Sarah McKenzie, Site, 2007, 48 x 72 inches

Anyone who’s recently visited the Walker Art Center will likely recognize Sarah McKenzie’s impressive painting Site, a work currently on view in their exhibition, Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, and now gracing our masthead for the next two weeks. Using paint as a metaphor for built space, McKenzie’s surfaces actualize the architectural framework she depicts. Such structures in part, represent the suburban American dream, in its imperfect, growing state. On the one hand these landscapes promise nothing but banality and repetition, and the other, the very nature of unfinished buildings suggests a positive opportunity for change, even if the skeletal structure merely frames more of the same within its background.

Sarah McKenzie Biography

Sarah McKenzie received her BA from Yale and her MFA in Painting from the University of Michigan. She is based in Colorado, and is represented in Denver by Robischon Gallery. In 2006, she was the first place winner of the National Young Painters Competition, hosted by Miami University of Ohio. Past exhibitions include the Katonah Museum of Art, the University of Akron, the Bemis Center, and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. McKenzie’s work is currently on view in the exhibition “Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes” at the Walker Art Center, and in the exhibition “This Modern World” at the General Electric World Headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut

Tema Stauffer, Ward Bond, “Wagon Train”, Hollywood, CA, April 2007

It was only a matter of time before Ward Bond was featured in our masthead, even if he ultimately comes in the form of wax figure documentation. Not that I have any specific connection to cowboys, it’s just once presented with the option of being personified by one, I couldn’t let the opportunity pass. Art Fag City’s new noble face comes courtesy of photographer Tema Stauffer, who notably has taken more than one pony related picture. Aside from her recent cowboy series, White Horse 2007 [below], is a favorite, as is the dog art she shot in 1999 (not a pony but I mention it on account of the fact that it’s hilarious!)

Shooting animals, landscapes, and people across the country, it’s hard not to describe the work as American in style, though I do so reluctantly given the imprecise nature of the term. In this case, I mean to describe the plain spoken nature of the photographs; what you see is what you get, in all its glory, grit, and whatever else Stauffer decides to throw in. For the next two weeks at AFC it happens to be Ward Bond, but visit her website and you’ll see a lot more.

Artist Biography

Tema Stauffer is a photographer based in Brooklyn. She graduated from Oberlin College in 1995 and received a MFA in Photography from The University of Illinois at Chicago in 1998. Her work has been shown in galleries and art institutions in Chicago, Minneapolis, San Diego, Philadelphia, New York City and Rouchechoart, France. Her solo exhibition “American Stills” was shown at Jen Bekman Gallery in 2004, where she has also participated in seven group shows. The Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College selected fifteen images from this body of work for their Midwest Photographers Project. Tema has been featured twice on 20×200, (here and here), and she teaches at The School of the International Center of Photography.

Stauffer’s Blog: Palmaire

Kristi Kent, Taj, 2003, paint, birch plywood, monofilament, 17 inches x 23 inches x 23 inches.

It may have been around 2003 when wall mounted light boxes were a little more popular, and frankly, I’m sad to see so much of that replaced with scrappy art. Kristi Kent’s work from the installtion Excerpts from the Habitat Series represent some of the more compelling examples of work made in this form, so for the next two weeks they will be gracing our masthead. In her later work, Kent exchanges sculptural forms for color, and black and white sci-fi-esque drawings creating a Phillip Guston meets robot Frankenstein type series. The work skirts the cliche, which unlike so many others, only tends to make her art more engaging.

Kristi Kent Biography
Kristi Kent is an artist based in Brooklyn. In her a search for a B.A., she attended Florida State University, University of Arkansas, (at both Little Rock and BeeBe), University of Minnesota, SCI-ARC (Southern California Institute of Architecture) and Otis College of Art and Design. In 2005, she received her MFA from Yale School of Art and was awarded the Barry Schactman Prize for Painting. Her exhibitions include: Carl Berg Gallery, Korean Cultural Center (LA), Santa Monica Museum of Art, Kaus Australis and Art Affairs in the Netherlands. Most recently, her work was shown at Jail Gallery in Los Angeles.

John Michael Boling, Untitled, gif.
Look at how fast artist John Michael Boling can navigate the web and work that video camera! It’s like he’s on speed, or as our new masthead suggests, LSD. As a means of rather forcibly injecting our fair coverage this week with the Net Art you’re not likely to find in any of the booths, we’re sporting one of our favorite net artist’s work in our masthead. While the artist’s work takes many directions and forms, an interest in movement and animation pervades the majority. This may simply be a formal preference, but since the results so often serve to underscore the density and invested energy users place in the web, the approach strikes me as at the very least practical to those concerns. All of my favorite works to date can be found on Boling’s website, Lord of the Flies, RGB Chord, Twenty Years Ago Today amongst them.

