Antwan Horfee

Juxtapoz says Antwan’s newest is “another leap in this world of the Parisian artist Antwan Horfee, an abstracted, mind-blowing series of paintings, drawings and video work that, when you squint your eyes, has the remnants of graffiti and urban density but feels entirely new.”

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Laura Payne

who is a also a painter, has installation work on display with Sinéad Ludwig-Burgess at Okotoks Art Gallery through March 31. Of the work, Payne says she was influenced by “those subtle-but-vivid spectrums of colour in the cloudless sky at dawn or dusk, or the way that hot pink light in November hits the buildings in the city. What I guess I wanted to do is synthesize, artificially, this sort of feeling of witnessing an ephemeral light phenomenon in nature – I want to bottle it, put it in something.”
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Reginald Sylvester II


Saw below at the Nasher recently. Born in Jacksonville, NC, Reginald merges unconventional art materials with simplified forms to create symbols of protest and resilience. Offering IV comes from a series of eight paintings on stretched industrial rubber. The artist’s use of rubber stems from his investigations into the exploitative history of its commercial manufacturing in central Africa.

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Nontraditional

I deploy this word as a tag on my blog for artists using materials in ways that one would have said, when I was in Art school, “that wasn’t how we were taught to use those in Art school.” Paint on canvas, pencil on paper, etc. Maybe I’ll switch to multimedia eventually…

The context for this observation is that I am in the early stages of working on glass- see below. Glass is definitely a nontraditional support for painting, for a couple of reasons that are obvious to me now- it’s the worst combination of heavy and fragile, and it’s definitely not a permanent substrate for water-based paints like acrylic (all you have to do is spritz it with water and the paint, even if dry, will rub right off). Regular readers will know that impermanence is just fine with me.

While landfill waste diversion isn’t a subject for this work, it is something that matters to me- all of my other installation work, whether the cubes or my recent interactive pieces, employ material reuse. In the later case not only are the cubes reused studies, the supports, including the foam core on which the cubes are mounted, are all upcycled– only the magnets and some “virgin” paint or media are first-use.

There are still themes/ideas of contradiction to work with- the contradiction of paint that appears to be free of a support; the layering of “sides” of the cubes which is undone by them being flat shapes rather than the edges of a solid viewed in perspective. Given my recent re-writing of my artist statement, I like adding another modality (another “and”) to my practice as well. I think eventually the sheets of glass will get stacked in a way that requires the viewer to move so that the cubes “edges” align- I’m intrigued, as a means to center contemplation, by strategies that highlight any requirement for the viewer to be present and engaged.

I am also taking time to revisit work by and words about artists who work with transparent supports- Nathalie Cohen, Helen Pashgian, Susan Meyer, Ivelisse Jiménez, Craig Kauffman, and in particular Ronald Davis and Sali Muller. If dear reader has suggestions I’d love to hear about them.

Michael Brennan

Earlier this month, Two Coats of Paint invited painter Kim Uchiyama to sit down with Michael Brennan to discuss “Floating Weeds,” Brennan’s fourth solo show at Minus Space. In their wide-ranging conversation, they discuss Japanese film, Russell Lee’s photographs, Charles Olson’s poetry, Venetian lagoons, architect Carlo Scarpa, Homer, and more.

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