ALEX KATZ / JUAN GOMEZ
I was drawn to these oil sketches for their bold brush strokes, their textures and colors. The overall handling of the paint is engaging. Alex Katz painted these oil sketches en plein air, in preparation for larger paintings.These paintings communicated a direct, quick and simple way of reading the subject. I imagined they would make a great visual project if I zoom in and showed details in the paintings. When coming up with a title I thought of “Blowup” a 1966 film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. The film has a scene where details of a photograph are enlarged to bring out information barely noticeable in the initial image. The paintings and the scene of the film have in common the use of first impressions.
MARC BIJL
Marc Bijl was born in 1970 in Leerdam, Netherlands. He studied at the Royal Academy of Art & Design in s’Hertogenbosch and at the Rennie Macintosh School of Art in Glasgow. Recent solo shows include “The simple complexity of it all” Fridericianum Kassel, Germany (2009), “Arrested Development,” DA2, Salamanca, Spain 2009 (cat.), and “Indy Structures” at The Breeder Gallery Athens, 2006. He uses street-art interventions and iconesque minimal sculptures to show the structure behind every social group’s behaviourisms and in our daily existence.
“There is a romantic desire,
hidden in his attempt to understand the world we line in…”
Besides all the interventions in public spaces and so-called symbolic actions, Marc Bijl has participated in various international group shows such as Manifesta 4 (2002) in Frankfurt, “Nation” (2003) at Frankfurter Kinstverein, “20/20 Vision” (2004) at Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the touring exhibition “Populism” (2005), “Youth of Today” (2006) at the Frankfurter Schirn, “I Love My Scene 2” (2006) at Mary Boone Gallery in New York and “Crop Rotation” at Marianne Boesky in 2008.
His latest solo show “9/11 666 777” (2010) was at Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam. Marc Bijl is bassist in the Gothic Rock Band Götterdämmerung and the psycho-punk-band The B-men. Marc Bijl lives and works in Berlin.
www.thebreedersystem.com
www.upstreamgallery.nl
CAROLINA RODRIGUEZ
The free and loose hand of Carolina Rodriguez and her brilliant choice to utilize crayons as her medium, beckons child-like spontaneity, yet within a masterful sophistication of her trained eye. She captures an age that is layered with battling issues of anorexia, make-believe, puberty, and purity. The stance of her models and the stare and manner of their pose creates an uncomfortable contradiction between lust and innocence.
—Patty Ortiz, Director/Curator, Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, San Antonio
LISA KERESZI
This piece is kind of a nutty, experimental melding of my projects—one on haunted house attractions and one on strip clubs. I thought to do it when I noticed all the abused, tortured and mutilated, sexy female mannequins in the various haunts I visited. I’m not quite sure what I’m trying to say here about sex and violence and horror and voyeurism—and rhymes.
FRED TOMASELLI
I’m a news junkie. Like any addiction it’s not so much the drug, but the lifestyle that kills you. “The NY Times Project,” which I began in 2005, is a way for me to manage this dependency. It comes out of my scrawled rejoinders on the paper to help combat the bad-news juju that seeps into my skull. Each one comes out of a specific conversation with the day’s news that directs a variety of outcomes.
ELIZABETH PEYTON / RICHARD KLEIN
All significant art is reflective of the particular time and place of its making. Part of this specificity is the artist’s social milieu; the web of personal relationships that defines-and informs-an artist’s life. For Elizabeth Peyton these relationships are crucial, for the attempt to portray the spirit of singular individuals is at the core of her work. Throughout Peyton’s twenty-year career she has been primarily known as a painter of intimate portraits. During this period, however, she has consistently taken photographs of people, at first tentatively, but then with a growing, conscious assertion. This exhibition, the first to exclusively present Peyton’s photography, brings together fifty photographs taken by the artist from 1995 to the present, focusing on artists, both close friends and acquaintances, who have played a meaningful role in Peyton’s life.
Peyton doesn’t consider herself a “photographer,” but rather an artist who takes photographs as a natural part of being alive in the modern world. The photographs in this exhibition and curated section have the character of a personal journal:
a memorable dinner party, a traveling companion asleep on a train, a friend reading on his couch, and the inevitable process of friends and lovers growing older. As intimate as these pictures are, however, the documentary motivation in Peyton’s endeavor has the effect of somewhat transcending their sole connection to her. These people not only know Peyton, but more importantly, they also know one another and share the same moment in time.
