DailyServing.com selects two notable artists each month from the submissions we receive to be featured in our series, Fan Mail. For a chance to have your work appear below, with an article written by one of the DailyServing contributors, please submit a link to your website to info@dailyserving.com, subject: Fan Mail. You could be the next artist in the series! (We will try to contact chosen artists prior to publication, but please be sure to check the site everyday.)

Lee Gainer, "Cassandra" from Workin' Hard

Lee Gainer utilizes the time-honored representation of the dedicated employee, phone-to-ear, as the basis of her new collection. Backgrounds vary, depending on the nature of the organization and the duties of the associate. This snapshot, ubiquitous to the point of being absurd, suggests that a corporation places high value on customer service, and provides access to courteous, efficient employees with pleasant speaking voices and problem solving skills. This image abounded in nearly every industry during the second half of the twentieth century, and has become endearingly archaic. (Note: Coiled phone cord of land line.)

For her most recent body of work, Workin’ Hard, Lee Gainer culls photographs from various business websites and literature, printing the selected imagery with her HP Z2100 printer on 8″ x 10″ satin paper. She then alters the appropriated image with gesso and several layers of acrylic, carefully isolating the hand of the subject that holds the receiver. The artist’s modification of the casual office portrait draws attention to the prolific over-use of this image, challenging its validity as a marker of the white-collar system. Gainer’s socio-cultural observations “invite the viewer to consider the cultural expectations of social status, gender roles, age, race, morality, tradition, and sexuality,” as stated on her website. Each portrait in Workin’ Hard is given a first name as a title, subtly undermining the corporate pretense of “personal” service. The faces of the subjects are obscured.

Lee Gainer, "Jr." from Workin' Hard

Gainer’s past projects include Two Month’s Salary, a series which addresses the widely held wedding industry belief that a woman’s engagement ring should be worth approximately two months of the purchaser’s salary. Using this industry equation and the most recent salary data gathered from the U.S. Department of Labor and Payscale.com, Gainer presents twenty prints, each print representing a specific occupation (i.e. Radiation Therapist, Funeral Director, Patrol Officer) and some suitable ring choices. The occupation titles are listed in elegant script below nine engagement rings. View the series here.

Gainer’s work, simple in aesthetic and execution, prompts the viewer to decode visual data and reassess promotional images encountered in everyday life. The artist lives and works in Washington, DC and is currently a resident artist at the Arlington Arts Center in Arlington, VA. Her work has been featured in The American Prospect, The New York Times, and The Exposure Project.

DailyServing.com selects two notable artists each month from the submissions we receive to be featured in our series, Fan Mail. For a chance to have your work appear below, with an article written by one of the DailyServing contributors, please submit a link to your website to info@dailyserving.com, subject: Fan Mail. You could be the next artist in the series! (We will try to contact chosen artists prior to publication, but please be sure to check the site everyday.)

Jeanne Jo’s diverse body of work, which includes video art, performance, sculpture, and collaborations with other artists, successfully evades categorization, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary culture. Often impermanent, her projects are theoretically sophisticated, aesthetically uncomplicated, and profoundly personal. After receiving her B.F.A. from the University of Nevada, Reno, Jo completed her M.F.A. in Digital Media at Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. She lives and works in Los Angeles, where she is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Digital Media at the University of Southern California, with an expected graduation date of 2014.

In her video series Ephemeral Interventions (2007), Jo performs simple activities in front of surveillance cameras situated around her Providence, RI. In the video seen above, Jo writes on a city street, at night, with powdered sugar. The ephemeral white text reads “When I look up from my mind, I see what you are:”, a fragment of poetry by Michael Collier. In this series, Jo inverts the function of surveillance by actively, as opposed to passively, providing content for the camera. The growing presence of surveillance in urban space, and the awareness of constant observation, has triggered a creative response from artists, most cleverly utilizing the mechanics of surveillance technology itself.

This simple but profound manipulation of chosen medium is seen in Jo’s more tangible works as well. Intrigued by the intersections of craft (specifically female  handicraft, i.e. crochet) and technology, Jo produces woven sculptures that reference the historical connections between the fields of weaving and modern computing. The Jacquard Loom, a mechanical loom invented in 1801, simplified the process of manufacturing textiles with complex patterns and was an important precedent to the development of computer programming, with punch cards controlling a sequence of actions. Jo’s knit sculpture, If a Mouth were to Whisper.. (2010), which resembles a giant cream-colored scarf, is a crocheted love letter, woven in alphanumeric code, with words spelled out in crochet knots. According to Studio Fuse art blog, the artist plans to engineer a computer program that would encrypt any text into a knitting or crochet pattern.

