Rise of Rebellion: DailyServing’s latest week-long series

I recently worked on a photo shoot with arguably America’s most prominent metal band. During the fourteen hour work day, I had the privilege of witnessing these icons in action amidst thousands of objects, instruments, images and banners that celebrate the band’s nearly three decades of prominence. As the day progressed, I watched as a band member lovingly called his mom to tell her what the day holds. I saw the wife of the aging guitar player tenderly paint the balding head of her husband black in a vain attempt to preserve the appearance of youth and vitality. What was instantly apparent was the first-hand deterioration of the aggressive spirit of rebellion as it aged over decades. No one can deny the use of masquerade and theatrics in heavy metal culture, but what is rarely seen is the softer side of this unruly behavior, which was something that I was privy to that day. When thinking about this softer side of metal and its rebellious association, it occurred to me that rebellion is an act best suited in short bursts, rather than sustained in perpetuity. I recently sat down with Ben Venom, an artist fascinated with the rebellious nature of metal, black metal, the occult and southern identity, to talk about his work. Venom employs many of the symbols and images associated with these defying subcultures, and by creating handmade quilts, pillows, flags and banners, the artist is able to celebrate and mock these cultures simultaneously.

Seth Curcio: Ben Venom seems like an all too convenient name for an artist with rebellious southern identity and slant towards black metal. Is this your real name?

Ben Venom: No..Venom has been my nickname since I was a teenager. I grew up going to a lot of punk rock and metal shows in Atlanta, GA, and it came about from hanging around the that scene. Everyone had some obscure nickname, mine just stuck and never left.

Later, I started to incorporate my nickname into my artwork more and more while I was at the San Francisco Art Institute pursuing my masters degree. I was tired of having my last name misspelled (Baumgartner) in exhibition catalogs or postcards for art exhibitions. Plus, so many people already knew me as Ben Venom, it seemed like a natural progression and of course a much easier name to spell!

SC: Much of your new work uses imagery and materials that are related to black metal as the aggressive epitome of an already masculine sub culture. You physically unite imagery from this movement by sewing it together into quilts, flags and banners. Where do you derive the source material?

BV: The source material is collected from attending concerts, reading, and researching certain aspects of metal culture. For instance, Sam Dunn, Canadian anthropologist and heavy metal fan, has produced two documentaries that explore the origins of heavy metal music from early bands such as Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath, to current bands like Slayer & Mastadon. I recently read Lords of Chaos and just bought Only Death Is Real (An Illustrated History of Hellhammer and early Celtic Frost). These books offer an inside look into what goes on behind the scenes or after the music dies, literally, HA! More specifically, a few pieces are directly inspired by bands that use corpse paint. Influenced by the likes of Alice Cooper, KISS, and the Misfits many black metal bands paint their faces with black and white shapes to mimic inhumanity or death. I re-design these shapes into forms that mimic faces or objects associated with metal or the occult. I was initially inspired to start quilting after seeing the Gees Bend traveling exhibition, which showcases handmade quilts from a very rural region in Alabama. I had a lot of old Heavy Metal t-shirts hanging in my closet and thought it would be interesting to make a metal themed quilt from them. The result was a 6′ x 9′ quilt constructed with over 35 vintage heavy metal t-shirts from my own collection and a few purchased on Ebay. The quilting pattern (Red Stitching) forms a Pentagram shape when viewed from a distance. The quilt is entirely hand-made using a basic sewing machine and took roughly 3 months to complete.

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"It's My World", installation view of downstairs gallery at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions; image courtesy of BRX Exhibitions

It’s My World, a current group show at Baer Ridgeway Exhibitions in San Francisco, is compelling in its approach to a somewhat dated subject matter: the landscape. The show successfully combines the apparent solid thesis of the exhibition: “a strong emphasis on the use of unexpected materials, abstracted forms and the examination of time” in a bid to approach issues raised by humans’ complicated relationship with the ever changing environment. The group exhibition is comprised of ten artists working in a variety of mediums: painting, video, drawing, photography and sculpture and the cohesiveness that permeates from each artist’s contribution is fantastic.

