A Spectre Haunts

Fabian Knecht

Während Zerbrechung

2013

acrylic on wood behind Satinato glass; photograph, 35 mm, Chromira C-print; Aktion, HD video
70.87 inches x 44.88 inches

(b. 1980 — Magdeburg, Germany) On April 3, 2013, Fabian Knecht threw a stone that smashed a window in Marcel Duchamp’s birth home in Blainville-Crevon, France, documenting the act as an artwork through video, photograph, and painting.

Duchamp has had an immense impact on art production after World War I. He rejected retinal art—intended only to please the eye—for art in service to the mind. One way he did this was by creating readymades—everyday items asserted as art objects. Duchamp’s Fresh Widow is one of these readymades, and looks a lot like the window Knecht broke.

This matters because Knecht’s hope is that art can still be a means for breaking convention and authority. While Duchamp’s readymades can still challenge convention, they’re safely canonized into major museum galleries. In this mischievous performance and its documentation, Knecht is working to connect with the spirit of Duchamp, while hoping not to ossify into repetition and hero worship.

Fabian Knecht

Zerbrechung (French Window)

2013

acrylic on wood behind Satinato glass; photograph, 35 mm, Chromira C-print; Aktion, HD video
53.94 inches x 34.25 inches

(b. 1980 — Magdeburg, Germany) On April 3, 2013, Fabian Knecht threw a stone that smashed a window in Marcel Duchamp’s birth home in Blainville-Crevon, France, documenting the act as an artwork through video, photograph, and painting.

Duchamp has had an immense impact on art production after World War I. He rejected retinal art—intended only to please the eye—for art in service to the mind. One way he did this was by creating readymades—everyday items asserted as art objects. Duchamp’s Fresh Widow is one of these readymades, and looks a lot like the window Knecht broke.

This matters because Knecht’s hope is that art can still be a means for breaking convention and authority. While Duchamp’s readymades can still challenge convention, they’re safely canonized into major museum galleries. In this mischievous performance and its documentation, Knecht is working to connect with the spirit of Duchamp, while hoping not to ossify into repetition and hero worship.

Owen Rundquist

Neglect

2013

oil, acrylic, and collage on canvas
26 inches x 30 inches

(b. 1979 — Casper, Wyoming, U.S.) Owen Rundquist’s heavily layered painting appears to depict a traditional wooded landscape. However, he is uninterested in showing the environment as it is. Instead, he wishes to explore the “forest and woodlands as a veil or buffer between us and the world unknowable.”

The artist sketches the scenes he wishes to create and then builds the props and places himself in the situation as if in a performance. Manipulating his photographs with collage, paint, and even beeswax, ParkeHarrison is always clothed in the same dark suit. George Eastman House Photography Curator Therese Mulligan describes, “Much of the potency of his work lies in the theatricality of his picture-making and the use of props rich in symbolism. Like a play or film director, he plots the staging of the drama, identifying the setting, creating the backdrops, dressing the protagonist ... From the moment he puts on his suit, he assumes the role of the Everyman, a symbolic personage who stands for the individual as well as the multitude. The actions his character performs—clearing, building, fertilizing—are affirmative of the human spirit, taking part in acts of healing or salvation.”

In this work, he connects folklore traditions that extend from mythology to heavy metal, where the forest is a strange, enchanted place of threatening danger, quiet refuge, or great adventure. In these traditions, the forest is mysterious (even terrifying), but holds the potential for powerful transformation. By invoking these places, Rundquist intends to heighten our cultural engagement with the environment, inviting us to explore our personal relationship with nature and our own limits.

Mike Schreiber

Tablet (XXIII)

2016

gesso, grommets, silicone, and quartz
20 inches x 15 inches

(b. 1980) Mike Schreiber scavenges granite and quartz-composite scraps left on the street from high-end apartment renovations. The lozenge shapes of the Tablets are from the actual holes cut from countertops for sinks. While relatively small and overlooked, the stone scraps are telltale signs of gentrification’s impact on a neighborhood. To the scraps he finds, Schreiber adds matte black grids and grommets reminiscent of ancient maps, marking a constellation or long-lost location.

In this work, Schreiber is protesting the destruction of local culture and the misuse of natural materials as a never-ending resource. The Tablets evoke grave stones or monuments, recording the impact of these decisions on the environment and mourning what is lost. They also serve to remind us (and even haunt us) of the impact we have on our own homes and neighborhoods.

Barry Underwood

Yosemite

2015

pigment print
50 inches x 40 inches

(b. 1963 — Wilmington, Delaware, U.S.) “My innate curiosity about the ecological and social history of specific places drives my practice. I strive to foster awareness of environmental change by engaging viewers in playful interactions, offering a novel lens through which to consider the impact of human action on our surroundings, both locally and on a larger scale. The landscape has been and continues to be altered by ambitious human activities linked to political, social, economic, climactic, and aesthetic forces.

Using shapes, lines, light, geometry, and especially color, my photographs reflect human disturbances, metaphorically suggesting how society divides and surveys landscapes or how humans force their will on the natural environment. By imposing flat and abrasive color (or light) onto a site, my photographic work contrasts human interference with the visually rich, wide tonal range of a natural landscape’s ambient hues.” — Barry Underwood

Natalie Rae Good

Clyman Bay

2015

toner transfer collage on paper
30 inches x 22.25 inches

(b. Los Angeles, California, U.S.) “Clyman Bay is part of an ongoing series of screenshot collage transfers sourced from Google Satellite imaging. The project concerns areas of the country where satellite imaging fails due to a lack of infrastructure, roads, or prominent natural features. In these locations, the images become pixillated and distorted, producing an interesting visual experience. This series of works involves finding such images and visiting the locations to make responsive maps, videos, photographs, and drawings. For this particular work (Clyman Bay) I visited the Great Salt Lake and the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. This ongoing project addresses the influence of easily accessible satellite imaging on our understanding of material space and challenges our ever expanding and ever deteriorating sense of landscape beyond the screen.” — Natalie Rae Good

Clive Murphy

Untitled (Pelts)

2013

“skinned” cardboard, aerosol paint, and pencil
11 inches x 13.625 inches each

(b. 1971 — Belfast, Ireland) Clive Murphy’s work pulls from the marginal and easily forgotten in our consumer culture, adopting and reconfiguring the formal properties of these everyday objects in order to explore some of our most fundamental human experiences. Here, he transforms common cardboard boxes that he scavenged from the grocery store into a series of “pelts.” At first glance, each looks like a tribal mask, but from behind the simple, seemingly ceremonial designs, other simple designs peek out—logos for bananas, Windex, and other goods.

By doing this, Murphy reconnects something as banal as the grocery store to our pre-historic drive for survival. However, as he summons our ancient needs and contextualizes them in the present, he also anxiously points to our likely inability to fulfill those basic needs for ourselves anymore.

Samantha Fields

She speaks folly in a thousand holy ways

2011

recovered afghan, beads
78 inches x 43 inches x 24 inches

(b. 1972 — Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.) Samantha Fields rescues afghan blankets from thrift stores and homes. She then transforms these blankets by partially unraveling them and using the loose yarn to weave in additional fiber and beads. The results are dazzling, transforming tatty, well-loved afghans into shimmering tapestries.

Her choice of materials and mode of working is influenced partly by growing up south of Boston and her experience of class and gender inequities in that community. By rescuing and transforming these humble blankets, she intends to invoke and celebrate the memory of the makers and their quiet, overlooked labor. In this remembrance, there is a deliberate insistence on the absence of language. Instead of words, she works with her hands, further honoring these individuals by adopting their unheeded mode of expression.