Art and Astronomy

An article I read about private funding for telescopes reminded me why I use space photography in my paintings. Both these disciplines have appealed to me for most of my life. They have similar positions of purity, or of transcendence, of a near-complete irrelevance to the mundane, the practical, and the necessary. In a way, they are the least humane human pursuits, which all the contradiction that entails. They therefore use similar justifications for their expenses, relying primarily on an appeal to aethetics, curiosity, and values about the search for truth.


There are, of course, both exceptions and loopholes. The best art engages directly with political, social, and economic interests, and part of the liberal and radical tendency of art is based on a goal of greater leisure and freedom to make useless objects. Astronomical research can be the source of better understanding of consistent and inconsistent physical laws, which has led to technological innovation. Most of the research that serves purely to disabuse society of superstition has been done. Monitoring for potentially disastrous comets or meteors is a not-insignificant part of astronomy, as is study of other planets to better understand where we're living.

But it's not those parts that interest me. It's the selling of what is superfluous even to a society based on the escalating transformation of wants into needs. Super-saturated, highly-manipulated photographs of interstellar gases are in one way a byproduct of billions invested in telescopes for better pure research, but in another way, they sell the research. By using them in paintings and digital sketches, I insert the efforts and investment of an entire industrial network, of what some might consider the loftiest achievements of "civilization". There's a sense of wonder there, and a sense of absurd amusement at the forgetting of wonder.

The sensation of a density of information, essentially indecipherable, behind an expensive image, is also why I consider all my work to be about knowledge, communication, and cybernetics. The final step, the work I do in nearly the least technologically entrenched medium that allows full color, involves the re-creation of signal from the noise remaining from an entirely different signal. Interstellar and intergalactic images are extremely lossy - as with any scientific measurement, entropy rules, and we only see a small part of the vast system we want to describe. Light from so far away is also light from far in the past - cosmology makes us recognize time's dimensionality. It's like archaeology in that much of the causality is lost. We're also looking at essentially a snapshot, since very little changes at that scale at biological speed. We haven't been observing long, nor may we be able to much longer, since it's possible astrophysical research itself was a cold war symptom. We can only observe from one angle, enforcing the primacy of two-dimensionality that I embrace with the abolition of ground. I replace space with space. Time becomes the uncertain palimpsest of historical process, the abstract unidentifiability of the original image. It's a discussion of re-interpretation, the use of one useless thing by another useless thing, and a celebration of affording any of it.

A Letter for the Younger Generation

This is by Steve Cannon and Chavisa Woods
bdlilrbt@gmail.com- (Chavisa's email)
www.tribes.org

You must remember, it was the exciting sixties when all the contradictions of American society showed their ugly face. There was a fight against racism and of course, the was a fight against the war in Vietnam. And of course there were other fights as well on a local Level. Then also, feminism was just emerging, the same with gay rights. As writers, we were concerned (and the same was true with most other types of artists at that time) not only with our own voices being heard, but that whatever we said or did would have impact on the society at large. We argued incessantly with one another. We critiqued the civil rights movement and the anti war movement in terms of do’s and don’ts. As artists we did not believe that we should “join” a movement, but, as Picasso is quoted in Marshal McLuhan’s “Understanding Media”, that artists are by nature, anarchists. Our job was to stand outside the movements and look in. Aside from arguing, of course we listened to lots and lots of music. It wasn’t only that crowd that invaded the states from England, like the Beatles, but also that crowd from Detroit; meaning Motown, etc. Of course there were people like James Brown, later Bon Marley, and Aretha Franklin yelling and screaming, “RESPECT.”



Everything was cut and dry, or, to use a cliche, black and white. Every weekend we would go to demonstrations, and after, party all night. ACID was in, so was Marijuana. The hard drugs, we stayed away from. But bear in mind, as far as we were concerned, everything in the country, especially communities in the lower east side, Venice beach, et.- wherever Bohemians lived, was involved actively in changing the country.



