When the Wind Comes Right Behind the Rain
POINT OF CONTACT GALLERY STAFF
Sara Felice Director Rainer Wehner Preparator Weisi Liu Financial and Administrative Specialist Sheridan Bishoff Alice Adams Tyler Sanchez Gallery Assistants Natasha Bishop Curatorial & Development Assitant Tere Paniagua Executive Director of Cultural Engagement
IMAGE CREDITS
Julie Herman Jamie Young
When the Wind Comes Right Behind the Rain Rebecca Aloisio, Patti Capaldi, Jennifer Paige Cohen, Melinda Laszczynski, Fabian Marcaccio, Paul O’Keefe, Bret Shirley, Sarah Sutton October 21 – December 6, 2019
This exhibition is made possible thanks to the generous support of The College of Arts and Sciences, and the Coalition of Museums and Art Centers at Syracuse University.
GF75 PAUL WILSON
A RECENT SEARCH FOR A BOOK WITH A CALL NUMBER beginning with GF75, far outside of the N call numbers (denoting art and architecture) I’m most familiar with, led me to an unfamiliar part of the library and several shelves lined with nonfiction books whose titles would, ideally, be found only in the darkest corner of the dystopian fiction section: Rape of the Wild, Unnatural Disasters, The Annihilation of Nature. Other titles left me with troubling questions. Who should I be rooting for in a book titled Gaia’s Revenge? Whose extinction is under examination in After Extinction? The Library of Congress dispassionately describes these books and others with the GF75 call number as dealing with “human influences on the environment.” Many of the newest titles in the section address the Anthropocene, the term proposed for the current geological epoch in which humans are the dominant force shaping the environment. Although the term is widely discussed and debated in the press and academia, it has yet to be adopted as accepted nomenclature within the discipline of geology. In part, this stems from disagreements about its starting point. Did the Anthropocene commence when humans began reengineering landscapes thousands of years ago, with the accelerated release of carbon accompanying the Industrial Revolution, or only with the global industrialization and urbanization that followed World War II?1. These debates about the start of the Anthropocene stand in stark contrast to the consensus about its end. As Richard Grusin points out, “to periodize the Anthropocene is already to assume a future world in which human presence on Earth has been reduced to a lithic layer.”2. Thinking the Anthropocene demands a kind of speculative time travel not unlike that practiced in science fiction. Both require “an imaginative commitment to a future that recasts the present as the past.” 3. This commitment to engage intellectually and emotionally with a possible future
can, in turn, cultivate an ethical stance in the present. By imagining the world after us, filmmakers, authors, and artists can influence how we imagine the Earth with us. Ramin Bahrani’s short film Plastic Bag (2009) follows the life of a plastic shopping bag, voiced by the German filmmaker Werner Herzog. The bag is devoted to the ordinary woman whose purchase at a grocery store gives its existence meaning, but that sense of purpose vanishes just a few days later when she unceremoniously throws the bag away. It resurfaces from a landfill at some indeterminate point in the future and then embarks on an existential journey across ruined, post-human landscapes, eventually making its way to a vast, oceanic garbage patch. It is driven by a desire to deliver a message to the woman who gave it life: “I wish you had created me so that I could die.” 4. This is, of course, precisely what the film does to its audience of plastic-bag-using viewers. This simple message, sent from a future after us, is remarkably compelling. Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us presents this thought experiment: What would happen if humans suddenly disappeared from the Earth? The book answers this question by reconstructing the world as it was before the rise of human civilization and speculating on what would transpire after it. That speculation provides some of the book’s best anecdotes. New York City’s subway tunnels would flood within two days without electricity, while the Uranimum-238 we have created will stop posing a threat to living organisms in about 4.5 billion years.5. Its descriptions of the pre-Anthropocene world are also important, as they describe the incredible richness and beauty of nature and suggest how the planet might regenerate. On the one hand, the book suggests that we should change out of a benevolent self-interest so that we can continue to live on this amazing planet. On the other, especially when he describes species and ecosystems pushed to the brink of
