AGATHE SNOW
After rummaging through piles of stuff left behind from previous owners of the house I just moved in, found a stack of photos all taken from the driver s seat of fast moving cars, small and large, moving through desolate landscapes on small county roads all over the 50 US states. And it reminded me of many road trips I had taken but always from the angle of the nervous passenger. I only got my driver’s license this year and for a while I loved being driven around and not worry, almost wishing to get lost, take a detour, get hurt. And then something happened, the more I grew up and took on challenges the more it was Me, body against the world, body and all the elements at large, and from then on I became a paranoid passenger always looking over at all angles coming at me, especially when it came to meeting with other vehicles. I always followed the roads anxiously from an angle. All and all, I realized that neither here nor there did I really ever take in a landscape, an impression from a road, yes, but no real photo memory, all blend of colors at fast moving speeds. And so this summer, more sedentary then ever, finally at the driver’s seat I sat down for a week or two everyday trying at drawing landscapes from drives on the days prior. Here are a few of these impressions . . . all and all when it comes to taking in landscapes I have not yet left the passenger seat.
ANDREA ZITTEL
In the mid 1990s I moved into a small row house in Brooklyn and called it “The A-Z”. I used the building to create a showroom/testing grounds for my work-living with one living system for a while, and then sending that out and building something new.
In the ’ 90s Brooklyn still felt like it was a very long way from Manhattan and was characterized by an outpost mentality. On this side of the water there was a lot less to do at night and an intimacy that led to creative experimentation.
On Thursday evenings we started to host a regular cocktail hour at “The A-Z” and Daniel, my assistant had a bar called “Dan’s Desk” where he fixed cocktails served in A-Z Containers. Curious neighbors, friends and visitors all showed up in different waves to hang out and check out whatever we happened to be prototyping that week.
BARRY STONE
Barry Stone’s images work in accumulation. When read together, the pictures in “Hum” distort sets of polarities: feminine and masculine, youth and adulthood, the drawn and the mechanical, the ballad and metal music.
Barry Stone was born in Lubbock, Texas, and earned an MFA in Photography from the University of Texas at Austin (2001). He exhibits his work at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York. Stone lives in Austin, with his wife and two daughters and is an Assistant Professor and the Coordinator of the Department of Photography in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University-San Marcos.
—Katie Geha
WELCOMEPROJECTS
WELCOMEPROJECTS is a studio of discursive sensibilities directed by Laurel Consuelo Broughton in Los Angeles. It is the purveyor of WELCOMECOMPANIONS, a collection of objects and sartorial accessories for a more playful everyday. THE VILLAGE is the place all WELCOMECOMPANIONS call home.
JENE HIGHSTEIN
These watercolors were produced between 2008 & 2012. Cape Breton Island is connected to the northern most tip of Nova Scotia by a causeway. The weather can come from any of four directions and usually shifts every 20 minutes. The sky and sea are constantly changing color as the sun comes in and out and rain alternates with clouds and fog. It’s a magical landscape.
THOMAS ØVLISEN
Thank you for offering me this opportunity. I have asked a few artists to draw objects from childhood from memory. Since art school, childhood has played a not so small part of my work and with this project I wanted to see how other artists would react to their childhood.
I have asked not only draughtsmen, but performance artists, sculptors, and painters alike. I have even asked a filmmaker to be part of the project. I wanted it not to be about drawing, but memories.
The artists vary in age, nationality, and gender and I hope it will be an interesting juxtaposing of experiences ranging in time and geography from Second World War Europe through yuppie 80’s New York.
I am very happy with the outcome and hope you will enjoy it as much as I do.
WALTER ROBINSON
BURGER KING
My original idea was for Walter Robinson to show his paintings of cheeseburgers in a series at Haunch of Venison Gallery this summer as an enhancement of Andy Warhol’s Soup Cans, 50 years after Campbell’s by Warhol first shocked the world. But as it turns out, a single cheeseburger was enough, as everyone at last week’s Haunch party posed in front of just one juicy Wallyburger for paparazzo Billy Farrell.
The Wallyburger becomes more excessive the more you examine its contents: drip equivalence achieves stasis in the paint Robinson meticulously applies, the tomatoes rolling into cheese in the imagery and the automatic Pavlovian drool which ensues. Never underestimate the power of a burger, even a painted one. Hamburglar Beth DeWoody couldn’t resist, requesting another Wallyburger for an upcoming London show that she is curating.
