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BIOMORPHIC

David Edwards: Metal Drawings, Paintings and Sculpture

Avenue 12 Gallery, San Francisco

The word ‘biomorphic,’ in art-history-speak, means organically shaped, not geometric. The term originates in the Surrealism of the 1920s and 1930s, which advocated ambiguous, organic forms deriving from the unfiltered subconscious. The Surrealists’ interest in bypassing conscious intent with its limitations in search of le merveilleux produced art as well as literature (automatic writing) that exploited chance and instinct; the unpremeditated painterly gesture was one of Surrealism’s legacies to Abstract Expressionism.

David Edwards’ exhibition comprises four bodies of work: 1) abstract calligraphic paintings on paper and plaster, made with ink and tools fabricated by the artist, resembling manuscripts written in some archaic, unknown language; 2) metal drawings, enlarging these pictograms into wall reliefs in steel, cut with a plasma cutter, and painted in brown and black acrylic; 3) sculptures similarly based on the pictograms, but built into three dimensional bas-reliefs with styrofoam, Bondo car-body filler, epoxy and wax; and 4) botanical-looking structures resembling stems bedecked with seed pods, made from, of all things, black trash bags made of LDPE (low-density polyethylene) transformed with heat and, one would suspect, skillful manipulations like a glassblower’s.

The Metal Drawings, made from painted, cut steel, isolate and enlarge the characters. Edwards used a slide projector, decidedly old-school, to transfer his ink sketches to the steel, after which he employs the high-tech plasma cutter. The dialogue between the artist’s materials and the impulses controlling his hand—the ch’i,tor life force, in Chinese calligraphy—yields images of unpredictable yet compelling poetry. Fossilized primitive life—egg cases, tentacles, seed pods—though not expressly invoked by the artist, will certainly come to mind in these untitled ‘drawings’ that are reminiscent of the indeterminate living shapes in the paintings of Joan Mirò and the sculptures of Jean Arp.

More three-dimensional are Edwards’ wall reliefs and sculptures, built up and out into the viewer’s space, but still fundamentally conceived of as wall-hung objects, like trophy tools or weapons of unknown purpose. These mysterious artifacts mighjt populate a Parisian ethnographic museum, along with 1930s Surrealist works by Giacometti with whom they share esthetic DNA. Edwards’ Plastic Formssculptures, again wall-mounted, are symmetrical structures suggestive of seed pods, spines, thistles, and egg cases, technical tours de force that have been magically or alchemically wrought from lowly garbage bags, a battery of specialized tools (tubes, spray bottles, misters), and practice, practice, practice. The artist, who has a degree in Plastics Technology: “I always want to try out new things.”

David Edwards has always gravitated to abstract art made from compulsion and necessity, and ad-libbed, rather than preplanned: he likes to “not have any idea what [he] was doing; to just dive in and make marks.” At the same time he has a love of materials and their specific properties, from the thick oil paint used by Van Gogh, admired when he was beginning his career, to WInsor Newton India ink, which combines intense pigment with just the right viscosity, a choice that he made after considerable experimentation. His work combines an artist’s interest in instinct and gesture with a scientist’s curiosity about materials to create “drawings from the subconscious come to life,” “living shapes,” and darkly mysterious artifacts suggestive of amulets, charms, fetishes, fossils, weapons and tools. 

VisualArtSource.com, June 5, 2021

JOHN PATRICK McKENZIE and WARD SCHUMACHER

A Field of Words

Jack Fischer Gallery

Visual art employing words walks a tightrope between the visual and verbal realms once thought to be apportioned to the right and left, or intuitive and logical, sides of the brain. This theory is nicely traced in Leonard Shlain’s 1996 The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, which interprets human history in terms of male linear logic (the alphabet) and female intuition/imagination (the goddess), and remains readable and fascinating, even if the science has proven to be more complicated.

In looking at word art, similarly, we may regard them in two mutually exclusive ways: as pattern or calligraphy, or, even asemic (non-literal) faux writing, in the Dada mode, beautiful-nonsense graphomania with a hint of satire about the limits of speech and writing;  or we can imbibe the word or text, relegating the painting to a mere placard or sign, with the visual element insignificant: Hamlet’s “Words, words, words.” In A Field of Words, John Patrick McKenzie and Ward Schumacher demonstrate that word art can be both verbally and visually evocative, with the viewer’s activated eye and mind engaging multiple points of view. The field-of-words metaphor suggests both the cascades of glowing, scrolling text, the Matrix coding beneath sensorial, blue-pill reality; the featureless color mists of 1950s-1960s Color Field Painting; and the orderly inscription of the soil with parallel furrows for agriculture, and thus culture.

