In 1996, the Affordable Art Fair opened for the first time in the UK. The concept of the fair was to encourage the sale of high-brow artworks to a public audience of modest incomes. The fair embodies the notion that bringing high quality artworks home, or having the pleasure of supporting an artist, are not experiences reserved only for the rich. In many ways, it sounds like a perfect venue for Recession Art to further our own purposes of providing opportunities for emerging artists and collectors.
This fair defines an Affordable work as being priced bellow $10,000, but also promises a wide range of prices, dipping as low as $100 or less. Unlike other art fairs, artworks purchased at AAF can be taken home immediately and can be wrapped by professional art handlers, working at the venue. Booths at the fair are constantly changing in appearance, and showcase more work than what might be expected. With this said, this fair is no exception to the more established NYC art fairs, which provide cutting edge, energetic work to their audiences.
Having shown at the fall 2012 Affordable Art Fair at the Tunnel, we are proud to announce our return to AAF this year. The Affordable Art Fair opens this Thursday, April 4th and will be happening through April 7th. Please visit the Affordable Art Fair website to see a detailed listing of times and events for the fair.
At this year’s AAF, we will be showcasing four artists who have contributed heavily to our efforts as a store, and as an organization; these artists include Ian Trask, Megan Berk, Paloma Crousillat, and Jiyoun Lee-Lodge.
Megan Berk creates paintings and prints with a darkly subtle beauty that simultaneously evoke the idealization of American suburbia and reveal the frailty of middle class desires. Born in Los Angeles, Berk currently works out of Red Hook, Brooklyn. In 2001, she earned her Bachelor of Arts from New York University and in 2008, she graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute. She has exhibited widely in the greater New York City area, including at Silas Marder Gallery, Bowman / Bloom Gallery, BWAC, Brenda Taylor Gallery, and the German House at the German Consulate General.
In 2010, Berk was selected for Recession Art’s Works Progress at the Invisible Dog in Brooklyn, where she exhibited paintings inspired by the ubiquitous Eichler developments that sprawl through her home state of California. The themes of emptiness and architecture that recur in her work play out in understated visions of these homes. With their beckoning entryways, they feel as if they came out of a distant memory. Colors are dark and appear to be in a haze that at any moment could transform into a nightmare or vanish into night. Long streaks of color look like they’ve rained on the painting’s surface.
The plunge of the housing market in recent years has made the subject of Berk’s work a somber reminder of the lost dream of suburban success. Whether she is painting Ohio, Palm Springs, Indiana, or California, all these scenes have the intangibility of a daydream. Lights of homes emerge as if the viewer is sleepwalking through the suburbs, wandering into backyards, glimpsing into the windows of glass houses, spying on the luminescence of swimming pools. These are the small invitations to viewers in Berk’s art, moments of seduction that suggest a movement towards something, a moment of belief in the future, a glimpse of some sort of Heaven. Yet, there is an emptiness, which can be seen as either room for imagination or just a vastness that can’t be filled.
Paloma Crousillat was born in Lima, Peru. In 1986 she moved with her family to the Washington D.C. area in response to the heightened threat of the Shinning Path Revolutionary Movement. The exposure she received as a young child to a bilingual, bi-cultural, and politically charged environment continues to inspire the central themes of her work: the systems and frameworks of space, language, and beliefs.
Crousillat received her BA in Fine Arts at the Slade School of Art in London and moved to New York to complete her MFA at the School of Visual Arts. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited in New York, Atlanta, Washington D.C., London, and Norwich, England. She has paintings in both private and public collections. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
In Crousillat’s paintings and drawings, meticulous line work combines with something extra that makes the images almost fantastic or surreal. She forces you to examine, in great detail, a structure like a telescope that we often take for granted or do not consider at all. Crousillat describes her work as both a fascination with the architectural forms that she depicts and their alternate meanings as sites of spirituality. In her view, these structures are conduits of our persistent attempts to send questions, prayers, and pleas out into the universe. With this in mind, the paintings and drawings become portraits of modern-day spiritual sanctuaries. By utilizing intricate, detailed, and abstracted forms within her subjects, Crousillat encourages the viewer to closely examine the architectures we build for asking questions of the universe. In this way, the works become a mirror, reflecting back to us our own questions, flatly, with no answer.
By processing, interpreting and responding to sensory information, Jiyoun Lee-Lodge creates works that she refers to as Mindscapes. These surrealistic artworks fuse compositional curiosity with intricately designed forms. Her images weave in and out of representation and allude to organic cerebral meandering. Design elements and geometry are in conversation with expressive forces within each Mindscape.
