Artist Talk with Jill Daves for Chasing the Sun

Deb Klowden Mann: Welcome to Jill Daves’ Chasing the Sun.  
Jill, I know one of the first things that people say when they come in is, ‘how do these two things—the paintings and the installation—relate, and where does the fascination with the sun come from?’

Jill Daves: They relate in the sense that both the paintings and the installation are really about the sun, and about marking time. The sun creates the wood, and it creates the wood grain as the tree grows every year. And in a sense, it’s a marking of time. In the wood grain it’s a marking of years, since each new line represents a year of life for the tree, and then whatever happens that we’re unaware of in that year is represented by the space between the grain.  And in the site-specific piece, it’s so transient that those shadows will never happen again, and even while I’m making them they are changing. So they are both kind of about this romantic loss, of trying to capture the unattainable.

DKM: One of the other things I’ve been seeing is that people come in and immediately see these paintings as a very organic and intuitive, about this natural process of moving with nature, and relating to natural patterns. In talking to you, I know that this is definitely true, but you also talk about the work as having this obsessive and controlled quality to it. Could you talk about the process a bit, and then talk a bit about the conversation and tension between those two aspects?

JD: Well, with the paintings it’s about finding a structure and deciding how many times I’m going to repeat it. And it’s usually based loosely on how far apart the sections of manufactured wood grain are (since the wood I paint on is not what occurs in nature, but is pieced together by a manufacturing company to a desired width). Different kinds of wood have their grains farther apart, or more subtle grain patterns in between. And then I start following that grain…And if I decide to more than just the first pattern I chose it’s because I think it’s not working. [laughs] It’s sort of really intuitive, and so I don’t know really how to explain why…

DKM: I guess what I’m asking is how you choose which path or part of the grain to follow? It seems clear in some of the paintings that you followed the strongest elements of the grain, but in others not as structurally obvious, and I’m wondering how you chose?

JD: I think I intuitively choose the parts that speak most strongly to me. And what happens is when you do things where it repeats like that, the pattern overlaps itself and it just becomes thicker where the different sections join and they got smashed together.

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Something Physical

front: Ben Rivera, Divided Form 2, wood, glass, charcoal, linen and felt, 71” x 71” x 24”

back: Ben Rivera and Frank Ryan, Yo Mamba, 2008-2012, oil-based ink and paint on linen, 42” x 96”

When we think about the act of experiencing art in a gallery setting a primal feeling of physicality isn’t the first thing that comes to mind, at least for me. I have often found myself surprised by the way in which art in a variety of settings can pull me outside of the structures (commodity structures? Maybe so) I habitually find myself living and thinking in, but not usually in an embodied way. My experience, even of very evocatively physical works—in subject or material—is still primarily an experience of conscious or emotional reaction, not of body.

For this reason, the last two shows at the gallery have surprised me. Living with art at home is a very particular and rewarding experience (have you read Ellen Caldwell’s “Gallerist At Home” series yet on the New American Paintings blog? It addresses this so well, and I’m honored that she’s going to be profiling me in August). Living with art at the gallery is a very different one. We get to experience the same work every day for weeks, without the distractions of life that one has at home, and we get to know it well on something close to its own terms. It makes impact on us, then we become immune for a moment, and then it sneaks up on us again.

With last month’s Ben Rivera, Frank Ryan, Rivera’s sculptures of chairs bisected by glass, Divided Form 1 and 2, were an intense experience of  physicality, one that I wasn’t expecting. Rivera said that he wanted the pieces to make people conscious of their bodies in space, and that they did. The invitation to sit that is so historically imbued in the chair form merged with the challenge proposed by the panes of glass was a potent combination. In front of those sculptures, we became bodies who might fall into a sharp corner, who might bleed, who might find our clumsiness paid for with shattering. And then, if we took the time, we became bodies with enough control to wonder. And that’s where it became something closer to what I believe Rivera intended. (Geoff Tuck wrote a great review of this show here). 

