ERASER 4

E R A S E R

ERASE

CURATING CONTEMPORARY

DISTANT Distant is a collection of acres next to the waterfront.

It would be inappropriate to call it waterfront property.

The District of Distant stares at glorious smokestacks where smoke lifts into your eyes and burns them with visions.

Distant gives you hope. You see it in the driftwood.

You see it in the river that shows you the face you own.

Distant gives you perspective.

The perspective of reaching into your pocket feeling the matchbook you put there when you first encountered Distant.

To make fire you must disengage your inclinations, swipe the sulfur against the sandpaper.

Distant will not help here. You are alone in Distant.

You smoke your cigarette in smokestacks beautiful plumes released as cloud formations.

In this way you have made your mark on Distant and she will let you back in. But now you must treblecleff, flatten your soles, place the matchbook back in the pocket you got it from when you first encountered Distant. ~ Gerard Lambert

ERASER VOLUME 4

WILLIS S T O PA BUTLER SPRECHER TURNER KLEBERG LAMBERT

CURATING CONTEMPORARY

Contributors

Melissa Staiger (b.1978, Louisville, KY) earned a BFA from Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore, MD; an MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. She has been included in recent exhibitions with American Abstract Artists, Equity Gallery, Neumeraki, and Stand4 Gallery.

Staiger lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She teaches at Pratt Institute, Adelphi University, and the 92Y.

Tina Ruggieri is an Assistant Curator at the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s AbromsEngel Institute for the Visual Arts since 2019. She received her Bachelor of Arts with a concertation in Art History from UAB and is currently working towards her Masters in Art History with a concertation in Comtepnoary Art. She has curated shows such as Shona McAndrew: Wednesday Night and Jiha Moon: Chasing Spirits and co-curated Quentin Morris and A la carte: A Visual Exploration of Our Relationship with Food.

Jacob Cartwright is an artist, curator, and writer based in New York City. He holds a BFA in Painting from the Kansas City Art Institute. His work has been shown internationally and recently exhibited at Mckenzie Fine Art and John Molloy Gallery. Curatorial work includes New York is Now, presented with IS-projects in Athens, Greece, and online shows presented with Laurence Miller Gallery, featuring the work of Mary Laube, Kevin Umaña, and Yoko Ikeda. He is a member of American Abstract Artists where he recently initiated an ongoing series of curatorial essays for the AAA Online Journal.

Pete Schulte is an artist based in Birmingham, Alabama. He is Associate Professor of Art at The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. In 2013 Schulte co-founded The Fuel and Lumber Company curatorial initiative with Amy Pleasant. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at McKenzie Fine Art in New York City and at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, where he was artist-in-residence in 2019. In March 2022 Schulte’s work will be presented in a two-person exhibition with Yevgeniya Baras at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York.

Alan Pocaro is an artist and writer based in Illinois. His award-winning works have been featured in numerous national and international exhibitions. Associated with the New Aesthetics movement -an informal group of individuals who emphasize the physical and material nature of art- Pocaro is a member of the AICA. His writing has appeared in New American Paintings, Art Critical, Abstract Critical, City Beat and ART PAPERS. Pocaro is currently appointed Associate Professor of Art + Design at Eastern Illinois University.

Dana-Marie Lemmer is the executive director and curator of the Wiregrass Museum of Art (WMA) in Dothan, AL, where she oversees the strategic vision, administration, and artistic direction of the organization. She specializes in building relationships between artists and institutions and works to build meaningful connections with the audience through diverse public programming.

She is a published writer and has curated independent projects focusing on various professional interests including: the (under)representation of emerging and female artists; regionalism and contemporary practice in the South; developing interpretive strategies through technology; and creative placemaking as a catalyst in social and economic development.

Vered Lieb, studied at the Arts Student League and established her first studio in Soho in 1970.

She is a painter with works in the collection of the Albright Knox Art Museum, the Cincinatti Art Museum and others. She has written for Art Forum, Art In America and Arts magazine as well as published and edited, “Appearances” and “Review: Artists on Art” magazines., and the introduction for many art catalogues and books. She taught and lectured at SUNY Purchase, and at Syracuse University.

Brian Edmonds is an artist, writer, and curator based in Alabama. His work has been exhibited nationally, including New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, and Nashville, and internationally, including London, Paris, Marseilles, and Cyprus. Brian started Curating Contemporary, an online exhibition space, in 2012. Since its inception the site has hosted over 50 exhibitions. In 2019, he began publishing Eraser, a biannual book featuring the work of contemporary artists.

Julie Karabenick was a geometric artist with work that has been featured in 10 solo and two-artist exhibitions. She has also taken part in over 65 curated and juried group exhibitions.

Her work may be found in numerous private collections. In addition to her career as an artist, Karabenick served as both a juror and a curator for group exhibitions in New York City and Philadelphia. For over 15 years, she was the editor/curator of an online scholarly project called Geoform (www.geoform.net) that focuses on the use of geometric form and structure in contemporary abstract art from around the world.”

THORNTON WILLIS Vered Lieb: What interests you about paintings that you see?

Thornton Willis: The best painting is always open-ended. It asks questions, and partners

with the viewer to bring the experience to closure, or it might excite another painter to respond.

This is what I aim for in my work.

VL: As a Southerner, you got your MFA at the University of Alabama studying under Melville Price who had been part of the first generation of American Abstract Expressionists. What happened to your work when you arrived in New York City after you graduated?

TW: I came to New York City at a great time to still be able to meet artists and to find a studio

in a loft building that was relatively cheap and affordable. I was still living pretty much hand to mouth and yet the energy of the city was and remains very attractive to me.

