Artist: Pieter Schoolwerth
Venue: Miguel Abreu, New York
Exhibition Title: Model as Painting
Date: May 21 – June 30, 2017
Press Release:
Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to announce the opening on Sunday, May 21st, of Model as Painting, Pieter Schoolwerth’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery. The show will be held at both our 88 Eldridge and 36 Orchard Street locations.
One of the clear characteristics of our digital age is that in it all things, bodies even are generally suspendedfrom their material substance. This increasingly spectral state of affairs is the effect of mostly invisible forces of abstraction that can be associated with the digitization of more and more aspects of experience. We as living beings are now confronting a structural split between the substance of things and their virtual double. To speak concretely, one can point to everyday phenomena such as coffee without caffeine, or food without fat, for example, but also to money without currency, love without bodies, and soon following, to painting without painting, and art without art…
In Model as Painting, Pieter Schoolwerth attempts to reverse the above described techno-cultural trend by producing a series of ‘in the last instance’ paintings, in which the stuff of paint itself reappears at the very end only of a complex, multi-media effort to produce a figurative picture. As such, paint here is not immediately used to build up an image from the ground up, if you will, one brush stroke at a time, but rather it arrives only to mark the painting after it has been fully formed and output onto canvas. In other words, one can safely claim that painting without painting has transformed into painting with painting in the last instance – with paint having been liberated from its traditional depictive and expressive functions for the first time, and therefore having become truly equal to itself, that is existing as pure excess, or ornament.
A sequel to the artist’s exhibition of the same title at Capitain Petzel in Berlin earlier this year, this new iteration of the project continues to conflate the shallowness of digital space with the flatness of modernist painting and the individual layers of relief sculpture. Here again Schoolwerth asserts that photography, drawing, the construction of sculptural reliefs, digital image processing, printing, and, finally, painting, all contribute to propose a contemporary definition of painting.
An expanded version of The Casting Agent, a film produced in collaboration with Alexandra Lerman, plays a central role in the installation of the various works in the show. An allegory for the pictorial processes implicit in the paintings, where one of the characters plays a ‘casting agent,’ a stand-in for the artist, while the other plays a ‘model,’ who, while being photographed, casts shadows that create openings in the flat sets behind that allow the characters to transgress the screen and puncture the two-dimensional picture pla
This new ‘model’ that Schoolwerth proposes finds further physical form in his series of multi-layered relief works, representational tableaux in which figures overlap with one another, simultaneously projecting out from the surface and recessing into the constitutive layers. Initially carved by hand in foam core, and then photographed and used in the digitally processed image that precedes the moment of painting, the models are then produced again this time in wood with a CNC router to complete the layered process. These three-dimensional versions of the paintings can be said to depict, and yet reverse the compression of time and space that is intrinsic to digital communications, challenging the illusion of a ‘dematerialized’ space in favor of a materialist view that is anchored in human labor.
Tanya Leighton is pleased to announce an exhibition of new and recent works by legendary artist-filmmaker John Smith, his fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. In SIGN LANGUAGE, Smith presents two videos: White Hole, 2014 and Steve Hates Fish, 2015. These videos are joined by two framed reliefs titled One State Solution, 2015 and Plasticine Flag, 2015, which are sculpted from the eponymous modeling material. The political and conceptual locus of the exhibition, White Hole, is constructed from one solitary image, pictured alternatingly in both positive and negative. Dependent on when the viewer enters the screening room, the video will either confound or engage. Half of the six-minute seamless loop is accompanied by an unintelligible voiceover, which at the start sounds like an inscrutable foreign language, but after a few moments of listening reveals itself to be reversed English. This soundtrack accompanies viewers on an uncharacteristically slow journey to the end of a train tunnel, eventually giving way to bright, unblemished white. But the train continues on, a tiny black speck appears on the horizon, and this time we hear the artist speaking to us.
With characteristic calm, Smith describes his only visit to a communist country – Poland in 1980. As a young leftist based in Great Britain just after the election of Margaret Thatcher, Smith recalls being pleasantly surprised by the lack of advertising signs, finding it amusingly difficult to determine from their window displays what shops were selling. By contrast, most Poles that Smith met longed for the capitalism of Western democracy. The artist then takes us 17 years forward to Leipzig, well after the fall of the Iron Curtain and just after the election of Tony Blair in Great Britain. The former East German city seemed to be flourishing under capitalism, yet growing unemployment and income disparity had fostered feelings of disquiet among the city’s residents, who coined a new aphorism – they felt like they could see 'a tunnel at the end of the light', just like that experienced by many British socialists after their initial enthusiasm for Blair's 'New Labour'.
