SUNNEI x Media

What inspired the Sunnei x Media series?

Media Issue 2 x SUNNEI is a collaboration that emerged in a completely spontaneous way. The SUNNEI team showed interest in our early publications and asked us to start collaborating, which aligns perfectly with the theme of the magazine: collaboration as a relationship and bond. Thus, it started a dialogue and exchange that led us to the realization of this third issue.

What do you think people should change their perspective on these days?

It might sound quirky, but we believe that people should change their perspective on the concept of perspective itself. We should step away from the unidirectional narrative of the fact and the falsely absolute concept of truth. There are always multiple points of view, and a single topic can be explored in ways that are radically opposite, yet equally valid. Being able to move away from a single vision of reality helps to open up to discussion and dialogue, allowing for exponential enrichment.

Is two really better than one?

Regarding the concept of relations, we believe that in some ways two and one are overlapping concepts. To be “one” implies having a strong relationship between the subcomponents of the “one”, which is a strong coherence of the multiplicity building us to be considered as one. Therefore, the interesting aspect of multiplicity and connection, doesn’t lie in the concept of “one” or “two”, yet it lies in their exchange and their continuous vibration.

Being able to move away from a single vision of reality helps to open up to discussion and dialogue, allowing for exponential enrichment.

Why green and red?

Rather than focusing on specific colors we decided to limit the palette to two colors, for an aesthetic value partially. Additionally, “2 colors for Issue 2” made sense, like the terms of a relation, this double creates a sort of dialogue. The theme of this issue is the relation, understood as a bidirectional interaction between two distinct poles that either sustain or mutually influence one another. Hence, we chose to use only two colors, green and red, and place significant emphasis on their interaction with the aim of creating an active experience. For this purpose, we created the ROSSOVISORE, an acetate tool that hides or highlights illustrations when overlapped. The final illustration is not the one printed in the magazine, not even the one seen through the ROSSOVISORE. It lies in the transition, in the oscillation between the two.

What topics does this installation cover? Why?

The topic of this publication, as we said, is the idea of relation, connection, bond. This theme can be found in several aspects of the magazine. First of all, it was clearly at the base of the design phase, where we had a continuous exchange with SUNNEI. The theme resurfaces in the illustrations, as each artist was invited to produce their work collaborating with another visual designer of their choice, with the idea that every part of the magazine could contain a collaboration, including texts. In this regard, we chose to develop texts as conversations between Media and guests, inviting them to discuss the idea of connection and relations between humans and various other counterparts. In this way, the theme of the magazine is embodied once again in the form of dialogues. Lastly, as already mentioned, the concept of relations is reflected in the way the images are experienced, as they can be modified and viewed in different ways using the ROSSOVISORE.

Describe the interplay between the publication and clothes, if there's one at all.

Well, there is an interaction with SUNNEI on the cover, which features their striped pattern, and the idea of the ROSSOVISORE it’s fun if you consider that it can be worn, kind of. However, there hasn't been a direct correlation between the clothes and the publication. Still, we believe that what unites us is the care for the finished product and the attention given to each phase of the process. For us, today a book is not just a medium. It becomes, in some way, an object. In a world where information is predominantly consumed on screens, a book is a tangible element, and this is something we greatly value. We choose paper, and we consider the tactile aspect of the reader's experience.

Art

Creative Capital Helps Artists Flourish

May 08, 2024

The practice of art is always free — it just requires a curious mind and the whimsy to create entire universes out of the mundane. That creative capability lies dormant within us all and a true artist is not afraid to ignite that passion without trepidation. But not all who dare to light that flame have access to the necessary tools — and a flame without accelerant is sure to fizzle out without being tended to.

Allowing that burning passion to flourish without bounds, nonprofit organization Creative Capital embarked on a mission to highlight artists pushing the bounds in their respective mediums — but the organization takes that support one step further by actually providing grants, services, and tools to height-seeking creatives. Through a democratic, open-call grantee program, the org helps shape the careers of artists of all ages and demographics, aiding through funding that has totaled $55 million in grants to date.

