David Farrar's Ephemeral Moments of Beauty and Comedy

“Ephemeral moments of beauty and comedy influence and guide my practice,” says artist David Farrar. “Lines of light cast through a venetian blind, a toilet roll dancing uninhibitedly in the gentle breeze of an extraction fan, the strong shadow cast from a streetlight illuminating a wooden pallet on the street. I repackage these moments as ethereal worlds isolated from the imperfections and noise of reality so that more people might appreciate the beauty of everyday occurrences.”

In his practice which incorporates printmaking, woodwork, sculpture and installation, Farrar makes use of humble materials and objects, subtly altering them in unexpected and, indeed, quite dysfunctional ways. In a hallway of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) in Amherst, Virginia where Farrar was recently in residence, he changed the EXIT sign to read EXALT, cleverly maintaining the font and utilitarian position, high on the wall, so it takes awhile to notice it. When you do, it’s hard not to smile. “I enjoy installing these pieces in ways that could be overlooked at first glance, and seeing the viewer’s moment of realization,” he says.

Farrar was drawn to the Exit sign as an oddity. In the UK, where he’s from, exits are marked with the symbol of the running man. It’s in keeping with his practice of working with what’s around him. Whether he does this using things like soil or tree bark as media, or in the creation of, often loaded, facsimiles of objects, sometimes reproducing them in miniature, other times they’re perfect, though functionless, replicas.

While commonplace for Americans, heating vents are also unfamiliar objects for Farrar (central heating is rare in the UK). His introduction to them occurred at the Artist House residency program, St. Mary's College, Maryland where he was prior to VCCA. Puzzled that the paper models he left on his desk at night would be scattered on the floor when he woke, he soon realized the culprit was the forced air that came on while he slept.

David’s interested in the relationship between form and function,“ particularly the point at which an object loses its functionality,” he says. “For instance, the same object found on the street functions in a wholly different manner than when it is in a dining room. Broken and discarded objects are imbued with a sense of pathos that stems from their loss of functionality and dislocation from their original environment. I reinterpret these objects within an artistic framework, raising them up as art objects by giving them new forms and functions. In this transformation, I often physically break down these objects to their raw materials in order to reconstruct them using traditional methods such as printmaking and woodwork. I see this process as a form of preservation: if these objects were left to break down naturally they would be lost forever. So, instead, I give them a new lease on life and purpose.”

Taking the scavenged furniture, Farrar photographs it, then breaks it down, burning the wood. Reducing the resulting charcoal to a fine ash, he uses this together with the original photograph to make a screen-printed image. It’s a wonderful rift on form and function that only gets better when you take into account silk screen terminology: you “burn” the image onto a screen using a thin layer of UV sensitive paint and a strong UV light. This, of course, references the burning of the original object; the residue or palimpsest often left behind after cleaning off a screen is called a “ghost image", which relates in some way as the image is a ghost of the no longer extant chair.

Lack of functionality also plays into his true-to-life 2-D templates of a glue stick and pair of scissors. The trick with these is you need actual glue and scissors to create their 3-D versions from the templates.

Shipping pallets figure largely in Farrar’s work. “I like their form, the fact that they are these very functional objects with this one purpose and they haven’t been superseded by something high tech.” He’s worked with large ones before, but there is something so appealing about his miniature versions. Some he paints, others he covers in material: velvet to exalt the mundane pallet and fake grass, which suggests that nature is reclaiming the pallet, but then again, it’s artificial grass. “I make scale models out of cardboard and balsa wood so they retain their formal quality but lose their functionality; after all a balsa wood pallet is about as much use as a chocolate teapot. These works also act as visual puns that reference, and perhaps make slight fun of, the overly serious monochrome canvases of minimalism: a monochrome palette for a monochrome pallet.”  

Farrar also makes miniature versions of the quite beautiful skeletal “houses” that are sometimes used in historic settlements to give visitors the idea of the structure of a building. “I noticed these striking forms on the landscape when I first arrived to St. Mary’s and was intrigued to learn that they are known as “ghost houses”, which is an apt description as they are wooden skeletons built on the footprint of the past and left to degrade naturally over time.”

