THE magazine - July 2006

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of and for the Arts • July 2006

OpeningsReviewsPreviewsStudioVisitsOneBottleDiningGuideWritingsArchitecturalDetailsOut&About


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CONTENTS 5

Letters

18

Universe of artist Paul Shapiro

25

Studio Visits: Bruce Nauman and Susan Rothenberg, photographs by Guy Cross

27

One Bottle: The 2003 Château Saint Martin, “Grès de Montpellier”, by Joshua Baer

29

Dining Guide: Santacafé and XiclO Vietnamese Cuisine

35

Openings & Receptions

36

Out & About

42

Previews: 5 Angles on Abstraction at Addison Arts; Julie Blackmon at photo-eye Gallery; Painting and Photography in American Art: A Symposium at the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center; Power and Delicacy: Masterworks of Bamboo Art at Tai Gallery; Sixth International Biennial at SITE Santa Fe; and Transparencies at Farrell Fishoff Gallery

45 National Spotlight: Martin Schoeller at Hasted Hunt Gallery, New York City 47 Interview: Klaus Ottmann, curator of the SITE Santa Fe International Biennial, interview by Guy Cross 53 Critical Reflections: Alive and Well at the University of New Mexico Art Museum (Alb.); Dan Griggs and Timur Tsaku at Klaudia Marr Gallery; Eugene Newmann at Linda Durham Contemporary Art; Gordon Micunis at El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe; Gregory Lomayesva at Art & Industry; Harry Geffert at the El Paso Museum of Art; James Marshall at Winterwod Fine Art; Jennifer Lynch at Fenix Gallery (Taos); Joe Ramiro Garcia at LewAllen Contemporary; Landscapes of the Mind at Touching Stone Gallery; Mexican Modern at the Museum of Fine Arts; and Nina Elder at Richard Levy Gallery (Alb.)

69

Architectural Details: Near Albuquerque, photograph by Cindy Carraro

70

Writings: “Safety,” by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Among the noteworthy projects of the last years of his life, Richard Avedon—one of the most celebrated photographers of the 20th century—completed a book of his photographs of women. In his time, Avedon created an unparalleled view of women, social mores, cultural ideals, popular styles, and high fashion. As an artist, he was responsive to nuances of expression, gesture, and manner, and his photographs opened a window to the interior lives of his subjects. Woman in the Mirror (Harry N. Abrams, $65) is wonderfully designed and printed, and includes a perceptive essay by art historian Anne Hollander.


T O K I H I R O S AT O SOLO SHOW JULY 6 –28 Opening Reception July 6, 5 – 7 pm

Minato-ku Daiba, 1996 Black & white transparency over light panel 39 x 48 inches, Edition 1/12 Copyright Tokihiro Sato

P O W E R A N D D E L I C A C Y: MASTER WORKS OF BAMBOO ART J U N E 3 0 – J U L Y 15 Opening Reception June 30, 5 – 7 pm

Abe Kiraku, one of Japan’s leading senior bamboo artists, will be present at the opening with a very special selection of his traditional flower and offering baskets.

Torii Ippo, Floating Clouds, 2005 25 x 16 x 15 inches

TAIGALLERY 1601 B Paseo de Peralta Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 505.984.1387

www.textilearts.com

N E W G A L L E R Y L O C A T I O N : 16 01 B P A S E O D E P E R A L T A A T G U A D A L U P E S T R E E T A C R O S S F R O M S I T E S A N T A F E


LETTERS

magazine VOLUME XIV, NUMBER I WINNER 1994 Best Consumer Tabloid SELECTED 1997 Best Consumer Tabloid SELECTED Top-5 Best Consumer Tabloids

Publishers E d i t or i a l a n d Cr e a t i v e D i r e c t or s

Guy Cross and Judith Cross A r t D i r e c t or

Chris Myers

C O NT R I B UTING EDIT O R

Diane Armitage Co p y E d i t or

Edgar Scully

Bill Wittliff’s classic silver print photographs and recent pinhole camera photographs—A Selection: Lonesome Dove and La Vida Brina (Life Jumps)—will be on view at the Andrew Smith Gallery, 203 West San Francisco Street, through August 14, 2006. Opening reception on Friday, July 14, 5-7 pm.

s t a f f p h o t o g ra p h e r

Jennifer Esperanza Proo f R e a d e rS

James Rodewald Kenji Barrett

Co n t r i b u t or s

Diane Armitage, Joshua Baer, Kristin Barendsen, Mei-mei Berrssenbrugge, Susanna Carlisle, Mary Carraro, Jon Carver, Kathryn M. Davis, Anthony Hassett, Colleen Hayes, Rinchen Lhamo, & Richard Tobin

TO THE EDITOR: Who would have thought I’d ever write a fan letter about an article featuring a guy smoking a BIG cigar—but that’s exactly what I’m doing. I greatly enjoyed the John Richard Grimes interview in the June issue. Santa Fe is lucky to have someone like him on the scene. Apart from the worthy task of bringing greater appreciation and understanding of Native American and Indigenous artists, his values are a refreshing change from the ‘boring mainstream art world’ with its same old white male Eurocentric narrative staring out at viewers in museums all over the globe. I can’t wait to see what Grimes will do to hasten the death of this much over-touted ideology.

CoVE R

Photograph by Julie Blackmon

—Judy Chicago, Belen, NM

Courtesy: photo-eye Gallery, Santa Fe

—Mike and Jodi Simmons and Michael Roberts, JHS Gallery, Taos TO THE EDITOR: In the modern world, we associate art with artists. When it comes to masterpieces of American Indian art from 1900 and earlier, attribution is not possible by artist. However, it is possible by culture. Anyone interested in the beauty and honesty of American Indian art will be well served by reading John Grimes’s extraordinary book, Uncommon Legacies. Thank you for your interview with Mr. Grimes in your June issue. He is that rare breed of individual—a man with an honest mind. —Mario Barsotti, Berkeley, CA

A d v e r t i s i n g Sa l e s

Rose Darland: 505-577-8728 (mobile) Sarah Ellis: 505-424-7641 THE magazine: 505-424-7641 Distribution

The Quick-Quicksilver Group THE magazine is published by THE magazine Inc., 1208-A Mercantile Road, Santa Fe, NM 87507. Phone (505) 424-7641. Fax (505) 424-7642, E-mail:THEmag1@aol.com. Website: TheMagazineOnLine.com. Copyright 2006 by THE magazine. All rights are reserved by THE magazine. Reproduction of contents within are prohibited without written permission from THE magazine. All submissions must be accompnied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. THE magazine is in no way responsible for the loss of any unsolicited materials. THE magazine is not responsible or liable for any misspellings, incorrect dates, or incorrect information in its captions, calendar, or other listings. The opinions expressed within the fair confines of THE magazine do not necessarily represent the views or policies of THE magazine, its owners, or any of its agents, staff, employees, members, interns, volunteers, or distribution venues. Bylined articles and editorials represent the views of their authors. Letters to the editor are welcome. All letters may be edited for style and libel, and are subject to condensation. THE magazine accepts advertisements from advertisers believed to be of good

Unfortunately, pretty much the only thing specifically mentioned in the review about the art in the show was a couple of titles. We do appreciate the favorable comments about Jodi Simmons’ icons and the paintings of David Hewson, neither being part of the show. We would add that the work of both David and Jodi has been described by those on the other side of the dogma coin as “incorrect,” “not church worthy,” and one fellow even said, “blasphemous.” But then, that’s what dogmatists do—intent on proclaiming their mission, they miss the essence. We fully realize that “sacred” is a very subjective thing. That’s partly what we’re exploring in the gallery—just what is sacred art? We are very interested in opinions and feedback, positive or negative, but like a lot of folks, we’ve heard enough sermons.

TO THE EDITOR: In his rush to preach a sermon, your reviewer, Anthony Hassett, neglected to actually talk about the art in his review of the Abstract Sacred show at JHS Gallery in Taos in May. He used the word dogmatic a lot. Dogmatic is “characterized by arrogant and authoritative assertions.” The review appears to have more to do with the reviewers own mindset than what he saw in the gallery. Indeed, some of the work in the show was perhaps technically weak, but some of it was well done and very powerful. Most of the artists featured do work which they do not consider sacred; the pieces they chose for the exhibition were personal explorations of Judeo Christian symbols, which are different from dogmas (as they suggest the intangible) and have long been used in the history of the mutual interaction of art and religion.

TO THE EDITOR: I have not enough words to thank THE magazine for including Dan Szpakowski [Universe of] and myself [Writing Page] in your May issue. Many of the other issues that I have read (some deeply perused) have spoken to me. Your periodical is one of the most informative I have come across—it reflects, and indeed, shapes the culture that is Santa Fe’s and, in fact, points the direction one wishes for Santa Fe to go. Both Dan and I realize the effort that goes into any issue is extreme. I am so happy that THE introduced me to its readers. Tom Joyce’s wife, Julia, called and gave me some delightful input on the two articles. She thought my word poem tied in so well with the Universe of Dan Szpakowski article. Full circle as it were. Such insight on her part was a thrill to hear. And this from a person who is so very quiet and unassuming. —Eava Mayanna, Holman, NM TO THE EDITOR: Thank you for Jon Carver’s wild response to my show at Nüart Gallery in your June issue. It’s inspiring that he responded to the images from the place they originated, reinforcing the joy of intuitive work. What a refreshing contrast to the traditional removed critical voice. Thank you for “unraveling my bikini intact.” —Suzanne Sbarge, Albuquerque

reputation, but cannot guarantee the authenticity or quality of objects and/or services advertised. As well, THE magazine is not responsible for any claims made by its advertisers; for copyright infringement by advertisers; and is not responsible or liable for any mistakes in any advertisement.

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CELEBRATION! 25th AnniversAry exhibition July 8 - August 26, 2006 featuring artists Bellas Artes has represented for 20 years

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oLGA de AMArAL

Honoring Jack Lenor Larsen who guest curated his first exhibition for the gallery 20 years ago in 1986

653 Canyon Road Santa Fe, NM 87501 505 983-2745 www.bellasartesgallery.com



CHARLOTTE JACKSON FINE ART 2 0 0 W. M A R C Y S T R E E T, S U I T E 1 0 1 , S A N TA F E , N M 8 7 5 0 1 , 5 0 5 - 9 8 9 - 8 6 8 8

w w w. c h a r l o t t e j a c k s o n . c o m

Specializing in Monochrome, Light & Space, Modernism, Color Field, and Photography since 1989.


EVENTS &

Programs

ADULT

LEARNING

T U E S D AY J U L Y 1 8 6 P M The Feminist Art Project: A National Initiative

This hands-on program presents a series of three interconnected workshops in acrylic painting that will explore the formal and expressive qualities of color. SESSION I addresses color properties, working with the color wheel, and color mixing; SESSION II introduces color families; and SESSION III presents the expressive use of color and color as feeling.

D R . O L I N , codirector of the Rutgers Institute for Women and Art and The Feminist Art Project, will discuss nationwide plans underway for 2006–2009 and beyond, to recognize the aesthetic and intellectual impact of women on the visual arts and culture, under the aegis of The Fem inist Art Project. The Museum is copresenting this program with the Southwest Regional Alliance of ArtTable, a national organization of women in leadership roles in the visual arts and one of the Founding Program Partners for this project.

Museum Education Annex, 123 Grant Avenue $120; Members $110. Cost includes basic art supplies. Individual classes, $50. Pre-registration required: 505.946.1039.

T H U R S D AY A U G U S T 1 0 9 A M – 4 : 3 0 P M Walks in the American West: Walking with Natalie Goldberg This special program offers a day of seeing, walking, and enjoying northern New Mexico in the company of author and artist, Natalie Goldberg. We begin with a visit to Ernest Mayan’s Gallery to see paintings by Natalie. The group will head to Santa Barbara Canyon in Penasco by way of the High Road to Taos. We will walk along the Canyon and follow the excursion with late lunch at the delectable Sugar Nymphs Café. The day will close with a drive back along the Rio Grande Gorge. N ATA L I E G O L D B E R G is the author of ten books, including her most recent: The Great Failure: My Unexpected Path to Truth. She has just completed with the filmmaker Mary Feidt, Tangled Up in Bob, Searching for Bob Dylan, a one hour documentary. She leads retreats at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, New Mexico.

Museum Education Annex, 123 Grant Avenue $130; Members, $120. Enrollment is limited. Reservation deadline; Sunday, August 6. For reservations call 505.946.1039.

For additional information please call 5O5.946.1OOO or visit our website at www.okeeffemuseum.org 217 Johnson Street

Santa Fe, New Mexico 875O1

PROGRAMS

T H U R S D AY S J U L Y 1 3 , 2 0 , & 2 7 2 – 5 P M The Language of Color: An Investigation through Painting L O R R A I N E S C H E C H T E R

L O R R A I N E S C H E C H T E R received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Arts, where she was later given an Angell Post-Graduate fellowship. Schechter was an early innovator of three-dimensional card designs published by MoMA/ New York. An arts educator for more than 35 years, she recently stepped down as Arts Education Coordinator for the Santa Fe Arts Commission and as Director of its ArtWorks program.

JOI N U S

LECTURE

FA M I LY

PROGRAMS

Family programs are free and begin at the Museum, 217 Johnson Street. Reservations suggested: 505.946.1007.

S A T U R D AY J U L Y 1 5 9 : 3 0 – 11: 3 0 A M The Magic of Mixing Colors Georgia O’Keeffe recorded her color recipes in order to repeat the various hues she used in her paintings. Looking like paint swatches found in stores, these recipes indicate that O’Keeffe mixed her colors in advance and not on the canvases themselves. Starting with pure colors, participants will mix shades, creating their own values and tones. By recording these color recipes, family members will be able to duplicate the palettes they use in their paintings. Led by LORRAINE SCHECHTER , visual artist and poet

S A T U R D AY A U G U S T 5 Green, Green, Greener

9 : 3 0 – 11: 3 0 A M

Georgia O’Keeffe had twelve different tubes of green paint that she used. A Nobel Prize winning chemist speculated that green could be used as a primary color and Georgia owned the book he wrote for painters. Green can be found in so many of her paintings perhaps she experimented with his theory. This Saturday, we will make green paintings and see how green can make reds redder and blues cooler. Led by the MUSEUM EDUCATION STAFF

DR. FERRIS OLIN

Museum Education Annex, 123 Grant Avenue Free. Reservations suggested: 505.946.1039.

S U N D AY J U L Y 3 0 6 P M Considering O’Keeffe’s Surfaces: A Conversation on Conservation & Technique DALE KRONKRIGHT , Conservator, Georgia O’Keeffe

Museum

BARBARA BUHLER LYNES , Curator, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum; The Emily Fisher Landau Director, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center JUDY WALSH , Associate Professor of Paper Conservation, Buffalo State College

O’Keeffe was extremely particular about the kinds of materials she used, always selecting the very best and using them in specific ways to create pristine surfaces of great distinction. Moreover, she was keenly interested in preserving these surfaces so that they would always look, as much as possible, as they had when she first completed them. In examining the materials O’Keeffe used in making the works included in Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, Lynes and Walsh came to a new understanding of the relationship between O’Keeffe’s aesthetic and her working methods and materials. In caring for O’Keeffe works, Kronkright has developed a keen understanding of the technical components of O’Keeffe’s oil paintings. These three experts will share their insights and discoveries about these rarely discussed but fascinating and critically important aspects of O’Keeffe’s art. Museum Education Annex, 123 Grant Avenue $5; Members free. Reservations suggested: 505.946.1039.

DIALOG 360: Ar tists in Conversation A C O L L A B O R AT I O N among the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the Center for Contemporary Arts, the College of Santa Fe, the Santa Fe Art Institute and SITE Santa Fe. This new lecture series is a community forum for presentations and conversations by artists and art professionals working in a variety of disciplines.

Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail Admission at the Door; $5; Members of participating organizations, students and seniors, $3. 505.982.1338 for more information.

T H U R S D AY J U L Y 1 3 6 P M John Kennedy, Director, Santa Fe New Music David Dunn, experimental composer/sound artist T H U R S D AY A U G U S T 3 6 P M Debbie Caffrey and Joan Myers, photographers Helen Kornblum, collector of women’s photography

I M A G E : Todd Webb, O’Keeffe Making Stew, Ghost Ranch New Mexico , 1961.

Courtesy, Evans Gallery.


Representing the Lifetime Collection of Boris Chetkov

Self Portrait in a Top Hat, 1987 acrylic on panel, 20 x 16 inches

Pushkin Gallery is proud to announce the publication of

BORIS CHETKOV Across All Barriers Essay by Dr. Alexander Borovsky Head of Contemporary Art, State Russian Museum 252 pages, 215 color plates

Modern Russian Masters International Contemporary Sculpture 550 Canyon Road, Santa Fe NM 87501 505.982.1990 pushkingallery.com


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July 6 - August 25

Gregory Crewsdon Martin Denker Julia Fullerton-Batten Candida Hofer In Sook Kim Dodo Jin Ming Scott Peterman Hiroshi Sugimoto Jenna Ward Pablo Zuleta Zahr , MONOTYPE ž X ž

Richard Levy Gallery Albuquerque 505.766.9888 www.LevyGallery.com

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Study portrait painting in the historic heart of Santa Fe Elias Rivera Inspirational Oil Painting with Aug 21 - Aug 25 Elias Rivera In celebration of renowned artist Elias Rivera’s retrospective exhibition, Andreeva Portrait Academy is pleased to welcome a limited group of students into his private studio. This unique workshop includes reflective discussions, slide demonstrations and painting from the model with personal instruction for both the novice and skilled painters.

Linda Kyser Smith Impressionist Portrait Dec 4 - 8 Learn the secret of painting jeweltoned portraits using a four color palette from master colorist Linda Kyser Smith. Students will paint from life every day as Ms. Kyser Smith demonstrates how to replicate the unique colors of individual skin tones and capture the essentials of gesture and character in a portrait.

Sherrie McGraw The Mystery of Figure Drawing Revealed Nov 27 - Dec 1

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Develop your artistic perception by expanding your understanding of visual information and identifying the structure behind what you see. Sherrie McGraw will guide students in drawing the clothed figure and portrait using skills and knowledge passed down from the Old Masters.

For more information call or visit www.ThePortraitAcademy.com 215 W. SAN FRANCISCO, SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 505.992.3330



ALICE LEORA BRIGGS CUT AND BURN

SANTA FE CLAY CONTEMPORARY CERAMICS

July 1 - 29, 2006

b o x

Opening Reception Sat., July 1, 4 - 6pm

gallery

1611A Paseo de Peralta Santa Fe, NM 8 7 5 0 1 (across from SITE Santa Fe) Tues - Sat 10 - 5, Sun 12 - 4 5 0 5 . 9 8 9 . 4 8 9 7 michelle@boxgallerysf.com www.boxgallerysf.com

5 ANGLES ON ABSTRACTION WILLIAM BETTS

June 30 – July 29, 2006

DANIEL BRICE TONY EVANKO PHILLIS IDEAL JAY TRACY

  a contemporar y gallery

209 Galisteo St. Santa Fe, NM 87501 505-992-0704 www.addisonarts.com


Gum © Julie Blackmon, 2006

Julie Blackmon photo eye Gallery

D o m e s t i c Va c a t i o n s

photo eye Bookstore

Opening & Reception June 30th, 5-8 pm

New Location: 376-A Garcia 376-A Garcia Street Santa Fe, NM 87501 Tue-Sat 11-5 gallery@photoeye.com 505.988.5159

June 30th - September 8th, 2006 Julie Blackmon is the winner of the 2006 Santa Fe Center for Photography Project Competition

www.photoeye.com/julieblackmon

New Location: 370 Garcia 370 Garcia Street Santa Fe, NM 87501 Mon-Sat 10-6 bookstore@photoeye.com 505.988.5152 www.photoeye.com/bookstore

Catalogue Available

We’ve Switched Spaces! Please join us to celebrate the opening of our new gallery and bookstore spaces along with the opening and reception for Julie Blackmon’s Domestic Vacations. Friday night, June 30th, 5-8 pm


ANDREW SMITH GALLERY, INC. Masterpieces

of

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Lonesome Dove: Gus On Porch

©1988 Bill Wittliff

BILL WITTLIFF A SELECTION: LONESOME DOVE and LA VIDA BRINCA

July 14, 2006 - August 14, 2006 Artist Reception: Friday, July 14, 2006 5-7 p.m. View the exhibition at www.AndrewSmithGallery.com.

