Stuff of Substance

Presented by The Outer Room !Brooklyn, New York !November 2014

The Outer Room !To show the work of diverse groups of emerging artists. To making viewing itself a creative experience. To foster a social and relaxed environment where people naturally contemplate and discuss the work on the walls around them. To ask the important questions about life, society, and the self. To value art for its power to provoke thought and reflection.

Stuff of Substance !!

‘‘the material aspect of the pictorial sign—the whole tactile realm of signification that exceeds the strictly speaking visual register’’

-Ewa Lajer-Burcharth !!Exploring the role of materiality in shaping aesthetic experience, this exhibition features artworks by emerging NYC and Brooklyn-based creators which are grounded in their materials from ice to sand, even cheese. Material is defined as the ‘‘the elements, constituents, or substances of which something is composed’’ and that which relates to ‘‘matter rather than form.’’ On an innate, sensual level without additional context, an artwork’s physical nature becomes its essence. By fostering interactions where viewers can respond to works through their strong sense of materiality, the art medium’s influence in creating initial reactions and interpretations becomes clear. Whether composed of non-art elements or a reinterpretation of traditional media, artworks enter human consciousness as and speak through their materials. Pushing deeper, ‘‘Stuff of Substance’’ examines the possibility of matter's transcendence into form and, ultimately, meaning. While there is much to be gained intellectually and emotionally by responding directly to physical substances, this physicality is activated in light of an artwork’s social and spiritual concerns to further transform creative amalgamations of materials into discursive tools. !How does the tangible medium, along with its inherent formal qualities, influence the first moments of experiencing an artwork? How does the material function independently to create meaning? How and why does physical matter become conceptual--a social and emotive agent? In a contemporary art world often concerned with large-scale works made of distinctive substances, like Richard Serra’s steel sculptures or Robert Morris’s felt constructions, what is the true importance and place of materiality in art making? !!-Liz Lorenz

Untitled by Matthew Bolton - clay !To create a physical embodiment of the materials of this exhibition—its artists—Matthew instructed each participant to imprint his/her hand in clay. Some chose to kneed the malleable substance around their fingers; others gripped it quickly yet intensely, slicing deeply with their nails. A poetic, personal gesture, this action also recognizes an exhibition’s nature by manifesting the essentiality and individuality of each creator within the interdependent structure. The sensitive clay is able to reflect the physical uniqueness of every hand and the variety of each gesture. Greeting guests upon entry, the negative handprints are the artist’s material trace. They function as signatures; yet, when disassociated with the imprinter’s name as in this installation, they become signs of universal human corporeality. Matthew invited the artists to take their handprint home upon the show’s conclusion, allowing the materials to leave with them.

I Smoked The Painting You Gave Me; I Spent Time With It by Steph Bow - performance, sculpture including a painting and cigarettes filters, photography !The artist smoked a painting that someone special in her life gave to her. Giving his art a new incarnation, she hoped that she would ‘‘digest, demolish and consume’’ the work by smoking it. The experience did not engender a clean break or definitive detachment from said person and their shared memories, but instead allowed Steph to spend time in contemplation. She examined their relationship through one of its material effects—ultimately destroying the physical emblem of their love with this action. Removed from context, the forms in the close-up photographs are substantial and weighty—scorched abstractions in gray. However, the remnants also possess a sensual quality, as their textured surfaces flow into lyrical curves. Their aesthetic and shape resemble Richard Serra’s large-scale steel sculptures, and Steph equates the effects of her gesture to the interior experience of moving around Serra’s work: ‘‘pondering, contemplating, absorbing and reflecting.’’ Displayed next to the images, the cigarette filters and the painting’s charred remains emphasize her process of manipulating the materials—a work of art and the habits of daily life.

Rusted Ice by Emma Strebel - ice, steel !By freezing a piece of rusted steel in water, the artist presents a changeable work whose physical shape and state of matter transform throughout the night. Slowly melting, the ice morphs into water, shifting the balance of the steel inside to ultimately produce a new formal arrangement when the ice disappears and the steel falls. Dripping from the block of ice, water creeps across the podium’s surface and down its sides. The initial materials—ice and rust—mingle together to become flowing water speckled with bits of rust and dyed with its distinctive color. In New York City, the artist was drawn to rust’s decrepit beauty on the cellar doors embedded within the street. To her, ice’s ‘‘elusive, ever-changing nature…demands time and stillness as [the process] captures the sensation of change over long periods.’’ Opening the ‘‘door to an awareness that meditates on impermanence,’’ Emma orchestrates an investigation of materials and their evolution in passing time. An artwork that takes hours to fully experience, Rusted Ice insists on focus and contemplation—a poetic rarity in our society of instant gratification.

