The escape from the banal everyday life to the world of the ideal

The LongestShow Title

of the Universeis Here

Annalisa PerazziKim Jong Il

Ronald ReaganMatt Kleenex

Ramon EsquivernaLaetitia Ann-Saedler

Camilla Perowski-WittgensteinEdo Udo

Rachel Minnesota

Curated by:Franklin Delano and

Eric Sutherland

From April 26 to May 28, 2012Opening Reception: Friday, May 28, 7-9 PM

NURTUREart Gallery56 Bogart St., Brooklyn, NY 11206

The escape from the banal everyday life to the

world of the ideal

Jonathan Allmaier

Tamara Gonzales

EJ Hauser

Stephen Truax

Maria Walker

From November 2 to November 30, 2012Opening Reception: Friday, November 2, 7-9 PM

NURTUREart Gallery56 Bogart St., Brooklyn, NY 11206

Curated by Brooke Moyse

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Arthur Dove, Fog Horns,

1929. Oil on canvas, 21 ½ x 28

½ inches. Colorado Springs

Fine Arts Center, Colorado.

Copyright, The Estate of Ar-

thur G. Dove. Courtesy Terry

Dintenfass, Inc.

The escape from the banal everyday life to the world of the ideal

by Brooke Moyse

The title of this exhibition is taken from a note in artist Charles Burchfield’s sketchbook. Burch-field worked in relentless pursuit of the elusive center of his artistic practice. His sketchbooks are filled with elaborate notes and codes, which he would deliberately refer to in crafting his sur-realistic landscape paintings. Burchfield’s paint-ings and drawings are unique in that they do not fit into conventional formal categories. They are simultaneously surreal, abstract, and representa-tional descriptions of the natural world. The sin-cerity of his marks make it difficult to know if he thought that he was fabricating environments, or believed he was painting from life. These fan-tastical landscapes gave Burchfield a framework through which to investigate his true subject: the ability of a work of art to transcend the constric-tions of its own physicality. This exhibition brings together five artists - Jona-than Allmeier, Tamara Gonzales, EJ Hauser, Ste-phen Truax, and Maria Walker - who make ab-stract work that is simultaneously conceptual, formal, and sincere. Their works discuss the his-tory of the art object and mark-making, and the way that these two things can join to articulate a new experience. I am presenting pieces that are a bit different from what each artist is known for, and that share a particular power that I feel is relevant to the idea of making timeless and vital art. Formal abstraction first started to emerge through the Symbolist movement of the late

Artspeak

If Art would only talk it would, at last, reveal

itself for what it is, what we all burn to know.

As for our certainties, it would fetch a dry yawn

then take a minute to sweep them under the rug:

certainties time-honored as meaningless as dust

under the rug. High time, my dears, to listen up.

Finally Art would talk, fill the sky like a mouth,

clear its convulsive throat while flashes and crashes

erupted as it spoke—a star-shot avalanche of

visions in uproar, drowned by the breathy din

of soundbites as we strain to hear its august words:

“a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z.”

Dorothea Tanning

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Charles E. Burchfield, Dawn of Spring, ca. 1960s. Watercolor, charcoal, and white chalk on joined paper mounted on

board, 52 x 59 1/2 inches. DC Moore Gallery, New York; image courtesy Burchfield Penney Art Center.

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in particular, is the way that abstract gestures have become less precious and more colloquial. Companies like Apple have brought modern de-sign into mainstream life, causing those lines to become more familiar and prevalent in places like street signs or web design. This attention to form and design affects the way that we interact physically with the art object, and perhaps even what that experience means, since looking at a painting is a uniquely slow and meditative inter-action.

“I’ve always felt with her a sense of common

purpose, ambition and predicament: that painting

should engage an urgent sense of responsibility to

life in this moment, yet with no roadmap for how to

even begin, there is a void which begs the ques-

tion: what is real? What can be made vivid? What is

the cost of launching oneself into this act against all

odds of making it new and vital?”

Jacqueline Humphries on Charline von Heyl’s work, in the

catalog for von Heyl’s Tate Liverpool exhibition, 2012.

