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
Jennifer Bolande
post conceptual objects and images
For our Wednesday art post, Dennis Kane features one of his favorite artists Jennifer Bolande. Her work uses photography/ sculpture to create quietly arresting moments that examine instances around the periphery of thought. She indexes and points to fault lines of power and ideological habit. Check more of her work at her website.
“Coincident with Bolande’s conscious deployment of dichotomies is an intense concentration on the meeting places between objects, the points where two differences border and thus define themselves.
Bolande pays an almost surrealist attention to loci of simultaneous meeting and division as sites for potential transformation”
Photo Credit: jbolande.com
Quotation Credit: Art Forum, Something to Do with Jennifer Bolande, January 1989
Portrait Credit: Jennifer Bolande, Chambre D'amis
Matias Faldbakken
creative vandalism
This week’s art post features the work of Matias Faldbakken. Faldbakken’s sculptures/ combines have an absurdity to them, a dark comic theatricality and resonant gestalt. He is represented by Standard Oslo. In addition to his visual art he has written several novels and a collection of short stories.
“Faldbakken... (has an) ability to bite his own tail by making works that unite vandalism and creativity, while both celebrating and lamenting the constant commodification of rebellious acts.
More than anyone, he understands that frontal critique only reinforces the classic master-slave dialectic, and that true radicality consists of infiltrating and perverting the system from within. ”
Photo credits:
Simon Lee Gallery, London, Hong Kong
Occula, Gallery Chant Grousel, Paris
Renaissance Society, “Fear of Property” Installation, University of Chicago
Mousse Magazine, Museum Boijmans, Rotterdam
kunstkritikk, Nordic Art Review, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo