This Is Not A Painting Catalogue

THIS IS NOT A PAINTING 9.4.15 - 10.10.15

g a l l e r y

Cover images: Stills from Reclining Nude #2, 2015, by Angela Willetts. Two channel digital video, red couch.

THIS IS NOT A PAINTING EMBARK GALLERY

September 4 - October 10, 2015 Nicole Aponte - CCA Megan Armstrong - SFAI Kathryn Gentzke - CCA Danielle Genzel - CCA Rebecca Hall - CCA Marcela Pardo Ariza - SFAI Miranda Robbins - Mills

Tania Houtzager EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AngelicaWilletts Jardini CURATORIAL DIRECTOR Angela - UC Davis

Embark Gallery.com

This Is Not a Painting

g a l l e r y

refers to Magritte’s famous artwork Treachery of Images in which “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” is written under a painting of a pipe. This self-referential acknowledgement of the limitations of language and representation inspired this exhibition that challenges contemporary discourse surrounding the medium. Our esteemed jurors selected artworks from eight women who defy convention and expand the definition of painting as we understand it today.

Nicole Aponte’s subtly stained canvas is accented with the visual opposite of her soft pours that pool in natural shapes: a hard sheet of bright red Plexiglas. The surface literally reflects the very painterly canvas, acting as a perfect entrance piece to an exhibition centered on the self-reflexivity of painting in the contemporary moment. Photography was used as painting in work by Danielle Genzel, who prints manipulated images from her family archive onto sheets of transparencies, building a painting by layering these fragmented pieces into a cohesive whole. Rebecca Hall takes extremely detailed photographs of spray paint and baby oil to create magically sparkling, yet abjectly visceral compositions that speak to the history of abstract expressionism, the natural versus the manufactured, and to the artist’s personal interest in alchemy. In Marcela Pardo Ariza’s practice, staged photographs act as queer reinterpretations of classic portraiture; muted backgrounds are replaced with monochromatic sets in primary colors, built

of surrealist objects, some absurd and some that seem referential- from a nod to Warhol’s bananas, stuck on a yellow wall, to a cow skull right out of an O’Keeffe, painted blue to match her sitter’s unbuttoned shirt. Angela Willetts’ video performance is similarly concerned with the history of painting. Stifled by the “unbearable weight of painting’s history and politics,” Willetts grapples with painting herself, ultimately breaking out of the frame to cover her entire body, couch, and studio in red and brown viscous paint. It is a feminist performance that references her predecessors, but is decidedly contemporary in presentation and use of technology.

Natural materials were present in the exhibition as well. Kathryn Gentzke works with the ephemeral media of light and sound. Her beautiful and haunting time-lapse video of shadows passing across a grey wall is projected into a black frame, propelling the study into the realm of painting by giving the illusion of depth within the black border, ultimately presenting a new way in which painting can be a window into another world. Megan Armstrong shows a durational sculpture in which wood glue was poured upon eight tiger branches affixed to the wall, effectively petrifying them before pooling onto the canvas drop cloth draped below. The wood glue acts as paint, streaming down the gallery’s white wall. A huge green and blue Sound Skin by Miranda Robbins looms over the crowd on the far side of the exhibition space.

Robbins uses natural materials from a specific place in order to create a living, decaying imprint of the landscape. She uses sound compositions to manipulate the liquid latex into a hide-like skin, which mimics the appearance of dried paint, but is not archival. This is the last time this piece will be shown.

Painting is king. Painting is dead. We’ve heard it all before. However, with these diverse approaches to the dichotomous “problem” of painting, we see painting redefined not as a static, obsolete medium, but as an artistic strategy with infinite possibilities and expressions.

Angelica Jardini | CURATORIAL DIRECTOR

Nicole Aponte CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS, 2016 “To Painting: When I think about what you mean to me, I think about the relationships I’ve had, the connections I’ve made, the collections of memories you accumulate, the late nights hours, the sifting of thoughts. I think about my interaction with you, and how you’ve absorbed my experiences and feelings. You became a sort of diary where words weren’t necessary. The medium, the simplicity of water and acrylic paint on canvas comforted me.

Each canvas was a clean slate welcoming me all over again. I felt at ease and open confronted by your raw, vulnerable surface. I guess I always saw you as a reflection of myself.”

Untitled XXXVI, 2015. Acrylic on canvas and Plexiglass.

Megan Armstrong SAN FRANCISCO ART INSTITUTE, 2015 “Through practical and emotional research of a specific system - mental illness and the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Version 5 (DSM-V) - I create artwork that translates the coded language within the system, as well as the individual experiences that are left out of the clinical translation of human behavior. When a system and its coding logic is laboriously translated into didactic lines that weave in and out, attempting individuality, but ultimately creating controlled chaos, the complexity and ambiguity of a convoluted system remains. Natural elements act as archetypes for the artist as caregiver and for individuals labeled within the system of mental illness. Materials are pulled from their original sources, cared for over time, and given new, fragile bonds to represent personal relationships, creating and transforming the objects into poetic symbols.�

Absent, Lamenting, 2015. Tiger branches, wood glue and canvas.

