About CUE

A NOTE FROM CUE ART FOUNDATION

Moving forward with the success of the last eight years, the Directors of CUE Art Foundation are pleased to host the ninth annual Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Award exhibition. This year the exhibition will showcase the work of artists who were granted the award in 2010 to further demonstrate CUE's continuing respect for a sister Foundation that has a laudable record of supporting artists at all stages of their careers. In the philanthropic and educational aims of its grants and programs, we feel that the Joan Mitchell Foundation's mission is consonant with our own.

The support of the Joan Mitchell Foundation has enabled these artists to establish a foothold in their artistic careers. Some used the grant as seed money to acquire or build a studio space; others purchased art materials; still others used the money to travel or relocate. However the money was used, this exhibition highlights the importance of assisting artists in the formative years of their careers. All of these artists exhibit a high level of quality, imagination, and commitment to their work and studio practice. We thank them for participating, and hope that this exhibition will further generate new opportunities for them in the ensuing years.  

About Joan Mitchell Foundation

Established in 1993, the Joan Mitchell Foundation sustains and celebrates Joan Mitchell's unique legacy as a leading American Abstract Expressionist painter, and honors her commitment to the support of visual artists. The Joan Mitchell Foundation focuses on two objectives: first, the study, preservation, and exhibition of the work of Joan Mitchell, as well as the examination and documentation of her life; second, to assist in the development, growth, and continued maturation of contemporary visual artists by providing support for painters and sculptors throughout all stages of their careers. 

The Foundation supports exhibitions of Joan Mitchell's work both in the United States and internationally and is undertaking the process of organizing a comprehensive catalogue raisonne of her work.

To meet the needs of visual artists, the Foundation has developed several programs. These include direct awards to painters and sculptors, support for the documentation of the work of older artists to ensure the preservation of their individual legacies, a comprehensive program of free art education for New York City youth through afterschool, Saturday, and summer classes, and emergency funding to individual artists and arts communities in need of support after experiencing a disaster. In addition to these programs the Foundation is in the process of establishing an artists residency at the new Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. Complementary programs will be developed in collaboration with local arts organizations that will allow the Foundation to expand its support for the New Orleans visual arts community begun post Katrina.

As part of its ongoing collaboration with other arts organizations, the Foundation supports a multitude of services for artists, such as professional development programming, documentation of work, exhibitions, and residencies. The 2011 MFA Exhibition at CUE Art Foundation is one example of a joint project the Joan Mitchell Foundation is a part of, others can be found at www.joanmitchellfoundation.org 

Directors:
Alejandro Anreus
Polly Apfelbaum
Tomie Arai
Ron Bechet 
Dan Bergman, President
Tyrone Mitchell
Yolanda Shashaty
John Koos, Director Emeritus

Members:
Theodore S. Berger, Treasurer
Carolyn Somers, Executive Director
Michele Tortorelli

Advisors:
Neal Ambrose-Smith
Penelope Dannenberg

Foundation Staff:
Jill Auckenthaler
Christa Blatchford
Ben Boatright  
Saul Chernick 
Jane Coffey
Jennifer Dohne
Allison Hawkins
Travis Laughlin
Jose Ortiz 
Kira Osti 
Toyia Phillips 

A NOTE FROM THE JOAN MITCHELL FOUNDATION

The 2011 exhibition for the 2010 MFA Grant Recipients marks the ninth year of the Joan Mitchell Foundation's collaboration with CUE Art Foundation. CUE's generous contributions toward this partnership have enabled the Joan Mitchell Foundation to exhibit the work of over one hundred and sixty MFA recipient artists to date. The Joan Mitchell Foundation feels very fortunate to partner with CUE in such an exciting annual event.

CUE's beautiful space and central location in the heart of New York City's gallery district provides the artists in this show with an incredible opportunity for visibility. As in past years, Jeremy Adams' curatorial talent and professionalism bring together a very diverse body of work, by a diverse group of artists, in a meaningful and energetic manner. 

The Joan Mitchell Foundation's Board of Directors congratulates the Board and Staff of CUE Art Foundation for their thoughtful and invaluable support for emerging and under-recognized artists.

