CONTENTS EVERYDAY CONVERSATIONS: GREGORY GRAHAM’S ANYWHERE I WANDER
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By Dana O’Malley
INTERVIEW WITH DUTES MILLER AND STAN SHELLABARGER
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By Kyle Peets
MARY LAUBE AT THE TIMES CLUB IN PRAIRIE LIGHTS
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By Brian Prugh
NOTES ON JULES DE BALINCOURT
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By Emma Steinkraus
WE LIVE IN A WORLD THAT IS NOT OUR OWN
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By Brian Prugh
JAMIE BOLING AT THE HUDSON RIVER GALLERY By Elizabeth Schule
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Co-creators: Brian Prugh & Heidi Wiren Bartlett Chief Editor: Dana O’Malley Assistant Editor: Elizabeth Schule Designer: Heidi Wiren Bartlett With a special thanks to the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History for their support.
FOR SUBMISSION OF ARTICLES AND/OR LOCAL EVENTS CONTACT: iowacityartsreview@gmail.com
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Gregory Graham, CrockPot, 6” x 6”
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EVERYDAY CONVERSATIONS: GREGORY GRAHAM’S ANYWHERE I WANDER BY DANA O’MALLEY Earlier this month, I was in Saint Paul/Minneapolis and I had the chance to go to the Bloomington Art Center for the opening reception of Gregory Graham’s show Anywhere I Wander. Gregory Graham, a Saint Paul-based artist, presents a poignant, funny, and understated sampling of small un-framed paintings on panel (approximately 5X7 inches). The paintings are completed in enamel—the kind of enamel you might use to fix up a model train—and hung in a line that runs eye-level around the entire Atrium Gallery at the Bloomington Art Center. Modest and unassuming, all works are given an equal weight; it is just as valid to enjoy one or the other-hierarchy is the same. In this sense, Graham’s paintings are little nods to the serial nature of Pop Art, except instead of deviating from poetry and personal narrative—it is that very poetry and personal narrative that is driving them to do such lovely things. Graham’s paintings reference photography in multiple layers: they are often painted from photographs, they allude to the snapshot with their focus on compositions through a rectangular viewfinder, and some are painted renditions of what seem to be old photographs. For instance, Paparazzi depicts three people in an event hall photographing us, the viewer. The subject matter is associative, moving from object to idea to memory to landscape and back again. The range is fun and surprising. Within this range of paintings in Anywhere I Wander, included is a cozy rendition of a Crockpot in his painting Crockpot, as well as his simultaneously alarming and humorous panel, In Progress, which depicts signs in a parking lot reading “Video Recording in Progress” and “Attention Shoppers” against a sublime sunset. Graham enjoys playing with text to create further context in his paintings, often with a sense of humor. Graham’s work draws attention to moments we often forget—he takes a painterly snapshot of a time and place, similarly to how Dike Blair’s gouache paintings depict the interiors of cars and trains. From a painting of an ice cooler at a brightly-lit convenience store, to a painting of a broken snow-covered branch, to a painting of a clunky television on a shuttle bus with a red balloon flying across the screen, to one of Graham’s family playing Jenga with their 80’s haircuts—all are fair game. Some people might say Greg’s work has a Hopperesque sadness to it—the isolated objects and rundown/forgotten spaces he depicts do allude to the haunting Americana scenes Hopper depicts. However, Graham does something far more interesting, contemporary, accessible, intergenerational, and funny. He knows how to make serious paintings with sense of humor and a refreshing what-you-see-is-what-you-see-approach. I see this show as a painterly nod to the photo album—an album of Graham’s daily conversations with the world. I want to take this painted album off the shelf and laugh, point, cringe and feel nostalgic and happy for all that there has been, and is, today. Anywhere I Wander; showing through November 15, 2013 in the Atrium Gallery @ the Bloomington Art Center: 1800 W Old Shakopee Rd, Bloomington, MN 55431.
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Gregory Graham, Jenga, enamel on panel, 5” x 7”
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Interview with Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger BY KYLE PEETS
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Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger are a Chicago-based couple who have been making work together since they started dating 17 years ago. Their work is sometimes playful, and sometimes a grave twisting and re-alignment of ideas such as love, loss and time. They use performance, printmaking, drawing, papermaking, painting, collage, sculpture and books as metaphors for the way that their bodies relate in the present, while always addressing the inevitable end of those bodies. For more information and a look at their work visit, westernexhibitions.com/miller_ shellabarger/. KYLE: Frank O’Hara wrote a sort of tongue and cheek manifesto called Personism. He uses it as a description for his own work. It’s sarcastic, you know. O’Hara describes it as something like, he was writing a poem for somebody— one of his friends—and then realized, he could just call this person on the phone, but instead he was going to write this poem to this person. O’Hara explains the process and how it, “puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last in between two persons instead of two pages.”1 And so I think that that kind of sums up three of us [that was the title of Dutes and Stan’s artist talk] relationship and your work kind of existing in-between you guys rather than in-between two walls. So when you started to collaborate was it difficult or did it just click? DUTES: It was super easy, I mean, it was a very natural flow for that to start happening. We had worked together noncollaboratively just doing physical work as undergrads in ceramics. You mix clay together, you mix glazes together, you fire kilns together, sort of also like printmaking there are lots of things that you can have help with. It’s not collaboration it’s just, help. STAN: It’s not like there isn’t collaboration in that work but it’s really incredibly integral to that person getting the work done. Like, having a clean person while you’re printmaking makes it go by SO much faster than having to do it by yourself. And so us collaborating was sort of a really natural extension of that. I mean it changed, the relationship changed, but it was really organic. KYLE: What’s is the biggest fight you’ve gotten into related to a collaborative project? DUTES: I don’t think there is one really. STAN: Oh well, recently. Because we had the residency in Columbia. DUTES: It wasn’t a fight.
