All posts by scottpgoodman@gmail.com

Jonathan Basile: Fictional Archives, Archival Fictions, September 11, 2015 – content

Screen Shot 2015-08-30 at 11.35.35 PM

Jonathan Basile: Fictional Archives, Archival Fictions

Friday September 11th, 8—10pm

A lecture and discussion exploring the online universal library, libraryofbabel.info

ONE NIGHT ONLY — libraryofbabel.info is a virtual recreation of an idea that has inspired philosophers and poets from the Ancient Greek Atomists to Jorge Luis Borges. By permuting a complete set of letters and punctuation, one can arrive at every possible utterance, including past and future literary masterpieces and day to day conversations. We will gather to consider together how the concepts of presence and absence, invention and discovery, and novelty and repetition can be undermined by the universal library, and how any archive can exist without physical form, embedded in the essence of language.

Jonathan Basile is a fiction writer, philosopher, and computer programmer. He created an online universal library (https://libraryofbabel.info/) and universal image archive (https://babelia.libraryofbabel.info/). He has written about his work in Flavorwire (http://flavorwire.com/515783/brooklyn-author-recreates-borges-library-of-babel-as-infinite-website) and The Paris Review Daily (http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/07/23/the-library-of-babel-as-seen-from-within/).

***

This Dog Needs A Name, July 18th – August 8th, 2015 – content

 

harmon_untitled_green

 

Link to Press Release

Good Work Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition and book launch for  “This Dog Needs A Name”, a group exhibition and book organized by Kerry Cox and featuring works by:

Anna Adler
Caitlin Baucomb
Courtney Childress
Erin Marie Dunne
Samantha Harmon
Dominique Hurth
Honey McMoney
Reuben Lorch Miller
Adam Pape
Ryann Slauson
Erin Sweeny
& Frank Traynor

Book featuring works and essays by:

Anna Adler
Caitlin Baucomb
Christiana Cefalu
Courtney Childress
Kerry Cox
Erin Marie Dunne
Daniel Esparza
Samantha Harmon
Dominique Hurth
Honey McMoney
Edgar Meza
Reuben Lorch Miller
Adam Pape
Ryann Slauson
Erin Sweeny
& Frank Traynor

Opening Saturday July 18:
Performances by Honey McMoney and Anna Adler

Screening of Sam Harmon’s Untitled (green)

Closing Saturday August 8:
Performance by Caitlin Baucomb

“This Dog Needs A Name” is the first in a series of annual or semi annual exhibitions called the “Notebook Series” that is also a book. Assuming the role of artist as curator, I am tracing common interests across a group of friends and acquaintances. The artists and writers included here often use fictitious elements to create non-fictitious narratives, or glean elements from non-fiction to create fictions. They are interested in character development through objects and use elements of surreality to bring us into commonplace themes. Also, this show is based on the following story.

One warm night a few weeks ago some friends and I found a dog in Bed Stuy. She had no collar but was well groomed and a nice guy from the neighborhood was feeding her canned food on paper plate. For the next twelve hours, this dog was all we could talk about. We had no idea where she came from but we wanted to make sure she was taken care of. We began to refer to her as “Choochi”, after Socrates Bueno, the Lower East Side Barber. That night, a kid decided to take her home to see if he could keep her, or until we could figure out something more permanent. In the morning, he told us his mom wouldn’t let him keep her. He had decided to sell her for $150. It took ten minutes. We never even knew her name.

Like Choochi, all the works in this show are the product of a narrative that may be real or imagined. In Samantha Harmon’s video “Untitled (green)”, Harmon portrays a hedge fund manager who laments not becoming an artist. In this confessional video portrait, Harmon’s character matches her clothing to money and tells us about her ideas for art projects. In works from his photo series “Blunts and Skunks” Adam Pape fixes his lens on the nighttime life of Dyckman Park in Inwood creating an eerie Lynchian documentary photo series. In Ryann Slauson’s sculpture “Preservation”, a paper mache bicycle wheel hangs from a branch, a scene of a possible suburban melodrama or the result of an abandoned petit theft.

The “This Dog Needs A Name” book features collaborations between artists and writers whose work has similar connective tissue. It serves as a sort of expanded exhibition catalog and independent work of print in its own write. It is produced by EAT editions in an edition of 50 and available for sale, here.

***

The Sorcerer/Apprentice, June 5th – 7th, 2015 – content

15
15

15

14
14

14

2
2

2

b
b

b

13
13

13

12
12

12

11
11

11

10
10

10

9
9

9

8
8

8

7
7

7

6
6

6

5
5

5

1
1

1

a
a

a

Gitter-02-01

The Sorcerer/Apprentice

June 5th – 7th

Opening June 5th, 7-10pm

In conjunction with Bushwick Open Studios

Good Work Gallery is pleased to present “The Sorcerer/Apprentice”, an exhibition of works by Karl Gitter, Scott Goodman, and Joshua Caleb Weibley.

