Joshua Mosley in his studio at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is chair of the Fine Arts Department

Below is a short clip from the interview. Click “read more” for the full interview. Also on the jump page, a YouTube audio/slide show.

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This episode is edited by Peter Crimmins. The music is by Eric Biondo. The slide show is edited by artblog Intern Alison McMenamin. Thanks to the Knight Foundation for helping us get the ball rolling on this project. Thanks also to J-Lab‘s Enterprise Reporting Fund and William Penn Foundation for additional support and to our partner WHYY NewsWorks for their ongoing support and for sharing artblog radio episodes on the arts & culture page of their community news site NewsWorks.org. You can subscribe to artblog radio on iTunes

Joshua Mosley at Site Santa Fe

Joshua Mosley, film still from dread, animated film. 6 minutes. Photo courtesy of ICA which showed the piece last year

Artist of sublime and philosophical clay animations with lovely soundtracks, Joshua Mosley was in the last Venice Bienale.  This summer his work is included in another international biennial, Site Santa Fe.  I’m not sure what film Mosley will be showing.

Here’s who else is in that big show: Robert Breer, Paul Chan, Martha Colburn, Thomas Demand, Brent Green,
George Griffin, Ezra Johnson, Bill T. Jones & OpenEnded Group, Mary Reid Kelley,
William Kentridge, Avish Khebrehzadeh, Laleh Khorramian, Maria Lassnig,
Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Joshua Mosley, Oscar Muñoz, Jacco Olivier, Raymond Pettibon,
Robert Pruitt, Christine Rebet, Robin Rhode, Hiraki Sawa, Berni Searle, Cindy Sherman, 
Federico Solmi, Kara Walker, with historical works by Edison Manufacturing Company,
Fleischer Studios, Lotte Reiniger, and Dziga Vertov.   The biennial is curated by Sarah Lewis and Daniel Belasco and runs June 20-Jan 2, 2011. More about the biennial here.

Tristin Lowe in orbit at RISD Art Museum

Tristin Lowe's new felted piece, Lunacy, at the RISD museum

Fresh off tackling a felted inflatable sculpture of the world’s largest mammal, Mocha Dick the mythic whale, Tristin Lowe has gone celestial, sculpting a room-sized felted ball with craters and an orbiting space capsule. The piece, called Lunacy,  just opened at RISD museum.

Tristin Lowe, Lunacy and Visither 1 at the RISD museum. All photos of this work courtesy of the artist

There are fourteen sections sewn together and hand worked, and Tristin said in an email that the piece is 12 ft 6 in in diameter and made of wool felt.

Visither 1

“But it’s not stitched form work, like Mocha was,” he said.

[Ed note:  Mocha Dick, which showed last summer at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, has been traveling.  Here's a video of Lowe installing the work at Williams College in Massachusetts.]

Lunacy, detail of craters

“I used tweezers and sculpted and brushed the felt over a sealed-air (no fan) silent inflatable armature of clear pvc  (that you can see into, thru a few craters, in spots).   RISD ceilings are almost 20′ and the neon piece I made with my uncle Dean Lowe (Visither 1) is roughly 50″ l x 22″ h x 31″ w)  with Argon gas and aluminum frame. ”

Tristin Lowe: Under the Influence, May 28 through Oct. 24 (closed in August).  More information about the installation here.

Purtill Family Business  designs Qwangju Biennale sourcebook

Qwangju Biennial sourcebook designed by Purtill Family Business

Did you know we have a powerhouse art catalog designer in Philly who has worked with major museums like the Whitney and has just finished the alternative/supplemental catalog for the Qwangju Biennale? Purtill Family Business, run by Conny Purtill (ICA curator Jenelle Porter’s significant other) is the designer. The new book is a daunting 572 pages with 400 color images, the tome is a research compendium for the biennale with information about the artists. It sounds a little like the book for the Younger than Jesus show at the New Museum–an outtake meant to be a kind of directory of facts and figures.