STAN: It wasn’t a fight. But one of the most stressful collaborative things we’ve done was this papermaking at Columbia College at the Center for the Book. We tried to do unique water marks. And it was really frustrating because we had no experience making paper or the physical components, like trying to pull paper. It was really frustrating and it was really stressful for the two of us because we were there for really long days. For like five straight days of 12 or 14 hour days and coming back with nothing. And it wasn’t frustration with each other it was just this frustration with not being able to get the thing to work. DUTES: We had sort of decided that it wasn’t going to work the way we wanted to. We were going to make it in this way that wasn’t satisfying, we were just going to do it that way. STAN: That was incredibly stressful because it was like ahhhhh. Generally, we would just jettison. ‘Let’s do this thing. Are we going to do this? It’s not what we want it to be?’ DUTES: So on one day, the day that after, I came in late and Stan had already figured out this way that was going to work better but was going to be twice as much work (and maybe still not work) and I just totally broke down. I was crying and was like, I can’t do this and walked off. STAN: ...walked off and I feel like an asshole. But in the end the project turned out to be exactly what I wanted it to be. KYLE: So a fight with the materials rather than with each other. STAN: I mean, we certainly have disagreement over the way something should formally happen, or over the way the material or the way we do the process. But often times they’re disagreements that lead to further discussions. DUTES: We throw our ideas back and forth and break them down and build them back up. STAN: Especially for long periods of time because we can’t figure out how to agree. So they just sit for a while so we both have time to think about them. We come back [to it], talk about it some more, throw it back on the table. Something else will come up that we actually agree on relatively quickly so that’s the next thing. And so then another piece just sits there and we ruminate on it trying to figure out what would work. DUTES: What is it really about? What are we trying to say? And one of the things I think, at least for me, we talk more clearly about our collaborative work because there is a lot more talk about it together. It forces you to not have this
1. Hoover, Paul ed. Postmodern American poetry: a Norton anthology. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1994.
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loose idea in your head that you’re going to play with in your studio. You have to be able to present it to someone, i.e. Stan, in a clear language that someone can understand. STAN: It might be our language, or our short hand, but you still have to communicate verbally or draw pictures or something—you still have to communicate that idea so that the other person knows just what it is the other person is talking about. And if you’re working by yourself that dialogue all takes place in your head. DUTES: And sometimes you don’t understand yourself. KYLE: Do you think that a movement, like an action as dynamic and complicated as love or time or death or sex can be turned into a moment? Can it be represented as a moment?
helium. And NASA uses for all sort of technical, I don’t know what they use it for and they probably wouldn’t tell anybody because it’s NASA. Our government had a big stock pile of helium and they just sold it off. They sold it really cheaply. A helium balloon should cost about a hundred dollars. KYLE: That’s really expensive. DUTES: It’s fairly rare. STAN: You can’t make it. And once you’re out of it there is no a place to get it. DUTES: Because it’s an element. I think there are people that think that there is helium trapped in some of the asteroids and they might try and go and get it. KYLE: Kind of like Armageddon.
DUTES: I think all of those things are very different from each other. I think sex is probably really easily represented as a moment. I think having sex with a person is a very deep and physical connection, but it’s hard to make into a moment. But a picture of sex is easy to freeze into a moment.
STAN: Sure. KYLE: Not at all like Armageddon actually. Okay, well maybe returning a little here.
STAN: The act of copulation?
STAN/DUTES: (Laugh)
DUTES: Yeah. I think love is too complicated and too long to be a moment. You can show a loving moment. You can have something that shows an aspect of love.
KYLE: Back to the matter at hand. I noticed that there is this kind of underlining paradox to a lot of your work. For example, In the Sheets, this paradox of being trapped in a safe place is investigated [this is a performance where the couple sewed themselves into a pouch between the fitted and flat sheet of a bed, ultimately arranging themselves into a spooning position]. I see this paradox in making something that will turn into something else that will eventually die like the seed drawings. [The seed drawings are self portraits on the ground made of seeds]. Or, paradox in this attempt to capture something wild and dynamic as movement, to capture love or time through a performance, object or image. These paradoxes, are they a result of just talking about these subjects, like time, love, sexuality—or is it something that your are consciously thinking of?
