Art in the office of Bailey Browne CPA and Assoc. and launch of kork

A current installation of work by Michael Pilon (l&r) and my own in the center.

Over the past several years, I've installed various selections of artists' work in the offices of Bailey Browne CPA & Associates. Deborah Bailey Browne, the firms principal has been very supportive of our efforts to tinker with the context of art in an office.

Deborah and her firm is a recipient of the 2008 Dutchess County Executive Art Award for a business or corporation that has shown leadership in supporting the arts.

Here is a link to images from the second iteration in 2006.

2007: above, a Peter Acheson painting in the conference room. below, Michael Pilon paintings.
2007: a painting by Jen Bradford, audio piece by einlab, both on the wall to the left, and on the ceiling, a portion of a work by Peter Iannarelli.

2007: a sculpture by Matthew Kinney.

kork, featuring Angelika's postcards as installed by Deborah Bailey Browne.

The most recent endeavor, kork, grew out of an idea Angelika had for a possible piece. She had wanted to work with the format of a bulletin board, which would be expected in an office, but using it in a way that may not be so obvious. Eager as I am to ever to marry artwork to its environment for specific periods, I co-opted the idea and have created a project space within the parameters of the cork bulletin board hanging above the photocopier. Angelika's postcard sized prints on which she wrote messages to Deborah and mailed to the office from NY and LA, then arranged on the board by Deborah, constitute the first kork project and it will be on view through the end of October. Every two months another artist will move into kork, and will see what shakes out. Up next on the board is Elia Gurna, followed by Marc Willhite. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with these projects, and the reaction that the staff will have to it. As I'm thinking of it, some artists will work directly on the bulletin board, but for other artists more distant from the office, mode of conveying and applying the artwork the board will become more important, and perhaps more collaborative with the office staff.

Above and below, my work currently installed.

While kork will be rolling on in two month rotations, the office wide installations of work will proceed at about one or two change ups per year. The artists that have participated thus far in the three or four iterations are mostly usual suspects if you follow the events around Beacon NY, ie.; Simon Draper, Marnie Hillsley, Alexis Elton, Peter Iannarelli, Michael Pilon, Peter Acheson, Angelika Rinnhofer, einlab, Claire Lofrese, Jen Bradford and Matthew Kinney, and going forward, the roster will be expanding. I congratulate Deborah on her award, and I thank her and the staff at the firm for allowing us to tweak their space.

2007: A daily dose of art when the mail arrives courtesy of Peter Acheson.

Peter Acheson at John Davis Gallery in Hudson NY.

Flag, 2008

I couldn't miss the opening of Peter Acheson's opening at John Davis Gallery on Nov 13.
I've mentioned Peter and his work here on this blog and on maykr many times before.  I've spent a lot of time with him talking about painting - and other things.
These conversations have had a major influence on how I look at painting and how I approach my own painting activity. 

Acheson's work has more often than not challenged my expectations of what a painting can or should be.  More often than not, his work, piece by piece has simply challenged me - directly - about each piece's validity as a work fit for the world.
My struggle to come to terms with the oddest of balls that spring from his hand has been rewarding too.  And even the works which, in the end still flag or fail do so with abandon and ballsy-ness - as should be the case. 

The artist in his formal opening attire.

So, Ok- to separate my relationship with the guy from the stuff he does, I'll say that walking into this show was a thrilling visceral experience, one that triggers a jones to get home and get painting - immediately.  I  relate the experience of entering this exhibit to that of discovering Norbert Prangenberg's work at Betty Cunningham Gallery.  It's funny that the works on the main floor are similar to Prangenberg's work in their slutty application of paint.  Never having done crack or suffered from a debilitating addiction of any kind, I can only guess in my assumption that the sense of walking into either of these two exhibits is like a recovered addict happening upon some den replete with the stuff of his addiction - regained intoxication, but without the torment or guilt.  My response to both these exhibits was the same; reveling in the residue of another's endeavor as if it were my own.
It's funny too that Peter's response to photos of that Prangenberger exhibit mirrored his reflection on his own show just a couple of days ago: "Too conservative."

