“Real time”—the actual time when an artist is busy at work in his studio—isn’t something we, the public, generally gets to see. We only get the final product: a painting, a drawing, a video. That said, it’s precisely this (formerly private) real time that forms the cornerstone for Harlem-based ar... Read more
“Real time”—the actual time when an artist is busy at work in his studio—isn’t something we, the public, generally gets to see. We only get the final product: a painting, a drawing, a video. That said, it’s precisely this (formerly private) real time that forms the cornerstone for Harlem-based artist Eric Sanner’s work. Not content to simply paint, he video documents his hand as it holds the brush; the numerous altered states his canvases go through; the other artists with whom he collaborates. When Sanner’s “done,” he presents to us, not a painting, but a composite-space-time-thing; an event on a spot.
Here, at 45projects, we’ve exhibited stills snapped from these installations (which can never be viewed the same way, twice), as well as video documentation footage.
To create the series “Continuous Wave,” Chris Spinelli takes old love letters, long abandoned, and keys blocks of their text into Morse Code translators he finds on the Web. The subsequent dots are dashes are painstakingly drawn by Spinelli onto fresh sheets of paper—and often stained with coffee, much like the letters that inspired them. There is a sentimental quality to Spinelli’s surface, and especially his touch. Yet there’s a coolly Modernist pleasure to be had from the abstract compositions themselves.
Spinelli applies this mixture of the ideal and the real into “Gugg, Gugg, Gugg,” a humorous visual meditation on the birth of, and role of, that storied museum, founded on the collection of Hilla Rebay and designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright’s spiral is seen here as flat form; likewise, Rebay’s hopes for a Utopian art-gallery experience are fodder for Spinelli’s reductive musings.
Spinelli takes a very personal approach toward mapping time in 2 dimensions.
Sanner takes personally the fact that 2 dimensions is often all we have.
Is it possible to create a “personal architecture” — one that can contain, not people, but the passage of time? If so, this exhibit is its answer.
