art - others

my show at Honey Ramka - gallery press release

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Below is the press release for the exhibition of Ana Weider-Blank (main space) and yrs truly (project space):

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Honey Ramka is pleased to present Strange Friends, an exhibition by Ana Wieder-Blank. Strange Friends opens Friday, November 20th from 6-9 pm, and runs through Sunday, December 20th. This will be the artist's second solo exhibition at the gallery.

Wieder-Blank's raw, ebullient paintings and ceramics invoke mythic, protofeminist players—Lilith, Leda, La Loba—to enact terrible and heroic flashpoints of legend. Visionary and revisionist, searing and playful, Wieder-Blank "explore(s) the materials and content with a combination of dark humor, joy, and tragedy" to "change, distort, and extend narratives past their ends to create contemporary political allegories."

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Also on view in the project space is Original PNGs, featuring work by Tom Moody.

A consummate digital draftsman and blogger, Moody paints polymorphous biomorphs and pens trenchant criticism with polymathic aplomb. Here, Moody's work evokes underground comix styles, graffiti, and modernist painting. Or, as described by the artist, Original PNGs is:

"A series of drawings made with open source paint applications and printed on paper. The software apps, with names like Chibi Paint, Krita, and MyPaint are often used for online fan art. Here I'm treating them as found processes with inherent virtues, limitations, and quirks to be explored. Made with a tablet and stylus, the drawings struggle between inherited notions of artistic dexterity and the default labor-saving functions built into software. In the frictionless world of 1s and 0s, what does it even mean to struggle? 'PNGs' in the title refers to the preferred output file format for these apps. The PNG is a lightly compressed image that can be read in any browser. Here, a collection of 'original PNGs' are preserved for gallery display. A recent animated GIF will also be on view."

Honey Ramka is an exhibition space in Bushwick, Brooklyn @ 56 Bogart Street (first floor). The gallery is open from 1-6 pm, Friday through Sunday (and by appointment). For more information, visit HoneyRamka.com.

a. bill miller daily drawing remix

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Another wrinkle (pun intended) on the idea of "digital painting." A. Bill Miller has been making physical drawings with oil stick and other media, scanning them, and texture-mapping them onto 3D-simulated folds of cloth. An archive of these is here.
Taking liberties I shopped (GIMPed) several of these into the "Magritte version" above.
Thinking back to studio days, painting cloth with a pattern was always hard because you had to simultaneously keep the logic or gestalt of the printed design in mind while reproducing the topological contortions of the fabric that you saw right before you. To get the folds right you were in constant danger of skewing the pattern. A 3D program allows so-called machine intelligence to do the problem-solving, freeing you the artist, up to do...what, exactly? What is the purpose of labor saving in a non-Taylorist context? In this case, I guess, it's to make a cloth-fetishist dreamscape.