In The Abstract

DOUG ASHFORD AIDAS BAREIKIS SARAH BRAMAN TOMASHI JACKSON ROSY KEYSER ERIC N. MACK IN THE ABSTRACT ROSE MARCUS RODNEY MCMILLIAN MATT SAUNDERS LETHA WILSON BRENNA YOUNGBLOOD

Eric N. Mack, Untitled (dwelling), 2015 Acrylic on pegboard with twine, rope, and paper; 95 × 83 × 63 in.

Bjørnholt Collection, Oslo

In the Abstract brings together a diverse, multigenerational group of artists whose works represent a potent and muscular approach to contemporary abstraction.

Employing various mediums, from painting to sculpture, photography, and video, their works are rooted in the formal languages of abstract painting. But along with their use of vivid hues, hard-edge geometries, gauzy color fields, and expressionist marks, they also employ representational imagery, found objects, and references to the figure as they grapple with exterior and interior worlds. Their works move seamlessly between different visual systems, their references to intangible, ineffable states and forces as real as their more concrete subjects. For these artists, the abstract functions as a metaphor for a way of thinking, or as an emotional, psychological, or spiritual lens through which to understand our current social and political realities and perhaps articulate an alternative. Looking to the social and political aspirations that have characterized abstraction since its inception in the early twentieth century (including such socially motivated movements as Constructivism, the Bauhaus, and Neo-Concretism), these artists engage abstraction’s limits and its possibilities.

SARAH BRAMAN b. 1970, Tonawanda, NY; lives in Amherst, MA

Sarah Braman repurposes scavenged objects like cars, desks, chairs, and screen doors in large-scale, light-filled geometric assemblages. Adding glass and plexi panels in vivid pinks, purples, and oranges, she suffuses her structures with the range of color and emotion embedded in our everyday experience.

Braman’s off-kilter combinations suggest the mixed terrain of her own life spent between country and city, from the chaotic palette, forms, and energy of a home with young children to the collision of sharp angles and soft blues of a city skyline viewed through a car windshield.

Braman’s work often points to the intersection of the domestic sphere with issues troubling the world at large, as suggested by the title of In Bed (how do we sleep when the planet is melting?) (2016). The haphazard stack of steel bunk beds, with a wall of hand-dyed sheets and a roof made of a reproduction of a sunset, brings to mind the imaginary world of a children’s fort, a memory of camping safely inside.

Yet the precariously angled top bunk might suggest the very uncertain fate of the natural environment, its reproduction someday our only experience of it.

Both In Bed and Driving, sleeping, screwing, reading (2016) have the feel of a refuge, shelters cobbled together with whatever might be available or recycled from the dump. The latter has a roof made from a truck camper that sits over walls made of colored glass and dyed, camouflage-patterned fabric. A flowery rug beneath and a selection of salvaged books, on topics such as gardening, astronomy, and wildlife, create a safe sanctuary, an inviting place to rest and hang out, or to watch the world go by.

Braman’s work seems to remind us that these simple pleasures and necessities of life, like those in the work’s title, are enough.

Driving, sleeping, screwing, reading, 2016 Truck cap, steel, aluminum, glass, rug, hand-dyed fabric, acrylic sticker and acrylic set paint; 81 × 1001/2 × 101¾ in.

Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

ROSY KEYSER b. 1974, Baltimore, MD; lives in Brooklyn, NY

Rosy Keyser creates gritty, large-scale paintings that are as metaphysical as they are physical.

Incorporating evocative objects and materials that include sandbags, sawdust, spray paint, and beaded car seat covers, the dense, abstract works obliquely suggest the figure, exploring, in the artist’s words, “our compulsions, scope of awareness, and stamina straddling the strange worlds of mind and matter.” Zodiac (2017) creates the illusion of an ineffable, even spiritual architectural space within the canvas, while its bared stretcher and the exposed wall visible behind bring Keyser’s paint, linen,string, and cardboard spinning back into the realm of solid matter. Like the zodiac of the title, which in astronomy indicates the stars near the path of the Earth’s orbit of the Sun, and in astrology is linked to the effect of celestial bodies on human affairs, Keyser’s painting tries to reconcile two seemingly opposing systems—or spaces—at once.

