Simone

Note Entries 3 + 4

3. Shit Happens; Notes on Awkwardness, Amy Sillman. (2015) Frieze.

4. Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, Richard Flood, Laura Hoptman, Massimiliano Gioni, Trevor Smith, (2012).

Amy Sillman’s exhibition, “the ALL-OVER” at Portikus, Frankfurt

Amy Sillman is an abstract painter, based in NYC. Her paintings fit somewhere along the abstraction continuum, oscillating between moments of figuration and abstraction. 

Her work is additive, though used somewhat paradoxically as she uses it as a way to conceal or erase layers beneath, sometimes using a variety of transparencies, as well as thicker, more opaque textural brush strokes/mark-making. 

Her work draws on the history of abstract expressionism, a movement dominated by white men who made large gestural paintings, and flips the narrative via feminist critique. 

She does this by approaching her paintings with vibrant colour, shapes hinting at bodily forms, and subject matter that speaks to themes of awkwardness, emotionality, affect and doubt and humour.

This is also a deliberate mode of critique to established patriarchal art world ideas of “the master”, “the genius”, … and the archetypical images often conjured up re. abstract expressionism… “associated with hard-drinking, brawling men who wore workmen’s clothes and used industrial paint.” Reference

Some have said that her work is psychosexual, in that it draws on intimacy, sensuality, and the human form. 

The first paragraph of “Shit Happens” she mentions “negative aesthetics” and that somehow this term does not quite fit into contemporary discussions of, “bad painting”, provisional painting and deliberate deskilling.

Never heard the term “negative aesthetics” before this.

From Arnold Berleant’s, Negative Aesthetics and Everyday Life, 2011:

“The discipline of aesthetics is generally associated with art and the word ‘aesthetics’ is often taken to connote art that is valued as good or great. What that value is and how to assess it are central questions for aesthetic theory. Despite common usage, however, the word ‘aesthetic’ is not synonymous with ‘beauty’ and has applications far wider than to art alone. The etymology of ‘aesthetic’ emphasizes its central meaning of sense perception, and I use the word emphasizing that core meaning. However, sensory experience, and hence aesthetic experience, is not always positive, and when it is offensive, distressing, or has harmful or damaging consequences, the aesthetic leads us to the realm of the negative”

Seems to me that the term “negative aesthetics” allows for both the good and bad, the ugly and the beautiful, harmony and dissonance, to commingle in a single work of art. This is something I’ve thought a lot about in my life. I’ve always struggled with the binary of “happy” vs “sad” …for example. Similar to the false dichotomy of mind vs. body…I feel there is more a continuum than clear cut, easily dissectible parts. I am both happy and sad, ugly and pretty, and the sensory experiences that I have every day do not sit neatly into one side of the spectrum or the other, but in an awkward in-between. 

The art that speaks to me most, that pleases my eyes / gets me thinking usually falls into this space; ordinary, yet sublime …uncomfortable yet seductive… challenging yet open. 

The reason this works for me is because I feel that it speaks to the “truth” of the human condition, which is complex, and not easily articulated with words.  

When Sillman said in the opening paragraph of “Shit Happens”, “The first question confronting artists is, ‘what should I do’? And the next question is, ‘what would make it better’? Is this ‘aesthetics’? I don’t know – but I know that we are no longer making things for the Beaux Arts, for truth, beauty, elevation or virtuosity. Yet the familiar forms of what could be called ‘negative aesthetics’ also fail to adequately describe what a lot of artists are doing in their studios. Dada, the readymade, ‘bad painting’, the Dandy, ‘provisional’ painting, deskilling, etc. – none of these ring quite right in accounting for something I would call negativity-at-work, the arduous search for form, the feelings of dissatisfaction, the endless decisions and changes that constitute the work of various artists.” I found myself a bit confused… 

What I think I understand from this is that in art today, in many ways we are more free from historical tropes that dictate what is “beautiful”, aesthetic, tasteful or valuable. 

Contemporary social change movements have pushed back against old ways of thinking, and more people seem to acknowledge and understand that more complex idea of what is beautiful is needed. The body positivity movement, disability rights, queer and feminist movements, anti-racist movements, etc. have contributed to these shifts greatly. 

For ex. sociopolitical movements like feminism are changing to represent more than a singular voice or vision, seeking intersectionality …in this way I feel that our culture is collectively moving (albeit slowly and more easily visible in the thinking of the political left) to a mindset that recognizes / encourages plurality, cross-over…and divergence, and that without this we simply have supremacy. These social and political perspectives have crept into contemporary art practices, and artists today have more freedom to explore themes of multiplicity, conceptually, but also materially, and acknowledge similar things happening in the actual process of making. For example, many artists can admit that “mistakes” can often lead to surprising “eureka moments”, in which the “unexpected” leads us to a moment of problem-solving, and subsequently new discoveries. 