John Davis' downstairs gallery features a sampling of the different threads of Peter's work, concurrently made, but divergent in intention.  Together they give the impression of a guy that is, at his core, a stick and mud man.

Painting for Ben La Rocco, 2010

So, as I alluded, there are two floors in the gallery, the top floor is predominated by what's been referred to as his vibratory paintings and the bottom being populated with variations of his production.

Martin Bromirski photographing Xochitl

Check out Martin's photos from the opening at anaba.  Also John Davis' website includes a pdf with images of all the works in the exhibit.  The show is up through Dec 5.

Observed and Considered @ CCS Bard Library through May 30, 2008

Two of my canvases in the foregrown. Three of Peter Acheson's toward the back.
I currently have work on view at the CCS Bard Library located at the CCS Hessel Museum at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.
The exhibition of my work, along with that of Peter Acheson, Daniel Berlin and Mark DeLura is installed throughout the library and was curated by CCS Hessel Museum director, Tom Eccles.
I'm showing several of the Genesis paintings, and two recent oils on canvas which have grown out of those. The marriage of divergent image and text and the convergence of high and low exemplified within the Genesis pieces is enforced by their presence in such a place of literature and letters.
Some of the Genesis pieces over the computer stations.
Daniel Berlin's oil on canvas pieces.
Mark Delura's work in the reading room.
Peter Acheson's abstract visionary pastoral pieces.
More of Mark Delura's works on panel.

Lunchtime Show and Tell

Back in June, I was working on the installation crew for the Martin Creed Feelings exhibit the Hessel Museum at Bard College.

A couple recent Peter Acheson pieces.

Through the middle of the install, I brought in a few small pieces for feedback from my buddies, Daniel Berlin, and Peter Acheson during our lunch break. This began a daily showandtell/critique session with each of us bringing in our work.

This is one of a series of stick paintings that Peter does. I took it home to live with for a week. I placed it over a doorway.

This added a nice perk to the work day and it was something I looked forward to each day.

I photographed a couple of the sessions. Toward the end of the install, we mutually decided on an assignment where each of us would create a piece using some trashed luaun that we came across.

Dan Berlin's luaun assignment.

My luaun assignment.

My Doings this week

 Peter Acheson pulling out some work.

On Wednesdsay of this week I went up to have a studio visit with Peter Acheson in Ghent, NY.  I've posted several pics over at MAYKR.  Peter will be running down to Beacon to create a few interventions around our place for the Beacon Open Studios which will be taking place on the weekend of Sept 26 & 27.  More on will be forthcoming.

 

From Ghent, I stopped in to the office of Bailey Browne CPA & Assoc. in Poughkeepsie to install some security envelope collages I've been working on recently.  I put several up in the conference room.  The day before, I installed the newest kork project which is a collaboration between Brooklyn artists Bridget Mullen and Christopher Patch called Faces or Friendships.

  

  

  

 

  

Faces or Friendships on the kork project space.

I was treated last week to a delightful and invigorating studio visit by Mark DeLura and Peter Acheson.  I'll be heading north to meet up with those two again to do a visit Mark's studio.  Later in the day, I'll continue on to Hudson to take in the opening reception of Peter's exhibit of new paintings at the John Davis Gallery. 

John Davis Gallery is located at 362 1/2 Warren St. in Hudson, NY.  Peter Acheson: Paintings runs through December 5, 2010. Tomorrow's reception runs from 6 to 8 pm.

John Davis has an awesome three-story carriage house behind the main gallery which is open during warm months.  I was able to catch Martin Bromirski's "Circus on Mars" show there a couple of years ago. I missed Sharon Butler's exhibit of Beacon Paintings last year, but I was pleased to exhibit two pieces from that body of work last month at kork.

