B C And from this distance one might never imagine that it is alive grant Hottle Marsyas (detail) 2015 Oil on canvas 72 × 60 inches And from this distance one might never imagine that it is alive © 2016 The Art Gym All rights reserved. No part of this This exhibition and publication are made Marylhurst University book may be used or reproduced in any possible in great part through the generosity 17600 Pacific Highway manner without written permission of the Ford Family Foundation. Other Marylhurst, Oregon 97036 from the publisher, except in the context individuals and businesses provided addi- marylhurst.edu/theartgym of reviews. tional support. Printed in Portland, Oregon The Art Gym is supported by the Robert by Brown Printing and Mercedes Eichholz Foundation, ISBN 978-0-914435-67-9 the Oregon Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The Art Gym’s publication fund is sup- ported by the Harold & Arlene Schnitzer CARE Foundation and Linda Hutchins and John Montague. JANUARY 12— MARCH 5, 2016And from this distanceTHE ART GYM AT MARYLHURST UNIVERSITY oneAMY BERNSTEIN might PAT BOAS CALVIN ROSS CARLnever JACK FEATHERLY imagine RON GRAFF ROBERT HARDGRAVE GRANT HOTTLE MICHAEL LAZARUS MICHELLEthat ROSS AMANDA WOJICK it is alive ESSAYS BY GRAHAM W. BELL & SUE TAYLOR CURATED BY BLAKE SHELL THE ART GYM N º 73 jack Featherly 9 Curator’s notes 11 Graham W. Bell At the beach: Secret abstraction & the undeath of painting 20 Map of the territory Artists included in the exhibition 24 Amy Bernstein 30 Pat Boas 36 Calvin Ross Carl Contents 42 Jack Featherly 48 Ron Graff 54 Robert Hardgrave 60 Grant Hottle 66 Michael Lazarus 72 Michelle Ross 78 Amanda Wojick 85 Sue Taylor Painting’s other atemporality 93 Acknowledgments 96 Notes and colophon jack Featherly Fax Generation 2015 Oil, enamel on canvas 72 × 45 inches 7 Michelle ross 8 From space, it seems an abstraction— a magician’s trick on a darkened stage. And from thisdis- tance one might never imagine that it is alive. It first appeared in the sea almost four billion years ago in the form of single-celled life. In an explosion of life spanning millions of years, nature’s first multicellular organisms began to multiply… Only a hundred thousand years ago, Homo sapiens appear—man.… Rising to a world population of over five billion people, all descended from that original single cell, that first spark of life. But for all our knowledge, what no one can say for certain is what or who ignited that original spark. Is there a plan, a purpose, or a reason to our existence? Will we pass, as those ebefor us, into oblivion, into the sixth extinction that scientists warn is already in progress? Or will the mystery be revealed through a sign, a symbol, a revelation? — DanA scully The X-Files, “Biogenesis” AbstrAction isn’t eAsy to talk about. Counting the uncountable, naming the unnameable: these feel like futile activities. But the very ambiguity of the process is what allows artists to approach concepts dif- ficult to touch on otherwise. In an effort to discuss this exhibition as a whole, I turned to the philosophical musings of FBI Special Agent Dana Scully. The images of our planet that she describes — zooming in until all one can see is a single cell, then zooming out until details are lost in the expanse of the universe — speaks to how scale is thrown off by abstraction: the macro and the micro are seemingly interchangeable at points. Similarly, the question of whether a sign, a symbol, or a revelation will BLAKE SHELL explain the unexplainable, the cause of humanity, acknowledges our The Robert & Mercedes Eichholz Director & Curator ongoing search for truth. Abstraction gives artists a way into the unknown The Art Gym and Belluschi Pavilion and unnamed. Freed from the demands of representation, they’re able to explore process more purely or engage with the ephemeral, the sacred, or other intangibles. Furthermore, the duality in The X-Files between belief (represented by Fox Mulder) and scientific examination (Dana Scully) is echoed in the variety of projects found throughout this exhibition. Some hinge upon intuitive choices, while others are executed according to a more cerebral, conceptual plan. Curator’s A friend told me about a couple, a musician and a visual artist, who often find their creative impulses to be at odds. The artist works from the head; the musician works from the gut. It seems that abstract painting can come from either place. Artists’ reasons, methods, and results may vary, but there is a growing, unifying energy within the world of abstract notes painting at this moment. It feels irreverent, exciting, freeing. It is Right Now. It’s fun. There’s no simple way to sum up the impulses of those artists work- ing in abstraction, except to say