Posit

A journal of literature and art

Ana Rendich

Posted on May 17, 2022 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

I have always been connected to the invisible and visible aspects of human drama, the particular and the universal. Although my paintings and sculptures are my own work, they are not intended to be about me. The subject matter is greater than me as an individual. My studio is like a lab, where space, form and meaning intertwine, shaping and filling my artworks.

I have been exploring the Japanese concept “Ma” (間), a concept embedded in our relationship with our space, internal and external, and how we relate one to another one; as well as the interpretation of time and space, pauses and silences, and the emptiness in a space, full of possibilities. This concept MA is the skeleton of my works, where my art starts. These sculptures, mixed media and paintings emerge from a thought, an infinite path with no endpoint, where resolution is impossible. Hope in the light of loss and displacement is my primary subject. The works are fragments of what has been lost, negated, and postponed. Their structures are a form of reparation, a healing tool, tying together absences and presences, sometimes in a meditative form.

In some of my sculptures, I incorporate resin, because of its reflective or opaque property, but I transform it, leaving my own fingerprints, and colors are mainly a tool that reveals presence. In certain works, the observer can see the ghostly effect generated by the reflection created by the mixed media illustrating the transient and mercurial nature of reality. Upon seeing my art, many find that the colors draw their attention before anything else. The story behind these colors is born in the interplay between these colors, but it is not color itself that matters most to me. Rather, the color is secondary, the whole composition makes the work… Colors and shapes are not separated elements, both are an essential symbiosis. When I make an artwork that contains individual pieces, it is always thinking that each piece must belong to the next artwork, creating a work, where all the pieces share the same space; the togetherness is what makes the work.

My work has been evolving and changing every year, incorporating new media and materials. Sculpture and mixed media has helped me to grow, and it gives me the chance to explore pieces rooted in the human condition, past and present social and historic events. In the WWII pieces, for example, the research in getting the letters from WWII has been a long road, it almost took me two years until I started to work.

The base of my art is bringing presence through absence. There are different types of absences: not only physical absence, but also the lack of the fabric that could make us better human beings. All these have created the need to incorporate other elements, according to the sensibility of each piece, like the use of wood, fabric, metal, yarn and paper, besides oil, silicone, etc. I enjoy immensely the closeness with my materials, that intimacy…the tactile and physical connection, too, aids to create a deep connection with space, form and meaning, leaving all decorative items aside, and helps me to concentrate more in exploration, questioning and contemplation. I see the reflections, materials and surfaces as healing presences, making the invisible visible.

Ana Rendich was born in Argentina and lives and works in Spotsylvania, Viriginia. She attended Instituto Superior de Arte del Teatro Colon, University del Salvador, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the National Academy of Design, New York, New York.

Andrea Burgay

Posted on May 17, 2022 by Posit Editor

Rhetoric and False Decoration (Purgatory) (2020) — Lay It Down (2018)

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Artist’s Statement

I find inspiration in the cycles of destruction and renewal that mark the passage of time. I
am interested in worthlessness and potential, finding meaning in materials that have been
discarded. I am interested in memory and examining the past, especially the potential of
imagination to confuse and create new memories.

My Fictions series of sculptural collages on deconstructed books and magazines are
colorful, densely layered objects that bear the markings of their visceral transformations.
The covers or interiors of these books are collaged, then taken apart and reassembled—
destroyed, then transformed. This process results in works that evoke both deterioration
and growth.

I imagine that these objects have taken on lives of their own, neglected and ignored stories
pouring out of them and mixing. Some books explode with color, others are eaten away,
ravaged by time. Either documents of the past or reimagined fictions, these objects no
longer communicate what they once did, but now explore realms of remembrance and
projection, nostalgia and evolution. They are invitations to reimagine the past and the
present.

Andrea Burgay is a visual artist from Syracuse, NY, living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Her
work combines collage, painting, sculpture and found materials to elevate the overlooked and the mundane via transformative processes. Through adding and removing layers of handmade and collected materials, her works harness both destruction and decay to create a sense of potential renewal. Her work has been exhibited in galleries in Genoa, Paris, Warsaw, New York and
throughout the US. Her solo exhibition Mining the Ruins: The Library was shown at Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville, MI in 2019. Andrea is also founder and editor of Cut Me Up, a participatory collage magazine and curatorial project.