McKenzie’s marker drawings on a variety of objects—paper, scavenged window frames, and glass bricks—have a graffiti energy reminiscent of Basquiat, but without that painter’s figurative imagery. The irregular rows of hand-printed phrases and sentences suggest the magical charging of objects by spells and invocations. In a drawing from 2008-9, 1980, the artist writes simple subtraction problems that seemingly solve for unknown people’s ages: 1980 - 950 = 30, 1974 - 1962 = 12, etc.  The artist’s tall, narrow numerals suggest op-art stripe patterns, with the blackened closed loops of certain numbers (0, 6, 8, 9) evoking computer-countable ballots and tests. Joyce DeWitt likes pink high heels, in white marker on black paper, suggesting a schoolroom blackboard, records banal or obvious celebrity information on actresses (Joyce DeWitt, Susanne Somers, Florence Henderson, Sarah Purcell) and musicians (Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney), including whether they are “still alive.” (Why not 2014 - 1933 = 81, for On Kawara, creator of the 1978 painting, I Am Still Alive?)  Equally cryptic are the random, stream-of-consciousness inscriptions on five wooden and aluminum window frames and glass panes and on three glass bricks, where the writing is so profuse, complicated with shadows and reflections,  as to be almost illegible. Words emerge here and there—e.g., radio, toilet, Swoosie Kurtz, taco shell, future generations—but the staccato markings suggest syncopated music scores or player-piano scrolls rather than script, an urgent profusion of mystifying words and phrases: Dada glossolalia.

If McKenzie employs writing less for literal meaning than to claim esthetic territory from non-art reality, Schumacher builds densely layered acrylic paintings on canvas of text, stenciled in black capital letters over gray and ocher backgrounds. The lettering is not clean and crisp, however, but deliberately imperfect, with blotches where the painting leaked under the stencil, and the texts layered in different colors, out of register, like Warhol screenprints, creating shadows or ghost images. The bleeding effect of the ’ink’  recurs in Schumacher’s works on paper, made on paint thickened with wheat paste, and bound in  books, several of which are on display by request. The lengthy texts recount the artist’s dreams and memories, “some fact and some fiction,” so the paintings serve as a kind of diary — perhaps of a fictional avatar escaped from an Eric Fischl painting. Russian Consonants (2020) is a stream-of-consciousness monologue on the fascinating oddments of Russian language and history, including Tsarskoe Selo, skoptski, Bolsheviki, and the lecherous mad monk, Rasputin. Horse, With Peonies (2020) recounts (with blocks of text reversed to white on black, as if poorly redacted) a dream of Freudian and Oedipal horror mixed with humor that is concluded by a mysterious equine visitor. Drawing Dirty (2021) introduces two young sisters who tempt the boy narrator with glimpses of nakedness and of dirty drawings for which he is unjustly condemned. Last but not least is I Need Do Nothing (2005), an eight-panel painting two feet tall by sixteen wide, with the walking-meditation mantra repeated endlessly, like “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” in The Shining, but with more rewarding results. Peruse the sides of these eight panels—there were originally ten—and you will note that the writing continues perfectly along the sides — although, presumably, not the back. Remember Jasper Johns’ stenciled words going off one edge of the canvas and continuing on the other side, as if the painting had been peeled from a cylinder. Schumaker’s love of ‘overall’ abstract painting, i.e., without traditional figure or ground, as practiced by Pollock, Rothko and Kline, combines with his dreams, memories and reflections in these humorous, mysterious, semi-fictional artifacts, or manuscripts, or handmade faded newspaper clippings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Laura Hapka

Themes+Projects, San Francisco, California  
Review by DeWitt Cheng  

Laura Hapka, “Two Blues,” 2020, acrylic and encaustic on linen panel, 36 x 36”

Continuing through April 24, 2021

The “Primary Process” abstract paintings of Laura Hapka, consisting of pairs of red, blue and yellow rectangles (supplemented by other palettes), hark back to the nonobjective, non-representational paintings of modernism’s golden age. Form was reduced to geometry, and color down to pure primaries, as in the mature works of Piet Mondrian, and Barnett Newman’s response to them in his four “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue” paintings of 1966-70. But if Hapka adopts (at least partially) the pure triadic colors in “Primary Process,” her use of materials, painterly touch and sense of humor (in her allusive, punning titles) counteract the ivory-tower formalism and pomposity satirized by Tom Wolfe in his book “The Painted Word.”