Smith has long engaged with the concept of misunderstanding – be it ideological, political, linguistic, or misunderstanding that arises from subjective narration, filmic devices, and our relationship to the media that shape our view of the world. Smith’s latest video, Steve Hates Fish is an exploration in manufactured misunderstanding. By deliberately confusing the popular 'Word Lens' translator app for smartphones, which translates text in real time using the phone’s camera, Smith recasts the shop signs in his local neighbourhood as a bazaar of dada-ist plays-on-words. The jumpy, often useless jumble of words onscreen inspires a kind of empathy. Watching the app search its memory for a corresponding translation is somehow not far from the futility of trying to make heads or tails of signage in a country where one does not speak the language.
Alongside Steve Hates Fish are Smith’s two Plasticine reliefs, the most overtly political pieces in the exhibition. Plasticine Flag is simply that — a Palestinian flag sculpted from unaltered lengths of coloured Plasticine. One State Solution uses the colours of both the Palestinian and Israeli flags to spell 'PALESTEIN' in block capital letters. For an artist who has long engaged with politics – those both as local as neighbourhood house demolitions and as global as international border disputes – Smith’s directness presents a stark political imperative: act now and direct the course of the future away from the tunnel at the end of the light.
John Smith’s work has been widely shown internationally for more than three decades. It is regarded for its formal ingenuity and its ability to combine compelling narrative with an acute observation of the everyday, often subverting the boundaries between documentary and fiction. As Smith puts it, '...if you look hard enough all meanings can be found or produced close to home'. Smith was the winner of the 2013 Jarman Award for achievement in artists' filmmaking. His solo exhibitions this year include Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig; Vita Kuben, Umea; and Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg. Retrospective programmes of his work were presented during 2015 at international film festivals in Leipzig, Munich, Stuttgart and Vilnius.
My whole family owns/operates/works in Chinese restaurants so lemme tell you:
-We chop all our vegetables FRESH
-We butcher our own chicken from whole chickens (we strip the breasts/tenders from the torso; we debone the thigh meat)
-We use the bones to make chicken stock for our soups
-We roast our own pork/ribs in an in-house smoker
-We peel and devein all of our shrimp BY HAND (this is what i did as a kid)
-We make our own dumplings/wontons/egg roll/spring rolls/breaded shrimp BY HAND (none of these are frozen)
-We used to make our own dumpling dough from scratch, but it was a lot of work and we switched to premade but many other places still do this
-All sauces and marinates are made by hand (no premade/store bought)
-All gravy is made by hand from scratch
-All soups are made from scratch
-Egg Foo Young takes FOREVER TO MAKE (there are like 7 different steps and you can only make one order at a time)
-An average take out restaurant has 3-6 employees (oftentimes family)
-Most employees work 6 days a week/60-70 hours a week
-Many employees live with their employers, sometimes very far away from their families (ie a father sending money back to his wife and kids in China)
-Owners (such as my parents) usually work 7 days a week, 364 days a year (we close on thanksgiving)
-Oftentimes kids will be helping out/hanging around bc they can’t afford childcare (I’ve been cashiering since i was 10)
SO WITH ALL THIS IN MIND, it’s really hurtful when someone complains about our prices. Averaging $5-$10/person (which is FAST FOOD LEVEL PRICES), the food you get has fresh vegetables, fresh meat, no weird preservatives—all cooked to order.
“HOW MUCH did you say this cost??? WHEEEEW!”
“You’re taking all my money!”
“(Asks for extra thing) Why does that cost extra?”
“So what do i get for free for spending $20?”
“How’s your pork made? It ain’t dog meat, is it?”
—all hurtful things I’ve personally heard and had to grin and bear
For some reason, it seems people don’t respect Chinese restaurants. You would never treat a Western-owned restaurant like this. Even places like PF Chang and Panda Express (who DO NOT use fresh ingredients) can overcharge out the wazoo but no one complains because they’re oftentimes being served by Western faces.
It really hurts for people to act like my family’s hard work isn’t worth anything to them.
Treat your locally owned business with respect. Treat your Chinese restaurants with respect. Really think about the food you’re getting and all the work that goes into it. Think of all the hard working people behind bringing you this meal you’re about to enjoy, a meal you didn’t have to prepare (this goes for fast food too).
Above all else, TREAT OTHER HUMAN BEINGS WITH BASIC DIGNITY.
In 2009 designer Gianluca Gimini started asking friends and strangers to draw a men’s bicycle from memory. While some got it right, most made technical errors — missing fundaments parts of the frame or chain. The exercise is similar to … Continue reading →
In "Vous êtes ici" (2002-2006), pictures of tourists discovering the landscape around them are moved around within an artificial environment. This new setting is created on the basis of the picture of the tourist. His shapes and tones give the various altitudes of the mountains; the colors of the landscape are those of the model's clothes. Within the environment thus obtained, I look for a point of view, in which I then replace the character. The model becomes the landscape which he discovers. I like to see this as an illustration of the romantic conception of landscapes.