This is a long winded way of saying that contemporary art practices have more freedom to explore aesthetic / conceptual work that is not simply defined by a singular dominant movement, and this shift has brought forth ideas like “negative aesthetics”…but perhaps Amy Sillman feels that this term, and movements like “bad painting”, “deliberate deskilling” etc, do not adequately describe what she calls, “negativity-at-work”… a phenomenon that does not fit easily into the conversation of aesthetics at all; the hidden emotional reality of the process of making, which is extremely personal, and as Sillman describes, often unsettling, difficult and, “awkward”… A quality that is at once familiar and unfamiliar… and in many ways reflects the subjectivities of the human condition. 

Sillman also writes, “There was a time in the ’90s when, as a younger artist, I started to be invited to panels about ‘beauty’ and ‘visual pleasure’. People were trying to reclaim some idea about pleasure for political purposes, sometimes with a feminist agenda. People assumed that as a painter and feminist, I would be interested in these discussions, but instead I would find myself quiet, sullen, usually blurting out at some point that I couldn’t give a shit about beauty… I just knew that attractiveness was the enemy.”

This reminds me of a recent talk at the AGG with artist Abedar Kamgari, in which the question of beauty was brought forward by a member of our cohort. Kamgari explained that beauty was not a main concern for her, not really something she thinks about. Perhaps in this way she hopes that the content of her work takes precedence to visual aesthetics. Or that she is tired of finding herself entangled in the trappings of “beauty”, often driven by western constructs that seek to oppress or erase all modes that differ from the panoptic colonial gaze.  

I’m conflicted by this, because I suppose I found her work to be incredibly “beautiful”. And if we were to conflate this w/ the idea of “negative aesthetics” …ideas of beauty, aren’t we basically saying that all of this exists on a continuum, bcus … beauty is subjective… I think if we are honest with ourselves, as artists we are always searching for beauty. Perhaps beauty is found or grown out of difficult places, and re. Sillman’s distaste for things like “visual pleasure” …I quite enjoy her scritchy, unfinished, untidy approach to mark-making in contrast to her use of pleasant pastel colouring, or rich, vibrant colour. That bittersweet effect gives me a feeling of pleasure. As a human, with many fallibilities, I can relate to that duality. 

This tension is what makes abstract paintings interesting to me; when a person manages to skirt the line of representation and create feelings not of alienation…but relation.

On another note, I love Amy Sillman’s words, “Just having a body is a daily comedy.” 

The difficulty of making, standing for long periods, moving in uncomfortable ways, hammering, staring, being exposed to terrible toxic materials… often frustrated by a body that will not cooperate due to disease, illness, lack of “ability” …the cosmic joke of trying to get along as an artist in a world that for the most part does not value our labour… you gotta laugh that off or else it can get dark ! haha

She writes, …”Perhaps this is particular to abstract painting, where you often don’t really ‘know’ what you’re doing, and so you are doomed to work in between hoping and groping. In abstraction, time goes by in fits and starts, with resistance of materials being part of that time. Like the body, you look down at your creation and think, ‘My god, you are ugly’.”

This statement is so relatable, but I actually think that the discomfort of making, especially in trying to conjure up something that is not a commonly understood representation of a beautiful flower or sunset, but something uncanny…is also a beautiful and poetic gesture. 

Sillman ends with the words, “Finding a form is building these feelings (in this case, dissatisfaction, embarrassment and doubt) into a substance. This is a very fragile thing to do.”

This conversation reminds me of a few artists who skirt the lines of beauty / ugly and ultra personal:

 Yevgeniya Baras, Untitled, 2018-2021, Oil and mixed media on linen and fabric 48″ x 48″

 Yevgeniya BarasUntitled, 2021-2022, Oil and wood on canvas, 20″ x 16″

Yevgeniya BarasUntitled, 2019-2022, Oil, burlap, and wood on canvas, 44″ x 33″

 Yevgeniya Baras, Untitled, 2021-2022, Oil and wood on linen 20″ x 16″

Yevgeniya Baras’ work is so compelling to me because of the balancing act it manages. In these works, personal mementos and banal intimate objects like bedsheets are hidden beneath layers of paint. Her images tensely float in the canvas, lines rarely dissecting the picture plane completely, which subverts our expectation of how we perceive / what we understand space to be. In this way her works take on a life of their own, and become almost like weird little creatures suspended in a formaldehyde jar. They have agency and are more like objects than an attempt to create illusion of depth or illusion of space. But this is also contradicted by interior shapes that are encrusted in layers and layers of super thick paint, creating actual relief, as well as shadowy effects that hint at 3d space. Sometimes the canvas fabric is not fully stretched, and flops over the top of the image, and the painting almost giggles as the viewer attempts to make sense of things and view the painting as if the work is not just an awkward object on a wall but a suggestion of another world or place. They are confronted with only more questions: a blundering mishmash of conflicting forms, bright and muddy unusual colour combinations, strange use of both high and lowbrow materials, linen and burlap in one work. 