It was in the summer of 2011 that Scott Goodman was first contracted to produce vinyl signage for the German painter and conceptualist Karl Gitter. The size of the job necessitated bringing in additional hands and Goodman reached out to Joshua Caleb Weibley, with whom he had done similar work in the past. They completed the installation—to Gitter’s great satisfaction—ahead of schedule and under budget. The gallery in Chelsea where the three first met would move several times that year before ultimately closing in the end of 2012, but Goodman and Weibley have maintained a relationship with Gitter over the years since, nonetheless.

Now in his late 60s, Gitter is of roughly the same generation as Goodman and Weibley’s parents but is lesser known in America than he is abroad. Likewise, he claims not to have heard of any of the American conceptualists whose work his most closely resembles (Sol LeWitt being a fair comparison), citing instead László Moholy-Nagy or Blinky Palermo and Imi Knoebel (with whom he was acquainted during brief study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf). Recognizing Gitter’s influence on their work, Goodman and Weibley are pleased he has allowed them to present his work for the first time in Brooklyn alongside their own.

The slash in the resulting exhibition’s title, “The Sorcerer/Apprentice”, confuses the relationship of light mentorship Gitter, Goodman and Weibley have shared while evoking a magical animation of inert domestic materials (referring, as it does, to Goethe’s “Der Zauberlehrling”, popularly known worldwide by its 1940 Walt Disney adaptation).

Scott Goodman’s prop-like paintings demarcate domestic space using flat, graphic shapes and colors that produce a paradoxical illusionistic sensation swinging back and forth between something less than real and hyperreal. The archway he has created for this exhibition suggests an aperture opened inward beyond the wall it hangs on into an apartment complex.

Karl Gitter’s work in scrawled notes and labored but precise drawings asks to be considered in terms of shifts in scale from an interior domestic setting outward. His small drawings are native to the space of a writing desk set by a window (perhaps even just inside the one Goodman has made) but they are patiently sketched out with the intention of being executed by others elsewhere. For this exhibition Goodman and Weibley will execute one of his works in the medium that first brought the three of them into contact with each other and have prepared a vinyl window mural to his specifications. Also on view will be a selection of his drawings including those directing the mural’s creation.

Joshua Caleb Weibley’s solitaire works hold to the scale Gitter’s work first emerges at and more directly (if humorously) illustrate the shuffling of papers involved in such work “coming into play” as finished pieces for consideration. The work begins in drawing at a desk before being submitted to further production processes and arranged for display, suggesting that creation and reception of art can be, each in their own way, two very separate and somewhat solitary activities.

“A Feeling” Interview

Maren Miller asks Catherine Pearson about the new paintings in her show at Good Work Gallery and the launch of her book, A Feeling.

IMG_7499-2M: Are we both going to transcribe and compare our own versions and see where we favored ourselves?

C: I’m just gonna make stuff up.

Both: [Cheers]

M: So I’m curious – and I think we’ve talked about this before – where you draw the line between mark and shape. With recent work you refer to certain things in your paintings as marks but other things as shapes. Does that reflect a particular thought process or is it mainly intuitive?

C: It’s rudimentary in an almost “elementary school” way. Like a thing that’s just one line, that’s a mark, but a big fat thing that takes two or three gestures to make, that’s a shape.

M: But wouldn’t you call that squiggle mark a
shape?

C: I think you might! We had that really good chat in my studio recently where you liked one of the first squiggle paintings and you were said: that’s the first time the mark looks more like a shape….

M: But you still consider that a mark?

C: Yeah. A shapely mark.

M: You just want it both ways I guess.

C: It’s everything at the same time. Simultaneously. It contains multitudes.

inside the surface. i’m trying to create depth with very little compositionally. If there’s already the surface plane of the canvas and the pigment is inside the canvas that’s something I can play off of.

M: It’s interesting to talk about depth with paintings that are so much about surface. Rather than illusionism.

C: I do have that woodshop story from Cooper about how I went in to make some stretcher bars and the shop tech says “How big do you want them?” And I’m like, “54 by 54”. He asks, “But what about the third dimension?” and I’m like…

M: I’m trying to think back to the point at which you started allowing the the canvas to come through…

C: I like the kind of stain painting where the

“what do you mean? It’s a square.”

