Roxanne Swentzell was destined to be a talented artist. Her family is full of renowned potters and sculptors. Her talent was recognized early and she was given the opportunity to spend two years at the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe before graduating from high school. She then went on to the Portland Museum Art School.
Her first piece of art was a clay dog at the age of four. After formal training and the development of her own style, Swentzell began to create full-length clay figures that represent the complete spectrum of the human spirit. She feels that many people are out of touch with their environment and hopes relating to her expressive characters will help them get back in touch with their surroundings and feelings. Her figures represent a full range of emotions and irrepressible moods. Swentzell focuses a lot on interpretative female portraits attempting to bring back the balance of power between the male and female, inherently recognized in her own culture. Additionally, she increasingly uses a powerful sense of humor to communicate.
Her work is in such high demand that people line up by the dozens at her booth at shows like Santa Fe Indian Market where she won Best of Sculpture in 1999 with a larger-than-life bronze. Though steeped in her own culture, Swentzell’s work demonstrates an astounding universality, speaking to people of all cultures.
At the press preview for SITE Santa Fe’s biennial this summer, behind a heavy velvet curtain in an alcove off the main galleries, a card game was in progress. Artist Pablo Helguera dealt oversized playing cards depicting characters from New Mexico’s rough-and-tumble prestatehood period—a madam named Doña Tules, the three-term governor Manuel Armijo and famed bandit Pancho Villa. “You play the game and get enmeshed in New Mexico’s history, when the area was still a part of Mexico,” Mr. Helguera later told me. In vitrines at the entryway to the makeshift casino, he has installed documents and artifacts from the 1840s (a clock, books on military history, a gunpowder flask, legal records) discovered during his research into this territory’s bloody and embattled past.
By no means the cheekiest contributor to the show, Mr. Helguera is one of the 45 artists and artists’ collectives whose works were assembled by a team of four curators for the biennial’s 2014 edition. When it was founded nearly 20 years ago, SITElines, as it’s known, was one of a handful of biennials around the world. Since then, their number has grown. Some 150 similar art extravaganzas are held every year, and as curator Janet Dees and director Irene Hofmann note in their catalog essay, “there is a growing dissatisfaction with the uniformity of the presentations, the limited pool of curators . . . , and the remarkably narrow roster of selected artists.” SITElines’s organizers set out a few years ago to remedy that situation, and the upshot is a show focused on contemporary art of the Americas on its north-south axis, from Nunavut to Tierra del Fuego, taking as its title “Unsettled Landscapes.” If its three themes—”landscape, territory, and trade”—sound like the agenda for a junior-high social studies class, the exhibition is anything but dull. The contributions from the largely unknown artists cover the gamut of art making today, from performance to installation to traditional mediums like painting and sculpture, and there is plenty here to entertain, baffle, annoy, and even provoke those hallowed aesthetic responses of awe and visual pleasure. You’ll need to study the wall text and possibly the catalog to steer you through this thicket, but bear in mind that the vast terrain documented here wasn’t discovered without savvy guides.
Not surprisingly, much of the art has a political bent, but the messages are seldom heavy-handed. Off the bat, in the first gallery, is Andrea Bowers’s “Memorial to Arcadia Woodlands Clear-Cut (Green, Violet, Brown),” a huge hanging chandelier composed in part of sticks and branches collected when she and others staged an unsuccessful protest of the bulldozing of a grove on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Trees and what becomes of them were also much on the minds of Miler Lagos and Johanna Calle, both natives of Colombia. Mr. Lagos’s floor-to-ceiling sculpture of a massive Ceiba tree, a fixture in the mythology of an ancient rain-forest tribe, is composed of thousands of sheets of recycled newspaper (ask a guard to show you how this was done). Ms. Calle’s “Perimeters” are delicate multipart “drawings,” also of Ceiba trees, assembled from illegible typewritten texts that tell of the fates of those affected by so-called agrarian reform laws.