Interview by Kayla Curtis-Evans
Feature Photo by Madison Craig, additional photos by Pablo Barrera and TC Meggs

In January, Creative Capital announced this year’s grantees, a beautifully colorful and expansive list of artists sending powerful messages through the visual arts and film/moving image. A total of 54 artists will each receive up to $50,000 of unrestricted project funding as well as opportunities to build their network and creative community. So Creative Capital is not only helping to ignite the fire in each artist but assuring that it burns on fiercely even beyond each new work. “We’re committed to not only helping these brilliant artists realize their projects, but to also create the conditions that will enable their artistic practices to thrive,” President and Executive Director Christine Kuan echoed.

This year’s grantee group is made up of 80% artists of color — 20% of which are Native or Indigenous individuals. Northern Cheyenne painter and printmaker Jordan Ann Craig is among that category. Craig uses her work to fuel her imperative pursuit of bringing visibility to the place she comes from.

Jordan Ann Craig always infuses her upbringing into her work, speaking from her personal experiences. Her Creative Capital-supported project will be in collaboration with her mother, Brigit Johnson. Within this work, Books Not Returned to the Library, Craig and Johnson are speaking with authority on an epidemic that has flown largely under the radar for the general public: the rapid disappearance of Native women occurring every single day, at unimaginable rates. This work will include handmade books, each representative of one missing or murdered Native woman, girl, or two spirit — telling their stories on a larger scale, as they deserve to be told.

Below, office spoke to her about her Creative Capital-funded project and what it means to open doors for others, as it has been done for her.

Kayla Curtis-Evans — How do you continually infuse your Northern Cheyenne heritage into your work?

Being a Northern Cheyenne woman, I feel everything I make is inherently Indigenous and Northern Cheyenne. In my practice, I bring in specific design elements inspired by Cheyenne and Northern Cheyenne beadwork and quillwork. I study beaded and/or quilled moccasins, baby carriers, and pouches, adorned in beautiful Plains Indian motifs. I feel very lucky to have incredible art to study and bring into my own art.

How does your current setting of Northern New Mexico influence your artistic outlook?

Color is very important to my work and how I experience my surroundings. In New Mexico, color is highly concentrated and vivid. I often bring that saturation and contrast into my paintings. I am also surrounded by an amazing community of makers and artists in Northern New Mexico which keeps me motivated.

Tell me about your experience so far with Creative Capital and what it means to you to have this organization assist you in spreading this message.

Having Creative Capital support my collaborative project with my mother is huge. Our project is a big undertaking, and we are currently at the beginning phases of our timeline. Having Creative Capital’s support and resources will undoubtedly help us carry out a successful project.

Your installation, Books Not Returned Library, will explore the major epidemic of Native women rapidly disappearing. How does your work act as an amplifier for the many Native stories that go unheard?

Books Not Returned Library is a collection of handmade books in which each book tells the story of a missing or murdered Indigenous woman, girl, or two-spirit. This library is overwhelmingly full, a powerful indicator of a severe and heartbreaking problem in our society. Collectively and individually, the books share the horrific reality of the violence happening against Indigenous women and girls. These books are a physical place for stories to live on. Every person has a story, and many of these stories have been untold or erased. This library is Brigit Johnson’s vision and idea. As her daughter and collaborator, I’m helping her bring this library to life. We are doing this for the countless Native women whose stories have been swept under the rug, including my mom’s sister Amy Johnson, who went missing in 1986.

Tell me about the research that will go into this project, as each “book” in the library will tell the story of a missing or murdered Indigenous woman. How did you discover the stories you wanted to bring to the surface?

