Meet yer Maykr: Marc Willhite

Buddy and collaborator of mine, Marc Willhite, will be kicking off the 2011 exhibition schedule at Ironton in Denver on January 14 with an exhibit of new work entitled Soft Descriptions which will run through February 19.

I snapped some photos on my visit to Marc's studio back in November 2009. I returned again in August of this year when I was able to see some candidates for the Soft Descriptions show in their nascent state.

work table

Over the years, I've looked at Marc as a metric against which I've measured my own development.
Marc and I met in our Freshman year of college. We had a drawing class together. Out paths diverted when I left college after Sophomore year.  He finished and went on to get his MFA while I did what I did - which was bot get an MFA.  Or a BFA for that matter.  We met up again a few years after college.  Though our approaches and experiences had evolved differently, a root commonality we shared from those early days allowed each of us to serve as a calibrated voice of critique for the work of the other.  I think this quality in our interactions has continued lo these many years.  The differences in process/practice we exhibit are clear indications of the divergence of our developmental experiences .  Marc is more conceptually and intellectually grounded than am I.  I get the ideas (eventually,) and I can get excited about them, but my response always comes, initially, viscerally.  (If my gizzard could read and reason, I could be unstoppable.) That said, his work at its base is also driven by intuition and it's often inventive.

pattern, color form.

a couple of works on canvas

Marc now has a website of his work at marcwillhite.com

In 2007 Marc and I collaborated to create the In the Spirit of the Text exhibit at the Curtis Arts and Humanities Center in Greenwood Village, CO.

In 2008 Marc had an exhibit at Pirate in Denver.  I posted some exhibition installation shots here.

In 2009 Marc created a work for kork in Poughkeepsie, NY.

In the foreground, you can see Marc's Dec 13th contribution to the 2009 kork Advent project.

collages on interior shots from magazines

Drape, 2005, scotch tape. at Echo

Marc's contribution to the 2005 installment of the Windows on Main St. Exhibit here in Beacon, NY

 Shots from 2010 studio visit:

mylar tape on wall

susan sontag

Here's the press release for the exhibit:

“Soft Descriptions” is Marc Willhiteʼs first solo exhibition at Ironton Studios. The work in
the exhibit is text-based and features a wide range of materials including etched glass,
neon, translucent push pins, oil on linen, latex on panel, ink jet prints, spray paint on
paper and direct carving into the gallery walls. The scale of the work varies from
discreet works of sixteen square inches to floor-to-ceiling, wall-size installation. It is a
formal exploration of the ways words exist, particularly in relation to how we visualize
and use them: a collection of textual depictions, “portraits” of words, terms and phrases.

The work for this exhibition is primarily rooted in Willhiteʼs interest in language. From
the artistʼs statement:

“Language is not so absurd, though our use of it often is. We are regularly
constructing realities incongruent with our experience. This project embraces this
characteristic aspect of our use of language (along with the reality that words are
subject to misunderstandings and misconceptions) and explores the arbitrary nature,
excessive possibilities and inevitable shortcomings of textual description.”

Willhite is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Denver, CO. He has an MFA in
painting and drawing and an art history minor from the University of Minnesota, Twin-
Cities and a BFA from Colorado State University with a double concentration in painting
and drawing. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, been included in various
publications and maintains a collaborative practice with several artists working around
the U.S.

Meet yer Maykr: Jim White

While in Denver back in November, I paid a visit to Jim White in his studio to pick up his contribution to the kork Advent project.
While there, I shot some images of Jim's space and a bit of the nascent works of various forms he has in progress.

I met Jim in the late 90's at a group exhibit he was participating in at Revolucciones space in Denver.  I was struck by his facility for drawing and his compositional treatments.  I bought two paintings from that exhibit and we've been in and out of contact ever since.

As I'm writing this, I'm recalling an instant during an exhibit I had at EDGE gallery in 2002.  At the same time, Jim had a show up across the street at Pirate.   Having run over to check out Jim's show, I came away feeling very envious of his work.  I can't say now what it was in particular that drew that reaction out of me, and I can't actually remember what I saw - that portion of the memory has been drowned out by response to it.  It's the only time I can remember feeling that way toward someone elses work.  It was a short but sharp sensation.

A box of antique player piano rolls that Jim is starting to use in his collages, such as he did for his Dec 19 contribution to the kork Advent project.

