Short Takes: Kaleidoscopic Wonders

According to Wikipedia, the term "kaleidoscope" was coined in 1817 by its Scottish inventor, Sir David Brewster, while he was performing experiments on light polarization. Brewster arranged for manufacture of his invention, intended as a science tool. The kaleidoscope was an instant hit -- over 200,000 sold in London and Paris in the first three months. After its initial success, Brewster believed he would make money from the kaleidoscope, but unfortunately, a fault in his patent application allowed others to copy his invention. 
 
Today's sophisticated computer imaging allows for endless experimentation with kaleidoscopic effects. In the following clip, Not As It Seems, video segments are manipulated with kaleidoscope and mirror computer effects to create wondrous new worlds.



If you prefer something more low tech, check out this beautiful video by Spanish designer Osman Granda.



This next video is from the American Folk Art Museum. Senior curator Stacy Hollander introduces us to artist Paula Nadelstern's amazingly detailed kaleidoscopic quilt.



It's almost impossible to think about moving images and kaleidoscopic effects without Hollywood movie director and musical choreographer Busby Berkeley's musical extravaganzas coming to mind. I found this wonderful montage of Berkeley choreographed film clips set to the music of Artie Shaw.



What would a blog about kaleidoscopes be without a trip to the world's largest one? If you've ever travelled through the Catskills, you've no doubt seen the signs -- and some of us have even stopped to experience this Woodstock-inspired wonder.

Upcoming Events at Offramp Gallery

Anita Bunn: Detour
through October 28
Closing Reception & Artist's Talk: Sunday, October 28, 2-5pm

Panel Discussion: Contemporary Art Conversations #13
Sunday, October 7, 4-6pmContemporary Art Conversations #13 will include critics Shana Nys Dambrot, Ezrha Jean Black and Peter Frank, artist/writerJohn O'Brien. The panel will be moderated by art historian Betty Ann Brown.

Patssi Valdez: Mementos
November 18 - December 23, 2012
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 18, 2-5pm
Closing Reception & Holiday Party: Sunday, December 23, 2-5pm

Elaine Carhartt: Portraits
November 18 - December 23, 2012
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 18, 2-5pm
Closing Reception & Holiday Party: Sunday, December 23, 2-5pm

James Griffith: Natural Selection
November 18 - December 23, 2012
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 18, 2-5pm
Closing Reception & Holiday Party: Sunday, December 23, 2-5pm
 

A Film and A Book Shed Light on the Enigmatic Francesca Woodman

Click here to purchase
The Woodmans
from Amazon.com

We see a naked young woman lying on the floor in the corner of a sparsely furnished room. Generously sprinkled on the floor all around her is a white powdery substance. As the young woman begins to rise she turns back to look at the black silhouette her body has left on the floor. She gets to her feet, walks toward the camera and out of the frame. We hear someone whisper "what a wonderful shape" and then louder with a girlish giggle, "I'm really pleased!" In that instant it becomes apparent that the girlish voice and giggles of the model are also those of the creator of the intriguing short video, photographer Francesca Woodman.

In a few short years, at the age of 22, Woodman would end her own life.

The fascination with Woodman's suicide has added to the allure and mystique of her reputation but also clouds our understanding of her work. Was she a precocious prodigy who began shooting photographs at age 13 and within a year was working on a mature, masterful body of work? Or was she the main character in a gothic tragedy that has reached mythic proportions? Or perhaps both?

Francesca Woodman, untitled, Boulder, Colorado, 1976

In the 2010 documentary, The Woodmans, Francesca's parents Betty and George, both artists themselves, reflect on the life and death of their daughter. The film is lushly illustrated with Francesca's photography, videos and journal entries, as well as interviews with family members, classmates and friends. At the beginning of the film her father states:

"I think it's hard to draw a line between Francesca being a provocative person as a choice -- I'm going to provoke -- and simply being provocative by her nature. I think she had quite a vivid sense of being an actor in her own drama, and that sense of being an actor in a drama gave her a skill in terms of, how should we say, organizing drama, making it work."



