#mapping fictions

[progressiveartstudios]

Mapping Fictions at The Good Luck Gallery

We recently had the honor of guest curating an exhibition at The Good Luck Gallery, an important, new space in Los Angeles. Founded and directed by former Artillery publisher Paige Wery, The Good Luck Gallery is the only space in LA dedicated to showing the work of self-taught artists. Wery fosters the burgeoning careers of artists such as Helen Rae and Deveron Richard, who maintain studio practices in progressive art studios, as well as artists like Willard Hill, that fall into the Outsider, Visionary, or Vernacular categories.  Mapping Fictions opened on July 9th and will be on view through August 27th.

Mapping Fictions presents an arrangement of works by four contemporary artists working in four different progressive art studios; Joe Zaldivar of First Street Gallery Art Center in Claremont, William Scott of Oakland’s Creative Growth, Daniel Green of Creativity Explored in San Francisco, and Roger Swike of Gateway Arts in Brookline, Massachusetts. Each of these artists’ idiosyncratic practices reflect highly original methods of archiving information through text, while also referencing fictional narratives, either from popular culture or their own devising. These approaches to art-making, traditionally ghettoized as eccentric outsider pathology (especially when generated by artists with disabilities) are reframed as relevant contemporary modes of expression. By bringing together a group of artists whose work is overtly informed by distinctly different ways of seeing, thinking, and being, but whose relationship to each other is based on the substance of their work and processes, we begin to see beyond the disparities between these artists and ourselves to discover nuanced messages.

Green, Scott, Swike, and Zaldivar embrace humanity with forgiving optimism, similar in tone and approach to Andy Warhol, but on a deeper level than Pop Art. Where Pop appropriated iconic advertising and popular culture to elevate common aesthetics and blur the line between high and low brow, these artists delve into human works that are more obscure, forgotten, or contemporary than any nostalgic idea of a coherent american culture - considering television schedules, floor plans, video games, and google maps; reiterating print ads and logos for obscure local businesses without cynicism; employing the aesthetics of propaganda to express an earnest hope for a utopian future; or merging lists of song lyrics with television show titles as though they can be appreciated or understood in the same way. 

These artists present to us the systematic nature of our culture through a myriad of surprisingly intuitive, poetic, or prophetic approaches to engage with the landscape of contemporary experience - media, technology, and the humanity to be found within it. 

More about each of these artists: Joe Zaldivar William Scott Daniel Green Roger Swike

[progressiveartstudios]

Mapping Fictions: Daniel Green

Daniel Green's process is slow and intimate, quietly hunched over his works in the bustling studio, he draws and writes at a measured pace. Initially, these detailed works are an uninhibited visual index of Green’s hand; when read carefully, they become jarring and curious, slowly leading the viewer to meaning amid the incoherence. Green’s text is poetic and complex - language and thought translated densely from memory in ink, sharpie, and colored pencil on robust panels of wood. Figures and their embellishments are drawn without a hierarchy in terms of space occupied on the surface; they are at times elaborate and at other times profoundly simple. The iconic figures’ facial expressions (Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, Tina Turner, video game characters, etc.) are generally flat with proportions stretching and distorting subject to Green’s intention.

Ultimately, they compel the viewer to internalize and decipher Green’s ongoing, non-linear narrative. His drawings call to mind Deb Sokolow’s humorous, text-driven work, but are less diagrammatic and concerned with the viewer. Much like Sokolow, Green engages in making work that begins with the rigorous practice of archiving information culled from his surroundings and interests, which then develops into intriguing, fictitious digressions. In an interview with Bad at Sports’ Richard Holland, Sokolow elaborates on her process: 

"I’ve been reading Thomas Pynchon and Joseph Heller lately and thinking about how in their narratives, certain characters and organizations and locations are continuously mentioned in at least the full first half of the book (in Pynchon’s case, it’s hundreds of pages) without there being a full understanding or context given to these elements until much later in the story. And by that later point, everything seems to fall into place and with a feeling of epic-ness. It’s like that television drama everyone you know has watched, and they tell you snippets about it but you don’t really understand what it is they’re talking about, but by the time you finally watch it, everything about it feels familiar but also epic."  (Bad At Sports)

Listing of dates and times, tv schedules, athletes, historical figures, and various pop culture references flow through networks of association - “KURT RUSSEL GRAHAM RUSSEL RUSSEL CROWE RUSSEL HITCHCOCK AIR SUPPLY ALL OUT OF LOVE…” Although the text in his work sometimes gives the impression of being stream of consciousness and intuitive in nature, most of it proves to be very structured and complex within Green’s system. Rather than expression or even communication, the priority seems to be the collection of information or organization of ideas; the physical encoding of incorporeal information as marks on a surface is a method for making it tangible, possessable, and manageable. 

From the perspective that Green invents, there’s an endless number of specific times described in sequences that haven’t been considered before. A grid of days and times (as in Pure Russia) imagines time passing in increments of one day and several minutes, then returns to the beginning of the series, stepping forward one hour, and proceeding again just as before. It could be cryptic if you choose to imagine that these times have a relationship to one another, or it could be an original rhythm whose tempo spans days, so that it can only be understood conceptually as an ordered structure mapped through time - the significance of the pattern superseding that of specific moments. 

By blurring the distinction between the articulation of ideas through text and the development of mark-making, Green’s highly original objects become unexpectedly minimal and material, yet simultaneously personal and expressive.

Daniel Green’s work will be included in Mapping Fictions, an upcoming group exhibition opening July 9th at The Good Luck Gallery in LA, curated by Disparate Minds writers Andreana Donahue and Tim Ortiz. Green has exhibited previously in Days of Our Lives at Creativity Explored (2015), Create, a traveling exhibition curated by Lawrence Rinder and Matthew Higgs that originated at University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2013), The Museum of Everything: Exhibition #4 in  London (2011), This Will Never Work at Southern Exposure in San Francisco, and Faces at Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco.