Observations of Modern Life | Ridley Howard: Slows | Leo Koenig Inc. | New York

Text by Dan Tarnowski

Slows is a new exhibition of paintings by the Brooklyn artist, Ridley Howard. Howard’s second show at Leo Koenig Inc. marks both a new direction in his artwork and a continued exploration of his typical style, which could be described as conceptual figurative work.

The first painting seen in the exhibition depicts a man in a patterned sweater of brown, white, and orange. The man’s face is realistically rendered with soft shading but the pattern of his garment is painted in flat shapes that conjure a Native American blanket. The 2-D style of the sweater recalls the geometry of the abstract and minimalist art contained in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Man With Sweater (2011), with its juxtaposition of soft flesh and angular shapes, sets the tone for the exhibition.

Blue Yellow (2011), a composition of yellow circles flanking a pink square over a blue background recalls the colour experiments of Josef Albers. It also shares a similar colour palette to the Pac-Man game for Atari. Considered alongside Black with Shapes (2011), a composition of green squares on black, it begins to seem like the artist has a serious interest in abstract painting. But the abstracts only encompass one of three artistic styles exhibited in Slows.

Progressing in detail, next comes Building (2011), a fairly realistic representation of the front of a factory, the kind of building common in Howard’s hometown of Brooklyn. The building is viewed from straight on and framed in the canvas so it makes a perfect rectangle; no slanting of windows or doors; all right angles. The flattened composition and factory aesthetic recalls Charles Sheeler’s modernist paintings of industrial architecture.

Progressing in detail once again, next are Ridley Howard’s paintings of people. And they stand in stark contrast to all the geometry. Meticulously rendered with full attention paid to anatomy, Howard’s figures are quite sensual. Nudes (2011) is the most erotic work in the exhibition, showing a couple embracing, a woman wrapping her legs around a man as he sits on a white downy bed. Despite the sexiness of the image, the viewer is not invited into the scene for long. Small details—the birthmarks on the man’s back or a perfect horizontal line across the back wall—serve to distract the viewer and remind them of the artist’s geometrical theme. The yellow color of the woman’s tights matches a neighbouring painting, a still life called Trattoria (2011). The still life features a yellow wall, a table, overturned wine glasses, and a small photo of a cat. Thus, the viewer is led out of the lovers’ scene and sent through the exhibition once again, looking at each painting a second time.

Holly, Rose Dress (2011) offers an interesting counterpoint to Man With Sweater (2011). In the portrait, a woman in a striped and flower-patterned dress features the same blend of three-dimensional form and flattened graphics as the man in the sweater, however the top half of the woman’s face is cut off so the majority of the canvas is filled with her dress. Thus, the pattern on her garment becomes a composition of its own, the flowers drifting towards the right while the stripes ripple to the left. The movement in the pattern on the dress hints at emotions that are not captured in the stoic face of the woman.

Although Howard bridges organic and architectural forms, their combination doesn’t seem jarring or disharmonious. The underlying geometry that appears throughout the paintings, even in the positioning of a nude’s birthmarks, gives the artwork an orderly effect. The clearest example of this appears in Tracks (2011), a mostly-monochrome painting in which a green racetrack runs horizontally beneath a bevy of puffy trees. Each tree is different and spontaneously placed, while the track is a sleek horizontal zip. Although the scene is banal, it gains a picturesque quality from the subtle sunset in the background and from the orderly nature of the composition.

But what does all this order mean? Is it the artist’s yearning to find meaning in places and relationships? Or is the artist detached from his subject matter, lining up his figures and shapes as an homage to painting?

Ridley Howard: Slows, 19/01/2012 - 25/02/2012, Leo Koenig Inc., 545 West 23rd Street, New York, NY 10011. www.leokoenig.com

Aesthetica in Print

If you only read Aesthetica online, you're missing out. The February/March issue of Aesthetica is out now and offers a diverse range of features from an examination of the diversity and complexity of art produced during the tumultuous decade of the 1980s in Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, opening 11 February at MCA Chiacgo, a photographic presentation of the Irish Museum of Modern Art's latest opening, Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection. Plus, we recount the story of British design in relation to a comprehensive exhibition opening this spring at the V&A.