Books Not Returned Library is at the beginning stages of research. With the generous funding awarded by Creative Capital, my mother and I are embarking on a research-heavy project that will require community engagement as well as consulting from a range of experts. We will be working with librarians, MMIWG2S experts, bookbinders, craftsmen, and most critically, the many families impacted by MMIWG2S.

You create abstract paintings, prints, and artist books. In this project’s case, you depart from those mediums, the books providing an in-depth visual analysis of just how grave this phenomenon is. Walk me through the process of creating these books and the technical skills applied.

Book Arts is truly a beautiful craft and art. I have been enamored by handmade books ever since I learned binding techniques in college. Each book will be handmade with love and attention to detail. We will be using traditional bookbinding techniques, and add details like letterpressed text to the spines.

Why is it important to you to use your vision to advocate for stories that do not always receive visibility — what do you hope the collective reaction is to telling these stories on a larger platform?

We want viewers to experience the gravity of the MMIW2S epidemic through Books Not Returned Library. We want people to feel overwhelmed, angry, and saddened by the amount of books in the library which translates to missing or murdered life. We want change, we want dialogue, and we want justice. More people need to know of this overlooked huge issue in our society. We are humanizing the available data to ultimately encourage change while also providing a safe space for families affected by MMIW2S to heal and share their loved ones’ stories.

How can we continue to support artists in the ways Creative Capital does?

My mom used to say, “If you just open the door for her, she will thrive.” I have been so lucky in my career that some big doors have opened up for me, giving me the chance to grow, succeed, compete, and thrive. As artists, we get a lot of “no’s” and closed doors. Taking a chance and providing a platform where you can say yes to artists and open those doors can be life-changing.

Art

Canon at Kapp Kapp

May 08, 2024

One of contemporary painting’s characteristic inventions was the prospect of rendering the artist’s hand as an entirely invisible entity. Andy Warhol most notably thematized this effect in his silkscreen paintings, trading out his authorial mark for a machine-like repeated printing process, and Wade Guyton’s more recent inkjet on canvas works further outlined the possibilities (and limits) of a technologically mediated artistic practice. Together, Warhol and Guyton’s printing-as-painting idiom mirrored the mechanics of an accelerating image economy that today has reached an apex in the popularization of AI image production.

As Warhol and Guyton’s influence looms large for young painters, for whom the tools of emerging technologies at their disposal remain vast but the challenge of artistic novelty appears ever heightened, the question emerges: how can one reanimate this ghost of the painter’s hand?

In the exhibition Canon at Kapp Kapp, the trio of young artists Thomas Blair, Kunning Huang, and Waseem Nafisi pose their response. The three artists each independently arrived at the employment of printing-as-painting processes in their work years after having graduated together from the Cooper Union. Aligned by a sensitivity to the stakes of art historical progress, their collisions of classical and contemporary methods boldly point forward.

By Evan Lincoln
Images courtesy of Kapp Kapp.

Thomas Blair, Crashed Car (Flat)

White Car Crash, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Kapp Kapp.

Upon entering the show, the viewer meets Blair’s Crashed Car (Flat) (2024), a cropped snapshot of a wrecked vehicle, doused with splashes of violet and rust on its body. Upon closer examination, the image feels unstable or uncanny, not quite hand painted but also not entirely photographic. This effect of image hybridity epitomizes Blair's inkjet paintings — depicting generated images of car crashes (an overt Warholian homage to the Death & Disaster series), they interrogate how the feeling of a painterly moment can be manufactured in an iterative negotiation between human and machine.

In his towering White Car Crash (2024), layers of ink appear to vibrate and bleed into one another, an indication of Blair’s multistep process of producing images in AI, slicing them into layers, then repeatedly running each layer on canvas through a printer. The result is a reverse engineered painting — Blair’s approximation of a human touch via machine achieves, paradoxically, a potent expressiveness.

Kunning Huang, Untitled (nature of art), 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Kapp Kapp.

