In it’s last week on view at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids is a solo exhibition of work by Chad Curtis entitled: DIGITAL IN NATURE.  The work included in the exhibition investigates the relationship of organic, living beings to the complex, nuanced environment and digital landscape. Each piece utilizes, to some degree, a crude, home brewed fabrication-and-drawing machine that relies on digital design tools, and computer numeric control.

Curtis often deals with simulation and refinement, utilizing highly processed materials removed from the context of their origin, to create a synthetic experience.  While the sculpture aims to potentially simulate an environment, the drawings serve as illustrations, of a lost world that happens to look a lot like the world we live in.

In a broader context, the work explores the line between the biological and mechanical, using popular, iconographic references. The idea of a distinction between the biological and the industrial, or the human and the digital, and the blurring of that distinction, is explored both as subject matter in the work and also in the production.

Chad Curtis currently serves as an Assistant Professor at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art. Trained in Ceramics and Printmaking, Curtis earned his BFA from Minnesota State University and his MFA from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University.

Each Sunday we reach deep into the DailyServing Archives to unearth an old feature that we think needs to see the light of day again. This week we found a video interview with L.A. artist Robbie Conal. If you have a favorite feature that you think should be published again, simply email us at info@dailyserving.com and include DS Archive in the subject line.

Originally Published on February 27, 2009

Artist Profile: Robbie Conal from By Osmosis TV on Vimeo.

Los Angeles-based artist Robbie Conal has made a name for himself over the past several decades for his poignantly irreverent and ultra-humorous political posters featuring unforgettable one-liner jokes. The artist wittingly simplifies issues that surround political figures and delivers the work to a mass audience by creating reproductions of his painting, pasting the posters in cities throughout the country. His clever insight can be seen over countless paintings such as a rendering of Dick Cheney with bunny ears bearing the simple phrase ‘Enronergizer Bunny’ over a hot pink ground.

In his current series of work, the artist has begun to move away from his well-known political poster portraits and has been investigating other, equally clever, connections between popular culture and politics.

The artist recently exhibited a new painting in the retrospective exhibition Beautiful/Decay: A to Z, which opened at the Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles last weekend. In addition, Conal recently teamed up with By Osmosis TV and Beautiful/Decay magazine to produce a short interview video that features the artist at work in his studio.

As a painter of political ideas—and, often, the grotesque and cruel—Luc Tuymans is a historian of images that appear banal but reveal sinister workings: colored blobs are actually disembodied eyeballs; a bare room with flattened perspective is the site of uncountable murders; a limp cloth turns out to be the emblem of a growing nationalist movement. His first U.S. retrospective, a mid-career survey now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is installed in chronological order, rewarding the viewer with a sense of how his ideas developed for each series. To mark this notable event, Mr. Tuymans conducted a personal tour of the galleries, illuminating his process and the themes behind each work. He concluded the tour with the remark, “I am not interested in having power. I am interested in looking at power.”

La correspondance (Correspondence), 1985. 31.5 x 47.5 inches (80 x 120 cm). © Luc Tuymans. Image via the excellent Luc Tuymans, edited by Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth, ISBN 978-1-933045-98-6.

“I stopped painting from 1981 to 1985 because it became too suffocating and too existential. And somebody by accident shoved a Super-8 camera in my hands and I started to film. And then I came back. Making images is important in the sense that you need distance.”

“This was the first painting made after the film adventure [above]. And it’s actually one of my most conceptual works, and it’s based upon an anecdote. The anecdote is from a Dutch writer who was stationed in the Dutch Embassy from 1905 to 1910. And he didn’t have enough money to bring his wife over to Berlin. And in those days you had the grand cafes with very bourgeois interiors, and also postcards taken of them. So every time he went to eat in such places he bought a postcard, and with a red pencil he crossed out the table at which he had eaten, and he sent it to his wife during the duration of five years. So that’s why it’s called correspondence. It’s also the idea of persistence, and homesickness without an end.”

Die Wiedergutmachung (Reparations), 1989. 17.75 x 21.625, 15 x 17.75 inches (45 x 55, 38 x 45 cm). © Luc Tuymans. Image via the excellent Luc Tuymans, edited by Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth, ISBN 978-1-933045-98-6.

“This is something I saw on television. It’s called the Weidergutmachung, and it’s about the woman who made the documentary, it was made in ‘89, which is when I saw the documentary on the West German television. It was quite an interesting documentary because Weidergutmachung means the pay-back system towards the people who suffered in the concentration camps…this time not the Jewish people, but Gypsy twins on which the German doctors in the concentration camps had experimented. These people were never paid back because the guy who was actually responsible for the whole situation of the repayment was also a doctor who himself experimented on them during the times he was working in the concentration camp. When he dies off in ‘83 in his bureau drawer, the woman who was making the documentary found contact prints of disengaged eyeballs and hands. So this is what I saw on the television screen. It was such a poignant element that I turned it into a more organic imagery.”

