Week 2: James Gilbert - Social Foreclosure

James Gilbert

Social Foreclosure

2012

Plastic, thread, wood, varnish, wax, fiberglass, aluminum

13 x 30 x 30 feet

I believe in making work that has a social reason to exist. The initial reason for making this installation was about social media, publicly sharing private information - making our bedrooms, intimate behaviors and stories into nomadic structures that are plastic semi-transparent camping tents, privacy freely and wantonly offered publicly. Building cities that have the ability to be easily deconstructed, travel and are accessible for mass public consumption. Modular forms, stacking as bunkbeds, allow us to quickly multiply and expand into larger tent cities. Now I think it has taken on a new meaning for me. Homelessness, income inequality, high cost of living in cities have caused tent and cardboard cities to multiply. Soon these tent cities will need to become high-rise structures to accommodate everyone. Los Angeles has nearly 60,000 homeless. Most all large international cities have homelessness. 

Week 2: Tara Centybear - Amita the Pink

Tara Centybear

Amita the Pink

2020

Oil on canvas

24 x 24 inches

Nominated by Dani Vinokurov & Sarah Detweiler

Tara's work is filled with powerful and yet vulnerable women. You are instantly drawn to the subjects of her portrait series, Persisters, because they are visually stunning. But they are also so arresting. Tara’s choice to partially cover faces is defiant and empowering. She only lets you see what she wants to see. Not unlike how we present ourselves to strangers, sharing only the parts we are willing or comfortable enough for people to know. And in the act of covering up faces, eyes, mouths and noses, Tara forces us to looker hard, to pay attention to these women. And perhaps their stories are not unlike our own.  

Website: https://www.centybearstudios.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/centybearstudios/

Week 2: Gustav Hellberg - Amnesia - the Eagle and the Rabbit

Gustav Hellberg

Amnesia – the Eagle and the Rabbit

2018

2-channel video installation, projection and monitor
HD1080p, video loop,
Clothes, flag, flashing beacons, samples, satellite dish
Dimensions variable

41:07 minutes

Video:
https://vimeo.com/287945539

password: memory

Gustav Hellberg visited Hopetown four times over the project’s three-year lifespan with each visit providing him more information about the history, the land and its people. The final project is made of three main sections: a video film, a video installation and a collection of artifacts together with text material.
The video film explores the absence of knowledge and the unspoken histories of the Ravensthorpe region, its nature, and also the people who have been active in this land.

Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth
https://vimeo.com/289017680

Week 2: Bean Gilsdorf - American Pietà

Bean Gilsdorf

American Pietà

2019

wool, cotton, polyester, lamé, buttons.

46 x 19 x 8 inches

Nominated by Anthony Discenza:

I’m submitting a recent sculpture by a dear friend, Bean Gilsdorf, whose work I’ve always felt should get more attention. Both she and I share an interest in the use of appropriation, but the way Bean incorporates historical imagery into her textile sculptures continually surprises. As a 4-th generation seamstress, her work is always exquisitely made (images often don’t do justice to this aspect of her work); in this series she incorporates a hybrid of couture and upholstery sewing techniques in the works’ construction. Recently her sculptures have gotten a lot weirder and more complex, in the best way. Operating in an unsettling space between puppet and slipcover, these works reify images of iconic American figures in an uncanny way, suggesting the hollowness of the narratives their images are used to prop up.

artist website: beangilsdorf.com

Week 2: Marie Thibeault - Gravity's Angel

Marie Thibeault

Gravity’s Angel

2019

Oil on canvas

78 x 72 inches

Of all my recent paintings, this one seems to best convey the complex feelings and contradictions of living in this moment in history.
The sky and earth are entwined with ghosts and fragments that simultaneously expand and and collapse.
The sky forms are like shields or banners that signal a way forward, or perhaps they are warning signs.
On the earth, surrounding the storm damaged house, fall reflections and cast shadows, that reference other than human life forms ,prompting deep memory and a longing for wholeness. 

This  painting is named after one of my favorite  Laurie Anderson songs , Gravity’s Angel. 

An  excerpt  from the lyrics:

"Last night I woke up. Saw this angel. He flew in my window.
And he said: Girl, pretty proud of yourself, huh?
And I looked around and said: Who me?
And he said: The higher you fly, the faster you fall. He said:
Send it up. Watch it rise. See it fall. Gravity's rainbow.
Send it up. Watch it rise. See it fall. Gravity's angel.
Why these mountains? Why this sky? This long road. This ugly train."

Week 2: Frankie Orozco - Check

Frankie Orozco

Check

2020

video art

3:57 minutes

Artist statement : As a photographer I’m fascinated by images... with so much time on my hands...desperately in need of an artistic outlet I had no choice but to attempt to create a video containing these powerful images we are all witnessing during these uncertain times. 

Week 2: Steven Michael Hampton - Bather

Steven Michael Hampton

Bather

2020

30 x 22 inches

Through a focus on world leaders and using official, candid, and campaign images, my recent paintings analyze the projection of masculinity in political imaging. In painting these “hard bodies,” my interest is in embracing effects largely considered “kitsch” for its appeal to archetypes and collective reception. As the theatre of American image politics is a global one my paintings pair the “antagonist” to American leaders in an attempt to picture global aesthetics as wholly relational and dependent. With a focus on scenes of leisure, or, more specifically, “bathers,” a genre that historically depicted an eroticized female nude and addressed modern notions of privacy or cleanliness, my work strives to de-schematize these highly coded scenes. By focusing on photographs of world leaders in domestic or familiar settings, exhibiting their tastes, physique, or connection to cultural archetypes, my recent figurative works investigate the role representation plays in contemporary politics.