JUDY PFAFF, CR10, Linlithgo, NY

Only near New York could u have such a superb show in such an amazing vast space and a crowd of folk to see it! 

CR 10 is in the middle of nowhere - fields, farms, trees. 

Pastoral at its best.

Till July 3rd it houses a spectacular 175ft long site specific installation by JUDY PFAFF on one floor 

and an exhibition of her framed paintings & prints downstairs. 

Curated by DAVID EBONY formerly managing editor of Art in America, now contributor to many online arts columns, it's a spectacular event, and perfect for the venue. 

                                               Judy Pfaff in green centre; David Ebony RHS
Former barn, (with as Pfaff pointed out - no walls,) its dark beams can support her huge, heavy sculptures while the wooden planks welcomes her often circular cosmic colourful floor pieces. All helped by side windows to produce the lighting.

Pfaff refuses to be categorised. This sprawling show is titled GRASSHOPPER & maybe this is a good indication of her organic & wide ranging approach to 2 & 3 dimensional work. Her circular images are influenced by Tibetan sand paintings and mandalas. 

She has said she is as far removed from minimalism as possible, proved by various lush, multi-collaged, multi-coloured embossed, inset, layered, encrusted constructions of wood, iron, plastic, print & digital imagery. 

But as Ebony points out, her most recent pieces, made specially for this show, are large, quite elegant, white & black structures.   

Pfaff,( born 1946 in London,) who teaches at Bard, has a long & illustrious career. Awards include a MacArthur Foundation Award (2004), fellowships from the  Guggenheim Foundation (1983), National Endowment for the Arts (1986). Major exhibitions at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (2002), Denver Art Museum (1994) and Saint Louis Art Museum (1989). In 2013 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Interestingly she is one of several women artists involved in large scale sculptural constructions. Think of Ursula von Rydingsvard, Beverly Pepper, Magdalena Abakanowitz, Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson, Phyllida Barlow, Sheila Hicks, Claire Barclay ... I wonder what it is that makes women take on such immense challenges? 

Pfaff says she loves plastic - melted & spread, folded & rolled. 

She also works with wood and metal - here anchoring strong twisted rods to the actual barn itself. 

Pfaff has 2 full time assistants - and surely needed them to install this huge show. She has her works stored in her studio & 11 buildings! 

She currently has several big exhs on the go & recycles - or as Ebony would have it, re-contexturalises her work for each venue. "It's all very green" she laughs. 

I also enjoyed her elaborate etched, painted and embellished prints and huge framed collaged pieces.

CR 10, (named after its location on County Route 10 near Linlithgow, NY) is the brain child of Francine McGivern, who has a long track record in the NY art field. This event - (open Thursday-Sunday 12-6pm)  proves that she can make her middle-of- nowhere institute work! 

Artist talk Saturday 4th June. 2016

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY in Kinderhook, NY. Four Solo Shows: DORIAN, KAHRAMAN, MOSSE, PUETT

The School, Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY 

Dorion, Puett, Jack Shainman, Carlos Vega, Mosse 

 GREAT exhibition! Best yet. "Well, I see u have a PS1 Moma right here" said one visitor today to Jack Shainman's anniversary party at The SCHOOL, Kinderhook.  

                                
Celebrating the 2nd b-day of his knock-out vast upstate gallery, Jack selected 4 artists, (3 men, 1 woman,) from Ireland, Iraq, Canada & Hawaii who work across photography, painting, sculpture, installation, site specific pix & video. 

 THE RESULT IS TERRIFIC! Memorable. Impressive. 

                         
The star here is RICHARD MOSSE, an Irish artist now based in NY. 

For photographer RICHARD MOSSE pink is not a pretty colour. 

After years of restrained, objective views of Iraq, (Saddam Hussein's former palaces - he had 84! - occupied by US military.) Mosse turned to war-torn Congo devastated by rebel fighters & ecological plunder. 

By shooting in old Kodak surveillance & reconnaissance film that turns jungle greens into lush bubblegum pinks & reds, he gives us a panoramic vision of bloody beauty overload coupled with terror. 

The results are breathtaking, & installed in Kinderhook's prime space (the largest photograph is 24ft x 14ft) quite awe inspiring. 

Moss told me, "It's the last venue for the series, & I wanted to end it on an optimistic note, even show the Congo's tourist potential. In the 1950s before Mobutu there was tourism, not surprising when you see the extraordinary landscape."   

Mosse, now 36 & NY based, is Irish, from Kilkenny. After Goldsmiths & Yale, in 2013  he represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale. 

Visitors start with the unusual. GARNETT PUETT works with bees & his remarkable surreal sculptures fill the entrance while upstairs 2 separate bee colonies are at work turning their specially constructed artistic hives into art.

Sculpture and the lost wax process of casting are old friends so it was a short step to his metal armatures & geometric forms embellished by the intricate organic beeswax honeycombs.