Likewise, both Madcat (2017) and its title seem familiar and foreign at the same time. Its fertile union of identifiable and somewhat politically charged elements—dried reeds, a tongue depressor, West African cloth—produces an effect that is something different than the sum of its parts. Keyser’s intuitive combinations, like poetry, propose new affinities and tensions between things, questioning the illusion of order that we cling to. The monumental Sea Wall (Steel Kilt Redux) (2017) is made of two sections of industrial steel piles. Keyser sees the two interlocking panels as an autoerotic form, the self with the self and also the self with the other, more or less seamless and united. Symbolic of our efforts to block both natural disasters and human movement, the sea wall seems like an ancient artifact, a monument to both hubris and a fool’s errand.

Zodiac, 2017 String, cardboard, line, wood, and enamel paint; 80 × 54 in.

Courtesy of the artist and Maccarone, New York and Los Angeles

MATT SAUNDERS b. 1975, Tacoma, WA; lives in Cambridge, MA

Matt Saunders makes process-based works that merge painting with photography, video, and animation.

Drawing thousands of frames in ink and oil paint on linen and mylar (which he digitally scans and reverses), Saunders produces animated collages that combine image and abstraction. Often working from found film sources, the artist manipulates and disrupts narrative fragments to produce colorful, abstract reveries. His video installation Reverdy/King Hu/Reverdy (2014−17) is the third iteration in a series of unique but related works, reedited with each permutation. Saunders pushes abstraction to the forefront in this series, the figurative scenes of bodies in motion—walking, jumping, running, biking, swinging, swimming—punctuating the longer passages of atmospheric brushstrokes that move between color and black-and-white. Together, the string of evocative still fragments pulsate with the fast cuts of animation and produce a nearly dizzying yet transcendent visual environment that moves from screen to architecture. Along with two photographs, six projections are presented on screens that are suspended from the ceiling and mounted on the floor.

Trained as a painter, Saunders uses stretched linen as screen material, conflating the video screens with both painting and object.

The work’s title references the French poet Pierre Reverdy and the Hong Kong−based martial arts film director King Hu, whose works share sensibilities with Saunders’s own. Working in the early twentieth century, Reverdy was associated with both the cubists and the surrealists. His poems, which have been called “cinematic,” revel in the everyday, with urban, domestic, and nature scenes mingled and steeped in the language of light and darkness. King Hu’s use of editing and practical effects to launch his performers into illusions of aerial flight prompted Saunders’s rumination on suspension and constant motion. Hu’s influential film A Touch of Zen (1971) is known for scenes that attempt to manifest the spiritual world through abstracted images of light, water, forest, and sky interspersed within the narrative action.

Reverdy/King Hu, 2014 Installation in 5 parts; 4 HD animated films, color and black-and-white, silent, loop on 4 screens; black-and-white silver gelatin print on fiber-based paper.

Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

DOUG ASHFORD

b. 1958, Rabat, Morocco; lives in Brooklyn, NY

Known for his teaching and writing as well as his art practice, Doug Ashford was a member of the artists collaborative Group Material, whose projects in the 1980s and ’90s were concerned with reimagining the exhibition as a place for dialogue, social change, and public interaction. Over the last decade, Ashford has turned to painting, combining images sourced from the news with abstract forms and color that the artist proposes as a reservoir for individual and shared emotions. Ashford sees these communal sensations as an instrument for political change.

With his installation Many Readers of One Event (2012), Ashford presents a collection of geometric abstractions in tandem with photographs of people collapsing into one another. The images reenact an original news photo featuring grieving parents falling into one another’s arms after the death of their children. With his paintings, Ashford offers a similar interaction or connection without a specific referent, and space beyond the prescribed images and ideologies that society presents to us.