Kathryn Gentzke CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS, 2016 “I am interested in the co-inherence of space and subjectivity – the innate interweaving of place and person.

During the late 20th and early 21st century, space, time, and consequently, constructions of subjectivity have been radically remapped. My practice uses technology as a tool to explore what is left out of abstracted and virtual models of space and subjectivity: the ephemeral, accidental, sensual and phenomenal.”

Untitled (Shadow Study #5), 2015. Video projection and frame.

Danielle Genzel CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS, 2015 “I am interested in the relationship between ourselves and the devices we use for recalling and storing memory.

I question the divide between the information these tools provide and the actual moment that occurred and was experienced. In my process I dissect my familial archive, looking for clues of a time and place I have forgotten, and for the traces of the apparatus used to capture and recall a particular image or moment.

I manipulate scanners to perform in ways not intended, giving the process up to chance in order to obscure the original information, and create traces of digital input. I merge both elements of photography and painting when compiling a single image. The final composition is created only through the layering of each transparency, creating a build-up of imagery. In this way, each image is reliant on the layer that comes before it, and uses the negative space of each composition to draw contrast to image and form. The layered photographs seem to contain dimension, yet are limited and static in nature, illustrating the ultimate sense of loss created in the divide between experience and recall.�

Reduction, 2014 (left) and Re: Dimension, 2014 (right.) Inkjet printed transparencies.

Reduction, 2014. Inkjet printed transparencies.

Re: Dimension, 2014. Inkjet printed transparencies.

Rebecca Hall CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS, 2016 “The works in this series are part of an ongoing attempt to explore the boundaries of paint, focusing on the industrialization of acrylic paint and the chemistry behind acrylics and plastics.

I have used the camera as a painting tool to consider paint in its liquid form. Through the use of photography I have composed what I call ‘temporary paintings.’

These images are paintings comprised of drawing inks, acrylic paint, spray paint, and oil that cannot exist without the vehicle of photography because once dry, the images lose their shine, fluidity and immediacy.”

This page: Temporary Series (Untitled 3), 2014. Digital print.

Opposite: Temporary Series (Untitled 4), 2014. Digital print.

Marcela Pardo Ariza SAN FRANCISCO ART INSTITUTE, 2016 “Through the use of wry humor, awkwardness and queerness, I engage with the medium of photography to create compositionally arranged and colorful scenarios that embed the uncanny within the mundane. By incorporating quotidian objects in seemingly absurd ways, these tableaux reference recognizable domestic spaces mixed with a hint of magical realism.

These monochromatic photographs are inspired by Renaissance portraiture and the gestures of the ones depicted in it. However, the inclusion of kitsch elements, floating objects and witticism transform these portraits into pseudo-Rococo, wholly contemporary compositions.�

This page: Princess Blue, 2015. Archival inkjet print.

Center: Sun Kissed Yellow, 2015. Archival inkjet print.

Far right: Sun Kissed Yellow, 2015. Archival inkjet print.

Miranda Robbins MILLS COLLEGE, 2015 “Using natural bodies in the landscape as a metaphor for the human body, I make portraits of places using site-specific crushed minerals and flora suspended in a liquid matrix. I then use a subwoofer to feed amplified field recordings into the materials to displace them. The action of the sound on the materials imbues the work with the spirit of the place.

This work is from the Sound Skin series: sculptural paintings that use liquid latex as the matrix in which materials such as diamond dust, atomized copper powder, or beach sand are suspended. The latex cures as it is being vibrated by collected sounds. The result is a skin of a specific site: the skin of a white dwarf star, or a skin of Seacliff Beach in Aptos, CA. In addition to looking like skin and evoking the body, the latex is visceral in that it ages. It is not an archival material. The skins will eventually change color, fade, become brittle, and break down, just as our bodies will over time. The material viscerality creates an opening for the viewer to find a connection with the place being portrayed and embodied. These are objects of transmission, containing the ephemerality of place, as well as being objects themselves, acting as records of a moment in that place.�

Sound Skin: Mills Campus, 2015. Detail.

Sound Skin: Mills Campus, 2015. Liquid latex, atomized copper powder, saltwater, pyrite, iron-based blue pigment, mica, sound of original Moog compositions created at Mills.

