Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Fearing fear itself?






















Regina Jose Galindo - above Lipieza Social, below Who can erase the traces? 2003 (Bloody footprints from the supreme court to the National Palace in Guatemala City).

Despite a feeling that success with such weighted subject matter is rather like shooting fish in a barrel, and a personal unwillingness to dwell on fear, I am intrigued. It is powerful work.

The Fear Society is host to Galindo and others at the Venice Biennale...doesn't seem constructive to re-live fearmongers' propaganda and results, but it makes it compelling viewing, as we know. Isn't part of the problem with fear-based propaganda (separate from the horror of the things really happening) the result that it spreads disempowerment? A disbelief that we can alter things? I'd be REALLY interested in work that addressed that aspect of the news content, and how to counteract it. I have still to check out the other artists in that show.

Anyway, more of Galindo's work at http://www.artvehicle.com/postcard/30, and artipedia

She's recently spent time with her husband and daughter in a jail cell/container rented for $6000 and transported to Artpace in San Antonio to protest at incarceration of immigrant families at the T. Don Hutto Detention Center. Info at artpace on that.

Friday, May 8, 2009

Alex Hubbard






















Untitled (SOP # 3), 2008
One shot sign paint and enamel on aluminum panel
62 x 47 x 1.125 inches

This layering of opposites may be reminiscent of the table tops from so many of his earlier video works, but is more specifically conditioned by an interest in the opposition between fictive depth ("optical") and factual depth ("thickness") in painting and how this will allow for a collapse of the relationship between fore- and background. It also exposes a greater concern with Hubbard's production: the aim at constructing an index or the appearance of empirical research, while also clearly exposing his aim at tension through the construction of a structure of oppositions.

That's an extract from Standard Oslo's website.

Not sure what this does for positive change on a wider scale, but in terms of painting it is very interesting. His other work adds a different dimension to painting - the videos, C prints and altered screenprints take the paintings from academic dryness to irreverent and exciting new territory.