Kristen Gaylord

Kristen Gaylord on Russell Crotty

Posted on by Rachel Nackman
Russell Crotty, Hale Bopp Over Acid Canyon, 1999, ink and graphite on paper, 48 x 48 inches (121.9 x 121.9 cm). © Russell Crotty / Photo: Ellen McDermott
Russell Crotty, Hale Bopp Over Acid Canyon, 1999, ink and graphite on paper, 48 x 48 inches (121.9 x 121.9 cm). © Russell Crotty / Photo: Ellen McDermott

Russell Crotty’s work seems self-evidently “amateur,” in the etymological sense of the term1 : he is a surfer who doodles the surf, a hobbyist astronomer who sketches the stars. Crotty’s transcription of the natural world conveys a straightforward fascination with its marvels: crashing waves, haunting landscapes, and sublime universes. Yet a drawing such as Hale Bopp Over Acid Canyon (1999) conceals a complex infrastructure. As is often true of talented artists, apparent simplicity is achieved only through technical mastery and conceptual diligence.

Hale Bopp was one of the brightest comets ever recorded. Although Crotty’s tondo format mimics the view through the telescope he uses to stargaze, Hale Bopp was in fact perceptible by the naked eye from May 1996 to December 1997. The artist has captured the celestial phenomenon as he may have seen it over Acid Canyon, a county park in Los Alamos, California.

In Crotty’s drawing, he has reversed the intuitive behavior of matter. To human eyes, outer space is always the backdrop, the emptiness against which focal points are determined. But in Hale Bopp Over Acid Canyon the comet becomes negative space, and the dark sky is filled with the artist’s residual ink. Crotty circumscribes the comet and accompanying stars, defining them through the absence of ballpoint pen marks. Instead of amenably fading into the background, Crotty’s empty spaces push forward, asserting presence amidst the tightly controlled marks of a concentrated scribble. At the bottom of the drawing, that darkness—not the uniform jet-black of comic books but the gradated expanse visible in every night’s sky—collides into teeming handwritten reiterations of the drawing’s title. Whether intended as a continuation of space or an indicator of the transition to land, this textual element corroborates the work’s subjective existence: this is not a photograph of the comet, but a record of it translated by the idiosyncratic human observer.

Crotty is well aware that his drawings could hardly serve astronomers attempting elaborate calculations. He has explained, “At some point I just start putting stars in. It goes from being ardently empirical to something else: it’s not so much that these drawings have a foundation in reality as that they have an experience in reality.”2 David Frankel aptly summarizes Crotty’s approach as “a humanistic version of science, perhaps informed by the Victorian gentleman astronomer.”3 Not only is the artist’s approach humanistic—in the sense that he emphasizes the perception of astral events over the gathering of quantifiable data—but his naturalist’s interests provide the occasion for philosophical ruminations.

Our perception of events in outer space is always delayed; it could be called “reactionary.” Crotty has alluded to his fascination with the element of time as it affects his astronomical observations: “A telescope is like a time machine. When you look at Saturn you’re looking at light that’s an hour and a half old. When you’re looking at some galaxies, you’re looking at something 50 million light years away.”4 In Hale Bopp Over Acid Canyon, he synthesizes and tangles the complicated relationship between humanity and the celestial, a relationship that challenges the strictures of time. Herein is the time distant past, which the stars experienced prior to our viewing of them; the time present, as the comet streaks over the canyon; and the time extended, during which the artist laboriously writes out his lines of text. The work sets forth its own history, and the layers of experience were all Crotty’s before they were belatedly relayed to us. The stars that had shone long before they shined to Crotty are now shown to us. The comet that once streaked now streaks, and the artist wrote words that we now read.

Crotty has described how, through observation, “You start realizing [the] distances and ages of these things.”5 “These things” encompasses the natural and ancient systems whose appeal to the artist preceded his idiosyncratic artistic treatment of them. He admits a “bit of sentimentality” about “deep time,” which substantiates the amare root of his amateurism. But Crotty’s love, rendered with a schoolboy’s delight, is actually the devotion of a mature artist, whose homage to his muses takes the form of beautiful and complicated visual explorations of the natural world: finite, but, from our perspective, boundless.

