In a crowded room on Wednesday night, video and performance artist Shana Moulton presented the ninth installment of Whispering Pines, a series in which her alter ego Cynthia relishes the life-changing potential of home décor, beauty routines, and self-help mantras. Cynthia’s obsession in this episode, entitled The Undiscovered Antique, focuses on her journey to confirm the value of personally meaningful domestic artifacts á la The Antiques Roadshow. Moulton’s work is a layering of video, performance, and prop staging that is, in its more effective moments, abstract and dreamlike. In the spirit of Sara Goldfarb minus the amphetamines, Cynthia fantasizes about the transcendental payoff of her kitsch consumer fetishes, which include a head massager and footbath. Moulton achieves this sense of escapism by fully integrating her character into a two-dimensional digital landscape: projected objects move in choreographed syncopation with Cynthia’s body, sometimes appearing to control its movement or color its surface.

Moulton’s work makes us particularly attuned to the social structure surrounding its protagonist through its exaggerated and fragmented representation of Cynthia’s environment. It uses this fiction as a means for creating a kind of framed anthropological analysis (in one interview I read, the artist says she began as an anthropology major and switched to art later in college). What became striking through this latest performance was not only the extent to which mass produced objects take on spiritual or healing significance for Cynthia, but how consumerism itself functions as a kind of religious outlet for her: the collection of “ritual” products, the pilgrimage to Roadshow, the promise of transformation through the practice of domestic consumption. If Moulton the anthropologist is showing us something, it is perhaps how our appetite for worship finds itself both in and outside of religious structures; organized consumption holds as much promise for accessing power and healing in Moulton’s scenario as organized religion might in other contexts.

Moulton’s practice uses the strategy of embodiment shared by artists across a wide swath of practices – Cindy Sherman, Michael Smith, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Tamy Ben-Tor, Yasumasa Morimura – to name a few, but the work finds its singular voice and appeal in Moulton’s personal and diaristic attachment to her character. It is the artist’s close affiliation with Cynthia (she views the character as connected to her own psyche) that keeps the work from spiraling into irony.

Her installation has the loose form of a fort. Like most forts, it is made from materials scavenged from the artist’s surroundings. Building supplies, paint, discarded crates, and weathered branches come together in precarious arrangements that function like large three-dimensional drawings. Granwell makes paper casts of trash and architectural elements as well, and these litter the site as shadows of their former selves. Her skeletal structures are scaled to the size of the human body, giving them immediacy and presence.

We get the sense, as we walk through the passageways set up in this makeshift haven, that we are both intruder and guest. Intruder, because what lies before us is in many respects the physical manifestation of a personal psychology: the architectural renderings of Granwell’s past projects come to life in this environment. But guest too, because the objects open themselves up to empathy through their distant familiarity. The inventive forms and their inherent fragility mimic the strange beauty of what we ourselves have left behind: collections of urban refuse the artist passes on her way to the studio have given her inspiration in their strange and spontaneous beauty. The exhibition title, Broken, to Bring Forth, hints at the metaphorical implications of these materials; through their impoverishment and reincarnation, Granwell presents us with vessels for examining our relationship to brokenness and renewal, to the cyclical nature of undoing and becoming.

The postmodern practices of Cindy Sherman are continued and complicated by Slater Bradley, Nikki S. Lee, and Yasumasa Morimura, the artists inserting themselves into social subcultures and iconic artworks. Michael Joo, Rachel Mason and Alex McQuilkin embody the affectations of political figures and movie stars; along with the work of Tamy Ben-Tor and Molly Larkey these artists refuse and deflect simple analyses of the processes of identification. Other projects by Rico Gatson, Clifford Owens, Jeff Porterfield and Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen reenact iconic moments in art and social history: Gatson becomes his ancestors’ racist oppressor in Flaming Hood (2000), and Owens revisits Benjamin Patterson’s Fluxus performance Lick Piece (1964). Coco Fusco and Joanna Malinowska take extreme measures to empathize with their characters: Fusco reenacts twelve-hour detention and interrogation of a Mexican maquiladora worker, and Malinowska treks to the Canadian Arctic in the steps of anthropologist Franz Boas. Photographic collages that document “Roberta Breitmore” (1974-1978), a performed character that was played by Lynn Hershman and three ‘multiples’, explore identity construction and precede her later agent-based works driven by artificial intelligence. Performances by Rachel Mason and Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen will take place at the exhibition opening. Through the course of the exhibition, Paris-based Mathieu Briand invites participation in his work Identity is Property (2009) in which the artist offers his identity for sale to the public.

