Interview with Jaime Lakatos

I had the pleasure of meeting artist Jaime Lakatos in Aggregate Space last week to chat with her about "Cinderscape," her solo show there. I encourage readers to visit Aggregate Space while "Cinderscape" is still on view (through Saturday, August 3). It's a very strong show by an artist I expect to see a lot more from in the coming years.

Jaime Lakatos
Installation view of "Chronic Remorse"
Watercolor and graphite on paper
14 x 18 inches
2013

Christopher Reiger: Are you from the Bay Area originally?

Jaime Lakatos: I grew up in New York, about an hour from the city, on Long Island.

Where on Long Island?

Port Jefferson, right where the ferry goes to Bridgeport.

So, you’re obviously interested in natural history. Where did that interest come from?

Well, you know, going to the Natural History Museum in New York. That was home base. I had an internship there before I started working in museums thirteen years ago, just making all the architectural models for the new Hall of Ocean Life. Also, when I was in school at RISD, I did a 6-month stint with Kiki Smith. My work was a lot more human body based at the time, and its gradually evolved. It was about parasites in the human body, then animals and humans, and now it’s just animals!

Ernest Jolly's Unfinished Labors

Ernest Jolly
"Limbo"
2012
Disco ball, flocking, wire, leather thread, and foam
Dimensions variable

One has to marvel at the inscrutability of the sculptures and installation Ernest Jolly includes in "The Labor Party," his current solo exhibition at Patricia Sweetow Gallery. "Carry Me Home," a wheelbarrow fashioned of frosted Plexiglas and metal, and "Limbo," an installation featuring a half-flocked disco ball spinning above leather punching bags, are compelling and surreal creations. Yet I connected neither to the plight "of the black agricultural worker in the Southern United States before the First World War," their conceptual substance according to the gallery's press release, which almost reads as if it describes a piece of choreography or theater.

"The punching bags represent the hero of the field laborer, a Black Prize Fighter, whose strength was respected in a world where the laborer was powerless. If only for a brief moment, and with great cathartic justice, The Prize Fighter could break the color barrier, by competing with, and potentially beating the white fighter. [...] The globe, while being a ubiquitous object at dance halls, also gives voice to the specific dance 'Limbo' - dancers move under a pole that is gradually lowered from chest level, and when cleared is considered the triumph of life over death. In Jolly's 'Limbo' the transformation of hope, life, and place are revolving in his disco sun, casting an eclipse in a profound struggle for life."

Gregory Ito's "Point of Vision"

Gregory Ito
"Untitled (Time Diagram Set B)"
2011
Acrylic and gouache on wood panel, acrylic on handmade wood object, and table
Like it or not, context informs our experience and interpretation of artworks. We generally think of context as a work's physical situation (e.g., how and where it is installed) or its social and art historical framework, but most important is the context provided by an individual viewer. What is the viewer's profession? What book is she reading? Who was she talking to an hour ago, and what about? Of course, artists can't control for these subjective factors, and many craft artist statements that provide viewers with what the artists believe is appropriate context for the artwork. Too often, though, these statements tell viewers what the "take away" should be, thereby forfeiting the most vital and collaborative element of the artistic enterprise, the creation of meaning by the viewer.

How refreshing, then, to find Gregory Ito's healthy twist on the artist statement in his terrific "Point of Vision" exhibition at Gallery Hijinks. While the artist and gallery provide a press release (usually an artist statement reworked and edited by the gallery staff), Ito also includes "Sources," a tidy stack of books on the floor, spines out so that the titles are easily read. Is "Sources" intended as a found object sculpture? Kinda sorta (after all, it's titled, is situated among Ito's other work, and is included on the exhibition price list, albeit "NFS"), but its principal valuable is as an alternative to the formal statement. It provides viewers with context without bullying them into a particular conclusion.

Gregory Ito
"Sources"
2011
Book collection
"Sources" is something of a companion piece to "Self Portrait (Object Collage)." Installed in one of the gallery windows, "Self Portrait" includes a beach chair, flip flops, a towel, a pile of diary-like journals, an ashtray, empty beer bottles, a candle, and 28 snapshots mounted on a board that faces the chair. One imagines the artist in his chair, sipping beer and smoking as he contemplates his collection of isolated observations. The photographs are mostly of clouds and sun-soaked skies, but there are also landscapes, some abstract imagery, a rainbow, and an illuminated light fixture. These pictures complement Ito's reading list. A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe, by Michael Schneider, Concerning the Spiritual In Art, by Wassily Kandinsky, The Cosmic Perspective, Third Edition, by Bennett, Donahue, Schneider, and Voit, The Handy Weather Answer Book, and other titles included in Ito's book pile suggest that the artist is preoccupied with sublime, existential mysteries and celebrating our species' impulse to solve them.