Claude Zervas, "Skagit," 2005, Green CCFL lamps, wire, inverters, steel, Wall: 70 x 50 x 1 inches; Floor: 37 x 65 x 60 inches; image courtesy of BRX Exhibitions

Claude Zervas’ Skagit, 2005, a vibrant installation of Green CCFL lamps, wire, and inverters that is modeled after the Northwest’s Skagit River, and protrudes out of the wall alive and active. Zervas’ arranges the inverter cords to simulate the river’s many tributaries, allowing the installation to course through the gallery space.  Christopher Taggart’s But Now You Know You’ve Seen the Worst, 2010, changes the term “process” to an entirely new level. The image is of a car’s driver side mirror that has been recreated, and pixilated, by small cut outs of UV laminated photographs glued to a board. To call this work a collage doesn’t seem to do it justice. The precision in which Taggart is able to assemble these small, seemingly picayune pieces while at the same time inferring the motion of a driver’s view of the landscape passing him by, is impressive.

Christopher Taggart, "But Now You Know You've Seen the Worst," 2010, UV laminated photographs glued to board with pigmented archival adhesive, 32 x 40 inches; image courtesy of BRX Exhibitions

If these eye- catching works draw you in, it is the more subtle pieces that will make you stay. David Wilson’s charcoal on paper drawings of public spaces serve as illustrations to his larger performance works of reinvigorating public spaces. Wilson arranges public events, or “gatherings”, within these depicted landscapes, as a way to serve as a conduit for others who have yet to figure out how to get back to nature. Sean McFarland’s series of Polaroid photographs, though small in size, are breathtaking. McFarland collages together a variety of mixed media – paint, image cutouts, etc., and then re-photographs these elements to create an entirely new image of an otherworldly landscape. These images are ethereal, elusive and affecting. Even if the image doesn’t stay with you for very long afterward, the mystical feeling it invokes within you of a lost world will.

Sean McFarland, "Plane and Land," 2008, Polaroid, 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 inches, edition of 3; image courtesy of BRX Exhibitions

In my opinion, to be an artist in these contemporary times is no small feat. At this point, it would seem that there is no topic that hasn’t been broached, no genre that hasn’t been explored, and no medium that hasn’t had its limits pushed. This is the second reason why It’s My World succeeds—the ability of the selected artists to take a theme that is almost as old as art history itself and to continue to innovate upon it.  Here’s hoping that other artists heed their call.

This week, the Christian Marclay: Festival will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. The exhibition celebrates many of the artist’s graphic scores for performance and will take the form of multiple daily performances by individual musicians and vocalists. The Whitney has pulled together some of country’s finest Avant-garde musicians to play more than a dozen of Marclay’s scores dated from 1985 to 2010. Some of the works to be performed include, ChalkBoard (2010), Covers (2007-10) and Screen Play (2005). Many of the pieces take the form of a physical art object produced from videos, photographs, found images, and readymade objects which are intended to elicit a musical response from the performers.

Christian Marclay, Screen Play, 2005. Courtesy the artist. © Christian Marclay

Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay is internationally known for his innovative artworks that explore the intersection of image and sound. Over the past several decades, the artist has combined performance, collage, sculpture, installation, photography and video to create unique work that provides commentary on many aspects of contemporary culture, while continuing to push the boundaries of visual art and music. Marclay is often recognized as an early pioneer of turntablism, as he first began to use turntables and physically altered records as instruments for performances in the late 1970’s.

Festival begins this Thursday, July 1st with two pieces performed by Min Xiao-Fen and Elliot Sharp at 1pm and Ulrich Kieger at 2:30pm. The exhibition will continue through September 26, 2010.

Jordan Kantor Installation View, 2010 Ratio 3, San Francisco

The press release for Jordan Kantor’s self titled exhibition, currently on view at Ratio 3 in San Francisco, provides readers with little more than a physical account of what the exhibition includes: “several paintings on canvas, some in oil, others in enamel, two looping slide projections,” etc. This type of opacity in the actual content of the show seemed frustrating at first, but after a few moments that frustration quickly dissolved into intrigue. Upon viewing the exhibition my emotional response was not unlike that of reading the press release, confused as to the artist’s intent, but soon a flood of connections between the exhibited works began to develop. The correlation between the press release’s purpose to outline the physicality of the show as opposed to the content and the show’s attempt to underscore the building blocks of painting without indulging the content of any said painting became strikingly apparent. And, while this exhibition seems to indulge a post-medium practice, as opposed to Kantor’s previous exhibitions which often consist exclusively of paintings, this collection of works may actually be more about painting than any other.

