30 Artists To Watch in 2012: Part I - NY Arts MagazineNY Arts Magazine

The artists presented in our “30 Artists to Watch” are a band of disparates, working in mediums that stretch from soundscapes to installations, acrylics to bed sheets. In this first installment of 10/30, readers get a glimpse of what to look for this year. Particularly exciting are DeVille and Schenkelberg whose works delve into realms of perversion, repulsion, and chaos, pitting their works between terror and enchantment.

“This just in: Boom! Painting is still not dead…surprise mothafuckas. Sculpture and peformance keep getting weirder/uglier/beautiful-er and we love it.”

Julie Schenkelberg, Cowered (detail), 2010. Plates, cutlery, crystal, chair, styrofoam, plaster, 59″ x 57″ x 48″. Courtesy of Asya Geisberg Gallery. Photo Credit: Etienne Frossard

30 Artists To Watch in 2012: Part I,
Jason Stopa, Kate Meng Brassel & Leah Schlackman

This just in: Boom! Painting is still not dead…surprise mothafuckas. Sculpture and peformance keep getting weirder/uglier/beautiful-er and we love it. Art films are still strange in a good way. And buttloads of information can make for some interesting art. The artists presented in our “30 Artists to Watch” are a band of disparates, working in mediums that stretch from soundscapes to installations, acrylics to bed sheets. In this first installment of 10/30, readers get a glimpse of what to look for this year. Particularly exciting are DeVille and Schenkelberg whose works delve into realms of perversion, repulsion, and chaos, pitting their works between terror and enchantment. One notices a bend in feminist art; even when incorporating “girlie” craft into their work, these artists twist and distort such practices to create beast-like sculptures and eerie landscapes. Over the next 2 weeks we’ll be posting more. Check the first ten out below.

Abigail DeVille, New York at Dawn, 2010. Tyvek, enamel and latex paint, dirt, American flags, graphite,lamp shade, synthetic hair, polyurethane varnish, chicken wire, plastic sheeting, plaster, garbage bags, pâpier-maché, fake eyelashes, duct tape, wood chips, wire, canvas, cigarette butt, acrylic yarn, metal, salt dough,and hardware, 102 x 114 x 96” Courtesy of the artist. Photo credit: LaToya Ruby Frazier

Abigail DeVille

Through bricolage, painting, and sculpture, Abigail DeVille cobbles together a visual mass that speaks to the material culture of the present moment. She experiments using found and inherited domestic objects in order to make a connection to the universe. W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of double-consciousness is the conceptual frame DeVille uses to deconstruct two spatial relationships: the claustrophobic space of the urban environment violently clashing with the infinite expanse of the universe. Black holes are an integral metaphor. Her objects speak to the physical infinite expanse of universal time and societal ills of the present moment. DeVille is making a visible representation of the invisible.

Bryan Rogers, Water Table Falls I, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 15 x 23 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Bryan Rogers

What a never-ending corridor that was, to be sure. It made one giddy to look either backwards or forwards. Here stood an ignominious crew waiting for the door of mercy to be opened, but long might they wait.

-Hans Christian Andersen, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf

Bryan has been painting what look like huge, underground tunnels—paintings of cross-sections of unpeopled caverns roiling with their toxic liquid cargoes.

Hydrofracking nightmares? A pictorial cliché of the collective unconscious? Formally-similar esoteric abstractions? Another oubliette in this networked abyss, an infinite waiting room, a fairytale purgatory? IDK.

-Jesse Patrick Martin

Carsten Nicolai, Pionier I, 2011. Wind machine, panels, parachute, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist, photo credit: Uwe Walter, Berlin

Carsten Nicolai

Carsten Nicolai (born 1965 in Karl Marx Stadt, now Chemnitz) has been working in the intersection between nature and art since the middle of the 1990s. His fascination for natural phenomena, mathematics and physics developed into an integral part of his artistic production. Using different media, such as sound, image, installation, sculpture, and computers, Nicolai examines the sphere in which explicit borders seem to disappear. He transfers natural phenomena into an artistic language and uses mistakes as creative material, thereby making sense of the perception and understanding of our environment.

Chris Baker, Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise, Thousands of first-time video bloggers introducing themselves to the world, 2008. Photo Credit: Chris Houltberg

Chris Baker, Murmur Study, A real-time installation that prints Twitter messages containing onomatopoeic emotional non-words like hmmph, grrr, and argh, 2011. Photo Credit: KMS Team

Christopher Baker

Christopher Baker’s work examines the complex relationship between society and its technologies. Originally trained as a scientist, Baker’s artistic practice represents an uneasy balance of eager technological optimism, analytical processes, deep-rooted skepticism and intuitive engagement. As technologists make daily promises to improve our lives by uniting our physical and digital worlds, Baker attempts to make work that reflects upon the practical implications of our increasingly networked lifestyles. With these interests at heart, his large-scale video projections, participatory practices and multi-media installations often fuse existing physical spaces with our disembodied yet poetic digital ephemera, resulting in revelatory and sometimes disorienting forms.

