As the World Grinds, Pulp Ladle, dArt Burger, and The Bunny Show. Citing the work of Andre Ethier, Ben Marshall, Ginette Legare, Saeed Mohamed, James Cooper, Steve Rockwell, and Katharine T. Carter.
The 2011 Making Minced Meat Out of dArt Magazine exhibition at De Luca Fine Art in Toronto introduced the dArt Burger to the city. Saeed Mohamed served it at his restaurant. Co-producer Ben Marshall insisted we install an actual meat grinder in the show. Gallery attendees were served the edible burgers, as the wall mounted print shards were available for visual ingestion. James Cooper’s film on the “grinding” of dArt magazine content may be accessed by clicking Dart Onion, and for his film on the making of the dArt Burger click here.
The image in Ginette Legaré’s Pulp Ladle (originally Scoop from the 1998 Feeding Disorder series) was transferred from the Fall 1998 edition dArt onto the dArt magazine pulp panel. Legaré’s constructions comprise of reconfigured found objects, out which meaning is teased as distilled language. Her recent “Supply Chains” exhibition at Birch Contemporary speaks to a time when links to the network of things necessary or desirable to our lives may unexpectedly show strain. Andre Ethier’s Atlas portrays the globe-bearing Titan in a state of perpetual stress – a punishment levied by Zeus after defeat in battle.
The Bunny Show image was created for Katharine T. Carter & Associates, a public relations and marketing firm for artists. It’s a view of the museum interior visualized as a rabbit artist might see it – a full retrospective with ample carrots.
Dead Idiot, Penck’s Passage, Richter Scale, and Card Players. Citing the work of Paul Pretzer, Mamma Andersson, Kurt Schwitters, A.R. Penck, Hannah Hoch, Gerhard Richter, Otto Dix, and Julian Schnabel.
A reading of the Curated Content #2 group of images may require the passage over something that Maurice Blanchot calls the “empty deep.” The Richter Scale image in the group had been the cover for the Fall 2002 edition of dArt magazine, featuring author Bruce Bauman’s review of Gerhard Richter’s exhibition at the MoMA in New York. Bauman conceded that seeing the retrospective forced him to reevaluate why he wrote about art. Bauman’s full article here.
In his search for, what cannot be put into words, Bauman arrives at what he calls, “the necessity of art: the search for that space in each individual for the longing for the lost god, for meaning, for beauty, humanity – the quest for truth which is our soul. In falling into that empty deep we can truly confront that terribleness of human history, the horror and little cruelties that live within us all.”
Paul Pretzer, Dead Idiot, oil on wood, 17.1 x 15 inches. Courtesy of Marc Straus Gallery
A tiny antagonist buzzes over the skull of Paul Pretzer’s Dead Idiot. The painting was part of Mortality: A Survey of Contemporary Death Art. Curated by Donald Kuspit, and assisted by Robert Curcio, the exhibition was to be held at the American University Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2020, but was terminated due to Covid-19. Since the exhibition catalog had already been produced, the show’s virtual life was extended as the 2021 dArt cover feature, in the sense that the Curated Content project had also breathed life into it. If Pretzer’s Dead Idiot is a focus on mortality as an individual struggle, the Otto Dix Card Players (1920) in panel four exemplify its residual collective trauma. The black card with Julian Schnabel’s portrait of a scarred Andy Warhol, deals the irony of someone who survived an assassination attempt, only to fall victim to a scalpel in the hospital.
A.R. Penck’s stick figure with outstretched arms embodies survival, literally here a trial by fire and tightrope in his 1963 oil Passage. The work was part of Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures (article by Emese Hajagos) and addresses the wider sociopolitical impacts of war, whether hot or cold.
Steve Rockwell, Good Gordo, Casual Observer, In the Black, andHard Edge, 2024. Citing the work of Steve Rockwell, Hills Snyder, Lorser Feitelson (1963 painting), and Otto Preminger’s “Anatomy of a Murder” (with Lee Remick).Hills Snyder, Casual Observer/Causal Observer, 2010, Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio, Texas, installation view
Curated Content #5 is a four panel image sentence that clusters pictures into paragraphs. As we read, a story may unfold. Dog observes a periscope rising out of the sea that breaks into light from something hidden – the “submarine.” Although Hills Snyder employed its image to advertise his 2010 exhibition at Blue Star Contemporary in San Antonio, Texas, the original periscope image was created byAndrea Danti for Shutterstock.com. Snyder’s employment of the periscope becomes a key that breaks the seal to his container of objects and experiences – now accessible to even the casual viewer. To get the “full” picture, however, further observation is necessary. A documentation of the work that went into mounting Snyder’s elaborate installation can be accessed by clicking Casual Observer.