Meet yer Maykr: Mark DeLura

On his blog, Form In The Fire, Peter Acheson recounts his recent visit to the studio of painter Mark DeLura.

Peter's posting prompted me to post images I took during a visit he and I made to Mark's studio back in November of 2010.

At that point, Mark had just embarked on his explorations of clusters of drip-tethered "splatters" (at this point, smaller scaled works done in oil on paper) which can be seen as the forebears of the paintings described in Peter's post.

On our 2010 visit Mark also showed us the large stripe paintings the pre-dated his (I'll just refer to them as "cluster") paintings.

What these works all share is the source of their chromatic character.  The colors here are not random "imaginary hues" but appropriated ones which have been found by the artist in the natural landscape and collected into a library through excursions in which they were mixed from nature.  

In Sept 2011 Mark's exhibit at the voluminous Re Institute in Millerton, NY paired his exploration of form and gesture with a new use of industrial paints (mostly silver and barn red).

It's interesting to me that, as with the earlier works, the colors Mark has chosen for the recent ones are not invented but appropriated and are readymade hues that are "naturally" found in the man-mediated landscape.


Peter will be speaking about his own work this coming Saturday, January 19 at 4pm as part of This Red Door's offering of events at the Kunsthalle Galapagos in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

Kunsthalle Galapagos is locate upstairs from the Galapagos Art Space.

I was able to check out both the Kunsthalle Galapagos and the TRD set up on Sunday when I went down to do a little recording for Dead Hare Radio, and to take in a reading of selections from Christopher Stackhouse's newly published volume of poetry, Plural.

The visual evidence of TRD's series of talks and presentations on the gallery walls.

Various readers shared selections of Christopher Stachkhouse's poetry.

Geneve Journal: Embarkment

I finally set out on my Geneve Journal journey yesterday.  Scheduled to depart yesterday from Newark at 5:15 pm to Geneva by way of Porto Portugal, I'm currently sitting in the Newark Double Tree Hotel.  "Technical difficulties" brought about the eventual cancellation of the flight and then the saga of getting hotel rooms for the affected passengers.  After the bulk of our fellow passengers filled all available rooms of the Renaissance Hotel, the remaining handful of us were given rooms at the Double Tree - at about 1:30 am.

From rm 311 of the Double Tree hotel.

Scheduled now to depart at 5:55, with the connecting city being Lisbon, the current snowfall - which is getting heavier now - makes me question the possibility of a timely take off this afternoon.

But, I took a pleasant breakfast this morning with Tim and Marion, a young French couple heading back to Paris after visiting NYC, and I'm able to catch up on some posting while I wait for the airline's call.

Over the last few weeks I began fulfilling the first rewards for supporters of the Geneve Journal Project.  All but a few handful of the Elliptical Drawings have been sent out - the rest will find their destination upon my return.  And I've been able to start making phone calls of thanks to those who joined in on the project.

I'm grateful to all these fine folks who agreed to participate:

Jo Cole, Angelika Rinnhofer, Lorrie Fredette, Deirdre Swords, Matthew Kinney, Beth E. Wilson, Brian Farrar, Lisa Townley, Michael Haskell, Trent Peaker, Erica Hauser, Pamela Todd, Tatiana Giametti, Angela Beloian, Rich Armstrong, Andrew Boscardin, Steffen Hyder, Chad Smith, Ilka Omdahl, Stan Gregory, Frank Albert, Desiree, Will Walker, Matthew Slaats, Andy Clayton, Richard Schoenstein, Randy Caruso, Olivier Pascal Zimmermann, Cristina Schuttmann, Cristin Frodella, Carla Rozman, elboso, Steve Rossi, Cole Wicker, AmyK, Rob Penner, Peter Iannarelli, C-monster, Kirsten Kucer, Peter Acheson, Marcia Acita, Marc Schreibman, Phyllis Lerud, Diana & David Armstrong.

 To project funders: if I've missed any pertinent links, please let me know.  I'll gladly add them.