Jiyoun Lee-Lodge began her art career in her native South Korea. After receiving her BFA from Chung-Ang University in 1999, she experienced success in the field of illustration. Lee-Lodge decided to move from Seoul to New York City in 2006, and in doing so, left her illustration career and doubts about artistic growth behind. Upon moving to New York, Jiyoun Lee-Lodge was quickly confronted with all of the challenges that are associated with uprooting oneself. This is when her process of self-learning began. Ever since, she has been committed to a rigorous, auto-didactic practice of transformation in her artwork.
Lee-Lodge currently works and lives out of Queens, NY. Last year, she received her MFA degree from Brooklyn College and was awarded the Teaching Assistant Fellowship, Charles G. Shaw award. Her work has been exhibited at the Jamaica Arts Center, Gallery Ho, Gallery ELL, ArtGate, Maum, InRivers, Arario, RabbitHoleStudio Gallery, Bowery Club and is a contributing member of the Recession Art store and gallery.
Ian Trask is a scientist-turned-artist. His sculptures transform materials of waste and commercial byproducts into refined aesthetic objects through an alchemistic procedure of reinterpreting a material’s value and usefulness. In many of Trask’s sculptures, the viewer will find a mischievous invitation. Texture and tangibility are essential to the experience of these objects, and by provoking the impulse to explore, each piece rouses in the beholder the same spirit of curiosity, experimentation and play that occasioned their creation. Yellow smiley faces from cast off plastic shopping bags bubble up jubilantly and curls of cardboard are endowed with the elegance of Japanese fans.
Ian Trask began sculpting with stolen forks at Bowdoin College where he earned his bachelor’s degree in biology in 2005. After several years of working as a technician in various research labs in Boston and Salt Lake City, Trask moved to New York City in 2007 to pursue a career in art. Between careers, he was a hospital groundskeeper, cleaning up trash daily. Being constantly confronted with other people’s waste, he discovered an infinite source of materials and inspiration.
In addition to participating in the Recession Art group shows No Money No Problems (2009), Works Progress (2010), and his solo exhibition Perpetual Recombination (2012), his artwork has been exhibited at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, the Dumbo Arts Festival, and the FIGMENT Interactive Art Festival. He has participated in the Wassaic Project residency in Wassaic, NY for the past two years, and was the inaugural resident at The Invisible Dog art space in Brooklyn, NY where his installation Worm has been permanently installed throughout the building.
Introducing Leo Castañeda, a new addition to our catalogue of artists showing at our store. Leo Castañeda is a Colombian born artist who works and lives in New York City. He recieved his BFA degree at Cooper Union, and is currently working toward his MFA at Hunter College.
At our store, we are displaying several paintings by Castañeda including Second Boss. These paintings were created by using an ethereal and organic palette, applied flatly to wooden panels. The interplay between painterly abstraction and the creation of representational imagery, keeps a viewer actively engaged in appreciating these paintings.
Responding to the media that he was exposed to as a child of the 1980s, Castañeda uses the vocabulary of videogames to comment on elaborate social relations. The simple ideas which were expressed by prototypical videogames, (levels, items, bosses and stages), are used by Castañeda to comment on “ancient mythologies” and “corporate structures.”
Leo Castañeda’s paintings focus on certain fundamentals of the natural world. The artist claims that he “want(s) to look at the beginning and end of time, from the big bang…to the possible singularity, as well as the stories that humanity has created to understand its place in a planet.” Castañeda is able to make artwork that touches upon a wide range of of scientific and philosophical topics, and does so by alluding to the specific situations created by technology and people.
In a recent interview, we spoke to the artist about his paintings, his desire to explore other interactive media, and the work that can be seen at Recession Art. When Castañeda describes his Void Constructions as “as much a building as a fissure in space and time,” we can begin to understand the complexities of his paintings, and Castañeda as an artist.
Anthony Tino: Some of your paintings that we are showing at our store, contain an allegory that may not be noticeable to a viewer at first. Can you explain what something such as “Second Boss” might be referring to?