George gave Francesca her first camera when she was 13 years old as she was going off to boarding school. By the time she entered the Rhode Island School of Design three years later she was already well on her way creating a very sophisticated visual vocabulary. RISD Classmate and friend Sloan Rankin recalls:

"She came with the idea that she was a photographer, nearly everyone else who comes doesn't know what they're going to be yet and they choose from the 19 different areas of study. She came knowing. She was a photographer and she didn't want to take 2-D and 3-D Design classes, so she had some hideous moments in class and even the teachers would ask me to go and rescue her from running away from these classes."

Another former RISD classmate, Catherine Chermayeffeff, recalls:

"There was a real rock star quality about Francesca because she was so ambitious, so talented and so driven and so focused that you, that it was shocking. She had this enormously sophisticated eye and was incredibly original."

Click here to purchase
Francesca Woodman
from Amazon.ecom

Chris Townsend, in his Introduction to Phaidon's lush monograph Francesca Woodman, begins the task of placing Woodman's work in an art historical context:

"Woodman never understood herself as a fully realized artist, even if that is how we see her now. When she died in 1981, aged only twenty-two, she was still learning, still absorbing influences, still exploring what she wanted her work to do and testing the directions it might take. We tend to see the work very differently: what was intended as a student exercise, we may apprehend as an independent project; what was a raw experiment, we may understand as the finished article; we may perceive it in the wrong contexts, or understand it as the work of an artist in full control of her materials and her medium, rather than as part of a process by which she was coming to terms with both."

Other essays in the book look at Woodman's work through the lenses of the American Gothic, Surrealism, Feminism, Post-Minimal Photography and Self-Portraiture.

Francesca Woodman, from Space 2 series, Providence, RI, 1977

So why did this beautiful, talented young woman throw herself off the roof of a building in New York City? We may never know the full answer to that question, and a note she wrote to Sloan Rankin after an earlier suicide attempt does little to add to our understanding:
"After three weeks and weeks and weeks of thinking about it I finally managed to try to do away with myself as neatly and concisely as possible. I do have standards and my life at this point is like very old coffee sediment, and I would rather die young leaving various accomplishments, some work, my friendship with you and some other artifacts intact, instead of pell-mell erasing all these delicate things."

Click here to buy The Woodmans from Amazon.com

Click here to buy Francesca Woodman from Amazon.com



Upcoming at Offramp Gallery




September 16 - October 28, 2012
Anita Bunn: Detour
Opening Reception: Sunday, September 16, 2-5pm









Sunday, October 7, 2012, 4-6pm
PANEL DISCUSSION
Contemporary Art Conversations #13
Moderated by Betty Ann Brown
Panelists: Peter Frank, Shana Nys Drambot, Ezrha Jean Black, John O'Brien

 
November 18 - December 23, 2012
Patssi Valdez: Mementos
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 18, 2-5pm


 


 

An Interview with Patssi Valdez, An American Painter

Patssi Valdez, Sunday, 2011,
acrylic on canvas, 72" x 30"
 

Los Angeles artist Patssi Valdez has gained international attention in the last few years, primarily from her early performance work as a member of the group Asco. Asco was recognized in a major exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2011, Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972-1987. Post-Asco, Valdez has had a very successful "second" career as a painter. I sat down with her earlier this week in her studio. 

JC: You've gotten quite a lot of attention in the last few years because of your participation in Asco. Let's talk about how you made the transition from the brassy performance-based political art you did with Asco to becoming a painter more focused on your internal world.

PV: Before I met the men that I worked with in Asco, I had grand ideas about being a great painter. But then I worked around Willie [Herrón] and Gronk and they seemed to paint so effortlessly while I had to struggle. I was not a good colorist at all, I couldn’t mix color properly -- I always say that I made mud paintings. So that’s why I worked in installation, performance, and all these other mediums.