Both: (laughter)

C: He goes: “No, the other dimension”. And I say: “they have four sides you fool”. This went on for some time and finally I realized that he was talking about how far they come off the wall. And I realized this hadn’t even occurred to me. And I really didn’t care. Then the story was told back to me later by someone “I heard this crazy story in the shop today about this painter who didn’t know about the third dimension”…

M: (laughs) That’s so cool

C: I don’t know about the third dimension!

M: And I refuse to learn!

C: I refuse to engage with the third dimension!

photo 4

M: Well the point is that you don’t think of them as objects. In any way.

C: No. I think of them as paintings.

M: So what does that mean? What is a painting then?

C: It’s just the surface. How much you can pack into just a surface. How much can you do with oil paint and a surface? These are the barest set of parameters I can work in, and since it’s abstract it can literally be anything that ever happened! It’s so open that it’s almost impossible to begin.That challenge has kept me super interested for a really long time. Now I finally want to make figurative painting and other things again because I feel like I got a little bit of a handle on what it meant to make work that way.

M: Do you draw a serious line for yourself between abstract and representational work? Because for me that’s really hard to do.

C: In my own way. Just in the sense that I became completely invested in, i would say, the classical idea of abstract painting. I really wanted to investigate it. I started from a very old-fashioned place and I felt like I had to work my way through all my interests to find out why I was interested in them. And to get them out of my system. So when I’m thinking about trying figurative work again I then want to work through all the kinds of figurative painting I like.

M: (Laughs) Which is a lot. You may have to take a different approach there.

C: But I think in the process of doing that I will find my own place in it…who knows if I’ll end up in a style that’s somewhere in the middle.

M: So when you say you have to enter into figurative painting in a traditional way, at what point are you gonna start? What are you considering traditional? Cause it’s easy to point to the beginning of abstract painting, but where are you going to decide is the beginning of figurative painting for you?

photo 3

C: Like a figure, in a room, a person in a room…

M: But I mean are you going to try to…

C: Oh you mean am I gonna try to paint like Courbet or something?

M: Yeah!

C: No I think it’s the same way that I approached figuring out what I like about abstract painting.

M: You want to feel what it feels like to paint your favorite type of work?

C: Yeah. I wanna paint like Matisse and get all these beautiful floral fabrics and one of my beautiful friends and get her cleavage out and go to town. If you’re gonna be voluptuous about it, you can’t be slightly voluptuous.

M: I like what you said though about having to paint through all the work that you were interested in. I mean, I have a hard time connecting with a lot of the painters that you really connect with, so I’m just curious what that moment is. Is it like… you’re looking at this painting, thinking about their process, wanting to feel the feeling of knowing that this decision is the right decision?

C: So much of what interests me in general in looking at art, and that I respond to with respect and admiration, is when I’m looking at a painting, no matter what style it’s painted in, that this person meant to make this exact painting. Every brushstroke that’s in here, every compositional decision — they’re into it.

M: So these painters that get into their own worlds and have their own systems, that create a vocabulary for themselves?

C: And who are invested in learning by doing…Hopefully you’re thinking of painting as a lifelong practice. When you’re flipping through one of these big monographs, looking at someone like David Hockney who just tries a shit ton of stuff…everything he tries still has this touch that’s very unique to him. It’s playful and has a certain sense of color, whether he’s making those weird xerox prints from the 80s, or now he’s doing the iPad stuff. Every era of his work is about getting excited about a new tool, or a new interest.

M: Do you feel like you go through periods where you’re really excited about different kinds of marks? That’s how I would apply that to you.

C: Yea for sure, I did that first squiggle and I felt this is new, this is different, I can do lots of things with this. I can give it different senses of speed depending on how fast I’m making it, how carefully I’m placing it, how wet to how dry, it can have a lot of different moods. So I got super excited about it and I did it on 30 paintings. But now when I went to make work a few weeks ago I was like I fucking hate that squiggle I don’t want to put that on this painting. I need a different mark, I’m so over that mark, I never want to see that mark again. But I’m sure it will find its way back eventually. It’s like when you get really excited about a food and you eat it every day until one day you’re like god Nutella’s disgusting.

M: It’s also funny with that squiggle though, most of your work I can see what you’re saying about the layers going over and under but the squiggle is always set on top like a little squirt of icing.

C: I heard it described back to me as a punchline which I thought was an interesting way of putting it.

M: It’s very you.

C: For a while, I wasn’t in a place where I fully understood what I was doing. I wasn’t capable of making the kind of work I envisioned and I wasn’t getting the feedback I wanted. But when I started to make the squiggly mark someone said: I can tell your work is humorous. The consensus was that it’s goofy. And that was one of the first times where I was like yeah, my work is conveying my intentions! That felt nice. I had felt like people thought I was trying to be more serious and intense about abstract painting than I was just because I was working through all these serious phases. It took a while for the humor that I naturally feel to become visible in the work, but I’m glad that’s finally coming through. It’s important to me that they be a lil goofy. Cause it’s goofy, it’s goofy to make something like that, and I feel goofy when I make them. I’m a goofball.