We read everything we could get our hands on, criticized it, and came up with our own ideas of what should be done to make changes in our local communities. We started our own presses, others started making their own independent movies, and others founded art galleries, collectives, etc. in contrast to the “establishment.” Fact is, we made our own newspaper called the East Village Other, which was involved with the LNS, newspapers like the LA Free Press, etc.



The difference between then and now, is everything was clear-cut, we knew the lines of offence and defense. Things are much more complicated for young people now, and on this note, I will let a twenty-something speak for her own generation.



The American radicals of the sixties had a distinctively oppressive culture, which they rebelled against and re-structured. When critiquing the current generation, you must not forget, they raised us. The lost hippies the un-caged panthers, the beat beats, the rockin’ rolling punks, are our fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles and bosses. Although those movements played a vital role in re-structuring the social mores and influencing today’s social codes, as far as getting to the core of it, abolishing the very thing that actually divides us (as sexism racism, homophobia, etc.. are obvious symptoms of that which even the most radical movements of the past failed to abolish) the hierarchical corporate (free market) class structure and the corporate military industrial complex. These are the institutions many of the radicals of the past eventually joined and helped to continue to create; when they reached a certain age, as Valerie Solanas warned, many of them did, “whisk their partners off to suburbs” to raise, us. We are the children of the eighties, the time of excess, riches, sexual freedom, celebration of individualism, tabu, etc.. Even those of us who were raised in lower class families were also raised with these icons and symbols of sensationalized individual success and fame as a future promise, only to find ourselves in massive debt, often time without any sense or experience real and vital of community upon reaching adulthood.

Still, you must recognize there are and have been real radical movements and communities created by the twenty something’s of today . Those of you who know will know, when I say, Stone Soup, CAMP, Slingshot, anywhere IMC, Idapalooza, Influx, and on and on it goes. From California to Chicago, to New York, to Tennessee and back up, the radical dykes of the sixties had womyn’s land, and we had/have a network of crusty collectives and we will surely look back on our days of protest and alternative lifestyles with the same nostalgia the sixties radicals do theirs , although, it seems, many of the older generation know nothing of this.

And this is the greater problem. Our generation’s radical re-structuring has consisted mainly of personal lifestyle politics, influenced no doubt by the mainstream indicators of our youth; taking on the form of urban farming, thifting, DIY, collective living, queerness, etc.. with some vital political and environmental action interspersed throughout. In order not to fall into the trap of the focus of our lives becoming personal survival upon reaching a more real adulthood, we, the younger radicals must make a conscious continuous effort to diversify. We must continue to create new movements hand in hand with the older generation, not be afraid to critique one another and accept critique, and above all we must find some way to believe, as the radicals of the past did, that we can have some real effect and impact on the MTV Militarized super dome projecting those binary images of pornographied success we seem to have been born into.

Portraits of charismatic men

Virgil, oils on linen, 12"x12".


Steve Cannon, oils on linen, 16"x20".
A blind subject is interesting because the object doesn't gaze back.

Works in progress

Titles possible: "Misunderstand Me", "Make People Like You". Oils on canvas, 24"x24". Invention, intended to tile.


Potential titles are "Reproductive Display", "Humor Me", "Make People Like You". Oils on canvas, 40"x40"? Working from models. Nebula base will change, otherwise would be recycling the Tarantula from "I Am Whatever You Say I Am", although a different photo.