annihilation by human greed or indifference, one cannot help but wish humans really would just disappear. It seems easier to imagine the planet recovering than humans reforming. When the Wind Comes Right behind the Rain presents us with artworks that, viewed collectively, also bring to mind a world that is at once deeply marked by humans and devoid of them. Evidence of human influence suffuses both the form and content of the paintings, sculptures, and prints. There we are in the plastics, silicone, artificial crystals, digital images, and discarded clothing; in the hyper-saturated, lurid colors; in the once familiar forms and objects. But the human form, when it is rendered or referenced, feels distant or absent. We enter the exhibition, then, as witnesses to our own extinction, left to contemplate the Anthropocene from after its end. Although the artworks lack the didactic qualities of the film or book, they too ask us to consider how our choices in the present will affect the future. Artworks by Fabian Marcaccio, Jennifer Paige Cohen, and Paul O’Keefe explore how human objects and systems might transform and evolve after us. Marcaccio’s sculptural painting Soft Fascism evokes a flag frozen in a moment of dynamic transformation. An enigmatic emblem combining a paintbrush, assault rifle, axe, olive branch, wings, and dollar sign rests atop a densely textured surface of garishly colored, extruded plastics. These symbols seem to be melting and reforming into the colored bands that form the field of the flag. The textures of these bands suggest knit fabrics or even the continuous track of a tank, but there is also a sense that the materials have moved beyond their human designs and intended functions. The sense that inanimate objects can take on a life of their own carries over into Cohen’s sculptures. Discarded clothing twists and transforms before ossifying into uncanny forms that at once reference and reject the human
body. The sculptures gesture toward classical artforms such as the portrait bust or ceramic vessel, but their asymmetry and confounding dimensionality give them an unsettling, abiotic quality. In contrast, the individual parts of Paul O’Keefe’s sculpture Magenta Bubble seem familiar enough: rectilinear steel bars and a bulbous pad or pouch, united by a coat of Day-Glo paint. However, these industrial relics are recombined into a whole that defies any conceivable function. Lines that should continue, end. Others that should end, continue. The artworks all carry traces of human intention but seem to operate according to some nonhuman logic. If Marcaccio, Cohen, and O’Keefe conjure images of the transmogrified remains of late capitalism, then the paintings of Bret Shirley and Melinda Laszczynski suggest possible compositions of the lithic layer humans will leave behind. The surfaces of Shirley’s large, abstract paintings are covered in encrusted fields of shimmering blues, golds, and blacks. But there is something corrosive and artificial in their tantalizing glitter and glitz; they have the sickly beauty of a rainbow in an oil slick. Its surface covered in brilliant copper sulfate and gold and silver leaf, Remarkable Grave Goods reminds us that material accumulation neither forestalls death nor ensures enduring recognition. Our final legacy is mineral, not historical. In contrast to the elite accumulation distilled in Shirley’s paintings, Laszczynski presents the sedimented remains of middle- and lower-class consumption. Metallic glitter and plastic beads embedded in exuberantly colored paint skins substitute for gold and silver, the dollar store for Tiffany’s. Her titles evoke the simple and appealing language used to encourage impulse buys: Snacking Cake, Tiny Shiny, Island Sweet. As objects, the paintings have the same contrasting qualities as a Little Debbie cake or glittery trinket. They are appealing and revolting in equal measure. Presented in a grid, the paintings are like geological cross-sections from an
American landfill compressed into stone. Both artists hint at what the Anthropocene might look like, not as an archeological layer, but as a geological one.
as if those interconnections only become comprehensible in hindsight. It historicizes the present as the past of the other artworks in the exhibition.
