Posit

A journal of literature and art

John Einarsen

Posted on January 17, 2025 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

Deep Seeing

John Einarsen has taken many kinds of photographs throughout his life, but for the past 13 years he has incorporated Miksang contemplative photography into his practice. It is concerned with slowing down our minds in order to see the world “as it is.”

“Seeing” is with us each day and a source of great joy. It is a journey of noticing more deeply whatever is around us, understanding and appreciating the essence of things.

What is the source of a contemplative image? When we are able to be still and receptive, the world appears more vivid, like removing grime from a window. There is a gap in thinking, and if the eye, mind, and heart are aligned, a unique perception can arise and manifest naturally. For a brief window the world can appear as it is unfiltered by human constructs, fresh and exhilarating, and be expressed with precision as a photograph. In this way we genuinely connect to the boundless, graceful, and fleeting nature of reality.

This condition can be elusive and is hard to sustain, and on many days is out of reach entirely. The images presented here were taken in those moments of clarity.

John Einarsen has studied “seeing” with the founder of Miksang Contemplative Photography, Michael Wood, and his partner, Julie Dubose, for over a decade. In October 2022, he published a collection of his Miksang photographs, This Very Moment. He has given Miksang workshops in Japan and Luxemboug and spoke about contemplative photography at TEDxKyoto in March 2023.

His recent exhibitions have been “Kyoto Stillness: The Photography of John Einarsen” at the Portland Japanese Garden Gallery, “This Very Moment” at the Shoyeido Kunjyukan Gallery in Kyoto and “Openings” at Komyo-in Temple (with Minako Hiromi and Myong-Hee Kim). He received the Kyotographie Lifetime Achievement in 2024.

Einarsen’s photography books include Kyoto: The Forest Within the Gate (with Edith Shiffert and others, 2010), Small Buildings of Kyoto Vol. I & II (2016 and 2017), Zen Gardens and Temples of Kyoto (with John Dougill, 2017), Curtain Motif (2019), and This Very Moment (2022).

Einarsen is also the founding editor of Kyoto Journal which he began with other artists and writers in 1986. Originally from Colorado, he has lived in Kyoto since the early 1980s.

Loren Eiferman

Posted on January 17, 2025 by Posit Editor

Spiraling Borage (2023) — 18v/New Growth (2021)

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Artist’s Statement

We have all at one point or another picked up a stick from the ground—touched the wood, peeled the bark off with our fingernails. My work taps into that same primal desire of touching nature and being close to it. Trees connect us back to nature, back to this Earth.

I start my process with a drawing of an idea. Each morning begins with a walk in the woods surrounding my studio to collect tree limbs and branches that have fallen to the ground. Next, I debark the branch to reveal the shapes that are found within each stick. Using a Japanese hand- saw, I cut and connect these small naturally formed shapes together using dowels and wood glue. Then, all the open joints get filled with a putty, which once dried is then sanded till it’s smooth. This putty and sanding process is repeated at least three times. The new sculpture appears like my original line drawing but in space. I want the work to appear as if it grew in nature, when in fact each sculpture is composed of hundreds of small pieces of wood that are meticulously crafted together.

My work can be called the ultimate recycling: taking the detritus of nature and giving it a new life. My influences are many; from looking at microscopic nature and plant life on this Earth to researching the heavenly bodies in the images beamed back from the Hubble Telescope. From studying ancient Buddhist mandalas and designs to delving deeper into quantum physics. From being inspired by the illustrations in the 15th century Voynich Manuscript to the black and white photographs from the photographer, Karl Blossfeldt, these influences are all an inspiration to me. I am interested in conveying with my work, the wonder and mysteries that are swirling and surrounding us daily.

Loren Eiferman was born in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA from SUNY Purchase. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the Tri-State region including gallery and museum exhibitions in NYC, the Hudson Valley and Connecticut. Her artwork is included in numerous corporate and private art collections. In 2014 she was awarded a NYC MTA Arts & Design art commission to produce steel railings for a Metro North train station. She currently maintains a studio in the Hudson Valley and can be found on Instagram at @loreneiferman.

