Little Paper Planes

Nicole Wermers

Kelly Jones — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:24:37 +0000

The work of Nicole Wermers.

**All images are from Nicole Wermers’ website.

Whitney Biennial 2012: Introducing performance artist Dawn Kasper

Guadalupe Rosales — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 08:00:12 +0000

courtesy of artist

I am excited to introduce artist Dawn Kasper who is part of this year’s Whitney Biennial.

Kasper recently moved to New York to work on a 3 month durational performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art starting February 27th.

(more info HERE)

courtesy of artist

As Kasper describes “… I propose being present inside of the installation as a 3–month durational performance plus as a “work in progress” installation. The importance of making this a 3-month residency is it will enable me to fully realize the process of creating THIS COULD BE SOMETHING IF I LET IT as a performance and sculptural installation. The end result is an entire body of work that includes a new performances series and a sculptural installation environment.”

Photo: Kevin Scanlon for The New York Times

photo courtesy of ACP

Dawn Kasper combines slapstick comedy and monologue to ask questions about life and death. She inhabits different personas through the use of props, musical instruments, and makeup to ask “What is a physical object? and “What is existence?” Constantly in play and always agile, Kasper’s performances are frequently ritualized through the repetition of words and actions.– SeaandSpace

photo courtesy of circus gallery

Dawn Kasper is a Los Angeles based performance artist currently living in New York. Kasper has performed and exhibited internationally at galleries and institutions including the Migros Museum Für Genenwartskunst in Zurich, LISTE Basel, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Art Basel Art Positions Miami, LACMA, LACE, The Hammer Museum, MOCA, Newman Popiashvili Gallery New York, Anna Helwing Gallery, Circus Gallery, Leo Koenig Inc., Projekte New York, Art in General New York, Copy Gallery Philadelphia, and David Castillo Gallery Miami. Kasper is currently one of the acting co-directors of the performance and experimental art venue Human Resources in Los Angeles.

For more information on artist please visit The Whitney Museum website and her vimeo link

If you are in New York, I highly recommend checking out her performances coming up soon!

Guadalupe

John Seal

Kelly Jones — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:21:46 +0000

The work of John Seal. He is currently showing at Workspace in Los Angeles. The exhibition comes down on 2/26.

Workspace is pleased to present Fighting With Phantoms of Purple Prose, an exhibition of new paintings and objects by John Seal.

To the 17th century Calvinist Dutch, the flower was the quintessential momento mori symbol. Life in the mortal sphere blossomed forth beautiful but brief. To look at a flower was to see the desire for immortality and the inevitability of death had but one origin. It was to gaze at the certainty of our uncertainty simultaneously celebrated and mocked.

Language, too, has a momento mori aspect. To say “flower” or to think “flower” or to paint a flower is to completely divorce ourselves from the original. It is to be carried away to our deaths- cut off from the life that we shared in common with that beautiful thing before we named it. But if we can take that thought “flower” and make with it another object in the world, we can briefly escape that death. With it we can build a bridge back to the world.

No, the object we create is not a flower, but it relates. What we make is a flower. It becomes a parallel through which we can live with our thoughts and language in the world, staving off death and estrangement for a moment longer.

**All italicized text is from Workspace.
**All images are from John Seal’s Website.

Mixtape Friday: February’s Bone

Loren Crosier — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 15:26:46 +0000

1. We Are Trees – Sunrise Sunset

2. Delta Spirit – Bushwick Blues

3. The National - Mistaken for Strangers

4. Beach House – Better Times

5. Otis Redding – Try a Little Tenderness

6. AA Bondy – I Can See the Pines Are Dancing

7. Tennis – Take Me Somewhere

8. Dusty Springfield – Son of a Preacher Man

9. Johnny Osbourne – We Need Love

10. Marvin Holmes – Find Yourself

Here it is, ya’ll, the second installment to our new Mixtape Fridays series. Every Friday we’ll make a mixtape along with lovely images to suit the songs!