While Shirley and Laszczynski uncover the material remains of our consumer society, Rebecca Aloisio and Patti Capaldi speculate on the material afterlives of immaterial images. Aloisio’s collages are built up out of layers of cut paper printed with brightly colored patterns and forms. Although there is a familiar quality to the printed images, they seem to have fragmented and enlarged into pure abstraction. From a distance, however, the lines and shapes created by the layers of cut paper coalesce into something that hovers on the verge of legibility—a spectral portrait in Backdrop No. 3 and standing figures with raised fists in Cast Suspended. Patti Capaldi’s spare and elegant Plot:4x4 stands apart from the riot of colors and textures in Aloisio’s work and elsewhere in the exhibition. Images of twigs overlap and intersect in clusters across a grid of fourteen sheets of aged, folded paper. Amid the play of repetition and variation there is a subtle tension between the seeming randomness of nature and the order imposed by culture. Although each twig initially appears to be unique, closer examination reveals each one to be derived from a single digital image that has been rotated and cropped in various ways. The flatness and iridescence of the printed image have a simulacral quality, the processes of scanning, editing, and printing having utterly severed it from its referent. The artwork has an elegiac tone, but what does it mourn? Perhaps the object of loss is not so much nature as it is culture, whose afterlife consists of an endless series of digital glitches and repetitions.
The title of the exhibition is taken from the song Oklahoma!, from the famous Rogers and Hammerstein musical of the same name.
The title of Sarah Sutton’s Autopoiesis refers to a system that can maintain and reproduce itself indefinitely. This is ironic given that the painting depicts a world that appears to be spiraling out of control. Leisure, exploitation, pollution, and natural disasters intertwine in a densely packed composition. The use of grayscale forces us to give equal attention to each element—water slides, oil barrels, amusement park rides, ships, storm clouds, a bikiniclad model, people walking through floodwaters—and to puzzle out how they relate to one another. While the painting aims to capture the economic and ecological complexities of the present, grayscale imbues it with a sense of historical distance,
Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain, And the wavin’ wheat, can sure smell sweet When the wind comes right behind the rain..6. Although often interpreted as a simplistic celebration of the American heartland, Frank Rich argues that the musical also plumbs the darker side of our national consciousness. 7.However, if Rich points out the bitter laced in the sweet of Oklahoma!, using the lyric as the title for this exhibition, I think, does the opposite. True, the exhibition presents a rather dark vision of what comes after capitalism and environmental catastrophe, but it also offers an opportunity to imagine sweeter possibilities that could follow the present storm. How can we change the present so that it becomes the past of a future that we want to be a part of? Amid the apocalyptic titles of the GF75 section of the library was this one: Becoming Good Ancestors. PAUL WILSON is an associate professor of art history at Ithaca College in New York, where he teaches contemporary art and museum studies. His research focuses on contemporary art that re-imagines the past and speculates on the future, particularly in Southern Africa and the Nordic region. Recent work appears in ASAP/Journal, Photography & Culture, and Public Art Dialogue. He was the recipient of a 2018 Fulbright Lecturer/Researcher Fellowship at the University of Namibia. Robinson Meyer, “The Cataclysmic Break That (Maybe) Occurred in 1950,” The Atlantic, April 16, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/04/great-debate-over-when-anthropocene-started/587194/. 2. Richard Grusin, introduction to After Extinction, edited by Richard Grusin ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), vii. 3. Veronica Hollinger, “Science Fiction as Archive Fever,” in Parabolas of Science Fiction, ed. Brian Attebery and Veronica Hollinger (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), 242. 4. Ramin Bahrani, dir., Plastic Bag (New York: Noruz Films/Gigantic Pictures, 2009). 5. Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (New York: St. Martin’s), 25, 205. 6.. Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Oklahoma!: Vocal Selections (New York: Williamson Music; Winona, MN: Hal Leonard, 1943), 58-59 7. Frank Rich, “Oklahoma Was Never Really O.K.,” New York Magazine, April 2, 2019, https://www.vulture.com/2019/04/frank-rich-oklahoma.html. 1.
