Barry X Ball

Images courtesy of Barry X Ball Studio and
Salon 94, New York

Left: torture prevalence compels victim-as-wounded-yet-resolute-iconoclasm-survivor portrait
(Lucas Michael, soldiering on – 3mm)
2000 – 2006
Mexican onyx
10-5/32 x 5-3/8 x 6-9/16 inches
Courtesy: Barry X Ball Studio and Salon 94, New York

Right: Plucked from The Standard Model and elevated again, The Holy Shroud of Nature calls into question The Creator it summons, as authentic as the original, yet altogether more remarkable for the image it preserves, from Rock to rock.
2002 – 06
Mexican onyx
41 1/2 x 22 x 14 inches

Stone portraits eerily lifelike at SITE Santa Fe

A portrait of artist Mathew Barney is skewered with a 24-carat-gold-plated stainless steel pole. A draping of flesh hangs from Barney’s neck and an eruption forms around the spike. The head is stretched vertically and layered in a Victorian Baroque relief pattern. His portrait is sculpted in Mexican onyx, a white stone with blood red inclusions. Suspended from the ceiling, the sculpture hangs alone in a gallery at SITE Santa Fe.

The sculpture took three-and-a-half years to create and is one of 12 heads by Barry X Ball on display at SITE along with two works from his new series of “Scholars’ Rocks.” SITE is hosting the most significant presentation of Ball’s work to date in a three-person show that includes paintings by Stephen Bush and video installations by Darren Almond.

Most of Ball’s sculptures are hyper-compressed at 85 percent scale, with patterns that play up the exaggerated features of his models. Ball merges elements from ancient Egypt, classic Rome and 13th century West Africa with 21st century technology.

The stone somehow doesn’t seem like stone, but something pliable, stretchy and sagging. The viewer is baffled by the realistic likeness of the portrait, the weird striations in the stone, the markings and their placement, the overlaying of lace patterning and the
minute bands of fluting.

Ball’s process is incredibly complex. It begins with a plaster life cast of a face. All of the portraits on display at SITE are of artists, curators and critics. Ball has cast about two dozen faces of people in the art world.

He selects faces with exaggerated features. Working from the life cast, he makes a plaster positive, which he sculpts by hand. A completed positive is scanned using a three-dimensional digital laser scanner to create a virtual model. The virtual model can be stretched, shrunk and decorated.

The computer file is sent to a computer-controlled milling machine that does the initial stone shaping using progressively finer diamond bits to mill the stone.

“The milling of one portrait can take up to 58 hours nonstop,” SITE curator Laura Heon told an audience on Feb. 22. This milling allows the artist to work with hard stones like lapis lazuli that were previously impossible to sculpt.

The sculpture is hand finished in Ball’s studio using dental tools. The lips, eyes, inside of mouth and back of neck are polished. The portrait is masked, sandblasted and oil-impregnated.

In one portrait of art historian and critic Laura Mattioli Rossi, Ball uses rare Belgian black marble. One eye is open, gleaming and hand polished, while the other is closed. The result is unsettling and captivating.

A sculpture of Lucas Michael is done in Mexican onyx a “wounded” stone with inclusions that become attributes of the portrait.

Another Lucas Michael is in sodalite and lapis lazuli. The most arresting work hangs alone in a second gallery and feheads of Matthew Barney and the screaming Barry Ball, overlaid with patterning inspired by Italian metalwork.

The scholar-rock sculptures, created using similar milling techniques, are beautiful and contemplative. Ancient Chinese scholar’s rocks – found rocks, worn by wind and weather into meditative forms – are the inspiration for these works. Chinese scholar’s rocks have been repeatedly copied and sold as “originals.”

“Ball’s deformed version (of the scholar’s rocks) address the notion of connoisseurship and the cultural and monetary values that we assign to notions of artifice and authenticity,” says the SITE gallery guide.

His sculptures are as authentic as the classic works of traditional stone sculptors, yet altogether more remarkable.

artsjournalist@centurytel.net Leanne Goebel is a freelance writer specializing in the visual arts.

Contents copyright ©, the Durango Herald. All rights reserved.

Photos courtesy of Open Shutter Gallery. Michael A. Shapiro’s work in “Oui” at the Open Shutter Gallery is all untitled. His work captures the connection between Paris and its people. Shapiro’s and Deborah L. Nelson’s work take an intimate look at Paris. The show runs through April 12.