If you would like to buy this issue, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Better yet call +44 (0) 1904 629 137 or visit the website to subscribe to Aesthetica for a year and save 20% on the printed magazine.

Caption:
Images courtesy of Leo Koenig Inc., New York

A World of Shifting Certainty | The Family in British Art | Millennium Gallery | Sheffield

Text by Kathryn Hall

The family is unique as a social institution: it functions largely in private, while at the same time has a public character; it may be defined one way for political purposes, yet assume any number of forms through personal perceptions and biological associations. According to context, the word family can carry with it notions of safety, obligation, compassion, social norms, or role fulfilment.

The Family in British Art explores the changing functions of the family and identifies certain concerns that have threaded through artistic depictions of family over the past 450 years. It is exactly the kind of large-scale, collaborative project that, since being dealt an Arts Council funding blow only weeks ago, seems under threat of not being exhibited again in the Millennium Gallery any time soon. Created in collaboration with Tyne & Wear Archives and Museums and Norfolk Museums & Archeology Service, the touring exhibition is part of The Great British Art Debate. Established to open up discussions about art, the partnership has already seen Restless Times: Art in Britain 1914–1945 and John Martin: Painting the Apocalypse come to the Millennium Gallery in recent years, exhibitions whose success lay in engaging the public with historic collections by drawing attention to their continued relevance. The Family in British Art builds on their momentum through its curation of historic and contemporary works alongside one another, and further stokes local interest with a commissioned set of Sheffield family photographs.

A theme so varied and abundant in artistic material benefits from being arranged thematically rather than chronologically. Under the sections Inheritance, Childhood, Parenting, Couples & Kinship and Home, the exhibition depicts a manifold of family connections, whether built through consanguinity, marriage, or closely shared environments or experiences. The common element across all pieces is an exploration of the ways in which humans relate to one another and their surroundings, and in doing so form an understanding of themselves and of others.

Drawing pieces from different periods together like this often heightens their impact. The earliest portraits are of moneyed families, posing, pets and all, against a backdrop of their sweeping estates. In these paintings children are depicted as small people in adult dress as a matter of course. William Hogarth's painting The House of Cards (1730) reveals a change in the conceptualisation of childhood at the 18th century, as children were seen to have needs and characteristics distinct from those of adults. His children are still adult-lings, mimicking their future roles as homebuilding husbands and wives. But with an ominous black dog lurking around their precariously built house of cards, Hogarth makes the point that children should be allowed to be children, protected from adult concerns before they are ready.

The House of Cards can be viewed in the Childhood section alongside Grayson Perry's 21st century ceramic pot Difficult Background (2001). At first glance both pieces appear to show a child’s world of play, but on closer inspection reveal unsettling distinctions between adulthood and childhood. In the foreground Perry places children of postwar "austerity Britain" innocently occupying themselves, seemingly oblivious and unaffected by the ruin, bloodshed and warfare playing out in the serious, grown-up world behind them. With its underlying modern consciousness of trauma and the psychological repercussions of a troubled childhood, plus its acknowledgement of the existence of the working classes, its context differs altogether from that of Hogarth's and earlier works. Together these create a historical narrative and reveal changes in cultural consciousness through time.

