Artist: Jan Maarten Voskuil

Jan Maarten Voskuil interests me because he considers himself a "painter" but pushes himself to find further satisfaction from painting by almost escaping it with processes not traditionally associated with painting. This is something I try to do with my photography.

Quotes:

(When asked: Are you happy at the prospect of working on this practice for the foreseeable future?)That's a good question. I do see my work as a constant flow of possible solutions for artistic problems. I recently made a work called One Way of Squeezing a Rectangle Into a Corner and of course there are endless ways to squeeze a rectangle into a corner, both in size and shape. How many do I intend to execute? When do I stop? I don't know. I discussed this with my colleague and friend Jochem van der Spek who makes beautiful real time drawing machines (www.dynamica.org). He creates endless and continually changing drawings. So he doesn't have to choose. The machine simple starts making everything and never ends or concludes. Maybe the only reasonable answer to your question is that I stop when I get bored.

-Jan Maarten Voskuil in interview with HUH. Magazine

Speaking about collaboration process with Christine Rusche:

We both see our selves as pure painters and at the same time we are not able to find a satisfying solution to just paint a canvas. Somehow we have to legitimate all we do and since there is no legitimation for painting we argue it, reduce it, escape it, attack or find legitimation in the location. We both don't know what to do with colour; it's so personal, subjective and narrative. I mean it's beautiful, but anything goes.

-Jan Maarten Voskuil in interview with HUH. Magazine

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Idea: Paper

In my last meeting with Paul he suggested I start experimenting with different kinds of paper for printing and for cutting my circles out of. I've started to think about all the different options there are with paper types, and it's almost overwhelming how many choices there are.

Letha Wilson

"Granite Tumbler" 2010. C-Print, Frame, Plexiglass, rubber. 30"x13"x3"

"Wall Cross Horse Shoe Canon" 2010. Digital C-print, Drywall, Joint Compound, paint. 28"x24"x3"

This artist has a process I could learn a lot from. She mixes sculpture and printing.

"My artwork uses images and materials from the natural landscape as a starting point for interpretation and confrontation. My work creates relationships between architecture and nature, and the gallery space and the American wilderness"

(Wilson, Letha. "P.S.1: Studio Visit: Letha Wilson". P.S.1, MoMa. New York, New York. 2009.
http://ps1.org/studio-visit/artist/letha-wilson)

"My interest in the relationship between interior architecture and the natural world has also led to recent work that juxtaposes reclaimed drywall into outdoors and site-specific installations."
(Wilson, Letha. "Hot Picks: Letha Wilson" SmackMelon.org. 2009
http://smackmellon.org/index.php/contact/hot_picks/letha_wilson1/)

Artist: Philipp Schaerer

Schaerer's work is attractive to me on a purely aesthetic level, but also poses interesting questions that make me think about the concepts of my own work. He examines the difference between reality and the image. He creates fictional architectural forms specifically to photograph and modify in order to challenge his viewer. I like to think of my process in a similar way. 


Bio from Schaerer's website:
After graduating from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL) as an architect in 2000, Philipp Schaerer (1972) worked as an architect and knowledge manager for Herzog & de Meuron in Basel (2000-2006). During his four years working as a research assistant at the chair of Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD) at the Faculty of Architecture (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich) under Prof. Dr. Ludger Hovestadt, he was able to continuously develop his knowledge in the area of digital image processing. Working as a freelance architect and image creator today, his main interest lies not only in design and in the execution of small scale projects, but also in creating images of architecture and the built environment. His work comments on this issue.


Quotes:
"The main focus of my interest lies in the creation of images which try to reflect a built, exaggerated reality. Today, digital image editing allows the creation of images which are nearly impossible to distinguish from a photograph. But what other image strategies and esthetics can be pursued with the help of digital image techniques – image strategies which are not only aimed at the most exact realization of photographic rendition? Working with images, I am interested in the creation of images which in fact are based on a photographic language, but which can be abstract, model-like and exaggerated and try to reformulate the question of the differentiation between reality and image."
-Statement from Schaerer's website


"I really love 'BILDBAUTEN' the architectonic photograph series by Philipp Schaerer. The series of images with the title "Bildbauten“ deals with the effect and the claim to credibility of images of architecture that appear to be photographs. It further questions the medium “photograph” as a documentary piece of evidence depicting reality.
Frontal views of fictional architectures serve as an example. By means of their exaggerated and orchestrated way of representation, they model themselves on the object-like appearance and the formal language of contemporary architecture in a rather ironic way. All images try to reproduce a reality. They are not a photograph; instead, they were newly designed and constructed from scratch by means of image synthesis and digital image editing."

-(http://www.triangulationblog.com/2010/09/bildbauten-by-philipp-schaerer.html)

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Idea: Sculpture

Sculpture:
noun
the art of making two- or three-dimensional representative or abstract forms, esp. by carving stone or wood or by casting metal or plaster.
• a work of such a kind : a bronze sculpture | a collection of sculpture.
• Zoology & Botany raised or sunken patterns or texture on the surface of a shell, pollen grain, cuticle, or other biological specimen.
(Oxford American Dictionary)


As I experiment with physically cutting out sections from my prints and play with mounting them away from the wall, I am thinking more about traditional presentation methods, and what it means to break them. The dictionary definition is interesting to me because they define sculpture as either 2 or 3 dimensional, when I've assumed most people consider sculpture purely 3-d. Can prints of photographs be sculptures when raised from the wall and their traditional flat plane interrupted by cutting? I'm not so much worried about finding a word to define my potential process, but I am interested in thinking about sculpture to further inspire my transformation of my prints and enhance my representation of my blocked out areas in my existing images.