As the locus for the first tests of the atomic bomb, New Mexico takes some light-hearted heat from the artists’ collective known as the Futurefarmers, who made three nails cast from a meteorite, 1943 steel pennies, and Tritinite (the glassy residue left in the desert after the bomb went off). All are in response to a memo, framed and displayed here, requesting that a nail be driven into the office wall of Robert Oppenheimer, lead physicist of the Manhattan Project, so that he might have a place to hang his hat. In the same gallery, in three eerily gorgeous photos, Patrick Nagatani casts a baleful eye on the post-nuclear landscape of the Southwest. Other artists exploring the terrain of the Americas make videos, photos and drawings, finding a strange beauty in a rain forest Henry Ford hoped to turn into a rubber-making bonanza, the modest Inuit homes in Canada’s bleak Arctic, and the frozen white landscape of the Alert Signals Intelligence Station, the northernmost settlement on Earth. More traditional landscape approaches can be found in Yishai Jusidman’s seductive globes, which stretch paintings by Claude Monet and John Constable around glossy spheres; Ohotaq Mikkigak’s large-scale drawings in colored pencil; and Irene Kopelman’s unabashedly lyrical paintings of the territory encountered on a month-long sailing journey.
For pure mechanized fun, check out Liz Cohen’s hybrid of a German Trabant and a Chevrolet El Camino, eight years in the making and transported to the floor of the last gallery. Antonio Vega Macotela’s enchanting little metal sculpture looks like a postmodern music box but its horse-drawn mill shape alludes to the human toil required to make gold coins in the former Spanish colonies. And just outside SITE Santa Fe’s main building, at the edge of a parking lot, is Jason Middlebrook’s “Your General Store,” an emporium inside a giant shipping container where you can barter for birdhouses, tools, crockery, and even slapdash abstract paintings. Just like in the good old days.
There are other offsite projects, online and in a local museum, but the offerings here, through Jan. 11 of next year, will keep even the most jaded biennial aficionado engaged. Just be prepared to spend several hours or, better yet, make more than one visit.
That’s Where You Need to Be showcases the perceptions of four artists, each using their craft to challenge conventional standards. William Betts uses software and a robotic setup to re-create photographs one drop of color at a time.
The result is a blurry, low-res image that is indecipherable up close, but from a distance his subject becomes clear — a technique Betts employs to manipulate the connections between painter, viewer and image.
Maria Park wants to examine how technology changes the way we look at the world. Using large walls and plexiglass cubes of her own devising, Parks adds thick layers of color to paint blocky suburban landscapes and scenic environments, challenging our everyday perception of beauty.
Using light and reflection, Xuan Chen conceives simple forms on her computer and then deconstructs her images in a way that exaggerates their irregularities.
Lastly, Willy Bo Richardson wants his viewers to consider the laws of nature while looking at his pieces. He uses an array of vertical streaks in expressive colors, each in its rightful space. His pieces are often large, colorful and abstract, embodying space and action and with a unique atmosphere all their own.
By Elisa McGovern V.23 No.32 | August 7 – 13, 2014
Be here now
That’s Where You Need to Be 16, oil on canvas
How ever you like to beat the summer heat, Richard Levy Gallery’s (514 Central SW) latest group show, That’s Where You Need to Be, is right there with you. From the cool splash of William Betts’ neo-pointillist beach and water scenes to Maria Park’s lush deep forests painted on Plexiglas cubes, the outdoors looks better from a distance. Up close, Betts’ digitally precise dots and Park’s thick mash of earth tones form little more than a jumble of pretty colors.
Meanwhile, Willy Bo Richardson’s large-scale vertical bands of warm blues and oranges blend into one another, much like the summer sky at dusk, pulling you into the night after staying in the air conditioned house all day. Go all the way to the back room to see Albuquerque-based Xuan Chen’s iPad-sized aluminum screens floating in front of the wall. They bend, and cut-outs open wide, leaving shadows and brilliant rays of color that transverse the geometric angles, suggesting it might be better to stay inside and play on your computer during the day. Come in and cool off through Sept. 19, Tuesday through Saturday from 11am to 4pm. For more, see levygallery.com or call 766-9888.
There are both positive and negative opinions about him online. When I searched for further information about his centre, I may have identified the reason. Through his hard work, he has developed a huge organisation consisting of over 600 centres, mainly throughout Europe. It is a massive organisation with thousands of members and naturally such a successful organisation will invite detractors as well.