Jeanne Jo will be participating in The Business of Aura, an upcoming group show at Broadway Gallery in New York, opening on August 19th. The exhibition addresses the multiple interpretations of “aura” and seeks to reclaim a broader understanding of the term in contemporary practices. The Business of Aura will remain on view until September 10th.

DailyServing.com selects two notable artists each month from the submissions we receive to be featured in our series, Fan Mail. For a chance to have your work appear below, with an article written by one of the DailyServing contributors, please submit a link to your website to info@dailyserving.com, subject: Fan Mail. You could be the next artist in the series! (We will try to contact chosen artists prior to publication, but please be sure to check the site everyday.)

William Powhida infiltrated the art industry with his unapologetic attitude, insightful drawings, lists of enemies, letters to collectors and curators, and other written and visual material that prey upon the “catastrofuck” of the art world. Merging his background in art criticism with his visual art practice, Powhida graphically dissects the complex capitalistic structure of New York art using graphite, gouache, watercolor, colored pencil, and incisive text. The artist has garnered much attention for his controversial cultural products.

How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality, seen above, depicts floating heads of several members and affiliates of the New Museum, suspended in the composition and surrounded by sharp and satirical handwritten text questioning the institution’s alliances and decisions. The drawing, which the artist describes as “a modest drawing about the New Museum’s terrible decision to show a trustee’s private collection,” appeared on one third of the covers for Brooklyn Rail’s November 2009 issue, fueling an ongoing debate about institutional ethics. Powhida was a regular contributor for the Brooklyn Rail for three years before he “decided he could no longer keep helping other artists develop careers,” and began concentrating on his own artistic inspirations.

The artist completed his M.F.A. in painting at New York’s Hunter College in 2002 and is represented by Schroeder Romero in New York and Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles. Powhida co-organized the group show Magicality, currently on view at Platform Gallery in Seattle until August 5th, with Eric Trosko. Magicality investigates the parallels between the disciplines of art and magic and includes Powhida’s series of thirteen prints, which double as talismans and hexes, entitled Ars Magica Portfolio.

On our final day of our latest week-long series, Summer of Utopia, DailyServing discusses the utopian ideals embedded in the building a new city and the economy attached to it. By delving into the work of Solomon Graves, we can take a look at preservation and lost information, truth and fiction and where utopia ends and reality begins.

The wilderness and wetlands that would later become the city of Miami ignited a utopian aspiration in one woman’s imagination, the aspiration to create a metropolis in the subtropical marshland. Cleveland native Julia Tuttle, the original owner of the land upon which Miami was built, moved to the Biscayne Bay region after inheriting land from her father in the late 19th century. Recognizing the need for transportation, Tuttle convinced American tycoon Henry Flagler to expand his railroad to this part of Florida. Initially, he declined her requests, but when the orange groves in that area survived the winter of 1895 and the rest of the state’s citrus crop was destroyed, Flagler allegedly saw the economic potential in Miami. The landscape was transformed.

The genesis of this urban paradise is a historical narrative; a literary embodiment of a past experience. Solomon Graves (an alias of the artist Raul Mendez), asserts on his blog that “objects and stories belong to all of us, in the now and beyond.” In his enigmatic exhibition, The Society for the Preservation of Lost Things and Missing Time: Florida Arcane, the artist investigates methods of remembering, analyzing, and preserving the past. As the Society’s website states, “It is our Mission to Thwart the all too common Demise of Things./ Stories, Ideas, which may not fit History’s Master Narrative./ We crave the Archaic and Arcane, the Strange, the Paranormal…those Things imbued / with Magical Properties, the Folkloric, the Homemade, the Story-told, /the Other World-ly./Left-Field.” Need I say more? Florida Arcane, currently on view at the Miami-Dade Main Library, consists of objects, ephemera, archival materials, and other fragments from Florida’s past. The objects are combined with descriptive and imaginative tales, which reference notable figures in the early history of Florida, but have little to no historical fidelity. Mendez cleverly utilizes the venerable institution of the library, a venue for scholarly research, to bolster his exhibition design. A two dollar bill is inscribed with the unwritten rules amongst hermits and derelicts in the Florida Keys at the end of the 19th century. A collection of optical and aviation instruments once belonging to Jacqueline Cochran (a native Floridian), and other evidentiary relics are here as well.