No Objective brings together artists who make simple gestures in banal materials – paint rolled on a wall, a block of sand placed on a pedestal, printouts covering the gallery – the works communicating an ambivalence towards textual meaning and the value of transcendence as a goal of non-objective art. The assembled artists share a fascination with the affects and after-effects of Modernity, particularly its influence in the aesthetic vocabulary of design and advertising strategies, vernacular architecture and the urban environment.

Skyler Brickley’s methodical rolls of paint in Untitled mimic the appearance of a Xerox print in their grainy texture and grayscale palette: his workman-like system of application recalls both New York school abstraction and inkjet printing. Instead of searching for compositional resolution in something transcendent, the form of the work is a register of the interaction of roller and wall, a result of the artist’s compliance with his tools.

Ivin Ballen’s Troncelitti has a similarly layered relationship to materiality. The artist employs a trompe l’oeil technique to approximate the presence of emphemeral packing materials. Ballen’s seemingly haphazard construction is in fact made with a laborious mold-making process that utilizes resin and paint to immortalize the throw-away culture of late capitalism.

In Ethan Greenbaum’s Lorem Ipsum, A1 text documents are wheat pasted over an entire wall of the gallery. Their meticulous grid-like pattern assumes the form of a declaration, but upon closer inspection, text goes no deeper than type. The Lorum ipsum filler of graphic design is the content, forming a visual structure without linguistic coherence. In David Scanavino’s accompanying works, newspapers are pulped and flattened into discrete monochromatic paintings. These rectangular forms operate as placeholders, occupying the space of their source, but divesting themselves of any communicative ability.

Lisha Bai’s Untitled construction of sand and glass has the iconic solidity of Modernist geometry, even as her use of elemental materials evoke ruin and entropy. Her work, like No Objective on the whole, steers away from the Platonic mysticism inherent in the history of abstraction and replaces it with an interest in material transformation and reconstitution.

Jenny Jaskey, who closed her Northern Liberties gallery in the spring to try life as an independent curator in New York, is still here in spirit, with an impressive group show she has organized for Tiger Strikes Asteroid called “No Objective.” Not coincidentally, the works of these five New York-based artists, all of whom use found materials and recycling in inventive ways, would have fit nicely into Jaskey’s hulking former space. As it is, they make out surprisingly well in the Tiger’s tidy quarters.

A close examination of Ivin Ballen’s initially unprepossessing wall sculpture will likely reveal it to be something entirely different from what you thought it was. Among other things, the duct tape supposedly holding it all together is an inverse cast of duct tape, painted that familiar lustrous graphite gray.

Skyler Brickley – using a small, conventional paint roller to apply long, uninterrupted, contiguous strips of black paint to the wall – has created a kind of decorative painting that allows for the idiosyncracies of memory foam, while its transparent application of black also manages to evoke painted or screen-printed renditions of strips of film (right down to what appear to be sprocket holes, produced again, apparently, by the foam’s memory). Yet another instance of Warhol’s reverberations in contemporary art.

The opposite wall of the gallery has been turned over to Ethan Greenbaum, who has covered it with sheets of paper printed with dummy type, into which another artist, David Scanavino, has inserted his rectangular blocks of newspaper pulp (talk about dire predictions for the newspaper industry).

Lisha Bai’s mesmerizing, slightly sparkly cube of black sand mixed with resin that’s presumably been cast into its geometric shape, is the unapologetic beauty of the show. Mounted on a tall glass pedestal, it suggests a relic of minimalism abducted by space aliens.

To view “Black Hole,” an absorbing video projection by Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib atKim Light/Lightbox, you must occupy just such a space — a chamber dark enough to divest you of your bearings. Before long, the aesthetic of withholding that visually characterizes the 7 1/2-minute piece becomes processed, experientially, as an ethic of confinement. 

