"I'm late! I'm late!" (like the Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland)

It's not that I haven't been inspired, or that I haven't seen new art, I've been overwhelmed.
And now, I'm not sure where to begin so I'll go with what is closest to my heart.

I love Alex Grey. I think his work is amazing. The detail, concepts, anatomical consistencies, and otherworldly auras all combine to create a force.

I met Alex about 7 or 8 years ago, in his Brooklyn loft he held a get-together/fundraiser for the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, his gallery in the city. I originally saw his work in person there, hung across his walls, some still in the process of being worked on, resting on easels, against walls.
I was absolutely inebriated by the complexity of his piece, "the Cosmic Christ", there are so many different intricate and beautifully painted cells that make up the entire piece. I also love that the frames are made specifically for his pieces.

Alex has done artwork for many bands, the two most famous being Nirvana and Tool.

I'm drawn to his work, I think, because I wish I could paint canvases like his. Science and biology have always interested me and bright colors make me feel the dynamism of his concepts. Maybe I feel comfortable because he uses symbols I grew up seeing. I'm not sure, I just know I'm drawn to his art like a Chappaquan housewife to Nordstrom.

I suck...at deadlines without an internet connection...but I promise, I'm getting my own internet setup this week, no more walking a few blocks in the cold to pay for a coffee and a danish I didn't even want just to get work done.

Anyhow, I figured I'd fill this blog in with some information about the images I chose for the top and sides. On the top is Clayton Patterson, who I promise to blog about soon. And on the side is Ryan McGinness, who I chose to blog about this time around.

He is awesome! I say this because I am one of those weirdos that likes Baroque art and graffiti. I love his use of cultural imagery and ideas to form his installations and the fact that it's not just works on paper, or works on the wall, or works on buttons (and in buttons), it's skate decks and sculptures and entire rooms of vibrant explosions.

I saw him this past summer at Pace Prints in the Chelsea gallery district. The images you see are from that show.

His work connects to me because of his use of vibrant colors, how intricate his designs and pattern work can be, and how wry his humor is. I love that he made buttons, hundreds of them, all different kinds, with all different sayings. I remember taking down some of the phrases he used but I couldn't find my notes in time. I'll edit this as soon as I do and include some of his hysterical and clever button phrases.

I loved his use of the skate decks to create the circular rainbow wall installation but I was most blown away by the fact that the rooms themselves were pieces of art, and then his pieces were put into them and on the walls so that in effect, you were walking into an installation that looked like an intelligent acid trip.

I would keep fawning over him but I know what about my past connects me to his art and I know that being objective is difficult in situations like these. But maybe you can see how I see if I explain where I'm coming from. I used to skateboard in high school, for a while, the only chick who'd risk getting arrested with the guys and willing to break bones for some air. I loved it, but my mom thought it was crazy and she threw my deck away. I didn't have the money to replace it so I lost touch with skating, but never with the lifestyle. Because it was illegal to skateboard in White Plains, we'd always run all over the town so as not to leave a scent, finding new places to do flip tricks and running like crazy when we saw the cops. Then, later on, when I dabbled in graf art, I realized it wasn't much different than skateboarding. I consider both of them to be art forms of a kind and they're both illegal so you always have to run around finding safe places to express yourself, and in both situations, the higher you get (with flip tricks or with tags/throw ups), the more street cred you receive. I, for one, don't have any street cred...I'm scared of heights...

but I loved San Francisco, in big part for the reason that they consider graffiti to be an actual art form and graf artists travel from all over to tag up in San Francisco, knowing their memory won't be covered over for a while.

But I did some cool art in my time (before they painted over it...damn anti-vandalism act...)

and I did some cool tricks in my time (before I literally busted my ass trying to do an ollie over a admittedly large set of stairs), so looking at his work made me nostalgic for the adrenaline rush of the illegal, and I don't know if that's what he meant to do...

But in another light entirely, his scrollwork and intensely colored patterning and symbolism reminded me of the Indian art and architecture I grew up around, highly decorative and very vivid.

The more art I see, the further I define myself.