The artist Jacqueline Humphries’ observation of the inherent impossibility of making a “new and vital” image in art directly reflects not only the digital age’s wealth of resources, but also the always-present weight of art history. Charline von Heyl is an example of an artist who does not discriminate between sources or influences. She has a deep and varied body of work that is at once current, ancient, and futuristic. In a 2010 interview with Shirley Kaneda for BOMB Maga-zine, von Heyl states that “What I’m trying to do is to create an image that has the iconic value of a sign but remains ambiguous in its meaning. Something that feels like a representation but

19th and early 20th centuries. American artists who were interested in mysticism at that time often used nature as a departure point in explor-ing those ideas. Many artists, like Arthur Dove or Georgia O’Keefe, gradually moved on from nature into formal abstraction as their interests in the occult and mysticism became essential source material for their paintings. The intui-tive and non-representational nature of formal abstraction lent itself to the investigation of the more personal (rather than institutional) type of spirituality that these artists were considering at the time. The new form of art thus became more about exploring the human mind and the role of the artistic object towards deepening our under-standing of it, than about literally telling a story. The first half of the 20th century was an incuba-tor for the formal and ideological developments of abstract art, introducing concepts and notions that would become establishment by the 1960s. While the critical establishment was preoccupied by the formal elements of abstraction, the artists who were exploring it were primarly interested in its power for conveying a transcendental ex-perience.The subsequent years of modernism and post-modernism have changed the way that we ex-perience art. Our relationships with images and objects have evolved as both became more disposable and less precious in this age of ex-cess and remote living. Digital reproduction has helped to make the impossibility of creating an original image increasingly obvious. However, the great secret behind this notion is the knowl-edge that it has always been the case, and that there probably has never been an original image, since it all first appeared in nature. What makes this time interesting for art and for abstraction

Charline von Heyl, Untitled (L.S. #3), 2007.

Oil on canvas, 18 x 20 inches.

isn’t. Something that looks as if it has a content or a narrative but hasn’t. Something that is kind of hovering in front of the painting instead of just being it.” Von Heyl is talking about the desire to somehow present or create a vital and authentic experi-ence that balances between having no roots, and remaining deeply integrated with all aspects of history and culture. Additionally, the idea of cre-ating an image that hovers in front of the paint-ing reflects the timelessness and spacelessness of the Internet, and brings us back to the non-linear commonality between it and art history. The abstract quality of the pieces in this exhi-bition is a consequence of the artists’ pursuit of a similar sense of authenticity. Their works reflect both the sincerity of ambition and the pointed power and presentness where Charles Burchfield intersects with Charline von Heyl. The power of the work is located in that ambiguous experience between the viewer and the paint-ing in which the image attempts to transcend its objecthood (thus “hovering in front of the paint-ing”). In bringing these artists together, I hope to facilitate such an experience of groundlessness in the gallery, as boundaries between new and old, virtual and real, disappear to reveal some-thing similar to Burchfield’s vibrating auras.

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Ali vs. Foreman; POV and personal identity

by Jonathan Allmaier

In Ali vs. Foreman, 1974, “The Rumble in the Jungle”, we can see the triumph of point of view over personal identity. When Ali does the rope a-dope, he does not say “I am Ali,” or “this is Ali.” The rope-a-dope is not about identity – it is about context. The rope-adope only addresses the (contingent) circumstance at hand; it does not assert a (necessary) identity.

Foreman fights the way he fights: he punches hard, and so he usually wins. The fight is for him an abstraction, and necessity is how abstractions are addressed. For Ali, there is no Platonic fight, just the fight he happens to be fighting that mo-ment. The actual fight at hand is all that is real for Ali; this fight is what dictates his actions. The rope-a-dope would be absurd in another fight; punching hard in a fight is never absurd.

Since Foreman’s punching is categorically nec-essary – it is who he is as a fighter – it lacks the immediate necessity that only exists within a par-ticular circumstance, regardless of his enrage-ment. His necessity, his punch, has an arbitrary flavor, precisely because it is always so strong. The rope-a-dope – not in general, but in this par-ticular fight, 1974, Zaire – is urgent: it is neces-sary because it is dictated by contingency.

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Jonathan Allmaier Untitled (Green Point), 2011. Oil on canvas, 92 ½ x 75 inches.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Part VII.

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This Hermit good lives in that woodWhich slopes down to the sea.How loudly his sweet voice he rears!He loves to talk with marineersThat come from a far country.