Nothing for Itself Catalog

Nothing for Itself – Price List

1. Allison Moore, "Easter Lambs at Veniero's", 24"x24" oil on panel, 2007, $1000


2. Janet Bruesselbach, "Entitled Mediocrity", oils on linen, 12"x12", $600


3. Allison Moore, "The Most Expensive Perfumes in the World for Less", 24"x24" oil on canvas 2008 $1200

4. Janet Bruesselbach, "I'm Doing What I Wanna Do", oils on linen, 32"x32", 2008, $1200


5. Jason Talley, right panel of triptych “Karma Sutra” 7x5 ft. $30,000


6. Janet Bruesselbach, "I Am Whatever You Say I Am", oils on canvas, 32"x35", 2008, $3000


7. Allison Moore, "Bodega II", 38"x46" oil on canvas 2008 $3000


8. JS Flores, “Depleting silence”, Oil on canvas 48”X60” 2009, $6000


9. Janet Bruesselbach, "Misogynation", oils on linen/cotton blend, 36"x36", 2008, $3000


10. JS Flores, “Remanence of glee”, Oil on birch panel 48”X36” 2009, $4000


11. Janet Bruesselbach, "Alexithymia", oils on canvas in found frame, 26"x34", 2008, $1500


12. Janet Bruesselbach, "It's Something You Would Do If You Were Me", oils on linen, 23"x32", 2008, $2300


13. Jason Talley, “Velvet” oil on canvas 8”x12” $1000


14. Allison Moore, "Seafood Buffet, Revisited", 36"x52" oil on canvas, 2007 $2500


15. Jason Talley, Wet#1 oil on canvas 5by6 ft $20,000


16. Janet Bruesselbach, "I Know What I'm Doing: I Don't Know What I'm Doing", oils on canvas, 23"x36", 2007, $2000


Nothing for Itself: Pluralist Paintings Born in the Middle of Salad
Curatorial Statement by Janet Bruesselbach, M.F.A., T.M.I.

The concept of “nothing for itself” came about in the conversation between representation and diversity. Representative objects are xenophiles, other-lovers. The frequency of sexual imagery in this show acts as an attractor towards further replication of people and things. Representation and diversity are organic, and, seeing culture as an ecology, benefit the whole system. At the same time, any individual artwork, and any one of its settings, can be seen as its own system. These paintings are outcomes of open-ended processes, in which individual parts respond dynamically to each other. Any of these artists could show alone, but we have chosen to divert and diversify.
The Lower East Side is often described as having both vivacity and diversity, in that there are cultures continually warring each other -- long habituated, although not necessarily superlatively so, to the continual financial encroachment cycle of NYC. There is a particular tendency towards a kind of micro-radicalism, an insistence on artists remaining equally poor but supporting each other within, and in direct resistance to, one of the most purely fiscally motivated geographies in the world.
The city is rich in resources that art needs to reproduce itself – money, and attention. So the image of NYC is fixated on raw competition, self-awareness, and its own marketability. A kind of continually fulfilled desire for plurality over a gained majority, as with people and groups of people, motivates a democratic culture. Yet moderation, collaboration, or cooperation for its own sake cannot benefit other qualities. Such is the melting pot to the salad. The qualities that attract resources are not necessarily aesthetic, although the concept of considering what takes a greater share of resources aesthetically superior has its own attraction. We choose to counteract the qualities of self-aggrandizement and narcissism. Some things will be for their own sake, others for the sake of others, some in a continuous chain, some in loops, all in complicatedly interdependent relationships.
This is not another gripe about commoditization and the market, nor does it praise it. If it contradicts itself, all the better. Although any solo show exists in a jungle of other art within the same market, the generous aim of diversity in Nothing For Itself permeates fractally within the individual works, artists, painting styles, the show, the neighborhood, the city, the country, the world, and the multiverse.
In the current economic stall, it has become important to develop economies of generosity beyond, and instead of, financial ones. JS Flores’s recently executed painting reflects the feeling of the times, of a multitude of desperate people competing for nothing more than your attention. In Allison Moore’s interpretations of images from nearby locales, displays of variety awaiting the choice of the consumer become competitions between the very colors and shapes used to represent them. Like Moore, Bruesselbach dizzies and disorients, to the point of making explicitly depicted human bodies flatten and abstract, in parody of the flattening liquidation of material culture. Talley also uses the most eye-capturing possible images, taken from pornography, and saturated colors appealing to inner and outer children. Yet the compositions are continuous playful processes more open-ended than traditional representation.
Through three of the four artists, California manifests strongly in this show, particularly the distributed post-city of Los Angeles. Certainly the imagery addresses distinctly American experiences, including two second-generation meso-Americans, a product of secular Jewish matriarchy, and an African-American from D.C.
To divertify is to desire that by being set with each other, the qualities of any given piece of this show become greater. Hope that they are not ends in themselves. Intend to be for something else, not because it is for itself, but because it is for many others. Be a nature preserve for endangered ideas. See something else in everything, and take nothing for itself.