Contact:
The Joan Mitchell Foundation, Inc.
545 West 25th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10001
Tel: 212.524.0100 • Fax: 212.524.0101
info@joanmitchellfoundation.org
www.joanmitchellfoundation.org

Catalogue Essays

The Work of Molly Anderson Smigelski, Michael Sirianni, Patricia Fernandez, Rema Ghuloum, and Erik Gonzalez

--Risa Puleo

Though radically different in intention, content, and form, the five artists discussed in this essay problematize representation in unique ways. Utilizing, respectively, the staging methods of public signage, the laboratory, and the library, Molly Anderson Smigelski, Michael Sirianni, and Patricia Fernandez each privilege systems of display. Erik Gonzalez and Rema Ghuloum, on the other hand, contend with the historical weight of painting, treating it as a site of correspondence with artists across time. Each of these artists use varied aesthetic languages to target specific units of focus, be they family, identity, or their artistic medium.

Molly Anderson Smigelski produces her glass works in a repetitive, almost factory-derived method, formally aligning her work with her stated interest in "our relationship and attachment to...the commodified world of mass-produced objects in which we participate and inhabit." For each of the objects she produces, she initially aims for industrial anonymity, which she then subverts with subtle differentiations to each unit that reveal themselves after close looking. In Reject Sample Study, (2010) clusters of blown and hand-modeled glass elements of a variety of sizes call to mind some complex science experiment, with the glass clinically arranged in an organic, almost cellular formation upon a nondescript table. Instead of abiding by the traditional method of coloring glass by infusing it with metals and oxides, she fills the vessels with dyed waters or house paint. Each agent in this improvised coloring system offers a range of transparencies, viscosities, and effects, and the fragility of the glass combined with the ephemerality of the color suggests a similarly tenuous relationship between culture at large and the consumable object.

 In the wake of the recent repeal of the US Military's 1993 Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy-which barred gay, lesbian, and bisexual soldiers and officers from disclosing or discussing homosexual desire while serving-Michael Sirianni created Tell (2010), the hot-pink neon outline of a limp-wristed hand.  The "tell" in this case reveals the effeminate homosexual male through a gesture. In a pointed nod to Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, Sirianni queers Adam and the biblical story of creation with a flick of the wrist that contains larger philosophical stakes. The tell is subtle, aimed at those who can interpret the signification of shared desire; it maintains anonymity and the ruse of heteronormativity. Sirianni chooses the most public of display mediums--neon signage--to pay homage to the hankie codes, cruising etiquettes, and encrypted syntax of past generations, while also recognizing the loss of those underground, closet-borne vernaculars in an age of increasing acceptance and visibility of queer desire.

Using a personal archive of objects and stories--real, remembered, recorded, translated, and created--Patricia Fernandez's investigation into family is anthropological in approach and museological in display. For its yours now. its all that there is (2010) the artist has recreated a portion of her father's library, emphasizing events and locations specific to his life in Franco's Spain before he was exiled. Shelves are filled with letters, photographs, documents, and abstract paintings of books by Ruedo Ibérico, the publisher of revolutionary texts banned under Franco's dictatorship, as well as some of the actual books themselves. The artist sought to occupy her father's subjectivity by recreating a past that politics, geography, and time have disconnected her from. As the work's title-taken from a line in Federico Garcia Lorca's poem "Pequeño Vals Vienes" ("Little Viennese Waltz"), which appears on the shelf¾suggests, the installation underscores the responsibility and challenge of the archivist: collecting and translating a fragmented past. Filling in the gaps to forge her own personal narrative, Fernandez posits the multiple levels of history-personal, familial, cultural-as an abstraction tethered to the irregularity and subjectivity of memory.

For Shrine--Red and Green (2011), Rema Ghuloum synthesized memories of the architecture, light, color, patterns, altars, and arrangements she encountered daily while living in India to make a sculptural painting (or a painted sculpture) as well as a functional object that the artist often returns to for her series of painted still lifes. Like a century of artists before her, Ghuloum recognizes the still life as an opportunity for formal experimentation. She works across mediums to address a set of analogous problems often at odds in the history of painting: illusionistic and flat space, material and image, image and object, and figuration and abstraction. Citing Matisse and Morandi as influences, Ghuloum's gaze scouts for nuance and subtlety as she revisits the same object in search of new aspects of the familiar, focusing on materiality in her translations from object to image through the most economic of gestures. White Light-tactile (2010) is an attempt to capture a subtle kaleidoscope of light reflected on a white wall that the artist happened upon. By constantly revisiting the same subjects, Ghuloum ritualizes the act of looking that documents time. Hers is a practice that privileges immediacy, awareness, and the everyday.