1. amateur, n. Etymology: < French amateur < Latin amātōr-em, n. of agent < amā-re to love. One who loves or is fond of; one who has a taste for anything. Oxford English Dictionary, 2012.
2. Quoted in David Frankel, “Russell Crotty” in Russell Crotty (Seattle: Marquand Books, 2006): 8.
3. Frankel, “Russell Crotty,” 10.
4. Ibid, 12.
5. In Ian Berry, “A Dialogue with Karen Arm, Russell Crotty, and John Torreano at the Tang Museum on February 5, 2005” in A Very Liquid Heaven by Ian Berry, Margo Mensing, and Mary Crone Odekon (Saratoga Springs, New York: The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, 2005): 125.

Russell Crotty Biography

Russell Crotty (b. 1956, San Rafael, CA) earned his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1978) and his MFA at the University of California, Irvine (1980). His continued interest in astronomy and the natural world influences his drawing. Crotty has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts (1991), the Peter S. Reed Foundation, New York (1999), and the Artists’ Fellowship Programme, The Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ballycastle, County Mayo, Ireland (2008). He has served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (1998-1999), and as a Visiting Artist at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (2001, 2003). Recent solo exhibitions took place at Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco (2006, 2010); CRG Gallery, New York (2006); Aurobora Press, San Francisco (2008); Galerie Ulrike Schmela, Düsseldorf, Germany (2008); Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica (2009); Michel Soskine, Inc., Madrid, Spain (2010); Left Coast Books, Goleta, California (2011); and Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris, France (2011). Crotty lives and works in Ojai and Upper Lake, California. More information about his work can be found at www.russellcrotty.com.

Kristen Gaylord Biography
Kristen Gaylord earned her MA from and is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She is interested in modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on postwar America, and also specializes in Latin American modernism and the history of photography. She lives and works in New York City.

Kristen Gaylord on Mary McDonnell

Posted on by Rachel Nackman

Mary McDonnell, Untitled, 2007, ink and mixed media on Japanese paper, 14 x 16 inches (35.6 x 40.6 cm). © Mary McDonnell / Photo: Ellen McDermott
Mary McDonnell, Untitled, 2007, ink and mixed media on Japanese paper, 14 x 16 inches (35.6 x 40.6 cm). © Mary McDonnell / Photo: Ellen McDermott


Audio Transcript
This drawing was made at the MacDowell Colony, where I was doing a residency in January of 2007. My studio was in the woods, surrounded by snow, which dampened any sounds that might be heard, and I felt the presence of silence all around me. I started focusing on the sounds that were audible: the ambient sounds of the studio, like a mechanical hum. The sounds I created by moving in the space. The wind and an occasional birdcall. I had been planning to work on painting, but the materials I brought weren’t working out, and I was frustrated. One morning after sitting still a while, with no preconceived thoughts, I got up and walked to my drawing table and started drawing. I drew horizontal red lines by simply moving my hand from the left side of the page to the right. I used an old pen that was in my box and mixed some red ink with gouache that I happened to have with me. At the beginning, in the first few drawings, all the lines were fairly perfect. But one morning the pen hit a fiber and caused the ink to bleed out from the line. I remember pausing, holding my breath for a brief moment, and then letting go, thinking, “Just keep going.” And so I continued on with the line, working with whatever came up, and letting the accidents be. As I did more and more drawings, I became aware of what caused the ink to erupt, which disturbed the evenness of the lines and created a blob, or an incident on the page. Sometimes it was a raised fiber in the paper that the pen nib would come in contact with. Sometimes it was the mix of the gouache and ink, that it wasn’t the right consistency. Or the incidents happened when I broke my concentration, had a lapse of mindfulness, or my thoughts drifted away from the page. It became interesting to me how and when the incidents arose, and how these clusters or centers located a scar, an accident, a stray thought. I laughed out loud, seeing my veering thoughts, my inattentiveness recorded. I started each day of the residency this way, and made fifty or so of these drawings altogether. The experience or act of making a drawing is what became important to me, more so than any one individual drawing.