Paper plate lithography is an experimental technique that exploits the chemical reaction between gum arabic and Xerox toner. Toner resists the gum arabic and paper absorbs it. When you put oil-based ink down, the toner attracts while the paper resists. For these lithographs, Farrar used ink he made with Mt. San Angelo soil. The process doesn’t require a lot of equipment. Basically, all you need is a Xerox machine. It’s transient, you can only use each plate once, and the image breaks down fairly easily so there’s a painterly quality that corresponds nicely to the clarity of the Xerox.

Farrar likes taking humdrum things and presenting them as art citing the Arte Povera movement as a major influence. Much of his work is either very fragile or not archival. “I like the delicate nature of things, they’re fleeting objects that only exist for a limited time. I don’t want to be perceived as too serious,” he says. “I like the fact people pick up on the humor in the work.”

One can marvel at his inventiveness and the labor involved in creating some of these pieces. It takes real passion, not to mention self-confidence to scan an entire roll of paper towels and then digitally print a version of it, but as Farrar says, “This is the work I want to do; I maintain truth to the original idea. I persevere.”

On his return to the UK, Farrar who is from Oxford, will continue to live and work in Glasgow returning to his post as a printing technician at the Glasgow School of Art where he studied. He will also be exhibiting work made during these residencies (St. Mary's College, Maryland and VCCA) in Glasgow Open House Festival, (Glasgow) and Hidden Door Festival, (Edinburgh).

Aaron Johnson's Reverse Painted Acrylic Polymer Peel Paintings

There’s a whole lot going on in Aaron Johnson’s paintings. They’re visually rich with vibrant colors, densely packed compositions and a profoundly macabre subject matter. Generously larded with potent political and societal themes, the work is created through a complicated technique Aaron refers to as “reverse painted acrylic polymer peel painting.”

In the multi-step process, Aaron starts with a preliminary drawing. “For the small paintings with their hyper detail it helps for me to plan it all out in advance,” he says. “Narratives come easily when I’m drawing with pencil and paper—letting things come into my mind and having fun with it.” The drawings get messy with all the erasing and smudges of graphite and so he makes a tracing of them that he tapes to the front of the polyethylene plastic sheeting on stretchers he uses as his painting surface. “For the bigger ones, I’ll just draw right onto the plastic because it’s a looser piece.”

Aaron’s paintings have three layers of paint each separated by a layer of acrylic polymer. The acrylic polymer is a clear plastic in liquid form, that’s poured onto the finished layer of paint and left overnight to harden. The layering adds a wonderful sense of rhythm and dimensionality to Aaron’s work.

Painting backwards, Aaron must first put down the detail. Disembodied from the rest of the components making up the form, these floating elements (teeth, eyes, nails, etc.) don’t make much sense to anyone at this point other than the artist. This layer is followed by the under coat of color which completes the figures, and finally the background layer is applied. To grasp how hard this is, you have to understand that from the working side, it’s impossible to tell what the painting looks like, it has to be turned around in order to see its true appearance. So, as he's working, Aaron is constantly thinking ahead to what’s going to happen in the next layers.

“The way I paint is the reverse of how most painters work,” Aaron explains. “They start with broad strokes and start to find forms and then refine and approach details. I start with detail and zoom out. It’s like the details are super precise and controlled and I know what I’m going for. In the beginning, I’m using a tiny brush; it’s painstakingly slow and then as the paintings progress, I’m relinquishing control of this thing I labored on. The backgrounds often involve splatters and poured paint—chance things and a little bit of chaos so I’m not exactly quite sure what the finished work is going to look like from the front anymore.”

After all the paint and acrylic polymer is layered onto the plastic, Aaron transfers the work onto stretched netting. This is done by laying the plastic painting surface flat, plastic side down, and pouring a final coat of polymer and then applying the netting. The polymer saturates the net, congealing all those layers of paint to the net as the polymer dries. When it's dry, the plastic is peeled away.

Aaron began using netting because when he used this multi-layered technique on canvas, it wasn’t porous enough and so he ended up with a lot of air bubbles, He got the idea to use the unconventional material walking past a construction site in New York where he spotted the orange net barricades. Eventually, he found a company in Connecticut that manufactures every kind of netting you could find. Aaron even did a commission for them using all the different kinds of netting they produce. They now send him barrels full of remnants.

