Issue 16 by artmazemag

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Winter Edi t io n, I

6, 20 20

Featured image: Benjamin Terry Untitled (Chromatic 3) paint, wood, and glue 24 x 18 inches more on p. 143

Art Maze Magazine is an independent artist-run and ad-free international print and online publication dedicated to showcasing and promoting experimental and progressive contemporary art, which reflects modern society and its environment, provokes conversation and action; and fosters innovation and diversity of mediums which make today’s art scene so intriguing and versatile.

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We invite guest curators from internationally renowned galleries as well as independent art professionals to select works for each issue. We try to give spotlight to artists and engage with our readers and followers every day through our social media, website and print and digital issues.

If you wish to submit to our online blog, you are welcome to fill in the application form on our website.

Artists are welcome to submit works in any medium: painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography, textile, installation, mixed media, digital etc. Artists or any art organisations on behalf of artists from all countries are welcome to submit.

WRITERS

Please visit our website for more details on how to apply for print publications: www.artmazemag.com/call-for-art/ or see p. 11 Artists are welcome to submit works to our online blog. This opportunity also provides a chance to be published in print issues.

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FRONT COVER: Alice Tippit Vise oil on canvas 24 x 20 inches more on p. 14-31 BACK COVER: Robert Roest Meatware Ecosystem, Part 3 oil on canvas 200 x 140cm more on p. 136

Registered office address: ArtMaze Magazine Ltd. G06, Binnacle House 10 Cobblestone Square E1W 3AR, London United Kingdom

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interviewed

call for art

“ Str i pp e d dow n and made st range ”: Toward s an amb iguou s v i s u al lang u age i n t he s e m iot ics of A l ic e Tipp it ’s gra ph ic p ai nt i ng s ........................................................ 14

S pring E d itio n 17 ..................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1

Yes, bu t … A mb iguit y and mult i plicit y i n A n na S ch ach inge r’s wor k ................................................................... 32 Sub me rge d b od ie s : D i sc ove ri ng t he plac e of t he hu m an i n t he nat u ral lands cape in the p ai nt i ngs of G iordan ne Salley...................................... ............... 50 Gut fe el: In c onve rs at ion w it h g ue st cu rator Scot t O gde n .............. ............... 68

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Contents

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curated selection of works

editorial selection of works

Jonath an DeDecker ..................................................................80 A nt hony Pad illa ....................................................... ................8 2 Juan Arango Palacios ................................................................84 D an iel He rr . . . ...........................................................................8 6 A m ie C u nat . . . . .......................................................... ................8 8 Ja s on Rohlf . . . . ..........................................................................89 M ile s D eb a s . . . .......................................................... ................90 Christina Van Der Mer we ..........................................................92 D ana Kot le r . . ........................................................... ................94 Q ui n n J D . . . . . . . . .......................................................... ................95 Jackson O’Brasky .....................................................................9 6 M ar ili a Koli b i ri .......................................................................98 G re g Brow n . . . . .......................................................... ..............10 0 A ndre a Ca st i llo ....................................................... ...............101 Paul L e ib ow . . . .........................................................................102 Far rell M a s on - Brow n .............................................. ..............104 D w ight Ca s si n ........................................................................105 D ana Old fat her ......................................................................106 Rai ne n Kne cht .......................................................................108 A na Wie de r- Blank .................................................. ...............110 Tarek S eb a st i an Al- sh am m aa .................................................112 N ichola s Moe nich ...................................................................114 Rachel G rob ste i n ....................................................................115 S e ne m O e zdogan ..................................................... ...............116 A m anda D oran ......................................................... ...............118 Sato Yamamoto ........................................................................119 I an Clyde . . . . . . ........................................................... ...............120 N i k k i Mehle . . . .......................................................... ...............121 Je s sic a D z ieli n sk i ..................................................... ...............122 Mona S he n . . . . . .........................................................................123 T h ang Tran . . . .......................................................... ...............124 D om in ic Te rli zz i ...................................................... ...............126 Manuela Gonzalez ...................................................................128 E lis a L e ndvay .......................................................... ...............129 D ylan D e Wit t . ........................................................................130 Andrew J. Long .........................................................................132 Maria Calandra .......................................................................134 Kimia Ferdowsi Kline ..............................................................135 Rob e rt Roe st . . ......................................................... ...............136 Lu m in Wakoa .......................................................... ...............137

All iso n Reimus ........................................................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 0 Francesca B lo mfield .............................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 2 Benjamin Terr y .......................................................................143 Liz Ain sl ie ............................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 4 Delphine Hennelly ..................................................................146 Suzy B abingto n ....................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 E rick Alej and ro Hernandez .................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 9 Joseph Parra ............................................................................150 Mar y DeVincentis ....................................................................152

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Featured image: Delphine Hennelly A Green Thought in a Green Shade oil on linen 38 x 26 inches more on p. 146-147

from the editor Celebrating the start of 2020 with the new Winter Edition 17! We feel privileged to have worked with Scott Ogden on our guest-curated section for this issue. Scott is the head curator and founder of SHRINE gallery in NYC where he exhibits a wide range of emerging and mid-career artists, many of whom are self-taught, outsider and underrepresented makers. Scott has a keen eye for emerging talent and has put together a vibrant selection of artworks from the submissions we have received from our recent call for art (p.78-137). In our interview with Scott we chat about his day-to-day work and the start of the SHRINE journey, his art collecting passion as well as his own art-making and sound advice to the ‘outsider’ artistic community (p.66-77). We thank Scott for his generous contribution to this issue and look forward to seeing how his work develops in the future. Our Editorial Selection (p.138-152) has brought together a group of artists whose work we admire and have been following and supporting for some time, as well as those whose work appeared in previous editions and, of course, a couple of new faces. We want to thank everyone who applied for this issue and showed so much kindness and interest towards ArtMaze—we hope our community makes everyone feel welcomed and provides motivation in further development as well as bringing people together to support each other in their journeys. In this edition’s interviewed section (p. 12-77) we converse in-depth about the practice of three artists whose work has been on our radar and we are grateful to finally have had a chance to publish them in this issue. The arresting ambiguity in this issue’s cover artist’s work, Alice Tippit, strikes the viewer through the context of simplistic, graphic yet painterly visuals, which play with form and meaning, perception and significations. The enigmatic portrayals of Anna Schachinger’s curiosity-inspired narratives welcome a kaleidoscopic multitude of points of view according to the artist’s interpretation of her own work. Painter Giordanne Salley conveys memories and observations of scenes with added layers of imagination from her time spent in nature into emotive painterly narratives which spark with a brilliant colour palette, and story-telling figuration. Our next issue promises to be another exciting edition as we have teamed up with one of our previously featured artists Matthew F Fisher to curate the next selection for Spring Edition 17. Matthew, being an artist himself, has shown great appreciation and interest in others makers’ work, helping put together exhibitions nationally and internationally, as well as tirelessly supporting many artists online through his curated Instagram account. We look forward to this collaboration, which will undoubtedly be a special one! If you are interested in submitting your work and appearing on ArtMaze’s pages, please feel free to check out our website for more information (www.artmazemag. com) and hopefully we’ll be able to work with you next time. Yours truly, Editor and Founder Maria Zemtsova

p.78-137 curated selection of works

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p.138-152 editorial selection of works

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Spring Edition 17

call for art DEADLINE: February 20th, 2020 Guest Curator: Matthew F Fisher artist and independent curator

Submit your work for a chance to be published in print and digital issues, as well as online on our website and social media. ELIGIBILITY: The competition is open to all artists, both national and international, working in all visual mediums. Artists are welcome to submit works in any medium: painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography, textile, installation, mixed media, digital, film etc. DISTRIBUTION: ArtMaze Magazine is an independent international publication which is distributed both nationally and internationally via book shops, galleries and museums, art events and via the online store: artmazemag.com/shop HOW TO APPLY: please visit our website for more details and fill in the online form via the following link: artmazemag.com/call-for-art OTHER OPPORTUNITIES: Artists are welcome to submit their works to our online blog. Please visit our website for more information: www.artmazemag.com or contact us at info@artmazemag.com

Featured image: Lumin Wakoa Muse of happiness oil on linen over panel 16 x 20 inches more on p. 137

inte

erviewed:

Alice Tippit Anna Schachinger Giordanne Salley Scott Ogden

www,alicetippit.com

“Stripped down and made strange”: Towards an ambiguous visual language in the semiotics of Alice Tippit’s graphic paintings Chicago-based artist Alice Tippit creates bold paintings that translate familiar forms into a visual language of stark shapes, symbols and colours, their meanings manifold, unstable and often evasive. Alice studied painting and drawing both as an undergraduate and as a graduate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, receiving the school’s George and Ann Siegel Fellowship for her MFA. Her works have been exhibited in both the United States and internationally in Berlin and Malmö. Previously in her artistic practice, Alice drew on the imagery and tropes of genre painting and familiar historical artworks to produce paintings that toyed with form and meaning to complicate or hinder the interpretation of the viewer. Her earlier work on recasting the symbols and elements in traditional paintings and convoluting their significations still feeds into her current practice. The forms in Alice’s paintings hover somewhere between the familiar and the obscure. Recognisable objects and images—a pair of lips, an apple, an eye, hair, a banana, a moon, various limbs and silhouetted faces seen in profile—are stripped of any discernible context or transparency of meaning. On the starkly coloured ground of Alice’s canvas, these forms become shapes that teeter on the edge of abstraction, interacting with one another to produce relations of meaning that verge on German Surrealist Max Ernst’s definition of the surreal as “a linking of two realities that by all appearances have nothing to link them, in a setting that by all appearances does not fit them”. Although Alice is influenced by such works as the enigmatic paintings by Belgian Surrealist artist René Magritte, her graphic eye and stark palette make for a form of Surrealism that is wholly her own. For Alice, colour is a device by which to distort relationships between forms and between the different layers that make up the painting. Combined with her use of flat, clear-cut shapes, Alice’s stark hues of light and dark produce a visual system of signification in which every element of the painting works towards, or against, a multitude of possible interpretations. Her tendency towards two-dimensionality is offset in some works by touches of detail—tiny, intricate lines or areas of shading that model the swell of flesh, the curve of a lip—that make unexpected gestures towards depth which contribute to the subtle layering of perspectives present in the paintings. This incorporation of images and colours as signs, a device shared by graphic design, works towards a visual language that, in Alice’s work, defies a single, clear reading. Her sustained interest in the relationship between text and image merges with her own painterly impulse to reduce and manipulate visual information so that her paintings divert and splinter understanding. Drawing much on the capacity of writing to produce multiple semantic implications by means of poetic devices such as metaphor, Alice ultimately creates images that stand as oblique references rather than as clearly stated, unambiguous definitions. Alice’s practice today relies on “thinking, researching and making”—sitting with an idea before manifesting it as a work, then sitting with a work before forming linguistic associations to produce titles and supplementary text. She tells us here about the distinctive visual style of her paintings, the affinity she feels with poets and writers who probe and distort systems of language, and her wish for her works to exist in a state of precariousness when it comes to their capacity for communicating meaning.

interview by Rebecca Irvin

Featured image: Alice Tippit Lick oil on canvas 16 x 13 inches

AMM: Hi Alice, have you always considered yourself a painter? AT: I’ve been making paintings—oil on canvas— since 2007. Before that, I was more of a work-on-paper artist: printmaking, drawing, watercolour. Though I make paintings, I’ve never thought of myself as strictly a painter. To be honest, I don’t enjoy it all that much, painting. I like thinking about them and I like finishing them. The making part is just something that I have to do in order for it to be a painting. So I prefer the distance between myself and the painting process that is implied when I say that I make paintings instead of saying I am a painter. AMM: How has the distinctive style of your paintings developed? Did your studies have a big impact on this? AT: The look of my paintings grew out of an earlier interest in combining text and image. In that work, I began to opt for a clean, bold appearance, counteracted by a corresponding lack of clarity as to a clear meaning. At the same time I was also making paintings that relied heavily on genres of painting and one’s knowledge of a particular work. For example, removing all of the signs of greatness in JacquesLouis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps: depicting Napoleon from behind and scaled down to miniature, on a flat plain instead of in the mountains. Somewhere between these two projects, I arrived at what I do now in painting. My love of wordplay lives on in titles and works on paper, while the paintings became more graphic in appearance. And while a knowledge of painting genres is helpful, in general they no longer rely on a specific, familiar image from art history. That process though, of breaking apart the signifiers of an image and manipulating them, is one I still use today. I put my own images through that wringer. AMM: Despite the bold nature of your works, your palette appears fairly reserved—the colours are rarely garish or loud but rather stark and subtle. Can you tell us about more about this aesthetic choice? AT: Aesthetics aren’t so much a factor; colour for me is more of a tool for delineating form. In any given painting I choose two to five colours for the image. Before making the painting I will think about potential interpretations for the image and how colour might sway it in one or another direction. If there is a recognisable form, do I want to use the most common colour association, or will the use of a different colour complicate the perception in a more interesting way? I use contrast to unsettle figure-ground relationships, and darks often stand in for deep space in an otherwise flat image. I admit though that I have a personal preference for warmer colours and so I end up reaching for them more often. I’ve definitely made lurid colour selections in my work, but unless deployed sparingly I find that those images lose something in the clarity of appearance mentioned previously. Sometimes though, this might be a desirable direction for the image, so I try to remain open to it. AMM: In turn, your stark colour palette evokes a certain balance between your subject and the space

around it, subverting the traditional hierarchy of background and foreground in painting. When making a work, how do you think about the relationship between negative and positive space, between background and subject? AT: I often use the contrast between complementary colours or light and dark colours to produce an unstable figure-ground relationship. This opens up the image and heightens the potential for the image to have multiple interpretations. AMM: Your forms are very clear-cut—how much are you influenced by graphic design? AT: The appearance and operations of graphic design are of great interest to me. The difference

“I am definitely taking advantage of pareidolia, which is our tendency—given even a limited amount of information—to see the figure and faces in objects. This tendency is very powerful, so I reduce the referential information, as I do with almost everything really, to allow other interpretations of the forms to coexist. For me, when the body is referenced, I want it to resist simple admiration and instead pose a question, if that makes sense.” - Alice Tippit being that graphic design usually communicates something specific whereas I prefer more ambiguity. AMM: How does your work negotiate between abstraction and representation, and between twodimensionality and three-dimensionality? AT: Well really it’s the viewer who negotiates the space between abstraction and representation, the paintings don’t do anything on their own,

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16, Interviewed: Alice Tippit

right? And I also negotiate that gap when I am developing an image. By using flat shapes without volume, colour to unsettle figureground relations, and shifts in scale, I can create an image that shuttles between the two even when there are recognisable forms. Rarely are they one or the other. Sometimes I decide that an image requires more detail for a representational element, or shading to give depth or volume, but this is relatively rare. I do it when it feels right. It’s a different thing to do and it can feel more meaningful than it is because I don’t do it very often. Usually I only do it when the specificity it adds complicates the reading of the image. AMM: Do you ever work in other mediums than painting, and if not would you like to? AT: I try to do what feels right for a particular idea, so yes, I’m always open to other mediums. Drawing is really important to my practice, but more as a means of developing ideas. I still work on paper, in a variety of mediums: collage, watercolour, coloured pencil, and I still do printmaking sometimes. I’ve included found objects and photographs in shows. All very twodimensional though! I don’t think in the third dimension very well, and even when I do it’s still very related to drawing or painting. AMM: When it comes to the technical undertaking of making an image, what is your process like? Is it painstaking work to create such stark lines? AT: Once I’m ready to make a particular painting, I usually finish it in one day. If a form is symmetrical I’ll often cut a stencil to get it onto the canvas, or if it is a form I’ve used multiple times I usually have a stencil made. I start in the morning, get the surface ready, mix my colours, and then I could be at work for only a few hours or all day if the forms are more complicated. I work from the edges outwards, with no masking or tape. I want a unified surface with edges that meet, not layers. It’s not easy but my paintings are small, so it’s manageable. AMM: The shapes and figures in your work seem to function almost like symbols or signs. Can you expand on the kind of visual language your work seeks to deploy? AT: Many of my forms reference painting genres such as still life or portraiture, but stripped down and made strange. My interest lies in creating something that has a kind of familiarity and seems legible, so the visual language and bold appearance of graphic design is also something for me to think about when composing an image. AMM: I notice that there is often an anatomical, bodily element to your works, where limbs, faces, mouths, hands, eyes become almost isolated, flattened shapes. Can you tell us more about the presence of the body in your images? AT: I am definitely taking advantage of pareidolia, which is our tendency—given even a limited amount of information—to see the figure and faces in objects. This tendency is very powerful, so I reduce the referential

Featured image (p.18):

Featured image (p.17):

