“My expression is a boil-over of soul, a reflection provoking evolution. By processing what is very personal, I may present a predicament, suspend disbelief, or explore an alternative in order to harmonize with humanity. I am continually refining; hoping to instigate healing by revealing a truth that makes sense to any intuition.”
“i don’t want unexplained anger, i don’t want unexplained fear, i don’t want unexplained hope, i don’t want unexplained heartbreak, i want the raw TRUTH.”
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
