See Space explores the intersections between space and perspective. The artists of See Space are all youth that attend the Technology After School Program I teach at the McNeil Family Clubhouse in Menlo Park. Artists are between the ages of 6 and 15. The images are created from projects the youth created in a variety of programs and mediums including video, photography, digital illustration and animation. Youth were asked to explore the theme of space through their own or another person’s perspective. The resulting assemblage of images point towards multiple understandings of space and ways of looking, world creation and alterity. Contributing artists include: Cirene L .(age 11), Danilo P. (age 11), James P. (age 13), Francisco (AKA Paco) D. (age 13), Rebeca S. (age 10), Lamarissha C. (age 11), Fred W. (age 7), Teyjuanne M. (age 6), Myles N. (age 10), Aherakhem N. (age 12), Ally C. (age 7), Rachel L. (age 13), and Tajianna R. (age 15).

INTRODUCTION
Sites Unseen: Contemporary Art Practice in Public Spaces explores alternative public art practices, the expanded notion of public space via new technology and media, and the increased significance of photographic documentation in an increasingly dematerialized culture. For this collaboration with Add-art, we collectively opted to literalize the agenda of Add-art through a focus on “ad art.” Source information for each image is provided to demonstrate the free accessibility of information on the Internet—a unique forum that enables us to appropriate and crop these images, as details, thereby allowing us to further the interventionist objectives of the original artworks.

Christian L. Frock
Senior Lecturer, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA
Curator and Producer, Invisible Venue

CURATORIAL STATEMENT
When our Sites Unseen class was presented with the opportunity to curate an Add-Art show, we chose to implement images of text-based, public art that co-opts physical advertising spaces as a form of critique on the very spaces occupied by Add-art and the framework that supports them.

Contemporary public art, having expanded beyond large-scale permanent sculptures, has grown to encompass temporary spectacle, guerrilla interventions, and community-based projects, among other formats. With advances in technology and communication over the last twenty years, it is increasingly easier to engage in these newer public art practices, especially as our concepts of “public” continue to grow. The Internet is the largest public sphere in the world, albeit one that does not require a physical presence, accessible to anyone with a device that supports web browsing and working Internet connection. In many ways, this makes it not only the largest public space, but also the most visited and therefore one of the most effective spaces for public intervention.

IMAGES
1: Neon sign intervention by Sylvie Fleury, selected by Benoit Antille
Source: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/2358306

2: Billboard intervention by Public Ad Campaign, selected by Erin Fletcher
Source: http://www.randomspecific.com/category/street-art

3: Billboard intervention by Mike Mandel in collaboration with Larry Sultan and students from Sun Valley Center for the Arts (Shoshone, ID), selected by Elizabeth Glass
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikemandel/2959640023/in/set-72157608227566351/

4: Anonymous billboard intervention, selected by David Kasprzak
Source: http://outdoors.webshots.com/photo/1195341389059025312luQCkd

5: Skywriting intervention by artist Bruce Nauman, selected by Christian L. Frock
Source: http://laist.com/2009/09/18/skywriting_art_in_pasadena_launches.php

6: Billboard intervention by Hewitt & Jordan, in association with FREEE, selected by Noah Krell
Source: http://hewittandjordan.com/archive/assets/economic.jpg

7: Neon sign intervention by Douglas Gordon, selected by Charles Moffett
Source: http://www.anewpath.org.uk/media/images/large/122.jpg

8: Billboard intervention by artist Robin Pacific, selected by Kris Timken
Source: http://torontoist.com/2009/04/mourning_and_loss_in_the_land_of_co.php

Invisible Venue collaborates with artists to present art in unexpected settings.
www.invisiblevenue.com

Internet ads are perfect little boxes, accurate to the pixel, placed within the precise geometric grids which delineate the contents of a website. This show replaces them with artworks exploring geometric abstraction–pushing, pulling, and reconfiguring the same mathematical language which defines the pixel-precise placement of internet ads. Cut and resized to the size of ads, these tiny artworks give us a glimpse into the diverse explorations of these artists as their pieces interact with the gridded landscapes in which they now find themselves.

