Works in progress

VERITAS ODIUM PARIT, Oil on linen, 5'x6', as of two days ago. I did a lot more work on it today and anticipate finishing next week. The figures will recede into that yellow galaxy center, and then I'll sort of mosaic-jpg-artifact-censor my least favorite moments.

I'm intending to submit this for the Diploma Exhibition. All are welcome to come to the reception/opening, Monday, May 11th from 6-8 at 111 Franklin St. in Tribeca (between Church and W. Broadway)




Respect the Autonomy of Inanimate Objects, acrylic underpainting on canvas, 6'x6'.
I'm using an odd technique, for Nicola Verlato, with this one in which I've been building up from a small drawing and making models, in clay and Poser, and then painting the whole thing in black and white acrylics before I go over it with space-photo colors. It has been intense, and involved, and queasy. It's the second largest painting I've ever done and the largest was actually the last time I used the same technique.




Several potential titles for this:

The Masochist Seduction Technique
Insults as Veiled Compliments (the little study I did for it can be Compliments As Veiled Insults, a pettier beast)
A Woman A Man Walked By (in tribute to PJ Harvey)

Opinions?

It's 3'x6', oils and silver acrylic on linen.

Janet's Recent Work

"Effect Affect", oil on canvas, 36"x42", March 2009.

In progress still:

VERITAS ODIUM PARIT, oil on linen, 6'x5'.

Deterration

This diploma thesis on Deleuzian optics and science studies goes some way towards explaining my influences, and is transformatively informative, too.
(yes, I switched to just a link, because it was too long for a cut, and figuring out cuts was more trouble than I thought it would be. You can't judge me.)

Panni Malek

website, mostly with work from Otis and illustration.

Panni is an Iranian painter raised in Los Angeles. Her paintings examine female sexuality, celebrating a lush, sensual, elaborate and fussy femininity. She perverts the masculine conceits of high art by embracing not just figurative representation, in warm colors and Sargent-like softness, but of kitsch subjects: kitties, titties,intricate interiors. There is a subversive element in every painting: sex toys, delicate profanity, a certain over-passivity.


oil on canvas, ~20"x30", 2008


(Self portrait in French abandoned house. oil on canvas, ~36"x48", 2008


oil on canvas, ~36"x24", 2008

Chris Marshall

I'm sorry for the hiatus! Things have been busy.

Marshall paints cool, atmospheric scenes that have the vague quality of childhood memories. Faces and gestures may drift into a blur with backgrounds. Careful elision accentuates an intense nostalgic affect, a sensation of significance without articulable meaning. He uses thin, evidential layers of an earthy, primarily opaque, palette influenced by Odd Nerdrum, with whom he has studied. He recently spent a summer in Leipzig and had an exhibition in Ireland.

All oils on linen, 2008, dimensions not precisely known but around 30"x30":

Armory Show highlights

Doug & Mike Starn's Amaterasu, a spinning, whirring dynamo, was the brightest feature of the Modern wing on Pier 92. Video selections from their installation last year, Big Bambu, also appeared.

Wei Dong's Chinese appropriations of Western painting:


What I saw of Alexi Worth was a large image of a man handling a woman, but I think I like the couples series even more.
His work carries on the semantic effect of Magritte's surreal clarity with greater stillness and less solipsism.

Pop Surrealist Kenny Scharf was the contemporary star of the show, with a mural outside and a friend carting around in a silver suit, just for the goofy mood of it all.

Also, they were giving out doughnuts. WIN.

Lutz & Guggisberg
For my own good, Ryan McGinness:


Mahomi Kunikata, "I Wish We Had Never Met, Cock Festival Edition"


The showings were really good from Mizuma from Tokyo.

Sashie Masakatsu:


Ikeda Manabu makes exhaustive pen drawings of landscape-objects. Reminds me of games probably actually derived from him, like Katamari Damacy and Shadow of the Colossus.