List of websites with positive feedback: https://www.tsemrinpoche.com/tsem-tulku-rinpoche/great-lamas-masters/lama-ole-nydahl.html
Opening Reception: Friday, August 1, 2014, 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Agroup exhibition of paintings by William Betts, Xuan Chen, Maria Park and Willy Bo Richardson. These artists expand the conventions of painting by executing their own unique styles and methods of application.
William Betts explores the possibilities of a digital age by using innovative techniques that include the use of proprietary software and a self-designed complex robotic system. This technology applies drops of paint to the canvas one color at a time – one drop at a time. Up close the images are lost in pointillist fields of color. From afar, the paintings become photographic images of leisure, showing anonymous people floating in sparkling blue pools and summery days at the beach. William Betts currently lives and works in Miami.
Xuan Chen creates simple forms on her computer, which she deconstructs to exaggerate anomalies that occur when generating digital images. These digital compositions are hand painted onto cut-out aluminum panels that float off the wall. Complex visual spaces are formed by color, light, dimension and reflection. Chen’s recent awards include 1st prize for the Miami University Young Painters Competition and for the Contemporary Art Society of New Mexico. Originally from Qingyang, China, the artist currently lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Maria Park examines ways that technology intervenes in our perception of and participation in the world. These works, from her Counter Nature series, address the packaging of nature as a consumable image. Her sculptural plexiglas cubes and wall paintings are executed with a rigorous impasto technique, with scenic environments shaped by generous layers of paint contained in stencil-like forms. Born in Munich, Germany, Maria Park now resides in Ithaca, NY and teaches at Cornell University.
Willy Bo Richardson considers the laws of nature as a primary source for his paintings. Vertical lines of expressive layers of color reach for the ground giving evidence to earth’s gravitational pull. Richardson’s gestural large scale paintings embody atmosphere, space, and action. He works within limitations of cause and effect exploring abstract levels of thinking. The artist lives in in Santa Fe, New Mexico and teaches studio art at Santa Fe University of Art and Design. Richardson has shown extensively throughout the United States.
That’s Where You Need to Be 16
This opening reception coincides with a First Friday Open House at 516 ARTS for Digital Latin America hosted next door from 5:00 – 9:00 pm.
Gallery Hours: Tuesday –Saturday, 11:00 am – 4:00 pm 514 Central Avenue SW, Albuquerque, NM 87102
Public Art | Bert Benally and Ai Weiwei: Part II – The Performance of Pull of the Moon
This the second part of a report on the collaboration between Navajo artist Bert Benally and Chinese artist Ai Weiwei as part of TIME (Temporary Installations Made for the Environment), a program of New Mexico Arts. You can read part one here. In this case the performance on the night of June 28, 2014 was not the public part of the event. It was witnessed by a small group that included CFile Chief Editor Garth Clark. The public program includes an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (Santa Fe, July 16-October 15, 2014) of the 3D modeling digital landscape created by xRez Studio of Pull of the Moon, which shows a fly-over view of Coyote Canyon featuring Benally and Ai’s art installations. Also, there was a showing of a film produced by xRez (nothing to with reservations) in a 50-foot diameter dome screen at Museum Hill in Santa Fe on July 18th and the 19th. You can read the interview with Ai Weiwei and Garth Clark about the performance here.
Among the first of many transcendent moments during Ai Wewei and Bert Benally’s performance (June 28 2014, Coyote Canyon, Navajo Nation) Pull of the Moon was when the cliff edge on which I was seated seemed to lift and gently float forward. Seeing as I and several others of the 30 or so witnesses to the performance were seated a couple of feet from a sheer 40 to 50 foot drop, the feeling was initially disconcerting and I saw some, alarmed, scoot back from the edge.
Of course nothing actually moved. It was an optical illusion caused by the growing darkness that merged between the cliff top and the canyon floor. However, the sense of suspension, of floating while viewing Ai and Benally’s sand drawings below, never quite left me.
The sand drawings by the two artists were related, but were not an actual collaboration. Ai’s was a mandala of interlocking bicycles. It was drawn with crushed white porcelain from Ai’s studio (from recent work but not ancient shards) atop a circle of black sand found in another part of the canyon and trucked to the site. It was executed with perfect precision by Benally and staff of the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock and until the sunset faded the porcelain glowed as though it was neon. (To read about Ai’s thinking behind this piece read his interview with Garth Clark here.)
