ELAINE REICHEK
You Were the Heroine, 30 1/2” x 42 1/4”, Hand embroidery on printed needlepoint canvas, 2015
"I’m just up here sitting at table sewing sewing sewing….I bought Paul some of the programs I have on my computer so we could try to replicate what goes on in the studio…but of course there are always glitches…also by transferring files we managed to update my web site…but am pining for my machine which is still stranded in the bowels of Flushing.”
-Elaine Reichek, e-mail from April 9, 2020
You were the heroine.
Yes, so I was and am.
I was exhausted—slept on Theseus’s shoulder—
and when I woke—
The black sail dipping on the horizon.
Alone I abandoned myself to grief,
an abandoned woman. I writhed
upon the sand, I gnawed my hair.
I wept until grief turned to fury.
When the sun
began to set I saw that I had better
prepare for a long stay. They’d left me
three matches and a tarp. In time
I had a blazing driftwood fire,
and chanterelles and mussels sizzled
in a tin can I’d found.
I wrote it all down in my journal.
She bit the thread.
Night fell.
— Erika Mumford, “Labyrinth”, Willow Water, 1988
HANNAH WHITAKER
We Us and That, 50 1/2” X 120”, Archival pigment print, 2020
Hannah Whitaker
April 2, 2020
As I type this, trying to put together a cogent thought, my three-year-old son has just taken a shit. He has insufficiently wiped his ass, insufficiently washed his hands, forgotten to put his pants and underwear back on, and is seated quietly with a book, pressing his shit-smeared bottom into the floor next to me. And yet, this moment is a victory, because I’m still typing, because he’s quiet.
In some ways, my life is ideally suited for this crisis. Solitude and volatility are baked into being an artist. Usually, I thrive in those conditions, probably one reason I’ve made the choices I have. I like being alone. I can handle precarity. On a normal basis, I embrace structural limitations, like—what can I do with one sheet of 4x5 film? Or, what photograph can I make with just the lighting and props I have on hand? I usually impose them on myself, but it doesn’t feel like a diametrical shift for them to be generated externally. So when I think about it, art making doesn’t seem like it would be that difficult to do right now. I can walk to my studio, where I can work alone, and where I have the equipment I need. I’m lucky for all of that.
I can handle precarity. Correction: I can handle the amount of precarity that I’m used to, which is perhaps more than what the conventionally-employed deals with, but less than what is going on right now. I can deal with the normal ups and downs of my income. Right now, it feels kind of like a normal down. What is new is that I know this down will not be followed by an up. I know that I need to make it to the studio to make the work that will allow me to weather the down that will follow this down that will be bigger than any down I’ve known.
But I can’t make it to the studio. It’s my day to stay home with my son, who has not played with another child in over three weeks.
I’ll be honest, I’m having a hard time. I’m not sick. No one I love is sick. I’m not an endangered health care worker, or grocer, or delivery person. I’ll be okay and there are a lot of people who will not. I know I’m lucky. I’m just an artist wanting the life that I worked my whole life to build, that is central to my selfhood, and that I’m worried is gone.
Art always feels inconsequential in times of real crisis, even though I know it’s important. Art can’t help us out of the crisis, but it can help us out of our holes. Like Ariana Reines’s new moon report in Artforum, which gave words to that strange combination of death and mundanity that characterizes this moment. At least I think it did. I can’t remember it very well. I read it half-awake in the middle of a sleepless night after my son woke me up to watch him pee.
Now my son is lying down waving Buzz Lightyear into the air, quietly repeating “What the fuck” in a barely audible whisper. But, I’m still typing, so again, a victory.
DANNY FERRELL
Spring Nostalgia, 22” x 30”, Colored pencil on paper, 2020
Danny Ferrell cannot access his studio during Covid-19, so has been working on a practice of works on paper. These exquisitely detailed pieces reference his oil portraits with beautiful color and depictions of his boyfriend and friends.