 I've set up a tout profile.  I'll be posting 15 second videos to this profile which will follow my Genevois goings-on at a micro-temporal and microscopic level.  If you're on the blog page now, you can see the Tout widget in the sidebar to the right.

Harbored

The October 11 opening of my exhibit HARBOR at Matteawan Gallery took place one year to the weekend after I executed a series of painted moves that ended up resulting in the base layers on which the Harbor compositions would be built. 

This act of painting done on Columbus Day weekend in 2013 was the final "processing" of Advent 2011, the last project to appear on the board of kork.  For Advent 2011 I sent postcard images of a 2001 painting, THA to 30 artists and asked them to manipulate the image in the photograph and mail it as a postcard back to the office of Deborah Bailey Browne CPA in Poughkeepsie, where it became an advent calendar marking the end of 2011 and the end of kork as an artspace - and some for some, possibly the end of the world with the apocryphal apocalypse of 2012 then looming on the horizon. 

The collected Advent 2011 postcards.

I took all of these manipulated postcards as suggestions for how to improve or destroy the painting in question.  The logical final step was to enact these suggestions on the actual painting and see what I came up with.
The video below is a time lapse capture of me going through the motions over the course of three days in October 2013.




After taking the painting through all of the iterations, I cut it up into smaller pieces to be used at a later date.  As it turns out, most of the body of this old painting has reemerged in the collective body of of the Harbor paintings which, as a group consist of 15 paintings.

After having chosen HARBOR as the name of the exhibit and the paintings, thinking of the significances of the word, I came to recognize these new paintings tangibly harbor the physical and intellectual efforts of all the participating artists, forming a receptive bed for a new layer of information and making the whole concept worth that much more to me.

Those participating artists are:

Angela Beloian, James Westwater, Sharon L Butler, Marc Wilhite, Lorrie Fredette, Thomas Huber, Peter Iannarelli, Elia Gurna, Angelika Rinnhofer, Alastair Dewell, Michael Asbill, Bruce Gluck, Kathleen Anderson, Matthew Slaats, Chad Smith, Mark DeLura, Peter Acheson, Jean Brennan, Steve Rossi, Mark Creegan, Mathew Hereford, Deirdre Swords,  Susan Walsh, Catherine Welshman, Kirsten Kucer, Christopher Stackhouse, Matthew S Kinney, Greg Slick, Sara Mussen and Karlos Carcamo.

Coming in December: kork advent

In a season where galleries all over will amassing their stables of artists to entice buyers with an array of small, gift worthy artworks, we at kork are bringing together our own cadre of artists, but we're not trying to sell you anything. Rather, we'll be sharing a little time with you; a month, to be exact.
Advent brings together 31 artists to count down the last month of 2009 on the kork board. In the manner of that desktop stalwart, the page-a-day calender, each day of December will be represented by an artwork accompanied by a phrase, quote or definition of the artist's choosing or contrivance for the day .
The project will exist in physical form at the office of Bailey Browne CPA & Associates in Poughkeepsie and in virtual calendar form as a daily email with each artist's work.
Consider it our gift to you.
You can sign up to receive the month of daily emails at the kork blog or fill out this online form.

Participating artists are: Daniel Berlin, Zachary Harper, Lauri Lynnxe Murphy, Matthew Slaats, James Westwater, Peter Iannarelli, Thundercut, Martin Bromirski, Joseph Liebhart, Theresa Gooby, Gregory Marvin Reynolds, Kirsten Kucer, Marc Willhite, Karlos Carcamo, Alisha Kerlin, Lisa Townley, Sara Wolfe, Carl Van Brunt, Jim White, Jill Reynolds, Bridget Mullen, Robert Lomblad, Steve Rossi, Peter Acheson, Elia Gurna, Mark Creegan, Mark Delura, Itziar Barrio, Angelika Rinnhofer, Sharon Butler, Christopher Patch.