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- The Woman in The Moon (2016)
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- There’s a Pony in There Somewhere (2016)
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- None is Like the Other (2016)
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- Agape Pink with Flying Buttress (2016)
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- My Cuntry ’tis of Me ( American title) / Crown Land (Canadian Title) (2016)
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- Jurisdiction (2016)
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- Elephant Toes (2016)
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- Spaces of all Sorts (2016)
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- Spaces in the Trees (2016)
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- Whatever happened to Baby Blue (2016)
What I like to do most of all is wonder. This Is what sets my work in motion. When I wondered what ‘negative space’ could possibly be or if it existed all, I began an investigation in my work that would span two decades. Questioning that one standard, but obsolete, phrase from the language of painting, propelled me through numerous media like blow torch paintings on wood, burlap bag installations and a substantial body of work on black velvet tarpaulins with extracted markings, text, images and at times, projections. It was also the basis for my thesis.
In 2010, I felt that my investigation had led me right back to painting itself. After two decades I began to paint on canvas once again. I felt that what I had studied, learned and experienced about space must now be synthesized. I had to trust that my findings would present themselves on canvas. I began to wonder about gravity and drops and how many drops did a space need to comprise a form. How many intersections would cause a direction change in the line and on and on, on and on, I wonder.
Yura Adams
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- Bit Light (2016)
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- Salt Spray Rose (2016)
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- Nesting View (2015)
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- Plumage Column Two (2015)
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- Sky Lace (2016)
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- Plumage Column One (2015)
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- Smart to be Shy (2016)
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- Nestling (2016)
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- Nature Dress Number Three (2015)
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- Lights Out Nature Dress (2015)
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- Quantum Lace View (2015)
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- Nature Dress Number One (2015)
I am a painter working within a contemporary practice; using color and energy to conduct the voices of poetry and science in my work. My studio is in an industrial building located in the middle of fields that have mostly gone back to nature and my paintings are a visual response to rhythmic forms I observe in the environment.
My most recent body of work is titled Nature Dress and is based on diversity of pattern and fluid motion in nature. Walking the farm road is an influential activity. I look at the flow of the adjacent Williams River, the visuals of the storms I have to beat to get back to my car, bird and plant patterning, and especially, color temperature shifts driven by changing light. When painting, I like to improvise with hand-cut stencils, sprayed and poured paint, and loose drawing. I jumble my painting supplies; quotidian and refined materials side by side. It is important to me to instigate chance encounters with materials. Taking as many risks as I can, I like to hook my intuition to my painting practice as I search for an idiosyncratic version of beauty.
Christopher Adams
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- Installation view, “Life, or Something Like It” (2015)
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- Installation view, “Primordial Garden,” all works untitled (2015)
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- Installation view, “Natural Selection” (2011)
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- Untitled (2015)
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- Set of six works, each Untitled (2015)
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- Untitled (Green and Red) (2015)
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- Untitled (2015)
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- Untitled (Primordial Garden) (2015)
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- Untitled (Spiral) (2014)
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- Wall Construction (2008) [side view]
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- Untitled (Sand) (2015)
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- Installation view, Resident Artist Exhibition, Greenwich House Pottery (2013)
I utilize biological concepts including speciation, convergence and mimicry to create sculptural works of organic abstraction. The sculptures suggest a variety of creatures, but not a specific organism. In the concept that drives my art making, a pioneering organism has entered an untapped environment, where it differentiates rapidly without departing too dramatically from its original form. The sculptures of porcelain, terra cotta, and stoneware are fired over a wide range of temperatures with a variety of glazes. In addition to making art, I work as a dermatologist. I pay attention therefore to skin surface in my art; and I utilize shiny, gnarly, and matte metallic finishes to evolve the skin surfaces.
Editors’ Notes (Posit 11)
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
Matt Nolen
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- (A)spire (2016)
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- Blinded (2015)
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- Cosmic Breath (2015)
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- Goddess II (2016)
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- Love Warrior (2016)
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- Portrait Bust with Eye (2015)
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- Squeeze (2016)
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- The Optimist (2016)
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- Volcanoes (2016)
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- Promises (2016)
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- Toss (2016)
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- Maladie/Morte diptych (2016)
As a painter, architect and storyteller, clay provides the means by which I can marry my loves: the painted surface, three dimensional form and narrative content. Ceramics gives me the language to communicate my stories to a world audience. The themes of my early work have included a broad range of social, political and psychological subjects.