STAN: Like a little Mylar balloon, is it love? It’s heart-shaped. DUTES: Not if it has helium in it, that’s hate. That’s wasting precious materials. Because helium is really rare. KYLE: Is that kind of like love? Wasting precious materials for something else? DUTES: Maybe. Maybe you’re right. Maybe that will be our next collaborative project. Mylar balloons of us, with helium. STAN: Copulating. KYLE: It’s hard to find. I tried to find some at a pharmacy a year ago to do a project. They told me there was a great helium shortage across the world.
DUTES: I think we’re very conscious of that. I mean in our discussions about things like, us dying at the same time and being in graves where we can hold hands, is an impossibility. And it’s presented in a way that it’s supposed to be seen as an impossibility.
DUTES: There is. STAN: We read. We watch movies. We see TV… KYLE: And CVS told me that. DUTES: …We don’t see TV. DUTES: It’s true. Because they use it in all sorts of really high tech situations. Like a lot of medical imaging units use
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STAN: …We have relationships with other people—it may
not be this same relationship but people that are friends with people over long periods of time. And then those people die [and] you have that same kind of loss or mourning. People have hundreds if not thousands of relationships with different people. People coming in and out of their lives and reappearing or disappearing forever and so all those things sort of inform our conversations with one another as well. And I don’t see it as being very paradoxical. I think that there is something that gets ignored a lot of times. And I think that as people age those things maybe become more apparent to them. Like, you are going to die, or the person you love will die, or you see people around you die. When you’re young, if you’re lucky, you probably don’t see anybody but your grandparents possibly die. Depending on the structure of your family you may not have anybody close to you die until you’re an adult. And then there are other people who lose their parents when they are in grade school and so they have a different relationship with death. So I think it’s not that paradoxical because everybody has a relationship with it, it’s just that some people don’t choose to think about it. DUTES: I guess I would like to talk a little bit about, time. We talk a lot about time and not just in terms of lifespan. But what is time? We mark time; the marking of time is a pretty easy time to figure out. We mark it in delineations of the earth spinning. And that’s a tracking of something, but what is this thing that is time? And how do you show that? I mean that’s just… we sit around and talk about stuff like that. Then those kind of discussions, one of us will, “Oh! Yes!” So there’s a lot of thought about sex, death, time, love and out of those conversations there’s no single answer to any of those questions. KYLE: Do you ever think that sometimes the idea of time is absurd when you think about death or whatever happens afterwards? Or does it reinforce the idea of time? DUTES: Well, it all depends on how you’re thinking about time. Sometimes I think that time is something that’s stacked up and you can move through it in either direction... that every time is existing all together and that we have a narrative structure to the way that our brain works and so time moves forward for us. I think that that’s an absurd idea about time, but I really believe that. I don’t think that thinking about death makes time absurd it makes it seem precious. Like a rare commodity. Like helium.
STAN: That’s another weird way to think about time. KYLE: What’s that? STAN: Well, if it’s all happened. If everything has already happened then you should be able to move it in any direction that you want. KYLE: And it seems like you’re nodding to that with certain pieces. I’m thinking about the drawing—the seed drawings. In a sense you are creating something that dies or ends, maybe dies is not the right word. It ends, but then it also nourishes this other thing; the bird or the squirrel that eats it that will then poop it out and nourish like, an earthworm. DUTES: It’s engaged in that cycle of life. People are food… STAN: It might look like to circle but maybe it’s because we can only see a small bit of it. Maybe it’s moving in that direction or that direction, or maybe it oscillates back and forth instead of making a shape… DUTES: It makes me think of some of the breathing pieces that you’ve done [talking to Stan] and the idea that some of the air that you are breathing is the same air that everyone’s been breathing forever. STAN: You know the guys at Bell Laboratories that discovered the static, the background radiation; they won a Nobel Prize because they were like, oh that’s the background radiation from the Big Bang. Marconi got really obsessed that on the radio he would be able to hear Christ because sound waves don’t disappear they only dissipate. You see lots of horror movies now about sounds and if you ran them through filters and slowed them down then they are actually ghosts or some bullshit. But he thought that if he got the right equipment together he would be able to hear the words of Christ. Years later, people at Bell Laboratories did come up with a big enough microphone and they figured out, they postulated that the radiation that they were getting was residual from the Big Bang. KYLE: Wow, that’s an amazing thought. STAN: Ya. KYLE: That’s kind of mind blowing.
KYLE: Oh, bringing it back. STAN: Ya. STAN: Bring it back to helium. KYLE: And so they made a recording of it? KYLE: AROUND, just like time. STAN: Well, it’s not a recording it. It’s just radiation that was left over.
