JAMES NARES Press Highlights
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JAMES NARES Press Highlights 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com PA UL KASMIN GALLERY Art Museum announces 2018-19 slate of exhibitions Bobby Tanzilo July 25, 2018 Photography: James Nares [EXTRACT] James Nares: Moves June 14-Oct. 6, 2019 James Nares: Moves is the first retrospective for the British-born, New York-based artist. Over the course of a career spanning five decades, Nares (b. 1953) has investigated, challenged, and expanded the boundaries of his multiple media, producing significant projects in painting, sculpture, drawing, film, photography and music. While the artist's single-brushstroke paintings remain the most recognizable and celebrated of his works, the release of STREET, in 2011, brought to the fore a vital aspect of the artist's production: film. Indeed, despite Nares' renown as a painter, film has served as his most 293 & 297 TENTH AVENUE 515 WEST 27TH STREET TELEPHONE 212 563 4474 NEW YORK, NY 10001 PAULKASMINGALLERY.COM PA UL KASMIN GALLERY steadfast and productive interlocutor and protagonist. This exhibition will highlight key works and projects from the artist's career and shed light on the connections between them; specifically the exhibition will elucidate the manner in which film informs Nares' explorations of gesture, time, and motion and the multiple facets of his career. Ultimately, James Nares: Moves posits the artist's entire body of work as innately "filmic" or "photographic," revealing a new way to understand the nature of his art making and the significance of his career to postwar art in New York and beyond. Organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum. 293 & 297 TENTH AVENUE 515 WEST 27TH STREET TELEPHONE 212 563 4474 NEW YORK, NY 10001 PAULKASMINGALLERY.COM PA UL KASMIN GALLERY A Guide to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s New York Mark Asch May 4, 2018 Photo: Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures [EXTRACT] As its title implies, Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat takes a circumscribed time frame: Basquiat’s emergence as a charismatic kid going to shows in the close-knit post-punk Lower East Side of the late 1970s, selling his first painting in the early 1980s, and launching himself into the stratosphere. Director Sara Driver was there at the time, and draws on her Rolodex of friends, scene survivors, and friends of Basquiat — including her longtime romantic partner Jim Jarmusch, who, in his brief interview, retells a story they both presumably remember, of the time Basquiat interrupted them on a “nice little romantic walk” to give Driver a flower. Basquiat is presented as a world-historical genius who both passed through that time and place, and was a product of it — an ambitious, curious creator and careerist who was inspired by the cross- currents of New Wave and hip-hop, street and Pop art, DIY filmmaking and squatting in New York 293 & 297 TENTH AVENUE 515 WEST 27TH STREET TELEPHONE 212 563 4474 NEW YORK, NY 10001 PAULKASMINGALLERY.COM PA UL KASMIN GALLERY during the years following “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Driver re-creates the era with copious archival material: not just news clips and private snapshots, but art, and especially films made by her and Basquiat’s friends and fellow travelers during the era. Below, we’ve created a glossary elaborating on many of the sources and references within Driver’s dual portrait of a quintessentially New York man and milieu. James Nares A painter and musician, Nares exemplifies the interdisciplinary crossovers within the close-knit downtown scene, and the diverse artistic energies that Basquiat would draw on for his intellectually voracious work. Driver inserts clips from several of Nares’s short films as stock footage of desolate NYC — though perhaps the film of his most relevant to the milieu is the feature-length Super 8 film Rome ’78, a sort of scenester toga party featuring a Who’s Who of downtown artist types play-acting at legendary decadence in somebody’s apartment. The film’s hey-kids-let’s-put-on-a-show and quotation-marks irony reflect a fertile era brimming with creativity and prankish self-confidence, and its proud amateurism and bold personality parallel the unpredictable lines and inimitable flair of Basquiat’s paintings. 293 & 297 TENTH AVENUE 515 WEST 27TH STREET TELEPHONE 212 563 4474 NEW YORK, NY 10001 PAULKASMINGALLERY.COM David Ebony's Top 10 New York Gallery Shows for April 04-08-16 David Ebony James Nares, Jahanara, video, 2015. Photo: Courtesy Paul Kasmin Gallery. 