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203 W. San Francisco St., Santa Fe, NM 87501 505-984-1234 • HOURS: 10-5 Mon.-Sat. w w w. A n d r e w S m i t h G a l l e r y. c o m


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UNIVERSE OF

Paul Sha p i ro first impacted the Santa Fe art

scene years ago making painterly abstractions based upon the landscape. He has been a regular fixture ever since. He appears most often as “the man in black,” sporting a laconic irascibility that recalls the great personalities of Abstract Expressionism. Shapiro’s recent work is based on the nexus between the psyche and the cosmos, and is inspired by his extensive knowledge of the history of abstraction and his recent attempts to grapple with theoretical physics. Shapiro’s work asks the big question: What is the true nature of reality? An exhibition—Quantumscapes—will be on view at Zane Bennett Gallery, 826 Canyon Road. Opening reception, Friday, July 14, 5-8 pm.

Paul Shapiro, Formation #46, acrylic/collage on DiBond, 32” x 24”, 2005


A Painting is Not a Joke For me a painting is an imprint of the artist’s psyche, revealing what an artist’s consciousness is engaged with and to what depth an artist is willing to explore. What one leaves behind cannot be undone, and I think an artist’s integrity is of the utmost importance. Art is a gift that we leave for the world. Paul Klee’s work is whimsical, but it is not a joke.

The Primary Impulse My primary impulse is to embrace the unknown and to extract from the void a visual metaphor of an abstract world that might evoke an inner state outside of the mundane, and perhaps convey this experience to the viewer. I try not to work with a rear view mirror strapped on to my head looking into the familiarity of my past.

Work Without Explanation I feel that we are living in a time where there is so much verbiage and theory connected to art and we have become addicted to so much information. I am still a strong defender and believer in the pure visual language standing on its own, carrying with it an imbedded message of the sublime, devoid of any cultural connotations. Issues come and go and usually get resolved in time and will not have much relevance outside of the time frame they existed in—they usually end up as a curious aberration from our historical past.

Reasons I Came to Santa Fe I moved to Santa Fe in 1982 because I was involved with painting landscapes and the work I was making looked as if the New Mexico terrain inspired it. I had invented all these images and when I saw the New Mexico landscape I knew I must live in the midst of this world that I was creating on canvas. I had a lot of success with this work; I also had many superficial imitators. In 1990, I felt that I had completed this body of work and returned to abstract painting, which I had abandoned in 1970 for various reasons. A lot of my collectors felt betrayed by this change and dropped me. (I guess they would have wanted Picasso to remain in his Blue Period forever.) I think that Santa Fe as an art town has been existing on some collective statistic about being the second or third largest art market in the country. This is the art carrot that is dangling in front of so many artists, leaving them very disappointed, along with its becoming very expensive to live here. I think that a very viable contemporary art scene is finally beginning to develop here. More attention needs to be placed on the good art that is coming out of this area.

Berlin For years I have felt this unexplained strong connection to Berlin. In 1989, I just happened to be in Berlin when the Berlin Wall fell. I was right in the thick of it on the first night—great timing. I have a daughter and two granddaughters living in Berlin—my son-in-law is a famous German actor, and there is a creative energy in Berlin that I haven’t experienced in any other place I’ve been. It is certainly not paradise, but there is a strong energy that is pulling at me and attracting me. The only other place I had this connection with was Santa Fe, when I moved here from Boston. My new body of work—the Quantumscape series—feels much more connected to Germany than to New Mexico. I want to keep one foot here in Santa Fe and one foot in

Photograph by Jennifer Esperanza

Berlin. ◆

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we’ve moved!

1012 MARQUEZ PLACE BUILDING 1, SUITE 107A 505.995.9800 HAIR STYLING & COLOR . WAXING . MANICURES TO THE LOFTS AT


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STUDIO VISITS

The studios oF

⇒ ANd Bruce Nauman ⇓

Photographs by Guy Cross

susan rothenberg

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Food... it’s our Forte! Pre-Performance Dinner Special 3 courses – $35 5:30 seating

I C O OK

Aqua

santa

451 WEST ALAMEDA ¡ RESERVATIONS 982.6297 LUNCH 12 - 2 PM W - F ¡ DINNER 5:30 - 9pm t - s

(full menu always available)

lunch & dinner served daily

YO U E AT

231 washington ave • reservations 505•984•1788 www.santacafe.com • menus & special events online

K L = 9 C K â—† K = 9 > G G < â—† K H A J A L K â—† E = J A ; 9 F D9 K K A ; K , =NA K A L = <

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Lunch Mon - Sat 11:30 - 2:30 â—† Bar Menu 11:30 - Close â—† Dinner Sun - Thurs 5:30 - 9:30 â—† Fri - Sat 5:30 -10:00

530 South Guadalupe Street

â—†

989-3300


ONE BOTTLE

One Bottle:

The 2003 Château Saint Martin de la Garrigue, “Grès de Montpellier” by Joshua Baer

When I asked the question, the twins looked at me like I was crazy. Then they looked at each other. The talking twin said something to the silent twin. He

“Being ready has nothing to do with it,” said the talking twin. “Neither does being White. Why are you angry?”

said it in Navajo. The silent twin nodded. He didn’t seem to be offended but he

“I’m not angry,” I said. “I’m just frustrated.”

didn’t seem all that happy, either.

“That’s who you are,” said the talking twin. “If you want to know the

“You need to come with us,” said the talking twin. He and the silent twin led me away from the dance and into one of the houses at the edge of the plaza. Inside the house, they led me through a series of rooms to a room at the back of the house. The house smelled like a combination of

four winds, start with the two. Speak to the howling wind. Listen to the listening wind. Maybe that will help with the four. Or maybe not.” Which brings us to the 2003 Château Saint Martin de la Garrigue, Coteaux du Languedoc, “Grès de Montpellier.”

bacon, peanut butter, and Vick’s VapoRub. There were beds and blankets

It has been a while since the beat of the drum and the whoop of the

in the rooms, and there were pictures of saints on the walls, but no people.

dance could be heard in the countryside of the Languedoc. As recently as

Everyone was at the dance.

two hundred years ago, in the middle of summer, people in the south of

When we reached the room at the back of the house, the talking twin said I should sit on the floor. There was a kiva fireplace in the corner of the room and there were embers but no fire in the fireplace. It was cold in the room, so I sat with my back to the fireplace. The silent twin sat on the floor across the room with his back to the door. The talking twin sat on the floor at the center of the room, halfway between me and his brother. “How come you asked us that question?” said the talking twin.

France danced, sang, and worshipped outside, but those days are gone— maybe not forever, but definitely for the time being. These days, the French do their worshipping inside, usually in the kitchen and at the dinner table. Eating and drinking are a religion for the French, at least that’s how it looks to Americans. Whether their food and their wines are sacraments or just food and wine depends on the Frenchman. In the glass, the 2003 Château Saint Martin de la Garrigue is opaque in color and thick in texture. The

“Hey, look,” I said, “if I offended you, I’m sorry. I have

bouquet is relentless. You get your nose into a glass of this

nothing but respect for Navajo culture. I was just watching

wine and you feel lucky to get it back. On the palate, the

the dance. When you guys came up and asked me what I was

Château Saint Martin is more of a story than a statement.

doing here, I thought you were from the pueblo. Then, when

The finish goes on for ten minutes. It’s like a song you

you said you were Navajo, I remembered reading something

can’t get out of your head.

about how Navajos believe in the four sacred winds. It’s a

That night, at the pueblo, the talking twin told me

windy night, so I asked the question. I meant no disrespect.

not to follow them. He and the silent twin got up and left.

I was just trying to be friendly.”

I waited in the room for a while, then I got up and went

The silent twin looked at the floor. The talking twin held up his hands. “Stop talking,” he said. The three of us sat in the room without saying anything. You could hear the drums and the singing from the dance, and you could hear the sound of the wind above the sounds of the drums and the singing. “The answer to your question is yes,” said the talking twin. “Our people believe in the four directions. So, for us, there are the four winds. But for you, there are only two.”

back to the dance. I looked from face to face in the crowd around the plaza but I never saw the twins again. That was almost thirty years ago, though it feels like it happened last night. In the years since it happened, I’ve met Navajo people in Santa Fe, at the pueblos, and on the Navajo Reservation. If I had to guess, I’d say I’ve asked a hundred Navajos about the twins. None of them could tell me anything. I’ve listened to the howling wind and I’ve let the

“Why?” I said. “Because I’m White?”

listening wind listen to me. Those parts I can handle.

The silent twin laughed and shook his head. He could not

Speaking to the howling wind is something I’ve done, but

get over how stupid I was. “For you,” said the talking twin, “there is a howling wind and there is a listening wind. You listen to the howling wind. The listening wind listens to you. Right now, for you, that’s all there is.” I tried to control myself but I’ve never been that good at controlling anything, much less myself. “Oh, I see,” I said. “I’m

I don’t think I’m any good at it. Listening to the listening wind remains a mystery.◆ One Bottle is dedicated to the appreciation of good wine and good times, one bottle at a time. The name One Bottle, and the contents of this column, are © 2006 by onebottle.com. If you need help finding a wine or building a cellar, write to Joshua Baer at jb@ onebottle.com.

not spiritually ready for the four winds. I can only handle two. Is that what you’re telling me?”

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ine s i u C ern Southwest West

142 WEST PALACE 5 0 5 9 8 2 9 8 9 1 www.senorluckys.com


DINING GUIDE

S antacafé Lunch and Dinner: Seven Days

$ KEY

INEXPENSIVE

$$

up to $14

MODERATE

$$

$15—$23

EXPENSIVE

$$$

Photograph by Colleen Hayes

Reservations: 984-1788

VERY EXPENSIVE

$24—$33

$$$$

Prices are for one dinner entrée. If a restaurant serves only lunch, then a lunch entrée price is reflected. Alcoholic beverages, appetizers, and desserts are not included in these price keys. Call restaurants for hours.

$34 plus

EAT OUT MORE OFTEN!

...a guide to the very best restaurants in santa fe and surrounding areas... 315 315 Old Santa Fe Trail. 986-9190. Lunch/Dinner Beer/wine. Smoke-free inside. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: French. Atmosphere: Three intimate rooms—reminiscent of a small inn in the French countryside. Patio dining. House specialties: Earthy French onion soup made with a duck stock; squash blossom beignets; smooth and rich foie gras terrine with poached cranberries; crispy duck; and one of the most flavorful steaks in town. Comments: Super wine bar and wine-pairing dinners. Andiamo! 322 Garfield St. 995-9595. Dinner Beer/wine. Smoke-free. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Italian. Atmosphere: Cozy interior with Tuscan yellows and reds. House specialties: The chicken Parmesan; baked risotto with mushroom ragout; and any fish special. Comments: Consistently good food and a sharp wait staff makes Andiamo! one of the places in Santa Fe to eat Italian. Aqua Santa 457 W. Alameda St. 982-6297. Lunch; Wednesday-Friday Dinner: Tuesday- Saturday Beer and Wine. Smoke-free. Patio. Parking entrance on Water St. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: American gets cozy with Provencal Atmosphere: Sophisticated charm that is at once warm and inviting, intimate and casual—everyone here is special. House specialties: The food is made to order, so don’t be in a hurry. The fresh tomato soup is paired with the best bread in town and is so full of flavor that it can’t get any better. The mussels, breast of guinea hen, anything with polenta are marvels of flavor. Other recommendations: If the cherry clafouti or the wedge of chocolate pavé is on the dessert menu, go for it. Comments: Aqua Santa draws a local, cool, and clubby crowd. Bobcat Bite Restaurant Old Las Vegas Hwy. South of Santa Fe. 9835319. Lunch/Dinner No alcohol. Smoking Cash. $$ Cuisine: American. Atmosphere: This is the real deal—a neon bobcat sign sits above a small, low-slung building. Inside are five tables and nine seats at a counter made out of real logs. House specialties: The enormous inch-and-a-half thick green chile cheeseburger is sensational. The 13-ounce rib eye steak is juicy and flavorful. Comments: No desserts. The Blue Heron Restaurant at The Inn at Sunrise Springs 242 Los Pinos Rd. (La Cienega) 428-7613 Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner/Sunday Brunch Smoke-free. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Asian/American Atmosphere: Zen-

like setting with fireplaces and Japanese-style sitting in upstairs dining room. The beautiful grounds feature ponds with giant koi and a meditation pool. House specialities: Flash fried calamari with lime ginger dipping sauce; Asian Ceasar salad; pink peppercorn crusted Ahi tuna; Hijiki crusted salmon; prosciutto wrapped pork tenderloin with sweet ginger mash and bok choy. Comments: Book one of their charming casitas and have a romantic vacation—just fifteen minutes from downtown Santa Fe. Bumble Bee’s Baja Grill 301 Jefferson St. 820-2862 Breakfast Daily Lunch/Dinner Patio and drive-up window Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Mexican Atmosphere: Casual, friendly and bright with handy drive-up for those on the go. House specialties: Soft corn Baja-style fish tacos, featuring mahi mahi; steak burrito grande; and rotisserie chickens. Homemade salsa (bowls of it at the salsa bar) and chips are super. Comments: Chef Chris Galvin (Andiamo!, Coyote Café, and Escalera) is at the helm. The tortilla stew is the best! Café Pasquals 121 Don Gaspar. 983-9340. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner/Sunday Brunch Beer/Wine. Smoke-free. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Multi-ethnic. Atmosphere: Café adorned with lots of Mexican streamers, Indian maiden posters, and rustic wooden furniture. House specialties: Hot cakes get a nod from Gourmet magazine. Huevos motuleños, a Yucatán breakfast, is one you’ll never forget. For lunch, try the grilled chicken breast sandwich with Manchego cheese. Comments: Always a line outside. Café San Estevan 428 Agua Fria at Montezuma St. 995-1996. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Beer/wine. Smoke-free. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: New Mexican Atmosphere: Old adobe, rustic wooden tables. House specialties: Enchiladas de la Casa de Estevan, Anna’s poblano chile, watercress salad with poached egg and bacon, and probably the best flan you’ll ever have. Comments: Chef Estevan García has taken New Mexican foods and refined them with French influences. Cloud Cliff Bakery & Artspace 1805 Second St. 983-6254. Breakfast/Lunch/Brunch/Bakery Beer/wine. Smoke-free. Patio. Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: American meets the Southwest. Atmosphere: Open room with long bar facing an open grill, a community table, and a bakery with heady aromas. House specialties: Roasted vegetable goat cheese sandwich; blue corn chile rellenos; soups; salads; and stuffed croissants. For Sunday brunch, try the smoked salmon sandwich.

Comments: Watchwords at Cloud Cliff are “Art, Politics, Community.” Compound (The) 653 Canyon Road. 982-4353 Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Smoke-free. Patio Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Contemporary American. Atmosphere: Beautiful and serene adobe. House specialties: The seared beef tenderloin carpaccio with horseradishcrème fraiche dressing is a great starter. The Compound’s classics remain: Roast chicken with creamed spinach and foie gras pan gravy and the forever-braised New Mexican Lamb shank with fire-roasted tomato risotto. Other recommendations: The bittersweet liquid chocolate cake is irresistible. Comments: Seasonal menu that pairs perfectly with the Compound’s extensive wine list. Copa de Oro Agora Center at Eldorado. 466-8668 Lunch/Dinner Take out menu Full bar. Smoke-free. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: New Mexican. Atmosphere: Bright colors are inviting. House specialties: Duck carnitas tostadas; guacamole with jicama and freshly made corn chips and the tortilla and cactus soup are tasty starters. For dinner, try the Margarita strip steak marinated in lemon and lime juice and tequila, grilled to order over mesquite or the San Carlos fisherman’s stew brimming with fish, shrimp, and mussels in a fire-roasted tomato and cactus broth. Comments: Written up in Gourmet. Counter Culture 930 Baca St. 995-1105. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Wine/Beer. Smoke-free. Patio. Cash. $$ Cuisine: All-American. Atmosphere: Informal. House specialties: Breakfast: burritos and frittata. Lunch: sandwiches and salads. Dinner: flash-fried calamari; grilled salmon with leek and pernod cream sauce; and a delicious hanger steak. Comments: Boutique wine list and reasonably priced. Cowgirl Hall of Fame 319 S. Guadalupe St. 982-2565. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Smoking/non-smoking. Patio Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: All American. Atmosphere: Popular patio shaded with big cottonwoods. Cozy bar. House specialties: Very “Atkinsfriendly.” The smoked brisket and ribs are fantastic. Dynamite buffalo burgers; potato salad (with skins); a knockout Texas onion loaf; and strawberry shortcake. Comments: Beers, beers, and more beers—from Bud to the fancy stuff. Coyote Café 132 W. Water St. 983-1615. Dinner Full bar. Smoke-free dining room. Major credit cards. $$$

Cuisine: Southwestern. Atmosphere: A bright, contemporary space. Saddle up a barstool covered in real cowhide. House specialties: Brazilian daiquiri or Chiletini to go with Coyote’s famous red chile onion rings. Do not deny yourself—get the chipotle shrimp on buttermilk corn cakes for an appetizer. Entrée of choice is the 22-ounce, bone-in, aged prime rib cowboy steak—hefty enough to satisfy most armchair buckaroos. Comments: A restaurant legend. Dave’s Not Here 1115 Hickox St. 983-7060. Lunch/Dinner Beer/wine. Smoke-free. Cash. $ Cuisine: American with New Mexican flavor. Atmosphere: One simple room with open kitchen. Friendly. Shared tables. House specialties: Thick chile cheeseburgers with french fries and knockout housemade chile rellenos have kept the Santa Feans coming back for years. Large portions and low prices. Comments: Knockout burgers. Downtown Subscription 376 Garcia St. 983-3085. Breakfast/Lunch No alcohol. Smoke-free. Patio. Cash. $ Cuisine: American coffeehouse and newsstand. Atmosphere: Café society. Over 1,600 magazine titles to buy or peruse. Big room with small tables and a nice patio outside where you can sit and schmooze. House specialties: Espresso, cappuccino, lattes, and pastries. Comments: As easy as it gets. El Farol 808 Canyon Rd. 983-9912. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Smoking/non-smoking. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Spanish. Atmosphere: The Western-style bar with wood plank floors, thick adobe walls, and a postage-stamp-size dance floor for cheek-to-cheek dancing. Wall murals by Alfred Morang. Intimate dining rooms. House specialties: Tapas; fresh garlic soup; and paella. Comments: Live music and flamenco weekly. El Mesón 213 Washington Ave. 983-6756. Lunch/Dinner Beer/wine. Smoke-free. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Spanish. Atmosphere: Spain could be just around the corner. Music nightly: Spanish guitar, jazz, and even a wild Tango night. House specialties: Tapas reign supreme, with classics like Manchego cheese marinated in extra virgin olive oil; sautéed spinach with garlic and golden raisins; and flash-fried baby calamari with two sauces. The grilled 14-ounce rib eye steak with chimichurri is outstanding. Paellas are worth the 30-minute wait. Comments: Chef/ owner David Huertas has brought authentic

