Beyond the totem is a stack of cinder blocks, arranged like the last wall of a dilapidated forge. Otherwise haphazard winter-edition Coca Cola cans have been lightly squeezed and positioned in a ceremonial ascension up the wall’s back; facing the gallery, a few thorny reeds shoot up from the blocks with a similar, seemingly-incidental decorum. - Whitney Kimball, NYC Contributor

Robert Buck | Installation view, Kahpenakwu, 2011 (Courtesy CRG Gallery)

Robert Buck | SUNNNNNNNNNNNN, 2011, Store bought fabric, dagger yucca leaves, aluminum straps, razor wire and roofing nails in two parts, 110 X 91 X 9 inches (Courtesy CRG Gallery)

The monumental sculptures which dominate the gallery floor share such ritualistic, sun-starved solemnity. A nine-foot-tall, bleach-pleated denim diptych adorns the left-hand wall.  Spikey dagger yucca leaves resemble violent solar rays, bolted onto the fabric and encircling a ring of shiny barbed wire. On the back wall of the gallery, a wooden loading palette, with long, aluminum rods jutting outward, is mounted over black reflective plexi; it’s impossible to make out the photograph of (what we’re told are) mutilated corpses of Mexican cartel victims beneath the murky pane. The same dark obscurity is achieved in El Camino, an eight-foot-tall, vertically-oriented wall-mounted photo of a “Navajo buck in ceremonial dress.”  This applies, too, in a long, rectangular photo of clouds, which lies face-up on a bed of cinder blocks on the floor, in the crossing over and/or the crossing out. The black, plexi photo bears a sheet of metal, twisted to form a rusty, hollow trough.

Robert Buck | Second Hand (“Dominy”),  2010, oil paint and India ink on found oil painting, 12 X 16 X 3/4 inches (Courtesy CRG Gallery)

A few smaller paintings and drawings are sewn amongst the large tombs. Dime-a-dozen postcard paintings of Western plains and undeveloped mountains evoke white nostalgia for a time before whites. Minor alterations have been made as reminders of an ancestral European artist’s ego and mathematical composition; an enormous, practiced signature fills a mountain range, and a grid structure invades like a transparent Photoshop layer.

Robert Buck | Untitled (“Transforming Images: The Art of Silver Horn and His Successors” by Robert G. Donnelley, The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art),  2012, Graphite, colored pencil and archival tape on singed Canson watercolor paper, 10 X 12 inches(Courtesy CRG Gallery)

Usually, I would dismiss Buck’s half-burned, colored pencil copies of Native American drawings as emotional manipulation. Here, though, the awareness of text, imagery, and the tenderness with which the figures are rendered, are remarkably sensitive. For instance, one drawing depicts a Christ-like Native American figure extending two pipes at arms’ length for two bison-shaped animals.  Each beast extends a front hoof with the daintiness of a Medieval unicorn; diaphanous strokes of orange and gray shoot from their nostrils toward each of the figure’s arms.  Typewritten text below reads:

9. WOHAW IN TWO WORLDS
The artist has written his name above the head of the central figure, suggesting that it may be a self-portrait.  He holds peace pipes out to two animals, and each blows it spirit breath toward him.  With one foot in a plowed field next to a cabin and the other near a miniature buffalo herd and tipi of the Kiowa past, the figure is both metaphorical and trenchantly literal.

The two voices, both dead, combine a sort of triple hindsight, in which we play an active role: the removal of the typewriter, twinged with a knowing-ness revealed by “trenchantly,” achieve a living clash of consciousness-es.  The Indians are gone, the cowboys are gone, the industrialists are gone, and even the typewriting historian is nearly obsolete.

The work evokes a very particular sentiment: the solemnity you feel when coming across a shot-up, antique car rusting in the woods.  Buck’s ability to conjure that same sense of time-larger-than-oneself in a gallery, and to apply it through a sort of communal necropolis– waking the dead, upon dead, upon dead– bestows his viewer with a profound insignificance.

Kahpenakwu will be on view at the CRG Gallery in New York until February 18th, 2012.

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Whitney Kimball is a New York-based painter and art writer. 

The juror for the 2012 competition will be Lisa D. Freiman, Senior Curator and Chair of the Department of Contemporary Art Department, Indianapolis Museum of Art. We will post more about Ms. Freiman in upcoming weeks.

In the meantime, if you live in the Midwest (IL, IN, IO, MI, MN, MO, OH, WI), APPLY NOW!

Last year’s Midwest cover, painting by Andrew Mazorol & Tynan Kerr

Thomas Aaron | UT T12N R11W, Mixed media, 2011, 78″ x 78″

His work reflects something of a combination of photographic realism and fantasy, as Aaron’s forced positioning of structured order, gridlines, and commoditization of the earth is projected in subtle earth-tones and paintings that somehow evoke peacefulness and calm rather than violence and degradation. - Elen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor

Ellen Caldwell: Man’s use of the grid has always intrigued me, so I loved reading about the connections you make between man imposing a grid on land and nature’s reaction to it.  Can you discuss this a bit more, particularly in relation to your paintings?

Thomas Aaron: The western landscape is slow.  I remember the first time I visited family in Virginia and saw trees sprouting up like weeds in an abandoned field.  Land here in the desert keeps a record of human interaction much longer – it heals at a lethargic pace.  A flight over the Great Basin will show you 150+ years of “western” history in strange trails and roads and current or abandoned projects of one type or another.  (Native cultures were much softer on the land before that so their impact is harder to see.)

Thomas Aaron | Water Rights, Mixed media, 2010, 68″ x 60″

EC: That is a great sentiment that “western landscape is slow.”  And I love the idea that you are tracing a history of the earth, much like counting and exposing the rings of a tree.  Please discuss this more in terms of your grids.

TA: The PLSS (Public Land Survey System) established a paradigm in the minds of the people who came here to claim their piece of America.  It created a way to conceptualize, divide, and control and by extension commoditize the vastness of the land.  The lines were drawn.  The fences and roads began to conform to the grid. Salt Lake City itself conformed rigorously to the original survey plat because it was a planned city and didn’t grow up naturally.  Some divisions of the grid space were cultivated and other sections were left untouched.  Fence lines and roads are barriers to livestock, and even native heard animals.  Grazing takes place on one side of a fence and not the other affecting the mix of vegetation.  Before long the flora of certain areas begins to conform to the grid.