In two new series of works on canvas, Ashford once again combines documents from his personal archives, including news clippings of tragic events, with abstract compositions—some of which suggest abstracted writing derived from the “heavenly writing” of fifthcentury Daoism. Ashford creates pairs of images as if they mirror—or translate—one another, that is, abstract image and what could be considered manufactured reality.

A new video animation, Bunker 2 (2017), intersperses news clippings dating from 1982 to 2016 with bands of changing color. The barrage of images and the black metal that accompanies them presents an overwhelming concurrence of fact and feeling. As images blend into one another, and the aesthetic connection to color allows intuition to take over, the work suggests the possibility that our emotions can resist the culture of publicity and reshape notions of progress.

Many Readers of One Event, 2012 Tempera paintings and photographs on wood on shelf and wall; dimensions variable.

Courtesy of the artist and Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam

RODNEY MCMILLIAN b. 1969, Columbia, SC; lives in Los Angeles, CA

Working in multiple modes, from sculpture to video, performance, and painting, Rodney McMillian uses the language of abstraction to tease out the visual, linguistic, and legislative systems that construct race and class in America. A beckoning: We are not who we think we are (2015) is an 80-foot-long painting that envelops viewers in a seductive yet unsettling environment vibrating with poured washes of color and charged gestures of paint. Simultaneously recalling the ambitious canvases of the Abstract Expressionists and the dark tunnel of a mine shaft, the work hints at the connections between the abstract sublime of the twentieth century and the heroic painting traditions that propelled nineteenth-century notions of Manifest Destiny. McMillian’s electrified skeins of paint evoke the freedom and virility associated with the American frontier but also suggest the veins of ore that drove westward expansion and caused the displacement of indigenous peoples.

The painting is presented with a video of the same title that features a figure dressed in a priest’s black cassock, Ultraman mask, camouflage head scarf, and cowboy boots. Difficult to make out against the black backdrop and lit with a single spotlight, the haunting figure comes in and out of focus as he makes a series of gesticulations and movements that range from stomping to running in place and dancing. Though his varied postures and unusual mix of costume elements produce a number of associations and stereotypes, the character remains elusive.

Moving between superhero, monster, curiosity, and alien, the figure speaks to the myths that construct identity while articulating an acute sense of alienation.

A beckoning: We are not who we think we are, 2015 Latex on fabric and canvas; 312 Ă— 960 in.

Courtesy of the artist and Maccarone, New York and Los Angeles

ERIC N. MACK

b. 1987, Columbia, MD; lives in New York, NY

Eric N. Mack combines clothes, blankets, rugs, and other found objects and textiles into layered, expressionistic “canvases” that are often fluidly draped in architectonic compositions. With She will lean with her back against the wall (2016), the artist has strung his painterly assemblage from the ceiling, the pliable fabric softly drooping and curving out of plane like a Sam Gilliam “drape” painting. As Mack’s title implies, there is often a figure suggested in his work, even in absence—the body that once wore the scarf or slept under the blanket. Here, Mack’s painting takes on the postures of a body, the fabrics that sag to the floor conjuring the resting limbs of a marionette on loose strings. If this work evokes a woman, the “she” of the title, she is complicated, with many moods and likes, boasting stripes, polka dots, plaids and paisleys, leather, muslin, and velour, all at once. Mack has added paper, dye splatters, acrylic, and stitching, augmenting the already rich textures of the composition with jewelrylike flourishes.