Andrew Jeffrey Wright’s hand painted “X-Waves” begin with a simple grid structure but begin to warp and waver as their tiny imperfections multiply outward making perfectly imperfect patterns. Ann Alstatt’s prints explore the geometry of patterns and the language of math textbooks, cleverly juxtaposing these borrowed elements with landscapes, animals and textures. Maureen Halligan’s paintings explore the striated spaces of suburban development, mapping abstract representations of the growth of sprawl. In his “codescapes” series, Nik Hanselmann writes code which visualizes itself, resulting in dense maps which show the movement of variables and functions across the landscape of software. Pablo Manga “Linescapes” are created by layering tape culled from shops Mexico City to create complex meshes of undulating lines and colors.

Andrew Jeffrey Wright
Ann Altstatt
Maureen Halligan
Nik Hanselmann
Pablo Manga

Dear _________,

I was recently invited by Add Art to curate their next exhibition. I think it’s a smart project and, from a curatorial standpoint, any kind of application that introduces me to new artists is fantastic.

I’d like to include your work in the exhibition I’ve been asked to curate. There can either be 17 distinct photographs or one photograph cropped in 17 different ways.

My curatorial approach to this was very simple and inspired entirely by the randomness of Add Art: I’ve always bookmarked artists whose work I want to follow, I typed in random letters (in no particular order), and the website that popped up is the one I chose. I like your work very much and I want others to know about it as well.

That will essentially be my “curatorial statement” on the site, though I would like to also include your website links as well.

My deadline for cropped images is Saturday, October 23rd, so I would greatly appreciate hearing from you as soon as possible.

Many thanks,

Chuck Mobley, Curator
SF Camerawork
http://www.sfcamerawork.org

1.    Angela Buenning Filo http://www.angelabuenning.com
2.    David Horvitz http://www.davidhorvitz.com/
3.    William E. Jones http://www.williamejones.com/
4.    Forest Kelley http://www.forestkelley.net/
5.    Jason Lazarus http://www.jasonlazarus.com/
6.    Jessamyn Lovell http://www.jessamynlovell.com/
7.    Wilka Roig http://www.wilkaroig.com/
8.    Jenny Vogel http://www.jennyvogel.net/

10:30 AM

Paint FX member: u dere?

10:32 AM

me: yah

Paint FX member: my boys are cookin stuff up for me

we’re all doing 2 sets each

10:33 AM

me: sure

sounds great

10:34 AM

me: can you maybe help me understand the project a little bit more?

Paint FX member: i see it as a return to formalism

like modernist formalism

but for the internet age

so the output is much greater

actually, more like “hyperformalism”

which is like formalism as a conceptual strategy

we can’t separate man from machine anymore

cause were so n’sync,

and were kinda like the band too cause there is 5 of us

me: i see the resemblance

10:37 AM

Paint FX member: also we’re trying to make transparent certain effects

from the emboss effect

to the sponge tool

10:38 AM

these effects become part of the vocabulary

of this new hyperformalism

me: right

sure

Paint FX member: so while abstract expressionism

was about the medium of painting

color, shapes, textures, composition, the paint itself

10:39 AM

paintfx is utilizing the limits of the software/applications

as the subject of the work itself

while at the same time being just viscerally aesthetically pleasing

10:40 AM

i see this return to modernism everywhere

10:41 AM

me: is the composition, color palette in reference to anything

or just an aesthetic choice?

Paint FX: sometimes the color palette

is mapped directly to found fotos we find

so literally we’re not even choosing the colors

me: ah

10:42 AM

Paint FX: the software is doing it for me

me: that’s cool

and other times?

Paint FX: other times i want to make something that is inspired by a great work of abstract painting

update it

10:43 AM

or im responding to another member of the collectives

work

i think there is lots of dialogue going on between us

like if i see a technique i like

ill just copy it

without any feeling of guilt

me: right

Paint FX: because we are anonymous

me: exactly

10:44 AM

Paint FX: but personal styles def emerge

still

me: it’s the internet, duh.

that’ll be the statement

10:45 AM

Paint FX: haha

me: do you worry that it might be too self-referential?