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KYLE: But you could hear it? STAN: They could pick it up with their equipment. That’s just left over residual radiation, noise from this thing, this event that happened. KYLE: Any Jesus in there?
KYLE: I don’t know if I want to or if I don’t want to. I’m open to anything. I’ve never had any experience that has led me to believe that I’ve ever been in the presence of a ghost. The idea of somebody’s spiritual presence being around in a place that they spent a lot time in doesn’t seem impossible, it seems like that kind of makes sense. I would like to believe in Bigfoot more than I would like to believe in ghosts. But maybe that’s the same thing.
STAN: Any Jesus in there?
STAN: …It depends on where I am. If I’m in a haunted house then I really believe in ghosts…
DUTES: I think it’s different. This idea of a spirit and whether it exists or not is interesting to me and is something I’ve been thinking about making work about. But I can’t figure out how to do it. Like about this idea… so we have all this interior life, brain activity, these emotions, and that somehow that’s inside of us and like when you think inside of your mind it can be HUGE. And then when you cut open somebody’s head it’s just brains. I’ve been reading On Touch by Derrida, and there’s a special sort of thing he talks about, self touch. The touching of the skin, it’s instantly realized in your head but where? How? I always think that the body and the spirit are not separate, they are the same thing. But I don’t know how to make art about that.
DUTES: ...My parent’s house was haunted.
KYLE: Yeah, it seems like that would be hard.
KYLE: How do you know it was haunted?
DUTES: But I think it’s a super interesting discussion. And those kind of things—things that are interesting to talk about or are hard to think about change you, they change your mind, not your opinion but they reshape your brain. So that then even if that work never comes to fruition it changes the way I think about things and the way that I do things so I think that it changes my studio practice in a sort of really ambiguous way.
DUTES: I don’t think that they’ve picked up his voice yet. KYLE: Just a Big Bang. DUTES: Maybe that proves something else. KYLE: Do you believe in ghosts? DUTES: I tend to say that I don’t believe in ghosts. But I’ve…
DUTES: Because everyone in my family has had an experience with a ghost that was in that house. Like when we first went in, I got this sort of impression of a story of the end of this woman’s life, not when she died, but this end part of her life. Everyone in the family has stories of being home alone, hearing a door open, someone walking in and then you go to see who it is and there is nobody there. My dad accused me of making it up because he thought I didn’t want to move. He said that I was just trying to scare people so that they wouldn’t want to move here. I was like, NO, I really think this. So one night, my mom was coming home really late and he didn’t like that. So she was coming home and got in the bed and he was like, I’m not going to talk to her, I’m going to pretend like I’m sleeping. The door opens. Someone walks over and puts an icy cold hand on his leg and he sort of jumps and there is nobody there. But now, he doesn’t believe. He told us all it happened, but he’s like, no no no no no. STAN: Like I said, if I’m in a haunted house I believe it. DUTES: It’s hard for me. I want to say that I kind of don’t believe in spirits, but I feel like I’ve experienced things contrary to that. STAN: Do you believe in ghosts? Do you want to?
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KYLE: So comedy, it seems like there is a definite comedic value to your work. How do you go about using it and what do you think it does? STAN: Well, I think what it does is some of the stuff like, in the graves piece or crocheting the pink piece. I think it allows an open door for people who might find that sort of thing off-putting or too uncomfortable. So that sort of comedic element can draw them into the piece and allow them to actually think about stuff that they might not otherwise feel comfortable thinking about. Or to see themselves in the piece like if they have a black comedy streak in them or a different way of thinking about those subjects. It’s another way for them to connect to the work. I mean, some people apologize to us when they laugh. I can see how some people don’t laugh and they find it incredibly poignant and it’s both upsetting and they’re very moved by it and other people just sort of giggle.
KYLE: And why do you think somebody would feel ashamed of laughing? STAN: I think they are afraid that they’re in some ways mocking us. That it’s fine art and laughing is, oh I’m sorry I didn’t mean to dismiss it or mock you in any way. It’s like it’s okay, there are a lot of other artists who use humor in that way to talk about stuff that is hard to talk about or that people don’t want to talk about. But get them to talk about it and get them to think about it because they are able to laugh about it first.
(it’s a timeline) a physical line that is developed over a long period of time. It’s interesting to me that I can see it again and again but it’s different every time I do it. KYLE: So the big book—the silhouette book—when the reader opens it, they’re separating you and then you’re brought back together when they close the book. Does that mean that I’ll never know? STAN: Ya. DUTES: Ya.
