It is paradoxical that Miya Ando‘s work has an intrinsic sense of tranquility and harmony, since her influences couldn’t be more conflicting and diverse. Of Japanese American descent, she grew up among Buddhist priests and sword smiths in a temple in Okayama in Japan. Leaving Japan, she got her bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley and then attended Yale. She learned from the master metal smith Hattori Studio in Japan and combines these methods with modern industrial technology to create her art. The resulting abstract gradations seem fragile and ethereal – the heavy physical work that goes into their creation is another contradictory element in Ando’s oevre.
It was intriguing to see that this ambiguity also found its way into Miya’s studio. Sprinkled on top of, in between, and under heavy machinery were a variety of playful elements – necklaces, wooden creatures, a skateboard, plastic flowers. A charming disarray with her meditative pieces as a gentle contrast, that subtly reflected the light and gave a sense of piece to the scenery.
Miay herself embodies these opposite sides of the spectrum as well, a soft voice and gentle manner, paired with strong hands and an obvious determination and vision for her work. Her latest series, Mujo (Impermanence), is exhibited at Sundaram Tagore in Chelsea from June 20 – July 20 (www.sundaramtagore.com, 547 W 27th Street. Opening reception is on June 20 from 6-8pm).
Where are you from? I’m from Santa Cruz and Okayama Where do you currently live? Manhattan How did you decide to become an artist? I followed my path. What is your creative process? I attend to the present, try to get to a place of stillness and then execute my visions. Define art: Everything is art. Favorite artists: James Turrell, Lee Ufan, Sara Sze, Teresita Fernandez, Malevich, Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin, Mariko Mori, Vija Celmins, Olafur Eliasson, Anish Kapoor Best exhibit you’ve seen recently and why you liked it: Tokyo Avant Garde at MOMA, it reminded me of my mom.
Duron Jackson is a painter, sculptor, video, installation, and performance artist. The intense richness of his creative energy is superbly counterbalanced by his refined and sophisticated mind, and is immediately felt when he is present. Exploring the African American experience through American history, the intellectual framework Jackson provides for his pieces makes for an intriguing interplay of emotion and intellect, giving depth and substance to his work that lingers long after viewing.
Jackson works in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The lightflooded, elegant yet raw space with beautiful views again is host to intriguing opposites, as the artist has created an authentic chaos within the structured, clean lines of the studio.
Rikers Island, 2010, graphite on blackboard
Where are you from?
Harlem, USA
Where do you currently live?
Brooklyn, New York – very soon to be Salvador da Bahia, Brazil for a year to do a Fulbright Research Fellowship
How did you decide to become an artist?
I’ve been an artist my whole life, I was highly encouraged as a child mostly by both grandmothers.
What is your creative process?
Some ideas I hold on to for years, then an opportunity comes, or an idea refuses to remain dormant and suddenly manifests. There’s usually a long gestation period, sometimes months of thinking of a thing, then research and execution. In the end, nothing remains as I originally imagined.
Define art:
Tangible magic: evidence of things unseen.
Favorite artists:
I have many, but here’s some – Egon Schiele, Giacometti, Romare Bearden, Yves Klein, Kerry James Marshall, Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, Doris Salcedo, Cildo Meireles, Emanoel Araujo, Harun Farocki, David Hammonds, Glenn Ligon, Rachel Whiteread, Sanford Biggers, Simon Starling,
Best exhibit you’ve seen recently and why you liked it:
Mickalene Thomas at Brooklyn Museum and Lehmann Maupin Gallery – Both shows were very personal, she gave the viewer so much. The scale of the paintings, variety of mediums, deeply personal content, kept just enough for herself, left you wanting more, and then delivered again and again. A complete game changer.
The charm of Kristof Wickman‘s studio in Bushwick lies in the details. On first view being your somewhat typical Bushwick studio used by emerging New York artists – somewhat spacious, somewhat light, industrial area, creepy stairway, – on closer inspection the space features stuffed animals (tucked away in canvas bags) and curious cut outs of photos and such, which are existing besides and among his tools and works in progress. The subtle sense of humor characteristic for his sculptures and installations are not only felt in Wickman the person, but extended into his work environment.
Kristof is a part of the Brooklyn Museum’s series Raw/Cooked, which focuses on emerging Brooklyn based artists and gives them their first museum show.
How did you decide to become an artist?
It wasn’t a decision as much as it is a default mode that I’m continually coming to terms with, like Bill Murray in Ground Hog Day. Growing up, my father was designing and building furniture and my mother had a painting conservation business. My childhood surroundings were aesthetically diverse, but I don’t think I really paid attention to form until my Air Jordan obsession in 2nd grade. I think that’s when I fell in love with things and had a desire to make things.