He kneels at morn, and noon, and eve—He hath a cushion plump:It is the moss that wholly hidesThe rotted old oak-stump.

The skiff-boat neared: I heard them talk,‘Why, this is strange, I trow!Where are those lights so many and fair,That signal made but now?’

‘Strange, by my faith!’ the Hermit said—‘And they answered not our cheer!The planks looked warped! and see those sails,How thin they are and sere!I never saw aught like to them,Unless perchance it were

Brown skeletons of leaves that lagMy forest-brook along;When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow,And the owlet whoops to the wolf below,That eats the she-wolf’s young.’

‘Dear Lord! it hath a fiendish look—(The Pilot made reply)

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I am afeared’—’Push on, push on!’Said the Hermit cheerily.

The boat came closer to the ship,But I nor spake nor stirred;The boat came close beneath the ship,And straight a sound was heard.

Under the water it rumbled on,Still louder and more dread:It reached the ship, it split the bay;The ship went down like lead.

Stunned by that loud and dreadful sound,Which sky and ocean smote,Like one that hath been seven days drownedMy body lay afloat;But swift as dreams, myself I foundWithin the Pilot’s boat.

Upon the whirl where sank the shipThe boat spun round and round;And all was still, save that the hillWas telling of the sound.

I moved my lips—the Pilot shriekedAnd fell down in a fit;The holy Hermit raised his eyes,And prayed where he did sit.

I took the oars: the Pilot’s boy,Who now doth crazy go,

10Tamara Gonzales The Sun Goes Down, 2011. Spraypaint on canvas, 60 x 88 inches.

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Laughed loud and long, and all the whileHis eyes went to and fro.‘Ha! ha!’ quoth he, ‘full plain I see,The Devil knows how to row.’

And now, all in my own country,I stood on the firm land!The Hermit stepped forth from the boat,And scarcely he could stand.

O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!The Hermit crossed his brow.‘Say quick,’ quoth he ‘I bid thee say—What manner of man art thou?’

Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenchedWith a woeful agony,Which forced me to begin my tale;And then it left me free.

Since then, at an uncertain hour,That agony returns;And till my ghastly tale is told,This heart within me burns.

I pass, like night, from land to land;I have strange power of speech;That moment that his face I see,I know the man that must hear me:To him my tale I teach.

What loud uproar bursts from that door!The wedding-guests are there:But in the garden-bower the brideAnd bride-maids singing are;And hark the little vesper bell,Which biddeth me to prayer!

O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath beenAlone on a wide wide sea:So lonely ‘twas, that God himselfScarce seemed there to be.

O sweeter than the marriage-feast,‘Tis sweeter far to me,To walk together to the kirkWith a goodly company!—

To walk together to the kirk,And all together pray,While each to his great Father bends,Old men, and babes, and loving friends,And youths and maidens gay!

Farewell, farewell! but this I tellTo thee, thou Wedding-Guest!He prayeth well, who loveth wellBoth man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth bestAll things both great and small;For the dear God who loveth us,He made and loveth all.”

The Mariner, whose eye is bright,Whose beard with age is hoar,Is gone; and now the Wedding-GuestTurned from the bridegroom’s door.

He went like one that hath been stunned,And is of sense forlorn:A sadder and a wiser manHe rose the morrow morn.

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Tamara Gonzales Love, 2011. Spray paint on canvas, 60 x 88 inches.

Wish for Paul (Thek) + Susan (Sontag)

by EJ Hauser

Above and RightEJ Hauser juicyfruit, 2012. Oil on canvas, 63 x 60 inches.moonflower, 2012. Oil on canvas, 14 x 11 inches.

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Reproduced photographs 2005/2012

by Stephen Truax

Three 24x36 inch framed photographs are en-larged images of three unique 4x6 inch photo-graphic prints taken and printed in Rome, Italy, in 2005. The prints were drum scanned edited and printed by photographer Scott Tavitian in Los Angeles.

Fingerprints, scratches, creases, dust, paint splatters, tack holes, and other traditionally undesirable elements that developed on the original prints through years of being present in the studio are visible in high resolution on the reproductions, fetishizing the originals. These el-ements link the objects back to the practice of painting. They qualify the minor action of taking a snapshot and using it as source material in a painting practice as an artistic gesture.