Nada para si Mismo

(Translacion para JS Flores)

Pinturas de diversidad, Nacido en el centro de ensalada
Octubre 1-31
Apertura Sabado 3 de Octubre 6-9 PM
Una exibicion de emergiendo jovenes artistas en una irracional exuberante involucracion con la ciudad, coadjuntor Janet Bruesselbach con Allison Moore, Jason Talley, y Julio Stanly Flores
La divesidad de estos artistas emerge en contraste con su similaridad. Se ocupan con el cuerpo humano y el tacto de la pintura. La representation se presta al objeto y se somete a una orgia de realimentacion. Esta no es arte por su propia cuenta, pero es cualquier cosa por la razon de ser algo mas. Vivacidad es el intercabio entre el cuerpo y sus alrededores, y la ciudad de New York todavia en su post-modernidad modernidad da vida a nuestras imagenes. Llenas de chaos pero completamente intencional, estos enbudos de deseo, su entropia, y la vida de los objetos que ellos sugieren, hacen un carnaval lleno de color para el otoño.
Allison Moore genera respuestas neo–cubista al Mercado del medio ambiente, en espeluznante, y intoxicante formas y colores. Es bi-costal.
Jason Talley supremamente delinea y forma figuras y jugetes en una manera erotica con ideas freudianas, jugando con la claridad en su lenguaje y nuestra resintencial a el.
JS Flores ataca la superficie de pinturas figurativas, apareando effectos visuals con su tactilidad. Sus figuras estan envueltas en su material dandoles una presencia poderosa. Esto engrana una tension a la destrucion de la piel humana.
Janet Bruesselbach improvisa y acomoda pinturas en olios surreales con indiferencia jugando con la gravedad y la profundidad, en donde todo se convierte en figura.
Tambien al ser la viva imagen, “nacido en el centro de ensalada” es aquella matafora anti-utopica de New York no como punto de fusion pero, en la manera inperfecta de todas otras metaforas, un multicultural, multi directional conglomerado de gustos.
Para mas informacion, contacte a janet@bruesselbach.com / (310) 617-3366

Nothing for Itself - Curatorial Statement

Pluralist Paintings, Born in the Middle of Salad

The concept of “nothing for itself” came about in the conversation between representation and diversity. Representative objects are xenophiles, referring away from themselves. The frequency of sexual imagery in this show acts as an attractor towards further replication of people and things. Representation and diversity are organic, and, seeing culture as an ecology, benefit the whole system. At the same time, any individual artwork, and any one of its settings, can be seen as its own system.



The Lower East Side is often described as having both vivacity and diversity, in that there are cultures continually warring each other -- long habituated, although not necessarily superlatively so, to the continual financial encroachment cycle of NYC. There is a particular tendency towards a kind of micro-radicalism, an insistence on artists remaining equally poor but supporting each other within, and in direct resistance to, one of the most purely fiscally motivated geographies in the world.



The city is rich in resources that art needs to reproduce itself – money, and attention. So the image of Nuyorican imagery, since Andy Warhol, is fixated on raw competition, self-awareness, and its own marketability. A kind of continually fulfilled desire for plurality over a gained majority, as with people and groups of people, motivates a democratic culture. Yet moderation, collaboration, or cooperation for its own sake cannot benefit other qualities. Such is the melting pot to the salad. The qualities that attract resources are not necessarily aesthetic, although the concept of considering what takes a greater share of resources aesthetically superior has its own attraction. The qualities of self-aggrandizement and narcissism are strong attractors, and it is a choice to counteract them. Some things will be for their own sake, others for the sake of others, some in a continuous chain, some in loops, all in complicatedly interdependent relationships. Be a nature preserve for endangered ideas.
This is not another gripe about commoditization and the market, nor does it praise it. If it contradicts itself, all the better. Although any solo show exists in a jungle of other art within the same market, the generous aim of diversity in Nothing For Itself permeates fractally within the individual works, artists, painting styles, the show, the neighborhood, the city, the country, the world, and the multiverse.