Judith Henry

Posted on September 27, 2021 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

During my art career I have used various multi-media techniques to both explore and hide identity. I examine the friction between the interior life and public self. To stress anonymity, I have often used masks in my work. In this issue of Posit I am showing work from two series done recently. Beauty Masks is a book consisting of self-portraits made by covering my face with “found” faces. There are 120 self-portraits in this book. I juxtapose images of model’s faces ripped from fashion magazines over my own face as a mask. The images I have chosen to disguise myself are diverse in their race, hairdo, accessories and dress. There’s a stark contrast between the retouched and made-up faces and my actual hands and body — a reminder of the commodification of idealized beauty and a reflection of the fear of death. The second series, Casting Call, is a collection of almost 300 miniature sculptures made of detritus found in my studio, on the streets and in my kitchen. I utilized adhesive tape, push pins, paint tubes, sponges, cotton balls, swabs, nails, clips, screws, anything and everything I was able to glean. These recombinant icons emerged as an installation at BravinLee Projects in 2018.They extend my exploration of personal identify by creating humanoid surrogate identities that stand in for my hidden persona(s). The diversity of forms reflect the huge disparity found in any crowd. Having pursued a detached, perhaps secretive, or voyeuristic observation of people throughout my career, I believe that my work has evolved into a unique and revelatory depiction of human nature in all its diversion and mass commonality.

Judith Henry is a multi-media artist, born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. After receiving a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, she moved to New York and started making art that explored the misalignments between cultural representation and inner psychology. She utilizes drawing, photography, typography, video, painting, sculpture, and bookmaking. Henry has shown her art in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Cleveland, Philadelphia and internationally in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, London and Switzerland. Her most recent solo shows were at BravinLee programs, New York, 2015 and 2018, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 2016 and The National Arts Club, New York, 2017.

Frank Whipple

Posted on May 27, 2020 by Posit Editor

the delayed association... (2019) — the delayed association… (2020)

the blurted confession... (2019) — the delayed association… (2020)

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Artist’s Statement

My work on an individual piece usually begins after I’ve cut a hundred or more elements from culled images that have attracted my eye. Once a particular image appeals to me by virtue of its shape, color, texture, or even degree of decay, it may suggest an association that triggers some remote memory or fantasy of the future, alternative mythology, or dreamscape, and if possible a combination of all of those and more, which gets me started on the road to completing the piece. As I work, I continually discover new techniques and approaches to the creative process.

Frank Whipple is a collage artist and long-time dealer and collector of antique books and ephemera. His work has been featured on the set of “NCIS: Los Angeles,” as the cover art for the Max Laser Band’s 2017 CD “Beautiful Heartbreak,” and in the book for Cecil Touchon’s 2017 exhibition, “Dada Centennial: Day of the Dead.” Since 1995 his work has been included in group shows at the Louis Stern Gallery, Gallery 825, and the Zipper Gallery (all in West Hollywood), as well as the Fremont Center Theatre (Pasadena), the Spring Open Show of the Collage Artists of America (2006), the Space Gallery, the Lark Gallery (2014), the Sebastapol Center for the Arts (2016), the MorYork Gallery (Highland Park), the Sullivan Goss Gallery (Santa Barbara), the Nisa Touchon Gallery (Santa Fe, 2015 and 2016), and the Retroavangarda Gallery (Warsaw, forthcoming). Solo shows include “Papercuts,” at the Space Gallery in Claremont, California (2016) and “Scenic Roots…a Collage Dreamscape” and “Frank Whipple Collages” at the MorYork Gallery (2018 and 2019). He was a featured speaker for the Collage Artists of America in 2017.Find out more at frankwhipplecollage.

Maritta Tapanainen

Posted on May 19, 2019 by Posit Editor

nascent (2003)
ilo ilta (2009)
distill the moon (2003)
nocturnal I (2008)
tether (2016)
sokkelo (2011)
host (2004)
frontera (2010)
nuclei (2009)
colony #19 (2012)
colony #15 (2012)

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Artist’s Statement

The collages are intuitive accretions, built-up layers of intricately contoured cut paper fragments—fragments found sifting through outmoded textbooks, encyclopedias, technical manuals and the like. Lyric improvisations recontextualize the natural, biological world with scientific, mechanical elements evoking recognition while simultaneously remaining enigmatic. I began acquiring old, discarded volumes long before their possibilities unfolded attracted by the visual beauty and richness, the soft warmth of the patina, the fragility inherent of this arcane printed matter—its evocative obsolescence, qualities redolent of another age—an authenticity that I desire to preserve and channel. Selections are made with a practiced eye—informed by snatches of memory and meditations on the micro- macro cosmos—finding inspiration in antiquated print aberrations, engraved optical eccentricities, and odd, inartful renderings. All coalesce to imbue the work with a sense of immediacy, and detached timelessness.

