Art at the James

Notes from the Artist: “My work deals with physical and pictorial occurrences in nature. Through curious observation I find infinite instances in which natural order and disorder create framework. A perfect example being fractured light through broken glass or a web of tree branches intertwining through a matrix of space. Wound together, the pictures I make float in and out of illusory space while simultaneously denoting flatness of their plane materiality. Surprisingly a rhythm emerges in all this; what excites me is the beauty and its unpredictability. Through Collage I take something as a whole, then break it down and reassemble it through my own filter. Layers are built up but are done so in order to subtract from the overall image and create voids in the landscape of the imagery. The uniqueness to my process adapts a traditional ‘cut and paste’ approach but also carries seamlessness equally redolent of digitized media.”

Aaron Wexler is represented by Josee Bienvenu Gallery – NY, NY.
*Works courtesy of the artist.

PIECES:

Untitled, (1), 2010
Collage and pencil on paper

Counter Tourism, 2010
Acrylic and painted paper collage on panel

Untitled, (2-5), 2010
Collage and pencil on paper

The Not-So-Distant Future, 2010
Acrylic and painted paper collage on panel

www.aaronwexler.com

Notes from the Artist: “Hope and despair come together to create many of the best moments within our lives, from our first kiss to our last hurrah. My work is about these great things that can happen when there is hope within desperate situations. I see my paintings as figurative, even though you will never see the human form. I use objects as stand-ins, or actors, to play out the narrative within each story.

In your stuff and my stuff became our stuff a pile of boxes represents the moment I moved in with the woman, who later became my wife, because my apartment building was vacated. At this very moment, both her and my possessions became ours, and this has never, and will never change; even though there has been, and will be, plenty of hope, and plenty of despair to follow.

Note from the Artist: “Like technology or like the instrumental rewriting of history, painting too can make more immediate the things we experience. Painting recasts these things in new terms, in new ways. My painting does not seek to present something impossible or particular; instead it represents something contingent, a re-imagining of what actually exists, a re-alignment of logic that makes plastic the anxiety underlying objects in the world.”

Ben Grasso was born 1979 in Cleveland, Ohio. Currently he lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA in painting in 2003 from the Cleveland Institute of Art, an MFA in painting from Hunter CUNY in 2006 and studied at the Edinburgh College of Art in 2002. Recent solo exhibitions include “New Territory” at Jerome Zodo Contemporary in Milan, Italy and a forthcoming exhibition this fall at Thierry Goldberg Projects in New York City. Ben Grasso is a 2010 fellow in painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts

Note from the Artist: “In my creative practice I create multi-disciplinary portraits of place. My process is formed through direct engagement and response to the landscape as it is combined with an earnest sense of what it could be. My projection-grams compress an elaborate sixty-second choreography into a single image. Working with digitally produced slides, I strategically project image-fragments and simple geometric forms into the landscape, and document the result through time-lapse photography. During the extended-exposure, I move through the frame with a white screen, creating a kinetic projection surface to capture and reflect parts of the projection as it travels through space.

For other works in the collection I cut straight-photographs along precise, geometric lines, inspired by both natural and industrial forms. The resulting image fragments are re-combined into imagined landscapes. If one assumes the single image represents a fractured view of a given space, then my work amplifies the resulting cracks and questions the apparent simplicity of the world as it appears.”

Note from the Artist: “Even as we pass through it, a landscape is already in the process of being remembered and reinvented. Landscape can be used as a medium with which we are creatively involved, a locus for the interplay of orientation, identity, memory and the poetic possibilities of misrecognition. Its value lies in its openness, its internal dynamism, and the scope of the imaginary variations to which it lends itself.

The process for my landscape paintings originates with a multi-source photographic index. I employ a stratified collage system to evolve an image from this indexical source into a final painting or series of works. Compositionally, the convention of field assumes the dual role of ground (rural and urban) and atmosphere (color and light). Suggestive shadows, amorphous blurs, architectural remnants, stacked lines and deformations are referents for an informed and impaired picture. These are dramas of transition, a landscape on the move where there is no contradiction between the limitlessness of becoming and the evocations of recollection.”