Photographers bring view of France to Open Shutter Gallery

“Oui,” a photography exhibit of works by Deborah L. Nelson and Michael A. Shapiro at the Open Shutter Gallery, brings a bit of Paris to Durango. In fact, a visit to the gallery is like a stolen
moment in Montmartre – an intimate glimpse into the lives of Parisians.

Nelson’s soft and quixotic works are all black-and-white, limited-edition prints. She captures the tones and depths of Paris in shades of gray. Her works are not intense in high-contrast black and white, but instead filled with spectrums of light and shadow.

Many images evoke the romantic Paris, such as “Montmartre avec bicyclette, Paris 1997,” a view down herringbone brick steps, the black iron light posts and railings typical of Paris under the mottled shadows of large trees; “L’Econte, Paris 1999,” a large sculpture of a head resting against a hand, on a patterned brick plaza, an encrusted Rococo style building in the background; and “Solitude, Paris 1997,” a man sitting alone in a park, reading beneath a classical sculpture.

Other images capture Paris at night or in movement. “La Rotonde, Paris 2001,” shows a café on a rain-wet street, after hours, chairs stacked up, the customers gone. “Champs de Mars, Paris 1997″ shows a view through the lit base of the Eiffel Tower. “Le Carousel, Paris 1997″ brilliantly captures the sweeping motion of the lit carousel, a small boy standing alone in front, small and still before the eternally moving merry-go-round.

The artist began photographing Paris in 1983 and sojourns annually to the City of Light. Many of her photos balance the soft and delicate with the crisp and vivid. My personal favorite is “Les Mots, Paris 2000″ capturing projected words onto a brick wall, the words swirling in an abstract manner. Another vivid image is “Musee d’Orsay, Paris 1999,” which looks through the backside of the large museum clock.

Nelson’s work is shown with Shapiro’s carbon pigment prints, a digital printing process that uses four tones of archival carbon-based pigment. The work has a velvety blackness directly related to the printing process. Particularly evident is the image of a woman, all dressed in black, merging into a shadowy background. As she reaches into her handbag for a lighter, a very white cigarette hangs from her lips. Everything else in the image is tonal, but the cigarette is white.

Shapiro provides no titles for his images, no biography, no artist statement. His work captures a slice of life, a narrative moment in time and an intimate connection between people in Paris.

One image is of two women, greeting on the street, in front of a large billboard advertising a Boticelli expo. Another captures a couple leaning together over a table at a busy cafe, a single glass of beer between them.

The most poignant and powerful works are that of a woman’s hand caressing the back of a man’s head, and a cafe scene where Shapiro caught the moment a woman looked up from her book, hand to her mouth, deeply contemplative and the woman at the next table, still looking down, into her book, hand to her mouth.

There is story in Shapiro’s work and one feels voyeuristic in viewing these life moments, stolen and captured and shared.

“Oui” is a feast for the eyes and for the soul.

lgoebel@centurytel.net Leanne Goebel is a freelance arts journalist from Pagosa Springs.

Contents copyright, the Durango Herald. All rights reserved.

Conceptual art at DAC makes social statement

“Pleasure Saddle,” by Annie Strader, is part of the
show “Intersections: Artifice & Matter” at the
Durango Arts Center. The traveling show features the
work of four female artists.

A “Pleasure Saddle” adorned with ruffles of pink ribbon hangs from the center of the gallery at Durango Arts Center. Pink pantyhose are pinned to the entry wall in what looks like hearts or leaves or the wings of birds. The overall shape of “Love as it Flies” is circular, with linear bands and individually abstracted shapes in differing shades of pink.

These sensuously charged works by Annie Strader are part of a traveling group exhibit called “Intersections: Artifice & Matter,” featuring the work of Strader of Wichita, Kan.; Christine Owen of Wappinger Falls, N.Y.; and Julie Wills of Crested Butte.

The show opened with a performance by The Bridge Club, a group made up of the artists and Emily Bivens of Knoxville, Tenn., and her piece “Ceaseless & Solitary.” DAC Exhibits Director Susan Andersen said in an e-mail that the women were dressed in waitress garb, wearing clear plastic hair covering, high heels, stockings and wigs styled in that ’60s flip hairdo. They stood in intersecting corners sanding, peeling and pulling threads out of the wallpaper, excavating bone or plaster and methodically rearranging items found in their environment. They did not speak.