Gaskamer (Gas Chamber), 1986; oil on canvas; 24 x 32 1/2 in. (61 x 82.5 cm); The Over Holland Collection. In honor of Caryl Chessman; © Luc Tuymans; photo: Peter Cox, courtesy The Over Holland Collection

“The most problematic painting that I ever painted—that I ever will paint as long as I live, probably—is the Gas Chamber. The Gas Chamber was derived from a visit to in Dachau where you have a real gas chamber and not a replica. And I stood in it, and I made a watercolor when I visited it, and for years this watercolor was on the floor of my studio, which made the color of the paper yellow. And I also made it on a frame that is deliberately not straight. It’s a metonymous image, because without the words of the title it would be completely without effect, it would be just a painting. Nevertheless, it shows the triviality of that type of horror. At the time of its use, it was masked as a place where you could get a shower. All the elements of perspective are taken out, in order to get to this feeling of claustrophobic existence. I mean, a lot of times the Germans say, ‘We can’t deal with that type of history as the Holocaust,’ but I’m not agreeing with that, it is part of the culture… This remains a very difficult and ambiguous painting.”

The Flag, 1995. 54.375 x 30.75 inches (138.1 x 78.1 cm). © Luc Tuymans. Image via the excellent Luc Tuymans, edited by Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth, ISBN 978-1-933045-98-6.

“This was from a show about Flemish nationalism in my hometown, where at that point (luckily not anymore) there was the biggest concentration of the right-wing political party called the Flemish Bloc. So I thought I would start with their icons. This is the Belgian lion. The Belgian lion normally is a lion on a yellow backdrop with red claws. To enlighten you about the history of Flanders is going to take us very long, because it’s a long story to begin with, but anyway, to give you an idea…During the first world war, all the officers were French speaking. This meant that during the First World War a lot of Belgian people died in that war, millions of them. The people who were the soldiers, the foot guys, they were all Flemish; there were huge massacres, because when the officers would say a gauche [French: left], they would go right, into the machine fire. In between the two world wars there was a closeness in terms of culture to the German culture, more than to the French culture. And that ended up in a collaboration with the Germans. So a very difficult situation. That’s why you have a lot of marriage trouble, which I also witnessed. My mother was Dutch, they were in the resistance. My father was the Flemish side, they had collaborated. At dinner, when I was five years old, this explodes by the accidental showing up of a photograph of the guy I was named after doing the Hitler salute. You can imagine the whole situation. So what you can see here is the Flemish lion, and I just made a watercolor of it, and then I crumbled it together, and then pinned it on the wall. And then I did something I had never done before, I took a Polaroid of it, and it was such bad quality that it totally deleted the imagery, which is actually beautiful I think. And this was the first time I used Polaroid as a device to derive imagery.”

Ballroom Dancing, 2005; oil on canvas; 62 1/4 x 40 3/4 (158 x 103.5); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, fractional and promised gift of Shawn and Brook Byers; © Luc Tuymans

“This was painted out of my disgust with the Bush legislation. The first idea I had was this: I was thinking of this element of regression in American society in those days, going back to an open form of conservatism, and therefore Fred Astaire, Ginger Rodgers. Ballroom dancing. So then I was on the web browsing, trying to find more contemporary imagery, and in 2005 there was the Texas Governor’s ball, this is the Texas seal, the woman swings her head out, this guy is the epitome of well-behaved and whatever. And on the other hand, this is an image that’s really classical, I really loved doing it…”

The Secretary of State, 2005; oil on canvas; 18 x 24 1/4 in. (45.7 x 61.5 cm); Collection the Museum of Modern Art, New York, promised gift of David and Monica Zwirner; courtesy David Zwirner, New York; © Luc Tuymans

“…Then, one of my best friends who used to be the Minster of Foreign Affairs, made a remark of Condoleeza Rice—I was in a bar, reading this in a newspaper—there was a day Condoleeza Rice came and visited our country, and he said something like, “She is very intelligent, and she is not unpretty.” And this sexist remark led to my idea of Condoleeza Rice. The interesting point is that she is depicted not to be judged, she is depicted with great determination. At that point no one knew what the woman was going to achieve.”

Originally published on September 29, 2008.

