Like a Golden Allegory: Holly Lane’s Bright Monuments to Epiphany and Eureka
Holly Lane. "The Root Seeker", 2005. Acrylic on wood. 28 3/4" x 24" x 7 1/8". Private collection.
“Its soul its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.” ~ James Joyce
“… Like tales that were told the day before yesterday-/ Sleek in a natural nakedess,/ She attends the tintinnabula-…” ~Wallace Stevens, “The Hermitage at the Center”
Over the past twenty years Northern California artist Holly Lane has created an impressive body of work that bears witness to her twin talents as painter and woodworker. Known for her intricately carved frames which are the settings for her exquisitely rendered paintings, Lane’s pieces share in the art historical traditions of Gothic architecture, the Flemish Renaissance, Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts and various modernist schools of landscape and figure. On viewing Lane’s oeuvre masters as far apart in time as Jan Van Eyck and George Tooker may come to mind. In these environments flora, fauna, weather and geography become conscious agents eager to communicate with and to play on the metaphorical capabilities of the viewer’s imagination. Imagery that one might classify as feminist or ecological is most certainly a persistent thread in Lane’s output. But if these works are didactic then it is in the sense of fables, those symbolically condensed vignettes in which talking animals or sudden reversals of plot manifest an important moral or truth about the human condition.
Holly Lane. "The Well-Traveled Mind," 2006. Gilded carved wood. 21 3/4" x 10 5/8" x 8 3/4". Courtesy the artist and Forum Gallery, NYC.
In recent years the richly layered architectural elements of Lane’s wooden frames have been set free to play a more prominent role. Those meticulously realized, almost animated foliages and decorous accretions drawn from the temples and palaces of history have embarked from their former roles as buttress and commentary. Liberated from their older alliance with the paintings, these elements have taken on a new weight- both literally and figuratively. Lane’s forms are no less ornate than before, but by allowing them to exist on their own a different level of significance emanates from them. They do not so much function as stories as the solidification of powerful experiences or ideas gathered up and exquisitely presented in a single moment: the epiphany ( a manifestation of a powerful, singular presence) or the eureka (a flash of insight into the heart of the matter). In this sense Lane’s golden sculptures are monuments to the very experience of fulfillment.
The Warriors’ Turn: Compassion and Control in Jason Hanasik’s Militaria
Jason Hanasik, photograph from the series "I slowly watched him disappear." Courtesy the artist.
“A uniform provides its wearer with a definitive line of demarcation between his person and the world… It is the uniform’s true function to manifest and ordain order in the world, to arrest the confusion and flux of life, just as it conceals whatever in the human body is soft and flowing, covering up the soldier’s underclothes and skin…” ~ Hermann Broch
“Spontaneity is only a term for man’s ignorance of the gods.” ~ Samuel Butler
In October of 2011, a number of San Francisco artist Jason Hanasik‘s photographic and film works were installed at Krowswork Gallery in Oakland. Hanasik has become well-known for his portraits of military men. His images are uncluttered and sparse, but there is always something quietly seductive in the way they lure the eye beyond a first impression of simplicity. Hanasik’s photographs are only one aspect of his multimedia installations which incorporate film-footage and occasionally objects. When seen as a whole, these function not only as intense, visual biographies, but as serious tools for deconstructing the performance of “the self” in both public and private spheres. The lives of soldiers have given Hanasik an effective way to explore the processes of self-fashioning and self-revelation. In two of his projects, “I slowly watched him disappear” and “He Opened Up Somewhere Along the Eastern Shore,” Hanasik focuses on gestural control and the expression of spontaneity between men to get at deeper questions of identity, and to collapse our social ways of seeing men’s “innate” qualities.
Jason Hanasik, photograph from the series "I slowly watched him disappear." Courtesy the artist.
For several years Hanasik has photographed Sharrod, a young African-American man who has spent much of his life within the U.S. military system. The images of Sharrod that make up “I slowly watched him disappear” reveal a great deal about how the body is made into a sign for things totally unrelated to its everyday biological functions. Who this young man is outside his (chosen?) career path is a tantalizing secret that hovers evasively beneath his intense gaze and his salute. Hanasik has taken Sharrod’s picture in a number of civilian spaces that accentuate his presence as a soldier. They also remind us that we are free at any time to see through that layer of social reality. Sharrod’s role as a cadet and future warrior is the visual starting point for any other question we might pose about who this young man is in the world.
