FrameWork 5/23
Philip Leonard Ocampo on
Oliver Husain and Malik McKoy
The glitches in our matrixes
EXT. SAN FRANCISCO ROOF TOPS - (DUSK) - CLOSE SHOT
Scottie looking down.
EXT. SAN FRANCISCO ROOF TOPS - (DUSK) - LONG SHOT
From Scottie's viewpoint, the gap beneath the building and the ground below. It seems to treble its depth.
EXT. SAN FRANCISCO ROOF TOPS - (DUSK) - CLOSEUP
Scottie looking down with horror. His eyes close as a wave of nausea overcomes him.
FrameWork 3/23
Erica Stocking on
Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky
I brought your hands in my pockets to see The Pool in the Shell.
I didn’t want to inconvenience anyone by bringing along your whole body. Sometimes it is preferable to be discreet. Sometimes detachment allows one more flexibility.
FrameWork 2/23:2
David Court on Katie Bethune-Leamen
A whole that is also parts: Katie Bethune-Leamen in conversation with David Court
David: The description of your exhibition notes that it brings references to historical domestic languages of geometric abstraction into the space of the gallery. It occurs to me that there are often allusions to the domestic in your exhibitions, but they do appear more overt, here, in the spritzdekor/red work stencil and plates? Were those elements the engine of the development of this body of work?
FrameWork 2/23:1
Fan Wu on Yan Wen Chang
32 Failed Fouettés Ad Nauseam (for Yan Wen Chang)
I am searching for an origin story that’s athletic enough to bear the momentum of the life that came after.
In the beginning there was black and white with no baggage nor moral valuation: just the hard, simple fact of contrast – a first awareness of difference.
FrameWork 1/23
Emilie Croning on Together / Apart
It’s like that feeling when a gust of wind hits the curls at the nape of my neck on a hot summer day as I walked between Rebecca Bair’s two larger-than-life prints of Type 3 coils - the fabric dancing in the breeze carried by my stride. Placed against bright blue and yellow backgrounds respectively, each image acts as a textured and vibrant path guiding you through.
FrameWork 11/22
Jonathan Scott on Callings—
From Notes for a diagrammatic postscript:
… the infinite / finite relation carries back the resonance of Pearky PinkTM (7) - an upper scale shift doubles (…….24,000.) Lower level – increase application twice over (23).
TM I propose considering every art form in terms of principles of sufficiency and no longer in terms of descriptive or theoretical or foundational historical perspectives. To do this, one must construct non-aesthetic scenarios or duals, scenes, characters, or postures that are both conceptual and artistic and based on the formal model of a matrix. Laruelle, 2012.
FrameWork 10/22
Mathilde Varanese on Patrick Howlett
Tennis makes my spleen swell and
clay courts sprained my optimism.
J’essouffle mes jambes à collectionner ses rebonds. Il défile les services avec l’ardeur d’un lance-balle automatique défectueux. Derrière la ligne de fond, j’emporte les reliques de ses frappes.
FrameWork 5/22
Sandra Meigs on
Sameer Farooq & Beth Stuart
Vision and Emptiness
In meditation any one of the senses can be a doorway to awareness. Vision can be a very powerful one.
FrameWork 4/22
Sabrina Tarasoff on Zin Taylor
A List:
Groovy things
Brain fry
Snowballs
Stress balls
Simple Simon sentences
The Alberta Void
Magical Thought
Big Dicked Hippy
Exclamation Marks
Mobiles
“Wands”
FrameWork 3/22
Parker Kay on
Meech Boakye and Gareth Long
In 1972, Bill Withers wrote the billboard-topping song “Lean on Me” that was inspired by his recent move to Los Angeles and the lack of community he felt in the city in comparison to the memories of togetherness he experienced in his hometown of Slab Fork, West Virginia.1
Lean on me
When you’re not strong
And I’ll be your friend
I’ll help you carry on... 2
FrameWork 12/21
Connie Wilson on Ian Carr-Harris
How do you make a word sound?
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) (image 1) should not be confused with the NATO Phonetic Alphabet (image 2).
FrameWork 11/21
Darryn Doull on Brian Groombridge
In Time Enough at Last, Lyn Venable introduces poor Henry Bemis. Henry’s lasting ambition was to read a book from cover to cover, despite his myopic eyes. In the end he cried, when after a cataclysmic event, he found his glasses had broken into a pile of blurry shards. His ambition was irrevocably thwarted, in spite of his escape from the tedium of normal life. A truly abysmal denouement.
FrameWork 9/21
Cason Sharpe on Derek Sullivan
I was the Inventory Manager at Art Metropole for two years, and I still can’t describe exactly what the organization is. A gallery, an archive, a bookstore? All of the above and none of it. Here’s the official line, the one I’d regurgitate to groups of visiting students: founded in 1974 by General Idea, Art Metropole is an artist-run centre devoted to the documentation, archiving, and distribution of images…[1]
Then I’d watch the students’ eyes glaze over.
FrameWork 5/21
Craig Rodmore on Shirley Wiitasalo
Goodbye to Language (Fragments)
When I tell someone I am not blind, is that an observation?
