Art in a literary context.
Guillermo Bert Luis Cornejo Hillary Gruenberg Matthew Heller Rebecca Lowry Susan Sironi
* Curated by Delia Cabral With an introductory essay by Peter Frank
Guillermo Bert's new series effects the active participatory fusion of ancient weaving and modern smart-phone technology (pictured above). Bert has transforms indigenous patterning into textile time capsules that, when scanned, take you back in time and allow you to hear long forgotten poems and sounds of native Chilean peoples. Bert's work has been exhibited and collected by prestigious galleries and museums such as the Museum of Latin American Art (Long Beach, CA), the Fowler Museum (Los Angeles, CA) and the Snite Museum (Indiana) as well as numerous museums in South America.
The stunning luminosity of Luis Cornejo's faces belies a humor and a not-so-subtle criticism of society's obsession with perfect beauty. Rather than Photoshop out wrinkles and cellulite, Cornejo adds two-dimensional dunce caps and Mickey Mouse ears to his otherwise perfect figures. In this exhibition he will tackle the fabled beauties of the fairy tale world. He has exhibited individually and collectively in galleries and museums in Nicaragua, Panama, El Salvador, Mexico, USA, Canada and Germany, enjoying sellout shows over the last several years.
Hillary Gruenberg's work transforms the written word into a multimedia sensory experience. She takes entire books and works them over from cover to cover, painting, coloring, cutting, and printing until each page becomes its own canvas. Perusing an entire book of Gruenberg’s is akin to visiting a museum. Gruenberg is an emerging talent with exhibitions in both Northern and Southern California. She won a Women Painters West Scholarship Grant Award in 2003.
Renowned for his ability to talk about dancing, Mathew Heller's pictorial homage to music launched his career; but his exploration of visual verse goes much deeper. Heller’s poetry pieces are graphically rhythmic, with black letters peeking out from a white mist. They explore the depths of love, need and the bond between parent and child. Heller has exhibited at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and has shown in prominent galleries throughout Los Angeles, where he has been collected by many of its influential celebrities.
Whether it's a woven sculpture made from a cassette tape upon which the entire New testament was recorded or a series of sweaters knit from home-mortgage documents, Rebecca Lowry creates relationships between texts, objects and actions as a means of modifying and reinforcing the associations inherent in them. She has exhibited in solo and group shows in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Germany, as well as at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art and the Museum of Ventura County.
Susan Sironi creates magical miniature sculptural worlds that live inside books - hands, gardens, flowers, walls within walls and castles - all exclusively through subtraction. Sironi's simple genius cuts around and into the existing words and images, adding and changing nothing to bring forth a new, alternate literary and yet purely visual universe. Sironi has shown primarily in California, with exhibitions in both Northern and Southern California including SOMArts in San Francisco, Marin MOCA and the Laguna Museum of Art.
Rebecca Lowry DARK RAINBOW 14 x 8 inches japanese romantic pulp comic book
Susan Sironi PINK GARDEN hand-cut and altered book
Hillary Gruenberg / SELF-PORTRAIT 3 / 12 x 16 inches / collage, watercolor and pencil on repurposed book
One picture, goes the saying, is worth a thousand words. But each word in fact contains several pictures. Writing is as much a pictorial as a literary craft; originating in hieroglyphs, written words emerged as stylized depictions of the things they connoted, and the traces of those depictions have persisted even in our phoneme-based alphabets. And, as those alphabets give way to the graphs and values of digital notation, those graphs and values continue to depend on and perpetuate the visual substance of linguistic, not to mention narrative, expression. Information is information, and as we tell it we hear it and as we hear it we see it. Long ago, the time-honored art of calligraphy, like that of song, made art out of words. Over the past century or two, the ever-increasing urge among artists to invade and absorb one another’s disciplines has made an art of words a broader and broader reality. One can dance not just stories, but language. One can perform letters and numbers, not just notes, as sounds. A silent theater accounts for words inferred. The word – the letter – is the sound seen. Every picture tells a story. But how do
pictures tell stories today? A picture composed of letters – or, conversely, a book made into a sculpture, or a textile woven to be read, or even a painting whose image re-tells us a story we already know in a way we didn’t know we knew – asks us to understand the “story” as a graphic event, a theater of the object or poetry of the image whose multi-dimensionality gives the imagination a tactile surface and unfolds the story over several kinds of time at once. Digital media make so much of this possible. And so much else refuses, even refutes, the still-restrictive conditions of digital media. Language is a kind of virtual medium, a refinement of experience into code. But that code itself is actual, with infinite potential to jump off the page, or the screen, to stimulate various senses directly. If you can read braille or sign language, you know this already. Artists can (at least figuratively) read braille and sign language and so many other stimuli besides. Their need to convey vast concepts and elaborate phenomena drives them to find and invent more and more expansive means of communication.