Most recently I have turned to the figure as form departing from the lavishly painted vessels and tiled environments of previous works. In doing so the stories I am telling have become more personal and often are informed by the inner landscape of self: notions of shelter that explore what we protect and keep private vs. that which we choose to reveal, escape through dreams, and contemporary takes on ancient Greek and Roman portrait busts and the load bearing caryatid and atlas. I have also expanded my use of sculptural materials to include found objects, metal, wood and stone.
My figures tell the stories of those who are challenged by conflicts and are in the midst of emotional or psychological transitions. It is life lived within the complexity of these “margins” that interests me the most.
Nolen’s work has been written about and reviewed in many periodicals and books including The New York Times, American Ceramics, Ceramics Art and Perception, Masters of Craft, Confrontational Clay, Postmodern Ceramics and Painted Clay. He has been awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Mid Atlantic Foundation (regional NEA) Fellowship and international residencies in Israel and China. His residency at the Kohler Co.’s Art/Industry Program resulted in a handmade public washroom that has been named “Best Restroom in America” by the Cintas Corp. and among “The 10 Best Bathrooms in the World” by the Travel Channel. He has recently served as President of the Board of Trustees for Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Newcastle Maine and is Adjunct Professor of Art at New York University and Ceramics Area Coordinator at Pratt Institute. His work is represented by Stephen Romano Gallery, NY. http://www.nolenstudios.com
Carl Heyward
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- The Dog Park (2015)
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- Untitled (2016)
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- Polka Dot Jack Johnson (2012)
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- Painting (2016)
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- Organics, Cyphers, Codices, Codes (series) (2016)
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- Pink Gray Tan (2016)
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- Painting (2016)
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- Painting (2016)
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- Graph Paper (2016)
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- Box/SING (2016)
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- Blue and Rose Painting (2016)
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- Green Man (2010)
Paying attention need not be a stress but a meditative process; an observation of the elements of existence viewed openly and with equanimity, neither exalting or diminishing the value of things as they are or present themselves; the value of the story intrinsic to their combinations and juxtapositions resonating in ways hopefully poignant and new.
…Like a movie we walked into the middle of … ours is a fragmented existence, cobbled together; challenging a perspective both flawed and poetic, toward an approximate accuracy that seeks to define and reconcile so-called reality; a facsimile of earnest truth, a rapid-fire cyber information glut combined with old-guard pulp and electronic media hustle on religio-politico pulpit bearing news of new opportunities in the greed and self-aggrandizement market. Distance is the philosophy, acquisition is the sutra that ties it all together… what’sa matter you? … memory is unreliable … so these cultural ghosts and hallucinations are nailed to the gallery cross for veneration, contemplation, or possible exorcism, as you will.
investigations in painting, collage, print making and artists’ books for creative people of all levels of experience. He is a mixed-media artist whose recent or upcoming exhibitions include UNLEASHED GALLERY (California), GAP : SF INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL (“Dada Here and Now”), GAP: ROOM ART GALLERY” By Collaboratve Means” (Mill Valley, California), THE FOURTH WALL GALLERY (Oakland California), GAP: CARLOS BUELNA GALLERY@MUSEO DE ARTE MODERNO DE MAZATLAN (Mazatlan, Mexico), and 10dence GALLERY “Poligious Issues” (Rotterdam, Netherlands), 2017.
