ANIMATE: Johnston Foste
By Horace Brockington
An exciting core of new works by artist, including Johnston Foster, as far ranging as recent works by Mia Westerlund to the delightful slide of Yutaka Sone’s Amusement Romana are re-invigorating new art possibilities beyond the restricted context of video installations. Many of the works dissolve and reject any clear lines between sculpture object and installation. Liza McConnell extends this to the projected image.
The result is a fresh energy in recent sculpture objecthood that is both exciting and novel. What unites the two artists in question is the use of rather simple material means to create works that speak to the investigation of the landscape, light perception, and "real" history. While Johnson Foster and Liza McConnell’s approaches and interests are singular, it points to works that are less dependent on the theoretic explanation or complex technical /computer assisted appendages. The rather simplistic means, without high tech manipulations, result in vigorous and engaging sculptural works that makes this artist fresh.
Johnston Foster
Johnston Foster creates uniquely strange objects whose banality is undermined by the literally simple material means and the random approach to their construction. Foam, duct, tapes, ordinary hardware items are the tools for his works. Rather simple hardware store batteries power his world of kinetic sculptures. In Miracle Grow (2003), the artist effectively translates the materiality of green and yellow duct tape into the flesh of Venus-fly traps. In a recent work a chandelier moves rather randomly around, powered by a raccoon composed mainly of duct tape, trying to extract his kite from the enormous chandelier. In his works, Johnson who lies in New York, and is currently completing the graduate program at Hunter College, exhibits a directed and mature voice. The promise of a unique talent is already apparent.
Foster’s intent is to subvert the ordinary. He has stated, "I want it to be true to form, (with) respect to what it’s made of. I want the viewer to see how I made it …that honesty comes through the shoddiness, honesty as well as humbleness." The artist points to world of his youth in suburban Virginia informed by TV consumption of cartoons. Foster notes that " [cartoons] are our [generation’s] visual vocabulary and education …built on Saturday mornings and afternoons after school. These are the things people recognize, and I want to put twists on them."
Foster’s absurd world is one in which 1960s sitcoms appeared turned inside out. In his recent exhibition at Rare Gallery, New York, his" world gone mad" objects are collectively on display. The artist presents images of a roasting pit with moving flames of colored plastic. The highlight of the exhibition is a vibrating peacock with a fake fur body, a big fanned tail made of simple colored pipe cleaners, and felt and plastic reflective material. The works, despite their obvious humor, are never over the top.
Foster’s world of sculptural objects of the ordinary gone strangely astray embraces the vocabulary of Red Grooms, but it moves further by abandoning narrative. His work points back to a early Pop Art with a rather Surrealist undercurrent, for we are clearly in the presence of another private hallucinatory world, that of the artist. But his in world we don’t reject the real but rather delights in the simplicity and absurdities.
Liza McConnell
Liza McConnell is a young artist who trained in sculpture at Ohio State University and Cornell University. She has exhibited at the Pittsburgh Mattress Factory, and recently completed an artist in residency at Smack Mellon, New York, The artist will be included in the upcoming exhibitions "Presence of Light", and later this year will present a solo installation at the Kunstverein Langenhagen, Germany.
McConnell’s works have consists of simple fluorescent safety cone used by highway workers, inexpensive clipon lights, a treadmill and bicycle parts. Like Foster, she is fascinated by the potential of both creating sculptural objects and referencing real world phenomena through rather ordinary means.
In Conical Monocles the artist used a truck mirror and solar lights with dioramas inside. The result is a diverse range of reflected images of the surrounding building and environments. The work consists of the truck mirror assemblies mounted in three site-specific locations. The flat mirror is mirror is oriented to reflect a specific aspect of the local environment. In this case a tall building face lined with air conditioners. The conical mirror has been altered to house a back lit diorama, seen through a hole in the mirror of a pastoral/suburban/idealized scene relating to the architecture reflected in the flat mirror. Solar panel provides light at night so diorama can be seen at night.