“For people coming into the exhibit, watching them pull strings out of the wall paper was disturbing,” Andersen said.

At the end of the performance piece, they hung up their aprons and tools, some left their shoes and all left their plastic rain bandannas. The floor was littered with white powder, porcelain teacups, cream pitchers and broken plates.

This is what is left for the duration of the exhibit. There is something haunting about the remains of an excavation site: the walls picked at and the decorative wallpaper peeled away. The group’s finds were left to litter the floor – a single shoe, some bone, a teacup – reflecting the way women are still discarded and dismissed.

“Some men commented at the performance, ‘Are the women for sale?’” Andersen said. “This lent credence to the exhibit and to their point.”

Their point, according The Bridge Club blog, is this: “The spaces these women inhabit reference both the decorative comforts of the domestic and the confined austerity of a cell.
Though not confined, the continuity of their activity indicates that they are unable or unwilling to see the possibility of leaving. This is a ceaseless individual pursuit, mirrored unknowingly by others engaged in similar pursuits – something between working and waiting.”

The rest of the show is made of domestic objects and bones – materials that expose the social expectations of items.

“Old Bones” is a broken rocking chair by Wills. The spindles point jaggedly like arrows into the sky, a bit of lace is snatched and impaled on several spindles. On the seat of the chair lies more lace, some dirt and fragments of vertebrae. A pair of white gloves is folded over the arm.

“Exhausted Prospects” by Owen is made up of piles of dirt, five stacks of decomposing gold pans and an empty wooden step stool, worn and weathered. “Ritual Sacrifice,” a mixed-media sculpture by Wills, is made of brushes, cloth, lace, staples, nails, wax, cord, latex and hair.

This is art created by four relatively young women commenting on the role of women in society and sexuality. The work says that we haven’t come all that far since our mothers burned their bras. Since the feminism movement, we seem complacent with the lack of progress and equality that is blatant within the art world.

Women make up half of all art students, but galleries devoted to emerging art in New York show 80 percent more men, according to a group of artists called Brainstormers. Yet as curators and scholars, women make up the majority in the field, but they are not selecting female artists. It’s a clever trick, yet women are still deceived.

Ben Davis, associate editor of Artnet magazine summarized the situation in a recent article:

“What is deemed ‘hot’ new art must pique the interest of playboy European heirs, Japanese capitalists, newly rich Russian robber barons, American i-bankers and the like – all of whom are predominantly male, and arguably less prone to buy overtly ‘feminine,’ let alone feminist, work …”

“Intersections” is the type of exhibit I wish we saw more of at the DAC – sensual, thought-provoking, conceptual art that tackles important issues.

lgoebel@centurytel.net Leanne Goebel is a freelance arts journalist from Pagosa Springs.
JERRY McBRIDE/Herald

“Spirit Mother,” by Michael Naranjo sits at the entrance of Mercy Regional Medical Center

Mercy Regional Medical Center has won one of four annual awards from the Colorado Business Committee for the Arts.

Mercy was chosen for the Workspace Award recognizing “exceptional design that advances business objectives.” The center was chosen over finalists Pinnacol Assurance and the San Luis Valley Regional Medical Center.

The award was presented before an audience of more than 750 on March 8 in the Denver Performing Arts Complex.

“Mercy has a healing environment that incorporates artwork in key areas of the hospital and is themed to support patients ranging from the critically ill to new mothers,” said Deborah Jordy, executive director of the CBCA. “Mercy’s workspace reflects pride in regional cultural diversity, creates a beautiful working environment, energizes staff, and contributes to the health and experience of clients.”

Mercy’s Chief Nursing Officer, Nancy Hoyt, accepted the award.

“Through the creation of our house of healing with the arts as its cornerstone, all who enter our walls -patients, staff and others- will leave with a nurtured spirit,” Hoyt said.

Shanan Wells, owner of Sorrel Sky Gallery and SCW Art Consulting, chose and placed the art for Mercy in consultation with hospital representatives.