Amy Sillman’s commentary on the body, are also drawing parallels to words from artist, Ashley Bickerton, who died yesterday from ALS at the age of 63. I don’t know his work well, I just discovered his work today. Some of it I enjoy, … some of it is too hyperbolic for my taste. But but I find some of his writing about art so sincere and honest in a way that makes me think of Sillman in her “Shit Happens” piece. Her discomfort with the idea of artist as “genius” feels similar to something I read today about Bickerton on ARTnews about his sculptural works that incorporated an alter ego named, “SUSIE”. The article explains that Binkerton “….began to focus on the myth of artistic genius, which he exposed as something empty and patriarchal.”

Ashley Bickerton, Seascape: Floating Costume to Drift for Eternity I (Armani Suit), 1991. Image courtesy the artist and Gajah Gallery.
Ashley Bickerton, Floating Family Footprints (Flow Tide) 1, 2022. Resin, fiberglass, stainless steel, wood, and sea sand, 165 x 234 x 25 cm. Photo: Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London

I read through his instagram page a bit and found a video interview from 2021 with the Brooklyn Rail. He speaks about the process of making his human sized “ocean chunk” pieces and says, “I’ve been trying to do it I guess for about a year now. And very significantly, you will notice that the piece is pretty much the size of a coffin. Was that intentional? I’m sure it was in some way because one of the original inspirations was David Smith’s 6 x 6 x 6 foot cube, black cube, which really represented the human body. And by taking the particular proportions I’ve taken, I’m not only imitating the height of the human body, but I’m also imitating the breadth and depth. So it does take on a coffin-like persona. What does that mean in relation to this piece? I’ve never thought about it. It’s just some things you don’t want to understand in your work process. If you’re working under the lights of laboratories, with everything spelled out, ticking boxes, it somehow ceases to be art. You’ve got to be groping in the half light.”

This ties back into Sillman’s words above, “Perhaps this is particular to abstract painting, where you often don’t really ‘know’ what you’re doing, and so you are doomed to work in between hoping and groping.”

In the comment section of the interview, a fellow artist speaks of his father who died of ALS. Ashley Bickerton replies, “For most, death remains an abstraction, for me now, I can smell it, make out its contours, and feel its breath. I try to stay in the moment, in art in humor, in ideas, and in family.”

Ashley Bickerton, 0°36’06.2″N, 131°09’41.8″E 1, 2022 Resin, fiberglass, stainless steel, wood 72 x 24 x 16.13 inches

And I also love the band XTC, for their use of annoying and weird sonic elements with full on pop melodies, they have some truly beautiful songs that perform this balancing act so artfully. Some classic ones are, “Wonderland”, “My Girl Performs”, “The Meeting Place”…”Making Plans for Nigel”….
…and this song kind of irritated me at first, but now it is my studio anthem:

Lyrics:
I put on a fake smile
And start the evening show
The public is laughing
I guess by now they know

So climb from your high horse
And pull this freak show down
Dear Madam Barnum
I resign as clown

You said I was the master of all I surveyed
But now I’m sweeping up
The last in line in your circus parade

Children are clapping
As I fall to the floor
My heart torn and broken
And they just scream for more

If I’m not the sole fool
Who pulls his trousers down
Then dear Madam Barnum
I resign as clown

You tread the high wire
Between truth and lies
Your safety net just walked out
Much to your surprise

Strike up the band love
And let the show begin
For this is the last time
I’m painting on a grin

If I’m not the sole fool
Who pulls his trousers down
Then dear Madam Barnum
I resign as clown
I resign as clown
I resign as clown

“Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century,” Richard Flood, Laura Hoptman, Massimiliano Gioni, Trevor Smith, (2012).