Leo Castañeda: As a framework and sometimes as a catalyst to my work I started visualizing a mythology appropriating the videogame structure. I found it curious that videogames would hold such potentially profound vocabulary within their landscapes and gatekeepers, (Levels and Bosses), that would speak as much to ancient mythologies as to corporate structures. As of now, the evolution of hierarchies within the “bosses” is an evolution of form. It starts with basic geometries and leads to higher complexities, starting with the First Boss, a black cube at top of a spiraling vortex. The Second Boss you ask of is an entity whose head has an array of spikes much like a cathedral or factory, placed on top of a malleable plinth. Their designs so far come from a mixture of intuitive image play and refinement of form. Many times the bosses or levels only materialize through their execution, but other times they are preconceived. Regardless, I have fun thinking of mythological structures and entities battling it out in a timeless realm.
AT: What role does the videogame, or interactive media play in your work?
LC: The videogame, though currently stigmatized as a baby medium as many have before it, combines most branches of creative expression into itself, from visual arts, to music, to theater, to film, to architecture. It is also weirdly archaic and ritualistic in its efforts to transpose the self into other entities, be them sports players, super heroes, gods or alternate humans, but at the same time it is using the highest technologies known to virtual reality. I find it fascinating that they are the current medium for mythology and storytelling within the virtual, and also the most inclusive as “players” identify themselves as “I” with the avatars on the screens. They are vast landscapes and dimensions existing physically as microchips and disc, holding code that when transcribed is working towards the “real.”
As far as how it plays into my work, I find that the highest form of the work would be a videogame as an artwork. An interactive virtual, visual and performative experience that would bring participators into the role of the protagonists, antagonists and landscapes interchangeably. I am currently starting to transform my images into virtual spaces as tests for the future works.
AT: Aside from being powerful, abstract visual works, what are some of the main conceptual elements at play in your void constructions?
LC: The void constructions came to be as I visualized a level where the First Boss was dematerialized and infinitely reconfigured through its properties. The properties being cubes or geometric forms next to flowing organic ones, and how far that relationship would go. Void construction became the way to define them also due to the nature of that “boss,” how the black cube is as much a mass as a void. How it is as much a building as a fissure in space and time.
AT: When did you begin painting, and how did you develop your distinct color palette?
LC: I am very fortunate for having been born into a family of artists and architects. It was quite natural for me to start drawing at age two right next to my parents, and the earliest paintings I remember seeing are a set of abstract compositions, which I completed at the age of four. The muted color palette I work with now is fairly recent, though for a quite a while I worked in monochromes, even if they were saturated in color. In a way the palette of muted tones came as a decision to break away from the preconceived notions of what the video game aesthetic would be like. Some of the works I began before the Levels series were linked too closely to that aesthetic and in a way they referenced a certain era of virtual reality instead of it in a broader sense. Ironically, due to a slight color-blindness, when tones are too muted and intermixed, I sometimes can’t see their dominant hues.
We are pleased to introduce Andrea Burgay as one of several new artists whose work we are displaying in our store. Burgay has attended SUNY Purchase, and received her BFA at School of Visual Arts in New York City. She has shown extensively at prominent galleries such as BRIC Rotunda Gallery, and has exhibited internationally in Italy and France. More recently, Burgay completed an artist residency at the Wassaic Project and a printmaking fellowship at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Having become well versed in a variety of media including printmaking, sculpture, installation, drawing and painting, Andrea Burgay has created a specific language of material that is very much her own.
At our store, we are displaying several of Burgay’s collages and sculptures. By mining everyday, low-brow literature as well as commonly found clothing and fabrics, Burgay collects the essential, structural elements of her artwork. After synthesizing these materials with her own drawings and printmaking techniques, Burgay’s art expresses a desire to connect larger natural forms to those that are found by micro-analyzing the human body and organic tissue.
Having begun collaging using scraps from old biology textbooks, Burgay upholds a tradition of creating work that alludes to observation. Burgay’s works are active, playful and when thought about literally, a bit morbid. She very candidly creates an interplay between attraction and repulsion and focuses on ideas of death, cycling and spiritual ceremony. Her sculpture Inner (featured above), brings in a viewer through it’s familiarity. This piece may be reminiscent of a surrealistic moonscape, or a selection of imagined plant-life as seen through the eyes of a puppeteer. Of course, what is being presented to the viewer is a depiction of the “inner” organs of some living thing.
Creating work that is both “printerly” and sculptural, Burgay claims that while working “the ability to cut, attach, and rearrange pieces” keeps her “interested and excited.” Her works are both visual, and products of a labor intensive practice of recombination. These works stimulate the imagination and the senses.
To learn more about Andrea Burgay’s artwork, I chose to ask her some questions regarding the works that we are showing in our store, which include collages from the Never/Forever series and her sculpture Inner.