"Territory", 2004 pen, acrylic ink on paper, mounted on board 42x59.5cm

Iva Gueorguieva:

Dread Dimple Dawn

Beth Campbell's "My Potential Future Based On Present Circumstances" hit close to home.

It's a decision tree for a starving artist.

Overheard comment on pornographic shower curtains: "it would be really good for someone's funeral."

Speculative Introductory Art Syllabus

Note for schools: This syllabus has never been taught, but is intended as an introductory visual art course, admittedly more painting- and Western-oriented, incorporating slide lectures and work critique. It is set to a short semester and can be expanded in weeks 3, 5 and 6 or contracted.
Reading excerpts are about 30 pages a week on average.

Janet Bruesselbach
Inverse Art History & Practice

This course will subvert the causality implied in art history surveys by beginning with the contemporary and ending with the primeval. Noisy pluralism is thus slowly peeled layer by layer down to the most multiply-influential but less physically preserved styles and imagery. Classes will alternate between slide presentations paired with seminar discussions, and active assignments aiming to progressively forget. What if you could only remember the future?
Readings will be emailed or copies distributed the week they are assigned.

Grades: 50% assignments, 40% participation, 10% responsibility

Week 1: The Present. Relational Aesthetics, art as whatever can’t be otherwise defined, Late Capitalist market context. Nominally about something else by being about itself. Read: Jameson.
Assignment: Make/bring an example of what you do next week.

Week 2: Modernism. Negational logic and an aesthetic of taking to extremes. Simplicity and alienation. Read: Greene
Assignment: Make something that desires to be nothing more or less than itself. Think about what the most basic aspects of a visual statement are. Due Week 4.

Week 3: Realism and impressionism; imperialist appropriation. An isolation of perception and a re-observation of the everyday.
Assignment: Make something whose goal is observed representation of reality. Think ambitious, labor-intensive, scientific. Due Week 7.

Week 4: Romantic &. Academic: The beginnings of political modernity. Aiming for the representation of an idea. The dialectic.
Read: Hegel (tbd), Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Week 5: Rococo, Baroque, Mannerist. Art the same as entertainment. Popular and theatrical, art serves those in power: the church, increasingly. Decadence -> drama -> systematized. The significance of light.
Read: Kant (tbd).

Week 6: Early Modern / Renaissance: Exceeding the idealized era. Analysis of space and anatomy, linearity. Read: Panofsky, “Perspective as Symbolic Form”

Week 7: Gothic, Medieval: The submission of the individual to a greater social project and another world to come. Assignment critique.
Assignment: Create a sacred object. Due week 10.

Week 8: Roman: Art made by slaves / owned craftspeople. A multiple, hybrid society, homogenized brutally. Relief/pseudo-space, humanism. Read: Gibbon (tbd)

Week 9: Greek: Hellenic -> Classical -> Archaic. Harmony and the body as measure. Read: Aristotle.

Week 10: Egyptian: permanence, sustainability, timelessness – everything written in stone, taking as much time as necessary. Assignment Critique.
Final Project: visually engage as much history as possible; consider how we understand other times. Consider the present as layered pasts (Palimpsest).

Week 11: Mesopotamian: Hybrid society and the fundamental language of power.

Week 12: Neolithic & Paleolithic: Archetypal forms and the reasons for art. Cave paintings, decorated tools, venuses.

Week 13: Final project critique

Jaclyn Brown

Jaclyn Brown creates a world of nostalgia, satire and dreams with her oils. Viewing this work is like entering into an X-Rated Mary Poppins film, where past, present and future social structures are questioned through absurdity. (Canada, current Graduate student at The New York Academy of Art, 2008 resident of the KW Institute in Berlin, Germany.)
This stuff truly speaks for itself. Darger-like narrative obsessiveness meets female narcissism in Carrollian spaces.







