Stack This Press Release Until Its 9 Feet Tall

Modernity gives birth to phenomena that are difficult to articulate, not least of which is a kind of faith in the direct relationship between phenomena and their articulation. This is just to say “bear with me”.

We talked about Brancusi’s Endless Column, that big knotty extrusion which seems to grow right out of history. But we could just as easily reverse the direction of force (think Walter De Maria’s Vertical Earth Kilometer). Taken together there is a kind of dipping. A piston like motion which, vis a vis time, constitutes the central motor of an artistic practice.

Rochelle Goldberg’s Dead-end, Infinite. is all trajectory and trace, or maybe a trace of trajectory. It makes me think of those dangling donuts of dust that cartoon rocket ships leave in their wake. But then again it is so stubbornly present. It feels like it will be here for ages, experiencing a different kind of trajectory, a different kind of dust. It plods along the path from art to archeology beginning its accumulation of dust -to say nothing of its gravitas- in the studio and never looking back. The viewer, a black jean wearing connoisseur, transforms into a scientist in a futuristic Hazamat suit.

Like Dead-end, Infinite. Elaine Cameron-Weir’s piece points in two directions at once. Those stainless steel racing stripes are like the stem of an arrow without the head or tail. Our attention is directed downward and I cant help but suspect that its feet are very charged. Lets ask Bataille: “Although within the body blood flows in equal quantities from high to low and from low to high, there is a bias in favor of that which elevates itself, and human life is erroneously seen as an elevation.” Cameron-Weir has given these feet “an exceptionally burlesque value.”1

I knew it. Those feet could star in a pervy Youtube video. The sculpture seems to ask “Is there a space for me between the ionic and the yonic?”

Speaking of weird spaces how about Robin Cameron’s Monument to Pedagogy? It is rife with the classic signifier’s of the classroom: the books, the blackboard the… orange? An apples to oranges comparison machine. It is nonsense in the best sense. I smell the outdoors in its precarious logic. The nowhere of recess, of finding a dead animal, or a piece of litter in the outfield. It seems to live in the stolen temporality one gets by playing hooky.

Perhaps this sculpture is a descendent of the school of fictive formalism begun by Tom Sawer, that trickster practitioner of the inkwell pigtail drip painting and the serial whitewash monochrome.

At the time I’m writing this there is no title for this exhibition. That seems fine the show being comprised of 3 capital I’s. Do they really constitute an I? Perhaps an Other? If you think you know look again, this time with the other eye.

Sebastian Black, 2012

1 Georges Bataille, The Big Toe, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (University Of Minnesota Press, 1985) 20, 22.

Robin Cameron, (b.1981, British Columbia, Canada). Robin Cameron's books are available at Printed Matter and held in the collection of the MoMA library. She is pursuing her MFA at Columbia University and will graduate this spring.

Elaine Cameron Weir, (b.1985, Alberta, Canada). Elaine Cameron-Weir will have her second solo show in New York at Ramiken Crucible this coming spring, as well as a solo show at Desaga in Cologne, Germany.

Rochelle Malka Goldberg, (b.1984, British Columbia, Canada.) Rochelle Goldberg is an artist that lives and works in New York.

Robin Cameron Elaine Cameron-Weir Rochelle Goldberg February 16 — March 17, 2012 Opening Reception February 16, 6 — 8 pm Martos Gallery 540 West 29th Street New York, NY 10001 212.560.0670 info@martosgallery.com www.martosgallery.com

 

The Work Locates Itself

 

Opening Reception

Friday, January 20, 5-7pm

 

Curated by Robin Cameron and Kari Cwynar

 

Lucien Durey

Shayne Ehman 

Allison Freeman 

Bitsy Knox

Arvo Leo

Davida Nemeroff

Tabitha Gwyn Osler

 

 

This exhibition began as a consideration of the dispersion of Canada’s artistic community, questioning the existence of common ways of thinking and making when artists pass like ships in the night. This is the new internationalism and an age-old Canadian tradition. Leaving. But to relocate to unfamiliar territory can be both challenging and productive, and the seven artists brought together here in New York demonstrate a variety of approaches to art-making completed during or after a significant journey. Journeys of mind, body, object, idea and memory. Common threads emerge in spite of geographical gaps. Above all, the work itself communicates a purposeful engagement with one’s surroundings. New places of living and working exist simultaneously with lingering specters of past homes, senses of longing and distance, and spaces between here and there. Is it time to consider the Canadian art scene as a constellation of disparate geographies? Think about the point of origin, the journey, the goal and the final destination. Why did you go where you went? How do you work now that you work where you work? From where does the work originate?