Note from the Artist: “My work is about the representation of, and access to, an ephemeral landscape. The works insist on contradiction to reveal the marks of industrial globalization and land loss. Which phenomena should we value? Where do we look to find utopia? Mapping becomes a mission to get lost and search for images. Mystery is my compass.

I merge large-format chemical photography with digital techniques to combine multiple images into an intricate view of the landscape. In Moss Map, the sublime void of the sky becomes the water that grounds tiny islands of moss growing across an expansive horizon.

Phenomenal Growth was made from video footage of migratory birds returning to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Drawn from my own video stills, the forms map repetitive moments of flight and landing. The birds rest on tracings of shadows cast from twigs and plant tendrils collected from the same migratory destination.”

PIECES:

• Consider Her Weightless, 2005-2010
  Four Pigment Prints
• Phenomenal Growth, 2008
  Ink on Mylar Drawings
• Terra Incognita, 2010
  Pigment Print

Notes from the Artist: “My work is concerned with exploring nature through the lens of technology. Early on I painted from video games like Grand Theft Auto and Halo because they dealt with space and detail in a manner similar to early Italian Renaissance paintings and they relied on painstaking visual economy. I am interested in how this economy creates conflict between generality and specificity in representing nature and how the mind processes the space of a landscape versus how the ocular-centric frame captures it.

By using Google Earth as a painting source I am able to navigate anywhere in the world in an instant and am equally equipped to explore places impossibly difficult to reach such as the summit of the Matterhorn or under-sea mountains in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. With this technology I can fantasize about places in the world that are out of reach. I can also perform a kind of self-surveillance on my memories of places I have already been. The hyper-realistic images draped over a three-dimensional framework in the computer program compete with what my mind has processed and retained from actual experience.

A textile atelier based in Bogotá, Colombia, Hechizoo was founded by Jorge Lizarazo. Originally trained as an architect, Lizarazo aims to bring this perspective into play when designing his exquisite textiles. This results in rugs, upholstery, and curtains that are an extension of the architecture, and interact with the interior spaces for which they are intended.

Hechizoo’s contemporary designs emerge from a rich Latin American tradition of textiles. For Lizarazo, sources of inspiration range from the beautiful Colombian landscape to a poncho worn by the famous singer Chavela Vargas. A colorist, Lizarazo pairs unlikely hues and tones to create vivid effects. It is his emotional translation of his reaction to the world around him into the language of textiles that makes the work so original.

Notes from the Artist: “Hymns to the void, planetary attributes, light-captured evidence of cosmic occurrences, and willful space-manipulations of immaterial ideas-all while the Earth under your feet wobbles and drifts. These various photographic works come out of a period of intense, yet simple, astronomical observations undertaken in some vain hope of actually apprehending what it means to live on a planet in space. Aristotle understood the Earth as spherical in the 4th century BCE, when he argued that a lunar eclipse is proof of our own circumference, the shadow of ourselves. Aristotle’s proof places us centrally in a three-dimensional cosmic drama, one deduced solely by naked eye and available to all. Just look up.”

Notes on the work: Jessica Cannon’s paintings explore a psychological landscape that contains personal and cultural experiences. She is interested in the conflict between ‘fight or flight’ as competing impulses in response to chaotic events: do we engage with the issues that overwhelm us or seek escape through physical or fantastical experience? Many of the paintings are set in a moment of suspension where the viewer is simultaneously apart from but witness to an event. Something is happening in the distance and turning away may no longer be an option.

Jessica’s process involves collecting source materials and piecing elements together to create a study. This collaged study acts as a rough outline for the painting, which is then rendered through thin layers of acrylic paint on paper. While the paintings are informed by studies, the finished work is a product of translation, an idea re-envisioned through material and imagination.

