I’ve been interested in Nava Lubelski’s paintings for something like three years. They seemed a bit lightweight when I first discovered them at Boston’s OHT Gallery. They’ve grown on me since then and I think the pieces themselves have gotten less uneven. Her method is unusual. She stains and splatters her canvases with thin washes of ink and acrylic paint in different colors. She then hand-stitches thread (again in various colors), tracing the outlines of the stains and creating new patterns as well. Some her recent canvases even have holes in them; A Lie About Birds and Bees is an impressive example. The results are reminiscent of abstract expressionism, as well as the post ab-ex tradition of color field painting. They also evoke birds-eye views of landscape or snorkeling—favorite themes of mine. At their best, the canvases are fascinating, intricate things.

In her artist’s statement, Lubelski describes her process in terms foreign to those of the stereotypically masculine world of abstract expressionism. She describes her staining as “spoiling” and her stitching as “mending”. The pieces are meant to suggest a duality of accident or wildness versus care and precision. I’m not a woman, but I do find this approach congenial.

Lubelski is also the author of a book: The Starving Artist’s Way. I haven’t read it, but it appears to be a sort of bohemian do-it-yourself guide. Her website also features several drawings and mixed-media sculptures (my favorite).

My review of the two-woman show “Transformations”, more or less as it appears in this week’s Ithaca Times.

Local abstract artist Syau-Cheng Lai is having a good year. For a week back in early February, her mixed-media on paper installation Visualizing for Bunita Marcus spanned the walls of Cornell’s Olive Tjaden gallery. Executed on four long sheets with a bewildering array of drawing and painting media, it was pinned directly to the wall. It effectively interwove moments of sparseness with those of almost dizzying density. It was a definite highlight for local art. Lai is also a noted pianist. Accompanying the installation was her performance of modernist composer Morton Feldman’s solo piano piece For Bunita Marcus.

Currently on view at the Upstairs Gallery is a selection of smaller, framed work by Lai. Its an impressive body of work, although nothing quite matches up to her Tjaden installation. In particular, I miss the interplay between its epic length and the close-up intimacy of her mark-making. Nevertheless, their combination of exoticism, playfullness, and rigor is exemplary. Characteristically, most feature a dense layering of eclectic textures—drawn, painted and even carved. A few are more minimal. She is joined by out of town ceramicist Ann Johnston Miller. Although not as diverse or quite as compelling, Miller’s work betrays a compatible fascination with her materials.

Evocative of Visualizing—albeit on a much more compact scale—are a series of thin, scroll-like pieces. Due in part perhaps to this compactness, their quality is somewhat uneven. Hung either in an upright, vertical manner or horizontally, they are matted so as to expose the rough edges of the paper sheets. Like the Tjaden piece, looking at these pieces can be akin to reading or listening to music, with a definite if not overpowering feeling of linear sequence.

An upright Shattering Sky features a mottled background of gold and dark brown. Hanging from the upper-right corner are wavy strands suggesting knotted rope or hair. These have been forcefully carved into the paper, revealing white below. In the lower right corner sits a jumble of hard-edged shapes reminiscent of the Louise Nevelson’s wood-scrap assemblages – although not for its wide range of hues. Standing beside Sky is Before Sunset. Divided into an intricate arrangement of wavery Klee-like horizontal and vertical bands, the predominantly red, yellow and blue piece has a textile-like quality. Pieces like Upload, Ski Jump and Watermill combine paper-white backgrounds with tighter, more rigidly geometric lines and shapes. These seem overly fussy, as if the artist was trying to make too much happen.

Lai’s smaller, more conventionally proportioned pieces have a more immediate impact. They compensate for their lack of breadth with their intensive layering. Her backgrounds are predominantly white, black, gray, red, pink, or gold over-painted with dark brown (the latter are scratched into revealing the color beneath). She often uses vertical and/or horizontal bands—hard edged or soft, thick or thin, visibly layered or opaque—to break up her compositions. Recurring motifs include illegible cursive script (running up and down in columns), Cy Twombly-like scribbles and erasures, dots and dashes, and suggestions of landscape elements such as horizon lines, waves, boats and crescent moons.

Deep Spring is particularly successful. Its horizontal bands of white, greenish yellow, warm brown and red have been extensively worked over with drawn and carved scrawls and loops, small impasto dashes and a blue arrow pointing offstage to the left.

Most of Johnston Miller’s pieces combine ceramic vessels with attached nest-like enclosures of grapevine (or in the case of Goddess Eye 3, copper wire). In Transformation, a smooth shiny orb glazed light green is placed inside the opening of a larger matte black blob. The small sphere is insulated with cattail seeds. Drawing – In and Open – Out are simpler: They are light green spheres in their vine enclosures. The long ceramic piece in Natural Dilemma resembles a rounded loaf of bread, right down to its toasted-looking brown color and rough texture.

Also by Miller are two parent and child pieces: the wide, plateau-like Cantilevered Form and the smaller squarish Cantilevered Bud Vase. Similar to Dilemma in color and texture, each has a outline echoing hole in the center. Bud Vase is so named for the smooth light green vessel nested smugly inside.

Other Lai pieces in the show include: Red Matrix, White Matrix, and Nuur Resides.

A controversial sculpture by “book artist” and Cornell University Art Department head Buzz Spector. The C-shaped structure is made up of over 800 books, all of them authored by Cornell faculty, students or alumni. The piece was originally installed in downtown Manhattan (pictured above); recently, it was reconstructed here in Ithaca, New York. More information, pictures, and an installation video can be found here.

Any thoughts?

More.

