Mike Hansen, Off Minor, Big Band (Jazz Series), 2021, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 inches
Classical music and contemporary jazz is wound tightly into every thread of the weave of Mike Hansen’s “Spot-o-fi” installation of watercolours, canvases, and plaster sculptures at Lonsdale Gallery in Toronto. Scan the QR code on the exhibition labels, and hear the music that gave life to the artist’s visual output. Yet, there is no necessary chain here that binds one to the other. Hansen admits that his painterly output amounts to a critique on abstract expressionism and its latter day emotional hangover, a purely visual art conversation between modernism and its post-painterly derivations. Consequently, the “Spot-o-fi” visual wall art stands alone against the welter of Hansen’s “wall of sound” references.
Mike Hansen Spot-o-fi installtion view
If Hansen has a go at abstract expressionism’s watered down derivatives, he also manages to save some powder for the music streaming platforms of our day. His exhibition title, “Spot-o-fi” is a dig at the prevalent algorithms, encouraging a type of lazy listening that tend ultimately to denigrate the sonic masterpieces he references to background noise.
Mike Hansen, A Love Supreme (Jazz Series), 2021, acrylic on canvas, 74 x 74 inches (four canvases)
No better example of a modernist painter steeped in music, who succeeded in as tight a threading of sound and image as anyone, was of course, Paul Klee. The 2008 “Melody and Rhythm” exhibition at Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, Austria was a tribute to the Swiss artist’s uncanny ability to evoke “sound composition” from colour, line, and texture.
Mike Hansen, Reflections on Gnossienne No 3, 2023, acrylic on epoxy, 27 x 11 x 8 inches
I make the Klee reference since the painted forms of Hansen’s four-panel “A Love Supreme (Jazz Series)”, for instance, a tribute to Coltrane’s opus, draw no obvious parallel to the music that may have inspired them. Brightly coloured, amorphic cutout shapes that waft and melt in airy layers, possess a graphic life independent of sound – unless of course, a conscious inference is made to connect them. The positive for Hansen plays to the materially visual art in the exhibition, and that the gloss-candied surfaces of his sculpture production appear good enough to eat, can’t be held against the artist.
Exquisite Variants: Maggie Nowinski and Alicia Renadette, the current exhibition at Overlap gallery in Newport, RI, features intricate collaged drawings, mixed media sculptures and paintings. Installed in a variety of configurations and formats, everything here suggests the peripheral representations one stores as secondary memory, the kind of imagery that might be spawned by subconscious prompts throughout the five senses. Within all this, there appears to be an overwhelming focus on the tactile quality of this mentally stored minutiae, details that keep all the visual effects fluid and stimulating without being too definitive or easily recognizable.
Maggie Nowinski, Somaflora Specimen – Friend or Foe I, 2023, Pen and ink and gouache on heavyweight Stonehenge paper, 28 x 42 inches
This series of works began during COVID when studio time for visual artists was unencumbered by social gatherings, work, or just plain “things to do.” Spanning over two years of detailed combinations of divergent imagery, materials and intentions, the approach of Nowinski and Renadette is very much like the 1925 Surrealist parlor game, Exquisite Corpse, where artists added strange, unrelated drawings on the same piece of paper, and always in sequential order. In this instance, with Exquisite Variants, there is more of a back and forth between the two artists who find common ground in an aesthetic that speaks of the inner-worldly. Overall, the imagery is tinged with Surrealist undertones that combine biomorphic forms, indications of technology, manufacturing debris and unlikely transitions all enhanced by a very wild and wily palette.
What I find most intriguing about this exhibition is the way the exhibition ebbs and flows visually and viscerally through the use of certain repetitive details found in both the two and three dimensional objects. Exquisite Realm: Scanning the Substrata (2023) covers the largest wall of the gallery, driven by seemingly endless, individual, collaged ink drawings and mixed media sculptures that set in motion an evolving, multiplying, expanding organism. A potent structure of energetic expression built upon meditative mark-making and inward searching.
Maggie Nowinski & Alicia Renadette, Exquisite Realm: Scanning the Substrata (detail), 2023, Mixed media installation
In the worst times of the COVID pandemic, there was an overall fog of life, of not knowing how bad it would get, if you were its next victim, or if there would ever be light at the end of the tunnel. So it is not so surprising that anxiety levels would increase throughout the globe under such overwhelming stress. For whatever reason, artists have an innate ability to employ that negative energy into their work by channeling the flow of lines, shapes and colors from the subconscious, enabling them to represent the illusive space between survival and dread.
