AMIE SIEGEL

Amie Siegel

Work from Black Moon.

“The centerpiece of this three-part work is “Black Moon,” a partial remaking of Louis Malle’s 1975 film of the same title. A present-day science-fiction without dialogue, Siegel’s “Black Moon” traverses multiple film tropes – action, guns, lonely campfires, the end of the world – and, like its band of armed female revolutionaries, resists taking up residence in a fixed genre or narrative. Set in the post-apocalyptic landscape of foreclosed housing developments in Florida and California, the houses and empty streets become protagonists of a silent narrative, a documentary of the recent past. A highly stylized troop of female soldiers wanders through the abandoned environments, pushed on by gunfire and the bloody aftermath of battles. “Black Moon” conjures references to wars ‘here and elsewhere,’ suggesting alternate endings to the mythical domestic return of US troops from campaigns abroad, pondering the places soldiers protect, and the parallel economies of gender, images, and warfare. The film’s deliberate pacing, juxtaposing scenes of the armed women with fixed camera tableaux and tracking shots of the empty architecture of financial speculation, ponders the uncannily recent ruins of a future that never was.

The second element is a series of photographs, “Black Moon / Hole Punches”, derived from the hole punches, or black moons, typically cut by the motion picture laboratory into the first frame of action in film negative. Always left out of the final edited film, these hole punches appear in Siegel’s prints as imperfect black disks or voids cut out of film frames. They are evocative of lunar phases, yet strangely violent in their intercession into the otherwise smooth picture plane. As metaphors of the filmic endeavor itself, the set of images expose the film’s own production in a fragmentary manner, while re-capitulating its latent violence and re-use of aesthetic ruins.

The third element is “Black Moon / Mirrored Malle,” a 2-channel video installation that places an original 1975 interview with Louis Malle about his film “Black Moon” against a shot-for-shot version in which the artist herself plays Malle. This shift of roles introduces a transposition of gender and language, enacting a battle of authorship and doubled future within the present.” 

– Amie Siegel

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PETER BONDE | ANDERSENS CONTEMPORARY

Artist: Peter Bonde

Venue: Andersens Contemporary, Copenhagen

Exhibition Title: Mirror Foil

Date: April 8 – May 7, 2011

Press Release:

Andersen’s Contemporary is proud to present Peter Bonde’s first solo exhibition in the gallery: Mirror Foil. The exhibition consists of new paintings, all painted on a special mirror foil, and thus the exhibition continues Bonde’s by now familiar practice; a constant insistence on – and experimentation with – the painting as media.

Peter Bonde’s experiments with painting during the past three decades covers everything from the use of perishable materials, assemblage, collage, painting on canvases with pre-printed photographs, to the installation of video screens on the canvas. The new works in this exhibition are merely oil paintings, but the experiment and the expansion of painting is still very central, as Bonde, as stated earlier, has replaced the traditional canvas with a special, ultra reflecting mirror foil.

In the exhibited works Bonde’s broad, colorful strokes, and abstract, spontaneous style of painting is now suddenly in constant interchange with the ultra-reflective foil, which incorporates both space and viewer inside the painting. The implications of this move are obviously many. One thing is, that the combination of the reflecting foil’s linear perspective and the gesticulating, abstract surface painting, stresses Bonde’s consistent insistence on painting’s potential as exactly painting. Another is, that the foil – simultaneously with mirroring the room – also seems to dematerialize itself, and the painted motif is thus the only thing remaining, floating weightless in the space as quivering, luminous strokes.

The works exude – as is often seen in works from Bonde’s hand – a raw energy, speed, turbulence, and something uncontrolled. Bonde works consciously with these elements and has throughout his practice refined his work with them, and with what one might name ‘the error’. Bonde is one of the few who is able to translate ‘the error’ into a productive element. Through his strong sense of composition and color, he exploits the potential in the aesthetics of i.e. paint over and cross out. The result are works in which the decomposed and ‘ugly’ appears in compositional balance and painterly beauty.

Peter Bonde (b. 1958) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Art (1976-82). He was a profes- sor at the Royal Danish Academy of Arts’s painting school from 1996 to 2005 and represented Den- mark at the Venice Biennale in 1999 (with Jason Rhoades). Since the 1980s, Bonde has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions both in Denmark and abroad and he is represented in all major Danish art museums including The Danish National Gallery, ARoS, the art museum Trapholt and Esbjerg Art Museum. He is also represented at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany and in the private collections Elgiz Collection,Turkey and Axa Northern Stern in Cologne.