"I am inspired by the clouds and the trees, flowers and their colors, men and fashion; I envy the sublime skyscapes of Tiepolo and Thomas Cole, the glorious visual theater of Christ’s Ascension; the camp photographs of Pierre et Gilles and the acid-washed aesthetic of Ed Paschke. I love the melodrama in Tooker and the technical precision of Magritte, but I am always most inspired by my peers—artists who are similar in age, hustling and making strides in their careers and practices. It doesn’t even matter what they are making, seeing them do it really motivates me.” -Danny Ferrell, April 2020
Danny Ferrell, work in progress
LINDSAY BURKE
Above (L to R):
All Wound Up, Nowhere to Go, 50” x 40”, Acrylic, compressed charcoal and graphite on canvas, 2019
All These Eras, 60” x 50”, Acrylic and pastel on panel, 2018
I have not read The Decameron but was immediately reminded of Botticelli's Scenes from The Story of Nastagio Degli Onesti, a commission of four paintings that illustrate one of the stories told on the fifth day of Boccaccio's Decameron. I first learned about these paintings in Maria Loh's Love and Death in Early Modern Italian Art, one of the best art history classes I've ever taken, and I have been fortunate enough to see the works in person at the Prado.
The story, as I understand it, centers around Nastagio Degli Onesti, a nobleman from Ravenna who is suffering from unrequited love. After he squandered all of his money, lavishing his crush with banquets and parties only to be turned down, he fled the city in a state of hatred. As he is traveling through a pine forest, he is surprised by the sight of a woman (naked) being chased by two dogs and an armed horseman. Nastagio attempts to defend the woman but is met by the horseman who explains that he once loved this woman but was rejected and he subsequently committed suicide. When the woman died later without regret for rejecting her admirer, she was sentenced to the cruel fate of being hunted, having her heart ripped out and fed to per pursuer’s dogs. This act was to be repeated every Friday for eternity.
After this encounter, Nastagio plans a banquet on the following Friday in the exact spot in the pine forest where the hunt takes place, inviting his beloved, her family and his own. As he suspected, the ceremony is interrupted by the eternal hunt. His beloved is so terrified by the horror of the hunt and the fate of the woman that she decides to marry Nastagio the following Sunday. And as a result, the women of Ravenna are 'taught' to be more kind and generous with their love.
Links to paintings and description HERE and HERE
I experience the story of Nastagio Degli Onesti as punishment for the expression of female autonomy. The repetition of this gruesome damnation speaks to a long history of violence against and the oppression of women. On a more contemporary note, the tale brings to mind modern day stories of unwanted sexual advancement, retaliation in the workplace and the revenge porn trend.
Painted across four uniformly sized panels, the story unfolds in a way that reminds me of a comic strip. Each composition is ordered by strong vertical lines that create structure and drama. The first panel establishes the initial terror of the hunt and the intense vengeance of Guido de Anastagi (the horseman). In the second painting, something interesting begins to happen with the way Botticelli plays with space. In the foreground we see the removal of the woman's heart, existing simultaneously with another loop of the hunt beginning in the background. Never having seen a painting operate this way, the move felt innovative to me. Illustrating the passing of time within a singular space.
The elements of this series that relate more specifically to my new body of work is the sense of movement and the idea of the loop. Botticelli's woman is clearly fleeing for her life, yet she appears completely frozen in time. Botticelli uses directionality and flowing drapery to indicate movement throughout the series, but there is an overall stillness to the images. I am interested in this contradiction and am finding ways to explore this feeling in my own work. I've become obsessed with the idea of the body (female) grinding in place. Strong legs pushing forward, but running in a circle. Frozen in place. The feeling of maximal effort and zero return. In this work it is important for my female bodies to be active, not at rest, not on view and not nude. I employ mark-making, line work, and the use of punctuation marks to emphasize momentum and force.
I’ve chosen various tableaus for the body to engage with: clocks, wheels, gears, fans; all rotational objects. I want there to be a question of whether the body exists within the machine or if the machine drives within. The clock, as an example of one of my tableus, is an object that creates order. The clock establishes a structure for us to measure time, progress, efficiency. We have a clear sense of if time is moving quickly, or slowly. And each day the loop begins again. In a more gendered sense of time I think about:
· the biological clock (fertility)
· turning the clock backwards (anti-aging/beauty/youthful skin)
· moving the clock forward (gender equality, equal pay, etc.)
Embedded in the story is the idea of a loop, repeating the same punishment for eternity. When I began this new body of work I was also thinking about the story of Sisyphus — how his eternal damnation exists as a loop; a repetition of effort and 'progress' without reward. That concept can operate as a metaphor for the studio, as we often make small advancements but return to the same core ideas, which can be comforting or drive you mad. It opens up questions about personal and collective progress. Are we just repeating the same behaviors over and over again with little advancement? Maximal amount of effort with little to no return.
-Lindsay Burke, April 2020