I’M NOT THERE
Edited by Massimiliano Gioni
Publication Advisors: Defne Ayas (ArtHub Asia)
Davide Quadrio (ArtHub Asia / Far East Far West Ltd)
Managing Editor: Cecilia Alemani
Designed by: Purtill Family Business
Paperback, 7 x 10 in., 572 pages including over 400 color reproductions
ISBN 978-89-87719-11-5
U.S. $20.00
Distributed by DAP More information on the 8th Gwangju Biennale

I’m Not There is published as a satellite research project of the 8th Gwangju Biennale. Separate from the exhibition
catalogue.  I’m Not There will be released June 16, 2010 in Basel, Switzerland.

Donald E. Camp, Man Who Hears Music, Andre Raphael Smith, Earth pigment and casein mono-print, 22” X 30”, 2006

I don’t want to say much more about the ideas in there (so many more I can hardly believe it) because if you go, the show will reveal itself to you in ways you won’t expect. And you should go.

Here are some more reasons why:

Photographer Donald Camp’s elemental, giant portraits of African American men dominate the show. If you have never seen these one-offs printed with earth and casein, you owe it to yourself to see them now. These portraits tell a tale of self-invention and gravitas that overwhelms the popular culture’s focus on African American men as gangsters and gangstas. Camp is a former photographer for the Philadelphia Bulletin who manages to indict even the crappy newsprint and its quick and dirty printing methods in these masterpieces of material and social depth.

James Mundie, Portrait of a Big-fingered Boy, Pen and ink, 8” x 6”, 2004

James G. Mundie’s small ink drawings of circus freaks–another group of outsiders reimagined, dignified, and preserved by portraits that borrow art historical compositions–stand up well, even next to Camp’s gorgeous ultra closeups. Mundie and Camp are both on a mission to reestablish into the mainstream the rejected, without tampering with the subjects’ self-images and their control of their own destiny.

Matthew Fisher, The Ocean, Pencil on paper, 10 1/4” x 9 1/8”, 2009

Two other drawing wizards–Matt Fisher and Rob Matthews–are still more reasons to see this exhibit. Fisher’s 18th Century soldiers are vulnerable and awkward, even when they cavort or daydream. The delicate drawings are everyman in costume, playing a role and yet not quite inhabiting the clothes,  adult boys who are confused about how they could possibly be who they are and where they are–models of self-doubt as modern as they are antique. The deadpan drawings are delightful and quite like the soldiers–dreamy storybook figures that leap off the page into your heart.

Rob Matthews, Steve, Graphite on paper, 9” X 9”, 2008

In contrast to Fisher’s figures who exist as universal soldiers of any time, Rob Matthews’ portraits are documents of this time–ordinary family and friends depicted with art historical allusions that preserve the subjects in the continuum of history, that place them in that collective memory that erases most mortals in a couple of generations. Matthews said he thinks of these as memorials, and therefore has written on the back the subjects names and particulars. The context of this show highlights all the thinking and complexity that has gone into this seemingly deadpan take on social circumstances that nearly consume individual identity.

Joshua Mosley, Commute, Still image from mixed media animation, 2003

Out on his own moon, Joshua Mosley’s claymation cyber-video Commuter uses the cell phone as the opening metaphor for journeying beyond concrete physical circumstances to some place in the imagination or the mind. The mind’s world here is futuristic, an adventure down the wormhole of technology where physical and genetic facts seem almost beside the point! The journey is playful, defying nature, gravity, and other limits–and highlighting how technology is a magical mystery tour where we can escape who we really are where we really are.

Laura Graham, Forrest, 40” x 60” inches, Archival pigment print from 4x5 film, 2006

In the context of these complex works, Laura Graham’s large, introspective photos of women seem too large, their hints of psychological depth and mythic underpinnings not fully realized.

Beautiful Human, curated by Shelley Spector, is up to Oct. 9, 2009.Bea

Joshua Mosley‘s “dread” and Anthony Campuzano‘s “touch sensitive,” in ICA‘s upstairs galleries, are sophisticated narrative disquisitions on the world and mankind’s place in it.  The pieces are in other respects nothing alike.