Exquisite Variants: Maggie Nowinski and Alicia Renadette ends September 10th. For more information visit the gallery’s website https://www.overlapnewport.com/
Jenne Currie, Feeling the Rhythm, 2023Feeling the Rhythm 16 x 16
By its nature, painting is a deceptive art; it seeks to present three dimensions with only two spatial planes. The perceptual shifts between these two and three dimensions create the optical illusion which in turn animates visual art. Two artists, Jenne Currie and Tracy Phillips present their paintings at the Associazione Culturale Castello 780 gallery venue in Venice, Italy. Although Currie works with collaged, sculptural shapes and Phillips paints nuanced, luminous forms, both artists confront the puzzle of the third dimension with comparable determination.
Jenne Currie, First Tango in Venice, 2023
Jenne Currie’s paintings balance sculptural space against the limits of the flat substrate. The shadows made by the suspended forms are influenced by the shifting ambient light. These ever-changing silhouettes allow the passage of time and its accompanying penumbra to serve as painterly components alongside with her pigments and mediums. The artworks all share an intense musicality as they collectively invoke the rhythm of dance, the convergent harmonies of sound and the suggested contours of instruments. The restricted palette and exuberant forms make for paintings that demand multiple viewings to determine the constantly shifting space.
Tracy Phillips, This Way Please, 2023
In contrast, Tracy Phillips’ complex and vibrant oil paintings straddle a universe that sways between within and without. Naturalistic light effects illuminate Intricate passageways while chromatic configurations balance on the cusp of the known and unknowable. The sensation is of an oneiric world originating somewhere deep inside the viewer and traversing beyond the self into more obscure realms populated by sensations. There is a familiarity with some edges and textures: a feather, a velvet cloth, a jewel or a shell; however, on closer inspection, recognition rapidly melts away and the viewer is left with visual memories. In Phillips’ hallucinogenic environment, we see the possibilities of an alternate biology that is neither inside of us nor outside but rather in the realm of the senses.
Tracy Phillips, The Heart of the Matter, 2023, 12 x 12 in, 30.5 x 30.5 cm
With paint and wood, Jenne Currie and Tracy Phillips unite as they harness the power of an intuited third dimension: Currie, by forging the forms and shadows of her sculptured paintings and Phillips, with intricate brushwork that animates fantastical worlds. Together, these painters make dynamic paintings that invite space and being.
Jenne Currie + Tracy Phillips. Castello Spaces, Castello 780 Gallery, Fondamenta San Giuseppe, Sestiere Castello 780, 30122 Venice, VE Italy. Gallery Hours: Thurs – Sun 3-7pm or by appointment Exhibition through September 10, 2023
Brenda Goodman, Self Portrait No. 5, 2004 Courtesy: Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and the Artist
Self: Portraits + Places is a three-woman exhibition of paintings recently at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts in Woodstock, N.Y. The artists in this exhibit, Brenda Goodman, Julie Heffernan, and Elisa Jensen, consider the myriad senses of being within the confines of the painted portrait.
Brenda Goodman, Self Portrait No. 1, 2003 Courtesy: Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and the Artist
For Brenda Goodman, the notion of Self is mirrored by the unflinching gaze of the canvas as the artist paints herself naked and standing alone in her studio. These artworks predate the abstract paintings she is now known for yet underline the very personal foundation of all her work. In these Self Portraits in the Studio, the crushing space evokes a loneliness and vulnerability that is almost unbearable as haunted masked figures surround a terrorized woman (No. 1) while other paintings feature the artist gazing at herself or at the viewer in clothed curiosity (No.5).
Julie Heffernan, Self-Portrait as Lacoön, 2022 Courtesy: Hirschl & Adler Modern and the ArtistJulie Heffernan, Self-Portrait as Mad Queen, 2021 Courtesy: Hirschl & Adler Modern and the Artist
Julie Heffernan weaves a different version of selfhood from the chaotic skeins of dreams and visions. The fluidity of the female form merges with the botany of the natural world, presenting an allegorical tableau vivant. In Self Portrait as the Mad Queen, the subject possesses a strength that controls telluric currents while funneling a white-hot intensity that can bend destiny. All of Heffernan’s paintings merge artifice with nature ; what is supposed to be wild and savage (the woodlands) are intricately ordered while the protagonists present as inscrutable actors posing as timeless archetypes.