  • Unmonumental is catalog from the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City’s inaugural exhibition. It includes works by 30 sculptors, all made before 2000.
  • In the section, “Ask the Dust” by Massimiliano Gioni, we are introduced with an image reference to the fall of the The Vendôme column, a sculpture in Paris made to commemorate Napoleon’s triumph at Austerlitz in May 16 1871. The original Vendôme column was destroyed During the Paris Commune in 1871.
  • Gioni goes on to explain how Modernism, (a movement which started around the early 1900s and continued until the early 1940s) moved past old ways of thinking and in the case of modernist sculpture, completely did away with the “plinth” … he explains that although the visual elements of the pedestal were erased, Modernist sculpture still found itself concerned with ideas of monumentality, and had similarly “assertive” commemorative tone.
  • He also mentions that in some ways, in modernist sculpture, the plinth was never fully erased, but subsumed by the sculpture itself.
  • Gioni then goes on to talk about the emergence of installation art, which again builds on these old ways of thinking and generates similar feelings of grandiosity to the viewer. 
  • But contemporary sculpture Gioni explains, “seems to describe a much more modest space…If we were to follow the signals that have accompanied the opening of this new century, we might conclude that we have come to live in an age that defines itself by the disappearance of monuments and the erasure of symbols – a headless century. Thus, it should come as no surprise that this first decade of the twenty-first century produced a sculpture of fragments, a debased, precarious, trembling form that we have called unmonumental.” 
  • He describes these new sculptures as unkempt, casual sort of readymades that often seem to be a reflection of our hyper accelerated internet culture, where diverging meanings and symbols are allowed to commingle and exist in a “polyphony of influences and appropriations.” 
  • Similarly to the Amy Sillman piece, Gioni speaks of a modest, more intimate and “radically anti-heroic” style of art that tips toward moments of humour at points…He explains that this is done materially: through ephemeral/common/found or recycled objects and materials, but also through scale. Gioni describes the small stature of many of the works in the show as being deliberate in this way.
  • This sense of fragility is a subversion of historical art preoccupations with ideas that valuable art should last forever…Gioni goes on to say that by revealing its vulnerability, these sculptures speak to remind us of our impermanency. 
  • The idea of doing away with the pedestal reminds me of issues of framing in painting. The frame, historically was used to protect the work, as a sort of armour. Surrealists like Magritte subverted framing conventions in playful ways, and at some point more recently, framing went out of fashion, for a while.  
  • Many painters today are making framing an integral part of the work. In this way it feels almost like a double subversion, of convention… and now a subversion of minimalism, “good taste”… and seem to find comfort in their folkiness, references to the home, intimate spaces, and uncanny states of mind. 

The Empty Picture Frame, 1934 by Rene Magritte
Alicia Adamerovich
Alicia Adamerovich
Horn, 2019



Stephanie Temma Hier, Did you let them skim the cream off, 2019. Oil on canvas with glazed stoneware frame, 14 x 12 x 3.5 in. 

Laura Benson, The Last Secret Meeting, approx 5×7 inches, gelli-plate print in solder frame, 2022

Edin Zenun’s deliberately crappy frames:

ASMA, Causing you sorrow, 2021

ASMA, Sparkling, Dive Rose, Rosé, 2021

We Are in a Time of New Suns – W/ adrienne marie brown – Slideshow

Simone – Notes on Queer Mycology – Mycology as Revolutionary and Political Practice, from For the Wild Podcast, w/ Patricia Kashian

  • Patricia Kashian, mycologist heavily influenced by the work of Indigenous biologist/writer Robin Wall Kimmerer  (Braiding Sweetgrass)
  • Likens monoculture practices to capitalism, fungi as great disruptors of the status quo:

“I find it compelling to relate the formation of capitalism to the formation of mycophobia, because a capital logic is one that, as Anna Tsing (author and anthropologist) says, that it’s stripping organisms from their lifeworlds and then commodifying them. Right, so the act of capitalism is to remove an organism or feature a structure from its life and then to trade it as an exchange as a commodity. And fungi are really difficult to strip from their lifeworlds: rarely can you… there are a few species that we can cultivate, but out of the millions that are thought to exist in a macro fungi, there are hundreds of 1000s of mushrooms that make fruiting bodies and only a handful we know how to actually cultivate, like the Agaricus bisporus, which is the portabello, oyster mushrooms, and a few others. 

So I think it’s very compelling that there is this relationship between this organism that cannot be controlled or dominated by the same mechanisms and logics that fueled control and domination of most other organisms, including human beings around the world, with the emergence of capitalism out of Western Europe. And then also, there’s this relationship between fungi and agriculture, which is also sort of, I think compelling, in which fungi were more likely to become disruptive pathogens in the context of monoculturing (which was also a fundamental technique of capitalism) to isolate organisms, strip them from their natural ecologies and maximize their output forcibly.”