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Anthony Tino: Can you tell me a bit about your work as a whole?
Andrea Burgay: The sculptural, installation and collage work all begin with a similar impulses- a desire to show connections between the physical forms and systems of structures in nature (trees, plants), and those of the human body. These impulses were driven by the search for an understanding of what it means to have a body that has the constant potential to break down and eventually decay. I began to think a lot in terms of landscapes when making this work- physical and emotional places combining components of humans and the physical world. It is comforting to me to place the human body in this context, as it seems we are often so far removed from connection with the natural world. Recently, themes of ceremony and celebration have found their way into the work in the form of brighter colors and decorative elements like flags and lights. The idea of religion and ceremony as a path of transcendence from the mortal world interests me as well.
AT: What connects the collages of your Never/Forever series?
AB: The Never/Forever collages began as a way to experiment with incorporating printed materials, spray paint, watercolor, acrylic, and sculptural elements into collages within a standardized format- a nine inch by nine inch square. As forms move, merge and stand in relationship with each other throughout these collages, they reference biological processes of growth and decay in the natural world. Spiritual ideas of transcendence or enlightenment are also explored as these forms evolve and rise into new states of being. The square format allows them to be hung and arranged in different ways, creating multiple relationships between the pieces through the occurrence of similar colors, forms, and symbols.
AT: Where do you find materials when you are collaging and sculpting? Are there certain materials that you are more attracted to?
AB: The materials that I use are the process of many years of saving and scavenging. The collage pieces come from natural history books, Time/Life books, fashion magazines, and sometimes my own drawings and paintings. Often, I make a piece that I’m not thrilled with and break it down to rework parts of it into a new collage. Fabric stores, thrift stores, friends, and various saved clothes or bags are reworked in the sculptures. I’m interested in materials that have interesting textures, odd colors, things that look organic, and sometimes things that are very ugly. The combination of what’s considered traditionally beautiful or ugly is often what appeals to me in the stage of choosing materials.
AT: At the Recession Art Store, we are displaying a sculpture called Inner. What is your working process like in regards to sculpture, specifically this piece?
AB: Inner was one of the first pieces that I made using a reshaped paper bag as the structure. I had made another piece, Growth- Eat Away, that was based on what I imagined cancer cells growing inside a body would look like, but made with fabric and soft materials. It was a way for me to describe this concept in a visual way that I could understand. Inner is an answer to that piece. There are polyps-like forms, which began the piece, but as I worked, I sought to balance these with other natural forms- plants, fungi, etc., creating parallels between different types of growth. As with several similar sculptures, I make individual small, sewn pieces to add to the bag form, changing and reshaping elements as I go. This piece eventually became like a garden to me, almost too pretty, which led to the addition of the stretched black nylon, obscuring and fragmenting our view into this interior world.
AT: Who are some of your influences as an artist?
AB: Annette Messanger is one of the artists whose work opened many possibilities for me in her transformation of materials into props for what often seem to be her own rituals, her combination of smaller works into larger wholes, her humor, and her integration of art into her own life. I was interested in her work as both a “collector” and an “artist”, separating these roles and questioning what it means to be either. Christian Boltanski’s work has also been influential in his use of light and religious and Catholic motifs to create meaning within different contexts. Among many other artists too numerous too mention.
AT: Is “Never/Forever” a Built to Spill reference?(listen)
AB: Yes. You’ve discovered my secret.
-Anthony
Our first opening at our new location, featuring Danny Ghitis’ Harlem Valley series, could not have gone better. Coinciding with the Invisible Dog’s opening of The Exploded Mind of Mulholland Hwang, and their open studios, Bergen Street felt a bit like Brooklyn’s answer to art fair week.
In case you missed our opening, Ghitis’ exhibition will be on display through March 31st and our doors are now officially open. Check out some photo highlights from last saturday’s opening.
Cooper Union alum Mitsuko Brooks is an artist whose creative impulses took hold of her at a very young age. Brooks’ lifelong involvement in the arts has made her body of work a dynamic and variant collection of processes, media and interests. She has been involved with BRIC Arts, Snug Harbor Artist Residency Program, SOMArts, and is now an exhibiting member of the Recession Art community.
At our store, we are currently displaying several of Mitsuko Brooks’ collages, text paintings, and prints. When creating her collages or paintings, Brooks typically works on reused surfaces, specifically hard, discarded book-covers. Using small fragments of photos and printed ephemera, along with vintage, typewriter lettering, the works that Brooks creates are tactile and complex. Her interest in the 20th century ‘mail-art’ movement, as made famous by Ray Johnson, give her collages a functional aesthetic where the artist is not only composing an image, but creating a pastiche of symbols, and relationships between objects and images. Our associate director Christian Fuller has described her work as “in the style and practice of bricolage.”