Jordan Kantor Untitled (studio shots, 2010), Sixty-nine 35mm slides, carousel slide projector

The press release states “Though comprised of individual pieces, this exhibition is conceived as a constellation of works to be seen together in the space in which they are shown,” and this certainly holds true. Each piece is strategically placed to complement or finish other works in proximity. Together these works culminate to provide an intimate, yet removed understanding of all that lies on the periphery of a painting.

Jordan Kantor Untitled (Lens Flare palette), 2008-2009 Oil on wax paper mounted on canvas 12 x 16 inches

Included in the exhibition are many pieces that serve as evidence of works past, such as three of the artist’s palettes that were used to construct works from a previous exhibition at Ratio 3, and two slide projectors which provide an intimate look into the materials of the artist’s studio. Kantor also displays an X ray of a painting that reveals the physical structure of the painting without revealing the content of the painting, a metaphor that continues to play out through the exhibition.

Jordan Kantor Untitled (x-ray photograph), 2009 Chromogenic color print, mounted on gatorboard 40.75 x 55.75 inches

The bulk of the works that actually contain pigment on canvas capture film leaders, which are used to lead into or trail out of films. These paintings, like many of the other works in the show, show a tool needed to aid in the display of an image without revealing exactly what that image is. The only work that bears a direct resemblance to Kantor’s previous body of paintings is Untitled (builder), an image of a brick layer building the foundation for a wall. This work acts as yet another layer in Kantor’s construction of an image.

This collection of work illustrates artist’s ability to distance himself from the very act of creating an image-based painting in order to obtain a more thorough investigation of his own role with the medium. The exhibition functions like a puzzle, where each piece is less than the sum of the whole.

Jordan Kantor Untitled (builder), 2006 Oil on canvas 28 x 40 inches

Jordan Kantor currently lives in San Francisco and is an associate professor of art practice and theory at California College of the Arts. In late 2008 and early 2009, his work was featured in the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, and he received the SECA Art Award Exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA). Kantor received an AB from Stanford University and his PhD from Harvard University.

Now on view at SOFA gallery, a DIY space in the living room of an Austin apartment, is the work of Jeff DeGolier. This pairing is fitting since both the artist and gallery make due with what is on hand. DeGolier, who is based in Brooklyn, came to Austin for a week and harvested bric-a-brac from trash piles and swap meets. Day by day, he assembled a sculpture at the center of the room that runs from floor to ceiling. Hung on the walls are a few digital prints based on similar assemblage sculptures.

The sculpture starts with the ceiling fan that becomes a source of electricity for a faux hearth made of a painted tire and an illuminated white plastic bag as well as some small fans with flashing blue lights, typically used to trick out computers like low riders. Pompoms, plastic hangers and a mop head are also carefully assembled in a way that approaches a kind of ritualized fetish object for our American consumerist wasteland.

This space of assemblage, in which objects hang, pivot and tilt, is flattened and framed in the prints. Color is heightened and patterns emerge to quote the psychedelic without falling into the traps of its potential sentimentality. What holds this work in check is the intensity of its realism and directness combined with a quirky specificity of craft. Like many of the artists in the New Museum’s 2008 exhibition Unmonumental DeGolier dispenses with slick expensive production in favor of the quotidian, making this living room both extraordinary and accessible.

Courtesy of the artist and D'Amelio Terras, New York

The Kitchen in New York City is currently showing On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance, a Leslie Hewitt solo exhibition curated by Rashida Bumbray.  The exhibition features new and recent work by Hewitt in photography, sculpture and film installation.  The Kitchen writes that in this exhibition Hewitt’s ‘…long-standing interest in non-linear perspective merges with W.E.B. Dubois’ theory of double consciousness, to create visually elegant and thoughtfully composed situational works’.