My work was bound to change from what I had done in graduate school. ‘Process Art” was just starting up among the sculptors I met, Linda Benglis, Richard Serra and Alan Saret, and others.

I wanted to translate that attitude of letting the materials become the means of expression with as little external guidance as possible, to how one might make a painting. Guiding the paint but also letting the paint do it’s thing.

When I arrived in New York I met painters I admired like Kenneth Noland who did something quite different from the kind of gestural painting that had interested me earlier. I had been influenced by the more color field wing of abstract expressionism like Rothko and Clifford Still. And I gravitated to the more gestural work of Pollock and Kline. deKooning is, for me the “Master” for both gesture and the ability to hold paint back (stop the paint as it were) when it is stronger to do so than to allow the line or form to come to some predetermined resolution.

So my attempt to carry forward with abstract painting has always been to find a means of synthesizing all those influences I’d absorbed.

Three Ladies (1978-79). 96 x 78 in.

Acrylic on canvas

VL: How did you manage to work out these influences and make the work your own?

TW: I hoped to just keep working through these means and try to bring together these

influences and to produce the most dynamic and powerful work that I can by injecting what I believe has to be injected into one’s art, which is ultimately personality and spirit, and touch those emotional places in us that we all share.

VL: What is it that you are hoping to achieve with your work?

TW: There is a desire on my part for the painting to take on a kind of objectivity as well as having a spiritual content. I want it to be an object, but a very special kind of object that engages the viewer, that actually reaches out and touches the viewer.

VL: You talk about your art and that of others, like Don Voisine’s, as having spiritual qualities. Aren’t you asking a lot from a painting?

TW: I recognize painting as a finite thing, there is no perfection or an infinite answer…it’s a

human struggle with more questions asked than questions answered.

There is a kind of longing, maybe for the infinite, but then painting is spiritual but it is finite.

There is an attempt to inject the spiritual into what is otherwise absolutely materialistic.

VL: Over the many decades I see that your work has changed and that at the same time you go back to certain ideas that interested you along the way. How do you approach making a painting? Is it pre-planned out ahead of time with drawings?

TW: I often start from drawings. But the minute you take an 8 by 10 inch drawing and try to make a large painting out of it, everything changes.

I have always been a highly intuitive painter and during the course of building a painting surface up, anything can happen. You go with it!

I am often led by my work in the sense that ambiguous parts can become a new direction, I become more interested in going in that direction then what I originally intended. The influence of unsuccessful parts of a painting ultimately can become the very successful parts of the painting and transition me into a new body of work.

From the first painting I made as a young artist through to now, I have been struggling to articulate much of the same ideas. We get better from the hard work and the struggle.

The intellectual content may vary, but we carry from one body of work to anther our values in terms of what we consider dynamic and worthy of expression.

VL: What do you get out of painting and what do you hope the painting conveys to others?

TW: I am struggling to deal with what I feel is real for me in a confusing world, one in which we have maybe longings that we need to deal with cathartically and therapeutically and painting does that.

As I have gotten older I no longer can physically attack the canvas with the level of energy that I did when I was young. But I try for energy in my work, high levels of it, with intention.

I can still climb the mountain, but the steps are more considered. Painting is physical, but it’s also a structured event. If the painting is successful it combines the physical and the considered structure and the dynamic set up between the two is what makes it forceful or powerful. I am trying to make as powerful and honest a painting as I can.

At 85, you know it seems like it should get easier (to make a painting)…but it doesn’t.

I end up doing different things to get to the same place!

I am making some new painting now in my studio that I am pretty excited about.

Parts of the interview were contributed by Julie Karabenick and were previously published in Thornton Willis: Essays and Interviews. Greenpoint Press Art Books (2018).

Flashback (2008). 83 x 61 in.

Oil on canvas

Hot Shot (1983). 108 x 120 in.

Acrylic on canvas

Cityscape (1999). 60 x 48 in.

Oil on canvas

Impingement (2015). 77 x 61 in.

Oil on canvas Collection of Sarah Moody Gallery of Art, The University of Alabama

The Conversation (2019). 32 x 32 in.

Oil & acrylic on wood

Black Warrior (2008). 70 x 59 in.

Oil on canvas Collection of Sarah Moody Gallery of Art, The University of Alabama

Gray Area (2020). 52 x 70 in.

Acrylic on canvas

Target (2021). 52 x 70 in.

Acrylic on canvas

JASON STOPA Jacob Cartwright: My feeling is that color is a primary subject in your work. An example

is your “High Fructose” works which use food, and the branding around food products, as a kind of formal toolbox. To me, those paintings make explicit the way painting—in particular color painting—hits all at once, like something coming into contact with your taste buds. Of course this also relates to branding and the way that color is coded to trigger immediate associations. Can you talk about your use of color across your paintings in general? Do you feel there is a common thread to how it is being deployed or do you conceive of it differently as you’ve moved from one body of work to another?

Jason Stopa: When I was making the High Fructose works I was thinking of Pop color. Part

of this was because I was using the color from a product, cherry red for Coke, hot green for 7UP, etc. In some ways, I really didn’t know how to use color, and using a readymade color palette solved the equation. It also triggered familiar associations that clued the viewer into what I was addressing. Those paintings were kind of smart/dumb, as opposed to dumb/dumb. I see that body of work as belonging to a transitional period where I fully moved my work into architectural territory. My early paintings used a lot of framing devices, and my current work still does, what has changed is that I’m no longer relying on obvious source material. My palette now references a couple periods in painting that seem to address my interests. The color of early 20th century French paintings, Cezanne’s bathers, Matisse’s Joy of Life, and other works are touchstones for me. They are paintings about arcadia, paradise and escapism. I also think about the palette of Piero della Francesca. Here the palette is severe and striking. Renaissance painting, at its core, is just another way to talk about paradise or heaven. I want to split the difference between these two periods in terms of color.