Elisa Jensen, Lights Across the River, Night (left), 2022 and Dawn, 7:45 AM (right), 2023 Courtesy: Pamela Salisbury Gallery and the Artist
Elisa Jensen turns away from both figure and fantasy as she places the Self squarely in the geography of light and object. Her subject matter is the serenity of interior space and the intimate connection to the forms that shape our world. Jensen depicts humble domestic objects and phenomena, such as a beam of light through a window, as a stage setting for an internal drama. Her dark interiors parallel the depths of the mind’s eye while the views out the windows become the portals that link the inside experience to the vast world beyond.
As three Fates, these artists present separate visions of Selfhood as an embodied physical emotion, a mystical mythology, or a subject-less experience bound by the very rooms we inhabit. These intangible self-portraits eclipse the subject in meaning as the paintings in SELF: Portraits + Places capture the paradox of individuality and the reality of a universal human experience.
Victor Ekpuk, Portraits # 5 & 1 (Portrait Series), 2015, acrylic on canvas. Image courtesy of Princeton University Art Museum- photo Joseph Hu
Nigerian-American artist Victor Ekpuk sees himself as an indigene of the West African culture which engendered Nsibidi, an ancient ideographic communication system that is both textual and performative. Native to the Ejagham peoples of the Cross River region shared by Nigeria and Cameroon, Nsibidi likely originated around 400 C.E., spreading to the neighboring Ibibo, Efik, and Igbo peoples. During the Age of Slavery, it also crossed the Atlantic, taking root in Cuba and Haiti. Ekpuk draws inspiration from Nsibidi to create dense sign-and-symbol networks that dominate his art, giving it evocative, expressive power. These networks also include signs and symbols arising from his own memory and imagination, as well as ideas from other cultures. Utilizing all these resources, Ekpuk has developed a unique, personal vocabulary that embeds in his art a symbiotic, rhythmic interplay between art and writing. He has gone far beyond the Nigerian artists who preceded him in utilizing Nsibidi as part of a merging of Western modernism with Nigerian and African ways of art-making.
Love of drawing has also pervaded Ekpuk’s journey as an artist. “I am almost always painting on my drawings or drawing on my paintings,” he says, revealing that, at core, it is drawing that drives the force of his art. This fuse manifests itself even in his sculpture, which he sees as his passion for line finding three-dimensional incarnation. When Ekpuk creates his enormous site-specific ephemeral murals for which he is well-known, his command of line is such his creation virtually flows out of him as a stream of consciousness.
Victor Ekpuk, Mask, 2022. Handpainted steel. Image Courtesy of Princeton University Art Museum/photo Joseph Hu
His drawing fluency made Ekpuk a successful illustrator and cartoonist at The Daily Times, a Nigerian newspaper where he worked from 1990-1998 upon graduating from the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University). Owing to the authoritarian military rule that Nigeria continued to endure during these years, the illustrations and caricatures he drew for the newspaper to enliven its articles and news reports were so constructed they spoke to their readers “between the lines.” In an illuminating article on Ekpuk, art historian Amanda B. Carlson suggests that his work as a journalist-draughtsman imparted experiential depth to his artistic exploration of Nsibidi’s graphic attributes. Referencing Julia Kristeva, she also draws attention to the intertextuality informing his works – an attribute that surely drew formative sustenance from the subtle dialogic relationship between text and image that he created for the newspaper’s readers.
With the Princeton University Art Museum’s main premises currently closed for a complete rebuild, Victor Ekpuk: Language and Lineage is on view at Art@Bainbridge, a gallery project of the Museum located in downtown Princeton. Four available rooms show seventeen selections from a thirty-year career. Embedded on the museum’s website is a downloadable brochure, which is also available in hard copy at the show. This document contains a biographical statement on Ekpuk, brief introductions by the curator, Annabelle Priestley, to the artworks in each room, and comments by the artist on specific works and his practice in general. Using the hyperlink given above, readers of this review-essay might like to download the brochure or pick up a copy at the show.