  • Dr. Patricia Kaishian worked with Kimmerer, when Kaishian was going to SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry
  • Kimmerer was a prof there and also served on Kaishian’s committee for their PHD.
  • Kimmerer’s drive to study botany came from a “fascination with beauty, and beauty being particularly in the ways in which asters, the flower, and goldenrod, looked next to each other -the asters being this brilliant purple and the goldenrod being this beautiful golden colour – and the ways in which they often grow near each other, and they looked so stunningly beautiful. She was interested in investigating, “why does that look so beautiful?” and when she approached her professor about that question, as an undergraduate student, he rebuffed that saying, “thats not a scientific question, if you’re interested in beauty go study art.”
  • Simo anecdote: When I read this section of braiding sweetgrass, this summer, I cried! Because this bizarre mental block that the sciences have with the idea of trying to study beauty, has found it’s way into the art world. It is no longer “valid” to study beauty, love…emotions. Conceptualism was grown from this notion that the idea behind an artwork is more important than the end result (which in a way has nothing to do with process…thinking vs. doing …using your hands, crafting something or tactility/materiality) and has become a dominant trend in art. Almost like a humanities teacher I had for an elective in University, who had a class on “Witchcraft” and had a chip on her shoulder because she always had to validate her class as an important subject, feels like artists feel the need to validate the practice of making, because non-artists often ask what making .. paintings for example has to do with anything, doesn’t fit very well into the capitalist model…my child could make that… and so we need to explain ourselves all the time, and prove our worthiness. Prove that what we are doing has meaning.
  • … and with that I feel that there is some underlying push for artists to go beyond, “trivial” or “frivolous” topics like beauty, that these topics are no longer “interesting”, or “important” and that our practice must go beyond the idea of seeking to make beautiful things. I feel like this is perhaps rooted in a patriarchal view that beauty is an inherently feminine pursuit, and therefore not worth studying.
  • Kimmerer was able to push back against her prof, and eventually found that there is a very “fascinating scientific explanation as to why they grow next to each other and look so beautiful. It has to do with the fact that when those two colours, gold and purple, grow next to one another, each becomes more visible because of the ways in which, in colour theory, they’re opposites. I’m not very good at explaining colour theory but it makes them more visible to insects, which then increases their pollination and increases their fitness.”
  • Kaisian goes on to explain that her own drive to mycology came from a similar interest in “romanticism”
  • Not necessarily that mycelium/fungi are beautiful but that the organisms exist in the margins, (IRL actually next to roads, ditches in my experience) and she felt a personal connection to that as a queer person.
  • Interviewer, Ayana Young: mentions, weird paradox in studying nature (the wild) in a strangely robotic/clinical/detached “objective” way. Nature is dirty and chaotic
  • animacy of non-human living + non-living things is a practice that Indigenous people have embedded in their language, but also practice in daily life, ex. harvesting: 
  • English for example is a language based in nouns, (instead of verbs) which others all non-human things
  • Anthropocentrism embedded in the language, makes it too easy for people to have no relationship to the world around them, “othering” everything. This aspect of the english language is in a way based in supremacy, and most likely leads to acts of violence, (extraction..taking too much, being greedy and looking at the world and all things in it that are non-human as resources for the taking, using)… in subtle ways…but also more broadly …
  • This language, embedded w/ ideas of dominance, supremacy not only leads to subjugation of the earth but also becomes an attitude that seems into interpersonal human relationships, as we other each other… 
  • Harder to do harm to things that you mindfully interact with, and relate to. This is why Indigenous ways of knowing rule
  • Kashian relates personal feelings, experiences as a queer person to the non-heteronormative ..non-conforming, punk characteristics of fungi, “fungi are non-binary”… 
  • Fungi also are a great metaphor for community… interconnectedness
  • From the National Forest Foundation:
    “When most of us think of fungus, we imagine mushrooms sprouting out of the ground. Those mushrooms are in fact the “fruit” of the fungus, while the majority of the fungal organism lives in the soil interwoven with tree roots as a vast network of mycelium. Mycelium are incredibly tiny “threads” of the greater fungal organism that wrap around or bore into tree roots. Taken together, myecelium composes what’s called a “mycorrhizal network,” which connects individual plants together to transfer water, nitrogen, carbon and other minerals. German forester Peter Wohlleben dubbed this network the “woodwide web,” as it is through the mycelium that trees “communicate.””
  • and they are resilient, you can chop them down or step on them but they have a knack for growing back
  • “I think whatever is motivating you should have space.” This got me thinking that finding these kinds of personal connections to ideas forms the drive for any good work. We are passionate about the things we can relate to. When we see ourselves in our work, and reflect back and forth, our work is more personal, intimate and relatable. 
  • This podcast episode along with Braiding Sweetgrass has really got me thinking that having a connection to our environment, the land, looking around and being present with it, thinking of the land as something deserving of respect, despite western people’s instinct to subdue, control and use it, is an incredible way to approach an artistic practice. Nature teaches us patience, gratitude and how to slow down ! Or at least thats what I always feel when I am in nature. This is very important as an artist. If you think about this kinda stuff often, I feel like you can more easily practice mindfulness.. very practical to have a grasp of when, for example you are making a painting, and it’s not going so hot, and you need to take a step back, slow down, or just decide to let it die. When you are used to going about the world with your eyes open, and you are present, not simply an extension of the technology we rely on so much, blindly following G maps instead of actually orienting yourself in your environment….you can actually find inspiration everywhere.
  • Looking around …having a relationship to the environment, is a good way to teach yourself to be more present. Then making art can be a more tuned-in thing. Thinking about the relationships of the colours, the textures, the sense of it in the room, your body movin around, being aware of that, I think could be helpful to make good/honest decisions when painting.
  • Cool reishi paintings by Guelph Alumni: Rachel Crummey —-> “what can fungi teach us about improvisation” an ongoing research project about fungi as material and living intelligence through the matrix of collaborative art” …uses reishi mushrooms and india ink, acrylic. These works are a kind of cross-species collaboration
  • In that way they are somewhat unpredictable, ephemeral…chance-based
Rachel Crummey Untitled no 1 Reishi mycelium, India ink and acrylic ink, canvas, hemp, 23″x 36″