This cadastral system is visually obvious in the aerial views of the Midwest where all the land is cultivated.  But here in this slowly changing arid land, it’s tenuous and fleeting.  The palimpsest of humanity is subtle, but it’s all here, layer on layer.  There are few places that don’t bear the signs of our interruption.  From trails to farms to nuclear testing sites.

Thomas Aaron | UT 1, Mixed media, 2011, 36″ x 36″

EC: I really find the work fascinating.  How did you first become interested in the grids as a means of exploring a human relationship to the land?

TA: I live in Salt Lake City and I grew up here in the west.  Traditional landscape painting is pervasive and for good reason.  The landscape is inescapable and from my earliest memories I have been attracted to it.  I wanted to paint the landscape.  But most expressions of the landscape are idealized and romantic.  I saw that romantic landscape at times but never in isolation.  I also grew up in suburbia so my concept of nature was always framed in terms of human control over it.

Our relationship with land is not just a visual panorama or an Arcadian farm or a strip mine but a complex stage of politics and ambitions that encompass all that and more.  Land is at the heart of the history of humanity.  So I began to search for a way to talk about the land as an amalgam of ideas and history and with this appreciation of the complexity of the landscape I wanted a more detached methodology to approach it.  I decided on painting Townships and Sections of the PLSS as a way of separation.  It let me treat my work more as a document.  Not a document of exact quantifiable reality but of experiential reality.

Thomas Aaron | Bend, Mixed media, 2010, 66″ x 72″

EC: What kinds of media comprise your “mixed media” you use in these works? 

TA: I usually use acrylics with spray enamels and spray primers to various effects.  I like to stain the acrylic with oil glazes.  Commercial acrylic latex sneaks in there in the right circumstances.  I use a lot of graphite, ink, pastel, oil pastel, wax crayon, and charcoal.  I’ll often add sand, coal, powdered marble dust or iron powder to the mix. I also use paper correction fluid quite a bit. I really enjoy that clash of materials. I just kind of pick stuff up that feels right and go.  It’s all ad hoc.  That doesn’t mean I don’t consider my choices but that consideration comes before and after the moment.

Right now my work isn’t focused on material issues per se so I let subject take a more prominent role than material.

Thomas Aaron | Spring Break-Up, 2010, Mixed media, 72″ x 72″

EC:  Will you explore similar subjects in your next shows?  

I just finished some work for a show in Michigan where I pushed the prominence of the grid far more than in these NAP works.  I think the future is filled with more back and forth between exerting prominence and dissolving the edges of the grid.  I also want to make more mono-material works.

Thomas Aaron | Urania, Mixed media, 2008, 24″ x 24″

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Thomas Aaron has a solo show this year at Nox Contemporary September 21- November 2 with receptions on September 21 and October 19.

Ellen C. Caldwell is an LA-based art historian, editor, and writer.

William Betts

Selected by a jury of distinguished curators and previous jurors, Betts will receive a cash gift of $1,000, courtesy of the magazine, and a $500 gift card sponsored by Blick Art Materials, for supplies. And, thanks to NEXT ART CHICAGO, Betts will also have a painting hung at the fair in April.

The panel for the Annual Prize consists of three previous NAP jurors who have not made selections in the last year, including Bill Arning, Director, The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), James Rondeau, Curator and Chair of Contemporary Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and Peter Boswell, Senior Curator, Miami Art Museum.

Fellow NAP contributor Ellen Caldwell and I caught up with Betts earlier this week to talk about his work and process. – Matthew Smith, Washington, D.C. contributor

William Betts | Untitled YYZ 10-30-2010, acrylic on canvas, dimension5: 36″ x 72″

His paintings, produced via mechanized industrial processes that push the very definition of what it means to paint, depict placeless bits of Americana captured from the grainy perspective of surveillance technologies. They’re placeless yet intimately familiar because they’re everywhere — parking lots, ten-lane highways, airports, suburban motel rooms. Equally as pervasive are the grainy visuals, from traffic cameras to the evening news, they’re reminders of our increasing willingness to trade privacy in favor of access to information. Indeed, Bett’s elegant representations of an experience that is mediated by technology hum with pointed familiarity.

William Betts | YYZ 10-30-2010, acrylic on canvas, 48″ x 72″

Matthew Smith: Your paintings capture a sense of placelessness that is common in much of the American landscape. They’re spaces without any meaningful cultural signifiers, and yet we’re so familiar with them. Is this idea of placelessness something you think about when sourcing photographs for your paintings?

William Betts: Yes, absolutely, for several reasons. I think that its one aspect of American modern culture that cuts across all of the typical cultural differentiators. Its a strange irony; I think as a culture we feel comfortable in these void spaces and yet there is nothing that gives us a personal connection that we typically find comfort in.

Also, as artists, we have to be aware of our point of view, where it comes from — how did we arrive there. For me, its a comfort in that placelessness, that space between things — between situations. I come to it naturally. As a kid, I was dyslexic and ADD and spent most of my time outside of class, between schools, sitting on the bench observing sports and not participating. As an adult, I worked in software sales for several years traveling constantly. I got very comfortable in hotel rooms and airports – between places, disconnected from things. This gives me a specific point of view as an observer.

William Betts | Untitled, Miami International Airport, acrylic on canvas, 72″ x 48″

Lastly, when I started painting from video, I struggled with how to represent in paint a slice from a time series. Sure, I could just look at each frame on a formal basis and paint what’s there but I wanted the viewer to participate more in the work. I wanted the viewer to look at the painting and be able to imagine the events on either side of the piece – what just happened and what could happen next. It seemed like the only way to paint from a time series.

William Betts | Untitled, Miami International Airport, acrylic on canvas, 48″ x 72″

MS: You not only source surveillance footage for your work, you also use staged photographs with actors posing in intimate situations. From security cameras to hidden footage of a secret hotel encounter, it seems like there’s a thin line between surveillance and voyeurism. Is this a connection something that you’re interested in?