“Mercy was recognized for using art to advance its business objective, and that objective is healing,” Wells said.

The judges were:
• Mark Hellerstein, president and CEO, St. Mary Land and Exploration.
• Kate Paul, CEO, Delta Dental of Colorado.
• Pelham Pearce, executive director, Central City Opera Association.
• Flo Hernandez Ramos, CEO and general manager, KUVO.
• Elaine Torres, manager of community affairs, CBS 4.

artsjournalist@centurytel.net Leanne Goebel is a freelance writer specializing in the visual arts.

Contents copyright ©, the Durango Herald. All rights reserved.

Alan F. Houston wrote to me today pointing out what he perceived as mistakes in yesterday’s article on the Classic Landscapes.

“There is mistaken identity in the review (Herald, March 9, 2007) of the traveling exhibition now at FLC’s Southwest Center. In no way was Moran’s Mount of the Holy Cross related to the designation of Yellowstone as a national park. That legislation occurred in March 1872. Wm. H. Jackson first visited and photographed the mountain in 1873, and Thomas Moran first saw it and sketched it in 1874.

Also, Holy Cross Creek is not imaginary (although waterfalls probably are), but is not seen as the Mountain is viewed. Moran, as well as other artists, simply rotated the creek (or the mountain) into the foreground. This is also the view painted by Helen Chain in the same exhibition. Moran’s earlier versions of the Mount of the Holy Cross indeed show a creek or river (from about 1875).

Jackson’s photographs of the Mount AND Moran’s sketches, drawings, and his truly “grand” painting of the Grand Canon (Canyon) of the Yellowstone, the petitions of Dr. Ferdinand Hayden, the Northern Pacific RR, and others, all contributed to Yellowstone’s National Park status.

Finally, Yellowstone is in Wyoming while Holy Cross Mountain is in Eagle County, Colorado, about twenty miles SSW of Vail, Colorado.”

Mr. Houston is correct in one instance.

I mistakenly included the Holy Cross painting with the sketches and yellowstone paintings that Moran did that were instrumental in helping to preserve yellowstone as a national park. It was the original 1875 painting of the “Mount of the Holy Cross” that was exhibited in Philadelphia during the nation’s Centennial. Moran wanted to exhibit “Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone” (1872) and “Chasm of the Colorado” (1873-74) together to represent the sacred landscapes of the West, but Congress would not loan the other two paintings for the Philadelphia Exposition. The image of Mt. Holy Cross was instrumental in the progress vs preservation battle.

However, Mr. Houston is not correct in suggesting that Moran didn’t visit Yellowstone until 1873. According to the National Gallery of Art, Thomas Moran first saw Yellowstone in 1871 and then returned with Jackson to sketch the land.

Moran did paint his first image of the Holy Cross in 1875 and the creek and falls flow off to the left of the canvas in that image. Moran freely admits that he manipulated the location of the waterfall and creek in his paintings. There are many creeks and falls, but this one is technically “made up” in the painting and doesn’t exist as he depicts it in the image. In the image on display at CSWS, the water flows off to the right of the canvas. The Yale library suggests that Moran may have used a montage of Jackson photographs to create his paintings. In chromolithographs, Moran shows the Mountain with no waterfall or creek at all. I did not intend to suggest that the mountain does not exist, only that the rest of the painting is not as it exists in nature.

I grew up in Colorado and viewed the Holy Cross in Eagle County every summer. I didn’t think it necessary to mention that the mountain was in Colorado since the exhibition is about Colorado landscapes. All the images are from Colorado.

Images Clockwise from left: “Mountain of the Holy Cross,” Thomas Moran (1890); “Aspen Trees,” Gordon Brown (2007); “Ruins of Central City,” Vance Kirkland (1935); “Autumn Eve, Buckley Lake,” John Encinias (2007)

“Topography in art is valueless,” said Thomas Moran, a landscape painter who specialized in the West. “I place no value upon literal transcripts from Nature. My general scope is not realistic; all my tendencies are toward idealization.”

Moran is included in “Masterpieces of Colorado Landscape: A Rich Legacy of Landscape Painting,” which opened at the Center of Southwest Studies on Feb. 25.

Well, it partially opened. The show was conceived to include more than 60 works of art, but only 40 are on display in Durango, which is unfortunate. Works on loan from the El Pomar collection and the Denver Public Library collection are missing.