Artist Biography

John Michael Boling is an artist and internet user living in Athens, GA. He was born in 1983 in Rome, GA. He is the creator of http://www.gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com/ and was a founding member of http://www.nastynets.com

Tom Moody, OptiDisc, animated GIF.

“The piece is meant to be big, dumb, and iconic, a moving, pulsing symbol of both the promise and failure of technology,” said Tom Moody of Optidisc during Geeks in the Gallery, a detail of which now resides in my masthead. Aesthetically the gif looks just as Moody describes it, the rings klutzy yet mildly hypnotic; though past this, its life as a meme underscores the artist’s excitement and reservations about the web as a medium. Referencing artists such as Kenneth Noland and Jasper Johns, without reiterating color field painting or Minimalism, Optidisc speaks as clearly to a tradition of Fine Art painting, as it does regular surfers looking for something “different” for their myspace page.

Update: A great screen capture of Moody’s Gif on Da Kid’s myspace page. Via T. Moody

Tom Moody Biography

Tom Moody is an artist and musician based in New York City. His low-tech art made with simple paint programs, photocopiers, and/or consumer printers has been exhibited at artMovingProjects in New York as well as galleries and museums in the US, UK, and Europe. He is interviewed in the film /8 BIT/, a documentary about “chip” art and music, and his blog (http://tommoody.us), commenced in February 2001, was recommended in the 2005 /Art in America/ article “Art in the Blogosphere.” A CD of his music collaborations with earcon (John Parker) was released last year under the title /Scratch Ambulance/. Most recently his work appeared in “Bitmap: As Good As New” at vertexList Gallery in New York.

Masthead image: Tom Moody, OptiDisc (Fragment), 2008, animated GIF.

Rene Smith, Permanent Garden 48 x 48 inches. Oil on canvas. 2007

Well, I guess the Danielle Mysliewec love fest in our masthead had to end at some point, and Monday is as good a time as any for that to happen. As such, today we move from abstract paint weaving to the representational figurative work of Rene Smith. Though the artist largely depicts solitary figures, their surroundings almost always suggest the presence of others. In the case of Permanent Garden [pictured above], the viewer is the one implicated in an act of voyeurism, in other works, such as those made in Iceland, they rely on interiors to suggest open ended relationships.  The strength of this work lies in the psychological space created within each piece.

Rene Smith, December 1969 (Georgie), Pastel on paper, 14 x 14 inches
Rene Smith Biography

René Smith received her M.F.A. in Painting from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and Rome and her B.A. in Painting from Bennington College in Vermont. She has exhibited her work in a variety of galleries and non-profit spaces, including recent exhibitions at Deiglan Gallery in Akureyri, Iceland, Brooklyn Arts Council, Project Diversity Queens at Koreavillage in Flushing, and The Courthouse Gallery at Anthology Film Archives in New York City. She has attended residencies at the Gil-Society in Iceland and Vermont Studio Center, and her work was featured in the latest northeastern edition of New American Paintings. She lives and works in Long Island City, Queens.

Danielle Mysliwiec, Interlock,
2007, Oil on wood panel, 36 x 36 inches. Photo copyright of the artist.

I know our masthead rotation hasn’t been as timely as we’d promised, but until we have a script written to automate the process of changing it some irregularity will continue. Apologies in advance.

In the meantime, this week in our masthead we feature the painting Interlock by Danielle Mysliwiec. Building upon the tradition of artists such as Annie Albers, Sheila Hicks, and Lenore Tawney, Mysliwiec creates a luscious surface with woven paint. Her paintings have a demanding presence, creating a great illusion of depth, while also imparting the same sense of transformation and strength fabric itself takes on once constructed.

Danielle Mysliwiec Biography

Danielle Mysliwiec was born in Worcester, Massachusetts and now lives and works as a painter in Brooklyn, New York. She complete her undergraduate studies at Wesleyan University and moved to New York in 1998, where she then received her MFA degree from Hunter College. In addition to painting, Mysliwiec is a co-founder of Brainstormers, a feminist performance group. In her current series of oil paintings she constructs highly textured surfaces that create the illusion of woven structures and unraveling moments.