Translation across media is notoriously ineffective, and when I sat down to write about Mary McDonnell’s Untitled (2007), my frustration and poor results exemplified that difficulty. The idioms lost between image and text are no different from untranslatable figures of speech. Some art begs to be explained, written about, and encased in academic language (conceptual art comes to mind), but McDonnell’s work demands to be experienced.

Both McDonnell’s paintings and drawings preserve and present their creation, acting simultaneously as objects and archival records. Yet the particular invitation of the works on paper in the “Red Line Drawings” series is situated in their mechanical familiarity. (Who has not drawn a line in pen on paper?) Acquaintance with this action increases our appreciation of McDonnell’s skill—forty-four lines, remarkably straight—as well as our understanding of what she calls “incidents” in the process: the inevitable blotches and bleeds of ink. Thus, during sustained viewing the character of Untitled vacillates between approachable and aloof: the intimate scale draws us in, but the fine art context places it just beyond reach; the familiar action recalls a commonplace experience, but the artist’s dexterity repositions it on the authoritative gallery wall. It is in this vacillating, this trembling—echoing the human trembling of the lines—that the complexity of this deceptively simple work is revealed.

McDonnell started these works when she was experiencing artistic frustration while on a residency at The MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. In an attempt to still her mind and enter a meditative place she started drawing lines on a piece of paper whose handmade quality had captivated her. One page a day, for several days, the lines proceeded without disturbance. When the first blotch arrived, McDonnell paused before accepting it as a necessity of the process, and then, as she described to me, “that was that.”1 The final number of drawings in the series is around fifty (she is unsure of the exact quantity), and they record McDonnell overcoming a passage of unproductivity through dedication, practice, and repetition. As physical documentation of her mental discipline they connote a schoolchild’s written lines or a monk’s manuscripts. Additionally, the solution to McDonnell’s struggle was also a beginning: besides representing a completed task the artwork resembles the grid of blank sheet music facing a composer, pregnant with possibility.2 The inherent potential of these lines effectively soothed the artist’s frustration, impelling her to bring that mentality back to her studio and subsequent work.

While the artist is undoubtedly skilled, her work proceeds from subjective intuition more than from premeditated technical consideration. “[From] the gut,” she explains, while embedding her fingers in her abdomen. Everything about this series of works could be construed as accidental: the number and placement of the lines, the irregular incidents, even the color of the ink (red was the color McDonnell happened to have the first day she began). Yet these characteristics are only “accidental” in the sense of being unplanned. They arise from the intuition of an artist who has spent her career considering color and form, who stripped these works down to reveal the fundamental tenets behind her more visually complex works: expressive line, lyrical movement, evocative color, careful positioning. In this sense the intuition that McDonnell heeds is both an inexplicable prompting and the automatic response of learned mastery.

The generative practices that led to Untitled reflect McDonnell’s broader creative habits. Beyond facilitating the visceral composition of each piece, the artist has situated herself in and towards life in a posture of attentiveness. In her upstate New York studio she paints amid the “silence” of nature, which she has discovered contains a polyphony of birds and running water. She lives with paintings for months, until she perceives the stirring that reveals how finally to fulfill them. Simone Weil wrote that true prayer is an attitude of attentiveness,3 but McDonnell is more of a midwife than a worshipper. The monolithic “act of creation” really comprises a series of acts, continual preparation for the awaited delivery.

1. All facts about the genesis of this piece, details about the habits of McDonnell’s practice, and record of her words are from an interview she graciously granted the author (23 June 2011).
2. McDonnell has a musical background, and her work’s affinities with music are not tangential. Multiple composers, including Meredith Monk, Linda Dusman, and Fred Hersch, have responded to her art in their own medium, continuing the cross-disciplinary trend.
3. Simone Weil, “Waiting for God” in Waiting for God (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002), 57-58.