ARTIST’S BRIEF BIOS REBECCA ALOISIO has been exploring the medium of collage and paint for the past several years. She employs a variety of technology along with traditional methods, using a mix of scanners, films, presses, screens, printers, and paints. Aloisio received her MFA from Syracuse University and currently teaches in the College of Art and Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant and has had solo exhibitions at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo NY, and the Schweinfurth Art Center in Auburn NY and received the 2019
Saint-Gaudens Memorial Fellowship.
PATTI CAPALDI’S hybrid practice includes print-media, multiples, installation, artists’
books and photo-based imagery. Exhibition venues include the Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston, Nylon Gallery, London, Metaphor Contemporary, Brooklyn, The University of RI, The Photographic Resource Center, Boston, CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, and most recently the Johnson Museum, Cornell University and the Michigan State University Kresge Gallery. Her work is instated in the flat-file viewing program at Pierogi Gallery, NYC and Caroll & Sons Gallery, Boston. Capaldi is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and the Lily Auchincloss Foundation Award (works on paper/multiples) and a recipient of a Gottlieb Foundation Grant along with artist residency grants from the MacDowell Corporation, the Millay Foundation, the Banff Center for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, AIR Program, Vienna, Austria, the Jentel Foundation, the Santa Fe Art Institute and the Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany. Capaldi received her MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design. She teaches art and design at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York. She has an upcoming group show at the Handwerker Gallery, Ithaca, NY. JENNIFER PAIGE COHEN lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been shown in
solo exhibitions at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York; The Pit, Los Angeles; Salon 94, New York; and White Columns, New York. Group exhibitions include The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut; Marinaro Gallery, New York; Rachel Uffner, New York; Regina Rex, New York; September Gallery, Hudson, New York; The Elizabeth Foundation, New York and Kate MacGarry, London among others. She has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, The Corporation of Yaddo, The Marie Walsh Sharpe/Walentas Space Program, Civitella Ranieri and was an artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation in 2015. In 2017 she was a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and received the 2019 Saint-Gaudens Memorial Fellowship. She has an MFA from Yale University and is represented by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery. MELINDA LASZCZYNSKI is an interdisciplinary artist working from a painting and collage
background. She received her MFA from the University of Houston. Laszczynski often uses found materials and objects, like lenticular prints, and is partial to the shiny, bright, and absurd. Her studio practice is playful, tactile, and reflective of contemporary experiences. She currently lives and works in Houston, Texas and was raised in Cleveland, Ohio. Laszczynski is represented by Galleri Urbane in Dallas. FABIAN MARCACCIO work investigates whether the traditional medium of painting can
survive in the digital age.He has used printmaking and transfer techniques to make paintings and became well know in the 1990s for his sculptural manipulations of the two-dimensional surface of canvas. More recently, he has infused his painting process with digital and industrial techniques. The results are environmental works, animations, and “Paintants” that combine digitally manipulated imagery, sculptural forms, and three dimensionally painted surfaces. Fabian Marcaccio was born in Rosario, Argentina in 1963. He lives and works in New York City. He has exhibited widely throughout the United States, Europe and South America. Major solo exhibitions include “Paintant Stories” Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro (2014), “Some USA Stories” Krefeld Kunstmuseen, Krefeld Germany (2012), “The Structural Canvas Paintants,” Lehmbruk Museum, Duisburg Germany (2012) and “From Altered Paintings to Paintants,” Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechtenstein (2004). Major group exhibitions include “Summer Projects,” PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2002), Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (2002) and the 44th Biennial of Contemporary American painting at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC (1995). Works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, MOMA, Blanton Museum of Art, Miami Museum of Art (MAM), and the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), among others.