In Huang’s answer to the “problem,” his referential strategy summons the history of Chinese imagery and rice paper, attaining a lyrical balance between past and present. In the anterior of the gallery, his piece titled Untitled (nature of art) (2024) broadcasts the tongue in cheek thematic tagline “Nature of Art,” alongside imagery lifted from an early Qing Dynasty painting manuscript — a graceful pond scene, complete with grass stalks and dragonflies. But the objects and their surroundings seem tonally inverted and actively glitching, indicating Huang’s treatment of rounds of image processing in the preparation stages of his practice. Quilted in tiles, each panel of the work undergoes an intensive process: a specially rigged Canon printer impresses onto an acrylic sheet and thereafter, Huang rubs the printed ink directly onto rice paper, continuing a technique performed in ancient Chinese woodblock printing. The porous nature of the material causes the CMY ink colors to separate, culminating in a pleasurably pixelated texture. In this manner, Huang’s historically enriched approach demystifies present day conceptual concerns and technologies as existing within deeper lineages.

Waseem Nafisi, Bar Peasants (after Malevich), 2023

Second Impressions (after Malevich), 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Kapp Kapp.

Nafisi similarly leads with an art historical reference — the paintings of Kazimir Malevich — in his playful interventions into the thrust of post-modernity. In Bar Peasants (2023), a distorted copy of a brightly colored Malevich painting is bisected by a stretcher bar that literally juts out from either side of the canvas, while also appearing to nudge forward a horizontal sliver of the image — yet this tromp-l'œil unit remains physically flat on the canvas. Nafisi accomplishes this effect by constructing a to-scale miniature “stretcher bar” fixed onto a page from a Malevich monograph, then photocopied and printed onto the canvas. As Malevich serves as a stand-in for the crushing sensation of art history standing on one’s shoulders, Nafisi triumphantly pierces the purified image to assert his place in the “now.”

In Second Impressions (After Malevich) (2024), he employs a similar technique of flattened physicality, in this instance introducing a hand-painted wooden feature in the foreground. True to theme, the only occurrence of paint in this exhibition of paintings is merely an image of paint. This ironic demonstration reveals a self-conscious strategy by Nafisi: the painter’s hand itself becomes an image.

It may come as no surprise that as art school peers, Blair and Huang both trained as photographers, while Nafisi studied more traditional painting — all three departed their mediums and converged in the center at technologically-driven painting practices. The culmination of these young artists’ experiments suggests that painting can trudge through the societal jungle of images and increasingly intelligent technologies of today by borrowing from the toolkit of the past — a promise that digital acceleration can, in fact, enhance the joie de vivre of making and experiencing art.

Canon is on view at Kapp Kapp, 86 Walker St 4th Floor, New York, NY 10013 until May 11, 2024

Art

'Whose Muse?' at Palo Gallery with Paul Henkel

May 07, 2024

As a young gallerist, Paul Henkel has the personality of an old-timey collector, interested in identifying talents lurking within his immediate circle and building intimate and collaborative relationships with these he acts as a patron of. Those familiar with Paul’s style would soon realize how much of a traditional dealer he is. Paul’s connoisseur approach, rooted in the vast knowledge of classical painting traditions he possesses, results in a program sensitive to this age-old medium’s historical specificity and discursive contexts, boasting a roster from Natalie Frank to David Smalling.

The architectural layout and design of Palo Gallery, Paul’s brainchild, tucked away on the quieter Bond Street, feels like an intimate salon of the Parisian avant-garde. Indeed, residents of artists’ lofts and studios in East Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Ridgewood, many of whom are producing exciting works for tomorrow’s frontier, regularly congregate at Palo Gallery and go all out for openings, often leading to block parties. Some of these artists would go on to work with Paul closely.

