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works words

newsletter - summer - 2004

articles

• A brief review of Blue: the 2004 Works Members' Exhibition
  (May 6 to June 5, 2004)
• Accelerated development: New California Masters (NCM)
  (March 25 through April 24, 2004)
• A weekend of intriguing performances at Works/San Jose:
  Rick Walker’s loop.pool on Friday 3/12/04
  Brandi J. La Zard’s Conversations with God, and Darren Patrick Blaney’s The Bird Club: Letter to Sandra Bernhard on Saturday 3/13/04
• Exhibition Review: Slippage/Wording the Thought Bubble at Works/San Jose
  (February 5 through March 6, 2004)
• A review of body commodities: queer packaging at Works/San Jose
  (June 10 through July 10. 2004)
  sexualized identity in popular media:
  gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, transsexual…queer

One hundred and fifty nine Works members (more than 45% of total current membership at Works) contributed to make this show a visual feast. Although paintings dominated the scene, there was a huge range of media including: photography, printmaking, collage, sculpture, and video.

With over three hundred artists and guests in attendance, the opening night reception for "Blue" was certainly as successful as ever. This year's exhibition lived up to its eclectic reputation.

Artists Jin Tsubota and Emily Hung created a piece thatsparked a great deal of conversation at the reception: Their installation, entitled "Infundibulum," used jello
"eggs" and a clear Plexiglass sheet installed about 8 feet off the ground to create a whimsical stained-glass effect that could be viewed from below. Guests also found that the piece tasted as good as it looked: extra jello eggs were included on the refreshment table and were happily gobbled up by hungry guests.

Many members of the San José arts scene contributed, including current and past San José State University (SJSU) art students: Christine Canepa, with a haunting painting entitled End of Winter; Jason Challas, with For David, a manipulated Xerox print; Ema Harris-Sintamarian, with a triptych of intricately illustrated patterns; Sandy Ledesma's Herstoria:Nuestra Reina a painting personal, spiritual and political; Sheila Malone’s thought-provoking video Sloblu; Fanny Retsek's perceptive What We Need, What We Don’t silkscreen monotype. Complex sculptural works were represented by Victoria May's Ringside Girl, a mini-dress made from fabric and anchovies, and Barbara Mortkowitz's mixed media Sentenced to Journey, at a Loss for Words, a tribute to messages in bottles, which tend to invoke pleas for assistance.

Works/San Jose’s current Artist in Residence (AIR) and SJSU MFA graduate, Renee Billingslea, participated in the show with a stunning array piece whose materials included paper, thread, and plastic, while former AIR Michael Pauker presented a delicately composed collage. Tony May, founding member of Works, currently teaching at SJSU and recently exhibiting at the San José Museum of Art, gave us something to ponder with Unaltered Photograph a digital photo, mounted and varnished.

Nearly six hundred people attended the run of the show- one of Works' most popular - witnessing the vibrant arts scene in the South Bay.

Nora Raggio/ Lis DuBois/ Saaba MBB Lutzeler

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Works/San Jose made a bold new move last year: it redefined the criteria by which soon-to-be MFA graduates would be included in its annual New California Masters exhibit. Instead of choosing solely from San José State University (SJSU) MFA graduate-students-soon-to-graduate (as had been the tradition prior to 2003), the competition was open to every MFA program in California. Christian Frock, curator for last year’s exhibit, focused primarily on Bay Area schools, and more than half of the students represented happened to be from SJSU.

This year’s curator, Kuniko Vroman, threw away the last vestiges of Bay Area bias, and offered an exhibition represented by 18 graduating students all over California, from San Diego and Los Angeles to the Bay Area. If last year’s show was heavily weighted toward painting and sculpture, this year’s show was a 180 degree shift. Most of the pieces in this year’s exhibition focused on photo-based media (stills and motion). Noted Vroman: “Not all the work in NCM uses digital media, but as the overwhelming majority can be connected [to it] in some way or another, this trend was insisting that it be acknowledged.”

Michael Rich’s S.O.S. was a cleverly crafted political statement. From a TV screen, emanated the face of George W. Bush, just about to announce to millions the war against Iraq. With this footage, and our president’s propensity for blinking, Rich was able to edit a looped, “blinking eye” Morse code, in which the president repeatedly blinks a “Save Our Ship” message to exhibition viewers.