The space is hot; its air feels dense. What is projected on one black wall is minimal, indeterminate, fleeting: the slow-motion hover of a hummingbird, a pair of bare feet, an illuminated blank sign, a quivering spider web, old footage of something traveling fast and leaving a trail of dust. A soundtrack layers gentle percussion and droning synthesizers, producing something between dirge and trance music. This induced state of unknowing suggests a deprivation chamber, a cell. On screen, an eyeball appears briefly to check on us. Metaphorically, we are stuck in Plato’s cave, catching only glimmers, shadows, reflections of actuality. 

With “Black Hole,” the Philadelphia-based artists (who also work independently) stage an experience both provocative and destabilizing. 

A sound piece in the gallery’s courtyard is interesting but less powerful, in part because it must compete with the continual whoosh of street traffic. Its mix of film noir dialogue snippets and musical fragments hints at political intrigue. The term “patriotism” is uttered by one voice, then cynically dismissed by another. As in “Black Hole,” not all is decipherable, and that elusiveness is part of the work’s appeal. In both works, Hironaka and Suib create a kind of environmental montage — restrained, tense and portentous.

In both works, the motif and conventions of film noir function as a metaphor for current and historical political discourse, highlighting the construction and subsequent control of narrative that lies at the intersection of moving image culture and the exercise of political power. 

Installed in a pitch-black room and projected onto a black screen, Black Hole presents an obscured sense of confinement and isolation.  The environment introduces a sequence of shadowy interior images that rest on the threshold of visibility, and the projection itself appears to float in space.  Occasional breaks of light momentarily orient viewers to the projected image and its surroundings, but the illumination is fleeting.  Bright images dissolve back to dark interiors and their accompanying sense of anxiety and disorientation.  A surround-soundtrack of hypnotic buzz and martial percussion adds to the sense of confusion.

The outdoor work, composed of soundtracks and dialog samples from classic film noir, reconfigures these sources into a soundscape in which language and dialog are obscured; voices move around the space, seemingly in narrative fashion, but the composition falls between the structure of language and our ability to understand it. Soundtrack samples punctuate this disjointed narrative like special effects lending drama and intrigue. 

This is the first solo gallery exhibition by Nadia Hironaka/Matthew Suib at Kim Light Gallery. In 2008, they presented the exhibition The Soft Epic, or Savages of the Pacific Northwest at Telic Arts Exchange in Los Angeles and at the Crane Arts Building in Philadelphia and Black Hole at Artists Space, New York and Vox Populi Gallery, Philadelphia. Nadia Hironaka’s films and video installations have been exhibited internationally at venues including Rencontres Internationals, Paris; The Elements Museum, Beijing, China; The Center for Contemporary Arts, Kitakyushu, Japan; The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Morris Gallery, Philadelphia; Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe. Solo projects by Matthew Suib have been exhibited at Philadelphia Museum of Art; Kunstwerke Berlin; Mercer Union, Toronto; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, D.C.; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and the 2007 Moscow Biennale.  Hironaka and Suib have worked collaboratively since 2007. They are the founders of Screening, Philadelphia’s first gallery dedicated to the presentation of works on video and film.

The exhibition is organized by Jenny Jaskey.

THE ARTISTIC PRACTICE OF MICHAEL E. SMITH

Michael E. Smith’s images and objects are portraits, making collages from smithereens of reality.  Smith’s exhibitions are improvisations. On site, he creates assemblages and installations out of profane objects, which are associated with social precarious situations and are marked by their everyday use. They are simple objects of an unassuming life, reduced to the necessary. Repositories that provide shelter or conserve. Or that are close to the human body like clothing and food or that appear corporeal themselves, like when the surface of an image resembles scarred skin.

The characters, to which Smith often alludes in his work, are ambivalent. Leadbelly, Miles Davis, Tupac Shakur, Isiah Thomas, Twiggy Ramirez assume the dual role of heroes and antiheroes; they are successful and yet hated, or they are loved but nevertheless failed. This makes them realistic and tangible. Smith portrays such ambivalent figures and abstracts them. He designs them as traces, signs, memory, and moments of identification.