Alice Tippit Verse oil on canvas 19 x 16 inches

Alice Tippit Follow oil on canvas 24 x 18 inches

information, as I do with almost everything really, to allow other interpretations of the forms to coexist. For me, when the body is referenced, I want it to resist simple admiration and instead pose a question, if that makes sense. Most of my figures are assumed to be female, perhaps because the female body is overrepresented in painting or because I am a woman, ergo I paint female bodies. But there are many that are not coded in one way or another, and some are most probably male. More than anything, what you are seeing is my interest in the literary blazon, which is a poetic device that catalogues the physical attributes of a subject, typically a female one, using comparisons to natural phenomena or rare and beautiful objects. Metaphor is deeply important to my work. AMM: How does the language of your paintings change when viewed in the flesh, in an exhibition for example? Are things like scale and the arrangement of the works important? AT: I take as much interest in the layout of an exhibition as I do in creating individual works. I often think of it in relationship to writing. I usually have one work that I think of as central and then I build the story of the exhibition around it. While each work has its own individual set of associations, these can be compounded by its proximity to others. I do this primarily by thinking about difference, so I would never place works together if the associations are too similar. It’s better to use a formal kinship, a visual rhyme or echo within the works first, then I assess where it takes me and whether I like the relationship or not. Scale is certainly part of this—my largest works are usually no bigger than 30 x 24 inches; my smallest size is usually 13 x 10 inches. Within this range I have quite a few sizes. The difference in size can seem quite meaningful when arranging works for exhibition, especially so if there is an unexpected use of scale within the image. AMM: What dialogue are you aiming to conduct with the viewer? Is there anything in particular that you are seeking to convey, an impression you wish to create, a feeling or atmosphere you hope to induce? AT: If there is anything I want to convey it is that the systems we use for communication are less stable than we assume them to be. This to me is exciting—things don’t have to be one way—but for others this is a threatening state. I’m not interested in nonsense, which is too easy to create. I will usually try to set a tone in an exhibition, either through writing about it, including text based works, or found objects. This will set folks off, but I’m always surprised as to where they take it. AMM: Does your work draw on other disciplines such as literature or are you more closely focused on language as a system, rather than as narrative or meaning? AT: A little rule that I have for myself is that nothing in particular should be happening in my images. No story is being told there. That said, I am very interested in poetry and some

writers who are not poets but whose practice I feel a kinship with in terms of their approach to language. I like the system of language but I’m interested in the cracks rather than the structure. And I do think a lot about poetic operations such as rhyme, repetition, and metaphor, particularly when creating an image or putting together an exhibition. AMM: As language is such an integral element within your work, how do you go about selecting titles for individual pieces and for shows? AT: I keep a list of words that I find interesting in the back of each of my sketchbooks. I like homophones—words that share their sound but not their meaning—and words with connotative meanings. When it comes down to titling it might happen quite easily in that I think of the title as I develop the work, or more deliberately. Most of the time I have to sit with a particular work and think about the associations it brings, then think about words related to those associations, then think about words that rhyme with or have a similar combination of letters to those words, and I’ll look at my lists for inspiration. It’s a ruminative process. A title should never tell anything in particular about a work, because a work should never be about any one thing, at least in my practice. AMM: Is there a particular artist or artwork that has had a great influence on your own work? AT: Magritte is a huge influence, a giant among many, many others. His works have a mysterious affect that is well worth analysing. One of my favourite paintings is of a loaf of French bread sitting next to a window, through which the evening sky and landscape is visible. The title is L’Avenir (The Future). His titles are really great. They extend the meaning of the work rather than explain. And this work is so funny and pregnant with meaning, though that can also be said about his work in general. The phallic shape of the bread, the opening of the window… what does it mean? Maybe it only goes in one direction but I don’t really care to answer that question, I just want to rest with it at that moment. AMM: What pursuits do you currently have beyond painting? AT: Not much gets between me and my studio time but I’ve always been a reader, though a lack of time means I don’t finish books as quickly as I used to. I take ceramics classes, though I am pretty terrible at it. I’ve also been teaching myself German for some time, though again, I am terrible at it. AMM: What is your studio environment like? Do you like to keep things neat or do you allow it to become more chaotic? AT: Somewhere in between I guess. I don’t think well in disorderly spaces but neatness is also stifling. I’m a tidy-piles-of-stuff person. My floor is clear but my work table is not. My easel is filthy.

“If there is anything I want to convey it is that the systems we use for communication are less stable than we assume them to be. This to me is exciting—things don’t have to be one way— but for others this is a threatening state. I’m not interested in nonsense, which is too easy to create. I will usually try to set a tone in an exhibition, either through writing about it, including text based works, or found objects. This will set folks off, but I’m always surprised as to where they take it.” - Alice Tippit AMM: Do you consider yourself part of a wider artistic community, either where you work in Chicago or further afield? Do you ever collaborate on shows or works? AT: Yes. Though I am not super social in the Chicago art community I am a part of it, and social media helps me to feel connected to the community beyond my physical one. I’ve collaborated on works only once that I can think of, with Dawn Cerny, a truly fantastic artist from Seattle with whom I have an unusual synergy. These days I’m more likely to collaborate on shows than works but it has been a little while since one of these has been realised. The last one was with Alex Chitty in 2013 at Roots & Culture here in Chicago. AMM: In what ways do you see your work developing? AT: I don’t think too intensely about how my work might develop, I just continue thinking, researching, and making, and trust that I will be able to see where it needs to go when the time comes.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16, Interviewed: Alice Tippit

Alice Tippit ESS ENVY Installation view Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

Alice Tippit Woman on Yellow Motorcycle in Crystal Lake Installation View Kimmerich Galerie

Alice Tippit Mass oil on canvas 13 x 10 inches

Alice Tippit Short oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches

Alice Tippit Idle oil on canvas 18 x 14 inches

Alice Tippit Monitor oil on canvas 16 x 13 inches

Alice Tippit Skirt oil on canvas 22 x 18 inches

Alice Tippit Bell oil on canvas 13 x 10 inches

Alice Tippit Sink oil on canvas 20 x 18 inches

Alice Tippit Sore oil on canvas 13 x 10 inches

Alice Tippit Toll oil on canvas 16 x 13 inches

Alice Tippit Loose oil on canvas 19 x 16 inches

www.cargocollective.com/annaschachinger

Yes, but… Ambiguity and multiplicity in Anna Schachinger’s work For Austrian-Ecuadorian artist Anna Schachinger, painting is an intricately intertwined process of balancing conceptual and intuitive impulses. Her work encompasses real and fantastical subject matter, and from a formal point of view, figurative elements and abstract gestures. Her paintings represent a state of ambiguity and possibility, conversations that are left hanging. The title of her exhibition, alles at Mexico City project space Lulu in 2017, is a not-quite word that resonated with the possibility of meaning without any actual fulfilment. Her more recent exhibition Desta Maneira Não at Galeria Madragoa in Lisbon, directly translates as “this way no”, a similarly ambiguous phrase ripe with possible interpretations. In this body of work, conceptualised in India and produced while Anna was on residency at Lake Millstatt in Austria, water is the dominant feature. In the painting Mergulho, the figure of a diver conjuncts the worlds of above and below. But Anna’s translucent application of pigment confounds the sense of depth and disrupts the surfaces, making it uncertain whether the foreign body is falling through air or descending through water. According to the logic of Anna’s work that welcomes a kaleidoscopic multitude of points of view, it is a resounding “both, and”. This succeeds from Anna’s Falling body of work, which explores a similarly abstract and ambiguous notion of the verb. Themes and motifs are revisited and reworked across bodies of work, creating layered strands of narrative. Working chiefly in oil and ink pigments on linen, Anna’s paintings are intriguing in their seeming disregard for conventional spatial hierarchy. Foreground and background merge and overlap creating fascinating new potentials to read, or get lost in, the compositions. Anna lives and works in Vienna. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. She has exhibited her work widely in Europe and the USA. Here, we speak with Anna about growing up on the move, collaborating with other artists and pineapple scented sauna oil.

interview by Maria Zemtsova text by Layla Leiman

Featured image: Anna Schachinger Fouteuil (with the lights still on) oil on linen 42 x 56 cm, 2018 courtesy of Sophie Tappeiner Gallery, kunst-dokumentation.com, the artist

Featured image (p.34):

Featured image (p.36):

Anna Schachinger o.t. acryl on velvet 27 x 22 cm courtesy of Sophie Tappeiner Gallery, kunst-dokumentation.com, the artist

Anna Schachinger Installation view, Supervulcanos, with Leena Luebbe, Irina Lotarevich and Andrea Kvas courtesy of Tarsia Gallery, kunst-dokumentation.com, the artist

AMM: Hi Anna, you grew up in many different parts of the world—India, Nicaragua, Ecuador. Could you tell us about your earliest creative experiences and share some of your most vivid memories that helped shape your artistic vision and desire to make art? AS: I don’t link my desire to make art to having grown up in different places. I do need to work with it as it forms part of my reality, but I think that it can be just as inspiring to have grown up in a single place, as complexities are everywhere. My desire to make art came a bit later. When I was 19, I started drawing a lot. It just made me feel content, something that was really hard for me to reach back then. So I started to show my very teenagy drawings to my friends—who were kind enough to look at them. I decided that I wanted to study art because making it (or what I thought back then was it, which was sketchbooks filled with very feely stuff) made me content. Not sure if that’s a good reason, but it’s not the worst one either. AMM: How does your heritage from the Americas and Europe influence your current artistic journey? AS: I hope I am not on an artistic journey. I am actually a bit sick of travelling. I would also feel a bit cautious about talking about my American heritage. I guess it just feels too easy to link myself to a history without having to deal with its sometimes very brutal everyday life. I chose to live in Vienna and not for instance in Quito, Ecuador, where my grandmother lives. I still feel very connected to this city. It’s just a bit easy for me or for others to use it as an explanation in the art context for my color choice or anything else. AMM: How has your practice developed over the years; were there major milestones? What have been some of the high points and learning curves thus far? AS: Lots of little milestones, just digging myself through the mud of my artistic practice. The last three were: 1. making a painting where the abstraction wins over the figuration in a super dizzy way instead of more concrete outlines; 2. making a drawing of all naked women without any sexiness in it. Not that sexiness is bad, but it was fun to desexualize the female body for once; 3. making my first abstract work in a larger format that doesn’t look like walking through a sad little city park listening to Enya. AMM: You have studied at the prestigious School of the Art Institute in Chicago and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna; how did these experiences affect your artistic trajectory? AS: I was really lucky that back then my father could afford to pay a substantial part of the fees at the Art Institute. It is just crazy how much education can cost in the States. I don’t want to hide the fact that I was able to be there because of my father’s income, no matter those scholarships I also got. I admire every American student taking huge loans in order to study, but my observation was that the rich kids probably outnumbered every other group at SAIC. For

me, SAIC was truly a great school as I was eager to learn and I could just suck it all in for two years, I had fantastic teachers there- then I went to Vienna. University education is for free or cheap in Austria and that’s great. I started in a male dominated painting class, but I finished my studies in the sculpture class of Julian Goethe, who is very dedicated to his students. AMM: What is your process of working: do you sketch and plan your compositions or allow things to take their own course? AS: Sometimes there is a lot of sketching beforehand. If so, it is in order to learn the composition and the motif by heart, so by the time I translate it into a painting, I can just do the drawing directly on the canvas without looking at any reference material. It is also a sort of test on the motif, if it already gets boring while drawing it; it’s probably not worth to paint it. Sometimes there is no drawing beforehand and I just figure it out along the way. I might also sketch while painting in search for a solution for a certain part of the painting. AMM: What guides your colour choices? Can you tell us more about your palette and the role it plays? AS: I mainly paint with pure pigments in different solvents, and I have about 10 colors I use and mix with each other. By now I kind of know how the colors interact with each other, which is a great advantage. My new goal is to learn how to paint with more body…It’s hard as I am very attached to the translucency of the paint. I just learned about painting butter, might change my life. AMM: Are there overarching themes and propositions in your work?

“I work with whatever is right in front of my nose that makes me curious. Painting is always the departure point, but it can lead basically anywhere I—with my limited perception and experience—am able to go. I like to work with subjects, where I would have a lot of answers like ‘yes, but...’ or ‘on the other side’ in a conversation. It’s stuff that I care about, that I feel involved in.” - Anna Schachinger

provokes is a very private moment.

AS: I work with whatever is right in front of my nose that makes me curious. Painting is always the departure point, but it can lead basically anywhere I—with my limited perception and experience—am able to go. I like to work with subjects, where I would have a lot of answers like ‘yes, but...’ or ‘on the other side’ in a conversation. It’s stuff that I care about, that I feel involved in. AMM: Do you create to understand or do you express what you have already learned. Or is it a bit of both? AS: I work to think and feel certain things through. I think of the process and of the finished works more as a conversation and never as a means to teach people anything.

AMM: We loved the concept of your beautiful 2018 exhibition ‘Holderinnen’. Can you elaborate on how your use of materials helped tell the story? AS: Holderinnen consists of three large scale paintings showing women ironing huge pieces of fabric and some small scale works with ripples and folds that are double-sided and hang from metal rods coming out of the ceiling. They repeat the action of the figuration (rippling and stretching) on a material level, and help to reinforce it. These works are about women’s unpaid labour as much as they are about painting and its history.

AMM: What do you hope the viewer takes from your art?

AMM: In your work at the Ash Street Project in 2018 you were experimenting with sculptural forms. Can you tell us more about this explorative process and its challenges?

AS: I hope to give the viewer a space where contradiction in thought and feeling is possible and no decision of what is right or wrong must be taken, but more a moment where everything can just be seen. But I do not think I have any control of what the viewer sees, and I am actually glad about that. Looking at a painting and the thoughts and feelings it

AS: Ash Street Project is a ceramics studio in Portland, Oregon. In the context of my solo exhibition at Fourteen30 Contemporary, I was invited to work at Ash Street for a month. I learned how to use the wheel and was able to start using the generated thrown material for building up sculptural forms, namely people sitting in chairs. I had known that I wanted to

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16, Interviewed: Anna Schachinger

do these sculptures since a while but I lacked all the technical skills to do them. So I basically specifically learned to throw to be able to chop up that material again into little figurative sculptures. AMM: In your fascinating exhibition Pensive State you and Irina Lotarevich worked very closely together to place ceramic figures on metal frameworks positioned through the gallery. We would be very interested to hear more about the ideas and propositions you and Irina were exploring in creating such a piece. Can you tell us how you collaborated to create such a powerful work? What roles did each of you undertake? AS: Irina and I started with the proposition that we would switch the roles people would expect us to take in a duo show. Irina, as a sculptor, made wall works. I, as a painter, made sculptures. As our approaches are quite different but weirdly compatible we thought that it would be nice to collaborate on a third element for the show. Thus, the idea for making metal structures that would hold the ceramics came about. It was great to design them together, using references that spoke to both of us. In the production, Irina took the lead, as she is very sophisticated in working with metal. I was happy to help in any way I could—which some days just meant to cook for her as she was welding and on others I learned how to grind metal properly. AMM: Does an exhibition close a chapter for you or does it lay the foundations for further development? AS: It is kind of nice to think about exhibitions as chapters, as the artist R.H. Quaytman. I guess with exhibitions I’m writing a collection of essays, that speak a bit to each other. And sometimes I rewrite an older chapter—right now for instance I am back at trying the whole teenagy thing of expressing my emotions through figurative works. Not the first time I have tried this in a show, not the first time I wonder if it’s even a good idea to do so. AMM: Are there other artists or artistic movements or traditions that you consider to be influences; if yes, who or what are they and how do they have a bearing on your practice? AS: I guess I have been formed as much by artistic traditions I agree with as by others I disagree with. Starting my studies in Vienna in a very male dominated painting class, male German painting was the main discourse for some years. Discovering women painters by myself and with a few friends always felt like a revelation—even though the people I was discovering were already part of an established canon—just not to my surroundings. I am talking about people like Nicole Eisenman, the already mentioned R.H. Quaytman or from the generation before, Lee Lozano and Ree Morton. As I had to look by myself for this history, I am very grateful for all the amazing women painting in my generation and the one before. I think that we all don’t have to feel lonely anymore as we are building a discourse together.

