MWCapacity: undercrowded at the University of Central Missouri Gallery of Art & Design, March11-April 10, 2010. The exhibit is part of the MINT: 3 exhibitions. 3 spaces. 3 ideas. program. Solo exhibits by Davin Watne and Lisa Iglesias make the other 2 of 3 exhibitions/spaces/ideas. Participating artists in undercrowded are: Joey Borovicka, Sam King, Kristin Musgnug and Stephanie Pierce.
Sam and I co-curated the MWCapacity 1/3rd of the exhibit, selecting some of our favorite artists making very different paintings and videos with a common subject matter: unoccupied spaces. The spaces are man-made, mostly people-friendly, yet there’s no one there.
These paintings (and I apologize that I keep thinking about Sam’s videos as paintings) share the need to make something where there’s nothing, or at least no one around. What we see are traces of human presence—things that are intended to attract people, messes that people have left behind, things that should have been done, and things that someone is done with, not forgetting of course the artist’s hand and viewer’s eye. All these somehow made to contain expression, intimacy, contemplation, even narrative and allegory.
See more images below.
installation shot showing work by Stephanie Pierce and Kristin Musgnug
untitled by Stephanie Pierce
installation shot of work by Kristin Musgnug.
East Beach Mini Golf by Kristin Musgnug
installation shot showing paintings by Joey Borovicka and video by Sam King
still from Sam King video.
A deliberately provocative question that returns to a theme that never quite gets laid to rest, are these H-bomb painings?
i.e. neutron bomb paintings?
What you said.
I loved the homeless guy in the shed sooo much. How did he get in there?
Just for continuity’s sake, the ‘Chris’ above is not me, Chris, that does the blog…but, welcome. UPDATE: OOPS, CHRIS D. I MEAN WELCOME BACK!
He was the three-women-in-there’s pimp.
The homeless guy stuff seems to refer to Davin Watne’s performance art, just for those who weren’t at the opening tonight. There is a computer in the gallery, logged in to the blog that viewers can use to comment on the work or to ask questions of the artists (or vice versa). But it seems we’re getting some stray comments from some of them. Oops.
Back to the subject at hand:
Everybody knows how much I love a good Zoomfinder. So here’s a Canaletto that’s in the Nelson-Atkins that in part gave me the idea for this show.
http://www.nelson-atkins.org/art/CollectionDatabase_ImageView.cfm?id=12179&theme=euro
If you zoom in on the bottom right of the canvas, you’ll see a shadow not connected to any visible figure. If you really zoom waaay in you can make out the ghostly image of a figure that’s been painted out, the figure that should be attached to that shadow. It’s not a neat thought exactly in my mind, but that idea of a figure that’s not there casting a shadow, or a figure that’s been covered up, erased, poking through the surface, seems like a fantastic allegorical idea in my mind. Even if Canaletto was just trying to simplify his composition or something.
I have a question for Joey…your painting “Shifts” is painted on two panels and there are some parts that sync up when the panels are flush with each other and some parts that would if they were slightly off-set. Since you’ve made some paintings that have unaligned panels, I’m wondering if “Shifts” is always hung as a square or ever with the panels offset (shifted)?
Chris L – I first painted and hung it offset, hoping to suggest plate tectonics. What is for the Earth a tiny twitch in its skin is apocalyptic disaster for people. I liked the idea but wasn’t satisfied with the image, it was too chaotic or something, needed more unity. So I lined the panels up and kept painting. I liked how the off-set images still created a sense of shifting, that something along that fault line between the panels had moved.
nice show guys; love it.
to push back on something that’s been discussed in previous threads:
regarding “thinking and making” (quote, S.K.), It seems that in the video there would be a lot more necessary disruption happening during the process -more stopping and starting- than might occur during a painting-on-canvas process, where it is possible to work without really being pushed back from the object (painting) for long periods of time.
Sam, is there a difference between thinking and making in the videos vs. the thinking/making dynamic that you might engage in a ‘painting’.
Ballou, you could throw in on this with legos too…
Thanks Jen. I can see what you mean, though I’d say the photographing becomes rhythmic, like wiping a brush or some other near-thoughtless activity. You know how with paintings, you back up every so often to see if what you’re doing is working? The constant photographing leads me to do that every few seconds, instead of, say, every 20 or 30 minutes.
The process of editing is sometimes a total mess, the way getting lost in a painting can be–especially if I’m repeating any of the photos for whatever reason.
The sound accompaniment often gets made in almost exactly the same way. A period of deliberately avoiding any analyzing followed by a period of intense analyzing.
I’d say the difference is that the video process is MUCH more time-efficient, and I usually feel quite a bit more freedom in what I could do. I can’t blame Chris for wanting to call the videos “paintings.” I still pretty much think of them that way, too.
Also, to speak to Chris D’s early question:
I’m thinking about how so much of what we see and experience now has been informed by so much study into our own appetites and conscious/subconscious responses to things, and crafted with those things in mind. I think a lot of people are losing their patience for anything that doesn’t cater pretty directly to them…even though engaging that kind of thing could be revelatory.
So, some people see an empty room (or golf course) and they’re like, ok, where’s the barbecue? where’s the basketball game?
Not that I don’t like barbecues and basketball games, I just like stillness and reflection, sometimes, too.
I’ve mentioned this on here before but it’s pertinent to this show, so…My feeling about making a painting without figures, and it’s a common one I’ve heard from others too, is that the viewer becomes the figure. The viewer is not voyeur looking in on a scene, but breaks the fourth wall in a way and can more easily imagine themselves into the scene, moving around those mini-golf courses, digging through junk in an attic, lying in the un-made bed.
I think it also neutralizes the sense of time, which helps the viewer imagine themselves into the painting too because if you see a figure doing something, the time span taking place in the painting feels narrower (how much narrower might depend on how well the painter is able to animate a figure or maybe if the figure’s pose is supposed to be rather still in the first place). But by only providing the stage scenery without the actors the painter restricts that momentary feeling and you can explore at your own pace.
I’m not trying to tie all of these together too much, I think there are differences in the use of uncrowded-ness in all the work. Sam especially probably has different and more developed ideas about time in his video work. But even the video, as Sam mentioned, operates a lot like a painting. I think the stationary position of the camera makes it feel like a canvas on which I’m seeing the work play out.
Also, I played a lot by myself as a kid.
Wow, guys. I was a little afraid that maybe the subject was dead. That we’d talked the life out of people-less paintings. But these last few comments & questions, Jen, Sam and Joey, have been great.
Joey, I’ve been thinking lately about statements that are absolutely true, part of the fabric of being a human and experiencing art and life and stuff, but somehow a little embarrassing or unpopular to actually say…and “imagine themselves into the painting” is right now near the top of that list.
I think the earlier subject of we’re all driven tword our own desires is something to be considered when looking at a painting. What are these drives and why exactly do we attribute them onto our selfs? Can we in some way manipulate anything into what it is that we think were trying to be? Wate a second iv found my self describing the work of an artist!
[...] spring, Sam and I curated an exhibit of paintings of uninhabited man-made spaces. So I was naturally interested this post from Jonah Lehrer’s WIRED blog, suggesting [...]
i’ve been on a real roll with songs lately and this one just keeps on bringing me back to this post. question of parts, parts to the whole, arrangements of parts, manipulation of parts. as Lilly and others point out…
turns out this song has nothing to do with a golf course. but why the hell not?
this whole album from Crooked Still (High Hop) is pretty worth a listen. My bro burned it for me for X-mas.
I will not [sic] be making any more musical posts under this name.