KYLE: Do you consciously think, oh, this needs to be a little more funny or there needs to be an entry point or is it something that kind of comes more naturally? Like are you naturally hilarious? DUTES: I wouldn’t say that we are naturally hilarious… KYLE: …Naturally balanced in that way. DUTES: We have a good sense of humor. KYLE: You both make books. What do you think the difference is between working in a book versus some other way of working? Like when does an idea turn into a book and how does a book work differently for you? DUTES: Just by the nature of something being a book it adds some sort of reference to a narrative and that sort of ties it to the idea of the passing of time. And I think differently about the really huge books that we make together and also about the really big books that Stan makes. I tend to make smaller books that you hold. It’s a different way of engaging an audience. Because you handle books differently. You hold them close to you and your relationship to a book is different from a painting. It’s just a different controlled experience that you can create. STAN: And those big books of silhouettes, [a large book of silhouettes of the artists facing each other on opposing pages of the spread]—a lot of the images in them are a little flip and silly. But also the size of the books: they have to have a stand because you can’t hold them yourself. So they are almost cartoonish: the scale of them and the presentation. Whereas Dutes, your books are quiet small and are a different experience as far as the intimacy. And they kind of have to be held because a lot of the materials that you use change color and reflectivity when you’re holding them. The books that I make both present the line of time that you can flip through and excavate, but you can also unfold them if you want to see the line all at once. [In] the books I work on individually, I don’t know if people make that connection, I end up walking Untitled Silhouette (Conjoined Eleven), Somerset black velvet on BFK rives, cut paper, 2008, 44 3/8” x 30 1/4”
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Mary Laube at the Times Club in Prairie Lights BY BRIAN PRUGH
Domenico Veneziano, Saint John in the Desert, 2012, tempera on panel, 11 3/16” x 12 1/2”
Mary Laube, Saint John in the Desert, 2013, 24” x 24”
Mary Laube’s recent landscapes are derived from pre-Renaissance sacred paintings—paintings that, for the most part, tell some story about the life of a saint. Laube has taken these paintings, re-shaped the original rectangles into squares, and removed the figures. If we might say, historically, that these paintings were made to tell a story—that these paintings, in an important way, do not exist without the story—that one cannot really understand them without understanding the story, the question for Laube’s paintings is, once the figures are gone—once the story has been removed—what remains? Because something remains. In Laube’s hands these compressed, often illogical spaces reveal the content they balance against the weight of the theological narrative. In paintings before the advent of linear perspective as we know it, space was a language, not a system. As in any language there is word-play, rhyme, poetry, slippage of meaning, the possibility for surprising juxtapositions and paradoxes that reveal deeper possibilities than there are within the hermetic seal of a system of determined points, fixed possibilities. It is much more difficult to deploy this language in the service of an agenda than it is to deploy perspective. Like any language, it retaliates against marching orders; it pushes back with its own solid gravity; it refuses to speak because of its own, dense, reserve.
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It is this rich language that is the starting point for Laube’s investigations into landscape. She pulls the landscape out of the painting, isolating its forms by carefully masked paint textures, tracking their interactions, exploring the relationships between shifting spatial elements. Small details reveal their importance—the lumpy outline of foliage, an ambiguous middle ground embraced between stands of trees, an abrupt transition to mountain, the sensuously curving line of a stream arriving into the foreground from the wilderness beyond. Laube’s canvases boil down these elements to their basic semantic components, opening up the linguistic geography of medieval landscapes. What remains after the stories, to my eye, is a space built for a spiritual journey. It is a landscape managed with as much care as Central Park. But instead of offering a calculated reprieve from the stress of city life, it is an arena in which to confront the wilderness of one’s own self and the whisper of divinity.
Stefano di Giovanni, The Meeting of St. Anthony and St. Paul, circa 1440
Mary Laube, The Meeting of Saint Anthony and Saint Paul 2013, 24” x 24”
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notes on Jules de Balincourt BY EMMA STEINKRAUS
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Jules de Balincourt lectured about his work at the University of Iowa on September 26, 2013 as a Visiting Artist. When I first saw Jules de Balincourt’s Itinerant Ones, a small recent oil painting of boats at night, I thought, it’s just like a Whistler Nocturne. But when months later I put images of the two side-by-side, their irreconcilable distance struck me. The initial association is sensical: Whistler’s The Lagoon, Venice: a Nocturne in Blue and Silver is also a painting of ships at night. Meditative and spare, it has the same wash of water, same pinpricks of light, and same hazy shapes at the horizon as Itinerant Ones; but placed beside it the de Balincourt appeared flat, washed-up, and clumsy, with none of the Nocturne’s miasmic depth. At the same time, the Whistler brought out the engaging and subtle weirdness of the de Balincourt: its blood-stained ship shadows, surface smudges and fingerprints, the ghostly red mess at the center and a ghost boat hovering transparently over the white reflected light of the bottom left cruiser. Comparing de Balincourt’s work to that of an early modern master is useful because he often seems at first to be retreading the intellectual moves of late 19th century painting in which newly fragmented, stylized surfaces produced representational images. But for all of de Balincourt’s references to fin de siecle painting, his work remains stubbornly contemporary both in style (which eclectically references outsider art, stenciled graffiti, pixelated computer screens and off-registered newspaper photos) and content, which ambitiously surveys much of the contemporary imaginary from political protests to utopian communes, modern warfare to climate change displacement and, most persistently, the interconnections of globalization. By visually revisiting turn of the 20th c. painting on his own terms, de Balincourt exposes the disorienting rift between now and then.