WB: There is a thin line and the two are closely related — one is institutional and one is personal. I think it speaks to intent. It feels sometimes like being on a balance beam. But even stepping back a bit, they are both views seen from a distance although one is mediated by space and the other technology. Its interesting but I try not to weigh in with too heavy a hand. I just make it and put it out there and let the viewer decide.

Ellen Caldwell: The intricate pixilation you create is unbelievable. You’ve previously mentioned industrial production methods and concurrent techniques that you use to create your paintings.  Can you tell me more about this process?

WB: I have combined several industrial technologies to create a process for making the paintings. All of my paintings are created using computer controlled machinery – CNC systems – to actually make the paintings. Think of it as a large and very precise industrial plotter that can go to very specific locations defined by X,Y, and Z coordinates. Once it gets to those coordinates, I use a proprietary control system to apply the paint in very small amounts through very precise valves. All of this adapted technology is software-controlled and the software that creates the control instructions for each image was designed by me specifically for this purpose.

William Betts | Untitled, Miami International Airport, acrylic on canvas, 52″ x 70″

MS: Technology is not only a part of your process, it’s also visible in your compositions — in the pixelation, for example. When we chatted briefly last week you mentioned your interest in the mediating effect of technology, how it allows people to have remove from the physical world. Can you talk about how this mediating effect relates to your compositions and to the physical process of making them?

WB: Pixilation is a structure I use but it is also the single constant of the work. Every other aspect is open to manipulation and interpretation. Again, [it’s] pulled from the video and the structural composition of the images on tape. In addition, it also provides another key function; it gives me a structure to accurately describe a location on the canvas and what should happen there. I can codify that – I can explain it to someone and they can execute it. This allows me to distance myself from the process while maintaining strict control over it.

EC: What led you to acrylics – how does it affect the look you are going for?

WB: For many years I used oil paints but my process requires that I use different types of application technologies, valves and applicator tips and the oil paint just wasn’t compatible. I found that the clean up was difficult, as I had to clean these small parts and rinse them in solvent. It took me a while to find the right acrylic paint but I finally settled on an industrial pure acrylic base.

William Betts | Untitled, CPH, acrylic on canvas, 40″ x 54″

MS: You have used mirrors as painting surfaces for several projects. Has this been a conceptual decision or a technical decision?

WB: Both, mirrors engage the viewer differently than a canvas surface. They reflect the image of the viewer when seen directly and incorporate the space as a modifier when seen indirectly. This changes the relationship between the viewer and the work and I like that. The idea behind the acrylic mirrors is to drill a perfect hole that was half of a sphere. When filled with paint from the front, it would appear as a small ball of color floating half way between the viewer and the reflection.  Technically, it is very complicated work — I came up with the idea several years ago and it took a few years to perfect. Drilling clean holes in plastic is hard enough but when you have to drill hundreds of thousands perfectly and then fill them with paint, it is a nightmare. I seem to like technical challenges though; I think I also really like to tinker around with the technology. I am always trying to push into new ways of making paintings — new ways to apply paint.

MS: You have a show at Holly Johnson Gallery coming up next month in Dallas. Can you tell me a little bit about the new work you’ll be hanging?

Yes, I am thrilled with this show. It is my fourth show with Holly and I adore working with her and I love her space! The show is a group of my white mirror paintings. I have shown these in several fairs before and have done one show of the work. They are large mirrors and I use black and white images and then drill out only the white portion of the images. The pieces use the reflection of the environment and the space to complete the image so they at first seem illusive but then as you move around them and the light changes, the images appear and disappear. I find them very satisfying although I am still trying to understand them fully. I guess that’s the great part about making art, if we fully understood it, it would be boring.

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WilliamBetts makes paintings that explore the intersection of the digital realm and the traditional craft of painting, utilizing advanced linear motion technology and proprietary software of his own design to create paintings that would not have been possible until recently. Born and raised in New York City, Betts graduated from Arizona State University in 1991 with high honors with a B.A. in Studio Art and a minor in philosophy. Between 1991 and 2002 he held various executive positions in the technology field. Before leaving the business world to pursue his painting full time in 2002, he was a senior executive responsible for the European operations of an international application software company. Betts’ work has been written about and exhibited extensively throughout the United States. He lives and works in Houston.

MatthewSmith is an artist and writer in Washington, DC and a frequent contributor to DCist.

Ellen C. Caldwell is an LA-based art historian, editor, and writer.

Give Me Head installation view. Left to Right: Evan Holloway, Sarah Awad, Almeida, Mark Mumford, Shimon Minamikawa, Akio Takamori. Image courtesy of James Harris Gallery.

Much in line with her most recent bodies of work, Tokyo artist Shimon Minamikawa’s two, multi-canvas paintings in Give Me Head position a simple, monochromatic head on a small square affixed to a series of larger, abstract panels. Color and pattern dominate the focus within yellow, person and gray face, black, while the faces’ blank stares recede into the background.  In the absence of facial cues, the viewer can project the painted imagery onto the individual’s identity, but whether such assumptions are accurate remains ambiguous; prolonged looking is disorienting, rather than revealing.

Shimon Minamikawa | gray face, black. 2011. Acrylic on canvas, three parts. 38 1/4″ x 29.″ Image courtesy of James Harris Gallery.

Travis Collinson’s Orchid Behind portrays a similarly unreadable human. Set against a potted orchid whose distinctive flower is noted but not shown, the painting depicts a blonde man in a blue t-shirt, seen from above.  This face appears slightly melancholy in his downward look but otherwise offers little expression. The strange angle of the work’s perspective implies there is more to know about this individual than can be seen, but supplemental information is not offered; his story is unclear.

Travis Collinson | Orchid Behind. 2011. Acrylic on linen. 10″ x 8.” Image courtesy of James Harris Gallery.