In the current economic stall, it has become important to develop economies of service and giving to others. JS Flores’s recently executed painting reflects the feeling of the times, of a multitude of desperate people competing for nothing more than your attention. In Allison Moore’s interpretations of images from nearby locales, displays of variety awaiting the choice of the consumer become competitions between the very colors and shapes used to represent them. Like Moore, Bruesselbach dizzies and disorients, to the point of making explicitly depicted human bodies flatten and abstract, in parody of the flattening liquidation of material culture. Talley also uses the most eye-capturing possible images, taken from pornography, and saturated colors appealing to inner and outer children. Yet the compositions are continuous playful processes without the cyclopean vision of traditional representation.



Through three of the four artists, California manifests strongly in this show, particularly the distributed post-city of Los Angeles. Certainly the imagery addresses distinctly American experiences, including two second-generation meso-Americans, a product of secular Jewish matriarchy, and an African-American from D.C.
Desire that by being set with each other, the qualities of any given piece of this show become greater. Hope that they do not necessarily have to fight for themselves. Intend to be for something else, not because it is for itself, but because it is for many others. Or be for something selfish, because agenda forget pluralism. See something else in everything, and take nothing for itself.

Nothing For Itself - October at A Gathering of the Tribes

Nothing For Itself
Paintings of Diversity, Born In the Middle of Salad
October 1-31
Opening Saturday Oct. 3rd 6 pm
Tribes Gallery
285 E. 3rd St. 2nd floor
New York, NY 10009

A show of young emerging artists in irrationally exuberant involvement with the city, curated by Janet Bruesselbach with Allison Moore, Jason Talley, and JS Flores


The diversity of these artists emerges in contrast with their similarity. They are occupied both with the human body and with the tactility of paint. Representation gives itself over to the object and submits to an orgy of feedback. This is not art for its own sake, but anything for the sake of anything else. Vivacity is exchange between a body and its environment, and New York in its still-modern postmodernity enlivens our images. Yet we contradict the self-aggrandizement demanded by a capitalized art market, in a continuous chain of promoting others. Chaotic and yet completely intentional, these funnels for desire, their entropy, and the life of objects that they suggest, make for a colorful carnival of the Fall.

Allison Moore generates neo-cubist responses to market environments, in lurid, intoxicated colors and shapes. She's bicoastal.

Jason Talley assembles superbly rendered figures and toys into Freudian-tinged erotic tableau, playing with explicitness and our resistance to it.

JS Flores engages the surface of figurative paintings, mating visual effects with tactility. His figures are warped by their media, giving them a powerful presence. This engages a destructive tension towards human flesh.

Janet Bruesselbach improvisationally composes surreal oil paintings with a playful disregard for gravity and depth, in which everything is figure.

As well as being a vivid image, "born in the middle of salad" is that anti-utopian metaphor of New York not as melting pot but, in the imperfect way of all metaphors, a multi-cultural, multi-directional conglomeration of tastes.

For more information, contact janet@bruesselbach.com / (310) 617-3366


Please come! Tribes is having some financial and anticipating legal difficulties, and for them to stay a Lower East Side institution, Steve Cannon needs your support.

Veritas Odium Parit

means "truth creates hatred".



Oil on linen, 72'x60', 2009. I started with a composite of several photographs of colliding/gravitationally interacting spiral galaxies, then improvisationally found humanoid figures (and some more virtual metaphors) in it, following a spatial structure of in for one galaxy center and out for the other, and finding cool and warm pastel lights in fetal forms. It's seeded by a psychological allegory of resisting attractive forces. Dali claimed that relativistic physics suggested the vacuum was meatspace: matter is not pulled towards other matter but pushed by muscular nothingness.

Also finished:


"Insults as Veiled Compliments", 36"x72", oil and silver paint on linen, 2009.

Almost finished:


"Respect the Autonomy of Inanimate Objects", acrylic underpainting with oils on canvas, 72"x72". Painted in brightly colored glazes, cheesy Richard Corben-style, under Nicola Verlato. I started with a spontaneous drawing and then evolved it through tracings, color studies, clay and digital models, and compositional organization.

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