Maritta Tapanainen was born in Finland, raised in Canada, has since lived in Europe, Central America, and in the harsh expansive beauty of the Mojave desert. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Her work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (mfa), The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The International Collage Center (ICC), and many other venues, and has been presented at The ADAA Art Show, Palm Springs Fine, Art Fair, Houston Fine Art Fair, CA Boom–Dwell on Design, Pulse Art Fair, LA Art Show, and Works on Paper (Park Avenue Armory). She has twice received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, been highlighted in The Paris Review, and had solo shows reviewed by Artforum, The Los Angeles Times, and more.

Buzz Spector

Posted on September 13, 2018 by Posit Editor

in modern America (2014)

important parts of religious experience (2014)

not even (2015)

the eternal mystery in pictures (2014)

the shadows’ touch . . . (2016)

Artist’s Statement

For the last five years I’ve been making text/image sequences of poetry employing found language on the dust jackets of hardcover books. I clip the last lines of blurbs to compose poetry. These last words, so to speak, are vestiges of writing which is itself deliberately ordinary in function. We are all too aware of the deception of buying a book after reading a blurb more engaging than the volume it’s wrapped around. I’m taking up the challenge of writing as collage from such meager shards, bringing variations of color, typography, and bits of images into the process.

Buzz Spector works in a wide range of mediums including sculpture, photography, printmaking, book arts, and installation. His art makes frequent use of the book, both as subject and object, and is concerned with relationships between public history, individual memory, and perception.

Tanya Marcuse

Posted on June 19, 2018 by Posit Editor

: Woven Nº 1 (2015)

: Woven Nº 1 (Detail) (2015)

: Woven Nº 9 (2015)

: Woven Nº 9 (Detail) (2015)

: Woven Nº 11 (2016)

: Woven Nº 11 (Detail) (2016)

: Woven Nº 17 (2017)

: Woven Nº 17 (Detail) (2017)

: Woven Nº 16 (2017)

: Woven Nº 21 (2016)

: Woven Nº 27 (2017)

: Woven Nº 27 (detail) (2017)

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Artist’s Statement

Woven

The ancient Greeks imagined the machinery of fate as three women, weaving the lives of human and gods into an enormous tapestry, killing or giving life by snipping or knotting a thread. Through the medium of photography, in my new series Woven, I imagine myself introducing time and thus mortality, into the lush flora and fauna which make up the millefleurs backgrounds of medieval hunting and falconry tapestries. The 5 x 10 foot photographs sometimes take weeks to compose, and during this process of composition, of collecting, arranging, burning, painting, and transplanting, there is change. Flowers wither, spiders build webs, new shoots emerge, and corpses decay. Influenced both by the Dutch vanitas tradition and the allover graphic compositions of Jackson Pollock, I intend the photographs to be experienced as exquisitely detailed still lives when viewed from up close, but to hold together as a immersive, more abstract composition from further away. Although the pieces are all made on the same wooden frame and printed at the same scale, each photograph incorporates a distinct set of conceptual and visual ideas. Some are densely packed with rotting plant and animal life, and others more open, sprinkled with small brightly colored flowers or verdant moss. What is common to all, however, is a sense of opulence which verges on excess, a plenty which verges on plunder. In these elaborately artificial tableaux, the inexorable movements of nature are shown forth and growth and decay, beauty and terror, life and death are woven together.

Tanya Marcuse is an American photographer whose work explores transience among other ideas. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the George Eastman House, the Yale Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. She studied Art History and Studio Art at Oberlin and earned her MFA from Yale. She has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, and has published three books with Nazraeli Press, Undergarments and Armor (2005), Fruitless (2007) and Wax Bodies (2012). She’s currently working on a book of Fruitless/Fallen/Woven with Radius Press. Her work is represented by the Julie Saul Gallery in New York City. She lives and works in the Hudson Valley and teaches Photography at Bard College.