Jules de Balincourt, Homer, Hopper and Manet, oil on canvas, 2011, 48” x 55”
Winslow Homer, Breezing Up, 1880, 24” x 38”
Within his work a number of motifs recur: images of surveillance (the Panopticon in the Watchtower, helicopter flood lights in Free for All, a sculpted paper security camera); images of tiny, swarmed humans at mass gatherings (political protests, music festivals, sporting arenas, city high-rises); maps and references to data visualization; and images of human-mediated nature (ski slopes, mountain tunnels, boating waters, trail maps at a state park). These motifs build an argument about the totalizing impact of humans on the earth. In de Balincourt’s work, even the globe has a face and every boulder is tied down. Behind the surface of the mountain is a landfill. There is no refuge; this is the Earth thoroughly conquered. And not just conquered, but continuously monitored and mapped. Drawing on the visual language of trade routes, flight maps, and telephone wires, de Balincourt covers his paintings with lines that link us all together in a network so dense it becomes an inescapable net. Iowa City Arts Review
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Jules de Balincourt, Globe Faces, oil on panel, 2012, 58” x 64” x 34”
Jules de Balincourt, Untitled (The Rock), oil and enamel on panel, 2007, 27” x 34”
A painting like Think Globally, Act Locally may seem proscriptive at first, like one more promotion of a popular political refrain, but the overwhelming beams shooting up from the small town can’t be contained. In de Balincourt’s interdependent world, there may be no way to act locally. Instead, we are presented with an ambivalent view of our interconnections as if to ask that persistent and essential contemporary question: how on earth are we supposed to act knowing that our even our littlest choices play into a system of global consequences?
Jules de Balincourt, Idol Hands, oil on panel, 2012, 76” x 66”
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Jules de Balincourt, Think Globally, Act Locally, oil on panel, 2007, 96” x 132”
Jules de Balincourt, Untitled, oil on panel, 2013, 78” x 87”
Jules de Balincourt, Internal Renovations (Diptych), oil on panel, 2005, 86.6” x 118”
This is why it’s important that Itinerant Ones looks washed-up and clumsy next to a Whistler. Our brave new world’s problems are too big for even murky mastery. Bombarded by information, connected to an incomprehensible 7 billion people, overwhelmed by harsh economic and environmental realities, it’s easy to relate to de Balincourt’s tiny, swarming figures swamped by cities, bowled over by technologies, and swept up in floods. His frequent aerial views and maps may at first imply that masterful ability to see the whole in one fell swoop that so appealed to the 19th century, but here the language of certainty (representation, maps, diagrams, text) gets messed up, flattened, pixelated, made clumsy. Often de Balincourt zooms out so far that you realize the landscape isn’t even a landscape, but a diorama under glass surrounded by a larger, complex, and uncaring world. If we are to be saved within de Balincourt’s complicated surveillance state, it’s not going to be by his small band of utopias and certainly not by anything like a government. If there’s optimism here - and there is - it’s encapsulated for me in the painting Idol Hands. Hundreds of protesters walk through a large plaza lined in blank white, faceless monuments. The signs the protesters are carrying are, in fact, paintings, portraits of all different everyday faces staring out at us like from a museum or yearbook, affirming that they exist. This is painting and portraiture as protest.
