The Making of Unmaking

PART TWO

To continue the theme from the first section, I want to discuss some more artists whose representative oeuvres exemplify the value of chaos and ruin in art, and whose formal transformations presage our understanding of the chaotic nature of creativity.

Shirley Wegner: IMPACT (2019), Archival pigmented print, 60 x 47 ¼ inches

I met SHIRLEY WEGNER in 2006 through an exhibition I was invited to co-curate called “Home Base” that brought together New York resident artists from different international populations. Wegner is a mixed media artist whose work displays the atomized elements of ruins and explosions from war zones. She makes set pieces that she paints and photographs, creating an array of different genres and perspectives on these dramatic experiences. I was extremely impressed with her ability to evoke to show the terror but also a strange beauty in the moment, and to make it extremely palpable for the gallery visitor. She creates not only the event but also the landscape where it takes place, and in which the people who commonly experience these intense but minute moments of sheer hell live their lives. Though it’s an arena for everyday conflict, this is a real world, a place with a history, and communities. Her works do have the appearance of theater sets but that only aids us in seeing these images as enactments of the drama of real, living participants who are unwilling to undergo the trauma at hand, the chaos overwhelming the duties and rituals of their shared lives.

Shirley Wegner: NIGHT EXPLOSION (2013), Archival pigmented print, 55 x 40 inches

AMANDA C MATHIS and I met at a gallery reception in Williamsburg c. 2005. We knew some of the same people, and at the time, I was not conscious of her developing work. I saw it online via Instagram in 2018 and wrote a short paean to it: “Art presents an essential mystery, which it then provides us with clues to decipher. When I see an image that outwardly confounds me, I immediately want two things: to be immersed in them, and to find the key to their apparent complexity. One desire alternatively complicates the other. The collages of Amanda C. Mathis contrast building exteriors with middle class interiors, creating a flipping effect that plays against how we tend to imagine one set of details to predict another unseen set of aesthetic variables. In each case the main issue that confronts us is Who lives here?" What I did not explore more decisively was Mathis’ use of, and fascination with, both actual interiors left to decay, some only recently emptied of their occupants, and also her collages and bricolages, which turned found materials from these same forgotten environments into nearly pretty totems. What impresses me about her work the more that I engage with it, is how she manages to dramatize the opposite conditions of appearance and utility of inside and outside images. What we often see as we pass by any residential edifice, even one that we see every day on our way to work or on errands, is a far cry from what may exist within. It’s said that people live lives of quiet desperation. Their homes carry the weight of that desperation, presenting details that both convince and overwhelm even the trained eye.

Amanda C Mathis: 07.19 (2019), Collaged photographs, 8 ½ x 8 5/8 inches

MARGOT SPINDELMAN had work in the 2019 iteration of The Governor’s Island Art Fair. I had done a marathon run through all the Colonels Row, where the artist installations were sited. The last house I only viewed the ground floor, because I was simply too hot and  exhausted. The day was ending, and exhibiting artists, their friends, and other random visitors gathered on the front steps of every house. Margot exited the building and was introduced to me. I gave her my card and she emailed me some images of works that week. I liked what I saw of her recent work but was compelled by the separate qualities of each of her successive bodies of work from the last half dozen years. Each was remarkably different from the other. Now I have known artists to develop markedly different kinds of work in the same time period, but much of it goes by the wayside. Only certain works are presented as the major steps in an artist’s creative progression. Here on her site was every step, some elements of each being less clear than others, less recognized according to scale, and to essential importance in the canon of her movement towards the present. We ended up having an extensive conversation about this. The works that were new in this path were the ones that captured my interest the most. They were medium sized and comprised of torn sections of oil painted 300-pound paper, with a material constitution heavy enough to withstand the application of oil-based paints and an underlayer of gesso. They were strongly reminiscent of the painted mass metal constructions of John Chamberlain while at the same time showing the calculated depth and rigor of Joan Mitchell paintings on paper.  Colorful and filled with a palimpsest-like quality they were both ruinous artifacts and painterly objects of jewel-like intensity. The artist has since moved on from them into a new territory of distinct collage that employs found printed imagery with painted sections, flatter and more intimately decrepit, they exhibit artifice as both hardscrabble evidence and quiet beauty.

Margot Spindelman: Untitled Orange Stretch (2020), Gouache and oil on gessoed paper, 10 ½ x 14 ½ inches

Margot Spindelman: #current#risk (2021), Oil pastel, pencil, and ballpoint pen on paper, 9 ¾ x 7 ¾ inches

I first saw the work of SIMONA PRIVES in a 2007 open studios event for Brooklyn artists in the Gowanus neighborhood, which I had travelled through on occasion just after appointments in the nearby area of Carroll Gardens. Her work was large scale drawings in which everything depicted took on an ethereal quality. They were meant to be landscapes but gave the impression of being contained worlds in which only the most specific protrusions gave evidence as to actual habitation or the progress of civilized life. The land is a mish-mash of matter, all texture with content obscured within. It could be clouds, or it could be mountains. It’s hard to discern which aspect is paramount. Placed in the center of each piece of paper, it takes on a focus in which it either floats in its own reality, like a momentary glimpse of Avalon, an actual land with closed borders, or a community hidden amidst a larger expanse of unremarkable lands. There are minute exceptions rising above the flotsam and jetsam of these complicated environments: structures that resemble the uppermost parts of suspension bridges, oil rigs, or wind turbines, deconstructed classical style buildings, or Ferris wheels, hinting at the importance of technological progress, of industry and distraction contained in an unperceived life. Part of the violence on hand in Prives work is the shutting away of pleasure, the maintenance of secrets forever entombed. How can we hope to penetrate into the real world of human agency?

HEREAFTER / Ink, monotype, graphite, and collage on paper, 50 x 11 inches

While doing online research for this article, I came upon the work of BEATRIZ MORALES. She has repeated bodies of work that exhibit a wild streak of mark making giving off sparks of illumination in their resemblance to primordial narratives, cave paintings and depictions of the unknown starry heavens; but also, painterly evocations of sonar, as if paint and ink could give us an equal idea of alien sounds, languages misunderstood as stand-ins for complexity, imposing deep echoes past intellect and into an extreme soulfulness that responds instinctually to her forms. Their collective title “Sounds I’ll Never Hear” transforms the act of looking, or attempting to affix ambiguities of form—the color shape in a dance with the embroidered line shapes in her works, as instead a gestural anthropology presenting frequencies of even more mysterious communication. On another plain altogether are her “Ruin Porn” series, in which the artist paints a multicolored, deeply hued work covered up and then ripped away to reveal a rich and visceral interior. As the enactment of a drama, these paintings reveal a curiosity that observes no limits to propriety in their desire for answers. The single rip is enough of a violence to excavate a complex reality that, if entirely exposed, would cease to contain the power it has only peeking through one puncture of its outermost layer. Sometimes we have to think of such buried treasures not as hidden from us but protected by history. Is knowledge so dear that we must peel back every layer, creating a cumulative rape of time? After we tear away the protective layers, what is left to know? The tear, despite its violence, reveals our innocence. We are looking into the heart of life with all its color and vigor. Despite the chaos, we must always keep looking.

Beatriz Morales: Sounds I’ll Never Hear II-VI (2021), Acrylic and embroidery on canvas, 37 ½ x 49 ¼ inches

Beatriz Morales: Ruin Porn/Pink (2018), Acrylic and wax on wood, 47 ¼ x 47 ¼ inches