Issue 20, March 2008

Haris Epaminonda By Brian Dillon

The art of Haris Epaminonda is a matter of sutures, folds and strange symmetries. Among the videos that she showed at the Venice Biennale in 2007 (Epaminonda shared the Cyprus Pavilion with Mustafa Hulusi), the most exemplary in this sense was Nemesis 52 (2003): seven discrete segments depict various involutions of matter, space and time. A pair of disembodied hands – their symmetry in fact a mirror image produced in-camera – folds and unfolds a mass of fabric so that it seems to come alive: a spirited or sexualised substance. Elsewhere the foldings are temporal: footage from Egyptian soap operas – slowed down, pixelated or cropped – seems to exist in some oneiric region that crosses decades and cultures. Once again, drapery is everywhere: in another fragment of appropriated television, a pair of dancers whirl endlessly before a backdrop of luxuriant fabric.
But it's in Epaminonda's meticulous and somewhat unsettling collages that the processes of cutting, folding and grafting produce the most startling meetings between times, places and bodies. In many of the images, the historical background seems to be mid-twentieth century, but incised by huge mirrored shards, suggesting an inhuman future. Certain images are almost consumed by these slivers from another time. In others, jagged holes have opened in the surface of the picture that provides the original ground, as if something alien were forcing its way through, invading eerie civic spaces and grey architectural interiors. In an untitled piece from 2006, a group of schoolgirls are pictured in a wood, beneath an article on a modernist school built by French architect Ecochard: their eyes have been covered by fragments from another scene. In a more recent example the usurper is a painting: a vast, wavering fauvist mass, like a malfunctioning television, that has hypnotised a scattered group of museum-goers.

Matt Keegan
By Shamim M.Momin

The seemingly oxymoronic notion of 'connective interruptions' provides a useful way to consider the work of Matt Keegan, whose various incarnations as artist, editor and curator exemplify an idea of expansive practice so prevalent in recent art. His exhibitions, participatory publications and curatorial projects explore ideas of community without idealism, interrogating both literally and metaphorically how social spaces are staged and described, and where absence, incision and removal can more powerfully frame identity then emphatic presence.

In 2005, dealer Andrew Kreps invited the artist to programme his interim space (itself an oddly shaped space, evoking a kind of transitional, interstitial sensibility) for five months. Expanding the notion of discourse among artists, and his interest in intersection and collaboration, Keegan’s efforts resulted in Etc., a kind of exquisite corpse series of events, lectures, exhibitions and screenings by invited artists, who in turn designed their own events, often including other artists or performers. Eventually the series was documented in a folder-style publication, which contained discrete documents of each individual effort – a format evoking the important conceptual conceit of communal function that maintains the authorial mark (quite literally holding together linked but distinct approaches loosely but deliberately under a single cover). This constellated approach to an artist’s community of ideas is further expanded in Keegan’s ongoing publication North Drive Press. A limited-edition boîte-en-valise of artist interviews and multiples, and a clear conceptual descendant of the seminal Aspen magazine project, it is approached by Keegan and his co-editor as a way to collect and disperse those linked conversations.

The central component of Keegan's most recent exhibition, Any Day Now (2007), might here function to capture these interleaved interests. A large wall sculpture wended its accordion-like way diagonally across the gallery space, serving to redirect the flow of viewers in the gallery and thus activating the space of transit itself. Keegan’s interest in the idea of – perhaps more accurately the construction of – social space is further reflected as one navigates around the drywall structure. Literally stripping down the architecture to its basic elements, Keegan has excised letters from the Sheetrock that spell out ‘good to see you’. Passing viewers look directly through the letters, alternately engaging the people or space beyond and being rejected from that connection, with the wall serving as both membrane and barrier, a means to circumscribe a community of viewers in a shifting state of identification (You, Me, I, We being the title of a work in the show), what Keegan has called 'a space of perpetual implication/engagement'.