 

Exhibition Dates
January 18 - February 10, 2012

LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University School of the Arts
310 Dodge Hall, 2960 Broadway at 116th Street
Hours: Mon - Fri, 9am to 5pm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My studio at Prentis Hall 213 will be open.

—

Columbia University School of the Arts: Visual Arts Program — MFA Open Studios
Sunday, November 20, 2011

Watson Hall Studios will be open from 2pm – 4pm
612 W. 115th Street, New York, NY 10027

&
Prentis Hall Studios will be open from 3pm – 6pm
632W. 125th Street, New York, NY 10027

The second-year MFA candidates’ studios will be open to the public. 
Each student is present to discuss his or her work in an informal setting.


Korakrit Arunanondchai
Julia Benjamin
Sebastian Black
Robin Cameron
Nathan Catlin
Lea Cetera
Caitlin Cherry
Lisa Cobbe
Jeremy Couillard
Ernst Fischer
Ben Hall
Kristina Lee
Alexandra Lerman
Molly Lowe
R. Lyon
Irini Miga
Susan Morelock
Claudio Nolasco
Bea Parsons
Jordan Rathus
Corey Riddell
Sandy Smith
Maria Stabio
Ian Warren
Matthew Watson
James Yakimicki

 

Paul Theobald and Company
Lauren Anderson, Robin Cameron and Paul Stoelting

October 28, 2011 - November 27, 2011

Opening October 28, 2011 6-9pm

Golden Age is please to announce our final exhibition, Paul Theobald and Company, featuring painting, photography and sculpture from Lauren Anderson, Robin Cameron and Paul Stoelting—three young artists hinged together by an interest in anachronism. 

The exhibition takes its name from the forgotten art bookshop cum gallery cum publisher located in downtown Chicago from 1936 to 1988. Paul Theobald and Company Publishers began during World War II when the supply of European art books was severed due to the ongoing international conflict. In response, Paul Theobald and Lolita Cruz Theobald began to publish works from the now-legendary artists, architects and thinkers that frequented their shop. 

We invoke the legacy of Paul and Lolita Theobald, the New Bauhaus émigrés they championed–Moholy-Nagy, Kepes, Hilberseimer, Gropius, and Malevich–and the distinctly American modernism they celebrated. While Chicago can claim this history, most of the creative community would prefer that it die. Golden Age proudly adopts this legacy because death—in the way that painting is “dead” or books are “dying”—is decidedly more interesting than novelty. 

With tradition, datelessness and the “anti-novel” in mind, the artists in Paul Theobald and Company use dead forms stripped of time, technique and function to communicate the experience of living in the present moment. Cameron considers the truth of presentation with palpably modern marks that conjure a sense of beauty similar to Alma Thomas, Hans Hoffman and Stuart Davis. Anderson presents a series of sandblasted glass drawings that recall the paintings of Ray Eames while resisting any easy classification. Finally, Stoelting directly links 1945 to 2011 by introducing one open, angular, three foot sculpture that contains a digitally created AbEx painting. 

For us, modernism means having the authority to pick and choose from all of history, regardless of convention, and using what is most appropriate for each new project. When history is so readily available and flattened by the immediate forms of reception, anachronism characterizes our current day. We enjoy the “misplacing” of customs, people, and objects. Instead of fantasizing about traveling to 1750 with a computer, we disrupt the contemporary with books. As Golden Age comes to a close, we invite you to look to the future, by acknowledging the past.  

Golden Age

119 N Peoria St. #2D

Chicago, IL 60607 USA

+1 312 288 8535

 

160 km 

Aaron Aujla

Robin Cameron

Elaine Cameron-Weir

Matt Creed

Dylan Eastgaard

Lukas Geronimas

Ryan Foerster

Rochelle Goldberg

Shawn Kuruneru

Ben Schumacher

 

 

160 km / West Coast Edition

It’s just sitting, is what my Scottish great-grandmother used to say about the weather on Canada’s British Columbia Coast. That’s true. Look out the window and you won’t see any sky, just some version of cloud cover. White and diffuse like the instant a screen flicks off. Step outside and you feel the air: not cold, just lower than body temperature. And you’ll probably get wet without a jacket, although it’s not really raining either. This can go on for months. 

