Melissa Meyer’s Dancing Paintings

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Lang, 2008

Word on the street was that the Melissa Meyer show at Lennon, Wienberg Inc. was worth seeing, so I was lucky I made it down there this weekend before it closed. Canvases, like Lang above, are larger than you would expect and the oils in some places have the thinness of watercolors.

Meyer was in the gallery, and she described how she works with the canvases flat on the floor and paint them in layers. She thinks of the linear marks she makes as “dancing.”

Galvin, 2008

Her work is rooted in Abstract Expressionism, and in these large paintings she achieves an effect rather like watercolors with the play of light and space. I found I really enjoyed just looking at them and tracing the different layers and marks. The marks don’t come together to mean anything, but watching how they interact is beautiful.

Sleepwalkers..Doug Aitken, Tilda Swinton, Myself.

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You know, typical Saturday night. I had some wine, and somehow that left me up at 4:27 AM remembering the film Doug Aitken did on the walls of MoMA the winter of 2007. (Hint: it was cool.)


The actors, such as Tilda Swinton and Chan Marshall of Cat Power, are cool. Screening your film on the huge walls of MoMA is cool. Waiting in the cold as snow starts falling to see how the different characters wake up, just for a short time, out of the comatose of their lives was also pretty cool. (Read: I am cool.)

So somehow when up at this time my thoughts drift to Sleepwalkers. I still remember how neat the experience of watching it was. The narrative played out on the city streets, with people hustling by or starting to look. Different parts of the film were shown on different walls, so the viewer had to walk around MoMA to see what other parts of the narrative.

This is a longer clip that gives you a better feel for the pacing and experience of watching at MoMA. The viewing process was fragmented, so you could never see anything at once and had to put it together in your head. Aitken says of the structure of the film that “the narratives interlock in a kinetic synchronicity and expand and break apart again. It’s almost like chaos theory.” Aitken, by the way, has also made videos for Fatboy Slim and Interpol.

So with that I leave you, well-rested reader, and may you all have a happy, bright Sunday morning. Enjoy your coffee and your blogs.

I will be sleeping.

How Clay Has Moved Beyond Craft

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Clay as Craft Clay as Something Far, Far Different

The recent New York Times review of a pottery show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia brings attention to the way this once craft is still fighting for recognition as a fine art.

Work by Kathy Butterly

Clay is a craftsy medium, despite the many directions it has taken since the caveman days. As the show’s press release points out, “Clay is a base material. From potsherds to porcelain fixtures, clay is synonymous with the building of industries and cultures. At the same time , its very materiality—its tactile malleability, earthen sensuousness, and humidity—make it the medium of more elemental associations and expressions.” The pieces being exhibited are anything but craftsy or utilitarian, and are more appropriately called sculptures whose medium happens to be clay.

Works by Ron Nagle

It is, as the review noted, remarkable to have a show solely devoted to clay, and it provides an impressive answer to what might be done besides bowls. Interestingly, the reviewer notes that some prominent artists did not care to exhibit in a show that only featured clay–snobbery in reverse.