Rebecca Loyche, In the Attic, 2006, 24 x 18 inches, digital print

For the next couple of weeks I will be featuring work by artists who are part of the New York studio group for women tART. First in this series is photographer and mixed media artist Rebecca Loyche, who has submitted photographs from her Leg series. In addition to In the Attic I have posted Cold March below, a favorite, but one that unfortunately does not benefit much by being cropped and placed beside our logo.

Rebecca Loyche, Cold March, 2006, 24 x 18 inches, digital print

Update: LeisureArts observed a relationship between this work and that of Nicola Kuperus of Adult. As Loyche herself pointed out to me in email today both artists take cues from 70’s Vogue Fashion photography. Loyche’s work however, is both more personal, since she works with familiar places such as her old office, or her sister’s attic.

Rebecca Loyche grew up on horse farms in Upstate New York and moved to New York City in 1997. She received her Bachelors of Fine Art at Pratt Institute in Sculpture in 2001 and in 2006 she received her Masters of Fine Art in Combined Media at Hunter College. Recently accepted into the 2008 Bronx Museum Artist in the Marketplace program, Rebecca Loyche lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Aron Namenwirth, untitled 33 (Bin Laden) 2006-07 acrylic on panel 60 x 48 x 2 inches

Artist and artMovingProjects gallery owner Aron Namenwirth appears in our masthead this week, representing some of the more political work to grace our front page. Chosing political figures and current issues to reproduce in the form of medium to large scale, Namenwirth uses small sized jpgs as a visual reference point. The paintings are perfectly executed; each color beautifully working with the next and the images, materialize and dematerialize relative to the viewers position. In some sense, Namenwirth literalizes what might be an imagined physical relationship between the user and a jpg, in another the paintings simply rearticulate digital representations of political figures and issues.

Biography

Aron Namenwirth is a painter, media artist, curator, and co-director of artMovingProjects which he founded in 1995. Aron was born in Ipswich Mass. He received his M.F.A. in Painting in 1987 from Yale. He works and lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Aron’s work is involved in Contemporary American Politics, War and Consumerist Culture. He recently showed at Momentaart, vertexList. and Galapagos. Namenwirth’s Animations have been screened at Diva in Miami. He has written and curated for Zing Magazine. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Time Out, Italian Vogue, and Broadcast on PBS and CNN.

Shane Harrison, Valentine, 2007, Mixed Media, 7.5 x 9.5 inches

This week Shane Harrison graces our masthead, an illustrator whose work I became aware of largely through the posts of MTAA. Personally, I love her work, and I hope you do too, because you’ll be looking at the above dangling feet and suspended bra strap for a good two weeks. Consider it our mid October treat to you all!

Biography

Shane Harrison is an illustrator based in Brooklyn, NY. She received
her BFA from The Rhode Island School of Design in 1992. In her work,
Shane combines both vintage and her own photographs with hand drawn
elements. Some of her influences include the work of Push Pin Studio,
and many of Harlin Quist’s artists. Her work has been featured in many
publications including The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Wall
Street Journal and The Village Voice.

Thomas Brauer, Post.date.flash.back., 2007, mixed media on paper.

I’m a little behind on posting this week’s featured artist Thomas Brauer, but such is life. There will be no writing of lengthy prose on this artist’s work or curatorial efforts, since ArtCal has already addressed much of this, but I will encourage readers to visit Brauer’s group show A Muzzle of Bees at 33 Bond. At the very least it will give you a chance to look at his work in person - I doubt anyone can attest better than us, that digital photography rarely captures the life of a work of art.

Thomas Brauer Bio

Thomas Brauer completed his MFA at the Yale University School of Art in 2005, where he received the Phillips Berden Award for Distinction in Painting and Printmaking. Thomas Brauer also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2005. His work most recently appeared in “I love New York”, the inaugural group exhibition at 33 Bond Gallery (2007). His work was also included in “In the Ring”, a group exhibition at Buia Gallery in New York (2005), and in “Somebody else is there”, his first solo exhibition, at Capsule Gallery in New York (2005).

Saul Chernick, “The Predator’s Waltz,” 2006, Ink on Paper, 16 3/4 x 14 1/2 inches framed

Given all the press Saul Chernick has received from us lately, I’m sure it will come as a great surprise that he’s our current featured artist. However, rather than bore you all by repeating everything I’ve already told you about Chernick’s drawings, I’ve simply provided links to the plethora of media coverage he’s received as of late:

Art Fag City at the L Magazine: Fall Preview

Flavorpill

Introducing “I Told You So”

LoVid, “Help Carry a Tune” performance at PS1 Warm Up, 2007
with analog audio synthesizer and hundreds of feet of cables, held aloft by the audience.