There is a sense of the impromptu in Mack’s works, a make-it-work sensibility that is a nod to street fashion, with its energy and innovation, but also an homage to the innovations of necessity. She will lean with her back against the wall might also be read as a makeshift curtain or partial shelter. Likewise, Untitled (dwelling) (2015) also conjures the temporary structures that the homeless cobble together to find refuge on the street (or that children construct in play). The sculpture is crafted from sheets of pegboard, a material that recurs in Mack’s work. Attached with string and zip ties, the humble material suggests a physical vulnerability, though Mack imagines them fortified by his paint. The panels bear the layers of color applied in their use as DIY printing screens. Mack pushes paint through the grid of holes to apply colorful systems of dots on his canvases, which variously appear as spatial incursions or act as embellishment, countering the illusion of painterly space. Mack has added a small collage to the structure, a drawing of a sculpture on legal paper and a page torn from a magazine with images from the Children’s Crusade of 1963, a Civil Rights protest in Birmingham.

She will lean with her back against the wall, 2016 Velour, microfiber blanket, muslin, canvas, felt, leather, paper, acrylic, dye, thread, plastic stress balls, and rope; 98 × 154 × 15 in.

Courtesy of the artist and Moran Bondaroff, Los Angeles

ROSE MARCUS

b. 1982, Atlanta, GA; lives in Bronx, NY

Rose Marcus transforms matter-of-fact photographs of iconic sites in New York City, such as Central Park, into layers of image and abstraction. Influenced by the work of Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler, Marcus applies a variety of expressive gestures to her photographs, executing traditionally painterly marks both as cuts through the work’s support and as colorful overlays of fabric. Together, these cutouts and arrangements of velvet, leather, and chiffon express the many invisible relationships, emotions, and narratives embedded and reflected within the spaces documented in the photographs.

Like Motherwell’s series “Elegies to the Spanish Republic,” which function as meditations on life and death with a repeated iconography of form and color, Marcus’s multiple works engaging the John Lennon memorial mosaic, function as similar ruminations.

Both rely on the convergence of the everyday with the tragic and the spiritual. Marcus finds in the forms that double, repeat and converge in the park—from the circle of the memorial, the ovoid shape it takes on when seen from the side, the curved swoosh of a pair of Nikes, to the gentle triangle formed by the bend of a young girl’s legs—an articulation of a metaphysical world that exists simultaneously with the material and the familiar. Marcus expresses this notion of simultaneous levels of experience in the physical construction of her works, disrupting the spatial illusion within her photographs both by showing the wall behind them and adding to their surface plane as she does in Central Park (Three riders, Motherwell) (2015), or in the case of Imagine (watch) (2016), capturing an image that is only a reflection in another photograph. With the large size of Marcus’s works and her use of industrial metal frames like those used for signage and advertising at bus stops and other public places, she connects her photographs and their multiple tiers of reality with the architecture of images that compete with the real in the contemporary landscape.

Imagine (legs), 2016 PVC, velvet, leather, silk, inkjet print on adhesive vinyl, and iron frame; 72 × 48 in.

Collection of Kai Loebach

LETHA WILSON b. 1976, Honolulu, HI; lives in Brooklyn, NY

Letha Wilson merges images of natural landscapes with poured concrete in nearly topographic works that are both ecstatically colorful and rugged like her subject matter. Wilson’s process begins with her photographic archive of iconic American sites, including Hawaii’s Volcanoes National Park, Yosemite, the Rocky Mountains, and Death Valley. Printing in the darkroom from her own color negatives, Wilson emphasizes the rich palette of her subjects, which range from purples and magentas to bright blues and greens. She then alters these images with a variety of sculptural processes and printing techniques to make multidimensional hybrids that shift between photograph, print, painting, and sculpture.

To create the large Kilauea Seaview Concrete Ripple Tondo (2017), Wilson printed photos from five different negatives of a rocky beach in Washington and lava fields in Hawaii. Folding the photographs into fan-like pleats, she placed them into a circular mold before pouring in concrete and cement. Curing into the ridges of the folded photograph, the cement also picked up a transfer print of the original images and their purple hue. The three framed works from the “Kauai Cement Fold” series (2017) were created in nearly the opposite fashion, with white Portland cement

partially lifting the emulsion from the folded photograph, leaving only ghost-like traces that obscure the image of leafy jungle. The patterns left behind in the photographs’ crease lines resemble geological strata. In Hawaii Lava Concrete Bend (2014), crumpled and bent photographs of a volcanic landscape peek out from behind hunks of concrete bearing transfer prints of the same images.