Only Walter Robinson shall suffer from too much surburgerrealism. To look at one Wallyburger is a trip to Wendy’s. To paint them is to be, and want to devour, the whole franchise.
—Charlie Finch, New York, July 29, 2012.
KELLY RICHARDSON
Included in zing #23 is a large scale print of Mariner 9, adapted from a major new video installation completed in August 2012 which presents a panoramic view of a Martian landscape set hundreds of years into the future, littered with the rusting remains from various missions to the planet. Despite its suggested abandoned state, several of the spacecraft continue to partially function, to do their intended jobs, to ultimately find signs of life, possibly transmitting the data back to no one. Mariner 9 was commissioned by Tyneside Cinema, UK.
MARCEL DZAMA
“A Coming Insurrection” is located between the waking and dreaming between the explicit & the enigmatic, a vision that cannot hold narrative.
Marcel Dzama lives and works in Brooklyn, and is represented by David Zwirner.
WILLIAM E JONES
Mark Twain coined the term “the Gilded Age” in the novel of that title written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner and published in 1873. The only criticism I can bring to this succinct and suggestive phrase is that its definite article implies the era was unique in American history. We now find ourselves in another period of vast capitalist accumulation and staggering political corruption. (Hundreds of millions circulate mysteriously through “super PACs” of recent vintage.) In a society where everything has a dollar value, the ultimate goal has become the concentration of the most wealth in the fewest hands, whenever possible with the assent of an electorate reeling from the latest scam.
“Gilded Age” is a reminder that certain key elements of American society have been with us for a very long time. This montage of historical photographs and cartoons from the Library of Congress asks questions-where does money come from? where does it go?-and provides an answer or two. Perhaps one day cash will disappear, and people will fetishize pieces of currency strictly as collector’s items, as they now do old silver and gold certificates. I suspect this agenda will fulfill itself only in the distant future in the United States, where even replacing the humble dollar bill with coins has met with decisive resistance. Venality, whatever material form it takes, is unlikely to go away in any but the most utopian society, and these days, utopia seems very far away indeed.
BRANDON JOHNSON
Since the days of my youth, I’ve always enjoyed a nice, weird story. Whether it be the Brothers Grimm, Alice in Wonderland, Edgar Allan Poe, Flann O’Brien, or my own father’s improvised bedtime stories about cat gangs, the more bizarre the better. With this project, I wanted to give the people a solid piece of strange fiction to delve into, if only for a short while.
Phillip E. Shaw is an old friend, longtime writer compatriot, and fellow weirdo. This is an excerpt from his first full-length fiction manuscript, The Takes, featuring a family assemblage thrown into cosmic crisis. I asked the venerable artist Nick Sumida, who once gave me a Leonard Powers (of Ugly Americans) shot glass, to illustrate the selection. Luckily, he was kind enough to oblige with some truly sensational visuals.
J PARKER VALENTINE
J. Parker Valentine is the signature of an artist named Jessica who lives in Brooklyn, but also spends a lot of time in Austin where she is from. Who Made Who is the title of her project for zing – drawings on a series 1950s lithographs of polychrome paintings from Altamira Cave, but also the title of two separate shows taking place in November of 2012 at Galerie Max Mayer in Dusseldorf and Supportico Lopez in Berlin. So in a way, Who Made Who is a title for this current period of her work, but is also the name of a Scandinavian band and a song by AC/DC about machines taking over the world.
HEATHER PESANTI/SHASTI O’LEARY SOUDANT
These photographs depict a collection of small objects given to me as gifts over the past several years. They are tchotchkes that have no monetary value, but in my psyche their presence looms large. Each has a story associated with it that evokes a particular memory or moment in time. In my apartment, they are lined up like little soldiers on the mantle of my fireplace. For this project, I invited my friend, the photographer and performance artist Shasti O’Leary Soudant, to collaborate with me and create portraits of them. She chose to monumentalize each object with paper and light.
—Heather Pesanti, Curator, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York.
MARY ELLEN CARROLL
Mary Ellen Carroll’s prolific career as a conceptual artist spans more than twenty years and a range of practices, from art, to architecture, writing, performance and film. The foundation of her practice is the investigation of a single, fundamental question: what do we consider a work of art? Carroll is the recipient of numerous grants and honors, including, a Graham Foundation Fellowship for prototype 180 and the AIA’s Artist of the Year Award. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollack Krasner Award, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited at numerous American and international galleries, including the Whitney Museum-New York, ICA Philadelphia, the Renaissance Society-Chicago, ICA-London, Museum für Völkerkunde-Munich, MOMUK-Vienna. Her work belongs to in numerous public and private international collections.