In “Colorado Landscape,” curator Rose Glaser Frederick brings together works by late 19th and early 20th-century artists, combined with the work of 16 living artists: Clyde Aspevig, Joe Arnold, Gordon Brown, Len Chmiel, Mark Daily, Joellyn T. Duesberry, John Encinias, Tracy Felix, Chuck Forsman, Ned Jacob, Karen Kitchel, Michael J. Lynch, Jim Morgan, Daniel Sprick, Don Stinson and M.W. Skip Whitcomb.

Frederick suggests that the exhibit begins with Moran’s “Mountain of the Holy Cross” (1890) hung at the left of the first gallery and that following the paintings clockwise through time, viewers will end with Vance Kirkland’s “Ruins of Central City” (1935). The second gallery should display all of the contemporary work alphabetically by artist. However, the work is not hung chronologically or alphabetically.

The Moran clearly is a masterpiece. The granite mountain, with its cross-shaped crevices in which snow accumulates, rises from a mist of clouds. The waterfall in the foreground is an imaginary feature that Moran added to the composition and does not exist in nature. It also is a historically significant painting.

This painting was instrumental (along with the photographs of William Henry Jackson) in convincing Congress to preserve Yellowstone as a National Park, launching the progress vs. preservation battle that has shaped the American West.

“In the 19th and 20th centuries, landscape painting went from ‘photographing’ scenes to advertising to creating art based on the land,” Frederick wrote in an e-mail this week.

“Today, landscape painting is about expressing concerns as well as awe. It’s about conservation. Most importantly, it’s about helping viewers see,” she said.

Frederick selected contemporary artists who help the viewer see more than just the land.

“I feel that landscape is often overlooked for the latest fad in art, and, conversely, since a lot of people like to paint landscape, there is much that is not worthy of a show,” Frederick wrote.

She chose contemporary masterpieces to show the evolution of landscape painting, taking the viewer from what it was to what it is, skipping all of the “isms” of the mid- to late- 20th century.

I found all of the contemporary work impressive, but here are a few of my favorites:

Encinias’ “Autumn Eve, Berkeley Lake,” captures the quiet feeling of being alone in nature, surrounded by the bustle of the city. The fading light and the fading season seem to reach out from this beautifully executed painting.

Brown’s “Aspen Trees” are twisted and nearly abstracted. The artist seems focused on the layers of botanical life at the base of the trees, the place the light touches and the depths it cannot reach.

Felix’s “Twin Peaks,” a painting of two blue-green mountains draped in snow and clouds. For me, this work expresses the jovial emotion of an amusement park. This landscape is one of pleasure and enjoyment.

For Kirkland, who completes Frederick’s 20th century selections, design was more important than subject.

“I had to change nature in order to be more concerned with the importance of the painting, rather than the importance of the landscape,” Kirkland wrote, echoing Moran.

This is the difference between a masterpiece and a just another landscape painting. A masterpiece doesn’t only capture the beautiful scenery; it manipulates nature until the viewer’s reaction is not realizable only as an experience, but as something more.

If you go:

“Masterpieces of Colorado Landscape” will be at the Center of Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis College, through April 22. Contact Interim Director & Curator Jeanne Brako, 247-7494. The show will move to the Foothills Art Center in Golden, from May 12-July 8; Western Colorado Center for the Arts in Grand Junction from July 28-Sept. 23; Fremont Center for the Arts in Cañon City, Nov. 9-Dec. 15; El Pomar Carriage Museum in Colorado Springs, Dec. 22-Jan. 31; Denver Public Library, Feb. 4 – May 31.

artsjournalist@centurytel.netLeanne Goebel is a freelance writer who specializes in the visual arts.

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"Masterpieces of Colorado Landscape" will be at the Center of Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis College, through April 22. Contact Interim Director & Curator Jeanne Brako, 247-7494. The show will move to the Foothills Art Center in Golden, from May 12-July 8; Western Colorado Center for the Arts in Grand Junction from July 28-Sept. 23; Fremont Center for the Arts in Cañon City, Nov. 9-Dec. 15; El Pomar Carriage Museum in Colorado Springs, Dec. 22-Jan. 31; Denver Public Library, Feb. 4 – May 31.

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