The disinterested faces persist throughout Give Me Head, from the colossal, disengaged head of Akio Takamori’s Boy with Yellow Cap to the lifeless statues of Sarah Awad’s Fallen Heads. Hawaii-based artist Jason Teraoka’s small, sinister paintings provide the one exception.  The smirking woman with a face clouded through gray undertones suggests an air of debauchery, if not something worse. Yet the specifics of her story are withheld; the viewer is left with only an unpleasantly green background as contextualization. The visual cues of her expression mean little without a backstory.  Teraoka also draws inspiration from vintage films in the construction of his portraits, suggesting the truth behind Miss Misschief’s expression may merely be an acted deception rather than an earnest representation of her being.

Jason Teraoka | Miss Misschief. 2008. Acrylic & Varnish on canvas. 10″ x 23.″ Image courtesy of James Harris Gallery.

Give Me Head, while provocative in its title, is ultimately more subtly inquisitive in its persisting questions surrounding the disengagement of its portrait subjects. If contemporary portraiture can be defined it this way, the implication for culture at large is that we may be more disinterested as a society than we realize. The vacant stares of Give Me Head leaves us to consider our own engagement in the present moment, and what we may be missing as our eyes wander away.

Akio Takamori | Boy with Yellow Cap. 2011. Stoneware with under glazes. 19 1/2″ x 15″ x 17 ½.″ Image courtesy of James Harris Gallery.

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Give Me Head is on view at James Harris Gallery in Seattle, WA through January 28, 2012.

Erin Langner is a writer based in Seattle and is Assistant Program Manager, Education and Public Programs at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM).

Something about her work makes me want to live in these homes and spaces she both creates and reflects upon. – More by Los Angeles Contributor, Ellen Caldwell, after the jump!

Chelsea James | Bookshelf, 36″ x 36”, oil on panel

Ellen Caldwell: Please tell me a little bit about your pieces featured in the recent NAP #96 issue. 

Chelsea James: “Bookshelf” and “Sylvia” are scenes taken from an art professors’ personal studio bookshelf.   Objects were collected from the desert for their peculiar beauty, some sentimental articles and others purely for utilitarian storage.  I find it fascinating what they chose to display.   The sink is from the Guthrie Building in SLC, which is an artist studio space.  Artists’ spaces are alive with interesting marks and traces from occupancy and resonate with the energy of creating.  I thrive off of that.

Chelsea James | Sylvia, 36″ x 36”, oil on panel

EC: Yes, I love this idea of stored momentum and traces of a past owner or spirit.  It’s something that Erin Payne’s works (NAP#93) really reference too.  The intimate and soft domestic scenes you create are fabulous.  What first led you to this subject and style?

CJ: About four years ago, I was primarily a still life painter and interiors seemed like the next natural step.  It began when my husband and I were renting an apartment in Prague and I didn’t have all of my equipment to properly paint still lives, so I began to paint the interior of the apartment and I really enjoyed it.  From there, I explored numerous types of spaces and naturally, my style began to evolve to a looser, more obscure approach.

Chelsea James | Prague, 12” x 12”, oil on panel

EC: Your color palette is really subtle, but compelling.  Does it shift depending on the subject and series, or do you usually tend to stay with the cooler colors? 

CJ: When I begin a painting, I try to not to start with a particular color palette, instead allowing the colors to evolve organically on their own, especially with my landscapes. I choose colors that I naturally gravitate to, it is purely instinctual. But for a series, I will strive to maintain some kind of unity and cohesion with the color palette.

Chelsea James | Guthrie Sink, 24” x 24”, oil on panel

EC: Your subjects vary in one way, with your interiors and exteriors, yet your style and approach makes them feel familiar and similar…

CJ: I like the idea of exploring the imprint of life and occupancy in interior spaces.  For example, shelves where people display their keepsakes, or the farewell of a dinner and the traces left behind.  Working with conceptual landscapes and perceptual interiors is how I like to work, so I will continue to work on the two subjects simultaneously and hopefully come to a more loose and abstract resolve with my landscapes.

Chelsea James | Above, 60” x 60”, oil on panel

EC: You’ve lived abroad and traveled a lot.  How has art you’ve seen impacted your work? 

CJ: A couple of years ago, my husband and I visited the Paris Museum of Modern Art along with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.  I was heavily inspired by Van Gogh’s landscape drawings; the simplicity yet and subtleties in his tonalities, and I was moved by Nicolas de Staël’s work at the Paris museum.  He uses very bold areas of color to describe space in a minimalist way.  After viewing these shows, I decided to change my direction as an artist: to take more risks and to stay true to myself.

Chelsea James, “Season,” 60” x 72”, oil on panel

Chelsea James’ Studio interior, Courtesy of the artist.

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Chelsea James is represented by the Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco, CA.

Ellen C. Caldwell is an LA-based art historian, editor, and writer.

With this is mind, I recently visited the Brooklyn studio of painter Angela Dufresne.  Her sweeping, cinematic landscapes are formally similar to music: richly colored panoramas, mashing rock, film, and art history, are painted- or performed- with the sensitivity and virtuoso of a legendary electric guitarist.  Angela describes her own process as such: the painter as performer, as cover artist, as groupie. - Whitney Kimball, NYC Contributor

Angela Dufresne | Bierstadt Cover with Fly Fishermen, 7 by 11 feet, 2010, oil on canvas

Angela Dufresne | Bierstadt Cover with Fly Fishermen, 7 by 11 feet, 2010, oil on canvas |  Angela Dufresne, Untitled, 2011, collage

Though her work is primarily associated with the precision and beauty of her marks, she also makes videos, often of herself, in mundane or embarrassing scenarios. Though apparently opposite, the videos speak directly to the paintings; performers are collaged into film stills, cover performances, and small-scale figures interacting with panoramic landscapes.  We discussed her recent paintings, the link between her paintings, video, and reference, and why certain pieces remain in the studio.

Angela Dufresne:  Right now, I’m trying to do all these things that aren’t allowed, like literary references in painting.

[We're standing in front of Angela's new, dark green, five-by-nine foot painting titled “Trans-stoaway Amelia Cruseo.” An expressionistic Amelia Earhart emerges, seated in the left side of a tree canopy, through transparent green washes which hang like dark veils over the entire canvas.  “Trans-stoaway” leans against a stack of similarly-sized paintings in Angela’s studio. She explains how she arrived at this image. Unfortunately, we were unable to get a photo.]