Untitled by Jesse Adwar - oil on canvas !In his substantial canvases, Jesse pushes the potential of oil paint to engage in a full-body painting experience. He derives satisfaction from the dynamic gestures he performs to create broad strokes and thick layers. The manner in which the artist moves the paint demonstrates the energy and attention he brings to manipulating the medium. Often, he employs a platte knife or a larger plexiglass squeegee to push paint across the canvas. This treatment creates a raised surface where the edges of the strokes have a veritable volume, as if a wave’s crest. The texture, along with his reduced palette, allows viewers to observe the confident motions of his knife and the expressive subtitles of a time-honored medium. Finding inspiration in a pared-down contemporary vocabulary, Jesse often incorporates geometric forms into his compositions. The artist created a new work for this exhibition. Here, he activates the canvas’s role as an agent of meaning, negating the traditional ‘rules’ of painting. Viewers can focus on the sensuality of the bare material, clarifying the way an artwork is constructed and revealing its essential material nature to be perhaps more honest than the oil veneer.

Untitled by Nora Chuff - granite, printed vinyl, wood !In a direct questioning of the essence and purpose of material nature, the artist juxtaposes slabs of granite with granite-printed vinyl. Fine metamorphic rock with its natural geometric complexities sits atop pedestals covered in the mass-produced material. The printed vinyl is fabricated as cheap, industrial covering for floor tiles; the solid, sparkling slabs are an interior designer’s kitchen samples. The addition of a ceramic handprint stresses Nora’s insistence on the organic over any manufactured product. Beyond a discussion of natural versus artificial, the contrast in quality between the materials alludes to the different environments of the stylish home and the depersonalized industrial space—and to the classes that have access to them. However, the delight in materiality that anchors the piece, namely Nora’s clever pairing, creates a truly sensual experience. Interestingly, the intimation vinyl covers the pedestal—evidence of the art world’s norms of viewing—while the genuine granite rests in the place of the artwork, suggesting a disconnect between the essence of art and the institutionalized constructions that surround it.

St. Sebastian by Logan Criley - tree branch, dog bone, CPR mask, wood !Using an eclectic selection of materials, the artist represents a frequent subject hallowed in Christian art—St. Sebastian. In the 3rd century, the martyr was tied to a tree and shot with arrows. Here, the dog bone becomes the saint’s body littered with wooden ammunition. A fragment from a CPR dummy constitutes his face. Missing his head from the nostrils up and lacking a recognizable corporeal entity, the figure is strange to human viewers who visually crave the relatable. Logan creates an arresting, surreal composition by collaging non-art objects into a veritable ‘exquisite corpse,’ a favored Surrealist technique for expressing the uncanny and the unconscious.

Sitting at a Corner Table with Crossed Legs and Peeled Eyes by Melissa Gollance - carpenter’s glue, plexiglass !To create a portrait of its user, the artist scanned the subject’s iPhone at a high resolution able to detect the oily fingerprints on the screen. Although this cryptic representation leaves the sitter’s identity unknown, the swipes and taps might reflect a more accurate reality in our contemporary age of Apple. Based on digitally-rendered maps, Melissa constructed this portrait by carving out grooves of varying depths in the plexiglass and filling them with carpenter’s glue—reminiscent of our body oil’s color and sheen. The care and attention in her process is mirrored by the energy that people invest into precisely crafting their identity on the Internet. Our essentiality as individuals is rooted in our public persona that we actively manipulate with technology. Returning to the corporeal, Melissa notes that fingers do not actually secrete oils; thus, the oil on the subject’s iPhone was transferred to his fingers from another body part, revealing his habits and movements beyond the device. To the artist, these ‘‘subconscious gestures captured on touch screens bridge the gap between the worlds we inhabit… In an era of multiple convergences…digital and physical intersect to confuse touch and illusion.’’

Untitled by Shelby Kaye - glass !Fascinated by the properties of glass, the artist created these objects working in her raw, intuitive style. She constructed rectangular molds and placed a selection of rocks, which she gathered during a trip to a desert out West, inside. When molten, the liquid glass is able to adopt the shape of the rocks, subsuming them in its final solid form. Shelby’s technique of blowing with multiple gathers creates the thick edges instead of a clean break, making the objects resemble bottles. Emphasizing a naturalness often found in Shelby’s art, these harmonious irregularities echo the segment of the bottle that is curved and bumpy from contact with the rocks. Some vessels even have bits of stone still embedded within them. Increasingly conscious about her work’s environmental impact, she favors sustainable materials from the earth. Beyond creating an opportunity to visually interact with a sensuous substance, the artist situates her practice within her personal spirituality and desire for healing.