Mary McDonnell Biography

Mary McDonnell (b. 1959, Saginaw, MI) received her BFA from Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo (1981), and her MFA from Syracuse University, New York (1984). She was granted the Western Michigan University Arts Centennial Distinguished Artist Award (2003) and the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance Fellowship Award (2004). McDonnell completed numerous artist residencies, including at the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, Schwandorf, Germany (2007); The MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire (2007); and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Amherst (2002, 2009, 2010). Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Miller Block Gallery, Boston (2005), and James Graham Gallery, New York (2005, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014). McDonnell’s work has also been included in group exhibitions at various venues, most recently including the Delaware Center for Creative Arts, Wilmington (2005); Kunst-und Gewerbeverein Regensburg, Germany (2008); the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia, Spain (2009); James Graham Gallery, New York (2006, 2009, 2010); the Visual Arts Gallery at the School of Visual Arts, New York (2010); the Christine Price Gallery at Castleton State College, Vermont (2011); the Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, New York (2011); the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey (2012); and The Hafnarjordur Centre of Culture and Fine Arts, Hafnarfjör∂ur, Iceland (2013). McDonnell lives and works in Brooklyn and upstate New York. More information about her work can be found at www.marymcdonnellart.com.
Kristen Gaylord Biography
Kristen Gaylord earned her MA from and is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She is interested in modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on postwar America, and also specializes in Latin American modernism and the history of photography. She lives and works in New York City.

Kristen Gaylord on Kry Bastian

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Kry Bastian, Our Work, 1997, paper, fabric, steel, thread and ink, 36 pieces, each 5 x 5 inches (12.7 x 12.7 cm). © Kry Bastian / Photo: Laura Mitchell
Kry Bastian, Our Work, 1997, paper, fabric, steel, thread and ink, 36 pieces, each 5 x 5 inches (12.7 x 12.7 cm). © Kry Bastian / Photo: Laura Mitchell

Kry Bastian’s work occupies the liminal space that all effective art does: between the private and the public, the familiar and the strange. Artworks that cannot move beyond the individual become self-indulgent or irrelevant, but those that attempt to speak universally without the imprint of their makers often fall into predictability and cliché; every inhabitant of this threshold balances the relationship in its own way. Bastian has exposed the infrastructure of the two objects under consideration here, Untitled (Safe II) (1994) and Our Work(1997), which cohere into a case study of this dialectic—they simultaneously present intimacy and distance by “weaving together the known/recollected present with an imagined past.”1

The pieces are personal in size, the dimensions of human objects. Untitled (Safe II) stands just shy of two feet tall and could be a bedside object, and the browned panels of Our Work measure about five inches on each side, curling up like warped old family photographs. They do not announce themselves as Artworks, monuments to the artist’s Genius to be installed in the foyer of a museum or on the wall of a corporate office, but rather invite the viewer in with restraint, rewarding subtlety and attentiveness.

Kry Bastian, Untitled (Safe II), 1994, metal, paper, fabric, ink and thread, 8 x 7 x 22 ½ inches (20.3 x 17.8 x 57.2 cm). © Kry Bastian / Photo: Laura Mitchell
Kry Bastian, Untitled (Safe II), 1994, metal, paper, fabric, ink and thread, 8 x 7 x 22 ½ inches (20.3 x 17.8 x 57.2 cm). © Kry Bastian / Photo: Laura Mitchell

Each piece is assembled from familiar components, including fabric, ink, thread, and metal; these found materials are gathered by Bastian and “live in [her] space for a time until they need to become something else.”2 The rusted metal receptacle of Untitled (Safe II) holds multiple book-like objects, constructed of fabric pages sewn together and encased in thin paper. An earlier iteration, Untitled (Safe I), failed at its ostensible purpose, its contents cascading out of it and spilling onto the floor. The valuables of this second “safe” have been contained and protected, even from our eyes. Our Work, created just a few years later, is an exploded variant of Untitled (Safe II). The pages are no longer bound, but stacked and spread; no longer secure, but visible to all and vulnerable to the whims of the wind. Each square is an accretion of fabric and paper, with steel rings that sometimes puncture the thin upper skin and handwritten lines that face all directions and are frequently crossed-out. None of these layers are discrete. They are physical representations of Bastian’s process of excavating history and then re-forming it—layered and re-layered rock strata. (The artist has remarked that the history is often her own.3)

While the formal qualities of these artworks render them intimate—the found materials, the personal size, the handwritten lines—in their conceptual conclusion Bastian provides the distance of ambiguity. Untitled (Safe II) and Our Work are tantalizing, teasing even, as they simultaneously present and withhold. Looking into Untitled (Safe II) evokes the experience of approaching a tunnel, when what is nearest is prominently clear, and what is immediately beyond is obscured in darkness; a peek under the visible book reveals that it sits on top of a pile of similar volumes bound together in stacks by wire, delicate and inaccessible. The typed text inside (we assume each volume but can only verify the first), which forms a compilation of letters or journal entries, is repeatedly sewn through with a tightly controlled running stitch.

