Studio work 2/12/12

516 ARTS New Mexico Showcase opens this weekend, Sat. Feb. 4, 2012

Jill Christian, Tranquil Sky, 2011

This weekend, stop by the opening of the New Mexico Showcase exhibition at 516 ARTS!

One of my paintings will be in the show along with work by 80 New Mexico Artists.

Opening Reception: Saturday, February 4, 6-8pm
Featuring live, old-school country/rock-n-roll with The Joneses

Feb 4 - Apr 28, 2012
516 ARTS Anniversary Juried Exhibition

For more information, visit the 516 ARTS website.

516 ARTS
a nonprofit artspace in downtown Albuquerque
516 Central Ave SW
Albuquerque, NM 87102
t. 505-242-1445
Open Tue-Sat, 12-5pm

516 ARTS is located on Central Avenue between 5th & 6th Streets

516 ARTS announces New Mexico Showcase, a juried exhibition of New Mexico artists in celebration of our fifth anniversary. We are pleased to welcome guest juror Peter Frank, an acclaimed curator and art critic based in Los Angeles. Mr Frank is currently Associate Editor of Fabrik magazine and art critic for The Huffington Post. The exhibition features 80 emerging and established artists (of the 1,018 pieces submitted by 279 artists, Mr. Frank selected 73 artists and made seven special invitations to artists he wanted to honor). 516 ARTS opened five years ago with an invitational exhibition of New Mexico artists. This time we used the juried format to cast a wider net and open up the opportunity to artists we might not have known about otherwise. Peter Frank has selected a record number of artists ever to be shown at 516 ARTS in a single exhibition, highlighting the abundance of talent in New Mexico. The selected artists come from over 30 cities and towns across the state. Mr. Frank observed, "It was a delight, not a chore, to sift through the submissions, never knowing what was coming next, but reasonably sure it wouldn't be the same old same old. The hard part was winnowing the submissions down to a selection that could fit into 516's space; as capatious as it is, New Mexico's worthy art could fill it many times over."

James Siena, "Demystification" at Tamarind Gallery

James Siena, Sawtoothed Angry Form, 2010, enamel on aluminum panel.


Last night, Dec. 8, I attended a talk by James Siena, titled "Demystification" at Tamarind Institute (Siena is currently at Tamarind creating lithographs in their workshop).

I of course don't know him, but as a member of the audience I found him to be smart, modest, engaging, and sincere.  I quite liked him and I like his work.

Siena started off engaging us by associating the landscape of New Mexico with his work.  He talked about his interest in phenomenology and details emerging from material.  Similarly, how forms emerge from the landscape, like the strata of mountains and valleys in New Mexico formed from millennia of sea wearing on rock.  I loved the way in which he related his early involvement with performance art to his two-dimensional work: the performance had rules for how it was to be carried out and it was created and made by hand in a very material way.

He touched upon his "philosophy" a bit when he talked about how there is an aspect (or quality) to an artwork that can't be intellectualized.  He emphasized the activity of an artist in the studio, not thinking about or addressing the work from a curator's or collector's perspective -- the artist as a person experiencing their own work.  He mentioned an anecdote of repeating a painting in a larger format and then feeling apologetic about it during a studio visit with Terry Winters.  Winters said something along the lines of, "maybe you just wanted to experience doing it again." Any artist should be free to not only experience doing it again, but doing a lot of different things, letting one thing lead to another.

One beautiful lithograph on the wall behind Siena was created on a broken stone with a jagged edge on one side.   It demonstrated a couple of his interests: the idea of compression and the pressure of the edge, the organic, and rule-based procedures.  As the pattern approached the wavy edge, he had to shrink the motifs in order to not violate his rule about completing a row and column.  The result was an undulating, illusionistic space that had an organic feeling.

Siena's wife, Katia Santibañez, was also at the talk.  With a brief online search, I discovered she paints beautiful paintings that address repetition and mark-making.  In 2008, Phong Bui at The Brooklyn Rail wrote about her then new paintings in Katia Santibanez New Work.  Also see "Journey of a Solitary Painter" at Morgan Lehman, Oct. 20-Dec. 10, 2011.


Katia Santibañez, "Between the Waves" (2008). Acrylic on wood. 24 × 24 inches. 
Image from Katia Santibañez at Danese Gallery.

Here are some links for James Siena:

New Art TV video (2010) of James Siena in his studio: http://www.newarttv.com/James+Siena.
James Kalm, James Siena at PaceWildenstein (2008).
James Kalm, James Siena, March 2011.
John Yau, James Siena at Pace Gallery, March 25-April 30, 2011.