DELUGE IN 14 WEEKS, AND COUNTING

the first, rough draft for my bfa show. 

“Ciphers and Shrines (Notes on Visual Language)”


As a product of my era, it is inevitable that my sense of history is viewed through the bias of a personal lens. Influence in our time is incredibly abundant and widespread. The individual is faced with the problem of prioritizing what information should be retained, and what is discarded, but one cannot be completely aware of all of what is actually retained and used. My images, words and ideas are the product of every day I have been alive and aware, and my subjective version of history is vast, but is still only a small fraction of actual history. The choice of making art in this condition is complex, and something that must be thought about and practiced constantly. The artist performs ritual, and the product is like a personal visual mythology. What I am making is a shrine to this mythology.
The installation will consist of three major parts: works on paper, videos shown on small televisions, and a sculptural component. The works on paper will be a combination of photographs, collages, drawings, and printed text. They will deal with personal iconography that has been constructed via my perception of various visual cultures. Sources are both historical and contemporary. The drawings and collages will use the icon more literally, and will stylistically refer to the history of drawing and painting. The photographs will be more of a way of alluding to the actual imagery that my aesthetic sensibilities are owed. Some will be actual recreations of other works, and some will share visual similarities.
In the sculptural component, photographs will be placed in small frames and lockets, making them into intimate or sentimental objects. They will be a personal collection, using family photographs and other images that reference my loosely constructed sense of history. Text will be placed over the images as a way to make connections between viewers, culture at large, and myself. They will be suspended from either fabricated tree branches or antlers, which will be hung high above the eye level of the viewer. What they are hung from will be a natural component within an interior setting, referencing some unknown natural order that lingers above.
Finally, the last major component will be five videos. These will be shown on small televisions placed on the floor. Ideally, The videos will be simple loops showing aspects associated with the practice of ritual. The more subtle components of sound and writing will be included, as well as different objects placed on shelves, in order to encourage interactivity and create unity with the space. The environment being created will be both visually and physically engaging on different levels. Though a lot is being included, it will be designed in such a way so that it is not especially crowded.
My influence for this project is theoretically incalculable, and that is the conceptual basis, but it can be seen trough historical context in the paintings of Piero Di Cosimo and Hieronymus Bosch. Similarities in spatial engagement can be seen with Ernesto Neto, and many other contemporary installation artists. My photographic inspiration for both the still pictures and video is coming mainly from film. My interest in non-linearity and ritual is shared with Maya Deren. Interest in the drama of cinematic lighting is shared with Steven Speilburg, but is also heavily influenced by Baroque painting. My main interest with this installed space is to bring together these specific influences with ones more broad and lesser known. The viewer becomes involved, and engages with what is shown through a subjective and coded visual language, and they will have to interpret this through their own similarly constructed rationale.

CAPITAL LETTERS ARE CATCHING ON

my body is sore from sanding the glen ligon text on the floor.





coming soon:

-summer camp

-flash animation (four dimensions!)

-screen printing (respectable reproducibility)

-installation for marshall arts, feat. indoor grass and televised landscapes

-installation feat. tiny reproduced molds, action words, and projected video

-official website

-less money, less problems



what are you doing this summer?

MEMPHIS GALLERY TOUR

It is an interesting experience to see the way art is viewed differently in different parts of a city. In Memphis, a city where the gallery scene is especially odd, this experience becomes especially interesting. If you start out on the eastern side and make your way west, you will notice dramatic shifts in the perception of art that are on par with the way you can see economic class shifts taking place across the span of single city streets here.