Emily Auchincloss, Untitled (Jellyfish), 2011. Oil on canvas, 66 x 56″. Courtesy of the artist.

Emily Auchincloss

Auchincloss’s paintings expressively pull apart and reconstruct a syntax of image, symbol and space in their relational webs. They are also satisfyingly painterly. Their surfaces hold exciting passages of layering, brush-marked textures and the lushness of oil color against color. There is a sense of a mind at work in these paintings— a sense of seeing connections and possibilities being thought out and then re-thought on the canvas. It seems both a mental process and a sensory one. I think I am seeing a plan in action, but also the unfolding of ad hoc responses to what the artist finds emerging on the canvas.

-Ken Weathersby

Heike Baranowsky, Barometer 1, 2011. 1-Channel video, 54 minutes, HDCAM, stereo sound. Camera: Volker Gläser, sound: Titus Maderlechner. Courtesy of the artists and Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin.

Heike Baranowsky

Heike Baranowsky is known as a video artist with a unique visual language, a language that emphasizes stillness and tranquility and that is able to open up new, confusing aspects of how we perceive a moving image with the most minimal of measures. With characteristic precision and with an intense concentration on the image’s atmosphere, the artist explores themes, such as the power of suggestion of moving images, the manipulation of meaning by media, or technology’s influence on our understanding of reality. She is an artist who mainly works with moving images yet, always returns to examining phenomena of action and stagnancy, and in-between-moments.

Hiroshi Tachibana, Kiki and Pokemon, 2011. Gel medium transfer, acrylic, maker, and trading card on canvas, 20 x 20 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Hiroshi Tachibana

To distract and seduce: the paintings of Hiroshi Tachibana evoke a sense of play in alchemical and aesthetic wonder. Incorporating attributes of printmaking, Tachibana builds layers of his visual language using a monotype technique onto canvas. Gestures, drips, lines, and brushstrokes allude to a bigger space, yet are physically flat when viewed.

Tachibana further complicates his process by incorporating outside variables such as children’s drawings and candy wrappers. Negating his own touch and leaving some responsibilities to chance, Tachibana’s trust and quizzical nature as an artist yield a great tension within his paintings without denying viewers the pleasure of discovery along the way.

-Patrick Berran

Isle Murdock, Ours, 2011. Oil on canvas, 14 x 18 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Ilse Murdock

Ilse Murdock’s paintings are concise visual statements that arise out of necessity and practical parameters, resulting in unconventional painting methods. In her process-oriented landscape painting the lower edge serves as the palette, causing image and materials to press forcibly upon one another. Equally important in her works is a devotion to gestural conceits, probing decision, and ultimately retinal and sensory pleasure – to seeing – moments of beauty – whether in daily refuse, The Great Outdoors, unconscious private movements of hand and brush, or anachronistic paintings styles.

Jenny Vogel, Alles Muss in Flammen Stehen (Everything Must be in Flames), 2011. 3D animation, 1.5 min. loop. Courtesy of the artist.

Jenny Vogel

Jenny Vogel’s work explores subjective themes as they are experienced in the age of information. She examines the anxiety of alienation, the desires of communication and a sense of be-longing in a virtual world. These traits, attributed to Romanticism, are dealt with in her work through the lenses of contemporary communication technology, the media and historical preconceptions. Through the juxtaposition of technology and Romanticism, Vogel attempts to challenge the image of the Internet as the “global village,” objectivism in the news and the ideology of science.

Julie Schenkelberg, In the Supper Rooms, 2010. Buffet, chairs, plaster, soil, cement, dishwater, 81″ x 93″ x 42″. Courtesy of Asya Geisberg Gallery. Photo Credit: Etienne Frossard

Julie Schenkelberg

Julie Schenkelberg’s sculpture is poetry combined with industrial grit. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she translates the visual imagery of her family narratives and an antiquated aesthetics of the mid-west, into her massive sculptural installations, with the contemporary vigor of post-industrial deconstruction and ruin. Her materials ooze and twist in their newly found positions, looking as if they had been there for a century. Schenkelberg displays an unexpected sensitivity with her materials from years of painting in theater shops across the country. Her work follows in the tradition of the heavy hitting feminist sculptors of the 70’s.

Now a Brooklyn-based artist, she attended the School of Visual Arts MFA program in 2011. She has been awarded a residency at the prestigious Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Spring 2012.