The word is not enough. The image is not enough. The book is not enough. The Internet is not enough. The breakthroughs of the past, driven by an ideology of change and experimentation, paved the direction and built some prototypes, but today’s artists want to crawl into the very impulse to language that drives human perception and bring forth some different, perhaps new sort of effect or concept or engine that rewires, and thus reveals, the mechanisms of meaning. And each artist in “Visual Chronicles” does so in a markedly distinct, and distinctive, way. Luis Cornejo depends entirely on pictures, but his subversions of these pictures, and the expectations they trigger in us, conjure whole new accounts. Similarly, and yet conversely, Matthew Heller’s paintings relate narratives in subversive ways, allowing themselves to function as pages and, at the same time, pictures of pages. Hilary Gruenberg, by contrast, fabricates pages of pictures, pictorializing whole books, invading and transforming their contents. Susan Sironi takes this process a physical step further by regarding the book as a sculptural rather than merely pictorial
site and cutting and gouging through pages to reveal topographic relationships. Rebecca Lowry’s objects consist not of pages or books but of recorded tape – a slowly vanishing medium that has bridged the analog and digital eras and represents the transmutation of the spoken word into physical, but ironically invisible, form. Guillermo Bert realizes the most dramatic conflation of old and new by translating ancient lore into up-to-the-minute QR codes – which are then woven back into indigenous form by the people whose lore it is (their textiles already remarkably similar to the increasingly ubiquitous codes).
These artists do not privilege the image, and/or the object, over the word. But neither do they subject visual practice to verbal. They regard the two realms of human expression as equal – and as congruent, the borders between their practice shifting and perhaps arbitrary. They don’t simply work in between language and image, they work among language(s) and image(s). They have created animals of the soil and galloping plants, hybrids that have always been in human imagination – and, in case,
Luis Cornejo MOSTACHO AZUL 51 x 39.25 inches oil and acrylic on canvas
hybrids invented from what is already human invention. Our “visual chronicles” go back millennia; what is new here is not the idea of doing this, but what these artists have done, and how they’ve done it.
Peter Frank Los Angeles-New York August 2012
_ Peter Frank is Associate Editor of Fabrik magazine and art critic for the Huffington Post. He has served as critic for the LA Weekly, the Village Voice and the SoHo Weekly News, and as Editor of Visions Art Quarterly and THEmagazine Los Angeles, among other publications. Frank has curated exhibitions for many insitutions throughout the United States and abroad and has written numerous books and catalogs. Rebecca Lowry ASSORTED DARKS Consisting of four Shakespeare tragedies, each dramatized on cassette tape: Macbeth, King Lear, Othello and Hamlet.
3.5 x 3.5 x 1.75 inches magnetic cassette tape with painted wood box
Matthew Heller THE URGENCY (poem) 56 x 81.5 inches limited edition print, edition of 8
Guillermo Bert PSALM 1492 Based on a poem by a Mapuche poet, Graciela Huinao From the Encoded Textile Series 76 x 41 inches Textile woven by a Mapuche weaver from the south of Chile
Susan Sironi / JANE’S HAND / 14 x 9.5 x 1 inches / hand-cut and altered book
Matthew Heller I NEED YOU TO LOVE ME (collaboration with artist’s son) 17 x 12 inches crayon and pencil on paper
Rebecca Lowry SUBSTANTIAL EVERYDAY FOR YOU 13 x 8 inches japanese romantic pulp comic book
Rebecca Lowry LETTERS Contents of tape: drunk as a hoot owl / writing letters by thunderstorm, written and read by Jack Kerouac
11 x 8 inches magnetic cassette tape on panel
Matthew Heller I WANT YOU TO LOVE ME (collaboration with artist’s son) 17 x 12 inches crayon and pencil on paper
Susan Sironi / (both) UNTITLED / 16.5 x 16.5 inches / collage with silkscreen on acrylic
Hillary Gruenberg / SELF-PORTRAIT 4 / 12 x 16 inches / collage, watercolor and pencil on repurposed book
Rebecca Lowry / AMERICAN (GINSBERG) / Contents of tape: a version of the poem “America” written and read by Allen Ginsberg / 18 x 24 inches / magnetic cassette tape on panel
Luis Cornejo FU 51 x 39.25 inches oil and acrylic on canvas
Rebecca Lowry ADVENTURES OF THE LONE RANGER Contents of tape: Dramatizations of The Adventures of the Lone Ranger
2 x 2 x 2 inches magnetic cassette tape with painted wood box
Susan Sironi / SELF-PORTRAIT, PROFILE / 11 x 8.5 x 1 inches / hand-cut and altered book
Hillary Gruenberg / SELF-PORTRAIT 6 / 12 x 16 inches / collage, watercolor and pencil on repurposed book
Hillary Gruenberg / SELF-PORTRAIT 7 / 12 x 16 inches / collage, watercolor and pencil on repurposed book
Hillary Gruenberg / Selections from UNTITLED / 14 x 10.5 x 2 inches / watercolor and pencil on paper throughout handmade book
Susan Sironi / SELF-PORTRAIT, FOOT / 14 x 9.5 x 1 inches / hand-cut and altered book
Rebecca Lowry / RED WHEELBARROW / Contents of tape: so much depends / upon // a red wheel / barrow // glazed with rain / water // beside the white / chickens / written and read by W. C. Williams / 12 x 9 inches / magnetic cassette tape on panel
Published on the occasion of the exhibition
Curated by Delia Cabral deliacabral.com All images reproduced with permission of the artists For more information on the gallery, please visit saltfineart.com
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