We started in East Memphis at the David Lusk Gallery. The placement of this gallery seems to give it away before you even enter the space. The gallery is located towards the back of a shopping center, sandwiched between two recognizable chain home decorating stores. This gives off the impression that this would be an appropriate place to go if you want to buy a painting to match the new curtains you just bought, but despite this impression, the work we see here is actually turns out to be engaging. There are two artists with work on display at David Lusk right now. Kat Gore holds it down in the front of the gallery, with a series of paintings mostly in the 30x30” range focusing on pattern. Seeing this work in a space like this conjures thoughts of the painting as decoration. However, there does seem to be a sort of valid conceptual dialogue taking place here. There is layering present in the pieces that seems to ask the viewer to contemplate what is being hidden and what is revealed. Sure enough, if we choose to read her statement, which turns out to be quite well written, this idea is central to the work. Behind the wall of the front desk, the work of painter J Ivcevich is on display. To me, this work seems immediately more appealing. The work shown here are mostly quiet paintings of urban scenes with Arabic script showing up here and there. The paint is handled in the manner of flatness, with embossed outlines that jut out from the canvas just enough to give them personality and establish a relationship with the viewer. There is a focus on looking up within the images, and the quietness of the flat colors in juxtaposition with urban themes seems to reflect on ideas of urban living, and the way you can stand in a crowd of strangers and still feel alone.

In the David Lusk Gallery, no ID tags are placed next to the paintings. On one hand, this is frustrating, because we don’t know the titles of the paintings. On the other, it is a relief that we don’t know the price of the paintings. This is very different from the next stop on our gallery tour, Perry Nicole Fine Art. If you go there now, you will find a collection of overpriced, ready to buy landscape paintings and abstract sculptures. If the David Lusk was a gallery geared towards the art-buying patron, at least it was either a patron with shame, or one legitimately interested in the work they are buying. The paintings and sculptures at Perry Nicole are above-the-mantle pieces at best, and the buyer who goes here is probably not ashamed of that. The cheapest painting here is over $800 and less than 10x10”, not counting the gaudy frame. If you’re in the mood to splurge, you can walk away with a mediocre bronze-cast abstract sculpture for a mere $45,000.

The Memphis art scene manages to redeem itself as we get back to it’s roots. Downtown at the Powerhouse, the Glen Ligon exhibition “Love and Theft” is on it’s last week of display. This exhibition is one that was long overdue in Memphis. The show combines a wallpaper installation of an twice-appropriated civil rights demonstration photograph, several black on gold text paintings of Richard Pryor jokes, the word “America” spelled out in the form of a flickering neon sign, along with other elements, all into a powerful installation that challenges that challenges racial stereotypes in a city where racism is still undeniably a huge problem. There are less commidifiable art objects in this show, but the ones that are (the neon "America" sign) are being bought by the likes of museums, rather than individual patrons. The Glen Ligon show is proof that Powerhouse is meeting it’s intended goal of bringing nationally recognized artists into the Memphis art scene, and furthering this idea by bringing artists this relevant to our experience.

GUSHING

Disclaimer: The assignment was to write a visceral response to an artwork. My writing is never too visceral. This is the best I could do.

FRANCIS BACON



The paintings of Francis Bacon seem to be solely about invoking a kind of visceral response. Even though when Francis talks about his work, he says a lot about the beauty of the colors of flesh and the human form, this is not really what we get from the images. The images seem to be more about power than beauty. We often see figures placed against sickly, undefined backgrounds. Sometimes they are deliberately confined within line-drawing-style cubes representing architecture. The stark environments read as a sort of psychological landscape, but not one that is healthy. The cubes drawn around screaming figures read as a sort of confining architecture of the psyche, or the inevitable psychological distance that is always present between two humans. The images are bleak and borderline frightening, but they possess their own kind of beauty in a tortured way. Francis talks about desperately trying to imitate the colors of the flesh on the inside of the mouth, but the mouths always turn out black. This kind of desperate approach, or always trying to get at something but never actually getting there seems to exemplify the human condition in and of itself. The figures keep screaming, and most of the time they are not anchored within the space; They seem to be vanishing, sometimes literally with halves of heads evaporating into space; Francis Bacon dosen’t let us forget our mortality. All of these ideas come to us in the form of immediate sensation. The images of Francis Bacon have a starkness and power that penetrates our psyche within the first few seconds of viewing the paintings. They are psychologically tortured images coming from a psychologically tortured man reminding us of our own psychological torture, even if we’ve never had any. In this sense, these images transcend interpretation. These were never intended to be overanalyzed. It seems the only proper response to one of Francis’s paintings is to scream back at it.

