The notion of the extended infographic is clearly in the air, Mr. Edward Tufte would be glad to know.
I recently gave an art director friend a copy of IDN magazine that was a showcase of exotic, expressive infographic design, some of it the deliciously oppositional combination of hard data with a subversively Raygun aesthetic.
Chris Jordan, in the handful of pieces from his Running the Numbers series on view in the current APEX show in the Portland Art Museum, employs a grandiose version of the infographic in large-scale prints that notably employ photo-collage (or specifically: Photoshop collage) rather than the common vector-graphic based illustration of the infographic. There is no summary of data here…no one icon representing 1,000 men, cigarettes, airplanes. Jordan’s M.O. is a one-for-one representation of data with photographed object. The objects are deployed as texture (426,000 cell phones filling a frame) or pixel/brushstroke in the service of image creation.
An example of the latter is “Skull with Cigarette,” a Seurat by way of Chuck Close image substituting 200,000 tiny tiles of cigarette box tops for brushstroke or gridpoint. It’s seductive in the way that Google Earth is, pulling you in closer and closer. Unlike Google Earth, here the viewer is pulled in away from the resolved image to its means, which of course is the artist’s “point.” And Running the Numbers is didactic work. The skull tells us via its wall tag that the 200,000 cigarette box tops represent “the number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking every six months.” The Numbers address easy targets like smoking, waste, prescription-drug abuse, together creating a portrait of late-capitalism America. And although we’re talking about death, the dying planet, and so forth here, the images are sanitized and in the case of “Lightbulbs” in particular, extraordinarily beautiful.
“Lightbulbs” of the lot, is the most successful piece because it is more open ended in that in spite of its wall tag, it doesn’t need to be “about” wasting energy. It’s an image of thousands of milky, glowing lightbulbs repeated on a black ground, tiny and densely placed in the center, progressively larger and more widely spaced in front of and around the center. By calling to mind early images of the Milky Way, it can be read as addressing vastness, isolation, the consequences or inconsequence of individual action or (why not go all the way) existence.
The work needs this kind of open-endedness and complexity to distinguish it from illustrations in the better periodicals. “Lightbulbs” finds the escape from the trap much overtly political art finds itself in, hitting the nail too directly (ouch) on the head.
–Radon
POSTED: April 25th, 2009 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: apex, art, portland art museum | No Comments »
Detail: ” s/plit,” Jenene Nagy, 2008, Site-specific installation with latex paint, drywall, wood, and neon. Courtesy of the artist.
Lit. Like a bulb. Or a book. Or a class about a book. Split like a seam or a house come under the ministrations of one Gordon Matta-Clark. Split, rent from ordinary circumstances. Spit or sit. It. Multifaceted like a cut gem, the word “split” when rent with a well-placed slash, all the more deliciously ambiguous. “s/plit” is Portland-based artist Jenene Nagy’s installation as part of the Portland Art Museum’s APEX series that brings dynamic regional artists space into the institution to Make Something Happen. Kudos, NW Curator, Jennifer Gately.
s/plit closes after tomorrow (June 22). Here’s why you need to go see it if you haven’t already been thrice.
Sited and Sited
s/plit fully engages the space in a way that no other APEX artist has. It’s not an installation series, so fine, but this is exciting and not to be missed. What do you mean “engages the space”? Nagy’s work dynamically draws you in, spins you around, and draws your gaze upward and over there. (all the more remarkable as this isn’t done with image, with color and color, it’s simply form (purple) enhanced with the briefest rhythmic frosting of neon light.) Eyes swept up and over your right shoulder, you notice an architectural feature, a cutout high in the wall above a doorway, that you have never noticed before. In this way, like good and truly site specific art, s/plit asks us to re-see a space. It’s the same (critical) function a small child performs on an urban walkabout, teaching us to re-see spaces, features, objects we have neglected to notice, ceased to see. Not coincidentally, the gallery Nagy runs with Josh Smith, Tilt, has shown exemplary work of this nature, esp. that of Alison Owen.
Your Hem Is Showing
The piece starts on the wall, as purple painted jagged form, grows off the wall and you notice the materials at work: the 2 x 4’s holding up panels that continue the wall-painted forms out into the space. You notice the transparency, the deliberate lack of sleight of hand, the methods of the panels’ suspension are here for all to see. And s/plit starts to talk about the walls of this site here, walls we take for granted in their paint over drywall over 2 x 4 studs, 16″ on center, say, foregrounding the space and its containment in interesting ways.
And were your experience of the work to stop here, it would be sufficient. But there’s a bit more, if you’d care to dig. Nagy is thinking about pre-fab American subdivision architecture, advertising billboards, stage props. The purple Nagy chose is a remembered shade, a sunset I think it was. Or see beyond walls, if you are the type whose mind can’t avoid looking at form as representing, and see horizon lines and reductionist landscapes, particularly with Nagy’s new use of glimmers of angular neon which could be reflections, water or glass. It’s a piece that perfectly balances appeals to intellect and eye.
Jeanene Nagy’s “s/plit” is located in the Wintercross Family Foundation Gallery, 4th floor, Center for Northwest Art, Hoffman Wing of the Portland Art Museum (1219 SW Park).
See also:
Nagy has work at upcoming shows in Brooklyn and Berlin: Au Courant at Dam, Stuhltrager in Brooklyn and at Knowable Terrains at Takt kunstprojektraum in Berlin.
“Slip,” Jenene Nagy, 2008. Latex paint and paper, 97”x14”.
POSTED: June 22nd, 2008 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: apex, art, artist, portland art museum | No Comments »