that theirs is a great impulse. And Michelle perhaps we shouldn’t try to explain that which defies explanation. Artists ross A moon moth moved 2014–15 are drawn to abstraction — it allows for both a loose structure and a Oil, paper, plaster, graphite way of breaking the rules. As much as the genre is accepted and revered, on birch panel 39 × 30 inches there is still something pretty punk about it. 9 jack Featherly GRAHAM W. BELL At the beach: Take A drive out to the coAst. Then, looking for the curve of the earth on the horizon, feel yourself come into contact with the infinite and abstract nature of our reality. This may all sound very New Age, but within this broader questioning is harbored a very personal experience. We try constantly to connect our singular lives to the communal web, Secret whether for understanding or approval or companionship, but too often get wrapped up in the ideas of others even as our own thoughts are crowded out by the newest and boldest. Abstract painting and our ideas about it have suffered this same fate. An abstraction is something at once universal and personal, having uneasy roots both in the mind of the artist and the world of the viewer. A new generation of painters is syn- abstraction thesizing this precarity not into large, brash compositions, but into an intimate processing of their daily lives. As a branching discipline with constant growth, abstract painting has an expansive family tree. The seasonal leaves that are Sunday painters and first-time students fall away and are renewed each year in a similar & the undeathpattern. The roots grasp firmly at the past 150 years (and beyond), unfazed by the herbicide of late twentieth-century critics and theorists who foretold the death of painting. But what of the new growth? How do we talk about the future of abstract painting in a time so fraught with over- theorization and an unending supply of new artists? What is it that sets jack Featherly Unpattern12 (detail ) one abstraction (or abstractionist) out from its contemporaries? 2015 The new generation of abstract painters, focused on their personal Oil, enamel on canvasof painting 53 × 46 1/2 inches inquiry into life through painting, are secret abstractionists. This is not 11 “secret” as in “covert” or “privileged,” but as in something not immediately knowable without investigation or the state of being secluded or with- drawn.1 These are artists who straddle the line between deep aesthetic rumination and common social interaction, at home in both. There is no mystery here, only an individual language that traces each artist’s path to understanding both the practice of painting and how best to filter their existence through the medium. Perhaps now it is the painter’s job to coalesce the surrounding world into a solid canvas (not that this hasn’t been claimed before). Given the inescapable mix of visual and conceptual stimuli we are exposed to on a minute-by-minute basis, abstraction serves more to make sense of and to get a handle on the day to day. Rather than exploring some intricate personal moment about the theoretical, an abstract painting serves as a sounding board for nonverbal coagulations that result from simply living life. Grant Hottle’s canvases echo comics and metal bands, but are neither. They are not a concrete reference, but a musing on influence and the inescapable media culture in which we all flail. In a similar vein, Michael Lazarus and Calvin Ross Carl pull from innocuous language and everyday design to create vaguely confrontational slogans and com- positions that are at once familiar and alien. They sit in that subcon- scious area of our minds before we bring words to our thoughts, before we let an idea take shape fully and linger in a zone of semirecognition. It is this mode of simultaneous familiarity and discovery that keeps secret abstraction on the edge of a knife. We think we know something, but upon further questioning and assessment we are reminded that our minds get lazy and fill in the gaps with logical conclusions or popular notions.2 Our memories recall the most prominent ideas and the images we see repeated most often. To this end, the typical reader, when asked what abstract painting looks like, will have an answer that may span from Modernism to “things I don’t get.” The culture at large has decided that abstraction is a style (most often Pollock- or Rothkoesque). It is not. Philip Guston, in conversation with Joseph Ablow in 1966, asserted that style is easily dismissed or debunked by the next generation, and that Abstract Expressionism (and abstraction in general, if we are to broaden the take) is a way of questioning how we can continue to make art.3 One must think of abstraction as a mode or process, and not as a visual 1.