Diorama Obscura: Riding Fences combines a road bike, a treadmills and a series of lights, safety cones, lights, a miniature diorama, tin foil, lenses, and electronics. The viewer on the treadmill activates the bike which in terms activates the lights aimed at a series of projected florescent cones and a projected image. The actual image is dependent on viewer intervention. The lights fade and the image is projected and animated by the viewer’s motion, such that the viewer is almost totally in control of the outcome. Lights dim as viewer walks on the treadmill and a moving image is projected from within the cones. The motion in the image is powered directly by the walker. Images of a highway moves as the viewer walks. Since the speed of the image is determine by how fast the person walks, viewers can determine that the image is projected in "real time", and not from a recording.
Landscape Painting is a wonderfully romantic work created from a series of cheap tin paint cans, a magnifying lenses, paper towels, mouthwash and motor oil, and the simple interact of a series of hardware store lighting fixtures whose beams are refracted on the wall. The resultant reflected lights dictated by the elements skillfully arranged in the center of a darken room create on the wall, what appears to be a expansive landscape filled with mist just at the break of dawn. The work is moody without being camp.
Ideal Landscape is an installation created in an old darkroom adjacent to an exhibition gallery. The space had a long 8’ long metal sink visible from the doorway connecting it to the gallery. Over the years The darkroom had been transformed into a storage room /utility closet, filled with lights, paints, tripods, cinderblocks, sawhorse, hammers, nails, brushes, wires, hook, and essential tolls and materials for maintaining the gallery. McConnell used many of the objects cluttering the site into her sculptural installation. Her aim was to create an environment /object that speaks to the function of the site.
From the gallery the viewers could look through an open doorway to observe a 20 x 30" screen hanging freely above the sink, illuminated with the glowing image of a pastoral landscape. Positioned as though it had just been photographically processed in the sink and was hanging up to dry. The image was actually projected from a video projector above the doorway. Though the terrain and structure of the landscape imaged remained static, the atmosphere was in flux, changing from a soft mist to a smoky noisy eruption.
Once inside the darkroom, the remainder of the installation exposed how the images were actually created. A miniature stage set made from lights; wire, paper, string and small tools were propped up on a set of sawhorses.
The image was configured in such a way as to cast the illusion of a vast landscape on a translucent screen. The screen was being recorded by a digital video camera on a tripod. The video camera was directly feeding an image-stream to the projector above the doorway. As changes occurred on the stage set (from the operation of a bubble maker and a fog machine) they were simultaneously projected on the screen above the sink.
All the props, light sources, technology and power cables were readily visible allowing the viewer to uncover the process of illusion. A red button encouraged viewers to activate the fog machine while inside the darkroom, filling the dimly lit space with a light mist and creating an ambiguous atmospheric eruption in the projected landscape image.
Johnston Foster and Liza McConnell create new works that are encouraging signs of the artists capable of creating fresh art less reliant on high tech or huge video screen to over-stimulate or seduce the viewer. Rather, their works emphasize the important of the creative mind working with rather simple materials to excite, inform and intrigue our senses. Both are interested in how the most simplest of materials can address representations of more serious and austere concepts Each invents rather unique means to activate his or her work. While working towards rather different images, both rely on the viewer to activate the work in rather formidable ways. The viewer in exchange has to bring a type of openness in. In their construction the works are full of wit, referencing a world that appears strictly that of the artist. Each artist highlights the irony of common perception of objects, and perception. Foster and McConnell evoke artist’s continued fascination with the ambiguous. Equally their works embrace the century old tradition of artists use of rather common materials means and industrially produced objects transformed into art works, but their works are far removed form the Duchampian or Surrealist intent of the readymade. Both Johnston Foster’s and Liza McConnell ‘s art address issues of the surrounding natural landscapes, the juxtaposition of culture and nature, the rationally serious and the absurd and the boundaries of which have become increasingly blurred
Both artists offer fresh new vision for art to intrigue and delight.
