POST: Eric Mack

Eric Mack photographed in New York City by Christopher Gabello. February, 2015. 

Painting Outside of the Canvas

Text | Antwaun Sargent for Interview Magazine

Photos | Christopher Gabello

In 2012, artist Eric Mack displayed his work Honey Hollow during "Fore" (part of The Studio Museum in Harlem's ongoing exhibition series of emerging African American talent), challenging the idea that painting must be represented in a traditional, rectangular format. Mack's "painting," which was actually a blanket painted purple, hung from a wall and swayed in the breeze created by a metal fan sitting on the ground. Honey Hollow foreshadowed many works to come, all of which encompass the conceptual and performative subjectivity of ideas presented by the Maryland-born, New York-based artist.

This past Sunday, Mack's most recent work went on view alongside works by Brian Belott and Noam Rappaport at OHWOW in Los Angeles as part of the group show "Some Stew You Got Inside Your Plastic Bag, and You Always Organize The Parts So Close." Continuing his desire to expand, or perhaps nullify, the boundaries of traditional painting formats, Mack stitched together found, bought, and personal fabrics, frequently adding layers of paint, magazine images, and paper. The 27-year-old artist, who is now completing a residency at The Studio Museum, hangs his works throughout the gallery in a way that forces the audience to come face-to-face with and physically maneuver their way around. With his work Claudine, fabric hangs from a curtain rod, exposing the material's movement, allowing for a temporal understanding between viewer and object.

"It is alienating," the Cooper Union and recent Yale MFA program graduate says about the limiting nature of paintings on canvas. "There is a removal from considering painting as an object, which was a big challenge for me early on. I thought, ‘If painting is an object, then how does it speak?' I'm trying to get people to feel a closeness to painting."

Click here to read complete interview and view additional images.

COVER: Ebony G. Patterson / Frieze / April 2014

Island Life

Art in the Caribbean

Comprising 700 islands, 13 states and 17 dependent territories, and hosting a range of languages including Creole, Dutch, English, French and Spanish, the Caribbean represents a rich and complex set of cultures and histories. Dan Fox asks six artists, curators and writers to reflect on how questions of identity, infrastructure and education shape art in the region today.

Quotes: 

 “The idea that anything intellectual happens in The Bahamas is anathema to the brand we have projected to the outside world.”

Amanda Coulson, Director, the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, Nassau

“It is getting increasingly difficult to draw a border around what is Jamaican art – as is also the case in the rest of the Caribbean.”

Charles Campbell, artist, writer and Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Jamaica

“Within the region, the contemporary visual arts are battling a legacy of being underdeveloped and underappreciated. There is not an economy of understanding concerning the development of contemporary art, and its evolution has not been supported in practical ways by local governments and federations.”

Holly Bynoe, artist, curator, writer and Director and Editor-in-Chief of ARC magazine

“Artists in the region are functioning in an arena with a relatively small audience, very limited primary art markets and, in many cases, non-existent secondary markets for contemporary practice. One challenge this poses is that much of the work is appreciated and valued outside of the region, creating a gap between the makers and their homegrown audiences.” 

Annalee Davis, artist and Founding Director of the Fresh Milk Art Platform, Inc.

“This question of identity often presents itself to Caribbean art. Artists either seem to address it directly or are determined to avoid it – both of which accentuate the enormity of the issue.”

John Cox, artist, curator, teacher, Creative Art Director of Baha Mar Ltd., and founder of Popopstudios International Center for the Visual Arts

“There are very few independent platforms, galleries or project rooms. The few that do exist are run by artists, with no specific curatorial or commercial strategy.”

Caryl Ivrisse-Crochemar, founder of espace d’art contemporain 14ºN 61ºW, Martinique, French West Indies

To read complete story and view images pick up a copy of the April 2014 issue of Frieze magazine on newsstands now or read online here.

IN PRINT: Hew Locke / ARTnews / April 2014

Hew Locke's Black Queen, 2004 reproduced from the April 2014 issue of ARTnews. © Hew Locke.

Every Toy Jaguar Has Its Place

Text | Elizabeth Fullerton

With a dazzling palette of beaded tapestries, blinged-out boats, and distinctive reliefs of Queen Elizabeth II, Hew Locke comments on the relationship between England and its former colonies

Excerpt:

Hew Locke has had solo installations in London at Tate Britain, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as shows at smaller galleries in Europe, China, and the United States. Later this year he is having a solo exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London, which will coincide with a new commission for the former warship HMS Belfast, and there will be a show in November of new work at London’s Hales Gallery, which represents Locke. In October 2014, he’ll participate in Prospect.3 New Orleans.

