12/29/20
12/25/20
12/20/20
12/17/20
12/16/20
12/12/20
12/7/20
11/25/20
11/20/20
11/12/20
Past Present and Future Tense
I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.
John Baldessari
10/31/20
Tell Me A Story, I Don't Care It It's True
When engaging with image-making, suspicions around legibility and interpretation often come to mind. As with the written text, visual language has a set of symbols which can direct a reader to a frame of meanings. For instance, when you hear or read the word, “chair,” a series of images come to mind that represent an object upon which one can sit. Even with more abstract descriptors, such as “love,” one’s emotions and experiences help render a picture. How might this translate in a figurative drawing? Does seeing a picture of a red chair read the same as someone reading that reference? What happens when an image and text work in tandem? What faculties of understanding are needed when a text reads as “chair,” but the image depicts infatuation or a loss of love? Does a third meaning arrive by combining the two? I’m often fascinated with how miscommunications happen and what the imagination conjures in misconstrued spaces—the gulfs between what is intended and how it is received. There’ lies possibility for stories to emerge from within these spaces of missed connections.
In a time when it seems our priorities are placed on certainty and how to control output amidst a plethora of information that also feels protean and deeply influential, drawing out these vignettes was a means of understanding for me. The works were created using colored pencil, graphite and ink at random, yet seeing them collectively, I sense a yearning. As if, in my attempts at understanding the activity of creating them superseded my intentions; the very conundrum I aimed to solve. Who am I to say what these works mean, but if I present them in such a way as to leave room for others to partake in the translation does that counter the underlying yearning? Exactitude is elusive. Now completed, I’m not where I was when I began the series, but the frame of meaning has tightened. While discussing the series with Reginald Moore, he stated what seems at the crux of this project:“We tend to tell people the things that make us feel better in the telling. It may or may not be what they want or need to hear, but at least we feel better. Is that deceptive or just another means of getting along in the world?” If this is where we gather our truths, then I understand it. In the end, you just don’t know. Sometimes, you have to trust yourself.
—Toyin Ojih Odutola, 22 May 2020
WWW.JACKSHAINMAN.COM INFO@JACKSHAINMAN.COM
10/30/20
10/29/20
10/26/20
10/24/20
Gazos Love Songs: Old Friends
Long ago . . . it must be . . .
I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They're all that's left you
Old Friends Simon and Garfunkel
10/23/20
10/17/20
In A Manner Of Speaking: The Untitled Art World
Art goes on. Art that is transgressive will recur. But it will do so nakedly for anyone who chooses to characterize it, not only for those initiates who congratulate one another on their shared investment in standards of truth, beauty, and good conscience. Cold winds are blowing from the future onto aspirations to provide society, or even segments of society, with a capacity to bridge differences with mutual respect. I’ve often reflected that uses of “we” in critical writing are unavoidably presumptuous, though they are rhetorically meant only to invite, or perhaps to seduce, agreement. I’ve never felt less confidence in the pronoun, at a time of alienations that recall what W. B. Yeats perceived in another pandemic year, 1919: “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
Excerpt from Philip Guston and the Boundaries of Art Culture By Peter Schjeldahl
New Yorker THE ART WORLD OCTOBER 19, 2020
10/13/20
10/8/20
10/5/20
So Far Away From Home
Many's the time I've been mistaken
And many times confused
Yes, and I've often felt forsaken
And certainly misused
But I'm all right, I'm all right
I'm just weary to my bones
Still, you don't expect to be
Bright and bon vivant
So far away from home, so far away from home...
American Tune Paul Simon
10/3/20
10/1/20
No. 45: The Truth Be Told
Those
who
think
it
is
permissible
to
tell
white-lies
soon
grow
color-blind
Austen O'Malley
9/30/20
No. 45: I Cross My Heart
"cross my heart
and hope to die
stick a needle in my eye
wait a moment,
i spoke a lie
i never really
wanted to die.
but if i may
and if i might
my heart is open
for tonight
though my lips are sealed
and a promise is true
i won't break my word
my word to you..."
9/27/20
9/21/20
9/20/20
9/16/20
9/14/20
9/13/20
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