We caught up with Uruguayan artist Paula Delgado when she was visiting New York for her recent show at Momenta Art.
Paula explored men’s relationship to their own beauty: in six different cities of the world she put an ad in the paper with a casting call for beautiful men, meeting those who responded one on one in a hotel room, asking them why they thought they were beautiful, what beautiful means to them, and how they view beauty in other men.
Thurber exhibited at Southfirst what he calls “nineteenth century music videos,” his 120 foot by three- and four foot sumi ink on paper scrolls – last unrolled at his performances at KGB bar, the Issue Project Room, and the Brick Theater. These tell the story of a mouse security guard, the protagonist of hi s graphic novel 1-800-Mice, and illustrate his band Ambergris’s songs Paid in Foam and Daylight Savings. While it was up to the gallery visitor to imagine how extraordinary those narratives must be (since you could only see a fraction of the rolls), the one-sheet comic strips by the artist gave a fascinating view inside his mind. Only loosely cohesive, they practically burst with creative thought and thematic diversity, giving witness to what can happen when a mind is given free range in regards to internal monologue and train of thought.
Matthew Thurber, photographed by Christina von Messling
Christina Von Messling: Where are you from?
Matthew Thurber: Lummi Island, Washington State.
CVM: Where do you live currently?
MT: Ocean Hill, Brooklyn, New York.
CVM: How did you decide to become an artist?
MT: As soon as I realized that books were produced by human beings, people called “authors”, I decided to be that kind of person.
CVM: What is your creation process?
MT: I try to make work every day. I draw and write in a sketchbook every day. A lot of my process involves staring off into space and trying to visualize stories or strange images or dialogue. I like deadlines so there are tangible goals ahead of me.
CVM: Define art
MT: Um, well, hmm….er, uh, un-alienated labor?
CVM: Name your favorite artists
MT: Marcel Duchamp, Alfred Jarry, Pablo Picasso, Moebius, Thomas Pynchon, David Lynch, Gary Panter, the Sun City Girls, Thinking Fellers Union Local #282, Sun Ra, The Beatles.
Into Thin Air by Matthew Thurber
A motley crew of new fine art photographers were picked by the Danziger Gallery in Chelsea for their latest exhibit – each of them leaving a lasting impression in their own way:
British photographer Chris Levine showed his portraits of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. His modern and unconventional takes, ranging from a holistic piece to photo-booth reminiscent images, put this traditionally very conservative form of portraiture into a new and exciting context.
Yuji Obata took five years to develop a method to microscopically photograph snowflakes outdoors as they are falling from the sky. The resulting monochrome images with their contrasting areas of sharpness and softness have a strong poetic and sensual quality about them, characteristics not usually connected to a photographic approach that has its roots in the scientific process.
Scheltens & Abbenes mix their talents (Scheltens is a photographer and Abbenes a tapestry artist) to reinvigorate the flower still life and to question the way we see things: cutting out photographed flowers, gluing the pieces together to form a new bouquet, and rephotographing the creation gives their work a graphic quality.
French photographer Patrick Smith‘s work is especially enticing because if its strong geometric quality – human beings in the midst of majestic nature, the trails they are forming (and leaving behind) becoming part of the environment and producing a new and exciting visual landscape.
Lastly Czech Tereza Vlckova presented two series: Two trying to capture our negative, as well as our positive self by portraying real or digitized twins, the other, A Perfect Day, Elise symbolizing the courage it takes to take a leap into the unknown – creating an Alice in Wonderland like quality.
Scott Hunt knows how to draw in his audience: the narrative of each of the nocturnal images of his Then the Darkness Fell collection keeps you wondering about what had happened just prior to the moment depicted. The realism of his detailed charcoal drawings adds to the immediate intensity, and so does his working method: Hunt started out searching for snapshots that enticed him – online and on flea markets – and used their most gripping elements as a starting point for the resulting images, creating a storyline around each one. I caught myself trying to imagine how the original photograph had looked like, and what Hunt had added to it.
With his typical sense of drama and sense of humor, Hunt explores the fascination of nighttime in this series, and examines the themes of fear of the dark, personal loss, and racism, among others. (Exhibited at Schroeder, Romero & Shredder).
Opening at the Pierogi Gallery (177 N 9th Street, Brooklyn, NY, www.pierogi2000.com)
on Friday, February 17th was Ward Shelley’s newest collection of work, Unreliable
Narrator (through March 18th 2012). Shelley continued on his quest to visualize how
things evolve over time and relate to one another, and focused on the different belief
systems of our world. Religion obviously being a major one, two of his diagrammatic
pieces deal with Christianity and Judaism, but he also explores American patriotism and
the resulting rationale for American wars, Teenagers as a concept that has been invented
after World War II, Science Fiction as a more playful form of belief, and finally Fluxus
as the last true avant garde movement.
To explore the structure of the narrative of these evolutions, he presents two versions of
each graph: one with text, one without. This allows the viewer to focus on the underlying
structure of the information, whose architecture as such carries information as well,
possibly equally significant for understanding the narrative than the written words
provided.