JC: I feel that your paintings have a very fleet footed way of delivering a good amount

of associative heft—the paintings you were making about four years ago frequently evoked for me Matisse’s Red Studio yet never seemed burdened by the association.

Obviously we’ve reached a point in contemporary painting where things are frequently perceived as being quotational. I often think that this can be a case of false resemblance, what Erwin Panofsky calls “Pseudomorphosis”—artworks can have morphological resemblance while having very different genealogies. That said, modern painting casts a long shadow and your titles sometimes namecheck artists who worked in other mediums

A portrait of Luis Barragán (2021). 28 x 23 in.

Oil on canvas

Roman Garden Arch (2020). 28 x 23 in.

Oil on canvas

(Sun Ra, Luis Barragán). Can you talk about how you approach these issues of influence and allusion in your practice?

JS: Thanks. I’m glad it’s associative and not derivative. Haha. I’m not interested in quotation or

pastiche; those Postmodern ideas about painting. I respect it, but I’m trying to do something else.

I think of the history of painting as a giant Christmas tree. The tree is up, all of the branches have ornaments, and there’s virtually nothing left to put on it. But occasionally someone can deliver the right ornament at the right time that illuminates the whole thing.

Luis Barragan said that he wanted to make an emotional architecture. This resonates with my thinking about my use of architecture in painting. He also places a lot of close value ranges together. His structures have a tendency to feel like an immersive experience. I want my paintings to have a similar effect. Sun Ra is a huge inspiration. The king of afrofuturism. And utopia is a means toward talking about that, it is a placeholder for so many things, but that is one of them. Making paintings in dedication to, or as an homage, is a way to keep history alive for me. I am saddened that many artists no longer feel tied to any artistic context or history, revisionist or otherwise. An art culture that cannot contend with its past cannot move into any possible future that doesn’t replay the same issues over again. That’s the definition of parody.

And when it does so without self-awareness, it’s kitsch.

Pete Schulte: Several years ago, I had a memorable studio visit with the artist Nayland

Blake. We spoke for over an hour after he inquired about the “audience of my heart”. In this regard, I am also thinking of Guston’s painting, Pantheon (1973), wherein he lists the names Masaccio, Piero, Giotto, Tiepolo, and de Chirico. In each case, there seems to be more at play than simply name-checking favorites of the moment. In the midst of all of the art that you look at, experience, and write about, much of which undoubtedly comes and goes either by evolving taste or fashion, who/what constitutes the audience of your heart (i.e. those that have sunk into the fiber of your being and will never let go)? Please explain.

Jason Stopa: I love that Guston painting. It reveals his inheritance. I think Guston was

putting a body on metaphysics, rewriting it into figuration, a subject that had gone out of fashion after de Chirico.

I always ask my first year grad students to make a family tree. No art comes out of the void. We are all responding to what came before us. In my list I’d include Stanley Whitney, Patricia Treib, Luis Barragan, Ad Reinhardt, Suzan Frecon and Fra Angelico. There is something elemental in

each of these artists. In each I recognize a desire for a severe aestheticism and restraint. It’s something that Ancient Greek pottery and Egyptian art have in common as well. There is also an aversion to language. I think these artists make paintings that are pre-verbal, and by that, I mean they paint from a place that tries to evade our capacity to name it. Before we describe the world, it appears to us as phenomena. Yet the words we use to describe a thing do not define it. This is interesting for painters. It is natural to want to attribute language to things, but these artists recognize that painting is its own language that refers to itself and the external world simultaneously. These are also moral values.

PS: When thinking about your work, I am reminded of an observation that John Yau made

about the forms that Suzan Frecon employs in her paintings, “They hover on the cusp of the identifiable without crossing over”[1]. In his review of your 2021 exhibition at Morgan Lehman, Yau makes a similar observation, but also provides a lengthy list of associations that your work conjures, suggesting perhaps more literal source material[2]. Will you discuss (a.) the source material that you employ in your paintings (is there any, how is it selected, how is it used?), and (b.) the role that improvisation plays while you are in the act of painting?

JS: I’m interested in the formal possibilities of utopian architecture. My oil paintings are made

of thin washes using archetypal, geometric forms. Recent source material includes Arcosanti, Drop City, and The City of the Sun. I’ve been abstracting those sources, as a means toward deconstruction. I want my paintings to feel highly physical and to resemble a kind of flattened sculpture. I’m interested in the capacity of graphic color to point toward idealism. I make several studies for each painting, these serve to inform my color choices and formal solutions. I allow for a lot of improvisation at this stage. The finished paintings have a bit less room for improv, though it happens, but too much improvisation risks losing a surface quality that I want to maintain.

Utopia is a dirty word. Almost everyone in the humanities is now skeptical of it. There is a burgeoning field of Utopian Studies, but its relevance has yet to be determined. Yet, somehow, we are stuck on it, stuck on this desire to create an ideal society for everyone. Whenever we try to create a perfectly balanced, egalitarian situation, it almost always ends in fascism. I think this is fascinating. I am after an abstraction that is two-fold: one that is critical of our notions of progress and also opens up a horizon of possibilities. By deconstructing utopia, it makes room for what could be. This ambiguity reflects what Edouard Glissant would call the “creolization,” of the modern world, and in this way, my work also reflects my identity as a mixed man.