Note on the works: The Surrealists suggested that we use a map of one city to find our way around another, but really we can do nothing else. We locate ourselves with close and constant reference to memory and imagination, interpreting our surroundings according to their subjective examples. A recurrent subject of Jude Broughan’s work is that process of understanding one place, one time, one state of being through allusion to myriad alternatives. The ten works shown here include photos taken by the artist in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Miami and around New Zealand, and depict the liminal spaces of international travel, suggesting both the free-floating anxiety of dislocation and the excitement of unknown futures.

Broughan’s work employs multiple, often incongruous processes and materials, sometimes mimicking processes associated with digital graphics, such as layering and masking. The fragmented appearance that results aims to cast human idiosyncrasy in a celebratory light and reflect on sustenance and growth, fallibility and imperfection. In Kilburn, 2009, and Dusk, 2010, plastic gel supports suggest the radiant virtual space of the backlit computer screen, against which photographic images float as if caught between contexts. LAX, 2010, juxtaposes a sheet of ’80s-vintage paper with a mechanical gradient (a relic of graphic design’s “paste-up” days) with an obviously digital photographic image. The “masked” areas in the series “Morningside Miami”, 2010, are digitally produced, contributing to an ‘in-progress’ look that connotes a state of becoming and deconstructs the language and values of commercial design by suggesting a renewed and recontextualized embrace of the “raw” and organic.

Notes from the Artist: “My artwork uses landscape photography as a starting point for construction and interruption. In my work the ability for a photograph to transport the viewer is both called upon, and questioned; sculptural intervention attempts to compensate for the photograph’s failure to encompass the physical site it represents. I am interested in the American Wilderness and issues of environmental conservation as well as modern architecture and design. My interest in the relationship between interior architecture and the natural world has also led to recent work that juxtaposes reclaimed drywall into outdoors and site-specific installations. A broad range of techniques and materials are used – photography, collage, sculpture, installation, video – in work that strikes a balance between abstraction and representation, landscape and architecture.”

Letha Wilson was Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and raised in Greeley, Colorado. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She earned her BFA from Syracuse University, and an MFA from Hunter College in New York City. Letha’s artwork has been shown at many venues including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Socrates Sculpture Park, Exit Art, White Box, Fredrieke Taylor Gallery, Platform Gallery, PARTICIPANT Inc., BravinLee Programs and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2009 Letha was a resident at the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Letha was recently selected as a Smack Mellon 2010 Hot Picks Artist, and in 2011 will have a solo show at Vox Populi in Philadelphia, and be an Artist-in-Residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art.

Fourteen floors of new paintings, prints, photographs and works-on-paper by emerging New York City artists using landscape as a conceptual element in their work.

The title, Stand Here and Listen, plays off the phenomenon of ‘viewing spots’ that occur in popular tourist destinations: exact spots, labeled with signs, where visitors are encouraged to stand and look. In a similar way, the selected artwork allows viewers to stand and look, inviting visual exploration; however, the activity and composition of each work embodies thought, motion and sound, as much as sight.

Notes from the Artist: “Sentient (Photographs) The ocean is simultaneously dangerous and beautiful. I was attracted to this duality and began to photograph the waves at night, a time when the ocean feels the most unknown and un-navigable. Although the ocean is physically the same at night as it is in the day, our perception of it changes in the dark. Unable to see the water at night, we feel uncertain of our surroundings. Even photography, a medium of light, captured only the white crash of waves, the lone visible sign of the water in the darkness. The white seemed sentient and in a sense was the mark by which we could know the ocean at night. Waves visualize the power of the ocean and in the black void of night the swirls of white in Sentient hint at that unseen energy we know in our minds to be present.

Sea Change (Palladium photogram) Wave after wave, the mark of the ocean is ever present and continuously changing. The variations in the images of Sea Change, a series of palladium-based photograms, reference the complex character of the ocean. Never on its own, water is always in combination with other elements or in various transitional phases. Water contains and transports many materials that are not visible to the human eye, including sand, minerals, and other sediments. To produce the images of Sea Change, I stand in the water holding light sensitive paper in the break of a wave and allow sand to form a pattern on the paper as it exposes in the sunlight. This process entwines the material aspect of the medium with the ocean and shows the trace of water. As a result, each piece becomes a unique document of the movement of matter within an individual ocean wave.”