All four snapshots were taken in quick succes-sion to capture a unique light phenomena that lasted only a few minutes at Santa Maria in Trastevere. Sunlight projected through stained glass windows and as colored oval shapes on marble columns. Although the images are diffi-cult to identify, they address the cliché of light streaming through cathedral windows, an image often invoked to suggest the literal presence of God.

The images are motion blurred and out of focus, suggesting the haste of their making in a mo-ment of inspiration. The images depict signifiers

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of true authenticity: real marble columns, light, an ancient cathedral, etc.; their all-over compo-sitions and emphasis on color have a strong re-lationship to abstract painting. The light picked up on the edges of the prints making them seem larger, heavier, and more sculptural than the originals ever could be.

Despite these signifiers of authenticity, the final artworks are reproductions: photographs of pho-tographs. They have been highly refined and run through multiple professional and technological processes to realize the final works. Romantic excitement about an instant of visual beauty is analyzed and reproduced to a degree that ne-gates the original’s spontaneity, and questions the authenticity of the actual experience.

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Right A picture of the interior of Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome, taken by artist Stephen Truax.

Previous and Next PageStephen Truax Reproduced Photographs, 2005/2012. 3 parts, each 24x36 inches, Ed. 1 of 3.

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Five Poems for and from the Studio

by Maria Walker

A stretcher A shelf A sled A ladder

Painting says I can stand on my own, see

work see waitlook work see

wrong

look and there wait work

work spacelook

Hello.

Painting, we hang up your coat of canvas today you are standing wood.

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The Shaker Room at the Met

“ultility, neatness, simplicity, perfection

pine, cherry, maple, beech, cedar

Blanket chestBoxesHangersCandlestandSide chairsWork standRevolving chairSconceCandlesticksBed Work tableSpool standRocking chairSewing stepsStove, shovel, tongsWash standLooking glass (cedar, maple)Towel rack”

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What are the Materials of Painting?

There is the wood. There is the cloth.There is the paint.

There is the water, the staples, the wood scraps, screws and glue.There are the tools—hammer, pliers, jars, drill, plastic, arms.

Wise Object (Talking to a Tough Painting)

Ladder, what? What? What? What? What? What? What?

The Studio Window

The studio window brings light and night to the studio.

Maria Walker Untitled Stand #2 (front and detail of back), 2012. Acrylic, canvas, wood, 100.5 x 21.5 inches.

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Maria Walker Color Series 1-2, 2012. Acrylic, drop cloth, gesso, wood, 17.75 x 15.375 inches.

NURTUREart Non-Profit Inc. is dedi-cated to nurturing contemporary art by providing exhibition opportunities and resources for emerging artists, curators, and local public school students. The unique synergy between NURTUREart’s programs generates a collaborative envi-ronment for artistic experimentation. This framework, along with other far-reaching programming, cultivates a supportive ar-tistic network and enriches the local and larger cultural communities.

NURTUREart Non-Profit Inc. is a 501(c)(3) New York State licensed, federally tax-ex-empt charitable art organization founded in 1997 by George J. Robinson. NURTU-REart is funded in part by The Andy War-hol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Bar-clays, City Council Member Diana Reyna, City Council Member Stephen Levin, the Greenwall Foundation, the Greenwich Collection, the Harold and Colene Brown Foundation, the Laura B. Vogler Founda-tion, the Leibovitz Foundation, the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, the Milton and Sally Avery Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York City Department of Education, The New York State Council on the Arts, The Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason Founda-tion and generous individuals. It receives legal support from Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts.

NURTUREart Sponsors:

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual ArtsCity Council Member Diana Reyna

City Council Member Stephen LevinThe Durst Family Foundation

The Greenwall FoundationThe Greenwich Collection, LTD

The Harold and Colene Brown Family FoundationThe Laura B. Vogler Foundation

The Leibovitz FoundationLily Auchincloss Foundation

Milton and Sally Avery Arts FoundationNew York City Department of Cultural Affairs

New York City Department of EducationNew York State Council on the Arts

Urban OutfittersWNYC Star Initiative

The Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason FoundationMany generous individuals

Thank You:

Brooklyn BrewerySociete Perrier

Printing For Less

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