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We live in a world that is not our own BY BRIAN PRUGH
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“If you ain’t no place you can’t go nowhere.” (Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town) Parked outside the entrance of Cheryl Robinson’s MFA show was the Brown Palace, a school bus that had been converted into a movable abode. It sat guarding the entryway to an installation about a very un-movable abode—a 200+ year old oak tree. The installation therefore stood between an attachment to a particular place marked by this tree (a tree, incidentally, that has since been removed) and a yearning for a detachment from place. The push and pull between the mobile home and the requiem for the immobile makes for a kind of bipolar conceptual moment addressing the ambivalent relationship between humans and their surroundings. Words like “place,” “space,” and “landscape” have a conceptual history that is too complex to address here. But the idea at the center of many of the distinctions that have been drawn between these concepts is relatively straightforward: we make our familiar surroundings “our own” in some ways, but our surroundings resist that claim. The foreignness of these surroundings reveals itself in different ways. A cluster of graduate student shows at the end of the school year touched on different aspects of this disjunction between the way that we imagine and experience the world around us, and what that world around us is—between our expectations of what an experience of a landscape should be and the ways that those expectations obscure the landscapes around us. Christopher Pickett’s Tracing the Line is about the Rio Grande. The exhibition is made up of several distinct, but related, elements: flanking the room on both sides are two wall drawings (one more literal, one more diagrammatic) that trace the shape of the river over and over to create a series of radiating, parallel lines. The shape of the river morphs as the lines move out from the central line describing the river. In the center of the floor, a plywood sculpture (a three-dimensional contour map of the area surrounding the river) draped in papier-mâché serves as a screen for a projection of news segments related to the border. Finally, on the back wall, a series of panoramic photographs document a trip along the river. If the news coverage suggests a fortified border with walls, fences, machine guns and an excessive police force, the photographs come as a real surprise. The Rio Grande photographs look like so many other rivers of no political import. One photograph contains a border check, but most of the pictures could have been taken anywhere—the river, full at times, empty or nearly empty at times, meanders through an unremarkable landscape, sometimes rural, sometimes industrial, but always pretty banal. If the river traces a line between the first and the third world, between rich and poor, between the “land of opportunity” and the fearful image we project on Mexico, tracing the line of the river reveals nothing of visible import. The perceptual twist at the center of the exhibition has much to do with the arbitrariness of this line and the very real (although invisible) forces that preserve this unremarkable river as a site of international conflict. The strangely uniform landscapes that scroll by on a drive from Iowa City to Chicago are the central point of inquiry for Brendan Baylor’s Accumulations of History: Iowa / Illinois. Long familiar to Midwesterners, the endless sea of corn is as unnatural as it is prolific. Baylor’s show inquires into the forces that have created this landscape and hints at some of its historical and ecological consequences. For instance, a map of Iowa that identifies ethanol processing plants, along with their annual output in millions of gallons, faces a line drawing of such a plant. A field of harvested corn stalks bleeds into the map. The combination of elements opens up a space of logical interconnections between these disparate and individually opaque pieces of landscape: the fields of corn feed into ethanol processing plants (which consume 38% of Iowa’s corn, according to Baylor’s image list). Byproducts (such as corn meal and corn starch) go into food products, and the profits from this enterprise pay the rent for the Exelon headquarters in Chase Tower in downtown Chicago.
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Interspersed between the images, making connections between what we see in the countryside and the economics and politics that shape that landscape, are a few well-placed reminders of how the landscape has changed. For instance, a map of the bison range from 1500 to 1890 shows the spectacular rapidity with which the grazing grounds of bison (and the bison themselves) disappeared to make way, eventually, for the corn that currently fills the land. Baylor’s exhibition attempts, through a variety of kinds of visual language, to create a sense for what the land is and has been—with the aim of making visible the unseen structures which are manifest only in dusty industrial facades and row after row of perfectly spaced, weed-free corn. Two other works address how we can become disconnected from our surroundings by considering the way that experiences of nature or wilderness are mediated. Kristin Degree’s short film, Wilderness, collects footage taken from Wilderness State Park in Michigan into a quiet and poetic mediation on the idea of “wilderness.” Images include a sign for the park, a walk along a snow-covered trail, gorgeous shots of snow falling amongst the pine trees and footage of a nature center taken from outside the windows. All of these things have a claim to the title, Wilderness: the park is land set aside and named as such, a trail promises to penetrate into the wilderness (even as it is itself constructed and curated), snow falling among pines in what could be an establishing shot for a lost-inthe-snow scene in a Christmas special, and the nature center provides educational programming about wilderness, even as it is full of colorful, cartoon-y posters, taxidermied animals and dioramas constructed to look natural. At issue here is a human need for wilderness, an idea that, as soon as we try to draw a line around it and mark it off on a map, becomes increasingly problematic. Gabriella Roth’s installation approaches this problem from precisely the opposite direction: instead of investigating a purported wild site with a video camera, Roth creates her own sublime natural scene with an eclectic collection of profoundly unnatural materials. Roth’s installation was immersive: a tiny constructed world hung about eighteen inches from the ceiling. It could be accessed only by ladder. But the world was not enclosed: visible from the ladder were both the gallery space and the space above the false ceiling. Yellow light from the adjoining rooms cast a dim, golden glow on the constructed space. The miniature world itself was populated with nature avatars: videos of waterfalls (one flowing backwards), cacti with fake flowers glued to them and carpet underlayment piled up like glacial ice into a foam polar seascape stood in for vistas of Sublime Nature. Blue Christmas lights and fans added a touch of windblown atmosphere. The shallow height of the installation made it impossible to survey the whole scene: I was trapped in the landscape. The result had all the cues surrounding a sublime experience of nature—and the ingenuity of the material construction lent itself to a visual delight in the created world. But the ultimate effect was unsettling. By its extreme artifice, the show raised the question: is a genuine experience of Nature even possible?” (Admittedly, I would answer this question in the affirmative—although I would argue that such an experience is more importantly connected to how one looks than what one looks at.) Central to each of these exhibitions is an ambivalence to the experience of the landscape as profoundly, deeply other—a mystery to stand in awe of—which is one facet of the concept of the sublime. Central to each of the exhibitions is a moment of disillusionment with this idea. For Robinson, the tree that had become an old friend and reminder of a different time scale (its life measured in centuries, not decades) was not even considered a casualty once chopped down to make room for the site of the future studio arts program. For Pickett and Baylor, the structures that create economic value and political divisions on unassuming ground are the root of a quietly disorienting experience of how to look at the world around us. Degree and Roth hold expectations of the experience of wilderness or Nature up to greater scrutiny, charting out the territory in which imagined encounters with a place that is not our own, and much more, not ourselves, are more complicated than they might initially appear. It is as if in every case of looking out at the landscape, some part of human history and human interference with it, prevents or obstructs the possibility of an authentic encounter with nature. Yet, each of these shows resounds with longing. All of the exhibitions seek meaning in places, in landscapes, or in the natural world. All evidence disillusionment with the ways that the meaning they seek is undercut or undermined by human intervention. The
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hope in them seems to be in looking straight at the human history behind what we take to be natural—at our ideas about the purity or sublimity of nature and the way these ideas obscure the impurity or banality or capriciousness of our representations of nature. The hope is to clear that away, and get a better sense of what is really there.