The exhibition overall is replete with an interest in layers and double-sidedness. For example, a stencil of the word 'men' is excised directly from the wall, repeated and layered to create shaped abstractions that hover between a formal composition and a frighteningly intense invocation. Elsewhere, images of men lounging casually in a chair are layered onto the space of a larger version of the same man's face, whose visage has been excised. Much like the wall text, they evoke both community and regimentation.

Kegan described North Drive Press as a 'conduit product', a phrase equally applicable to his other endeavours. Similarly, a collaboration in 2006 with the artist Leslie Hewitt, From You to Me and Back Again, elegantly refined this current of motion and reversal, individuality and community, and the ever-shifting shape of our most meaningful exchanges.

David Smith
By Martin Herbert

Why not start over? If that permission comes bundled with the keys to a studio, most artists don’t use it; David Smith frequently does. Employing what he calls 'a stylistically jumpy, cognitive approach', the London-based twenty-six-year-old painter has unloosed a prolific and barely categorisable stream of canvases since taking his MA at Chelsea in 2006 – where a studio visit by artist Peter Peri led to a hookup with the latter's gallery, Carl Freedman, and a superb debut solo show in 2007. There Smith would memorialise a teenage date as a fervid bouquet of flowers drifting wanly across downbeat minimalist stripes, scrape 'I am a Psyco' (sic) onto an acidic spread of yellow impasto and summarise the mournful end of his family’s farm in a rapid-fire sketch of a 'For Sale' sign. What anchored these diverse works, however, was an unmistakable emotional gravity – a sense that Smith, for all his hectic variety, was constantly redacting, filtering or ironising deep-seated emotions. If the mood was often luxuriously bleak, the flexible surety of touch was thrilling.

But already Smith is somewhere else. The mood swings animating his paintings are "becoming more closely connected with what I see", he says, which made a recent first trip to New York a windfall of sensory experience to be translated into paintings which formally bear only a slight resemblance to what’s gone before, though Smith’s delicately bipolar colour sense remains consistent. A sequence of monochromes has emerged, the canvas sides covered in brightly coloured tape which, like an Ambilight around a flatscreen TV, subliminally thrusts the dark, minimal but textured surfaces forward. Interred here are Smith’s recent crushes on Alan Charlton, Peter Halley and Anish Kapoor, compacted into a singular, dark-yet-energised aesthetic.

"I don't feel like I've ever made a series of work before", says Smith, discussing the paradoxical lassitudes, the energetic returns in terms of focus, of narrowing one’s margins. One might lazily speculate that lack of precedent within his own practice was the motivating factor, but Smith is not so predictably contrary. Rather he’s a model of the painter as self-abandoned to the winds of sensory experience and the mutability of feeling. "I think I do have a consistency with mood," he says. "It's a place you find yourself in sometimes, when the act of painting feels particularly worthwhile."

It's an anti-intuitive, anti-romantic way of getting there, but is he able to access the vulnerabilities on show – in his figurative paintings, in particular – because he’s buoyed up by the act of painting? (One might contain multitudes, and one's output might be both brimful of consistency and a model of resistance to the calcifications of stylism, but escaping one's nature is no easy trick.) While stating his desire to "make paintings that I’ve never seen before", Smith agrees. "Yes, something dark tends to come out – even though I might be painting with a smile on my face." And with that, he turns back to the boundless realm of his workspace.

Micol Assaël
By Massimiliano Gioni

Micol Assaël's sculpture is one of cacophonies, a cranky Ballet Mécanique that she has staged in a series of impressive installations. The spaces she creates are often oppressive, transfixed as they are by magnetic force fields and lines of tension. Perforated by violent gusts of wind and sparks of light, Assaël's environments can recall the cruel geometry of prison cells and the suffocating quarters hidden in the belly of some old sinking ship, while her sculptures are built on the ruins of our industrial society: a post-apocalyptic wasteland of bachelor machines, rusty materials and broken engines. These might take the form of frozen rooms full of tangled cables, hot air turbines, fumes, acid clouds and the pounding noise of motors and generators.