The craggy appearance of the rock-like material aptly evokes the character of the jagged terrain while suggesting the clash between industry and environment.

By altering and abstracting her images, Wilson not only suggests the incompleteness of a photograph but manifests the texture and toughness of her subject matter or, in many cases, its fragility and potential erosion. In comparison, Slotted Sunrise (Goblin Valley) (2017) offers a lighter view of the landscape and its ephemeral pleasures.

California Concrete Ripple Tondo, 2016 Emulsion transfer on concrete; 24 × 24 × 2 in.

Courtesy of the artist

BRENNA YOUNGBLOOD b. 1979, Riverside, CA; lives in Los Angeles, CA

Brenna Youngblood incorporates her own photographs and fragments of found objects, such as wallpaper, book pages, and contact paper, into atmospheric paintings that read between pure abstraction and a slice of life. Variously using thin washes and thick layers of paint, as well as a mix of bright colors and more muted tones, along with referential imagery, Youngblood moves easily between different visual languages.

Influenced by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Youngblood includes recurring images like air fresheners, light switches, and dollar signs in her work, creating an index of symbols that hover between the existential and the everyday. These quotidian images and objects act both as formal elements and speak to personal history and emotion. Uncle Grandpa (2017) features a photograph of a truck that belonged to the artist’s grandfather. Split in two, the vehicle precariously straddles a flat mountain-like shape that recurs throughout the artist’s oeuvre. The converging lines simultaneously delineate the corner of a room, adding spatial complexity to the composition that mirrors the fluid and complex network of family relationships suggested in the work’s title.

Cellophane Sink (2014) is a Robert Ryman-like nearly monochromatic painting that incorporates a photograph of a sink encased in a pool of resin. Strips of decorative wallpaper and a piece of dark wood paneling give the beige-ish work depth and variation of tone. Referencing the segregated restrooms of the Jim Crow−era South, the work projects a kind of intimacy and institutionalism simultaneously. It hints at how personal spaces such as bathrooms have been contested public spaces past and present.

With its palette of red, white, and blue, I Want to Believe (2014) reimagines the American flag with an unequal distribution of its usual elements. The car freshener at the center of the painting might suggest that what stinks may need more than a temporary fix.

L: Uncle Grandpa, 2017; photographs, acrylic, and spray paint on canvas with artist’s frame; 72 × 60 in. Private collection R: I Want to Believe, 2014; mixed media on wood panel; 80½ × 60 × 2 in. Private collection

AIDAS BAREIKIS b. 1967, Vilnius, Lithuania; lives in New York, NY

Aidas Bareikis creates condensed but unruly assemblages of ready-made objects that he fuses together and transforms with splatters, pours, and thick layers of paint. Trained as a painter, Bareikis uses muddy browns, tropical blues, and acid oranges— both applied and within the components themselves— to simultaneously animate and disguise the lurid, sometimes humorous combinations. These shapeshifting products of the consumer age take on anthropomorphic and geological appearances, as well as art historical allusions. Sneakers, hats, and trash, along with the broken mid-century modern chrome chair and hole-ridden, out-of-date globe visible in Day Off (2017) suggest the digestion and detritus of everyday domestic life, as well as larger economic, ecological, and even geopolitical systems.

with a trucker’s cap. The front of the cap, where one expects a logo, is printed with the emblem of a tree.

The hat is both a symbol of a now-fashionable bluecollar chic and an artifact from the transportation industry associated with a carbon footprint that threatens the environment. With Be brave, have fun (2017), the artist has created an architectonic stack of paintings on paper that rest on elegant metal legs as well as two polygons. A pair of running shoes and a small T-shirt at the top of the precarious stack conjure the double meaning of the title—the ubiquitous clothing used by everyone, from military recruits to children.