Spanish cuisine from the hills of Spain to the high desert of New Mexico. Geronimo 724 Canyon Rd. 982-1500. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Smoke-free dining room. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: American and Southwestern contemporary cuisine. Atmosphere: Two-hundred-year-old building with fireplaces, portal, and a garden room. House specialties: Executive Chef Eric DiStefano masters a complex union of herbs, spices, and fresh ingredients in creating awe-inspiring meals. Entrées include seared the “Sea Salad”—butter roasted sea bass w/ brined English cucumbers, mesquite grilled Colorado lamb chops, and the peppery elk tenderloin. Other recommendations: At dinner, choose from three of the Chef’s Tasting Menus—paired with wines for each course. Comments: The service is excellent—the desserts extravagant. Guadalajara Grill 3877 Cerrillos Rd. 424-3544. Lunch/Dinner Beer/wine. Smoking. Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: Mexican. Atmosphere: Recently renovated restaurant in a strip mall. House specialties: Birria estila (kid goat); camarón al mojo de ajo; shrimp cocktail; and chilaquiles. Comments: The free salsa and chips are utterly addictive. Harry’s Roadhouse Old Las Vegas Highway. 989-4629. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Beer/wine. Smoke-free. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: American and Southwestern. Atmosphere: Roadhouse charm. Small, front room with the counter and bar stools is way cool. House specialties: Hearty breakfasts, and a darn good burger with fries. Try the meat loaf or a smoky chicken quesadilla. Specials can be spectacular. Comments: Very generous portions and very friendly folks. Il Piatto 95 W. Marcy St. 984-1091. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Smoke-free. Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: Italian Atmosphere: A bustling interior with cozy bar. House specialties: Grilled hanger steak with three cheeses, pancetta and onions; lemon and rosemary grilled chicken, pumpkin ravioli w/ brown sage butter. For dessert: Warm bread pudding. Comments: Extremely reasonable prices. No dinner entrée over $18. Jinja 510 North Guadalupe St. 982-4321. Lunch/Dinner Full Bar. Smoke-free. Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: Pan-Asian. Atmosphere: Rich, deep colors, dark wood booths, a stunning

continued on page 31

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Xi C L O

kasasoba

(see-clo)n

soba udon bento sushi kaiseki sake

traditional japanese cuisine

lunch • dinner

1. artspace 2. vietnamese cuisine

544 agua fria @ sanbusco center monday - saturday 11:30-2:30 and 5:00-9:00 closed sunday 820.6777 solana center next to the marketplace - santa fe

reservations 984.1969

TR ATTORIA NOSTR ANI Offering Seasonal Northern Italian Cuisine and a Comprehensive Wine Program Patio Dining

New Summer Menu

New Mexico’s Sole Recipient 2005 Wine Enthusiast Ultimate Award of Distinction

featured in the new york times and gourmet magazine international wine and food society award of excellence 3o4 Johnson Street in downtown Santa Fe • Monday - Saturday 5:3o - 1o pm Reservations 983.3800 or online at www.trattorianostrani.com • Ample parking available • Fragrance free


DINING GUIDE

Ristra 548 Agua Fria St.. 982-8608. Dinner/Bar Menu Full Bar. Smoke-free. Patio Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Southwestern with French flavor. Atmosphere: Small dining rooms in an old cottage and a lovely tented patio. House specialties: Black Mediterranean mussels in aromatic chipotle and mint broth; ahi tuna tartare; squash blossom tempura; pistachio crusted Alaskan halibut; and achiote grilled Elk tenderloin. Comments: New bar with a full menu and extensive wine list.

It’s kinetic art on the walls and a great selection of Vietnamese food on the table at Xic L o

Vietnames e

Re s t a u r a n t

919 West Alameda, Santa Fe. Closed Sunday. bar, and a Gauguin-like painting in the dining room deliver romance and nostalgia. House specialties: If you remember Trader Vic’s, the drinks at the too-much-fun Jinja Bar will blow you away. It reads like something out of the 50s: Mai-Tai, Singapore Sling, Zombie, Kava Bowl, and Volcano drinks. Comments: Great savory soups and wok bowls. Try the shaking beef. Julian’s 221 Shelby St. 988-2355. Dinner Full bar. Smoke-free. Patio Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Italian. Atmosphere: One of Santa Fe’s most romantic restaurants. House specialties: Eggplant grilled with olive oil, roasted red peppers, and balsamic vinegar. The boneless breast of chicken sautéed with raisins, shallots, and capers in a sweet-andsour wine sauce are addictive. Comments: Tiramisú for dessert. Kasasoba 544 Aqua Fria. 984-1969 Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine/Sake. Smoke-free. Patio. Visa & Mastercard. $$ Cuisine: Japanese bar food. Atmosphere: Casual and subdued. Movie posters on walls. House specialties: Miso soup with lobster, sake steamed striped bass with enoki mushrooms; vegetable tempura; uni-crusted sea scallops; and maki sushi rolls. Comments: A wonderful selection of sake. Kohnami Restaurant 313 S. Guadalupe. 984-2002. Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine/Sake. Smoke-free. Patio. Visa & Mastercard. $$ Cuisine: Japanese. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: Miso soup; ramen; sea weed salad; soft shell crab; dragon roll; chicken katsu; noodle dishes; and the Bento box specials. Comments: Good selection of sake and beers. For dessert, opt for the wonderful tempura ice cream—ginger, red bean, green tea, or vanilla. Friendly folks. Los Mayas 409 W. Water St. 986-9930. Dinner Full bar. Non-smoking. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: New and Old Mexican. Atmosphere: Intimate, borders on sultry on some evenings. House specialties: Ceviche; turbo fish marinated in fresh lemon and orange juice; guacamole freso, and “Taste of Santa Fe” award-winning Chile en Nogada. Comments: Entertainment every night. Flamenco every Satuday evening. Fair prices.

Maria’s New Mexican Kitchen 555 W. Cordova Rd. 983-7929. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Smoking/non-smoking. Patio. Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: New Mexican. Atmosphere: Rough wooden floors, hand-carved chairs and tables, and kiva fireplaces set the historical tone. House specialties: Freshly-made tortillas and green chile stew. Pork spareribs in a red chile sauce are a fifty-year-old tradition. Flan with burnt-sugar caramel sauce is the perfect ending. Comments: For margaritas, Maria’s is the place. Mu Du Noodles 1494 Cerrillos Rd. 983-1411. Dinner Beer/wine. Smoke-free. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Noodle House Atmosphere: Casual and friendly. House specialties: Try the salmon dumplings—steamed and drizzled with oyster sauce; the Pad Thai; the beef jantaboon; or the Malaysian Laksa—wild rice noodles in a red coconut curry sauce with baby bok choy. Comments: The daily specials are excellent. O’Keeffe Cafe 217 Johnson St. 946-1065 Lunch/Dinner Beer/wine. Smoke-free. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Contemporary Southwest with a French flair. Atmosphere: The walls are dressed with photos of Ms. O’Keeffe herself. House specialties: A silky smooth foie gras served with orange muscat is an inviting appetizer. For your main, try the Northern New Mexico organic poquitero rack of lamb with black olive tapenade. Comments: Nice wine selection. Osteria d’assisi 58 S. Federal Place. 986-5858. Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Smoking/non-smoking. Patio Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Italian. Atmosphere: Casual, friendly, and perfectly unpretentious. House specialties: A super selection of antipasti; a perfectly prepared Scaloppine al Vino Bianco e Capperi (veal sautéed in white wine with lemon and capers). Comments: Housemade pastas, breads, and micro-brewery beers. Old House (at the Eldorado Hotel) 309 W. San Francisco St. 988-4455. Dinner Full bar. Smoke-free. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Southwestern Contemporary. Atmosphere: Clubby and comfortable.

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House specialties: Pan seared Alaskan halibut with Yukon gold potato and lobster cake and pepper-tomato jam; and the grilled veal chop. For dessert, the warm liquid center chocolate cake with crème anglaise. Comments: Very professional service. Pink Adobe 406 Old Santa Fe Trail. 983-7712. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Smoke-free dining rooms. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: American/Creole and New Mexican. Atmosphere: Housed in a 300-year-old former military barracks with 36-inch-thick walls, and six fireplaces. House specialties: Creole Mary, a Bloody Mary with Stoli, a skewer of celery, olives, and pickled okra. Gypsy or green chile stew at lunch. Steak Dunigan—a New York cut smothered with green chile. French apple pie with hot brandy sauce for dessert. Comments: A Santa Fe tradition. Railyard Restaurant & Saloon 530 S. Guadalupe St. 989-3300 Lunch: Monday-Saturday Dinner daily Bar Menu daily Smoke-free. Free parking. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: American Classics Revisited. Atmosphere: Open, spacious, and bustling. House specialties: Appetizers include southern fried buttermilk chicken strips with Creole remoulade dipping sauce, and BLT salad. The classic sides—potatoes au gratin, macaroni and cheese, creamy spinach, mushrooms with sherry, and steamed asparagus or broccoli—will drive you mad with decisions. Steaks and chops grab your attention with choices of compound butters that melt on top of the meat. Try the ribeye with blue cheese and port butter or the blackened pecan-crusted ruby trout. Other recommendations: Catfish Po’Boy at lunch and the lemon meringue pie. Comments: Many familiar waitpersons and a generous pour at the bar. Louis Moskow rocks! Rio Chama Steakhouse 414 Old Santa Fe Trail. 955-0765. Sunday Brunch/Lunch/Dinner/Bar menu. Full Bar. Smoke-free dining rooms. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: American Steakhouse/New Mexican. Atmosphere: Pueblo-style adobe with vigas and plank floors. House specialities: USDA Prime steaks and prime rib. Haystack fries and corn bread with honey butter are yummy sides. The tuna at lunch is superb. Other recommendations: The bar menu features a great fondue and mini hamburgers. Comments: For dessert, try the chocolate pot.

Santacafé 231 Washington Ave. 984-1788. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Smoking/non-smoking. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Contemporary Southwestern. Atmosphere: Minimal, subdued, and elegant. House specialties: For starters, the crispy calamari with lime dipping sauce will never disappoint. Favorite dinner entrées include: grilled rack of lamb; pan-seared salmon with olive oil crushed new potatoes and creamed sorrell; miso marinated halibut with lemongrass. Comments: If available, order the tempura shrimp. Righteous cocktails, super appetizers, and a knockout crème bruleé. Drinks and appetizers at the bar at cocktail hour is fun. Saveur 204 Montezuma St. 989-4200. Breakfast/Lunch No alcohol. Smoke-free. Patio. Visa/MasterCard. $ Cuisine: French/American. Atmosphere: Cafeteria-style service for salad bar and soups. Deli case with meats and desserts. Sit down at small tables in very casual rooms, elbow to elbow. Bustling with locals every day. House specialties: Excellent salad bar and sandwiches. Comments: Fast and easy. Second Street Brewery 1814 Second Street. 982-3030. Lunch/Dinner Beer/wine. Smoke-free inside. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Simple pub grub and brewery. Atmosphere: Casual and very friendly. House specialties: The beers brewed on the premise are outstanding, especially when paired with beersteamed mussels; beer-battered calamari; burgers; fish and chips; green chile stew or the truly great grilled bratwurst. Comments: A kid-friendly place and very generous portions. Señor Lucky at The Palace 142 W. Palace Ave. 982-9891. Lunch/Dinner Full Bar. Smoking in bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Southwest meets Western. Atmosphere: Call it “cowboy/cowgirl chic.” House specialties: The grilled lime-and-garlic-marinated flank steak basted with honey and chipotle, served with a sweet corn and a grilled onion salad; Chimayo red chile pork chop; and the oven-roasted Negra Modelo half chicken. Comments: Specialty cocktails and a sunny patio with its own bar. The Shed 1131/2 E. Palace Ave. 982-9030. Lunch/Dinner Beer/wine. Smoke-free. Patio. Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: New Mexican. Atmosphere: The Shed—a local institution; some say a local habit)—is housed in a seventeenth century adobe hacienda just a heartbeat from the Plaza. House specialties: The stacked red or green chile cheese enchiladas with blue corn tortillas are the real deal. The posole is a knockout! Comments: Avoid long lines, go to sister restaurant, La Choza, for the same classic New Mexican food. Shohko Café 321 Johnson St. 982-9708 Lunch/Dinner Sake/Beer. Smoke-free Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Authentic Japanese Cuisine. Atmosphere: Sushi bar as well as table dining. House specialties: Softshell crab tempura;

hamachi kama; sesame seafood salad, and Kobe beef with Japanese salsa. Comments: Yak with the sushi chefs who create great sushi and sashimi—ask for the blue fin—it is wonderful. Steaksmith at El Gancho Old Las Vegas Highway. 988-3333. Dinner Full bar. Smoke-free dining room. Major credit cards $$ Cuisine: American. Atmosphere: Family restaurant with full bar and lounge. House specialties: Aged steaks and lobster. Great pepper steak with Dijon cream sauce. Comments: They really do know steak here. The Teahouse 821 Canyon Rd. 992-0972 Breakfast/Light Fare to 7 p.m. Patio. Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: Contemporary with a French flair. Atmosphere: Casual cafe. House specialties: Lovely salads and an absolutely amazing selection of teas by the cup or in bulk. Comments: Yup, a bit of old Europe on Canyon Road. Tia Sophia’s 210 W. San Francisco St. 983-9880. Breakfast/Lunch No alcohol. Smoking/non-smoking. Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: New Mexican. Atmosphere: The “real deal.” Old wooden booths or tables. House specialties: Green chile stew (known to cure the common cold). Enormous breakfast burritos stuffed with bacon, potatoes, chile, and cheese. Comments: Authentic Northern New Mexican food served here. Trattoria Nostrani 304 Johnson Street. 983-3800. Dinner Wine/Beer. Smoke-free dining rooms. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Northern Italian. Atmosphere: A renovated 1857 adobe with a great bar. House specialties: To start, order the Trio of Crostini: duck pate, wild boar, and roasted plum tomato or the fried calamari, shrimp, and whitefish. The crépes with salt cod puree and shrimp reduction is delicious. For you main course, you cannot go wrong ordering the veal scaloppine with Tuscan vegetable ragu and orzo; the grilled hanger steak with fried potatoes; or the grilled Colorado rack of lamb. Comments: Large selection of Italian and French wines. Yes, the bar has been raised for Italian food in Santa Fe. Vanessie of Santa Fe 434 W. San Francisco St. 982-9966. Dinner Full bar. Smoke-free dining room. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: American. Atmosphere: Grand piano bar and oversize everything thanks to architect Ron Robles. House specialties: New York steak and Australian rock lobster tail. Comments: Many daily specials. Whole Body Cafe 333 Cordova Rd. 986-0362. Breakfast/Lunch Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: Mostly organic. Atmosphere: Cafe casual. House specialties: Tasty breakfast burritos, seasonal fruit plates, smoothies, juices, coffees, and teas to start your day. Raw food, curry, sandwiches, and salads at lunch. Comments: Healthy, healthy, healthy. Zia Diner 326 S. Guadalupe St. 988-7008. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Smoking/non-smoking. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: American. Atmosphere: Very down home—a curvy bar, booths, and simple tables. House specialties: Meat loaf, embedded with green chile and pine nuts, and served with real mashed potatoes and gravy; a variety of of hamburgers; and a totally smashing chicken-fried chicken. We suggest the hot-fudge sundae with bittersweet, homemade fudge sauce—it is amazing. A plus: many wonderful take-out pasteries and desserts.

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SHOHKO C AFÉ

bar menu from 5:30 pm

sushi • sake japanese cuisine lunch dinner •

321 johnson street

the bar @ RISTRA RISTR A

548 agua fria street

982.8608

open nightly

www.ristrarestaurant.com

Copa De Oro At the Agora Center at Eldorado

Take-Out Menu

466-8668

Lunch & Dinner

Tuesday - Sunday

Lunch: 11:30 am to 2:30 pm. Dinner: 5 pm. to 9 pm.

Mexican Style Steaks Seafoods &

Local Favorites

Reasonable Prices

982.9708



SITE SANTA FE SIXTH INTERNATIONAL BIENNIAL

OPENING WEEKEND EVENTS: FRIDAY, JULY 7–SUNDAY, JULY 9, 2006

FRIDAY, JULY 7 Opening Weekend Reception and Bronze Preview Privileges 6:30–8 pm, $250 per person*

STUDIO SITE party at Swig, 9 pm, $20 per person

SATURDAY, JULY 8 SITE Members’ Preview, 1–5 pm, free with current membership Performance by Jonathan Meese at Paolo Soleri Amphitheater, 5 pm, Admission $20; SITE Members, Students & Seniors $15. Call Tickets Santa Fe at the Lensic at 505.988.1234.

SUNDAY, JULY 9

STILL POINTS OF THE TURNING WORLD JULY 9, 2006 –JANUARY 7, 2007

Curated by Klaus Ottmann

Public conversation with artists and curator at the Lensic Theater, 12 pm, Admission $10; Students & Seniors, and SITE Members at Friend & Family levels $5;

Presenting Sponsor:

Corporate Sponsor:

SITE Members at Supporter level and above, free with advance reservation. Call Tickets Santa Fe at the Lensic at 505.988.1234. Public Opening at SITE Santa Fe, 12-5 pm, Admission $10; Students & Seniors $5; Free for SITE Members. Concert by Thorns Ltd. at Paolo Soleri Amphitheater, 7:30 pm, Admission $20; SITE Members, Students & Seniors $15. Call Tickets Santa Fe at the Lensic at 505.988.1234

This announcement is partially funded by the City of Santa Fe Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers’ Tax Wolfgang Laib, Ziggurat (detail), 2003, Burmese lacquer on wood, 241 x 317 x 66 cm, courtesy of the artist. Jennifer Bartlett, Twins (detail), 2005-06, Enamel over silkscreen grid on baked enamel, steel plates, 270 x 710 cm, courtesy of the artist and Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, photo: Jeffrey Sturges. Peter Doig, Girl in White With Trees, 2001—02, Oil on canvas, 300 x 200 cm, courtesy of the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht. Wangechi Mutu, Strange Fruit (detail), 2005, Mixed media, wine, saltwater, Dimensions variable, Installation View: Miami Art Museum, courtesy of the artist, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles, and Sikkem a Jenkins & Co., New York. Catherine Opie, Sula (detail), 2004, C-print, 50.8 x 40.6 cm, courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Carsten Nicolai, video still from Spray (detail), 2004, courtesy of the artist and Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin, © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

*includes ticket to STUDIO SITE party and Lensic event

For Opening Weekend information: please call 505.989.1199

1606 PASEO DE PERALTA SANTA FE, NM 87501 www.sitesantafe.org


OPENINGS

july June

Friday, June 30 Canfield Gallery, 414 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 988-4199. Solo Show: recent paintings by Catherine Green. 5-8 pm. Chalk Farm Gallery, 729 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 983-7125. Solo Show: bronze and ceramic sculptures celebrating womanhood, by Monica Mechling. 5-8 pm. Deloney Newkirk Fine Art, 634 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 992-2850. Muse and Mystery: new paintings by JuLee Simmons. 5-7 pm. Downtown Contemporary Art Center, 105 4th St. SW, Alb. 2421983. Second Annual Contemporary Photo Arts Show: group show with eighteen photographers. 5-9 pm. Galerie Zugar, 120 W. San Francisco St., Santa Fe. 984-5099. Solo Show: landscapes by Eric Wallis. 4-8 pm. Hahn Ross Gallery, 409 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 984-8434. Bel Canto: oil and mixed-media work on panel by Betsy Bauer. 5-7:30 pm.

30

art openings —

August

Santa Fe Clay, 1615 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 984-1122. Six Functional Potters: group show of ceramic work by Malcolm Davis, Mary Law, Peg Malloy, Kent McLaughlin, Blair Meerfeld, and McKenzie Smith. 5-7 pm.

Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe. 982-1338. Scenic Overlook: artists explore place, home, memory, and imagination through installation, sound, painting, and sculpture. 5-7 pm.

Tai Gallery, 1601-B Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 983-9780. Power and Delicacy–Masterworks of Bamboo Art: bamboo art and antique textiles from Asia and Africa. 5-7 pm.