I was in India and then Bali for three months with my girlfriend. We were on this tiny island for a weekend, and [the island] was literally like [the book] Robinson Crusoe, which I had brought with me for no other reason than it’s just hilarious.  It’s actually very beautiful. It’s basically about everything that people need to do right now, which is relearn how to do everything: abandon all of the societal crap that has been getting in the way of true progress.  I became obsessed with that idea and thought I’d try to make some paintings based on it.

I was provoked to [make this painting in particular] because I was reading some trashy Gore Vidal bits- little essays he was writing about the birth of the American airways, so basically the birth of PanAm, the TWA.  [Vidal] was part of the TWA, along with Amelia Eahart.

Related to the Vidal essays and this painting, there’s a rumor that Amelia Earhart was spotted after her plane crashed.  A tall white lady in men’s boxer shorts was spotted on an island in the South Pacific near where she crashed, and there’s a myth that there are radio recordings of her saying she was out of fuel- but she wasn’t really out of fuel and she shouldn’t have been, given what they had given her and where she was.  Vidal had written that his father was having an affair with her, and [Vidal] had witnessed this conversation in which Earhart told his father that she wanted to run off and be on a desert island together.  She, I guess, was really fed up with her public image. And it’s all myth about the overly active participation in society versus isolation, and how neither one of them work- how nothing works, it seems, nowadays.

So I decided I was going to do Amelia Earhart as Robinson Crusoe…that’s the story behind this.  It all happened kind of organically, it was strange, I was working on those paintings when I was reading those Vidal essays, and then I started reading that and it sort of perpetuated me….it was actually a sandy, sunny day painting.  I do this thing a lot where I turn an exterior into an interior, so I paint sort of a situation like this one. If I don’t like it, or I don’t think it’s interesting, I turn an interior space into an exterior.  You could go on and on about interior/exterior forever, though.

Whitney Kimball: That interior/exterior idea seems to relate a lot to the relationships between your videos and your paintings. You made a painting “Me in the TV”  of the video Communist Accidental Death, in which you’re collaged into a TV set within a film still.  I was wondering how those spaces, the film spaces that you paint and the films that you make, relate to one another?

Angela Dufresne | Me in the TV (from Antonioni’s ‘The Passenger’), 24 by 30 inches, 2006, oil on panel, courtesy angeladufresne.com

AD: Oh. Well, they do a lot.  It’s sort of antithetical to performative painting in any modern sense; it’s more like you’re taking on this role.  I often think of things as covers, the best covers.  Like Tina and Ike’s Revues: by the time they’re done doing the covers, you barely recognize the reference. Or the reference has an entirely new, different energy.  They start getting multiple layers of stuff, like this painting. [She gestures to “Trans-Stoaway”.]

The more layers of thought, contemplation, association, the more interesting they are.  So in Communist Accidental Death…definitely.  The still from that video was from Antonioni’s The Passenger; that’s the interior of the England apartment, where his wife is dredging through his stuff, finding out that she’s not the person she thought she was, which always, that interested me.  The whole idea that something is not what you thought it was– you thought it was one thing, and it becomes another– that’s the essential thing of art in general, certainly in painting.

I’ve been making a lot of paintings that are covers of other paintings, too. So this [Angela pulls up a photo on her laptop of a busty nude woman lounging on a mountaintop] is this semi-famous early Courbet painting of a young bearded boy on a mountaintop with his dog, which, of course, you see what I did with it.

So this is kind of the extent of my thinking about covers- I’ve been constantly doing these musical covers that went into doing covers of paintings. This giant painting, a cover of a Watteau painting, was done as a single session, so the idea is that you’re responding to something, but there’s no extra time, like it all has to be alla prima, so it’s live.

For me, video is a vehicle. I would love to show them, but more than anything, it’s like a drawing process for me.  Did you see the cover of The Man That Got Away?

WK: No.

AD:  I’ll show you that one, it’s embarrassing…

[Angela pulls up a video on her laptop. We watch her, in different settings- driving a lawnmower, hoeing her back yard at night, trudging around the kitchen with her pants around her ankles- singing Judy Garland's "The Man That Got Away," out of tune, at the top of her lungs.  It's seamless.] 

Angela Dufresne | Two stills from “The Man That Got Away,” 2011, video

WK: Are you hoeing?

AD: Yep.  I had to take this rock out. [laughs]

[I wanted to make this because] in order to bring a reference back, you have to kill it first.  Sometimes I reference things in video that is like the act of killing it, or a performative way of killing it…decimating a reference with my own, personal experience for no other reason than to embarrass myself and the response and the reaction around that.  So that when I go into the painting- it’s not just so that I’m not doing anything predictable- but it certainly helps.  And it just helps to be fearless.

I shot this thing with a flip camera.  It’s perfect for doing something like this, which, everywhere I was going, I was just doing a little bit.  It was just a conflation of my daily life up to date.  Literally making crepes for lunch, fly fishing..

WK: It’s hilarious.

AD:  This was kind of a precursor to it, but it was like, I did this in India [She pulls up a second video, Willingre, on her laptop.  This time, two nude, full-length Angelas sing in the doorways of an ancient Indian temple.]  This isn’t the actual format because I shot this with a flip camera, too.  It’s just a similar literal collage– visual collage versus a time-based collage, like the other one.  It’s an American religious song…

Angela Dufresne | Stills from “Willingre,” video

WK: How did you get into this space?

AD:  It’s literally collage.  Cheating, in a way…it’s almost like an emotional training process for more videos and paintings, and sort of accessing embarrassment and insanity. Also because you don’t have to go through the process of rendering things, it allows you to make associations at a quicker pace than you would if you were painting.  And that’s super interesting to me, because when I go into the painting, I just have a more loaded weapon.

WK: It seems that in all of your paintings, there’s no planning when you come to it.  You have everything figured out before you start, so the process can be intuitive.

AD: Yea, it’s rehearsal.  A lot of paintings get tossed, or rolled up and stored, and there’s a lot of thinking about an image, and thinking about being in the right mindset to be able to make a painting this scale: like this seven-by-eleven-foot scale [looks to Amelia Earhart] in a long, but single session- for that live feeling.