Paint FX: what?

me: kind of like an inside joke

Paint FX: well,

no not really

i think that its okay to make in jokes

because if the subject is interesting enough

10:47 AM

people will try hard to be part

of it

and that extra effort

makes the work even more lasting

10:48 AM

me: fair enough

Paint FX: and the people who make no effort are probably not worth having as an audience.

me: good answer

Paint FX: besides

we have so many projects that are very approachable already

me: right

Paint FX: its nice to make art for art sakes

sometimes

10:49 AM

and maybe that is the most revolutionary act

because art for art sakes attempts to break free out of the commodity system

by being useless

10:50 AM

me: haha

10:51 AM

i think i just want to use this chat sessh as the statement

Paint FX: oh vey

u have to edited it srsly

but thats a good idea

me: yeah

i know

10:52 AM

Whether she fixates on a contemporary environmental disaster in China, a terrorist attack, declassified military images, or the US Presidential plane on a tarmac, Garnett grapples with images that are at once nebulous and universal. Rendering them into oil paint she doesn’t neutralize the impact of each image as much as abstract them until they look like they are crawling out of some dark corner of memory. Looking at her paintings we instinctively search the surface for any semblance of meaning. Often their titles are the only hint as to their source, and even those images that arise out of her imagination, such as “New York’s Chelsea Art District On Fire (4)” (2004), somehow feel more real on canvas even though we’re aware they are fictions. Through the filter of her painterly vision Garnett collides meaning with style — there is no message only interpretations.

My hope is that online, Garnett’s images will make people surfing the web aware of the technological distance we have to other forms of media, such as paint. Oil painting relies on in-person experiences to reveal the wonders of its voluptuous texture, but online they are transformed into postcards devoid of most visual depth. This is an attempt to return Garnett’s plundered images to the online world — even if only momentarily — to reveal some dark corners of the internet that few find and even fewer people spend more than a few seconds with.

To investigate this concept of obscuring that which distracts and thus detracts from the impact of the written or pictographic information we aim to enjoy, HIDE AND SEEK conversely asks a group of eight artists to make the ultimate compromise: create work wherein the emotional/intellectual center is missing altogether. The absence of content that would otherwise be relied upon to transmit the larger concept means that we must glean substance from the excess alone. It might be done by creating a complete work and removing or occluding the central element, or by omitting that information from the start––or by any number of other methods. This presents an important conflict, as it is likely counterintuitive for the artist to consider that anything inessential would be found in their work to begin with. But as ‘excess’ and ‘inessential’ are relative terms in this context, another goal of HIDE AND SEEK is to show how the orthodoxy of definitions might modulate within a group.

Chris Fallon

Partisan Gallery

August 2010

List of Featured Artists:

The artist used this experience as an exercise in juxtaposition of the old (manual manipulation of graphic images) with the new (culture jamming via programming), bringing a unique perspective to the minuscule fractions of digital ephemera that all modern internet users experience on a daily basis.

thanks for supporting us.

The mandate, for the purpose of this show was to take inspiration from the advertising that is being replaced – to play with the idea of branding and commerce and, ultimately, the concept of selling out. The ways in which the artists did this was myriad. Skewville, a New York City duo renowned for elaborate architectural interventions, fused common street slang with the straightforward imagery of grocery store circulars in a series called “Brooklyn Beef.” Others devised fictional brands to which they have “sold out” their work: infinity created a non-existent pop-rock candy inspired by his interest in the language of science, illustrator Abe Lincoln Jr. created a humorous street art energy drink and eko integrated his match-stick figure into “ads” for everything from pasta and ice pops.

Others approached the project in a somewhat more conceptual fashion. Stikman integrated his iconic stick figure into existing advertising campaigns, producing images that riff on the absurd nature of so much visual branding. El Celso took on the guise of mad scientist and created a series of ads for a time travel agency that doesn’t exist, commanding viewers to forget the past – a gesture that condemns us to repeat it. Hargo (otherwise known as Geoff Hargadon) plays on the recession-style advertising found on American roadsides and telephone poles – except his message is geared at cash-strapped art collectors ready to hock their Warhols. And the artist who goes simply by Cake, a painter interested in all things anatomical, produced a series of images inspired, in part, by fashion and beauty ads. She subverts those ideals, making her figures unearthly hues of blue and green.

Ultimately, that is the purpose of this show – to undermine imagery that has saturated our consciousness and become all too commonplace and familiar. By playing with the language and imagery of marketing, they not only reveal something about how advertising works, but how we, as consumers, have also been programmed to think.