Joshua Mosley "Dread" at ICA. This is Pascal.

“dread” is a multi-part installation with a display of five small bronze sculptural figures and a six-minute black and white computer animation.

Dread installation at ICA. That's Mosley, sitting against the wall, watching with everyone at the opening.

The animation – projected large in a dark gallery with benches for seating — marries gorgeous landscape photographs, a lyrical soundtrack and animated figures based on clay sculptures the artist made of a dog, a cow and the philosophers Rousseau (1762) and Pascal (1669).

Dread --Pascal and Rousseau in the woods

In the video, the philosophers take a walk in the woods, talk of God, and encounter death.  The piece suggests that man may write philosophy about God’s existence and nature’s goodness but that truth lies elsewhere: Nature is beautiful but ultimately unknowable and God has better things to do than take care two philosophers in the woods.

Dread--the cow. The dog, named Dread (not pictured) is based on a dog Eadward Muybridge photographed in his motion studies.

The small catalog for the show documents the film and sculptures and includes a pithy essay by historian Harvey Mitchell.

Anthony Campuzano. Self-portrait via Donald Crowhurst, 2008. ink, colored pencil on board. 40x30"

Campuzano‘s word art in framed poster-sized pieces and pinned to two free-standing cork boards is based on anecdotes from news sources ranging from pop culture magazines to obituaries in local newspapers.

Everything is filtered through the artist’s wry philosophy, a combination of belief in Murphy’s law and praise of the common man who carries on.

Anthony Campuzano. detail of Various titles, Various times 1 and 2. ink on paper, pushpins, cork, wood, acrylic, hardware, enamel and steel. 72x48 1/2 x 20

The large and small hand-lettered works tell stories in streams of urgent-looking upper-case letters that grow bigger towards the bottom and rush down the page with no punctuation to stop them.

Campuzano uses words for their content.  He loves the obituaries for their ability to distill a life down to a few labels: “exceptional woman; historian, had green thumb; volunteer fundraiser; educator; Texas judge; Hee Haw performer, real estate agent; lawyer and activist” are a few examples from “Various Titles, Various Times #1 and #2″.

Various titles, Various times, 1 and 2. installation

But the words are graphic design tools as well and many of the pieces have raking diagonals or two-column newspaper-like formats that imbue them with a modernist look.  They are highly self-referential however and highly post-post modern.   In fact they’re like hand-made blog posts waiting for comments.  (Campuzano is indeed a blogger — his ice station zebra blog is a several-times-a-week stream of music and movie clips and thought posts.)

Bucking the rising tide of skin deep art, Mosley and Campuzano tackle big questions that are as important today as ever. Both artists recently participated in a group show of drawings at the University of the Arts, and Campuzano was also featured in “Rich Text” at Fleisher/Ollman Gallery last month.

Joshua Mosley: dread and Anthony Campuzano: Touch Sensitive, to Mar. 29. ICA,  118 S. 36^th St.  215 898 7108.

A marvel of a drawing Howard Finster made for Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts) graces the entrance of the exhibit Drawing in the World at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at UArts. The drawing made in 1981 for an outsider art exhibit in the same gallery — organized by Elsa Weiner (Elsa Longhauser) — stopped us in our tracks. Our eyes traced the banners of names of artists animating the surface; we admired the way Finster used Martin Ramirez-like arcs of lines to define and fill space; we pondered the past and the present all represented in this drawing–Philadelphia art history, outsider art history, and the school’s history and Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery’s history. (RWG, now run by Sid Sachs, who stepped us through the show, mentioned the gallery’s impressive list of directors including Longhauser, Paula Marincola, Janet Kardon, Leah Douglas and Gerard Brown!)

Here’s what we say about the Finster:  Keep this iconic piece out of storage already… and make it into a poster or something! We at artblog declare it a treasure–a signature piece of the school’s and the gallery’s identity.

