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

Sonic boom, are the two words used to describe Matt Jones paintings and Guile’s signature move. For Jones, along with other painters in this post, space is a central concern. These artists are cutting it up, refracting it, exploding it or filling it to the brim – proving that painting can exist and persist in multiple modes without canceling one another out. Other artists in this installment are turning body politics upside down in funny, bizarre and disturbing ways. For more on that see R. Scott Whipkey and Narcisster.

“Cutting it up, refracting it, exploding it, or filling it to the brim – proving that painting can exist and persist in multiple modes without canceling each other out.”

Courtesy of Lauren Luloff.

30 Artists To Watch in 2012: Part II
NY Arts

We love sequels. I mean – Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom or Street Fighter II for Super NES – you straight up can’t touch that shit. Alas, we digress, but our second installment of 30 Artists To Watch is more rad than those two put together. Sonic boom, are the two words used to describe Matt Jones paintings and Guile’s signature move. For Jones, along with other painters in this post, space is a central concern. These artists are cutting it up, refracting it, exploding it or filling it to the brim – proving that painting can exist and persist in multiple modes without canceling one another out. Other artists in this installment are turning body politics upside down in funny, bizarre and disturbing ways. For more on that see R. Scott Whipkey and Narcisster. Check back soon for our last installment. It’s gon’ be off da chain.

Matthew Hassell, Untitled, 2011. Hot glue, paper, adhesive, and dust on 1/4” plexiglass12 x 12 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Matthew Hassell

Matthew Hassell engages a process art inspired approach to break open the aesthetic value of atypical art mediums. Taking somewhat of a backdoor route to reductive abstraction, he strives to distil visual experience into formally concentrated compositions. The work is built on the framework of spatial geometrical tropes yet takes on a varying interpretation based on the viewer’s physical positioning to the painting.

The key to understanding the work is in being present. The artist is interested in allowing the impermanence of one’s own memory and visual history to dictate the substance of the viewing experience within each subsequent encounter with the work.

Kris Chatterson, Untitled, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 in. Courtesy Jeff Bailey.

Kris Chatterson

Kris Chatterson’s paintings evoke vast and ever-changing spaces, presenting the natural calligraphic gesture as synthetic, abstract elements. These elements transform the physical ‘objectness’ of the mark into nonlinear spatial compositions. Images from his earlier paintings are digitally manipulated, distorted, and transferred in layers onto a painted surface. Working between the “touch” of painting and synthetic output of digital manipulation, enables Chatterson to create formal inventions that evidence the short distinctions between the physical and the abstract world of phenomena. Kris is represented by Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York and Western Project in Los Angeles where he had a solo show at each in 2011.

Kris Scheifele, Acid Fade, 2012. Acrylic paint and acetate, 21″ x 12.5″ x 2.5″. Courtesy of the artist.

Kris Scheifele

Kris Scheifele’s recent work is rooted in process and began with an investigation of paint’s physicality. After thirty to fifty layers of acrylic paint are applied to a support, these slabs are pulled up, sliced, carved, and/or peeled. Free of a support and hung directly on the wall, the paint then performs by bending, sagging, and stretching. This elasticity suggests the body and skin while the ‘aestheticised’ decay alludes to the moth-eaten, rot, or fire damage. Meant to reflect on cycles in life as well as cycles in art, Scheifele’s work rides the line between painting and sculpture.

Lauren Luloff, Dark Foliage, 2011. Oil on bleached bed sheets and fabric. Courtesy of the artist.

Lauren Luloff

Whenever I visit Lauren’s studio there are literally twenty, thirty, or more paintings on the floor and on the walls in various stages of completion. Lauren’s large paintings are sculptural, made from an assortment of materials including bed sheets and bleached fabric in addition to paint, but not necessarily canvas. These paintings are rugged and abstract. They seem like time capsules, which encase the scene of a crime or the drama of an intense quarrel. Lauren’s smaller paintings, which are often studies for larger works, are landscapes that Milton Avery would’ve made had he gone the way of Van Gogh.