A circle of life-like photo banners, Japanese Males—Surrender, hung provocatively from the ceiling, depicting larger-than-life, frontally nude Japanese men with their arms over their heads. According to Mayumi Hamanaka, the artist, this piece addresses “the construction of Japanese…masculinity within the context of the U.S.-Japan post-war relationships.” Similar in scale, Christine Nguyen’s Clionessonic Temple was a huge photo array of an imaginary landscape, including what seemed to be the integration of microscopic and macroscopic worlds. Like Nguyen, Julia Page also referenced landscapes in her work, “White Box,” but with a stronger overlay of social commentary. Julia Page’s impeccably constructed, huge “white box” provided mini-animations of landscapes overtaken by “urban planning, home design…military manuals and cold war propaganda.”

The work of Chei Ishida and Binh Danh depicted the fragility of life and socio-political structures respectively. While Ishida carefully wove together a sort of “paper quilt” of the receipts he’s been saving since his August 2002 arrival in the U.S. from Tokyo, Danh’s work used a sophisticated Chlorophyll Print technique he developed in which he grows an image on plant leaves through a photosynthetic process to research “the hidden stories of Vietnamese American experiences.”

Absurd, yet insightful, playful, and enlightening were the works of Bill Berry, Jason Montara, Tim Sullivan, and Jackie Summell. Berry’s rather masochistic sense of humor emerged in Cackle of Chickens: he emblazoned a photo of himself as a corporate-bespectacled-zombie onto several rows of vinyl punching dolls. “In the American retail market,” Explained Berry, “they sell anger management toys for therapy…Why not a bop bag with my image on it?” Montara’s version of the absurd included video shorts of “tool couples” doing what they do: a hammer hitting another hammer, clamps clamping other clamps, a chair sitting on another chair. Sullivan’s quirky C-prints showed himself receding into the wallpaper or wrestling with lawn chairs. Summel’s short video narratives were absurdly touching, like the fate of a remote-control Barbie doll crossing heavy traffic intersections or a mechanical shovel trying to pour milk into a glass.

Other artists juried into the show included Alice Cattaneo, Rose DeSiano, Rachel Beth Egenhoefer, Scott Hinton, John Richey, Adam Schwartz, Chad Staybrook, and Robin Ward. The show had a positively postmodern feeling to it, employing a conceptual process with pluralistic perspectives and a clever application of technology to comment on the absurdity, fragility, and irrationality of political conditions, personal situations, life.

Show curator Vroman was right: “Fresh ideas and opinions abound here, as do artists that are able to convey those opinions and ideas in unique and vibrant ways. Californians aren’t afraid to take themselves too seriously, or paradoxically, to poke fun at themselves and use humor to try to understand an absurd world.” Vroman’s careful selection process from the 60 artists who applied, provided the Works audience with a compass to navigate through emerging art trends in the sunny state suddenly ruled by The Governator.

Nora Raggio/ Saaba MBB Lutzeler

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Rick Walker's loop.pool (3/12/04)

Using an incredible array of found/bought objects, constructed artifacts, and body noises which included PVC pipes, bells, a clitoral vibrator buzzing in a glass, or just a random gurgle of intestinal bubbles mixed with jaw clicks, Rick Walker created, an entrancing evening.

Walker, king of looping, played with his stockpile of instruments or engaged his body to perform – and then directed these sounds, in real time, to his computer, to generate loops, which were then woven to create an assemblage of sound from a pool of noise, thereby creating aural complexity.

Walker hypnotized the audience at Works for close to two hours, an unusual treat. For more info on Walker’s performances, check out www.looppool.info

Brandi J. La Zard & Darren Patrick Blaney (3/13/04)

Brandi J. La Zard opened the evening with her performance “Conversations with God”—stunning the Works audience with her honest, intense delivery of self-authored text – a combination of essay/diary/prayer. In this performance, she addressed god with a “chat” about death, achievements, and anxiety. LaZards’s monologue/performance borrowed from life situations she’s faced since childhood and created a haunting voice that searched both within as well as to a higher force for possible answers to the human condition.

Darren Patrick Blaney followed with a colorful performance of “The Bird Club: Letter to Sandra Bernhard.” Originally, Blaney meant to deliver the show in drag to Sandra Bernhard at the Westbeth Theater where she was performing, but the plan went sour, and the performance was transformed, instead, into a bittersweet tale of pan-gender metamorphoses. “The Bird Club” is a series of vignettes about wistful, yet optimistic people, a fantasy of reality chapters metamorphosing from one scene and character to the next. For close to an uninterrupted hour, Blaney performed a wide range of roles with uncanny veracity, including a former stripper turned apathetic Brooklyn housewife, a farsighted anthropologist, a lusty guy running wild with sexual fantasies in the locker room, a transgender lesbian hoping for true love, even an optimistic housecleaner who knows he is HIV+. This Works performance was by no means the first for Blaney: “The Bird Club” had been presented at numerous venues including festivals, cabarets, and galleries, in places like New York, Portland, and the Bay Area. Despite these multiple previous performances, Blaney’s delivery was both fresh and saucy, entertaining as well as compassionate, insightful.

