Science Fictional thinking / alex A. Jones / December 2019
"Science Fictional Thinking" is both playful and dark. It speaks to a collective vision of the future at the crossroads of horror and humor, shadow and light.
There are no dreams of the space age here, although numerous works deal with the legacy of this bygone futurism. Amy Yoes has built a Lander, but instead of a rare-metal spacecraft, it is a small domestic sculpture of wood. It is shrouded in black cloth as if in mourning. Alex Schechter's Pendulum as Accurate Measure also collides the aesthetics of the spacecraft with the humble and domestic. The work arose from the artist's meditation on "the utopian vision of space as a nationally unifying project as well as facing human and environmental cost of those actions." In the large-scale collages by Kristyna and Marek Milde, it would be easy to mistake the subjects as space stations, but looking closer, one sees they are actually cut-up fragments of 20th-century modernist buildings. These failed utopian housing projects and cold institutional fortresses have been scrapped and jettisoned into space.
One of the curatorial prompts of the show was "If science fiction is a tool, what does that tool look like?" Alexander Rosenberg has answered with a pair of wryly humorous devices that require faith in magic rather than technology. An interactive neon piece invites the user to approach a black chalice mounted to the wall and Whisper the name of someone who has wronged you. The act prompts the cup to glow red, but there is no suggestion that the device sends anything other than bad vibes to its target. Rosenberg's black glass crystal ball, meanwhile, asks us to gaze into the darkness. Made from melted-down ashtrays, this tool for scrying is perhaps an appropriate metaphor for present anxieties about the future--it's opaque and difficult to discern meaning ahead, but there's definitely a joke about consumer waste in there.
The small sculptures by Vincent Castro could be science-fictional devices or organisms. Modeled from silicone putties as if from clay, the little objects have a visceral quality like cuttings from John Carpenter's Thing. They are more transhuman than retro, though, perhaps because they suggest the collapse of "self" and "tool" into a single being. Castro has described these works as "faux artifacts to fuck with archaeologists of the future," an imaginative exercise that could also apply to Ryan Rennie's installation of ceramic pieces. Pot, tusk, tile are archetypes of sculptural objects with a deliberately ambiguous relationship to time and to art history; examining them 8,000 years in the future, it would be stylistically impossible to discern from which culture they emerged.
A series of screen-prints by Norberto Gomez also employ a visual vocabulary of mysterious archetypes. With titles like reticulate uprising and zones over the river styx, the scenes are pictographic but suggest narratives. Within the context of this exhibition—a collective exercise in speculative fiction—they feel like illustrations for a story we do not yet know.
Alex A. Jones
photo by Daniel Schwartz
PRESS / Fathom / December 3rd, 2018
Mountain Dale Is the Weirdly Awesome Up-and-Coming Catskill Town You Need on Your Radar
https://fathomaway.com/mountain-dale-catskills-new-york/
For artist J. Morgan Puett and designer Abby Lutz, a gallery is not just a gallery, at least where theirs is concerned. A Guide to the Field: Storefront Practices in the Social Realm is a gallery doubling as a retail space that showcases conceptual products that comment on a shared theme. The inaugural exhibition, Encampment,reimagines the domestic goods people will need to rest, cook, clean, and play in the 21st century: a set of recycled soaps, a deck of numerically inspired tarot cards, a wooden coracle (for navigating our ever-more aquatic world), a wardrobe of handmade garments, and, on the more abstract end of the spectrum, a scuba suit fashioned by artist Hope Ginsberg, who leads marine meditations in full diving gear. The collection, which is displayed in a space that mimics an apartment (even the works in the bathroom are for sale), was co-curated by Puett and Lutz and a roster of contemporary artists, who either contributed pre-existing pieces or created new ones to fit the topic.
Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
Press / New york times / November 3rd, 2018
Can You Curate a Town?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/style/mountain-dale-new-york.html
Up the street at A Guide to the Field, a hybrid boutique-gallery, J. Morgan Puett, an owner, explained her vision. It was, she said, meant to create critical engagement with “forms of dwelling, systems of labor, design apparatuses” so that shoppers don’t simply feel “desire, desire, desire” when they enter.Items included a line of $1,400 “swampy-fairy-dresses,” soaps made from recycled doughnut-frying oil ($85 to $195) and a felt scuba suit ($3,500), which Ms. Puett conceded was more “psychological” than commercial. Back at Bà & Me, Mr. Resnick said, “I don’t understand Morgan’s store, to be honest.” Mr. Vegliante said, “You know what I love? The fact that I don’t understand it.”
SATURDAY, December 15th, 2018 / 12-6pm
The Cowboy Cooker Sausage Party
For the December 15 festivities around Mountaindale, A Guide to the Field features Brooke Grant’s Cowboy Cooker, and other metal wares for gifting. We will be grilling sausage tastings with warm tidings from the Field. Celebrate High Voltage Cafe’s grand opening with free mulled wine and cookie. Celebrate the regrowth of Mountaindale with a Tree Planting and Pickle Holiday Tree Decorating Event. Get your Hygge off to a good start this winter with a chance to win a pair of handspun angora cuffs! Get drunk on eggnog and while you test your luck and enter to win a gift giveaway at Witchey Handmade. Pet a pig: meet the cute and cuddly ambassadors of Majestic Farm. Hang out with “Butch the Bad Santa” and his reindeer at The Porch. Come view Charlie’s fantastic Christmas village at Cinder Tracks.
Saturday, October 20, 2018 / 1PM-4PM
Rebecca Purcell and the Organon 9 Worlds Card Deck
Rebecca Purcell has spent the last twenty-seven years working on an elaborate matrix she calls Organon 9 Worlds. O9W references a wide spectrum of western aesthetics, views on eastern philosophy from the seventies, Jungian and alchemical research and a sampling of feminist studies – all filtered into nine categories represented by symbolic numbers. Combining Purcell’s two lifelong interests in aesthetics and the evolution of consciousness O9W is an ongoing art project and an integral part of what Purcell refers to as personal world making.
Drawing material from the O9W matrix, Purcell has designed a card deck that is focused on the creative process and uses aesthetic attraction to determine what cards are chosen. The cards offer insight, expand, define or confirm the current phase in ones’ creative process or project.
SATURDAY, October 6th, 2018
Encampment, A Guide to the Field’s Inaugural Topic
A Guide to the Field: Storefront Practices in the Social Realm, a new project gallery by J. Morgan Puett and Abby Lutz, exhibits and sells socially and politically sensitive artworks, textiles, sculpture, clothing, furniture – fine art in the everyday – set in topic-driven installations (Swarmings) by artists working in the social sphere.
Encampment, A Guide to the Field’s inaugural installation, offers visual and functional conversations around living in an ever-migratory society. Visitors experience a storefront apartment environment, where artist's works are responses to one's daily activities of clothing, cooking, cleaning, making, playing, resting, and thinking/being.
With David Brooks / Jorge Colombo / Barbara de Vries / Mark Dion / Hope Ginsburg / Leila Gordon / Gary Graham / Brooke Grant / Jeffrey Jenkins / Alex A. Jones / Cameron Klavsen / Abby Lutz / Kristyna & Marek Milde / J. Morgan Puett / Rebecca Purcell / Gina Siepel / Shelley Spector / Allison Smith / Caroline Wallner / Allison Ward / Natalie Wilkin / Caroline Woolard / Amy Yoes //