–Joshua Abelow

Lisa Kirk, Untitled (Speaker), 2011. Maple, oak, (If You See Something… Say Something… soundtrack included), 24.75 x 16.25 x 12.25 in. Courtesy of the artist and INVISIBLE-EXPORTS.

Lisa Kirk

Lisa Kirk’s practice deals with the contemporary American cultural infrastructure, the political history it must contend with, and an investigation into our deep and undeniable need to engage with these social phenomena. Her work seeks to expose contemporary human nature as that of consumers and combatants of objects and ideas. Kirk has culled a vocabulary of references from war, popular entertainment, middle-class America, and the sentiment of nostalgia for revolt. Site specificity seems undeniably important; bringing the audience together, not just as spectator but as co-author in the experience.

Russel Tyler, Fortune Teller, 2011. Oil, acrylic and spray paint on caves, 30 x 30 in. Courtesy of the artist

Russell Tyler

Russell Tyler’s paintings read as basically process-based. The paintings themselves are seemingly a manifestation of a horribly frenzied state. There seems to be little control over the paint itself as it is allowed to do as paint does – drip, drop, and have a viscous surface. However, it is clear that Tyler is intentionally combining the inseparable, yet opposing languages of both “high” and “low” art in an investigation of the dystopia of his surroundings. The paintings, as settings which look at the relationship between reality and the performative or sensational aspect of art, provoke comedy as much as they express criticism.

Beach: Paul Beltran. Narcissister photographed in her hometown of La Jolla, California, 2011

Narcissister

With masked face and merkin’d pussy, Narcissister’s work rests at the intersection of performance art, burlesque, dance, and public provocateur. Performing reverse striptease by dressing in stockings and sequined dresses pulled from orifices, then layering and removing hijabs, wigs, and plastic bangles, she reminds us that the body is never bare. In creating an excess of artifice, on the one hand, and revealing the “natural” yet trained body, on the other, Narcissister implicitly questions the relationship between feminist craft, commodity fetishism, and bodily technique, uncannily reframing assumptions of blackness and feminism in contemporary performance. Narcissister is multiplicity; Narcissister is ambiguity, Narcissister is You.

–Ariel Osterweis

Matt Jones, Space painting installation, 2011-2012. Adam Reich Photography, courtesy the artist and The Hole NYC

Matt Jones

Matt Jones lives in a sonic boom. His work as an artist manifests the cultivation of traditional knowledge and doctrine, while being embodied with the principles of adolescent masculinity and ideas of wasted youth. There is an orchestrated spontaneity in his art that makes him a master of mischief, yet well aware that his playfulness is consequential. There’s a mathematical language developing in his work that is grounded by concepts of the universal expansion of energy and its regenerative potential. He sees space and time as something that can be recognized and represented figuratively, as a body that is active and transformable.

–Jorge Ulrich

Kelly Worman, 51 mins.45 sec, 2012. Oil, acrylic, graphite, pastels on panel. 50 x 40. Courtesy of the artist.

Kelly Worman

Kelly Worman’s new work is a lesson in frantic expression. Every mark is pregnant with the want to explore and boggle. There is a muscular and emotive quality to the work. It appears labored yet instantaneous simultaneously.

In applying chance and intuitive improvisation to her mark making, there is an immediacy present in her exploration of gesture, color, rhythm, and space. A twisting and shifting of the plane is made evident by varying weights throughout the panel, furthering the push for disorientation. Her work is at once a delight to observe as well as a dizzying trial- a difficult dichotomy to achieve.

R. Scott Whipkey, Penis, 2011. Pencil and industrial striping marker on Tyvek, 60 x 40 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

R. Scott Whipkey

I am interested in what happens to images and symbols when removed from their orientation in the American body politic. My work investigates visual nuances that occur through the decontextualization of such an image: simultaneously neutralizing the image and emphasizing the significance of the event that generated it. And by exploiting the faults of an image in commercial representation, I am alienating the symbol from its sedimentation in historical consciousness. Using a kind of Post-Neo-Pop [sic] sensibility, my work draws upon an art historical dialectic which uses the familiar vernacular of modernism to investigate the nature of a symbol’s construction through the process and materials I employ in fabrication.