Mary DeVincentis
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- Not Kansas #3 (2016)
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- Spiral Safety Dance (2016)
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- Waking on Water (2016)
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- Night Dive (2015)
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- Signifiers (2015)
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- Night Reign (2015)
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- Sense of Falling Forever (2015)
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- Molting (2016)
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- Mind Field (2015)
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- Beginning to End (2016)
Very early on, I got interested in the meta-themes of life. Why are we here? How do we create meaning and purpose? I grew up in the suburbs of a typical American town. All manner of trauma happened in my home and in neighbors’ homes, beneath the prettified veneer of suburban life. So you see that contradiction reflected in a lot of my work. Society now moves at such a fast pace and demands that our attention be outward in focus. Time without external stimulation starts to feel threatening, as we attend less and less to our internal well being. Unclaimed, our shadowy aspects get projected outward onto the “other.” This is the theme of my series of paintings, Sin Eaters, which explores who or what volunteers or is volunteered to absorb or reflect these disowned aspects. This shadowy side is also addressed in this series, Dark Matters. I strive for a dynamic tension between form and content in my work. I appreciate seeing evidence of the artist’s physicality, their unique fingerprint, as evidenced in brush-stroke and mark making. Paint is kin to skin, viscera, blood, mineral, plant and stardust.
Cynthia Carlson
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- Black Diagonal X (2015)
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- Zig and Zag (2015)
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- Yellow, Green and Pink (2016)
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- X and O (2015)
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- Red Borders (2015)
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- Yellow Edges (2015)
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- Green House (2015)
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- Little Pink Corner (2015)
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- Eight and Blue House (2015)
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- Color 101 (2015)
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- Black Arrow Up, Brown Arrow Right (2015)
I began this group of paintings by connecting several different sized canvases together, making a shaped surface of complex edges as a starting point. The painted surfaces evolved running the gamut of possibility from geometric abstraction to modulated fields, and includes eccentric shapes invented purely for themselves. Sometimes they conform to, sometimes openly defy, the physical boundaries of individual canvases. The process includes a great deal of serendipity, and the results reflect a playfulness in the use of shape, color and contradictory spaces. Artist friends have likened them to puzzles or games, which I find appealing.
Alex Bunn
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- Zombie Hunch in the Chinese Room (2015)
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- Lugensteine Manifolds (2015)
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- Lugensteine Manifolds (detail)
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- Fusiform Face Area (2015)
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- Fusiform Face Area (detail)
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- Fusiform Face Area (detail)
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- Extensions (2015)
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- Extensions (detail)
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- Gauge & Seams (2015)
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- Boundaries (2014)
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- Boundaries (detail)
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- Triple-shape Memory (2015)
I create large-scale macro-photographs of purpose-built assemblages, sculptures and tableaux. The objects depicted—though arduously crafted—do not persist after being photographed. Instead, I deploy a unique, specially-designed rig to capture the subject at infinite depth of field and microscopic detail.
“Art seeks universals through detailed examination of particulars.” —Prof. Lee Smolin.
I am broadly fascinated with the disparate—and often irreconcilable—systems employed in thought, learning and communication. This fascination branches into formal systems such as taxonomy, scientific method and language, but also into more arcane systems such as personal interpretation or instinct.
My work reconfigures essentials of sculpture, photography and cognitive mapping to deliver superstates, where matter can appear simultaneously inert yet reactive, or continual yet granular in structure. The experience subverts presupposed relationships between material and object, singularity and plurality, dissonance and harmony, or even cause and effect.
“A system is simply the subordination of an aspect of the universe to that aspect of the universe.” —Jorge Luis Borges.
The work asks the viewer to cogitate: what is the nature of the objects captured? Yet simple definitions are elusive. We see that the artworks harbour ostensibly singular objects, but they appear to embody multiple histories or generations that undermine a linear description. I guide events to generate vestiges of change that—though they are static as photographs—flux richly with history, potential, properties and a dissonant multitude of identities.
Editor’s Notes (Posit 10)
Welcome to summer, and with it, to our 10th issue!