By Qingyuan Deng
Image courtesy of Palo Gallery. Photography by Lily Burgess

Recently, Paul curated a show, Whose Muse?, at Palo Gallery. Expansively and liberally installed, Whose Muse? demonstrates a boundless curiosity for the contemporary contour of portraiture painting and its limit. Problematizing the assumed parameters of muse as a passive recipient, Paul’s curatorial maneuver focuses on how the status of muse is granted but never a given. In line with his commitment to emerging talents, Paul highlights rising stars in the exhibition, who also happen to have posited some of the most enigmatic and provocative thesis on the absence and presence of muse in the contemporary landscape of portraiture painting.

For example, Lorenzo Amos’ Girl with pink hair / Analiese hides his painterly gaze in the abundance of gestures and impressions. Alternatively, Ronan Day-Lewis designates archives of images floating on the Internet as his source of inspiration, in the case of The Space Between Us. Asher Liftin’s Miles Reading takes the digital impulse to explosive ends, bracketing otherwise unseen pixels as units of perception. Elsewhere, Charlie Gosling’s self-study series outright denies viewers access to the artist’s face, the locus of recognition and identification. A similar act can be seen in Leah Ke Yi Zheng’s Untitled (melting woman). The muse (or a fleeting image of the artist) seemingly disappears.

(left) Lorenzo Amos, Girl with pink hair / Analiese, 2024. Courtesy of Palo Gallery.

(right) Ronan Day-Lewis, The Space Between Us, 2024. Courtesy of Palo Gallery.

Leah Ke Yi Zheng, Untitled (melting woman), 2023. Courtesy of Palo Gallery. (left)

Asher Liftin, Miles Resting, 2024. Courtesy of Palo Gallery. (right)

This exhibition is called Whose Muse? and most artists in the show seem to be troubling this historically problematic notion of the muse. Shall we start with your curatorial strategy responding to the question of muse?

This whole conversation started because we wanted to do a show on portraiture. I found that there is a small group of very brilliant artists, loosely inspired by British academic painting, who are working in a very real portrait mode of paintings. Quickly, when it comes to showing portraiture, the inevitable question is who is being depicted and what’s the relationship? My curatorial strategy toys with the historical idea of muse, and the difference between the muse and portraiture subject, the latter often appearing in paintings commissioned by powerful figures in an official capacity.

My research discovers that contemporary women artists are not only painting a great deal of self-portraiture that deviates from the historically troubled muse but also intimate familial relations that are more balanced in terms of power dynamics. Ultimately, I am interested in complicating the trope of male artist and their muse. Through proper research, it is much more apparent that Kiki Montparnasse or Elizabeth Siddal, who have unfair reputations for being poor, helpless women, were brilliant artists in their own right. Siddal had just as much influence on the pre-Raphaelites as anyone in their circle. To me, the muse as a participatory subject in the creation of the work becomes a running thread. The question mark in the exhibition title is to look at the breadth and complexity of these relationships, especially in the 21st century, where we have artists who are working without an actual model. Ronan Day-Lewis just grabbed an image of one of these weird images people post on Flickr for his painting. It was a picture from someone’s digital camera from the 2000s. He cropped and painted it into an incredible portrait in the sepia tone. Ronan will never meet them and has no relationship with them, he’s just fascinated by the mystery of their lives.

I am glad you mentioned the role of digital technology. As I understand it, there are quite a few artists in the show who are responding to how technology complicates this more expensive reading of muse-artist relationship. Could you talk more about those artists a bit more?

We live in a world where we are inundated with the idea of a portrait, right? We can take hundreds of portraits a day on our phones, but it is not the same as a true relationship to or study of a human. In most cases, the traditional portraiture is just as much a painting of the artist as that of the sitter. In spite of sounding arrogant, I wanted to put together an exhibition that encourages looking at images and depictions of other people again. Asher Liftin made two portraits for the show. One of them was based on an iPhone picture of his friend Miles, taken when they were visiting the last Venice Biennale. Asher broke the photo up into pixelated four colorway practice, which becomes a fascinating interplay between digital pixels and printed inks.