Among the most fascinating pieces of the exhibition are those addressing the idiosyncrasies of adolescence. Sarah Jones’ The Dining Room (Francis Place) I (1997), a photo seemingly of three sisters in their home, relates to earlier family portraiture of the exhibition, but as a self-aware construct: in reality the girls are friends, and are posed with disregard for one another. It explores performativity and the ambivalent attitude of teenagers toward those closest to them at a time in life when each is wrapped up in their own concerns over self-identification. John Collier’s early 20th century depiction of teen rebellion The Prodigal Daughter (1903), in which a daughter defiantly leaves the house against her parents’ wishes, addresses an adolescent need to break from family confines and assert independence. Contemporary artist Zineb Sedira strips her work of so familiar a context as the home in Mother Tongue (2002), a video triptych of attempted conversations between her, her Arabic-speaking mother and English-speaking daughter. The awkwardness of a teenager relating to older family generations is exasperated further through a literal inability to communicate, nodding to the idea of family being an identity formed through discourse.

The Family in British Art could do more to explore less conventional famliy structures - there is little addressing adoption, gay parents, single parents, and non-marital cohabitation. Paul Graham touches on a 20th century technological extension of the family in his intriguing Television Portraits (1991), and it would have been interesting to see more on families involving subjects beyond humans. There is a wealth of material here though, encompassing a wide range of art forms, and plenty of room to make endless connections across pieces and to individual experiences.

The Family in British Art, 02/02/2012 - 29/04/2012, Millennium Gallery, Arundel Gate, Sheffield S1 2PP. www.museums-sheffield.org.uk

Aesthetica in Print

If you only read Aesthetica online, you're missing out. The February/March issue of Aesthetica is out now and offers a diverse range of features from an examination of the diversity and complexity of art produced during the tumultuous decade of the 1980s in Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, opening 11 February at MCA Chiacgo, a photographic presentation of the Irish Museum of Modern Art's latest opening, Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection. Plus, we recount the story of British design in relation to a comprehensive exhibition opening this spring at the V&A.

If you would like to buy this issue, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Better yet call +44 (0) 1904 629 137 or visit the website to subscribe to Aesthetica for a year and save 20% on the printed magazine.

Caption:
Family Portrait, 1960s, from the Belle Vue Studio Archive © Bradford Museums and Galleries

Contemporary Sound Art | Haroon Mirza: /|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/| | Spike Island | Bristol

Text by Regina Papachlimitzou

In his first UK solo exhibition, Silver Lion Award winner of last year’s Venice Biennale, Haroon Mirza unfolds the map of an uncharted soundscape at once inviting and forbidding. His show /|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/| (the title being the "typographic representation of a sawtooth waveform" –that is to say, the representation of sound waves) consists of installations in which the auditory element heavily outweighs the visual. Each installation is pervaded by its own distinct mood, but all share a common denominator in the intensity of the experience and of the response each work elicits.

The artist has created a sense of insularity in which to experience his work through a spatial intervention in the galleries of Spike Island: the familiar rooms have been broken up and reassembled beyond recognition, with the help of temporary structural elements such as walls and latticed flooring. Upon entering what used to be Spike Island’s largest gallery, the visitor is almost sucked in, as if by a black hole, into Mirza’s award-winning The National Apavilion of Then and Now . Through a pitch black corridor soundproofed with thick, carpet-like material that swallows the sound of your footsteps, you walk into the unknown guided by a droning sound.

At the end of the corridor you find yourself in a dark and narrow triangle-shaped room, soundproofed with triangular pieces of dark grey foam jutting out from the walls. Overhead, a halo of white LED lights is the only light source, distorting the surface of the walls into apparent movement. The drone rises in pitch and intensity, the vibrations travel up through your body from the metal grille floor. When the lights and sound abruptly cut off, you are left in absolute darkness with the only sound a faint reverberation seeping through from the installations in the adjacent galleries; the only light a haunting afterimage of the LED halo. At that breathtaking moment you are engulfed by an overwhelming, absolute aloneness: a strangely welcome lack of any sort of context, temporal or spatial.