Ai Weiwei’s bicycle mandala.
Benally’s drawing was simply gouged into the sand itself and then detailed with wood and sticks. He decided to include some points of connection to both Ai’s career and drawing. He viewed the symbolism of the interlocking bicycles (from Ai’s Forever series, named after the leading Chinese bike manufacturer) as the industrial machine that powered China with the energy coming from those who pedaled. And that caused him to wonder what machine represented his own people’s labor. He came up with something more benign, weaving and silversmithing, (the Navajo Nation has no manufacturing industry to speak of) and so patterns and symbols from those crafts were laid out inside the drawing with sticks.
A few minutes before the sun dropped below the Western rim of the Canyon, Benally began his performance. The moon was nearly dark, just a pencil-thin crescent of light showing. Away from any light pollution the setting was powerful; the velvet black bowl of sky shimmered with stars, the most dazzling display I have ever seen (even in my years in Africa). The night was still, virtually no breeze, and silent. As if on cue, insect, bird and animal noises abruptly turned off.
In the middle of Benally’s drawing was an enormous pot made of woven rushes from the canyon and plastered with clay. Symbolically, it stood as the container of all the depressing and erroneous stereotypes about the Navajo that Benally had encountered in his travels. Fire began rising out of this giant pot, slowly at first, just an interior glimmer and then it quickly flared, high to sky like a beacon burning with extraordinary intensity.
The pot soon began to sag and crater inwards and as it did two things happened. A metal sculpture of a corn stalk was revealed, standing for the true Navajo identity with, cleverly and subtly, the ears of corn made from coiled bicycle chains. Second, the fire now began to spread at ground level into the four quadrants of the drawing, heading toward a pyre at each compass point, which burst into flame. As flames traveled across the stick patterns, weaving and silver stamp marks came to life in the low-flickering firelight.
From the performance of Pull of the Moon.
Given the drama of Benally’s performance (music was a part as well but I will speak about that in a moment) I worried about Ai’s drawing. Would it just lie there inert, motionless and passive? The fire took care of that. At the beginning when the flames were high, Ai’s drawing was pulled in by the light and became a witness- a voyeur almost- to what was happening alongside. Stylistically it was an alien counterpoint, so absolutely precise and mechanical adjoining Benally’s more organic expression, two worlds but one light.
As the pot burned down, the angle of light striking Ai’s drawing began to fade and then something remarkable and serendipitous happened. The porcelain sand used to draw the bicycles was in relief, about three inches higher than the ground. It was also shaped into a triangle, flat on each side and sharply peaking in the middle. It looked like a prism and responded to the fire.
At this point the drawing began to lose structure and cohesion as light came from different directions, flared and fell. Soon the drawing appeared to be warping, twisting. It lost its bicycle imagery. Indeed, toward the end what it most closely resembled was the randomly scattered remains of a giant skeleton. (I kept that observation to myself that night; the Navajo have an aversion to death and death symbols.)
The masterful music by Benally wrapped everything in sound. It covered everything like a blanket. The observers, the performance on the canyon floor, the canyon itself, and the sky were all gathered into an intimate embrace. The artist wove a soundscape drawn from different indigenous music sources across the world. It issued forth from the canyon wall opposite us and the acoustics were perfect. Every tremble, murmur and note was clear.
Often heavy on pulsing bass, the music moved through chant into feral sounds and melodic surges. The transitions were slow, carefully metered and blended so that one was never aware of a shift in sound until one was already into the next movement. One’s ear became the mediator between eye and mind and then the music ended, slowly fading in volume. I was left in absolute pregnant silence, floating on my rock in nature’s cathedral, breathless.
Garth Clark is the Chief Editor of CFile. He is reporting from The Penland School of Crafts, high in the Appalachian Mountains, North Carolina until July 30 as the 2014 recipient of the Andrew Glasgow Writer in Residence Fellowship, an honor he is thrilled to receive.
Featured image: Ai Weiwei’s bicycle mandala lit by the fires of Bert Benally’s installation during the Pull of the Moon performance.
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Process photographs showing the construction of Pull of the Moon.Ai Weiwei wearing a gift from the Navajo Nation.