Based out of San Diego, Mike Calway-Fagen’s work “Boldly Gone Before” in the Urban Garden combines reclaimed timbers and an actual rowboat to create a wonderful surprise for guests exploring the terrace.

mikecalway-fagen.com

Notes from the Artist: “My work features parallel architectural universes assembled from the detritus of discarded utopias and unrealized paleo-futuristic structures. Taking compositional and aesthetic cues from Japanese painting (in particular graphic flatness and frontal qualities) and Western architectural drawings (pre computer-era), I adapt obsolete manual drafting techniques to explore these worlds. Mechanical pen on mylar, brush, straight edge and knife blade (and a bit of software-enabled 3D modeling) are used to create hundreds of fragments, which are then hand-placed and assembled into compositions that float in the gravity-neutral space between reality and the imagination.

Inspired by this image of a green Manhattan, and building on a series I have been working on that feature urban “vertical gardens,” I created a new piece for The James called Vertical Garden (Marshes) — featuring one-hundred cut-out drawings of the indigenous plants that once grew on this spot, now growing from the roofs of a rotated contemporary high-rise. Accompanying that piece are studies of architectural fragments, a drawing in tribute to the visionary architect Buckminster Fuller’s airborne habitats and a piece called From the Abandoned Cities (Cave), which imagines the discovery of a strange half organic, half manmade underground world.”

Dutch artist Nienke Sybrandy designed the electronic privacy shades in the guestrooms of The James New York. Her work arises from observations of daily life: small events at home, street images, actions and traditions. She has exhibited widely across The Netherlands and Europe. Her favorite materials are objects that are often overlooked: A nail is a sign of hope and desire and a photocopied bunch of flowers is as transitory as a seventeenth-century painting. By working with common utensils she unites the small with the great and thus creates a connection between today and the past. Each object is a bearer of stories and symbols.

www.nsybrandy.nl

The James New York added a new art installation to the artistically-inspired Urban Garden where the community helped choose which design should live on the statuesque pillar in the heart of the garden. Local and accomplished artist Molly Dilworth submitted three unique designs and fans were invited to vote for the final design.

The pillar artwork is inspired by the history of Lower Manhattan, Ghost Acre offers a unique take on public art from the hotel perspective with the pattern derived from the decorative histories of the original natives of the city– Native and African American, Dutch, English and French settlers.

Based out of Brooklyn, Molly Dilworth’s work is visually graphic and “site specific” meaning it can be adjusted and adapted conceptually to tie into the history of the location. Molly believes it is critical for the content of the artwork to be connected to its site where her projects are built from the ground up, beginning with research about a particular site, with an emphasis on things that have an effect on our daily lives but exist below the level of conscious experience. The work is always drawn from data – historical, geological, sociological – from the site so the resulting piece is relevant and engaging to the community in which it is made. Dilworth’s work also references quilting, which is a subtle tip of the hat to “women’s work” which has a long history within the artistic community.

www.mollydilworth.com

Paul Wackers makes works based on the familiar, which in the bustling city can often be hard to find–and sheds new light on everyday objects. Born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1978, Wackers graduated with his MFA from San Francisco Art Institute, and with his BFA from Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC.

Artist notes on his piece at The James New York: “I wanted to work with the shape of the wall to create a narrative within the piece itself—the same way I would over many pieces within a solo show of my paintings. I was able to create a story with this piece by using compositional elements and recurring motifs: a cabinet with familiar but intangible objects, plants, pots and vaguely historical imagery. It incorporates many of the objects and shapes which I see as characters that can interact in different ways through use of color, line and juxtaposition. This installation depicts the version of a passage of time. The first object has a sense of potential energy and growth. As you make your way through the mural, you see a human manipulation of this energy in conflict and in conjunction with the natural, and end with the hopeful balance of the two.”