Hills Snyder, Casual Observer/Causal Observer, 2010, Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio, Texas, installation view
An attentive Gordo in the first panel mimes the periscope, having been obedient to his master’s voice (Stuart Regen) in posing for my photograph – a captured moment that merited the cover of the premier edition of dArt magazine in January 1998. By sheer coincidence, the dog’s front paws in the Good Gordo image cover a crack in the concrete floor, echoing the one in the Snyder submarine photo. In that respect, as the dArt genesis account unfolds, Gordo’s paw bruises the wriggling serpent crack on the floor of the Regen Projects gallery.
The third panel of a woman contemplating a black rectangle is derived from dArt‘s 1998 second edition and was provided ACME gallery in Los Angeles to accompany More Shifts in the LA Gallery Landscape, an article by Michael Darling. Two years earlier ACME had consented to take part in my Storage installation project by storing a 32 by 32 inch acrylic on panel painting showing my hand holding a black card. The project served as the visual component for the book work Meditations on Space, An Artist’s Odyssey through Art Galleries in Europe and North America, published in 1996. My earlier visit to ACME in Santa Monica on January 3, 1996 had taken a geometric bent, “I walked in a straight line from the door to the back of the gallery where someone was installing work. He pointed me towards the desk corner. I made a 40 degree turn and walked over to speak to Randy Sommer, and then a 70 degree turn for the door. That completed the triangle.”
Left: Steve Rockwell, Storage Project, 1996, ACME gallery, Los Angeles, installation view. Right: In the Black, 2024, oil and mixed media on dArt magazine page, 8.5 x 7 inches
The fourth panel, Hard Edge features Lorser Feitelson’s 1963 Untitled painting, managing a further echo, this time, of the red facade of Snyder’s installation exterior. If a connection were to be be made between the peephole in Snyder’s Casual Observer/Causal Observer to ones in the Spanish door of Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an intriguing possibility is introduced – a murder of the mythic art kind. Lorser Feitelson’s red lozenge shape in Hard Edge is interrupted in its right corner by a film still crop of Lee Remick testifying in Otto Preminger’s courtroom drama, Anatomy of a Murder.
Historically, artist Lorser Feitelson has a tie to the emergence of “hard edge painting.” He was featured in the 1999 dArt magazine article Testing the Fabric of the New Color Field by Michael Duncan. Duncan had been critical of this group of primarily Los Angeles-based artists writing, “For me a lack of ambition and conviction is the problem with the most hyped members of the so-called New Color Field movement.” Duncan preferred works of several older LA artists, “whose explosive and inventive use of color and abstract design provide quirky and fruitful contexts for the works of the younger experimenters.” A dip into the trove of art world narratives about Paris, New York, and Los Angeles from a century ago, should not disappoint those truly interested. Simply click the Lorser Feitelson Interviews for a brouse.
Christy Rupp, Streaming, installation view at the Fairfiled University Art Museum
Since the ’70s, Christy Rupp’s sculptures and works on paper have explored the relationship between economics and the environment. Rupp seeks to make this complex topic – one usually examined in abstract articles – into a clear and direct visual narrative accessible beyond the language of dissertations, punditry, and scientific studies. Emerging from the lens of Discard Studies, a discipline that considers the systems and consequences of waste, Rupp weighs these systems and their short-term benefits against the long-term costs of climate degradation and the marginalization of threatened species.
Buried in history, politics, and culture, the politics of waste are rooted in consumerism with its voracious consumption and energy needs. Christy Rupp dives into this dystopia with welded steel, foraged plastic detritus, historical, scientific, and contemporary imagery, a dark sense of humor, and the uncanny ability to connect the dots. Her artwork charts a course through the turmoil, observing the trail of collateral damage as it moves through our world, seeking to interpret and magnify these interdependencies.
Christy Rupp, Moa (detail) in front of wall installation at the Fairfield University Art Museum
Some examples of Rupp’s visual unification of cause and effect are found in her installation Moby Debris, a collection of microplanktonic organisms made from welded steel rods and discarded plastic. To quote artist and art scholar Ellen K. Levy, “Rupp considers how waste and toxic elements in our environment corrupt the accepted way in which organisms function and evolve…Each of her aquatic-inspired “organisms” is composed of discarded plastic detritus and visually comments on the damage done to species when they consume the glut of inorganic detritus hurled into our food chain.” In magnifying the petroplanktonic microbes that inevitably find their way into a whale’s stomach, Rupp clarifies the irony of a food chain where the smallest organisms sustain the largest mammals along with the floating oceanic plastic waste that accompanies them into a whale’s stomach. A similar statement is made with the plastic-stuffed wall works of Aquatic Larvae, with the paradox of young hatchling fishes nurtured in egg sacks populated by a buffet of accumulated microplastics.