David Smalling’s painting is not of anyone, it is a surrealist contortion of a figure in marble. He has gone completely meta with it, using Photoshop to make almost a fetishization of the idea of a traditional, erotic muse such as Venus de Milo.

At the same time, I am balancing that with people who completely reject the technological side of things. Phoebe Helander only works with live models. Esme Hodsoll just told us she needs another three months of sitting!

Lorenzo Amos is in the middle. He would say his biggest inspiration are Mapplethorpe, Freud, Menzel, and Goya. Lorenzo sits with his models for hours, gets them to close and sit and frame up. But he takes photos of them with his iPhone, and that is his reference images to turn into these very painterly paintings.

I’m also thinking about artists using projectors to project images on a canvas. When you put them next to Lucien Freud, which is probably the other end of the spectrum, a very slow considered study, tensions rise.

(left) Phoebe Helander, Orange Eyeshadow, 2022. Courtesy of Palo Gallery.

(right) Esme Hodsoll, Boy In Bed, 2016. Courtesy of Palo Gallery.

You mentioned Freud. There’s a whole group of artists in the show hadn’t been thinking about technology, just because they were making works at a different time. I’m interested in the intergenerational lineup that you’re opting for here. Is this a historical survey? Or are you trying to establish interplays and tensions between the historical and contemporaneous.

I would love to do a historical survey of portraiture, but I don’t think we have the access or the wall space to go as far back as I would like to go. However, you can’t look at the state of new academic painters, like Lorenzo Amos or Sergey Kononov without considering Freud because he is certainly one of the most important post-war artists working with the idea of muse. Freud also had quite a reputation for being rather horrible to his subject. Nicola Bowery and Sue Tilley have both written books about their complicated relationships with Freud. But he is the ‘father’ of many of these painters working today and having this exhibition without his work felt some somewhat off.

I also selected a George Grosz drawing Artist and Model in the Dunes, which is a very sexualized study he did in the dunes in North Germany. It’s very cheeky, as Grosz was always slightly tongue in cheek, and still felt very relevant to the context of portraiture. Having a few artists who represent more of the history, even if it's the last 100 or so years was very important to look at this larger picture of portraiture.

George Grosz, Artist and Model in the Dunes (1940). Courtesy of Palo Gallery.

I’m also curious as to, now that you have completed curating the show, what are some of the insights you wish for people to take home?

When I go to the Met, or a lot of other museums, I have noticed that aside from the really, famous ones, like Mona Lisa, a lot of people move past portraits. It is less interesting than a grand landscape or history painting to many people. To me, portraitures often the most interesting. Because of this technical technological profusion that replaces portraits with images of people, we have lost touch with looking at considered portraiture. The show is an attempt to encourage considered looking and think through what representing a person really means. As a story or a vessel, a portraiture is always a complex network of contradictions, intricacies and tensions. Most importantly, I want people to physically be at the gallery to look at these portraits that fill our walls. Even right now, as I start looking at works together, and seeing connections that I hadn’t considered before, my perspective is constantly being slightly shifted. As much as we can put things together as a PDF, it is never the same as having them in the same space.

It seems that your curatorial strategy here goes beyond identifying different modalities of contemporary portraiture, be it seated, observed, or self-portraits, and really fleshing out the more intellectual and aesthetic implications of creating portraitures in the age of device saturation.

I started with the idea of putting portraits into three categories because we have these three rooms. I have left that idea behind because I thought it was too reductive. A portrait of a model can be just as much an act of self-portraiture as a physical self-portrait, and a self-portrait can be just as distant as copying a found image into a painting to me. I want to be unconstrained in my curation here and explore these more intricate, sensitive relationships when it comes to technology, subject, and agency. It is more exciting and a lot harder to put together a show that avoids using easy marks, but I think it’s going to turn out to be a very interesting conversation.

Whose Muse? is on view at Palo Gallery, 30 Bond St. New York, NY 10012 until June 1, 2024.

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