AMM: You were involved in a Maumaus International Study Program in Lisbon, a Portland residency with Fourteen30 Contemporary in collaboration with Ash Street Project, and an artist residency on Lake Millstatt in 2019; how significant are such creative opportunities in your artistic development? AS: All these places and situations were quite different, but what was always special were the people I was able to meet. As for instance the great Rainen Knecht in Portland, who is featured in this issue too. I have talked a bit about Ash Street Project that was dedicated to learning how to throw on a wheel. A month to learn a new skill. Maumaus was an intense seven months study program, that I owe a lot to. I learned that the world is a complicated and in many cases a nasty, cruel place and that it is important to talk about it and to talk about it through an artistic practice. That discourse is important and can be transformed into action. I still hope for that with every work. This summer I am going to do a residency at the artist run space NoLugar in Quito, Ecuador. Very much looking forward to that, as I haven’t been there since 2014. In general, this constant traveling has been a bit much these last years. I want to become better at just staying in Vienna and I don’t want to feel like I am missing out just because I decide for the great structures to work and live that I have here. AMM: Can you elaborate on your Millstatt experience from which the delightful works ‘A Marina Esta de Ferias’ followed? AS: At Millstatt, the studios are beautiful and located right by the lake. It felt like I was in the lake most of the time. The ideas for the series “Marina Esta de Ferias” came from a month long visit to India in the Winter before. It was the first time I was there since having lived there as a kid, and I felt utterly aware of being a tourist. Travelling—a seemingly simple thing, has become quite complex in our current society. In India I found myself feeling like I was mainly destroying the things I liked the most about the places we visited, and I felt very alienated to myself and my surroundings. This experience was kind of the kick-off for the whole show at Madragoa, Lisbon, that “A Marina Esta de Ferias” is part of. Still, I took the plane for the install and opening in Lisbon and also did some nice trips to the beach. AMM: In an age of social media and instant connections, does the speed of communication and change affect your art practice or have you managed to stay relatively detached? AS: In the Summer of 2018 I was so deep in an unhappy Instagram addiction that I deleted my account for good. But as my brother and my most hippiest-never-want-to-be-part-of the-art-world friend agreed that I needed one, I got back to it last winter. I discovered that I feel more comfortable only sharing work as content, not putting any private pictures up. Sometimes there’s this weird old school fear in me that looking at the flat screens is making my work more flat as well—but I have no proof of it and I am not giving my smart phone

away anytime soon. Maybe it’s just the hope that my works would be better if I wouldn’t spend so much time staring at screens. AMM: We enjoyed the article in KubaParis— Magazine for Young Art, November 2019, which included your poetic description of your apartment in Vienna. You are able to express your feelings vividly in words and also through visual language. We recently read that a typical viewer spends as little as 2 seconds looking at an art work. If paintings also need to be read, as you have maintained, what can we put in place to assist the viewer in their quest to glean even more from works of art? AS: I am glad you liked the text! It’s in German, so I wonder how it sounds like in English? Which translation tool did you use? I never feel completely comfortable writing, but sometimes it is fun to do. Where do viewers spend 2 secs on every work of art? In a museum? On Instagram? I don’t think I have any expertise on how to help people trying to look at art. However we all know that through social media we are learning to divide things and people in what and whom we like and what and whom we don’t like. But I think that looking at art that breaks with one’s scheme of comfort can be just as gratifying. Also, I don’t think people have to look at art at all. I respect if there is simply no interest, not even for 2 seconds. AMM: What are you reading and listening to at present? Does the content inform your work? AS: Since 2 summers ago, I am listening a lot to the mixtapes of the deceased Danish Dj Djuna Barnes on soundcloud. A friend recommended her to me because I was euphorically talking about the writer Djuna Barnes and her book Nightwood—maybe the only book I have read twice. Back when I discovered it, I also was making paintings of women reading—and the titles refer to the protagonists of Nightwood. I read a lot different kind of novels, but I listen to the same music all the time. AMM: When you manage to have some free time, what do enjoy doing? AS: I have a lot of free time. This doesn’t mean that I don’t work. Work and free time don’t have to exclude each other, at least not in Vienna. What keeps me sane in the Winter time are regular visits to the public women’s sauna, that is self-organized within by the visitors and that was built by the socialist Viennese city council in the 1920s. I actually have witnessed intense fights between the regulars about adding pineapple scent to the sauna infusion, but I still truly believe in these spaces where women make their own structures, and where nakedness is not looked at but a simple fact. AMM: What does the future hold for you? AS: Ehm, happiness? That’s all I hope for. And on March 11 I am opening a solo show at Sophie Tappeiner. Very excited about it. The pineapple scented sauna infusion might make it into it too.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16, Interviewed: Anna Schachinger

Anna Schachinger Stone Nora oil on linen 42 x 56 cm courtesy of Sophie Tappeiner Gallery, kunst-dokumentation.com, the artist

Anna Schachinger Nora’s Sofa oil on linen 42 x 56 cm courtesy of Sophie Tappeiner Gallery, kunst-dokumentation.com, the artist

Anna Schachinger Nora’s Sofa (with Stones) oil on linen 42 x 56 cm courtesy of Sophie Tappeiner Gallery, kunst-dokumentation.com, the artist

Anna Schachinger Lost in Thoughts (yellow underskirt) oil and acrylic on canvcas 66.0 x 55.9 cm

Anna Schachinger Installation view Pensive State, Dou with Irina Lotarevich courtesy of Sophie Tappeiner Gallery, kunst-dokumentation. com, the artist

Anna Schachinger Hangers glazed ceramics 20 x 15 x 10 cm courtesy of Sophie Tappeiner Gallery, kunst-dokumentation. com, the artist

Anna Schachinger Lemon Tree oil and gesso on canvas 56 x 42 cm courtesy of Lulu gallery, kunst-dokumentation.com, the artist

Anna Schachinger Büglerinnen 2 oil on canvas 150 x 180 cm courtesy of Brennan and Griffin gallery and the artist

Anna Schachinger Mergulho oil and ink on linen 180 × 150 cm courtesy of Galeria Madragoa, kunst-dokumentation.com, the artist

Anna Schachinger The Nakedness of her Face acryl and ink on linen 180 x 150 cm courtesy of Sophie Tappeiner, kunst-dokumentation.com, the artist

Anna Schachinger Go Ahead oil and ink on linen 40 × 30 cm courtesy of Galeria Madragoa, kunst-dokumentation.com, the artist

Anna Schachinger Pure European Linen oil and ink on linen 27 × 22 cm courtesy of Galeria Madragoa, kunst-dokumentation.com, the artist

www.giordannesalley.com

Submerged bodies: Discovering the place of the human in the natural landscape in the paintings of Giordanne Salley Growing up around the “woods, water, and quiet” of the American Midwest of Ohio, painter Giordanne Salley had an early penchant for interpreting the world around her by drawing. It was at local art classes that she first began to experiment with painting as a means of observation. For Giordanne, the pull of paint as a medium lies in the process of conveying a witnessed, remembered or imagined subject into a material that might capture not only space, light and color, but a mood, sensation or experience. Under Giordanne’s painterly gaze, an observed scene becomes a ground on which to graft intangible concepts like desire and nostalgia. In turn, the viewer of the work is invited to transpose their own experiences, their own desires, their own memories and perceptions, onto the undulating lines, hazy shadows and dusky colors that characterize Giordanne’s paintings. Giordanne studied painting as an undergraduate at Anderson University. While still a student, she cultivated her individual practice by spending two summers taking part in the artistic residency program offered by the Chautauqua School of Art. She was also a resident at the Vermont Studio Center, where she went on to work for a short while. Invigorated and stimulated by her time spent as part of passionate and vigorously creative communities, Giordanne went on to complete an MFA in painting at Boston University. After graduating, she secured a grant which allowed her to attend a two-month residency at GlogauAIR Berlin and provided her with the time and space to develop her work away from the rigor of study, as well as giving her access to the novel possibilities of being an artist in a new city. Now living and working in New York, something she finds simultaneously “wonderful and difficult”, Giordanne conducts her practice from a studio in an old industrial building in Ridgewood, Queens. For Giordanne, the experience of working as an artist in New York comes with both an inevitable struggle and a fantastic sense of belonging to a thriving artistic scene. Her work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions alongside her fellow New York artists and in solo shows across the city, in galleries such as Off-White Columns and Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects. Though the creation of her work takes place predominantly in the metropolitan landscape of New York, Giordanne has not renounced her core affinity with the natural environment of her childhood. The imagery within her paintings recalls the quiet and the solitude of rural spaces that, rather than referring to a specific place, evoke the feeling and memory of being situated in an organic landscape. There is a sensory appeal to Giordanne’s images that takes precedence over realism; her subject is not so much the person, the tree, the sand, the shell, the moon, the sun, the sea, but the sensation of water, wind and sun on bare skin, the shifting moods and colors of a tree between day and dusk, the way that bodies and natural objects interact with light, the submersion of bodies in cool water. With their intertwining of visual and sensory memory, imagined and lived experience, what Giordanne’s paintings communicate is a longing to immerse oneself wholly and bodily in the natural elements. For the viewer—whose own figure is often implicated in the paintings as an anonymous shadow, a reflection, a silhouette—the experience of looking at Giordanne’s work is one that encourages a renewed awareness of sensory perceptions. Giordanne’s paintings teach us, among other things, what it is to be a feeling, seeing body in the world.

interview by Rebecca Irvin

Featured image: Giordanne Salley Low Tide Swim oil and paper on canvas 72 in x 54 inches

photo by Ryan Garber

AMM: Was there a particular moment or person that made you realise you wanted to be an artist and, in particular, a painter? GS: Rather than one specific moment, I feel like I have become a painter slowly over the course of my life, gradually taking things a bit more seriously, and suddenly here I am—an adult who is a painter. Growing up, I loved to draw. I loved the immediacy and portability of it. I was homeschooled as a child and my parents noticed my inclination towards art and specifically drawing. They were very supportive of my interest and were able to incorporate drawing into many of my other subjects and assignments. I attended art classes at a local art center where I first painted from direct observation as a child. The first painting I made from observation was of a yellow teapot. I remember being frustrated with the material and struggling to paint what I was observing. I was insecure about the painting when I brought it home to my parents. The painted teapot was clunky and kind of just floating in the middle of a smudged white surface—all my mistakes were laid bare, but I was excited to try to paint more. I remember feeling as though the paint was not totally in my control the way a crayon or pencil may have seemed to be. Maybe this was when I subconsciously decided to be a painter. Part of what has always kept me coming back is the struggle with the material translation of content, whether it be observed or invented. AMM: How have your practice and your work evolved since you first started making paintings? GS: My first paintings were all about learning the material. Most of my formal painting education, and even earlier explorations in paint, were strongly rooted in working from observation. I fell in love with paint as a material by working from observation, and I fell in love with observing nature and the figure by looking with paint. In college, I began experimenting with painting from memory and imagination. I continued working from observation for my classes and as a daily drawing practice, but would go to my studio at night and paint clunky, awkward attempts at scenes describing my parents’ home and members of my family. I made a painting of my dad mowing the grass from memory that I was so embarrassed to show my classmates. I felt like I was able to describe the shape of my dad working hard in the yard, but the lawnmower itself just read as a nebulous pile of red and black shapes. This problem of painting a convincing world from memory or imagination and the humor that can accompany failed attempts has intrigued me ever since. I began thinking of drawing and painting from observation as a way to bulk up my intimate knowledge of objects and figures in the world, and to understand light and space so that I could be more deliberate about how to manipulate these elements in an invented or remembered world. I still consider drawing from observation an important part of my practice, but it is more private and supplemental than in the past. In my

current work, I am using observed drawings and remembered experiences of light, color and mood to build images that present information to the viewer and create more of a psychological than naturalistic space. AMM: In what ways have artist residencies helped to develop your work? GS: Artist residencies have been essential in the development of my work and also my painting community. When I was in college, my professors urged me and my classmates to apply to summer programs. I ended up attending the Chautauqua School of Art for two summers. This program, while definitely geared toward pre-graduate students, placed me amongst some very ambitious peers and incredible faculty. It was here that I learned what it meant to put in 12 hour days in the studio and formed some lasting bonds with other painters who to this day remain some of my closest artist friends, one of them being my partner of almost 10 years. After finishing college and attending Chautauqua for the second time, I felt compelled to move to the East Coast to be among a serious painting community. I attended a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, where again, I felt at home amongst other ambitious artists. I ended up getting a job at VSC and staying there for a little over a year before moving to Boston for graduate school. The time I spent in Vermont was a true gift. Johnson, Vermont was the first place I felt truly at home apart from where I grew up in Ohio. My position at VSC provided me with a small stipend, studio, room and board, and access to all of the visiting artists and residents that came through the program each month in exchange for something like 20 hours a week of work. I spent my time there working on the body of paintings that I would submit for graduate school applications. Being in such a supportive and ambitious community in the middle of this utopian landscape where (in the summer) you can walk to a pristine, ice cold swimming hole after breakfast to start your day, definitely left a permanent impression. I think I could have stayed there forever. The uninterrupted time and space to focus on my paintings propelled my work in a way that I do not believe would have been possible in normal circumstances. After finishing my MFA at Boston University, I received a grant from the school to attend a two-month residency at GlogauAIR in Berlin before moving to New York. This residency was a welcome change of pace and scenery after the rigor of completing an MFA program. Each residency I have attended has been completely different and has offered me something specific to my needs at the time. There are many options out there, but I feel very fortunate to have experienced a few and hope to have the opportunity in the future to do more residencies. AMM: Can you tell us about the kinds of mediums you prefer to work in? GS: I prefer to use oil paint on canvas. I like the openness of oil paint and how forgiving

it can be as a material. When I am building my images, I like to start with small, casual drawings in a sketchbook to work quickly through ideas and compositions. Once I feel like I have a solid starting point for a painting, I usually start drawing and collaging with dry materials directly onto the canvas. This process functions as a sort of scaffolding for the painting. The collage helps me find the form of my figures and other solid objects or shapes in the painting. At a certain point in the drawing, which varies from piece to piece, I prime the drawing or collage on canvas with clear gesso, then begin painting on top of it. From here on, it is all oil paint. I don’t use much medium, but if I need something to be more fluid I will mix some cold wax medium with neo megilp. It keeps the paint matte while increasing the flow and transparency. Otherwise it is just paint. I use thin layers of oil paint on the surface of the canvas to build up color. It is a slow way to arrive at an image, but it seems as if I have to find the painting and bring it out of the surface rather than impose it. AMM: Despite living and working in the city, many of your paintings draw on natural environments and landscapes—where does this imagery come from? GS: My work has always been informed by a sense of desire. My whole life, up until I moved to the city, I have had direct access to woods, water, and quiet. I love living in New York, but there is one essential thing that I do not get from living here and that thing is solitude in nature. Nature has been present in my work in some form as long as I have been a painter, but almost immediately when I moved from Johnson, Vermont to Boston I began painting figures in the woods. At that moment, I think I was processing the experience I’d had and the place I had just left while finding my footing living in a ‘real’ city for the first time. Now, after living in New York for around seven years, I feel like that longing for nature has only intensified. As a salve for city life, each summer my partner and I spend a few weeks in Maine. We go to the same place each year and have been able to get to know specific nooks and crannies of rocks and trees and mossy paths. We spend time drawing, swimming, reading, and just looking. Even though it is only for a short time each year, I think that the polarity of that experience versus our daily life in the city only heightens our senses while we are there. My current work is definitely informed by the cold swims and late summer light that we experience in Maine, but I see the imaginary landscape as being a sort of invented hybrid of places that hold significant personal meaning, like the quiet woods behind my parents’ house in Ohio (which now barely exist due to subdivision developments), swimming holes in Vermont, and of course the edge of the cold water in Maine. I think of the natural objects in my paintings, such as rocks, shells, trees, even water, as being characters in the paintings or stand ins for figures. I do fantasise about moving upstate

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16, Interviewed: Giordanne Salley

Featured image: Giordanne Salley Toe Dip oil and paper on canvas 16 x 14 inches

and painting in a barn in the woods—I wonder if, in that environment, I would make paintings about the city? AMM: We notice that there is also a lot of water imagery in your work, much of which centers on the relationship between the body and water—can you tell us some more about this? GS: I am interested in different ways that I can position the figure in nature, enmeshing figures into a landscape. Painting figures submerged in water, concealing and revealing specific parts of their body, have been ways I have attempted to merge the figure with its surroundings. I am thinking of water as a symbol for change and time and rhythm and a place for contemplation and solitude. I am a swimmer myself and I enjoy the feeling of a cold plunge and being totally submerged, if only for a few moments. I like opening my eyes underwater and seeing green bands of light pouring through the surface. I feel free of restrictions in the water, but my body is not the body of a fish, so I am actually quite limited and have to eventually get out. It is my hope that this primal urge to be in or near water, floating, comes across in the paintings of swimmers. AMM: The body is almost always present in your works, but often hidden, obscured, distorted, seen in parts, seen as reflections, silhouettes or shadows, or from behind. What is the concept behind this? GS: In an attempt to weave my figures into their surroundings, I have largely removed the gaze from the equation. Similar to how I submerge figures in water, revealing parts of their body above and beneath ripples, I am hoping to carefully divulge the figure piece by piece. I am interested in different ways of inserting the figure into the landscape without painting a full frontal figure. I do not want to confront the viewer. I am hoping rather to create space for them to enter the image via pattern, color, or memories of the viewer’s own. Ideally, I want my paintings to feel like a secret that I have revealed privately and uniquely to each viewer. Recently, I have been trying to use shadows or reflections to describe a presence. Sometimes the shadow clearly comes from the indication of a figure outside the edge of the painting, and other times the shadow could be coming from the viewer herself. I am thinking of the shadows and reflections as an alternate world or dual possibility for the figure in the painting or for the viewer who could be casting the shadow. I have been using reflections as a way to slowly reintroduce the face into my paintings, but I am still exploring where this may lead. AMM: There is an element of self-portraiture in your work but this is rarely explicit—are you seeking to capture and relate personal experience or to signify a wider, shared experience via the subjective perceptions of the individual? GS: I think of my paintings as loosely-based self portraits. The one thing I have with me all the time is my body, so I end up using it as reference when I am drawing and painting figures in my

studio, even if I am drawing a man. While I am referencing my hand and my foot, I am thinking of the image as a signifier for a hand or for a foot. I see the man-made objects in my paintings (glasses, sandals, watch, undergarments, etc.) as being more specifically tied to personal experience and indicative of specific people or moments, but it is still my hope that these objects will function as keys to open up the image rather than dictate a single narrative. AMM: Does color play an important role in your paintings? Do you use it to alter, complement or contrast with the subject matter, semantic content and mood of the work? GS: Color is important. I also think it is the hardest part of painting. I begin each image with an idea about color and that idea often changes and surprises me over time. I am interested in a hazy, glowing light that describes a transitional time of day. I think of long shadows and exaggerated hot pink suns or moons as marking a beginning or ending. In that way, I think my palette contributes to the temporal quality of my work, while also being playful and even humorous at times. AMM: Are there any recent works of yours that hold particular significance for you, either because of what they show or because of the feelings they evoke? GS: One recent painting titled ‘Sunset without Anyone’ feels special for some reason. This painting turned out nothing like I originally intended. I thought the rock would be at the edge of the water instead of partially submerged. I tried it with a purple-blue sky and a red sun and several other variations, but slowly the color was brought up, as was the tide. I think it feels meaningful because of how much it surprised me. I also feel like this painting is at once sad and funny in a way that I hope for in all my work, but cannot always control. AMM: How do you title your works? GS: My titles are generally descriptive, with a nudge toward a specific mood. I want the titles to help guide the viewer slightly toward my hope for the painting while keeping their read more open when possible. AMM: You have participated in many group exhibitions—how has working and exhibiting alongside other artists shaped your own approach? Do you consider your practice to have a collaborative element? GS: I feel very lucky to have been shown alongside so many wonderful artists, including painting heroes of mine. I am always interested in seeing how different curators contextualise my work. Sometimes the relationships seem obvious, other times surprising, and still other times totally dissonant. Seeing my work amongst the work of my peers as well as historical artists has allowed me to view my work differently and to sometimes see what others may see in my work that I do not. I have also met so many wonderful painters from being shown alongside them. While I see group