Bernard Chadwick, Isolation Booth: Drums, 2012, video loop with sound, wood, plaster, gesso, 70” x 46” x 22”  

Bernard Chadwick’s Synesthesia, as the title suggests, is in many ways about a cross-coversation and mixing of sensory experiences. Chadwick explores the relationship between the visual and the auditory, and as a musician and a visual artist, it’s a realtionship he thinks about a lot. But what surprised me once the show was installed wasn’t so much the thinking element of Chadwick’s work—being familiar with his process and the intellectual depth behind it, that was to be expected—but the physical effect of the exhibition. A projected video onto a plaster cast of a suitcase meant for musical equipment, stacked on top of a plaster construction of an organ, actually does make my senses confused. I want to pick things up, to move them, to knock them over, to turn on the lights. And then I calm down, and I want to watch and to listen to the music that accompanies many of Chadwick’s pieces, some with a fundamental and insistent beat, some with sweet tones made on a children’s xylophone following imagery that is just is just as fundamental and insistent. A large circle of orange on a painting that is still dripping on my gallery floors with its mixture of tang and glue.  Chadwick’s work makes me conscious of the vulnerability and power of the elements of my body that are in charge of taking in sensory experience. By confusing those elements, refusing finished form, and inviting something close to participation, I believe Chadwick creates a strong counter-argument to the commercial culture of looking and listening to which we are accustomed. More on that when we discuss his two Listening Events.

— DKM

Synesthesia, East gallery installation, with Tang Eyeball Moon on the back wall

 And just for fun, here is a video Bernard took while he was making Tang Eyeball Moon. Enjoy!

Interview with Rebecca Farr January 10, 2012

The following interview began as a casual conversation between Deb and Rebecca, of the kind that often precedes the writing of press releases and overall conceptualization of a show as it will be presented on the gallery walls.  However, Rebecca’s thoughts about her upcoming show edge offered such a wonderful articulation of her process, and the rigorous yet non-linear manner with which she approaches her subject matter, that we felt they needed to be shared.  A few minutes into the conversation (which took place in the gallery’s kitchen), Deb ran to get something with which she could record the rest of their dialogue.  Here are the results, and we hope that you enjoy them as much as we did.

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Rebecca Farr in her studio, photo by Lisa Romerein.

Artist Talk with David Lloyd for Monas Hieroglyphica, at gallery km in Santa Monica on Thursday, December 1st.

 

Deb Klowden Mann:  Thank you everyone so much for coming to hear David talk about this great show, Monas Hieroglyphica.  We love it, it’s a great body of work.  I have to say, we’ve been living with it at the gallery for five weeks now, and I’m still seeing things I haven’t seen before.  There was a man who came in to see the work a couple of days ago, someone who looks at a lot of art, and he kept standing in front of this painting and saying, “I keep seeing things!  I keep seeing things!” But it really is work that brings that out in just about everyone who gets a chance to view it, which is pretty exciting.

So, there are so many different possible places to start, but should we start with this show, and the name of the show, and go from there?  What is Monas Hieroglyphica? 

David Lloyd:  Well, it’s a… you discovered a couple of things about it… It’s a manuscript by a 15th century philosopher, mystic and astrologer named John Dee, who was trying to put together kind of a theory of everything.  I’ve read some of it and it is utterly indecipherable.  Which is, I think, really interesting, because [the manuscript] is pages and pages of stuff that nobody can figure out, but it seems smart.  It’s kind of smart and unknowable at the same time, and I feel like this [exhibition] is kind of smart and dumb at the same time in a similar way.  When I say dumb, I mean it in the sense that I’m interested in a lot of fringe ideas.  I’m interested in things that are really considered way out there, and exist on the edge of what most people consider normal dialogue.  My wife is here tonight, and she makes fun of me because I go on the internet and look at all this information about UFO’s and astrology and Christianity and Judaism and Islam and the way all of this stuff goes together.  It kind of becomes this soup that I’m trying to make sense of.  

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