POSTMODERN CATALOG ESSAY

The assignment was to write a catalog essay in the postmodern tradition of excessive citation to an exhibition of our own work. Here it is:


What is a photograph (for “photography” see “Photography for Dummies: Second Edition” by Russell Hart)? To understand the work of Taylor Martin we must find an answer to this question, so we can therefore gain an understanding of underlying concepts (for “concept” see “The Big Book of Concepts” by Gregory L. Murphy). When we have come to a reasonable conclusion to this problem, we can then begin to unpack the work. Everything we see in Martin’s photographs is real (for “the real” see “Desert of the real, five essays on September 11th and related dates” by Slavoj Zizek). Taylor is the author (for “the author” see “The Death of the Author” in Image-Music-Text by Roland Barthes) of photographs that question our standard conventions of processing information (for “information” see “Information: The New Language of Science” by Hans Christen von Baeyer) and put all other preconceived modes of representation (for “modes of representation” see “Les Modes de Representation Dans L'Union Europeenne by Sabine Saurugger) to shame. All of a sudden, after viewing this exhibition (for “exhibition” see “What Makes a Great Exhibition” by Paula Marincola), our place in the world seems to make sense. Maybe our human (for “human” see “Human, All Too Human” by Fredrich Willhelm Nietzsche) condition (for “condition” see “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge by Jean-Francois Lyotard) really isn’t so bad.

ALBUM REVIEW

No Age -- "Nouns" released May 2008


LA based group No Age gives us the the perfect summer record for 2008 a month early. This album is the duo's first full-length, following up 2007's critically acclaimed EP Weirdo Rippers. e got to hear the band's more experimetal side with Weirdo Rippers, and Nouns is a great follow up with coherence that was not present in the EP. You could fit the band's sound within the genre of garage rock, only coming out of LA seems to give the group an edge. We hear sunny guitar riffs and a quality of recording not so typical to garage rock you hear coming out of Memphis. The band consists of two members, a drummer/vocalist and a guitar player. We also hear some intense layering of self recorded samples. The duo aspect gives the band's sound vitality and directness that is refreshing, yet they make us wonder how just two members are able to make this much noise. While some tracks are in keeping with their experimental roots, we also get single-worthy summer tracks like 'Eraser', along with power driven anthems like 'Teen Creeps'. While this is probably the poppiest record we've heard from No Age to date, it is also the most well rounded and fully realized.

SNAP JUDGEMENTS

Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography


Nontsikelelo "Lolo" Veleko -- "Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder"


If you plan to view this new exhibition of contemporary photography only once, you are in for an overwhelming experience. "Snap Judgements" is a collection of over 200 photographically-based works representing contemporary art practice over the whole continent of Africa, put together by curator Okwui Enwezor. The show is undeniabley powerful, and carries with it intricate layers upon layers of the history of an entire continent, and presents it to a Western viewer to comprehend, one typically unaware of the complexity of this history. An exhibition like this one is rare, and difficult to find comparisons for. One of the only exhibitions of it's kind was also organized by Enwezor himself for the New York Guggenhiem in 1996, called In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present". In a way, Snap Judgements is the sucessor to this show. However, "In/Sight" showed works made in more Modernist traditions, while "Snap Judgments" shows cutting edge contemporary works of photography, installation, and video documentaton of performance.

Shows at the Brooks are always inevitably a little crowded, but the hanging of Snap Judgements is handled better than shows we've seen here in the past. This time, they've managed to put together 200+ works challenging photography as a medium of representation into a space that could stand to be larger, but have still managed to give everything room to breathe. You might say that a show like "Snap Judgments" is one that is long overdue, because it is. Yet it is exciting that this show is in Memphis, a city where the message of the collection resonates louder than it would in other cities.