It’s February! For a large percentage of the population February is the most depressing month of the year (or so I’ve read). Maybe it’s because it’s winter?* Blue valentines perhaps? Either way these are songs I listen to year around but find particularly relevant to my “winter mood.” A little bit slow but hopeful nonetheless.

*It’s my first winter here in California, which contributes to the last two more summery photos. They still scream February to me, right?

-Lo

Photo Sources:

Matthew Harris

Alanna Cassidy — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:30:34 +0000

Matthew Harris is a 20 year old who lives in Australia and (quote on quote) “does all sorts of things.” His photos capture an essence of youth and playfulness mixed with occasional somber undertones that seem to intrigue the eye.

All images can be found here.

Now Featuring Theodora Allen

Maggie Haas — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:42:17 +0000

Theodora Allen’s carefully researched paintings expertly skirt nostalgia to examine longing and legacy. Her allusions to sad musical histories and shared cultural memories draw forth surprisingly personal reactions, a reminder that a eulogy is also a moment of togetherness.

To view her exclusive prints visit: The Little Paper Planes Shop

Exclusive Print Set 1, Hippie Cowboy Keepsake

Exclusive Print Set 1, A Song For You

Exclusive Print Set 2, Epitaph

Exclusive Print Set 2, My Time Ain't Long

MH: Looking at your work, I am so glad I’ve listened to as much Gram Parsons as I have! How did you start intertwining very specific music references in with painting?

TA: A couple of years ago I made a painting based on the drapes from the top of the staircase at Graceland (From Graceland to the Promised Land, 2010). I was interested in this idea that the drapes acted as a barrier between the toured portion of the house, and the private upstairs rooms, (which have remained untouched since Elvis’s death). The art direction—the placement of these ominous drapes—felt like an incredible solution for a glaring omission. A kind of Wizard of Oz solution, like “don’t pay any attention to the ‘death room’ that lies beyond.”

This sort of mythology and memorializing is something that I have always been interested in, but I believe this was the first time that I brought an explicit music reference into the paintings. I started reading music biographies as a way to understand and contextualize the music that I love. “Dead Elvis” by Greil Marcus is the best collection of essays that I’ve read on an artist.

From Graceland to the Promised Land

MH: Can you talk about fandom and nostalgia, and if you don’t mind, about how old you are? I asking in part because I’m 30, and I get all the musical references you’re making. The Band, Gram Parsons, the Rolling Stones, and so on are what I listen to most of the time, more so than any music from the last fifteen years or so. It’s all stuff from before I was born, and some if it is taste I feel I’ve inherited from my parents, and some is stuff I feel they should have introduced to me, but I discovered on my own. Anyway, it brings up a lot for me… what does it bring up for you?

TA: I’m 26. My musical taste is both inherited and researched. The Byrds Sweetheart of the Rodeo and Dylan’s Bringing it all Back Home were the two cassettes that were always on in the car when I was a kid. A number of years ago, I brought home a box of vinyl that belonged to my grandfather. These albums were my introduction to some older country and western music… Bill Monroe, Bob Wills, and Hank Williams. Willie, Waylon, and George Jones were in there too. Tradition and homage are important aspects of country music, and it was from these initial albums that I learned about others. I started to pay attention to the artists whose songs they covered, and who covered their songs. I’m also very interested in the country musicians who set up in California in the ’60s and ’70s: Merle Haggard, and Buck Owens in Bakersfield, and Gram Parsons in Los Angeles.

I’m currently working on a show for Michael Jon Gallery, in Miami, that stages a sort of eulogy for the late Parsons. The story is both past and present. I think that mourning that kind of cultural loss is more than idol worship, or nostalgia—it’s about recognizing life’s tragedies, and allowing them repose (clichés and all).

Burn That Candle

Safe at Home

MH: You’re a really good painter in terms of technique, all other good stuff aside. How long have you been painting? I understand it runs in the family?

TA: I have a pretty good technical command of the medium, but I’ve always felt that the style of a painting should be generated and informed by the paintings content, and not by technique (or technical limitations). However, I’ve never found much merit in the notion of ‘bad painting’ or ‘deskilling’ in painting.