On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance brings together a selection of images from three of Hewitt’s photographic projects.  Riffs on Real Time (2008) features sculptural, layered collages with mundane objects created to be captured in photograph.  These sculptural creations reflect the condition of existence through a shared temporality.  In the Midday (2009) series she creates contemporary still-life arrangements that reference our consumerist society through repetition.  Hewitt creates and documents multiple times – making each photographic image of the same still-life arrangement subtly altered in perception.  Hewitt’s newest photographic project, A Series of Projections (2010), breaks down and simplifies the artist’s structural complexities.  In a departure, black and white photographs capture photographic fragments projected onto the studio wall in addition to honing in on objects placed on wooden surfaces.

Courtesy of the artist and D'Amelio Terras, New York

Like much of Hewitt’s work, her new film installation, created in collaboration with experiential cinematographer Bradford Young, is inspired by a literary source – in this instance Claude Brown’s Harlem migration text Manchild in the Promised Land (1965).  This film installation engages the landscape of a particular place (Harlem) and the manifest implications and effects of movement through this space.  Hewitt and Young drew visual inspiration from Harlem’s dense urban grid, its architectural features and through the study of its street archives.  The Kitchen describes this film installation as featuring ‘a series of silent vignettes’ where ‘time is marked through oscillations between the still and the moving image’.  The passage of the gallery visitor through the installation mirrors and completes the work.  This theme of human movement is as particularly definitive to our global age as it was to the formation of 20th century Harlem.

Leslie Hewitt graduated from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2000 and earned an MFA from Yale University in 2004.  She also undertook Africana Studies and Cultural Studies at New York University from 2001-2003.  Hewitt received the 2008 Art Matters research grant to the Netherlands and, more recently, the 2010 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Individual Artist Grant.  She is currently in residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Courtesy of the artist and D'Amelio Terras, New York

Leslie Hewitt is represented by D’Amelio Terras in New York and is in the public collection at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.  Hewitt has shown extensively across the US and was part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial and MoMA’s New Photography exhibition in 2009.  Hewitt’s work has also been shown internationally – notably at the Thomas Dane Gallery in London and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw.  Look for Leslie Hewitt’s work in the exhibition After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York City (organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta).  This exhibition is on view 28 March – 11 August 2010.

The Leslie Hewitt solo exhibition On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance will remain at The Kitchen through 20 May 2010.  A discussion between Leslie Hewitt and Bradford Young, moderated by Rashida Bumbray, will be held Sunday, 9 May at 4.00 pm.

The mysterious and psychologically challenging images created by Denver-based artist Mario Zoots are produced by applying a visual barrier between the viewer and the appropriated image by way of physical paper collage and digital manipulation. Each work carefully alters an existing image that was originally existed through the Internet, print publications and photographs and challenges our perception of and relationship to everyday mundane imagery.  Likewise, up until recently, the artist’s work could only be found through similar distribution sources such web pages, small run printed zines and prints or posters. However, Zoots opened his first public show this month, offering viewers the unique opportunity to engage his images in person. I Miss Mystery is the title of the artist’s new exhibition which is currently on view at Illiterate Gallery in Denver. DailyServing founder, Seth Curcio, recently spoke to the artist over a brief phone interview to talk about how he interrupts his found images, the advantages of working online and in print, and his sound project Modern Witch.

Seth Curcio: When did you first begin to create collages and prints? What was the initial idea that got these series going?

Mario Zoots: I began making collage because I didn’t have enough space in my apartment to paint anymore. Brian Bamps was living in an attic apartment in Denver for a short time. I visited his house and saw his small American school desk that was attached to a chair where he made all of his drawings. He had a box that he’d place the finished drawings in.  I knew I must work smaller because I was at risk of losing my living space. So I began to make collage and pen illustrations. We’re not artists with studios, we’re artists with homes. I consider myself an appropriation artist and a network artist. I am interested in making pictures reflect contemporary feelings by subtracting and distorting them. I’ve been preparing for my first solo show, I Miss Mystery, which opened in Denver at Illiterate Gallery on February 5th. I printed large giclee reproductions of my collages for the show. In addition to original and printed collage, I’m showing an experimental video and creating an installation out of hundreds of pages of porn all slightly altered. It feels cinematic. My ideas for the work come from movies, long Internet conversations with my contemporary girlfriend, and my own studies of archives.

SC: There is a mix of vintage and contemporary imagery used in your work. Where do you find your source material and what qualities do you look for when selecting an image?