“In an attempt to weave my figures into their surroundings, I have largely removed the gaze from the equation. Similar to how I submerge figures in water, revealing parts of their body above and beneath ripples, I am hoping to carefully divulge the figure piece by piece. I am interested in different ways of inserting the figure into the landscape without painting a full frontal figure. I do not want to confront the viewer. I am hoping rather to create space for them to enter the image via pattern, color, or memories of the viewer’s own.” - Giordanne Salley

shows as a great way to meet other artists, point out trends and larger threads in artists working across time, and to see my own work with a different perspective, I do not view group shows as being collaborative in regard to the making of the work. I think of my process as personal and private. AMM: Are there many other artists, either in art history or among those currently practicing, whose work influences or informs your own? GS: Of course! As a young painter, I completely

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16, Interviewed: Giordanne Salley

Image (p.56): Giordanne Salley Sunset Without Anyone oil and paper on canvas 48 in x 40 inches

fell in love with Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard. Their work probably still informs my interest in enmeshing the figure into their surroundings, making every piece of paint as important as the next. Bonnard’s bathroom paintings unwittingly gave me permission to try to paint from memory for the first time. Milton Avery is also a painter whose work I feel I have had a long term relationship with. His distilled landscapes are so true and undeniable in a way that I think speak to the deepest meanings of life. One contemporary painter who has certainly influenced me is Kyle Staver. I was introduced to her work in college when I was making the awkward shift out of working primarily from observation. Her solid, almost cubist compositions gave me a boost of courage to break away from naturalistic representation. She is an awesome painter who has become a support and friend and her paintings continue to push and inspire me in the studio. AMM: What is it like working as an artist in New York’s creative scene? GS: It is wonderful and difficult. I do not know where else I could live (perhaps LA or London?) and be surrounded by so many other ambitious artists making their work. I feel lucky to have so many friends who intimately know the struggle of being a working artist and with whom I can relate and at times commiserate. I think the hardest part can be feeling like you have enough time to work in your studio and attend all your friends’ openings while making sure you also have enough money to pay your studio rent. The precariousness of life here as an artist certainly keeps you on your toes, but the sense of community that living and working surrounded by other artists provides is something I would miss deeply if I ever move away from New York. AMM: What is your studio setup like? GS: I have a medium-sized studio in an old industrial building in Ridgewood, Queens. My studio has a large northeast facing window and two large working walls with racks along the back for storage. I generally like to keep things fairly organised, but my painting table looks like a teenager’s bedroom. I keep snacks on hand— very important. AMM: Do you work on your practice, source images or make sketches when you are away from the studio? GS: I bring a sketchbook with me everywhere I go and try to draw a little bit every day whether I go to my studio or not. Drawing from observation, even little quick sketches, is a way I have found to be present in a moment. For me it is a way to feed myself visual information, instead of constantly pouring it out.

Virginia Woolf’s exquisite descriptive language in The Waves or the poems of Wendell Berry. AMM: How do you approach self-promotion? Do you think it is important for currently practicing artists to use social media? GS: I use Instagram and my personal website to share announcements for shows and new works. Social media—and specifically Instagram—can be a useful tool for artists. I have made friends and set up studio visits through Instagram. I have even been curated into shows because of someone seeing my work on Instagram, so I cannot deny the value that it can provide artists. I have had to throttle back in the last year or two in an effort to protect my process and works in progress. It can be confusing and disruptive to share something in progress and to receive a wide array of responses and inquiries, or to have that work in progress shared or reposted and misunderstood as a finished piece. I enjoy using social media as a way to build relationships with other artists, but I think it is important to remember to see the work in person whenever possible. A whole other layer of experience usually exists when you are faced with the surface of a painting. AMM: What has been, or continues to be, your biggest challenge as a painter? GS: That is a tough question! The self doubt that I assume all artists feel is probably the biggest challenge that never seems to go away. Interestingly, self doubt seems to disappear when I am in my studio, working with my hands. It just creeps up in-between working. I have always felt that if I continue to show up for my work, my work will continue to be fulfilling. Of course, in New York there never seems to be enough time or space or money all at once, but that balancing act is becoming less daunting over time. Oh, and paint itself! I feel like I may spend my whole lifetime attempting to intimately know and understand how to use this expansive medium. So, to answer your question—I guess all of it, showing up every day, humbled and ready to keep going. AMM: Any exciting projects coming up that you can tell us about? GS: I have been working on some drawings for night paintings. I have been thinking for a long time about making a group of night paintings and have dabbled here and there with a moon or a night sky, but I am interested in making paintings that feel like night, keeping the tones in a tight range. This is a big challenge for me, since I tend to be drawn to warm bright colors, but I am ready to make a concerted attempt!

AMM: Does your work draw much on other disciplines, for example music, literature, film? GS: Probably yes, but not directly. I am not referencing any specific film, text, or musical composition, but certain pieces surface in my mind from time to time such as, currently,

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16, Interviewed: Giordanne Salley

Giordanne Salley Edge of the Water oil and paper on canvas 14 x 12 inches

Giordanne Salley Wader oil and paper on canvas 22 x 18 inches

Giordanne Salley Pile oil and paper on canvas 18 x 22 inches

Giordanne Salley See Through oil on canvas 8 x 10 inches

Giordanne Salley Head to Toe oil and paper on canvas 48 in x 40 inches

Giordanne Salley Knot oil and paper on canvas 8 in x 10 inches

Giordanne Salley Arm Window oil and paper on canvas 16 x 18 inches

Giordanne Salley Haul oil and paper on canvas 24 in x 20 inches

Giordanne Salley Halfway Down oil on canvas 24 x 22 inches

Giordanne Salley Moon Water oil on canvas 24 x 22 inches

www.shrine.nyc

Gut feel: In conversation with guest curator Scott Ogden For artist-turned-gallerist Scott Ogden, the curatorial journey has always been led by the heart (with support from the head). “I first start by looking for art and artists making works that I personally would want to live with,” Scott explains. He began collecting art during college in the early 90s, and opened SHRINE gallery in Lower East Side Manhattan in 2016 during a lull in his own art practice. Now, almost five years later and over the initial start-up hurdles, Scott finds the curatorial challenges of presenting work in interesting and thought-provoking ways as satisfying as making work himself. His long-standing love is with outsider and vernacular/self-taught artists, which makes up roughly half of his gallery programming. The other half focuses on emerging contemporary and underrepresented artists, with the occasional intertwining of the two. Scott takes great care to create a sophisticated and contemporary digital and physical aesthetic for SHRINE, which allows him to spotlight and elevate the work of self-taught makers in a fine art context. At outsider art fairs, Scott has presented work from the historical Friern Hospital Collection, produced by mentally ill patients without any formal art training or even the awareness of art at all. The artworks reveal a creative output that is completely unfettered in its directness with a complete lack of inhibition. This freedom and naïve nonconformity runs through the work of many of the artists in the SHRINE stable. It’s a special eye that can recognise the latent potential of the untrained artists and separate the amateurish from the unconstrained. And Scott is a master of this. We’re thrilled to have been able to work with Scott as guest curator for this issue of ArtMaze Mag. He brought his characteristic excitement about discovering new artists and industry expertise to bear in what we think is a fabulous selection.

interview by Maria Zemtsova text by Layla Leiman

Featured image: Bernard Gilardi We Belong Installation view SHRINE Gallery presented by Maurizio Cattelan

AMM: You were born in Oklahoma City and raised in Texas. You gained your BFA from the University of Texas in Austin and an MFA from Queens College in New York. Were you raised in a creative household? Can you tell us about your earliest memories of making art? SO: I actually was not raised in a family that made art or expressed much creative energy, but I was always told about my father’s mother, who was a painter but sadly destroyed much of her work in a backyard bonfire. I never met her, but as an artist I can relate to not feeling satisfied with my work. Still, I would have loved to see what she had imagined and made. AMM: When did you open SHRINE and what is the back story that led to this? How did you get into curation? SO: I opened SHRINE in January of 2016 and had never really felt aspirations of being a “gallerist”. However, I had collected art, mostly in the Outsider and self-taught vein, since college and was perhaps inadvertently putting more energy into that than making my own work. And I was feeling very uninspired in my job/career at the time after having been doing it for a long time. It was actually a good friend who suggested that I open a gallery when I was abstractly looking for a big life change. Somehow it was a perfect fit for what my life needed. AMM: Opening a gallery in New York has its challenges. Do you recall the advice you were given at the time? Did you have a lot of support and mentoring? Were many cautious in their response to your new undertaking? SO: I think it is extremely daunting for anyone to open any kind of business in New York City. And for me, I had never worked at an art gallery before, outside of as working as an art handler/preparator, so I really had no idea what it would entail. The first two years were fairly brutal, and I often found myself often asking aloud to myself for help... But as I got going, like anything, it started feeling easier and slightly more stable, where I would no longer have to send out prayers for rent. Collectors are great, and along with the artists we show, are at the core of what we do. So many people new to me made purchases and trusted in what I was doing. It was humbling and hard to let them know that they were actually keeping SHRINE afloat those first couple of years. I also think it helped that I had the niche of focusing primarily on selftaught and Outsider art. AMM: What is your understanding of the role of curator? SO: To me, when I am putting shows together and curating, I first start by looking for art and artists making works that I personally would want to live with. Finding individuals and objects that move, in whatever way, is the most exciting part of this, and then getting to be playful (and thoughtful) about how they

are presented is giving me the same creative satisfaction as making my own art. AMM: How important is social media in your work as a gallerist and curator?

things to do and stay on top of. AMM: How would you describe the space and atmosphere of the gallery? What is the culture and aesthetic of the gallery?

SO: Simply put, I do not think I would still be in business without Instagram. It’s the only social platform I use daily for the gallery, and it has allowed me to get the word out that I am here, meet artists, find collectors and even reach out to people who would never look at an email from me but somehow are open to messaging on the app. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s free and such a powerful tool for artists and galleries.

SO: I try to make it sure approachable and fun. We don’t play it very “cool” and instead make sure to say a proper hello to everyone and let them know we’re here for questions or to further explain the art on view. Really, I just want the space to feel open and inviting.

“I do not think I would still be in business without Instagram. It’s the only social platform I use daily for the gallery, and it has allowed me to get the word out that I am here, meet artists, find collectors and even reach out to people who would never look at an email from me but somehow are open to messaging on the app. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s free and such a powerful tool for artists and galleries.”

SO: It’s a truly wonderful part of Manhattan where we are located. There’s no perfect name for it but the neighborhood is called Chinatown, Lower East Side, Two Bridges etc. There are so many cool galleries near here, really great bars and restaurants and sky. There are few if any tall buildings around here so you get to see and feel the sky. It all feels like a New York from another time.

- Scott Ogden

AMM: What are some of the ways that curating challenges and satisfies you creatively? SO: You’re telling a story with art made by other people, and I love it when curation allows for new or expanded ideas about these artworks. How art is placed and installed created new dialogues with the other works they are near and interacting with. I think it’s a creative act as powerful as making art.

AMM: We’d love to hear more about the area in which your gallery is located; how does the environment inspire and influence the way in which SHRINE is developing?

AMM: What do you hope visitors feel when they enter your gallery? SO: Excited, curious, inspired, like they should go home and make some art! AMM: As a film maker you created the documentary ‘MAKE’ in 2008 which delves into the lives of four American self-taught artists. We would love to know what inspired you to tell their stories and in what ways do their journeys reach out to us all? Do you believe that access to art for all is important at the times we live in? SO: ‘MAKE’ was another inadvertent project. I had found out about all of these amazing artists and their works, and I was just completely blown away. So I started shooting video footage eventually and also researching where archival material might be hiding. Eventually, when my co-director Malcolm Hearn came on, we realized these individuals who had never met still had lives and art practices that touched and made sense together. The rest is history, as they say. What was incredible was to see these four artists: Prophet Royal Robertson, Judith Scott, Hawkins Bolden and Ike Morgan, creating such unique and highly personal/idiosyncratic art with the barest of means. It is just so inspiring and changed me as both an artist and a person. And yes, I love the idea of everyone having access to both making and seeing art. Now more than ever, art is a vehicle to heal and also make sense of such unique times.

AMM: What does your working day look like?

AMM: How important is it to go to art school for those who want to make art?

SO: Always different... Emails, lots of emails, posting on Instagram, researching and writing about whatever show is new, keeping track of inventory, invoices, sending out previews, writing to artists. There is never a shortage of

SO: I do not think art school is necessary for anyone, but it can definitely introduce artists to new methods of art making, other artists, provocative ideas and, most importantly, it gives you a dedicated span of time to create.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16, Interviewed: Scott Ogden

Garden Installation view SHRINE Gallery

“...the one thing I would advise an “outsider artist” would be that if they have decided they are an “outsider artist” and are aware of the field, they really are not that and the label is not going to be helpful.” - Scott Ogden AMM: You have collected art since the 90s. Can you tell us more about your interest in outsider art and what drew you to it initially? We’d be fascinated to hear about your favorite pieces and how they were acquired. SO: I began collecting art in college with student loan money and anything leftover from making falafels at the local sandwich shop I worked at with a bunch of artists. When I first saw, really saw—in person, works by outsider artists, I was just dumbfounded. It became an instant passion and it seems my life’s work. My favorite works are always shifting and changing, which is part of the fun of living with art, I think. And I am always seeing something new, sometimes even in pieces that I have lived with for decades. AMM: Do you work with a fixed body of artists or is the program more fluid? SO: Both—I love developing relationships with artists and showing them as “galleys artists”, and I am also always keen to see new work and meet interesting artists. AMM: How does the advice you offer to outsider artists, those who are self-taught and contemporary artists differ? SO: I don’t think advice given to self-taught or trained artists would ever be different. I do suppose the one thing I would advise an “outsider artist” would be that if they have decided they are an “outsider artist” and are aware of the field, they really are not that and the label is not going to be helpful. AMM: Can you tell us more about the artists you are currently working with?

lucky to be surrounded by such talents. There are so many that I feel it a disservice to highlight anyone individually, but if I am working with someone it is because their art moves me and I think their work is ahead of the game. AMM: How do you establish a connection with collectors and how do you maintain that relationship? SO: Each relationship is so unique. Some collectors become great friends that you talk to almost every week, and others you only hear from on rare occasions when something grabs their attention. I’m constantly trying to be better about staying in touch with everyone as it’s fun and keeps this all running. AMM: What advice would you give an inexperienced collector? SO: Go with your gut. Intuition and personal taste are so important. Choose what you want to live with, and if possible, don’t buy art simply as an investment. Purchase works that inspire you and will evolve in your eyes the longer you live with them. AMM: In your opinion are there any trends shaping the current New York art scene? SO: It seems that Outsider Art is steadily becoming increasingly embraced by the larger contemporary art world, which is great as it is contemporary art. I see lots of new and young artists finding interesting ways to create figurative works in completely new ways. Abstraction is feeling more thoughtful and less decorative. Race and gender issues are at the forefront and helping broader audiences experience lives outside their own. AMM: You have a very busy work schedule, how do you spend any downtime you are able to grab? SO: Bad TV with my pup and wife, even just a little, is a great way for me to unwind. Eating well, whether at home or out, is key. Enjoying everything that New York has to offer. There’s just so much opportunity to experience things here that you cannot see anywhere else. AMM: Are you still able to find the time to make art? SO: I am just now finding time to get back to art making. The first few years of SHRINE were all-consuming. So it’s exciting to start up again. AMM: Where is SHRINE heading? Are you able to share details about future projects? SO: I will keep that secret for now. But I always love when people decide to follow and keep up with the gallery, and see what I’m doing, whether in person or virtually through the lens of my website. So please do that if you’re into what the gallery is up to.

SO: I work with so many talented artists and bodies of work. It’s hands down the best part about running a gallery, and I feel perpetually ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16, Interviewed: Scott Ogden

Garden Installation view SHRINE Gallery

Bernard Gilardi We Belong Installation view SHRINE Gallery presented by Maurizio Cattelan

curated selection of works by Scott Ogden, founder and curator of SHRINE Gallery, NYC Featured image: Rainen Knecht Ant Lady oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches more on p. 108-109

J o n a t h a n

D e D e c k e r

www.jonathandedecker.org

Image: Summer Nights acrylic, flashe on canvas 11 x 14 inches

Born in 1992 in Tucson, Arizona, Jonathan DeDecker, received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree in the Painting, Drawing and Sculpture Department at Tyler School of Art, in Philadelphia, PA. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Image: Doggos acrylic, flashe on canvas 9 x 12 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16: curated selection

A n t h o n y

P a d i l l a

www.anthonyzpadilla.com

Image: Jungle scene oil on linen canvas 60 x 48 inches

My goal with my paintings is to highlight the abstract and chaotic elements of our natural world. Focusing on dense jungles and lush flowers as my primary subject.