NATURE
EXHIBITION INFORMATION: Cheryl Robinson, The Other Side, Studio Arts, Sculpture Installation Space; Christopher Pickett, Tracing the Line, Studio Arts, Porch Gallery; Brendan Baylor, Accumulations of History: Iowa / Illinois, Public Space One; Gabriella Roth, Atrium: personal space: iliad/odyssey, Studio Arts, Sculpture Installation Space; Kristin Degree, Wilderness, screened at Public Space One.
Images from Kristen Degree’s Wilderness, 2013 and Gabriella Roth’s, Atrium: personal space: iliad/odyssey, 2013
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Jamie Boling at Hudson River Gallery BY ELIZABETH SCHULE Jamie Boling, one of the U of I’s own MFA graduates in painting, has an impressive body of work on view at the Hudson River Gallery. The show, American Standard, derives its title from the toilet company with the same namesake. Boling investigates an array of issues in American popular culture: from the idolization of pop stars to the concept of the sublime in American philosophy to the binge-drinking decadence of youth culture. Even if you don’t actively seek it out, in our media-dominated, celebrity-obsessed nation, pop culture will reach you no matter what cave you dwell in. Jamie Boling selects elements of American culture and re-envisions the subject matter in technically masterful and visually compelling paintings. The self-titled piece in the show is tucked away in a hallway that adjoins the main gallery, and it should not be missed. The image presents a witty mash-up of an airbrushed Christ figure superimposed on an ink wash painting of Johnny Cash, cradling a guitar in one hand and flipping us off with the other. The pairing of these two Messianic figures resonates for both its humor and insight. Cash in particular, provides the embodiment of an important aspect of American culture. He is the repentant rebel, singing about Jesus in one breath and prison yards the next. Upon entering the main gallery space one is struck by a painting of a surfer braving a catastrophically large tidal wave. In Rogue, the breaking wave and sea spray cascade toward the edge of the canvas in a radiant swirl of blues, teals, and lavenders. Employing traditional painting techniques, Boling inserts the fearless surfer in a historical context with a style evocative of Romanticism. He is man confronting the sublime. The image could operate as a metaphor for the kind of reckless dedication to an idea or cause that is integral to American culture. The viewer gets the sense that the surfer has resigned himself to surf this wave as if it were his last. On a neighboring wall is another painting called, Throttle. A cluster of turbulent clouds churn against a cobalt sky that is keyed up with all the weather and atmosphere of a Turner landscape. Upon closer inspection, one realizes the cloud formations are in fact plumes of smoke and bursts of flames that have been thrust out the back of a space shuttle. Boling, however, has erased all traces of the spacecraft. Perhaps, in an attempt to rewrite history and prevent disaster, Boling has anachronistically removed the space shuttle from the sky just moments after it had been launched. Across the room, an alluring yet grotesque painting titled Wasted, spans the length of an entire wall. In it, we see a girl with a beer-drenched T-shirt sprawled out, presumably dead drunk with her hand on her brow and cell phone resting on her stomach. Next to her is another girl who miraculously maintains the ability to stand. Evidently, this image was extracted from a Facebook page (which has since been dismantled) called 30 Reasons A Girl Should Call It A Night. Subscribers to the page voluntarily posted images of themselves and female friends looking visibly intoxicated and showing themselves in comprising, or at the very least, unflattering positions. In the painting, both the figures are cast in a sickly green hue. Beer foam glistens on the arm of the girl passed out on the floor causing her skin to look slimy and amphibian. Though the scene is depicted in a repellent and unnerving manner, the sensitivity with which Boling paints the figures overturns the notion that this is merely a critique of these young women’s drunken antics. The painting is like a two-pronged joke, something that initially makes you laugh, only to cry later. American Standard is a clever, edgy, and thought-provoking investigation into the culture that every American is heir to.
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Jamie Boling, Wasted, 2013
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