"Bees like to aim for the top of the hive,"  he told me, "So it all depends on where I put the queen." His "hives" range from garbage can lid to a gun cabinet titled Perfection. Here a tube leads out to the Hudson Valley countryside where the bees collect their pollen. 

A fabulous collaboration of artist, bees and creativity. 

HAYV KAHRAMAN originates from Iraq but left for Sweden at 11.  

Trained in Italy, now based in LA, her work has a decorative slant combining elegant Islamic script & female form. 

This new work includes intricate pattern & pierced canvas across the women's chest. 

Evidently the openings are filled with acoustic foam, an absorbent shield against high decibel siren noise used as a weapon in war, but this too subtle concept & imagery is lost in the overall design. 

Better are her sculptural versions with overlapping screens as found in Arabic homes, & her large sculpture which takes these ornate ornamental perforations to another level. 

French Canadian painter PIERRE DORION presents work site specific to the School. 

Last November he came to Kinderhook & took photographs of its numerous interior spaces, including a couple of unfinished rooms where the work now hangs. 

  Dorion & Mosse.

Dorion is fascinated by spaces: windows, doors, screens, geometric & infinite in permutation. 

VERY Best show yet at The School. The show runs to October 1st. There are also 2 Shainman galleries in Chelsea NY. 

Pierre Dorion, Clare Henry, Ricard Mosse in Kinderhook. May 22, 2016. 

JAMES McDONALD, 'DARKNESS HAS ITS USES': the BOOK & exhibition, Leiper Gallery Glasgow

JAMES McDONALD is a great printmaker. 

His wonderful effects of depth & shadow, texture & feel, are achieved through fine lines, immense detail, precision - and lots of looking. 

The looking comes first "Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough," according to Flaubert. McDonald has taken this to heart. 

But as his recent book, 'Darkness has its uses: Intaglio & Woodcut Prints' demonstrates - he can also write.  

The book, (allied to his exhibition at The Leiper Gallery, 117 West George St, Glasgow) is a treasure. Poetic, sincere. 

McDonald has a romantic streak & in the book, honest to a fault, he allows this to flourish alongside the BEST descriptions of printmaking I've ever seen. He describes its implements, inks, paper, wax for the ground, straw hat varnish, nitric acid, copper, steel plates, proofing blankets, Eagle presses etc etc in loving detail. 

He has his favourite implements - like his 35  yr old german tempered steel scraper/burnisher, "perfectly weighted, feels good in my hand." But he also utilises ancient pins taped to a pencil stub, chewed matchsticks, needles etc, to make his "short, stabbing cross-hatches, dots and shaky scribbles" to create the face of his younger brother Jonathan who died suddenly, unexpectedly in 2015. 

He has made several portrait woodcuts, large & small,  etchings, aquatints, mezzotint, - in profile, three-quarters, & head on, some even with chine colle. McDonald learnt this technique "late in life" at GPS after seeing a young do it. (I too learnt Chine colle only a few years ago, in the Blackburn Workshop in NY.) 

Using this ancient method of incorporating fine thin papers onto the plate, he has embellished Jonathan's face with fragile pages from "The Coal Mines Act of 1920" or a map of the moon from 1969 Soviet Union Atlases or one of Stenhousemuir.   As he says, "Often the juxtapositions are weirdly apposite. Some like the hammer & sickle or sweeping red arrows "lend his brow a troubled air, while The Sea of Tranquility from Collins Lunar Map, - its phantom waves breaking silently on the shores of his cheekbone - is where I fancy I might one day meet him again."   

He had intended the original image as a memento keepsake for his family and his brother's friends. The series grew. His young brother will never know what a huge, important & wonderful inspiration he has been to McDonald. 

His family means a lot to McDonald. One of my favourite series is Soup Notes, trompe l'oeil etchings & paintings based on notes his mother left him. "Over the years, on my regular visits, my mother would make me the most delicious soup. If she was out when I arrived she would leave notes explaining where she was & giving instructions how best to heat up the food." 

McDonald started to collect these scraps of paper & their haiku-like messages, "I saw tangible, if abstract, artistry here," even on blank sheets. 

Recently he has tackled her telephone book, an ancient, tattered well worn A5 spiral-bound lined notebook crammed full of names in different coloured biro, all fading ... a creative seam he can mine, he says, for years, angling it in different light, scrutinising its patina, making different compositions, like Hiroshige & his 36 views of Mt Fuji.  

He told me, regarding the book, " I’ve never felt such trepidation about a project." Well, it is a success and I recommend it heartily to all artists, art collectors and all of you with a love of your family. It is rare to find such an articulate memorial.  

The book accompanies McDonald's latest exhibition which also contains paintings, some of still life, others of Glasgow's subway, & even large images  of jam sandwiches, + also beautiful oils of his mum's notes. On till May 15th.