But the idea of transformation has always been something that I romanticize in a work. I’m cautious of it but I also need it to connect my thoughts with the process of making. That’s really important.
—
Nari Ward
BOMB Specific by Carrie Moyer
- Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn by Michael Smith
- Jacques Roubaud by Marcella Durand
- Bill Callahan by Jon Raymond
- Guy Maddin & Isabella Rossellini
- Carrie Mae Weems by Dawoud Bey
- Nam Le by Charles D'Ambrosio
- Dike Blair and Joe Bradley
- Nature Theater of Oklahoma by Young Jean Lee
Interviews
- Four Photographs by Lou Reed
- The Bar On Tompkins Square Park by Frederic Tuten
- Wayward Sleep by Tara Goedjen
- Wandermoment by Hildebrand Pam Dick
- This Is The House That Horse Built by Colum McCann
- Ugly Duckling Presse by Alan Gilbert
- Seconds by Adam Simon & Matthew Sharpe
First Proof
- Michael Combs by Rob Fischer
- Dan Wolgers by George Negroponte
- Xaviera Simmons by Adam Pendleton
Artists on Artists
- Trevor Paglen’s Blank Spots on the Map by Nick Stillman
- Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster by Shoshana Shmuluvitz
- Version Fest by Melissa Potter
- Ugly Duckling Presse by Alan Gilbert
- Daniel Kane’s We Saw the Light: Conversations Between the New American Cinema and Poetry by Abigail Child
- Two Books on Graffiti by Matthew Aaron Goodman
- Bobbie Oliver by Mimi Thompson
- Treeless Mountain by Montana Wojczuk
- Sun City Girls: Singles Volumes 1 & 2 by Corey D'Augustine
- Phillip Lopate’s Notes on Sontag by Jonathan Lethem
- Charles Reznikoff’s By the Waters of Manhattan by Betsy Sussler
- Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s When Skateboards Will Be Free by Lena Valencia
- Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn by Patrick McGrath
- Pep Talk and The New Anonymous by Brian McMullen
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Mantrap, 2009, taped paper collage, 5 × 5”. All images courtesy of the artist and CANADA, New York.
For the past several years, I have been looking for forms that are nearly representational, that hover somewhere between abstraction and figuration, and generate the preliterate force of the Venus of Willendorf. I troll the web, bookstores, and museums looking for ritual vessels, sculptural prosthetics (headdresses, masks, armor, and weapons), and ethnographic oddities that can be morphed into fearsome and/or sexualized silhouettes. Recently I’ve found myself transfixed by Oceanic, Inuit, and preColumbian objects, similar to those collected by André Breton and the Surrealists. Is the world really such a finite place, filled with a fixed (and paltry) number of things to look at? Or am I susceptible to the same aesthetic charms that so radicalized the early modernists nearly a century ago? This thought, with its insinuations of cultural myopia and art-historical patrimony, both horrifies and delights me.
These days I start work by making small collages based on shapes preloaded from a long-accumulated image bank. The black-and-white taped paper collages become the genesis for large paintings. For BOMB Specific, I’ve sprinkled digital fairy dust onto these altogether modest works to bring them closer to the paintings they inspire.
Torch, 2009, taped paper collage, 8 × 4”.
Barbute, 2009, taped paper collage, 7 × 4”.
Rapa Nui Smashup, 2009, taped paper collage, 5 × 3-1/2”.
Today’s Woman, 2009, taped paper collage, 5 × 3-1/2”.
Related
In one painting, I am picked up and drawn into a wild weather event, a storm of color, wind, and light.
With exuberance, Jablon’s paintings tell the story of their own making. They are what they are by showing how they got there and how they take up their subject—and that subject is text.
In Chinatown, NYC, where Wendy White lives, new signs go up over outdated signs, new awnings are installed over old ones, graffiti is painted over, windows become walls, additions are built, architecture is modified, buildings disappear … White has become a connoisseur of these visual shifts.
Originally published in
BOMB 108,
Summer 2009
Featuring interviews with Dawoud Bey, Dike Blair and Joe Bradley, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn and Michael Smith, Nam Le and Charles D’Ambrosio, Guy Maddin and Isabella Rossellini, Bill Callahan and Jon Raymond, Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, and Jacques Roubaud.