Aaron’s characters are inspired by Mexican Day of the Dead figures. There’s plenty of blood and grossness in his work, but it’s handled in such an irreverent and intentionally outlandish way, it comes across as darkly funny rather than truly disturbing. In one, a bizarre feast/operation is depicted. It’s a grotesque comedy featuring a cast of oddball death’s headed characters arranged around a table including a nurse who has cut into the body releasing a toaster with toast flying out and hitting her on the face.

Aaron’s mother grew up in Assam and his childhood house was filled with Indian art. He says the Indian aesthetic is so ingrained in his self-conscious he references it without thinking about it. This explains the ease with which he incorporates the sumptuous palette, marvelously inventive patterns and flame-like gestures that recall Indian miniatures and enliven his paintings. In some works, Aaron makes more direct reference: inserting the elephant foot stool he inherited from his grandfather in one, a Ganesh-like figure in another.

Johnson enjoys putting “little things for people to discover” in his paintings. He uses a lot of food imagery. Often, it’s fast food that he utilizes to critique American capitalist culture. It’s a recurring theme that pops up in his paintings, but he keeps the meaning very open. “I’m not really thinking why the fries and hamburger would be dancing on the piano… it’s just available iconography to me. I wanted something on the tabletop to punctuate the wood grain.” And what wood grain! Wild, yet controlled it’s like an evocative caricature of wood grain. His approach to this one this one element neatly sums up his inventive and elaborate approach to subject and process.

http://www.aaronjohnsonart.com/

Kylie Heidenheimer

Kylie Heidenheimer arrived for her fifth residency at VCCA with work already begun on some of her pieces. “It’s what I like to do, to arrive with something in progress.” This ensures a relatively smooth segue into work without the added weight of a blank canvas staring you down from across the studio. And, as Heidenheimer points out, “You see things differently when you move them around.”

Beginning in 2010, Heidenheimer started working with more amplified color. This initiated a medium change from acrylic to oil, the acrylic colors being too highly-keyed for her taste. It was “an interesting adventure” since she’d been using the medium for 15 years and had to adjust her working methods to accommodate the demands of oil.

But the rich colors and translucent glazes characteristic of oil make it all worth the trouble. Heidenheimer paints on oil paper, canvas on stretched panels and canvas stapled directly to the wall.

It was interesting seeing Heidenheimer’s recent work after looking at a catalog from 2008. Not only was the vibrant color a surprise, but the looseness of her brushwork was markedly different from the more tightly controlled, all-over effect of those earlier paintings.  

With these recent pieces, Heidenheimeris exploring what she refers to as “a twisted space.” You’ll see in her paintings how one side comes forward while the other recedes. Heidenheimer does this as a way to acknowledge both surface and depth. “The painting is both an object and a container for space,” she says.

They’re also beautiful with pairings of color that are interesting and satisfying, and a complex lexicon of marks, that range from daubs to jagged lines to washes. Hue and gesture impart a wonderful drama to her compositions that are, as Heidenheimer says referring to her constant reworking, a few paintings in one.

Killer Heels

There are two take aways from Killer Heels on view at the Brooklyn Museum. One: women's shoes through the ages have been designed to keep the wearer down: trammeled and unbalanced in teetering pinnacles. And, two: everything old is new again.

Now, I like my heels as much as the next girl, even if that girl happens to be Carrie Bradshaw. I trace my obsession with shoes to when I was six. We had just made the annual pilgrimage to Best & Co. to buy our school shoes. The following day, I was sitting on our front stoop while my mother swept the sidewalk in front of our brownstone. Because I’d outgrown my sneakers, I was wearing my brand new oxfords. Back then things were simpler and also more complicated: us kids owned just three pairs of shoes: sneakers, school shoes and party shoes. Stores were more specialized — I don't think Best & Co. carried sneakers; we bought ours, like everybody else, at Melnikoff's on York Avenue and this entailed a separate shopping trip. My de rigueur party mary janes, which would have come from Best's, hadn't been purchased yet, perhaps because my party going needs weren't pressing and with the sticker shock of outfitting four children, my mother put off that purchase for another day.

