For
this exhibition I have selected Erik Wesselo and Clifford
LeCuyer, two artists who utilize the landscape and the
body to explore notions of existence and discovery.
Wesselo's Düffels Möll,
a 16mm film made in 1997, begins in medias res.
Erik Wesselo is bound to the sail of a windmill rotating
swiftly counterclockwise. The movements of the camera are
gentle, smooth, and strangely hypnotic. Initially the camera
follows him closely with only his body and a section of
the sail visible. There is no sound. Slowly the camera
begins to zoom out revealing the windmill's monumentality
and the vastness of the surrounding landscape. In the final
minutes of the film, the camera returns to close position,
but this time the movements are aggressive and disorienting.
The film concludes with the blades of the windmill coming
to a stop.
By binding himself to the windmill,
Wesselo is simultaneously empowered and powerless. Flying
through the air at great heights, he experiences the rush
of being able to survey his surroundings from a new perspective.
At the same time, Wesselo's movement is dictated by the
forces of nature. Using camerawork to parallel his psychological
experience, Wesselo interchanges the particular and the
infinite conveying a range of internal emotions. Not only
interested in paying homage to his native landscape and
to Holland's history of painting, his gesture also establishes
his position within the context of Dutch art.
Los Angeles-based artist Clifford
LeCuyer makes photographs of table-top maquettes that he
constructs with wet porcelain. Like Wesselo, LeCuyer sets
up images for the camera while leaving the meticulous details
of his preparation hidden from the viewer. His process
involves moving back and forth between working with material
and looking through the lens of a 35mm camera. The final
images are a sort of photographic drawing. Shot and printed
in black and white, his images are soft, grainy, and often
somewhat out of focus. To that end, they lack the signifiers
of traditional photography, almost appearing to be grisaille
quasi-photorealistic paintings or delicate charcoal works
on paper.
The content of LeCuyer's images
is nearly as elusive as the media; his intuitive landscapes
are reminiscent of the body, the pyramids of Giza, the
surface of the moon, and Smithson's Spiral Jetty. Working
from memory, LeCuyer doesn't create images, he rediscovers
them. Attracted to the monumental and its psychological
power, he utilizes landscape, playing with elemental form
and deep illusionary space.
LeCuyer's work mirrors the self,
complex and unexplored. It deals with an array of dualities
including ancient and modern, interior and exterior, infinite
and particular, masculine and feminine, and real and artificial.
The unique combination of monumental space and perspectival
recession work together to pull the viewer into his sensual
and spiritual world.
Both Wesselo and LeCuyer are
concerned with personal existence within a broader context.
LeCuyer's "self-portraits" depict the inner landscape of
his body and indirectly speak to his own mortality. At
the same time, Wesselo claims his place within a vast continuum
of time and space. The two artists also focus on rediscovering
the familiar. LeCuyer mines his subconscious to discover
original form. Wesselo, on the other hand, alters his vantage
point to discover new things about both the landscape and
himself.
Derek Eller
©June 2001
Being a Dealer and a Curator
necessitates doing studio visits as much as you can find
the time to do them, which means you normally see more
work in artists' studios than in galleries or museums.
For 222, we each picked the artist whose work we'd
seen most recently at a studio visit that had made the
biggest impact on us. In the case of Amy Kao, I'd been
to her studio once and was almost instantly bowled over;
my partner Larry Walczak had been following Sante Scardillo's
work and it had maintained supremacy in his mind over everything
else he'd seen during that time. Working with a partner,
in the case of eyewash means bringing two distinctly
different aesthetic visions together. In 222, it
has resulted in work that represents different extremes
in today's pluralistic artworld. Amy Kao's work is concerned
with seeing and how she can manipulate us into being conscious
of this process with her visual pyrotechnics. On the other
hand, Sante Scardillo's work is concerned with how advertising
tries to manipulate the viewer and by artfully altering
the text, underlines what it is actually saying. The more
obvious connection between the two, that will strike anyone
who walks into the gallery, is very superficial; i.e.,
they have in common two-dimensional results that hang simply
on the wall with pushpins. The combination of these two
artists emphasizes the fascinating range of intents and
stylistic approaches that co-exist in the very simplest
of formats.
Amy Kao's Mylar pieces are explorations
of perceptual emergence achieved through light. They consist
of incisions, made with a razor blade, to create an aggregate
of a singular motif, achieving spatial volume through a
play of shadows against the translucency of material. Volume
defies mass and opacity. Here, volume is light, voluminous
light, as a conversion/juxtaposition of various kinds of
light. Luminosity is defined as soft, hard, translucent - the
diffused movement, reflection and emanation of light.
An equally compelling imperative
is the permutation of a geometric motif. In each of the
Mylar pieces, a simple motif systematically populates (mathematically
symmetrical) within the confines of a rectangular field.
Geometry dictates its underpinning structure; its whole
adheres to an inherent grammar of the material and immaterial.
Evident in these Mylar pieces is the issue of de-materialization.
Negation is transformed into emergence - a becoming through
transfer (transference) and shadow (phenomenon). It is
at this junction where the work is situated, in the threshold
between negation and emergence, the tangible and the intangible.
However, these works are not
exclusively a pure investigation of the optical, for they
deal with the whole experiential, perceptual event. At
this junction the viewer is engaged in a visual/bodily
dialogue with the work. The viewer's physical position
and proximity to the pieces, either centered or peripheral,
alters the pieces completely.
In the LIFESTYLE Series,
Sante Scardillo confronts the impact of advertising on
social behavior by "hijacking" advertisements, altering
the text and enlarging them. While maintaining the advertisement-slickness
and aesthetic appeal, he turns the original intent against
itself making hilarious and thought-provoking statements,
satirizing, exposing and questioning the Message of advertising.
The level of Scardillo's ideological
commitment to his work becomes apparent when you read his
Artist's Statement, which reads more like a manifesto than
the usual artist's thoughts on his or her work. Scardillo
declares, "The ultimate goal of brand domination defines
a tool of cultural colonization with implications and objectives
beyond simple economics. Global ad campaigns no longer
advertise the mere object exchanged for currency: it is
the image as mirror, the marketing of the imaginary inclusion
in the elite who can appreciate the subtleties of a constellation
made of objects that imply a life style. No longer just
incidental to the medium, the message is the Message."
Annie Herron
©June 2001
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