“Ten Years Later,” a 9/11 Memorial-Projection in San Francisco
Ben Wood. "Ten Years Later" (9/11 memorial), 2011. Site specific projection, St. Ignatius Church, San Francisco CA. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Michael Nerro
On September 11, 2011, St. Ignatius Church in San Francisco was the site of a 9/11 memorial service and a large-scale projection by British artist Ben Wood. Working closely with curator Tamara Loewenstein, Wood created a melange of images invoking the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and traditional rituals of remembrance. In this interview Loewenstein and Wood discuss the process of creating something that was equal parts installation, performance, sacred rite and act of communal memory.
Curator Tamara Loewenstein, Photo: Kelly Haehnel
Jason Lahman: What was the genesis of the 9/11 memorial project at St. Ignatius and how did you decide to use the exterior of the building?
Tamara Loewenstein: When Ben Wood approached us at Manresa Gallery [the art gallery inside St. Ignatius] with a proposal for a 9/11 memorial, we began to discuss what that might look like. At first we planned an interior illumination using the existing LED lighting system within St. Ignatius Church. However, it became clear that an outdoor public project was more in line with our combined interests. Much of Ben’s work has included large-scale outdoor projections, including four different projections on San Francisco’s historic Coit Tower. Ben and I began to think about who our audience would be and how we would incorporate the architecture of the landmark San Francisco church. We decided on the east wall, which had the most visibility. Conceptually, we were seeking to break down the physical barrier of the wall to reveal the prayerful acts taking place inside the church. The four solid archways were transformed into windows by the projection.
Ben Wood. "Ten Years Later" (9/11 memorial), 2011. Site specific projection, St. Ignatius Church, San Francisco CA. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Madeline Brown
The Coincident Dance of Image and Word: An Interview with Jessica Serran
Jessica Serran. "Flip the Process," 2009. Mixed media on file folders. 73 x 73 inches. Courtesy the artist.
Jessica Serran is a Canadian-born artist currently living in Prague. Her drawings, paintings and installations incorporate images and words into surprising and often humorous gestalts. She creates these sensuous and conceptually challenging realms of connection in a wide variety of formats, from book illustrations to the floors and walls of decaying train stations.
Jessica Serran. Sketchbook drawing, (I'm dying...). Courtesy the artist.
Jason Lahman: How would you describe the relationship between the writing and the other sorts of visual forms that inhabit your pictures?
Jessica Serran: The two are really inseparable. Words have always been very visual for me. It’s how I learn a language and it’s how I gave myself headaches when I was a kid – I couldn’t “get the words out of my head.” Creating without words would be like creating without colors or lines for me. They’re part of my palette.
Words took on a much more prominent role when I started to pay attention to the constant internal dialogue that was there when I painted. It used to be debilitating because the words came from such a critical place. So I figured that if I were going to shift my relationship to the critic I would need to shift my relationship to the words. It became like a Buddhist meditation – noticing what was arising, noticing what nasty things the inner-critic had to say and then choosing to include it in the work.
As an end product, I’ve received a certain amount of criticism for the inclusion of words. Some feel that the visuals are stronger by themselves, and that the text causes an unfortunate break in how the images are read. But I like what the combination does – it creates a quality, and a particular way of reading and entering the work. It’s as if you’re zooming in under a microscope – giving the viewer/reader a chance to vacillate between two different ways of perceiving.
What the Talisman Tells: Meditations on David King’s Latest Collages
David King. "Talisman #1," 2011. Collage. 15 x 22 inches. Courtesy the artist and Hang Art Gallery, San Francisco.
David King is a collage artist based in San Francisco. In the last several years, his work has moved away from representational imagery into abstraction. The sensual and magic-realist inflection of the earlier work is still a resonant factor in his latest series called “Talismans.” It is as if the impressions elicited by King’s older dreamscapes (populated by classical figures, athletes, yogis and jeweled architectures) had been collected, purified and condensed. Suddenly, the human body is gone altogether and the props of opera and fairytale dissolved. All that remains is the darkened stage on which the exquisite remnants of his older work have coalesced into archaic amulets. The picture plane becomes a theater of talismans more potent than one with human actors. And yet there is something incredibly alive about these “things” which exude an almost watchful persona while they hover against panoplies of starry clusters.
David King. "Talisman #3," 2011. Collage. 15 x 22 inches. Courtesy the artist and Hang Art Gallery, San Francisco.
King’s Talismans move back and forth like pendulums between transparency and solidity. Movement from one state to the other seems imminent, though we are arrested in that moment of elegant equilibrium. This feeling of balance, of hovering on the border of density and dispersal, is also strengthened by the background columns of atomized spheres. Their softly bulging contours engender memories of soap bubbles, or even jellyfish–things protoplasmic and primitive which nevertheless connote a sense of joy through buoyancy. For the human viewer, the inhabitants of atmosphere or ocean often trigger thoughts of that most delicious (and elusive) of physical states: weightlessness.