—Richard Klein, Exhibitions Director, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
PHILIPPE JARRY
Philippe Jarry is a french artist living in NYC
These drawings are part of his works.
You can see his complete publications on blurb.com and www.philippejarry.com.
Contact: philjarry@gmail.com
ADAM E MENDELSOHN
Adam E Mendelsohn is an artist and free-lance art critic who lives in Brooklyn, NY. He’s written/writes for Art Review, Time Out, Art Monthly, Frieze, Whitewall, Spike Art Quarterly, Saatchi On-Line Magazine, The London Magazine, Art On Paper, artforum.com, Flash Art, Contemporary Magazine, Film Comment, Tokion as well as various catalogue essays.
ENOC PEREZ
Enoc Perez is an artist living and working in New York City.
ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST
This suite of drawings is from a book of cartoons and what I describe as light/dark verse called IN THE MEAN TIME: The Other Ends of the World, which is being published by Freight & Volume. It will shortly be presented to the, um, waiting world at Art Basel, Miami. My intention with the cartoons has been to do stuff that works as art without losing the joke. I am not inventing the wheel here. George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland packed this double whammy in the first half of the last century and Saul Steinberg, according to Arne Glimcher, his dealer, saw himself as the peer of Picabia rather than his fellow cartoonist. In my drawings here the art is itself, of course, the joke.
RICK LOWE
I wanted to use zingmagazine as a platform to look reflect on the work I’ve been involved in Houston, Texas. Project Row Houses emerged from my desire to explore work that has a practical application that accompanied its aesthetic aspiration. This piece looks at the components of what drives this project. The sense of place in the broader community of Third Ward to the reviving and redefining of the architecture that traditionally held it’s identity and all the beautiful struggles in between have made this project a vital investigation in social practice.
SERGE ONNEN
Like anybody else, Serge Onnen can be very cruel to/with objects. He thinks it’s okay to torture them, to get his/your money back. But he also likes to make books with J&L, draw & animate hands, cast a shadow or two, and play trumpet with his band OORBEEK. With exception of the trumpet, it’s all related to drawing. www.sergeonnen.com ww.jandlbooks.com
ANNA KNOEBEL
My good friend Danielle Kalinoski introduced me to Robert Kaiser in Jamaica. “Robert collects Modern homes,” she said. Intrigued (who wouldn’t be?), I flew to Orlando to see for myself. Tom Sibley came along so we could create this project for zing. We spent the weekend enjoying Robert’s unique and superbly restored home, nestled in a quiet community near those infamous theme parks. To experience Robert’s home yourself (as a vacation rental), email him at rlk@designage.net (http://www.themodernhouse.net/tmh/holiday).
RAYMOND PETTIBON / ALVIN HALL
The artist, Tina Barney, once said to me that my collection was about conversation. The red letter A’s by Raymond Pettibon are indeed a personal conversation about attending Bowdoin College (which was also Nathanial Hawthorne’s alma mater), discovering my love of literature and art, and thinking about phrases and sentences people have said in stories, novels, or everyday conversations that have reshaped particular points of view. Each of Raymond’s scarlet letters is always a beginning and finding each right new one always thrilling.
LUCKY DEBELLEVUE
A couple of years ago I decided to open up my art practice by collaborating with people that I knew, and didn’t know. This took on the form of inviting different artists to work with me on a project, “reinterpreting” found artworks, and this one involving the scrapbook made by women convicted of murder in the south. The original scrapbook belonged to a friend who found it in the things left behind by a former co-worker at an ad agency in New Orleans. He said that the co-worker was a big talker who had promised them a book deal and then forgot about them. The unease of this forced collaboration is on purpose, and I’m not sure I would want to meet these women in person to see how they feel about it, although I did try to find information about them on the Internet with no success.
CHLOE SEYMORE
Chloe Seymore is an art advisor and independent curator based in Durham, North Carolina. She was previously the owner and director of Branch Gallery, a contemporary art space that focused on the work of international emerging artists. The gallery served as a laboratory for the arts in the Southeast while exposing its audience to work that was both innovative and engaging. Seymore first met Japanese mixed media artist Taiyo Kimura when he came to Durham to install and exhibit his work at Branch in 2008. Kimura immediately came to Seymore’s mind for this project – not only because of his previous use of magazines as sculptural material, but also for his work’s unique relationship to the page as a site for wild humor and transformation.