Hapka works on panels covered with linen, which she coats, irregularly, with clear encaustic beeswax, which both emphasizes the weave of the linen and obscures and occludes it where the wax is laid on thicker. On top of this matrix, which suggests fixed manuscripts or scrolls, or linseed oil halations on unprimed canvas, the artist trowels heavy-bodied acrylic paint in parallel stripes, suggestive of writing and icing. The resulting irregularly-shaped Rothkoesque rectangles, framed by the exposed linen, suggest diptychs, or open books, and, more metaphorically, portraits of couples, or the passage of time. When the painted elements are mounted to the wall, as in “The Yellow Press,” or painted directly on it, as in “The Primary Report,” hand-made paper sheets also come to mind. If post-minimalism with its covert anthropomorphism humanized the severe geometry of minimalism, these materials-focused abstractions humanize the impersonal, superflat, machine-look geometric abstractions of the 1960s. Hapka’s color blocks floating in space owe something to Hans Hofmann’s push and pull aesthetic as well.

But if Hapka adopts certain formal limitations and historic antecedents, she also offers resistance to them, if playfully. The nine-diptych, “Red States, Blues States, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter,” with its 3x3 array of panels, evinces both her aesthetic rootedness and independence. Hapka moves beyond the primaries into a darker palette of the four “Tone Down” paintings. The color blocks are mismatched — in size, as in “Red Before Red,” and in color, as in “Nostalgic Purple Void.” These are painter’s paintings that embrace art history without being constrained by it. As Ben Shahn once said, “the ancestors are looking benignly over your shoulder; they’re not your enemy.”

WOMEN我們: From Her to Here

Chinese Cultural Center, San Francisco

by DeWitt Cheng

 Last year’s Black Lives Matter and MeToo movements shook America to the core, focusing long-overdue attention on ancient injustices institutionalized by law and custom. The prejudice of ’real’ Americans—white, straight, and male-dominated— toward the racial and gender (or sexual) Other has been aptly characterized by the historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., as “the white normative gaze.” That gaze is increasingly backward-directed, as post-election and post-insurrection attempts to forestall the future include serious measures like voter-suppression legislation and hate-crime attacks on Asians, and trivial distractions like the culture-war hysteria over ‘classic’ children’s books and toys.

In this fraught context, WOMEN我們: From Her to Here, at San Francisco’s Chinese Culture Center (February 19-August 28, 2021) offers an alternative vision that is global and inclusive—and forward-looking. The Mandarin term for ‘we’ is ‘wǒmen,‘ and the playfully-titled From Her to Here, is the third of a series exploring women’s and women artists’ roles in the Asian diaspora. By employing archival imagery and digital technology, it melds respect for the past (e.g., ancestress pioneers) with hope for a future of gender respect, solidarity and tolerance.  CCC Curator Hoi Leung: “I want to present feelings and experiences rooted in the nonbinary, where individuals  are given the freedom to define who they are, what their safe spaces are like, and what their communities can be.” CCC Executive Director Jenny Leung: “WOMEN我們 is a bold voice for equality and social justice.”

Eleven LGBQT+ and feminist artists and art collectives or teams from the San Francisco Bay Area, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Beijing were invited to participate. Their works range from prints and photography to video, film and installation.

The three artists from Taiwan are Chen Han Sheng, Huang Meng Wen, and Yao Hong.  Chen’s mixed-media installation, When I Was A Child, employs floral and botanical imagery in a screenprint and a sculptural array of stainless steel boxes, each bearing a single leaf that moves, intermittently, to commemorate the murder in 2000 of a Taiwanese teen, Yeh Young-chih, who was deemed effeminate by bullying classmates for making artificial flowers; his death in the school bathroom eventually led to reformist legislation. Huang’s Suits and Corsages series pays homage, via a video of black-and-white vintage snapshots, to the sartorially splendid cross-dressing “Teddy Girls” of 1950s Taiwan who defied conformist fashion expectations financially, too, running a corsage business; her color group portraits, with their youthful subjects posing casually while attired formally in tailored black business suits and floral cheongsams, exalt their cultural descendants today; and vintage studio portraits framed by defocused period backgrounds add an elegiac note. Yao’s Erotic Wallpaper, framed by digitally printed tiles, covers the gallery foyer walls with dazzling color and pattern, and snippets of imagery and text; the artist’s free-form, non-associational “neurotic visual texture that defies common sense” may express the anxiety of contemporary Taiwanese life in our uncertain era, but the more-is-more effect is as weirdly exhilarating as it is claustrophobic.