Image: Lush red flower oil on linen canvas 60 x 48 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16: curated selection

J u a n

A r a n g o

P a l a c i o s

As a queer person who has been navigating foreign spaces for over the past decade, my essence grows through the cumulative lived experiences I have witnessed as a member of a constantly migrating family. My work often explores a physical space that is tied to one of my most significant childhood memories. While attending Catholic school in Colombia, I was forced to suppress my queerness to an extreme. However, I found companionship and comfort with one of my peers. Together we would venture into the jungle at the edge of our school—a space which allowed us to fully express and explore our preference in love. The jungle became a place of refuge—a safe haven—it was the first place and time in my life where I have felt completely content with who I am. This space, which over time has been transformed into an archetype, acts as a timeless setting for the people that I would meet and experiences that I would have navigating the path ahead of me. As a queer body that was raised in a post-colonial context in Colombia, my identity was shaped in the shadows of North American normativity. My sense of self was further confounded by a series of migrations that my family experienced in search of work and a more prosperous future. Moving through varying homophobic and misogynistic cultures in Louisiana and Texas, I have formed a disembodied identity that is not attached to any specific homeland and has always been challenged by the general norm. My practice works towards addressing the lived experiences of ambulant queer identities that have been marginalized within a diasporic or migratory context. Through the fluid and boundless medium of paint, I have been able to represent memories, places, people, and archetypes that I associate with the safety, survival, and endurance of queer bodies in spaces that challenge their existence. Placing emphasis on color and composition, my work aims at creating images glorifying and fantasizing the idea of safety in a queer experience.

Image: Cowboys oil on canvas 48 x 48 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16: curated selection

www.jarangopalacios.com

Image: Yellow Haven oil on canvas 48 x 72 inches

D a n i e l

H e r r

www.dherr.com

Image: Dining Car oil and collage on canvas 60 x 48 inches

I was born near San Francisco, CA. I studied music in high school but gave it up when I realized I wasn’t going to be Glenn Gould. I went to UC Davis and later to Boston University, where I worked within a community of true painters. I’ve lived in New York now for 12 years. My work is about structure, place, confusion, society, solace, and exhilaration. I’m interested in how painting can communicate an experience of what living is like in a way that is unique to painting. It has to do with the history of image-making, yes, but the way you hold your brush or pencil can communicate a sense of “now” that can’t really be argued with. If there is a running narrative in my work it involves what it means to be an American, a man, and an artist today.

Image: Frontier oil and charcoal on canvas 62 x 50 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16: curated selection

A m i e

C u n a t

www.amiecunat.com

Amie Cunat (b. 1986, McHenry, IL) is a Japanese American artist whose painting-based installations present reconsiderations of interior spaces through the use of comedic hues and biomorphic forms. She readdresses notions of familiarity by exaggerating, punctuating, or arresting characteristics from an observed experience in order to reveal parallels between abstraction and perception. Cunat’s work utilizes American decorative arts, horror films and science fiction as influences, and when these sources are translated into painting and hand built objects, take on the behavior of soft materials like flesh, oil or water. This reflects a sense of humor that she wishes to express, but it’s also because she augments what is familiar or overlooked through pictorial and tactile means. For the large-scale installations, Cunat uses the context or history of a site to share dissonances between historic hopes and contemporary realities. Recently, the influence of Shaker craft and culture within the work has pointed to these distinctions in the American past and present. Cunat received her MFA from Cornell University, a Post- Baccalaureate in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her BA in Visual Arts and Art History from Fordham University. She has had solo exhibitions in New York and abroad at Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon; VICTORI +MO; Knockdown Center; Sunroom Project Space at Wave Hill; The Cooper Union and AIRY Gallery (Japan) among others. Recent group exhibitions include Fur Cup at Underdonk (Brooklyn), The Unusual Suspects at DC Moore Gallery (NY), Surreality at Crush Curatorial (NY), The Unlikely Whole at ArtYard (NJ) and Softer but Louder at Geary Contemporary (NY). Cunat has participated in numerous residencies including the Studios at MASS MoCA Residency (MA), Guttenberg Arts Space and Time Artist Residency (NJ), and the Artist-Teacher Residency at Cooper Union (NY). In 2019, she was awarded a Regional Economic Development Council Grant by NYSCA in collaboration with Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon. Her work has been reviewed and featured by The New York Times, ARTnews, Artsy, Artnet News, Vogue Italia, Two Coats of Paint, and Hyperallergic. Cunat lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Image: Japanning polyvinyl acrylic, flashe and gouache on canvas 34 x 30 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16: curated selection

J a s o n

R o h l f

www.geoform.net/artists/jason-rohlf

Jason Rohlf, b 1970 Milwaukee WI, resides in Brooklyn, NY. “Field Guides” is my ongoing effort as an artist to collect and preserve my visual sensibilities, with each piece being the field for continued exploration as countless layers of collage, mediums and acrylic paint coalesce to become a finished painting. In a confluence of forms, I will develop lines and planes of color to delineate an intuitively created space. Almost in an effort to stamp some order in the chaos, geometric shapes will blanket the underpainting’s more organic textures. Relief pushes up from the underpainting, betraying the order, and light raking the surface reveals tension between the two. By drawing geometric maps into the work, I can assume the role of cartographer as well. The ink has the amazing ability to migrate up through multiple layers of acrylic, and, even if covered, will later reveal an earlier intention. It has the effect of allowing me to have a conversation with an earlier version of myself—a crude form of time travel perhaps. The one thing I can count on—in defiance of my intent and regardless of how hopeful my expectations—each attempt will undergo many revisions as I participate in the creation of a piece, with the end result ideally being the cumulative effect of the whole and not just a working toward the outermost layer. Like a recalled memory, a once obscure thing, hidden elements from the piece’s past will form an essential role on the surface, often as relief, while the most hard-fought details will likely earn a swift opaque top coat as a result of each day’s fits and starts. By conveying an urban palimpsest, many of the most thoughtful moments occur as these conflicting efforts achieve harmony and then begin to recede, resulting in the melding of competing ideas. The end results will ideally continue to serve up a variety of visual reminders or clues telling of how important certain influences have been and, over time, where they led. Hopefully over many years, this process will allow me to imagine the body of work as a stopaction time line slowly revealing the newly favored elements, only to see them diminish and evolve again as my changing guides and exposure leave their mark on my art making.

Image: Conjour acrylic on collage 54 x 40 inches

M i l e s

D e b a s

www.milesdebas.me

Image: Silver Tongue ink, acrylic paint, plaster, gauze 30 x 52 x 41 inches

I was born in France and raised in a bilingual household in coastal Massachusetts. My parents and their friends were practitioners of Hindu meditation and I went to Jesuit high school in South Boston. The disjunction of these influences taught me to be observant and adaptive in uncertain circumstances. I developed a skeptical sense of humor and a bit of a “new-to-town” outsider’s sensibility that manifest in my work. I employ emblematic figurative imagery to convey ideas about communication and connection to others. The imagery that I use draws in classical iconography and the visual shorthand of popular culture, both tuned towards essential forms associated with naïve and child art. The foundation of my work is drawing; my sculptural and painting work is seeded in the sketches I make as notes, recording ideas as they arrive. These drawings are fast and structural, outlining an idea’s first form. I find that when a drawing is made in pursuit of a very specific vision, it can have a thrilling, charismatic urgency. This vitality is the goal, though the work may be framed as a joke, or built in a gawky, ad hoc way. The resulting sculptures flip between figure and object, actively teasing and arguing, suggesting activity in bony assemblages of arms, feet and faces in profile. Sculpture masquerades as painting, and paintings stand in three-dimensional space. My most recent work is comprised of characters and vignettes that interact with the space around them, by reaching into it, acknowledging and trespassing familiar margins.

Image: Chorale ink, plaster, gauze, acrylic paint, rice paper, wood 80 x 48 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16: curated selection

C h r i s t i n a V a n

D e r

M e r w e

www.christinavandermerwe.com

Image: Spring oil and sand on canvas 17 x 20 inches

Through my paintings and drawings I strive to braid my sense of the world with the lightness of the unseen and the weight of current times. What role does the imagination have in our hyper-connected, fractured landscape? How can one map the power of nature when it is disappearing and pushed to its edge? In my paintings I use oil paint often times mixed with sand that I gather from beaches and deserts I have visited. Water, whether present or not, is always in the air and represents change, immersion, escape and healing. I grew up in South Africa spending most of my time in nature including my family’s farm surrounded by an expansive terrain. My grandmother’s devotion to her garden and tenderness in storytelling of local folk lore captivated me and continues to inspire me as a way to reconcile harsh everyday realities with wonder and magic. How can memory enable the present and provide a mirroring to not only oneself but the world? Within my practice I hope to share a series of remnants—each a shadow of our presence within a larger omniscient vista.

Image: Body oil and sand on canvas 17 x 20 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16: curated selection

D a n a

K o t l e r

www.danakotlerart.com

I was born in Odessa, Ukraine, grew up in Jerusalem, Israel, and relocated to New York with my family in my teens. I received my MFA from the New York Academy of Art, have shown in a number of solo and group exhibitions, and have received two Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grants, among others. I have taught college courses at a summer study abroad program in Dingle, Ireland, as well as in universities in Boston, MA, and San Diego, CA. Currently, I am working out of my studio in the New York area. I find that every now and then an event, a thought, or an experience smacks us in the face and challenges an integral part of our existence. It agitates the significance of things we considered salient, forces us to recalibrate our priorities, question meanings we were certain of, and see something we previously overlooked. My work has found a way to face and slowly digest those aspects of my life, by gradually removing the layers under which things not easily addressed, are purposefully buried. Those layers provide comfort, yet not satisfaction. Removing them provides a sense of control and, I think, joy. Most of my work is rather large and slow, even the smaller works usually incubate over time, providing me with an opportunity to ask questions, give some ambiguous answers, and most importantly, play—an excellent way to learn anything. Much of my imagery becomes fragmented, translated, and strung by associations. When something begins to look too much like its symbol, I tend to expand its meanings and obscure its clarity, because I think that everything is more full and extensive than its surface or its name. I am interested in investigating the sources of my assumptions, questioning my beliefs regarding the identities of things, analyzing the origins of my fears, and enshrining what is dear to me. I ask the viewer to make the very safe assumption that nothing is sure, and that knowledge can distort our vision. Let perception be based on observation, intuition and visceral logic, rather than informed expectations.

Image: This Time oil, Elmer’s glue, polyisoprene, paint tube fragment on canvas 47 x 70 inches

Q u i n n

J D

www.quinnjd.com

I was born and raised in Dalian China. I studied drawing from age eight to seventeen, meanwhile I started playing with cameras during my teen years. I created my first series 时冲动一 (Impulse) in 2006, unfortunately this series was deemed as problematic and was censored in mainland China. I was profoundly impacted by Dadaism and Surrealism, it offered me a meaningful perspective in dealing with isolation and rejection from my peers and the society I was living in. I explore deeply hidden emotions and oppressed sexuality in my work. I do not see beauty in anything, but I do seek humor in pain and suffering. I use whatever means necessary to make the images exactly what I expect them to be.

Image: Imaginary Friends-Bedtime photography 16 x 20 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16: curated selection

J a c k s o n

O ’ B r a s k y

www.jacksonobrasky.com

Image: Argumentum Ad Hominem oil on canvas 24 x 20 inches

I am a painter working after the end of the world. We who identify as artists have had the unique privilege of experiencing one of history’s great reversals. All along the surface of the Earth, immense machines once thought stable and self-governing are now grinding to a halt. The landscape is crowded with the corpses of concrete giants. Continental layers of permafrost shudder and boil into oceans that bubble under the tundra grass. The surface is taut like a trampoline, and you can even bounce on it. Elsewhere, the ground opens and swallows houses and cars as the last drops of fuel are drained beneath them. Robot weapons cross the skies above, peering down with their narrow lenses fixed upon the highways lined with the dispossessed. Everywhere, there is movement. Towns empty themselves overnight, farmers flee their fields. When they approach our security barriers and razor-wire fences, we are ordered to deploy chemical agents. The desired effect is achieved. This is not science fiction; it is our lived reality, a result of centuries of unchecked expansion in the name of progress. Progress and its manifestation in the field of art, the “avant-garde,” have captured our idea of the future, replacing the possibility of an egalitarian society with an illusion of never-ending growth. In my work, I reject the idea of the avant-garde and of progress. My work is an ethnographic document describing a future, post-human civilization that has dedicated itself to repairing a broken ecosystem. My paintings portray this new species’ language, mythical cycles, artifacts and way of life. In so doing, I hope to create the imaginative space for a new way of living, to steal the future away from the forces of extraction and exploitation.

Image: Elephant Man oil on canvas 18 x 24 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16: curated selection

www.instagram.com/mariliakol

M a r i l i a

K o l i b i r i

Image: Downtown oil and mixed media on canvas 1.70 x 1.90

My new work focuses on the human condition within the urban milieu. It is an observation of the process of adulthood, the gradual shift from a childhood that now seems completely lost. The metropolis appears as a chaotic setting in which man has to cope, either by struggling daily to overcome his anxiety or by surrendering himself to it, and in both versions stress is morphing, sculpting its own core. Spontaneity, the well-intentioned approach to things, is treated as an example of emotional immaturity and is therefore overlooked. The focal point of my new series of works is the somatization of the surrounding stimuli and their consequent disorders by the resident of the big city. That precise moment when anxiety and fear are interpreted and appear as their clinical synonyms. The senses, fragmented and overwhelmed by the over-information, sink into inaction forgetting the sharpness of youth. The aim, through reflecting the spectrum of the current human condition, is the identification and end of stigmatization of the issues, with the ultimate aim of restoring a happier and healthier lifestyle.

Image: City life oil and mixed media on canvas 1.70 x 2.00

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16: curated selection

G r e g

B r o w n

www.gregoryjosephbrown.com

For years I’ve explored collage in my drawings and paintings with various kitschy materials like fake fur, costume fabrics, flocking, and more. Only recently did I start using fake fur by itself as a ground of sorts. By shaving two-toned long nap fur and thus “drawing” lines and shapes with the darker color revealed beneath, I create various minimalist “paintings”. Large scale seems necessary for these works to suggest some sort of authority or seriousness, while fake fur conveys fun and absurdity. They seem to spoof formal geometric painting. Not that I specifically focus on satirizing minimalism or exploiting kitsch, but more perhaps focusing on the play and fun art can be. As much as I enjoy making them, for the viewer they are meant to be easily accessible—sensually more than analytically. I aim at cross-stimulating the senses of vision and touch. Whether a viewer actually touches my fur paintings (which I welcome and kids in particular enjoy), their tactile quality is very much part of the stimuli. I associate fake fur with stuffed animals, more than kitsch. But as my paintings are art objects to hang on a wall and not to cuddle with, there is a kind of a wistful character to them. The stretched fur itself is like a stuffed animal character. I remember years ago walking down 5th Avenue after birthday shopping at FAO Schwartz with my seven year old daughter—as I carried her enormous stuffed puppy over my shoulders and held her hand, every person we passed looked at us and could not help but smile. Greg Brown was born in Reno, Nevada and grew up in Nevada and California in the 1960s and 1970s. He graduated with a BA from USC School of Cinema, focusing on animation and film editing, and also earned a BFA in Fine Arts from Pasadena Art Center. Brown worked as a scenic artist and set painter at ABC-TV studios in Hollywood. He painted sets and backdrops for sitcoms and many award shows, like the Grammys, American Music Awards and Muppet Specials. His own collage paintings became more tactile with fake fur and flocking when volunteering at the Braille Institute. He showed in various group shows in LA, including Rosamund Felsen and LACE, before relocating to New York, originally for scenic work. His first solo show in New York was a White Room Show at White Columns in 1993. After briefly working as an artist assistant to David Deutsch and William Wegman, Brown attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1995. He returned to Skowhegan for two more summers hired to establish a video and digital media lab. Recent shows in NYC include a solo show at the Lichtundfire Gallery in 2018 and a two person show at Carter Burden Gallery in 2018, as well as several group shows at both galleries. He has an upcoming solo show at The Yard, Flatiron South, as well as a two person show next May at the Carter Burden Gallery. ‘Two Pink Moons’ is currently on view from January - March 2020 in a solo exhibition in Manhattan curated by Akeem K. Duncan at the YARD FlatIron South.

Image: Two Pink Moons tile adhesive on shaved fake fur 68 x 60 inche

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A n d r e a

C a s t i l l o

www.andreacastillo.net

Andrea Castillo was born and lives in Los Angeles, California, and received her MFA from Lesley University College of Art and Design. She has been the recipient artist in residence for Vermont Studio Center, Grand Central Art Center, Signal Fire, along with artist grant and residence at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has been shown at the CCCM, Mexican Center for Culture and Cinematic Arts (Los Angeles, CA), Hote Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), SOMArts (San Francisco, CA), Richmond Art Center (Richmond, CA), Flux Factory (Brooklyn, NY), Queens Museum (Queens, NY), Slide Room Gallery (Vancouver, BC), and Bemis Art Center (Omaha, NE). Publications including her work are The Los Angeles Times, Voyage LA Magazine, and Studio Visit Magazine. Influenced by nature, the symbolic images of Mesoamerican mythology, and the compositions of postimpressionist paintings, I link elements embedded within nature and myth with signifiers of my contemporary urban surroundings. A kind of incident results through a myriad of visual cues that interact with subconscious semi-trance character marks that I create. While not depicting actual figures I examine the ambiguous traces and movements constructed in the paintings to seek and explore cultural identity. I am interested in merging the personal, textile patterns, symbolic structures, and iconography from pop culture to bring to mind the various meanings and associations that cling to particular methodologies, and reshuffle the interpretations of cultural signs. The stylized manner of gestural brush marks and colorful abstraction without spatial depth give a sense of being pulled in and out of the paintings, perhaps to show a space where fixed identities do not exist. In a world where bodies of water could be tripped over and traffic cones no longer divert, these works are the reflection of lived experience.