[1] John Yau, “The Places Suzan Frecon’s Art Takes Me”, in Suzan Frecon, exh. cat. (New York, David Zwirner Books, 2020), 51 [2] John Yau, “Where Painting Can Live”, 26 June 2021, https://hyperallergic.com/658956/jason-stopa-where-painting-can-live/

The Gate II, 2020 (2020). 28 x 23 in.

Oil on canvas

Install shot of “Joy Labyrinth” at Morgan Lehman Gallery, NY 2021

Joy Labyrinth (2020-21). 72 x 60 in.

Oil on canvas

Bay of Harmony (2021). 55 x 41 in.

Oil on canvas

Human Nature (2021). 18 x 14 in.

Oil on canvas

Sound of Joy (2021). 50 x 38 in.

Oil on canvas

Pig (2019). 9” x 11” x 2” in.

Wood, various paints and glue

Reflection Pool (2020-21). 60 x 48 in.

Oil on canvas

Primary Cathedral (2021) 41 x 35 in.

Oil on canvas

VADIS TURNER Dana-Marie Lemmer: What role do materials play in your artistic process?

Vadis Turner: I’m trying to think of a role they don’t play… my materials are the vehicles for my

ideas.

I identify materials from the domestic sphere that have behavioral expectations and the potential to speak in some way. Ranging from the decorative to the structural, think curtains and cement, the materials are partnered with concepts specific to each body of work. That relationship is the departure point for my process.

I manipulate these materials, allowing them to transcend their intended function, contradict their structural nature and betray their traditional gender association. I delight in the moment when the materials start to misbehave and take on a new identity …..when used bedsheets become megalithic structures or when driveway gravel becomes a vessel.

DML: How has your work evolved over your career?

VT: Shortly after getting my degree in Painting, I became fascinated by the transformative

possibilities of household goods and beauty wares that relate to traditional forms of women’s work. I have made bite-sized chocolates out of curlers and large-scale installations out of chandeliers. Now I am making large sculptures from curtains. The scale, forms and content vary greatly from one body of work to the next. The practice of re-imagining domestic materials has stayed the course.

When I look back at my early mixed media work, I see surfaces that are laden with visual information. I am not apologizing for it, but I have come to realize that editing is everything.

I now aspire to say as much as possible with as little as possible. What can I say with two elements? With one?

I have let go of what something is supposed to look like. The twists and turns of a creative process ideally lead to destinations without exact locations or pre-determined shapes.

Studio, 2020, Photo: Hannah Deits->>>

Leather Grid, Figure 1, (2020).102 x 54 x 12 in.

Leather, thread, burnt wood & resin Photo: Hannah Deits

I have learned how to insert my own female-identifying experience into the crossroads of the content and the materials. I think that’s when the work starts to get its teeth.

Hopefully further refined skills and advanced visual values present new vantage points. Hopefully I’ll laugh at this answer in twenty years. Either way, I am so thankful that making this work is my work.

DML: Can you talk about the relationship between painting and sculpture in your work?

VT: I love this question. I aspire to create work that that doesn’t fit easily into any category.

I like things, people and experiences that I don’t know what to do with…. that I want to spend time learning from. Can my works simultaneously be paintings and sculptures? Can the categories bleed together? Breathe together?

Above all, I am most interested in putting myself, and the viewer, in the way of being moved.

Tina Ruggieri: How has the time during the pandemic allowed you to reflect on your own work and how has it evolved?

Vadis Turner: The pandemic continues to underscore the relevance of domestic materials and

life at home. Some household elements offer comfort, some confinement. Identities and gender roles have been unraveled and rewoven in varied ways.

After long days of home learning and impromptu adventuring with my sons, I clocked into the studio at night. I’ve never been more grateful for my practice. The work helped me maintain my identity and my sanity, even though I go there to question both. I was lucky to have a deadline, that was likely to be postponed. I told the gallery that I would be ready either way, that I needed to be in the studio.

That body of work evolved from a dual interest in Brutalist Architecture and the biology/behavior of moths. These disparate forces expose tensions between austerity and vulnerability, weight and flight, structures and unruly-ness. The tensions of being homebound helped these contrasts started to spark and take shape. The resulting 2020 exhibition, Cups and Grids at Geary NYC, featured 2D and 3D works ranging from limp linear systems to irregular vessels made with domestic and structural materials.

Pandemic culture is palpable in my current body of work. I am exploring the structural and expressive possibilities of window treatments. How can a curtain become a window? How can a window become a figure?

TR: Can you elaborate on how being a mother has influenced both your work

conceptually and with your choice of materials and mediums?

VT: As an artist and a parent, I want to present what I see with clarity and confidence. I am not doing my children or the work any favors by overcomplicating and/or overexplaining.

Like many life lessons, the work doesn’t have to be pretty to be meaningful.

My subject matter has started to align with topics my sons are sniffing out. Our favorite family podcast, Greeking Out, reignited my interest in mythology. I re-read the Odyssey and am currently making free standing forms that embody Circe and Scylla. The boys have been hanging out more in the studio to see how their podcast content is taking shape as window figures.

Winged Victory Vessel (2021). 24 x 19 x 16 in.

Charred wood, ribbon, & resin Photo: Hannah Deits

Ribbon and Rebar Grid (2021). 43 x 32 x 4 in.

Rebar, ribbon, & thread Photo: Hannah Deits

Eyespots (2020). 72 x 72 x10 in.

Mineral wool, bedsheets, resin & acrylic Photo: Hannah Deits

Two Cups in a Dresser Drawer, Cement & Bedsheets (2020). 20.5 x 19 x 6 in.

