 artists who have exhibited at the Gallery and contributed to BRIC’s history. 30 includes work spanning a range of media: painting, works on paper, sculpture, photography, video, and a site-specific commission on the gallery’s storefront by Jackie Chang.
With its breadth and dense installation addressing such varied themes as place, process, materiality, and abstraction, 30 evokes the contemporary art landscape of Brooklyn. The exhibition distinguishes BRIC Rotunda Gallery as an artist-centered space, where curatorial ideas are sparked by the art discovered in studios across the borough and in our registry, and where young artists have found a resourceful platform to present new work.
Artists include: Eric Arctander, Leslie Alexander, Kamrooz Aram, Daniel Bejar, Francisca Benitez, Phong Bui, Joel Carreiro, Jackie Chang, Vincent Cianni, Amy Cutler, Blane de St. Croix, Elizabeth Demaray, Melissa Dubbin & Aaron S. Davidson, Yvonne Estrada, Linda Ganjian, Anthony Goicolea, LeRoy Henderson, Gilbert Hsiao, Katarina Jerinic, Aaron Johnson, Eve Andrée Laramée,
William Lamson, Kristin Lucas, Despo Magoni, Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz, Mary Mattingly,
Marci McGuffie, Lori Nix, Patrick O’Hare, Alex O’Neal, Karyn Olivier, Carolanna Parlato, Dulce Pinzón, Jenny Polak, Larry Racioppo, Ray Rapp, Zoë Sheehan Saldaña, Juan Sánchez, Charles Schucker, Dread Scott, Lizzie Scott, Ward Shelley, Diana Shpungin, Peter Simensky, Micki Watanabe Spiller, Eugenie Tung, Adele Judith Ursone, Randy Wray, and Dale E. Williams.
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To James Bascara, art is a process of translation: he uses his canvas as a space to re-imagine and recreate his emotional or intellectual response to source material ranging from vintage photographs to the writing of T.S. Eliot and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. With a style and technique that combines gestural abstraction with the precision of photorealism, Bascara blurs the divide between artistic genres. He applies the personality of painting to the mechanics of photography; he evokes words through images. Through his work, Bascara makes tangible the intangible sensations of nostalgia, memory, longing, and loss.
He articulates his creative process with depth and eloquence, revealing a profound complexity of thought. Bascara paints from photographs, choosing ones that he finds in thrift stores as a basis for his work. Looking at a photograph, he explains, is “looking at a memory:” in reinterpreting it, he mimics an object already dense with subtext of remembrance. Looking at Bascara’s paintings, however, is like looking at a memory altered: perhaps half-forgotten, or reworked repeatedly in one’s mind. He creates the appearance of damage through his abstraction. By manipulating the images, he saturates them with a more nuanced emotional depth. Bascara clarifies the significance of this technique: “I don’t want to just make the viewer see the memory, but feel it.”
James Bascara, Water, 2011
Though his paintings are intrinsically tied to photography, he is quick to stress their self-reflexivity. “I try to keep things two-dimensional, and to acknowledge that what I am making is two-dimensional, based on a two-dimensional photograph. The abstract elements of my work keep this flatness,” he explains. “The work is representational but at the same time, it’s abstract… You do see brush strokes in my work, it’s not perfectly accurate, there’s not the same texture to it as a photograph. I just try to keep the vibe of the photograph.” And so he does, by including, for instance, the “weird, hard flash” of the camera, but these quirks of photography coexist with Bascara’s own creative inflections. “I’m not striving for photorealism, just for my paintings to look like photographs.”
The influence of photography on Bascara’s paintings is immediately evident, but more covertly, language, too, is key to his artistic process. He overlays his imagery with bold, seemingly unrelated graphic letters, which he cites as visual elements, meant to be seen as much as read. “I try to keep the text as abstract as the other elements of the painting. I don’t want the meaning to be too literal. But at the same time, visually, I just react to a word that would look right in an image – just the shape of the letters. I’m not trying to add too much meaning from it, just evoke some meaning so that it’s more than a decorative element.”
Bascara speaks lucidly and passionately about his entwined identities of artist and reader, finding connections between the disparate disciplines. “I give myself an abstract problem to solve: what images can I make that go along with this text? For example, [some of my recent] work came from reading magical realism – like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Reading through these things, I was thinking parallel to them, and trying to create the same thought processes on my canvas.” The influence is discernible: the canvases he refers to are painted entirely deep red or blue monotone, a juxtaposition of simplistic imagery and fantastic color – he transforms generic scenes into visions of a boundless, lyrical reality. He adopts his inspiration in style, conceptually re-presenting both the mechanics and the meaning of text as he absorbs them, and as they might exist visually. It’s a process of distillation more than interpretation: “It’s not even just literal concepts – when you read things, your brain starts reacting in different ways, it gets your brain moving in different directions. I don’t make direct illustrations, I’m just inspired by text.”
James Bascara, Blue, 2011
James Bascara, Tootsie, 2011
Perhaps most powerfully, he cites T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” as a critical source of inspiration; his discussion of the technical elements of the poetry reveals an almost synesthetic ability to visualize language. “I read it so many times but I still don’t fully grasp it – the way he phrases things, I’m not fluent with his language, yet I can feel what he’s saying. I thought I could probably do that visually.” Evidently, he makes concrete on canvas this unseen response of comprehension – his personal cerebral insight takes the form of physical process as he transposes his sensory experience into paint. It is this ability to seamlessly convey the essential meaning of one medium in another that makes Bascara’s work so unique. As he puts it: “You could say I have a working relationship with T.S. Eliot. I can’t really get away from text.”
–Georgina Wells, Marketing and Curatorial Intern
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On Wednesday May 18th, INvent/ONsite, the 23rd Annual BRIC Contemporary Art Education Exhibition opened with a reception at BRIC Rotunda Gallery. The exhibition, curated by Director of Contemporary Art Education Hawley Hussey, features art work created by students at eight public schools throughout Brooklyn. The art is as varied as it is dynamic, featuring projects that range from P.S. 503’s collaborative portraits of Michelle and Barack Obama to pieces inspired by Kandinsky, Calder, Mondrian and Pollock created by pre-kindergarteners at P.S. 8. BRIC Contemporary Art Education’s collaboration with Brooklyn schools gives students the unique chance to view their art in a professional gallery setting. The opening was a special celebration of creativity. See the art work on display until June 11, 2011 at BRIC Rotunda Gallery!
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