I’m an absolute, belligerent lover of painting, but I’m equally influenced by the Pictures Generation.  I grew up looking at Richard Prince just as much as I was looking at Caravaggio at the same time, so there’s no way that can’t be an active part of my work.  I’m not really the type of person to crawl into a cave and paint still life…it’s just not my way. That’s something that…I think that’s where I struggle and I succeed with the cinema reference, and reference in general, because I use it a lot.

Two years ago, I gave a talk in Virginia, and I said it’s like I’m occupying these images.  The word now it seems to have a whole different connotation; it’s not overtly political, but it definitely has to do with participation versus passivity.  So I could occupy them with a conflation of different references or just with myself, which, in a way is the same thing..we are cyphers, I think.

Angela Dufresne | No title, 2011, 60 by 40 inches

This is a painting I made this fall.

[Angela pulls up a photo on her computer of a vertically-oriented painting.  In place of the cinemascapes, here there is only a central figure of an upside-down female nude, legs splayed and masturbating.  A cartoony wolf head floats, smiling, above her vagina. The background is still washy, with large strokes of purple and yellow wipes, but the space is cropped and frontal, and the figures are more iconic.]

No one would know that I had made this painting.

WK:  Yea, it’s completely different..

AD:  It’s not, actually, completely different if you actually sit down and look at it.  It’s a process of the collages that I’m doing;  artists love it, but galleries are more hesitant.  It’s not a painting that embraces beauty in a sense that the others supposedly do.  There are a lot of things that I think are important that don’t get seen.  I don’t want to say that I’m branded in any way, but to a certain extent, there is always a catching-up that is happening in terms of the audience and the artist.

WK:  Right.

AD:  Or, rather, I think there should be.  Our society’s goal and focus has been do it more efficient and better, and do the same thing so that every one will recognize it over and over again, and that will be your [brand].  I was just reading Hilton Kramer talking about how Courbet could never reconcile his two attitudes, and that was his failing; I thought that seems like his success. That [Courbet] was full of contradictions, and he was inconsistent.  To me, that seems more true to what life is actually about, and not some modern oppressive thing that says this is what you do to be a mature, successful person in this society.  I really don’t think that’s interesting or working very well.

There are a lot of perverse paintings that I make, and a lot of portraits that up staying here.  I do them because that’s part of the rehearsal process.  I do them so I can do that [points to Earhart]- and I do them so I can do them too, just to be able to do them.

WK: [Looking at the painting of the girl-beast] And that’s one that you wouldn’t sell?

AD:  It’s not that I wouldn’t sell it, I don’t think it would sell.  Which is kind of crazy, but it should–

WK: I think it would.

AD:  Well, it hasn’t been seen or exhibited.

WK:  May I see the collages?

AD:  [Yea...]

Angela Dufresne | Untitled,  2011, collage

[Angela pulls out a loose stack of roughly 18-by-24-inch papers collaged sparsely with cut-outs of magazines and photographs, with bold patches of crayon and pastel scrawled in select areas.  One I recognize from her paintings: a patched-together mountainscape containing what look like a Swiss castle, overlooked by tiny figures sunbathing on a plateau. Others are much more abstract; singular, tilted images and color photocopies of groups of people, patched over with faces or brushstrokes.  She points in particular to a print of a fading color photo of slave girls floating in what looks like outer space; at closer inspection, it's a photo taped to a drip-covered darkened window.]

I was playing with this [collage] when making the painting [Angela points to a 5.5-by-nine-foot painting of bodies balanced on a small boat in a magenta sea, titled “Shark fishing or how the west was won.”] It’s not a direct correlation, which I thought it was going to be. They’re not actually fishing in the painting, it’s a kind of early Americana, Family of the Republic kind of painting. These slave girls in this fishing boat [from the collage] ended up getting in this painting with the shark.

The swatching and patching-ness of the space came from the dripping, because in the collage, the paper is taped to the window [which is covered with spray].

WK:  So would you ever show the collages?

AD:  I would love to show these.  I’m actually going to do some monoprints with them; I’m going to do prints on paper, and them I’m going to draw and write on plates or plexiglass, and print on them.  But eventually they get another layer.

WK:  And I have to ask– all the videos are available on YouTube, but do you sell them?

AD:  Well, I’ve only exhibited them in group shows, but it’s like this.  In 1950, almost forty years after Monet died, some one went into his studio– now I don’t want to compare myself with Claude Monet– but some one went in and dug his last series of paintings from his studio.  They had never been seen, they had never been exhibited, he unstretched them, rolled them up, and they sat there for a long-ass time. Those are the water lilies.  Those are what made him modern.  Do I think this stuff is as important as that?  I’m not the one to say, but I do know there are a lot of works that I make- collage works- that don’t get shown– this is the reason I’m constantly challenging myself and broadening the processes that I work in.

Angela Dufresne | Untitled,  2011, collage

Angela Dufresne | Untitled,  2011, collage

Steven J. Miller| Banking, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 48 inches

On a recent plane ride, I couldn’t help but recall his folk-like imagery of airplanes sailing above mountains, minute in comparison to the power of nature and call of the wild.  Miller’s paintings are powerful because of his distillment of reality.  Planes hover above a combination of earth and manmade structures, yet somehow feel calming.  His use of vivid color planes and flattened space heightens this alternative reality, creating something that sticks with you and makes the world feel a bit more fantastical. - Ellen Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor

Steven J. Miller | Fish and Fowl, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 60 inches

Ellen Caldwell: Your work has such a distinct style… How did you get your start?

Steven J. Miller:  I was in a professional practice session a few years ago and a presentation was on the big screen. A man was talking about an education project and the screen kept fading back to an image of a neighborhood where the project was being implemented.  The presenter stopped the film for a break and froze the image just as the figure was fading into the neighborhood image. For me, this was an Ah Ha! cinemagraphic moment. It looked like two worlds colliding or the present and the past in one image.  I knew I had to find a way to paint what I had just experienced so I started experimenting with layering images. The paintings represented in New American Paintings were the result of that experiment.