MZ: I find my source material in libraries, in thrift shops and on the Internet. I’m constantly working and constantly picking things up. The mix of vintage and contemporary material is not significant. I don’t feel that using baseball cards from 1971 makes them more meaningful or valuable. Thousands of the same cards were printed and are lying around in hundreds of basements. I use popular materials because I’m attracted to them. I like the idea that there are multiples of the images in existence, that others have seen them in print too. The Pop Era has existed for so long, it’s inescapable, and it’s married to reproduction, duplication, and multiples. I feel by putting my art online and working with print that I am also participating in this type of reproduction culture, albeit, digitally.

SC: In many of your works, the composition seems to be deconstructed, and sometimes even aggressively interrupted. When constructing your imagery, do you intentionally obscure your subject to heighten the mystery or psychology of the image? How is the viewer’s relationship to the original source image altered by your manipulation?

MZ: There is an inherent psychology in popular media. Magazine pages are rich with meaning that’s been devised by advertising agencies or publishing groups. I believe the meaning in popular data is always heightened by audience. I can’t say that my collage or illustration heightens the psychology because I believe it’s already there.  Change causes mystery.  When I change images, I believe the psychology of the image is still in tact for the most part but then I find the disruptions and interruptions in my art to be haunting and mysterious. Perhaps the change, the deconstruction, the mystery is what my audience feels the most.

SC: Many of your works embody dark and disturbing qualities while utilizing a playful and irreverent humor. This seems to work as a tool to allure your viewers into the often absurd images, while causing them to confront their expectations of commercial imagery.  How do you want this visual jarring to effect the viewer?

MZ: I find humor in what I create but don’t necessarily feel like I need an audience to share that sensibility.  I borrowed a family portrait from the Internet and disrupted the faces. While sitting at my desk one day, I received an email from a man who said he really liked my art and that he was writing to tell me that one of the family portraits I’d used was his own.  It made the collage feel so different. It felt like a lifting of the curtain, synchronicity. Someone from this hyper multiple meme on the web spoke out. There are real people behind those faces!

SC: Most of your artwork is displayed digitally through the Internet. It is rare to experience the work in person in a gallery setting, however you do create a series of zines that feature the works. I am curious about both the production of your zines and how you feel the work is best displayed, over the Internet, in person or as a publication?

MZ: Most of my art is viewable online. Some of the digital collage only exists on the Internet and nowhere else.  I make zines with Kristy Foom and Keenan Marshall Kellar under the publishing name Drippy Bone Books. Zine publishing gives me an opportunity to curate and work collaboratively.  I just finished printing a new zine called Rescreened that features the work of Natalie Rodgers, Daniel Hipolito and myself. It’s a book of photographs taken of televisions screens and screenshots on personal computers of youtube.  I printed thirty copies. Kristy is tabling for Drippy Bone Books at the Lancashire Zine and Multiples Fair. We’re releasing Rescreened there at the end of this month. I like working in both the online, print and gallery realms. They’re all very different. When I need a break from one, I move to the other.

SC: What are the main sources of inspiration that you constantly return to?

I’m inspired by the Internet, and the many blogs I follow on a regular basis, my Internet footprints. I watch a lot of b-films, just last night I watched Virgin Witch a film from 1972 about 2 sisters, Christine and Betty, who have dreams of becoming fashion models, they sign with an agency and go to a castle for a photo shoot, but it’s not just any photo shoot, the real reason they are there is to serve as virgins in a induction ceremony for a coven of witches! I am inspired by music too, a record I can’t stop listening to is ‘Songs’ by John Maus, it’s insanely epic.

MZ: Do you have any new projects lingering around the corner. Anything that we should look out for?

Modern Witch is my sound project. I work with artists Kristy Foom and Kamran Kahn as a band. We use electronics and synthesizers, and most times record straight to tape. We play DIY venues and art galleries.  Disaro Records is releasing our cdr!   We hope to put out a 7″ record later this year.  One of my favorite Modern Witch shows was at Show Cave Gallery in Los Angeles. I think there are special things happening in Los Angeles right now, and I’m excited to have the connection to the L.A weirdos.  We’re planning a return to Show Cave in March 2010 to perform music and curate a Drippy Bone Books group art show.  The name of the show is WE OOZE. I feel like it’s going to be a mysterious year.