The small but top-heavy, nearly cantilevered work, Untitled (Tree) (2017), resembles the upward blossoming and extended reach of a tree canopy. It seems to grow from a mound of paint and debris, expanding outward from a trunk fashioned from a structure that resembles tomato plant cages. There is humor added to this nod to the natural world, which Bareikis has crowned Day Off, 2017 Mixed media; 36 × 38 × 36 in.

Courtesy of the artist

TOMASHI JACKSON b. 1980, Houston, TX; lives in Cambridge, MA and New York, NY

In her mixed-media painting, video, collage, and textile works, Tomashi Jackson explores the perception of color and, in her words, “its influence on the value of life in public space”. Her research-driven work visualizes the merging of historic desegregation and contemporary resegregation. While studying the court transcripts of the 1954 Supreme Court cases fought

by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) and Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color, the instructional text on color theory published in 1963, Jackson found similar language used to describe color in both groundbreaking texts on policy and phenomenon. Jackson points out that “Marshall and Albers found color, chromatic and social, to be relative, unstable, and laden with optical illusions.” Influenced by Barnett Newman’s writings, Jackson embraces abstraction as a vehicle for the sublime and as a tool for interrogating subliminal perceptions of color.

With The School House Rock (Brown, et al. v.

Board of Education of Topeka) (Bolling v Sharpe (District of Columbia)) (2016), Jackson embeds archival photographs from late-1940s segregated classrooms, late-1950s desegregated classrooms, and 2015 McKinney, Texas into a complex painting object. States’ Rights (Brown, et al. vs The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas) (Limited Value Exercise)) (2017) uses painting, embroidering, and printmaking to collapse segregated Topeka classrooms using two shades of red, half-tone lines, and a

contrasting surface. Her materials provoke questions about value and beauty in art anexactld society at large. With her use of gauze, Jackson makes connections to flesh and fragility. Upright, Colored, and Free (2017) features one of Jackson’s knit color studies, an exposed frame, and prints of children in a mix of transparent and opaque materials.

Jackson’s works project shadows and images on the wall behind and hide images within their surface.

Weighed down with the effects of gravity, the works jut out from the wall and into the gallery space, boldly staking out their place.

Her dynamic video collages incorporate her paintings, color studies, and half-tone prints using color as a vehicle for sound within layered spatial realities. A meditation on youth and the abstraction of innocence, Forever 21: The Essence of Innocence (2015) features two Madonna-like figures in knit shrouds facing each other. In one frame is a young boy reading about the first successful case of school desegregation in Texas in 1949. In another frame are images of slain children and teens and the men who killed them. Aiyana StanleyJones, killed by Joseph Weekley in Detroit; Tamir Rice, killed by Timothy Loehmann in Cleveland; and Michael Brown killed by Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri.

In the center frame, a color study sits atop a plinth as changing light rhythmically reveals a young girl reading Albers’s text as we hear Luther Vandross sing “Give Me the Reason.”

Forever 21: The Essence of Innocence 1. Give Me the Reason (To Forgive) (Texas Courtroom) (DC Classroom) 2. Give me the Reason (To Forget) (Texas Courtroom) 3. Give Me the Reason (Tell Me How) (Detroit, Cleveland, Ferguson), 2015 Video collage with sound.

Courtesy of the artist and Tilton Gallery, New York

Tomashi Jackson, The School House Rock (Brown, et al. v Board of Education of Topeka)(Bolling v Sharpe (District of Columbia)), 2016 Mixed media on gauze; 102½ × 114 × 32¾ in.

Courtesy of the artist and Tilton Gallery, New York

Bareikis

Youngblood

Wilson

Jackson

McMillian

Marcus

Keyser

Braman Mack

Saunders

Ashford

In the Abstract On view starting May 6, 2017 Major exhibition support is provided by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Barr Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

1040 MASS MoCA Way North Adams, MA 01247 413.MoCA.111 massmoca.org