Curated by studio artist / writer / DJ Dennis Kane
Charles Gaines
aesthetics, politics and philosophy
This week’s art selection features the work on noted conceptual artist and teacher Charles Gaines. Gainses’s work engages formulas that interrogate relationships between objective and subjective realms. Using many forms - photography, musical composition, sculpture, video, etc. - Gaines examines identity and power and the fault lines of capital’s utopia. His is some of the most engaged and ambitious work being made today.
“His work belongs to a branch of conceptual art concerned with processes and systems. The aim was to remove subjectivity from art by following self-determined rules and procedures. His breakthrough came in 1973, with his “Regression” series, in which he wrote sequential numbers in the squares of a hand-drawn grid to generate an amorphous form that grows from drawing to drawing, each generating the next. ‘One of the joys was the fact that I could experience things that I couldn’t predict, that I couldn’t anticipate.’”
Photo Credit:
Colossal,Through Monumental Sculpture of Moving Chains, Artist Charles Gaines Confronts the Enduring Legacy of American Slavery
Paula Cooper Gallery, Charles Gaines
ARTFORUM, Differing Equations: The Art of Charles Gaines
LA Times, How the dense grids of artist Charles Gaines took the ego out of art, Carolina A. Miranda
Jonathon Griffin, Charles Gaines