Elise Siegel

Posted on September 25, 2024 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

My artwork has taken various forms over the course of my career. It has at times been more abstract or more representational, and I have employed a range of materials and processes. But my constant underlying motivation has been the desire to give concrete form to fragmentary bits of consciousness: moments of inner conflict, disquiet, ambivalence and unease; and in doing this, create work that generates a psychological tension with the viewer.

Since 2010, I have been creating ceramic portrait busts that explore the abstract edges of figurative representation. Although each of my sculptures is a distinct individual, none are portraits of specific people. Rather, my sculptures are meant to embody familiar psychic states while remaining open-ended, allowing viewers to bring a wide range of projections to the encounter. The challenge for me is to imbue each piece with the immediacy of human experience, and through the process of making, allow each sculpture to project a sense of its hidden life—to create an object that comes to life while remaining a thing.

My visual inspiration comes from a wide range of sources. I’m most drawn to figurative sculptures and sculptural objects that appear to have had some other cultural function, either in ritual or in daily life, in addition to being creative expressions. These are objects that humans have empowered: idols, reliquaries, masks and even toys. I’ve taken formal cues from the abstracted features and exaggerated forms of the Jomon Dogu figures of Neolithic Japan, as well as the hollow eyes of the Haniwah funeral figures from the third to sixth century A.D. For me, these sculptural objects—everything from Renaissance reliquary busts to medieval European iron helmets and masks from many cultures–continue to resonate as their meanings evolve over time.

The meaning of what I do is very much embedded in process—in all the ways I connect to my material. As much as possible, I want everything I perceive and feel and do in this process to be revealed in the resulting object. From early childhood and for most of my art career I have made things out of clay. No other material rivals clay’s immediacy, its capacity to register and record touch, and its ability to capture the experience of making.

I think of what I do as a kind of intimate interaction with the clay: a conversation, a dance, an exploration, or a wrestling match. Mainly, it’s an engagement in the unpredictable present moment, rather than an attempt at control. Hopefully, the resulting sculptures are embodiments of this experience.

My work has led me to think deeply about the transformative nature of our relationships with objects. Objects change us. We connect with them. We animate them, use them, learn from them, and empower them with all kinds of meaning and at times, even agency. This is the realm of the uncanny and the religious ritual. For me it is also the realm of art.

Elise Siegel (born 1952) is an American sculptor and installation artist based in New York. Raised in New Jersey, Siegel attended the University of Chicago, where she was introduced to ceramic sculpture by Ruth Duckworth. From there, Siegel transferred to the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr College of Art and Design) to continue with ceramics and sculpture in earnest. Siegel moved to New York in 1982.

Major exhibitions: Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, NY; Studio10; NY, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Nancy Margolis Gallery, NY; Third World Ceramics Biennial, Seoul, Korea; Garth Clark Project Space, NY; Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan Univ., CT, Jane Hartsook Gallery, NY; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS; and Halsey Gallery, College of Charleston, SC; Laurie Rubin Gallery, NY. Fellowships: Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, and 3 NYFA Fellowships. Other awards: Virginia A. Groot Foundation grant and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Public Collections: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Chazen Museum, Madison, WI; and Arario Gallery, Seoul, Korea.

Nancy Davidson

Posted on September 25, 2024 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

In this new series of drawings I explore the complex interplay between form and formlessness, a thematic continuation of my ongoing inflatable sculpture series. Just as my sculptures defy traditional boundaries with their dynamic, mutable shapes, these drawings delve into the fluid and often absurd nature of the human body, echoing the same sense of elastic transformation. The drawings are inspired by the concept of bodily inflation and deflation, capturing moments of both expansion and contraction that resonate with the physicality of my sculptural work. Each piece reflects a tension between rigidity and flexibility, much like the inflatable forms that swell and deflate in unpredictable rhythms.

A quote from Samuel Beckett, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on,” serves as a metaphor for the ceaseless cycle of growth and decay inherent in the human experience. Beckett’s depiction of the protagonist Winnie, ensnared in the absurdity of her predicament, parallels the existential themes of my art. The drawings, like Winnie’s struggle, embody the fleshly absurdities and ephemeral pleasures of existence, inviting viewers to confront the paradoxes of their own physicality.

Through these drawings, I seek to evoke a sense of both vulnerability and resilience, mirroring the tensions found in my inflatable sculptures. Together, they form a dialogue on the human condition—one that oscillates between the tangible and the intangible, the controlled and the uncontrollable.