Seeing is Believing: An Interview with Trevor Paglen

Recent advancements in technology such as Google Earth and street-view, has given anyone with a computer and an internet connection the ability to collapse time and space. It is easy to sit in the comfort of your home and within just a few seconds, virtually place yourself anywhere in the world, that Google has imaged. This uniquely 21st century way of seeing may be relatively new to the masses, but there is no doubt that similar advancements were made years ago for military purposes. From the birth of photograhy, man has learned to “see with machines.” This concept is a crucial part of Trevor Paglen’s research in art and experimental geography. Paglen recently presented a new series of images, and video, in an exhibition titled Unhuman on view now at Altman Siegal Gallery in San Francisco. I recently spoke with Paglen about photography and art history, aesthetics and the politics of watching that which watches us.

Trevor Paglen They Watch the Moon, 2010 / Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

Seth Curcio: Trevor, your practice is centered in both experimental geography and art-making. Often the two collapse into one. Did your interest in geography develop concurrent with your interest in art-making? Or, did one come before the other?

Trevor Paglen: I’ve been an artist my whole life – much longer than I’ve been a geographer. In the mid 1990s, I started doing projects that had a strong relationship to landscape and the politics of visibility. While earning a MFA in Chicago, I became frustrated by the limits of traditional art theory, which mostly comes out of literary criticism, and wanted to find a more expansive theoretical language that could account for things like economics, politics, materiality, and so forth, in addition to questions of representation. Geography theory, I found, was incredibly powerful and flexible: it provided me with a way to think about cultural production in a much more powerful way than what I’d found in art and representational theory. So, I ended up moving to Berkeley and doing a PhD in geography.

Trevor Paglen: Unhuman Installation View/ Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

SC: It’s interesting to know that you began making art long before your interest in science. In much of your work, there are strong references to art history as well as the history of photography. Those histories are intermingled with political and scientific concerns, allowing much of the work to function on multiple levels simultaneously. There are obvious references to Abstract Expressionism in works such as The Fence (Lake Kickapoo, Texas) and Untitled (Reaper Drone), as well as specific references to the history of photography in the works Time study (Predator; Indian Springs, NV) and Artifacts (Anasazi Cliff Dwellings, Canyon de Chelly). How do you feel these art historical references operate in the work, and what insight do they provide the viewer?

TP: Absolutely. There are all sorts of reference and nods to various art-historical moments and works, and references to specific historical photographs and gestures. I constantly use those references in a number of ways. With those references I want to ask “150 years ago, for example, a photographer looked at a particular place and that act of looking and photographing, at that particular historical moment, said a number of things about that historical moment. What happens when we try to see the same place now, and what might that act of seeing or photographing tell us about our particular historical moment?” The same is true for the references to various representational modes: “What,” for example, “does abstraction mean now? What, if anything, from that particular way of representing a historical and cultural moment, is relevant to our own contemporary moment? Why? And how?” For me, these sorts of historical references act as guide-points that we can use to understand how to see the world now, which is ultimately what I’m interested in.

Trevor Paglen Untitled (Reaper Drone), 2010 / Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

SC: The notion of seeing remains consistent in your work. As you mentioned before, this idea can be explored through the use of photography or by referencing specific moments of art history, when considering how other artists have seen the world and then represented that view in their work. Beyond these methods, much of your work is also investigating technology that is designed to see us, but not be seen. I find it interesting that the main way you shed light on these objects is to track and photograph them yourself, further reinforcing the idea of seeing. It seems that you are actively engaged in watching that which watches us. How do you feel about this cyclical processes?

TP: I think that there is a little bit of any irony in the act of “watching the people who are watching you” here for sure, and it’s certainly something that I’ve developed into a sub-theme quite explicitly in some works. But overall, I don’t think that particular dynamic is something I’m categorically interested in. That reading seems to emphasize the “surveillance” aspect of the work too much, and I’m actually not particularly interested in surveillance, per se. But it does point towards something that I am interested in, something I call “entangled photography” or “relational photography” – what I mean by this is thinking about photography beyond photographs. What happens if we start thinking about the practice of photography as embodying the critical moment in the work? In other words, what if the “fact” of photographing something is the essential critical point of a work? I started thinking about this a while ago when I was photographing secret military bases and CIA prisons – for me, a crucial part of those projects is not always what the images look like so much as the politics of producing them.

