Systems, processes, and habits are a few of the technologies that we use to organize ourselves and our relationships.
These technologies can often be invisible and unconsciously lived, but they strongly shape where we are and where we’re going. The recently acquired artworks collected here reflect on how these organizing technologies can be enablers of self-loss or of self-actualization. A number of these artworks acknowledge the stifling constraints that devices like systems, processes, and habits can place on an individual. However, other works offer a glimpse into how these devices can help us evade these same constraints and organize moments of freedom.
pigmented plaster on MDF panel 40 inches x 30 inches
(b. 1964 — Richmond, Virginia, U.S.) Elise Ferguson trowels layers of plaster—what would typically be described as a sculptor’s material—to form abstract paintings on panel. Through the paintings, she explores the capabilities and physical limits of the material, and the results are both tactile and cerebral.
The precise grids, concentric circles, and undulating patterns Ferguson uses are reminiscent of the graphic design of the ’60s—a visual language that was often used to visualize the hope for a peaceful future of internationalism and scientific rationalism. This hope was never fully realized, and now this language carries a nostalgic melancholy for both the naiveté of that period and our current alternatives.
These paintings remind us not to solely rely on order and logic and provoke us to think about where the promise of order and logic fail.
Hoda Tawakol
Portrait #2
2013
felt, fabric, thread, metal 16.75 inches x 12.2 inches
(b. 1968 — London, U.K.) Hoda Tawakol’s work reflects the conflict of growing up between two cultures and trying to define one’s identity in these conflicting social structures. In particular, she explores how traditional Islamic notions of femininity and concealment resonate across cultures, especially in the hijab—a veil worn by Muslim woman in the presence of adult males outside of their immediate family. In Islamic cultures, the hijab is worn as a symbol of modesty and morality, while in many Western European countries (including in her current home of France), these garments are banned because of purported security and social concerns. Her work highlights how individuals struggle to find identity within a rigid cultural logic, whose order leaves few possibilities.
In her embroidered “Portrait” series, Tawakol stretches, layers, and sews brightly colored fabric to create imagined portraits. With some of the portraits, Tawakol uses thread as makeup and sews over photographs of women printed on paper or fabric. The act of sewing on makeup exposes beauty as a sometimes-violent construction that reveals as much as it conceals. Some of the portraits—like Portrait #2—look like mashrabiya, privacy windows enclosed with wood latticework used in many Islamic countries. Again, instead of fully seeing a person, we only see a covering, and this interplay between revealing and concealing runs through much of Tawakol’s work.
Hoda Tawakol
Falconry Hood #11
2013
fabric, thread, Styrofoam 13.39 inches x 10.63 inches x 11 inches
(b. 1968 — London, U.K.) Hoda Tawakol’s work reflects the conflict of growing up between two cultures and trying to define one’s identity in conflicting social structures. In particular, she explores how traditional Islamic notions of femininity and concealment resonate across cultures, especially in the hijab—a veil worn by Muslim woman in the presence of adult males outside of their immediate family. In Islamic cultures, the hijab is worn as a symbol of modesty and morality, while in many Western European countries (including in her current home of France), these garments are banned because of purported security and social concerns. Her work highlights how individuals struggle to find identity within a rigid cultural logic, whose order leaves few possibilities.
In the Falconry Hood #11, Tawakol creates human-scaled hoods used to man falcons. Manning refers to the process of acclimating a bird to humans. The better manned a bird, the calmer and less likely it will be to engage in fight or flight response. Falcons learn that life with the falconer affords the easiest and most reliable source of food and protection. By referencing this practice, Tawakol raises questions about the traditional social roles offered to women, how women are enculturated to fulfill them, and potential motivations for not resisting. By using Western-style fabrics (stretch fabrics in bright colors), she also signals that this social training of women is not unique to Islamic culture. In both cultures, women are encouraged to wear masks in exchange for comfort and safety.
Paul Anthony Smith
Untitled 08
2014
unique picotage on pigment print 30.5 inches x 20.5 inches
(b. 1988 — St. Ann Bay, Jamaica) Paul Anthony Smith uses a ceramic tool to laboriously pick away at the surface material of photographic portraits of the people of Jamaica and the broader African diaspora, a unique technique called picotage loosely derived from an 18th-century French textile process. The resultant texture creates a soft, shimmering surface that is as seductive as it is negating.
Interested in ideas of hierarchy, culture, and identity, Smith always obscures his subjects’ faces and sometimes their complete bodies. The effect of the treatment is part haunting and part mask, yet always an erasure of self. These photographs provoke questions of the difficulty of developing a self (especially by members of disempowered communities) in hierarchical cultural structures. Here, the hint of the subjects being photographed is alluring, but there’s also a melancholy of never being able to penetrate the surface to see who they actually are.