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour
FrameWork 12/20
Alejandro Tamayo on Kevin Yates and Sara Maston
To disclose:
The premonition of an event
The event of a premonition
The presentation of a representation
The materiality of the Earth
FrameWork 11/20
Simon Fuh on Greener than Grass: Katie Lyle and Ella Dawn McGeough
Mark Making
It was mid-summer, 2019, when we left the gallery’s air-conditioned walls and followed the cool wind off river that guided us downward. Sitting on a sun-warmed concrete embankment, we watched the boats go by. I rolled up my shorts to tan my legs and held an ice cream cone far outward after each lick so that the drips fell into the water below
FrameWork 10/20
Notes on Process
Pardiss Amerian, Ella Gonzales, Patrick Howlett
Something I find engaging in both your work is how, as I see it, a process of abstraction does not preclude narrative or a range of figuration. It can be hard to write out of that binary and I thought we could start by discussing the work in relation to the processes you engage with and different kinds of activities in the studio. What is a starting point for each of you?
FrameWork 7/20
Zach Seely on Long and Sullivan's Decameron
On April 28, 2020, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, stated during a Q1 2020 Earning Call, that he had “seen a significant rise in search activity.” He further contextualized that “coronavirus-related search activity at its peak was four times greater than during the peak of the Super Bowl” (Retrieved 06/14/20 from the transcript of the Q1 2020 Earnings Call). The increased traffic should be of no surprise. By this date, people had been stuck at home, many without work, and plenty anxiety-ridden for at least a month. Like a modern-day Delphic oracle, people brought to Google their most pressing questions: what are the symptoms, can I travel, or what should I read? In each case, the platform rewarded the searcher with a plethora of answers. Unlike the Greek riddles that the Pythia returned in verse, the algorithm provided those inquirers with a cypher of listed decontextualized answers and images. Search was just a bit less poetic than its Greek counterpart.
Statement
Following recent events we (I with assistance from associated artists) are evaluating our mandate and making organizational changes which are self-critical with the aim to situate our activities in a sustainable and equitable future. I acknowledge the gallery’s failings and complicity. Together we are listening and learning.
...
The Decameron
Gareth Long and Derek Sullivan
In a new iteration of their collaborative drawing project the two artists will methodically work their way through Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, each illustrating the one story per day in the isolation of their own studios. They will Zoom conference and draw together, but make separate drawings. The resulting pairs will be dated and numbered according to the story. The project will be continued until complete, or social distancing restrictions are lifted, whichever comes first.
Decameron (completed 1353 CE), set in Italy during the time of the Black Death, tells of a group of seven young women and three young men who flee from plague-ridden Florence to a deserted villa in the countryside for two weeks. To pass the evenings, each member of the party tells a story each night, except for one day per week for chores, and the holy days during which they do no work at all, resulting in ten nights of storytelling over the course of two weeks. Thus, by the end of the fortnight they have told 100 stories.
series to date: www.aviewingroomv4.com/shop
FrameWork 3/20
Danny O'Quinn on Sandra Meigs
“Between us and reality are our feelings”—Svetlana Alexievich
Saturday, March 21. It is International Puppetry Day. Social distancing has lost its vaguely oxymoronic connotations. We are resuscitating strategies for transmitting affect across space, through objects, without words. Because of course we have been through this and done this all before. The Italians singing arias collectively on their balconies have known all along how to reach into the core of others when those others are distant or gone. In times of danger the fetish not the commodity reemerges as a method for communication and remembrance: our objects, especially those imbued with intimate attachments, live among us. And the eloquent stillness of painting does what it has always done, stopping time, opening a temporal loop while our sensuous, rational, and emotional experiences dynamically reset themselves.
FrameWork 2/20
Rhiannon Vogl on Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky
February 13
Minus 20.
At least the sun is shining … that’s what they say. Crocheted afghan on my lap, a knitted coil of lavender, pearl and lime wrapped twice around myself, tucked in deep to the seams of the Lazy Boy. Sipping tea, cradling the cup, trying to keep my hands warm. The winter. It gets into my bones.
FrameWork 12/19
Josi Smit on Katie Bethune-Leamen
LIVING, THROBBING MISCELLANIES (LOOSELY FRAMED)
A harmonious dip into a blue porcelain bathtub surrounded by blue and white checkered tiles
My bathmat either hates me or loves me obsessively. I either hate my bathmat or love it beyond logic. It won’t stay clean; I can’t keep it clean. It drives me crazy but it matches the tiles so perfectly: a rectangle of softly speckled sky blue and ivory.
FrameWork 11/19
Daisy Desrosiers on Beth Stuart
Faire des histoires: DAMMA Paintings V.1
L'usage de la matière, telle que considérée par les artistes, me fascine. Les cultures matérielles passées et actuelles présentent un lien complexe et fluide auquel je réfléchis avec curiosité. Mémoire et matérialité. À quoi peut potentiellement ressembler la rencontre des deux?
A Viewing Room v.4
For our presentation at Art Toronto 2019, we collaborated with Klaus, on a continuation of our project series entitled A Viewing Room, in which we investigate the relationship between design and art; how design and domestic objects interact alongside artworks and how one can highlight the other. Please visit the website www.aviewingroomv4.com