By Christopher Knight

link to Los Angeles Times

In 1962, Andy Warhol used a stamp technique to reproduce 210 bottles of Coca-Cola on canvas as they might appear in a big supermarket cooler, 30 bottles across and seven rows high. Some were pictured full, others empty and still others only partially filled.

In “Naked Coke,” sculptor Koh Byoung Ok ups the numerical ante while adding a considerable degree of mystery. Eleven rows high, his aluminum shelves feature 264 unprinted, silver cans, polished to a high reflection, in regimented rows of 24. Their tops have not been popped. Whether the mute, light-reflective array of stripped commercial goods is full or empty is a question inducing an unexpected state of meditative stillness and tranquility.

Nearby in his show of eight sculptures at SolwayJones (his first with the gallery), an illuminated light bulb suspended from a cord dangles into water that puddles in the seat of a modern, mass-produced plastic chair. Potentially shocking, in a literal sense, the work twists Warhol’s 1960s silkscreen paintings of electric chairs into conceptual and perceptual knots.

Sculptural koans, where intuition transcends logic, Koh’s work draws its forms from Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual art, especially the work of Warhol, Donald Judd and Felix Gonzalez-Torres (perhaps significantly, all now deceased). Two of the most compelling works stop time — again literally, simply by affixing thread and yarn to the second-hand of battery-powered clock mechanisms affixed to the wall.

The tension and weight of the slender material is enough to cause the second-hand to jerk and quiver, rendered unable to move forward through the curve of space. The most compelling works in the show, Koh’s simple clocks warp expectation

Photo: Naked Coke, 2010

Copyright © 2010 Tribune Company

Jet Set Saturdays: Channa Horwitz at SolwayJones and kunsthalle LA

By Anne Martens

If Channa Horwitz wasn’t female and 78 years old, she’d perhaps—and deservedly—be as well known as her male, L.A. artist contemporaries Robert Irwin and James Turrell. At the time of Ferus Gallery’s emergence, she lived in Tarzana—then as Channa Davis—raising three children, where she created remarkable works of art. One wonders, had she hung around La Cienega Boulevard often enough, would the boys have let her in the clubhouse? This Jet Setter doubts it.

In 2005 and 2007, SolwayJones Gallery exhibited Horwitz’s contemporary work. The gallery’s current two-part exhibition, one at its main space on Hill Street; the other at kunsthalle LA on Chung King Road, showcases the artist’s seminal work of the 60s, 70s and 80s, as well as a piece from 2000 and one from this year. Upon a recent visit to both gallery spaces, Michael Solway pointed out a 1971 LACMA exhibition catalog in a vitrine — tangible evidence of the type of historical exclusionism female artists face. On the cover, about a dozen artist-faces, all male, stared back. Nearby hangs Davis’ 1968 notated sketch for a sculpture, Suspension of Vertical Beams Moving in Space. The sculpture would have included eight moving parts and eight light beams, suggesting the complexity and ambition that any “Light and Space” project would have entailed. The artist had submitted the drawing as part of a proposal for an installation she planned to execute if accepted into the prestigious “Experiments in Art and Technology” program—in which artists were paired with scientists and engineers to explore perceptual phenomena—that culminated in the LACMA show. Although she was admitted into the exhibition, the more significant installation proposal got rejected.

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Channa Horwitz at SolwayJones and kunsthalle L.A

“Sequences & Systems,” a terrific two-part show (split between SolwayJones and kunsthalle L.A.), skims across 40 years of visual investigation by the L.A. artist Channa Horwitz. By the time Horwitz earned her B.F.A. from CalArts in 1972, she had already submitted a proposal (included in this show) to the landmark “Art & Technology” exhibition at LACMA and was well on her way to developing methods of articulating space, typically in ink on paper, using the orderly rigor of predetermined systems.