Galerie Zugar, 120 W. San Francisco St., Santa Fe. 984-5099. Solo Show: landscapes by Eric Wallis. 4-8 pm.

When, 422 Broadway, Truth or Consequences, NM. 894-0032. Mandalas: Circles of Healing: colored pencil drawings by Kaycie Black and ceramics and glass by Shel Newmark. 6-9 pm.

Johnsons of Madrid, 2843 State Rd. 14, Madrid. 471-1054. Group show, solo show, and two-person show. 2-4 pm. Parks Gallery, 127-A Bent St., Taos. 751-0343. Solo Show: works on canvas, paper, wood, and stone by Jim Wagner. 4-6 pm.

Saturday, July 1 Box Gallery, 1611-A Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 989-4897. Cut and Burn: sgraffito (incised clayboard) drawings, mixedmedia works on paper, and wood relief constructions by Alice Leora Briggs. The latter mixed-media series includes tableaux from a series on the seven deadly sins carved in relief. 4-6 pm.

Stables Art Gallery, 133 Paseo del Pueblo Norte, Taos. 7582036. Paint: photographs by Jari Poulin and paintings by Delmoz. 5:30-7:30 pm. Tadu Contemporary Art, 110 W. San Francisco St., Santa Fe. 9920100. Group Show: new work by Marc Katano, Betsy Stewart, Doug Trump. 6-8 pm.

3

Total Arts Gallery, 122-A Kit Carson Rd., Taos. 758-4667. Solo Show: landscapes and portraits from travels to Tibet by Huihan Liu. 5-7 pm. Unit D, 2889 Trades West Rd., Santa Fe. 424-1307. Embalming Technique, Environment, Still Life and Details of Home: black-and-white and color photographs by Kelly Germaine Root. 5-9 pm. Vida Design, 1012 Marquez Place 108-B, Santa Fe. 989-5061. Classic MidTwentieth Century European Glass Artists: classic modernist glass work. Artists include: Murano, Flygsfors, Orrefors, Kosta, and Whitefiars. 12-5 pm.

Sunday, July 2 Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, Museum Hill, Santa Fe. American Ceramic Art: the show highlights new uses of texture in Pueblo pottery and addresses themes of innovation and tradition. 2-4 pm. Lecture at 2:30 pm.

Wednesday, July 5 Casa Nova, 530 S. Guadalupe St., Santa Fe. 983-8558. Takashi x 2:

Hunt + Gather, 311 Aztec St., Santa Fe. 989-9105. par+a+doxs: new work by Victoria Hughes. Alphabet Sculptures: work by Bobbi Culbert. 5-7 pm.

Thursday, July 6 EVO Gallery, 554 S. Guadalupe, Santa Fe. 982-4610. Topographies: photographs by Edward Burtynsky and David Maisel; paintings by Vicky Columbet. Spheres: video work by Steina Vasulka. 5-7 pm. James Kelly Contemporary, 1601 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 9891601. Collages in Black and White: 1973-1991: collages by Ellsworth Kelly. 5-7 pm. Santa Fe Community College Design and Media Arts Gallery, 600 Wing, 6401 Richards Ave., Santa Fe. 428-1501. Seeming: recent work by Michelle Goodman. 5-7 pm. Tai Gallery, 1601-B Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 983-9780. Solo Show: work by contemporary Japanese photographer Tokihiro Sato. 5-7 pm. Victoria Price Contemporary Art & Design, 550 S. Guadalupe, Santa Fe. 983-2625. Grand Opening Group Exhibition: features Sean Albert, Elen Feinberg, and Holly Russell. 5-7 pm.

JHS Gallery, 302 Camino de la Placita, Taos, NM 87571. 7580280. Keeping Faith: photography by Dorie Hagler, in conjunction with release of Keeping Faith: A New Mexico Photo Album (foreword by John Nichols). 6-8 pm.

Friday, July 7 B lack A rt S tudio , 418 Cerrillos Rd. #25, Santa Fe. 992-3372. Oshogbo, The Next Generation: returning Folk Art Market artists: Ife Fidudusola, Gasali Adeyemo, and Rafiu Aderemi Mustapha. 4-7 pm.

Klaudia Marr Gallery, 668 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 988-2100. Abstract Group Show: invitational group show focusing on abstract painting and sculpture. 5-7 pm.

Blaire Carnahan Gallery, 225 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 955-9901. One-Man Show: landscapes by Edward Samuels. 5-7 pm.

LewAllen Contemporary, 129 W. Palace Ave., Santa Fe. 988-8997. Wetlands: monotypes by Forrest Moses. 5:30-7:30 pm. Gallery, 370 Garcia St., Santa Fe. 988-5159. Domestic Vacations: color photographs of family life—inspired by paintings by Jan Steen, and other Dutch and Flemish painters—by Julie Blackmon. 5-7 pm.

East Meets East: a collaboration of Casa Nova and Tammfinearts, with work by Japanese artists Takashi Murakami and Takashi Hinoda. 5-7 pm.

photo-eye

Alice Leora Briggs, Lucretia, incised clayboard with India ink, 18” x 24”, 2004

Cut and Burn, a show of incised clayboard drawings, mixed-media works on paper, and wood relief constructions by Alice Leora Briggs at Box Gallery, 1611-A Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. Reception on Saturday, July 1, 4-6 pm. Show runs through July 29.

Blue Rain Gallery, 130 Lincoln Ave., Santa Fe. 954-9902. Spanish Market Show: sculptures by Gustavo Victor Goler and paintings by Jim Vogel. 5-7 pm. Coleman Gallery, 3812 Central SE, Alb. 232-0224. Group Show:

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DEAL

ARTISTS WITHOUT GALLERY REPRESENTATION

FULL-PAGE ADS FOR AUGUST:

$500. 424-7641


OUT & ABOUT

Photographs by Clix, Stanley Darland, & Kimberly G. Haragrove



OPENINGS

New Grounds Print Workshop & Gallery, 3812 Central Ave. SE, 100-B, Alb. 268-8952. Everyday Gals: figurative monotypes by Sarah Anderson. 5-8 pm. Optical Shop of Aspen, 201 Galisteo St., Santa Fe. 988-9510. Empty Spaces: photographs by Michael Webb. 5-8 pm. The William & Joseph Gallery, 70 W. Marcy St. Santa Fe. 982-9404. From Wax To Real: encaustics by Jeff Schaller and photorealistic paintings by Ray Hare. Baby Fats: sculptures by Barrett DeBusk. 5-7 pm.

Oscar Lozoya, El Contento, silver print, 14” x 11”, nd

Second Annual Contemporary Photo Arts Show—a group show with eighteen photographers is on view at Downtown Contemporary Art Center, 105 4th Street SW, Albuquerque. Reception on June 30, 5-9 pm. Show runs to July 28.

Yale Art Center, 1001 Yale Blvd., SE, Alb. 242-1669. Radio Gardens: photography exhibition—with work by Bunny Lampert, Merkin, and his organization—inspired by walking the earth in the visual spectrum of thought from different regions such as Laos, Romania, and places without names. 6-9 pm.

Deloney Newkirk Fine Art, 669 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 992-2882. Two-Person Show: figurative paintiof women by Phil Daves and Dan Schultz. 5-7 pm. El Zaguan, 545 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 983-2567. Lifelines: Text=Image: works on paper incorporating lines of text from various literary sources by Linda Hunsaker. 5-8 pm. Exhibit 208, 208 Dartmouth NE, Alb. 266-4292. Pattern and Flow: paintings, drawings, and photo-collage by Charles Fresquez. 5-8 pm. Gary Farmer Gallery, 131 W. San Francisco St., Santa Fe. 988-1171. Nora and Eliza Narjano-Morse: a dialogue between two artists/ mother and daughter. Monotypes and paintings. 5-8 pm.

Hunt + Gather, 311 Aztec St., Santa Fe. 989-9105. Readymades/ Duchamp: 5-7 pm. Hunter-Kirkland Contemporary, 200-B Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 9842111. Two-Person Show: bronze and stainless steel sculptures by Ted Gall; acrylics on canvas and paper by abstract expressionist Hal Larsen. 5-7 pm. Main Street Gallery, 108 Main St., Truth or Consequences, NM. 8940087. Summertime Blues: group show of Sierra County artists. 6-9 pm. Manitou Galleries, 123 W. Palace Ave., Santa Fe. 986-0440. Solo Show: oil paintings of historical structures by Roger Hayden Johnson. 5-7:30 pm. Marigold Arts, 424 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 982-4142. Solo Show: largeformat landscape photography by Kenneth Parker. 5-8 pm.

Mississippi:

Mariposa Gallery – Monte Vista, 3011 Monte Vista NE, Alb. 2657966. Group Show: new work by Amanda Tinsley, Jill Erickson, and Linda Tarr. Upstairs gallery: fifty state birds and flowers by Joie Villeneuve. 5-8 pm.

photographs by Janck Kotz that document the landscape and culture of the South. The Place Between: paintings by John Felsing and woodblock prints by Leon Loughridge. 5-7 pm.

Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, Santa Fe. 992-0800. The Eye of Eisenstaedt: an exhibition of the work of the “father of modern photojournalism.” 5-8 pm.

Gerald Peters Gallery, 1011 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 954-5700. Ms. Booth’s Garden:

Photographs

of

SITE Santa Fe, 1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 989-1199. SITE Santa Fe’s Sixth International Biennial: Still Points of the Turning World, curated by Klaus Ottmann. 12-5 pm.

Rio Bravo Fine Art, 110 Broadway, Truth or Consequences, NM. 8940572. Vision of the Past: series of artwork of Truth or Consequences by Dianne Evangelista. Art by William Harvey: abstract works by William Harvey. 6-9 pm.

Andrew Smith Gallery, 203 W. San Francisco St., Santa Fe. 984-1234. A Selection–Lonesome Dove and La Vida Brinca (Life Jumps): silver print and pinhole camera photographs by Bill Wittliff. 5-7 pm.

Santa Fe Art Institute, 1600 St. Michael’s Dr., Santa Fe. 424-5050. Stories: group show with Debbie Fleming Caffrey, Gary Hill, Alfredo Jaar, Juan Manuel Echavarria, Anu Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, Adrian Piper, Anri Sala, and Gerry Snyder. 1-5 pm.

Sunday, July 9

Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, 200 W. Marcy St., Suite 101, Santa Fe. 989-8688. Hard Edge: computer drawings and hard-edge oil paintings by Frederick Hammersley. 2-4 pm.

College of Santa Fe, MOV-iN Gallery, Garson Communications Center, 1600 St. Michael’s Dr., Santa Fe. 473-6555. 100 Monkey Garden: an interactive video installation by David Stout that utilizes real-time 3-D animation to create a fictional ecosystem. 2-8 pm.

College of Santa Fe Student Gallery, 1600 St. Michael’s Dr., Santa Fe. 473-6508. Aluminum, Silver and Chrome: alumni exhibit, curated by Nancy Sutor. 1-6 pm.

College of Santa Fe Student Gallery, 1600 St. Michael’s Dr., Santa Fe. 473-6508. Aluminum, Silver and Chrome: alumni exhibit, curated by Nancy Sutor. 1-6 pm.

College of Santa Fe, Fine Arts Gallery, 1600 St. Michael’s Dr., Santa Fe. 473-6560. A Darkened Line: Art and Death: the exhibit brings together work and ideas by nine artists who question our relationship to death and confront the nature of healing and loss. 5-9 pm.

Santa Fe Art Institute, 1600 St. Michael’s Dr., Santa Fe. 424-5050. Stories: group show with Debbie Fleming Caffrey, Gary Hill, Alfredo Jaar, Juan Manuel Echavarria, Anu Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, Adrian Piper, Anri Sala, and Gerry Snyder. 1-5 pm.

Saturday, July 8 hand-hammered steel by Scott Krichau, acrylics by Erica Lohan, and monoprints by Izabela Riano. 5-8 pm.

Linda Durham Contemporary Art, 1101 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 4666600. Enfolded Notions: wrapped muslin and found-art sculptures by Barbara Zusman. Illuminations: video works by Susanna Carlisle. Collages and assemblages by Dana Newmann. 5-7 pm.

Friday, July 14

Chiaroscuro Gallery, 558 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 992-1100. Solo Show: prints and multiples by Jennifer Bartlett. 5-7 pm. Deloney Newkirk Fine Art, 634 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 992-2850. What Women Do: paintings by Leslie Sandbulte. 5-7 pm. Gerald Peters Gallery, 1011 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. Drawings and Sculptures: new work by James Suris. Solo Show: collages, monotypes, and paintings by John Fincher. 5-7 pm. Hahn Ross Gallery, 409 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 984-8434. Foresight/ Hindsight: luminous and ethereal landscape paintings by Greg Skol. 5-7:30 pm. Jane Sauer Thirteen Moons Gallery, 652 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 995-8513. Two-Person Show: new work by Mary Giles and James Koehler. 5-7 pm. Karan Ruhlen Gallery, 225 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 820-0807. The Still Surface: thirty new oil paintings on panel by Kurt Meer. 5-7 pm.

College of Santa Fe, MOV-iN Gallery, Garson Communications Center, 1600 St. Michael’s Dr., Santa Fe. 473-6555. 100 Monkey Garden: an interactive video installation by David Stout that utilizes real-time 3-D animation to create a fictional ecosystem. 2-8 pm. IAIA Museum, 108 Cathedral Place, Santa Fe. 983-8900. Relations: Indigenous Dialogue: first phase of an innovative IAIA biennial initiative presenting Indigenous world art, artists, and cultural leaders as they actively seek to break stereotypes. 10 am-5pm.

Ellsworth Kelly, White Curve (Radius 12’), pencil and collage on paper, 31¾” x 47½”, 1976

Black-and-white collages (1973-1991) by Ellsworth Kelly will be on display at James Kelly Contemporary, 1601 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. Opening reception on Thursday, July 6, 5-7 pm.

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Klaudia Marr Gallery, 668 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 988-2100. Tapestries: tapestries by Ed Moses, Bruce Connor, Chuck Close, DJ Hall and Donald Farnsworth, to name a few. Gallery Artists Portfolio: new work by gallery artists. 5-7 pm. Manitou Galleries, 123 W. Palace Ave., Santa Fe. 986-0440. Solo Show: oil paintings that reflect man’s journey for light and truth, by Jim Eppler. 5-7:30 pm.

by Jean Richardson and large scale sculptures in stainless steel or bronze by Kevin Robb. 5-7 pm.

Saturday, July 29 InArt Santa Fe Gallery of Fine Art, 219 Delgado St., Santa Fe. 983-6537. Grand Opening Reception: gallery artists. 5-7 pm.

Special Interest Patricia Carlisle Fine Art, 554 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 820-0596. Solo Show: twenty-five new paintings on canvas and wood by Melinda K. Hall. 5-7 pm. Turner Carroll Gallery, 725 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 986-9800. Solo Show: female nudes by Georges Mazilu. 5-7 pm.

Saturday, July 22

Takashi Murakami, Hiropon, offset color lithograph, 2001

A collaboration of Casa Nova and Tammfinearts—Takashi x 2: East Meets East. Work by Japanese artists Takashi Murakami and Takashi Hinoda at Casa Nova, 530 South Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe. Reception on Wednesday, July 5, 5-7 pm.

Joyce Robins Gallery, 210 Galisteo St., Santa Fe. 989-8795. The Intricacy of Beauty: oils by Brad Aldridge, 5-7pm.

0433. Celebrating Patterns of the Land: acrylic paintings by Claudia Hartley. 5-7 pm.

Selby Fleetwood Gallery, 600 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 992-8877. Solo Show; new landscapes by Clay Wagstaff. 5-8 pm.

Deloney Newkirk Fine Art, 669 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 992-2882. The Edge of Innocence: mixed-media work by Carole Rae Watanabe. 5-7 pm.

Summer Showcase of the Arts at the Skier’s Edge, 1836 Cerrillos Rd., Santa Fe. 983-1025. Two-Person Show: watercolors by Maureen Freyne and photographs by Carol Becvarik. 5:30-7:30 pm. Zane Bennett Gallery, 826 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 982-8111. Quantumscapes: new paintings by Paul Shapiro. 5-8 pm. (Signing of artist’s catalogue on Sunday, July 16, 2 pm.)

Saturday, July 15 Act I Gallery, 218 Pueblo del Norte, Taos. 758-7831. Solo Show: new plein air watercolors by Ken Daggett. 5-7 pm.

Gerald Peters Gallery, 1011 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. Solo Show: work by painter and scholar E. Boyd. 5-7 pm. Harwood Art Center, 1114 7th St. NW, Alb. 242-6367. New Mexico Pics–The State of Photography: Curators Holly Roberts and Miguel Gandert selected ten photographers from New Mexico, each of whom invited another photographer to exhibit with them. One of a Kind: multi-color monotypes, drawings, and oil paintings by Jan Nelson in the North Community Gallery. Rauschenberg Rose: new collages by Richard Hample in the South Community Gallery. 5-8:30 pm.

Friday, July 21 Canyon Road Contemporary Art, 403 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 983-

Hunt + Gather, 311 Aztec St., Santa Fe. 989-9105. Hillbilly Modern: work by Robert Bassara. 5-7 pm.

Las Comadres Gallery, 228-A Paseo del Pueblo Norte, Taos. 7375323. Mosaic Landscapes: ceramic mosaic wall hangings by Karen Kerschen. 3-6 pm.

Friday, July 28 Chiaroscuro Gallery, 558 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 992-1100. Flowers: paintings, sculpture, and installation by John Nelson. 5-7 pm.

Amapola Gallery, 205 Romero NW, Alb. 242-4311. Four Winds of Change: Receptions every Sunday, 24 pm. Open House: July 2, 1-3 pm. Bellas Artes, 653 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 983-2745. 25th Anniversary: to mark the occasion, Charlotte and Bob Kornstein will honor their mentor, textile designer, author, curator, and collector Jack Lenor Larsen. The gallery will also host an exhibition of work by Olga de Amaral, Richard DeVore, and Ruth Duckworth. July 8-August 26. Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe. 982-1338. Lecture: Julie Blackmon talks about her photography on Saturday, July 1, 2 pm at the CCA Cinematheque. Lecture presented in conjunction with photo-eye Gallery.

Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe. 982-1338. Dialog 360:Artists in Conversation features sound artist, composer, and musician David Dunn in conversation with John Kennedy, director of Santa Fe New Music, on Thursday, July 13, 6 pm. “Art History for Humans” class, Chicano Art: Before and After, is taught by Kathryn Davis and begins on Tuesday, July 18. This class will culminate in a walkthrough led by Davis of the exhibition Mexican Modern at the Fine Arts Museum. Class runs for five Tuesdays from 12-1:30 pm. Free and open to the public. Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe. 982-1338. Toast of Santa Fe: a major fund-raising event celebrating wine and food artistry benefiting the CCA, on July 1622. Includes a silent and live wine auction, dinner, and series of tours of notable Santa Fe wine cellars. Call for ticket info. To learn about sponsorship packages wineauction@ccasantafe.org, or visit www.ccasantafe.org Counter Culture, 930 Baca St., Santa Fe. 995-1105. Nada Digitalla: wet work (traditional photography) by Corry McGillicuddy will be on view through July. Feral Art Tour, 1302 Cerrillos Rd., Santa Fe. 577-4774. Art Party:

Farrell Fischoff Gallery, Suite 29, 1807 Second St., Santa Fe. 9950620. Transparencies: plexiglass sculptures by Barbara Erdman and monoprint collages on rice paper by Izabela Riano. 5-7:30 pm. Phil Space, 1410 Second St., Santa Fe. 983-7945. The Golden Egg Book Launch and Show: twelve artists and writers from Canada, the United Kingdom, New Mexico, Chile, and Los Angeles who use humor as a tactic in their work. 5-7 pm. Steve Elmore Indian Art, 839 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 9959677. The Glen LaFontaine Collection of Plateau Beaded Bags: early 20th century beaded bags collected by Native artist Glen LaFontaine. 5-7 pm. Ventana Fine Art, 400 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 983-8815. TwoPerson Show: abstract expressionist paintings with an equine theme

David Maisel, Terminal Mirage (836-11), C-print, 48” x 48”, nd

Topographies, a group show of photographs by Edward Burtynsky and David Maisel, and paintings by Vicky Columbet, is on display at EVO Gallery, 1601-B Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. Reception on Thursday, July 6, 5-7 pm.