In any event, while my mother wasn't paying attention, I took off my new shoes and put them on the steps beside me. Being six and easily distracted, when I got up and went inside, I left them behind. By the time my mother realized what had happened and ran outside to retrieve them, they were gone.

Of course, I was roundly scolded for being so careless, but the real punishment came when I was forced to wear a pair of white drum majorette boots with red tassels, part of a costume of my sister's, the only footwear that fit me. The problem was it was a Sunday and in the 1960s shops were closed on Sundays. It wouldn't have been so bad if we were going to spend the day at home, but we'd been invited to a barbecue on Long Island and so my humiliation at having to wear the horrid boots was public. Clearly, it made a lasting impression on me for I now possess the perfect shoe for every occasion.

But back to the Brooklyn show. Here, the emphasis is on the exotic. There's everything from the elevated 11” wooden Nalins Ottoman Empire ladies wore in the baths to keep their feet high above the water, to the most outrageous contemporary designs.

The show provides a heavy dose of fetishism, with plenty of stilettos and lots of boots. One pair, red and black high button boots from 1900, would be quaint except they're thigh high giving off more than a whiff of gilded age burlesque. There's a clip from a Betty Page film which shows her hobbling around in a pair of impossibly high — nearly vertical — pumps that, oddly, appear two or three sizes too big for her judging from the gap at the back. This kind of outré heel is seen in quite possibly the most extreme pair in the show: Christian Louboutin toe shoe stilettos, Fetish Ballerinas. God, they were weird.

There are plenty of other bizarre examples like the pair of high heeled booties made using real horses hooves that look like they clopped right out of a Matthew Barney video, a Japanese black lacquer platform thong sandal called a geta that forces the wearer to adopt a halting, dipping, figure-eight gait as seen in clips from Sakuran and Memoir of a Geisha projected on a nearby wall.

There are numerous sculptural and architectural examples including a bamboo and plastic wedge by Winde Rienstra that could almost stand alone as an art object and a silver pair designed by Zaha Hadid which would make you look like you were walking around with a couple of her buildings on your feet. 

Heelless heels have been a popular design since the 1930s. There’s a beautiful red and gold kid pair by Delman (1938-40) and a red suede sandal from 1940. Both look incredibly chic and modern. But apparently the practice of undercutting the heel goes back much further being evident in chopines from the 16th century. A steel cantilevered heel was actually patented in the 1950s. The most dramatic version of this design on view is Noritaka Tatehana’s austere and quite beautiful, faux leather heelless platform bootie. According to the label, the footwear represents his response to the 2011 earthquake in Japan. Hmmm. But if you find this a stretch, there’s a second design by Japanese/British artist/designer Sputniko! entitled Heeling Fukishima (Nanohana Heels). Adorned with flowers from a plant whose seeds absorb radioactivity. The seeds are stored in the spike heel and sowed as one walks. Giving the shoe a steampunk quality is an antiqued brass circular mechanism on the side, perhaps a Geiger counter? Another Japanese designer, Masaya Kushino continues the trend of shoe as art. His Stairway to Heaven, an elaborate lace-up, cantilevered wedged bootie, features outstretched crows’ wings at the ankles, their considerable span making it impossible to walk.

Beth Levine’s rolled heel slingback from 1962, Chanel’s light bulb heel, Prada’s Cadillac inspired mules all show that beauty and a sense of humor can co-exist. I wonder where the shoes with the hollow Lucite heels in which you were supposed to put live goldfish into were? Or perhaps that’s an urban myth?

For me though, elegance rules. My two favorites pairs were relatively tame. A black and gold brocade wedge by Christian Siriano and a kingfisher feather (sorry about the kingfisher) Roger Vivier “choc” pump, a re-issue from a 1959 design created for Christian Dior.

Notably missing from the show was Alexander McQueen’s Armadillos, not that I object as I see nothing redeeming about them except that they might have provided the inspiration for Leanie van der Vyer’s film, Scary Beautiful playing on a continuous loop.  In the film, a woman straps herself into a pair of grotesque acid yellow leather boot-like containers with enormous backwards-facing heels. She then struggles across the room, her body contorted by the weird and hideous footwear. It was a tribute to the overall strangeness of the actual footwear on display that a woman next to me remarked on the ones in the film in a way that indicated she thought they were real.

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