Trevor Paglen Time study (Predator; Indian Springs, NV), 2010 - Detail / Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

I think I’m going to revise what I said about these relationships of seeing not being interesting to me. They are. But I think they’re part of what we might call the spatio-ethical dimension of the images’ conditions of production, rather than the aesthetic part of them. Sometimes the “entangledness” of the photograph can arise from these complex relations of seeing and counter-seeing in my work (i.e. photographing spy satellites or Predator drones photographing me), but not always. Sometimes the relational dimension can arise from the very fact of taking a photograph of something that, for political purposes, “isn’t there.”  Or any number of things. But, yes, the “relational” aspects of my work are absolutely crucial, even though they’re often not self-evident in the prints themselves.

Trevor Paglen Time study (Predator; Indian Springs, NV), 2010 / Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

SC: It’s intriguing to consider the fact of photographing being the critical crux of the work. However, I think I am still unclear exactly what you mean by entangled or relational photography in this context.  Can you provide me with a little more insight? Are you saying that the fact that you are able to produce the photograph supersedes the photograph itself? If so, why show the photograph at all — does it then become about exhibiting proof of the action?

TP: With regard to your question about whether “that the fact that you are able to produce the photograph supersedes the photograph itself,” what I mean is a little more subtle. The “fact” of being able to produce the photograph is just one aspect of this. Let’s think about what photography is in two ways: we have one aspect of “photography” that happens prior to the photograph itself, and we have another aspect which is the photograph or image itself. In the former sense, I’m talking about all sorts of things – on one hand, you have a technological and social history of “seeing with machines” (my definition of photography). You also have specific sets of relations that  “set the stage,” as it were, before you open the shutter. In every instance, those relations are going to be different, but what I mean by “entangled” photography has to do with making those relations somehow part of the work – whether visible in the final photograph or not. And yes, the photograph in a sense does become “proof” of the action, or, more precisely, the photograph may point towards the action. But that doesn’t mean that the “relational” or “entangled” aspects of the photograph supersede the photograph itself. On the contrary, we also have the photograph itself. The image or photograph is an opportunity, related yet distinct from the “relational” aspects of the photography process, to convey other sorts of meaning, metaphor, allegory, or, if you’re so inclined (I tend not to be), documentation. So I’m not really talking about either part of the photography process superseding the other, I’m talking about the fact that there are all sorts of opportunities to develop the “relational” side of the work that can contribute to what the overall artwork is.

Trevor Paglen Untitled (Predators; Indian Springs, NV), 2010 - Detail / Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

SC: As you often turn to the sky to track objects such as satellites, planes and drones, you seem to present these objects engulfed in a sea of space. Formally this presents a vastness that seems to echo the sublime. I feel like this gesture is also referential of moments in art history, but I also suspect that the idea of vastness itself operates as a metaphor for the unknown, or at least that which is present but rarely detected.  What are your thoughts on the concept of vastness and the sublime as it relates to some of the images on view now at Altman Siegel Gallery? 

TP: This notion of the “sublime” is a really important part of what I do. I think about the sublime in relation to Jean Luc Nancy’s definition of it, which has to do with the sublime being the “sensibility of the fading of the sensible.” In other words, the sublime arises from those moments where we can sense that we cannot sense let alone understand something. This brings us to the “aesthetic” dimension of the work. In terms of contemporary critical theory, an investigation or discussion of the aesthetic is often thought of as a philosophical dead-end, a discussion that ended quite some time ago (except in reactionary ‘neo-art-for-art’s-sake’ conversations which usually function as little more than apologies for vapid art). But I’m not willing to cede aesthetics to the more reactionary corners of the art world. Historically, aesthetics has often been linked to notions of freedom: ambiguity and the sublime can be quite powerful and is something visual art can be quite good at dealing with. So it’s important to me that it’s a part of my work, but the underlying “relational” and ethical aspects of the work are crucially important. Without them, it’s just pretty pictures. And there’s no reason to care about pretty pictures.

Trevor Paglen PAN (Unknown; USA-207), 2010 / Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

SC: Well, I appreciate that you are able to balance both political and aesthetic concerns without either seeming arbitrary. Taking a different turn, I’m also interested in the intersection of vision, geography and time in this new work as it applies to the 21st century. As an artist and scientist that produces artwork and research in this area, I am curious what you feel is happening right now? What are the implications of new technology and how do you feel it is changing the way we, as a collective society, view ourselves and the world around us?