Self Portrait, 2010
What is your creative process?
I’m attracted to elegant and awkward forms that are affected by weight and compression– things that have a physical and emotional content, more so than intellectual. For me ‘sculpting’ involves exploiting and nurturing these things.
Define art:
For me it’s a slippery word. The more I think about its definition the more it eludes me. At it’s best it alters consciousness and messes with your perception of the world. An art experience can be a perceptual palate cleansing. It can also grant you permission to feel and act in different ways. It can enable you to change your life. At its worst it’s pure redundancy. I’ll re-read this sometime in the future and probably wonder what I was thinking. I can never pin it down but I can try.
Untitled, 2012
Favorite artists:
Right now, HC Westerman, Ulysses Davis, Auguste Rodin, Charles Ray…
Best exhibit you’ve seen recently and why you liked it:
African innovations at the Brooklyn museum. Beautiful ritual textiles and carvings that make the European Modernists feel like dumbed down imitators of an advanced visual vocabulary. See the ceremonial Elvis Mask for the Nayu Society, ca. 1977.
Jim Torok’s storyboards have the intriguing attribute of discussing highly controversial and complex subject matters (God, Fear, ) with a childlike naivite that is at the same time completely disarming and makes you identify and sympathize with its creator.
When I entered Jim’s studio, I took a similar instant liking to the airy, wide-open space with wooden floors and big windows, located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It’s a living quarter that hasn’t decided if it’s industrial or simply generous in space, the most intriguing aspect being the mix of personal traces and organized exhibition of artwork. With two such contrasting energies present, I was not surprised to discover that Jim has a second body of work completely different from his storyboards: realistic portraiture paintings in miniscule formats.
Where are you from?
I am from Indiana.
Where do you currently live?
Brooklyn, New York.
How did you decide to become an artist?
I started at a very early age, before I remember. I was just always an artist.
What is your creative process?
I do a lot of work and then I put it away, and then I look at it later and see if I like what I have done.
Define art:
Art is what artists make.
Favorite artists:
Chuck Close, Ed Ruscha, Gerhart Richter, Rudolf Stingle, Neo Rausch.
Best exhibit you’ve seen recently and why you liked it:
Mary Carlson’s recent show at Sudio 10 was the best show. I liked everything in it, specially the figures of the saints with the cocktail swords.
Editor’s note: We are proud to present our first “visit” of 2013, a stunning portrait of artist Miru Kim by our own Christina Von Messling. -SV
Even though Miru Kim did not become a doctor (she switched from pre-med to art in college), her passion for dissecting things have found application in her artistic work. This New York City based artist is best known for her photographs of the underbelly of urban landscapes that lies just beneath our everyday reality: she puts her attention on closed-off subway tunnels, abandoned industrial spaces, sewers, catacombs, and shipyards, photographing herself naked in these spaces and therefore reclaiming them in a childlike manner, breathing fresh life into them. Her latest work focuses on the state of being of pigs that are being bred for consumption, visiting hog farms throughout the country. Even though meat consumption is part of our routines, the animals we are consuming are peculiarly unfamiliar and removed from us. Especially pigs are often seen as dirty and worthless, but interestingly they are often extremely similar to humans in their physiology. Kim examines this aspect in respect to our own humanity in a series of images and videos.
Where do you currently live?
I live in New York City.
How did you decide to become an artist?
For me it sounds a bit awkward to say that I decided to become an artist, since art is something that is infused in everyday life and it’s difficult to even say that I am “an artist.” I know most people mean by this term that one makes income from making fine art and that it’s the main profession, but for me I never dreamed of being professional in anything, I just started doing things that made me happy and following my passions, and in that process, I started getting recognized and making some income from the work I was doing, just enough to keep doing something new that interests me.
How I became interested in art has a long history. When I was a little child, I loved animals very much, all kinds, and I started drawing them. People around me recognized unusual talent in my drawing skills, and I was encouraged to draw and paint, all through my youth and adolescence. In school, I was always excelling in art classes, and this subject helped me feel more confident even when I moved to the US without knowing much English, and attended a boarding school, which was very competitive. My high school, Phillips Academy, Andover, had an amazing art department and one of the best American art museums in the country right on the campus. I learned art history earlier than most, and I was blessed to be able to travel and visit art museums all over Europe when I was a teenager. I used to feel so touched by certain artworks in museums. Going to art museums for me was like going to a rock concert for most teenagers. I was a big nerd I guess.