 

The BC Coast is a rainforest climate, and I felt kind of plantlike when I lived there: my paths of activity grew like moss or fern, biologically plugged into the ecosystem. I stayed up late and drew pictures of densely ornamented buildings and fantasy cities, filling them with transparent flora and liminal human inhabitants. The way me and my friends lived was kind of liminal too. The doors of my apartment building were left open to the neighborhood and visiting drug users occupied the hallway bathrooms for hours. Any night of the week, people I didn’t know that well might shout my name from the street outside my window. 

 

West Coast Canadian author Douglas Coupland once said this about his parents and childhood: “We had food, a bed and TV, they just didn’t tell us anything...There was a culture of reflection and introspection...but nothing was ever explained to me and it did leave me clueless.” The flipside of cliched Canadian politeness is passive-aggressive and alienating: don’t ask, please. Sorry, but you can’t come closer. 

 

Canadians live so close to Americans that it feels unimportant to talk about the differences between us, especially since America has so much variety contained within itself. In comparison, Canada seems to have embarrassingly little regional variety, and what variety there is appears to correspond with a comparable section of the US: the Pacific Northwest, the Rockies, the Prairies, the Northeast, the Maritimes. Maybe we can attribute this to the fact that Canadians reside in such regular formation: an often-cited statistic says that between 90-97% of Canada’s population lives within 160 Km (100 miles) of the US border. Except, as Americans sometimes point out, “The only thing you don’t have is the South,” and one of the things the US doesn’t have is the North. Canada is home to the Northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world: the town Alert, in the province of Nunavut. And North even of that is Canada’s other border, 

 

in the Arctic, where the country is “commencing the collection of technical evidence...in support of claims for continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles from its declared baselines...as stipulated in Article 76, paragraph 8, of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.”* There’s room up there. Barely-populated, rarely-visited, partially uninhabitable, that frozen space represents lifetimes of dormant energy, beyond ski resorts and hiking trails and climbing routes. 

 

It’s been almost four years since I moved to the US and I still don’t have my Social Security number memorized. And come to think of it, I don’t have any of my Canadian numbers memorized either. In Canada, I have some leftover bank accounts and credit cards that I don’t use anymore. In the US, I have a single overworked checking account and no credit. Every year or so, I reserve something like a month’s wages in order to prepare and travel to keep my immigration paperwork up to date. Remember, it’s the longest border in the world, patrolled by an armed staff employed to check your identity and screen for illicit substances. 

 

We mirror US trends but they don’t mirror ours. When you experience everything in multiple — American, Canadian, and even British versions — ambivalence is a matter of course. When I was growing up, TV and magazines were full of stories and images that I could look at but didn’t have to take seriously. Not every product advertised would be available in Canada. Statistics from the US could often be considered a rough reflection of the facts, but technically they didn’t apply to me. Since I was going to college in Canada, I would never have to take an SAT, or go through life knowing what my score would have been. In my head a vision of ocean landscape mingles with a fragmented guitar track from one of the albums that I used to play on the stereo in my family’s van, on a weekend trip from the island to the mainland to the mountains and back.

 

We did this often, and each time I packed a duffel bag full of CDs in jewel cases and piles of books and magazines and more clothes than I would be able to wear in a weekend. It was as if I was secretly preparing to leave home forever. Something might happen. I remember once staring at the ocean flying past, listening to another track of noise, thinking, this is exactly what I want played at my funeral. 

I’d watch from the backseat of the musty unheated vehicle, hypnotized by the wet landscape moving by. Inside, the glass of my seat window was cold, something like the temperature outside, and my dad would allow a 10-minute-long section of guitar distortion to stretch out in silence as we drove on. Looking through tall trees — on the left if driving toward Whistler, on the right if heading to Vancouver — I could see the Pacific Ocean far beneath us, extending into the distance and dotted with islands that were textured dark green with forest.

My eyes used to be good enough to make out the silhouettes of the trees on some of the faraway islands. I liked to choose one tree and imagine switching places with it, seeing myself standing way out on the island, looking back at the van as it raced along the highway, leaving me alone.

 

Kayla Guthrie

 

October 2011

 

 

 

KIDD YELLIN

133 Imlay Street

Red Hook, Brooklyn

New York 11231

Opening Sat, Oct. 8 — Sat, Nov. 6th

 

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