TP: Ha! That question is too big for this interview, I think. This is really something I’m trying to think through. I’m not someone who thinks there’s something historically new about the fact that human perception is being radically reconfigured at the moment (I think that those in the 19th Century were probably greater, and this is a big hint to looking at some of my newer works), but at the same time, I’m interested in the ways that what “seeing” is, is historically specific. I’m extremely interested in what seeing is, and what seeing means in the contemporary moment. Of course, this has everything to do with machines, which in turn has everything to do with time (in several senses: 1) the ways in which machines rationalize time; 2) the ever-increasing “speed” of vision – think Predator drones in Pakistan flown by pilots in Nevada), which of course has everything to do with space (what Marx called the “annihilation of space with time” – again, think Predator drones flown from Nevada creating a relationally contiguous geography even though they’re obviously on opposite sides of the world). You can see the question gets really big really quickly.

Trevor Paglen: Unhuman Installation View / Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

SC: Thanks for entertaining a question of that magnitude. I know that you currently have an exhibition on view, but I’d love to hear more about the research that you are currently engaged in. What are you working on now, and what projects or exhibitions do you have on the horizon?

TP: In the immediate future, I’m continuing my work on drones and continuing my work on “invisible” infrastructures that the piece The Fence (Lake Kickapoo, Texas) points to. I’ve also begun work on a longer-term project dealing with time and universality. I know that’s pretty vague, but it’s going to be a while before I begin to understand that project.

Unhuman will be on view at Altman Siegal Gallery in San Francisco through April 2, 2011.

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BOYLE FAMILY

“Take the actual surface coating of earth, dust, sand, mud, stone, pebbles, snow, grass or whatever. Hold it in the shape it was in on the site. Fix it. Make it permanent.”  (Mark Boyle, Journey to the Surface of the Earth – Mark Boyle’s Atlas and Manual, 1970)

Boyle Family, World Series, Barra, Elemental Study (rippled sand with worm casts), Mixed media, resin, fiberglass, 1992 – 2010, courtesy of Sebastian Boyle

In 1968, Mark Boyle (b.1934 Glasgow, d.2005 London) and Joan Hills (b.1931 Edinburgh) invited friends to a party at their flat in London. A map of the world – the largest which could be found – was hung in the upper room. Their children, Sebastian (b.1962 London) and Georgia (b.1963 London) Boyle led blindfolded guests to this upper room where they threw darts. The points where the darts landed, all over the map on dry land and sea, become the sites for the Boyle Family’s World Series, a significant undertaking where elements from randomly selected sites across the world, from a forest at Skarberget in Norway, to a pavement in New York City, and the Negev Desert in Israel, were recorded, represented and made permanent. The Barra Project forms one of the World Series, developed on the island of Barra in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Recently on view at the exhibition What You See Is Where You’re At:Part 3 at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, The Barra Project is the outcome of 18 years’ of work, and is the first British island the Boyle Family completed.

Boyle Family, World Series, Barra, Human / Physical Response Study (hairs from Boyle Family), Electron microphotographs, 1992 – 2010, courtesy of Sebastian Boyle

The works of the Boyle Family arise from a desire to study and present the world as truthfully as possible, eliminating the employment of personal preferences, judgments, hierarchy, or styles, and using, in essence, reality as a medium. In addition to objects from their environment, they have also enlarged microscopic views of their hairs, exhibited as towering prints. While visually presenting parallels in textures and forms with other plant and earth materials, the choice in drawing from an extension of themselves acknowledge their impact and interaction with the site.

Boyle Family, World Series, Barra, Surface Study, HD video on blu-ray, 1992-2010, installed at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 2010/11, courtesy of Sebastian Boyle

This philosophy of drawing material from life was shaped from the initial forays of Mark Boyle and Joan Hills into making art. From their constructions of junk assembled from pieces of bicycles and twisted metal on wooden boards to their staging of live art events which dismantled barriers between the art, performer and audience, core to their practice was an interest in pursuing objectivity through a documentary approach. The commitment to include anything to represent has resulted in subjects spanning the elements of earth, air, fire and water, to human beings and societies. Behind the extreme visual accuracy of their works lie the complexities of traveling to, surveying the site, data collection, and a labor-intensive process in creating the works.

While initially marketed under Mark Boyle’s name until 1985 when works were presented under the Boyle Family, the concept, research and making of their works have been underpinned by a collaborative endeavor beginning with Mark Boyle and Joan Hills after they met in 1957, and later when Sebastian and Georgia Boyle arrived. Boyle Family works are currently presented in London at the Modern British Sculpture (22 January to 11 April, 2011) at the Royal Academy of Arts and at the Boyle Family’s project space, construction.