Bedsheets, cement, dresser drawer, resin, thread, & mixed media Photo: Hannah Deits

Charred Ovals (2020). 31 x 44 x 4 in.

Bedsheets, charred wood, ashes, acrylic, resin, & mixed media Photo: John Schweikert

Vadis Turner’s Studio, 2020, Photo: Hannah Deits->>>

Red Gate (2018). 118 x 120 x 10in.

Braided bedsheets, fabric dye, acrylic paint, acrylic resin, thread, & wood Photo: John Schweikert

Loose Leather Grid and Cement Grid (2020). 72 x 60 x 9 in.

Leather, cement, wood, thread & mixed media Photo: Hannah Deits

Ghost Megalith (2019). 144 x 84 x 10 in.

Bedsheets, leather, buckwheat, pillow stuffing & mixed media Photo: Wes Magyar

Red Findings (2020).70 x 66 x 5 in.

Bedsheets, mineral wool, steel and mixed media Photo: Hannah Deits

MATT KLEBERG Jacob Cartwright: Obviously we all see a lot of paintings on screens these days. I

sometimes think the impact of this is overstated—after all, the gospel of modernism was spread internationally via publications like Der Blaue Reiter almanac. That said, things were arguably more obviously mediated in earlier periods—there’s an interesting argument to be made that early abstract artists in the US arrived at different approaches to color because they were seeing European modernist paintings reproduced in black and white. The immediacy and improved resolution of contemporary image sharing surely contributes to a false sense of having truly seen a work that we’ve experienced indirectly.

It occurs to me that the material concerns in your work come across fairly well online but the (important) relationship between your work and a viewer’s sense of bodily scale is lost. Can you talk about your experience making works that have this kind of dual lives for viewers?

Matt Kleberg: When I was a teenager my parents took us on a family trip to Rome. I was

already geeking out on painting by then and my mentor in Fort Worth, TX told me I couldn’t miss Caravaggio’s St. Matthew suite. The images of those three paintings- The Calling of St. Matthew, The Inspiration of St. Matthew, and the Martyrdom of St. Matthew- were familiar to me. I had long admired the marriage of narrative and form in those paintings, and they were already impressed in my brain as important, paradigm shifting works- and then I saw them in person.

You walk into the San Luigi dei Francesi church, pass several darkened chapels until you arrive at one with a coin box, drop a Euro into the slot and activate the timed lights, and then, when the lights flood the space and illuminate these three masterful, huge paintings, you have to fight the impulse to either evacuate your bowels or kneel. All to say, I thought I knew the work from books- and I did in one regard- but seeing them in the flesh, in their original setting since 1600, and in their immersive, bodily scale, they became something altogether different. They projected their own auratic, electric charge that was only broken when the allotted time was up and the lights went off again.

Without comparing my work to Caravaggio, I do think there is obviously something compelling about seeing work in person, and that experience definitely contributed to my desire to make

Double Bacon Balustrade (2019). 60 x 50 in.

Oilstick on canvas

large scale work. Arhitectonic scale feels more appropriate for my own architecturally inflected paintings, where the viewer is physically framed by the spaces in the work. Like you said, plenty of people probably first encounter my work digitally- online or on Instagram as thumbnail images where it definitely reads as clean, graphic, regimented. I’m ok with that. It creates room for the viewer to have a new relationship to the work once they eventually see it in person and realize how physical the surface is, how wonky the geometry feels, and how the scale addresses bodies.

JC: It occurs to me that a throughline in your work is a mood that’s an interesting

combination of abundance and absence. Color and the material vigor of the work provide the energy. On the other side, there’s the allusion to certain classical forms— stages, vaulted rooms, altarpieces shorn from their original context—that by definition exist in this space that’s about both persistence and loss. Reflecting on this I started to think about a kinship between your work and, say, Giorgio de Chirico. Can you offer your perspective on this aspect of your work and its possible origins?

MK: This question is particularly resonant with me. I have always loved de Chirico and the

sense of “charged space” in his work. The Sienese painters- Duccio, Giotto, etc- depicted similar architectural spaces in their work with those amazing arches, windows, and arcades in the backgrounds. Somehow the Sienese paintings impart a sense of mystery that feels more grounded in physical experience than de Chirico’s surreal dream-space. In both cases, though, I’m interested in work that sits in the tension between vacancy and fullness, a sort of pregnant or expectant emptiness.

Tina Ruggieri: How did architecture come to play such an important role in your work?

Matt Kleberg: I was always a figurative painter and the move toward abstraction was basically

an accident. For a long time I painted portraits of my friends, then cowboys from old family photo albums, then birds, then skulls, then bottles…and more often than not the subject was frontal, central, iconographic. Around 2015 I was working on a painting of a bottle and the bottle seemed like a default plug-in, nonessential. In frustration I redacted the bottle, just painted it out, and instantly the painting became about constructing a frame around that now-vacant central space.

The paintings that followed embraced that framing more directly and started to feel like post and lintel architectural spaces. With the figurative subjects gone from the work, it made sense to use the rectangle of the canvas to build space that might implicate the viewer as a potential subject, space that hovered between invitation and barrier. At that time, my studio was in the Brooklyn Navy Yard surrounded by amazing brick buildings, and slowly the various architectural and ornamental forms made their way into the drawings and paintings, along with countless

influences from art and life (ie the Kimbell Art Museum, Sienese painting, etc, etc).

TR: Influences from artists such as Frank Stella and Sol Lewitt are apparent, however can

you talk about other influences that, at an initial glance, might not be so obvious?