Locke’s elaborate works have, at times, been relegated to the category of folk or naïve art, yet they are the product of a solidly trained artist, who earned a B.A. in fine art from Falmouth School of Art and Design (now Falmouth University) and an M.A. in sculpture from the Royal College of Art in London. His work sells, for $16,000 to $385,000 and is collected by the Tate, the British Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, among other institutions.

Hew Locke. Image © Hew Locke.

To read complete story pick up a copy of the April 2014 issue of ARTnews on newsstands now.

IN PRINT: Shinique Smith / Sculpture / January-February 2014

Shinique Smith, The whole realm was his, 2010. Acrylic, rope, and found objects, 36 x 36 x 25 inches. © Shinique Smith.

Anonymous Exchanges: A Conversation with Shinique Smith

Text | Kathleen Whitney

Excerpt: 

Thoughtfully constructed in terms of relationships and arrangements, Shinique Smith’s freestanding sculptures, suspended objects, collages, and wall paintings are based on a formal approach to color, pattern, and design. Her works take on a number of related forms – totems, bales, swooping decorative gestures, and figures. Although the work is carefully orchestrated, it seems improvised and spontaneous. Smith has said, “I’m not attached to the final product, but I’m attached to the process of making it.” Both abstract and literal, her work involves viewers in three levels of evaluation: reading the materials as the raw things they are, estimating their social value, and considering their transformation and new juxtapositions.

KATHLEEN WHITNEY: Sometimes the work seems abstract, sometimes figurative. Do categories matter to you?

SHINIQUE SMITH: I’m working with a lot of abstraction, but I don’t set out to make something figurative or non-figurative – everything depends on what I’m working with and what happens as I go along. I want my work to be as open as possible. I have many pieces with furniture, dolls, and stuffed animals in them; sometimes those elements become part of a pattern of fabrics and colors, and sometimes they remain what they started out to be. I don’t believe in categories because they hold you back. I’m not avoiding reality, but I want transcendence and transformation. I want the viewer to see something new.

There seems to be a strong political and social narrative running through your work.

I’m concerned with three different things in my work: making something that’s beautiful, commenting on the social relationship people have with their possessions, and dealing with the politics of clothing. I’m not interested in irony; I want to have direct access to the viewer. Much of my work is politically motivated, but my intention is to make that interest ambiguous and subtle. I’m especially interested in the idea of “surplus value,” because the value of the worker’s labor and the value of the finished product are way out of balance.

Shinique Smith, Untitled (Whistler's Mother), 2009. Clothing, fabric, ribbon, rope, twine, and chair, 60 x 45 x 34 inches. © Shinique Smith.

Pick up a copy of the January/February 2014 issue of Sculpture magazine to read full story and view more images. 

IN PRINT: Betye Saar / Flaunt Magazine / Issue 131

What Might Be Over to You Is Far From Over to Me

Text | Sway Benns

Photograph | Guy Lowndes

                                       

Excerpt:

You’re wandering through the brush, looking for sustenance, the sun beating down on your concave chest. Suddenly an object falls from the empyrean heaven. You cautiously pick up this small vessel, clear as water—but hard—and emblazoned with the characters C O C A C O L A. You come to admire its aesthetics and functionality, and that’s a problem because there’s only one, and the rest of your tribe has come to admire it too. Swept up in idolatry, you’re unaware of the fact that the object of your affection is merely a mortal afterthought.

This scene, from the Australian film The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), was the inspiration for what 87-year-old Los Angeles born artist Betye Saar calls mojo-tech, and the foundation for her views on technology. “It’s an object of magic…they throw away all this ‘over’ stuff and invent something else and it keeps going and going. That’s what the mojo is: the magic technology, mojo-tech.” [Incidentally, following this interview, I was surprised to learn that The Gods Must Be Crazy is widely pegged as a slapstick comedy.]

We sit in her studio, inset in the hills of Laurel Canyon, as her pug—not so coincidentally named Miss Mojo—keeps a watchful eye out for an unoccupied hand to perform an obligatory belly rub. Lining the shelves around us are groupings: mini twig furniture, paint-chipped birdcages, and wood figurines. Saar, a recent recipient of MOCA’s Distinguished Women in the Arts award, pulls out a piece, her own objet magique: a circuit board stripped bare, reconfigured in an assemblage. “The only thing that I like about technology is some of the components that are used—like the circuit boards—because they just seem too beautiful. They use real gold and real silver because that traps the electricity. That’s how I relate to technology; the components of it and how beautiful they are and what I can visualize with them.”

To read complete story and view additional images, pick up a copy of Issue 131 of Flaunt on newsstands now or read online here.