Angela Willetts UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS, 2016 “Reclining Nude #2 documents my attempts to find a way back to working with paint, through performance. Reclining Nude #2 both acknowledges the history and politics of painting and chooses to battle through them despite the futility of this task. It addresses questions such as the challenges of being a female painter, the spaces between being a viewer and a maker of art, the impossibility of escaping painting’s history, and ultimately, shifts focus toward “painting” as a description of a body in motion rather than an image at rest.”

Above: Reclining Nude #2, 2015. Two channel digital video, red couch.

Right: Stills from Reclining Nude #2, 2015. Two channel digital video.

Out of the Loop: This Is Not a Painting Artists Innovate at Embark Gallery Nicole Aponte A critical essay by artist Xiao Wang CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS, 2016

Pushing the idea of abstract painting forward in the context of postmodernism hasn’t been easy. For some leading contemporary institutions, the act of painting has become somewhat of a formula. Painters find themselves re-living the glorious moments of their ancestors: minimalism, abstract expressionism, cubism, and so on—abstract painting has become the autobiography of itself. This leaves the possibility for a future that is, optimistically, rich in reference yet also paralyzing. In The New Yorker’s review of the recent painting show Forever Now at MoMA, curator Laura Hoptman’s idea was explained: “All eras seem to exist at once,” thus freeing artists, yet also leaving them no other choice but to adopt or, at best, reanimate familiar “styles, subjects, motifs, materials, strategies, and ideas.”[1] Innovation has always been the central topic of any progressive art, but when we find the very word “innovation” has lost its meaning and purpose, maybe it’s time to look for a new objective.

This Is Not a Painting at Embark Gallery provides a different perspective on the age-old argument on what painting is, or has become. The exhibition features 8 Bay Area women artists that are either current MFA student or recent MFA graduates. Don’t come to the show expecting to see some pretentiously large canvases, in fact, none of the artists—except for one—can be identified as painter in an explicit sense. The statement here is clear, instead of looking for new path within the painting realm, they ask a question: how can other mediums engage with painting?

We are all too familiar with the frustration of getting into a “medium war” in a typical graduate seminar, and the last thing we want to debate in a critique group is whether something is a painting or a sculpture. The title of the show plays a trick by stating the theme of the show without getting into the meaningless argument, so we can move on and focus on the content of the work . Overall, the works are reasonably small and distanced, giving the presentation a clean quality without making it seem underwhelming, I find myself constantly pushing and pulling between each artist’s work. One artist that first struck my eyes was Marcela Pardo A. Her photograph series consists of three square-shaped portraits, each explores a monochromic theme based on the three primary colors.

Pardo plays with this topic by categorizing everyday object by their colors and construct them formally in the backgrounds of the portraits, the lower-centered figures are compositionally surrounded by painted frames. These pictures wittily connect Portraiture, Cubism and Minimalism while seemingly mocking all of them.

One thing worth noting is that all 8 artists selected for this exhibition are coincidentally women—a rare case even for famously progressive Bay Area art scene. This has added a strong feminist element to the show. The resulting genderization of the show breaks away from the linear and male-dominated narrative of painting history.

Perhaps the most politically charged piece is Angela Willetts’s Reclining Nude #2, a video installation that documents her performative painting using both a still camera and a GoPro. In the piece Willetts traces herself using both brush and her body on a couch and a plastic screen. The performance is given a sense of violence by the use of red paint, the violence is also enhanced by the presence the couch that was used in the performance. It is not difficult to read the influence of Janine Antoni’s work in Willetts’ piece, yet she pushed her work further by referencing and protesting the history of figurative painting by positioning herself nude in a gesture that was heavily used to portray the idealized female body.

With a more romantic approach, Miranda Robbins’s mixed media pieces engage with the elements of performative painting in a very different way. She creates her work using complex processes and techniques such as pouring, mixing, even playing sound in order to create texture. The results are stunning sheets of latex that have preserved and transformed found materials into physical memorials. Visually, Robins’ work plays with the push and pull between details of the surface and the fluid formal quality. Conceptually, she connects the elements of sound, material and location. The “body” of the performer in her work is not the maker, but the material itself, as a remnant of a specific place and time.

In “This Is Not a Painting”, abstract painting is no longer considered as a self-referencing medium, in fact, the very fundamental question of what it is has been replaced by what has come out of it. It represents a source of ideology or philosophy that inspire all mediums. The show is therefore by no means attempting to define a direction for contemporary painting, but to find a new way to make use of what we have learned.

Acknowledgements Sartle.com Fort Mason Center Amy Cancelmo - Root Division Kerri Hurtado - Artsource Consulting Megan McConnell - Anthony Meier Fine Arts Lauren Dare

Designed by Carolyn Nickell

2 Marina Blvd. Bldg. B Ste. 330, San Francisco CA 94123

Tania Houtzager EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Angelica Jardini CURATORIAL DIRECTOR

Embark Gallery.com