Detail of Kry Bastian, Our Work, 1997, paper, fabric, steel, thread and ink, 36 pieces, each 5 x 5 inches (12.7 x 12.7 cm). © Kry Bastian / Photo: Laura Mitchell
Detail of Kry Bastian, Our Work, 1997, paper, fabric, steel, thread and ink, 36 pieces, each 5 x 5 inches (12.7 x 12.7 cm). © Kry Bastian / Photo: Laura Mitchell

The opening line of the displayed book, Dear indifference, promptly signals that we will not be provided with the explanations that, as Bastian points out, we have come to expect from text4: the epithet is ambiguous on its own, and crossed out provides even more space for uncertainty. As in the bound and unreachable volumes of Untitled (Safe II), the lines we can decipher on the panels of Our Workare often crossed off or pasted over, containing meaning but hindering our apprehension of it. In both of these works the words that would purport to grant understanding are purposefully displayed but conspicuously insufficient; text that, as the artist interprets it, “varies in legibility…surfaces and recedes as a voice might.”5

So much of what I’ve written about Bastian’s work could imply that it is exasperating, but the artist’s intention is to frustrate, not to make us frustrated. She acknowledges the presenting-yet-withholding nature of the work: “just as walking into an old house or coming upon an old object gives us the sense of knowing or familiarity while simultaneously remaining a mystery, so does my work reveal and veil itself at the same time.”6 But this revealing and veiling is meant to open up one’s experience of the art, not to impede it. When asked whether the dual nature in her works is intended to obstruct or simply appears that way as a byproduct of the human imperative to understand, the artist responds that such a situation is “the definition of what memory is—a sometimes blurry piecing together of what we believe has occurred.”7 And it is perhaps this reference to memory that encapsulates the works’ positioning vis-à-vis the binary dialectics of public/private and intimate/strange. Memory dwells in the same stratum as dreams. It is personal, providing a varied, emotion-laden, and unique construction of a series of events or experiences, but also somewhat unknowable, being vulnerable to influence, time’s murkiness, and self-corrective rationalization. The conglomerate character of memory renders it both individual and corporate, a thing-created while a thing-being-created. In these works Bastian has captured the uncanny sensation of déjà vu, that mysterious recognition, and the compelling expression of her objects ultimately emerges from the realization that their past—familiar yet strange—could be ours.

1. Kry Bastian, e-mail message to author, 12 July 2011.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Kry Bastian, “Statement,” accessed 17 July 2011, http://www.krybastian.com/statement.aspx.
6. Kry Bastian, e-mail message to author, 12 July 2011.
7. Ibid. Emphasis original.

Kry Bastian Biography

Kry Bastian (b. 1972, Carmel, NY) earned her BFA in Sculpture (1994) and her MPS in Creative Arts Therapy (2002) at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. At Pratt, she was the recipient of many academic awards and scholarships, including two Circle Awards for Outstanding Academic Achievement (1994, 2002). Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Phantom Gallery, Baton Rouge, Louisiana (2003), and Jungle Science, Binghamton, New York (2009). Bastian’s work has been included in numerous group shows, most recently at Pierogi, Brooklyn (2008); State Street, Binghamton, New York (2010); City Hall Gallery, Binghamton, New York (2010); the State University of New York at Cortland Memorial Library, New York (2010); and Crest Arts, Brooklyn (2008, 2009, 2010, 2011). Bastian lives and works in Binghamton, New York. More information about her work can be found at www.krybastian.com.
Kristen Gaylord Biography
Kristen Gaylord earned her MA from and is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She is interested in modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on postwar America, and also specializes in Latin American modernism and the history of photography. She lives and works in New York City.