JC: And yet my memory is that as a painter, in your first painting show at Pico House Gallery in 1989, you sprang full blown -- Athena from Zeus’ head -- an accomplished painter right out of the box.

PV: When I got out of art school, where I focused primarily on photography, I started teaching kids at Plaza de la Raza and I had to give lessons. They asked me if I would teach painting, so of course I said yes – I needed the job – then I panicked and went to the library looking up assignments, how to mix primary colors – and along the way I taught myself color theory.

Patssi Valdez, The Crying Tree, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 48" x 60"
 

Then one day I went to the David Hockney Retrospective at LACMA with a friend and I said, “I think I could do that.” My friend thought it was the funniest thing, that I would have the nerve to say that! It was inspiring. It was like Truth or Dare. So I went home and bought all this paint and canvas and started on this body of work. 

After I had finished a few, I thought “Ok. Who’s the harshest critic in the world? Who’s the friend that will tell you the truth and let you have it?” The answer was Gronk.  

So I picked up the phone and called Gronk and told him I had something to show him. He came over and he was real quiet, pensive looking. All he said to me was “you need more paint.” I thought, ok! that means they’re not horrible, that means they passed the Gronk test, I think I can show them to the world.

Click here to purchase
from Amazon.com
ASCO: Elite of the Obscure:
A Retrospective 1972-1987
catalog from 2011
 exhibition at LACMA
 

I had done a lot of collage work and photography but nothing ever sold. I lived very frugally. Then I had that first painting show at Pico House, with no expectations of selling anything, and suddenly I had people coming up and asking how much was this painting? How much was that one? So many people were interested that I finally said “whoever gives me the check first gets the painting,” and I went home with my little purse full of checks! That was the beginning of making money and selling my work. I never looked back. I was no longer in Asco, I was done with art school and I just forged ahead.

JC: What impact have the museum shows have had on you? Do you feel you have become mainstream?

PV: First of all, I feel it has legitimized me as an artist – not as a woman artist or a Latina artist, but as an artist. 

Have I entered the mainstream? I believe I haven’t. Asco, maybe, but me individually as a painter, my real passion -- I’m hoping that someday I can have a major retrospective of my own. People don’t know the whole range of my work. I’m an installation artist, I’ve been a performance artist, I was a photographer for ten years, I make short films, I do iPad drawings, I sculpt and I paint. I have all these bodies of work and my dream is to be able to see them together in one museum space at the same time. That’s my dream. So, to the museum world out there: Can we start working on that, please? [laughing] While I’m still on planet Earth?

In the following video Patssi Valdez and Vyal Reyes transform a Lexus into a work of art.



JC: What's in your immediate future?

PV: I’m ready to start a new body of work. I have these big empty canvases and I’m reevaluating what I want to say and how I want to say it. I want to find a dealer, representation.

I didn’t have to struggle financially for years, but when the economy tanked, and I was no longer with a gallery, that’s when the trouble started. I had been on a roll for years. Now I’m struggling again. Thank god I have a couple of supporters who believe in me, who believe in me 100%. They make all the difference in the world.

My mother always says to me "you have all these angels daughter." And I say "don't I mother?"

Patssi's upcoming schedule:

Offramp Gallery, Pasadena, CA
November 18 - December 23, 2012
Patssi Valdez: Mementos (gouaches, ceramics and site-specific installation)
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 18, 2-5pm
 
Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico
ASCO: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972-1987 
03/21/2013 – 09/01/2013

Upcoming at Offramp Gallery


September 16 - October 28, 2012
Anita Bunn: Detour
Opening Reception: Sunday, September 16, 2-5pm










Sunday, October 7, 2012, 4-6pm
PANEL DISCUSSIONContemporary Art Conversations #13
Moderated by Betty Ann Brown
Panelists: Peter Frank, Shana Nys Drambot, Ezrha Jean Black, John O'Brien

 
November 18 - December 23, 2012
Patssi Valdez: Mementos
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 18, 2-5pm