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”.
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In Chinatown, NYC, where Wendy White lives, new signs go up over outdated signs, new awnings are installed over old ones, graffiti is painted over, windows become walls, additions are built, architecture is modified, buildings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
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.
We need our own space to think and digest what we see. And we also have to trust the viewer and trust the power of the object. And the power is in simple things. I like the kind of clarity that that brings to thought. It keeps thought from being opaque.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