MK: Marsden Hartley has always been a major figure for me. His influence was much more

evident in my earlier figurative work, but when my work shifted I tried to hold onto the physicality I always admired in Hartley, that muscular elegance.

Blind Arcade (Blue Yodel) (2020). 84 x 64 in.

Oilstick on canvas

Little Tombstone (2020). 22 x 12 in.

Oilstick on shaped canvas

Cheek to Jowl (2021). 66 x 60 in Oilstick on canvas

Retablo Reverb (2018). 100 x 78 in.

Oilstick on canvas

Heatwave (Scaffold Askew) (2018). 72 x 60 in.

Oilstick on canvas

Electric Shimmy (2021). 80 x 60 in.

Oilstick on shaped canvas

Blind Leading the Blind Arcade (2021). 80 x 60 in.

Oilstick on shaped canvas

The Troublemaker (Absolutist Absolution) (2021). 72 x 264 in.

Seven parts, oilstick on shaped canvas

SHARON BUTLER Alan Pocaro: I regarded your past work as the material residue of a phenomenological

approach to the act of painting. Embedded within that process was an inquiry into the conventions of the medium. Your recent works, however, feel more focused; they seem more content being paintings in the traditional sense. While no painting is a hermetically sealed object, these seem to project an “origin story” that rests in the world outside of themselves in a way your work from a decade ago did not. Is that a fair characterization?

Sharon Butler: Back in 2010, I was working between a studio in Bushwick and a small attic

space in Connecticut, where I had a full-time teaching position at a state university. Adapting to my circumstances, which involved taking work back and forth, I switched to unstretched canvases and began mixing my own acrylic paints, which dried faster and enabled me to paint directly onto unprimed canvas. The paintings got larger – 72 x 84 inches – starting with simple pencil drawings that riffed on architectural form, linear perspective, HVAC units, cement chutes, and other industrial objects seen around Bushwick. I began limiting the amount of time I spent on each canvas. This self-imposed rule required – or perhaps forced – important choices with respect to paint coverage and image development. It turned out that my situation began to inform the work in interesting ways. Leaving the paintings unstretched and unfinished, often with large areas of empty canvas, reflected my ideas about beginnings and irresolution. And the work hovered in an unfamiliar space between drawing and painting.

AP: What precipitated this change? I’m also thinking about that description of Buddhism that suggests the beginner looks up and sees the mountain, the adept knows there is no mountain, and the enlightened one sees the mountain again.

SB: After I’d left the teaching position in Connecticut, I got a lease on an affordable studio in Dumbo (thanks to the Two Trees Space Subsidy Program) and I was able to settle in for a while. I stretched canvases, got out the old tubes of oil paint, and began to think more closely about surface and color. I wondered if manipulation of the surface, which had become so raw and reductive in the previous work, might be worth exploring. I was also thinking about Sharon Butler in her Brooklyn studio, 2022->>>

Favorite (April 17, 2019) (2019). 52 x 45 in.

Oil on canvas

mixing color, creating a series of painting studies based on Goethe’s color triangle. I started an artist’s book (still unfinished) that included Goethe’s writing on color theory. I was thinking about composition, too. Within geometric abstraction, composition creates meaning. Why are painters so wedded to the Bauhuas principles of composition we learned as students? Aren’t we past the idea of “good” composition?

Honestly, the return to stretched canvas and oil paint was like rediscovering a long-lost love. I had missed the smell of turpentine and the easy drag of the brush on stretched, primed canvas.

When I returned to a traditional approach, I felt like I had to relearn how to paint. In my current work I’ve embraced more limitations and rules. For instance, I always work with traditional brushes within rectangular supports. It’s more of a challenge.

Melissa Staiger: Favorite (April 17, 2019) brings me so much joy to look at. The beaming yellow pulls me straight in. The fine line of a triangle with the staggering or almost feeling like it has been cut up into strips and collaged back down. The tops that we get to see twice is delightful to see repetition and slight variations in the lines. Is this an example of how your digital drawings that you posted each morning from 2016-2020 reflect back into a painting? Is the title a marker of time, or something else?

San Miguel Allende is a painting of brilliant oranges, variations of shapes and lines. I was curious where it was – so when I looked up a map of San Miquel Allende in Mexico, I saw a resemblance of the map as part of your composition. Is this true? What are your ties to this place?

Sharon Butler: Thanks Melissa. For several years, starting in 2016, I made digital drawings

every day in a phone app called PicsArt and posted them on Instagram. The presidential election, combined with the realization that my teenage daughter, like so many other kids of her generation, was using opioids, led to several difficult years. Awake at all hours of the night and tethered to my phone, I began using it to make drawings. I liked the idea of making work that was meant specifically to be seen on the phone, and I started posting one each morning on Instagram. Posting the drawings was like sending up a flare, celebrating that we had all made it through another night. In retrospect, I can see that the project is related to On Kawara’s postcard series. In one he sent postcards to a friend each day noting the time he woke up.

In another, the postcard said “I’m still alive.” During those years, getting feedback on social media from other painters made life so much more bearable. Eventually my daughter went into recovery, we ousted the former president, and the drawings became the basis for this series of paintings.

Anyway, to get back to your question, the dates in the titles of the paintings reflect the days I made and posted the original digital drawings on Instagram. Later, when I began selecting drawings to use as the basis for paintings, I chose this one because, if I had to pick a favorite color, it would be yellow. I’ve always liked the play of warm yellows against cool yellows.

The most recent paintings are still based on specific daily drawings, but I began giving them titles that are easier for me to remember. I called the red one San Miguel Allende because at the time I started painting it, we were coming out of Covid lockdown, and I was wondering what it might be like to live in a different country. I know a few artists who have places in Mexico, but I don’t speak Spanish.