Carroll’s opus prototype 180 is a conceptual work of art and urban alteration that entails a radical form of renovation through the physical rotation and reoccupation of a single family house in the aging, first ring subdivision of Sharpstown in Houston, Texas. In conception and planning for over 10 years, the project is temporally, physically, and structurally organized around its catalytic rotational transformation. While the rotation and relocation of the house on its lot interrupt the relation of the house to its context and to existing street typologies they also signal the altered life of the house as a space devoted to a program that will address the issue of aging neighborhoods and their potential futures. prototype 180 strategically intersects conceptual art projects, social activism, urban legislation and economic processes. Its 180 degree reorientation registers aesthetically against a history of critical house alterations and administratively in relation to Houston’s unregulated land use policies and its absence of zoning. (www.prototype180.com)
A monograph of her work published by SteidlMACK (London and Gottingen) received the AIGA’s 2010 Book of the Year Award.
No. 18 is an architectural insertion that locates itself in the important historical area of Jwacheon, Dong-gu District, Busan, South Korea that connects the natural surroundings to the built environment. Retrofitting and the use of renewable materials are the foundation of the work. It is a commission realized for the 2012 Busan Biennale, directed by Roger Buergel. This year Carroll’s work was also included in the exhibition Counter/Production at the Generali Foundation in Vienna, Austria, Open Outcry at R20th Century Gallery in New York and will be a part of Love and Progress at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas.
OKAY MOUNTAIN
Okay Mountain is a nine member artist collective based in Austin, Texas. Formed in 2006 as an artist-run exhibition space, Okay Mountain has shown a diverse array of projects throughout the United States. Their contribution to Zing is an excerpt from an ongoing series of drawing exchanges within the collective. Family Tree charts the blind pairing of the animate and inanimate alike over what becomes increasingly grotesque generations of offspring.
GRAHAM FAGEN
Here’s what I’m talking about, I’m talking about mental self-awareness, weapons, gardens, housing schemes or projects, acts of depravity as a learning tool, common shared forms that are unique, somewhere beyond, slavery, communication, identity, love, hierarchies, war, language, us.
SEBASTIAAN BREMER
A few years ago I found a box of color negatives in a box. I printed them and on the contact sheet I found my parents and siblings happy, beautiful and young.
Sadly, when these pictures were taken, I was not invited on the trip. I was too small. The world in which my siblings and parents wandered seemed sunny, clean, without labels on their clothing, unhurried, and without troubles. They all seem at ease, unhurried and generally balanced. Now, the truth of that time, as remembered by these actors and in history books, of course is different.
The pictures were super charged, ultra bright, technicolor dreams. I had to use them. But what to do with this perfect slice of life from the box I had found?
They stared at me full of pure joy and happiness and I thought about how hard this is to capture. I wanted to amplify, boost it, make it round, loud.
I played of the few great pieces of art I could find about Joy: Beethoven’s 9th. With his Ode to Joy booming loudly in my studio I started working on the prints I had made from the negatives.
I felt like the magician’s apprentice, and..by making these marks I became part of the trip I missed. It took me two years to finish this series, marking marks with dyes and paint, small, big, translucent and opaque. These globules of color seem present to my siblings and parents and boost the general technicolor bliss of the underlying photographs. They know now how good the moment is.
Heavenly joy, spark of the gods.
Play it loud with Beethoven’s 9th.
NILS FOLKE ANDERSON
The Rolling Squares take an open square frame as a fulcrum for a series of transitions.
The squares change from frame to solid plane, or angle at a corner or along an edge, or multiply into a burst of linked frames, casual structures at the end of a line.
These linked frames are reciprocally linked: every frame links through every other one; each is simultaneously discrete and entangled.
In the Series Links, neon folded squares touch one other, making a constellation of points of coincidence.
A single current runs through the whole work, and the multiple colors merge into a continuous field of light.
ELISABETH KLEY
The watercolors are studies for ceramics that could decorate the fantasized homes of the aging dandies I’ve also been drawing for years, including Salvador Dali, Erte, Coco Chanel, Elsie de Wolfe, Jack Smith and Ethyl Eichelberger. I often put decorative faces on bottles because I like it when things look at you, as if they are ready to come alive and change-like a drag performer putting on makeup. Visual references include garish Russian textiles, Renaissance and Baroque grotesque ornamentation, and Islamic art, as well as paintings and set designs by artists including Matisse, Van Dongen and Goncharova.