John Hundt

Posted on September 8, 2016 by Posit Editor

: Botanical Figure (2016)

: History Repeats Itself (2016)

: Comb Over (2015)

: Egret (2015)

: Comet (2016)

: Inner Self (2015)

: Rise Up! (2015)

: We Are Me (2016)

: Warrior (2016)

: Wild Bird (2016)

: Put Out To Pasture (2016)

: The Factory (2016)

Artist’s Statement

Nature and the world around us is the inspiration for my work. I explore the notion of evolution that ‘took a wrong turn’, whether it be vegetation or animal, blending elements drawn from human, animal, geological, astrological, archeological, and others. The funny thing is, it is likely that over the hundreds of million years of Life on Earth, many of these strange little creatures of mine may have well walked the Earth at one time.

John Hundt was born in New Jersey, but his family moved to Los Angeles when he was five. After high school he moved to San Francisco where he put himself through the San Francisco Art Institute. John has had solo and two person shows throughout the US, as well as numerous group shows in the US and Europe. He is currently in a show at Stanford University. His solo shows have been reviewed in arts publications and his work published in New Collectors Book vol. 4 & 5. He is co-curator of the international collage exhibition, “Marvelous” (Sebastopol Center for the Arts, January, 2017). His work is handled by Aeterna Gallery in Los Angeles, Lauren Davies Projects in Cleveland and Jack Fischer Gallery in SF.

Editors’ Notes (Posit 11)

Posted on September 8, 2016 by Posit Editor

Welcome to September, and to Posit 11!

It is a special thrill to introduce the masterful poetry and prose Bernd and I have gathered for this issue. Not only has another summer come and gone, but we are in the last stages (if not throes) of an American election cycle in which the complacency of most notions of “normalcy” have been shattered, giving rise to an appropriately pervasive anxiety about the depth and scope of the humanly possible. In its own provocative and evocative ways, the work in this issue addresses that anxiety, and even musters some degree of optimism. For tragedy rendered inseparable from the beauty of its vehicle, consider the stark profundity of new work by Michael Palmer and Fady Joudah; the disturbing resonance of two parables by Marvin Shackelford and Eric Wilson; or the tender melancholy of verse by Jeffrey Jullich, Stephen Massimilla, and Simon Perchik. For an inspiring balance of critique and optimism, take a look at Sharon Mesmer’s tragic yet emancipatory tributes to undervalued women poets, Sheila Murphy’s inimitable and ineffable pull-no-punches constructs, Sharon Dolin’s disciplined frolics, ambitiously braiding tribute and lampoon, or Anne Gorrick’s high-octane mash-ups of web-commerce parlance examined and re-examined to reveal rich veins of resonance. And on the brighter side, bask in Felino Soriano’s linguistically untethered odes to transformation.

Whether you are absorbed by the anxiety of our historical moment or weary of its seep, I hope you’ll take some moments to explore:

the tightly packed wit and wisdom of Sharon Dolin’s allusive riffs on Conceptismo, W. C. Williams’ So Much Depends, Niedecker’s ‘condensery,’ and the fraudulence of linguistic obscurantism;

the looping logic of Anne Gorrick’s expansive assemblages, artistic antidotes to our day-to-day “doses of forgetting” the “fine tunings built into” these rocking, rollicking litanies in which “invisible empires of products, fireflies and songs add to the beauty;”

Fady Joudah’s profound and miraculous condensations, with their masterfully chiseled, spare, and haunting visions of oppression and its internalization (“Election Year Dream”) sanctuary in the face of damage (“Monastery”) and the devastation of love (“Coda: A Fragment”);

Jeffrey Jullich’s grimly beautiful constructs, evoking the hazard, sorrow, and insignificance of existence as revealed by the “metamorphosis of seraphim,” “Nostradamus contradictions,” and “a cloud/hung between my life—and life itself” in which “intelligence is only – a fraction – a niche for omniscience;”

the mystery and beauty of Stephen Massimilla’s chiseled lyrics, gesturing towards the elusive and tragic lightness of love, loss, and existence itself, in which “so many little masks (marks, tasks) / make a life” until one is reluctant “to come down from the lightfastness / of this insomnia high;”