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OBJECT LESSONS AT THE CARPENTER CENTER

Liz Glynn; On the Museum's Ruins (Morris Hunt- Corbusier- Pian)-- LC2 chair and Fogg Museum Rubble (2011) All photos courtesy John Pyper

The inventiveness of how we handle the innumerable things around us, is the hallmark of a certain form of contemporary art. I don’t know if we have a single word for this longstanding tendency in art, but I think Penelope Umbrico and Steve Wolfe can be traced back through Cindy Sherman or Sherrie Levineand eventually to pop art’s focus on the world of reproductions. The personal reservoir of things that artists work from forms their vocabulary, the stuff becomes unmistakably part of their intellectual collection and their work.

Meredith James; Day Shift-- Mixed Media Installation (2009)

You can treat a real or imagined memory the same way. Liz Glynn wrestles with empires by focusing on imagined success and the real debris left after empire’s collapse. Her ruins are both implied and actual. Earlier work included repaired classical columns, marble dust installations, while her newest relic is a Courbusier LC2 chair made from rubble from the Fogg Museum, currently under construction. Her time-lapse documentation of The 24 hour Roman Reconstruction Project (at the New Museum April 8, 2009)  gathers the clumsy chaos and motion from building a cardboard replica of Rome in one day. You spend nine minutes watching a band play music and a constant barrage of motion of pizza, glue guns, cardboard, people, etc just to see Rome for a brief moment before the barbarians destroy the city in a blink of an eye. The document, like many of site-specific performances, leaves you with only a hint of the actual thing. It connects you to the process of making more than the object that was made.

Present Time from Becky James / Meredith James on Vimeo.

Meredith James tackles architectural space and realness. Her recursive environments use camera tricks and complicated stage craft that leave none of her environments simple or comfortable. Sections ofPresent Time feel like early MTV, made from what could have been slick transitions it ends up self-consciously imperfect. She literally flips paper, like a cliched preset video transition, from wallpaper pattern to lace to random painted patterns. She exposes her camera tricks and repeatedly takes us out of the moment. Like the cast metal chicken that is exhumed from a baked real chicken, her work disposes with realness and heads right for the replicated. Day Shift, is also an evasive environment . Everything is recursively intermingled, when the actor leaves her desk she find a miniature desk in the back of the car, all the while we stand in front of the same mini-workspace wondering when she will return to answer the real phone.

Both James and Glynn question as much as answer with their works. The chaos of memory, invented memories, of empire, and impossible architectonics. The history of these objects, how these objects became part of the art maker’s collection, is unresolved, but the ways that they handle the objects in their collections are enthralling.

OBJECT LESSONS will be on view at Harvard’s Carpenter Center from January 27 through February 20, 2011

From the DS Archives: Ryan McGinness

This Sunday From the DS Archives invites you to check out what Ryan McGinness has been up to.  Among his many shows slated for 2011, Coloroblicuo at Espai Cultural Caja Madrid of Barcelona is beginning on the 26 of this month and will be up through March.

This article was originally written by Seth Curcio on July 20^th, 2009.

Using the principles of graphic design, painter and silk screen printer Ryan McGinness creates elaborate two dimensional works and room-filled installations that are dense with iconography, language and product symbolism. Corporate logos, graffiti and elements of art history serve as inspiration for the artist’s prints, vinyl decals, wall murals and commercial objects. McGinness has recently produced several publications featuring his work including No Sin/No Future, Ryan McGinness Works and Aesthetic Comfort. Next year, the artist will present the exhibition Studio Franchise at La Casa Encendida in Madrid and Art History is Not Linear, on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

February 13, 2011, filed under Uncategorized; No Comments

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Building Up Layers: An interview with Leslie Wayne

Leslie Wayne wants viewers to feel the Earth’s compression and sense the subduction of geologic forces in her dimensional oil paintings. She layers vibrant and dissonant colors built through the structural qualities of paint. When the top layer is dry, she cuts, flips and sculpts the material to evoke the power of the natural world. A collection of the last five years of her work is currently being shown at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, SC. Amy Mercer recently spoke to the artist, on behalf of DailyServing.com, about her process, the physicality of her materials, and the nature of her restlessness.