8. James Nares at Paul Kasmin Gallery, through April 23. At first there doesn't seem to be much action in James Nares's video portraits. The images of his sitters—mostly the artist's friends and art-world denizens, such as Douglas Crimp, Jim Jarmusch, Amy Taubin, Walter Robinson, and Glenn O'Brien, as well as the artist's daughters, Sasha, Zarina, and Jahanara—appear rather static, as if these were still images in a photography show. However, given time, a tense drama slowly unfolds in each of the videos, which are presented as life-size portraits on vertically hung monitors. Subtle hand movements, a blink of an eye, or a gentle shift in pose begin to seem like heightened drama. Filmed wearing a luminous Indian sari, and engaged in a graceful dance, Jahanara is one of the most animated of the portrait subjects. Known for hyper-energized paintings featuring single, convulsive gestural brushstrokes, Nares, in this show, uses high- speed cameras to capture at several hundred frames per second a sense of motion, or what the artist describes in a press statement as “micro-moments." After a while, the sitters, despite their formal comportment, set against stark neutral backgrounds, become even more lifelike and mesmerizing. Still Life with Movement: James Nares at Paul Kasmin 04-02-16 Peter Malone James Nares, Jahanara, 2016. Video, TRT: 54:55 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Paul Kasmin. “James Nares: Portraits,” currently at Paul Kasmin, offers one of the more intriguing efforts by a contemporary artist to affect the portrait genre, currently enjoying a popular revival. Though appearing at first glance to be still photos, these portraits are actually shot with a special video camera that can record in excess of 300 frames per second, many more times a camera’s normal rate. Each portrait in the exhibition amounts to an extremely slow-motion video displayed on HD screens with their respective subjects posed mostly in conventional head-and-shoulders format. The result is that a viewer can track a subject’s movements as methodically as one can follow a snail on a branch. In acquiescing to this weirdly protracted form of observation, the effect is mesmerizing — just as mesmerizing as it was in Bill Viola’s “Quintet” videos 15 years ago. James Nares, Jim, 2015. Video, TRT: 47:25 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Paul Kasmin. The glacially slow movement of each subject certainly holds one’s attention, and to put this to use, Nares had each sitter accentuate a specific movement. Titled with the subject’s first name only, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, Jim (2015) offers a turn of the head, while film critic Amy Taubin, in Amy (2015), augments a similar gesture with a smile that replaces a grave stare. These examples are mere fragments, as some of the videos last up to 20 minutes. Art critic and curator Douglas Crimp, posing for Douglas (2015), clasps his hands together just under his chin, sometimes interlacing his long fingers in a series of gestures that resembles the sort of unconscious movement a portrait subject is likely to indulge in when an appropriate gesture escapes them. Others display more calculated gestures, like Jahanara (2016), in which a young woman in South Asian dress performs dance-like motions with her arms gently ascending and descending. More than the other pieces in the show, her gestures seem calculated to complement the camera’s artifice. And this is where the work’s more contradictory aspect becomes apparent. Though charming, her attempt to cooperate with the artist’s intentions manages to put even greater emphasis on the camera’s unusual interpretive bias, coldly thwarting her effort to create something personal. Jahanara is a portrait of one of Nares’s three daughters participating in the series. The remaining subjects are all well-known art world figures and friends of the artist, suggesting Nares wished to lend his project the standing of celebrity along with a note of personal and emotional involvement. Visual aspects are ordinary. The lighting of many is stark but not exaggeratedly so — softly diffused and aimed generally toward the front. Whatever contrast it creates naturally changes as the subject turns from left to right, or right to left. Backgrounds tend to be dark. A deep charcoal blue for instance does the job of offsetting the platinum shock of Jim Jarmusch’s hair. James Nares, Amy, 2015. Video, TRT: 12:20 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Paul Kasmin. A temporal medium like video applied to a still-image genre like portraiture brings the viewer into an unsettling space where neither a feeling for cinema nor any sensitivity toward still images are much help in coming to terms with what they are experiencing, mostly because as a hybrid their individual characteristics cancel each other out. To watch Amy morph from a frown to a smile holds our attention to the tiny muscle changes that create her expression. But in doing so, the expression itself becomes secondary — it feels bypassed. What can be appreciated of her humanity is undercut by the camera’s mechanism. As social animals we are super sensitive to, yet almost entirely unaware of, how we read facial nuance.