AMANDA ROSS-HO & KRISTEN STOLTMANN
Amanda Ross-Ho and Kirsten Stoltmann have known each other for over 10 years. They are currently based in Los Angeles, and for several years worked in the same studio building. In January, 2008 they presented the collaborative exhibition “Vaginal Rejuvenation” at Guild and Greyshkul in New York. For this issue of Zing Magazine, Ross-Ho and Stoltmann have developed a special print version of the exhibition, including new works.
“Vaginal Rejuvenation” is a rarefied and specific presentation of the two artists—a conversational project using their proximity and access to one another as a framework.Their longstanding friendship and points of convergence is in effect a particular strand of history, and the artifacts from this unconventional timeline are directly referred to in the works. Rather than simply a collaboration, “Vaginal Rejuvenation” is a presentation of two individual practices that use response and appropriation as a primary medium.
MISAKI KAWAI
thanks for putting my works in this issue!
when I was little, my mom was looking for me in home.
she found me playing in the toilet. after that day, my mom
put lock on the toilet door. I love tropical ocean!
MARIA TALERO
Maria Talero is a philosophy professor and phenomenologist who writes about the role of the body in human experience. This essay is informed by the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as well as current findings in developmental psychology on the importance of touch throughout our lives—in infancy, childhood, and especially in our adult relationships.
Photograph by Levi Mandel. www.levimandel.com
RACHEL COLE DALAMANGAS
Readings begin by flipping the switch off Momoyo Tormitsu’s installation, “Somehow I Don’t Feel Comfortable” (2000): two 16′ x 10′, pink, inflatable bunnies. It takes about five seconds for the bunnies to hit the ground face-first, another hour to fully deflate. Featured poets and writers read their work aloud between the giant, slowly collapsing bunnies. When it gets ungodly hot in the summer and the windows facing the alley are opened, the noise of shouting and traffic waffles into the room, dumbly following the wind over the shiny pink carcasses slumping. Some of these readings I count among the most bizarre and beautiful situations of my life in the past five years: no one ever imagines that at exactly some point in the course of living, one would stand at the back of a large, crowded exhibition room in July, as Selah Saterstrom recites an Anne Sexton poem and twin giant bunnies lose shape like marshmallows melting on the floor and a sliver of the sun is visible glowing down over the alley, as a 16th Street Mall musician is heard singing, Karma Police, 5 stories down. There’s been a lot of debate since I founded the reading series, February 2007, in the course of 49 featured writers, about what the bunnies are “doing,” what their participation in the readings consists of: an unidentified visitor suggested that the bunnies are bored or falling asleep; Brandon Johnson hypothesized that they die and are subsequently resurrected; Bin Ramke interpreted that they”re, “paying homage to poetry.” When I moved to Rhode Island, my successor, Jessica Hughes, took over the reading series in August 2009. Both she and I tend to think in terms of catastrophe. While pulling the protective white sheets over the bunnies for the weekend, she asked me once, “What would you do if the bunnies totally popped off and flew around the room?”
SASHA PETERFREUND
Sascha Peterfreund is a music producer and audio engineer living in New York City. Please visit www.saschap.com for more information.
TERENCE KOH
A Standing Drawings For Myself
I did this set of drawings when I read a book about flowers
What title I cannot ever hope to tell you cause it will break the magic bounds between us
I am fearful that a turtle will eat me alive one day and that by eating me, both the turtle and
I will become skeletons
It is true that sometimes at night I think that I am a ladybug crying during a crescent of a
moon falling into the shades of a sea
It is with courage that I feel that an orange filled with cherries will drown me in a mountain
Sometimes when I am singing with my cats I sense my mother’s ghost floating over me
I am filled with nothing but a heart made of paper maché
from a book of flowers
GIASCO BERTOLI
“…Anyway, that’s one example of a Federer Moment, and that was merely on TV-and the truth is that TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love.”
—David Foster Wallace
KEN WEAVER
There are Draconian forces at work. We face an all or nothing death drive towards the oblivion, an out of control apocalyptic machine hell bent on breaking the mind, body, and soul of all artisans. “Requiem for the Immortal” is a meditation on the power of vengeance, the courage of creation, and the nightmare manifesting as the death of compassion. It is a call to arms, a battle cry, the day of judgement for all who preach this destruction. Ken Weaver is represented by Schroeder, Romero & Shredder, New York, NY.