It's odd, but I love it.

This is a little late...I'm sorry.
I had to turn my laptop in for repair and didn't get it back til a day or so ago.
But here's what I've been thinking about all week...or all month...I'm not actually sure how long.

This past summer, at Pace Wildenstein in the Chelsea area, they had an installation by an artist named Keith Tyson.

To give you an example of scale, it was in a gallery with renovated warehouse space. From the time you enter the space by pushing aside thick black curtains, to the time you leave, in order to take in the whole installation, it would take around an hour or so. It's about half the length of a football field from the black curtains to the very back wall.

In terms of the pieces themselves, I'm about 5'3" and each of them averaged about half my body size. A lot of the pieces were worked around the idea of a cube (I could've fit into were I in a fetal position) and there were over 200.

Each piece (top 5 are examples of specific pieces all put together for the final installation) came together to form what he called the "Large Field Array" (bottom 2 are examples of the whole installation from different angles). From the pictures of the whole installation, you can see that he has effectively made the whole room a piece. In order to take in his whole body of work, you have to walk around the entire room and walk around each piece individually. They are all done with such great detail, the books the penguin stands atop of had their spines beautifully painted and lettered with the names of famous authors. The top piece was a large scale, sculptural representation in homage of Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights". Throughout the installation, Keith is paying credit to the people, places, ideas, etc. that made him who he is, and in turn, affects every individual in our society.

The idea of the "Large Field Array" is one I haven't been able to get out of my head. Walking through the installation, I was inspired by each piece, and at the end, looking back on the whole thing, I had a moment of epiphany where I felt instantly in tune with all the forces of our universe and for a second, was able to pin all the intangible hopes and dreams of humanity on the basis that clarity of purpose and integrity of thought might be able to propel our civilization to the understandings it has, until now, only kept stumbling over.

It's really tough to describe what it really felt like, and I don't want to overblow the situation for the simple fact that others may not be affected the same way as I. But it felt a little like what I suppose tripping on acid might feel like, or what our discussion in class on thursday theorized. I was able to conceive Keith's image through both abstract and concrete negation, and that doesn't happen to me often unprompted. Like Magritte's painting, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe", it is both what it is and what it isn't.

But mostly, I don't want to admit that it probably affected me so deeply because I have a background in scientific thought. Besides, my favorite muppet is Beaker.

I've already eaten up enough bandwith with this thing just trying to keep up with me and save my draft...good ol' technology. So I'll leave this off with an excerpt from the press release of Keith Tyson's installation, "Large Field Array", from Pace Wildenstein. You'll see that his mark as a succesful artist was made on me because he achieved what he set out to.

The work is named after the Very Large Array (VLA), a field of Radio Telescopes in New Mexico. The VLA focuses on one spot from multiple viewpoints to give us a clearer picture of the universe. Similarly, Tyson’s monumental modular work combines over 230 separate sculptural forms into a single Field Array, which is designed to operate as a gigantic experiential lens for viewing some of the fundamental forces that make up reality.

In an interview with Dominic van den Boogerd published in the exhibition catalogue, Tyson remarked, “Each one of the pieces is the sum of all possible forces acting upon it. Each sculpture is basically the result from the things around it.” The catalogue also includes an essay by Dr. Jacob Wamberg, professor of Art History at Aarhus University, Denmark.

The individual elements of Large Field Array are two-feet squared and arranged at four-foot intervals in a roughly cubic array on the floor and walls of the gallery. They range from hyper-real illusionistic sculpture through to residues of physical processes. Each sculpture is connected with all the other works within the field, and these connections are diverse whether visual, psychological, causal, philosophical, physical or conceptual. The viewer is subsumed within this gigantic field and is forced to re-make it themselves, by tracing these myriad connections. They combine to form a lens that allows the viewer to interact with their essential boundlessness. The work attacks the myth of individuality, and the accepted concept of the unique discrete artwork. It continues Tyson’s joyful exploration of how everything in the world is connected.


If you're interested in Keith Tyson and his work, here's the link to the Pace Wildenstein site about this installation, and google will handle the rest.