Cynthia Lin, Crop1Gmouth815, 2006
graphite on paper, courtesy of the artist. Lin’s enormous, extreme closeup of lips is the sexiest piece in the show, and suggests some sort of electronic process behind it, whether it’s xerox or digital.

The rest of the show lived up to the Finster! It’s a far-reaching exhibit, showing a wide variety of contemporary and traditional approaches to drawing, and it is filled with outstanding work, even though it grew out of a humble mission to support the drawing curriculum. (See the results of the school’s recent drawingathon in the Hamilton Foyer gallery across the street from RWG.)

Pencil or pen never touch paper in Josh Mosley’s totally cyber-made drawings

Plus so much of the work in this show is related to work now showing at the ICA and Fleisher/Ollman–all serendipitous concordance. Sachs said he didn’t know about this show’s harmonic convergence with Anthony Campuzano‘s and Josh Mosley‘s solo exhibits at the ICA right now.

Mel Bochner, Indifferent 2007, ink on paper

He was surprised when he saw that Campuzano, Mel Bochner, and Isaac Resnikoff are also currently in the Rich Text exhibit at Fleisher/Ollman.

Anthony Campuzano, Vietnam/Iraq, Cronkite/Woodward, 2007
colored pencil and graphite on illustration board

Crazy! But it all works great for the artists — a trifecta for Campuzano and double whammy for the others. 

Isaac Resnikoff,

While in Dallas for the College Art Association annual meeting I managed to slip away to see some art. At the Dallas Museum of Art was a small exhibition, Leonora Carrington; What She Might Be, containing twenty-five works by an artist some ten years younger than Lee Miller and Frida Kahlo, both of whom she knew ( both currently have exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), see post and post). The English-born Carrington, who is celebrating her ninetieth birthday, is another woman who used her beauty as entree into the artworld. At nineteen she fled her proper bourgeoise upbringing (she’d been presented at court to George V) to go to Paris with Max Ernst where they were part of the Surrealist circle. Fleeing the Germans she ended up in Mexico City in 1943, as did a number of other Surrealists, and became a close friend of the expatriate Spanish artist, Remedios Varo.

Country House, 1957, oil on canvas, 34 1/2 x 26 1/2 inches, private collection, photo courtesy of Dallas Museum of Art

As with the Kahlo exhibition (organized by the Walker Art Center and currently at the PMA), the Carrington show contained numerous photographs of the artist (presumably from her own collection), picturing her with family and friends, from infancy to maturity. This much emphasis on biography is unusual in art exhibitions; while Frida concentrated on self-portraiture, Carrington didn’t. Don’t know whether it’s audience demand or curatorial choice, but I can’t think of a male artist who’s been presented this way.

Carrington’s touch is delicate and her imagery dreamy and fantastical – a sort of Magic Realism avant la lettre (that is, Magic Realism as used to describe a strain of Latin American literature; the term was used in the 20s and later to describe paintings that were more hyper-real than surreal). Altogether her work has an illustrational quality; in fact, she both wrote and illustrated books. Some of the modest ink drawings have entertaining titles, such as The Fall of the House of Mink. The one painting that has a compelling interest for its paintwork is Country House, largely done with thin, chalky, white paint for both background and central image. The house lost in mist and foliage is both lyrical and mysterious; it has some of the elusive qualities of Armando Reveron’s evanescent white nudes.

Double Portrait (Self-Portrait with Max Ernst), 1938, oil on canvas, 25 3/4 x 32 1/4 inches,
Rimrock Foundation

Double Portrait intrigued me because of its unfinished state. Unfinished paintings offer the clearest view of how an artist works. In this self-portrait with Ernst in the bird costume of his alter-ego Carrington began by sketching the figures in fluid brown paint on a mid-toned, tan ground. She filled in the faces and some of the figures but stopped before painting her legs or any of the background.

Upcoming Talks on Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo

Susan Alberth, author of the only substantial monograph on Carrington available in English will be speaking this Saturday, March 8 at 3 pm at Taller Puertorriqueño, where on May 3rd, Janet Kaplan will discuss the work of Remedios Varo.

