Scott Olson

Untitled, 2004, oil and collage on canvas, 16" x 14"

Untitled, 2005, oil on wood, 13" x 9"

Untitled, 2005, oil on canvas, 15" x 12"

Untitled, 2008, oil and acrylic on canvas, 18" x 12"

After experimenting with sound and sculpture, Olson started painting around 2004. Since then, he has been consistently working on these small-scale abstractions. While there is an obvious conceptual, even technical thread, the newer works are more refined and focused.

Last weekend, I stopped by for a second look at his current show at Taxter and Spengemann. After seeing the Thomas Nozkowski show (how many paintings can we cram into one space?), I was excited by the subtleties of these intimate works that don't try to do too much. Where Nozkowski's works are beginning to appear nostalgic, Olson's are less deliberate, understated, and ultimately personal. The show closes May 10.

Update: Roberta Smith on Olson in the NYT "Is Painting Small the Next Big Thing?"

Sam Gibbons

M is for..., 2003 , acrylic on canvas, 36" x 48"

Attackers, 2003, acrylic on canvas, 24" x 24"

Filthy, 2003, acrylic on canvas, 36" x 48"

Flag Wizard, 2008, acrylic on carved wood panel, 38" x 45"

Sam is currently showing a group of great new work at Claire Oliver, which closes April 12. Go see it. We are going to do an interview in the not too distant future. I'll post an update when that happens...

Also check out his seriously sweet band called Sally Fields, and his website.

Perfect Strangers Daily Operation

This weekend is the last chance to see Perfect Strangers Daily Operation, the first show at Daily Operation. Send me an email if you'd like to stop by. The press release follows...

Perfect Strangers Daily Operation brings together eight artists for a special one-week exhibition. Representing a variety of current practices, these artists are comfortable being conflicted, ambiguous, and unrestricted. Rather than being didactic, each work operates as a kind of visual non sequitur where convention is borrowed and then displaced.

Patrick Brennan and Jasmine Justice each sustain a nonchalant approach to painting, but this approach reveals itself differently. Through layering, Brennan pits the decorative and crafty against the sensual and utterly esthetic. In Justice’s paintings, there is an initial appearance of completeness, which unravels slowly to uncover a playful and open-ended experimentation.

While unrelated in process, Gianna Commito and Jesse Hamerman each work with an anti-formulaic space. In Commito’s watercolors, a lyrical, soft-edge geometry intersects with meticulousness for perspectival, formal, and literal vagueness. Similarly vigorous, Hamerman reduces the signatures of public personas to sculpted, abstract line drawings, masking any referential content.

Aaron Steffes and Mark Stockton address the awkward nature of celebrity. Steffes envisions popular fiction writers transplanted from their book jackets into cramped apartments and surrounded by strange plants. Taken from sources like film stills and press photos, Stockton’s intimate and detailed portraits of well-known personalities simultaneously mimic, mock, and revere their subjects.

J.D. Walsh and Jaime Gecker carefully construct their arrangements of borrowed material, but they depart in their chosen subjects and manner of execution. Walsh uses a self-invented computer program that randomly generates text and images and projects them in rhythmic patterns onto wall constructions. Gecker photographs, dissects, and reconfigures film stills into paintings with miniaturized, conflated scenes with hazy narratives.















Images, from left to right, top to bottom:
Jaime Gecker, All time cut-up, 2008, photo transfer, latex and spray paint on canvas, 20" x 16"
Gianna Commito, untitled, 2008, casein and watercolor on panel, 10" x 9"
JD Walsh, Manual Blues, 2008, DVD derived from custom software, video, wood, metronome, dimensions variable
Aaron Steffes, Tom Clancy at my place on the eve of Baghdad’s liberation, 2008, ink on paper, 7" x 6"
Jesse Hamerman, My Signature Works (miss congeniality), 2008, foam, joint compound, paint, 31.5” x 21” x 2”
Patrick Brennan, untitled, 2008, acrylic, spray paint, and collage on canvas, 12" x 12"
Mark Stockton, Madonna I (After Lee Friedlander), 2008, graphite on BFK Rives, 6” x 4”
Jasmine Justice, untitled, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 20” x 10”







PSDO on Matthews the Younger.

EJ Hauser

so below, 2007, oil on wood panel, 20 x 16 inches

EJ Hauser's current show at Never Work underscores the relationship between her different manners of working. Moving from thick, painterly pseudo-landscapes to highly detailed and laborious renderings of letter after letter, her meandering studio practice produces a body of work that spins off of a reverence for language.

If there is one conceptual thread throughout the past few years, it is that she has used text as starting point. I asked her to talk a little about words and their emergence, presence, and evolution in her work...