In college, I was a pre-med, because, in my culture at the time, art was considered as something of a hobby, and you have to do something serious especially if you’re from an academic family, like going into medicine or law. Then I changed my mind, after taking more art history and art classes at Columbia. I remember, I used to jog weekly and often I would jog to the Metropolitan museum and take a walk inside to cool off my sweat. At some point, I realized that medicine is not the only way to help people and cure sicknesses. If I wasn’t so passionate about being a doctor, how can I be a good doctor? So I applied to art schools for a Master degree, and that was the beginning of focusing on what I really wanted to do.
What is your creative process? When I see something I become obsessed with some ideas pop up for a project, and when one of the ideas just stick and haunt me for a while, I go ahead with it.
After I do some photos or performance, I start to think slowly about what it means and why. I do research and keep working on the project for a couple of years or more. Basically, I’m the type that just goes with the gut feeling then thinks later. Whereas some people intellectualize first then do the work accordingly.
Define art:
I see art as a gift that keeps circulating around.
Favorite artists:
Too many to list but most of them not living.
El Greco, Egon Schiele, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovic…
Best exhibit you’ve seen recently and why you liked it:
Sorry I can’t think of a recent show I liked, I haven’t seen anything lately, I’ve been appreciating the beauty of the desert for the last few months…
Following up on Christina Von Messling’s recent coverage of Elyse Graham’s LA show, contributor and videographer Ashley Moore pays a Studio Visit to the gifted artist. Graham gives us a rare look into her remarkable process, her curious mind and very personal ways of seeing.
Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe’s elaborate Stray Light Grey exhibit/installation transforms the Marlborough‘s Chelsea gallery into a surrealistic living space that makes you feel as if you’ve woken up in the middle of a Trainspotting inspired dream sequence. The artists pick up on the themes that they have explored in previous projects: hypertrophic urbanism, psychedelic drugs, conventions of society and science, this time using the period room (as it is used in museums today) as their weapon of choice to merge these different fragments together. (545 West 25th Street, through October 27th).
LA based artist Elad Lassry has dealt in the past with the question of when a photographic image obtains “presence” – meaning it simultaneously becomes an object with its own meaning as well as a display of viewers’ projections. His starting point for this exhibit at The Kitchen is the statement that we see the world through the pictures made of it. He plays with this concept and turns it around by creating a space that seems two dimensional through walls designed with unexpected holes and endings, as well as flattening the pictoral depth of the photographs on view through flat lighting and placement of his subjects in front of monochrome backdrops. (The exhibit was on view through October 20th).
Patrick Jacobs creates his own versions of this universe, visible only through a small lens, inserted into a wall. The distortion of the fisheye perspective contributes to the mystical feel of these seemingly realistic landscape, each one dedicated to a particular curiosity of nature – be it a mushroom which forms strange circles in the grass, or a dandelion. Jacobs’ work leads us to take a closer look at the beauty and fragility of the nature surrounding us, and lets us discover the wonder of our everyday.
Where are you from? I was born in Merced, California, but because my father was in the air force, we moved all over.
Where do you currently live? I live/work in Brooklyn, NY.
How did you decided to become an artist? I never made a conscious decision to become an artist. Like most everyone as a child, I was drawing, painting and building things; but I just kept at it.
What is your creation process? I come up with an idea or am inspired by something I see or read and then set about trying to figure out how to realize it. Most exciting is when, somewhere along the way, it unexpectedly takes on a life of its own.
Define art: When you use your imagination.
Favorite artists: Jan van Eyck, Kudo Tetsumi, Franz Josef Haydn, Bas Jan Ader, Jean-Antoine Watteau.
Best exhibit you’ve seen recently and why you liked it: Gino de Dominicis at MAXXI in Rome. Strange and mystical.
Steve Lambert‘s show at Charlie James Gallery centers around his most ambitious work to date, Capitalism Works For Me! True/False. Accompanying the sign on its tour through the US, the artist asked viewers their opinion about capitalism, recorded their response (see above underneath the sign), and videotaped their answers, giving an indication of the public’s stand on the subject. The other sign sculptures further define the question posed in Capitalism, with its targeted audience being the members of the 1%-ers that have collected the artist’s work over the years. (Through October 20, 969 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, CA 90012).
Scene of videotaped interviews with viewers of Capitalism Works For Me
A "studio visit" is artspeak for an arranged visit to an artist's studio. In contrast to "open studios," where the artist's studio is open to the public, studio visits are generally private with dealers and or clients typically present. A studio visit often gives first viewing an collecting opportunities to collectors. Studio visits can also be a type of interview with the artist for press and enthusiasts affording an up-close look at work which has not been exhibited yet.