Her work falls somewhere between game and exercise, mathematics and music. Its key ingredients are rhythm, pattern and repetition, its precursors the minimal, serial art of the ’60s. The entrancing “Composition #8 Augmented Variation #2 reads like an elegant score, following the momentum of a single thick ink line that rises, falls, breaks into separate staccato beats then resumes its sustained visual hum. Some of Horwitz’s works over the years have been performed live, using dancers, synthesizers and projected imagery. Even when not actualized physically, her notations are dynamic and usually involve a sense of progression, so that time and process are actively engaged.

In the Canon series of 1982, for instance, Horwitz draws a simple geometric pattern on separate sheets of graph paper, then draws images that represent the sum of the individual parts. “Eight Layers From the Canon Series, Exposed” presents a grid of 64 such basic components, and the lacy tapestries of line that result when the patterns of each row or column are combined. The austerity of the system gives way to sensual ebullience, and the images, however prescribed, feel immediate and fresh.

– Leah Ollman

Copyright 2010 Los Angeles Times

Hadley Holliday: “Paintings” at SolwayJones
by George Melrod

November 2009

Forever and Never, 2009

Maneuvering a graceful balance between precision and experimentation, the thoughtful, visually appealing canvases of Hadley Holliday are informed by a spectrum of historical precedents, but address them very much on her own terms, with far more sincerity than cynicism. Like Mark Grotjahn, the Los Angeles (Blum and Poe) -based painter who over the past half decade has glided to visible project room shows at the Hammer and the Whitney on the wings of color-chart butterflies and pinwheels, Holliday employs a conscribed formal and conceptual vocabulary to engage abstraction at its roots. In this, her first solo show, the 2004 Cal Arts MFA graduate seems to be striking out in multiple directions and for the most part hitting her mark.

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AROUND THE GALLERIES
By Holly Myers

September 18, 2009

p. D 23

Artist of a totally different stripe

If you’ve ever found yourself thinking, as I will admit that I have from time to time, that you would be quite content to reach the end of your life without ever laying eyes on another stripe painting — at least by anyone born after 1960 — then Hadley Holliday’s lovely exhibition at SolwayJones should come as a breath of fresh air: proof that there’s joy to be found yet in what has come to seem a dull and largely reactionary genre.

It’s not that her stripe paintings — which constitute roughly half of the 11 works on display — are especially radical.  They’re large, for the most part (up to roughly 6 1/2 by 4 1/2 feet), and composed on unprimed canvases, to create the soft, saturated feel of a Helen Frankenthaler.

In some the stripes swirl into knots, in others they arc like rainbows staked on top of one another.  In some they form grids.

Holliday is a graceful colorist, however, with trust in the simplicity of her forms to carry the nuance of her palette.  (In addition to the stripes, the show includes a number of smaller squares — 30-by-30 inches — filled with free-form washes of color.)  The tones are sweet without being saccharine, gentle without being timid or shallow: lavender, violet, salmon, sky blue, indigo, coral, rose and butter yellow, all grounded with shrewd accents of gray and black.

Her application of the pigment is equally sensitive.  Her strokes are loose, perhaps intuitive, without being lazy.  Most of the canvases are scattered with drips and, in a peculiarly charming gesture, she generally guides the stripes around them.  It results in a sense of warmth and humanity that the stripe — among other classic motifs of abstraction — is often employed to deny.

Copyright © 2009 Tribune Company. All Rights Reserved

Art Review

Landscape of Eros, Through the Peephole

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: August 27, 2009

Hannah Wilke Through the Large Glass, 1976

    And there is a film by a contemporary female artist, Hannah Wilke (1940-93), who went to art school in Philadelphia, saw “Étant Donnés ” soon after its installation and remembered finding it “repulsive.” She later did a performance about it in which she assumed the place of the prone figure. And in a 1976 film made in the museum’s Duchamp gallery, she engaged with “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even,” his other grand erotic masterwork.

Dressed in a high-fashion white tailored suit and fedora, she does a slow striptease in front of the piece, or rather behind it, as the camera shoots her performance through the glass and through Duchamp’s painted phallic and vaginal forms frozen in unconsummated union.