blue-oyster-mycelium-canvas-ink-and-oil-pastel-and-hemp-1

Rachel Crummey, Untitled, blue oyster mycelium, canvas, ink and oil pastel and hemp
  • Was surprised to find one of my fav painters, Tracy Helena Thomason, likes mushrooms too. I was like dang, I don’t know any other artists that make stuff about mushrooms. Good reminder that ideas don’t have to come out in an obvious or literal way, and still be part of the work:
    Tracy Thomason I See/You Mean (After L.L.) , 2020 Oil and marble dust on linen 20 x 16 inches 50.8 x 40.6 cm
    Tracy Thomason, I See/You Mean (After L.L.) , 2020. Oil and marble dust on linen, 20 x 16 inches, 50.8 x 40.6 cm

    Tracy Thomason Road Maps and Flame Outs, 2019 Oil and marble dust on linen 40 x 32 inches 101.6 x 81.3 cm
    Tracy Thomason, Road Maps and Flame Outs, 2019, Oil and marble dust on linen, 40 x 32 inches – 101.6 x 81.3 cm

    From Artsy:
  • “Tracy Thomason creates works with tactile surfaces built up from a combination of oil paint and marble dust. She applies her hand-mixed pigments in precise layers, using tools she has described as surgical. Featuring biomorphic abstract shapes that occasionally verge on figuration, her paintings have been compared to the visionary artist Hilma af KlintSurrealist Joan Miró, and Neo-Geo painter Peter Halley, with whom she showed in a two-person exhibition in 2016. Thomason has also cited influences like psychedelia and feminist art.”
  • On that psychedelic note: my friend Maude Deslauriers makes some awesome paintings that have elements of nature, maybe invented forms inspired by nature… that fit well in this theme.

    Maude Deslauriers, Larmelette, sand, flashe, oil on muslin over wood, 49 x 20 x 1 in, 2021. Larmelette (detail).
    Maude Deslauriers, Larmelette, sand, flashe, oil on muslin over wood, 49 x 20 x 1 in, 2021. Larmelette (detail).

     Illusion, marble dust, sand, flashe, oil on muslin over wood, 95 x 41 x 1 in, 2022. Illusion (detail)


Maude Deslauriers, Illusion, marble dust, sand, flashe, oil on muslin over wood, 95 x 41 x 1 in, 2022. (detail)

Bio: Maude Deslauriers is an artist working with painting and drawing. Her recent work explores the abstract notion of form as a link between the natural world, the body and consciousness. Through revisions of botany, anatomy, philosophy and mythology, a reflection of the creative process is observed in the autopoiesis of nature’s own growth. Deslauriers lives and works in Montreal, where she completed her MFA at Concordia University.

Simone – Notes on Timothy Morton’s Hyper-Pandemic by Morgan Meis

Simone – Notes on Queer Mycology – Mycology as Revolutionary and Political Practice, from For the Wild Podcast, w/ Patricia Kashian

  • Patricia Kashian, mycologist heavily influenced by the work of Indigenous biologist/writer Robin Wall Kimmerer  (Braiding Sweetgrass)
  • Likens monoculture practices to capitalism, fungi as great disruptors of the status quo:

“I find it compelling to relate the formation of capitalism to the formation of mycophobia, because a capital logic is one that, as Anna Tsing (author and anthropologist) says, that it’s stripping organisms from their lifeworlds and then commodifying them. Right, so the act of capitalism is to remove an organism or feature a structure from its life and then to trade it as an exchange as a commodity. And fungi are really difficult to strip from their lifeworlds: rarely can you… there are a few species that we can cultivate, but out of the millions that are thought to exist in a macro fungi, there are hundreds of 1000s of mushrooms that make fruiting bodies and only a handful we know how to actually cultivate, like the Agaricus bisporus, which is the portabello, oyster mushrooms, and a few others. 

So I think it’s very compelling that there is this relationship between this organism that cannot be controlled or dominated by the same mechanisms and logics that fueled control and domination of most other organisms, including human beings around the world, with the emergence of capitalism out of Western Europe. And then also, there’s this relationship between fungi and agriculture, which is also sort of, I think compelling, in which fungi were more likely to become disruptive pathogens in the context of monoculturing (which was also a fundamental technique of capitalism) to isolate organisms, strip them from their natural ecologies and maximize their output forcibly.”