Carolina A. Miranda

C-Monster.net

http://c-monster.net/

ARTIST WEBSITES & BIOS:

Stikman

http://www.flickr.com/groups/42499904@N00/

The mercurial Stikman deposits his two and three-dimensional stick figures in cities around the globe.

Skewville

http://skewville.org/

This twin-brother duo from New York City is renowned for their visual deceptions, tossing wood sneakers over telephone lines and bolting three-dimensional sculptures onto city structures.

infinity (See additional links here and here.)

http://www.brooklynstreetart.com/theblog/?p=3722

http://www.brooklynstreetart.com/theblog/?p=10910

Born in the Midwest but now based in New York, the highly mathematical infinity fuses his adolescent obsessions with comic books, heavy metal and graffiti with more recently cultivated interests in expressionism, punk rock, and semiotics.

Geoff Hargadon (Hargo)

http://www.cashforyourwarhol.com/

Headquartered in Massachusetts, Hargo is a conceptually-driven artist who can’t resist a good parody. As part of his ongoing project, “Cash For Your Warhol,” he set up a telephone number that has received nearly a thousand phone calls over the past year.

eko

For a decade, this dedicated graffiti and street artist from Pau, France has run the must-read graffiti blog Ekosystem.org.

http://www.ekosystem.org/

Celso

A figurative painter and conceptualist based in Brooklyn, Celso has dabbled in printmaking, assemblage and installation. Most recently, he shredded $20,000 worth of original art during Armory Week at the Edward Winkleman Gallery.

http://elcelso.com/

Cake

A New York-based street artist, Cake is a painter inspired by anatomy and the human body.

http://cakestreetart.com/

Abe Lincoln Jr.

Illustrator Abe Lincoln Jr. is a founder of New York City’s Endless Love Crew and the man behind art stunts like the Taqueria Pendejo (an art taco stand, complete with signature menus).

http://girlsbike.com/

This show focuses on care as maintenance, a very practical question about production and perpetuation, and one that only slightly touches on the questions about affect and morality. Here, the art itself is maintenance labor, or makes caring labor visible.

While these actions look similar and even seem banal, they offer unique questions about caring labor. Services United interrogates human-cultivated energy, in the form of electricity, to find the value of the work, and to dig deeper into the possible historical contingencies of how we do caring labor. Material Exchange’s DIY Coat Check sets an expectation of care, and asks what might happen when it’s unmet; how far caring mechanisms can extend or be extended is at stake in the process. Other artists include Environmental Services, Natasha Wheat, Mike Wolf, Jane Palmer and Marianne Fairbanks, the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, and Hideous Beast.

This theme is also the subject of a forthcoming journal edited by the Groundswell Collective. [http://blog.groundswellcollective.com/journal/]

Special thanks to Andi Sutton and Salem Collo-Julin whose artist suggestions were instrumental in putting together this show, and to Team Colors for the title, which is borrowed from a piece published in Baltimore’s Indypendent.

Statement:
The intention of IMPRESSIONS is to present the idea of artistic brands as malleable and separate from human identities. To assume the role of an artist is to become an avatar of yourself; it is the creation of a brand with an identical name that is inevitably separate from the real you. The artist brand is required to release precisely orchestrated information on a routine basis, continuously re-affirming her being in all sites of public interaction. Facebook, Tumblr and any other websites the artist exists on function as theaters of recognition for viewers to gain a greater understanding of her projected image. The extent to which an artist brand becomes successful is dependent on how well the viewer is able to make sense of the matrix of information presented to them.

Human identities exist in real time while artist brands are segmented and chosen intentionally. Artist brands are conceptual beings that live somewhere in the point between the author’s informational output and the viewer’s recognition. Because today’s artist no longer relies on her in-person presence for mass recognition, we no longer need to bind single human identities to single brands.

IMPRESSIONS proposes to make the artist brand a permeable franchise open to contributions by other individuals, (should the brand’s prime author consent to others’ inclusion within the franchise). The same decoding process of viewership that allows us to understand an artist’s work may allow us to recode those patterns into new work for them. In doing so, IMPRESSIONS explores new roles of outsourced authorship and the potential for viewing to become one with creation.