Mueller Report - - January 11, 2017 (2019). 52 x 45 in.

Oil on canvas

Divide (2016). 20 x 16 in.

Oil on canvas

Most Popular - - September 26, 2016 (2019). 24 x 24 in.

Oil on canvas

San Miguel Allende (2021). 52 x 45 in.

Oil on canvas

Twelve Days in July - -July 7, 2020 (2020). 52 x 45 in.

Oil on canvas

Rounded Corners (2016). 16 x 20 in.

Oil on canvas

May 29, 2018 (2020). 52 x 45 in.

Oil on canvas

Study -- San Miguel Allende (2021). 8.5 x 5.5 in.

Pencil on paper

Study (de Keyser) (2021). 8 x 5.5 in.

Pencil on paper

JERED SPRECHER Pete Schulte: As the pandemic wears on, I am wondering how this direct existential

threat has impacted your view of the role of an artist in the broader culture, as well as your time producing art in the studio?

Jered Sprecher: Definitely a timely question. The pandemic as well as recent political and

cultural upheavals provoke a lot of self-reflection, including questions of “What am I doing?” and “What good does it do?” I believe that as artists we do different things and those things change through the seasons of our lives. Sometimes we point to beauty, sometimes we point to injustice, sometimes we point to problems, sometimes we point to answers. We are always asking questions.

In the studio, as the past two years unfolded, it has been vital to make work that feels very much embodied, full throated. Some of the recent paintings and drawings have been mournful images.

Lamentations. Flowers are a recurring motif. Tiny miracles that blossom and fade…producing seeds. I suppose I have doubled down on this evanescence, abstracting the flowers as though they were seen reflected in a window or flickering on a screen. For me as an individual it is important to carry on, to show up each day and do the work, whether that is in the studio, classroom, or as a spouse, parent, neighbor. These are all part of my vocation.

PS: Describe a pre-pandemic experience (personal or societal, small or large) when you

recognized that your conception of reality had been definitively re-arranged. How has this experience shaped your life as an artist? Are the vestiges of this experience in any way visible in your work?

JS: I remember hearing my oldest son’s heartbeat for the first time, at that moment it was the

most beautiful noise I had ever heard. (Now it is a three way tie amongst my kids.) That simple repetitive lub dub lub dub was amazing to experience. How simple it is, how ordinary, billions of hearts thumping away, how simple, how extraordinary. That lub dub as an artist helps remind me that simple seemingly inconsequential things can mean the world. That is pretty freeing as an artist. A leaf, a flower, a silhouette, the play of light can contain so much.

Eclipses Suns Imply (2018). 48 x 36 in.

Oil on canvas

PS: Several years ago, I had a memorable studio visit with the artist Nayland Blake.

We spoke for over an hour after he inquired about the “audience of my heart”. In this regard, I am also thinking of Guston’s painting, Pantheon (1973), wherein he lists the names Masaccio, Piero, Giotto, Tiepolo, and de Chirico. In each case, there seems to be more at play than simply name-checking favorites of the moment. In the midst of all of the art that you look at and experience, much of which undoubtedly comes and goes either by evolving taste or fashion, who/what constitutes the audience of your heart (i.e. those that have sunk into the fiber of your being and will never let go)? Please explain.

JS: I love this question. There are so many artists I want to list, giants who impart so many gifts

and keep me company in the studio. Agnes Martin is amazing, each painting, drawing, print is so finely tuned though never overworked. There is a presence and matter of factness to her work that slows down time, allowing the viewer to be aware of themselves in relationship to the world around them. Looking at an Agnes Martin painting is like resting your hand against a granite rock or a two thousand year old tree. Giorgio Morandi’s ability to animate his material and the image are humbling to encounter. Each painting is self-contained and generously welcomes the viewer into its shallow proscenium stage. You feel the light, you feel the gravity, and cannot help but empathize with each jar and vase, especially as they relate to one another. Edouard Manet’s paintings really perceive and digest the change of speed of life and technology during his life.

The paintings he made are both in and out of time, old and new. Anni Albers for engaging the use and beauty of textiles and bringing to the forefront the woven matrix. She was a student filled with wonder and respect for the long history of textiles and their possibilities. That curiosity matched with rigor is so palpable in her work.

Melissa Staiger: While looking through your body of work, I noticed your exploration

of fragmentation – being a whole. If a painting were to have a superpower, “Invisible as Music,” would be that it activates all of my senses. I hear snippets of sounds from ASMR, the sound of in-between radio station music, then clear notes. This painting has a buzz of dominant colors and makes me want to touch and smell flowers. It is a kindred spirit to a Pipilotti Rist film. Does your process start with a drawing, collage or on the computer?

Jered Sprecher: Pipilotti Rist is an interesting comparison. I definitely feel a kinship to the

lush sensory environment’s that she creates. For the painting, “Invisible as Music”, I really want to engage the senses through flickering lights and darks as well as saturated colors. When the viewer approaches the surface of the painting, they see the varied haptic marks on its surface.

Window/Day/Night (2021). 30 x 22 in.

Oil on canvas

This particular painting started from a single photo that I took of a reflection in a window. It contained the dual reality of the flowers on the other side of the glass and the city street reflected on its surface. There is a subtle grid that I introduced through the painting process.

This painting really pulled quite directly from a source photo.

My working method in the studio can greatly vary. As I look around my studio, there are paintings that began from cleaning my brush on canvas. I make drawings and collages to play with ideas or images, these usually end up as stand alone works rather than preparatory works.