I started to paint when I was at the art high school in east L.A. I went to undergrad at Art Center in Pasadena, where I majored in studio art, with a minor in photography. It wasn’t until my last year there that I developed a more focused interest in painting.

Painting does run in the family though––My parents both went to graduate school for painting, although neither pursued it as a profession. My grandfather was a California landscape painter and worked as an illustrator at Disney.

studio

MH: I’m interested in how you speak about some of the subject matter for your work as a “vanishing heritage.” Was this in reference to your recent work? Because your work does reference the past (and the past always recedes) but the things you’re referencing are revered and almost canonical. Can you talk more about that?

TA: In a magazine Q&A, a while back, I said that my paintings “focused on mythologized imagery that had part in shaping a collective American identity,” things that alluded to a “vanishing heritage.” At that time I had brought a lot of American iconography into the paintings—The blue drapes from Elvis’s Graceland that I mentioned earlier, as well as a few paintings of Niagara Falls at night, The White House ballroom, James Dean’s gravestone, and fragments from album covers. Essentially, pop time markers from the past century. However, removed from context, stripped of their biography, they became these banal scenes— a curtain, a body of water, an empty ball room, a grave stone, etc. “Vanishing” in that the meaning of these symbols are in the process of a change, or shift, or like you said they’ve “receded.”

My recent paintings are still situated at this crossroad of individual and shared experience—How we attach ourselves to things that are outside of ourselves, and how these things then become fused with who we are.

Beggars Banquet

MH: Would you talk about your research process? It must be a ton of fun.

TA: The research largely consists of reading and collecting. I mentioned earlier that I spend a lot of time with music biographies. I also comb flea markets and eBay for pertinent material. I find pictures in books, record sleeves, and old magazines. Recently, I’ve set up still lifes with these objects, which is how the Gram Parsons paintings and the record paintings came about.

“Paper” Product Look Book

Loren Crosier — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:28:10 +0000

I sat down for the first time in a long time today and wrote a letter, the hand-written, lick the envelope kind. As I noticed the cramp in my hands and writer’s bump on my finger I instantly became nostalgic for those familiar writing pains and what goes along with them. In my head the smell and touch of paper go hand-in-hand with the effort and satisfaction that goes into actually making something. When I’m done I have a tangible final product with remnants of my physical touch. Rather it be writing letters, making gifts, using your imagination, playing with paper is like revisiting simpler times, when saying thank you or that you care about someone holds a slightly different meaning. With Valentine’s Day, a holiday that glorifies paper crafts, around the corner, it seems fitting that we all find a little inspiration in the wonderful possibilities of paper.

Here are some products in the LPP shop that carry this exact sentiment:

1. Rabbit and Penguin Puppets by Furze Chan

2. Mixtape Activity Stamp by Yellow Owl Workshop (When was the last time you made a mix for someone with a hand written track list??)

3. Zebra Doll by Faye Moorhouse

4. D.I.Y Collage Kit by Anthony Zinonos

5. You Made it! Cards by Kelly Lasserre

6. It Comes for Only a Moment and then it is Gone by Scott Albrecht

7. I Heart Stickers Pack by Sally Faulkner

8. Coloring Book by Gracia Lam

Photo Sources:

Natural Car Alarms by Nina Katchadourian

Kelly Jones — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 17:48:10 +0000

I saw Nina Katchadourian speak last week and it was by far the best lecture I had seen in a long time. I love her approach to her practice. There is a good balance of fun and seriousness. Her investigations are part of her “noticing” what is around her. She highlighted how being aware and seeing all the little things is part of being an artist. I particularly loved this piece, “Natural Car Alarms”.

While on an artist’s residency at Caribbean Contemporary Arts in Trinidad during summer of 2001, I decided to travel to a small coastal town called Grand Riviere for a few days. This place was known for its natural beauty and wildlife, including giant leatherback turtles that came up onto the beaches there to lay their eggs during a brief window every year. Trinidad hosts an incredible variety of plant and animal life, and is particularly well known as a bird watcher’s paradise.