M: It’s like you want to convey that feeling but you refuse to speak English. You want people to feel really specific things but you won’t do anything to let them know, it’s all an insinuation game.

C: I think thats the magical thing about abstract painting that keeps me so invested in it. You’re trying, in my experience, to convey something so specific, with a medium that is so vague, so every single choice has to be exact or you’ve failed. Which is the high stakes I was talking about that’s super exciting. If I want to do a painting that’s starting with the three colors of the builing that I saw this morning when the light was at a certain time but I’m also listening to Jonathan Richman and giggling to myself while making it then I want that all to be exactly in there somehow because those are are all very specific things.

M: But only in your special Catherine language that’s so subtle.

C: But I want you to look at the painting and be like I feel a sense of early morning goofiness…

M: But you are still so invested in your own vocabulary that you won’t give that to anybody. I mean I don’t know how you would do it but I can think of many ways that aren’t like the Catherine paintings I’ve seen. I’m not saying you have to write Jonathan Richman on your paintings but I can think of many ways that would be more direct, so it can’t just be about wanting people to feel that…

C: Yea, well it’s about taking something and filtering it through your own process. For me it’s more than just that specific experience.

M: I wanted to talk you about your use of color. It seems like you go through these palettes that you work with for periods of time. I’m curious where those come from. You’ll say something like, oh, I based this off what I saw in the morning… But that can’t be happening that often, because you go through these periods where you paint with the same colors over and over again!

C: Well I’ll see a combo somewhere, and it’ll be super interesting to me so I’ll use it directly in one painting. Then as I’m making that painting I’ll be like, what if it was a slight difference, what if this hue was warmer, what if this hue was cooler, and that will start me immediately into the next painting. And I’m usually working on 3 or 4 paintings in the studio at the same time and sharing the different colors between them. And trying all the different ways that I can make one or two colors I found work.

M: Can you define a color working?

C: Ooh. I guess when it strikes me as being exactly what I want it to be and in the vibration with the other colors in a way that feels precise and correct to me.

M: And that preciseness and correctness, is that embodying a particular feeling that you want to convey or embodying some sort of moment, or a mood of the painting?

C: All of the above?

M: Because I get the sense that you’re afraid of your colors becoming muddy. The colors, even though translucency and stains are used, are all very autonomous. You seem to be in love with individual colors and you don’t want them to mingle on the canvas other than one behind the other. Is that another function of trying to preserve this moment you had when you were struck by the moment of those colors being put together?

C: I think so. And I think it’s a desire to have every element of the work feel chosen, so that if I do choose to have one small corner or one specific mark or moment in the painting where the colors do bleed together that you see that and you notice it. Because I think that so much of the allure of painting is that juicy messiness but I want that to feel intentioned. So when I’m working through a painting I’ll be striving for that crispness and that autonomous color for most of it so when I get to a certain part of it and it’s a wet plane and I’m going into it wet and the brush is mixing the two together and making this unholy alliance that part sticks out to you as an intention. So I think it’s like a meaningful mess.

M: Will you reject a painting if it leaves the devised system of experimentation? Or do you find that you’re making decisions on the fly?

C: On the fly all the time. I never, or very rarely have a preconceived idea of what the painting is, just a general scheme of colors that are on my mind and go from there. And oftentimes that’ll completely change through the course of making it. The only time I’m rejecting is when it feels overworked, when it loses spontaneity. I like the thought, like with the layers we were talking about that are all suspended and autonomous, and also intersecting, that they coalesced and were captured at this specific moment. But that they could also dissolve again at the next moment. If it’s overworked that sense of a briefly captured composition is lost.

M: Well you’re clearly invested in painting as a time based thing. You’re inserted in the moment of touching it, how long it takes to pull across it, the existing time as something like: I put this mark here first because it’s in the canvas.

C: I had a really good studio visit that kind of made me laugh but also cry a million years ago with this super anal guy who made every painting over 6 months, photorealist rendered things, and I had tried something new where I had done about 50 tiny pencil lines across the whole canvas or something, and I was like “this one is special because it took so long to make it, it took a whole day”

Both: [laughing]

C: And he was like “if you think that’s a painting that takes a long time then you’re a fucking insane person. You’re a very fast painter, so own it and get to know it but calm down”.

M: Yeah that’s really funny. It took a whole day.

C: It took a whole day to make that whole mark.

M: Should we go?

C: Lets go.