Wilke, who was a great beauty, preens, shifts, undoes a button, tips her hat, shifts, stares, slowly pulls at a zipper. The Bride and the Bachelors can never complete their erotic task, but she can. In her performance she was the cool but active counterpart to the woman in “Étant Donnés,” just as exposed but in control of the exposure.

Duchamp, the transcendent pornographer, would have understood all these contradictions. I suspect he saw himself both as the distanced creator of his final work and as the passively light-bearing figure lying within it. And surely he would have agreed with Wilke’s tough-love words: “To honor Duchamp is to oppose him.” Because he opposed himself — or the mythical self he invented — by slaving away at material forms of art that he had declared beneath contempt. His dispassionate passion is what continues to make him magnetic. Tough self-love, perverse and seductive, is what “Étant Donnés” is about.

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 “These artworks are making noise”

July 17, 2009

Holly Myers

Koh Byoung-ok, 2 Glass Clock, 2007, clock parts, glasses, aluminum, 7 x 10 x 3 inches

Instruments, at SolwayJones, builds on the gallery’s long-standing interest in the line between visual art and sound to present just what its title implies: a selection of artist-designed, sound-producing objects as compelling in their aural as their visual presence. The works span from the early ’70s through present day. Save a charming trio of stringless banjos painted with folk-art-inspired scenes by Clare Rojas, nearly all are functional and available for demonstration by a gallery associate.

There are a number of string instruments — two harp-like pieces by Robert Wilhite; another by William T. Wiley; a cello and a bass by William Leavitt — as well as a trio of gongs (also by Wilhite) and a beautifully carved, long, pale wood structure housing a single piano key and string by Koh Byoung-ok.

Several are purely electronic: Paul De Marinis’ 1973 “Pygmy Gamelan,” for instance, a nondescript device that amplifies ambient radio waves; Nam June Paik’s 1994 “I Wrote This in Tokyo in 1954,” a 144-note music box mechanism nestled inside a vintage television frame, with a miniature video camera transmitting it to the screen; a trio of synthesizers built from children’s electronics; and a lovingly scrappy pair of amplification devices by Dani Tull (who will perform at the gallery July 25).

My favorite, so subtle in the din of the others that one could almost miss it, is Koh’s 2007 “Two Glass Clocks,” which consists of a pair of unmarked pint glasses into which the battery-powered gears of two dismantled clocks have been dropped. Each retains merely a second hand that, pinned by the wall of the glass, taps a steady, deliciously delicate rhythm on the lip.

Copyright 2009 Los Angeles Times

Matthew Picton at SolwayJones

by Tucker Neel

Originally published in Artillery Magazine  jul/aug 2009 vol. 3

Cities are living creatures, shifting and growing, contracting with time, but fragile too, subject to the forces of historical change and destructive powers both internal and external. This fact is no more evident than in Matthew Picton’s recent exhibition “Postwar Landscapes” at SolwayJones. Here, Picton presents five works that deploy the formal tropes of mapping to speak to memories of space and time.

In one of the most alluring works, Moscow 1808, 1905, 2007, 2008, Picton traces Moscow city maps from these four years in white-painted Duralar and pins them, like preserved scientific specimens, atop each other against a black background. The ghostly sinewy lines of rambling city streets attest to a place that congeals and expands its borders and features. It is up to the viewer to give the work’s four dates and the years in between a historical relevancy.

Hiroshima, 1930, 2008, paper sculpture on lightbox, 192 x 120 x 48 inches

Hiroshima, 1930 consists of a massive 16×10ft. light box holding a 3D paper map of that city’s buildings and streets, 15 years before they were devastated by the Little Boy nuclear bomb. The installation brings to mind the modular and rectilinear sculptures of LeWitt or Smithson, but it is more reminiscent of a war room, a literal stage where buildings and the humans they house are envisioned as targets for future destruction. Even with this theatrical set up, the work comes across as surprisingly restrained, and instead of banging the viewer over the head with a moralizing tale of war and death, the piece calmly acts as a jumping-off point for a discussion of Hiroshima, before and after World War II, as an important historical site.