Though utilizing the languages of abstraction, Erik Gonzalez contributes to the dialogue of spatial innovation that locates his work in a lineage of perspectival Western painting. Van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding Portrait­ emphatically resists the space of the real in favor of deepening spatial illusion. Holbein's The Ambassadors complicates our relationship to the image by requiring viewing from multiple angles. Velazquez's Las Meninas establishes a dialogue between the interior space of the painting and the exterior space occupied by the viewer. Each represents the perspectival regime of their moment. So too do Gonzalez's takes on perspective. He updates questions centered around the nature of seeing while accounting for the circumstances of our moment, specifically the surfeit of perspectives now achievable with the technological eye. This dual notion of human-machine vision is crucial to his work. In Untitled (Blob Diptych with Gesture) (2010), Gonzalez began by making the first of a pair of paintings on a shaped support. He then holds a mirror up to it, translating the object into an image which traces back onto the mirror surface. Cracks in the skin of the paint on the mirror signal its reflective surface, while the surface of the original painting is then partially obscured by a monochromatic shape-that of the mirror at a skewed angle traced back onto it. Through this complex triangulation between objects across space, Gonzalez proposes that more is not necessarily better -- that multiple views of an object may serve to obfuscate instead of clarify it. 

The Work of Caitlin Lonegan, Micah Daw, Kristin Haas, Brian Porray, and Janet Bruhn

-- Charles M. Schultz

It takes guts to be a painter in the third millennium. There is so much variety in the medium that any parameters of right or wrong, of good or bad, have long been abandoned. While there is a measure of freedom in an environment that refuses to put a premium on any particular aesthetic pursuit, that freedom comes with a catch. If there are no rules, then there are no rules to break, so how does one differentiate oneself in a world where there is no norm from which to deviate? The answer is not that no two painters should share a common thread-many do-nor is it that painters should band together and form movements-most don't. Rather, as the work of the following five painters exemplifies, the quintessential elements of their practice emerge in the relationships they forge between the places they inhabit, the materials they employ, and the processes through which they create.

Caitlin Lonegan is ruthless in her execution. "If something doesn't go satisfactorily," she says, "I'll just unstretch the canvas and try it again." Rarely starting out with more than a loose idea, she builds up layer upon layer of oil paint, reacting to the changes of color and texture, editing as she goes. There is a formal rigor to Lonegan's practice, though it is not so severe as to keep her personality from coming through.  Lonegan's paintings function simultaneously as vehicles for her own intimate occasions as well as sites of potential conversation. Untitled (Xo CL) (2010-11) is exemplary. More than six feet tall and wider than five feet, the painting dwarfs any viewer who stands before it. Its impressive scale is augmented by loose brush strokes, each of which is given enough room to evoke the sensation of open space. Yet the painting is grounded by a series of marks referenced in the title-XO CL­-letters the artist might use to end a note to a close friend. With the subtlest of touches, Lonegan imbues her massive abstraction with a legible element of personal affection.

Micah Daw sources images from the screens of phones, computers, and televisions, though no one looking at his finished paintings would necessarily know. For Daw, negative space is just as valid as positive space, so a particular shape that emerges when multiple browser windows are open simultaneously might, for example, find its way into his canvas. The aesthetic character of Daw's work expands on this relationship of negative and positive space, often confusing the two. In his paintings, the hard-edged geometric shapes created from overlapping layers appear thoroughly intertwined. Some layers are thick, some opaque; others are scraped away. The effect of all this working and re-working is a feeling of material tension. The history of the painting is fully apparent in some areas and totally obscured in others. Consequentially, Daw's work stakes out an intermediary space, a passage or point of intersection that suggests transitional movement. His painting Wandering Telegram (2011) advances this idea of motion even in its title. Executed in acrylic and oil, the canvas is dominated by a semi-transparent vermillion trapezoid situated in the center. Coalescing beneath and around this bold color is an array of turquoise and mustard tones punctuated by patches of white that form polygons of various sizes. There are no curves; every shape comes to a point. Linear relationships abound vertically, diagonally, and horizontally, activating three axial directions amid a field of overlapping geometric forms. The organization invokes a sense of destabilization. Everything seems to be in a state of flux. 

