Visual Chronicles

Art in a literary context.

Guillermo Bert

Luis Cornejo

Hillary Gruenberg

Matthew Heller

Rebecca Lowry

Susan Sironi

*Curated by Delia Cabral

With an introductory essay by Peter Frank

Guillermo Bert's new series effects the active participatory fusion of ancient weaving and modern smart-phonetechnology (pictured above). Bert has transforms indigenous patterning into textile time capsules that, when scanned,take you back in time and allow you to hear long forgotten poems and sounds of native Chilean peoples. Bert's workhas been exhibited and collected by prestigious galleries and museums such as the Museum of Latin American Art(Long Beach, CA), the Fowler Museum (Los Angeles, CA) and the Snite Museum (Indiana) as well as numerousmuseums in South America.

The stunning luminosity of Luis Cornejo's faces belies a humor and a not-so-subtle criticism of society's obsessionwith perfect beauty. Rather than Photoshop out wrinkles and cellulite, Cornejo adds two-dimensional dunce capsand Mickey Mouse ears to his otherwise perfect figures. In this exhibition he will tackle the fabled beauties of thefairy tale world. He has exhibited individually and collectively in galleries and museums in Nicaragua, Panama, ElSalvador, Mexico, USA, Canada and Germany, enjoying sellout shows over the last several years.

Hillary Gruenberg's work transforms the written word into a multimedia sensory experience. She takes entirebooks and works them over from cover to cover, painting, coloring, cutting, and printing until each page becomesits own canvas. Perusing an entire book of Gruenberg’s is akin to visiting a museum. Gruenberg is an emergingtalent with exhibitions in both Northern and Southern California. She won a Women Painters West Scholarship GrantAward in 2003.

Renowned for his ability to talk about dancing, Mathew Heller's pictorial homage to music launched his career; buthis exploration of visual verse goes much deeper. Heller’s poetry pieces are graphically rhythmic, with black letterspeeking out from a white mist. They explore the depths of love, need and the bond between parent and child. Hellerhas exhibited at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and has shown inprominent galleries throughout Los Angeles, where he has been collected by many of its influential celebrities.

Whether it's a woven sculpture made from a cassette tape upon which the entire New testament was recorded ora series of sweaters knit from home-mortgage documents, Rebecca Lowry creates relationships between texts,objects and actions as a means of modifying and reinforcing the associations inherent in them. She has exhibitedin solo and group shows in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Germany, as well as at the Orange County Center forContemporary Art and the Museum of Ventura County.

Susan Sironi creates magical miniature sculptural worlds that live inside books - hands, gardens, flowers, wallswithin walls and castles - all exclusively through subtraction. Sironi's simple genius cuts around and into the existingwords and images, adding and changing nothing to bring forth a new, alternate literary and yet purely visual universe.Sironi has shown primarily in California, with exhibitions in both Northern and Southern California including SOMArtsin San Francisco, Marin MOCA and the Laguna Museum of Art.

Rebecca Lowry DARK RAINBOW

14 x 8 inchesjapanese romanticpulp comic book

Susan Sironi PINK GARDENhand-cut and altered book

Hillary Gruenberg / SELF-PORTRAIT 3 / 12 x 16 inches / collage, watercolor and pencil on repurposed book

One picture, goes the saying, is worth athousand words. But each word in fact contains several pictures. Writing is as mucha pictorial as a literary craft; originating in hieroglyphs, written words emerged as stylized depictions of the things they connoted, and the traces of those depictionshave persisted even in our phoneme-basedalphabets. And, as those alphabets give wayto the graphs and values of digital notation,those graphs and values continue to dependon and perpetuate the visual substance oflinguistic, not to mention narrative, expression. Information is information, andas we tell it we hear it and as we hear it wesee it.

Long ago, the time-honored art of calligraphy, like that of song, made art out ofwords. Over the past century or two, theever-increasing urge among artists to invadeand absorb one another’s disciplines hasmade an art of words a broader and broaderreality. One can dance not just stories, butlanguage. One can perform letters and numbers, not just notes, as sounds. A silent theater accounts for words inferred. Theword – the letter – is the sound seen.

Every picture tells a story. But how do

pictures tell stories today? A picture composed of letters – or, conversely, a bookmade into a sculpture, or a textile woven tobe read, or even a painting whose image re-tells us a story we already know in a waywe didn’t know we knew – asks us to understand the “story” as a graphic event, atheater of the object or poetry of the imagewhose multi-dimensionality gives the imagination a tactile surface and unfolds thestory over several kinds of time at once.

Digital media make so much of this possible. And so much else refuses, even refutes, the still-restrictive conditions of digital media. Language is a kind of virtualmedium, a refinement of experience intocode. But that code itself is actual, with infinite potential to jump off the page, or thescreen, to stimulate various senses directly.If you can read braille or sign language, youknow this already.

Artists can (at least figuratively) read brailleand sign language and so many other stimuli besides. Their need to convey vastconcepts and elaborate phenomena drivesthem to find and invent more and more expansive means of communication.