Nora Raggio/ Saaba MBB Lutzeler

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Participating Artists

What’s in a name? Take Slippage, for example. Julia Bradshaw, curator and participating artist for the exhibition at Works, cooperated with three other artists who use a range of media in combination with text - including painting, photography, and the web. “[I collaborated] with people who had worked with words to give some sort of ambiguity to the image,” Bradshaw explained. “That’s why we called it Slippage, because we felt that the words would slip…they’d cause the image to change its meaning.”

Participating artists included José Arenas, Diane Fenster, and Nanette Wylde. On February 26th, in conjunction with the exhibition, photographer Jack Fulton offered a free lecture on the employment of the photographic image accompanied by text. In his talk, he discussed the work of 19th century artists from William Henry Fox Talbot— all the way to Ed Ruscha, Man Ray, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Robert Frank, Bruce Nauman – and surprise – Jack Fulton himself.

Artists’ Perspectives

On opening night, Friday, February 6th, I had a chance to interview participating artists.

Nanette Wylde, who teaches electronic art at CA State University Chico, contributed to the show with several works, including Storyland II and ebaybies. “I’m a conceptual artist and cultural worker,” Nanette offered, adding that she likes stories and narratives. “My work all has a conceptual base, and I usually work with some text that’s running around in my head. I like art to be in the community – it’s very important for me that people have a lot of art in their lives… My favorite work in this show is ebaybies. Photo images of dolls that were up for auction on ebay were rescued by me and brought …into the world of fine art - and now you can adopt one and take them to your home as a genuine and lasting friend.” Nanette smiled. Indeed, to assist with these adoption transactions, Nanette hired Miss Strange, ebaybie Adoption Counselor, who facilitated the process. Miss Strange lured potential adopters to her table set up at Works and then presented them with an adoption application entitled “ebaybies/genuine and lasting friends” – which included questions such as:

Do you own a home?

Where will your ebaybie reside?

Are you a collector? If so, what do you collect?

How many friends do you currently have? What is the duration of your oldest friends?

How do you regard/treat dolls?

Are you interested in a particular ebaybie, or can you befriend any ebaybie in need?

One ebaybie adopter at the show reported glowingly: it’s “a match made in cyberspace.”

Storyland II, was another of Nanette pieces on display: a randomly generated narrative. The first Storyland was written in Java Script. It currently exists on the web at: www.preneo.com/nwylde/storyland/
Nanette expounds: “Pools of words are put in there to randomly create a story…it’s never the same…it’s about stereotypes and popular culture and aspects of contemporary culture production, like hybrids, stock content, design templates. So it doesn’t make sense all the time, but I find it very amusing – I need to be entertained by my work.”

Diane Fenster’s work included huge Polaroid transfers on curtains hanging from a central location in the gallery. These worked as partitions for each of the fortunetellers that were invited to participate in the exhibition. Says Diane: “I’ve worked on investigations of inner needs and desires, but I got to thinking – what is it in people that makes them want to know what the future is going to hold for them…people, from the beginning of time, have been interested in knowing what their dreams mean and what their future holds…when I was thinking about how to construct this body of work I had this idea of the curtain that covers the entrance to the soothsayers parlor – meaning that you always have to move aside the veil in order to see the future, so it seemed natural this time to do the work on actual window curtains.”

Julia Bradshaw (curator for show) saw herself as the instigator for Slippage: “I tried to make sure that we didn’t just have photographers…we made sure that we had a painter…and that’s how I went about choosing people, I wanted to make sure there was a variety of medium here.” Julia’s work in the exhibition included photographs of different parts of the body with text, like tattoos, digitally inscribed on them. A striking piece depicted the neck of a bowing woman with the word “lonely” placed on it.

José Arenas’ paintings were haunting. Wheelchairs framed by roses were combined with ambiguous text. Illustrations of children’s named body parts were linked to medical graphs or pathologies. He commented on his work: “I collect image and text that I put together in various types of arrangements – sometimes in a spontaneous way, and sometimes in a very pre-planned way—where I think about what image is going to be paired with another image or text to create a kind of relationship. On the other hand, I’m really into the process of being lost, of having mystery, accident.” José explained how he felt about collaborating on this show: “I’d like to add that it’s been great to work with these amazing artists —a lot of times it’s hard to click with people…but here there’s been a…flow.”