The artist combines documentation and historical fiction in a series of color photographs depicting a concrete modernist structure curiously situated in the middle of a swamp (seen above on the left, click here for detail). The structure is described as Mr. J.E. Lummus’ Failed City in the Swamp. In the accompanying text, J.E. Lummus, an individual associated with building the City of Miami, is described as an eager entrepreneur, whose jealousy over Tuttle’s success with Miami drove his desire to erect “a world class city of industry and culture in the midst of a swamp” for himself. According to the story, the winter of 1895 halted construction, and plans were never resumed. In reality, the structure, which resembles an interstate overpass, is the Shark Valley observation tower located in Everglades National Park, as noted in the Miami Herald. The magical mixture of historical and apocryphal information infuses the dusty discipline of history with imagination and thought, offering valuable insights into our broader processes of cultural interpretation. A speculative and philosophical presentation, Florida Arcane is obscure and difficult, but simultaneously enjoyable and entertaining.

Merging documentation, fiction, and art, Florida Arcane prompts the perceptive viewer to question the construction of history and thus reality, both past and present. The curator deviates from established histories, igniting learning with imagination. At the opening reception on June 24th, Raul Mendez, a.k.a Solomon Graves, theatrically continued his mission to “destroy ideological darlings” while sitting at a desk in the exhibition area. His costumed presence, which now exists only as a photograph, reminds us that awareness of imagination is a principle, and potent, feature in the formation of reality. In the subjective space between his materials and information, Mendez invites the viewer to experience experience itself, rather than experiencing a description of reality.

DailyServing.com selects two notable artists each month from the submissions we receive to be featured in our series, Fan Mail. For a chance to have your work appear below, with an article written by one of the DailyServing contributors, please submit a link to your website to info@dailyserving.com, subject: Fan Mail. You could be the next artist in the series! (We will try to contact chosen artists prior to publication, but please be sure to check the site everyday.)

Andreas Templin’s multi-dimensional body of work includes sculpture, video, installation, photography, and urban interventions. His diverse practice is guided by a critical approach to the making of art; each work is the outcome of an insightful process that examines culture from a philosophical point of view. As the artist states, “The adult individual consumer is faced with the creative possibility of reinventing his identity each day, with the wide variety of enhancement products now available for use. The artist, too, must move with the times, and avoid being a fixed label, but use everything available to him.”

Templin’s technically simplistic, and somewhat disconcerting, video work, As if to nothing (9:54), consists of the constant display of earth’s qualitative statistical data, culled from governmental sources, accompanied by a recording of Anton Bruckner’s 7th Symphony. The emotional depth of the audio heightens the impact and immediacy of the dreary data display. Selected statistics include a tally of the world’s population, military expenditures, infectious diseases, and species extinct. The environmental data set “Ocean Oil Spills (tons)” holds particular poignancy in our current cultural moment.

This type of cultural insight, and perhaps critique, appears in Templin’s vinyl record album, Andreas Templin plays Bach, a recording of the artist whistling Bach throughout the city streets. This more playful form of artistic commentary was born out of the artist’s distaste with the “clean and highly competitive virtuoso-recordings” that exist of the German composer, and was recorded in the red light district of Amsterdam. The album cover was created by classical music photographer Felix Broede.

Templin, who lives and works in Berlin, is currently participating in the group show Consume at Exit Art in New York. The exhibition, which is a project of SEA (Social Environmental Aesthetics), investigates world food production, consummation, distribution, and waste. Consume will remain on view until August 28th.

At six o’clock on Saturday evening in SoHo, Kathy Grayson and Meghan Coleman made public their intent to fill the hole that Jeffrey Deitch’s trans-continental career move created in the world of New York art, which is no small undertaking. The two former directors of Deitch Projects opened a much anticipated new space at 104 Greene Street, aptly titled The Hole. The inaugural exhibition, Not Quite Open for Business, was directed by Taylor McKimens and showcases unfinished works by over twenty artists, including Nate Lowman and Rosson Crow.