Steven J. Miller | Outcroppings, acrylic on canvas, 36″ x 60″

EC: In your recent NAP feature, you say “I am employing layers of images to talk about time and memory.”  That is a wonderful sentiment.  Can you tease this out a bit more and tell me more about your subject and this relationship?

SJM: In the painting, “No Single Current,” I am alluding to the multiplicity of world views at any given time and the divisions it can create.  In this case, science is going one way and religion another.  The veiled background represents the history of ideas and conflicts. In “Banking,” it is time reversed. The natural world came first represented by the islands in the foreground; in the future, skyscrapers appear mimicking those natural forms.  The airplane symbolizes the time between the two, a time machine of sorts.

Steven J. Miller | No Single Current, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 60 inches

EC: The interplay between humans (and their technology) and nature (and its technology too in a sense) is really fabulous.  What first led you to this subject?

SJM: It is difficult to remember when I wasn’t interested in making connections between natural systems and cultural systems. For me, it is a big story. More than any other animal, humans have been using natural resources to create first simple tools and later complex machines. Natural systems have long been an inspiration for technological development. I am also interested in environmental issues, how nature and culture interact and affect each other. My painting “Frozen Wave” is a good example of this. In the piece “Outcroppings,” I create visual pattern by bumping nature and culture up against each other.

Steven J. Miller | Frozen Wave, acrylic on canvas, 9″ x 12″

EC: Your style is distinct, yet seemingly familiar too.  What art do you draw upon and how does it inspire you?

SJM: Japanese art has been a big influence. I’m drawn to their use of perspective that often looks down from above and flattens out the space and how the clouds open to reveal a scene. I love how the artist Utomaro balances object with emptiness. All these influences can be seen in my painting, “Fish and Fowl.” I appreciate Neil Jenning’s mid-career work for its subject matter, color, and formal design. Finally, Alexis Rockman, who does lush bold paintings about the environment inspires me to continue in the direction I’m going.

Steven J. Miller | Cargo Ship and Pirates, acrylic on canvas, 8″ x 22″

EC: You have a couple of upcoming shows in 2012.  What themes and subjects are you exploring and do they depart from your current work?

SJM: The ideas that I have been discussing will be reflected in those pieces but I am also interested in human relationships. In my last show at Conduit, I was painting beautiful natural environments that also included destructive human activities. The painting “Cargo Ship and Pirates,” which will be in the Conduit show, reflects that interest.

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Steven J. Miller’s solo show Fish and Fowl is at the Conduit Gallery in Dallas, TX now through February 11^th.  He has another show at the Darke Gallery, in Houston, TX in May 2012.

Ellen C. Caldwell is an LA-based art historian, editor, and writer.

Thanks to our sponsors mentioned above, and to you, “The Reader,” for making this award possible (and fun). After the jump, read a conversation between Payne and our Austin Contributor, Brian Fee, and see more of Payne’s work.

Erin Payne

Erin Payne conjures a bracing nostalgia in her Piles Paintings, blending memories and location in colorful fabric sundaes set in front of (or within) naturalistic landscapes. She has cultivated this transfixing style throughout exhibitions in California, an MFA from Claremont Graduate University, and now the New American Paintings Annual Reader’s Choice award.

Erin Payne | Home on the Range, Oil on panel, 60” x 55”, 2010. Image courtesy the artist.

Brian Fee: I am intrigued by this blend of realism and abstraction within your ongoing Piles Project. Specifically, how the real textile piles are executed in gestural brushwork, while the artificial landscapes and backdrops maintain this more naturalistic impression. Could you talk about this?

Erin Payne: Blurring the lines between reality and illusion is important to me with the Pile Paintings, because I’m addressing an ambiguous relationship to place and the environment, and navigating the slippery definitions of those terms. The result is a mix of realism and abstraction. There is also a blending of “thing-ness” with place that is expressed at times through the fluidity of the paint, and sometimes through mimicry between pile and landscape.

Erin Payne | Manzanita with Pile 20, Oil on panel, 60” x 60”, 2011. Image courtesy the artist.

I relate to the piles in an anthropomorphic way. They become displaced characters that both drip, ooze and blend with — as well as stand in sharp opposition to — the landscapes. Painting the illusion of different types of fabric using realism with abstraction allows me to indulge in uncertainty, lavishing freedom and specificity at the same time. I want the landscapes in these Pile Paintings to have enough information so that the piles can exist within a place, but not so much  that the viewer can’t move around freely within them.

Erin Payne | Drift, Oil on canvas, 24” x 24”, 2011. Image courtesy the artist.

One distinction between the way I paint the backdrop paintings and the landscapes in the pile paintings is that the landscapes on the backdrops carry a sort of mystique for me. I’ve never traveled to these actual places. I love the stories of the viewing spectacles of Frederic Edwin Church’s 19th-century landscape paintings.  Enormous crowds gathered in New York City to view The Icebergs. Revealing this “exotic” frozen land was mesmerizing. It hits that same chord in me: this desire to connect to a place by creating my idea of it. My landscapes, however, are pieced together from source images that I gather from books, magazines, the Internet, and from my idea of what it may actually look like there. I paint the backdrops passably natural, though not realistic enough to even begin to trick the eye. I want them to function as landscape paintings in the landscape.

Erin Payne | Ice Pile, Oil on canvas, 72” x 72”, 2011. Image courtesy the artist.

BF: So have you ever displayed Piles paintings, or just the piled fabric and textiles, in front of a landscape diorama, like an installation?

EP: Yes I have. It’s a fun play with reality and illusion, where the painting sets the “place” for the pile, even though the backdrop is within an actual place. For me, they function like two characters in a scenario that is immensely larger than either one can comprehend. Who is the subject and who is the prop, and which location is actually real? It’s very funny and human to me. When I pose these setups in my studio, I view the process like an exercise and use the situations to construct some of the paintings.

Erin Payne | Pile with Diorama, Diorama: oil on PVC sheets and wood, 72” x 144”; fabric pile: various, 2011. Image courtesy the artist.

BF: Can you trace the artistic evolution from your Diorama Project and the Piles to Memory Lane for Lagerstroemia, your contribution to Friday Night Lights & Sunday Afternoons at Summercamp Project Project?