Eva Hesse, Untitled (Rope Piece) 1970

One of my favorite "sculptors" who has served as a constant inspiration to me. She often worked in ways that did not normally pertain to sculpture.

Eva Hesse by Lucy R Lippard would be a good text to read to think about how sculpture is perceived, and how sculpture that pushed boundaries of its time was criticized and interpreted. 
"Lucy Lippard’s Eva Hesse combines biography and criticism, formal analysis and psychological readings, to present a complete portrait of the life and work of this complex and compelling artist."


"Sculpture is a three-dimensional object with a message... Painting is an object with a three-dimensional message." (Bob Brendle)


"I say that the art of sculpture is eight times as great as any other art based on drawing, because a statue has eight views and they must all be equally good." (Benvenuto Cellini)

Artist: Sea Hyun Lee

Sea Hyun Lee's process is something I can relate to in my own work. His paintings show landscapes of North and South Korea, but do not aim to be political. They deal with his own sense of loss and put forward ideas about nostalgia and utopia. I like to learn about artists who are dealing with subject I can relate to but use processes to express there ideas and create that are visually very different than mine. 


Quotes:
"Lee is of course concerned with vanishings; these are paintings of a lost past, of disappearing landscapes and eroding memories. “The landscape no longer exists, and so I have to paint it,” Lee explains. But his paintings are never simply about the longing to recover the past. They are, instead, about the very process of reconstitution itself. They are concerned with a trauma that is not necessarily located in the past, but that is perhaps instead located in the endless attempt to recapitulate the past."
-from Union Gallery's website


"This is where the emotional power of Lee’s paintings resides - in their depiction of trauma, but also in their depiction of the devices we use to refute the fact and the evidence of that trauma. The human compulsion towards narratives of wholeness and totality is rendered with an acute awareness of its futility, as well as its potential to achieve a kind of grace. Lee represents both the landscape of fragmentation and the restored landscape of completion in equal measure."
-from Union Gallery's website

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Denise Markonish lecture questions/response

Initial Questions:
What jobs in the museum field did you have before becoming a curator?

Were you ever a practicing artist? If so, how has this affected your job as a curator?

Response
I really enjoyed this lecture. I would love to have Markonish's job one day. I liked learning about this museum as I am preparing for a move to Connecticut and am interested in new places to visit and possibly work in the future. I liked her "Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape" exhibit. She seems to have good clear ideas and successful ways of executing them. Her extensive study of contemporary Canadian artists was also extremely interesting. She is choosing topics that she has not seen addressed before and therefore inspiring interest from viewers who want to learn and see something new. I was surprised at how small the staff is at Mass MoCA. Makes the job market seem daunting.

My questions were not really answered, although I did get the feeling she was never a practicing artist. I am now more interested in knowing how she got the jobs she did, and what she recommends to other people trying to find jobs in her field.

Artist: Georges Rousse

An artist who successfully inserts a circle into his photographs! Couldn't have asked for a better example of a way to improve on something that was mentioned as a weakness of my work during my last critique. I am also interested in his philosophy, and why he uses geometric shapes. This artist truly inspires me. Wish I would have discovered him sooner. 


There many examples of his work I would like to reference. Unfortunately the artist's website forces you to save the images with this bizarre template around them.

Quotes:


He has invented 'Geometrism' in space, at once knowing and strange. And it has an amazing subtlety: there are no accidents in his work. Everything is planned, from its very inception to the final snapshot.
Philippe Dagen, Le Monde, January 1, 1986.


The idea that drives my work, that I hope to push to the extreme, is to make an intervention on an entire building.. I would make a whole sculpture out of the building's mass and photograph it, then the building would be destroyed.
Discussion with Jerome Sans in Flash Art, Spring 1984.


In Georges Rousse, we see an actor in search for another mode of spatial experience, based on his critical analysis of space. A sensibility of deconstruction emerges in these settings, in the tension between inside and outside, between floors and ceilings, between direct and reflected sights, in this aesthetic of chaos, confusion and imbalance.
Isabelle Alzieu in "Georges Rousse : Plasticité des espaces déconstruits" in Espaces transfigurés - À partir de l'oeuvre de Georges Rousse, PUP 2007.


I use white because it symbolizes light and black because, on the contrary, it represents earth's darkness.
Georges Rousse


His use of maps of cities, buildings, shifts from the memory of landscapes through which he has travelled, towards a memory of their own history. Excerpt from the interview "Georges Roussse -
Philippe Piguet" in the exhibition catalog at Chateauroux museum, 2003.


Constructions are organized entirely around a partition: a continuity/discontinuity between painted space and real space, a remotely geometrical expanse in which colour plays the abstraction game fully. Michéle Moutashar, "L'esprit des lieux," in Georges Rousse Arles, Editions Actes Sud, 2006.


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