When their originally planned exhibition fell through mere weeks before the scheduled opening, Grayson and Coleman decided to make the best of what others might deem an impossible situation. They solicited their artists to “Give us an incomplete piece…Give us a drawing that you just cant bring yourself to finish from your flat files. Put half your makeup on and give us most of a performance!” In a press release littered with intentional “typoos,” Grayson and Coleman clarify that this is not about the process of the artist, or the deliberate incompletion of work, but about “being caught with your pants down and your lipstick smudged and your armpits sweaty because you didn’t have time to take a shower before YOUR FIRST GALLERY SHOW.” A personal and self-deprecating tone replaced the more traditional formality of this document. The opening was a straightforward and unpretentious debut for Grayson and Coleman, making up in energy what it lacked in polish.

The unfinished theme pervades, and the space resembles a construction site overtaken by creatives. Painted scrap lumber, an industrial ladder, bare studs and unfinished sheetrock share the space with art. Works on paper are mounted with thumbtacks. A half painted logo contributes to the the display’s impromptu, work-in-progress quality, disarming the viewer and generating unlimited interest in future progress.

Not Quite Open for Business will remain on view until August 14th. As mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article written by Erica Orden, upcoming exhibitions include a solo show by Mat Brinkman and an installation by Kenny Scharf and the collective Dearraindrop. Other projects in the plans for The Hole include a book store in the back room of the gallery, Holey Books, and a dating service for artists, purportedly titled Hole Lotta Love. We’ll keep you posted.

Installation View, Halsey Institute, photographs by Rick Rhodes

Call and Response: Africa to America / The Art of Nick Cave and Phyllis Galembo recently opened at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina. The exhibition brings together the work of two American artists intrigued by the formation of cultural identity and individual experience within a society. Drawing inspiration from the rich ceremonial traditions and elaborate guises of African nations, Nick Cave and Phyllis Galembo create objects that are visually captivating and conceptually charged. Cave’s imaginative Soundsuits and Galembo’s photographic portraits of West African masqueraders prompt the viewer to regard the world in terms of connection and community.

Installation View, Halsey Institute, photographs by Rick Rhodes

Upon entering the Halsey, one is struck by the mystical presence of Cave’s Soundsuits. Cave, a former dancer and current Chair of the Fashion Design Department at the School of the Art institute of Chicago, combines his experience in modern dance with his expertise in fiber textiles to create his Soundsuits. The first soundsuit was constructed entirely of gathered twigs, resulting in a subtle rustling sound when worn; thus, the name. The kaleidoscopic costumes reference the ritualistic garments worn by Galembo’s subjects, the people of Africa whom she has spent decades photographing. Cave’s sculptures, anthropomorphic assemblages of materials such as dyed human hair, plastic buttons, beads, sisal, sequins, fabrics, feathers, and other natural ephemera, are layered with personal and cultural associations. The disparate materials are masterfully woven together by the artist, ornamental embellishments create undeniable tactile and visual appeal for the viewer; the soundsuits incite a collective sense of awe.

In the adjacent gallery, Phyllis Galembo’s photographic portraits chronicle masqueraders from various West African countries, including Benin, Nigeria, and Burkina Faso. The masquerade is a meaningful mode of cultural expression for several African groups, and Galembo presents a straightforward observation of individuals within particular cultures. Galembo’s work is a field study on these regions, a modern documentation of their ancient ceremonial traditions. Disguised as animals, spirits, or ancestors, her subjects enact ancient legends and stories, but the artist captures them in stasis. Galembo, described as a “photographic hunter-gatherer” by writer Emma Reeves, incorporates her subjects’ natural surroundings in detailed compositions that highlight the garments, the accoutrements (i.e. a staff to connote authority), and the occasional glimpse of a bare, or sneakered, foot of a masquerader. Galembo elegantly achieves a personal encounter with a masked individual, and successfully conveys this engagement to the remote viewer.

Courtesy of Phyllis Galembo and Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Call and Response: Africa to America will remain on view at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art until June 26th. The exhibition is taking place during Spoleto Festival USA, an annual performing arts event held in Charleston, SC every spring. The Halsey’s sincere presentation of Cave’s soundsuits and Galembo’s photographs offer an exciting visual arts alternative to the citywide performing arts festival.