Washington, DC, 2009, burnt archival paper, 41-1/2 x 55-1/2 x 2-1/2 inches

In another more startling work, Washington DC, Picton uses the same folded paper technique on a smaller scale, blocking out sections of The Capitol Mall and surrounding environs in a way that makes the layout unmistakable to anyone who has ever lived in, or visited, the city. This approximately 4×3 ft. work hangs in a white frame on the wall and is pockmarked with hundreds of seemingly random brown and black miniature explosions, places where the artist burned holes into the white paper. During the war of 1812 the British did in fact burn the White House and parts of the Mall, and riots have certainly set sections of the city ablaze in the past. But this diorama reads as a quick model for a Hollywood set explosion, a view of DC ravaged by aerial bombardment. While the work causes an immediate reaction regarding the possibility of DC in ashes, its spectacle nature and lack of historical grounding set it apart from other works in the show. While the work could be interpreted as an imagined future, juvenile wishful thinking, or misplaced Cassandra-like prognosticating, it seems more than anything to address our familiarity with seeing famous cities reduced to ashes in mass media.

With this we see the strength of Picton’s overarching project and the curious way he is able to incite viewers to plumb the feelings and associations that come with looking at a map, be it of the past or the possible future.

Potsdam Culture
May 2009

Channa Horwitz, Language Series   photo: Andreas Klaer

Drawings, compositions and performances of Channa Horwitz in the Brandenburg Art Association.

The Announcement that structure stimulates artistic freedom.  Doesn’t this border on paradox?  This topical exhibit in the Brandenburg art association in Potsdam submits this kind of a thorough concept.  The work of California artist Channa Horwitz who is barely known in this country and is just being discovered.

The first big exhibition in Germany after her show in Berlin at Aanant and Zoo Gallery curated by Artist Michael Muller, is now in Potsdam.  Never seen drawings and some documentary photographs, most from the late sixty’s are seen here.  When Channa Horwitz was young, she chose to investigate what the greatest possible freedom in artistic expression could be.  She found that limitation and structure are synonymous with and the basis of freedom.

Based on this conviction the whole spectrum of the artists work develops.  This concept is astonishing because it came to her before she knew about the work called “Concept Art,” of the sixties.  Channa Horwitz continued her determination in the development of her own mental universe, doing drawings, paintings and performances.  She also created a visual philosophy which is part of her work to this day.  The Potsdam exhibit offers in multiple variations the opportunity to see the universe of Channa Horwitz bit by bit.  The work can be seen in multiple graph paper drawings that follow a system that can be seen and felt.

An essential knowledge is seen immediately that every drawing, every graphic notation uses the count of one through eight in it’s concept.  The figures one to eight become the fulcrum and pivot of a notation principle which Channa Horwitz created to visualize time, rhythm and movement.  The description in the form of diagrams is only one variation.  Because of her use of geometry and abstraction, the drawings on graph paper spray the charm of logic.  In her drawings of “Sonakinatography,” which the artist calls her instruction drawings for performances, detailed notes are found to explain the desired equipment and roles to be distributed.  These compositional drawings become cinematic documentation instructions.  Three live examples of the performances of Channa Horwitz were experienced at the opening of the exhibit under the title “Variations in Counting One through Eight” There was a percussive sound interpretation, by percussionist Thomas Gohing, a dance performance and a “Poem Opera” performance by members of the Berlin Dance Ensemble.  The dance performance was danced by four dancers and choreographed and authored by the daughter of Channa Horwitz, Ellen Davis, who spoke the recorded poetry the dancers performed to.  The dances were a recreation of a performance first done in 1969 where the dancers wore black-and-white Circle and Square motifs from a painting series the artist did in 1968.  There were three presentations which were held every 30-minutes for the duration of the show.

A lasting impression one takes away from this exhibition is of the severity of the set of rules of an artist whose visions of logical precision and serial logic is followed.  At the same time the amazing experience that on the basis of a meticulously contrived, complicated system that is an unconventional sound experience and exceedingly aesthetic movement choreography can be created and seen.