Thereby Smith turns against the self-idealization of the American society, considering it as ignorant.  He corresponds to Walter Benjamin’s Destructive Character, who destroys false ideals in order to blaze a trail between their ruins – without idealizing the newly  acquired perspective. He does this without accusation or judgment. As a portraitist of the early 21st Century American social reality, Michael E. Smith is a realist and a non-idealist. The vanishing point of his aesthetic praxis is the belief in a hermeneutic of empathy: reading his works means to feel pain, fear, and distraction, as a healing process that is the actual object and impetus of reception.

The individualism, which the western societies conventionalized and idealized ad nauseam, appears as a traumatic existence against the background of a social repression that is systematically suppressed. Smith’s work stems from a deep skepticism towards his own social world, which, nevertheless, remains the only mental realm for orientation. Not an orientation inside a greater societal matrix, but rather a devotion of one’s life to a concrete collective, whose solidarity is perhaps exemplary.

The Detroit-born artist (1977) belongs to a tradition of social-oriented art practice. His motives of social self-purification resemble Joseph Beuys, yet are partly ironically, partly pragmatically twisted and replace Beuys’s shamanism and object mysticism with influences from Hip Hop and Soul. 

 Alexander Koch and Nikolaus Oberhuber, Berlin, October 2008

PHILADELPHIA, PA (August 12, 2008) – Jenny Jaskey Gallery is pleased to announce the group exhibition WYSIWYG from September 13 – October 18, 2008.  A reception with the artists will be held on Saturday, September 13 from 4-6 pm.  Titled after the computing acronym for “what you see is what you get,” this exhibition examines abstract photography made through an interdisciplinary approach. It features six artists who are equally informed by music, sculpture, painting, graphic design and science as they are by the photography. Far from any notion of pure abstraction, the works in the exhibition are “dirtied” by other practices and disciplines, often making abstract what is found in the everyday.

James Hyde defies the flatness of photographic prints by making use of sculptural and painterly strategies. Hyde applies paint and attaches objects to photographs of scaffolding and other architectural forms, highlighting the rhythmic and musical qualities of the composition. Seemingly improvisatory, the aural and visual combine and recombine to synesthetic affect.

Summer Kemick’s installation of snapshot-sized prints inspired by her native Hawaii forms a cloud of vibrant color and textures. The arrangement of successive images suggests the drama of a narrative arc without any explicit meaning, stemming from a place of memory and ebullience.

An artist who mainly works in sculpture and installation, Sungmi Lee has recently been taking pictures from her studio window. Rather than document urban space, her images capture the atmosphere and shadow play of New York’s gray winters. Spumes of steam merge with the overcast sky to produce near monochromes and road markings form striated drawings.

Avery McCarthy presents a series of black-and-white contact prints called The Theory of Everything. Lifting scientific imagery from various online sources, McCarthy uses a systemic approach that finds equivalence among atoms, neurons, viruses, cosmic bodies, and mathematical models.

Colin Montgomery’s photograph made specifically for the exhibition creates a network of foam and spray taken from images of a boat’s wake. Almost sculptural in form, the large-scale print alludes to both the microscopic and the cosmic. This broad vision is fitting for an age in which seemingly benign travel can have global climatic impact.

Paul Salveson’s black-and-white photographs are informed by DIY ‘zines and role playing games. Salveson’s prints were made with the intention of being cheaply reproducible via desktop laser printers or photocopying machines where mid-tones are often abandoned for the high contrast grit of true black and white.

WYSIWYG is organized by Christopher Y. Lew.  Christopher Y. Lew is Manager of Curatorial Affairs at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. He has recently curated Aljira Emerge 9 at Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art and co-curated Salad Days III at Artists Space. Lew is also co-organizer of Altered, Stitched and Gathered (2007) at P.S.1.  Lew lives in New York City.

Jenny Jaskey Gallery is located at 969 N. Second Street, Philadelphia, PA  19123.  Gallery hours are Wednesday – Saturday, 12-6 pm.  Jenny Jaskey Gallery presents contemporary art by emerging and mid-career artists in a variety of media.  For more information, please contact the gallery at +1 (215) 543 6029 or visit www.jennyjaskey.com.