Samantha Bittman
Untitled
2014
acrylic on hand-woven textile 30 inches x 25 inches
(b. 1982 — Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) Samantha Bittman weaves simple patterned textiles, which she then uses as a canvas to paint additional thick acrylic paint. Reminiscent of midcentury optical art and the dazzle camouflage used on WWI naval vessels, her painting obscures the original woven pattern while introducing new patterns. The effect is both visually arresting and disorienting.
Through simple patterns and a palette of black, white, and primary colors, Bittman’s paintings highlight how basic means can be used to evade easy identification, requiring more time and engagement for actual understanding. Her work requires us to slow down. These paintings can inspire us to think about our own patterns and habits, how they make things predictable, and how they can be shaped to frame more meaningful experiences.
Norman Zammitt
UmBlu 57
1986
acrylic on canvas board 11 inches x 13 inches
(b. 1931 — Toronto, Canada — d. 2007) Raised on an American Indian reservation in New York State, Noman Zammitt moved to California in 1945, where he would work for most of his life. Approaching his paintings with the rigor of a scientist, Zammitt focused on how colors effect one another and how light penetrates and emanates from color. Zammitt’s linear geometric abstractions and seemingly mathematical color combinations produce the illusion of dimension and movement. The precise, systematic approach he developed can be easily forgotten when looking at the ethereal and nuanced surfaces of his mesmerizing paintings.
Not only do the paintings conjure a meditativeness, but they also render the means of manufacturing such illusions disarmingly transparent. Zammitt’s canvases are gentle revelations into how simple means can be used to produce almost spiritual effects and how easily the eyes can acquiesce to seductive distortions. They’re at once a promise and a caution.
James Hoff
Skywiper No. 13
2014
ChromaLuxe transfer on aluminum 20 inches x 16 inches
(b. 1975 — Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.) These paintings are the result of infection by a computer virus. Digital images of blank canvas and monochromatic shapes are infected by the Stuxnet and Skywiper computer viruses, both of which have been employed in recent years to carry out acts of cyber espionage. The NSA-created software Stuxnet was built to destroy centrifuges at Iranian nuclear facilities. Skywiper is a targeted cyber espionage program that was discovered infecting computers in primarily Middle Eastern countries. Here, the virus corrupts the original basic image, adding visually seductive chromatic streaks, blotches, glitches, and static.
James Hoff doesn’t hold the common perspective that viruses are negatively destructive. Instead, he sees them as carriers of information that have the potential to productively reconfigure what came before. “Viruses, like art, need a host. Preferably a popular one,” says Hoff. His work brings to attention the systematic and distributed nature of communication, as well as the infrastructure we use to share ideas. It asks us to think about the affordances (e.g., what is made possible by a specific piece of technology) of language, print, the web, social networks, and other technologies we use to communicate. And it provokes us to think about how (through our own imprinting use) these mediums can be remade to do and say something new.
Charles Long
Hulhm
2014
35 inches x 24 inches
(b. 1958 — Long Branch, New Jersey, U.S.) Charles Long uses reoriented photographs of the horizons around his Upland, California, studio as a foundation for these pastel drawings. The ethereal monadic* figures appear suspended midair. In a time where we’re assailed by information trying to explain our experiences for us, this work offers no such elaboration. What the drawn figures are, when and where they come from, and what they mean are unknown to us. Instead, we’re left with the drawing and our experience of it.
The figures come from Long’s idiosyncratic artistic practice and his desire to avoid rote patterns of experience. Long explains, “As ephemeral as it is, what is most important to me, and always has been, is the ineffable experience, the pondering of the complexity of experience and why this experience … If I could do that with a viewer, I would do it through creating something that takes advantage of the attention they are going to give it and that does something to bring that ponderance to happen.” 2014.084-087
*Philosopher Gottfried Leibniz coined the term “monad” to describe elemental substances that aren’t solely object, being, or idea, but an utterly unique unit. In Leibniz’s cosmology, there are an infinite number of monads, which together compose reality while also functioning as a microcosm within it.
Nicolas Grenier
One Day Mismatched Anthems Will Be Shouted In Tune (II)
2014
oil on canvas 80 inches x 60 inches
(b. 1982 — Montreal, Canada) Through his paintings and sculptures, Nicolas Grenier diagrams systems and how they can determine our experiences and social relations. To do so, he uses the rational visual language of 20th-century graphic design, scientific illustration, and abstract painting (for example, the color studies of Joseph Albers) that attempted to bring clarity and order to things previously only understood intuitively.
Grenier’s work sensitizes the viewer to systems that may be invisible or opaque, while his use of this simplified visual language and murky color combinations suggest that something may be missing. In the case of One Day Mismatched Anthems Will Be Shouted In Tune, there’s a hint in the brown root-like foundations of the painting that the social relations illustrated may not be fixed. Grenier’s work encourages us to think about the systems that may constitute our own lives and challenges us to think about how they help us understand and navigate our lives.