Christy Rupp, Pangolin, Installation at the Fairfield University Art Museum
In works such as her Pangolins and the series Remaining Balance Insufficient featuring aquatic mammal skeletons, Rupp bends and welds steel rods into graceful lines as effortlessly as if drawn on paper. The animals’ forms are then sheathed in innumerable, shimmering credit cards as they float jewel-like in the air. However, these pangolins and manatees are victims of environmental exploitation as they wrestle with human-caused habitat degradation. Rupp’s visualization of their plight equates the debt incurred with their survival, leveraged against the temporary advantage of human exploitation. Made as they are of credit cards, this work reminds us that, unlike the world of finance, the biosphere is not man-made, and it’s impossible to manipulate with numbers and percentages. Natural habitat is much easier to destroy than repair.
In addition to numerous sculptures, the exhibition features two giant digital prints on fabric that confront the emergency of non-renewable energy and plastic waste and their enduring damage to terrestrial systems. While these immense banners cannot ever be large enough to fully present this unfolding catastrophe, an abstract appreciation for the beauty of materials out of place is obvious.
As much as Christy Rupp’s art is about ecological emergencies, she is informative without being didactic, while her playful wit and whimsical spirit convey the darkest news. However, her direct and accessible message does not come at the expense of aesthetics as the artist’s accomplished draftsmanship and percussive colors are at once delightful and dramatic. In visualizing the effects of ecological degradation, Christy Rupp does not pinpoint any single culprit – only because there isn’t just one cause; rather, there is a collective complacency that permeates society. Anyone who views Rupp’s work is engaged in some way as a citizen of a world in which it is easier to participate in a petrochemical-fueled lifestyle, blissfully ignorant of our burgeoning carbon footprint and impending doom.
Garrett Lockhart,Profile (Right), 2023, inkjet transfer on linen over board 5 x 7 inches, 12.7 x 17.78 cm
Garrett Lockhart’s “Wrinkle” exhibition at the Hunt Gallery Toronto is an offering of paperback-sized objects that carry the look and feel of fastidious graphite drawings. The seven by five inch cotton and denim works over board are, in fact, inkjet transfers that wash onto the fabric imperfectly. This careful sifting and arranging of print magazine images evoke a memory of lived presence – a migration of the effluence of luxury amid closely-cropped photos of models and interiors.
Garrett Lockhart,Deceit, 2024, inkjet transfer on linen over board, 5 x 7 inches, 12.7 x 17.78 cm
Although the artist’s sources to his subjects span the decades from the 80s into the near present, the citing of Andy Warhol’s “Interview” magazine in particular is significant. Lockhart’s “Wrinkle” can be read as a grainy homage to Warhol’s Factory, which at its giddy peak was an avant garde laboratory, a chaotic jumble of the rich and famous with artists and musicians – the celebrities of the day. In Warhol’s transfer, his silkscreen subjects migrated from canvas to celluloid, turning them into “superstars.”
Garrett Lockhart,Fire Escape, 2023, inkjet transfer on cotton over board, 5 x 7 inches, 12.7 x 17.78 cm
Lockhart’s catalogue of exhibition images, on the other hand, can be read as an art director story board replete with character closeups, sets and locations. His “Profile (Right)” and “Profile (Left)” are actor test shots, much as Warhol’s screen tests became standard fare for his film works. It’s the viewer, however, in the “Wrinkle” exhibition that splices and edits their own narrative from the sparsely-placed “frames.” That the works mime the pocketbook format rather than a film cell, cues us for a story rooted in pulp fiction. To the gallery consumer they are an affordable “prêt-à-porter.”
In a wider sense, the aesthetic impulse of the artist is the poetic distillation the material presence of selected objects. Lockhart has mounted an impressive bouquet of solo and group exhibitions worldwide in just the past few years, that include, not only Toronto, but Vancouver, Chicago, Brooklyn, The Netherlands, and London, England. A single work in his 2021 “Sleeper Cell” show in Montréal contained blank keys, aluminum house numbers, deadstock glass beads from Queen Street, found plastic jewel, hardware store tag, and wire, salvaged wood, rope, twine, found steel pulley and a sailboat cleat. Each fragment of a Lockhart work is a trace clue to its origin. In a group exhibition, meaning and import sifts from their permutation with participating artists.
While a formal singularity sets Lockhart’s “Wrinkle” exhibition apart, it’s best to view the artist’s full oeuvre as patches and swaths cut from a single bolt of cloth. Here at Hunt Gallery, however, your steam iron is not required. The linearity of the presentation makes its reading smooth and wrinkle-free.
Garrett Lockhart: Wrinkle. From January 19 – February 17, 2024 at Hunt Gallery, 1278 St. Clair Avenue West, Unit 8, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6E 1B9