OPENINGS

Millicent Rogers Museum, 1504 Museum Rd., 4 miles north of Taos. 758-2462. 50th Anniversary Turquoise Jubilee Benefit Auction and Dinner: www.millicentrogers.org for details. New Mexico Women in the Arts, PO Box 31314, Santa Fe, NM 87594. 986-9695. Studio tours of New Mexico Women artists on Thursday, July 6. Call for info. Pendaries Art League, Third Annual Studio Tour: invitational fine art show and studio tour on Fri./Sat., July 1-2 in Pendaries Village/Rociada. Reception at Community Center on July 1, 10 am-5 pm and on July 2, 12-5 pm. Directions: between Las Vegas and Taos on Hwy 518 to 105/94, follow signs to Pendaries Village Community Center. For more info: 505-425-3877. Rancho de San Juan, Hwy 285 between Española and Ojo Caliente, 3.5 miles north of the junction of Hwys 84 and 285. 753-6818. Navajo Weaving Exhibition: consists of authentic weavings by numerous artists, July 10–Aug. 22. Artist champagne reception, Saturday, July 15. Free. Call for details.

Many artists who live in the drought-impacted Jemez region are channeling their concern about the environment into art and will display unique outdoor installations in the form of The Jemez Tree Shrines Project, Monday/Tuesday July 34. The project will coincide with a Studio Tour that will take place along Hwy 4, from Jemez Pueblo up to the village of Jemez Springs. For info: 505-829-4700 or 829-4561. Yale Art Center, 1001 Yale Blvd SE, Alb. 242-1669. Grand Re-Opening.Film night: Thursday Night Chones on July 13; Jazz and Blues (every third Wednesday of each month) on July 21, Grand Reception on July 21. Sunday School—It Ain’t Church: music, poetry, dance, and free-form performances on Sunday, July 23, 8 pm. Call for info. Zane Bennett Gallery, 826 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 982-8111. Book signing: on Sunday, July 16, at 2 pm, artist Paul Shapiro will be signing copies of his new catalogue, Quantumscape.

Performing Arts Randall Davey Audubon Center, 1800 Upper Canyon Rd. Santa Fe. 983-4609. Guided tours of the home and studio of artist Randall Davey every Monday, 2 pm. $5 donation. Call for details.

Painted violin by Nicholas Herrera

The Painted Violins of Santa Fe is a project in which forty-two artists have transformed donated violins into works of art. They will be exhibited throughout the summer in Santa Fe galleries, private showings, and the New Mexico Governor’s Gallery at the State Capitol. On October 6, the violins will be auctioned at a gala event at the Santa Fe Hilton. For details: 983-3530, or www.santafesymphony.org.

fine art, live dj, toys, street art, gratis libations, and more. Friday, July 7, doors open at 6 pm. Call for details. Garcia Street Books, 376 Garcia St., Santa Fe. 986-0151. Booklaunch, Exhibition, Sale, Signing: Elias Rivera will sign his new monograph Elias Rivera on Saturday, July 1, 2 pm. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 217 Johnson St., Santa Fe. 946-1000. Workshop: O’Keeffe recorded her own color recipes in order to repeat the various hues she used in her paintings. Starting with pure colors, participants will mix shades, creating their own values and tones.

By recording these color recipes, family members will be able to duplicate the palettes they use in their paintings. Saturday, July 15, 9:30-11:30 am. Adult Learning: The Language of Color: An Investigation Through Painting: hands-on program of three interconnected workshops, led by Lorraine Schechter, on Thursdays, July 13, 20, 27, 2-5 pm. Call for details. Hunt + Gather, 311 Aztec St., Santa Fe. 989-9105. Parisian Flea Market, Friday, July 14, 7 am-7 pm. In Depth: workshop with Dana Newmann and Laura Stanziola on Sunday, July 16. Call for details.

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Richard Levy Gallery, 514 Central SW, Alb. 766-9888. Group Photography Show: including Julia Fullerton-Batten, Gregory Crewdson, Martin Denker, Candida, In Sook Kim, Dodo Jin Ming, Scott Peterman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jennah Ward, and Pablo Zuleta-Zahr. Show closes Aug. 25.

Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe. 9821338. Three-week workshop with Leslie Satin: InterArts & Movement Explorations for dancers, artists, and choreographers. Artists in all media are welcome. Workshop meets twice a week for two-hour sessions at Wise Fool Performance Space, 2778 Agua Fria, 5:30-7:30 pm. Dates: July 11 & 13, 18 & 20, and 25 & 27. Call for info.

Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe. 982-1338. WATIV Quartet: an evening of electro-acoustic jazz with a hint of middle-eastern music, Saturday, July 15, 9:30 pm at the CCA Cinematheque. Call for details. High Mayhem Studios, 1703-B Lena St., Santa Fe. Saturday, July 8, 8 pm: The Acoustic Show featuring Mike Begatta, Kris Tiner Duo, and the Acoustic Quartet. Saturday, July 22, 8 pm: High Mayhem Dance Party. Free, with purchase of High Mayhem CD, or $10 donation. Dates and performers subject to change. Check dates @ www.highmayhem.org or 505501-3333. S anta F e D esert C horale . 988-2282. Twenty professional singers perform: Mystery & Majesty on July 6, 11, 27 at St. Francis Cathedral and July 9 at San Francisco de Asis (Ranchos de Taos). An American Hallelujah on July 14, 20, 25 and August 1 at Loretto Chapel. Romance on July 18, 28 and August 2, 3 at Loretto Chapel. Hear & Now: Voices of the Earth on July 23 at Santuario de Guadalupe (4pm & 9pm with a pre-concert conversation one hour before each performance). Oh Joy, Oh Rapture! Gilbert & Sullivan Revisited on August 6 at The Lensic. Cocktails with the Chorale on August 9 (5pm & 8pm) at the Eldorado Hotel. Encore! on August 11 at Cristo Rey Catholic Church. Most performances at 8 pm. Call for details and tickets.

Art in the Park, presented by the Santa Fe Council for the Arts. Sat./Sun., July, 22-23 in Cathedral Park, corner of Cathedral Place and Palace Avenue, next to St. Francis Cathedral. 10 am-5pm. Santa Fe Society of Artists Outdoor Art Shows. Saturdays and Sundays, July 1-2, 8-9, 15-16, 22-23, 9 am-5:30 pm. Off the Plaza, behind the 1st National Bank of Santa Fe. The Downtown Gallery District Association. Truth or Consequences Bath House Historic District presents a “Gallery Hop” from 6-9pm on Saturday, July 8. The Jemez Tree Shrines Project, at the Jemez State Monument.

Jennifer Bartlett, Naral Print, black, gray, and white woodcut, 16” x 20”, 1991

A show of prints and multiples by Jennifer Bartlett will be on view at Chiaroscuro Gallery, 558 Canyon Road, Santa Fe. Opening reception, Friday, July 14, 5-7 pm.

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Wolfgang Laib, Ziggurat, Burmese lacquer on wood, 977/8” x 124¾”x 26”, 2003

SITE Santa Fe’s Sixth International Biennial: Still Points of the Turning World July 9, 2006 to January 7, 2007 SITE Santa Fe, 1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 989-1199 Opening reception: Sunday, July 9, 12-5 pm. Intensity, experimentation, and visceral presence are the hallmarks of the thirteen one-person installations of SITE Santa Fe’s Sixth International Biennial. Curator Klaus Ottman’s intention is that these singular works speak for themselves, unmediated by a prescriptive curatorial theme, and thus elicit a direct experience in each viewer. Most of the artists will show their work in separate rooms, an arrangement meant to create a pure and focused experience for the audience. Several of the artists will include performances as part of their work, thus encouraging a

Phillis Ideal, Zowie, mixed media on canvas, 20” x 20”, 2005

5 Angles on Abstraction June 30 to July 29 Addison Arts, 209 Galisteo Street, Santa Fe. 992-0704 Opening reception: Friday, June 30, 5-7 pm. The work of five artists are represented in this show, ranging from Jay Tracy’s “thermogenic drawings” on vintage fax paper to Tony Evanko’s geometrically formed toner pieces to William Betts’s tightly compacted, vibrant blue and green acrylic bands painted on medium density fiberglass. Daniel Brice’s intriguing exercises with an improvisational linear line, rendered in charcoal on paper, explore figurative possibilities within abstraction. There may be a human breast, there may be a backside, but only the barest suggestion. Phillis Ideal’s mixed media pieces on canvas are epiphanies of brash movement and luscious color, freely invented forms that are at once humorous, energetic, daring, and carefully preposterous.

complicit engagement between the creator and the viewer. The exhibition will cover the full spectrum of contemporary art media, comprising photography, installation, painting, performance art, soundscapes, sculpture, and video.

Power and Delicacy June 30 to July 15 Tai Gallery, 1601-B Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 983-1387 Opening reception: Friday, June 30, 5-7 pm. Mary and Rob Kallenberg, the world’s preeminent if not sole purveyors of contemporary Japanese bamboo art, will inaugurate the opening of their new gallery space with a show of approximately fifteen bamboo sculptures and baskets, as well as some of their treasured Indonesian textiles. An important distinction in this collection is that the sculptures are often meant to perform no practical function, as if their inherent delicacy and power deliver a lyricism that is sufficient reason for their creation. Likewise, the Indonesian textiles have traditionally been used ceremonially to establish power and prestige, a kind of testimony to the self-existing authority residing in well-crafted beauty, however pliant and delicate the medium. Tokyo architect Tei Huwa, renowned for his exhibition spaces, has designed the interior of the gallery to create an environment where the textiles and bamboo complement each other perfectly. Honda Syoryu, Aurora, bamboo, 24” x 15” x 12½”, 2006


PREVIEWS

Julie Blackmon, Nail Polish, 2005, color pigment ink jet, 22” x 22”

Izabela Riano, Tryptych II, monoprint collage on rice paper, 20” x 18”, 2006

Julie Blackmon, Domestic Vacations June 30 to September 10 photo-eye Gallery, 376 Garcia Street, Santa Fe. 988-5159 Opening reception: Friday, June 30, 5-7 pm.

Barbara Erdman and Izabela Riano, Transparencies July 28 to August 28 Farrell Fischoff Gallery, 1807 Second Street, Santa Fe. 995-0620 Opening reception: Friday, July 28, 5-7:30 pm

This body of work is inspired by the narratives of chaotic and boisterous

The title of this two-person exhibition, Transparencies, refers to

family life as depicted by certain Dutch and Flemish genre painters of the

the nature of the materials used by each artist—Plexiglas and

seventeenth century. Julie Blackmon, the mother of three children and

rice paper. Erdman’s sculptures are molded from translucent and

the eldest of nine siblings, states that “we live in a culture where we are

colored Plexiglas whose playful, twisted forms belie their intrinsic

both ‘child-centered’ and ‘self-obsessed.’ The struggle between living

strength as dramatic architectonic forces in their environment.

in the moment versus escaping to another reality is intense because

Renowned for her collaged monoprints that are printed on both

these two opposites strive to dominate [each other]…. As an artist and

sides of the paper, Erdman will also contribute one new monoprint

a mother, I believe life’s most poignant moments come from the ability

to the exhibition. Riano, who studied art in her native Poland

to fuse fantasy and reality: to see the mythic amidst the chaos.” Each of

before pursuing a second MFA in experimental printmaking at the

these photographs, as up to date as they might be with the trappings of a

University of Florida, creates forms that are flowing and gloriously

contemporary milieu (albeit a countrified one), points to the mythic and

subtle. Large areas of rice paper are printed, torn, and then

unchanging dynamics of lives lived together as a family.

stitched together into mysterious shapes that refer both to the natural world and the inner workings of the mind.

Painting and Photography in American Art: A Symposium July 6 to July 8 The Mesa Ballroom, Hilton Santa Fe, 100 Sandoval Street, Santa Fe. For reservations: 988-2811 or toll-free 800-336-3676 Registration: Thursday, July 6, 6-7 pm. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center is sponsoring this threeday symposium at which thirteen prominent speakers from the art world will explore insights about the exchange of ideas that has transpired between painters and photographers since the late nineteenth century. Specifically, the talks will present the history and significance of this exchange, pointing out how each medium informed the development of the other. Eminent art historian and critic Robert Rosenblum will be the keynote speaker, presenting a talk entitled “How Painting Became Photography and Vice Versa.”

Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe After Return from New Mexico, gelatin silver print, 3 1/ 8” x 4¾”, 1929. Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

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MONROE GALLERY of photography

THE EYE OF EISENSTAEDT Opening reception Friday, July 7 • 5-7

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NATIONAL SPOTLIGHT

Photograph of Cindy Sherman by Martin Schoeller Of Martin Schoeller’s large-format photographic portraits, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, writes, “Celebrity is all about surface and saturation, and the ‘big heads’ of Martin Schoeller push those qualities to the limit. They give the face, the human expression, a new dimension, and that’s why we keep looking at them. That’s what portraits are for, what they are all about. It is very hard to look for a long time at these faces, known and unknown, celebrities and ordinary people.” Martin Schoeller: Closeup will be on view at the Hasted Hunt Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, New York City, through July 14, 2006. J U LY 2 0 0 6

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SHIPIBO TRIBAL ARTS

BOOTH 67 JULY 7,8,9 INTERNATIONAL FOLK ART MARKET WITH ADDITIONAL WORKS AT

CLOUD CLIFF ARTSPACE


INTERVIEW

raising Questions Of SITE Santa Fe’s Sixth International Biennial, entitled Still Points of the Turning World, independent curator and scholar Klaus Ottmann states, “I want this biennial to be about the artists, not about the curator.” The exhibition will be limited to thirteen artists, each showing about forty works in separate rooms—the raison d’etre being to engage the audience with a purer, unmediated experience.” Ottmann is the author of numerous articles, essays, and books on art and philosophy. THE magazine met with Ottmann in New York City to conduct this interview. TM: You have written that the 1990s was the time when art lost its actuality. What did you mean by that? KO: What I meant was that at that time art became a lot about itself—self-referential. Artists distanced themselves from their work and, therefore, from the viewer. Their work became more about ideas and about art itself, unlike the 1960s when artists were very close to their art.

TM: Is this important? KO: It’s very important because there is no such thing as a completely abstract art that is remote from everything. Art is foremost about communication—it has to communicate. And communication requires at least two people—someone who talks and someone who listens. A dialogue with one’s self—a monologue—is not a true communication.

TM: Are you talking about people in New York City, like the Judson Dance Theater? KO: Yes, those people, and people like Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic, and other performance artists whose work art was very personal yet participatory; artists were taking risks then. They were in the middle of things— physically and mentally.

TM: So art should speak for itself? KO: Yes, art should speak for itself, but it has to speak to an audience, it also needs to communicate.

TM: Do you think that one of the reasons for that is because in the ’60s it was a much smaller art community? When artists did something, everybody in the art world knew what they were doing. Now, it’s an enormous world. KO: That’s part of it. I think it’s also that it came out of a kind of existentialist period after the war, so there was still a strong sense then that art needed to relate to existence more than to daily life. People like the Judson group did that.

TM: Regarding the SITE Biennial, you say that you want to seduce the viewer into a “pure experience, a more personal experience.” How can you accomplish that? KO: I believe that art is first and foremost about experience and only secondarily about a cognitive process. Our brains are wired so that we always search for meaning in anything we see. We try to understand what it is we are looking at. That’s natural. So we tend to immediately ask for explanations, look for explanations, or make up our own explanations if we’re not given them. I have been critical about the ways in which art has been presented. There is now a strong tendency now (sometimes an overemphasis) towards the role of education in institutions. Of course, art education is important. It is one of the roles of a museum. However, museums seem to be afraid of not providing enough education, so they provide too much information.

TM: Is that what you mean by actuality? KO: Yes, that’s what I mean—that it relates to our current life. The Judson people would incorporate objects and rituals from daily life into their dance routines and other artists would do similar things—people like Allan Kaprow with his tire pieces. And even the Pop artists in a way. People were taking objects, ideas, and images from their daily lives and incorporating them into their art.

TM: All the wall texts… KO: Yes, the wall texts and the audio guides. And what that means is that we are getting explanations from wall labels, from a wall text, from the audio guide, and sometimes a museum guide, even before we have a chance to look at the work. Even I, if I go into a museum and there is a big wall text next to a painting, I will instinctively look at the wall text. That’s what we do because it’s very natural,

TM: So you’re saying they took chances? KO: They took artistic chances, but also—at times— personal chances.

but we shouldn’t. I’m not saying that education is wrong; I’m saying that it’s important that there is an immediate experience first. Then you take it from there. I don’t think it’s a wise thing to put a lot of information in the same room or very close to a work of art. I don’t think people should wear audio guides and stand in front of the work and listen to something that someone else says. I think that information should come later. Picking up a brochure or looking at the catalogue before looking at the art kills the imagination, because it immediately puts the viewer into a certain frame of mind. Works of art are multi-leveled and multi-layered—there’s never one explanation. And all art constantly negotiates with, or hits, this boundary that you can’t go beyond. All artists are trying to represent something in their works that can’t really be represented completely. So all art education does is give you the illusion of understanding a work of art. TM: It’s a fragment. KO: And there are things that exist on a different level that you can’t put into words, into music, into paint. And to pretend that it’s all there, like we have all this knowledge, is just a deception. To try to make people believe that they can really understand works of art is wrong, and that’s a very important fact because many people become frustrated when looking at Modern or Contemporary art—they don’t understand it, they’re lost, and often confused. All of which is very understandable. What museums try to do is to pretend, “Let me help you, you don’t have to be confused. I can tell you what this is about.” And you come out and you say, “Aaahh, now I understand.” But that’s a deception, because looking at art is all about becoming confused—that is what art is really about. It’s not about providing answers; it’s about raising questions. It’s about making you insecure. TM: Lisa Corrin. You ever hear of her? She’s the director of the Williams College Museum of Art. KO: Yes. continued on page 48