Nancy Davidson is a contemporary artist whose practice encompasses sculpture, installation, and
photography and drawing. She focuses on exploring the female form, power dynamics, and societal expectations. Her innovative use of materials, such as inflatable latex sculptures, challenges traditional representations of femininity, blending humor with reflections on power and gender.

Davidson has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at prestigious galleries and institutions, including the ICA Philadelphia, Locust Projects Miami, and the Robert Miller Gallery. Davidson's contributions to contemporary art have been recognized with various awards and fellowships, such as the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Creative Capital Grant, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award.

Nancy Bowen

Posted on September 25, 2024 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

My work ranges from mixed media sculpture to collage to public art to literary collaboration. The common thread underlying it all is the collision of representation and abstraction which results in objects that exist in an in-between zone of form and idea. I present familiar forms and materials in unfamiliar juxtapositions to create an uneasy fusion of information and experience. My process has always been extremely inclusive; both in my approach to materials and in the imagery I source. I am as inspired by historical decorative arts and craft traditions as I am by Brancusi or Eva Hesse.

The group of sculptures shown here are made of a variety of materials including clay, glass, steel, wax, resin and other non-traditional mixed media. Often, I begin with a fragment of the female body which is complicated by the material aspects of the sculpture. My use of tactile materials combined with organic form accentuates the visceral sensuality of the work. I don’t know where I am headed when I start these pieces – I like to surprise myself by venturing into the unknown. Unconscious associations sometimes dictate forms or materials. The resulting sculptures become a site for projection, a mysterious addition to our rapidly changing material world.

Nancy Bowen has had solo exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, including at the Lesley Heller Gallery in NYC, Annina Nosei Gallery in NYC, Galerie Farideh Cadot in Paris, the Betsy Rosenfield gallery in Chicago, and the James Gallery in Houston. She has been included in group shows in various museums such as the Museum of Art and Design, the Neuberger Museum, the Tucson Museum of Art, and the Institut Franco- Americain in Rennes, among many others.

Bowen has won awards from Anonymous was a Woman, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Jentel Foundation, the Brown Foundation Fellowship at Dora Maar House, and the European Ceramic Work Center, among others.

Recently Bowen published her first book, in collaboration with the poet Elizabeth Willis: Spectral Evidence: the Witch Book (Litmus Press).

Bowen received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Hunter College (CUNY). She has taught at Bard College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Columbia University. She is a Professor Emerita of Sculpture at Purchase College, S.U.N.Y. She maintains a studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Zazu Swistel

Posted on May 21, 2024 by Posit Editor

Spatial Portrait of Katie and Alan: Ground-Level Landscapes (2023)

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Artist’s Statement

As a trained architect, I am dictated to by laws and codes but, as an artist, I believe in subversion and perversion; decay and decadence; and the downfall of manmade development and the insurgency of the natural and disordered. I have a desire to portray the mesmerizing, but also painful claustrophobia that comes with being controlled by one’s perception as it moves through actual and corrupted spaces.

Here, the majority of the pieces are from my so-called Spatial Portrait Series. The work consists of non-normative, conceptual drawings of rooms, or rather interpretations, of individuals’ “spatial memories.” To obtain these memories, rather than asking individuals to show me images, I instead ask them to use only their language to describe a combination of physical descriptions, narrative story-lines, and emotional states.

Through these pseudo-psychoanalytic interviews, I visually translate their architectural melancholia into reimagined drawings. Each piece is often displayed with either its recorded interview or poetry that I write based off the original verbiage. The result is a queered, unseen image of personal stories, bitter relationships, hate, love, and mental associations–all of which are attached to color, pieces of furniture, architectural objects, walls, etc.

The idea for this series partially grew out of my own frustration as an architectural designer–a job that often lacks imagination–and partially stemmed from the feeling that by reinterpreting memory, changes can transpire. My core medium is drawing and painting, but I often employ digital images, audio, and poetry when my hands are simply not enough.