Bicuspid; Incisor by Logan Criley - oil on canvas !On a two-dimensional plane, the artist is able to conjure all the sensuous possibilities of paint. Rooted in formal concerns, Logan paints a solitary free-form shape, based on a tooth, scaled to fill the canvas. The undulating edges and precise use of highlights and shadows in his harmonious, almost iridescent palette, endow the ambiguous entities with a curvaceous shape and tangible mass and weight. Although they inhabit the flat surface of a painting, their illusionistic volume projects them into the viewer’s space. As an exploration of the medium of oil paint, Logan’s newest works foster a unique aesthetic experience grounded a classic art material.

English Breakfast Tea by Emma Strebel - tea bags, string, walnut ink !When thinking of her home in California, the artist links the time she spent there to a particular, tender memory: drinking English Breakfast tea amongst her family, especially with her mother. The simple act was a daily ritual of relaxation and sharing. After moving to New York, Emma started to dry and save her tea bags. At first, her collecting was a unconscious gesture. The evocative material moved her enough to save it and create with it. During two years, she gathered enough tea bags to create chains of them. Stained with tea and age, the bags float and spin lyrically on their thin strings. Confronting their non-art nature more directly, Emma includes a multi-media drawing which juxtaposes an actual tea bag to her artistic interpretation in walnut ink. In the context of the artist’s personal history, the manner in which she deals with two different materials representing the same concept alludes to the tensions between fantasy and reality, past and present, and nostalgia and daily life.

Untitled by Nora Chuff - oil, gesso, toilette paper, embroidery floss on linen !Often initially drawn to a project by its medium, the artist finds many works interesting because of their material qualities. To her, both traditional and non-art materials can be activated as producers of meaning. In this mixed-media work, Nora applied incomplete layers and drips of gesso to the canvas, allowing parts of the darker linen to remain bare. As if a medical process, she stitched patches of linen onto the canvas, transforming the plane into a sculptural object. She stuffed these pouches with toilet paper before closing them. Remains of the floss hang from the joins, and fragments of the toilet paper bulge out of the sacks. The canvas is sutured with added appendages, similar to a surgical patient. The artist’s precise treatment of the materials results in a visceral and grotesque work that retains its aestheticism through innovative formal qualities.

Cheese Insolation by Andrew White - C-41 prints !Manipulating non-art objects, Andrew subjects them to cheese insolation: the artist melted slices of Velveeta over each using a blow torch. The racecar and the couch are children’s toys, and here a gender binary is apparent. Enveloped in darkness, the central globular entity is a light bulb, and the luminosity of this commonplace household object becomes potent symbol. Andrew chose Velveeta cheese because, to him, ‘‘nothing is more American than processes food.’’ This familiar yellow goo graced the grilled cheeses of our childhood, but here it seems to suffocate the eerily recognizable forms. The cheese bubbles into fatty lumps around the lightbulb; yet, its illuminated contortions are still pleasing. Fascinated but ultimately repelled by consumerism in the United States, the artist engages with emblems of Americana—its childhood amusements, practical realities, and gastronomic delicacies. He perverts these modern products—all made in factories—to suggest a truth in their underlying nature.

Untitled II by Caroline Yopes - oil, gesso, sand, turpenoid on canvas !To create this large-scale, immersive work, the artist layered the canvas with oil paint and sand. Attacking its material accumulation, she then chipped away at the surface with a hammer in a labor-intensive process aided by turpenoid, water, and sandpaper. Her interest in deterioration and destruction ‘‘of form, material, and self ’’ ultimately produced the work’s rich, sensual quality and complex texture. While exploring the tensions and anxieties surrounding beauty and pain, Caroline is energized into spontaneous movement. She notes that her ‘‘work embraces reaching one’s breaking point, when clarity creates a blank slate to move forward.’’ By ceding control of motion and form to the medium, she is ‘‘able to capture the chaos of the mind that can seem untamable.’’ Hanging like a tapestry with veritable weight and three-dimensionality, this work reflects her physical and emotional engagement with her materials while creating a space for viewers to contemplate the tensions of building, breaking, and re-building within themselves.

Stuff of Substance !!

Curated by Liz Lorenz !Text by Liz Lorenz !!

Exhibition Design and Installation Assistance from Matthew Bolton !Hosted at the Apartment of Matthew Bolton and Angel Fraden

Special Thanks to Matt & Angel, Steph Bow, Talia Heiman, and Adriana Stephan

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Check out The Outer Room online for info about past & future events http://cargocollective.com/theouterroom

!Comments, questions, submissions: liz.m.lorenz@gmail.com

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Artworks © their respective artist. All rights reserved.