If anything, I need to have many things going on in the studio. While I am working on one piece it often gives me the answer to another painting or drawing that I have been stuck on. Drawing, collage, photography, or the computer, any of these may be the starting point.

MS: The title “8.25 Minutes” initially made me think of a reflection in a window over a

period of time changing. How many colors and nuances live and move in reflective surfaces. Were these paintings akin to film? They kind of have a movement of their own hanging in space.

JS: The passage of time is certainly important in this work. “8.25 Minutes” refers to the time it

takes light to travel from the sun to the earth. With the carpet and the room created by the hanging paintings, the viewer is encouraged to inhabit the space. I envision it like a glass house, where you are looking out, but also seeing reflections of the interior space on the surface of the glass, inside and outside pressed onto that thin fragile plane. Each of the paintings comprising “8.25 Minutes” is meant to be radiant, yet fleeting and transitory.

MS: In “8.25 Minutes,” please tell me all your secrets in the drawings, photocopies and

varied paper ephemera. What is the narrative? Or is there one?

JS: Small incidental drawings, photocopies, pages torn from books are piled up around

my studio and tacked to the walls. They are little heartbeats or like the scraps of envelopes that Emily Dickinson composed her poetry on, which she called her “gorgeous nothings”.

These drawings and other ephemera are the breadcrumb trail that helped lead me to create “8.25 Minutes.” A few examples of the drawings and such attached to the back of the paintings are thin pencil sketch of a mushroom cloud, handwritten notes with poetic fragments, Goethe’s color wheel, an archaeological photo from Pompeii, an envelope edged in black, and a postcard image of the wallpaper from Anne Frank’s bedroom. Each drawing evokes a moment or instance in time, fragments of experience.

8.25 Minutes (2017). 10 ft. x 16 ft. x 20 ft.

Six oil on linen paintings, wool carpet, hanging hardware, drawings, photocopies, and varied paper ephemera (photo by EG Schrempf, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS)

back side of 8.25 Minutes (with the drawings attached)

back side of 8.25 Minutes (with the drawings attached) photo credit (both pages): Bruce Cole & the Knoxville Museum of Art. From Jered’s exhibition, Inside Out (2017)

Whisper (2021). 16 x 12 in.

Oil on paper on panel

Stone (2021). 24 x 18 in.

Oil on canvas

Invisible as Music (2019). 90 x 146 in. Oil on canvas

GERARD LAMBERT BLUEPRINT While in the hospital I dreamt of my house down to the blueprint of what it would be like to finally live alone.

I’ve never lived on my own.

Always someone’s business cramming the place.

The bedroom is in the front, painted Prussian blue, a wall of creamy curtained French doors.

In my house the kitchen is clean.

Swaths of counterspace and open windows give the breeze a flow.

Some days it will be lonely by choice filled with nothing to do.

The cat asleep atop the toaster oven.

While in the Behavioral Unit behind closed doors and ceiling patterns, life obliterated, I dreamt of Saturdays taken for granted.

Next time you are alone think of someone whose life has been yanked away.

Think of what you might construct.

What color the walls would be.

IT SMELLS LIKE MIAMI The weekend laundry you insisted be tumbled clean with fabric sheets; the iridescent curtains through which you would stare to see things that may or may not be there.

You convinced me.

Made it clear as sunshine you saw something in every tumbled weekend that needed to be cleaned so you could see and be with the smells in Miami.

And when the hell-orb finally sank below our equator, life was folded, swept crystalline.

And alone together we failed to see happiness was not there.

The breeze through the curtains smells like Miami: the single season that never ended, beans and beaches, the flotsam of fun. The horrible never ending cyclical drone of being together, loathing one another.

It smells like Miami when you look for something that may or may not be there.

Searching through curtains that, like the waves, move with the wind smelling like sunshine.

ACTUALLY, IT MIGHT BE A GOOD IDEA for you to get out of here.

Whoosh. Swoosh. Vamoose.

Every Mississippi morning a bird chirps me from dreams of anywhere on earth other than here.

Daily, I awake with the intent to set flight to that bird.

Catapult it into the stratosphere.

Every goddamn day all I have failed to become torques back into my chest with a suck and a thud through cul-de-sacs of the day before the day before that and tomorrow’s repetition.

I want that bird to know that when I shoot it it will learn of all possibilities that exist elsewhere on earth other than here.

I’m doing that bird a favor.

I don’t want it to hate being awake.

I hate being here.

Every Mississippi morning.

MR. STOUT’S SOUL

had a habit of leaving the thorax of home in search of more than lung and bone.

It slips through rib slats looking for sunlight.

Mr. Stout’s soul is a restless soul.

For nights and days it wanders the arteries and alleyways in search of more than home.

Mr. Stout knows it must roam the bodies of others to understand its own.

When his soul arrives a freewheeled man, Mr. Stout says it has been quiet without him; there’s been an emptiness.

Mr. Stout witnesses an exhilarated soul, flirtatious, now a defiant man with no interest nor intent of returning to the body of home.

(after Zbignew Herbert)

BOARDING PASS I didn’t book the trip to Mars. The mind calendars a lot these days. The mind went (I want to say) to outer space but to be more accurate it was 140 million miles away.

I miscalculated the launch by 2 hours, 47 minutes.

Seems like no one wants you to go.

Not even on a silicone microchip aboard NASA’s InSight lander.

I read that Mars offers, among other attractions: cocktails with the god of war permission to roam gulleys, galleys and alleys, volcanoes to discover things we the people of Earth won’t or can’t yet fathom.

That’s why I fully intended to send you where you wanted to go But as mentioned, the mind was a ways away.

CURATING CONTEMPORARY