This sense of elemental adjustment, of ongoing evolution, is also at the heart of Kristin Haas's paintings. Haas works with recycled latex house paints donated by companies and individuals who, for one reason or another, found the colors unsuitable. She pours her paint onto large sheets of plastic, exploring the paint's tactility. Once dry, she peels the paint away and piles it up on a shelf. While there is certainly a sculptural component to Haas's work, she was trained as a painter and continues to think like one. She builds up her piles in layers, focusing on color relationships and overall design. Haas's use of shelves allows her work to be wall-mounted, keeping it within the domain of traditional painting while simultaneously mocking that tradition. In Tell (2010), Haas incorporates drinking cones and small cups, which have been thoroughly doused with paint. This expands her practice of using recycled materials and functions as a compositional element. The neat rims and rivets of these manufactured drinking apparatuses contrast with the more organic quality of the paint piled and drooping around them. The piece is at once haphazard yet still in possession of an uncanny sense of balance. Her vibrant color palette, a mélange of blues, greens, magenta and orange, gives the work an energetic charge, as if celebrating the successful synergism of its numerous constituent parts.

Brian Porray's abundantly colorful abstractions are similarly composed outside the realm of the brush stroke. Porray employs synthetic polymer, which is a particular type of acrylic paint with a soft body and low viscosity. It has the textural quality of spray paint but with a more concentrated color saturation. He uses the paint to build up a black and white grid pattern that recedes to a single point in space, and to add flourishes of color. On top of the grid, Porray collages patterned portions of paper that he pulls from a wide variety of sources. In Psychostimulant Supercluster (2010) the sheets of paper form an enormous multi-hued disc that commands the foreground. The disc might be expanding, retracting, exploding, or imploding; the movement is unresolved, and as consequence the space it describes seems at once infinite and immediate. Porray refers to this as an "astro-tweaker" aesthetic, calling attention to the two worlds from which he draws inspiration: cosmology (an outer space) and meth-addiction (an inner space). Not only are both prevalent practices in his native Las Vegas, but they inform Porray's artistic impulse: to abandon himself totally to a material process and to focus his thinking on the abstract qualities of space and scale.

The inspiration for Janet Bruhn's narrative realism is mundane American life. Bruhn grew up in the Midwest and is deeply attached to its charm and tradition. "By painting what I know," she says, "I feel like a diplomat to the heartland." As a painter, Bruhn is deliberate and controlled, constructing American stories by reprocessing personal photographs and objects of particular significance. One such object is an Ernie Smith LP, pictured out of its sleeve, either ready to be played or put back in the collection. It conjures memories of afternoons spent in the soothing company of warmly crackling vinyl. In Jelly Record (2010), Bruhn departs from the typical red, yellow, green, and black associated with reggae, executing the painting in shades of cerulean and ultramarine blue. The abundance of the halcyon hue evokes an easy calm that approximates the mood of the music. Portrayed atop its protective sleeve, the record appears as if floating in a soothing azure expanse. By isolating the record, Bruhn encourages a direct meditation on it, conjuring the sense of total captivation people feel when absorbed by their favorite music. 

The Work of Jon Lee, Cobi Moules, Eric Kniss, Ashley Shellhause, and Michel Droge

--Cameron Shaw

We live in a world where "140 characters" has become an accepted standard of communication. Tweets, buzz, and relentless status updates have reduced our capacity to process information down to practically nothing, while multiplying the frequency of our public declarations. That's not to say that weightier, more time-consuming forms like letter, novel, and essay writing are all dead, but the simultaneous shift towards brevity and babble is hard to ignore. Young artists today must grapple with this radical compression of content, just as those before them responded-consciously and unconsciously-to the political, technological, and social shifts of their respective times. The five MFA graduates discussed here, though diverse in their approaches, seem to foreground this sense of loss, glossing the contemporary visual language of emptiness. Some explicitly acknowledge the constantly changing relationship between man and machine in their work, while others more broadly indicate the isolation that remains when the deluge of babble has passed.