PAUL O’KEEFE born in Dublin, Ireland in 1957, O’Keeffe attended St. Martin’s School
of Art, London and the National College of Art and Design Dublin. He subsequently studied at UCLA through a Fulbright Travel Scholarship, where he received an MFA in 1981. A professor emeritus at Kent State University, O’Keeffe currently lives and works in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. O’Keeffe has had solo and group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Paris and Dublin and London, including at White Columns, NY; Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin; Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; Akron Art Museum, OH, Dorsky Projects, NY; among others. His work is in public and private collections including The Arts Council of Ireland; Bayer USA, Pittsburgh; Progressive Insurance, Cleveland; Kaiser Permanante, Cleveland and the Cleveland Public Library. He is the recipient of a number of awards, including a 2019 Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Excellence Award, which the Ohio Arts Council has given him on twelve previous occasions. In 2017, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. He has also received an Arts Midwest/National Endowment for the Arts Award, a Ford Foundation grant and awards from the Arts Council of Ireland. BRET SHIRLEY is interested in the value of objects as they lie both within and outside of the traditional and often elite environments of art markets and luxury goods. through the creation of facsimiles of objects of value and desire. He hopes to bring in to question the functional use value of luxury goods and associated social statuses. The use of basic industrial minerals to approximate gemstones and rare minerals, high end automotive paints and the traditionally stigmatized gold and silver leaf fill in for the glossy eye catching pieces flooding art markets and design stores alike. Brett lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. SARAH SUTTON is a painter based in the Ithaca area of NY. Her work has been shown
in Europe and across the United States. She attended the Millay Colony artist residency, Sante Fe Art Institute residency funded by the Joan Mitchell Foundation. She has an upcoming residency at Yaddo and a solo exhibition at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, NY.
Sarah Sutton, Autopoiesis, 2019, 48 x 60 in, Oil on panel
Paul O’Keeffe, Magenta Bubble, 2012, 23 x 69.25 x 48.25 in, Steel, plastic, day-glo and flashe paints
Jennifer Paige Cohen, Shoulder Pad and Teardrop, 2015, 23 x 12 ½ x 9 in, Shirt, plaster, lime plaster
Patti Capaldi, Plot: 4x4, 98 x 45”, Digital print on folded paper (14.25”x22.5” each sheet)
Bret Shirley Left from left to right: Remarkable grave goods, 2019, 44 x 60 in, Copper sulfate, silver leaf, gold leaf and resin on linen; Slow violence, 2019, 44 x 60 in, Chrome alum, alum, copper sulfate, gold leaf, silver leaf, resin on linen; A lavishly funded army of new bewilderers, 2019, 44 x 60 in, Chrome alum, gold leaf, silver leaf, resin on linen
Melinda Laszczynski From top right, counterclockwise: Pink Smoke, 2017, 14 x 11 in, Vinyl film on raw panel Chunk, 2017, 10 x 8 in, Acrylic, spray paint, and paint skins on panel; Hawaiian Snow, 2019, 20 x 16 in, Acrylic, spray paint, and glitter on panel, Tiny Shiny, 2019, 12 x 9 in, Acrylic, ink, spray paint, glitter, crushed glass and paint skin on panel; Island Sweet, 2019, 20 x 16 in, Acrylic, spray paint, ink, paint skins, glitter on panel Hole, 2016, 10 x 8�, Acrylic and paint skins on panel; Center left: Snacking Cake, 2019, 12 x 9 in, Acrylic, ink, glitter, and paint skins on mylar on panel; Center right: Girl Chorus, 2019, 10 x 9 in, Acrylic, mediums, ink, crushed glass, spray paint, and vinyl film on panel
Rebecca Aloisio, Backdrop No. 3, 2018, 44 x 57 in, Mixed media, collage and paper
Rebecca Aloisio, Cast suspended, 2018, 44 x 57 in, Mixed media, collage and paper
Fabian Marcaccio, Soft-Fascist Abstract, 2016, 30 x 30 x 4.5 in, 3D printed plastic, alkyd paint, silicone
Jennifer Paige Cohen, Shoulder Pad and Teardrop, 2015, 23 x 12 ½ x 9 in, Shirt, plaster, lime plaster
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