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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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!

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Rebecca Farr in her studio, photo by Lisa Romerein.

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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When Jackson and Sienna and I first discussed what they were going to do for their collaborative installation at the gallery, there were a number of funny and ambitious ideas tossed around.  After coming by to take very precise measurements of the layout of the gallery (still the best floorplans we have in our own records of the space, in fact), it was decided that they would go home, mull things over, and come back at us with an Official Proposal.  Recently, when writing out the show statement for our press release, I came back upon this great little dialogue between the two artists.  I asked their permission to share it online because I feel it gives a real sense of the conversation between the two of them as artists, and all that can happen when our usual tendency to shy away from the personal and familial in our professional lives is replaced by a desire to harness the power of those relationships and the multiple levels on which they can enhance our powers of expression. 

What the De Govias have created with Angel City Eats is intergenerational, familiar, intelligent, and a very funny and insightful measure of our cultural appetites.  It is also something that neither of them could have conceived alone.  

Though there are a few things in the Official Proposal that were not realized in the final exhibition (no large birds or cats or police helicopter pinatas), there are a number of additions that suprised the artists along the way.  I hope you enjoy reading their thoughts as much as I did.

— DKM

Jackson and Sienna stand in front of Con Woman at New Year’s on the evening of the opening.

Official Proposal for ANGEL CITY EATS

SIENNA:

Creepy food sculpture in walk-in dioramas…

JACK:

We look at LA through the prisms of vintage Dragnet and today’s Kardashian Reality.  The rectilinear aridity of Joe Friday’s matter-of-fact Los Angeles - “This is the City.  Los Angeles, California…” became Kourtney Kardashian’s flamboyant, vacuous paradise.  A cop doggedly collaring petty criminals while living on coffee and cigarettes, a self-made celebrity Princess who presides over, and perhaps is made of, really complicated eats that are bad for you:  what do these icons signify?  

We don’t know, but we’re coming at them through food.

SIENNA:

I view the edible object as a means for evoking an emotional response.  We all gotta eat, and food is problematic.  Especially in our fair city, no, in our whole country.  We are over-consuming to a massive degree and nearly everything we eat is artificial and heavily processed.  Some people view Los Angeles that way, artificial and heavily processed.    A place where a living breathing cream puff (Kourtney Kardashian) walks…  

JACK:

…the meaningless streets where Jack Webb once drove, caffeinated and nicotined.
After years (and years) of designing for the flat screen I’m fascinated by the possibilities of two dimensional objects liberated from their backgrounds and presented in planar layers.  Thus Sienna’s visionary sculptural edibles can be seen in subtly changing contexts.

SIENNA:

Truly, I make sculptures of food because it’s what I like to do.  As we start making things they will begin to tie together and make sense.

JACK:

We will set them in East Hollywood, our neighborhood, in venues we know and love.

SIENNA:

Some pieces I will make are:

3-D donuts with a sordid interior

tiny desserts on pins stuck into dolls (foodoo dolls!)

heavily weighted meat products

police helicopter pinatas spilling polymer candy

soft sculptures dusted in cocoa powder - perhaps the stuffed animals left at a roadside altar for the felled donut.

hot wax or coconut oil revealing objects suspended within Mexican votive candles at the altar

motorized marching boots on the sordid side of the neighborhood

JACK:

There will be cats, also, and maybe a few large birds.

I have been living with the images from Maquette since I first saw them on a computer screen just under one year ago. The members of Maquette— principally Matthew Anthony Stokes and Dirk Hendrikx, along with Robert Bennett, Ulrike Koennecke and Guillaume Panneau— have been living with these images since they began working together 22 years ago, through the nine years of their collaboration, and during the 14 years between the period of activity and their current incarnation on our gallery walls.

The tableaux and films of Maquette are resolutely and unapologetically dramatic, as seems fitting of a collaborative project that found its routes in the study of corporeal dramaturgy in 1980’s Paris with the aging but still formidable Étienne Decroux.  The images present us with an escapist alternative reality, but unlike the escapism we are accustomed to in our culture’s current mode of daily experiential overload, these moments of performance caught on film do all they can to resist the commodification so prevalent in most of fantasy’s contemporary manifestations.  What Maquette creates instead is a kind of willful nostalgia without teleology.  Here, the object of our longing is not a moment that existed in an idealized past, nor one that is posited as a future outgrowth of our current technological frenzy, but a temporal reality that exists everywhere sideways, a potent possibility for those with the right mix of absurdity, creative vision and powerful belief to access it.  

Maquette offers us ourselves, in all of our oddities and ego (or egoless) states.  It is earnest, as Matthew Anthony Stokes has often said to me, “almost incredibly naïve in some ways, but fantastic and powerful as well,” and in its earnestness and naivety it has the ability to make us nervous (a potent power, indeed).  The work is incongruous but not ironic, complex but not intellectual, unreasonable but not emotionless, and as such it places us firmly outside of our contemporary comfort zone.  Somewhere in the state of fascination, confusion, wonder and anxiety in which we find ourselves while looking at this work, there is also something like the seeds of an unsentimentalized inspiration. 

Though Maquette received a great deal of attention in Europe before they chose to walk away from their collaboration, we are honored to present their work for the first time to an American audience.