Once you've pried yourself away from the magnetic hold of National Apavilion, head to the gallery hosting I Saw Square Triangle Sine. The spatial arrangement of the installation -in the centre of the room on a raised platform- creates the effect of walking into a performance space, a recently abandoned set on which the instruments are still pulsing with life. The sculptures have clearly been positioned to bring to mind a band, including decks, drums, a keyboard, microphones and amps. This effect is however undercut by the physical reality of the undulating feedback noise, the sound of no music being produced at all. There is something distinctly menacing in the continuous rise and fall of the sound waves, intensified by the fact that the invisible line separating artwork and visitor is here erased: the visitor is welcome to play the drums or listen to the earphones, thus melting through the invisible barrier into the installation.

The adjacent space, set up as a corridor lined with sky blue foam, provides a welcome break from the intensity of the auditory experience that is The National Apavillion and Square Triangle. The mutedness and light spilling across the space sharply contrast with the sense of engulfment created by the previous installations. With head still vaguely throbbing, the visitor can examine a mixture of preparatory drawings for installation projects: some with the playful, careless quality of pencil drawings, thoughts absent-mindedly scrawled on paper; others precise, colour-coded diagrams with explanatory keys and notes. The juxtaposition of the doodle-like notes and almost mathematical blueprints make for a tongue-in-cheek reminder of the mixture of flash of inspiration and meticulous planning that inhere in the creation of any artwork.

The break, however, does not last long: already the exacting clamour of Untitled Song featuring Untitled Works by James Clarkson next door flows in and penetrates the visitor’s consciousness. Entering the adjacent gallery you are greeted by a symphony of energetic sound-snatches running alongside each other, collapsing, and dividing again. As time passes, different installations come alive at different points, gradually building a soundscape as if in reaction to each other and to the visitor.

A small, barely noteworthy speaker next to the entrance suddenly gives out an authoritative thump that vibrates its surface; from the other end of the room, a contraption made up by a wall-mounted speaker, a ceramic lamp, and a glass table responds and develops the thumping. In the centre, a modified shop display case, empty but for a lonely small speaker inside it; above it, a chain is suspended with its end curling on a woofer. As if swept along by the soundwaves rising and falling across the room, this installation comes to life too: the vibration travelling through the ear forces the chain to dance, adding its own jangle to the orchestra. Close to the entrance, suspended from the ceiling hangs a mobile-like structure, made up of a visibly vibrating small speaker, a string of red LED lights, a drum rim, and two more speakers on the other end. Across the room lies an old-style turntable with an analogue radio spinning on it, strongly echoing the decks of Square Triangle; an energy-saving bulb overhead sheds intense white light and creates a not unpleasant grating sound crossed with the static emitted by the radio spinning past. Untitled Song employs the lyricism of looped feedback and static sound waves to create an auditory experience precariously straddling the border between noise and music. The use of muted speakers through which music –presumably- flows only to be discarded in favour of the pure sound of vibrations renders the work all the more poignant.

In /|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/| the most promising young artist of the 2011 Biennale has put together a daring, original, and deeply moving solo exhibition that helps to carve a distinct niche for sound art in the landscape of the contemporary art world.

Haroon Mirza: /|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|, 21/01/2012 - 25/03/2012, Spike Island, 133 Cumberland Road, Bristol, BS1 6UX. www.spikeisland.org.uk

Aesthetica in Print

If you only read Aesthetica online, you're missing out. The February/March issue of Aesthetica is out now and offers a diverse range of features from an examination of the diversity and complexity of art produced during the tumultuous decade of the 1980s in Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, opening 11 February at MCA Chiacgo, a photographic presentation of the Irish Museum of Modern Art's latest opening, Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection. Plus, we recount the story of British design in relation to a comprehensive exhibition opening this spring at the V&A.

If you would like to buy this issue, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Better yet call +44 (0) 1904 629 137 or visit the website to subscribe to Aesthetica for a year and save 20% on the printed magazine.

Captions:
Haroon Mirza
Installation view, Untitled Song featuring Untitled Works by James
Clarkson, 2012. Mixed media.
Photo: Stuart Whipps. Courtesy the artist and Spike Island.