An impression that you might take from the exhibition as a whole is that Ekpuk’s muti-media artworks are at once abstract and figurative. A twenty-first century artist, he has internalized the lessons of the previous century’s art. You might also note that, within his hybrid style, the impulse of his practice is to grow the abstraction without detaching himself entirely from its figurative attributes. Take a look at Prisoner of Conscience, 2002 in gallery 4 in conjunction with the brochure’s Figure 1, House with Crouched Figure Inside, which the artist made circa 1994. In the more recent image, Ekpuk has so stylized his depiction of the prisoner’s plight you feel their physical confinement and psychological pain in a direct, visceral way, and the more you look at the picture, the more its semantic value unfolds in you, including the message of the light streaming in though the tiny window. He has also substituted the hatching of the earlier picture’s substrate with his Nsibidi-based script forming a new substrate. Here he depicts symbolically the violence attending the prisoner’s capture even as it shows a solar eclipse promising hope through time’s passage. On a broader and deeper plane, it also alludes to a universe of endless signification clouded by ambiguity. The artist has said that it is not necessary for the viewer of his script-based art to read it in granular fashion but rather to sense its meaning through feeling – that is, in an oceanic, abstract way.
Most artworks on display depict the human head, in full or part. Referencing his art as a whole, Ekpuk says, “All portraits in general, whether I call them portraits, masks, or heads, bear the idea of the human head as the center of human consciousness. Through the years, I have devised ways to portray the head, to stylize the form and make it abstract, looking for the essence of the form of the head.” This is not the pursuit of abstraction for its own sake. The aim rather is universal signification.
VictorEkpuk, In Deep Water, ca. 2012, printed 2023, digital drawing printed on canvas + two other works. Image courtesy of Princeton University Art Museum-photo Joseph Hu
The head in In Deep Water (gallery 2) contains a dense agglomeration of signs, symbols, and scribblings, so dense that the density may itself be a key message of the drawing. Ekpuk explains in the exhibition brochure that his drawing “pictures the head of a Black person” in America so weighed down by life’s circumstances they are “still struggling for air.” At the top of the head, however, is a sun-like spiral that may signify hope. And this, indeed, is intertextuality in action in the context of abstraction, sun-like spirals being a recognizable Nsibidi symbol.
For a striking example of the power that Ekpuk conjures through both abstraction and intertextuality, linger, please, when in gallery 3 you reach the acrylic painting Royals and Goddesses. The scarlet of the striations modelling a king’s head as well as coloring the dots that form his crown is set off by the underlying dark green background, which in turn is made more intense by the grey-green Nsibidi-like symbols providing affective depth to the painting. The overall effect is one of spectacular beauty. Then when you consider that, through his imagery, Ekpuk is recalling for you the Ife bronze heads of Nigeria, the fruit of a sophisticated cultural and artistic tradition that flowered more than half a millennium ago, you might say, “This is truly awesome.”
Ekpuk often listens to music when he makes art. It’s even important to him intertextually, as the soundtrack in gallery 4 shows. Featured there is the music of Nigerian musician Fela Kuti (1938-1997), whose culturally hybrid output, especially his lyrics, augments the semiotic power of Ekpuk’s drawings, such as the work Still I Rise displayed in the gallery, as the exhibition brochure affirms.
So proud is Ekpuk of his West African cultural and musical heritage he says that in his art-making, he is realizing an inheritance that is partly genetic. We have previously noted the stream-of-consciousness mode of much of his artistic practice. So primal and fluent is his drawing, he often gives you the feeling that his art originates in a bodily drive, akin to something emerging from his unconscious. In essence, his art exemplifies Julia Kristeva’s thinking not only with reference to intertextuality, as discussed above, but also in respect of the semiotic mode of the signifying process, the mode she thought found expression in music, dance, poetry, and visual art, the very things that animate Ekpuk’s creativity. Kristeva spoke of bodily energy and affects driving language use. In similar vein, art and writing dance together in his oeuvre impelled by the personal Nsibidi-based vocabulary that he has developed.
For Kristeva, the signifying process continues to have a second mode, namely, the symbolic, which uses language as a stable sign system that includes grammar and syntax. The semiotic and symbolic are also intertwined, with each vitalizing the other. What we see at Art@Bainbridge testifies that in Ekpuk we have an artist whose work illuminates the continuum that unites the two modes. Back in 2017, when the Morgan Library and Museum organized the exhibition Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection, Jay A. Clarke of the Art Institute of Chicago suggested in a catalogue essay that “there is still a great deal to uncover in terms of the relationship between drawing and writing.” She then said that “the formal semiotics of drawing are ripe to be explored in new ways.” The wonderfully-curated Princeton University Art Museum show on Victor Ekpuk says to us: For a distinctive, cross-cultural contribution to such exploration, look to Ekpuk’s artistic achievement.