While not what is most often referred to as “summer reading,” this issue’s poetry and prose is energetic, surprising, pleasurable, and above all, various. From Martine Bellen’s Delphic utterances to James Capozzi’s lush expansiveness; from Joe Pan’s virtuosic fecundity to the compressed insightfulness of Alec Hershman, Call Freeman, and Becka Mara McKay, the work aggregated in these pages gives rise to its own poetic chiarascuro, an emphatic energy of contrasts fed as well by the moving micro-fiction of Anthony Schneider, Randee Silv’s suggestive “wordslabs,” an excerpt from a new collaboration by Thomas Cook and Tyler Flynn Dorholt, and the accomplished poetics of TJ Beitelman, Brett Salsbury, and Patrick Williams. So here’s to the delights of summer, and of Posit 10:
T.J. Beitelman’s probings of the intersection of truth and creation, vanity and desire, futility and hope, exploring “the real imagined” and the “imagined real” in which “none of this is holy. This is only art”;
Martine Bellen’s spare and exquisite excerpt from Dō, inspired by Brazilian jujitsu, invoking “the efficacious arc of hatching” the insight that “delusions are inexhaustible”;
the expansive richness of James Capozzi’s verses, grappling with the psychic implications of “film that is a litany of artifacts ragged behind the rest of our evolution” as well as the elusive notion of “our majesty” which “blows the petals that form us” whether it resides in “maps of the coast the length of the coast” or “the life and the sub-life”;
Thomas Cook’s and Tyler Flynn Dorholt’s masterful collaborative meditation on time, identity, and language, which “keep[s] breaking perfectly with commas into slight unknowns” in order to remind us that “no matter what, what is always the thing mattering,” which “is not news nor is news not us”;
Cal Freeman’s sure-footed gems of energy, imagination, and insight, in which, as the author tells “The Innocent” in the epistle addressed to her, “grace is the shape of light that isn’t cast”;
the range yet compression of Alec Hershman’s lyrics, which convey meditative melancholy, wry humor, and philosophical rumination by tapping a well of surprise in which “the megaphone’s a dunce-cap; the helicopter lands with a limp”;
Becka Mara McKay’s lyrical yet gently wry investigations of relationship and faith, in which the “heart is/a dropped bottle,” “sorrow sags,” and “God leaves unlatched//the shore of sleep”;
Joe Pan’s virtuosically individuated monologues on one love which is wistfully “awash in what [she] cannot keep/or keep private,” while another struggles with her own “humble fidelity to [her] infidel’s lovely bits & bargaining chips” such as the beloved’s “ol’ stigmata’d-mouth-by-unforgiving-knuckles exploitation show”;
The wry melancholy and deadpan humor of Brett Salsbury’s pitch-perfect timing, reminding us “how your dreams rearrange the day” until “eventually gravity takes its whole toll”;
Anthony Schneider’s poignant fiction about personal constriction as coping mechanism and abuse, ringing with the potency of what is left unsaid;
Randee Silv’s ‘wordslabs’ constructed from resonant declaratives colliding productively like “circuits of cascading autumn clouds,” their “inward attentions inexhaustible”;
and Patrick Williams’ elegies to memory and mortality, in which “the lake is dead as a dream” although “we are too unfixed” and “someone is calling, but really/who picks up the phone anymore?”
Thank you for reading!
Susan Lewis and Bernd Sauermann
And welcome to the visual art of Posit 10!
Alex Bunn’s photographs bedazzle and confound the viewer. Through his meticulous studio arrangements he creates temporary universes that leave us wondering at exactly what we are looking at. They are both delicious and decidedly creepy at the same time.
In Cynthia Carlson’s recent body of paintings, “Beyond the Rectangle,” we see a group of rigorously constructed, geometric compositions. Each painting is made of up many smaller canvases, combining to make compositions that inhabit the walls with architectural presence. The paintings are deeply and lushly painted: Carlson uses color to both harmonize and connect the compositions. Like jazz, they are syncopated and alive with energy.
Mary DeVincentis presents us with a world where darkness, both physical and psychological, is ever present. Beneath the cheerful colors and vigorous brushwork we see hints of the troubled life inside.
Carl Heyward creates mixed media works that are elegant and lyrical. With graceful gesture he mixes found and fabricated imagery to suggest visual short stories. Each work provides us with a bit of the narrative, leaving it up to the viewer to complete the story.
And Matt Nolen’s ceramic sculptures are richly layered with color, texture and meaning. Like surrealist narratives, they lead us along a dreamlike path where all interpretations are the rights ones.
Enjoy!
Melissa Stern