Gregory Ito
"Self Portrait (Object Collage)"
2011
Window installation with 28 photographs and wood display
Ito's sculptures, paintings, and installations reflect this focus. Especially in the gallery's "white cube" setting, they read as speculative objects and diagrams as much as they do aesthetic entities. The artist is well aware of this; he titles the two most compelling installations on view, "Untitled (Time Diagram Set A)" and "Untitled (Time Diagram Set B)." He pairs a painting with a sculpture in each. The paintings are straightforward illustrations of the sculptures, but, displayed in the gallery setting with the three-dimensional objects they depict, the images read as icons, potent stand-ins for the "real" or "true" object. Curiously, by virtue of having been depicted, the sculptures also gain in significance. The meaning of these pictures and objects remains somewhat esoteric. I infer, based on the works' titles and Ito's "Sources," that these are representations of space-time's nature or shape, but that's a rather general interpretation. Still, the sculptures resonate as totems and the paintings as their icons. This reciprocal dynamic is compelling, and serves as an oblique reminder that all artwork exists in relationship to the world and ideas outside of the gallery and studio, a fact too often overlooked since the advent of modernism.

Gregory Ito
"Untitled (Time Diagram Set A)"
2011
Acrylic on wood panel, acrylic on handmade wood object, and shelf
In other works, Ito more directly highlights what I've elsewhere described as "the wonder current." In "Human Euphoria," a disembodied ceramic head of a girl in a big-brimmed, yellow hat rests on top of a block of adobe clay, apparently gazing at an ocean sunset. The piece is a winking, contemporary tribute to Caspar David Friedrich's Romantic masterpiece, "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog," but Ito's head is better-suited to contemplation than the vigorous morning constitutionals of Friedrich's dapper hero. Is this a comment on the continued dominance of conceptual concerns over aesthetic and material considerations in contemporary art? Perhaps; perhaps not. Ito's better pieces excel precisely because they can be interpreted as "art for art's sake" or, taking a hint from his "Sources," as art about the stupefying magnificence of being.

Gregory Ito
"The Embrace Installation"
2011
Acrylic and gouache on wood panel, found book with handmade page holders, and petrified object on shelf
Image credits: all images, courtesy Gallery Hijinks and Gregory Ito, 2011

Gallery Report, November 6th, 2010

On a beautiful fall Saturday, I visited a number of San Francisco's downtown galleries with Brian Friedman, a good friend and artist who was visiting the Bay Area from New York City. Although I'm very happily installed on the west coast, I haven't lived here long enough to establish close friendships, and I was impressed by how much I appreciated spending time with a friend with whom I'm so comfortable. Maybe I'm getting prematurely sentimental? Sentimental or not, I'm still a harsh judge of artwork, and most of what Brian and I viewed was unremarkable. Fortunately, there were a few exceptions.

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"Narwhellian"
Seth Koen at Gregory Lind Gallery


Seth Koen
"Djiril"
2010
Wood
43.25 x 72 x 8.25 inches
Sculptor Seth Koen produces work that appeals in equal measure to my formal sensibility and my imagination. Viewers who prioritize craft will delight in Koen's refined and sensuous surfaces and formalists will applaud the forms' casual elegance. As playful as they are soulful, some wear knitted contraceptives or melt impossibly while others limn space's transcendental properties almost as effectively as a James Turrell light work.

My principal pleasure, though, is considering what the esoteric objects might represent or be. The artist avoids didacticism -- he shows instead of telling -- and the sculptures are more open-ended and interesting as a result. Are they abstracted totem animals, as the exhibition's title, "Narwhellian," might suggest? Are they instead the tools or ritual objects of some unknown, aboriginal population? Or are they sophisticated, conceptual responses to our contemporary political predicaments, another reading of the show's title? The answers, of course, are supplied by each viewer.