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were literally popping off the wall; they were alive. They looked like they were painted an hour ago. TM: Who is responsible for this— the curator or the preparator? KO: It’s a combination, but it’s the curator primarily. The curator always makes the final decisions, working with the lighting people and so forth. I’m not trying to criticize MoMA, but it’s just an example of how works of art can change… TM: Depending on how and where they’re shown... KO: Yes. Also not every work of art, and not every artist, speaks to everyone. There are recognized major artists who do nothing for me. TM: Like who? KO: Elizabeth Murray. I never understood the work. I think she’s a very important artist—I recognize her importance—but as much as I try, Catherine Opie, Beatrice, C-print, 20” x 16”, 2004. Courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles as much as I want to, her work just does not speak to me. So I move on to another artist. I always say that if a TM: She said “most museums sterilize our experience work doesn’t speak to you after you’ve given it a chance, of art because they displace strategies, domesticate the don’t force it. Move on. work, and promote a kind of detached voyeurism. In short, they’re not stimulating spaces.” Your thoughts TM: But don’t you know instantly when you walk into a on that comment? gallery or museum if… KO: She is right to a certain degree. Daniel Buren wrote KO: I do this so often, so it’s fairly instant, yes. But I also have a wonderful article about the artist’s studio, in which he noticed that sometimes I go in and look and then come back argued that once the work leaves the studio, it becomes another time, and I’m in a different mood, things look a little a commodity and becomes something totally different. I different. So it changes. Art, as I’ve said, is a living organism have always said that a work of art is an organic structure, and it will change as you change. It projects into you, it reflects an organic thing. It needs to evolve. It has to communicate. you—your own self. So if the work only stays in the artist’s studio, it’s not yet a complete work of art. TM: Who you are? KO: Yes, it is about who you are. Every TM: It needs to be seen… great work of art will do that. If you’re KO: Even if the painting is finished, and the artist thinks it’s the depressed, it can reflect that back, and if best thing he or she has ever done, it’s not a complete work you’re happy it can do that, too. It can also of art until it is out in the world and seen in a space where make you happy if you’re depressed. All other people can enter into a dialogue with the work—art this is possible. And in the SITE Santa Fe continues to evolve. Biennial, I’m simply trying to encourage people to try to spend a little more time TM: Would you agree that if you look at a Rothko, or de with the work. Kooning, or Franz Kline painting, there’s presence and authenticity in the work—you can see that these guys TM: No wall labels? loved paint. On the other hand, I can look at a Diebenkorn KO: No wall labels. There might be in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and I think some very discrete labels, with the title it’s awful because it just doesn’t have any presence. of the work, but no explanatory didactic KO: It all depends on how works are presented. At the wall labels. Museum of Modern Art they did a little memorial installation in the Rotunda after Philip Johnson died and installed two TM: Were you writing before you got Rothko paintings. They looked terrible there—very flat and into curating? dead, it was painful for me to see that. KO: Yes. TM: Was it the way it was hung or lit? KO: Yes, it was the way it was hung and lit—it just didn’t work. And then I went to see an excellently curated show of Rothko’s paintings at Pace Wildenstein—a commercial gallery—and they were so exquisitely hung and lit that they

TM: And how did you come to be writing about art, or were you writing about philosophical matters? KO: I have a degree in philosophy. I

began writing on cultural events for weekly magazines like Time Out in Berlin almost thirty years ago. I covered different things, including art, and I got to know artists pretty well. I also studied art history, but not contemporary art. TM: Do you make art? KO: No. I take photographs—mostly portraits. But, I don’t consider myself an artist. TM: What would make you an artist? What would you have to be doing to consider yourself an artist? I make photographs, but I don’t consider myself an artist because there’s a certain dedication and a focus that artists have, and I don’t have that. Actually, I find it too easy to make images. KO: That’s exactly it. And I would have to do something different and new, and that’s a very hard thing to do. I am interested in creative ideas and I find creative ideas in different places: in art, philosophy, science, and so on. I express myself creatively through my work. Curating exhibitions and writing are creative processes. But, I do not consider myself to be an “artist.” TM: What kind of music do you listen to? And which composers are you listening to these days? KO: Music is my other passion. I listen to classical music almost exclusively. Bruckner, Sibelius, Schumann, and Haydn are some of my favorite composers. TM: On the radio? Or do you listen to CDs? KO: On my iPod. I have an extensive music collection and I continue to buy CDs. I am also very interested in modern music—composers like Boulez, Scelsi, Feldman, Ligeti, Messiaen. And other kinds of music as well: electronic music and jazz. I also like American folk music, like bluegrass. TM: Do you listen to your iPod on the go, or do you listen at home? KO: I listen to it on the go, not so much in the subway, but when I take long walks. And I listen to it at home, always with earphones.

Thorns Ltd; photo: courtesy of the artists.


INTERVIEW

TM: Being a curator and a writer, do you ever feel any conflict between the people you want to get to know as friends, and do you ever cultivate friends for your career? KO: I don’t cultivate people for my career, ever. I’m very bad at living and working politically in that way. I have many artist friends, but I made a conscious decision not to put any of them into this Biennial. TM: You don’t want to influence their careers? KO: I try to stay out of that, yes. I think that in the long run it might not be so good for them, and it might not be good for me. I have very high ethical standards. It’s important to think about these kinds of thing, especially if you are, like me, married to an art dealer. And I notice it when other people have ethical lapses of that kind. It does happen quite often. TM: We are living in a digital age where images are the basis of reality. A couple of questions: Do good artists give us clues through their work on how to see things? And does great art deal with the reality that we, the viewer, have never seen before—kind of like “I’ll be your mirror?” KO: In a way they do. Great artists are a mirror of who we are, and they should be that—that’s part of what makes them

TM: The thirteen artists in the Biennial—are all of them, any of them, great? KO: Yes, I think so. TM: They’re all great? KO: Yes. In my view they are. TM: What makes Catherine Opie’s photographs of children great? KO: Her portraits of children are probably the most “normal” pictures that she’s done. She became famous making portraits of lesbians and trans-gendered people. What makes these pictures of children great is that she crosses over the edge of normalcy in very subtle ways. With her photographs of surfers, it’s more obvious because she takes pictures of the surfers when they step out of the water and they’re completely and utterly exhausted physically. And this exhaustion is almost like a post-orgasm kind of exhaustion. TM: The still point? KO: Yes. What amazes me in Opie’s portraits of children is her lighting and the way she uses color in the background against the color of the clothes of the children—she’s an incredible colorist. And her photographs are incredibly open.

pay twenty bucks to get in—I have the luxury of being able to visit the museum as often as I like. When people are charged twenty bucks for admission, they understandably think that they have to see everything because they want to get their money’s worth. They go in, they get the audio guide, and go from picture to picture, rarely looking at anything for more than a few seconds. After seeing two hundred paintings or photographs, what do they come away with? Very little. The way I do it is this: I go and look around, I try to walk in a parallel line to the crowd, because I can’t go so slowly, and I look very quickly at all these pictures, and I find usually just one or two, and then spend time looking at those paintings, and then I’ve no reason to look at anything else. This is probably not the way most curators want you to look at their shows, because they’re putting a lot of effort into the presentation, they’re making connections, etc. I’m looking for the one or two paintings that really speak to me. TM: And how do you look? Do you walk back and forth? Do you sit? KO: If I can, I like to sit. That’s why we’re going to put benches in as many of the spaces at SITE as possible. I want people to be able to sit and look at the works because that’s how I look, and for me, this would be the still point. One thing that I want

Ar t should speak for itself,

but it

has to speak to an audience— it needs to great artists. I strongly believe there are extraordinary works of art that stand out, and what makes them stand out is that they make us take part in the internal struggle the artist is involved in when trying to express and represent that which cannot really be represented. It’s a struggle and it’s not about success. An artist always fails. He can never succeed, but he can try to fail better. And that’s what we try to do—approach this boundary more and more. Wittgenstein talked about this—he called it “the boundary of language.” You can never fully express what you’re trying to express. So there is always a built-in frustration, a built-in failure. And great artists will embrace this failure and leap into it, knowing that this is what’s going to happen. A bad artist . . . TM: Ordinary… KO: A weaker, ordinary artist, thank you, will shy away from that and will not make that leap and will remain somewhat mediocre. My classical example has always been that of James Tissot, who was a very accomplished society painter and probably the most successful artist of his time. A contemporary of Manet’s, he chose not to make the leap to Modernism, which is why most people today think about the Swiss watch, not the artist, when they hear his name.

communicate These are innocent, beautiful children but there’s something slightly off in the way the color works, and there’s this unbelievable openness of the subjects, which is present in many of her other portraits. TM: Talk about the “still point.” I’m trying to understand it. Robert Scott Thompson wrote a piece of music, At the Still Point of the Turning World, which has been described as “melancholy minimalism” and “eerily calm and forebodingly beautiful.” To me the still point is when things are in the absolute now. It’s when things come together… KO: Exactly. TM: What I want to know is this: where and how do you experience the “still point” in your life? Is it when you are listening to music on your iPod? Or sitting in the park? Where’s the “still point” for you? KO: Experiencing art, listening to music, reading books. TM: Okay… KO: When I go to exhibitions, at the Met, at the Modern, I have free access because I have a press pass, so I don’t have to

to stress is that this is not a new age, feel-good kind of show, where people can go in and, you know, feel good. There are going to be some very disturbing things in this show. And the show is not going to be for everyone. Some of the work is going to be quite heavy. TM: How so? KO: The Thorns Ltd. sound piece, for instance, may not be for everyone—there’s a lot of noise in the work and some people will not like that. There are going to be some things in the exhibit that will shake people up a bit. But that’s part of the exhibition—to stir up the usual ways of looking at art. TM: Should one judge the success of the show by that? KO: I’m hoping that people will stop a little short and say, “Hmm this is different.” First, there won’t be many different works on the wall, so it wan’t be as easy to run through the exhibition quickly. Instead, there will be different rooms. And secondly, there are not a lot of artists in the show, which might be upsetting to some people. Some people may come and say, “What! I came all the way here to look at thirteen artists, I want to see fifty artists.” When you go to the Venice Biennale, documenta, or the Whitney Biennial you usually end up looking continued on page 51

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Santa Fe Camera Center Local Service / On-Line Pricing Photographic Equipment, Rentals, and Supplies Photo and Digital Mini-Workshops Fine Binoculars by Leica Canon, Olympus, and Celestron We have the Canon 30D and 5D in stock!

1807 Second Street #34, Santa Fe, NM 87505 • www.santafecameracenter.com 505.820.0229 (local) • 866.922.6372 (toll-free)


INTERVIEW

at a hundred or more artists—and that’s the expectation of the viewer. I’m trying to stir up these preconceived ideas that people have nowadays about art. And I’m hoping that this exhibit will assist in that. I’m not just trying to rattle things up. I’m doing this because I’m hoping that this show will put people into a state of mind where they might be more open to looking at the work differently and entering into more of an experiential attitude. To stop and look. And to stop and listen. Stop is the point. So, the still point is about stopping, standing still. Standing still is what the “still point” means. TM: Seen from above, the layout of the show is almost like a maze. When people come in to see the show, do they have to go through a prescribed route? KO: No, there are several routes one will be able to take. There are at least two main routes one can take—one going from the left, one going from the right. And because of the fire codes, every room has to have two exits, or two entrances. In most cases, the rooms will be well insulated from each other. Some spaces will be semi-open, and in others the artists will create their own walls or barriers. So there will be many ways to go through and look at the work. No dead ends. TM: Want to do some one-liners on artists? KO: Sure.

The still point is really about

stopping

TM: Richard Tuttle. KO: Richard Tuttle? I have ambivalent feelings about Richard Tuttle. TM: Well, his work is kind of ambivalent, isn’t it? KO: Yeah, that’s true, and I think that other people say the same thing. I saw the show at the Whitney; I enjoyed it very much. I don’t understand his later works, they don’t speak to me. But I love his earlier works from the 1970s—the early paper pieces, the wire pieces, and some of the cloth pieces. They do speak to me, so it’s a strange thing. TM: Damien Hirst. KO: I doubt that he’ll be remembered a decade from now. TM: Mike Kelley. KO: Mike Kelley is an important artist, very influential.

TM: Tracy Emin. KO: But she’s not in the show.

which will present his own philosophy rather than my interpretation of him. TM: Is beauty important to you in art? KO: Beauty is not that important to me. Beauty is not a word that I think about much. TM: Have you ever heard the phrase “curatorial conceit?” KO: Ummm… I’m not sure what that phrase means. TM: Well, one could say that to create a biennial with thirteen artists creating one-person installations on no particular theme; one might say that’s “curatorial conceit.” KO: It’s not a conceit—it’s a curatorial decision. A very intentional, conscious decision that I made to bring more emphasis on the art, on the artists, and on their work, and to give them a better forum—an arena—in which to express themselves. I think a very strongly themed show is more about the curator than it is about the art. I want to let the art speak for itself. TM: Are you saying that a stongly themed show is more about the curator? KO: Yes, always. The curator comes up with a theme, with an idea, and then fits the art into that, so it’s really about the curator first, and then about the artist. I’m trying to do the opposite. Of course I’m the curator, and of course it’s a very subjective selection… TM: But you’re not the star of the show. KO: I’m not the star; I don’t want to be the star of the show.

ct ite

ch Ar al

ur

TM: But there are curators who do want to be the star of the show… KO: Yes, but I don’t agree with that. I’ve always put the artist in front, because without the artist and the art there would be no me. Of course, I have a certain amount of curatorial power because I’m the one who comes up with the concept. I selected the artists, but I want to make it clear that I did not select artists based on a theme. I selected artists I thought were extremely interesting, some I’ve always wanted to work with, and others who would give an interesting balance—a diverse overview of what’s going on.

an pl he

ft

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h ex sp e. ac

TM: No, not on your artists, on other artists. KO: I think she’s a really interesting and talented artist. TM: Marina Abramovic? KO: Marina is a pioneer. She’s already part of art history, and has been extremely influential. TM: What do you think of her break-up with Ulay at the Great Wall of China? KO: [Laughs] She’s been doing fine without him.

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TM: Rebecca Horn? KO: I love Rebecca Horn. She’s a wonderful, poetic artist. TM: After the SITE Biennial, what’s your next curating project? KO: I have a few ideas, but nothing concrete yet. In the meantime I am writing an “uncritical” intellectual biography of the French artist Yves Klein,

TM: Last question: Do the best exhibitions raise more questions than answers? KO: Yes. Raising questions is the best thing you can do. ◆ Interview and photograph by Guy Cross, co-publisher of THE magazine.

Still Points of the Turning World is on view from July 9, 2006- January 7, 2007. Public opening, Sunday, July 9, 12-5 pm.

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“Elemental Baroque” • 48” x 30” each panel • Oil on Canvas

208-A Ranchitos Road Taos, New Mexico 87571 505.758.9120

KRISTINE KEHELEY “ELEMENTAL BAROQUE” • NEW PAINTINGS July 15 - August 30, 2006 Opening Reception: July 15, 5-7PM

www.fenixgallery.com

Mary Giles Artifact Passage, waxed linen, copper, iron, 19” x 42” x 2.5”

Mary Giles James Koehler July 14 - August 7, 2006 Opening Reception: Friday, July 14 5-7 pm James Koehler Koan: Ensnared Light XII hand-dyed wool tapestry, 40” x 40”

JANE SAUER Thirteen Moons Gallery 652 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501 • TEL 505.995.8513 jsauer@thirteenmoonsgallery.com • thirteenmoonsgallery.com


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CRITICAL REFLECTIONS

Eugene Newmann: From Painting In his seminal book

to

Painting

Linda Durham Contemporary Art 1101 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe

Italian Painters of the Renaissance, art historian Bernard Berenson wrote, “… the essential in the art of painting is

somehow to stimulate our consciousness of tactile values, so that the picture shall have at least as much power as the object represented, to appeal to our tactile imagination….Furthermore, the stimulation of tactile imagination awakens our consciousness to the importance of the tactile sense in our physical and mental functioning… unless a picture satisfies our tactile imagination, it will not exert the fascination of an ever heightened reality.” No doubt about it, From Painting to Painting stimulates our tactile imagination. Eugene Newmann cuts loose the iconography and spatial relationships

depicted in classical paintings of the deposition of Christ by Van der Weyden, Rubens, Duccio, Martini, Lorenzetti, Raphael, Caravaggio, and others. With abstract impulses that embody the twentieth century idea of letting go—giving up an orientation to the ground and holding no concrete commitment to a subject—Newmann shapes the underlying structures of the depositions to bring forth free yet timeless choreographies of weight and weightlessness, suspension and continuance, rising and falling. The paintings become kinetic stages like Muybridge photographs, inviting us to participate in the study of motion. Roger’s (at the Prado) alludes to Rogier Van der Weyden’s altarpiece (circa 1435) commissioned for the chapel of the Confraternity of Archers in Leuven. It now resides in the Prado. Although Newmann has left out many of the figures in the original painting (there were ten in the original), he paints Christ, Mary, John, and Mary Magdalene. He also introduces two smaller deposed Christs directly below the Magdalene in the middle of the right side of the painting. The visceral intensity of the portrayal of the divine and the human is heightened by omitting figures, by adding the other Christs, and by reducing and abstracting what is left in the original painting. The large Christ is suspended, weightless in an ochre sky. We can feel his body hovering, perhaps ready to float down the painting, head over heels, passing through the positions of the smaller Christs. The cross and the ladder are rendered as a thin vertical ribbon crossed by skeletal horizontal lines. This ethereal structure rises like a spine, a compelling contrast to Mary, who is fainting into the arms of John, and to Mary Magdalene, who is bending forward on the verge of collapse. Color also imparts weight and directs the eye. The translucent white of Christ’s body (flecked with hues of rust and yellow) gives buoyancy to the floating figure while the rich cobalt blue of Mary’s robe weighs down her sinking body. Newmann’s vibrant painting is not a representation, but an abstract jumping-off point in which the essence of the Van der Weyden thrives. Newmann has extended parameters into a vast expressive entity that stands entirely on its own. Colors, gestures, lines, and brushstrokes are unleashed throughout the show. Although the subject matter is solemn, this release expands space, lifts

Eugene Newmann, Descent with Rays, oil on linen, 46” x 54”, 2005

the spirit, and sets the whole gallery in motion. Relationships are extended among the paintings and within the paintings themselves. The Christs in Roger’s (at the Prado) seem to have somersaulted across the gallery to become the

earth-hued flying form and small sketches in Figure (Pozzoli’s Earth). Here the “flying” figure embodies the transformation from substance to spirit, paralleling, for me, the angels Klee painted toward the end of his life. Descents 1 and Descents 2 portray figures from the altarpiece, as well as from other depositions—including those by Lorenzetti, Rubens, and Duccio. The two paintings are very much like the Renaissance cartoons that were made during the development of a composition. Newmann blends and overlays the images of Christ and other figures to create potent choreographies—visual poems—with the distinct musicality of descending scales. He expands complexity and enigma by liberating the gestural placements of the original compositions into a looser and rougher spatial context. These works become challenging puzzles for the viewer. Newmann’s explorations continue in his most recent work, Three Horizontal. Here each of the figures is placed in a horizontal position on the canvas, vertically one above another. There is no orientation to up or down, left or right, front or back. Space takes on another dimension, without orthogonal delineation. The figures do not seem to be on the verge of rising or falling. Yet we feel that they are perpetually moving, vibrating in place. These vibrations set up a visceral field that engages our tactile sense, revealing interior landscapes where we confront the messy energy of the world. This exhibition presents Newmann at the height of his power. Fluid drawing, textured brushwork, luminous color, thoughtful composition, potent content, and fertile imagination combine to make each painting a mysterious magnet that attracts the senses, initiates movement, and stimulates the mind, bringing forth “the fascination of an ever heightened sense of reality.” Susanna Carlisle J U LY 2 0 0 6

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A

Gregory Lomayesva: The Art

of

War

Art+Industry 101 West Marcy Street, Santa Fe

A house on fire is like your body burning in love. And a house on fire is a bittersweet dream of revenge. Fire is magic, and magic transforms. He burnt it to the ground. He needed a change, a different outcome, a transformation. His expectations had been disappointed. Call it betrayed. Once the house by the water was gone, all that remained was the sea, the dark sea. He watched the waves at twilight, losing the last colors into darkness. Watched dark

emotions roll in, curl and crash. Watched the anger, rage, hurt, and the sorrow so sad, and then watched them rising again in waves. He watched the ocean and tried not to try to make things make sense. At least there are flowers, someone said, simple and beautiful things. He bought a dozen organic romantic signifiers and arranged them in the blue space of her absence. “Roses

are red and violence is too and that’s how I paint when I think about you.” The paint blossomed like blood blooms in a fresh flesh wound. The sky went dark again. The ground disappeared. And the flowers in all his pictures cried their empty eyes out. Who’s ever discovered their (un) true lover with another? It is a decidedly unpleasant, not flowery, feeling. You can lose your head, but your head can’t lose that image. He decides to paint it in the bright light of day, to expose the deceptions, the surreptitious phone calls, the secrets told, the gossip, the lies, and that moment. He’d make it bright and cinematic, like scenes in a storyboard for a Pop film that happened to somebody else. He’d paint colorful close-ups to lie about the darkness and the distances. He’d paint the same scene once, twice, ten times, whatever it took to get it out of his body, his heart and his head. Whatever it took to finally get it right. Not to make sense of it, but simply to see the truth. He’d finally be free. When war ends peace starts again. Gregory Lomayesva is an incredible individual. He’s got his woodworking business, his kick-ass musical productions, his micro-circuit wizardry (Google: “Drip Electronics”) and his paintings; paintings of burning houses, dark seascapes, scary flowers, secret silences, lies, blind spots, and betrayals. In The Art of War he triumphantly turns personal catastrophe into images with universal resonance and even present-day political undertones. His bright, light style is the perfect foil for the dark implications of his subject matter. The reflections in the eyes take the shape of the Hopi symbol for the Warrior. The Hopi words below the images act like subtitles and tell stories of Coyote in his scheming attempts to make life easier, and the lessons he doesn’t learn. Lomayesva isn’t taking any shortcuts, however. He knows the only way out is