Mitsuko Brooks claims that she is “drawn towards things that are unlovable,” and in reviving these neglected objects as well as her own personal thoughts, she has given “life back to something dead.” This interest in life-cycles is consistant throughout much of her work, which includes sculpture and photography. Her text paintings represent a thought process of feeling frantically confronted by mortality, as expressed through phrasing which may resemble internet user-comments, all regarding love and relationships. Brooks’ choice of material and her expertise in selection, reflect a classical struggle, a snapshot of the human condition, and do so in a way that is attractive while also being morbidly compulsive.
Brooks’ collage, “Emotional Regurgitation,” which is on display at our store, contains several signature attributes of the artists work. It feels like some kind of humorously dark postcard sent by Brooks from an imaginative world where animal skulls, poisonous snakes and the living writings of Kierkegaard might come springing from a piece of bedroom furniture. Her subliminal referencing of the home, which also appears in her c-print “Shack-les in the Heart,” exemplifies a mood, which can best be described as uncanny- an unrecognizable sensation, understood in contrast to homely feelings.
The tacit familiarity with handling books may suggest to a viewer that these works are intimate. Upon further inspection, one will notice that both sides of her collages offer visual information which ultimately culminate in a completed artwork, and therefore require a certain level of viewer participation. Also upon further inspection, the viewer may begin to understand the emotional function that these pieces play for their creator. Beautiful, and haunting echoes of psychological microanalyses that are gesturally dispelled, sometimes literally “sent-off” via snail-mail.
To understand a bit more about Mitsuko and her artwork, here are some words from the artist herself…
“Anthony Tino: In reference to “Emotional Regurgitation,” would you consider the ideas of growth, or death to be some of the more important themes in your work?
Mitsuko Brooks: This collage is about an accumulation of all that is grotesque. I wanted to sum up the overpowering emotions I was having at the time that made me feel like I was going to explode. The piece is very much a metaphor for the desire to purge emotions. I wanted to make a piece to release my desire to “get rid” of something inside of me that I hate. I believe in the visualization of the grotesque, and through that one can arise from it all and reach a level of emotional growth.
AT: Are the writings in your text paintings also ‘found?’
MB: My text paintings are derived from my own words, usually contemplations on a secondary layer hidden beneath intimacy: anger. I also do use words taken from searching through user comments from random websites discussing relationships (boundary issues, control issues, etc.) The text painting I have at Recession Art is written by me.
AT: Do you think that you would be interested in book-binding or going through the process of making your own book, or do you feel a special connection to those which are discarded?
MB: I was first introduced to some minimal book binding basics through working with artists Ginger Brooks-Takahashi & Courtney Dailey and their projet Bookmobile-Mobilivre. During my undergraduate studies at Cooper Union, I learned book binding techniques from hand sewn signatures to Japanese book binding. While there, I had begun to made books from discarded book covers and pages, in a way, to bring life back to something dead. I am very drawn towards things that are unlovable: things we have no need for anymore. I still collect discarded book covers and small pieces of trash on the street- and create collages with them. I am instinctively drawn to hoard and use these fragments.
AT: Your sculptures are all in reference to the human body? What relationship do ‘bodies’ have with your interests as an artist?
MB: I am very consumed, literally and abstractly by the body, so yes, you could say all my work relates to it. Some maybe are less related, like the text paintings. I am always drawn back to referring to the body, specifically the female body, due to being trapped in mine which was marred by chronic health issues my whole life. I’m interested in the body used as a point of reference, and all the hidden mysteries of it (abuse memories hidden in places of the body which can be released years later, etc.) There is this really great, potent song by the Raincoats called The Body that captures my sentiment…(listen to it)
AT: How did you begin making art, and what inspired you to do so?
MB: I was raised by a latent painter/healer/mother and latent poet/photographer/father so they just naturally supported their children as artists, musicians, and critical thinkers. There was always paint, cray-pas and pencils around our house to make things, which my siblings and I were all using before we could talk. One of my favorite earliest creations is a drawing illustrating me losing my teeth at the bathroom sink with the blood coming out of my mouth. I think my making art just became a natural way for me to communicate and interact with the world.”
All images are copyright and courtesy of Mitsuko Brooks and Recession Art.
-Anthony