The material and process-based sculptures of Foon Sham have spanned the past 20 years. The artist’s recent work relies on the principles of design, and some works have shifted from the previously abstract into newly recognizable forms, such as the house. During a residency in the mid-90s, Sham created “Houses at Night,” a work that formed as an intuitive response to the surrounding landscape. The piece marked a breakthrough for the artist, as he is now working more freely with familiar forms and integrating light and architecture within the work. Sham was born in Macao, China, in 1953 and moved to the United States in 1975. The artist completed his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond, Va., and his BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCA) in Oakland, Calif. Sham has continued to participate in countless exhibitions and residencies, including recent shows with Heineman Myers Gallery in Bethesda, Md., Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong and Dianne Tanzer Gallery in Melbourne, Australia. Artist residencies include Kulturhuset USF in Bergen, Norway, and the Pyramid Atlantic Arts Center in Riverdale, Md.

This article was originally published on August 23, 2007.

Now at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Production Site reexamines the artist’s studio as subject, presenting work that documents, depicts, reconstructs, or otherwise invokes that space, revealing how the studio functions as a place where research, experimentation, production, and social activity intersect.

The exhibition reflects and addresses the pivotal role of the studio in artists’ practice while alluding to its enduring status in the popular imagination. The works that comprise Production Site include multi-channel video projections, photographic light-boxes and installations, and life-sized fabrications of artists’ studios — real and imagined — that either extol the virtues of the studio or problematize the preconceived and often highly romanticized notions associated with it. The exhibition provides the viewer with a look at how some of the most compelling artists of our time have demystified, remystified, and reconsidered this site within the physical and conjectured space of the work of art.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, February 9 and 10, Mumbai-based Nikhil Chopra performed Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing XI in the MCA galleries. Chopra brought the artist’s studio into the gallery using a variety of costumes and props, and wall drawings that he created during the performance. These will remain in the gallery as an installation for the duration of the Production Site exhibition. During his performance, Chopra assumed the fictional persona of a Victorian-era figure named Yog Raj Chitrakar, who is based loosely on his grandfather. His last name, Chitrikar, literally translates into picture- or mask-maker in Sanskrit. Chopra inhabited this character for the two days, changing into masculine and feminine costumes that challenge assumptions about race and gender. While performing, Chopra made drawings that reflect on Production Site, blackening the walls with his obsessive charcoal drawings to emphasize the studio as a place where an artist’s internal anxieties and struggles are confronted and resolved.

The exhibition is organized by MCA Curator Dominic Molon, and features the work of Nikhil Chopra, Deb Sokolow, Justin Cooper, Tacita Dean, Amanda Ross-Ho, William Kentridge, Andrea Zittel, Kerry James Marshall, Rodney Graham, Ryan Gander, Bruce Nauman, and John Neff.  Production Site is presented as part of Studio Chicago, a year-long collaborative project that focuses on the artist’s studio through October 2010.

Originally published on: November 18, 2008

The new James Cohan Gallery in Shanghai is currently exhibiting work by Dutch sculptor Folkert de Jong. The artist’s large scale narrative installations often reference themes of war, big business, and global greed, as well as the history of art. This particular body of work takes Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” theory and applies it to competition between the nations.

The new work, entitled Thousand Years Business as Usual, includes three sculptural tableaux composed of industrial Styrofoam and Polyurethane insulation foam. The main installation, Early Years, consists of 7 anthropomorphized monkeys arranged in a loose circle, alluding to Matisse’s The Dance of 1901. They are precariously positioned atop oil barrels, with one foot suspended in the air. Covered with a sloppy application of black pigment, these simian characters appear to be plucked from a horror movie. This circular format not only quotes a Modern master, but also references the cycle of life and evolutionary (and artistic) progression. In addition to their role in evolutionary theory, monkeys are also the most versatile sign in the Chinese zodiac. In Business As Usual-The Tower, 3 monkeys are stacked one on top of the other on an oil barrel, miming the cautionary statement “See no evil, hear no evil, say no evil.”

De Jong’s choice of materials holds symbolic significance, for the insulation itself is a petroleum product. Styrofoam has no sculptural precedent and was originally used by Americans in World War II to create blue lift rafts that were barely visible on the water. After the war, Styrofoam was absorbed into our daily lives after several companies developed the “Styrofoam Plan” in the 50s, an effort to replace other materials. War leads to innovation and progress and slowly this technology is incorporated into mass culture. While both Styrofoam and Polyurethane are mixed with the same chemical components, Styrofoam has a rigid closed cell structure, while the Polyurethane foam allows the artist to develop more organic forms due to its fluidity.

Folkert de Jong studied at the Academy of Visual Arts and the Rijksacademy for Visual Arts, both in Amsterdam, where the artist currently lives and works. He has had several solo shows, one at James Cohan in New York in 2007 as well as Peres Projects in Berlin. de Jong won the Prix de Rome in 2003 for sculpture and has been influenced by artists such as George Grosz and Otto Dix.