She's featured in Siren's Warning, a show at Artspace in Hartford, next week.
four artists
three countries
new works by women of Generation Y

February 16th – 27th 2009
Gallery Hours: Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday 4-7 pm
Or by appointment at scustance@gmail.com

Opening Reception Saturday the 21st, 7 – 10 PM

Artspace Gallery - 555 Asylum Avenue - Hartford Ct, 06105

Jan Pecarka

Jan is a Slovakian artist whose work examines a scalar confusion of figure and landscape. At first they appeared separately, vast, smooth-seeming pieces of bodies and surfacey land. His best work places bodies on vast geographical scale: a woman waist deep in a planet her own size, a man hovering above a city, a figure either blue or in atmospheric perspective, toes on islands.


about 5'x7', 2008, I think. I just went to his studio and took these pictures because it's not up on his site yet.



He's having a solo show January 29th through February 11th at the Bohemian Benevolent & Literary Association at 321 E. 73rd St (between 1st and 2nd), 3rd Floor, NYC. (212) 988 1733
Reception 6:30 on the 29th. WON'T YOU

Teaching Philosophy

I feel that theory and practice can be the same, and especially that theory derives from practice. People often become too isolated in their own fields and exclusive about their influences, and don’t realize how much bodily and mental activities create knowledge. Many people shrug off not knowing how to see, as many feel about math. But learning how to represent should be requisite in learning how to think.

The way people think when they've always been about symbol manipulation, and don't think so much about the visual foundation of text, excludes a whole system of thought that may undermine so many biases. The more everyone knows the process of coordination and self-examination involved in visual art, the better – and the more about anything and everything that artists know, the better.

I am continuously learning something new, and part of what I want to teach is that everything artists find interesting is relevant to their thinking and their art: music, culture, the material everyday. Each person is their own universe and I want to encourage my students to keep their universes as open as possible. An ability to communicate and persuade is more critical in society and it’s important to connect it to visual rhetoric, although one of the major changes occurring is a proliferation and acceptance of non-verbal media.

When you've seen how differently everyone in a class depicts something you get a much more explicit illustration of how differently people process sense-input. That is something I aim to have my students recognize.

Janet's Statement

A bit of my own stuff while I work out who's up next and try to persuade people that free advertising isn't going to destroy them.

How is this? Does it match/describe the work well?

My figurative oil painting seeks to allegorize the autonomy of the inanimate object. I celebrate a female multiplicity by arbitrarily ordering disparate and similar images. Sensory overload and interplay between smooth and striated space incite affect. Imagery intuitively derived from science fiction and comic art maintains an amused contrarianism to categorization. Eclecticism induces a decentralized, eccentric perspective out of a mainstream and traditional medium. In search of levity, here is no automatic orientation; everything is both figure and background. The humanoid body, its agency compromised through merging with others, is nevertheless skillfully embraced through a fluid observational style, combining invention and self-representation through a democratic objectivity. Bodies shift colors, reflect and are reflected, both fully permeable and closed. Extremities and contradictions are sought through a hybrid middle ground.

Removed by request

Cecilia Roberts

is in the class of 2009 and has a website up, although it was last updated in summer 2008, so I'll put up some more recent paintings of hers soon.


Portrait of Mallory, oil on canvas, 2008. Anyone else reminded of Magritte's "Pleasure"?




Portrait of Antonia, oil on canvas, 2008. Antonia is a Greek printmaker and artist from the class of 2008, now working for Jeff Koons.




Self Portrait with Candy and Babies, etching?, 2008.

Cecilia paints intimate portraits that capture the idiosyncracies of personality. They develop out of a process of looking an interacting with her subject and their things, with a kind of improvisational feminist space structured by interest. Both her oil paintings and her prints show a quirky line by a quirky observer.

Having finally managed to gain access to this account again, I will be turning this into an art blog featuring students at The New York Academy of Art, and more. Stay tuned!


Janet Bruesselbach, "Portrait of the Artist as Grad Student", Oil on canvas, 28"x62", 2008.