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For a number of years, until 2005, I painted aerial views of suburban sprawl. In my recent work, I have "zoomed in," to focus on individual tract homes and commercial structures captured in a state of partial construction. These new paintings explore the building process and, in it, find a metaphor for the activity of painting. I hope to draw a connection between the construction of a building out of raw materials (lumber, steel, and concrete) and the construction of a picture out of raw materials (paint, canvas, wood). My paintings are informed both by three-dimensional architectural space and by the pictorial "space" of twentieth century Modernist painting. The generic forms of suburban architecture provide a convenient framework through which I explore the basic structures and issues of geometric abstraction -- stripes, grids, flatness vs. depth, color relativity, and so forth. Many of my recent works are marked by distinct moments of visual rupture, where the picture as a whole becomes fragmented. I am applying paint to the surface in any number of incongruent ways, juxtaposing various painting "styles," leaving sections of the painting support unpainted, and otherwise undermining the potential for a unified image. This disruption of the viewer's experience is disorienting, but in a good way, for it enables the viewer to see the picture with fresh eyes - to see the picture itself as a construction. The underlying structure of the image is revealed, like the skeletal frame of a building. At this point, my work is only minimally about suburbia. Tract homes and strip malls provide the fodder for the paintings and help to place them in a specific cultural moment in time, but the work is ultimately about paint and the nature of pictures. To the extent that my paintings still comment on suburbia, it is through the moments of visual rupture described above, which may be interpreted as revealing cracks in the suburban American dream. http://www.jenbekman.com/artists/ian_baguskas/?gallery=current&image=ian_baguskas_lawn_agua_dulce
statement :: Sweet
Water
Traveling end to end across Southern California, I witnessed the attempts people made to transform areas of the desert into their own personal oasis, defying both nature and reason. From what I could tell, the lush palm trees, green lawns and lakes in the towns of this region were nothing but a mirage to most of the people living there. Without large-scale human intervention, this part of the West could not sustain most of its inhabitants. It is the diversion of rivers and the rapid use of the aquifer that has made it possible for some people to live this dream. For others, this lifestyle was only temporary, ending when the aquifers were depleted and the water ran out. This was the case for the people of Lake Los Angeles, located within Antelope Valley, where in the 1960s an artificial lake was made to attract land buyers. Left to dry up once the developers sold their land, the empty lake is still colored blue on maps. Similarly, in 1958, a developer bought 80,000 acres of desert land and named it California City with the dream of creating the next Los Angeles. Miles of empty paved grids remain to this day just beyond the limits of a small city that never lived up to its builder’s intentions. It is stories like these that made me wonder, and want to explore, what still remains of this grand dream to populate the beautiful, yet unlivable, desert.
http://www.jenbekman.com/artists/kate_bingaman-burt/
http://www.jenbekman.com/artists/carrie_marill/
statement ::
Doing a Lot with Very Little
Doing a Lot with Very Little is the result of my endeavor to create a series of non-narrative work. I am using recognizable imagery and the language of systems to create a dialog; the mathematical and the organic cohabitate, creating a world of exploration and curiosity. I chose to paint house plants after coming across some elegant images in a Japanese architecture book. I've painted them before and found myself returning to plants when I needed a break from the detailed birds I had been working on over the past year. I like the quiet and contemplative way drawings of ordinary house plants can say so much, through very little. The abstract drawings are observations in color, value and composition, generating three-dimensional images in a two dimensional space. They act as pauses between the house plant paintings. It is an organic process, each color choice was in response to the previous color painted. Simple marks combine together to create an optical illusion, much like the subtle value changes and intricate lines that make up the images of house plants. The majority of my source material is found online and my final artwork is often viewed online. Is the final image just a collage of media re-constituted through me? I can't even really see a drawing until I scan it and view it on my screen, knowing that is where the majority of my audience will view the work. Drawings and paintings were the first ways humans recorded imagery and communicated. Nowadays, recorded images are captured and edited with digital media. How has this changed the way we see, construct, and choose our images? Pixels create a large chunk of our visual world. With that in mind, how is experiencing art in person different than what you will see online?
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