Image: Watch Your Step oil, acrylic, sand and wax on canvas 30 x 24 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16: curated selection

P a u l L e i b o w

www.paulleibow.com

Image: FL_3_Pink_ acrylic on canvas 36 x 48 inches

102

Leibow was born in NYC, gained a BFA from SVA in 1983, and studied with designer Milton Glaser in ‘85, showing nationally from 1990. New American Paintings art book, work featured and selected by Elisabeth Sussman, curator Whitney Museum. I worked on art projects for Bruce Springsteen, art for apparel, the album the Ghost of Tom Joad, and helping to brand his world tour with icons. My work is also in the ACNNJ NJ National Juried Show curator: Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, Whitney Museum. Also NJ national juried show, awarded top prize by: Juror-Cynthia Goodman curator Whitney Museum. The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1990-2000 art film: For a Limited Time in the program for art on film. New York Times—(2017) Taking it to the streets review by Colin Moynihan; The New York Times—NJ (09/03/95) Review of work. The New York Times—NJ (05/14/95) Leo Castelli Gallery exhibition from SVA Alumni ‘77 thru ‘87 (work removed from show)—Work Selected by Lowery Sims Curator: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Directed art film “Black Babylonian Beads” 9 min short, 2016 premiered in MoRUS Museum NYC, the event “speaking truth to power” film was selected into five film festivals. Tamarind Institute, awarded an “Arts Residency” for February 2019, (one of four artists selected into UNM), Tamarind Institute in New Mexico I created two new limited edition lithographs. Both editions shown at the Tamarind Institutes Gallery in May/June of 2019. The New Mexico Museum of Art in UNM. Two lithograph editions are archived into the museum collection. In my process I merge abstraction with figures, I work the thighs and hips of a model into a structure of cartoon imagery in charged mark making. I reflect a fractured alphabet over classical figure drawing in the series FeelLicks, a style somewhere between expressionism and pop art. In the face of the character is also a woman’s shape from behind. My materials are usually mix media from charcoal, paint and even print making, to depict icons informed by Batman, Felix the Cat and alternative vintage cartoons. Artists that included characters in their works I find useful are Raymond Pettibon, Joyce Pensato, and Philip Guston. Some of these artists utilize a myth from characters, which enter from the child’s world in an interwar period post 1918. When characters were combating internal conflict from kids paranoia with hero’s fighting pho’s over grave realities of political extremism. However these reinvented characters I abstract, look at art history to find the appropriate structure and surface tension, artists such as Gerhard Richter and Mark Rothko employ. I also hold a lens up to address the public citizenry as humanity and activism are integral in the work.

Image: FL_1_Lovers_ acrylic and charcoal on canvas 48 x 36 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16: curated selection

F a r r e l l

M a s o n - B r o w n

www.farrell.portfoliobox.net

I am a self-taught artist and have been painting and drawing since I was eight years old. I started dedicating myself more seriously to painting when I was in nursing school. I found that making art was a beautiful way to express the amount of suffering I witnessed and life stories I heard. Soon I began painting my own stories and visions. I have shown my artwork at Fields Projects (NYC), Distillery Gallery (Boston), ArcWorks (Peabody, MA), and Art Plug (Boston). I participated in a residency with Mobius Gallery in 2018 with the Day de Dada performance art group. The paintings I’m submitting investigate story, myth, and history. I have been thinking about how our understanding of our lives and the world around us is based on the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we have been told growing up. Stories immensely influence mental health, relationships, political and social movements, etc. Yet stories are subjective and mutate in content and significance over time. In the case of understanding ancient history we are left to understand past civilizations’ cosmology through small shards of archaeological artifacts. I want my paintings to be like mysterious archaeological objects that tell a story and suggest a history. But I want this story to be evolving, mysteriousand completely subjective to each viewer. Through these paintings, I aim to evoke deep respect for the forces of nature, story, and myth.

Image: Sphinxes oil on wood 12 x 12 inches

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D w i g h t

C a s s i n

www.dwightcassin.com

I have a BA in Religion from Bowdoin College. For nine years, I worked and travelled through Europe, North and South America before moving to Brooklyn in 2010. I have attended a residency at Vermont Studio Center and am part of a group show at Santa Clara University in spring 2020. I sculpt anthropomorphized animals from wood and nails. My process involves assembling and manipulating discarded scraps of wood. In exploring an abundance of forms in the animal world, I am looking to uncover new forms of human expression.

Image: Finally wood and acrylic 12 x 8 x 3 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16: curated selection

D a n a

O l d f a t h e r

www.danaoldfather.com

Image: No One Can Hear Us oil, acrylic, airbrush, spray paint on linen 48 x 38 inches

106

Dana Oldfather is a painter who has exhibited nationally in galleries and museums including Library Street Collective, Detroit; Zg Gallery, Chicago; Kathryn Markel Fine Art, New York, and The Butler Institute of American Art and the McDonough Museum of Art in Youngstown. She was awarded the William and Dorothy Yeck Award for Young Painters, two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, and residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Zygote Press. Oldfather was twice featured in the New York Times and published in the book The Art of Spray Paint by Lori Zimmer of Art Nerd New York. Oldfather’s work was recently exhibited at art fairs in Houston, Miami, Palm Beach, and New York, including Art on Paper. Her paintings are internationally collected privately and can be found in many public and corporate collections in the US including the Pizzuti Collection with The Joseph Editions, Eaton Corporation, MGM International, The Cleveland Cavaliers, The Cleveland Clinic, and the prestigious Progressive Art Collection. Dana Oldfather currently works and lives just outside Cleveland, Ohio with her husband Randall and young son Arlo. My paintings explore relationships between partners, parents and children, friends, people and nature. Piles of bodies at work or play are bound up together; they support each other and crowd each other. Traditional ideas about femininity and motherhood are questioned as women in this work bounce back and forth between getting it done and becoming undone. Walls dissolve and interior objects mix with landscape, the kind of landscape one sees outside the car window while driving down the interstate; landscape that looks serene but wears the mark of human hands. Glazes, drips, sprays, veils, slashes and daubs build up things like pine trees, transformers, grass, houseplants, bugs, dishes, fire hydrants, and bodies with too many hands, feet, knees and elbows. The scenes are in flux. An action sequence composed of multiple still images is condensed, out of the usual order of time, into one disjointed moment. I use anxious mark making and warped perspective to mirror a rushing world distorted by apprehension. These paintings underscore the inherent emotional conflict of parenting young children and the fragility of comfort and happiness in America today.

Image: Queen Bed Diptych oil, acrylic, airbrush, spray paint on linen 72 x 80 inches

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R a i n e n

K n e c h t

I was born and raised on the edge of a small harbor in western Washington State in 1982. After years of playing in mud with pigs (literally) I did everything I could to move to a real city. I studied painting at SFAI, graduating with painting honors in 2006. I spent a semester in NYC at SVA where I studied with Marilyn Minter. I did not have a “real” show until 2015, six months after the premature death of my mother. I feel lucky to have had the shows I have had, including at Capital ( San Francisco), Fourteen30 Contemporary (Portland,OR), Various Small Fires (LA) and SITUATIONS ( NYC). Most of the characters that populate my paintings are hardened, defiant women. Amply endowed, they cram into the space of the canvas, often contorted by their attempts to be wholly described. These women are primordial vestiges: beheaded queens, witches, mothers and children. A mix of personal stories, memories, folk tales, fashion spreads and horror movies. My approach to painting comes out of my start, as a staunchly non-figurative painter. I have a real love of paint and of painting. I also worked as a house painter for years - including a stint as a decorative/ faux finisher. I approach every canvas with curiosity. I make my best attempt to wrestle something interesting from it. I do not always succeed. In fact I almost always fail. I try to keep my attempts loose but often, when things don’t go well, I often grow sour and rash. But that leads to some good things too. My latest works have been in sketchbooks, but when on canvas they have a quality of being shallowly carved in relief. Ah, relief. I want to fill up each one with patterns and ideas and symbols but I also want them to remain open and weird and funny. The figures and scenes I paint are often symbolic or fantastical; a mash up of fairy tale or folk tale villainesses, motifs from my childhood or from someone else’s and landscapes scraped out of my memories, or also stolen from my favorite painters and illustrators.

Image: Lizard Lavender Face oil on canvas 11 x 14 inches

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w w w. f o u r t e e n 3 0 . c o m /A r t i s t - R a i n e n - K n e c h t

Image: Delivering Gladiolas oil on linen 30 x 36 inches

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A n a

W i e d e r - B l a n k

www.anawiederblankart.com

Image: The Way We Would Heal 1: Dinah and Persephone’s Shamanic Quest oil and oil sticks canvas 68 x 68 inches

110

Ana Wieder-Blank is a contemporary artist working in painting, ceramic sculpture, installation, and performance. Ana works with narratives from the Torah, Greek, and Indian Mythologies, and fairy tales. These stories are loaded with political, gender and allegories that are as potent today as they ever were. She is particularly interested in narratives that deal with ideas of outsider marginalization, queer sexuality, environmental concerns and issues of rape and consent. Ana Wieder-Blank couples womyn characters together and explores dynamics of hidden and overt love, jealousy and escape of patriarchy. She creates the voices of womyn in these narratives. She changes, distorts, and extends narratives past their end to create contemporary political allegory. Ana is working on three ongoing installation projects The Fairytale Protestors, The Way We Would Live, and The Chronicles of Failure. Ana Wieder-Blank graduated in 2011 with an MFA in visual arts from Pratt Institute, with a concentration in painting. In addition to her Thesis show at Pratt she has had three solo exhibitions at Honey Ramka Gallery, in Bushwick. Her first solo show Women of Song was reviewed very positively in the Brooklyn Rail. Her second solo show Strange Friends has been featured on the James Kalm report and Brooklyn Arts Magazine. Her third and most recent solo show The Fairytale Protesters has been featured in Whitehot Magazine, James Kalm Rough Cuts, Two Coats of Paint, Hyperallergic, Art Spiel and more. She was selected for the Directors Tour at Pulse Miami 2016. Her work has been featured in numerous group shows at Honey Ramka Gallery, Novella Gallery, Regina Rex Gallery, Ceres Gallery, The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and more. She also recently completed a mural in the Lower East Side that was proposed to and accepted by Arts for the City, a nonprofit public arts initiative in NYC. Ana Wieder-Blank is a 2018-2019 Sharpe-Walentas fellow for the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program. Ana Wieder Blank has attended Residencies at VCCA, Playa Summerlake, Open Wabi, Otis College of Art and Design, Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center and more. Her work has been featured in reviews and interviews in the Brooklyn Rail, Whitehot Magazine, Create Magazine, Maake Magazine, Studio Visit Magazine, W Magazine, Bushwick Arts Daily, and Hyperallergic.com. James Kalm featured The Fairytale Protesters in a video. Ana was interviewed by James Kalm of the James Kalm report/rough cuts about her show Strange Friends. Strange Friends was selected by Brooklyn Arts Magazine critics list as one of the best shows of 2015.

Image: The Way We Would Heal 5: Dinah and Persephone Dance The Tango oil and oil sticks on canvas 6 x 5 feet

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16: curated selection

I am Tarek Sebastian Al-shammaa a self taught artist born in London to Iraqi and French parents. My work is a personal reflection on history, migration, culture, colonialism, orientalism, east, west, war, death and sex. I have had several solo shows in Britain and am part of collections in Singapore, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, Spain, Paris and London. The work doesn’t always follow the same path with each painting and can come from different sources. I went to art school for a short while but though the teachers were useless and they also keep telling me painting was dead and to make some conceptual work. So I concepted the fuck out of there and made music and painted at home for years with no one seeing my work really till only recently when I started to show it on social media.

Ta r e k

S e b a s t i a n

A l - s h a m m a a

Image: Gray sick in the oil field oil stick and acrylic 76.2 x 91.44 cm

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www.instagram.com/tareksebastianalshammaa

Image: The Warmongers oil stick and acrylic 76.2c by 91.44 cm

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N i c h o l a s

M o e n i c h

www.nicholasmoenich.com

Nicholas Moenich is a Brooklyn-based artist born in 1985 in Cleveland, OH with a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and an MFA from Hunter College. Exhibitions include: Wild Blue Yonder: Kari Cholnoky & Nicholas Moenich at Disturb the Neighbors, New York, NY (2019); The Garden of Earthly Delights, curated by Timothy Bergstrom, Washington Art Center, Washington, CT (2019); a solo project with Disturb the Neighbors at NADA NY (2018); Actually Weird, Underdonk, Brooklyn, NY (2018); Hyperactif: Alexander Calder, Larry Bell, Nicholas Moenich at D’Agostino & Fiore, New York, NY (2015). Moenich is a 2019-2020 recipient of the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Award. In the fall of 2016, he curated Shroom Show at helper, Brooklyn, NY. In 2014, he was a visiting artist resident at Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Village, Colorado and was also a lecturer and panelist at the “Corporeal Texture Conference” at the University of Cincinnati. He was awarded the Tony Smith Award in 2011. Other projects include Won Eh, a curatorial project with Lauren Clay and TASP, a self-published zine with Justin Q Martin. Taking inspiration from art history, mythology, punk rock and science fiction, my paintings create eerie psychological spaces through a complex and personal formal language that is situated between figuration and abstraction. Incremental and anxious marks create optical confusion through figure/ ground shifts and interlocking forms. Cats, mushrooms, Batmans, snakes and jewels emerge out of undulating forms within the density of the picture plane. In the paintings these characters intertwine with text and dates to explore the anxiety surrounding the creative act and the passing of time. The tense and fragmented compositions of the paintings are direct metaphors of our twenty-first century’s hyper-stimulated daily life of interconnecting media. My goal is to create paintings that simultaneously have material presence and believable pictorial space full of a certain sinister humor, exuberance and simplification of form.

Image: untitled (Parasite) vinyl paint on sized canvas 42 x 36 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16: curated selection

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R a c h e l

G r o b s t e i n

www.rachelgrobstein.com

Rachel Grobstein creates miniature sculptures and paintings based on objects from everyday life, inviting close attention through a radical scale shift. Her work ranges from constellations of paintings hung directly into the wall with pins to sculptures cataloguing a world of things where domestic routine meets consumer culture and personal history. She recently completed a series of 32 miniature sculptures cataloguing the objects on people’s bedside tables. She began by asking friends for pictures of their nightstands, and later expanded the series to include people across the country. She has long been interested in how people’s collections of stuff create snapshot biographies, and became especially fascinated by the wide array of objects kept on bedside tables. These bedside collections speak to universal themes, from memory and self-care to sex and dreams. Grobstein is currently completing a series of miniature sculptures based on roadside memorials. These memorials function as anonymous tributes, expressions of love, and collective gathering spaces for negotiating grief and trauma. She’s interested in how objects are used to facilitate a dialogue between the dead and the living in dynamic, complicated ways. She uses photographs that she’s taken in different parts of the United States as the basis for her sculptures, layering homage upon homage. Awards and residencies include the Museum of Arts and Design Artist Studios Program, a Roswell Artist-in-Residence Fellowship, a Jentel Foundation fellowship, a Hammersley Foundation Grant, a Studios of Key West residency, and a Vermont Studio Center Full Fellowship and Residency supported by the Joan Mitchell Foundation. She has had solo exhibitions at Andrew Rafacz Gallery (Chicago, IL 2018), Next to Nothing Gallery (New York, NY, 2018), the Roswell Museum and Art Center (Roswell, NM, 2017), and This Friday or Next Friday (Brooklyn, NY, 2015). An upcoming solo exhibition will be at Galleri Urbane in Dallas, TX, in February 2020. She received her MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and her BA in Philosophy and Visual Arts from Bowdoin College.

Image: Bedside Table (Picado Kid) gouache, polymer clay, thread, paper 3.5 x 1 x 2.75 inches

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S e n e m

O e z d o g a n

www.senemoezdogan.com

Image: Blue Canary acrylic on canvas 40 x 50 inches

116

My practice includes painting, fiber art, and drawing. Working with different materials allows me to discuss formal qualities on different surfaces. The reality of texture, time and surface is shared across all mediums but perceived differently in each one. This new body of work attached to this submission is non-gestural and brush strokes are absent. There are no traces of the act of painting and the colors seem to move across the surface in a fluid and seamless way. This stands in extreme contrast to the actual process of creating this work, one similar to the act of action painting and its physicality. Multiple layers of paint are brushed repeatedly onto the canvas to create smooth layers. My intention was to create independent forms that should not be perceived as painted shapes on a surface but as three-dimensional objects. I have explored the transformation of paint into light and the creation of three-dimensional reality on a flat surface in the past. The new paintings take these ideas further by exploring new spatial relationships and expanding the formal vocabulary by adding curvilinear elements. These new components create an anthropomorphic and biomorphic system of relationships that refer to the urban environment as well as the human body and condition. Shape turns into form. Form turns into volume. Volume turns into emotion.

Image: Tender acrylic on canvas 46 x 52 inches

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A m a n d a

D o r a n

www.amandadoranart.com

Amanda Doran was born in 1987 and grew up in Co. Wexford, Ireland where she now resides. She completed her Honours Bachelor Degree in fine art painting at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland in 2012. Since graduating Amanda was shortlisted for the Saatchi Gallery & Channel 4’s New Sensations Award 2012 showcasing new talent from the UK and Ireland. Since then she has had many exciting opportunities to exhibit her work throughout Europe. She was shortlisted for the Marmite Prize for Painting in 2016 and has been the recipient of the Paul Funge Residency Programme for 2018-2019. In 2019 she has had two solo shows; Flora & Fauna, RHA Ashford Gallery, Dublin; Familar Faces, Periphery Space, Co. Wexford and a two person show Pretty Fleshy Pain Things with Shelia Rennick at Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin. Doran has works in the Axa Insurance, Saatchi and O.P.W. collections. My recent work has been exploring my daily surroundings, documenting the eccentricities and quirks of my family, friends and pets. I seek to find the humour in the mundane and accentuate these fleeting moments that may go unnoticed. Taking inspiration from the essential role that phone photography plays in our daily lives I turned to my own collection of phone photographs to really examine what I deem is important enough to capture. What are the reoccurring themes and subject matter? In ways I am examining myself through the collection of images on my phone and trying to reconnect that digital allegory to something more tangible and highlight the importance of these key relationships and memories. It’s a reconnection between the artist and true domestic reality, a rediscovery of who I am and how I identify myself.