Gerry Bergstein—as some of you may already know—is one of my favorite living artists. I wrote an excitable (if not altogether approving) review of his recent show This Is Your Brain on Art at Boston’s Gallery NAGA. I’ve learned a lot of things from him, although not so much from taking his painting class at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (also in Boston). Rather, I’ve learned by absorbing his thoughtful and intoxicating images over the last eight or so years.

In response to a post by Colin Jago on religious art, I once spat out that “the role of art is to present compelling fictions”(comment #23), further claiming that “internal coherence is more important than any resemblance the work might have to something outside of it”. Later (#31), I added the following clarification:

By “fiction”, I don’t mean necessarily a conventional narrative. I mean that works of art create their own worlds, with their own rules.

I don’t consider this to be a “real” definition of art, a statement of necessary and sufficient conditions for arthood (I don’t believe such a definition is possible.) But it does point in the direction of what I find most valuable in art. My guess is that many other people feel the same way (but do let me know if otherwise).

I like a broad variety of styles and approaches. Categories and oppositions like “abstraction vs. representation” or “modernist vs traditionalist” are useful signposts, but they appear to have little to do with artistic value. On the face of it at least, Bergstein’s work couldn’t be more different from that of Syau-Cheng Lai’s. Bergstein’s is representational, implicitly narrative and “literary”, whereas Lai’s is abstract, deliberately analogous to music. His are often loud and bombastic, while hers tends to be quiet and delicate. He works primarily with oil on canvas, she with a variety of media on paper. I don’t want to paper over (pun intended) such differences or suggest that all art is fundamentally the same. But I do think that both artists—like most others that I admire—are talented and ambitious world-builders.

The world-building in question is at root visual. Bergstein’s work cites or alludes to a generous (excessive?) assortment cultural debris: stylistic borrowings and iconography from popular culture (e.g. The Simpsons) as well as from art history (Magritte, Bruegel, Pollock, Philip Guston, Ivan Albright…). Lai’s work refers to the real world as well; colors, tones, textures and patterns have the feel of familiar things. In both cases, what first draws you into the work is a internally consistent feel for space—both real and implied. If they don’t stand up at this level, they don’t stand up at all.

Gerry’s paintings make a particularly strong case for art as fiction, because they are—to a large extent—artworks about fictionalizing (art about art). His work in recent years has focused on images of mounds or towers. In the foreground of many of these stands a figure, facing away from the viewer. In This Is Your Brain:

The figure is Gerry himself, but he also acts as a stand-in for the viewer, a way of penetrating these forbiddingly dense vistas. In some pictures, he holds up a map or canvas, contemplating the scene before him. In others, he takes a more active role, interacting with the material of the cities themselves. In both cases, he is an explorer, trying to find a sense of place in world composed of dislocations and nested (ir)realities.

I’ll add that in addition to being an explorer, the Gerry figure is also a creator. The “map or canvas”—often depicted as a blank white rectangle—conflates the two. To make art is to explore its terrain.

These snaps—sorry I’m not a real photographer—depict the fourth and final section of Visualizing for Bunita Marcus, a site-specific drawing-painting project by Syau-Cheng Lai. I wrote the following about the piece on my blog (where you can also find more pictures):

Made up of four long sheets of unframed Rives BFK paper pinned to the walls, it covers nearly the entire perimeter of the gallery (minus windows and doors). It contains a rich variety of abstract markings in ink, pencil, pastel, and (oil and acrylic) paint. She uses strong colors—red, orange, gold, bright pink—with considerable restraint. The piece unfolds in a temporal sequence and employs pauses and empty space. I was delighted.

The installation accompanies Lai’s recent performance of composer Morton Feldman’s quiet, subtle, spacious solo piano piece For Bunita Marcus.

To this I would add only that neither photographs nor words can capture the subtle texture and sense of depth present in the piece. In particular, her use of iridescent pigments—reflecting the surrounding colors—was remarkable.

She has the following to say about her work:

This project is a departure point for me in making art.

I am a pianist. All I need to make music is a piano and sheets of music, which do not take a lot of space. I am a painter as well. Yet over the years I started to get overwhelmed with how many framed works, big and small, accumulated in various corners of my house. Not to long ago, I started to think about alternative ways to make art.

I found that using a roll of paper solves this problem. I like its textile sensuality. I can experiment, developing and expanding my ideas on something relatively big in scale. Then, when I am ready, I can simply roll it up and put my work away.

Spreading my elbows, knees, and ankles on the floor and moving my body back and forth to paint and draw retrieved memories from my childhood when I was living in my grandparent’s house in southern Taiwan. In that house, which was converted from a Japanese temple, people worked, ate, and rested on the tatami floor. I like the grounded feeling while working on the floor.

The work itself, now installed in the Tjaden Gallery, was originally inspired by a solo piano music masterpiece entitled For Bunita Marcus (1985) by the American composer Morton Feldman (1926-1987). Approximately 75 minutes in length, this piece of music is characterized as exquisitely spare, quiet, glacially paced, sensual, and full of intricate sound patterns. I would like my work in paper to communicate some of the same sensual and ephermeral aesthetics. I wanted to find out what it means to be at ease, how far to push an idea, and when to let go. The work itself is a journey. Please walk around and enjoy.

This strikes me an excellent artist’s statement. It addresses the relationship between art and music, which is especially useful for those (like myself) who know little of the latter. It delves into the physical and psychological motivations for making art, and it connects these to autobiography in a way that isn’t overbearing.

To push this hodge-podge into the flow of ideas here at A&P, I’ll draw your attention to the discussion following my post last week. Syau-Cheng’s art and writing answer questions raised by Karl and June better than I could.

I first came upon Dorman’s work in a show at New York’s CUE Foundation and was thrilled. More work and information here.