I

through. His art, like fire, is magic, and magic transforms. Jon Carver

Gregory Lomayesva, Untitled #1, acrylic on canvas, 48” x 48”, 2006

Joe Ramiro Garcia: True Grit

LewAllen Contemporary 129 West Palace Avenue, Santa Fe

“Is the rabbit a toy or a shaman? Is the snake primordial, or is it a dog’s chew toy?” Joe Ramiro Garcia posed these questions in conversation at the opening

of True Grit. His words capture the whimsy and ambiguity that he explores in these newest paintings, where images read first as playful and cute, but soon unsettle viewers. The show’s title describes the grittiness of Garcia’s backdrops—domestic interiors with dirty walls and dingy couches. These rooms are populated by icons that recur like

persistent childhood memories: teddy bears and monkey sock puppets, old comic book characters, Otis Redding 45s. Translucent and floating on a flat plane, the images are transferred or doodled on to walls like graffiti. This vocabulary of free association describes the interiors we grew up in, or the interior of our cluttered minds. But Garcia’s real subject is the paint. He applies layers of underpainting with oil and alkyd, a drying agent that imparts a satin sheen. The supple medium wrinkles, forms fissures,

and makes ridges where fields of color meet. Garcia builds the composition with visual textures that faintly echo Roy Lichtenstein: overlapping rectangles, dot patterns, wood grain, and bricks. He applies the paint with pallet knives and sponges, rarely using a brush; even his thumbprints are visible in the eyes of one bear. In Time Out, a laughing teddy bear lies stiffly horizontal on a shabby couch, above which a paintbrush hovers beside a framed blank canvas. (“I use the back of the canvas as a subject. The real art is behind the painting,” Garcia says.) The bear’s expression seems charming at first, but soon becomes odd, false, like a grimacing clown. No one is watching the image of Jesus, broadcast on a staticky TV that happens to be unplugged. In Separation Anxiety, another bear peers out of a window, looking lost and forlorn. On the wall, upside-down graffiti is a paean to love and survival. Garcia reveals that this is the Snuggle fabric softener bear, who “is wicked, and has really major problems.” Are our childhood memories happy, or are they laced with anxiety, uncertainty, feelings of abandonment and separation? Other titles, like Perhaps, Either Way, and Just Surviving, capture the open questions of these rooms that are devoid of people. The show’s brochure claims that the symbolism in these paintings “pulls viewers into deeper psychic regions than those explored in most of [Garcia’s] earlier work.” Indeed, Garcia plays with vagueness quite deliberately, and sometimes verges on the disturbing. In our desire for this sinister aspect to evolve, we may read into a piece more “grit” than is there. Still, these paintings draw us in and hold us while we attempt to decipher their mysteries.

Kristin Barendsen

Joe Ramiro Garcia, Time Out, oil and alkyd on canvas, 60” x 72”, 2006


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Wang Nong, Landscapes

CRITICAL REFLECTIONS

of the

Mind

Touching Stone Gallery 539 Old Santa Fe Trail, Santa Fe

According to notes from the Touching Stone website, American painter and educator Arthur Wesley Dow

(1857 – 1922) explained sumi-e black ink brush painting as an approach intended “to develop aesthetic acuity [through] line and notan,” the latter term “refer[ring] to the varying ink density produced by grinding an ink stick in water. Sumi-e artists spend years practicing basic brush strokes to refine their brush movement and ink flow. In the hand of a master, a single stroke can produce astonishing variations in tonality, from deep black to silvery gray…. [Notan] is the basis for the beautiful nuance in tonality unique to Oriental sumi-e and brush-and-ink calligraphy.” In his classic book Composition, Dow stated the importance of placing “the fewest possible lines and tones; just enough to cause form, texture and effect to be felt. Every brush-touch must be charged with meaning, and useless detail eliminated.” This current exhibition of sumi-e painter Wang Nong constitutes an aesthetic microcosm in which those stable values of tradition, delicacy,

and control are balanced with those of Wang’s own imagination, experimentation, and keen observing faculty, one that was developed during the six years that the artist lived in a labor camp in China’s remote Black Dragon River district, known as the “Northern Vast Wilderness.” While not portraying pure abstraction, but rather the purity and essence of an idea expressed in its simplest form, these paintings are decidedly not merely decorative landscapes. Landscape here might be seen as a metaphor for “other”—what is “without” (as opposed to constructed within the mind)—which may mirror a particular kind of mental state. It could be any visual subject, but these unpopulated landscapes evoke a deep mystical meaning; they stimulate the imagination and express the emotion of serenity laced with grief. They also offer the possibility of the most severe kind of elemental reflection: there is the world, here is me, and where might I fit into the scheme of things (if at all)? Hence there is a note of melancholy and aloneness, as well as one of unusual wakefulness and clarity. In Far Far Away, black, white, and gray convey a cold, austere mountain setting, an immaculate effect produced with an economy of means—a nonchalance, a looseness, and a stillness that are of great beauty in themselves. One imagines that Wang’s long enforced stay in the wilds of northern China might have eroded any sense of cozy belonging and, most fittingly, Landscape of the Mind suggests arctic expanses that bring to mind deities of pristine immaculate indifference. Several ever-more-distant horizons in this and other paintings suggest that the notion of “quest” (evident in most of Wang’s work) is ongoing, lonely, and unrequited,

Wang Nong, River of the Soul II, sumi-e on paper, 13½” x 18½”, 2006

symptomatic of a core transiency, which in turn connects to a particular expression of spiritual aloneness. The painting is an especially good example of Wang’s sureness of hand, his mastery of line as an instrument of expressive, uninterrupted improvisation, one that captures subtle detail that invokes an engulfing stillness and vastness, a poetry of distance. In After the Rain, an abstraction derived from nature, there are apparitions of blue emerging from mist, possibly signifying an unqualified transcendence, one of a constant becoming. There is an expanse of the same tender blue ether in Reflection, the beauty of which exists by a deprivation of some kind, an economy of means in reaching the essence of an idea, a sensation in human consciousness that is beyond reason, intended to be ultimately fused within the mind of the beholder. This would seem to be a picture that owes nothing to the data of any actual vision, but rather is inspired by the necessities of the spirit, pent up and ready to burst. The ungrounded apparition of a boat is perhaps intended to give a sense of a human place in the cyclical movement of the world. Indeed, the frequent presence of a slight sliver of a boat in other paintings suggest its presence as a metaphor for journey, expansion, and immersion; the solitary questing and giant bravery of a single human soul confronting the infinitude of the universe. In some of the paintings rivers are laden with reflections of sky and earth, but in Golden Passage the presence of autumnal trees crested with tangerine orange stops short at the riverbank. They overlook a stark white body of water—devoid of reflection—all the better to express a chasm of depth wherein another sliver of boat is cast. The white extends to the edge of the painting, giving a sense of dropping off the edge of the world. In Dream, the presence of the dreamer might be indicated by the boat in the foreground. The rest of the painting has a sensation of pink and rose tones, as if the twilight state of mind were equally an evaporation, a suffusion, and a becoming. Wang painted Dream in the wake of his wife’s death, in 2004, hence the viewer might be tempted to see the landscape as one that portrays the human mind being conscious of its vulnerability, an elegiac yearning of a soul that is taut, still, and overwhelmed in its grief. While Wang uses a particular framework of tradition within which to practice his intuition, his paintings are deeply personal and have the flavor of a particular human life. Nonetheless, they have a final irreducible mysteriousness and silence that speak of a moment seized and rendered purely, as an eternal aspect of time, change, and separation. Rinchen Lhamo

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CRITICAL REFLECTIONS

Dan Griggs, Timur Tsaku: New Paintings Material witness:

Klaudia Marr Gallery 668 Canyon Road, Santa Fe

Last month’s shows

in velvet repose insinuates a seductive quality into

of new work by Dan Griggs and by Timur Tsaku

the innocence of sleep. Griggs invests his detailed

underscored the multiple facets of the realist core of

observation with conscious artifice to suggest a reality

representational painting. One year shy of a century

beneath the familiar and conventional.

since Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon put paid

Timur Tsaku’s series of new paintings is entitled

to Western art’s debt to the Renaissance figurative

Haiya Kdusha, which according to the gallery catalog

tradition, realism continues with a range of visual styles.

is a Hebrew name for a holy being or angel. Tsaku’s

Their common focus is what one art historian termed

paintings feature a young girl, a child, or a young woman

a dialogue with the visible, sustained by a controlling

in elaborately embroidered robes, accompanied by

fidelity to nature as we observe it, to life as we actually

an ever-present Haiva Kdusha, portrayed as a dog—

experience it. The legacy of Modernism—by now,

sometimes a cat—in similar ceremonial garb, with

like Mick Jaeger, an aging avant-garde institution—is

both figures set against the indeterminate backdrop

as strong in figuration as it is in abstraction. Surrealism

of a photography studio. The paintings—highly

redefined the realist encounter with the visible world

detailed, black and white photorealist renditions in

by probing the reality beyond appearance, life below

oil and acrylic on board—are visually stunning, jewel-

the surface, under the skin. The convoluted course

like with their exquisite stitched patterns.

of “post-Modern’ figuration has enabled painters like

What tends to distract from any deeper,

Griggs and Tsaku to stake out their respective places

symbolic engagement is the dog-as-angel conceit. No

in contemporary realism. The result is painting that

appeal to vague millennial claims for the sacred or

bears witness to the material world and to the critical

mythic status of the dog can dispel the light effect of a

role of observation.

William Wegman Weimaraner photo or an immediate

The series of new paintings by Dan Griggs might be called “a room of one’s own.” A constant

association of the Haiya Kdusha cat to the Puss-inBoots character.

motif in the oil-on-linen canvasses is a female model

What is compelling in Tsaku’s work are the

placed in the same setting—the interior of a room

paintings like Child or Little Kerudim, in which the

lit by the soft light of a stain-glass window—under

child or infant dominates. Even in the work featuring

varied circumstances. This linkage

a child in which the dog is present—

of model and setting might be

but simply as a dog (e.g. Child and

simply a marriage of convenience—

Haiya Kdusha IV)—Tsaku pulls off a

the model has to be someplace.

dazzling visual effect of voluminous

Conscious or not, it does allow both

wingspread drapery whose lighter-

painter and observer a controlling

than-air majesty is reinforced by the

vantage from which to explore a

intricate ornamental stitching of the

range of narratives and moods. The

fabric. This decorative tour-de-force

vaguely Victorian tone of the room

serves as a poignant foil that brings

suggested by the stain glass, period

out the child’s beguiling (and all to

chaise lounge, and framed paintings

fleeting) sense of dignity and openness

on Florentine green walls supports

to the world.

In works

The realist paintings of both Dan

such as The Chaise Lounge and Late

Griggs and Timur Tsaku are highly

Afternoon Slumber, a partially draped

accomplished essays in observation

nude sleeps on the couch. In Noblesse

that

Oblige, a woman in a Flemish veil

appearance. Yet—precisely because

sits by the stained glass window a la

of that command of their craft—the

Vermeer. Griggs evokes Zurbaran

viewer is left with the sense that the

with a partially draped seated nude

work has not attained the level of

dramatically lit by intense candlelight.

compelling human content, where the

He deploys the same Spanish-veil

visible object has coaxed out some

motif and Caravaggesque setting to

invisible, immanent truth beneath the

exploit different moods. A young

visible surface that is inexplicably tied

girl shielding a candle gazes into the

to the sensible world.

the painter’s vignettes.

probe

the

reality

beyond

viewer’s space (Out from the Dark). Richard Tobin

A black lace veil revealing a nude TOP: Timur Tsaku, Child, oil and acrylic on board, 32¾” x 20” BOTTOM: Dan Griggs, Anonymous, oil on linen, 31½” x 28¾”, 2004

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J. Barry O’Rourke 505-983-7173 • 860-350-9999


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Painting: Alive

and

Well!

CRITICAL REFLECTIONS

UNM Art Museum, Albuquerque

Despite the goofy exclamatory title, Painting: Alive and Well! is a show of strong work by eight artists working in or around New Mexico. Painting has been a human habit for over thirty thousand years. It isn’t kickin’ the bucket anytime soon. And there is so much other visual stuff waiting to take its place that owes its existence to the history and traditions of painting that we might as well simply expand the definition to include it. This exhibition, however, is painting in the old-school sense of slathering colored dirt on a surface to create both abstract and figurative images and some that hover someplace inbetween. The single piece by Agnes Martin is a pastel stunner that does everything

her work was ever purported to do. Her signature sense of sweet contentment vibrates beyond the square and evokes the secular spiritualism that made her great. Horizontal bands of blue, yellow-green, and pink separated by thin strips of unpainted canvas hum like waking up in the morning in a good mood for no apparent reason. Zachariah Rieke’s Twister is a large-scale swirling smudge of dark grays that

gives gestural abstraction a new twist and makes chaos seem user-friendly. The fact that Rieke grew up in Kansas may have something to do with his taste for this abstract tornado, but probably not. More likely it arrived out of his penchant for allowing chance into his projects in ways other artists only dream about. There is a wizard after all, Dorothy. Eugene Newmann shows up with his incredibly “felt” mark-making and oddly appealing color combinations that suggest a kind of sublimated figuration. There is a sense of magic in his work that is not easy to put in words, a pure painterliness that is awkward, astounding, and utterly sincere. His work here is on loan from the collection of Jonathan Abrams who also curated the exhibit. Forrest Moses checks in with riotous, colorful takes on landscape that hover somewhere between naturalism and abstract mark-making with a confidence that makes him seem like a force of nature himself. There is a painterly bravura in these pieces that shows just what thirty thousand–plus years of paint slathering, scumbling, and smearing can lead to. Similarly straddling the border between the abstract and the concrete is Susan Rothenberg with her spooky, disembodied limbs and animals floating in fields of overworked brushstrokes. These pieces are all recent, quite accomplished, and suggest that she’s back on top of her game at last. Okay, they’re not as great as her Mondrian Dancing (what is?), but they’re as bizarrely composed and as scary and primal and mysterious as any of her powerful works from the past. It seems like it’s been more than a few years since one could say that. Richard Hogan presents a kind of gestural minimalism in which bounded and less bounded forms in white and tan swirl around on pale grounds of warm beige interacting with spindly graphite lines. This subtle use of near color gives Agnes Martin a run for her money, but unlike her intense sense of structure, Hogan’s work seems like it could be the still center in the eye of Rieke’s cyclone. Sam Scott gets all wild and free and visceral and expressionistic in big quasifigurative pieces full of hot desert colors and strangely powerful bodies that look like tortured cartoon vivisections—in a good way. Noon Blueboy Wind crackles with high desert electricity and a primal symbology that could easily take your

Sam Scott, Noon Blueboy Wind, oil on canvas, 2004

head off. And best for last is Jim Waid and his also cartoony abstractions. Narcho’s Blues is a knockout. Quirky forms bounce, swirl, and pollinate a mostly maroon forest. For out-and-out inventive wackiness, Waid is the runaway wizard of weirdness. His work adds spunk to a show that otherwise might take itself just a little too seriously. Actually, Waid’s work indicates a direction for painting derived from the imaginative distortions of the relatively new tradition of the animated cartoon that seems to be territory many younger painters are hell-bent on inhabiting. We’ve come a long way from the cave walls, baby, and if painters like Waid have their way there are many more manic miles to go before we sleep. Jon Carver

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Barbara Erdman Izabela Riano

Transparencies

28 July - 28 August Opening Reception: Friday, 28 July 2006 5:00 – 7:30 PM

Farrell Fischoff Gallery 1807 Second Street #29 Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505 Tel 505.995.0620 Fax 505.955.8487 www.FarrellFischoff.com


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Mexican Modern: Masters

CRITICAL REFLECTIONS

of the

20th Century

Museum of Fine Arts 109 West Palace Avenue, Santa Fe

There are two major themes in the expertly assembled Mexican Modern show. The primary theme

is didactic, as is fitting for a public organization: this exhibition seeks to educate its visitors about the kind of breakthrough art that was being made in Mexico after its long and bloody revolution of 1910 to 1921. The MFA succeeds here, though it has a notable failure as well. But for a mid-level institution in a financially disadvantaged state like New Mexico, this is a good effort. Never mind that the costs for priming the national press for Mexican Modern made headlines in the local newspaper, this remains a second-tier show that succeeds, like the engine that could, despite its limits. A secondary theme, and this is where it gets a little murky, is that as New Mexicans we have, or at the very least, should have, a special and “very old relationship,” as the press release states, with Mexico. The result of a collaborative effort of good will between the MFA and the Museo de Arte Moderno of Mexico City, it remains a shame that in reality, Mexico has had no more or less bearing on the art of New Mexico than has the art of Grandma Moses or Pablo Picasso. That is, the art of Mexico was an international phenomenon; in a roughly contiguous period, the art of los cinco pintores of Santa Fe was much more the result of their awareness of European, not Mexican, movements. In actuality, this is an exhibition of the remarkable responses of several highly talented artists and activists who happened to be Mexican during an extremely important era in their country’s history. European modernism was greatly influential to the trajectory of Mexican art immediately after the revolution, a period that is known as the Mexican Renaissance. A highly significant aspect of that Renaissance was the popularity of using the Italian al fresco technique of mural making in order to bring art to the masses. There is a direct connection between those early murals and the later Chicano art movement here in the USA. However, this exhibition has nothing to do with that connection, nor should it. The fact remains that despite our common history as Spanish territories, the relationship between the art histories of New Mexico and Mexico seems quite forced, a public relations ploy more than a reality. Just ask the guy washing dishes in the next restaurant you visit about relationships between Mexico and New Mexico. Or better yet, try the National Guardsman who’s going to patrol the border about this “very old relationship.” It’s far from a solid alliance. As David Craven notes in his excellent catalogue essay, “... Mexico comprises several ‘nations’ at once, all of which are uneasily fused into a semiunified whole.” Therefore, an exhibition using the word “Mexican” in its title is bound to have gaps in its thesis, as would any exhibition of “American” art. We here in New Mexico should be particularly sensitive to that sort of mainstreaming of art and culture that inevitably proves less than satisfying. We wind up here with a kind of Mexican Lite, going for the overall branding effect, a “feel” of Mexican-ness that serves purpose number one adequately but

Tina Modotti, Nursing Baby, silver gelatin print, 6¾” x 9”, 1929.

not deeply. The second purpose is hardly served at all.