Seth Koen
"Medusa" and "Arachne"
2010
Wood / Wood and thread
63.5 x 5 x 7.75 inches
69 x 6 x 6 inches

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"Incidental Objects"
Andy Goldsworthy at Haines Gallery


Andy Goldsworthy
"Hand hit site dust, Presidio Spire, October 2008"
2008
6 unique C-prints
16 x 16 inches, each
Could it be that Andy Goldsworthy is at last taken seriously? These days, I don't receive as much grief as I used to when I admit that I admire much of Goldsworthy's effort. Perhaps the self-conscious, punishing cool of conceptualism is finally beginning to wane, making room for artists who aspire to the sublime and wear their Romantic and mystical impulses like badges of honor? Whether or not Goldsworthy's work is taken seriously by his contemporaries, however, it is no less important. That's not to suggest that all (or even most) of the artist's output is particularly notable; nevertheless, when Goldsworthy connects, he produces profound and potent work.

A few gems are included in "Incidental Objects," his current show at Haines Gallery. The strongest work in the show is a series of photographs titled, "Hand hit site dust, Presidio Spire, October 2008." The photos document an unremarkable gesture captured in six frames; the artist smacks dry, dusty ground at the site where his "Presidio Spire" sculpture would later be constructed. By presenting the action in a Muybridge-style sequence, Goldsworthy invites the viewer to ruminate on the significance of the crude, abrupt mark-making; in so doing, he invests the unremarkable with significance or, as the exhibition's title terms it, the "incidental" is rendered radically full of meaning.

Few artists are so interested in getting dirty. Playing in the mud, Goldsworthy asks vital questions about our contemporary relationship to terrain, ritual, time, and natural processes. It's interesting, then, that video and photography, mediums we associate with an anthropological remove and even sterility, are the artist's most effective means of documentation and presentation.

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"Recent Paintings"
Stephen Beal at George Lawson Gallery


Stephen Beal
"untitled"
2010
Acrylic, gouache, and graphite on wood panel
31.75 x 31.75 inches
In the Bay Area art community, Stephen Beal might be better known for his regional academic and managerial activity than for his artwork. Like many other working artists, Beal is a college professor, but he's also the active President of the California College of the Arts (CCA), a Board member of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Board President of the Creative Growth Art Center. Impressive and laudable though his contribution to Bay Area arts is, I'm pleased to report that his show of recent paintings at George Lawson Gallery proves he's an artist who "sunlights" as an arts administrator rather than an arts administrator who moonlights as an artist.

All of Beal's paintings hum and vibrate, and his brightly colored works crackle with energy; generally, however, his strongest pieces are understated, more Om than bug zapper. Admiring "untitled" (pictured above), Beal's repetitive, paced process calls to mind the meditative work of Agnes Martin. The finished, undulating picture, however, relates more to Mark Rothko's transcendental canvases. (Tweeting contemporary benefactors: "21st Century Chapel, Anyone?" But, until Daddy or Momma Warbucks steps forward to give Beal a permanent space to transform with his pictures, his work will transform one collector's wall at a time...and that's no incidental thing.)


Stephen Beal
"untitled (sb03)"
2010
Acrylic and graphite on wood panel
8 x 9 inches

Image credits: all images, courtesy the respective gallery websites

Beth Cavener Stichter's "On Tender Hooks"

Beth Cavener Stichter
"your eyes have their silence"
2009
Stoneware, sticks, whiskers
13 x 12 x 8 inches
In December 2006, I reviewed Beth Cavener Stichter's New York City solo exhibition "A Modest Proposal."

"There isn't anything extraordinary or even distinguished about Stichter's subject matter; she presents us with animals cowering, lounging, squirming, fucking, scowling. [...] Stichter's sculptures are strong because she is confident enough to tiptoe in cliche. As Wallace Stegner writes in his novel, All The Little Live Things, 'it's only the literary, hot for novelty, who fear cliche, and I am no longer of that tribe'; his point being that, unfashionable though they may be, cliches are usually more evocative than so much 'original' content.

Stichter's menagerie is familiar because it is family. We know these animals (and their foibles) because we know ourselves. Until we stop scratching the itch, then, the honest animals (rare among the self-styled avant garde) will continue to respond to work of this ilk. I look forward to following Stichter's work for years to come."

Beth Cavener Stichter
"Bolt"
2009
Stoneware, cast iron bolt, and washer
32 x 11 x 6 inches
Not surprisingly, then, I'm looking forward to Stichter's upcoming New York solo outing, "On Tender Hooks." The exhibition opens this Thursday, October 22nd, at Claire Oliver Gallery.


Beth Cavener Stichter
"Render"
2009
Stoneware, wooden peg
21 x 18 x 8 inches

Image credits: courtesy Beth Cavener Stichter