After her first international exposure, at the 2003 Venice Biennale, Assaël has gone on to participate in exhibitions in Italy - where she is based; she shows with Galleria Zero in Milan – and abroad, particularly in Berlin, where her work was presented at the 4th Berlin Biennial and at the Hamburger Bahnhof. In 2007 came a solo show at Kunsthalle Basel, where she premiered a series of more abstract works, seemingly quieter than earlier output, but in fact just as threatening; the centrepiece of the installation, titled Chizhevsky Lessons, after the Russian scientist Alexander Chizhevsky, gave the huge space – and all who entered it – an electrostatic charge, inevitably released later in a sparking shock.

Assaël's is an art of physical turmoil and frontal assault. But as in a noisy baroque mise en scène, Assaël's machines seem to aspire to an immaterial dimension: the sounds that punctuate her work have a hypnotic quality to them, and the rooms she designs seem inspired by a monastic severity, with an intimate and sublime simplicity.

It is a sort of pilgrimage that Assaël envisions. In spite of their rough appearance, Assaël's sculptures and environments can function as secret passages to ethereal mental landscapes and distant emotional geographies. Her recent exhibition at Johann König Gallery, in Berlin, made this aspect quite clear: legendary musician Mika Vainio performed within one of Assaël's sculptures, turning it into a strange meditation chamber. Enveloped in a litany of industrial drones, Assaël’s machines are always tuned to an ascetic frequency; they emit a spiritual noise.

Eric Wesley
By Paul Schimmel

Eric Wesley's work is goofy, broad, gestural, humorous and anecdotal, and at the same time structured, rigorous, reductive, concrete, intellectual, social and political. The fact that he never went to graduate school (surprising for a young artist in Los Angeles, a town known for its art schools) might have been why his first solo museum exhibition, which was part of MOCA's Focus series, was conceptualised as an off-campus 'thesis' exhibition. This show demonstrated that his rigorously developed sculptural installations are part of a broad matrix that draws from a range of Southern California artists.

In it, Wesley dragged a Vespa (possibly a reference to Chris Burden) into a gallery of the Pacific Design Center. In great incongruity with the elegance of the space, it created an empty stage for a performance that would not happen. The motorcycle, whose exhaust pipe was redirected out of the gallery, would be turned on at regular intervals, thereby igniting or activating the space. Its fuel line ran through a glass painting that acted as an external gas tank, referencing Charles Ray's Ink Line (1987), and the electricity generated by its battery-powered lightbulb was jerry-rigged to the museum’s electrical light-track system. A stagelike elevated floor was inlaid with rotating disks rendered immovable by museum restrictions. Within this spare environment, one also saw the influence of Paul McCarthy (a teacher at UCLA, where Wesley was an undergrad), Richard Jackson, Bruce Nauman and Michael Asher. In a further show, at Bortolami, New York, Wesley achieved a spectacularly functional minimalist sculpture using the cliché of the California health spa as its centrepiece. On a cold, rainy December evening, the opening was less an invitation as it was an elegant assault on New York's expectations.

These two back-to-back exhibitions allowed me to appreciate what Connie Butler, curator of the MOCA exhibition, had realised – that Wesley is developing a sculptural language rich in possibility and well-grounded both formally and conceptually. Drawing more from the generative period of the late 1960s and early 70s, and working in the as-yet-undefined and certainly noncommercial space between sculpture, performance and political action, Wesley revisits the interest of working between practices. His breakthrough work Kicking Ass (2000), a full-scale model of a donkey that has knocked a hole in a museum wall, draws from Liz Larner's Corner Basher (1988). However, Wesley transformed Larners's more formal inetic sculpture into an animatronic reference to Paul McCarthy's goat while making a metaphor for his own development.