Artist Jon Lee is an avid Internet surfer and online gamer attuned to the "overlapping memories, associations, and images that clutter the mind of a 21^st century boy." His paintings evoke the sensation of facing a web browser blanketed with sound bites and image fragments-the noise of our digital world. Using glossy, candy-colored paints, he applies multiple layers to his surfaces; some strata of painted data are completely covered in the process while others remain visible. Lee disrupts the semblance of order imposed by his patterned backgrounds with pools of swirling color, graffiti-inspired scrawl, and sweeping calligraphic gestures. The sheer proliferation of styles at play in Lee's paintings negates a sense of deep engagement with any one historical source. Overload functions to destroy the potential meanings that might have been gleaned from those sources and saturation becomes the meaning in itself.

The work of Cobi Moules further explores the tipping point between abundance and lack, but in lieu of abstraction, Moules roots his practice in the figurative tradition of the 19^th century. Drawing inspiration from Hudson River School landscapes, the artist populates his painted waterfalls and craggy forests with dozens of images of himself. In these multiplied self-portraits, he often wears a uniform of blue jeans, layered t-shirts, black-and-yellow vest, and yellow hat. Moules has said of these paintings, "I have created a fantasy world in which only I exist." The artist has tied this impulse to his early feelings of rejection and aloneness because of his identification as a transgender person. The act of self-aggrandizement explicit in his paintings invariably conjures the consuming  "social networks" of Facebook, Myspace, and the evocatively titled Second Life. The Internet now provides millions of individuals the tools to create immersive virtual realities where through the proliferation of their own image they are able to manipulate perceptions of personal identity, both to themselves and others. This has resulted in a culture where many interact more with the simulacrum of "friends" than with the flesh-and-blood individuals. Moules shows a kind of gated isolation trapped within the fantasy of "connectedness" that allows for the erasure of spontaneity, and even diversity, from social life.

For Eric Kniss, nothingness manifests itself in the idea of the remnant. The artist uses humble materials such as dirt and clay dust to create sculptural installations. He brings form to otherwise formless materials through repetitive actions such as sifting, stacking, and compressing. His installations take shape as undulating hills and depressions, piles and dispersions. For 220 Bowls (2010), Kniss created three stacks of handmade, unfired porcelain bowls which he allowed to crack and break under their own weight suggesting the toppling of empires-a culture so hell-bent on excess that it collapses from the strain. Many of his works are site-specific, engaging with what he calls "the capacity of physical labor to generate a visceral sense of connectedness to place." Perhaps it is this sense coupled with an awareness of the impermanence inherent in his materials that draws attention to their very presence in actual space, grounding the distractable viewer in the here-and-now.

The abstract paintings of Ashley Shellhause navigate the issue of human responsibility to nature at a time when that relationship is growing increasingly tenuous. Her work charts both the smallest and largest components of our world, uncovering their meeting points and similarities. Exploring and merging the formal structures of nature and of technological innovation, her forms as readily suggest water crystals and veins of leaves as nerve synapses and blood vessels¾even circuit boards and wiring systems. In Mimicry (2010), amoeba-like contours and spongy formations juxtapose a gridded framework. Though never pictured in her work, man becomes a single actor in a vast network, not a 4G network of plugged-in individuals, but rather as an integral part of a complex and differentiated global eco-community.

 Somewhat like Shellhause, Michel Droge negotiates the place of the individual in relation to the natural world. During her ongoing travels in northern Maine, Droge has conducted a number of interviews with survivors of storms, shipwrecks, and other tragedies at sea. She then translates these remembered experiences into eerie painted scenes where pieces of rope float, barely visible through white mists that hover above an inky backdrop. With no evidence of the human form, the images seem like tightly focused views of a limitless vortex. Droge's works seem weighted down by their emptiness, signaled by the exaggerated contrast between her dark grounds and wisps of whitish paint, and convey a heartbreaking absence that is evident even without knowledge of these paintings' backstories. Despite the current communal willingness to overshare daily, Droge's paintings serve as a reminder that some human experiences remain almost beyond linguistic communication, mysteriously unspeakable in their gravity.

Participants

Molly Anderson Smiegelski, Tulane University
Janet Bruhn, Virginia Commonwealth University
Micah Daw, The Ohio State University
Michel Droge, Maine College of Art
Patricia Fernandez, California Institute of the Arts
Rhema Ghuloum, California College of the Arts
Erik Gonzalez, Yale University
Kristin Haas, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
Erik Kniss, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Jon Lee, Syracuse University
Caitlin Lonegan, University of California, Los Angeles
Cobi Moules, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Brian Porray, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Ashley Shellhause, Miami University
Michael Sirianni, University of Illinois at Chicago