Joshua Mosley still from A Vue, 2004, mixed-media animation, high-definition video, © Joshua Mosley

I made a quick visit to the Museum of Modern Art Ft. Worth where, in addition to seeing the new building by Tadeo Ando and a prime collection of painting and sculpture from the 1950s-70s, I caught a solo exhibition of Philadelphian, Joshua Mosley. A Vue, a high-definition animated video projected onto a large screen was shown along with a 24 inch bronze sculpture of George Washington Carver (that reads as a colossus in the video, see detail above) and a number of ink wash and charcoal sketches.

Joshua Mosley still from A Vue, 2004, mixed-media animation, high-definition video, © Joshua Mosley

Mosley’s use of music (an original score by Abby Schneider) and somewhat elegiac tone recalls William Kentridge’s Felix Teitlebaum series, but his clay-mation figures before painted backgrounds and tale of life decisions and lost opportunities is his own. The eight-minute piece set in George Washington Carver’s birthplace involves a park ranger, who cares for the huge Carver monument, and his abortive relationship with a scientist who has moved to the town. It’s a sort of modern-day Brief Encounter, with commitment to work rather than family coming between the couple. Despite having to stand to view it, the video attracted a large and well-deserved audience.

Joshua Mosley still from A Vue, 2004, mixed-media animation, high-definition video, © Joshua Mosley

Joshua Mosley
I got a note from Mosley recently. The artist has been in Rome all year on fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. He said his work will be in the International show installed in two rooms of the Italian Pavilion. Mosley’s project is called Dread, and it’s five bronzes and a six-minute animation projection.

Anthia, from Dread, 2007 – Mixed Media Animation, 6 minutes, and five bronze sculptures. Photo courtesy of the artist.

The project is a fictional animated walk in the woods taken by two French philosophers, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) and Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). The two thinkers have incompatible philosophies and as they talk they go deeper into the woods and deeper into irreconcilable differences.

I live with a philosopher but he’s out of town at the moment and since I can’t say I’ve ever read any Pascal or Rousseau I asked Max, who’s studied philosophy. He told me about Pascal’s Wager: Given that you don’t know whether God exists you should lead your life as a Christian anyway and if there is a heaven you’re in. Here’s Pascal’s texts online.

Because of many French classes I know Rousseau was about human freedom and the rights of man and that his thoughts influenced the French Revolution. Somehow I think he was not as tamped down and conservative as Pascal. So we will imagine a God-fearing Christian and a Secular Humanist in the woods — and that is scary enough to begin with. The pairing of philosophers has great resonance with discussions today and the clash of ideologies that has brought the world to the brink.

Dread, by the way, is the name of the dog character in Mosley’s piece (there is also a cow character). Dread was also the name of the dog in one of Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic motion studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mosley has been working on the ideas in Dread for some time. Here’s my short Q&A with Mosley that ran in the Weekly in 2005.

The backgrounds in the animations, says Mosley, are versions of six digital photographs, translated from color to black and white and digitally altered. The clay and resin figures were 3D scanned for the animation.

And with Mosley, music is always big. Here’s what he said: “I composed the music, it’s orchestral (sort of like an extended jazz ensemble) – but has parts for gamba and harpsichord that I worked on here in Italy.. The people speak gamba..”

Mosley said he’ll be back in Philadelphia in August and that he hopes to show the piece in Philadelphia next year.

Odili Donald Odita

Odili Donald Odita
Open Sky
2007
acrylic on canvas
60 x 80 inches

I heard about Odita’s inclusion in the Bienale a few months back and recently was reminded of that fact by Locks Gallery’s Doug Schaller when he wrote to tell me about the gallery’s Post Painterly Abstraction show, in which Odita’s work is included. This is Odita’s first exhibit in Philadelphia, Schaller believes. Others in the show are Stuart Netsky, David Row, Polly Apfelbaum, Paul Feeley (early work), Andy Collins, Judy Chicago (early work), Edna Andrade (early work).