During my time in Grand Riviere I decided to spend an afternoon hiking with a local guide who took me far up into a remote mountainous area in the rainforest. We climbed up narrow mountain paths into areas thick with vegetation that surrounded and disoriented me. It was an environment unlike any I had ever been in before. Stopping to take a breather on the way down the mountain, I suddenly heard a very familiar noise in the midst of all unfamiliar natural surroundings: a car alarm. I stood listening to it for a few moments before things snapped back into context and I realized that this sound couldn’t possibly be a car alarm. It was in fact a bird.

I’m a great believer in misunderstandings as fruitful starting points for art works. Moments of confusion can be incredibly expansive mental spaces, where you hover in a kind of vastness, trying to extend this state as long as possible until some clue provides context, or some bit of information anchors you once again to what’s actually going on, delineating and determining what you should be understanding about things. Most people have had the experience of sleeping in an unfamiliar place and for a moment having no idea where you are when you wake up. Standing there in the rainforest was a bit like this: I tried to stay with both interpretations of that sound for as long as I could, but I also made a mental note to remember the error for later.

In Spring 2002, SculptureCenter was finishing renovations on their new exhibition space in Long Island City and wanted to commission a work that didn’t need a roof over its head. I proposed a project called Natural Car Alarms: a flock of three cars, each outfitted with a different car alarm modeled on the ubiquitous six-tone siren so common in New York City cars. Although they would behave just like the real thing, the alarms would all be composed of bird sounds.

I contacted the Macauley Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. They were known for having a vast archive of animal sounds, and agreed to work with me on the project. I sent them a recording of a car alarm from a screaming car on my street one day, and they set about finding bird calls that roughly matched those sounds. A few weeks later, I had a CD in hand with 33 different birds on it and I set to work to edit the sound.

Each car had a different alarm soundtrack, and each alarm had six different birds, so there were 18 birds involved in all. The choices were tough. I wanted to find a good balance of sounds that were both shockingly alarm-like but also distinctly still bird-like in their quality. Almost as important as matching the sounds was finding a patterning that mimicked the swooping cries and punctuated honks of the familiar six-tone siren. They also needed to be as loud, intrusive, obnoxious and surprising as the real thing. Ideally, I wanted to replicate some of the ambiguity I had experienced in the forest, where the urban and the natural were suddenly very continuous. Car alarms were after all a completely natural part of the Long Island City landscape where the piece would be shown.

The piece was shown at several locations during the summer and fall: MoMA QNS, PS1, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Sculpture Center, where the flock came home to roost at SculptureCenter’s opening of their new space. In each case, the cars were parked adjacent to one another and left there for the day. The alarms ran on timers, not synchronized to another in any particular way. There were moments were one car was screaming and another would seem to respond a few minutes later, and occasional moments when all three cars would go off at once — a completely chaotic, jungle-y effect.

**All images and italicized text is from www.ninakatchadourian.com.

Michael Norton

Kelly Jones — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:20:17 +0000

The paintings of Michael Norton.

**All images are from ACME Gallery.

Mixtape Friday

Alanna Cassidy — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:25:11 +0000

To The East by Electrelane

Love Songs On The Radio by Mojave 3

Walkabout by Atlas Sound w/ Noah Lennox

You Trip Me Up by The Jesus and Mary Chain

You Will Always Bring Me Flowers by Shannon and the Clams

Beat Your Heart Out by The Zeros

Million Tears by The Pastels

Watching My Baby Get Ready by Greg Oblivion & the Tip Tops

The Sweetest Thing by Camera Obscura

Can I Touch You by My Bloody Valentine

Mixtape Friday is the first of the new “Mixtape Friday” series on LPP! Every Friday we’ll make a mixtape along with lovely images to suit the songs! This particular mixtape was created with the idea of Valentine’s Day just around the corner, and an obscured view on “love songs.” Enjoy!

Images (from the top): Thomas Bavington, Nina Zivkovic, Roxana Azar, Alanna Cassidy, Cortney Cassidy, Mario Arruda, Julien, Brian Bielawa, Gem, and Internet K-Hole.