The word is not enough. The image is notenough. The book is not enough. The Internet is not enough. The breakthroughsof the past, driven by an ideology of changeand experimentation, paved the directionand built some prototypes, but today’s artistswant to crawl into the very impulse to language that drives human perception andbring forth some different, perhaps new sortof effect or concept or engine that rewires,and thus reveals, the mechanisms of meaning. And each artist in “Visual Chronicles” does so in a markedly distinct,and distinctive, way.

Luis Cornejo depends entirely on pictures,but his subversions of these pictures, andthe expectations they trigger in us, conjurewhole new accounts. Similarly, and yet conversely, Matthew Heller’s paintings relate narratives in subversive ways, allowingthemselves to function as pages and, at thesame time, pictures of pages.

Hilary Gruenberg, by contrast, fabricatespages of pictures, pictorializing wholebooks, invading and transforming their contents. Susan Sironi takes this process aphysical step further by regarding the bookas a sculptural rather than merely pictorial

site and cutting and gouging through pagesto reveal topographic relationships.

Rebecca Lowry’s objects consist not ofpages or books but of recorded tape – aslowly vanishing medium that has bridgedthe analog and digital eras and representsthe transmutation of the spoken word intophysical, but ironically invisible, form.Guillermo Bert realizes the most dramaticconflation of old and new by translating ancient lore into up-to-the-minute QR codes– which are then woven back into indigenous form by the people whose lore itis (their textiles already remarkably similarto the increasingly ubiquitous codes).

These artists do not privilege the image,and/or the object, over the word. But neither do they subject visual practice to verbal. They regard the two realms of humanexpression as equal – and as congruent, theborders between their practice shifting andperhaps arbitrary. They don’t simply work inbetween language and image, they workamong language(s) and image(s). Theyhave created animals of the soil and galloping plants, hybrids that have alwaysbeen in human imagination – and, in case,

Luis CornejoMOSTACHO AZUL51 x 39.25 inchesoil and acrylic on canvas

hybrids invented from what is already humaninvention. Our “visual chronicles” go back millennia; what is new here is not the idea ofdoing this, but what these artists have done,and how they’ve done it.

Peter FrankLos Angeles-New YorkAugust 2012

_Peter Frank is Associate Editor of Fabrik magazine and art critic for the Huffington Post.He has served as critic for the LA Weekly, theVillage Voice and the SoHo Weekly News, andas Editor of Visions Art Quarterly andTHEmagazine Los Angeles, among otherpublications. Frank has curated exhibitions formany insitutions throughout the United Statesand abroad and has written numerous booksand catalogs.

Rebecca Lowry ASSORTED DARKSConsisting of four Shakespeare tragedies, each dramatized on cassette tape: Macbeth, King Lear, Othello and Hamlet.3.5 x 3.5 x 1.75 inchesmagnetic cassette tape with painted wood box

Matthew HellerTHE URGENCY (poem)56 x 81.5 incheslimited edition print, edition of 8

Guillermo BertPSALM 1492Based on a poem by a Mapuche poet, Graciela HuinaoFrom the Encoded Textile Series 76 x 41 inchesTextile woven by a Mapuche weaver from the south of Chile

Susan Sironi / JANE’S HAND / 14 x 9.5 x 1 inches / hand-cut and altered book

Matthew HellerI NEED YOU TO LOVE ME

(collaboration with artist’s son)17 x 12 inches

crayon and pencil on paper

Rebecca Lowry SUBSTANTIAL EVERYDAY FOR YOU13 x 8 inchesjapanese romantic pulp comic book

Rebecca Lowry LETTERS

Contents of tape: drunk as a hoot owl /

writing letters by thunderstorm, written and read by Jack Kerouac

11 x 8 inchesmagnetic cassette tape on panel

Matthew HellerI WANT YOU TO LOVE ME (collaboration with artist’s son)17 x 12 inchescrayon and pencil on paper

Susan Sironi / (both) UNTITLED / 16.5 x 16.5 inches / collage with silkscreen on acrylic


Rebecca Lowry / AMERICAN (GINSBERG) / Contents of tape: a version of the poem “America” written and read by Allen Ginsberg / 18 x 24inches / magnetic cassette tape on panel

Luis CornejoFU51 x 39.25 inchesoil and acrylic on canvas

Rebecca Lowry ADVENTURES OF THE LONE RANGERContents of tape: Dramatizations of The Adventures of the Lone Ranger2 x 2 x 2 inchesmagnetic cassette tape with painted wood box

Susan Sironi / SELF-PORTRAIT, PROFILE / 11 x 8.5 x 1 inches / hand-cut and altered book



Hillary Gruenberg / Selections from UNTITLED / 14 x 10.5 x 2 inches / watercolor and pencil on paper throughout handmade book

Susan Sironi / SELF-PORTRAIT, FOOT / 14 x 9.5 x 1 inches / hand-cut and altered book

Rebecca Lowry / RED WHEELBARROW / Contents of tape: so much depends / upon // a red wheel / barrow // glazed with rain / water // beside the white / chickens / written and read by W. C. Williams / 12 x 9 inches / magnetic cassette tape on panel

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

Curated by Delia Cabraldeliacabral.com

All images reproduced with permission of the artists

For more information on the gallery, please visitsaltfineart.com

saltfineart1492 South Coast HighwayLaguna Beach, CA 92651

[email protected]

Documents

Visual Chronicles