Wednesday, June 11, 2014

newsprint


All the News That's Fit to Print, at the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, was a big success- lots of people visited and enjoyed it. It was great fun to put it together with Erin Elder of CCA. I've published images from some of the works already, so this is a summary of the show.

On the last day, we had a panel discussion with three of the exhibiting artists, whose works are below:
Adam Simon
Elissa Levy
Pat Boas


It was so interesting to hear the other artists talk about why they are attracted to working with the New York Times. Pat Boas talked about living abroad and how other countries have a national newspaper- the Times seemed to be the closest thing we have to a national newspaper. She uses content from the Times- in this work, she traced all the heads from the photos on the front page on tissue paper and each sheet would be used for a whole month, so the outlines overlap and fill the page. There are twelve drawings, one for each month. 

Elissa Levy also talked about being at a residency in Scotland and seeing how the newspapers there were full of sports. She and I are sometimes attracted to using the same front page photograph. She alters the page by painting and cutting, creating a three dimensional work that's colorful and thought-provoking.

Adam Simon's work was from a number of years ago, and stemmed from his desire to take himself out of the work by using the pre-existing design from the front page, painting out the photographs with white red or black paint, depending on his own system of hierarchy, affixing the pages to canvas and sealing them with resin. He said something at the panel that I loved- that we as artists are lucky that we can take a memorable moment from time and freeze it forever in an art piece. I think of my own work that way, because each of my cut New York Times pieces commemorates a historical event. I choose the page that jumps out at me from the paper in the morning when I open it.


I created a work specifically for the exhibition, titled Quotidian. I made vector files of the page layouts from the Times for a week, seven layouts in all. I had four of each of these laser cut into handmade gampi paper, which was folded and hung on a tall metal ladder, 16 feet to reach the ceiling joists of the gallery. The rungs of the ladder got further apart as it went up, so the paper sheets that were layered fairly thickly at the bottom were thinner at the top and seemed to float up into the space above. The image below shows the piece on site and a detail.


Other artists in the show were Guy Richards Smit, whose large watercolor facsimile of the paper full of his own funny made up news stories, was open on a large table so viewers could read it; Lauren Di Cioccio, who seals the paper in a muslin sleeve then embroiders through it to enhance the front page photograph; Francesca Pastine, who contributed a sculptural mask constructed from the financial pages and covered with copper leaf, plus moody photographs of other similar works. Shanti Grumbine recorded a sound piece that used redacted text from the paper as a kind of musical score- accompanied by a folio of prints of the score plus another print using the newspaper's design and text but overlaying her own pattern on the photographs; AJ Bocchino sent a large digital work on canvas that used headlines concerning the US relationship with Saudi Arabia dating back to the 1940's; and Fred Tomaselli painted his own phantasmagorial image on the front page photograph. 




Previewing this, I see that the text is all wonky, and I am trying to figure out how to fix it! For now, it'll have to stay put.  Why, blogger? Trust me folks, I've tried to edit so all the text is the same size, and on my page it is, but as you see it, it isn't. Mercury is in retrograde, so I've been told.