The photographer Nicole Pun and the gay archivists/activists of the Queer Reads LIbrary and Mixed Rice Zine are based in Hong Kong. Pun in her In & Out series photographed against black backgrounds the caressing gestures of lesbian lovemaking. The Queer Reads Library, a collaboration of three artists, writer Rachel Lau, editor Kaitlin Chan, and publisher Beatrix Pang, is a collection of LGBTQ books created for young readers created in response to censorship by HK libraries. J. Wu, the Bay Area-based creator of  Mixed Rice Zine, named after a term for Asians who prefer white sex partners, curated. Besides the publications, the display features an interactive aspect, the Queer Reads Lexicon Project, which employs QR coding (note QR coded meaning) to collect gay slang in various languages.

Moving west, we have the team of filmmakers Luka Yuanyang Yang (Beijing) and Carlo Nasisse (New York), and the spoken-word performer Brad Walrond (New York).  Yang and Nasisse collaborated in the affecting 2019 film Coby and Stephen Are in Love, about a former nightclub dancer from San Francisco Chinatown’s Grant Avenue Follies and her experimental-filmmaker partner and soulmate. In his video, Blood Brothers, Walrond declaims passionately and poetically about the onset of the AIDs crisis, his words in English and Mandarin accompanied by images from artist Steven A. Williams; if we could once have comfortably relegated that tragedy to history, it resonates particularly powerfully with us now, struggling through the covid and opioid crises.

Rounding the terrestrial corner, we come to the Bay Area, home base to filmmakers Heesoo Kwon, Madeleine Lim, and Tina Takemoto, and painter Chelsea Ryoko Wong.  Kwon’s digitally created videos employs Second Life software to generate 3D animated figures, nude stand-ins for her female relatives, who inhabit a tropical paradise atop an island floating through deep space, or enveloping a 3D flyover representation of the Chinese Culture Center’s distinctively inverted-Y-shaped building (on the third floor of the Holiday Inn). In Kwon’s invented religion, Ley Museoom Town is a multi-generational peaceable kingdom of sisters and daughters partially clad in snakeskin, a borrowing from Korean folk culture; utopianism is always iffy, but the current dystopic myopia calls for hope. Lim’s acclaimed 1997 video, Sambai Belacan, named after a Malaysian shrimp dish, portrays the daily struggles of three Singaporean lesbian immigrants; employing a variety of styles, the film captures the complexity and contradictions of new Americans negotiating life suspended between the old and the new, between reality and dreams.  Takemoto’s film, Ever Wanting (for Margaret Chung), takes as its subject Margaret Chung (1889-1959), a pioneering Chinese woman physician who lived an adventurous secret love life; the film is evocative rather than expository, so that you might not discern its subject matter from its oblique, allusive shots of medical paraphernalia, Lily Pons, Anna May Wong, WAVEs and WW2 Flying Tiger fighters, all speckled with orange and brown flak suggestive of combustible nitrate film stock. Last but not least, Wong paints cheerful scenes of a gay alternate universe in bright tones and flattened shapes reminiscent of Romare Bearden’s collages or Joan Brown’s paintings. A Secret Place: Li Po Lounge depicts the Chinatown hangout for 1940s gays, still in operation, as a fit milieu for the legendary poet who drowned while trying to embrace the moon.  The Forbidden City illustrates not the imperial center of Beijing, but the 100%-Asian Union Square nightclub of the 1940s and 50s that inspired the novel and movie Flower Drum Song. No chastely alluring fan or bubble dancers inhabit this cheerfully feminist painting; it’s a place where the drop-dead gorgeous sisterhood might warble with delight Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “I enjoy being a girl.”

The exhibition was online only (https://www.cccsf.us/women-from-her-to-here ) due to pandemic regulations, but is now open for scheduled visits via the website.