A personalized valentine.

Jim said that he's just now returning to drawing and painting after a period in which he's been involved in creating small foamcore sculptures.  These table top sculpture sit somewhere in between misguided architectural models and a fanciful scheme for cultural merchandising.  Jim thinks of  to these as miniature monuments; each one a lilliputian ode to the heyday of macho plop art.

In time, these pieces will receive some form of paint treatment.  We began discussing possible applications of these for a future kork project....stay tuned for that later in 2010.

Some images of Jim's workspace:

 The two untitled works from (98, 99?) currently hanging in my bedroom.

You can view past Meet yer Maykr studio visits at Maykr.com

Meet yer Maykr: Elia Gurna

Early in October, I paid a visit to Elia Gurna's studio in the Beacon Studios building. Of course, I snapped some images.

The work in her studio was predominated by her lushly hued paintings and blanched sculptures of silk flowers and plastic tchotchkies. The objects collaged together create hieratic verticals and are unified under layers of white enamel. I was pleased to learn that the constituent material is resurrected from a previous life and generally it is sourced from within her own home. This knowledge pleases me for two reasons. First, one who hordes likes to know he's not alone and secondly, because the forms of the sculpture take their cues from Elia's intuitive play with what's available. They grow out of what is - responding to that condition, not negating it as does a fully premeditated work. The little item in the foreground in the above image is sitting on a plinth of stacked Pakistani (I believe) chewing gum, which I believe Elia said is at least a decade old.

Though all of this work has been greatly influenced by her becoming a mother last year, the tiny pieces lining the windowsill (above) are the most directly affected by this change in her life. What she calls her 'Sculptures for Mice' are works of opportunity made during the sporadic and fleeting moments of art making that present themselves to the mother of a one year old.

There's such a stark chromatic difference between Elia's paintings and sculptures. In surface and form they but two sides of the same coin - oozy, glossy, dimensional. But where the paintings are blindingly vivid, the sculptures are subdued, with hints of the underlying objects' inherent, often garish, color barely bleeding through.

Elia is the second artist to go on the board of kork - the newest and most exciting project space for contemporary art in Poughkeepsie, NY. kork is located on the wall above the photocopier in the office of Bailey Browne CPA and Associates. The work Elia created for kork will be installed this week and remain through December.

@ HVCCA: Jonathan Meese performance & talk, May 10. Chris Jones exhibition opening May 18

German based artist Jonathan Meese will be giving a performance followed by a talk on Saturday from 12-2pm in Peekskill at HVCCA. $5 Adults; $4 Seniors/Educators; $2 Students/Children; FREE HVCCA Members.
Speaking of HVCCA, Chris Jones, the museum's current artist in residence will be opening an exhibit of the work created during these past three months he's been in Peekskill. I stopped in two weeks ago to see him and drop off more magazines to feed the furnace of his studio frenzy. Chris Jones' stockpile of material.

Since my first visit in the beginning of March, Chris' studio has become far more densely packed with materials and it is now dominated by the sizeable works in progress. Chris uses collaged elements from magazines to build a sort of 3D collage. His work has a dualistic nature - visually, and conceptually. Visually, seeing his work feels a little like viewing something through a set of stereoscopic glasses; your field of vision is slightly skewed. Conceptually, that duality plays out in the notion of actuality vs. representation and what is concrete, solid, vs. the ephemeral, non-structural made structural. The glossy pages Chris uses are not simply the surface of the piece they are integral to the structure and form holding his work together, yet the amorphously shifting imagery within the pages that are essentially the building blocks of his structures serve more to dissolve or erradicate the work's representational presence rather than reinforce it.
He manipulates the imagery in the magazines to embody an uncanny presence and form of textures depicted in his source images. Sculpture detail.
It's trippy stuff. How an appropriately crumpled piece of paper bearing a photographed image can take evoke the immediate and visceral experience of seeing a thing even while you are aware that you are viewing a scaled down, 2D, documentation of that thing.
I'm not going to give away what he's been doing, but he's been doing it feverishly. The work that he's creating now has everything to do with his stay in Peekskill, which is his first time in the States.
architecture of paperChris Jones' exhibit opens Sunday May 18 with a reception and Gallery talk from 4-6pm. The exhibit runs through August 17, 2008.