Until June 14, 2009, at the Brandenburg Art Association, Potsdam.  12-18 o’clock, Luisenforum, Brandenburg Street 5.

Matthew Picton, Washington DC, 2009, burnt archival paper, 41-1/2 x 55-1/2 x 2-1/2 inches

By Annie Buckley

Prior to becoming an artist, Matthew Picton studied politics and history at the London School of Economics, a biographical detail that proves integral to his newest body of work, on view in the sophisticated “Postwar Landscapes.”  Picton’s exhibition comprises five multimedia pieces: sculptural maps of Berlin, Hiroshima, Washington, DC, Moscow, and Warsaw.  The weblike tracings of precisely cut and painted Mylar in two of these works draw on a process Picton has used previously.  One of them-Moscow 1808, 1905, 2007, 2008-consists of three layers of intricate white Dura-Lar forms pinned to a black ground.  The three strata correspond to maps of the city from each of the years cited in the work’s title, resulting in a beautiful tracery akin to a spiderweb, while serving as a complex survey of a place over a period of time.

By pushing his material choices, Picton expands the conceptual arc of his project; three works in this exhibition present new challenges in the aesthetic mapping of geography and time.  The strongest of these, Washington DC, 2009, is an eerie dramatization of the nation’s capital, made from carefully incised burned paper and hung on the wall.  Blocky areas of the city form a maze of tiny white roomlike structures, the edges of each disintegrated and stained reddish brown by the smoke.  The use of fire adds an element of unpredictability and chaos to an otherwise highly controlled process, a bridge between the cool distance of record keeping and the playful curiosity of imagination.  The “what if” here is less a question of Washington burning and more the insertion of a sense of wonder into meticulous abstraction-as if Picton paused in the midst of making one of his conscientiously assembled constructions to ponder what might happen if it served as the set of a sleek Hollywood disaster.

© Artforum International Magazine, New York, NY

Joan Snyder at SolwayJones
By Christopher Miles

March 25, 2009

Joan Snyder, Sustained, 2007, oil, acrylic, seeds, glitter, pastel, cloth,
papier-mâché on linen, 54 x 72 inches

An artist whose practice was forged among latter-day abstract expressionism, postminimalism’s hybrid and experimental approaches to painting, and the nascent feminist art movement(s) with the accompanying tide of bodily and domestic themes, Joan Snyder couldn’t be accused of being subtle with her imagery.  Her current exhibition at SolwayJones is, shockingly, the first L.A. solo show for the MacArthur Fellow whose on-radar career has spanned from participation in biennials at the Corcoran Gallery and the Whitney Museum in the early ’70s to a 2005 retrospective at New York’s Jewish Museum and inclusion in the recent, historically significant traveling survey exhibitions Wack!  Art and the Feminist Revolution, and High Times Hard Times, New York Painting 1967-1975.  The show is riddled with compositions bearing not-so-vaguely vaginal, woundlike puddles of viscous, transparent crimson paint containing screws and nails – phallic shrapnel that evokes improvised explosive devices and both literalizes and toys with the varied connotations of the slang “getting nailed” and “screwing.”  But such play between the literal and the literary, between images and objects that tap into both a physicality we know in our bodies and a ricochet of language we know in our minds, is pure Snyder; she deals in confrontational materiality and weaves in imagery and language, often scrawled on her raw-feeling canvases, to unsettling yet engaging ends.  The word “RAW” turns up in a canvas here, mirroring – as “REDRUM” mirrored “MURDER” in The Shining – “WAR” on the opposite side of the composition, centered upon fleshy orbs of paint.  It speaks for this whole exhibition of works that try to address our relations to our bodies, ourselves, each other and our earth.  Such works succeed without the Neo-Expressionist posturing that Snyder, coming up in a different era and with little to lose, had no use for, and without the heroics that she knew from the get-go were largely denied her by the culture, her being a her.  Instead, she sticks with raw – nobly, and often profoundly.

© 2009 Village Voice Media  All rights reserved.