Before the Quake, oil on wood, 36” x 132”, 2006 Courtesy of the Artist

Amy Mercer: You studied plein air landscape painting at the University of California in Santa Barbara and then moved to New York City to study sculpture at Parson’s. How did this transition effect or change your style? You’ve also said that your paintings are a secular response to traditional 19^th Century landscape painters; can you explain the importance of a secular response?

Leslie Wayne: Landscape and abstraction only dovetailed in a very direct way when I decided to confront my early history, and my interest and identification with western landscape. I had mixed feelings about denying the very obvious references to geology and landscape in my work; because I was so invested in the language of abstraction, and it became a question of why was I denying it? Why don’t I look at it?

I began working with the Blue Ocean Institute and was thinking about how we can affect the consumption of endangered species. I read the book written by the founder of BOI, and just thought it was really incredible. The organization’s mandate is to inspire a closer relationship with science, literature and the arts, and before I knew it, I was out there working with the institute in a fundraising role. So ocean conservation was just on my brain at that time. I was starting to really address issues of the environment, and this dovetailed with my desire to confront my history of plein-air landscape painting. I was also reading a thesis written by a friend of mine about the traditional landscape painters of the 19^thCentury who were often motivated by religion to express the sublime in nature. All of this created the perfect storm. I was trying to find a contemporary, secular, abstract response to the traditional landscape painting. I’m not an atheist, but for me it was more about finding reverence for the spiritual in nature.

One Big Love #36, Oil on wood, 13” x 13”, 2009, Image Courtesy of the Artist

AM: Process is so important in your work, and you have said that you want viewers to have a visceral response to your paintings; can you talk about the physicality of your materials? How much planning goes into each painting?

LW: I don’t start out with a plan. I’m not looking to make anything specific. I have a general idea of where I want to go, but I like to allow the process to flow. I like to let the shape of the panel suggest where it might go in terms of feeling. I let the shape of the panel dictate a way in which the materials might mimic processes of the natural world, the flow of lava, the weight of water, and the compression and subduction of the earth. In so far as I allow physics if you will, and the phenomenology of the material to lead the way, one could say that process plays a dominant role in the resolution of my work. But it’s not the subject of my work any more than say the properties of steel are the subject of Richard Serra’s work. The issue lies in the degree to which will dominate chance, and intention governs outcome. In Velocity for example (3 panels, 49”x22”), I had a vision of being on the other side of a train and seeing something in motion, but stationary at the same time. The painting was originally 7 panels and I slowly whittled it down. I wanted it to be a vertical snapshot, but also to be seen as a continuum so you could read it from left to right as if the landscape was moving in front of you. That’s one of the few examples of control in my work because the very first panel set the tone for the rhythm of color, and the others had to line up in a way that created a flow. So that piece was more planned out from the start.

AM: You have a series titled, One Big Love that was shown in 2010 at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York where you live with your husband, and also included in the Halsey exhibit. These paintings are much smaller and maybe more intimate than the other works at the Halsey. Does gender play a role in your work, and do you think of yourself as a female artist or is gender beside the point?

LW: When I first started painting this way I was very aware that I was coming out of the trajectory of Abstract Expressionism, which was very male dominated. By pressing the heroic gesture of Abstract Expressionism into the small format, I was making a feminist statement about the impact of scale: a huge gesture on a small scale. For example, the small works from One Big Love allowed a physical respite from working with larger panels. Years ago someone (who was unsure if Leslie was a male or female’s name) said, something like, ‘oh this work has to be done by a woman because of the way she lifts up the veil of secrecy.’ So I’m aware that building up layers of color are also metaphors for building up layers of thought, and history. You kind of build your own history in this little painting. However, I think you get into dangerous territory when you try to describe work as feminine or masculine. One of the reasons I started to work larger was because I am very aware that I am seen as “the lady who makes the little paintings.” I remember something I said when I gave a talk for a show I was in about ornament and abstraction in contemporary painting… I said that I wanted to make a painting with the seduction of a pink angora sweater and the power of a Barnet Newman.

One Big Love #48, Oil on wood, 12 ½” x 9 ¼”, 2010, Image Courtesy of the Artist

AM: You’ve called yourself a restless artist and I wonder if you can talk about the evolution of your work and what role size and scale have in your evolution?

LW: I do have a restless nature. Maybe I’m doing myself a disservice by not following a trajectory, but my nature is to think where can this go next? I have this innate fear of repeating myself. Given the way I work, something different happens every time. It’s in my nature to keep exploring the unknown.

Recent Work by Leslie Wayne will be on view at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, SC through March 12, 2011.

Installation image from the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art

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