Overall, an ambitious show—redefining the way media and text can be arranged to create fresh meanings, different perspectives.

Nora Raggio/Saaba MBB Lutzeler

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Sheila Malone was the mastermind for this unprecedented show at Works. Not only did the exhibition focus on queer art and queer issues surrounding popular culture and media—the process by which the show came about was innovative: Malone was the “meta curator” for regional curators all over the U.S., which then selected artists from their particular region. Five curators, including Malone (curator for the Southeast) participated in choosing the artists to represent this exceptional show – including Greg Youmans (curator for the West), Leta Evaskus (curator for the Southwest), Clare Charles Cornell (curator for the Midwest), and David P. Duckworth (curator for the East).

Curators’ perspectives on body commodities: queer packaging (bc:qp)

Youmans (West Coast curator) suggested that this show aligned quite well with his graduate studies at the University of Santa Cruz (History of Consciousness Program) focused on queer identity and consumerism. “I appreciate that there would be a notion that queer sexuality is actually called forth in mainstream, mediated culture…I’m interested in instances in which a vocal, very visible queer identity is actually demanded for straight consumption.”

Evaskus (Southwest curator) was pleased to find a plurality of opinions. “The work that I got, commented on these issues in ways…that really surprised me…those surprises really caught my eye and expanded my vision of what people are going through.”

Duckworth’s (East Coast curator) perspective centered around the critique of this current, unprecedented visibility of the queer community portrayed by mass culture, popular culture, print, TV, film. For him, the questions centered around: “What do you think is the situation, what does it mean as a whole that Americans are consuming queer bodies? Why are they doing that right now? What are we, as a community, getting from this? For a person that identifies as queer, what does it mean that we are being looked at in this way?” He questioned how close mass media perspectives intersected with the reality of queer lives. He added, “Is my life any better because five guys can makeover a straight guy for American homes? I don’t think so…”

Cornell (Midwest curator): “It’s interesting, because the work has extended the meaning beyond what I initially thought was the intent…how homoerotic, gay male desire is all of a sudden mainstream, like in Calvin Klein advertisements…but it’s been extended beyond that to—the queer body as commodity, and I would say the queer body meaning anybody who deviates from the penis and the vagina for reproduction – so I think it is a very inclusive title the queer body as commodity, and I would say the queer body meaning anybody who deviates from the penis and the vagina for reproduction – so I think it is a very inclusive title —it extends an invitation to people who just aren’t gay white men, or lesbians, or particular groups…people are recognizing the dynamics of the sexuality.”

Malone (Southeast curator and ‘meta’ curator) synthesized: “Queer work is of a very general, large scope—so we started thinking of the body as being this terrain that will continue to be a place that artists explore as long as humans are in their physical bodies…as well as it being an interesting topic for science, especially biology – sex changes, transgender rights – all those issues are coming to the forefront politically, socially, culturally. So we looked at the body as a location, the idea that the body is commodified by culture, by commercial endeavors.”

Participating artists

The artists selected for each region, represented to some extent, the perspective of each of the curators.

Cornell is a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, and many of the artists he chose came from the Chicago area. Among them were Jessica Bader’s pink ceramic log cabins on ceramic pillows referencing log cabin republicans-kitsch, with a sensuous, almost erotic quality. Aaron Taber included photographs of his make-up art. Taliaferro Logan presented assemblages of packaging that commodified and constrained the body. Chris Walla’s embroidered bandana hankies read as a codified matrix, as well as a wall quilt. Walla provided the key to a dress code system of colored bandanas worn by gay men in Chicago and other U.S. cities in the late 70s– signifying different sexual behavioral preferences. Cornell’s work subverted model military airplanes, by painting them glossy “military lavender” and embellishing them with “Liberace rhinestones.” Each military plane model had a quote from either Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, or Dick Cheney – ironically referencing the American military: “I believe they’re trying to protect this hyper masculine identity so much that they’re afraid of lesbians, gays, and transgenders in the military.”

The artists from the East derived mainly from New York. For Duckworth, the emphasis was on the critique of media and other social structures portraying queer artists for the mainstream.