Courtesy: Museo de Arte Moderno Collection

Let’s get the above-mentioned failure out of the way. If you’re coming here looking for big Diego Rivera canvases of flower vendors and the like, or Frida Kahlo self-portraits, forget it. This is where the Museum system’s limited budget really shows. Once you get past that, the rest is an enjoyable journey through some really good art. These Mexican artists were well aware of European history. Borrowing from the Italian Renaissance not just in mural technique but in form as well—Manuel Rodriguez Lozano’s scenes of death are keenly reminiscent of Masaccio’s strong and simplified figures in the Brancacci chapel in Florence—Mexico’s early modernists used everything they could get their eyes and hands on. Rivera studied Cubism, and both he and David Alfaro Siqueiros used it with a boldness that spoke volumes. Siqueiros is especially wellrepresented here, and his two portraits, one of a proud yet shadowed Mexican man and the other—brighter, more lucid—an Anglo woman, represent perceived differences in class and culture that visually articulate the artist’s political activism. All of Modern’s artists were quite obviously aware of German expressionism and Fauvism, as well as of their own highly theatrical Baroque traditions and the more recent developments of José Guadalupe Posada, whose calaveras cavorting in the newspapers during the Revolution continue to define Mexican art and culture today. Then there’s a beautiful corner in the galleries set aside by the lovely device of chartreuse walls. Devoted to three photographers—Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, and Manuel Alvarez Bravo—these pictures speak to everything this exhibition is trying to convey. From the cleanest lines of modernity to the most basic appeal for social change, they draw their lines in the dirt with a firm clarity. Birth to death, as Roger Bartra writes in Cage of Melancholy (Rutgers University Press, 1992), “the definition of a Mexican is rather a description of how he/she is dominated and, above all, how exploitation is legitimized.” Mexico’s very beauty seems to invite its exploitation. For, to continue Bartra’s quote, this “subverted paradise… is an eternal instant trapped between two mythical fissures: after the original sin, when women and men have already tasted the fruit… but before their expulsion from paradise.” Ah, the heartbreak, to live exiled from paradise. Somehow, this exhibition doesn’t quite get to that explosive fissure, leaving us with a lingering melancholia under academic propriety. Kathryn M. Davis

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THE MAGAZINE | 61


by Ray Hare haller & photorealism Sc ff Je by s tic us ca Featuring en

JUNE 30 - AUGUST 13, 20

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Bernard Plossu, Daniel Zolinsky The Edge of Silence: Photography

CRITICAL REFLECTIONS

of the

African Desert

The Oldest House Museum Shop 215 East De Vargas, Santa Fe

All the photographs in this two-man show were shot in Mali, in 1990, with no further descriptive titling other than being numbered, for referencing purposes. Whether one has been there or not, the African desert is universally identified with the monumental, elemental forces of wind, sand, and huge, inexorable spaces, so we expect that it will dwarf humankind’s efforts to leave its mark on it. Still, there will always be a subjective aspect to photographing landscapes—all the choices involved in leading up to actually taking a picture. Landscape photography, amongst other things, is a record of place—a specific piece of terrain distilled to its fullest strength; the viewer can intuit Zolinsky and Plossu’s personal involvement and cherishing of the African desert by the nostalgia for the unfamiliar that their photographs induce. Such impersonal, elemental grandeur can produce sadness, but it can also act as a balm. The notion of there being any unspoiled places left anywhere is now perhaps a romantic one, and though this is no less true for the African desert, a primordial beauty

nonetheless persists on its own, choicelessly, not diminished by the very real hardship of drought and the overwhelming suffering that is implicit as part of that imbalance. Of course we know that about Africa, but neither of these artists (who are close friends) photographs with a photojournalist’s sensibility. French photographer Bernard Plossu’s first encounter with the Sahara desert occurred when he was thirteen, when he was brought there by his father who himself traversed the Sahara in 1936. So right away there was a romance with desertscapes, bred in the bone, as it were. Since then Plossu has journeyed in southern Morocco, along the Senegal River, Mali, and on to Egypt. He even lived in Taos for a while, so it is no surprise that we see in one photograph a highway that could be in New Mexico, in others, adobe dwellings reminiscent of Native American pueblos. While all of Plossu’s photographs are shot in black-and-white, Daniel Zolinsky, covering the same terrain, has produced colored prints made according to a method developed by the Fresson family in France who continue to keep the details of their process secret. Quoting from a link on the Internet, “Fresson prints are a proprietary form of direct carbon print in which the image is developed by the abrasive action of a slurry of wet sawdust.” The printing effect is quietly gorgeous, somewhat reminiscent of old-fashioned hand-tinted photographs (though far more subtle), with skies in particular looking as if they have been rendered in watercolor, or even pastels. A last bonus to this little treasure of a show (“little” because the rooms and wall space of this “oldest house” are so small) is that a few of Al Ogard’s photographs from the last show remain on the walls. The artist chose Machu Picchu as one of his subjects, a place made yet more seductive thanks to Ogard’s mastery of pinhole photography.

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Rinchen Lhamo

Bernard Plossu, Mali, silver print, 1990

Nina Elder: Exhaust

Richard Levy Gallery 514 Central Avenue SW, Albuquerque

Whatcha see is whatcha get. In a superflat, paint-by-numbers style, Nina Elder depicts factories and the smoke that streams out of them. She deliberately reduces her

monolithic subjects to clean lines and wild, wacky colors that give them a kind of ironic Pop cheeriness and adds to their basic anonymity. We drive by these industrial sites all the time, yet rarely know what they produce. We use the goods they make constantly, but rarely have any idea where they come from. These are aspects of the fundamental displacements that are so much a part of consumer capitalism. Exhaust refers not only to the particulate matter these mega-machines belch into the air day and night, destroying the atmosphere, the rain, and the environment, but also, perhaps, to the

exhaustion of these unsustainable realities, and more obliquely to the exhaustion of the Modernist modes of depiction Elder mocks. Are these icons of a culture on the verge of wearing itself out? The style of these paintings is deliberately dumb. Her subjects are decidedly mundane. The point of these pictures is simple presentation. There is a neutrality about them that recalls

Warhol’s best work, his car crashes and electric chair images. “Here it is” is all these images seem to say. Here’s the smoke going into the air and here’s the factory that makes the smoke. “I want to paint it like a robot would paint it,” says Elder, again recalling Andy Warhol. This deadpan rhetoric also reminds one of Ed Ruscha’s early works, and leads inevitably to Duchamp’s presentation of the readymade, without which Warhol and Ruscha wouldn’t have done what they did. The images on display are deceptively lovely in the spacious setting of the Richard Levy Gallery, but also unnerving. Is this an anti-industrial statement or a clunky celebration a la Charles Scheeler of the lines and designs of capitalist means of production? The fact that Elder doesn’t really give us a clue is her greatest strength. Her public statements about the paintings are equally ambiguous and ultimately indecipherable. This is the balancing act that Warhol exalted, and the result of this overly even-handed aesthetic strategy is that it leaves you, the viewer, to ruminate a bit longer than you might otherwise. They’re out there, the power plants, the refineries, the storage facilities, and the factories. They dot the landscapes of the Southwest like giant flies. Whatcha gonna do about it? Jon Carver Nina Elder, Tijeras, New Mexico, acrylic on canvas, 36” x 48”, 2006

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THE MAGAZINE | 63


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CRITICAL REFLECTIONS

Gordon Micunis: The 500 Mona Lisas

El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe 1615-B Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe

This show is the fourth in Gordon Micunis’s “homage” series, this time honoring Leonardo da Vinci and incidentally presenting a birthday valentine to that most

famous of all famous faces, da Vinci’s model Madonna Lisa Gherardini Zanobi del Giocondo. Leonardo completed his painting The Mona Lisa (renowned as La Joconde and La Gioconda

to both the Italians and the French, respectively), in 1506, so this year marks the 500th anniversary of what is arguably the world’s most famous painting. Arranged in a flat-topped pyramid formation and hung on a single giant expanse of wall in a vast and otherwise empty room, The 500 Mona Lisas will at first strike the viewer

as a single totality before the individual units (each one measuring 8½” x 11”) pop out in their variously humorous, quirky, clever, and endlessly inventive styles. Micunis’s materials are varied: colored papers, Magic Markers, crayons, silk and other fabrics, metallics, newsprint, old ledger papers, pages from fashion and art magazines, candy wrappers, doilies, multiple layers of transparent film, gold leaf, whiteout, torn papers, and so on. His techniques in his homage series up to now have all been “low tech.” The single constant is a Canon PC black-and-white copier, the indispensable tool, which enables the artist to superimpose, reverse, and multiply the images. Micunis makes it clear that none of the “monoprints” have been computer generated, for he cherishes the visceral sense of his art-making process that comes with a “hand on” approach. The monoprints were created in series, and subsequently interspersed throughout the pyramid. That is, the hanging of the units was carefully orchestrated, based on visual complementarities rather than being a random arrangement. Like many other pictures of the Italian renaissance, La Gioconda—some would argue Leonardo’s absolute masterpiece—may correspond to an ideal rather than to the actual characteristics of the Florentine lady who sat as his model. Painted when she was in her thirties and appearing almost portly with somewhat pudgy hands (and therefore a subject for portraiture that ran against the taste of the times), she is nonetheless bathed in a light that imparts a power to her gaze and suggests a complexity of psychological aspects that have been the subject of both awed speculation and mockery for the last century. Some of Micunis’s series pay homage to those playful mockeries: Mona Lisa with moustache and pointed beard, a la Marcel Duchamp, and homages to Warhol, Dalí, and Chuck Close as well. Three series give nods to iconic beauties of our own times: Marilyn Monroe, Greta Garbo, and Elizabeth Taylor. And then there are

the cutouts, face-offs, and twelve Mona Lisas that incorporate roses. Some of the series play with the sparkling and moist luster of her eyes, her delicately shaped nose. Micunis teases out a meek and prim demeanor in one, a moon goddess in another. Echoing the atmospheric and primordial landscape found in the original, he has likewise fragmented and patched together all manner of

I

imaginary backgrounds in this lovingly wrought salute to a great visionary painter and his subject. Rinchen Lhamo Gordon Micunis, The 500 Mona Lisas, collaged, mixed-media monoprints, 20’x 45’, 2003-2006

Harry Geffert: Out

of

Eden

El Paso Museum of Art One Arts Festival Plaza, El Paso, Texas

If destiny takes you through El Paso this summer, veer toward

The artist’s current works are of cast paper, a technique that allows for even finer

the city’s Museum of Art, where a retrospective of Texas sculptor Harry Geffert runs

detail than does the wax-bronze process. Geffert pulverizes toilet paper with a KitchenAid

until August 20. An artist who constantly reinvents his subject matter, materials, and

mixer and sprays it into molds. In Conservatory, we see a cabbage as never before: pure,

casting techniques, Geffert uses objects found in nature to both imitate and re-imagine

crisp, and white, with exquisite detail in the veins and edges of the leaves. These paper

the natural world.

sculptures step beyond Surrealism into hyperrealism, bringing forms into sharp and

Several of the forty-two exhibition pieces are tree branches

exaggerated focus by re-visioning them in new materials.

cast in bronze—simple and poetic, yet state of the art in delicacy

Geffert built a foundry on a forested hilltop (his personal

and detail. Geffert makes a mold directly from a branch and then

Eden) in Crowley, Texas, where for years he cast for other

burns out the wood with molten bronze. He must cast each

Texas sculptors. Today, still going gangbusters at seventy-two,

twig individually and then painstakingly weld them together.

Geffert focuses on his own work, casting objects he finds on the

Other bronzes tell a story. In Devil’s Eggs, three human

property. “I’m trying to find art where I am, and not go outside

figures with Geffert’s face struggle in the branches of a thorn

of that world,” Geffert says. He says he recently made a paper

tree. The tree’s roots twist into three pitchforks, each stabbing

cast of the baggy sweater and hat of a “sloucher” friend and

a large white egg (appetizers for the devil?). The existential

called the sculpture Bruce.

drama is both terrifying and humorous. “We aren’t nearly as

Geffert is represented by the Gerald Peters Gallery in

important as we think we are,” Geffert says.

Dallas, and his work is part of many private and museum

Mantime, the show’s most complex work, is a Hieronymus

collections. But, Geffert says, he’s “not in it for the sales.”

Bosch–inspired narrative about the birth of mankind, an assemblage

Geffert doesn’t do editions: all of his pieces are one of a kind.

of separately cast elements of different scales. There is a large globe thriving with organic matter, and a life-size man riding away from it

He explains: “I tried making editions years ago. But the second Harry Geffert, Mantime, bronze, 86” x 91” x 50”, 1995

in a child’s wagon—perhaps seizing the world, perhaps careening out of control. Below, tiny figures crawl out of pea pods, while atop the globe a new version of the Eden story plays out. Like Devil’s Eggs, this piece is a Surrealist metaphor of the human condition, if more elaborate.

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one is pure work—you just don’t get the same buzz. The artist’s excitement must be in the piece for it to be alive.”

Kristin Barendsen

THE MAGAZINE | 65


Victoria Mauldin Contemporary Realism Capturing the Magic of the Southwest

Visit Victoria during Art Loop in Lincoln County, NM July 7th, 8th & 9th, 2006 View more of Victoria's art at: www.artloop.org

“Soaring Eagle”, oil on canvas 10 x 20”, 2005

Private showings at the Mauldin Studio by appointment 119 Merlyn, Ruidoso, NM • 505-257-5037 • vmauldin@valornet.com


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CRITICAL REFLECTIONS

James Marshall: The Endurance

of

Form

Winterowd Fine Art 701 Canyon Road, Santa Fe

The first sculptures I ever saw by James Marshall were not ceramic but were fabricated from wood. And the shapes tended toward Baroque configurations; some could have been from the science fiction worlds of J. G. Ballard. They were elaborate and incredibly well made. Marshall is a master of whatever form he puts his hand to, and this sense of perfection runs through all of the sculptures in this show—now made of clay and glazes, though, instead of rare woods. Marshall’s ceramic work, however, has turned decidedly minimalist, and he has embraced a vocabulary of stripped-down geometries. Marshall’s pieces dazzle the eye with their primary colors—fire engine red, canary yellow, forest green, orange. But the sculptures glazed in black are no less compelling. While

the largest pieces are no bigger than three feet on a side, all the work has a monumental presence, and you could easily envision it on a larger scale. One can imagine this work outside in a courtyard, larger than life and enlivening the severe right angles of earth-hued stone, transparent glass, or gray concrete. Thinking about Marshall’s clean forms writ large and in a dialogue with Modernist architecture is not

to diminish their impact in the here and now. These sculptures are beautiful and powerful in their current scale and can hold their own no matter what. I just think it’s interesting sometimes—when the work seems to suggest it—to play with the idea of context. There is more to Marshall’s work than the realities of eye-candy color married to a relaxed elegance. There is the actual quality of glazed surfaces to be studied and taken into account. Brilliant reds and yellows, for example, are more than what they seem. The glazes are subtly mottled, covered with tiny veins, and varied thicknesses so that the marks of the glazes being poured and running down a side become part of a work’s identity. The black glazes possess some of the most striking variations and often look like frost patterns on a window or simulate the visual dynamics of water as it goes through the stages of becoming ice. One piece in particular is a model for the complex results arrived at in the process of combining

silicates and other inorganic matter and putting them at the mercy of high temperatures. Untitled 148 does indeed look like a Platonic solid that has merged with molten chunks of caramel, and the result is a flat plane that possesses great depth. It’s as if you were looking at a photograph of stalactites on the ceiling of a cave. Glazes have pooled, coalesced, been pulled apart, and have been transformed from a dull mat surface to one of crystalline seduction under the influence of heat and chemical reaction. In this show, we see the artist’s ability to wrestle successfully with the havoc of fire.

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Diane Armitage James Marshall, Untitled 148, glazed ceramic, 29” x 26” x 4”, 2006

Jennifer Lynch: New Work

Fenix Gallery 208-A Ranchitos Road, Taos

The ubiquity of photographs in our daily

there, the image is introduced to the polyester plates

surroundings has made it quite difficult to regard photography

of a printing press, where a hit-and-miss experiment

as an artistic entity in its own right. Nevertheless, photographic

in optical science takes place. The workable prints

information continues to prove itself reality’s most nimble

are then laminated in a heat press to Fabriano

escort, poignantly combining the real and imagined so effectively

Tizziano paper with acrylic film. Hermetic and

as to render the question of artistic merit utterly moot. The

disarmingly familiar at once, each piece brings the

power of photography extends beyond the classifications of art.

heavy hint that the viewer will have to look carefully

If you don’t believe it, take a photograph of your mother and try

in order to see the riches hidden in the wet and

to cut her eyes out with a pair of scissors.

poetic juxtapositions of image and darkness. Glass,

While it is obvious that images do not have appetites, needs,

opalescent raindrops, irregular and nocturnal flares of

demands, drives, it is true that a photographic image is both a

impenetrable blackness, and de-saturated color, are

verbal and visual trope and that its persuasive, even dictatorial

the essential visual components of the foreground.

power is undeniable. Because of this, the subversion of images

As a Trojan horse, these visuals rhyme perfectly with

often provides us with a pleasurable moment of unbinding, the

an atmosphere of nostalgia. But upon closer scrutiny,

feeling of breaking out of a determined boundary, and a sense of

a latent content is revealed, and one enters this with

critical distance from optical and linguistic tyranny.

a palpable stereoscopic sensation, a shift.

With New Work, a series of one-of-a kind, multiple-color,

With this work we are given not the elaboration

large-format photolithographs, master printer Jennifer Lynch

of a conceit, but rather imaginative expansion,

has combined the raw energy of lithography with the cool

which is something no less elaborate and far

trappings of photography to create an interesting and original

less predictable.

territory. She accomplishes this through a labor-intensive Anthony Hassett

process that begins with a digitally altered photograph. From Jennifer Lynch, L#19, photo-lithograph, 52” x 40”, 2006

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THE MAGAZINE | 67


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Safety by

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Urban space is a series of partial views, convex, opaque. You go from mass to detail, individuals, little ants. The instinct to preserve oneself deflects onto vertigo from the domination of space, fear of death to fear of damage to the beautiful body. You connect dwelling to a child guarded by a woman. Its fate is foretold, child implicit in a word chain, flash, flowers in ice. In the days we have left, we count our probable meetings, first surface content, then in your language, as in my dream. The more disconnected your monologue, the more it correlates to something latent in that moment, separation, flowers in ice. It’s not raining, but it’s as if there were mud everywhere, and you’re plastered in mud. When a person falls in front of you, something like rain washes mud away, and his leg becomes white as a piece of marble. Being with each other, we want to reveal and reveal, conceal nothing, but there’s the sense something does not get across, a secret. In this sense, hospitality between us is a secret interior, instead of reality being the plaintiff’s. Shards, detail, singularity, winter garden in a glass, palms, extreme refinement of the civility. There’s a linking of structure by joint and weld, springiness, and an unlinking across expanse. The rigor of the link is an artifact. Its volume is innate in the witness, leg covered over, memorialized by what I saw, concealed, closed, covered with sight as with gauze, light surface with which I wrap you, light trampoline.

“Safety” is from I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (University of California Press, $45 cloth, $19.95 paper). Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing and lives in New Mexico. She is the author of nine volumes of poetry, including Nest, The Four Year Old Girl, and Empathy.

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TIRRANNA: house by Frank Lloyd Wright

TIRRANNA: sculpture garden by Ted Flicker By appointment. Ted Flicker at 505.466.9191 www.tedflicker.com


play hard to get play it again, Sam will work for food hard work play ball play to win work through the pain a woman’s work is never done play both ends of the field play it as it lays play it by ear all work and no play makes jack a dull boy whatever works child’s play work up a sweat dirty work play hooky play for keeps workin’ for the man all in a day’s work play your cards right at play in the fields of the gods we can work it out work for peace play possum work out workin’ on the chain gang fair play play your trump card piece work whistle while you work play around play the market work against the clock work all day play all night go to work busy work a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work play hardbal come out and play out of work work wonders play cat and mouse what a piece of work is man less work for mothers go play in traffic play hide and seek it’s a work-a-day world play with fire will it play in peoria? work with me equal pay for equal work It works to play well with others play the fool good work Linda Durham Contemporary Art work your fingers to the bone 1101 Paseo de Peralta Santa Fe, NM 87501 505.466.6600 www.lindadurham.com play with me she’s a piece of work


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