Image: Comfortable Shoes acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cm

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S a t o

Y a m a m o t o

www.satocoyamamoto.com

Feeling sorry when misunderstanding in the energetic city, NY, hopefully we can share expression and resolve trouble in the traffic jammed city. Friends from US gave me lecture about “American head”, hope to be a pioneer here, in US with my art performing. Discussing nationality in NY is quite common as it’s one of the most important things at multicultural cities in the world, the best way to connect with people across nationalities is by expressing each other’s feelings. I challenged my artist possibility when receiving award at Speedball printmaking competition in 2015. SGCI conference experience amazed me too, The Tolman Collection of Tokyo director Allison believed in my possibilities and displayed my prints in several art fairs including the IFPDA Print Fair in 2018. Because of my awarded experience, I was enrolled in Dieu Donné Paper admin intern program in 2016, learning papermaking technique at their class in Navy Yard. That’s why being from Japan, Awagami Paper Factory invited me as a Japanese-New York artist on two occasions, I enjoyed their rare program in Tokushima, Japan. I believe my artworks connect people with each other through shared feelings regardless of where they come from. In my work, I depict emotions, tell stories and express common memories that everyone has. I love diversity and cross-culture, and always try to express that. I hope every viewer of my artwork feels like “Sato’s art describes my own experiences and feelings,” and that the more people who see my work, the more connections among them are made.

Image: Yoshiwara destiny of women woodblock print 16 x 11 inches

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I a n

C l y d e

www.ianwilsonclyde.com

Ian Wilson Clyde is an artist and motion graphics designer living in Queens, NY. He paints in oil, acrylic and spray paint. Childhood Memories of the images in video games are often more vibrant than the pixels themselves. Repeated patterns become fields and forests. Simple shapes become complex characters in a story. The glow of a CRT television blurs the hard edges of the pixels to separate these fantasies from our current march towards reality. I make paintings using points, strokes and planes because these tools are the building blocks of game imagery and of these memories. These three fundamental properties allow me to recapture the past. My paintings are a recollection of these images and stories. Image: There’s Enough To Go Around oil and acrylic 24 x 48 inches

120

N i k k i

M e h l e

www.nikkimehle.net

Nikki Mehle (b.1991) received her MFA from Hunter College and her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art. She is a 2019 recipient of a New Works Grant from the Queens Council on the Arts. She has been a resident at Vermont Studio Center and at Brashnar Creative Project in Skopje, Macedonia. She lives and works in New York. I am concerned with the principles of femmage as coined by Miriam Schapiro: scrap as material, themes related to women, abstraction and figuration in cooperation, patternmaking, narrative sequences, and intimacy. Many of the images in my paintings originate in dreams. I believe that dreaming—like nearly everything else—can be practiced. The more that I consider the archetypes which appear in my dreams, the more vivid these pictures become, and the more often they appear to me. Additionally, anthropomorphism is a concept which interests me. Ancient and contemporary cultures include parables/creation stories regarding animals: as gods, evil spirits, as partially human, disguised humans, or as humans reborn. I am interested in birds for this reason; they are vessels which can contain and transmit human emotions and human stories. In my paintings they can be seen playing many roles; they are protectors, messengers, paired as lovers, all-seeing, gods or angels, presenters of human questions, and sometimes ominous forces.

Image: Back in Baby’s Arms oil 60 x 60 inches

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J e s s i c a D z i e l i n s k i

www.jessicadzielinski.com

The work of Jessica Dzielinski—comprised of paintings, drawings, installations and books—examines and re-imagines the underlying complexities and powers of ostensibly ordinary and passive figures, spaces and objects. Informed by an interest in human-made and natural environments, she constructs images of imagined and real worlds— often shifting loosely between abstraction and representation. Sourcing thematic and visual influence from warped memories, daydreams, public observations, cartoons, music and found ephemera, her approach to image making utilizes rhythm, color and patterns as a meditation on the paranoia, despondence, joy, uncertainty and intimacy interwoven into everyday life. Raised in Arizona, she received a BFA from Arizona State University and will receive an MFA and MA from the University of Iowa in 2022. She has exhibited work regionally and in Mexico.

Image: In the bushes spray paint, acrylic, and oil on canvas 37 x 59 inches

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M o n a

S h e n

www.monashen.org

Mona Shen (b. 1992) grew up in South-East China. She studied in the US and achieved her BFA at Columbus College of Art & Design in 2015. She has lived in Lancaster, PA while she completed an “Emerging Artist Program” at Millersville University. At the same time, she’s one of the promoted artists at Mount Gretna School of Art. In 2018 she achieved her MFA in Painting at New York Studio School. She’s currently painting and living in Brooklyn, New York. My work explores abstraction through figuration, configuring the right moment where imagination and sensation start to emerge in a metaphorical way, until it becomes the role of content in contemporary paintings. My use of recurring motifs or subjects is from the different circumstance of the reality that is recalled by endless looking, wondering and dreaming—fleeting experiences, both mundane and extraordinary. The more I paint them, the more repetitive and ambiguous feelings they start to have. Therefore, the act of painting informs my search of color and shapes. They are discovered by the frailty and malleability of paint, the resistance and liberation of surface, how they can support an image or make an image disappear. Ultimately I am obsessed with the openness and mystery of the materiality in an historical way. Drawing is a strong element within my practice. It is born from uncertainty and temporality, and thus, the most direct and intuitive. It could punch dents in the back of our logical and reasonable brains, upsetting intentions and resolutions. I play with the idea of masking throughout the loose drawings. They navigate my way to start off paintings, which have more selfconsciousness to become collaging segments.

Image: Untitled acrylic and oil on canvas 48 x 52 inches

123

T h a n g

Tr a n

www.thangtran.net

Image: Unlikely Sacrifice Upon Arrival oil on canvas 19 x 25 inches

124

I vaguely remember a time in my past when I was part of a binary star system, devouring another star while being eternally stuck in cosmic friendship that outlasts time. Through my paintings, I reach into this clouded dream of my childhood in Vietnam, composing elegant and haunting dreamscapes full and empty of the unreal characters and deities which subsume my anima. I’m forever amazed at the abstracted quality of Renaissance landscape paintings. The figures and their backgrounds superimposed upon one another to create a mythical narrative, somewhere recognizable but unreal. The same can be said about my approach on articulating flesh and its make-up like appearance. No longer I feel the need to conform to the general idea of skin color but rather consider its responsibility to the rest of the painting. The characters in my paintings are merely the archetypes of my own being. They’re like useless objects sitting on a shelf, purposeless and meaningless. But slowly they inhabit my heart with desires and care. They become memories of a hazy banal time that I constantly refer back to in my work. Through a cocktail of images from Tarkovsky’s “The Mirror” to badly rendered E.T. images of “Ancient Aliens”, the protagonist and his environment emerge. They are no longer disparate entities far removed from each other’s worlds, but an entwined codependent unit with its own narrative and universe. Perhaps that it is true where that another me is swimming in an orbit of two stars.

Image: Only Whisper to Me oil on canvas 19 x 25 inches

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D o m i n i c

Te r l i z z i

www.dominicterlizzi.com

Image: Beachcomber acrylic on linen 20 x 16 inches

126

Dominic Terlizzi is a Brooklyn Artist. Recent exhibitions include “See Someone Say Someone” at One River School, Hartsdale NY; “A Minimal Relief” at NEVVEN Gallery, Gothenburg Sweden, and “A Spirit Knows A Shadow Shows” at Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica, California. His work has been exhibited in NYC, LA, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Delaware, Sweden, London, and Mars. He has completed two monumental public sculptures for the City of Baltimore, with his third project underway. His awards include the Maryland Artist Equity Grant, Hoffberger School of Painting Award, Triangle Workshop Fellowship, PNC Transformative Art Project Grant, and Belle Foundation Grant. International lectures include Cebu City, Philippines; Seoul, South Korea; Incheon, South Korea; Jeju Island, South Korea; Hangzhou, Shanghai, Fuzhou and Beijing, China. He received a BFA from The Cooper Union NYC 2003 and an MFA from Hoffberger School of Painting MICA 2008. He has taught at MICA, University of Tennessee Knoxville, Towson University, and PI Art NYC. In addition to his studio practice, Dominic directs and curates St. Charles Projects in Baltimore City. Dominic’s paintings utilize an interdisciplinary approach that includes gleaning, baking and mold-making. After casting objects into acrylic paint he arranges them to resemble quilts, mosaics, and pixelated imagery. The textures are made from breads, domestic sundries, tiles, leaves, seashells and other artifacts. Influences range from ancient mosaics to early video game landscapes.

Image: Blue Familia acrylic on linen 20 x 16 inches

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M a n u e l a

G o n z a l e z

www.manuela-gonzalez.com

I grew up in Colombia in a family and a culture where women’s visual intelligence as in many other places in the world has often been expressed through homemaking and the creation of objects associated with it. A woman’s role has been to formulate a visual identity for her family by inventing within familiar formats such as quilting, knitting, crocheting, object arranging, patching up and making clothes for loved ones. These pieces are often saturated with pattern and color, they come about through arrangement and editing of fabrics and unconventional materials, through meticulous organization and accumulation of precious objects and techniques. They are imbued with a deep visual intelligence that frequently sits as background for day-to-day life going unnoticed and unexamined; through my work I attempt to bring it to the foreground. For the past few years in studio, I’ve been exploring the relationship between the visual language I just described, and the history of abstraction in painting since Kandinsky up to now. Through my paintings I delve into the intersections and distinctions between both traditions, with their respective legacies, and the socio political implications of their separation. I often consider the long tradition of representational painting in western culture, and the loaded action of choosing subject matter. Who/What gets visibility and through what lens? These are simultaneously abstract paintings, still-lifes and portraits. I paint textile designs, likely by anonymous women, worn by my family using the same format and tools used by our European ancestors and colonizers. Manuela Gonzalez (B 1983) is a New York based artist from Medellin, Colombia. She holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. Gonzalez’s work has been exhibited in places including 20 20 gallery in Miami, Lisa Kehler Art and Projects, Westbeth Gallery, Loisaida Center, The Clemente Soto Vélez Center, La Salita NYC and Chashama in New York City. She has been awarded the Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Travel grant from Yale University and the Florence Leif Award for Travel and Study from Rhode Island School of Design among others.

Image: Untitled 2 acrylic on wool and canvas 51 x 59 inches

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E l i s a

L e n d v a y

www.elisalendvay.com

Elisa Lendvay (b. Dallas, TX 1975) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions have been at Sargent’s Daughters, New York, NY and Fred Giampietro Gallery, New Haven, CT. Her work was recently on view at Ratio 3 Gallery, San Francisco and The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, NY. She has exhibited at Underdonk, Brooklyn, NY; Jason McCoy Gallery, NY; Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York, and SARDINE Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Lendvay has been awarded honors from the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the New York Foundation of the Arts, the Mabel Residency, at the Norman Bird Sanctuary, the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center, and the Dallas Museum of Art. She received an MFA in Sculpture from The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY, in 2006. My explorations in making form, color and enigmatic objects move between sculpture, painting and drawing. They present interplays among internal vision, observation of nature, and corporality to generate moments of perception, truth, and whimsey. Diverse materials are employed to consider how unlike elements can merge into something other and new. I explore the physicality of making and matter with a sense of play and discovery in the process.

Image: Conejo (rabbit) aluminum, rope, papier mache, bottle caps, acrylic 7.5 x 5.5 x 7.5 inches

129

D y l a n

D e W i t t

www.dylandewitt.com

Images (p.144-145): Reflexion custom mirror, chairs, wood, drywall, lights 189 x 96 x 104 inches

130

Dylan DeWitt investigates the unusual, the everyday, and the puzzling territories in between. Dylan holds a BFA in Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design, and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. Recent exhibitions include Reflexion, a solo exhibition at Backspace Gallery in University of Wisconsin-Madison; Cimarron National Works on Paper Exhibition at Oklahoma State University, and CLIP International Exhibition of Works on Paper at Charles Adams Studio Project in Lubbock, Texas. His work appears in New American Paintings #136, Friend of the Artist Volume #9, Studio Visit Magazine #46, and Floorr Magazine Issue 21. He has been a resident at Vermont Studio Center and Yale/Norfolk, and will be in residence at MASS MoCA this March. Dylan has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Arkansas School of Art, where he is Clinical Assistant Professor of Drawing. Reflexion is an installation that generates an optical illusion which allows a pair of viewers to simultaneously perceive themselves and one another in the same image. This work is inspired in part by the work of neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, whose mirror-box therapy has helped treat amputee patients who feel pain in limbs no longer attached to their bodies. I see Reflexion as related to Ramachandran’s box, providing an analogous form of therapeutic illusion—this time at a social level rather than an individually neurological one. Instead of reconnecting the subject with a missing limb, Reflexion reconnects the subject to a whole other body. It seeks to distill a wide array of social questions and issues to a fundamental unit of empathic interaction: when I look at you, do I see another version of myself?

131

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16: curated selection

www.alongigo.com

A n d r e w

J .

L o n g

Image: Many Houses crayon and collage on butcher paper 24 x 14 inches

132

I work as an independent illustrator and researcher based in the United States. Through my work, I strive to understand place. To do this, I focus on human processes of accumulation and collection. This informs my own labor and also how I see the world. By using collage and found objects I cycle through waste for materials; forcing me to interpret society through the lens of popular and discarded materiality. Otherwise, I am drawn to human narratives and stories (another form of collection). By understanding narratives, I attempt to reflect on the fragility of the human story and the complexity of human relationships given the current environmental context. “BUSCADOR”- MEANING A PERSON WHO SEEKS. Each spread shown is from the series “Buscador”. Every page is a capsule, a chunk of an exploration I began this past May. In May of 2019 I began a research program in Cuba. I spent 2 months in Havana attending courses. Afterwards, I embarked on a month and a half journey to backpack around Cuba - bringing me to small towns and far-off homesteads, all the while committed to only using “Cuban” transportation (instead of tourist buses). My investigation was both academic and personal, bringing me into the homes of many unique individuals to interview and find stories; many priests, rural people, and cave guides. In my downtime (moments where my hands were free), I would draw what I saw and discovered. Once I was in The States, I cut up my favorite drawings, and mashed them together with materials I had gathered in Cuba to produce this booklet. It is my ode to the explorative, joyful, chaotic journey I had in Cuba. With this work, I attempted to visually come to terms with an experience that affected me beyond words. The work is a mashed up, non-linear testimony to all the information my mind had been processing in Cuba; my own testament to a literal psychogeographical search for spiritual knowledge in a foreign place I came to love.

Image: Departure crayon and collage on butcher paper 24 x 14 inches

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M a r i a

C a l a n d r a

www.mariacalandra.com

In the past year and a half I have made an unexpectedly strong connection with raptors—hawks in particular. Soaring like messengers, floating in and out of our metropolitan skies, and living between nature and city, they have captivated me wholeheartedly. I visit them, with my heavy duty binoculars, where they nest in various parks across Brooklyn and Manhattan. Sometimes I will even visit them in the Catskills, Montauk or as far as the oceans and mountains of Northern California. A few red-tailed hawks live mere blocks from my apartment. I call these hawks, my hawks. Occasionally one will land in the tree out of my third floor apartment’s back window, greeting me while terrifying the squirrels that scurry up and down the large maple that is the hawk’s preferred perch. I follow them almost like one does a religious figure. Their uncanny ability to lead my eye upwards forces me to take in the trees and clouds, helping me to escape and find a sense of other worldly peace and resolution no matter what chaos surrounds me. A whole body of work has stemmed from this new found obsession. I can’t stop painting and drawing hawks. I love repeatedly mirroring their loaf-like form or flipping my panels to paint hidden hawks within hawks. I often outline their feather’s patterns and contours to the point of abstraction. In March I also made a pilgrimage to Assisi to study Giotto’s Fresco Cycle of Saint Francis. Although not religious, I feel kindred with Saint Francis and his relationship to birds, his conversations with animals and his hopes for the survival of nature and peace. Hawks are becoming an expression of figuration in my newest paintings, swirling in and out of chroma, dipping and diving into other realms, taking on a plethora of different human expressions. The hawk’s particularly curious existence has given me endless ways of describing my world through painting. Maria Calandra was born in 1976 in London, England and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a BFA from Ohio University and received an MFA from Cornell University in 2006. She is the artist behind the project Pencil in the Studio. She has shown in both New York City and across the United States previously exhibiting with Andrew Edlin Gallery, Shrine Gallery, White Columns, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Fourteen30, Ampersand Gallery, and BravinLee. She recently completed large scale murals for the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn, NY and for Essex Flowers Gallery in the Lower East Side.