I have always written words down on the surface of my paintings as a way to begin, as a starting point, as a way to secretly inform what I hoped the painting could be about. Whether or not these words ended up having any influence on the finished paintings is unclear, but I used words as a system for starting work. Words were a layer underneath, and mostly hidden. Occasionally words or numbers would end up out in the world as actual work (like the small pink encaustic / glue piece). Then in 2000-2004 there were some paintings I did where I focused on one word and I would work and work the painting until I felt like the words had earned their right to be out there in the world but all this paint working had the effect of sucking the life out of what I was working on. I kind of gave up on words on the outside of paintings for awhile.

untitled, 1999/2000, paper, glue, and encaustic wax, 10” x 10” x 2”

a word moves about in the shadows and swells the draperies, 2007, oil and enamel on wood panel, 36” x 56”

Hauser’s work is interesting in a discussion of the old and the new in that the older work is literally buried beneath the new, finished works of 2007/8. This is true for both for the Untitled wax work from 1999/2000 and the my personal favorite from the show, "a word moves about in the shadows and swells the draperies” from 2007. Coming a little ahead of it's time, the former began as a page from her notebook and was eventually embedded in glue and covered over in wax. The latter took five years to finish and contains her experiments with written words, layering, texture, and design. In the end, its was all painted over in a contrast of a shining/reflected black landscaped silhouette over a matte black ground.

The skateboard below was actually the first work where she really let text out into the world. Initially, the work came together as a gift and was not particularly meant to lead any direction. Instead, it opened up a new, more directly personal avenue for her.

untitled, 2006, oil and enamel on skateboard

She went on to discuss more about the origin of her attraction to text:

Obviously I like to print. I like to craft letters with care. My father and grandfather, both engineers, only really printed. I think because their handwriting was illegible but also I think it is what engineers do. They are scientific and they need to be clear, so they print. In this way, for me, printing is a family tradition.

My word paintings are like recordings, like snapshots, exposed notebooks, or dedications to other words I care about (my own or others). ‘Capturing’ all these words also plays into my fantasy as being a kind of art-scientist.. As art-scientist, I sometimes devise a more unified word structure / program inside one painting, other times I create multiple mini-programs that work independently inside one piece. The impetuous for these paintings is about talking as well as reading and recording. I find it important to try out word combinations / juxtapositions by saying them aloud. Some word strings I want to write down because they sound good.

forces trying to get in touch with one another, 2006,
oil on newspaper, 6" x 8"

Be sure to see her show at Never Work before it closes on March 30.

Tim Laun

The artist loading footballs in Hangtime, 2005 at Socrates Sculpture Park

Over the past few years, Tim Laun has been making works specifically related to the Greenbay Packers and the career of their star quarterback Brett Favre. He uses his lifetime love of the team as a kind of armature to highlight what is a rarely explored, but reasonable connection between sport and art: temporal experience.

In Hangtime from 2005, he installed an automatic football-throwing machine at Socrates Sculpture Park. Set to simulate the long and high arc of a kick-off, the ball would be received in a designated area designed by Laun (one where dry grass was converted to a rectangular patch of a football field and another where he dug a shallow, square trench around the spot). People lined up to catch the balls in the transformed spaces while Laun loaded the machine and photographed the receivers at the moment they catch the ball.

Diagram of Hangtime, 2005

His long-standing project, called the FavreEra Cyclorama is designed as a monument to Favre’s unprecedented career. Laun proposes to present the entirety of Favre's career by replaying each game, complete with commercials, in a panorama of televisions.

Many of Laun’s other works have acted, at least tangentially, as theoretical supports for the cyclorama. Hangtime is unique in that it does not directly reference the Packers and it was a performed action, outside of the gallery setting. Here, a simple, universal gesture was stressed and the demonstration itself fostered a more practical understanding about how such personal reverence for football can emerge.

photo of a receiver from Hangtime, 2005

On the occasion of his show, "Tim Laun: Sunday, September 20th, 1992" at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, he discussed with curator Jane Simon, his work in relation to time and art history.

"I think a piece like Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson is a useful example, in that the completion of that artwork was outside the artist’s control. After Smithson created Spiral Jetty it immediately began to erode and has mostly been preserved through documentation and cultural memory. The temporal nature of sporting events can be fleeting and seem meaningless, and also fade away. So, what I wanted to do is give form to something that was otherwise inherently ephemeral—the streak or arc of an athletic achievement."

His current show at Parker’s Box includes a major work called, “Don Majkowski (Sunday, September 20th, 1992), 2007 .” It is a large scale dot matrix rendering of the quarterback in his last game, injured and lying alone on the field. Favre subsequently filled in and had been their quarterback in every game since. This is the LAST weekend to check out the Parker's Box show- it closes March 3.