The general opinion goes: Zazu Swistel is a lurking criticism in the built and fake environment. Zazu is a born and raised New Yorker currently working and living in their native metropolis. They graduated stoned with a liberal arts degree from Oberlin College; later received a politically charged master’s in architecture from the University of Virginia; then worked for a number of years in the architectural office profession; and now, remain an ambiguously gendered, half-Ukrainian, transdisciplinary artist, economically-fueled designer and high school history teacher.

Zazu’s work has been shown in galleries in Europe, as well as New York City. They have received fellowships from the Ellis Beauregard Foundation and A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, which concluded with a solo show entitled, “In a Vulgar Language: When Your Childhood Wasn’t Invited.”

Rona Pondick

Posted on May 21, 2024 by madeby18

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Artist’s Statement

For the last 40 years I have worked with the body.

In the 1980’s I began working with objects and fragments that invoke the body- including shoes, baby bottles, and teeth – trying to make wholes that were suggestive and psychologically acute. In the late 1990’s I made my first hybrid sculptures, marrying my own body parts with animals and trees.

I often say that “I am a material- holic who thinks with my hands.” I like working with a wide range of materials, using both hand modeling and cutting-edge technologies. I see tradition, materiality, and technology as providing tools for my exploration of the imagistic, the metaphoric and the psychologically suggestive.

I’ve had a long love affair with Franz Kafka. For me, metamorphosis, hybridity, and transformation are central. I like to draw from art-historical, literary, and scientific references- from ancient Egyptian sphinxes and Ovid’s retelling of classical mythology in the Metamorphoses, to contemporary cloning technologies.

Across the last four decades, I have experimented with materials, techniques, processes, and imagery, focusing on relationships between biography and mythology, the psychological and the bodily, the uncanny and the familiar, trying to embody some of the emotional complexities of human existence.

Rona Pondick lives and works in New York City. Since 1984 she has had 52 solo exhibitions of her
work in museums and galleries internationally, including Galleria d’Arte Moderna Bologna, Italy; Groninger Museum, Groningen, Netherlands; Rupertinum Museum für moderne und zeitgenössische Kunst, Salzburg, Austria; Cincinnati Art Museum; Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts; DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, Massachusetts; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; and Upper Belvedere, Vienna, Austria, among others.

Her sculptures have been included in over 250 group exhibitions, including numerous biennales worldwide: the Whitney Biennial, Lyon Biennale, Johannesburg Biennale, Sonsbeek, and Venice Biennale. Pondick has participated in group exhibitions at museums internationally including the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Peggy Guggenheim Foundation, Venice; Museo de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal; Ca’Pesaro, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, Venice; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, France; Pera Museum, Istanbul; Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Daimler Chrysler, Berlin; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among many others.

Her work is in 52 museum collections worldwide including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); The Morgan Library & Museum (New York, NY); Brooklyn Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles); Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas); San Francisco Museum of Art; New Orleans Museum of Art (Sculpture Garden); Toledo Museum of Art; The Nelson-Atkins Museum (Kansas City); Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh); Ursula Blickle Stiftung (Kraichtal, Germany); Centre Pompidou (Paris); and The Israel Museum (Jerusalem).

Pondick has received numerous awards and grants, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, Anonymous Was A Woman, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Cultural Department of the City of Salzburg, Kunstlerhaus, Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship, Mid-Atlantic Arts Grant, and others.

Catherine Howe

Posted on May 21, 2024 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

The many-hued paintings in “Wallflower” represent a catharsis, punctuating the end of a period of extreme isolation. After the shared solitude of the Covid outbreak, I was further sidelined by a diagnosis of blood cancer.

Excluded from socializing while undergoing treatment, I spent my days in the studio and the shaggy garden that surrounds it. My perennial companions were the local flora and fauna. While sitting things out, I focused on working and waiting and invited imagined partners to spin into my space.

The results are a group of paintings that are very different in their process and color-relationships, yet still linked to my past output. I could now really take my time and see what came up. These blooms spring wholly from this extended musing and an urge to anthropomorphize. They are purely invented and non-existent in nature, embodied in variegated brushstrokes on color fields of mutable, iridescent pigments.

It is a wet-into-wet process wherein nothing may stand still including myself, each piece being executed with full body engagement. Movement is an aspect of composition and function – both color and sheen shift as the viewer takes a step and realigns their view.