Image: Hawk Talk acrylic on paper 20 x 16 inches

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134

K i m i a

F e r d o w s i

K l i n e

www.kimiakline.com

My work deals with the various roles I occupy as a woman in society: daughter, sister, wife, and most recently, mother. I explore these themes through paintings and drawings, using a variety of materials including salvaged wood, oil paint, pastel, thread, ink, and papyrus. Each painting is an exploration of my inner psychological world and is inspired by specific experiences I’ve had as a female. The materials I use, such as paper and thread, mirror my physical body. Stitching paper isn’t so different than stitching up skin, wounds, cuts, or tears after childbirth. The thread is used both aesthetically and formally to create a line, but it is also a practical tool to create a fold or a seam, to bring things together and heal disparate sheets of paper into one cohesive image. Thread can bind something into confinement or offer expansion by uniting separate things together. Most recently, my surfaces have begun to take on the form of houses. Their familiarity holds the shape of our families and inner worlds, literally housing the architecture of not only our bodies, but also our psychology. For me, house and home have always been concepts and terms that are at once comforting and confining, familiar and terrifying. The figures bend into conformity within the confines of the picture plane, contorting themselves to fit the limitations of the page, reflecting the transformation so many women go through in shedding previous lives or dreams for the sake of family. Papyrus was first manufactured in Egypt as far back as the fourth millennium BCE. Using this ancient material reflects the archetypal and universal themes of womanhood and family life I’m interested in exploring. Growing up in a Persian immigrant family, I was exposed from a young age to Persian miniatures on vellum and papyrus, giving this material further significance to my work. This fragile material tears and frays at the edges, mirroring the fragility of family life and human relationships. New York based painter Kimia Ferdowsi Kline earned an MFA in visual arts at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2011 and holds a BFA in painting from Washington University in St. Louis. She has mounted solo exhibitions at Turn Gallery (New York), Marrow Gallery (San Francisco), The Elaine L. Jacob Gallery at Wayne State University (Detroit, MI) and Quirk Gallery (Richmond, VA), as well as a two person exhibition at 68 Projects (Berlin, Germany). Selected group shows include Ceysson & Bénétière (Luxembourg), Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, The Drawing Center (New York) and 68 Projects (Berlin, Germany). As an extension of her studio practice, she directs the art curation at Wythe Hotel.

Image: Sun Day ink and thread on papyrus 14 x 10 inches

135

R o b e r t

R o e s t

www.robertroest.nl

Robert Roest’s practice of painting is visually rooted in both the contemporary world of new media as in the history of painting. In his work Roest explores painting in relation to digital media. His work is structured in a series of about 5-15 works. This serial method provides for him to explore the possibility of his themes from different angles, and deploy multiple styles, as well as to keep his work open and not be pinned down too quickly on a particular idea or perspective. The series exist next to each other, in the same way different roles of an actor coexist. The work is much about the physical experience of seeing and also on our perception, about the impact images have on us, not at least the images we see online.

Image: Meatware Ecosystem, Part 6 oil on canvas 200 x 140 cm

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136

L u m i n

W a k o a

www.luminwakoa.com

Lumin Wakoa lives and works in New York. She received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Wakoa was a recipient of the Dedalus Foundation MFA Grant in 2010 and a Fountainhead Fellow at Virginia Commonwealth University, 2010/11. In 2018 she was a recipient of the Sharpe-Walentas Foundation yearlong Studio Program Fellowship. She has had recent solo and two person exhibitions at George Gallery, Deanna Evans Projects, Present Company, and Providence College. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Spring Break Art Fair, Taymour Grahne Gallery, and Untitled Art Fair, among other venues. I work on each textural painting slowly over time, and I stop when I get to a place where they are strange and I no longer understand them. I hold my paintings in my lap while working on them and even though they are made of paint on canvas, I relate to them as objects. Writing is also part of my practice, and through writing both casual gestures and life changing events become intimate. I use my writing as a starting place for the paintings because even in an abstract image I want there to be absolute specificity. In my small atmospheric paintings I want the world to feel like both a microcosm and a macrocosm. I want the paintings to have the quality of dissolving and dispersing, the way that any one thing does when one looks too long or too closely.

Image: horizon oil on linen over panel 20 x 24 inches

137

editorial selection of works Featured image: Liz Anslie The Greatest oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches more on p. 144-145

A l l i s o n

R e i m u s

www.allisonreimus.com

Image: FICKLE oil and flashe on sewn linen 56 x 50 inches

140

Allison Reimus’s work explores the relationship between decoration and function and similarly, how painting operates as both an object and an idea. Simple compositions depicting singular moments and objects, within a shallow pictorial space, allow Reimus to freely explore her interests in formalism, geometry, text and abstraction. Thoughtful investigations regarding tactility and surface often lead to experiments with media closely associated with domesticity and the feminine—glitter, gold leaf, flocking fibers, textiles and spray paint. Reimus’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions and publications throughout the United States. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Chicago, IL), Knox College (Galesburg, IL), and The Mission (Chicago, IL). Recent group exhibitions include Left Field Gallery (Los Osos, CA), Kirk Hopper Fine Art (Dallas, TX), Platform Gallery (Baltimore, MD) and No Place Gallery (Columbus, OH). Her work has been included in ArtMaze Mag, Maake Magazine and New American Paintings (#88, #113, #125), where she was highlighted as both an “Editor’s Selection” and a “Noteworthy Artist.” Reviews include The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and NPR. Upcoming exhibitions include Left Field Gallery (Los Osos, CA) and Massey Klein Gallery (New York, NY).

Image: MOTHER oil, acrylic, flashe, adhesive, glitter, flocking fiber, pom poms, spray paint, textiles on sewn canvas 7 x 5 feet

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F r a n c e s c a

B l o m f i e l d

www.francescablomfield.org

Francesca Blomfield (b. 1990) is based in London and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2019. Blomfield received the Jerwood Painting Fellowship in 2015, which allowed her to have touring shows in the UK between 2016-17. She has had two solo shows in London with Barbican Arts Trust and the Horse Hospital, as well as group shows in the UK, Canada and Mexico. Blomfield produces paintings and drawings of text/image panoramas and more recently has started wood carving. Her work is concerned with areas of extremity to form a type of psychic self-surgery. Her paintings and drawings are formed of automated internal subject matter, which explore night time atmosphere. This temporality of night allows for multiplicity of space that has potential for different transgressions in the conjuring of what wants to be forgotten or what can only be forgotten led by a desire to extend new possibilities and actions. Both the paintings and the drawings are concerned with the slowness of painting and drawing whilst never forgetting the urgency inherent to the experience of thoughts and feelings. Blomfield’s paintings render her designs in a baroque and excessive texture that compress the figure and ground of invented graphics in a rapid and laboured exchange. The compositions become subverted friezes, expanding horizontally. Painting becomes a dissonant activity where there is a continual action of creation and destruction of surface and content. The drawings are constructed like musical scores or architectural diagrams falling vertically, becoming a place where the physical build-up of paint is reversed. Drawing reduces the graphic and deconstructs the volumized marks in the paintings.

Image (top): The Lost Keys oil on canvas 26 x 66 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16: editorial selection

Image (bottom): DR.CARE oil on canvas 26 x 66 cm

142

B e n j a m i n

Te r r y

www.benjaminjterry.com

Benjamin Terry lives and works in Dallas, TX. He received an MFA in Drawing and Painting in 2013, from the University of North Texas. He has exhibited work in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the country including Atlanta, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Oakland, San Francisco, Dallas, and Houston. He recently had solo exhibitions at Galleri Urbane in Dallas, TX and Johansson Projects in Oakland, California. Terry was an artist-in-residence at The Maple Terrace in Brooklyn, NY in the spring of 2018 and will be a resident at 100W Corsicana in 2020. He was featured in volume 96 and 132 of New American Paintings, and has received both the Clare Hart DeGoyler and the Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough awards from the Dallas Museum of Art. He is currently a Professor of Practice at the University of Texas Arlington

Image (left): Untitled (Chromatic 2) paint, wood, and glue 24 x 18 inches

Image (right): Untitled (Chromatic 4) paint, wood, and glue 24 x 18 inches

143

L i z

A i n s l i e

www.lizainslie.com

Image: A Not-This oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches

144

Liz Ainslie lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received an MFA from Tyler School of Art in 2004 and a BFA from Alfred University in 2001. Ainslie has exhibited solo shows at Transmitter, and Airplane in Brooklyn; Creon Gallery in Manhattan; and BCB Fine Art, and Cohen Gallery at Alfred University, in upstate New York. Her work has been included in shows at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, SARDINE, Ground Floor Gallery, Orgy Park, Outlet Fine Art, Centotto, Norte Maar, Parallel Art Space, Small Black Door, and A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn; Valentine in Ridgewood, Queens; Station Independent Projects, Lu Magnus, Artjail and Spazio 522 in Manhattan; Vox Populi and Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia; and Gallerie Kritiko, Prague, Czech Republic. Her work has been reviewed in Giornale Dell’Arte, ArtCal Zine, The GC Advocate, interviews with Ainslie can be found on blogs including And Freedom For, Pencil in the Studio, #fffffff Walls, Standard Interview, Otino Corsano. Her work is included in the Pierogi Flat Files. My painting titles are extracted from ambiguous snippets of found speech. I listen to the radio or conversations I hear in public, extracting phrases and separating the words from their original context. This process mimics my painting practice where abstractions are formed from abbreviations, clipped motion, and interrupted horizons. Every summer I make small observational drawings while immersed in the upstate New York landscape. A hiccup in the translation from eye to hand to paper captures my attention. The act is a flawed means for recording the moment. This curious imperfection is the seed of my work. My visual vocabulary is derived from the memory of momentary perceptions. The greys, mauves, and browns I mix are the nuanced colors of fleeting natural light. Loops and lines borrow from my handwriting and automatic drawing. Orbs and oval forms are akin to moons, eggs, and faces. Empty spaces between these forms open out to fields, oceans, and skies. I once walked into a room at a museum with three ancient Roman fresco walls surrounding me. The illusionistic columns, windows, and doors opened out on tiny rectangles of the bright landscape. The imagery was derived partly from observation, but also fantasy. Walls angled to impossible degrees, distances became compressed, but my eyes found faith in this architectural structure, allowing my mind to enter the picture. Through the painter’s work of transmuting memory into vision, the picture took on a new set of rules, a skewed environment that I momentarily accepted. This is the space I aim to explore, an arena of impossibly situated items.

Image: Creates a world oil on canvas 14 x 11 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16: editorial selection

D e l p h i n e

H e n n e l l y

www.delphinehennelly.com

Image: Good Companions In Orange oil on linen 60 x 48 inches

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Wandering Players takes its title from the name given to actors of the Elizabethan period in England; Strolling Players. The old dictum about the point being not the end of something, or the arrival, but how you get there. At the outset of any journey one does not often or always know where it will take you and what you will encounter. Unexpected things happen, you go up blind alleys, you get lost but you always bring something back that you can latch onto for the next foray. There are struggles, rocks, impediments but there are also discoveries and joys, sun and shade, moments of respite. The figures in my paintings take on the role of actors playing archetypes in their ubiquitous banality. Slightly costumed, meandering a stage set in a bucolic landscape , an abstraction of the pastoral, the Idyllic. Anachronistic, their journeys remain random. Taking as axiomatic the notion that there is no time but the present, which contains past and future, I work serially as a means to employ this concept of time in the paintings. Much of this thought stems from Gilles Deleuze’s ideas on Difference and Repetition. I enjoy the idea of a liminal space where past and future can be inscribed in a present. In painting a motif or an image over and over again I see the space of a continuity in time simultaneously accepting the fact of the still image. A painting will never be a narrative in movement such as would happen in film but perhaps a painting can allude to the temporal or the notion of an omnipresent event. I enjoy how in every repetition there occurs something specific, and therefore new in the work. It is within this structural thought that drawing becomes a key component of the work. Welding concept with form I lean towards bending the nature of the paint to fulfill a graphic need mimicking ideas of reproduction, the print, paper, ink, a doodle.

Image: He Who Would Valiant Be oil on linen 38 x 26 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 16: editorial selection

S u z y B a b i n g t o n

www.suzybabington.com

For me painting is creating a safe fantasy. I work with things like nostalgia, illusion, storytelling, layering imagery, linear forms, mechanics and colour with the aim to feel refreshed. The back and forth throughout working on the painting is akin to instinctual drawing. I enjoy making these vivid high energy paintings and hope these feelings become the work. Influenced by surreal artists such as Dorothea Tanning I welcome impulsive atmospheric imagery, creating fantastical fanciful images in-between fairy tales like ‘the woman and the shoe’ and real life apocalyptic disillusion. The activity of painting becomes a challenge in how to execute a wild fortuitous image as I treat each painting individually which welcomes variation between the works rather than repetition, working responsively. Structures have movement like kinetic contraptions that pivot and support with elements that interact as though animated like mechanics, moulding mechanic and organic, the viewer can slip in-between different imagery which falsifies any certainty allowing the pictures to slip into an abstract space. For me paintings are stories and the fantasy, narration and parody is significant because as humans we have such an intrinsic complex relationship to storytelling.

Image: Enclave oil on canvas 110 x 150 cm

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E r i c k A l e j a n d r o

H e r n a n d e z

www.erickalejandrohernandez.com

Revolving around overarching narratives such as a car crash or the death of a loved one, my paintings are orchestrations of memories that have been fractured or reimagined in processes surrounding lived trauma. Rooted in traditional image making, my practice intends to disrupt classical vignettes within the genre of painting by inserting personages and spaces that are in flux. I populate my images with figures and amalgamations of figures from my own experience in order to explore various simultaneous histories of loss and displacement. In collecting from my own life and those around me I am able to emulate the labor of locating these bodies in a realm of physical and allegorical exile from representations of culture and home. As such, I am able to locate my own place amongst them. The figures in my paintings exist in a state of bodily transit that parallels my own experiences with immigration at a young age. In the work, the body functions as a vehicle to express psychological states and complex relationships with its surroundings. In depicting figures and their navigation of spaces where footing is unstable and susceptible to sudden catastrophe, I work to describe nuanced indexes of their personal histories in the form of gestures and expressions. This process of quilting images of people, many of whom are deceased or absent, into a-temporal constructions is ultimately a search to reconcile with the pictured event. The aim is the development of an ongoing investigation into the effects and manifestations of these shared experiences through image making and allegory. Erick Alejandro Hernández is an artist from Cuba living and working in New York City. He received his BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 2017 and has been a fellow at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Ox-Bow School of Art, and the Sharpe- Walentas Studio Program. In 2020, he will be a participant at the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and Vermont Studio Center.

Image: Mi Patria es un Papel; Is that your shadow? (Hermanos) oil on canvas 48 x 60 inches

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J o s e p h

P a r r a

www.josephparra.com

Image: Torso paint squeezed from the tube on canvas 40 x 32 inches

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Squeezing paint directly out of the tube, Parra creates tactile paintings that are rigidly systematic and physically organic at the same time. The dots created with this process are arranged in an orderly grid and then interrupted, which should ultimately lead to chaos, but instead a gesture of an image is revealed. These paintings both materially and visually reflect on an attempt to control desire and the inherent urge to touch. Joseph Parra attended the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Parra has received grants from NYFA, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, and a Pollock-Krasner fellowship for the Byrdcliffe Artist in Residence Program. Other residences Parra has attended include Offshore Residency in Penobscot Bay, ME; the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT; Second State Press in Philadelphia, PA; the International School of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture in Umbria, Italy; and the Atelier Artist in Residence Program in New York, NY. Parra’s recent solo exhibitions include Gallery Four in Baltimore, MD, Gallerie M in Milwaukee, WI and Crane Arts in Philadelphia, PA.

Image: Butt paint squeezed from the tube on canvas on panel 30 x 24 inches

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M a r y D e V i n c e n t i s

www.marydevincentis.com

Painter Mary DeVincentis employs a deeply personal iconography to investigate the dilemmas and mysteries of existence. Dwellers on the Threshold, paintings which allude to the experience of a sudden, pervasive shift in paradigm in both individual and collective life, was featured in her April, 2018 solo exhibition at David&Schweitzer Contemporary in Brooklyn, New York. She is represented by M. David & Co. in New York and by Gibbons and Nicholas in Dublin, Ireland. Her work has been previously exhibited at Life on Mars Gallery, the Painting Center, the International Print Center, the Brooklyn Public Library, White Columns and the Brooklyn Museum and is included in numerous public and private collections. DeVincentis earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art and a Postgraduate Diploma in Advanced Printmaking from Central St. Martins in London, UK. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. I am preoccupied by our unique position as the only species consciously aware of our temporality. It informs a great deal of my subject matter as a painter. My focus on this concern began during my late adolescence and early adulthood, initiated by the deaths of my parents, the dissolution of my nuclear family and the loss of meaning and security that followed. While we are here on earth we get into all kinds of situations and predicaments that involve our attempts to deny, defy, embrace, rage against or simply manage our knowledge of mortality and of the impermanence of all that exists. Some of the strategies we employ are destructive to ourselves and/or others and some involve the willing or non-voluntary acceptance of a life of oppression, sacrifice and service to others. I explore these orientations respectively in my painting series Dark Matters and Sin Eaters. Sooner or later, many of us come to an impasse, a time which may be an exit point or an opportunity for expansion, renewal and rebirth, a moment when we can no longer continue as before. My body of work Dwellers on the Threshold explores these transitional junctures. Of course, the act of painting itself is an attempt to somehow outlast death and I count myself as very fortunate to have found such a way to live. Paint is kin to skin, viscera, blood, mineral, plant and stardust.

Image: Upside Down in the Garden acryla gouache on found wood 11 x 8 inches

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We are looking to help more emerging artists to publish and promote their work If you would like your work to be featured in our upcoming issues, please find out more details on how to apply to be considered. See p. 11 or visit our website: www.artmazemag.com We have an open call for art for the next print issue which provides publishing opportunities, as well as the ongoing open call for online blog. For any questions, please feel free to get in touch with us at info@artmazemag.com