Working under the collaborative hood of LoVid, Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus make material art out of immaterial video abstraction. The collective takes our featured artist position during the busiest two weeks in Chelsea not only for their demonstrated ingenuity within multiple mediums, but as a reminder that performance art is not yet dead within the contemporary art world.

LoVid Biography

LoVid (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus) overwhelms the senses with their new media performances, videos, objects, and installations. Touring the US and Europe extensively, LoVid has performed, exhibited, and lectured at The Neuberger Museum, The Butler Institute of American Art , PS1, Evolution Festival (UK), The Kitchen, RISD, Massachusetts College of Art, Kansas City Art Institute, Chicago Art Institute, University of Wisconsin, Futuresonic Festival (UK), The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Ocularis, The Happy Lion, and Institute of Contemporary Art London among many others. LoVid has been part of the artist in residence program at Eyebeam, Harvestworks, iEAR, Alfred University, and Stevens Institute of Technology, has received grants and awards from Experimental TV Center, NYSCA, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and Greenwall Foundation, and are a free103Point9 transmission artist. They are currently working on a commission for a new web-based project from turbulence.org to be released in the Fall of 2007.

Tara Gianinni, Midnight Recollection, 2007, Taxidermied Beetles, spraypaint, latex, glitter, oil and acrylic paint on panel, 12 x 8.5 x 2.5 inches

Wordpress appears to have eaten up the Featured Artist post I wrote last night, a bell or whistle (we’re not sure which) to this software I can’t say I love. If you had read the original post, you would know that Tara Gianinni participated in last year’s Emerging Artist Series and that I liked her work so much that I chose to highlight it again, this time in our masthead. You would have learned a bunch of other stuff too, but rather than continue the use of an irritating writing device, I think I’ll just recast the three or so sentences I lost on the subject of the artist’s studio practice.

Most important in those now gone words, is the seemingly mundane observation that Gianinni has been working much smaller this year, and incorporating less taxidermy (though it is clearly still in use). The artist tells me this practice is a direct result of having to spend a lot of time dealing with the limitations of a rat friendly studio, an anecdote (if you can call it that) I mention because it provides a powerful example of how dramatically an artist’s work space can effect the their art. I hate to be sentimental, but I love it when life’s residue shapes art.

Visit Tara Gianinni’s featured artist page.

Tara Gianinni, In the Grotto, 2007, Taxidermied field mouse, taxidermied butterfly,
shells, glitter, dirt, spraypaint and acrylic paint on panel, 17 x 10 x 3 inches

Rob Carter, Coventry City F.C., 2006, postcard, 4 x 6 inches

A few of you may remember this week’s featured artist Rob Carter from last year’s emerging artist summer series, but for those who missed the post, I wrote several paragraphs on his art here. Since that time Carter made a number of new works, so we felt he deserved additional spotlight from us, this time in the form of space in our masthead. As always a full bio and image of the featured work can be seen on this page, or simply by clicking on the masthead itself.

In other news, Art Fag City will be running a second emerging artist series next week, this time focusing on conceptual art. Each day the work of a new artist without gallery representation will be posted on the site with a small write up and bio for each. Not that I can claim any objectivity on the project, but I personally think the series will be HOT!

Guthrie Lonergan, Total Artwork Related Expenses and Income for 2006 (not bad)

Bad news for those who hate animated gifs! A rotating laptop laid over of an image of falling bricks graces our front page for the next two weeks, an art work courtesy of our featured artist Guthrie Lonergan. This in combination with the swimming dolphin and flashing AFC sign should provide enough visual stimulation induce motion sickness in at least a few of you. Consider this a warning, I guess.

Click through for Lonergan’s full image and statement.

Eric Hairabedian, Manushag, 2006

As you may have noticed there’s an old dude mixing some hot tunes in our masthead right now. Given the recent discussion here on the value of Ryan McGinley’s invincible youth photographs, I have to say we’re happy to be showcasing a piece that focuses on someone over the age of 30 who choses to wear clothing. We like to mix things up a bit of course, and featuring an artist that mixes the funny and slightly creepy certainly achieves this, but we may also simply prefer pictures of fathers* in their evening wear to virtually all other genres of photography. I’ll let you be the judge on that one. View Hairabedian’s work this Friday in Not Yet Utopia, a group show at Pocket Utopia. Click on the masthead to read a full bio on our Featured Artist page.

* All works on the Featured Artist page are of the artist’s mother and father.