Thus, Duckworth was careful to include deceased artists from the AIDS pandemic, including Gin Louie’s assemblages, David Worjnarowicz’s two-panel screen print and Ronald Monroe’s box assemblage. In our interview with Duckworth, he spent most of his time explaining the work of these artists, although 28 artists were selected from this region – the East being the region with the highest representation for this exhibition. Monroe’s work, which encapsulated a found religious note with brown bottles and red balloons, spoke to the irony that queer people could be packaged in a message of salvation, suggesting that salvation is something one can manufacture. “This message is particularly cogent, because it’s as if we have to be saved” suggested Duckworth. Louie’s piece, on the other hand, combined a Physician’s Desk Reference with embedded scientific and personal objects. Duckworth commented: “It’s a work about how you negotiate existence itself.” Beyond the packaged information presented in the manual, Louie inserted a syringe and other objects used in the immediate struggle with AIDS, however, couched within the book was also a huge stone – which pointed to solving the dilemma of the AIDS pandemic not only with “a system that tells us how we address our own bodies” added Duckworth, but that also incorporated the artist’s personal and spiritual insight. Duckworth considered Worjnarowicz’s two-part piece one of the most political in the show. In one panel of the diptych, Worjnarociz superimposed stock market quotes with a map of the U.S. as a target – linking corporate profit and greed with the need to address the AIDS crisis. Duckworth also commented on a piece entitled "Concentration" by New York artist Christopher Clary. The piece consisted of a set of cards organized in several rows, in a semicircle, like the seats of an amphitheater. It turned out that the so-called cards contained downloaded pictures of the abuses suffered by Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. Duckworth mentioned that this piece commented directly on the American military: “we are allowing the American government to abuse men sexually…we know they have this taboo about homosexuality.”

Evaskus, a recent MFA graduate from the University of New Mexico, sought to explore personal experiences with body commodities – investigating the exterior and interior of an individual’s gender – which is dominant? She asked herself how does one feel when the perceived gender is ambiguous, when one keeps second guessing or is unable to ‘figure it out’? Does that make one feel uncomfortable? Do we treat people differently depending on their gender, and how does that play out when gender is ambiguous? Her white and black photographs exploring beauty and androgyny make us question our positioning in this space. So does the work of artists selected by Evaskus. Jesse Pearson explored ambiguity by superimposing or combining photographs – like the one of a boy scout head with the belly of a man from the army – implying that the same issues are faced by gays in both institutions. Jules Rochon painted herself as a sailor – the solemn countenance in the painting defies the struggles she faces with her identity. In his altarpiece, Ed Check explored the relationship between being raised Catholic and sex work – how do these two things in his world fit together?

Youmans selected artists from the West Coast who looked into the issues of body commodities: queer packaging from a poignant, yet humorous perspective. Hannah Hammond-Hagman showed one of her series of painted torsos – in which she took a model of her body, manufactured copies, and then had an auto body shop detail each copy. Hammond-Hagman plays with the notion of commodity by the act of successive reproduction, but on the other hand explores the idea of the fetish by turning a body part into a sort of plastic, shiny, car part. Koak constructed diorama explored an awkward social situation– evoking poignancy and pain combined with sharp and caustic wit. David King’s photo collages summarized complex tensions around gay male identity: both kind of hot and innocent, disturbing and funny. Elizabeth Stephens, who teaches at UC Santa Cruz presented two rows of bronzed panties—the upper row a collection of porn star panties, the row beneath, panties from academics: the juxtaposition of concept and media created an immediate environment of humor and insight. Teri Claude Dowling’s photo of a constructed, saran-wrapped Wonderbread in the form of a penis emanated a very urban, sexualized, violent scene — all wrapped in one. David Allen Burns combined photo and video piece portrayed a journey into self exploration – he wanted to see inside his own ass – the video documents the challenges and tribulations involved in constructing the photo— in which his ‘double’ is looking up his ass with a flashlight – combining camp and eroticism.

On collaboration

Curators for this show had mixed reviews about collaborating primarily through email. Some considered it novel – disguising voice and identity – until they had a chance to meet face to face a few days before the exhibition. Others found that it led to electronic miscommunication and found the process more frustrating.

Curators, however, were extremely pleased with the results of the collaboration.

Malone concluded: “This show represents a national vision…As a resident of the South Bay, I get really tired of not having the opportunity to see queer work here – even though I know there’s a queer culture, there’s a queer community, there’s a queer community center. I’m a queer artist and so I wanted to have the opportunity for queer art to be shown here, but also to provide queer artists an opportunity to show work.”

For more information on the queer arts festival, please visit the Billy Defrank community center at: www.defrank.org

Nora Raggio (from footage shot by Manuel Platino)

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