Sarah Frost is an emerging artist based out of St. Louis, Missouri. In her QWERTY installations, she re-uses keyboard keys to cover surfaces, creating a mosaic-like effect. Frost scavenges her materials from items she finds at garage sales or in garbage bins. Creating a second life for these objects is her primary interest, as each object carries traces of its previous life. Frost’s pieces, made entirely out of cast-off keyboard keys, discarded by an array of users from individuals and small businesses to financial institutions, government offices and Fortune 500 companies, can cover whole rooms. Each key has a unique history and bears the imprint of the thousands of taps by countless users. In her works, Frost hopes to convey both the material effects of consumer culture and its connection to human mortality. Her piece for The James has been custom-created for the hotel lobby.

PIECES:

Qwerty 5, 2010
Discarded keyboard keys

www.sarahfrost.info

About the Artist: Sarah Nicole Phillips employs commonplace symbols to reveal underlying societal tensions while offering an alternative and hopeful vision. She imbues images of bicycles, rainbows, clouds, landscapes with subtle humor and irreverence, providing a silver lining to possible dystopian futures. Obsessive rainbow-inspired doodles take over the planet; transcending partisan debates about climate change. Bicycle-chain grease stains the sky with a rainbow-shaped stamp and sunshine composed of shards of photovoltaic solar cells pierce through somber, stormy clouds. Collages made with discarded office envelopes conflate images of plant life with hard-edged linear repetition, suggestive of man-made infrastructure and human-imposed order. Encroaching plant life calls attention to the living, wild source of paper fiber and an ever-present, yet obscured wilderness that permeates the imposed order of civic life.

Sarah Nicole Phillips is a Toronto-born, Brooklyn-based artist. In 2003 she received her B.A, in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto. In 2006 she received her MFA from Brooklyn College with a concentration in printmaking. From 2006-07 she participated in a year-long artist residency at the Lower Eastside Printshop where she continues to teach. She exhibits widely in Canada and the US and has recently been included in shows at the Queens Museum of Art, the International Print Center New York (IPCNY), and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). She is a 2009 recipient of a Brooklyn Arts Council grant. She has created several solar-powered sculptural installations including a public installation during SolarOne’s 2007 Citisol festival at Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Cove Park. Sarah is active in New York’s cycling community.

Sharon Levy explores psychologically charged spaces and objects that trigger feelings of childlike awe, awkwardness, anxiety, isolation and pathos. In her sculpture she uses materials and techniques from crafts, theater props, toys and furniture to make objects that incorporate the evocative, narrative and flat qualities of drawing and painting into the physical presence of sculpture. She is interested in the tension that exists between her works’ formal properties and the emotional responses it provokes.

With the “Strays” series Levy has made a group of stray dogs to inhabit the patio of the James. This is the second incarnation of this project; the first group of “Strays” was made for an exhibition in Tijuana, Mexico, as a response to the ubiquity of stray dogs in that city. For the group at the James, Levy used wood she salvaged from behind a hardwood store. The wood scraps she reclaimed were discarded for their awkward shapes or flaws, which in turn informed the gesture and character of the dogs they became. In New York, a city where luxury and decrepitude are never far apart, the “Strays” bring a bit of scruffiness to this manicured setting.

Korean artist Sun K. Kwak lives and works in New York and has exhibited and been reviewed across the world. Her custom piece for The James New York was inspired by the space within which it was created: The Glass Elevator. As the elevator moves up and down the black image on the white wall will start to move together and appear gradually floor-by-floor. The finished piece will be full of life and vibrancy, and the unusual exhibition space allows viewers a unique way to appreciate a work of art. As a result, she says, “the usual perception of the space “Elevator” is now changed through viewers’ time and experience in the new pictorial reality.” Black masking tape is Sun’s signature medium, with which she has been creating pieces for fifteen years.