Elisabeth Kley’s ceramics, watercolors, drawings and prints have been seen most recently in two solo shows: Peacocks and Bottles at the Georgian National Gallery in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia, presented by Nana Kipian as part of Artisterium IV; and The Queen’s Feathers at John Tevis Gallery in Paris. Last summer in New York, her work was included in Claxons at Haunch of Venison, a four-person exhibition curated by Walter Robinson.
GÉRALDINE POSTEL
The section entitled “The Blue in Green,” curated by Géraldine Postel, is based on a 1959 composition by Bill Evans and Miles Davis. It is an invitation to 18 artists to express their idea on the Blue in Green, an abstract feeling extracted from memory containing some melancholy as one can hear in the ballad, as well as, in parallel, the concept of the dosage of blue that one can find in green.
Géraldine Postel is the founder of Outcasts Incorporated, developing the french market for art and fashion magazines such as Purple Fashion, Dazed & Confused, AnOther Magazine, AnOtherMan, Novembre and Hunger. She has been a contributing editor for zingmagazine since 1995, has developed the Ideal Office project since 2001, and just finished her first novel to be published in the year of 2013.
WILLARD BOEPPLE
My monoprints all begin with a sculpture. The forms are laid out on a screen and the first colors are laid down in very thin, translucent layers and gradually built up with multiple layers of color, often twenty or more by the end. Like building a sculpture from the inside out, it’s an adventure and a mystery.
RAINER GANAHL
As if working for a space agency like NASA, the Argentine/Italian artist Lucio Fontana titled nearly all his works SPATIAL CONCEPT.
In a state of real anger, I decided to copy some tinfoil works by Fontana in the same material but add curse words. Later, I replicated this strategy in porcelain. At one point, in order to really express my rage, I fabricated a series of cups, covered them with foul language and smashed them forcefully on a wall for a short video.
Thanks to the fact that Fontana titled almost everything just SPATIAL CONCEPT I felt entitled to do the same and extend it also to his bronze pieces. Like Fontana’s cuts, ruptures, and pierced holes in his two dimensional works, his bronze pieces, Spatial Concept Nature, also have something aggressive and subversive in their formal appearance. While I am writing this, six versions of my interpretation of them are at a bronze foundry. They too will be called Concept of Rage, Nature, Mother Fucker; Concept of Rage, Nature, Fucking Bitch; Concept of Rage, Nature, Fucking Dick, and so on.
CHAD DAWKINS
Chad Dawkins is currently writing on contemporary aesthetics and Gadamer’s hermeneutics; planning a project involving a sandblaster and a sky blue, cast resin bald eagle statuette; and eagerly awaiting the birth of his son, Wolfgang Pinson Austin.
BRAD KAHLHAMER
>>>>———————————–> Community Board <———————————-<<<<
Fusing the Pop w/ the Wild, w/ the Street, w/ the History, w/ the West, w/ the Yet-To-Be-Born, w/ the Dead w/ the Dying w/ the Dreamers/Creators/Killers…………W/ the Scarred, the Young, the Yondering………W/ the Ecstatics and Nomadics…….The Intercessors…….Text/Twigs in stacked rows, fire-starter for future sing-alongs and studio blazes…………
10,000 Feet above, the wavering high pitch Tall-grass Song/Chorus……….Singing High and Hard….The Bronze Cardboard Totem twisting down………….At Pond level……The 100……. loose-lined, watch and observe, As one rope-hair Skull-Kid breaks line, and offers to the Stack:
……….“Ashley, the White Buffalo” “J-9” “Small-Brain-Vortex” “Rapid City” “Spirit Bitch” “Waqui Totem USA”………
>>>>———————————————-> <———————————————<<<<
MICHAEL BALLOU
Bubbles! Bubbles!
Gittit! Gittit! Gittit!!
Zzboy, that’s a boy.
Oooh, Oooh!
C’MONN!!!
That’s a boy, zboy.
OHHH – BEAUTY!
That’s my guy!!
MARGARET LEE
Aubrey has taken a lot of photos of artists and continues to do so. The portraits shown here were selected not for artist name recognition but rather for everything else: composition, light, essence, etc… It’s not so easy to take a good picture and doubly as hard to take a portrait. Hope you enjoy.
KENNY SCHARF
bear jungle is the place to be all the fun happenings for you and me!
Bees, bears, bugs and trees! i want to be a bear jungleeeeee!