Brad Troemel, 2010
Parker Ito, 2010

Inspired by the political illustrations and impact of artist and Black Panthers Minister of Culture Emory Douglas, New York-based artist Shani Peters’ work responds to the persisting schismatic elements that plague the African-American community to date. Looking at African-American families as a microcosm for the state of the community at-large, Peters uses the stories and images of both fictive and non-fictive African-American icons to revisit history in order to propose new endings. The disproportionate incarceration rate of Black men and the subsequent absence in their homes set the stage for her investigations.

In these bodies of work, she includes Douglas-inspired silkscreened prints; stills from her comedic video collages, which put characters from America’s favorite African-American television families in conversation with Black political leaders and activists from the1960s and 1970s; and digitally printed stick puppets, which appear in her latest video Battle for The Hearts and Minds (of Future Revolutionaries Everywhere).

For the next two weeks, Peters’ images occupy our computer screens. Similar to Douglas, she uses this public forum to address the realities of brokenness and the possibilities of wholeness within the African-American community. Her visual meditations remind us that the prison-industrial complex is real and Black fatherless families will increase if love and racial unity are not prioritized.

-Petrushka Bazin

___

Shani Peters received her B.A. from Michigan State University and her M.F.A. from The City College of New York. Her work has been exhibited and screened throughout New York, including group exhibitions at Rush Arts Gallery, the International Print Center New York, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She has completed residencies at The Center for Book Arts and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space program. She is currently participating in the Bronx Museum’s 2010-11 Artist in the Marketplace program and is a Keyholder resident at the Lower East Side Printshop. Peters also works as a teaching artist with various community-based organizations in New York.

Petrushka Bazin is an independent curator and artist based in New York. She is currently the Program Associate and Exhibition Coordinator for The Laundromat Project, a community-based public art non-profit offering art programs in coin-ops throughout New York, and was the 2009-2010 Curatorial Fellow at The Kitchen, an interdisciplinary arts organization that supports and presents the work of innovative artists working in various disciplines.

June 2010

In the recent spate of articles about Bushwick section of Brooklyn, NY, innovative DIY arts projects and spaces, artists almost invariably cite Austin Thomas as a key early influence. Thomas opened Pocket Utopia – her groundbreaking salon, international residency program, and exhibition space in the neighborhood – in 2007, while the art market was still safely and unadventurously ensconced in the airtight studio/gallery bubble. She conceived of Pocket Utopia not as a commercial gallery, but rather as an extension of her own social sculpture. She had spent several years building large-scale “perches,” driving cross-country in a vintage 1973 El Camino and assembling portable social spaces of constructed tables, chairs, and sanctuaries as she went. Thomas wanted to push her projects beyond what had become increasingly comfortable terrain.

For Thomas, Pocket Utopia was a transitional two-year experiment, which she closed as originally planned in July 2009. Despite Pocket Utopia’s overwhelming success and the wonderful moments it produced, Thomas, who has returned to studio practice, doesn’t miss hanging the shows, mopping the floors, and cleaning the bathroom. For years she considered herself an itinerant artist who kept her supplies portable and worked wherever she could find a spare table. Now, in two studio spaces at the Elizabeth Foundation – one for drawing and one for construction – she has begun work on diminutive wooden models of the three-dimensional paper collages that she has made over the past several years. “The new work isn’t as literal as my earlier perches and social sculpture,” Thomas explained.  “I’m thinking about issues of space and scale, and studying craft techniques from old furniture making books.”

This online exhibition features several of Thomas’s paper collages, sketchbook pages, and images taken of work in progress in her studio. In September, she will present the new work at a solo show at STOREFRONT in Bushwick.

Note: A longer version of this essay appears in the June 2010 issue of The Brooklyn Rail.

Jordan Seiler is the founder of PublicAdCampaign, an artist/activist project started in NYC in late 2000. Through the reapropriation of outdoor advertising space, the PublicAdCampaign project questions commercial media’s right to the city while demanding a more democratic outdoor media environment which assures public participation and interactions. Operating under the belief that physical interaction with the public environment is an important part of fulfilling your identity as a public citizen, PublicAdCampaign organizes large scale outdoor advertising takeovers as well as other collaborative actions, allowing residents to take personal responsibility for the cities they live in. Jordan Seiler currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.