I imagined a garden of blooms in airy, watery spaces, or barely held captive by a vase. In my hopes, these flower figures possess a self-confidence and spirit that transcend earthbound woes.

It is now a world where nothing is alive without peril. This hard-won period of studio output reminded me it is also a paradise, where each day may see nature rising again to flourish still.

March, 2024

Catherine Howe received an MFA from SUNY Buffalo in 1983. The many publications that have reviewed her work include Art in America, Artforum, Art Critical, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times. Howe has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe for over thirty years, including shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, MoMA PS 1 in New York, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. She became Associate Director of White Columns in 1990, and in 2000, Chair of Faculty at the New York Academy of Art, where she taught MFA students for 21 years. She now paints full time in the Hudson Valley.

John Walker

Posted on January 23, 2024 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

John Walker’s oeuvre, spanning across over sixty years, has included a variety of abstract approaches bound together by a careful balance between raw and spontaneous movement, and mindfully structured space. Walker has been inspired at different times by the art of Oceania, European masters Goya, Manet, and Matisse, and the work of American Abstract Expressionists. Throughout his career he has utilized different shape and pattern motifs: in the 1980s, a time when his work was heavily influenced by the art of Oceania, his “Alba” shape (a loose reference to Goya) was a focus of most paintings; in the ’90s, polka-dots and egg-like orbs prevailed; and his 21st century work has included a variety of repeating amorphous shapes and zig-zag lines.

Much of Walker’s work of the last 20 years is based on the coast of Maine, where the artist lives. These abstract landscapes oscillate between spontaneity and a decidedly conscientious approach to shaping the architecture of the canvas. In a palette which ranges from crisp whites and primary and secondary colors to muddied, rusty browns, greys, and black, alongside gritty surfaces and carefully manipulated linear movement, Walker evokes the character of the New England coastal landscape.

John Walker (b. England 1939) is originally from Birmingham, England, attended the Mosely School of Art, the Birmingham School of Art, and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. His work can be found in museum collections including The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Gallery, Edinburgh; Tate Gallery, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.

The artist’s many teaching appointments throughout his lengthy career have included Cooper Union, Yale University, the Victoria College of the Arts in Melbourne, and the Royal College in London. He retired in 2015 from his position as the head of the graduate department in painting at Boston University.

Robert Feintuch

Posted on January 23, 2024 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

I want my work to be rooted in lived psychological life, so I try to recognize and work with a full and often contradictory range of desires around vulnerability, admiration, humiliation, beauty, self-aggrandizement; and increasingly, around power, moralizing and mortality.

I have a long history of using myself as a model and at times, I’m acutely aware that I have these desires myself, and I work to embody them. Other times I tell myself I’m trying things on, thinking – for better or worse – this stuff is broadly human. Either way, I really don’t see myself as doing any of this looking down on it from a position above.

Looking back, I can see that I’ve often been drawn to the thin line between grandeur and grandiosity, and while I’ve tried to make paintings that are felt, I am also instinctually drawn to parody. I think laughter operates a lot of different ways in the world. For me, it doesn’t prevent real feeling – it just helps as a way to get through.

Years ago, at one of my openings, a writer who had followed my work for years pointed at one of my paintings and said, ‘That is so painful, I can’t look at it.’ A couple of minutes later, an artist friend, pulling me in front of the same painting, said, ‘That’s one of the funniest paintings you’ve ever made.’ I loved both of those responses.

Robert Feintuch (b. 1953, Jersey City) is a painter who lives and works in New York. His paintings and drawings have been shown in solo and group exhibitions internationally at galleries and museums including Thomas Brambilla Gallery, Bergamo, Sonnabend Gallery, New York, Akira Ikeda Gallery, Berlin, CRG Gallery, New York, Daniel Newburg Gallery New York, Moskowitz/Bayse, Los Angeles, Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston, Studio La Citta, Verona, Remai Modern, Saskatoon, C’a Pesaro Galleria Internationale d’arte Moderna, Venice, Serralves Museum, Porto, Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Kraichtal, The Rupertinum, Salzburg, The Portland Museum of Art, Maine, Museum für moderne zeitgenössische Kunst, Bolzano, The Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Venice, and in the Venice Biennale. Feintuch has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Leube Foundation, Bogliasco Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships.

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