  • Dr. Patricia Kaishian worked with Kimmerer, when Kaishian was going to SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry
  • Kimmerer was a prof there and also served on Kaishian’s committee for their PHD.
  • Kimmerer’s drive to study botany came from a “fascination with beauty, and beauty being particularly in the ways in which asters, the flower, and goldenrod, looked next to each other -the asters being this brilliant purple and the goldenrod being this beautiful golden colour – and the ways in which they often grow near each other, and they looked so stunningly beautiful. She was interested in investigating, “why does that look so beautiful?” and when she approached her professor about that question, as an undergraduate student, he rebuffed that saying, “thats not a scientific question, if you’re interested in beauty go study art.”
  • Simo anecdote: When I read this section of braiding sweetgrass, this summer, I cried! Because this bizarre mental block that the sciences have with the idea of trying to study beauty, has found it’s way into the art world. It is no longer “valid” to study beauty, love…emotions. Conceptualism was grown from this notion that the idea behind an artwork is more important than the end result (which in a way has nothing to do with process…thinking vs. doing …using your hands, crafting something or tactility/materiality) and has become a dominant trend in art. Almost like a humanities teacher I had for an elective in University, who had a class on “Witchcraft” and had a chip on her shoulder because she always had to validate her class as an important subject, feels like artists feel the need to validate the practice of making, because non-artists often ask what making .. paintings for example has to do with anything, doesn’t fit very well into the capitalist model…my child could make that… and so we need to explain ourselves all the time, and prove our worthiness. Prove that what we are doing has meaning.
  • … and with that I feel that there is some underlying push for artists to go beyond, “trivial” or “frivolous” topics like beauty, that these topics are no longer “interesting”, or “important” and that our practice must go beyond the idea of seeking to make beautiful things. I feel like this is perhaps rooted in a patriarchal view that beauty is an inherently feminine pursuit, and therefore not worth studying.
  • Kimmerer was able to push back against her prof, and eventually found that there is a very “fascinating scientific explanation as to why they grow next to each other and look so beautiful. It has to do with the fact that when those two colours, gold and purple, grow next to one another, each becomes more visible because of the ways in which, in colour theory, they’re opposites. I’m not very good at explaining colour theory but it makes them more visible to insects, which then increases their pollination and increases their fitness.”
  • Kaisian goes on to explain that her own drive to mycology came from a similar interest in “romanticism”
  • Not necessarily that mycelium/fungi are beautiful but that the organisms exist in the margins, (IRL actually next to roads, ditches in my experience) and she felt a personal connection to that as a queer person.
  • Interviewer, Ayana Young: mentions, weird paradox in studying nature (the wild) in a strangely robotic/clinical/detached “objective” way. Nature is dirty and chaotic
  • animacy of non-human living + non-living things is a practice that Indigenous people have embedded in their language, but also practice in daily life, ex. harvesting: 
  • English for example is a language based in nouns, (instead of verbs) which others all non-human things
  • Anthropocentrism embedded in the language, makes it too easy for people to have no relationship to the world around them, “othering” everything. This aspect of the english language is in a way based in supremacy, and most likely leads to acts of violence, (extraction..taking too much, being greedy and looking at the world and all things in it that are non-human as resources for the taking, using)… in subtle ways…but also more broadly …
  • This language, embedded w/ ideas of dominance, supremacy not only leads to subjugation of the earth but also becomes an attitude that seems into interpersonal human relationships, as we other each other… 
  • Harder to do harm to things that you mindfully interact with, and relate to. This is why Indigenous ways of knowing rule
  • Kashian relates personal feelings, experiences as a queer person to the non-heteronormative ..non-conforming, punk characteristics of fungi, “fungi are non-binary”… 
  • Fungi also are a great metaphor for community… interconnectedness
  • From the National Forest Foundation:
    “When most of us think of fungus, we imagine mushrooms sprouting out of the ground. Those mushrooms are in fact the “fruit” of the fungus, while the majority of the fungal organism lives in the soil interwoven with tree roots as a vast network of mycelium. Mycelium are incredibly tiny “threads” of the greater fungal organism that wrap around or bore into tree roots. Taken together, myecelium composes what’s called a “mycorrhizal network,” which connects individual plants together to transfer water, nitrogen, carbon and other minerals. German forester Peter Wohlleben dubbed this network the “woodwide web,” as it is through the mycelium that trees “communicate.””
  • and they are resilient, you can chop them down or step on them but they have a knack for growing back
  • “I think whatever is motivating you should have space.” This got me thinking that finding these kinds of personal connections to ideas forms the drive for any good work. We are passionate about the things we can relate to. When we see ourselves in our work, and reflect back and forth, our work is more personal, intimate and relatable. 
  • This podcast episode along with Braiding Sweetgrass has really got me thinking that having a connection to our environment, the land, looking around and being present with it, thinking of the land as something deserving of respect, despite western people’s instinct to subdue, control and use it, is an incredible way to approach an artistic practice. Nature teaches us patience, gratitude and how to slow down ! Or at least thats what I always feel when I am in nature. This is very important as an artist. If you think about this kinda stuff often, I feel like you can more easily practice mindfulness.. very practical to have a grasp of when, for example you are making a painting, and it’s not going so hot, and you need to take a step back, slow down, or just decide to let it die. When you are used to going about the world with your eyes open, and you are present, not simply an extension of the technology we rely on so much, blindly following G maps instead of actually orienting yourself in your environment….you can actually find inspiration everywhere.
  • Looking around …having a relationship to the environment, is a good way to teach yourself to be more present. Then making art can be a more tuned-in thing. Thinking about the relationships of the colours, the textures, the sense of it in the room, your body movin around, being aware of that, I think could be helpful to make good/honest decisions when painting.
  • Cool reishi paintings by Guelph Alumni: Rachel Crummey —-> “what can fungi teach us about improvisation” an ongoing research project about fungi as material and living intelligence through the matrix of collaborative art” …uses reishi mushrooms and india ink, acrylic. These works are a kind of cross-species collaboration
  • In that way they are somewhat unpredictable, ephemeral…chance-based
Rachel Crummey Untitled no 1 Reishi mycelium, India ink and acrylic ink, canvas, hemp, 23″x 36″