Effulgence of the Effigy: The Medicine Bodies of Daniel Joshua Goldstein
Daniel Joshua Goldstein. "Invisible Man X 3," 2010. Photographic triptych of original sculpture: syringes, red crystal beads, steel wire, electric motor. Each photograph in triptych: 65" x 32". Collection of the artist.
“Sickness shows us what we are.” ~ Latin proverb
“You see, somewhere our unconscious becomes material, because the body is the living unit, and our conscious and unconscious are embedded in it; they contact the body. Somewhere there is a place where the two ends meet… and that is the place where one cannot say whether it is matter or what one calls ‘psyche’.” ~ Carl Jung
Illness and art have a long, entangled history. The human need to ameliorate suffering, to engage in a creative practice that mitigates the sense of loss brought on by illness or in some way counteracts the illness itself (however illness is imagined) is universal. A persistent example is the making of effigies–sometimes to focus the attention of the sick on images of the supernatural world (for example the Isenheim altarpiece) or to attempt to bring about change in the body itself through a mimetic process of healing (such as votive objects in the shape of body parts).
In the contemporary world, HIV/AIDS has been a potent catalyst for the making of art which marshals social activism, engenders a supportive community, or challenges the public to reinterpret the meaning of the disease. In this way, art about HIV/AIDS is a gauge of social conscience and cultural consciousness.
Daniel Joshua Goldstein. "Icarian Angel," 1993. Photograph of the original found object sculpture: leather, sweat, black felt in case of wood, copper, Plexiglas. 36.125 x 30 x 6 inches. Private collection.
San Francisco activist and artist Daniel Joshua Goldstein has been living with HIV since 1984. As one of the few HIV+ survivors from the early time of the epidemic in America, he is an historic witness to the thirty year transformation of society’s response(s) to AIDS. Goldstein is one of the five subjects interviewed in David Weissman’s documentary film We Were Here, which records eye-witness accounts of the devastation and collective trauma wrought by the onslaught of the illness.
The human effigy has played a significant role in a number of Goldstein’s AIDS-related works, beginning in 1993 when he first exhibited the “Icarian Series” in New York City. These were the salvaged leather skins of exercise machines from a gay gym, their golden surfaces broken down by a decade and a half of physical impress, friction and sweat. As remnants of an entire culture, lost overnight as it were, the eerie figures shining from the surfaces could not but denote all manner of connections to the sacred, the saintly and the spooky. The force of these effulgent effigies was so strong that during an exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1998, curator Rosemary Crumlin told Goldstein she would often find visitors openly weeping in front of them.
Constructing the Sacred Dramas: David Maxim’s Revealing Bible Stories
David Maxim. "Simon Peter," 1988. Mixed media on canvas. 118 x 152 x 20 inches. Private collection.
“I will incline mine ear to a parable: I will open my dark saying upon the harp.”
~ Psalm 49:4 (King James Bible)
The Biblical tradition was once considered a pillar of Western consciousness and a major component of American popular culture. Although the power of Christianity waned in the twentieth century among urban elites, modern artists, so often preoccupied with non-narrative, often returned to “The Good Book” as source material [see Rosemary Crumlin's 1998 publication Beyond Belief: Modern Art and the Religious Imagination for the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia] . In our time knowledge of the Bible’s lore occupies a significant place in the mental landscape of large segments of the US population, in particular (though not exclusively) where forms of Evangelicalism hold sway. Apart from cultures of the religiously committed however, a number of contemporary artists, poets and authors have continued to enlist the Bible as source material, often creating alternative and subversive interpretations of the stories. Recall the popularity of Anita Diamant’s feminist novel The Red Tent a few years ago.
David Maxim. "Loaves and Fishes" (from The Miracles), 1990. Acrylic on baskets, mixed media, canvas. 72 x 54 x 20 inches.
An exciting and challenging re-imagining of key episodes from the Bible was undertaken in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s by the San Francisco based artist David Maxim. The works in this series have been brought together in print for the first time in a new catalog titled Pictures and the Bible issued this winter by Maxim’s studio. Working on the backs of specially constructed canvases, a variety of three dimensional materials serve as tools for paint application before being incorporated into the final construction. This exposed format, with its attendant crossbeams, pulleys, ropes and hinges, makes one conscious that the Bible is a tremendous source of theater. By alluding to the hidden workings of stagecraft, Maxim asks us to consider how the Biblical tales do their work on our emotions and on our beliefs.