Sharon Mesmer’s lyrical tributes to women poets of the Americas which, by “beating all sorrows/into beauty” themselves fulfill the determination to be “no mere witness/to inertia” by evoking, among other notions of liberation, the freedom of radical departure — in what her fans will recognize as a masterful departure from the pyrotechnical virtuosity of her signature Flarfian poetics;

Sheila E. Murphy’s confidently quiet, powerfully enigmatic new works evoking the intimacies of existence anchored by “the palpable act of witness, witnessing” in which “pounce marks levitate a posse / of connect points” in our appreciation of her bracing linguistic montage;

the incomparable music of Michael Palmer’s austere and profound masterpieces of compression, sternly confronting us with the tragedy and horror of a world — our world — in which a child is “set afire / before blindered eyes / a world’s eyes” and authors “lost at sea / in a storm of words” stand idly by as their “books consume . . . the fire”;

Simon Perchik’s moving lyrics of love, loss, and memory, gently guiding us to “listen / the way all marble is crushed” and witness how “inside each embrace // the first thunderclap and shrug / no longer dries”;

Marvin Shackelford’s haunting parable of shipwreck, survival, and friendship, with its “reversed exploration” of the great parable, Before the Law, replacing Kafka’s eternally-withheld judgment with rescue, but, gratifyingly, perhaps not redemption;

Felino Soriano’s “relocated” lyrics, as musical as they are disjunctive, enacting the generative power of the transformations of which they sing; “alters” “of improvised becoming” in which the day is “a dangle of marbled light, an / algebra of sun” for the reader to gratefully absorb;

and the disturbingly resonant infinite regress powering Eric G. Wilson’s “Bowl,” ruled by the labyrinthine, archetypal, Escher-esque logic of nightmares.

Thank you, as always, for reading!

Susan Lewis

Welcome to the visual art of Posit 11!

Christopher Adams’ background in biology and science informs these environmental installations of ceramic sculpture. He creates small universes of hundreds of individual elements reminiscent of creatures from the biological world, as filtered through Adams’ imagination. Installed on walls painted in brilliant, deeply saturated colors, they seem to vibrate with energy, transporting us into another dimension.

Yura Adams works in a diverse vocabulary of forms united by her nuanced and thoughtful vision of the world. Based on both scientific and intuitive observation of the natural world, this work encompasses a lovely tension between loose drawing and complex patterning. Her use of rich and beautiful color reinforces this dynamic.

Kate Brown’s solidly painted compositions address one of the basic constructs of painting – the push and pull between positive and negative space. Using a carefully controlled palette of color, she has created an exploration of figure and ground that transcends the academic idea and emerges as glorious paintings. Big gestures are offset by architectural spaces. These works are luscious and bursting with energy.

In John Hundt’s hilarious and odd collage pieces, we see a world of biology and evolution gone strangely awry. Unlikely combinations of creatures are meticulously constructed from Hundt’s trove of imagery. Building upon the grand tradition of Surrealist collage, he has created a world of creatures found (hopefully) only in dreams.

With intricate and delicate etched lines, Renee Robbins explores the biology of the ocean. Her etchings, all based on actual creatures, evoke the undersea world caught in mid-motion. Her images are simultaneously scientific and dreamily ethereal. Rendered in softly psychedelic tones, they are like specimens on view through Robbins’ artistic microscope.

I hope you enjoy!

Melissa Stern

Kyle Gallup

Posted on December 16, 2013 by Posit Editor

Artist Statement

My paintings are an extension of my life in New York City. I have two ways of seeing–one as a painter in my studio, and the second as a walker in the city viewing urban life and architecture. My art-making process involves painting, collage, print-making, and drawing. I build up my paintings with layers of painted papers and fragments of prints, allowing an open-ended narrative to develop as I work. In my work I take fragments from the real world and re-imagine them in invented urban spaces.

Kyle Gallup grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. She attended Carnegie Mellon University and received her BFA from Tufts University and the Boston Museum School. She has spent time in France painting watercolor landscapes in and around Aix-en-Provence. During the 1990’s she made prints in Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop. Robert Blackburn requested a print for his collection, which now resides in the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop Collection in the Library of Congress. She was invited by founder of Triangle Workshop Sir Anthony Caro to a residency there in 1983 and again in 1991. Kyle Gallup has been in group shows in the United States and her work is in many collections in the US, Canada, Britain, Italy, and South Africa. Kyle Gallup lives and works in New York City.

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