EP: Memory Lane for Lagerstroemia was a site-specific piece that I created for the show. The majority of the exhibition space is outdoors, and I knew I wanted to make a piece that responded to one of the crepe myrtle trees on the property. The crepe myrtle (Lagerstroemia) is a big fixture in the Southern California urban landscape, because it’s fairly drought-resistant and produces abundant flowers, but it’s originally from Southeast Asia. I thought that the tree sort of functioned as a surrogate for our own displacement in the urban landscape, much like the piles do in the Pile Paintings.

Erin Payne |  Documentation of Memory Lane for Lagerstroemia, Oil on canvas, canvas size: 76” x 30”, and various materials. Site-specific installation for Friday Night Lights & Sunday Afternoons at Summercamp Project Project, El Sereno, CA, 2011. Image courtesy the artist.

I created a freestanding canvas backdrop and painted my version of the Huangshan Mountain Range in China where crepe myrtles are native. The backdrop stood on one side of the tree and a full-length vanity mirror on the opposite side, so the tree could “view” itself in its ancestral homeland. I have since further expanded the project to include a second panel and traveled around Los Angeles County photographing it behind different crepe myrtle trees, much in the spirit of the Diorama Project, except that there is a stronger figure/ground relationship more akin to the Pile Project. Some of this expanded documentation was published in Articulate (BookMark Publishing; curated and edited by Alex Moore and Emily Smith, 2011).

Erin Payne | Documentation of Memory Lane for Lagerstroemia (Expanded), detail. Oil on canvas, canvas size: 76” x 60” and various materials and locations. Image published in Articulate (BookMark Publishing, curated and edited by Alex Moore and Emily Smith, 2011).

BF: How do you want to further channel your artistic message, and what can we look forward to in 2012?

EP: I plan to continue working on both the Pile Paintings and site-specific paintings and experiential pieces. All of the work weaves back and forth, informing and imbedding itself in the other.

In February I will be included in a show called Landscape Where Nothing Officially Exists, in conjunction with Un-Space Ground at the College Arts Association Conference in Los Angeles. In the Fall I’ll be involved in another Summercamp Project Project show, in collaboration with Side Street Projects in Pasadena. The work will be site-specific and collaborative. And of course at the end of April, thanks to the New American Painting’s Reader’s Choice Poll, I’ll be showing a new Pile Painting at Next Art Chicago!

Erin Payne | Dune, Oil on canvas, 24” x 24”, 2011. Image courtesy the artist.

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Erin Payne‘s work was featured in two Fall 2011 shows in conjunction with Platform Los Angeles at the LA mart: Boom, Southern California MFA Invitational and Realm of Realism, curated by Shane Guffogg. Additionally, she contributed to Friday Night Lights & Sunday Afternoons at Summercamp Project Project. A previous interview conducted by Ellen Caldwell can be found on our blog here.

Brian Fee is an art punk currently based in Austin, TX. His culture blog Fee’s List covers his three loves (art, film and live music) occurring in his other three loves (the Lone Star State, the Big Apple, and Tokyo).

New Work: Richard Aldrich; photo: Ian Reeves, courtesy SFMOMA.

New Work: Richard Aldrich; photo: Ian Reeves, courtesy SFMOMA.

New Work: Richard Aldrich is the artist’s first solo museum show. Bringing together fourteen of the artist’s paintings from 2004 to the present, they display a range of styles and techniques. Two large canvases, Reality Painting #1 (my apartment) and Reality Painting #2 (Patricia’s studio), both from 2009, are abbreviated excerpts of larger scenes, framed so as to appear abstract at first. The source material for these works was in fact photos captured with the artist’s iphone, and later translated into larger-than-life paintings. In this way, his practice succeeds in combining the slow and meditative process of creating a large painting, with the digital immediacy of recording a cell phone image.

Left: Reality Painting #1 (My apartment), 2009; Oil, wax, and graphite on linen; Ovitz Family Collection. Right: Reality Painting #2 (Patricia’s studio), 2009; Oil, wax and graphite on linen; Ovitz Family Collection; photo: Ian Reeves, courtesy SFMOMA.

Richard Aldrich’s eclecticism in inspirational matter is markedly contrasted by his tendency to work in only two formats: large canvases, always 84 by 58 inches, and small wood panels, usually about 15 by 11 inches. Preferring to work exclusively in these two sizes, he’s said that to do otherwise would be “too arbitrary.” He compares the two painting sizes to the human form, described the large canvases as “person-sized,” and the small panels as face-sized.

Reality Painting #1 also recalls the work of Philip Guston, particularly in his reoccurring imagery of disembodied shoes and legs. The scene is actually of the artist’s legs, crossed, and the tip of his shoe can be seen in the lower left of the picture. The notion of disembodied limbs also recalls Aldrich’s comparison of his paintings to the human form.

His work walks the line between painting and sculpture, sometimes evoking Rauschenberg’s combines in materials and scale. At times he builds up his canvases with layers of oil paint and wax, working up a thickly textured surface. Other times he experiments with removing parts of the canvas, cutting pieces away until the viewer is left with little more than an exposed stretcher, forced to confront the bare basics of the object.

If I Paint Crowned I’ve Had It, Got Me, 2008; Oil and wax on wood and cut linen; Collection of Carlo Bronzini Vendor; photo: Ian Reeves, courtesy SFMOMA.

On the whole, one truly gets the sense that Richard Aldrich is an artist whose practice is grounded in experimentation and exploration. As an artist, his work grapples with the question of what a painting is, what it means to be a painter, and how he fits into the painting tradition. He says, “The problem I have with a lot of contemporary painting is that so much of it serves a purpose today that’s too directly related to the idea. Whereas my paintings, there are no ideas. The idea is more a structure of framework.”

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Richard Aldrich was born in 1975 in Hampton, Virginia, and received his BFA from The Ohio State University in 1998. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. New Work: Richard Aldrich was organized by senior curator Gary Garrels, and is on view at SFMOMA through March 25, 2012.

Nadiah Fellah is a curatorial assistant at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)