blue-oyster-mycelium-canvas-ink-and-oil-pastel-and-hemp-1

Rachel Crummey, Untitled, blue oyster mycelium, canvas, ink and oil pastel and hemp
  • Was surprised to find one of my fav painters, Tracy Helena Thomason, likes mushrooms too. I was like dang, I don’t know any other artists that make stuff about mushrooms. Good reminder that ideas don’t have to come out in an obvious or literal way, and still be part of the work:
    Tracy Thomason I See/You Mean (After L.L.) , 2020 Oil and marble dust on linen 20 x 16 inches 50.8 x 40.6 cm
    Tracy Thomason, I See/You Mean (After L.L.) , 2020. Oil and marble dust on linen, 20 x 16 inches, 50.8 x 40.6 cm

    Tracy Thomason Road Maps and Flame Outs, 2019 Oil and marble dust on linen 40 x 32 inches 101.6 x 81.3 cm
    Tracy Thomason, Road Maps and Flame Outs, 2019, Oil and marble dust on linen, 40 x 32 inches – 101.6 x 81.3 cm

    From Artsy:
  • “Tracy Thomason creates works with tactile surfaces built up from a combination of oil paint and marble dust. She applies her hand-mixed pigments in precise layers, using tools she has described as surgical. Featuring biomorphic abstract shapes that occasionally verge on figuration, her paintings have been compared to the visionary artist Hilma af KlintSurrealist Joan Miró, and Neo-Geo painter Peter Halley, with whom she showed in a two-person exhibition in 2016. Thomason has also cited influences like psychedelia and feminist art.”
  • On that psychedelic note: my friend Maude Deslauriers makes some awesome paintings that have elements of nature, maybe invented forms inspired by nature… that fit well in this theme.

    Maude Deslauriers, Larmelette, sand, flashe, oil on muslin over wood, 49 x 20 x 1 in, 2021. Larmelette (detail).
    Maude Deslauriers, Larmelette, sand, flashe, oil on muslin over wood, 49 x 20 x 1 in, 2021. Larmelette (detail).

     Illusion, marble dust, sand, flashe, oil on muslin over wood, 95 x 41 x 1 in, 2022. Illusion (detail)


Maude Deslauriers, Illusion, marble dust, sand, flashe, oil on muslin over wood, 95 x 41 x 1 in, 2022. (detail)

Bio: Maude Deslauriers is an artist working with painting and drawing. Her recent work explores the abstract notion of form as a link between the natural world, the body and consciousness. Through revisions of botany, anatomy, philosophy and mythology, a reflection of the creative process is observed in the autopoiesis of nature’s own growth. Deslauriers lives and works in Montreal, where she completed her MFA at Concordia University.

3 Comments

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3 Responses to Simone

  1. Diane

    Hi Simone! Do put your notes in the same place – on this post as one long post… ok?
    Thanks! Diane

  2. Diane

    Hi Simone –
    Such thoughtful and comprehensive notes – I appreciate the reflections on beauty – and triviality vs. what is essential, the virtues of noticing and relationship etc. A little hard to read written notes but I sense your engagement, and SO grateful for these abstract painting references, I am continually impressed how students make critical associations in response to concepts, language and motifs in the readings… I hope it’s useful in your own research. Thank you too for your valuable contributions to class discussions.

  3. Chelsea Ryan

    Hi Simone!

    I appreciate reading your notes and seeing the selection of artists you’ve provided in your responses.

    In your presentation, I find it interesting to look at organic and natural forms, for example, broccoli, and be able to compare its structure to other things we see in the everyday. I also found the discussion of fractals interesting – and the mathematical balances of that shape. When I was in your studio the other day looking at your materials, I saw some tracing objects that mimicked those shapes and the swirls. I also saw many of these lines and forms in the work of the artists you referenced, such as Tracy Thomason and Agnes Pelton.

    Reading your reflections on these artists and interpreting them as using paint to make their worlds is also enjoyable and curiously engaging. I wonder if you touch on that in your practice, mixing the personal with the abstract, the cognitive and the emotional.

    Overall, I appreciate reading your reflections, learning more about your thoughts on these contemporary painters, and being exposed to artists I don’t typically study. Thanks, Simone!

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